Don't Worry About Countdown -- Focus Elsewhere

2008-07-20T18:55:00.002Z

I've decided to consolidate my online presence in order to effect synergy from my core competencies or something, so from now on all my blogging (comics and otherwise) will be at my new blog andrewhickey.info .

Rock Of Ages - Darkseid's New Clothes

2008-06-29T16:23:00.001Z

So, before my own verbosity got the better of me, what was I going to say about Rock Of Ages? (For those who are wondering, I'm writing this before getting to the comic shop this week. I'll be looking at Final Crisis 2 probably on Monday).

One of the descriptions I've read of Morrison's JLA run is that it's a 'Cliff Notes for the Invisibles', and nowhere is that more true than in Rock Of Ages. The connections between the present-day story and the Invisibles are obvious, of course, but it's the near-future dystopian story that covers a lot of the same themes. Fundamentally, Rock Of Ages is about the impossibility of totalitarianism.

Morrison is one of the few writers in comics who actually seems interested in science, and appears scientifically literate. While many comic writers use 'scientific' terms seemingly at random to handwave away problems (and to be fair Morrison does this to in New X-Men with the extinction gene, although there he was playing with a Marvel genetics that has been established as very different from real genetics) - see for example Byrne's 'Godwave' which was somehow able to cross the universe twice in 40,000 years - Morrison uses scientific ideas as jumping off points for new stories. Sometimes those ideas will be fringe ideas rather than mainstream (see his use of Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis in Animal Man) and quite often the interpretation he uses of (say) quantum physics will not be the most mainstream one, but he's clearly actually interested in science.

And one of the sciences he seems to be most interested in (although he doesn't namedrop it in the way he does 'cooler' ideas such as brane theory) is cybernetics - not computing, but cybernetics in its original meaning of regulating systems.

And cybernetics shows that totalitarianism - and indeed any attempt to control human beings - has some inbuilt flaws. Any system that doesn't allow for feedback will eventually go off the rails, and any authority relationship is one where accurate feedback is not possible - if someone has the power to sack you, or have you imprisoned, or have you killed, you're going to be very careful about what you tell them. Authority breeds lies - the cheque's in the post, the dog ate my homework, it's my grandmother's funeral - and then the person in authority has to make decisions based on those lies. Garbage in, garbage out. (This, incidentally, seems to explain the decisions made by a lot of political leaders, and may also explain the apparent paranoia often exhibited at the very top.)

Robert Anton Wilson - a big influence on Morrison - called this 'the burden of omniscience' and contrasted it with the 'burden of nescience' in the people who are being controlled. In any system where total control over people is attempted, the person doing the controlling has to be aware of every factor relevant to the decisions. Those being controlled, on the other hand, have to do what they're told even when it goes against their own experiences.

Darkseid, of course, wants absolute control of the universe. As he puts it, "I will remake the entire universe in the image of my soul, Desaad. And when at last I turn to look upon the eternal desolation I have wrought... I will see Darkseid, as in a mirror... and know what fear is."

The problem with this kind of ambition of course is that it depends on everyone else being deaf-blind-mute - or acting like it. The future portion of Rock Of Ages is ultimately a rewrite of The Emperor's New Clothes - as long as no-one tells the emperor what's going on, everything looks fine from his perspective, but as soon as one person tells the truth the whole edifice of control comes tumbling down.

This is, of course, why the 'zombies' in Rock of Ages, in possibly the most disturbing image Morrison has ever come up with, come out of the 'Wise Monkey' factory with their ears, eyes and mouths covered up by hands. And it's in this context that Darkseid's defeat is so interesting.

Firstly, because the efforts of the superpowered time-travellers are actually unimportant in his defeat - it's the literally powerless who bring him down. And secondly, he's defeated by Ray Palmer shrinking to the size of a photon and entering through his eyes and into his brain - in other words, he's defeated by information.

The whole of Rock Of Ages in fact is about control and information, and about attempts to reform the universe or part of it in the image of someone's mind - from the holograms controlled by the Joker, to Darkseid's plans, to the Philosopher's stone - and the defeat is always by people understanding those systems better than the controllers - J'Onn changing his brain to match the Joker's, Batman getting Desaad to put his mind into a reprogrammable computer, persuading Metron to become human.

It's also about disguise and replicas - Batman as Desaad, Plastic Man as the Joker, the duplicate Philosopher's Stone, the holograms of the League at the beginning, the hologram of Luthor at the end. J'onn making himself think like the Joker also plays into these ideas of identity.

In the end, the comic shows that attempting to control people by imposing your will on them with brute force is stupid - the way to get what you want is to attempt to understand your enemies, to walk in their shoes, and to understand the world around you. Luthor is shown as more intelligent than Darkseid, with his 'corporate takeover' plan and his way out of criminal charges, but Batman is shown to outthink both of them.

These themes turn up all the time in Morrison's work, and we'll definitely return to them as I continue looking at Final Crisis, the second issue of which I'll be getting to shortly.

Excuses, excuses...

2008-06-24T20:12:00.001Z

Yes, I know it's been a while...
Since I last posted, my life has been full of unpredictable events. I've had to travel to Wales, London, the Lake District and York, had my in-laws fly over from the US, had a friend die suddenly, seen Leonard Cohen, had a famous TV presenter pretend to know me, been threatened at gunpoint by a soldier... leaving me not in the most coherent state to post my thoughts on Batman. By the time I got any free time, the comics on which I wanted to comment were *so* yesterday to the rest of the blogosphere.

Equally important was the fact that I didn't want to comment on the Dan DiDio pecking party that was going on for much of the last few weeks. As many of you may have gathered I am not a wholehearted supporter of DiDio's editorial regime, but nor do I think it's been all bad. For every bad decision (letting Judd Winick write anything at all) there's been an excellent one (letting Grant Morrison essentially have free run of the DCU).

DiDio's job is pretty much guaranteed to make him one of the most hated men in comics, at least among the comic blogosphere, and there's been an undertone in many of the posts of "Well, Jimmy Palmiotti is the kind of person who'll recognise the genius of my proposed twelve-issue series about an alternate world where Zatanna and Barbara Gordon are lovers but they're both cats! Damn you DiDio for turning down Pussies Of Prey!"

Anyway, DiDio's job appears safe for the forseeable future, and I've not had a major shock to the nervous system in nearly four days, so I'm going to talk about comics.

Specifically, I'm going to talk about Grant Morrison's big epic story featuring the New Gods going up against the big guns of the DCU, where we see a world where evil has won, that doesn't tie in properly with the weekly comic it was meant to tie in with.

I'm referring of course to Rock Of Ages.

One of the big criticisms people have had of Final Crisis is the way it doesn't quite tie in with Countdown To Final Crisis, and it's true that that could have been handled better. However, the two comics are doing fundamentally different things. Final Crisis is an attempt (and, I believe, a largely successful one) to create art (pop art, but art nonetheless) - it's written to stand up to repeated readings, and the intention is presumably that it will remain in print indefinitely, outside of its context.

Countdown, on the other hand, was an attempt to create comics-like product that would keep people going to the comic shop. The Countdown trades will presumably go out of print within six months or a year or so. In those circumstances Morrison is absolutely right not to alter his work because of continuity issues created by others.

Rock Of Ages here provides a point of comparison. When it came out originally, it was contemporary with a four-week DC crossover called Genesis, which I reread last week in preparation for writing this post and have already forgotten - it was a John Byrne thing and DC might as well have just put out a circular saying "John Byrne desperately wants to be the next Kirby, but in fact he's a less-good Jim Starlin" as that would have had the same effect as actually publishing the story, and at less expense.

Anyway, both stories deal with the New Gods, and while Morrison's story pays lip-service to the crossover (mainly by putting in a few pages at the end of the first issue, not reprinted in the trade), reading the two stories back to back is a very confusing experience, as everyone in Morrison's story is being told who this 'Metron' fellow is directly after just spending four issues doing some ... stuff... involving godwaves or something with him.

The interesting thing here is how much light Rock Of Ages sheds on Morrison's writing methods, and on his take on superheroes and the New Gods, when compared to Genesis.

In Genesis, it's explained that all superheroes are in fact demigods, created by a Godwave that now threatens to destroy the universe for rather poorly-defined reasons. They have to team up with Darkseid and then against him, there are double-bluffs and stratagems and so on, and it's just like every other 'cosmic' crossover ever created.

But that reveal, that the superpowered people are demigods rather than humans, much like every other Roythomasism that's tried to tie all superheroes together (the meta-gene, homo magi, etc) is a profoundly dispiriting idea. Superheroes, in this view, are superheroes just because they were born special. You can never be as special as they are, in their special specialness - they're just *better* than you. You're disgusting, aren't you? Why don't you just die?

(To be fair, Byrne does make a half-hearted stab at having the non-powered heroes say things like "We mustn't be downhearted - we must fight on regardless!", but still the ideas that remain in the memory (to the extent that such an unmemorable story remains in the memory at all, and I feel here like the protagonist in Memento, trying to reconstruct a story that's slipping from my grasp even though I read it only this weekend - "I must have read a big cosmic crossover recently, because I have a profound feeling of ennui. If only I could recall what it was...") are the ones about how superheroes are really gods).

This message - that some people are just born special and better than everyone else - is at the core of Joseph Campbell's 'hero of a thousand faces', which thanks to George Lucas is now the accepted formula for every piece of mass entertainment (which in turn is why I go to the cinema maybe every couple of months, if that).

The formula can be used well - Neil Gaiman uses it passably, though the more you read of Gaiman's writing the more obvious his use of it and similar formulae becomes - after all, if it was incapable of being used well, it wouldn't have become a formula - but more often it gives us dreck like Superman Returns.

"But Andrew!" the three of you who've read this far are shouting "Doesn't Grant Morrison also have an unhealthy obsession with this misbegotten formula? He sometimes goes back to its Jungian roots, but All Star Superman, which you like so much, is a hero's journey if ever I saw one. Death of the father, journey through the underworld, death and rebirth motif, it's all there, isn't it?"

To which I can only respond by analogy.

The I-vi-ii(or IV)-V chord sequence has been the basis of innumerable terrible songs over the years, and one or two decent ones as well - it's the sequence used in every doo-wop song and bad ballad ever. That sequence or a slight variation is used in Duke Of Earl, Blue Moon, I Will Always Love You and a billion other songs you know. It's a cliche, and even though it's been used well in the past, I could perfectly happily go a lifetime without hearing it again.

But Brian Wilson, in the song The Warmth Of The Sun, managed to make something new. He started that progression in C, went through the first two chords, then *started it again*, a minor third up, going through the changes again before returning to the original key and finishing the progression. A twist as simple as that can turn something from the most obvious of cliches into something quite extraordinary.

In the same way, it's possible to use the hero's journey as something to build upon, to twist, to play with, and come out with something interesting. If you take it as a description of what other people have done (as, to be fair, Campbell appeared to intend it) rather than as a prescription of what you must do, you can get something interesting out of it. This is what Morrison does.

While sometimes, in Seven Soldiers for example, Morrison does fall into the trap of the hero just being born special (though in Seven Soldiers this is mitigated somewhat by the fact that there are *seven* 'unique' people, and actually many more playing important roles), more often he focuses on normal people, or on people who are special not because of any powers but because of their character. The occasions where he has most obviously written a hero's journey - things like The Invisibles - have been ones where the journey is clearly subordinate to other elements (few people would say that Jack Frost's growth as a character is anything like the most important element in The Invisibles).

And so in Rock Of Ages, straight after John Byrne has revealed that Wally West and Eel O'Brien were just born special and better than the rest of us, Morrison has Darkseid - as powerful and 'special' a being as exists in the DCU - destroyed by Green Arrow, Batman and the Atom, three people who have no powers other than their own intelligence (yes, yes, I know, Ray Palmer had the metagene and so on - it doesn't matter. He got his powers from his own scientific knowledge, he wasn't born with them).

And the way in which they defeat Darkseid is something I'm going to go into a lot more in my next post, because this one's grown into something of a monster already. I've got most of that post written (this was a much longer post that I've split up), and I *hope* to have it up tomorrow, but given my recent history I'll probably be kidnapped by sentient alligators or something, so no promises.

If anyone's still reading this, I recommend you go and read Andrew Rilstone's recent posts on Dave Sim - as always, Rilstone is writing some wonderful stuff over there.

Final Crisis 1 - It Goes Like This, The Fourth, The Fifth, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift

2008-06-02T16:23:00.003Z

Now that the terrible Countdown has concluded (our long national nightmare is finally over!) I'm hoping we'll start to see more comics of actual substance coming from DC, rather than endless tie-ins and continuity patches to make sense of bad comics which in turn introduce more continuity errors to be patched by more bad comics. Final Crisis is obviously infinitely better than that kind of thing, and Trinity, while (probably rightly) being promoted as totally separate from Final Crisis, looks to be dealing with some of the same multiversal hijinks I love, and by at least competent people. It also looks like it'll feature some of the Big Giant Hand stuff that's been going on at various levels in various comics.

Kurt Busiek has been very impressive recently with his work on the Superman titles. Those titles have been almost a perfect storm of editorial problems recently, with delays, last-minute rewrites, art problems, Countdown tie-ins and continuity changes meaning that not only has Busiek been writing his own title, he's had to write fill-ins for Action, he's had to write fill-ins for himself when there have been art delays, and he's had to write *replacement* fill-ins when fill-ins have been dropped. Despite all this, he's managed to produce work that is at worst decent and at best excellent. Although the strain has clearly shown at times, his work has been some of the best on the Superman title in decades. So I have enough faith in Busiek's reliability to have at least some enthusiasm for Trinity.

So my plan, for now, is that this blog will go back to more-or-less weekly (or more) posts dealing with the various big DC events that interest me - so far this would be all Morrison's work, possibly the tie-ins to Final Crisis and Batman RIP, and at least the first few issues of Trinity and whatever the Wonder Woman Big Event is. This won't be annotations ( Douglas Wolk is doing a fine job of that at http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com ) but reviews and talking about the themes and so on. I'll also be looking back over the next few months at a variety of earlier comics that relate in some way to these titles. In the case of Final Crisis that will be 52, Seven Soldiers, The Filth, DC One Million, JLA: Earth 2, Morrison's JLA, The Kingdom, Marvel Boy and maybe some others. In the case of Trinity I'll look over JLA/Avengers and Syndicate Rules, both of which Busiek has said tie into the story. Those posts will mostly be in weeks when not much new is happening. I'll also continue to review any non-DCU stuff that seems interesting to me as and when it comes out.

This week was possibly the best week for new comics in years. Judenhass (which I've already reviewed a couple of months back) came out, and on top of that three comics by Grant Morrison. The reason it's taken me this long to post a review is because I've spent every second since Friday just running around saying "ohmygod flyingluthoranddeicideandalfredasbrucesdadandsupermandyingandthedeathofthefourthworldandkamandiandaaaa!!!" which I didn't think would live up even to my normal inarticulate level.

I'll be writing this as a couple of separate posts - this one about Final Crisis, and the next one tying it into All Star Superman and Batman, as well as the bigger picture links between Morrison's work at the moment.

Having read a number of reviews of Final Crisis before reading the comic itself, I was amazed to find it is actually one of the best single issues of a comic I've read this year. Most reviews, even those by people whose opinions I ususally respect, have said that it's too slow and that nothing happens. While it's not on the same scale as Crisis On Infinite Earths, and there's comparatively little Action (in the sense of things blowing up and people punching each other), the story is full of events and ideas.

(Some people, incidentally, have also complained that the events here don't match up well with/lose impact when placed alongside the execrable Countdown. That may be true, and is a fair criticism to lay against DC editorial, but not against the creators of this comic, which was apparently written before the terrible Countdown even started. Presumably whatever the events were in the egregious Countdown, it was what Morrison was talking about when he complained of the New Gods being 'passed around like herpes').

But really, seriously - 'nothing happens' is simply not a valid criticism here, in a story where huge swathes of the DC Universe come together in new combinations, bringing out thematic links that were never there before.

You've got a reworking/revisiting of the Kirbyesque New Gods as Eternals as Von Daniken Chariot Of The Gods stuff from Seven Soldiers with Metron as Prometheus, bringing The Human Flame (divine inspiration, as well as literal fire). Is the Prometheus angle going to tie in later with Frankenstein (who appears later in the series). The Human Flame is also the villain that kills Martian Manhunter, and fire is being linked throughout with both death and creation - fire representing chaos as well as inspiration (this ties in with a lot of the stuff in Seven Soldiers).

Death through fire always inspires thoughts of the phoenix, and rebirth, of course.

The Green Lanterns have a *code* for deicide! And note the death of Orion - the 'God of War', at the same time as the death of J'onn J'onzz, the last survivor of Mars, named after the God of War. And of course Mars is the Fourth World in our solar system, and this story is about the destruction of the Fourth World and its rebirth as the Fifth.

Incidentally, a lot of Morrison's previous work, especially The Invisibles, has referenced the idea that there will be a big change at the end of 2012, an idea that seems to come from lots of sources (pop-anthropological looks at Native American beliefs combined with now out-of-date predictions about information and technological growth). Part of that comes from what has been reported (in various new age sources whose credibility I haven't got the knowledge to verify - I'm talking in these bits not about what I believe to be true but about ideas Morrison has drawn on) as a Hopi belief that we are now living in a Fourth World that is about to change to a Fifth World.

Looking around for information on this (which Morrison may or may not be drawing upon, but I suspect he is) Hopi rituals relating to this change apparently include a 'new fire ceremony', and there is this rather interesting bit from Wikipedia:

"The coming Fifth World (where our present World is presented as the Fourth) is said to arrive following a cycle in Nature affecting our entire Solar System, where our Earth births an Egg (Mystery Egg, Hidden Egg) and then moves "up" within our system to reach its crowning place. All of the Earth's life is then said to be "raised" to its perfected-eternal form. Some tribes refer to this period of change as "Purification Time." During this period of Purification, Time is said to change where we must choose between the natural Time we have now upon our Earth (meant for us) and an unnatural Time structure which removes us from Nature and our opportunity to reach the Fifth World. It is told that everyone will have to choose between the two Time frames-- one leading to the Fifth World with our Earth, and the other (which will be very alluring, deceiving many) which will remove us from our Earth, taking us to oblivion."

I would be very surprised if these ideas didn't come into play as Final Crisis continues. It certainly *sounds* Crisis-like, doesn't it?

Some other notes on bits of the story:

I do not like Doctor Rapey McRapeRape, and never will, even with Morrison writing him. However, Jones' depiction of Mirror Master is absolutely wonderful. Looks like Terry Gilliam playing him.

The stuff with the secret society ties in with JLA:Earth 2, which I will look at soon. Also, Grodd's expressions are drawn perfectly.
"I am not averse to the taste of human flesh, sir!"
Damrung brand phone!

Orion appears to have 'infected' Terrible Turpin with a bit of his own essence.

That's no Monitor, that's Rhodes Boyson.

More on this tomorrow, as I have a LOT to say about this. I've not even really touched on the plot, or all the things that echo back and forth between this and Morrison's other works, or the art. But this issue is so densely packed with meaning and resonances without even getting into that that I'm having difficulty seeing how *anyone* could think 'nothing happened'. This is really what superhero comics *should* be.

This has still, of course, been incoherent - I hope that the later posts will be more organised, but this is the kind of comic that sets off my inner fanboy, with my thoughts racing in a million directions. It's exactly the kind of comic the industry needs right now, and I love it.

Ask Not What Your Comics Can Do For You...

2008-05-29T14:21:00.004Z

A warning here, before I start. This isn't a comics review. This week looks like one of the best in comics since I got back into them, and I will be looking over some of this week's comics over the next few days (except Judenhass, which I already reviewed a couple of months back). This is an incoherent rant.

In this rant I will be hypocritical - making exactly the same mistakes I accuse others of - and I will no doubt say some intensely stupid things. I will almost certainly delete this post, unless I don't, because I know going in that it's going to get nasty. Please read this with that in mind, or skip it. This isn't a well-reasoned piece of logic, it's a scream at the stupidity of the world, purely in immediate reaction to something I've read. I wrote this because I had to get this off my chest.

I was reading Newsarama today (I know... I have only myself to blame) and I read something that shocked me to the core. A statement so callous it bordered on the sociopathic, but one that seemed to go unnoticed by everyone reading it - so much so I had to triple-check if I'd actually read it correctly:

"Just think for a second about the pinch on the budgets of millions of Asians and fears of civil unrest that are being raised. In fact, food riots have erupted in recent months in Mexico, Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Guinea.

What do all these mean for the comics industry as a whole?"

You read that right. I didn't cut out any context that would put this in a better light.

"People are starving - there are riots in six countries because the people there don't have enough to eat!"
"Really? That's terrible! Ultimate Hulk Vs Wolverine may never come out if this continues!"

Now, you might think this is just an isolated example of idiocy from Benjamin Ong Pang Kean - a man who, after all, less than a month ago thought the best response to being pulled up by Paul Cornell on his witless bigotry would be to try to make a joke about Cornell being British and then publish the whole thing. We're not talking here about someone competent, after all.

But to me this seems to fit a pattern of thought that's observable in a lot of comic readers - when the Siegel family won back their share of the copyright for Superman the other month, the response among the message board posters wasn't generally a discussion of whether justice had been done, or the intricacies of 'intellectual property' law and whether the decision made sense, but revolved around two questions - "Does this mean I won't get my comics?" and "Does justice being done in this case mean it might happen in other cases, thus denying me other comics?"

Now, I think the article that got me so infuriated had everything exactly backwards. When something terrible is happening in the world, the response of 'the comics community' should not be 'what will that do to my comics?' but rather 'what can we, as 'the comics community', do to help?'

(Please note, I'm only talking about what 'we' can do here qua 'comics community' - I'm assuming for the sake of argument that everyone who cares about the state of the world is doing all the other Good Citizen stuff like contacting your elected representatives, giving money to charity, and so on).

Now, this particular problem is, alas, not one that is wholly soluble by comics (unless we were to pool our collective resources into a gigantic magical ceremony led by Alan Moore and Grant Morrison to pull Superman into the real world from ideaspace and have him sort out the economic mess - a solution not noticeably less practical than those offered by many leading politicians) - the problems that are caused by having populations grow while resources shrink were pointed out quite effectively by Thomas Malthus 210 years ago - but other problems can be helped by comics.

That sounds like a grand claim - but remember that comics are an art form and medium of communication, and an effective one. Art can and does help find solutions to social, economic, political and even technological problems - by giving us new ways to think about them. Probing the limits of the possible allows us to try out ideas, and the impossible can be used as metaphor, allegory or analogy.

The problem is, I think, that a large number of comic readers now read little or nothing other than comics - or more precisely, other than superhero titles taking place in the shared 'universes' of the Big Two. And increasingly, those comics, when they're about anything at all, have become about nothing more than other comics. As Douglas Wolk puts it in his rather wonderful book Reading Comics, "More and more superhero series are readable really only as metacomics, because they're mostly about where their plots and characters are positioned in the matrices of the big superhero narratives".

The problem is, when a large majority of superhero comics are only about superhero comics (to the extent they're about anything) then... well, they're not about anything else, are they? And is it really surprising that a genre that has essentially turned into navel-gazing on an immense scale produces fans who wouldn't care if the whole population of Asia were to die so long as they got their comics (though they'd probably complain at the price increases because of the lack of that cheap (slave) labour that lamentably even the more 'ethical' indie companies use to print their comics).

(Art comics don't get a free pass here, either. They're not usually about other comics - not since they finally got over defining themselves by what they're not - but a staggering number essentially boil down to 'my life is the most fascinating thing in the world'. Save it for LiveJournal.)

I think in order for comics to actually matter, they have to start containing actual ideas, about things other than comics. Meta-commentary is fine as one element of a larger story, but when it's the only thing approaching an actual idea in the comic, then there's a serious problem. The ideas can be about anything - from a new formal idea about the medium (a different thing from the genre, note) to 'a superhero who only speaks in Irving Berlin lyrics' to an alternate universe in which the introduction of crop rotation never took off thanks to a new species of insect wiping out all turnips in the 15th century. So long as it's an idea. Start putting in ideas, and the readers will start to think. Get a few hundred thousand people thinking and who knows what will happen?

But pressure needs to be put on the comic companies to do this, in the same way feminist comic bloggers have over the last few years put pressure on them to moderate at least their worst excesses (so we still get Black Canary posing as if she's presenting to someone just off-panel on the front of her comic, but Spoiler is no longer dead). We've tolerated the lack of ideas in comics for too long. If you read a comic and come away thinking 'meh. Nothing happened. What was the point of that?' then that comic is contributing to the creation of morons, and needs to be held up as an example of everything that is wrong with the medium.

Because if we want to know what good comics can do, the single most important thing they can do is change the mentality of people who prioritise comics over starving human beings.

Black & White & Red All Over

2008-05-05T18:50:00.003Z

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...

2008-04-16T20:07:00.002Z

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

2008-03-30T23:25:00.003Z

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

2008-03-15T11:01:00.004Z

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

2008-02-20T22:30:00.002Z

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

2008-02-16T22:14:00.004Z

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

2008-01-11T00:11:00.000Z

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

2008-01-08T17:04:00.000Z

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

Dave Sim - The Song, Not The Singer

2007-12-30T20:21:00.000Z

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

2007-12-27T00:47:00.000Z

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.

Moore And Moor(cock)

2007-11-02T22:18:00.000Z

Last Friday my wife and I went to see Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock have a discussion about London (along with a reading by poet Brian Catling, who seemed rather uneasy in front of an audience and a performance by a singer called Kirsten Norrie, who sounds like Enya would if she had talent). I want to give a quick overview of it here because it's started me thinking about things I want to talk about, but this post is going to be more personal-journal type writing than the more analytical stuff I usually write here. The analytical stuff will come tomorrow night or Sunday.

I wanted to write a short review of it closer to the time, but it's taken this long to stop myself unconsciously imitating the shared rhythms of Moore, Sinclair and Catling. All have very similar writing styles - loping, rambling, looping adjectival torrents of words, flowing through the sentence like the Acheron through the abyss of the underworld, a tunnel with no end in sight, til the brightness of a new metaphor appears, classical references and pop culture intertwining, Ariachne and Peter Parker meeting mid-sentence in a web of language and reference. Then a short sentence. Hanging there, portentous. Another longer sentence then, the construction vaguely archaic, the language flowery... I'm sorry.

But easy as it is to imitate Moore's rhythms (even more so in speech - his inflection is almost as distinctive as his language) , his spoken work is crucial to understanding his comics, so after talking for a little while about the event itself, I'd like to go on to talk about Moore's spoken-word work and (to tie into the themes of my more recent posts) how his magical practice differs from that of Grant Morrison, the other major comic writer/'magician'.

The event was held at the Bishopsgate Institute (or Foundation, or Library, depending on which sign you believe, making the venue rather difficult for us non-Londoners to find), and it seemed like half of the 200 or so people there were important in the British comics/literary world. Holly and I were sat directly behind Moore himself (pre-show) with Melinda Gebbie, Oscar Zarate and Hayley Campbell all in a row next to him, which led to me spending a large chunk of the evening embarassed, as I couldn't help saying "But that's Oscar Zarate (or whoever)" and then having to explain to Holly who Zarate is with him in clear earshot.

(For those who don't know, Zarate is an incredible artist, who collaborated with Moore on the comparatively little-known graphic novel A Small Killing, but who I know best for his work with Alexei Sayle on Geoffrey The Tube Train And The Fat Comedian).

I also got to briefly meet Roz Kaveney (who I've known for several years as a vague acquaintance online) for the first time, but not for very long as she was busy talking to Important People about Weighty Subjects. I'd really have been rather disappointed if she hadn't been...

I was intermittently distracted during the first half (with Moore and Moorcock reading their pieces from the Sinclair-edited anthology London, City Of Disappearances , and Sinclair reading a rather wonderful piece about Jayne Mansfield opening a parrot-fanciers' meeting) because Melinda Gebbie was busily sketching away little ballpoint sketches of the principals on lined paper as they talked. In many ways I was more impressed by this than by the readings - while I'm not a writer on the level of those reading, I know how to put words together, but being able to create visual art that quickly (and the sketches were good), looks like magic to me.

And magic is a subject that came up in the discussion half of the event. The discussion was in some ways rather frustrating. Sinclair didn't speak much (although he got in a wonderful line about how as a result of him and Moore there is now a block of flats and restaurants for yuppies called Hawksmoor Mews, which is probably not a result they intended for their work), but essentially moderated between Moore and Moorcock.

Moore and Moorcock are both very articulate, but also tend to build up an argument, speaking in paragraphs rather than sentences. They'll often appear to have thought three paragraphs ahead, and be saying something in order to get to something else more interesting. The problem is that the 'something' is often in itself quite interesting, and since by this point the speaker has been talking for a good couple of minutes, Sinclair would cut them off mid-flow to ask the other one.

As a result, we got a sort of ping-pong of half-finished sentences, trains of thought brutally derailed, as each man's half-ideas would send the other careening off in a completely different direction. (This actually reminded me of the game in I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, a recording of which we also attended this week, in which contestants build sentences one word at a time in turn and you end up with phrases like "Paraguay is the largest badger-wearing country in Poland".) Often the two would visibly cut short something they were saying that was becoming too discursive, to go for the cheap laugh instead (Moore referring to himself as being on first-name terms with Gilbert and George springs to mind).

But however maddening this kind of thing can be, it was also exhilarating. In particular, the subject got on to the topic of writing as magic.

Moorcock was fascinating on this subject, and I'd like to hear him talk more about it - he was essentially riffing on Shelley's line about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of humanity, talking about how "we can't get real change, and the only way to get actual change is to change the rhetoric", as well as talking about how other people had often come up to him and described remembering events from his fiction.

Moore's thoughts were broadly similar, but subtly different. While Moorcock spoke about the need to change rhetoric as a stepping-stone to real change, Moore says "we are living in text - we live by manipulating language". Moorcock talks about writing himself a new London when the old one was blitzed, but still finds it funny that someone told him about a portal to other worlds underneath a nearby building, and said he should include it in one of his novels (Moorcock had invented the portal in an earlier book, which the person talking to him hadn't read).

Moore, on the other hand, would probably (though I don't want to put words in his mouth) say that Moorcock inventing the portal had made it slightly more real - "I made it all up, and it came true anyway". The distinction Moorcock makes between 'real' change and change in rhetoric is one Moore would not make and possibly doesn't believe in. For Moore, a change in rhetoric is a real change, and may well actually change the physical world. Certainly he seems to see the borderline between the physical world and our brain software as being more permeable than most do.

Tomorrow I'm going to look at how this belief affects his writing.

Did You Miss Me (Yeah!) While I Was Away? Did You Hang My Picture On Your Wall?

2007-10-31T22:11:00.000Z

Well, it seems some people actually read this thing...
This is just a very brief post to say sorry for not saying anything for a couple of weeks. Some problems at work coupled with a very uninspiring bunch of comics coming out, and some semblance of a social life have left me with less time than normal for writing.

I will post properly tomorrow, on a semi-comic related topic (the Alan Moore/Iain Sinclair/Michael Moorcock reading I went to last week) but wanted to gather my thoughts on it a bit. Expect it about this time tomorrow. This should lead to a discussion of 'ideaspace', possibly comparing and contrasting the use of magic(k) in Moore with Morrison. I hope to post the first of those posts on Sunday.

If you can't wait til tomorrow for my writing and are willing to accept a non-comics related piece, I have an article up on the culture 'zine The High Hat about Brian Wilson which is a lot less clever now than when I wrote it (it's quite galling to spend a couple of thousand words teasing out the previously-overlooked goddess symbolism in someone's songs only to have them then start a song with "Summer of 61/A goddess became my song". Other critics never have these problems. Shakespeare never wrote a sequel to Hamlet called "No, he definitely was mad, no really"...). It does mention Jack Kirby, so that might be enough for you.

Thanks for the concern, normal service will be resumed shortly. No refunds will be given.

I shall return

2007-10-14T23:35:00.000Z

Just letting people know I *will* update this again, soon - I've just had two separate bouts of the 'flu in the last fortnight (the kind that gets passed round everyone at work). I got rid of them easily enough, but I've not had the energy to write. (I'll delete this when there's some actual content).

Quick Question

2007-10-01T22:34:00.000Z

I'm no fan of Diamond and their monopolistic practices, but... I'm probably being dense, but I just don't get the latest controversy at all.
As I understand it, Diamond are asking all publishers to put a bar code on their comics. This is being interpreted as a way to force small publishers out. There's a huge leap there that I'm just not getting.
My band's CDs have bar codes on them. I can guarantee the profit margin on them is lower than any comic in Previews, by quite some way, yet the cost of the bar codes is minimal.
Yes, it can cost a lot to get registered to produce your own bar codes, but you don't need to do that - bar codes can be purchased from resellers for approximately £20.
I really, really don't see how this decision harms anyone. Could someone explain?

I Don't Know Who He Is Behind That Mask, But We Need Him And We Need Him Now... Morrison (and others) on Batman Part 1

2007-10-01T00:32:00.001Z

After that slightly-longer-than-expected hiatus, it's time for us to continue our look at the DC Morrisonverse. Today, I want to start looking at Grant Morrison's work on Batman.

One of the complaints a lot of the more intelligent comic-bloggers make is that most online comics criticism seems to take comics as a branch of literature rather than as a medium in its own right (the pedant in me cringes at that sentence and its mixture of singular and plural - the one real reason I can see for wanting to get rid of 'comics' as the name for the medium). They're right of course, but to a large extent they're beside the point.

Disregarding for the moment the regrettably large number of internet 'reviewers' who in fact are just preparing book reports, listing the events in the story rather than dealing with it as a piece of art (and I know I've done capsule 'reviews' like that myself, but I hope my longer posts do contain something approximating analysis) , one would at first thought assume that most comics reviewers would have at least as much to say about the art in comics as the writing.

The problem is, while comics as a whole have room for as many different types of art as there are people in the world, superhero comics, which are the bread and butter of most comic blogs, have traditionally allowed only a small fraction of those styles to be used. With some exceptions, almost every artist working for Marvel or DC (or the other companies feeding on the crumbs from under their table) would fit into the bottom left corner of Scott McCloud's "Big Triangle" .

In fact, for superhero comic artists, rather than a 'big triangle', almost all fit into a 'little square', defined on one axis by the number of tiny little lines and on the other by how distorted the anatomy is. Roughly the four corners of this square would be Jack Kirby (no little lines, ultra-distorted anatomy), Darwyn Cooke (very few little lines, relatively accurate anatomy), George Perez (millions of little lines, relatively accurate anatomy) and Rob Liefeld (millions of little lines all over the place, wrong number of knees).

Anything outside this box would not get published by the mainstream companies, and despite the obvious differences in ability between those four gentlemen, there's really not a huge stylistic difference between them when compared to the full range of possibilities out there. Korn don't sound much like the Beatles, but both sound more like each other than like Edgard Varese.

Comic art also has a relatively low entry threshold. Given its low rate of pay compared to commercial art, and given that every fan thinks they could write the perfect Green Lantern story and submits it to DC, but most have a more realistic assessment of their drawing skills, the talent pool on which the big companies are drawing is relatively small, and mostly made up of amateurs, be that in the true sense (working in comics for love when they could earn more in other fields) or in the pejorative (barely competent).

Most superhero artists, therefore, are concentrating firstly on making the thing they're drawing look something like it's meant to, and secondly on their panel-to-panel storytelling, ensuring the reader can follow the story. It's actually only exceptional artists (two examples off the top of my head are Frank Quitely and J.H. Williams III, but there are others) who go further than serving the story and actually try to create something that has an aesthetic value in and of itself, something capable of producing an emotional reaction independent of its context within the story - something, in other words, worth criticising on its own merits.

This means that even the more visually literate comics reviewers will often treat a comic as if it were essentially a prose work, because they have nothing really to say about the art. However, this results in reviews that are unintentionally dishonest.

The treatment of the recent Club Of Heroes storyline in Batman is a perfect example. Most reviewers have praised this story to the skies, and (either explicitly or implicitly) compared it with the earlier Morrison-written issues of the title, with the latter suffering in comparison.

And this is a good assessment of them as comics, but that's not the fault of either Morrison or of Andy Kubert, the artist on the earlier issues, but rather of their pairing. Grant Morrison is a writer who, more than any other non-drawing writer I can think of in comics, takes advantage of the visual aspect of the medium by making details matter.

Generally speaking, comics writers working in full script have one thing happen per panel. Sometimes there'll be a background detail or two for world-building or as a joke, but even Alan Moore, who's known for his incredibly detailed panel descriptions, tends to work in foreground/background terms. Watchmen is made infinitely richer by the background detail, by the way panels echo and reflect each other, but only rarely (the scenes by the newsstand in issue 11, for example, when all the plot threads come together) does the background detail or figure placement convey information about the main plot itself.

Compare and contrast this with, for example, Morrison & Quitely's All Star Superman #1. In this, there's a whole series of intricately choreographed moments which require paying attention to every detail. Most superhero comic readers have been trained to see the figures of the major characters as foreground and everything else as background. You can't do this with Morrison & Quitely's work and have any hope of following what's going on.

Unfortunately, this kind of work requires a particular type of collaborator in order to succeed. It was revelatory, for example, to see Morrison's script and thumbnails for Arkham Asylum in the 15th anniversary trade a few years back. Dave McKean's art, while gorgeous, was utterly unsuited to the story as written. Important plot points in the script were simply not drawn, resulting in the finished work being incoherent and coming across as a lot more pretentious than the script would suggest.

It is entirely probable that the comparative lack of response to Morrison & Kubert's Batman has a related cause. I'm not suggesting that Kubert didn't follow Morrison's script to the letter, and nor do I think he's a bad artist (while his style isn't to my taste, he's one of the best of that type of artist out there), but his style is fundamentally unsuited to Morrison's work.

Andy Kubert is in the ultra-distorted, millions of little lines corner of our hypothetical square, and that style isn't suited to the type of subtlety Morrison's scripts require. To parse the action correctly, we need to take in a minimum of visual information. The extraneous detail that Kubert adds actually detracts from our ability to process the image at a glance. I can't speak for anyone else, but to me those little lines paradoxically make me gloss over the image - everything in the picture is of about equal importance, and thus equal unimportance. A lot of detail in Morrison's stories also comes from characters' body language and facial expression, and Kubert simply isn't a nuanced enough artist to show these things. He's great on action (which is why the most impressive sequence in his run on the title is the fight in the museum), but his 'actors' are all scenery-chewing hams.

I suspect that further down the line, we will discover that (much as in his runs on Animal Man, Doom Patrol and especially New X-Men) Morrison has planted a number of time-bombs in his scripts, subtle details that will make us look at these early issues in a new light. And they will be there when we go back and look at the issues, but the art style will have stopped them registering with us.

So Morrison's pre-Club Of Heroes issues are, overall, at best qualified successes as comics. But that's not the fault of the writer, or of the artist, but of the system by which mainstream superhero comics are produced. While the production-line system exist, there will be occasions on which talented people, doing their best to produce good material, end up working partly at cross purposes.

But they are still better than the vast majority of superhero comics being produced at the moment, and they've provided an intriguing basis for the work that's followed. I'll look at them (and the Clown At Midnight issue and Club Of Heroes) in more detail in my next few posts.

50th post - Capsule reviews for the last two weeks

2007-09-27T17:22:00.000Z

Apologies for the extended delay here in posting, but life sometimes gets in the way... tomorrow, I'll start a series of posts about Morrison's Batman (and post-IC Batman generally), but for now here's a quick look over the last couple of weeks' comics.

Before that, though, just to quickly weigh in on a topic I've seen mentioned a couple of times recently, I can't wait for the day Diamond's monopoly ends. Part of the reason my comics purchases are so weighted towards superheroes (although not as much as you might think - I'm more likely to buy indie stuff in trades and superhero stuff as floppies) is the fact that I can actually buy those comics. The comics shop I go to is helpful and will generally try to order stuff I want, but even stuff they try to get shelf copies of just doesn't arrive sometimes. For example, I've been looking forward to the latest Apocalypse Nerd for months, but it didn't arrive in the shop. This month's Comics Journal didn't turn up either. I'm missing one issue (5, I think) of the D&Q serialised version of Ed The Happy Clown, I still don't have issue 10 of Following Cerebus...

I'm absolutely convinced that plenty of people out there would buy a wider variety of material if they could actually find it in the shops, but if people don't see it on the shelves they won't buy it, and if the stock doesn't arrive in the shop they can't put it on the shelves. Diamond are obviously uninterested in the vast majority of the titles they stock, because their business is built around selling Batman and the X-Men to the exclusion of everything else. While I accept that those things will always sell better than Action Philosophers, we are in a relatively brief sliver of time between the internet becoming popular and Peak Oil hitting hard, where those of us lucky enough to live in the West have become accustomed to whatever we want being instantly available. In the age of the Long Tail it is annoying to see the only distributor used by most comic shops stuck in a bestseller mentality.

(As an aside - reminder to myself. Go back to the shop tomorrow and get Astro City, which was missed out of the pull list for some reason.)

Anyway, on with the reviews.

I'll deal with Batman 669 (by Grant Morrison, J.H. Williams III and Dave Stewart, DC) tomorrow. For now, I'll just say wow...

Flash 232 (by Mark Waid and Daniel Acuna, DC) continues last review post's theme of decent Mark Waid comics with slightly-disturbing, unintentional subtexts. In most ways, this is a classic Flash storyline - tentacled monsters defeated by Science. However, the giant tentacled monsters have huge vaginas dentata for faces (the first page is a splash page of one of them being punched on the clitoris) and are killing people by sapping their precious bodily fluids... still a decent comic, but weird...

Speak of The Devil 2 (by Gilbert Hernandez, Dark Horse) is very odd. I didn't read issue 1 (see earlier rant for why) but this is very unlike Hernandez' usual work. It appears to be playing with some of the cliches of the teen slasher genre, with the mild titillation (but without the violence) and bad dialogue that goes along with that. It's surprisingly accessible for the second issue of a miniseries, but not really up to the standard of his usual work... unless this is deliberate. I sort of get a Grindhouse feel from this, if you see what I mean. I'll probably pick up the trade...

JLA/Hitman 1 (by Garth Ennis & John McCrea, DC) was originally intended as a storyline for JLA Classified (and was obviously meant to be four issues rather than two double-sized ones. The break between issues comes with "that would be fine" on the page after the staples). It's a little disappointing, because it's more a JLA story than a Hitman one, so we only get a couple of pages of the gang at Noonan's, which is what I was looking forward to from this, but any Hitman is better than none, and with luck this will bring DC to reissue (and finish) the trades. It's still better than most JLA stories of recent years, though Ennis' Wally West is nastier than I'd like (not totally out of character, just being crueller to Kyle than he was portrayed as during this era).
While Ennis doesn't like superheroes, he gets Superman in a way few other writers do - Hitman 34, which this refers back to, was the best single Superman story of the 1990s, and while this doesn't reach those heights, his characterisation of him is spot-on. I'm probably alone in this, but I'd love to see Ennis as regular writer on one of the Super-titles - I think he'd be a breath of fresh air for them, and I also think the constraint of writing Superman might stop Ennis falling into his increasingly noticeable writing tics.
Also, Natt The Hat's new girlfriend is wonderful.

Countdown To Adventure #2 (DC) is another comic of two halves. The first story, featuring the space heroes from 52 is fun enough. Eddy Barrows' art sometimes strays into early-Image territory, and is wildly inconsistent, but the story by Adam Beechen, while clichéd (*sob* ! Adam Strange has been replaced by a new, more violent hero so the people on Rann don't love him any more!) is entertaining enough. However, the less said about the backup Forerunner story the better. Apparently Nazis are not very nice people. Sadly, as terrible a pile of tedious, unnecessary toss as this 'story' is, more happened in this backup feature than in the whole ten issues I read of the title it spins out of...

Shadowpact 17 (by Matt Sturges, Doug Braithwaite and Mike Atiyer) is the debut of a new creative team, and I'm not very impressed as yet. Matt Sturges is a protege of Bill Willingham, the previous writer, and he seems to be taking a more serious tone which I'm not sure suits the series. Combined with Braithwaite and Atiyer's art (which is essentially identical to Braithwaite's work on Justice, stiff and undynamic, looking like traced fumetti rather than freehand drawing) , the total effect is like reading one of those early-90s 'fully painted' comics from around the time the Vertigo line first formed, when people were trying to be Neil Gaiman within the DCU. Not a bad comic as such, and I'm going to at least read the rest of this storyline, but I miss the lighter touch the comic used to have. It is nice, though, to see Detective Chimp drawn as an actual chimpanzee.

The Order 2 (by Matt Fraction & Barry Kitson, Marvel) is the kind of comic about which it's hard to find much to say. It's a good superhero team book of the kind that used to be the bread and butter of the industry, you can read it in about five minutes, Kitson's layouts are very impressive, and there's not much else to say here. If you like decent superhero team books, you'll like it.

Countdown To Mystery 1 (DC) is the better of the two spin-off anthology titles. The Doctor Fate story by Steve Gerber with Justiniano and Wong is excellent. It actually feels more like Shadowpact than this month's issue of that title does, featuring as it does that team in minor roles (flashing back to Day Of Vengeance) and being drawn by the art team who co-created them. The art is surprisingly good - most of it is in Justiniano's normal style, which is fine as far as it goes, but in some of the flashback sequences the colouring is fainter, and there's an almost ligne claire look to the inking. Those pages show a definite J.H. Williams III influence (specifically his work with Mick Gray - it almost looks like Gray inking at points) and are among the comparatively few pages of recent superhero comics to be actually pleasing aesthetically.
The story itself is mostly setup, but it's Gerber so it's well done and makes me want to read the next issue. And is that Ne-Bu-Loh on the last page?!

The backup story, by Mathew Sturges and Stephen Segovia, featuring the Spectre, Eclipso, Darkseid and Plastic Man, is actually pretty much exactly my kind of thing, but it unfortunately sets off one of my pet peeves. The first few pages are set in Manchester, which happens to be the city in which I live, and it doesn't look like that. Real-world cities have their own character and it's easy enough to do some quick photo-reference. Either set this stuff in a made-up city or use Google images. The Mancunian character (who I think is Sturges wanting his own Dane-from-the-Invisibles/John Constantine character, but more violent) also doesn't look like he's from Manchester either, but the look of people in a city is more indefinable and mutable than the architecture, so that can be given a pass.

What can't, though, is the dialect. This is something I've brought up several times, in relation to, for example, Mirror Master and Captain Boomerang, and it grates on me, but especially so when it's meant to represent my home city. I do not know of one single American comic writer who can accurately capture the way non-American English speakers talk. It's really best not to try. If British, Australian, Irish or whatever characters are written in the same voice as the Americans, it works well enough. But a failed attempt at dialect just makes me think of Jack Lemmon imitating Tony Curtis imitating Cary Grant - "Nobody talks like that!"

Sturges at least avoids one elementary mistake - he's noticed that people who substitute the word 'me' for 'my' do not do so all the time, and sometimes still use 'my'. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to know what the rules are for such substitutions (which are hard to explain, but have to do with the rhythm of the sentence, the amount of stress placed on the word itself, the amount of stress placed on the sentence as a whole, and other things) and gets them consistently wrong.

Seriously - and this rule goes for writers of all types, in any genre, but only in comics have I come across people repeatedly breaking this rule - if you haven't lived somewhere for at least five years, don't try writing in that place's accent, just write standard English.

Other than that, though, the story seems to set up something that might be very interesting.

The Spirit 10 (by Darwyn Cooke & J. Bone, DC) is magnificent. It's galling that Cooke is about to leave just as he's hitting his stride on this book. He's finally stopped doing stories that feel like he's paying tribute to Eisner, and started doing playful things with the medium, silly inventive stuff that lives up to the expectations everyone had for the title. This one, though, might be almost impenetrable for some non-US readers, being as it is a rather heavy-handed satire of US cable TV news/opinion, featuring obvious versions of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rosie O'Donnell, Stephen Colbert and others.

Four Horsemen 2 (by Keith Giffen and Pat Oliffe) is a very good piece of superhero entertainment. It has zombies building Apokolips on Earth, Batman being a sarcastic bastard, Morrisonesque technobabble and the return of Snapper Carr. You can't really ask more from a superhero comic than that.

Justice League of America 13 (by Dwayne McDuffie & Joe Benitez, DC) on the other hand, is frustrating. McDuffie's script is fine - he's one of the better superhero writers in the business, and he knows the characters well - but the art is some of the most ugly I've seen in years. The storytelling is confused, the women all have porn-pouts and impossible anatomy, John Stewart and Black Lightning have the same face, there are next to no backgrounds, characters change physiques, characters change relative sizes (on Grodd's first appearance he's about 9 or 10 feet tall, but by the time he's dangling Black Canary from his hand he's maybe 20 or 25), characters change their position relative to each other seemingly at random from panel to panel, the female characters who don't wear high heels spend the entire comic standing on tip-toe anyway... it's just ugly. I'm far more verbally/aurally oriented than visually, so as long as I can tell what's going on bad art is far less of a problem than bad writing, but this is really terrible.

As for Blue Beetle 19 (by John Rogers, Keith Giffen and David Baldeon), it's yet another fun, funny issue which manages to be a satisfying story on its own while advancing ongoing subplots and tying in elements of what's going on in the wider DCU, while remaining entirely accessible to a reader who's only reading this. It's the most consistently enjoyable superhero title DC is putting out not written by Grant Morrison, and yet nobody is buying it. This is also the best of the three comics with Detective Chimp in them I've reviewed this week.
This is only an average issue of this title - maybe even a below-average one - but this is one comic that I always know I will enjoy going in, and I've not been wrong yet.

2007-09-23T20:39:00.000Z

Just a quick post to let you all know I'm not dead. My wife's away visiting her parents, my father's fiftieth birthday was today, I've got problems at work and I've been ill. Between all those, I've not had time to write anything more than a sentence long. With luck, I'll have a post about last week's comics up tomorrow, and some more posts on Morrison later in the week.

Reviews For This Week - Countdown Contamination

2007-09-16T16:52:00.000Z

While it may not be readily apparent from my recent posts, this blog is still intended to be focussed on the countdown to Final Crisis (as opposed to Countdown To Final Crisis), and there has been quite a lot to talk about on that front recently. This week DC started three new titles, as well as debuting a new writer on Justice League.

Wonder Girl #1 and Countdown Presents: The Search For Ray Palmer : Wildstorm (50) #1 are of absolutely no interest as comics whatsoever, and are merely secondary tumours that have metastasised from the crossover. In the case of Wonder Girl there appears to be a pleasant superhero-fights-plus-teen-romance comic aimed at teenage girls in there somewhere, but it's choked to death in the tangle of unresolved plotlines from (as far as I can tell) four separate comics - Countdown, Wonder Woman, Amazons Attack and Teen Titans. Given that none of those comics have exactly lit their way up the charts, it's amazing that something like this was even considered. DC editorial are obviously having no truck with the idea of not putting all your eggs in one basket. Instead, they're trying to fit them into one extremely small basket that's clearly not big enough for a single egg, and one with holes in the size of the holes in this metaphor.
All-Colon 1 on the other hand, which spins out of (again, as far as I can tell, I may be missing something) Ion, Atom, Countdown, Amazons Attack, Sinestro Corps War, The Authority and, for all I know, Sugar and Spike and Famous Funnies, is just a fight scene in which we learn that the Authority's methods would be met with disapproval by DCU superheroes. There is no possible reason for anyone to buy either of these comics. If World War III was, as Jog put it so well 'gonzo continuity porn' ("there’s only forty-five seconds of repartee, if that, before those discrepancies start resolving"), these comics are the hotel room porn Bill Hicks spoke about, continuity porn but with no 'money shot' at all, just the promise that if you pay another $3 you might get to the good bit.

Suicide Squad 1 (by John Ostrander, Javed Pina and Robin Riggs, DC) is bad in a different, far more forgiveable way. If you're just after action and thrills, this comic has them - in the first four pages alone we have a secret mission behind enemy lines, an atomic explosion, an attempted prison break and a half-man half-cat creature whose head explodes. The rest of the comic continues at much the same pace, ending with a dinosaur about to attack our unconscious hero.
The problem is that Ostrander's writing hasn't really changed since he was writing this title in the 1980s. He still can't do plausibility, or dialogue, and has still never heard an actual Australian speak. This would have been a very acceptable issue of the series in 1988, but seems curiously pointless now.

Another comic that feels like a late-80s DC midlist title, but this time in a moderately decent rather than a moderately bad way, is Booster Gold 2 (by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz, Dan Jurgens and Norm Rapmund). Less accessible (and less funny) than issue 1, because our hero has now started time-travelling and continuity-patching, it still manages to tell a more-or-less complete in itself story, while setting up future stories in what looks like it will be a regular variant on the old Levitz ABC plotline formula - one page is 'the origin of the Dan Garret Blue Beetle', one is 'something ominous in the timestream' (with a quick feature from Team 13 having a rather unnecessary dig at Brian Azarello) , half a page is 'who is evil Supernova?' and the last page sets up next issue.
The rest of the issue is deliberately patterned after Quantum Leap (with a dash of Back To The Future thrown in) - Booster goes back in time to try to prevent a catastrophe without letting anyone know of his involvement. He succeeds, but another problem comes along. It's all very formulaic, but the way in which Booster resolves the conflict with Sinestro is quite fun.
I don't want to give the impression that this series is great or anything - for a start, it's very reliant on at least a passing knowledge of the DC Universe - but for what it is, it's surprisingly decent. The premise allows Johns and Katz to tell single-issue stories while advancing a larger plotline, to make use of pretty much any DCU character, and to not take it too seriously.
The current comic this reminds me of most is The Brave And The Bold, and I suspect anyone who enjoys one will get at least some enjoyment out of the other. Booster Gold isn't as good as Brave & Bold, but it's solid, fun superhero entertainment, and that's sadly lacking at the moment.

Poor Kurt Busiek has got the short straw with the Superman assignment. The Camelot Falls story which continues in Superman 667 (by Busiek, Carlos Pacheco and Jesus Merino) was obviously meant to be a relatively short storyline, but with the various inventory stories that have been dropped in, plus the scheduling problems and Busiek working double duty on Action for much of the time, the storyline has been running for thirteen issues with no hint of resolution. What looked to be a brief darker story in the mold of Must There Be A Superman? in the middle of an otherwise light-hearted run has now become a long dark epic with brief incongruous light moments, simply because of the order in which the issues have come out.
It's a tribute to how well Busiek gets Superman that the story is still readable, but I can't wait for this plot to be over. This storyline finally wraps up next issue, and will probably read much better when it's collected.

The JLA Wedding Special (by Dwayne McDuffie, Mike McKone and Andy Lanning) is McDuffie's debut on the title. This is mostly setup for future storylines - the inclusion of Firestorm and John Stewart (who didn't see them coming?) and the formation of a new Injustice League. It's nothing special, but it's infinitely better than Meltzer's recent run (which McDuffie takes a few potshots at) - McDuffie juggles a large cast well, and manages to get in a few choice lines (the Joker stealing one of my favourite Mel Brooks lines, and Lex Luthor's "If you don't want your enemies to neutralize your powers, refrain from publishing scientific papers explaining them"). It's a competent Justice League comic - something I thought I'd never see again. Now if they can only stop getting Ed Benes to draw those horrendous T&A covers (or failing that at least show him what a real woman looks like)...

The Groo 25th Anniversary Special (by Sergio Aragones & Mark Evanier , Dark Horse), shows all these newcomers how it's done. I've always had a soft spot for Groo, which is in many ways the comic that people must have expected from Dave Sim when he first announced his plan to go to 300 issues, and this special is exactly what you'd expect from Groo. The main story is about how there's a disease going round, originally caught from a monkey, which is spread by kissing and can only be prevented by wearing something over your mouth, but the priests don't approve... Groo has never been about subtlety. There are some delightful pot-shots taken at the priesthood and the medical profession (who provide palliatives that don't work, then medication for the side-effects, then medication for the side-effects of the side-effect medication) which as an advocate of orthomolecular medicine I love (but I have enough of a sense of humour to appreciate the shot at alternative medicine too).
There's also a back-up tale of Young Groo, a rhyming glossary of the main characters, and a text piece by Evanier. There's no such thing as continuity when it comes to Groo, so if you've never read it before, you can start with this issue. Aragones and Evanier have just been announced as the new writers of The Spirit - I can't wait to see their take on it.

Finally this week I bought Potter's Field 1 (by Mark Waid and Paul Azaceta, Boom!), a comic about which I have very serious reservations.
Other people have pointed out most of the interesting things about this, but to recap - this is Waid doing Ellis, specifically Fell (but the panel layouts owe more to the widescreen Transmetropolitan than to Fell's 9-panel grid). It's 'high concept' - an investigator wants to find names for all the dead people buried in unmarked graves in the city - and reads a lot like a pitch for a TV series.
This first issue is actually very like Paul Dini's Detective Comics - a decent, atmospheric done-in-one story with a plot that doesn't quite work as a fair-play mystery but comes close enough, and the concept can generate a potentially infinite number of stories.
My one problem with this is simple - the reveal that the bald, black, burly working-class man kidnapped, raped and murdered an upper-middle-class white girl.
I am absolutely certain, beyond all doubt, that neither Waid nor Azaceta have a racist bone in their body, and that the very nasty subtext here was totally unintentional, but this sort of thing shouldn't get through editorial. Someone should have said "Hang on, we've got an apelike black man raping and murdering a young white girl here - maybe this could be seen as being a little bit dodgy".
I don't mean to sound too critical here - it's even possible there will be a reveal in a later issue that it was someone else all along (though I think it's unlikely, the series doesn't seem set up that way), and this is, other than Groo, the best comic in an otherwise lacklustre week - and I certainly don't want to suggest that no comic should ever have a black villain. But there are certain cultural resonances one shouldn't play with without a great deal more thought than Waid and Azaceta seem to have put into this. I'm sure both men would be mortified at the thought that they could even inadvertantly give the slightest ammunition to bigots, but the subtext is there...
I'm going to buy the second issue, and it is a genuinely good comic, but I wish someone had pointed this out before it went to press. It's the kind of thing that could be changed without upsetting the story, and I wish it had been...

The DC Morrisonverse 5: They Fuck You Up...

2007-09-14T13:33:00.000Z

Most of the things I've posted so far in the look back over Seven Soldiers have been about fairly obscure elements in the series, things that have in large part been ignored by other writers on the subject (possibly, I accept, because they're not as interesting as those subjects they have focussed on).

However, to move on to Morrison's other DC work (and, eventually, to Final Crisis) I think I need to cover one of the most covered aspects of Seven Soldiers, (and in this post I'll draw a lot on the posts of both Jog and Marc Singer ), fatherhood and influence.

If we look through the seven soldiers and their fathers, we see a pattern in those where they're mentioned:

Shining Knight - no mention is made of Ystin's parents, but Ystin has to kill the undead King Arthur, the most important authority figure in the young knight's life.
Guardian - No mention of his parents, but has to let his father-in-law, who is also his mentor, die.
Zatanna - Goes on a quest to find her dead father('s bequest) , ends up killing people in a recreation of his death, meets an evil counterpart of her father and finally has to come to terms with his death.
Klarion - Goes in search of his father and discovers him to be evil. Kills him. The only one of the seven whose mother plays a role in the story, but her role is minor. Ends up taking the place of his evil ancestor Melmoth (who introduces himself to the puritans with "Daddy's home!") after Melmoth dies.
Frankenstein - Had two fathers, both evil, and killed them both.
Bulleteer - No mention made of her parents, but her oldest ancestor, Aurakles, is portrayed as a once-great god who's now an accidental destroyer who needs to be killed.

Now the interesting thing about this is that Aurakles is also drawn as looking exactly like Alan Moore.
Morrison's relationship with Alan Moore is a tricky one, and he knows it. Morrison has said in interviews that he was inspired to start writing comics by Moore's work in Warrior, and his early work shows Moore's influence very heavily (for example the Watchmen visual references in Animal Man, and the striking similarity between The Coyote Gospel and Pog) but has also on a number of occasions been absolutely scathing about Moore's magical practices and later work. In fact much of Morrison's career can be seen as a reaction to Moore's work (for example his championing of Robert Mayer's horrible novel Superfolks makes sense when you consider it a stick to beat Moore with - Moore 'borrowed' more than a bit from the novel).

Much of Seven Soldiers can be seen as a reaction to Moore, or as homage, depending on the part of the work in question. Zatanna #1, for example (which I just typed as Promethea in a Freudian typo), contains the famous cutting parody of Promethea and the line about Zatanna's writing about magic being 'non-preachy', but it also contains an almost exact recreation of Zatarra's death-scene from Moore's Swamp Thing run. In fact a lot of Swamp Thing makes its way into the series - not only is Frankenstein very much in the same vein, but Zor is reborn as Solomon Grundy in much the same way that Alec Holland becomes Swamp Thing (in, of course, the origin story by Len Wein, who Morrison also claims as an influence) and Alix Harrower's job is working with autistic children, as Abby Holland (note the initials) did in Moore's Swamp Thing run.

But the aspect that has had most people talking is what has been interpreted as the inclusion of several avatars of Moore within the story, usually in negative roles. While the similarity in appearance of Aurakles to Moore might be charitably viewed as coincidental (and the similarity of Melmoth that some have pointed out extends only to him having a beard), and even the rivalry between pirates All-Beard (with his huge bushy beard and big hair) and No-Beard (bald like Morrison) can be seen as people reading too much into it, Zor is another matter.

Zor (rhymes with Moore) is one of the major villains of the piece (and in fact is also the person directly addressed by Morrison's avatar in the last issue), a magician who was one of the Seven Unknown Men ( who are all DC writers) but went renegade, who is responsible for much of the darkening of the DCU, and who has a beard of which he is comically proud. I wonder who that could be?

From The Comics Journal 176 (as quoted in a post on Barbelith):

Actually, at one point there was a sense that we were all marching into the future together waving the same flag, then I realized that we weren't, which is probably why I criticized Alan quite a lot, which is why he doesn't speak to me anymore. But I really felt the need to get out from under his shadow, because it had become so oppressive, and we were all being expected to do as he did.

This need to get out from Moore's shadow characterises huge chunks of Seven Soldiers, but another creator is equally present - Jack Kirby.

At first sight Kirby appears to be treated better than Moore - three of the minis ( Guardian, Klarion and Mister Miracle) are updatings of Kirby's concepts, and Kirby's avatar in the story, Ed Stargard, is one of the heroes - he has behind the scenes put together the seven soldiers who will defeat the Sheeda.

However, Ed is also trapped in the body of a child, grown wrinkled and decayed, but still a baby - a pretty potent metaphor for the US comics industry that has largely been built on the back of Kirby. He is also revealed as possibly having contributed to the death of an old friend, and is generally a far more ambiguous figure than he at first seems.

Kirby and Moore could be seen as the 'fathers' of Morrison-the-writer, and Seven Soldiers as a whole says that 'fathers' are to be distrusted - as is all authority. The work undercuts authority figures at every turn (the Submissionaries are tools of the Sheeda, Stargard isn't the imposing man he presents himself as, Shilo Norman's psychiatrist is a minion of Darkseid, Melmoth is a slaver, the expert on the past in Shining Knight turns out to be the Sheeda Queen) and over and over the message that's hammered home appears to be 'don't trust anyone over thirty'.

Remember, as well, that in Morrison's evolution, Seven Soldiers comes after Seaguy (which it resembles in many ways), with its apocalyptic conflict with 'the Anti-Dad'. This ties in with the big themes of the series - to live we must change. We must outgrow the influences that formed us, and become ourselves. Zatanna is the books her father wrote, but she is not her father. Frankenstein is immortal because of Melmoth, but he still kills Melmoth. And Grant Morrison has been shaped by Alan Moore and Jack Kirby, but he has to move beyond them (whether he does or not is a different matter).

Oh see ye not that narrow road so thick beset with thorns and briars?
That is the path of righteousness
And see ye not that broad broad road, that is the path of wickedness
... though some call it the road to heaven.

But don't forget... there's a third road.

(Next in this series - 52).

Brief note

2007-09-12T23:45:00.000Z

Sorry for those of you waiting to hear the last part of my 7 Soldiers stuff - the review of the Brian Wilson gig I wrote yesterday took longer than I was expecting, and I've been ill today. Tomorrow expect a post about fathers and influence in Seven Soldiers...

Books you should read: Reading Comics

2007-09-08T00:17:00.000Z

I'll be continuing the posts on Morrison on Tuesday evening, once I get back from seeing Brian Wilson in London. I want to do at least one more Seven Soldiers post, and then I want to look at 52 and the current Bat-books, and Morrison's involvement in those.

But for today, I'm going to have a quick look at Douglas Wolk's new(ish) book Reading Comics.

One of the ideas we see floating around on comics blogs a lot at the moment is that we need a comics magazine 'between Wizard and The Comics Journal'. Now, I expect that the people who say this mean at least two different things. I think for the majority what they're talking about is some ghastly middlebrow Mojo magazine for comics, something to confirm for them that the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans was the greatest achievement in the history of the comics medium, and that Alex Ross is the only real artist working today. Sadly, given the current demographic of comics fans, I suspect such a magazine would outsell both Wizard and The Comics Journal.

But what I think at least some are talking about is the potentially far more interesting idea of criticism that engages with work of whatever genre, with neither TCJ's incessant brown-nosing of whoever Fantagraphics are publishing this week (and I say that as someone who finds TCJ generally a very readable, interesting magazine) or Wizard's role as a press release outlet for Marvel. Something that actually applies actual critical standards to the work in question. Now, for someone like myself who thrives on discourse, for whom almost half the fun in a piece of art is reading the criticism of it and formulating my own response to it, that sort of thing is worth seeking out. Much of what is available in the comics medium, like in any other medium, is pap, but there is good material out there, both in the superhero genre and in 'art comics', and there is a lot of material out there that is worthy of discussion.

There are a few people out there who are actually looking at comics with a critical eye - Jog is obviously the most prominent, but some of the other writers in my sidebar do the same kind of thing at times. And Douglas Wolk's book is in many ways the book I would like to have written on comics, had I the knowledge or writing ability.

Reading Comics does not pretend to be a comprehensive guide to comics - Wolk (who most of you will know from his blog 52 pickup , the blog that inspired the original incarnation of this one, and from his writing for The Savage Critics ) is not stupid enough to pretend that such a thing is possible - but is instead a discussion of those comics Wolk finds interesting to talk about, primarily English language comics published by American publishers. And it is all the better for that - Wolk's passion for the medium and his chosen topics shines through even when he is talking about work that he considers flawed.

The book is split into two sections. The first, shorter section of about 140 pages is mostly devoted to explaining for non-comics readers what comics are, and some of the ins and outs of comics 'culture'. Most of those reading this will be familiar with many of the concepts here, and some of the material of necessity duplicates that in works such as Understanding Comics, but a lot of it reads as surprisingly fresh. In particular Wolk's explanations of how continuity functions in modern superhero comics and the way that a story gains significance from its placement in the larger context are very effective at putting into words things which many superhero readers have internalised but may never have verbalised.

But it's the second section which will be of most interest to the readers of this blog. Wolk devotes a series of chapters to creators or works he has something to say about, ranging from Chris Ware to Steve Ditko, from Fun Home to Tomb Of Dracula.

What most of these works and creators have in common is that they're ambitious but flawed, and Wolk deals well with both aspects of the work. All too often (and I'm very guilty of it myself) comics critics fall into the habit of overlooking flaws in an impressive work, or conversely overlooking the good points in a flawed work. It's very easy to see the flaws in Jim Starlin's Warlock and dismiss it as superhero hackery. Likewise, it's incredibly easy to look at Will Eisner's later work and be awed by the mastery of the form, without noticing that a lot of the content is semi-competent.

Wolk doesn't fall into this trap, and it's to his credit. He's especially good on works where the quality and the flaws are both very noticeable - he's one of the depressingly few people who seem to acknowledge that the Dave Sim of the last 15 or so years is both the most interesting and creative comics writer/artist in the business and as mad as a box of frogs rather than focussing on one to the exclusion of the other - but he is equally good on someone like Alan Moore, pointing out the lazy shortcuts Moore sometimes uses, while still acknowledging his achievements.

The one exception is his chapter on Grant Morrison, which reads almost as a love-letter to Morrison. With good reason - Morrison is the kind of writer a critic like Wolk should love, packing endless layers of meaning and subtext into almost every panel - but Morrison at least as much as Moore is a flawed writer, with his own tics and bad habits. I suspect though that this chapter has lost quite a bit in the editing - it is mentioned near the beginning of the chapter that "Morrison's arguably still grappling with Moore's legacy, as we'll see", and then Moore's not mentioned again. If there was a section on this that was cut, it's a shame - one of the most interesting things about Morrison is the way he interacts with Moore's work, flitting between outright imitation, critique, and deliberate attempts to be as dissimilar from Moore as possible, and I would have liked to see Wolk deal with that.

I'm possibly over-praising Wolk's book here, but that's partly because it's so close to my own tastes and concerns. As Wolk says of The Invisibles "I've never been able to recommend it to anyone else with a clear conscience... partly because it struck me as being exactly the kind of story I like to read." I can think of only a handful of cases where I actually disagree with him (his acceptance of the claim that 'art comics' have no genre rather than being a genre themselves is surprising for someone who's otherwise so insightful about this sort of thing, his claim that the early Image artists had much technical skill, and his rather over-high opinion of Art Spiegelman) and many where he cast an interesting new light on something I'd read, or articulated something I've thought but been unable to put into words.

I have criticisms of course - many of the individual creators Wolk writes about deserve (and some have) entire books written about them. Dealing with Alan Moore or Chester Brown in a chapter, or Will Eisner and Frank Miller in half a chapter each, sells them short. But it made me want to reread Ed The Happy Clown, Lost Girls, The Invisibles, the last half of Cerebus and Jimmy Corrigan, and to seek out the comics he talks about that I haven't read. If you're the kind of person who likes the stuff I try to do on this blog, I can't recommend it strongly enough.

The DC Morrisonverse Part 4: They All Float Down Here

2007-09-06T21:34:00.000Z

This entry isn't going to be as in-depth as the other posts I've been doing on Seven Soldiers as I'm not identifying any new themes or ways of looking at the material, merely pointing out a novel that I think almost certainly provided some of the inspiration for the series, but that I don't recall being mentioned anywhere else. As a result, it's only a few paragraphs long, and I'm just pointing out similarities, not drawing conclusions. I'll be doing more of that in tomorrow's post, which will be much longer than this one.

Morrison has described the structure of the collected versions of Seven Soldiers as being "like a Stephen King book", and I'm pretty sure he had a specific Stephen King book in mind when he said that, because the parallels with King's book It are much greater than most people appear to have picked up on.

It is represented as the personification of destruction and consumption, somewhat equivalent to the personifications of entropy scattered throughout Seven Soldiers, and is also portrayed as a giant spider. It is from a realm outside spacetime known as the Macroverse.

All these things are parallels, as is the fact that It mentions a Roanoke-like event in Derry' s past. But there are closer similarities.

It, like Seven Soldiers, deals with a team of seven. In fact their story in many ways parallels that of the Newsboy Legion - working together as children to defeat a menace that the adults don't believe in, but drifting apart after that, then working together when the menace resurfaces. The seven are all damaged in some way by the event, but most go on to wealth and fame.

In both stories when the menace returns in the present day, it is fought by a team of six, rather than seven.

Almost all King's characters have fathers who are absent or outright evil.

I'm not sure what to make of these similarities, but I thought I'd throw them out there for people to comment on - a more thorough, analytical post will be up tomorrow.

The DC Morrisonverse 3: ytilautxetatem dna annataZ

2007-09-05T18:33:00.000Z

Before I start this post, I'd just like to put in a quick plug. My own webcomic, Dumb Angel, is finally restarting after a lengthy absence. The latest page is drawn but I'm having problems getting it on the site - by the time you read this it may well be there, though. Let me know what you think of it...

One of the most common complaints about Seven Soldiers concerns Zatanna's role in the story. While the Zatanna mini itself is possibly the best-received of the minis (in part because its mild attacks on Alan Moore allow some reviewers to use Morrison as a proxy for their own assertions that the Emperor has no clothes, which says more about them than it does about Moore, Morrison or the mini), it has been asserted by many critics that Zatanna plays no role in the final issue, Seven Soldiers 1.

In fact, Zatanna may be the most important character in that issue.

Morrison has spent the whole of the Zatanna miniseries having her travel between dimensions, popping out of flat surfaces (the 'brane universes in issue 1) and, in the climax of her miniseries, meeting the Seven Unknown Men, who are the personifications of Morrison and his fellow DC writers.

Now, several DC characters had met their creators over the years, with for example the Flash meeting Cary Bates and, in one memorable issue of The Brave & The Bold, artist Jim Aparo being held hostage and forced to draw the comic in the way the criminals wanted. But this kind of thing has usually been played as a joke - just a throwaway idea, with no real significance.

The two big exceptions in comics have been Morrison's own Animal Man and Dave Sim's Cerebus, both of which had creator/creation meetings as the climax of their respective storylines. However, both these comics came from the same source - the classic cartoon Duck Amuck, and carried over a good chunk of Chuck Jones' moral (such as it was) - "like flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods - they kill us for their sport".

Zatanna's reaching out to the third dimension is something else though. It brings the readers, as well as the creators, into the story - we can no longer be voyeurs, but have to choose sides. And it does so extraordinarily effectively - I've read time and again that readers of Zatanna, when they get to the crucial point, have placed their hands against Zatanna's. (I, of course, am a rational adult who would never do such a childish thing. Of course.)

And at the climax of Seven Soldiers 1, Zatanna interacts with the readers again, and this time actually becomes three-dimensional.

Or rather she doesn't. She attains the illusion of three-dimensionality - and she does so at precisely the same time as she says "it's not about illusion or trickery". Words, as have been shown throughout Zatanna's story, can be untrustworthy.

Zatanna is absolutely essential to the story because she is the only character in the DCU who is capable of literally rewriting reality (which is why she is able to join the writers, however briefly, in her own series). Something that Morrison has noticed that I believe had never been made explicit before is that Zatanna's reversed speech bubbles look exactly like a speech bubble would if coming from someone facing her - that is, coming from outside the page, from 3-space.

This is made explicit in her climactic scene in SS1, where the reader actually responds 'ydaer', with the lettering, as well as the letter order, reversed. But few people have noticed what this implies - whenever Zatanna is casting a spell, she's projecting her words into our reality. In other words, she's changing the script.

This makes Zatanna one of the writers, as well as one of the characters, of the DC Universe, and thus we can see her as one of Morrison's 'fictionsuits' (Morrison's term for characters who are essentially avatars of the writer). It is notable that Morrison makes Zatanna a published author (whose Hex Appeal sounds very like Morrison's own proposed Pop Magick book) . Zatanna's whole story is about the interchangeability of words and reality within the DCU - she is searching for her father's books, the Libri Zatarae, only to discover that she is the book he has written in the universe. Gwydion is also portrayed at one point as being living words in a book.

When she calls on the universe to awake and the seven soldiers to strike, then, Zatanna is Morrison, trying to complete the story and also trying to bring about his project of making the DCU sentient. But she needs the help of the reader.

Morrison's point (well, one of them - nearly everything in Seven Soldiers admits of three or four different readings) couldn't really be more explicit - we can have comics full of hope, where good triumphs over evil, or we can have dark Sheeda 'raping our childhood' (which is literally what the Sheeda are doing with their wholesale destruction of previous times, but also a common accusation from the more unreasonable type of comic-book fan aimed at the powers that be at DC after series like Identity Crisis), but only if the fans, as well as the writers, want them.

Zatanna's spell is the point where everything starts to come together, where everything that had previously looked hopeless starts to brighten up. The split between Jake Jordan and Carla had been the biggest symbol of hopelessness in the series (used as an example of 'anti-life' in Mister Miracle) yet on the very next page after Zatanna's spell, they are reconciled. Zatanna has reached out into the third dimension and changed the script, chosen to use her free will rather than being the puppet of others. She's escaped from the Life Trap, and taken everyone else with her.

More on this tomorrow.

DC Morrisonverse Part 2: Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold

2007-09-01T18:43:00.000Z

Before I start this post, I just want to let people know I've started a second blog, at http://olsenbloom.blogspot.com , where I'm going to be posting about music and songwriting. If you're interested, check it out - the first post is on Brian Wilson.

Anyway, on to the second of what appears to be an interminable series of posts about the themes of Seven Soldiers.

I finished my post from Friday by talking about entropy. Entropy has been a recurring theme in Morrison's work (see for example the Invisibles volume Entropy In The UK) but never more so than in Seven Soldiers.

For those of you who don't know, entropy is a measure of the amount of chaos or disorder in a system. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, possibly the single most fundamental law of physics there is, says that in a closed system entropy must increase.

I've written before about how this applies to the Mister Miracle mini - and how that only made explicit what was implicit in Kirby's original conception of the Fourth World characters - so I won't go over that material again here, save to say that Morrison's relationship with the concept of entropy appears a very ambivalent one.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics means that no authority can ever have ultimate control - there will always be a random factor outside their control, and that random factor will always increase until there is no authority - definitely an idea that would appeal to someone of Morrison's politics (I've not seen Morrison put a label on his politics, so I don't know if he regards himself as socialist, anarchist or what, but all his interviews and writings place him pretty firmly in the lower-left quadrant of the political compass ...). In that sense, the second law is undoubtedly A Good Thing (if you share Morrison's anti-authoritarianism, as I do).

However, Morrison is also a hopeful writer, in the most fundamental sense. And the Second Law is a fundamentally pessimistic law. It says that in the end, the universe will simply fade away, that everyone and everything in the universe, everything that has ever existed or will ever exist
, everything will decay, crumble, and vanish and there will be nothing at all left. Any effort to stop this can only make things worse - every single act increases entropy. Even by reading this, increasing the information in your brain, you are contributing to the heat death of the universe. Everything is futile and life is a hollow joke. In comparison to the Second Law of Thermodynamics seen in this light, Ozymandias is positively Norman Vincent Pealesque - after all, those two vast and trunkless legs of stone are still standing, even if nothing else is. The Second Law is a true Anti-Life Equation.

So throughout Seven Soldiers there is a tension between these two views. In Zatanna #1 entropy is represented as the ultimate Big Bad:

"Doesn't the red god look just the way he's described in the Omninomicon?"
"...I'm witnessing large-scale entropic decay"
"Thank Tahuti your father trapped the beast here when he did"
"Well, see, that's the thing... dad couldn't stop the red god. All he could do was freeze him. He'll eat the universe in the end."

And throughout the series, entropy and decay are portrayed as something negative, but fighting against them as being pointless or outright evil. Alix Harrower's husband tries to preserve her perfect physical form from decay, but ends up killing himself - he can't breathe once his superskin is applied (breathing of course being an oxidation reaction, as are most forms of decay - again going back to the theme throughout that the only way not to change is to die). The world of the Sheeda, a billion years from now, is "steaming in the squalid, luscious decay of the refuse-littered slopes at Summer's End".

But at the same time, entropy can be used to the advantage of the forces of good. I've gone into this in the Mister Miracle article linked above, but there's also Ed Stargard's plan - making sure the Seven never meet, so they remain a random factor, unaccounted for by the Sheeda.

But in the end, though, Morrison points out the get-out clause - "In a closed system entropy will always increase". From the same double-page spread as the above Zatanna dialogue, the line straight after what I quoted before is "I'm hoping we all get a bigger place to stay in before that happens". Later on the same spread, we get:

"No way out of a closed system! Don't you see how it all has to fall down in the end?"
"teg su tuo fo ereh! If I say there's a way, there's a way."

I'll go into this more tomorrow - there's much more to say here. But in Seven Soldiers Morrison is talking about closed systems - systems of thought, the DC Universe that endlessly recycles the same tropes with little or no influence from the larger culture, and our universe as well - and saying that there are two choices - stagnate and die, or open up to new possibilities and live free.

Tomorrow, I'm going to talk about magic, metatextuality, and Zatanna...

The DC Morrisonverse Part 1: Seven Against Gravity

2007-08-29T18:49:00.000Z

I'm sorry it's been a little while between posts here. I tried to write a post reviewing last week's comics, but junked it - I had nothing to say about most of them that wasn't just surface-level stuff, with the exception of Batman, and I want to wait until next issue before discussing that.

What I would like to do, though, is discuss Grant Morrison's DC Universe work.

Morrison is almost unique in his generation of comic writers (those who started in the late 70s and came to prominence in the mid-late 80s) in that almost all his significant work has been done in mainstream superhero comics. Morrison has been hugely prolific, of course, and worked in a variety of genres and for a variety of publishers, but while, say, Alan Moore has done almost all of his important work outside of the shared superhero universes, Neil Gaiman found his own little corner of the DCU and played there without interacting with the rest, and Dave Sim wrote his own indie comic and never ventured into the shared-universe arena at all, Morrison has produced a staggering amount of major work planted firmly in the mainstream DC (and to a lesser extent Marvel) superhero universe. If you read only Animal Man, Doom Patrol, JLA, Arkham Asylum, All-Star Superman, New X-Men and Seven Soldiers, and never read another word Morrison wrote, you'd have a fair idea of his strengths, weaknesses and preoccupation as a writer. Read The DC Universe Stories Of Alan Moore and Swamp Thing and you'll certainly be impressed, but you'd have no idea why their writer was considered the finest ever to work in the medium.

While this has caused any number of problems with Morrison's work - too much of his work shows the signs of editorial edict, and he has often been forced to work with unsympathetic collaborators - it has advantages. Working in what we laughingly call the mainstream means that Morrison has been able to expose a large proportion of the comics readership to his ideas in a form that makes them palatable. Morrison, for example, said that his run on JLA was intended as a 'Cliffs Notes' version of his creator-owned magnum opus The Invisibles, the action and concepts in the two comics often paralleling each other closely. (Personally I use them the other way round, finding the storytelling of Steve Parkhouse, Frank Quitely, Steve Yeowell, Phil Jiminez, Cameron Stewart et al much easier to follow than Howard Porter's Image-isms).

This also means that, at least to a greater extent than his peers, he is regarded as a 'good company man' and is given the keys to the company's most important intellectual properties on occasion. This is particularly true at the moment - Morrison is writing both Superman and Batman, and is in charge of two major crossovers (which will probably tie into each other) - this year's Death Of Ra's Al-Ghul running through all the Batman titles, and next year's Final Crisis (to which the whole DCU is patiently counting down).

Given that Morrison will effectively be guiding DC comics for much of next year, I think it could be valuable to look over some of his earlier ventures into the DCU and see what, if anything, we can glean from them.

To start with, I'd like to do a few posts about Seven Soldiers. I wrote quite a bit about this series when it first came out (some of you reading this will have read those posts) , and it's been talked about by some of the most intelligent commentators in comics criticism - Jog and Marc Singer in particular have done an extraordinary job of covering the themes in the series, and the annotations at Barbelith are absolutely essential. I also strongly suspect that Douglas Wolk's coverage in his book (which I have on order at the moment) will have much of interest to say.

I have no hope of bettering what those excellent writers have already said on the topic, but what I find fascinating about Seven Soldiers, and what I hope to show over the next few days (I've got a few days off work and some important procrastinating to do, so I expect to write several posts) is that no matter how much you write on the subject there's always more to tease out of it. Morrison's writing is hugely dense, with allusions to folklore, mathematics, physics, superhero comics, occultism and, for all I know, Belgian clog-dancing, and at times the writing in Seven Soldiers reaches that Finnegans Wake-esque state where there are so many references and allusions that connections that almost certainly weren't intended by the author become apparent.

I'm going to deal with those connections, and more, over the next few days, but in this post I want to focus on a theme that appears to have been ignored by most commentators on the series - gravity. (This will come back into play when I finally get around to writing about All Star Superman).

A lot of commentators on Seven Soldiers have mentioned the parallels with Newton's theories of colours that can be found in the comic, but something I found quite interesting is the role of gravity in the series.

The very first speech bubble in JLA: Classified #1 reads "F= γ(m1m2/r^2)" (allowing for my inability to represent formulae in HTML. This is also repeated as a thought bubble in Frankenstein #1 . Anyone who's studied any physics at all will recognise this as the formula for gravitational attraction.

Now, there could be several reasons for the prominence of this equation (which, as far as I know, has not been picked up by any other commentators on the series, which is why I'm leading off my analysis with it). It could be to make oblique reference to Newton, whose obsession with the number seven is well known (the reason why we differentiate between indigo and violet when looking at a rainbow, despite the two colours being almost identical, is so there would be seven colours to fit in with Newton's numerological ideas).

It could also be because Newton's ideas about gravity stemmed from Newton's occult investigations - the whole concept of forces acting at a distance is one that comes from Newton's magical beliefs.

But I suspect there's a deeper meaning. Gravity is referenced in many places in the story, but most prominently in Mister Miracle. On the first page of this mini we are told "nothing can escape the deadly gravitational pull of a black hole!" and asked "Can he cheat gravity itself and free himself from the crushing oblivion inside black hole X?!?"

The latter is, of course, the main question in the whole Mister Miracle miniseries. Gravity here is the life trap, a crushing force that we have to fight or die, a force that should by rights overwhelm us. In fact, much of the Seven Soldiers story involves the characters in orbit, sucked in by the gravitational pull of 'black holes' - absences (the missing god of the witch-people, the missing eighth soldier, Zatanna and Klarion's absent fathers) and occasionally pulled in by each other's force before swinging off in their own directions, their orbits perturbed by the presence of characters of whose existence they are unaware.

But I think there's a deeper meaning to gravity here. Much as Morrison used JLA to explain The Invisibles by paralleling it, I think gravity - a natural force against which our heroes have to fight - is being used for its resonance with a lesser-known concept in physics, one that I think is the theme - or at least one of the overriding themes - of the story.

I'm referring of course to entropy, and that shall be the topic of my next post.

Comic Shop Semiotics 101

2007-08-18T12:58:00.001Z

I've been wanting to speak for a while about the furore
recently about the Mary Jane statue, the Heroes For Hire cover and other such tasteful and mature expressions of an adult sexuality, but was waiting for the discussion to calm down enough that reason, as opposed to snarling, might have a chance to be heard. I suspect that may not yet be the case, but I had a perfect personal illustration the other day of why this issue matters.

There are two comic shops in my town, within walking distance of each other, both branches of national chains. One, let us call it Friendly Neighbourhood Comic Shop, is quite a small shop, but brightly lit with natural light, with (for the most part) helpful staff. They don't have a huge stock, and in fact have an air of genial incompetence, but the staff will chat to you, some will smile, and one is even an actual woman. This is the shop I have my pull list with, and the one I visit on a weekly basis, where I know the names of the staff and they know mine.

There is another shop across the road from it, which we shall call The Android's Dungeon. This is a branch of a larger, better known chain, and it has a much larger stock, of greater variety. However, it's in a cellar, with no decoration (no posters or fliers for conventions or anything), staffed by a famously surly man with no interest in the stock or customers, lit by harsh fluorescent lights. This is a shop I go into maybe every couple of months, if Friendly Neighbourhood Comic Shop have sold out of something, or if they have a sale on, or to browse through trades that FNCS don't have.

Now, I'm perfectly happy to shop there, but my wife won't. If we go into town together and I want to pop into there, she'll complain that she doesn't like it, and if I insist will be looking restless and anxious from the moment we're in there. I've also heard from a few other female friends that they don't feel welcome in that shop. But I've never really understood this on other than an intellectual level. My gut reaction has always been 'well, you don't go there to feel welcome. You go there to buy comics. If I want to feel welcomed I'll go round to see my grandma, if I want to buy comics I go to the comic shop'.

However, last Thursday, we not only went into Android's Dungeon, but we immediately afterwards went into a mobile phone shop. And within a fairly short time I was feeling a mild panic that didn't fully abate until maybe half an hour after getting out of the shop. At the time I felt foolish, but in retrospect it makes sense.

Advertising companies and marketers are paid ludicrously huge sums of money to find symbols that people will respond to on a visceral level. The idea, thankfully not yet perfected, is to come up with symbols that will affect people on such a deep, automatic level, that they will buy whatever the product is without even thinking. The amount paid to these people, and the amount of effort put in, suggests that they have at least some effect.

Unfortunately, a certain number of people, myself included, are conditioned to react in the opposite way, but to an equal degree. Put me into a room full of pictures of David Beckham, AOL logos, Virgin logos, and pictures of Disney characters, and fill that room full of people with hairstyles, and it has much the same effect on my hindbrain as pointing a gun at me, as I discovered on Thursday. I go into 'fight or flight' mode.

Now, if a lifesize cardboard cutout of a metrosexual footballer can have that effect on me, what effect could images of women being tortured or bound have on some women, and with far more justification?

I'm not talking here about an effect that can be argued with, which was the problem I had until recently. I have always argued that the sexist and degrading imagery we take as the norm in comics was pernicious, but I was thinking of it as something that could be laughed out of existence. I was essentially thinking in terms of the 'marketplace of ideas' - if enough people ridicule that kind of material loudly enough it will go away.

The problem (and I am almost certainly the last person in the world to realise this) is, if people have a visceral gut reaction that says "Bad! Run away!" they're not going to stick around to debate ideas.

On a purely intellectual level, a comic shop that displayed Reads by Sim & Gerhard should be infinitely more threatening to women than one that displays, say, Lady Death with the same prominence. Reads attempts to justify relegating women to the status of subhuman, whereas Lady Death is just (as far as I can tell from covers and solicits, having never read it) soft-core porn and mild violence for horny teenagers who are too scared to look at real women. However, Reads looks relatively (for want of a better word) classy, and totally unthreatening. You can argue with and ridicule the ideas in Reads - Lady Death is a whole different animal.

I am not suggesting that comic shops should refuse to stock, say, Madame Mirage or Heroes For Hire - censorship of any kind is anathema to me. But what I am suggesting is that if the cover of a comic is something that looks a bit dodgy to you, me, or anyone who is experienced with superhero comics, to Jane Q Newbie it may well be something that could give her an actual physiological 'gut reaction' - these kind of things can change the atmosphere of a shop in a
way that is almost imperceptible to those who are used to that kind of thing. Put them behind the counter, or even just don't put them on display at the front of the shop.

I'm not arguing that the content of any comic needs to change at all - once you can get people to actually look at the content, then the 'marketplace of ideas' has some validity. But in a hobby that has slightly fewer adherents than model train collecting, I suspect it might be worthwhile trying not to scare off any potential new fans before they even see a page of sequential art. The window display, the posters on the wall, what's shelved on the rack front and centre, what the person behind the counter is wearing - these aspects of your local shop, all visible in the first few seconds, can make more of a difference to the continued survival of the direct market than a dozen Watchmen or Mauses.

Capsule Reviews For The Last Two Weeks

2007-08-17T19:51:00.000Z

The personal problems alluded to in the post before last meant I was unable to get to a comics shop for a couple of weeks, so I'm now going to review two weeks' worth of comics (and skip the weeks previous) in an attempt to catch up. Almost all of these are DC titles, and I'll discuss their relevance to Countdown-the-event (which is still metastasising little mini-Countdowns - the most recent of which is the newly announced Countdown: Arena) tomorrow, but for now I'll just be talking about their quality in and of themselves.

Booster Gold #1 by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz, Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmond (DC) was the biggest positive surprise I've had in a long time. I'm normally not a fan of Johns' writing at all, but I've noticed he's capable of very good work when co-writing - he had a few good moments in 52 and his Up, Up And Away in the Super-titles last year with Busiek was excellent - so I gave it a try.

It's actually a very competent, fun superhero first issue, although it did feel a bit like a 52 hits medley - Supernova! Booster pretending to be selfish when he's really being good! Rip Hunter's blackboard! Time is broken! I also wonder how long the title will be able to run given that the only plot that current writers appear able to conceive of for Booster is act selfishly - have a change of heart - become good but get no credit.

It's also a worrying sign that this comic contains more snide digs at other comics - including ones written by Johns himself - than any other I've read recently. Most of these (including the new title for this blog for the next week or so) come from the mouth of Rip Hunter, so I wonder if this is some kind of meta-thing, but still, there's only so many times characters in a comic can point out how bad other comics those characters appeared in are before the whole suspension-of-disbelief thing collapses in a jumbled mess like this sentence.

But there's a lot to like about this title (Johns & Katz are doing nothing original - the relationship between Booster and Daniel, for example, is straight out of Hero Squared, hardly the most original comic in the world itself), and the hints about future issues suggest Booster Gold could be a great source of rip-roaring light-hearted adventure through time and space. It's a flawed first issue, but suggests the series has a lot of potential.

In particular, I liked that Batman was portrayed as the only member of the current Justice League of B-Listers to have some faith in Booster Gold and some decency. I'll be talking soon about how Batman has been portrayed post-IC (and in particular how the revamp of his character has been seen as much in his guest appearances as the main titles), but it's very consistent with Morrison & Dini's ideas of how the character works.

Batman #667 (by Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III, DC) is a perfect example of this - Williams throughout draws Batman to look like the Dick Sprang version (although coloured by Dave Stewart to highlight the similarity between the Sprang and Frank Miller interpretations), even laying out the double page title in a variant of the old Batman-head logo. This is a Batman with a sense of humour and a desire to socialise, very different from the Dark Avenger of Darkness and Vengeance who Wreaks Terrible Vengeance in the Dark because the world is Dark but he is Darker of recent years.

Morrison's Batman has so far not had the impact one would expect, and I suggest this is largely down to the choice of Andy Kubert for the art. Kubert's art, while popular, is stronger on atmosphere and dynamics than on clear storytelling, and Morrison is telling the kind of story that relies on readers being able to pick up on some quite subtle details in the art.

Thankfully, J.H. Williams III is on the title for a few issues, and as regular readers will know I consider him easily the most inventive artist working in comics, who can tell a story with the utmost clarity while at the same time making each page a thing of beauty in itself. This storyline appears to be a riff on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (originally published under a title I won't repeat here), but featuring international versions of Batman, thus continuing Morrison's ongoing theme of identity, and showing us yet again who Batman is by showing us who he isn't.

Incidentally, I'd love to know how the Knight's appearance here works with his JLA Classified appearance, and if his surname is a reference to Morrison favourite Rupert Sheldrake. We shall have to wait and see, but this was a promising start.

Brave & Bold #6 (by Mark Waid & George Perez, DC) is the end to the first story, and thus impossible to review on its own - the issue only makes sense if you read the first five. I would find it difficult to review anyway, as this series simply hits too many of my buttons. If someone asked me to explain what I meant by superhero comics, I would give them the first six issues of this series, as they're quite close to being the Platonic Ideal of superheroics.

In precisely the sort of universe-spanning story I was hoping for from Countdown, these six issues have gone from a locked room mystery to an interplanetary war being manipulated by cosmic beings in order to remake the universe to their own ends in a thousand years. The story has taken in Batman, Green Lantern, Supergirl, Lobo, Adam Strange, Blue Beetle, the Legion of Superheroes, Destiny of the Endless, and the Challengers of the Unknown, and done so in a way that lets even those readers who know nothing of these characters grasp their essential details, and doesn't conflict with anything in other titles.

It's not the best comic ever or anything, but it does what it does as well as it's possible to do it. I simply can't imagine anyone liking superheroes (at least anything published by DC or Marvel between say 1970 and 1990) but not liking this.

Action Comics #854 (by Kurt Busiek & Brad Walker, DC) is something I'm going to discuss in more detail in the 'Countdown roundup' post, as it ties in with Countdown, but suffice it to say it's a story of Jimmy Olsen and Krypto fighting Titano, which should tell you instantly whether it's the kind of thing you want to read or not.

What I will say though is that the last year or so of Supertitles have increased my respect for Kurt Busiek enormously. Busiek's work on Superman has been wildly variable, and has ranged from extremely good (some issues have been almost All-Star Superman good, though these have been the exception rather than the rule) to the fairly poor (the various religiously-infused stories). But they've always been readable, and more often than not enjoyable.

But the thing is, Busiek's been trying to tell one shortish (six part or so) story, Camelot Falls, for most of the last 18 months. But in that time he's produced what must be close to thirty Superman titles as writer or co-writer. He's had his story interrupted by art problems and had to do fill-in stories, he's had to cover Action, whose supposed regular permanent writing team have produced I think four (maybe five) issues since Infinite Crisis, and he's even had to do fill-in stories when his fill-ins got postponed (the original Krypto story he wrote). And then on top of that he's having to tie all this in to a mega-crossover.

In the circumstances, the stories having any kind of coherence at all would be an achievement worthy of praise, but the fact that at his best Busiek has produced some of the best Superman comics of recent years, while at his worst he's produced competent enough journeyman work, shows a rare level of professionalism.

JLA: Classified #41 (by Pete Milligan and Carlos D'Anda, DC) is part five of the disappointing Kid Amazo storyline. D'Anda's art style is too cartoony for this kind of material, but even were it not Milligan is just going through the motions here. Someone needs to decide what the point of JLA: Classified is, exactly. Early on, it was simple - almost 'All-Star Justice League'. The best creative teams tell stories free from continuity, using any era of the League. Sometimes these could be file stories (as in Ellis and Guice's New Maps Of Hell), but even so the first twenty or so issues of this title were extremely good - Morrison's Seven Soldiers prologue, I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League and New Maps Of Hell were all excellent, interesting work, and Engelhart's Detroit League story, while bad, was at least different.
But since then it's settled into a comfortable mediocrity, with competent creators writing stories about the League as it was immediately pre-Infinite Crisis, with most of the stories following the same patterns. The only exception was Slott & Jurgens' Red King Rising story, and that was better in the concept than the execution (which may well have lived up to the concept had Slott written the whole thing rather than only plotting the last few issues).
A rotating-teams, non-continuity title like this can't survive on reader inertia, and JLA:Classified is getting dangerously close to trying to do just that.

Modok's Eleven #2 (by Fred Van Lente and one or more artists who might be any or all of the nine other people credited but without their job titles in this comic, Marvel) is a decent but not great issue by itself. This comic is sticking very close to the traditional heist movie plot, and so this issue is the planning section, which doesn't work so well as a single issue. But I'm sufficiently intrigued that I want to pick up the rest of this series to find out how the story goes. Plus, it's Fred Van Lente, so it's subsidising stuff like Action Philosophers. And there's a They Might Be Giants reference.

The Boys #9 (by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, Dynamite) is exasperating. Ennis appears to be trying to tell what could be an extremely good story about non-powered people hitting back at the super 'heroes' who show no concern for the collateral damage they cause. This story is livened up by Ennis' trademark dark and often scatalogical humour. When the balance is right, The Boys works. However, when, as in this issue, the balance tips too far toward the kind of humour Ennis uses in comics like Kev or Dicks, it just becomes tedious. Even back when applying gross-out humour to corrupt superheroes who aren't anything like their public image was a new idea, when Rick Veitch was doing it in Brat Pack, it wasn't especially funny. Now, someone getting caught short and having to go to the toilet on the floor of a Batcave-analogue is tedious and unoriginal, and distracts from the genuinely good stuff. A weak issue.

Much of what works in this issue is Darick Robertson's art, which has some extremely subtle facial expression work (see for example the bottom tier of panels on page 14). But even here, Robertson appears to be inking in a notably more slapdash way than his other work (see the bottom tier on page 12). This may be an aesthetic choice, but if it is it's not one I would have made. If not, it may be because Dynamite can't pay the advances Wildstorm can, and so Robertson can't put in the same time he did on the earlier issues. I hope the latter is not the case.

About Flash 231 and Shadowpact 16 I have little to say by way of review - both are competent and enjoyable but forgettable comics. I will, however, discuss both in the Countdown-event post tomorrow.

An "iTunes for comics"

2007-08-10T20:15:00.000Z

I've heard a lot of people recently saying we need 'an iTunes for comics'. And I agree in a sense. We definitely need some sort of online delivery system for (what comics bloggers think of as) comics (there is of course the webcomics scene, many of whose larger lights have a much greater audience and income than anything in what we refer to as the 'mainstream'). But I suspect the iTunes metaphor is a poor one.

I'm not suggesting here that anyone believes that the elusive digital comics 'revolution', when it comes, will borrow iTunes' design and functionality wholesale - there will undoubtedly be at least surface differences, but the problem with metaphors is that people often allow them to constrain their thinking. If we keep talking about 'an iTunes for comics', even as shorthand, then we will end up with something that bears a very strong resemblance to iTunes' business model.

Now, before we go any further, I want to point out that I am in no way trying to disparage iTunes with this post - for all its faults it has some excellent music on it - but the iTunes business model is not one that would make sense for comics.

iTunes is essentially based around the model of selling singles, rather than albums - you can buy albums from the site, but it's not geared to do that. The singles are also priced relatively high for what you get, and are encumbered with some rather nasty DRM. The way the site works, in essence, is that you hear a song you like on the radio and want it, next time you're online you click and buy that song. It's very much geared to the casual listener, and has built its success mainly on having tied most of the major labels to exclusive deals.

An equivalent would be a site where you could go and buy a single issue of Batman or X-Men or whatever, for say $3, which would be viewed on a proprietary viewer, and I suspect that if we do have some industry-wide digital comics initiative (as opposed to a Marvel-only one or that kind of thing, which would on the face of it be more likely) (incidentally, I think that if we do ever get such an initiative it would probably be Diamond who would do it), then we will have something along those lines. But it won't work.

The reason is that comics are no longer, and haven't been for many years, an impulse buy. Nor were singles when iTunes started out, of course, but iTunes had the immense advantage that music pervades everyday life - it's impossible to go anywhere or do anything without being bombarded by music (and as a music lover this disgusts me, but it's true). Very few people really care about music (by 'really care' I mean own more than say 500 albums on physical media and/or 2000 tracks in digital form) but most people at least have a few favourite songs or artists.

In contrast, comics are basically nonexistent in popular culture unless you specifically seek them out. Note here that I am talking about comics, not comic characters. A film about Superman isn't a comic, and there has been very little evidence (other than the Batmania of 1989) that people will see one and want the other. Many people can go a year without seeing a comic.

So while it is imperative that our 'iComics' not exclude casual browsers and people from outside the comics fan community - in fact the single biggest reason for such a site would be to increase the overall number of comics readers - it cannot rely on impulse and casual browsers in the way an iTunes can. "If you build it they will come" works in films, but it's lousy economics. The site r sites should be as heavily publicised as possible, as user-friendly as possible,and be as welcoming as possible (I would suggest actually three different URLs with different front pages, something like heykidscomics.com with the main links being to say Carl Barks Donald Duck stuff and Tintin, superheroes.com with Batman and X-Men all over it, and iGraphicNovels.com with Maus and Jimmy Corrigan and some things that have been made into films like Ghost World on the front page).

What we need is an eMusic for comics.

For those of you who don't know the site, eMusic is a (legal, paid) music downloading site that caters more to those who, like myself, are seriously into music. They don't have any of the major label stuff that iTunes has, so you won't find Kate Nash or The Kaiser Chiefs on there (nor, alas, will you find The National Pep there), but you will find (to choose a few that I've downloaded from there recently at random) Candypants, Tom Waits, Guitar Slim, Sun Ra, The Negro Problem, Ornette Coleman, Jerry Lee Lewis, Big Star, Clifton Chenier, Joanna Newsom and The Minus Five.

Now, the way eMusic works is that you buy a subscription which allows you to download a number of tracks (in my case 90, but they have a few different packages) every month, for what works out as a few pence per track. The more you pay per month, the cheaper the tracks are per-track. They also have a 'try-before-you-buy' deal - if you sign up, you get 25 (or sometimes 50) free tracks before having to pay.

The thing about this model is that unlike iTunes, it positively encourages people to try new things. With iTunes, you have to pay for every new track you buy (unless you buy an album at the flat fee of $10). This makes a substantial number of people think "Well, I liked the three singles, but I'm not going to pay more for the other songs - they may be no good".

Now, in terms of mainstream pop music this makes good sense - it may even have a positive effect as filler tracks effectively disappear - but it's not so good if you're having difficulty drawing any audience in at all. Unless we can encourage people to try new things, the industry will die. And one of the main problems with comics is the relatively high price - people don't want to pay $3 for something that will take ten minutes to read.

The eMusic model solves all of these problems. If you subscribe for 90 downloads a month for £15 (or whatever it costs me, I can't remember exactly) and you download two good albums that you already knew you wanted, that's what you paid for that month - that's already good value for your money. But then you're left with 70 downloads, so you might as well download anything that catches your eye - it's effectively free. ("Yeah, I might as well go for the Captain Beefheart outtakes box set - why not? And I might as well get the new McCartney album, since it's there... Chewy Marble? Didn't one of them used to be in the Wondermints? I'll have to check them out... oh, the Young Fresh Fellows did a single about gorillas? Yeah, I'll try that...")

This kind of model would be great for the independents - it could move the habitual comics buyers out of their comfort zone ("Damn! Only 78 Batman titles came out this month! What will I do with these other two downloads? Might as well download a couple of things at random... hmm... Action Philosophers and... Love & Rockets.") , but it would be equally good for the big two - a lot of people drop marginal comics that they're enjoying but don't think are worth full price. Those tend to be the type of things that sell better in trades, but a small monthly cashflow for those titles could allow them to keep going long enough to find their audience.

The popularity of trades and manga show in their different ways that comics rely on 'bang for the buck' - people want a lot of comics for their money. The Big Two seem to understand that with the Essential/Showcase titles and (in Marvel's case) the DVD-Roms of complete runs of titles. An eMusic for comics would allow them to make money from marginal titles and back catalogue in a way that a business built primarily around single-issue (or even single-trade) sales wouldn't.

(On Sunday I'll start posting about Grant Morrison).

Hello, hello, it's good to be back

2007-08-10T11:04:00.000Z

No, I haven't 'run out of bile' as our resident troll (who still hasn't learned these comments are moderated) tried to put it over the last few days, I've just been unable to get online for a couple of weeks due to a series of circumstances so bizarre and unusual (involving one of the world's oldest universities, a £2 debt, a job interview, and a hundred mile taxi ride at midnight) that I won't go into them here.
I'll be posting a proper update in a few hours (talking about the 'we need an iTunes for comics' that people keep talking about, and what we really need), and if people would like to see it I'll do at least brief reviews of all the comics I've bought recently on Sunday (covering the last couple of weeks).
But this post is just to say I've received notification from comicbookresources.com that someone has repeatedly been trying to access my forum account from the IP address 74.53.243.34 , which is in Dallas.
I have not posted to any message board (as opposed to mailing list or blog) in the last year or more, as I find they tend to make my level of argument descend to snarling rather than discourse rather quickly, and I had to quit them cold turkey. As a result, if you see anyone posting on any comics-related message board using my name, it is not me, but is someone else trying to take over my account...

Final Crisis and Morrison 1

2007-07-29T21:09:00.000Z

I've been wanting to write about Grant Morrison on here for a few weeks, but have held back. There appear to be two default options for comics blogging. One is to post a panel from a Silver Age comic out of context with hilarious results ("Batman said 'I need Dick!' - he's so gay!"). The other is to wax lyrical about how great Morrison is. I didn't want to fall into either of these cliches. (A third cliche of course is blogging about blogging, which I'm doing here).

However, now that Morrison and J.G. Jones have been announced as the team on Final Crisis, the event to which Countdown is counting down, I pretty much have to talk about Morrison. So I'm going to try to do a series of posts over the next few weeks looking at his recent DCU work, especially his Batman, which for some reason is making no impact at all compared to his other recent work, and try to see what the recurring elements are, both in terms of themes and motifs, and try to figure out what kind of thing Final Crisis will be.

I must say, the announcement and the interviews that have been reported about it have done a lot to reaffirm my faith in DC's current editorial direction. Morrison is the only person (after the original Crisis On Infinite Earths) to have written a DCU crossover that was actually good as opposed to competent (DC One Million, which I hope to look at here some time soon), and J.G. Jones is one of the most imaginative artists in comics today. A reunion of part of the 52 team (and the team behind Marvel Boy, which I'll look at in a few posts' time) has to be an improvement on the incoherent mess that's passing for a line-wide crossover at the moment.

The few statements we've had about the project so far (that it'll begin with Anthro and end with Kamandi, that Morrison wanted to do it out-of-continuity if it couldn't be done in the regular DCU) tend to suggest that this will be a crossover that is actually worth reading.

So, Grant Morrison.

The obvious question when discussing Morrison is why he's so popular among a certain segment of comic readers (especially those with blogs) and so unpopular among many others (especially those who post on superhero-related message boards).

Part of the reason, I suspect, is that he has ideas. The cliche about Morrison that turns up within a page or two of any message board discussion of him is 'mad ideas', usually followed by 'what was he smoking when he thought of that?' or some similar dismissal. The fact is, it is extremely unusual in the comics medium for anything approaching an actual idea to make it to paper. Most superhero comics deal primarily in melodrama and conflict for its own sake, while far too many independent comics are nothing more than the autobiographies of people who have nothing unusual about them other than the gargantuan ego that presumes the tedious details of their life, presented without comment or technical ability, qualifies as art.

With the de facto retirement of Alan Moore, Morrison is almost alone in trying to express any ideas in the superhero genre. To the extent that most mainstream comics have any ideas in them at all, they are, as in Infinite Crisis, ideas about the genre itself, the current state of superhero comics, and not much else. If I never again read a comic in which a symbolic representation of modern comics, a symbolic representation of the Silver Age, and a symbolic representation of fanboy entitlement have a three-way battle to the death, I'll be ecstatic.

Morrison is, of course, guilty of this kind of thing himself - in fact more so than almost any other comics writer I can think of. I was hugely amused in 2005 when Morrison and Jeph Loeb (his polar opposite in terms of fanbase and critical respect) both had Superman and Batman fighting not-at-all veiled counterparts of the Ultimates/Authority in an attempt to show that Violent Superheroes Are Bad. And I was even more amused when it was announced Morrison would be writing the Authority and Loeb the Ultimates.

But Morrison's 'mad ideas' often contain much more than that. There was a storm in a teapot in the 'blogosphere' recently (deliberately stirred up by one writer in an attempt to promote his book on Morrison) about describing some people as 'bad readers'. Without wanting to stir that up again, I would suggest there's definitely an element of truth to this - many people don't like having to interpret a narrative on anything more than a surface level, and even most of those who do like to read things that contain some level of metaphor, allegory or ambiguity don't have the necessary critical tools to comprehend them.

(I include myself in the latter group, incidentally. I constantly think I've got everything there is out of a text, then read what Matt Rossi or Marc Singer or some similar writer has found in it and realise that my reading comprehension has advanced little beyond Janet And John books.)

However, there is also some truth in the claim that Morrison doesn't always give the reader enough information to appreciate fully what he's talking about. To take the first example of one of Morrison's lines to pop into my head, in Shining Knight #2 (part of the Seven Soldiers maxiseries and collected in one of that series' trades), Ystin is confronted by a monster named Guilt, a 'Sheeda level-seven mood destroyer' who kills with words.

Now, this is a good and interesting development in the story for a relatively attentive reader. Morrison is combining the fall of Camelot and Ystin's exile to the modern world with the expulsion from Eden (with a hint of the fall of Satan too). Ystin lived in a prelapsarian, guilt-free state until sin entered the world, but after falling from a castle in the sky is left with the knowledge of guilt and death. There's a lot of resonances packed in there, especially when you consider that the serpentine Sheeda Queen (the villain of the story) is presented in Zatanna as being the Wicked Queen from Snow White (who also caused a lot of problems by persuading a woman to eat an apple...)

Then, on top of that, there's the resonance with Pilgrim's Progress and similar stories. Given that Morrison has essentially been doing a Grail-quest narrative up to this point (later in the series he will mix in other classic folk tales), having his pilgrim accompanied by a monster called Guilt makes perfect sense - you almost expect them to meet up with Mr Worldly Wiseman (which in fact sounds like the name of a Silver Age character - possibly a humorous sidekick).

But the literal reader - and, indeed, many readers who enjoy the series on multiple levels - will balk at the introduction of this character. The rest of the series has been realistic in tone (well, as realistic as a series about one of King Arthur's knights on a flying horse fighting a woman from the future in a flying castle that travels through time can be) and every other element in it works on a literal level. Guilt appears to be purely symbolic, something that has drifted in from another level. He appears in isolation to be intended as metaphor, but in terms of the story as a whole, he really is a giant monster. But the giant monster is given no reason for existing - no-one knows who he is, or where he comes from.

Most readers of both types will gloss over this - just go with it and see where he's going with the story - but it appears a definite flaw in the issue.

However, in an interview shortly after the issue came out, Morrison mentioned The Origins Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. For those who haven't read this book, Jaynes' thesis (now generally considered to be incorrect in a number of details) is that until fairly recently in evolutionary terms, roughly three thousand years ago, the corpus callosum (the body in the brain which connects the two hemispheres) was thinner than it is today, making the brain less integrated, and as a result those ideas which we now know come from our own brain would have appeared to our ancestors to have come from outside themselves.

Jaynes argued that our ancestors lived in a state of near-constant hallucination, with these hallucinations appearing as gods, demons and so on, giving people orders which were in reality messages from the other side of their brain. He also argued that people at that time were not truly self-aware - that there was no concept of introspection or thought generally even as late as the Bronze Age.

Once you know Morrison had this in mind, then the sequence becomes clearer - Ystin is literally perceiving the emotion Guilt as a giant monster, and from Ystin's point of view the scene plays out exactly as it does on the page (in fact Ystin here could easily represent a particular mode of reading). It also adds another level to the Fall resonances - given that Adam and Eve were thrown out of Eden for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and becoming aware of their own nakedness/sin, the parallel with the brain becoming integrated and self-awareness coming into existence is inescapable.

It's incredibly well thought-out, a quite brilliant logical extrapolation from a bit of information found in a pop-science book to create a sequence that moves the plot along, expands on the themes of the story so far, brings in allusions to medieval literature to add to those already present, ties in neatly with material in the other Seven Soldiers series, and does so in one line of dialogue. But one crucial link in the chain is missing, having not quite made it to the page.

I think this tendency of Morrison's, to think things out in exhaustive detail and then not quite get round to putting all the detail on to the page (see also his scripts for Arkham Asylum, which are infinitely more interesting and entertaining than the finished comic) is the reason he is both loved and hated to the degree that he is. I also think that when working on the keystone book for DC - the culmination of everything they've been doing for four years - rather than a project being sold on the value of his name alone (as Seven Soldiers was) he'll have an editor who insists on a narrative clarity that might otherwise be missing (I'm not certain of this given the lack of editing apparent in Countdown, but I'm making the perhaps hopelessly optimistic assumption that DC editorial can learn from their mistakes).

With luck, we'll have a story that works on its surface as a universe-spanning superhero epic, but also has something to say and a reason to exist beyond trademark maintenance. Let's hope so. We'll see in 40 weeks.

DC Roundup For Last Week

2007-07-26T10:31:00.000Z

OK, so 'tomorrow' in the last post should be read as 'four days from now'. Migraines can be a killer... I'll be updating a couple of times over the weekend though. This is the DCU update for last week. I'll do this week's in a few days.

The most important DCU related events of last week weren't in the comics themselves, as much as in the comics-related internet. In particular, the backlash against Countdown has grown to gargantuan proportions.

It's difficult for me to talk about this, because I in some sense became 'part of the story' a week or so ago when I dropped Countdown, and that was remarked on by many, many other sites, but I think there was a tipping point last week where everyone stopped giving Countdown the benefit of the doubt.

Weirdly, by all accounts, last week's Countdown was one of the less terrible issues, with some reviewers even rating it as competent, but it seems that people have lost patience with the title and are just wanting to see how catastrophically it fails. You expect Brian Hibbs to be fairly devastating about something that's even a moderate failure - that's what he does, and even though as far as I can see he's usually right he could be dismissed as Hibbs being Hibbs.

But when Matt Brady at Newsarama - someone who, for all his many sterling qualities, is not known for his Paxmanesque attack-dog attitude towards people working for the big two, starts being sarcastic about plot holes and refusal to take responsibility for errors, and Mike Carlin in turn insults readers who want a coherent story for their money... well, something's very wrong.

This of course has led some people to exaggerate the difficulties DC are having. It was a huge mistake, and one that will cost them a great deal of money, and may yet cost some people their jobs, to tie the company's entire line to one extremely poor comic, but it doesn't mean, as some have suggested half-seriously, that the company is going to collapse.

(I suspect it will, eventually, because the market is dying and events like Countdown will probably hasten that collapse, but it won't be a direct cause-and-effect relationship and it won't happen overnight).

The sad thing is that some of the stuff DC is putting out is as good as any mainstream superhero stuff they've ever released. It's getting overshadowed by the Crossover That Never Ends, but some of it is as enjoyable as you could wish for.

Part of the reason, incidentally, that I want to semi-segregate the DCU stuff from the reviews of more 'important' comics that I do here is that I think a different critical standard needs to be applied to these comics. I will often ladle on the superlatives for what are, by objective standards, fairly mediocre comics when talking about superhero stuff, simply because that mediocre comic might well achieve exactly what it sets out to, and what it sets out to do happens to be to my taste. If I put the reviews together, someone reading my writing could come to the conclusion that I think Brave & Bold #5 a superior work to Maus, because Brave & Bold achieves its relatively limited aims with competence and a certain amount of style, while I think Maus' reach doesn't quite extend as far as its aim.

Speaking of Brave & Bold 5... I find it very difficult to review this comic, because it just... well... I'm a child of the late Bronze Age. The first time I ever hunted down any back issues, it was to find out what this Crisis thing that everyone was talking about from a couple of years earlier had been. I see George Perez drawing an Aparoesque Batman or Hal Jordan and my critical faculties get turned off and I become 13 again, saying "This is so cool!"

Just looking at Perez' pages (and I know the criticisms of his work as well as anyone - over-detailed, at times undynamic, unimaginative layouts, not enough distinction between foreground and background - and I can agree with many of them on an intellectual level) with those characters makes me think I'm looking at the Platonic ideal of 'superhero comic'.

Having said that, looking at this as dispassionately as I can, this is a genuinely good comic. Brave & Bold , in fact, has been the comic I'd hoped for from Countdown. Mark Waid is a writer who's very hit-and-miss for me, but this is definitely a hit - he's taken all the lessons of 52 and put them into his own crossover.

Because this is a genuine Cosmic World-Shattering Epic Spanning Galaxies And Aeons of the kind we all wanted from Countdown. Starting in issue 1 with a locked-room mystery (Green Lantern and Batman both find corpses somewhere it would be impossible for them to be... and it's the same corpse), Waid has brought in characters from every corner of the DC Universe - Supergirl, Destiny of the Endless, Lobo, Green Lantern, Batman, Blue Beetle, Adam Strange, the Legion of Superheroes - in a way that seems totally unforced, but has led from that simple mystery to Supergirl being on Rann while Batman is in the 31st century with no way home.
This is the kind of story that takes advantage of the shared universe to tell stories, rather than just to shake it up - the kind of story that is the reason people care about the DCU in the first place.

Waid is also getting the characterisation right - his Blue Beetle and Batman had exactly the relationship they did in Blue Beetle's own title - a rarity in these days of comic writers ignoring everyone's titles except their own.

This issue has faults the earlier ones don't - for a start the Batman here is the uber-competent one who can outsmart Brainiac 5 and outfight Karate Kid, which I know some people are sick of, and this issue is almost a DC's Most Republican Characters Convention, featuring as it does Adam Strange, Hal Jordan, Batman and Brainiac 5, all of whom are Very Competent And Very Crew-Cut, with no Blue Beetle or Lobo to leaven the mix - but it's still got everything you could want in a superhero comic. As an in-continuity superhero title, there's nothing out there to beat it.

Waid says that the good reviews are making this title sell less - 'fun' is apparently not something most readers want from superhero comics. If anything is a bigger indicator of everything that's wrong in the direct market, I've yet to hear it...

Waid's other title of last week, All-Flash 1, was of much lower quality than Brave & Bold, but of no less interest from a 'where DC is going' perspective. The first thing to note about it is how little story there is. Even though it's two pages longer than Brave & Bold an inordinate number of those are splash panels or pages with a very small number of panels. Where Perez packs a ton of information into every page, much of the artwork for this feels like that in Countdown, to which it bears a strong family resemblance.

The sheer number of different artists, though, along with the nature of the story, suggests that Wally's (and Waid's) return was planned out a lot less far in advance than the announcements would have us believe. The story itself mostly comes down to "Wally finds the individual Rogue most responsible for Bart's death, and now everything is back to how it was and let us never mention this again". Not really worth buying in itself - it's a flimsy story just designed to handwave everything about the total cockup of a reboot away - but it does leave me curious about where Waid's going to go from here.

And it was nice to see that, despite the horrific Silver-Agey poetic justice for the villain, Wally refuses to cross the line and kill. Geoff Johns, in the runup to Infinite Crisis, had him state explicitly that he was pro-capital punishment and would kill if it came to it, which I always thought was a rather nasty mischaracterisation (done so he'd be able to 'take sides' after the killing of Max Lord, I think). From the looks of it that, like most of the last year of Flash comics, has been put into the 'things of which we shall not speak' category, and I for one hope it stays there.

Action Comics I dealt with the other day, but just to reiterate - it's a fill-in that's significantly better than the regular team, and it's a tie-in that's significantly better than the series it ties in to. It's a good-but-not-great Superman story of a type we've seen several hundred of, but I like good Superman stories.

A Quick One While She's Away: Countdown No More!

2007-07-21T20:12:00.000Z

During the few days since my last proper post (hello everyone in the universe! My name's Andrew and I like comics but I get grumpy when they're bad) I've been thinking about what form this blog should take . I don't want to lose the DC-Centric tone, as that would mean getting rid of this URL and also because I genuinely like a lot of what DC are putting out. However, I want to have some flexibility, too - often there's just more to say about a comic like Action Philosophers or a magazine like Following Cerebus (the latest issue of which I will definitely review when it finally gets to my comic shop) than there is about Action Comics or whatever.

I've also figured that most weeks I can update this two or three times, so here's the plan. Every week I'll try to do three posts. The first will be a quickie-review one, covering everything I buy that week. The second will be a DC Universe roundup, looking at the DCU titles I bought, plus any 'news' to do with the DCU, Countdown, etc that I've picked up elsewhere, and my thoughts as to where it's all going. The third will be a longish essay type post on something I consider worth writing a lot about (this week I'm considering writing something about Morrison, but everyone seems to write about him all the time). With a bit of luck this format will allow me to get some interesting posts done.

To start with, I'll go through the comics I've picked up this week. These will be brief capsule reviews, written straight after first reading each issue - anything I need to go into detail about I'll do in a later post.

This week I bought a large number of comics for me. Anyone claiming that this is because my wife's away for the weekend and can't shout at me for spending too much is totally wrong. It was a totally different, unconnected reason. Honestly. Luckily it's also been a well-above-average week for comics.

deevee is a black & white anthology that's apparently been publishing for ten years, but which I've never heard of before. I picked it up on the strength of Eddie Campbell's involvement, and most of the people involved appear to be Australians who have worked on Bacchus with Campbell (I've only read Campbell's work in trades before, so don't know many of these people's work). As with all anthology titles, it's a very mixed bag.

The Playwright (written by Daren White with art & lettering by Campbell) is a beautiful, touching little story, full of bittersweet humour. The story flits in and out of the interconnected lives of four people - a playwright, his brother (the one touch I don't like about this is that he is described as 'retarded'. Having done a lot of work with people with learning disabilities, that word always makes me flinch a little), the brother's nurse and the nurse's father. Campbell's storytelling mirrors this, with panels moving between wide multiple-character shots and tight close-ups of elements of those shots. It's beautifully done, and reminds me again just how incredibly good Campbell is (and makes me want to check out more of White's writing).

Arsehole, by Mandy Ord, is the kind of filler story you find in every black & white anthology title, be it from Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Alternative Comics or whoever. Thick black cartoony lines, poor panel composition, improperly-punctuated lettering, and a story that could have been told in half the space. The story (little girl on holiday gets crush on boy, he teases her and upsets her, they go home) could have been quite nice had it been told in three or four pages, but it's told over 13 pages of six-panel grid, with most of the panels being silent panels of a kid looking sad.

The Depth Of My Anger Is An Indication Of My Love by Jeffrey Brown is a funny examination of a relationship based mostly around sex. Some of the dialogue comes off a bit Clerks, especially "I never had sex before you"..."...and then I had oral sex with a bunch of guys that summer...", but the characters come off as real people. Brown's art is very reminiscent of Ed The Happy Clown era Chester Brown, and the format is also interesting. It's done in four-panel newspaper-style strips, but reformatted into 40-panel grids of five panels by eight, so each strip carries on into the next one, with small arrows between the strips, giving an effect similar to some of Acme Novelty Library.

Don't Call Me Baby by David Tong and Matt Huynh is another slice-of-life story (and by this time many themes, intended or not, are showing up in the comic - relationship difficulties, ageing, sexual problems - Ord's piece also doesn't fit those themes, making its inclusion in here even more inexplicable). It works mostly on the strength of Huynh's art - while his sketchy style isn't to my taste, his figures are extremely expressive and he understands body language in a way shockingly few comic artists do.

Hayley Campbell Funnies by Jason Conlan is standard setup-feedline-punchline gag-strip stuff, of about the quality of some of the weaker running strips in Private Eye. The three-panel gag strip is territory that I fear has been pretty much mined out, at least until we get another Watterson, but if you have a higher tolerance for the predictable format, it might raise a smile.

The Fat Sheila Hit Me written by Peter Doyle with art & lettering by Eddie Campbell appears to be an adaptation of the court records of a rather mundane murder trial. It's done well enough, but leaves no impression.

Commute by Daniel Best & Daniel Gibbs is another filler 'story', this one a two-page sub-Pekar autobio that wouldn't even make for a decent LiveJournal entry, leading up to a punchline that isn't.

Blind Love by Daren White and Jason Paulos is an interesting failure - it can't quite make up its mind whether it wants to be parody or homage, either in the writing or the art. It's doing both 50s romance comics and silver age superheroics, and the art, while mostly rooted in Kirby, jumps between Wally Wood, Gil Kane, Eisner & Toth (the last two being the dedicatees of the story) for odd panels before returning to its Kirby ground state. The whole thing feels a bit ill-thought-out, but is fun and fits well with the other stories in here.

The one-page Karen Summers MD (also by White and Paulos) on the back cover is a decent parody of the kind of soap-opera comic strip we don't really get in the UK unless it's about football. It's impressive how different Paulos' art looks in this strip to the earlier one.

There's too much filler in this issue to give it an unambiguous recommendation, especially given the relatively high $4.95 US cover price, but the good stuff is very good, so it may well be worth getting hold of the trade paperback of early issues advertised in the back, featuring most of the same creators, along with others such as James Kochalka. It's available from deeveepress.com

Thunderbolts: Desperate Measures #1 by Paul Jenkins & Steve Lieber (Marvel) is spinning out of one of the few definite successes from the Civil War aftermath, Warren Ellis' revamp of Thunderbolts. It seems a bit pointless, being in effect just another issue of the original title, and most of that fight scene, but it's a competent enough done in one story. The art is pitiful, though - while Norman Osborne doesn't look like Tommy Lee Jones like he does in the main title, it's because he doesn't look like the same person for two panels in a row. Lieber apparently is incapable of drawing a consistent likeness, though his composition and storytelling are decent. All in all this felt like it has no real reason to exist, but if you're interested in the characters it's not actively bad or anything.

The Spirit #8 by Darwyn Cooke & J. Bone (DC) is, as ever, a fun action adventure story. This time, you'll be able to figure out most of the story just from the cover (The Spirit and Satin trying to defuse a bomb with only three seconds to go) and Cooke packs in all the usual cliches, but it's still a fun, exciting, stand-alone adventure. To be honest, though, there's no reason for this series to be titled 'The Spirit' - it bears very little relation to the classic strip, being a far less imaginative beast. It's still well worth reading though - just don't expect anything revolutionary.

Godland #19 by Joe Casey & Tom Scioli (Image) is another great issue, with more ideas in one panel than many superhero comics have in an entire 'arc'. For those of you who for some reason aren't reading this, Godland is essentially the comic that Fantastic Four would have been if it had been created by 70s Kirby rather than his 60s incarnation, and if Grant Morrison rather than Stan Lee had provided the dialogue.
It's difficult to review an issue of Godland because it's so information-dense, and so full of references to its own backstory, that I spend half the issue going 'wait... which one is that again? Why's he hitting him?'. It usually takes a couple of rereads, and a read back through old issues, before I figure out what's going on, but the first read is still a pleasure, providing a confusing adrenaline rush that leaves me with a silly grin on my face.
If you're new to Godland, that means this issue isn't an especially good jumping on point, but you should pick up the trades now. Meanwhile, for those already reading this, it's yet another stellar issue.
There are so many good lines in this it's tempting to quote every line, but just a random sampling from a few pages:
"Thanks to you I've got labia! I want your head for a candy dish!"
"Nickelhead! I have floors yet to be scrubbed! Your arrogant insubordination is the weakness I will ultimately exploit!"
"Okay, forget what I thought about this bumblebee psycho queen!"
"Witness, you blubbering baboons! The directional exhaust jets have activated -- initiating the clockwise spin that will facilitate terrestrial penetration!"

Scioli is also getting more experimental with his inking. While he's still doing a Kirby homage, he's started putting thick lines around the bodies (but not heads) of his characters, and then inking everything else in extremely thin, fine lines. This is, to my mind, a huge improvement - whereas previously his art looked dynamic but (deliberately) ugly, now there's a strange delicate beauty to some panels, while still looking like his earlier work. This now looks like the Fourth World stuff would have had Kirby been consistently inked by people who could give his art the time it deserved.

Naughty DC! They've put the C word right on the front of Action Comics #852 (by Kurt Busiek, Brad Walker and John Livesay). That's right, it's a 'Countdown tie-in!'
In fact, it contains the Jimmy Olsen scene from Countdown 42 , reducing the number of 'Countdown only' scenes from three to two. The scene contains exactly the same dialogue, and better art. It then has an inner monologue where Jimmy explains everything about his new powers in just under half a page, rather than the ten issues it's taken in Countdown. One can only assume that the editor's note (apparently these are only banned from Countdown, not unimportant titles like Action) which says "See? We told you not to miss it!" is intended as some sort of sick joke.
Busiek's Superman work has been getting criticised perhaps a little harshly by many people, and there's no doubt he's been spread a little thin by the need to cover for the ridiculously over-late Johns & Donner issues of Action, but he gets what makes the character fun. This issue has the Kryptonite Man making a kryptonite laser 'for medical purposes' , Scottish robots called 'the rude mechanicals' who talk like the Nac Mac Feegle in Terry Pratchett's books ("They'll not be so fast to be disrespectin' traffic lights an' cash machines in th' future they won't! The clan strikes! Fer silicon! Fer justice!").
The whole thing is a great Jimmy Olsen romp of the kind I hoped we'd see in Countdown, and features what looks like it'll be the post Infinite Crisis debut of Titano. Inessential, but fun. And it makes perfect sense without having read a panel of the comic it ties in to.

Supervillain Team-Up: Modok's 11 #1 by Fred Van Lente, Francois Portela and Terry Pallot (Marvel) is pretty much exactly what you'd expect from the title- MODOK putting together a team of minor villains for a heist. This issue is all set-up, but it promises to be a very fun mini. It's the writer of Action Philosophers writing a heist story featuring MODOK - it doesn't get better than that.

Brave & Bold #5 by Mark Waid, George Perez and Bob Wiacek (DC) I will deal with tomorrow in the DCU roundup. But to repeat every other blogger ever, this is how you do a Batman/Karate Kid fight.

The Order #1 by Matt Fraction, Barry Kitson and Mark Morales (Marvel) is a pretty decent story spinning out of Civil War. I only read Civil War through Christopher Bird's redialoguing of it, so don't take my word as accurate, but Tony Stark comes off here as vastly more decent and responsible than I gather he did in the original series.
This is decent enough, but feels unoriginal. The main plot (superteam brought together, most of them are no good, new recruits take their place) is a standard one, the 'billionaire industrialist gives some untried people powers to form a new media-friendly superteam' origin is another standard one, done as recently as last year in 52, and the idea of basing a team on the Greek Gods seems inspired by the Morrison-era JLA (the first line-up of the team, disbanded halfway through this issue, are JLA-analogues).
I'll probably give it another issue or two, but at this point it just seems competent superheroics without any particular distinguishing features.

All-Flash #1 by Mark Waid and too many artists to name (DC) is a very efficient story designed to restore the status quo wrecked by the appaling previous Flash series. It does so competently and quite enjoyably, but it's really just getting things in order for the new Flash ongoing. Wally West is back and all's right with the world. I'll look at this in a little more detail tomorrow.

Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome...

2007-07-19T21:18:00.000Z

To the couple of thousand extra visitors who've come in over the last few days. Only in the comics 'blogosphere' could "man stops buying comic because he doesn't like it" cause such comment. I am the new Mary Jane statue. Or something.

Anyway, just to reassure those of you nice enough to ask me to carry on talking about other comics that I will be, but not until Sunday. I hope those of you new to reading this blog will bear with me til then...

Addendum to the last

2007-07-17T12:08:00.000Z

Yet more Countdown tie-ins announced today:
Flash 80 Page Giant - this is a collection of old Silver Age Flash stories promoted as a Countdown tie-in
Captain Carrot - words fail...

Incidentally, I will be buying at least the first issue of many (not all) of the new series DC have been announcing, so for the foreseeable future I'll be writing quite a lot about Countdown-The-Event even if I don't discuss Countdown-The Comic.

And one new solicitation which is actually exciting - JLA:The Ultramarine Corps TP. For those who don't know, this was essentially a prequel to Seven Soldiers, and really should have been included in the trades with that series. I have all the floppies (though not the JLA/WildCATS story they're bundling with it, so I might pick the trade up for that) but if you haven't, get it...

Countdown 42: Won't Get Fooled Again

2007-07-14T20:34:00.000Z

I have now dropped Countdown. The extent to which there will not even be a pretence of a story in this comic has become painfully clear.

Let's look at the series/miniseries spinning out of Countdown:
Search For Ray Palmer
Countdown To Mystery
Countdown To Adventure
Death Of The New Gods
Lord Havok & The Extremists
Gotham Underground

Then there's the stories not promoted as Countdown tie-ins but which have been absolutely necessary to follow it so far:
The Lightning Saga
Death Of The Flash
Amazons Attack

Then there's the other big crossover stories that I would bet good money on tying in in some way:
Check/Out
Sinestro Corps (and its own spin-offs...)

That isn't even counting the issues of ongoing titles that are getting drawn in (like Superman, Blue Beetle and The Atom). Nor is it counting the numerous 52 spin-offs, which will almost certainly tie in.

None of this can possibly be necessary from a storytelling perspective. Fifty-two issues is more than enough to tell any story in by itself. That's Cerebus and High Society put together. It's double Morrison's run on Animal Man. It's Promethea plus Watchmen plus The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (well, a few issues less than that, but still...). It's an expanse of space few comics creators have been able to work with, and almost none have been guaranteed. It's a gargantuan canvas on which a truly epic tale could be painted.

But instead of bothering to do that, Countdown is instead being used as a repository of deleted scenes from other comics. Now, I'm not arguing that the series shouldn't tie into the main DCU - it is, after all, a cross-over, and that's what they do. But nothing at all is happening in Countdown itself to justify its existence.

In this issue, the only things - the only things - that aren't continuations of events that happened in other comics are:
Holly (who we've still not been given any reason to care about) watches Harley Quinn do the splits in the air (and even this may well be coming out of some other comics I'm not reading)
Jimmy Olsen draws some pictures of himself in his old Silver Age costumes
Mary Marvel (who appears to have two watermelons attached to her chest) shows her black leather panties a lot and gets covered with mud.

Oh, and there's a backup feature in which a bunch of near-omnipotent cosmic beings of unstoppable power are so scared of the Siegel family's lawyers that they use the most ridiculous circomlocutions possible to avoid saying the word 'Superboy'.

All the rest is stuff following on from Flash (the Rogues), Atom (the Ray Palmer bit), JLA and JSA (the Karate Kid stuff).

Even that wouldn't be too terrible, were it done competently. To take the Atom stuff as an example, because it's the only one of those comics I'm reading, we have three pages here featuring the Atom and his supporting cast. It sets up nothing that readers of the main title don't already know, so it's of no value to them. But it doesn't actually say who these characters are, either in dialogue or in a caption box of the "For more about Ryan Choi's adventure in the Palmerverse, see All New Atom, on sale in three weeks! - Molecular Mike" type. So anyone who isn't reading Atom will not have a clue what's going on and they won't even be pointed in the right direction to find out.

The most entertaining thing in this comic, by a long way, is the pull-out ad for hot dogs. At least that has some Sergio Aragones artwork. Unless you have a burning desire to see incompetent drawings of the scantily-clad bottom of a teenage girl, there is no possible reason for wishing to read this.

Countdown may well be the biggest mistake DC have made in ten years or more. Because they're turning Countdown into a brand, but what that brand says to me is 'steer clear'.

If you put out Steve Gerber writing Dr Fate, I think "this is something I need to pick up." Put out Countdown To Mystery and I think "Danger! Run away!"

I may pick up some of DC's new titles, but it will be cautiously, and I will not be inclined to take a chance, or give any comic from them the benefit of the doubt. DC have consistently mis-solicited these comics (Keith Giffen is still not working on the title, despite having been solicited as breakdown artist on every issue). They have lied in the promotional interviews (saying the title would be self-contained, when it's anything but). And they have insulted those of us who gave them the benefit of the doubt but pointed out the flaws in the comic (saying we don't understand how it's being paced).

I will keep this URL for a while (a couple of people have asked me to keep it just so they don't have to update their blogrolls) but I will never buy another issue of this drivel, and any comic that requires me to buy it will be dropped (though if the Atom tie-in is anything to go by, nothing of any consequence will ever happen in these tie-in bits). Starting tomorrow I will start talking about comics that are good - or at least interestingly bad - rather than comics whose only function is to waste perfectly good trees and make their readers a tiny bit more stupid.

Everyone involved in the production of this series should be ashamed of themselves for producing such meretricious drivel. But not as ashamed as I am for supporting them.

Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me every week for ten weeks straight... well, there's no word for how foolish that makes me, and how ashamed I should be. But even someone as stupid as me eventually learns.

The Black Racer's Death Song

2007-07-11T21:43:00.000Z

Sigh...

So this is the big New Gods event that Countdown is leading up to. How dull.

As huge a Fourth World fan as I am, I'm not getting worked up over the 'death' itself - we all know those characters will return within five years. I may even buy the series - Starlin's done quite a bit of good work (although the artwork in this article looks absolutely wretched, I have to say).

I'm not even going to take part in the outrage when the female (Big Barda & Granny Goodness) and black (Vykyn, Shilo Norman, The Black Racer) characters 'die'.

What I do find wearisome, however, is the rationale for this series' existence:

"Since Kirby's initial run on the characters others have presented them with mixed results. Looking back I'd say at least half of the past New Gods series have done more harm than good. So for me, Death of the New Gods is half honoring Jack Kirby, half mercy killing."

This is, of course, completely true. The New Gods have rarely been handled well. But then, you could say the same for Superman, Batman, whatever character. Most superhero comics through most of their history have been pretty terrible, and completely missing the point of an established character seems to have been par for the course for at least the last twenty years.

But that's not the point. The point is, the characters still have tons of potential, as Grant Morrison proved in Seven Soldiers and Rock Of Ages. I'm sure Mark Waid, or Dwayne MacDuffie, or Gail Simone, or Kurt Busiek, or Starlin himself, or Keith Giffen or any of a hundred other pretty good superhero writers could do some interesting fun stuff with the characters. And if you can't get a good comic out of the characters, just don't use them, and wait until the next Morrison or Moore or whoever comes along with the Perfect Big Idea for them.

Because whether it's the latest hot young creator wanting to use them, or a change of editorial policy, or even just people forgetting this series was written and using Darkseid without remembering he's dead, these characters will be used again. The only thing this series will achieve in that respect is to make a Geoff Johns Special continuity wank-fest miniseries necessary before anyone with a good idea for the characters can use them.

Like I say, it may be a good comic on its own terms, and I'll probably pick up the first issue at least, but it's indicative of a fundamental error in DC's editorial stance (and I'll repeat, I think they're doing more right than wrong overall). With these 'sandbox' characters - the characters that don't have their own titles but which provide part of the shared background for the DCU - the policy should be 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Instead, the policy in recent years seems to be "if it ain't broke, break it".

Incidentally, the interview suggests that Lightray's death (and Darkseid's plot?) will be things that won't be dealt with in Countdown at all, but will be dealt with in this mini. Is Countdown going to have any plot of its own, or is it only going to be trailers for miniseries and deleted scenes from ongoing titles?

Geoff Johns has essentially built his career on fixing mistakes made by DC editorial in the 90s. DC seem bent on giving him, or someone like him, plenty to do for the next decade.

A Question

2007-07-10T12:03:00.000Z

Given that this blog will no longer be based around Countdown (though I will review the next issue, and will be dealing with its fallout in other titles in future posts), should I keep this URL or get a new blog for future comics posts?

V For... Batman?

2007-07-10T11:26:00.000Z

J. H. Williams III , my favourite comic artist working at the moment, has posted some samples of his work on the next issue of Batman, number 667 (666 will be coming out after 666 due to DC's incredibly sensible and not at all screwed up system of getting books out on time).

Now, I know it's meant to be Musketeer, and it's only one panel, but I can't help thinking this resemblance is deliberate, and I wonder what that means for the story...

Countdown 43: The being known as wonder girl is weeping, I believe

2007-07-08T20:15:00.000Z

This is more like it. Countdown 43 is by far the best issue of the comic so far.

Which is not to say it's good. It isn't - it's competent. But competent is still better than this series has risen to previously. If every issue of this title had been this not-terrible, I wouldn't be dropping it. As it is, this level of mundane competence isn't enough to save it, but it is enough to make me feel better about the £1.50 I spent on this issue and the £1.50 I will be spending next issue (my last).

The responsibility for this surprising display of competence could rest with several people. The most likely possibility is writers Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti - those few issues of Countdown that have displayed some small sign of ability have been theirs, to the point where my opinion of them has risen while my opinion of everyone else involved has dropped. However, it may also be that new editor Mike Carlin has stepped in and insisted on the people involved pulling their fingers out a little - Carlin has some experience of delivering superhero comics on a weekly basis thanks to his editorship of the Superman titles in the early '90s (the 'triangle number' period where the four titles were essentially one weekly).

But another possibility is that Keith Giffen has finally come onto the title. Admittedly, he's not credited, but he wasn't credited for issue 3, either, and it was later revealed that he laid out that one. The storytelling is far stronger than in earlier issues, and it has many of Giffen's stylistic tics - six- and nine-panel grids, aspect-to-aspect movement and so on.

Either way, this comic has its share of faults, but at least someone seems to be trying. In particular, the comic feels a lot more organic than the earlier issues, thanks in large part to the funeral, which contrives to bring several of the 'plot' threads (such as they are) together. Of course, this in its turn brings in one of the worst problems with the issue, which is that the funeral is in response to a death that happened in another comic - the death, in fact, of a character who has not appeared at all in this series.

Having said that, the funeral is handled as well as these things ever are, and page 4 in particular is very well done - some quite subtle characterisation is put across in the different characters' silent reactions to the funeral. Although I can't help at this point but suspect that superheroes' funerals would be more likely to be like Metamorpho's in Morrison's JLA run rather than this stadium event.

pp10 & 11 - I wonder where Monarch got those from? That size army couldn't be assembled without anyone knowing.

p12 & 13 - I suspect that most women's refuges aren't quite like this... "The beds here are warm and soft, and very big... our life must seem very dull and quiet compared to yours - we are but eight score young blondes and brunettes, all between sixteen and nineteen and a half, cut off in this castle with no-one to protect us. Oh, it is a lonely life. Bathing, dressing, undressing, making exciting underwear..."
About a million questions present themselves here - like who is paying all the women performing massages and so on - but I suspect these are things that will be answered later. However, I don't think questions like 'how is this Holly character so dense as to not realise this is some sort of trap?' will be... or indeed questions like 'who is this Holly character and why should we care?'
However, for those who don't know, Harleen Quinzel is the alter ego of Harley Quinn, a Batman villain created by Paul Dini who had an obsession with the Joker but has apparently reformed as of her most recent appearances.

p18 - At the time Bart made this video, there had been three heroes named The Flash, and only one of the three had died, so getting killed 'in the Flash tradition' doesn't really make sense.

p20 - I don't know if Monarch's face is a colouring error or a clue...I am, however, reasonably sure that they're trying to make us think the woman Forerunner is after is Donna Troy - which means she almost certainly isn't.

Meanwhile in the back Dan Jurgens' History Of the Multiverse has become some sort of horrific bad-comic Orobouros - it's recapping the same stories that the History of The DCU he did last year recapped, down to almost identical choices of panels to reswipe, and those stories themselves happened so recently (less than two years ago) that anyone reading Countdown
must have read them. At this rate, expect a backup in Final Crisis - Dan Jurgens' History of The History of the DC Universe which just consists of panels drawn by Jurgens showing himself drawing himself tracing panels from Zero Hour.

Anyway, I'm almost regretting the decision not to buy Countdown as it starts finally to get readable, but this month's All-New Atom suggests I'll be able to follow the plot (if it ever gets one) by reading good comics instead. After the last storyline (which was just horrible - Ryan Choi getting revenge on his old school bullies and getting dumped again by the girl who wouldn't go to the prom with him) Gail Simone has started again giving us high adventure, comedy, dodgy pseudo-science, good characterisation and tiny men riding toads fighting snakes with swords.

In this issue (which comes between Countdown 43 and 42), The Hunt For Ray Palmer continues, with Ryan visiting the South American area where Ray Palmer adventured in the 80s Sword Of The Atom series, ending up (for good and logical reasons) in the same costume Palmer had then, and getting involved in a civil war between Palmer-worshippers and those who think Palmer was the devil. But the best thing in this wonderful issue is the little fat masked alien scammer pretending to be Palmer - "I Ray Pama! Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! Trech-Ery Woman!"

I honestly can't imagine anyone liking superhero comics at all and not enjoying All-New Atom, but it's selling in miniscule numbers. Please buy this and support one of the funniest, cleverest comics out there.

In other Countdown-related comics, Paul Dini proves in Detective that he can write a good comic when he wants to. The plots in Dini's Detective run have often been contrived, but they play by the rules of both the superhero and mystery genres, portray the characters in ways that are consistent with their previous appearances while still occasionally showing new sides to them, include occasional new characters who are usable in future stories, and generally are the kind of good, solid, enjoyable but disposable fluff that should be the mainstay of the superhero genre but is currently as rare as a good metaphor in one of my posts. This story again relies on the villain leaving obvious clues in an obvious place, but it deals well with the relationship between Zatanna and Batman, gets Zatanna out of the death-trap in a way which makes sense and doesn't cheat, has that escape give Batman the clue he needs to look for further clues, and in general does what you'd want from a good Batman story.

I only bought Action Comics by accident - I'd actually forgotten there was meant to be an 'ongoing story' in here at all, given the sheer number of fill-ins this year, and I'd been following the fill-ins rather than the regular team (whose work I'm not interested in). I can't really say much about this story (part four of a story whose first three parts I've not read) but I will say that the delays to this title have shot the 'regular team' of Johns & Donner in the foot in a way they won't have realised until recently. Their next story, starting next issue (this story will be completed in an annual at some point in the future) is 'Escape From Bizarro World'. If that had come out late last year, as originally planned, it would have been judged on its own merits. As it is, it will be coming out only three weeks after All-Star Superman 8, which is about how Superman... escapes from Bizarro World. I'm going to be writing a proper post about All-Star Superman at some point in the next few days, but for now, let's just say "Bizarro am think Geoff Johns much better writer than Grant Morrison! Richard Donner am have lots experience writing good comics! Escape From Bizarro World am sure to be critically-acclaimed masterpiece, and not suffer at all in comparison!"

Comics You Should Read: A Disease Of Language

2007-07-04T13:53:00.001Z

First, to all you USians reading this, Happy Fourth Of July. Of course, this means you'll be getting your comics when the comics shop open tomorrow over there, while we'll get ours several hours earlier, but I'm sure you're not feeling at all bad about that.

How does your much-vaunted independence feel now, eh, Johnny Colonial? Feels like getting your comics several hours later than the rest of us, doesn't it? We may have lost in the short term, but we were playing a waiting game, and we're reaping the rewards now!

Anyway, yadda yadda new preview image blah blah Last Supper Planet Of The oh I can't even pretend to care any more. I'm going to look at this week's Countdown tomorrow and I'll do the same next week, but the comics I'm looking forward to tomorrow (and I'll write about those, too) are All Star Superman, Atom and Following Cerebus.

You may have noticed in the last post I moved from slightly depressed by Countdown to outright angry. The reason for this is simple - on the bus to work, the day before my last Countdown post, I was reading Promethea while listening to I Am The Walrus on my CD player. And I was just overcome with awe. Just looking at a page of Promethea, even before reading Alan Moore's writing, or processing the page as storytelling, one is overcome by the sheer beauty of J.H. Williams III's layouts. And combining that with one of the greatest tracks ever recorded in rock or pop music gave me an epiphanic sense of what the human race is capable of. The ugly bags of mostly water that are busily racing to extinction are also capable of looking at the world around them and perceiving beauty, and communicating that perception to others and making the world a better place.

And looking at the sheer amount of effort that was put into any issue of Promethea, the level of detail and attention from not just the writer and penciller, but from the inker, colourist and even letterer, filled me with contempt for Countdown and anger towards its creators. I'm not asking that everyone in comics put in the same care as Moore, Williams, Gray, Klein, Villaruba and Cox put into Promethea - Batman doesn't have to give you staggering insights into the human condition (though if it does, that's a bonus), just provide a pleasant diversion for a quarter of an hour. But to have access to one of the best playgrounds in the world, the freedom to let your imagination play as it will, an audience of (at least to start with) hundreds of thousands, and to be paid for the privilege, and then just not to bother... to turn in half-baked, badly thought-out drivel which no-one, least of all those involved with its creation, can believe has taken one femtosecond of actual effort... and then to blame the readers when they are not overjoyed... that just seems obscene.

But that's all just a digression. I posted that because there was another Alan Moore comic which gave me a much greater epiphany last year - one that, in fact, literally changed my life.

Last year I was working for Barclay's Bank, in a job I found both tedious and morally repugnant. I had ambitions - still do - I'm paying my way through various courses at the moment in the hope of eventually sidestepping into academia - but the job itself was dragging me down. And then, one lunch-hour, I read:

Then Monday. And the lathe, the desk, the counter. New vocabularies are absorbed a brittle language coined by blind industrial processes; glib abbreviations, acronyms. The running jokes become ungainly verbal furniture, with jutting innuendos that will jar your funny-bone until it snaps.

The complex political bitterness and envy; weather systems, highly localized, of cheap ambition, fiscal iotherm; a corridor of stifling heat blown in from Threadneedle Street, from Westminster, a fever-wind that curdles the behaviour and scatters reason.

People we do not respect and yet must be polite to.

The humiliations, devastating and yet so obscure as to be undetectable.

The lacerating splinters come from plastic fragmentation bombs, invisible to X-Ray. But they sting. They suppurate. The big ones take you off below the knees.

I broke down in tears and went home feigning migraine. By the next week I was working as a nursing assistant at the local hospital instead.

The comic from which those words came is A Disease Of Language, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, and is one of the few comics out there I could consider absolute masterpieces.

The bulk of the comic is taken up with adaptations of Moore's spoken-word prose poems The Birth Caul and Snakes & Ladders. I'd heard both of these before buying the comic, and been only mildly impressed - while Moore's booming bass voice and Northamptonshire burr are mesmerising when heard live (as anyone who was at the magnificent tribute to Robert Anton Wilson a few months ago can attest), they can, when combined with the rolling rhythms of his writing and without visual stimulation, be somewhat soporific, and for someone like myself with a relatively low attention span, the recordings can be more 'impressive' than truly moving.

Campbell's adaptations, though, recontextualise Moore's words and transform them. Only occasionally directly illustrating the text, they're as likely to comment or expand on it, often bringing the text into the picture itself (the best example is in the line "Virginity a thing to be disposed of quickly, like the Q in Scrabble". The Q in the text is actually on a Scrabble board as, apparently randomly placed, are the U, I and M...).

The Birth Caul is the more impressive of the two, and earlier (both chronologically and in the book). Inspired by Moore's mother's death, and his subsequent discovery of the caul she had been born with among her effects, it is a profoundly depressing work - a meditation on death, and the way life grinds us all down. Starting 'here and now', at the moment and in the place where Moore performed the piece for the only time, it goes backwards through a typical life, through depressing, futile work, through adolescent dreams never to be realised, through childhood and finally to conception.

Some of the best writing in here is in the childhood section. In a passage very similar to the first chapter of Voice Of The Fire in its limited vocabulary and comprehensibility, Moore presents a series of sense-impressions from a very small child, though even these are flavoured with the constant awareness of death:

It when we want does snow. It when we want be a Christmas. Dead is birthday party where us cannot get with mumps but all time while goes on everything not us.

In heaven is the Odeon, an upstairs part there only where we dream and we are on an adventure that for being good we win and everything is best.

The Birth Caul is very difficult to read on a regular basis, because its view of the world is one that, while largely true, if accepted would lead to suicide. Luckily, in A Disease Of Language, it is countered by Snakes & Ladders.

Snakes & Ladders is in many ways a more formally impressive work. Campbell's style here is much less illustrative, much more abstract. Many pages consist of just a single image, others a collage of several images , often created in Photoshop:

Where The Birth Caul had been a deeply personal, emotional work, this appears to be more intellectualised, and to my mind doesn't pack the punch of the earlier piece as a result. Written for a symposium on magic, it covers many subjects, from Moore's views on psychogeography to the nature of language and magic, to the lives of Arthur Machen, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oliver Cromwell and Francis Crick.

However, the heart of the piece comes in the middle, a dance between a naked woman (and how pleasing that Campbell, unlike so many comic artists, can draw a woman as simultaneously both beautiful and human) and a snake, while Moore talks about the symbolism of the two:

If there is to be progress, then there must be sex. There must be death, and all Earth's children, all the myriad creatures must destroy each other to survive. Into mortality and evolution we descend. We fall.

This section is some of the most beautiful work either Moore or Campbell has done, and while The Birth Caul's message is "we're all going to die", that of Snakes & Ladders is "we're all going to die, so let's dance while we can".

And Arthur Machen in Amelia's death, finds his Golgotha, finds his place of skulls, his Calvary, is taken down into the black earth of his grief. His heart become a vast stone rolled across the door. Yet Machen somehow finds an exit, stumbling in his wretched dark, led blinking like a pony from the pits of Gwent into the daylight, into Syon..... every sound and colour singing like a Hallelujah choir after the long and lampless silence of the tomb.

Rounding out the package, we have a long interview of Moore by Campbell (and two more articulate people you will not find in the comics medium) discussing Moore's magical work and his less 'mainstream' writings - Voice Of The Fire, Promethea and Lost Girls, examining the ideas, especially about 'ideaspace', that link these seemingly very different works. And to end with, a series of sketches (one reproduced above) by Campbell, roughs for the dance sequence.

These works seem almost like an anti-Cliff's Notes to Moore's other works, presenting the underlying ideas unburdened by plot or character. As such they can be hard going - there are no compromises made here - but when read, they will increase your appreciation both of Moore's other work and of life itself. Moore talks about his work being a magic working, and this definitely is...

Maybe he's in the refrigerator

2007-07-03T22:05:00.000Z

Just wondering if anyone else thinks it's amusing that while Gail Simone is writing the Atom, Ron Marz is doing the Search For Ray Palmer?

Countdown 44: Is Anyone Still Reading?

2007-06-30T20:41:00.000Z

The DCU is getting crossovered to death.

I read a fair chunk of the main DCU titles - this month, for example, DC released 32 titles in 'current continuity' (i.e. not non-DCU, Confidential or similar ) of which I bought twelve (the four issues of Countdown, Detective, Blue Beetle, Atom, Action, Superman, Brave & Bold and Shadowpact). Many months I buy more than that (there was no Batman this month, and I'll be buying All-Flash next month, for example).

I can not realistically afford more than this - I also buy several non-continuity titles like All-Star Superman, some Wildstorm titles, a few Marvels and a few from smaller companies. Even if I could afford more (and there is a little leeway there - I will, for example, be buying JLA when McDuffie comes on as writer) I don't like many of the comics they're publishing. I'm not going to spend a significant amount of money on something from which I'll get no pleasure.

This wasn't a problem last year. DC had a cohesive universe, but you could read most DC titles without having to read twenty others. Awareness of events in, say, Aquaman might make Superman more interesting, but you could read one title without the other with no problem. That's no longer the case.

Every comic in the DC universe now appears to be telling one incredibly complex yet banal story. The following information is what I've been able to find out from the internet - The Flash died in Flash, his funeral was in (or will be in?) Teen Titans, which crosses over with Amazons Attack, which in turn crosses over with Wonder Woman (as far as I can tell, the story in Amazons Attack so far is that some Amazons are attacking somewhere. Whether it's just the US or 'man's world' in general, or maybe even just some cities, I'm unsure). Meanwhile the previous Flash comes back to life and learns of his successor's death in a crossover between JLA and JSA. That's six titles telling what appears to be one story.

There was also over the last few months a 'CheckOut' crossover between Checkmate and Outsiders which is, as far as I know, contained only in those titles. Then there's the separate 'Sinestro Corps' crossover which started in the Sinestro Corps special and appears to be going between Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps. That will almost certainly play into whatever the Big Cosmic Event coming up is, as the last splash page of Sinestro Corps was just a reveal of every characterless crossover Macguffin villain ever created for a DC crossover (I was amazed not to see Doomsday there).

In the space of 18 months the Johns/Meltzer/Winnick axis of DCU writers seem to have gone from trying to recreate the mid-80s to bringing back everything from the early 90s. This week saw two separate Dan Jurgens crossover villains come back - Monarch from Armageddon 2001 and Cyborg Superman from the return of superman/Zero Hour. I thought everyone had agreed to pretend those disasters never happened. Next Marvel will be doing The Return Of The Clone or something...

These crossovers are, from what I can tell, incomprehensible if you've not read a bunch of decades-old, out-of-print not-very-good superhero stories, but that's fine - obviously some people like that kind of thing. But they're starting to encroach on the comics I like - Blue Beetle this week seems to be setup for things to happen in Countdown this year, and we all know that Atom is going to tie into it very heavily. From a sales point of view that makes sense - Blue Beetle, Atom and Shadowpact, my favourite three DCU titles not starring Superman or Batman, are also the three lowest-selling DCU comics not yet cancelled. Doing anything at all to get them readers makes sense at this point.

And if this event were being structured like DC's last megacrossover, I would have no problem with that. While the main Infinite Crisis title was a mess, you could read any of the four minis leading up to it without having to read the others, and while every comic acknowledged the events of the crossover, most could be read independently (there were crossovers within 'families' of titles, but that was about all). There was a through-line through the events of the crossover, and while that crossover may have been a horrible unreadable mess, it was easy to know what you needed to read if you wanted to follow it.

Countdown has been being promoted as something along the same lines. The line they've been using in interviews is 'the spine of the DCU'. It's not. It's more like the toenail clippings. It's a collection of random, rather repulsive, bits of detritus which once taken away from their context have no function, and even in context are near-useless. This issue, like almost every one before it, is nothing but a series of snippets, each gesturing at some other story apparently being told in some other comic, with no hint given as to what comic this might be or why we should care. There's no narrative here in any sense that anyone outside of the comics hardcore would use the term, no story, nothing one could review in any reasonable sense of the word. One can enumerate events - though not give any reason as to why these events are important - but not review this as a work of art or craftsmanship because it isn't one. No thought has gone into this, no love, no excitement or inspiration. It has no reason whatsoever for existing except to alert that tiny number of existing comics readers who are reading some but not all of DC's titles that they are missing out, but it does not even do that properly - nothing could be more likely to put me off from trying a new title than the knowledge that it's tied into this soulless mess.

I will be reading Countdown for two more issues, but at this point those two issues would have to be by a creative team of Alan Moore, J.H. Williams and the ghosts of Jack Kirby and William Shakespeare to rescue the title from the morass into which it has sunk. It's simply not telling anything like a story (and not in an innovative avant garde way but in a can't-be-arsed way).

Without a through-line, crossovers become a matter of all or nothing - you either buy everything that company does, or you buy nothing. DC's recent creative team announcements and announcements of new projects have been exciting ones - I would buy almost all the new comics they've announced (Waid back on Flash, Crime Bible, Milligan on Infinity Inc, and so on) in a heartbeat. But if they make it so that only the hardest of the hardcore can follow their comics, they'll lose not only the casual fans but even those like me who go to the comic shop every single week without fail, read a dozen comic sites regularly, but just buy with some sort of discrimination.

Do these people not know what happened directly after all the huge 'event' comics they're so keen to emulate now? Do they not remember what happened after Death Of Superman, Knightfall and Zero Hour? No? Nor do I. Because I, like millions of other comics readers, stopped buying them then. I wonder if the industry can survive another crash like that...

Comics You Should Read: Jaka's Story

2007-06-30T11:57:00.001Z

I'm going to write about Countdown in a few hours, but before I do, I thought it might be fun to post something a bit different. A lot of the time here I've been talking about comics I don't find very impressive, and don't have much to say about. That's not especially edifying either for myself or for my readers, so every so often (like I did with my post about Alice In Sunderland ) I'm going to write about something outside of the normal range of this blog but which I think anyone who enjoys comics will get something out of. Don't worry, I'm going to keep the Countdown focus for as long as I'm reading that comic, but I'll post one of these when the mood strikes.

To start with, I'd like to talk about Jaka's Story. This post is actually a slightly rewritten version of something I wrote a few years back, so apologies to those few of you who've read it before.

This one is very, very hard for me to justify here, because it's by the most horribly misogynist person I've ever heard of, someone whose every idea is anathema to me, someone who I believe to be anti-life in the true sense - everything he believes is about sucking the joy out of the universe. He wants everyone in the universe to live an ascetic life in which we do nothing but worship God, shun women and bomb brown people. Dave Sim appears to have read the Bible and Koran, found that they tell a strange Manichean tale of Good vs Evil, taken sides and started worshipping Darkseid.

And yet...

This is the single truest book I've ever read. The things it has to say about relationships, about people, about actions and their unintended consequences, about resistance to tyranny, about art... they're true and speak to me in a way no other book does. This book is by someone who I consider evil, who would celebrate the death of me and my friends, and is part of a larger work that towards the end espouses a worldview I find at least as appaling as any I know of. But it is still something I'd recommend everyone read. It's that good.

In 1988 Dave Sim had been working on Cerebus for 11 years. What had started out as a simple-minded parody of Conan the Barbarian (and an attempt to hop on the Howard The Duck bandwagon) had quickly become something more complex, and Sim had produced two ‘graphic novels’ (not counting the compilation of the first 25 issues), the 500-page High Society, a wonderful 1930s comedy, mixing the Marx Brothers with Warner Brothers cartoons (Groucho, Chico, Zeppo, Foghorn Leghorn and Yosemite Sam are all characters, retooled to a greater or lesser extent to Sim’s purposes), and the more complex 1200-page epic Church & State, which was inspired in equal parts by Tolstoy and Jules Feiffer, as what starts as high farce becomes genuinely gripping political drama, a true novel of ideas in the 19th century mould (albeit not up to the standards of complexity of a Tolstoy, but far, far above most writing in any field).

As wonderful as those works are (and to many people they are the ‘early, funny stuff’, and they’re still the books that get promoted as Sim’s best work), Jaka’s Story is something else. While Church & State had been a gigantic, complex, tightly-plotted work involving hundreds of characters , Jaka’s Story is a small, human story involving a tiny number of characters. Where Church & State is Tolstoy – empires and religions rising and falling, destinies of nations hanging in the balance – Jaka’s Story is, instead, closer to the work of Ibsen or Bernard Shaw. It feels, in fact, like a stage play. There are only eight characters with any sort of important speaking role within the story – Jaka, Cerebus, Rick, Oscar, Mrs Thatcher, Pud, Nurse and the nameless soldier – and I could easily see it being performed by a very small-scale theatre company.

Much like the works of Shaw or Ibsen, each of these characters more or less stands for an idea. Unlike Shaw, at least, the characters still work as characters. Jaka’s Story is a true tragedy in a way that very few people have managed in the last century. There are no truly ‘good’ characters in the story, but nor are there any truly bad ones – they’re all motivated by mostly selfish motives, but try their best to be decent within their own moral framework. Pud, the character who is motivated by thoughts that are at best disturbing and at worst comes very close to committing rape, is also the only character who doesn’t end up causing huge amounts of damage to everyone else’s life. Conversely, Mrs Thatcher is (or appears to be) motivated by a firm moral and ethical code, but this allows her to commit acts that no-one but a fanatic could possibly condone (it is no surprise that Sim now finds her the most sympathetic character in the text). Cerebus is motivated solely by his own drives, but even he finds it impossible to cause any harm to Rick, and it is his desire to help that leads him to be away during the denouement, and thus unable to save them.

None of these characters are ‘sympathetic’ in the classic sense of only doing good or decent things, but I can identify with all of them, from Mrs Thatcher letting her morals destroy others’ lives, to Pud Withers trying his best to behave like a decent person but with no outlet for a sex drive that leads him into ever-more-dangerous fantasy territory. All the characters are, objectively, horrible people when judged on the basis of their actions, but they are no more so than I am, or most of my friends.

That’s the real tragedy of this story – that well-meaning, more-or-less-decent but flawed people can, merely by acting in perfectly reasonable (or, at least, excusable) ways, end up causing immense harm to themselves and to those they claim to love. There is no way that these people, in this situation, could end up other than horribly damaged or dead, but the outcome is one that none of them would have wished for. Even without the reveal that Sim uses, or the (literal) Macguffin that he puts in place to lead up to the reveal, the situation is one that eventually had to end up with all or most of the characters dead, in prison, or semi-catatonic with grief, which is (of course) how the story ends.

But as well as being a wonderful human story of emotions, Jaka’s Story is also a story of ideas. While the emotional story is one that has been played out again and again, the specifics of the plot are absolutely grounded in the world that Sim set up in the previous 100 or so issues of Cerebus – nearly a decade of background details set up. The way Sim uses this background is exemplary – people can read this story without ever reading another Cerebus story (and they have – when I passed this to my friend Tilt, for example, he said it was the kind of book he wants to buy hundreds of copies of and give to everyone) - all the details you need to understand the plot are made explicit in the story. But at no point is there ever a moment of ‘as you know, your father the king…’ – there is no exposition at all, in fact. Sim gets around the problem in two ways, both of which he has used throughout his career.

The first, and most obvious, is that the background can be understood by the characters’ actions. Pud Withers’ reaction when Cerebus tries to pay him with a gold coin shows everything about how valuable gold is in this time and place. Rick’s reaction when he figures out who Cerebus is shows exactly how important a figure Cerebus has been in the recent past.

The other technique is one which has often led to criticism of Sim – his use of famous people, both real and fictional, in his stories. Throughout the 300 issues of Cerebus, more people from pop-culture and history have appeared than one could count – comedians (The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Woody Allen), comic creators (Seth, Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, Eddie Campbell), politicians (George Washington, Mrs Thatcher), writers (Oscar Wilde, Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald), and musicians (Mick ‘n’ Keef, George & Ringo) have all appeared in thinly- or not-at-all veiled (and in the case of Mrs Thatcher literally veiled) form. Many of Sim’s more cretinous critics have said this is a sign of a lack of imagination on his part. In fact, it’s no different from the use of stock characters that dates back to the commedia dell’arte . If you see Oscar Wilde and Groucho Marx having a conversation, then you know things about those characters that would take dozens of issues to impart otherwise. This use of these characters is an invaluable shorthand that allows Sim to tap into a sort of collective subconscious, and write very powerfully – the fact that he uses Wilde as a comic-relief character in Jaka’s Story makes Melmoth (which is a comics adaptation of the letters and diaries of Wilde’s friends during the weeks before his death) even more powerful and affecting. And there is no greater ‘oh shit’ moment in the whole history of comics than ‘My name is Mrs Thatcher. I’m here to help you’.

This means that we have a very, very rich background to this story, implied with the lightest of brush-strokes, and which allows Sim to do very interesting things. In particular, the Cirinists, who have often been used merely as evidence of Sim’s misogyny (as if such evidence were needed), are extremely well thought out. Sim manages to create a government that, perfectly consistently, is totalitarian, theocratic, matriarchal, pro-censorship, pro-life, dresses in something close to the burqa, is redistributive, creates an absolute safe space for women, makes people significantly materially better off, and actually leads to most people being happier. The Cirinists contain within themselves most of the views that would make them hated by both the left and right, and so consistently that it will make many readers question their own views, because they will be shown to lead logically to views that they despise. What’s amazing though is that they are shown as making the world undoubtedly a better place for the vast majority, but still shown as bad. For Sim, at least the Sim of Jaka’s Story, totalitarianism isn’t wrong because it makes people’s lives worse; it’s wrong because it removes freedom from them, and no improvement in quality of life is worth that.

But all these pale in comparison with Jaka’s Story as a formal achievement. Reading the book, certainties are overturned time and again. Prose passages that we are encouraged (or, rather, not discouraged) to think of as being written by an omniscient narrator at the beginning of the work, filling in parts of Jaka’s back story, turn out to be from a novel written by Oscar, based on Rick’s accounts of Jaka’s memories. The nurse who is an evil ogre in Oscar’s telling is revealed at the end to be a kindly old lady who did her best to raise a difficult child – but is that the nurse lying to herself about her own past?

The more you read this comic, the more you realise that you know nothing. Every single character (except possibly Rick) has a motive to lie (and Rick is either so stupid or naive that his remarks may well be untrue because he hasn’t understood the situation, or he is pretending to be that way), and every single character does lie, several times. We have absolutely no way of knowing how much of what we’ve read reflects the ‘real’ actions of these fictional characters, and how much is different sets of lies coming into conflict. In a very real sense, one cannot say what ‘happens’ in Jaka’s Story, because we don’t know if anything does.

There is much, much more I could say about this. I haven't even mentioned the art, which is some of the best I've ever seen, by both Sim (figures/lettering) and his collaborator Gerhard (the meticulously rendered backgrounds). Then there's the symbolism of Jaka’s doll being used in place of the Nurse’s head. And I could write 1000 words on the short piece of text that ends ‘bad Missy’, let alone the use of repetition, the child abuse that may or may not have happened, the way that the appearance of the Cirinists has a totally different set of cultural associations now than it did 15 years ago… but I could write a book bigger than the comic itself on this stuff. I’ll just tell you to go and read it, and mention one other thing:

I’ve been trying not to spoil plot developments (although I don’t think spoilers actually matter - anything that depends on one shock to be worth reading isn’t) but anyone who’s heard the ‘cantina’ version of Heroes & Villains, by the Beach Boys, will recognise that the plot is almost identical. The really strange thing is that that song was recorded in 1967, but not released until 1990 - after Jaka’s Story. Great minds do think alike.

And speaking of great minds, I'd just like to point out to people interested that my friend Matt Rossi has recently restarted his weblog, Once I Noticed I Was On Fire, I Decided To Relax And Enjoy The Fall . He's currently writing a lot of excellent stuff about comics, and further back in the archives you can find some wonderful speculative-history posts and great short stories. He's one of the best writers I have ever read, and you'll find that any one of his posts will give you things to think about for days after reading it.

Non-Countdown related... Love Punks Want To Make You Cry

2007-06-29T18:26:00.000Z

I'll be updating this with Countdown-related content tomorrow, but I've not been able to get to the comic shop yet. The reason is that my band, The National Pep, have been in the studio, recording our second EP, Love Punks Want To Make You Cry .

The EP won't be out for a few weeks (although you can buy our first one here or on iTunes ) but in the meantime, we've uploaded a very rough mix of one of the tracks, Jaded, for you to download free from here for one week only. This is a rough mix (my songwriting partner Tilt, the vocalist on this, wants me to apologise for the vocals on the 'people go on TV' section) and doesn't feature, for example, the female vocals or theremin. But it does have clanking ukuleles, recorder, saxophone, mellotron and synth bass, and its modular structure (six songs for the price of none) means that of you get bored of one melody, another will be along in a minute.

My apologies for using this space for such shameless self-promotion, but please do check it out and let me know what you think...

Countdown 45: Exposition Time!

2007-06-23T14:42:00.000Z

They really don't want to give me a lot to write about, do they?

Countdown 45 is superior to many of the previous issues in that it is, at least, comprehensible on its own terms, without needing to have read any issues of any other comic, and without having to refer to creator interviews to fill in missing information. However, the reasons it's comprehensible are actually the biggest faults with the issue.

Firstly, behind the traditional Countdown cover of dozens of characters who don't appear in this comic all running in different directions looking constipated, is a comic with no plot.
This issue consists entirely of fight-scene and exposition. The exposition reveals precisely one plot point previously unknown to us - Forerunner is the creation of a breeding programme by one of the Monitors (although it's also stated that she was created because of the Monitor 'taking the Duela Dent matter into your own hands' - presumably Forerunner's race breed very quickly).

We also see in this issue, for the first time, that Monarch (about whom more below) is doing... something. Possibly this is to do with the something Darkseid is doing. Or maybe it's to do with the something the Rogues are doing. Or it could even be to do with the something Karate Kid is doing. As we're still not sure what, if anything, these characters are doing (or, more to the point, why we should care) it's difficult to say. Whatever it is, Monarch is definitely doing it, and those villains/heroes will rue the day they came into conflict with/teamed up with Monarch and his dastardly/heroic plans.

It's also stated that the members of the Legion of Superheroes (who have still not been identified as such within the pages of this comic, as far as I can recall) don't know why they're in the past, but as I'm not reading JLA or JSA I don't know if that information had been previously revealed.

This brings us to the first - and most serious - problem with this comic. Two important threads in Countdown - the Rogues' plot against the Flash and the... whatever... with Karate Kid - got tied up this week. But they were tied up in, respectively, The Flash and JLA. These resolutions (which apparently tie into each other - the Legion bring back Wally West while the Rogues kill Bart Allen) were not mentioned at all in Countdown. As I don't read JLA or Flash at the moment, this means the only reason I know those plot threads have been tied up is because I read various comics websites. Countdown has been promoted as being a stand-alone story, but it's now absolutely apparent that it's anything but. If you're not prepared to buy every single comic DC are putting out, you have to resign yourself to missing chunks of the 'story', such as it is.

As I've pointed out, this issue is comprehensible because of the huge chunks of exposition in it, explaining the 'plot' of the previous issues. Incidentally, this exposition is handled as well as possible, and reflects well on Palmiotti and Gray, the writing team for this issue. But I suspect (and this is only my suspicion) that the reason for all this exposition reflects a fundamental disconnect between the comic the Countdown team think they're producing and the one they're actually putting out.

This first came to mind when reading Mike Marts' latest interview on Newsarama. As always in these things, Matt Brady threw in a very soft question, asking about Countdown's pacing so far - " Mike, with 52, there was always talk of the first few issues setting the stage, and then, things really taking off once all the players were where they were supposed to be. Is that similar to what we're seeing in Countdown's first few issues?"

Now, the answer I would expect for that question would be along the lines of "Yes, we've been doing a slow-burn to start with, but you'll see things start to ramp up over the next few issues. Especially 42 - you won't believe what hit you in that one. All I'm saying is fans of Mr Terrific will have something to talk about!" or words to that effect. Instead, the answer Marts gave, which I'm still boggling at days later, was "No, with Countdown we took a different approach—we decided to blow #%&! up from the very first issue and never allow readers to catch their breath."

Now, if they think that they're not allowing readers to catch their breath - if they think they're putting out some sort of roller-coaster ride of a comic - then the comic they think they're putting out is not the comic that's getting released. And that makes me wonder if they do think they've been putting out a self-contained easily-readable comic. Because this is the seventh issue. Comics these days are usually written in 'arcs' [sic] of six issues, for release as trade paperbacks. The exposition in this issue only really makes sense if they're imagining this being released in trades, with this issue being the first issue of trade number two. If this is their plan, I pity anyone buying this in trades - the fragmented, incoherent nature of the story so far would read as absolute gibberish when divorced from online commentary and without the other comics that week.

I'm beginning to wonder, in fact, if the huge rash of new announcements DC made in the various conventions they attended last week were not a form of damage control. I can't see this title lasting the full 52 issues - I don't believe anyone, even the most die-hard of DC anoraks, will stand for 45 more issues of this drivel. I don't have access to the sales figures (I know some retailers read this site - anyone have any idea of sales?) but this title appears to be haemmoraging readers at a ludicrous rate. It would not surprise me at all if this title were to be cancelled sooner rather than later and the remaining plot parcelled out between various other projects.

However, those announcements have done their job with me at least - after the announcement of McDuffie on JLA and Waid on Flash, to go with the previous announcements of Giffen on Four Horsemen, Milligan on Infinity Inc and so on, I'm positively drooling at the prospect of all the comics I'll be reading this year. So much so that I'm going to carry on reading Countdown for now, even as we head into our third mis-solicited Giffenless month, even as there is no story to speak of, for at least another month. DC editorial are getting enough right right now that I still have some trust in them. But if within another month I'm not seriously blown away, I'll be dropping Countdown, and also dropping any title that ties into it enough that I need to read Countdown to understand it.

Anyhow, on the assumption that they are eventually going somewhere with this, a couple of interesting points. First, Jimmy Olsen apparently doesn't know the difference between the Tomorrow People and the Forever People, even though he knows the secret identities of everyone in the world. And secondly, there's yet another reference to an 80s action/SF film, this time Terminator. A few people have suggested that these references - all pre-Crisis - might actually be a plot point. I hope so, because otherwise they're horrifically annoying.

I was going to write in this post about Monarch, and why he's important, and why you should never let Dan Jurgens near a crossover, but I think this post is long enough. I'll write that post on Wednesday.

Countdown 46: Nice And Sleezy Does It

2007-06-16T10:55:00.000Z

So, as I said in my last post, I am going to pick at problems with this comic as I go through it, but I don't want people to think that this means I disliked this issue. It's actually an above-standard superhero comic, though still patchy. If this had been the general standard of this series, I would have been much less scathing than I have been.

In fact, I advise anyone who hasn't been reading Countdown, who's in two minds about it, to pick up this issue. This is as good as it's been so far, and it does a good job of filling in the information needed to understand the story.

The cover is horrible. It's not badly done or anything, but that early-90s Image style art, all tiny noses and scratchy lines, is ugly as sin. It's also nothing like the art on the inside - Jesus Saiz' pencils coupled with Jimmy Palmiotti's inks actually look more like a less-detailed Rick Veitch.

The art is actually the best in the series so far. Saiz' poses look stiff - sometimes they look traced from photos rather than drawn freehand, there's a general lack of dynamism there - but the storytelling is clear, there are subtle shifts in the art style in the different sections (almost ligne claire in the Rogues sections, dirty and gritty in the Suicide Slum sections (the pages that first brought the Veitch comparisons to mind, looking very like Veitch doing Eisner in Greyshirt).

p1 - You'd think if Amazons Attack were 'the hottest story going', and given that it was the big cliffhanger at the end of the last issue, it would be dealt with in this issue in some way. Having said that, this page does a good job of delivering a lot of exposition in a relatively unforced way, and of showing the relationship between Jimmy and Lois.

pp2-3 - Ten thousand? Assuming she's using Beijing as poetic shorthand for 'the other side of the earth' so she can feel every thunderstorm happening on the earth, assuming as well that her figure of 44,000 thunderstorms a day is accurate, and that the average length of a thunderstorm is about half an hour, there should be just under *one* thousand happening, not ten...

p4 - "Five pregnant women on the roof of a hospital praying in pentagram formation beneath a floating rock while singing Echo And The Bunnymen's Killing Moon". I don't know what's funnier - that image or the fact that Mary Marvel knows the song...

p5 - OK, a demon made of dead babies. That's revolting.

pp6-8 - Oh dear. These pages are terrible. Alan Moore talks in Writing For Comics about how Eisner taking ideas from Orson Welles in the 40s was an innovative idea, but people still using those panel layouts and transitions in the 80s was unimaginative. In the same way, Garth Ennis writing dialogue in obvious imitation of Tarantino was entertaining in Preacher. Just copying the argument about tipping from Reservoir Dogs is both unoriginal and passe.
Secondly, the writing for Mirror Master has been uniformly awful in this series. In general, there's a problem when comics try to represent any form of dialect phonetically. Even the greats get it wrong - Dave Sim managed perfectly to capture the rhythms and vocabulary of Liverpool dialect (and more specifically the rhythms of Alun Owen's screenplay for A Hard Day's Night) in his Harrison Starkey and Richard George characters in Guys, but his attempts at rendering the pronunciation phonetically were hopeless. In less skillful hands the results are much worse - no-one who has ever heard a real Australian speak could ever read a comic featuring the original Captain Boomerang .
Mirror Master's dialect, in every issue in which he's featured, has been just horribly wrong. And worse than wrong, it shows a contempt and a patronising attitude to non-USians that I find offensive. It's as if I were to write dialogue for an American character and have them saying "Howdy pardner, ah'm a good ole cowpoke from a li'l ol' village name o' Brooklyn, New York, in the great state o' Minnesota, y'all". It pulls me out of the story, and gives the impression that the people writing this stuff don't actually care about getting details right - everyone not from the US is just a funny foreigner.

pp9-12 - These pages are well done, apart from the "Yoda" reference (another fault in Countdown has been the film references. This was bad enough with Karate Kid, but at least there the comic character came first. Saying Sleez looks like Yoda is just pointing out the derivative character design and breaking suspension of disbelief). However, I'm unhappy that they brought back Sleez at all.
For those who don't know, Sleez was part of John Byrne's comprehensive plan to slime up the Superman mythos (the plan that ended with Superman becoming a murderer). Sleez came from Apokolips, and psionically controlled Superman and Big Barda into appearing in a porn video together.
Sleez was killed off many years ago, and the story seemed to be one of those 'we shall never speak of this again' moments, which I was more than happy with - as far as I was concerned, it was Zero-Hourased/Superboy-punched/eaten by Mr Mind , and it never happened This section of the comic brings Sleez back, thus establishing the story firmly in current continuity, before killing him again.

p13 - We really did not need an upskirt shot of Mary Marvel's panties. Mary's 'darkening' is more than conveyed in the captions. The sexualising (or increase thereof) of the character is both unnecessary fanboy pandering and conveys/reinforces some pretty horrible messages about female sexuality.

p14 - Devil Day Care is a nice phrase.

pp15-16 Jason Todd and Donna Troy hold my interest not one iota. There appears to be no reason for them to be in Washington other than to promote DC's hot new miniseries Amazons Attack, on sale at a comic shop near you...

p17 - Forerunner to go with Harbinger? What's next? Precursor? Augurer?

Incidentally, seeing Sleez killed off by the Continuity Cops (bring back Jonni DC!), the conjunction of continuity-fixing death and Fourth World character, made me think of something that no-one else appears to have mentioned, which I think may be a big part of the plot to Countdown.

It's been established that the Monitors want to destroy 'anomalies' - people who shouldn't be in the universe they're in; continuity errors. Now, I think I know how the Fourth World characters fit into this - the Omega Beams.
For those who don't know, one of Darkseid's established powers is the Omega Beam, which can be used to kill or teleport victims. But it's been established in the past that the Omega Beam can make it so that the victim never existed in the first place.
Now, doesn't that sound like something the Monitors might be interested in?

VERY quick note

2007-06-15T10:15:00.000Z

I've only just had a chance to read Countdown 46, and I'm not going to be able to post properly about it until tonight or tomorrow AM. When I do, I am going to point out a lot of flaws in the comic, but I just want to say - if the first few issues had been this good I would have been a lot kinder to them. This issue is not a good comic, but it's competent. I actually think you could pick this up without having read the previous five issues and follow it. This issue is up to the standard of the better bits of issues 49 and 50 and manages to keep some momentum going throughout, unlike those issues, and is miles ahead of the tedious 51, 48 and 47. More later.

(BTW, I'm off to work now and won't be able to approve comments until tonight. If yours doesn't show up, that's why).

Countdown 47 - Delenda Est Donna

2007-06-09T14:57:00.000Z

I'm beginning to think Countdown isn't for me.

This issue has precisely one thing I could call an event - Black Adam giving Mary Marvel all his powers. This has been telegraphed so far in advance that nobody could have been surprised (although Black Adam's new word was actually quite a good twist).

Other than that, here's a breakdown of what 'happened' in Countdown:
Jimmy Olsen had a dream
Someone from a comic I don't read angsted about something I don't know, then kicked someone in the face
The Monitors don't like Donna Troy, Kyle Rayner or Jason Todd
Piper and Trickster have a chat
And there's a big commercial for another comic I'm not reading.

I hate 'reviews' that are just plot summaries (as far too many reviews online are), but I'm just finding it harder and harder to say anything at all about Countdown.

When I started doing this blog, I wanted to use Countdown as a hook to write about what's happening in the DCU generally, and to analyse anything new and interesting in itself. Unfortunately, the comic is giving me nothing to say, and I don't want to keep posting what amount to attacks on it over and over for another 47 weeks - that's pointless. The comics medium is small enough that it's far more important to praise the good than to attack the bad, especially when it's bad work by generally-good creators. I'll be buying Countdown for another month or so - giving it a decent chance - but if it doesn't start going somewhere fast I'll be dropping it.

If that happens, I'll also be dropping this blog, for obvious reasons, but I'd be interested to know how many of the people reading this would carry on reading a general comics blog if I were to do one instead of this? There's a poll at the side - please let me know.

Anyway, on to the other DC comics I bought this week, and thankfully they're much better.

Paul Dini proves in Detective 833 that he can write the kind of story I wanted Countdown to be. Detective features an appearance by Zatanna, and everything you need to know about the current state of relations between her and Batman is put across in the story without it feeling forced. You could give this comic to someone who'd never read anything featuring the character before, and they would be able to get the basics - stage magician, wears fishnets, talks backwards, can do real magic as well, did something bad to Batman a while back that she's sorry for and he's angry about. All that comes through without any problem. The story ends on a cliffhanger (one that almost demands a "Tune in next month, same bat-time, same bat-channel!" caption, in fact) but feels satisfying - there's a mystery which gets solved, it's one which plays fair by the readers (I didn't spot the T-shirt as a clue until the second reading) and it fits with what's been happening in other comics.
There's not much to say about Don Kramer's art, but in a good way - it's good, solid storytelling with recognisable characters. It's the kind of art that the Bat-titles should have all the time but generally haven't had in fifteen years or more. Competence is a very underrated virtue.
Curiously it doesn't fit with what's happening in Countdown right now, although Countdown editor Mike Marts appears to suggest this is deliberate.

Another comic that doesn't fit with Countdown is Superman #663, by Kurt Busiek, Carlos Pacheco & Jesus Merino, which features a character who died a week ago in Countdown. At least now that DC have brought back the editor's box they can acknowledge this - "This story occurs prior to Countdown 48".
I've been in two minds for a while about Busiek's Superman. The overarching story he's doing is tedious in the extreme - dark, dystopian futures are soooo 1985 - while the theme behind it was done better and in many fewer pages by Elliot S! Maggin in Must There Be A Superman?
Then, on top of that, the cliffhanger suggests we're about to do a story again that's a perennial Superman staple, and that was last done less than two years ago.
But on the other hand, his Up, Up and Away! (with Geoff Johns, not usually a favourite of mine) last year was one of the best Superman stories I've ever read. And when he's doing single-issue stories, he gets Superman. Marc Singer has attacked Busiek's penchant for the 'little epiphany' story, and Busiek has been guilty of that, too, with some of these issues... but the 'anniversary' story last year was so good a friend described it to me as 'the missing issue of All Star Superman'. And the 'aliens are stealing our stuff' story was just priceless.
While I couldn't have less interest in the big picture, in other words, Busiek gets Superman and his supporting cast. He gets the potential of the powers (Lana's speech to Superman in this issue suggests Busiek has half a mind to take him in a Julius Schwartz direction) and also gets the effect the man has on the people around him. I can put up with a couple of pages of continuity-fixing (explaining the discrepancies between Arion's appearances here and in Day Of Vengeance) if I get the Young Gods of New Genesis chorusing "Sorry, Superman..."

The All-New Atom #12 though, I'm in only one mind about. This is just pure fun from beginning to end. I was disappointed with the last storyline in this comic - the return of the bullies from beyond the grave to battle the nerd who couldn't get a date to the prom just felt like fanboy pandering - but this, part one of The Search For Ray Palmer is a textbook example of what a good superhero comic should be. Fanboy pandering of the good kind (Lady Cop!) , robot taxi-drivers who speak in anagrams, a giant floating head, subplots moving forward, a big last page reveal, the Ivy Town Chamber Of Commerce brochure ("Our only known serial killer hasn't been seen in days! Take that, Gotham City!"), a fight scene that's actually exciting...
There's very little to say about this other than that it's excellent, and a welcome return to form in a comic that started out great but has been coasting a little. This is the thing that's given me most hope that Countdown will become something I'll remember fondly - this story is tied deep into the bowels of Countdown, and it's just wonderful.

Just a quick one here

2007-06-05T18:38:00.000Z

A few people seem to be under the impression that I started this blog with the intent of attacking Countdown, or that I have something against DC. Aside from a few cheap shots I make, it actually makes me feel bad to post about how bad Countdown so far has been. I'm looking forward to posting about the great issues coming up (well, OK, other than next week, with Mary Marvel's Lightning Nipples...)
I started this blog, as a matter of fact, because I think for the last year or so (basically since One Year Later), DC has been getting things right, and I wanted to write about that. My wife's away for a few days, and I'm off work sick, and so I'm reading through back issues at the moment (something I don't get too much chance to do normally). I just went over to the bookshelf where I keep the recent issues, and was literally unable to choose - do I read Up, Up And Away! ? Morrison's Batman? 52? Atom, Blue Beetle, Brave & The Bold, Detective, All-Star Superman, Shadowpact,The Spirit... all told, in the last year or so, DC has put out maybe as many as 100 comics that I would actually enjoy rereading - which hasn't been the case since the fag end of the British Invasion, a good 15 or more years ago. The last year has been one of the best ever for 'mainstream' comics.
Up through Infinite Crisis I hated everything the current regime were doing at DC, but for the last year I've found a good chunk of it to be as good as superhero comics get. (They've put out some dross, as well, but unlike in 2005 it's been possible to ignore that without missing huge chunks of plot in the good stuff).
When I criticise Countdown, it's because I'm genuinely disappointed that the pendulum appears to be swinging back to the previous, pre-Infinite Crisis, 'Countdown' event - random happenings as a substitute for plot or characterisation. I expect better from the people involved, and I'm hoping they'll start to live up to those expectations soon...

Issue 48 : Gotterdammerung

2007-06-03T22:17:00.000Z

Before we begin, I'd like to apologise for the comparative lateness of this post - we got our comics even later this week than usual, thanks to the bank holiday, and my job requires me to work weekend shifts on occasion.

The consensus on this week's issue of Countdown seems to be that it's more of the same, but a very slight improvement, and I have to agree. Over at The Savage Critics they said the issue "did mark the first time that the series didn't feel like a terrible mistake", which is a little harsh, but which seems to sum up the overall reaction.

This is the blandest issue so far, in both bad and good ways. It has nothing to match the great moments in the last couple of issues (the "no umbrellas" sign, Elastic Lad), but it also has none of the obvious errors and bad writing we've seen in the earlier issues - where things seem wrong, they seem to be plot points rather than errors.

This leaves comparatively little to say about the issue, but to cover the key points:
p3 - Even Perry White knows who Jason Todd is...this is one mystery that could actually play out rather interestingly.
p8 - The composition in panel 3 here looks very familiar, but I can't think where from - anyone know? (It's going to be something incredibly obvious, isn't it?)
pp10 & 11 - This Karate Kid story still makes no sense whatsoever. It's only comprehensible if you're reading two other comics, JLA and JSA, which in turn are only comprehensible if you've read some other comics from 20 years ago that haven't been reprinted. Further, there's not even any way to know where to look for the information without looking online. Several other DC titles have (finally) brought back the "See Othercomic #7 - Ed" box, and I can't imagine a comic that needs it more than this one...
p12 - The transition between these two pages is very awkward
p13 - As Scipio points out, Jimmy Olsen has had superspeed before, just like the Elastic Lad powers. I would hope this was pointing to the return of Hypertime, but I suspect not...
p15 - For those of you who don't know, Lightray was a character whose primary function was to appear in crowd scenes, say things like "Orion, your impetuous nature needs to be tempered by wisdom" , and not much else. Also, he was in the JLI for about six issues...
The History of the Multiverse is still comprehensible, amazingly...

In other DCU comics this week, Action 850 was a pretty decent flashback issue of the 'important moments linked by a framing story' type. It did a good job of filling in the back-story of the current iteration of Superman (the Supermullet is officially out of continuity now) though Clark's reaction to his mother's bereavement rang false, and I found Supergirl's 'nice' and 'cute' comments about her cousin a little unnerving.

Anyway, now a few issues are out, I thought I'd engage in some speculation as to what Countdown is counting down to. All we know for sure at this point is that it's to be another Crisis along the lines of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the title Final Crisis has been mentioned, and the names Kurt Busiek and Grant Morrison have both been bandied about.

Now, if it really is a Crisis type story, DC have a big problem - their universe is getting rebooted every few minutes at this point, and another reboot could quite possibly kill their comics line stone dead. So we can assume it won't be a reboot.

The most popular opinion among fandom seems to be that it will be leading to an Ultimate-ised DCU - the start of a second line set in a fresh universe, uncluttered by continuity baggage. I suspect that this isn't the only thing happening, if it's happening at all - you don't start your new continuity-free line with a 52-part story plus tie-ins referencing a 20-year old comic.

Other people have suggested that the "Ultimate DCU" would provide a chance to have the grimungritty characters and stories in one Earth, while having more Silver Age-esque stories take place on New New Earth. Depending on how the Earths were split up, Earth Bronze could be the private fiefdom of Geoff Johns while Earth Silver could be the playground of Mark Waid or whoever, in the same way Roy Thomas used to have Earth-2 to himself.

This separation of storytelling styles could seem a good idea short term, but one of the big strengths of the DCU is the fact that Mr Mxyzptlk and Swamp Thing both live there, as do Batman and G'nort. The real world contains tragedy, horror, humour and hope in equal measures - the DCU should do likewise, and for all their occasional missteps, I think the DC editorial team have shown they understand this in the last year.

But there is one way such a separation could work, and I think I got this idea from my friend Tilt, but all my instincts tell me this is what they're going to do. You make one to throw away.

At the end of Final Crisis the multiverse is left intact, but we concentrate on two Earths - call them Earth-Silver and Earth-Bronze. Earth Silver is the shiny neo-Silver Age rebooted universe with no continuity, Earth-Bronze is our current DCU. As a result of the Crisis, Earth-Bronze is going to die.

Set it up so that the superheroes of Earth-Bronze know, for a fact, that their universe has, say, three years left before it is totally destroyed, and use those three years to tell every end story the writers ever wanted to tell. Superman pounding the walls of reality, trying to change things and fighting to the end, Batman keeping order to the last, policing a Gotham whose citizens have nothing to fear because they know they're going to die anyway. You can do these stories and have them 'be real'. A Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? for the whole DCU. Meanwhile, if the new Earth-Silver doesn't work out, at the last minute they could always pull a Macguffin out of a hat and find a way for Earth-Bronze to survive.

So my prediction for what we're counting down to? Two lines of comics - one small (to start with) line featuring all the icons at their most iconic - what All Star was originally promoted as (and I think it likely that All-Star Superman would become continuity there) starting fresh and building up a new continuity, while the other, larger, darker line would be heroes raging against the dying of the light.

What do you think we're counting down to?

2007-05-28T16:22:00.000Z

It turns out the reason issue 49 looked like Giffen is because he did lay out at least some of it. Images at IGN.

Non-Countdown Related - Luther Arkwright

2007-05-28T07:08:00.000Z

One of the few posts I've made on this blog discussing something other than its subject, Countdown, was this review of Bryan Talbot's wonderful new graphic novel Alice In Sunderland. I discovered yesterday that he's made his classic The Adventures Of Luther Arkwright (one of the all-time greats - Alan Moore, Warren Ellis and others have very obviously been influenced by it) available online for £5 . Oddly, it's not linked from the front page of his official site...
It's available here (full disclosure - that's a referral link, which means if you buy it I get a small portion of the price, like with Amazon links. If you hate me and don't want to give me any money, the direct link is http://bryan-talbot.com/lutherarkwright ).

I'm hoping to post later today with my first attempt at guessing what Countdown is counting down towards...

Holly Reads Countdown So You Don't Have To

2007-05-26T13:25:00.000Z

A lot of people have been talking about Countdown as being a good jumping on point for the DCU, so I thought I'd try that out. My wife Holly isn't a superhero comics fan, but is comics-literate. She's read most of Alan Moore's stuff and a handful of the more self-contained Grant Morrison things, and quite liked Sandman and Cerebus, so I thought she'd be a good test case. Last year I gave her the first few issues of 52 to see how well she could follow them, and she found them fairly comprehensible (she liked 'the big dumb guy with the sarcastic flying robot' and 'the guy with no face' and thought Black Adam and Steel tedious). So I thought I'd try the same with the first few issues of Countdown and see how they appear to someone who's not got 20 years' experience of reading these things. Here's her reviews, unedited except for my comments in italics:

The first one, or Nobody Talks Like This
They all have different numbers at the top! It looks really stupid. But then the covers look kind of stupid generally.

Ooh, a fold-out cover. Room for more ads. Hooray.

People don't talk like this, you know. Even bad guys shouldn't rhapsodize like this. The analogy is not nihilistic, unless nihilists are idiots. It's overly simplistic about chaos theory and it calls
people "souls" instead of people. What good is putting people on hooks and trying to look sinister if you're going to talk like that? (Sadly, Holly doesn't get Kirby...)

"I try to make a bid for individuality... I gotta keep my bad girl cred." Nobody talks like this!

"Simmer down sparky. I don't know about the fancy lad..." You know I have no idea what's supposed to be going on here, if anything, because nobody can string together a sentence that doesn't put me off.
"Treating the Flash to a righteous beat-down"?

Dude, whole pages are going by and nothing is happening. For a while people were talking about purging the multiverse of stuff, which sounds promising, but they're just standing there saying "This is a gross violation of your jurisdiction, brother." Bah!

At least this doesn't have that appalling rubbish in the back like 52 did! But then that meant a few pages I didn't have to read, which is a good thing actually.

The second one, or It's a Good Thing the Internet Stopped Working or I Never Would've Finished This

Hey, here's somebody I recognize, at least! On only the second page. And -- I went back and checked -- the events of the first page made sense and nothing too stupid was said. I'm feeling better already.

Er, so this old Robin is a darker, grittier Batman who kills people?
Now, I remember how loudly Andrew shouted "They killed Jason Todd!" in the kitchen at somebody's housewarming party, but I'm beginning to think being dead would still be better than this. (I actually shouted about bringing him back).

Never mind; it's gotten so boring I've gotten up to take my dirty dishes to the sink, turn on the radio, look at the internet, anything.

I don't have any idea what people who see the future in crystals actually sound like, because all anybody seems to offer in any book or movie is this. "Be careful what you wish for." "The future is cloudy." Oooh, "there's a reason we aren't supposed to peer into the future." All this means your money would be more constructively spent on ice cream or going to the movies.

I like the way the martial-arts dude is just a regular freakishly-muscled comic book guy except with a permanent scowl. I guess that's more socially acceptable than making the eyes any
slantier.

I feel like I should be saying less superficial things, like you comics guys do, but I just realized that I can only talk about the way people look and the crappy dialogue because I still have no idea what, if anything, is going on.

"You flip flop more than a Massachusetts senator"!? Where to begin? I'll settle for a re-match of Nobody Talks Like That. People who also want to "hit some Kryptonian" (without it meaning "get someone to murder") especially don't.

The last few pages were okay though. I like the Joker.

The third one, or If I Don't Get Hopeful I Won't Get Disappointed

Jimmy Olsen's pretty stupid though, isn't he?

Oh, I get it. There are Auditors here too. Only more ugly and violent and thus more boring.

"Must another crisis move us to action?" Ha ha. "Just look at all the loose ends left by the last crisis!" Oh, such subtlety, such wit.

I have a lot less to say about this one because it's going a lot faster. Either because it's actually almost okay or because, as now, I'm thoroughly confused by whatever's going on on the JLA satellite.

Spoke too soon. This is getting irritating again. The Rogues are boring.

Ah, I'd forgotten this about 52, when I had to read the first few issues of that. They're trying to tell nineteen stories at once or something, so you only get a few pages of each, and nothing really
happens, and you have to pay another £1.50 for this every week?

"Limey"? There's a "limey" here? Is that the guy who keeps saying "yeh" instead of "you"? I was wondering about that. I think I recognize him from Animal Man, but he didn't talk so strangely in that. What about "ye perfect wee bastard" then is that the same person? It's unfair that more than one of them wears green.

The chick with lightning in her thought bubbles? Also boring.

Argh! I spoke too soon! History of the Multiverse! Not reading that.

So there we go. This is how the first few issues of DC's flagship title appear to one casual reader. While I'm still expecting it to get good, it does highlight how little the title so far has to offer those who don't have Roy Thomas levels of continuity knowledge...

Countdown 49: De(com)pression

2007-05-25T10:03:00.000Z

I was reading The Savage Critics this morning, and one of the commenters there didn't like my first Countdown review at all. I started to post a reply, saying "Yes, you're right, my blog isn't as good as Douglas Wolk's one, and that first review was very poor - not enough content to really justify posting it - but I had more to say about the second issue, and I think you might enjoy some of the other posts..." and then I realised. Oh my God, I'm turning into Paul Dini !

As a few other comic bloggers have noted, Dini's interview linked above essentially blames the readers for not liking the comic so far, saying "People are not falling in with the rhythm. You'll always have people who'll hate it just because they do or they hate everything [...] in that first issue, yeah, we started out kind of slow, but that's just the prologue and the actual story starts with issue #50 and from here on in things are just going to build and get faster and faster. I prefer starting out that way rather than having a huge explosion that will leave everyone kind of scratching their head and wondering what's going on."

Now, I don't want to sound too critical of Mr Dini here for a few words in an interview that mostly made me more excited about the project, but in saying this he is confirming the criticisms about Countdown that have been made so far.

I have not read one single positive review of the first two issues of Countdown - I've read a few neutral ones, maybe some that mildly recommend it, and a bunch of negative ones. Those negative reviews were all based on the fact that nothing happened in the first issue, and little in the second.

Now, Mr Dini can say all he likes that 'people are not falling in with the rhythm' but we know what the rhythm is. We just don't like it. And as for the story not starting until the second issue, that just suggests that the second issue should have been the first issue.

The fact is, 'decompressed' storytelling and page after page of atmosphere and set-up only really work in trade paperbacks and graphic novels. You can just about get away with them in an ongoing story where the readers know to trust the creators. But the first issue of a new series should be, if not a complete story, at least something that approximates to a satisfying reading experience - it should lay out its stall and say "this is what we have. If you like this come back, it only gets better from here!" I would have expected Paul Dini, whose done-in-one stories in Detective over the last year have been so enjoyable, to understand this. People are paying ridiculously large amounts for these comics (relative to the entertainment value gained from them - an issue of Countdown costs the same as an issue of Private Eye, or as much as a week's worth of The Guardian or The Independent when bought from a newsagent in a student area) and they deserve to actually get something for their money other than a promise that next week's comic will be good.

On top of this, this strategy actually makes the comic seem less good than it is. Some of the apparent mistakes (for example Jimmy Olsen knowing Jason Todd's secret ID) are going to be part of the story and aren't mistakes at all, but when there are actual mistakes there as well, and when there's so little happening, it's very tempting to dismiss all of them.

I think, on balance, the 52 model of weekly comic-writing is probably better than the Countdown model. If each writer gets, say, four pages this week, and is only writing the part of the story he's interested in, he's (for unfortunately all the writers on both these series have been male) not going to waste two of them on a big splash page of Superman floating above the earth - he's going to make them count in a way that he won't if he's writing 22 pages and he has to put in that bit about the Rogues when he really just wants to get to the Mary Marvel bit (or whatever). You end up with a comic containing a lot more story for your money.

I'm continuing to read the comic, but it's for reasons which have nothing to do with those first couple of issues - I trust Paul Dini and Keith Giffen to do good work (assuming Giffen's work ever appears - another reason people are slightly less willing to give the comic any slack is because we've essentially been mis-sold these first few issues. I bought them with the understanding that Keith Giffen was working on them, and no-one admitted otherwise til after they were released), the few hints about what it's counting down to that I've read have been promising, and I like the characters. If I'd just had those two issues, and no ancilliary material on which to base my judgement, there's no way I would commit to spending £1.50 a week to find out if it's going to get good.

Having said that, Countdown 49 is a great improvement. I wouldn't say it's good, as such, but it's very competently done. There's nothing in there that requires you to have read another comic, the back story (such as it is) is explained without too much exposition-dumping, and the story is told well.

Partly, this is to do with the pacing - while Keith Giffen is still absent from this issue, the pacing and layouts are done in an obvious attempt to imitate his layouts for 52 - tons of six- and four-panel grids. This is important - it means that when Giffen's breakdowns do start appearing, there will be some continuity in the storytelling between this issue and the later ones. The pacing and layout of a comic are far more important to its effect than most people give them credit for - Watchmen and Fell both get a lot of their effect from the 9-panel grid, while almost all of the effect of Dark Knight Returns comes from Miller's use of that 16-panel grid with its tiny images. A regular (or semi-regular - any rule should be broken if it affects storytelling adversely) panel layout sets a rhythm for the story, a regular beat, and subliminally makes you want to carry on reading - the rhythm pulls you along. A page with more panels also feels more information-dense than one with fewer, even if it contains the same amount of action and dialogue. I don't know if this was a choice made by scripter Tony Bedard or penciller Carlos Magno, but whoever it was did the right thing - this is the first issue of the comic that really feels like something's happening.

Also, I'm glad to see there was no Jason Todd in this issue.

Looking at the story itself:

pp 1-5 - I love the resolution to last week's cliffhanger. The return of Elastic Lad! It's interesting to see Jimmy's surprise at this as well - obviously his early-90s elasticisation has been retconned away. Unless this is an alternate earth Jimmy... Incidentally, Jimmy's characterisation has been one of the things this series gets absolutely right.

pp 6-8 The Monitors plotline is probably going to be the most important in the story, but I can't say I can work up any enthusiasm for them at all. The original Monitor was a walking MacGuffin, and these are given no characteristics that make them interesting yet. But at least here we have a definite motivation ( protect the purity of the Multiverse), source of conflict within the group (do we kill to further the greater good?) and source of conflict with the heroes later on (threat to the lives of several characters we're supposed to care about). Also it's good to see that the Monitors use the Star Trek facial hair universe-distinction system.

pp 9 & 10 - Still no explanation given for who these people are or why we should care. Looks like they think everyone reading this is also reading JLA and JSA...

pp 11-15 - The first time the Flash Rogue's storyline has worked for me. The differing motivations of the three characters here actually work, all the necessary information to understand what's going on is given in the dialogue, and it's a funny little sequence. "Bear-market" Boesky is obviously the DCU version of Robert Maxwell , but hopefully for him he's a better swimmer. And page 14, panel 1, Mirror Master's "Och, ye perfect wee bastard!" and his look of horror (with Pied Piper almost looking like Harpo Marx in the background) is just lovely.

pp 16-19 - Well, it couldn't be perfect, could it? I really, really, hoped to have seen the last of Black Adam for a while. Black Adam is The Punisher with powers, a character with absolutely nothing interesting about him as written in any comic I've read. No doubt it's possible to do something interesting with him (there's no such thing as a character with no potential), but if the 52 writers couldn't manage, given the characters they managed to revive, I doubt he'll fare any better in Countdown. Even here, though, there's one good exchange - "Who are they?" "Drug addicts, squatters, real estate agents..."

Even the History of The Multiverse by Dan Jurgens, which I'd been dreading given that the History of the DCU backups he did last year were widely acknowledged as the worst thing about 52 by a long way, was competently done. It's still a bunch of characters standing around telling each other things they already know, but you could read it without having read Flash Of Two Worlds (the story it recaps in four pages) and come out knowing what had happened, which is about all you can hope for with this kind of infodump.

I'm hoping to post something in the next day or two with guesses as to what Countdown is counting down to, but for now I'm going to leave with a plug for something completely unrelated. My songwriting partner Tilt is promoting a gig on Wednesday 30th May in Bradford, at the Love Apple Cafe, featuring our friends Wilful Missing and Blake Jones (the latter having travelled all the way from Fresno). If you're in the North of England, and you like good music, please come along, so we can do more of these shows.