skip to content or skip to search form

Category: Comics

“Continuity” Revised

“Continuity” Revised: David Fiore replies to Paul O'Brien's Ninth Art article on superhero-comics continuity. Does a shared universe continuity increase verisimilitude, or does it emphasize textuality with historiography and intertexual references? This question brings to my mind the No-Prize---if you, the reader, are given authority to contribute to the text by 'fixing' continuity 'mistakes' in the letter columns, this must mess with verisimilitude a bit, no?

25 May 2004 by Steven | Permalink | Comments disabled

Troy, The Gabriel Cut

25 May 2004 by Steven | Permalink | Comments disabled

“Don’t you want to inherit the earth?”

So we finally got to read New X-Men:Here Comes Tomorrow, written by Grant Morrison and penciled passably by Marc Silvestri. I don’t have the book to do a close reading now, so I’ll do an impressionistic reading of my own responses to it, I guess.

At the core of the story is the same event in two alternate futures, since the real “present” of the story is the moment of Jean Grey’s death. In the same page repeated twice, Emma Frost, resplendent in one of the worst excesses of Silvestri’s quirky art, tries to bring the grieving Scott Summers away from his wife’s grave and back to the X-Men. “Don’t you want to inherit the earth,” she asks? And so we reach a defining question. Is milquetoast Cyclops meek enough to do just that?

If he says, “Yes, that is what I want,” that’s just standard superhero bravado, and superheroes aren’t supposed to admit they’re saving the earth for themselves. It’s all about the little guy, or in this case the little guys and mutants (and mutants are guys too!) living in harmony. And so if Scott wants to inherit the earth alongside Emma, he can’t do it through meekness. He has to take on a new role leading the school (acting as a surrogate father to atone for the phantom future children Jean’s death means they never had together?) to ensure the survival or success of the X-Men. This move means decisiveness, strength, courage, fortitude are his future, but he’ll be too tired to enjoy any inheritance.

Instead initially he chooses the meek route, denying that he wants any part of a future with his almost-lover or the mutant ties they share. The earth he then inherits is the Tomorrow of the title, and neither Cyclops nor Scott Summers is anywhere to be seen within it. The X-Men of 150 years in the future, who have a remarkable amount of overlap with the New X-Men of today, are fighting for control of a dying world. And Judgment Day is coming in the form of Scott’s former wife, who finally remembers herself only to see her friends destroyed and destroying each other. This is not a future she wants, in which the X-Men are being systematically wiped out, where humans are almost nowhere to be seen, where sentient bacteria with extinction agendas can destroy one of the finest minds of the previous century. What’s more, Scott wouldn’t have wanted it. If he rejected the X-Men, it was because he was tired of death and fighting, unwilling to continue grappling with longing and love and hopeless expectations, frightened of failure and continued loss. He has his time for grief, but being a superhero means instead doing what his wife did, making The Ultimate Sacrifice for the team. Jean’s initial sacrifice is meaningless if Scott’s rejection of the earth and his duty as a steward of it allows everything to be destroyed anyway. And what both of them, all of them really want is not to be meek but meaningful.

Scott can’t see this, can’t see anything beyond himself and his pain and fear as he stands in the cemetery. The sturdy diamond White Queen doesn’t understand the weight of her question, asking it as if it’s rhetorical, but she wears her worry on the outside in the form of her ridiculous breasts (unless she keeps her spine in permanent diamond form to avoid the pain they must cause, in which case I suppose they’re acceptable) and the dead bear of a coat that covers her less important bits. This is the moment of truth for a man who had avoided decisiveness, put off making a real, clear commitment to either of the women in his life, someone who doesn’t realize that the fate of the world is in his hands, as it is all the time. Can he inherit the earth if that means not being meek but being strong enough to hold onto it? Can he bear a suffering greater than his own? Can he take the weight of everything onto his own shoulders even if he doesn’t realize that’s the choice he’s making? And will he choose to carry it alone or share the burden with others, including his snow-white questioner? Scott pauses in both versions of this present, hesitates briefly before giving a steady answer that will change his life and change the world.

But this time around there’s Jean, who’s seen Tomorrow and in a touching, tender flashback to the present, urging Scott on. This raises the question of whether she’s actually kinkier than the White Queen, encouraging her husband to make out with Emma on her own grave and whether this is then an act of selfless love or spite. I’m sure the answer is both and hope to talk later about which is harder to give up, life or love. “Live, Scott, live,” she begs with her last breath, and Scott meekly obeys as best he can.

Aye aye, Seaguy!

I got myself a college degree! Go me. I was getting really burnt out this semester and devoted what little energy I had to my schoolwork, which resulted in a serious reduction in blogging. But now I’m free, and I just read Grant Morrison’s Seaguy #1 and New X-Men: Here Comes Tomorrow, which may very well be my favorite of the New X-Men TPBs. (I should also give a ’shout out,’ as the cool kids probably don’t say anymore, to Cameron Stewart and Marc Silvestri, who bring lovely visual life to Morrison’s scripts.) I’m feeling inspired to get back to blogging!

Speaking of Morrison’s collaboration with Stewart and Silvestri… David Fiore has harsh words for those who idealize writer/artists! Consider: if we accept only writer/artists, you know what that means—no Seaguy as the wonderful result of the collaboration of Morrison and Stewart, colorist Peter Doherty and letterer Todd Klein. And a world without Seaguy is not a world I want to live in.

“You’re too young to remember all that nonsense.”

I don’t have time for a real review, but I have to say I’m smitten with Seaguy. For one thing, it may well be the first comic I’ve read that uses the word boustrophedon, always one of my favorites. In fact, I hope it’s a telling plot point. This is a story that’s not going to be told directly, but each turn it takes, each stopping point will require passage back across what came before to continue.

See, Seaguy lives in a world that’s somehow been conquered by The Residents and accordingly commodified into an eyeball-based sideshow where cigars are legal. And because they’re so cool, nobody minds. Or nobody minds because of the seven-second attention spans. I like this world, though. Nice place to visit, yeah, yeah, but it’s a much more fun and palatable (and thus dangerous and interesting) than your average authoritarian dystopia.

There are wonderfully bad puns, though I won’t mind if this is the last “Aye, Aye, Seaguy!” we have to read. I like all the characters, the moon-mad seadog and She-Beard, who seems to be Red Sonja with lower standards but clearly is more both on and beneath the surface, and that lovely gondolier Death, and my new fashion icon Doc Hero. And then of course Wynken, Blynken and Nod themselves, Seaguy and his friend Chubby da Choona, who implausibly seem not to be lovers as well, and a third fellow I’ll leave unnamed.

The art is simple and bright and clear, beautiful and appropriate for such a dark story with a buffed veneer. Everything is disarmingly light and casual, though every bit as depressing as any other story of unemployed ennui. How will I ever manage to wait for more?

One Hell of a Something

If comics publishers went to an iTunes-style distribution, Hellboy Junior would be my first nomination. See, I don’t want the full album. The Hellboy Junior trade has some tracks I really, really love and others that I basically don’t want in my house.

The Hellbaby part is irresistible, a little red fellow in a diaper. I’m sold! But the rest of it has a lot of problems (ok, and so does the Hellbaby stuff, but I’ll get to that) and I can’t resolve them. There’s a certain attitude of Hey, we’re all good-minded liberals, so we can laugh at racist/sexist/homophobic/generally offensive humor because we know better than to mean it, unlike those awful insensitive people! and it bothers me. And unfortunately this means that I’m not at all interested in stories about “Huge Retarded Duck” or “The Ginger Beef Boy,” and so the only non-Hellboy comic I enjoyed was “Squid of Man,” by Bill Wray and Mike Mignola, a dark, inconsequential little story about the ups and downs of love in the home of a mad scientist. Apparently most of these stories take old Harvey comics characters and add in morbid sex jokes, but I’m don’t think knowing the source material would have increased my appreciation. I just don’t think looking at pictures of My Little Ponies having sex is funny, subversive or worth my time. I’m sure in the right context it could be, but I didn’t find that in any of the stories here.

The problem is not necessarily that I prefer my humor to be tasteful. Almost all the comics about Hellboy Junior, whom I prefer to call Hellbaby because it’s as cute as he and doesn’t imply weird paternity issues with Hellboy Senior, prominently feature Adolf Hitler. Idi Amin makes a guest appearance too. Somehow an endless string of tasteless maggot-eating jokes seem palatable to me, and even the story that mocks a transvestite witch redeems itself, but “let’s play shove the retard!” just isn’t funny. I think this is partly because Hellbaby is a recurring character, so it’s funny and poignant to see him try and fail again and again, but also he is a character. He has wants and desires and dislikes (maggots!) and he trusts people when he shouldn’t and then suffers for it. He’s a likeable little guy, gruff and petulant and red and diapered, just what anyone would want in a little devil.

I grabbed Hellboy Junior off the shelf and bought it solely because I’ve been obsessed with Hellbaby for months, and it met my Hellbaby needs all right. I’m just not sure I can recommend it except to people who consider Maakies a bit mild or who have fantasized since childhood about the adventures of “Wheezy the Sick Little Witch.” It’s not really the offensiveness of Hellboy Junior that annoys (more than offends, really) me, but the juvenile pride it seems to take in that offensiveness. If you’re going to revel in your depravity, can’t you do a little better than making incest jokes about poultry? I know from the back of the book that these are supposed to be “some of the funniest and most original comics ever to haunt the shelves,” but I’m not impressed. And I know that they’re only being made so that people like me will say, “Oh, but you can’t joke about that,” which is not quite what I’m saying. You can joke about it all you want, but I’ll be unimpressed and not laugh, unless you somehow manage to be really funny.

But there’s plenty of cutely hideous art with spectacular facial expressions. The Hellbaby stories do manage to get in a Nuremberg joke, which is one of my specialties, as well as a horrible, horrible, excellent Bob Dylan joke I didn’t get until my second read. I think I may just not give the stories I disliked another read, but the ones surrounding them should still hold up fine.

Super-Annoyance

As a public service announcement to anyone else trying to buy Steven a graduation present, DC Direct lies in stating that the Beppo the Super-Monkey plush toy is in stores now. It’s not in mine and they can’t get it! It’s nowhere to be found, not even for ready money. This is truly a tragedy for all monkey lovers, although not, I suppose, those who were wise enough to buy themselves Beppos while the cute little fellows were still in circulation.

Relatedly, this may be a slow week at Peiratikos as I have to attend two graduations and Steven has work to finish to get to his. I hope to write a review of the Hellboy Junior TPB tonight, since I believe that infernal scamp is far, far cuter than Beppo, but that may be it for my contribution for a while.

“Clark. The Earth Moved.”

Sean Collins on me on Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again:

Steven Berg on The Dark Knight Strikes Again. I’d say “’nuff said,” but it really isn’t, because I’ve got to mention his wondrous description of the role played by the cataclysmic Superman-Wonder Woman sex scene. It beggars belief that people can read a book with something like that in it and think that said book was some sort of play-it-safe corporate sellout. I mean, it has a cataclysmic Superman-Wonder Woman sex scene.

Play-it-safe corporate sellout?

Somebody said that? No way! Who?

“I was sentimental—back when I was old.”

At first, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again reminded me of Gigli. No, seriously. Gigli is a movie in which some parts are good, other parts are good but you find yourself asking “Why the hell’s that in this movie?” and other parts make you hope they’re an absurdist parody but you have this horrible feeling the director actually wants us to watch that final scene with the mentally retarded kid whose only dream in life is to meet the hot babes of Baywatch and find it touching and heartwarming

So DK2 was like that, except mostly scenes in the latter two categories.

Now I think that’s probably much the effect Frank Miller and Lynn Varley were going for. (Miller and Varley are both listed on the front cover, and Todd Klein is listed just below them on the title page, no information about what each actually did on the book, which I think is neat because the message seems to be “We are all equally authors of this text” but I suppose it would be annoying if you didn’t already know who each author was and which parts of the text he or she contributed. At any rate, hereafter I’m going to go auteur and refer to the “author” as “Miller” and “he.”)

Something just occured to me: the plot, such as it is, of DK2 involves Lex Luthor and Brainiac faking an alien invasion to maintain their control of the populace (and to kill off the pesky superheroes). Sound familiar…? Yeah, Watchmen! An allusion? I think so. And DK2 pretends to be a sequel to Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, but it really doesn’t work as a sequel—it’s more of an extended allusion ot DKR.

How would you feel if you fancied yourself something of an iconoclast in the realm of superhero comics, somebody who’s not so worried about preserving traditions, who in fact likes to kick tradition in the ass and go looking for fun new stuff… and you found that people have canonized a comic you created 15 years ago? You’d feel a lot like Frank Miller must have when he decided to write DK2, I bet. Miller doesn’t strike me as the sort who likes his books to be safe. But DKR is second only to Watchmen in safeness—not that either of these books is safe or comfortable if you read them and pay attention, but they’re safe in that they have such a status among comics readers that they’re practically untouchable and most negative criticism is met with indifference at best, even though many readers would probably be hard pressed to explain just why they’re so great without resorting to mumbling about “deconstruction” and other fancy words they probably can’t define. They’re respectable comics.

Canons and classics are just fine, no doubt about it, but if you revere the canon at the cost of ignoring other good new comics, comics will stagnate. How many times have you heard somebody say “There has never been a comic since Watchmen that was as good as Watchmen” or “Watchmen is the best comic ever written”? I’ve seen lots of people say things like that, and it’s bullshit. There have been piles and piles of superhero comics as good as or better than Watchmen and DKR. Miller doesn’t want to be safe and respectable, he wants to kick tradition in the ass and blow up icons. DK2 is his powerful projectile aimed directly at the reputation of DKR. The projectile is… Superman and Wonder Woman, united in carnal embrace.

If you haven’t read DK2, trust me, you have to read the Wonder Woman-Superman sex scene yourself to grasp its full impact. Superman has just been beaten up by Batman, blown up by the Flash, shot full of Kryptonite by Green Arrow, and had the Atom inserted directly into his brain: he’s in bad shape. Wonder Woman finds him at the site of the erstwhile Fortress of Solitude and berates him, saying among other things, “Where is the hero who threw me to the ground and took me as his rightful prize?” Yes, Wonder Woman, doing a Red Sonja act! Then she and Superman fuck each other’s brains out so hard that, I’m not kidding folks, they cause catastrophic seismic and weather disruptions across the entire world. If your reaction as you read this passage (pp. 111-124 of the trade paperback collection) isn’t something like “What the fuck???” then you are entirely too jaded for your own good. And that’s exactly the reaction Miller’s going for. Whether you think it’s good reading hardly matters (I do not think it is good reading, I think it scarred my poor innocent brain for all eternity). What matters is that Miller has broken free of the limited bounds within which Superman and Wonder Woman had been allowed to operate. DK2 has many other more, dare I say it, subtle ways of breaking free, like giving Superman and Wonder Woman a daughter (who, in one of the book’s best scenes, demands that Superman tell her about Kryptonian sex).

If I haven’t made it clear, I had a lot of fun with DK2, although to a certain extent it’s not a book that was designed to be liked (at least, not liked by everybody). The fact that so many people hate it is arguably a sign of success—I suspect Miller deliberately wrote a book he knew a lot of people would hate, not just to screw with his fans but as proof against it’s ever losing its edge and becoming safe and comfortable.

Why Don’t I Dig This?

I’m home sick from work today but, as my dad always says, too sick to enjoy it, alas. I’m assuming it’s a mild flu (complete with respiratory symptoms!) but it’s annoying. This is all a prelude to ranting, letting you know there’s a mild chance when I come to my senses I’ll think everything I’m saying is insane. But onward!

I’ve been thinking about Barb Lien-Cooper’s opinion piece “Why Don’t Chicks Dig Comics? Well, Why Don’t You ASK One?” and several things about it have been nagging at me.

First, and maybe most importantly, there’s this:

In addition, in spite of the fact that women are made to feel somewhat more welcome in comic book stores, there’s still a slight majority of stores that WANT to be like Floyd’s Barbershop or whatever. Some places REVEL in being the last place on earth a man can hang out without having to deal with women or their objections to how women are treated as customers, as readers, as creators, and as characters in comics. I’ve been to some stores where I have been made to feel unwelcome because of my gender. Those experiences were like accidentally stepping into a men’s locker room.

Relatedly, Alex de Campi said that German comics stores are more girl-friendly. I have no way of knowing whether the German part is true. I didn’t find any specialty comics shops in Turkey, and I suppose the Spanish stores I was in would have been friendly to girls who liked Conan and porn. But I’m bothered by the constant references to offensive behaviors in stores. I’ve never had any myself, but I stand up for myself. The problem is that if these kinds of things are going on, we need to know details. If there are stores with systematic discrimination towards women or where there’s a hostile shopping environment, there needs to be a list of names all over the internet so the managers can explain themselves and improve and be aware that this is a problem, and so that the rest of us who care about this issue can choose to shop accordingly. It seems like the most basic site for comics activism, and yet I’ve never seen anything beyond such vague complaints.

But then there’s the whole issue of why women need to be reading comics anyway. I’ve participated in lots of male-dominated fields and never considered that much of a problem or a barrier, nor did it deter me from following things that interested me. I’m also a knitter, a stereotypically female activity, and in reading message boards and knitting blogs there are plenty of entreaties to remember that men knit too and not to assume that all knitters are women as well as comments to the pattern makers that they should include more clothing for men, but I haven’t seen much widespread activism to get men as a group more involved in knitting. So why do comics readers get hung up on this kind of Affirmative Action, tricks to get women to read comics? As Barb points out, lots of women do read comics, especially manga. So where exactly is the problem?

I have yet to meet a comics reader who’s really just happy with the status quo. Whether it’s wanting writers to conform more closely to their view of the Platonic form of Green Arrow or wanting new writers (or a return of old writers) or different art styles or more or less editorial involvement, comics fans all want to make comics better. So when the thesis of such gender-driven articles invariably is that comics should be written better with more awareness of interpersonal interaction and characterization, why is this in any way special to women? To me, that feels patronizing; it’s not enough to say “Smart, sensible people want comics that read well and make sense,” but you have to add, “and chicks would dig it too!” I guess what I’m saying is that “what women want in comics” always turns out to be about what the writer wants in comics, which makes sense, but might be more useful if given in a more direct manner. The Class of Women is not a good demographic. Barb wisely suggests aiming for women who are already geeks, which I think is one place where comics have made significant inroads among female readers – or at least comics published by Vertigo and Slave Labor Graphics, as well as the aforementioned manga.

And one more gripe:

Right now, we are a hermetically sealed off order from the mainstream, with more terms of art, jargon, rituals, secret symbols, inside jokes, and offshoots than one can shake a stick at. We’re the bloody Masons of subcultures! And, that’s the way a lot of us like it. We make it difficult for newbies to come inside, as we make it so only those who are willing to study the subculture and take its ways to heart feel welcome.

Maybe that’s true. Certainly superhero continuity seems like a ridiculous mess to an uninterested outsider, but that’s not all of “comics.” And I think what’s just been described is true of just about any self-selecting hobby group. There’s a new language you have to learn to be a part of any subculture, and having gone through several, I strongly disagree that it’s harder to learn to speak comics than it is to get into any other subculture. I started reading comics 4 or 5 years ago and have figured out how to get by, and I have absolutely horrible visual skills: it can’t be that difficult. I’ve also seen many people who do welcome new or potential readers, both online and real-life folks in general, as well as organizations like Sequential Tart and Friends of Lulu, both of which are explicitly interested in helping women transition into The Comics Lifestyle, whatever that is.

None of this means that I don’t want more women reading comics! Most of my comics-reading friends offline have been women, and plenty of the online ones are, too. I just don’t look at myself as being somehow special or privileged for being a woman who (gasp!) reads comics, even the superhero kind! But trying to use women as an excuse to advocate the kind of comics you like is stupid and demeaning. In Barb’s defense, she’s not just talking. Her comic Gun Street Girl was created to fill what she considered gaps in the range of comics currently available. And I agree wholeheartedly that sexist discourse among and from comics professionals and fans needs to stop. I’m just sick of reading about what women want instead of reading good comics, and the ones I consider good won’t be good for all women. I’m ok with that. In fact, I think it’s great. But at least Barb didn’t advocate beefcake. Ick!