Peiratikos

Ex Machina #1

“If only there were a real superhero to save us…” “It’s like an action movie, but there’s no Bruce Willis to save us…” I read a lot of comments like that on Internet message boards, even heard people say things like that on CNN, in the days following 11 September 2001. It was only a matter of time before somebody decided to write a superhero comic that asks, “What if there had been a superhero around on 9/11?” (That idiotically pious and ill-conceived issue of Amazing Spider-Man published a couple months after 9/11 doesn’t count.) There are several ways you might address the question. There’s straightforward wish-fulfillment: a hero appears, stops the plane, saves everybody, and brings peace to the world. Or more vengeance-inspired wish fulfillment, like Chuck Dixon’s aborted American Power series. There’s political allegory, like the “President Luthor invades Qurac” story from DC. There’s good old critique of power, a cautionary tale about the danger of relying on heroes. (I don’t think anybody’s written such a story about 9/11 yet, but there’s certainly no shortage of superhero comics that address the theme.)

Vaughan, luckily, looks like he’s going for nuance in addressing the question. Mitchell Hundred’s limited effect on the 9/11 attacks and his legal inability to join the military in Afghanistan (and later, presumably, in Iraq) suggest that this story isn’t about wish fulfillment. The opening scene which takes place sometime after 2005 hints that Vaughan is setting up a story that deals with the dangerous mixture of hero worship and politics in post-9/11 America, but not in a trite “superheroes = power-mad fascists” way:

People blame me for Bush in his flight suit and Arnold getting elected governor, but truth is… those things would have happened with or without me. Everyone was scared back then, and when folks are scared, they want to be surrounded by heroes. But real heroes are just a fiction we create. They don’t exist outside of comic books.

So far, Mitchell’s status as a decidedly amateur superhero has been as harmful as it has been helpful in the political arena. His superheroic reputation was enough to get him elected mayor, but he’s not so powerful that it’s like Superman being mayor of New York (or Lex Luthor being president of the USA, for that matter). It looks like Vaughan is aiming to address hero worship as a political issue without drifting into a critique of the excessively powerful. It remains to be seen whether Ex Machina will finally agree with Mitchell’s pessimistic stance on heroism.

DC Comics Presents #1: Mystery in Space

First, as for the cover painted by Alex Ross: Too bad for Ross they included the original by Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson on the inside front cover. Ross’s cover, bland and stiff as typical for his work, appears especially lame in juxtaposition with Infantino and Anderson’s brighter and livelier piece. Ross’s attempt at a tribute loses the boldly clashing colors and sharp black lines of the original in favor of a tastefully restrained color palette and Ross’s typically fuzzy and indistinct figures. Boring.

“Crisis on 2 Worlds”

Government officials in the small African nation Swazeria confiscate Adam Strange’s amazing Rannian technological artifacts and trade them to a terrorist group in exchange for weapons-grade plutonium. They build a nuclear missile and launch it at a neighboring hostile country, but Adam enlists Sue Dibney’s help to hack into the missile’s routing computer (which is apparently Internet-based) and reroute the missile into the path of a Zeta beam that teleports it to Rann, where its fission explosion fizzles harmlessly due to the “geological signature” of Rann. The idea seems to be to tell the kind of story you might find in a class Golden Age or Silver Age comic: slightly disjointed, bordering on nonsensical, but packed with action and fun ideas. It’s also unabashedly antinuclear, although in a rather apolitical way that avoids stepping on controversial toes.

This is a fun little story, but I think the pace is off—it needs to be about three pages shorter, and the weird unresolved subplot about the kid and his “rare East African harness zebra” ought to have been dropped. The story would probably also have benefitted from slicker art and brighter colors. The art looks like it’s trying to be sober and realistic, which is the opposite of the tone this story needs.

“Two Worlds”

The art for this story isn’t exactly brilliant stuff, but it’s what I meant when I said “Crisis on 2 Worlds” needs slicker and brighter art. Ordway doesn’t just swipe the style of the Infantino/Anderson Mystery in Space cover, but he alludes to it convincingly in his own style.

Morrison’s story is even more blatantly political than Maggin’s. A team of stupidly arrogant soldiers captures Adam Strange. Their commander forces him to tell them how to travel to Rann and then leads an invasion party—which is attacked and destroyed by the Rannian monsters Adam tried to warn them about. The obvious real-world reference is Vietnam (although I suppose you could read the story as political commentary on the Iraq war if you wanted), which Morrison mentions in his narration. Adam Strange’s story is accompanied with narrative captions that tell the story of Julius Schwartz’s desire to encourage kids to become scientists and astronauts through his optimistic sf comics:

Adam Strange—lost on a science fiction vision quest to heal the psychoanalyzed traumatized soul of his people—preparing his children not for a glorious space race with Russia but for the alien killing fields of Southeast Asia

I don’t know if the narrative about Schwartz is factual or imagined, but combined with the Adam Strange story, it gets across the optimistic drive toward a world based on rationality and science in the early Cold War pre-Vietnam days, which I suppose was an important theme in Schwartz’s DC work in the 1960s (I’m trusting Morrison on that, since I’ve not read enough of the relevant comics to know if it was really a common theme).

“Two Worlds” ends making the same melancholy point as “Crisis on 2 Worlds”: Rann is an ideal world of peace on which even the planet’s geological and ecological properties work to prevent war—but how will we Earthlings manage to save ourselves from ourselves? Morrison’s answer is not satisfying—but then, what answer would be? In the end, he captures the goofiness and beauty of the comics of Julius Schwartz’s era without indulging in nostalgia for that time. It’s a lovely tribute.

Identity Crisis #1 & 2

What I want to know is, why isn’t anybody worried about Zatanna’s boyfriend? Everybody’s worried about the superheroes’ girfriends and wives, but nobody’s expressed anxiety that Dr. Light and Co. might go after the superheroines’ boyfriends and husbands. Do any of the women superheroes even have non-superpowered boy toys? For that matter, why haven’t any of the gay superheroes expressed concern for the safety of their same-sex life partners? I can’t think of any gay superheroes in the DC Universe. Are there any? Isn’t it awfully convenient that all the men have normie wives or girlfriends to put on a pedestal and protect, over whose mutilated and raped bodies they can shed manly tears when the supervillians get hold of them… but none of the women have husbands or boyfriends who might have to suffer embarrassing emasculation if they had to be protected by a girl? Is it a coincidence? Or are (overwhelmingly male) comics creators simply incapable of imagining a man willing to date a woman strong enough to punch a hole through his chest?

Or maybe many of the women superheroes of the DC Universe do have boyfriends and husbands, but Brad Meltzer was too busy pandering insultingly to the patronizing fears of the men in his audience that he forgot to mention them in a story in which the fact that superheroes have families and friends is gravely important.

Marc Singer has this to say about the common overuse of the term “backlash” in the comics blogosphere:

“Criticism” does not equal “backlash,” or “snobbery” for that matter (as you should damn well know, Abhay). […] Do we really need to hear those disclaimers now? Or is the problem that this time the object of scorn is a fan darling, not one of those eminently safe targets like Liefeld?

Marc is replying to a commenter who pinned the word “backlash” on Marc’s critique of Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s work on Daredevil, but the above quote applies equally well to Sean Collins’s use of the word in his round up of recent discussion on, among other topics, Eightball #23. Now, I’m sure Sean means well, but he has a habit of crying “backlash” every time somebody expresses a less than entirely positive opinion concerning something Sean likes a lot (e.g., Blankets). The problem is, “backlash” usually carries a connotation (whether it’s intended or not) that the backlashers are antagonizing or attempting to punish the targets of backlash for pushing too far in a direction the backlashers don’t care for. Merely offering negative critique of some popular and well-liked work isn’t really backlash, but attacking those who like some popular and well-liked work—whether directly, or indirectly through a critique of the work—certainly is. It’s true that Steve Pheley begins his review of Eightball by writing, “Really, I don’t understand what the fuss is about,” but questioning the outright absurd mania with which, e.g., Alan David Doane reviews Eightball should hardly be lumped in with “‘Dan Clowes has no clothes’ backlash,” particularly considering Steve goes on to suggest he rather enjoyed the book. (And after all, Alan’s review contains entire sentences typed in all-caps and bizarre ranting about Dan Clowes’s “arctic shit-knife.” He’s sort of asking for people to giggle at him, really.)

What I’m getting at here is, if I never see another comics blogger use the word “backlash” again in my life, I will be so happy.

(By the way, I was actually expecting Sean to pull out his trusty “backlash” stamp for my own review of Eightball. I didn’t ask what all the fuss is about in my review, but it’s what I was thinking as I wrote. I mean, as I implied at the end of my review, I’ve read or am aware of so many stories [usually but not always written by white American males] about “I’m a horrible monster because of my repressed homoerotic urges that I can’t get over” [although the homoeroticism is usually annoyingly coy and subtextual, as in “The Death-Ray”], and come on Dan Clowes, we had to read this same story a million times in high-school English [not that our teachers were ever willing to admit they were forcing us to read practically nothing but stories about subtextual homosexuality], it’s time to write something new. I mean, I’m sure Clowes really felt like he had to write this story, but why do there have to be so many American male writers who have to write this same story? If there’s a “‘Dan Clowes has no clothes’ backlash,” I’m probably part of it. Although I think he probably does have clothes, it’s just that maybe he should try on some different clothes, to strain the metaphor.)

(By the way again, see Ken Lowery for hilarious “backlash” [1, 2].)

Eightball #23, by Dan Clowes. Fantagraphics Books, Inc., 2004.

If Eightball #23 were pitched as a Hollywood movie, the high concept might be “A Separate Peace starring Rorschach from Watchmen.”¹ As High-school students forced to endure A Separate Peace already know, the novel is at heart a tragic tale of repressed homosexual love. In short: Gene and Finny desparately want to make sweet love with each other, but cannot act on their desire thanks to years of repressive social conditioning. (They’re a couple of WWII-era rich boys trying to dodge the draft by getting diplomas from their exclusive boarding schools.) Finny sublimates his unspeakable desires into being a fine athlete and a ‘nonconformist,’ while Gene sublimates eir schoolboy crush into typical childish envy of Finny’s athletic talents. Eventually, Gene sublimates so much that his love turns to hate and he pushes poor Finny right out of a tree. Finny dies.

The most important thing about A Separate Peace, though, is that all that steamy homoeroticism is entirely subtextual. The novel pretends to be about envy, insecurity, denial, the cultural malaise in elite boys’ boarding schools in WWII-era New England, nice themes that teachers can assign in high-school English classes without offending students or parents. If you asked author John Knowles about the homoerotic subtext, he might even claim not to know what you’re talking about. But the malaise, the undercurrents of moral corruption, envy and denial that bubble to the surface of the text when Gene pushes Finny out of a tree, rise from a repressed subtextual volcano of hot gay sex. That’s appropriate, I suppose—the boys of Devon boarding school are so repressed that even the story about them becomes repressed.

In his review of Eightball #23, Sean Collins writes:

And finally, of course, there’s the unspoken sexual dimension of Andy and Louie’s relationship itself. Paired killers are not at all uncommon, from the Hillside Stranglers to Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, and often the killings serve to consummate the sexual tension that the killers themselves aren’t (or, sometimes, are) willing to consummate themselves. It’s no coincidence that, just before Andy and Louie’s traumatic “break-up,” Louie seems to have found an actual girlfriend and Andy has finally acted on his love for Dinah. The two don’t need each other anymore.²

Like Gene and Finny, Andy and Louie’s motto is “Sublimate!” They borrow some superhero-comics metaphor and mix in the classic ’sex = death’ equation familiar from entirely too much repressed American fiction. Andy, thanks to his dead scientist father, gains superstrength when he smokes and comes into possession of a death-ray which zaps its targets right out of existence. After discovering Andy’s powers, they embark on a spree of violence, punishing men who have committed ‘crimes,’ often sexual, against women. The one exception is their punishment of Stoob for snubbing Louie, but given the homoerotic context, it seems likely that Louie’s antagonism of Stoob is inspired by a schoolboy crush. Little boys, of course, express romantic love by chasing little girls around the playground and pulling their pigtails. Louie is a little old for schoolboy crushes, but since his repression prevents him from simply fucking the boys he loves, he falls back on an especially violent version of pulling pigtails. His behavior becomes regressive and aggressive.

That’s where punk and superheroes come in. Louie is attracted to the pointless violence of punk rock (his immediate response to the first punk song he hears on the radio is that “It makes me want to kill somebody” [p. 6]), and he adopts the most simplistic and reductive, Wertham-inspired definition of superheroes: powerful thugs who pummel justice into weak criminals, most of whom wouldn’t have been criminals anyway if not for the existence of the superhero. Andy and Louie’s attempts to bring justice to the world raise an old moral quandary of superhero comics: may self-appointed heroes be held responsible for creating and enabling a cycle of violence and destruction that wouldn’t have existed if not for their selfish insistence on adhering to simplistic and aggressive notions of justice?³ “The Death-Ray” approaches the question with a literalism at once amusing and too simplistic—too simplistic mostly because there have been so many other supehero comics that have already addressed this question with relative subtlety and sophistication that Clowes’s interpretation looks like the Cliffs Notes version in comparison. Andy and Louie literally create criminals: for example, they leave a cash-stuffed wallet on the street and then attack the first sucker who picks it up and tries to take the money (p. 19).

Sublimation, of course, ends in tragedy. After Andy acquires his death-ray, Louie pushes him to move from superpowered beatings to killing. Louie’s sister left her boyfriend Sonny for another, allegedly evil and abusive, guy, and Louie convinces Andy to help Sonny out by zapping the other guy. Sublimated sexual release through murder turns out to be a little too intense for Louie, though, and he effectively ends his quasi-sexual relationship with Andy by getting a girlfriend. (Andy seems to have the same idea, and at about the same time in the story he decides to express his love for his housekeeper Dinah.) The end of the relationship leads inevitably to Andy’s murder of Louie with his death-ray. After that, Andy, who’s basically a passive slug who goes along with whatever Louie suggests, and now left with no direction other than the one Louie set out for him, lives the next 25 years of his life following that direction. He lives his boring, passive life and occasionally gets out his cigarettes and death-ray to distribute justice among the pettiest of petty criminals.

It’s appropriate that Andy’s costume is clearly inspired by Spider-Man’s, since Spider-Man is probably the quintessential loser-hero popularized by Marvel in the early 1960s. Andy’s problem, unlike Spider-Man, is that he’s just as much a loser when he’s playing superhero as he is in his normal life. He’s such an unimaginative loser that he can’t think of anything more interesting or worthwhile to do with his powers than beat up an insensitive bartender (p. 36) and zap a possibly abusive boyfriend (p. 38) (not his own boyfriend, his neighbor’s). The panels in which the adult Andy goes into superhero mode are drawn in full-color, contrasted with the monocrhome panels of Andy’s everyday life. The contrast creates an artificially higher level of visual interest that isn’t reflected in the narrative—as I said, Andy is equally a loser as a superhero and a regular guy, basically indistinguishable. In the first scene of the story, the panels go full-color when Andy confronts a litterer and doesn’t zap him (p. 1). As it becomes clear that color panels of adult Andy mean he’s in superhero mode, this early instance may engender a minor hope that Andy is capable of standing up for justice without resorting to absurd violence, but that hope is dashed when Andy later meets the same guy sitting on a park bench and zaps him (pp. 39-40).

In his writing on Watchmen, David Fiore discusses Spider-Man and Rorschach:

Take Peter Parker, for instance. When we first meet him he’s an ostracized nerd—a nonentity. In more realistic fiction, this type of character only has two options open to him: either he continues to endure social oppression, or he becomes a “somebody” by “standing up for himself”, thus altering the power dynamic in his community. In the actual event–he does neither, thanks to the spider bite. Throughout Ditko’s run, at least, Parker remains the same bookish nerd he’s always been. And yet, his newfound indifference to the power structure that so determined his life before his “conversion experience” enables him to develop actual relationships with other characters… His “adventures in morality”, as Spider-Man, ground him.

But what if that adventure consumed his entire life? Wouldn’t that “grounding” then become something akin to a burial? […] if he got trapped in that condition, he wouldn’t be a “free spirit”, he’d be more like a wrathful ghost. He’d be like Rorschach, in fact.

When Walter Kovacs gives up his dual identity, he upsets a delicate balance. No longer grounded, he goes underground—and his capacity to relate to the world rots away. Rorschach’s strange destiny is to become the undead embodiment of his own moral law.⁴

David calls this “failing the Rorschach test,” and Andy surely gets an F- on that test.⁵ As an adult, he doesn’t even bother distinguishing between his normal and superheroic lives by donning a costume.

Andy’s narration is written in speech balloons (he appears to speak directly toward the reader) instead of the more traditional captions. The effect is similar to documentaries or reality-tv shows in which footage of an event is edited together with interviews with people who participated in the event—the effect is enhanced by two “What do you think of Andy?” interview sections with other characters from the story (pp. 4, 41) in which they also speak directly to the reader. It’s a neat twist of the comics form that gives the story a confessional tone. Andy doesn’t appear in special interivew panels to narrate, though—he usually narrates at the same time he’s participating in the narrative, so that his adult narration of flashbacks to his high-school days comes from the mouth of his teenage self. That’s appropriate, since Andy is such a static character and the only change he manifests as he grows older is increased assurance in his stunted emotional and social life.

I think it’s really too bad Clowes allowed the homoeroticism to remain a subtext, really. We’re not living in the 1950s anymore, and nobody’s going to assign Eightball as a high-school reading assignment, so why be coy with the subtext? American literature (including American comics literature) has plenty of stories about fucked-up repressed guys already. Male comics writers of America, get over your crisis of masculinity! We already get that masculine culture and superhero comics are seething with sublimated homosexual urges, so what I’d like is some more comics (superhero or not) about totally unrepressed gay guys who have hot sex and aren’t loser serial killers.

¹ Lev Grossman, in Time Online Edition article “If You Only Read 10 Trashy Novels This Summer”, offers the equally appropriate and much funnier “IT’S LIKE Holden Caulfield with his phaser set on kill. Phonies beware.”

² See Sean Collins’s “Eightball #23″, Comic Book Galaxy.

³ This question is actually probably raised by superhero comics themselves much more often than by moral critics of superhero comics. Clowes’s story follows a long tradition of superhero comics which offer self-critique: Frank Miller’s Daredevil and The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Brian Michael Bendis’s Daredevil, Gran Morrison’s New X-Men, etc. etc. and so forth.

⁴ See David Fiore’s “Rorschach Test”, Motime Like the Present.

⁵ Again, “The Death-Ray” follows a long tradition of such ‘heroes’ who choose to reject their human identities in favor of living entirely within their superheroic identities, including Rorschach himself, various interpretations of Batman (e.g., in The Dark Knight Returns), various interpretations of Wolverine (I’m most familiar with Morrison’s take), various interpretations of Spider-Man (e.g., during the early-mid 1990s prior to the Spider-clone storyline), Daredevil (e.g., during Bendis’s current run on the title), Superman (in Kingdom Come), Captain Marvel (in Peter David’s run, in a rather offbeat way). Just about every DC or Marvel character seems to have been run through this particular story at least once.

Rose and I were watching the Criterion Collection Chasing Amy DVD this weekend (why is Chasing Amy in the Criterion Collection, anyway?), and the deleted scenes gave me a newfound appreciation for the movie. If you think the final cut of the movie is preachy (and I certainly do), just wait till you see the deleted scenes. There’s an extended skee ball scene in which Alyssa takes about five minutes to explain why straight boys shouldn’t call each other fags and cocksuckers. There’s an extended darts sequence in which Alyssa tells a several-minute story about the true meaning of love. (In short, a guy’s girlfriend is raped and killed in a dark train station while waiting for him to arrive for a visit, and he donates money to the station to install more lights and then spends the rest of his life riding the train every day, apparently out of some misguided sense that such activity will assuage his obsessive guilt and grief. Remember that this story is about the true meaning of love.) There’s a scene in which Kevin Smith performs a cinematic equivalent of burning his detractors in effigy, a moment of meta-preachiness. The movie already has dozens of sermons (from Why I Became A Lesbian by Alyssa to Chasing Amy by Silent Bob). Kevin Smith has trouble integrating his moral ideas into a narrative. The result is a moral fable that seems more simplistic than it needs to be. It’s annoying, because the characters become generic speech-givers who continuously tell me about abstract moral concepts I’ve already figured out.

I want less Alyssa lecturing on her decision to become a lesbian because she didn’t want to force herself into a heterosexual role she wasn’t sure she’d fit, and more scenes like the opening one in which a couple of cruel fanboys mock Banky for being an inker, a task they mistakenly believe involves mere tracing of the pencilled comics pages. The former scene is boring because it’s clear from that opening scene that the movie’s going to be about open- and closed-mindedness and the problems with pigeonholing people into roles they don’t really fit. Note how the opening convention scene gets the point across with relative subtlety and freedom to interpret, while Alyssa’s lecture lazily falls back on telling you exactly how you’re supposed to interpret the text.

Of course, this is a highly subjective issue, and plenty of people obviously have no problem with Chasing Amy. I personally have no problem with stories that explicitly address thematic material in narration, but I generally loathe (as you may have noticed by now) the results of authors allowing unprocessed thematic material to get into the dialogue. I despise characters who act like they know what the story’s about. I prefer ambiguity to certitude.

This post wasn’t supposed to be about Chasing Amy, though. I was going to write about Spider-Man 2, and I only mentioned Chasing Amy because those preachy deleted scenes helped me clarify a problem I had with Spider-Man. Now, Spider-Man 2, as all the other comics bloggers have already pointed out (and as anybody familiar with Spider-Man comics presumably guessed anyway), is about that old Spidey Slogan, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The first movie introduced the theme, and the second complicates it. Basically, his Spider-Man identity has caused Peter Parker two related problems:

1. He neglects more mundane responsibilities (getting an education, paying the rent, delivering pizzas on time) in favor of devoting all his energy to his superheroic responsibilities.
2. He avoids his friends and family, not exactly because he neglects his responsibility to them but because he takes too much responsibility for them, especially for Mary Jane. He believes his Spider-Man identity will endanger them if he remains close, so he pushes them away. (His avoidance of Harry is a little more understandable, since Harry actually wants to kill Spider-Man.)

Peter has to decide who gets to call the shots—Peter Parker or Spider-Man? Whose responsiblities are more important? Otto Octavius allows “Doc Ock” to call the shots (the fact that Otto is able to take control and save the city by destroying his fusion device suggests that he does allow the octopus arms to control him), and look where it gets him. Spider-Man’s urges are undoubtedly more heroic than Doc Ock’s, but that distinction doesn’t actually matter much. Doc Ock’s monstrous urge may threaten the entire city, but of course we know Spider-Man will take care of the city. The really engaging question raised by Doc Ock’s monstrous urge is whether he will manage to pull himself back from the brink—will he die a monster? So it is with Spider-Man: his superheroic (but equally monstrous) urge doesn’t threaten the city, but it does threaten to sever the ties of friendship and family. Will Spider-Man become a superheroic monster, a Fiorean solipsist, or will he pull himself back from the brink?

So that’s the stakes, and fine stakes they are. The problem, of course, is that the movie gets so damn preachy in addressing them.

The movie’s not all preachiness. The first scene, one of the best, lays out the moral landscape without spelling it out too much. The opening shot is of Mary Jane once removed: a billboard Peter watches longingly. “She looks at me every day,” Peter tells us—but he misspeaks, as Jim Henley notes, “for ’she’ is simply a billboard of MJ at her most made-up and ethereal—flat, creamy, dreamy, two-dimensional and, we might note, looking out at nothing from our left.” This is as close as Peter believes he can get to MJ without putting her life in grave danger. Later in the scene, Peter is fired from his pizza-delivery job after failing (and for not the first time) to deliver a pizza on time—he delayed the delivery to assist the police in apprehending a couple of criminals. “Joe’s 29-minute guarantee is a promise, Peter,” his boss tells him. By this point in the movie, an attentive viewer should understand the central conflicts of the story. The opening scene is a skillfully constructed narrative that explains the conflicts concretely, and the movie does not need to resort to more abstract moral explanations—intelligent viewers can figure it out for themselves. Unfortunately, the filmmakers didn’t have the confidence to let the narrative speak for itself, and they ended up shoveling nasty thematic material right into the characters’ mouths.

By far the most offensive scene is the one in which Aunt May explains the concept of heroism to Peter. The basic idea for the scene is a good one: as Jim Henley notes, May’s speech seems motivated not by any healthy notion of heroism but by a weirdly sadomasochistic urge to punish Peter for his responsibility for Uncle Ben’s murder:

It’s . . . a bit . . . unsettling. There’s the possibility that she’s announcing Peter’s punishment: make it up to me by giving up your one chance at happiness. It’s also possible that we’re simply seeing where Peter’s own maladaptation to the problem of self-sustenance versus altruism comes from: Aunt May knows that she and Ben sacrificed much for the sake of their nephew, and she expects Peter to do the like when presented the opportunity. Giving what you can’t afford to give comes naturally to her. It’s the dangerous lesson her ward has absorbed.

So Aunt May wants to give Peter a disturbing Christ complex. That’s a great way to raise the stakes, but too bad the scene doesn’t live up to its potential. Aunt May really shouldn’t need more than a few seconds and a few well-chosen suggestions to sow her poisonous seeds in Peter’s soul, but the scene drags on for long minutes as she foolishly belabors the point. By the time she wraps up, she’s oversold her heroic ideal so much that Peter looks like a blind idiot for not realizing she’s trying to manipulate him.

Then there’s the Uncle Ben dream sequence in which, as I recall, Uncle Ben actually goes so far as to say aloud “With great power comes great responsibility.” Peter’s decision to toss his Spider-Man costume in the trash, the subsequent (and hilarious) “Raindrops keep falling on my head” scene, are all we need to figure out what Peter has decided to do with his life. We remember from the first movie that Peter feels guilty about Uncle Ben’s death. Trundling out the ghost of Uncle Ben to explain all this to us indicates a stunning lapse of taste on the parts of the filmmakers.

Luckily, the movie recovers its wits in time for the ending, which dumps the characters back into lovely moral confusion. Mary Jane’s decision to stick with Peter is the movie’s response to Aunt May’s masochistic ideal of heroism. See how her decision is packed into that one all-important sentence, “Isn’t it time someboday saved your life, Peter?” and that one final closeup shot that shows her inability to decide whether she’s made the right decision? Just imagine how much the scene would have lost if Mary Jane had been required to explain herself in an Aunt May-style speech.

My point, as I said, is that I can’t stand characters who talk like they’ve read the script and know what the story’s supposed to be about. Characters who act as mouthpieces for authors who are too lazy or too scared to construct a narrative that stands on its own. Spider-Man 2 is most disappointing as it establishes a strong narrative but then falters and gives in to sermonizing.

I don’t have a special shelf for my favorite books—not even an imaginary one, because I lack whatever psychological trait that allows people to easily create hierarchical categories of the things they like. I have books I especially love, but I never know where to draw the line between “favorite” and “not quite.” But Rick Geerling created a meme, list the books on your special shelf of favorite books, which has been spreading through the blogosphere (Ken Lowery, David Fiore, Dave Intermittent). I suppose I’ve caught the meme as well.

On David Fiore’s comments thread, Jess Nevins notes that the problem with this meme is that “The Bookshelf” (as Rick calls it) is going to end up with hundreds of books on it. Actually, I think it’ll probably end up with too many or too few, depending on whether your listing is governed by an obsessive completism or a reticent hesitance to include every book you know you really should. To save both you and me some time and boredom, I’ll choose the latter governor.

Before I start my list of favorite(ish) books, though, I want to note something I’ve just noticed. Many of the ones I’ve chosen are about what Rose calls “creation of self through narrative” and David Fiore calls “identiy-formation through narrative-building.” These are narratives that literalize narrative: the characters in these stories usually know or figure out they’re in a story. Sometimes they get to meet the Author. I think if we humans were offered a little discussion time with God—not just your standard prayer or divine visions but a meeting in which you could get some real answers—most of us would eagerly accept the offer. Even those of us who don’t believe in Him would, I think—wouldn’t you like to know what God would have to say about all those clever arguments atheists have come up with to “disprove” Her existence? I know I would. Can God create a rock so heavy even He can’t lift it?

Why is there suffering? Why didn’t you ever answer my prayers—is it just because I didn’t believe in you? If you had a chance to get not just the answers but The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything—well, who wouldn’t be tempted by that? We have all these questions we’d love to ask God, but She doesn’t answer (if God exists then He seems to have been out to lunch for the last few million years, and I never trust people who have a personal relationship with Jesus). The only place we can get God to answer our questions is in our fantasies, that place where we’re more powerful than God and get to tell Her what to do. I think that’s why there are so many stories about meeting God. But then, God (creator of the Wor[l]d) and an author (creator of words) have a lot in common, don’t they? J.R.R. Tolkien discusses writing, especially of fantastic stories, as a reverent imitation of God’s creation of the world in his essay “On Faerie Stories.” In Animal Man, Grant Morrison and God are the same.

My Bookshelf (for now) consists (largely, but not at all entirely) of fiction texts that take on these intersections of text, authorship, and humanity’s own search for cosmological answers.

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Michael Swanwick

The dangerous thing about finding God and asking your questions is, of course, what if God won’t answer? Or can’t answer? What if He answers but the answers make even less sense than your own feeble guesses? What if the only useful thing you got out of your meeting with God was a reminder of the idea of free will—and you couldn’t even get God to tell you whether you actually have free will or if it’s just a comforting fiction you invented yourself? Are you even capable of dealing with the responsibility for your own stupid mistakes and fucked-up life, the liberating and terrifying fine-print clause in the free-will contract? (And why didn’t God ever ask if you wanted to sign that contract?)

(In other words, what if you were human?)

The Dark Tower, Stephen King

The fantasy epic about a gunslinger straight out of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, on a quest for The Answer, which lies at the highest level of the Dark Tower—or does it lie in the home of the young writer of Salem’s Lot? King thinks the opening sentence of The Gunslinger, the first book of his Dark Tower series, may be the best opener he’s written in his career: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” I like the next sentence even more: “The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what might have been parsecs in all directions.” It’s the “parsecs” that makes it great—any writer with the audacity to put “parsecs” in the second sentence of a book like The Gunslinger, and the skill to actually pull it off without sounding like a jerk, is a writer worth reading. (In the recent and ill-conceived revised edition of The Gunslinger, King foolishly replaced “parsecs” with some safer and forgettable word. Too bad for him.)

Vurt, Jeff Noon

Labyrinths are almost as important a theme in this genre as the quest for God, labyrinths as a metaphor of the text. The goal at the center of the textual labyrinth is meaning… but there’s a nasty structural ‘flaw’ in the labyrinth: there is no center! There is no one perfect interpretation of any text—even the simplest of texts may have several plausible interpretations. (This is not to say all interpretations of a text are equally plausible—the lack of one correct interpretation is not the same as the lack of any wrong one.) And don’t fall for the intentional fallacy—a statement of the author’s intended meaning may look like a map to the center of the text, but it’s only another textual labyrinth. What do you do with a centerless labyrinth (the only escape is not to read)? Why not be a writer yourself, a creator of labyrinths?

Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges

In some shelf of some hexagon [of the Library], men reasoned, there must exist a book which is the cipher and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has perused it, and it is analagous to a god. …I pray the unknown gods that some man—even if only one man, and though it have been thousands of years ago!—may have examined and read it. …May heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but may Thy enormous Library be justified, for one instant, in one being.
— “The Library of Babel”

Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever which gave the appearance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet? Useless to reply that reality, too, is ordered. It may be so, but in accordance with divine laws—I translate: inhuman laws—which we will never completely perceive. Tlön may be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth plotted by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.
— “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

More books…

And now, since this is going to be ridiculously long and time-consuming if I keep writing so much about each book, I’ll list the rest of the books with no more than one or two explanatory sentences each…

• If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino. The book is narrated in the second person, so you the reader become the protagonist as well.
• The Invisibles, Animal Man, The Filth; Grant Morrison. Morrison is one of few comics creators I’ve encountered in my short career as a comics reader who gets into these metatextual themes (and, more importantly, deals with them intelligently) (I have no doubt there are plenty of other comics creators who do as well, but I’ve not yet discovered many of them).
• Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco. I read an essay by John Updike in which he claims Foucault’s Pendulum shows what might have resulted if Borges had attempted to write a novel. He may be right about that, but his belief that it’s a flaw in Foucault’s Pendulum probably shows why I don’t waste my time reading Updike.

For this next book I’m afraid I need to go back to a longer format:

Good-Bye Chunky Rice, Craig Thompson

In this book, Craig Thompson emerges as a young comics master: In the purest narrative form he tells a highly charged personal story, crammed with pain, discovery, hijinx, penance, religious conviction and its loss… and along comes self loathing. In this story of family and first love, that which goes awry in life, goes well as art. Mr. Thompson is slyly self-effacing as he bowls us over with his mix of skills. His expert blending of words and pictures and resonant silences makes for a transcendent kind of story-telling that grabs you as you read it and stays with you after you put it down. I’d call that literature.
— Jules Feiffer

Feiffer is writing about Thompson’s Blankets, but he could just about be writing about Good-Bye Chunky Rice. The funny thing is, what he writes makes a lot more sense if you pretend he is writing about the latter rather than the disappointing (and generally redundant, after Good-Bye Chunky Rice) Blankets.

Even more books…

This is getting way too long. OK, here’s the rest of my list:

• Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Pattern Recognition; William Gibson
• The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
• Ubik, The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, et al.; Philip K. Dick. If I kept going I might end up listing every one I’ve read. Dick’s books are often incoherent and clumsily written, but no other writer inspires quite the same fascinating effect of simultaneous desire to throw a book across the room and unwillingness to stop reading long enough to throw it.
• Robert Howard’s Conan stories
• Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

I guess that’s it. For now!

Rose and I are moving tomorrow, and we won’t have Internet access in our new apartment until Monday at the earliest, so the posting forecast for this weekend and next week is light to nonexistent. Stay tuned for a series of posts about Minicomics You Should Be Reading, though.

Seaguy is shaping up to be one of my favorite superhero comics in a while. It’s the sort of comic where you half-expect a purple gorilla from Mars to show up at any moment (no gorillas yet, but Atlantis and its clockwork wasps have made an appearance). It has that Silver Age-DC sense of manic nonsense in it, but it’s not a nostalgic trip back into the past… Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart grab what they need and leap forward. #2 is very different in tone from #1, and Seaguy and Chubby are finding out why nobody goes on adventures anymore. Things are getting heavy but, thankfully, neither grim nor gritty. (But then, with Animal Man, Doom Patrol, New X-Men and even The Invisibles, Morrison’s always been a chief contributor to the school of ‘mature’ superhero comics that don’t stand on the shoulders of Frank Miller and Alan Moore).

I’m still considering this, but I think Seaguy intersects neatly with the current superheroes-as-fascists conversation flying around the blogs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc.). The only authorities in Seaguy’s world seem to be Mickey Eye and his I-Police, who rule by enforcing the herd mentality with marketing and consumerism. The superheroes have all retired, not because the regular folks decided heroes are fascist, but because they decided they don’t need heroes. (Who needs a superhero when you have a ridiculous iron umbrella to protect you from meteorites? And who cares if the meteorites are moon rocks covered in Egyptian Hieroglyphs? I’m sure the people who’re supposed to know about that stuff know what’s going on…) When Seaguy and Chubby decided to become real heroes and go on adventures, their decision makes them pretty much the opposite of powerful auhority figures—not only does nobody take them seriously (taking things seriously doesn’t seem to be allowed), now they’re being hunted by the I-Police. But at the same time, the I-Police are so inept that Seaguy and Chubby can evade them easily. And the fact that Seaguy and Chubby are inept and half-hearted heroes at best (”Now we’ve done it, Chubby! Maybe we should just pretend none of this ever…”) hasn’t kept them from (accidentally) creating a humongous blob of intelligent processed-food product, (accidentally) destroying the Xoo industry, and (accidentally) discovering Atlantis.