I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Not the Beastmaster RIP

Or, "The Life Trap."

Spoilers for Final Crisis #7, by Grant Morrison and Doug Mahnke

Grant Morrison loves endings.  He's so careful to give each hero his or her bit of business--to make everybody part of the grand finale--that his more sprawling stories pile climax upon climax until they threaten to collapse under their own weight.  "World War III," the conclusion of his run on JLA and a precursor to Final Crisis, just barely manages to keep its endings in balance, juggling last-second arrivals and heroic sacrifices and superhuman cavalries, dancing on the edge of complete incoherence so every reader's favorite character can get their due.

In one comic book with a finite set of characters, Morrison managed to pull it off.  Against the canvas of a multiverse of worlds that contain effectively infinite reflections of every single DC character, Morrison has too many options, too many stars, and far, far too many endings.

Plenty of the criticisms leveled at Final Crisis have little to nothing to do with the comic itself:  snarled schedules, bungled lead-ins, missed opportunities, the ravages of event fatigue.  All legitimate concerns (particularly for retailers), but all more or less irrelevant to the quality of the work itself.  The problems of Countdown and Death of the New Gods and Batman RIP may be important to understanding Final Crisis the marketing event but they have nothing to do with Final Crisis the story, and thank goodness, because the story has enough problems on its own.  Just look at the endings jammed into the final issue:

1. The Flashes destroy Darkseid with his own Omega beams (an ending that, as Jog says, gets interrupted by a panel of Aquaman wrapping up a plot that hasn't previously appeared anywhere in Final Crisis).  This is Darkseid's first defeat this issue (second overall, counting Batman's bullet last issue).

2. Black Canary has rescued Green Arrow from the Justifiers--off-panel between issues--while the Ray forms the protective Metron sigil over the entire planet.  Neat idea, one with no apparent effect on the rest of the plot.  Nor does Morrison indicate how or even if Canary and Ollie and the other evacuees survive the satellite that's burning up on reentry--the satellite turns up as good as new later in the issue, but the evacuees are nowhere to be seen.

3. Checkmate's Black Gambit fails and shunts a bunch of people off to Kamandi's future (now one of DC's multiple Earths).  This apparently splits up the Super Young Team, who, after getting a nice build-up in the early issues, never do much of anything.  But at least they appear on-panel!  Mister Miracle, after getting a huge build-up in the early issues that built on his huge build-up in Seven Soldiers, once again manages to accomplish absolutely nothing that matters to the main plot.  He doesn't even show up in this issue, with the Question merely mentioning him once.  Well, technically, mentioning his Motherboxxx once.

4. Hawkman and Hawkgirl destroy the malfunctioning Lord Eye, sacrificing themselves and bringing to a noble end a subplot that began in two panels last issue.

5. Overman is reunited with his apparently dead cousin, concluding a subplot from one of the tie-ins that received little attention in the main series.

6. Luthor completes his face turn by siding with Superman--except the actual moment of his turn is once again occluded by a cutaway, this time to Frankenstein.  That "meeting" with Wonder Woman is a cute joke, but it blots out the culmination of a subplot that had been simmering since the first issue.

7. Wonder Woman breaks her possession by Bernadeth--no indication how, we just see her crushing that tusked mask--and chains the disembodied Darkseid, presumably, but not explicitly, purging him from all the possessed humans.  This is Darkseid's second defeat this issue, third overall.

8. Darkseid continues to expand anyway, possessing/becoming everyone and everything in the universe (multiverse?) except for one final watchtower.  Doesn't look like Wonder Woman chained him all that well.  William Moulton Marston would be disappointed!  The disembodied/universal Darkseid penetrates the Watchtower and Superman destroys him in two panels through the power of super-singing.  This is Darkseid's third defeat this issue, fourth overall.

9. Then Mandrakk appears for the first time in Final Crisis proper to wrap up a plotline that should have already been wrapped up in Superman Beyond 3D.  Superman activates the Miracle Machine and uses it to summon Captain Marvel, who was already on his way anyway with an army of alternate-universe Supermen.  The Supermen destroy Mandrakk's servant Ultraman while singing a line from Hair.

10. Monitor Nix Uotan shows up and turns a couple of animals into Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, and the Pax Dei show up, and Uotan summons the new Forever People, who are probably the Super Young Team, which I guess makes Uotan the new Infinite Man, except it doesn't really matter because they all just stand around and watch while the Supermen of Many Worlds burn Mandrakk and the Green Lanterns drive a spike through him.  Nix Uotan tells Ultraman's burning corpse that "No one %$%$ with the judge of all evil," which would be scary as shit if the judge of all evil had actually done anything.

11. The superheroes unfreeze the entire human race, which they just froze a couple of pages earlier, because Earth is all better now and apparently balloon sales are way up.  The superheroes and Green Lanterns tow the multiple Earths back into position.  This requires all the risk and effort of cleaning up after a disastrous party, and conveys about as much excitement.

12. Apokolips is reborn as New Genesis and the dead New Gods of New Genesis reappear looking exactly as they did before they died, meaning that not a damn thing has changed. 

13. The Monitors are all absorbed into the Overvoid (or supercontext? Morrison's list of self-quotations grows to include the finale of The Invisibles) and Nix Uotan wakes up in the same mortal body he woke up in back in issue #1.  See item 12.

14. We see what happened to Anthro, and what happened to the rocket the Watchtower launched, and what happened to Batman.  This one is rather elegant and, even at a mere two pages, not at all rushed, unlike most of the endings above, which are checked off like so many items on a shopping list.

Those final two pages excepted, every one of the endings is unsatisfying on some level, whether it's Barry Allen's unnecessary return (what does he do that Wally West couldn't do on his own?) or Morrison's decision to build the final issue around a set of characters who have been mostly if not entirely absent from the series thus far.  Every element is either incomplete or superfluous; a few manage to be both.

A tabulation of everything that goes wrong in this issue would be as disjoint and frustrating as Final Crisis itself, but one example might crystallize many of its problems.  Wedged into three panels, the arrival of the angels of the Pax Dei at the final battle--their first and only appearance in the whole crossover--seems, like so many of the series' narrative convolutions, curiously unmotivated.  Doing nothing more than floating around and watching other heroes triumph, the angels of God manage to be slightly less significant than the Zoo Crew.  Those wacky animals are also nothing more than witnesses, but I suppose they make some sort of metatextual point about a kinder, gentler DC accepting the odder corners of its rich, weird history--a point that superhero comics have only been making for the past twelve or thirteen years, Morrison's superhero comics for the last twenty.

On second thought, maybe this is a point in the Pax Dei's favor.  They have the good grace to symbolize nothing, I hope, being a repeat of only a single story Morrison told back in 2000--"World War III" in fact, where their climactic appearance actually had causes and consequences.  Final Crisis is too busy to supply either one.

One of the more common defenses or praises of Morrison's style--one I've made myself many times in reference to other comics--is that he provides readers with just enough information that we can fill in the blanks ourselves, implying more stories than he could ever fit on the page.  That implication is in evidence here, too.  Final Crisis #7 opens with a genius move, cutting away from last issue's cliffhangers to a brief interlude in an alternate universe where most if not all of DC's prominent heroes are black and Superman just happens to be the President of the United States.  It's a great scene, one that captures the current mood of optimism and renewed hope in the face of great adversity.  It also implies a longstanding (if previously nonexistent) publication history for these characters, through the simple detail of a reversed color scheme.

President Superman's chest emblem is the same yellow-on-red pattern that Morrison gave to Sunshine Superman, the Afro-sporting hero of a retro-sixties parallel Earth whose first and only prior appearance was back in Animal Man #23.  For most of the issue I thought this was supposed to be Sunshine Superman, until the original pops up in the cavalry of Supermen.  But that doesn't matter, because in those couple of pages Morrison gives us everything we need to imagine President Superman's fictional history (a quick reference to Vathlo Island, Bronze Age home of all the black Kryptonians) and his publication history.  This really could be the Sunshine Superman, shorn of his theatrical Boomer politics of personal affect, given a Hart Schaffner Marx suit and a pragmatic competence that could propel him into the White House.

You see what I'm doing here, right?--and let's drop any pretense that I'm not the one doing it--turning the purely hypothetical transformation of Sunshine Superman into President Superman into a repudiation of the Baby Boomer politics of cultural confrontation and the Boomer politicians who played them to such personal gain and national or international ruin.  The generational shift maps perfectly onto the two versions of Sunshine Superman but its presence in this comic is my invention, folks.  It's not in Final Crisis at all.  Yet every detail that enables this invention, sparks this act of fan fiction, is right there on the page, right down to President Superman's polite, confident assurance that he actually does know what gravitons are and his interest in diplomacy.  The contrast with his political predecessor couldn't be clearer; the contrast with his previous self is equally telling.  The scene shows Morrison at his best, scattering a handful of perfectly-chosen details that can imply a whole world, a whole history, a whole politics, a whole story.

And as soon as President Superman is dragged into the morass of Final Crisis, it disappears.  The overabundant endings that trip on each other's lines and jostle each other out of frame, the abandonment of old characters and sudden introduction of new villains and new premises in the final issue of a seven-part series--this isn't implying stories, it's summarizing them.

When it comes to writing these longstanding, corporate-owned, functionally immortal characters, what happens at the end isn't nearly as important as how we get there.  The endings are more or less predetermined:  Superman wins.  Batman wins.  The good guys always win.  All that matters is how we reach that predetermined end, how we are surprised and scared and delighted along the way, and that's exactly what Morrison's summative supercompressions have begun to exclude.  That beautiful first page is a starting point, one that can imply two twinned histories but can also set up a whole world of characters and launch them out into new stories.  The cascading anticlimaxes of the rest of the issue are nothing more than a series of brutally abbreviated endpoints, bypassing the pleasure of arrival, cutting out the last places for invention and emotional investment.

And for reader participation, too--for meaningful participation that asks us to think about theme and ethics and setting and future stories instead of asking us to imagine Black Canary and Green Arrow off that burning space station, imagine roles for Barry Allen and the Super Young Team and the Pax Dei and Captain Carrot and His Fucking Zoo Crew that actually amount to something, imagine a pair of stories in which Darkseid's corruption and Mandrakk's hunger were separated and allowed to grow to their own natural lengths and endings.  Instead of being asked to clear the desk and clean the gutters, fill in the many loose ends and prune off all the superfluous ones.  Instead of being asked to edit Morrison's story for him.

I know many Morrison fans will say--already are saying--this elliptical style is part of Morrison's technique, part of his charm.  And they're right, to a point, although mounting any such defense of Final Crisis overlooks the difference between asking readers to ponder an idea or imagine a world or forge an emotional connection, and asking them to clean up a mess.

At the end of Final Crisis #6, Darkseid zaps Batman with the Omega Sanction--"the death that is life!"--apparently destroying him.  But we know this will come undone:  all that matters is how.  The end of Final Crisis #7 reveals how with a beautiful economy, and even if it is a quote of Jack Kirby's Forever People it's still a relief.  Because the suspicion, for me as I'm sure for many Morrison fans, was that Morrison was going to quote his own Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle instead and consign Batman to the Life Trap, dooming him to live an endless cycle of miserable reincarnations, a dharmic version of Hell.

Which he'd just escaped from, in a sense, in "Last Rites," a Batman tie-in that linked Final Crisis up to the inconclusive ending of Batman RIP.  (After the narrative pile-up of Final Crisis, a little inconclusivity is looking a lot more appealing now.)  Having just seen Batman snap out of not one but two versions of his life story in the last couple of months, I didn't think I could stand watching him bounce in and out of yet another set of repetitions.  His torment would have too closely matched my own.

The last two pages of Final Crisis sidestep that trap rather neatly, but the damage had already been done.  Final Crisis cribs liberally from Morrison's "Rock of Ages," "World War III," The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo, Seven Soldiers, Animal Man, and a couple others I'm probably forgetting.  Morrison's use of Kirby's characters promised some element of interpretation and reinvigoration, even if those new designs never quite materialized and the Fifth World seems no different from the Fourth, but he simply repeats his own prior work.  It's a cut-and-paste job that doesn't culminate his favorite themes so much as exhaust them.

It's no secret to anyone who's been reading this blog for a while that Grant Morrison is one of the last writers keeping me interested in monthly comics--and absolutely the last one keeping me interested in writing a comics blog.  Three years ago (good lord), Jog offered a persuasive evaluation of why Morrison holds such broad appeal for comics bloggers (although I suspect that appeal is notably less broad at this particular moment).  Blogging thrives on the periodic, the recurring, the ongoing, and Morrison has supplied a steady stream of material for as long as there has been a comics blogosphere.  But more than that, Jog observed that Morrison straddled the cultures of the comic book and the graphic novel.  I would go farther, a lot farther; sometimes it seems like Morrison is the last master of the monthly comic book in an age when all of his peers are padding it out for the trade paperback.  Certainly it's not an overstatement to say that Morrison has mastered the pacing and structure of the monthly serial comic and the narrative bounties of the shared continuity.  Now, after Final Crisis, I have to acknowledge my nagging fears that he's also become trapped by them.

At his best, Morrison writes comics that exploit the serial format while still reading as well or better in collected editions--less trade paperbacks than sprawling, multivolume graphic novels.  This isn't some distant golden age I'm describing; Morrison hit the jackpot just last fall.  Lately, though, with Batman and especially with Final Crisis he seems to have become more interested in the monthly superhero comic as a final narrative format, a neverending story whose installments are not even vaguely self-sufficient, individually or collectively, and the continuity-bound superhero crossover as something still less self-sufficient than that.  Final Crisis is so determined to read as a network of interconnecting series that it not only resists collection, it resists any expectations of a whole and relatively self-contained narrative.  It cannot tell a complete story in 225 pages without fracturing across a half-dozen tie-ins; it cannot even be so kind as to have Superman re-enter the story from the same spin-off he exited it for.

All this could be forgiven if the series added up to something more than a sheaf of character designs and continuity notes for a story that gets outlined rather than told.  My favorite tie-in was probably the Final Crisis Sketchbook, a behind-the-scenes guide filled with Morrison's lightly comedic reinventions of the New Gods and pointlessly detailed, utterly perfect histories of Japanese superheroes.  Most of these characters would barely appear in the crossover.  Some never would.  Only now is it clear: that sketchbook was Final Crisis in its purest form.

It's been over three months since I posted anything here.  I meant to, honest, especially after the election.  Christy and I worked hard for that one, canvassing in Virginia almost every weekend from Labor Day to Election Day.  At the time it seemed like each trip supplied a new reason for confidence--like the first Saturday after the Republicans' smug, spiteful convention, when the line of Obama volunteers spilled out of the office and down the block--but I never got around to writing them up.  I wish I had now, not for the blog but for my own personal record.

I realized a while ago that there was no point to blogging about politics on my schedule.  If blogging is ideally a daily activity then political blogging is an hourly one, and I could never devote that kind of time to it--especially not last fall, when my time was better spent knocking on doors in Fairfax County.  By the time I was done knocking the polls were closed, and anything I could have said about the election was said more powerfully by the crowds crying in Grant Park and dancing in front of the White House.

So politics was out; well, we'll always have comics.  One of the nicer things about comics blogging is that you don't really have to do it every day; as long as Tom or Dirk links to your post, it doesn't matter how badly you've let your readership atrophy.  But that can be a trap, too.  Comics blogs offer a guaranteed (if tiny) audience and absolutely no standards other than the ones you and your chosen peers set for yourselves.  Not exactly a recipe for great writing, which makes the great writing it has produced that much more remarkable.  But once you fall out of the habit for a while it begins to look a bit too cozy, a bit too comfortable.

The problem is not the subject matter, even when a subject disappoints as deeply as Final Crisis does, severing that last tether to the weekly conversation.  The problem is the medium itself.  If blogging is daily it is also ephemeral, yet the ephemera cling to life with embarrassing persistence; even the best-kept archives reek with the overripe tang of long-forgotten controversies that never mattered in the first place.  (Paul O'Brien thinks comics are boring! Micah Ian Wright lied to me! How could CrossGen fail?)  Not long after I started this blog I made an effort, haltingly at first, to purge it of such ephemera, to write only pieces I thought I could be proud of later.  I'm still proud of many of them, but the consequence was a blog that rarely updated and still took more effort than a blog should take.

Some folks are able to turn their blogs into part of their professional development or, better yet, make blogging a profession unto itself.  More power to them.  Writing this blog has been incredibly valuable, as a laboratory for developing ideas and as a motivation to push my style in directions it otherwise wouldn't have taken.  But after a while it's time to apply all that work to formats and venues that aren't measured chiefly by their frequency.  No matter how much time and energy I sank into it, blogging has always been a hobby for me.  Time spent blogging is time not spent writing for some other format that demands better work and offers something more durable in return.

I doubt this will be the end of this site--there will always be some work of exceptional quality or exceptional frustration to tempt me back--but it will be the end of it as a blog.  (This only makes official an ending that really started last spring, with the conclusion of the other serial narrative that kept me posting.)  There will be updates as other projects come into print, some possibly as early as the end of the year.  Some will take a lot longer; I've decided to bite the bullet and write that Morrison book that's been pushing itself into blog form for the last five years.

I'm looking forward to Seaguy 2; I'm looking forward even more to Grant's temporary break from comics and the newer, more self-contained, more original works that I hope will follow.

In the meantime?  We'll always have the President.

All Stars

All Star Superman vol. 2, by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Jamie Grant

"As a matter of fact, I had the whole thing paced out to end pretty much exactly like this, Lex."

For someone who used to complain about his inability to end a story, Grant Morrison is awfully proud of this one.  And rightly so; All Star Superman is unusually well-structured for Morrison's works, and exceptionally well-structured by any standard, so much so that having Superman brag about it doesn't seem too unseemly.  Everything has been planned down to the last detail, even the previously unsuspected clue Superman mentions in the next word balloon, set up all the way back in issue #2.  This is one of Morrison's most meticulously plotted works and one of his best endings (especially if Cole Odell is right).  While the finale pulls all the pieces together, though, the entire series has been structured with equal care.  Now that the whole design is apparent it's clear that the second half is especially important, a coherent work of its own expressing ideas that extend well beyond the modest concerns of most supehero comics.

The first half of All Star Superman is mostly a tour of Superman's cast of characters, showcasing Morrison's takes on Lois and Jimmy and Luthor and the Smallville crowd.  If the series had stayed at this pitch it would have been nothing more than an unusually well-crafted example of the "commercial strip-mining" approach, which Morrison once described as "creators playing it safe by cherry-picking and re-packaging all the best and most popular elements of an already successful feature."

Instead, the second half brings the focus back to the title character, assembles the stories into a unified narrative, and builds to a climax as thematically fraught as it is tightly plotted.  Issue #7 marks the new beginning with several references to the first half of the series (opening with another dangerous Leo Quintum expedition, showing the missing technician from #4, releasing the baby sun-eater, and so on).  A series that has already synthesized the best elements of every period in Superman's history is now including itself in the synthesis--as if the first half of the series were a separate work already fit for quotation and memorialization.

And a series that has already confronted Superman with several alternate versions of himself (the scoundrels Samson and Atlas, the Black-K induced evil Superman, the Supermen from the future) kicks into high gear.  It's difficult to remember this in retrospect, but Morrison didn't really hammer home the alternate Supermen in his first couple of issues, and Luthor represents a different kind of reflection in the prison story.  With the second half of All Star, however, every single issue features a copy--and sometimes, in the case of poor Zibarro, a copy of a copy as well.  This is more than just Prismatic Age brand proliferation, though (or rather, it's one of the best "Prismatic" works because it achieves more than mere brand proliferation).  Each of these distorted funhouse images, from the comedic-horrific inversions of Bizarro to the Kryptonian chauvinism of Bar-El to the nightmare scenario of a man with Superman's powers and Luthor's character, serves to burnish the original by comparison--even the best of them, Superman's Kandorian cousin Van-Zee, is too physically unimposing and ineffective to match the template.  But a couple of them go much farther, speaking directly to the series' core themes of the power of ideas and hope for the future.

I wasn't a big fan of issue #9, the Kryptonian astronauts, when it was first released, seeing it as little more than a reworking of the Mon-El story.  But reading it against the rest of the series, especially its immediate successor, reveals it as an important turning point.  Bar-El and Lila accuse Superman of dragging his feet when it comes to freeing the citizens of Kandor, telling him he lacks drive and ambition.  By issue's end Superman concedes the point, saying "Perhaps I could have done more"; the next issue he's rushing to settle his affairs, including the Kandorians.  Similarly, Lila's comment that Superman "could have laid the foundation stones of tomorrow" leads into his gift to Leo Quintum and Lois Lane--the DNA sequences and superpower serums that will most likely generate his successors, as hinted on the series' final page.  His bequest of the future answers Lila's challenge without duplicating her haughty Kryptonian cultural imperialism.  The tenth issue is justly regarded as one of the series' highest points, but the ninth sets it into motion.

The grand finale in issues #11 and 12 opens with yet another set of call-backs, this time marking the end of the series and beginning the summation of its ideas.  The first five pages of #11 contain visual or textual reminders of every prior issue; the next scene takes us inside one of Luthor's lairs, littered with costumes and weapons that indicate his own history is every bit as palimpsestic as Superman's.  (Which, of course, it is.  You can imagine these pages being outtakes from another comic--call it All Star Luthor--that just happened to intersect with this one.)  These nods to comics tradition, and to All Star Superman's own prior nods to that tradition, aren't the important part, just structural markers that the end is here and the important stuff is about to begin.

The second half of the series highlights Superman's capacity to inspire people, even (especially) as a purely fictional character.  It's the only power he has in our benighted world, and Morrison believes it's the most important one he's got.  In fact, he says that if Superman did not exist, we would have to invent him (simply returning a favor, since Superman thoughtfully created us back in issue #10, March 2008; mark your calendars).  That's why the finale pits him against an antagonist who disputes the very idea that fictions and abstractions can hold real power, as seen in this exchange from issue #12:

WHITE:  The truth sent you to the chair, Luthor!

LUTHOR:  Is that right, Mister White?  Funny, I don't see the truth anywhere around, do you?  I mean, what color is it?  Can I touch it?

Luthor mocks White's dedication to abstract principle, confronting him with the truth's immateriality, because he's a materialist to the extreme.  He says the priest at his execution "stinks of the irrational" and his niece proclaims "This is Science Year Zero!"--next I suppose they'll be rewriting the calendar.  This scorn for idealism confirms Luthor's stature as the series archvillain, especially since a hallucinatory Jor-El (himself part of "the field of living, fluid consciousness") has just told his son he has given us humans "an ideal to aspire to, embodied [our] highest aspirations."

After viewing the world through Superman's eyes, though, Luthor gets with the All Star program.  He realizes "The fundamental forces are yoked by a single thought"--apparently the entire universe is "thought-controlled!"  His enlightenment and defeat aren't just the typical final-act reversals; they enact the triumph of the ideal over the material.  Or, as Superman tells Luthor (while laying him out with a decidedly material, decidedly anticlimactic, decidedly satisfying punch) "Brain beats brawn every time!"  In grand superhero tradition, Morrison stages a conflict of ideas and resolves it through the physical embodiments of his characters... which itself happens to be a perfect illustration of their ability to embody our ideals.

But tragically, perfectly, the story doesn't end there.  Superman converts to pure "solar radio-consciousness," pure information, pure idea, yet he still manages to save us all one last time.  He ends the series presiding serenely over Metropolis and Earth, maintaining the sun that keeps them alive, duplicating his earlier custodianship of Kandor on a much larger scale.  And he ends it as a purely ideal being inspiring others to do better, duplicating his relationship to us poor souls down here on Earth-Q, where he's never been anything else.  Trust Morrison to end All Star Superman with one more radical variation of scale, one more blurring of fiction and reality--but trust him also to apply these familiar games to a new theme, one perfectly matched to his character, about the power of ideas; the power of inspiration; the power of hope.

I Believe This is Called "Locking Down the Nerd Vote"

Full (and very funny) video from the Al Smith dinner here.

This actually lines up with a piece I'm writing on All Star Superman, which should be posted early next week.  Until then, suffice it to say that every good joke has some basis in truth.

This is an IMAGINARY STORY

All Star Superman #12, by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Jamie Grant

A beautiful symmetry is at work in All Star Superman.  The sixth issue showed a young Clark Kent learning the limitations of his powers when he failed to save his adoptive father.  The twelfth and final one opens with Kal-El learning about the other side of mortality from his birth father as Jor-El guides him through a postmortem fantasy and confronts him with an important choice.  Both halves of this series are punctuated with lessons from the fathers that Superman, for all his powers, can never rescue, and reassurances that he still lived up to their expectations anyway.

That's not the only elegant pattern on display in this issue as Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely pull out all the storytelling techniques at their command, investing meaning in processes as mechanical and automatic as the turning of a page.  Jor-El's injunction that Superman can linger in his fantasy world or "Turn and face down evil one last time" is followed by both a page turn and the face of evil, Lex Luthor, ordering the Daily Planet staffers to make their own life-or-death decision.

And if you've been reading these reviews for any length of time, you've probably already guessed that another heavily freighted page transition sets up one of my favorite bits in the issue--hell, the series.  Immediately after Jor-El tells his son that Superman has inspired humanity's highest aspirations and embodied our best qualities, what should we see but Steve Lombard frantically performing CPR on Clark Kent, calling him "buddy" and apologizing for all those pranks.  Lombard has usually been the butt of the joke in this series, just as God and Cary Bates intended, a preening he-man whose overcompensating hypermasculinity always falls short next to Superman's real deal.  But this time Morrison grants some genuine heroism to the blowhard ex-jock as we see him working fearlessly to save the nerd he's tormented.  Superman's in all of us--even Steve Lombard.

In the world of Superman, the better All Star world Superman's inspired, everybody does the right thing in the end (except Luthor, of course).  This issue all of the little guys get their chance to make a stand, from Perry White's defense of the truth to Jimmy Olsen's timely turn as costumer.  Does Jimmy know he's covering for Superman when he trots out the line about the disguise?  And does Luthor figure out the big secret, the one that eluded him in issue five, on the next page, only to lose it when his super-enhanced intellect runs out?  The issue moves so quickly that Morrison can only hint at these developments, planting just enough information for us to make the leap and then moving on to the next surprise.  Even Superman gets to play the role of the plucky underdog, concocting a delightful quasi-scientific trick to beat his artificially empowered archenemy at his own game.

Because it's a Morrison comic there are also the references, fleeting and supple, to Supermen past:  the scarlet fevers and fire falls of Silver Age Krypton, the crystal canyons of the Salkind movies, the fantasy life of "For the Man Who Has Everything," various deaths of Superman from the sixties to the nineties, Morrison's own DC One Million, and a flight of balloons that recalls the end of Miracleman's "Golden Age."  They're all executed without rancor, just a patient sense of obligation that suits the book and its subject.  Morrison's not trying to banish or one-up anybody, only to sum up all of his predecessors in a single compelling vision of the character.

Jamie Grant contributes an unusually vivid palette of bright primary and secondary colors, and Quitely is up to his usual high standard whether he's giving us a gorgeous x-ray panel or a stop-motion view of a truck in collision (both of which call back to his finest work in We3).  The series' final image--I won't spoil it--is a beautiful piece of graphic design, as much a question as an answer and one that leaves me clamoring for a sequel we may never see.

Morrison and Quitely have accomplished something that many comics creators and fans thought impossible:  they've found a way to tell stories about Superman that feel fresh and energetic after seventy years of the neverending battle.  Yes, they amplify the menaces, but that's just the window-dressing--and they avoid the woefully common misstep of writing Superman down, casting the world's greatest superhero as an incompetent or a fascist to make their own jobs easier.  The physical challenges are never a problem for the man of tomorrow, even at Quitely's cinemascoped best.  The emotional challenges--to atone with his fathers, to be with the woman he loves, to confront his own mortality, to inspire our compassion and courage and hope--those are the tough battles, those are what really matter, and Morrison knows it.  His real coup is not just making Superman interesting again, but showing us why it matters that we still come up with new stories about him.  Because even if he were perfect, we can always be better.

It's a fitting end to All Star Superman.  Even if the comic got a little flabby in the middle with the Bizarros and the astronauts (a story that actually reads much better after you've read the next one, but that's a post I'll probably never write)... well, all it had to do was stand up straight, unslump its shoulders, take off its glasses and show us the taut story that was always waiting within.

This issue is a masterpiece.

...Aren't they all?

Back to Basics

Love and Rockets: New Stories #1, by Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez

 

More than twenty-five years after they started Love and Rockets, the Hernandez brothers have relaunched Fantagraphics' signature comic book by taking it back to its roots.

Jaime Hernandez contributes the most noticeable call-back with a 50-page tale that brings his Locas characters back to the tone of the "Mechanics" stories that introduced them.  Maggie is still managing an apartment complex, not excavating spaceships, and Hopey is nowhere to be seen, but Penny Century has finally realized her dream--first voiced back in the original Love and Rockets #1 in 1982--of becoming a superhero.  Unfortunately, Penny's reckless pursuit of her desires has always threatened to ruin her life, and this time is no different:  she becomes a kind of Mort Weisingerized version of La Llorona, roaming the universe wailing for her lost children.  The characters are entirely true to form even as Jaime reverses the direction of twenty-five years of Locas stories, moving from highly stylized realism back to manic fantasy. 

And he negotiates this U-turn in all of three pages, when Maggie's friend Angel decides to investigate a mysterious tenant by putting on a homemade superhero costume and climbing onto the roof.  Naturally!  Who wouldn't?  One of the most endearing things about this tonal shift is that Jaime executes it so matter-of-factly, without apology or self-congratulation or distancing irony.  He just presents the material as if it belongs here, which--of course!--it always did.

He brings back a couple of familiar faces from the old sci-fi days, like Rocky and Cheetah Torpeda, but most of the characters are new, including no less than three teams of super-women and a whole barful of costumed losers.  Jaime has a knack for coming up with wonderfully generic superhero designs that still jump off the page.  I haven't seen this many costumes tangled up in action since the superhero orgy in Flex Mentallo--never too far out of mind in this story that percolates with the barely contained libidinal energy of Jaime's exuberant good-girl figures.

Gilbert gets in on the act, too, with a couple of stories that hijack the tropes of lame sixties humor comics, including a standout piece that gives Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrelli the Hollywood tie-in comic they never deserved.  The Martin and Lewis ripoffs are beamed to a surreal, sadistic Beto-world where they become locked in a deliriously nonsensical battle (whose boundless mutability reminded me, oddly enough, of Glenn Ganges' video game at the start of Ganges #2, only with even less apparent purpose).  All of these pieces, from the high-octane romps to the quiet dreamscapes, appear to be drawn for the sheer joy of drawing, the pleasure of throwing images at one another and seeing what results.

For all that it became one of the touchstones of alternative comics, the original Love and Rockets began as an independent comic rather than an alternative one.  The early issues were part of the 1980s black-and-white boom, an explosion of creator-owned work that mostly stayed within the familiar genre territory of superheroes, crime, fantasy, and science fiction.  It sounds absurd now, but those first issues--viewed as finished products, not as blueprints for their creators' future aspirations--had a lot more in common with Zot! or Nexus than they did with Raw.  (Here's an odd data point.  One of my first purchases from a direct-market comics shop--maybe the first--came in a bag with advertisements printed on both sides.  One side was Love and Rockets, showing Maggie in full "Mechanics" gear.  The other was Dalgoda, the adventures of a friendly canine alien.  And they were both from Fantagraphics!)

Love and Rockets survived the independent implosion and made the leap to the burgeoning alternative comics movement through its creators' considerable skill and dedication to improving their craft as much as it did through any changes in subject matter.  But the overt sci-fi and superhero elements were pushed to the margins--not a problem when the results were stories like "The Death of Speedy Ortiz," "Human Diastrophism," or "Poison River," some of the most ambitious and sophisticated comics then or since.  Any direction can grow stale after twenty years, however; I dropped the last, pamphlet-sized incarnation of Love and Rockets when it seemed like Gilbert and Jaime were both stuck in well-worn ruts.  (The Mario-written "Me for the Unknown" was easily the highlight of that volume.)

Now they've revitalized the title by going back to its origins.  Even the shape of this handsomely designed, squarebound book is a lot more reminiscent of the old magazine-sized Love and Rockets (aspect ratios of 1:1.24 and 1:1.27, if you must know) than the pamphlet series that followed (a boring, industry-standard 1:1.5).  Reading the New Stories feels like reading the original comic, except in a smaller, more convenient, and more durable form. 

The comics inside present the same attractive combination of youthful energy and mature craft.  The Hernandez brothers have honed their styles to perfection over close to three decades, but Love and Rockets: New Stories still feels like the work of a couple of twenty-something kids from Oxnard who synthesized all their influences from Ditko to Dan DeCarlo to Gabriel Garcia Marquez without discrimination or shame, and revolutionized comics.

Blog to Print (Finally)

It's here at last:  the spring 2008 issue of Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction has my article on comic books and metaphor in Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which first germinated as this post more years ago than I care to think about.

In other, not even remotely blog-related news, my first published piece of film criticism, an article on Citizen Kane and Nixon, sees print in the summer 2008 issue of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory.

And the piece I've been waiting the longest to see in print, on noir and nostalgia in The Big Lebowski, appears in the current, all-Coen brothers issue of Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities.  Sadly, it's been stuck in the pipeline for too long for me to become known as "the Lebowski guy," but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

None of these journals are terribly easy to track down outside of a university library (though you can order copies of Critique through the link above), but if you happen to read any of these articles I'd be glad to hear your reactions.

More projects on the horizon, but it's too early to announce them.

Update:  Forgot to mention that I also have a review of Scott McCloud's Making Comics in the Spring 2008 issue of the International Journal of Comic Art.

All Policing is Local

King Suckerman and Hard Revolution, by George Pelecanos

Sometimes I get the feeling that George Pelecanos writes his novels with an ADC map book close at hand.  In addition to writing and producing The Wire--he got all the gut-wrenching penultimate episodes--he's the author of sixteen crime novels set in and around Washington, DC.  And his geography is impeccable; you could navigate the greater DC metropolitan area using nothing but Pelecanos books.

That's not always to their credit.  This passage from King Suckerman crystallized the doubts that nagged at me throughout the novel:

They drove north on Wisconsin Avenue, out of the city.  Vivian bent forward to light a cigarette in the wind, and when it had burned down to the filter she lit another off the first.  She didn't try to argue or make conversation with Karras.  Wisconsin Avenue became Rockville Pike.

"Go right there," said Vivian, and Karras turned east onto Randolph Road.

They got over to Viers Mill and made another turn, entering a neighborhood of smallish houses originally offered to World War II veterans on the GI Bill.  Vivian was in the place in which she had been raised.

Anybody can follow that route to Vivian's neighborhood; I could even tell you what it looks like today.  But until Pelecanos feeds us that one thin line about the smallish houses and the GI Bill, I have absolutely no idea what it looked like in 1976 or who lived there, or what sets it apart from the novel's other locations that are equally defined by their street names and little else.  Pelecanos is renowned for writing about the DC you don't see much of in popular culture, the one that extends far beyond Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill, but King Suckerman pursues its geographic precision at the expense of the human detail that could bring that city to life.

That's a shame, because the book has great promise as prose blaxploitation set at blaxploitation's height.  (Pelecanos lavishes enough attention to the city's vanished movie houses that I had to get this book for Christmas.)  He gives us a wonderful description of an invented movie that reads like a surreal cross between Superfly and Bertolt Brecht, and the finale captures something of the freewheeling anarchy of DC on a Fourth of July, but otherwise King Suckerman comes across as less than the sum of its meticulously itemized cinematic, musical, and cartographic influences.

Hard Revolution, written several years later, does a much better job of setting the place without relying on street names.  The book still has a couple of ADC passages ("They walked the east side of Georgia's 6200 block...") but Pelecanos spends more time evoking an even more alien city, DC in early April, 1968, just before and just after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

I may not be the most reliable judge here.  When Pelecanos describes a chop shop in a lonely stretch of cinderblock and gravel in P.G. County, back when the county was home to white bikers instead of upscale black professionals--that's my neighborhood, and I can still see a few garages that might have stood alongside (if not inspired) Pelecanos's locale.  When he records a rally on the steps of Douglass Hall at Howard University--I teach classes there, and I can picture the students filling The Yard.  When he locates Derek Strange's apartment building "on the northeast corner of 13th and Clifton, just above Cardozo High School"--I have been in that building, and I've seen the million-dollar view that keeps Strange there.  (On the Fourth of July, no less, lining my experience up with King Suckerman, whose climax unfolds just on the other side of Meridian Hill Park.)  I can't evaluate the Pelecanos novels with any objectivity because I sit right in the bullseye for their ideal audience.  I can't walk away from DC any more easily than Strange can give up his view.

But the local color serves a purpose in Hard Revolution that it was missing in King Suckerman, possibly because Suckerman was about small-time criminals and Revolution is about police.  Pelecanos cops don't solve crimes through their ability to spot seemingly innocuous details, deduce improbable chains of events, or read a man's life story from the soil tracked on his shoe.  They don't solve crimes through any special knack for getting knocked on the head while shuttling from social caste to social caste either, although you might expect that would be closer to Pelecanos's generic turf.  His detectives, police or private, solve crimes because they are all DC locals who can draw on lifelong professional and social networks to identify and locate their suspects.  Detective work is a matter of diligently checking in with contacts, or making new ones, a social rather than intellectual trade.  In Hard Revolution, a robbery is foiled because a liquor-store employee happens to know one of DC's first black police officers through neighborhood ties; he also, completely by chance, knows Strange's father through the local American Legion post.  (This raises a question you could build another novel around--what the hell was going on in a black American Legion post in 1950s DC?--but that ground is left untrodden.)  In Pelecanos's world all policing is local, and you can't solve or punish a crime if you're not fully at home in the city where it's committed.

The novel has other virtues.  Even non-DC lifers should be able to appreciate Hard Revolution's urgent blending of personal and public history as it chronicles the days (shockingly few) between LBJ's declaration that he would not run for re-election and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  The riots that followed King's assassination were the most significant event to befall DC in the last sixty or seventy years; some neighborhoods still have yet to recover.  Pelecanos smartly intercuts the national and local tragedies with the more personal but equally devastating traumas that befall Derek Strange and his family.  The sprawling, citywide nature of the riots puts his penchant for geographic minutiae to good use, and he chronicles the spreading violence with admirable clarity.  He also identifies those parties most responsible for the local breakdown without passing easy judgment on them; he simply tracks their actions and lets their incompetence or posturing or inability to foresee the consequences speak for themselves.  (Stokely Carmichael does not come off well, nor does the Metropolitan Police Department.  I do wish he showed us the confrontation between Walter Washington and J. Edgar Hoover that he alludes to here--that would have been fantastic.)

Hard Revolution is far from perfect--it has a long, aimless prologue and a formulaic salt-and-pepper cop friendship, neither of which go anywhere--but it becomes a lot more than just another ADC crime novel.  By writing the story of the 1968 riots, Pelecanos has recorded the terrible birth of the modern DC.

Wire Open Thread

Joltin' Jeff McCoskey recently posted these thoughts on The Wire seasons three and four on a dormant comment thread.  His shocking departure from the conventional wisdom on seasons two and three (we're talking Copernicus here) deserves more attention, so here you go.  May they kick off an open thread for any readers who are deep in the pangs of withdrawal.

Not 'cause anyone asked me, but seasons 3 and 4 are now under my belt. Understand all comments forward are on a Wire relative scale, not intended to be used for comparison to say Desperate Housewives.

I ended S3 respecting the thorough thought excercise of Hamsterdam, enjoying Carver's first steps to respectability, McNulty turning on Daniels, the nice (too-nice really, but why not?) Avon-Bell double betrayal, but in the end couldn't stack it above S2. I think Bell poisoned himself in S2 against my sympathy, so while I found his arc intellectually tragic, emotionally I was uninvolved. The new element, politics, was cut off mid-arc to my mind (the election in S4 would have been a tighter structure, though probably not story). I enjoyed the Mayor's agonized deliberation of the pros to Bunny's experiment... but I missed the scenes of wheels moving against each other tightly and inexorably, and did take points off for retrenchment to Barksdale ground already covered. Ultimately it felt like a slight letdown after S2. (Relative scale, remember?)

So S4 just up and blew it all away. The stock central conceit, cresting innocent youth into adulthood, is supercharged here with inner city concerns and premature aging. Each of the 4 kids' character arcs was compelling on its own, so much so that McNulty can rehabilitate himself (becoming a better, more boring, person) and not take anything away. The political angle comes into its own here too -- ending what S3 started. If anything the school system gets shorted in its own season by the compelling character and political drama. Prez gets some nice moments but by and large mouths stock-if-accurate 'why can't we just teach' speeches, and it's still the best use of the character yet. Carver's arc, Carcetti as frustrated crusader ultimately doomed by his own pride if not political ambition, Bunk and Omar... A thoroughly rich backdrop to the intensely engaging Front 4. Who each get a wrenching Sabotka-worthy arc making it, what, 4x S2? Maybe 3.5? The only sour note I could come up with was the neutering of Prop Joe - it becomes more and more difficult to see him as a drug kingpin as easily as he's played by Omar and Marlo. But really? Window dressing.

All the praise I lavished on S2? Quadruple it for S4.

And it is true that the linearity and focus on Barksdale->Bell->Marlo, as well as their intimate connection to Hamsterdam in S3 and the schoolkids in S4 make S2 standout as disconnected (the Greek link only apparant at the end). I still vaguely find that an issue with S1,3,4 rather than 2.

Kind of sad now, actually, with only 1 more season ahead.

Remember, Jeff hasn't seen Season Five, so don't tell him that Marlo hired Kenard to strangle Kima and Cheryl's kid.

I hope to be back in a couple days with a new post looking at two books by Wire writer and Washington, DC novelist George Pelecanos.

I Feel Alright

Not a lot of time for blogging around here.  In addition to the usual end-of-semester crunch, I spent a couple of Saturdays driving up to Lancaster, Pennsylvania to canvass for Barack Obama (after doing some much easier, and tremendously rewarding, local canvassing here in Prince George's County in February).  I wasn't planning to go back up again after mid-April--I was out of town the weekend before last, and classes are wrapping up, and I had an important talk to deliver on Wednesday.  I figured I was entitled to sit one out.

Then I bought Steve Earle's I Feel Alright, one of the first albums Earle made after his release from jail.  The tracks are anthems of survival and defiance and perseverance and continued fuckups, especially the title song (which ran over the montage that ended season two of The Wire).  It's great music for digging deep, picking yourself up, and starting all over again.  It would also be great for throwing away a relationship or starting a fight.

Steve Earle's music, in short, can inspire a man to do stupid things.  I'm just lucky I'm enough of a dork that my fight was to go up to Lancaster one last time to get out the vote for Obama on primary day.  The senator owes Earle for one more day of volunteer labor (with partial credit to David Simon and Ed Burns).

But that's not where this story starts.  It starts about five weeks ago when Christy and I went up to register voters before Pennsylvania's deadline.  It was not a great day. We didn't sign up that many people, and we were almost as likely to register McCain or Clinton supporters as Obama ones.

The McCain guy told us that he'd already met some Clinton people doing the same thing, and they wouldn't register him.  That struck me as a pretty characteristic move from the Clinton campaign:  pugnacious, selfish, and short-sighted.  As one of the local Obama organizers told me, he was happy to register any Clinton leaners as Republicans--since that locked them into the other race in the state's closed primary.

Our reasons for registering McCain and Clinton supporters were a little less cynical.  We couldn't refuse anyone on general principle.  Barack Obama runs his campaign on a community organizing model of voter empowerment, and we took that to mean we should register anybody who wanted to register.  We also hoped that, as representatives of the Obama campaign, our willingness to talk to and sign up anybody might cause people to think better him.  So we registered anybody who asked, even if they said they supported Hillary Clinton.  I'm glad we did, but I drove home that evening wondering if we'd netted more than one or two Obama voters for the day.

Last Tuesday, while I was doing a last-minute canvass in a poorer neighborhood in Lancaster, I ran into one of those Clinton voters I'd registered.  She happened to be the last name on my list, the last voter I contacted after three long shifts; I recognized her, but I don't think she remembered me.

This was a list of identified Obama supporters, and she proudly said that Barack Obama was her guy.  In the past five weeks, she'd switched candidates.  I don't think our registering her had anything to do with that; more likely it was a result of media exposure and Obama's campaigning in the state and the steady work of the local volunteers (who ran a great operation--Obama has the best-organized campaign I've ever seen), and maybe the influence of friends or family.  But if we hadn't signed up that soft Clinton supporter, we would have had one less vote for Obama.

That chance encounter was the perfect way to end my Pennsylvania canvassing, and it took a lot of the sting out of Obama's primary loss.  Even more than seeing him rack up a solid win in Lancaster County--proof that grassroots efforts matter--it was good to see that his method of campaigning and organizing does pay off over the long run.

I hope we get that McCain guy in November.

Who Are These Shadows in My Way?

A quick heads-up for the Alan Moore fans in the house. The Dirtbombs' new album, We Have You Surrounded, features a pounding arrangement of Moore's "Leopardman at C&A," a lighthearted "Lord of the Flies"-ish ditty he originally wrote for Bauhaus. The Dirtbombs are known for their garage-rock covers of soul standards, but this doesn't qualify in any sense; the song was never recorded until now, Bauhaus only counts as "soul" on Bizarro World, and the Dirtbombs brilliantly exploit their two drummers by presenting the song with a primitivist swing that's more reminiscent of Gene Krupa than the Greenhornes.

Another note to comics fans--that's Gary Panter doing the album art.

In a telling sign of comics' growing cachet, "Leopardman at C&A" is the primary talking point for most of the reviews of the new album. It was also the opening number at the Dirtbombs' DC show last Saturday, not that you could tell with the ineptly mixed microphones. I didn't know those were Alan Moore's lyrics until I played the CD the next day.

The show was a blast anyway; if you get a chance to see them, take it. The Dirtbombs are one of the most showmanlike garage acts around, and for all their energy, one of the tightest--at least until the end of the night, when all bets are off. What their DC finale lacked in creativity (nothing will top their show at Nashville's Mercy Lounge back in, oh, 2004 or 2005, which finished with one of the drummers playing his set with one of the bassists--not the bass, the bassist) it more than made up for in general band freakout. I'm sorry to say I left in the middle of the second encore, as the hour-long set was approaching its second hour, when the crazy drummer started ranting about DC go-go and Detroit go-go, but I'm not sorry I stuck around that long. The Dirtbombs are one of the best live acts around, and this show did not disappoint. Just ask the sound manager to check his mikes.