I Am NOT the Beastmaster

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Some reading to tide you over that long, agonizing wait for season five:

First, be sure to check out this New Yorker profile of David Simon, a career-spanning piece that ranges all the way from the DC suburbs to the Baltimore Sun to the last episode of The Wire.  (You'll want to let your eyes glaze over a few potentially spoiler-laden paragraphs.  I certainly did.)  Margaret Talbot clearly knows her Simon--no features writer who was not conversant with The Corner would use "off-brand" as a pejorative.  Added bonus:  the real-life Marimow.

Then head over to this Rolling Stone interview from last year for the hilarious story about how Simon managed to keep the show in Baltimore.  Reads like a lost script page from seasons three or four.

Wrap it up with a nice leisurely read of this extended version of a George Pelecanos interview in the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages.  Pelecanos, a Washington, DC-based crime novelist and Wire writer, fires off the truest, most damning line you never heard in season two:

The dock locations were literally disappearing as we were shooting. There is no working class anymore. The working class is a myth that people use to sell Ford trucks.

Don Draper wishes he could be that hard boiled.

Comics Scholar Denied Entry into USA

Ernesto Priego, a doctoral candidate at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College, London, and a scheduled presenter at this year's International Comic Arts Forum, has been denied entry into the United States of America.  The United States government declined to renew Mr. Priego's visa and has not given any explanation why he will not be allowed in the country.

Mr. Priego's exclusion is part of a recent and disturbing practice of denying entry to foreign scholars, and an infringement on academic freedom in the United States.

I have included Mr. Priego's paper abstract and biography below.

“The Tell-Tale Smell of Burning Paper: ‘Logic of Form’ and the Origin of Comics”

Inspired by Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, this paper discusses the origin of comics through a study of the “logic of form” in comic artists from the 1870s to the 1930s: the departure point being the recognition of a series of formal aspects that could be agreed as essential or definitive of the comics language. Different technological and artistic factors were involved in its development, resulting from the convergence of industrial development in the form of a transformation of printing and distribution techniques, artistic trends, and significative codes employed at the time.

Ernesto Priego, a poet, essayist, translator, and PhD candidate at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College, London, has taught English literature and critical theory at major Mexican universities and published a translation of Jessica Abel's award-winning graphic novel, La Perdida (Astiberri Editores, Spain, 2007) and a first book of poetry, Not Even Dogs (Meritage Press, 2006).

Readers may judge for themselves what sort of security or immigration risk he poses to the American people.

Update:  Tom Spurgeon, Heidi MacDonald, Mike Rhode, Chris Mautner, and the Chronicle of Higher Education cover the story on their blogs.

Advantage: Good!

Batman #669, by Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III

Spoiler warning.

There isn't a lot to say about the script for this final chapter of the Club of Heroes murder mystery that hasn't already been said about the first two parts.  The overstuffed plot and its light but omnipresent themes unfold more or less as expected, everything having already been set up in the previous two issues. All that remains is for the pieces to fall into place, and fall they do, with a rapidfire precision that still leaves room for little surprises like a fistfight in the middle of an impromptu surgery or a final battle complete with jet packs and ejector seats.  The issue is more of the same retro fun, and considering the first two chapters were the best Morrison has produced in his uneven run on Batman, that's no criticism.

But if you're going to review a new-release comic two weeks after it was a new release, you'd damn well better have something to talk about, and the feature that most demands and rewards attention in this comic is the art by J.H. Williams III.  This installment sees the return of Williams' signature device of framing panels with icons representing the superheroes depicted therein; in one especially nice example, El Gaucho's coiled bolas becomes the panel border itself.  I'm surprised Williams kept the icons in reserve this long--perhaps he was saving them for the triumphant finale, a heroic counterpart to the panel-bending intrusions of the Black Glove?  They also constitute a nice, if late clue to one of the killers' identities:  alone among the Batmen of Many Nations and their sidekicks, the Ranger doesn't receive any panel icons until long after he's exposed as the treacherous Wingman, at which point the proper symbol makes its appearance.  If the extradiegetic images could lie last issue, showing us a Wingman who wasn't actually dead, this time they even the scales.

I've read a few comments about the ostensibly cluttered layouts, sometimes with reference to Williams' own comments about his hectic schedule while he drew this issue.  It's a testimony to Williams' skill that I never got any sense that he was rushed.  If the pages were busy (though still perfectly legible), that only suggested the density of information he and Morrison were trying to cram into the final installment of this plot-heavy story.  In a brilliant touch, Williams even distills this overabundance of narrative action (and maybe his own frantic pace) into graphic form, overlaying two plotlines on top of one another as if they were each complete pages jostling for space in a limited field of vision.  He's turned severe time and space constraints into part of his compositions!  By making the art the story, he thrives where many of his peers would have stumbled.

It's a shame he has to move on.  Williams was the perfect artist not just for this arc, but for Morrison's entire history-obsessed run.  Faced with the challenge of writing a character who's been around for nearly seventy years, Morrison's response has not been to wipe the slate clean and replace the past with something new (as a few of the Club of Heroes tried to do, with disastrous results--not the least of which is that their modernizations now look as ridiculously outdated as the older, more genial past they rejected), but to aggregate all of it.  He not only gets to cherry-pick the best elements of each period, he's also generated narrative tension by placing these historical moments in conflict with Batman and with each other.  If earlier issues alternated between periods fast enough to induce whiplash, the Club of Heroes storyline has succeeded by cultivating a simple narrative hook that can accomodate all of them at once--and by placing them in the hands of an artist who can evoke all of them in a single page simply by varying his figure drawing and his line weight.  If the most distinctive feature of Morrison's Batman is its omnivorous attitude towards the past, then Williams is the only artist for it.

That fealty to tradition is common to a lot of Morrison's work--contrary to his reputation among fanboys who were incensed that this Vertigo weirdo dared to take up the proud mantle of Gerard Jones' Justice League, he's always been respectful to his predecessors, and he has a knack for knowing which ones are most worth respecting.  His Doom Patrol was more true to the work of Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani than John Byrne's narrow and lifeless imitation; the same holds for his use of Kirby's Fourth World characters.  But his Batman tops all of them by incorporating all of its predecessors.

Ironically, this respect for tradition may be the thing that's kept Morrison from achieving the same kind of general recognition as the other writers to whom he compares himself incessantly.  He hasn't written that breakout graphic novel that jettisons the burdens of continuity to tell a story that's widely accessible and appealing to an audience that can't tell Monsieur Mallah from B'wana Beast.  Arkham Asylum is the closest he's come, and look how that turned out.

Morrison generally doesn't write graphic novels.  He writes monthly comics, a vanishing art and one he's mastered more than any other current practitioner.  The clever use of tradition is an asset in this art.  So is knowing when not to tie yourself to tradition, the thing--okay, one of many things--that separates Morrison's work from the leaden re-enactments of a Kurt Busiek, bound in their own antecedents like Jacob Marley on Christmas Eve.  But it's been a few years since Morrison has written a standalone work like The Invisibles or The Filth or We3 and I'm beginning to miss the broader ambitions that have come with such projects.  The Club of Heroes story is easily his best Batman, but it isn't his best Grant Morrison.

God in the Time Machine

Astro City: The Dark Age Book Two, by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson

Sometimes the unqualified successes are less rewarding to think or write about than the interesting failures and the near misses.  That's probably why I've devoted so much space to Grant Morrison's Batman (which finally clicked with the right artist), and it's probably why I keep coming back to Astro City.  But with its latest issue, the final chapter of the long-delayed Book Two of The Dark Age, Astro City may have finally crossed that invisible but all-important line that separates the interesting failures from the merely frustrating ones.

The final issue of Book Two doesn't devote nearly enough space to the bitter falling out between Street Angel and Black Velvet.  It's the plotline that rose to the highest emotional pitch, received the most buildup in Book Two, and most fulfilled its tone of corruption and betrayal.  It also had the best antecedent, owing more than a little to the classic Daredevil/Elektra story but not limiting itself to a replay of the original.  This image certainly seems designed to evoke that climactic scene in which Bullseye stabs Elektra (it would evoke it better if the villain character weren't such an awful design, and the dialogue so atrociously stagy, but more on those later):

Book Two could have built to a climax that captured some of Miller's pathos instead of just trading on our recognition of his iconic scenes, but the comic is continually hijacked by discordant elements of the supernatural--an artificially induced riot (when the previous issue had already set up a wave of crime and looting through perfectly normal causes), a giant demon, a mystical artifact, and a supercharged time traveler who literally wanders in from another storyline.  Street Angel becomes a bystander in his own story, his apperance reduced to just four panels.  But then, Astro City has always been too invested in its bystanders.

The Dark Age has been torn between the kind of comics Busiek clearly loved to read in the 1970s and wants to honor, and the kind of stories he's been most lauded for writing.  The narrative is always breaking out into other dimensions or outer space, yearning to tell stories in the Gerber/Englehart/Starlin mold, and then drifting back to the mundane concerns of its mortal protagonists, Charles and Royal Williams, or the slightly less mundane problems of the street-level vigilantes who have filled most of the backgrounds  in Book Two.  Seventies Marvel could manage these contrasts by distributing them across an entire line of comics; Astro City tries to cram them all into one title.  The result is a book that cannot satisfy any of its conflicting impulses.

Virtually all of the dialogue is expository, as if Busiek doesn't have time to show us anything, yet most of it exposits things we don't really need to know, like the backstory of the utterly superfluous character Hellhound:  "Hold it in, soldier!  The old man taught you!  Use the trapping spell!  Hold it in, hold it --"  That comes awfully close to being another entry in this list, but it isn't nearly as bad as the next panel, in which a news helicopter reporter describes Hellhound's transformation into a demonic giant.  Perhaps Mr. Busiek forgets that we, unlike the reporter's listeners, can actually see the panel he is describing.  His top dramatic priorities are always telling us what we're reading and giving us information about the backwaters of Astro City continuity, no matter what they edge out.

This has often been a problem in Busiek's comics.  Sometimes his Avengers run was more interested in codifying Marvel continuity than adding to it, and his Superman run has been so preoccupied with showing us characters' reactions to a world-ending threat that he hasn't gotten around to starting the threat yet.  He routinely neglects his plotting in the interest of showing us lots of fragments of a bigger picture, the better to situate his stories within a larger universe.  But this tendency is most frustrating in Astro City, where Busiek controls the entire universe and doesn't need to dole out all the pieces at once.  I wonder if The Dark Age would have been more effective if he'd separated out its constituent genres into different arcs, given us one fully-developed cosmic adventure story, one tale of gang violence and urban vigilantes, one cynical, politically relevant journey to the heart of America, and, because I'm writing this sentence, one story in which an ensemble cast of jive-speaking ethnic stereotypes unites to foil the epic machinations of a late Victorian supervillain.  Busiek tries to combine all these story types (except the last one, damn him) not just in the same arcs but in the same issues, producing comics so desperate to replicate all the tropes of 1970s Marvel Comics that they don't have time to do anything with them.

The genre mix can be effective at times.  Busiek crafts a visually appealing end to Black Velvet's tale--not coincidentally in one of the few pages where he zips it and lets the art tell the story--by wheeling in the magically empowered Silver Agent to stop her, not with sais and billy clubs, but with some nicely rendered pyrotechnics.  But he pays for it by bumping the Street Angel down to a weepy spectator who can only gape at the deus ex machina ending.  Busiek gains an incremental advancement in the protracted Silver Agent plot (now running for nearly two and a half years) at the expense of any payoff for the hero we've been following the last three issues (which ran over a comparatively sprightly ten months).

Also, I don't know if the depiction of the people of Astro City, who are overjoyed when a nostalgized hero from the past saves them and fixes all their problems, is meant to suggest something about the politics of the late seventies--it would be clever if it were, the first time the series has said something less than wholly obvious about its setting.  But I get the feeling we're supposed to take the Silver Agent's reassurances only at face value, as proof of his valor and the citizens' rediscovered loyalty and the book's long-running nostalgicore thematics.  For a book that's all about the past, The Dark Age doesn't have much of a sense of period or place; except for a couple of characters with sideburns, nothing in Book Two locates the story in the seventies.  Even the riot and the final issue's title, "Saturday Night Fever," feel wasted, like the comic is just going through the motions.

Brent Anderson's art remains a huge problem.  Except for the aforementioned page with the Silver Agent and Black Velvet, his action scenes are lifeless; anatomies are stiff or contorted; character designs are overwrought or uninspired, or both; backgrounds are under-rendered, if they're present at all.  This fight scene looks like it was composed with Colorforms.  (Or would that be Cray-o-forms?  And what happened to the bar's interior?)

I can't speculate on the reasons for the long delays between issues of Astro City, but if it's Anderson's art, the end result is no longer worth the wait.

Character design is still one of the book's greatest deficiencies.  You can immediately spot the Alex Ross-designed characters because they possess a trace of the mystery or grandeur of the iconic characters they're meant to evoke.  The others just muddle through the background, hoping we won't notice they're all composed from the same limited repetoire of quirks.  Somebody, either Busiek or Anderson, has a weird predilection for mashup characters who fuse two aspects into one body.  This issue alone sports Umbra, the Astro City Irregular who's partially bathed in shadow, and Jitterjack, the handsome customer up above who teaches us that combining two boring character designs does not yield one interesting one.  Not to mention all the characters like Black Velvet or Hellhound who contain internal dualisms, less graphic but equally cliched--Jitterjack even points out the similarity in his broken dialogue, because, again, why would Busiek show us something when he can tell us? 

Maybe all these dualistic characters are meant to draw on venerable superhero conventions, or maybe they're supposed to convey some signal theme for this arc.  But as I read the latest issue I could only interpret them as unintended but all too appropriate symbols for The Dark Age:  they try to compress too much into one figure, and end up with nothing.