I Am NOT the Beastmaster

The Institute for Korvac Studies presents: The Man Behind the Man-God

Too often, the general public misapprehends the lonely work of the comics scholar.  It's not always about trying to decode the semiotics of the sweat bead or the ironic off-panel flop.  We do not all toil in the aesthetic dead-ends of autobiography, realistic fiction, comics journalism, or graphic novels about funny animals who exterminate each other in death camps.  To better reflect the totality of comics scholarship—and, if I may, its intellectual peak—I present the following transcript of a lecture I delivered at a special session held at the annual conference of the Popular Culture Association on April 6, 2007:

Ladies and gentlemen, comics scholarship stands at a crossroads. Since the infamous “culture wars” of the early 90s, comics studies has shown an increasing tendency to accept scholarly work on embarrassingly demotic subjects. The consequences may have seemed innocuous enough at first—a paper on Deathlok here, an article on Ultron there, a critical exegesis on the Biblical significance of the Living Monolith—but soon, the gates were thrown wide open to research on HERBIE the Robot, or Arnim Zola, the Bio-Fanatic, or, of course, MODOK. Enough is enough, gentlemen—we will have no more of your MODOKery. If comics studies is to remain the respectable field it has become, it must continue to focus on the finest stories, the simple, moving, human stories about a man who has replaced the lower half of his body with a cybernetic dreidel.

I refer, of course, to Korvac.  The Institute for Korvac Studies is long overdue for a return to the text itself, to the Korvac canon, and it must take up the challenge it has so far avoided, the challenge too many Korvacologists are afraid even to mention: the question of Korvac’s authorship. 

Since a work of literature’s meaning is completely determined by its author, we cannot understand the Korvac saga without first knowing who that author is.

For decades, readers and scholars have been content to accept the conventional Pittsburghian narrative in which the Korvac saga is written by a Pennsylvania native named Jim Shooter. Since the early 1980s, however, a countertradition in Korvac studies has sought to question this narrowminded orthodoxy, uncovering copious reasons to question Shooter’s authorship or, indeed, his very existence.

The anti-Pittsburghian thesis is based on upon the simple observation of a strange confluence of improbabilities. The Korvac saga bears a mysterious abundance of authors, scripters, and artists, but one name stands out among the crowd. Jim Shooter, supposedly a humble Marvel Comics author, is also listed as the series editor and then, suddenly, as Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief. Is it possible that this scheming executive, ascending the corporate ranks with Machiavellian upward mobility, could also have the time to write a masterpiece of the comics form? Or is it more likely that he simply stamped his name on the work of a toadying underling—a young English boy, perhaps, eager to break into the world of Marvel Comics?

Or is it still more likely that “Jim Shooter” was not an author at all, but rather a composite identity shared by some of comics’ most famous talents? Why does Shooter—or should I say, “Shooter”—bear such a striking resemblance to character actor Carlos Jacott, best known as “Ramon the Pool Boy” from TV’s Seinfeld?

And how are we to account for “Shooter”’s lengthy career working for DC, Marvel, Valiant, Defiant, and Broadway over a thirty-year period? Given the scant biographical information available on him, this resumé means “Shooter” would have had to start writing comics at age 14—a clear impossibility! Could a 14 year old have experienced enough life to imagine the nobility of Ferro Lad sacrificing himself by flying into the Sun-Eater? Could a mere teenager have imagined the unrequited love of Duo Damsel? Could he have felt the betrayal of Superboy being kicked in the groin by his own super-pet?

I think not. The adventures of the Legion of Super-Heroes, to say nothing of the Korvac saga, are the work of a mature artistic sensibility and could not possibly be the work of some plebian teenager from the wilds of western Pennsylvania, and those who say otherwise are elitists who simply cannot accept that all great art is produced by the social elite.

Also calling Shooter’s authorship into question are the almost folkloric tales of his tremendous height.

According to Marvel writer and artist Bob Layton, Shooter was “meaner than a work for hire contract and taller than a stack of stolen art,” an “ornery polecat” who “used a giant redwood to scratch his ass.” However, this account is not completely reliable as Layton was himself a quasi-legendary figure, reputed to be radioactive.

If Jim Shooter did not exist, then which of the authors who adopted his name wrote the Korvac saga? Theories range from Steve Gerber to Alan Moore to Francis Bacon. But I believe only one author has attained the wisdom, the depth of experience, the insight, and the immaculate pedigree to be considered the creator of Korvac.

As every comics scholar agrees, comics can achieve dignity only if we consider them as a modern mythology.  Neil Gaiman writes the best mythological comics, and the Korvac saga is the best comic bar none: therefore Gaiman wrote the Korvac saga. QED.

Some commentators, most notably “Doctor” Gene Kannenberg, Jr.—

seen here abusing some poor piece of innocent comic art, no doubt—have suggested that Gaiman cannot be the author because he was only 18 when the Korvac saga was published. To that my response is threefold:

First, as a boy of Jewish origins raised by Scientologists and sent to Anglican schools, Gaiman would have had the life experience necessary to explore the themes of anti-Semitism I have already elucidated in my almost-award-winning essay, “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel, I Made You Out of Hate: Korvac as Self-Loathing Jew.” Secondly, Gaiman writes comics about Shakespeare and is therefore smarter and better than everybody else. Finally, as an Englishman and a lineal descendant of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, Gaiman is the only comics author with the breeding and, therefore, the intellectual and emotional range to create a work of such sublime, subtle beauty as the battle between the Collector and Korvac.

But we cannot leave this subject without considering a final possibility: that the author of the Korvac saga is none other than the machine-god himself, Michael Korvac, reaching into our reality to inspire an 18 year old Neil Gaiman to chronicle his story under the pseudonym “Jim Shooter.” As no evidence has yet been offered to disprove this thesis, I think we can say it is as valid as any other and deserves equal consideration in the field of Korvac authorship studies.

This does raise, of course, a profound theological question: can Korvac write a story in which Korvac dies? One thing is certain—our world has become filled with so much tragedy and hatred since 1978, clear proof that Korvac is dead. But as the great Voltaire once said, Si Korvac n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer:

“If Korvac did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”   Of course, he said that while working on an early draft of the Korvac saga. Thank you.

Thank You, Matt Fraction

...for inspiring me to buy this:

The Doom Patrol Archives vol. 1, by Arnold Drake, Bob Haney, and Bruno Premiani

For all the comparisons that have been made between the contemporaneous debuts of the Doom Patrol and the X-Men, the Doom Patrol really read like a slightly skewed take on the Fantastic Four.  The "World's Strangest Heroes" are the product of a couple of polished DC craftsmen trying to loosen up and capture the Lee/Kirby feel with the requisite aloof scientist leader, hotheaded flyboy, beautiful girl, and cranky, self-pitying guy trapped in a monstrous body.  It's a dynamic that Grant Morrison grasped in his Kirby tribute issue of Doom Patrol, one of many reminders of just how true Morrison and Case (or in that case, Ken Steacy) were to the spirit of the original.  Arnold Drake may not have matched Stan Lee's knack for irreverent dialogue, and Bruno Premiani certainly couldn't duplicate Jack Kirby's kinetic compositions.  But they more than made up for any failures to mimic the Mighty Marvel Manner with a surreal imagery that was all their own.

At first glance Premiani's figures appear to have the stiff banality characteristic of a lot of Silver Age DC art, although he frequently inks them in ominous shadows that give his work an almost photographic realism no matter how outré the subject matter.  Both features play well against the weird menaces and unsuppressed tensions that are always erupting into the Doom Patrol's world.  The shadows give the tension visual expression; the banality gives the weirdness definition and contrast.  This panel is both a hyper-real horror and a Pop Art masterpiece:

That image is courtesy of Matt Fraction.  His tribute to Drake and Premiani might look like one of the just-add-captions scanfests that make the comics blogosphere go 'round, but it's actually a treatise in pictorial disguise.  Fraction identifies the recurring motifs that give the Doom Patrol its dreamlike appeal, maybe because if you read through every issue of Doom Patrol your only options are to come up with a thesis or go insane.  Fraction saves his sanity by latching onto the recurring body trauma that twists and distorts nearly every character.  It's no wonder Morrison loved the Doom Patrol, who are perfectly designed for embodied anxieties and fantastic adventures. Rita allows for dramatic variations in scale; Cliff affords endless opportunities to mutilate, dismember, and destroy the human form.  Larry?  Larry's just weird.

The first couple of stories haven't quite risen to the polymorphic madness Fraction's scans promise, but then I haven't gotten to this issue yet:

After the Revolution

(or, "I'm Just Wild About Harry")

Heart of Empire: The Legacy of Luther Arkwright, by Bryan Talbot

I couldn't wait for Dark Horse to roll out its new printing; when I saw this sequel to The Adventures of Luther Arkwright on sale at the local comic store I knew I had to have it then.  I'm not disappointed. Heart of Empire changes a number of elements from its predecessor but retains its inventive historical pastiche, its addictive pacing, and its freewheeling narrative sprawl.

The most immediate difference is the art.  Talbot has traded in the black and white cross-hatching, the textual collage, the tonal inks, and the shifting visual styles of Luther Arkwright for the full-color, clear-lined style he developed for The Tale of One Bad Rat.  With the use of thick black lines to set the characters apart from the backgrounds and each other, Heart of Empire sometimes resembles a Dover coloring book that's already been filled in--beautifully so by Angus McKie, who sets the mood by allowing key colors to dominate each scene.  The browns and yellows of the Alsatia rookery play off against the blues and lavenders of sterile, utopian Zero Zero, leading into the oranges and reds of the sex scene and finally the gold of a London dawn.

In this interview for ImageText, Talbot says he wasn't interested in repeating his twenty-year-old style, which is understandable.  His figure drawing is vastly improved over his early work, especially his faces, and the book is beautiful to look at.  Heart of Empire trades the restless innovation and boundless energy of a young artist for the polish of a master craftsman, a transformation that reflects the story's changed setting--the revolutionaries of Arkwright now command an empire that has just reached its apex, although nobody knows that yet.

The story delivers on the sinister promise of the final pages of Arkwright, reminding us that sometimes the new boss isn't much better than the old.  The Puritans have been defeated--although counter-revolutionary "Futurists" are skulking about in thirties trenchcoats and Oswald Mosley's old thunderbolt logo--and Arkwright's former lover Anne presides over an England that combines the sexual licentiousness of the Restoration with the imperial reach of Victoria.  With a renaissance in art, architecture, and industrial design (albeit of the gaudiest variety) underway, Anne's England looks better than Cromwell's at first glance, but we don't have to read far to see that it's built on class, racial, and imperial exploitation.

Sometimes, in fact, Talbot oversells the corruption.  I find it hard to believe that, in a world where social values don't seem to have advanced beyond the nineteenth century, England, even an England dominated by such Tory sensibilities, would be less progressive on race than America, yet one of the first stops on Hiram Kowolsky's sightseeing tour is a slave market in the heart of London.  Victorian England presents enough real inequalities that Talbot shouldn't have to depart so far from his historical template; I suspect the visual of slaves on the coffle proved too tempting a shorthand.

He otherwise nails the period feel, which is oddly impressive in a comic that conjures every era from the Restoration to the forties, with a couple of visions of the near future thrown in to boot.  It would appear that Talbot is fascinated by every period except the span of his own life, a suspicion confirmed by the alternate-universe biography that opens the collection, which mixes artfully scratched photos of Talbot and his wife in Victorian clothing with wonderful and bizarre details from Talbot's other life ("He subsequently relinquished his command and returned to Blighty, there to take up painting in oils and practice as a consulting detective for ten years").  The world of Heart of Empire is no less fully realized.  I'm particularly fond of this bit of cant from a pre-Raphaelite artist and would-be revolutionary who is utterly convinced of her own radicalism:

We espouse pacifism, humanity, racial and sexual equality and free love!  You would call us libertines!  Do we not shock you?

All of the revolutionaries in Heart of Empire are would-bes, another sign of how much England has changed from the civil war of the eighties. When revolution inevitably breaks out it almost happens in spite of them.

Talbot offers new characters like Princess Victoria and Gabriel Shelley (obviously Arkwright's bastard and Victoria's half-brother--ewww) and old favorites like Hiram Kowolsky, still a proud graduate of the Ben Urich School of Hard-Bitten Journalist Fashion Sense.  I would have liked to see Harry Fairfax in better (i.e., new and different) circumstances, as a rake who's in the process of dissipating his fortune and his health rather than one who's already extinguished them; that would have given Talbot an excuse for some suitably Hogarthian tableaux.  But it's hard to begrudge him for recasting Harry in the role where he works best, as a filthy reminder of all the earthly pleasures and frailties that the more ethereal characters are always in danger of forgetting.  No one has forgotten them more than Luther Arkwright himself, and once he's reunited with Harry the book regains some of its predecessor's hectic energy.

Earthly and spiritual, body and soul, sacred and profane:  Heart of Empire gets the balance right, yet it never quite recaptures that old Arkwright magic.  The stakes are too low.  Heart of Empire doesn't try to imply an entire world, barely leaving London but for a few ventures out into the multiverse.  The historical pastiche is as playful as ever, but it's drawing on fewer sources.  Even the social unrest that unfolds at the climax is smaller than the war that toppled Cromwell--too small, I'm afraid, for the number of plot elements Talbot feeds into it.  The book doesn't attempt anything like Arkwright's multiple narrative timelines or its brilliantly executed ordeal of death and transcendence.

Apparently I'll take youthful bravado over mature composure.  Heart of Empire is an entertaining sequel and a beautiful visual object, but it leaves me, like its characters, looking back to the heroic revolutionaries of the last generation.

Clowns at Midnight

Batman #663, by Grant Morrison and John Van Fleet

That cover could not be less representative of the book it masks.  Behind this pedestrian Andy Kubert image lies a strange mishmash of computer-generated art and overcooked prose, ill-fitting midwives for an abortive rebirth of the Joker.  Everything about this comic is slightly off-kilter and yet oddly appropriate for its schizophrenic subject, except for the faux hard-boiled narration, which is just bad.  Jog already culled the worst offenders, so I humbly nominate "Gotham City [...] Where crime swaps spit with high society and everything's for sale."  I hope they print that on the signs leading into town, right above "Hamilton Hill, Mayor."

Underneath the purple prose and plasticine computer graphics there's a sturdy if standard mystery plot about the Joker killing off his old henchmen to mark the birth of a new self.  That hook gives Morrison an excuse to rifle through the comic's history, including a couple of references to The Killing Joke and maybe even a wink at Frank Miller's "goddamn Batman," although this time the criticism is pretty much nonexistent.  The Batman stories that most influence this issue (besides Morrison's own Arkham Asylum) come from the 1970s:  the prose format evokes Denny O'Neil and Marshall Rogers' "Death Strikes at Midnight and Three," while the shtick of the Joker killing his own henchmen comes straight from "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge," the Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams classic that recast the Joker as a vicious murderer for the first time since the early forties.  That story fixed the role that he has been playing, with madly escalating body counts, ever since.

Instead of breaking out of that paradigm, "The Clown at Midnight" looks for a new way to present the same old homicidal Joker.  Morrison reintroduces and attempts to canonize his Arkham Asylum interpretation of the mutable multiple-personality Joker who burns through "superpersonas" like a Vegas dealer runs through decks of cards.  (Speaking of which, wouldn't it be awesome if Harley Quinn were not the obviously pseudonymous "Dr. Harleen Quinzel," but Dr. Ruth Adams, the woman who diagnosed Joker's "super-sanity" before becoming a killer herself at the end of Arkham Asylum?  No?  It's just me, then?)  It's a clever idea that explains and incorporates the Joker's many radical changes over his sixty-seven-year history, but that's a thesis, not a story.  Except for a couple of note-perfect taglines like "the Thin White Duke of Death"--pinning the Joker to another noted aesthete's penchant for reinvention--Morrison hasn't shown us what the Joker's going to become next.

For all that, the Joker's rebirthing sequence is arresting.  He runs through his own best lines from Batman #1 to Arkham Asylum, rolls all his history up into a ball and primes us to watch him jump outside it--but then, all the Joker scenes work; the overheated writing and hyperreal/hyperfake art finally make sense as representations of how the "21st-century big-time multiplex man" sees the world.  Ideally the story should have been split into two modes or even two separate issues--a conventional comic showing Batman's investigation of Five-Way Revenge 2007 and a prose/computer art look at the newest Joker.

But what is the newest Joker?  Just before his rebirth, the Joker watches a bank of television screens, searching for inspiration.  "What face, he wonders, will the bogeyman of this dark century wear?"

The answer seems to be something lifted from J-horror, mutilated and unsettling and tremendously brutal.  But the Joker's been playing that card for more than thirty years now, while the rest of our culture has caught up and finally surpassed him.  How do you become a bogeyman for a society that celebrates torturers?  Our bogeymen are faceless, anonymous--everybody is a potential killer, which means everybody is a potential victim except the hero cop holding the alligator clips.  Where's the room for an old showman like the Thin White Duke of Death?  Is it time for him to join the ashheap of villainy alongside mustache-twirling landlords and Nehru-jacketed nuclear blackmailers?  How can his old routine become fresh again?

If Grant Morrison knows, he isn't telling.

Dark Ages

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

Astro City has always been most effective at implying stories it never has to tell.

By that standard, a double-page spread in Astro City: The Dark Age Book Two #2 is the purest Astro City storytelling we've seen in a while, as a desk covered with police reports brings us up to speed on the city's heroes and villains of the seventies.  Busiek's knack for conjuring fully-grown comic book continuities from an economy of detail is on full display.  Take for instance the character of Bamboo, who combines a vintage Dragon Lady stereotype with a strong dose of Talia, right down to her supervillain father and her rumored romance with the Black Rapier.  Any reader who knows the comics Busiek is referencing can immediately fill in the character's entire publication history (the Black Rapier's bare-chested duel with Bamboo's father on the steppes of Central Asia in 1971, her brief flirtation with the side of good in the early eighties, her sudden relapse after a brutal brainwashing at the hands of one of her father's lieutentants, the child she bears the Black Rapier in an out-of-continuity prestige format graphic novel in 1987, recently brought back into the regular title by a hot writer following a bloody and self-righteous universe-wide continuity reset)--therein lies Astro City's genius and its greatest flaw.  Because the histories we tell ourselves, poor patchworks of comics past though they are, will almost always be more satisfying than the rare ones Astro City chooses to show us.

That may be what's holding back Astro City: The Dark Age, Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's exploration of the Astro City and, by extension, the superhero comics of the 1970s.  Since the second Astro City issue was released back in 1995, the franchise has invested no story with more significance than the fate of the "poor, doomed Silver Agent," betrayed by the people he served to their eternal shame.  When Busiek and Anderson finally revealed that fate in the first book of The Dark Age, the anticipation had been building for a decade.  Maybe any story would have been hard-pressed to live up to those expectations, but the one they provided fell far short.

The early stages of the plot were an unusually faithful point-by-point retelling of a single story, Steve Englehart and Mike Friedrich's Captain America/Committee to Regain America's Principles/Secret Empire/Richard Nixon shoots himself in the head extravaganza.  The narrowing of inspiration worked against Astro City's normal pastiche of comic book continuity--if you can even have a pastiche when you're working from a single source.  When it was faithful to that source, the Silver Agent's tragedy was nothing more, could be nothing more, than a replay of one of the mustier stories from the seventies; when it finally deviated from that script, it ended up as something far less.  Busiek presented a Silver Agent who passively accepted his fate, who went to his execution without complaint even though he had to know he'd been manipulated.  Yet Busiek allowed us no access to his motivations--the real story--because The Dark Age was filtered through the worm's-eye bystander viewpoint that has been Busiek's specialty since Marvels.  (It's worth noting that The Dark Age's focus on two brothers, one a cop and one a criminal, had its origins in a projected Marvels sequel.)  Charles' and Royal's story is not without interest--by Book Two they seem to have stepped into a seventies cinema of mob wars and crooked cops--but Book One's focus on their grudges with superheroes felt like a distraction from the greater dramatic potential of the Silver Agent story.

(I should add that The Dark Age is scheduled to run through four books of four issues apiece and it's only halfway through the second one.  It's possible that later books will address this glaring omission and clue us into the Silver Agent's final hours.  Then again, Book One of The Dark Age wrapped up a year and a half ago and we've only seen three issues of Astro City since then.  We won't see for the next one for at least two months.  If the series keeps to its present schedule we'll be lucky if The Dark Age wraps up before 2010.  That tests the limits of reader patience and trust; if the book is going to come out at such a sluggish pace then it has to offer closure in smaller doses, and each book has to tell a complete story on its own.)

To its credit, The Dark Age aspires to be more than just another self-aware comic book, connecting its genre commentary to the larger cultural malaise of the seventies.  Astro City's superheroes change from friendly authority figures and wisecracking daredevils into angry outlaws and grim vigilantes at the very moment when the American people lose faith in their leaders after Vietnam and Watergate.  These trends complement each other beautifully, yet the book merely connects them without attempting any further exploration: neither one says anything all that new or perceptive about the seventies.  The result is a story whose meaning feels as predetermined as its end.

Even the craftsmanship fails to meet the usual Astro City standard, especially in the area of character design.  Meet the Apollo Eleven:

They have a great name, but it commits their designer to about four characters too many;  several of the Eleven would simply never be superheroes as they are rendered here.  The little green guy with the big head might make a corny Mxyzptlk-type pest, and the furball could be a comic relief animal sidekick from a particularly dismal Saturday morning cartoon, but the brain-and-tentacles thing couldn't be anything more than a villain--and a quickly forgotten one at that--while the tall, stretchy Gray is too Whitley Streiber, an invader from another genre and medium entirely.  If this seems like a minor complaint, consider that the aesthetic keystone of Astro City has always been its posture as a comic book from a real, decades-old continuity you never read until now.  The Apollo Eleven are too weird and inhuman to achieve even the fleeting career of the Guardians of the Galaxy, and their appearances only remind us that the pastiches of Astro City aren't quite as spot-on as they used to be.

Other characters don't even get the cool names.  I suppose "Energy" Brown could be trying for a Cleopatra Jones vibe, if it were trying at all; it doesn't help that as Anderson's drawn her, you can barely tell she's female--I had to check against her police dossier.  Meanwhile, small-time crook Joey Platypus wouldn't even make the grade as a Dick Tracy villain.  This is probably deliberate, the weak design suggesting their low position in the hierarchy of comics characters:  they have about as much visual distinction as Boss Morgan or Cockroach Hamilton, and about as much import.  But there's something trivial and pointless about a comic filled with characters that advertise their own irrelevance--and not as comedy, a la the hilarious "Buck Wild" parody in Milestone's Icon, but as some elegiac letter to the comics of the author's youth.

And not, I'm surprised to say, a love letter.  Unlike Buck Wild or the Silver Age pastiches of Alan Moore's Supreme, The Dark Age hasn't yet shown us why its source material is worth reproducing.  The Bronze Age of the 1970s is a fascinating stage in the history of superhero comics, when the mad rush of invention and reinvigoration of the Silver Age gave way to a consolidation of what came before, when industry changes put the fans in charge of the comics, when market changes sent the companies running to new genres, when the turbulent politics of the times appeared directly on the comics page.  It's the period that laid the building blocks for the artistic revolutions of the eighties and beyond.  It's the period that produced some of my favorite comics, not just the ones I remember from the cozy, unreflective fog of childhood but the ones I discovered or rediscovered as an adult, and obviously it produced some of Kurt Busiek's favorites too.  But the Dark Age has yet to capture most of that.

It has replicated one feature of the early Bronze Age:  the way its much-referenced superhero epics will often disappoint you when you finally read them.  I have spent most of my life reading Marvel comics that alluded to the Captain America/Committee to Regain America's Principles/Secret Empire/Richard Nixon shoots himself in the head extravaganza, but I'd never read the story until last month.  That was when I realized all those tantalizing flashbacks and footnotes had the luxury of pointing right to the money shot, Nixon blowing his brains out, and its aftermath, Cap's obligatory 1970s Journey to Find Himself, not the eight months of maundering plotlines and wild coincidences and utterly absurd master plans that preceded them.  References to the Celestial Madonna story always showed the sublimely bizarre double wedding at its finale, not the tedious origin of the Vision or the weak Don Heck art.  These are quintessentially seventies stories, rooted in the mythology of the Marvel universe yet lacking both the wild energy of what came before and technical polish of what came after.  They are the awkward adolescence of a genre, which perhaps explains why they make such excellent objects for nostalgia, but adolescence is something you only want to live through once.

The seventies won't always let you down.  Jim Starlin's Thanos stuff holds up surprisingly well, and the ensemble-cast comics like Tomb of Dracula or, especially, The Deadly Hands of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu are some of the high points of the decade.  But these tend to be the comics that strayed farthest from Silver Age superheroics.  The Dark Age nods towards the seventies' forays into science fiction with its two-page recaps of cosmic epics, transparent stand-ins for the work of Starlin, Englehart, and Steve Gerber, but it never quite embraces the decade's genre diversity--Astro City's gallery of urban vigilantes extends only so far as Luke Cage and the Punisher.  Busiek's retelling of the Bronze Age hasn't strayed far from superheroes or from Marvel continuity and it's that age's lumbering continuity behemoths that disappoint most, bound to a past they can neither escape nor equal.

Busiek, a writer of considerable talent and craft, is all too able to equal the past that inspires him, but he looks back to a time that was already looking backwards.  The Dark Age, like Bronze Age it simulates and emulates, has high ambitions but gets dragged down by the weight of its antecedents.  The copy is too perfect.

Legends of the Status Quo

Daredevil #93, by Ed Brubaker, Michael Lark, and Stefano Gaudiano
Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #214, by Christos N. Gage and Phil Winslade

Last February I worried that Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark's then-nascent run on Daredevil would have no goal other than reverting the comic to its pre-Brian Michael Bendis status quo, restoring Matt Murdock's secret identity and slotting all the characters back into their familiar roles.  One year later, they appear to have done just that.  The restoration was inevitable, and I suppose handled more elegantly than most--nobody had to "punch through time"--but it still casts the past twelve months of comics as nothing more than a long, generally well-written exercise in trademark maintenance.

Brubaker, Lark, and Stefano Gaudiano did include some interesting feints and detours along the way.  The recently-concluded arc flirted with casting Daredevil in a dashing, globe-trotting mode not too far removed from the character's old sixties swashbuckler persona, even renovating no less lame a villain from that era than the Matador.  But within a couple of months Murdock was back to dangling criminals off rooftops and brooding in the rain; the only thing to distinguish Paris from New York was the replacement of his usual cornice with a gargoyle, and even that could have come off the Gotham City back lot.  Now Daredevil is back in Hell's Kitchen, the Kingpin is free, and everything new is old again.

I have to give the team credit for taking longer than I expected--six months longer, which these days is just a single storyline--but they still ended up at exactly the same place we all knew they were going.  Worse yet, with a year of comics behind them, they still haven't shown us their version of Daredevil--only what he was and inevitably will be again.

Their storyline leaves me with a lot more respect for comics like Christos N. Gage's one-shot Deadshot tale in the latest (and last) issue of Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, which doesn't even try to tinker with the character's status quo.  And why bother?  It's Batman, whose character traits are even more rigidly prescribed by public familiarity and profit potential than Daredevil's.

Fortunately, Batman inhabits a broader range of story types than Daredevil.  Gage builds a plot around his fundamentally unalterable protagonist by resurrecting a venerable story type that's been neglected in recent decades, confronting Batman with a puzzle.  The caped crusader has to work out how to handle a threat who's legally untouchable, isn't afraid of him, and scares other criminals more than he does.  The solution is so simple I can't believe it hasn't been done before, but Batman's bit of knot-cutting displays the keen analytical mind that used to be his chief character trait before hypercompetence and irritability took over.  This is the kind of story Paul Dini should be producing every month over in Detective Comics (which also makes no claims to reinvent the character but still falls short of its promise more often than not).

Gage is aided by Phil Winslade's dense but expertly modulated page compositions; Winslade works with a five-by-five-panel grid, subject to countless expansions and variations, that conveys in a single issue what many a lesser team would stretch out over two or three months.  The story also benefits from Gage's familiarity with Deadshot, the semi-popular antihero he wrote a miniseries for two years ago.  Here, as there, Gage bends over backwards to let us know he's writing the Deadshot from John Ostrander's Suicide Squad, which is just fine by me and sits well with the story's preference for consistency over originality.

This comic doesn't aspire to high art, but then neither does Daredevil.  Both are tasked with keeping their properties recognizable, but one presents us with the illusion of change even as it undoes its own best changes, while the other accepts its constraints and works to tell an entertaining story within them.  Solid, well-made, unassuming comics like Gage and Winslade's used to be the norm for DC and Marvel. Now they're the exception--so uncommon, they almost feel original.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, by Bryan Talbot

There have been great American artists who have worked beyond the public's ability to understand them easily, but none who have condescended to the public--none who have not hoped, no matter how secretly, that their work would lift America to heaven, or drive a stake through its heart.  This is a democratic desire (not completely unrelated to the all-time number one democratic desire for endless wealth and fame), and at its best an impulse to wholeness, an attempt not to deny diversity, or to hide from it, but to discover what it is that diverse people can authentically share.  It is a desire of the artist to remake America on his or her own terms.

[...]

The inability of the vital American artist to be satisfied with a cult audience, no matter how attentive, goes right back to the instinctive perception that whatever else America might be, it is basically big; that unless you are doing something big, you are not doing anything at all.

--Greil Marcus, from "Randy Newman: Every Man is Free"

If I have to disagree with Marcus anywhere, it's the American.  British popular culture, and I suspect any modern mass culture, overspills with artists who sought to remake their country by incorporating all its diverse people and history into their work.  If Marcus can step around the obvious example of the Beatles by saying, through Leslie Fiedler, that they are "imaginary Americans," then so are Alan Moore and Michael Moorcock and Bryan Talbot.

That would be a strange honorific to bestow on a work as undeniably English as The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, Talbot's much-loved and highly influential graphic novel, newly reissued from Dark Horse.  First serialized in Near Myths back in 1978 and not completed for more than a decade, the story concerns a life-or-death struggle between two dimension-spanning superpowers, the utopian technocrats of Zero Zero and the sinister Disruptors, mostly played out in a parallel England that combines the Puritan Protectorate with the fascist 1930s.  When Zero Zero agent Luther Arkwright, your run of the mill albino dandy messiah assassin, stirs up a Royalist counter-revolution, the English Civil War meets the Spanish one.

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright features a sci-fi apocalypse, a potpourri of religious iconographies, and an insurrection against a fascist government that serves as a barely-veiled stand-in for both Hitler and Thatcher; the end result sits somewhere between V for Vendetta and The Invisibles, though it precedes both.  (In fact, Luther Arkwright is so similar to parts of The Invisibles that The Invisibles looks a little shabbier in retrospect.  Karmic payback for The Matrix?  Or was that the other way around?)  Talbot's inspirations run to New Wave SF and Nicolas Roeg and David Bowie and especially Michael Moorcock.  In combining them, however, he has created something far beyond a Jerry Cornelius riff:  Luther Arkwright is a teenaged geek boy's will-to-power fantasy blown up into something else entirely.

A voracious and rollicking pastiche, for starters.  Talbot's art alternates between meticulous line drawings and more painterly images, often on the same page, throwing in flashes of photomontage, blocks of text, and "found" art both real and fabricated for good measure.  Meanwhile, the plot incorporates Egyptologists and czars and Roundheads and insectoid stormtroopers and Daughters of Albion and chain-smoking American reporters in trenchcoats--seemingly every period or genre that ever interested Talbot.  This is the kind of work that sums up an artist's influences and then looks around to see where else they can be taken.

Almost two dozen characters play significant roles, a web of interactions that makes Luther Arkwright one of those rare works for which the term graphic novel doesn't seem like a misnomer.  Talbot's work matches the novel's social scope, imagining multiple strata of societies in conflict with themselves and each other.  It shares the novel's capacity for historical scale, reaching from the Norman Conquest to Thatcher's eighties in an attempt to grapple with a thousand-year history of violence and revolution.  (I'm tempted to say that Talbot substitutes English historical depth for Marcus's more geographically-inspired American bigness, but that comes perilously close to repeating old clichés.  I'm not sure it's wrong, though.)  The novel is a form that, at its best, engages with entire cultures as well as individual characters, and Talbot doesn't flinch from the challenge.

Nor does he skimp on the characters, grounding the high action of lumbering dreadnoughts, barbarian girl-gangs, and kamikaze biplanes in the drama of genuine emotion.  The ruthless Queen Anne, who spends the entire novel trying to be the spirit of Britannia and Arkwright's true love, has a wonderful, wistful moment when she realizes she's been eclipsed in both roles by Rose Wylde; those futile longings spark sympathy for a character who normally comes across as treacherous and scheming.  Even the noblest characters do evil things (Arkwright gets the sympathy-for-the-henchman routine long before King Mob) while some of the worst earn our pity.  Like any good novel, graphic or otherwise, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright aims to acknowledge the broadest possible range of human experience, from the flatulent cynic Harry Fairfax to the antiseptic idealists of Zero Zero.  Nothing is too big for Talbot to attempt; like Marcus's vital American artist, his ambition is half the point and Arkwright's scope is its own greatest success.

I believe that the reason the story remains so fresh and interesting is because under all the glorious invention and wild adventure, glamorous characters and exotic machinery, Talbot deals in fundamental realities and makes stern self-demands.

He is interested in reality.  He is curious about reality.  He isn't, thank God, afraid of reality.

--Michael Moorcock, from his introduction to the Dark Horse Luther Arkwright

Ambition isn't everything.  Talbot's skills as writer and artist grew considerably during Arkwright's long completion, and the early chapters display a talent still in development.  The anatomy is sometimes tentative and the plot rams up against iron walls of narrative convenience.  (Why don't the Disruptors just take Arkwright when they grab Firefrost out of the pyramid?)  But ambition delineates the possible, setting upper limits on a work's capacity for meaning and invention.  Talbot's ambitions are virtually boundless, and he fulfills them with astonishing regularity.

The novel rapidly outgrows the potentially limiting dualistic moral framework of its Disruptors-versus-Zero Zero scenario to present a more seasoned view of politics and human nature. The monarchy Arkwright installs is scarcely better than the dictatorship he topples--both are laden with scathing evocations of Margaret Thatcher.  Sometimes Talbot almost implies Arkwright is backing the wrong side:  his erstwhile allies in the imperial Prussia and czarist Russia join the war because they despise the Puritans' once-democratic revolution, yet The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is a democratic work to its core.  The strategists on Zero Zero prop up the Restoration as a gambit in their own battle against the Disruptors, a proxy war fought in a game of apocalyptic brinksmanship, but Talbot never quite lets them off the hook for it.  The consequences of Royalist victory are too similar to those of Puritan oppression, and Talbot too cynical about any revolution.

He breaks down the dualism of his fantasy-novel source material in other ways that transcend politics.  One of his recurring themes is the reconciliation of opposites, an idea incarnated in the doomsday weapon Firefrost and in Arkwright's various sexual and spiritual climaxes.  The book's artistic tour de force occurs when Arkwright, in the midst of being tortured by the Puritans (this was back in the swell old days when heroes were only the victims of torture, not its perpetrators) escapes into meditation and recalls his birth, his upbringing, and his relationships with three women.  Talbot's breathless narration modulates four characters, four seasons, four elements, and at least four musical genres, each one matched perfectly to the rest and culminating in one of those rare breakthroughs where the experience of reading matches the intensity of Arkwright's experience.  There are epiphanies here, too, but they are the epiphanies of gnosis, of samadhi, of Beethoven's Ninth or "Memory of a Free Festival"--epiphanies of a consciousness reaching outside itself and finding something else out there.  The union of the individual and the infinite.  Satori must be something just the same.

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is one of the first British graphic novels and one of the best of any nation, surpassing imitators and forerunners alike.  Take advantage of the new edition at your earliest possible convenience, if only to remind yourself that ambition, epic scale, and the democratic impulse toward wholeness cannot be reserved for Americans alone.

Greil Marcus Explains MOME

MOME vol. 4 (Spring/Summer 2006), ed. Eric Reynolds and Gary Groth

Rock 'n' roll is suffering from that old progressive school fallacy that says if what you write is about your own feelings, no one can criticize it.  Truth telling is beginning to settle into a slough where it is nothing more than a pedestrian autobiography set to placid music framed by a sad smile on the album cover.  This is about as liberating as thinking typecast movie stars are "really like" the roles they play.  In many cases, though, this has come to be true in rock 'n' roll:  singers have dispensed with imagination and songs are just pages out of a diary, with nothing in them that could give them a life of their own.  A good part of the audience has lost its taste for songs that are about something out there in the world that the singer is trying to make real--usually by convincingly assuming the burden of that reality; replacing such songs are tunes that desperately deny the world by affirming the joys of solipsism.

--Greil Marcus

That's from "Randy Newman: Every Man Is Free," a chapter from Mystery Train that I haven't been able to stop rereading for the past month.  Marcus delivers a disconcertingly accurate manifesto of my own critical tastes, not just for music but for film, literature, and comics, and with minimal rewriting his words would explain why this site tends to focus on popular genres, creators, and characters:  "When it is alive to its greatest possibilities--to disturb, provoke, and divide an entire society, thus exciting and changing a big part of society--pop says that the game of a limited audience is not really worth playing."

The passage about autobiography and solipsism needs the least transformation, especially if you've read the fourth volume of MOME, the Fantagraphics anthology of art comics.  Marcus unwittingly nails the majority of its contents thirty-plus years in advance of their creation, even those stories that do not literally record the authors' lives--"autobiography" being understood here as a style of writing more than a simple transcription of one's life.  Most of the stories in MOME are not pages out of a diary, though the label certainly applies to Sophie Crumb, who actually has the gall to complain about "boring" autobiographical comics while submitting a couple of the same.  She exempts herself from her rant, saying

I'm too busy having an interesting life, and I don't take enough time to write and draw!!  [That much I agree with.]  I am not a bored suburban loser!  My life is so weird and crazy, I wouldn't know where to start!!

Just in case you've mistaken this winking narcissism for a genuine rhetorical irony, the editors have thoughtfully preceded her complaints with "Melanie & Billy," which uses the tragic fates of two homeless New York kids to illustrate that, yes, Sophie Crumb does lead a weird and crazy life.  This aria to the self lacks even the excuse of technical accomplishment, being composed mostly of debased, deadened language.  Here's Crumb's reaction after her friend ODs on heroin:

Of course, I was shocked, then sad, thinking of what a waste it was... a waste of beauty, life, all that shit... what a stupid mistake, how easy it could have been to avoid... how it just couldn't be.  It couldn't happen to someone like Melanie.

Crumb musters some modicum of reflection on her own vacant words ("all that shit," "This is corny as hell") but she doesn't act on it, doesn't go back and write a better elegy that comes from real grief and not the regurgitated mush of a thousand funerary clichés.  More crucially, and fatally for any art that seeks to be more than pages out of a diary, Crumb doesn't direct her reflections outwards to the world or to the friend she supposedly mourns.  She's so taken with the romantic image of lamenting Melanie's senseless death that she doesn't even seem to realize it isn't all that senseless--that homeless drug-using nineteen-year-old girls who shoot up alone with creepy guys that nobody in the neighborhood likes are precisely the someones to whom it happens.

She does pause, though, to illustrate herself three times (as many as nominal protagonist Billy) and to tell us in detail about her drinking, her passing out, her grieving ("all that shit"), her feelings, her "orgiesque" parties.  In one picture a caption pointing to Sophie (or, more accurately, to the woman Sophie is kissing, precision being no more a feature of the art than it is the writing) reads "Caution!  Gay when drunk," which Crumb honestly seems to think sets her apart from all those bored suburban loser girls.  The half-formed meditations on her friends, poor simulacra of feeling, don't conceal Sophie Crumb's utter infatuation with her own lifestyle, in which all her gay and bi and drunk and high and jailed and evicted and dead friends are just so many status symbols.  What could be more bohemian than an overdose?

It's tempting to dismiss Crumb as a legacy cartoonist who got her spot in MOME on the strength of her last name; her final piece, a cartoony incest funny in the vein of her dad, certainly does nothing to dispel this idea.  The truth is that Crumb's work is entirely of a piece with her fellow contributors'--a little more directly autobiographical, perhaps a little more artless, if such a thing is possible.  Anders Nilsen is so lo-fi he shows us the scratched-out words on the hastily scrawled introduction to his decoupage piece, presumably to confirm its authenticity.  Nilsen describes his piece's development in the same banal, noncomittal, painfully inadequate language as Crumb's elegy ("...wondering what the hell I was doing.  As an artist or a cartoonist or whatever I was") but he at least manages more proficiency in his story's graphic design.  Regrettably, the tremendous production effort feels wasted on this striking but empty and affectless collage, which allegorizes its own aimlessness.

Nilsen's piece does serve as a reminder that, just as not all autobiography is solipsistic, not all solipsism is autobiographical.  Even the stories that feature fictional characters typically feature only one, as though the artists are not yet confident enough to imagine something so wondrous and strange as two people interacting, and that single character is typically a lonely shut-in who has vivid dreams and fetishizes childhood experiences and talks to stars.  ("And they shrink you into nursery rhymes":  the depths of the universe reduced to mute reflections of the hero's gloom, with a range of reference that does not extend beyond childhood.)  These pieces are observed, not made, and their observations are too familiar; they are unable to imagine anyone much different from the sort of character--or the sort of artist--who usually ends up in books like MOME.

The most interesting thing to be gleaned from these stories is the overpowering influence Chris Ware has had on the next generation of comics artists.  One contributor will ape his cutaway diagrams and repetitive staging; another will duplicate his muted yet richly textured colors; almost all go for his fumbling, emotionally stunted protagonists.  Copying these superficial features, they miss Ware's interest in history, urban space, causality, fate, time--all those somethings out there in the world.  An honest comics criticism would hold these pieces in about the same regard we have for the impoverished Frank Miller imitations that came out in the eighties and nineties (some of them, to be fair, from Frank Miller).

Instead, Gary Groth opens his interview with Jonathan Bennett with a saucy dig at Secret Wars II, a comic released more than twenty years ago and reviled ever since.  This is a bit like opening a festival of halfassed student films with a shot at Ed Wood, but the line serves its purpose.  Groth's cozy disdain projects an ethos common to many of the most celebrated comics of the nineties (including Ware's, to their detriment), a strictly negative argument for the value of their work:  it's good if it's not superheroes.  It's great if it hates superheroes.  The problem with achieving the cultural respectability that Groth and his peers so desperately sought, a respectability that now hovers within their grasp, is that we can no longer confuse their negative argument with an affirmative case for quality.  When comics aspire to the stature of literature or art they have to succeed as literature or art, not as not superheroes.

MOME might be able to cruise by on such oppositional posturing if it viewed itself solely as a showcase for developing artists, a workshop for talents that haven't quite reached the creative imagination necessary to produce good comics about the world outside their own skulls.  But the Fantagraphics website calls MOME "the premier literary anthology in comics" and compares it to The Believer or Granta.  The latter is exactly the sort of journal I might expect a status-conscious anthology to aspire to; I haven't enjoyed a Granta piece since 1999, but at least it expects its contributors to demonstrate technical competence in their chosen medium and to engage with the world.

Only a few stories in the fourth volume of MOME meet either standard. R. Kikuo Johnson abandons last issue's Jimmy Corrigan-lite comic strips for a polished piece on John James Audubon; Martin Cendreda wisely trades in ironically-drinking-smoking-cursing-and-flopping-out-of-panel cartoon animals for a story about the weight of time.  One selection alone achieves the formal command and creative inspiration that we should demand of a premier literary anthology--of premier literature--and it does so by embracing the very things most of MOME's contributors either cannot encompass or actively reject.

David B.'s "The Veiled Prophet," although based on a historical figure, is one of the few stories to use fantasy elements and the only one to do so without a smirk.  Like "The Armed Garden," translated in the previous volume of MOME, the story features a reluctant prophet of humble origins who leads a fanatical sect to repudiate his nation's temporal authorities and retreat into a new, isolated world of his own perverse making.  The twist here, and the thing that may elevate "The Veiled Prophet" even above "The Armed Garden," is that Hakim al-Muqanna doesn't initially proclaim himself a prophet:  everyone who beholds him sees a different religious figure behind the piece of cloth that miraculously gets stuck to his face.  As more people gaze upon him his prestige grows, and so does his veil, until the cloth appears to be composed entirely of speech, unspooling from gossipy mouths like the ribbons of old-fashioned word balloons.

The story is filled with gems like this, where the minutiae of panel composition provide essential keys to interpretation; and if this seems like too neat a metaphor for our tendency to invent our own messiahs and acquiesce to what we only believe to be a higher power, it must be noted that David B. complicates this reading even before he finishes setting it up.  (This superficial interpretation is still leaps and bounds beyond anything the other stories attempt, with the possible exceptions of Johnson and Cendreda.)  Legendary caliph Haroun al-Rashid, journeying incognito, overhears three travelers speculating on what lies beneath the veil.  Two of them toss out the first guesses anyone versed in psychoanalytic theory (or The Maltese Falcon) might venture:

Clearly, he has no face.  [...]  Behind his veil there is emptiness.  This revolt is founded upon wind!

His face is like a mirror! [...]  Whosoever looks into it sees his own soul!

More suggestions that the veil's power lies solely in its observers, but they are floated too early, and on too slender evidence, for us to accept them.  They may be plausible, but they aren't likely to be right.  And look again at that panel where the gossip appears to increase the size of the veil and turban:  two of those ribbons of cloth/speech are coming from a dog and a cat!  It's a cute visual joke, but it means our clever, eminently reasonable theory that al-Muqanna's power comes from the awed words of those who see or hear about him can't be entirely right.  The truth is more mysterious and terrible: the power behind the veil turns out to be horrifically real, and Haroun al-Rashid soon learns that even if he can accurately theorize it, that doesn't prepare him for it.

"The Veiled Prophet" flirts with interpretations and discards them, but still manages to allude to the faith we invest in self-proclaimed prophets, the power of the prohibited to dominate our imagination (especially the prohibited image), the universality of violence (especially religious violence), and the inadequacy of reason in the face of such terrifying power and violence.  Reaching far outside his and our personal experience, David B. finds a means of representing forces that touch all of us, and he does it through the stuff of orientalist fable: caliphs and prophets and harems, protean veils and armies of the dead, magical weapons and a climax of virtuous violence straight out of heroic fantasy--but if a thing seems too simple to be true in this story, it probably is.

It may seem unfair to compare the work of a seasoned professional like David B. with the nascent (or stillborn) talents that fill the rest of MOME, but "The Veiled Prophet" sets itself apart by its ambitions.  While the other pieces in MOME vol. 4 are angling for the kind of bourgeois literary respectability Sophie Crumb pretends to disdain, David B. is happily toiling away in the issue's only true demimonde, the gutter of genre fiction, and he finds in it a path to the world.

He's out there at the margins, scheming.

All 7 And We'll Watch Them Fall

Seven Soldiers #1, by Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III

Could Seven Soldiers #1 possibly live up to expectations?  Not just the expectations created by the long wait for the grand finale, but the burdens its own author has placed upon it--the task of wrapping up a thirty-part story with seven different protagonists and supporting casts?

Paul O'Brien doesn't seem to think so.  His comments on the final issue's pacing and narrative unity are sadly unarguable, but I don't think he gives the book or the project as a whole enough credit when he switches to its content:

But it's all form and very little substance.  Or rather, the substance is all in the individual characters, conceived as pitches for solo titles.  Sure, it's an incredible piece of planning, but what was it actually about?  What are the themes of this story?  What was the point?  And how was this issue supposed to make it?  You can't justify this story as a work of genius simply on the formal elements alone, but that doesn't seem to be stopping people from trying.

Paul is overlooking a number of themes that have cropped up throughout the project.  Obviously there's the industry critique of comics that conflate cynicism with artistic maturity, and Morrison's call for a renewed belief in heroism--which becomes so overt by the final issue that it hardly deserves the name of "theme" anymore.  "Lecture" might be more like it.  (Whatever happened to "It's so like, down-to-earth and non-preachy"?)

Even that manifesto relates to other themes whose scope mercifully extends beyond the confines of the comics industry.  The anxiety about genre maturity reflects a general preoccupation with physical and emotional maturity.  Most of the project's antagonists and failures, from Gloriana Tenebrae to Don Vicenzo all the way down to Lance Harrower, are deathly afraid of growing old or dying.  A few of the friendly supporting cast can't or won't grow up, like Ed (Baby Brain) Stargard or the gestalt child Leviathan.  But other villains like Solomano or Zor try to make the heroes more "mature" by casting them in grim and gritty character revamps, turning them into racists or child murderers.  Morrison confronts his heroes with two equally unpleasant options, the stasis of permanent childhood and the degradation of false, forced maturity.  The Seven Soldiers have to find ways to grow without giving in to nihilism, despair, and the death of a thousand cuts that all too often passes for our experience of adulthood.

And what is the recurring anxiety over the influence of Alan Moore on the superhero genre if not another facet of the project's fascination with absent or evil fathers?  Morrison's always liked to write avatars of youth who rebel against evil patriarchs and faceless authorities (Zenith and the Many-Angled Ones, Jack Frost and the Archons, Noh-Varr and Midas, Seaguy and Mickey Eye); Seven Soldiers provides plenty more examples of both.  Klarion, the most classic of these Morrison rebel youth, is such a wild card he refuses even to pick a side in the grand struggle.  Instead he dispatches multiple progenitors--the crossword puzzle is quite clear on this--and supplants Gloriana.

But Morrison adds a number of benevolent if absent fathers and father figures, no strangers to his earlier work, but usually less common than they are here.  Zatara is only the most obvious; Larry Marcus, Metron, Arthur, and Aaron Norman all fill the same role. Even that eternal brat Klarion wants to follow in his missing father's footsteps.  (Oh, the irony!)  Aurakles is the prototype for all these vanished dads, his appearance recalling God, Urizen, and of course Alan Moore.  If Moore is one of the writers getting stitched up inside the DC universe/Cyrus Gold (where he's doomed to die in a swamp and be reborn as a swamp-creature... oh, the irony!), he's also one of the benevolent progenitors being freed by good son Shilo Norman.  That creative tension has been one of the mainstays of this project, as Morrison alternates between criticizing or parodying Moore's recent work (Promethea) and citing or imitating his older material (Swamp Thing, especially the end of "American Gothic").  Both constitute a kind of literary one-upsmanship, the fealty no less than the open critique.  Morrison rebukes the recent Moore by going back to the classics--in some cases all the way back to the Len Wein Swamp Thing that started it all--and choosing them as his templates.  Nor is the "wretched, mindless" Aurakles the most flattering portrait of one's literary ancestors.

Okay, so Seven Soldiers can't really escape the metacommentary, but the project applies it to some larger purpose.  Both Morrison and his characters have to retrieve or preserve the legacies of the good fathers while resisting the dead hand of the evil ones.  Morrison won't let them settle for mere nostalgia or repetition of the past, which has run its course and entered its twilight; they have to find a third path of change, which sometimes involves violently overturning the very legacies that have produced them.  None of the Seven Soldiers illustrate this better than Ystina, who kills the corrupted Galahad and an undead Arthur himself in the halls of Castle Revolving so she can preserve their ideals--and, we're told, establish a new golden age in their place.

Substance has never been lacking in Seven Soldiers.  The question is whether the final issue brings all these themes and character arcs to a successful resolution, or whether the stylistic experiments--and the extreme formal constraints of wrapping up seven plots in just forty pages--overwhelm them.  The results, unfortunately, are a mixed bag.

p. 1: A DC logo pin?  In case the previous appearances of the Seven Unknown Men were too subtle?

p. 2-7:  Already commented on these pages.  I have to say, I wasn't expecting those preview pages to be the first seven pages in the actual order--what's that Shining Knight page doing up here, away from the rest of the story?

p. 8-11: I also have to question why, in an issue that's so pressed for time it can barely squeeze in all seven of the Seven Soldiers, Morrison treats us to a nine-page flashback.  I can see the need for the five-page Kirby tribute, which unifies the project's mythology, but did the Arthur stuff need four pages when it totals seven panels?

p. 12: For a scene that's calling for the end of brutal, cynical superhero revamps, this scene is pretty brutal itself.  The Unknown Man has drowned Cyrus Gold and is preparing Zachary Zor to take his place, to be killed by an angry mob that thinks he's a child-killer.  Poetic justice, given what Zor did to the Newsboy Army, but I'm not sure the Unknown Man is in much of a position to criticize Zor's "nasty game."

And that's the saving grace of this whole sequence... (please see p. 37)

p. 13: The Guardian photographs, especially one remarkably callous caption, remind me of the infamous Mars Attacks! cards.

Is Guardian riding Harry the police horse?  And what are the chances that this valiant steed is a distant descendant of Pegazeus and the winged horses of Gorias?

p. 14: GUARDIAN CRYPTIC X-WORD! Maybe this is a coincidence, but if we look to p. 28 for answers to today's crossword we get the first page of the Mister Miracle scene--the cosmic substratum that underlies the entire project.  And some of the crossword answers (full answers here) link up with the Mister Miracle/Dark Side confrontation. 

The last answer, 8 DOWN. ONE, completes Dark Side's new slogan.  1 DOWN. LOA suggests the New Gods have been moving through the story in human bodies, much as we see the real Darkseid inhabiting Mr. Dark Side through Shilo's god-sight.  Is the crossword telling us that the real action, the real war has been happening on this remote plane all along?

Other clues point to the various patriarchs or evil authorities of the project, especially those that Klarion overthrows.  I'm not sure why the third Submissionary, 2 DOWN. ABEDNIGO, warranted inclusion, but they're the first group Klarion challenges.  4 ACROSS. BADDE tells us  the atrociously-named Ebeneezer Badde was Klarion's real father.  That explains his little chuckle when Klarion tells him he's the son of Mordecai and Charity of Limbo Town, and it makes me read the end of Klarion #2 in a new light--perhaps Badde really is trying to save his son from Melmoth's agents, and Klarion kills him without realizing who he is.  Then he fights off Melmoth, who doesn't rate a space in the crossword, before supplanting 7 ACROSS. GLORIANA as the ruler of the Sheeda.  These characters share a thematic connection to Darkseid, DC's ultimate bad dad.  The real question is whether Klarion will become the tyrant he replaces, or look for a new path as he did after assuming the power of the Submissionaries...

6 DOWN. LANCE implies that the symbolism of the spear really does pass down to Alix through Lance Harrower.  Rather strange since she's the descendant of Aurakles, but then she gets her powers and her Aurakles-like appearance from Lance as well.

And finally, the left-field revelation of the series, 1 ACROSS. LENA implies that Lars and Lena, Ed Stargard's assistants, are the twin children of Chop-Suzi of the Newsboy Army.  It makes sense that the dutiful Ed would raise his dead friend's children.  But here's the question...

Consensus after reading Guardian #4 was that Captain 7 molested/impregnated Suzi and either killed her or led her to die in childbirth (after Zor writes his grisly suit/life).  The Captain is black and Suzi is Asian.  Lars and Lena are as Nordic as anybody on this earth.

Who was Lars and Lena's father?

Did the Newsboy Army kill the wrong person?

(RAB identifies the next most likely suspect, although I'm not sure if that character was physically capable.  He also has some great material on parenting and misdirection in the Seven Soldiers project.)

p. 16: The second greatest disappointment of this issue.  The last issue of Bulleteer presented a wonderful dilemma: the person destined to save the world is so soured on superheroics that she doesn't want any part of her destiny.  This set up a perfect resolution for Alix's arc (rekindling her compassion) and an opportunity to tell a classic Marvel-style story of redemptive heroism.  The final issue truncates all of that, giving us an Alix who's already regained her compassion and who never takes an active role in saving the world.

p. 17: Zatanna sports her costume from Zatanna #1. This is the first time we've seen her wear the same costume twice.  Does this indicate that she's stabilized her external identity after settling her internal doubts in the final issue of her miniseries?  Or did Morrison just not specify in the script that she get another new look, and Williams went with an old model?

p. 18:  Misty/Rhiannon's real name is Errrhiahchnnon, per Frankenstein #4.  We might just as easily call her Arachne (note her spiderweb loom in Zatanna #3), which would make her the source of the eponymous 13th month of the sorcerors' calendar mentioned in Zatanna #1.  Every ordering scheme in this project has been either incomplete or overcomplete--sixes and eights, but never sevens--so why not an extra month that's not mentioned on any calendars?

Unfortunately, Ali ka-Zoom's reappearance undercuts the finality of his exit in Zatanna #3.  Maybe Morrison should have tapped someone else to deliver the expository dialogue--Ed Stargard, the Vigilante (where'd he disappear to?), somebody who would let him tie in another strand of the narrative.  Ali didn't really need another appearance, although his detailed knowledge of the plot and his general appearance (top hat!) have always suggested that he might be one of the Seven Unknown Men.  Perhaps the one who replaced Zor (unless that's Morrison himself)?

p. 22: Is that Jorge and Hannah Control?  Does the talking head mean that Hannah was another robot?  Belittled and rejected by one of his own androids... no wonder Jorge flipped out in Guardian #3.  Note that they're standing in front of the United Nations building, which Morrison has juxtaposed with their Century Hollow project once before.  This single panel creates a nice metonymy for the whole world falling apart.

p. 22-23: The similarities to the final arc of Promethea are overwhelming--the apocalypse comes to Manhattan and the President wants to nuke the place.  Both stories also culminate in fourth-wall-breaking addresses to the reader.  And, of course, Morrison has snagged the Promethea artist to illustrate it.

The human resistance hardens around the Manhattan Superhero Museum, which has already helped Shilo Norman shake off the Anti-Life Equation.  The museum reminds people of humanity's best traits, traits Morrison finds embodied in the meaning-making forms of the superhero.

p. 25: "I have been a story in a thousand books."  The Merlin has been DC continuity; perhaps he becomes it again on this page as Zatanna wakes up the universe.  Zatanna's spell doesn't seem to contribute to the death of Gloriana, but it may affect the metaphysical levels of the plot: the rescue of Aurakles and the imprisonment of Zor, both of which Morrison means to signal a new direction in the writing of superheroes.  (Somehow I doubt it will amount to that anywhere outside Morrison's own work, but All-Star Superman is good enough for me.)

p. 28: Here begins the issue's greatest disappointment.  I loved the final issue of Mister Miracle, but Shilo's appearance here doesn't do anything that issue didn't already do better.  Do you get the feeling this issue only had space for about five soldiers? (please see p. 39)

p. 29: "When the harrowing is done we will hunt the living gods themselves through the ruins of paradise."  Like Adam Strange, Starfire, and Morrison's old friend Buddy Baker in 52?

The thought that this whole project has been building up to a 52 tie-in depresses the hell out of me.

p. 33: "You're free."  Having fulfilled her destiny--in just about the most passive, accidental, narratively unfulfilling way possible, might I add--Alix is now free from destiny.  It's a lovely little panel to end her arc (I like the way Dave Stewart uses grays and spot color to play up her similarity to Aurakles).  I just wish this issue had given that arc more than eight panels to build to its climax.

p. 34-35: More painfully overt metacommentary, although I do like Morrison's description (and we are literally reading Morrison's description here, in-story as well as out) of the DC universe as "Threadbare and ragged... the work of too many hands to ever fit properly..."  He clearly loves it, though, in all its patchwork glory.  Zor is stitched into a heteroglossic universe that can never be standardized into a single genre, tone, or narrative.

Also interesting to note that Morrison is only doing to Zor and the cynics what he's already done to himself:  he's sewn himself into the story as the Seven Unknown Men and Mind-Grabber Kid.  Though I'd much rather be Lucian Crawley than Cyrus Gold.

Finally, the first-person viewpoint of these scenes means that we're sewn into the coat along with Zachary Zor, just as we're part of the spell Zatanna casts on p. 25.  We helped tarnish the heroes through cynicism and we help refurbish the universe through self-awareness; we're implicated, too. (please see p. 37)

p. 36: I find I like Ystina more now that she has a Linda Lee-style secret identity.  Her miniseries also reads better now that the whole project is finished and its overarching themes are more apparent; perhaps it simply suffered from being first in a project that depends on interconnection for its charge.  Shining Knight still had that unforgiveable lapse in showing the destruction of Caliburn, though.

p. 37:  The third road was first mentioned by one of the Seven Unknown Men back in SS #0:  "There's a third road... Slaughter Swamp is one of those in-between places, where solid things turn soft and change."  Real change is the third path that avoids the false binaries of cynical maturity and arrested development.

But Morrison may be breaking down other binaries here, including the relatively straightforward good and evil morality that has structured the Seven Soldiers macro-plot until now.  The Sheeda are our own descendants, consuming us as we consume the planet; Misty says that defeating and becoming them is as bad or worse than being defeated by them.  And lest we feel too cocky about sewing those bad "deconstructionist" writers up in the miser's coat of DC continuity, Morrison commemorates the event with a black flower--one more guilty secret floating up to the surface of Slaughter Swamp.  If the awakening of the DC universe weren't founded upon a couple of murders, if the "good" Unknown Man weren't implicated in a little violence himself, this metacommentary might lapse into a saccharine call for nostalgia that would completely contradict Morrison's point about growth and change.  Instead he accepts the evil along with the good, the grim with the playful:  both have a place in Morrison's post-Seven Soldiers universe.

Not unlike the ending of "American Gothic"...

p. 38:  Are we meant to read this lovely image of a cackling Klarion as a response to the previous page?  Is Klarion following a third, independent road between righteousness and wickedness?  His people back in Limbo Town are a fusion of both.  This may be the best possible resolution for the human race, one that breaks outside the binaries and avoids simply replacing Gloriana with a copy.

The page also serves as a nice counterpoint to the image of the terrified Whip that closes Seven Soldiers #0. 

J.H. Williams III's remarkably adept pastiche of the other Seven Soldiers artists is the saving grace of this issue; love that Frazer Irving Klarion being... er... waited on by those two Simone Bianchi Sheeda, with a Dave Stewart color scheme that unifies the looks of those two miniseries.  Everything about this page reconciles opposites, doesn't it?

p. 39:  One of the fans in Bulleteer #3 mentioned a rumor that Millions the Mystery Mutt is immortal and secretly running the U.S. banking system.  Now we discover Millions is alive, even though a caption in Guardian #4 (the suit Zor sewed for him) said he was dead at 14.  Bear in mind that Millions' pal Kid Scarface discovered the Cauldron of everlasting life in Slaughter Swamp.  And now Millions the Mystery Mutt is immortal and running a nationwide organized crime syndicate.  Possibly in addition to the U.S. banking system.

p. 39: "All is one in Dark Side."  An odd note for Morrison to sound at the end of this project, especially in conjuntion with the crossword clue 8 DOWN, "And all is this, seven into seven."  Seven Soldiers has previously made heroes out of characters like "Sky-High" Helligan who can assemble its disparate pieces into a single story, but the slogan and the clue imply that Dark Side lies at the end of the project's drive for narrative unification.  Dark Side certainly thinks he's won on the penultimate page, when the narrative is as complete and unified as it ever will be.

The Dark Side scenes hint that the whole Sheeda plot has been a misdirection, just as RAB says (please see p. 14).  Dark Side has pulled off a cosmological coup d'etat while everybody else was distracted by the pyrotechnics, much as the Sheeda threat itself is presented as the more serious threat brewing while all the big-name heroes are distracted by Infinite Crisis (a template lifted from "American Gothic" and its arm's-length relation to Crisis on Infinite Earths).  The real struggle is for the possession and execution of the first superhero and the avatar of freedom, a struggle Dark Side wins until the final page and its unfortunate retread of Mister Miracle #4.  Still, it's surprising that Morrison would cast his own narrative completion as a sign of victory for one of his antagonists.

Surprising, but not inconsistent.  This isn't the first Morrison work to associate the push for narrative order or clarity with tyranny (I'm thinking of Sir Miles in "Entropy in the UK"), and Seven Soldiers has always been a glorious mess, much like the miser's coat.  This is a project that defiantly refuses to complete any of its organizing groups of seven, and it preserves that anarchic confusion right up to the end.  (Is I, Spyder the eighth of Seven Soldiers?)  That makes for a chaotic, frequently frustrating final issue, but Seven Soldiers #1 is true to its story and its author.

Imperishable

I was afraid it would be hard to dive back into the Seven Soldiers storyline after a six-month hiatus, but DC has wisely rekindled my interest with this preview (thanks, Jog) of the long-delayed final issue.  It's the perfect appetizer for readers of this series, loaded with backstory delivered in a style that meshes Kirby's Eternals with J.R.R. Tolkien.

Among the other revelations, the preview lists all of the seven imperishable treasures that have been bouncing around this series.  To get ready for the final chapter of Seven Soldiers I thought I'd take an inventory and see which ones have yet to put in an appearance...

The Cauldron of rebirth is easy; Kid Scarface had it before Neh-buh-loh recovered it for Gloriana.

The Merlin made of living language is easy, too; Gwydion, currently in Zatanna's possession, is one of the treasures.

The steed Pegazeus is the progenitor of the race of winged horses that includes Vanguard, Ystin's horse. The horses have gathered at the city of Gorias in the Himalayas in Frankenstein #4; in Zatanna #4 Misty and Vanguard are leading a, ah, flock? of them to San Francisco to get Zatanna's help (which brings two of the treasures together).

The Sword is troublesome; this should be Caliburn, Arthur's sword, which Ystin takes from Gloriana. Gloriana identifies Caliburn as one of the seven imperishable treasures, specifically "the treasure of Findias," one of the cities built by the New Gods.  (The cauldron comes from Murias, and the winged horses congregate in Gorias.  No word on the treasure of Filias yet.)  But in Shining Knight #4 Galahad destroys Ystin's sword.  That looks pretty perishable to me.

Is Caliburn a bit of misdirection, and if so, to what purpose?  Is Frankenstein's blade the true imperishable sword?  Did artist Simone Bianchi screw up in drawing the destruction of Caliburn?  (Nothing in the script calls attention to the loss of this treasure, and the second preview page shows Ystin holding a sword that looks a lot like Caliburn.)  Or did this just fall through the cracks of Morrison's 30-part story?

The Hammer has shown up only briefly, carried by the knight Bors in the flashback that opens Shining Knight #3.  Bors uses it to forge the Arthurian A-bomb that ends Mordredd's reign but also begins the corruption of the last knights of Avalon.  (That flashback says the knights carry three of the imperishable treasures, but it doesn't indicate what the other two are.  They can't be the cauldron or Caliburn, which have been lost in time by this point, and I don't see a winged horse anywhere.  Galahad is carrying a spear on his back in one panel, but I'm not sure that treasure should be understood as a literal spear.)  No more recent signs of this treasure.

The all-knowing Fatherbox is a mystery.  The name implies a New Gods connection, but Mister Miracle had a Mother Box (or Motherboxxx if you prefer).

Could the Fatherbox instead be one or both of the mystical dice that have appeared in Klarion, Guardian, and Zatanna?  (An even more intriguing possibility if Croatoan is just another name for Aurakles, who has already slipped out of one pair of chains elsewhere in this series, or if it' s a name for the Fatherbox itself as Melmoth implies in the last issue of Klarion.)  The last two preview pages show all of the treasures except the Merlin, which has no fixed form, and the spear, which may not be a physical entity at all, but they do show Aurakles peering at a small, die-shaped object in his hand.

Finally, and most important of all, there's the enchanted Spear that can slay Gloriana.  The spear has some connection to the bloodline of Aurakles, the first superhero; in fact, it may be the bloodline.  The preview tells us that Aurakles is entrusted with "the hushed and profane secret" of the spear, not the spear per se, and its ability to strike across time may refer to the bloodline being passed down from generation to generation.  That venereal, reproductive transmission might also explain why the spear is called "love" as well as "vengeance."

We already know that Alix Harrower is descended from Aurakles, whose pale skin and bright red hair evoke the transformed Bulleteer.  (Strangely, her name connotes the harrowing that the Sheeda are going to perform, but she would have gotten that from her husband, who had the rather suggestive first name of Lance.  Can you inherit symbolism by marriage?)  The resemblance between Alix and Aurakles is telling enough that Morrison didn't need to jump the gun with the Vigilante's sudden exposition in Bulleteer #4; this could have been one of Morrison's classic only-obvious-in-retrospect reveals if he hadn't spoiled the surprise before he planted his best clue.

The New Gods charge Aurakles "To bring order and meaning where incoherence reigns."  For Morrison, that's the fundamental mission of any superhero--restoring meaning to a debased world where values are in freefall and words cannot be trusted.  That places them in opposition to Gloriana Tenebrae, who exults in the degeneration of meaning, proudly telling Ystin that "Words can mean anything and everything, that is why they have no proper shape here."  (Shades of the shapeless living language Gwydion, whom she turns loose on Zatanna.)  This is quite a change from the younger Morrison who once presented languages with fixed meanings as implements of torture and control in The Invisibles, who wrote "Love means nothing at all.  Life means nothing at all" as the most tender and romantic line in the entire run of Doom Patrol.

But Morrison is also indicating the ideal reading strategy for Seven Soldiers.  He's telling us we have to find the patterns in the seemingly incoherent jumble of characters and plotlines, become like "Sky-High" Helligan or the Bride and fit thirty discrete pieces into a single narrative.  The seven imperishable treasures make a convenient starting point for assembly, but we could just as easily look at the less explicit recurrences that have unified the series:  the vanished, usually terrifying patriarchs, the dutiful or rebellious children who encounter them, all the absences yearning for completion, and the Romantic, tragic model of history and modernity as falls from grace.  Morrison has thrown a lot of elements out there over the last twenty-nine installments; here's hoping the final chapter can pull them all together into some kind of order and meaning.