I Am NOT the Beastmaster

History Under Glass

All-Star Superman #10, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely

Gorgeous cover, isn't it?  And given Grant Morrison's customary interest in radical variations of scale (if this were a Wire post, I would've titled it with a certain Van-Zee quote), it comes very close to being a literal representation of this issue, where Superman plays God (in a good way!) with not one but two pocket worlds.

The interior is even better.  The image of Superman's face smiling beneficently over Kandor (you can see a sample here) is one of Quitely's finest, especially the way he breaks it over two panels--as if we have to pan up to see it all, as if it's too big to take it all in at once.  The kind, patient expression sums up Morrison and Quitely's take on Superman at least as well as the cloud cover that opened the series.

That's only one reason why All-Star Superman was much-anticipated and sorely missed after a long drought.  I'm with Jog, more or less--I loved the Zibarro issue (pretty much the best Fourth of July comic ever), but the follow-up with the Kryptonian astronauts didn't seem to bring anything new to its well-worn story.  And I say this as someone who deeply appreciated that Morrison finally gave us the Steve Lombard stumblebum routine I'd been begging for.  It's been nearly nine months since this series was firing on all cylinders, and even longer since it devoted significant attention to the story of Superman's mortality, but this latest issue returns to the plotline that gave the early ones so much of their melancholy appeal.

Among the other features that make this issue so rewarding are the patterns of allusion--and the multiple levels of allusion--that run throughout it.  There's this series' standard palimpsest of Superman history, condensing and combining the most interesting elements from seventy years of comics.  We get Superman writing his last will and testament on a slab of metal, Leo Quintum in a Flamebird costume, Luthor biding his time in prison, even a reworking of that story where Superman shoots a little Superman out of his hand that so captivated Morrison (note that Van-Zee, leader of the Superman Emergency Squad, is by tradition an exact double for his cousin Kal-El).  We get Superman rushing, with a little help from his friends, to complete his unfinished business and expose a secret to the world (prematurely?), both of which come straight from "The Last Days of Superman."  But it's not all Silver Age nostalgia; properly speaking, it's not nostalgia at all.

That's most visible in the Kandorian council, which makes a nice visual metaphor for this series' signature move.  Their clothing ranges from classic Silver Age headbands and emblems to an ornate Byrne-like headdress to Quitely's own hypermodernist designs. The council is tasked with preserving the last remnants of Kryptonian culture, and their appearance encapsulates just about all of it, much as All-Star Superman tries to preserve all the different eras of Superman--but not under glass, where it can only grow old and die.  This is a living history.

Then you have all the references to Morrison's own work.  You've got the infant universe of Qwewq, where our own planet dwells--only this time it's created by Superman, as one of his twelve super-labors.  (I would love that gimmick a lot more if Morrison gave us a scorecard--it's impossible to tell what the labors are!)  You've got the radical variations in scale from The Filth.  You've got several other callbacks to Morrison's run on JLA, from ominous rumblings about Solaris to a Superman who tells Lex Luthor "I know there's good in you" to maybe, just maybe, a reference to that JSA crossover where Green Lantern artificially accelerated time on that microscopic civilization that was built on top of the Spectre.

I'm not so sure about that last one--I think Morrison is really just playing around with that old idea that if the history of planet Earth were fit into a single day, all of human civilization would unfold in its final second.  A tad more cerebral than the JLA plot, but they both stem from his interest in narrative compressions of time and space.  And boy, do I love Morrison's endpoint for his pocket history of the human race--something that speaks to why he thinks this comic is important in the first place, why All-Star Superman and superheroes in general are, for Morrison, a lot more than just a paycheck.

Finally, because Morrison is Morrison--or because I am me?--I see we have a surprising number of references to Alan Moore.  Watchmen references abound, with a godlike hero who creates life at the culmination of his ascension and plants a city of delicate spires in the soil of Mars, in the shadow of Olympus Mons.  I'll charitably assume the Nietzsche quote originates with Nietzsche, but it does happen to be the same line that opened Miracleman.  An obvious place to go if you're looking to give the superhero a (spurious) historical pedigree, sure, but Moore got there first.

There's no overlooking the parallels with "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" though--not when we meet a messenger from an idyllic future, who shows up in a transparent bubble, no less, and who isn't supposed to share information with Superman but manages to provide a hint about an upcoming menace.  It's the Legion of Super-Heroes cameo updated for the age of text messaging.  And it calls attention to all the ways the larger plot structure of All-Star Superman as a whole--a grand tour of all the elements of the Superman myth, in the face of his impending death--owes a little something to Moore's big, serious, heartfelt, slobbery kiss of a Superman story from twenty-three years ago.

But it's gentle references this time, knowing winks to the reader.  No commentary or anxiety, as befits this most serene of series.  Just another nod to the past as this comic walks, square jaw held bravely up, into the future.

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.

Who Done It?

Spoiler warning and idle speculation for Batman #667-668.

One of the pleasures of the current Batman storyline is that it invites heavy reader involvement.  Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III don't just ask us to identify all the art homages, they practically demand that we develop theories and search for clues to the identity of the Black Glove--even though they haven't really written a mystery at all.

So, who is the Black Glove?  Is he part of a Club of Villains, or is he just impersonating the Club of Heroes' foes?  Is he one of the Club of Heroes?  Or is he posing as one of the heroes after killing and replacing them?  That was certainly Wingman's theory, but then Wingman himself made a great red herring because he was such a jerk.  You were probably hoping he turned out to be the killer right up until he turned up as a victim... assuming that really was the Wingman hanging there, his face burned beyond recognition.  Perhaps he just created his own alibi?  But then who did the body belong to?  The great thing about this theory is that it makes Williams' flashback images part of the misdirection--they would be showing us the wrong character!  But why should we assume these extradiegetic images are honest and accurate clues?

The Knight has been behaving oddly--when did he disappear, and why was he waiting around inside the locked library instead of getting help?  But he's being set up too obviously (although, in a better set-up, the red herring wouldn't have that bomb in his belly).  Batman has already discounted the possibility and, stepping outside the text for a minute, it seems unlikely that Morrison would corrupt a character after investing so much work and affection in him.  And where would that leave Beryl?

Suspicious coincidences are settling around the Dark Ranger. He keeps running off on his own, Red Raven disappears (apparently getting captured) after vowing to follow him, and that full-face mask means anybody could be wearing the suit at any point after he wanders off at the end of his initial appearance.  The Ranger could have been the first hero to die; his combat boots do look a lot like the pair we see standing over the fallen Legionary.

Maybe we shouldn't read too much into such incidental details.  Nothing can motivate Morrison to produce a meticulous, detail-oriented script like a top-notch artistic collaborator--Williams is at least the equal of Phil Jimenez and Frank Quitely in this regard--but the parts don't always line up.  At the beginning of #668 the Knight has disappeared and become a prime suspect in the killings, yet at the end of #667 he ran outside with the others and was standing by their side just before the Legionary was killed.  Not visible in that scene:  the Dark Ranger, Wingman, and Man-of-Bats.  But does that mean anything?

The Dark Ranger has some curious absences and reappearances in this issue.  But does that mean anything?  Wingman's body turns up in a room that's already been locked and broken into and re-sealed once before; the house must be so riddled with secret passages that no character movements can be sufficient evidence in and of themselves.  And we know so little about most of these characters that nearly any of them could turn out to be the killer--Morrison has insured we won't learn about the breakup of the Batmen of Many Nations (and hence the likely motive for whatever revenge transpires here) until the final chapter.

From the brief flashback we get this issue, we know that John Mayhew has something to hide, some "grave news" that prompted the Club of Heroes to disband.  But he was killed in the first issue, wasn't he?

Maybe.  We see something that looks like his face, and the Black Glove says he killed Mayhew, but how much should we trust him?  Or does "John's dead" signal the death of an old identity, a discarded personality? A movie director could easily work up (or pay someone to work up) a false face that looks real enough for a short video.  And that body dangling on page 1 of #667--sure, that looks like Mayhew, but is that a moustache or a shadow thrown by the weird lighting?   Other odd details from that issue:  a picture of Mayhew posing in front of a race car, with almost exactly the same uniform and posture as the Dark Ranger on the previous page; and that "Black Glove" poster, of course.  Even if Mayhew is dead it seems likely he had something to do with the Black Glove's creation, making him a victim of his own ennui.

If this were a fair-play locked-room mystery, I'd guess that Mayhew either is the Black Glove himself (possibly posing as the Dark Ranger), or he inadvertently created the Black Glove when he approached someone else to help him set up a murder mystery for the Club of Heroes reunion--possibly either the Dark Ranger or the Wingman, who killed the Ranger and switched costumes with him at some point while the other heroes were preoccupied with the Knight.  (Plus, making the Dark Ranger and/or Wingman the Black Glove's guises/accomplices would be a none-too-subtle way of repudiating the grim and gritty Batman both men have imitated, and Morrison's been all about that lately.)

But the story may not be a fair-play mystery, and the walls of the Mayhew mansion are so porous that "locked-room" is a misnomer. This is a suspense story, set in a private little paradise turned hell where evil becomes so palpable it distorts panel borders, or becomes them, drawing the heroes into its tightening grasp.

We may not be able to figure out the Black Glove's machinations until they're over, but that's all right.  Watching them unfold is half the fun.  Watching Morrison and Williams deliver them, and trying to guess where they're going next, is the rest.

And Then We Were Many

Batman #667-668, by Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III

Spoiler warning.

It's easy to recoil at the story this could have been--and perhaps, by all logic and prevailing comics industry patterns, should have been.  A comic in which a writer unearths a bunch of forgotten DC Comics characters only to kill them off in a carnival of blood?  In which those forgotten heroes have aged along with the trends of comics history, the better to contrast their dark modern personas with their innocent origins?  In which "darkness" itself is hardened from a stylistic preference to an almost ontological presence, the font of all evil?  In which fat men eat chicken?

Maybe we don't get enough of that last one, but all the rest have been trotted out so many times over the past decade that they're practically the DC house style.  The return of the Club of Heroes (a.k.a. the Batmen of Many Nations) should be a disaster, but it helps when the writer is Grant Morrison and the artist is J.H. Williams III.  Their playfulness, their knack for note-perfect impersonations, and their willingness to embrace all those eras that apparently embarrass everybody else at DC dispel any fears that the story has a chip on its shoulder, even though it's about a bunch of has-beens and never-weres who have chips on their shoulders.

The comic is so eager to recreate different moments in comics history while also advancing them into the present that it never falls into simple nostalgia, ridicule, or self-loathing.  In the story's most delicious touch, the evil menace is just as gloriously retro as the Batmen of Many Nations.  The murder plot harkens back not so much to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None as it does to the old Avengers episode inspired by the same, and Steve Flanagan has already suggested that Williams' visuals of the Black Glove (the villain so ominous that most of his appearances are as panel borders!) recall the movie titles of the great Saul Bass.  Even the dangling feet of one unfortunate hero suggest Bass' angular, late-modernist compositions:

Death by hanging has never looked so stylish!

Morrison does occasionally succumb to the shortcuts of industry critique.  He sets up the Wingman as the obnoxious one, the Batman who's fallen the farthest into grim and gritty excess (drawn as a Gibbons character, no less!) and who has the temerity to doubt his fellow heroes, including the big guy with his name on the cover.  He's the one we're supposed to hate and so he's the best red herring candidate for the Black Glove, at least until he makes his ignominious exit.  (Although we never saw his face under that helmet, and we don't see much of one after it comes off, so who's to say if he's really gone...?)  The best current suspect, the Dark Ranger, has also succumbed to modern trends towards violence and cynicism, while the hero who's gone through an Arkham Asylum-like ordeal of trial and purification seems to be one of the noblest of the good guys.

But the story is surprisingly, and welcomely, non-judgmental about all these failed Batmen, recognizing that every one of them reflects a part of his history.  Our trip to The Island of Mister Mayhew is an excursion into the downside of all Batman's many personas--not just the grim avenger (Dark Ranger, Wingman) and the stifling mentor (Man-of-Bats) and the guilt-ridden son (Knight) and the megafranchise sellout (Legionary), but also the jet-set playboy that Morrison's earlier issues tried, however intermittently, to resuscitate.  As Jog wrote (and when was the last time one of my Morrison posts did not include some variation on "as Jog wrote"?) a few weeks ago,

If Morrison's run on this book seems to be about Batman trying to wipe away the past and move forward, only to be constantly haunted by stuff from years ago that he can't quite get rid of, these last few issues come off a lot like a dark version of what Morrison's doing with DC's other big icon on All Star Superman: pitting him against visions of himself.

If Jonathan Mayhew has some dirty secret to hide--and judging by that movie poster in #667, it may be the biggest secret in this storyline, hiding right out there in plain sight--then Morrison is also pitting Batman against visions of what Bruce Wayne could have been, a bored billionaire gone to seed without any life-defining mission.

The failed Batmen of Many Nations, on the other hand, are not there to battle Batman, or even to magnify him.  Morrison writes them to humanize him.  They remind us of a period when Batman was the grinning patriarch of a family of franchise knock-offs that spanned the globe, and they give Morrison a handy set of excuses to show us a modern-day Batman who's capable of working with other heroes, training sidekicks on the job, even handing out compliments and gently chiding his partner for a crack about the "League of Losers."  Batman is always respectful of his colleagues, never disdainful (an impulse that gets shunted off onto Wingman, of course), and he welcomes the Club of Heroes back into his story through cooperation rather than conflict.  The multiple reflections help to expand the character's valences back out beyond the reductive, sociopathic  interpretation of recent years.  Morrison is well on his way to dislodging the stick that Frank Miller shoved up Batman's ass twenty years ago--and that his own JLA did its part to wedge in there.

Much of the success is due to J.H. Williams III, whose playful spirit keeps the story from stumbling into all the smirking pitfalls it opens up.  He's absolutely the perfect artist for this story, blending different periods in comics history (and inventing new additions to that history) as seamlessly as Seven Soldiers #1 did the styles of his fellow artists. Most impressive of all, the pastiche never feels forced--while certain characters might jump off the page with Howard Chaykin's manic lines or Dave Gibbons' more measured ones, the pages as a whole never look like collages.  (Whether this is because Williams designs such unified pages or because he knows exactly when to stop the homage and assimilate the characters into his own style, it's difficult to say.)  Between this and the sense of tangible, apocalyptic evil exuded by the Black Glove, the Club of Heroes storyline feels like a nice little Seven Soldiers reunion project, even if the scope is necessarily smaller.

The only false step so far is the Benday-dotted flashback that opens the second issue.  It's a trick that we've seen too many times over the past decade's worth of self-referential comics, and Williams is far, far too adept an artist to need it.  His character designs and his ingenious variations in line weight and shading can already connote any artist or period he sets his mind to.  I don't know who decided to use the Benday dots, but they're like placing a chainsaw in the hands of a surgeon.

Otherwise, this is a highly entertaining storyline that overcomes all odds, except the ones that say a comic by Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III is probably going to be pretty damn good.  Finally, Morrison's Batman run has come into its own.

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.

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.

Doom Patrols 2: Do You, Mr. Jones?

If the war in space is redeemed by its ideas, then the booby prize for worst Doom Patrol story must go to its immediate predecessor, Mr. Jones and his war on Danny the Street.  True, this storyline introduced one of the book's most entertaining and durable characters, Flex Mentallo; but it's also a prime example of the problems that marred Doom Patrol in its middle period.

Doom Patrol moves through three stages.  First there's the shock of the new as Morrison introduces his characters and sets the tone for his run; this period of amazing creativity culminates in Cliff's voyage into Jane's Underground.  The book coasts nicely up through the Brain-Mallah masterpiece, then enters its brief but problematic middle period from Mr. Jones through the Pentagon Horror.  This is the part of the run where the strange ideas overwhelm the title, each concept trying just a little bit harder than the last and usually falling just a little bit shorter.  After the Pentagon Morrison shifts into the final phase, where he consolidates the series mythology and advances the book towards its apocalyptic ending.

Unfortunately, the Mr. Jones tale is one of those "hey Doom Patrol, look at these crazy concepts" stories typical of the middle period.  And unlike the war in space, the concepts aren't all that crazy, clever, or interesting.

There's Danny the Street, I suppose, although he never did all that much for me until the very end of the run.  The idea of a transvestite street--that is, a street with "masculine" buildings like gun shops and army surplus stores decorated in "feminine" frippery--just reinforces the same gender roles it pretends to question.  I mean, what gender is a street supposed to have?  Like Fanny said in the "auto-critique" issue of The Invisibles, "The transvestite, far from being a rebellious or transgressive figure, actually serves the status quo by validating stereotypical images of femininity."  At least, that's how Morrison wrote them back in the 90s.

Maybe I'm missing the point here.  The letter columns print a couple of comments from readers who are ecstatic to see gay or transgendered characters appearing in their favorite comics, and maybe that's what matters.  I'm sure the pickings were pretty slim back in 1990, and I'm glad they had a queer character to read about; too bad it wasn't anyone recognizably human.

That might have provided some genuine transgression, instead of the adolescent social critique on display in these issues.  Mr. Jones has built his Men from NOWHERE to act as "normalcy agents" to "eradicate eccentricities, anomalies, and peculiarities wherever we find them."  He wants Conformity, that bugaboo of all writers groping for a theme, so of course he lives in a suburban rambler with a white picket fence that looks like it came right out of the 1950s.  (From what I gather, the people who actually lived in the 1950s would be mightily amused to see us holding up their neurotic decade as the pinnacle of normalcy and order.)  The recurring gag of Mr. Jones acting out his parody of domestic bliss to a laugh track while he tortures his family falls absolutely flat--Morrison is a damned funny writer, as many other issues of Doom Patrol show, but it's awfully tough to wring a joke out of something being not funny.  He isn't trying to be funny here, though, but to show us that sitcom domesticity is a LIE!, in case anyone thought otherwise.

Naturally, the academics love this one.  A certain stripe, anyway, the type for whom multiplicity and nonconformity and subversiveness are not just values, they're obligations.  And hey, if you think people need to be told that conformity is bad then maybe you'll love this one too.  Me, I find it about as incisive as American Beauty, about as transgressive as Mrs. Doubtfire, about as rebellious as an X-TREME! soda ad.  Morrison would complicate this freaking-out-the-mundanes routine later--the Shadowy Mr. Evans practically recites the theme of these issues about a year down the road, and we know he's mostly full of shit--but everybody has to hit their low point, and this is the Doom Patrol's.

Doom Patrols 1: Grudging Admiration

I've been on a bit of a nostalgia kick lately, reading my favorite comics from fifteen years ago.  It all started with the recent release of this trade paperback, which includes my favorite issue (from right when I started reading the book, naturally--everybody's Golden Age), and with this trip down memory lane by Greg Burgas, which accomplished exactly what it set out to do:  get me hankering to re-read some Doom Patrols.

I don't think I've ever read them all in order before.  Doing so gives me a newfound appreciation for what Morrison and his collaborators built over the course of the series:  they started off with a bang, jettisoning all the lukewarm X-Men team-book cliches, and then they got better.  Artist Richard Case grows by leaps and bounds, from those chunky, plasticine figures in the early issues to the moodier and more expressive ones at the height of the run.  I hadn't realized how good he was at teasing different expressions out of Cliff Steele's unmoving face until I read the Kelley Jones fill-in issue; Jones cheats and makes it malleable and fleshy, basically a normal human face in orange paint.  Case doesn't have to.  He contributes some fun character designs, too (with a little help from Morrison and Brendan McCarthy), from Rebis to the Brotherhoods of Dada to the gallery of Replacement Heads.

(That's the other great thing about rereading the whole run:  taxonomy.  You can classify the Doom Patrol's antagonists into shadowy conspiracies and Bad Dads, as Morrison himself does, but I now prefer to think of them as Faceless and Replacement Heads.)

Rereading these issues has also given me a newfound appreciation for one of the least regarded stories--Greg calls it "perhaps Morrison's weakest of the entire run"--the big war in space that ran from issues 37 to 41.  Those issues are the least regarded for good reason.  The story is long (the longest single arc until the book's final one), slow-moving, light on action and heavy on exposition, much of it delivered in the annoying dialect stroke gimmick of the Geomancers.  It's almost completely devoid of the wry humor that leavened the weirdness in so many Doom Patrol issues.  It pulls the Doom Patrol too far out of their standard milieu--this is a milieu in which hungry paintings and transvestite streets are par for the course--and takes too much time explaining the setting instead of letting the characters run amok in it.  The Patrol spends most of the first half standing around and listening to the exposition stroke infodump, and as much as Morrison is enamored with the heavy-handed religious imagery of the pheromone communion, it just isn't worth the time.

But as the Doom Patrol joins the war the story takes on renewed life. The armies of functionally indistinguishable armored warriors clashing in endless, senseless combat, and especially the figure of the Judge Rock, come across as a Morrisonized take on the eternal war of the New Gods.  It's a much harsher spin than his recent foray into the Fourth World in Mister Miracle; it may also be the most intellectually rich story in Morrison's Doom Patrol.

The story is obsessed with signification and meaning.  The Geomancers and the Insect Mesh battle by psychosomatic proxies and plagues of abstraction; the war ends when Rhea topples the Judge Rock, bringing about "the end of all meaning and certainty."  Morrison lambasts the certainty of religious fanatics who are convinced they and they alone hold the key to scriptural interpretation, but he's also playing around with his own techniques of generating meaning.  The embodied neuroses of the Insect Mesh are no different from Dorothy's powers to externalize her subconscious or the battles inside the hungry painting, all of them embodiments of some subconscious terror or abstract ideology.  Morrison sees how far he can push his own tools, then takes them apart on-panel in the final issue as he reveals that the whole senseless war has been an allegory constructed by a being of limited creativity.  (Which does highlight the problem of reading an allegory of limited creativity for the previous four issues.)

He'd just done this as parody in the robot-on-gorilla extravaganza of #34.  (Interesting that one of the most humorless stories in the run is bracketed by two of the goofiest and most brilliant, this and the Flex Mentallo origin.)  The gorilla in the Che Guevara beret may claim that he and the brain in the jar in the baby carriage are "A vivid and explicit expression of Cartesian dualism," but they make ludicrous symbols in comparison with the real mind-and-body struggle of Cliff and his malfunctioning robot body, which is itself played for laughs.  Then Morrison does it again for real, using the symbolic warfare of the Geomancers and the Insect Mesh to explore the high stakes of theological certainty and the downside to his own method of symbolic externalization.  Creating objects that have only one possible interpretation can be a first step towards killing for them.

It's probably sheer coincidence that Morrison would name one faction after Jan Hus and the Ultraquists, reformers who provide the historical backdrop for another story of religious fanaticism, warfare, and attempts to regain the certainty of Paradise in David B.'s The Armed Garden.  And surely it's a coincidence that the image of the Judge Rock--a floating head with a city sprouting on top--looks so much like the image on the I♥NY mug that opens Paul Karasik and David Mazzuchelli's retelling of the Tower of Babel in City of Glass.  Or that the war in space ends with both sides deciding to build a great tower to heaven.  Or that Paul Auster interprets the story of Babel as a retelling of the myth of the Fall from a perfect, primal language in which a word equalled the thing it stood for.  Or that Peter Stillman, Rohan the blacksmith, and the Judge Rock are all trying to reverse the Fall, with disastrous results.

So Morrison's war in space has tapped into some heavy ideas, and the story is better for the contemplation it invites.  Even if it's no damn fun at all. 

Next time we'll talk about what's genuinely the weakest story in Doom Patrol, but for now we'll let Cliff Steele have the last word:

"Screw symbolism and let's go home."

Holy Hot Pants!

Batman #657, by Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert

With its third installment, Grant Morrison's Batman has finally grown on me.  Morrison builds on the best feature of the previous two, otherwise disappointing issues, their embrace of all the strange, occasionally repressed corners of Batman's sixty-odd years.  All the old stories are here, from Son of the Demon to Batman's gallery of rainbow-colored costumes, even the Spook from those 70s David V. Reed issues--although he won't be around for long, I'm sorry to report.  Best of all, Morrison doesn't fiddle around with some tedious in-story explanation for why these pieces of forgotten lore have returned, the way a Mark Waid or a Geoff Johns would.  He doesn't feel the need to ontologically justify them, he just puts them in his comic and uses them to whatever extent they serve his story, caring not a whit whether they were in-continuity or not--they are now.

But the third issue pulls away from its predecessors, finally offering more than the shallow pleasure of recognition for the longtime fans.  After two issues of meaningless fight scenes and tongue-in-cheek set pieces Morrison has finally put something at stake for Batman, confronting him with the daunting task of raising a son he never knew he had.  Damian (too obvious by half, Grant) comes across as a younger version of the old Batman--sullen, spoiled, nasty, and violent.  Sure, the kid has been raised by terrorist assassins (the reference to living in caves draws a timely parallel between Ra's al Ghul and Osama bin Laden) but Alfred's line about "memory lane" tells us that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree.  Nor is he just referring to the younger Bruce Wayne:  Damian's arrogance, aloofness, viciousness, and self-imposed isolation reflect the "sour-faced, sexually-repressed, humorless, uptight, angry, and all-round grim 'n' gritty" traits that Morrison is trying to purge from the adult Batman.  If he can raise this kid right, Batman has an opportunity to correct his own--that is, his writers'--past excesses.

In an equally nice touch, though, he has to resort to the humorless, angry martinet because that's the only treatment the boy respects.  Morrison has given Batman a complex challenge, to train Damian to be a healthier human being without backsliding in the opposite direction.  It's a rich premise and I hope Morrison does it justice by keeping Damian around longer than the one remaining issue of this arc.

While Morrison's writing has finally picked up, Kubert's art still hasn't risen to match it.  At best it's mere illustration, and not always effective illustration.  Either he or the letterer forgets which of the Spook's spooks is the goon and which is the undercover cop, although Morrison's script probably wasn't much help in this regard.  I do like the little mouths Kubert puts on their ghost costumes, though--an important detail that makes them overgrown trick-or-treaters rather than Klansmen.

He does a better job with the climactic fight scene, staging it against the Batcave's most iconic exhibits.  I suspect that's by Morrison's design, as the composition of that final splash page is just too perfect.  The page not only juxtaposes the fallen Tim Drake with the costumes of Thomas Wayne and Jason Todd (a juxtaposition that loses a little of its force, unfortunately, now that Jason isn't dead anymore--thanks for nothing, Superboy!), it drapes Tim with the most risible part of the old Robin costume, the green chain mail hot pants.  Is that meant to be a further humiliation?  A chilling replay of past failures?

Or is it a reminder that no matter how much these characters grimace, no matter how many depradations their writers inflict on them and no matter how much black their artists add or how much green they subtract, the somber heroes of "New Earth" will always be in continuity with the smiling four-color champions who apparently embarrass everybody at DC?

Everybody, it seems, but Grant Morrison.