I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Luthor, You Supercilious Bastard

All-Star Superman #5, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely

Quitely really should get top billing this time around:  he simply outdoes himself.  Given an issue that's mostly set in Stryker's Island, Metropolis's prison for super-criminals, he turns the prison's stark utilitarianism into part of his layouts.  He stages the initial prison scenes in a three-tiered, six-panel grid that reflects the monotony and confinement of prison routine. In one beautiful two-page spread the prison design literally becomes the page design, and throughout the sequence panel gutters bleed into prison walls and vice versa.

But when the Parasite triggers a riot the pages open up into four-tiered widescreen layouts, the better to capture the action.  When Clark ends the Parasite's rampage with a timely earthquake, the gutters themselves bend and buckle, doubling as ceiling and floor.  And when the issue ends on a note of uncertainty Quitely gives us a splash page, leaving us no clear visual cues on where to go next.  It's a wonderfully self-assured artist who can turn such a conventional scenario into a breezy lesson on page design--and do it without smacking of effort or pretense.

It doesn't hurt that Morrison is firing on all cylinders, too.  This issue returns to three of the key elements that made All-Star Superman #1 so entertaining, none of them much in evidence since then:  Luthor, Superman's impending death, and Clark Kent.  All three lend Morrison's Superman a vulnerable, human side that's been noticeably obscured in the last couple installments--although Lex intends just the opposite.  He's granted a death row interview to Clark Kent (presumably an old Smallville chum, given Lex's shout-out to Mrs. K) so he can vent about the oppressive perfection of the strange visitor from another planet.  As Jog says, it's basically the Jules Feiffer/Kill Bill interpretation of Superman, but Morrison keeps undercutting Luthor's spiel with little reminders of how much he's missing.

"I've always liked you, Kent," he says.  "You're a humble, modest, uncoordinated human.  You're everything he's not."  And because any five-year-old can appreciate that irony, Morrison and Quitely don't stop there:  they hammer us over the head with it, playing Luthor's hoary interpretation for comedy and countering it with a decent, humane, fundamentally nice Superman at every glance.  Lex spends the entire issue failing to notice the many times Clark saves his life without breaking cover (the best gag from #1 recycled many times over); he can even stare an angry, de-spectacled Clark right in the eye and still not recognize the Superman simmering to the surface.  Nor does he see that the "smug self-regard" he so despises in his foe is just a projection of his own overweening ego.  (In this respect he's a bit like Morrison's treatment of Darkseid in "Rock of Ages":  two iconic super-villains who can't see anything but themselves, monomaniacally projecting their own worst traits onto the world around them.)  Any intimations of Superman's arrogance or condescension are rightly placed back on the shoulders of his antagonist, where they belong.

The comic's finest moment is a visual joke so good I'm not even sure I should spoil it.  (But I will, so look out.)  The beautiful part is not Morrison and Quitely hiding the set-up in plain sight for several pages until they're ready to roll out the punchline.  It's not seeing Lex Luthor redrawing his eyebrow with a pencil.  (First I wondered if the missing eyebrow signified some dastardly escape plan, then I considered the possibility that Lex had subconsciously trimmed it into the "Superman Swoosh" and shaved the whole thing off in a fit of pique.  I was lost until no less a luminary than Cameron Stewart over at Barbelith suggested Morrison was simply extending Luthor's baldness--and this is clearly the classic Luthor, presumably with the classic explanation for his baldness--to his entire head.)  No, the beautiful touch is that when Luthor redraws his eyebrow, he redraws it in character so he can deliver a menacing supervillain rant with that much more flair.  That's dedication to the part!

And then, at his most ludicrous, Lex reminds Clark that he's killed him.  It's a gut-punch ending, reminding us that we have to take Luthor seriously in spite of his arrogance and blindness--or because of them, because they've led him to condemn the kindest man in the world.  Clark doesn't seem to know where he's going next and neither do we, but I'm sure eager to follow him there.

This was easily the best issue of All-Star Superman yet.  Then again, I thought that last issue and I could probably say it of all of them except the third one--this comic just keeps getting better.  Morrison has taken what could be a dreary and repetitive story structure, the grand tour of all Superman's friends and foes, and transformed it into a thoughtful reflection on what makes these characters tick.  It's a Superman story bible that retains the energy of a proper story, filtered through Quitely's expert storytelling.  Again, he's the one to beat in this issue; as well as Morrison writes Clark Kent, Quitely sells us on a Clark so self-effacing that in some panels he actually appears to have a paunch and a double chin.  You can honestly believe he doesn't need the glasses to hide his alter ego (which makes Luthor's ignorance a little more understandable, I suppose).  Morrison's script is note-perfect, but it's Quitely who never lets us overlook the man in the Superman.

If he'd just show Clark pulling the covert-powers-stumblebum routine to make a prank backfire on Steve Lombard!  Come on, guys, will this be the money shot of your twelve-issue megaplot?  What are you waiting for?

WHAAM!

Batman #656, by Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert

Well, he justified the Lichtensteins, anyway.  The pop-art paintings that so vexed me last month are played for beautiful effect in Grant Morrison's second issue of Batman, acting as a chorus on Batman's brouhaha with a squad of ninja man-bats and wittily interacting with the combatants.  Amazingly, Morrison doesn't go for the obvious gag of William Dozier POW!s and ZAP!s illuminating the melee but he isn't exactly hiding his influences under a bushel, either.  This comic gleefully excavates the strange, sexy, or just plain silly parts of the Batman saga that have been edged out of the frame by twenty years of monotonous Millerisms.  Batman isn't quite as clinical about its reclamations as All-Star Superman, though; if the latter can occasionally feel like a museum exhibition of bygone tropes, the former is just a straight-ahead romp by a creator who's popular enough to ignore the entrenched mistakes of the last two decades.

The flipside is that All-Star Superman never seems to be playing down to its audience.  There's still no indication why an aid for Africa charity would meet in such a frivolous locale, or why a museum of popular culture would also house a gigantic upside-down (and apparently real) dinosaur.  The whole Aid for Africa set-up seems to be there largely to give the resuscitated "Bruce Wayne, fop" persona an excuse to mock the charity's mission and, come to think of it, the entire concept of charity in general.   And maybe to add a touch of hip celebrity social engagement--some thirteen months out of date--before Wayne undercuts it, much to the amusement of supermodel head of state Jezebel Jet (a name that manages to try too hard and not nearly hard enough) who I'm sure is not at all a supervillain.  I wouldn't want any Batman comic, especially this one, to be "about" African aid, but there's something mildly perverse about using continent-wide poverty as the staging for such frivolity.  Hey, Bruce, we have something in common--I can't stand art with no content either.

And that's all I've got.  This was an exasperating week for comics:  the dog days of summer brought me two more installments of 52 that were monthly comics in weekly drag (it's really time to bail) and a Daredevil fill-in that squanders whatever noirish suspense Foggy's witness protection stint might have generated for a fight scene with ninjas of the non-man-bat variety.  Batman #656 was the best of the lot but there is no honor in this victory.  It's mildly frustrating to see Morrison speaking about his take on the character so eloquently (and hilariously--"a sour-faced, sexually-repressed, humorless, uptight, angry, and all-round grim 'n' gritty Batman would be more likely to join the Taliban surely?") while his first two issues have remained so glib.  The Newsarama interview speaks to a tremendous depth--not a thematic or symbolic depth, but a depth of feeling for the character and his milieu and a simple depth of craft--that still hasn't quite worked its way to the surface.

Love Child

Batman #655, by Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert

I finished this comic with the wrong question weighing heavily on my mind:  why is an African aid charity benefit decorated with pseudo-Lichtenstein prints and a... ah... a giant upside-down floating dinosaur?  I realize today's fans are expected to applaud every sign of arch self-awareness in their comics--thank god there were no gorillas, at least--but does every scene have to recirculate the same devalued imagery?  Or is that just a reflex impulse that kicks in whenever a writer or artist doesn't think enough about what they're doing?

We'll come back to the dinosaur later.  Everything right and wrong with Grant Morrison's Batman debut is on display in the first scene, a deliberately disjoint battle with the Joker that dares you to assume it's not real--there's just no way the Joker is going to kill Batman, especially "in front of a bunch of vulnerable, disabled KIDS!!!!"  In a nicely-delivered twist, the scene turns out to be entirely real (as real as it gets anyway), although not everything is quite what it seems, and it ends with a blatant declaration that we won't be seeing the same kind of stories that have dominated Batman since The Dark Knight Returns.

But the blocking isn't quite up to the task:  is the Batman with the gun dead or alive?  Where's the second Batman coming from?  All is made clear eventually but the scene doesn't make enough sense as you read it.  Meanwhile the ending--Batman tossing Joker in a garbage can--is a little too overtly metaphorical for my tastes, a little too insistent that we get the point.  In short, the comic is alternately oversold or jury-rigged.

If you're tempted to attribute these flaws solely to artist Andy Kubert, consider that much of the heavy-handedness is Morrison's and Morrison's alone.  Here's a nervous, sweaty Kirk Langstrom, a.k.a. Man-Bat, meeting Bruce Wayne in a hotel lobby:

Err... yes, yes... my wife and I are both very active in the... errr... the whole charity thing...

You don't have to be the World's Greatest Detective to know that when a scientist with a propensity for transforming himself into a gigantic bat starts acting jittery there'll be problems down the road, but Morrison doesn't trust us enough to signal that with something a little more subtle.  Langstrom might as well parade through the lobby with a sandwich board reading I AM IN BIG TROUBLE AND I'M LYING.

The overall plot is much more satisfying than these outsized details.  Batman, with a little prodding from reliable Alfred, decides to take a vacation from Gotham and cultivate his Bruce Wayne persona just as his ex-lover Talia resurfaces with a son from the long-out-of-continuity Batman: Son of the Demon in tow.  It's a nice set-up for returning Batman to the "hairy-chested globetrotting love god of the 70s" Morrison wrote about in the Arkham Asylum 15th Anniversary Edition.  I look forward to a barechested (but masked!) desert swordfight at some point in the near future.

Regrettably none of the edges fit together, and not just in the dialogue, orthogonal conversations peppered with non sequiturs being a Morrison tradition very much in evidence here.  The plot itself doesn't quite fit the larger context Morrison was handed--didn't Batman just take a year-long vacation as Bruce Wayne to clear his head?  Wouldn't this storyline make more sense if it were that trip?  It's tempting, and troubling, to speculate that, between Seven Soldiers, All-Star Superman, the weekly 52 and now this, Morrison may be overextending himself again.  Hopefully nothing as bad as the 1997-98 meltdown that cost him Phil Jiminez on The Invisibles, but this isn't up to his usual standards.

Or maybe I should face up to another possibility: this could be exactly the comic Morrison wanted to write, and it just isn't aimed at me.  Everything from the theatrical dialogue to the washes of lurid color in the opening scene feels like it's pitched to excitable fourteen-year-olds.  Did I mention the ninja man-bats?  There will be ninja man-bats.  This might be a perfectly fun comic for fourteen-year-olds, although I think the really good comics for fourteen-year-olds write up to their audience, not down, and can be just as entertaining for adults.  I hope Morrison's Batman ends up reaching that point, but it isn't quite there yet.

Expectations with Morrison are so high that the strong initial disappointment I felt on finishing the issue is already abating a little.  The plot has potential and the comic is peppered with little gems, from Comissioner Gordon's gradual detox to rumors of alternate-universe hideaways for the super-rich to Alfred's menu of gourmet guano.  (Although even there... goujons?  Was that a typo?)  Unfortunately some attempts at seeding the ground with gems misfire.  Bringing us back to the damn dinosaur.

I'll keep reading Morrison's Batman, of course, and I'm coming to like it more even as I write this.  At the moment, though, Paul Dini and J. H. Williams III have produced a much more seamless, satisfying Batman story over in Detective Comics.

But if I were fourteen...?

Queen for a Day

All Star Superman #3, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely.

Did anyone else find it strange that a comic built around the premise that Lois Lane gains super powers for a day--a premise that received an issue-long build-up in the previous installment--doesn't show Lois using those super powers to do anything?  She flies around in a couple of panels, but otherwise the powers serve no purpose except to enable her to survive the kind of hijinks Superman gets drawn into on a daily basis--and even there, she still ends up in her venerable role of Lois Lane, Girl Hostage.  All the rescuing and problem-solving is reserved for Superman, while Lois remains a slightly more durable object of his affections.

It's his book, of course, and we did just get an issue-long spotlight on Lois, but there's something odd about Morrison's failure to exploit his own premise.  Part of the problem may be that there's just no room, what with all the contests and challenges he puts Superman through.  This is Morrison's update of one of those loopy Silver Age issues where Lois makes out with Batman, Aquaman, and Green Arrow in order to drive Superman mad with jealousy, though in this case his competition is a pair of time-traveling heroes of legend.  There's a great panel where Lois admits she's stringing these two scoundrels along for some birthday fun, and a little payback on the Man of Steel, but it's her only glimmer of agency--otherwise she's waiting patiently, if not comatosely, for Superman to put things right.

The issue feels like a missed opportunity, especially since it turns on the question of what Superman sees in Lois.  Morrison answers that quite cleverly through the Ultrasphinx's riddle, but Lois herself doesn't do much to show why she's the unstoppable force to which Superman must surrender. By casting her in her traditional Silver Age role of passive victim and love interest, Morrison misses a great chance to show what Lois could do when she's finally Superman's equal.  And more to the point, maybe today's comics, even the all-ages ones, especially the all-ages ones, have better things to do than replicate the psychosexual mores of stories written in the 1950s for 8-year-olds.

That aside, this comic has everything a Superman fan could want:  subterranean invaders, super-rescues, a grim omen of Superman's impending death and a quick foreshadowing of his Twelve Super-Challenges (including Solaris!), a romantic rooftop moment (again harkening back to the Superman movie--Morrison wisely raids it for its human relationships and not its sterile Kryptonian production design), and typically gorgeous Frank Quitely art.  The big splash page with Superman and Lois's lunar clinch is perfect--not only for Lois's little kick and the spray of moondust but for the Earth that floats above them, unlined and luminous like something out of a NASA mural or a Chesley Bonestell painting.  The Morrison and Quitely Superman inhabits a world more utopian than our own (all due to his presence, no doubt), and Quitely's evocation of this utopian vision of space is both apt and striking.

The issue also features a cameo by the Daily Planet supporting cast, including the magnificent Steve Lombard (who must be read as if voiced by Patrick Warburton)--I love the little touch that it's his Luxus Samaritan getting trashed in the opening splash.  Lombard is basically a human analogue of Samson and Atlas, a big jock who's vying for attention he will never get from Lois Lane, and his brief appearance reminds me of another puzzling absence from the last couple of issues of All Star Superman: Clark Kent.  I can understand the plot reasons why we haven't seen Clark in the last two issues--perhaps Superman feels he no longer has the time to walk among we mortals--but half of the character's appeal is that the world's greatest man resides within its most average joe.  Hopefully future issues will restore that half of the equation, along with a less passive Lois.  The sci-fi trappings are fun, but it's the human element that makes these stories special.

And if we don't see at least one instance of ultranerd Clark Kent covertly using his super powers to turn a prank back on his jock tormentor, I'll be sorely disappointed.  What else is Steve Lombard for?

Evil Serum?

Bulleteer #4, by Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette.

The final issue of Bulleteer is more about Sally Sonic than Alix Harrower, although as Sally's unfortunate life represents a possible fate for Alix the flashbacks never seem out of place.

This late in the game any regular Seven Soldiers reader can spot the recurrent themes in Sally's story:  the stunted aging, the importance of change and mortality, the forces that conspire to pervert innocent heroes, and the very blunt critique/participation in superhero comics' fetishization of women that has been this book's bread and butter.  I am a little surprised that Morrison would resort to such a hokey excuse for Sally's corruption ("Doctor Hyde's Evil Serum") when he'd already done such a great job of taking Sally to the precipice of that corruption quite naturally, through her own naïveté.  But he's done this before, with the Vigilante's lycanthropy or, to switch projects, with the paranoia-inducing alien chemicals in All-Star Superman.  All of these stories present plausible psychological motivations for some pretty unsavory behavior and then veer off into the transparently ridiculous shelter of genre devices.

It smacks of the same refusal to grow up that characterizes so many of the failed heroes in Seven Soldiers--if you assume that psychological realism is the only way to tell mature stories, which Morrison plainly does not.  That's the way favored by Zor and the Sheeda, who both force the heroes they encounter to "grow up" into the venality of what passes for realism in most comics.  It's the wrong kind of change, as bad or worse than stasis, and the two feed off one another.  Morrison's alternative seems to be heroes who can grow into real emotional maturity, and who can say something valid about our lives without giving up even the zaniest genre trappings, but attributing their behavior to Mort Weisinger plot devices like the Evil Serum feels like an unpleasant atavism.

(I'm also surprised that Morrison didn't explain Sally's behavior through the Sheeda, who have become more naturalized through steady exposure.  Although perhaps he does--there's one panel near the end where Sally seems to scratch the back of her neck, right where they ride, as she talks about madness and change...)

Alix goes through a few changes herself in this issue; happily, no Evil Serum is in sight (although Sally does make the offer).  Last issue Alix inadvertently saved herself through her own empathy, but this time she can only triumph by shutting out her archnemesis, crying "I DON'T CARE WHAT YOUR +%@&'N SOB STORY IS!" just before she delivers the coup de grace.  This hardening and Sally's negative example of the fate awaiting attractive female superheroes--the culmination of four issues that bombard Alix with dead, failed, or twisted heroes--prompt Alix to turn a deaf ear to the Vigilante's pleas for help.  Morrison dumps the information about her role in the Seven Soldiers storyline a little too easily, but Alix's renunciation of her mission does great things for future stories, cementing her even further as a classic Marvel-style reluctant hero and establishing a challenge for the finale that ties right into one of Morrison's recurring themes.  Somebody has to pull Alix out of her jaded, negative attitude towards superheroes and rekindle her compassion or we're all finished.  Come to think of it, if the Evil Serum is, like the Guilt monster or the Omega Sanction, just a stand-in for the forces that strip us of our idealism and grind us down, then maybe Alix caught a whiff after all.

This comic isn't the tour de force of issue #3, and the pieces of the grand puzzle aren't delivered as elegantly (and hence aren't as thrilling, even though by all rights they should be moreso) as those in #2.  Still, it's a nice little finish for a series that surprised me by finding more emotional depth in its arch premise and its unabashedly cheesecake art than I would have thought possible.  This was right up there with Zatanna and Klarion as the best Seven Soldiers has had to offer.

"I believe it may even be a type of hologram"

"Be born again and again in me!  Life after life!  Suffocated in mortal clay!  Broken and blinded by the explosion of being!"  --The Omega Sanction, Mister Miracle #4, 2006

"The whole of creation was nothing but a cage, devised by Ormazd to trap the forces of evil where he could destroy them.  That's when the battle started.  Ormazd, creating the first trap, created the concept of restriction.  The forces of Ahriman struggle for liberation.  Which side are you on?  Do you know?"  --Quimper (by way of Denise), Invisibles vol. 1 #25, 1996

"Have your eyes grown strong enough to behold the fundamental force that is restriction?"  --The Omega Sanction

"Only set me free and break this chain."  --Aurakles, Mister Miracle #4

"Look there!  Urizen, deadly black, in chains bound."  --Tom O'Bedlam, Invisibles vol. 1 #2, 1994

"I've had a long time to think about this.  So let me get things straight.  You're right here with me.  You're suffering too, Omega.  Am I right?  That's okay, everybody's got chains they wanna get out from under, right?  Even you."  --Shilo Norman, Mister Miracle #4

"I WILL SET YOU FREE!  I AM THE LORD THY DESTROYER!"  --Aurakles

"I am not the god of your fathers.  I am the hidden stone and break all hearts.  Break open your heart."  --Barbelith (by way of Jesus), Invisibles vol. 1 #24, 1996

"And there's a fundamental force in me too.  I gave my life over to representing something that's in all of us.  So whatever's holding you down, wherever you are, however hard it seems... how about you and me escape together?"  --Shilo Norman

"Which side are you on?"  --Barbelith, Invisibles vol. 1 #16, 1995

"The dalang is more than a puppeteer.  His skill makes us believe that we see a war between two great armies, but there is no war.  There is only the dalang."  --Agus, Invisibles vol. 1 #5, 1994

"Forgive yourself and remove those chains you wear."  --Metron, Mister Miracle #4

"I've been here before... feels like..."
"7 days.  You have survived the first initiation into the mysteries of the New Gods."  --Shilo and Metron

"All times are the same time.  The initiation of a sorceror reveals this.  That is why they say a true initiation never ends."  --Tlazolteotl, Invisibles vol. 1 #14, 1995

"Think of timespace as a multidimensional self-perfecting system in which everything that has ever, or will ever occur, occurs simultaneously.  I believe timespace is a kind of object,  a geometrical supersolid.  I believe it may even be a type of hologram [...]"  --Takashi, Invisibles vol. 2 #5, 1997

"Teenage kicks right through the night."  --King Mob (by way of the Undertones), Invisibles vol. 2 #5, 1997

"Funny, don't you think?  How your life coulda turned out."  --Shilo

"Welcome home, Mister Miracle."  --Professor

"Lost one.  Welcome home."  --Barbelith

Morrisonarama 2

Why don't I just change the name of the blog to Morrisonarama?  And I can include letters and pin-ups and reader polls and fanfic and we can have arguments about who's better, Grant or Shaun Cassidy.

Here's where I make some very belated contributions to conversations that began while I was otherwise occupied...

...Happily, even though it features a tour and a mystery inside the Fortress of Solitude All-Star Superman #2 doesn't retell "The Super-Key to Fort Superman," one of the most grossly over-homaged stories of the Silver Age.  No, Morrison does an end run around comics entirely and retells the legend of Bluebeard instead.  An inquisitive woman (who contemplates her future as Superman's wife), a forbidden room, intimations of a horrifying fate... is this what Morrison meant when he talked about "science fiction folk tales" and a mythology for the modern age?

...Mister Miracle seems to be the least popular of the Seven Soldiers miniseries, but Shilo Norman's torments in the third issue have struck a chord with some readers, redeeming the earlier issues at least partially.  Unfortunately, I had just the opposite reaction.

It all gets off to a swell start as Shilo loses his career to an imitator, his friends to an emotionally numbing fad, and, temporarily, his sense of self-worth to the Anti-Life Equation, cutely rendered as a meme so horrific that Dark Side's word balloon can't even represent it lest we go mad.  This triggers a wonderfully-executed three-page sequence that carries Shilo through the dark nights of the soul experienced by his fellow male New Yorker Soldiers in their third issues.  As Jog ably comments (at the above link), the scene works as an overt psychologization of Kirby's concerns in the original Fourth World comics and as a kind of magnification or explication of the story formula that all the other Seven Soldiers series follow.  So far so good.

The problems begin when Metron shows up to inspire Shilo with some words of confidence and a simple display of human kindness.  This is very much in the tradition of Kirby's Fourth World, where the most fondly regarded issues built up to charged, apocalyptic epiphanies:  Scott Free's  insistence on his own independence in "Himon," the pacifist son's final battle and transformation in "The Glory Boat," or--perhaps my favorite scene in the Kirby canon--Izaya's  renunciation of Darkseid's methods and his search for a better way in "The Pact." 

But Kirby allowed those transformative scenes to sprawl for pages, serving as the climaxes for their entire chapters, whereas Morrison tosses Shilo's torment and resistance out in a single page; Shilo is saved by two word balloons and a single panel reminding him that Dark Side's equations don't account for everything in the human condition.  There may be single panels capable of conveying such a stirring renunciation of despotism and depression, but the cloying picture of two nice gentlemen helping ladies don their coats in the rain isn't one of them.  (I do like the background detail of the Manhattan Superhero Museum, a reminder of all the qualities Morrison loves about superheroes--their selflessness, for example--that refute Dark Side's equations.  But the weight of Metron's counterargument and Shilo's resistance have to rest on something more substantial, and the two courteous gentlemen just don't cut it.)  Morrison follows it up with yet another round of torment, this time more physical, and a visit from Dark Side and another visit from the fallen gods of New Genesis, which promises a last chance I'd rather not see advertised at this cliffhanger point in the miniseries.

I don't necessarily mind the placement of Shilo's redemptive epiphany so far in advance of the series' climax--Peter Hensel observes that Mister Miracle is following the basic plotline of the Jesus myth and so this third issue, the dark night of transformation in Jog's formula, is a Kirbyesque take on the temptation in the desert/garden.  The big finish and the real moment of redemption will no doubt reserved for next issue, when Shilo Norman puts his modern spin on the most famous escape trick of all time--The Empty Tomb!  But the pacing of this third issue is too rushed to do justice to the Kirby epiphanies it so clearly wants to echo.  I never thought Grant Morrison would have me longing for the days of narrative decompression, but there you go.

...Almost forgot to mention this great post by Jog, contemplating the reasons behind the breadth of Morrison's appeal (and his constant blog coverage) following his landslide win in the first Comic Bloggers' Poll.  Jog, when I finally start up Morrisonarama! you're going on the masthead.

Morrisonarama 1

Bulleteer #3, by Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette.

Three panels.

That's how long it takes Grant Morrison to turn one of the loopier tropes of Silver Age DC Comics--their propensity for undersea kingdoms and gorgeous mermaids people of marine origin--into a full-fledged if still fundamentally loopy culture.  Or, more properly, a subculture:  the first page of Bulleteer #3 introduces us to Stellamaris, the "undersea diva" who talks like an activist but acts like every other wannabe, has-been, and never-was at the Zenith City superhero convention.

Morrison has typically avoided the "What would superheroes would really be like?" question that has dogged so many comics post-Watchmen.  He takes superhero comics on their own terms, so that set-pieces like this issue's convention, which simply transplants the culture of comics fandom right onto the (lesser) objects of our adoration, can critique the genre (and the culture that has accumulated around it)  without rejecting its underlying premises.  What would superheroes really be like?  They wouldn't exist and so we couldn't have any of these stories--the ultimate if rarely acknowledged end of most such attempts at superhero realism.  Morrison asks, instead, "What would it be like to live in a world of superheroes?" and it furnishes stories like this one, at once hilarious and moving.

After a slight digression into the Seven Soldiers megaplot last issue, Bulleteer has returned to its critique of the warped gender politics and not-even-sublimated sexuality of comic book superheroes and comic book culture, and Yanick Paquette is once again let loose to turn out the cheesecake.  This can only be described as playing to his and the series' strengths.  And if the issue's main plot, such as it is, of murder, mystery, and assassination still gets short shrift it's because Paquette and Morrison are having so much fun with the scenery.  (That plot isn't completely neglected, though, with a good appearance by "I, Spyder" and even a cute resolution to the mystery of who's poisoning Stellamaris.)

This issue is a treasure chest for comics fans, with references to bottom-of-the-barrel DC characters like Dumb Bunny of the Inferior Five (every bit as awful as she seems here--Morrison invented nothing) or the original Bulletgirl (who levels her own, much less sarcastic critique of the Bulleteer's cheesecake appearance).  Morrison's references are perfectly chosen:  Who better than perennial B-lister Booster Gold to present awards?  He's as much a wannabe as the losers at Mind-Grabber Kid's table, albeit one who briefly made it big.  And where better to hold the convention than Zenith City, which (Google informs me) only appeared in a couple of stories featuring the ultimate hero wannabe, the meta-hero wannabe, Robby Reed of "Dial H for Hero"?  (Either that or it's a name-check to my old friend Radioactive Man.)

The issue is also, like most of the recent chapters, chock full of connections to other Seven Soldiers series.   A reference to Kid Scarface locates Bulleteer #3 the day after Zatanna and Shining Knight #3, much as Shilo Norman wanders through the third issues of Klarion and Guardian in Mr. Miracle #3.  If the first issues of each series began at variable and isolated moments--some of them, like Alix's, must have started weeks or even months before Seven Soldiers #0--then the third ones are roughly contemporaneous, lining up every series to end just in time for the grand finale.  (Some odd spatial alignments are also coming into focus:  Morrison seems to have divided his soldiers up into East Coast and West Coast groups, separated by gender, while Frankenstein gallivants around the solar system.)  The timelines are condensing and converging, creating a sense of narrative acceleration.

The same is true for the interseries connections, the element that has recently generated the most narrative charge.  The early chapters had so little to do with one another that some readers complained Seven Soldiers amounted to little more than a shared setting; now every chapter either adds a new piece to the puzzle or shows characters assembling the ones we've already got.  In this issue Li'l Hollywood learns that her old buddy Kid Scarface is dead (and possibly shows some advance knowledge of the troubles to come?  "Your time is coming, Lucian, love, sooner than you might think"??  Watch out, Mind-Grabber Kid!).  Even better, as a table of reject heroes toasts the loss of their own Jackie Pemberton one character (a Blue Boy--any connection to Solomano's nephew?) exclaims, "What was she thinking?  Nobody goes into battle with six in their team." Another voice--his fellow Blue Boy, if Paquette and letterer Jared Fletcher have mapped the table seating and the word balloons with any particular design--adds "Everybody knows it's unlucky.  Five is good.  Seven is better."  It seems the loser heroes of the DC universe have always known what we Seven Soldiers readers took a couple of months to figure out.

I love this interpretive pile-up.  I don't see it as redundancy or poor planning; quite the opposite.  As the story nears its finale the characters combine more pieces to complete the narrative, and vice versa, so that every moment of in-story connection feels like one step closer to the inevitable, apocalyptic end.  The characters' experience of the plot and their reading of the plot--and by extension our reading of the plot--are one and the same.  To read Seven Soldiers is to watch a story put itself together chapter by chapter, like watching a scattered pile of cards fly back into a neatly assembled deck.

That assembly would mean nothing, of course, if Seven Soldiers existed only to tell a conventional story of invasion and heroism and sacrifice.  Such tales might be well-told, and a great deal of fun, but why bother with the baroque narrative structure if it only leads up to another version of the coming of Galactus or the Skrulls?  Fortunately, Morrison has also used that structure to distribute a number of more evocative and meaningful themes across the storyline, themes Bulleteer has accomodated better than many of the miniseries.  The sexual ones simmer throughout this issue, of course, but Morrison also works the convention and its third-rate superheroes for some genuine pathos--nowhere moreso than Mind-Grabber Kid's two-page monologue, which viciously exposes the desperation that drives all the wannabes and never-weres, the fear that they've wasted their best years on idol-worship and nostalgia.  It enmeshes this chapter in the project's recurrent fear of aging, with an amazing admission (or joke) carried by the art.  Tell me I'm the only one who sees a connection between this:

and this!

For all the genres Morrison said he was going to tackle in Seven Soldiers, I never would have thought confessional autobiography would be among them.

And Then There Were Seven

I should just drop all other pretenses and dedicate this blog solely to comics by British writers whose surnames begin with the 13th letter of the alphabet.  It's good to have a niche.

Bulleteer #2, by Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette.  Spoilers follow.

This is one of Morrison's loopiest chapters yet, not because the content is particularly outré--no heralds of the apocalypse with grandfather clocks for heads here--but because he continually forces us to revise our judgments about the story and the many stories contained within it.

The comic starts out innocuously enough, with FBI agent "Sky-High" Helligan coming over direct from her appearance in Shining Knight to explain the plot for us and revealing something of the aftermath of Seven Soldiers #0.  It's not quite as eye-opening as the revelatory Guardian #4, largely because it's telling us what we already know or have guessed, but it's enough to make this issue another key part of the overall crossover and it provides plenty of cud for the devoted like myself to ruminate on.  (The folks over at Barbelith have developed some pretty interesting theories about the traitors within each team of seven; this issue confirms that theory in a big way, with a twist I didn't see coming but which makes perfect sense.  Those are a Morrison specialty, of course.)

The fun really begins with a visit to a dying Golden Age supervillain.  First Morrison elegantly connects his take on the Seven Soldiers of Victory and Nebula Man to existing DC continuity.  Then he conducts a standard, fairly obvious revisionist take on the Vigilante, turning him from a singing cowboy hero into a racist thug.  Old SSoV enemy Solomano (heh) insists that villainy is just a matter of cultural perspective and says "My own people will call me a hero," and for about two pages it seems like Morrison might actually agree with him.  But then Solomano says "there are no such things as heroes, only weak fools who want to believe in them!" and we know Morrison is setting him and us up for a fall since the Seven Soldiers project is about rekindling a belief in heroism (often among the heroes themselves).  Solomano, briefly sympathetic, is now just a slightly more realistic version of Zor the Terrible Time Tailor, another villain who attempts to write his own revisionist narratives that equate maturity with pessimism and degradation and say heroism is impossible.

I can't say I'm satisfied with Helligan's alternative explanation for Greg Sanders's malice and his death-wish.  (Tangent:  how many characters in this narrative are old men and women trapped in young bodies, or old men trapped in dying bodies, or men and women who seek eternally youthful and unchanging bodies, or adolescents who seek the alien chrysalis of the Sheeda?  In other words, characters who can't change, who resist change, or who pervert change?)  Partly that's because Solomano's story seems so eminently plausible.  If we were following the "what if superheroes really existed" logic of those infamous '80s revisions--and Morrison clearly is not--who would be a better candidate for a bigoted superhero than the guy who puts a bandanna over his face and rides around the southwest shooting at people? 

Morrison brings up an ugly possibility, and then he shies away from it with a deliberately ludicrous story about lycanthropy.  Sanders's secret accounts for the rage Solomano saw--it might even be said to act as a metaphor for the rage within him, possibly for the rage of bigotry*--but it lets him and us off the hook.  I can see how Morrison needs to reject the Solomano/Zor/Grim 80s mode of revision for the larger purposes of his project, but he can't quite write off the racism that, to modern eyes, lurks in the figure of the Vigilante by exclaiming "He was a werewolf!"  It's like saying Rorschach was only moody because he was a gnome:  the figure raises very real anxieties that deserve much more honest representations.

(*Yeah, metaphor.  When the narrative vehicle has absolutely no mimetic connection to the thematic tenor--when it's in fact providing cover to insulate the character against the uglier implications of those tenors--we have left literality and hypostasis far behind.)

Those qualms aside, the issue succeeds both as a narrative lynchpin for the Seven Soldiers macro-story and as a light-comedy exercise that wrings gentle humor out of the yoking together of disparate elements that turn out to be more connected than we first think (hence the werewolf gag, which has a good payoff).  Helligan is the perfect character to anchor this issue, which is all about bringing disparate pieces together to assemble the larger story; when she describes her methodology ("I know it's a lot of information, but that's the way I work.  Everything at once") she might as well be describing Morrison's own.

She's a smart enough investigator and an engaging enough protagonist that the Bulleteer becomes a guest star in her own comic.  Paquette doesn't have nearly as many cheesecake opportunities this time (even with a cameo by the Whip!) as Morrison dials down the sexuality, but Alix still fits the story, and the story fits her comic.  As a reluctant heroine who comes into the world of superheroes by way of their own fetish community she would have fit right in with the misfits and wannabes like Dyno-Mite Dan, making her the perfect candidate for the missing seventh soldier in the first issue.  That revelation brings a belated sense of completion to their ill-fated group, and creates a real charge for readers who have been following this story from the beginning.  With the arrival and confirmation of the missing seventh we seem to have reached some kind of critical inflection point; from here on it's a headlong rush to the climax.

Addenda:  You may have already seen this midpoint evaluation of Seven Soldiers by Ian Brill, but it's worth reading; Ian offers a sharp overview of individual and cultural rebirth across the project as a whole.  Jim Roeg collates all the Seven Soldiers criticism to date; I hope he continues to update the list.  And Ragnell has a superb reading of Helligan and Bulleteer.

Seventh Soldier

Reviews of the two latest chapters of Seven Soldiers.

Zatanna #4.  Well worth the wait.  Weak third issues and long delays are all forgiven with the arrival of this final chapter, in which Grant Morrison and Ryan Sook restage a classic forties comic battle and Morrison achieves a deeply satisfying emotional resolution for Zatanna, all while engaging in the kind of fourth wall breaking that he practically owns.  When one of the Seven Unknown Men (these demiurges now drawn to resemble their bald, sunglassed Weegie creator) asks "Wow.  You ever seen one of them do that before?" I wanted, desperately wanted another one to say "Yeah, once, actually."

He's entitled to his fun, though.  He places many other amusements in this comic, starting with the tour of Zatanna's costume closet.  In a series that has, as my esteemed colleague Jog notes, focused on transformation and reinvention, Zatanna has perpetually been in flux.  She hasn't worn the same costume twice, and the past couple of issues she hasn't even worn the costumes featured on the covers.  Sook continues to design ridiculously alluring outfits for her; if anything this is even more overstimulating than the overt fetishization in Bulleteer because the script never calls attention to it.  No attempts are made at ironic commentary or self-aware critique--the comic just presents a series of unapologetically sexualized looks for its heroine, each one carrying us farther and farther away from the top hat-and-tails original.

This issue Morrison incorporates that fluid appearance into the story by showing us a closetful of outfits.  It's surprising that Zatanna, who would seem to have the most well-established and therefore stable identity in comparison to all these new or minor characters, should be the one most in transition, at least in her outward appearance, but the costume closet makes that fluidity a major part of her stage/superhero persona.  Does it reflect a deeper uncertainty?  In issue two Zatanna tells us that magic is all about performance, misdirection, posture, surface, but in this issue she says "Magical battles happen where the inside meets the outside."

Zatara provides his daughter with some inward certainty--and a closure that's been denied her since 1986--when she finally meets him in a brief but emotional climax.  His revelation may play as the kind of sentimentalism that only Morrison and a few other writers (eminence grise Alan Moore among them) are truly unafraid of, but the simple fact of this postmortem father-daughter reunion overwhelms any stylistic objections.

Not that I'd make any, since Zatara's explanation of the disposition of his books also provides a neat explanation and encapsulation of the books of this very series.  Issue one is obviously fire and spirit (Gwydion's flaming appearance, the incineration of Zatanna's friends, and the subsequent sapping of her will).  Issue two is air and mind (Gwydion's disembodied linguistic form--often seen as vapor--and Zatanna's sharp intellectual solution to his capture).  Issue four is water and heart (the pervasive rain, the waters of Slaughter Swamp, and Zatanna's emotional resolution).  That leaves issue three as earth and the body:  it's the least obvious connection at first, but that issue centers around Ali Ka-zoom and Kid Scarface letting go of this world (and the Tempter, who tempts people into eating themselves to death) and it does feature the cauldron of eternal life.  Maybe not the best fit, in that it's concerned more with abandoning the body and those concerns aren't centered around Zatanna--who already seems, shall we say, quite comfortable in her body--but it's close enough for metaphorical work.

Amusingly enough, that means Zatanna has revisited the same themes that drove an early arc of Promethea; in issues 5 through 8 she visited more abstract, more overtly metaphorized realms of compassion, intellect, and materiality before also reaching a fire/wand/spirit climax.  So the slightly snide critique of Morrison's first issue has been sustained throughout the series, but demonstrated through action and plot rather than dialogue (which was always Promethea's biggest shortcoming).  He puts his protagonist through the same journey, works in a few metafictional bits that are just as distinctively Morrison as Moore's lectures were Moore, but still manages to tell some ripping yarns along the way.  (Three, in my opinion; the third issue seemed like a chapter of Shining Knight or Guardian in which Zatanna was just an observer.  Still, a pretty good batting average.)

This issue should also provide plenty of grist for Seven Soldiers fans to pore over past issues and reformulate theories about the complete work.  For example, we learn that Gwydion the Merlin is a living language (thus further insuring a big, meaty chapter on Morrison, language, and signification in comics) and one of the seven ancient treasures.  I've been assuming that each title will feature one of these treasures:  so far we've got the sword Caliburn, the cauldron of eternal life (I assume), and now Gwydion.  Did anything seen in Guardian qualify?  I don't recall anything vaguely Celtic or Arthurian in that series (save perhaps his own helmet or shield); oh well, it's back to the comics this weekend.  You see how I suffer for my blogging?

We also get the revelation that the Terrible Time Tailor (aka old Spectre villain Zor) was once one of the Seven Unknown Men; but if there are seven now, does that mean there were once eight?  Or were they reduced to six, and did they have to recruit/create a new member?  Once again, no group can reach the stable, mythical number of seven except, perhaps, our titular heroes.

But it's the emotional journey of Zatanna that satisfies most in this series.  As much as the final page seems to open back out into the larger storyline, it also provides a knowing, ironic, entirely appropriate capstone to her character arc.  Zatanna, who got into trouble as a "spellaholic" by summoning her ideal man, asks for trouble again:  "I deen a wen erutnevda..."  Right on cue, Misty arrives to tell her that the Sheeda are invading the earth and to escort her into the final issue.  Be careful what you wish for...

Frankenstein #1.  We'll keep this one quick.

Loved the ludicrous, over-the-top opening action sequence, especially Melmoth's dispatch.  (By the way, tell me that scene doesn't remind you of Swamp Thing confronting Arcane and his Un-men.  Still more evidence for the Moore theory.)

Liked Doug Mahnke's scratchy skin-diseased art, moreso for the monsters than for the opening scenes of pristine teenagers.

Liked the refusal to make the geek figure a quietly heroic reader surrogate or an object of our sympathies, even though the geek culture/fantasy element (Excalibur Fantasy Butterfly World?) was strangely underplayed.

Thought the  issue's climax and resolution unfolded far too quickly.  How did Frankenstein end up under the school--was he buried there, along with the Sheeda larvae, in the train crash?  What happened to wake him up?  The issue gives us enough information to make inferences--that's not the problem--but these answers have potential as scenes in themselves. I'm not sure it was worth skipping the potential drama of a more gradual awakening so we could get three pages of abbreviated, listless battle scene in this issue.  Then again, Morrison being Morrison, maybe he didn't have room to devote a second issue to this suicidal Northwestern town; the next one packs Frankenstein off to Mars and then he's on to some toxic spill for issue three and for all I know issue four features a devastating showdown with an army of wind-up dolls in the Sunken Bordello of Lost Lemuria.  Morrison is one of those rare writers who makes me pine for a little more decompression; his material's good enough to warrant it.

Liked the actual awakening itself, though, in which a noble monster with a slow, ellipsized speech pattern arrives to save a frightened girl from a lascivious madman and his legion of maggots.  Frank looks to be a little more vengeful than Swampy, but otherwise this series has firmly staked itself out in DC 70s horror comic territory.  So far this looks to be the Seven Soldiers miniseries determined not to make us think too hard, just entertain us with the old ultraviolence.  And that's just fine, even if the violence itself could use more build-up.

And on that thought--happy Thanksgiving!