I Am NOT the Beastmaster

The House that Keith Built

Comics produced through an assembly-line division of labor require a strange alchemy if they’re going to be anything more than generic product. For a few years in the early 1980s, The Legion of Super-Heroes had it.

Where writer Paul Levitz was a master of DC lore, skillfully weaving the Legion’s rich past and boundless settings into a coherent narrative (and more or less single-handedly resuscitating Jack Kirby’s Darkseid), artist Keith Giffen finally took the Legionnaires into the future they had claimed to inhabit all along. He brought clean linework, visionary architecture, innovative uses of color, tons of futuristic chicken fat, the Interlac alphabet, and costumes that (80s color schemes notwithstanding) seemed to combine the best features of the Legion’s childish past and its bold new future.

And then, after building the Legion into a franchise that could support a deluxe-format book, Giffen changed his style just in time for the relaunch. Now working under the controversial (and unacknowledged) influence of Argentinian artist José Antonio Muñoz, Giffen was suddenly interested in shadows, inks, caricatured figures, and fragmented images that sometimes occluded the human figure entirely.

And then he was gone after two issues, the first of his many abrupt departures from the franchise. In this case the loss was probably a fortunate one, because editor Karen Berger (yes, the Karen Berger) replaced him with Steve Lightle. A perfect successor, Lightle’s fine linework, detailed backgrounds, and obvious affection for the characters harkened back to Giffen in his prime (especially when inked by Giffen’s collaborator Larry Mahlstedt). Unfortunately, he couldn’t maintain the regular monthly schedule – a punishing grind that wasn’t helped by issues that ran to 27 pages each. Lightle barely lasted a year, with a couple of fill-ins along the way.

He was replaced by Greg LaRocque. I enjoyed LaRocque’s work on The Flash with Mark Waid, where he had the good fortune to illustrate the greatest Flash story ever told, “The Return of Barry Allen.” On the Legion… well, he enjoys drawing the ladies, but it’s all fairly standard 1980s superhero comic art. Still, he could handle the huge cast and hit his deadlines, no small feats; the Legion has ground up many a fancier artist.

LaRocque lasts about two and a half years, and then he’s replaced by Keith Giffen. (For the final part of a long-developing storyline – reading these comics in hindsight, the utter indifference to any sort of collected edition is amazing.) Giffen returns with yet another new style: clean, crisp lines reminiscent of (but not identical to) his classic look, expressive faces that owe much to his former Justice League collaborator Kevin Maguire, and wide-open layouts that are well-suited for the Legion’s grand superheroic action. There’s a moment in issue 58 where Colossal Boy, returning to duty after a long absence, expands to fill the panels and it’s absolutely perfect –as if that’s what they were designed for all along. Giffen has once again found a style you could build a book around.

It lasts for nine issues. Two of them are fill-ins. Of all the things about Giffen that are maddening – and they too are legion – one of the worst is his inevitable tendency to change gears just when he’s starting to build some momentum. “The Magic Wars,” the final story of this volume, sees Giffen auditioning his new new look, a nine-panel grid that would define his work on the next volume of Legion of Super-Heroes. That tight focus meshed well with volume 4’s focus on conversation, character interaction, and highly mediated media images, but it’s spectacularly ill-suited to the cosmos-shaking super-action that Levitz chooses to end his long tenure on the Legion. Battle scenes and magical spectacles are cropped so closely they become almost illegible, while the quieter moments are presented with a kind of laconic abstraction that neutralizes any intended emotional effect. As he did at the beginning of volume 3, Giffen sometimes threatens to abandon the human figure, a stunningly bad decision for a genre that is, at its heart, all about the dynamism of the human body in motion.

No Keith Giffen run on the Legion, however brief, would be complete without at least one pointless Legionnaire death. (There may be other artists as eager to bite the hand that feeds them, but few have been given so many opportunities to bite the same one over and over again.) Levitz and Giffen actually manage to pack three in, claiming the last of Triplicate Girl Duo Damsel Luornu Durgo’s cannon-fodder bodies and inflicting fatal injuries on Mon-El that kill him after a long, joyless year. The last one is the worst of all, a death so forced that it doesn’t even bother to conceal its essential arbitrariness: Magnetic Kid basically dies because The Rules say somebody has to. Otherwise, how would you know it’s a big important story?

Despite all the doom and gloom, Levitz does his best to end the story, and his seven years on the title, with an upbeat note about the Legion’s enduring service  – a note that would be undercut by the very premise of the volume that follows, which opens with the Legion disbanded and the United Planets fragmented in their absence. But the truth is, Levitz and Giffen had already done so much damage to both institutions on the way out that v4 feels like a logical extension of what came before it. Legion of Super-Heroes volume 3 ends with a writer who’s run out of stories to tell and an artist who holds the characters, setting, and genre in more or less open contempt.

The Legion would suffer many indignities over the next couple of decades: editorial interference, countless retcons and reboots, nonstop regime changes that repeatedly cut out its heart. More than anything else, that indecisiveness is the source of the Legion’s current troubles and its absence from the comics shelves. But when the title’s two greatest creators give it a send-off like this, it’s hard to make the case that anybody else should care about protecting what they built.

End of the (30th) Century

On Free Comic Book Day, the local comic store was selling a bunch of dollar comics, including some back issues of Legion of Super-Heroes volume 3. So I bought a few. A steal!

The next day I hit eBay and bought some more. Well played, "Free" Comic Book Day. Well played.

I spent the rest of the month rereading volume 3 (not the whole thing, just the issues I have, which is the bulk of it now). I had never exactly been a fan of this run. I read the Legion in the early 80s before DC split the book in two, resulting in a book printed on high-quality Baxter paper and sold in the direct market and a cheaper newsstand version that mostly told fill-in tales before switching over to reprints. That split basically marked the end of my ability to read the Legion stories that mattered. I had never been in a comic book store when volume 3 debuted in 1984. (My first visit would be about a year later, to pick up Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 and 8.) Most of volume 3 was inaccessible to me, and the few issues I did manage to track down – most notably the death of Superboy – didn’t convince me I was missing much.

Reading the full span of the series now both confirms my initial impressions and softens them a little. It helps that I finally read two of the best storylines from those years. The recruitment drive and all the stories that spring from it – the betrayal of Mentalla and the ongoing mystery over Sensor Girl’s identity – read like classic Mort Weisinger Legion tales blown up to modern length and given modern characterizations. The later Legion Conspiracy story that springs out of Superboy’s death is much better than I would have expected (the Starfinger subplot that runs alongside it is about as good as I would have expected), but it probably did lasting damage to the book's tone, cast, and cohesion. After that the book seems to lose all sense of direction, meandering around for a year before it finally sputters to an undignified end.

Part of the problem is that longtime Legion writer Paul Levitz was much, much better at working with existing characters and histories than he was at creating new ones. This is no knock against him; working with an expansive, unwieldy cast and a rich but frequently inconsistent history and pulling them together into something that resembles a cohesive whole is an important, undervalued skill in corporate-owned superhero comics, and Levitz at his peak did it better than just about anybody else. But you can tell by the end of the volume he’s running on empty. (The fact that he spent the first year trying to juggle two Legion books every month clearly did not help.) He runs out of things to do with most of that expansive cast and just starts bumping them off one after another – a trait that his final collaborator could only have encouraged.

If the first couple of years, culminating in the end of the Sensor Girl subplot, see an influx of new members in an attempt to give the book some vitality, the last couple of years reverse course drastically. Levitz kicks a half-dozen Legionnaires out of the book, kills some of their most enduring villains, and writes fairly conclusive endings for several others. Oh, and he kills off Superboy, the reason the team was founded and its biggest commercial draw for most of its history. That one probably isn’t his fault – no other book was hit so hard by the one-two punch of Crisis on Infinite Earths and John Byrne – but it certainly didn’t work to the Legion’s long-term benefit. By the end of the series even the Legionnaires are complaining about their empty roster and Levitz has moved on to cannibalizing his own creations, few though they were.

Which brings me to Quislet. Brought into the team to satisfy a pointless and ultimately misguided outcry for more alien members – the membership drive inducted three white superheroes, one mopey fishface, one disembodied entity with a “quirky” shtick, and zero minorities – Quislet is one of my least favorite characters in Legion history. Tellus is another; I’m tempted to blame it on their lack of expressive faces and body language, but the dialogue and actions as written are pretty thin, too. They’re proof that not only can’t Levitz write new characters but he shouldn’t really try.

Quislet is defined by annoying tics and forced fun right up until LSH #58, the final battle with the Emerald Empress. She’s taken down all of his teammates. He’s the only one left. And little Quislet takes her on anyway, fighting alone and scoring some solid hits until she casually destroys his containment vessel, forcing him to return to his homeland. (Where, we are told, he might be executed in some sort of Plato’s cave scenario. The eighties, everybody!) It’s a frustrating scene, because that character… the plucky little guy who fights on against overwhelming odds, who refuses to drop his positive attitude even in the face of personal loss… that guy is one of the all-time classic superhero character types. It’s a shame Levitz couldn’t figure out how to bring him out until his final scene. But given how miserable the next (and last) storyline would be, perhaps Quislet had to go.

Speaking of the eighties. These issues came out at a time of creative upheaval at DC Comics, when the company took a chance on projects that still define the company thirty years later. The books are filled with house ads for Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Justice League, Suicide Squad, V for Vendetta, Animal Man – high points of my comics reading. Those years, as much as anything, are probably responsible for why I’m still reading them today.

But this was also the time when DC learned all the wrong lessons from those groundbreaking comics (lessons they continue to mangle thirty years later). Here are the in-house solicitations for some contemporary Batman issues written by Jim Starlin.

• “Batman 421: Batman knows the identity of the person murdering women in Gotham—and there’s nothing he can do about it.” Holy misogyny!
• “Batman 422: Batman stalks the vicious Dumpster Slayer while Robin succumbs to the darker side of his nature.” What, you don’t remember the Dumpster Slayer from the TV show? I think Joey Bishop played him.
• “Batman 424: A beautiful woman dies, but the killer has diplomatic immunity. Robin can do something about it, but is he willing to pay the price?” You know, I’m beginning to sense a trend here...

The same tendencies are becoming part of the Legion at this time – not the overt misogyny, thankfully (although there’s a Dream Girl subplot that rivals the worst of the eighties for its casual recourse to sexual coercion and abuse), but all the gratuitous death, angst, and infighting. Levitz is trying to produce stories that have some of the impact, the finality of Watchmen or DKR or The Killing Joke, but most of those projects were located safely outside of a continuity they couldn’t destroy. Levitz is enmeshed in that continuity (even as it’s collapsing around him) and his many successive changes to the status quo result in a book that’s been stripped of all the things that made it popular in the first place.

The least sensationalistic but most destructive change was the gradual abandonment of the premises that made the Legion the Legion. Prohibitions against killing are routinely discarded, but so is the core assumption, ridiculous and essential, that a bunch of teenagers can band together and use their abilities to make the universe a better place. Without that, what’s left? Maybe the Legion of Superheroes hadn’t been completely exhausted yet, but their greatest writer certainly was.

Tomorrow: the art paragraph post.

The Man in the High Castle

Amazon's The Man in the High Castle is not a great adaptation. But then, it isn't really an adaptation at all so much as a full-body genre transplant, just like every other Philip K. Dick adaptation, except instead of triple-breasted prostitutes and Vangelis scores you get the dour and repetitive intrigues of the world's worst resistance cell. Still, it got me to reread the novel for the first time in 25 years, so I guess that's something.

I had forgotten how much I loved this book, how much of an influence it had on me at an age when we are most primed to be influenced. (It's possible this was the first PKD novel I ever read, something I probably owe to Michael Bishop's The Secret Ascension.) And I had forgotten all about my favorite Philip K. Dick character, Rexford Tugwell.

At the time, the concept of an alternate history still held a fair amount of novelty for me. (This is something the Amazon adaptation absolutely depends on, as it brings little else to the table.) The idea of an alternate history that tried to imagine our own world in a fiction inside the fiction was mind-blowing. That novelty is gone now, too—twenty-five years of pop-cultural postmodernism has seen to that quite nicely—but the novel still works, in large part because Dick recognized that his characters couldn't possibly get it right.

They only know what they know, and their efforts to imagine a better world are bounded by all that they don't know. Their lives were shaped by FDR's assassination, and even if they can perceive his absence they still can't imagine what could fill it. Since it was inconceivable that any president would exceed Washington's self-imposed two-term limit, Philip K. Dick (sorry, "Hawthorne Abendsen") had to invent a successor. But surely it was Dick's boundless imagination that came up with the delightfully improbable name of Rexford Tugwell, a caricature of WASPish benevolence that could only exist in a fantasy within a fantasy.

I read this book in my senior year of high school. It says something about our educational system that I had no idea Rexford Tugwell was not only a real person, but the founder of the town my high school was located in. Since this was also the town I grew up in, that should suggest something about my own reading too.

The Man in the High Castle was an important step forward in that reading, a revelation that genre fiction didn't have to revolve around plot and action; Philip K. Dick could use the merest trappings of science fiction to hold a distorted mirror up to the apocalyptic polarities of the Cold War. But the book endures because it presses even farther than that to tell a story about how we make art and find meaning, how we try to see beyond the limits of our knowledge to understand the world. Naturally, this is what Amazon jettisoned in favor of plot and action. 

Hawthorne Abendsen is missing from Amazon's Man in the High Castle. So is Rexford Tugwell. They skipped the best part.

C-Minus Force

A couple of weeks ago, comics writer G. Willow Wilson got into a public dust-up with scholar Jill Lepore over Wilson's new comic, A-Force.

I feel slightly dumber just for typing that. I felt much dumber after reading the comic in question, but now that I have at least I can say with confidence: as much as Lepore's recent review in the New Yorker traded in bad-faith arguments that equated superheroes with porn stars, Wilson's response is even worse.

First she relies on the oldest and weakest standby of defensive fanboys everywhere, the claim that it's not fair to judge her comic because it's a) part of a crossover, and b) the first installment of a series. Therefore, Wilson says, Lepore's reading is "decontextualized" and invalid.

All I can say in response is that if Wilson doesn't think it's fair to read her comic in standalone 20-page installments, perhaps Marvel shouldn't release them that way—or charge $3.99 for the privilege. Lepore took what she was given and found it incomprehensible. I am probably somewhat better versed in Marvel continuity than Lepore and found it much the same. This book has no frame of reference outside the confines of a company-wide crossover that, to judge by what's on display here, looks pretty dreadful. That's not Jill Lepore's fault.

Then Wilson defends her work by insisting that it's written with a knowing smile, that we aren't really meant to take its tropes at face value, that the "feminist paradise" of Arcadia is at least a little tongue in cheek. But the comic gives no indication that we should read it that way. True, the dialogue and narration lurch between cheap snark and stilted artifice. (Seriously, when did She-Hulk stop using contractions?) But the characters all treat the ridiculous premises with deadly seriousness, and most of the plot (such as it is) is given over to explaining its own arbitrary rules. Nobody explains why this society is a feminist paradise, let alone why we shouldn't take that declaration seriously.

Maybe that's because Arcadia has no society to speak of. I only counted five panels—single panels—that showed any civilians, any citizens at all. Everyone else in this book is a superhero, and the action is dedicated entirely to their following or violating or protesting or upholding the made-up rules of Superhero Land. It's so committed to the rules of the crossover, in fact, that it doesn't tell us the first thing about the rules of Arcadia, the laws and values that might (or might not) make it a feminist society.

And here's where Lepore's lack of context does hurt her ability to read this comic: the all-female cast and their "feminist paradise" only exist as one of about three or four dozen microworlds that were formed as part of the Secret Wars crossover. Each of these microworlds is apparently built around some well-defined hook or theme or some forgotten pocket of Marvel continuity. In other words, we have a feminist paradise guarded by female heroes for the same reason that we have worlds where all the heroes are zombies or cowboys or whatever. It's a gimmick, and not one that speaks to any feminist ambitions: Marvel literally had to destroy and remake their universe in order to imagine a world defended by women.

Wilson is right that her characters aren't sexualized in the manner of countless "brokeback" poses (and she's right to challenge Lepore's priggish porn star comparison) but that is an awfully low bar to clear. She gives herself a great deal of credit for not writing one particular type of bad story, but that doesn't mean she's written a good one.

Wilson concludes with a couple of potshots about elitism and "the ivory tower" (ah yes, those elitist academics, always writing about superhero comics in the New Yorker!) and she huffs about "the difference between criticism from within the community—criticism from people who love comics and want to see them succeed—and criticism from the self-appointed gatekeepers of art and culture, who categorically do not give a shit."

Abhay Khosla has already taken Wilson to task for her anti-intellectualism in his own inimitable style, so there's nothing more to say there. I'll just note that Wilson's argument boils down to a false option, a choice that excludes the possibility of criticism from people who know superhero comics, who like superhero comics, and who still recognize A-Force for what it is: a soulless script-by-numbers event comic tie-in, and nothing more. The criticism from within the community that Wilson asks for, with its "aspirational messages" and its "calls to action," wouldn't really be criticism at all: it would just be marketing for her lousy comic.

I do love comics and I do want them to succeed. I believe success means producing something better than this. If you think that makes me a "gatekeeper," well—you can put me down among those who categorically do not give a shit.

The Multiversity

I didn’t give much thought to The Multiversity #1 when it first came out. It seemed too much of a piece with Morrison’s other superhero comics of late, more concerned with charting DC’s increasingly baroque cosmology than doing anything interesting with it. Even the variety of its cast, which Morrison and his fans went out of their way to trumpet, amounted to little more than a collection of derivative copies of 75-year-old DC characters; when Morrison really wanted to change it up he wrote them as analogues of 50-year-old Marvel characters instead. There was a little diversity among the principals, or at least a certain amount of lip service to it, but creativity was in short supply.

I didn’t get interested in the larger crossover until The Just indicated that Morrison was interested in using the event to tell other stories that were not limited by the increasingly limited horizons of superhero comics in the 21st century—that Morrison was once again approaching superheroes as a vehicle for finding meaning and not as a meaning in and of themselves. Those middle chapters showed Morrison stretching himself again, exploring new themes and trying out new techniques. Even Mastermen, probably the most maligned of the one-shots, had a refreshingly harsh take on DC’s prevailing aesthetic, suggesting it could be adapted to fascist propaganda with little to no alteration. These comics didn’t always work as comics, and most of them didn’t even pretend to tell complete stories, but they showed Morrison trying to break out of his comfortable rut and say something dangerous again.

Unfortunately, with The Multiversity #2 the series has reverted to form as a comic dedicated to exploring endless and functionally meaningless variations on the same depleted stock of character types. The good work of the middle chapters drops away, plunging us back into the continuity obsessions of the frame tale. That continuity obviously fascinates Morrison, but he never translates that fascination onto the page. The stakes are wholly artificial, with antagonists who are little more than unfinished character designs and heroes who stand around explaining what they’re doing in excruciating detail even though they never actually seem to do anything. It’s all weightless, a series of made-up solutions to made-up problems, and it ends with the revelation of an even bigger villain with an even bigger plan that depends on (oh god) an even bigger cluster of multiple multiverses, because apparently this one hasn’t exhausted that concept enough. Perhaps this neverending chain of crises really is the “ultimate statement on the DC multiverse,” as Morrison promised when this series began. But if so, is the statement even worth making?

The comic does have its moments: a fun character design here, a line of dialogue there. I love the Dreddified Batman more than I probably ought to, and I appreciated the note of linguistic determinism in Jason Blood’s rhyme, a reminder of a time when books like The Invisibles had greater aspirations than continuity maintenance. The opening scenes are easily the best ones, as Morrison breaks from the ongoing story to show us developments in another parallel universe where DC’s various supernatural heroes band together to fight off an invasion by backstabbing Sivanas from across the multiverse. That story looks like it would have been a lot more fun than the main plot; I can only wonder at the possibility of a crossover that took its cues from Thunderworld rather than The Multiversity Guidebook.

This is an old trick from Morrison, of course. It’s a replay of the final issue of Final Crisis, which also opened with the introduction of a new world and gave us the President Superman character who could be said to be one of the main characters of The Multiversity, if The Multiversity had characters and not continuity cyphers. (Maddeningly, Morrison’s few President Superman stories never actually show him as president, essentially writing him as a standard Superman character who happens to have a different day job—another example of the series’ paper-thin commitment to diversity and its avoidance of anything that might deviate from the over-familiar DC crossover template.)

There are other nice touches, but even those tend to be lifted wholesale from earlier Morrison comics. The Red Racer, Morrison’s fanboy Flash from another world, defeats the corrupted Nix Uotan with a trick lifted straight from a 1997 issue of Morrison’s JLA—and then says as much on the next page. In other circumstances the self-aggrandizement might rankle, yet the sheer brazenness of it got a laugh out of me. I guess it is true what they say: good artists borrow, great artists steal, even from themselves.

Another such moment comes at the end of the issue when President Superman, realizing the invaders have come from Earth-33 (that would be us), turns to stare directly out of the panel and says the superheroes are coming to hit us back. I kind of like the audacity of that, if only because I can’t imagine how Morrison would actually write that story any differently from the one he’s just told, but I would love to see him try—provided it is different.

The Grant Morrison of Supergods would probably say that the counter-attack has already begun, that superheroes have invaded and conquered every part of our pop culture here on Earth-33. The problem with that argument is that they tend to be the kind of superheroes The Multiversity doesn’t like very much—dour, alienated, depressed, violent, the very qualities it attempts to purge from its corrupted Supermonitor. DC and its owners at Warner Brothers are the industry leaders in purveying these qualities, and Morrison doesn’t really provide any indication of how he would challenge his employers in this regard.

But he does recognize that they are part of the problem. The middle chapters of the crossover, especially the last couple of installments, have been filled with backbiting critiques of editorial directives, corporate owners, and most of all the readers, who drive all these policies through their  (our) purchases—and who Morrison suggests have been wasting their (our) time. Shame and disgust and more than a little self-loathing course through these issues, and that’s okay—these feelings can fuel great stories. But where the middle chapters either pursued these thoughts to their ultimate, grim conclusions or else denied them with ebullient retro stylings (Thunderworld looks better and better as this series drags on to its end), the final issue of The Multiversity doesn’t really have an answer. Rejecting one mode of DC corporate storytelling, the “realistic” cynicism and violence, Morrison falls back on another, the continuity porn. Framed as a victory, the issue feels like a surrender.

Curiously, though, someone is left out of its all-encompassing spite. Some crucial link between the owners and editors and the readers, some hand that shapes the characters (though it certainly does not create them) and delivers them to us, ready for the consumption it both enables and despises. This figure is omnipresent in The Multiversity and yet he receives almost no attention until the last couple of pages, when he claims his well-earned reward:

Rarely are the defenders of work-for-hire comics so honest about their motives: he did it for the money.

Hey, even supergods have to pay the rent.

Daredevils

While Netflix is busy taking Daredevil back onto Frank Miller’s turf, Mark Waid has spent the last four years trying to get away from it.

His run on Daredevil with Marcos Martin, Paolo Rivera, and now Chris Samnee has centered on a Matt Murdock who wants to be better, wants to end the cycle of depression and loss that’s afflicted him for thirty years, basically wants to break out of the Miller straitjacket. But Waid doesn’t simply put on a smiley face and do a series of retro-sixties callbacks to the wisecracking swashbuckler of old. He knows that depression isn’t battled so easily, and he keeps the threat of relapse alive. Characters are constantly raising the possibility that Murdock is just faking it till he makes it, and it’s by no means certain that he’ll make it. It’s a smart use of the overriding limitations that face all comics about corporate-owned properties, namely the knowledge that any change, any bold new direction, is just one creative team change or editorial whim away from a return to the status quo.

Unfortunately, we may be coming up on that return fast. Waid and artist Chris Samnee are slated to end their run in just a few issues, and nobody knows what’s happening to Daredevil after Marvel’s next big crossover. It’s a shame, because it feels like Waid and Samnee could keep this up for years to come.

Samnee’s bright, clear art and strong draftsmanship are a perfect fit for the series’ upbeat tone, but he’s also adept at handling the pain (physical and otherwise) that always threatens to break through. His art has been a master class in how to cut up space on the page to show time, motion, and action—Daredevil’s  battle with Ikari in the last volume was a standout in that regard—and like his predecessors Martin and Rivera, Samnee has devoted admirable attention to taking the blind crimefighter’s sensory experiences out of the caption boxes and putting them onto the page, finding visual strategies for representing things that cannot be seen. Waid has proven equally game at playing around with the medium of comics, including one of its most basic and rarely exploited conventions, the placement of lettercolumns and other paratextual material—which he used to set up a false ending in one recent issue before completely changing the emotional register. These are creators who never seem to get tired of their work.

Nevertheless, a little over a year ago they breathed new life into their run by moving Daredevil to San Francisco (setting of some not terribly highly regarded stories from the 70s) and making some other changes to his supporting cast: a law partner who’s living in hiding, a girlfriend who’s not a psycho assassin (for once), and a complete abandonment of his secret identity. To be sure, the changes have mostly been cosmetic, and early issues were too prone to get dragged back to New York for flashbacks or company-wide crossovers (those damn crossovers again), but there’s been just enough new material to make the move worthwhile. In particular, one ongoing storyline—the only one this volume of Daredevil has managed so far, sadly—pits DD against the Shroud, a third-rate vigilante whose powers are so similar that he takes the high-profile hero’s arrival in his town as a personal affront.

This volume has also been given over to fresh takes on old but not particularly impressive Daredevil villains like the Owl, the Purple Man, and even the Stunt-Master, all of them overcoming the lame source material to provide new hooks for entertaining stories. I do wish Waid and Samnee had let some of them breathe a little more. (The first part of the Stunt-Master story hit an absolutely perfect emotional beat and then kept going for another six pages, presumably so everything would fit into two issues.) Then again, maybe they knew they wouldn’t have the room.

If that’s so, if Waid and Samnee are leaving even one issue earlier than they wanted to, then that’s a shame. Their work on Daredevil marries a consummate command of comics storytelling to the illusion of change that Marvel thrives on. This is not an insult. Daredevil is the work of two creators at the top of their game, and I only wish they were staying longer.

Appetite whetted by the Netflix series, honed by the unfortunate Dark Knight announcement, desperate for some non-crazy (okay, less crazy) Frank Miller comics, I went back and reread "Badlands," the single issue Jersey western/Springsteen noir Miller did with John Buscema and Gerry Talaoc in Daredevil #219 back in 1985.

This comic probably read a lot better when it first came out than it does today. Within the context of a long run of Denny O'Neil stories where Daredevil fights the Jester or whoever, this had to feel like a breath of fresh air, a return of the master. Outside that context, it reads like an overheated noir parody that doesn't know it's a parody. Broken Cross, NJ is supposed to be one of those crooked little towns that one strong man can clean up, but it's filled with a gallery of typical Miller caricatures spouting his trademarked repetitive "crazy" dialogue. ("Kill you I'm crazy tonight kill you I'll kill cut out your heart and eat it" TM Frank Miller 1984, all rights reserved.)

Still, there's something to be said for a Daredevil comic in which Daredevil doesn't appear in costume and doesn't say a word. Instead Matt Murdock adopts another guise, inadvertently assuming the identity of a dead sheriff whose story emerges only gradually with what could almost pass for subtlety in a Marvel comic in 1985. Murdock doesn't even have to rely on superheroic feats; his taciturn presence alone is enough to tip the town's corrupt establishment into a spiral of self-destruction. You can see Miller itching to leave the superhero genre, but he hasn't quite found a way out yet.

Again, as a one-issue departure from a series that had fallen into a post-Miller rut, this would have been a breath of fresh air. As a stage in Miller's career, it shows him stretching towards the crime fiction of Sin City without hitting the different kind of rut that series represented. Characteristically for Miller's work in this period ("Born Again" would start just eight months later), collaborating with another artist keeps him from returning to his own worst excesses. A paragon of the Marvel house style like John Buscema might not seem to be the greatest fit for Miller, but he keeps the work grounded in an only slightly exaggerated realism that many a younger artist wouldn't be able to match.

This comic is also an amazing snapshot of its time, complete with a copy of the annual circulation statements that Marvel used to run in its letter columns. Here's what Marvel publishing looked like in 1984:

At first glance this might seem like more fuel for one of those ever-popular rants demanding that publishers put comics back on the newsstands: Marvel printed 362,000 copies of Daredevil a month?!

In fact, it shows us why the comics industry needed the direct market. Marvel did indeed print an average of 362,000 copies of each issue of Daredevil cover-dated 1984, and newsstand vendors returned an average of 126,000 copies. And this was after the comics companies had started shifting their business to the direct market; those 126,000 copies must have made up the bulk of comics allotted for the newsstands, assuming they ever made it to the newsstands in the first place. (Distributors could simply declare comics unsold to claim credit from the publishers, then resell them under the table and keep all the profits.) Daredevil actually holds up pretty well, losing just a third of its print run to returnability or fraud; according to the numbers at John Jackson Miller's Comichron, books like The Avengers and Iron Man lost between 40 and 50 percent before the shift to the direct market was complete. For all its sins, the direct market kept American comics alive.

On a lighter note, the letter column also offers the following snapshot of comics fandom, which had some high praise for regular series artist David Mazzucchelli:

"I didn't think anyone could draw DAREDEVIL so powerfully, but Mr. Mazzucchelli is doing a fantastic job. So well, in fact, I am daring to compare his detail of faces and body expressions to the master himself, John Byrne."

Oh, and the "Bullpen Bulletins" in this issue has Jim Shooter comparing himself to Attila the Hun and basically admitting that he browbeat his own employees into throwing him an anniversary party. Not his wedding anniversary or anything--the anniversary of his taking the editor in chief job from Archie Goodwin.

And that would be Marvel Comics circa 1985. Today the bosses are less brazen about their treatment of their subordinates, but the editorial hand is just as strong. Every new direction runs its course. We got a nasty, rotten little industry here, stranger... and we aim to keep it that way!

Astro City: Old Soldiers

I think I’ve finally figured out why Astro City vexes me so much, and why I keep coming back to it: this is a series of predictable successes and fascinating failures.

I’ve spent plenty of time talking about Astro City when it doesn’t work, from petty epiphanies and troubling subtexts to interminable homages and bloated mega-epics. Even when the series falls flat on its face, though, it tends to do so out of overreaching ambition: writer Kurt Busiek clearly had grand plans for those stories, sometimes too grand ever to fit them all onto the page. If reading them could be frustrating, thinking about how and why they fell short turned out to be highly rewarding, yielding insights into the series and the comics it modeled itself after.

When Astro City failed, it did so in a new and different way each time; but its successes all tend to work on the same register. At its best the series is a superhero procedural, taking us step by step through scenarios that the genre implies but has never gotten around to depicting. It’s always offered slice-of-life stories, but the good issues showed slices of lives that couldn’t exist anywhere outside of superhero comics. What happens when a supervillain actually makes his big score, or a petty street criminal learns a hero’s secret identity? When a hero drafts a sidekick or an agency of super-spies enlists a new recruit? The very best issues made us care, not despite these fantastic premises but because of them.

This is the mode that the current volume of Astro City works in almost without exception, and it’s a fine return to form. Busiek is playing to his strengths, showing us what it’s like to be a master mage’s personal assistant or a threat analyst for a super-team or a hero who’s aging out of her profession. That last one produced one of Astro City’s finest stories to date, as Busiek finally delved into the life of Quarrel, a highly trained athlete who appeared in the very first issue back in 1995 and who is now well past her physical prime. It’s a story of aging and mortality that could not exist in a superhero universe owned by anyone other than its creator, and Busiek takes full advantage of his opportunity. It’s also a nice reward for those of us who’ve followed Astro City since the beginning—even if it implies something troubling about our own personal calendars.

Aging and mortality loom large over this run,  for reasons which are fairly obvious: it’s not just the characters who are compensating for time’s passage. Astro City has finally started using fill-in artists on a limited basis, and that seems to have allowed Busiek and regular artist Brent Anderson to maintain the quality and the schedule. Anderson’s art is typically strongest right after he takes a break, weakest right before one, and there are shortcuts aplenty. But the book has come out like clockwork, and it hasn’t been plagued by the weak character designs or slapdash layouts that marred The Dark Age.

It’s Busiek, though, who shows the greatest improvement.  The stories seem much less forced now that he’s is no longer locked into a sixteen-part macro-epic that could never support the amount of space it was given. (There are periodic hints of some larger plotline in this new volume, one that Busiek has mostly ignored; no complaints here.) Each story runs to its natural length, no more, no less, and Busiek lets them stand or fall on their own merits. Mostly they stand tall. With the publication of the next issue this will become the longest continuous run of Astro City, and easily the best since those first six issues.

I realize there is something quixotic about reviewing a series twenty issues into its run—let alone twenty years. Chances are, if you ever liked Astro City you’re probably already reading this. But if not, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Morrisonarama

Annihilator:

If this book had committed fully to the over-the-top science fiction saga, Diabolik by way of Alien, I might have been able to get into it. That plot isn’t especially original, but its mining of pop-cultural archetypes is bombastic enough that we understand originality isn’t the point. (I especially like the religious fundamentalist superhero/villain whose henchmen appear to be graphic representations of the four fundamental forces of the universe.) Unfortunately that stuff only leaks in around the margins, more narrated than told, as it’s placed in the service of a shopworn plot about creativity and writer’s block. In a fitting example of the problem, Annihilator doesn’t have much to say about either one.

It’s got art and colors by Frazer Irving so of course it looks beautiful—but even there, the space plot gives him a lot more to work with than the screenwriter one. Both settings are equally sparse, but only one of them has reason to be, and while Irving fills the space station with loops and sworls of teeming chaos or ecstatic creation, his Hollywood seems mostly to be a series of time-saving blank backgrounds. The characterization is equally barren, with clichés that are pardonable among the sci-fi archetypes but far less so in their nominal creators. Why do Morrison’s fantasy worlds always feel so much more real than his realistic ones?

There’s another problem. I loved Morrison’s comic about the lifelike android who is cursed with a soul as part of a competition between two manipulative male creator figures. And the one with the miniature universe contained in a cube. And the one where the world exists as a prison to trap an enemy in a gnostic hell. And of course the one where the fictional character meets his author – well, the first pass at that one, anyway. Morrison’s played all these riffs before, and Annihilator isn’t adding anything new.

I’m afraid this is why I can’t quite sign on to proclamations of a Morrison renaissance. Yes, when he did his best work in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s he was usually feeding off the interplay between his mainstream superhero comics and his more alternative work. I don’t think he’s getting that benefit now because this isn’t really much of an alternative. It’s the same old gestures in a very pretty new package.

Remember, Morrison’s indie work gave us The Filth and The New Adventures of Hitler, but it also gave us The Mystery Play.

Nameless:

Now this is more like it. I had some reservations despite the strong first issue—because Morrison’s also done the comic about the eccentric industrialist who holes up on the moon and marshals his considerable resources to save the human race—but with the second issue that element and the series as a whole have moved in an altogether darker direction, one that’s not quite as trusting in the beneficence of our captains of industry.

The main character is stamped neatly from the Constantine mold, but he’s got an engaging voice and he feels like a good engine for the type of story Morrison wants to tell. I do wish he had a few more characters to bounce off against; it’s hard to care about the slaughter of the astronauts and ground crew when most of them don’t even have names. And the exploration of Xibalba feels a little too heavily indebted to Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, at least before the story shifts and switches focus to all the other things it’s indebted to.

The real strength of the book is its creepy, unsettling mood. Much like his work in Ultra Comics, Morrison throws us off balance by denying us a stable narrative frame from which to read the book. In this task he’s aided by Nathan Fairbairn’s lurid colors, which render dreams all but indistinguishable from reality, and Chris Burnham’s masterful page layouts. Perspectives are constantly shifting, while panels turn into pictures and pictures into panels. Best of all, these games with the surface of the page have no apparent purpose other than to unsettle, no commentary whatsoever.

Nameless and Annihilator and their predecessor, the generally miserable Happy, mark Morrison’s belated realization that the rewards of comics scripting have shifted back to creator-owned work published through smaller publishers with generous terms like Image. His first couple of efforts read like they were written solely to seize the opportunities afforded by this new territory, or perhaps to stake a claim to a little piece of it while there was still a piece left to be claimed. Certainly they were not written for any driving creative purpose, which would explain their exhausted imagery and subject matter. Nameless is a cut above them, not necessarily any more novel or meaningful, but executed with confidence and care.

So far it’s just a well-made sci-fi horror comic. But sometimes that “just” makes the difference between an ambitious failure (or a less than ambitious failure) and a runaway success…

JLA: 

My recent foray into nineties comics (courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service) got me hooked. Desperate for more stories of Steel and Kyle Rayner and Connor Hawke and all those other sadly temporary replacement heroes, I went back and reread Morrison's JLA.

If you invested enough of yourself in these things at the time they become charged with memory; your longboxes turn into calendars that take you back through jobs and apartments and relationships and old friends. I discovered quite late in this reread that a copy of one of Morrison’s JLA scripts, courtesy of one of those old friends, had been sitting in my house for about the last fifteen years. Technically it’s lived here longer than I have. I’d completely forgotten this when I wrote the Morrison book.

I’ve always thought fondly of these comics. When it’s at its best (I would say from the “Flash Fact” in issue three through the end of “Rock of Ages,” with a real shot in the arm when DC One Million comes around) Morrison seems to be simultaneously resurrecting and reinventing classic Silver and Bronze Age superhero storytelling. He balances nostalgia with a more jaundiced take on the genre that I found both massively entertaining and surprisingly thoughtful.

Unfortunately, the best scripts are saddled with some of the weakest art. Howard Porter's work is awfully rough at the start of the series, almost illegible at times, as he tries to accommodate Morrison’s overstuffed scripts with stiff figures and cluttered, perpetually busy layouts.  His pages open up considerably as the series progresses, and his figures improve a lot—he’s one of the only artists to make Kyle Rayner’s costume and ridiculous crab-face mask work—but they’re never so improved that he can’t toss out the occasional howler of a panel, like one hilariously ill-considered scene where Bruce Wayne is walking up to Oracle’s apartment, which sits at the top of a flight of stairs.

But even their shortcomings are more amusing than infuriating, and what these comics lack in polish they more than make up for in raw energy and enthusiasm. They exploit the possibilities of the superhero genre more than they explore them, and they do not strive for any but the most gentle and fleeting of metacommentaries. They do not try to “offer up the ultimate statement on what the DC multiverse is.” They do not try to grant the DC multiverse sentience, as if that were both possible and a good idea. (If the New 52 were sentient, would you really want to be alone in a room with it?) They do not try to convince you that superheroes are quasi-divine mythological beings or ethical role models, although they do have characters who do ethical and quasi-divine things, a rather more efficient means of making the point which Morrison’s recent work has sometimes forgotten. They are, in short, just trying to be good superhero comics. Maybe even great superhero comics.

And that’s enough.

Ultra Comics

We’ve got another cover that appears to be the product of two different narrative registers interacting with each other, as some concerned citizen has helpfully scrawled a “not” across the John Broome-like injunction to read this comic. Like the gaudy frame of Mastermen, which both contradicted and redeemed the crude illustration inside it, this clash of registers is a perfect representation of the comic within—a comic that cannot quite decide what it wants.

I loved the first thirteen pages, as we watch the comic construct itself and narrate its own creation before our very eyes. Self-aware comics are a familiar routine from Morrison, to be sure, but he manages to put a new spin on it that we haven’t seen before : this time he eschews the airy abstractions in favor of an unusual attention to the materiality of the comic, from its production to its reception. Like a band performing a fresh arrangement of a beloved standard, the old number takes on new life.

This rendition is delightfully unsettling thanks to Doug Mahnke’s too-slick art, which seems calculated to provide an uncanny-valley simulation of life, and by Morrison’s refusal to settle on a stable narrative frame. That refusal is anything but arbitrary, and these scenes are neatly constructed: there’s a wonderful fair-play clue on pages three and four, for example, as the alarmed Ultra who stares into the eye of his enemy yields to the sedate executive who reads the comic along with us. That same gimmick seemed hollow and unmotivated when Morrison used it to very different effect in The Multiversity Guidebook, but here he invests it with a malign purpose that’s only clear on the second reading.

These sorts of metafictional games can be delightful over the course of a short story, but they’re difficult to sustain over the long run. Ultra Comics shifts drastically when it moves from the creepy 1950s industrial film to the “nakedly allegorical tale” that consumes its final two-thirds. That tale sends Ultra to a “generic post-apocalyptic urban wasteland” that looks like it came straight out of any number of recent superhero crossovers (including DC’s Future’s End, which has been running for the past year and seems to be the main butt of the ridicule).

It’s tempting to play the allegory game and ask which forces or factions all these new names and characters stand for, which parts of the comics industry they symbolize, which stages in its history they condemn, for at this point in Multiversity it is painfully obvious that they could not stand for anything else. And to be fair, Morrison is not shy about implicating himself in this tissue-thin allegory of cannibalistic children who dine on the corpses of their elders.  At one point the narration gets co-opted by (or does it co-opt?) the most common criticisms of Morrison’s work, criticisms he appears both to mock and to validate. Of all the recycled and redundant characters who inhabit this derivative dystopia, it’s tempting to ask which ones are meant to represent the author of Ultra Comics.

But this is the wrong game. A game the issue courts, to be sure, but also one that accepts the premise that there’s nothing left to do in this post-production era but shuffle around the genre formulas and play spot the reference. More interesting to me by far is the palpable loathing with which Morrison accepts that premise, and the naked self-criticism that drives so much of the issue.

The early pages, when Ultra still dwells comfortably in his official narrative as a fully trademarked savior, present him as a kind of protective idea designed to interact with and inspire us in the battle for our souls. It’s the Supergods approach to superheroes, in other words—and by the issue’s end it has failed utterly. The last-minute reversal of fortunes, the tough kid with a heart of gold who’s inspired by the hero, all the usual formulas that pull out a victory in these kind of situations, they all fall short. The hero saves no one, least of all his readers. The comic ends with multiple voices begging or commanding us to put the comic down, to end the “Oblivion Machine” that has wasted all our time.

Does this represent the end of the Supergods approach to superheroes as liberatory ideas? Has Morrison finally acknowledged how the corporate practices he defended in that book also produced the genre shifts he laments in this one? Surely it’s no accident that the threat that defeats Ultra arises from within the highest echelons of the team that created him.

But this is the wrong game, too. This is just the next level of the all-consuming allegory. The veiled criticism of his corporate employers might be a late addition, but Morrison has been criticizing the superhero genre from within for decades. The genre has little to show for it, except this:

When Morrison wanted to recapitulate the history of superhero comics in Flex Mentallo he did it in four issues, organized loosely around the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the grim and gritty deconstructions of the 80s, and the “ultra-post-futurist” age that Flex was supposed to initiate.

He recapitulates the history of superhero comics once again in Ultra Comics, this time in just four panels. Once again, the first three are the Golden Age, the Silver Age, and the grim and gritty deconstructions of the 80s, but the fourth age, the modern age, is really just an extension of the third, an even more violent and angry hero. The only remaining trace of ultra-post-futurism is the sullen glare as he turns out of the panel to snarl at us:  “What are you looking at?”

But this is the wrong game, too. The whole exercise of recapitulating the genre inside itself is ultra-post-futurist, and it’s been done before. (Though these exercises are not always limited to superhero comics nor so sanguine about their past.) The only result of this twenty-year-plus postmodern turn is the further cementing of the very trends it was supposed to subvert. The promised revolution never arrived. It is always promised; it will never arrive. It’s always midnight in Dark City, but Morrison is always there to tell us the morning will come. It’s always just around the corner, always ultra-something-or-other.

Until this time. Until we reach the cold dead terminus of postmodern self-reflection and it fails on the page as well as off and Morrison tells us in so many voices, including our own, to close the book on it. Stop expecting anything different. Stop wasting our time.

This ends now.

Put the comic down.

Pow! Zap! Commemorative Postage Stamps Aren't Just for Kids Anymore!

Tragically ignored and excluded from Multiversity--unless it exists as one of those seven "mystery Earths"--is the world in which DC's greatest superheroes all worked as shills for the U.S. Postal Service.

This oddity has a strange provenance. A recent application for a passport renewal was softened by the incredibly helpful postal workers who (among their other kindnesses) gave our son a goodie bag filled with various U.S. Postal Service-related coloring books. It also contained one issue of the Celebrate the Century Super Heroes Stamp Album from 1998. This is a comic book that has spaces for collecting stamps in a series commemorating events from 1900 to 1910. It is also, in its own way, a time capsule commemorating DC comics from 1998.

The cast of characters is basically the Morrison-era JLA in all their late '90s finery. The Green Lantern is Kyle Rayner, the Green Arrow is Connor Hawke, and Wonder Woman is saddled with her ungainly Byrne-designed costume. (In the only departure from DC orthodoxy, Superman gets his classic outfit, not the cobalt blue bug-zapper look.) It's basically The Just, but instead of parties and gallery openings the heroes care about history and philately.

The art is generally from middle-of-the-road DC house artists like Dan Jurgens, Paul Ryan, and M.D. Bright, who put in about as much effort as you'd expect for a comic that was distributed exclusively through the Postal Service and was pretty much invisible to the direct market. Josef Rubinstein does a lot of the inking, insuring that any traces of individual style or verve are stamped out. Somehow a few good pages sneak through anyway: Norm Breyfogle contributes a couple, as does Joe Orlando(!), and there are three amazing pages of Jim Aparo inked by Bill Sienkiewicz(!!).

The script offers the triumphant liberal view of American history--if you ever wanted to see John Henry Irons smash a giant logo that says "RACISM," this is the comic for you--although it's willing to acknowledge at least some forms of past oppression. (I'm curious to know how far it was willing to extend that acknowledgement into the present. Considering the stamps for the last five decades of the 20th century were voted on by public ballot, I'm guessing racism and all other forms of injustice were beaten soundly after 1964.) Still, if any government publication today admitted the existence of racism, even in our past, half the country would immediately denounce it as an act of treason and move to ban it from the high school curriculum. This stamp album is probably about as forthright as we should expect any stamp album to be. Advantage: nineties.

Writer Doug Moench assigns the superheroes to introduce different events in a manner so on-the-nose that it drives right through embarrassing and becomes kind of charming. Superman gets all the big historical events and the Americana; Wonder Woman gets Ellis Island and women's issues (of course); Steel gets civil rights (of course); Green Arrow gets nature and national parks (this was the '90s half-Asian Green Arrow, so yeah, of course); Green Lantern gets cinematic breakthroughs and Flash gets automotive ones. Robin gets children's culture and complains about it (of course). Moench clearly put more thought into the script than it probably deserved, and for that I salute him.

Oh, and Batman gets law and order--specifically, the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act (BIFF! POW! UPTON SINCLAIR!)--and, um, painting. But it's Ash Can school painting, which he goes out of his way to describe as "gritty realism," so that's okay.

I kind of love this comic. For a minute there I thought I'd discovered that holiest of grails--a collectible comic published after the 1960s--but no, the stamp collectors are just as anal about saving all their purchases. That's okay too, stamp collectors. We understand each other.