I Am NOT the Beastmaster

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.