I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Back to Basics

Love and Rockets: New Stories #1, by Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez

 

More than twenty-five years after they started Love and Rockets, the Hernandez brothers have relaunched Fantagraphics' signature comic book by taking it back to its roots.

Jaime Hernandez contributes the most noticeable call-back with a 50-page tale that brings his Locas characters back to the tone of the "Mechanics" stories that introduced them.  Maggie is still managing an apartment complex, not excavating spaceships, and Hopey is nowhere to be seen, but Penny Century has finally realized her dream--first voiced back in the original Love and Rockets #1 in 1982--of becoming a superhero.  Unfortunately, Penny's reckless pursuit of her desires has always threatened to ruin her life, and this time is no different:  she becomes a kind of Mort Weisingerized version of La Llorona, roaming the universe wailing for her lost children.  The characters are entirely true to form even as Jaime reverses the direction of twenty-five years of Locas stories, moving from highly stylized realism back to manic fantasy. 

And he negotiates this U-turn in all of three pages, when Maggie's friend Angel decides to investigate a mysterious tenant by putting on a homemade superhero costume and climbing onto the roof.  Naturally!  Who wouldn't?  One of the most endearing things about this tonal shift is that Jaime executes it so matter-of-factly, without apology or self-congratulation or distancing irony.  He just presents the material as if it belongs here, which--of course!--it always did.

He brings back a couple of familiar faces from the old sci-fi days, like Rocky and Cheetah Torpeda, but most of the characters are new, including no less than three teams of super-women and a whole barful of costumed losers.  Jaime has a knack for coming up with wonderfully generic superhero designs that still jump off the page.  I haven't seen this many costumes tangled up in action since the superhero orgy in Flex Mentallo--never too far out of mind in this story that percolates with the barely contained libidinal energy of Jaime's exuberant good-girl figures.

Gilbert gets in on the act, too, with a couple of stories that hijack the tropes of lame sixties humor comics, including a standout piece that gives Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrelli the Hollywood tie-in comic they never deserved.  The Martin and Lewis ripoffs are beamed to a surreal, sadistic Beto-world where they become locked in a deliriously nonsensical battle (whose boundless mutability reminded me, oddly enough, of Glenn Ganges' video game at the start of Ganges #2, only with even less apparent purpose).  All of these pieces, from the high-octane romps to the quiet dreamscapes, appear to be drawn for the sheer joy of drawing, the pleasure of throwing images at one another and seeing what results.

For all that it became one of the touchstones of alternative comics, the original Love and Rockets began as an independent comic rather than an alternative one.  The early issues were part of the 1980s black-and-white boom, an explosion of creator-owned work that mostly stayed within the familiar genre territory of superheroes, crime, fantasy, and science fiction.  It sounds absurd now, but those first issues--viewed as finished products, not as blueprints for their creators' future aspirations--had a lot more in common with Zot! or Nexus than they did with Raw.  (Here's an odd data point.  One of my first purchases from a direct-market comics shop--maybe the first--came in a bag with advertisements printed on both sides.  One side was Love and Rockets, showing Maggie in full "Mechanics" gear.  The other was Dalgoda, the adventures of a friendly canine alien.  And they were both from Fantagraphics!)

Love and Rockets survived the independent implosion and made the leap to the burgeoning alternative comics movement through its creators' considerable skill and dedication to improving their craft as much as it did through any changes in subject matter.  But the overt sci-fi and superhero elements were pushed to the margins--not a problem when the results were stories like "The Death of Speedy Ortiz," "Human Diastrophism," or "Poison River," some of the most ambitious and sophisticated comics then or since.  Any direction can grow stale after twenty years, however; I dropped the last, pamphlet-sized incarnation of Love and Rockets when it seemed like Gilbert and Jaime were both stuck in well-worn ruts.  (The Mario-written "Me for the Unknown" was easily the highlight of that volume.)

Now they've revitalized the title by going back to its origins.  Even the shape of this handsomely designed, squarebound book is a lot more reminiscent of the old magazine-sized Love and Rockets (aspect ratios of 1:1.24 and 1:1.27, if you must know) than the pamphlet series that followed (a boring, industry-standard 1:1.5).  Reading the New Stories feels like reading the original comic, except in a smaller, more convenient, and more durable form. 

The comics inside present the same attractive combination of youthful energy and mature craft.  The Hernandez brothers have honed their styles to perfection over close to three decades, but Love and Rockets: New Stories still feels like the work of a couple of twenty-something kids from Oxnard who synthesized all their influences from Ditko to Dan DeCarlo to Gabriel Garcia Marquez without discrimination or shame, and revolutionized comics.

Who Are These Shadows in My Way?

A quick heads-up for the Alan Moore fans in the house. The Dirtbombs' new album, We Have You Surrounded, features a pounding arrangement of Moore's "Leopardman at C&A," a lighthearted "Lord of the Flies"-ish ditty he originally wrote for Bauhaus. The Dirtbombs are known for their garage-rock covers of soul standards, but this doesn't qualify in any sense; the song was never recorded until now, Bauhaus only counts as "soul" on Bizarro World, and the Dirtbombs brilliantly exploit their two drummers by presenting the song with a primitivist swing that's more reminiscent of Gene Krupa than the Greenhornes.

Another note to comics fans--that's Gary Panter doing the album art.

In a telling sign of comics' growing cachet, "Leopardman at C&A" is the primary talking point for most of the reviews of the new album. It was also the opening number at the Dirtbombs' DC show last Saturday, not that you could tell with the ineptly mixed microphones. I didn't know those were Alan Moore's lyrics until I played the CD the next day.

The show was a blast anyway; if you get a chance to see them, take it. The Dirtbombs are one of the most showmanlike garage acts around, and for all their energy, one of the tightest--at least until the end of the night, when all bets are off. What their DC finale lacked in creativity (nothing will top their show at Nashville's Mercy Lounge back in, oh, 2004 or 2005, which finished with one of the drummers playing his set with one of the bassists--not the bass, the bassist) it more than made up for in general band freakout. I'm sorry to say I left in the middle of the second encore, as the hour-long set was approaching its second hour, when the crazy drummer started ranting about DC go-go and Detroit go-go, but I'm not sorry I stuck around that long. The Dirtbombs are one of the best live acts around, and this show did not disappoint. Just ask the sound manager to check his mikes.

History Under Glass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Black Dossier

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill

Spoiler warning.

One of the more impressive features of The Black Dossier is its effortless combination of two radically different types of comics, the artist's book and the continuity-laden epic.  This is a beautifully designed book, from the ominous all-black cover to the perfectly faked documents that fill its pages, but it never becomes a mere objet d'art or fetish object (with the possible exception of the Fanny Hill sequel).  Kevin O'Neill's art and Todd Klein's design are perfectly adapted to Alan Moore's story, and vice versa; graphic elements like the explosion of Gill Sans (surely the most attractive and authoritarian of all fonts) that opens the book establish as much about the setting as any details of the plot.

Half the book is the story of the theft of the Black Dossier, a secret British intelligence file detailing the activities of the legendary League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the other half is the Dossier itself. This pleasant slippage between fiction and reality puts us in the position of the characters, flipping through documents from their world as if it were our own.  Those documents are immaculately constructed, whether they're recreating Shakespeare plays or World War II posters, mashing up H.P. Lovecraft with William S. Burroughs and P.G. Wodehouse (not at the same time--though I don't doubt Moore could manage it) or 1984 with Jane and a Tijuana Bible.

The pastiches that make up the narrative frame-story are executed just as confidently.  Moore's multilayered homages are, to a point, so efficient that you'll wonder why no one ever thought to combine these characters before.  He's at the top of his game when he ties in seemingly every British secret agent with 1984 and a famous fictional boys' school.  The sudden, surprising discovery of these interconnections creates a literary-critical apophenia not so far removed from the cloak-and-dagger paranoia experienced by the characters:  we both learn that the world runs on sinister, frighteningly simple patterns of order.  The revelation of the new M is magnificent, on par with the similar moment in the original League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but every reader will have their own favorite. (Jess Nevins' annotations are, as always, essential companion reading; it looks like they'll be coming out in print next year.)

For the first hundred and sixty pages or so, The Black Dossier looks like it will indeed live up to Moore's promise that it would be "the best thing ever."  Yes, the exposition can overwhelm the dialogue, and the references can bend the plot into painful contortions--the trip to the Birmingham spaceport, while visually rewarding, makes absolutely no narrative sense except as an excuse to homage the Frank Hampson and Gerry Anderson rockets of Moore's youth.  But with the contents of the Black Dossier around to carry most of the backstory, the framing tale can deliver a tense thriller, a fugitive travelogue perfectly appropriate to the cultural moment it depicts.  When Allan Quatermain and Mina Murray find themselves caught out in the open with a helicopter bearing down on them, I thought Moore and O'Neill might be restaging the classic scene from North by Northwest, released just a year after the novel's 1958 setting.  Perhaps the moment is meant to evoke that sequence; but two pages later, the Hitchcock allusions disappear and our heroes are saved by a minstrel character from children's books.

If I step back from the Golliwogg's racist caricature--which some readers will understandably find hard to do--I can just about see why Moore works such a wrenching change in his book's tone.  The frame-tale's allusions and settings advance through a careful structure, from the mundane opening in an England that's still recovering from Big Brother through the progressively more fanciful worlds of spy fiction and science fiction.  Meanwhile, the files in the Black Dossier advance chronologically from ancient gods and prehistoric empires to the foreclosed possibilities of Ingsoc and Newspeak.  The narratives pull against each other, and when they finally reach the breaking point--at the moment when MI5 has cornered Allan and Mina--Moore casts his lot irrevocably on the side of fantasy.  I can see why he chose to introduce an outlandish children's book character at that moment, although I question whether he had to use that particular one.  (The Golliwogg is a possible origin for the British racial slur wog; Americans, imagine a comic that ends with a triumphant rescue by a grinning, bulge-eyed Sambo.)

The Golliwogg carries the narrative off into the world of children's literature, then into a Blazing World full of all the fantastic characters O'Neill can cram into his panels, which he and Moore and Ray Zone have ambitiously expanded into the third dimension.  This Blazing World, a repository and asylum for the magical beings who have been declared "unpersons" in postwar England's tyrannical realism, should look familiar to anyone who's read Promethea or Supreme or any of Moore's many interviews over the last five or six years.  It's yet another iteration of the Immateria, or Ideaspace, or whatever else Moore has called this realm where all fictional creations rub elbows and share equal ontological footing.  And that's part of the real problem with The Black Dossier:  the taut opening and the stunning format only lead to a place Moore has taken us many times before.

I also have to stress how visually as well as narratively dull these fictional supercontexts have become.  Even if you haven't purchased The Black Dossier you can imagine the Blazing World already:  the floating animals and coiling tentacles, the distant pyramids and superfluous eyeballs, the crowd scenes manned with characters familiar and strange.  Moore and O'Neill show their pedigree by aping Winsor McCay rather than Steve Ditko, and they pull off a few neat 3-D tricks--I especially like the overlay of two different images on the same spot, proof that Moore is an effortless innovator who sees potentials in media others ignore--but it ends up looking the same as every other incarnation of this tedious fantasyland.

Repetition is only part of the problem.  Most of the Blazing World sequence is taken up by one of Moore's now customary lecture-tours, explaining concepts that no longer require such exhaustive explanation, but he does wring a little pathos out of it.  We learn that Allan and Mina have been working for Prospero on a mission to recover the Black Dossier from MI5 and hide the Blazing World from the government's reach.  It's impossible not to read these passages autobiographically--the bearded magus makes a much better stand-in for Alan Moore than he did for permanent sorceror's apprentice Neil Gaiman--as a commentary on Moore's own struggles with DC Comics for creative autonomy.  When Prospero says the characters (or is that "intellectual properties"?) of the Blazing World are "unshackled from mundane authorities" you can practically hear Moore sighing with relief:  in just one more page he will never work for DC again.

As an allegory for personal artistic freedom, the Blazing World works just fine.  But The Black Dossier begins with much wider concerns about the world beyond Moore's own career, and the Blazing World finale is an inadequate, frustrating evasion of them.  The early sequences in the frame-story, and some of the documents in the Dossier itself, outline the myriad humiliations that come with living under an authoritarian state; they also make it clear that not all authoritarian states are as easy to recognize as Big Brother's.  A late reference to party leader Gerald O'Brien's attempt at a rebranding experiment called "New Ingsoc" makes the parallel to Tony Blair's Britain abundantly clear, if the cameras didn't already.

Perhaps it's good that Moore doesn't offer us the naive satisfaction of watching two noble individuals bring down a government with nothing but The Truth.  Instead, he gives us two heroes who don't make the slightest effort at correcting the crimes they uncover or holding the criminals accountable.  They abandon the overcast world of human interaction to retreat into a starlit haven for fictional characters.  That's all well and good for Allan and Mina, but what about the rest of us?  Or, taking the book more on its own terms, what about all the characters they leave behind--the cabdrivers and landladies who are tortured just for crossing their path, the young woman who's left in the care of her father's murderer, the country that's run by the same conspiracy of schoolboys no matter which government is in power?  Nobody in this book pays a second thought to any of them.  The end of The Black Dossier is not just a retreat from the world, it's a retreat from any sort of ethical responsibility to the world.

With another volume coming out, the story of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is far from over.  Maybe later installments will correct this disappointing abstinence--they almost have to, just by virtue of placing their characters back in human society.  The Black Dossier stands alone as a complete, self-contained narrative, however, and it demands evaluation on its own.  The ending still falls short, even if we take it at its own words:

In the final pages, Moore defends his preference for the ideal by arguing that the ideal is no less real than the material.  Prospero says fiction influences reality by contributing to our personalities, inspiring our achievements, shaping our virtues, guiding our actions.

So what does it say that this work of fiction ends with a retreat into a private fantasy world of personal indulgence and gratification, leaving public evils unchallenged?  At the end of The Tempest, when he is ready to rejoin society, Shakespeare's Prospero drowns his books; Moore's crawls deeper into them, and invites us to do the same.

This Weekend

Click here to view a larger version of this photo.

You can download an audio recording of Thursday's panel courtesy of Mike Rhode.

Advantage: Good!

Batman #669, by Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III

Spoiler warning.

There isn't a lot to say about the script for this final chapter of the Club of Heroes murder mystery that hasn't already been said about the first two parts.  The overstuffed plot and its light but omnipresent themes unfold more or less as expected, everything having already been set up in the previous two issues. All that remains is for the pieces to fall into place, and fall they do, with a rapidfire precision that still leaves room for little surprises like a fistfight in the middle of an impromptu surgery or a final battle complete with jet packs and ejector seats.  The issue is more of the same retro fun, and considering the first two chapters were the best Morrison has produced in his uneven run on Batman, that's no criticism.

But if you're going to review a new-release comic two weeks after it was a new release, you'd damn well better have something to talk about, and the feature that most demands and rewards attention in this comic is the art by J.H. Williams III.  This installment sees the return of Williams' signature device of framing panels with icons representing the superheroes depicted therein; in one especially nice example, El Gaucho's coiled bolas becomes the panel border itself.  I'm surprised Williams kept the icons in reserve this long--perhaps he was saving them for the triumphant finale, a heroic counterpart to the panel-bending intrusions of the Black Glove?  They also constitute a nice, if late clue to one of the killers' identities:  alone among the Batmen of Many Nations and their sidekicks, the Ranger doesn't receive any panel icons until long after he's exposed as the treacherous Wingman, at which point the proper symbol makes its appearance.  If the extradiegetic images could lie last issue, showing us a Wingman who wasn't actually dead, this time they even the scales.

I've read a few comments about the ostensibly cluttered layouts, sometimes with reference to Williams' own comments about his hectic schedule while he drew this issue.  It's a testimony to Williams' skill that I never got any sense that he was rushed.  If the pages were busy (though still perfectly legible), that only suggested the density of information he and Morrison were trying to cram into the final installment of this plot-heavy story.  In a brilliant touch, Williams even distills this overabundance of narrative action (and maybe his own frantic pace) into graphic form, overlaying two plotlines on top of one another as if they were each complete pages jostling for space in a limited field of vision.  He's turned severe time and space constraints into part of his compositions!  By making the art the story, he thrives where many of his peers would have stumbled.

It's a shame he has to move on.  Williams was the perfect artist not just for this arc, but for Morrison's entire history-obsessed run.  Faced with the challenge of writing a character who's been around for nearly seventy years, Morrison's response has not been to wipe the slate clean and replace the past with something new (as a few of the Club of Heroes tried to do, with disastrous results--not the least of which is that their modernizations now look as ridiculously outdated as the older, more genial past they rejected), but to aggregate all of it.  He not only gets to cherry-pick the best elements of each period, he's also generated narrative tension by placing these historical moments in conflict with Batman and with each other.  If earlier issues alternated between periods fast enough to induce whiplash, the Club of Heroes storyline has succeeded by cultivating a simple narrative hook that can accomodate all of them at once--and by placing them in the hands of an artist who can evoke all of them in a single page simply by varying his figure drawing and his line weight.  If the most distinctive feature of Morrison's Batman is its omnivorous attitude towards the past, then Williams is the only artist for it.

That fealty to tradition is common to a lot of Morrison's work--contrary to his reputation among fanboys who were incensed that this Vertigo weirdo dared to take up the proud mantle of Gerard Jones' Justice League, he's always been respectful to his predecessors, and he has a knack for knowing which ones are most worth respecting.  His Doom Patrol was more true to the work of Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani than John Byrne's narrow and lifeless imitation; the same holds for his use of Kirby's Fourth World characters.  But his Batman tops all of them by incorporating all of its predecessors.

Ironically, this respect for tradition may be the thing that's kept Morrison from achieving the same kind of general recognition as the other writers to whom he compares himself incessantly.  He hasn't written that breakout graphic novel that jettisons the burdens of continuity to tell a story that's widely accessible and appealing to an audience that can't tell Monsieur Mallah from B'wana Beast.  Arkham Asylum is the closest he's come, and look how that turned out.

Morrison generally doesn't write graphic novels.  He writes monthly comics, a vanishing art and one he's mastered more than any other current practitioner.  The clever use of tradition is an asset in this art.  So is knowing when not to tie yourself to tradition, the thing--okay, one of many things--that separates Morrison's work from the leaden re-enactments of a Kurt Busiek, bound in their own antecedents like Jacob Marley on Christmas Eve.  But it's been a few years since Morrison has written a standalone work like The Invisibles or The Filth or We3 and I'm beginning to miss the broader ambitions that have come with such projects.  The Club of Heroes story is easily his best Batman, but it isn't his best Grant Morrison.

God in the Time Machine

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

Sometimes the unqualified successes are less rewarding to think or write about than the interesting failures and the near misses.  That's probably why I've devoted so much space to Grant Morrison's Batman (which finally clicked with the right artist), and it's probably why I keep coming back to Astro City.  But with its latest issue, the final chapter of the long-delayed Book Two of The Dark Age, Astro City may have finally crossed that invisible but all-important line that separates the interesting failures from the merely frustrating ones.

The final issue of Book Two doesn't devote nearly enough space to the bitter falling out between Street Angel and Black Velvet.  It's the plotline that rose to the highest emotional pitch, received the most buildup in Book Two, and most fulfilled its tone of corruption and betrayal.  It also had the best antecedent, owing more than a little to the classic Daredevil/Elektra story but not limiting itself to a replay of the original.  This image certainly seems designed to evoke that climactic scene in which Bullseye stabs Elektra (it would evoke it better if the villain character weren't such an awful design, and the dialogue so atrociously stagy, but more on those later):

Book Two could have built to a climax that captured some of Miller's pathos instead of just trading on our recognition of his iconic scenes, but the comic is continually hijacked by discordant elements of the supernatural--an artificially induced riot (when the previous issue had already set up a wave of crime and looting through perfectly normal causes), a giant demon, a mystical artifact, and a supercharged time traveler who literally wanders in from another storyline.  Street Angel becomes a bystander in his own story, his apperance reduced to just four panels.  But then, Astro City has always been too invested in its bystanders.

The Dark Age has been torn between the kind of comics Busiek clearly loved to read in the 1970s and wants to honor, and the kind of stories he's been most lauded for writing.  The narrative is always breaking out into other dimensions or outer space, yearning to tell stories in the Gerber/Englehart/Starlin mold, and then drifting back to the mundane concerns of its mortal protagonists, Charles and Royal Williams, or the slightly less mundane problems of the street-level vigilantes who have filled most of the backgrounds  in Book Two.  Seventies Marvel could manage these contrasts by distributing them across an entire line of comics; Astro City tries to cram them all into one title.  The result is a book that cannot satisfy any of its conflicting impulses.

Virtually all of the dialogue is expository, as if Busiek doesn't have time to show us anything, yet most of it exposits things we don't really need to know, like the backstory of the utterly superfluous character Hellhound:  "Hold it in, soldier!  The old man taught you!  Use the trapping spell!  Hold it in, hold it --"  That comes awfully close to being another entry in this list, but it isn't nearly as bad as the next panel, in which a news helicopter reporter describes Hellhound's transformation into a demonic giant.  Perhaps Mr. Busiek forgets that we, unlike the reporter's listeners, can actually see the panel he is describing.  His top dramatic priorities are always telling us what we're reading and giving us information about the backwaters of Astro City continuity, no matter what they edge out.

This has often been a problem in Busiek's comics.  Sometimes his Avengers run was more interested in codifying Marvel continuity than adding to it, and his Superman run has been so preoccupied with showing us characters' reactions to a world-ending threat that he hasn't gotten around to starting the threat yet.  He routinely neglects his plotting in the interest of showing us lots of fragments of a bigger picture, the better to situate his stories within a larger universe.  But this tendency is most frustrating in Astro City, where Busiek controls the entire universe and doesn't need to dole out all the pieces at once.  I wonder if The Dark Age would have been more effective if he'd separated out its constituent genres into different arcs, given us one fully-developed cosmic adventure story, one tale of gang violence and urban vigilantes, one cynical, politically relevant journey to the heart of America, and, because I'm writing this sentence, one story in which an ensemble cast of jive-speaking ethnic stereotypes unites to foil the epic machinations of a late Victorian supervillain.  Busiek tries to combine all these story types (except the last one, damn him) not just in the same arcs but in the same issues, producing comics so desperate to replicate all the tropes of 1970s Marvel Comics that they don't have time to do anything with them.

The genre mix can be effective at times.  Busiek crafts a visually appealing end to Black Velvet's tale--not coincidentally in one of the few pages where he zips it and lets the art tell the story--by wheeling in the magically empowered Silver Agent to stop her, not with sais and billy clubs, but with some nicely rendered pyrotechnics.  But he pays for it by bumping the Street Angel down to a weepy spectator who can only gape at the deus ex machina ending.  Busiek gains an incremental advancement in the protracted Silver Agent plot (now running for nearly two and a half years) at the expense of any payoff for the hero we've been following the last three issues (which ran over a comparatively sprightly ten months).

Also, I don't know if the depiction of the people of Astro City, who are overjoyed when a nostalgized hero from the past saves them and fixes all their problems, is meant to suggest something about the politics of the late seventies--it would be clever if it were, the first time the series has said something less than wholly obvious about its setting.  But I get the feeling we're supposed to take the Silver Agent's reassurances only at face value, as proof of his valor and the citizens' rediscovered loyalty and the book's long-running nostalgicore thematics.  For a book that's all about the past, The Dark Age doesn't have much of a sense of period or place; except for a couple of characters with sideburns, nothing in Book Two locates the story in the seventies.  Even the riot and the final issue's title, "Saturday Night Fever," feel wasted, like the comic is just going through the motions.

Brent Anderson's art remains a huge problem.  Except for the aforementioned page with the Silver Agent and Black Velvet, his action scenes are lifeless; anatomies are stiff or contorted; character designs are overwrought or uninspired, or both; backgrounds are under-rendered, if they're present at all.  This fight scene looks like it was composed with Colorforms.  (Or would that be Cray-o-forms?  And what happened to the bar's interior?)

I can't speculate on the reasons for the long delays between issues of Astro City, but if it's Anderson's art, the end result is no longer worth the wait.

Character design is still one of the book's greatest deficiencies.  You can immediately spot the Alex Ross-designed characters because they possess a trace of the mystery or grandeur of the iconic characters they're meant to evoke.  The others just muddle through the background, hoping we won't notice they're all composed from the same limited repetoire of quirks.  Somebody, either Busiek or Anderson, has a weird predilection for mashup characters who fuse two aspects into one body.  This issue alone sports Umbra, the Astro City Irregular who's partially bathed in shadow, and Jitterjack, the handsome customer up above who teaches us that combining two boring character designs does not yield one interesting one.  Not to mention all the characters like Black Velvet or Hellhound who contain internal dualisms, less graphic but equally cliched--Jitterjack even points out the similarity in his broken dialogue, because, again, why would Busiek show us something when he can tell us? 

Maybe all these dualistic characters are meant to draw on venerable superhero conventions, or maybe they're supposed to convey some signal theme for this arc.  But as I read the latest issue I could only interpret them as unintended but all too appropriate symbols for The Dark Age:  they try to compress too much into one figure, and end up with nothing.

Who Done It?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Then We Were Many

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

Spoiler warning.

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

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

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

Death by hanging has never looked so stylish!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Army@Love

Army@Love #1-2, by Rick Veitch and Gary Erskine

A house ad--just about the only kind of ad they run these days--proclaims "Vertigo Comics is by far the HBO of the comic-book world."  That's probably more apt than either HBO or Vertigo want to admit.  Both would like to find another series to replace their cash cows, the not-long-for-this-world Sopranos and the long-dead Sandman.  Both can occasionally reek of desperation as they try to create new marquee series by replicating the old ones.  Lately, though, Vertigo seems to have given up mining Sandman's corpse and has instead turned to copying HBO, offering up gritty westerns and mob family dramas--with vampires!--all in the hopes that something will strike a chord with the readership and give them a new franchise they can build, expand, and run into the ground.

At first glance, Army@Love looks like it could be another Vertigo HBO ripoff.  Writer/artist Rick Veitch has called it "M*A*S*H meets Six Feet Under" and "Catch-22 meets Six Feet Under," and the series even has its own HBO-style website complete with character guide.  (Which is handy, since this comic is loaded with characters--and the web guide only covers those introduced in the first issue.)  Happily, the similarities end with the promotions:  this series has little to do with the HBO aesthetic and everything to do with its creator's distinctive sensibilities.  He may have traded in his traditional obsession with the alimentary canal for a look at the reproductive system, but otherwise this comic is a Rick Veitch satire all the way.

Army@Love is set in a "not too distant future" where the government has drafted corporate middle managers and marketing experts to revitalize the armed forces (ask Robert McNamara how that turned out last time).  The strategy, as realized in their Motivation & Morale initiative, is to sell military service the way they sell everything else:  as rebellion, as self-actualization, as "peak life experience" and above all as sex sex sex.  Now the army's staging orgies and the grunts are forming "Hot Zone clubs" where they knock boots--or bare feet, actually--under heavy fire.

It all sounds too high-concept to work, but Veitch's scripts show a couple of qualities that just may allow him pull it off:  an attention to the details of the culture of this radically transformed army; an attention to all the details of technology, institutional inertia, and human psychology that will keep the transformation from working as smoothly as its architects have planned; and Veitch's customary cynicism, which stops just shy of being too unremitting to bear.  By the end of the second issue he's given us a romantic couple we can root for without making either one of them entirely nice people.  Even Healey, the Motivation & Morale colonel who would make an easy punching bag, shows some signs of depth as he defends his accomplishments and worries that some unknown foe is out to destroy them.  That doesn't make him sympathetic, but sympathy isn't Veitch's goal--Healey comes across as someone who honestly believes he's right, making Veitch's satire more than an idle exercise in sarcasm and finger-pointing.  He's taken a ridiculous, impossible premise and dropped an awful lot of people with very real concerns into the middle of it.  Kind of like the war we have right now, only with fewer casualties.

The comic does hit a few false notes as it seeks its rhythm.  The worst one thus far is Veitch's notion that the army can keep its sex retreats a secret--well, they can't keep it a secret, as the first issue makes clear, but I'm not sure why we should be expected to believe they ever thought they could.  The army is giving cell phones that can dial home to the same front-line soldiers it's sending to massive orgies; do they really think nobody is going to tell their friends?  Should they really be surprised when word starts to leak out?

That bump in the logic pales beside a more basic contradiction.  In the second issue, Healey explains how sex is part of his strategy to boost recruitment--but if the sex is a secret, how could it pull in recruits?  It's possible to read Healey's monologue as saying that the arm has coded its new, sexually-charged atmosphere just thinly enough to allow both intelligibility and deniability.  He calls sex "the secret sauce" and says, "There had always been sexual tension in the military.  But by putting women into combat, we made it a key selling point."  Perhaps they sold the unspoken promise of sex between troops, and then quietly instituted the retreats as a means of delivering on that promise in circumstances that left them a modicum of control.

The promise of hetero sex, that is.  I hope future issues address the question of same-sex activity in the Army At Love.  Armies already tend to look the other way on homosexual activity in times of full war mobilization (unless it's among Arabic translators, apparently), and if this one is so hard up for recruits that they've turned to instituting orgies, maybe they've also relaxed "Don't ask, don't tell."  Has the presence of women in combat units, along with the ample opportunities for male troops to reaffirm their heterosexuality, lessened the army's gay panic?  It would be nice to think so, but I can see it going the other way, too:  with all the nudity and exhibitionist sex that's going on at the retreats, more than a few soldiers must be getting jumpy at the thought of other guys scoping them out.  I wonder if MoMo screens the retreats for queers as assiduously as they apparently do for diseases?

At least, I assume they screen for diseases.  I hope they screen for diseases.  Specialist Flabbergast goes through a battery of tests and gets shot with something before he's admitted into the heavily fortified pleasure garden--hopefully penicillin with a heavy dose of spermicide.  The retreats must be venereal nightmares, and that too would make a good subject for a future story.  Veitch's brand of highly scatological satire works best when it explores the consequences of its absurd premises in minute, even harrowing detail.

The most effective element of the series, in its current, nascent form, is therefore its most realistic and one of its most outlandish.  Veitch portrays an increasingly automated armed forces where network slowdowns spell disaster, where combat support systems speak with help-line menu options, where a bored musician looking for inspiration can control a drone fighter attack with his laptop and his electric guitar.  Most of it's already happening; the interactions between Beau Gest (the names are the least clever part of Army@Love) and his combat robot Roy could come straight out of this article from yesterday's Washington Post.  Veitch exploits this technologized, remote-controlled army for some good old-fashioned Hellerian paranoia, using mysterious system failures and surveillance programs to imply that something's going on with Big Finger, the supercomputer that's directing the war, or perhaps with the people who operate it.

I initially doubted that Army@Love was open-ended enough to make a viable ongoing series, but if Veitch teases out every quirk or consequence of the Motivation & Morale program he'll have stories for years to come.  That's one reason he should put the retreats out in the open as soon as possible; it would let him explore the culture that supports the war as thoroughly as he's begun to explore the culture of the army that fights it.  In the first issue the Secretary of Defense worries that, if word of the retreats gets out, "it will make the Abu Ghraib scandal seem like a walk in the park."  Maybe Veitch has forgotten that the biggest boosters of the Iraq war are the same people who said Abu Ghraib was just "people having a good time" (while calling media coverage of American war crimes a "gang rape").

Understandably, Veitch may want to avoid home-front politics while he builds an audience, but that oversight points to the series' greatest omission and, potentially, its greatest failing:  for all its postures at transgression, Army@Love is cleaner and far more decorous than the war it satirizes.  Here's the cover to the second issue:

The image is clearly meant to evoke this, but the horrifying part's been cleaned up.  However incongruous that pink poodle may look, at least it's a dog at the end of the dog leash.

And that's why Army@Love needs to take it up a notch, crank that guitar up to eleven and confront all the worst truths dredged up by its absurd premise.  It's a good satire, but it has to go a lot farther if it's going to catch up with real life.