I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Morning in Baltimore?

Everything's looking up this week.  Carcetti's getting the city government working, Daniels has reconstituted Major Crimes, Freamon has finally learned where Marlo's dumping his bodies, and Omar knows damn near everything.  Sounds like a new day.

Clearly this can't last.  Obviously the plans for turning the police around from stats-juking to investigation won't go as well as Carcetti and Daniels promise, but there are plenty of clouds on the horizon:  the Herc mess, the power plays for commissioner, the possibility that Daniels' past corruption or his relationship with Ronnie will come back to haunt him.  The most immediate question is whether Lester can get some movement on the Barksdale subpoenas before Carcetti gets hooked on that developer money.  The crosscutting between Lester dusting off the Major Crimes office and Carcetti making the rounds at the charity ball is more blatant than a lot of Wire comparisons, but it works as a basic suspense-film race against time.  The race is to keep Carcetti from becoming Clarence Royce.

Everything else will rise or fall on that--on the citywide level.  On the individual level, over at Tilghman Middle or Bubbles' Depot, people continue to fall like there's no new day at all.

Sweepstakes:  Looking for the biggest asshole can get tiresome week after week, so I thought I'd change the game.  (With some caution--look how that turned out for Stringer Bell.)  I contemplated looking for the nicest guy, the person who treats people with the most decency and who's working the hardest to make the city a better place, but that's too easy:  Bunny Colvin, two years running.  That affectionate horseplay in the hall with Namond kills me, because I know it can't last either.

Let's look instead for something The Wire does even better than the biggest asshole:  the craftiest bastard.

• Tommy Carcetti?  I loved his rampage through the city's public works departments (pure O'Malley), but he's still on the learning curve.  Burrell's played him on this Herc thing, when Herc might have given him an opportunity to start turning the ministers against Burrell.  (Who ordered the double in street busts, after all?)
• Ervin Burrell?  He finally shows us how he got his job--nothing to do with police work, everything to do with politics--but if he were that crafty he wouldn't be in hot water in the first place.
• Herc?  Hahahahahahahahaha!  I kid.
• Jay Landsman?   He sees right through the sky-high promises (McNulty plays the same role in the Western) and his quip about the "cute couple" may foreshadow how Daniels will be cut down.  He is a master at protecting his own position in a division where the bosses know his name, but ultimately he's just treading water.  He is but an apprentice next to the real winner.
• Lester Freamon?  Not really in the running, though I did love watching him unravel the mystery of the vacants.  Time's up, Marlo.
• Omar?  He knows more about Marlo and the co-op after a couple weeks of tailing cars than Freamon did after a year of investigation.  That bothers me to the extent that it furthers the show's uncharacteristic romanticization of Omar, but presumably his competence is the result of a brutal Darwinian selection:  this is what he does, and he wouldn't still be around if he couldn't do it.
• Bill Rawls?  For once he's caught off guard.  The look on his face when he realizes he won't be the next commissioner is almost, almost justice for four years of assholery.
• And that leaves the man who broke the bad news... nobody, and I mean nobody, plays the game like Stan Valchek.  Rawls questioned his competence when Carcetti proposed him for Deputy Commissioner for Administration, but the guy's incompetent like a fox.  Valchek might have thrown the election to Carcetti with his tip-off about the "witness homicide," and now he's a Deputy Commissioner because of it.  He read the weather for Herc earlier in the season and now he's reading it for Rawls.  In so doing he angles Rawls against Daniels, who went out on a limb for his fuck-up son-in-law three times, so no points for loyalty--but when has anybody ever been rewarded for loyalty in The Wire?  Just ask Clarence Royce.

Valchek may be treacherous, he may be spiteful, he may even be incompetent, but the crafty old bastard does get what he wants.  He's like the old, white, Polish police version of Delonda Brice.  Hats off to you, Stan.

Blog to Print 2

Just received the latest issue of the International Journal of Comic Art, which contains my article "'A Serious House on Serious Earth': Rehabilitating Arkham Asylum."  It's a discussion of Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum 15th Anniversary Edition, the latest step in an evolving argument that started here.  It's one of the most fun pieces I've written in a while (I have a rather odd definition of "fun") and I'm excited to see it in print.

Except that apparently Slavoj Zizek's last name has become unrepresentable, the Zs-with-carrots converted into little circles every damn time his name pops up.  I suppose one of the Jones boys will be amused; so, for that matter, might Zizek.  Somebody ought to be.

Casino Royale

It broke my thirteen-year-old heart to see James Bond playing Texas hold 'em.  I could almost accept it in Casino Royale's Bahamian scenes, but attiring Bond in a tuxedo and sending him to an old-world casino while the dealer intones in an elegant continental accent about "the big blind" was a damn waste.  Why not have Bond drink Coors Light and drive a Ford truck and scream "I'm James Bond, bitch!" while you're at it?  Put the man in a game that reminds me of Sean Connery, not Dave Foley.

I realize the producers chose Texas hold 'em because everybody already knows the rules and can follow the game (and I suppose the game's televised popularity stems from the fact that it's so easy to follow, with most of the cards visible on the table and a betting system that lends itself to cheap theatrics--did any hand in Casino Royale not end with somebody going all in?).  But if you're going to choose the game because you don't need to explain it, you don't then need to have the characters standing around telling each other what a "tell" is, especially as Bond gets taken in by an obvious feint.  Besides, the Bond franchise is supposed to lead the curve, not follow it: maybe Casino Royale could have started a nationwide baccarat craze.  No, probably not, but it would have been fun watching your old college buddies and that slightly obnoxious guy from work buy those little paddles and the shoe.

Other than the choice of game, the biggest disappointment was the theme song by Chris Cornell (hopefully on his last stop before "I ♥ the 90s" color commentary), all feigned emotion and canned soul.  It would be hard to think of a less Bond-like singer who doesn't perform with a headset mike and a cowboy hat; another wasted opportunity, especially since the opening titles finally outgrew the naked-chicks-dancing-in-front-of-a-gun motif.  Otherwise the music was as great as it's always been since David Arnold came on board the franchise--he knows exactly when to play it cool and modern, when to introduce a loud John Barry flourish.

My gripes aside, the movie is a highly successful reinvigoration of the Bond franchise (although, as a Brosnan fan, I didn't think it needed much reinvigoration--just redirection, which Casino Royale supplies).  The film is unusually front-loaded on the action (I don't think I was able to exhale once during the Le Parkour chase scene) but I didn't mind the shift to intrigue and betrayal.  Daniel Craig handles himself well, presenting two very different faces of Bond:  the stoic, all but sociopathic killer of the Fleming novels and the first couple of movies, and a more humane person who surfaces only briefly before he is submerged again (literally).  The movie has too many false endings, although that's largely due to the imperfectly climactic source material.  This is the most complete and faithful adaptation of a Fleming novel in a long time, a sound strategy for bringing James Bond back to basics.

Of course, James Bond is always going back to basics.  The critics praised Timothy Dalton for playing a grittier, meaner Bond after the bloated Roger Moore years, and that only led to a couple of movies where he fought the Nancy Reagan-approved scourge of drug dealers--and Wayne Newton.  Pierce Brosnan started out with the cynical Goldeneye (directed by Casino Royale's Martin Campbell, apparently the franchise's go-to guy for realistic reinventions) and three movies later he was fighting villains who wore powered armor.  We'll see how long Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson can resist the temptation to include unkillable henchmen and submarine cars.

That said, I know Le Chiffre originally worked for SMERSH but I'll be disappointed yet again if the mysterious organization turns out to be anyone other than SPECTRE.  (Preferably a newer, quieter, more sinister SPECTRE but SPECTRE just the same, white cat and all.)  There are basics and then there are essentials.

Asshole Sweepstakes

It's time once again, Wire viewers!  [cue audience shouting:]  Who's... the biggest... asshole?

A wide-open race this week:

• Herc makes a weak play for the title, leaving Bubbles hanging yet again; Bubbles' revenge plants Herc squarely back in the dumbest asshole spot, continuing his ten-week streak.
• Marlo orders the death of two people but, strangely, this doesn't qualify him for biggest asshole since they're both work-related.  His increasingly itchy trigger finger keeps him on the radar, though.  Plus, he hurt Bodie--have we ever seen that before?
• Rawls is conspicuous in his absence, doing nothing more assholish than letting Barrell run wild--or giving him enough rope to hang himself?
• Marimow is an asshole, but he's the same asshole he's been since his first appearance:  a cheap Rawls knockoff who doesn't even share Rawls' glee in his own assholery.  And that's why he hasn't won a week yet.  Show us something new, Marimow!
• The area superintendent makes a late but strong run for the crown with her insistence on turning Colvin's class into another meaningless test prep.  Does Miss Mason undercut the program because she just got shoved by a student, or because she can see which way the wind is blowing?
• McNulty, last season's winner, hasn't been in the running once this year.  This week he cements his "most reformed" title by becoming one of the series' good teachers, educating Baker in the ways of real police work.
• Clay Davis is always a contender, but at least Carcetti and Norman know his game.  Will somebody please act on those subpoenas and get rid of him?
• This week sees a surprising new contestant:  Michael.  Not so much for the favor he requests, but for the disturbing, sinister pride he seems to take afterwards.  He isn't a serious contender yet, but small steps and good intentions are leading him there.
• Bubbles plays a mean little trick, but it's on Herc so that doesn't qualify him at all.  (Great bit of misdirection in the on-demand summary:  when it said "Bubbles gets revenge" I assumed it meant on the guy who's been robbing him.)
• And that leaves Delonda Brice.  Other characters do far more damage to far more people with their inflexible policies, their negligence, their drugs, their murders, but every week that Delonda shows up she somehow places herself in the top two or three assholes.  Maybe it's just great acting from Sandi McCree, who freezes her face into a permanent sneer of baseless entitlement.  Maybe it's the parasitic way she lives off a son she's done nothing for except push into the drug trade.  Maybe it's because in a season about children, nobody comes off worse than the many bad parents.

But this week it's because she has the gall to disrespect Colvin, who's doing more to help Namond than she probably ever has.  Does she cuss him out because she knows he's police--Colvin radiates police--or because she makes the same assumption Michael made about Cutty, that any man who takes an interest in a teenaged boy's future must be a pedophile?  Either way, she runs down the man who's been doing her job, and runs down her son in the same breath.  Congratulations, Delonda:  you just might take the season title and you haven't lifted a finger.  But then, you never do.

Juking the Stats

Finally, we get substantial attention to No Child Left Behind and the mania for standardized testing.  I was going to say that we finally see how the school system thwarts itself, just like every other institution on The Wire, but this particular problem doesn't originate with Tilghman Middle or even the city of Baltimore.  It's imposed from above as the federal government mandates testing and the schools respond by teaching to the test, training students to produce nothing but empty, formulaic responses.  All so the school can raise the numbers on a test that measures little more than whether the school can raise the numbers.

Prez calls this one:  it's all juking the stats, no different than the jump-outs and buy-busts of the Eastern DEU.  And it's no accident that the opening credits for every episode place the MSA test in such close proximity to the security camera in the low-rises from season one.  Both are forms of meaningless surveillance, accomplishing nothing except to let their target populations (in some cases the same population) know they are being watched.  The tests don't motivate the students any more than the cameras make the low-rises safer; and like those Eastern buy-busts, they create new opportunities for these little citizens to fail.  No Child Left Behind is just the Ervin Barrell/William Rawls school of policing applied to education.

Prez is getting better, though, isn't he?  Not only did he have his class learning, before the MSAs killed that, but he recognized the politics of the testing on the fly.  He's starting to remind me of Colvin, and like Colvin, he's grabbing his students' attention with the skills relevant to their lives as a way of getting them enthusiastic about math.  He's also picking up a cynical streak we've never seen in him before.   (His "points on the package" line was even better than "juking the stats.")  He comes across as more of a police now than when he was on the force; really, the guy belongs on the Major Crimes unit so long as nobody ever gives him another gun.  Given what Rawls and Marimow have done to that unit, though (flagship officer is Herc: never a good sign), Prez can probably do more good where he is.  If the system will let him.

Asshole sweepstakes:  week in, week out, Herc is always the dumbest asshole--but for giving up not one but two CIs in the span of five minutes, he's also this week's biggest.

Political watch:  Congratulations, Governor Carcetti!  (And read Carcetti's meeting with the council in light of this article, especially the second page.)

Sixty-Two Ways for the Peanut

Each new episode of The Wire provides a new opportunity to play my favorite game:  Who's the biggest asshole?

Most weeks it's Rawls, Marlo, or Namond's mom.  Rawls and Delonda Brice both made strong bids last night (although Delonda has a point, once you accept the premise that she's living off her son's drug money).  Crutchfield's been running hard the last couple of weeks, chasing stats over justice.  But we have a new champion:  Michael's dad.

Now we know why Michael was so afraid of Cutty.

But let's hear from you, viewers!  Who's the biggest asshole?

In non-asshole business:

• So we've finally gotten to testing, curricula, and No Child Left Behind, although we didn't see much on them.  The season has mostly focused on all the extracurricular factors impeding the schools, but we could stand to see more on how the institution impedes itself (or is impeded from above).
• The Eastern Drug Enforcement Unit also makes a pretty serious bid for Biggest Asshole.  I could see more of these guys as a kind of anti-Major Crimes Unit, jailing citizens on meaningless stat-padding busts, but I suppose this appearance made the point.
• Carcetti for governor?  What perfect timing...
• Gary D'Addario's back doing cameos.  I guess the city can only fire you once...
• Right now the guy with the best chance of putting the pieces together and figuring out where Marlo's been dumping his bodies is Herc.  The fates are cruel.

I'm worried about Bunny's corner kids class.  Sure, he finally got through to them and got them to focus on learning, but so far he and his team haven't gotten them to connect the skills and attitudes they used in setting down the rules of the corner to the kind of behavior they need to exhibit in other classes.  All he's done so far is helped Namond to become a better corner manager, or at least talk like one.  If word gets out that Tilghman Middle School is teaching kids how to sell drugs, Bunny may end up losing another job--and this time he could pull a good chunk of the institution down with him.

I'm not sure what to make of the disciplinary breakdown in Bunny's class.  When we see the kids setting down the corner rules, Namond is out of uniform and out of his seat, padding around the classroom and sitting on his desk.  On the one hand, I'm no fan of school uniforms and I can see the class is learning better without all the martinet discipline.  But by relaxing the rules, the teachers have taught the kids that discipline is negotiable--and how will they get the kids readjusted to the larger school that still imposes those rules?  They have a lot of work ahead of them.

Bunny's taken the corner kids very far in just a few weeks, but he has to connect their newfound focus and enthusiasm back to the habits of the classroom before another grand experiment blows up in his face.

All 7 And We'll Watch Them Fall

Seven Soldiers #1, by Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III

Could Seven Soldiers #1 possibly live up to expectations?  Not just the expectations created by the long wait for the grand finale, but the burdens its own author has placed upon it--the task of wrapping up a thirty-part story with seven different protagonists and supporting casts?

Paul O'Brien doesn't seem to think so.  His comments on the final issue's pacing and narrative unity are sadly unarguable, but I don't think he gives the book or the project as a whole enough credit when he switches to its content:

But it's all form and very little substance.  Or rather, the substance is all in the individual characters, conceived as pitches for solo titles.  Sure, it's an incredible piece of planning, but what was it actually about?  What are the themes of this story?  What was the point?  And how was this issue supposed to make it?  You can't justify this story as a work of genius simply on the formal elements alone, but that doesn't seem to be stopping people from trying.

Paul is overlooking a number of themes that have cropped up throughout the project.  Obviously there's the industry critique of comics that conflate cynicism with artistic maturity, and Morrison's call for a renewed belief in heroism--which becomes so overt by the final issue that it hardly deserves the name of "theme" anymore.  "Lecture" might be more like it.  (Whatever happened to "It's so like, down-to-earth and non-preachy"?)

Even that manifesto relates to other themes whose scope mercifully extends beyond the confines of the comics industry.  The anxiety about genre maturity reflects a general preoccupation with physical and emotional maturity.  Most of the project's antagonists and failures, from Gloriana Tenebrae to Don Vicenzo all the way down to Lance Harrower, are deathly afraid of growing old or dying.  A few of the friendly supporting cast can't or won't grow up, like Ed (Baby Brain) Stargard or the gestalt child Leviathan.  But other villains like Solomano or Zor try to make the heroes more "mature" by casting them in grim and gritty character revamps, turning them into racists or child murderers.  Morrison confronts his heroes with two equally unpleasant options, the stasis of permanent childhood and the degradation of false, forced maturity.  The Seven Soldiers have to find ways to grow without giving in to nihilism, despair, and the death of a thousand cuts that all too often passes for our experience of adulthood.

And what is the recurring anxiety over the influence of Alan Moore on the superhero genre if not another facet of the project's fascination with absent or evil fathers?  Morrison's always liked to write avatars of youth who rebel against evil patriarchs and faceless authorities (Zenith and the Many-Angled Ones, Jack Frost and the Archons, Noh-Varr and Midas, Seaguy and Mickey Eye); Seven Soldiers provides plenty more examples of both.  Klarion, the most classic of these Morrison rebel youth, is such a wild card he refuses even to pick a side in the grand struggle.  Instead he dispatches multiple progenitors--the crossword puzzle is quite clear on this--and supplants Gloriana.

But Morrison adds a number of benevolent if absent fathers and father figures, no strangers to his earlier work, but usually less common than they are here.  Zatara is only the most obvious; Larry Marcus, Metron, Arthur, and Aaron Norman all fill the same role. Even that eternal brat Klarion wants to follow in his missing father's footsteps.  (Oh, the irony!)  Aurakles is the prototype for all these vanished dads, his appearance recalling God, Urizen, and of course Alan Moore.  If Moore is one of the writers getting stitched up inside the DC universe/Cyrus Gold (where he's doomed to die in a swamp and be reborn as a swamp-creature... oh, the irony!), he's also one of the benevolent progenitors being freed by good son Shilo Norman.  That creative tension has been one of the mainstays of this project, as Morrison alternates between criticizing or parodying Moore's recent work (Promethea) and citing or imitating his older material (Swamp Thing, especially the end of "American Gothic").  Both constitute a kind of literary one-upsmanship, the fealty no less than the open critique.  Morrison rebukes the recent Moore by going back to the classics--in some cases all the way back to the Len Wein Swamp Thing that started it all--and choosing them as his templates.  Nor is the "wretched, mindless" Aurakles the most flattering portrait of one's literary ancestors.

Okay, so Seven Soldiers can't really escape the metacommentary, but the project applies it to some larger purpose.  Both Morrison and his characters have to retrieve or preserve the legacies of the good fathers while resisting the dead hand of the evil ones.  Morrison won't let them settle for mere nostalgia or repetition of the past, which has run its course and entered its twilight; they have to find a third path of change, which sometimes involves violently overturning the very legacies that have produced them.  None of the Seven Soldiers illustrate this better than Ystina, who kills the corrupted Galahad and an undead Arthur himself in the halls of Castle Revolving so she can preserve their ideals--and, we're told, establish a new golden age in their place.

Substance has never been lacking in Seven Soldiers.  The question is whether the final issue brings all these themes and character arcs to a successful resolution, or whether the stylistic experiments--and the extreme formal constraints of wrapping up seven plots in just forty pages--overwhelm them.  The results, unfortunately, are a mixed bag.

p. 1: A DC logo pin?  In case the previous appearances of the Seven Unknown Men were too subtle?

p. 2-7:  Already commented on these pages.  I have to say, I wasn't expecting those preview pages to be the first seven pages in the actual order--what's that Shining Knight page doing up here, away from the rest of the story?

p. 8-11: I also have to question why, in an issue that's so pressed for time it can barely squeeze in all seven of the Seven Soldiers, Morrison treats us to a nine-page flashback.  I can see the need for the five-page Kirby tribute, which unifies the project's mythology, but did the Arthur stuff need four pages when it totals seven panels?

p. 12: For a scene that's calling for the end of brutal, cynical superhero revamps, this scene is pretty brutal itself.  The Unknown Man has drowned Cyrus Gold and is preparing Zachary Zor to take his place, to be killed by an angry mob that thinks he's a child-killer.  Poetic justice, given what Zor did to the Newsboy Army, but I'm not sure the Unknown Man is in much of a position to criticize Zor's "nasty game."

And that's the saving grace of this whole sequence... (please see p. 37)

p. 13: The Guardian photographs, especially one remarkably callous caption, remind me of the infamous Mars Attacks! cards.

Is Guardian riding Harry the police horse?  And what are the chances that this valiant steed is a distant descendant of Pegazeus and the winged horses of Gorias?

p. 14: GUARDIAN CRYPTIC X-WORD! Maybe this is a coincidence, but if we look to p. 28 for answers to today's crossword we get the first page of the Mister Miracle scene--the cosmic substratum that underlies the entire project.  And some of the crossword answers (full answers here) link up with the Mister Miracle/Dark Side confrontation. 

The last answer, 8 DOWN. ONE, completes Dark Side's new slogan.  1 DOWN. LOA suggests the New Gods have been moving through the story in human bodies, much as we see the real Darkseid inhabiting Mr. Dark Side through Shilo's god-sight.  Is the crossword telling us that the real action, the real war has been happening on this remote plane all along?

Other clues point to the various patriarchs or evil authorities of the project, especially those that Klarion overthrows.  I'm not sure why the third Submissionary, 2 DOWN. ABEDNIGO, warranted inclusion, but they're the first group Klarion challenges.  4 ACROSS. BADDE tells us  the atrociously-named Ebeneezer Badde was Klarion's real father.  That explains his little chuckle when Klarion tells him he's the son of Mordecai and Charity of Limbo Town, and it makes me read the end of Klarion #2 in a new light--perhaps Badde really is trying to save his son from Melmoth's agents, and Klarion kills him without realizing who he is.  Then he fights off Melmoth, who doesn't rate a space in the crossword, before supplanting 7 ACROSS. GLORIANA as the ruler of the Sheeda.  These characters share a thematic connection to Darkseid, DC's ultimate bad dad.  The real question is whether Klarion will become the tyrant he replaces, or look for a new path as he did after assuming the power of the Submissionaries...

6 DOWN. LANCE implies that the symbolism of the spear really does pass down to Alix through Lance Harrower.  Rather strange since she's the descendant of Aurakles, but then she gets her powers and her Aurakles-like appearance from Lance as well.

And finally, the left-field revelation of the series, 1 ACROSS. LENA implies that Lars and Lena, Ed Stargard's assistants, are the twin children of Chop-Suzi of the Newsboy Army.  It makes sense that the dutiful Ed would raise his dead friend's children.  But here's the question...

Consensus after reading Guardian #4 was that Captain 7 molested/impregnated Suzi and either killed her or led her to die in childbirth (after Zor writes his grisly suit/life).  The Captain is black and Suzi is Asian.  Lars and Lena are as Nordic as anybody on this earth.

Who was Lars and Lena's father?

Did the Newsboy Army kill the wrong person?

(RAB identifies the next most likely suspect, although I'm not sure if that character was physically capable.  He also has some great material on parenting and misdirection in the Seven Soldiers project.)

p. 16: The second greatest disappointment of this issue.  The last issue of Bulleteer presented a wonderful dilemma: the person destined to save the world is so soured on superheroics that she doesn't want any part of her destiny.  This set up a perfect resolution for Alix's arc (rekindling her compassion) and an opportunity to tell a classic Marvel-style story of redemptive heroism.  The final issue truncates all of that, giving us an Alix who's already regained her compassion and who never takes an active role in saving the world.

p. 17: Zatanna sports her costume from Zatanna #1. This is the first time we've seen her wear the same costume twice.  Does this indicate that she's stabilized her external identity after settling her internal doubts in the final issue of her miniseries?  Or did Morrison just not specify in the script that she get another new look, and Williams went with an old model?

p. 18:  Misty/Rhiannon's real name is Errrhiahchnnon, per Frankenstein #4.  We might just as easily call her Arachne (note her spiderweb loom in Zatanna #3), which would make her the source of the eponymous 13th month of the sorcerors' calendar mentioned in Zatanna #1.  Every ordering scheme in this project has been either incomplete or overcomplete--sixes and eights, but never sevens--so why not an extra month that's not mentioned on any calendars?

Unfortunately, Ali ka-Zoom's reappearance undercuts the finality of his exit in Zatanna #3.  Maybe Morrison should have tapped someone else to deliver the expository dialogue--Ed Stargard, the Vigilante (where'd he disappear to?), somebody who would let him tie in another strand of the narrative.  Ali didn't really need another appearance, although his detailed knowledge of the plot and his general appearance (top hat!) have always suggested that he might be one of the Seven Unknown Men.  Perhaps the one who replaced Zor (unless that's Morrison himself)?

p. 22: Is that Jorge and Hannah Control?  Does the talking head mean that Hannah was another robot?  Belittled and rejected by one of his own androids... no wonder Jorge flipped out in Guardian #3.  Note that they're standing in front of the United Nations building, which Morrison has juxtaposed with their Century Hollow project once before.  This single panel creates a nice metonymy for the whole world falling apart.

p. 22-23: The similarities to the final arc of Promethea are overwhelming--the apocalypse comes to Manhattan and the President wants to nuke the place.  Both stories also culminate in fourth-wall-breaking addresses to the reader.  And, of course, Morrison has snagged the Promethea artist to illustrate it.

The human resistance hardens around the Manhattan Superhero Museum, which has already helped Shilo Norman shake off the Anti-Life Equation.  The museum reminds people of humanity's best traits, traits Morrison finds embodied in the meaning-making forms of the superhero.

p. 25: "I have been a story in a thousand books."  The Merlin has been DC continuity; perhaps he becomes it again on this page as Zatanna wakes up the universe.  Zatanna's spell doesn't seem to contribute to the death of Gloriana, but it may affect the metaphysical levels of the plot: the rescue of Aurakles and the imprisonment of Zor, both of which Morrison means to signal a new direction in the writing of superheroes.  (Somehow I doubt it will amount to that anywhere outside Morrison's own work, but All-Star Superman is good enough for me.)

p. 28: Here begins the issue's greatest disappointment.  I loved the final issue of Mister Miracle, but Shilo's appearance here doesn't do anything that issue didn't already do better.  Do you get the feeling this issue only had space for about five soldiers? (please see p. 39)

p. 29: "When the harrowing is done we will hunt the living gods themselves through the ruins of paradise."  Like Adam Strange, Starfire, and Morrison's old friend Buddy Baker in 52?

The thought that this whole project has been building up to a 52 tie-in depresses the hell out of me.

p. 33: "You're free."  Having fulfilled her destiny--in just about the most passive, accidental, narratively unfulfilling way possible, might I add--Alix is now free from destiny.  It's a lovely little panel to end her arc (I like the way Dave Stewart uses grays and spot color to play up her similarity to Aurakles).  I just wish this issue had given that arc more than eight panels to build to its climax.

p. 34-35: More painfully overt metacommentary, although I do like Morrison's description (and we are literally reading Morrison's description here, in-story as well as out) of the DC universe as "Threadbare and ragged... the work of too many hands to ever fit properly..."  He clearly loves it, though, in all its patchwork glory.  Zor is stitched into a heteroglossic universe that can never be standardized into a single genre, tone, or narrative.

Also interesting to note that Morrison is only doing to Zor and the cynics what he's already done to himself:  he's sewn himself into the story as the Seven Unknown Men and Mind-Grabber Kid.  Though I'd much rather be Lucian Crawley than Cyrus Gold.

Finally, the first-person viewpoint of these scenes means that we're sewn into the coat along with Zachary Zor, just as we're part of the spell Zatanna casts on p. 25.  We helped tarnish the heroes through cynicism and we help refurbish the universe through self-awareness; we're implicated, too. (please see p. 37)

p. 36: I find I like Ystina more now that she has a Linda Lee-style secret identity.  Her miniseries also reads better now that the whole project is finished and its overarching themes are more apparent; perhaps it simply suffered from being first in a project that depends on interconnection for its charge.  Shining Knight still had that unforgiveable lapse in showing the destruction of Caliburn, though.

p. 37:  The third road was first mentioned by one of the Seven Unknown Men back in SS #0:  "There's a third road... Slaughter Swamp is one of those in-between places, where solid things turn soft and change."  Real change is the third path that avoids the false binaries of cynical maturity and arrested development.

But Morrison may be breaking down other binaries here, including the relatively straightforward good and evil morality that has structured the Seven Soldiers macro-plot until now.  The Sheeda are our own descendants, consuming us as we consume the planet; Misty says that defeating and becoming them is as bad or worse than being defeated by them.  And lest we feel too cocky about sewing those bad "deconstructionist" writers up in the miser's coat of DC continuity, Morrison commemorates the event with a black flower--one more guilty secret floating up to the surface of Slaughter Swamp.  If the awakening of the DC universe weren't founded upon a couple of murders, if the "good" Unknown Man weren't implicated in a little violence himself, this metacommentary might lapse into a saccharine call for nostalgia that would completely contradict Morrison's point about growth and change.  Instead he accepts the evil along with the good, the grim with the playful:  both have a place in Morrison's post-Seven Soldiers universe.

Not unlike the ending of "American Gothic"...

p. 38:  Are we meant to read this lovely image of a cackling Klarion as a response to the previous page?  Is Klarion following a third, independent road between righteousness and wickedness?  His people back in Limbo Town are a fusion of both.  This may be the best possible resolution for the human race, one that breaks outside the binaries and avoids simply replacing Gloriana with a copy.

The page also serves as a nice counterpoint to the image of the terrified Whip that closes Seven Soldiers #0. 

J.H. Williams III's remarkably adept pastiche of the other Seven Soldiers artists is the saving grace of this issue; love that Frazer Irving Klarion being... er... waited on by those two Simone Bianchi Sheeda, with a Dave Stewart color scheme that unifies the looks of those two miniseries.  Everything about this page reconciles opposites, doesn't it?

p. 39:  One of the fans in Bulleteer #3 mentioned a rumor that Millions the Mystery Mutt is immortal and secretly running the U.S. banking system.  Now we discover Millions is alive, even though a caption in Guardian #4 (the suit Zor sewed for him) said he was dead at 14.  Bear in mind that Millions' pal Kid Scarface discovered the Cauldron of everlasting life in Slaughter Swamp.  And now Millions the Mystery Mutt is immortal and running a nationwide organized crime syndicate.  Possibly in addition to the U.S. banking system.

p. 39: "All is one in Dark Side."  An odd note for Morrison to sound at the end of this project, especially in conjuntion with the crossword clue 8 DOWN, "And all is this, seven into seven."  Seven Soldiers has previously made heroes out of characters like "Sky-High" Helligan who can assemble its disparate pieces into a single story, but the slogan and the clue imply that Dark Side lies at the end of the project's drive for narrative unification.  Dark Side certainly thinks he's won on the penultimate page, when the narrative is as complete and unified as it ever will be.

The Dark Side scenes hint that the whole Sheeda plot has been a misdirection, just as RAB says (please see p. 14).  Dark Side has pulled off a cosmological coup d'etat while everybody else was distracted by the pyrotechnics, much as the Sheeda threat itself is presented as the more serious threat brewing while all the big-name heroes are distracted by Infinite Crisis (a template lifted from "American Gothic" and its arm's-length relation to Crisis on Infinite Earths).  The real struggle is for the possession and execution of the first superhero and the avatar of freedom, a struggle Dark Side wins until the final page and its unfortunate retread of Mister Miracle #4.  Still, it's surprising that Morrison would cast his own narrative completion as a sign of victory for one of his antagonists.

Surprising, but not inconsistent.  This isn't the first Morrison work to associate the push for narrative order or clarity with tyranny (I'm thinking of Sir Miles in "Entropy in the UK"), and Seven Soldiers has always been a glorious mess, much like the miser's coat.  This is a project that defiantly refuses to complete any of its organizing groups of seven, and it preserves that anarchic confusion right up to the end.  (Is I, Spyder the eighth of Seven Soldiers?)  That makes for a chaotic, frequently frustrating final issue, but Seven Soldiers #1 is true to its story and its author.

The Fox Fatwa

Just when I thought the midterm election character assassinations couldn't sink any lower, along comes the drummed-up "controversy" over Michael J. Fox's ads promoting stem cell research and the candidates who support it, which prompted no less a medical luminary than Rush Limbaugh to pronounce that Fox is "exaggerating" his Parkinson's disease symptoms.  (I guess he went to the same diagnosis-by-video medical school as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.)  I don't expect any better of Limbaugh, but do the television networks have to repeat the charge, even to the point of grilling Fox, as if it had any basis in fact?  No, on second thought, I don't expect any better of them, either.

The insinuations that Fox has been faking his own degenerative disorder remind me of another famous case of blaming the victim, the many attempts to twist the fatwa against Salman Rushdie around until it was Rushdie's fault.  In his essay collection Step Across This Line, Rushdie documents the efforts of right-wing journalists, radical British Muslims, conservative politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, and leftier-than-thou radicals like Alexander Cockburn to whip up some cheap moral indignation by accusing him of creating his own problems, stirring up controversy, being insufficiently dedicated to free expression (Cockburn, naturally), or costing the British government too much to protect him.  Rushdie sums up these criticisms:

In the rest of the free world, the "Rushdie case" is about freedom of expression and state terrorism.  In Britain, it seems to be about a man who has to be saved from the consequences of his own actions.  Elsewhere, people know that the outrage has been committed not by me but against me.  In certain quarters of my own country, people take a contrary view.

Or, as he says in a lighter context (the frothed-up furor over his selection of ten "Best Young British Novelists" in 1993), "Apparently I am the only person not allowed to make fatwa cracks."

And apparently Michael J. Fox is the only person not allowed to talk about Parkinson's disease and stem cell research.  In a saner world, Fox's ads are about the importance of using a science that neither creates nor destroys life to help people suffering from horrible disorders; the only controversy would be about a conservative movement that's dominated by religious fanatics who value embryos above human beings, and by "moral" voices who will smear anyone else's character in their last, desperate bids to hold power.  But in the American media, the controversy is a he-said/she-said debate where Limbaugh can question Fox's medical condition and his ethics with no evidence whatsoever, where a newly respectable Katie Couric treats the fabrication like it's a valid possibility, and where Michael J. Fox is the shameless liar. 

Yes, I realize nobody is placing a bounty on Michael J. Fox's head.  (The preceding sentence is the kind of obvious disclaimer nobody should have to issue, except to forestall other people from pointing out the obvious differences between the situations as if they invalidated the galling similarities.  Also, that sentence is kind of fun to type.)  But both men have been criticized for speaking out on issue that affect them more than anyone else--literally life-or-death situations.  At least nobody accused Salman Rushdie of faking the fatwa.

So the Republican solution to neurological disease is to blame the victim.  This is nothing new, but it reinforces the need to drive their anti-science, anti-medicine candidates out of office.  Because in a world run by conservatives, if you have a genetic or idiopathic disease it's your fault and you're the only person who can't talk about it.

Michael Steele, the Republican Senate candidate here in Maryland, is a conservative party insider who's running as a political moderate and a Washington outsider because he knows most of the state opposes his hardcore conservative views.  While he quietly takes millions of dollars from national Republicans, his public campaign has been virtually content-free:  the major policy statement in his first ad was "I love puppies."

He may love puppies, but he doesn't seem to care about his fellow human beings:  he not only opposes embryonic stem cell research, he compared it to slavery and the Holocaust.  Michael J. Fox has endorsed his opponent, Ben Cardin.  I wasn't too enthusiastic about voting for Cardin before that.

I am now.

In other political discussion, and a bit closer to this blog's usual focus, Brad Reed discusses the greatest threat to our nation:  dorkofascists.  (Via Jim Henley.)

Imperishable

I was afraid it would be hard to dive back into the Seven Soldiers storyline after a six-month hiatus, but DC has wisely rekindled my interest with this preview (thanks, Jog) of the long-delayed final issue.  It's the perfect appetizer for readers of this series, loaded with backstory delivered in a style that meshes Kirby's Eternals with J.R.R. Tolkien.

Among the other revelations, the preview lists all of the seven imperishable treasures that have been bouncing around this series.  To get ready for the final chapter of Seven Soldiers I thought I'd take an inventory and see which ones have yet to put in an appearance...

The Cauldron of rebirth is easy; Kid Scarface had it before Neh-buh-loh recovered it for Gloriana.

The Merlin made of living language is easy, too; Gwydion, currently in Zatanna's possession, is one of the treasures.

The steed Pegazeus is the progenitor of the race of winged horses that includes Vanguard, Ystin's horse. The horses have gathered at the city of Gorias in the Himalayas in Frankenstein #4; in Zatanna #4 Misty and Vanguard are leading a, ah, flock? of them to San Francisco to get Zatanna's help (which brings two of the treasures together).

The Sword is troublesome; this should be Caliburn, Arthur's sword, which Ystin takes from Gloriana. Gloriana identifies Caliburn as one of the seven imperishable treasures, specifically "the treasure of Findias," one of the cities built by the New Gods.  (The cauldron comes from Murias, and the winged horses congregate in Gorias.  No word on the treasure of Filias yet.)  But in Shining Knight #4 Galahad destroys Ystin's sword.  That looks pretty perishable to me.

Is Caliburn a bit of misdirection, and if so, to what purpose?  Is Frankenstein's blade the true imperishable sword?  Did artist Simone Bianchi screw up in drawing the destruction of Caliburn?  (Nothing in the script calls attention to the loss of this treasure, and the second preview page shows Ystin holding a sword that looks a lot like Caliburn.)  Or did this just fall through the cracks of Morrison's 30-part story?

The Hammer has shown up only briefly, carried by the knight Bors in the flashback that opens Shining Knight #3.  Bors uses it to forge the Arthurian A-bomb that ends Mordredd's reign but also begins the corruption of the last knights of Avalon.  (That flashback says the knights carry three of the imperishable treasures, but it doesn't indicate what the other two are.  They can't be the cauldron or Caliburn, which have been lost in time by this point, and I don't see a winged horse anywhere.  Galahad is carrying a spear on his back in one panel, but I'm not sure that treasure should be understood as a literal spear.)  No more recent signs of this treasure.

The all-knowing Fatherbox is a mystery.  The name implies a New Gods connection, but Mister Miracle had a Mother Box (or Motherboxxx if you prefer).

Could the Fatherbox instead be one or both of the mystical dice that have appeared in Klarion, Guardian, and Zatanna?  (An even more intriguing possibility if Croatoan is just another name for Aurakles, who has already slipped out of one pair of chains elsewhere in this series, or if it' s a name for the Fatherbox itself as Melmoth implies in the last issue of Klarion.)  The last two preview pages show all of the treasures except the Merlin, which has no fixed form, and the spear, which may not be a physical entity at all, but they do show Aurakles peering at a small, die-shaped object in his hand.

Finally, and most important of all, there's the enchanted Spear that can slay Gloriana.  The spear has some connection to the bloodline of Aurakles, the first superhero; in fact, it may be the bloodline.  The preview tells us that Aurakles is entrusted with "the hushed and profane secret" of the spear, not the spear per se, and its ability to strike across time may refer to the bloodline being passed down from generation to generation.  That venereal, reproductive transmission might also explain why the spear is called "love" as well as "vengeance."

We already know that Alix Harrower is descended from Aurakles, whose pale skin and bright red hair evoke the transformed Bulleteer.  (Strangely, her name connotes the harrowing that the Sheeda are going to perform, but she would have gotten that from her husband, who had the rather suggestive first name of Lance.  Can you inherit symbolism by marriage?)  The resemblance between Alix and Aurakles is telling enough that Morrison didn't need to jump the gun with the Vigilante's sudden exposition in Bulleteer #4; this could have been one of Morrison's classic only-obvious-in-retrospect reveals if he hadn't spoiled the surprise before he planted his best clue.

The New Gods charge Aurakles "To bring order and meaning where incoherence reigns."  For Morrison, that's the fundamental mission of any superhero--restoring meaning to a debased world where values are in freefall and words cannot be trusted.  That places them in opposition to Gloriana Tenebrae, who exults in the degeneration of meaning, proudly telling Ystin that "Words can mean anything and everything, that is why they have no proper shape here."  (Shades of the shapeless living language Gwydion, whom she turns loose on Zatanna.)  This is quite a change from the younger Morrison who once presented languages with fixed meanings as implements of torture and control in The Invisibles, who wrote "Love means nothing at all.  Life means nothing at all" as the most tender and romantic line in the entire run of Doom Patrol.

But Morrison is also indicating the ideal reading strategy for Seven Soldiers.  He's telling us we have to find the patterns in the seemingly incoherent jumble of characters and plotlines, become like "Sky-High" Helligan or the Bride and fit thirty discrete pieces into a single narrative.  The seven imperishable treasures make a convenient starting point for assembly, but we could just as easily look at the less explicit recurrences that have unified the series:  the vanished, usually terrifying patriarchs, the dutiful or rebellious children who encounter them, all the absences yearning for completion, and the Romantic, tragic model of history and modernity as falls from grace.  Morrison has thrown a lot of elements out there over the last twenty-nine installments; here's hoping the final chapter can pull them all together into some kind of order and meaning.

Doom Patrols 2: Do You, Mr. Jones?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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