I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Luthor, You Supercilious Bastard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key 17

Babel #1, by David B.

By Friday morning it was pretty clear that I didn't like most of the comics I bought last week.  The best were merely clever; the rest were lifeless exercises, written to fill another month, bought because they showed up on my pull list, exactly the kind of comics I told myself I wouldn't read anymore.

So I went out and bought some different comics.  Not a particularly highbrow bunch: the Batman: Son of the Demon reprint, Brave New World (at $1 it only had to be one-third good, and so it was), a collection of seventies Justice Society stories, and Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk's delightful Agents of Atlas, reuniting Marvel's 1950s characters for a spy/sci-fi romp.  (The Nat King Cole playing in the background when I read it was perversely appropriate.  I recommend you try it yourself, with smoking jacket and pipe.)  These are not all great comics--some of them, in fact, are crap--but they all seem sincerely glad to be superhero comics, which is more than I can say for the ponderous wheel-spinning of Daredevil or 52.

But the comic that restored my faith in comics was the first issue of David B.'s Babel, published by Drawn & Quarterly back in 2004.

I hadn't read any David B. until I caught this review of The Armed Garden by Jog, which indicated that the serial of war, debauchery, and talking geese brought a unique approach to the literalized representation and concretized language that have recently caught my eye.  I picked it up as a kind of scouting mission for the next book project, and because a recommendation from Jog is usually enough for me (speaking of which, thanks for pushing The Grizzly Man!).  Now I'm thoroughly hooked on David B.  This means I'll probably have to buy another volume of MOME filled with amateurish, derivative indie work just to get The Veiled Prophet, but I'm on the trail and I won't be dissuaded.  It's one of those rare cases where my professional interest intersects so perfectly with my reading pleasure that I'm reminded why I went into academia in the first place.  Amazon discount, here I come!

Babel is a companion piece to the acclaimed Epileptic.  It's a dream comic somewhat akin to Rick Veitch's Rare Bit Fiends, but it's also a chronicle of the Biafran war and an autobiographical account of how his brother's epilepsy affected his own development as an artist--all of David B.'s signal themes (I gather) roiling together to produce this strange fusion of surreal visuals and frighteningly real terrors. 

It would be foolish to talk about the ways these themes converge--they're never really separate--but the obvious overlap is a common focus on images and the power they hold over the mind of young Pierre Francois (David B.'s alter ego).  Only images can record his brother's spasmodic contortions.  Only images can convey the terror of a murder or a civil war.  Only images can describe the King of the World, a mysterious dream figure who is also the King of Images, yet "his face is always ambiguous and elusive."  Wielding power over images but screened from them, the King of the World "is the image of power" to Pierre Francois, a graphic hypostasis of all the power his brother and his family lose following the onset of the epileptic seizures.

But even more grandly, more discomfortingly than that, the King of the World is the image of power itself, and the image of the imaginary itself.  He's not just the brother's lost power or the proof of the breakdown of language implied by the comic's title; he's any breakdown or abuse of authority (helpless doctors, a smack from Dad, a civil war) and all the pain that rushes in to fill the void, from Orleans to Biafra.  He exists outside language and therefore, in Lacanian terms, outside the entire symbolic/parental order that fails Pierre Francois and his brother, but he is just as exempt from the images he commands.  (This prohibition against seeing the imaginary authority is something I expect David B. develops in The Veiled Prophet as well.)  He is power subject to no power, the thing that can't be symbolized or pictured, the way we shut out the trauma of the real and the trauma we shut out.

If these thoughts seem half-formed, that's because they are; "half" is probably too generous by half.  The most exciting thing about Babel is that it gives me too much to think about, and that's really all I can ask for.  (What was all that stuff about the African charity in last week's Batman review if not a reviewer desperately looking for something to sink his teeth into, and not finding anything else?)  It helps that David B. stirs these ideas together with consummate skill, his figures blurring the line between letters and images, individual panels also forming full-page designs.

I'm looking forward to the next installment, published by Fantagraphics just this past June.  (The master reviews both issues here and here.)  Then The Veiled Prophet awaits...

Bookshelf

In honor of the start of a new school year, I thought I'd share the contents of my small bookshelf of comics scholarship:

Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked
Jeffrey A. Brown, Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans
Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity
The Comics Journal Library: Jack Kirby
Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes
Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, eds., Arguing Comics
Gary Groth and Greg Sadowski, eds., Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art
R. C. Harvey, The Art of the Comic Book
Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature
Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones, The Comic Book Heroes
Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow
Geoff Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why
Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen, eds., Comics & Culture
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics
Lance Parkin, The Pocket Essential Alan Moore
Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture
Dan Raviv, Comic Wars
William W. Savage, Jr., Commies, Cowboys, and Jungle Queens
Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd, Jack Cole and Plastic Man
Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons, eds., The Language of Comics
and, of course, a complete run of IJOCA

Books I consult often enough that I really should have my own copies:

Roberta E. Pearson and William Urrichio, eds., The Many Lives of the Batman (out of print!)
Richard Reynolds, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology
Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History

And I'm looking forward to reading Pete Coogan's Superhero: The Secret Origins of a Genre as soon as I get the chance.

WHAAM!

Batman #656, by Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert

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

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

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

And Introducing... the Generics!

52 #1-14, by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid, Keith Giffen, Joe Bennett, Chris Batista, Eddy Barrows, Shawn Moll, Todd Nauck, Dale Eaglesham, Jackson Pollock, Hans Holbein the Elder, Ambrose Bierce, Amelia Earhart, Pope Boniface VIII, and Sir Stewart Wallace as himself

Last week Brian Hibbs wrote a sharp critique of 52, the weekly series from DC Comics:

the central conceit that each book is a week, no more and no less, is crippling the dramatic through-line of the book. [...] it has been a full real month since we've even seen Booster or John Henry; even longer since we've heard back about the teleportation accident -- is Hawkgirl still 40 feet tall two months later? While "3 pages each of the 6 leads" would have been a worse structure, there really needed to be some sort of checking in with each protagonist week-by-week -- even if it is just a panel or two. [...] See, unlike a monthly title where the reader largely needs to be recapped and hand-walked through the story-threads because enough time has passed and we've forgotten, in a weekly release, he audience is directly behind you, and needs forward momentum, more than anything else.

In the right hands, the week-by-week storytelling could be a great asset, the constraint that forces writers to bend their methods to it and tell tightly-constructed tales that take full advantage of the rare realtime pacing.  But the writers trust of 52 has, for the most part, continued to write stories on a monthly schedule and simply forced them into the weekly format.  Characters disappear for months at a time only to show up for issue-long fight scenes, as if this were a monthly comic all along.  Those issues tend to be the worst of 52 (last week's failed resurrection of Sue Dibny would be a strong contender for worst bar none) as they fly in the face of the series format and put all the other plotlines on hold.

This leads to some strange absences.  52 is nominally dedicated to chronicling the changes that happen in a year when Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman all disappear, yet most of the changes happen off-panel or not at all.  Metropolis and Gotham don't seem notably different without their protectors; we see a few heroes stepping into the breach in Metropolis, but shouldn't Gotham be reeling under a massive crime wave?  The Great Ten, a small army of Chinese superhumans, appears out of nowhere after six weeks, popping up in medias res with references to prior battles.  Couldn't the writers have milked their debut for more dramatic (and geopolitical) impact?

Nobody's arc has been more accelerated than Booster Gold's.  He's sporting a couple of product endorsements on Week One, Day 5 that he wasn't wearing in Infinite Crisis.  Apparently five days after a planetary catastrophe is all it takes for Lit Beer to decide a washed-up second-stringer is their man.  Booster had one of the most promising plotlines at the start of 52, when he was using flawed historical records from the future to boost his burgeoning career.  But the writers truncated his ascent through an abysmally stupid move on Booster's part, and now he hasn't been seen for weeks.  Regular weekly appearances could have allowed for a more plausible rise and fall and still gotten him to exactly the same point by week 14.

The series feels like it's gotten nowhere, yet it's been in such a terrible hurry to get there.  We should have seen a few weeks of Clark trying to investigate Supernova before he resorted to Lois Lane tactics. (And we should have seen a better payoff after he did; did Clark learn anything worth risking his life for?  Did we learn anything worth $2.50?)  We should be checking in with the injured superheroes more often.  Even Greg Rucka's Question/Montoya plotline, the only one to show any appreciable progress, has moved in fits and starts.  The fifteen-page investigation of Ridge-Ferrick in issue #11 could easily have been broken up over two or three weeks, keeping the forward momentum and leading up to the debut of Batwoman.

The Steel plot hasn't even bothered to name Luthor's team of "trademarked superheroes" yet, or to show them doing anything other than displaying their lackluster character designs.  I mean really, tell me this isn't the most uninspired bunch of superheroes you've ever seen:

Outside of a mid-90s DC summer crossover, anyway, which is exactly where they belong.  Maybe their namelessness is a tacit admission of the fate that we all know awaits them, assuming rather optimistically that they survive 52:  they'll show up in about two comics, then get gutted in the opening chapter of the next major earthshattering crossover just to show us that nothing we know will ever be the same again.  Everybody will be killed except Natasha Irons, who will angst over it for a few panels and then we will all discreetly agree never to mention Luthor's team again, until Donna Troy has a good cry about it in 2016.

At least two plotlines have been unmitigated duds.  The Black Adam storyline hasn't done much except to show us a Captain Marvel who talks to the Seven Deadly Sins while making the 52 Crazyface (Copyright 2006 DC Comics, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company) and introduce an Egyptian woman named "Adrianna Tomaz," but I wasn't expecting much more from Geoff Johns.  At least we've moved past the weekly disembowelings.

I had higher hopes for the Ralph Dibny storyline--lord knows why, since it started with the once-lighthearted detective ready to swallow his gun.  Mark Waid has kept that plot at pretty much the same emotional pitch, hitting Ralph with blow after arbitrary blow and eschewing any opportunity to show him doing actual detective work.  The structure is partly to blame--it shouldn't take Ralph four weeks to track down the Cult of Conner unless the writers haven't allotted the pages for it--but Waid, who has Ralph rather snottily remind us that he's a detective (characters explaining their own or each other's hooks being a Mark Waid trademark), hasn't written any detecting other than Ralph randomly beating up some teenagers.  There is hope on the horizon, with a Weird Science Mystery that's tailor-made for the old Ralph Dibny; tellingly, it looks like it's been set up by Grant Morrison and not Waid.

Morrison seems to be hovering around the fringes of the project, writing a Booster Gold scene here, a Steel scene there, but mostly concerning himself with supporting characters and bit players.  His monthly meetings betweeen T.O. Morrow and a very Bob Dobbs-looking Will Magnus have been the highlights of the series (and the storyline that best uses the weekly conceit); the interludes with the stranded heroes on Adon have been close behind.  It isn't surprising that Morrison's plotlines have generally been the most successful, even if you account for the fact that (to paraphrase Chevy Chase) he's Grant Morrison and they're not; the guy who grew up on 2000 AD has a better handle on the punctuated storytelling needed to make these short installments work.  I get the feeling some of his collaborators couldn't write a three-page scene to save their lives.

So there's been good work from Morrison and from Rucka, once I got past his surprisingly mellow Question and his titillating lesbians in bed (just nekkid enough for the kids, just clothed enough to stay on the shelves)--he's also kept his plots moving, albeit with some heavy-handed foreshadowing that makes me worry about poor Vic Sage, comics' only Zen Objectivist conspiracy theorist.  But the other half of the writing team has been spinning its wheels every week, and the overall plot structure isn't managed tightly enough to contain the damage. It's a shame to see a series with so much time do so little with it.

Harmacy

They're invading my favorite bar.

I managed to pay sporadic visits to the finest drinking establishment in DC and therefore the world during my Nashville exile, probably around once a year.  Other bars flared brightly only to burn out; even the mighty Common Share went down in a tide of slumming legislative assistants, although that will happen when you have the balls to sell Guinness at two bucks a glass.  But this place remained in its effortless indie rock-meets-Baltic expatriate groove.  It was one of the last places in the city where I still ran into friends completely by chance.  Only the jukebox (best one in town) would tell you it wasn't 1999.

We stopped in last night--a little on the early side, I admit--to find the place filled with polo-shirted post-collegiate preppies.  They're still prepping for something, I guess.  Eighties clothing was bad enough the first time around that the resurgence of the placket is a sure sign of a culture that has run out of ideas.  Funny thing is, the culture industry was trying to sell an eighties nostalgia kick when I left--anyone remember "That 80s Show"? or want to?--but it wasn't taking.  I guess the last couple of years have been rough enough to wear down even the hardiest immune systems; shit, with all the war, recession, and state-sanctioned torture those polo shirts almost look like they belong.   But to see them spilling into the Pharmacy fucking killed me.

I should have seen it coming; we spotted two different bachelorette parties roaming down 18th Street and I'm sure there were more inside the clubs.  Christy turned to me after the second one and said you knew a place was ruined once the bridezillas started moving in.  This is the ugly face of gentrification, and it wears a veil.  Now it's only a matter of time before some tipsy policy wonk is demanding that I suck Life Savers off a beer-stained T-shirt that's touched the lips of every other motherfucker in Adams Morgan.

I'm glad to see the neighborhood is doing so well that the Georgetown crowd thinks it's safe--I always found it plenty safe--but the last thing DC needs is another Georgetown.  This city has too much fucking money, and that money likes to transform every neighborhood into the same crass habitation for itself.

An aside to the three people in the world who will appreciate this:  now I know what Morgan Adams' last case must be.

Everything else from the tap to the jukebox to the rest of the crowd was as good as ever, although there was this bizarre video hunting game that offered the white-knuckled, hyperrealistic experience of standing in an open field and blowing away herds of animals that stood calmly about ten feet away.  The polo shirts loved it.

Infidels

Astro City: Samaritan #1, by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson

This is the post that got me to hook up my scanner.  I couldn't find any promotional images of the full cover for the Astro City: Samaritan special on the web; I'm wondering if that's coincidence or design.

This is the comic that introduces the archenemy of Samaritan, the Superman-archetype for Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City.  His name is Infidel, and as you can see he draws on Muslim iconography even more openly than Samaritan draws on the Christian variety, transforming the hero's vaguely dove-like symbol into a crescent and star.  I don't think Busiek and co-designer Alex Ross intend any cultural judgments with this juxtaposition; they're just following the logic of comic book antagonisms, distorting Samaritan's imagery and concept to come up with his opposite number.

It makes for good old-fashioned superhero comics and unsavory cultural politics.  Pairing these two symbol systems as hero and villain implies that Christianity and Islam are locked in a combat as unending and, needless to say, morally stark as that of Superman and Luthor, Batman and the Joker, or Captain America and the Red Skull.  I don't think Busiek and Ross intended their character design to fulfill that kind of propagandistic function, but at some point intention stops mattering--propaganda is what they've got.  Interestingly, though, most of that propaganda isn't aimed at Islam.

Backstory.  Infidel was a slave who studied astrology and alchemy until he unlocked the secrets of the universe.  Retreating from the world to conduct his studies, and occasionally kidnapping human specimens for his experiments, he found himself hounded by every society he encountered.  Here he is explaining his credo:

I believe in nothing but what I can see.  I trust in nothing but  what I can discover, what I can prove.

In other words, Infidel is a scientist--our worst fears of the arrogant, callous, unethical, elitist scientist.  But he differs from most comic book mad scientists in that his espousal of this bastardized empiricism is part of what makes him Samaritan's opposite number.  His very name suggests that he's a villain because he lacks faith, while his bevy of mindless, topless homonculi servants, grown "to serve [his] needs and warm [his] nights," read like a Christian conservative's nightmare-fantasy of the applications of cloning technology.

Looking back over the length of Astro City I'm almost suprised Infidel was so long in coming.  Many of the heroes come in Christian trappings, from the vaguely muted (Samaritan) to the loudly trumpeted (Street Angel, the Confessor, the Crossbreed).  Even the heroes who lack explicitly religious iconography are described as "angels" by their own enemies (Steeljack, in The Tarnished Angel, a story replete with religious symbolism direct from your high school English class).  Individually these stories and characters have never seemed proselytizing (though the Crossbreed come awfully close) but the cumulative effect is striking.  Now that the noble Samaritan can battle a villainous atheist scientist--sorry, a villainous atheist Muslim scientist--Astro City has edged from simply depicting Christian characters (or characters who can be read through a Christian framework) to animating one particularly xenophobic strain of conservative Christian ideology.

Again, I don't think Busiek and Ross set out to design Infidel as propaganda, especially not anti-Muslim propaganda.  Busiek bends over backwards to paint Infidel in a somewhat sympathetic light by making him a former slave and, drawing on contemporary popular culture's easiest shorthand for moral authority, making him black.  But because he applies the inflexible Manichaean logic of superhero iconography--and applies it quite well--he implies, however unintentionally, that Christianity and Islam, religion and science must forever remain antagonists.  It's never unclear which side is the moral one.

All troubling iconography aside, the Samaritan special is actually a pretty entertaining story about an uneasy truce between perfectly matched enemies.  Art is supposed to trawl the cultural unconscious, dredging up a society's beliefs and anxieties and subjecting them to catharsis or holding them up for examination.  But there's little examination or catharsis here:  this comic dredges one of the most paranoid lines of argument in our culture and provides a fantastic justification for its fears.  Astro City can do better.

Love Child

Batman #655, by Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But if I were fourteen...?

Blog to Print

After blogging about it for nearly two and a half years, I've finally gotten an article on metaphor in comics and comic book novels accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed academic journal.  The article, which looks at Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, argues that the visual representation of comics offers writers a means of bypassing the symbolic order of language and potentially erasing the divisions of signifier and signified that preoccupied so much critical theory in the twentieth century.

The article went through two rejections and multiple rounds of revision, putting all previous estimations of dinosaur time to shame.  It always was neither fish nor fowl--too invested in linguistics and psychoanalytic criticism for some pop-culture journals, too invested in comics for some journals of lit-crit.  It was also too damn long and it needed some major work before it was ready for publication.  Thanks to some patient editors, it's finally one step closer.

And I'm still not done riding this hobby horse.  In the last round of revisions I cut the material on Morrison and Moore, confident that I'll come back to them later in the future book.  My first draft was really an introductory chapter trying to pass itself off as an article; I think I'll let it breathe back into a chapter again.  The next ones should be a lot more fun to write...

So hopefully one day you'll read me announcing that the book on Lethem, Cantor, Moody, Chabon, Moore, Morrison, DeLillo, Auster, Karasik, Mazzuchelli, and hell, for all I know David B. is done.  (No guesses when; I've learned my lesson.)  And it all started here.  My thanks to everyone who responded and offered feedback on those early posts, or just quietly put up with them and didn't say anything when I started going off about hypostasis again.  Couldn't have done it without you.

Long Live the Legion: Postscript from Shanghalla

Last one, I promise.  After I wrapped up "Long Live the Legion" last week I realized the history of the Legion of Super-Heroes neatly encapsulates the generic evolution of DC Comics over the last fifty years:

First it has a period of invention in the late 50s and early 60s, at the start of the Silver Age, marked by an inundation of new ideas that compensates for the juvenile ambitions;

then it gradually adopts Marvel-style plotting, characterization, continuing storylines, and even page layouts in the mid-60s;

then it shifts to a focus on soap opera and interpersonal conflict in the 70s, with all the stock character types and hyperintense emotions that typically entailed;

then it develops a wildly successful synthesis combining the best elements of the new post-Claremont Marvel (intricate ongoing storylines, more nuanced and mature characterization) and the old Silver Age DC (tight plotting and pristine, uncluttered art) in the early 80s;

then it attempts to replicate Watchmen and other mature-readers superhero comics in the late 80s and early 90s with ambitious, elliptical storytelling and a cynical worldview--although the initial thrill of innovation gradually gives way to an artistic dead end as the experiment fails to live up to its promise;

then it attempts to reverse or throw out the excesses of the previous years with a back-to-basics retro approach in the mid-90s, although it's often less entertaining than the old stories to which it frequently alludes;

then it briefly rejuvenates itself with a spark of widescreen action in the early 2000s, although like most "mad ideas" comics, the ideas turn out not to be all that mad, just a futuristic gloss on standard, workmanlike superhero plots.

Sometimes the Legion leads these trends (the mid-60s, the early 80s), sometimes it's just a follower, but it's always right in the thick of them.  As DC goes, so goes the Legion.  Or is that the other way around?

And what does the current Legion tell us about DC Comics today?  Just that like Infinite Crisis and its infinite tie-ins, the new Legion of Super-Heroes comes across as a cunningly marketed but ultimately unsatisfying attempt at reinvigoration.  It doesn't appear to have learned any of the lessons of previous relaunches and it isn't nearly as much of a break from the past as it thinks it is.  But this smug phase won't last forever--the Legion's history reminds us of that.

Every longtime Legion fan has their own alternate timeline, their own pet theory on how to fix its tortured past if they could just turn back the clock.  The best changes to the Legion worked by addition, though, not by wholesale erasure; as Abnett and Lanning showed, even the worst periods in Legion history offered something to build on, and the foulest aftertaste disappears with the first good new issue.  To that end I offer the world my personal solution for what's ailing the Legion, the easiest way to restore the breadth and diversity and tradition that made it strong without invalidating any of its current texture.

Picture if you will the first issue after Waid and Kitson's run comes to an end.  The first page is a starry background in full bleed, galaxies swirling in cosmic grandeur.  Above them floats a single caption, in bright bold letters:

FIVE YEARS LATER...