Favorites: Black Hole

Hi folks! I've decided I'll use my slot as a Savage Critic to talk about my favorite comics of all time. I'm kicking things off with Charles Burns's Black Hole--which, coincidentally, Dick Hyacinth had also chosen to use as the inaugural book for his series on the best comics of the decade. So Dick and I will be tag-teaming on this one: I'm going first, then he'll post his thoughts without reading mine, then we'll check out what the other guy has to say and post responses. Should be a pip. Meanwhile, I've also dug a review of the book I wrote for the geek-culture iteration of Giant magazine out of the archives and posted it on my blog--check it out. And now, without further ado... Black Hole Charles Burns, writer/artist Pantheon, 2005 368 pages $18.95, softcover EXCELLENT

You lose a lot of extremely impressive supplemental material if you purchase or read only the collected edition of Black Hole rather than the individual issues from Fantagraphics (and, earlier, Kitchen Sink). The full-color front and back covers for each issue are probably what stand out in most people's minds, followed perhaps by the almost masochistically detailed endpage spreads, and last but not least those terrific ripped-from-the-hotbox dialogue snippets that accompany Burns's yearbook-portrait openers. I think everyone is probably partial to the one where a guy asks to be cremated if he dies so that his friends can smoke his ashes, but the one from the first issue isn't some nugget of stoner wisdom, it's the premise of the entire book:

It was like a horrible game of tag...It took a while, but they finally figured out it was some kind of new disease that only affected teenagers. They called it the "teen plague" or "the bug" and there were all kinds of unpredictable symptoms...For some it wasn't too bad - a few bumps, maybe an ugly rash...Others turned into monsters or grew new body parts...But the symptoms didn't matter...Once you were tagged, you were "it" forever. 

That quote made it into the collected edition as the back-cover blurb. This one, from the twelfth and final issue, didn't:

It's like tryin' to explain sex to a nun - there's no way you'd ever understand it unless you lived it. I was there, okay? Half my fuckin' friends died out there, man. I never dreamed I'd get out of that shit-hole...but one day I notice the stuff on my face is starting to heal and a couple of months later, I'm totally fuckin' clean...out walking around with all the normal assholes. 

This directly contradicts the quote from the first issue and upends the premise it establishes. Turns out the horror of the teen plague is finite. Turns out everything that happened in the book didn't need to happen, not the way it did, not based on the assumption that nothing was going to change and they'd never get better. Turns out, in other words, that the teen plague was ultimately like being a teenager itself: It sucks, but you grow out of it.

Rereading Black Hole for the fourth time or so, it's easy to see the set-up for this punchline. Keith in the woods during the kegger where he finds out Chris has the bug, peeing on a tree and grumbling to himself, "This is it...this is all it's ever gonna be. It'll never get better...I'll always be like this..." Chris's similarly themed rebuke of her parents: "You don't understand! You'll never understand! Never!" The constant hyperbole the kids use to describe virtually everything even potentially enjoyable: "It was going to be the best day of my life"; "Rob had brought along all kinds of incredible things to eat...black olives, an avocado, french bred, salami, cheese..."; "All right! That's gonna blow your fuckin' mind!"; "It's called Monument Valley--you won't believe how amazing it is!"; and my favorite, "I want to show you how to make the best sandwich in the world." Chris telling Rob "I'll love you forever, no matter what," and Keith and Eliza telling each other the same thing. Chris's repeated refrain "I'd stay here forever if I could"--in Rob's arms, in the icy water looking up at the night sky. Everything is either the best it can possibly be or the worst it can possibly be, and it will never change.

Needless to say that's just about the most accurate depiction of the emotional life of teenagers I've ever seen. It's how I remember high school. It's not terribly far removed from how I remember college. (And to be perfectly honest, when I think of how I look at the world even now, it's within spitting distance of how I live today, which is probably a big part of why this is one of my favorite comics.) But of course, things do change. Bad things usually get better, which is why it's such a goddamn tragedy any time a teenager commits suicide because of a bad grade or a breakup--or when a group of sick kids feels it necessary to drop out of school, run away from home, and in the case of some characters literally throw their lives away. And unfortunately, good things often get worse; parents do understand, at least some of the time, and it's damn hard to tell someone "I'll love you forever, no matter what" and mean it, and two stoners driving across country probably won't be able to find a cozy apartment where he can make an honest living and she can work on her art and they both live happily ever after. That's a tragedy too.

So why remove the quote that points this out, the quote that completes the metaphor? Maybe--and I'm just guessing here; I've interviewed Charles Burns about this book a couple of times but I don't recall asking him about this--he didn't want to give us that escape valve. Maybe he doesn't want us to read this and think, "Silly kids, if only they knew." Maybe he wants to eliminate anything that lessens the number-one effect of the story and the art here: claustrophobia.

Honestly, the claustrophobia of Black Hole is what struck me the most in this reread. Take the panel gutters, for example. Burns employs a traditional method of delineating between real-time action and dreams or flashbacks--straight gutters for the real stuff, wavy gutters for the reveries. But those wavy gutters still create as uniform a grid as ones drawn with a ruler would. Instead of dreaminess, they evoke haziness, like heat waves radiating up from a road or the room spinning when you're cataclysmically wasted. Indeed, the few times the grids do deviate from the norm is when the characters are completely blotto, or completely panicked--even there, panels remain locked in tiers, and the effect is like careening from one side to another when you're too drunk to stand up straight and really, really wish you were suddenly sober again but you're stuck drunk. There's no way out.

Then there's the look of the art itself. Elsewhere I've described it as like immersing yourself in a blacklight poster, which is apt not just because of the subject matter (look and you'll see a few such posters on a few walls, in fact) but because looking at this book can practically give you a contact high. While I read the book this time around, I thought it might be neat to listen to a couple of playlists I recently made of the kind of electronic music I listened to in college, a time when presence of the kind of emotions you find in Black Hole still feels fresh to me, a time when I got stoned pretty frequently listening to that very music. Even though I did this on the commuter train out of New York, I'll be damned if I didn't feel the pressure on my eyeballs, the weight in my limbs, a slight throbbing of the vision when staring at Burns's flawless blacks and the trademark shine effect of his characters' hair. For the first time in his career, I think, style and substance lined up perfectly. It's not for nothing, though, that the use of drugs and alcohol in the book almost always reduces the options available to the characters--most of the time they prevent people from doing what needs to be done or saying what needs to be said, and even during the story's few positive depictions of inebriation, intoxicants are used to push things toward a preordained conclusion rather than open up other possibilities. No minds are expanded.

Maybe the most powerful aspect of the book's claustrophobic effect is its eroticism. True to adolescent love and lust, the desire these characters have to fuck one another is irresistible and all-consuming--it has to be, or else the story couldn't have happened, and virtually every major plot development wouldn't have taken place either. Frequently the very environments where the sex takes place contribute to this feeling. Rob and Chris's fateful liaison takes place in a graveyard. Keith first sees Eliza, nude from the waist down, under the harsh and unforgiving glare of florescent kitchen lights. He first becomes aroused by her when her tail struggles against the restraint of her towel. Their romance is kindled in her bedroom, surrounded by hundreds of her bizarre (and very blacklight) drawings. They first have sex while stoned as fuck, a red scarf draped over the lamp and bathing everything in crimson. The atmosphere is oppressive, but so can be the feeling of being very, very turned on. "That's all it took to get me totally sexed up and crazy," says Keith of his first kiss with Eliza. "I could hardly catch my breath." (Is it worth noting I knew a girl who looked a bit like Eliza back in college? Probably.)

One final motif comes to mind when I think of how Black Hole works to confine and oppress: repetition. I've already mentioned some of the repeated dialogue, and there are any number of repeated visual cues--shattered glass, snakes, holes--and even repeated scenes--Chris floating in the water, those dream sequences. But there are two instances of repetition that stand out to me the most. The first is when Keith angrily leaves his parents' house to avoid watching some lame TV movie with them, only to end up tripping on acid and watching the very same movie at his friend's girlfriend's place. The second, and the most chilling, is Eliza's sexual assault, which is an implied echo of never-directly-described abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather--and, as her nightmare at the end of the book indicates, will likely continue to haunt her dreaming and waking life. Even her and Keith's blissful roadtrip escape is just a tour of places she's already been, trying to recapture the happiness she knew long ago. And maybe this more than anything else is why cutting that final reveal that the bug was temporary was the right move: Bad things usually get better, but that doesn't mean they never come back--different, perhaps, but the same in all the ways that count. Sometimes you can break free of something only to spin right back around to it, spiraling inward into that gravitational maw until that bad thing might as well be constant, for all you can truly escape from it.

I mean, the book is called Black Hole.

Don't Worry, This Zombie Comic Had a Head Start on the Trend: Jog and a 2/18 comic from half a decade ago

The Zombies That Ate the World #1 (of 8)

All right! Early aughts nostalgia, coming in fierce! Some of us do still pine for those bygone days of Les Humanoïdes Associés publishing in English, even if our (by which I mean 'my') reading wasn't nearly as extensive as it should have been, and even after that ill-fated partnership with DC.

These days it's Devil's Due releasing the stuff, and they're keeping things pretty conservative - not only are they breaking albums up (and shrinking them down) into $3.50 pamphlets, but they're focusing keenly on material front-loaded with noteworthy North American talent. Indeed, for now (with this and the John Cassaday-drawn I Am Legion), they're devoting their energy to stuff DC started publishing but never got around to finishing. Still, I can't help but pray my dreams of an English-release of that last volume of The Metabarons might finally be coming true.

Until then, there's always stuff like The Zombies That Ate the World, which does boast the participation of Guy Davis, who's maybe head of the class among prolific, idiosyncratic cartoonists working in front-of-Previews genre comics today (John Romita, Jr.'s the only comparable talent I can think of offhand). The project started off as a one-shot deal for the 2002-04 revival of Metal Hurlant, but eventually expanded into four albums' worth of material (and a short animated film), released through 2008. I'm not sure if later volumes form book-length storylines, but this particular issue covers part of the first album, which collects a bunch of the Metal Hurlant stories; as a result, there's no pacing problems from the conversion to the pamphlet format.

Problems with the stories themselves are a different matter. The writer (and letterer) is Jerry Frissen -- also creator of the Image-released Lucha Libre series -- whose premise sees the walking dead more-or-less normalized into human society in the far future. Sure, the occasional bit of flesh still gets chewed, but zombies mostly just amble around looking rotten, powered by whatever instincts they'd developed prior to their deaths; they're perfect prey for the series' anti-hero zombie hunters, deluded nerd Karl and his oafish sister Maggie, who'll procure or dispose of any former human for any seemingly any damn reason, so long as they pay's good.

Social satire is the narrative result, in just about the most unsubtle manner possible - it'll come as no surprise that political correctness comes under fire ("life-impaired," ha!), or that consumerism is duly indicted. Hell, George A. Romero himself contributes a cover blurb! But Frissen's chief humans don't really struggle against anything, which admittedly is sort of the point - Karl and Maggie are just useful cogs in a capitalist machine that's inched ever closer to literal dehumanization by transforming ex-humans (parents, etc.) into burbling items that can be collected or tossed away for a fee.

Frissen underlines this point over and over again, then puts it in bold and repeats it often - see a middle-class fellow spewing quasi-liberal nonsense while obsessing over his zombie father-in-law breaking expensive stuff on the way to living creamtion! Look! Here's a rich guy with a thing for sex with undead models and actresses, women finally within his reach! It's simplistic, shallow stuff, although I'll give the writer a bit of credit for his willingness to let his protagonists be genuinely repulsive at times - Karl in particular has no qualms about diverting a freshly transformed woman to his own bedroom, and Frissen is rightly unsparing in showing the amoral state of his titular zombie/consumerism-eaten world. It's too bad that the scatalogical, infantile and very wooden conversations between Karl and Maggie lack the zest needed to add some real lived-in heft to his emphatic concept.

But that's where Davis comes in, to make it all OKAY. This comic is a classroom-ready example of how inspired visuals can enliven a so-so script, with Davis' impeccable character designs adding a sweetly vulnerable dimension to Frissen's unsparing world. Coupled with Charlie Kirchoff's colors -- warmer and earthier and than Dave Stewart's excellent work in B.P.R.D. -- Davis' drawings reveal a latent humanity to even the meanest human, and afford all those decomposed zombies a hapless air.

It's funny work, but there's pathos too, and it goes a ways toward counterbalancing the script's barking tone, investing it with more believability than such noise would otherwise elicit. It does make me want to see more of this stuff; I haven't read the later Metal Hurlant chapters since they first came out, so I don't recall if the writing settles in, but it certainly might. Good thing we'll get to see the whole span. Here's hoping this latest iteration of Les Humanoïdes in English gives more projects the time to show us how cross-cultural talents can (or cannot) gel.

Late to the Welcoming Party: Chris Reviews some Final Issues

Hey everybody, why are you packing up the soundsystem? Why are they stacking the chairs? There's still some helium left in these balloons, and it's still a holiday weekend in Hawaii -- c'mon guys, I just got here!

Anyway, hello to all. I'm Chris, and alongside fellow newcomer David I work with the Funnybook Babylon gang. I don't do a lot of straight reviews for FBB, so bear with me as I try to remember how those work.

When I was a youth and had no Internet or collected editions to fall back on, I used to love getting last issues out of quarter bins. Last issues were always jam-packed with Things Happening, as creators scrambled to finish their stories, set things up for a new status quo, and just generally try to go Out with a Bang. I may have not known who most of the New Defenders were, but damned if a lot of them weren't killed or turned into stone in New Defenders #152! And Luke Cage was a fugitive from justice, with Danny Rand apparently killed in Power Man & Iron Fist #125! And man, that final issue of U.S. 1 had... well, it had a pretty awesome SPACE TRUCKER cover by Howard Chaykin. They can't all be winners, as we'll see today.

NIGHTWING #153 -- one more issue than the Defenders, take that Marvel! -- is less an ending than a mercy killing. Dick Grayson was supposed to get killed in Infinite Crisis but DC wimped out at the last minute, leaving the book to flounder around and serve as a testbed for Marv Wolfman's Vigilante relaunch, a place to house tenuous tie-ins to other Batman books, and a place for Bruce Jones to write some truly terrible comic books. For the past thirteen issues it's been a place for Peter Tomasi to kind of mill about, waiting for a better writing job.

This is some EH by-the-numbers Last Issue stuff, without the benefit of even getting to set the new status quo. Nightwing moves out of his New York status quo without even saying goodbye to his supporting cast ("It'll be like I was never there.") and returns to Gotham to share a good cry with Alfred about how Batman is Really Dead This Time. I don't know why so many writers feel the need to explicitly reference how Superman and Jason Todd and Donna Troy and Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen and Barry Allen and the Dingbats of Danger Street have all come back from the dead while trying to hammer home how damn important and real THIS fake death is, but Tomasi does that too. We know, these are all dumb fake stories! Nothing lasts forever! Just don't tell us in the middle of the trick.

Then Nightwing recapitulates Batman's origin. Because there might be some readers that don't know Batman's origin. This is the only place Don Kramer's serviceable art really grates, as "Crime Alley" appears to be a well-lit four lane road. The story ends with Nightwing reminding us that he loves Batman a bunch, and is sad that Batman is dead. REALLY DEAD.

But the show isn't over, as the last six pages are given to ORIGINS AND OMENS, a terrible idea in concept and execution. Apparently there's a scarred up Smurf possessed by the evil from The Fifth Element and she is spending the month of February reading a magic book that allows her to see people's origins if DC publishes a book about them. Except sometimes it doesn't even do that. Instead of an "Origin", Tomasi tosses off a quick vignette about Dick hauling his wheelchair-bound friend blindfolded out to a skydiving lesson as her birthday present. Astute readers may recognize the girl, but anyone looking to "Origins and Omens" to provide the introductory information that "Origins" implies is fresh out of luck. I have no idea what any of this was meant to accomplish, save to fill a slot on a production line.

Two mini-series featuring ladies writing lady superheroes also concluded this week, and they had the distinct advantage of containing no Origins and Omens backups. VIXEN: RETURN OF THE LION #5 is a pretty GOOD little story that exists adrift in a bunch of confusing DC Universe lore. G. Willow Wilson and Cafu take Vixen to Africa, and they're culturally literate enough to set the story in a fictional country on the continent, not just Africa, where people speak African. This sounds like a no-brainer if you're not Sarah Palin, but it tripped up everyone involved with last years DC HALLOWEEN SPECIAL, who also thought that young girls growing up in African villages in the 1980s would have a special weakness for Blaxpoitation films.

VIXEN suffers from a lot of problems that aren't really its fault: the rejiggering of the titular heroine's origin and powers might seem less awkward if a separate contradictory storyline hadn't run through the past two years of her Justice League of America appearances, and why the editors felt the need to let us know that the series takes place before Batman R.I.P. but don't bother to put it in context of Vixen's own recent appearances is baffling. There's also a reveal of Evil Mastermind Whisper A'Daire near the end of the fourth issue that adds nothing to the story, and even as a hardcore nerd I don't pretend to know who the hell A'Daire is. Combined with an Amazons Attack-worthy final page reveal that a friendly character is secretly a fire-breathing demon watching over Vixen, this seems to fit into a larger story DC either doesn't plan to ever tell, or they want to keep it a fun secret. These keep VIXEN from being a pleasant self-contained trade to put on the shelf, which I assume was their goal.

Over yon Marvel way, Kathryn Immonen and David LaFuente's PATSY WALKER: HELLCAT is genuinely self-contained, charming and VERY GOOD. I have no idea if Marvel has further plans for Patsy Walker, former supermodel and current magically-inclined defender of Alaska, and I have no idea if all the magical totems and Inuit mystics and Yeti boyfriends they piled into these five issues are culturally insensitive to someone out there, but I had too much fun reading this series to be too concerned. There was a lot of amiable nonsense piled into five issues, and it threatened to devolve into nonsense, but it walked the line in a way that pleasantly reminded me of Grant Morrison's DOOM PATROL. And it did it all without any editor's notes about Secret Invasion or Dark Reign or Ultimatum, so kudos for that!

Two from a bestseller: Jog on some new hit manga

Oh Naoki Urasawa, how many thousands of comics did you move while I was out for coffee? You all know what I'm getting at, right? I think we're at the point now where most readers of this site have at least a passing familiarity with the Urasawa name, a font of manga megahits since the mid-'80s - no less than 100 million copies have been sold, which Japan's Daily Yomiuri helpfully notes is terribly close to one book for everyone in the country.

But just four years ago, Urasawa was nearly unknown in the US; the first I'd heard of him was through an essay by our own Abhay Khosla, who surveyed the artist's works through the still-growing 'scanlation' scene of 2004. All that was legitimately available of Urasawa's stuff back then was a lone out-of-print VIZ compilation of the 1985-88 sentimental comedy/action series Pineapple Army, which Urasawa illustrated from scripts by Kazuya Kudô of Mai the Psychic Girl. It wasn't particularly representative of his body of work.

No, Urasawa had long ago become synonymous with longform suspense manga aimed at a slightly older audience - many forget that even his breakthrough 1986-93 sports manga, Yawara! A Fashionable Judo Girl, was serialized in Big Comic Spirits, a weekly anthology aimed at adult men, and home to the diverse likes of Junji Ito's Uzumaki, Taiyō Matsumoto's Tekkon Kinkreet and Kazuo Koike & Ryoichi Ikegami's Crying Freeman (not to mention the food opus Oishinbo). Urasawa eventually began exercising more authority over story concepts, initiating his 'mature' period with the debut of the cliffhanger-crazed 1994-2002 thriller Monster, which eventually became the first of his works as a writer/artist to appear in English, again courtesy of VIZ, in 2006.

Urasawa hasn't slowed down at all in Japan. His new series, Billy Bat (launched just this past October), turned some heads by pretending to be a full-color funny animal comic for its first two chapters, before revealing itself as the story of a Japanese-American funny animal cartoonist in the 1940s. Heaven knows when a mangaka has released his own rock album in the past year he's well and truly beyond anyone telling him what the hell to do, an attribute that apparently extends to English-language releases of his work - it was allegedly the artist himself that disallowed VIZ from releasing any of his newer works before Monster was published in full, so as to prevent a more experienced version of himself from 'competing' for reader attention.

However, it seems attitudes have relaxed, since VIZ has recently released two of Urasawa's newer series to bookstores. Direct Market retailers will have them on Wednesday. 20th Century Boys Vol. 1 (of 24): Friends

Do note that the "of 24" I inserted above is inexact, I admit; the last two volumes of this 1999-2007 saw the title change to 21st Century Boys, with vol. 23 dubbed vol. 1 and vol. 24 serving as vol. 2. Many sources treat it as a discreet 'sequel' series, although it appears to be simply the conclusion to the main series, set off by a hiatus in production. I'm just treating it all as a single 24-book series. Hopefully VIZ has licensed those last two volumes; I suspect we won't want to miss anything.

Lingering fan qualms about its finale aside -- I haven't read it, so don't ask -- 20th Century Boys is generally considered to be Urasawa's magnum opus. It remains visible in the public eye today; the second installment of a six billion yen live-action movie trilogy from director Yukihiko Tsutsumi opened at #1 in Japanese theaters two weeks ago, and an in-joke comedic story-in-the-story just ran in Big Comic Spirits (again the serializing anthology), presumably in support. For a while it was quite the hot item on the English scanlation circuit, and I suspect its readily available breadth did wonders for establishing Urasawa among English readers in the know as an artist to watch.

But even from this very, very introductory 216-page book -- $12.99 with fancy softcover flaps, that kind of release -- the ambition is obvious. Chapter one alone features sequences set in at least four separate decades, with short additional segments possibly taking place adjacent to longer scenes, or maybe dozens of added years in the future or past. You'll turn the page and not even know what country you're in; that kind of sprawl. There's a huge cast that obviously isn't even fully introduced, with many characters appearing in multiple time periods at different ages. The series' title is taken from the T.Rex song, which get covertly played over a lunchroom's speakers in 1973, in the series' opening pages, the first rock music heard by most of those kids. And it's surely no coincidence that Urasawa, born in 1960, was just the right age to hear that song, in that lunchroom, at that very time. Though conceived with a collaborator (editor Takashi Nagasaki), 20th Century Boys stands with the unmistakable poise of an author aiming to address his generation, to take stock of where people his age have been, and where they're going as the age passes. It's a millennial work, heavy on cloudy portent and shaking from cataclysm nerves, but also a grand, funny human story about growing up and then preparing, futilely, to grow old, a personal evolution no less scary than any 2000 A.D. apocalypse. It's also an unabashed pop comic, entertaining as all hell and weird and thrilling and everything.

The more-or-less 'main' character is Kenji, an ex-guitarist (hmmm, know any mangaka who put out a late-blooming rock album?) who's settling in to minding the family store -- not to mention his absentee sister's infant child -- now that he's staring down middle age in 1997 - and god, how many genre comics can you name with a cast that's mostly pushing 40? There's weddings to attend and small regrets to nurse, along with a heaping helping of flashbacks to Kenji & co.'s youth in the 1960s. But strange things are beginning to happen: a troubled boy-turned-science teacher commits suicide out of the blue and high tech professors and students go missing or turn up dead. Nasty disease crops up in foreign locales, and dodgy religious leaders are knifed in public.

Most crucially, a certain symbol starts popping up. It's oddly familiar to Kenji, but we readers are allowed more access than him - it seems someone has literally started a cult around the miscellany of childhood in Kenji's part of Japan, with Kenji's circle of friends. Indeed, the mystery cult leader is addressed by acolytes as only My Friend -- and maybe it's better the series came out this late, so as to skip 1001 John McCain jokes -- espousing wisdom centered around the US moon landings and reciting manga-fed childhood vows to always protect the world. And through the magic of flash-forward, Urasawa reveals that something really did threaten the world, and, moreover, that someone really did save it. Still, you know what they say about manga - it's always the journey more than the destination.

This is a VERY GOOD one, so far. Urasawa's visuals are as clean and appealing as ever, with great little character touches - you'll never mistake this manga for something else. Despite juggling one million characters over a timeline spanning half a century, the storytelling never confuses, although VIZ kindly includes a character chart up front as a courtesy (skip it 'till you've read the story, though!). Even Urasawa's semi-infamous tendency to mash emotional buttons like next week brings the bathos prohibition is kept mostly in check - sure, at one point a childhood outsider can only prove himself to the gang by saving them from certain death, but in this work it seems more a fitting expression of heated childhood emotions -- the impulse to vow to save the world, say -- which grows to a fire in adult retrospect.

Such is the core of Urasawa's work here. You can probably draw some comparison to Stephen King's It or something, wherein childhood trauma forces adults to band together to confront a danger, but the childhoods glimpsed here aren't much more traumatic than usual. It's what people do with the stuff of their childhood that matters, and Urasawa duly presents many views of potential lost, prominence gained, dreams faded and ideals kept alive, even to the point of bringing the most absurd elements of a J-pop childhood to life, even past the threshold of sanity.

Perfect stuff for a comics artist determined to speak for and of his generation, and I can't wait to see how it plays it out.

Pluto Vol. 1 (of 8)

Note too that the "of 8" above is an estimate; the Japanese vol. 7 is due to arrive next week or so, and the series is technically still ongoing (in the biweekly Big Comic Original), although it's set to conclude in April, unless something changes. That'll make it Urasawa's newest completed work (2004-09), and easily the shortest of his 'major' projects. But then, it's an odd duck in other ways.

Pluto was initially cooked up in 2003 as part of the celebrations surrounding the in-story birthday of Astro Boy, Osamu Tezuka's famed creation. It's a wildly expanded, thoroughly modified adaptation of a single popular storyline from Tezuka's original, The Greatest Robot on Earth (available in English through Dark Horse's Astro Boy vol. 3), starring a marginal character from the original, who encounters updated, more 'realistic' versions of All Your Favorites. Given the year of its debut, I don't think it's out of line to call it Ultimate Astro Boy - the similarities are many, and I said as much when I did a longish review of a big clump of chapters back in 2005; there's spoilers in there, although some of my guesses at future plot points turned out to be inaccurate. Anyway, I stopped following the scanlations after a while.

I think some damage was done, though. Reading a huge chunk of scans -- like, two and a half volumes' worth -- gives you a very different experience than sticking to the collections (or a serialization for that matter). If you follow that Abhay link above, you'll notice that he didn't think much of Pluto at the time (2004). Frankly, if I'd only had the seven chapters presented in this book (200 pages, $12.99), I wouldn't have gotten a much better impression; I was a bit shocked at how poorly the stuff holds up on limited re-reading.

Now, granted, some of that effect is probably due to my knowing a whole lot of story twists ahead of time, but I was still struck by how slowly Pluto builds. The premise -- with editor Nagasaki now credited below Urasawa as a full-blown co-author (co-writer, I presume), a rather material fact I certainly don't remember seeing in the scans! -- concerns humanoid robot Gesicht, a detective based out of Urasawa's beloved Germany, who takes on an odd murder case that seems to be connected to something much bigger: the systematic destruction of all the world's most powerful robots, a list he's on!

A devil seems to be on the loose, an impossible being that cares not for human laws or robot rules against killing humans, so Gesicht sets out to check up on many mechanical parties of interest, ranging from the mad, murderous Brau 1589 -- impaled-yet-alive like St. Sebastian, imprisoned-yet-dangerous like Hannibal Lector -- to the surviving remainder of the world's strongest robots, including a certain mighty Atom from Japan.

That's really all that goes on here, but the journey isn't nearly as fine as with 20th Century Boys. In fact, if the prior project seemed to somehow keep Urasawa's soppier tendancies down, this one's proximity to Tezuka's special brand of unbridled humanism appears to have driven the artist hog wild, culminating in a 76-page side-story about a blind composer who was abandoned as a child and can't compose and his new robot butler is a war machine that only wants peace and to play the piano but the composer hates him at first and abuses him and the robot goes away and the composer's garden starts to die, but then there's mommy issues and growing friendship and forgotten tunes of childhood innocence and TRAGEDY STRIKES AT A CRUCIAL MOMENT, OH CRUEL CRUEL FATE, OH ROBOTS AND HUMANS AND MUSIC AND DREAMS!!

It's the type of head-spinning melodrama that rarely manifests without the direct participation of Lillian Gish, pushed straight to the brink of camp by the fact that the robot butler has a face like a luchador mask and wears a cape to hide a torso made of knives and guns. Wait, am I making this sound awesome? Eh, I guess it is kind of awesome, taken that far (it'll be something to see how Urasawa tackles the ending of this fucking thing, oh my god), and like I noted back in '05, the artist's sheer skill with visuals is often enough to keep things vivid - a page setting bursts of piano playing against rhythmic panels of robot fighting is a standout.

But I've read a lot of Tezuka since 2005, and I can't help but feel Pluto may be missing something vital about the master's work. Always, even in the most emotionally-charged moments of his most 'important' work, Tezuka had a way of inserting rude, loud humor, brassy slapstick that never failed to accentuate the lightness of being - humans, robots, lions and everything else was connected in that manner, as part of the God of Manga's cosmology of whimsical pictures, the manga (translated literally) he invented.

Pluto, in contrast, is a self-serious work about how serious things are for fantasy robots from children's comics. Tezuka's children's comics were damn serious too, at times, but never only serious. At risk of projecting my Western funnybook perspective too brightly, it all seems especially like certain American superhero comics (maybe even some Ultimate issues) where everyone glowers all the time so as to demonstrate how important and serious the superhero genre can be. Here, Shōnen Manga is Serious Business too, with frowns on nearly every face when tears won't do, and any fleeting smile set against a hopeless, inevitable doom, which is so totally odd for a book with Osamu Tezuka on its cover.

Again though, my reading is skewed. I didn't get anything better than an OKAY impression from this book, although the craft is solid and I readily concede that the shock of the new might give you a better experience. Plus, I'm confident (having not re-read it, ulp) that Pluto does really start to cook very soon, when the suspense mechanics have warmed up and Urasawa gets to unveil his Big Idea for the series - Tezuka's war/peace, man/machine struggle set against the United States' continuing conflict in Iraq!

That's right, get ready to relive all those wonderful memories of weapons inspections and such with Astro Boy and all of his friends! It's still stone-solemn, and prone to some of Urasawa's worse creative instincts, but it has a way of growing on you. I hope it gets under my skin all over again.

Oh, And My Entire Lower Jaw Is Held In Place By A Flimsy Metal Wire

I'm not sure how I got here either, so hey: we're in agreement, probably for the last time. Tucker Stone's the name, writing about random stuff at The Factual Opinion is the hobby, it turns into a profession at comiXology, and if you like to hold it in your grubby paws, grab a copy of Comic Foundry. If comics aren't your bag, and you want to brush up on your Italian, keep an eye out for upcoming issues of MUSE magazine. (I know!) Otherwise sister, the game plan is simple: I plan to write purely about sexism in comics, or maybe sex in comics, or maybe just some sex I had on top of a pile of comics--whatever the Hibbster says is most popular. Just in case you were wondering, I'll clear up a couple of your concerns: I'm not qualified to be here, my head is kept firmly up my rear end, I'm not as funny as Abhay, not as smart as Wolksie or the Jogster, and yes, most of the time I get finished with a comic and go "Huh, so it had pictures and words in it. They all like this?" But don't worry! Kissing is still your friend, and the Savage Won't Go Changing, until I get fired, which will be RADICAL.

Under the breaker: oh mama, hit the breaker! Hit it with your fist!

The best way to deal with reviewers in my estimation is never to base your decision to read them off whether or not they are smart writers, or funny writers, or interesting writers--"That's a Waste Of Time Right There", as my dad used to say about my existence. No, the best way is to read enough of their stuff to figure out if they are writing reviews that directly agree with your own personal taste. Reviews, and we all know this, are for backrubs and handclaps. When I peruse a review, my main question is always this: Do they have a Hal Jordan toy?

No?!

Then fuck THEM, what kind of "critic" doesn't have a Hal Jordan toy? With that, here's a breakdown of the Savage Critics scale of review, and how I plan to use it. It's provided for you, the Savage Critic fan, to determine whether you want to use your hacking computer skillz to edit the random "Tucker" posts out of your RSS feed. (And I know you know how to do that, cookie puss!)

If it's EXCELLENT, that means it's on the scale of that Gary Panter slipcase that Picturebox put out, which I finally got. I'll still probably burn it, because that's what I do with all my comics eventually, but Hey! Until then! Excellent!

If it's VERY GOOD, that means it could be a super-hero comic with plenty of punching and funny jokes, not jacked up in the coloring process and, because Hey, This Matters To Me, it's got the same art team from the beginning to the miserable end. (Which means all those comics that involve 4 inkers and "replacement" pages don't have a shot. Standards!) The only reason it doesn't hit EXCELLENT is because, and this is petty, but I like conclusions, and I need conclusions, and I don't really enjoy things as fully unless, you know, they have conclusions. Non super-hero comics can be VERY GOOD as well, obviously, but only if they aren't about white people complaining about something, because, and yes, this is petty too, I hate white people.

If it's GOOD, then you must be talking about Junior Bonner, which could have been VERY GOOD if Steve McQueen had been the one on the bulldozer, and if the script had more cursing. Still trumps The Getaway though, which is merely OKAY, because no, you're wrong, Ali McGraw is a terrible actress. (And yes, I told that to her face when she came to my Dynasty fan-fiction forum, held annually at the Tuskagee Holiday Inn. I told her to her dirty Lady Ashley Mitchell face. "You're awful," I said, "and I would know!")

If it's OKAY, then it's probably Optic Nerve. Adrian Tomine is kind of boring, right? Right? Get it? Because he's so boring. No, seriously. Dude makes boring comics. Except for that "Pink Frosting", which is my favorite curbing story that isn't the one that some guy told me about on my first day in high school, right before he punched me in the stomach. TJ! I miss you baby boy. Ever get your grill fixed? But yeah, OKAY will be pretty much reserved for comics that don't have any serious problems from a technical standpoint, but end up not being something I really enjoy because I don't have good enough taste to know what's good for me and am more than willing to chug a can of Pringles just to prove I can.

If it's EH, then it's probably Kingdom Come, because serious comics about Captain Marvel always make me want to cut little strips of skin off my leg to use as a bow on a Christmas present I give to homeless people. In March. Actually, just about everything Alex Ross does is pretty much EH in my book, but sometimes he can find somebody to include words that bring it down to good old fashioned AWFUL.

If it's AWFUL, it could be some "trying to hard" comics, which is pretty much a category that's totally PWNED by that old issue of Detective Comics where Robin yells at everybody for smoking the Floronic Man's magic marijuana concoction. He uses the phrase "Why would you want to 'mess up' your mind? Why would you do that?" To which no one responds "You're the one who fights crime in a red and green unitard, you stupid jerkoff." Most of the time, EH and AWFUL are where a lot of the comics I read live, because even the worst of the bunch can usually still be somewhat readable, and because I only buy comics that I don't like, because I'm a failure at life.

Is that how you use the word PWNED? I hate that word.

If I'm going to rate something CRAP--and I'll probably forget this eventually--it will be something that is made by people who shouldn't be working in comics, simply because what they make is completely incompetent work--sadly, this means most of the Big Two super-hero comics won't end up here, because they can at least draw things like hands and eyeballs that look like some kinda hands and eyeballs, even if it's on the low side of the Platonic "hands and balls" scale. Serial incompetence, is what I'm saying. For instance, the only Marvel thing I've read recently that would go in the CRAP column would be one of those Anita Blake comics, because that was the first time in a while that I'd read something that was actively unreadable, and not in the exaggerated "let's be mean" sense. I mean it was a comic that I was incapable of reading, that my body and mind actively screamed "Stop doing this, this is hurting you" by the middle of the book. (I asked my wife to review it.)

So there we go! Tried to keep it brief, but hey: that's why you aren't supposed to click "Read More" if you don't want to Read More. I'd love to promise you that this is going to be fun, because it totally is, but it's only going to be fun for me.

Man, that's your instrument

Hi, I'm Dick, and I'm really excited about being here since this is one of the first comics blogs I remember reading obsessively (two of the others were Fanboy Rampage and Jog the Blog, so TRIPLE excitement, actually). It really is a great privilege to write on the same site as those folks you see on the sidebar. And now that I have this forum, I can devote my personal blog to my true passions: reviewing frozen food, complaining about video game stores, and posting pictures of disgusting MMA injuries. What I'll mostly be doing here, at least over the next year, is continuing my obsession with year's best lists. Or in this case, decade's best list. Savage Critics will be the home of my ongoing Best of the 00s Diary Thing, in which I'll revisit some of the best comics of the last decade, and look at some for the first time as well, probably. By the end of the year I'll hopefully have a pretty good idea of what I'd put on my own personal best of the decade list. And since I'm such a fiend for discourse, I will encourage all those reading to consider this as well. What are the best comics of the 00s? Should we consider reprints and translations as well as original material? And many other rhetorical questions.

For now (after the break, actually) I'm going to review a couple of things I picked up in one of my rare trips to an actual comic shop, after 10 long hours of flying and running from gate to gate. If only there were a way to avoid flying through O'Hare for the rest of my life. . . .

Jin and Jam #1 by Hellen Jo Preview

Flipping through this, the Taiyo Matsumoto influence leapt off the page--check out those preview pages and it's about as obvious as one could imagine. I considered this a very good thing: a North American comic with such an obvious art manga influence. Don't see that as often as you'd hope or expect; could be interesting.

The Matsumoto connection isn't just heavy influence, it turns out, since the first page includes a quote from Matsumoto's Tekkon Kinkreet (which Jo refers to by its alternate/original English translation title, Black and White). Given the art and the story, you'd want to look at Jin and Jam as a kind of gynocentric Tekkon Kinkreet anyway: a pair of teenage girls, alienated from their surroundings and prone to fits of extreme violence. But by providing that quote from Tekkon Kinkreet, Jo is making explicit that this is, in fact, a commentary on Matsumoto's most famous work. Or maybe it's a commentary on what it's like to be an Asian American teenage girl, using Tekkon Kinkreet as a sort of cipher?

By the end of the book, it looks like Jo's leaning towards the latter. Jin doesn't want to borrow Jam's hoodie because it reeks of fish sauce. Jam is surprised that Jin wants to go to college to escape their unnamed town (presumably San Jose). In the preceding pages, you get as good a Matsumoto pastiche as once could hope for. Like, it's not just the puddles of black ink and leering, grinning faces; this thing is composed like a Matsumoto comic as well. It's precise enough that one might wonder if such a thing is necessary, given that Tekkon Kinkreet is available, but Jo makes clear her intentions to create something beyond a Matsumoto tribute. And I came away from this thinking that Jo might really be on to something; those last five pages suggest great potential in her characters and approach.

There may be more style and potential than substance so far, but this is issue #1, thus implying further material yet to come. Whether or not Diamond's new policies will allow for additional pamphlet-format issues is an open question, of course. Hopefully we'll at least see more of Jin and Jam in an eventual graphic novel, because this is very worthwhile material. Somewhere between EXCELLENT and VERY GOOD on the Savage Critics scale. (EQUIVICATION!~) Certainly those who enjoyed Tekkon Kinkreet should seek it out, but those who admire Jaime Hernandez' work may also appreciate the relationship between Jin and Jam. And by the time Hellen Jo completes Jin and Jam, we may want to place it alongside American Born Chinese and Same Difference in the growing field of comics about the Asian-American experience. So yeah, I really do hope to see a lot more.

Never Land by David Kiersh Preview

Okay, first might I suggest that Bodega (an otherwise excellent publisher, one of my favorite small presses) make sure to put prices on all their publications? There's a UPC, an ISBN, and even contact information for Kiersh and Bodega, but no price! I mean, it's not like this is going to stop me from buying Bodega titles in the future, and I doubt it will have any effect on the ordering policies of the store where I bought it, but it's kind of a strange oversight. Maybe there was a price sticker on the back which peeled off.

As for the book itself, I think David Kiersh is several steps removed from fulfilling the potential he shows here. The first half of the book is strongly reminiscent of Art Spiegelman's Breakdowns-period work. Kiersh's art is sort of like a rounder, softer version of Spiegelman's in the German Expressionist-influenced "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" (especially if viewed in the postage stamped-sized reproduction in Maus). The pacing resembles "Don't Get Around Much Anymore": odd breaks in the captions between panels, a general sense of stillness (see that preview above). The end result is a bit off-putting at times, however. The narrator considers the changing nature of his town and the way place ties into his own memories and regret. That's fine, interesting even, but there's the execution to consider. Again I direct you to that preview--the narrator (angrily!) shedding tears over his aging and the distance he feels from the roller rink of his youth. Kind of a silly image, one that undercuts the effectiveness of the preceding pages.

The second half of the book deals with the narrator's inability to deal with the disappointments of the present (he works in a grocery store) and desire for escape. Hence the title--Kiersh depicts the narrator's escapist impulses in the vernacular of fairy tales. A female Peter Pan flies off with the narrator, stopping to fight a female Captain Hook--Captain Hooker, actually. These fairy tale fantasies are sexualized, leading to criticism from the Peter Pan figure ("You're such a boy" and "You have a perverted sense of humor") .

By the end, the narrator has relocated his escapist tendencies into a relationship with an actual woman (who may or may not be the Peter Pan figure from earlier). This is the point where the comic gets most saccharine; as the narrator and his unnamed companion soar into the sky, the caption reads "But now that I've learned to fly, I want to fly with you . . . to a place where we never have to land." Yeesh.

That's about the size of it: the narrator moves from bittersweet nostalgia to fantasy to rescue by a woman who we don't really know anything about other than that the narrator is in love with her. This kind of story might work with a different sort of execution, but that's not the case here. Kiersh's art is pleasant, even evocative at times, but the dense fairy tale imagery is repetitive and so cutesy as to only add sweetness to an already cloying comic. There are a few images that hint at possible future discord--the Peter Pan lady walks away from the narrator with tears in her eyes at one point--but Kiersh doesn't follow up on it. It's an isolated image in an otherwise jolly montage.

There's a lot to like about Dave Kiersh's art, and there are some promising sequences scattered throughout Never Land. I'm under impression from the dedication that this is a rather personal project for him, but that doesn't really add to my appreciation of this "love conquers all" story. I'd say it's at least an OK for the craft, possibly a GOOD if (like me) you place a premium on such things.

All My Senses Dislocating: Diana on 15/2

NEW SAVAGE CRITICS #1Written by Brian Hibbs Art by Kate McMillan Cover by Blogspot

A new epic begins here! Witness the rebirth of a super-team as Stonetuck, The Hyacinth, Uzumeri Yojimbo, Shan-Ti and Chris Eckert join the Savage Critics! The revelation of Norman Osborn's natural hair color in GOTHAM UNBOUND: THE GREAT PIE HEIST has rocked the universe to its core; as other thrilling secrets come to light, the Savage Critics reunite to unmask the true mastermind behind recent events. Who will live? Who will die? Who will receive the dreaded ASS Rating? Nothing will ever be the same again!

On sale Feb 14 • infinity pg, FC, $0.00 US

Welcome aboard, guys!

And now, a review. ANGEL: AFTER THE FALL #17 brings the "sixth season" of ANGEL to a close. I was never a big fan of the series - David Boreanaz is about as sharp as lime Jello, and the later seasons had an awkward habit of getting all their female characters pregnant, crazy and dead (not always in that order). But I thought it'd be interesting to see what Joss Whedon had had in mind if the show hadn't been cancelled.

As it turns out, ANGEL: AFTER THE FALL makes for an interesting companion to the current "eighth season" of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER over at Dark Horse, in that the two series have taken the same premise - continuing the Sunnydale Saga past its conclusion - in very different directions.

BUFFY, for example, suffers from an overabundance of "cool" ideas: whether it's Joss Whedon or Drew Goddard or Steven DeKnight writing, what we get is a rapid sequence of interesting concepts - many of which couldn't have been televised even with a substantial CGI budget - but none of those ideas are explored in-depth. An average story arc of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER is so compressed that it just runs from plot point A to plot point B, and I don't think there's enough characterization - Buffy, Willow, Xander and the others are just sort of there.

On the other hand, ANGEL: AFTER THE FALL has spent seventeen issues essentially telling one story: Los Angeles has been sucked into Hell after the events of the series finale, Angel's crew has scattered and the civilian population finds itself hunted in the streets by demons and vampires. Angel himself has become human, at the worst possible time.

Brian Lynch has basically taken the opposite approach to the BUFFY teams: seventeen issues on one storyline, no matter how expansive, is a bit much. In fact, despite the fact that the actual LA-in-Hell bit ended last issue, the emotional denouement in this epilogue still gets co-opted by Angel's ongoing feud with the demon lord Bruge. It wears a bit thin.

All that said, I still think Lynch does a better job with Whedon's characters than Whedon himself in recent months; in this issue, you've got Angel coping with his newfound popularity, a lovely posthumous moment for Fred and Wesley, Spike doing what he does best (and yet, at the same time, Lynch finally, mercifully moves past the juvenile "You Touched My Stuff" Angel and Spike routine), and Gunn... well, no spoilers, but there's some dramatically powerful closure there too.

Odd bit of trivia: both the BUFFY and ANGEL comics, either independently or by design (though how likely is that given that they're being produced by different companies?) have now done away with the whole secrecy angle, exposing the supernatural to the world. So Angel's an LA celebrity, and Harmony has turned public opinion against Slayers simply by being an undead Paris Hilton, etc. It's such a paradigm shift that I have to wonder whether Whedon was planning to do that during either series' run; it would've redefined everything.

So I'm going to go with a GOOD for this epilogue and a high OKAY for the series, because it really did take way too long to get where it was going.

Introduction; a picture of David Bowie by Ross Campbell

Hi everybody! My name is Sean T. Collins and I am now a Savage Critic. Neat, huh? Whilst I gear up for my actual debut as a Critic here, I figured I'd let you know a bit about myself, and then bribe you with something pretty so that you'll like me. INTRODUCTION

For a very long time I've been blogging at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat, mostly about comics, also about horror, also also about other pop-cultural phenomena I enjoy. I like to consider it the Internet's premier one-stop shop for links to Anders Nilsen's sketchbook, quotes from Clive Barker, and news about sea monsters. You may also have seen me writing about similar things for Maxim, The Comics Journal, ToyFare, The Comics Reporter, and Comic Book Resources, to name a few of my more recent freelance outlets, and I worked for Wizard for several years too, but the blog is probably the best way to get a sense of what I'm about.

In addition to writing about comics, I've actually written some myself, too. You can buy a minicomic called Murder that contains several of them for three measly American dollars; you can read a bunch of them at Top Shelf 2.0 for no money whatsoever. A bargain at any price, I tell you.

Okay, now the bribe portion of the post.

A PICTURE OF DAVID BOWIE BY ROSS CAMPBELL

I like David Bowie a lot, and so when the time came to put together a themed convention sketchbook, rather than select Yoda or Lockjaw or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I picked him. Ross Campbell, writer/artist of Wet Moon, Water Baby, and The Abandoned, is my latest addition.

I was very, very excited to get a Bowie sketch from Ross at New York Comic Con, but not having anticipated the demand for sketching, he didn't bring a pencil. I loaned him my pen, and he was concerned about not being able to make a mistake, but drew this anyway. It was done entirely without photo reference, which amazes me--he NAILED that Labyrinth hairstyle. As you can see, he wasn't happy with the hand, but he's being entirely too hard on himself.

Hope you liked it, hope you like me. See you on the site!

Then we didn't come to the end: Douglas on GaimanBats, pt. 1

Goddamn: this site just got even more fun to write for. Welcome, Wave Three! I'd be very surprised if the title of "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?"--the story that begins in BATMAN #686--had been created any way other than editorial fiat, as a companion to "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" (Whoever came up with this one apparently failed to notice that there was a joke in Alan Moore's title.) So I agree with Brian and David: points to Neil Gaiman for coming up with a different way to spin it. (More beneath the cut.)

As David pointed out, Gaiman's got a habit, these days, of making sure that we know he's Telling Stories, For He Is a Teller of Tales. A lot of Morrison's parts of Final Crisis were about stories-as-told too, but its narrators provided the surface of the story, or emerged from and sank into its surface (like the false and true Alfreds in 682/683). Here, there's a distinct frame for a pair of embedded stories, and I assume the second half is going to have a couple more. "WHttCC" seems to be about the ways in which the seventy-year Batman narrative might have been unsustainable but wasn't--as a tragic romance (Gaiman kind of gives the game away by citing "The Death of Robin Hood" by name), or a horrible lie (although "the Joker was really Alfred" is a less scary/nagging version of the "the Black Glove is really the guy with the white gloves" payoff that Morrison feinted toward throughout his run).

Still, that's a fun idea for a piece of meta-ish fiction, and it sits fairly gracefully on the page thanks to the updated '40s vibe of Andy Kubert's artwork. (Gaiman barely suggests the period he's dealing with in the dialogue--really just Catwoman's line about "listen[ing] to George and Gracie on the radio.") I like the little circular panel Kubert threw in on one page--you don't see those much in post-1955 comics; I like his designs for everybody's cars, too, especially Two-Face's, and the way he riffs on early Batman artists' designs. Interestingly, Kubert's sketches and pencilled page, seen at the back, are prettier and more interesting than the inked artwork--that Jack Burnley-style sketch of the Penguin has so much life and playfulness in it.

It's an OKAY comic--probably better than that on its own--but something is disconcerting about the way it works within the seventy-year narrative it's addressing. Mostly, it makes me think about how DC's squandered a resource nobody even thought it had until it was gone: the capacity for any kind of actual dramatic closure.

It was once the case that one version of a character could pass on his trademark to another, or even die, and it could be more or less expected to stick. (Was anyone in the '60s demanding that THE FLASH should be turned over full-time to Jay Garrick, the "real" Flash?) But now the DCU has an official mandate that Green Lantern is really Hal, that the Flash is really Barry, that the Legion is really the Levitz-era Legion. No threat of change can be effective any more; the gravitational force of How It Was in '83 is impossible to escape, and growing stronger all the time. Any change, any breakup, any death, any exploded planet will revert to its early-'80s form sooner rather than later. Superman says "pray for a resurrection"; we know one's coming--the only question is when. It seems like some kind of backfiring corporate-psyche-repression that DC's most interesting villain of the moment is literally a furious, bitter fanboy who wants everything to go back to the way it was when he was reading DC superhero comics in the mid-'80s.

This time, there was briefly the pretense--the scantiest veil imaginable--that Batman was ending. (The return of the Batman family of titles was officially announced before this issue even appeared, but it was never even faintly in doubt.) Morrison's "Butler" two-parter was one kind of "final Batman story," and Gaiman's is another. (The O'Neil and Dini stories between them: less so.) THE SANDMAN had a fine string of closing fanfares; why not BATMAN, too?

Because it's not ending--even in the way that the pre-Byrne Superman ended. This story acts like a conclusion, and in fact it'd be a lot more effective if it were the final Batman story: a last curtain call, with all the old favorites coming out for a bow to the audience before it's time to go home. This is a curtain call with all the old favorites coming out for a bow to the audience before they leap back into position for the next scene of the play that never ends.

Where Batman ends--the only way Batman ends--is where you stop reading Batman, which is how Batman has actually had hundreds of thousands of endings: dissatisfaction or boredom, walking out of the theater (past a dark alley?), cutting losses and wondering if it would've gotten better again. That's not what I'm doing yet; I'm already psyched for Morrison's return in June, and the Quitely rumors make me more enthusiastic, and those Rucka/Williams DETECTIVE pages look fantastic. But I also long, a little bit, for the kind of genuine conclusion Gaiman is pantomiming here but is forbidden to give us for real.

Hello! I'm Here to Talk About the Comics. Those Shitty, Amazing Comics.

I'm David Uzumeri, from Funnybook Babylon, and I'm pretty honored to be invited to this pretty elite crew. I'm probably most famous on InterNET for my work annotating Final Crisis and Batman R.I.P., but what you might not know is that I read comics that aren't by Grant Morrison! Hell, I read comics that aren't published by DC - or even by the Big Two! So I'm pretty happy to be here at Savage Critics, and I plan on reviewing my weekly titles (along with other items of interest) fairly regularly. If I seem a bit superhero/genre-centric, that's not because I'm averse to "indie"/mainstream stuff, but more because I'm still reading classics like Love & Rockets and I doubt I'll be contributing much with insightful revelations like "Wow, this Scott Pilgrim book is pretty good!", and I'm still building a reviewer's knowledge base to be able to insightfully criticize that stuff at the level I'd like. But superhero comics? I know those. So let's go.

Batman #686: It's kind of hard not to compare this to Grant Morrison's take, even though they're incredibly different stories; while Gaiman's working at a completely different tone and pace, they share certain idiosyncratic sensibilities that lead to a more supernatural yet methodical, empirical, almost scientific take on the character. Morrison and Gaiman's stories are, behind all of the devils and post-hypnotic suggestions and prismatic funerals (All the Jokers! All the Catwomen!), detective mysteries. And that's what Gaiman's doing here, holding a big fat prismatic funeral for the uber-Platonic-form of the avenging crusader, through the lens of our culture's iteration, Batman. I can't really comment on the ongoing mystery until the next issue, but this certainly raises and holds my interest. I certainly can't let this review go by without mentioning the art - Andy Kubert joins Jim Lee's embellishment team of Scott Williams and Alex Sinclair to do the work of his career, traversing through seventy years of Batman's artistic history and continuity with grace, style and ease. It's not an especially progressive story, nor is it at all high-octane, but it's clever and intelligent and, as sappy as it sounds, it feels like it came from a lot of love on Gaiman's part. More important than all of that, it's in no way a mirror or derivation of Alan Moore's similarly-named ode to the Man of Tomorrow - Gaiman's created his own beast here, a paean to the history and concept of the tortured masked vigilante. It won't change the world, but it's a VERY GOOD Batman story.

The only big caveat I have - and to the book's credit, it's something I didn't even realize until I was in the middle of the article, hanging out with friends about to watch Battlestar, talking about the issue and Gaiman - it's YET ANOTHER goddamn story where a bunch of people stand around telling stories! That was, like, half of Sandman, and utterly killed the pace of Miracleman when Gaiman took over. He gets a lot of mileage out of it, but it's still the same old trick, even though it's done really well - make no bones about it, Neil Gaiman likes to tell stories about people telling stories.

Action Comics #874: First, the art - I've always liked Pablo Raimondi, but I've also never seen him without Brian Reber. Hi-Fi do what would be a fine job on a normal Superman comic, bright colors and clear delineations between objects, but Raimondi's shadowy style acts in complete opposition to that, leading to what looks like, well, kind of ugly art despite what were probably the best intentions of all involved. It's an OKAY comic, certainly better than Robinson's earlier work in the Atlas arc in Superman, but it's far more effective as a section of Geoff Johns's Master Superman Plan than as a single issue. So if you're already invested in that stuff, don't miss this - it's the next episode of the ongoing Superman narrative, and some cool stuff happens. But it's certainly not a jumping-on point or a brilliant piece of work on its own, a byproduct of the nature of serial storytelling.

Thor #600: This is, as Brian's said, probably the best value you'll get in superhero comics for a long-ass time. There's about 42 pages of main story material here, plus about (I haven't counted precisely) eight pages of a backup by Stan Lee and David Aja and then another few pages of Mini Marvels from Chris Giarrusso, who turns in his strongest and funniest iteration of his Mini Marvels concept to date, combining just the right amount of reverence and irreverence for a both funny and accurate recap of Thor's status quo in the Marvel Universe. If this were a shorter book, I'd have qualms with the pacing in the main story - it's a lot of wordless fighting and punching and car-throwing and all that EPIC stuff, but I really can't argue with using the space like this when you have so damn much of it. Straczynski continues his celebrated run here, which has improved much since the first arc of Thor Vs. Real World Issues (did you know Katrina and Darfur are horrible?), and really makes fantastic use of both Norse mythology and the personality of Loki to bring twelve issues of scheming and Asgardian puppeteer-chess to a quick and total climax, changing the status quo of the book. I'm sort of mystified that it didn't get a Dark Reign banner, though, since it's actually a very important chapter in the mega-story of the Marvel Universe and draws a lot from its new status quo. VERY GOOD.

Batman and the Outsiders Special: Really Outsiders #14.5, this is the first issue of Peter J. Tomasi's run on the title and features what's likely Adam Kubert's last DC work, using an all-double-page-spreads (except for the first and final pages) layout style that moves the entire bulk of the advertisements to the back. I'm not entirely sure that the story required this - sometimes the panels even break right in the middle of the page, so it's difficult to tell if you're supposed to read it left to right (you are) or stop at the page fold - but it's strong work, and Dell's inks work better here than the did on his portions of DC Universe: Last Will and Testament.

The story, though... Tomasi's a longtime editor at DC, and he's worked with some of the greats on truly complex storylines (Seven Soldiers, for one). He clearly knows all these characters, but he assumes a little bit too much that you do too, and his Katana scenes skirt dreadfully close to Claremontian cultural simplification where the Japanese are all about RITUALS and HONOR and shit. He doesn't really set up the threat, either - they appear at the end, but there's no real menace, instead they're just slightly creepy generic Hills Have Eyes cannibal monster zombie whatever types. It reads like a book about B-list characters for people who care about those B-list characters and want to see them come back, and while it's alright at that I can't imagine people who picked this up for the Adam Kubert art draw compelled enough to continue following this in the main title with Lee Garbett (who can actually reach a deadline). EH.

Captain Britain and MI: 13 #10: I thought the last arc of this title kind of dragged, but this was just a really, really fun 22 pages, completely embracing the silliness of every concept within - I'm sure everyone's seen the Dr. Doom and Dracula on the Moon teaser by now but it only ramps up from there. In the wake of the recent cancellation rumors, this issue especially leaves me VERY glad that the title is continuing, since Cornell is undoubtedly one of the smartest and most imaginative writers Marvel's employing right now and this issue really found the title's feet in my opinion. It switches from character moments to high-concept insanity basically every scene, and it all flows together remarkably well; additionally, this issue is practically an object lesson to Batman and the Outsiders on how to present characters that the audience doesn't give a shit about and, well, actually provoke some shits being given. I always liked Blade as a cool-looking dude with some sweet swords who stabbed vampires and shit, but I never thought I'd actually start digging him as a real character until Cornell got his hands on him. A VERY GOOD classically Marvel comic.

Young Liars #12: Straight up - I love this comic. I think, with all due respect to Jason Aaron's justifiably-widely-lauded Scalped, it is the best thing Vertigo's putting out right now, full stop. I barely even miss Stray Bullets anymore. I haven't even reread the whole series yet - and when I do, I'm sure I'll have something to say - but I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to read every time I open this comic, yet absolute trust in Lapham that it'll fit into his broader picture. He's a superb storyteller at the top of his game, and this is the dirtiest, sleaziest, funniest, sometimes most touching and definitely most unpredictable comic out there. If you enjoyed the punk-rock viscera of the Amy Racecar scenes in Stray Bullets, or just comics in general that start at an insane tempo and don't let up and thrive off of fucking with reader expectations, then this is really a must-read. I know this is more of a review of the series as a while, but this issue - #12 - really just acts as yet another story that redefines what comes before it; it feels like every issue of Young Liars changes every issue preceding, like the whole structure morphs every time it's informed by an upcoming issue. Completely EXCELLENT.

How to get a link to "Various"

First off: be sure to check in this weekend for big Big BIG news. I'm excited, and I think you will be too...

Here's some stuff I really liked this week:

THOR #600: now this is how all anniversary issues should be done! A meaty lead story that changes up the status quo (not that that status is all that quo, really, being that this is effectively issue #13), and ending on a pretty reasonable cliffhnager that not only makes me begin to think that "Dark Reign" could be potentially interesting and go some where, but that also seems rational and chilling. I might have even liked the lead story enough to praise this comic, but then it adds a gorgeous David Aja-drawn, Stan Lee-written story that DIDN'T suffer from Crazy Stan Overwriting; a lengthy "Mini-Marvels" story that condensing the last 3-ish years of Thor continuity into total hilarity; and five (!) Kirby reprints (all short ones, but still!). All that plus all 600 covers of THOR (and JiM, natch). Dang, what a sweet package, and worth every single penny of the $5 they're asking! VERY GOOD.

BATMAN #686: The first part of Neil Gaiman's imaginary story (but aren't they all?) about the Death of Batman. Not that this one has anything to do with the other couple of Death's of Batman running around lately, but that's hardly the point. Obviously this was pitched to Neil as being a similar ending to an era of BATMAN as Alan Moore's "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" was in SUPERMAN and ACTION, but Neil very wisely went the completely opposite direction with this one. I mean, not only did Frank Miller write as definitive "ending" to Batman as could be had, but I don't think Neil knew what Morrison's plans were when he scripted this.

Instead, Neil goes the other way, and makes this a series of "What Ifs" (more or less) about how the original Batman could have gone sideways, and I thought it was incredibly effective. The only thing that's going to mar this at all is that Andy Kubert's art has delayed the 2nd part back yet another month -- to, as of today, 3/18 -- which is horrifically sad when you think about it. Having the Kubert's exclusive to DC really didn't work out very well, did it? Anyway, this is completely out of continuity, and even more effective because of that. I liked it a lot: VERY GOOD.

INCOGNITO #2: There were some pretty meh reviews of issue #1, but I thought this one completely hit it out of the ballpark. To the point that, maybe, this should have been issue #1. Crisp and lean, and everything you'd want from a super villain driven comic book, including some nice backstory stuff. VERY GOOD.

WALKING DEAD #58: There has been, I think, a little wheel spinning going on in this book lately, but this issue really grabbed me by the balls, mostly by returning to a plot point from issue #1 (or was it #2?), and being COMPLETELY FUCKING CHILLING while doing so. Wow, on top of wow -- this is one of those issues that I think is not going to read as well in the middle of a collection, it's a very stand-alone thought and meditation on the premise of the series. Gotta go with EXCELLENT.

What did YOU think?

-B

Abhay's Brief Note About Scott Pilgrim Volume 5.

In the coming weeks, it’s probable that much will be written about Bryan Lee O’Malley’s SCOTT PILGRIM Volume #5. It is EXCELLENT. This has been said with every installment, but: Volume #5 is the best written, most confidently executed installment of the series yet. Every comic, every success story attracts its share of Grinches-- you know, it’s pretty fun to be that Grinch. But Volume #5 makes me so enormously sad for SCOTT PILGRIM's Grinches. What a terrible fate that must be, to lack the capacity to enjoy this book. You've made terrible choices in life. So: I'm gushy sweaty spazzy about this book, basically-- not a state of mind where anything I can write is well-advised or likely to be helpful to you. But I noticed something in a few other reviews that had bothered me, something that I felt had been overlooked.

Most of those reviews had focused on Volume 5 in light of how it developed the stories of Scott Pilgrim, Ramona Flowers, Kim Pine, Knives Chau, and/or Wallace Wells.

Why aren’t people talking about Young Neil?

Because, holy shit, dude: Young Neil!

* * * * * *

Spoilers, severe spoilers ahead. I know there have been supply shortages and lines and screw-ups at Diamond. I know buying this comic book apparently resembles buying toilet paper in the old USSR in multiple ways for a great many of you out there, and I sincerely don’t want to spoil this episode for anyone. Because there is so very much to spoil. For example: the scene where Scott Pilgrim has sex with a hooker to restore his health and then murders her (just like in video-games!). Don't let anyone spoil that scene for you. Or the scene where Kim Pine takes off her pants and reveals her penis, Shiwasu No Okina style (it’s manga influenced!). Once these scenes are spoiled for you via textual summary, there is no un-spoiling them from your mind.

So, please be certain that I will 100% spoil this comic for you, if you read ahead, even though I’m focusing on Young Neil who you might (incorrectly) think is not a major character in the series.

* * * * * *

SCOTT PILGRIM has never been a series without flaws. For example, in two words: vegan police. And if someone were to tell me that they couldn’t enjoy the series on account of the extent to which it’s saturated in crap culture-- well, I wouldn’t be upset by that. I don't imagine the book’s use of video-game tropes, anime nods, etc. is for everyone, even though I happen to be personally amused by those elements. The most emotional moment of the Vol. 5, the departure of Ramona Flowers, vaguely recalls the worst moments of shitty anime like DNA-Squared or … I don’t even want to know what. Some people might not be able to get past that.

But I think SCOTT PILGRIM fans might agree that anyone complaining too much about those elements is underestimating how relatable the characters are, and as importantly, how there are multiple characters to relate to. In other words, I understand if you don't know what a Super Mario Brother is, but were you really never aimless and selfish in your 20's? Lucky you.

In her book Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (or as most comic book critics call it, The Bible), Susan Douglas discusses how the success of the girl bands of the 1960's can be attributed to how they allowed girls of that generation to "try on" different sexual identities, whether the troubling thrills of dating the bad boy of Leader of the Pack or the hopeful uncertainty of the Shirelle's Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

I've always thought SCOTT PILGRIM likely owed its success to that same quality-- that it didn’t merely randomly reflect some temporary spasm of the zeitgeist, that it’s not some fluke of particles colliding in a vacuum, but that its success can be tracked to how SCOTT PILGRIM fills a different vacuum, a vacuum for cartoon characters, modern cartoon characters, that speak to life experiences other cartoon characters can’t and/or historically haven’t.

Younger fans can see themselves in Knives Chau as much as Ramona Flowers, in Wallace Wells as much as Scott Pilgrim. But the true facts are that many of us, maybe even most of us, aren’t the heroes of any story. We face no thrilling battles; our romances are not action-adventures. Our presence or absence makes no difference to the world around us, maybe even the majority of the people around us.

Many of us are Young Neil.

* * * * * *

Volume 1 is the heyday for Young Neil. He's Stephen Stills's roommate, Sex Bob-Omb's only fan (besides Knives Chau). But by Volume 3, it's over. It's all over Young Neil before he even knew it. He’s expelled from his group of friends for offenses he barely knew he committed.

Well, that’s an overstatement: dating a friend’s ex without the proper hesitation or consideration isn’t a minor offense; you know: ignorance of the law is no excuse. But surely he paid for his crimes! Look at the poor guy.

He thought he might get laid, and instead he's ending the night watching a girl who’s all wrong for him randomly crying for reasons he can't guess. At least, when I look at that scene, based on my life experience? She’s crying. I know: the fact he’s drawn with his heart literally on his sleeve is pretty overt, but… the poor son of a bitch.

I re-read the series on Tuesday, in anticipation for Volume 5. What does it say of my life experience that the thing I most related to in the entire goddamn series was Young Neil and the crying girl? Oh, right: it says I need to change my fucking life. Thank you, Internet. You are a comfort as always.

It was my first time through the books since I'd first read any of them. Probably my first time noticing Young Neil as anything besides comic relief. I hadn't paid attention to Young Neil before. But that's sort of the whole point of Young Neil, I think: because neither do his friends. Young Neil is just there. Until he's not. Until finally, in Volume 5, there's Young Neil and he's in a dirty room, completely alienated from the people who he used to think (incorrectly) were his friends, just spending a day getting high and listening to music. Move over, crying girl: I now have a new “Scene I Relate to the Most” winner.

How did he end up there? It wasn’t that his friends ever sat down and decided to hate Young Neil in the prior books. They just didn’t care. I’ve done to that people. It’s, I don’t know-- it’s easy. And I’ve had it done to me. That was … well, less easy.

* * * * * *

It’s a tough book, the SCOTT PILGRIM Volume 5, with no shortage of bleak scenes for fans who’ve grown attached to these characters. My favorite scene in the book is the bus station scene, and the simplicity of its dialogue-- for me, it called to mind one of my all-time favorite movie scenes, the Bill Murray “She’s my Rushmore” scene that begins the winter stretch of Wes Anderson’s RUSHMORE. There's something so powerful to watching an apology, and yet they seem so precious and rare in our fiction. Why do we always want to watch people fighting? Fights are brief; regrets take longer. What the hell is wrong with us, like, as a species? Tribute must also be paid obviously to Volume 5's sex scene, a sad and wildly un-erotic scene. God, look at it. The last sex, the goodbye sex? It’s a sex scene in silhouette. It’s a sex scene that neither of the characters are actually PRESENT for. Just the shape of them in the technically correct poses. Crikey.

So, no, sir, there’s no shortage of scenes to feel horrible about relating to in SCOTT PILGRIM Vol. 5. But I would argue to you that the final Young Neil scene in the book is not in any way less than those others, is in fact one of the hardest scenes to sit through if you have any affinity for that character (which you should).

* * * * * *

My theory is you don’t become less of an asshole when you get older. You just learn to hide it more. But setting that little future Hallmark card aside…

There’s Young Neil at the end of book 5, angry at Ramona, lashing out at Stephen Stills. And there’s Ramona not even pretending to care. And it’s strange and I don’t understand it. You take any close group of friends, and just add time. It’s as if by some magical clock, everyone wakes up one day and decides to start hurting each other. And I wish I could say I’ve only seen it just the once, or that I knew why it happened. What is that exactly? What is the explanation for that? Why do we so persistently do that to each other?

SCOTT PILGRIM seems to subscribe to the same explanation for it that I had in my 20’s, that ancient Latin graffiti of “Penis erectus non compos mentis” (a stiff prick knows no conscience). Stephen Stills betrays Scott Pilgrim’s confidences on account of his crush on Knives; Young Neil’s rejection by Knives didn’t seem to help, etc. Oh, barely legal Asian ladies: is there nothing good you can’t destroy!

But: that's just what I thought in my 20's. I don't think that anymore, though I haven't replaced that hypothesis with anything more considered. It just seems like too pat an answer; I don’t think it explains enough. Even if you could take stiff prick out of the equation, somehow, by some evil voodoo magic, I still maintain that even then, even assuming such a frightening & unpleasant premise, that you’d see that same exact phenomena repeat itself endlessly. What the hell is wrong with us, like, as a species?

Extra-reason why the Young Neil scene is great: volume 4 closes with all of the SCOTT PILGRIM cast around a restaurant table, laughing. Can you see them all together like that after the Young Neil scene in volume 5? The Young Neil scene is great because it makes scenes in earlier books retroactively sad. Goddamn, Young Neil! Goddamn!

* * * * * *

Bryan Lee O'Malley from 2007: "I actually kind of like most of my characters. There’s this character named Young Neil that I kind of don’t like drawing because his hair goes in his eyes. So he has no eyebrows. So it’s really hard to give him facial expressions. So he always looks kind of dopey. Sometimes he has to not look dopey, but maybe I should try writing him so he’s always like that."

* * * * * *

But if Young Neil is an asshole-- and in that final scene with Ramona, he absolutely is, well you can at least see how he got that way, book by book, scene by scene. I would argue that Young Neil in Volume 5 is as sad, as heartbreaking as anything in the book. So much of Volume 5 is about Scott gradually awakening to the fact that as he's had his epic story of growing up, everyone around him has had their own (the shout-out to Jason Kim is especially welcome in that regard). With Young Neil, as much as is the case with Ramona, Kim Pine, whoever, the threat is that Scott might be waking up to that fact too late.

He’ll get a second chance in Book 6, which I look forward to, which I'm eager to read. But many of us don’t have that opportunity; will never have that opportunity. Absent friends. Friends who are no longer tethered to this, our mortal coil. All the people we’ll never see again. And I don’t know how I can end a review of SCOTT PILGRIM Vol. 5 other than saying I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so sorry.

...and the rest

I always felt bad for the professor and Mary Ann during that first season of Gilligan's island. I mean, not only were they stuck with a bunch of idiots, but they didn't even rate a mention in the theme song!

Last week I discussed DARK AVENGERS #1, but the whole Avengers franchise just got a semi-reboot, so here's "...and the rest", after the jump!

NEW AVENGERS #49: now I'm certainly hoping there's more to the Luke & Jessica's baby thing, because otherwise that was the single worst dangling plot thread wrap up in history, with absolutely no suspense or energy whatsoever. There's got to be more to this, right? Right? There's no logical reason for the "Jarviskrull" to do what he did, and there's certainly no real motivation in the pages here...

Does the kid even have a name? I just can't remember! I just flipped through the comic again, looking at all of Luke & Jess' dialogue and it's all "the kid" "the baby" "she" and so on. When Tzipora & I talked about Ben, even as an infant, we said his name ALL of the time.

Here's the weird one, too: this issue was solicited with a $3 cover price. It shipped with a $4 one. There's no extra pages. There's nothing special about this issue whatsoever, and NEW AVENGERS wasn't, I thought, one of the new $4 monthlies. Even if it was, it is completely tacky to raise the price after the book has been solicited and ordered.

(Our sales look to be down by ~20% on normal first week sales... though that COULD be post-SECRET INVASION burnout, hard to say so early)

But here's the thing: I don't know what the premise for this book is at this point. I guess, maybe, it is "street level rebels" -- but that's really a dull premise, as most of the post-CIVIL WAR adventures showed... and they don't have the advantage of everyone and their brothers "looking the other way" seemingly every issue - and given they're already presenting "NEW versus DARK!" as the centerpiece of next issue, it confuses me even more where this *or* DARK can go in the next quarter, next six months, next year.

I mentioned in my review of DARK that I was satisfied with the density of the storytelling for the price. I was very much NOT feeling that in this issue -- this just flashed past without any real depth or meaning to it. I can't possibly say anything better than EH, and even that's a LOW "eh".

For $4 a throw, it's got to be a lot better than that!

AVENGERS THE INITIATIVE #21: Christos Gage gets his A-List shot... on a book full of B-list characters! Spending the issue wrapping up a number of plot threads, I thought there was good humor and action chops on display here. I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing "Clor" again, but it was used here to adequate effect. I don't understand, really, how Trauma could take the lightning hit, but not the hammer blow, but that's really quibbly stuff.

Where this is going to end up going as a "Dark Reign" title is still a little unclear, but I'm going to assume that the basic intent of the book being "training ground for heroes" is going to stay effectively intact. It's not a bad premise, really, but there needs to be a core of characters that I really care about to keep it going.

I was amused by "Gorilla Girl's" self-awareness, though, and I'll give this a very high OK, bordering on "good"

MIGHTY AVENGERS #21: Dan Slott takes a step over sideways, and gives me the closest I've read to what I would consider an "Avengers" comic book in... well in four or five years, maybe? Big epic threat, powerful heroes, in-team and internal conflict, all in the Mighty Marvel Style. Now there's a premise I can kind of get behind. Even though this is decidedly "classic" in feel, it also feels really fresh because Marvel hasn't really done a comic like this in a while.

If Slott can keep this level of energy and tone, this could be a really fun ride. It isn't Shakespeare, but it is a return to a tone that's been missing from Marvel books for a while, and it feels like it has a distinct reason for existing, at least so far.

I liked it ($4 cover and all) -- GOOD from me.

What did YOU think?

-B

Finally: Manga you can put in your mouth

Oishinbo A la Carte Vol. 1: Japanese Cuisine

Yeah, you've heard it a hundred times by now: 'manga' as often seen in English -- a youth thing, a bookstore thing, a shōnen/shōjo thing -- is only a fragment of what manga really is. There's always a few non-porn exceptions, sure - most of them take the form of action or fantasy pieces For Mature Readers, with the occasional history of cup noodles or oddball art project slipping through. Astro Boy once filled us in on the story of Anne Frank, so there's always that. But it's still so hard to really get that old joke in Koji Aihara's & Kentaro Takekuma's brilliant satire, Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga, that one day there'd be manga for everything in Japan, up to and including train schedules. That's how omnipresent the stuff is.

So here's VIZ's latest exception, a 276-page, $12.99 peek into the secret world of mainstream manga for adults. And believe me when I say 'mainstream' - Oishinbo (The Gourmet) has been an ongoing series since 1983, and is currently up to vol. 102 (one hundred and two) in Japanese collections. Now, mind you, this English-language release isn't chronological or comprehensive; it's based on a separate Japanese repackaging, the A la Carte series, which itself has racked up 45 volumes since 2005 by sorting various stories from the series' run into themed collections. The very basic theme of this debut English volume (actually vol. 20 of the Japanese series) is Japanese Cuisine. Did I mention it's a comic about food?

Not that big a surprise, I guess - there's been a few English-translated manga involving chefs, your sheer shōnen Iron Wok Jan or the older teen shōjo of Antique Bakery. I've heard a few jokes about the sheer amount of food-related programming on Japanese television (including a 1988-92 Oishinbo anime, which ran for 136 episodes); Iron Chef apparently doesn't scratch the surface. So hey, why not some similar subject matter for an art form that's built up as much mass appeal as television? There's been golf manga and gambling manga, sex tips manga and religious cult manga - many with their own strata of legends, their masters of the form, heroes and inspirations little known outside of Japan.

Oishinbo is the work of writer Tetsu Kariya and artist Akira Hanasaki; neither have been published in English before, save for a few chapters of Oishinbo showcased in the semi-legendary 1990-97 'learn Japanese through comics' magazine Mangajin, although Kariya might also be known to my fellow obsessive compulsives as co-creator with Ryoichi Ikegami of the '70s schoolyard tough guys classic Otoko Gumi (Gallant Gang), which is supposedly more-or-less the ur-series behind Cromartie High School.

Hanasaki's visual style is a slick 'n staid approach that matches photorealistic (and, in all likelihood, photo-traced) backgrounds/items with the sort of airy, arch-mainstream cartoon character designs which, ironically, only ever seem to be glimpsed in North America through 'alternative' works that reference mainstream manga - think the pretty girl drawings in Hideo Azuma's Disappearance Diary, or the 'normal' framing sequence in Takashi Nemoto's Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby. It's certainly not very heavy on tilted panels or speed lines -- though both are present -- and may come off as oddly Western to some readers. Don't be fooled - it's just another aspect of manga!

The plot is the very essence of simplicity giving way to unlimited potential. Young Yamaoka Shirō is a newspaper reporter cum archetypal salaryman's fantasy character: frequently snoozing at his desk or plotting his next trip to the track, but always respected in the end for some superior attribute or another, here specifically an all but peerless taste in food pounded into him by his hated, brutal artist-foodie father, a man of such unflinching standards he worked Yamaoka's dear mother right into her grave and just didn't give a shit.

Now, Yamaoka has been ordered to assemble the "Ultimate Menu" for his paper's 100th anniversary, a quest that'll lead him to do basically nothing but enjoy hundreds of delicious, impossibly high-class meals all around the nation (just like real newspaper reporters!), while pushing him ever-closer into the arms of his lovely partner Kurita -- whom he'll eventually marry (this being a rather long assignment) -- and uncovering the occasional mild peril that's rarely more than one eating-related idea away from resolution. But watch out, Yamaoka - a rival paper is planning their own, cleverly titled "Supreme Menu," and they're staffed exclusively by sneering villains, and their project, dear reader, is headed by none other than Yamaoka's wicked father!!

Naturally it all comes down to consuming lots and lots of presumably expensive food -- money is almost never mentioned, as that would get in the way of the escapism -- in self-contained short stories roughly 25-30 pages in length. This VIZ edition is one of the nice ones with the flaps; it sports a pair of recipes and an extra-long translator's notes section as supplements, so you'll be double-damned sure you know the various cuts of tuna. The stories themselves are a little scattered, perhaps owing to this volume's vague theme, covering everything from rice preparation to sashimi slicing to the value of not smoking. There's stuff to learn, although I couldn't call it educational - most of the pieces are structured like little suspense thrillers, often pitting Yamaoka against his dad in battles of foodstuff wits that'll leave most readers horrified at the prospect of visiting Japan and subsequently being humiliated in public for wrapping rice in seaweed the wrong way.

But, you know, I found this book to be very interesting, not really because the stories are especially thrilling or impressive, or even for any reason directly related to food - no, I was fascinated by the comic's relationship with elitism.

Everything in this manga revolves around characters with incredibly developed taste, and every solution to every problem involves uncovering a superior presentation/preparation of food. Yamaoka may loathe his father, but he's hardly above correcting someone who's "enjoying" their food the wrong way, or standing up at a table to dismiss a meal as insufficient. This is no slobs vs. snobs saga - there's snooty antagonists that get taken down a peg, yes, but only because their hubris has somehow led them to advocate for something less than excellent. Sometimes Yamaoka is bested by his father -- any time Our Hero starts going on about gathering some showy arrangement of "the best" ingredients he's headed for a fall, since Japanese cooking is an unfailingly subtle art -- and while he scowls and pounds his fists it's always with some respect for how correct the old man is.

In other words, the series' stance can be summed up simply: it's best to be elitist, but try not to be too much of an asshole about it.

And you know what? Being an asshole is still better than being mediocre.

Gosh, that's not a sentiment you hear much of in North American comics. You can pick up traces of it in plenty of shōnen action titles - how many young men have raised their hands to the sky and vowed to be the very best there is? The cast of Oishinbo is a bit like that, if less childish - their Ultimate Menu quest is ultimately one of discovery, and even the worst setback, like, say, Yamaoka's father dismissing them all as unworthy to even dine in the presence of a truly great chef for getting their chopsticks an inch and a half too damp, only leads them to vow a greater level of achievement next time. As in, one character goes running off at the end of the story with a ruler, just to make sure.

Why is this? Is everyone mad? Is this a horror comic? Do I ever want to eat in front of other people again?

Quite simple, I think. At their bottom, these stories aren't just about eating or elitism - they're about patriotism. They're about discovering all aspects of Japanese cuisine, and drawing out the gorgeous simplicity and minute sympathies that make Japan itself a wonderful place, of wonderful, rich culture.

Do note the time when this series launched: 1983. The bubble economy was growing so much bigger, and Japan was getting noticed all over the world, especially in the United States. Oishinbo, aimed at older male readers, thus takes a position of intense pride, of showing how Japan deserves to be seen as excellent, to stand with the best.

One story sees a US senator of Japanese descent visit the old country; all the lush meals and local pomp mustered by bigwigs (as neat as it must seem for salaryman readers!) cannot compare to the gentle excellence of the best green tea, prepared beautifully in an aesthetically rich setting, "as if a breeze from a mountain stream has just blown through my body," the soul of Japan. Another sees a young girl raised in France ashamed of eating with chopsticks; she learns that the gentle caress of a meal is far less 'barbaric' than stabbing it with a metal skewer. A famed critic bloviates about the superiority of foreign procedures, but he goddamned learns some respect. And oh, you can just guess what happens when a crew of Benihana-style American-learned chefs-as-performers rolls out; it's not pretty.

Too bad that VIZ couldn't include some information on when these various and sundry stories were first published; I'd have liked to savor the subtle shifts in flavor after the bubble burst and Japan was reaffirmed as only human after all. But, fittingly, it would have to be subtle - there's no ferocious shifts in this taste, this cooking, this kind of mainstream. No, be quiet, and thereby be loud. Eat proud. Eat GOOD.

I don't want to be Left Behind...

Hey, all of the cool kids are doing it, so I might as well join in too! What I thought of FINAL CRISIS #7 after the jump...

I pretty much agree with all of the gang; even Abhay in the comments -- I liked it, I disliked it, I loved it, and I hated it. All at various points, and sometimes even at the same time.

Sure, it's sometimes barely coherent, and you kind of NEED to read the annotations and commentary and interviews to really get all of the points of what's going on. But that's pretty standard for a Morrison comic, really -- I felt the same way about THE INVISIBLES or much of his JLA run, for example. But I always ALWAYS come away with a line of dialogue or an image or a thought that will stay with me, pretty much forever, and that's what a proper piece of art does for you, anyway.

I'm not a good enough of a critic (or, even more properly, a reviewer) to really handle a writer like Grant -- it feels to me like he casually threw out more ideas and concepts in just the last issue alone than pretty nearly the entirety of the non-GM/Johns-written DCU did in the whole of 2007 -- so I'm going to approach the rest of this as a retailer as well as with what my customers having been saying as well.

The major problems with FINAL CRISIS have less to do with the work itself, and more to do both with how it was POSITIONED into the marketplace, as well as its CONNECTIONS TO the DC Universe. None of this is Grant Morrison's fault, or even something he as a creative person should have thought much about.

But FINAL CRISIS wasn't ever positioned as "just a cool big story" or whatever -- it was positioned as the culmination of the narrative thrust of the DC Universe over Dan Didio's tenure. I don't want to go digging through old interviews to find specific lines, but certainly this is the sense that Dan has given over the last, dunno, 18 months or so, or at least I think any reasonable person would agree.

FINAL CRISIS is buried under the expectation of the "Crisis" in the title; it had to bear the weight of having a 52-part weekly lead-in (plus several other series like DEATH OF THE NEW GODS) to the series that ended up contradicting Morrison's story; and it had to suffer from the branding that not only impacted FC itself, but also RIP in BATMAN as well.

None of this is Grant's fault, of course, but it is inevitable that it will color the audience's reception of the work.

Y'know, art is supposed to challenge the audience's expectations. But commercial products are supposed to conform to them. Well, or at least support them.

If you add up all of the comics that are meant to be part of this overall plotline as Didio has positioned it in interviews, starting with that TITANS mini where they killed Donna Troy, through the build up to INFINITE CRISIS, IC itself, 52, COUNTDOWN straight through to FC, you're talking hundreds of dollars - perhaps in the $500 range. If you tried to READ it that way, you'd probably go insane, being given only crayons to write with in your padded cell. Extremely little of it adds up, or builds to anything of real lasting significance.

That's why I think FC was "the last straw" for a really large chunk of my DC readers. I have customers dropping DC titles left and right, and they tell me the reasons are that they're confused about DC continuity, and they feel like they're being sold things that are not what they were told they are.

Of course some commenter will suggest that this is the audience's own fault for not being discerning enough in the first place, and while as a human I might not disagree with you all that much, as a retailer who has to deal with the ultimate financial outcomes of these decisions, I'm not at all enthusiastic.

What FC is, in a lot of ways, is the culmination not of Didio's path, but of Morrison's. If you read this as the capper to an arc that began in ANIMAL MAN, through SEVEN SOLDIERS, and a number of other DCU books that Grant has written, then this reads a whole lot differently. In fact, I think he has utterly reversed the paradigm -- in ANIMAL MAN, Buddy is ultimately shown to be powerless because of his writer, while by FINAL CRISIS, the stand-in for the writers are undone by their own story.

Anyway, this and RIP were just positioned badly, with a tidal wave of expectations that they crumble in the face of. If there's any mistake that Grant himself is guilty of here it is that SUBMIT, SUPERMAN BEYOND and that two-parter in BATMAN are actually plot-essential to the story, but aren't included IN the story. BEYOND especially -- I'm not sure if FC works AT ALL without reading that. But I think all of those have plot points which were critical to have in the main series itself.

You can understand FC just fine without reading REVELATIONS or LoTW (and especially without REQUIEM or the SECRET FILES or whatever I'm forgetting) -- I don't think that is at all true for the other Grant books.

As an individual consumer myself, I'm not going to buy the announced FC collection -- because it doesn't have those in there. And I'm not going to buy a separate "companion" book, just like I refused the buy the split season sets of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. Maybe maybe when they finally get around to putting out the Whole Schmeer Edition, I might still be interested in it, but who knows if I'll still care by then?

Beyond the EXPECTATIONS, the other prong of the problem is the CONNECTION TO the rest of the DCU. As much as everyone complains about being "forced" to buy umpty-jillion tie-in books, it is really worse when you throw a Crisis in the DCU, and THE REST OF THE DCU DOESN'T EVEN NOTICE.

The DCU will supposedly sync up "over the next few months", is, I believe, the phrasing, but that's really too late.

And I suspect that 98% of the kajillion ideas that Grant threw out there will never be followed up again, unless Grant himself does so.

At the end of the day, I'm personally happy with a comic where Superman destroys the embodiment of evil with a song, then uses the magical-wishing-machine to write us all "a happy ending". Superman is fucking awesome. I'm maybe a little sad he didn't wink at us after doing so, but that's about it. That makes it for me a GOOD comic.

But the retailer in me, who has watched the erosion of his DCU reader-base, and is looking ahead to the next quarter, and the next year, and the next decade, well I think this was AWFUL -- a confusing jumble of great frustration and no immediate follow-through, culminating the last couple confusing jumbles of great frustration and no follow-through.

I love Grant Morrison's DC Universe. I want to read much more that is set in that mold: where epic deeds of heroism are done in astonishing ways by bold & fantastic characters. But I don't see anyone else approaching the DCU that way... least of all the editors.

What do YOU think?

-B

Yes, Me Too: Jeff Also Talks about Final Crisis #7 (and Superman Beyond #2)

For those of you keeping track, I wasn't that big a fan of SUPERMAN BEYOND #1: I admired it, but didn't like it very much and spent a lot of time thinking about why. So when issue #2 came in, I didn't exactly break down the doors of my comic shop to pick it up: I ended up reading it, in fact, right before FINAL CRISIS #7 on Wednesday. And so, for better or for worse, I've got to review the two books together, because my experience of one is hopelessly tied up in the other. Check it out, if you want, after the jump.

To put it plainly, Superman Beyond #2 is really, really clever. I mean, it's absurdly fucking clever: Not only do you have a 3-D comic book in which Superman must be joined with Ultraman, his symmetrical opposite, to travel to the higher reality of the monitors (a plot point that is analogous to the way your eyes work with each other via the 3-D glasses to give you stereoscopic images), but in order to process the big battle of the story properly--Superman battling with Evil and the idea of Superman battling with the idea of Evil are literally the same thing--the part of your brain that experiences the story textually and the part that experiences it metatextually must also work together (again, the way your eyes do with this 3-D process) in order to "get" the full "image." For a certain type of formalist who's also a fan of superhero comics, it's impossible not to love.

And love it I did, so much so that it pretty much overwhelmed all my previous criticisms and won me over.

And yet, the more I think about it, the more I feel those criticisms are still valid: The Monitors are higher-reality beings who have become infected with the disease of story, and Morrison has mapped out a grand little epic for them with fathers and sons, and lost loves, and fallen heroes who create the weapons that will bring them low--combined with the way Batman and Superman's side-stories play out in Final Crisis, it makes me think that Morrison's structural model for this whole event is as much Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, as it is any Crisis or other big superhero event--but Morrison seems to think taking the exposition out of an exposition info-dump makes it less of an info-dump and more a story. It doesn't.

Scott McCloud talked in Understanding Comics about the "blood in the gutters," the moments between panels where the real action takes place and reader closure occurs. (And isn't it possible, by the way, this term at least partially informs Morrison's metaphors of blood and vampirism throughout this book?) Perhaps Morrison feels he can shorthand so much story information and character motivation because the reader will ultimately make all those connections on their own anyway, just as they do the action between panels (and, let's face it, it's not as if the motivations of heroes when the fate of universe at stake is particuarly subtle. To quote Tony Shaloub's character in Barton Fink: "Wallace Beery! Wrestling picture! What do you need, a roadmap?!").

And perhaps this also explains why the response to Final Crisis has been so diametrically opposed on the Internet--you've got those people who provided their own catharsis between the panels and those who didn't, just like you've got those people who fucking love Lord of the Rings and can get all worked up over the saga of Boromir and Faramir and Denethor II, and guys like me that dug all three movies but is still pretty "meh" about the whole thing. I feel like Morrison's shortcutting works better the closer he gets to working with established characters (and probably the closer his take on those character is closer to mine), so that although Superman's motivation--the life of Lois Lane, hanging between heartbeats--isn't any more fully developed in this miniseries than Overman's quest for his sister, or the chick driving the Ultima Thule's for Novu Dox, it still means more to me (thanks to a bajillion years of established continuity) than the others, and even more than the fate of countless imaginary universes at stake. Without that bit of motivation that personally speaks to me--the desire to take on anything to save the person you love--would the cool-as-hell end of Superman Beyond #2 have seemed quite so Excellent to me?

Maybe? Or maybe when you get into the realm where formalist thrills are supposed to deliver your emotional thrills, elegance is as important as ambition. Because Final Crisis #7--as full o' ambition and intelligence as Superman Beyond, if not more so--didn't kung-pao my chicken nearly as much. I can totally see why Graeme and Douglas and Jog and everyone else is turning up, like the Pax Drei at the end of this book, to defend it at this crucial moment of critical analysis, but FC#7 is like issue #1 of Superman Beyond all over again for me. I see a lot of what it's doing--operatic motifs; the fragmentation of the storyline's narration mirroring the fragmenting of linear time at the end of the universe; hell, I even caught the line from "Hair" yelled out by one of the the Supermen analogues that manages to underscore the recurring references to music in this issue as well as point toward the dawning of the new age (of Aquarius?)--but didn't find myself caring particularly much.

Maybe it's because when you do decide your story is going roll at the level of almost pure signifier, that shit has got to roll correct. You can't pull a lumpy-ass space vampire out of the last twenty pages of your tie-in miniseries and have him show up as your ultimate big bad without expecting a certain amount of "umm, foreshadowing, plz?" on the part of your audience. [I can only imagine how baffled I'd be if I hadn't picked up the second issue of Superman Beyond--which I almost didn't.] You can't show the end of the universe being overwritten by Superman firing up the magical Maytag wishing machine, and not expect a certain amount of "Really? That's it?" You can't score an opera that gets shoved on stage with almost no rehearsal and be surprised when people complain that the singing is uneven. (Swap in "miniseries" for "opera" and "art" for "singing," would you?) No joke, I think Morrison has thought out Final Crisis to a level as fine as Moore did Watchmen--there's a concision of commentary in what Morrison is doing with the character of Super-Bat that knocks me on my ass--but do I think Final Crisis is as good as Watchmen? To me, it's not even close--while you can argue that, just as Moore doesn't nail the landing in Watchmen, Morrison doesn't quite hit the mark at FC's finale, it's really all the little misses and fudges and afterthoughts and "well, I gave you everything you need to know about this character in six nouns, two verbs and a very cool adjective, what more do you need?" Internet interviews throughout Final Crisis that keep it from being sublime.

Or maybe it's not a formalist issue at all. The last time I was in CE, Hibbs was talking to a customer about the upcoming film adaptation of Watchmen and said something with which I strongly disagreed: he said, "Nobody loves Watchmen for its plot. They love it for its structure."

Now, structure may be Watchmen's strongest point, but if it wasn't for the characters, I don't think it would've made it beyond a second printing. Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan and John and Laurie and that dude on the Black Freighter--I didn't have decades of experiences with them but Moore gave me reasons to care about them as their stories unfolded, and caring about them is what made the story worth reading for me.

I don't doubt that those who had an exultant experience reading Final Crisis truly did, nor am I saying that they're wrong to do so, even with all their caveats. But I'm genuinely surprised Morrison couldn't get me to care about what happened to the entire cast of the DCU in almost the same number of pages Moore was able to make me care about analogues of barely-known second-stringers. The fault may be mine, or it may be the work's, and it may not be the case several years from now when there's a collected edition with the relevant Superman and Batman crossovers pulled under one cover. And maybe, when the majority of your story takes place in the reader's heads instead of on the page, it should be no surprise when the story absolutely works for some and absolutely doesn't work for others. But for me right now--as a certain type of formalist with a love of superhero comics--good art that jams all the blood into its gutters isn't really much better from bad art that has no blood in it whatsoever. Judging the work on what it delivered, I'd say that Final Crisis #7 was Eh, and the miniseries as whole was OK.

Why I loved Final Crisis

I've been enjoying the online discussion of Final Crisis, especially as the last three parts have been coming out over the last three weeks. But one thing I think is particularly interesting about the reaction to the series is that a number of people who disliked it seem angry about it, or convinced that people who "actually enjoyed" it have somehow been duped. And even though I've been posting notes on every issue, I realized that I haven't actually said much about what I thought of the series since the first issue. I really did enjoy it enormously--as much as I've liked any superhero comic in the last few years. I thought it was problematic in a lot of ways, although I might not say "deeply" as many times as Jog did. But I love a lot of art that's seriously flawed, as long as 1) it's sufficiently ambitious and 2) it does some stuff very well. I found myself looking forward to every issue of Final Crisis, and reading and re-reading it with pleasure. So here's what I liked about it:

*It's incredibly densely packed. There's a lot to mull over in every issue--including a ton of plot--and earlier parts of the story reward re-reading in the context of later ones. A few people have commented that Morrison's writing style here seems like a puzzle or game; I don't think it's that, exactly, just a bunch of cues that let the story unfold in the reader's head. I think #7 is the only issue that's seriously non-chronological, and there the organization works really well dramatically: that opening scene is fantastic (and beautifully timed for a periodical coming out right now), and much more effective than picking up with #6's also-excellent cliffhanger would've been. The outcome of the great big physical fight is a foregone conclusion--by the time we get to it, it's not just past-tense narration, it's literally a bedtime story being told to children ("and no one was hurt").

*Morrison's dialogue is pitch-perfect. He juggles a gigantic cast, but he's great at establishing who they are and how they think about things with just a few lines. (Green Arrow and Black Canary get barely any on-panel time, but their characters and relationship are totally there.) The dialogue also delivers a lot of exposition that doesn't read like anyone's stopping to explain the plot. See, for instance, the conversation between Turpin and the Question in the first issue: "Didn't the Question used to be a guy?" "Lung cancer. From smoking." If you're meeting these characters for the first time, that reads as "you're not the person I was expecting"/"yeah, fuck you too," and also opens up the idea that we're in a setting where characters' identities are roles that can shift from person to person. If you know the Question from his appearances on the Justice League animated series, it clarifies why the Question's a woman here. If you know the characters well already, it's following up on a plot thread from 52, and showing the way Charlie's sensibility has rubbed off on Renee. And, in any case, the conversation sets up the position the Question will occupy by the end of the series--a kind of liaison between the human and superhuman worlds, who's tight with the law-enforcement community but isn't really one of them any more.

Speaking of which:

*It's a massive event comic that's totally self-contained. I realize that could sound odd coming from somebody who's been annotating every little extratextual reference in FC for nine months, but I'm serious: every essential part of the story is right there on the page of Final Crisis and its five Morrison-written tie-ins (Superman Beyond, Resist and the Batman two-parter--and I also think not including Superman Beyond in the collected edition sabotages the project). Everything else is just Easter eggs--and there are a ton of them. But, for example: there are a few sequences (in the first and last issues) involving a caveman. Is it fun to know that this particular caveman had his own series for six issues in the late '60s? Sure--but all you need to know about him for the purpose of this story is that he's a caveman. And, just on an analyzing-craft level, I enjoyed seeing how Morrison introduced all of this story's important characters and ideas for the benefit of readers who hadn't encountered them before.

*The art is mostly really good. (Aside from the dreadful sliver cover for the last issue.) I mean, yes, it would've been nicer to have an all-Jones (or all-Mahnke) project, but I enjoyed the look of almost all of it, and Alex Sinclair consistently hit the color out of the park. The coloring on Superman Beyond, in particular, is just fantastic--even the 2-D scenes stick to a color scheme that looks cool with the glasses on.

*It invites a whole lot of ways of reading it. Sean T. Collins has a really interesting post here about the elaborate light-as-information/darkness-as-dogma motif going on in the series, and how that was ultimately less interesting to him than the "crazy-ass superhero story" aspect. (And under the circumstances, I'm surprised that there wasn't a prominent Lightray analogue in this story.) I also share his frustration with Morrison's "why aren't there right-brain comics?" quote--but I think it'd be fairly on-the-mark if it were phrased as "why aren't there more right-brain superhero comics?"

Another good quote, from amypoodle of Mindless Ones: "the symbolic/thematic reading is just as important to [Morrison's comics] as the literal one." I think that's true, and in Final Crisis those readings bleed together: parts of the story are more or less literally about internal and ground-level struggle against darkness (Batman, Submit), others are grand symbolic treatments of the cosmic "what stories do you tell?" question (Superman Beyond), and they become the same thing by #7. There's a deus ex machina ending, of course, but only in the literal sense; it's been fastidiously set up from the very first scene, with its divinely inspired technology turning will into reality.

*It's totally entertaining, panel-for-panel. Final Crisis tosses an amazing number of fun ideas out into the idea-space of the DCU; you know, if Lord Eye only gets two panels, so what? Somebody else can play with that later. Frankenstein on a motorcycle with a sword in one hand and a gun in the other, quoting Milton as he kills Justifiers, is my idea of quality entertainment. Morrison writes great endings, too--not a surprise coming from the writer of the final scene of We3, the last page of "Batman R.I.P.," the conclusion of his Doom Patrol, etc., but Jesus did this series ever have some killer cliffhangers. The story accelerates steadily, from its police-procedural opening to the insane fireworks of the ending ("what the hell, let's throw in Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew. And the Host of Heaven, too"). And when Final Crisis cranks up the volume, it really cranks it up. Superman's entrance in the final scene of #6? It's like having three symphony orchestras in the balcony that you didn't know about suddenly join in with the two playing triple-fortissimo on stage.

*It opens up a lot of possibilities for stories, and doesn't close many off. That's something an "event comic" should do, I think. I don't know which of those possibilities will actually be fulfilled--and even Morrison seems dubious about the prospect--but they're there.

The End Of The End

So, I'm kind of conflicted about FINAL CRISIS #7. As the last issue of a company-wide "event" - Hell, even as a narrative - it feels like a failure, with lots of important plot points either muddy or entirely screwed-up in one way or another. But on an emotional level, as a shameless love letter to superhero comics, it was wonderful; moving, bold and purposeful and entirely successful. Maybe I should call this post "Crisis On Infinite Viewpoints" and get it over with.

To admit my bias early; I love Grant Morrison's superhero work. It's almost always flawed in one way or another, and sometimes to the extent that it's a terrible mess, but it's almost never a boring mess, and every failure can generally be traced back to being too ambitious or taking on too much at once, which is always something to be admired. One of the usual flaws for his superhero stories is his climaxes, which tend to either be of the deus ex machina variety or the "Wait, what the fuck was that" variety; Final Crisis has both, somewhat fittingly, and it's a tribute to Morrison's talent as a stylist that it still managed to work, somehow, despite at times feeling like the work of an overeager seven-year-old ("And then Aquaman came back! And then the Hawks died! Maybe! It's entirely unclear!" Both of which deserved more than just the panel of attention that they got). But then, Final Crisis was always less of what you would expect - or, perhaps, deserve - from a superhero crossover, and closer to something like The Invisibles (or Seven Soldiers, more appropriately), anyway; something less a story than an experience that either works for you or doesn't, with no in-between (By the end of The Invisibles, I didn't care how the story ended as much as I wanted the characters to be okay, if that makes sense; I was so invested in the characters I'd spent years reading about that I would've been equally happy if the final issues had been Grant Morrison stepping into the story and saying "Okay, so they're all going to be all right in the end. I just wanted you to know that" as much as, you know, the actual end of the story he was writing). The idea that Morrison could've been able to bring the story to a successful conclusion purely in terms of plot with only 40 pages was already unlikely, and so it was almost refreshing to see the approach he took.

Was I the only person who was reminded of Secret Invasion's final issue, when reading this? Not only the switch from watching the events "live" to being told what happened by participants after the fact, but also the construction of the issue so that the threat is dealt with by midway through the issue, and everything else was "what happened afterwards" exposition. Those similarities made it easier to compare the two, and draw (jumping to) conclusions about the two companies; while Final Crisis' finale was romantic, upbeat and embracing of the ridiculousness of the superhero genre (I mean, Captain Carrot and his Zoo Crew being part of the heroes that save the universe? Really? And when I saw that, I was actually glad that JG Jones wasn't drawing the issue, because I dread to think how realistic he might have made them), Secret Invasion was all... I don't want to say pointless, but oppressive and never-ending, and without actually achieving anything, or making any greater point beyond "And here is more of the same, our poor heroes." As much as Final Crisis may have made no sense on a plot level, at the end of it, I know what it was about and what it was trying to say; I'm not sure I can say the same of Secret Invasion, beyond "Selling comics." And, yet, maybe that made it a better superhero event book?

In the end, I think Final Crisis was - for me, at least - a Very Good series overall, with a Good, if rushed and overeager, last issue. It makes superhero comics seem full of possibilities again, but considering what is likely to follow, it's probably best not to think about that too much.

I'm not afraid of the dark!

DARK AVENGERS #1: So this is my theory, and it may be wrong.

Marvel has been very good, maybe especially amazingly good about judging the zeitgeist when it comes to their recent big events. CIVIL WAR and SECRET INVASION were both pretty prefect distillations of the nation's feelings at the time of their initial publication, and that's why they resonated so well with the comics audience, and sold so well. That's what pop comics are supposed to do, of course: reflect ourselves back at us so we can know ourselves better. One can argue this is a tradition that goes back to the start of Marvel, as well: what else are most of the original Marvel characters but perfect pictures of America's fears of the Bomb, the commies, the generational changes between "the 50s" and "the 60s"?

So my theory is this: Marvel (and Bendis, one presumes) really really thought that Obama was going to lose the presidency. Maybe this is from liberal self-loathing; maybe it was just playing the odds -- hell, even here in liberal pinko San Francisco, there's very few of my peers who thought the black guy REALLY had a chance.

Storylines are planned months ahead of time, of course. And once you start something down a certain path, it really is hard to change that path in a group-planning environment.

Because I'm not sure how to otherwise really explain DARK AVENGERS #1 coming out the day after the inauguration of our 44th president. Tonally, it's completely wrong. Here's a man who, in his first week, has strengthened the Freedom of Information Act; is doing his initial interviews with "the Muslim world" trying to show them that America is not their enemy; is shutting down Gitmo.

And in DARK AVENGERS #1 a loathsome and insane enemy takes over super-heroic security of the country, installing twisted parodies of some of our favorite heroes as though they were the real thing, and is ruling based on fear and blackmail and psychosis.

Well, fair enough that I have a few conservative friends who might argue that IS the undercurrent of America '09, but I think they're fair from the majority opinion this time around.

I don't want this to become a big political debate or anything, but the dissonance between watching our President speak, and the workings of America in the Marvel universe is pretty breathtaking -- it's like going to the opera and finding out tonight's selection is the Sex Pistol's greatest hits!

So, yeah, I think they were betting on McCain winning this thing. Could be wrong, but that's my theory and I am sticking with it for the moment.

Putting THAT aside, how was the comic itself?

Actually, surprisingly GOOD.

There was some fine storytelling going on here -- everything you might possibly need to know is right there within the pages of the comic itself, and it unfolded organically, as well as with a reasonable amount of suspense. There was a density of storytelling that I haven't gotten from a Bendis comic in some time -- this is a "crowded" book, with lots going on, and a lot of insight into the individual pieces.

This is one of Marvel's new $3.99 monthlies, but if it keeps this density, that might even be a reasonable price to pay.

The art is lovely and moody, the script is strong, what's not to like?

My one concern is two-fold (hm, does that even make sense?) -- this book's premise is a bit too much like that of THUNDERBOLTS (and TBOLTS changes it's premise a little bit, kinda, to match to that), but because of the high profile nature of the title and the characters, I really really don't see how you can get a lot more than a year out of the premise.

At least TBOLTS had places to run after it's big surprising reveal -- those were, largely, minor characters, who were wide open to change, and there were a number of themes of heroism and redemption that could be explored because of that, in several different directions.

DA really doesn't have that option, as I can see it -- not only CAN'T characters like Venom or Bullseye change or be redeemed or become heroic, the audience would really hate them for doing so.

In some ways, DA's premise reminds me (a SMIDGE) of that of THE SHIELD: bad bad people in charge of your security, and they're going to do bad bad things along the way to enrich themselves as well. The problems that I see is that, unlike Vic Mackey, Norman and his psychos are at the top of the food chain, and there's nothing, no chain of command, no leaders above them to reign them in, or hold them back. At best, you've got public opinion, but that's a weak chain for storytelling. What makes something like THE SHIELD so compelling was "How the fuck do the bad guys get away with this, get out of eating the shit sandwich they made... hell, make someone else eat that sandwich?" BUt that's because they were under CONSTANT scrutiny and political forces arrayed against them.

Plus, I really liked Vic Mackey in a way, and his honor, however twisted, that put his family's life as his main goal (even if he fucked it up constantly by being, y'know, corrupt and evil)

Not so with Norman, not so with the rest of the cast -- I don't feel an "in" there, the character to root for, or a path that things can go that won't end up by issue #12 having to be in the same place as the conclusion of THE SHIELD. The Dark Avengers don't seem to have anything to strive AGAINST.

So yeah, flawed premise, hard to see how it can last, completely wrong for the moment in history... and yet I thought it was GOOD, nonetheless. So figure, eh?

What did YOU think?

-B

A long, long time ago...

I can still remember, how the comics used to make me smile... These days it's mostly just yawns or facepalms (or, in the case of FINAL CRISIS #6, both at the same time). I promised Brian I'd step up my contributions to the Savage Critics, which, given that I've had the consistency of Damon Lindelof lately, that's totally fair. Except I then spent two weeks scouring the new releases, looking for anything interesting enough to talk about; hell, I'd settle for some controversial news items, but all I've got is JEFF PARKER'S ON EXILES:

 

And I seriously doubt anyone cares about that except me.

It may just be that January's a slow month, and the only noteworthy new launches tie into either DARK REIGN or FINAL CRISIS, and I'm pretty much just waiting for them to be over at this point. So rather than analyze a specific issue in depth, I'm going to run some old-school bullet points this week. UNCANNY X-MEN ANNUAL #2: You know, ever since Matt Fraction went solo on UNCANNY X-MEN, the book's felt a bit... flat to me. It's basically turned into a string of unrelated subplots that don't seem to go anywhere: Magneto teams up with the High Evolutionary, then they disappear for six months while Madelyne Pryor resurfaces and starts putting her own team together, only no one seems to care about that because Colossus has gone AWOL and Emma's having a Moment of Angsty Introspection (tm Tom Welling). It all amounts to a rather disjointed Big Picture, which is pretty much the same problem with this Annual - the story's a sloppy mess even by X-Men standards, constantly jumping back and forth to retcon a link between Namor and Emma Frost (ostensibly because of the whole PURPLE REIGN thing), and it's just... I have no idea what Fraction's trying to do here. Maybe it's an attempt to make White Queen-era Emma more sympathetic, but I've had enough frou-frou apologia from the nice folks over at HEROES. And the dialogue... "You're not my prince. Do you always smell like that?" "Yes. Do you?" I say thee EH.

X-FACTOR #39: Peter David gets a cookie for thinking up a rather inventive way out of the whole parenthood storyline. Unfortunately, the end result takes us to a rather conventional place, a place that's become such a tired cliche in the superhero genre that I can't help thinking it would've been a gutsier, more creative move to see things through, so to speak. Even the sharpest character moments, like Siryn's reaction immediately after the Big Twist, are muted because they're so familiar, bordering on tedious. So that cookie has to be, I don't know, bran or something like that. Not as much fun as chocolate chip, but it's OKAY to chew on for a while.

WAR MACHINE #2: Wow. This... really hasn't gotten any better, has it? I mean, I was willing to write the first issue off as a fluke, because I still think of Greg Pak as the guy who wrote PHOENIX: ENDSONG and that cute WARLOCK miniseries with the surprise ending. But this is just... page 7, that splash of War Machine with half of North America's arsenal strapped to his back? That's straight out of the Dark Ages, people. We're talking Rob Liefeld pecs-out-to-there guns-guns-guns Dark Ages. And then on page 17, War Machine... turns into a tank? I have no idea. Though that makes it a nice tie-in to the TRANSFORMERS movie, which was also about stuff getting blown up and not much else. AWFUL, because I can understand Golden Age retro and I can understand Silver Age retro, but why anyone would want to go back to the days of tin-foil radioactive sub-atomic tri-fold variant covers is beyond me.

STARSLIP: Technically not a new release (or, you know, a comic) but I'd like to point out that Kris Straub has just one-upped DC with his latest storyline by: A) destroying the universe, B) permanently displacing his cast into an alternate timeline two years in the past, which means everything you know is not wrong because it did happen and the characters are now scrambling to rewrite history, and C) blowing up the universe actually had a purpose, as it gave Straub an in-story reason to go from this to this. (Okay, that's technically a three-up.) And to top it all off, he's kept me laughing the whole damn way. EXCELLENT.