Favorites: Batman: Knightfall Part One: Broken Bat

Batman: Knightfall Part One: Broken BatChuck Dixon, Doug Moench, writers Jim Aparo, Jim Balent, Norm Breyfogle, Graham Nolan, artists DC, 1993 272 pages $17.99

Knightfall was the big Batman event during my time as a comics reader in the early to mid '90s. That basically means it was the big superhero comic event for me during that time. Batman was the character that got me reading comics. The first Tim Burton movie sparked my interest in the character, and The Dark Knight Returns--the first comic book I can actually remember reading--cemented it. The comic shop I went to was called Gotham Manor, for pete's sake. And so, a multi-series crossover pitting Batman against basically his entire rogues gallery until some hulking brute takes advantage and breaks his back? Yeah, sign 9th-grade Sean Collins up. But how does it look now? Find out after the jump...

Unlike most of the straightforward superhero comics I read during that time, I actually remember Knightfall, and remember it fondly at that. This is not to say it doesn't suffer from all the shortcomings you'd expect. The dialogue, the clothing designs, the hairstyles, especially for anyone we're supposed to think of as "cool"...you almost wonder whether early-'90s DC writers and artists ever had any contact with the outside world at all. The book is also deep, deep in the shadow of Dark Knight, and not just in the obvious grim'n'gritty way; it occasionally serves up ersatz versions of Miller's satire--a pop psychologist called "Dr. Simpson Flanders" hawking his book I'm Sane and So Are You! and glibly defending the rights of the escaped Arkham Asylum inmates, for example--with none of Miller's sharpness or genuine comedic sense. Despite the overwhelming tonal debt to Miller and Burton, the character designs and color palette remain incongruously bright and buoyant. And while the newly created archvillain Bane cuts an impressive figure despite his many detractors at the time, the less said about his perfunctory posse of villain types (bird guy, knife guy, tiny brick) the better. This comic is not one of my favorites in the way that Black Hole is one of my favorites, in other words.

But! The book still somehow remains exactly what a big crazy Batman event should be. For one thing, it's got that inner-eight-year-old appeal: What Bat-fan wouldn't want to see Batman tangle with all his big enemies in rapid succession, with some minor ones given impressive tweaks and thrown into the mix for good measure? The very nature of Batman's rogues gallery--75% of them spend their days right next to each other in a row of cells in Arkham Asylum, allowing both the comic and your imagination to pace the hall and peruse them like a set of action figures on the shelf--taps into a childlike desire to see a bunch of cool characters one after the other, and the story takes full advantage.

But it's not just that Knightfall shows Batman fighting the Joker, Scarecrow, the Riddler, Killer Croc, the Mad Hatter, the Ventriloquist, Firefly, Zsasz, Poison Ivy and so on all in a row--many subsequent storylines, for both Batman (Jeph Loeb's Hush) and other characters (Mark Millar's Spider-Man), have gone back to that well with diminishing returns. Knightfall clicks because, as far as Batman comics go, it makes sense. If I were some criminal mastermind who wanted to take over Gotham and fuck Batman up, blowing a hole in Arkham Asylum and freeing all the crazy supervillains is exactly what I'd do. Meanwhile, if I were Batman, taking on all my crazy supervillain enemies in a row really would wear me down to the point of exhaustion. To Dixon and Moench's credit, the labors they put Batman through are such that they emphasize the physical toll Batman's heroic activities would have on his body. During one fight, he has to leap his way through a burning amusement park; during another he has to carry the wounded mayor through a flooded tunnel; he does an awful lot of hand-to-hand combat with guys with swords and knives or guys twice his size. And keep in mind that this is the Jim Aparo-era Batman, not a Frank Miller tank or a Jim Lee splash-page pin-up. He has a sinewy swimmer's body that you can practically feel getting pummeled. His downfall--ahem, Knightfall--is perfectly plausible.

Then there's the ending. Ninth-grade me wound up so upset about Bruce Wayne getting replaced that I stopped reading with that issue with the die-cut Joe Quesada cover where the new armor-clad Batman takes Bane down; the bad guy got his comeuppance, and that was enough of that for me. I've since managed to track down most of the KnightQuest and Knight'sEnd material that followed, and it seems to me that the mega-event couldn't keep up the manic intensity of this opening arc. So in that sense, having Bane break Batman's back so that a new guy could take over may not have amounted to much. But as an image? One of the highlights of the '90s in superhero comics, certainly. Say what you will about Bane and Doomsday, but people remember them not just because of what they did (if that were so, everyone would remember all the Clone Saga bad guys too), but because of the memorable way in which they did it. And after issue after issue of histrionic overwriting, it's how simple the end winds up being that makes Bane stick: There's the famous splash page of Bane snapping Batman's spine over his knee, followed by the words "Broken...and done." After all this crazy build-up, Batman goes out like a sucker, and Bane drops him on the floor like garbage. It's almost the opposite of the big final simultaneous punches that enabled Superman to "die" a hero. It's appropriately more morose.

Knightfall is a book I return to often, but not to read. I flip through it, skimming a passage, checking out an image, slowly going through a sequence. The execution may often be wanting, which makes going page by page a slog, but the basic ideas are sound as a pound and a delight to light upon. When I'm in the mood for raw superhero action and thrills, there aren't many books I like better.

Give me something to sing about: Diana gets nostalgic, 4/9

Here's an interesting bit of synchronicity: just as I'm feeling a bit tired of comics, two of my old favorites stage a comeback. Insert Al Pacino/Godfather reference here... EXILES #1: I may have mentioned that EXILES used to be one of my favorite series back when Judd Winick was writing it. I liked the Tony Bedard run too, warts and all. But then Chris Claremont took over, and... well, I'm pretty sure that if you hold his first issue in your hands and listen closely, you'll hear an eight-man band playing "Nearer My God To Thee". It was that bad.

Enter Jeff Parker, relaunching the book with a new #1, a new team, and a familiar premise with a new twist. I think the most important thing Parker brings to the table, right off the bat, is subtlety; after the electric-jackhammer stylings of his predecessor, it's refreshing to see simple narrative devices like foreshadowing being used effectively - for example, there's a mystery in this issue (hint: somebody might know more than they're saying), but Parker doesn't hang a neon sign that reads HERE IS A MYSTERY OMG.

Being the debut issue, there isn't much here by way of characterization: with the exception of the Panther, the Exiles seem more or less consistent with what you'd expect. But there's plenty of leeway for maneuvering, and Parker's track record leads me to believe he just might pull this off. I'm actually looking forward to the next issue, for the first time in a long time. GOOD.

TIMESTORM 2009-2099 #1: So that other favorite of mine? Marvel 2099. Well, half of it, anyway. I adored Peter David's SPIDER-MAN 2099, and DOOM 2099 was sort-of-okay during the John Francis Moore run but really took off with Warren Ellis, and X-MEN 2099 had no Wolverine (seriously, I want you guys to just stop for a second and imagine a X-Men series running for over two years with no feral Canadians at all), plus it put together an interesting and diverse bunch of mutants without ever doing the Great-Great-Grandson of Scott Summers bit.

So the line had a great run for a while, until it quite literally drowned in editorial interference and that was pretty much the end of it. Well, unless you count Robert Kirkman's attempt to revive the franchise in 2004 (which I don't because my God it was AWFUL but that's neither here nor there). And now it's 2009, and Brian Reed is trying to bring it back. Sort of.

Marvel's traditional stance on future timelines (especially dystopias) is that even if you avert whatever event created the World of Suck, said World will still exist in an alternate universe. From a marketing standpoint, that's a sensible approach: you can keep mining the popularity of those timelines long after the present-day story's moved on (case in point: "Days of Future Past" and the many, many, many spin-offs it's generated since 1981).

I mention this because that's not what Brian Reed does here. The 2099 of TIMESTORM has some familiar elements: Tyler Stone's still running Alchemax, Miguel O'Hara's around, Shakti Haddad is still Cerebra (though she's been boldly - and disturbingly - redesigned), etc. But the furniture's been rearranged too, and normally a writer would just handwave this as being a "different 2099" (which is what Kirkman ended up doing for the Marvel Knights story). Reed does one better: Tyler Stone is using time travel to rewrite the past, and every change causes a ripple effect that alters the "present" of 2099. Frankly, it's a very clever twist - it lets Reed rewrite and reconfigure whatever he wants while maintaining that sense of nostalgia, because as far as we readers know, anything that isn't consistent with the original is a result of Stone messing with the timeline.

Points off for using Wolverine, though. So... GOOD, and I hope this does well enough that we get an ongoing or two out of it.

Da Fug? Jeff is Enslaved by Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye

Is it fair to review a book about which I have very little to say? To you or to me?

Probably not. And yet, it seems necessary to write a little review of Grant Morrison's Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #1, if only because I and a million other people on the Internet were more than willing to record our impressions of G-Mo's Final Crisis each and every time an issue came out. Although I have nothing to support this theory, I've always assumed one of the conditions to Morrison's agreeing to do Final Crisis was that Vertigo publish the follow-up to his sublime but not particularly fiscally successful Seaguy.

And so, in my mind, while not fair to you or or to me, perhaps writing up my thoughts on this issue at this early juncture is more than fair to Grant Morrison, so that my second-guessing, half-baked theories, and if my flimsy, lazy thinking ends up being shown off in all its deluded, wearing-my-underwear-on-the-outside-of-my pants glory...then maybe so much the fairer.

You are welcome to join me in my fool's errand after the jump.

Let me begin by cataloging my sins. I purchased this issue and read it almost immediately, occasionally smiling while doing so. I then put it aside. Then, after a few days, when I realized things had remained relatively quiet on the Internets, I decided it might be good to see if I could start some sort of conversation on the matter. To do so, I did NOT go to my bookcase and dig out my Seaguy trade (it's all the way on the other side of the room!), I did NOT scrupulously re-read Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #1 (I spent about two minutes re-reading it), and I did NOT think through what I was going to say before I started typing.

As long as I am cataloging my acts of hubris, I should confess my nagging doubt that I have deeply misunderstood the first Seaguy limited series, if only because it seems to me one of the clearest and most straightforward pieces Morrison has ever written. Every time I read or talk to someone saying they enjoyed Seaguy but were pretty sure they weren't getting a lot of it, I realize my conviction regarding Seaguy's thematic transparency is more than likely that of the narcissist, the undeveloped child, around whom the world seems to revolve, and with whom the world communicates its system of odd, gnostic signs with perfect soothing clarity.

For me, the first Seaguy mini was a lovely, devastating meditation on the nature of corporate-owned characters and their lot in life: They traipse about in theme parks, immortal, carefree. As Morrison frequently does (and can often do so well), Seaguy is a look at how that life must feel for the character--the unsettled, subtle anguish of someone for whom everything is pleasant but nothing is good. The theme park in which they are an attraction seems to them a boisterous, capricious town eager to distract from what lies behind its manufactured facade. The characters never die, but their sidekicks do--but in order for everything to stay the same, the memories must be ripped from them, like a waxing of the forebrain, and although the mind aches from the loss, it doesn't know why.

And even better, this sort of haunted, ahistorical pleasantness was just a perfect god-damned snapshot of America--not post-9/11, but post-post-9/11, where my wife and I go out to dinner and shop along some lovely prefabricated spot like Santana Row, while non-chain stores sicken and die like poisoned children; where we sit at home and speculate about Lost, while the TV barely shows the war, now in its fifth year of grinding up the poor; and where I lie awake sometimes at night knowing that my distance from the true and terrible conflicts in this world (which I can sense thrashing about, coiling and uncoiling like a serpent fighting for its life, which I sometimes imagine being the cause of the flickering I can see on the night horizon from my window) is a luxury, a luxury for which I'll gladly suffer under the yoke of dull but steady employment, even while I idly wonder what it must be like to touch the scales of that furious beast. All of this I can feel in my life and see in the bright candy colors of the first Seaguy mini, in the pitch-perfect art of Cameron Stewart, looking like a one-page comic ad for the action figure you never bought, and, like I said, the whole thing doesn't seem baffling at all. It's as to-the-point as a ransom note.

And so I was never too riled up about seeing the sequel to Seaguy, although I rooted for the possibility and was gladdened by its announcement. For me, the perfect sequel of Seaguy would be exactly--and I mean exactly--the same three issues of Seaguy, just with Lucky El Loro in place of Chubby Da Choona. Failing that, it's probably for the best to have only the original miniseries and the the promised sequel never to arrive, so that a reader had no choice but to return to the original story again and again until they'd suddenly realize that the first volume of Seaguy was the sequel, and that they, the readers, were the true slaves of Mickey Eye.

But just as a child spends some time investigating outside their window and realizes with some degree of relief and no small amount of disappointment that the faerie messenger scratching and knocking furtively at the bedroom window was merely a newly displaced dangling branch, I come to tell you the the first issue of Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye is not a mere repeat of Seaguy's first issue, but a comic book all its own, a continuation of the fugue, but also an entirely new measure of it.

In Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #1, Seaguy is more unsettled, more aware that something isn't quite right in his world, and quicker to realize when he's being lied to. Where it last time took Seaguy the course of several issues to wander in over his head and lose his sidekick, here it takes less than twenty pages, leaving enough time for a quick asylum incident that recalls the end of Peter Pan and a rescue by the three chaps seen on the cover, whom I've nicknamed (for now) TeaGuy, ThreeGuy, and PeeGuy (although the colors and logos on the closing page and the cover don't match, so maybe Peeguy is really green and Teaguy is really yellow, I don't know).

Considering the rescue comes hot on the heels of evil Lotharius' order for "radical solutions," I think it seems likely the trio of Seaguy analogues may end up being tools to keep Seaguy from discovering the truth. It'll be interesting to see if Teaguy, Threeguy and Peeguy end up being Morrison's spoof on the growing tendency to give superheroes lineage make-overs, putting them as but one in a line of Fisty Riders or Green Flashes. It seems important that Seaguy consider himself inessential, when the behavior of everyone around him suggests that he is in fact crucial to the world around him. And, of course, doltish clod of a comic reviewer that I am, I only know begin to realize how Seaguy's scuba mask resembles nothing so much as an eye itself. It seems a very Morrisonian pun if 'Seaguy' is in fact 'Seeguy' and I wonder if he's going to end up having some unexpectedly close ties to Mickey Eye than might have already been established. (That last clause is a a somewhat slipshod way of confessing I don't quite remember what was revealed at the end of the last Seaguy by the time he ended up on the moon--butterflies? Mummies? Maybe I really should've dug through my shelves and re-read that trade?)

Oh, and the art on this, by the way, was superb. Stewart knows right where to put an unsettlingly realistic touch in the midst of things at their most unreal (there's a close-up shot of slightly misaligned bottom teeth that's just spot-on) and I love how none of the panels here are fully bordered--they manage to feel both claustrophobic and disquietingly open-ended, as if the characters inside are trapped, but something could still enter in suddenly and change everything. And the colors by Dave Stewart? Also great--I really liked that greyish miasmatic feel he gives the first few pages.

So that's one rube's opinion: Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #1 is Very Good stuff, worthy of your time and attention and even that high-end Internet chatter that we only seem to break out for the big-money events. Ignore it at your peril.

Patterns of Patterning: David Takes a Look at Irredeemable #1 (With Capsule Comments on Other Stuff From This Week)

In Grant Morrison's afterword to Irredeemable #1, he discusses an email exchange he had with the book's writer Mark Waid regarding patterning, or the practice of essentially permanently categorizing and cubbyholing a person's potential and MO. Morrison goes on to relate this to himself being "patterned" as a factory of insane gobbledygook - and while that's an opinion of him that may be held by many, I'd hardly call it a complete majority, so I was surprised at how defensively that came off - and of Waid being "patterned" as a dude who writes Silver Age throwback stories, which, well, is pretty true. A lot of people don't remember Empire.

And it's difficult not to compare Irredeemable with its seeming spiritual predecessor - they're both stories where Mark Waid, Biggest Superman Fan Alive, writes about really nasty people doing shitty things to each other, so some people seem to initially view it as a sort of novelty thing, like Avenue Q or that YouTube video with Bert & Ernie performing M.O.P.'s "Ante Up" - hey, Mark Waid's writing about bad people! Empire succeeded creatively, though, because it relied on more than shock value - Waid's a superb character writer, and all of his skills in that arena were on full display. So it's disappointing that Irredeemable #1 seems to sidestep the issue of character entirely so that Mark Waid can try to break his pattern.

I'm not saying it's a bad comic, not by any means, but the Plutonian (the I'm-sick-of-being-called-of-a-fag-so-fuck-you-guys spiteful, homicidal Superman analogue that drives the action of the book) isn't really a character yet, he's a just a guy flying around blowing shit up while people panic - something which takes up a decent chunk of the issue's bulk. It's a lot of shock and sadism, and it's certainly well-executed (and, I must admit, not overly gory or fetishistic in any way - credit to artist Peter Krause on the opening sequence especially), but throughout the issue we're only teased with a glimmer of the "why" for all this. It's certainly Waid breaking out of his pattern, but a part of me wonders if it isn't going too far in the other direction - if it's trying so hard to be mean that it loses sight of that human element that marks the best of Waid's work. Or maybe I'm just patterning the guy.

Peter Krause does a great job with the art - it reminds me a lot of Steve Epting in Captain America, except with a far more varied and vibrant color palette courtesy of Andrew Dalhouse, just the right mix of mythological iconography and creepy stalker faces for a book that's all about perverting the supposedly incorruptible.

None of this is to say that it isn't a Good comic - it is, and I'm fairly confident that my complaints about the book's lack of a human hook won't last long, since this is an ongoing series and I doubt he'll stay away from that for long. I think it's going to make for a really good ongoing series, and I'm incredibly happy Waid's finally in the position where he can give himself a canvas like this. But taken as a hermetically sealed first issue, I'm still going to be buying the second issue more on my trust in Mark Waid as a creator than in me being hooked into the story so far.

Also, if you ever wanted to see what a two-page four-star verbal blowjob was like, Grant Morrison's afterword sure is something.

On to some other stuff - it's a shame Geoff Johns's run on Justice Society of America is ending with such a whimper, since the first few issues of this run were superb and really seemed to be showing a ton of promise, but the endless droning of the Kingdom Come storyline killed so much momentum that I can really see why Johns chose to leave the book. It just doesn't have as much energy as his other work, and has that same plodding, co-written feeling that his late issues of Teen Titans did, where the car was just running out of gas. I think next month's Eaglesham-drawn Stargirl spotlight will probably be a winner, but other than that this issue and run overall have been fairly disappointing. Okay.

In terms of superhero fun, I'm really enjoying the "Messiah War" storyline crossing over between Cable and X-Force - this week's Cable #13 is the second part, sort of rearranging all the pieces of the stuff I remember loving as a kid (Cable! Deadpool being funny! Wolverine slicing shit up! Archangel flying! Stryfe's awesome blade armor! Copious time travel!) into a story that actually has some degree of forethought and coherence, unlike the flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants plotting of the Liefeld/Nicieza/Lobdell stuff I inexplicably loved as a kid. I really wish Olivetti would draw his own backgrounds instead of using 3D models and Quake II screenshots, but Duane Swierczynski writes quite a Good comic here.

Lastly, I've got to admit I've really turned around on Daniel Way recently - I thought a lot of his early Wolverine: Origins work was fairly awful, horribly paced stuff, so I'm really surprised by how much I'm enjoying not only that book these days (the focus provided by Dark Reign certainly helps, though) but also his Deadpool, which pushes out its eighth issue this week, the third part of the "Magnum Opus" crossover with Andy Diggle's Thunderbolts. It's a fun madcamp romp more than any sort of high art to be sure, but for God's sake the story is titled "Magnum Opus" in full self-awareness, and as a superhero comedy that manages to stay within the bounds of seriousness I can pretty much say that I laughed a lot and was genuinely surprised by a number of the plot turns, so that's a pretty Good comic to me.

I've also got quite a lot to say about the first issues of Flash: Rebirth and Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye, one in review form and one in a sort of annotation-esque form (I'm not sure yet), but I owe some love to my homies at Funnybook Babylon so make sure to keep an eye out there for those and other great articles.

My Scott, Your Jean: Jeff Takes A Quick Look at His Sacred Cows.

Because I follow several of the Alert Nerd people on Twitter, I had the head's up about their "what's your Scott & Jean?" event they were planning for March 30th. Unfortunately, because I'm still a waster with terrible time management skills and the world's worst book to re-draft, I didn't realize that March 30th would somehow end up being, y'know, today.

I think the question is relatively comprehensible to yr. average comics geek. As Sarah puts it in Alert Nerd's master post:

Said phrase means, essentially, “That is my geek sacred cow, the one topic I cannot discuss rationally because it makes me too insane/angry/scary-eyed.”

So what's my geek sacred cow? Let's find out together shall we? After the jump.

Being the "Raised on '70s Marvel" geezer that I am, my list of geek sacred cows back during that time would've been something like:

(1) Bucky stays dead; (2) Gwen Stacy stays dead; (3) Uncle Ben stays dead; (4) Howard The Duck does not wear pants, and wears a hat too small for his head.

In the '80s, I think I would've added the following to the list:

(1) Jean Grey stays dead; (2) Nobody but Frank Miller writes Elektra; (3) You never learn Wolverine's origin; (4) You can't break up Nightwing and Starfire (Hey, my entry point into DC was Wolfman & Perez's Teen Titans).

In fact, this may have been the true joy of being a young comic book geek: stepping out each fine morning and looking out an entire herd of geek sacred cows happily grazing before you--nobody but Kirk will command the Enterprise; the Man From Atlantis will never remember his origin; in the end, Godzilla never loses; you can't have a Planet of the Apes movie without Roddy McDowall; you never see the Human Fly's face. There's something thrilling about coming down from Mount Sinai with those two tablets of shall-nots and will-nots. Every parent will tell you about the phase their kid goes through where their response to everything is 'no!' But there's also something satisfying about these rules because you learn them, basically on your own. Unless you're reading a John Byrne comic, nobody would ever say, 'Reed can never cure Ben! Iron Fist will always love Misty Knight! Scott will only love Jean!' They're the things you learn on your own--that's why they're so powerful, something so similar to sacred.

But over time, as you get older, you watch most of your sacred cows get a bolt in their brain, hung upside down and bled, cut into parts. Then you are offered the chance to plunk down some cash so you can bite into that extra-thick and juicy hamburger formerly known as your sacred cow. And some of us bite deep into that burger just so we can complain knowledgeably about what a horrible waste, a sacrilege, a defilement of the divine, the burger's production is. And some of us realize the sacred cows were never grazing in our pasture, and we either stay because we like the view, or we split.

Or, you know, every so often, in mid-self-righteous mouthful,we find ourselves going, 'this is one damn tasty burger.' I was not a big fan of bringing Bucky back, but god-damned if Brubaker didn't grill that shit up and serve it to me with thick-sliced onions and a side of bacon. I was incredibly annoyed at how lame 'One More Day' was, but on the next-to-last page, I was a little bummed Gwen Stacy wasn't right there next to Harry Osborn--as long as you're gonna defile the church, people, fornicate on the altar, not in the pews.

(ugh, no, not literally.)

Now, it may be that I have some list of geek sacred cows that I am hiding from you--that I am, in fact, hiding from myself, so that I don't have to worry about saying them out loud and having today's writers go, 'Wow. That would blow everybody's mind if it turned out that Dick Grayson was gay, wouldn't it? Hmmm...'

Because in a marketplace that caters exclusively to the disciples, sacrilege sells. If you can sell the sacrilege in a way that stays true to the characters, then you've got a pretty good future in this business. But if you can't? Find the cow, man. Find it and kill it.

But I came to this meme to honor it, not to bury it. I'll give you two Scott & Jeans, in fact: a bugbear and a meta-bugbear, either of which I'll happily argue about until the [WARNING: STOP TALKING ABOUT FUCKING COWS!]... new comics come in.

Scott & Jean Number One: Lois Lane and Superman and Clark Kent must always be a love triangle.

Why? Because apart from his constant inherent goodness (which is only interesting now because no other hero is considered constantly, inherently good--fifty years ago, that was par for the course) it is the only fucking interesting thing about Superman, that's why. Nearly every other single interesting thing about Superman (Kandor, weird 'L.L.' fixation, lost civilization of Krypton, the Legion) is an odd external facet, some little idea that stuck and crystallized in a really interesting way.

But the fact that Lois loves Superman and Clark loves Lois, but Lois doesn't love Clark the way she loves Superman and so therefore Superman can't love Lois the way she loves him, comes from Superman/Clark himself, and not from any external geegaw or fifth-dimensional whatsit or from being exposed to some rare strain of Kryptonite that makes him peevish or capricious. You can spend a lot of time and energy thinking about why this weird dynamic exists (and believe me, I have) and you'll never get to the heart of it, but you can, like an actor, pick a reason that makes sense to you and craft stories that suggest your explanation.

The bizarre love triangle (or maybe it's better to say Bizarro love triangle, since it's not a triangle at all) is not only tied to the internal drama of the lead character and multivalent, it's also real. (In fact, it's better than real--it's super-real, in that "a wheel is a leg" kind of way.) Remember that person who liked you enough to hook up with you (repeatedly, even!) but always had some weirdo explanation as to why they couldn't be with you? Remember that person who adored you, and you realized all you had to do was adore them back and everything would be fine, but there was something--the way they slouched or the way they laughed, or your unrequieted love for someone else, or the fact that you were still five years away from realizing you were an emotionally damaged alcoholic who had to keep everyone at arm's length? Sometimes, later on, you figure out why things didn't happen, or maybe you never do and you think of that person--not so much the one who got away as the one you let go--and you accept it because that's the way things are, you guess: Lois loves Superman and Clark loves Lois, but Lois doesn't love Clark the way she loves Superman and so therefore Superman can't love Lois the way she loves him.

Scott & Jean Number Two (the meta-bugbear): Continuity matters.

Continuity is a noose. Continuity is a trap. I believe that, I really do. It's one thing to have continuity for five years or ten years in your superhero universe--maybe you can split your Earths in two, and you can double that. But it's like entropy--sooner or later it gets you. At a certain point, it renders the system useless as every transaction in the closed system is made and no other transaction can be made. A noose. A trap.

But even though I know that, continuity matters to me--without it, the idea that what happens now matters to what happens next, and what happened last month is important to what's happening now. The noose of continuity is what has raised superhero comics to such spectacularly successful heights. More and more, I enjoy the craft of a fine done-in-one, but that's because there aren't that many continuity driven stories I enjoy these days--maybe because I'm not personally invested in them, since there's either a good chance they'll be undone in the next two years or because they ignore some piece of former continuity, or the continuity they had to wipe in order for the story they had to have happen. But as much as I enjoy sitting around high on the drug of my choice reading Bob Haney Brave & The Bold showcases (and I'm enjoying it these days probably more than I should), I totally would've ditched comics when I was twelve or fourteen or seventeen if that's all there had been to it.

(Yes, really.)

I wish I had somewhere further to go with this point from there, but I don't think I do. This is where I have to remember that those cows don't belong to me--they belong to the guy next door, the one who assures me the cows are sacred to him, too. (You know, the guy running the slaughterhouse.) He's gotta make a living, or he closes up shop and there are no more cows. [HOW THE HELL DID I END UP ON THE FUCKING COWS AGAIN? STOP, STOP, STOP.] Maybe this is why I'm more vegetarian these days--18 volumes of Urasawa's Japanese mushrooms; Jaime and Gilbert's strange burrito joint with the tear-summoning hot sauce; stranged aged cheeses from the '40s and '50s. I dunno.

And, anyway, the stupid settlement says that Howard has to wear pants, so what are ya going to do, right?

Abhay Talks about Two Stacks of Comics.

At the beginning of March, I spent a week living out of a hotel room.

Hotel-living turns into the fucking Shining for me pretty fast. Long creepy hallways of identical rooms, filled with strangers. Why are there so many pillows on hotel beds now? 9 pillows? 10 pillows? The classier the hotel, the more pillows on the bed. Occam’s Razor says that the logical conclusion is that fancy people like to play pillow fort on vacation. Plus, thanks to the Local Channel 6 News Action Eyewitness Investigation Squad-team on my TV, I’m convinced that if I had UV goggles, the entire room and all 20 pillows would all glow white-hot with fancy-man semen stains, like Tron bukkake aftermath.

After the hotel stay, I visited my hometown, stayed with my family. I was around My Stuff again, not Hotel Stuff. Not just My Stuff, but My Old Stuff. Found a stack of old comics, thirteen random comics from different years, different eras, slung together next to my bed, collecting dust.

I want to write about that stack. Not really "reviews" or anything that formal-- I don't see the point of "reviewing" any of these comics, but just talking about what books were in that stack. Plus there’s another stack, a second stack.

The Mighty Thor #382 by Walt Simonson and Sal Buscema: This was the very last issue of the Walt Simonson run. Thor's soul is trapped in the body of the invincible Destroyer robot, and he has to robot-fight his way through Hell in order to steal his dead body away from the Goddess of Death, in time to defeat an army of evil ice dwarves invading Asgard.

Do they still make comics like that? Maybe they do; I haven’t bought one recently.

In the letter pages, Sean of Tahoe, California, "a fan of legends", writes a letter in support of Thor's new beard. He is responding to a previous letter from an earlier letter column that disapproved of the beard. Tank Girl 2 #1 by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett: A collection of short Tank Girl stories. They just cram jokes into the margins, nooks, crannies— it’s just filled with drawings and doodles and noodling. It still feel very alive. A lot of people don’t make that effort.

Suicide Squad #18 by John Ostrander, Luke McDonnell, and Bob Lewis: After I quit Marvel comics in middle school, I eventually switched to DC. This was one of my first DC books; I got it from the 24-Hour Ameristop next to the chili place in town. The Suicide Squad fights some bad guys. Without even re-reading it, just by looking at the cover, I could remember at least one line from it: Captain Cold tells a bad guy how "Hell isn’t hot. Hell is cold, and buddy, I'm Captain Cold."

When I first got into DC Comics, everyone in them was a middle-aged failure at life. The Suicide Squad was all about Amanda Waller, an aging, widowed, morbidly obese bureaucrat. The Secret Origins story of Cave Carlson ends with one of Cave Carlson’s sidekicks, years after their adventures together, homeless and in a wheelchair, begging for change. The Atom was divorced, after he’d caught his wife cheating on him in the back of a Chevy. Captain Atom had a dead wife and kids he couldn’t relate to. The Swimmer would go from swimming pool to swimming pool, fighting crime. I don’t really understand DC characters any other way, I guess. DC books don’t make any sense to me, anymore.

The Last American #1 by Alan Grant, John Wagner and Mike McMahon: I don't really remember anything about this comic other than buying it for Mike McMahon's drawings, the way he builds drawings out of sharp lines, flat colors, off-kilter shapes. Lego humans, wandering through desolate post-apocalyptic landscapes.

Most of the comics I’ve read lately have just been that sort of “Art Experience” for me. When I got home from my trip, I returned back to a second stack of comics. I’ve been buying #1 issues this year, non-established-universe #1 issues, trying to get some whiff of what’s new in comics, what people making new things were trying to do. But: Jersey Gods (Image), The Great Unknown (Image), Mysterius the Unfathomable (Wildstorm), Bang Tango (Vertigo), The Life & Times of Savior 28 (IDW)…?

Couldn’t catch a scent of anything.

I’m not saying these are bad books necessarily (well: maybe some of them)(Bang Tango), just that my experience of them has been really art-focused. I guess I’ve been distracted. I've already forgotten every single one of Jersey Gods' characters; I just remember enjoying Dan McDaid's performance.

Jersey Gods is about Kirby-style Space Gods fighting in New Jersey; The Great Unknown is about an inventor whose ideas are being stolen from his mind; Mysterius the Unfathomable is about a magician who is a PG-13 asshole; Bang Tango is about a retired gangster who dances tango, who goes back to being a gangster; Life & Times of Saviour 28 is about a superhero who gets murdered while protesting the Bush Administration.

Some of the books are entertaining, for what they are. Mysterius seems focused on “fun” in a very professional way, and in a way I think most people will find effective; I think smart people trying to create fun stories is at least admirable in theory-- it's something I've always enjoyed about the Ocean's 11 movies, say. Et cetera. Sure: entertainment, if you’re in the mood to be entertained.

I just didn't feel very connected to any of them regardless.

American Flagg #3 by Howard Chaykin and Ken Bruzenak: Aaah-- Chaykin, lingerie, blowjobs, Ken Bruzenak lettering, and violence, all for a single U.S. dollar.

But more than that—the way a comic can contain a whole world. You can see signs in the background, you can see what people are wearing, you can see the brand-names of their junk food. The characters in FLAGG, I know what they watch on TV: Bob Violence. The name of the cab company in WATCHMEN? Prometheus Cabs.

Who does that needlepoint right now?

The new comics I’ve read-- none really created an entire world for themselves. Jersey Gods tried but its first issue cribbed so heavily from Jack Kirby that it was hard to take it very seriously as its own thing. But I can’t really criticize all of these new books for failing to tell me their main characters' favorite TV show, can I? That sort of world-building seems rare in general, so singling these books out in particular strikes me as unfair.

X-Men Classics #98 by Chris Claremont, John Romita Jr., Glynis Oliver, Dan Green: Before I’d ever seen an X-Men Comic, or had any idea what one was, another kid in third grade attempted to describe the contents of this issue to me. Do you have any idea how long it took him? “The X-Men fight Nimrod” takes somewhere between nine hours and forever to explain to someone who’d never heard of a mutant, Rogue, Wolverine, Sentinels, Days of Future Past, any of it. Now, you can just rent the movie.

Someday, I would like to travel back in time and give both of those kids wedgies. Then: I'd put them in a figure four leg-lock or a camel clutch, and I'd explain to them that they were gebronies. Then, dangle them over a cliff until they wet themselves, you know like Bill Paxton in True Lies. Then, I would explain sexual intercourse to them because I think at that age, it'd really gross them out and it'd just be super-funny to see their expressions. Plus, I would throw in stuff like vagina dentata or nekomimi fetishes or docking or whatever, just to screw them up a little mentally, you know, for giggles. Then, if I had time, and I wasn't tired, I'd go back in time and murder Hitler and prevent the Holocaust or whatever. But first: beating up those little brats. Priorities.

The last panel of this comic is my favorite-- a Russian with an eyepatch says "We are fast approaching a crossroads, Sasha. And I fear that somewhere, somehow, the decision has already been made...to turn us irrevocably towards Armageddon."

I’m about 100% sure this is how every single issue of the X-men ended in the 1980’s.

Tribe #1 by Todd Johnson and Larry Stroman: this was a black superhero team by Larry Stroman at the peak of his comic career, published by Image Comics near the peak of its fanboy-dominance. 1993. The cover is black cardstock with the Tribe logo in gold-embossed letters. No art-- just the gold-embossed letters. Stroman and Johnson's names are almost bigger than the title of the book. According to Wikipedia, it was cancelled by Image before the second issue came out, because it had been delayed so much. According to Wikipedia, its final issue was issue #0.

If you explained the 90's to a kid reading comics today, do you think they would believe you?

Jinx True Crime Confessions by Brian Michael Bendis: Bendis creates a comic around a series of monologues and interviews, people talking about violence they've witnessed, pranks they've pulled. I think this is reprinted in the Total Sell-Out trade.

The selling point aren’t any characters; it has no characters. The selling point is just Bendis. The old Jinx books were just so packed with entertainment value-- letter pages, reviews, short humor strips from his Cleveland newspaper strip. That’s not really true of any of the books in my New #1 Comics stack. Everyone’s trying to make their stories the stars; no one seems very interested in communicating anything about themselves instead. Only Jersey Gods even has a letter page, and it’s not exactly rich with personality...

I doubt this one-shot would ever get made today, but it’s not like comics have ever really been set up to sell books like this. Plus: not many people seem interested in making stuff like this anyways, comics that are just entertaining without trying to sell some new character / concept / bullshit.

Stray Bullets #3 by Dave Lapham: This issue is titled "The Party," but it doesn’t have Lapham’s best party scene in it. For that, you want issue #5, the first Orson issue. But I remember when this comic first started coming out being so excited, going out-of-my-head excited, that the page numbers continued from issue to issue. You know, how if issue #2 ended at page 45, then issue #3 started at page 46...? Oh, man!

It's a strange detail to be excited by but I think a lot of people overlook how much those little details can matter for fans. The letter page in the old Bendis Jinx comics, the page numbers in Stray Bullets, the lettering in American Flagg-- just some hint that there's something going on, some extra bit of work being invested.

The new comics I’ve seen? Can I really tell any of them apart? The Great Unknown has a one-color all-blue color scheme, but even that’s becoming a thing now, maybe.

I tried Dave Lapham’s Vertigo book Young Liars again a couple weeks back, issue #13 (“The Rock Life”). I hadn’t thought much of the first issue, but the new issue had some Twilight Zone moments that were somewhat appealing. The premise apparently went in more of a science fiction direction than the first issue had promised. I didn’t think the first issue had promised anything with any particularity, at all.

Which: maybe that’s true of the other new comics I’ve read recently-- maybe they’re holding back some key part of their DNA. Reading past a first issue is essentially a leap of faith. One I’m making less often.

I went to a screening of a documentary about Joe Sedelmaier the other day. Yes, THE Joe Sedelmaier. At the Q&A afterwards, he said two things that stuck out. First, talking about the work he'd created that he hadn't felt good about, he said "I always said 'Oh-oh' when someone said to me, 'Joe, it's good for what it is.' If something's 'good for what it is', what it is is usually bullshit." I laughed and thought of Mysterius the Unfathomable. The second thing he said, before introducing a (terrific) short film he'd made: "It's about the importance of having an open mind. Everyone thinks they have an open mind, the same way everyone thinks they have a sense of humor. Usually, they don't have either." I didn't really laugh at that.

Instant Piano #1 by Kyle Baker, Mark Badger, Robbie Busch, Stephen Destefano and Evan Dorkin: This was a very uneven issue of a comedy anthology. Some comedic voices blend together well; these guys, not so much-- everyone's voices were just too different. I remember the second issue being much better, but the series didn’t last very long. Dorkin still makes comics, too rarely; Destefano works on the Venture Bros. now, I think; I don’t know what happened to Badger or Busch, though both have blogs, of course.

Challengers of the Unknown #2 by Steven Grant, Len Kaminski, John Paul Leon, Shawn Martinbrough, and Matt Hollingsworth: Aaah, John Paul Leon working with Matt Hollingsworth-- why doesn’t that happen every week?

This was in a brief era in comics in the mid-90's when everyone was trying to recreate the success of the X-Files television show. DC's solution was a Challengers of the Unknown revamp. I enjoyed it at the time—Grant & Kaminski did done-in-one “weird mystery” stories that Leon & Hollingsworth were suited for more than would always be the case in their later assignments.

But living in something else’s shadow never makes much sense in the long term. I’m no expert on positioning, but-- you know: as fun as Dan McDaid’s art is (and it’s fun), as hard as they try, can Jersey Gods ever be anything besides “that book trying to be Jack Kirby”? Jersey Gods is about Kirby; tango-dancing aside Bang Tango’s first issue didn’t promise anything besides cliched pulp crime fiction; Mysterius is about a Mandrake/Doctor-Who type character; Life & Times of Saviour 28 will likely be compared unfavorably to the current storyline in Captain America, let alone any number of other superhero "deconstruction" stories. An argument can be made here on behalf of The Great Unknown. The Great Unknown at least doesn’t feel assembled from a pop culture erector set, at least. Which isn't to say it succeeds at the whole character/dialogue/plot thing, but...

Of course, The Walking Dead perhaps started out owing some debt to George Romero; Casanova owes a debt to, well, plenty; Umbrella Academy probably pays some small licensing fee to Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol. I don’t know. There’s an expression that “bad artists copy; great artists steal.”

Casual Heroes #1 by Kevin McCarthy: This was a weirdly well-remembered celebrity superhero riff-- very fondly remembered by the few people who caught on to it, though glancing at it now, I don't really know why. The celebrity superhero riff has become old hat since this first came out; maybe it was fresher then. There were rumors that Kevin McCarthy was making comics again a few years back, but I don’t know what became of them.

Super Powers #4 by Jack Kirby, Joey Cavalieri, and Adrian Gonzales: This is terrible shit, a 10-cent bin gamble that never paid off. Jack Kirby draws a cro-magnon Superman fighting the Justice League on the cover, but nothing inside remotely pays off on the promise of that.

Adrian Gonzales draws the interiors. The cover sold the book, though. Jack Kirby. I went with the Jack Kirby hardcover LOSERS collection this week. I’d never seen any of his LOSERS comics, but I love the Kirby HOWLING COMMANDO comics. I'm only a couple issues in; so far, the Losers aren’t quite as cheerfully violent as the Howling Commandos. I like Kirby’s war comics for the violence, but I have a hard time putting the fact that he served in the war out of my head. Kirby almost lost limbs to frostbite, but could still make happy-go-lucky comics about the Losers saving a classical pianist from the Nazis...? These sugary candy-coated explosion-fantasies. But, you know, Lee Marvin made The Dirty Dozen. It's sort of amazing, sort of odd.

According to wikipedia, Kirby’s wife Roz worked in a lingerie store during the war. I’d never read that before today. What were lingerie stores like during World War 2? I never really thought about World War 2 era lingerie stores before, what that shopping experience must have been like.

“Dateline: Normandy. Jerry's nowhere to be found now that our boys landed on their shores. Goodbye, Jerry, say hello to St. Peters. Dateline: New York. Sale on Crotchless Bustiers brings Broadway to its knees-- the bee’s knees. Why, is that Vivian Leigh buying a chiffron babydoll with faux fur trimmed cups, satin bow, and g-string? Those leathers corsets she's buying provide as much support for her, as Liberty war bonds provide support for our boys. Our March to War has been silky smooth thanks to pink-satin corsets with removable straps. What’s that? Francis is getting in on the action, buying a spaghetti-strap fishnet crotchless bodystocking with low-cut, criss-cross backstraps? Thatta boy, Francis! You know who doesn’t likes Lace Deep-V Teddies? That’s right: Adolf Hitler.” Oh god, I could do this all weekend...

And weren’t they rationing fabrics during the war? Was lingerie during World War 2 made out of, what, potatoes? Sex potatoes? I’m guessing Jack Kirby's wife didn't sell very sexy lingerie. Deal with that opinion, nerds. Savage critics.

Anyways, right: comic books. I guess I gave up on my whole first issue plan. It just wasn’t leading me anywhere interesting, and I'm having a better time sticking with Jack Kirby. Same as everybody, I really enjoyed Boom Studios' and Roger Langridge's MUPPET SHOW #1-- I'm not made out of stone. Same as everybody, I liked that they didn't do some "Muppets have a Charles Dickens adventure in Space" bullshit but stuck with the Muppets at their most entertaining: theater-nerds trying to put on a show.

Past that, I’m not finding anything that means anything to me. Whatever inspired these creators to create these particular books, I didn't share in that feeling when I read them. But: I didn't give any of them much of a chance either. If I'm honest about it, I don't think I did. Everyone thinks they're open-minded but... And I don't know why that's the case, why I wouldn't be receptive to what they're selling. They're nerdy books? Well, I'm a nerdy guy so that should be an okay marriage. But: not so much. And it's disconcerting. It’s like being in a hotel-- you’re surrounded by this stuff, and it’s like, “Bed” or “Table”, stuff you like in theory. But they're not right. There’s something not right about them. There’s too many pillows.

The old hat routine: Douglas on a couple of 3/25 comics

THE MUPPET SHOW COMIC BOOK #1: I had some conflicting expectations for this one. I would not have expected a comic book based on a TV variety show inspired by stage vaudeville (and notable for excellent puppetry and famous guest stars) to be up to much good. On the other hand, Roger Langridge, who's writing and drawing it, has never to my knowledge made a comic book that's less than worthwhile--I even kind of liked GROSS POINT. It turns out to be VERY GOOD, I'm happy to say, because it reads less like a solid cartoonist servicing somebody else's trademark than like somebody had the bright idea to let Langridge have some fun with the Muppet characters. It's a Roger Langridge comic through-and-through, even within the strictly formulaic confines of the Muppet Show format--a friend pointed out that almost all the Muppets are only seen from the waist up, puppet-style, although Robin the Frog's eyebrows levitate a couple of inches into the air, comics-style. A few sequences (especially the ones involving rhymes) are straight out of Fred the Clown territory. Which is to say dry, bubbly whimsy: there's something at least kind of amusing in nearly every panel.

It's pretty impressive as a juggling act, actually: there's more of a narrative through-line here than there usually was on the TV show, but Langridge manages to cram in a Muppet News Flash, "Pigs In Space," a climactic musical number, a Statler-and-Waldorf routine, and even some guest stars: an aged pair of "Zimmer Twins" (who seem to owe a little to Dave Sim's Mick 'n' Keef). He also nails the Muppet characters' speech patterns so well you can hear their voices--particularly in a Swedish Chef sequence that's arguably even funnier for having its dialogue written rather than spoken:

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #31: This might be a first: in-story spoilers for a comic that hasn't even been solicited yet. This issue was sold as dealing with "the fallout from FINAL CRISIS," which it does, sort of. But it also follows up on some threads from JUSTICE LEAGUE: A CRY FOR JUSTICE. What's that, you ask? Well, it's the James Robinson-written Justice League series that was announced a year ago, and has now become a miniseries, "coming this July," according to a footnote. Whoops: now we know some of what happens in it.

We also now know what happened in the scenes of FINAL CRISIS where story logic (and visual logic) dictated that Hawkman and Hawkgirl died: they didn't, they just got roughed up a little. Apparently, this was a decision made after those scenes went to press. Dwayne McDuffie posted last month that "I wrote a scene set at their gravesite that I recently had to quickly rewrite into something not very good." He's right; it's not.

As for the rest of the issue, the premise is that the Justice League is failing to accomplish its objectives, which are... Right. So Hal has started another group, to do things more proactively, which is a problem, because the League can't have a situation like, say, Batman with the Outsiders, and... Anyway. Wally, the world's greatest multitasker... Never mind. So they have to disband, because... wait, that was the plot of the end of the previous JLA series... Oh the hell with it. This is not even a story: it's a set of mandated beats to which these characters can't even be tacked without stretching them until they rip. AWFUL.

Hey, Kids! Comics! Reviews for March 25

Yeah, OK, so I lied to both you and myself about my scheduling. I'll be better in the future, I promise. I'll also try to be more... savage... in my criticisms, hopefully regarding some books that aren't *too* obvious of whipping boys. (What's the point of making fun of Ultimatum at this point?)

So yeah, comics!

I read some good comics! And some mediocre comics, and even one utterly, completely, fucking terrible comic, which I will review since there were complaints last time I wasn't "savage" enough. Let's see how we roll now, bitches.

New Avengers #51 Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayamn! First: Billy Tan really isn't very good at all, I'm sorry, and he needs to be put on a book more suited to big whiz-bang action sequences than this. It's the same problem David Finch had with working with Bendis (although then again David Finch found a new home with Jeph Loeb) - he just isn't very good at anything other than stuff that's supposed to make you go, "Damn! That shit is BADASS!" If it's not supposed to be badass - they can't draw it. So it's funny that the most BADASS sequences of this issue went to the immensely talented Chris Bachalo, while Billy Tan got to basically draw the Avengers version of chillin' at your bro's crib smoking a spliff and watching the Battlestar finale. But at least we don't have any blatantly repeated panels, so we're a step above last issue.

That said, the writing - I've talked a while ago on FBB about how I feel like Bendis really works better with long-term plotting, where he can drop shit out of nowhere in an issue where you're expecting standard decompression that just surprises the shit out of you. I won't spoil it for obvious reasons, but there's absolutely one of those moments in this issue, and it was unexpected and genuine and really well-done on Bendis's part. As flawed as the art is, I love these characters and Bendis's plans on them so much that I'd honestly pay $3.99 just for a printed copy of the script if I had to. In the grand scheme of things it's a Very Good chapter of a Good comic.

Amazing Spider-Man #589 Welcome to the Web-Heads, Fred Van Lente! HOPE YOU SURVIVE THE EXPERIENCE (of thousands of dorks emailing you asking when One More Day will be undone)

Siqueira does a good job on the art - he's solid but the dude needs to continue developing his own distinctive style - but it's Van Lente who's the star here, rehabilitating the Spot (from the place he left him in the Super-Villain Team-Up: M.O.D.O.K.'s 11 miniseries) and making a certain joke I won't spoil work that absolutely, positively, definitely should have been the dumbest, nerdiest, most unnecessary reference ever. But in the script - it works, and it works really well, especially with Cory Petit's assistance. Other than that, it's another Good issue of Amazing Spider-Man, which has done a pretty admirable job not being a shitty comic despite having so many chefs in the pot, especially considering the lineup of relative winners they've had since "New Ways to Die."

Immortal Iron Fist #24 Another oneshot interrupting the main story that'll probably be collected in a separate trade, but I don't really care, because the book is just brimming with ideas. I've never read D-Swyz's prose work, but I was a fan of his since I read his first issue of Cable - not because it was especially good, but because all of its problems were symptomatic of getting your brain around the medium, not of a lack of talent in the first place. The potential that I saw has been completely fulfilled since, and his work on Iron Fist - perhaps Marvel's most fertile idea-soil of a franchise in a long time - is what's done that. I mean, a pacifist Iron Fist - when Fraction and Brubaker rebooted the character in 2006, they came up with ideas like Iron Fists with guns and stuff, but the... simple complexity... of a pacifist Iron Fist could lead to any number of stories, one of which is told here and perfectly fits in to the recently-established history of K'un-Lun. Very Good.

Incredible Hercules #127, Captain America #48, Daredevil #117 Do you really need me to tell you these books are pretty great?

Oracle: The Cure #1 So, uh, yeah. This was... a comic? Kevin VanHook said he got this assignment "primarily because [he's] a computer geek." Look, I'm used to some technical inaccuracies in comics like this, I can accept them - when you're dealing with macroscale technology like Ultron or a Mother Box, I'm fully willing to accept some sort of superintelligent or divine variable that I can't fathom. But I work dealing with programming and computer logic, and this is some serious bullshit from both mathematical and logical perspectives. The Anti-Life Equation represented as a set of numerical constants transformed into diamonds that when combined blow someone's head off? Are you fucking serious? Kevin VanHook's script is internally consistent and his dialogue is relatively grounded, but there's a certain fetishistic quality to the book - especially in the shower segment drawn by Julian Lopez - that makes it fail on both the personal/microscale and big-ideas/macroscale levels. Awful.

My Life is Choked with Comics #18 - King Smurf

The Politics of Smurfing

This is the story of the day the Smurfs became terrorists.

***

In 1965, the comics album King Smurf (Le Schtroumpfissime) was released to French-reading audiences. It was drawn by 'Peyo' (Pierre Culliford), the artist and animator who had created the Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs) in 1958 as impish supporting characters for his Johan et Pirlouit medieval adventure series. It was written with Yvan Delporte, editor-in-chief of Le Journal de Spirou, the Belgian comics magazine in which the story had been serialized.

In 1978, the Belgian publisher Dupuis licensed an English translation of the album to Random House -- sans its original back-up story (Schtroumphonie en Ut) -- for simultaneous release in Canada and the United States. As evidenced by the back cover of the U.S. edition, an entire line of English-language Smurfs books had been released (or at least planned) by that time, although the franchise's prolifigate merchandise had only just begun to materialize stateside, its longstanding smash success in Europe not quite yet gone supernova.

In 1981, the animation studio Hanna-Barbera Productions introduced its wildly popular television adaptation of the Smurfs, which ultimately ran for 256 half-hour episodes, until 1990. It was a cultural force. Most of you reading this can still whistle that damned theme song. Yes you can. R1 dvd box sets began appearing in early 2008, although I suspect many viewers were not aware that the little blue characters were approaching their 50th anniversary, or that it all used to be a comic, or that the comic used to be political, sometimes, owing to its time and place.

King Smurf was adapted into an episode of the animated series in its first season. The edges were smoothed down considerably. But then, the Smurf Village is a secret place, and I expect the comic book Smurfs would rather keep a few things to themselves.

***

Our tale begins on a beautiful night in Smurf Village. Papa Smurf, who is totally not a Communist, is up late cooking up some alchemical thing for a no-doubt beneficial purpose.

But wait! Papa is fresh out of the suggestively-named herb "Euphorbium," which is crucial to the success of his project! We're never told what exactly Euphorbium does, or how it ran out, but my current theory connects it to the community service obligations that required Papa's appearance in Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. Anyway, it's obvious this little ritual to Glycon won't work without it.

I do think the whole explosive materials in the lab deal is what's known as 'the pistol in act one,' just a heads up.

As such, Papa takes off the next morning to fetch some herb on "the other smurf of the mountains," where I presume the police helicopters cannot navigate. He asks his Smurfs to "be very smurf" while he's gone, at which point a Smurf smurfs in to suggest a round of smurf, but then Brainy Smurf smurfs in like a smurfwit and starts demanding everyone work on restoring a bridge and shit (smurf). The gang isn't terribly enthused about addressing Smurf Village's longstanding infrastructure problems.

Oh right, "go to smurf," yeah! Did you think me and your elementary school classmates were the only ones to play the 'replace ass with smurf' game? No, I kind of expect that possibility occurred to Peyo approximately three seconds after he and fellow cartoonist André Franquin came up with the Smurf (Schtroumpf) language over dinner, and may indeed have made up the majority of the Schtroumpf-related interactions for the remainder of the week.

You do know the Smurf language, right? And how the different Smurfs have different characteristics, even though they look pretty much the same? Brainy Smurf is slightly more complicated, in that he's both a brain and a total dipshit who's usually wrong about things. He's actually a really good, funny character in this particular comic, a very specific-seeming caricature of (pseudo)intellectual elites as social conformists, trusting in the status quo to reward them for their blustering support while remaining totally clueless to anything outside of their frame of reference.

Naturally, Brainy expects to be hailed leader of the Smurfs, more or less because he figures it's his turn, just for being as brainy as him. This (again) doesn't go over well with the other Smurfs, who eventually opt for their first-ever display of "universal smurffrage." A few kinks in the plan quickly emerge.

The philosophical profundity in the bottom left corner comes from Grouchy Smurf, who boasts one of the more iconographically questionable origins in comics history, having been a sunny Smurf who was bitten by a bug that turned his skin black and made him violent and sour; more and more Smurfs were bitten and made black, until Papa managed to expunge the blackness from Smurf society, although Grouchy was still grouchy afterwards. This all went down in 1963's The Black Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs Noirs), not available in English.

Getting back to the story, a lone anonymous Smurf soon arrives at a startling revelation: if he promises people stuff, they'll vote for him! So, when Brainy Smurf finishes boring some other Smurf to tears via assertions of his Papa-approved greatness, Our Smurf zips in and promises to pass a law outlawing bores - success!

Soon Lazy Smurf is promised a Right-Not-to-Work Bill, Harmony Smurf is promised a position as first trumpet in the Big Smurf Band and Vanity Smurf is complimented on his immense physical beauty. Smurf Prime even makes sure to urge Dopey Smurf to vote for Brainy, trusting that he'll somehow screw it up. Speaking of Brainy, the niceties of the political process seem to have escaped him.

Before long, Smurf (and yes, it's always just VOTE FOR SMURF, since it could be anyone in his position, you see) is having parades in his honor, and delivering hot campaign speeches before inviting the lads out for drinks while Brainy babbles on and on about his status as virtual incumbent to an audience of Grouchy, who hates drinking.

Election day arrives. It's a real nest of vipers, chock-full of thrown-out ballots and rampant fraud; thank heavens there's no appeals in Smurf Village, or we'd still be awaiting the results.

In the end, Smurf-Just-Smurf emerges winner of the farce, with Brainy receiving votes from only himself and Dopey Smurf, who is so phenomenally stupid that he managed to screw up fulfillment of Smurf's intent for him to screw up, paradoxically arriving at the correct result for possibly the first time ever. The total voting population of Smurf Village, by the way, is exactly 100, counting the absentee Papa. I only ask that you dedicate your next trivia night victory to me.

***

If you really want to understand the Smurfs-in-comics, though, just take a look at their feet. Fat, oval lumps, real dinner rolls.

Oh, I'm sure there's some longstanding precident for that look, and it's obviously been used in many places subsequent. But I always associate it with Belgian comics of that period, specifically the tight-knit "Marcinelle school" of Belgian cartooning, named for the town surrounding Dupuis, aesthetically headquartered in the Spirou anthology and bound by blood (and marketing) to always oppose Le Journal de Tintin, home of Hergé and the style that would become known as the ligne claire, the "clear line," after some Dutch guy cooked up a sufficiently catchy name in the '70s.

The Marcinelle school was different, focusing broadly on vigorously cartooned forms and the illusion of movement. Granted, there were several individual departures, including, ironically, the "school's" founder, Joseph "Jijé" Gillain, who eventually developed a distinct oscellation between a clear line-inspired cartoon approach and a polished 'realistic' style, a dichotomy later replicated by his noteworthy pupil, the Frenchman Jean "Moebius" Giraud. But the core identity of the style was nonetheless firm, perfected in the works of André Franquin, the great cartoonist who headed Spirou's flagship series, Spirou et Fantasio, in its mighty golden age.

However, almost nobody in the U.S. has heard of Spirou et/ou Fantasio, whereas everyone over the age of 15 has heard of the Smurfs, and so they are the sealed-in-amber conclusion of the Marcinelle school for many American eyes. And while Peyo was no Franquin, there's something about the uniform chubby roundness of the lil' blue devils that suggests a summary at work, a distillation of accrued cartooning tropes into factory-ready icons, every one perfect, and perfectly ready to adopt specific, isolated attributes: Brainy, Lazy, Grouchy, etc. After all, if you're not going to tend toward realism, as the Tintin school did, you might as well plunge into sheer iconography, the sure symbol of Smurf society.

But that's no secret; it's as plain as your eyes, regardless of your personal awareness as to Papa's seat in Belgian comics history.

No, the mystery is provided by Delporte, who lived until 2007 and wrote a ferocious amount of comics, not to mention his share of scripts for the Smurfs cartoon show. As stated above, though, the Saturday morning iteration tended to be sedate, in spite of the slapstick, while Delporte's Smurf scripts for comics took on an often satirical edge. They were children's comics, sure, but keenly aware of their place in a society owned and operated by adults.

Take, for example, 1973's Smurf Vs. Smurf; I haven't read it (since it's never been translated to English), but Wikipedia's summary suggests that it's a fairly pointed lampoon of the strife between the Dutch-speaking northern region of Belgium (Flanders) and the French-speaking South (Wallonia), as translated to an ongoing Smurf Village argument between the verb-dominant Smurfs (ex: I wanna smurf you like an animal) and their noun-dominant brothers (I wanna fuck you like a smurf). All-out war in the streets soon erupts, leaving Papa to restore peace via the conclusion of the hit comic book and motion picture Watchmen.

I'm serious; the story ends in almost exactly the same general manner as the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons classic, with Papa fabricating a threat by villain and gourmand Gargamel so as to pretty much scare the warring Smurfs into a state of peace. I sure hope Wikipedia isn't pulling my leg, since there's even apparently an ambiguous ending suggesting that the harmony may be short-lived! No word on whether Grouchy Smurf narrates from a journal kept of the story's events, or if any right-wing publications discover it in the end.

***

But oh, dear readers, trouble soon arrives in the fair Smurf municipality. The freshly-elected Smurfy Smurf hustles into his room to change into a little something he'd obviously been working on for a while: a brand-new footy pants 'n cap combo, forged from pure gold. Or, colored in that manner, unsuccessfully.

Undeterred, Our Man declares that all shall henceforth refer to him as King Smurf, resulting in highly respectful peals of laughter. No matter: when Harmony Smurf pops into the His Majesty's office to collect on his Big Smurf Band promise, King Smurf gives him a really fancy title (First Chief Head Spokesman), outfits him with a drum, and sends him out to announce that all Smurfs will respect and obey, or face terrible consequences.

This prompts Hefty Smurf (who is strong) to bust into the King's room to kick his ass. But King Smurf knows what desires lurk in a powerful Smurf's heart.

In mere minutes, Hefty has lined up an honor guard of fellow Smurfs, armed with deadly blades. Brainy can't believe he wasn't picked. Tiring of his shabby digs, King Smurf decides to put the rest of the village to work building him a rightly awesome palace. Sensing another authority figure whom he can leap behind, Brainy takes up his tools while the guards round up the rest of the Smurfs. The reign of terror has begun.

Yes, forced labor is the new rule of the day! Smurfs now live as slaves, worked to the bone under threat of death! The rule of law is useless too, and inequality reigns supreme; poor Jokey Smurf gets hauled before His Eminence for pulling off one of his knee-slapping 'exploding gift' tricks on a guard, and comes face to hideously singed face with the new double standard.

Sending a man to jail for innocently detonating a bomb in someone's face in the name of fun is step #5 or #6 down the road to totalitarianism, as I've personally mentioned to several magisterial district judges, so you can imagine the uproar in the Smurf community following Jokey's arrest and detention. But a march on the palace only leads the Smurfs to be held back at speartip, and the crowd is soon dispersed. Is there no hope left in this town?

Under the cover of night, a shadow falls across a mushroom house. A cloaked figure evades the evening patrol. He knocks on a door, whispers a password, and enters. Then descends. There's friends waiting, under the earth.

La résistance! De weerstand! A regular White(-Hatted) Brigade! Smurfs should not fear their government - the government should fear its Smurfs!!

No time at all is wasted. The Secret Smurf Society drugs a guard, busts into the prison and runs like hell to the woods beyond the village. Brainy Smurf, no doubt anticipating a change in the winds, happens to be with them, and also manages to be the only one caught. For the remainder of the comic, he'll occasionally get a one-panel cut to his prison cell, in which he'll ponder when his friends will be around to break him out and hail him as a hero. Nobody will ever come.

That's probably the most powerful lesson a young person can take from the Smurfs: don't be an asshole.

***

The politics of King Smurf in particular -- or at least its deep-seated distrust of political mechanisms -- likewise had some probable correlation with the adult life of Belgium surrounding its creation.

After all, both Peyo and Delporte were born in 1928, positioning their individual comings-of-age directly against the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, in which many citizens were shipped away for use as forced labor in the Nazi machine. It's extraordinarily easy to see those rebel Smurfs' covert activities as reminiscent of the many factions of the Belgian resistance, often squirreled away in the woods, spiriting away downed pilots and evading capture to subvert another day.

However, this reading seems insufficient, since neither Belgians nor Smurfs elected Adolph Hitler, who was not specifically a king. No, Belgian had a king of its own, Leopold III, a controversial man in those days of struggle. It had been less than three weeks since the German invasion of May, 1940, when the King of the Belgians announced the nation's surrender, without the approval of the legislature. Compounding the difficulty, Leopold III chose to remain in Belgium under the occupation, while the civil government eventually repositioned itself in London, outside the village of mushrooms, although unsuccessful overtures were made to construct full occupational governance in Belgium.

This resulted in a duly anarchic state of affairs, with the Belgian monarch and legislature-in-exile declining to entirely recognize one another's authority, neither body cooperating with the Nazis and their military government, and various aspects of the resistance -- necessarily separated by language, remember -- sometimes operating to their own ends.

Interestingly, though, from this chaos grew the might of the Marcinelle school, the home of the Smurfs. Imported comics became inaccessible, leaving gaps to be filled; Jijé drew a considerable amount of Spirou's content in those days, including a few off-label episodes of the American comics the magazine was running at the time, like Superman. By the time the war ended, Jijé had the authority to appoint younger artists like Franquin to fill slots, thus seeding the future of Spirou in the trodden dirt of war. Peyo followed several years later, having met Franquin & company as a teenage animator during the occupation.

Still, formative an artistic age as it was, it couldn't have been the best time for instilling pride in civic coordination in a pair of young men, to say nothing of respect for His Majesty, who was deported by the German military government in 1944, and, following the end of the war, settled in Switzerland while the returned Belgian government set about determining whether he was a literal traitor (A: no). His eventual return to the domain in 1950 was marked with violence and civil disoedience, particularly in the Wallonia region, and he abdicated the throne in 1951.

Yet while it's probably not a stretch to position Peyo's & Delporte's vision of governance-as-free-for-all as purely a product of the domestic upheaval which, in its way, brought them to the place they were, there were separate breakdowns going on as the comic itself was drawn, farther away, but still close.

***

King Smurf is on edge after the jailbreak, and his enforcers are attentive to even the slightest departure from the usual. Still, Smurfs sometimes manage to slip away from the village, trusting that their faith won't get them killed by their exiled brothers out in the trees.

Serious shit those Smurfs are into. Covert activities have been sowing the seeds of discord in the village too:

Yes, they're threatening to kill him. Or, I dunno, maybe "Smurf to King Smurf" means "Voter Recall to King Smurf"; I don't even know how you read those things. Is it subtle shifts in the handwriting? A perfect in the 'S' the difference between libel and reverence? Oh the debates I have with my anime hug pillows!

Regardless, King Smurf clearly gets the message, and opts to put a crack forestry investigatory together the only way he knows how: by appealing to everyone's basest instincts.

I really do truly love that this comic is aimed squarely at kids. There's no respect for anything at all in here. Not military service, not heads of state, not the fundamentals of democracy... it's great! It's awesome, noisy slapstick paired up with bizarre fits of witty sophistication, all in a crispy pretzel cone of rampant anti-authoritarianism. How could the cartoon get so fucking saccharine? Smurfs have teeth! Shit out in the woods? It bites you.

So, King Smurf leads his decorated fellows out into the forest to smoke out the rebels. What results can best be described as a rib-tickling military quagmire (aren't they all?), with people falling into holes, getting soaked with water and opening strange gifts in the middle of nowhere to unhappy conclusions.

The campaign is a disaster. King Smurf and his men turn tail and retreat as the rebels laugh and jeer. Defections are evident. Still defiant, King Smurf declares that all Smurfs shall now join the military or face jail. A wall is erected around the Smurf Village. Nobody gets in or out.

A message from the other side is delivered.

Abdicate, Your Highness, or draw your sword. The King of the Smurfs opts for the latter.

It's time to get down to some serious killing.

***

Belgium's colonialist disposition was in for a shift as World War II ended. For our purposes, some symbolism can be dragged from the work of Hergé, whose Tintin in the Congo contained several unconcerned references to the colony's status as such in its 1931 initial printing, which were removed by the artist in an extensive 1946 revision.

Outside of comics, pressure for Congolise self-government was building as the '50s moved forward; riots erupted in 1959 upon Belgian prohibition of a meeting by the increasingly formidable ethnic association ABAKO, resulting in some allowance for Congolise participation in governance, and the subsequent formation of dozens of political parties.

Events passed with tremendous speed. Plans to transition the colony into independence compressed, and free elections were held in May of 1960. The Mouvement National Congolais-Lumumba performed well, and the formal handover of power occurred on June 30, 1960. However, not a week later, a mutiny broke out against remaining foreign military officers, leading to the entrance of the Belgian army and, by August, the secession of two areas -- the mining-rich province of Katanga, still close to Belgian industry, and the region of South Kasai -- and the intervention of the United Nations. This situation (and I'm wildly simplifying here) also led to prime minister Patrice Lumumba requesting aid from the Soviet Union to press into Kasai, after which strife exploded in the parliment and army chief of staff Joseph Mobutu, with support from the American CIA, ultimately took power in a military coup.

The struggle continued through the 1960s. In 1964, the year King Smurf began serialization, violent rebellions broke out, which again saw involvement by Belgium and the U.S. In 1965, the year the comic was published in a collected edition, Mobutu (who had previously suspended the parliment) launched a second coup and prohibited all political organizations save for his. This was the backdrop for the story's creation and release, in addition to the bloody division of Ruanda-Urundi into Rwanda & Burundi. The motif of elections leading to conflict seems perhaps informed by such current events.

Naturally, the comic's satire isn't directly on point. I speculate. And frankly, a noxious reading is possible from that perspective, a clucking of the tongue at those silly Smurfs thinking they can run things without the undemocratic wisdom of Papa around - my god, can names get any more paternalistic than "Papa"?

Yet maybe I'm wrong to look to the Smurf's feet for their secrets. Maybe the answer to everything is on top of their heads.

Those wilted cone things aren't their skulls, you know; they're Phrygian caps, and I'm not talking gallbladders. I mean headgear of antiquity, used in ancient Greek art as a symbol of foreignness, and in Roman culture as an accoutriment of freedom, worn by freedmen. Sometimes there was a martian connotation; if you should even encounter a Smurf running at you quoting Horace in Latin at the top of his lungs, the meaning will be clear. The caps were later adopted by the American and French Revolutions for their long-built association with liberty. The red cap was preferred, but putting Papa and his Smurfs together gives you something cumulative: the colors of both lands, red, white and blue.

And if indeed the Smurfs, as icons, as drawings, as mentioned above, are a distillation of accrued cartooning tropes, perfectly molded identities upon which endless human characteristics can be imprinted, the widest exposure of the Marcinelle school, grown from the dirt of World War II and wearing liberty caps and fighting in the midst of a democratic collapse in a time of post-colonialist democratic collapse, then - isn't their uniformity especially and awfully human? Isn't there a metaphor at work in these blue gnomes born it seems with freedom atop their brows?

Doesn't everyone want to be actualized? To be in control of themselves? And don't we still fall into groups, communities of desire or necessity, to our benefit and peril?

That's the real conflict of Smurf village, illustrated in King Smurf. To long to stand for yourself, but for individuality to be your downfall, and to become a collective, all again for freedom; resistance, rebellion, subjugation. Liberty atop the brow, all Smurf underneath, just lose Brainy's glasses and shave Papa's beard.

Er, and there's Smurfette, I guess, but she's not in this comic, and that's another story.

***

Thus:

What more needs to be said?

Do note, though, that while the Smurfs hold clubs and rocks and spears and things, and sometimes bite one another's asses, most of the actual warfare goes on via the not-very-deadly tomato, which Peyo nonetheless uses for maximum graphic detail, red on white. It's an impressive balancing act, maintaining an appropriateness for children while getting the point across without a lot of obfusication. I mean:

As the battle rages, some hot-blooded patriot gets the bright idea to raid Papa's lab, which we've long ago established contains a lot of explosive materials, no doubt stockpiled for the revolution Papa won't be heading, in that he is not a Communist. The bomb is lit, and chucked into the palace, and in a glorious flash of victory the walls of the oppressor come falling, mostly around Brainy Smurf, who was still locked inside. Ah, he's a big guy, he can take it.

Before long, the war's conclusion is certain. The final press is made. No quarter given. We're gonna see what color a Smurf bleeds. This had to happen. This is how you water a society.

And then, Papa walks in, before anyone's head seriously loses track of its shoulders. He's unhappy to an extent that even a green sack full of Euphorbium cannot counteract, not that he'd ever try that stuff.

I like the pike driven through the red-stained home on the left; they should have ended more episodes of the Get Along Gang with images like that.

Yep, with Papa back in town, order is soon restored. King Smurf volunteers to clean up the village all by himself, but soon every Smurf is jumping in to help. Everyone is happy, and democracy is rightfully relegated to the scrap heap of bad ideas. I mean, nobody comes out and says that, no, but it's not left unclear that Smurf Village probably won't be seeing another election day for a quite a while; what's the need, with Papa back? I mean it: the comic concludes with the heroes rejecting democracy and it's a happy ending.

All right, ok, but what are the Smurfs? Politically? Like, isn't this a weaselly ending, the whole book talking all sorts of shit about the perils of authority and then spinning around and having the Smurfs just agree with whatever Chairman Papa says?

Jesus, 'Papa' does have that paternalist bite.

Which makes sense, because, on the surface, not as icons, not symbols or allegories, without thinking about it too hard - the Smurfs are children, in the way their audience is children. And surely children need to listen to their parents when it's time to go to bed.

But that's the only authority this comic nods toward as valid. The parent, calling an end to playtime, and scolding the kiddies for acting like "human beings," which we might as well call adults, specifically the adults a child witnesses beyond their parents' adoration. Don't grow up to be like them. Don't make their mistakes.

Someday they'll be old enough to know their parents hold some responsibility. Until then, you know what they can do with the shit stupid robes of those awful motherfuckers?

Sadly, this wouldn't be the final conflict to bedevil the good Smurf Village.

***

In 2005, a certain commercial for UNICEF aired on European television.

Produced with the agreement of the family of Peyo, who died in 1992, the short piece depicted happy, dancing Smurfs and their delightful music annihilated by aerial bombing, their shouts of terror giving way the the squeals of Baby Smurf, a future bomb-thrower, an anticipatory gunman aimed, in potential, toward the next village, the next nation, sitting in the center of a heap of blue corpses, their faces blackened in that Marcinelle manner.

Witnessing this terrible scene, it is not difficult to imagine the tiny Smurfling growing to find a mask and wear it, and hide among the trees. This time it won't be tomatoes, and there's no Papa left to stop it.

The ad campaign was initiated to raise money for the rehabilitation of child soldiers in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the former colonies of Belgium.

And history's great burden is that it never does end.

***

Nothing ever seems to end.

Favorites: The Last Lonely Saturday

The Last Lonely Saturday Jordan Crane, writer/artist Red Ink, 2000 Currently available from Fantagraphics 80 pages, softcover or hardcover $8

I find it both impossible and undesirable to separate The Last Lonely Saturday from the pivotal role it played in my life as a comics reader, and thus in my life in general. During the year 2001 I took a job as an editor at the A&F Quarterly, Abercrombie & Fitch's big giant magazine/catalog/softcore porn hybrid publication. My boss there, Savas Abadsidis, was and is a big fanboy, and a chance encounter with a Wizard magazine on his desk, which contained an article teasing an upcoming revamp of the X-Men by Grant Morrison (whom I remembered favorably from my days as a comics reader in high school for Arkham Asylum) and Frank Quitely, led me into Jim Hanley's Universe on 33rd Street to track down the series. This was the first time I'd entered a comic shop to purchase anything that wasn't either an isolated Acme Novelty Library, Savage Dragon, or Frank Miller comic in years--the birth of my modern comics readership. (The rest of the story after the jump...)

Intrigued by the offerings on hand, and empowered by a complete lack of editorial oversight that enabled us to write about anything we wanted in the Quarterly--not to mention Abercrombie's expense account--I made a solemn vow to buy something completely unfamiliar to me every week. Jordan Crane's The Last Lonely Saturday was one of my first such purchases. From there it was a short journey to Crane's anthology NON, his distributor Highwater Books, the Fort Thunder aesthetic in general, and thence all of alternative comics.

None of that was likely to happen if I didn't just love The Last Lonely Saturday to pieces. And that itself might seem unlikely. It's a slight book--many of its 80 pages are endpapers, and the rest contain all of two panels apiece. Dialogue is minimal; the majority of it of it comes from a little boy's triplet proclamations: "It's a man," "Look man run," "Ha ha! Windy!" It has a simple red, white, and orange color scheme. Although a ghost is involved and a character dies, we're pretty far from the violent morality plays that make up much of Crane's recent work.

What The Last Lonely Saturday is is a love story, a romantic fable. To some eyes, it might be a creepy one at that. In the tradition of the Police's "Every Breath You Take," albeit in something of a gender reversal from that song, Saturday could be looked at as a depiction of the role fixation and selfishness, even emotional violence, frequently play in love. But just as the sweeping, insistent, intimate, evocative sound of "Every Breath You Take" make it one of the great love songs regardless of the obsessive lyrics, so too the particulars of The Last Lonely Saturday make it pretty much the best love story in comics form I've ever come across. Crane's character designs are at their most adorable here. His jolly little potato-shaped protagonist, with his rumpled suit and charmingly crinkled brow, looks like the grandpa of our collective unconscious made real. His beloved Elenore's jaunty hairdo, long eyelashes, and high-wattage smile evoke beauty and charm that transcends her cartoony form, while her two lines of flashback dialogue upon receiving flowers from her beau ("Oh sweet heart! They're just lovely!") nail me to the floor with sweetness every time. Everything seems airy--leaves and papers float and twirl in the breeze, the little old man's car jauntily jumps along the road, puffy white clouds are a constant presence in the background--until, at the story's moment of truth, Crane weighs down his line and crumples his art toward the center of the panel. I'm a huge, huge sucker for emotionally devastated old men, so imagine my utter joy when our hero is granted a reunion with his dear Elenore! (Think the video for Blur's "Coffee & TV" and you've pretty much got it.) At that point, it doesn't matter to me how it happened--that it did happen is what's important, and that Elenore understands that is what makes this a great love story, in that it appreciates that what can seem unpleasant to outsiders is, within that world of two, an act of grace. It's an intelligent, moving, beautiful, terrific little comic.

Okay, so you're a rocket scientist: Diana on 3/12

Mr. Kyle Baker, you got some 'splainin' to do. I hate to start reviews with that God-awful cliche "I liked his old stuff better!" but for context's sake, WHY I HATE SATURN still makes me laugh. I say that because I think I picked up and read SPECIAL FORCES expecting the same kind of manic energy you'll find with Anne Merkel and her crazy sister, or with Larry running amok in the streets of New York in I DIE AT MIDNIGHT.

SPECIAL FORCES #4... did not make me laugh.

It may be that I'm just sick of politics-via-comics in general: in a medium where subtlety is the exception rather than the rule, I can't think of many instances where political/military criticism didn't come off as awkward and simplistic, where valid points are submerged under a wave of bile that aspires to be clever and falls far short of the mark (pick a Millar comic, any Millar comic).

Or it may be that SPECIAL FORCES seems to be making contradictory points: on the one hand, Felony and Zone represent an implicit accusation that the United States Army recruited people for the Iraq war who had no business on the battlefield. Baker helpfully attaches news articles describing the recruitment and eventual dismissal of an autistic teenager to demonstrate that there's a bit of truth in this fiction.

On the other hand, these "unfit soldiers" turn out to be as capable (if not moreso) of getting the job done. Doesn't that suggest that the Army was right to enlist them in the first place? If an autistic kid succeeds where entire squadrons of trained soldiers fail (in pretty embarrassing ways), that sends a very different message and doesn't quite match the critical tone Baker's aiming for.

But there's something more essential that's missing here. The situation in Iraq is no laughing matter, and yet I can't help wishing that SPECIAL FORCES had exhibited more of Baker's snark and wit - as it stands, it's pretty much just an EH story that tries to send a message far too aggressively to be successful.

X-MEN: NOIR #4 also came out this week, wrapping up Marvel's first foray into what seems to be a rising Noirverse (although I'm still curious as to how DAREDEVIL: NOIR will distinguish itself from Ed Brubaker's DAREDEVIL: POORLY-LIT URBAN CRIMEFIGHTING WITH FEMME FATALES, CORRUPT COPS AND CRIME SYNDICATES).

This sort of thing can be very tricky to pull off: the last time Marvel tried to import its universe to a different historical period/genre, we got 1602 and its spin-offs, most of which was spent playing Spot The Analogue.

Fortunately, Fred Van Lente avoids this trap by putting together a rather clever string of adaptations: I liked the idea of mutants being swapped out for sociopaths, with the Xavier/Magneto ideological schism taking on a decidedly more realistic dimension. I loved Van Lente's take on Anne-Marie (Rogue) and the resolution to her storyline. The Bolivar Trask/Sentinels prose story ends up with a different moral than you might be expecting.

In fact, the only problem I had with this miniseries is that the X-Men aren't the protagonists: the story's focalized through and narrated by a completely different character (who may or may not be an analogue for a mainstream Marvel figure, it's rather difficult to tell), and that leads us to a confusing last-minute twist ending that didn't really work for me. It's still VERY GOOD, though, and one of the few examples of a cross-genre experiment that successfully adapts superhero characters into other molds and conventions.

Kramers Ergot 7

A lot of comics were the subject of controversy in 2008: Ice Haven, Memin Pinguin (remember that?), that one comic where the dog ate the teenagers. Surprisingly, alt comix anthology Kramers Ergot 7 was arguably the most controversial comic of them all. The issue was not the content (though much of it would scandalize those who were offended by Ice Haven), but the price of the book. Some of the controversy came from those who supported (or who were at least familiar with) the anthology series and its contributors, but who regretted the high ($125) price point. Others came from people who had apparently never heard of the series, or who had little interest in the sorts of comics which had been featured in previous volumes of Kramers Ergot.

By the time Kramers Ergot 7 actually came out, however, the furor had mostly subsided. It's almost too bad that the controversy didn't happen closer to the book's release, because the actual content of KE7 hasn't actually received nearly as much attention as its price point. And since the only thing which could justify the high price is good content, it seems like a relevant issue. Kramers Ergot 7 was the most anticipated comic of the year for many people, including myself. How did reality stack up to expectation? The answer, along with my best attempt at providing some art samples (this thing's way too big for my scanner, and our digital camera/the person operating it aren't ideal), comes after the break.

Usually anthologies are all over the place in terms of quality and content, but that's surprisingly untrue for Kramers Ergot 7. This volume boasts an incredible roster of cartoonists, including several best-of-their-generation types, folks who your more literate friends and acquaintances might have actually heard of. Thousands of New York Times readers are familiar with Seth, Chris Ware, Jaime Hernandez, and Dan Clowes from their contributions to the Sunday "Funny Pages" section. And while Adrian Tomine hasn't had anything appear in the NYT (yet), he fits in with this group pretty well (surely you remember this picture from, you guessed it, the New York Times). These cartoonists' contributions to KE7 are, for the most part, the sort of thing that would appeal to the audiences they've built over the last decade or so. Ware's story is actually a continuation of his NYT work, while Seth has another contemplation of the Canada of yesterday (though it's not nearly as bittersweet--or as good--as George Sprott). Tomine's story fits pretty neatly within the niche he's carved out as well.

I found Hernandez' and Clowes' contributions the more interesting from this group. Hernandez' story is one of the denser single-pagers in the book (and there are a lot of dense single-page stories in KE7), a frantic, entertaining study of memory and sentimentality. Clowes' story, "Sawdust," is excellent, effectively a counterpoint to his equally good NYT story, Mister Wonderful. There's a real similarity between the protagonists--age, stream-of-conscious narration, desire for romance--but this is a much darker, even noirish work. I don't think Clowes has written many lines funnier than "Lucky for me, he couldn't dig a grave for shit!"

Daniel Clowes

But the most famous cartoonist featured in KE7 is unquestionably Matt Groening. I was as surprised as anyone to see him announced as a contributor, but his single page strip is one of the best in the book. Groening produces an homage to this illustration, but with a focus on Southern Californian despair which should be eminently familiar to anyone who's read Life in Hell over the past few decades. "River of Unsold Screenplays" replaces "Failure," "Grad School/No Escape" replaces "Charlatanism," and so forth. It's no bleaker than "Love is Hell" or "School is Hell," but the context is so much different now than in the 1980s. These days, Groening effectively represents the best case scenario for the modern alternative cartoonist. If anyone knows anything about the "Road to Success," it's Matt Groening, so it's rather dispiriting to see a long slide labeled "Disappointing sales of second album, novel, play or film." And you have to kind of wince at a series of spider webs spun by "Psycho Exes," or a cliff labeled "ungrateful children." (Simpsons fans might make note of a balloon labeled "Crackpot cult religion, you know the one.") It's a great encapsulation of Groening's Life In Hell, and one of the best cartoons of his career.

And that about does it for the very famous people, though there are plenty of other contributors who are well-known within comics circles. Ivan Brunetti plays with the book's mammoth size by forcing the reader to turn it upside down to finish his story--the joke's on us, since this thing weighs about as much as a St. Bernard. Kevin Huizenga does something similar with his page. Kim Deitch basically distills his story from Pictorama into three pages, but it's worth the repetition to see all his incredible bottle cap designs--or are they replicas? I have to admit some ignorance of the bottlecap collecting hobby here, but they're really nice, charming drawings either way. Ben Katchor contributors two stories about architecture in his imagined New York; if that sounds good, you won't be disappointed when you read them. Richard Sala's single page is mostly a showcase for his gorgeous art and character design (we're talking monsters and villains in vibrant watercolor here).

Richard Sala

The lesser-known contributors bring just as much--probably more--to the table, plus they provide the book with some degree of aesthetic and thematic coherence. When you flip through Kramers Ergot 7 for the first time, you're not struck by the star-studded lineup so much as the barrage of colors from story to story. Given the dimensions of the book, it's practically an assault on the eyes. Many of the contributors work in limited palettes, making KE7 a staggering visual experience. Stories by Sala, Dan Zettwotch, Frank Santoro, Blex Bolex, Anna Sommer, and Helge Reumann are especially noteworthy; the blue and red motif is particularly popular (and effective). Deitch's soothing pastels and Ben Jones and PShaw's multi-tiered, multi-hued contributions also stand out.

Blex Bolex

Once you actually start reading Kramers Ergot 7, you might also notice how many of the contributors have produced work dealing with the fantastic. Perhaps inspired by the towering dimensions of the book, a good many of these cartoonists turn to religion and mythology in particular. Several reviews have cited Tom Gauld's four page retelling of Noah's Ark as a highlight of KE7, and justifiably so. I've long admired Gauld's work, and it's never looked better than it does here. Gauld takes advantage of the book's size as well as anyone, using large panels to underscore the surprise of Noah's sons in finding their father wasn't just a senile old weirdo. The dense linework is stunning, reminiscent of Edward Gorey in the larger panels.

Tom Gauld

Other contributors' stories explore religion in a more general sense. The first of Conrad Botes' two stories is sort of like a pantheistic Book of Job, only without any reward at the end for the protagonist. There are a lot of horrific images inKE7, but Botes' depiction of a series of divine punishments is particularly unnerving. John Brodowski's single page story is one of the best examples of dark humor in the book, dealing with the ill-fated resurrection of an arctic traveler. Joe Daly's cold, precise drawings depict a disturbing creation myth, with bizarre creatures with enormous phalli emerging from the ocean and raping the land-dwellers, who immediately gives birth to a swarm of offspring. Anders Nilsen, Shary Boyle, and David Heatley contribute stories of a similar ilk.

Conrad Botes

There's also a great deal of surreal fantasy in Kramers Ergot 7. CF delivers a two-page strip which will appeal to those who enjoy his Powr Mastrs series. Will Sweeny works in roughly the same territory, imbuing his tale of monster invasion with very cool character design and beautiful, gossamer linework. Matthew Thurber chronicles Brian Eno's work producing an album of songs written by the resurrected corpse of Michael Hutchence. (I'm struggling to explain exactly how much weirder (and better) the actual strip is than that description.) Florent Ruppert and Jerome Mulot's two-page story is surreal and highly effective; the large panels convey the enormity of a staircase which various figures are scaling. And the art, black and white with hundreds of evenly-spaced, short, vertical lines, really stands out in a book filled with violent displays of color.

Ruppert and Mulot

Matt Furie's story is handsome and disturbing, particularly for those who have read Boy's Club--the good-natured anthropomorphic burnouts are now killing and enslaving each other. Ted May's "Cradle of Frankenstein" has a more straightforward narrative than many of these stories, but the layout is daring, every bit as good as you'd expect from someone who included a Slade-themed pinball machine in the last issue of Injury (RIP).

Matt Furie

Probably the best of KE7's fantasy comics--and actually probably the best thing in the book, period--is Josh Simmons' extremely dense 3-page comic, "Night of the Jibblers." The pacing is extraordinarily effective, building a great deal of tension for two payoffs, each of which floored me for very different reasons. Just as remarkable are the Jibblers, some of the most memorable creatures I've ever seen on a comics page. No spoilers here; you really need to read this story if you have any interest in the genre. I'm not at all exaggerating when I say it's one of the best horror comics I've ever read. I'm now wondering if Josh Simmons might be the most underrated active cartoonist in the world.

Two other contributions bear special mention. While not rooted in fantasy per se, Gabrielle Bell's deconstruction of the espionage genre is a career highlight. By eliminating any trace of motivation from the protagonist, Bell exposes the absurdity of the spy thriller, while simultaneously distilling its appeal to its base elements (eg, exotic settings and murder). The monotony of the 8 x 8 grid enhances the effect. It reminds me a great deal of Richard Sala's shorter work, except Bell plays it the whole thing perfectly straight.

Editor Sammy Harkham provides as fitting a cover for Kramers Ergot 7 as one could hope for. The image depicts a post-apocalyptic colony, but it's somewhat unusual in that it's less of a wasteland and more of an idyllic pastoral. Storefronts on what used to be a city street are coated with vines and moss, but life continues to thrive; young women sit in communion with nature (one's even hugging a deer). Harkham's cover hints at the nature of the culture these human survivors have constructed. First, they're all female; the lone male figure is a cadaver in a car which is in the process of being coated in green. All the women are unclothed, except one figure who appears to be receiving oral sex from another figure (whose genitals are obscured by a group of passing ducks, adding a further note of ambiguity--maybe there are men in this world after all?). Only one storefront isn't covered in vines; rather than a store name, there is an ambiguous image which might possibly be of religious significance. Water is flowing out of its window display. The most dominant aspect of the composition is the black sky, taking up the top third of the picture and making the whole image quite ominous.

Sammy Harkham

It's a terrific illustration, and an appropriate one in a few of ways. Like many of the stories within the pages of KE7, the cover is extraordinarily dense, providing a great deal of narrative meat in what amounts to a single panel. Furthermore, the image of a post-apocalyptic city street inhabited by naked women and wildlife actually gives you a good idea of what you'll find within: haunting, off-kilter fantasy. Finally, one of the women is reading the comics section of a newspaper upside down, thus undercutting the grandiosity of the whole Kramers Ergot project.

That's the thing which might surprise all those who were inexplicably angered by the very thought of a $125 anthology: this is not a pretentious, ponderous book. Many of the stories are quite funny. Johnny Ryan's strip, "My Sexy History," mocks the most famous work by fellow contributor David Heatley--which itself appeared in a previous volume of Kramers Ergot. And it comes a mere three pages after Heatley's story in this volume!

Kramers Ergot 7 is, for my money (all $125 of it!), the best anthology of the last decade. It's also the most impressive monument to comics as a form of art. Those enormous pages do absolutely make a difference, both for the opportunities it provides the cartoonists and the overwhelming effect on the reader. Several contributors turn in the best work of their careers. I only wish I could afford to buy a copy for Alan David Doane.

Batman, where art thou?

BATMAN: BATTLE FOR THE COWL #1: I had somewhere between low and no expectations for this. Ultimately, it would seem to be a placeholder of a comic: it seems unlikely, given what we know, that the "battle" will end up with any other than Brucie-boy back in control.

Like many DC comics, this feels needlessly brutal -- people getting eaten and blown apart and Underage Jailbait Unattached Feet and all of that; and, like many DC comics, this feels oddly unattached from continuity -- the Birds of Prey are disbanded in their own comic, and together here; this wouldn't appear to be post-FINAL CRISIS (though I guess it could be), and so on.

It also repeats several Been There, Done That plot points: blah blah someone brings the b-list villains together; blah blah, warring gangs fight over the Batman-less pie (though I liked the pig mask guys, that was cute); blah blah Arkham explodes (how many times does that make?); blah blah someone who Gets It Wrong is usurping Batman's costume; and so on.

But despite that, the execution is perfectly adequate. There's a basic attempt to give different characters different personalities. And there's at least somewhat of a mounting urgency in the narrative.

This is journeyman work -- perfectly acceptable in all ways, if not especially thrilling. And while I could have lived without the $4 price tag, at least there are 30 story pages, so the math isn't completely heinous. But it is hard to work up any real feelings about it either way: a textbook example of an OK comic book.

But you know who really should be the next Batman? Jon Stewart.

No, no, not the Green Lantern. Sheesh.

I was just very impressed with Stewart's assault on CNBC and Jim Cramer this whole week, and the face-to-face interview last night was absolutely riveting television. Stewart just plain HAMMERED Cramer, but did it without screaming or ranting or using much else other than reason and a plea for ethical conduct.

Jon Stewart is an American treasure, and his sense of Justice is just a soaring stalwart thing.

I wish we had ten of him.

-B

Look, Up In The Sky! It's The Not-As-Bad-As-You-Thought Superman Revamp!

When DC announced that they were sending Superman off-planet for an entire year, and taking him out of both the Action and Superman titles in doing so, I have to admit, I was somewhat skeptical. If, by skeptical, we all agree I mean "derisively snarky." But the proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and apparently this pudding isn't as doughy as I expected.

Wait, was that me taking the metaphor too far?

I admit, I skipped out on the second half of "New Krypton" when the first half left me more than a little bored, and planned to do the same for the Superbooks' new 2009 status quo; if it wasn't for getting comp copies of SUPERMAN: WORLD OF NEW KRYPTON #1 and ACTION COMICS #875, I wouldn't have even given the storyline(s) a second thought... and maybe that would've been better for my budget, because I have to admit being more sucked in than I would want to be by what I saw. Don't get me wrong, I still think there's an element of wrong-headedness to what's going on - Why would you take the character Superman out of the comic Superman and then create a new comic for him to star in, for one thing - but it's done with such... I don't know, shamelessness? Panache? Smugness? that I can't help but want to find out what the endgame is.

You see, that's what really won me over. Not the fine art by Pete Woods (although, I admit, I liked the sketchier style he used on "Up, Up and Away") and Eddy Barrows, although both WONK and Action look wonderful and the best they have in awhile. No, it's the way that, reading both books pretty much back-to-back reminded me, more than anything of reading 52. The way that they both felt like chapters in a larger story, but one that's (a) actually going somewhere, and (b) going somewhere that isn't immediately obvious. That 52-esque feeling is helped, of course, by the shout-outs to continuity (The reveal of Nightwing's identity in particular works much better than I'd expected it to, and I loved that you find out who he is, but not necessarily why he is) and the strong scripting of Greg Rucka (on Action, and co-writing WONK). Even if you're not as easily pulled in to what's happening in the two series, you still have to marvel (ha?) at the way that both issues are written, balancing exposition and narrative in such a skillful way (Admittedly, WONK #1 is still a little too "And this is the set-up" heavy for my liking) that you can pretty much pick the books up cold (or, like me, having skipped the last few months of what came before) and still not be lost, but without feeling that anything has been sacrificed to help you get there.

Of course, everything could still go to shit in the next year or so, but then, that was always a possibility with 52, as well. For now, though, I'm as surprised by anyone that I'm onboard the Supertrain through 2009, but WONK #1 was a low Good and Action #875 was just plain Good. Who saw that coming, even with telescopic vision?

Turning it off: Hibbs is done with HEROES

Oh, I know I should have done it before -- really, at the end of the first season -- but I've finally deleted HEROES from my DVR recording schedule.

Oddly, it wasn't the inanity of the plots: between this week's scenes of the "bad ass" fed trying to turn super-powered people into suicide bombers (Ut? why would anyone, anywhere, draw a line between an explosives vest and the powers?), and the Sylar-finds-his-dad-then-doesn't-DO-anything, I would certainly have been justified.

No, it is the comics shop scenes.

I let the first one pass without comment ("Oog! A Gurl!?!? We don't get any of those in here!") because I was hoping it was a momentary lack of reason, and it would never be mentioned again, but this week they decided that Claire should work at the comics store, and they packed it full of sweaty nervous uber-geeks, panting and drooling over her.

To quote my sainted Irish mother: Nigga, PLEASE!

I've been in a whole god-damn lot of comics shops in my life, and, sure, there have been a few monumentally shitty ones, but the overwhelming majority of what I've seen have been locations that were open and inviting to all people of any shape size creed color or sex.

Here's the thing that really gets me: as an LA-produced show, the staff of HEROES has no shortage of excellent comics shops. Just off the top of my head: Earth-2, Meltdown, Golden Apple, Secret Headquarters, Brave New Worlds -- these are all world-class stores run by world-class retailers.

I'm going to assume that the HEROES staff shops at some of these stores, which makes this decision even more head-scratchingly fucked up.

I'd probably be a lousy comics shop in LA because I have a low-bullshit threshold, but I have got to say that if it was MY store that the staff was shopping in, I'd be telling them this week to take their business somewhere else.

You don't shit where you eat, you don't bite the hand that feeds you, and you don't insult your core constituency.

So, on behalf of every comics store that gives a fuck, that tries hard to be clean and diverse, that actively seeks to appeal to any person that walks in off the street: fuck you HEROES.

Fuck you very much.

-B

Best of the 00s/Favorites: Black Hole - A Discussion

Dick Hyacinth here. In case you've forgotten, Sean and I both reviewed Black Hole for our first posts here at the Savage Critics (Sean's post, my post). It seemed kind of silly to have two reviews of a four year old (or twelve year old, depending on how you look at it) comic on the site without something or another to tie to the two together. So over the course of a week of emailing, Sean and I discussed Black Hole and each other's reviews. We examine gender, genre, eroticism, the horrors of adolescence, and a host of other issues after the break.

DICK: One thing I didn't really get to talk a lot about in my review was the character of Eliza. I think she's interesting in that she isn't really like any of the other characters; she seems to occupy liminal space in several respects. While Keith, Chris, Rob, Dave, and almost all the other characters are still in high school, Eliza apparently is not. But her infection places her at least partly in the world of teenagers. Sexually, her tail is something of a phallic object. When she and Keith have sex, it writhes around in his hand as he grips it tightly. She has a great deal more freedom than the characters who still live with their parents or are confined to the woods, but as you mention in your review, she's very much haunted by her past.

It's also interesting that Eliza seems to be the most distinctive looking of Black Hole's characters. I'm a great admirer of Burns' art, but I think it's safe to say most of his characters look like they come from his repertory company (to borrow a concept from Eddie Campbell). Eliza is different; there's something oddly specific about her. Other characters' expressions are reminiscent of those one would see in horror or romance comics (the latter being particularly true for Chris), but Eliza's facial expressions are much more naturalistic; they look photo referenced. Especially that first panel she appears in--she looks so different from all the other characters, it just pops off the page.

The other thing I can't quite figure out about Eliza--and this might speak to my own ignorance--is what we're to make of that drawing which seems to depict Keith, gagged and bound to a tree in the woods. On one level, we can take it as a purely symbolic thing. At the end of the book, she draws a picture of Keith soaring above the other bug victims, suggesting escape from his problems (and adolescence, maybe). The value of that symbol is increased if you consider the woods as a symbol of stagnation. In this interpretation, the forest is essentially imprisoning Keith by preventing him from escaping his adolescence; the later picture correlates freedom with movement beyond the woods. In this sense, the pictures reflect the events going on in the book rather unambiguously.

But Burns blunts this positive interpretation in a couple of ways. First, Eliza seems somewhat embarrassed by the drawing of Escaping Keith. It's much more optimistic than her other work; she calls it "corny." One almost gets the sense that she's telling Keith what he wants to hear, rather than expressing her true thoughts about their new situation. The other, more troubling thing is the nature of the Bound Keith picture. First of all, it's something she drew before she knew him--making it oddly prescient. Secondly, her flashback to sleeping in the woods as a runaway indicates that she actually saw this scene in reality (in which case it's not actually supposed to be Keith in the drawing after all). There's no indication of who the bound figure is or who is responsible for his condition. You might suppose that Eliza was camping in the outcast colony, and that Dave and Rick were responsible for the incident, but Burns leaves it open enough that this is interpretation is more speculative than definitive.

For Keith, I think Eliza represents the allure and danger of adulthood and the future in general. Eliza's mystery and experience make her more attractive than the girls his own age. At the same time, he hardly knows her; there's no particular reason to think that they will have a happy future together. She seems more aware of this than Keith.

What's your take on Eliza?

SEAN: Eliza is an interesting case to me, because to be honest, when I think of her I think of sex. I think that Tom Spurgeon did a Five for Friday one time about comics characters you find attractive, and she was at the top of my list; to be honest, after her there really didn't need to be a list. I know that admitting that sort of thing is seen as creepy, especially if you're a dude, especially if you're a dude who also reads and likes superhero comics, but I've sort of been making an effort lately to talk about arousing art in the context of being aroused by it, reclaiming that space as valid, and that's where I'm at with Eliza--something about her triggers my lizard brain (no pun intended). Like I mentioned in my review, this is probably in part due to her resemblance to a girl I knew IRL, but that's not all of it by a long shot. For starters, you're right, she's much more realistically drawn than the rest of the gang, including (for the most apples-to-apples comparison) Chris. She pops against the other characters. And Burns takes advantage of how the added level of detail and nuance to milk very specific facial expressions and body language: being really fucking high, being surprised, being dazed, being lonely, being happy about something simple like an ice pop or sandwich or bumping into a friend in the grocery store.

She's also older and freer, as you note, at least in the sense that would register with Keith, i.e. she lives outside the sphere of parents and school. As we learn, she's actually less free than Keith, Chris, and the other kids, since she's sort of in thrall to these college-kid drug dealers and her own history of abuse. But there's a glamour to her ability to walk around a house half-naked, spending all her time getting baked and making art. "It's all right there," as Keith says--she's created a life out of articulating, however inarticulately, the feelings he has to keep bottled inside. What I like about this is that her sophistication, her devotion to her work, and her talent are all part of what makes her sexually attractive to Keith. I feel like that's the sort of thing you see more when the shoe's on the other foot, and you're telling a story about a male artist and his female admirer/muse. I don't go in for playing spot the phallus all that often, but it seems fair to point out as you do that she's the character with the vestigial dick--yet she's never less than breathtakingly (literally!) feminine. Here, it's the guy who's blown away by the girl's artistic gifts and commitment to them. (Creative void my ass, Dave Sim!) And it's not just some intellectualized admiration, it's a turn-on.

Indeed, Keith actually becomes Eliza's muse there at the end. I believe her earlier drawings of a boy tied to a tree were meant to represent a real-life incident she witnessed in the woods involving not Keith, but some other victim of Dave and Rick the Dick's depredations, but there's obviously no question who her drawing at the end is of. Because I'm a cockeyed optimist (LOL), I like to believe this represents some kind of maturation for Eliza. Her past subject matter was uniformly sinister; perhaps this liberating image represents a turned corner in terms of what she expects from life and herself. Moreover, I also like to believe that Keith and Eliza have a better than even shot at making a go of things. Surely there's a reason their situation is so sharply contrasted with Chris's at the end, seeming so much more comforting and hopeful. Again, this is personal experience talking, but I really did meet my future wife in high school and begin dating her back then. We had our ups and downs, but we made it work, knowing each other barely at all at first, connected by physical attraction and mutual admiration and intrigue. So to Keith and Eliza, I say, Yes we can!

But that raises a question perhaps you can take a crack at for me: Why do you think Chris's story ends on such a down note? She seems to have a lot more going for her than Rob, in several departments: Brains, looks, social proficiency. What are we to make about the magnitude of the personal tragedy that befalls her, her inability to process it (contrast it with Eliza shaking off her sexual assault, which maybe isn't a whole lot better a way to process trauma but she at least has picked herself up and moved on), and her ultimate near-suicidal state?

DICK: Chris' fate is something that I've struggled with as well, partly because of a knee-jerk reaction to a story that ends with the male protagonist moving forward and the femal protagonist regressing. At first glance, it doesn't speak well to the book's gender politics, but that's a rather shallow reading (and thankfully one I haven't heard come up very often--maybe those likely to offer this response aren't reading books like Black Hole?).

To understand what happens to Chris, we obviously have to go back to her relationship with Rob. As I said in my review, Rob's death leaves Chris feeling like she has nothing to live for. The death of someone so close is, of course, a tragic thing, but the severity of her response speaks to what you said about the teenage characters' overreactions to everything, good or bad. Part of being an adult is accepting the idea that people are going to die; we never really get over the deaths of those closest to us, but we (hopefully) eventually figure out how to go on living. When she buries that picture of Chris, you do kind of get the sense that Chris has accepted that she has to move on with her life. That's the silver lining to her ending; I guess you could interpret her retreat to the womb as temporary, a safe shelter in which she can heal her wounds then move on.

The Chris-Rob dynamic also sheds a little light on Keith's relationship to Eliza. There's a little bit of a counterfactual in Chris' reaction to Rob's death: what would have happened to Keith without Eliza in his life? Would he have survived, or would he have met a fate similar to Rob or Dave? I don't think Burns is saying anything as facile as "surviving adolescence requires good friends (platonic or otherwise)," though I do think that anyone who's made it through to adulthood will agree that good friends make the teenage years a lot easier.

On the other hand, we're all aware that those who are popular have an easier time of adolescence. If we think of the bug as the supreme determinant of who's popular and who's not, I think it sheds some light on Chris' situation. She's popular, studious, and attractive, but all that evaporates in the span of about a week. It's the sort of sudden reversal of fortune that teenagers undergo all the time. The bug isn't that different from other adolescent traumas like pregnancy, substance abuse, parents' divorce, or the realization that one is gay. Those are all legitmate problems, and teenagers haven't developed the emotional mechanisms to deal with them. Which is why it's so important to have some external support, be it from friends, SOs, family, teachers, or whatever.

Again, I think Chris' burial of the photo and explicit rejection of suicide point to an ending which, while not as hopeful as Keith's, at least suggests that she will try to deal with the traumas she's encountered. I think the difference between her and Eliza may well be time; she hasn't had as long to process what happened, and seems to be in the middle of her potential recovery as the book ends. But, to again cite your review, recovery is a process, not an event. There will be setbacks along the way, but there are plenty of things worth living for. Eliza is fortunate to have Keith (who, in turn, is fortunate to have Eliza). Maybe Chris really does need her parents.

And that brings me to another point about Black Hole: the startling absence of adults. You mentioned before that most of the characters dismiss adults as incapable of understanding their problems. Is there anything more to it than that?

SEAN: Before I tackle the parent angle, I feel I should add that as a horror enthusiast, I have no problem with serving up extremely bleak endings for your protagonists. It satisfies some nihilistic part of myself to see a fundamentally together person get broken down in a story like this, so even if there were no more "reason" for Chris to end up in a darker place than Rob than "because it's disturbing," I'd be fine with that. I think this is even reflected in Burns's visual treatment of Chris, who occasionally looks ripped straight from a romance comic--I'm thinking in particular of the shot after she and Rob first have sex and she realizes he has the bug; by the end of the story you've seen her all dirty and hairy and practically passed out naked in a stranger's bathtub. And this in turn reflects Keith's realization that he's been in love with a figment of his imagination, with an idealized girl who in no way resembles the very real girl with very real problems that actually exists. Of course, you could argue that he then goes and does the exact same thing with Eliza, but I think you can see his enthusiasm for her art, and his willingness to talk her through the traumas she's faced, as signs that he loves Eliza as she is, not as he imagines her to be.

Meanwhile, I'm glad to see you reject the gender-politics read of the book, which as you say would be a pretty shallow way to approach it. My favorite definition of feminism, and certainly the way I try to live it, is that it's the radical proposition that women are human beings. No more, no less! The reason that strikes me in the context of Black Hole is because I feel that this is what Burns is trying to say regarding sex: It's not the be-all and end-all serving of awesomesauce that teens (particularly teen guys) think of it as, nor is it necessarily a sqaulid and dangerous recipe for disaster. It's a powerful, ideally pleasurable, physical mode of interaction between two people, no more, no less. It can be dangerous for you, physically and emotionally--obviously that's the whole point of the teen plague idea, and you see it manifested in less fanciful ways with Rob and his ex, Keith's friends, even Eliza's rape. But when you look at the sex scenes Burns actually chooses to depict, they seem to be a lot of fun for the participants, and to bring them closer together emotionally. I've always found Black Hole's even-handed, if warts-and-all, approach to teen sex refreshing.

Back to Chris and adults: I think you're right to point out that there are hints toward the end there that she may be preparing to truly process her grief and loss and move on, and to me one of the biggest signs in that regard is her acknowledgement (even if it leads to a rejection, at least for now) of the potential for adults--the kindly woman on the beach, her parents--to help her solve her problems. Prior to that, adults throughout the book are uniformly thought of as sources of embarrassment, conflict, and oppression, when they're thought of at all; most of the time they don't even register. Now, I think that's a slight exaggeration of how kids live--I know I thought of my parents and their reactions to things I did pretty constantly, even if in certain cases it didn't affect how I behaved--but it's emotionally true in the sense that kids, particularly troubled kids like the ones in the book, tend not to feel that grown-ups can offer any succor or insight into the problems that afflict them emotionally and psychologically. But even more importantly to the book--here, perhaps, is the "more to it than that" you asked about--the absence of parents just makes everything feel that much more insular and claustrophobic, really a must to pull off a convincingly frightening horror story. It's the plot-mechanic equivalent of going so heavy on the blacks in the visual department, as you pointed out. The presence of grown-ups would not only create opportunities for the characters to escape the worst aspects of their situation, it would also serve to remind them on some level that you can grow up and get out, that things do get better as I've said. For the story to work, for the story to be the story it is, those options can't exist.

Hmm, one thing I'm noticing as I discuss the book is that I'm sort of splitting my time between talking about it in genre terms, as horror or as erotica, and in your basic non-genre human-drama terms. Do you feel it functions effectively in both worlds?

DICK: I've never really viewed Black Hole as a type of erotica, mostly because it doesn't work that way for me at all. So I don't really have much to say about that. As horror: I think that's an interesting question, and kind of relates to something Jeff mentioned in the comments to my review. Jeff wondered if the gorgeous art in Black Hole might make it a little more accessible; I would say the horror aspects to the book might function similarly. I haven't read everything Burns ever did, and it's been a while since I've read anything by him other than Black Hole. But my memory is that Burns tends to use horror trappings as a way to enhance larger themes in his other work. The Big Baby work, of course, deals with a character on the cusp of puberty, but I remember it being pretty similar thematically (though not nearly as rich as Black Hole).

Mostly, though, I've always thought of Burns as an excellent horror artist, but not really a horror cartoonist, so to speak. I might have a narrow view of horror, but his comics don't work on that level for me. The mouth in Rob's throat is an unsettling image (actually, that kind of makes Rob another liminal character--he possesses both vagina and penis), as are the tadpole growths on Keith's side, but they're not the kind of images that really stick in my brain like that underwater scene at the begining of Inferno (to use a horror film I really like as an example). And I was never scared by anything in Black Hole, at least not in a horror genre kind of sense. For me, Black Hole inspires dread rather than fear.

It would be interesting to consider his work in the context of other cartoonists of a similar stripe: Mat Brinkman, Josh Simmons, Tom Neely, early Chester Brown, Richard Sala, maybe even Rory Hayes, and certainly a bunch of other people I'm surely forgetting. I think Neely, who works in a very attractive EC Segar-influenced style, probably comes the closest to doing what Burns does. I'd go on, but we've already reached epic proportions. And you're the horror expert, so it's only fair to give you the final word on this. Does it work as horror for you, and how does it stack up to other horror comix (for lack of a better term)?

SEAN: So, nothing sexy in Black Hole for Dick Hyacinth, huh? Well now I feel like a bit of a freak myself. Aw, who am I kidding: Own it, Collins! I can't help but feel that sex scenes involving attractive people drawn attractively enjoying themselves having sex are intended to be erotic, regardless of those scenes' surroundings or their ultimate outcome in the narrative. Indeed I think that's part of Black Hole's power: Its ability to titillate and repulse in rapid succession, or even simultaneously. When people liken the book to the work of David Lynch, I'm pretty sure they don't just mean that both Black Hole and Twin Peaks take place in the Pacific Northwest, you know?

Now for the horror. You've actually got a leg up on me in terms of placing Black Hole within Burns's oeuvre, because this is literally the only book of his (other than that little photography collection D&Q put out a couple years ago) that I've read. Why? Because his past work fails my "is it visually appealing on a cursory flip-through surface level?" While he's always been almost ridiculously talented as a craftsman, his '50s and '60s trash-culture/Famous Monsters of Filmland aesthetic previous to Black Hole just doesn't speak to me much. Call it the narcissism of small differences if you will, but that whole tradition of combining horror iconography with outsider/alternative music and culture--you can also see it in psychobilly, John Waters, even Lynch's Wild at Heart--is just a few steps removed from my own similar aesthetic journey, but they're big steps, I guess.

So in the sense that Black Hole's brand of horror is more straightforward, darker, more sexual, less comical, more "realistic," then yes, that gives me more of an in. And I'd imagine that's true for other horror-interested readers as well. I've certainly tried to sell Black Hole to other people as The Greatest Horror Comic Ever Made, the same way people sell Watchmen as The Greatest Superhero Comic Ever Made, even though in both cases these books have myriad other concerns beyond just being a good horror comic or a good superhero comic. Granted, I have a pretty catholic definition of horror (Barton Fink, Eyes Wide Shut, Heavenly Creatures), one that definitely weighs dread pretty evenly alongside fright. But the list of horror-ish comics creators you cite--I'd throw Junji Ito in there quite comfortably, by the way--sort of makes this point for me. You're not including, say, Steve Niles, or even Robert Kirkman, whose The Walking Dead I actually quite like; you're talking about alternative cartoonists whose work doesn't "look scary" the way all the "horror comics" that clog up Previews do, and who in some cases never considered their work to be horror (Tom Neely has told me that until he saw me describe The Blot as a horror comic, the thought had never occurred to him), but whose work has the power to discomfit, disgust, disturb, and unnerve us. Jump-scares may be few and far between, but reading those comics has a sort of darkening effect on me, like turning some sort of psychological dimmer-switch way down low. Everything's a little creepier and more uncomfortable after I'm finished reading. Black Hole does that better than any other comic I've read, even as its lovely art and sympathetically messed-up characters keep inviting me back to start the process over again.

The Wire Holds My Jaw In Due To A Wallet Chain Removing The Gum That Holds Normal Lower Jaws In

Still adrift in the sea of figuring out how to carve a niche for myself amongst the Savage Critics sea of talent, a task made that much worse ever since The Hibbsnation 2000 vetoed my proposed 27 part multimedia series "Fantasy Tales Involving Chris Eckert Coating The Chest Of Sean Collins in Warm Peanut Oil," but unwilling to break for the beckoning seas of non-participation, I, you're friendly Can O' Spinach, thought it might be best to just dive in and "punch the keys" as if I was a poor kid trying to get through private school on something besides my amazing free throw skillz. Lay down all your burdens, unbuckle your pants, throw on Japan's Adolescent Sex: this was the best single issue comic I read on March 4th, and it's going to take me about 9 paragraphs before I get to the point where I mention what it is. Ed Brubaker's career of late hasn't, for my money, had a lot of misfires. His work on Captain America is arguably one of the tightest usages of long-range plotting currently available in any serialized comic, his collaborations with Sean Phillips have resulted in one of the most seamless storytelling partnerships in contemporary comics, and his willingness to keep his feet squarely planted in both creator-owned work as well as the corporate stuff that keeps his name in the minds of buyers point to a guy who knows what the hell he's doing with his career. (Unfortunately, he's been known to read this site, so it should be clear that, while I enjoy his work, I don't particularly like him as a person, because he wears a hat, and everybody knows that hat-wearers are inherently contemptible people deserving of disdain. Hats. Ugh. For peasants, really.)

Most praise, including any I might have given in the past, is usually focused on how his stuff is so tightly constructed, how the stories he tells--especially the genre ones--often spin through twisting, labyrinthine plots that consistently ratchet up the tension of while subtly tricking the reader into believing that a climax is right around the corner. It's the necessary trick of super-hero comics these days--the need to tell something strong, compelling, and yet never get around to actually playing out a true ending. With work like Captain America--a nearly 40 issue story that luckily dovetailed with the willingness of Marvel Comics to retire the Steve Rogers version of the character for a time--Brubaker found easy fans in people like me. I came to the book only because of my appreciation for his previous work on Catwoman, Gotham Central and Sleeper, and this, coupled with an absolute zero relationship with Captain America (ignoring that Amalgalm Age thing where they crossed Steve Rogers with Blue Beetle and Mannix), made for a willingness to buy into whatever he had to offer. Sure, it wouldn't have worked if I hadn't ended up enjoying the comics as well, which are a sort of combination of Steranko's Fury with the addition of a brutal, almost overwhelming sadness. But it does work, and it's damn good stuff on an aggregate basis.

Daredevil was a tougher one: it's a comic that's always been either wildly good or absolutely horrible, and its damn good runs include Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli's solemn Born Again saga, as well as the years of punishment wreaked upon the character by the previous-to-Brubaker team of Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev. Unlike Captain America--actually, unlike all the Brubaker stuff I've previously enjoyed--I do have some love for a few of the character's stories. I'm not coming at this one naked, covered in my mother's slime. I'm a...shit. Shit, I like this comic, don't I?

The rules for good Daredevil are pretty well laid out. Either bring something that's really hell-on-wheels intense, or watch it get filed alongside the goof-tastic retardation that was the period where Matt Murdock dressed like a Go-Bot while the Kingpin ate out of a trash can. And you know what? Brubaker's run has been a rough go at times. Daredevil's history is a tough one to manage, even when you only pay heed to the better stories--Matt's girlfriends are constantly getting lit on fire, murdered, or chucked into wells, Matt himself is about as broody as you can get before somebody brings up Young Werther and bad indie comics, and, with only a few exceptions (Kingpin & Bullseye) the rogue's gallery has a serious case of weak sauce.

It hasn't helped that the dude was saddled with the Bendis/Maleev climax, which, if you don't remember, was when the main character of a super-hero book got thrown into prison. (And if dealing with morons is your thing, it's notable that some people at the time were actually internet-style upset because that meant that they weren't going to see Daredevil wear his Daredevil costume. Apparently some people actually sit around flipping through comics angry when the people doing the punching aren't wearing spandex outfits more often than they wear cotton and linen based clothing.) Brubaker spent his time--more time than might have actually been required--tying off the various loose ends of the Bendis/Maleev run, successfully introduced his old Gotham Central partner Michael Lark as the new artist, and eventually got around to telling new stories. For whatever reason, those new stories read like remixes of the old ones--people went after the women in Matt Murdock's life, he defended an innocent man and worked to redeem hard-case criminals, Foggy was fat and whiny, crybaby sex was had, somebody got pushed in front of a train. Honestly, if it hadn't been such a tight art/story partnership, and if Brubaker had ever experimented with the current Marvel vogue of having their stock-serious characters wink their way throughout the silly repetition of it all, the comics wouldn't even be classed alongside the same team's previous work.

Anyway. March 4th comic, right? How long is this thing? Too long, right? Ah, whatever. You'll figure out who you should read out of the new Savage crew soon enough.

Michael Lark doesn't handle the art for Daredevil # 116. While he's missed, he's backed up by the extraordinarily good David Aja. Take a look at this, which reminds me of that Takeshi Kitano where he hangs out with the kid and never kills anybody:

And in case you're wondering if he did any of the sort of design work that helped the covers of The Immortal Iron Fist to stand out amongst the sea of B-list character comics that nobody with sense usually pays attention too, he did, and it looked like this: First things first: Daredevil only shows up once in this comic, and only because he happens to be mentioned in brief. This issue is all Wilson Fisk, out trying to make good on the promise he made to Matt Murdock to "honor" the wishes of Wilson's deceased wife Vanessa, those wishes being...look, her dead lady specifics don't matter. She wanted Willy to stop killing people and being a monster, that's what he's trying to do, and he's trying to do it by brooding in some rainswept area in Spain after hanging out in Switzerland's graveyards failed to do the trick. He meets a lady, she has kids, she's not grossed out by the prospect of dating a beached sperm whale, he's able to keep himself from strangling the locals because she smiles at him...it's all well and good standard genre type stuff. Since it's a Daredevil comic, it has ninjas, and since it's a Brubaker comic, the ninjas actually kill people as opposed to not killing them. Yes, like most single issue super-hero comics, you can probably figure out the big ending yourself long before you get there, especially if you looked at the cover, which says "Return of the King Part One." Pat yourself on the head, you brilliant sage: you've figured out how serialized genre stories work. I bet you get upset when Dexter Morgan doesn't get caught during season finales.

But here's the thing about Daredevil # 116, or at least "here's the thing" as I see it: this thing is VERY GOOD. It's just a flawlessly put together comic, and even the stuff that we're all sort of sick of--like killing woman to teach a lesson, or the 400th Marvel comic to open by teasing the ending--is so clean, so well paced and coherent to the story it's telling, and the art is so attractive that those minor complaints become actual strengths. Of course the story opens with the ending. The story isn't about whether or not Wilson Fisk has to start killing again, that's something Brubaker knows full well can't possibly be told in a dynamic, tense fashion, and he doesn't feel like having to do the 800th version of that story anyway. It's a done deal: Wilson's a monster. Sure, he's also a complicated, complex man, a criminal with an extensive history, he's a person who's suffered emotional and physical trauma, but those days of complicated emotional problems, of who he is--those days are over, they're long gone. He's gone so far inside his own forest of pain, power and rage that the idea that he could live long enough to make his way out is absurd. Even the way Aja draws him accents it--this isn't a guy trying to climb his way out of something, it's a guy coming to terms with the realization that he's lived a violent life that's lasted so long that even learning to change is going to be impossible. This is a guy who's slumping his shoulders, because he doesn't know what he's supposed to do, because he doesn't know how to "do"anything. The Kingpin can't work as a story of hope, and there's no reason for a story of Kingpin to start from a place where hope seems possible. He's so bereft of motive and sense when he arrives on the scene that it takes the sarcasm of the soon-to-die woman for us to register how ridiculous he is. "I knew you could not actually be sneering at the ocean."

And yet, that's exactly what he's doing. He's a grown man, and he's scowling at the ocean. That's not what people do. It's what teenage poets and stunted growth 20-somethings do, because it's the type of random, selfish act only attributable to someone who is so consumed with their own confused emotions that they can't believe that other things beyond their feelings carry real weight. The Kingpin isn't a man trying to find his way out. He's a bored psychopath with nothing to occupy his lust for rage, and his brain is trying to figure out what to do with its time now that it isn't figuring out new ways to hire Bullseye to screw up Matt Murdock's life. He's been so comfortable in hate that it's the only thing he can relax in, the same way a newly recovered alcoholic doesn't understand how to deal with waking up without urine in their bed when they're still counting days. Feeling good, feeling depressed--anything is going to seem bizarre when you're somebody whose life has been defined by not feeling at all. So he acts like a child, a lovestruck boy, he teaches foreign languages to children, he bashfully agrees not to strangle idiots, and then, and then, and then.

Then he gets exactly what he wants, which is to come home and find that somebody else wants him to come and play Fight The Super-Hero again. And since David Aja is handling the ninja fight that ensues, it's brilliant to look at, and since it's Brubaker handling the words, the "i'm still a bad-ass" lines are delivered with appropriate levels of testicle-filling pizazz. "Yes....yes. Of course. Come on, then. Let us do this." No screaming, no contractions. He's finally at peace, and he's finally calm. He has people to kill again. He's good at one thing, and somebody woke him up and made it okay to do that one thing again.

That's it, really. It's a return comic, it's a get the band back together issue focusing on one man, and since Bullseye is relegated off to the 7th level of So Many Avengers! books, it's the return of the most compelling character that Daredevil comics has ever had. (Elektra can wear a hat, please.) Will the level of quality brought to bear here stay this high? Will that handshake sequence between Daredevil and Wilson previewed on the final page result in a long Harvey Pekar style conversation about the various ways in which men deal with the death of women who made the mistake of sleeping with them?

Man, I don't know. But the next issue could be half as good as this one, and it would still be ten million times better than fucking Kingdom Come.

Favorites: Watchmen

This past summer, with Watchmen movie hype already in full swing, I reread the book for the first time in a while and posted a review on my blog. Now that I've got a "Favorites" review series going here, and with the movie almost upon us, I figured it's a good time to share the results with Savage Critic(s) Nation after the jump. Hope nobody minds a re-run... Watchmen Alan Moore, writer Dave Gibbons, artist DC Comics, 1987 416 pages $19.99

Like half the nerds in America, I recently re-read this graphic novel, inspired to do so by the trailer for Zack Snyder's upcoming movie adaptation. I feel much older than I did when I first read the book during my sophomore year in college, and much of what I appreciated about it then fails to impress me now...or perhaps "fails to impress itself upon me" is the better way to put it. Moore's scripting, for example, seemed wildly sophisticated compared to the house-style comics of the '90s with which I could then compare it, but comes across shopworn, even hokey to me now. All those panel transitions where what someone is saying in one place is placed in a dramatically/ironically appropriate caption box over something unrelated yet thematically linked in some other place! There's one groanworthy bit in the Owlcave where Nite Owl says something about a reflection while we're shown his reflection, and I liked the failed sex scene juxtaposed against the commentary for Ozymandias's gymnastics routine better when it was Phil Rizzuto doing play-by-play for Meat Loaf in "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." I mean, maybe it's just that I'm sick of the fact that people like J. Michael Straczynski are still doing stuff like this 20-odd years later, maybe it was a total revelation then, but to me, this sort of neat thematic coincidence requires far more suspension of disbelief than just having guys run around in costumes. It feels emotionally artificial, which of course is the problem I tend to have the most with Moore's rigorously, ostentatiously authored work.

Instead, what strikes me hardest here, what I don't think I ever thought about all that much before, is how much power the story draws from its uniformly engaging sad-sack main characters. I think it's here that Dave Gibbons's contribution is at its most valuable, with his all but countless shots of heroes and do-gooders worrying, frowning, furrowing their brows, being uncertain. It must be noted that this is worlds away from the Identity Crisis-style vogue for angst and selfish over-emoting. All the characters in those "you'll believe a man can cry"-type supercomics are just as 100% sure of their emotional experience as their relentlessly upbeat Silver Age counterparts used to be. Not so in Watchmen, where the primary mode of emotional interaction with the world is confused dismay. The mileage Moore can get out of this is almost inexhaustible. These aren't emo Batmen, they're Tony Sopranos and Seth Bullocks, idiosyncratic and troubling portraits of great physical strength and moral violence juxtaposed against tremendous emotional and psychological weakness. Their failures--and they spend pretty much the whole book failing--are hard to stomach, especially giving the truly impressive air of impending doom Moore creates out of snippets of current-events and vox-pop cutaways; we hope for their success even though the art and the script both do everything they can to show us without coming out and saying it that their failure is inevitable. I'll tell you, reading the book this time around, when Rorschach takes off his mask at the end and yells "Do it!" at Dr. Manhattan, tears streaming down his face, I nearly started to cry. To me now, it's almost as devastating as that line "I did it thirty-five minutes ago" and the subsequent reaction shot were 11 years ago.

I noticed a lot more than that this time around, too. For example, everyone remembers the symmetrical Rorschach issue and the Dr. Manhattan flashback/flashforward issue, but the rest of the individual chapters were all quite structurally different from one another as well. Issue #1 is a pretty straightforward superhero whodunnit. Issue #2 does the classic-flashback thing that the creators of Lost borrowed so effectively. Issue #3 is moved along by those transitions I mentioned earlier. The penultimate issue is driven at least as much by the "normal" characters as the superheroes, and the final issue is as straightforward as the first one. It's a restlessly creative book, uncomfortable with being this thing or that thing exclusively.

It's also much funnier than I gave it credit for, especially early on, before the final failures. Rorschach, for example, is kind of a scream, constantly making mental notes to investigate whether this or that character is gay or a Communist or having an affair, obliviously wondering why so many superheroes have personality disorders. There's also the running rivalry between the left-leaning Nova Express and the right-leaning New Frontiersman. I always thought Moore rather stacked the deck against the more or less nakedly racist and anti-Semitic conservative publication, compared to the smooth Rolling Stone-isms of the magazine that (one assumes) more closely aligned with Moore's own outlook. This time, however, it suddenly jumped out that while their culprits (Russian and Chinese Reds) were off, pretty much everything the New Frontiersman alleged about what was going on in the world was accurate, while Nova Express was literally a bought and paid dupe of crazy old Ozymandias. That's pretty funny, actually. So is the fact that at least four of the main characters are crazier than shithouse rats and, if one wants to be literal about it, serial killers. And the more I think about the ending, the more convinced I become that it's perfect as-is and the kvetchers should zip it. I mean, if you stick with the Comedian/sick joke leitmotif, this very serious book about nuclear war, sociopathy, sexual dysfunction, the intractability of human suffering and so on needed a punchline in the worst way; if you run with Ozymandias and slicing the Gordian knot, this rigorously realistic take on superheroes needed an outside-the-box climax; and for either one, how can you top teleporting a brain-squid-thing into a metal concert at Madison Square Garden?

The ending, and the book overall, are more problematic when viewed as a serious hypothetical response to real-world political problems. Moore's diegetic voice-of-reason when it comes to geopolitics, Dr. Milton Glass's "Super Powers and the Super-Powers" prose piece, posits a Soviet Union every bit as undeterrable and ultimately suicidal as the current neoconservative conception of Iran; granted, Moore/Glass's policy prescription for what do do in the face of such an opponent is 180 degrees away from your Podhoretzes and Kagans, but clearly the validity of the underlying viewpoint was not borne out by events. In that light, there's something faintly ridiculous about watching Ozymandias go through all this trouble to end the Cold War when boring old military expenditures, international negotiations, and internal politics pretty much took care of it here in the real world. Moreover, I can't be the only person soured enough by recent years on the idea of the ends justifying the means to completely, 100% side with Rorschach's doomed decision to reveal Ozymandias's malfeasance to the rest of the world, right? A faint over-willingness to forgive bad shit done in the name of Moore-ish beliefs can be detected in Moore's work from V for Vendetta to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and while it's perhaps fainter here than ever, it's there, and to the extent that it is there it rankles.

But that's fine. Great art should encompass enough ideas that you can find at least one that makes you a little uncomfortable. And Watchmen encompasses tons and tons and tons of ideas--the clockwork clues, the extensive Tolkien-style barely-glimpsed backstories, the alternate history, the intricate panel layouts, the emotional texturing, the Charlton riffery, and everything else I just ran down. It's simply full of ideas, which makes it rich and exciting and thrilling and fun. It's not someone's movie pitch or someone's attempt to write comics like a summer blockbuster, or like anything else, for that matter. It's a great comic book.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Hibbs on The Film.

We're a week or so from the real release of the WATCHMEN film. I've seen it. This is INCREDIBLY FUCKINGLY SPOILERY, so you must absolutely NOT read it if you don't want your watching experience potentially ruined.

Seriously, I almost felt I should hold it until actual release. So don't go below the jump unless you understand the ramifications of your actions.

Friday night... well, no Saturday morning, there was a IMAX screening of WATCHMEN, at WonderCon, roughly a week before the film is generally released.

They decided to be clever by having it at 11:55 PM (five minutes to midnight being a theme in the book, y'see), but, of course, with the various multiple levels of security to get in, and the desire to fill each and every seat in the place ("Who has an empty seat next to them, please raise your hand. No, only one person raise their hand") it didn't start until, ugh 12:30 or so.

Dave Gibbons gave a quick intro which was worth the price (or time) of admission by itself, kinda -- who doesn't want to watch WATCHMEN without Dave Gibbons standing there with you?

I managed to stay awake pretty much through the entire thing (though I started to nod off a little in the prison break sequences -- but I caught myself, and adjusted my seating until it was uncomfortable, so I could stay awake) -- we finally got out at like 3:30 am, ugh.

So, here's a review:

Overall, I did not like it.

It's utterly slavish to the comic in places -- amazingly astonishingly incredibly faithful. Then, in the same scene, completely absolutely and totally unfaithful. Obviously I get why having Rorschach vs The Psychiatrist being a single scene (instead of the 3-4 in the original) "needs" to be done for time reasons, but I don't understand why having, say, Dan and R's first encounter doesn't have R stealing all of his sugar so he can eat it through the rest of the film: that doesn't take any screen time, it is just incidental character movement that can happen while delivering dialogue. It isn't like you need, or want, to cut to a tight shot of him doing it.

All in all, the film is the Reader's Digest version: if it can plausibly be cut, it probably is. For example: the news vendor and The Kid are in the film, but they don't have a single line of dialogue. The Intersection is there, but nothing occurs on that spot. All in all I'd guess that roughly half the book makes it to the screen.

Its weird because I wish the film was actually worse, so I could honestly HATE it -- I walked out feeling totally disappointed, but not in a "stay the fuck away!" sense.

And it made me want to see the 6 hour version (that doesn't exist), kind of, but also afraid that would be just as wrong.

I was distracted by:

Rorschach's moving mask. It was distracting, and didn't really look right to me, with everything focused purely on the face (it goes around his entire head, after all) I also thought the "texture" of the mask was wrong.

Jon's massive cock. It is pretty big, alright, and you notice it in every scene it is in.

The Two Silk Spectres, anytime they had a scene together. Mom looked younger than the daughter, damn it! And neither of them was particularly a good actress.

The stupid scaled-up super-heroic nonsense. I'm not talking about the slow-mo jumping scenes in the trailer, actually most of those are out of context, and in the film they look pretty decent -- but things like The Comedian punching through solid concrete. With bare hands. When he's 70 and about to die. Everytime a non-Jon, non-Adrian character did super-heroey things, I wanted to die inside.

Dan's lack of those owl-wings hairs in the front. That's like Superman not having the spit-curl "S"!

The not beginning and ending the movie with the same image, damn it. Those images are there, but a few minutes to either side, weird!

But, really, the biggest problem with the film is I feel like they Didn't Get It, for several reasons. Namely:

1) It fetishized the violence. This is a seriously violent movie. Most of that violence is in the comic, but it is very very different in a comic than in a movie -- especially when the movie tends to use that speed-up, then slow-mo down technique for the action. Movies also have sound effects (you can hear shit breaking and tearing, yes), which the comic resolutely did not have.

2) It fetishized the heroes. Jon is built nearly like Ah-nold (and/or John Holmes, depending on the angle). Dan doesn't look like a broke-down middle-aged man. Everyone has Batman-Style fake muscles and all that. Only Rorschach fit my idea of being what he should be: being nearly-shockingly puny in size compared to the others.

3) Most of the "world building" is thrown out the window -- cigarettes aren't any different (not that we see ANY in the world, but still), nor do there appear to be cheap electric cars or any of that. OK, there's still a Gunga Diner, I guess, OK.

4) Dan and Laurie are explicitly still super-heroes at the end -- they even talk about taking Archie out. Yikes, NO.

5) The Final threat isn't the giant squid attacking New York for that 9/11 moment, but "'Dr. Manhattan' attacks the WORLD", yet only with Tricky Dick leading the change. Like, OK, lets assume Jon does go nuts and kill people... what the fuck could you POSSIBLY do to band together to stop him? That works even less as an ending, thematically. Esp. when Dan has that dumb fucking ass line about "We'll be OK as long as everything thinks Jon is still watching" or whatever.

No, no, no, and no. Have you ever READ the book, guys?

Here's what gets me: this is very much a perfect adaptation of WATCHMEN in several ways -- there are places where you're going to go "Ooh, NAILED it", but they go far enough from theme and incident that the human-ness in the story is a distant second to the spectacle and a literal read of the plot.

As I've said: no one reveres WATCHMEN for its plot -- it is its construction and characterization* that we marvel at.

I hope this does well enough that another 10 million people will seek out the book, I can tell you that, but I also sorta hope it doesn't make back its production costs, because hacking out a WATCHMEN II is actually almost possible with the new ending.

At the end of the day, I might say this was much like the film version of V FOR VENDETTA -- it entertained me reasonably well in the moment of watching it, but I walked out of the theater thinking they had misunderstood the fundamental philosophic underpinnings of the original work.

That opening sequence of "the times they are are a-changin'" with the semi-moving photos and the history of the world really made me think that maybe they made a version of WATCHMEN that while not-the-comic, was also pretty good -- that's a nice opening. But as the film went on and on, I thought it had less and less heart, and I was pretty disgustipated by the end of the film. On the Critic Scale, I'd absolutely call the overall thing an EH.

I can also say this: there's no reason that I could see to really see it on IMAX. Should be just fine on a normal-sized screen. This isn't like THE DARK KNIGHT, where there were IMAX-filmed scenes that demand that viewing. In fact, maybe just maybe that added to my sense of "Why all the spectacle?" because the shit was 100 feet high. I honestly might have liked this better on a television screen, really.

So, when you see it, what did YOU think?

-B

* = (Yes, Mr. Lester, that's more exact)

Best of the 00s: Black Hole

In case you missed my first post, I'm going to devote most of my writing at The Savage Critics to an ongoing project of making a list of the decade's best comics and graphic novels (at least that's the plan for the first year). I had planned on starting with Black Hole and announced my intention to do so at my blog; little did I know that Sean was also planning to look at Black Hole for his inaugural review at this very site! But Sean caught my comment and we convened, deciding that we would both review Black Hole, and then compare notes in a subsequent post.

Why did we both want to start with Black Hole? I can't speak for Sean (I've made a point of avoiding his post up til now; I'll read it once this is up), but I thought of it as a great way to kick off a column about the best comics of the 00s. Black Hole is generally regarded as one of the great graphic novels of all time, so why wouldn't one consider it for the decade it came out? (Kind of--I realize that half of the original, pamphlet-type issues were published in the 90s, but we'll save any quibbles over that for the comments.) Plus it's a good yardstick for talking about the other comics I'll be covering here--more about that later. The review follows after the break.

Every time I look at Black Hole, the first thing that hits me is the blackness. Outdoor scenes, particularly those in forests, are common in Black Hole, and play a role in the plot and the multiple, shifting layers of symbolism. But when you first crack the book open, you're hit by the blackness of the woods, trees only distinguished by the slightest slivers of light. It's a primeval forest Charles Burns draws, the woods of fairy tales where wolfs and witches lie in wait for young people.

Which is appropriate, because more than anything else, Black Hole is about the mystery and danger of youth. I don't mean to say Black Hole is a murder mystery, although that's certainly an aspect of it. The mystery I'm talking about is the confusion and frustration that comes with puberty and adolescence. That theme is also apparent from the first pages of Black Hole, in which protagonist Keith Pearson cuts a perfect vagina-shaped hole in a frog he's dissecting in biology class. This causes Keith to pass out, but not before triggering a vision which establishes Black Hole's vagina-wound motif and presages many events yet to come.

But back to the forest. Keith and his friends are smoking a joint in a spot they've named Planet Xeno. Keith is transfixed by the natural beauty of the location, ignoring his friend's story that Rob Facincanni, a popular classmate, has fallen victim to "the bug": an ill-defined STD which turns its victims into deformed mutants. Rob, for instance, has a mouth in his chest that occasionally speaks in a high-pitched voice, often speaking truths Rob wouldn't normally reveal. Keith eventually realizes that they're being observed by someone. They leave the spot to look around, and soon stumble upon the tent and possessions of another affected classmate, Rick "The Dick" Holstrom.

Rick "The Dick" Holstrom looks on as Keith and his friends leave his campsite. Apologies for the quality of the scan--it's a thick book.

While his friends look through Rick's belongings, Keith wanders around nearby. He finds a shedded human skin, apparently left behind by a female victim of the bug. Keith (wrongly) laments the fact that he'll never know this woman, and is confronted by an especially grotesque sufferer from the disease, who asks (warns?) Keith to "go away." Keith soon realizes that he and his friends are surrounded by the mutated victims of the virus, watching them from within the woods. When he returns to Rick the Dick's campsite, he finds that his friends have trashed it and are ready to leave.

In those first pages, Burns establishes most of the major themes and plot points of Black Hole: (1) Keith's crush on classmate Chris Rhodes, whose skin he found; (2) the distressing nature of sex, both as a source of obscure dread and as the means by which the bug is transmitted; (3) the casual way in which the characters deal with the bug--no one ever speaks of a cure or even treatment, and adults seem to be entirely unaware of it or unconcerned about it; (4) the use of dreams as foreshadowing but also as a way to twist the meaning of previously established symbols or to uncover the true feelings of characters; (5) the role of specific natural locales as symbols of safety and comfort, but also stagnation; and (6) the aforementioned vagina-wound motif (the masculine equivalent being snakes and other phallo-serpentine things).

If that sounds like a lot to unpack, you're right. For those less interested in these themes, Black Hole works as a relatively straightforward narrative--only "relatively" because there's lots of flashbacks and retelling of events from multiple perspectives. That scene in the woods actually takes place around the same time as events from the middle of the book. But it's not hard to figure out what's going on--if you can follow Watchmen, you can follow this--and besides, you have Burns' extraordinary art to enjoy in the process. But even those more interested in Black Hole's surface elements might find themselves pulled in deeper by Burns' heavy symbolism and relatable themes of adolescent anxiety.

(Spoilers follow from this point.)

The story follows the intertwined experiences of Keith and Chris, from their exposures to the virus to their participation in the emerging culture established by victims of the virus (centered around a colony in the woods) to their attempts to escape from their situations. Chris responds more poorly to her circumstances: before infection, she was pretty, popular, and studious (though also a bit of a drinker). She's reluctant to rely on or even socialize with any victim of the bug other than Rob, who infected her in the first place. Her ability to deal with her new circumstances rest entirely in her relationship with Rob; when he is murdered, she essentially breaks down, strongly contemplating suicide at least once. Still, both Keith and fellow outcast Dave Barnes are looking out for her, providing her with the sustenance and knowledge she needs to survive. While Keith is a mostly benevolent figure, however, Dave has actually been manipulating events to pull her towards him, including ordering his friend Rick "The Dick" to kill Rob.

Keith is initially motivated by two occasionally opposing forces: his desire for escape and his desire for Chris. His narration at the beginning of Black Hole suggests this will be the story of how he achieved both goals at the same time, but a trip to buy pot from some college students throws a wrench in his plans. He meets Eliza, a roommate to the students and another victim of the bug; she has a small tail. Rather than revolting him, Eliza's tail (particularly its soft swaying beneath an impromptu skirt) arouses Keith. He's also fascinated by her bizarre art (most of which seems to depict infected mutants) as well as her intriguing maturity ("She knew something. She knew more than I did."). Keith finds himself sidetracked by his growing attraction to Eliza. Yet his compassion for the outcasts, Chris in particular, keeps him grounded in that world as well.

Keith follows Eliza down to her room, his gaze lingering on her barely concealed tail.

Burns takes us through three of the major anxieties of adolescence: sexual awakening, socialization, and the transition into adulthood. This vision of adolescence is reinforced by Chris and Keith's mutations--skin-shedding and tadpole-like protuberances, respectively. Though they feel comfort in their "natural" environments (the woods and the ocean), Chris and Keith must escape by metamorphosis, changing from undeveloped juveniles to fully-formed adults.

They approach this problem differently. Chris retreats from the challenge, reverting to a more childlike state; she expresses to Dave her wish to undo all the decisions she had made and return to her "boring" life. When Rob is alive, she sublimates her feelings of abandonment and ostracism into their relationship. After his death, she relies on Keith and Dave to take care of her, fantasizes about her parents doting on her. The final scene sees her floating in the amniotic fluid of the ocean, unwilling to leave the womb: "I'd stay out here forever if I could."

Keith, on the other hand, is anxious to move beyond this stage in his life. He irritates his friends with his restlessness, never satisfied with where he is, worried that "This is it...this is all it's ever going to be." When things get difficult, Keith finds solace in green: marijuana and the woods, where he retreats after a bad acid trip. Still, Keith is proactive in dealing with his sexual anxieties, seeking out Eliza and confronting the queasy mixture of feelings he has for her. He accepts the help of the outcasts, and offers help in return. And after "escaping" with Eliza, he plans to move boldly into adulthood, taking up a job and presumably raising a family (as suggested by his tadpole-like deformities).

A third reaction to the traumas of childhood comes from Dave. Keith and Chris try to escape adolescence by moving forward or backward, but Dave seeks to prolong it. Chris sees the bug as tragic, while Keith seems to accept it as a new, permanent part of his life. Dave, however, embraces it, seeing new opportunities in his outcast status. Bullied, belittled, and ignored before his mutation, Dave's isolation from society allows him to ignore its mores altogether. He abducts, rapes, and kills, aided by his friend Rick (who Dave seems to have some control over--he doesn't socialize with the other outcasts, relying on Dave for food and entertainment). In addition to ordering Rob's death, he also destroys Chris' tent in order to encourage her to move in with him. Unsurprisingly, he confesses that he prefers his new life to his old one. But when Chris runs away, revealing the limits to his power, he responds by killing himself and several of his friends.

Black Hole is something of a period piece--look at those hairstyles!--but there's not a whiff of nostalgia to it. The teenage years are something to be navigated carefully, lest one end up "stuck" in the way Keith fears. The first sexual experiences aren't fun--they're awkward and strange, and lead to unwanted side effects. Friendships aren't bedrocks of solace or support; they're motivated by convenience or lust, with the possible exception of Chris' friendship with Marci. And even that relationship is marred by a lack of empathy and casual cruelties.

Keith seems to do better for himself than the other characters, but even then Burns leaves room for despair. Keith's final dream involves him apparently trying to resuscitate a frog-like baby (metamorphosed from his tadpole/sperm outgrowths?) with the same vagina-shaped scar we saw in the first of the book. His friends then show him a yearbook, pointing out that the hideously deformed character who told Keith to "go away" was in fact a future version him, perhaps suffering from an advanced stage of the bug. Finally, he encounters Chris, apparently consigned to the dump heap of his adolescence, sitting naked among the empty beer cans, old magazines, and other pieces of trash Keith has left behind. Having escaped adolescence, then, Keith is rewarded with an introduction to the traumas of the adult world. His sperm/tadpole protrusions suggest virility, but will his offspring survive? And if they do, will they also be mutants? Will Keith be able to recognize himself in the future, after the rigors of adulthood further transform him? Will he always regret leaving Chris behind, failing to save her when she needed it most?

Keith dreams about the future and laments his present (exemplified by the apparent shedding of skin by the baby--a reminder that Chris is somewhere out there alone). Again, apologies for the blurriness.

Still, the dream ends on a positive note. Chris pulls a piece of paper out of her vagina-shaped foot wound, revealing a drawing of a lizard (maybe a horned lizard or "horny toad")--an obvious symbol for Eliza. "See," she says, "It doesn't always have to be bad. Sometimes things work out." No matter what the years ahead bring, Keith will always have his time on the road with Eliza. And even though she lost him, Chris will always have her memories of Rob, buried in the sand of the beach to be dug up later.

It's a complex take on adolescence, one which rejects conventional narratives of triumphant transformation, blossoming through acceptance of one's true nature as an individual rather than a stereotype. The nerds don't win--they end up dead. There's no climactic confrontation, only three escapes (counting Dave's suicide). The book ends with the bug still out there, ready to afflict more teenagers. Burns also takes an unusual approach to mystery. Though he does dwell on the Rob's murder and the discovery of various disturbing artifacts (including a disembodied arm), the more important and satisfying mystery comes from the initiations into adulthood that Chris and Keith must undergo.

These complex themes are expressed largely through Burns' repetition of symbols, all rendered in his sumptuous, distinctive style. Burns is one of the foremost symbolists (capitalize it if you want) in comics, earning a place alongside David B., Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware. He creates a dark and intriguing world, filled with shadows, grotesqueries, and naked flesh. Black Hole is a pleasure to look at, one of the most beautiful comics I've ever read. It's also a dense, challenging narrative which makes good use of the unique storytelling properties presented by comics as a medium.

Not everything I review in this series will prove the equal of Black Hole --in fact, very little will. But I start here because Black Hole provides a model of excellence to which we can hold up other books. When reading other works, we can consider its complex themes, satisfying density, stunning art, and rich storytelling, and realize the potential for greatness in the medium of comics. We can appreciate Burns' deep ambition and successful realization of his specific vision, and seek out works which attempt (and hopefully attain) the same degree of sophistication. It's a high standard, but a lot of comics were published in the last decade. It's entirely appropriate to start with our expectations high.