This is nothing new. Steven Grant's columns over at Comic Book Resources have always been some of the most respected in the comics blogosphere, and for good reason.
But his newest column (thanks to Fanboy Rampage for the link) perfectly identifies what's so disturbing about the endemic victimization of women that's come to dominate modern comics. One of the most common defenses of the humiliation, subjugation, and sexual assault routinely visited on female comics characters is that it's "nothing personal" - the women are just supporting characters, right, and it's the supporting characters' job to get tortured, to suffer, so the male heroes can grit their teeth and shed a solitary tear and swear vengeance, right?
Grant doesn't buy any of it for a second:
If you can't come up with better storylines or characterizations for female characters, particularly heroines (or the hero's girlfriend) than that, something's wrong. At minimum, something's derivative, lazy and uninteresting. How about a voluntary ban on rape storylines for the foreseeable future? Even better, how about an end to women in comics as mainly victims or props? We've been doing this for around 75 years; you'd think women as genuine characters would be par for the course by now, instead of special events.
Read the whole column. Then applaud.
That bearded Aesir - besieged by a trio of yapping foes! No affar of mine. I've done my day's work for Aesir gold. Still, why should one lion die- and three jackals live? By Crom! They should not - and by Crom they shall not!!
I don't know if anyone has ever given Roy Thomas the credit he deserves, because in the halls of the Conan pastiche creators (fellows such as L. Sprague de Camp and Robert Jordan) I can't recall anyone else ever writing a speech quite like that for our Cimmerian friend. In fact, while it is singularly out of character for Conan as Howard himself wrote him to talk so much, what Roy managed to do in that passage is impressive on its own. He's encapsulated the entire style of the Howard canon (that breathless, non-stop narrative force, with its manifest disdain for civilization and civilized folk) and has used Conan himself as its mouthpiece, in keeping with Marvel's tendency towards using its characters as mouthpieces for the stories (think back to any one of Peter Parker's long soliloquies) and their themes. Nothing Roy has Conan say is anything Conan would disagree with: in fact, I'd have to say that among those that wrote stories of the Cimmerian as he reaves his way across the jeweled thrones of the earth, Roy and his co-conspirator Barry Windsor-Smith have one of the best takes on exactly who Conan is and how he'd act. It's not flawless, mind you, but expecting perfection from a comic book adaptation of another format, especially one that had to contend with the Comics Code Authority (and if you read a single one of Howard's Conan stories you'll realize that the CCA would have exploded in a shower of viscera if Roy and Barry hadn't been careful) is probably not very reasonable.
In Howard's unfortunately abbreviated career, he created many characters - the pictish king Bran Mak Morn, the adventurous Steve Costigan, the stern and relentless Solomon Kane, and the philosophical king and barbarian Kull. Yet as excellent as those characters and their stories often are (and I greatly enjoy Howard's unusual Kull stories, with their air of ancient decay and their heroic center, a king and barbarian who contemplates the meaning of his existence so often you begin to wonder if Schopenhauer wrote the stories, or perhaps Camus) the character who was the centerpiece of Howard's reputation and the one without whom we might not even know his name today is his Conan the Cimmerian, who rose from mercenary and thief to eventually become king of Aquilonia by his own had. Unlike Kull, who Conan was clearly patterned on (the first Conan story, The Phoenix on the Sword, is a revision of a Kull story, By This Axe I Rule, which was rejected for publication) the Cimmerian is not a deep thinker, he does not muse or ponder about the fetters of civilization, the meaning of his life, the duration of his memory or the memory of nations, or indeed much of anything. This isn't because Conan is of inferior intelligence to Kull or anyone else: in Howard's stories (and in Roy's, too, for the most part) Conan is in fact very intelligent with quick wits and a keen eye. However, the essential difference between Kull and Conan, and that difference being most likely what allowed Conan to rise to the top of Howard's stable of characters, is that when confronted by an ancient wonder or a time lost ruin, Kull was likely to muse and ponder. Conan was much more likely to kill and plunder. Kull might ask what it meant: Conan wouldn't care. When you combine this with Kull's relative disinterest in women (whenever a woman appears in a Kull story she's usually in love with some younger character and Kull serves, at best, to rescue and unite them, usually pretty diffidently) we begin to see that the two characters are almost mirror opposites of each other. It's hard to argue that the hard drinking, woman chasing Cimmerian doesn't make a better character for comic books.
Roy and Barry capture this aspect of Conan's personality very well in their adaptation of a non-Conan Howard story, The Garden of Fear. In it, after having dispatched a strange ebon-winged entity in a tower surrounded by carnivorous plants, Conan's traveling companion Jenna asks him if he's curious at all about this strange tower, the now-dead angelic figure who sought to throw humans to be fed upon by the bloodthirsty plants, or anything else about their situation. Conan replies that he's dropped their food pouch rescuing her and that they'd better make haste to find more. In a world of strange monsters and debauched cities, Conan does so well because he concerns himself primarily with the business at hand, reaving, stealing, killing, taking revenge on those who wrong him, not contemplating the ringing of a gong or engaging in discourse as to the nature of the passage of time with a talking cat.
The volumes of The Chronicles of Conan I picked up this weekend (which I will be going in-depth issue by issue in the next post) show that Roy Thomas developed an understanding of the character over the first five or so issues of the book, moving from plots that could well have unfolded in an issue of Fantastic Four (the story Lair of the Beast-Men in particular is not a very convincing Conan story, especially when you combine Roy's very stereotypical plot with Barry Smith's as yet still very Kirbyesque art style... it looks like Conan has somehow stumbled into an issue of The Avengers in a few places, and the scene where Conan finds the fallen beast-man's crown and sets it on the brow of the deceased chief thrall... it's not in character at all) to two excellent tales that both in art and story show that the team of Thomas and Windsor-Smith were moving in a new direction with the character. Both Twilight of the Grim Grey God and Tower of the Elephant show that Thomas is starting to get how to have Conan act like Howard's character while still appearing in a comic book and that Windsor-Smith's art is losing the Kirby influences, becoming looser, rangier, and allowing the adventures of the young Cimmerian to have that feeling of decadence and fading glory so much a part of the character. From these two stories developed the style for the best tales in these two volumes.
Next up: a story by story evaluation of Roy and Barry's take on the once and future king of Aquilonia.
I think Batman lives on protein shakes and power bars.
I suspect Green Lantern likes Mexican.
Elongated Man eats sushi.
The Atom is a meat and potatoes man.
Ollie Queen eats chili.
Wonder Woman eats stuffed grape leaves.
Any other guesses?
The recent discussion about superhero fight scenes got me thinking, once again, about what superhero stories are really all about. I’ve written before that I think superhero stories are a “literature of the imagination,” but that only tells you so much. Part of the “problem” is that superheroes graft so easily onto other visual and narrative tropes. You can throw superheroes at detective stories, action stories, horror stories, westerns – you name it. But is a western superhero story really a western? Is it different than a “regular” superhero story? And what the heck is a regular superhero story anyway?
I think that’s a tough thing to define because it’s a moving target. There is clearly something about superheroes, a certain special mojo they have that keeps bringing people back over and over again. My guess at the moment is that it’s a combination of that “literature of the imagination” thing I’ve talked about before and a certain very appealing fantasy notion that by creative intelligence, grit, and two-fisted determination one can mete justice out against the bullies, crooks, and things that scare us. Juvenile? I say human.
But the specifics of what a superhero story is will, I think, depend on the era, as superhero creators have mapped the characters and concepts onto different genres, ideologies, artistic approaches – you name it – as their interests at the time dictated.
The “common wisdom” I grew up with was that superheroes were about “preserving the status quo.” This was in the wake of Englehart’s Captain America stories and, most famously, O’Neil and Adams’ Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories. Who can forget the famous, “You helped the blue man and the yellow man and the green man, but when you gonna help the black man” speech? I always wished that instead of bowing his head and acting sheepish, Green Lantern would’ve looked at the guy and said, “I didn’t realize that when I saved THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD I wasn’t helping the black man out. My bad.” I was personally never a fan of “relevance,” because it has always seemed a poor match to the imagination and fantasy that was naturally at the heart of superheroic fiction. I mean, would you embrace “Die Hard IV: John McLane Runs For Mayor?” Did Clint Eastwood ever play a drifter in the Old West who goes to law school to become a family court judge?
You could certainly do a story about a famous hero ex-cop who runs for mayor, or an Old West lawman who becomes a family court judge, but would you do it with those characters? I’m sure that would be appealing to some, but to me it just feels like people trying too hard to be clever.
However, I digress. The thinking I grew up with was that O’Neil and Adams Were Right, and had made some meaningful point about superheroes. Much was bandied about that superheroes were paramilitary, neofascist yes-men for The Man, a mindset that still casts a shadow on superhero comics to this day.
Still, there does seem to be something to this “defenders of the status quo” business. If you look at traditional heroic stories, you usually find a situation where Something Is Wrong with the world of the main character as he understands it, and heroic action of some sort is required by the main character to fix things. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, the tales of King Arthur, The Matrix, every Michael Moorcock story, you name it. Very common stuff.
Superheroes, on the other hand, really do seem to have traditionally acted most often as a kind of special-exemption vigilante police force (and sure, writers in the past tried to get around the vigilante thing by making superheroes “special deputies” or whatever). Someone or something attacks the placid and positive everyday world, something the regular authorities can’t handle, and superheroes show up to save the day. I can see where it would be hard to write story after story from that perspective and keep it compelling. It doesn’t have the same visceral appeal of stories where Something Is Wrong with the everyday world itself, where it’s become tainted or damaged somehow and requires fixing.
Think about it this way. If you always start and end with a positive status quo where nothing significant has permanently changed (a necessity if one desires to maintain the “world outside your window” fiction), and you want to do action stories, what you end up with is a pattern where a bad guy shows up, does something bad, and so the hero beats him down (oh, maybe after “losing” an initial bout or something). The point is that the hero starts to look like something of a bully after a certain point because month after month suckers are sent into the ring just so he can beat them down. Not anywhere near as satisfying if permanent change to the world is at stake and beating down some credible bad guys on the way to that change is a necessity.
Why do you think DC and Marvel do so many “Elseworlds,” “What If…,” and alternate reality/alternate history- type stories? And why do so many of them feel more satisfying and self-contained than “regular” superhero stories (particularly in comparison to today’s talking head-heavy superhero stories)? An Elseworlds type of story can be self-contained in the sense of having a definitive, satisfying end – the problem is fixed or not, and significant, if not permanent, change is indeed at play. It’s hard to get the same satisfaction from a story about how things are good, some knucklehead shows up and causes trouble, the hero beats him down, and things are back to their normal goodness, with nothing significant changed. There’s almost a built-in implication that this is all going to happen again. (Claremont and other Bronze or Mylar Age writers got around this somewhat by introducing the heavy soap opera elements with which we are now all too familiar, the idea being that permanent changes in the personal lives of the characters were at stake, even if we knew the world itself was not going to change.)
But how true is all of this in practice? If I had the resources to go buy all the requisite collections and back-issues, and, more importantly, the time to read all of that material and take notes, here is what I’d be interested in researching.
Superman was the first superhero where everything is in place and the tradition we know and love begins in earnest (feel free to debate if you will). He’s followed by Bat-Man…and then who else? Who else, besides Superman and Bat-Man, were the first five clearly-recognizable-as superheroes who achieved serious popularity?
Superman and Bat-Man, especially in their early incarnations, clearly have at least one boot in their pulp magazine roots (in the tradition of Doc Savage, the Shadow, and the Spider, among others). How did their adventures match the pulp tradition? How did their adventures deviate from the pulp tradition? In their early adventures, did they defend the status quo in any obvious sense? If so, what were they defending it from? If not, what were their adventures about? What were they defending, if they were defending something, and what were they attacking when they were attacking something? (Realizing that maybe some of their early stories were about defending the status quo while others were not, perhaps even about attacking that same status. If so, then what was the ratio of one type of story to the other, roughly?)
In their early stories, how did Superman and Bat-Man generally overcome their obstacles, defeat their foes? Powers? Gadgets? Fisticuffs? Outwitting their foes? Convincing other people to change their ways or take up arms against some foe or injustice? How do the early Superman and Bat-Man stories compare to the other four or five most popular superheroes that followed?
Common wisdom also tells us that Superman and Bat-Man softened considerably from their early adventures. How, and how quickly does this change occur? What are the answers to the relevant questions in the previous two paragraphs when applied to the softer Superman and Bat-Man?
Did Superman and Bat-Man’s adventures change significantly with the outbreak of World War II? If so, how?
I think the next era I’d like to look at more closely is the early Silver Age. Are these superhero stories more about defending the status quo or less so than comics from the first ten years after Action Comics #1? How do the stories differ – in tone, in terms of the kinds of challenges faced, foes defeated, etc.?
I’d then look at the early post-Fantastic Four Marvel stories. How do the adventures of the FF, X-Men, Hulk, Avengers, and Spider-Man compare to each other and to the earlier DC Silver Age stories? If the Hulk and the X-Men can both be seen defending the status quo in their early stories, how so? Are they defending the same status quo? Do they do so via noticeably different approaches? How do they differ in terms of the fundamental structure of their stories, assuming they differ at all?
I’m throwing questions scattershot at the problem, but maybe we’d be able to discern some patterns or some insight from their answers. I simply don’t know enough to even guess any of the answers to the above questions, but if you think you do, even if it’s speculative, feel free to throw in your two cents.
--Chris M.
Tom DeFalco has been named editor-in-chief of the new version of CRACKED Magazine. I know MAD was more popular, but I was always a CRACKED guy. I am curious about this decision. Larry Hama and Priest both worked on CRAZY which was Marvel's attempt at doing this sort of humor magazine, but I don't know about DeFalco. Did anyone else read CRACKED? Anyone else have an opinion on this?
Continuing my recent interest in buying habits as a diagnostic for the comics industry.
I bought twenty-one monthly comics between mid-February and mid-March. (I'm being very generous in my definition of "monthly," since it includes Promethea; comics issued in short serial installments, let's say.)
Of those twenty-one, eight either ended this month or will end with their next issue. The majority of those are miniseries; two titles are being cancelled and one is ending by its creators' decision.
In two months, one more miniseries is ending. Additionally, I've decided to drop one ongoing series not in danger of cancellation, and I've come to realize I should probably drop another. (The Danger Room is angry? The reader is bored.) That means that over the course of two months, at least ten titles - or nearly half of my regular monthly purchases - will be gone.
Some new titles are coming along to replace those, mostly miniseries, and mostly Seven Soldiers miniseries - but those only come out at the rate of two a month. I'm still looking at a net drop of about a third, with little in sight to replace those comics on a monthly basis.
This is the downside of the big two's renewed focus on miniseries and standalone arcs (presumably as loss-leaders for eventual trade paperback collections of the same stories): if the companies don't have something new and appealing in the pipeline to replace them, they lose those purchases. Some of the miniseries I'm currently enjoying will be self-replacing (I'm most likely going to be reading the Rann-Thanagar War, filling in for the highly enjoyable Adam Strange), but most won't. And meanwhile, most of the big two's ongoing monthly series continue to hold little interest.
The best I can say for DC and Marvel is that maybe the numbers on my pull list look so bad because the last couple of months have been artificially high, bolstered by a couple of new runs and some very good miniseries, and things are stabilizing back to their regular levels.
I live. And living, live to conquer!
Okay, not really. But after a really bad month, I seem to have found some of my equilibrium again, and in so doing, have regained a touch of my passion for writing: which is good, as I have a monthly column to keep up with as well as assorted other projects. As an aside, my long article about Superman has been published this week in The High Hat, a fun mag you should all check out.
As I crawl out of my depression, I find myself still interested in writing about the books I picked up before the nose-dive, books like Sleeper, Seaguy and The Filth. But next up, I think, we're going to be discussing Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith, because while working at the Norwescon convention this week, I picked up volumes 1 and 2 of Dark Horse Comics reprints of the old Marvel Conan series. Since I love REH's stories (and even did a panel on Sword and Sorcery for the con) I feel uniquely positioned to give those books a thorough looking at, and so I shall.
See you guys around, and it's good to be semi-back.
While I was at the comic book shop, I also picked up this digest-sized Teen Titans comic (of the animated television show)for my young daughter who is a big fan. I sat down and read the first story to her this morning, and once again I'm struck by how clueless Marvel and DC are when it comes to comic for kids (or comics that certainly could, if not should, be made accessible to young children).
There are no narrative captions, virtually no exposition, so if you're a parent reading this thing with your kid and you're not already an expert on the Titans, you have no clue as to who all the characters are or what the hell is going on. The word balloon type is too small (and I've read plenty of digest comics in my day, this is not a constraint of the format).
The coloring is typical modern comic book coloring -- muted colors, no attempt to design using color to create visual contrast or to direct the viewer's eye around the page (and I went to art school -- this stuff is not some great mystery, it's Painting 101). The pages are very hard to scan and look muddy. There's one panel where a villain is floating in the air (being held by Raven's power although there's no visible power effect on the villain, which confused my daughter), and the villain's dark purple pants and boots are against an extremely dark blue background. My daughter asked, "Why doesn't she have any legs?" because they were so hard to make out.
I literally learned to read in large part from comic books. If this is what I had to work with as a kid, I don't think I'd have bothered.
--Chris M.
After hearing all the "Oh, the new Legion comic is so good!" talk here on HC this week, I broke down and bought the first three issues last night after vowing not to start reading the new series (my will is weak). This thing better not suck, or I'm going to open up a can of virtual whoop-ass on you clowns. You've been warned!
Jim Henley reviews the new Legion of Super-Heroes series and discusses why modern comic book fight scenes suck. Not in reference to LSH, which he likes significantly more than Jason or I do, but in reference to poorly-conceived, lazily executed battles like those in New Avengers.
Jim notes that most comics fight scenes today are undifferentiated messes (the graphic equivalent, I'd say, of the Bruckheimer Shakycam that's destroyed narrative clarity in most action movies), which works against the appeal of the superhero genre. Unlike some other academic comics bloggers, I have no problem with fight scenes as a central element of the genre; but when the fight scenes are boring, that leaves the comics in poor shape.
I wish more writers of superhero comics approached these scenes the way Chris Claremont did back in the glory days. While it's too easy to regard him today solely in light of the stylistic tics and psychosexual obsessions that have squeezed out every other aspect of his craft, he and John Byrne used to write some great fights. The battle between the X-Men and the Hellfire Club Inner Circle in Uncanny X-Men #134 is a sterling example: ten characters with significantly different abilities, each one fighting differently - some wisely, some not - and the fight is decided in its opening seconds through Cyclops's tactics. It's what every group battle scene should be, varied, smart, tautly-paced, tracking characters through a couple of different spaces and never letting you forget where each one is or what they're doing. It takes only eleven pages and it's more gratifying than some entire story arcs. It's meat and potatoes storytelling, but superhero team books should be meat and potatoes, not the fast food quality in nouvelle cuisine portions we get in today's Bendisized comics.
So, with Clone Wars arriving on DVD this week, and the discussion about comics characters in other media, I started to wonder how Superman, might interact in the Republic. But then something else occurred to me.
I am struck the Hal Jordan saga is artistically, and in quality terms, the mirror of Star Wars as Lucas has made it now:
In Star Wars we enter the story with the galactic police force already destroyed by its greatest ever member Anakin Skywalker who changes his name to Darth Vader, dies redeeming himself and comes back as a ghostly presence. And then Lucas adds a couple decades of real time later, a bunch of crap about how when the police force was in full power, it's greatest hope destroyed it.
In GL we see the galactic police force in full flower a couple decades real time before the shining member Hal Jordan destroys them all,changes his name to Parallax, dies redeeming himself, and comes back as a ghostly presence. Of course, I was right with Parallax on the whole restoring the multiverse thing.
(I'm probably completely full of crap on this, but I'm trying to scrape up a post every couple days. I used to have an elegant four word sentence for indicating when I thought I was full of crap, but I am informed it sounds needlessly hostile and defensive, and if I use it, I'll be killed by flying monkeys or something...)
Well, unless you've already seen these sites (which is certainly possible):
http://www.nationallampoon.com/supermanisadick/default.asp
http://www.jaypinkerton.com/superman/index.html
--Chris M.
One of my favorite things is to speculate what my favorite comics superheroes would do if put in my favorite books or movies. For instance, what if Dr. Strange faced that chick from "The Ring?"
Well, Doc would take her down. He'd also make short work of the houses in "Rose Red" and "The Amityville Horror."
Clarice Starling and Will Graham aare decent agents, but let's see how Hannibal Lector works out against Wildfire.
How would the Belgariad have been different if Mon-El had been around?
Were the Kryptonians uplifted? Find out who their clients are as they beat the snot out of the Quackoo.
What if Ender faced the Khunds?
What if the Daleks faced Lex Luthor?
Suppose the Pre-Crisis Barry Allen Flash was recruited to take the Ring to Mordor, along with Hal Jordan.
What if the Spectre took on Cthulu?
Occasionally on the old Usenet of the 1980's and 90's I used to post stupid, insane, little fan theories for my own amusement. I still do that, but nobody reads them. I just posted one I was exceptionally proud of, but I realized it was doomed to obsurity. But then I remembered the blogosphere! Here it is, the secret origin of the Time Trapper and why he bothers fighting the Legion of Super-Heroes instead of mucking about with some other section of universal history.
My theory : The Time Trapper is actually the servant of low-level bank robber Tim Connors. Every time he tried robbing a bank, the LSH stopped him. Finally, after an encounter with Triplicate Girl, he realized he could never beat them. He decided what he really needed was a distraction. He went to Chronarch's Time Machine correspondence course, and Querl's insane robot course and built an insane time travelling robot who was programmed to do one thing: fight the LSH enough of the time that they can't bother with preventing bank robberies. Time Trapper attacks correspond with the times Connors returns from Ventura. The plan was successful enough that Connors has capital to improve the plan by doing things like hiring renegade controllers and manifesting the livng incarnation of entropy. Sadly, Connors was killed by Mano during the whole conspiracy thing. But the Time Trapper goes on, fighting the LSH for no particular reason...
There is hope, however, because Mordru is hiring a gaff for his new head act.
yammering. ger. Conversation about whatever comes to mind, emitted to fill the silence.
Attention Marvel and DC: Page numbers: They're useful, they're helpful, they've been a standard of English publishing since before Webster. Use them, dammit.
Adam Strange 1-2: I picked this up on Marc's recommendation of a couple months ago. Eh. One of the useful things about color, see, is that it can provide contrast, make images pop out, and this is difficult to achieve when everything is the same color. Look at issue one, page two, for example. Or compare the top of page (flip flip count count) five with the rest of it--Adam's and Alanna's contrasting colors make the top panel readable, while the rest of the page is a fuzzy orange mush.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I accidentally read issue 2 first. Since I understood what was going on and was impressed at how fast the story started off moving, that means that, oops, issue 1 wasn't necessary, that the writer started the story too early and that, once again, the story editor didn't actually exist.
And as I mentioned in an earlier post, Superman tells Adam Strange that Alpha Centauri A went supernova (this is six months prior to current time, according to the narration). And this news is not immediately accompanied by massive, Earth-wide panic due to our 4.3 years hence broiling. The text at the end of issue 2 is a bit incoherent; it's not clear where in the system Adam is beaming to; the text says he's beaming into the path of the supernova (i.e., at least six light-months out from Rann), but, in fact, he seems to have beamed into Rann's original position, a few light-minutes frmo the collapsing neutron star remnant of Alpha Centauri A. Nothing an editing pass wouldn't have fixed, but still. And that's one hell of a spacesuit he's wearing; it protects him from corona-temperature plasma, 15,000 degrees.
Batman: The Man Who Laughs: Not recommended; pick up one of the many reprints of Batman #1 available, wherein this story was done with more craft and attention to detail than ever needed to be retold. Not one of Brubaker's elaborations and additions is necessary or useful, and the wholeness of the narrative is discarded. The double assault on Wayne and Lake, for example: the Joker's men attack Lake early without explanation (in defiance of formula), coincidentally with Wayne triggering a fairly foolish gambit to get him free of surveillance, and Gordon says it's 11:30 PM when Wayne's clock clearly says it's five till midnight. There's at least three major errors of craft there in only two pages. Gardner Fox at the dawn of comics knew more about how to put a story together than Ed Brubaker does sixty-five years later.
Doug Mahnke's art is pretty good, actually. There's the usual swipe from Mazzucchelli for Bats' origin, of course, and the now mandatory swipe of Batman's boots from Jim Lee, so it's not like it's specially original.
Birds of Prey 70-78: I have a bad habit of putting books aside for several months at a time. So I read a big lump of Birds of Prey all at once. You know, I enjoy this series. Simone is good with the characters, the art is clear (and I like the cheesecake as long as it doesn't interfere with the story), the cast and premise lend themselves to superheroics well within my comfort zone. The addition of Lady Blackhawk to the cast is wholly unexpected and yet entirely appealing. Recommended.
Deadshot 1-2: I picked this up on Marc's recommendation of a couple months ago. It's not for me. Probably Suicide Squad fans will groove on it, though.
Doc Frankenstein 1-2: I picked these up for the Steve Skroce art, and I shan't be continuing with them. It's pretty enough, I suppose, but it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Extremely heavily armed church militias going to war on American soil? And Doc's lettering font is annoying. Neutral recommendation.
Earth's Mightiest Heroes 1-8: This, on the other hand, is really pretty good. I'm only familiar with early Avengers history in an Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe sort of way, but this kind of allusive reference to those stories with elaboration in the interstitial moments seems quite well done to me. This doesn't seem like an attempt to retell early Avengers history; it seems like an attempt to build on early Avengers history. And its scope isn't to be as big or important as those early stories; it tells smaller stories about smaller moments. The last issue's a bit too much stop, not enough end, however. Otherwise I'm impressed. Joe Casey, I'm going to have to pay more attention to. Recommended.
Fables 31-34: I'm on inertia here, as I suspect Bill Willingham is. Still, it seems more likely that he's accreted enough continuing story elements that inertia can keep him going for a long time yet, like the sweet spot in a long-running RPG campaign's lifetime when the characters generate their own adventures. Mildly recommended.
Flash 215-218: More gimmicky adventures, less psycho-drama, please. I want the Cary Bates/Irv Novick era Flash back. Neutral recommendation.
Hawkman 30-36: Like Birds of Prey, this got set aside for a while, but for a different reason; I had about decided that new writers Palmiotti and Gray weren't any good. I was wrong. They are good. The stories are easily digested superheroics. I especially like the assembling Hawkamn Rogues' Gallery, since the appreciation of DC Comics's depth of history is one of the things that draws me to the line. Mildly recommended.
Little Lulu: Lulu Goes Shopping: I'm more of an Uncle Scrooge man. This would make an excellent gift for the beginning reader in your family, however. Recommended on that basis.
Losers v1: Ante Up: Not my bag, this is the origin of the A-Team done seriously. I would like a hair more exposition, but writer Andy Diggle (as in his Adam Strange series) has a lot of verve and there's little wasted space. No yammering on about nothing in particular to fill up panels here. The art kinda reminds me of Richard Case on Doom Patrol. (Now THERE was a guy whose colorist really brought out the best in his excellent but non-standard art.) Neutral recommendation.
Enchanted Apples of Oz
Secret Island of Oz
Ice King of Oz
Forgotten Forest of Oz
Blue Witch of Oz
When I was home for Christmas, I pulled these out of storage to read again. Holy cow, can Eric Shanower draw! His Oz characters are completely on model, but have never looked better. These absolutely beautiful accomplishements also tell pretty good Oz novelettes as well--this kid has got the chops. I only wish I liked his current series Age of Bronze more. Highly recommended.
Shanna the She-Devil 1-2: This is crap. Very pretty art, with a beautiful babe and plenty of dinosaurs, and good, high-contrast coloring. The story, however, is as thin as a proctologist's glove (and owes far too much to Budd Root's Cavewoman), and the script reminds me of the quality of Todd McFarlane's dialog in Spider-Man. For adolescent males only.
She-Hulk 11-12: This series grew on me (especially when Paul Pelletier came on for art duties). It showed a fine appreciation of what a shared superhero universe is good at, it had a good sense of humor and a good sense of story, and I'll be looking forward to its return. I'm definitely picking up Slott/Pelletier's next project, Great Lakes Avengers. Recommended.
Sleeper v1: Out in the Cold: It's sort of a mob drama, sort of a superhero story. Mostly it's not anything I want to read. As usual, this, like anything that's not a primary superhero comic, is colored in shades of mud. When I am king, all colorists will be restricted to 6-bit color until they demonstrate they can enhance a page's readability with color. I don't mean six bits per channel. I mean six bits. Eight if you can deliver a sensible publishing-technology reason to add a black channel.
Aside from my basic unattraction to the premise of the secret undercover agent who's lost in a world of crimelords, I'm also bored by the appearance of yet another secret, omnipotent world-controlling cabal who are actually incompetent or so hopelessly bound up in infighting as to render the entire concept as ludicrous as the episode of Gilligan's Island with the radioactive vegetables. The sleeper does have a moderately creative power, though. Not recommended.
Superman: Birthright: Eh. Loeb/Sale did it much better in Man for All Seasons. If you'll recall Scott McCloud's "picture plane" that puts photo-realism, abstraction, and cartooning at opposite corners of a triangle representing drawing, most superhero comic art is up around the Milt Caniff/Neal Adams region toward the photorealist corner. Yu's art here is adjacent to that region, just far enough toward the abstract corner to annoy me. (People's faces just aren't shaped like that, among other things.)
Storywise, there's nothing particularly compelling here, nothing in the new revelations and elaborations that demanded this story be told again. Plus, of course, I have been utterly unable to engage a Luthor story in any respect since his 1987 re-envisioning. Thanks, Marv Wolfman; you have apparently put an entire primary segment of Superman myth out of my reach. Despite a distinct swing in Luthor's portrayal back toward the scientist here, he's still primarily a businessman with no emotional or practical hook for his opposition to Superman. Not recommended.
Terra Obscura v2 5-6: To paraphrase Homer Simpson, this wasn't a story. It wasn't even a bunch of stuff that happened. It was just some stuff that happened. Disappointing. There was a fair amount of change in the status quo, it just didn't make much of a story. Not recommended.
Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck: I also pulled these out of storage. While Don Rosa's obsession with McDuck continuity borders on the disturbing--it reminds me of myself with respect to DC continuity back in the 80s and early 90s--nonetheless, he can turn out a well-drawn, well-written comedy-adventure story with the best of them. There are other stories of Rosa's that I like better, but this series is undoubtedly his career's touchstone, something made abundantly clear by the fact that the initial twelve chapters have in later years had three or four additional chapters inserted. Highly recommended.
Wanted 6: The last two pages were stupid, all right. Whatever, dude. Otherwise, the series overall probably doesn't suck. The basic structure that the story hangs from is solid--one man's desires for his son result in the destabilization and destruction of the outward expression of his success, but only the outward expression and hence nothing of particular relevance to him. The art is superb. There are basically no original ideas here, just DC's old supervillains wearing phony mustaches. Mildly recommended.
We3 2-3: As others have noted, this has an ending far more happy than might be expected, but I'm going to break with common wisdom and suggest that the tragic ending wasn't required; this was about suffering, and there was suffering aplenty. Mostly, I think, it was about the suffering that is caused when one is in conflict with oneself: a family dog rebuilt as a weapon of war, a scientist who loves animals turning them into weapons of war, etc. Removing the conflict requires even more suffering. But once the conflict is removed, the suffering can end, as we see here; even the scientist going in to testify at the end has found calmness.
This series was a little too advanced for me, not unlike Seaguy, but it is still clear that it is very good indeed. Recommended for the elite (-ist) comics reader in you.
A number of people read Jim Shooter's first Mordru story which referred to the Legion of Super-Heroes first battle with the wizard. Apparently many of these people then spent years looking for the first story which did not exist. Now, I propose a thought experiment: what do we know about the first battle with Mordru?
To begin with, Mon-El helped, so it was after Imra developed her first cure for lead poisoning. We also know it was before Shady joined. We know they somehow discovered that airlessness would stop him.
We know some other things too. It wasn't an "Unknown Tale of Nemesis Kid," because that would have been a short fight: "Gee, NK, the big guy in the hat seemed pretty tough before you developed those earth generation and terrforming powers." Actually, Nememsis Kid would be incredibly useful. Not only can he beat one opponent, but the powers he gets to do so will tell you what you need to do to beat the guy. They should have kept him around. So what if he was a Khund spy? Nobody's perfect. Besides, they could feed him false intelligence and keep an eye on him.
Anyway, we know he was pretty goddam tough because once they stopped him, they didn't stick him in jail. They kept him in the headquarters.
What else?
The Massachusetts Institute Of Technology has placed their entire curriculum online, much to the delight of every potential nuclear or biological terrorist with an Internet cafe and a dream. (Seriously, I like that the next Ramanujan can now access the entire MIT mathematics program, or at least many portions of it. On the other hand, if the State Department will not even let us export Play Stations for fear of the technology falling into the wrong hands, what are we to make of MIT's whole EE curriculum (and Chem E and Nuclear and Mech E and Physics being on the web for anyone. Elmo assures me this doesn't make a difference.) So, seeing this, I got to thinking, what do the comics universities' online programs look like?
Over at Empire State we have the med school teaching their android course. Over in the physics department, Reed Richards, meanwhile, is teaching "Interdimensional Travel and How to Avoid Blastaar" in the Cosmology Department with special guest lecturer Dr. Stephen Strange. Sadly, Dr. Strange's lecture requires not just a Pentium box but a hexagram. In the journalism school, adjunct J. Jonah Jameson has posted his popular course on covering superheroes: "Inflammatory Headlines: Threat or Menace."
Oh, and if you happen to be on campus don't miss Dr. Banner's thesis defense for his second Ph. D. dissertation in the economics department "Why Property Insurance Can Be the Basis of a Planned Economy." Just don't get him angry. You won't like him when he's angry.
And, over at Ivy University, Ray Palmer has posted the lectures for his courses "White Dwarf Matter and Demolitions Technology" with a guest lecture by Brainiac 5. Also of note is his article "Angel on My Shoulder: Why I Prefer to be Six Inches Tall Rather than Just Make a Regular Sized Costume Out of Normal Cloth."
Misty water-colored memories...
So, someone asked elmo to fix something, and I was reminded of this issue of Justice League of America. I believe it was the issue wherein the satellite was constructed.
At some point in the story, Batman or someone says they need a physicist to fix something -- I think I read this story in one of those little Signet paperback collections from the 1970's -- and the Atom is standing right there. Ray takes umbrage at this suggestion that they send out for a physicist. He says to Batman something like "Hey, Mr. Detective, I'm a physicist."
This came to mind when someone asked elmo to fix a problem in one of my entries. I mean, do people think I'm so stupid I can't delete a comment?
Of course, this is an overreaction. There are many reasons people think I'm an idiot. I wish it were my ability to manage weblog entries. But I also realized something. There was a show called "Dream On." The main character's life would be illustrated by his memories of his child spent in front of the television. Something would happen to him, and we'd see his thought process remembering some tv show.
Apparently I do this with comics. Something happens. I remember a comic book scene. For instance, I was attacked by the Fatal Five, and I instantly remembered the Suneater story. No, seriously, I'm just curious if anyone else finds themselves remembering comics scenes in that fashion.
In honor of the DVD release of The Incredibles, I thought we could take a survey of some of the greatest comic book superheroes whose footsteps the family follows. And, yes, this is pretty much just bait for comic book trivia hounds. It's fun!
Elastigirl: Stretching and shapechanging; Plastic Man, Martian Manhunter, Elastic Lad, Elongated Man, Mr. Fantastic, Elasti-Girl. Who else?
Mr. Incredible: A ground-bound brick; he's not monstrous like the Hulk or the Thing, but he can't fly like Captain Marvel or Superman. He's closer to Doc Samson, She-Hulk, Hourman, or Hercules. Who else?
Is it odd or kinda nifty that Mr. Incredible's antecedents are mostly Marvel and Elastigirl's antecedents are mostly DC, like their marriage is symbolic of the union of all the superheroes?
Violet: OK, first, there's only one hero who combines force fields with invisibility, and that's such an idiosyncratic combination that Violet is probably a rip off of Invisible Girl/Woman. Other invisible heroes include Invisible Scarlet O'Neil, Invisible Kid I and II, and Martian Manhunter. Other force field heroes include Kid Psycho and Brainiac 5. Who else?
Dash: A long tradition of superspeedsters: Flash I, II, III; Kid Flash I, II; XS; Tornado Twins; Whizzer I...; Blur I, II; Quicksilver (DC) (aka Max Mercury) and Quicksilver (Marvel). Northwind and Aurora? Who else?
Jack-Jack: In the short "Jack-Jack Attack", he demonstrates pretty much all the powers, but let's stick with the movie, where he demonstrates pretty much just three: self-immolation, like the Human Torch I, II, and Toro; transformation into metal, like Colossus, Metamorpho, and the Absorbing Man; and transformation into a demon, like the Demon and Ghost Rider. Who else fits into those categories?
Folks are having trouble posting comments; we're aware of it and working on it. Thank you for your forbearance.
UPDATE: Comments should be working again. Thanks, wondrous whiterose mega-elfs!
Via the redoubtable PZ Myers at Pharyngula, here are some humorously altered comic book covers from Something Awful:
Comic Book Chaos (Part 1)
Comic Book Chaos (Part 2)
Comic Book Chaos II (Part 1)
Comic Book Chaos II (Part 2)
Note that each link has multiple pages.
Laugh, cry, overload their image server.
I posted this to Usenet at the request of another poster, and...crickets.
I'm hoping that more people will deride my opin--, er, I'm hoping for more conversation here.
I should note that I miscounted. there are *FIVE* not four classic LSH villains in the Earthwar. I left out the Resource Raiders. Also, a guy named Rick Bennett has written a more detailed paeon to the Earthwar.
The question is not "Why does Chary like Earthwar?" but rather "Why does Chary like Earthwar better than the Great Darkness Saga?"
It gives more screen time to some of my favorite characters: Dawnstar,
Brainiac 5, Wildfire, Karate Kid, Bouncing Boy and Superboy.
It features the second fight between Val and Superboy.
It features some of the greatest supporting characters in LSH history
including Ontir and Relnic and Off. Erin.
It features not one, not two, not three but *four* classic LSH villains, and just as you think one is responsible, another shows up. We go from the Khunds, to the Dark Circle, to *Mordru*!!!!. And the Dominators were also hanging around.
It features some of the truly great moments: Brainiac 5 being dissappeared just as he figures out the mystery. The negasphere scene. The "How fast is Superboy" scene. The Element Lad-B5-Saturn Girl three way defeat of Mordru. The final fight scene has one goofy moment. If anyone can tell me what Dream Girl and Jeckie are meant to be doing.... Superboy's great moment of foreshadowing when the ambassadors disappear and Superboy says "It's like magic." The Subs and the married LSHer's defending Earth.
Really, I think it boils down to the Earthwar being more of a LSH story than GDS. It features more classic villains; it features Superboy more; and it has more of a sense of a superhero club than an official branch of Earthgov. I like "Inner Light" for instance, but it's not as good a Star Trek episode as "This Side of Paradise" not just because of Kirk and Spock fight in TSoP, but because Stewart isn't even playing Picard for 90% of "Inner Light." I like Earthwar better because it seems like more of a Superboy and Legion of Super-Heroes story, and that's what I generally want to read.
The real problem with the title isn't the reboots, or TMK or Coipel's pathetic art or any of that. It's that the premise of the book was that the greatest superhero the universe has ever seen started his career as a kid, and a thousand years later that memory was still enough to inspire other kids, and then he joined the group too. Byrne ruined that, so he castrated the series. Just having "Superboy" in the title is almost enough for me to want to like it better than GDS with its pansy little wimp "Legion of Super-Heroes" written on it.
I must admit part of my liking for Earthwar is that everyone else seems to like GDS better, and there's just enough pure contrarian in me to bow to with all the other stuff added in.
I was 9 when I read it for the first time.
Arthur Miller died a few weeks ago and a bunch of people said he was married to Marilyn Monroe and I didn't care. And they said he was America's foremost man of letters, and I said "No, you just thought that because he was married to Norma Jean, just like those idiots who say Joe DiMaggio was the greatest baseball player of all time." And then they said he was the greatest American playwright, and I thought "No, Neil Simon." (I used to be a theater critic which tends to give me a butts-in-the-seats approach to quality. Though my mom assures me it's Thornton Wilder, and a drama professor friend of mine assures me it's Edward Albee, and a friend of mine who is a patent lawyer tells me it is Eugene Ianesco, but I've seen "Rhinoceros," and he is on crack.) And then they said "The Death of a Salesman" was the greatest play ever written, and I started to think about comics.
I hate "The Death of a Salesman." In English 4X I was forced to read it for the first time, and I hated it more than Byrne's Man of Steel. (I went to high school after the AP tests were implemented, but before there were AP Courses. I ponied up the fifty clams and never saw an English course again anyway.) I made fun of the play in a short story called "The Death of the Snail Men" which I claimed was Arthur Miller's attempt to write a Hollywood sci-fi serial, and he later cannibalized the title. I've since seen it in person a couple times. I hated it both times but I had been indoctrinated enough to figure it was me. Nuh uh. It's that miserable, depressing excuse for a play.
The last time I saw it was third year of law school. My buddy Jake (pronounced Jackie) was a fellow law school student. We would occasionally do stuff together. She had been a cheerleader at Minnesota, so I can only assume her dance card was pretty full when not hanging out with me (I'm extremely ugly, and she's quite short so we weren't destined an item, so to speak), but she came with we to review a couple restaurants and a micro-brewery, and we'd see some shows together. Mostly musicals. One time we went to see this theatrical monstrosity. It was a *brilliant* performance. The IU drama department is one of the top programs in the country, and they were in top form that night. By the thirty-minute mark, I wanted to go on stage and strangle Loman myself. Jake claimed I just don't appreciate fine drama. I claimed they should give out Prozac at the door. I'm not claiming fine drama can't be depressing. I am saying that being too depressing is a mark against a work in a way being too funny is not. (Compare "Mr. Roberts" which at least tempers the ending a little.)
So I made a mental note never to see the Salesman play again, even with beautiful former cheerleaders as company, and occasionally I would cogitate on the how drama interact6ed with other forms of entertainment, and whether stage drama has a particular effect on the rest of the cultural milieu. In the twenties the greatest American playwright was, I dunno, Eugene O'Neill probably and then Thornton Wilder into the thirties, George Kaufmann too but I don't think he did much to influence comics later. In the thirties we have Moss Hart. In the forties we start in on some real heavyweights like Tennessee Williams (who lacked a champion amongst my friends, but also competes with Miller if you ask me), Rogers and Hammerstein, and Artie. In the fifties we have Miller, but toward the end of the decade we also have Edward Albee, Steven Sondheim and Neil Simon.
Now, Thornton Wilder, Moss hart and George Kaufmann wrote such plays as "You Can't Take It with You" and Our Town." These plays were made into movies. These were sort of people friendly stories. My mother, for instance, finds comfort in the notion of a life after as imagined in "Our Town." These plays were actually quite socially relevant in their own way, but on the surface they seemed rather innocuous. (The original S/S Superman is also pretty socially relevant, but quickly succumbed to pabulum.) Now, this dramatic mindset came about just as mass media was coming into its own in the form of radio and movies and television, and it reset America's cultural mindset at Capra level -- good times. (The Dark Capra somehow seemed to escape everyone, but c'est la vie.)
Comics got set there too. But then something odd happened. Drama changed. O'Neill wrote "The Iceman Cometh" (Now, *there* is the great American play.) Tennessee Williams came in. And Arthur Miller as well. Plays became grim and gritty, if you will. This took a while to filter down to comics, but comics got grim and gritty a couple decades later. The odd thing is the theater of the absurd and light comedy came into vogue with Albee and Simon, and they seemed to have and immediate impact on comics. How else to explain Batman in the Silver Age? And Flash, fer Pete's sake.
Oh course, the other companies like Marvel and Charlton seemed to take other tacks. Charlton's tack seemed to be printing whatever they could on a machine built for cereal boxes. I’ve read a lot of Charlton comics from E-man to Blue beetle to Ibis to Beetle Bailey. I’m not altogether certain they ever had an editorial policy.
Marvel took on a gritty realism to an extent. Angsty comics which fit in more with Tennessee Williams than Thornton Wilder, though "The Skin of Our Teeth" appears to have a direct descendant in the Roy Thomas X-Men. Now, it is slightly harder find the connection to DC in the 1980's with "death of a Salesman," I suppose, except that comics seemed to equate "dark" with "quality." I don't know that death is responsible for that directly, but I submit that Miller did a number on American culture in general and that this filtered down to comics in the 1980's.
Following that train of thought, I predict we are in for some Neil Simon type light comedy soon. I see Superman as Oscar and Batman as Felix. I also see Brainiac 5 as the owl and Dream Girl as the pussycat. And Nightwing and Starfire would fit nicely into "Barefoot in the Park." You could do "Chapter Two" with Batman and Robin.
Nah. I just mean that we'd have comics that are light hearted and quality, instead of grim and quality. The Giffen stuff is absurdist. Archie is stuck in Capra mode. The indies are all over the place, but there’s no sophisticated adult middle class comedies like Neil Simon did.
Superman's Origin, by Jay Pinkerton. Some naughty language.
Interesting in large part for the art styles--there's a scientist lifted from Flash Comics #1, some Challengers of the Unknown, some Shuster, some Flash Gordon-esque stuff. Mildly funny.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite shows was "The Greatest American Hero." I just bought the Anchor Bay DVD release. I was going to wait until the Wonder Woman set claim and do them together, but I think there's enough here for me to natter about.
Technically the set is only okay. I don't know what kind of restoration work they did, but their releases of "Three's Company" are much better in video and audio quality. The audio is also too low.
Anyway, some random thoughts:
1. Robert Culp was an incredible talent, and so were William Katt and Connie Selleca. Robert Culp is an accomplished writer and director as well as an actor. He wrote and directed several episodes of Hero but he'd been doing it since "I Spy." He quickly became one of my favorite actors, and Bill Maxwell was my favorite character. I realized watching this show that he's kind of a jerk. I'm also kind of a jerk, and I wonder if some of that is from emulating Bill Maxwell.
2. William Katt was an incredible performer. His performance in the Bob Fosse directed "Pippin" is on DVD. I encourage everyone to give it a gander. Skiddooo!
3. Connie Selleca doesn't get much play as one of the great television beauties of the time compared to: Suzanne Sommers, Cheryl Ladd, Farrah Fawcett, Victoria Principle, Veronica Hamel, Erin Gray, Cathy Lee Crosby, Lynda Carter, Catherine Bach, et al. But she was really very stunning. And she has incredible comedic timing.
4. Steven J. Cannell is one of the great tv writers. I'd like them to fire JMS, and give Cannell a gcrack at some comics. I'd like to see his Batman for a start.
5. I don't really game that much, does anyone know if any of the superhero based RPGs like Champions, DC Heroes or Marvel Superheroes ever did stats for Ralph? If not, I have a request, since I know the other curmudgeons do game, and most of them professionally, and a regular reader, also writes for games. What are his stats?
In Marvel superheroes, I guess:
Fighting: Good
Agility: Remarkable
Strength: Incredible
Endurance: Amazing
Reason: Excellent
Intuition: Monstrous
Psyche: Good
Flying Incredible speed (Poor agility)
Body armor: Amazing
Clairvoyance: Monstrous
Invisibility: Incredible
How does that look?
6. I now have hopes that another of my favorites, to wit "My Secret Indentity" will come to DVD. Especially since I missed the last season. And where is "The Rockford Files," which is a must for LSH completists?!!!
So, this one time, at band camp, Dr. Doom was defeated by Squirrel Girl.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Brian K. Vaughan Two Minutes Hate.
Completely unplanned, too - I didn't expect that reaction, either from my own reading or from the comments section.
I confess, my exposure to classic strips is somewhat limited. I had been meaning to catch up on some of the more classic strips. "For Better or For Worse" has never really appealed to me, but some of them sounded interesting just from the title. This site has ten years of "Calvin and Hobbes".
I have mixed feelings about this strip. They are amusing enough, but oddly, none of them address the predestination of the soul or the nasty, brutish and short quality of life in state of nature. In fact, the whole strip appears to be about some kid and his stuffed toy.
I have high hopes, however, for Fantagraphics collection of the adventures of George Washington Carver and Jimmy Carter, and I hope it includes some history of the Planters company.
I also have to wonder about this Walt Kelly strip about hopping up and down.