the Adventures of Wyatt Earp in 2999

the Wild West Was Here (assembly)

2011-05-23T17:10:00.002-05:00

Uncut Pages.

the Wild West Was Here book 1...ish @ Springcon

2011-05-20T19:32:00.002-05:00

So its official. I have the first few copies of the book in print. It has three stories, the Bitter Cold, ...Said the Pilgrim to the Duke, and the Mirror Universe Affair. I'll be at Springcon here in the twin cities this weekend so swing by and get one. I'll also have the marvel cuties buttons, a few Yul Brynner t-shirts, and old stuff like post cards and even some of the old wyatt earp books.

Stop by and get a sketch. I hate when people charge for sketches (not commissions... I'm totally okay with $$ for those, but I don't like paying for sketches) So I'll do some sketches for free or donations or whatever. Maybe we'll do a sketch trade. You do a sketch for me and I'll do one for you. Either way, come one down.

Eventually the book will be available elsewhere. Eventually.

Earp scraps

2011-05-16T18:08:00.000-05:00

Here is a small selection of some Wild West Pages.

the Bitter Cold

2011-05-11T18:10:00.000-05:00

Here's a screenshot from page 1 of "the Bitter Cold"

...Said the Pilgrim to the Duke pg1

2011-05-06T18:24:00.000-05:00

You may remember seeing the pencils and inks for this page a year or two ago... or maybe more. Well that's how long it takes to do a single page. Fact.

check it out! Wyatt Earp Stuff....

2011-04-23T08:56:00.004-05:00

In preparation for this next issue going to print I've been going back through and reformatting old pages. Last time the book saw paper it was a very widesrceen approach where as now we have adopted the standard web comic format. There are pages that were drawn a few years ago in the old layout that now need to be reformatted (since this has been something like 3 or 4 years in the making...sorry) take a look. The originals are on the top. The reformatted versions are on the bottom.

Also here are the front and back covers for book 2. If you find the colors to be garish its probably because you're using Firefox which handles colors in an odd way sometimes. If you are overly concerned and are loosing sleep at night load the image up in another browser. It will look fine. If it still doesn't look fine you can consider the possibility that you may have poor taste.

Also, if you are reading this you should go buy Justin's story in this magazine!

Cross-Post: DON'T ASK, JUST BUY IT!

2011-04-18T21:26:00.002-05:00

Buy a magazine that contains a story I wrote and show publishers that you support authors with sideburns:

http://justinpollock.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/arcane-1-featuring-hazards-by-justin-pollock-on-sale-now/

Cross-Post: Two New Stories Slated for Publication in April 2011

2011-03-27T13:03:00.003-05:00

In case you are interested, info on the stories I wrote, where they will be appearing, and when:

http://justinpollock.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/two-new-stories-slated-for-publication-in-april-2011/

Also: haircut travails. Miss it not!

LOOK

2011-03-22T22:53:00.004-05:00

So it's not done yet...needs a bit of fine-tuning, I suppose (add more blogroll links and do more with them)...but it is live and out there, so I can share it with you. Test drive it, if you like:

http://justinpollock.wordpress.com

Now that I actually have published work coming out, this place needs to exist. Not a replacement for this blog (although I have been neglecting it lately - did I not tell you about The Internet Troubles?), but a supplement. The blog you're reading now will still be Wild West Was Here updates and comics, the new one will professional updates and horror.

Or at least that is the plan...

Earp in progress

2011-03-17T10:37:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to Justin on his news. Here is a progress shot of an Earp page. There was a fair amount of debate on whether the pages should be toned with a spacey blue/green or the more western themed tan. Its still a bit up in the air but for the time being we're leaning towards the tan.

You have not heard the last of me

2011-03-11T23:14:00.004-06:00

Hey dudes. You still drop by once and a while? Aside from the faithful commenters who let me know VERY INTERESTING POST THANK YOU FOR SHARING YOU BUY IMITATION ROLEX WATCH CHEAP, YES?

I haven't posted anything lately because I have had what is known as The Internet Trouble. So I thought I would get you up to speed with what has been going on.

Liam is very nearly ten months old now, and he's grown his two front teeth on top. There's a decent-sized gap between them, however, and I cannot help but think that he looks like a baby Terry-Thomas (and, therefore, also Mad Jim Jaspers).

I have been getting into Concrete for the first time thanks to my local library. I am several decades too late to inform you of how good this is, but it is really good stuff. It's just so earnest, you know? You'd never get away with it today. I mean, it's high concept, but there's absolutely no "elevator pitch" with it, you know? "So a senator's speechwriter gets his brain transplanted into a super-tough concrete body? So what's he do with it, fight the aliens that did this to him?" "What? No, those aliens are gone, I don't care about the aliens. Mostly he does things he thinks would be interesting, like trying to swim across the ocean or help out a struggling farm family. Oh yeah, and in one issue he writes a letter to his dying mother." CLICK. Dial tonnnnne.

Been catching up on a lot of comics through the library. I'd been mildly curious for some time to read the Jim Kruger/Alex Ross/Doug Braithwaite joint Justice, but I'd never had the opportunity, particularly since DC packaged the 12-issue series in three separate trades of four issues instead of one package like anyone sensible would do. The art was surprisingly hard to follow. I'm not sure that the "realistic" painting approach translates well to superhero action comics, because I spent the whole time going, "Wait, is that a laser beam? What exactly is happening to Clayface here? Man, could we get John Byrne to draw this or something?" The writing does that thing I hate that every superhero writer thinks s/he has to do where it tackles why superheroes are reactive and just uphold the status quo instead of, you know, feeding the hungry, curing the sick, that sort of thing. Except there is no good answer to that, so asking the question just draws attention to something we're supposed to ignore. Even Grant Morrison did it in JLA #4 and it was just as unconvincing there. If I am willing to play along with genre conceits like superpowers and secret identities, I will also play along and accept that Batman causing massive property damage to stop the Riddler from knocking over a bank is the socially responsible thing to do.

Oh yeah, I also sold two more stories this week, so apparently there is something to be said for this "believing in yourself" thing. Let's hear it for Dark Highlands and the newly launched Arcane for thinking that I am worth somebody's time to read. More on this as it develops.

Battery's running down gotta go now laterz

Earp Page

2011-02-17T13:24:00.004-06:00

Big ups to Justin on his first official paid story. Isn't he awesome? Here are some pencils for a panel from the Wild West Was Here, "the Mirror Universe Affair" page 9, written by Justin and drawn by myself.

GUESS WHAT DUDES

2011-02-07T23:04:00.003-06:00

Somebody's bought a short story that I wrote.

I have had it confirmed that this is a thing.

Not like that other thing where a magazine was going to buy a story, and then they had to "indefinitely suspend publication." (They were super nice about it, though, and I can hardly hold it against them.)

It's going in a themed horror anthology. You will be able to buy this book, and when it comes out, I will insist that you do so.

Gettin' paid, gettin' published. Not gettin' paid a lot--we're talking dinner at like an Applebee's, you understand. But it's a start.

More on this as it develops. Should probably post some new material as well, huh? Maybe a page of script from The Wild West Was Here coming soon...

Still earping in 2011

2011-01-24T15:06:00.003-06:00

Alright, here it is. Nearly finished. And although my pages come along really really slowly justin has been plugging away on his writing. He recently sent me an amazing script. I think he should upload a small excerpt of it here.

Earp in 2011

2011-01-03T17:09:00.004-06:00

I hope Justin isn't offended that I'm taking the first post of 2011. Lets hope to see some progress on the book this year. I guess that would start with finishing this page.

Silver Age Snootchie Bootchies

2010-12-16T23:03:00.003-06:00

I've had a thought, and I don't know if it's nothing or if it's something. It's probably nothing, or at most, a very small something.

In the DC Universe of the 90s, Wally West was the Flash, Kyle Rayner became Green Lantern, Connor Hawke took over as Green Arrow, Aquaman got the metal harness-thing and harpoon-hand...and so on, yeah? The landscape looked very different. And now in 2010, most of the Silver Agers are pretty much back in the saddle, back to their Silver Age status quo. For better or for worse, for better or for worse!

Now, this usually gets traced to Geoff Johns and Green Lantern: Rebirth, and he's done an awful lot of Rebirthing, true enough. But I was thinking about it...

...does it really start with Kevin Smith on Green Arrow in 2000? Was Oliver Queen the first Silver Ager to reclaim the role from his Modern Age successor? Did that kick down the door for Hal Jordan and Barry Allen to come back? Did Smith start this thing? There's even a bit in there with Ollie telling Aquaman that he should go back to the orange shirt, and Black Manta's back in his classic gear.

Considering that Smith's Daredevil launched Marvel Knights, which got Joe Quesada the Editor-in-Chief job at Marvel that he still holds...wouldn't it be damned weird if he was, somewhere up the chain, a huge influence the other company as well?

Are superhero comics the way they are in 2010 all because of Kevin Smith?

...

It's probably nothing...

Earp-cerpt

2010-12-16T18:27:00.002-06:00

Chuggin' along...

Now I have a gimmick Twitter account just like everybody else

2010-12-14T20:24:00.003-06:00

http://twitter.com/YrUpstrsNeighbr

Earp scraps

2010-12-14T18:37:00.003-06:00

I managed to squeek out a few more panels. Here is an excerpt.

A Web of Romantic Entanglements

2010-12-12T21:25:00.003-06:00

Did I forget any?

It's kind of weird, right? When everybody gets together, it's either really awkward or really comfortable.

Earped

2010-12-07T18:13:00.001-06:00

While Justin was living large in Miami hanging out with Dexter (thankfully sans Rita) I was slaving away drawing Wyatt Earp pages and digging my car out from under all the snow.

Man of Kleenex

2010-12-06T22:36:00.007-06:00

Oh hai.

Last week I was on a trip to Miami for a work-related thing. It was an interesting time. I ate at Joe's Stone Crab, saw a bunch of local landmarks you'd recognize if you've ever watched Dexter (which I have not), and watched locals bundle up for 65-degree-Fahrenheit weather, knowing that when I returned to Wisconsin I would have to dig my car out of some snow.

I also got to fly on a plane, which is still an enormous treat for me. (Less exciting: Eat Pray Love as the in-flight movie.) Which brings me to my little anecdote for today.

Somebody asked me on the trip what it's like to have a baby. And my standard answer is that I don't have anything interesting to tell them, because it is just like what everybody else says it is like. You know? "Um...I don't know, man, it's like...it's the greatest thing, although all of a sudden you're more okay with the idea of handling somebody else's poop and it takes you about fifteen extra minutes anytime you need to leave the house." Really, just listen to any stand-up comedian with a baby, and whatever he says probably goes for me as well. I don't usually have much to add.

But I had five hours of plane ride back home on Saturday, and so I decided to watch some Dini/Timm Superman and Batman episodes on my iPod. One of them was the Superman pilot, "The Last Son of Krypton, Part I," which, as you may or may not remember, is all the Krypton part of the Superman origin. And I've seen this episode before. And I've read or seen countless "Jor-El and Lara put baby Kal-El in the rocket and send him to Earth before Krypton explodes" scenes.

But this time I had to turn it off, because I'm sitting on a plane and I feel tears welling up, and I don't want somebody to think I'm crying at Eat Pray Love.

Like, he has to put his baby on that rocket, man. He has to send him away and he'll never know what will become of his son. And that baby...! Kal-El has no clue. He's sleeping when he's put in the rocket; he falls asleep in his parents' arms, he wakes up someplace else and they're gone. Bruce Wayne remembers his parents and that's the whole point, but (barring some sort of super-infant-memory, which I'm sure was probably featured in at least one story over the years, right?) Superman has no memory of anything that happened there.

*hnkkk*

Man, I did not sign up to choked up about Krypton, you guys.

continuing the Earp-cerpts

2010-12-06T18:15:00.000-06:00

bit of a spoiler

More Earp-cerpts

2010-11-30T18:03:00.003-06:00

more earp-cerpts

2010-11-22T15:37:00.001-06:00

more scraps...

Earp scraps

2010-11-16T17:36:00.003-06:00

Always working away on earp. Building the stockpile of pages. Pencils and ink details.

Great Marvel Comics of the Late 1990s (Yes, They Do Exist): Conclusion and Honorable Mentions

2010-11-14T21:50:00.004-06:00

I’m fairly pleased with how I summarized the late 90s for Marvel in the comments of the last post: after shortsighted decisions in the early 90s bent its superhero stable out of shape, Marvel spent the latter part of the decade trying to repair the damage and make their characters recognizable again to their core audience. With the exception of a few new concepts, like Deadpool and the Thunderbolts (and even those weren’t totally new, strictly speaking), Marvel’s main focus was on trying to get back in touch with the ol' Marvel magic. If the Bill Jemas/Joe Quesada era was Reconstruction, might we distinguish the Bob Harras era by calling it Restoration? Or am I confusing the issue by throwing around not-very-well-thought-out academic classifications like this?

Would it be easier to tell you what it all meant to me?

Much of the discourse in the superhero comics blogosphere the last few years has been on “darkness,” about the loss of “fun” in our funnybooks. Which I’ve always felt was a little misdirected. I mean, I like superhero comics that are dark, I like superhero comics that aren’t necessarily all playful and wacky. But what I can’t abide is when a superhero comic is a complete and utter drag.

And that’s what the worst offenders of the last couple years have been. But I don’t quite feel that kind of crushing betrayal you read on a lot of blogs because I’ve been through it before, in the mid-90s. I went through my “Alas, what happened to the comics of my youth?” phase when I was 10 years old.

I mean, really, if you think those days were disheartening for longtime fans, imagine what they were like for someone in elementary school, finding himself reading a comic where Peter Parker has a psychological breakdown, wraps himself in a web cocoon, and refers to himself as “the Spider.” Like I said, “dark” is fine -- I had some X-Men Classic issues reprinting the first Morlock two-parter by Chris Claremont and Paul Smith, and they were dark and moody and mysterious and seemed very sophisticated and “adult” to me as a kid. But these Spider-Man comics were, again, a drag; that really is the best word for them, if you know what I mean. Thoroughly unpleasant books -- what would a kid see in them, anyway?

But the years passed, and then the late-90s period came. The murky browns and greens and dark purples gave way to a brighter (computer-separated) palette, and the characters were all pretty much as I recognized them from the cheap little Marvel Super Heroes Guide Book I’d gotten from my school’s book fair that had taught me who all these guys were in the first place. They weren’t always the most adventurous comics, the most daring comics, the most innovative comics. But they were generally solid and they seemed entertaining, and as a 12-to-15-year-old, that was really all I wanted at the time. And I was fortunate, when I did start wanting more, that Jemas and Quesada came along to feed my teenage brain with Marvel Boy and New X-Men and X-Force.

When all is said and done, I think the comics I’ve talked about these last two months belong in company with the best stuff Marvel’s ever put out, and I do want people to know that the decade in which I spent my formative years did produce some legitimately good stuff. But as for the rest of it…you don’t have to like it, and I'm not going to try to convince you. You can tell me the post-Clone Saga, pre-Byrne reboot Spider-Man books were mediocre stuff, and I'll tell you you're probably right. It’s not particularly distinguished stuff, I know that. The Harras approach to Marvel worked to hook this particular nostalgic-before-his-time early teenager, but it certainly wasn't an approach that was gonna revitalize the superhero comic for the 21st century. But, you know, those comics were mine, man, I was there. When I’ve got a really bad cold I’ll pull ‘em out and read them in bed, I don’t care.

Anyway. Was that sappy? You can tell me if it was. I hate to romanticize nostalgia too much, but I'm also suspicious of bloggers who dismiss it completely. Before I go, though, I’ll just list very briefly a couple more comics from the era that might not be great, might even be severely flawed, but are still easy-to-overlook bright spots of the age in their own way.

Joe Madureira issues of Uncanny X-Men: It’s hard to remember now, but Joe Mad’s infusion of manga/anime style into mainstream superhero art was a breath of fresh air when he first appeared. While a lot of artists in the wake of the Image founders copied and watered down their heavily rendered and crosshatched style, Madureira made stylization cool again. So these comics get an honorable mention purely for the art; Scott Lobdell’s scripting was, just as it was in the beginning of the decade, quite insular and inscrutable…

Fantastic Four (vol. 3) #1-4: …and yet. Lobdell’s “create a mystery that’ll hook readers and worry about figuring it out later” approach that became so exhausting on X-Men seemed like a breath of fresh air for the FF. By the late 90s, the Marvel Universe didn’t seem to have enough undiscovered country left for these explorers to explore, but Lobdell’s four-issue run seemed to at least promise new ideas ahead; we’ll just never know if he could’ve followed through, because they swapped Lobdell for Chris Claremont, and his run, suffice to say, is not on this list.

Heroes Reborn Fantastic Four: The other “Heroes Reborn” books seemed to be proto-Ultimate takes on the characters, but on FF, Jim Lee (with scripting by Brandon Choi) gave us a retelling of highlights from Lee-Kirby FF. In the first six issues, the FF get their powers, fight the Mole Man, fight Sub-Mariner, meet the Avengers, meet the Black Panther, and get wrapped up in a battle between Doctor Doom and the Skrulls for control of the Power Cosmic that Doom is siphoning off the Silver Surfer. That is some condensed storytelling, man. These comics don’t offer much of anything new, and they certainly don’t improve on Lee and Kirby, but I like to think of those six issues as a really cool adaptation of a Fantastic Four movie you could never afford to film.

Sensational Spider-Man: This isn’t the post-Clone Saga/pre-Byrne reboot Spider-Man book I was reading the most at the time, but looking back, I’d say it was probably the best. Nothing groundbreaking, but just some really nicely done work can be satisfying in and of itself. Mike Wieringo’s work is great; why did we all wait until he was gone to notice? Writer Todd Dezago, meanwhile, offered old-school Marvel larks but gets hamstrung by inter-title crossovers and continuity, and for what it’s worth, he developed a way to modernize (well, for the 90s, anyway) the Stan Lee winking-but-still-sincere "voice" that most comics writers even today haven’t figured out how to do successfully.

Spider-Girl: I read maybe one or two issues of this, but never totally got into it. Still, I’m compelled to mention it because it had everything going against it in terms of what's traditionally successful in superhero comics -- female lead, set outside of regular continuity, debuted in friggin’ What If?, I mean really -- but found a hardcore devoted fanbase and managed to keep going (in one form or another) until just very recently. That’s got to count for something, right?

Cable: Man, I never read this either, but I always mean to track Joe Casey’s run down in dollar bins if I can. He works with artist Ladronn, who at the time was doing a style very openly aping Kirby. We associate Cable so strongly with the Image aesthetic, but Ladronn’s art forces you to rethink the character through a Kirby lens. Soldier from the world that’s coming, gimmicky glowing eye, part-man-part-machine…hey, let’s not dismiss this guy for being a Liefeld creation, you could almost make this thing work from a certain angle, couldn’t you? It suggests, to me at least, something relatively unique in comics at the time: instead of a modernization, a...past-ification? The late 90s' response to the early 90s. I don’t know, maybe it was rad.

That Punisher miniseries where he’s, like, an undead angel hunting demons and stuff: All right, just joking with that one.

Great Marvel Comics of the Late 1990s (Yes, They Do Exist): Black Panther

2010-11-07T19:38:00.002-06:00

Christopher Priest’s big idea on this series was to take the fact that the Black Panther was a head of state and run with it, blending superheroics and politics.

Well, here is a book that was ahead of its time!

Has this book been an influence on today’s comics or just a coincidence? Because in reading his Black Panther, you see Priest ground the superhero action we all know and love with the political thriller genre in very much the same way as some of Marvel’s comics have for the past few years (the “Dark Reign” storyline, for example), or the way Brian Michael Bendis and Ed Brubaker and others like them sometimes write superheroes as though it’s crime fiction in tights.

Indeed, sitting down and rereading Black Panther recently, I was struck by how much it resembles a recent-model Marvel, right down to the snarky banter about how goofy superhero costumes are; swap the guest appearance by Busiek’s Avengers for Bendis’ team, change the year on the indicia from 1997 to 2007, tear out the Sarah Michelle Gellar “Got Milk?” ads, and you might not even notice.

But should it be a surprise? Black Panther launched under Joe Quesada’s (and Jimmy Palmiotti’s) "Marvel Knights" banner, and the success of these books is what led to him getting the Editor in Chief job (replacing Bob Harras, who oversaw most of the books I’ve been talking about in this series…and who was recently named EiC of DC Comics. Hey, I’m relevant!). Clearly Quesada knew what sort of thing he’d like to see in his Marvel comics even then. If this book is not a direct influence, then it at least comes from the same place as today’s Marvels.

Then why do I like this so much more than the stuff that drives me crazy today? (Don’t say nostalgia, don’t say nostalgia!) Well, we could say that Priest got there first (although he didn’t, of course). We could say his dialogue is funnier. We could say that his political intrigue plots about rogue intelligence agents, political coups, and international economics at least sound more sophisticated than “What if the Green Goblin was in charge of national security?” We could simply say Priest’s writing is better, according to criteria X Y and Z. I could even put it down to that great comics boogeyman of the last decade, decompressed storytelling, but even if I believe that to some extent, how tiring would it be to write, and how much more tiring would it be to read?

We could argue one, some, or all of these things, but a lot of it comes down to taste. Black Panther was a really well-done book. But what I will say is that Christopher Priest approached the material in a different way than those who have followed him, because he played that series Stan Lee-style so he could be knowing and ironic about superheroes while also using them in a very straightforward, sincere way.

That’s one of the things Lee was best at, and part of the reason his books still resonate with today’s considerably more jaded audiences. Stan figured out that you could point out and wink at genre conventions and clichés so that the non-kid audience is in on the joke…but in doing so, it allowed him to use those conventions and clichés just as much and as shamelessly as he pleased all the same. Take the Black Panther’s first appearance in Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four, where T’Challa reveals the story of his father the chieftain, murdered at the hands of a white outsider, after which the son swears revenge. Lee has the Thing point out -- a couple of times, actually -- that this narrative is cribbed from almost every contemporary movie or book on this subject you can find…but pointing it out deflates any unwarranted, undeserved pretensions and allows Lee the freedom to integrate these tropes into his story, where cliché fuses with traditional superhero narrative and becomes something new.

Priest does this constantly in his Black Panther run, largely through narrator, reader-identification figure, and “useless white boy” Everett K. Ross. Every time there’s a twist in the political intrigue, Ross is there to point out how it’s like something out of a spy thriller to prevent us from pointing out the comparison first. Conspiracies are compared to Oliver Stone’s JFK (actually, the 90s movies references are maybe the only thing dating this comic) regularly. The nonchronological narrative structure is unabashedly pulled from Pulp Fiction, and the characters comment on it all the time just so you know Priest knows. Of course, you could very easily overdo this deflation and nothing would mean anything; everything would just be one more in-joke and hedged bet, but Priest is smart enough -- tactful enough like ol’ Stan was in his day -- to know when to pull back.

Because the criticism isn’t coming from the Black Panther himself. When the Avengers guest-star, they’re not self-deprecating or ironic or anything like that at all. Here’s the difference between Priest’s poking fun at the superhero genre and some of his successors: in Black Panther, there’s nothing funny about superheroes themselves -- it’s Ross’ observations that make them funny.

Remove Ross and the whole thing is played fairly straight, and I think that’s important. Superhero comics for a modern adult audience are a curious animal and a precarious tightrope act. Your average adult readers aren’t going to just take this stuff at face value the way they could as kids -- even the attempt to do so requires some sort of adult-level interaction with text that’s just not present in the way an eight-year-old kid picks up a comic and goes, “Venom? Awesome!”

So how the hell do you write children’s stories for adults? We don’t believe in superheroes, but we still want to believe in superheroes. A tall order! You play it too seriously, and it becomes heavy-handed and overwrought. You can cut it with irony, but it’s easy to go too far and everything becomes a joke, and nothing means anything anymore. If the Avengers aren’t going to take themselves seriously, why should I?

But Priest’s Avengers do take themselves seriously. Issue #8 has the Avengers intervening in a New York City riot, and all the while, Ross’ narration is calling them “Gaudily dressed borderline fascists,” “The Village People with repulsor rays,” “the expression of some chronic self-delusion” and perhaps the ultimate insult, quotation marks around the “super” in “super-hero.” But all the while, the Avengers themselves are played just as they are in their own comic. The Avengers’ "integrity" remains intact, but we also get critique. That critique would ring false coming from the Avengers, because in the world of comics we so desperately want to believe in, there’s nothing funny and there’s nothing shady about the Avengers at all. But Ross isn’t an Avenger and he isn’t a superhero. He’s an outsider*. Ross can make fun of the Panther’s kitty-cat ears all he wants, and we’ll forgive him, because we’re Ross.

So Priest can supply that ironic distance from the Avengers, but he can also have the Avengers doing their Avenger-y stuff. You read Black Panther and you get both at the same time, the same as you do reading Lee/Kirby FF.

That’s classic Marvel Comics in any decade.

(* - Ah, but what about the Thing, you might well arsk? He is a superhero after all and thus not an outsider, so who is he to be poking holes in the Black Panther’s backstory? But I’d argue the Thing, the original “unglamorous” superhero, functions in Lee/Kirby FF is as an outsider as well, albeit one who’s more integrated with the main action. The Human Torch is closer in age to the comic’s original intended readership, but it’s Ben Grimm -- the comedian, the freak -- who’s meant to be the reader-identification figure. Although he’s a plainspoken, unpretentious individual, he’s wise to the tropes of superhero comics so that the rest of the Fantastic Four can afford not to be.)

Great Marvel Comics of the Late 1990s (Yes, They Do Exist): Deadpool

2010-11-01T21:22:00.003-05:00

Today Deadpool has…four ongoing series, is that right? I don’t really understand why the market will bear this at the moment, but it seems incredible to me now that in the late 90s, there was only one Deadpool comic, and it was often teetering on the edge of cancellation. But believe me when I tell you, this is one of the best Marvel Comics of the decade, and at the time, no comic being produced meant more to me than Deadpool.

I’ve been trying to make a case in this series about the Marvel mindset circa 1996-1999 or so – after the near collapse of the industry as a result of the excesses of the early-to-mid 90s, editorial spent a few years re-evaluating their primary superhero properties and trying to get them back to “the good ol’ days” while remaining modern. It's back to bright colors and clean lines, but those colors (and letters) are done on a computer, and those clean lines are in service of that new "manga" fad we'd been hearing about that everyone was so sure would fizzle out in a couple years. So in light of that, Deadpool scoring his own comic in 1997 was a bit odd because he’s a symbol of that early-90s excess.

You could look all this stuff up on Wikipedia, but I need it here for context: Deadpool started out as an X-Force villain “created” by Rob Liefeld (co-creator Fabian Nicieza has apparently admitted that he was basically just a lift of DC villain Deathstroke, which is why he named him “Wade Wilson”: as an in-joke and as a pre-emptive strike against cries of “ripoff!”). A bloodthirsty, wisecracking killer-for-hire, Deadpool proved popular enough to eventually be spun off into his own mini-series. (If you were a mysterious supporting X-Men character in the 90s, it was pretty easy to get yourself spun off into your own miniseries.)

This sort of thing happened all the time in the early 90s – the fan-favorite villains got their own books, but for propriety/morality’s sake, they reformed or, more often, became antiheroes. Here’s how you do it: You give your villain a slight noble streak - he won’t hurt innocent people. You pit that character against worse villains than himself, so that he comparatively is the “gooder” guy. That way the character doesn’t lose the violent, gritty edge that made him so popular in the first place, but now you’re allowed to root for him. So the formula’s easy, but it’s hard to pull it off without being totally cheap. You get unconvincing reversals (Venom, who’s murdered prison guards on multiple occasions and isn’t above threatening Aunt May to get at Peter Parker, rather abruptly decides to dedicate his life to protecting “innocents”) or a lot of stock brooding about the long road to redemption.

Deadpool’s second limited series was written by the last guy you’d expect: our old pal Mark Waid! And the standard seeds of redemption are planted there – there’s a notion that Deadpool’s a bad dude, but when it really counts, he’ll make a heroic choice, etc. etc. Not his best work, and I recall Waid saying in an interview if he’d known what a scumbag Deadpool was before accepting the job, he’d’ve turned it down.

So for whatever reason, Marvel decides to give ‘Pool his own series in ’97, and the job of writing it goes to Joe Kelly, then a newcomer. (The original artist was a young Ed McGuinness, who’d go on to dazzle us with three incredible JLA Classified issues with Grant Morrison but was still very much learning his craft at this time.) Kelly turns out to be a really good match for Deadpool. Partially it’s because Kelly can channel an appropriately twisted sense of humor for the character. It’s easy enough to write pop-culture references and jokes about how much this guy digs maiming and explosions to get across how cuh-razy and deeeee-mented your antihero protagonist is (although it’s not so easy to keep it from being irritating as hell; it's down to taste, ultimately, but I think Kelly pulls it off). Deadpool’s words, however, always seem to adhere to some sort of central character logic. Not just a bunch of random, funny lines Kelly thought up on the bus, Deadpool “sounds” like the same guy from joke to joke, and he’s distinct from all the other smartasses who populate this book. The dialogue is in no way realistic, but it is consistent, so it at least creates the illusion of a “real” person, however fantastic he may be.

But more importantly, Kelly and Deadpool were a perfect match because Kelly was a new, relatively unknown writer, and Deadpool was a low-profile book crammed in its own corner of the Marvel publishing schedule. Working in the Marvel Universe is a lot of laboring in the shadows of giants. You’re trying to write Fantastic Four that lives up to Lee/Kirby, Spider-Man that lives up to Lee/Ditko, Daredevil that lives up to Miller, X-Men that lives up to Claremont/Byrne, and so on. Before Kelly got ahold of Deadpool, however, the character had never had that “definitive” run. Rob Liefeld, for all of his faults, was one of the last Marvel creators to pump new characters with staying power into the Marvel Universe, uninspired though they might be in conception. A writer can look at this assignment in dismay – “What am I supposed to do with a character like Deadpool? Where do I start? There’s never been anything particularly interesting about him!” – or you can look at the character as a blank slate.

And it’s quite obvious from reading the book how passionate Joe Kelly was about his blank slate. There is a hell of a lot of creating going on; Kelly basically a milieu and supporting characters for Deadpool from the ground up, but it feels like something that's been in place for years. He dips into Marvel lore but never depends on it – I keep harping on it for a reason, the best of these late-90s Marvel writers had discipline. He never treats Deadpool as an audition for a better gig; he poured everything he had in it as though convinced he’d never get to write another book for Marvel ever again.

And that was a very real possibility at the time! These were the days of Busiek/Perez Avengers and Waid/Garney Captain America…in 1998, who the hell was Joe Kelly, and who the hell cared about Deadpool? Chris Claremont likes to tell the tale of how he and Dave Cockrum, and later John Byrne, were pretty much just left alone in those early years of the new X-Men because then it was who the hell cares about the X-Men? Like Claremont & Co., Kelly seemed to be able to do pretty much anything he wanted to do on a midlist book (at least until cancellation rumors started circling around #25, a dance of “Yep, you’re getting cancelled, so you better wrap up all your storylines in the next few issues…no, wait, numbers are okay, you’d better come up with some new material…wait, no, actually…” that eventually drove Kelly off the book). And so, like many of the best creators do when left alone, their superhero books become bizarre, idiosyncratic, personal. Remember, I liked this “re-examination” phase Marvel was going through, but it was exciting to see a book that didn’t have to grapple with What Had Come Before, because What Had Come Before had been kind of crummy. Kelly and Deadpool were free to do their own thing.

And so what Kelly wanted to do was to turn that “long road to redemption” thing we’d seen a million times into something unusual. His innovation was to subvert this clichéd character arc by not making redemption a straight line. It’s “realistic,” in its way – if you’d spent the last however-many years as a paid assassin after escaping from a Canadian supersoldier program that had performed gruesome experiments on you to turn you into the perfect killing machine, you’d probably have a hard time making the transition too. He’ll look like he’s making progress for a couple issues – he spares the life of the Weapon X scientist who’s largely responsible for Deadpool’s condition – and then he’ll have a bad day and say “Screw it, this is too hard,” and go back to the dark side.

There may be some commentary on the quickie villain-turned-hero phenomenon in that Deadpool is trying to become a hero for all the wrong reasons. It’s a mixture of low-self esteem and trying to score with Siryn from X-Force, who thinks Deadpool might not be such a bad guy after all and harbors some sort of nebulous “feelings” for him for reasons largely unexplained. He falls in love with the idea of being a hero, mostly. You get the sense that he would be much happier if he could just give up trying altogether, but he can never quite let it go.

If he tries, he’s spurred to continue by Zoe Culloden of Landau, Luckman, & Lake, who believes that Deadpool is somehow destined to lead humankind into a new age of peace and prosperity. It smells a little like the standard “You have a mysteeeerious desssssstiny!” crap that got flung around a lot of comics of the day, but it’s undercut by the humorously corporate atmosphere of LL&L (Zoe is an “expediter,” and the firm offers Deadpool a 401k upon joining up) and, of course, by Deadpool himself. This promise of a cosmic destiny gives him a temporary ego boost…until he discovers his actual role in ushering in the new golden age is to kill a Predator-looking dude before he can kill an alien messiah headed to Earth. Even when promised a heroic destiny, Deadpool’s still little more than a glorified hitman.

But the upside to this almost-unending cycle of getting knocked down is that when Deadpool does manage to do the right thing (for varying degrees of “right”), it’s a true victory. Captain America can do a hundred noble things before Sunday brunch (and we love him for it, don’t get me wrong), but because Deadpool is wired for self-interest and violence, his little pockets of altruism mean more.

A similar thing could be said about the book’s tone. Deadpool is a character built for humor, a voice to poke fun at these comics we take so seriously. But Deadpool, for all its jokes and its typically late-90s bright color palette, could get quite serious and quite dark when it wanted to, and the contrast made it all the more powerful. We’re told Blind Al is Deadpool’s “prisoner,” but she seems, at first, more like a sassy sitcom mother figure. They trade insults and eat breakfast together and play wacky pranks on each other, and the whole thing seems pretty low-stakes. But then an issue like #14 comes along, where you find out about The Box, a torture chamber where Deadpool sticks Blind Al when she’s “bad,” and about the one time she escaped and went to hide out with an old flame…only to find Deadpool got there first and fed him, quite literally, to the dogs. Kelly’s quite comfortable using an assassin for comedy, but he never lets you get too comfortable about it. Blind Al stops talking to Deadpool and you're angry about it - "Just be friends like you used to!" But they can't, and you start to realize they never really were. Never forget that this is a dude who’s killed people for money. This isn’t just Spider-Man With A Gun.

So the question Kelly ultimately poses is whether or not Deadpool is a "good guy." And saying “Yes he is, because he tries to be better than what he is” isn’t really the final answer Kelly was going for, I don’t think, and my support for that is the “Dead Reckoning” storyline (#23-25) that wraps up the whole first two years of the series. The alien messiah I mentioned earlier is headed for Earth, and it leaves peace and bliss wherever it goes, but it also eliminates free will – it's basically a benevolent version of the Anti-Life Equation. So when Deadpool finds out, he makes a snap decision, and kills the “space baby” instead of saving it. And it makes sense because ultimately, Kelly’s Deadpool is a messed-up guy at the mercy of fate. He’s bad because he was created that way by Liefeld, because he got dealt a rough hand in life, and he’s good because people tell him to be, whether it’s Siryn or Zoe or Marvel editorial not wanting a psychotic killer to be the lead in a series. So it makes sense that he’d defend free will the one time in his miserable life he gets to assert his own.

As the fanbase gets older, and the comics themselves become increasingly self-aware, it’s hard for superhero comics to transcend themselves anymore. It’s hard now, and it was hard back in the 90s. But Deadpool the character and Deadpool the book were just scrappy enough to have something to transcend, and Kelly pulled it off like nobody else working at the time could have.

Wyatt Earp: a work in progress.. I promise.

2010-10-25T18:28:00.003-05:00

Hey Justin, and others. After your inspiring post I decided to share some of the in progress AWE2999 stuff. So you can see it is in fact having some forward momentum. As Justin mentioned it won't be called AWE2999 this time around. Instead it will be WWWH. Currently I've got four stories drawn and waiting for color. One or two more scripts to draw and Justin and I are both sitting on a mountain of ideas. I don't think we'll be publishing them anytime soon. We really want to build up a bulk before we present them to the world. That way you don't have that 6 month delay between pages. Have fun if you go to BTF tonight. I hear good things.

-josh

Sorry, No 90s for You Today

2010-10-24T22:13:00.003-05:00

I started writing about Joe Kelly's Deadpool, and then it turned out I have an awful lot to say about Joe Kelly's Deadpool. This is a comic that was really important to me at the time, real defining stuff, and so I didn't want to rush it. So next week, get ready for a hell of a lot of words about pre-four-books-a-month Deadpool.

In the meantime, have you been checking out Josh's sketchblog? In keeping with the 90s theme of my recent posts, his blog is like a box of chocolates, in that it is heart shaped, has a lot of little paper wrappers around everything, and contains a good deal of nougat. No, wait, actually, it's that you never quite know what you're going to get, from a particularly menacing drawing of Galactus, domestic interludes of a humorous nature, a Breaking Bad-inspired redesign of Mister Sinister, and often pictures of dogs of various sorts.

There are also bits of art from the comic we do together that gives this blog its name (although the name of the comic, at least, is changing). This is quite a technological terror he's constructed, and I find a real elegance in this simple conversational panel. We may have more stuff to pass along as well. (Josh, you still have the keys to this blog, right? You should crosspost the Earp/TWWWH stuff on here, it's only right. Also, I need to call and/or e-mail you soon, but Monday there's a movie theatre here playing some sort of digitally remastered Back to the Future on the big screen, so my brother and I will obviously be unavoidably detained that evening.)

Great Marvel Comics of the Late 1990s (Yes, They Do Exist): Thunderbolts

2010-10-17T22:26:00.002-05:00

The disinformation campaign surrounding the book’s launch is legendary. After the “Onslaught” crossover, the Fantastic Four and the Avengers were presumed dead (actually taking part in “Heroes Reborn” in a pocket universe), which, you can imagine, leaves a pretty big superhero void in the mainstream Marvel Universe. So it’s announced Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley are going to introduce an all-new superteam called the Thunderbolts. These mysterious new superheroes get an intro in an issue of Incredible Hulk to lead you into buying the regular series, where the first issue is played totally straight, right down to the enthusiastic “Justice … like lightning!” catchphrase on the cover. They have a solid first-issue adventure, crafted by Busiek and Bagley to look like everything else Marvel was publishing at the time…until the last page when the Thunderbolts are revealed to be Baron Zemo’s Masters of Evil in disguise, merely posing as superheroes to con the authorities to give them access to the Avengers and SHIELD files.

And you had no clue until you read that page. Marvel couldn’t have kept the secret today with the internet the way it is, of course, and even in 1997 it was a feat. That makes me a little sad, but I’m part of the problem, of course; I don’t buy very many new superhero comics these days, but I “follow” them, as you might follow a baseball team you don’t get to see play very often, by reading the internet. Even if I were buying more, I’d likely steer of the big line-wide tentpole events…and yet the junk is in my system, so I’ll read news and reviews about them because I want to know what happened. It takes almost no effort to find spoilers, so I’m always quite surprised how reliant these tentpole events are on rearranging status quo. That’s why Thunderbolts looks even stranger thirteen years down the line. Now you’d have to hype up that concept ahead of time, or else who’s gonna buy it? I almost think you’d know something was up with this book from the start if they launched it today – “All new characters, not tying into anything, no high concept…there’s no way they think this is gonna sell; what’s the twist?” Conditions were just right in 1997, though. The issue sold out, reprinted and sold out again. Stealth high-concept smash hit.

The problem is, where do you go from there? The trick about high-concept superhero books is that they’re hard to build a long-running series out of because high concepts have a way of boxing superheroes in. You can do a million issues of the Avengers (so long as you can think of new scenarios) because their only real mission is to stop threats and preserve the status quo. These Thunderbolts, though, have a clear endpoint in mind, so either they accomplish their goals and the series ends, or you keep putting it off and the audience gets bored waiting for them to hurry up already and do something.

Busiek, however, doesn’t need me to point this out, because he already has the solution. So, through the first twelve issues, most of the team decides they like being superheroes and want to reform. Well, that’s a start, but by 1997, “villains reform and become heroes” has worn thin (in the early-to-mid 90s, of course, it was all too common for popular villains to get their own book and reform just enough so you could root for them a phenomenon we’ll get into more about next week with Deadpool), so Busiek has Zemo (who has no intention of reforming) see where this is headed and outs the whole group so that they’ll have to be loyal to him or be fugitives.

Busiek has done something very clever here, in using a high concept to bait an audience and then getting them hooked on the characters and situations so that they’ll stay even after you’ve removed the high concept. After issue #12, the Thunderbolts aren’t driven by their high-concept mission; they hang together because it’s them against the rest of the world.

Curiously, I'd like to make a case that Thunderbolts is Chris Claremont’s X-Men in reverse!

The whole mutants-as-persecuted-minority is a high concept, and you can use it to sell movies and power some storylines, but it's hard to really sustain it because again, either mutants and humans finally live together in peace and the story ends, or you get what has happened to the franchise, and get locked into a holding pattern where nothing is ever accomplished and no progress is made, and that’s a pretty terrible lesson to teach kids about overcoming adversity, isn’t it?

Claremont’s the one who really pushed the high concept as he stayed on the book for years and years, but if you look at the first chunk of his run, the stuff with Dave Cockrum (the first time) and John Byrne, it does nothing to drive the main plots of the book (with the exception of the Sentinels, kind of, and "Days of Future Past"). What does Arcade’s Murderworld have to do with these themes? What does Black Tom Cassidy? The Shi'ar? You could rework Proteus to be a non-mutant and the story would play out much the same. The Dark Phoenix Saga is generally considered the peak of the X-Men franchise, and yet you will find nothing at all about persecuted mutants outside of a few comments after the attack on the Hellfire Club.

Being mutants doesn’t drive the story, being mutants is simply what brings the characters together, because the Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne stuff is really all about how people you’re sort of thrown together with become friends, and how friends become family. Nightcrawler finds people who don’t fear his appearance, Banshee finds love with Moira MacTaggart, Colossus finds a larger world than life on the farm. They all find friendship, and the Dark Phoenix Saga is really about how far you’d be willing to go for somebody you love.

Once you have a solid core of characters like that, you can do soap opera and supervillains for years. And that’s what Busiek hit upon doing Thunderbolts – being an ex-supervillain, just like being a mutant, is the reason these people with very different personalities don’t just go their separate ways.

And then you can throw curveballs. Busiek has Hawkeye join the team and offer to become the T-Bolts’ new leader to help them get a pardon, but he also demands MACH-1, the former Beetle, serve a prison sentence for an old murder charge. Instant conflict. “Who does this guy think he is?” “He’s trying to help us!” I’d never seen much personality in Hawkeye, but under Busiek he’s good-hearted but always a little self-righteous, always assuming that he knows exactly what you’re going through even when he probably doesn't, always looking for a chance to prove that he’s not just The Dude With The Arrows even if it involves big risks.

High concepts are great at grabbing attention and they help you sell the movie rights, but you also have to actually make things happen that are interesting or all you have is a pitch. Thunderbolts did both.

Great Marvel Comics of the Late 1990s (Yes, They Do Exist): Captain America (vol. 3)

2010-10-10T22:47:00.004-05:00

In the mid-90s, Mark Waid and Ron Garney did something like ten issues of Cap before handing the book over to Rob Liefeld and Jeph Loeb for “Heroes Reborn.” According to Waid, the deal was in place before Waid and Garney came on, only nobody told them. Marvel was then left with some egg on its face, because the Waid/Garney “fill-in” combo turned out to be a critical sensation that got the book more attention than it had in years, only to be cleared away for the critical failure that followed. And so when the “Heroes Reborn” storyline/experiment ended, the choice for the “new” creative team was obvious. Waid and Garney are back, and it’ll be like they never left!

But it couldn’t be just like that, and there’s two reasons why. The first is the more obvious – because the original run had the mystique of being a good run cut down before its time, Waid and Garney would not only be in competition with themselves, but with that hype. But just as importantly, I’d argue, the climate in the comics world had changed. Waid/Garney v.1 wasn’t a success because it was a brightly colored retro superhero book at the tail end of the dark ages. No, the book itself and its milieu were just as dark as anything on the shelves at the time, very much not what’s come to be known (sometimes dimissively but often reductively) as “fun” comics; it was Captain America himself who was brightly colored and retro in the middle of some dark comics, and that was the magic formula – once a man out of time, Captain America was now a man out of zeitgeist. By the time Waid and Garney were back, however, Marvel was in full retro mode, and so that approach wouldn’t mean the same things anymore.

I can’t speak to whether it was intentional or not (and I don’t really care; authorial intention be damned, discovering and developing your own meanings and interpretations is one of the great pleasures of the arts, and don’t let anybody take it away from you), but the storyline in the first seven issues of the relaunched Captain America (Garney left after #5 to do an ill-fated Hulk relaunch with John Byrne) seems to converse with these problems.

Presumed dead at the end of the “Onslaught” crossover, Captain America’s return becomes something very much like the Second Coming in the eyes of the American people, and Cap’s off-put by his new status as icon. Of course, “hero is uncomfortable with being the subject of hero worship” isn’t anything new in superhero comics (it’s a story told so often with Superman these days – Waid’s favorite superhero, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence – that you can be forgiven a groan when you see it polished off again), and hasn’t Cap been declared dead and returned so many times you’d think the public would be used to it by now? But I can’t help reading Cap’s hesitation as Waid’s, blown up to appropriately superheroic proportions (again, even if the thought never crossed Waid’s mind). “I’m not a messiah, I’m just a soldier/comic book writer!”

But see, it’s more complex than you might think, because Cap’s humility is not self-delusional. He knows he’s not really “just another guy”; he knows he’s exceptional, and he does want Captain America to mean something. And Waid, I’m sure, wouldn’t have taken that initial Captain America gig if he’d known it was just to fill a publication gap until someone else could take the job away; he knows he wrote a good Captain America, and he wanted to write the best damn Captain America comic he possibly could. Cap and Waid both believe in themselves, both strive for excellence; the concern is that everybody else’s perceptions and expectations might be inflated.

So what makes this aspect of the storyline so compelling is that it isn’t a matter of “all hero worship is inherently bad,” because Cap wants to be a good example for His Fellow Americans, and Waid wants you to think he wrote some good comics. My favorite issue of this run is #4, where Captain America and Hawkeye go out on the town and hash it out. Hawkeye isn’t troubled at all by “Capmania,” and really he’s not the sort of guy who’d shy away from attention, but it’s his contention that Cap really does deserve it. And that in itself is touching – the guy with the arrows who was always after Cap’s job as leader in those early Avengers issues has matured and thinks better of ol’ “Methuselah”. He still serves to antagonize Cap (it's a hoot for him rubbing the crappy merchandizing in Cap's face, he buys an oversized Captain America helmet, and tells a news crew about a bunch of absurd Chuck Norris-like reasons why Cap is so great, including that he gave Galactus a wedgie and used to tour with Fleetwood Mac). But that antagonism is constructive rather than destructive – Hawkeye makes jokes to get his friend to lighten up. And Cap really does need a friend like Hawkeye. At the height of his brooding, Cap laments that because of his newfound superstardom, he can’t even leave Avengers Mansion...at which point the more grounded Hawkeye comes up with the solution Cap is too inward-focused to have thought of: he tells Steve to take off the costume and just walk around like a dude.

It becomes a little unsatisfactory toward the end – Captain America claims that even he was “seduced” by Capmania, and yet the only moment where I can see him doing anything but chafing at the attention is a tiny smile that escapes his lips when a crowd is chanting his name. I understand that it makes for a more satisfying character arc to give into the hype and then see the error of your ways, but frankly if that is the only thing he did, I am going to say you should not have to beat yourself up over this, Steve! If I had a giant statue of me in Japan and action figures and a movie and people screaming my name, I might smirk just a little bit too!

So. Then we get to the second problem facing Waid and Garney at the dawn of their second run, the problem of how to be relevant in the face of changing times. And, obligingly for my pseudo-thesis, Waid makes it explicit in an interior monologue in #4:

“Now more than ever, people are looking to me for answers I’m not sure I have. I talk a lot about the American dream, the American way…but talking’s easy. In fact, after the Onslaught fight, I was gone for a while…and my absence didn’t exactly cripple the nation. […] If Captain America’s going to matter in the new millennium, he’s going to have to start being proactive…not reactive. But what do I do to make a difference in this complicated world nowadays?”

I am tempted again to read a little Cap-as-Waid here. Indeed Waid was gone from the title awhile after the Onslaught fight! That’s taking it a bit too far, I’m sure, but Waid does seem to be grappling with the question of relevance, the same as Cap. At first thought, however, you might not understand why. After all, Waid’s won, hasn’t he? One of comicdom’s greatest modern Silver Age boosters writing Captain America again in the middle of a full-on retro craze. Mission accomplished, eh?

But despite the fact that Mark Waid can name every single member ever to serve in the Legion of Super-Heroes or that he purportedly memorized Clark Kent’s Social Security number, he is a disciplined writer, and like a discplined writer, he is quite never satisfied in what he’s done. Much like what I’ve said about Kurt Busiek, he’s not out simply to scratch a nostalgia itch (even though he could've gotten away with it). At this late-90s Marvel, where everything old is new again, you could simply do a modern take on a Captain America vs. Batroc the Leaper battle and call it a day.

And in that much-loved issue #4, Cap does fight Batroc. But, and here’s the thing, he does it grudgingly. This Captain America searching for relevance doesn’t really want to get sucked into “Cap vs. Batroc, Round 27.” He’s forced to, because this is superhero comics, after all, but after he’s done, he describes the fight (and, quite cheekily of Mr. Waid, the entire superhero thrust of the issue) as “a completely pointless way to spend and afternoon.”

“I wasn’t defending my country. I waasn’t fighting to protect the innocent. I was brawling because some idiot came gunning for me. What a pathetic waste of time. […] I fought a battle I’ve fought a dozen times before…and it did nothing to make the world a better place. This wasn’t a heroic act. It was a wrestling match…with just as little at stake.”

He walks a fine line, very nearly criticizing the reader who bought this issue because, hey, Batroc! But personally I think Waid pulls it off - do a straight-up supercharacters fight, and then deflate it with commentary. Yep, that's the ol' Marvel style, all right.

Ooh, running long. I really really liked the first storyline in this series, you guys. I’d like to say a bit about the conclusion to that arc, because I think it’s one of the best uses of an established Marvel Universe concept we’ve seen in the modern era. But I also don’t wish to spoil a genuine surprise on the off chance I could convince any of you to go track down these issues. Perhaps we might take it to the comments, but perhaps not.

So I’ll close by talking about Ron Garney, because this series is a true collaboration between writer and artist (Waid once remarked, too humbly, I’m sure, that it was Garney who made the first run a success, and that he was merely along for the ride). Garney’s art on the first run made a splash, and yeah, it was nice, and Captain America himself hadn’t looked so good in years. But by the time "Heroes Return" rolled around, Garney made the leap from really quite good to phenomenal.

Man, his storytelling chops on these issues. His layout and compositions are breathtaking. Issue #4 begins with one of the best splash panels I have ever seen. Oh, look, I can actually show you this one, thanks to Waid himself posting it: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_xAeJG-YrjJQ/SbdoObMktPI/AAAAAAAAABo/Na-nuVvTrT8/s1600-h/Cap+04.jpg. Credit must go to Waid for figuring out how to pack a whole lotta information into one single image like that, but it wouldn’t work without Garney’s sheer talent behind it. This page doesn’t read as anything like a single frame of a movie (what a waste that would be of a great concept). No, there’s time in this panel, there’s movement. I don’t feel like I’m looking at this panel, I am watching it.

Garney does it even better in the intro sequence to issue #2 and man oh man do I wish I had a scanner (again) to show you this. Track it down, you won’t be sorry, but there’s a shot of a Hydra agent kicking down the door, and I would swear to you that the image is moving on the page. Garney really is a master of timing and pacing, which we don’t see enough of in modern comics art. He can slow time down with some long shots and small panels, and then instantly crank up the speed with a big action-packed panel. So often we see splash pages in the middle of the story that don’t really add anything (this isn’t a knock on current artists; this has always been the case); it comes off like the artist got bored and wanted to draw a flashy pin-up for his portfolio. Not so with Garney. He uses half- and full-page splashes fairly liberally, actually, but they always hit at exactly the right moments. You will forgive the expression, but…these are money shots.

It’s sad to see Garney go in this series. Doug Braithwaite pencils #6 and the first half of #7, and he does a fine job. After that, Andy Kubert takes over the art chores, and things certainly get more stylish; I shan’t say a word against him. Their first real storyline together gets Cap out of his comfort zone and dealing with Doctor Strange’s enemy Nightmare, and it’s pretty good. After #13 (a really nice single issue, it must be said) my interest in the series declines a little bit. There’s a Red-Skull-gets-the-Cosmic-Cube-again storyline that segues into a return-of-Korvac time-travel story, and then back to the Red Skull storyline. The Korvac storyline is good in places (he keeps rebooting time every time Captain America forms a resistance to his rule in the future, but no matter what he tries, Captain America is always there, in spirit if not always in flesh), but the Red Skull storyline never really hooked me. Then there’s some tying up of loose ends involving Cap’s missing shield that are okay superhero comics as well.

I do wonder what they would have been like with Garney still on board, though.

Another 90s-Marvel Schedule Change

2010-10-09T00:19:00.002-05:00

There'll still be a new post Monday, but it'll be on Mark Waid and Ron Garney's second run of Captain America (vol. 3, which once upon a time used to mean something indeed) rather than Christopher Priest's Black Panther, because right now it looks like BP'll be a good way to end this whole show.

Should you decide to come back here for the Cap write-up, I'd bring, like, some coffee or a change of socks or something, because this is shaping up to be long.

Great Marvel Comics of the Late 1990s (Yes, They Do Exist): Avengers Forever

2010-10-03T23:40:00.003-05:00

Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s regular Avengers series from the same time was pretty good, too, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve always thought this 12-issue miniseries Busiek wrote (with an assist from Roger Stern) was even better, or at least, more interesting. And interesting comics are what I am interested in.

I want to mention artist Carlos Pacheco’s work right off the bat so I don’t tack it on as an afterthought at the end, because it’s so vital to the project. I feel like this story, so rooted in Avengers comics past, would’ve been a little too on-the-nose with Perez’s art – I mean, he drew some of the stories this book name-checks; he was there! While I don’t want to minimize Stern’s contribution (although I’m not sure what it was, precisely…plotting assist?), this series is really about Busiek and Pacheco, two guys who’d read those stories when they first came out, now revisiting and re-exploring them from their late-90s perspective. You can tell Pacheco loves those old comics, but his style is fresh and new. I’ve always thought of Pacheco as the ultimate artist of the 90s (which I mean as a sincere compliment, not ironically or sarcastically) – you see in his artwork the clean lines of the Silver Age, the handsome figure work of the Bronze Age, the energy and flair of the Image guys, the stylization of his contemporaries, all combined in an artistic goulash that just screams THIS IS WHAT SUPERHEROES SHOULD LOOK LIKE. Also: guy draws some really dramatic hands, I don’t know how he does it. Just look at them.

Of course, the first thing everybody mentions about this series is the continuity surgery, and Pillock and I had some rollicking back-and-forth about retcons and what-have-you last week. It may surprise you, but I don’t even think the continuity stuff is the most interesting part about this series, but you can’t really not write about it.

On the one hand, where Busiek doesn’t want to step on anybody’s toes in Untold Tales of Spider-Man (it’s about adding history, not retconning it; tidying up a few loose ends but not really making any radical changes), Avengers Forever does have some big, fat, “Everything you know is wrong!” changes that overturn some comics you may have read. Busiek reveals the master manipulator Immortus as being behind a whole mess of important events in Avengers history, from Avengers #2 to “The Crossing.” Along the way, we find out the Vision really was built out of the Human Torch (although the Torch exists as a separate being as well through some time-travel tinkering – Busiek wanted everybody to be happy, here), Kang’s claim that he was behind Hank Pym’s mental breakdowns was a lie (turns out that wasn’t even Kang!), and an old Thor story happened in a totally different way than originally portrayed. So this story does some undemocratic, totally authoritative retcons that don’t play nice, that insist that you take them as canon from now on and retroactively.

Why, then, does it not bristle the way many similar massive retcons do?

Well, to be upfront with you, part of the reason for me is that I’ve never actually been a hardcore Avengers fan (although I know you’ll call me out on the concept of “not a hardcore fan,” Pillock!). I’ve read enough Avengers comics over the years, but I’m not emotionally invested in them the way I am with, say, Fantastic Four or the Flash. So, y’know, you tell me some of the characters in some comics I’ve never read from the 70s and the 90s were Space Phantoms, it’s really no skin off my nose. It was just fun for me to get a quick summary of the 35-year metaplot of the Avengers to that point, additions or no.

But leaving that aside, many fans believe the “Everything you know is wrong!” type retcon to be a show of arrogance. I feel that’s severely overstating things in most cases, but there is an element to it that when you decide to contradict an established storyline, it’s implied that you’re doing so because you know better or you have a better idea.

Yet, I don’t read a drop of vanity in Avengers Forever (well, it’s maybe a little harsh on “The Crossing,” but who wasn’t, in those days?). To read it as hubris, as Busiek imposing his will on over three decades of Avengers history, would be a mistake. I mean, read the thing. This was a labor of love, but it was most certainly a labor! This was something Busiek knocked his brains out over, trying to reconcile nearly every loose end and continuity error (and the whole thing hangs together about as well as it possibly could), and he didn’t do it to write his own name into the Avengers legacy, or even for a No-Prize. He did it for us, we readers of Marvel Comics in the late 90s. The early 90s (even the late 80s, in places) had been pretty unkind to the Avengers, and so Busiek went about fixing holes – “Avengers continuity’s fine, I got it to make sense, I balanced the checkbook and took out the garbage. Let’s carry on, shall we?”

And that carrying on is important, because like I said, I don’t have a deep personal attachment to the Avengers, and so a big continuity patch manual alone isn’t gonna do it for me. Fortunately, Busiek’s got that discipline that I mentioned in talking about Untold Tales, enough discipline not to let it take over the narrative; it’s toward the end as sort of a reward for anyone who’s stuck it out and is interested, but what’s really driving this series is a story.

And what is that story? It’s long and complex and twisty and would take a whole blog post in itself to summarize, so I’ll just cut it down and say: Kang vs. Immortus, for all the marbles. Of course, Kang is Immortus - Kang was a time-travelling warlord, and Immortus was a mysterious, time-travelling manipulator, and eventually it was decided that both of these old Avengers villains were the same guy at different stages of their lives (Immortus is Kang’s future self), working at cross purposes.

What’s so interesting is the animosity between Kang and Immortus. Kang is obsessed with war and conquest, and considers Immortus a feeble academic who’s turned his back on the glory of it all. Immortus, meanwhile, seems embarrassed of Kang the way we might be about our teenage selves. And there’s something to that; although Kang describes himself wearily as “so old…”, there is something childish about Kang and the way he loves war for war’s sake, the way kids just love to play without an agenda. I mean, here’s a guy who likes to conquer galactic empires, but hates running them – he’s the kid who likes getting presents on Christmas morning but never cares enough to play with them!

And yet, there is something almost heroic about Kang here. Partly because Immortus is working an agenda for some higher-ups that involves destroying entire timelines, and so working with Kang is the lesser of two evils for the Avengers. But beyond that, what I find so compelling is that even though Kang knows he must become Immortus (having met him through time travel and all), he fights his destiny. He’s not fighting his future self alone, but inevitability itself. When he crushes the body-swapping device he’s used in past Avengers stories to cheat, the message is clear: "Hope I die before I get old"! Kang is every elementary school kid who doesn’t want to go to middle school, every high schooler who’s afraid of going to college, every twentysomething in love with the privileges of adulthood who doesn’t want to face the responsibilities, and every grown man or woman dreading the day they become a senior citizen. Kang is Peter Pan, and it works – the timestream is his Never-Never Land! He’s fighting adulthood, but not in the form of Captain Hook, because an adult with a hookhand and a pirate ship is still kind of cool. He’s fighting the Robin Williams adult Peter Pan from Hook; it’s bad enough getting old, but do you have to be so boring?

And the most striking thing about it is that Kang wins! The story doesn’t force him to accept his lot in life and mature (which is the knee-jerk way you'd end such a story); he gets separated from Immortus (sort of; if you’ve read it you know it’s trickier than that) and becomes master of his destiny once again. Free to be that child forever! Would it be playing “postmodern games” to read Kang’s refusal to quit as a metaphor for the Avengers franchise itself in this series? Kang doesn't have to get old and boring, and neither do the Avengers; it's telling that Immortus too gets a new lease on life. A new course is charted into the future for the "new" Captain Marvel, and heck, even Libra’s revealed to be still knocking around. I meant it when I said "everybody wins" - I read this series as Busiek and Pacheco saying, “Well, the Avengers had a patchy couple of years there – and if you want to be totally honest, the franchise has always had some inconsistencies, its good times and bad – but we survived. Nothing is broken, because the Avengers still work!”

Avengers forever.

Great Marvel Comics of the Late 1990s (Yes, They Do Exist): Untold Tales of Spider-Man

2010-09-26T23:13:00.004-05:00

So if you buy me saying that the “retro” movement in mid-to-late-90s Marvel was a reaction to the excesses of the early 90s – the idea that we have gotten away from what made these comics great, and we should try to get back to that place – then Untold Tales of Spider-Man is a pretty clear place to start. The thing about the Clone Saga is the whole storyline was multiple Peter Parkers basically taking a couple years off just to get their shit together; all that stuff we associate with Spider-Man’s popularity – colorful superhero action grounded with relatable situations – went missing for a long time…“Sorry, Vulture, I’d like to fight you, but I’m just super busy with my own stuff, here.” The core 90s audience was digging the twists and turns (let’s not forget, the reason they dragged that storyline out so long is because it sold very very well), but two groups of readers were being alienated: longtime fans who missed all the elements that made them love Spidey comics in the first place, and new readers who knew Spider-Man from cartoons and couldn’t find anything recognizable in the books as they were.

But, since both those groups wanted the same thing – fighting Electro in between bouts of girl trouble and money trouble, that sort of business – you just put out one book that caters to both of them, problem solved, bets hedged. A series set during Spider-Man’s early years would be recognizable to both groups (you get your teenage Peter Parker, but you also get the continuity-minded fans on board because it supposedly “counts”), and it sounds like a simple enough thing to pull off, until you really think about it. You try to balance appealing to old and new fans, but the new fans have a significant handicap – namely, that it’s the old fans writing the things, so who are they gonna look out for first?

Nostalgia and retro are infuriating in the wrong hands, because they're not demanding of a writer or artist – you just mix a bunch of elements that you loved as a kid together, recapture that warm fuzzy feeling, and call it a day. Now, Kurt Busiek clearly is a guy who loves old superhero comics, and he has a reputation as a total continuity freak, but if you actually sit down and read his stuff, you’ll find a superhero writer with some discipline. Busiek could just write a bunch of self-indulgent nostalgia-pandering and be done before lunch, but he doesn’t. Untold Tales is, make no mistake, crammed to the gills with in-jokes and callbacks for the thoroughly initiated (when you find out the Spacemen got their powers from gasses that were trapped inside a meteor, it’s a cookie and a pat on the head if you link it to the Looter’s origin, but it’s such a quick, understated aside that Busiek isn’t punishing you for not having memorized your Lee and Ditko).

But his love for the originals isn’t just surface, it isn’t just Silver Age for Silver Age’s sake; Busiek has very clearly studied not just what happens in the original tales, but how the stories are told. He’s interested in the mechanics of the thing in a way that a lot of writers aren't; he doesn’t just want to record in Abbey Road, he wants to figure out what made those Beatles songs work, anyhow.

Many of Lee and Ditko’s early Spider-Man issues follow a definite formula: Spider-Man meets villain, villain either defeats Spider-Man or manages to get away, Spider-Man learns his lesson, Spider-Man defeats villain. The first Vulture story, the first Doc Ock story, the first Electro story…they all do it! It’s quite brilliant, actually – what better way to demonstrate how Spider-Man doesn’t quite have the superhero thing down by having him need two tries to succeed? What makes Spidey a good superhero isn’t that he can beat a bad guy the first time he meets him, it’s that Spidey knows that you can learn from failure. Busiek’s Spider-Man can’t beat the Scorcher or the Sandman the first time around, either, but he taps into the endearingness of failure, which was always the hot air that keeps Spidey’s balloon afloat.

Perhaps even more interesting: Lee and Ditko’s Peter Parker initially wears a costume not to be a superhero, but to find applications for his unexpected powers. In Amazing Fantasy #15 he tries to become a TV star; in Amazing Spider-Man #1 he tries to join the Fantastic Four because he figures there's a salary in it; Amazing Spider-Man #2 has Peter figure out how to make money off Spider-Man by selling photos, and later issues even had him try to license his image and sell his web fluid to make some cash. Busiek, similarly, portrays a Spidey just trying to scrape by, who’s not yet necessarily a “career superhero”. He tries to become a police officer in issue #1; a politician hires him as a bodyguard in #2; another issue has him try to get hired by the military to protect the shipment of a device the Vulture’s after; another issue has NASA considering making him an astronaut. Untold Tales really splashes around in that whole seeming gray area of the early Spider-Man stories. What kind of “responsible” superhero charges for his services? The kind who keeps putting on that Spider-Man costume because Aunt May needs money for her meds. If not for her, that whole "Well, hell, I'll just take photos of myself if someone's gonna pay for 'em" gets a little ethically iffy when you take Aunt May out of the picture, doesn't it? Really, the whole reason he doesn’t throw away that Spider-Man costume at the start of Amazing Spider-Man #1 is for her, it’s always all been for her; pity she can never know because the shock would kill her (we’re always told) but hey, that’s Stan Lee for you.

Another thing Busiek’s learned well from the masters is how to use continuity as a tool, as another way of generating stories. Busiek truly was the King of Kontinuity in the 90s – anybody can memorize a bunch of Silver Age stories and reference them; Busiek looks at old stories as springboards.

Here’s what continuity is for! To be exploited! Not to drag your narrative down with chains and responsibilities, but to inspire! See, for me, the coolest thing about Doctor Doom in early Fantastic Four comics was that each story had him appear to buy it, only to reappear in a subsequent issue not only alive and well, but with a new scheme derived from that last appearance. Doom gets hurled into deep space, only to be found by aliens who teach him a mind-swap trick he pulls on Reed Richards. Caught in his own shrink ray, Doom appears to fade to nothingness, but subsequently finds a subatomic kingdom from which to strike at the FF.

And so, Busiek goes through Silver Age Marvels with his continuity comb, looks at what happened in the space between stories, and thinks, “Where could I go from here?” The Big Man comes out of nowhere in the original issues but is portrayed as an established threat; Busiek sees an opportunity. Remember how Spider-Man sorta flirts with the Invisible Girl in that one throwaway backup story (Amazing #8)? Busiek sure does, and if there’s mileage to be gotten out of playing it out to its (il)logical conclusion (and there is – plus Mike Allred art!), then he’s gonna get it.

“Untold Tales of Spider-Man” – what a chore that book could’ve been if it’d been predicated on continuity-as-obligation. But for Busiek, it’s continuity-as-opportunity, and he makes it look so easy! That’s why this book is on the list. A story set during a classic run that doesn’t set itself up as competition. The series is set chronologically in between issues of the original Stan Lee and Steve Ditko Spider-Man tales, and yet the stories are told according to modern conventions. Straight pastiche would be grating at best, condescending at worst, but these comics play by modern rules and aren’t trying to pass themselves off as Silver Age originals; not even the least-informed comics reader could mistake Busiek and Pat Olliffe’s work for Lee and Ditko’s (Olliffe’s style recalls Ditko’s general sweaty weirdness, particularly in the faces, but takes its storytelling and panel layout cues from then-contemporary comics).

It's a book very much trying to have its cake and eat it too, looking backwards while also venturing into some new places. You might consider Busiek taking apart his Lee-Ditko pocketwatch to see how it works merely a formal exercise, and maybe you're not wrong. But Busiek was given this little corner laboratory in 1995 to see if he could build “comics the way they used to be” and make ‘em work; fifteen years later and a lot of writers still haven’t got that one figured out.

Untold Tales of Spider-Man is a cleverer book than it gets credit for, and I think that’s part of the reason I like it so much. Busiek and Olliffe invested a lot of thought and work into what they were doing, and it would be a lot more apparent if they weren’t so damned elegant about their precarious balancing act.

Great Marvel Comics of the Late 1990s: Schedule Change

2010-09-24T11:56:00.004-05:00

So the introduction had dates and topics, remember? I hadn't really given much thought to the order the posts would go in; I thought they were modular, but now I've decided to kick off the series with Untold Tales of Spider-Man. It seems like a pretty useful (and pretty obvious, in retrospect) starting point for talking about the fusion of retro and modern present in most of the comics I'm going to highlight, and it's probably the best introduction to Kurt Busiek (who writes two other books on this list) and how exactly his superhero writing works.

So...theoretically, there's nothing stopping the rest of the posts from going in the original order, but I don't want to commit and then have to write another post like this in two weeks if it comes up, so let's just say

a.) there will be a new entry every Monday through November 8th, and
b.) it will be about one of the books on the original list.

See you Monday for our trip baaaaaack to the niiiiiineties! Queue up your Fiona Apple CDs and set your VCR for Must See TV. I am, no joke, wearing a flannel shirt over a T-shirt today.

Great Marvel Comics of the Late 1990s (Yes, They Do Exist): Introduction

2010-09-19T23:23:00.003-05:00

The 1990s are often looked at as a bad time in terms of quality for comic books in general, but especially for Marvel Comics.

“Extreme” heroes with chains and spikes and claws and guns (Wolverine and the Punisher, these are your children!) ruled the day, operating under the assumption that they were more “realistic” and “mature” than their predecessors. Villains who became popular enough to get their own series were redeemed very slightly and superficially so that you could root for them when they killed a bunch of dudes and made jokes about it.

The X-Men became increasingly inscrutable and insular. Chris Claremont had stopped writing the books in 1991, but because his style was widely credited with turning a second-tier, bimonthly book with a cult following into the industry leader, his successors continued writing in his general style but cranked up the intensity and turned down any measure of restraint. People get on Claremont’s case for self-indulgence and excess, but after he left, the unresolved plotlines, mysterious new characters with mysterious pasts, and dystopian alternate futures started piling up like never before. Every character seemed to have some secret connection to the past of every other character, so that while the number of mutants skyrocketed, their world became so much smaller.

But the X-Men kept selling, and so gradually that style of plotting spread to the other books. The infamous Clone Saga of the Spider-Man books was originally planned as a single sales-spiking storyline, but Marvel’s marketing department got a hold of it and demanded it be stretched to the breaking point, no matter how many times the creative team tried to just end the damn thing. All told, the storyline went on for about four years, turned at one point into an attempt at a back-to-basics reboot – establish the clone as the real Spider-Man, and give the “unrelatable” married Yuppie a happy ending with a new baby – and ended almost exactly where it started, except Norman Osborn came back out of the blue as a Lex Luthor-style master manipulator because they needed some sort of payoff for the readers who'd stuck with it.

The Avengers got the worst of it, because nobody seemed to care about the Avengers at all in the early 90s, so they just threw everything they could think of into the books and hoped something would work. They got trenchcoats and muted color palettes; Iron Man was manipulated into becoming a villain, died, and was replaced by a teenaged Tony Stark doppelganger from a parallel reality; the Wasp metamorphosed into a hybrid wasp creature; and Giant-Man…uh…Giant-Man got a costume covered in pouches.

So why would Marvel do all these goofy-ass, shortsighted things to their characters? Well, I think part of it is they got left behind by DC in the late 80s. They didn’t have a Watchmen, they didn’t have a Dark Knight Returns, they didn’t have an Alan Moore Swamp Thing or a Neil Gaiman Sandman. They didn’t even have a Crisis on Infinite Earths, man! So I suspect they were looking for a way to reinvent themselves, and when the guys who’d go on to start Image Comics came along, Marvel saw its opportunity.

It starts with artists like Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, and Rob Liefeld, but I don’t think the problem was ultimately with the future Image dudes themselves. By the late 80s when they burst onto the scene, superhero art had become perhaps a bit staid, bit too comfortable with itself – and I say this as someone with a genuine love for the art from that time, my own childhood golden age! – so it’s no surprise their energetic, enthusiastic approach sold. Some of my first Spider-Man comics were McFarlane Amazings, and I can’t rip Liefeld’s ridiculously proportioned heroes apart without noting that Jack Kirby was hardly consulting anatomy textbooks himself when drawing books like OMAC.

The point is, I can’t fault these guys for trying something new and exciting in superhero comics, even if it wasn’t always to my taste. The real problem, as it usually is in superhero comics, was with the guys who didn’t have any of their own ideas, so they cashed in current trends, following instead of leading. By the time the Image founders had studios of “clones” able to imitate Lee or Liefeld’s style so they didn’t have to draw their own stuff, we’re getting pretty far away from the haven for comics creators the Image rhetoric initially promised, but it’s even more unseemly for Marvel to do the same, to try to fight Image on Image’s terms with cheap knockoffs and lose.

In the wake of the Image revolution you had the great speculator craze – variant holographic foil covers polybagged with trading cards you were never even supposed to open – that was ultimately unsustainable and imploded by mid-decade. But just as unsustainable was the Image-model superhero, he of the gunspikechainbloodclaws. What ultimately distinguishes Kirby from some of the Image guys is that he was interested in creating concepts; at their worst, the new guys seemed interested in little more than names and costumes, all surface. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Spawn was the best selling Image book, because McFarlane actually took the time to develop a concept and an ongoing narrative and ideas (even if I never was into the book, personally) and stuck with it; Savage Dragon survives today because Erik Larsen was invested in the little corner he’d happily carved out for himself in comicland, not in hot-selling #1s.

So by about 1995 or 96 or so, Marvel didn’t have to worry about Image quite so much anymore, but when the smoke cleared they found they were in financial hot water (for reasons I’m not 100% on, but it’s not important to our discussion here), and all of their characters had somehow come to be in mangled states beyond recognition. Something had to be done. What would you do, True Believer?

What Marvel banked on, under Editor in Chief Bob Harras, was “retro.” A sort of “neo-Silver Age” movement was being spearheaded by Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Tom Peyer, and others at DC Comics, and Marvel was trying its hand at something similar. After the “Dark Ages” of the early 90s, here was a promise of comics “the way they used to be.” “Onslaught” / “Heroes Reborn” / “Heroes Return” provided enough of a break in the narrative that they could sneak in a semi-reboot on the Avengers and Fantastic Four properties, and suddenly everyone’s back to their classic costumes and characterizations. Goodbye Teen Tony and Wasp-Creature! At the same time, it wasn’t just a matter pretending the Bronze Age never ended. These were comics that turned a loving but critical eye to Marvel’s history; reconstructing superheroes, going through the code line by line and keeping the legacy stuff that still works, trying to update what can be salvaged, and dumping the rest.

Ultimately, though, trying to incorporate all the excesses and ridiculousness of the early-to-mid 90s with the rest of Marvel’s 30-40 year “tapestry” proved unworkable and unprofitable (particularly with the Spider-Man line), and this led to Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada having a go at it that proved a bit more successful.

But back to the late 90s. These years get painted with the same brush as the early 90s comics, and I don't really think they deserve to be dismissed like that. I’ll admit, I was in late middle school/early high school then, so these are the comics of my own youth. There’s some rose colored glass there, some nostalgia. And yet, even looking back on it ten-plus years later, trying to strip away all the sentimentality as best I can, I can’t condemn these years and wouldn’t want to. I honestly don’t think they’re terrible comics. Of course, there was some terrible stuff to be found, as there is in any decade, but I think if you sat down with a stack of late-90s comics stripped of all your preconceived notions, you’d see a lot of comics that were okay. Spider-Man comics were okay. There was a Quicksilver series and a Heroes for Hire team book concept that was okay. There was even an X-Men book or two that was okay. Though I was reading a bunch of these books at the time, I’ll admit that some of them don’t hold up and wouldn’t have a lot of re-read value for someone without the emotional connection to them that I have.

And yet…there were some Marvel Comics of the late 90s that were good. Some weren’t just good, some were actually pretty good, really. Maybe even great.

So I thought if nobody else was going to stick up for these books, I might give it a go. I’m going to focus on six in particular; I’m not saying these are the only good comics Marvel put out in the late 90s, or even that they were my favorites at the time. But they’re six that I think represent well the peculiar time they were produced in. There was no going back to the way things were completely; post-Watchmen, both the audience and the creators were too self-aware, almost painfully so, about superheroes and what they meant for that. So it comes down to a balancing act: how do you do something that feels like it belongs to that Marvel tapestry we all remember fondly while adding something new? How do you keep from being crushed under expectation? Can “retro” be fresh? What should a Marvel Comic look like in the last years of the 20th century? If you look at it this way, even some of the failures are interesting.

Let’s have a chat about all these things for the next couple Mondays, what do you say? Spread the word, invite a friend. I hope to find something interesting in these books nobody wants to talk about anymore.

Sept. 27: Avengers Forever
Oct. 4: Black Panther
Oct. 11: Untold Tales of Spider-Man
Oct. 18: Captain America (vol. 3)
Oct. 25: Thunderbolts
Nov. 1: Deadpool
Nov. 8: Honorable mentions and maybe a little something to tie it all together

Pardon Our Dust...

2010-09-15T21:14:00.004-05:00

What are you doing in this ghost town, stranger?

You might remember (oh, but probably not) that last year around this time I took a break from my already-erratic-and-infrequent blogging schedule because of a work-related move.

This has happened again.

Two moves one year apart! Certainly not an enviable state of affairs (once upon a time, I seem to recall, I owned things that did not reside exclusively in cardboard boxes), but this last move I hope (and, actually, I believe) was the right one. I'm typing at you from my new living room in the great city of Madison, Wisconsin (official motto: "Five dollars for a cup, bro"), and it feels strange indeed to no longer tick the "media/journalism" box when filling out surveys asking for my occupational field, instead finding my pen (or mouse pointer) come to rest unexpectedly in the "healthcare" box.

But what does this mean for you, the most discerning reader of all?

It means I am back and I am writing, and if you can still be bothered to type in my blog URL (or however you find yourself here), come back Sunday for the kickoff of a new series of regular posts: "Great Marvel Comics of the Late 1990s (Yes, They Do Exist)".

Tell your mama; tell your pa. Gonna send your preconceived notions about '90s superhero comics back to Arkansas.

Bronze Age Spider-Man, and Peter Parker As "Aspirational" Identification Figure

2010-07-30T20:36:00.005-05:00

Okay, answer me this question: Is Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man, a fully realized character?

I mean, he’s got character traits, certainly. Loves science, strong sense of responsibility, protective of his aunt, young(ish), prone to self-pity and paranoia, an outsider, an underdog, ability to banter with super-villains, etc. etc.

But is there much in the way of depth? Does he have those idiosyncrasies that make us who we are? Does Peter feel like a really real person, the kind you’d meet walking down the street or share a cubicle with?

I would argue, in most cases, no. (Although if anyone disagrees, I bid you, let us have a stirring conversation about it in the comments.)

Most A-list superheroes are not, partially by virtue of being the subjects of ongoing narratives by different writers and artists spanning decades, owned by media conglomerates, having to straddle the line between art and commerce, taking licensing into accommodation, and so on. But perhaps more importantly, I’d liken them to what I described in the Friends post as “aspirational figures” – you find a superhero you can kind of relate to, and you can aspire to being as super as them. Science enthusiasts have Reed Richards and a bunch of others, engineers (and I am thinking of one in particular, Daine!) have Tony Stark, guys who spend their lives training their bodies have Batman. Marvel’s unglamorous misfits of the Silver Age are just as aspirational because they’re heroes despite their problems: if you’ve got anger management issues, Bruce Banner is someone who understands you, and the Thing is every guy who got dealt a bad hand, who was ever written off for seeming low-class or not having a pretty face.

They’re relatively vague because they are meant to be, because you have to identify with them. It’s been said (maybe it was Scott McCloud – I’ve never sat down and read Understanding Comics from cover to cover, I’ve just gone through sections of it here and there over the years, so I'm a bit patchy on it) that in cartooning, the more stylized a face is, the more identifiable it becomes. You could say that Bruce Timm’s Bruce Wayne reminds you of any number of big beefy dark-haired white guys, but Bryan Hitch’s Nick Fury is quite obviously (and in this case quite intentionally) one guy. The characters on Friends are cartoony for a similar effect – with more subtle, fully realized characters, you couldn’t quite as easily (imagine yourself/aspire to be) Chandler or Rachel or whoever. And so it is with the A-list superheroes.

Spider-Man’s got it harder, though, because he’s got to be an aspirational figure for everybody. He can’t even be a character type like Tony Stark or the Human Torch because Peter Parker has to be all things to all comics fans. He’s the part in all of us that screws up, feels alienated, feels alone and always on the outside of things. He represents youth, and if we're not still as young as he's supposed to be, we can at least remember when we were. Because he’s so universal, he’s got to be extremely broad, and indeed, as is often pointed out, because of the full face mask you can very easily imagine your own face under there.

But Spider-Man’s greatest asset as a character is also therefore his greatest liability. He can’t progress or become an individual if he has to be relatable to everybody, but once you outgrow the aspirational aspect of Spider-Man, there’s not a lot to the character you can hang on to. Much of the audience reading the “in-continuity” “616” version of the character’s passed Peter Parker up in age, and now it’s gotta be him aspiring to be us at this point, right? “Why doesn’t he grow up already, get a steady job? He’s been at this superhero thing as long as anybody now, shouldn’t he have gotten good at this at some point?” I’ve offered a solution before, but it’s a somewhat cynical one, and not satisfying for everyone.

Quite frankly, I think the reason why Spider-Man is considered to have been in a creative malaise for over 20 years now isn’t because he was married or too old or anything like that – it’s that the fanbase is increasingly invested in the writing of superhero comics over the art, and from a writing standpoint, Peter Parker can be a pretty thankless character.

But in the Bronze Age of Comics, it wasn’t always quite so.

Stan Lee was 49 (if I have done the math right) when he stepped away from writing Amazing Spider-Man in 1972, but his successors were much younger (most notably, 19-year-old Gerry Conway). Lee was a guy aiming for authenticity as best he could in depicting teenage life, and pulled off a slick soap opera approach pretty well, but these new guys had recently been or were actually still livin’ la vida Parker.

So for whatever reason, whether that these comics were being produced by people the same age as the character, or that the writers and artists were young and brash and ambitious and serious…for whatever reason, Peter Parker occasionally got a few moments of real humanity in the Bronze Age. Where he’s more than just the aspirational everyman, “the super-hero who could be…YOU!”, but something approaching an individual person. Not all the time, because he for the most part remained that carefully maintained combination of heroic and neurotic that is the formula for Spider-Man we all love so dearly. But he got a couple. And I would like to share three here with you.

Now, I really wish I had panel scans so I don’t have to describe these, but if anything it emphasizes what I’m talking about. I do not have any of the issues I’m going to talk about, but I have read them, each only maybe once or twice, but they stayed with me. They’re fairly small moments, of varying weights and importances, but they stick in my head because they hint at a depth you rarely see in Peter Parker as a character. Perhaps it makes him slightly less relatable to a mass audience, and yet…I feel as if I know him better, I feel as if those moments are able to surprise me. And that’s something you don’t get all that often.

1.) SPIDER-MAN SINGS ELVIS COSTELLO (Marvel Team-Up Annual #4, 1981, written by Frank Miller)

Okay, so if I remember how this goes, Spider-Man interferes in some scheme of the Purple Man’s, so Purple Man uses his mind control powers to get Spidey out of his hair. He tells Spidey to hang on a lamppost and recite some Shakespeare. Spider-Man says he doesn’t know any (ah, you see? Less relatable to me, in theory!). Purple Man asks him what he does know, and as a result, you get Spider-Man singing the lyrics to “Oliver’s Army” for a couple panels (I forget why, but he never does make it to the unprintable lyric on-panel).

This is not the only occasion that Bronze Age Peter Parker has been shown to dig Elvis Costello (you have to scroll down to "Spiderman" on the link). And it’s a risky thing, in its way, to pin down. Defining a fictional character’s musical tastes always threatens to alienate readers, as much or possibly even more so than politics or religion. The line in High Fidelity is that it’s what you like, not what you are like (granted, John Cusack’s character is not meant to be a great judge of interpersonal relationships, but still). If I tell you a character (or a real live human being) is into U2, or into Ben Folds, or Phish or Lady Gaga, it probably suggests something to you. Such is the power of pop music that if you tell me you like XTC, you can show up at my house uninvited, eat all my chips, drink all my booze, crash on my couch and then make a mess in the bathroom in the morning; but tell me you think the Stones are better than the Beatles, and we have to fight bareknuckled in a back alley in the pouring rain.

Maybe I’m biased because I really like Elvis Costello, but what I take away from this is a different sort of Peter Parker than we saw before or since. In the early Silver Age, Peter Parker was a nerd and a social outcast; today Peter is cast more as a geek and lovable loser – both pretty broad characterizations. But in the Bronze Age, I feel like Peter’s deal was a little more nuanced. Parker’s kind of a hip guy who remains straight laced. He’s tuned into pop culture but doesn’t get wrapped up in it; notably, it doesn’t define his life in the way that geeky things rule your thoughts and mine. He’s uncomfortable at a disco, but not a total square either. He can get a first date but has trouble getting a second.

He’s a guy who’s got a Trust poster on his wall but who doesn’t talk your ear off about how great it is every time you see him.

2.) PETER TRIES TO BRUSH OFF MARY JANE (Amazing Spider-Man #122, 1973, written by Gerry Conway)

The last one was a lightweight scene, and this one’s about as heavy as Spider-Man gets. This is the issue after the Green Goblin kills Gwen Stacy, and then in this issue gets impaled on his own glider in a fight with Spider-Man. You know.

After the battle, Peter wanders back to his apartment and finds Mary Jane there. At this time she’s still played at best as a carefree party girl, at worst as superficial, capricious, self-absorbed. She tries to comfort him, but Peter, all torn up with grief and rage and a million other things, isn’t having any of it. Here’s what he says (secondhand, courtesy of a Google search, so I can’t vouch for it being 100% accurate):

“Don’t make me laugh, Mary Jane – you wouldn’t be sorry if your own mother died. What do you care about straights like me and Gwen? Go on…get out of here! I know how you hate sick beds, and believe me, I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun.”

This sticks with me because it’s such an ugly moment – lashing out at someone trying to reach out to you. It’s somewhat understandable, given the state of mind he’s in, but there’s no denying it’s really ugly. And that’s what I love about this moment.

See, Peter is usually portrayed as being in the right all the time because he’s both aspirational and a reader identification figure, and most of us don’t often think of ourselves as being wrong, nor do we wish to be. He can make mistakes, misjudge things, but it’s a rare occasion when you could actually call him out for a lapse in morals or, in this case, just being a colossal ass. You’re not supposed to think the character you’re supposed to relate to is being a jerk, so most of the time Peter isn’t one. It’s why people got bent out of shape about him making a deal with Mephisto (well, rightly I might say) and, previously, joining up with the pro-registration movement in Civil War.

But one of the drawbacks to a character who is always right and always good is that they’re flat. So this nasty little scene at least supplies slightly more depth than we’re accustomed to from Peter Parker. He’s not May Parker’s perfect nephew on these pages, but a guy who is just not in the mood for you right now. On the surface it’s alienating – “I would never say what Peter just said!” But how do you know? Your girlfriend just gets murdered by someone trying to get to you – maybe you’d say exactly what Peter said. Maybe you’d say worse. Or maybe you wouldn’t. In any event, here is a rare occasion where you can judge Peter Parker, where he’s not above reproach, where he’s not trying to be liked by you.

3.) PETER’S LAST WISHES (Amazing Spider-Man #151, December 1975, written by Len Wein)

Not as heavy as the aftermath of Gwen’s death but not as frivolous as singing “Oliver’s Army,” this moment is one that I find the most poignant, and it’s also one of the more obscure.

So this is the wrapup of the “original Clone Saga,” where Spider-Man fights his own clone (the one that would go on to become Ben Reilly), who supposedly dies. Peter takes the “body” to a factory smoke stack and says wistfully to his clone something to the effect of, “Well, since it’s my wish to be cremated, this is probably what you would’ve wanted too.”

I’ll repeat that: Peter Parker knows what he wants done with his remains when he dies, and it’s cremation. Unusual for a superhero! Whenever you see a superhero funeral – whether a “real” one, or a symbolic one that just happens on the cover for effect – it’s a casket burial with a big ol’ tombstone. Makes sense, I suppose; you’ve got the ceremony, the pallbearers, the lowering of the casket – it’s visual, it’s a spectacle, which makes for good comics iconography.

But that is perhaps exactly why Peter Parker isn’t planning on having a casket burial. It’s a little detail, fairly insignificant, never really brought up again so far as I know, and to be honest, the whole thing is probably motivated by the plot – Peter has to get rid of the clone body somehow. But still, you hear “it’s my wish to be cremated,” and you start of thinking of the young man who’s made that decision, and he’s made it as a man, and not as a superhero. Spider-Man won’t have a big stone monument with an eagle perched heroically on his arm to mark his grave; Peter Parker will just get himself taken care of in a low-key manner…don’t want to bother anybody, don’t want to make a fuss, it’s only me for heaven’s sake...! What’s to be done with the ashes? At this point in his life, he’s probably thinking scatter them off the Brooklyn Bridge, hm? Aw.

It’s one line, and yet I feel it suggests so much about Peter Parker that we never even knew.

(I know, all that build up for the Bronze Age Spider-Man post for that? Still, this was important to me for whatever reason.)

Friends vs. Seinfeld

2010-07-16T23:55:00.005-05:00

Okay, I said I was going to do that Bronze Age Spider-Man post this week, but after my post about Seinfeld, I got to thinking about Friends…and I saw a way in which a brief discussion of the differences between them might actually help me in making the point I’m eventually going to make about Bronze Age Spider-Man. Honest! It’ll all pay off, trust me on this one.

So. Expanding on a comment I made in my own Seinfeld post:

…Friends takes the sort of "engine" of Seinfeld but replaces the neuroses with quirks. Different people can be a "Chandler" or a "Monica" type or whatever, but EVERYBODY is a "George" on their worst day.

Okay, first let me say I’m not going to hate on Friends, exactly. I watched it the same as anybody when it was on, when I was about in middle school and early high school, which I think is probably a prime Friends-viewing age. The group dynamic in Friends is based around everyone playing a role:

Rachel = The Popular One
Monica = The Uptight One
Phoebe = The Kinda Hippie One
Ross = The Square but Loveable One
Chandler = The Funny One
Joey = The Ladies Man

So the idea here is that you can match everyone in your circle of friends to one of these roles, right? Quite deliberate on the part of the showrunners, I’m sure. Figuring everybody knows “a Phoebe” and “a Joey” and the rest. It’s the same thing that happens with Sex and the City.

But just like Sex and the City, you also assign yourself a role, but because it’s hard to be objective about yourself like that, you latch on to a sort of an aspirational figure. That’s why I think Friends goes over well for high schoolers - because you’re still forming your identity (with all the messy dreadfulness that entails) and this show presents you with some basic options (plus, they’re cool adults who live in a cool apartment in a cool city, which adds to the aspirational aspect of it). Certainly I thought I’d like to be a Chandler. Perhaps...I might even be a Chandler?

But I got older and I found I might also be…what, bits of Ross? A Monica to boot? Of course in reality if I'm anything, I'm a mixture of a couple of them plus a bunch of other things that aren't there in any of the characters, and so if I didn’t correspond to one of the Friends gang 1:1, everybody else I knew probably didn’t either. *

Which brings me back round to Seinfeld.

I don’t think Seinfeld is as dependant on character types as Friends. Can you really call someone “a George” or “an Elaine”? Who’s Kramer in real life? (Except for, I guess, the real Kenny Kramer the character is based on.) They’re all distinctive personalities, and yet I don’t think you’re supposed to identify with one to the exclusion of others. We’re supposed to be all of them, right? In a single episode, I can identify with Jerry’s superficiality, George’s insecurity, Elaine’s frustration, and maybe even Kramer’s self-assured (but perhaps ill-deserved) contentment.

But these aren’t aspirational figures. Nobody really wants to be George, we just sort of are, at our worst. Oh, maybe being Jerry seems a pretty sweet deal on the surface for his confidence, success and prowess (I love that the AV Club describes him as “a sexual Jedi”) but of course, Jerry is also that part of you that’s kind of a creep sometimes.

So today I don’t watch Friends. I do fondly remember some funny jokes in it (well, I stopped watching somewhere before the last couple seasons, so I guess it could’ve gone downhill in that department for all I know), some fine crowd-manipulating (in the good way) character bits. But it’s not something I can really invest myself in anymore. I don’t really need what it used to do for me (if, indeed, it ever did; this all seems right to me, but it's possible this is me seeing something in hindsight that was never there to begin with).

Friends is a brochure for personalities and social roles you might enjoy, but Seinfeld is an unforgiving mirror into the personality you already possess. Friends is advertisement and Seinfeld is analysis, and self-analysis is something I think you always need.

Also: um, it’s funny too!

(* - Well, of course I'm using a bit of dramatic license to make a point, here; it's not as though I had some sort of epiphany on my 16th birthday and decided never to watch Friends again. But by the time the end of high school came around I'd lost interest in the show, so I maintain this was a reaction I was having on some level, maybe not conscious, and definitely not as self-aware and introspective as I make it out to be here.)

Radio Free...ah...Office in Which I Work

2010-07-16T20:49:00.003-05:00

Just popping in real quick to be self indulgent and post an iTunes playlist I made the other day. At work we had a thing where four people could volunteer to put together a two-hour playlist of whatever the hell we wanted and they'd play it over the speakers. The winner gets a chance to compile another playlist next Friday, so there was some incentive to make it something agreeable to co-workers; I mean, if it were totally up to me I might've just played Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of the War of the Worlds straight through and filled up the rest of the time with Revolver on repeat, but it probably would not be appreciated.

So this is what I put together. There's no real principle or theme to it other than "relatively upbeat and accessible pop songs I wanted to listen to today". It's not meant to be representative of my whole collection (Pugwash/Duckworth Lewis Method is disproportionately represented because I've just gotten into them) and it's certainly not meant to impress anyone ("Ooh, you played a song off of London Calling? Gosh, what a bold and obscure choice!").

If you have these songs at home, you can play along.

1. Requiem for O.M.M.2 - of Montreal
2. You're Going to Lose That Girl - The Beatles
3. Mr. Blue Sky - Electric Light Orchestra
4. Apples - Pugwash
5. Iron Man - The Cardigans
6. No, Not Now - Hot Hot Heat
7. Chick Habit - April March
8. Hey Bulldog (Yellow Submarine Songbook mix) - The Beatles
9. Accidents Will Happen - Elvis Costello & The Attractions
10. Underground - Ben Folds Five
11. New Town Animal in a Furnished Cage - XTC
12. You're So Great - Blur
13. Big Dipper - Built to Spill
14. Lost in the Supermarket - The Clash
15. Queen Bitch - David Bowie
16. The Age of Revolution - The Duckworth Lewis Method
17. Good Morning Good Morning (Anthology version) - The Beatles
18. The Bouncer - Electric Light Orchestra
19. Alison - Elvis Costello
20. California - Rufus Wainwright
21. F.N.T. - Semisonic
22. Fish 'n' Chip Paper - Elvis Costello & The Attractions
23. Look Inside America - Blur
24. Pancakes for One - of Montreal
25. Monorail - Pugwash
26. Crimes of Paris - Elvis Costell0 & The Attractions
27. Better - Regina Spektor
28. This Is Pop? (album version) - XTC
29. Mother Mother - Tracy Bonham
30. Summer Teeth - Wilco
31. Race for the Prize (Remix) - The Flaming Lips
32. Earn Enough For Us - XTC
33. Burndt Jamb - Weezer
34. Nothing Will Ever Change - LEO
35. Pressure Zone - Beck
36. You Never Give Me Your Money - The Beatles

On Seinfeld

2010-07-09T23:57:00.006-05:00

Hey dudes. Yes, still alive.

Haven’t been around here much. Part of it is having a baby – which is not only time taking care of a baby, but of course, savoring the baby. I mean to write some posts, but then it’s like, “Well, should I spend an hour or two writing some kind of gripey thing about comics or should I watch my brand new son wave his arms about and look at things out the window?” Having essentially dedicated the first twenty-five years of my life to triviality, it is a strange time indeed to have something decidedly non-trivial drop into your lap (and, subsequently, poop in it).

But when he is asleep, as he is now, that part of me that wants to write about things that are unimportant to the majority of people but are terribly important to me wakes up.

So, I don’t really have time to write something, sit on it, think it over on a drive to work, edit it, and finally post it two days later like I used to. But what the hell, we are only blogging here. Let’s just talk about some things, and if I say something stupid or at best not very well thought out, then we’ll just talk about that next then, okay? Stimulating conversation is more interesting anyway.

Anyway: I promised like a month or two ago I’d do this thing about Bronze Age Spider-Man, which has been pretty much done for some time but I wasn’t totally happy with it, but I’ll just post that baby sometime next week anyway and be done with it. Also - tell your friends! – I am doing a “Good Marvel Comics Really Did Exist in the Late 90s, Although Admittedly in Somewhat Small Quantities” post for realsies, and that is something I think is terribly important. Look for that soon, in addition to – could it be? – an actual Adventures of Wyatt Earp in 2999-related update, because you may recall, there is a comic that I write that gives this blog its name.

Also a mystery writing project in the works, but I don’t want to get anybody’s hopes up too much in case it sucks. It might suck, I won't really know until it's out there, will I?

But tonight: I want to write about television, and write quickly.

I borrowed the first three seasons of Seinfeld on DVD from my brother, because I’ve been reading the AV Club’s recaps on them, and it’s been years since I watched what was once my favorite show that I knew top to bottom, quotes and trivia and behind the scenes factoids (I was, it may distress you to know, that kid in middle school). I also borrowed the first two seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which I have never watched, but Zach recently got into it and has been really digging it.

Watching Seinfeld up to 20 years later…those intensely observational first episodes don’t strike one as so bewildering as they did the NBC executives and test audiences when they first came out. It’s obvious that they shouldn’t, because of Seinfeld’s tremendous influence on the pop-culture landscape. You can have two guys talking about Superman or cereal or poorly positioned shirt buttons in any TV show or movie and nobody questions it. It’s not important anymore if Seinfeld’s a “show about nothing” because now anything can be about nothing, and in 2010 I have a blog where I talk about communists of the Marvel Universe.

So we’ll look at the other part of the Seinfeld pop-culture narrative, which is that the show supposedly has unlikable characters.

This has never rung true to me, and watching It’s Always Sunny has helped point it out, because there you have some genuinely unlikable characters. Like, reprehensible. Selling liquor to minors and pretending to have cancer to get a girl and going to pro/anti-abortion rallies for the sole purpose of meeting chicks. They’re bad people who do outrageous things, so when bad things happen to them we don’t feel bad. I’m quite enjoying the show.

But that’s not what Seinfeld is. Not really. If George was really a monster he wouldn't care if he got that busboy fired. A truly reprehensible Jerry wouldn't worry about the "pony remark" and whether it contributed to his aged relative's death. The key to why Seinfeld resonates is because the show vocalizes ugly things that we’re all secretly thinking but don’t say. The character of George doesn’t work if we despise him; we have to identify with him on some level, even if it's remote. Of course, that’s not to say that we’d all be exactly George Costanza if we weren’t keeping ourselves in check, but he does magnify that part of ourselves that can be petty, can be shallow, is jealous and angry and all that other stuff. George Costanza is a potential us…

You know what, actually? Maybe I’m making a dumb comparison I’ll regret later, but George is kind of The Hulk, isn’t he?

Anyway, at the same time, Seinfeld is a comedy of manners. The It’s Always Sunny gang doesn’t care what anybody thinks of them, but the Seinfeld gang does – the petty side just usually wins out, that’s all.

And because we care what people think about us too, the narrative develops that the Seinfeld gang is “unlikable,” and it seems a bit like denial. Whenever the characters do become genuinely unlikable, as in the series finale and a few other later season episodes, it feels wrong. We’re not supposed to be judging from a position of moral superiority, as we are for It’s Always Sunny, it’s really more of a “There but for the grace of God…” thing, isn’t it?

You want an example? "The Switch," in which Jerry isn't getting along with his girlfriend, but thinks he might like to date her roommate. If you or I found ourselves in this situation, I think most people, if we're being totally honest, would consider that possibility, at least for a second. We in all probability wouldn't act on it, and it's hard to argue that it isn't good that we don't, but there is a tiny element of, "If only..." Seinfeld, at its best, simply removes the "If only..." and runs with it (but also usually reinforces the societal norms, because no real lasting good ever comes from any of it, and most often it actively blows up in their faces).

So what I think makes Seinfeld still relevant and interesting and funny today is how honest it is about how ugly it is. If you will permit a moment of pretentious self-indulgence, I would even venture that Seinfeld is an influence on my own writing. To be able to risk characters being perceived as unlikable in the pursuit of touching something inside of us that we (quite rightly) deny. We can say that the Seinfeld gang is unlikable only if we admit that everyone is unlikable, at least in theory.

I don’t know, I think this Seinfeld thing is gonna be a hit, but nobody’s going to be sure why…

Abdication of Personal Responsibility - Two Case Studies (Two-Face and The Riddler)

2010-06-05T00:48:00.002-05:00

This started out as a comment on my last post, and before long I realized I had something to say, but I didn’t want to take a lot of time on it. So here, in very rough form, written and read over just once, then shot out onto your computer screen, is everything I want to get out at the moment about my two favorite Batman villains.

I’ve mentioned that I don’t care for the interpretation that Two-Face is a multiple personality, as in the Dini/Timm animated show – Harvey Dent vs. “Big Bad Harv.” This isn’t because I think it’s terrible or anything, it’s entirely a matter of there being a far more interesting way of looking at Two-Face.

The brilliant thing about Two-Face – not “brilliant” as in, “Hey, that’s pretty cool,” but rather “Seriously you guys, do not tell me that 1940s comics weren’t capable of sophistication, because listen to this” – is that he was a lawyer. The law, being what it is, is a very long, messy process of deliberation, and Dent has replaced it with the instant gratification of the coin flip.

And it’s very important that he was district attorney, and not a defense attorney. Because imagine you’ve got to prosecute criminals in Gotham City. Gotham City! Not an enviable task! You have to make a lot of tough choices, wade through some really murky gray areas. I’m sure it’s the sort of thing where you have to make decisions that feel terrible and are terrible, but that you’re banking on serving the greater good in the long, long run. That’s going to really wind a dude up.

And now imagine that your reward for all that hard work, all those carefully weighed decisions and master plans, is that some uppity gangster throws a bottle of acid at you in court and ruins your perfect face.

Screw that, man, from now on I’m just going to make all my decisions with a coin toss!

What a relief it must be! Surely there’s a part of him thinking, “If only I wouldn’t have prosecuted that guy, if only I’d made sure they checked him more thoroughly, if only I’d decided to skip out on court and stay in bed or go fishing, this would never have happened.” I’m sure we can all relate to something like that, albeit less sensationally. Even when something’s “not your fault,” even if you’re the perfect innocent victim, something in your decision making process led you to a place where you became the victim. Anything bad that happens to you is, from a certain point of view, your own damn fault, no matter how unfair that may be.

But not with the coin. Nothing’s ever Harvey’s fault anymore. Caught by Batman? Mob takeover bid ruined? Hey, that’s on the silver dollar, man, not him! Neither luck nor the criminal justice system are perfect or even always fair, but at least the coin gives you a black-and-white answer with no fuss. I like to imagine DA Harvey Dent as a guy on the verge of a nervous breakdown before the incident, and that he doesn’t quite see why everyone calls him crazy for developing this great new therapy he’s found that really does make him feel so much better about everything!

But of course, that’s not a healthy way to deal with stress – he’s just abdicating personal responsibility for decision making and handing it to a coin. Which brings me, I think, to the Riddler.

So Riddler’s deal is he leaves clues at the scene of his crimes, and the reasonable enough question to ask is why a criminal would want to do this. One school of thought says that he’s less interested in crime than he is at challenging Batman, and so the riddles are an element of the “game” he’s playing. Another interpretation is that it’s a compulsion or “mental block” – that he couldn’t commit a crime without leaving a clue.

My own personal spin I’d run with, if I were given the opportunity, (and I bring this up a lot because it's my pet theory, so if you know me and I’ve already told you this a dozen times, I’m sorry,) is that the riddles serve to undermine Batman. Batman’s the world’s greatest detective, and the Riddler tries to assert superiority by condescending to him, by leaving him – let’s face it – fairly obvious clues. The mental whammy this puts on Batman is that he has to ask himself, would he be able to catch the Riddler if he didn’t leave clues? Or (he wonders, paranoid), what if the Riddler has been committing secret sideline crimes for years without leaving clues, and Batman has never found out about them?

And yet, it occurs to me now, this intrepretation might betray some insecurity on the Riddler’s part. Because what if the Riddler didn’t leave a clue … and Batman caught him anyway? Holy crap, that’d pretty much be the end of the Riddler, wouldn’t it? It’d prove that Batman really is smarter than him, and that’d be enough to make him hang up both the dapper three-piece suit and the spandex bodysuit for good, right?

So maybe those riddles have become to him what the coin is to Two-Face – a way to abdicate responsibility for his actions. So long as the Riddler leaves a clue, it’s not his fault when he’s caught. And so in this way, it does become a compulsion of sorts. But rather than the twisted pathology of a criminal genius, it’s a hedge so that he doesn’t have to face the sobering possibility that maybe he’s not as smart as he thought he was.

So I don’t know what the significance is that my own little personal interpretations of these characters are linked in this way – two guys trying to shirk their responsibility in the nuttiest, most desperate ways. But it gave me something to think about and, perhaps, you as well.*

(* - Unless, of course, you think there is a flaw in my reasoning, or even that “my” Two-Face and Riddler are just total crap ways of looking at the characters. I did ask my wife for her somewhat-outsider guess about why the Riddler leaves clues, and she said she just figures Riddler likes to be caught (a bit of pervy-ness was implied). Which is elegant and simple and sad and compelling in its own way, really.)

As You Will Recall, I Am A Dude Who Enjoys Superhero Comics (Non-Baby-Related Content Comin' Atcha)

2010-05-31T08:35:00.003-05:00

I still haven't finished those posts that I've been meaning to do, but I did feel compelled to dash off a short (for me, anyway) comparison between the Joker as seen in Batman: The Animated Series and the Joker as portrayed in contemporary comics and other media.

To keep this from being a totally uncritical love-in about a fan-favorite show: One of my favorite portrayals of the Joker, the Riddler and a bunch of other characters, but Two-Face-as-multiple-personality is not my cup of tea, even though the episodes were really good.

BABY TIME

2010-05-21T19:57:00.004-05:00

NAME: Liam Lesniak Zyduck. ("Lesniak" (LESH-knock) is my wife's last name, but it's used here as a middle name, as was a custom in days of yore, rather than a hyphenated last name; "Lesniak-Zyduck" is just too Polish for one baby, and actually I think he works out to be a quarter Russian anyway. Also, you must agree that "Liam Lesniak" would be a good name for a late 19th century/early 20th century Irish bareknuckle boxer.)

BORN: Wednesday, May 19, 12:27 p.m.

WEIGHT AT BIRTH: 5 pounds, 4 ounces. He is, in fact, a tiny little man.

HEIGHT/LENGTH: 19 inches.

DAD WAS READING IN THE HOSPITAL: Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger when I needed something chewy and engrossing to get wrapped up in so as not to freak myself out worrying, and Essential Fantastic Four vol. 3 when I needed comfort food.

MOM WAS READING IN THE HOSPITAL: Ivanhoe. The resident who assisted in the delivery seemed to think this was funny.

DAD'S FIRST WORDS UPON SEEING CHILD: "Holy crap, it's a baby." (Shameful, perhaps, but true.)

MOST FRIGHTENING QUESTION ASKED BY NURSES: "Is there anyone who is stalking you or who would want to do harm to you or your baby?" (Standard security question we answered "no" to, but still...)

VISUAL AID: At birth he looked kind of like actor Wallace Shawn, but the pointiness of his head has gone down. Josh's speculative illustration is fairly accurate, although he was born with a porkpie hat and not a bowler.

Got back from the hospital today; at one point I was foolishly expecting, "Oh sure, we'll be out of there Thursday afternoon, no problem" (FALSE). Baby's mom is healthy after the high blood pressure concerns that resulted in the induced labor. Blogging will resume at some point, and I do not intend to gas on about ah, the dizzying highs and terrifying lows of parenthood to no end, but I am just having my moment right now.

Iron Man 2, plus What Has Been Going On With Me

2010-05-10T12:18:00.005-05:00

Hey dudes. How have you been?

I saw Iron Man 2 opening day, and of course I will tell you what I think, and I will be brief, and I will not divulge any spoilers, because I do not want to mess about with inviso-text.

The movie is a very good time. Not, perhaps, as good as the first movie, in part because instead of a left-field success this is now a planned summer tentpole superhero blockbuster, and so more time is spent on superhero movie business (more villains, evil plot, etc.). The filmmakers, like in the first movie, are still more interested in the Tony Stark side of things than the Iron Man side of things. This is good, because for the purposes of this movie I am also more interested in Tony Stark and the implications of the Iron Man technology than actual superhero stuff, but the demands of an action movie require action sequences, and while there's not too many of them, they can feel a bit perfunctory (like the last movie, the big climactic battle is the least interesting part of the whole thing, as though every one involved would have rather been doing something else with the end of the movie).

What else...Robert Downey Jr. is winning as always. Sam Rockwell is awesome as an ambitious-but-hapless businessman who doesn't just want to usurp Stark's technology, but also his flair and public persona. Mickey Rourke is sufficiently menacing. Samuel L. Jackson has obliged to not chew as much scenery as he is capable of doing.

A disappointment: The movie brings up a potentially interesting moral/ethical dilemma - you are inclined to side with Stark that the military can't be trusted with his designs, and yet a guy who's cool with using his deadly repulsor ray technology whilst drunk to entertain party guests in not really the guy you want with that kind of firepower either. But the movie doesn't really engage with it beyond "Yep, our hero was right all along." I know not every superhero movie's built to be as ambiguous as The Dark Knight, but this one kind of set me up for something it didn't deliver.

Also: I do not for one second believe that this Avengers movie is ever going to actually happen. NOT IN ONE MILLION YEARS.

Anyway. Very very good show. Better than X-Men 2, not as good as Iron Man.

I went to see it with my brother, and not my wife (who really enjoyed the first one) because she's on bed rest until she has the baby. The due date was supposed to be May 30 or so, but now they're hoping she'll make it another week or two. No cause for immediate alarm - her blood pressure's just a bit high, and it goes down when she's laying down on her side. So she's stuck home from work reading (All-Star Superman got the thumbs up) and watching TV, which is, of course, my personal idea of heaven, but it is not a belief in the afterlife she shares.

And, as a result of getting the apartment all set up for the baby (and we are, now) and Alison basically out of commission, I have been quite busy, and not posting as much as I would like.

And I would like! I've got an ode to Bronze Age Spider-Man I'm tinkering with (I think I can say there's more than nostalgia at work here, because I was not alive for much of the Bronze Age) for here, and a piece about "following" superhero comics - in the same way one can "follow" Major League Baseball or whatever by reading the paper and watching SportsCenter without ever having to actually watch a single game - for MGK's. This is going to be dependent on when my status flips from "I do not have a baby in my home" to "My home contains one (1) baby," and it's hard to say exactly when that will be. So: Not now, but ... soon?

I will keep you informed.

EDIT/UPDATE: Baby ETA - Wednesday, May 19. Plans are in the works to induce labor that Tuesday. So you have until then to buy cigars. Get on it.

Thought for Today: Mankind's Most Odious Invention

2010-04-30T12:38:00.003-05:00

It's the car horn, isn't it?

Because when you honk, the cars in front, behind, and to the side of you are all going, "Who's honking? Are they honking at me? Is there something I should be aware of or did they just see someone walking down the sidewalk they recognized? Should I be moving? Oh crap, did I accidentally lean on the horn?" One honk can confuse a dozen people.

Meanwhile, there is no need to blow the horn at the person you are actually honking at, because s/he already already knows that s/he cut you off, and s/he will follow that up by flipping you off for making such a big frigging deal about it.

I am just saying, during a busy morning commute, what we need less of is LOUD SOUNDS WITH NO CONTEXT.

Thought for Today: A Touch Can Mean So Much When It's All You've Got

2010-04-28T12:49:00.007-05:00

I've been listening to "That Means A Lot" fairly obsessively for the past couple days since re-borrowing The Beatles Anthology CD set from my dad to stick it on my iPod. As in, it ends, and I immediately play it again, and then I think about it a third time.

If there is a better "lost" Beatles track than "That Means A Lot," I have not heard it (I guess that means you've still got a shot, "Carnival of Light").

Let no man speak ill of the Anthology when it brings us such treasures!

* * * * *

(EDITED to add links if you are inclined to listen to it yourself, and as long as I've got your attention...)

I'm trying to put my finger on what exactly I like so much about this song. It's got a couple strikes against it, actually. The mix on the Anthology is going for a kind of Wall of Sound thing but just comes off muddy. And the lyrics on the song itself I don't find quite up to the usual pop elegance of the Lennon-McCartney team of this time. That "a friend" conceit sort of sticks out and isn't used for any reason, the first verse has a redundancy that doesn't sit well (First line: "A friend says that your love won't mean a lot", last line: "But when she says she loves you, that means a lot") and the pronouns are kind of all over the place. They sound a bit like temporary lyrics, except that there's apparently twenty-plus takes out there all with the same words (although it's possible that this is all used to a secret, brilliant effect that I'm too dumb to pick up on).

The music itself, as a song rather than a performance (although the drumming is great, any take I've found on YouTube that does it differently isn't as good), I find really stirring though, maybe it's as simple as that. I looked up some tab for this song and messed about with it on piano and I really like that Am6 chord (if that's indeed what's actually being played)...

Today I Am A Writer

2010-04-27T12:43:00.004-05:00

Got my first rejection from a potentially paying publication last night (for fiction what I wrote, that is), which I am celebrating as an important milestone. I was, of course, highly unlikely to strike gold the first time with the first thing I sent to the first publication, so now I got that behind me.

But, uh, I won't be posting every time I get rejected (even though I'm 100% positive it'll never ever happen again because I'm A Special Boy, right??).

What I Have Been Doing In My Spare Time

2010-04-18T21:22:00.005-05:00

1.) Coming up with a second entry for Pillock's "Write a proposal for a TV show set in space" thing (Plok, man, when are we all supposed to be posting these things?)

2.) Trying to decide which organs I can sell to help ease any financial strain that having a baby in about six weeks will create. (To be blunt, Left Kidney ... what have you done for me lately?)

3.) Aggressively not going to see Kick-Ass, because please, media people, do not make a big deal about whether or not this movie goes too far in its portrayal of violence! You are only giving Mark Millar what he wants! Do not feed the bear!

4.) Talkin' Mission: Impossible down at the ol' Mightygodking.com.

Thought for Today: The Chicago Way

2010-04-17T09:56:00.004-05:00

Whenever I watch Brian DePalma's The Untouchables, I really enjoy it, but I'm never quite sure whether what I'm watching is actually a good movie or a bad movie. Even the things I suspect are or identify as "bad" ("He's in the car.") I rationalize in my head as intentional choices to provoke a desired effect that enhances the film.

Well, except for Sean Connery's Irish accent.

Content...

2010-04-12T23:44:00.001-05:00

...can be found at MGK today.

Communists of the Marvel Universe #003: The Red Ghost

2010-04-01T20:28:00.004-05:00

(Part three of an ongoing series analyzing the role of communists in the early Marvel Universe and how they have been adapted - or, in some cases, how they glaringly haven’t been adapted - by comics creators in a post Cold War climate.)

That’s the Red Ghost as in “The Red Ghost and his Super Apes,” of course. He turns intangible - hence the “Ghost” bit in his name - as a result of flying through a cosmic ray storm in order to recreate the circumstances under which the Fantastic Four got their powers, except he used a spaceship with no shielding in order to increase the exposure. Started out as an FF villain and has become sort of an all-purpose Marvel baddie.

Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say.

Ivan Kragoff was born in Leningrad, in what was at the time the Soviet Union. Before becoming the Red Ghost, Ivan was a Soviet scientist bent on beating the Americans to the moon and claiming it for the Communist empire. He assembled a crew of three trained apes — Mikhlo the Gorilla, Igor the Baboon, and Peotr the Orangutan — which he subjected to specialized training regimens of his own design, then took off on his lunar rocket trip on behalf of the USSR...

Hell, I got this one, you guys:

Ivan Kragoff was born in Leningrad, ~~in what was at the time the Soviet Union~~. Before becoming the Red Ghost, Ivan was a ~~Soviet~~ scientist ~~bent on beating the Americans to the moon and claiming it for the Communist empire~~. He assembled a crew of three trained apes — Mikhlo the Gorilla, Igor the Baboon, and Peotr the Orangutan — which he subjected to specialized training regimens of his own design, then took off on his lunar rocket trip ~~on behalf of the USSR~~...

Right, that’s wrapped up! (Checks watch.) Hm, and quicker than usual…

Actually, no joke, in most of the Red Ghost’s appearances, I think that’s all you really need to do. Most of the times I've ever seen the Red Ghost in a comic, it’s not because the guys who were doing the story needed a commie bad guy, it’s that he’s a.) an evil genius, b.) a guy who turns intangible, and c.) OH MY GOD YOU GUYS MONKEYS AWESOME. If you’re going to do Spider-Man or the Hulk fights the Red Ghost in a contemporary comic book, it’s no sweat, there’s no need to bring up all that messy communist stuff; he's a mad scientist who happens to be Russian.

The messy communist stuff is, however, acutely important in his first appearance.

If you haven’t read Fantastic Four #13 … well, you should. Ditko inks Kirby (it results in a magnificently monstrous Thing), and you get this panel, which in black and white is absolutely stunning:

But anyway, here’s a summary. Reed Richards is again trying to get to the moon before the Soviets do, and he finds a new fuel source (Tunguska-derived, it appears – that’s right, Warren Ellis, Stan Lee totally beat you to this one!) with which to accomplish this. However, the Red Ghost and his simian crew also blast off at that very moment to conquer the moon in the name of Mother Russia. They both make it to the moon and start to fight, when suddenly, The Watcher makes his first appearance. He does his whole “I am bound never to interfere in mortals’ affairs, except this time” speech because the US/USSR conflict, no longer confined to Earth, now potentially threatens the rest of the universe. So he transports them to the Blue Area of the Moon where there’s breathable atmosphere and the ruins of an ancient civilization (it’s where the X-Men fought the Imperial Guard at the climax of the Dark Phoenix Saga, you’ll recall) and says to fight it out there, and whoever wins will win the space race for their side. The Fantastic Four, of course, beat the Red Ghost and claim the moon for freedom and democracy. “Space is your heritage,” the Watcher tells them. “See that you prove worthy of such a glorious gift!”

Okay, so right off, Marvel Time makes the “first men on the moon” thing an anachronism (though I guess we haven’t actually had a woman or apes up there yet). As for the Red Ghost himself, we can’t just cross out the communist references because they’re actually important in this case. The Red Ghost here isn’t just any mad scientist to fight, he has to represent something that the Fantastic Four would oppose ideologically; otherwise, it’s just another supercharacter scuffle and not the event of cosmic significance that Lee and Kirby are trying to sell us on in this story.

So to that end, we can ask, “What is it that ‘Soviet-ness’ represents here that the audience is to be repulsed by?” In other words, what exactly is Stan Lee’s beef with communism (other than that he’s an American citizen in the early 1960s)?

Well, it turns out in the story that the Red Ghost treats those apes pretty badly. He calls the gorilla “My monsterous slave,” and in the next panel shouts, “No food for you yet, comrade baboon! It is important to me that you remain hungry – I want you to be mean, vicious, dangerous!”

Later in the story, the Red Ghost captures Sue and imprisons her behind a force field guarded by his Super-Apes, and she thinks, “If I could only find a way to eliminate this force field – to free the Super-Apes! I would take my chacnes with them, rather than the Red Ghost, for they are like the communist masses, innocently enslaved by their evil leaders!” Sue manages to knock the force field out of commission, but they don’t attack her. “Just as I expected! They’re so ravenously hungry that they don’t even notice me in their frantic attempt to get the food which Kragoff had left on the other side of the force screen!” The gorilla punches out a wall. “And now,” Sue thinks, “no longer under the Red Ghost’s mental control, they want their freedom!

At the story’s end, they leave the Red Ghost on the moon to the mercies of the Super-Apes, who have rebelled against their cruel master. “Wait!” Kragoff says. “Why are you staring at me that way? Aiming the [paralysis] ray at me?? Your eyes – they’re gleaming with hatred – with vengeance!”

So stripped of era-specific politics, what “Soviet-ness” seems to mean for Stan Lee here (and elsewhere, notably in a Captain America/Hawkeye/Quicksilver/Scarlet Witch Avengers story with a Vietnam analogue) is exploitation, and that’s something you can always find a relevant outlet for. In fact, it’s interesting to see how Marvel’s anticommunist themes of the early 60s morph into the antiestablishment themes of the late 60s – they’re both about taking a stand against The Man, whether that Man is an American establishment figure or the Soviet high command keeping the little guy (or ape) down.

So there are any number of ways you could make this story relevant, to find a new way for the Red Ghost to be The Man. Perhaps the most mischevious would be to take the Soviet boogeyman and turn him relatively seamlessly into a ruthless, total free-market industrialist. Maybe he’s headed to the moon to strip it of its resources, to ransack the wonders of the Blue Area – you could play this as a guy who wants to own the moon, who wants to privatize Earth’s satellite. The Super-Apes are, as you will, his corporate drones or his underfed and underpaid working class. The FF, then, fight him to protect the moon from being divvied up like it was just another chunk of unclaimed geography; that space exploration is about something finer, something to bring humankind together, despite whatever differences we might have had on Earth. All that idealistic 60s Star Trek stuff, right? There’s a philosophical/ethical/ideological conflict that would make this important and not just another bad-guy fight, worthy of the Watcher’s interference.

Well, whatever way you do it (I'm sure there's a better way I haven’t thought of), again, it generally doesn’t matter for 99% of the Red Ghost appearances past, present and future. But then again, if you committed to the Red Ghost as a symbol of exploitation, maybe you could get more out of the character than just a mad monkey wrangler...

Terror! Chills! The Current Price of Gasoline!

2010-03-29T18:53:00.005-05:00

Justin Pollock, that dude who is totally me, has a new story up on MicroHorror:

http://www.microhorror.com/microhorror/author/justin-pollock/economics-lesson/

This is, in fact, the very sort of thing I worry about all the time.

A Titan by any other name...

2010-03-21T19:38:00.002-05:00

I mean, is there a better name we could call this guy?

Communists of the Marvel Universe #002: The Chameleon

2010-03-15T21:25:00.004-05:00

(Part two of an ongoing series analyzing the role of communists in the early Marvel Universe and how they have been adapted - or, in some cases, how they glaringly haven’t been adapted - by comics creators in a post Cold War climate.)

The Chameleon, master of disguise, debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #1 as the first villain Spider-Man ever fought. (Chronologically in publication, at least; Kurt Busiek retconned in one or two between Amazing Fantasy #15 and ASM #1, did he not?) He appears here as a spy planning to steal U.S. missile defense plans, and it’s made explicit he’s selling them to the Soviets (“The Iron Curtain countries will pay a fortune for these plans!” he says, and he has a rendezvous at one point with a submarine bearing the hammer and sickle). He decides to impersonate Spider-Man and frame him for the theft, but is eventually apprehended.

If you believe the standard line about alien shapechangers and body snatchers (like the Skrulls Stan Lee introduced not long before this issue in Fantastic Four #2, and the Space Phantom which would come a couple months later in Avengers #2) being a symbol of Cold War paranoia – spies and invasion, your neighbors turning against you, all that stuff - what’s interesting about the Chameleon is that he’s a much more literal take on this theme; he’s not an alien that's supposed to represent the Soviet Union, he’s actually a spy who can make himself look just like you.

The Chameleon is in many ways a very good adversary for Spider-Man. One of the many things Peter Parker represents is our neuroses and paranoia, but of course, in the comic book world, everybody really is out to get him. Since the public at large could be said to be one of Spider-Man’s archenemies, the Chameleon is effective because he can be anyone in that public. The Chameleon can pose as Spider-Man, commit some crimes, then pose as Jameson and write an editorial condemning Spider-Man for the crimes, then pose as civilians demanding he be brought to justice, then pose as the chief of police and declare Spider-Man a wanted criminal, etc. etc. The Chameleon never seems to go that far, but the point is that he could, and there’s got to be a part of Peter Parker’s brain at his most paranoid wondering, “What if they’re all the Chameleon? Every person who’s ever made it tough for Spider-Man and Peter Parker … what if it’s all been one guy all along playing all the parts?”

There’s mileage to be gotten out of the Chameleon, you know!

But while the Chameleon is a moderately popular Spider-Man enemy, he’s never been quite in the A-list for a couple of reasons. For one, he’s not a hand-to-hand fighter, so you can’t fall back on that crutch of just having the good guy and the bad guy punch it out at the end of your story. For another, shapeshifters and face-changers are numerous in a comic book universe, and I suspect many people have the impression that there’s not much that’s unique about the Chameleon (a notion I intend to explode momentarily, just you wait for it). And third, the Chameleon’s motivations are very different than most of Spider-Man’s other enemies. When Spider-Man rips off the door to the fleeing Chameleon’s helicopter and shouts “End of the line for you, commie!” it feels a bit out of place, doesn’t it? Similar to how Spidey rarely fights aliens the way he does in Amazing #2; Lee and Ditko were still toying with the new characters and hadn’t hit upon the now-standard formula of Spider-Man’s adversaries being motivated by base, ugly, selfish desires – money or power or revenge - as opposed to a political cause.

So we’ve got two problems here – the Chameleon is an enemy rooted in politics, which is not the Spider-Man series’ strong suit, and those politics now belong to a bygone era.

Ah, but Stan Lee has helped us out possibly without even knowing it! Look again at the line “The Iron Curtain countries will pay a fortune for these plans!” Why, he’s not an enemy agent doing his duty after all, he’s in this for the money. Neophyte, naïve Spidey is wrong - The Chameleon’s not a “commie,” he’s a freelancer!

Which brings me to my point about what makes the Chameleon unique in a universe of villains who do the same thing as him. It’s because most other shapeshifters in comics have a “true” face. Skrulls “really” look like green dudes with pointy ears and weird chins, Mystique looks like a blue chick with red hair. But the Chameleon? He looks like this:

The Chameleon has no “real” appearance; he doesn’t change his face, he puts one on. He’s a blank canvas. At some point he made the transition from wearing masks to actually having his skin replaced with some sort of synthetic shapechanging material (although he seems to be back to masks as of a recent, and actually quite good, arc on Amazing Spider-Man). The '90s Spider-Man cartoon took this a step further by never having the Chameleon speak unless he was “in character”; at least once he even turned into somebody else solely for the purpose of delivering one line.

When he was writing the books, J.M. DeMatteis noted all this himself and came up with a backstory to explain. The Chameleon was born Dmitri Smerdyakov and was Kraven the Hunter’s boyhood servant (and possibly half-brother). He idolized young Kraven, but Kraven treated him like crap, so Chameleon developed a sense of worthlessness and became the Chameleon so he could sublimate his own identity in favor of others’. DeMatteis got some good stories out of this (he seemed to have a fondness for the character), but it didn’t exactly turn the Chameleon into one of Spidey’s archenemies (though to be fair, DeMatteis probably wasn’t shooting for this anyway). His motivations are still a bit murky; Spider-Man’s villains aren’t usually quite so complex (both a strength and a weakness – they don’t threaten to steal the spotlight from Spider-Man like some other heroes’ villains do, but it makes them a bit interchangeable). I don’t know, maybe it’s a bit of a Batman villain idea?

Or, perhaps, a bit selfishly, a bit snottily, but probably honestly, it’s not what I would have done.

“What would you have done, Justin?”

Gosh, since you asked:

I’d make it so you don’t know who the Chameleon ever really was. Fred Van Lente’s set this up a bit, actually, in that recent arc I mentioned by having him insist that Dmitri Smerdyakov was “just one of his faces.” For whatever reason, the Chameleon makes himself faceless and has a talent for disguise; if you like the DeMatteis feelings-of-worthlessness thing, you can read it that way, but I’m not going to bring it up. He’ll basically work for whoever’s willing to hire him, but his rates are considerably reasonable considering the level of skill and expertise he brings to the table, and that’s because the money he makes only covers running his operation and a few creature comforts (I’m not going to ditch the fact that this is a dude who looks sharp in a robe). The reason he’s available for hire is because he’s a blank canvas not just in appearance but also in motivation; these missions give him a superficial sense of purpose in the same way that the masks give him a superficial sense of identity. He has no loyalty, no agenda. He’ll work for HYDRA, the Red Skull, Al Qaeda, the Leader, Doctor Octopus, no questions asked, no judgment passed. Hey, he’d even work for the good guys if they’d be willing to pay him (one of my favorite ever comic book moments is in JLA: Rock of Ages when Batman simply outbids Lex Luthor for the Mirror Master’s services).

He still isn’t motivated by a simple base desire like most of Spider-Man’s villains, but it’s okay now. A Chameleon with no motivation, rather than a political one, is such an outlier that he becomes unique and interesting – the exception to the rule, rather than a data point that just doesn’t quite fit.

Or, if you like, maybe he does have a selfish motivation – maybe this is all done out of boredom!

All of which is a lot of elaboration to say that the Chameleon is easy to remove from the Cold War aesthetic because it’s not important to him in the first place. If you ignore the hammer and sickle on that submarine in Amazing Spider-Man #1, there could be anybody in that submarine; it doesn’t matter. Because there’s always somebody out there who’d like to get their hands on the nation’s missile defense secrets, and there’ll always be somebody who’d be willing to steal them.

Such strange things did I viddy in my dream, O my brothers…

2010-03-13T11:13:00.004-06:00

All right, you guys, I had the weirdest dream. So weird, in fact, that I felt I had to tell it in detail here.

This dream was long, uninterrupted, very vivid, and extremely geeky in all respects, which is extremely odd because my dreams are usually none of those four things. I had not had a particularly geeky day; I had read no comics, watched no movies or TV, not even thought much about anything to that effect – I fell asleep on the couch at one point reading A Clockwork Orange, but that did not factor into my dream in any way (thank goodness for small favors, one supposes). I also want to stress that I am getting over a cold, but I had not taken any NyQuil or anything like that which might be blamed for the dream. I had one bottle of hard cider, essentially equivalent to a single bottle of beer, at around 10 p.m., and anyway the dream must have started after 6 a.m. sometime, so I do not think that ought to have played a factor.

I was, however, extremely tired that night.

I am going to provide links in the anchor text for people who might not get every single reference (hello, Zach … and possibly my dad). I just had to share it because I do not remember ever having such a concentrated pop-culture dream.

I swear, what you are about to read is not exaggerated from my recollection in any way.

* * *

The earliest part I can remember begins with Batman protecting a mobster in the basement of police headquarters in Gotham City. The headquarters was basically the one from The Dark Knight, but Batman was a very ‘90s looking comic book Batman (not actually Kelley Jones, but someone who would have drawn part of Knightfall or something), and the mobster was Al Pacino, but Al Pacino as Big Boy from Dick Tracy.

Now, in my dreams I tend to, like, “transfer consciousness” a lot, where I’ll be “playing” one role in the dream, and then halfway through I’ll transfer to another “character” in the dream. So in this one, I think I started out as Pacino, because I remember being worried that the Scarecrow was coming to kill me (hence being under police and Bat protection), but at some point I must have switched to Batman, because Pacino excuses himself for the bathroom and didn’t come back. As Batman, I investigate the bathroom and find there was a large, loose panel that must slide back and lead to some hidden tunnel. But I’m terrified to look in it. Like, horribly, deathly terrified that if I slidd it open, some horrible thing would come out and kill me.

So I get Agent Scully to do it. The deal was, she’d point her gun at the panel as I (suddenly Mulder) open up the panel. There was somebody cowering in the bathtub as well. Maybe it was Pacino/Big Boy, although he was supposed to be gone. So I open it up, and Scully assures me there was nothing moving inside. It looks, in fact, just like some weird cave that leads into the darkness. Scully goes in, and I follow her.

And suddenly I am no longer Mulder in the tunnel, but I am me reading a comic book of these events at a picnic table in the park on a sunny day. The comic book is an issue of Fantastic Four, and the FF are going through the tunnel, and it winds up in some sort of buried underground New York filled with the sort of denizens you would expect to inhabit a comic book underground New York. I finish the comic, and I am convinced that this is the greatest issue of Fantastic Four I’ve read in years and years, and I look back at the credits and see that it is apparently a contemporary issue of Fantastic Four drawn by Steve Ditko.

So I’m going on and on about how great this issue of Fantastic Four was to the guy sitting at the picnic table with me, and that guy is Kurt Busiek, who asks me if I’d like to tell Ditko that myself (Busiek, for whatever reason, has Ditko’s phone number). So I say I would, and I call Ditko on my cell phone and discover, contrary to his reputation for being a recluse who never talks to fans, very friendly and open. I keep gushing, just wretched fannish gushing, about how great I thought this comic was, and Ditko tells me where he got the idea for the underground city, the backstory he’d created for it, all of it.

And then suddenly, I see Ditko’s lips moving, and they’re surrounded by a fluffy white beard. The camera pulls back (I am no longer in the park on the phone, but rather watching TV) to reveal it’s John Travolta, except that he looks like he’s been cast in the lead of the new Santa Clause movie, and he’s “playing Ditko.” (It should be noted that Steve Ditko in no way looks like that, of course.) He hangs up the phone and says, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”

So I guess I’m watching Saturday Night Live, right? And Travolta in his Santa beard is hosting. And we go right into the first sketch, which, in defiance of all reason, is another sketch in which Travolta is playing Ditko.

The conceit of the sketch is that Steve Ditko and Stan Lee are corresponding to each other, except it is Victorian London, and Ditko is basically Bob Cratchit, and Lee is basically Ebenezer Scrooge. And Travolta-as Ditko-as Cratchit is wearing some kind of footie pajamas and standing on the cobblestone, and I’m aware of how hard and sharp and hot the ground is on his feet because suddenly I am Travolta-as Ditko-as Cratchit, and I start walking toward where I know Lee/Scrooge’s office to be, and every step is painful.

And then, all of a sudden, I am me again, and I am in the Mall of America with my father and brother (the three of us are actually going to Minneapolis for something this month, so this is not altogether weird yet). We’re walking by a bunch of movie company boutiques – there’s a Disney store and a Warner Bros. store. And then, strange though it may seem, there is a store devoted entirely to Ghostbusters memorabilia, as indicated by a sign that’s nothing but the logo.

So I pull my father and brother into the store and I am just ecstatic (as one would be if one discovered against all odds that a Ghostbusters store would be profitable enough to stay in business). Stranger still, inside the store, the ceilings are very high – we’re talking three stories, maybe, and the ceilings were molded white plaster (apparently we were supposed to be in the Ghostbusters firehouse, although I do not recall the Ghostbusters firehouse looking anything like that).

Now, not only is there Ghostbusters memorabilia in this store, there is also some kind of weird nightclub at the back of the store, and all the employees are wearing like Ghostbusters uniforms. My dad asks my brother and me if we want anything to drink, and I consider a rum and coke, but it seems weird to have a rum and coke at a nightclub in a Ghostbusters store at the mall, so I just order a Diet Hi-C (I am not sure that such a product exists). It comes in a paper cup like at a fast food restaurant, and I grab a lid, and just like I always do in real life, the first lid I grab is a size too small and so I have to take a bigger one too, and now I can’t put that small lid back because I’ve already touched it and I feel bad for being wasteful.

So I’m drinking my Diet Hi-C and we’re leaving the store, and the three of us talk about where we’d like to get dinner in the mall. My dad suggests Burger Hole, and my brother is not having any of that. He’s like, “Burger Hole? That place is a hole!” And I’m trying to remember where I know the name “Burger Hole” from, and I think, Isn’t that the name of the restaurant in the movie Role Models?

And then I wake up.

* * *
So that’s the dream. I shudder to think that any of it means anything. My wife and I bought a crib and changing table that night, so I’d hate to think this is some sort of weird metaphor for impending fatherhood in some way.

That is all.

A True Conversation With My Brother (Only Very Slightly Dramatized, By Virtue Of Me Not Having Thought to Tape Record It)

2010-03-11T21:30:00.004-06:00

JUSTIN (as soon as Zach has picked up the phone): So you know that Gwen Stefani song, “Cool”?

ZACH: Yyyeah.

JUSTIN: So do you think those lyrics are sincere or ironic?

ZACH: (Long pause.) I…

JUSTIN: Because, you know, it seems like it’s supposed to be coming from a sincere place, with all the stuff about them being totally happy for each other. But then I think, well you know, they say that if you take the time to write a whole song about how you’re totally okay with the way the relationship ended and that you’re both totally moved on … that maybe you’re not.

ZACH: Well, I…

JUSTIN: What I’m saying is I think maybe they’re not cool…

ZACH: (Long pause.) Um … I guess the lyrics sound pretty sincere to me.

JUSTIN: Yeah, I mean it is Gwen Stefani, right? It’s all heart-on-your-sleeve stuff; there’s never really many layers there. But those lyrics are kind of awful on their own, aren’t they? So I think … I think it would be a much better song if she were an unreliable narrator, that she’s really not over him.

ZACH: Hm.

JUSTIN: Next time you listen to that song, pretend that she’s just totally lying. Or, like, deluding herself. It’s a much better song that way.

ZACH: I guess. But if the lyrics are sincere, she really is deluding herself.

JUSTIN: Meta.

ZACH: (Pause.) I smell a blog post.

JUSTIN: Really? I was going to write one about the Chameleon…

A Short Story What I Wrote (Justin Pollock's Debut)

2010-03-07T08:55:00.007-06:00

I have written a short story (and by "short," I mean, "less than 500 words") that's been put up here: http://www.microhorror.com/microhorror/author/justin-pollock/the-skeletons-request/

You will notice it's credited to "Justin Pollock." A few years back I became concerned about the marketability of the name "Zyduck." I mean, that's the end of the alphabet; any book I would actually be able to get published would get jammed in the lower-right-hand corner of any bookshelf - awful visibility. So I went through a couple of pen names. My first choice was "Justin Pierce" for no particular reason at all, but it turns out there is a late skateboarder/actor of some note by that name already. Justin Leonard (Leonard being one my grandfathers) is a famous golfter. My middle name is Paul, so I tried working with that, but there are a couple of Justin Pauls out there already.

Eventually I settled on Pollock as a last name; it's got the "Paul" sound in it, and I like that "ock" at the end, which also sort of retains the "ock/uck" sound in my last name (my wife's too, actually - Poles, the both of us). It sounds nice if you say it if your voice is raspy when you have a cold, as I do now. It sounds like some kind of weird tribute to Jackson Pollock, which it isn't, but I like that one might think it was, for some reason. Best of all, though, though it's not a totally bizarre name by any means, there are not terribly many Justin Pollocks out there - a Google search for it has my story on the first page already, actually, not too shabby.

All of this is to assure Pillock that I did not try to usurp his online identity with a clumsy typographical error.

Anyway, the story itself - I've been writing horror for going on a year and a half. Had to take a break from writing the novel during the recent move, and then lost all my momentum. So I've been writing shorter pieces (I've got three stories just about ready to go out to a couple of publications, hopefully for actual money) to get working again. Then I found MicroHorror.com, which is a neat idea - all the stories have to be under 666 words (you get it ... you get it ...). I decided to write something as an experiment - I think that short form works well for horror, and the super-short word count frees you up to write something loose and quick and send it off without too much laborious self-editing and second guessing. The story I've written here is a little different in style and language (overegged, a bit) than the other stuff I've got in the hopper, but I thought I'd take advantage of what I viewed as a chance for experimentation to write an "old-timey" horror story.

More to come, possibly.

Communists of the Marvel Universe #001: Igor Drenkov

2010-03-02T21:22:00.003-06:00

(Part one of an ongoing series analyzing the role of communists in the early Marvel Universe and how they have been adapted - or, in some cases, how they glaringly haven’t been adapted - by comics creators in a post Cold War climate.)

So this guy is arguably one of the most important figures in the history of the Marvel Universe.

He was, you may recall (though you’d be forgiven if you don’t), the Soviet spy sent to infiltrate Bruce Banner’s gamma bomb project. Tries to get Banner to give him his notes, but Banner's all "I don't make mistakes." And when Banner goes to warn Rick Jones off the testing ground because the bomb’s primed to go off, Igor (he’s not given a last name until much later than this story) decides not to halt the countdown – he’ll let the bomb take Banner off his hands if he’s not going to cooperate. This, of course, results in the creation of the Hulk.

So yeah, this is the dude directly responsible for the Hulk’s existence, so you figure such an important guy’s gonna keep popping up in the Hulk comic, right?

Except that after Incredible Hulk #1 in 1962, not counting flashbacks to the origin, he does not appear again until issue #393 in 1992.

That’s a phenomenal time span, especially for superhero comics. Comics writers and editors seek out and extrapolate and elaborate upon the tiniest, most obscure details of continuity and ephemera, and yet nobody except Peter David wanted to use this huge player in the scheme of things. He appears in that ’92 issue of Hulk where he’s driven insane after realizing that he’s responsible for all the destruction the Hulk has caused, but also for the good things the Hulk has done. And I didn’t know it before I did a bit of research, but Igor appeared just a couple months ago in a Winter Guard one-shot where he, ah, gets turned into a monster by The Presence and fights Russia’s answer to the Avengers. Modern-day Marvel, you guys are scamps. Anyway, it’s totally not important.

So why is it that, even before the Soviet Union collapsed and enough time had passed to make the Red Menace irrelevant to modern-day readers, nobody wanted to touch poor Igor?

Igor, I would suggest, was made irrelevant very early on in Hulk history when Stan Lee & Co. decided to depoliticize the series.

Because that first story is pretty explicitly political. The amoral scientist Banner is a weapons maker to put Tony Stark to shame; Marvel historian Peter Sanderson points out the gamma bomb is, after all, a “dirty” bomb that he’s making on behalf of the U.S. Government. It’s a pretty standard sci-fi trope for its time – a scientist blinded to the consequences of his actions by his own hubris is made to pay himself for the horrors he threatened to unleash on mankind. It’s the political and military presence that makes it interesting. There’s incredible potential for black comedy and satire – here you have this weedy intellectual who has trouble communicating with his girlfriend, so he builds a weapon of mass destruction as an expression of his surpressed emotions. You’ve got General Ross, who hates Banner for not being a “real man” and dating his daughter, and yet he can’t just totally dismiss him because otherwise he won’t build that bomb they need. Igor seems oddly dejected by Banner’s refusal to show him his notes; it stops being a matter of his spy mission and becomes almost an affront to his dignity. The whole thing’s entering Dr. Strangelove territory, and if they followed through with it, you could take this places Kubrick wouldn't've dared to tread.

But then the Hulk becomes about psychology instead of politics. You know the drill – an uncontrolled, unhealthy expression of repressed emotion, the conflict between brute force and intellect, struggling with base desires, loneliness and alienation, multiple personalities – all that stuff Peter David took and ran with. Okay, I’m not fond of the multiple personality angle, but I can’t say this new direction was a terrible idea. It’s fertile ground and it’s clearly touched a nerve in the public consciousness, and anyway they’d soon come up with Iron Man to do political stuff with. The military that's always after the Hulk becomes just a symbol of authority.

But where Igor comes in, or rather where he doesn’t, is because if you’re going to set up the Hulk series as internal conflicts externalized as a giant monster, the whole damn thing is muddied up by Igor acting as an external prime mover for the series. It weakens the dynamic; Igor becomes a cheap device who’s more trouble than he’s worth, and that’s why he’s forgotten. You’ll notice the movies and TV series don’t want to deal with Banner the bomb-builder; he’s invariably portrayed as a guy who’s trying to use gamma power to help mankind rather than blow it up, but tampering with nature is still tampering with nature, and thus is punished. But it’s always a freak accident, or some matter of hubris getting back at him. There’s no Igor or Igor stand-in. It’s just Banner.

If the Hulk is about personal demons and personal mistakes, it’s got to be Banner’s finger on the button, not some Commie spy who never shows up again. So Marvel hasn’t really had to rehabilitate Igor or make him relevant for the 21st century (although John Byrne did try to retcon, in that particular John Byrney way of his, that Igor was a Skrull). He’d been phased out long before changing political fortunes would have necessitated it.

Although you know, if I were handed the keys to the Hulk franchise and told to write whatever I want … frankly, I think the psychodrama aspect’s been so thoroughly mined I’d be pretty anxious to swing it back into the political arena, to exploit that potential for satire and commentary. And if the Hulk were back in that mode, maybe Igor could come along for the ride.

But then again, we’d have to figure out just what Igor’s deal is if he’s not a Soviet agent, so we’re right back where we started from. SORRY FOR WASTING YOUR TIME, EVERYBODY.

Communists of the Marvel Universe: Introduction

2010-02-23T23:15:00.003-06:00

So I had an idea for a new ongoing feature based on an unusual interest of mine. It’s not like Seven Films for Seven Batmen or the Seven Soldiers posts, where there’s a specific end point in mind. This one’s open ended; something I’d like to come back to now and again, or not do it for a couple months if I don’t have any ideas, or abandon it entirely if it turns out to be thoroughly uninteresting and unworthy of the time investment.

I’d like to talk about the role of communism in the Marvel Universe.

But not, you understand, from an explicitly political or philosophical standpoint. I mean, I’m certainly not equipped to speak insightfully about communism, and I’m not sure it would be of much value anyway; there’s not much under the surface aching to be explored from Spider-Man wrenching the door off the Chameleon’s helicopter and shouting, “End of the line for you, commie!”

Rather, I want to look at communism contextually, in the greater scheme of a shared comic book universe. Specifically, how it’s been phased out since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I don’t have to go into this in too much detail, right? If you want to play along with comic book continuity at all (and it is part of the fun, let’s be honest with ourselves), Peter Parker can’t have become Spider-Man in 1962 or else he’d be old as Uncle Ben today, so we have to say there’s a “sliding timescale” in effect, and that it’s been ten to fifteen years since Fantastic Four #1 (as a wretched teenager, I decided on a 4:1 year ratio based on what was going on in Spider-Man comics at the time, and today that puts us at 12.25 years).

So if Marvel’s Silver Age begins no earlier than 1995, that makes a bunch of topical references invalid (Spider-Man couldn’t possibly have teamed up with John Belushi on Saturday Night Live, for example), but it also means that the Marvel heroes have always existed in a post-Cold War environment.

Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that Marvel stories are crawling with communists, some in actually very important roles (for continuity’s sake anyway).

We could fanwank this away pretty easily, of course. When Captain America mentions one president, he means another; the Avengers go on The Late Show with David Letterman instead of Late Night; and the Soviet Union just collapsed later in the Marvel Universe (a bit after Jim Lee launched the second X-Men title, I think; less than five years ago if you use the Teenage Justin Method, or TJM for short).

Or you could just, you know, stop mentioning it.

The latter is the approach most writers seem to take, and I think it’s the right one. I mean, continuity is nice and all, but you’re just gonna look ridiculous if you keep hammering on about the Red Menace in 2010 (not to mention, politically, it’s pretty uncool). All this superhero business isn’t meant to be taken so literally anyway; relevancy is more important than consistency, and The West vs. The Soviet Union just isn’t all that relevant anymore. So yeah, next time you retell the origin, just leave all the commie spies out.

It’s the right move … but the removal of communism from the backstory of the Marvel Universe doesn’t only change stuff on a facts-‘n’-continuity level. Sometimes it actually affects things at the level of character and theme, and this is what I’m really interested in.

For example, let’s start, fittingly, at the beginning of the Marvel Universe with the origin sequence in Fantastic Four #1, where this exchange appears on page 9:

BEN GRIMM (to Reed Richards): If you want to fly to the stars, then YOU pilot the ship! Count ME out! You KNOW we haven’t done enough research into the effect of cosmic rays! They might kill us all out in space!
SUE STORM: Ben, we’ve GOT to take that chance … unless we want the commies to beat us to it! I – I never thought that YOU would be a coward!
BEN: A COWARD!! NOBODY calls ME a coard! Get the ship! I’ll fly her no matter WHAT happens!!

So in 1961, you understand why Reed wants to go through with the launch without having done proper tests on cosmic radiation and the appropriate shielding: There’s no time, man, don’t you know there’s a Space Race on? Reed is portrayed as a patriot, putting his personal safety (well, and the other three but youknowwhatever) at risk to conquer “the stars” in the name of his country. Ben, in context, doesn’t actually come off all that great. He’s not the selfless patriot Reed is supposed to be; it’s not the threat of Sue’s “commies” that gets him in the ship, it’s Sue impugning his pride.

But remove the Soviets, as we do now, and it’s a completely different story. Because without the Space Race context, why is Reed in such a hurry to get up there? It’s no longer an act of patriotism, so it’s got to be hubris; it’s inconceivable to Reed that he could have made a mistake. I don’t know what the in-story reason they’re using these days for why he took his girlfriend and her kid brother along on the flight, but I think the relevant thing to do would be to cast it as a guy trying to make space flight accessible to the common man: “Look, I’ve made this ship so easy to crew, Johnny can do it, and he’s just barely legal to drive a car.”

Even Sue takes a hit; in the original, she’s trying to get Ben to do his patriotic duty by reminding him of the communists, and only when that doesn’t work does she appeal to his ego; the modern version, one imagines, goes right for the emotional manipulation.

Ben, meanwhile, goes from the worst portrayal to the best. Because, of course, Ben is 100% right and Reed is 100% wrong, he gets cajoled into it by Sue, and Ben’s the one who ends up paying for everyone else’s mistake by becoming the Thing.

So in this case, the removal of communism makes the relationships in the Fantastic Four conceptually stronger; it multiplies and multiplies again the sympathy we have for Ben, and patriotic scientist Reed is a far less interesting character than the guy who thinks too much of himself and makes a terrible mistake he’ll spend the rest of his life trying to make right.

That’s the kind of thing I want to get into in future installments; going through and picking apart how Soviet saboteurs don’t really factor into things anymore sounds like extremely micro-level stuff, but as we’ve seen from the example above, it can have some unexpectedly macro-level implications.

So I’ll begin next time with a character who’s arguably one of the most important figures in the Marvel Universe, yet has been all but forgotten; in fact, he had a thirty-year gap between his first appearance and his second (and last).

You Can Dress Me Up As A ... What, Exactly?

2010-02-22T22:14:00.006-06:00

First of all, let me say I don't like that Paul McCartney's mailing list or whatever (I am not 100% sure why I'm on it; maybe when I entered that remix contest two albums ago I sent it from that Yahoo account) addresses e-mails as being from "Paul McCartney" and not "Paul McCartney Mailing List" or "McCartney Fan Club" or whatever it is. Because for one brief, unthinking moment, I honestly thought, "Oh, Paul's written me an e-mail." You think you'd be more excited, even in that stupid half-second before figuring out what it obviously is, but there you have it.

Okay, point number two. Here's the image that came attached to the e-mail:

It's weird, isn't it? Don't get me wrong, I figure McCartney's needed some "rebranding" for some time now. The "cheeky" shots he keeps putting out -- the cover of Driving Rain leaps immediately to mind -- have become somewhat undignified for a legend of a man in his sixties. But what am I to take from that image above?

"Paul McCartney is mad as hell and he's gonna give you a piece of his mind!!"
"Paul McCartney is gonna rock your socks off like they ain't never been rocked off before!!"
"Paul McCartney is quite enthused about his new suspenders!!"

I think it's interesting, anyway. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but then again, this is the image he and his people are putting out to represent him. Paired with the "Up and Coming" name, is this meant to be some sort of hungry Paul McCartney?

Conscripted

2010-02-18T22:41:00.004-06:00

The Onion AV Club has joined in my war against irony (in a move that I am one hundred per cent certain was inspired by my declaration of war, despite the fact that it appears to have been posted before I wrote my blog entry). Although the comments, always a dubious undertaking on the AV Club to begin with, raise the issue of "New Sincerity", which is apparently a thing already, and not one whose tenents I can fully get behind (it seems to promote the Cult of Awesome, which I'll reject as well).

But even the act of rejecting a "movement" is a movement in and of itself, which is why it seems to be difficult to talk about anything in the early 21st century.

Basically, I just want to know at what point we can stop acting like 90s "alternative" rock was some kind of blight upon culture and re-evaluate it as guitar pop under a somewhat misleading name.

Everybody Out of the Pool

2010-02-17T20:12:00.003-06:00

All right, I get it. Deadpool is overexposed at the moment, so Marvel overoverexposes him as a joke. "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if Deadpool had as many monthly series as Superman?" Parody of Big Two marketing excess, etc. etc. I get it.

But at some point, "It's a joke" really isn't a joke anymore. The Colbert Report is funny and all, but it's begun to disturb me. He parodies crass commercialism by plugging his Christmas special DVD, but really, he's still actually plugging his Christmas special DVD. He parodies pundits who thrive on a cult of personality, but the joke has become so successful that he's got a following every bit as fanatical as a Bill O'Reilly ever did; the only difference between the two fanbases is a continuously thinning veneer of irony.

You can buy "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON" stuff on notebooks and posters for your dorm room. People are paying for propaganda.

And sure, Deadpool having four or however many it is series at the same time shouldn't cheese me off because I'm not buying anything anyway. But at the same time...

...once upon a time, in the late 90s, there was a Deadpool comic that I actually enjoyed. I'm not sure if Joe Kelly's run is held in high critical esteem today or not, but I don't care. It was uproariously funny, but also had a lot of solid character work. Kelly took a Rob Liefeld-designed character with no real thought put into his creation save "He's like Spider-Man if Spider-Man was an assassin. Oh, and he's got Wolverine's healing powers!" and tried to build a purpose for this character. Not a pinnacle of the sequential art medium, but just good supercomics.

But Kelly left, prematurely, after 33 issues because sales were hovering around cancellation, and he was sick of being told "Okay, wrap up your plotlines because you only have five issues left ... wait, hold on, eight ... oops, three." So it's quite irritating that Kelly's labor of love had the axe hanging over its head the whole time, but now they're doing Deadpool Corps and Deadpool Team-Up because, you know, that's hilarious.

So starting today, I am declaring WAR ON IRONY. UP WITH SINCERITY. DO YOUR PART.

If nothing else, I've been watching The Daily Show instead of The Colbert Report lately.

Point and Counterpoint for Today

2010-02-13T14:47:00.003-06:00

Inspired by my current rereading of New X-Men.

POINT: The way that I feel about the last few years of Avengers comics under Brian Michael Bendis must be people who are not me felt when Grant Morrison was given the keys to the X-Men franchise.

COUNTERPOINT: No, this is totally different.

Build Your Own White Album: Part Two - A Doll's House

2010-02-10T19:11:00.002-06:00

Long version here, summary here: You know how people sometimes say The Beatles’ White Album would work better as a single album than a double (“people” in this context actually includes Ringo Starr and George Martin)? In a fit of madness, I decided to try and construct what that might look like. The first part of this series was just my 15 favorite tracks, but for this one I tried to bring some actual discipline to it. I was taking the position that it’s 1968, the Beatles have given me 30 songs for consideration on their new album, and I’ve had to whittle it down to 15.

Now what criteria do you use to do this?

- Quality. Obviously that’s the first step, but it’s not just what I think are the 15 best songs (different than my 15 favorite songs).

- Art vs. commerce. The balance is important. This is a Beatles album and a canonized masterpiece, but it’s also a pop record.

- Band politics. I’ve stated before my belief that this is the best album John Lennon has ever put his name to, Beatle, solo or otherwise. But this is a Beatles album, so Paul’s got to have his tracks, George has got to have his tracks, and yes, SPOILER ALERT, Ringo gets his. Although Paul is still going to be pissed.

- Reduce duplication. The Justice League has this same rule on their charter. Basically, if there are two songs that have a similar sound, I should really only pick one in the interest of variety, which as far as I’m concerned has always been the key ingredient in Beatles releases. At the same time…

- A sense of unity. Not in theme or sound (although I did sketch out a “Revolution”-themed concept album, and it’s as dumb as you’d expect), but in, I don’t know, feeling. “Savoy Truffle” is a year or so too late to fit in on this. “Mother Nature’s Son” would have probably fit in better on a McCartney solo release. Basically, I’m looking for tracks that embody “White Albumyness,” and no, I don’t know what that means either.

- Sequencing. It’s sequenced the way I would sequence an album. I’ll get more into that on the track-by-track stuff.

Without further ado, here is The Beatles’ ninth LP studio album: A Doll’s House. If you like, follow along by jumbling up your White Album on iTunes or whatever – it’s what I did.

SIDE ONE

1. Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey (2:25)
2. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (3:09)
3. Julia (2:54)
4. Piggies (2:03)
5. Happiness is a Warm Gun (2:44)
6. The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill (3:14)
7. While My Guitar Gently Weeps (4:48)

SIDE TWO

1. Birthday (2:43)
2. Dear Prudence (3:54)
3. Blackbird (2:19)
4. Glass Onion (2:18)
5. I’m So Tired (2:03)
6. Don’t Pass Me By (3:46)
7. Back in the USSR (2:44)
8. Long, Long, Long (3:05)

And now I shall explain myself.

1. Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey
The main motivating force behind me even taking on such a crazy project, and the thing that kept me going when it seemed impossible, was my absolute belief that this would be the perfect song to open the album with. It’s a powerful track with a lot of energy to kick things off with, and it’s welcoming with the guitar lines and drums giving way to the barreling distorted textures, which build up energy and release it with the chorus. It also nicely introduces the album musically. It says, a little more definitively than “Back in the USSR” does, I think, that this is what the album is about. Still complex structurally, but returning to a more direct arrangement with guitars, bass and drums.

2. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
I think piano-driven white ska is a good counter to “Monkey”; I like having a pair of tracks at the front that are both muscular but in different ways. And it’s commercial and a good song, so a prominent position is important. And, politically, since Paul does not appear again on Side One, it’s good to get him out there right away.

3. Julia
Perhaps too obvious to follow up two strong, energetic songs by taking it down a notch? Ah well, I like the effect anyway. I wanted something quieter and simpler; could have been “Blackbird” or it could have been “Mother Nature’s Son,” but I wanted this for its purity.

4. Piggies
And then picking it up, but not so much as to be jarring, we have George Harrison’s first of three tracks. This was in direct competition with “Martha My Dear”; I contend that you don’t actually need both, that although the arrangements are very different they have a similar thing going on. “Martha My Dear” I think is the better song musically, but I balked at removing Harrison’s social commentary in favor of McCartney’s pure whimsy, and anyway Paul can always put it on Ram or something.

5. Happiness Is A Warm Gun
Although “Happiness” is, I think, the best song on the album, you can’t deploy it too early; you’ve got to ease into this stuff, and I think after "Piggies with" the harpsichord and the dark lyrics/whimsical sound and pig noises, you’re about ready for it. Still wanted it to be on Side One so it’s prominent.

6. The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
The Spanish guitar at the beginning of this transitions well from “Happiness” – for a moment you might almost think it’s a new “movement” – and then goes off into its own thing. Counters the structural weirdness of “Happiness” with something direct, warm, and inviting, but still unusual and worthy in its own way. This is a track that I don’t think “needs” to be on the album, but makes it stronger anyway for exactly that reason.

7. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Kept the “’Ey oop” transition because I could not improve upon it. The longest song on the album rounds out the first side, and I think it’s a good track to close the halfway point on. It’s big and grand – you need to work up to it, but I don’t think it’s the sort of thing you want to hold to the very end.

8. Birthday
Works both as an opening to a record side (again, I can’t improve upon this idea, nor does it need improving upon), and works as a lighter, more energetic antidote to “Weeps” if you’re listening on CD. Refocusing on rock ‘n’ roll, and too pure and energetic not to include.

9. Dear Prudence
Okay, I made this playlist on iTunes, but the problem is that I don’t have the equipment, know-how or inclination to remove the jet airplane sound from the end of “Back in the USSR” on the original. So we’ll just pretend it’s not there, and we’ll also pretend that “Birthday” crossfades with “Prudence” in a similar way, because I think this song does benefit from being led into like that. Starts off much more stripped down than “Birthday”, obviously, but by the end becomes almost as full, so I think this fits well here, and you do need this song on the album.

10. Blackbird
I’m no fool – even if I didn’t have the benefit of 40 years telling me “Blackbird” is a classic in the halls of popular music, I’d like to think I’d’ve been able to spot it at the time. If I had my druthers, I’d probably sub this out for another Lennon tune – “Sexy Sadie” – but Paul needs his tracks, and this is toe-tapping and commercial while still being poignant. Discipline: I has it.

11. Glass Onion
I think this hits really nicely after Blackbird. The transition is jarring, but the song kind of demands it – the song itself is jarring. We get our quota of bluesy rock with this song.

12. I’m So Tired
The laziness of the strings on the outro of “Glass Onion” segues well into “I’m So Tired,” which I didn’t mean to do but turned out anyway. I guess I’m just a genius. Takes the tempo down after some toe-tapping numbers. Again, I was tempted to say that this song didn’t “need” to be on here, but it does – it’s a very affecting oddball.

13. Don’t Pass Me By
This is maybe a little gimmicky, but the backwards Lennon mumbling on the end of “I’m So Tired” could be made to flow into Ringo’s piano noodling, artificially suggestion a sort of “live performance” link between the two. Okay, so the song itself – yeah, maybe this doesn’t need to be on here, and maybe this doesn’t deserve to be on here with so much other great material that doesn’t make the cut, but Ringo gets to do a song on an album. And I’m not going to tell him the first song he’s written himself doesn’t get to go on. And I’d just replace it with another Lennon song, and McCartney’s going to have a fit as it is. But I’m being too hard on “Don’t Pass Me By,” because it’s not like this is anything less than a good song (better recording than a song, though).

14. Back in the USSR
On here for commercial reasons. We do need our McCartney rockers (and rockers, period), and it’s not like this isn’t a great song. Why I’m putting it second from the end is so that it functions as what appears to be the climax. You get a big, bombastic song to be the sort of public finale – and we know it works because I stole the idea from the Sgt. Pepper reprise going into “A Day In The Life.”

15. Long, Long, Long
And like “A Day In The Life,” it starts out unassumingly, almost disappointingly after the bombast of the previous track if you didn’t know any better (and as a record producer in 1968 I am counting on you not knowing any better) before building into something grand of its own. But I wanted to play a trick; as the “official” followup to Sgt. Pepper, “USSR”/”Long” mirrors “Reprise”/”Day” but also goes in a different direction – where Pepper ends on that massive, legendary chord, this more stripped-down album ends on that bare, angular guitar chord (well, and a drum hit, but I’ll probably edit that out).

So that’s how it turned out. A few of the obvious things to point out:

1. Lennon dominates this album. Seven Johns, three Pauls, three Georges, a Ringo and a Lennon/McCartney in “Birthday.” I don’t feel too bad about this, though, and I will tell you why. First, McCartney has taken over as defacto leader of the Beatles at this point – Pepper was largely his show, and Abbey Road will be again, so why not let Lennon have this one? Second, it puts George and Paul on equal footing; this is a good boost for George, who has absolutely blossomed as a songwriter by this point, and perhaps a wakeup for Paul, whose numbers on the White Album are, I think, his weakest since the early Beatles albums.

2. Where the hell is “Sexy Sadie”?! I know, right? But this is DISCIPLINE. Another John song means one less George or Paul (or Ringo), and I tell myself that the last “movement” of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” sort of covers the same territory but more succinctly. Can I issue this as a single or something? A double A-side with “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”?

And finally…

3. This is, I think, a pretty good condensation of the White Album (I would gladly challenge anyone else’s attempt to go down the same rabbit hole I been down), and if it had been this way all along, I don’t think anyone could say it was anything less than an excellent album. But it’s just not as good as the existing White Album. Comparatively, it’s a bit charmless. Yes, you don’t really “need” “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road,” but what kind of heartlessness is that? Honestly, there are maybe five or six tracks I could say “Yes, we could lose these,” but that’s still an incredibly strong twenty-five track album. Man, I’ve even developed an appreciation for “Rocky Raccoon,” and that’s for real.

So this debate is over, right? (Or wrong?) I have rigorously tested the “Should’ve been a single album” hypothesis. It is demonstrably false.

Pass it on.

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS: Conclusion

2010-02-07T22:09:00.003-06:00

One last lap around the track real quick:

SHINING KNIGHT: I could probably do about fifty issues of this. The soap opera stuff is pretty well set up, I’d just let it loose to get twisted up on itself until they kicked me off the book. Actually, take out that one kid’s connection to Adam Strange and Shakespeare Kid’s LoSH membership, and subtract Billy Beezer, and that whole thing with the TODAY special class program is all me, so I guess I could conceivably use some of that stuff, who can say; that’s the stuff I was really keen on in the proposal anyway.

KLARION THE WITCH-BOY AND FRANKENSTEIN: A good setup for a series, I thought, but one I like better in theory than in practice, I think. I’d probably run out of steam on it; I’d give it twelve issues maybe before I’m no good to you.

THE BRIDE: I would write comics with the Bride in them for the rest of my life for free. Maybe in exchange for groceries and some money to go out to bars on, but this is negotiable. I wasn’t expecting that this would turn out to be my favorite one until I actually sat down to do it, and I discovered the possibilities. Seriously, this isn’t even about me or "I should write...", DC is sitting on pop comics gold, and they have no clue. I have, actually, thought about ways to file off the serial numbers, but I’m uncertain whether or not a comic called Nosferata is too stupid or just right. I would draw it myself if I were marginally competent to do spy-fi.

MISTER MIRACLE: I really really like the idea of MM escaping from a Schrodinger’s Cat experiment and there’s one live MM and one dead MM, and he throws his own funeral. I am stealing that and using it someplace else, hopefully. The rest, as I said at the time, is just sort of okay. You don’t want me on this one, I don’t think.

BULLETEER: Not my favorite, but not my least favorite either.

ZATANNA: Came out better than I expected. The best thing about it, the thing I actually will pat myself on the back for being clever, is the idea of her narration being misdirection, being part of “the act”. Not that I’m 100% clear on how I would actually get that across in practice, but ah well, it’s not like anyone’s asked me to do scripts of these (Plok: for the love of God man, please don’t ask me to do scripts for these).

MANHATTAN GUARDIAN: I like this one a hell of a lot, a close #2 behind the Bride, and I would very much like to file the numbers off this one as well. (Josh, I know we’re committed to Wyatt and all, but I’ve always really loved the way you draw city buildings, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you that…) Three-Card Monty was actually a character I’d had for a while and didn’t know what to do with him; my original idea was to pair this guy with a totally unpretentious view of magic with a sort of stick-in-the-mud prissy apprentice, but it didn’t really work. But Top Cop & Three-Card Monty set in the New York I only imagine in my head might be workable if I ever got around to that.

I think I’m about done here. The whole thing was about 9,000 largely unusuable words, but a very stimulating mental exercise. Thanks, Pillock, for laying down the challenge. Now, onto other things. A Doll's House coming soon.

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS #7: The Manhattan Guardian

2010-02-03T22:20:00.002-06:00

I know, took long enough. Let me explain why.

Manhattan Guardian was my favorite of the original Seven Soldiers series, and it was also the one with the clearest direction for an ongoing series. Disgraced ex-NYPD cop Jake Jordan gets a second chance to make something of himself when he answers an ad to become a reporter/mascot/superhero for the Manhattan Guardian, a tabloid newspaper that doesn’t just report the news … they make it. The first three issues of the series lay out a very clear blueprint, I believe, for how the series is supposed to work: one- to two-issue stories, largely self-contained, with ongoing personal sub-plots running in the background.

Theoretically, you’d think that would make it the easiest to write, but it’s not the case. See, the the other six protagonists, by and large, ended up in a different place than they were at in the beginning of the series (I think Morrison knew in his heart of hearts that Klarion or the Bulleteer were unlikely to win their own ongoing series, but figured there was a good chance Manhattan Guardian could actually be a commercial success; so he gave the rest a complete arc, knowing that would probably be all they’d ever get, but left Guardian open). So the other six series required some conceptual legwork, and the question of “where do we go form here?” generates its own storytelling springboards.

But the direction of Manhattan Guardian was extremely well-established to begin with. Since the main meat-and-potatoes conflicts are one-offs, that means you have to come up with a ton of ideas; you just need to work up big piles of conceptual coal to run this train. So I had to take some time to do just that. But first: overall details about the series.

Superheroism in the post-Spider-Man mold is, of course, often portrayed as equal parts blessing and curse. Sometimes the curse part of it seems oppressive to the heroes, but their unerring sense of responsibility makes them stick with it, right? Jake Jordan, then, is quite refreshing, because for him, being the Guardian is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him. An incredible opportunity giving him financial security, a sense of purpose and direction, and perhaps most importantly for him, pride. Jordan seems somewhat traditional-conservative, and I’d want this to be apparent in his characterization – the kind of guy where, not that he thinks his wife shouldn’t work, but that she shouldn’t have to. He’s also extremely level-headed, which is good for the high-pressure situations of his “job,” but it also makes him – well, it’s not “cynical” or “jaded” at all, but a kind of cool seen-it-all pragmatism. Idealistic but not romantic. He enjoys being a hero, but he’ll never let fame consume him. Right man for the job.

Jake’s fiancée, Carla, in the original series, was initially supportive but, following the death of her father during a Guardian “story,” found herself disapproving of the dangers inherent to the superhero lifestyle to the point where it nearly destroyed their relationship. It’s the one disappointment in Morrison’s series for me – “significant other who wants superhero to give up the life so she won’t have to worry that he’ll be killed in action” is a pretty well-worn cliché (basically Mary Jane’s schtick in Spider-Man since they were married), and there’s no fresh twist given in the series. So I have devised a solution. Though she’s taken Jake back and worked through her issues to some degree, she still has that nagging fear in the back of her mind. You would too. But she does something about it by forming Super Significant Others, a support group for wives/husbands/boyfriends/girlfriends of superheroes. And since, of course, it’s difficult for the significant others to get together without compromising the identities of the superheroes, they come to meetings dressed in costumes as well; this not only conceals their identities but also helps them get firsthand experience of what it’s like to lead a double identity.

Oh, and I want most of the stories to be New York-specific; “Manhattan” is in the title, after all. I live in Wisconsin USA, and I never been to New York, but I have seen an awful lot of movies and television shows that take place there. Since Grant Morrison’s DCU-version of New York is one in which a number of fantastic and exotic architectural projects that were never built in real life were actually completed, I feel this gives me license to set the series in a hyper-real version of New York – not authentic in any way, but the romanticized version that exists in my head from watching Ghostbusters, The Critic, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Woody Allen movies and David Letterman’s shows; New York as American Narnia, sort of.

The DC Universe New York, as it happens, has never produced many costumed supervillains. Befitting an image of NYC gleaned from movies and TV, the city tends to be threatened by gangs and mobs; the subway pirates of the first two issues again establishes the blueprint to follow. Jorge Control from #3 appears as a recurring villain; not necessarily an “archenemy,” but a guy who shows up when we need him – an unscrupulous genius with an interest in social dynamics.

So, on with the plots:

- We are introduced to Three-Card Monty, who will be a recurring character throughout the series. A “street magician” or “urban mage” dressed in a firefighter’s jacket, he’s got no time for Aleister Crowley, uses Bicycle playing cards instead of the Tarot, and will kick your ass if you insist that magic should be spelled with a “k”. He tracks down Jake and informs him that the time has come for the myth of St. George to replay itself in the modern world – only the part of St. George will be played by the Guardian, and the role of the dragon will be played by one of the 100-foot long mutated alligators that rule the New York City sewers.

- Former Manhattan Guardian theatre critic “Playbill” Pete Petrowicz was fired when his reviews were deemed “too extreme,” so he became a gritty vigilante stalking Broadway in the name of good taste – a bad review from Petrowicz isn’t a thumbs down, it’s a bullet in the brain. So when Samson Frank Robbins’ new musical Sub-Rosa Subway, the story of Alfred Beech’s Victorian-era pneumatic subway system, opens, it’s the perfect target.

- The head of the Chicago Deep-Dish Syndicate is in town for a historic peace agreement with the New York Pizza Mafia. But when a delivery boy is found dead in the Bronx, the Guardian has to solve the murder to prevent all-out war. And the killer is not who you think…

- Twin brothers Romulus and Remus Parker are known as New York’s greatest criminal real estate barons – think Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor in the DC Universe – and they’re about to pull their greatest coup by building in New York’s greatest undeveloped and unexploited piece of real estate: a floating skyscraper that hovers 100 feet above Central Park.

- A giant monster from an unknown galaxy of terror attacks New York, but is placated when it falls in love with the Statue of Liberty. The rudimentary communication the government is able to receive from the creature indicates that he’ll return to his home planet if he can take the statue with him, and New York finds itself divided about whether or not to let the alien have her. Save the city at the cost of one its most enduring landmarks? What side will Jake Jordan take?

- Remember Bill Brazil, who owns an art-house cinema and whose life Jake saves in Manhattan Guardian #2? His theatre shows The Most Controversial Movie Ever Made, which has half of New York trying to burn down his theatre, and the other half literally killing each other for a chance to see what’s got everyone so worked up.

- In the wake of a number of tourist abductions in Manhattan, Jake Jordan goes undercover as an accordion salesman from Green Bay to get to the bottom of it. Will seeing the city from outside eyes help Jordan rekindle his love of the city his job has caused him to sour on, or will the shabby treatment he receives from his fellow New Yorkers cause him to write off NYC once and for all?

- How does The Manhattan Guardian cover sports? When the Giants are down by five in the NFC championship game and their quarterback is injured, Guardian reporter Champ Takamura forgoes any sense of journalistic integrity and joins the team, takes over under center, and wins the game. Only problem is, the team they were playing was the Hub City Knuckles, and they don’t take kindly to losing. Their revenge against the Guardian is to tie Takamura to the goalpost in a boobytrapped stadium and challenge Jake Jordan to rescue him – if he survives One Hundred Yards of Death.

- After eight issues of nonstop rock’em-sock’em action, I will ask the editors and readers very kindly for an issue’s worth of indulgence for Issue #9. In a story that can only be called Waiting For Johnny Moondog, Three-Card Monty convinces Jake on behalf of the newspaper to camp out in front of the former home of a rock ‘n’ roll legend on the anniversary of his assassination in the hopes that they’ll see his ghost. As they wait, Jake and Monty have a long conversation about the artist in question, and Jake will take quite a bit of convincing that this working class hero was anything but a complete hypocrite.

- The Guardian interviews Lois Lane for a position with the newspaper – after all, if any reporter knows about putting herself in harm’s way and making herself a part of the story, it’s Lois, right? – and they get themselves mixed up in Romulus and Remus Parker’s latest scheme. You know that urban legend about con artists selling the Brooklyn Bridge? The Parkers discover that one of those contracts is, in fact, valid and try to hijack the bridge when the city doesn’t recognize their seemingly legal right to it.

- Jake Jordan was once in the NYPD. Jordan’s former superior gets in touch with him and reveals that he and five other ex-cops are going to form a superhero vigilante team, and want Jake to help train them. Now, this story usually ends with the hero telling the vigilantes that laws are important, that they’re all we have, and that we should work within them. But the cops point out that half the Golden Age superheroes have the same motivation and they’re all looked at as heroes, so Jake finds this issue isn’t as black-and-white as the traditional superhero boilerplate.

- The Guardian finally puts The King’s Menaces, a bunch of former Shakespeare in the Park actors who’ve taken to crime after falling on hard times, behind bars. But a poorly planned sentencing puts them in the same prison that Playbill Pete is being kept in, and the Guardian has to prevent a Shakespearean tragedy from occurring at Attica prison.

- Following the story with Lois Lane, the Guardian is sent to Metropolis to do an expose on why Superman hasn’t been able to completely clean up Suicide Slum.

- And finally, as promised, the Reverse-Crazyface from my Bulleteer proposal gets mixed up in a gang war between Two-Face and Doctor No-Face, and Zatanna is drafted in when things threaten to go cosmic as the unfathomable Anti-Face makes its presence known.

So that’s somewhere around fourteen issues, which I think is a good start, and hopefully all that would be required to convince somebody that yes, I could totally sustain this thing. I couldn’t think of anything to do involving taxis; well, that’s not true, I could, but all the most obvious ideas were uncomfortably xenophobic, which you could make work, I just hadn’t found the proper angle at which to attack it.

I think I’ll have one more short post to wrap this up in a day or so, but for know I say only “THE CHALLENGE HAS BEEN MET,” and retire to the mead halls in celebration.

Coming Soon...

2010-02-02T12:32:00.004-06:00

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS #7: The Manhattan Guardian
I did not forget. Should be up before the end of the week, and thus endeth the challenge.

Build Your Own White Album: Part Two - "A Doll's House"
In which I attempt to make a "proper" single Beatles album out of the White Album. A good idea? Good lord no. But that has never stopped me before. FOR MADMEN ONLY! PRICE OF ADMISSION - YOUR MIND. Next week.

Also: I have need of Tank Girl-related assistance.

"And Nothing To Do But Go On Home" (or: "Dudes, Remember Bryan Singer Made A Superman Movie?")

2010-01-17T22:31:00.005-06:00

Holy crap, Superman Returns, aren't you an hour and forty-five minutes drowning in a two-and-a-half-hour movie? (And, on AMC, it's a three-and-a-half-hour affair, but I hadn't seen it since it was out in theaters and decided to give it another go.)

I'm not even saying there should have been more action (couldn't've hurt, though), and I'm certainly not going to insist "Superman needs to punch somebody" because he most certainly does not have to ... but man, this is a movie in need of some content. Maybe you could get away with long, silent glances if they seemed to signify something, either in the writing or in the acting, but it's an awful lot of audience participation going on there - "Fill in the blanks, kids, what do you think Lois is feeling but can't find the words to express?"

But what makes that two-and-a-half hours inexcusable is that the movie doesn't have any payoff, not really, anyway. I mean, the whole secret-child angle and competing with the kid's swell-guy dad for Lois' affections - it's not my favorite idea, I'll admit. But it could be interesting. Spare me the "faithful adaptation"; at this point, I'd much rather watch a movie like The Dark Knight, that takes a risk by using these concepts as a springboard to talk about things that matter to somebody, than an updated Superman origin using CGI. So I am totally willing to give this a shot. And it does start out very amibitiously, even to the point where I'm thinking on this second viewing, Man, maybe they really are going somewhere with this.

But they don't. Lot of questions to be sure, and that gives it the illusion of gravity: How does Superman cope with a world that's moved on in his absence? What would fatherhood mean for the Man of Steel? (Hey, that one might be something I could get into now.) Most importantly, as Eliott S! Maggin put it, "Must There Be A Superman?"

But at the end of the movie, I don't know. The movie doesn't answer any of those questions. Okay, Dark Knight doesn't give you the firm answer on any of the questions it poses, either, but it engages with them so that you can work it out yourself. You can debate the morality of the characters' actions in The Dark Knight - even that crap about "Batman is George W Bush" ... there's at least enough material in the movie where there's a case to be made.

But Superman Returns doesn't give you even that much. It lays before you a bunch of questions and then refuses to give you the tools to answer them with. This is a movie that's really just shrugging its shoulders, saying "Hey, don't ask me, I'm just puttin' it out there. I mean, I'm just sayin' is all..."

So what's the point of Superman Returns, ultimately? If it's spectacle, it's dragging in places. If it's a love story, the leads don't connect. It hits the Superman-as-Christ-figure beats, but only in that totally superficial screenwritery way. That bit at the end with Superman giving his son the same speech his father gave him - surely that's too thin, too irrelevant to you and I to justify 150 rather ponderous minutes.

And then Superman flies away into the sky, and they play that John Williams theme, and Brandon Routh does that same fly-by-the-camera thing Christopher Reeve used to do ... well, what does that mean? Because that music's always meant "Superman's saved the day and everything is fine" in the previous movies this film is so dutifully referencing. But there is no closure in this movie, so that music's just hollow. Rather cynically, it's using that familiar score to fool you into thinking that the movie is over - "Yep, that's it, everything's resolved ... you wouldn't be hearing that music if it wasn't, right?"

What is the point? You've got the Christ stuff, the abandonment issues, the fatherhood stuff, the unresolved love triangle ... and married to the constant homage to the previous Superman movies that just weighs it down because Brandon Routh looks a lot like Christopher Reeve but isn't, Kevin Spacey is doing a lot of the stuff that Gene Hackman is doing but isn't as funny when he's trying to be, the theme's by John Williams but the score's by somebody else.

You're a weird animal, Superman Returns. But that makes you an interesting failure. I watched you twice, which is more than I can say for Ben Affleck in Daredevil.

(I'd like to see that 20-page essay in defense of Superman Returns that Quentin Tarantino was supposedly working on, actually. Like, quite a bit.)

So Am I Just A Big Ol' Hypocrite Or What?

2010-01-15T12:21:00.003-06:00

All right, so it is well documented that I am an unabashed Grant Morrison fan, but I dislike Geoff Johns (well, I mean his writing, it's not as though he's ever cut me of in traffic or anything).

So you could reasonably predict my reaction when I read about how Johns wants to define the nature of the Speed Force on his upcoming Flash run:

"I always thought of the Speed Force as if it were this layer, kind of like the fluid in your joints that allows your bones to move together, and if you think of that as the Speed Force, it’s this fluid between the now and the time stream. It allows the two to co-exist, because the way time exists, it’s not just a line, it’s a sphere. So that fluid coats that sphere and the sphere is the Speed Force. And that sphere touches all reality and it’s full of everything, it’s full of ultimate speed, moving through reality, because time is all relative and it’s full of all scientific knowledge. It’s all knowledge of all eras."

That reaction, of course, was "ARRGH."

Because it just seems so pointless, doesn't it? I mean, the purpose of fiction, right, is to either mindlessly entertain or reveal some truth about the real world (ideally both). I realize this seems awfully lofty for superhero comics, but I mean, even "Helping people is good" and "Stealing is bad" are truths - I'm not asking for Kafka or anything.

But this is just explaining how an imaginary system works. It is never going to be relevant for me to know how the Speed Force works because we haven't got one of those. It could be in service of a good story, of course, but it also could be that fan fiction-y mythology building and expansion that Johns does and that fans seem to like.

But then I re-examined my immediate reaction.

For one thing, the Speed Force has always been explaining how an imaginary system works (i.e. why a bunch of different superheroes all have the same powers for different reasons) that never really required an explanation in the first place; for fifty years everyone was fine with them just running really really fast. The difference is it came from Mark Waid, whose comics I've always liked.

The second thing is that quoted bit above, superficially, reads an awful lot like a Grant Morrison impression. It's big and wonderful and metaphysical, and you're not quite sure exactly what it means but it all seems to make sense to him. And if I had read that in a Grant Morrison interview, I'd be, "All right, sign me up, this could be rad times!" Now granted (...pun!), Morrison has built up a significant amount of goodwill with me as a reader, where even if something doesn't start out great, I'll stick with it because I trust it will pay off eventually (after about the second or third issue of Final Crisis, I thought, "Man, if Jeph Loeb had written this, I would be so done with this right now").

So the question I have to ask myself now is, am I totally biased against Johns as a writer of funnybooks? Even if he launched The Adventures of Exactly Everything Justin Wants To Read In A Comic Book tomorrow, would I dislike it? Or, more worrying - might I even be capable of liking it, but on some level (conscious or not) be looking for things to object to?

Man, this is why I haven't been to the comic book shop in months.

A List That I Started Writing And Gave Up On Finishing Almost Immediately

2010-01-13T21:06:00.003-06:00

BEATLES SWIPES/RIFFS/TRIBUTES IN ELVIS COSTELLO SONGS:

1.) "...And In Every Home..." - Orchestra plays similar riff to "Here Comes The Sun" (also Cream's "Badge") at :33 and elsewhere. Arrangement supposedly contains numerous musical allusions to George Martin arrangements and other pieces.

2.) "Blue Chair" - Costello sings same "Oh ho ho ho ho ho" as Lennon on Beatles' cover of "Anna"

3.) "20% Amnesia" - Guitar break at :48 recalls "I Feel Fine"

4.) "Pony St." - Bass bit at 1:48 recalls McCartney-style bass on "Paperback Writer" and "Rain"

And then I kind of lost interest.

Asterios Polyp

2010-01-10T19:44:00.005-06:00

I finally got around to picking up 2009's critical darling graphic novel by David Mazzuche...Mazzuecel...ah...man, don't make me look it up*. You know who I'm talking about.

Everyone else already read and commented on this several months ago, so I don't have anything in-depth or particularly novel to add, and anyway I just finished it today so it needs time to digest. All I'll say for an immediate critical reaction is:

-YES, it's formally brilliant and a message to purveyors of "cinematic" comics that hey, there are specific storytelling devices that are only found in the medium of comics, and you should be taking advantage of them.
-YES, the characters are very broad types, and the story and plot are fairly well-worn, but the book gives you a whole lot else to think about. In fact, given the somewhat abstract nature of the ideas in it, Mr. M has couched them in a very familiar narrative to help them go down easily (the book is nothing if not easy to read).
-NO, I do not have a strong positive or negative opinion about the controversial ending yet. I did not hate it, although I was warned about it.

On a personal note, my main reaction is this: Asterios Polyp is so good it almost makes me want to start drawing comics again. But only almost.

(*-Although I can spell Bill Sienkiewicz's name without looking it up, but that's because I used to work with somebody who had the same last name.)

Here Comes The Son?

2009-12-30T12:48:00.004-06:00

I promised I'd let you know, so here goes: Thanks to SCIENCE!*, I have been informed that I can expect a baby boy 'round the first of June or so.

Of course, I would have been equally happy either way, but this result does mean there is a higher probability that the baby will want to play with my old He-Man and Transformers figures (as soon as they're no longer a choking hazard, that is). Mom and Dad, I thank you for holding on to those in your guys' basement for so long, and I am going to pretend like this was the plan all along.

Both mother and baby seem to be healthy, so all is well. And now that we know the gender, we can get to really deciding on a name** and slowly start to accumulate some gear. I am telling you dudes, I have just come from an exploratory mission to Babies R Us, and why is it that all the boys' clothing has sports on it? I mean, we were planning on going fairly gender neutral anyway, but would it kill you to manufacture a green shirt that doesn't say "SOCCER" on it?

Anyway, more on this story as it develops.

* - We got the traditional ultrasound as well as that new "4-D" ultrasound. I'm not sure what the fourth dimension is meant to be, but it makes the baby look as though it is made out of butterscotch pudding ... look it up.

** - Aside to Josh: Alison is less than receptive to "Roll Fizzlebeef" as a name. Aside to Daine: Ditto "The Baron."

XTC vs. Elvis Costello ... Content vs. ... um ... MORE Content?

2009-12-21T21:49:00.003-06:00

More silliness at Mightygodking.com.

Why? Because when Chris Bird gave me the ability to post on his blog, he never explicitly made me promise to use it wisely.

"I love you, Dark Phoenix Saga." "And I, you."

2009-12-13T23:22:00.002-06:00

What I read recently: X-Men (first series) #129-137, a.k.a., "The Dark Phoenix Saga."

What I wrote recently: A piece at MGK about the topic named above.

No, I can't believe I'd never read it before, either. I'd been fraudulently posing as A Dude Who Knows His Business When It Comes To Comics all this time.

Build Your Own White Album: Part One - The Subjective List

2009-12-10T22:27:00.004-06:00

Long version here, short version here: What if you had to make the Beatles' White Album into a single album by cutting half of its thirty tracks?

Part One is based entirely on my own subjective preferences. The songs that make it won’t necessarily be the “best” songs, or the most “important” ones. I’m not going to try and get an even number of John and Paul songs. These are just the songs I like the best.

How I did it: I listed all 30 songs in a Word document and whittled them away one by one until I was left with 15. Not an easy task. I think I’d got as far as six without too much agony, but then I had 24 incredible songs left and I had no idea where to begin trying to get rid of nine more.

But eventually I did. The songs I picked aren’t necessarily the cool picks, but it has been well-documented that I am not a cool guy, so I’m fine with that. We’ll just go through the album track-by-track and say CUT or KEEP and, briefly, why.

Back in the USSR – CUT
Okay, you see why this is so hard. I mean, Back in the USSR – wonderful, classic, a triumph on most other albums, but it’s up against some real stiff competition here. The bar is essentially set at unfuckingbelievable. So in light of that … well, you make the hard decision and you have to say yeah, musically at least, it’s Another McCartney Rocker, although it is one of the better ones. This one held on to nearly the end of the “culling,” and one of the reasons for that is conceptually, lyrically, it’s effortlessly funny in a way you don’t always see out of McCartney. The borscht-and-Beach-Boys thing is all a joke, of course, but McCartney sounds like he’s keeping a straight face. No mugging to be found here. So don’t think I wanted to cut this, but my crazy self-imposed challenge is my crazy self-imposed challenge.

Dear Prudence - KEEP
Right, this one was never in any danger of not making it. That middley bridge bit (“Look around round round … Look arowwww-owwwww-owwwww-ounnd”) conveys an almost religious awe (which I suppose is appropriate for where it was written). Love the blooping bubbling bass part that kicks in at the second verse, and that fantastic messy lead guitar on the third.

Glass Onion - KEEP
A funny little throwaway it may be, but the energy is fantastic. Lennon’s vocal on “Fix-ing a hoooole in the o-sheann” is sublime, one of my favorite performances of his. But it’s really all about that second at the end of the chorus where everything stops, you get a bit of ring from the piano, and then that papery Beatles drum sound I love so much.

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da - KEEP
Don’t pretend you don’t like this song! Here’s a track that (based off the alternate take on the Anthology) is only “quite good” until, according to Beatles legend, Lennon comes into the studio, stoned and irritated that McCartney is still working on it, and demands that it be played with loud, pseudo-ska piano; Paul made a Snickers bar, and John said “Hold on, deep fry that thing and then we’ll talk!” Also: “Hap-ply ever after in the mahketplace.”

Wild Honey Pie - CUT
This was a pretty easy decision, but you know, I like Wild Honey Pie.

Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill - KEEP
What I really like is how immediate this song feels; it sounds put together in about ten minutes with the first mocking words Lennon could think of, and then sung outside Rik Cooke’s window in another ten. You hear a tiny sliver of proto-Elvis Costello in the lyrics if not the melody, too, right? ("So Captain Marvel zapped 'im right between the eyes") And for absolutely no reason I can fathom, I adore that breeeeet of the mellotron or whatever after the final verse.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps - KEEP
There are Beatles Harrisongs that I like better, but I think this is probably George’s most epic Beatles recording, if you are into that sort of thing. Love that high, screechy organ.

Happiness Is a Warm Gun - KEEP
An incredibly bizarre song when you stop to think about it (I don’t know enough music theory to even begin to parse the time signatures of this thing), but you don’t always realize it because it feels so natural. Is it the best song on the album(s)? It might well be, although it has strong competition I’ll get to later.

Martha My Dear - KEEP
Okay, this very nearly got cut. I had this and Don’t Pass Me By left, and I cut this and kept DPMB, and then I changed my mind, and then I changed it again, and then slept on it. Ultimately, I had to go with McCartney’s supreme pop craftsmanship. “Help yourself to a bit of what is all around you” is a pretty perfect marriage of melody and chords, to my mind. Throw in the goofy Yellow Submarine brass for good measure, I’m a sucker for it.

I’m So Tired - KEEP
And during my Martha My Dear/Don’t Pass Me By struggle, I suddenly thought, “Well, we could cut I’m So Tired, couldn’t we? What does it really bring to the table that, say, Happiness Is A Warm Gun doesn’t?” But the answer is atmosphere. How moody self-absorbed high school-me never adopted this as an anthem I can’t figure out. I was not unaware of this track.

Blackbird - CUT
“How could you cut Blackbird?” Well, you know what, it actually wasn’t too hard at all. Very beautiful, very well-put-together (again, this is an inferior song only by comparison to uncut awesomeness elsewhere on the album) and yet … the just-Paul-and-an-acoustic-guitar never wins me over as much as it does a lot of people. If that makes me a bad person, then I am a bad person.

Piggies - CUT
Man, I am just as surprised as you that this didn’t make the cut. Surely I love harpsichord too much to let this go…! My wife’s gonna be mad, this is one of her favorite Beatles songs. Piggies did hold on close to the end, but something just had to give.

Rocky Raccoon - CUT
HATE. No, that’s too strong, I don’t really hate Rocky Raccoon, I just … I just have no time for this, Paul McCartney; no time for these little genre pastiches that only exist as genre pastiches. I cut you twice.

Don’t Pass Me By - CUT
What gave the edge to Martha My Dear is that this is probably a better recording than it is a song. Perfectly fine song if pretty straight-up-and-down basic, but what makes it something special is the arrangement – psychedelic country and western! Oh, and Ringo, I don’t blame you saving up your best drumming for your own song, okay?

Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? - CUT
Great showcase for Paul’s voice and Ringo’s drumming, though. And it always makes my brother laugh even when he knows it’s coming.

I Will - KEEP
A notable exception to my indifference to just-Paul-and-an-acoustic-guitar, because I love the hell out of this. McCartney at his most sweet and sentimental, but it’s just so pure and warm. The “mouth bass” is goofy, but it serves to nicely deflate would could be too sweet a song without just being dumb mugging. It is, actually, what love sounds like in my head, and I don’t care what you think of me for saying so.

Julia - CUT
“No you didn’t!” Yes I did and I’m sorry and I know it’s one of the most open and naked things John ever wrote (and certainly the most up to this point in his recording career) and it is extremely beautiful, but I only have 15 tracks to work with here, and this is really frigging hard, you guys.

Birthday - KEEP
It’s -- it’s just so nice to hear everyone getting along, you know? It really shows in one of the Beatles’ most enthusiastic recordings. Also a sentimental favorite. There is video of my brother and me, maybe six years old and two years old, respectively, dancing to this. But I will not show this to you.

Yer Blues - CUT
Man, I really really like this, but to be honest? Towards the end I’m totally ready to move on to something else.

Mother Nature’s Son - CUT
Look, I’m not a monster. This song is really exceptionally beautiful. I almost believe in being a poor young country boy singing songs for everyone, just not enough to make it.

Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey - KEEP
This is the contender I told you about – the only song that might be as totally rad as Happiness Is A Warm Gun. Gives Birthday a run for its money in the energy department! Firebell clanging away. That spiky guitar sound is king, one of my favorite parts ever.

Sexy Sadie - KEEP
Perhaps a somewhat inessential song, but I adore the icy piano sound on this, with the slight delay. Wonderful recording. I like it, anyway.

Helter Skelter - CUT
Okay, here’s the thing. You can say Honey Pie is kind of an embarrassing thing for Paul to have done, but I contend this is equally embarrassing for the exact same reason. Honey Pie is mugging, and this is mugging. It sounds like a pastiche of hard rock rather than actually being hard rock; it’s Paul with a mask on (EDIT: although, of course, I know that's not exactly the case, being that Helter Skelter is in fact a major influence on the hard rock I'm accusing McCartney of imitating, but that's what it sounds like, forty years later). Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good time, but it’s the sort of thing that is supposed to sound effortless but really comes off calculated. Rubs me the wrong way.

Long, Long, Long - KEEP
Strange and beautiful, and when you listen to it, it’s weird how much it’s a prototype of Harrison’s solo stuff – you could almost put this on Living in the Material World and you’d hardly notice. That alone wouldn’t qualify it, but that absolutely terrifying conclusion…! It genuinely gets me spooked if I’m listening to it alone at night; the cabinets are going to open up by themselves and plates are going to start flying through the air and the closet door’s going to open up to reveal a vortex to hell.

Revolution 1 - CUT
Sorry John, you were wrong, the single version of this is better, no offense.

Honey Pie - CUT
Yeah, it’s mugging. It’s like When I’m 64 but not funny, and what’s the point, really?

Savoy Truffle - KEEP
Again, this is a list of songs that I like the best, not what’s most deserving. This doesn’t really fit in on the White Album (a year or so behind, might’ve been great on Magical Mystery Tour, actually), and it superficially resembles Good Morning Good Morning, but I just dig this song. Chugs along so well.

Cry Baby Cry - KEEP
I know, right, what’s this doing on here? I’ve always loved Cry Baby Cry a whole lot and I don’t know why; I guess every Beatles fan has to have his “No, seriously, you guys, you don’t even know how good this song is!” and this is mine.

Revolution 9 - CUT
I am not going to pretend I know anything about musique concrete or the state of avant garde composition circa 1968, so I don’t know if this is “good” or not. I like it; it’s neat, it’s interesting, it’s spooky (although who needs this to be spooky when Long Long Long has that covered considerably more succinctly, right?). I like to listen to it, but I like to listen to the other fifteen tracks better. I had to pick fifteen songs, and this is not really a song, so I don’t think I can be faulted.

Good Night - CUT
I get a bit sentimental about this as well. My dad used to sing it to me when I was little, and I expect I’ll do the same to my kid when he or she comes along, when nobody is looking. But, you know, everything else is just so good.

Aaaaand that does it for the White Album. So, to recap, the winners are Dear Prudence, Glass Onion, Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Happiness Is A Warm Gun, Martha My Dear, I’m So Tired, I Will, Birthday, Everybody’s Got Something To Hide…, Sexy Sadie, Long Long Long, Savoy Truffle, Cry Baby Cry.

And some of the finest losers around are Back in the USSR, Wild Honey Pie, Rocky Raccoon, Piggies, Don’t Pass Me By, Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?, Blackbird, Julia, Yer Blues, Mother Nature’s Son, Helter Skelter, Honey Pie, Revolution #1, Revolution #9, Good Night.

So the list turns out to have a pretty strong pro-John, anti-Paul vibe. Which, I assure you, is not typical of me. As Beatles, I consider them pretty near equals from Revolver on (and post-Beatles, if you average out all the good and the bad, they probably come up about the same in my estimation as well, although as a solo artist I am totally in the tank for George, warts and all). But I will go on record as saying that I believe the White Album is the best album John Lennon ever made, Beatle, solo or otherwise, and it’s Paul’s weakest Beatles effort since Rubber Soul. But don't feel too bad, McCartneyans, because about a year or so from now Paul gets his masterpiece, which, of course, is Abbey Road.

Okay, the totally subjective business is out of the way. Now, onto trying to compile that “proper album” I promised. It probably won’t be ready this week. Maybe after Christmas. Maybe after my child is born and has been in school a few years. But eventually … I will the attempt that which probably oughtn't be attempted. Be here then!

Build Your Own White Album: Introduction

2009-12-06T22:05:00.003-06:00

So I’ve finally got my hands on the remastered White Album in mono (I could be cool and insist on calling it The Beatles, but I am not cool). And on my first listen of it, I did something I sadly do not usually have the time or inclination to do much anymore – I put it on the stereo in the afternoon, lay down on the couch, and gave it my undivided attention the whole way through. That’s slightly over ninety minutes, which I think is a fairly sizable investment for popular music, but the White Album really earns it.

Obviously it’s a big mess (though I think the degree to which it's a mess is actually exaggerated in popular lore), but that is, as the cliché goes, exactly what is so interesting about it. Because of the conditions in which it was made, of course. It is 1968 and you are a Beatle, and you have nothing to prove to anybody anymore – not the public, not music critics, not George Martin, not even your bandmates … so what do you decide to do? The title The Beatles and the plain white sleeve works so well in light of that – there’s no quote-unquote concept like Sgt. Pepper’s, no movie tie-in, no attempt at even making a cohesive album (although it does make the White Album, in some way, uniquely suited to the post-album iPod era of popular music, if you believe in such a thing). The Beatles is just The Beatles, unfiltered. And it’s a testament to their talent that their most self-indulgent, uneven record is still considered one of the finest ever made by anyone ever despite all that. There are boring bits, and there are embarrassing bits, but it’s fascinating nonetheless; this is the breakup record, not Let It Be.

But not everyone goes in for that. I recently went through The Beatles Anthology (the book, not the TV series or CD set) again and Ringo Starr and George Martin apparently both feel to one degree or another that yeah, maybe they should’ve just made one really good album. To which, on any other day, I scoff and wave my hand dismissively…

…but then I think, what if?

What if you had to cut down the White Album to one album? There’s thirty tracks in all (I’m counting, as most everyone does, the Can You Take Me Back fragment as a part of Cry Baby Cry), so let’s say you get fifteen tracks. That means you have to take fifteen really good Beatles songs and say these are not good enough. What a horrifying proposition!

Well, you know, I had to try it...

So here’s what I’m doing, and if anyone wants to do the same, we can make this a meme, but I’m happy to let this be my private folly (though I’m sure somebody’s already done this before). I am, in fact, going to do this twice.

The first one will be just my 15 favorite songs on a purely subjective level. Not based on “importance” or interest or quality, just the 15 I would rather listen to than the other 15. I’ve made that list, and it wasn’t easy.

But even more difficult is what I’m going to attempt next, and that will be to try and assemble a “proper” single album. Subjectivity has to give way to objectivity. I am going to play Fantasy Producer in my Fantasy Studio; the Beatles have given me 30 tracks but I have to pick 15 based on quality, 15 qui vont tres bien ensemble, if you'll indulge, and I suppose trying to keep everyone in the band happy. And then I have to resequence it as well.

So this is my mad idea. My 15 favorites, coming soon. New album (let’s call it A Doll’s House, eh?) coming probably after much more thought (if ever; might just drive me insane instead).

It'll be grrrrreat!

YAY FOR JUSTIN, ALISON, AND A YET TO BE DETERMINED NAME FOR A BABY!

2009-12-02T10:23:00.002-06:00

You remind me of the babe.
What babe?
The babe with the power.
What power?
The power of voodoo.
Who do?
You do.
Do what?
Remind me of the babe!

New Project Announcement

2009-12-01T19:55:00.003-06:00

I have a new project currently in development.

It's due to drop around May 30.

It's a collaboration between me and my wife.

...

Yes, it is a human child, and I will be its father.

We did the first ultrasound today and I was quite chuffed to see the result and figured I'd share the official news. I'll abstain from posting it here, as a.) I don't know how I'd feel about that, and b.) I haven't been able to find the cable to my scanner since the move anyway (which incidentally complicated my John Hodgman/Sandman Mystery Theatre post on MGK. Have you ever tried searching for a picture of Wes Dodds online? There is apparently only one).

I will keep you posted on how it goes, but hopefully not annoyingly so. Just bear with me, and I'll let you know after Christmas whether it'll be a boy or a girl.

Woooooo!

Sandhodgman

2009-11-30T07:15:00.000-06:00

Silliness. Or is it??

Pop-Drama: Doctor Who

2009-11-22T21:56:00.005-06:00

Here’s my first contribution to Andrew Hickey's Pop-Drama meme-thing he’s tagged the whole of the internet to do. Don’t know for sure if there’ll be another one (I’ve still got Seven Soldiers to wrap up, and I have a new blog series I may or may not decide to do in the end), although I actually think I have an idea for a Transformers series that wouldn’t just be a big wanky waste of everyone’s time.

Before we start, let me just say that I’m not a huge Doctor Who fan, actually. I really love what I’ve seen, but I haven’t seen very much; I live in the States and don’t get BBC America, so I’m pretty much at the mercy of PBS, the Sci-Fi Channel and DVDs at my local library for whatever they happen to play or have in stock. Consequently, I’ve only seen about eight or nine Fourth Doctor serials, the Eighth Doctor TV movie everybody hates, and episodes here and there from “New Who” (although not all of them, and I haven’t seen any of the latest series).

But Doctor Who is something if you’re as thorough as geek as I am, you learn bits and pieces about through osmosis and secondhand sources. So what I’m going to lay out is basically what my impressions are of what the Third Doctor’s show was like without ever having seen a single episode.

Written very quickly and very dirtily, but that’s what you get, I’m afraid, and look, maybe that’s even in the spirit of the show? Here goes:

********************

Tomorrow morning, Earth makes First Contact, and it is not friendly.

It’s not a full-on invasion, mind you. Earth is discovered by a small party of aliens, who land in a small village in the English countryside. They had intended to go unnoticed, but were spotted by the natives – so the aliens got spooked, and started shooting, thinking nothing of it; two-thirds of the village’s population was killed, and the aliens holed up in their spaceship. A three-day standoff later and a global military response had breached the ship’s defenses. The last alien left alive after the ensuing shootout had learned some rudimentary English in those three days – “Primitive slime, you! Only explorers, we!” And when our scientists got a look at the instrumentation on the craft, it’s light years ahead of anything we’ve got, of course, but they could make out one thing: sometime during the first day, the explorers had sent out a signal with coordinates.

The Earth has been discovered … and now everyone out there knows about it.

Flash forward seven years, and Earth has formed the United Intelligence Taskforce, or UNIT, based in the bombed-out ruins of that country village, to deal with extraterrestrial relations. They’ve reverse engineered the explorers’ spaceship for a technological boost to weapons and communications, and now they’re preparing for whatever comes next. And so far, nobody else has actually come to Earth (takes awhile, you know), but we have made some brief, crackly subspace communication contact with some of the beings out there.

And as near as we can tell, the universe is populated by a multitude of diverse races – but most of the ones with interstellar flight capacities are the colonial ones. And you can imagine how the story got back from the explorers before they were killed – "This Earth is populated by bloodthirsty savages, and you’d be doing ‘em a favor by taking over, frankly."

And the series opens on the eve of the first attempt to do so.

Oh, let’s say it’s the Cybermen. Unfortunately, not one of the handful of potential invaders we know even a little bit about. We send out some scout ships hoping to make peaceful contact, they just blast them out of the way without even accepting the incoming transmission. An invasion party lands in London and takes over quite quickly, using it as a base from which to attack UNIT HQ. The rest of the world’s screaming at UNIT – “You dropped the ball! You had seven years to prepare for this and you didn’t last seven hours!” To which the only reply is, “We only had seven years. We’re lucky to last seven minutes.” Because face it, all we had to go on was the one spaceship, and the one the Cybermen have parked over London in geosynchronous orbit is a hell of a lot more impressive than that first one. We, frankly, do not have a clue, and we don’t have a chance.

Then there’s a lurching, grinding sound in the control room at UNIT HQ, and what looks like an old police box materializes from out of thin air.

UNIT troops swarm in, form a perimeter, train their guns on the door. This is it, boys, this is war. Cyberkind’s first strike on them, surely. The doors slowly open, and out pours thick, acrid black smoke.

And out steps, instead of a merciless machine-man, a striking older gentleman with silver hair dressed like he’s stepped out of a PBS Jane Austen adaptation. He is gentle and kind, but a bit condescending. He makes little account for himself other than that he’s a bit of an explorer (and that sets UNIT off after the last bit, you can imagine). They stick him in the brig and say they’ll get to him if and when they get this Cybermen business figured out.

To which the visitor replies, “Cybermen? Oh, that’s an easy one so long as you’ve got enough gold.”

He introduces himself as the Doctor, to which the reply is, of course, “Doctor Who?” and the name sticks no matter how many times he insists that is not his name. With his knowledge of the Cybermen they’re able to drive off the invasion. And, once things have settled down, they find out he knows of all the other alien empires that might threaten the Earth because of his extensive “traveling” through space and time. This guy is an invaluable resource and could well be the key to the Earth’s survival – and he just appeared out of thin air. They keep him on retainer, which suits him well enough; he says he can’t go anywhere anyway with the TARDIS being broken the way it is.

“What’s a TARDIS?”

In the weeks to come, everyone gets a different story about their mysterious visitor. He gives the sense it’s some sort of time machine, but beyond that details are vague. The word either means Time And Relative Dimension In Space, or Time Anomaly Research Deep Immersion Scout, or it’s the brand name of the manufacturer. As for Doctor Who himself, he tells some that he’s a scientist and inventor from the year 4172, some that he’s an alien Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey (“Why do you have an English accent if you’re an alien, then?” “Oh, is it that convincing? I can do a German one if you like as well.”) He tells a young researcher one night that he’s just a confused old man from 1815 who’s found a time machine, but never mentions that story again. Complete mystery, and between themselves, UNIT’s say, hey, maybe even the Doctor doesn’t know Who he is.

Whatever the hell that TARDIS thing is, he’s working on repairing it whenever he’s got a spare moment. Nobody’s allowed inside of it, and no one can open the doors except for Doctor Who. I wouldn’t even want to show the inside of the TARDIS for several episodes (I’m assuming this is a television show, but we could do it in comics as well); the first person to be let in and see the bigger-on-the-inside thing is a middle-level officer in UNIT we’ll call Brian.

Let me steal a bit from RAB here:

“…my take on the Doctor is this: his view of humans should be the same as my view of dogs. What charming, intelligent, brave, friendly, affectionate creatures! How charming the simple things that make them happy! How wonderful to make the acquaintance of each one! But they can also be vicious and dangerous if mistreated, and they’re ignorant of the harm they can cause. And when a more capable creature abuses them, our duty is to rescue and protect them.”

I would like to add that sometimes, no matter how much you love that dog, you get furious at it when it pees all over the kitchen or eats your shoes when it really should know better, and from time to time the Doctor will go off on humans when caught in a bad mood. “You bloody imbeciles! If I’d had known you were going to act like this, I’d have left you to the Cybermen!” After which, of course, he apologizes profusely and sincerely because he didn’t really mean it.

Still, not many people in UNIT like the Doctor. (Well, some of the girls do; he doesn’t seem to have any interest in sex, so it’s kind of a “flirt with the sweet older man for a laugh” sort of deal.) It’s society’s natural mistrust of anything smarter than us. They think he’s being superior when he’s not, and so they assign Brian (I haven’t given any thought to this name at all, so don’t read anything into it) to be the Doctor’s “handler” because nobody likes him much anyway either – everyone finds him irritatingly earnest, which they don’t suppose is a very useful personality type when you’re Earth’s first line of defense against alien invaders. He is, however, a survivor of that attack on his village seven years ago.

So Brian becomes the Doctor’s “companion” of sorts (UNIT treats him as a go-between) while Who is stranded on Earth and helping UNIT fend off alien invasions and other curious phenomena (not everyone wants to conquer Earth – some are looking for zoo exhibits, and some are just thoughtless tourists who don’t care if they park on the Louvre). It should be stressed that the Doctor’s main usefulness is in information about these various invaders; he’s got a sonic screwdriver, but it’s not any better a weapon than a real screwdriver, and it’s certainly not as useful as it is in the current series. The Doctor’s attribute is his knowledge and his wits, and nothing more. He’s up for adventure, but he’s old and needs a lie-down after a particularly stressful day.

So that’s the engine driving the entire first “series” (I’m using series in the American sense, not the English of what we call “seasons”). That can go on for years until everyone’s about had it. Then … "The Final Invasion." And since I know I’m never going to get to do this for real, I might as well spoil the whole thing.

It’s Daleks, of course, and not a moment before but the kicker is this – Doctor Who doesn’t know a damn thing about them. He’s heard about them on his adventures, but he’s as blind as us primitive screwheads on this one.

The Daleks, however, know all about the Doctor (they even call him “the Doctor”) or at least they seem to. There’s a thread running through the series of researchers finding references to “the Doctor” throughout history, intervening in matters of global importance – wars, plagues, scientific discoveries. Except he is always described differently: young and old, fat and thin, tall and short, sometimes a woman, sometimes any number of things. And so during the Final Invasion, Doctor Who tells only Brian very briefly about the whole regeneration thing we all know from the series – when he dies, he “comes back” in a new form, and sometimes there are side-effects. In this case, his memory about Daleks seems to have been erased, although Brian can tell he’s lying about something, and he gets quite furious with the Doctor. “After all we’ve been through, you’re just telling me stupid made-up stories the way you would anyone else!”

Big budget special effects, carnage and destruction at the hands of the Daleks. This isn’t conquest, this is extermination. The extinction of the human race, and the truth is this – they can’t win. There’s no way to defeat the Daleks. So the Doctor has a breakthrough. He finally fixes the TARDIS (maybe it was never really broken in the first place, I'm not sure) and uses it to go back in time…divert the explorers landing in the English countryside all those years ago…

…and prevent anything in the series from ever happening. Because for the sake of my series, we’ll say that’s how it works.

Humanity is saved, but here is the thing – Brian can’t go home anymore. Because in the world he and the Doctor have made, that little English countryside village is still there, and there’s a Brian who lives there and has a date with the girl who works at a small IT firm he met at the shops one day. Well, obviously this is hard to hear, but Brian doesn’t really have a choice, and he’s nothing if not pragmatic. And it’s not even one of those “one life in exchange for all the world” deals because, hey, there is still a Brian knocking about. So he spends one last day walking through his old village, calls his mum on the phone (can’t go to see her, of course, he is seven-plus years older) and even pays himself a secret visit. Basically saying goodbye to his old life, but even that’s okay – most people never even get to do that.

So it’s settled, then. Since Brian doesn’t have a place in the world he helped save, the Doctor will take him along as a companion on his travels, although he never really explains what that exactly entails. They’re about ready to set off when, suddenly, the Doctor clutches his chest and falls to the ground.

“Doctor! What is it?” Brian asks.

Panting, sweating, the Doctor replies: “It’s the Time Tribunal! Passing judgment on me! Altering history is forbidden by their laws! The sentence is death! Can’t you see them?”

The Doctor points in the air in front of him at this last sentence. Brian, with horror: “Doctor ... there’s no one there.” And it looks for all the world like he's just having a heart attack. “But you’ll come back, won’t you?” Brian asks, desperately. “You – you said you regenerate, when an old body dies…?”

“It’s a lie,” the Doctor responds between breaths. “There is no regeneration. It just works like this: You who stand by my side: I charge you to carry on my work.” His eyes are bugging out, face wet with sweat.

“Doctor, wait! What work? What am I supposed to do?” Brian eyes the TARDIS.

And the old man’s last words, very difficult to even get these out: “I know you’ll be brilliant.”

“Doctor, wait! There’s so much I don’t know! You never even told me – Doctor! Who are you?”

But he’s already dead.

Brian sits crying over the mystery man’s purple, choked body. For a second he almost believes that the body will just magically vanish in a puff of smoke or a flash of light, but it’s just there, and it’s heavy. And he’s left to stew on that.

Only for a moment, though. Because then Brian does what he’s supposed to do. He kisses the old man on the head, buries the Doctor (…somewhere. Maybe in the village?) and grabs a change of clothes from his UNIT uniform. Something comfortable and durable, as well as a very long scarf - “In case it’s cold.”

So it’s the New Doctor, at the controls of the TARDIS (He’s never “Brian” again; as he points out, Brian is the version of himself that lives his life). He has no idea how to really set a course or destination – even the interface is totally alien and non-intuitive. So he spins some dials at random, pulls some levers, and when that’s all over, he takes a deep breath and presses a large red button.

There’s a grinding sound, and soon the police box has vanished.

And now you could do an entire second series about this New Doctor, but frankly I’d be happy just to end it there and leave the rest to imagination.

Not entirely pleased with "they just fix it all with time travel," but you need it for the New Doctor stuff to work, I think.

Earp Art

2009-11-13T08:54:00.005-06:00

I know its been a long time since anything Earp related has popped up here... the one place it should be. But like I've said before, Justin's got the stories written, and I fully intend on returning to them. It makes me really happy drawing cowboys and robots and aliens.... and penguins, and clones, and man eating pies, and space ships.... and ... and giant carnivorous planets.... and time traveling norse gods... (I hope I haven't exposed too many upcoming plots but to be honest by the time these stories see ink you'll have totally forgotten anyways.) Long story short I came across a page tucked away in my closet after moving and I pulled it out the other day to start doodling on it. Here's a panel from it.

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS #6: Zatanna

2009-11-10T22:19:00.002-06:00

Oh jeez that's right, I have a blog, don't I? I was right in the middle of something ... what was it ... ah yes:

At one point or another, you’ve probably found yourself in the middle of a hostile situation between friends, family, or co-workers, right? You want to keep your relationship with both parties intact, and that means not picking a side, which therefore often means playing both sides. And when you play both sides, sometimes it feels like you’re not on anyone’s side at all. It’s awkward and unpleasant, and you feel insincere and cowardly.

This is Zatanna’s unhappy state of being.

See, magic users and superheroes don’t really get along. Superheroes see magicians as aloof and haughty; too mysterious for their own good (not to mention that a lot of them don’t like magic because it doesn’t seem to have any “rules”). Magicians see superheroes as naïve goofs who tend to ignore the big picture. Don’t get me wrong, everyone’s mature enough to recognize each side does things the other one can’t, but it's hard to coordinate your efforts when you're suspicious of each other.

Zatanna is a magician and a superhero. We’re very fortunate that there’s someone like her around; there are times when the two camps really need to work together, and nobody can facilitate that like Zatanna. When the Toyman invades Metropolis on Memorial Day with an army of toy soldiers, it looks like a job for Superman. But when it turns out the spirits of soldiers from every American war are inhabiting those toys, you call in Zatanna; it’s not like Doctor Fate has a bloody clue what the Toyman’s deal is, after all, or who he might have struck a deal with to pull this off.

But the rest of the time? She’s friends with Oliver Queen and the Phantom Stranger, and those guys do not get along. So to the Stranger she’s saying, “Yeah, sorry about Ollie, he’s just really short tempered and, y’know, he’s an immediate-response sort of guy, and you kind of have to respect that,” but to Green Arrow she has to explain, “Look, I know it seems like the Stranger doesn’t care about the common man, but he’s working on a bunch of different levels you’re not seeing all the time, you know?” Invariably, everyone ends up mad at her, and that’s just great, isn’t it?

Threats … threats … One thing I got out of the existing Seven Soldiers Zatanna series and the usual sort of daddy-stuff to be found in Morrison’s work is this idea that Zatanna sometimes still feels like that little girl who gets things wrong – an adult who still feels like a kid. So I think a lot of the threats would occur at that intersection between childhood and adulthood, where all those childish whimsies turn sour.

There’s the Toyman bit I’ve already mentioned, but that’s only a precursor to the arrival of the Cosmic Toyman, an entity called the Puppeteer, and he lures his victims with childhood things reanimated and ruined – your fifth grade teacher telling you you’ll never make anything of yourself, children’s show hosts encouraging you to take crack, beloved cartoon characters getting old and senile and sick and dying; the Puppeteer poisons your nostalgia, and while he’s at it, he’ll bring back Barnabus the Teddy Bear King to really rub it in.

Along the same lines, picture a bitter, dejected twentysomething who reconnects with his childhood imaginary friend. But instead of a simple playmate, this individual now wants an accomplice, someone who can help him get all the money, power, and women he’s always wanted. Imagine Calvin and Hobbes as a precursor to a horrible nightmare (but oh God don’t really think of it as Calvin and Hobbies, I mean really).

Imagine discarded children’s art projects – broken clay pots and egg-carton dragons, scribbled stick figure families emerging from their typing paper world – lashing out because they’re confused and unloved. They may not be very good, but those kids tried hard just the same, and that ought to count for something, right?

But it won’t be all uncomfortable reflections of childhood. Zatanna should be a funny comic, too – funny and meaningful in the way that Buffy was. A jealous sorcerer can force Zatanna to relive every bad date she’s ever had, although it only shows her how much she’s learned from the unpleasant experiences. And when adults are suddenly being visited by the ghosts of their teenage selves, most people feel bad after being chewed out by their younger selves for settling for their boring adult lives; Zatanna, on the other, has to contend with the absolutely dreadful 16-year-old she was, but there’s something to take from that as well.

One more thing – I’m interested in the stage magician, performance aspect to Zatanna. For that reason, of all the Seven Soldiers books I am proposing, hers is the only one that will have first-person narration. But it won’t just be an excuse to dump some exposition, or show and not tell character traits – Zee will be, in some sense, putting on a show for the readers, talking them through each issue the way a stage magician talks you through a magic trick. And what’s important to take from that is that stage magicians are very often untruthful in their monologues; at the very least, they’re trying to mislead you, so you’d really have to look at what her narrative captions say and whether or not they can be taken at face value. Because very often, I would have Zatanna try to throw you off the trail, just to see if you’re paying attention.

Ecneidua, kniht rof sevlesruoy!

Oh, by the way, the Bulleteer/Guardian/Zatanna crossover I mentioned … all will be revealed next time in the last series proposal – Manhattan Guardian.

This (Was) Halloween

2009-11-01T23:07:00.004-06:00

Another Halloween has come and gone. I'm a little sad; Halloween is like my Christmas - my favorite holiday, and I'm sad to see those Halloween supply stores that pop up every October go back to being empty out-of-business big-box stores, like zombies returning to the grave. To commemorate the occasion, I have written a grim little post about Friday the 13th and Jason Voorhees over at MGK's House of Pop Culture Pain. In a livelier spirit (pun?), here is me at Halloween:

Spent Halloween at friends' house, where I assisted in the passing out of candy. In truth, I didn't so much "pass out candy" as "lurk about the front yard beckoning at passersby and trying to unnerve small children." Look, I'm not a bad guy, this is the whole point of Halloween.

Afterwords: bars. It was not the first time I have sung the DiVinyls' "I Touch Myself" at karaoke, but it is the first time I have done it dressed as a ghost (the skeletal fingers added a particular layer of obscenity).

And yes, of course I cut a small hole in the mouth of the mask so I could drink through a straw (or, as in the photo below, a child's sippy cup shaped like a monkey's head). I am no fool.

It was a rare blessing to have a mask that was not only large enough to contain my enormous head, but also accomodated my glasses so that I didn't have to walk around the whole night squinting through black mesh. Halloween is the one night a year that I regret giving up contacts, but not this time.

That was my Halloween. Hope you had a good one.

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS #5: Bulleteer

2009-10-17T10:40:00.003-05:00

Generally speaking, I dislike overthinking superheroes. Maybe that sounds odd coming from a guy who writes Superhero Theory posts (used to anyway), but there’s a very specific kind of overthinking I find insidious in large enough doses. Why doesn’t everybody figure out Superman is Clark Kent? Why can’t Reed Richards cure cancer, and really, what’s the great benefit to society of exploring weird alternate dimensions anyway if it seems to have no practical application in the everyday Marvel Universe? If the Hulk causes such massive property destruction when he rampages through town, shouldn’t he be causing thousands of deaths? And really, shouldn’t Batman just kill the Joker and save all his potential future victims?

The truth of the matter is, mainstream superhero comics don’t hold up to such logical scrutiny because they were never designed to. They’re not about that, which is why it’s not important (on a story level, anyway) why the dark Jedis have red lightsabers, and why Rebel ships have red lasers when Imperial ships have green ones. The original trilogy has more important things to talk about (and the reason the prequel trilogy suffers is because it doesn’t have anything more important to discuss and so engages with that sort of menial business).

Generally speaking, I find a conversation about superheroes’ sex lives in a Justice League comic just unpleasant.

But the function of Bulleteer is that she’s not a “mainstream” superhero. She’s on the fringes, and so that frees her comic to deal with the fringes of the superhero set. If you point out in a Superman comic that glasses and playacting are a crummy disguise, you cheapen Superman, or at the very least you poke the concept so full of holes it can’t stay above water. But you can play with superhero tropes using these marginal figures. Morrison made Mind-Grabber Man a straight man pretending to be gay for the attention, and used Bulleteer herself to examine the superhero as fetish object.

If Superman and the Justice League can be likened to A-list Hollywood stars, Alix Harrower and her ilk are the David Faustinos of the DC Universe. The seedy underbelly of the superhero world.

Here’s a book where you could deal with what happens when a superscientist thinks he’s discovered the end to all disease, but drug companies try to keep it under wraps. The great agony of what it would really be like to have Daredevil's heightened senses, where all the world's a garbage can, rain is hell, and you're eating nothing but plain noodles night after night because you can't handle anything with a stronger flavor to it. How the Rook, Tomahawk City’s moral paragon protector, deals with the fact that his bloodthirsty vigilante rival Simple Simon is actually getting more tangible results than he is. Another city rejects its longtime superhero when it’s discovered she actually hails from another dimension and is thus technically an illegal alien.

Again, not something I’d want to see in Daredevil or Superman's books, but this is a place you could grow and cultivate these ideas while still keeping them safely quarantined in their own little corner of the DC Universe.

Right, but I haven’t established the status quo. In Seven Soldiers #1, it’s revealed that she’s the descendant of Aurakles, the first superhero, and that her ultimate destiny was to kill Queen Gloriana. In that issue, a policeman tells her after questioning, “You’re free,” to which Alix replies, “Am I?” As the series begins, she’s still asking that question. You know how in the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk show, David Banner is always extremely coincidentally in the right place at the right time to make a difference? The same thing happens to the Bulleteer, only she recognizes it, and interprets it to mean that she isn’t free, that she’s being controlled by fate -- or, in the interest in imagistic unity, that fate is the gun, and she is its bullet.

So she has a tendency to just let things happen. She rarely pursues hero-for-hire gigs, they just seem to fall in her lap. Her accountant and financial manager Morgan Chapel, a regular supporting cast member, is just a guy she picked out of the phone book at random, and though he has no experience in superhuman affairs, he proves himself a natural at it. After getting fed up with commercial air travel (it's a pain to get past the metal detector when you are in fact made of metal), she happens to save the life of the Machine Queen, a 52-year-old mechanic who specializes in esoteric vehicles and builds Alix an inexpensive Bulletcar (complete with ejector-seat “launcher”) out of an old Dodge Dart, and she becomes another supporting cast member.

This drifting attitude has a number of unintended consequences. Remember Crazyface from Morrison’s Shining Knight? Alix is tricked into recovering his super-enhanced cybernetic eyeballs for his brother, who gets them implanted and becomes the Reverse Crazyface to avenge his death. (This will eventually lead into a crossover involving Bulleteer, Manhattan Guardian, and Zatanna, but I’ll get to that later.) She can also sometimes seem cold and distant, but ultimately her compassion wins out (she did, after all, try to take Sally Sonic, the woman who ruined her marriage and indirectly led to Alix’s husband’s death and her “condition,” to the hospital after their fight).

This I see as the overarching conflict in the series: Originally her trying to fight fate was jeopardizing the world, but now having completely surrendered to it isn’t proving any healthier.

The format: I’d like these to be largely self-contained stories, to be told, for no real reason other than it seems right to me, in a sort of action movie/new wave/neo noir mashup style; Cowboy Bebop is my stylistic guide here.

And there will be time for subplots. For example, the Machine Queen has long been building a working, full-scale Batmobile replica as a hobby, but when it’s stolen, Alix has to track down The Man Who Would Be Batman. As for Alix herself, her husband’s secret superhero fetish has put her off romantic entanglements to some extent. She finds nebbish, timid Morgan Chapel nonthreatening, but is that a good foundation to a relationship? (Note: It is not.) And is Morgan even interested? It turns out an ageless, perfect physical specimen encased in shining indestructible metal is not to everyone’s taste. Frankly, I’d like to see a relationship in a superhero book that’s weird and awkward and has serious foundational problems and maybe just doesn’t work instead of the usual storybook whirlwind romance.

After all, this is the book to do it in.

NEW sketchblog!!

2009-10-12T11:02:00.003-05:00

I know I know.... Josh is an asshole. He never posts here anymore and its not even about wyatt earp when he does. Well Justin has been holding his weight around here much better than Josh has but to be honest Justin can't just post scripts and the like. He has to post non earp content because Josh hasn't touched an earp page in something like 6 months. As with everything else stuff happens. Life happens. Day jobs, houses, friends, family, life, death, fuzzy puppies. These are all parts of life and get in the way of things like wyatt earp comics. The truth is that I find it difficult to sit down and draw on my own time for more than 20 minutes. If I'm drawing these days its because I get paid. Spending 10 hours a day drawing followed by more drawing when I get home is a little difficult. However, inspired by many of the other artists I follow I've decided to start a sketchbog. The idea is for it to be updated daily and so far its been going pretty well. I started it a few weeks ago but haven't wanted to share it or go public until it got on a roll. It should only be sketches, or concept pieces. Never finished work and hopefully not often paid work. Take a minute, stop by, tell me what you think. Even if it is just one word: "asshole"

http://joshlynchart.blogspot.com/

Follow along with your very own copy of Glamour which I know you are secretly hiding

2009-10-07T22:38:00.004-05:00

For my triumphant return to being allowed to write on Mightygodking.com, I have contributed a riveting piece regarding a free copy of Glamour I recently came to find in my possession. No, I don't know why I wrote it, either.

Also, it may interest you to know (though it probably will not) that I am on Twitter. A bit, anyway. I must admit, I'd never planned on having an account, and I'm still a little fuzzy on how to read those damn "@UserName" tweets. I've only signed up because my office uses it as a sort of internal communication device, and to be honest, I have no idea what I am going to do with it outside of work stuff. But I might think of something. Following that riveting sales pitch, you will no doubt be falling over yourself to follow me at jduck1.

You will not be rid of me that easily

2009-10-03T16:34:00.004-05:00

Good afternoon.

I have regained the ability to write to you near-instantaneously over a great distance via the "internetwork." I will type out a few things in this space, and when I hit "Publish Post," my words will be transmitted and available for everyone to see, despite the fact that there are no visible wires or cables connecting my typing-device to any other thing.

Truly, it is a strange and marvelous time to be alive.

I have taken a few minutes away from moving, and organizing in anticipation of more moving, to write this. The big move is going thoroughly all right. The new place is just a half-hour by freeway from the old place, so we are doing it in small chunks, after work and on the weekend. I will spare you the expected blog post reflecting on how many comics I own, and how they are difficult to move, and how it makes me wonder whether it is healthy to devote so much time and money to a hobby that leads me to accumulate so much stuff, and how one might consider it strange to be hoarding and lugging about boxes of thin periodicals originally intended to be disposable. Frankly, I am fine with all of that. My lower back is aching not because I have too many comics, but because I am weak and unused to such prolonged heavy lifting.

There are still more things to be hauled, new pieces of furniture to be purchased (microwave stands: I am not sure such a piece of furniture exists, but my wife seems to think it does), and more important people and agencies to inform of my relocation (VISA Cardmember Service, your call is forthcoming). After all of this is taken care of, there are two things I intend to do.

1.) Get a kitten (grey, tabby).
2.) Resume posting regularly.

That means more MGKontent is in the works, and Why I Should Write Bulleteer is also in the hopper.

Thank you for not leaving forever.

Telegram For You

2009-10-01T10:08:00.002-05:00

NO INTERNET AT NEW APARTMENT YET STOP

POSTING FROM REMOTE LOCATION STOP

MOVING GOING OK STOP

CABLE INTERNET COMING SATURDAY MORNING, WILL RESUME USUAL THINGS THEN FULL STOP

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS #4: Mister Miracle

2009-09-22T22:49:00.003-05:00

I’m sticking this one in the middle because it’s different than all the others. See, I’m not so sure I should write Mister Miracle.

David Brothers has a piece about Afro Futurism and Mister Miracle, and it’s compelling stuff. Morrison’s reimagining of the New Gods mythos was fascinating and relevant, and it elevated the characters above some of their more pedestrian post-Kirby portrayals. Truth be told, I’ve never been the biggest New Gods fan, but Shilo Norman’s experience really opened it up for me. I think the Afro Futurism/“elevation” approach is how Mister Miracle should be written…

…but I’m not the guy to do it. It’s not just a matter of authenticity, it’s one of experience. I’d only embarrass myself if I came on here with my underdeveloped ideas about what Afro Futurism really means, fused it with wacky comic book plots, and passed it off as “something meaningful.”

But, the challenge was to come up with a way to write all these books, so I have to do something. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED:

So, Shilo Norman was the understudy of the original Mister Miracle, eventually became a 21st century celebrity escape artist (only in the DC Universe!) and was tapped by the New Gods to liberate them from the evil gods of Apokalips. After Final Crisis, Darkseid has been defeated and the New Gods are reborn. And what happens to Shilo?

Well, the only thing I can think of is he wakes up one day after Final Crisis to discover that those fabulous space gods no longer have any need for their human savior now that his purpose is complete, and they’re restored on Earth-51 or whatever.

The New Gods have forsaken him.

This would be a less-actiony, more introspective series than my other ones. Shilo Norman knows there’s something bigger than what he can see and touch out there, and he used to be a part of it, but now it’s all gone. All he has left is Motherboxxx, which retains its incredible powers, but seems to have lost its soul; where that “ping!” sound once seemed like the distant echo of a great cosmic bell ringing from Heaven, now it sounds like nothing more than a cheap electronic tone.

Once you’ve tasted what it’s like to be the living avatar of freedom, going back to being a rich guy with a nice house is going to seem pretty shallow. What does the mythical Hero do when his special destiny is fulfilled? After Luke Skywalker vanquished the evil of the Empire, did he have trouble going back to being an ordinary guy? Shilo’s new mission is to escape depression and sorrow, to escape loneliness, to escape the mundane and material -- and find his New Gods once again.

So what does Shilo actually do in the comic? He seeks the great spiritual and/or philosophical leaders and experiences of the DC Universe: Shilo visits Nanda Parbat and Mount Olympus and discovers the final recording of the last science-priest of Krypton, embedded in a crystal in the Phantom Zone. He uses his vast wealth to buy five minutes of Vandal Savage’s time, and asks the immortal terrorist from 50,000 BC for his perspective on life, the universe and everything.

He puts himself through a number of innovative new traps as well. The old physical traps will still be there (being thrown out of a plane with no parachute, stuck in an avalanche, etc.), but, like the monsters in Shining Knight, just as momentary glimpses of Shilo’s everyday life, whereas the stories will be driven by more unusual traps. These will be more conceptual or metaphorical in nature, and they won’t always be something Motherboxxx can just fix. After spending his last penny on the visit with Savage, Shilo will be broke and homeless and living on the streets (where he meets Ali Ka-Zoom, of course!), a trap he accidentally escapes by unwittingly saving the life of Millions, the Richest Dog in the World. Mister Miracle throws himself into a time loop in which he’s forced to replay the death of a young boy in a traffic accident that Shilo is unable to prevent through conventional means (an old chestnut of a sci-fi plot, I realize). And, in a twist on Schrodinger’s Cat, when Shilo volunteers to take part in a quantum experiment that goes horribly wrong, two Mister Miracles emerge -- one alive, one dead -- and he decides to hold and attend his own funeral.

I will also do the unthinkable and admit Brad Meltzer had an idea that I thought was interesting. Doctor Impossible, who’s either Scott Free’s long-lost evil brother from Apokalips, or deranged muscle-for-hire who stumbled upon New Gods technology and only convinced himself he’s a god, returns. But after Shilo’s experiences in Morrison’s miniseries, he’s willing to admit there may be more to Doctor Impossible than meets the eye. On the other hand, the thought that this guy might just be a crazy dude forces Shilo to consider that his own experience with the New Gods might be self-delusion as well.

And it’s Doctor Impossible who pits MM up against a variation of Darkseid’s Life Trap: the Golden Slumbers, which consists of only a powerful hypnotic code, a comfortable bed, and a banner we’ve seen in Morrison’s Invisibles: La mort est un sommeil eternel. Unlike the Omega Sanction, each dream-existence is more pleasant than the last; in some he finds his New Gods once again, in some he learns to live happily without them, in some he is welcomed into the fraternity of superheroes and becomes Earth’s second Superman. It’s like the Black Mercy, but with one difference: sometimes you wake up from the Golden Slumbers … and then you decide to fall back asleep.

So there you have it. I could write Mister Miracle, I suppose. But even though I like some of the ideas above, I’m not so sure I should.

Oh yeah, here's more things I wrote

2009-09-22T12:30:00.004-05:00

My lapse in posting has not been very lapse-y of late. For, if you have not already seen them, here are my most recent MightyGodKontrabutions:

Part the first, in which a most curious editorial decision regarding DC's Superman/Batman is discussed.

Part the second, in which I wonder why DC and Marvel try to sell "untold tales" when few are willing to buy them on an ongoing basis.

Coming soon: Mister Miracle is happening, but it's up to you whether it will be worth waiting for.