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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Point and Counterpoint for Today

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.

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS: Conclusion

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

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.

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

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.

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS #6: Zatanna

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.

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS #5: Bulleteer

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.

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS #4: Mister Miracle

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.

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS #3: The Bride of Frankenstein

Is there a legal issue with the name Bride of Frankenstein? Like, does Universal own that specific grouping of words? In that case, The Bride would work just as well or better, unless there’s an issue with Kill Bill. Basically, I am saying THE NAME IS FLEXIBLE.

The deal with the Bride is this: Victor Frankenstein created a woman with the intent that it would become his first creature’s mate, but the she-creature wasn’t having it (in Morrison's Frankenstein!, she says “It’s nothing personal. But you were never my type. … Alive. One of these days they’ll figure out how to sew on a sense of humor.”). The Bride escaped captivity and lived a wandering existence before “the Red Swami brainwashed me, grafted on two extra arms, and passed me off as a reincarnated assassin goddess.” That incident brought her to the attention of the Super Human Advanced Defense Executive, or SHADE.

What is SHADE? Their leader is Father Time, a master manipulator who only seems callous and amoral because he can see the big picture (and I’m talking the biggest). Like a certain celebrated Time Lord, he periodically regenerates into new forms, except Father Time does it every January 1st (comic book time being what it is, it would theoretically be years between regenerations, but it would be more fun to have Father Time obey the real-world or "higher" calendar, to the great confusion of the characters within the book). I’ll let Morrison, via Father Time, explain the organization’s mandate:

“Here’s the pitch. Superman meets James Bond. Big time for a little while. These days we clean up the crap no one else will touch, on a budget that wouldn’t buy you breakfast at a fancy hotel.”

God, I love that notion. SHADE headquarters hasn’t been remodeled since 1978 and the paint is peeling; since every penny they get goes to developing new and innovative superhumans for the purpose of national defense, their computers are perpetually four years out of date, and everyone has to chip into an office fund to buy the coffee. Even if you don’t drink coffee, you have to pay into the fund, and I cannot stress that enough.

SHADE is drawn like a Jim Steranko spy-fi comic, except all the characters are ugly.

The Bride is the perfect operative to work for SHADE, and here’s why:

1.) She’s quick-witted with a dry sense of humor and a strong stomach. The latter will come particularly in handy when a monster composed of self-loathing, disappointment, desperation and alcohol vomit coalesces in the sewers beneath Ivy Town and attacks the college students from which it originated.

2.) She’s got the flexible morals her job requires; she has no problem ordering an entire Manhattan city block vaporized when a lack of flow renders the architecture poisonous and threatens to spread; that act, however, doesn’t exactly get her on the Guardian’s good side, and there is of course a fight until they realize they have to team up to defeat the sinister Landlord.

3.) She’s infinitely adaptable and has a lust for life. Something of an aesthete, she dresses in the latest, most outrageous fashions, and it is her stylistic convictions that make her alone immune to Nightmare in Plaid. The Bride surrounds herself in fine art, food, and music, and desires (and is desired by) some of the handsomest men in all the world; unfortunately, this taste for the finer things leaves her highly susceptible to the 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 configurations of Baron Sensor’s Pleasure Cube, and that mission does not go very well.

4.) The Bride is extremely professional; she has no ties, and so the mission doesn’t become personal. One of the few exceptions to this rule is when the last in the Frankenstein bloodline is discovered living in Toronto. The secret of the Frankenstein Process is encoded into his DNA, and using this, the Men from MOMMA derive their experiments with the end goal of no longer needing women to reproduce. This project turns out to have military applications, and from it will come the only creature who might be considered the Bride’s equal: the mysterious supersoldier and poet, Lilac Vapour.

5.) The Bride is probably the coolest person you’ll ever meet, but if you ever have occasion to meet her, it probably means you are going to die very soon.

(Also, Josh: If DC called tomorrow and wanted more story springboards, I’d pitch them the “Bitter Cold” killer-snowmen idea from Wyatt, in which a science-priestess curses the raiders that destroyed her laboratory village, binding their souls to water molecules and leaving them to freeze in the winter. But that is okay because you should totally be drawing this.)

Another asset: You have to understand, approximately one in three SHADE agents will eventually go rogue, and the agency has learned to just accept that. Mental breakdown is a frequent side effect of superhumanization. You might agree really quickly to have supercool pilot skills uploaded into your brain (as do the members of the X-Hawks Squadron), but you may become unhinged when you can’t sleep because your mind is incessantly playing out hypothetical combat simulations. A young agent signs up to gain ESP at the cost of his sense of smell; it sounds like a good trade-off, but when he can’t enjoy movies because he knows how they’ll end, and when the smell of cooking bacon has no effect on him whatsoever, he’ll want revenge on the superscientists who did this to him (and of course, with the ESP, they can’t hide a damn thing from him).

It is, of course, one of the Bride’s jobs to track down these rogue agents and kill them or try to salvage their enhancements. And they can trust her with it, because she’s got another edge over every other SHADE agent.

She never had any humanity to lose in the first place.

NEXT: Mister Miracle (I guess).

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS #2: Klarion the Witch-Boy & Frankenstein

Klarion the Witch-Boy & Frankenstein would be a much different series than Shining Knight. While SK is all about intrigue and a sprawling cast (that's what being a teenager felt like to me, at least), KtWB&F focuses more on the leads and their relationship. Think of it as the strangest buddy movie you’ve ever seen.

When last we left these two in Seven Soldiers #1, Klarion had become the new Sheeda King and master of Castle Revolving (which one page on Wikipedia describes as “a time-traveling fortress,” and that’s the best description I’ve ever heard of anything), and Frankenstein is in his thrall, since Klarion’s witch-brands control certain kinds of undead creatures like Big Frank.

Now, the problem set up in Seven Soldiers is that the Sheeda are us -- humanity on life support one billion years from today, their stale culture kept alive by dipping back into the past and “harvesting” healthier civilizations. As Queen Gloriana asks Frankenstein in the last issue of his mini-series, “Are we not human? Would you have our people starve, thou very moral monster?” In Zatanna, Gloriana’s daughter Misty knows that if she defeats her mother, she’ll have to keep her people alive by preying on the past as well. Dilemma, right?

But in 7S #1, we are assured “there’s a third way,” and since the very next page shows us Klarion as Sheeda King, it suggests Klarion will be the one to reject binary ideas and come up with a mutually beneficial solution; he’s been shown not to follow precedent just because that’s the way it’s always been done. He is a child, however, so his motives are going to be a little immature: he won’t destroy the present because his family lives there and he’s charmed by our world, but he won’t let the Sheeda go extinct, because then who would worship him as king? So don’t expect a Superman-style heroic speech, but rather something a little more characteristically understated for Klarion. “Plunder the past or starve? I think neither. Surely with this fantastic castle at my disposal I can figure a way out of this.” And so, the main thrust of the series is Klarion moving through time and space, investigating other civilizations and enlisting history’s great thinkers to come up with that third way.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it goes smoothly. When Castle Revolving shows up in Ancient Greece, it invokes the ire of the Greek gods. Klarion loses track of Leonardo da Vinci, and thus nearly gets the legendary polymath vaporized in New Mexico on the date of the first atomic bomb test. Klarion’s trip to the 853rd century very nearly undoes millennia of planning by the Justice League. And might we expect him to cross paths with the Shining Knight and the Three King Arthurs on their quest?

Of course, this mucking about with the timestream is bound to attract the attention of Rip Hunter and Booster Gold. Klarion finds time to have a great deal of fun with his time travel capabilities and power as King of the Sheeda; inspired by the incident with Mr. Mxyzptlk when Castle Revolving accidentally rotated up into the fifth dimension, Klarion finds playing pranks on Rip and Booster are a good release from the stresses of his kingly duties.

But I’ve left out Frankenstein’s role in all this. Initially, Klarion sees him as little more than muscle to back his brains, a means to an end, and keeps him under the witch brand. As time goes on, they get to know each other better, and Klarion finds the monster’s centuries of experience very helpful. Frankenstein’s grim, dry comments also keep Klarion grounded when his fawning subjects threaten his sense of perspective. Klarion is infuriated to no end by Frankenstein’s protests and by the many times he points out glaring holes in Klarion’s plans, but the Witch-Boy recognizes the value of keeping Big Frank around. It is Frankenstein, for example, who helps Klarion through the difficult, desperate choice he has to make on Krypton one week before its destruction (those Kryptonians are, after all, just going to die anyway when the planet explodes, right?). And in turn, Frankenstein’s strict, black-and-white view of good and evil (he is of the opinion, after all, that simply wiping out the Sheeda is the easiest solution) may be softened by Klarion’s moral flexibility.

I think there’s room in there for some touching character growth. Oh, they’ll never be friends, especially since Klarion never completely releases Frankenstein from the witch brand’s control. Because if he did, Frankenstein might leave and never return…

…that is, if he doesn’t exact his revenge on Klarion first. It’s said, after all, that one of Frankenstein’s arms is that of a former slave, and the flesh remembers.

That’s also something that would come up in the book: Frankenstein’s ability to integrate body parts. Frankenstein isn’t some guy with other people’s limbs sewn on, he’s actually made out of different pieces, and they all become Frankenstein (and he becomes them). What did the dead man hear before he was killed? Sew his ear onto Frankenstein, and he’ll know. Think of him as having the potential to become a sort of macabre version of Amazo. Upon the discovery of a recently slain Green Lantern, Frankenstein will take the creature’s arm and ring to make sure the death is avenged.

Ah, but hold on a moment! If Klarion and Frankenstein are combined into one book, doesn't that leave a vacancy? Next time we’ll see that Frankenstein’s book has been taken over … by his would-be “bride.”

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS #1: The Shining Knight

Here is everything you might want to know about this character, and here is a simplified version: Ystina is a young girl who disguised herself as a boy to become Sir Justin, a member of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table circa 8,000 BC (Camelot, as Morrison establishes, is a recurring archetype, but Ystina’s Camelot is the first). The evil queen Gloriana Tenebrae destroys Camelot, and in escaping, Ystina accidentally time-travels to the present day with the sword Excalibur, and her winged horse Vanguard. After Gloriana is defeated, Ystina is enrolled in the “H.S. Johnson School for Heroes” by Ali-Ka-Zoom, a homeless mystic, and on one of the last pages of Seven Soldiers #1, he explicitly sets up of the potential ongoing series:

“…you’ll have fun here. You need to learn some more about the 21st century and how it works before you go swinging that sword all indiscriminate. Weekends you and your horse can fight the good fight all you want. I can’t stop you, only give you advice … even if you do decide to start up your own round table with all the new friends you’re gonna make…”

Morrison’s made it very simple, right? Girl knight with mentor figure, lost in time, can’t go home, enrolled at some kind of hero academy. So … what happens?

Some of it is her “weekends.” She’ll fight random monsters, of course, but we’ll only see enough of that to get the sense that it happens all the time (just like when Spider-Man spends a page stopping a mugger; it’s not the main thrust of the story, just an excuse for a quick action scene). Most of the on-panel time will be spent on more interesting and bizarre adventures, chief among them the Quest of the Three King Arthurs. We are told by Gloriana that after the original Arthur from Ystina’s Camelot, “There were of course several Arthurs; a pagan general in Roman Britian, a medieval Christian mystic…” Gloriana knew about, but did not mention, the King Arthur of the 109th Century AD. There is, however, only ever the one Merlin, and it is he that brings the three of them together to enlist the help of the last surviving knight of the Primal Round Table in the search for a treasure that loses itself in time. Together they embark on a series of journeys that culminate in 12th century England, where they also discover the terrible origin of the Sheriff of Nottingham’s Clockwork Man technology, and the tragic tale of how Robin Hood really died.

There is, of course, a King Arthur in the present day as well, but just how Aquaman fits into the legacy is a mystery he and Ystina will have to work together to solve.

But it’s not all epic quests through time, because there’s still the school five days a week. Note that it’s not a school for superheroes, but a school for heroes. School policy impels the faculty, which includes Arn “Iron” Munro among its members, to actively discourage costumed, superpowered heroism; but to understand why, you must also understand why this H.S. Johnson formed the school in the first place, and none of the students are permitted to know.

The star student at the school is Ranger St. Clair, who you might imagine to be exactly like Doc Savage, except three months shy of legal driving age. Billy Beezer, a former member of Mister Melmoth’s child gang, enrolled at the school after escaping the forced labor camp on Mars in Morrison’s Frankenstein! series; he tries to become a hero and leave his former days of hedonism and petty crimes behind, but when some of his former gang members turn up at the school, he’ll have to deal with temptation.

Ystina is placed in one of the school’s special classes (“Well, they’re all special classes, aren’t they?” the school administrator says). It’s called the TODAY program, and it’s designed to help other temporally displaced youth adjust to life in the 21st century. From the past there’s Juan-Carlos Canyon from the Old West brought to the present by aliens, and Victor Victorian, whose interest in séances led him into the mysterious limbo known as the Ghost Realm in 1897, only to re-emerge six months ago with the ability to commune with and control spirits. Brash and callow Axel Strange claims he’s Adam Strange’s grandson but can’t prove it, and isn’t saying why he finds himself in our time, but he’d love to supplant Ranger St. Clair as the school’s top hotshot. You might assume Shakespeare Kid is from about 1600 AD, but you’d be wrong – “Shakesy” is a member of the Legion of Substitute Heroes in the 31st century and hopes to become a full Legionnaire after learning some valuable lessons at H.S. Johnson, but has developed a curious interest in Axel in the meantime...

Ystina is extremely serious and grave, and Ali-Ka-Zoom is there not only for advice, but also to help her lighten up. Of course, her new friends in the TODAY program might help as well; are they to become the first of the prophesied Queen Ystina’s new Round Table, or are they just a bunch of weirdos who can’t work a toaster? And when Iron Munro goes missing tries to recruit the Leviathan entity (which is, as you’ll recall from Morrison's Klarion, made up of 125 lost children underneath the subways of New York City), will the TODAY class save the day, or will they need Ranger St. Clair’s Young All-Stars to rescue them as well?

Next: A witch-boy and his monster.

Why I Should Write SEVEN SOLDIERS: An Introduction

I know what you’re thinking; a couple weeks writing at Christopher Bird’s blog, and I’m already stealing his bit. But I assure you, this was not my idea. Someone issued me a challenge, and never let it be said I shrink from such things.

So: Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers series. I don’t know that it’s the “best” thing Morrison’s ever done, but I personally find it the most interesting. There’s a lot going on thematically that you can either choose to engage with and go down philosophical and sociological rabbit holes, or you can just let wash over you and engage with it on an almost subconscious level. Structurally, it amazes me every time I read it how well it all fits together, both in theme and in narrative; the ideal way to read it isn’t in a book, or even on a computer with connected hyperlinks, but maybe as some sort of 3D holographic interface in which you could see the point where Klarion’s encounter with the Horigal intersects with the pirate train from Manhattan Guardian, and then watch the two streams go on their separate ways again.

But, leaving aside all that fancy stuff, on the most basic level, Seven Soldiers was an attempt to “transform a neglected, third-string, C-list DC property into a strong commercial feature with franchise development potential.” In his introduction in the first collected volume (where that last quotation also comes from), Morrison says he gave each character “a first issue origin story, a well-defined opening character arc and enough conceptual fuel to run for years, if fan support demanded an ongoing title.”

So did he succeed? According to the standards of the second quotation, I think he did, because I think most of the concepts are pretty well set up by the end of the megaseries. But by the standards of the first? Not a bit! This is something I complain about all the time, and I suspect it is why Plok issued this challenge. None of these characters have been given an ongoing series (well, Zatanna’s getting one, I believe, but she’s got the JLA connection and was probably the least revamped of all the characters, and it’s not likely it’ll carry much of the Morrison stamp on it anyway), and very few of them have appeared even in guest-starring roles outside of comics Morrison’s written. In the case of the Guardian, the new version’s been dismissed in favor of the old one in James Robinson's Superman comics.

Why is that? Part of it is a nostalgia-driven market suspicious of new ideas (or even new takes on old ideas), and part of it is Morrison’s reputation. Not only is he considered a difficult act to follow because of his status as a popular, top-tier writer, but a lot of people have convinced themselves you can’t follow Morrison. “Oh, he just has these cah-rayzee ideas; must be the drugs!”

Very well, then. If paid professionals are not going to have a crack at it, then a dude sitting at his computer very late at night is going to do it for free.

Here are the ground rules for this game: I am going to assume that the comic book market is a very different place, and that all seven books were successful enough to warrant an ongoing series (I may in fact be pretending it’s 1992, when pretty much anything with a character resembling a superhero sold like crazy), and that I am writing all of them. They’ll be interconnected to some degree, like a mini-universe inside the DC Universe (but they’ll still interact with that main DC Universe), but probably to a lesser extent than the original mini-series. Morrison went out of his way to find connections between all the characters, and it would be silly not to exploit that. Readers of Morrison's series may also remember that Millions the Mystery Mutt, world’s richest dog and former mascot of the Newsboy Army, appeared at the end of Seven Soldiers #1 to be given control over the East and West Coast mobs as the Dogfather; this will show up in all my imaginary series as an important plot point, if for no other reason than it’s too crazy not to run with.

The posts will go up whenever I finish them (hopefully once-a-week-ish). Each post will cover one ongoing series and will discuss themes, the status quo and storytelling engine, and –- like MGK’s similar posts –- a bunch of intriguing-sounding mysteries I am only going to hint at, and if you want to learn how they turn out, someone is going to have to put me in touch with DC Comics to write actual scripts for real. (Note: This is not going to happen.) Or just take me out to a bar and buy me lots of drinks. (Wait wait: WHY NOT DO BOTH?)

Unlike MGK’s posts, however, mine will not have cool little graphics at the top, and for this I can only apologize.

I hope to have the first up by the end of the week, and we’ll see how this goes. I’ll start out with the one that seemed the most explicitly set up by the end of Seven Soldiers, and my semi-namesake – Ystina, the Shining Knight.

21 Influential Mainstream Comics Writers (For Better or Worse)

As promised, here's a list of 21 influential mainstream comics writers I've concocted in a similar vein, if not a similar tone, exactly, to this Onion AV Club article.

Things to keep in mind:
1.) These are not ranked in any order, although the top four are set apart as being, I think, almost impossible to argue.
2.) These are going to be superhero-heavy because the original article says "mainstream," and I tried to keep to that.
3.) This is not what I would cite a definitive list because I'm only one guy, I'm not a proper hsitorian, and I did this in a couple of hours.
4.) Like the original list, this is a "for better or for worse" situation. There's writers on here I don't care for and writers I do, writers whose work I like but influenced a lot of lesser writers, etc.
5.) There's going to be editorializing, but it's a list I picked of people I think are influential. There's going to be editorializing whether I mean for it or not.

Let's begin.

1. Stan Lee
To no one’s surprise, I’m sure. Again, these aren’t really ranked, but I don’t really think there’s a bigger game-changer than Lee. His once wild innovations and experiments have become the very basic building blocks of mainstream superhero comics. He’s the Beatles of comics writers; you’re influenced by him even if you do not intend to be, and there will probably never be another quite of his like.

2. Alan Moore
Introducing new levels of literary sophistication to mainstream comics, Moore’s almost inarguably number two behind Lee. Obviously influential, though I think (and Moore seems to agree in interviews) that his influence has been mostly destructive. To me, Watchmen demands that you either reject superhero comics for their disconnect from real life and their inability to tackle complex situations, or you accept the trade-off of simplicity for symbolism and power. The third option, however, has been the most prevalent, and that is to simply graft “mature” themes onto “immature” superhero comics and hope that the resultant birth favors the mature side. It usually does not.

3. Chris Claremont
Things Claremont was one of the early pioneers of on X-Men: 1.) “Voice” in comics, no matter how hideously purple his prose and dialogue can seem today. 2.) Plugging his own interests (Japan, etc.) into the work, often veering into self-indulgence. 3.) Bringing themes to the forefront. 4.) Moral ambiguity, resulting in villains who are sympathetic (Magneto) and heroes who cross lines traditional superheroes after the '40s never would (Wolverine, Gambit). 5.) Probably most importantly, the long run of comics, with character arcs taking years to pay off.

4. Neil Gaiman
Like Alan Moore, mostly influential for literary sophistication, but with some distinct differences. For one, Gaiman wore the literary business on his sleeve a bit more, to the point of threatening to become overly showy. For another, Watchmen, for all its achievements, is still a superhero story (or at least a story about superheroes), while Sandman is a fantasy comic. His mature-readers work showed that comics could once again reach a different audience (including that elusive, nigh-mythical female reader, depending on who you talk to) that might not be as into superheroes.

Those are some of the more obvious ones. Here’s some that I’d think could invite a little more debate.

5. Jerry Siegel
For inventing, along with Joe Shuster, the most basic building blocks of the superhero myth – the costume, the secret identity, the powers, the very name "Superman," which begat the word “superhero.”

6. Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson
Because everything that we associate with Batman comes pretty much from them (and I’d say it’s probably the most powerful mythos in all of comics), but I suppose primarily for the advent of the hero with motivation in tragedy.

7. Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein
For essentially inventing the horror comic with EC’s New Trend, creating a craze that really only lasted a couple years but is still immensely influential. For being one of the reasons why there was/is a Comics Code. For the “We’re all pals here” approach they took to fan interaction, which would pave the way for Stan Lee’s jocular narration and editorial style.

8. Harvey Pekar
If American Splendor wasn’t the first autobiographical comic, it’s the first one anybody seems to remember. Alt comics are almost nothing but autobio comics these days. I even kind of do one on this blog, however unserious it may be.

9. Warren Ellis
I don’t actually think Ellis gets enough credit for being influential. When superhero comics seemed mostly to be trying to do some sort of Silver Age revival in the late '90s, Ellis gave the middle finger to nostalgia and invented “widescreen comics” with The Authority. I enjoy Ellis comics, but Ellis’ Authority begat Mark Millar’s Authority, which begat Millar’s Ultimates, which begat Millar’s Civil War, which begat all the massive crossover business they’re doing now, so basically half of the most awful stuff at Marvel these days is traceable back to Ellis, unfortunately. Not that he’d care, I suppose.

10. Gardner Fox
Stan Lee created the first comics “universe,” but might Fox’s Earth-1/Earth-2 stuff have been the first comics cosmology? For good or ill, the idea of complex continuity you can actually catalogue stems from him.

11. Mort Weisinger
Not technically a writer, but all that wacky '50s stuff we associate with Superman reportedly came from him (and, if rumors are to be believed, as some sort of odd therapy), and '50s Superman is arguably the most infamous of all Supermen. Writers keep trying to shy away from the Fortress of Solitude and Super Pets and multicolored Kryptonite, but Weisinger’s mythology inevitably creeps back in.

12. Len Wein
Perhaps less for his work itself and more for what it led to. He created, after all, Wolverine, the X-Men, Swamp Thing and others, and as an editor helped bring Watchmen into being. Grant Morrison credits him as a big influence, and hey, speaking of him…

13. Grant Morrison
For being superhero comics’ foremost re-imaginer, freshening up stagnant properties by reintegrating elements that might have been dismissed as outdated seamlessly into a modern aesthetic, while at the same time taking the franchise in uncharted directions. His ultracompetent Batman is still the standard characterization for Bruce Wayne, and he made people believe that you could do an A-list Justice League roster again. Even on books like X-Men where his work is largely undone after he leaves, the abrupt break from years of wheel-spinning gave creators a new starting point, if only to reject everything Morrison’s done.

14. Brian Michael Bendis
The other half (along with Mark Millar, who’s not on the list largely because his work is an extension of Warren Ellis’) of the shape of Marvel today. His superhero work seems to de-emphasize plot; villains and fights are really only MacGuffins to facilitate characterization and interaction, and then shuffling around the status quo. However you feel about this approach, and the rise of “showrunners” at Marvel and DC, it’s here to stay for a while longer, at least. Bendis works long-term on a scale Claremont couldn’t even have conceived of.

15. J.M. DeMatteis and Keith Giffen
People still use “Bwa-ha-ha” to describe superhero comics like their Justice League that lampoon conceits of the genre while still playing by their rules. At best, DeMatteis and Giffen let the air out of the tires and keep us from taking our beloved superhero narratives too deadly seriously. At worst, it makes us complacent, believing that laughing at the occasional goofy third-string character is all it takes to make a comic book “mature.”

16. Roy Thomas
Plok lays it out, but in short, Thomas set a precedent for how a writer follows up on the Stan Lee stories that make up the foundation of the Marvel Universe (and thus defined how DC writers would eventually make use of their newfound continuity).

17. Steve Gerber
For bringing personal politics and satire into it, and showing that superhero comics could be a vessel to explore greater themes (while still being good superhero comics in their own right).

18. Denny O’Neil
O’Neil introduced “relevance” to superheroes (which we usually mean “superheroes dealing with real-world issues”) to modern comics with Green Lantern/Green Arrow, however hamfisted. Also, I guess, for his '70s refocusing of Batman as a grimmer sort of chap.

19. Frank Miller
His development of the “grim ‘n’ gritty” approach alone would make him on the list, as would Dark Knight Returns, but both of them together?

20. Carl Barks
He’s on the Onion’s list for the art, but he wrote all those stories, too! Aside from his contributions to Disney’s catalogue of trademarks, he showed that sheer quality could rise a comic creator from anonymity … that the people working on the comic were just as important, if not moreso, than the characters themselves.

21. Geoff Johns
I’m not totally confident on this one; I suppose it’s still too soon to know. His singular approach to comics is becoming very influential, but he seems so backward-looking that I can’t say what new he really brings to the table, you know? Part of my hesitancy is that I don’t really feel that I understand Johns. Like, I don’t like Bendis’ comics, but I feel that I can see where he’s coming from. Even the much-reviled-of-late Jeph Loeb … I believe I understand what he’s trying to do, or what he wants to do, and it’s just not to my taste. But Johns is a mystery to me. What is he thinking when he has Red Lanterns vomiting up blood and Black Hand licking Bruce Wayne’s skull and Black Adam gouging out Psycho-Pirate’s eyes and tearing people in two? I think I'd know what Bendis or Loeb or Morrison or Mark Waid were doing (or trying to do), but I have no idea why Johns thinks this is a good idea. I suspect his drives and goals are more complex than he’s usually given credit for, but then again perhaps not. I’d absolutely love to read a really in-depth interview with him, not just talking surface stuff and “what’s your favorite character/book/creator/universe?”, but process and intent. I want someone to ask, not in a hostile bitter-fan way but in a journalistic way, why he does these things, what he hopes to accomplish, how do you respond to critiques of your work, what his intended audience is, etc. But he holds a lot of clout (he may or may not be influential, remember!), so I could see a comics journalist not wanting to offend him and close himself off. I’d still like to read it.

Well, that was an unexpected sidetrack. I’d have saved that Johns stuff for a later post, but this pretty much sums it all up.

Back on topic … how does this list stack up, internet visitors? Any egregious oversights?

Seven Films for Seven Batmen, No. 2: THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

I’m not going to write a whole lot on The Dark Knight. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting somebody’s blogpost about this movie, and if you swing five dead cats, you will probably hit at least one very good one.

What I am gonna talk about is this: Why do I consider Batman Begins the second-worst (or, let's call it my second-least-favorite) Batman movie and this one the second best? I guess I feel that ultimately, Begins doesn’t commit the way Dark Knight does.

Batman Begins says it’s going to show you a Batman who could really be. So you get the cape that turns into a hang glider, the radios that fit into the ears, the heavy-duty military Batmobile. But it turns out you can’t really be Batman, and the filmmakers try to explain everything you can’t do with the magic ninja training. Except it feels like a cop-out, because the magic ninja training is so out of place in an otherwise realistic milieu.

Batman in The Dark Knight isn’t any more believable; in fact, he is even more fantastical a superhero. A Batman with some spectacle to him, again. But TDK doesn’t try to justify Batman the way Begins does. Batman can just appear and disappear because he is Batman. How does he turn everybody’s phone into that massive sonar grid? He just does, because he’s Batman. This Batman is not trying to prove he could exist, he just does exist.

Similarly, Gotham City in Batman Begins is boring and unengaging because you’ve got Wayne Manor and that neat el train and Arkham Asylum and the Narrows, but these fantasy locales are surrounded by what looks like plain ol’ Chicago. It feels a little incongruous to me. But The Dark Knight’s Gotham City is Chicago. No Narrows, no Arkham, no train, and Bruce Wayne’s living in a penthouse apartment. There’s not even a Batcave, more like a practical Bat-basement.

They’ve removed the more fantastical bits of Gotham City and the ninja terrorists, and what you’re left with is a completely real (at least as we experience it in film) environment … except for Batman, the Joker, and Two-Face. It’s a similar approach to what Frank Miller did on Daredevil, stripping away most of the comic book trappings and grounding it in something closer to resembling reality so that when people in costumes with superpowers finally do show up, their massive incongruity* lends them a real weight and power. The Joker is scarier all of a sudden because he appears in your world. Two-Face is freakier because you get the sense that nobody should be able to function with their face like that. There’s that wonderful scene where Gordon and Harvey Dent are on the roof of police headquarters, having a completely "normal" argument about procedure that you might see in any cop movie, but Batman is there, and he’s absolutely silent in this debate because someone like him has no place in it. He’s waiting for the ordinary people to finish so he can do what he needs to do, and what only he can do.

Of course, you couldn’t keep that tone up forever (and Nolan seems to have realized it, since he’s reportedly talking about not doing a third one), because the stated point of this movie is escalation; you’re watching the real world gradually get taken over by comic book people at the fringes. But while it lasts, it is actually wonderful. There’s almost as much difference between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight as there is between, say, Returns and Forever, or Batman & Robin and Begins, I’d argue. You’d think there was a whole new creative team on the movie. The Dark Knight makes Begins look so workmanlike, doesn’t it? (Although I'm not sure you could have TDK without first having done Begins. What do you think?)

One more thing I will say about this movie that I’ve not read elsewhere is to address a criticism of it. Some people say the Joker has no motivation. They say that a character who just wants to “watch the world burn” can’t be dynamic or truly interesting. This criticism extends to the comic book version of the Joker as well, and even I must admit that the “force of nature” Joker that Saint Morrison does can wear on me after awhile (the fallibility of the Joker in the Dini/Timm cartoon's pretty charming, actually, isn't it?). But this movie suggested something to me -- a possibility I can take or leave, but one I like to at least keep in mind:

The Joker is lonely.

It kind of explains a lot, right? The Joker doesn’t just kill you, he makes you look exactly like him. Remember in Miller's Dark Knight Returns how happy he is to see everyone in the audience with the exact same face? His whole “You complete me” thing in this movie? Him trying to make Batman understand, trying to make Harvey Dent understand, trying to make those people on the boat understand. Trying to make everybody understand. That doesn’t mean that he has to be honest. He makes up stories about his scars, he insists he hasn’t got a plan despite all the meticulous plots and reversals we’ve seen him carry out. Look, they say comedians aren’t as fun people to be around as you might think; that they tend to be lonely people who use humor to reach out to others. These big crazy crime sprees and conflicting stories are just to get your attention.

Understand, I’m not arguing for, like, a psychological realist approach to the Joker, because that is going to flame out real quick. I’m just suggesting that maybe the Joker could represent a certain kind of narcissistic loneliness, this sort of emotional void that swallows and destroys everything it comes into contact with. Watch the movie or read a Batman comic with this in mind and let me know if it works.

Next: One movie left, and it couldn’t be any other one. We haven’t a moment to lose!

(*-I know I called the “weak” Gotham City “incongruous,” and here I’m praising incongruity, but frankly, Wayne Manor and the train aren’t incongruous enough to have the same impact. Again, it’s a lack of commitment: either keep completely unified surroundings, or have Arkham Asylum be so incongruous that it becomes charmingly bizarre.)

Seven Films for Seven Batmen, No. 4: BATMAN FOREVER (1995)

Does this seem a little high in the rankings to you? Then strap yourselves in, because you and I are going for a little ride in a crazy-ass Batmobile with one giant fin sticking out the top.

I will be the first person to admit that this movie doesn’t make a whole lot of narrative sense. It’s one of those movies where the studio felt it was running a little long so they cut out huge swatches of it. Except they can’t didn’t out any action sequences because this is supposed to be a big summer blockbuster, so they cut out a lot of the explanatory material. You know that subplot where Bruce is having a recurring dream about this red leather book, and it seems like it’s important but it never gets resolved? It’s supposed to be that on the night of his parents’ funeral, Bruce read a diary entry that suggested Bruce asked his parents to go to a movie that night, making their deaths his fault, or so he reckons. This leads to a great deal of angst and guilt, and it’s made out to be that this is the “crime” he has been punishing himself for by being Batman all these years. But then Bruce rediscovers the book in the caves surrounding Wayne Manor and finds out his parents ended up taking him to a different movie (presumably at a different time) than the one he wanted, so he’s absolved of blame, and no longer motivated by revenge or guilt, he can be Batman … forever.

Okay, this is kind of crap for a couple of reasons, but at least it’s something: it’s the payoff for Bruce’s arc in the movie, as well as the reason for the unusual title, and it’s nowhere to be found in the finished product. They just leave it hanging and don’t offer any satisfying workaround explanation so you wonder why any of it was left in the final cut in the first place. There’s a few other, smaller bits of connective tissue missing as well. So yeah, taken as a whole film, this movie has a huge, gaping hole in at the most basic narrative level that prevents it from being a “good movie.”

But break this movie down into its components, and I find something very striking. Where Tim Burton in his first Batman movie brought a comic book character into films and brought a somewhat demented fairytale to life in his second, Joel Schumacher has in this movie taken the aesthetic of an actual Batman comic at its most sensational and added motion.

It’s the canted angles in the action scenes, the way the camera sometimes defies the 180-degree rule, the combination of bright primary and secondary colors with heavy blacks. People say Burton was an auteur and Schumacher merely a journeyman, but actually watch this movie and you see an aggressive stylishness. So aggressive, in fact, that sometimes he’s unable to get what he’s going for. Some of the more stylized shots (the Batmobile driving up a wall, the Batwing falling apart as it’s coming toward the camera) require heavy special effects, and 1995 CGI isn’t quite up to the task. But the intent isn’t just to adapt Batman the character, but Batman the comic book.

And the Batman in this movie is the one I recognize most from the comics. I maintain that Val Kilmer’s Batman is the closest we’ve ever seen in a movie to the Batman found in Grant Morrison’s JLA series. He’s confident, he’s competent. Fiercely intelligent, able to size up any situation in a moment. Damaged, but not in a loud sort of way; very high-functioning. Less cruel and brutal than Michael Keaton. He’s got a sense of humor, but it’s glib and clipped (the “Thanks” when takes the guard’s hearing aid, the way he calls Dr. Meridian’s work “Insightful; naïve, but insightful,” and the way he responds to her attraction to his black rubber with that dismissive “Try a fireman; less to take off”). He conveys urgency a lot better than Burton’s portrayal: Keaton walks at a criminal head-on like a slasher movie villain, but Kilmer is always running. I’m almost positive neither Burton movie uttered the word “superhero,” but it’s all over this one. He’s the only movie Batman who could really replicate that famous Neal Adams shot, and he’s the only movie Batman to date that would join the Justice League; the JLA would want Keaton but change their minds after meeting him, George Clooney would shrug that he’s too busy in that "dopey dad" way, Christian Bale wouldn’t think he belongs, but Kilmer? He’s the guy Superman would call “the most dangerous man on Earth,” he’s the guy who would deduce the Hyperclan are really evil Martian invaders and bring the Batplane to fight the Injustice Gang but also have a flying saucer sitting somewhere in the Batcave (although to the Bale-Batman’s credit, he’s the one who would think to outbid Lex Luthor for the Mirror Master’s mercenary services).

And this bigger, more sensational, more comicky Batman demands a more comicky plot. For this reason I like the Riddler’s brain-draining Box. We’re no longer dealing with crime bosses in clown makeup and angry mutants planning child kidnappings. This is supervillainy. The Riddler is only stealing money for production capital, as he says. What he really wants to steal are your thoughts, your intelligence, your secrets. This Riddler is recession-proof. Money can buy you power, but information is power; why steal one when you can steal the other?

Jim Carrey’s Riddler isn’t quite "my" Riddler, but he shows flashes of being a great supervillain in his own right nonetheless. I do think the “obsessed stalker” angle is a workable one. The main problem is he starts to get on your nerves. I don’t know that his performance is any more restrained than Frank Gorshin’s in the Batman TV show, but Gorshin seems to be working peaks and valleys. He’ll be manic energy one moment and then calm down the next; there is, I’ll argue when we get to Batman ’66, a surprising subtlety to his performance. But Carrey is almost always cranked up to 11. It becomes exhausting.

Still, there are some moments where he stops performing, where he stops doing schtick for an audience, and really gets into a certain megalomaniacal headspace. There’s a swell sequence where he returns to his apartment after killing his boss, walks up to his mechanical “Guesser” fortune-telling machine and says in a gently gleeful half-confession: “Guess what I did today?” And once in awhile, you really do get the feeling that he’s the Riddler and Val Kilmer is Batman, and you’re seeing a real comic; sometimes Carrey says “Batman” and he really means it.

Tommy Lee Jones, however, doesn’t have a whole lot to redeem him. Coincidentally, the Riddler and Two-Face are my favorite Batman villains, but they’re not really recognizable in this movie. Two-Face’s coin-flipping thing never ends up really meaning anything; when he and the Riddler invade Wayne Manor and his flip lands “good side” up, he just flips it again until he gets the result he wants. I could say that it puts the lie to Harvey Dent’s supposed reliance on the coin, that it’s all just psychobabble excuses to hide the fact that he’s actually a horrible, horrible person, but I’m not sure I want to let anybody off the hook for this. Jones is cranked up to 11 all the time as well. There's no duality at all coming from this Two-Face; he’s scarred side up all the time without a trace of the other side. If anyone could benefit from peaks and valleys, it’s him.

But back to the good things about this movie, it also does some interesting things with that “real world”/”comic book world” interface, and it does this primarily through Chris O’Donnell’s Robin and Nicole Kidman’s Dr. Chase Meridian.

Despite references to Metropolis (and thus Superman, indirectly) in this movie, it seems to be that Batman is a new idea; he’s not the latest link in a chain going back to some “Golden Age.” He was one of the first superheroes in this world, if not the first, if not the only. Bruce Wayne invented Batman as a way to deal with his trauma, as a way of solving the problem of crime in Gotham City. But Dick Grayson doesn’t have to invent Robin because there’s precedent now; he sees Batman and goes “Oh, this is an option for me” and goes about becoming a superhero. It’s an idea you can find in Watchmen and a few other places, actually, with Hooded Justice dressing up in a costume and Nite Owl and a few others being inspired by him – all it takes to turn an "ordinary" fictional world into a superhero world is one guy to put on a costume and get the ball rolling.

Dr. Meridian is also, I’d argue, more interesting than you might think. She comes on almost ridiculously strong in her first few scenes with Batman with the snappy banter and aggressively vampy smile, and it’s almost too much until you see her interact with Bruce Wayne, and suddenly she’s dialed it back by a magnitude of five (here’s someone working peaks and valleys). There’s still some nice repartee, but it’s not so showy and over-the-top; it’s playful and not vamping. And then it starts to make sense. Dr. Meridian is this movie’s version of Batman Returns’ Max Schreck – an ordinary person trying way too hard to seem like one of Gotham’s extraordinary figures. On the roof of police headquarters, she comes short of actually saying that she’s trying to be Catwoman. But where Schreck’s villainy is utterly trumped by Catwoman’s supervillainy (thanks again for that notion, plok), once Dr. Meridian actually kisses Batman, she decides it was a hollow goal and turns back. It turns out she’d rather be with Bruce Wayne (played in a low-key fashion by Kilmer; where Bale throws people off his trail by pretending to be an idiot playboy, Kilmer does so, whether this was his intent or not, by playing Bruce as a staggeringly dull individual). She picks the real guy over the fantasy, however boring the real guy might be; Chase Meridian outgrows Batman.

See, there is interesting stuff happening in this movie, it’s just buried under a lot of gunk, and I’m not sure exactly who to blame for it. Schumacher for being the director? The studio execs for demanding a more commercial movie than Batman Returns? The writers for not putting enough in the script? (There’s this little “dream warden” doll that’s half white, half black, and there’s Bruce talking about “two sides” to himself, and it seems like it should link to Two-Face somehow but it never does.) Jones and Carrey, for just being them? Hard to say. It’s a shame, though. But the good stuff always shines through for me.

Short version: A seriously flawed movie with only the most awesome of intentions.

Next: Three to go!