Do Not Multiply Non-Entities

Or, Marvel’s Cosmic Clusterf@*#.

Hello there, Bloggers. Let’s talk comics.

I recently acquired and read Neil Gaiman and John Romita, Jr.’s six-or-seven issue miniseries Eternals. Some parts of which I had read before, as some of you may remember; and I liked it then, but I like it a lot more now.

Mostly, for the simplest of reasons.

I’ve read a lot of reviews of this Eternals, and I understand that I like it a lot more than many others do. Moreover, I think their complaints are mostly well-founded, so let me acknowledge something that bothered me about it myself: in many places it does seem like a rush job. We never do get back to Thena’s remarks about the Eternals liking mountaintops, the most promisingly Gaimanesque meditation in the series; neither the intent nor the frustration of Ajak’s machinations is made particularly clear; and even JRJR’s consistently stellar pencilling falters mysteriously in a place or two. Enabling features of the plot jump in and out a little bit, seeming to owe something to Grant Morrison’s insistence that the reader run faster to keep up better. And in the end, most damningly, it turns out that this is to be neither Kirby’s Morpheus nor Gaiman’s Mister Miracle — because although those expectations most definitely come into play, six issues is not enough for them to come to fruition.

Now I’ll drop in a couple positives, which I think most critics have acknowledged, but underrated. The art, outside of those incredibly strange and un-JRJR-like hiccups, is out-and-out fantastic. Also, the framing of the story of the Eternals within the amnesiac-protagonist scenario is on the surface very pleasant and stimulating, and down a little deeper is just a damn well-chosen approach all around, with a lot more sophistication to it than meets the eye on first reading. The dialogue is of course beautifully-written, and the primary ambition of the series is I think realized very well…so well, indeed, that many who read through it, seem to have found this accomplishment easy to brush aside.

But the simplest thing, though it is far from unconnected to these other things, is this:

Marvel’s worldbuilding sucks.

By which I mean, it may be to your taste, but it isn’t to mine any longer. And it would be easy to blame it all on Jim Starlin’s Thanos — love Starlin, but so sick of Thanos! — honestly, I hunger for new Thanos stories about as much as I hunger for new Star Wars sequels! — except even Thanos isn’t the problem with this taste. Thanos, you see, is only like pepper — and no one just wants to eat frickin’ pepper all day every day either, but there’s a limited amount of damage that overseasoning can do to taste.

More significant than seasoning, you see, is what the food’s actually made out of.

In the great Kevin Bacon game of Marvel’s cosmic characters, the degrees of separation are all going down, down, down, as the parade of anthropomorphized abstracts grows longer and more childishly completist. Heck, I just found out that there’s something called Anthropomorphos, which is the embodiment of the cosmic force that causes cosmic forces to be anthropormorphized! Which as I hope you can see is not like having everything you eat taste like pepper anymore, it’s like having everything you eat taste like mango — mango spaghetti and mango steak, and mango scrambled eggs and mango mashed potatoes! Mango baked beans! Washed down with a big foamy glass of mango root beer!

For Christ’s sake, take it away…!

…The central problem being, that in Kirby’s hands “cosmic” stuff — cosmic power, cosmic energy, as he used to like to say! — stood for something quite specific, in a storytelling sense. In Ditko’s hands, too, the world of magic he created in graphic form was meant to evoke a particular thing, a particular philosophy to be included or referenced in the handling of particular characters. And Stan Lee, for all or any of his other failings, got what all this was supposed to be about, and ploughed it into his own worldbuilding strategies. Those who followed these guys, then, were sufficiently influenced by them in a direct way that they got it too: in my beloved Seventies, they inflected it all in different ways, but they had a firm grasp of the implicit rules of that game.

In the Eighties, this changed a little. New creators came to the fore, who inflected the shared-universe concept, that went all the way from Spider-Man up to Eternity — I’ll return to that in a moment — in yet another way. But too, in the Eighties, new creators came to the fore who did not get the implicit rules of that game, and in the fullness of time they became influences themselves. And that’s when things really started to go off the rails.

The Kevin Bacon game gets vicious on Wikipedia — if you start with the entry on, say, “Eternals”, you’re only a couple of clicks away from concluding that Marvel has just plain lost it, and then just to make sure it never gets found again has covered it in about a thousand tons of the smelliest garbage they could scrape off the bottom of the barrel. The incestuousness of the Cosmic Powers grows and grows, until it takes on a genuinely unsavoury aspect…not to mention, an unsalutary one. And is there no other approach to a shared universe than this one, one wonders, helplessly staring at screen after screen full of unsightly, unimaginative guck? Is there no mystery, no magic anymore? Is there no room to move at all, in this overcluttered attic of a Grade C sci-fi poseable-toy Heaven? Abraxas and Vance Astro stand within spitting distance of each other; Gwen Stacy, Mr. Sinister, and Eternity are practically roommates, close enough to argue about the dishes and the laundry. Between every meaningful worldbuilding concept in Marvel’s universe lies miles of pointlessly stringy connective tissue, good for nothing except making Stan’s Pop Art eat itself…and the original wide-eyed import of the Kirby dots and the Ditko ribbons is left far behind.

For, again, the simplest of reasons: because it seems to have been forgotten, at Marvel, that the cosmic stuff is not sufficient by itself to build anything like a world.

Because all real worldbuilding is local.

I said I’d get back to Spider-Man, so here I am. I think I read it on Warren Ellis’ site, a quote from someone or other that went something like, “all good science fiction is the triumph of character over worldbuilding.” A valuable thought, indeed — who cares about the worldbuilding, if it’s got nothing to do with the character? But of course we might flip this principle inside-out, to have it say: “the only worldbuilding that even really exists, is properly called character development.” Which is something that was never lost on any of Marvel’s more talented creators, from Kirby to Claremont (although Claremont, too, ended his Eighties experiment by going more than a little off the rails). This is the kind of thing that gets you as close as comics can to a Sistine Chapel, or a Jacob’s Ladder: a hidden order to the universe. But the instant you forget it, all you produce is a bunch of bathroom-stall graffiti, that to any outside observer just looks like something that would be better painted over. Not order, at all. Much less beauty, charm, or glamour. The urge to play with the big cosmic pieces of the puzzle has turned Marvel’s cosmic landscape, in my estimation, to a choked stream that carries no water; as a backdrop to character it’s worthless, even counterproductive, and as a springboard for imaginative flights of fancy it’s been thoroughly neutralized. Pretty far from stone soup at this point, it’s more like a big pot of cement — and no one wants to eat cement. It should probably just be thrown out.

Enter Gaiman and Romita.

Much of what Kirby adorned his Eternals concept with is gone from their effort, of necessity. Can’t help that: neither of them is Jack. Over at DC, you can see even more clearly that Kirby’s latter-day work had become so much of a personal statement that an equitable assignment of legal rights in the property was almost superfluous, at least in terms of keeping other people’s hands off it: has anyone but Jack ever written a Darkseid or an Orion that was more than a cipher, when compared with the genuine articles? No, of course not, and it’s no knock on anybody to say so — how could they, after all? They don’t have the same things invested in Orion that Jack did. It isn’t their story. Maybe they just weren’t born in the right time, or the right place…and that isn’t their fault either, it’s just the way things are.

Over at Marvel, the Eternals are similarly too hot to handle — to even begin, you either have to peel them away from their own story, ignoring the concept behind them as best you can (what an indignity!), or you have to jettison the parts of their story that resist anything but an authentically Kirbyesque treatment in order to get at the concept in the first place.

Gaiman and Romita get rid of an awful lot of Kirby’s own handiwork; but they do get back down to the core concept.

More importantly, they blow off a lot of non-Kirby stuff that got glued on to it.

And most importantly, they manage to make me care about the shared-universe concept at Marvel more than I have in decades. Seriously, I’m not joking, in decades: because they offer something as a side-dish to the mango-cement soup of Marvel’s infernal, interminable slurry of worldbuilding.

That is: realizing that all worldbuilding is local, they make it local. By 2007, the “realistic” elements that always provided the unique tension of Marvel comics had been transmuted to the “realistic” elements that operate best in other companies’ riffs on Marvel: super-powers as ubiquitous, superheroes as measurable segments of populations…all the long-underwear stuff taken out of the realm of the psychological, and into the realm of the sociological, with subcultural praxis and governmental juridiction created and apportioned, “as if superheroes were real”. Real, and almost obnoxiously familiar. Quotidian. Which can certainly make for interesting stories…

But perhaps not so much at Marvel, eh? I mean, the sociology of the heroes is bad enough, but when you start getting into the group dynamics of the cosmic folks…!

Mango!

But note Gaiman’s clever opportunism, here, his casual virtuosity: using the old amnesiac “Nine Princes In Amber”-type F/SF plot, he inverts the whole thing, and I do mean the whole thing. And, sure…I guess that looks like a pretty simple trick, but could you do it as slickly as he does? Maybe we don’t quite get the Eternals out of Neil that we might have, in this case…and we certainly don’t get Kirby’s Eternals…but when critics of this series note that its chief goal seemed to be a simple refurbishment of an old concept, I believe they speak truer than they know: because what’s really being refurbished here is the viability of Marvel’s shared universe itself. And, not before time! My God, how refreshing it is to take the sociological superheroes out of the spotlight, if only for an hour or two! That I’m far more interested in Mark Curry, M.D., and Sersi’s friend Abi, than I am in Iron Man or Yellowjacket, is something I think Gaiman and Romita and I evidently share…all too often this new Marvel, the one that riffs on itself, does so with such a heavy hand and such blunt fingers that it actually becomes rather revolting. Boring, too. But Gaiman and Romita, even operating in what I can only assume was an unusually cramped compositional space, know better than to use a heavy hand. Because they’re aware that all worldbuilding is local, see? And they’re also aware of what the Kirby dots and Ditko ribbons are supposed to be for. Well, those are both the same thing, really…

And so in a way it’s as though they heard my plea: if I must have this neo-Marvel thing that borrows so heavily from Astro City and Ultra and Top Ten and Invincible and all the rest of it that it forgets those things are borrowing from it…then can I at least be permitted to understand how things are structured in it? Can it at least be apparent what things are important in it, and what things aren’t? You may not have liked it as much as I did…you may have felt as though it would’ve been irresponsible for you not to point out its shortcomings…but I endured Mark Gruenwald’s refurbishing of Kirby’s Eternals the first time Marvel tried this, and let me tell you frankly: these are Golden Days, my friend. Golden. DAYS. And I still miss the old familiar super-types of my youth, but Gaiman and Romita have made the Eternals into the superheroes now, at any rate what the superheroes used to be, and so I miss my old days much less: because no matter how sophisticated the storytelling, this kind of thing has a kid’s pure need for identification down at the bottom of it — and how can my inner kid identify with Iron Man or Mr. Fantastic any longer, when they just don’t care about the same things I do? The Eternals, however, do — manifestly, obviously, clearly and concisely. The Eternals are the wise-children here, and it’s their world — the ordinary Marvel superheroes are just grown-ups stuck in their jobs, trying to shake off anaesthesia — perhaps even, amnesia? — long enough to figure out how to navigate this fantasy wish-fulfillment scenario in the first place. Which used to be such second nature to them. But at which they now suck.

The Eternals, of course, have never sucked. But now, they not-suck in a compensatory way.

And I have to tell you: whew, I needed that. Neil and JRJR have worked a wonder, here. They’ve accomplished something I thought was impossible. They’ve made me interested in this game again. So, imperfections aside:

Astonishingly good job, there! And actually, if you think about it for more than ten seconds…quite bloody clever, too.

(Was going to post a GIGANTIC long ramble about Alan Moore here, specifically on Lost Girls and Black Dossier, but it’s so damn huge I don’t know when I’m going to manage to finish it off in good condition. But this one was lighter — as its subject is lighter — so here it is.

Subject, I suppose, to some revision…)

Flashback! To “Sin City…!”

And I may throw in another word or two about “Superman Returns”, too.

But for now…

Well, it looks marvellous, but what the hell is it? I really haven’t been sure for some time now that Frank Miller’s vaunted noirishness isn’t just a sort of collage, that works very well sometimes and verges on the ridiculous at others…but seeing this movie wasn’t at all an encounter with the parts of Frank I don’t care for, and a realization that I don’t like them much. Instead it was an adventure into the hilarious collapse of Millerian tics and tricks, that may have made me like him a bit less, but absolutely made me love him a lot more.

Let me explain: Sin City is a musical.

Seriously, it’s a musical. Notwithstanding the absence of any singing and dancing, no other form of film fits with what’s on display here; strip “Siddown You’re Rocking The Boat” out of it, and replace the goofy pastels with the strict hypercolour, and what you’ve got more than anything is the queerest of all possible knuckleball homages to Guys And Dolls, that is capable of being imagined — because only musicals indulge in this sort of massive jamming-up of a million exaggerated story motifs, that exposes their intrinsic over-the-top silliness. Really, consider the environment of Sin City: I almost laughed my head off when the Discover card was mentioned, it was so thoroughly sour a note…nothing here signifies anything greater than a swirling colour on a soap bubble, the whole thing patently fails to exist in any meaningful way at all, so…people have Discover cards? I’m sorry, I just don’t believe it. Silly? The silliness on display here is awesome. Even the aggressively non-black-and-white black-and-white-ness signals that it’s all just a dream, and the sex stuff, Good Lord the fabulously stunted SEX STUFF…

Heh. “Stuff”. Oh yes, this is a boy’s club, no question about it. But so what? So we get a collision of Quentin Tarantino and Frank Miller, so what’s the problem? Partly due to the “musical” mashing-up, and partly due to the schlockiness of the exercise, and partly — it’s a thought I’ll return to in a future post — due to the replacement of fairly anonymous drawn figures with fairly specific-to-individual lit faces, Sin City sends itself up so raucously that you can’t help cheering it on. At a certain point the whole thing’s a lot like watching MST3K cover a slasher movie you really like…oh, the evil priests and politicians, oh the noble sacrifices, oh the pointless “survivors”, holy cow what a medley of cliche it all is! But noir, it ain’t. Because everyone here is an innocent, and no one here is an adult, and goddamnit if Sin City’s about anything, for heaven’s sake you know it isn’t…I mean, don’t look for meaning in the armed vixens of the Prostitute’s Sector, you know? You won’t find it, and besides you’ll look ridiculous by seeming to think it’s there. Don’t mistake the dance numbers for the exposition, is what I’m saying, because this whole thing’s a lot more Rocky Horror than it is Red Harvest, and if you don’t know that going in…

Well, that’s one thing. But if you still don’t know it when you’re coming out, then it’s entirely possible that you may not love Frank Miller’s bullshit as much as I do, and it is bullshit, in fact it’s utter bullshit…!

But it’s magnificent bullshit, too, that’s the thing. That’s what I love about it. It is absurdly singleminded play-acting, with a punch-in-the-face clear aesthetic backing it up, and if it were not so absolutely brilliant it would be absolutely awful…but then again if it were not so absolutely awful, it wouldn’t be so absolutely brilliant. A musical? Oh, definitely, a musical comedy to be sure; but edgy, which is where the brilliant failure comes in, because Sin City is such a harmless piece of fluff trying, and failing, to make itself look so threatening and portentous, that it has to make you smile. Because it is just so damn cute, when it tries to do that! Adorable little vapid thing, you’d have to be an ogre to dislike it.

I expected to dislike it.

Instead, I found it absolutely fascinating.

And I seriously may have to re-read ASBAR now. I’m telling you.

But first, I may have to re-watch Superman Returns, because I’m pretty sure it’s sort of the anti-Sin City. No, not the anti-Batman Begins, the anti-Sin City! Because everything so stupendously not-to-be-believed S*E*R*I*O*U*S about Sin City is executed just as moronically in Superman Returns — the smugly-clinging false poignancy, the dopey sacrifices, the patronizing tone — yes, they both go desperately wrong from the very first decision…

But Sin City’s great at wearing its incoherent genre-retardation on its sleeve, and Superman Returns isn’t, and I’ll tell you why. Because Superman Returns didn’t have the guts to be a comedy, and it didn’t have the guts to be a musical. As either of these, it could’ve worked — but it chose another kind of self-consciousness, and so it blew itself up. Who believes that Superman Returns was a story that needed to be told? No one, I hope, because it wasn’t; there are probably even people out there who loved Steven Spielberg’s Hook (I haven’t checked lately, but I’m sure there are), who felt vaguely insulted by SR’s aphasic yuppie-pomo young-adult nostalgioporn. And like Sin City — like Hook — SR was not really about anything, or at least not about anything that the viewer didn’t drag into the theatre along with him, but the difference is that where Hook of necessity had few illusions about what its own reflexive structure was in service to, and Sin City waded into its illusions with such great and perverse gusto that it inevitably attracted a kind of forgiveness for insisting on having them in the first place, Superman Returns lacked both conviction, and something to have a conviction about. Hook was not, I think, a very smart movie…but without question it was an intelligent one, and since that intelligence was the only thing it was really trying to achieve, it sufficed. Sin City, by contrast, wasn’t very intelligent at all…but, it was smart enough to get the job done, when it counted. SR, though, failed so terribly not because it lacked these qualities, but because it couldn’t figure out how to use them to compensate for its shortcomings; unable to manage complexity (and it should probably never have tried for such a species of complexity in the first place), it didn’t have much simplicity to fall back on, either. “Superman Leaves” would have been a much better movie, either way…but of course that was the very first decision, and it was dead wrong, and Superman never recovered from wanting to be something other than Superman.

Sin City makes the same kind of initial mistake, of course. If there was ever a more misguided idea for a comic-book movie, I’m not sure I’ve heard of it.

But!

Then you’ve got all this zany distorted Guys And Dolls energy surging through it, and somehow it triumphs. Because somehow, improbably, it manages to recognize itself for exactly what it is. So bravo, Frank, you nutcase! And so sorry, Superman. Because it really was a shame that you turned out like you did.

Poor, poor Superman.

Forgotten Comics: Carmine Infantino’s “Psychedelic Colour” Period

There is a Beast/Wonder Man one-shot Avengers issue.

There is Star Wars, where I believe he first begins to screw around with this.

There is the Detective Comics #500 Batman/Deadman team-up.

And I know there’s more I’m missing, but I really love Infantino’s “psychedelic” work.  Was it him colouring himself?  Was it him pairing himself, or being paired, with a particular colourist or colourists?  This, too, was a style that might have caught on, but somehow didn’t…explanations?  Examples?  Disputations?

Wouldn’t you just freak out to see him do that on, say, a Silver Surfer comic?

The Title-Drawers

Now, I confess I don’t know much about how this works.  Most of the titles in comic books that I can think of off the top of my head are by writer/artists.  Like, Kirby’s Fourth World (and by the way, no disrespect to any artists involved, but for Christ’s sake throw away the dust-jackets for those Omnibus editions!):  there Jack goes absolutely over the top, by providing not one but two introductory splashes with narration and titles per issue…and wow, man.  He blows my mind, it’s a whole new style, it’s 100% gripping.  But look at those titles he draws, in the same style he would later use for Marvel’s Eternals and Captain America…you know the one, it’s that creepy quasi-horror thing.  Unfortunately he had less room for narration at Marvel, and of course there was no two-splash approach.  I guess it’s tempting to compare what Jack does in, say, The Forever People, to what TV shows do with their pre-credit teasers…but having looked at it carefully with an eye to just this comparison…no, he’s doing something just a bit different, and it’s really rather interesting…

But as I said:  writer/artist.

The other example that springs instantly to mind is John Byrne:  big, square, solid-coloured BLOCKS of titles, sometimes eating up as much as a third of a page all by themselves.  Very dramatic look, lots of “wow”.  Say what you will about Byrne (and I do, all the time), but you look at those titles and I believe you can see a thought-process.

And then there’s Eisner, but c’mon.  That’s too easy:  Eisner’s Eisner for heaven’s sake.  Why that’s like saying you can always know a Marshall Rogers book from its titles, it simply goes without saying.

No, what I really want to know from you, Bloggers…is who else designs super-distinctive and dramatic titles on the introductory splash, that I might be forgetting?

And, how’s it done?  Is it always the penciller, who does it?  Is it (or has it been in the past) sometimes the writer?

I just don’t know.

As Gil Gerard might say:  “enlighten me.”

Moon Of The Falling Grass

It’s a certain season here, in Vancouver. Springtime, and the cherry trees all blossoming; clear blue skies.

Some rain.

To get right to it: they say these things come in threes, but here’s hoping that isn’t true. A short while ago, an old ersatz uncle of mine, a formative influence, a great iconoclast, an artist, a thinker…after a protracted battle with cancer finally died, going down at last below the molten tin roof of the sea. An inconceivable event, but it happened.

And then my friend Dave Watson died last Tuesday, and I missed his funeral service on Sunday due to logistical complications involving buses and ferries…which is an awful, awful shame, since I would’ve really liked to pay my respects.

I’ll pay them here, I guess.

Dave, like my faux-Uncle, was a pretty well-known guy around these parts, and although only in his mid-forties I’d say he was already pretty qualified to be known, just as my Uncle was, as a Builder Of This Province; which is the highest honour I think we have, though it’s strictly an unofficial one. One of our few local writers with a genuine voice and style of his own, he worked at the Georgia Straight newspaper for twenty-odd years before being diagnosed with cancer at the age of 44. I met him through his girlfriend, later his wife, a very close friend of mine…and over the years I found him to be, unfailingly, a welcome sight. I was by no means one of his close confidantes, but we shared many common interests, amusements, and perspectives…we were present together at marriages and memorials…and in short I liked him a lot, and always enjoyed talking with him.

It’s a terrible pity that he’s gone.

Cancer, of course.

I think there’s always a sense, when a contemporary dies, that the register of time has been powerfully shaken somehow. Older generations bequeath to us a bottomless fund of emotional value that, whether it was good or bad, can never be fully expended; they are part of the primeval landscape of our childhood, and as such their status as landmarks can never really disappear…even if, sadly, they themselves must do so. But since we inherit ourselves from them, their bequest can’t be out-spent: the world we (often blithely) walk about in is made on their bones, too, and so in a sense it’s as timeless as they were, and can’t be demolished even by the shuddering fact of their deaths…

…Though these are always tragic.

But, it’s not the same with contemporaries: there’s no bequest there. They’re not given to us. We have to invest our own money in them, bank our own precious attention in the bond of their lives, on purpose. They’re born into the landscape along with us, and they wander around in it as we do; they give us nothing. Rather, they share with us the experience of the world.

Until one day. inexplicably, they vanish right out of it.

And the bond reaches maturity.

Whereupon so much comes free, that was once caught up, that we hardly know what to make of it all — there is an instant where it seems a clock that has been stuck silent on a wall finally ticks, and a bell finally rings…and we are not prepared. We are not prepared for time to give such evidence of its passing; we are not prepared to become, so suddenly, so much older.

I heard of Dave’s death on Friday, I think…and I am just starting to feel that he is missing. Where did he go? I can’t find that guy anywhere. And believe me, I’ve looked.

Fucking cancer. I’ll tell you, it’s making a real enemy of me these days.

I have another friend who has it, a very close, very talented, very vivacious friend. New mother; big laugher; joy to be around. But right now she is in tough against it, in fact come to very fierce grips with it: she and cancer are eye to eye and tooth to tooth, and I don’t even know what round this fight of hers is in, though I clutch the betting stubs tightly in my fists. To be as old as I’ll be if she doesn’t make it is something I don’t want to think about at all…and so I don’t.

Well, because I refuse to.

Because this may indeed be the moon of the falling grass, I guess…but it can’t go on forever, can it?

No, no…surely it can’t.

I don’t usually do obituaries on this blog, as you may know. I felt oddly moved to mark the death of Kurt Vonnegut (perhaps because I always associated him with my sick friend!), and I couldn’t figure out how not to mark the death of Steve Gerber, because I almost felt that in some peculiar way I knew him. More accurately: that he, somehow, knew me. And whether this was true or not, it felt the same: after Gerber’s death, a certain fund somewhere reached maturity, and a certain bell somewhere rang, and I had a massive realization of a certain kind…which one day I’ll get to talking about, probably.

These more close-to-home deaths are different, though. I don’t really want to mark them in a blog; after all I am marking them in real life all the time, in phone conversations and coffee meetings and sometimes even eulogies. And, what if the deaths just keep on coming? I can’t afford to make a job out of this sort of thing, you know, if they do. I made an abortive attempt to post about the death of my Uncle John a little while ago, but it didn’t take…well, if all flesh is grass, all memorial posts on this blog are doubly so…and I’m glad it didn’t take, because this was a box I didn’t need to put that stuff into. Because it properly belongs in quite a different box, you see?

But damn it if this doesn’t appear to be the moon of the falling grass after all…so this, yes, I’ll mark. Late April and early May, as I believe Eliot pointed out, can be a real bitch of a time. Cherry blossoms, and all.

Poor Dave. I wish I could tell you that he didn’t suffer, but he did. However he found some accomodations for himself too, I believe…and this will probably have to do, as far as solace goes. He lived in the shadow of a green mountain with his wife, my old friend, and they got a puppy. He found a way to do some writing, towards the end. I already know it’s never easy for the sick person to think about having to leave the world…but Dave was a very smart man, and doubtless he discovered some things through the accomodations he found, that I am not privileged to know.

Not yet.

I suppose I will find them out eventually. In the meantime knowing him was my privilege, and as far as accomodations go, he will always find as many as he wants in my memory of him. Hardwood floors, Dave. Broadband. Marx Brothers movies. Edamame. Grass.

Please stay as long as you like.

The Difference Between Ninety Minutes, and One Hundred And Ten Minutes

When it’s overtime in the playoffs, and you’re talking about balancing out bullshit penalties…

The one at ninety minutes is a gut-punch.

But the one at a hundred and ten is a rifle bullet.

Sad thing is, this was the most exciting playoff game I’d seen so far this year.  And what an amazing story!

I blame Bettman for its anticlimactic ending.  Oh, well…at least it was a tie game to begin with.  So many times this year I saw good late third-period rallies squelched by marginal calls, I sometimes wondered why I was bothering to watch at all.

In a word:  bogus.

Esoteric Star Wars

Just thought you’d like to know: our friend Adam Star has created a spin-off from his fantastic Cosmic Cube, called Esoteric Star Wars.

I’ll be spending tomorrow reading it. That is, if I can keep myself from wandering down to the LCS and spending what’s left of my dough snapping up the next three volumes of Moore and Williams’ Promethea.

Which is not certain.

Okay, enjoy!

Please Weigh In On Your Favourite Superman Creators!

We should actually be doing this all the time, Internet. And I don’t even know why we aren’t. But let’s start, because Superman is awesome! Why, he can fly, and everything!

Let’s all do four.

Number one for me, both categories, is Jerry and Joe. Rough, vibrant ideas punching you in the face! Nothing like it.

Okay, better do four outside that…because if there’s anybody out there who doesn’t put Jerry and Joe as tops in this book, you may be visiting the wrong blog.

Okay, four each, outside the masters. To quote Millar, “poofs first” (this means writers):

Apostle #1: The sainted Maggin, who dared to have Lois fall in love with Clark, and who himself loved Lex Luthor, maybe even a little too much.

Apostle #2: Cary Bates, of course.

Apostle #3: You’re not ready for this, but…it’s got to be John Byrne. Superman’s world through Clark’s eyes…that was a neat idea. …No YOU shut up!

Apostle #4: Kurt Busiek and Geoff Johns, for their wonderful “Clark Kent: Reporter!” series in OYL. I wouldn’t've complained if it had gone on for TYL.

And, artists, AKA the ruggedly masculine ones:

Apostle #1: Are you kidding? Curt Swan. So many pictures of Clark Kent getting into elevators….!

Apostle #2: Without a doubt, Jack Kirby. His Superman faces blow my mind. DC erred, egregiously.

Apostle #3: Neal Adams. World’s most mindblowingly dynamic Superman.

Apostle #4: Throwing you a curve ball, it’s the man who made me believe in Metropolis as a place again — Adam Kubert.

Jerry and Joe top all, of course…and I’m not just saying that, just take a look, or read a caption! But even if you don’t agree with this patently-obvious truth…

Let’s hear your views!

Grudgingly, I have to admit that if you don’t esteem Jerry and Joe…well, then, you get two more spots to screw around with. Fair enough. You’re crazy, in my estimation, and ought to be locked up. But tastes, unfortunately, differ.

So…

Well?

Let’s have it!

Bend Sinister

Hello, Bloggers. Today I’d like to briefly discuss the assassination of character in Marvel Comics.

Here’s something I found Omar Karindu saying about his favourite supervillains, as I dutifully follwed a Neilalien link:

“I like so many of them….

Hmm, I guess today I’ll say the Mad Thinker. Here’s a guy who’s so cripplingly good at understanding things that he can predict everything down to the last detail, but he can’t quite wrap his head around that last little bit, that non-mathematical datum that’d explain the world to him and let him do whatever he wanted. And it makes him bitter, vicious, warped, and, worst of all, uncreative. He’s the anti-imagination, the inability to generate concepts. And as such, a perfect foil to all of those smart, imaginative heroes who consistently beat him by thinking outside the box. He’s like a hack writer whose plots get away from him in search of better authors.”

A marvellously concise summation of the symbolic meaning that makes this classic Kirby villain tick, don’t you think?

And until Omar put it just that way, I hadn’t realized quite what had bothered me about Dwayne McDuffie’s first issue of post-Civil War Fantastic Four. It isn’t really McDuffie’s fault, of course — he was painted into a corner by Mark Millar’s (and to a lesser degree, JMS’) consistent portrayal of Reed Richards as a warning that there may be Soulless Intellectuals Among Us, so he had to paint himself out.

But there was something that grated on me in that, and now I know what it is.

To justify Reed’s hugely out-of-character behaviour in Civil War, McDuffie has him reveal that it was all for a necessary Greater Good — and Reed invites the Mad Thinker to his lab, to show him why.

Here comes the first thing I thought was a bit of a kludge. I mean, it was all right for Byrne to use Larry Niven’s stasis fields in his FF, in part because it was a throwaway bit that didn’t damage anything, and in part because he never actually said that’s what he was doing…but McDuffie has Reed explain in so many words that, inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, he’s invented psychohistory, and it was pure psychohistorical necessity that forced him into his out-of-character actions.

Okay, this is jarring. But, at least it paints Reed out of that corner. However, there’s something else going on here, too: why is it the Mad Thinker, that Reed invites to see his mathematical proof that he wasn’t really being a dick, not really? Well, because only the Mad Thinker will understand it. And, you know, he does: he even hails Reed as a genius, expressing awe at the way in which he’s so effortlessly accomplished the goal that the Mad Thinker has striven for his entire life.

Marvel Psychohistory. Or, as we might choose to call it…

The Anti-Life Equation.

Notably (if I remember right, that is), Reed doesn’t even stretch in this scene. You know what I mean? The number one proponent of the X factor of human imagination doesn’t even do the superpowered thing that usually makes him such a dandy symbol of it. He just stands there, like a grey-templed Dr. Manhattan, hailed as a respected colleague by the Anti-Imagination Man who has always, before this terrible moment, been his enemy.

And, I’m not even saying I didn’t enjoy this scene, because I did…still, it’s gotta make you think, doesn’t it?

About character, and symbolism, and how that can all get desperately messed-up. Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, was always a properly superheroic character who always stood for the same thing, no matter who was writing him that week.

But no more. Until the excesses of Civil War and Illuminati have been forgotten, he will always have this big black mark on him.

Except…

Except isn’t forgetting the very problem, here? Because what you can’t remember, you can’t deny, and as far as the character of Reed Richards goes, the Internet is full of people opining that the Millar/JMS/Bendis interpretation is an accurate and faithful one — Reed has always been a bit of a dick, they argue. He’s always been a little scary, working there in his lab without the regulation of normal human emotionality or sense of proportion. He’s always been an image of Amoral Science Gone Wrong.

Of course, as anyone who’s ever read an FF comic prior to JMS’ run knows, this assertion is utterly false. Utterly false, in the sense that superhero characters are crafted by their creators with a certain amount of built-in symbolism, carefully chosen and developed…and if there’s something that reading forty-odd years of FF comics (and I most definitely include FF: 1234, here) ought to inform the reader about, it’s that this character was never made to be that way.

Only if you just started reading, could you think that. But, what a thing to think even if you have just started reading! “Reed Richards has always symbolized this, this character has always been like this.” That’s not a thing a person thinks because they’ve just started reading. That’s a thing a person thinks because either a) they’ve been told it’s true by those they accept as knowledgeable about the matter, or b) they did read all the old stuff, but so inattentively or uncaringly that they can’t actually remember the sense of what they read.

Reed as the Mad Thinker’s idol. There’s something quite wrong about that.

But, it’s not just Reed.

Let’s take another favourite character of mine who suffers from the problem of mass fan-forgetting: Nighthawk.

“He’s always been a bit of a loser, a wannabe.”

This common judgement exposes the prevalence of a radical misreading of Nighthawk’s historical character arc, one that stops dead at about the same time Nighthawk acquires a character worth talking about — and then cherry-picks whatever it can from after that (and it’s not much) to support the misreading. Nighthawk’s “always” been a loser, a wannabe?

Nighthawk starts out as a villainous Marvel-ized Batman, a credible foe for Captain America. Not much character there at all, except “whoever this joker is, he moves like greased lightning!”

We next see him employed in Daredevil — where he gets a bit more character plastered on him: becoming a slightly more textured anti-Batman, a rich guy who becomes a villain just for kicks, and who decides to discredit Daredevil so he can commit crimes without having to worry about DD’s interference. Wannabe? Hmm, one could argue it fairly convincingly, I think…Nighthawk’s definitely presented as a coward, a phoney, and a dilettante in this story (anti-Batman!), and I can’t even say pretending to be a hero wasn’t part of his plan, because it clearly was. However, even leaving aside the fact that of course everybody remembers that classic story, don’t they? Remembers it like it was yesterday? Sure you do…but even bearing that so true! fact in mind, I think I’ll quibble with the idea that this appearance forms his essential character, and that everything that happens or is revealed subsequently is just a variation on that one brilliantly-composed theme. If you don’t mind.

Because the next time we see him, in Defenders, he makes the Noble Ultimate Sacrifice, doesn’t he? Ah, the classic and time-honoured Redemption storyline, you have to love it…

Especially in this case, because this is where it starts to get interesting. Because it isn’t the Swordsman. It isn’t the Hulk. It isn’t even Franklin Storm.

Nighthawk is saved at the last minute by Doctor Strange and the other Defenders, and promptly goes out and gets himself a new costume and a new raison d’etre. When next we see him, he’s a wisecracking acrobat, mostly effective and even occasionally inventive…a little bit like Bruce Wayne mixed half-and-half with Peter Parker. Generic Marvel Hero, you might call him. Anti-Batman No More!

And then Gerber gets his hands on him, and we’re into something else yet again. He goes through some stuff. He changes and grows, and in about half a year successfully attains the realization that the superhero thing is barely about the costume and the cape at all. By the end of Gerber’s run, he may still be a bit cranky on occasion…but a loser wannabe?

Hardly.

Then Kraft makes him perhaps a bit more petulant at times, but also — largely — even more inventive and effective. More of a day-saver, even in hysterical mode.

Then DeMatteis — unforgivably! — kills him off. In yet another Noble Ultimate Sacrifice. Well, we all saw that one coming, didn’t we?

Next up is the BuLars Defenders — by the end of which, no less an authority than Mother Earth has pronounced Nighthawk the heart and soul of the team. Which, he clearly is — by this iteration, he’s become indefatigably optimistic (you would be too, if you’d been through the revolving door of Death that many times), and above all he gets the job done. Vindication for Nighthawk, hooray! You see, the whole point of that story was that the “Big Four” thing is bullshit; again and again, it’s Kyle and Val and Patsy who save the day…

But I guess somebody missed that bit.

Maybe they were still reeling from the hilarious Ultimate Defenders, in which they all really are loser wannabes?

Well, whatever happened there…by the time Civil War comes around, Nighthawk folds like the cheapest of cheap tents. It’s uh…really great. Yeah.

A really great example of either — take your pick — fannish contempt, or an inability to read for deeper meaning. Something a tad over twenty-five years of character development, retconned into “always been a loser wannabe”. It’s a shame.

Why, he practically gets dragged around the walls of Troy.

Such are the perils of fan-forgetfulness.

But, it’s not just Nighthawk.

Let’s look at everybody’s favourite punching-bag of a character, Dr. Henry Pym. Once useful, now “always” a mentally-unstable wife-beater with an inferiority complex so yawning you could drop a helicarrier into it…all because of a brief storyline in Avengers written something like twenty years ago, and fixed up at least four times since then! But, nobody remembers the fixes, and for the simplest reason imaginable: because he was always this way, so putting the Shooter stuff behind us just isn’t an option. Shooter’s tenure on Avengers is now deemed to have provided, retroactively, the core of the character. And it can’t be departed from: taking him back-to-basics just naturally takes him there. Well, but where’s the surprise in that, exactly? Nighthawk’s redemption was somehow peeled off him, in the dead of night, with nobody looking…once a happy-go-lucky asshole forced by circumstances to become a mensch, he’s now always been a loser wannabe. Reed Richards has been given a need for redemption he never knew about before (by the way, just to point it out: he’s cured his friend Ben Grimm of being the Thing about a dozen times so far. No, seriously: read the comics), that unfortunately seems impossible to attain, by having always been about how imagination is dangerous, rather than liberating. So why should Hank Pym be any different? Once a square-jawed polymath with a mild temper, who struggled with his commitment issues only to have Fate ironically throw them back in his face as super-fights, he’s now always been about how psychological repression must always be maintained, not worked through.

But, it’s not just Hank Pym.

Over here we have Iron Man, the damaged idealist (look for out-of-left-field Iron Man movie review shortly!) who because he can’t repair his heart, tries to repair the world’s injustice instead. This is a guy who started with Redemption! But, when the wounded heart got thrown out, they passed him a bottle instead…and the upshot is, all these years later, that his story no longer starts with Redemption, but with Recovery. Well, fair enough…and it might have worked in much the same way…except that, perhaps inevitably, someone came along and turned continuous Recovery into continuous Recidivism, because they didn’t read closely enough to be able to tell the difference between those things. Thus, Tony Stark has now always been the man in trouble with the bottle and the ego, and the compromises of the power and the vision. The damaged idealist? That idea’s been flipped around, and now he only damages himself: sneaking, with an addict’s cunning, little stray bits of power and independence from his companions, like so many fifths of scotch from out of toilet tanks…closing the circle of responsibility on himself, and only himself, with an addict’s deadly focus. Protected in his iron suit, and his influential post as head of an ultra-powerful government quango, and his reputation for genius. And there are no Twelve Steps being followed here! Because it isn’t that the heart was damaged by misplaced ideals, and so the ideals must be corrected even though — or in fact because — the heart can’t be…! No, it’s now that the ideals are eating away at the heart, and vice versa, and one will eventually kill the other. You want a conflicted character? Oh, we’ve got your conflict for you: but it’s the conflict of the man who hasn’t hit his own bottom yet. Tony Stark, Addict! I’m surprised he hasn’t tried MGH…

Oh, wait, he has. Just in the Dom Perignon form of Extremis. Well, but the rich are different from you and I…

This, too, is a radical misreading: Tony Stark, futurist. Well, that’s just an excuse, isn’t it? As Reed Richards has come to signify the need to subordinate imagination to control, as Kyle Richmond has come to signify the desire to escape responsibility by role-playing, as Hank Pym has come to signify the inability to overcome weakness and start a new life (“Don’t bother going to the ants, thou sluggard!”), so too has Iron Man come to signify the dark commitment to an ideal, which is really just ideology wearing a false face…

As all ideals are, perhaps we’re meant to think?

Good Lord, even Ultimate Tony doesn’t have it this bad.

But, it’s not just Iron Man.

Enter the Scarlet Witch, and the chthonic terror of the feminine!

The Human Torch, stubborn upper-echelon Peter Pan, whose trust fund is a superpower!

The Sentry, ultimate asocial high-school loner sitting in the library at lunchtime!

Dr. Strange, bumbling know-nothing, mystic Polonius!

Every one of these readings is comically reversed. Or, “comically”, that might be putting it a bit strongly…

Professor X, incestuous para-daddy who fucks with his children’s minds…!

Nick Fury, absent deity!

Spider-Man! With great power comes the ducking of great responsibility!

I’m angry!

Actually, I’m not that angry. Really, not angry at all. But it’s interesting, don’t you think? I mean, I liked Watchmen a lot, but I never expected it to go on for this long…

Daredevil, gifted by radioactive accident with the powers of Job!

I take it back: it is comical. Because if these characters were really all always like this, the fledgling Marvel would’ve imploded much like Nighthawk’s convictions in Civil War — don’t blink, you’ll miss it! – sometime around, oh, let’s say 1975.

And who knows? Maybe, in this new reality, it kind of did.

Because they’re going back in time, you know. It’s all up for grabs, now. And all the symbols are set free, tumbling into empty air…there to find new and precisely-wrong meanings…

Such is the peril of forgetting.

…

Gee, I gotta admit: I had fun ranting that out.

Just a little late about it, of course.

But oh well.

Anybody catch that “Bend Sinister” thing?  Deb Whitman in line at CBGB’s;  I loved that.  That’s how I’ll always remember her.