Double Articulation

18 Things I Loved This Week (in Comics!)

2010-05-29T20:18:00.000-04:00

Man, I am in love with monthly comics right now. Both Marvel and DC are producing some of the best mainstream fare I have read in YEARS. Welcome to my weekly (?) love letter to comics. [read whole article on the NEW Double Articulation]

Tales From the Pull-List: The Truly Awful

2010-05-15T22:45:00.002-04:00

Outsiders -- Titans: Villains for Hire

[read new post here]

Tales From the Pull-List: The Good

2010-05-15T09:56:00.000-04:00

Birds of Prey - Secret Six - Green Lantern - Brightest Day - JSA
[Read the new post at the new Double Articulation]

All New Mutants All the Time

2010-04-10T20:11:00.000-04:00

There are so many reasons not to let myself get too excited about the just-announced New Mutants Forever miniseries by Chris Claremont, Al Rio, and Bob McLeod. But I can’t help it. My inner thirteen-year-old (not known for his discretion at the best of times) is squealing with glee.

[Continue reading]

The Outstretched Hand... The Swarm...

2010-04-03T15:24:00.001-04:00

My new posts on Stan Lee and Herb Trimpe's The Incredible Hulk #112 are up on the all-new, all-identical Double Articulation [Wordpress].

Moving Day...

2010-03-07T16:12:00.000-05:00

Dear friends,
I'm slowly but surely getting back into blogging comics again after a several year absence. To kick things off, I'm moving Double Articulation over to wordpress. Basically because it's about a million times prettier. Hope to see you there! (Things are still very much under construction, but I have a little new content up. Bear with me!)
All best,
Jim

Tales from the Pull-List

2009-09-20T00:00:00.002-04:00

Hi there. I hit a grouchy patch for awhile, which corresponded with a general belt-tightening and pull-list shaving. Thinking too precisely about money puts me a foul mood, which I typically seek to allay by setting up a variety of ascetic regimes. These are pleasing for awhile, but then I rebel and gorge myself on cake and comics. ( I know—what vices! ) And I feel better: restored and human. Albeit penniless. But that's what credit is for. And so, I’ve been fattening my pull-list again.

Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps. were sustaining me during the lean months, and they are better than ever. The multi-colored lanterns and the war of light are fundamentally silly, but they are being handled so deftly—and wrung for such great melodrama—by Johns and Tomasi that it hardly matters. Johns has an eye for locating the contours of myth within any comic book cliché, and his riff on the color spectrum works splendidly, despite its (so far) somewhat goofy conflation of metaphysical diffraction (the splitting of the “white light” into colors by the “darkness”) with an arbitrary assortment of affects. Like all of Johns’s plotting, the whole event—from the Lovecraftian design of the various corps. to the Biblical allusiveness of the action and the moral tenor of the allegory—seems like a semi-profane Sunday School lesson, which is precisely why I like it. It doesn’t hurt that the entire series of linked books is gorgeously illustrated (and in a relatively consistent style no less) by Ivan Reis, Doug Mahnke, and Patrick Gleason.

Batman and Robin is my favorite kind of Grant Morrison, and if any character needed a little freshening, it’s Batman. Having Dick assume the cowl was the best thing DC could have done to make the “death” of Batman into something more than a stunt. It completely reinvigorates the icon in a way that doesn’t seem arbitrary, and having Morrison helm it has brought a kind of perverse energy to the series that I’ve felt missing from Batman for a long time. The problem with Batman’s rogues’ gallery for me has long been that none of them are scary anymore, if they ever were. Fear requires a certain amount of novelty, and Morrison is good at inventing frightening things. I found Professor Pyg and his “Dollies” genuinely creep-inducing. Good. More of that, please.

For the whimsically depraved (which means most of us, I would assume), Secret Six is a gem of a series that has improved since it began. It remains superior to Simone’s still-enjoyable Wonder Woman, though I’m not quite sure why. The Silver Banshee revelation had the quality of all great reveals: the it-was-so-obvious-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that? factor. And the Scandal/Bane pairing is sentimental drivel and insanely hot all at once. (So of course I love it.)

And then there’s the new Fantastic Four creative team of Jonathan Hickman and my fanboy crush, Dale Eaglesham. Ah, that logo. I’ve been obsessed with it for a week now at least. They’re laying it on pretty thick—the nostalgia trip, I mean. Eaglesham is of course the go-to guy for Norman Rockwellizing your world’s greatest comics magazine. But throw in the Perez-era Fantastic Four logo to boot and you’ve basically lobotomized Mama Roeg’s little boy. He’s in the corner, rocking and hugging himself, crooning softly, wrapped in the cloak time, a far-away smile faintly on his lips as he slips back, fatally, into that golden year, 1977…

I pulled myself out of my fugue state long enough to give Adventure Comics a try—and I have to admit, it is nicely done. I’m not particularly interested in Superboy, but the Legion “second feature” has whetted my appetite for Paul Levitz’s return to the Legion.

Those have been the highlights for me lately, though I have also been enjoying The War of Kings over in Marvel’s space books. Anything space-faring drawn by Paul Pelletier is fine by me. I wish I were enjoying the Titans and Outsiders books more. The best of the bunch is Teen Titans, which everyone else seems to hate, but which, for me, has at least developed an aesthetic and a reasonably interesting team. Tomasi’s Outsiders has been a disappointment so far, primarily because it is too focused on missions and not enough on the Outsiders as people outside of the costumes. It hardly needs saying that the adult Titans book is nearly unreadable. Please fix it, DC. (Or perhaps that is what James Robinson is doing with his new JLA. I’m curious about that development…) Finally, I’m reserving judgment of JSA, but, like many, I’m skeptical that anyone can follow Johns on this book, and so far, Willingham has not done anything to make me feel otherwise.

To be continued.

The Seventh Coming of Jim Roeg (Maybe)

2009-06-02T08:51:00.003-04:00

How many times do you have to die and be resurrected to qualify for Jean Grey status?

I peeked out of my burrow a few days ago and saw that Mike Sterling has Double Articulation listed as “retired” on his blogroll. My first thought was: wow, Mike Sterling is really organized. I should do that with dead blogs on my link list. Waitaminnit… I’m what?

Let’s call it semi-retired—the semi-retirement peculiar to new parents. Kid arrives, castle walls spring up, drawbridge retracts: fortress of solitude. Well, not from the inside, of course. Inside everything’s cake and ice cream. And like the Lady of Shallot’s garret, a little bit squirrely. But it’s okay, because you’re so in love that you don’t notice. Until someone reminds you that the world outside the castle thinks you died. “Retired.” Which, of course, you did. So, here I am again. Blame Mike Sterling!

And speaking of blame, it would be easy to blame the kid for my disappearing trick. He is, after all, my new excuse for everything. But that’s not the whole story. Looking at it now, I can’t tell whether my vague disenchantment with comics over the past year was an inevitable side-effect of parenthood or the result of a whole confluence of other things. Was I burnt out by the demands of work and family? You know it. Was this a particularly bad year for comics? I kind of think it was. At the very least the “event fatigue” I’d been fighting finally got the better of me. On the other hand, it was such a good year for me personally, how could the satisfactions of fanboy obsession do anything but pale in comparison? Perhaps I was just getting tired of generating all this chatter, the endless rehearsal of my by now all-too-predictable “opinions.” Is there a blogger out there who doesn’t confront that particular nausea at some point? And let’s be real: Double Articulation had been clawing and gasping its way across the desert with prey-birds circling for at least a year before this most recent “hiatus.”

So, what now?

To be honest, I’m not sure. I’m feeling contemplative but lazy and not particularly fanboyish these days, though that may change I suppose.

I’m buying far fewer comics than I once did. Nostalgia acts, mostly. Titans. Outsiders. They’re not particularly good, but 1983 is a harsh mistress and, in any case, I’m not so much reading as clinging to them—in a “these fragments I have shored against my ruins” kind of way, you understand. Green Lantern does a better job than either of these titles at capturing the sense of richness that I, rightly or wrongly, associate with the DC universe of that earlier era, so it has become the “cornerstone” book for me of late. Like many, I admired but did not particularly enjoy Final Crisis and need a break from Morrison’s exhausting delirium. Green Lantern is the cotton candy version of the same thing, so of course I’m wolfing it down. I’m still mostly off Marvel, though I tried the new (old) New Mutants, predictably. Eh. I don’t know. I’ve been rereading Mike W. Barr and Jim Aparo’s magnificent Batman and the Outsiders—what ever happened to comics like THAT?

God, I’m grumpy this morning. Back into the burrow, Roeg!

DCU: State of the Nation

2008-06-22T12:33:00.005-04:00

Well, the bloom is off the rose, and the backlash is in full swing.

Like the rumors about Joe Quesada’s probable axing following Civil War and One More Day, the recent rumblings about Didio’s post-Countdown firing are no doubt so much hot air.

Still, there are plenty of reasons to hate on DC these days. Countdown was, without a doubt, the most self-destructive example of corporate greed and editorial incompetence that comicbookland has seen in quite some time. It tore down—week-by-week, with striking symmetry and efficiency—all the good will and fuzzy feelings that 52 had built up. So, post-Countdown, DC was in effect starting from scratch—at least as far as its weekly series was concerned.

The good news is that Trinity rocks. Hard. It’s exactly what I want from a weekly series. Busiek is on his game: the plot is intriguing and clearly going somewhere. The characterization and dialogue are tops. And Mark Bagley’s art is fantastic. I think that this might actually the be the best work I’ve ever seen him do—so energized and polished. The “back-up” stories (though this is the wrong word for what these stories actually are) are effectively interwoven with the main story and yet still feel like a bonus—what a great way of sharing the creative burden of the weekly book without making the art in the main story seem like a jigsaw puzzle for readers. I really like this. Simply put: Trinity is great comics.

Final Crisis. Well, huh. Looks like Morrison’s series got royally screwed over by DC editorial. Is anyone steering this ship? I say we follow Morrison’s advice and just treat Final Crisis as an extension of Seven Soldiers and 52 and forget that Countdown and Death of the New Gods ever happened. What a pathetic spectacle; if this were the real world and not the comics industry, someone would actually be fired for this mess.

Something else I’d like to forget ever happened is the utterly incompetent relaunch of the Wolfman-Perez Titans by Winick, Churchill, and Benitez. I won’t beat this dead, rancid, decomposing horse’s carcass any more than I already have except to say that DC should cancel this shit RIGHT NOW and give all of us 35-year-old fanboys a chance to get the awful stink out of our noses before trying, once again, to rekindle the old magic at some far off point in the future—hopefully with a creative team that has some idea what they’re doing. Dropped.

The other notable ongoing screw-up at DC is the handling of its flagship superhero team. Justice League of America is a truly awful comic from start to finish. Just everything about it is wrong—starting with the fact that nothing happens (where are the adventures?) and what little does happen always feels underdeveloped or stupid or is just plain confusing. I’ve tried to give this book the benefit of the doubt and have stuck with it for twenty-two issues—much longer than it deserves. As I’ve mentioned before, Dwayne McDuffie (who is good on other things) is at his worst here—though certainly DC’s use of this series to pimp its various other projects has not made McDuffie’ job easy. Thankfully, I don’t need to review the current issue to back up my case because Comic Book Resources’ Timothy Callaghan has already provided the definitive diagnosis of this terminally bad series. Dropped.

On a smaller scale, but equally aggravating is the fact that awesome former-Batman and the Outsiders scribe Chuck Dixon “is no longer employed by DC in any capacity.” I don’t know anything about Dixon as a personality, so who’s to know quite how to take his (totally delicious) innuendo-laden internet posts about “Jim Shooter.” Talk about a sour-candy treat for fans who are already disgruntled by TPTB at DC. Whether or not Dan Didio is an editorial ogre, it’s the readers who really lost out on this one. Dixon’s departure from BATO has me in the dumps, because, as you know, I was loving his take on the relaunch. Drat. I’ll stick with the series for now and hope for the best.

Of course, all is not terrible. DC continues to publish some fantastic books, though god help them if Geoff Johns decides to jump ship. Action Comics, Green Lantern, Booster Gold, and Justice Society of America are some of my favorite DC books at the moment—all penned or supervised by the boy wonder. Wonder Woman is also excellent again, finally. All-Star Superman is in a class by itself. The much-missed Manhunter is back. And Nightwing is still being given a satisfying star treatment by Tomasi, Rags, and Kramer. I’m enjoying Shooter’s Legion of Superheroes too.

Morrison’s Batman still has me a bit puzzled, but I’m enjoying it more now that R.I.P. has finally begun. Green Lantern Corps is pretty good as a military adventure book. Tony Bedard’s Birds of Prey is also okay, but that title is still having trouble soaring beyond the heights it achieved under Simone’s tenure. Speaking of thankless jobs, Bruce Jones’s Checkmate is…nothing at all like Rucka’s. It’s passably entertaining so far, I guess, but I certainly wouldn’t be buying it if I wasn’t still being carried forward by the momentum of Rucka’s superb run. Jones had better dazzle soon, or this series is toast. People seem to be accepting Mike Norton’s replacement of Cliff Chiang on Green Arrow/Black Canary, but for me, the change in artists just highlights how little-invested I am in Ollie and Dinah’s quest to find Connor. I’m think I’m done with this one. I’m also done with the awful Rann-Thanagar Holy War. Just, ugh.

Fortunately, there are at least a few things on the horizon to look forward to. I’m psyched about Simone’s new Secret Six series, obviously. Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds looks amazing. I’m optimistic about Reign in Hell, primarily because of the creative team, not the concept, which doesn’t do much for me. Perhaps, most importantly, there’s Ambush Bug. After the last year, this series will no doubt be profoundly cathartic.

I (Heart) Hergé

2008-06-18T18:21:00.004-04:00

Sorry to have disappeared there for a time, dear readers. I'm totally immersed in "real life" these days--work, family, you know the drill. I have, however, recently written a little piece about Tintin for Blog@Newsarama's summer feature, "I (Heart) Comics!" The essay, which begins to describe my infatuation with Tintin, is called I (Heart) Hergé.

More new content soon.

The Torture Continues (with tiny, dim flashes of respite)

2008-05-16T12:21:00.008-04:00

Hello, gang. It's time once again for my monthy hissy fit.

Well, it was better than the first issue, for whatever that's worth. We get the reintroduction of a weakened Trigon, a bit of warmed over team banter, more of the awful awful new version of Raven (Geoff Johns's worst idea ever), and a reveal about (spoilers) Trigon's other child.

The best parts of the issue (if you could somehow mentally block out Raven's painful dialogue and costume) were the scenes revealing Trigon as a sort of Ozymandias figure, languishing in a desert realm where he is recovering from wounds inflicted by "a thousand armies." This may have something to do with the forthcoming Reign in Hell event, or it may not. Either way, it looked nice, thanks to guest artist Joe Benitez.

If only he drew the Titans themselves as well as he drew Trigon. Visually, what we have in this issue is a strange mash-up of almost Vertigoesque fanatsy art in the Trigon sequences and the kind of Image comics-inspired take on superhero firgures that leaves me cold. It's really beyond me why TPTB insist on pitching what is essentially a nostalgia book for 35-year-old fans to a much younger demographic by assigning flashy artists that kids today seem, for some reason, to dig. Bah!

(That creak you just heard? My rocking chair. Or was it my artificial hip? Oop! Mind the oxygen tank, young whippersnappers!)

On Reading Out of Time

2008-05-06T17:49:00.008-04:00

So, I was sitting in Tim Horton's this morning reading a paperback copy of Mordecai Richler's Cocksure.

It was a new Tim Horton's for me, in a different part of the city, because I had taken the kid for a long walk to let his mother sleep. I like Tim Horton's, whatever one might say about the coffee. And--if you're a self-involved, slightly full-of-himself new dad on the a.m. stroller circuit who expects the entire world to fall on its knees to pay homage to the kid as you pass because, obviously, it's never seen a grown man with a baby before--Tim Horton's is a fun place to go. The counter staff always seem genuinely interested in checking the kid for cuteness, unlike Starbucks, where 90% of the employees look grim, or too cool for this shiz, and won't even smile at you, much less at your carriage.

So, yes, I'm sitting in Tim Horton's, reading Cocksure, enjoying hot black coffee in a paper cup, with the kid (my kid!) beside me, aware that I will probably only make it through about two of Richler's very short chapters before his nibs tires of the beautiful expensive baby toy that was a gift from his grandparents and needs me to furnish him a rice cookie or a bottle or a funny face, any of which--all of which--I would and do, willingly, immediately, gratefully. And that's how many chapters I get though, too. Exactly two--the first two--on this beautiful perfect sundazzled morning.

And, while I'm putting my book away, in the diaper bag, and pulling out a package of Baby Mum-Mums that I opened yesterday, in a different coffee shop, somewhere else in the city, because it still has half a cookie in it, and handing it to this little boy who is sitting in the stroller beside me, his arms taut and quivering with excitement about the rice cookie that I'm placing in his hands, I think: this is the most fun I've had reading a book in quite a long while.

It isn't that Cocksure is such a great novel. It's entertaining. It does the Richler thing, but with a little extra weirdness, which I appreciate. The reason I enjoyed those two chapters so thoroughly had more to do with the snug fit between that particular book and the little fatherly reverie I had going in Tim Horton's there. It mattered, it occurred to me, that I was reading an old paperback copy of the novel. This one:

The third printing of the Bantam Edition (1969, twice; 1976) of a novel originally published in 1968. Just look at that cover. And those puffs! This isn't a book, it's a time machine. I loved it before I even cracked the spine. The page edges are yellow of course. You know how they smell. And the size. It's literally a "pocket" book--which is the size that all fiction should be. Little wonder that, reading a book published shortly before I was born, in an edition published shortly after I was born, in a coffee shop with an attitude that feels like 1972, sitting now with my son, soaking it all in, I would find so much pleasure in the old, dirty pocketbook. This is what it feels like to dwell, for a little while, out of time.

And on my way home, after the kid had been fed, and cuddled, and cooed over (this last, by the ladies behind the counter), I got to thinking. When, exactly, did the old pocketbook die?

Whoever masterminded the publishing industry's shift from pocketbooks to trade paperbacks has a lot to answer for. Why on earth would I want to read an ugly oversized copy of a novel and pay twice the price for my trouble? McClelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library--which for years has been one of the holdouts, publishing attractive, cheap, pocketbook-sized editions of classic Canadian works--has just this year begun to shift into publishing trade-sized books and charging double what they used to.

Yes, yes, I know why it happened--or some version of the story, anyway. No one was buying books, the internets attacked, or videogames did, or tv, or something, and how could the industry save itself except by charging us double and turning every paperback on the shelves into a dreary-looking Oprah's Book Club clone with a photo cover of daisies, or food, or a soft focus picture of a human figure running through a field?

Sometimes, when I'm desperate, or forget how it is, I walk into Coles and just stare at the wall of fiction, searching vainly for something that I won't feel embarassed to pick up, something that doesn't look like it's been processed by Martha Stewart's marketing hacks. And, yes, I realize that there is a terribly gendered dichotomy emerging in my little rant, here, which makes it doubly atrocious that Cocksure is my example of the lost greatness of the pocket paperback.

But it's too late to go back and start over now. Sometimes, the chips just have to fall where they fall, and if that means running a "shocking, disgusting, scatological, dirty, clever, near-pornographic, funny, embarrassing, nauseating, bewildering, cynical, uninhibited, unruly, unabashed, and very interesting" bit of macho late-sixties provocation up the flagpole to flip the bird to the crummy state of today's precious trade-dress for popular fiction, well, sometimes that's just what it means, true believers.

Alpha Flight: The Movie

2008-05-05T08:58:00.015-04:00

Here I was, all ready to get some real work done, and then, who comes along, but that insidious tempter and ne'er-do-well plok!

Never one to back down from a challenge, I've assembled the players (all have signed on for three films, 'natch). Yes, there was some arm-twisting involved, but Canucks Fillion and Polley were gung-ho and gave a hard-sell to some of the holdouts (you can guess who they were). The first film would obviously be some radically abbreviated version of Byrne's first twelve or fifteen issues, culminating in Mac's death and hinting at Heather's assumption of his role as team leader. Because there are so many characters to introduce and assemble, and so much conflict internal to the team already, the villainy in the first film would have to be minimal, and probably linked in some way to nefarious doings at Department H. (Tundra: the government's secret plan to transform the fabled Canadian wilderness into a megaweapon to protect Canadian interests in the north?) The second and third films... Well, there's a lot to play with in this toybox, isn't there?

Guardian (James Hudson) - Nathan Fillion

Who else? Already a Captain, my Captain. And dig the red scarf!

Heather McNeil - Sarah Polley

The most difficult role to cast, since she must be both sexy and nerdy, a background player and also a lead. Yoiks! Polley could do it, though.

Sasquatch (Walter Langkowski) - Russell Crowe

Crowe has already played the brainy/hunky scientist role with aplomb. Bonus: no special effects needed for the Sasquatch "transformation." His romance with Liv Tyler's Aurora would rival the Jackman/Janssen chemistry in the X-Men films.

Snowbird (Narya/Anne McKenzie) - Tilda Swinton

To my mind, the only other actor in the running is Uma Thurman, but I like Swinton's unearthly beauty better for Inuit demi-goddess, Snowbird.

Puck (Eugene Judd) - Peter Dinklage

Dinklage broke out in The Station Agent; as Puck, he'd become a household name. And an action figure.

Shaman (Michael Twoyoungmen) - Michael Spears

This Dances With Wolves actor certainly has the look of a First Nations superhero. A bit young to be Talisman's father, but hey...it's the movies.

Talisman (Elizabeth Twoyoungmen) - Q'Orianka Kilcher

The New World star Kilcher (she played Pocahontas opposite Colin Farrell) would make a great Talisman, I think. Only a minor role in this film, but would become a bigger player in future installments of the series.

Northstar (Jean-Paul Beaubier) - Gaspard Ulliel

My criteria were: French pretty-boy who looks like an elf. Success, no?

Aurora (Jeanne-Marie Beaubier) - Liv Tyler

Okay, so she's not French, but she's gorgeous enough to fake it. Picture her as the stern Jeanne-Marie, hair up in a bun, librarian glasses. Then... Um, moving on.

Marrina (Marrina Smallwood) - Christina Ricci

I was really stumped by Marrina until I found this picture of Ricci. The round face and big eyes have it, I think. A little yellow-tinting and CGI'd gills, and there you have it.

[Updated]

Duh. And how could I forget? Special appearance by...

Wolverine - Hugh Jackman

Carey's X-Men, Claremont's Legacy

2008-05-02T11:12:00.006-04:00

Is it wrong to be enjoying X:Men: Legacy so much? Mike Carey is doing a great job of capturing the classic (good) Claremont feel of the X-Men, minus the mannered dialogue. Scot Eaton is a good regular penciler for the series. And if you squint, you can imagine what those supplementary pages by Gred Land would look like if they had been drawn by, say, John Romita Jr. Two outta three ain't bad, folks!

Sure, X-Men: Legacy #3 was a bit thin on story from one perspective, but Xavier's defeat (or escape from) Exodus's psychic guilt-trip hit all the right buttons--especially on that last page where Xavier walks away from Eric and Karima (and us) speaking with melancholy optimism about failure and second chances--a moral which felt like it had been beamed directly out of Claremont's brain sometime in the mid-eighties.

And then, for a treat, Carey gives us two epilogues--an ominous one featuring the Hellfire Club and another featuring Rogue, riding into the Australian desert. Why is it that the X-Men always head for the desert? And why does it feel so good when they do? Something about frontiers and outlaws, I suppose. The wonderful thing about the X-Men, when it's good, is how generically malleable it is. It plays as a Western--it really does. And as science fiction. And as Regency Gothic, etc. I'm dying to see where this book goes and hoping, fervently, that it sticks with its premise of examining the interconnections of X-past and X-present for a long time to come.

Now, can we please just dispense with Greg Land and his writhing, airbrushed ladies?

Teaser Wall Showdown

2008-05-01T13:14:00.001-04:00

Discuss.

Massachusetts Academy: The X-Men/American Idol Mash-Up Continues

2008-04-30T22:48:00.013-04:00

God help me, there’s more.

In honor of what may just be the most hilarious fuck up in reality TV history this past Tuesday, I humbly present the retrograde FOX TV series that picks up where American Idol's Young X-Men film leaves off and stars the bottom six of the singing competition's top twelve.

Delirious over the hit film, but starved for a concept, FOX executives scoured the network’s vaults for failed projects and half-remembered pilots that could be dusted off and polished up anew. And then they found this.

Almost overnight, Massachusetts Academy: The Series was rushed into production, helmed by 90210 wizard Darren Star and a mass of jelly in a mineral bath rumored to be the cloned brain of Joss Whedon, grown by FOX’s ultrasecret Superscience Division from DNA left behind after the Firefly debacle.

This is what we know: Following the near-victory of Apocalypse and his four horsemen over the neophyte Young X-Men in the Fox-Marvel film, a mysterious rival group of young mutants gathers at the elite Massachusetts Academy, now run by the last living representative of a previous generation of X-Men: the X-Man known as...

Amanda Overmyer – Rogue

Escaping from Skrull captivity in the early days of the Secret Invasion, Rogue tracked down and killed her Skrull impersonator. Then, fed up with the angst and turmoil of life with the X-Men, she revved up her Harley and made for the open road. In the wake of the recent Apocalypse fiasco, which was badly bungled by the Young X-Men, she reappeared as Headmistress of the Massachusetts Academy, hoping to train a new, more disciplined generation of mutant superheroes. How? By putting her New Hellions through mutant boot-camp from hell... You think you know pain, Shu-gah? Honey-chile, you ain't seen nuthin' yet!

Chikezie – Cloak

Son of the original Cloak and Dagger and field leader of the New Hellions, Cloak’s mutant connection to the Darkforce Dimension is both a blessing and a curse. A brooding presence, Cloak is haunted by the tragic ending of his parents’ partnership and obsessed with finding his own Dagger. Despite a flirtation with team member Jubilee, Cloak also nurses a secret crush on the Young X-Man Dazzler, whose light-based powers exert a similar attraction.

Kristy Lee Cook – Husk

Tough, serious, and smart, Paige Guthrie II is the youngest of the Guthries’ seventeen children. She is named after her older sister—a former X-Man and member of Generation X who perished giving birth to Young X-Man, Angel. (Although they are nearly the same age, Angel is Husk’s nephew.) Like her older sister, country girl Husk is able to shed her skin at will, revealing a second skin, composed of entirely new material underneath: iron, flint, steel, adamantium, you name it. Recently plagued by excruciating headaches and visions of riding a winged horse in the realm of Norse gods, Husk begins to fear that she has been marked, like former New Mutant Danielle Moonstar, to become an Asgardian Valkyrie.

Ramiele Malubay – Jubilee

Unrelated to the original Jubilee, this mischievous firecracker and karaoke machine hog is a time-lost X-Man from another reality who spent most of her adolescence shopping and dimension-hopping with the New Exiles until Sabretooth “accidentally” left her behind in this reality—literally dropping her on Rogue’s doorstep. Flirts with all the boys, and humors Cloak, but has a major crush on Young X-Man, Wolverine. Like, OMG...!!! MAJOR!!!

David Hernandez – Rictor

The party animal of the group, Rictor is the genetic son of gay parents: the original Rictor and his partner Shatterstar, a neat trick made possible thanks to the genetic manipulations of Mojo's minion Spiral and her Body Shoppe. Unbeknownst to him, Spiral is planning a coup and plans to use young Rictor to achieve her victory over the villainous alien television executive Mojo by activating cybernetic controls that she implanted in Rictor’s body when he was just an infant.

Michael Johns – Chamber

A being of pure psionic energy who cannot age because he is no longer really mortal, Chamber was a member of the original Generation X and remains as embittered as ever about the mutant power that destroyed his face from within. At present he is attempting to make contact with Mojo to strike a devil's bargain. In exchange for betraying the New Hellions and selling them into slavery for the Mojoverse’s televised gladiatorial contests, he hopes to receive a rebuilt version of his original body designed by Mojo's minion and genetic artist Spiral. Little does he realize just how large the stakes of his betrayal will become when Civil War errupts in the Mojoverse...and within the halls of the Massechusetts Academy...

Morrison's Unconscious Manifests, Storms Runway

2008-04-30T14:30:00.003-04:00

I sure hope Gareth Pugh is picked up as a costumer designer for Batman III; I'm going to have nightmares tonight. Morrison's Batman meets Morrison's Doom Patrol? [The Independent]

Snowbird in the House

2008-04-29T12:19:00.006-04:00

The "God Squad," from The Incredible Hercules #117

She's back! Forgive me for having a pseudo-patriotic moment here, but Alpha Flight is one of my favorite John Byrne creations, and Snowbird is such a visually stunning character she was always one of my faves. In Snowbird, Byrne deftly synthesized the cultural myths of "the Great White North" with Inuit oral tales that were already once-removed in early Canadian comic book heroine Nelvana of the Northern Lights. Plus: she looks really cool.

It wouldn't be difficult to critique the cultural politics of the Snowbird character, or of Alpha Flight more generally. But I don't have the heart for it today. I thought of Snowbird as the Canadian version of my favorite New Teen Titan, Raven. Still kinda do, I guess. I hope this means more Alpha Flight Classic trades.

I Would Like To Know... [UPDATED!]

2008-04-28T18:43:00.013-04:00

The Mighty Avengers #12

Did Alex Maleev use a celebrity photo reference for his awesome rendition of Nick Fury in last week's Mighty Avengers? His Fury reminds me of someone, but damned if I can put my finger on who.

UPDATE:

Colin Farrell is good guess, and, sure, I can see some Rollins in there, too, and definitely the CSI guy (George Eads)--he'd crossed my mind, too. (My original, and very lame guess, was Nick Lachey.) But I think Sean Kleefled nailed it: Dominic Purcell from Prison Break. The likeness is even clearer in the pictures of bald Nick earlier in the same issue.

Because You Demanded It!

2008-04-26T15:26:00.001-04:00

And Better Still...

2008-04-26T07:59:00.004-04:00

For Mike Sterling

Final Crisis Shaping Up To Be Even Better Than Expected

2008-04-26T06:52:00.007-04:00

Final Crisis Titans Teaser Image Leaked

2008-04-25T20:14:00.009-04:00

[Final Crisis Teasers at Newsarama]

Wake Me When Final Crisis Starts

2008-04-25T12:10:00.010-04:00

Justice League of America #20

I get that the Final Crisis tie-ins don’t begin until next month, but I am so tired of this book. First Brad Meltzer strings us along with an interminable story that I could barely follow and whose main attraction was the promise of more Geo-Force (who was thankfully traded to Chuck Dixon’s Batman and the Outsiders). Then McDuffie takes over with all kinds of fanfare and expectations attached, and what do we get? A ho-hum crossover with a much better book (Ostrander's sorely missed--and now missing again--Suicide Squad).

And this.

Let's review.

Wally West is a busy guy. He's worn out from cooking breakfast, so to keep himself alert while saving some cats, he monologues about thrilling matters like how forest fires start (droughts! lightening strikes! careless smokers!) and explains something about rotating updrafts and fuel ignition temperatures... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... Sorry, I nodded off there for a minute.

Then, Wonder Woman shows up to save Wally’s bacon after he fucks up the cat-rescue. In the process, she gets him all hot and bothered, in a gross Oedipal sort of way, and Wally explains how he really wants Diana to “respect” him after they hook up—which, hey, I guess, who doesn’t? But please, dude, keep it to yourself.

Anyway, it turns out that Wonder Woman wasn’t just passing through, but popped by to tell Wally to stop spending so much time with his goddamn family, which of course gets him all excited and hopeful…until he realizes that she really just wants him to spend more time alone in the clubhouse pulling “monitor duty,” if you know what I mean. Totally bummed out, and sensing the oncoming guilt-trip, Wally whines about how hard done by he is, having “just come back from the future” and finding himself with “a lot of stuff to deal with,” “just needs time to catch up,” etc, etc. Diana’s not having any of that shit, and proceeds to unleash the mother of all guilt-trips on this douchbag, explaining, in detail, the various ways in which he sucks.

“Wallace, Superman was very disappointed that you didn’t answer that distress call last week (too busy loafing off!), but don’t worry, he forgives you. Oh, and Batman? He thinks you’re a write-off and wants to replace you with Jay Garrick (burn!), but he wanted me to come check things out with you, just to make sure.”

Thoroughly dissed by the whole damn Oedipal trinity and now a nervous wreck, Wally falls tearfully to Diana’s feet, renounces his wife and children, and begs her for some test—anything—that would allow him to regain her approval and the confidence of his two passive-aggressive daddies. Luckily, at this very moment, Wally’s much cooler older brother Black Lightening calls with a hot tip about Queen Zazzala and a bunch of lab techs who’ve been turned into extraterrestrial bees. Something about a diabolical plan to steal earth’s honey supply.

The honey is saved—by Wonder Woman, primarily; meanwhile, Wally runs around for pages and pages providing exposition. Diana feels sorry for him, and, in the end, lets him collar Zazzala, because that's just the way she rolls. Wally isn’t fooled, though. He knows he’s a total fuck up. Miserable at having pissed Wonder Woman off yet again, he grits his teeth for the inevitable lecture. Diana is more efficient than that, though, and lets him off with a parting knee to the groin, which she delicately calls “an entreaty.” Humbled by these attentions, Wally hobbles home to tell his family to fuck off, and then heads off to the Hall of Justice to watch TV.

Beautifully illustrated by Ethan Van Sciver.

Young X-Men, Starring the Top Six of American Idol (Season 7)

2008-04-24T09:39:00.023-04:00

In the near future, in the wake of a Skrull attack that devastates the Marvel Universe and leaves the X-Men shattered (again), six mutant heroes rise to pick up the pieces, forming a new team of Young X-Men. Just as things begin to look up, however, the menace of a new Apocalypse darkens the horizon…

David Cook – Wolverine / Phoenix

The secret love-child of Jean Grey and the original Wolverine. Turns out that Jean wasn’t just recuperating in that pod beneath the waters of Jamaica Bay—she was gestating. Before the pod’s discovery by the Avengers, it has already been tampered with by the Phoenix Force, which snatched the baby from Jean’s sleeping body, spiriting young David away to a nursery in a convent in Montana. A lonely orphan, David felt an uncanny (indeed, dimly telepathic) attraction to the deeds of the fabled X-Men, idolizing Wolverine most of all, without ever realizing that the mutant berserker was his real father. As a teen, he was driven by a powerful obsession that he could not fully comprehend, volunteering for the mysterious Weapon X program, which gave him claws and reinforced his skeleton with unbreakable adamantium. Now, still ignorant of his parentage, he leads the Young X-Men, unconsciously carrying on the legacy of his father…and his mother?

Brooke White [a.k.a. Alison Blaire] – Dazzler

Everything that’s happened to Dazzler since her series was cancelled in 1985 is a lie! In Secret Invasion, it was revealed that the Dazzler who joined the X-Men (and later, New Excalibur) was a Skrull imposter. The real Dazz has been on ice in a Skrull mothership for decades. Recently thawed out and preternaturally youthful, our girl is still the bright-eyed songbird who refused to have her spirit crushed by the music industry, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Changing her name to Brooke White and turning “Here Comes the Sun” into an unlikely comeback hit, Dazzler’s music career soldiers on, while, between gigs, she rolls (literally) with the Young X-Men. Whenever her spirits sag under the pressure of all these responsibilities, she just reminds herself: you can do this, Miss Alison Blaire. All you have to do is pop on those magnetic roller skates…and GO FOR IT!

David Archuleta – Angel / Archangel

One of playboy (and original Angel) Warren Worthington’s many innocent bastards. As a teenager, David was shocked and confused to discover wing-stumps sprouting from his shoulder blades, but a school guidance counselor helped him put two and two together. Selflessly, young David soon took to the skies to seek out the Young X-Men, anxious to inspire others while doing his part in the war against evil mutants. Unbeknownst to him, however, Destiny’s diaries predict dark times ahead. What ominous fate awaits him at the hands of the new Apocalypse? [Hint]

Carly Smithson – Siryn

An Irish mutant with a deadly sonic scream, Siryn is one of the Young X-Men’s most experienced and most powerful players. She was believed to have been killed in battled during the Skrull attack, but in fact, she was rescued by one of the children of Caliban, who nursed her back to health in the underground caverns of the Morlocks beneath New York. Recently married, the pair have devoted most of their energy to deciphering the mysterious script that has appeared all over Caliban’s body. With the help of the Young X-Men, they have cracked the code: the markings are actually ancient prophecies portending the coming of a new Age of Apocalypse.

Jason Castro – Nightcrawler

Using an image-inducer to appear human, Jason is the son of Thunderbird and Nocturne (the daughter of the original Nightcrawler from an alternate reality). Like his grandfather, he can disappear and reappear in another place—it’s all a state of mind, dude. As the threat of Apocalypse grows, he turns anxiously towards his faith and various nerve-calming herbs, fearful that his father’s ties to Apocalypse will come back to haunt him.

Syesha Mercado – Mystique

Syesha originally believed herself to be the non-superpowered daughter of mutant weather goddess Ororo Munroe (the original Storm) and Wakandan King T’Challa (Black Panther). Following the revelation during the Secret Invasion that her mother was actually a Skrull impersonating former X-Men leader Storm, Syesha was plunged into an identity crisis—a crisis exacerbated by the awakening of her own Skrull-given shape-shifting abilities. She could literally be anyone…so, who was she? After a period of turmoil, during which she morphed aimlessly from one impersonation to another, Syesha has recently embraced her Skrull heritage and adopted Mystique as her nom de guerre, a nod to the shape-shifting mutant who once bedeviled, and later joined, the X-Men.

These are our heroes, True Believer! In preparation for the coming siege, they study their adversaries carefully:

Simon Cowell – Apocalypse

The Horsemen of Apocalypse: Pestilence, War, and Famine

Ryan Seacrest, Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul

But wait…where is the fourth horseman? Where is Death? [Hint]

So our saga begins...

[Thanks to Rickey.org for the inspiration and images]

Don't Leave Us, Greg!

2008-04-24T08:27:00.003-04:00

Greg Rucka, you old softie. Checkmate #25 provides a pulse-pounding conclusion to "Castling" and a fitting end to Rucka's brilliant run (with Eric Trautmann). Is Joe Bennett staying on as series artist after Bruce Jones takes over? I hope so.

Let Us Never Speak of This Again

2008-04-23T17:44:00.002-04:00

Switcheroo: Hulk in Space

2008-04-23T10:27:00.008-04:00

“What creators who are usually associated with a certain company (or, indeed, medium) would you like to see writing someone else’s title?”

So, after I butchered the creative team switcheroo meme instigated by plok and Madeley, turning it into yet another pathetic jeremiad against Judd Winick and Ian Churchill’s Titans series, plok suggested that more title-specific versions of these shenanigans might be fun. So, here goes…The Hulk!

The first Hulk stories I read were probably the ones collected in Marvel Treasury #20, the most memorable of which was not the Doctor Doom story featured on the cover, but a Hulk-in-space two-parter by Roy Thomas, Herb Trimpe, and Sal Buscema called “Klaatu! The Behemoth From Beyond Space!” and “The Stars Mine Enemy!” (originally presented in The Incredible Hulk, vol. 2 #136-7). The tale, which riffs heavily on Moby Dick, involves the Hulk getting caught up in Captain Cybor and Xeron the Star Slayer’s hunt for the powerful and enigmatic Klaatu aboard the Starship Andromeda. The Abomination shows up. The crew are all monsters. Lots of smashing ensues. It’s truly a glorious ride.

Of course, no Hulk story would be complete without a sharp tug at the heartstrings, and this one certainly delivers. The final page still gets me right here. First, we see the Hulk and the Abomination falling back to earth after a throw down in space; then the perspective changes to that of a little girl on earth who is watching the night sky with her father. Two “shooting stars” appear, but the girl sees better than her father that the cosmic bodies are not stars but men: “Two men who fell off a star… and fell so far… they can’t ever get back again…!”

sniff! Oh…excuse me. Anyway, this, to me, is what the Hulk is all about. When it comes right down to it, I’m more interested in the Hulk as a feeling monster than I am in the Jekyll and Hyde conceit that often drives the Banner/Hulk saga. A science fiction setting only adds to the sense of cosmic alienation that great Hulk stories do so well, and the science fiction conceits here all sail straight out of 1940s an 50s SF, one of those amazing Ace Doubles by Jack Vance, say—only with more monsters and mutants.

Who would I like to see writing and drawing my science fiction Hulk adventures? This is harder than it might seem…so many great creators have already worked on the Hulk. I think these are all relatively non-Hulky picks, though I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

1. plok has already suggested Alan Moore and Steve Bissette, and who wouldn't want to see that? We might as well as Rick Veitch to the list, too. His work on the Swamp Thing-in-space stories is particularly haunting.

2. Keith Giffen and Scott Kolins. Two key creative forces behind the (first) immensely satisfying Annihilation series would do a great cosmic Hulk, steeped in nods to Marvel space sagas of the past--and no skimping on the Kirby dots.

3. Steve Niles and Bill Sienkiewicz. I mean, just picture it. Brrrr….! Outer space has never been this cold and terrifying, has it?

4. Samuel R. Delany and Paul Pelletier. What would Delany do as a comic book writer? I’d love to find out! Some subversive crazy-ass shit, I’m guessing. Pelletier, who I’m convinced is the love child of John Byrne and Jack Kirby, would be more than up to the job of bringing Delany’s worlds to life. (Paul Pelletier is permanently on the list of artists that I'd like to see draw anything.)

5. And just because it's good, I'm also going to steal plok's suggestion of Grant Morrison and Jae Lee. So there!

Fan Films, Fetishism, and Fate

2008-04-21T22:30:00.006-04:00

I’m always a little nonplussed after watching a fan film: it’s as if I’ve just rifled through someone’s underwear drawer and discovered some awful secret thing that screams, “too much information!”* Not that I should be surprised. All self-styled fans are, in one way or another, fetishists, even if we don’t always quite fit the description of—in Warren Ellis’s memorable phrase—“underwear perverts.” And what are fan films but superhero fetishism writ large? They involve fetishes that are not simply taken down from the shelf and contemplated every now and then, but are literally embodied, enacted, and in a meaningful sense, lived. In the end, the film itself becomes the new fetish, perhaps—the culmination of the whole process that integrates the fantasist and his (or her) objects through performance and representation.

Or, maybe it’s just a good way to learn the craft while pissing around with your buddies in film school. Who’s to say?

At any rate, the genre intrigues me, and I admire this Dr. Fate fan film (Part 1 of a serial) that I bumped into on youtube this evening. The acting is sometimes a bit stiff (particularly the scene in the middle between Dr. Fate and the sister) or veers into self-parody (the closing moments, I think, were meant to be dramatic), but the actor who plays the wayward student of chaos magic is solid and the overall production and effects are really cool. The direction is even, dare I say, a little bit David Lynchy in parts. Good fun; Gary Lobstein has a nice little film here.

And here's Part 2, with The Question thrown in for good measure:

[drfatefanfilm]
____________
*Why I’m rifling through anyone else’s underwear drawer in the first place is an interesting story, but not one I’m going to get into here.

The New New New Titans

2008-04-20T09:40:00.010-04:00

That rascal plok tagged me with this nifty meme:

"What creators who are usually associated with a certain company (or, indeed, medium) would you like to see writing some else's title?"

Plok's suggestions are, as you would expect, big and of the "it's so obvious, why has no one thought of that?" variety. The world would be a better place if you ran Marvel and DC, sir!

My own thoughts on the matter of talent-swapping address a smaller issue: how to fix the goddamn Titans series that DC has just launched--and doomed--under the stewardship of Judd Winick and Ian Churchill. Not exactly the creative team of my fanboyish dreams, as I've already mentioned about several million times. Who is?

1. Marv Wolfman and George Perez. Well, obviously. I mean, there's no point in pussy-footing around it: Titans is a nostalgia book to its core. Might as well go all the way. Hell, set the damn book in 1984 and slap an Elseworlds label on the cover for all I care! And while you're at it guys, could you just finish Games already? Sheesh. (I realize that this one may violate the spirit of the meme, but...)

2. Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Paul Pelletier. These guys are going to tear up the forthcoming Guardians of the Galaxy series they're doing for Marvel, but they would be perfect for a Titans book with a classic feel. I'd love to read a DnA Titans space epic, given the duo's flare for superheroic science fiction. Plus, this piece of promo art by Pelletier for Guardians reminds me of a similar two-page spread from the original New Teen Titans series when the team breaks into one of Brother Blood's compounds:

Nice, huh?

3. Gail Simone and Dale Eaglesham. They're both great on team books, and, like Grummett (the best Titans artist post-Perez--if only he would come back), Eaglesham is a details guy, which is something that this book sorely needs. Gail's Titans would be awesome, obviously. Plus, she's perhaps the only person currently writing comics who could fix Donna Troy. (Damn you, Countdown!)

4. Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting. Wait, wait...really! Remember "Runaways"? Remember NTT Annual 2? Under Bru, the book would focus on Nightwing, there'd be plenty of gritty urban crime stories with flashes of superheroics; lots of moody settings; bucketloads of drama, anguish, and soapy goodness; oh yeah!! It would be so great!!! Imagine Brubaker and Epting's Church of Blood! Or their H.I.V.E.!!! Or, for that matter their Trigon!!! Okay, okay, I'm sold...THIS is the creative team I want on Titans. Sorry Marv and George; sorry DnA, Paul, Gail, Dale! Ed? Steve? Are you done noodling around with Captain America yet?

Sunday Morning Verse

2008-04-20T08:55:00.004-04:00

Robert Frost - After Apple-Picking

Saturday Morning Short

2008-04-19T05:40:00.005-04:00

Jack London - To Build a Fire

Rise of the Olympian

2008-04-18T14:08:00.005-04:00

"The next story shows another side of Wonder Woman entirely as she faces some of the great DC barbarian characters, face to face and sword to sword." [Newsarama]

Awesome!!!

And while we're on the subject of Wonder Woman, how great is it that Aaron Lopresti is the new regular artist? And, how fitting, too? As the illustrator of CrossGen's MYSTIC (a title also featuring a iconic female lead), his new job seems a bit like a homecoming. Can't wait to see his take on the barbarian epic that Gail Simone has cooked up.

Countdown to a Proper Burial

2008-04-17T09:22:00.007-04:00

You want to know what's really sad? This is probably the best issue of the entire series.

The ludicrous Jimmy Olsen-Darkseid smackdown/Kirby homage (or whatever) advertised on the front cover turns out, mercifully, to be a red herring. The real fight this issue is (spoilers on) a father-son matchup between Darseid and Orion. First, the good news: the fight looks amazing. Every Scott Kolins issue of Countdown looks sensationsal, obviously, but he really pulls out all the stops here. There are more Kirby dots per square inch in this comic than, perhaps, in any comic actually illustrated by Kirby himself. (BTW: Someone needs to hook a fanboy or two up some kind of blood pressure/heart rate monitor and then show them slides of images with and without Kirby dots--I'm pretty sure it will bear out my theory that Kirby dots are actually physiological stimulants.)

So, CWCID: great looking issue.

The totally mindnumblingly not-at-all-surprising bad news is that, like every single issue of this misbegotten travesty of a series, good writers once again produce risible work. For instance: Superman's response to the showdown between Darkseid and Orion in the middle of Metropolis:

Green Lantern: Superman, I don't care what Orion says--we've gotta do something here!

Superman: This is between a father and his son, Kyle. [portentously] This is between Gods.

Whaaa??? Huuuhhhh?????? One of the "Gods" is Darkseid! At least the Flash was running around saving people on page 1, not standing on a roof eating popcorn with the impossibly lame "Challengers of the Unknown." Normally, I don't care much about this kind of hiccup in my suspension of disbelief, but it's so egregious here that it seems as if Paul Dini and Sean McKeever (good writers both) have just said, fuck it. Let's put this baby to bed. And you know what? I can't say that I blame them. Does anyone really care anymore--if, indeed, anyone ever did? Don't we all, much like poor Brooke White on Tuesday night, just want this damn song to be over and done with so that we can get on to something new and pretend it never happened in the first place?

Cover of the Month: Skrull Skulls

2008-04-15T22:06:00.005-04:00

I've noticed his covers before without knowing who the artist was, but browsing through today's Marvel Solicits for July this cover to Secret Invasion: Frontline #1 by Juan Doe made me sit up and take notice. The glowing eye and wisps of green haze emanating from the Skrull skulls (try that five time fast) take me back to the SF paperback covers of the 60s and 70s that so deftly synthesized SF with horror. Creepy creepy creepy. Check out some of his other Marvel work here.

Dale Eaglesham: An Ode

2008-04-15T09:26:00.002-04:00

Is Dale the hardest working penciller in comics, or what? GodDAMN. Panels like this one (Sand’s bedroom from JSA #14) take me back to those days when you could seriously brood over a comic book page for hours. His choice here, of showing us only Sandy’s back while foregrounding what should really be the background, is subtle and brilliant. The panel literally “turns its back” on the (usually crappy) figure-centric art that dominates much of the field of superhero comics these days. And there’s wit in these details, too. Just look at them. (The hookah is a nice touch.) I actually find myself wondering what books those are on Sand’s shelf, what records he’s listening to… Or check out the slippers tucked under the bed in the panel where he chats with Powergirl. Or check out the monkey and the tree roots in the two-page spread of Gog blasting Infinity Man in the

Congo

(the monkey shows up again on page 14). Or, though I don’t have a scan of it, lose yourself for a few minutes in the two-page spread of the JSA sitting around their clubhouse table with Ma Hunkel serving coffee (Jay Garrick will have tea, thank you very much). There’s so damn many members now that they have to pull in all manner of extra seating, including a stool for Mr. Terrific and a 1950s deck chair for Mr.

America

. This is how you create a world, people. Eaglesham, you fucking ROCK.

Not them too!

2008-04-14T23:23:00.014-04:00

SPOILERS! You always knew that the Wolvie-Sabretooth feud was more bark than bite, didn't you? Turns out, beneath all the feral grunting, growling, and rending of flesh they're just a couple of family guys who'd gladly trade in their claws for a soy latté and an I'coo Targo with cub. This priceless pic from the set of the Wolverine film gives away the ending...but who cares? You'll go see it anyway.
[via SuperHeroHype]

How To Relaunch a Classic Property

2008-04-14T19:13:00.006-04:00

BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS #9
Written by Chuck Dixon
Art by Julian Lopez & Bit
Cover by Doug Braithwaite
Metamorpho finally makes the trip back to Earth — only to be immediately arrested! And while Katana and Batgirl attempt to break Rex out of a Paris jail, they also manage to abduct a mysterious astronaut! Plus: don’t miss the return of the former Outsider called Looker!
On sale July 16 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US

I love love love this book. This is exactly what the new Titans series should be, but (so far) isn't. Batman and the Outsiders is all action, mystery, and great characterization. And it looks fucking stellar, both inside and out. The covers by Doug Brathwaite are more than just icing. They give the impression that DC is actually behind this series. Really behind it. Committed to making it something special, much like the Justice Society of America with its classy Alex Ross covers and slick Eaglesham interiors. Either editorial is behind a series or it isn't; sorry, Titans. Great news for BATO fans, though. Chuck Dixon, Julian Lopez, Doug Brathwaite: kudos.

Skrull Appreciation

2008-04-13T19:07:00.006-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, ComicMix put up a nice little reminder of just how lame previous Skrull invasions have actually been. But that's not the whole story. "Skrull Takes a Slave" in Fantastic Four #90 from 1968 (reprinted in World's Greatest Comics #72) is a great Skrull story, even if it does end in Tommy guns and fedoras. I lost my issue of World's Greatest a long time ago, but darned if Kirby's grotesque images of the Skrull slaver lurking in a spooky wood straight out of "Young Goodman Brown," preparing to ensnare Ben Grimm for servitude on a gladiatorial prison world aren't permanently etched in my grey matter. Skrulls should be spooky, not silly, as Bendis clearly understands, judging from the last three panels of Secret Invasion #1. I got chills!

Banana Not Included

2008-04-13T07:53:00.008-04:00

"The playful little sweethearts in this baby monkey doll collection are quite a handful - and as much fun as a barrel of you-know-whats! They're sure to make your heart wild with joy...

"Available exclusively from The Ashton-Drake Galleries, the darling collectible baby monkey dolls in this first-ever collection are by acclaimed artist Darlene Austin. They're realistically sculpted, from the tops of their fuzzy heads to the bottoms of their cute little monkey feet. Each doll in the collection is covered with soft hand-applied mohair, and each wears a precious costume just like a pampered human baby! For yourself or as the most delightful collectible monkey-lover gift ever. You can pose them anywhere, and these Heavenly Handfuls will have you falling in love with babies all over again - but only if you hurry! Strong demand is expected, so order now!"

I'm still having nightmares about this.

[Link] NSFW...or anywhere

The Master, Unleashed!

2008-04-12T21:20:00.008-04:00

Yowza! Thank Jeebus that Perez has been liberated from Brave and the Bold. I'm counting the days until Legion of Three Worlds. Counting. The. Days.

"You’re Flapping Your Wings Back on Purpose"

2008-04-12T16:56:00.005-04:00

Booster Gold is ___________________.
(a) the shit
(b) the Second Coming of Dan Jurgens
(c) proof that you really can go home again, even if you never lived there in the first place
(d) how it’s done, bitches
(e) flat-out, the most fun you can have for $2.99
(f) the antidote to Countdown
(g) a Skrull
(h) better with Beetle
(i) destined to be overshadowed by the more earnest works of the Johns canon
(j) all of the above

All Growed Up

2008-04-11T06:48:00.007-04:00

Obssessed? Oh, yeah. I was gonzo over this house-ad announcing the arrival of a new era for the already excellent New Mutants title in 1984. I dismembered my copy of Marvel Age (the ad was used as a cover); I hung it on my wall; I tried to copy it by hand in my sketchbook. Being a mutant teenager had never looked so fucking rock star. As for the New Mutants' "new direction"? Thanks to Bill Sienkiewicz, the book looked liked it had been beamed in from another planet. I get all stupid just thinking about it. Volume 3 out now.

Am I Still Allowed To Hate His Other Books?

2008-04-10T22:10:00.001-04:00

You Can Never Go Home Again, Fanboy

2008-04-10T17:16:00.003-04:00

This pretty much sums it up.

Double Articulation Digest #9

2008-02-25T21:56:00.007-05:00

Just for kicks:

My Current Top Five DC Comics

Checkmate – I am saddened—nay, crushed—that Greg Rucka is leaving what has to be the best spy story in recent comics history. The characters actually behave and speak like adults, the plots twist and turn vertiginously—I am constantly surprised, delighted, and entertained by this book. Top of the pile every month. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Justice Society of America – Geoff Johns, Alex Ross, and Dale Eaglesham continue to explore the legacy theme with a tenderness and reverence for their subject matter that verges on the religious. Some people will hate that, but I’m grateful that there is a book like this on the stands. The world they've created has the same intricacy, believability, and depth that the Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titans had back in the day.

Green Lantern – At this point, does anyone need convincing? The Sinestro Corps War was the best sequel to the original Crisis on Infinite Earths that DC has published, and the book shows no signs of slowing down. The “teaser trailer” for Darkest Night gave me the kind of anticipatory tingles I haven’t had since I was a teenager.

Suicide Squad – If DC is going to inflict a Bruce Jones-penned Checkmate on us after Rucka leaves (why?), the least they can do is put Ostrander back on a Suicide Squad ongoing. The current series has everything (love the Windfall/Sister Twister relationship—inspired!). I heard a rumor that DC might forego reprinting the original series in Showcase Presents B&W editions (as originally announced) in favor of full color trades. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Booster Gold – Another Johns book, I know. But what can I say? This is just the most fun you’re going to have for three dollars. Plus, it’s made me rediscover the awesomeness of Dan Jurgens, who, thanks to this, has finally redeemed himself for that hideous reinvention of the Teen Titans in the late nineties.

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Honorable Mentions

Batman and the Outsiders – This is a great, great relaunch. Thank you, Chuck Dixon!! It manages to do what so few relaunches of beloved books ever manage: it stays absolutely true to the premise, tone, and feel of the original, while not seeming at all old-fashioned. (There is a scene in issue 3 where Rex, Brion, Tatsu, and Jeff have a mini-reunion that could have been written by Mike W. Barr. Again, thank you Chuck Dixon!) The “new” Outsiders all work wonderfully and the art by Julian Lopez is stunning.

Wonder Woman – With only one storyline under her belt, Gail Simone has already proven that Diana’s adventures are in the very best of hands. Although I wasn’t as bothered by the group effort on the art as some, I’m looking forward to Aaron Lopresti’s run. Consistency is always a plus.

Nightwing – After a blabbery first issue, Peter Tomasi has begun to get his scripting under control, and I like it. Plus, Rags on art and a storyline that seems to be positioning Nightwing at the center of the Bat-universe? You’re spoiling us!

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Should I be reading…?

The Legion of Superheroes – The answer is yes, isn’t it?

The Brave and the Bold – I probably shouldn’t have dropped this, but I was so annoyed with that stupid Supergirl issue that I had to take a break. Jerry Ordway’s upcoming tenure also tempts me.

In Memory of Steve Gerber

2008-02-11T19:28:00.000-05:00

The comics industry lost a great writer and a great man last Sunday. This is truly sad news; Steve Gerber wrote comics that said something profound about what it means to be a human being, about what is difficult about being in the world, and about what makes the struggle worthwhile and even noble. Below is a link to an essay I wrote some time ago about my favorite Steve Gerber story from Marvel Two-in-One #7. I respectfully dedicate it to Mr. Gerber's memory.

On Existentialism: Why Paper Dolls Do(n’t) Cry, or Steve Gerber’s Myth of Sisyphus

Double Articulation Digest #8

2008-02-09T20:33:00.001-05:00

There was a cornucopia of DC news today, but most exciting was the announcement of its new Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman weekly, Trinity. The format of the new series (12 pages of continuous story each week by Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley, plus backups written by Busiek and Fabian Nicieza and drawn by various artists) and the promise that it can be read relatively independently of the rest of the line at least show that DC has learned from the creative and logistical stumbles of Countdown. A weekly twelve page lead is enough to scratch the serial itch, and a related ten-page back-up by different artists should add a nice touch of surprise to each issue. A bonus, as the interview with Busiek at CBR reminded me, is that this is the same crew who were responsible, at various times, for two of Marvel’s best series from the 1990s: Thunderbolts and New Warriors. This is obviously a perfect gig for Bagley, and even though I’ve never been a “fan” of his art, per se, I love its energy. There’s something bracing about speedy, robust pencils in the current era of “star” artists who produce exquisite pages at a glacial pace. Very excited about this.

* * *

The announcement of two other forthcoming DC events—Rann/Thanagar: Holy War and Reign in Hell—is somewhat intriguing, though I’m not completely sold on either one yet. Countdown to Adventure has been okay, but nothing to write home about, and I’ve passed—perhaps mistakenly—on Countdown to Mystery (I’ve heard that the Doctor Fate story has been good). Will these new forays into DC’s science fiction and magic territories be any better? I really like DC’s space characters, but another Holy War? Ugh. I’m also inclined to agree with the Newsarama poster who said that Starlin and Lim are perhaps too predictable a pair as the creative force behind this type of story. And then there’s the notion of a war in DC’s version of Hell. Again, ugh. I hate Neron—a lot. In fact, I pretty much hate all comic book attempts to turn God and Satan into characters—the effect is invariably shabby and lame. We’ll see.

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I’ve never been a Ghost Rider reader, not even back in the 1970s. But I would occasionally leaf through those old seventies issues at the cigar store in Grant Park mall with curiosity. I mean, what ten year old imagination isn’t compelled by a biker with a flaming skull? I realize now that my flicker of attraction to the comic back then was rooted in the fact that it looked more like a horror book than a superhero title—the same thing that attracted me to Swamp Thing, Night Force, House of Mystery, and even The New Teen Titans (I began reading in earnest during the horror-tinged Brother Blood issues). That’s why this item at CBR gave me a little feeling of nostalgia for a book I never read and a character I know little about. Jason Aaron’s intention to take Ghost Rider back to his horror roots certainly sounds appealing. In fact, his plans for the series recall the picaresque structure of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. Roland Boschi’s art looks suitably moody. Worth a try?

Double Articulation Digest #7

2008-02-04T08:54:00.001-05:00

ITEM! Paul Pelletier’s new job as Marvel’s Nova penciller (with inks by Rick Magyar) is enough to make me give the series another try. Although I’ve enjoyed the Annihilation books, Nova’s own series never quite took off for me. Pelletier’s art, however, is huge draw. His work on CrossGen’s Negation was outstanding, his quirkily-imagined alien races a feast for the eyes. I was sorry to hear that he and McDuffie were ending their great run on Fantastic Four to make way for the “blockbuster” team of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. I’ll be buying Nova instead.

* * *

ITEM! My wish is granted, sort of. The good news is that I get my Titans team; the bad news… But, you know, I’ve really been enjoying Winick’s Green Arrow/Black Canary, so I won’t prejudge. Not thrilled about Ian Churchill on pencils, but maybe… Wah!

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ITEM! And speaking of Judd Winick, I read the Outsiders/Checkmate: Checkout trade this weekend, co-scripted by Winick and Greg Rucka. I buy Checkmate regularly (one of DC’s best) but I’d skipped the Outsiders crossover issues because I was sulking about that title, having dropped it earlier in the year. It was my loss, because it turns out to be a great adventure yarn with a cracking good script that provides a nice coda to one aspect of 52 and neatly sets up the relaunch of Batman and the Outsiders (more on that in a future post).

* * *

ITEM! Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction sure know how to give the fanboys what they want, don’t they? Just reread The Immortal Iron Fist: The Last Iron Fist Story trade. Wow. This is fun comics. Danny Rand is the distillation of fanboy fantasy—a perfect point of view character. A King Fu master, sure. But, beneath all those burning dove chops and drunken wasp stings, white boy is still a bit of a dork. “Sorry. He always acts stupid when he has a head injury,” says Luke Cage, apologizing to Night Nurse for his old partner’s goofball antics. If the character has a refrain, it would have to be, “Danny, don’t be an idiot…”—a phrase that echoes across the first story arc of this superior superhero adventure series that explores Danny’s relationship to the Iron Fist legacy as he battles the Hordes of Hydra and the Champion of the sinister Crane Mother. A word about the art: dazzling. David Aja adds a touch of classic New Mutants-era Bill Sienkiewicz to a style that resembles Michael Lark. I hate to wait until June for the second trade to be released!

GoldenEyed: Watching the Bond Films After Casino Royale

2008-02-03T11:42:00.000-05:00

One of the downsides to Casino Royale’s dynamite reigniting of the Bond franchise is to have made earlier installments of the series—even some of the very good ones—difficult to enjoy. GoldenEye, for example, fondly regarded by most aficionados as one of the best Bond films, does not fare well by comparison—perhaps because it, too, is a relaunch of the series, but a less thoroughgoing one.

I remember my excitement about finally getting a Brosnan Bond, back when GoldenEye hit the big screen. I had endured the humorless Timothy Dalton years with as much stoicism as I could muster, and now Remington Steele was finally where he belonged; all was right with my fantasy world. And it really was great, wasn’t it? Brosnan was like a hipper, younger, more dashing Roger Moore; Dame Judi made a perfect M(ommy) for the post-Freudian era; Sean Bean was well-cast as Judas 006; and Famke Janssen’s deliciously wicked femme fatale, Xenia Onatopp, stole every scene she vamped through.

And yet, when I watched it this weekend, I was barely able to sustain the attention necessary to see it through to the closing credits. The few truly delightful scenes were the ones at headquarters between Bond and his MI:6 cronies, M and Q. The rest of it all felt…so 1995.

It isn’t that the film is bad on its own terms. And of course it isn’t fair to compare something as of-its-moment as an installment in the Bond franchise with later, “cooler” installments. By virtue of their very hipness, every new Bond film should seem cooler, better than every Bond film that came before (even if it doesn’t always work that way in practice).

Nonetheless, knowing that doesn’t make it any easier for me to enjoy GoldenEye now—not after thrilling to the psychologically gritty, more darkly humorous, bloody-fisted elegance of the new Bond-cool established by Casino Royale. Unfortunately, rather than thinking of GoldenEye as I once did—as a moment of creative reenergizing—I can’t help but see it now as a cheesy relic of the mid-nineties (and earlier) blockbuster aesthetic, an aesthetic that is epitomized by the boring bark of machinegun fire and broad, dissonant comic riffs. In GoldenEye, the latter responsibility falls mainly on the shoulders of Alan Cumming, whose hammy, jittery performance as treacherous Russian computer nerd Boris Grishenko (he of the catchphrase, “I am inveenceeble!”) is particularly grating. The cut to his screaming face as the Goldeneye satellite explodes in space—the film’s climax—is laughably bad by any measure, but so much more excruciating now.

Do all the Bond films suffer by comparison to Casino Royale’s new gold standard? Certainly not, thank goodness. In fact, I suspect that the damage of Craig’s Bond to the rest of the franchise is limited to the Brosnan films, which suffer mainly because they are still so comparatively recent and embody a “cool” that we’re all—most of us, anyway—anxious to repudiate. Fortunately for them (and for those of us who shelled out for the Bond boxed set), Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and the rest all benefit from a different kind of cool—the cool that one attaches to genuine historical artifacts. They have an alibi for their cheesy machismo, for they dwell in the “real” past of pop culture, as opposed to its recent past of the Brosnan films, a shallower past which contains only detritus, yesterday’s news.

In the end, I wonder if the real beneficiary of Craig’s gritty, introspective Bond will be the reputation of Timothy Dalton’s tenure on the series. Not particularly beloved, and rarely anybody’s favorite, Dalton’s Bond was a more serious fellow than the rest, more of a Craig than a Moore. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen them. Perhaps the time to dust off those Timothy Dalton DVDs for a weekend marathon has finally come.

Double Articulation Digest #6

2008-01-29T14:32:00.001-05:00

A very grumpy Reverend over at Newsarama preached quite a sermon about the latest issue of Simone’s Wonder Woman and its “laundry list of offenses” in the Best Shots column this week. I share his irritation with the art pastiche, sorta—if I had my druthers, the Dodsons would be chained to Wonder Woman for life, along with Simone. Nevertheless, Ron Randall was a good choice to fill in the missing Dodson pages and the story of Hippolyta’s zealous personal guard and a Nazi invasion of Paradise Island continues apace. Simone is staging a confrontation between two paranoid groups with Diana caught in the middle. The Nazis and the personal Guard (led, significantly, by a skinheaded Amazon) are essentially purity fetishists, so WW’s ape army is a clever reversal of Nazi propaganda about “unclean,” “lesser” races and their supposed evolutionary handicaps. Great issue.

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I needed a comic fix a couple of nights ago, but the comic store was closed, so I hoofed it down to the nearby mall to check out the selection of comics at Coles. Unsurprisingly, it consisted of a bunch of major event trades (X-Men: Age of Apocalypse, vols. 1-18—no thanks!) some prestige projects (Superman: Red Son, etc.), and a variety of things that don’t much interest me (various “Ultimate” titles, reprints of silver age DC material). I was almost tempted by DC’s Man of Steel trades, which are reprinting the John Byrne/Marv Wolfman relaunch of all the Supertitles, in sequence. I’ve picked these up and put them down about a dozen times in my comic store. Did the same thing here. I loved this stuff at the time, but the Superman stories that I really find myself wanting to reread from that era are not in print yet: the Eradicator story in particular (Superman in space) and all the Kerry Gammill/Jon Bogdanov art that followed. I liked that so much better than the Byrne-illustrated Supes. All of which is to say, that I ended up getting Superman Batman: Absolute Power instead. Not half bad! I haven’t been reading the series, but I couldn’t resist (yet another) alternate history tale drawn by Carlos Pacheco. Seriously. Avengers Forever, the Camelot Falls epic in Superman, and now this too? The plot was fairly slight—just an excuse for Loeb to animate some of DC’s distinctive characters from various eras, but it was fun all the same. Its cast resonates nicely with current happenings in the DCU: the presence of the classic Legions (of heroes and villains), Kamandi, Darkseid, Ra’s, the revival of various Western heroes, etc. I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

* * *

Also in the category of enjoying it more than I expected to is Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente’s The Incredible Hercules # 112 and 113. Tapping into Herc’s mythological roots and teaming him with bratty boy genius Amadeus (“What do you say to you and me spending our summer vacation totally destroying S.H.I.E.L.D.?”) Cho makes for a hugely entertaining read. Herc’s renaissance is superficially inspired by the Spartan success of 300, perhaps. But, in addition to being hairier than any of Sparta’s lunkheads, Herc turns out to be a more interesting lunkhead too, with a tragic past that gives the character more depth than you might expect. Along with Ellis’s Thunderbolts, this is a deeply satisfying remedy to the rest of the company’s post-Civil War, OneMoreDaygate world. The art by Khoi Pham and Stephane Peru attractively channels the styles of Oliver Copiel and John Romita Jr. Covers by comics legend Arthur Adams.

Double Articulation Digest #5

2008-01-18T22:00:00.001-05:00

I caught the first two episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles last week. Newsarama's Tom McLean found various things to complain about, but this is exactly the kind of TV SF I love. It perfectly captured the aesthetic of the films, and the cast is so good that I'm happy to go along with whatever character tweaking they've done bringing the franchise to TV. Summer Glau is much better here than she was in Firefly, as much as I loved that one too. My wife walked in as I was watching the last ten minutes of the premiere and caught the giant grin plastered all over my face. "What are you watching, Jim?" Time machine in a bank vault. Heehee!

* * *

Countdown to Final Crisis #15 was almost readable. The sections with Pete Woods art managed to inject a little grandeur into what is otherwise a conceptually and visually flaccid war between Monarch and the Monitors. (Surprising no one, I enjoyed the Donna Troy splash page.) Less enjoyable was the climax of her fisticuffs with Wonder Girl of Earth Whatever. Sorry, but..."I'm Donna Troy, Bitch" is not something our girl would say--in any reality! The Brother Eye stuff was kind of exciting, though. A mixed bag.

* * *

"Meet the Beetles" was a cute title for Booster Gold #6, and the issue was (as always) an enjoyable romp through DC history. Having Dan Jurgens illustrate this title is a feel-good editorial decision on many levels. It's always nice to see a creator back on one of their own characters, but even better is the genius of having Jurgens work on a time-travel book. I literally feel transported back to the eighties and early nineties every month--in a good way!

* * *

Birds of Prey #114 was fun, though I've been rereading Gail Simone's run from the beginning, and was struck by how different the current book is from Simone's take on it. Sean McKeever seems to be positioning this book as more of a superhero title than the mystery/detective/kung fu/action thriller-thingy that was Simone's Black Canary epic--and that's okay with me, though I miss the tight focus on a core team of Birds. I'm a little worried about the foregrounding of Misfit, given that she's kind of a Danny Chase character, right down to the red hair and freckles. Nevertheless, McKeever is great at writing teens, so it's all working well at the moment. Loved the Zinda/Killer Shark encounter, Bonus: the next issue blurb actaully made me laugh out loud; that doesn't happen often. Nicola Scott rocks the artwork, as usual.

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My comic store missed my copy of Wonder Woman #16 this week, so I have that to look forward to next time.

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Erik Larsen has a wonderful last word on the whole One More Day debacle at CBR. I didn't read the comics, but derived a shameful amount of pleasure from the hissing and booing they elicited.

2007-11-14T08:23:00.001-05:00

2007-11-13T07:45:00.001-05:00

2007-11-12T09:44:00.000-05:00

The Funnies Page: Your Five (or Three or Two) Must-Read Strips

2007-11-11T07:24:00.000-05:00

Like most people, I imagine, I've always been a selective reader of the funnies. Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly desperate for distraction, I'll take on the entire comics page as if it were the TLS--as if, that is, I'm getting bonus points for reading THE WHOLE THING. In such moods, I valiantly slog through Garfield, Gil Thorp, and the aptly named Hagar the Horrible, a task made bearable only by the leavening presence of reliable stand-bys, those strips that I may not read every day, but whose drawings and gags immediately draw my eye as it passes over the page.

When I was quite young, my favorite strips were Garfield, For Better or For Worse, Blondie, and Beetle Bailey. Garfield was explicable by three notable facts: mine was a cat-owning family, it was the favorite strip of a girl that I wanted to impress, and of course, back then, Garfield was funny. My For Better or For Worse fixation had similarly autobiographical origins--though it was also drawn so differently from other strips at the time that its "realistic" detail was immediately attractive to a boy who, in adolescence, would worship the pencils of George Perez. I also liked the art in Blondie--so much that the strip's rather old-fashioned jokiness didn't bother me--in fact, it may have been part of the appeal.

And Beetle Bailey? Well, what can I say? It was a funny strip, too, back in the day. But I suspect that, once again, it was a love affair born of identification with the luckless, bossed-around protagonist. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud notes that the simpler the drawing, the fewer its individuating details, the easier it is for a reader to identify with it. Highly detailed portraiture obviously repels our unconscious processes of identification for the same reason that Charlie Brown or a stick figure invites them. Hapless Private Beetle Bailey was an image that spoke particularly to me, perhaps because we never see his most individuating feature--his eyes. Sad case, wasn't I?

At any rate, my tastes changed. Some of them, anyway. When I was about twelve or thirteen, I began to keep a scrapbook of three amazing new comics that I cut out of the newspaper every night: Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Far Side. I was still avidly reading For Better or For Worse, so it made it into the scrapbook too. The scrapbook (an old telephone book, actually) was, in effect, a primitive sort of comics blog. And like a blog, it immediately developed encyclopedic ambitions. Before long, I was cutting out many more comic strips--in some cases, pasting them in with my ink smudged fingers and my Uhu glue stick without even reading them!

One curious side-effect of my snipping and hoarding was that, because I read the comics page religiously, I began to follow the serials: Spider-Man, Gil Thorp, and Annie. I was already a comic book fan, so it might seem odd that I hadn't been reading Spider-Man already. But remember how dull those strips looked--barely a supervillain in sight! It was just panel after panel of Peter Parker talking to Mary Jane. Still, I got into it. Even the gothic world of Annie began to seem interesting, though I was never really able to fool myself into thinking that the jock drama of Gil Thorp was cool.

And now? I barely recognize the comics page anymore. Zits? Get Fuzzy? Grand Avenue? And these aren't even the cutting edge, fresh off the truck strips. (I don't even know what those would be!) Are they funny? I don't know. I can't seem to compell myself to read them. This will come as a shock to regular readers, I'm sure, but my eye just keeps drifting back to those older, more recognizable strips:

Peanuts
Despite the ritualized viewing of tv specials like It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and A Charlie Brown Christmas as a kid, I didn't "get" Peanuts until much later. Now it is the first strip I read. I especially enjoyed today's:

One often feels this way when reading parenting manuals, I'm finding.

Doonesbury
My home town paper The Winnipeg Free Press used to run Doonesbury on the editorial page, so I didn't discover it until quite late either. It's still sharp as ever--and though it's not a political gag, today's comic is priceless. One of the great surprises of my adult life was how much I enjoy teaching, and don't get me wrong--I love my students. Except these ones:

For Better or For Worse
I won't go on about this one any more than I already have, except to say that Supert Teddy rules. Deal with it.

I miss the exquisite nostalgia of Mutts, and keep intending to read Opus online, which is where I sometimes catch Sylvia as well. I still enjoy Dilbert, though not as much as I once did.

These are, I suppose, my favorites. What are yours?

2007-11-10T08:39:00.001-05:00

2007-11-09T08:43:00.000-05:00

2007-11-08T14:15:00.001-05:00

2007-11-08T09:16:00.000-05:00

Nota Bene. Are you reading Ottawa-based phenomenon (Cult)u're magazine? You should be! Thier fabulous Fall issue is now online. (Check out their previous theme issues on Identity and Rituals too!)

Judd Winick's Titans East

2007-11-07T20:43:00.000-05:00

I didn’t want to get too excited about my often wished-for reunion of the original Wolfman/Perez Titans, but this announcement made me very happy. Judd Winick is a hit-or-miss writer, so I was a bit nervous that he would be in charge (his Outsiders was grating, but I enjoyed his Green Arrow as well as the snappy but maligned Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special). In any event, his newsarama interview suggests that he might be a great fit with the classic Titans team. This, especially, curled my toes:

The way we’re going about it…is that they’re not actually a team. There’s not going to be anyone on monitor duty, there’s not going to be meeting s and roll calls – they basically are coming together because they are together…. They are a team without associating as a team, because they’re more than that. They have a lot more history. No one is getting in anyone else’s face about who’s the leader, or who will do this or that. The adventures that will occur, and the missions that they will go on will come from one of them needing some kind of help. Somebody will be working on something, and they could use some backup from their friends.

This is exactly how the classic New Teen Titans always felt, even when they did pull monitor duty. It’s a timely team concept for this particular configuration of characters too. As Winick says in the interview, "they’re one of the very few sets of characters who actually aged during their fans’ life spans." Since this is a book that appeals directly to fans who aged right along with the characters (I was 12 in 1984), its nostalgia value as a superhero comic capitalizes on the real nostalgia that its now adult fans might have for their own teen relationships at the same time that it mirrors back to them their own sense of having aged and (in some cases) of how their teen friendships grew and changed into adult friendships. This is especially true for me because my own sense of what friendship meant as a teen was deeply bound up in the idealized fantasy of a "family of friends" that I found in the pages of the Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titans.

Long story short: I’m dying for this relaunch. Memo to Judd: since my wishes are being granted left, right, and center, and I’m getting used to being spoiled, please read this post attentively. Titans Together!

2007-11-07T10:50:00.001-05:00

2007-11-06T20:38:00.000-05:00

On Reading and Rereading For Better or For Worse

2007-11-05T00:02:00.000-05:00

I’ve been intending to rip off Comics Curmudgeon Joshua Fruhlinger’s entertaining newspaper strip commentary concept for a long time, and now that fatherhood is upon me and all those 3:00 a.m. diaper changes have left me too sleep deprived to come up with ideas of my own, the time for shameless plundering has finally come.

I decided to begin with Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse, the first strip that I ever truly obsessed over. Why it spoke to me so intensely and so conspiratorially is a no-brainer. The strip began running in 1979, when I was seven and my sister was two-and-a-half—an age gap that was very similar to the one between Michael and his baby sister Elizabeth in the strip. Indeed, everything about the Pattersons and their children reminded me of my own family, a connection that was enhanced by the strip’s real-time development.

Most importantly, it was funny. Younger readers who came late to the adventures of the Patterson family probably find its current slice-of-life tone a little too maudlin. There is also, undeniably, an element of Bill Keane’s (risible but unintentionally fascinating) Family Circus in Johnston’s sometimes precious humour. But perhaps not as much as people like to think. And even if the strip does reach too quickly for upbeat or consoling forms of narrative closure, I still appreciate its frequent focus on non-traditional—often depressing—themes (epitomized by the Death of Farley storyline and subsequent arcs concerning death and disease), something that is consistent with the serious edge that the strip had from the very beginning.

Reading the earliest strips from the late 70s and early 80s now, one might be amazed by the stringent honesty of their treatment of parenthood—or perhaps I should say, motherhood. Usually focalized through Elly and her frustrating struggle to reconcile conventional maternal and wifely roles with the liberating promise of second wave feminist ideals, the “comedy” of many of the early strips is propelled either by Elly’s barely suppressed rage at being taken for granted by her husband and children or by her melancholic reflection on the hurts, missed opportunities, and emotional disconnections that haunt family life. Johnston’s particular skill as a cartoonist is to give even the darkest of this material a genuinely comic turn—though, at its best, the effect is to leave the honest core of the cartoon harsh and undiluted.

One of the best early examples of this shows Elly ranting angrily to John as she stalks through the house: “I’m sick and %&@ tired of picking up TOYS! I’m tired of housework and dirty noses and cooking and the NEVER ENDING MESS.” John, always hilariously meek and nervous in these early strips (as if he’s living with a keg of dynamite), takes Elly in his arms and comforts her with characteristic platitudes: “Take it easy. Kids are a lot of work. They’re part of life—you have to accept these things. After all—you’re the one who wanted kids in the first place.” This one makes me laugh out loud every time I rediscover it in Johnston’s first For Better of For Worse collection, I’ve Got the One-More-Washload Blues…” What really gets me is the way this marvelously dark humour is punctuated by Johnston’s visual depiction of Elly’s rage—pop-eyed with Medusa hair—as she’s wrapped in the arms of her well-meaning but clueless husband. More generally, it’s this integration of Johnston’s feminism with the inherent cruelty of comedy that makes the humour of the early For Better of For Worse so delightfully bracing. It’s Johnston’s exceptional skill as a cartoonist that makes these strips classics.

Like Charles Schultz, who masterfully transformed melancholia into a kind of textured gallows humour in Peanuts, Johnston always took the “or for Worse” of her strip’s title seriously as a thematic compass for its gags, reflections, and plots. Usually, the sources of strife were the quotidian disappointments of family life—disappointments whose seemingly familial nature was often revealed to be sexist and systemic by Johnston’s astute comic eye. In the introduction to Washload Blues, Johnston names these disappointments “guilt”—an emotion that brings the most private experience of desire, moral responsibility, and social codes into complicated and uncomfortable relation. We feel guilty precisely because of some failure to regulate our desire in accordance with the social codes and values we’ve internalized—codes and values that present themselves as transcendent and unquestionable. As Johnston pointedly asks, “Who in this world could ever follow all the sage advice in all those parenting books and be human?” (a question that is as relevant to parents now as it was in 1981). The strip, she tells us, is thus a confession, a “diary”—“therapy, you could call it”: “When I start to draw the hunched and disheveled housewife, eyebags drooping, mop in hand, grimacing as she removes junior from the dog’s dish, I am cleansed.” Evidently, Johnston’s cartooning against guilt, her laughter that momentarily drowns out the self-condemning inner voice, was a kind of therapy for her readers, too.

The strip’s recent return to its beginnings by reprinting this old material using various framing devices involving characters in the present has fittingly returned to the theme of guilt that animates the early strips as well. The weekend comic from October 7th (top) is a savory blend of the strip’s current nostalgic direction and its longstanding confessional tone. As the reprints of the earlier strips remind us, Elly isn’t kidding: she really did want those precious kids to hurry and grow up; the split between an idealized maternal experience and a “selfish” desire to live her own life remains starkly unresolved—at least on its own terms as an historical event. Here, as Elly sees it in retrospect, however, her confession to the reader apparently “resolves” the contradiction. Now, we might infer, she is in a position to render a judgment on her earlier self and can finally embrace the maternal role she struggled with when her children were young. Of course, this kind of retroactive nostalgia is all too easy, coming, as it does, so long after the experiences in question, and after so many of the deferred satisfactions have been realized. And perhaps the strip, which looks nostalgically over Elly’s shoulder at the photo albums that stand in for the very newspaper strips of the 70s and 80s that are currently being reprinted, allows us to see this too. For the photo album’s selective preservation of happy memories—the memories that support Elly’s judgment on herself as an impatient young mother, necessarily tell only half the story. The other half—the half that is being put before us each week in the reprints of those early strips—must be temporarily suppressed in order for Elly’s internal conflict to be “resolved” in the rather pat manner presented here. All of which is to say that, for me, Elly’s ironic, self-recriminatory punch-line does more to sustain the comic’s delicious ambiguities than it does to secure a finally nostalgic representation of motherhood because the rift between the idealized photograph album and the cannier reprinted strips make any such resolution elusive.

Dear Readers...

2007-11-01T22:53:00.000-04:00

Four months since my last post without a word of explanation? That’s terrible!

What the heck happened?

Well, for one thing, I became a dad. Is there any more surprising or absorbing event than the birth of your first child? Probably not. No matter how much you try to anticipate it, there’s no way to predict the way it’s going to feel. Nor, as I’ve discovered, is there any way to predict how much fun it’s going to be. Did you know that babies were fun? I didn’t! Jim Roeg Jr. was born a happy and healthy 8 lbs. 4 oz. and he is, as you might expect me to say, utterly perfect, beautiful, and amazing...and very distracting! I can’t lay my prolonged silence entirely at his feet, but the family time I’ve been enjoying certainly does have a great deal to do with it.

Besides that, I’ve been increasingly bored by comics over the last few months and just haven’t felt like blogging them.

Sure, there are several books that I continue to enjoy. Justice Society of America is still the jewel in DC’s crown—one of the few truly special books on the stands. Checkmate is a superb espionage drama, month after month. Ostrander’s Suicide Squad gives old fans something to chew on. Booster Gold is an enjoyable romp. The Green Lantern portions of The Sinestro Corps War are reminding everyone of the virtues of more contained crossovers. Tony Bedard is proving that Birds of Prey A(fter).G(ail). still has legs. Across the way, Marvel’s Thunderbolts is still riveting—something that cannot be said of many of their team books. World War Hulk has also been good for a chuckle.

On the whole, though, the mainstream comic scene has been kind of a let down this Fall. DC’s Countdown has been abysmal—truly wretched. (How did they manage to come up with a multi-character weekly series that didn’t have a single compelling storyline?) Marvel’s Annihilation: Conquest is perhaps objectively better (at least there is a story), but not interesting enough to keep me reading. Brad Meltzer’s JLA underwhelmed and McDuffie’s is worse—a surprise, because I’d enjoyed his Fantastic Four. I imagine that there are some interesting things happening in the Superman books, but I’m not reading them as monthlies anymore. I’d like to get the Donner/Johns “Last Son” story as a collected edition…once its conclusion finally appears (!), but my days of buying Superman floppies are over. And is it just me, or is Grant Morrison’s Batman turning out to be just kind of…average?

Well, anyway: it’s easy to complain. Despite my gripes, there are still a number of things I’m looking forward to…cautiously. Gail Simone’s Wonder Woman is at the top of that list. Dixon’s Batman and the Outsiders is close behind. The various rumored “adult Titans” projects are too vague to get excited about yet, but I am foolishly hopeful. Nightwing by Tomasi and Rags sounds intriguing, as does Wolfman’s new Vigilante series. And what old school fan isn’t at least curious about DC’s plans for the Legion in the coming year? Whatever they do, I’m just hoping that their plans include finally reprinting the Levitz/Giffen Legion in a nifty format (Omnibus?).

In the meantime, I’m savoring some older fare. I finally caved in and bought the Brubaker/Epting Captain America Ominbus (chapters-indigo.ca had a fantastic deal) and am really enjoying that. In keeping with my more limited attention span, I’ve returned to reading newspaper strips, particularly the original volumes of For Better or For Worse (very topical in my household, and really funny) and the early Peanuts. I’ve also just begun David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, which I can already tell is going to be as good as everyone says.

As for Double Articulation? I don’t know. I’m not one to give up on things once I’ve started, but the days of painfully long and tortured pseudo-academic essays in which I project my fantasy life and romantic values onto contemporary comics and Marvel of the seventies are probably over—at least for the time being. If you’re still out there, dear readers, you can expect to see some changes around here. What those changes will entail, well... We’ll both find out soon.

New BATO = New Adult Titans

2007-07-07T09:03:00.001-04:00

Yes!!! It’s not exactly one of the teams I asked for, but close enough.

The other fantastic news here is that the absence of Nightwing paves the way for the teased “adult Titans” team. If I were a betting man, I’d lay money on prediction that one of the forthcoming Countdown teases (which are gorgeous, btw) will be a pic of the New Adult Titans Team.

My fantasy line-up? So glad you asked.

The first orders of business:

1) Re-age Raven. The teen Raven has been a ridiculous cartoon tie-in marketing gimmick that completely ignores the nature of the character from the get-go.

2) A return of the real Brother Blood and his Church. Plus Arella and Mother Mayhem.

3) In the background, Trigon is rising...

4) Bring back Lilith. She's about as dead as Donna Troy was after that terrible miniseries that set up Johns's Teen Titans.

5) More "Children of the Sun." Was that ever resolved? Was it retconned out of existence? I can't remember.

6) A proper Tamaran epic.

As to the issue of who should write this title... Must I even spell it out?

Thank you.

Best. Summer. Ever.

2007-06-30T14:08:00.000-04:00

Just how awesome can big event comics be? Just how awesome is my summer looking?? Just how awesome is it to be reading comics right now???

This awesome. And this. And this. And especially (warning: spoilers on) this.

Yowza!

Annihilation Conquest: Prologue perfectly captures the strength and flavour of Marvel SF. I don't know how better to describe Marvel's approach to science fiction except to say that its image of deep space is deliciously cold. Because of this, there's a level of grim beauty and high seriousness that acompanies its science fiction stories, giving them a more adult feel than DC's. Perhaps this is Kirby's doing; perhaps it's rooted in the predominance of humanoid races over the wackier alien creations that DC's space books sometimes favour (though Rocket Raccoon gives the lie to this one!). Whatever it is, Annihilation Conquest taps into it in spades. The Prologue, sumptuously illustrated by Mike Perkins, promises great things ahead. Two words: more Moondragon. Two more words: no Skrulls.

And speaking of space sagas, do they get any better than last week's perfectly executed Sinestro Corps Special? The nearly universal praise this Special is receiving is justly earned. I can't recall when I've read such an entertaining 64-pager--much less a single comic so crammed full of surprises. Some might not like Geoff Johns's neo-Hegelian mania for synthesis (even I feel exhausted by it at times), but it's irresistable here. Finally, that last remaining shoe from Crisis on Infinite Earths has dropped! Bonus: Ethan Van Sciver produces the best work of his career to date. Gorgeous.

Last but not least is World War Hulk #1. I rarely read the Hulk, but the combination of John Romtia Jr. illustrating the Hulk's rampage and the inevitable Iron Man beat down was too tantalizing to pass up. The World War Hulk event is genius marketing on Marvel's part: now they get to profit from all the rage and ill-will that have been simmering within fanboys and fangirls over Civil War. Perfect timing. Perfect planning. I can't help but fall for it. Who doesn't want to Hulk-out on Tony Stark and expend their disgust and loathing for the Avengers-Universe by throwing a violent temper tantrum that turns Manhattan into a war zone? Joe Q, your recent decisions have ensured that I won't be buying an Avengers title until well into the next decade, but you are a smart, sneaky E.I.C.! Will the Hulk be paying a visit to Marvel's New York offices in the great 70s tradition of Bullpen cameos, too? Now that would be sneaky--and shameless! FYI: Greg Pak and Garry Frank's WWH follow-up in The Incredible Hulk #107 is all kinds of awesome too.

Narcissus Neuroticus: Eight True Dull Things About Jim Roeg

2007-06-28T10:15:00.000-04:00

Here we go. Blame plok!

1. I’ve always had a problem with procrastination—a shocking blogger confession, I know. On the one hand, I find it incredibly productive. Nothing lights a fire under me to do something creative like avoiding “real” work. On the other hand, the avoidance fills me with stress and undermines both my creative projects and my professional life, neither of which is quite as developed as I would like. Maybe the problem isn’t procrastination so much as attention deficit.

2. I love soap operas. They remain the most misunderstood and underappreciated art form in any popular medium. He said, defensively.

3. I don’t like James Joyce and have never been able to make it through Ulysses, much less Finnegan’s Wake.

4. I’ve always hated dieters and gym bores whose ripped bodies and healthy lifestyles seem designed to make the rest of us feel bad. When they jog past me at a swift clip on a hot July day I wonder, where are you going? What’s the hurry? How narcissistic and yet herd-like must you be to worship idealized body images and make yourself a slave to the scale and the mirror? That was then. Now I’m one of them. After a year of lethargy and tubs of Drumstick Ice Cream, I’ve become obsessed with my diet and weight, have taken up jogging and exercise, and have lost 20 lbs since May. And have the nerve to brag about it at the slightest provocation. Ironically, I now hate myself.

5. I’m nervous but excited about impending fatherhood.

6. I have trouble throwing things away. Once, in grade six, I did a major purge of my room and threw out a huge bag of classroom notes passed between me and my friends that I’d saved from the first few years of primary school. I’ve always regretted it.

7. I don’t understand how people are able to both eat and drink at parties that involve mingling. We only have two hands. If one hand is holding a plate and the other hand is holding a wineglass, how do you get the food into your mouth? I made a decision long ago that one either eats or drinks at wine and cheese events. I drink.

8. I hate tagging other bloggers because I worry that tagging will be perceived as an unreasonable demand on their time and presupposes a level of web pal intimacy that might not exist, the revelation of which would wound and embarrass me. I like to relieve my anxiety about this by making coyly humble, endearing confessions like this one. But I also worry that in doing so I will offend the very web pals who were nice enough to tag me in the first place. I’m very neurotic.

Dropped Threads: Outfitting Donna Troy

2007-06-27T20:31:00.000-04:00

Donna’s scenes in Countdown aren’t exactly setting my world on fire, but I salute the effort and am hopeful that it might ultimately yield something interesting. I’m of course always happy when someone at least tries to repair this beloved character to whom the fates have not been kind.

Despite a good college try by Phil Jiminez and Co. a couple of years back, the doyenne of the New Teen Titans’ heyday has proven almost impossible to rehabilitate. The “Who is…?” heroine’s infamously tortured continuity issues are only part of the problem. While they may have turned her into a punch line to some, continuity tangles alone are not insurmountable in the hands of a committed writer who is prepared to make a virtue of necessity and transform the black hole of Donna’s hopelessly fractured history into a plot point that actually builds the character rather than reducing her to a flat caricature--as Crisis on Infinite Earths and its consequences originally did (yes John Byrne, I’m looking at you, but not only you). All this can still be fixed or (better yet) erased.

The bigger obstacle is Donna’s outfit, which, I’m sorry, just isn’t cool at all. And if there’s one sure way to undermine a character’s chances for rehabilitation, it’s to make them look silly.

It isn’t Phil Jimenez’s fault. Though I am loathe to say it, it’s George Perez’s. It feels blasphemous to say so, considering that Perez defined Donna Troy’s three-dimensionality throughout the 1980s, most memorably in the classic, “Who is Donna Troy?” (NTT v. 1, #38). But it was also Perez who designed Donna’s “cosmic” black threads (borrowed from one of the Titans of Myth) during the reheated epic “Who is Wonder Girl?” (NTT v. 2, #50-55) that attempted to “fix” Donna’s post-Crisis continuity conundrum.

I always hated that outfit. It was fussy, over-designed, and impractical in the way of nineties costumes. And despite Perez’s intention of having the costume change signify Donna’s maturation, the effect was quite the opposite: suddenly, the mature, capable woman looked awkward and self conscious. The outfit seems even to have thrown off Perez’s usually impeccable draftsmanship; on the cover of New Titans #56, Donna appears to be falling rather than leaping through the poster of her former self. Talk about adding insult to injury. The subsequent transformation of Donna into a Darkstar could almost have been an excuse to put her back into some semblance of the simpler, cleaner, more commanding red costume.

Later, when Jiminez redesigned her look, he was clearly trying to synthesize the two Perez versions—but the full body cosmic leotard and the addition of white go-go boots produced risible results. Donna may have switched from red to black, but she hasn’t been blessed with the dazzling costume designs of a certain webslinger who pulled off the same feat with considerably more aplomb.

The good news is that the early teaser image of Countdown puts Donna back in her classic red duds. Indeed, the implication might even be that we are looking at some neo-80s version of the character who, like the Legion of Superheroes that recently appeared in “The Lightening Saga,” may actually be the real McCoy, “preserved” in the amber of the wonderful new Multiverse. (BTW: Where is the Time Trapper these days?) Such, at least, is my hope. I would quite happily forget the last 20 years of character assassination by inches. Moreover, a return to the red costume through the restoration of the actual 80s Donna would circumvent the problem created by Perez’s original costume redesign: how do you restore and earlier, better costume when everything sartorial that’s come after has explicitly signaled development and maturation? How can we have our cake and eat it too? Cool threads turn out to be a problem of Time.

ENTER: Empire Valley

2007-06-26T22:44:00.000-04:00

Just because I don't have enough to do, I've started a second blog--this one about television. Mainly it's an excuse for me to rhapsodize about Twin Peaks (forthcoming), to relive the guilty pleasures of my teens (no shortage of those), and to whine about the idiot writers who are ruining my favorite soap (ongoing; I've ruminated about soaps here before in a post about nonendings, so those who can stomach it can expect more of the same).

Since I've been so good at maintaining a regular posting schedule here on Double Articulation (hawhaw), this whole venture seems rather foolhardy. But what the hell? If there's one thing the world desperately needs, it's another television blog chock full of slavish hype and banal observations that have all been made more eloquently and expansively elsewhere. ENTER: Empire Valley.

The Poetry of Death and Difference: X-Men: Endangered Species

2007-06-21T23:10:00.001-04:00

This week’s X-Men: Endangered Species one-shot is more of a visual mood poem than a story, and that may be why I enjoyed it so thoroughly and so unexpectedly. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I might be ready to give the X-Men a serious try again.

The issue’s slight narrative concerns the X-Men’s attendance at the funeral of one of the 198 mutants who survived Wanda’s magical interdiction in House of M; largely, it is an excuse for the X-Men to reflect on their new status as “the last of their race”—to reflect, that is, on the nature of death and the meaning of life. There are no earth-shattering revelations here and very little action—almost none in the conventional sense. What we have instead is a series of character pieces that chart a range of responses to the new mutant status quo. These responses span a realistic range of emotions, from fatalistic piety to dignified defiance, culminating in a surprisingly affecting 9-page scene between Cyclops and Wolverine that is the raison d’être of the book and a rare example of effective decompression.

The scene is simple, but it does its work beautifully. It begins with Scott Summers alone in the graveyard after the funeral; he removes his quartz glasses and releases a frustrated eyeblast into the overcast sky, igniting a storm. Scott’s subsequent confession to Logan that he feels guilty for not having successfully recruited the boy to Xavier’s school confirms that Scott’s grief, guilt, anger, and fear center specifically on mutants as an “endangered species.” But then something wonderful happens: Logan replies that the X-Men’s new situation forces them to confront the reality of death as such, not just for themselves as a “species,” but as a universal condition of being alive.

This is pop profundity, to be sure—but it’s no less true nor is it any less affecting for that. It’s also a welcome qualification of the “endangered species” theme, which could very easily be played as a race war in which the theme of mutant “survival” becomes the excuse for reveling in a quasi-racialist discourse of “species survival” for its own sake. There’s a fine line between the metaphor of genetically different mutants as cool but embattled minorities (the reason many of us fell in love with the X-Men in the first place) and uncritical celebrations of group identity. In these paranoid times, I’d prefer my X-Men to be embattled but still alert to what might without too much embarrassment still be called “the universal.”

This danger of overvaluing one’s own identity (“species”) at the expense of what we all have in common is precisely what this issue is about, as the accusation of the angry father of the dead mutant boy make clear. When Scott and Emma try to pay their respects, the man bristles: “You’re paying your respects to a name crossed off your list. You’re just here to mourn your own hard times.” Judging from Scott’s confession to Logan, the shoe fits.

Yet, the conversation between Scott and Logan ends with an affirmation of the two-sidedness of an existence that is always haunted by death and of the will to life that compels us not despair but to keep fighting. Indeed, there is no death drive in Wolverine’s universe: we don’t give up on life because “we don’t know how.” If only that were true! But as fantasies go, it’s one I can’t help but enjoy. Moreover, it’s particularly gratifying here because Wolverine’s gloomy affirmation (spoken in the graveyard just as the rain begins to fall) seems to qualify the vapid consolations of the minister who assures the mourners that “pain—all pain—has a point” that will be understood at the end of history. Penciler Scot Eaton does a superb job of rendering Charles’s skepticism about that bit of biblical “wisdom,” as well as the bored faces of a number of other X-Men in attendance at this public rite. The narrative privilege accorded to Logan’s more sober, implicitly secular account of the individual’s encounter with death as “the only way you know what life is worth…Any life…” puts a very different spin on the minister’s faith in a transcendental justification for suffering.

The last three pages depicting the thunder and lightening of the storm over the cemetary, followed by the breaking of sunlight beyond are obviously symbolic, but like any true symbol, the meaning of these sky pictures is rich and ambiguous. They might be taken to affirm the minister’s view of pain followed by divine redemption, but they might equally affirm Logan’s reflections on the way that death gives life meaning here on earth, or perhaps some nebulous combination of the two.

More generally, the wordless two-page spread of the sun bursting through the clouds concludes the book on a “poetic” note that elevates the resonance and ambiguity of the entire issue’s-worth of vignettes. How? It’s a truism that realist prose fiction conventionally tends to favor literal language over metaphor, whereas lyric poetry conventionally reverses this situation, favoring metaphorical language over the literal. The reason for this is obvious (though perhaps tautological): realist prose fiction is about advancing a plot, moving a story along, whereas lyric poetry is principally about evoking a complex situation and equally complex emotions. X-Men: Endangered Species is nominally a narrative, but it veers repeatedly in the direction of lyric poetry, and it does so by substituting visual images for lyric poetry’s verbal metaphors. All comics do this to some degree, but it is especially prominent here. The visual poetry of this issue (which is, after all, about reflection rather than action) works particularly nicely at the end because the shift to symbolism that is not anthropomorphic strikes the note of universality that Logan’s concluding speech has already sounded.

All of which is to say that Mike Carey does a nice job with the words and that Scot Eaton (with John Dell on inks) does an extra nice job on the pictures. It’s incredible how much Eaton has grown as an artist, isn’t it? His work for CrossGen’s Sigil was a quantum leap from his early work on Swamp Thing; his pencils for New Excalibur and Endangered Species are even slicker. The book couldn’t have succeeded the way it does without an artist as good as Eaton, and I notice that he will be drawing a great many of the Endangered Species back-ups in the X-titles over the coming months. I may actually have to start reading X-Men again after all these years.

Surf Bored: On Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

2007-06-17T21:30:00.000-04:00

[Spoilers Ahead]

I was hoping for "refreshing, weightless, and cheerfully dumb." What I got was "a plotless, brainless, witless bore."

I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose. With the exception of Batman Begins and V for Vendetta (both flawed but in a different league than the rest), Hollywood has had trouble making aesthetically coherent, genuinely enjoyable superhero films with first-rank comics properties lately. Like the X-Men films, the Spider-Man trilogy started strong but stumbled with the histrionic weepathon, Spider-Man 3. Meanwhile, the equally grandiose Superman Returns collapsed under the weight of its own ponderousness and narrative bloat. Ghost Rider was a passable distraction, but only because it aimed so low.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer joins this distinguished company of creative misfires, but for different reasons. Spider-Man 3 and Superman Returns both fell short of lofty ambitions for pulp transcendence by taking themselves way too seriously. No such accusation could be levelled at FF2, a movie that reduces Ben Grimm's existential angst to body humour. The occasionally charming imbecility of the first movie was supposed to have been the second film's biggest strength. After the tedious self-importance of Superman Returns and the bathos of Spider-Man 3, how nice it would have been to see a dumb, good-natured, competently-executed comic book romp. Ghost Rider, but bigger and brighter.

FF2 doesn't deliver on even this minimal promise, however. Not simply because half the main players (Alba's Susan Storm, Chiklis's Thing, McMahon's Doom) are unbearable, but because the film's script aims both too low and, in a curious way, too high.

The "too low" is easy to account for. This consists of the reduction of the already slim characterizations from the first movie to entirely one-dimensional cartoons, the film's tireless cataloging of the Thing's bodily functions, and Johnny's dick jokes. When did the Hollywood suits decide that this was the only way to make a commercially successful all-ages film? Has everyone forgotten that kids will rise to the level of the material as readily as they'll sink to it? George Lucas knew that--"once upon a time..."

The "too high" is relative to the "too low." The one good thing about the film (though not enough to redeem it) is the Silver Surfer, who seems to have sailed straight out of the tip of Jack Kriby's pen and onto the silver screen. The anguished cosmic slave takes over Ben's traditional role of eternal sufferer, embodying exactly the kind of nobility and gravitas that one might have hoped to see in the translation of this character from comic to film. Unfortunately for the film, the Silver Surfer's movingly visualized tragic plight seems to belong in a completely different movie than the one we are watching--that is, a movie for grownups and children with IQs higher than a pretzel's.

The incoherent tone produced by the contrast between the Surfer and the FF themselves is evident throughout, but is particularly glaring at the climax of the visually stunning chase between Johnny and the Surfer when, just before being flung back into the earth's atmosphere by the emotionally remote, god-like Silver Surfer, Johnny gets off some moronic wise crack that undercuts the awesomeness of the moment. The later scene in which the Invisible Woman first converses with the Surfer illustrates a related problem: the CGI'd Surfer appears to have more emotional depth and to be more convincingly human than shallow, doe-eyed Susan Storm (who is for some reason written as a selfish, shrewish ditz, leaving Alba once again with the most thankless role in the film).

Needless to say, I have a fair degree of ambivalence about the film's tone. Part of me would be quite happy with a witty, well-crafted adventure pic, something like a super-powered version of the bubbly, ticklish Ocean's 13 that I enjoyed the night before. But another part--the shameless geek who still pointlessly yearns for a truly great FF movie--sees reflected in the Silver Surfer's gleaming form an image of what might have been, and starts to feel decidedly pissy.

Clearly, a "great" FF film isn't in the cards and was never part of the mandate for the sequel, so at best I'm left hoping for the amusing romp. And this is where things get really irritating, because the writers of the film seem perversely intent on withholding even the consolation prize of a half-decent B-movie. How else to explain the script's self-sabotaging impulse to curtail the sprightliness that was its only real hope for conjuring a bit of summer afternoon fun.

What is FF2 about? What's its theme? Forget about Sue and Reed's wedding shenanigans--this one's all about educating Johnny, the only truly puckish one of the lot. Or at least, he was, until the Surfer showed up, scrambled his powers, and tutored him on responsibility and humorlessness.

The pedagocial subtext of the opening air-battle between the Torch and the Surfer is not immediately obvious, but acquires its symbolic meaning retrospectively, at the end of the film when our favorite "narcissist" (as Frankie Raye calls Johnny) soberly takes on the responsibility of saving the earth because he realizes "some things aren't all about me." This goofball epiphany about selflessness and sacrifice is, of course, the lesson of the Silver Surfer's own tragic existence: he serves Galactus to save his planet and the woman he loves. Ultimately, he sacrifices himself to save the earth as well, anticipating and outdoing Johnny's own transformation from horndog to savior.

Thus, in that earlier air-battle between Torch and the Surfer, Johnny trails behind the quasi-angelic Surfer, both literally and morally. That battle concludes with the Surfer extinguishing Johnny's flame and throwing him back to earth--just as his example will later provide the model for the symbolic extinguishing of Johnny's "narcissism" when he is brought "down to earth" by the impending destruction of the planet and the apparent death of his sister. It is of course Johnny who gives the Surfer's board a final boost as the Surfer plunges into Galactus and destroys it in a sort of glorious cosmic crucifixion. Susan's parallel, but more minor, transformation from sullen bridezilla to can-do superwife is similarly informed by the Surfer's example (she reminds the herald of his beloved--why? because she's a woman?).

This would all be fine if the film had enough gravity to convince us that it was sincere about its moral fable. But the movie's indifference to its own moral is palpable, and the moralizing merely bogs the film down. Really, who wants to see the Human Torch mend his ways, anyway? Did we pay our two bits for "hugging and learning"? Is the domestication of the film's only remotely amusing character really a good idea in a series that is already painfully short on the fun it promises to deliver?

Bah.

Fortunately, FF fans have other options this summer. Despite the destruction of Reed Richards in Civil War, Dwayne McDuffie, Paul Pelletier, and Rick Magyar's The New Fantastic Four is an absolute blast--and it looks sensational to boot. Its just-wrapped Glactus/Silver Surfer three-parter was infinitely more entertaining than the film version. I wasn't sure about Storm and Black Panther replacing Reed and Sue at first, but the shift does liven things up, and Pelletier drawns a mean Black Panther. In fact, the quirky new team is just one other detail that harkens back to the glory days when Steve Englehart, Keith Pollard, and Joe Sinnott presided over the odd but wonderful FF team of Thing, Ms. Marvel, Torch, and Crystal, telling cosmic adventure stories with a classic look and feel. Their work really reignited my enthusiasm for the FF back then; perhaps McDuffie and Pelletier can pull off a similar renaissance for the title today.

As for the movies? I give up.

Double Articulation Digest #4

2007-05-30T23:09:00.000-04:00

Thomas has a blog! And as you might expect from the author of this dazzling guest-piece on X3 here at Double Articulation, it's home to provocative and erudite pop culture commentary--or maybe it's just a place to stew in his seething hatred of Lost, Season 3. Time will tell! Since I've only seen up to the end of season 2, I can't read this fun-looking piece until December, but angry, angry Thomas has promised some Marvel-bashing, which I await with baited breath. P.S. Thomas's inspired defense of X3 (prompted by a certain blogger's unkind review) lives again in a phenomenal post by the prodigious plok!

* * *

Who says that wishes don't come true? It's not in color, but I'll take it! These too:

SHOWCASE PRESENTS: THE SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS VOL. 1 TP
Writers: Gerry Conway, David Kraft, Bob Rozakis and Paul Levitz
Artists: Pablo Marcos, Rich Buckler, Arvell Jones, Dick Ayers, Mike Vosburg, Ric Estrada, Bob Smith, Vince Colletta, Bob Layton, Joe Rubinstein, Bob McLeod, Jack Abel, Romeo Tanghal, Joe Orlando, Frank McLaughlin, Ernie Chua and others
Collects: THE SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS #1-15, DC SPECIAL #27, DC SPECIAL SERIES #6, SUPER-TEAM FAMILYI #13 and 14, JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #166-168 and a story from CANCELLED COMICS CAVALCADE #2
$16.99 U.S., 520 pages

SHOWCASE PRESENTS: SUICIDE SQUAD VOL. 1 TP
Writers: John Ostrander, Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Paul Kupperberg
Artists: Luke McDonnell, Keith Giffen, Erik Larsen, Dave Hunt, Karl Kesel, Bob Lewis, Al Gordon and Malcolm Jones III
Collects: SUICIDE SQUAD #1-18, the DOOM PATROL AND SUICIDE SQUAD SPECIAL, and a story from JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL #13
$16.99 U.S., 528 pages

It's about time DC got the absolutely classic Suicide Squad back in circulation--if you've never read it, I can't recommend it highly enough. I've been rereading what I have of the series, and it's remarkable how fully this title has been mined by the authors of some of DC's best current books: Rucka's Checkmate, obviously, but also Johns's JSA (Kobra) and even to some extent JLA (John Ostrander knew how cool Vixen could be long before Brad Meltzer came along). All this, and Batman and the Outsiders is finally getting some respect? Thanks, DC.

* * *

At first I was excited. Then I remembered that I swore I'd never be sucked into seeing another idiotic Spielberg picture. Damn you, Fates! Meanwhile, Anthony Lane has a nice Tintin article in this week's New Yorker in honor of the centenary of Herge's birth. The abstract of Lane's article is available online.

* * *

I missed the first episode when it aired, but was pretty enthralled by the second installment of abc's new serial thriller, Traveler--a TV show about two grad students who are conned into committing a terrorist act by "Will Traveler," a guy who seemed to be their friend. Now they're on the run from the FBI and searching for the treacherous Will. You can watch the entire 2-hour pilot at abc.com. CBR has a great write-up on the show too. Are we all too exhausted to tolerate yet another tv serial? I hope not; this one looks like fun.

* * *

Out from the Shadow of the Batcave: Wolfman’s Nightwing

2007-05-29T06:42:00.000-04:00

Nightwing was born in the pages of The New Teen Titans and has always worked best as an ensemble player for me. That’s perhaps why I’ve never been drawn to his solo adventures and, until recently, had never read his book. I tried it for about six months during the One Year Later jump, and was amazed by how truly horrible it was. I dropped it. Then Marv Wolfman took over. Then Jamal Igle hopped on board as penciller, drawing the coolest motorcycles I've ever seen. And now I’m hooked. Why is an interesting story.

I wouldn’t call the two first arcs of Wolfman’s Nightwing unqualified successes. The Raptor is about as generic as supervillains come, and the Natural Born Killers riff Wolfman has just wrapped up in the “Bride and Groom” feels so 1994—and it was already stale when Oliver Stone subjected us to it back then. When Dick Grayson talks to himself in his apartment he says things like “Bada Bing! So tell us, Don Pardo, what has Dick won for his amazing lunch?” and “I am so outta here.” When he roughs up lowlifes, his patter takes on a Spiderman-worthy tweeness: “Hey, boys, you got some ’splainin’ to do.” Really, Dick? ’Splainin’? It’s always challenging for an older writer to capture the authentic voice of twentysomethings, and Wolfman shows his age with clunkers like these.

Yet, the quaintness of these details in no way impedes my enjoyment of this title—in fact, I suspect that they partly account for why I’m enjoying this book so much. Wolfman’s Nightwing is just so wonderfully old-fashioned. As I understand it, Wolfman (Nightwing’s co-creator, with George Perez) was hired to give the character a sharper sense of definition because Dan Didio didn’t “get” him. Mission accomplished, I’d say. Thanks largely to Dick Grayson’s talky internal monologue, I have a much stronger sense of who Dick Grayson is now, of what drives him, of his relationship to Batman, of his idealism and his insecurities. In eight issues, Wolfman has reminded me why I liked Nightwing in the first place and how he can be interesting and iconic as a solo hero out of the shadows of the Batcave or, for that matter, the Titans Tower. He’s done so, however, by writing Nightwing as if it’s still 1985—and for some of us, this is a selling point, not a criticism.

It isn’t just that Wolfman voices the character as if he’s stuck in that earlier era, it’s that the storytelling style itself has a kind of endearing fustiness to it. Wolfman takes time to set up and flesh out his strikingly unhip villains; we get scene after scene of Dick working out, chatting with his neighbours, brooding over his love life, finding a job. It’s all so heartbreakingly earnest, I can’t help but be won over. People just don’t pace comics in precisely this way anymore. And I’ve missed it. Wolfman has made Nightwing into a truly character-driven detective book about an adult hero struggling to be his own person. It’s archetypal, appealing, and I now look forward to it every month with more eagerness than I ever expected to.

Yet I do wonder if the appeal of Wolfman’s Nightwing isn’t strongest for fanboys of a certain age—fanboys who can identify not simply with the slightly retro feel of the comic, but with the character’s curious status within the Bat-canon where he is neither fish nor fowl, neither Batman not Robin, neither master nor apprentice, yet always tenuously balanced between both roles. This kind of ambiguous positioning of Nightwing with regard to his own authority no doubt speaks very strongly to an aging group of readers who might still be getting comfortable with the idea of being responsible adults. Do we ever stop wondering when we’re finally grown up? I doubt I will. And Wolfman’s Dick Grayson is the archetypal male hero for that dilemma. This is perhaps the thinking behind John Fiorella and Gabriel Sabloff’s legendary Grayson film “trailer,” whose adult Robin is simply a Nightwing re-imagined for a mass audience. Were that “trailer” ever to be made into a film, I’d be the first in line on opening night. In the meantime, Wolfman and Igle’s retro gem is a very pleasant diversion.

"We Were Legion": JSA #6 Preview

2007-05-24T18:51:00.000-04:00

Fans, myself included, have gushed over Johns and Eaglesham's dazzling new Justice Society of America. And now they're giving us yet another reason to make soppy slobbering fools of ourselves. Not only is "The Lightening Saga" treating old folks like me to the return of the classic Legion, it's doing so in rare style. What can be said about Eaglesham's art that hasn't already been said? The image of the Legoinnares flying at night and silhouetted against the swamp is so delicate, you don't doubt its reality for an instant. Johns's dialogue is equally graceful. Superman's heavy-lidded response to Geo-Force and Batman on page 3 is poingnant. It is also a brilliant bit of metaplay because the Superman who can be nostalgic for his childhood (in the future!) occupies the same position as the dyed in the wool Legion fan of a certain age in 2007 who is nostalgic for his or her own childhood--a childhood in which this Legion figured prominently. And after all, what Legion fan isn't already nostalgic for the future? THIS is what the return of the multiverse is for. Just...wow.

On Reduction: The Secret Joys of Pull-List Asceticism

2007-05-20T20:16:00.000-04:00

I’m reducing.

Once upon a time, I didn’t buy comics at all.

Then, I did.

And at some point after those early delightful days of title-sampling, I started “collecting,” which only meant that I bought certain books every month and turned them into fetishes by encasing them in snugly fitting plastic bags.

At first, I was very selective about which comics I collected. This is hardly surprising, since collecting anything is not a neutral activity, and collecting illustrated fantasy narratives least of all! The urge to collect, to say nothing of the things one “chooses” to collect (our degree of volition is questionable), is deeply bound up in our sense of who we are and who we are becoming, perhaps especially when we are young.

So, my “collection” was more than just an enjoyable pastime. It was, in a very real sense, an idealized externalization of the identity that I was at once creating and discovering (very hard to tell creation from discovery sometimes!).

Of course, to call a comic collection a “thing” is imprecise. Because unlike a bike or a marble or a doll a collection is always growing and changing; it has porous boundaries and is always absorbing foreign matter. This wouldn’t be a big deal if it was “just a bunch of comics.” But, when you’re talking about shoring up the fragments of your kid-self and imagining who you might become, the danger of polluting your collection with unwanted books becomes a distinctly uncomfortable prospect. If “pollution” isn’t a big deal now, it is only because my choice of reading material is no longer quite as obsessively and inflexibly all about me as it was when I was eleven. (I reserve the blog for that!)

To put it a bit (but only a bit) more melodramatically than it felt, comic collecting involved a flicker of psychological risk when I was little, and this is no doubt why I had so much trouble knowing what to do with those few comics I accumulated that I regarded as babyish, ugly, or, for some nebulous reason, uncool. Where did these comics come from? I don’t know for sure. But they were there all the same. And I had to deal with them. Certainly they could never enter the ranks of those prized books that I bagged, boarded, and (to my mother’s horror, I’m sure) nailed to my walls to make-believe that my bedroom was actually a comic store. They weren’t even good enough to be stored in the same box as the rest of my collection. Instead, they were relegated to a drawer, the basement, or, in serious cases, given to my sister.

This was the “purity” phase of my comic book collecting. It’s vaguely embarrassing, but I can hardly deny it. And though you’d never be able to tell (if you saw the pigsty that is my office), the fastidiousness of that early “phase” is still very much with me.

From time to time, this fastidiousness reappears. Not as an urge to unclutter my comic collection by sorting the grain from the chaff (who has the energy? and besides, this is why god invented longboxes, as his prophet has shown us). But it does come back: as a kind of ascetic impulse to pare back my pull-list to it’s smallest possible size. To make it lean and mean. To hone it Emma Frost-sharp.

This impulse invariably strikes after periods of voluptuous expenditure, gross indulgence and wanton consumption. Those times when I’ve felt flush and added titles to my pull-list willy-nilly. When I’ve allowed my subscription to become bloated with second-rate books. Sure, that kind of gluttony is exciting for awhile, but even too much ice-cream will make you sick eventually. (Yes, Colin, I am admitting that I overate at the DC buffet this past year!)

The tipping point is always the same: the realization that I’m buying more books than I’m actually reading. So begins a new era of austerity and restraint. The nature of pleasure becomes converted into its opposite. Delight no longer resides in addition but in subtraction—a metamorphosis often marked by a symbolic excision, the cutting loose of a long-cherished darling.

Like the early era of collecting, the ritual curtailment of the pull-list is an act of self-fashioning. It’s a renewal of the commitments of that old fastidious self. A desire to be seen as someone who chooses quality over quantity. Someone who is shrewd, discriminating, exacting. A snob. Everything I’m not—except of course, when I am.

I Love You Deeply

2007-05-20T16:22:00.000-04:00

click me

Post-Mortem: Teen Titans

2007-05-15T14:58:00.000-04:00

The recent announcement that Adam Beechen would, in fact, not be taking over the Teen Titans following Geoff Johns’s departure as originally planned was greeted with relief by a number of newsarama message board posters—a response that seemed (unfairly to Beechen) to have been at least in some cases predicated on his involvement as pinch-hitter in the wretched “Titans East” debacle. I haven’t read much of Beechen’s other comic book work, so I can’t say whether his aborted tenure as Titans writer is a good thing for that series or not. What I can say, however, is that I should have greeted the news that his replacement would be Sean McKeever with nothing short of elation—much as I had when it was announced that McKeever would be replacing the seemingly irreplaceable Gail Simone on Birds of Prey. (Just spend an afternoon basking in McKeever’s tender and brilliantly scripted Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane series for Marvel to see why.) And yet, McKeever’s appointment to the position of Titans writer finds me in an awkward spot.

You see, I cancelled my subscription to Teen Titans last week.

This may not sound like a big deal, but the fact that I stuck through the entire Jurgens series, not to mention its dismal follow-up, should give you some idea of the pathetic intensity of my Teen Titans cathexis. (Just in case the blather on Double Articulation hadn’t already furnished you with enough evidence!)

What was the final straw? At first I thought it was the sheer awfulness of the “Titans East” arc, which was a kind of HeroClix Titans battle utterly devoid of characterization, narrative logic, or even basic suspense. But I’ve sat through bad story arcs before, so that wasn’t it. Was it the loss of Johns as writer? Superficially, I suppose. But I can’t say that I’ve really enjoyed his Teen Titans either. Strangely, despite the magic he worked on The Flash and JSA, Johns’s Titans work was never really able to overcome the fanboyish impulses that occasionally (some would say, always) mar his writing. Johns’s Titans run was frustrating because the instinct towards reconnecting with a team or a hero’s history that is the hallmark of his most successful writing was reduced to a kind of frantic referencing of the past coupled with an equally hyperactive generation of endless new “Titans” and team line-ups in the present, as if he were presiding over a giant game board rather than a work of sequential art. God knows, I tried to get into it, but the experience was, on balance, depressing. Certainly, the Johns/Beechen “Titans East” arc was an unfortunate way for Johns to bow out of the series that he (without question, and despite my perennial whining) reinvigorated, because the dilution of Johns’s script unintentionally showed up the weakness that plagued his entire Titans run and which dampened the success of his Titans revamp.

So, then, what settled it? Why, after all this time, finally dump the Titans? To some extent, I can attribute it to my vague feeling that if Johns couldn’t recapture (or at least reinvent) the Wolfman/Perez magic, perhaps no one can. Certainly no current writer was more perfectly qualified to do so, though Sean McKeever might have a shot. But there’s a bigger problem too—and this one is entirely a personal one that cannot even pretend to critical distance or objectivity.

Basically, the Young Justice characters that now form the core of the Titans just never won me over. I was too old to invest in the stars of the original Young Justice series when it premiered, and in any case, I’ve never liked the interpretation of the Teen Titans as a sort of Junior Justice League. The JLA guest appearances in the Wolfman/Perez series were among my least favorite Titans stories, and when Superman popped up during the first Starfire/Blackfire story it felt like a visit from dad. I’ve come to see Superman differently as I’ve aged, but at the time, he represented everything old, stodgy, and boring about the DC Universe. The venerable Justice League of America was simply another iteration of this mustiness. Why did the New Teen Titans need to compare themselves to those fossils? They were already awesome! This is no doubt why I’ve never been able to get excited about the magnified role of Lex Luthor in the current Titans series, nor have I been able to read the romantic tribulations of the new Wonder Girl and Superboy with much interest. One of the things that was extraordinary about Wolfman and Perez’s Titans was the originality of its cast—most of the characters were brand new to me and were not simply junior versions of existing heroes. Is it any wonder that of the current cast the only characters who’ve remotely piqued my interest are Ravager and Kid Devil? Only these characters bear any resemblance to the freshness of Raven, Starfire, and Cyborg. (Ravager may be a rehash—but at least she is a rehash of a villain!)

Can McKeever write teenaged characters with wit and skill? Yes he can, and I’m sure he’ll do a wonderful job with his new cast, a group which certainly has lots of potential. But these just aren’t my Teen Titans. When it comes right down to it, what I really want to read is a character-driven adult book starring the adult Teen Titans from the Wolfman/Perez run. I guess it’s time for me to accept that and move on.

Hey, what's this I hear about “a possible comic starring some former Titans.” Hmm...

Double Articulation Digest #3: 52, Countdown, Kirby, and Spider-Man 3

2007-05-12T00:32:00.000-04:00

Whew! What a term. I hadn’t expected to be away from the blog for so long, but somehow, life just kept interposing itself between my fingers and the keyboard. It feels good to be back though…finally!

And what have I come back to, exactly? What the heck, let’s review.

A lot has happened over the past several months—much of it highly enjoyable. 52 wrapped up in style thanks to the Oolong island shenanigans, the Morrisonian metamorphosis of Mr. Mind, and the return of the multiverse (hooray!). Hard to say yet whether or not Countdown will be a worthy follow-up given its luke-warm first issue, but the commercial and creative success of 52’s weekly universe-spanning adventure bodes well for those of us who revel in this sort of thing.

Regardless of how Countdown fares (and I’m optimistic about its chances), I’m pleased that DC will be reprinting the Kirby Fourth World material in omnibus format. Though it is perhaps sacrilegious to say so, Kirby’s DC work has always felt like a poor relation to his truly “senses-staggering” work for Marvel—but that may only be because I’ve read so little of the former. Now I’ll have no excuse. Also, the reprinting of the Kirby material does something quite ingenious: it simultaneously showcases another part of DC’s rich history, while at the same time covertly “Marvelizing” that history (in a good, 1960s Marvel way) for readers like me who (ignorantly) associate Kirby primarily with Marvel—all at the very moment that Marvel itself seems to be deemphasizing its own mythic past (eg. Lee/Kirby FF) in favor of a more pedantically “realist” approach to superhero storytelling.

In any event, even though DC’s everything-old-is-new-again approach isn’t for everyone, I at least find the current regime’s dedication to linking newer material more fully to the mythic sensibility of the company’s roots very gratifying. In fact, the very concept of the multiverse—with all the creative chaos that such a model implies—sits perfectly with that mythic sensibility. (Classical myth, after all, presented its interpreters with perhaps the original set of fanboy problems: multiple versions of characters with similar but not identical histories, continuity glitches, etc.). Bring on the contradictions!

Meanwhile, JLA has finally emerged from its six-issue coma (the Geo-Force/Tara Markov teases have me a-tingle), and Geoff Johns and Dale Eaglesham’s dazzling Justice Society of America continues to set the bar for mainstream superhero storytelling.

Of course, these books are also currently hosting the long hoped-for return of the classic (and best) Levitz-Giffen Legion (newsarama’s recent feature on The Great Darkness Saga had me getting all misty the other day). Now that we’ve got ourselves some multiple earths, surely it can’t be too long before we see the classic Legion back in monthly action…I hope!

And what of DC’s trinity? Not a rosy picture, despite several strong starts. Of Detective, Batman, Superman, Action, and Wonder Woman, the only title I’m still buying is Batman—though Morrison’s all-prose issue was almost enough to make it a clean sweep. I’m not a huge fan of the stand-alone stories, so Dini’s Detective was always one of the last books I read on the week it came out; it was good, I suppose, but I don’t particularly miss it. Needless to say, the bungled scheduling of the Super-titles has been frustrating. The main story arcs in both of those books felt like potential classics, but I finally reached the end of my patience with fill-ins and will be waiting for the trades on the Johns/Donner/Kubert saga and Busiek/Pacheco’s Camelot. At least there’s hope for Wonder Woman. Gail Simone, as everyone knows, is not just exceptionally talented. She’s a professional. She’s also a genuine fan with an unusual level of commitment to the books she writes. There is simply no better writer for this series; it’s a shame that it took Didio so long to realize this and that the relaunch had to stumble so badly in the meantime.

Meanwhile, my post-Civil War disenchantment with Marvel continues. One book deserves a mention, however, and that’s Ellis and Deodato’s Thunderbolts. I had my reservations about this one, but I’m completely won over: this book is riveting…and gorgeously drawn. My favorite Marvel title by a fair stretch; the fact that it is a satire of mainstream Marvel doesn’t hurt either.

In the world of superhero cinema, Ghost Rider was mildly entertaining—if you could get over the increasingly cadaverous Nicholas Cage and his distracting collection of hairpieces. A challenge, frankly. Nonetheless, some of the effects were nifty and the scene in the desert where the two riders are side-by-side was a beauty. Speaking of Marvel films, I’m surprisingly enthused about the new Fantastic Four movie this summer, which looks pretty wonderful, actually. Despite its many, many flaws, the goofy first installment of the FF franchise was at least fun to watch, which is more than I can say about a number of recent superhero films. Some time ago, I argued that in order to be truly great, superhero films had to take the characters and the scenarios seriously. I still believe that, but after the guffaw-inducing bathos of Spider-Man 3 (more on that below) I’m really ready for something lighter—you know, like Galactus and the end-times.

Ah, Spider-Man 3. Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review called it “a shambles,” which is generous. After the superb Spider-Man 2, I guess it was inevitable that things would go off the rails at some point, and woooo! did they ever. I don’t want to be merely dismissive of the third film, because it did contain a number of spectacular sequences (the fight scenes between Peter and Harry early in the film were standouts). As a story, though—ugh. Shockingly boring. For the last hour of the movie I must have checked my watch more often than I did for the entire duration of Singer’s bloated Superman. When Mary Jane was finally caught in that giant web all I could feel was relief. Yes! The big battle! We’re almost done! And then the film ended…several times. Apart from its terrible pacing and inconsistent tone, Spider-Man 3 suffered from the same problems (though perhaps not quite as severely) as the egregious X3. In both cases, the filmmakers attempted to cram the plots of two potentially great movies into a single script, leaving us with an underwhelming, narratively flaccid pastiche of characters and ideas. Did we really need Sandman and Harry Osborne and Venom and evil Peter Parker and Gwen Stacey? Apart from a few nice action sequences, the best scene in the film—the most authentic feeling scene—was, ironically, the totally charming, totally throwaway omelette-making bit between Harry and MJ that culminates in Harry accidentally dropping half the omelette on the floor when he tries to get too fancy with the skillet. (There’s a metafilmic metaphor in there somewhere, but why bother?) The point is that this was one of the very few scenes that actually made me for a moment believe in the reality of these characters; compare the emotion of this scene with the histrionics of the conclusion. Was there a single opening weekend theatre-audience that did not greet Peter’s waterworks with gales of laughter? I doubt it. Even I laughed...albeit mirthlessly. I really can’t do better to sum up my feelings about this one than to quote the closing lines of Lane’s review: “‘People really like me,’ our hero says at the start, adding later, ‘They love me!’ Not for long, Whiny-Man, not for long.”

Didn’t mean to leave things on such a crabby note, but there it is. I’m pinning my hopes for summer superhero fun on the Surfer.

On Bookfair: Tales of the DC Decade (Part 2)

2007-02-28T02:03:00.000-05:00

On Saturdays, I liked to take the Corydon bus downtown to Portage and Hargrave and spend my allowance at Bookfair. This was in the early eighties when Bookfair was still quite a large store whose front section of used paperbacks half-concealed an enormous showroom of new comics and back-issue bins. What I was there for, though, were the 25-cent bins at the very back of the store: voluminous, neatly-kept, and filled with a surprising abundance of relatively new comics that other kids like me had brought in to exchange for store credit.

Those were the days, huh? Hard to imagine bringing in an old pile of comics to your neighborhood store today and being given a choice of “cash” (30% of their resale value) or “trade” (50% of their resale value, which could be “spent” in the 25-cent bins). Even if you could, they would be dollar bins now, I suppose.

But that was Bookfair in Winnipeg, 1983.

Browsing through those bins was exciting, of course. It was the main way that I tried new things and rediscovered old ones. Swamp Thing. All-Star Squadron. Dazzler. Avengers. Uncanny X-Men. Night Force. Legion of Superheroes. Somerset Holmes. Evangeline. Elric. It’s also where I began “filling in” my first collections: The New Teen Titans, for instance, which I had really only started collecting with issue 21.

The bins were wonderful, but it’s the transactions at the counter that really stay with me. These exchanges of money for comics—or even better, comics for comics—were exciting and intimidating in a way that is difficult to explain adequately from the perspective of adulthood when the act of buying something has become second-nature.

What accounted for this mixture of excitement and nervousness that accompanied these transactions? Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Bookfair seemed to be run entirely by middle-aged women whose (to me inexplicable) knowledge of comic books (and, it must be said, pornographic magazines) gave them a curiously witchy aspect. The unsettling thing about them was that they were my mother’s age, and yet they had an intimate knowledge of a largely male world that (I imagined) my mother had no interest in, did not approve of, and would hardly have traded in, much less superintended!

These “weird sisters” (as I think of them now) were not friendly and did not smile. And they imbued Bookfair with a kind of sinister glamour that made the store into a sort of pocket universe, a liminal place where the regular rules that governed my life and my sense of the order of things no longer quite applied. This was a place where children’s pleasures brushed up against the scary but coveted world of adult things, and the counter was the site of that fraught but thrilling exchange.

The woman with short grey hair and butterfly-frame glasses is the one I remember best and most fondly. It goes without saying that I never learned her name, but I have a vivid memory of standing at the counter on any number of occasions as she sorted the pile of comics I’d brought to trade. Her face was all business. She separated my stack into comics she was willing to take and comics she would pass on, checking the spines to make sure they weren’t curled or opening a comic to the middle to check the snugness of the staples. I admired the thoroughness of her inspection and held my breath in anticipation of which comics would make the cut.

Sometimes, if most of the comics were good, she’d throw the few rejects back onto the pile and say, “four dollars for the lot.” But that was rare. Usually, when she was satisfied, she’d square the stack of good ones on the counter, count them up, and make a calculation on the small noisy adding-machine that printed receipts on a spool of white paper. Finding out how much you had to spend was almost as much fun as spending it.

Of course, the receipt wasn’t for you, but for the store. The grey-haired woman would remember who you were when you went up to pay. In the meantime, she would write down the value of your trade on a scrap of paper taped to the counter by the cash register—a scrap of paper that contained numerous other (mostly crossed-out) sums. After you’d made your selections from the 25-cent bins, she’d cross out your sum too and everything would balance, even if you had to top up your credit with a few dollars from your allowance. If you had trade dollars left over, you left the store with your pile of new comics and a credit receipt in you pocket for next time.

It was magic, of a kind.

Double Articulation Digest #3: The Helmet of Fate

2007-02-24T01:14:00.000-05:00

DC’s Helmet of Fate event has been really quite good so far. The premise of this series of loosely linked one-shots is that Fate’s helmet is flying through the magical quadrant of the DC universe looking for a suitable candidate to serve as the new Doctor Fate, a format that allows each writer/artist team to explore a different magic-based character for a single issue before the helmet moves on to its next stop on the magical mystery tour. There are lots of ways this kind of thing could flop, but so far the quality of both the stories and the art has been top-notch, and the reintroduction of DC’s obscure magicians and sorcerers has been a truly delightful journey.

What I’m especially enjoying about the series is its tone. Unlike the more comedic superhero/sorcery hybrid Shadowpact (which went from great to so-so as it leapt from miniseries to monthly), these stories treat their subjects with a touch of gravity and wonder that recalls Vertigo’s Books of Magic and that I hope the upcoming Dr. Fate series will run with. This pitch-perfect tone is particularly evident in the two strongest issues of the event to date: Ibis the Invincible #1 and Sargon the Sorcerer #1. In the former, Tad Williams and Phil Winslade chronicle an Egyptian-American boy’s Captain Marvel-like transformation into an ancient Egyptian sorcerer; in the latter, Steve Niles and Scott Hampton tell a wonderfully gloomy story of inheritance and revenge as down-and-out drifter, David Sargent is tricked into assuming his grandfather’s identity as the sorcerer Sargon. Both books are blessed with the kind of dark, creepy artwork that I wish we saw more of in contemporary comics.

Of the two stories, Ibis is somewhat lighter and jauntier, but Winslade’s art keeps the mood sinister and foreboding, particularly in his pulp-style rendering of the Egyptian tombs, sarcophagi, and ancient gods. Scott Hampton’s work on the attics and alcoves of Sargon’s gothic mansion is equally strong; here too, he is clearly drawing on an older pulp tradition of gothic interiors, complete with suits of armor and grim family portraits. These two issues are in a completely different class than DC’s other current mainstream magic offerings, Tales of the Unexpected and Shadowpact, and I would gladly buy either Ibis or Sargon as monthlies with these creative teams at work on them. The opening chapter starring Willingham’s somewhat too precious Detective Chimp (art by Dr. Fate alum Shawn McManus) and the most recent issue featuring Gail Simone’s Black Alice (Duncan Rouleau on pencils) are not as much to my taste, but both are respectable entries.

Of course, what the classic-creepy goodness of Ibis and Sargon is really arousing in me is my old desire for a rapprochement between the horror titles that ended up in the Vertigo line—Swamp Thing and Hellblazer—and the mainstream DC universe. Since this is unlikely to happen, let me once again register my plea for a reintegration of horror comics more generally into the DCU. A better Spectre series would be a good start (how I miss the old Moench/Colan Spectre with Madame Xanadu and her tarot readings!), but the two other obvious contenders for revival are I…Vampire (once Lord Andrew Bennett decamps from the high camp back-up in Tales of the Unexpected) and Night Force (the Wolfman/Colan version, of course). Either one of these dusty concepts could serve as the basis for a Swamp Thing-style injection of horror into the DCU—in the right hands. That is, provided that they are not played for laughs. In the meantime, I’ll be keeping my eye on Dr. Fate.

Civil War #7: R.I.P. Marvel

2007-02-22T23:54:00.000-05:00

Watching Joe Quesada and Mark Millar destroy the Marvel universe has been no fun at all.

In fact—and pardon my hysteria—it’s even felt a little bit sinister. A bit? Okay: very sinister. Or maybe that should just be cynical.

How does one assess the motives of storytelling this reactionary?

Sure, sure. Cap’s “radicalized underground” (!) is still out there, no doubt itching to carry on the good fight against Tony’s evil (oops, I mean “equally valid”) machinations. And heck, maybe we’re even supposed to see that last panel as irony. But you know what? It doesn’t matter, because the problem with this stupendously awful series is bigger than whose side “wins.” Much bigger.

I’m referring to the fact that this series has changed the way we “read” Marvel superheroes, a change that has something to do with the political content of the story, but even more to do with its form.

Wishful thinker that I am, I sometimes delude myself into thinking of superhero comics as a progressive, sub-cultural pocket of the mainstream media that has at least a minimal investment in challenging particularly odious forms of authority and orthodoxy. And there might even be some justification for this semi-delusional way of thinking, despite the obvious rejoinder that comics are just a storytelling medium like any other and are home to stories that implicitly or explicitly endorse any number of political positions. Despite, too, the equally inevitable rejoinder that superheroes are inherently “fascistic” or “authoritarian,” a topic that has been explored (and refuted?) both intelligently and otherwise within the medium itself (Watchmen, The Authority, The Boys, etc.).

The argument against both of these claims—and against the claim for the inherent conservatism of the superhero genre in particular—is basically formal and goes something like this: Superheroes are not real. Superhero comics are therefore fantasies. That is, they present events that break with reality and in so doing suggest ways in which “reality” as we commonly know it is inadequate or dissatisfying. Fantasy is always, in some sense, a critique of the present. If we take the fantasy of the superhero literally, it is easy to see how it could be described as a sinister longing for fascist solutions and transformations. But must we take the fantasy literally? Not necessarily. Like any literary work that depicts events that do not happen in real life, the superhero comic and its superhero fantasy can also be taken metaphorically. And when we read superheroes as metaphors (or better yet, as symbols), their meaning—especially their political meaning—is no longer so simple or so certain. This ambiguity about how to interpret the fact of the fantasy itself (which is a formal feature of the genre) is why the superhero can be either a terrifying ubermensch or a liberating metaphor depending on how you read him (or her)—and is often both of these things simultaneously.

The reason Civil War has felt so flat and depressing from the beginning is that its architects have done everything possible to completely jettison the liberating (and less rigidly fixed)metaphorical reading of the superhero in favor of a dreary literalism that can produce only the most plodding and banal of political allegories. What if there really were superheroes?, Civil War asks earnestly. The inevitable answer follows: they'd have to register with the government! This, I submit, is a silly question that not only serves as a pretext for a rather unsavory civics lesson, but also calls forth a particularly limited form of reading. In other words, it isn’t just that the conclusion of Civil War is morally bankrupt (which it is), but that, like the rest of the series, its overblown political allegory removes the ambiguity of the superhero fantasy itself and thus robs the series of the rich metaphorical resonance that made us all fall in love with superheroes in the first place.

In the new Marvel universe, we no longer have to think about the metaphor of the superhero and what it might mean in political terms or in any other terms for that matter. Joe Quesada and Mark Millar have already done our allegorizing for us.

To the extent that they manage to contain and limit the metaphorical possibilities of Marvel superheroes in Civil War, Quesada and Millar have simply embellished and generalized the work that Chris Claremont did (much more palatably) on mutants as a metaphor for various forms of social outsidership in the 1980s and 90s. In both cases, there is a turn away from the chaotic complexity of symbols (whose meaning is unstable and thus impossible to pin down) towards the greater simplicity of allegory (where individual images or characters stand in for particular ideas). The difference between Claremont’s quite supple mutant allegory and the crude political cartoon of Civil War is that Claremont, whatever his faults as a storyteller (and they are fewer than people commonly suppose), had years to work out an allegory of enormous resonance and complexity whose delicious reversals and Byzantine storylines produced a genuinely thought-provoking narrative that frequently transcended its allegorical premise. (The fact that it was driven by a powerful and credible moral imperative didn’t hurt either.)

By contrast, the allegory of Civil War has about as much complexity as Pilgrim’s Progress. And this is reflected in the utter flatness of the miniseries’s treatment of character (something that always suffers in works of pure allegory). People (not me) accuse Geoff Johns of “action-figure” plotting; Mark Millar’s messy script for Civil War makes him the true owner of this mantle, and the lack of characterization in the series isn’t helped by Steve McNiven’s pretty pencils. Yes, McNiven is a very talented guy, but all you see on any given page of Civil War is McNiven—the characters themselves are just posed, empty figures.

Marvel has always distinguished itself from DC by rooting its stories more firmly in “the real world”—and Civil War is certainly in keeping with this tradition. It’s just too bad that by rooting its superheroes so uncompromisingly in a “real world” allegory it’s made a mockery of its own internal history, turned half its cast into monsters, and reorganized its universe into a place I can no longer recognize as a space of meaningful fantasy.

On Escapism: Tales of the DC Decade (Part 1)

2007-01-14T23:06:00.000-05:00

No, not this one. The other DC Decade. The one Marv Wolfman announced in 1984.

I was twelve years old in 1984, the year that DC initiated its hardcover/softcover plan, splitting The New Teen Titans and Legion of Superheroes into regular “Mando” and deluxe “Baxter” format books. Wolfman’s trumpeting of the details of this plan in a guest editorial for Dick Giordano’s “Meanwhile…” column is worth savoring in full (click to enlarge, left), for it captures a moment in comic book history when DC’s commercial and creative impulses achieved an exquisite symbiosis (a symbiosis whose details uncannily anticipated DC’s current 52/One Year Later experiment). Even now, I find Wolfman’s palpable joy at the prospect of new, brighter paper for Perez’s Titans drawings totally disarming and totally charming. He is speaking here in the voice of fan and co-creator, not businessman, and he is as smitten with the idea of simultaneous “hardcover” (direct market) and “softcover” (newsstand) editions of the Titans being released each month as I was.

I don’t think it would be possible to overstate the degree to which my twelve-year-old self reveled in this new plan. In its original form, The New Teen Titans was the comic series that I already regarded as a confirmation of my own mature tastes: “Runaways,” “Who Is Donna Troy?” and the just-wrapped “Judas Contract” were not kid’s stuff after all! So when DC’s invention of a second, “Deluxe” edition of the Titans promised to launch me into even more sophisticated territory, I was thrown into what I can only describe as a kind of rapture or ecstatic fit. And I’m sure I wasn’t alone, for what Titans fan could fail to appreciate the magnitude of a plan that would take a book that was available to just anyone on the newsstand (the “softcover” regular series, renamed Tales of the Teen Titans and destined to be a reprint book after a final year of original stories) and supplement it with a “hardcover” title that was available only to the elite readership that frequented comic book specialty shops?

In my case, what made this “evolution” of the Teen Titans so electrifying was that the change in format corresponded almost perfectly with my transition from primary school to the unforgiving world of junior high—a transition that was, to say the least, bumpy. In the same year that my social fortunes plunged from the relatively comfortable heights of grade six (in a school that I knew) to the nerve-wracking depths of grade seven (in a school that I didn’t), at least my fantasy world was ascendant and expanding.

The plan—a softcover newsstand edition that would print original stories for a year at the same time that the hardcover direct market edition would jump a year ahead in continuity so that the softcover edition could seamlessly begin to reprint those stories twelve months later—turned out to be a kind of microcosm of the dual temporal track upon which my own life at that time was destined to run. My dreams may have been Baxter, but day-to-day life was, without a doubt, Mando all the way—and it was appropriate that the stories in the Mando newsstand edition of the book were themselves a little drab. The idea that I could literally jump ahead by a year in the better, glossier hardcover book while the regular book continued to trudge along was a luxury whose symbolic resonance was not lost on a kid who would have liked nothing better than to fast-forward through grades seven and eight.

It helped that in the new hardcover Baxter series the Titans themselves were more adult-seeming than ever. Dick and Kory were shown (scandalously) waking up in the same bed, and the remarkably horror-driven Raven plot reached new levels of darkness and seriousness. And of course, Marv was right about the paper. George’s art had never looked better than it did in those first two self-inked issues of The New Teen Titans, vol. 2. This was a book for connoisseurs only—a “mature” title at every level of its production. Script, art, and now format—a total achievement and a whole new level of comic fetishism to mark a new phase in the Teen Titans’ (and my own dreamed of) coming of age. That it was available only through subscription or “through the special network of comic book shops”—perhaps the most profoundly important counter-space to the official world of the school for many kids—confirmed an exclusivity that was already deeply felt.

For me, the new Baxter series of The New Teen Titans represented the acme of juvenile fantasy, not simply because it was so fanboyishly satisfying (which it was), but because it provided a very unique sort of consolation for the misery and uncertainty of junior high: it was an object that validated my precocious snobbery—my belief in the sophistication and maturity of my tastes and my conviction that, even though I felt like I had little in common with most of my classmates, there was some parallel universe in which a twelve-year-old’s capacity to appreciate the beauty, darkness, and, yes, profundity of the world was actually recognized. The book was also a peculiar kind of fetish. To read it, to hold it in my hands, was to regard a perfected self. A self that was, in its own mind anyway, already fully grown and complete, though it was of course a self that was totally incommunicable. No doubt, like all comic books, the hardcover New Teen Titans was an “escape,” but it was not merely “escapist” in the way that people usually mean when they invoke that word to characterize the preoccupations of twelve-year-old geeks. This was an “escape” that actually pointed somewhere. Not (just!) to some never-never land of perpetual narcissism, but to that hazy realm past secondary school, past even high school, towards the (relative) autonomy and freedom of adulthood.

to be continued...

For New Readers: The Best of Double Articulation

On Allusion
All-Star Superman #1 and “The Golden Apples of the Sun”

On Love
Clichés, Obsessions, and Objects in The Amazing Spider-Man #205

An Archaeology of Affect
What I Learned About Gender from The Defenders #53

On Existentialism
Why Paper Dolls Do(n’t) Cry, or Steve Gerber’s Myth of Sisyphus in Marvel Two-In-One #7

What is the Impossible Man?
Mighty Marvel Metafiction in Fantastic Four #176

Spoilers Abound (Vol. 1, No. 6)
On Villains United

What I Did On My Summer Holidays
Notes on the Cabin Bookshelf

and, just for nostalgia’s sake, the first post: My Golden Age

Double Articulation Digest: Wish List 2007: CrossGening DC’s Science Fiction Titles

2007-01-04T22:59:00.000-05:00

Many moons ago, I fantasized about repairing The Outsiders. This year, I fantasize about the science fiction titles I’d love to see from creators whose work I enjoy more than a little. Sure, the Green Lantern Corps is back in deep space action in a (mostly) nifty book by Gibbons, Champagne, and Gleason, and DC’s reinvestment in its other space characters is heartening. But imagine how good these ongoing titles would be:

The Omega Men
Written by Tony Bedard / Art by Paul Pelletier

Yeah, so, they work for Marvel now. That’s what contractual loopholes are for. It’s a crime that they didn’t get a chance to finish Negation, CrossGen’s superior space adventure, but at least that series gave a sense of what this duo can do with a space-faring group of misfits. An Omega Men book with a (resurrected) classic cast written by Bedard and drawn by Pelletier would be a grand slam. Bedard knows how to have fun with space-faring teams and Pelletier’s visual imagination is ideally suited to the kind of universe-spanning adventure and interplanetary intrigue that the Omega Men are all about. In the hands of this cult creative team, the book would sell better than it ever has before and it would provide a roving camera for exploring both the familiar worlds of the original series as well as the weirder pockets of the DC universe.

Captain Comet
Written by Chuck Dixon / Art by Scott Eaton

Hmm… This creative team seems familiar too. Are you sensing a theme here? The thing is, CrossGen had it largely right: their books had incredible established and up-and-coming creators working on classic genres in a thinly-veiled superheroic mold. Dixon and Eaton’s Sigil was a great-looking space opera bursting with potential, but it (like most of CrossGen’s books) was held back by the dead hand of the corporate metastory that ended up killing the entire line. Put this pair on Captain Comet, age the protagonist back to his grey-templed glory, and turn it into the science-adventure it was meant to be. Eaton grew enormously as an artist at CrossGen—and he can draw spaceships like nobody else. Give the man some work!

Legion of Superheroes
Written by Keith Giffen / Art by Andrea DiVito

I seem to be in a minority, but I just don’t like Waid and Kriston’s Legion. Kriston’s art doesn’t do it for me, the kids are annoying, and the whole enterprise is just a little too knowing for its own good. Give me the young adults, the low concept, and the pure soap operatic melodrama of the Levitz/Giffen LOSH any day. And who better to restore the Legion to its roots than Legion alum Giffen and on-the-rise penciller DiVito? In fact, DiVito’s pencils even have an early-Giffenesque feel to them and between Marvel’s Annihilation and CrossGen’s The First he’s already proven that he’s adept at drawing both space sagas and books with outrageously overpopulated casts. Please, Dan Didio, I don’t WANT to beg, but I’m not above it. I’d even settle for an out-of-continuity Tales of the Legion or Legion: Classified sort of thing. What do you say, huh?

Double Articulation Digest: The Year in Review (Part 3)

2007-01-04T00:10:00.000-05:00

Read: Part 1 and Part 2.

On Probation

1. The All-New Atom – I was surprised to learn that Entertainment Weekly named this title book-of-the-year. Gail Simone is the bee’s knees, but this book hasn’t completely won me over. I’m grateful that they dumped Byrne, but even without his arrogant scribbles, there was something a little too tongue-in-cheek about the opening story-arc for my taste. Nonetheless, I’m intrigued and sticking with it.

2. Blue Beetle – I’m rooting for this series, but I dunno… Love the characters and the premise. Curious about the New Gods connection and the ongoing mystery of the alien tech. Not thrilled with the pacing of the series, the inconsistent art, or the meandering nature of the story so far. Loathe the Beetle suit. Fingers crossed.

3. Green Lantern Corps – This book is in certain ways more entertaining than the main Green Lantern title—Guy is just a lot more fun to read than Hal Jordan. Gleason’s sensational art is also a major plus. However, this book suffers from a fairly dull supporting cast and, in Dave Gibbon’s hands, was cursed with the most pointless fill-in story arc since the endless Justice League Detroit saga torpedoed both JLA and JSA Classified titles earlier in the year. Thankfully, things are looking up again with the brand new “Dark Side of the Green” storyline.

4. Shadowpact – Another book I’m prepared to love, if only it would let me. Much of the charm of the miniseries seems to have vanished along with Justiano. The villains are too silly for my taste and the stories need a denser texture.

5. Tales of the Unexpected – The Spectre story is pretty good but the art is a bit rough. The Doctor 13 back-up is a hoot.

6. Ms. Marvel – This started off as one of the more entertaining new Marvel books of 2006, but has since become a casualty of Civil War politics. The recent Wieringo fill-in issues didn’t work for me either—the tone of Ringo’s art is all wrong for this title. Better days ahead, I hope.

7. Omega Men – I like the concept behind this book better than the execution, but I’m in it for the duration because I want to see more of these characters.

Disappointments

1. Teen Titans – I’ve been holding out for the big pay-off, but I think it’s time to admit that it just isn’t coming. There’s no momentum here at all, partly because Johns never really allows things to simmer and because there are so many new (or new-again) characters flying through these pages that the reader never actually gets a chance to care. The perfunctory handling of Kid Devil’s origin in the most recent issue, which Newsarama’s Koben Kelly accurately describes as “com[ing] off like a fill-in issue,” is another sign that Johns isn’t quite the right writer for this series, despite his superb instincts for reinvention. I know how I’d fix Teen Titans from a creative standpoint, but I’d be curious to know what others think.

2. Astonishing X-Men – This is a strange situation. I love Joss Whedon’s TV, and I can see that “objectively” this has many features of a “good” book: drama, tension, surprises, likeable characters, witty dialogue—the whole nine yards. One problem is that it isn’t an X-Men comic—it’s an episode of Firefly masquerading as an X-Men comic. And as much as I enjoyed Firefly, I would really like to enjoy a good, involving, non-cutesy X-Men comic that moved at faster clip. The pacing is just brutal. But the underlying problem here is that I find myself bored senseless by the X-Men generally. I routinely pick up new X-Men stories in the hope that something will hold my interest, but all of it just feels blah. I think I need a little vacation from the X-Mansion.

3. JSA (Levitz/Morales) – What a shame to end the series with such a whimper.

4. OMAC – I was drawn in by the first couple of issues, but MAN has this series killed my interest. Is that big satellite STILL in the sky? Is it still sending signals to that kid-OMAC? Is he STILL in bed with that girl? Is it all a hallucination? Did he just wake up again? Wait, where is he now? Did the sheriff come and get him, AGAIN? Is this, like, the most boring road movie I’ve ever had to sit through? Did this REALLY need to be eight issues long? Is it over yet?

5. Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis – A valiant but apparently doomed effort on the part of Busiek and Guice. The pictures are pretty, but I’ve finally had to give up on this waterlogged King Arthur yarn.

6. Trials of Shazam – Not at all what I’m looking for from a Captain Marvel story. Awful.

7. Martian Manhunter – My expectations weren’t all that high to begin with, but I wasn’t sufficiently hooked to stick around past issue #3. Not a fan of the cone-headed J’onzz either.

8. Creeper – This “Brave New World” experiment hasn’t worked out so well, has it? The series has really fallen apart since the loss of Justiano—or rather, it’s revealed how thin its premise was to begin with.

9. Mystery in Space – I think I might actually hate The Weird, despite having briefly convinced myself that his return was something to be excited about. My reservations about de-aging Captain Comet are already on record, so I’ll only add that the problem with this series is its rather claustrophobic focus on the protagonist. Captain Comet is awesome, but the canvass doesn’t feel big enough.

Unmitigated Catastrophes

1. Civil War – Too harsh? I don’t think so. It’s high production values can’t disguise the fact that it is the most loathsome book of the year and the epitome of everything that is wrong with the company’s current, utterly humorless creative “vision” for its mainstream titles. It’s killed my interest in Marvel for the time being—and not because of its notorious lateness. What’s so awful about this series (aside from the multifaceted idiocy of its premise) is the way that it has made character subservient to the dictates of a high-concept plot, with the result that it utterly poisons some of its most significant characters. And then it has the gall to pretend that the plot really is “character driven” and all about “character moments” after all. Right. The reason this rings so falsely is that the manipulations leading up to the series (getting Peter into bed with Tony Stark, for example) were all utterly transparent, crude, and unconvincing. But, you know, it isn’t even that that really irritates me. It’s the self-importance and utter humorlessness of the project that turns me off. I could elaborate, I suppose, but why bother?

2. Flash – Someone must have owed someone a favor. How else to explain the shockingly incompetent handling of the relaunch of a title that had been climbing in quality and popularity for the past several years? It’s hard to say what’s worse: the writing or the editorial decision-making behind this fiasco.

3. New Avengers – How did a promising start go so completely off the rails? This book has been in a death spiral since the end of the Savage Land story, and most of the Civil War issues have been pointless filler. The Luke Cage issue was good, I guess, but not the reason I read the Avengers (New or otherwise), and Maleev’s art in the most recent issue was lovely, but Hawkeye—wha? I’m really just done with Bendis. The post-Civil War sister book isn’t cause for optimism either.

4. Hawkgirl – An object lesson in the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule. The infuriating thing about this title is that it had finally established its viability as a nearly first-tier superhero book when it was shot out of the sky by One Year Later.

5. Outsiders – As if its pseudo-hipster status weren’t enough to make you flee, the unsuspenseful stories themselves moved at a snail’s pace. Run, Katana—run to Birds of Prey while you still can!

Friday: My 2007 Wish List for DC’s Science Fiction Books: 3 Redesigns

Double Articulation Digest: The Year in Review (Part 2)

2006-12-31T23:42:00.000-05:00

On Saturday, I looked at my favorite books of the year. Today I cast an eye over books that are ripe with potential but are still finding their feet, as well as books (or partial runs of series) worthy of particular praise, even if they don’t quite make the cut for “Best of the Year.”

Promising and Notable Books (2006)

1. Justice Society of America – The most exciting #1 of the year. Hands down.

2. Batman (Morrison/Kubert) – A tantalizing and overdue return to a more colorful Bat-sensibility, but where’d it go? There’s something cozy about the merely passable Ostrander/Mandrake “Grotesk” story arc currently in progress, but its tone couldn’t be further removed from the James Bond Batman that Morrison was developing. A “re-imagining” of the magnitude Morrison promised requires consistency to work, even if it is only within a single Bat-title. It would be too bad if Morrison’s jauntier playboy Batman ends up to be just a missed opportunity.

3. Wonder Woman – Alan Heinberg and the Dodsons? I love it. I’m even prepared to wait for it. My only complaint is that there are too many superheroics (and heroes and villains) hogging the spotlight in this frantically-paced opening arc. Let’s hope this is followed up by one of those “day in the life” issues laden with character moments and subplots, hmm?

4. Checkmate – Intelligent and compelling. Arguably DC’s slickest, most adult mainstream book. And it reintroduced the sorely missed Suicide Squad.

5. Justice League of America – I haven’t liked the pacing of this opening arc at all. (Meltzer needs to worry less about the feints and reveals and more about basic storytelling.) It has been an undeniably exciting ride nonetheless. More than anything else, I’m excited about the possibilities for this book down the line and the incredible JLA line-up that exploits the as yet untapped potential of DC’s lost 80s generation (about which you will be hearing a lot from me this year). Vixen? Geo-Force? “Doctor Jace”? Black Lightening? Arsenal? Trident? Cyborg? This is the first time since Morrison that the JLA has felt like a truly fresh property.

6. Nightwing – Wha… huh? You bet. The Wolfman is back, baby. Granted, Marv’s first story arc was saddled with the turgid pencils of Dan Jurgens, but thank goodness for the return of some old-school storytelling. The half dozen issues of this title prior to Wolfman’s assignment as writer were mind-bogglingly unreadable. Truly awful stuff. What a breath of fresh air to have this character back in the hands of the writer who defined him. You show those punk kids how it’s done, Marv. Your reward? The talented Jamal Igle!

7. Manhunter – May the appearance of Wonder Woman in the new arc finally help this entertaining and distinctive book find the elusive wider audience it’s been seeking.

8. Green Lantern – I’ve been enjoying the return of Hal Jordan for the last couple of years, but I haven’t been completely grabbed by the series until the last few Global Guardians issues (I especially enjoyed the reintroduction of all those weird Green Lantern science fiction villains in issue #15). After a year or so of housecleaning and set-up, the series finally feels like its heading into interesting territory. And finally, the return of the only Green Lantern villain worth getting really excited about: Star Sapphire! Reis is the ideal artist for this series, and I hope he stays because the book would take a serious hit without his sumptuous visuals.

9. Jonah Hex – It’s wonderful to read a book as assured as this one, whose gritty and engrossing re-energizing of the Western genre continues to impress. The current Hex origin story is fantastic, and I wish that Bernet would stay on as artist indefinitely; failing that, I’d love it if they could tap Eduardo Barreto as regular artist.

10. Detective Comics – It’s been awhile since I’ve been a regular Batman reader, and I’m enjoying Dini and Kramer’s stand-alone Bat tales quite a bit. Kramer’s art looks better here than it did on JSA and Dini is doing a very nice job of rebuilding Batman’s rogues gallery—in fact, the storytelling “model” here feels very similar to what Geoff Johns did on Flash, and that’s a good thing.

11. Moon Knight – Brutal, ugly, gratuitous...and ingenious. One of the few Marvel books that I enjoyed this year. Can Huston and Finch sustain the momentum? Here’s hoping.

Wednesday: Year in Review Continues with: On Probation, Disappointments, and Unmitigated Catastrophes

Double Articulation Digest: The Year in Review (Part 1)

2006-12-30T17:01:00.000-05:00

Let’s take a look at the old pull-list, shall we? It’s always tricky to evaluate comic books by year, given the wild fluctuations in quality that perennially afflict ongoing titles (and even miniseries) over the course of twelve months. In an effort to make some meaningful distinctions, I’ve categorized the books I buy according to several sub-lists that I will be posting over the following week: The Best of My Pull-List (2006) (today), Promising and Notable Books (Monday), On Probation, Disappointments, and Unmitigated Catastrophes (all on Wednesday). Not included on any lists are several books that I’m way behind on and buying as trades (Fables, Y the Last Man, Godland--all excellent).

The Best of My Pull-List (2006)

1. All-Star Superman – Despite a disappointing cinematic interpretation, 2006 was Superman’s year. Who cares if this series only comes out every six months—it’s one of the few that can legitimately make the argument that great art takes time. These are stories for the ages.

2. Seven Soldiers of Victory – Morrison at his most maddening and dazzling. The last page of Seven Soldiers #1 is perhaps the purest encapsulation of Morrison’s beautiful secularization of religious themes yet. I want the poster.

3. 52 – I can’t really argue with Ian Brill’s charge that many of the individual issues seem uneven or even (sacrelige!) mediocre, but this series is greater than the sum of its parts and has reset the bar for comic book “events” by addressing the temporal experience of reading and the distribution schedule of the medium rather than just focusing on the content of the story itself. (What other event can claim to have captured the “Wednesday” experience in a bottle?)

4. Birds of Prey – What can I say that I haven’t said already? If you’re still not reading this book, you’re missing DC’s best monthly.

5. Infinite Crisis – Uneven, but riveting. Although it never quite achieves the gravitas of the original Crisis, it hopscotched its way through a memorable series of emotional (and adrenaline filled) highs and lows.

6. Superman (Busiek/Pacheco) – With only a handful of issues under their belt, Busiek and Pacheco have infused more excitement and sheer coolness into Superman than I thought possible. Morrison and Quitely’s All-Star Superman is a science fiction myth; Busiek and Pecheco’s Superman is a seamless blend of Metropolis story and sf superhero saga.

7. Doctor Strange: The Oath – Remember wit? This one was a very pleasant surprise, and Entertainment Weekly agrees. Finally, the Doctor is in! Er, out! Er…whatever!

8. Action Comics (Johns/Donner/Kubert) – Exhilarating. But be warned: for sentimentalists only.

9. Secret Six – Not quite as good as Villains United, but pretty damn close. Brad Walker stepped into Dale Eaglesham’s considerable shoes from out of left field and completely made these characters his own. Simone’s lurid, titillating, so-wrong-it’s-right, Alice-in-Wonderland script does not disappoint.

10. Freedom Fighters – I have enough Canuck prejudice in me that I never thought I could enjoy a book whose primary theme was American patriotism. Palmiotti, Grey, and Acuña proved me wrong—waaayyy wrong. In an entirely different league than the silly miniseries that spawned it and a tonic for its line-wide counterpart at Marvel. (Sure, it’s cartoon politics, but still!)

11. Thunderbolts – Nicieza and Grummett have recaptured the magic of the Byzantine original, and how does Marvel thank them? By kicking them off one of the last bastions of classic Marvel storytelling. Hmph. Ellis and Deodato had better be worth it, gang.

12. Annihilation – A rip-snorting cosmic adventure that gathers steam with every issue. Jaw-dropping moments galore, even if, like me, you only recognize about half the cast. Pure militaristic fanboy fun.

Monday: Promising and Notable Books of 2006

Mirth Without Mischief: Twelve Pleasing Pastimes

2006-12-27T22:03:00.000-05:00

Holy cow, is it Christmas?

Not quite sure what happened to December, but I have briefly (and temporarily) reemerged from work-related things long enough to clean up the apartment, deck a fake tree, and read plok’s dangerously head-swelling post from December 3rd (!) on that enigmatic little triptych of mine. What a Christmas present—bless you, sir!

I had grand ideas for this year’s holiday post, but I’m sufficiently burnt out from term that the follow through just wasn’t in me. Maybe next year. Instead, let me recycle last year’s reflections on a favorite Daredevil Christmas story of mine (I would have found a way to say the same things again in a different form anyway), and offer a few remarks on twelve things that have kept me afloat these last few months and for which I give thanks on these (already in progress) Twelve Days of Christmas.

12. James Bond - Stephen King recently remarked after seeing Casino Royale: “I came out of the theater thinking it was the best Bond since Goldfinger. A subsequent viewing of Goldfinger…has convinced me it’s the best Bond ever.” I couldn’t agree more, but that’s no reason not to give in to the temptation of the 4 vol. James Bond Ultimate Edition collecting the twenty (official) films of James Bond B.C. (Before Craig). I watched many of these films a few years ago during a TBS Bond Marthon (“Superbond on the Superstation”)—over Christmas break, I believe. I was doped up on Sinutab at the time and all the movies sort of bled into each other in an extraordinarily pleasing way.

11. The Wild Wild West - And when you run out of Bond, there’s always West, James West. Please, forget everything you think you know about this series from the dreadful-looking Will Smith/Kevin Kline summer suckfest of the same name (I didn’t see it). Yes, the 1960s TV show is a rip-off of James Bond set in the American West, but it’s a spectacularly entertaining rip-off, and that’s all that matters. Season 1 (currently out on DVD) is in black and white, but don’t let that discourage you. These episodes are perfect '60s mixed genre tales with a little something for everyone: a cowboy/martial artist (!) hero (the usually shirtless Robert Conrad), an affable, resourceful, and long-suffering sidekick (Ross Martin), gorgeous, dangerous women (usually femmes fatales rather than damsels in distress, though often both), scenery chewing villains with world-conquering ambitions played by an array of classic character actors (who later had careers on nighttime soaps in the 1980s), more gothic traps (and trappings) than you could shake a stick at, an endless stream of steampunk sci-fi spy gizmos, and, of course, a seriously pimped out train. The stories—precisely because they were camp to begin with—stand up remarkably well.

10. Birds of Prey - Rarely is a first-tier series that is already running like a finely oiled machine retooled so gracefully. Gail Simone and incredible new find, penciller Nicola Scott (hopefully destined for a long run on the book), are keeping the Birds flying high—possibly even taking them to new, more exhilarating heights with the expansion of the cast to include such unlikely (but delicious) additions as Big Barda, Manhunter (star of another stellar book), a new Spy Smasher, and an unexpectedly appealing fangirl/Batgirl wannabe. Under Simone’s tenure (and with the help of a great group of artists), Birds of Prey has reached a level of storytelling quality, creative energy, and consistency that makes it one of a handful of DC’s unmissable books. It is quite simply the best treatment of a primarily female superhero cast in recent memory, and it is probably the best character-driven book in contemporary comics period.

9. Justice Society of America - And speaking of impressive retoolings of already excellent books… Dale Eaglesham? Geoff Johns? Dawnstar?? Kingdome Come??? The excitement level for this book is off the charts. The relaunch of JSA as the cornerstone book of the new DCU looks simply incredible. I met Eaglesham at a convention this year and learned that, in addition to being a superb artist, he’s also one heck of a nice guy—I couldn’t be happier that he’s the artist on this title. I’m also delighted that Johns will be pouring his energies into this book, since JSA has been, arguably, the strongest and most consistent work of his career so far. (I think it’s time to pass the Teen Titans on to someone else—Marv?) The first issue of Justice Society of America was a winner, stuffed with great new characters, tensions, mysteries, revelations, and teases—all wrapped up in an immediately engrossing story foregrounding the series’s legacy theme, which I love. Time to collect All-Star Squadron and Infinity Inc, DC.

8. YouTube - There is much that is (delightfully) ridiculous about the content on You Tube, but occasionally the ridiculous takes a detour through the sublime. Exhibit A: the lo-fi stop-motion mini epic, Tony vs. Paul. Spectacular. Less sublime, but still gratifying is the ubiquitous Live Action Hamster Video Game. And on the subject of YouTube and gaming, is it wrong to be a fan of the elastic-faced Angry Video Game Nerd and his sophomoric profanity? He has an informative rant that attacks sequel numbering fuckups in movies and videogames with a rigor that I appreciate.

7. Andy Goldsworthy - This is who I would like to be, if I were a talented, faintly tortured artistic genius. Goldsworthy’s fleeting and profound art/nature “installations” are a perpetual source of wonder. He provides the best gloss on the significance and power of his art in this clip from Rivers and Tides (the stunning documentary on his work) when he says, “I am so amazed at times that I am actually alive.” Here is a second excerpt from that film. Stefan Beyst has a nice essay on the artist. And here are some photographs of the work.

6. Calvin and Hobbes Snowman Cartoons - I certainly don’t want to encourage the war on Christmas lunatics, but now that the snowman has become the prime signifier of ecumenical winter cheer it’s nice to remember that he need not be as dull as he often seems. This is nice too.

5. George Perez Storyteller - A Christmas gift from a good friend that I tore through on Christmas day. There have been collections on Perez before, usually in the form of interviews, but this is the first time I’ve been walked through his entire career. What a trip. Particularly fascinating for Perez fans will be the middle sections on his post-Titans decline, his mid-career fumbles, and the subsequent rejuvenation of his reputation following his run with Kurt Busiek on the “Heroes Return” Avengers. Perez recounts a priceless convention moment when, after his Avengers work allowed his “discovery” by a new generation of fans, one kid told him that he was such a good artist, he had the potential to be the next Todd McFarlane! Ever-gracious, Perez resisted the cheap shot. An attractive and surprisingly revealing book. (Finally, the cringe-inducing Sachs and Violens at least makes sense.) The Newsarama interview here. And a preview of Storyteller too.

4. Tintin: The Complete Companion - Tintinology 101 by noted Tintinologist Michael Farr. A superb account of Herge’s career and influences, and also a fascinating record of the twentieth century. I received this as a gift from a friend earlier in the year and have been delving into it with enormous delight for the past few months. I have been intending to explore my fixation on Tintin ever since I started this blog, but have always held off—I think for fear of not doing justice to a body of work that means a great deal to me. Working on it…

3. The Office - I’m usually not all that fond of comedies. Cheers, Seinfeld, Fawlty Towers: these are the obvious exceptions. Comedies whose humor seems (almost) timeless. Don’t know if the American version of The Office will stand the test of time or not, but few comedies make me actually ache with laughter, and this one does. Not sure I’ve ever seen such a deft juggling of mockery and sympathy.

2. 52 - Still the first comic I read every week, and always among the most enjoyable. But even when a given issue fails to dazzle, the momentum of the weekly experience carries me through. Watching it unfold is exhilarating for many reasons. Partly, it is the form—the thrilling momentum of weekly seriality as such. Partly it is the brilliant interweaving of high-pleasure comic book staples such as the training of a successor (The Question/Renee Montoya), the “who is behind the mask” mystery (Supernova), and the Romance-Quest (Ralph Dibney). Partly (and this is a big part), it is the focus on secondary characters. But beyond this, it is the sheer line-wide scope of the storytelling, both at the level of plot and in terms of stakes and implications (what is “52”? the “Grant Morrison factor”, etc.). Thrilled to hear that DC plans to revisit this kind of storytelling in the future—it’s the essence of comics, comin’at’cha every seven days. Wonder what Marvel could do with this?

1. Battlestar Galactica - Just watched the miniseries and am starting Season 1. OMFG.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Kirby’s Best Character Design: The Thing

2006-11-27T18:53:00.000-05:00

Better late than never, right Sean? I can’t tell you how tempted I was by King Solomon’s Frogs, but in the end, I have to agree with plok and go with Ben Grimm. This will come as no surprise, I’m sure, since I’ve waxed poetic about the pathos, profundity, and—heck yeah—perfection of Kirby’s great existential hero before.

The idea of a creature composed of living rock is one of humankind’s oldest myths, but Kirby gives this myth its most viscerally human embodiment with one brilliant design feature: the brow. Yes, the orange rocks are essential, but it is the craggy brow shading Ben’s mournful baby-blues that creates a visual metaphor of the character’s extreme vulnerability and gives this pop version of Frankenstein’s Monster the true spark of life. And let’s not forget that Ben Grimm’s connection to Mary Shelley’s monstrous Adam (or is that Eve? or Satan?) extends beyond a visual referencing of the Boris Karloff movie version: Shelley’s original alienated Monster is, in many ways, the existentialist precursor to Grimm as well.

Additionally exciting, I think, is the way the Thing design so successfully sublimates Kirby’s primitivism. The astonishing modernist vitality that Kirby cannot help imparting to everything he draws achieves something unique here: in contrast to his more overtly thematized designs, the Thing is a truly modern primitive, and this means that he uncannily embodies an emotional intensity that (politically incorrect though it now is) modernist art routinely associated with “pre-modern” cultures. The Thing’s living rocky hide makes him a humanized version of the “primitive art” that was in many ways at the heart of Kirby’s own style. That Kirby himself was a stout figure gives Ben Grimm the additional savour of a self-portrait.

The real shame is that Marvel seems unable to imagine a meaningful place for its most adult character in its current universe. Is it a coincidence that the Thing left the FF just as Civil War began? I don’t think so; perhaps he found the whole debacle as depressing as I do. May his exile at least be short-lived.

Lost Objects 3: What Was It?

2006-11-22T08:21:00.000-05:00

Law of the Father? Fetishism? My Castration Complex?

Double Articulation Digest #2

2006-11-12T15:26:00.000-05:00

Doctor Strange: The Oath #1-2 – There’s still time. If you hesitated about buying the first issue because the cover logo was so inexplicably ugly, it’s probably not too late to reconsider. My advice? Just suck it up and take the plunge. Yes, the logo is hideous; but if you turn the page quickly, you’ll forget it in no time. Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin are outdoing themselves in this witty, beautiful story, which is by far the most assured and entertaining Doctor Strange tale I’ve read in many years. Vaughan’s wry take on the Stephen Strange/Wong relationship is perfection, and so is his use of Florence Nightingale fetishist Night Nurse, a salty structural stand-in for Clea who uses bobby pins instead of spells. Who says Marvel doesn’t know a thing or two about style?

Annihilation #4 – The exciting twists and turns of this space saga are further evidence that Marvel needs to liberate both its writers and its fans from the creative quagmire of Civil War a.s.a.p. Annihilation is a “traditional” space saga—by which I mean, it has an entertaining story, appealing characters, and beautiful art. This issue contains some satisfying revelations about Annihilus’s plans and gives more airtime to one of my favorite second-string Avengers: Moondragon. Oh, and it features one titanic ass-kicking. The best issue so far of a series that is shaping up to be outstanding. If only the Marvel webmasters could succeed in matching the covers with their correct issue descriptions in their on-line catalog (the actual cover to this issue is here). While they’re at it, perhaps they could make the Marvel website legible. Even after its reorganization, it is still, hands down, the most unnavigable company site on the web.

52 #25,#26, and #27 – There’s no shortage of things to praise about 52, but one thing I’m especially enjoying is its revival of DC’s more freakish characters, as well as its invention of new ones. Oh, Grant Morrison.

Is Chang Tzu “Egg Fu”? And more importantly, why do both he and Emerald Eyed Ekron have all those crazy robot legs?? (And who’s “driving” Ekron??? Or do my eyes deceive me?) Can we expect more disturbing monster-heads? 52 is so entertaining that someone is going to have to invent a special industry award just to honor it. Am also loving Ralph’s Orphic Odyssey. Not to mention the promised integration and rationalization of DC’s time-travel characters. Interesting too that the most recent issue appears to confirm my (and probably everyone’s) suspicion that the little girl on the cover of week 25 foreshadows of Renee Montoya’s future. R.I.P. Vic Sage; long live The Question.

Jonah Hex #13 – The already unmissable series gets gussied up a little further as Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti are joined by international comics artist Jordi Bernet to tell the origin of Jonah Hex. The story is gripping and the interior art every bit as rich and expressive as the superb cover image suggests. What a treat, for as good as this series has been, the charm of this issue is that it actually looks like classic Western comic. Highly recommended.

Superman #657 – This is turning into one of the best Superman stories ever told. Seriously. Busiek is on fire writing an apocalyptic future in which Superman’s own body becomes the missile that send the earth into a state of nuclear winter.

The apocalyptic future has long been a cliché of the superhero genre, but it feels different this time. The “superteam” of Luthor, Lois, Jimmy, and Parasite on the cover is...so cool. And Pacheco’s art…gasp! The cover. The two-page spread of Metropolis falling into the sea. Everything here is just so beautifully rendered. I have nothing intelligent to say about this except: more please!

Teen Titans #40 – This was a good issue. But precisely because it was good, it also reveals the main limitations of the current series. When I finished reading it I thought: “Well, that was…moderately fun. It reminded me of some great stories from the past.” But, unfortunately, that’s about the most I could say about it. As my various Teen Titans posts over the past year and half have indicated, I’m tremendously ambivalent about this series, despite my nearly sycophantic admiration for Geoff Johns’s work on virtually every other title we writes, and despite (or perhaps because of) my fetish for the Titans era that Johns’s current series is attempting to emulate. I really like the One Year Later team; for the first time since the end of Wolfman’s brilliant Titans-Hunt saga, Johns has created a Titans team that could be spectacular. The group has energy, dynamism, and strikes a winning balance between novelty and tradition. And yet, despite a lot of action, globetrotting, new characters, and revelations, the actual story of this team still feels like it hasn’t started yet. I’m still asking myself, who are these characters? Who (especially) is Raven? And not in a gee-I-can’t-wait-to-find-out kind of way. More like an annoyed, wtf? kind of way. Similarly, the reveal at the end of this issue was enjoyable. But in a Johnsian universe, it was also inevitable (even though, I admit, I hadn’t predicted it). My complaint is that being caught by surprise this way can only be a mild thrill, and after awhile, begins to feel like a cheap trick if it isn’t supported by the kind of intricate character development and extended serio-comic “a day in the life…” downtime that was a hallmark of the classic New Teen Titans upon which so much of a reader’s enjoyment of the current series depends. What I don’t like about the current series, then, is its selective use of those Wolfman-Perez stories: it keeps much of their content, but throws out the form. What this new series has made me realize is that (nostalgia aside) my love of those earlier tales had as much to do with their formal density as with their treatment of plot and character. And of course, the two things are inseparable. Between Wolfman’s verbosity and Perez’s super-compressed, multi-panel pages, the classic New Teen Titans actually had room to deliver substantial doses of action and reflection every issue. The Johns/Daniel stories, however, are still too decompressed to do this adequately, so instead, they tend to build character development and reflection into their action sequences, sequences which are themselves simultaneously rushed (because there are too few panels per page) and overextended (because they take up so much of each issue). The result is a frenzied pace that never quite allows the team to gel. For an older fan like me, it all feels a little too much like the proverbial sound and fury… And yet, fulfillment is so close, you can almost taste it. Gah!

Kryptonian Fathers, Kryptonian Sons

2006-11-04T18:38:00.000-05:00

Action Comics #844 – I wasn’t sure about this at first, but now that I’ve adjusted my brain to recognize this as a Richard Donner Superman film in the form of a comic (not a regular DCU Superman book), I’m enchanted. The orphan’s fantasy of recovering the absent father that pervades the Donner films is the driving force here too as Superman intervenes in what appears to be his own story being played out a second time. This is a compelling premise because while Superman’s intervention in this issue brings his own position in the orphan/foster-father narrative full circle, it does so in a way that may allow him to heal the initial gap between himself and the ghost-father/Mighty Oz, Jor-El. By becoming the space-boy’s guardian, Superman consciously steps into the role of archetypally good foster-father, Pa Kent; yet, because he and the boy are (apparently) both Kryptonian, Superman potentially transcends the position of “alien” foster-father to symbolically recover the original absent father, Jor-El—that is, he recovers his own father by “becoming” a “real” Kryptonian father in relation to a “real” Kryptonian boy/self.

No doubt, complications will ensue to muck with the promise of such mythic fulfillments. But it’s a tantalizing premise all the same, and its pathos is enhanced by the “filmic” visuals supplied by Adam Kubert in this issue. By “filmic” I don’t mean “grand” or “panoramic,” but quite the opposite: strangely subdued, realistic, plain. The banal details of the lab make it feel ordinary. Superman hovers cross-legged talking with the boy as he eats a sandwich on plastic toy furniture. The cubicles at the Daily Planet where Lois is working late have an exceptional degree of cinematic vraisemblance. There are no “supervillains,” yet. Barely any powers. That’s why the action sequences feel heavy—rather like “special effects.” (Could the producers not afford a conceptual artist to design a convincing spaceship? Is that why the child is “delivered” to earth in a giant wheel of brie?)

But this isn’t a criticism. What I am describing is the “austerity” that Hollywood cinema brings to the superhero movie because budget constraints require a stingy and very deliberate parceling out of visual departures from everyday realism. Superpowers are expensive, which is why the movie-Superman and his spandex-clad fellows spend so much time acting as brooding metaphors in superhero cinema rather than tossing bad guys around. When this kind of situational austerity is transferred to comic books—usually in adaptations of superhero films—the effect is almost invariably ugly, boring, and depressing. (I don’t think I’ve ever read a comic book movie adaptation that I’ve liked. And of course, that’s partly because such things aren’t written for me anyway; the adaptation is a “mediating” genre written for film goers who don’t read comics, though it’s hard to imagine that they’d be convinced to try more by such labored introductions.) Here, however, the Johns/ Donner script and Kubert’s translation of the restraint and austerity that comes from Donner’s (and Johns’s) film background produces a deeply gratifying effect, perhaps because the story is not an adaptation and because the paring down of the “color” of the regular DC Universe in the pages of Action Comics gives the plot a melancholy and nostalgic feeling that fits.

And there’s something else too. In a story like this, whose main concerns are thematic (and not intrinsically tied to the superhero genre, even if they find in its tropes a particularly congenial form of expression), the shift from a comic book aesthetic of spectacle to a filmic aesthetic of superhero “realism” confers a significant advantage. Namely, the reduction of ordinary spectacle means that the moments in which “special effects” are employed resonate with unusual power. The image of the boy holding the entertainment unit over his head is extraordinary, but we’d barely notice it in an ordinary superhero book. The same is true for the remarkably evocative illustrations of Superman sitting with the boy as he eats his sandwich or talking over his case with the scientists while the boy lays asleep in the racecar-shaped bed. These images take us to the heart of an emotion that runs deep and is, I suspect, fundamental to Superman’s continuing appeal, particularly for men who can no longer lay claim to the territory of boyhood, despite their most ingenious and self-flattering efforts. That these images are set within a story about relationships between sons and fathers is not coincidental. The feeling they evoke is not one that I expected myself to be moved by, because it is almost too corny to name. But as I get older, it’s one that, increasingly, gives me pause. Especially when it is presented as delicately and earnestly as it is here.

On Halloween: Shrouded Skeletons and Friendly Ghosts

2006-10-31T07:57:00.000-05:00

The covers of classic horror titles were often far superior to the “chilling, thrilling tales of mystery and suspense” they promised inside. Take this cover from Dell’s Ghost Stories #30 (1971), for instance, which I bought recently because it struck me with the force of archaic recognition.

Everything, everything that matters, is here. The greenish night. The house on the hill. The broken shutter. The bent and useless fences. The black claw of tree that reaches for the house and in the same moment frames it in the protective curve of its trunk. The spectral bat that frames it on the other side, flying us into the pinprick at the picture’s center: that eerily lighted room. (Look closely: it is a human figure.)

It is of course this room that has the broken shutter; like the house surrounded by broken fences, it must bear the signs of supernatural breach. Even these broken fences are doubled by the merely relative (and thus deceptive) frames of tree and bat whose ability to enclose depends on your point of view, as if you can never have too many signs of rupture.

And supervening all, the grey skeleton, veiled. Or is that “bed-sheeted”? A garment of ghostly mist that blankets the house, not so much framing as enveloping. Snugly and reassuringly. The garment of a grim Casper, an ultimately friendly ghost. A quaint spectre who “tucks us in.” A “familiar.”

For this is not an image of horror. Those images are different, and I would discover them in other places. (A coffee table book filled with giant color photographs of insects that I was afraid to touch. Pages swarming with ladybugs.) This is a picture of cozy transgression. It is “spooky,” not frightening.

No doubt, we could roll out the entire psychoanalytical machinery of Oedipus and the family to understand the domesticated “secret” of this skeleton in bed sheets. But must we? For me, the intensity of this painting resides not in the promise of unveiling, but rather in the satisfactions of deferment. Its signs of transgression are a ruse. The doubling, tripling of broken frames (shutter, fences, tree/bat) do not “disclose” the painting’s “secret.” They are the secret. It is literally an open secret, displayed on the surface. Like the pallid ghost stories behind the cover, the promised secret is too banal to read. (The stories inside have nothing to do with the cover—total detachment, infinite deferral; the revelation of the secret, what “only the ghost knows,” must be sought elsewhere, perpetually. A definition of pleasure.) This is a painting of the only true “secret”: the one that cannot be known. That yellow room. A pinprick.

In the end, this cover painting attracts me because it is an image of our profound delight in secrets. And this delight is condensed in the childhood bogey of the shrouded skeleton because—with its familiar, comforting bed-sheet and its only half-disclosed grinning skull—it is our most intimate, most reassuring signifier of the pleasures of secrecy. The keeper of a “chilling, thrilling” “mystery” whose solution is perpetually “in suspense.”

A friendly ghost.

Why I love Halloween.

__________
For more friendly ghosts, visit Keith Milford’s Old Haunts.