Brian Reed's Ms. Marvel.

I've developed a bad habit, where comic books are concerned, of letting a significant portion of my regularly purchased titles build up months and months of backlog before I read them. I suppose it's because I was having trouble keeping up from month to month, and constantly found myself reading issues and not knowing what was going on. Then I started pulling out every issue since the beginning of a particular story arc and rereading all the old ones before reading the newest one. This helped with dense, complicated storylines, like those Brian Wood often writes for DMZ, but with my more standard superhero titles, left me sick of the early issues of certain titles before the final issues of the arc came out. Whether I was just reading a certain issue once and trying (usually failing) to remember all of its significant plot points until the next issue came out, or rereading the entire arc from the beginning over and over, I wasn't having a satisfying reading experience. So I started letting a bunch of the titles I regularly buy pile up for months at a time. More often than not, it was the superhero titles, with their tie-ins and complicated, long-running plots, that built up for the longest. And sometimes I find myself sitting in my easy chair in my room, looking down at the box of unread comics, thinking, "Am I buying too many of these? Would I miss any of these titles if I stopped getting them?"

I got an answer decidedly in the affirmative this week, at least where one title is concerned. I started picking up Brian Reed's Ms. Marvel title back when the first issue came out. I picked it up because Reed collaborated with Brian Michael Bendis on the then-recent Spider-Woman: Origin mini-series. I enjoyed the series, and any author with a link to Brian Michael Bendis is a guy whose other work I will check out. I was not disappointed--in Reed's Ms. Marvel, a character I usually thought of as a pointless also-ran, I found an update on my teenage connection with Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man. As a kid, I related to Peter Parker, because his experience with being a superhero was extremely similar to my pre-teen experience with being smart. He had this power, it enabled him to do really well in one area of his life, and it either did nothing for him or actively got in the way in every other facet. He was a superhero who had constant girl problems, was seen as a wimp by everyone he knew in his civilian life, got pushed around by his boss, and was always broke. Plus, he had trouble connecting with a regular group of friends, because he didn't have the social skills necessary for smooth interactions. Either he was nerding out about science stuff that he'd always loved, or he was too focused on Doctor Octopus or whoever to even tune fully into the conversations of his friends. This stuff can be a strained metaphor at points, but it's similar enough to work, at least for me. As a pre-teen and an early teenager, I related to Peter Parker like crazy.

I still see myself in some of his adventures in the rebooted title Ultimate Spider-Man, as written by the aforementioned Bendis, but it's in a sense of looking back. I can remember how rough high school was, and on that level, I can relate to his adventures in that title. But the still-running original Spider-Man title has been tweaked and screwed up to an extent that I can't see anything of myself in it. I still read it, though I question myself more and more often as to why I bother. Either way, as much as I enjoy them (well, at least one of them), both of these titles are pretty far from something I relate to at this point in my life.

This is where Ms. Marvel comes in. She's one of Marvel's most powerful characters, but she's always been under-utilized; she's existed for over 30 years and only occasionally had her own title. At other times, she's had a leading role in team-up titles, but it's usually been temporary. Mostly, she's a character some writer or another will bring in to defeat some super-powerful baddie they've created, and then after that issue, she'll fade away again. Brian Reed started his Ms. Marvel title by acknowledging this fact, and turning it into a narrative hook for the story. His Ms. Marvel is a woman who doesn't really know what she's doing with her life. During the Marvel alternate-reality whole-universe tie-in House Of M, Ms. Marvel, always one of the most powerful superheroes in the Marvel Universe, was seen as the greatest hero on Earth. Although everything went back to normal after a week, Ms. Marvel--Carol Danvers--remembers this week in an alternate reality, and feels compelled to try and live up to the life she had during the House Of M event. She laments in the first issue that she's tired of doing some big powerful world-saving thing, and then "spending the next six months sitting on her couch eating Ben And Jerry's." Brian Reed has taken an under-utilized character and turned her into a poster girl for the ennui-filled underachieving thirtysomethings that a lot of Generation X kids have grown up to be. No doubt I am one of those, which has a lot to do with why I relate so heavily to this version of the Ms. Marvel character.

One of my favorite single pages in any comic I've read in the last three years since I got back into comics comes from Ms. Marvel #10. The plot of the issue is the sort of plot that all truly good superhero comics have: some ridiculous, unrealistic sci-fi device forces our hero to confront and engage with a flawed element of their own character--the sort of element that is common to regular people everywhere. In this issue, an alternate-universe version of Carol Danvers, going by Warbird (a name Ms. Marvel used for a brief period in the late 90s), shows up in this universe with the full intention of killing Rogue of the X-Men. The Ms. Marvel that we've known for the entire comic tries to stop her, only to have alternate-universe Warbird freak out on her. Warbird, it turns out, is still angry over something that Rogue did to her a long time ago. The alternate-universe plotline gets pretty crazy and hard to explain (though it's easier to follow when you're actually looking at the pages of the comic and can tell the two different Carol Danvers characters apart), but the subtext is much easier to understand: has Carol made the right life choices? Should she be where she is? Should she be doing more? Was she right to forgive Rogue? Is she a good friend to the people who look to her for friendship?

By the end of the issue, Rogue is unconscious in a hospital bed at the X-Men headquarters, and Beast asks Carol to leave. She feels responsible for Rogue's condition, and hates that Beast is angry at her about it. And as she's leaving, she's trying to figure out how she feels about what has gone down, and more generally, about herself as a person. The third-to-last page of the issue is the one that hit me hardest:


(art by the late, lamented Mike Wieringo)

The first time I read the line "I try to believe... that I am a good person," I'm pretty sure I cried. It's a simple way of putting it, but really, it cuts to the heart of the matter: I have trouble believing that I am a good person. There are things that I am good at in life, but they've never really helped me feel like someone who is worth being around. There've been points in my life where I've been suicidal, where I've been firmly convinced that I'd do the people in my life a big favor by just dropping dead, and not troubling their lives anymore. When I feel that way, it's because I struggle with the same question. Am I a good person?

Over the course of the last two pages, Carol comes to a positive conclusion, and determines to start facing up to her fears. In fact, this is the rest of her monologue from the last two pages of the issue: "The last time I ran away, I went into space. And I stayed there for awhile. It's so beautiful out there, so peaceful... it makes me want to scream. Part of what I love about outer space is that there's nobody else out there. And when you're that alone, you forget what makes you human. Yeah, space is beautiful. But it's also a means of running away. And I'm not going to run away from anything ever again." Pretty powerful stuff. Although I can't relate to the idea of hiding from my problems in space, I've certainly hidden from them in a lot of other places, both physical and mental. I try to stick to that same pledge, not to run away from things, but it doesn't always work. But I keep trying.

Anyway, that issue of Ms. Marvel was enough to make me a fan for life, or at least as long as Brian Reed is writing the title. It's stayed good since then, even though at some points the issues have been more straightforward fighting bad guys and such, with less time for introspection. Despite all that, recently I let something like 8 issues of Ms. Marvel pile up without having read them. Some of them were tie-ins to big-universe-wide-tie-in-event of the moment, Secret Invasion (which was better than the inane World War Hulk, but not much). Those issues suffered from some of the same problems that Secret Invasion's main title had--too many huge double-page spreads of 80 characters fighting, plenty of action but corresponding lack of plot advancement, and convoluted details that the reader needs to follow across multiple issues of multiple titles in order to completely understand--though they were better than some of the Secret Invasion stuff I read. However, the issue that immediately followed the multi-issue Secret Invasion tie-in arc, #31, blew me away. It's called "Family", and once again, Brian Reed used a big elaborate unlikely sci-fi plot device to confront an issue that we all have to deal with sometimes. By way of example, here's a page from the issue:


(art by Marcus Marz)

Once again, the trouble Carol Danvers has with relating to her family has to do with that incident that happened between her and Rogue a long time ago. I wasn't reading comics back when it happened and don't pretend to understand the logic behind what happened, but apparently it involved Rogue sucking out all of Carol's feelings? Actually, I'll let her Wikipedia entry do the explaining:

"In Avengers Annual #10 (1981), Ms. Marvel is found by Spider-Woman, floating in the water below the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California. Carol is literally mindless, having had her mind wiped clean by parties unknown. It is ultimately revealed that Carol was assaulted by the mutant Rogue, who ambushed her and used her ability to absorb others super-powers via physical contact to permanently steal Danvers' powers and memories.

Spider-Woman contacts the X-Men who try to reverse the damage done to Carol by Rogue. Ironically, Rogue's attack has failed to erase Danvers' subconscious, which allows Xavier to completely restore Danvers' memories and personality, though he is unable to restore Danvers' emotional connection to most of her memories."

So we have a convenient sci-fi explanation for Carol's inability to feel much of anything for the members of her family (as well as the reason that the alternate-universe Warbird back in issue #10 couldn't stand to forgive Rogue for what she'd done). And that's fine, as far as it goes, but it wasn't the sci-fi explanation that led me to relate so heavily to this issue.

The holiday season just ended, as you well know, and between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, I spent about a week staying at my parents' house. I only really see my parents on these holidays, and it's been that way since I first moved out over a decade ago. I'm pretty much fine with it, and in fact, I have a lot of trouble dealing with going back to their house when I do it. I don't have any excuse not to go, and it seems like cutting off that form of contact with them without an obvious reason would cause more trouble than it would be worth, but I never have that good of a time when I'm back at their house. Regardless of the fact that I never had some mind-draining mutant attack me and steal my memories, I feel very similarly about my family to the way Carol feels. Who are these people? What place do I have in their lives? Why don't I feel a damn thing when I'm around them?

It isn't that Carol doesn't have a good reason to have lingering resentments towards her family, though. Later in issue #31, she sits by the bedside of her comatose father, and talks to him as if he can hear her. I have to wonder whether she'd have been able to say them if her father were conscious, but we all know how that goes. Anyway, she talks about how most of her memories of her father are of him yelling at her, about how his descent into alcoholism as she grew up made it hard for her to have a relationship with him, and about how she wishes she felt like he'd ever been proud of her. She feels like she wasn't what he'd wanted from a child, and that it doesn't matter what she's accomplished--it wasn't what he wanted to see his daughter accomplish, so he could never be proud of her. Then she says something else I could really relate to: "I don't know why I even care. I've lived a lot of my life without you in it."

Again, simply put. But again, cutting right to the heart of the entire issue. I think about that question a lot--why do I still care what my parents think of me? I certainly don't think they respect the things I wanted to do with my life, and I don't think they see the things I've accomplished thus far, meager though they may be, as worthy. And as I've grown older, I've come to see that they aren't even necessarily nice people. Yet, after all this time, I still care what they think. Even as I go on, at least 11 months out of the year, living my life without them in it, I wish, and on some deep level, I hope, that they will approve of me. I don't know why I care. But I do.

I'm not sure how much of a basis, if any, there is in prior stories about Ms. Marvel to support Brian Reed's interpretation of her as a character. For all I know, he completely reinvented the character. If he did, though, I am glad he did, because his stories about her have come to mean a lot to me. She may be one of the most powerful superheroes in the Marvel comics universe, but we're not so different, she and I.

Rundown, week of August 20th.

It's been a while since I've done any writing about comics. So, without further ado, I present commentary about every comic book I bought this week:

MOON KNIGHT #21: The second issue with Mike Benson writing solo, first with him doing an ongoing story arc rather than a one-and-done. I hate to say this, since in theory I love anything Charlie Huston writes (basing this mostly on the fact that I fucking adore his Joe Pitt novels), but I think now that Huston isn't involved with the title anymore things are a lot clearer. I also think this is a good time to start reading this title. Moon Knight has been even more insane than usual since returning to the caped-crusader scene, and has killed or nearly killed a lot of people. The government has run out of patience, and they're after him. Is it possible that Moon Knight has lost his mind any more than he already had? If so, it looks like maybe he has... or maybe he's actually getting better. Either way, he's dressed all in black and appears to have shed the spectral presence of Khonshu, his god of vengeance. But Moonie's only in about 6 pages of this issue, the rest being setup for a major reckoning that's coming down the pike. I'm looking forward to what's coming, especially since it's going to look fucking gorgeous with the art team of Mark Texeira and Javier Saltares on the title. Love these guys' work.

IMMORTAL IRON FIST: ORIGIN OF DANNY RAND: Other than a 2 page intro by Matt Fraction and Kano, this is a straight up reprint of Iron Fist's first appearances in Marvel Premiere #15 and #16, back in 1974. I'm one of those people who tends to think that any comics made more than a decade ago are utter shit 99% of the time, so I was surprised to find two issues obviously churned out by Marvel Bullpen regulars of the time (Gil Kane, Len Wein, Roy Thomas) to be pretty decent. Don't get me wrong, this isn't great writing, and it gets pretty cliched at points, but it's not the kind of churned-out crap I expect from just about anything this old, so that in itself is a compliment. I probably could have done without this comic--if I'd realized it was almost entirely reprints, I wouldn't have bought it--but having gotten it, I don't regret doing so.

AIR #1: Never read anything by Willow Wilson before, but have heard good things, so I figured I'd check out her new Vertigo title. SO glad I did! This is excellent writing, excellent art by M.K. Perker, and something like 48 pages crammed in for a regular-comic price of $2.99. Great enticement to keep me sticking around on the title, and even though I don't completely understand what's going on, I love the character of Blythe the acrophobic stewardess, and want to see what happens next with her. It's really hard for me to tell which of the shadowy organizations using commercial airlines for their own ends in the post-911 world are really good guys and which are really bad guys, and I question whether any of them are 100% one or the other, but that only makes it more human and more interesting. Definitely on board for more of this. Also, I found out from Willow Wilson's afterword that she's straight-edge, which is cool because a lot of times in the world of comics, where everyone's either down the pub knocking back pints or doing hallucinogens and chaos magick, I feel like the only sober one in the pack. Nice to know I'm in good company there.

1985 #4: This is an action packed issue of a title that started out quite calmly, with a lot of exposition. If I'd gone straight from issue #1 to this one, I wouldn't have recognized it as the same title. The Marvel supervillains that have been unleashed on little Toby's town are running completely amuck, and most of this ish is nonstop action as Toby and his dad try to avoid the chaos erupting and make sure each other and Toby's mom are safe and accounted for. By the end of the comic, Toby's realized that drastic action is called for... and wait til you see what he does. It kicks the whole thing up to another level, at a point when I didn't think this comic could get any more intense. Between this title and the few of Millar's recent Fantastic Four issues I've checked out, he's on a serious roll with the Marvel universe, and that's not to mention his creator-owned title Kick-Ass. It's all the more remarkable that I'm saying this in light of the fact that I usually have nothing but hate for Fantastic Four, and would typically have to be bribed to read it. Oh, and by the way, Tommy Lee Edwards' art on this title is outstanding. I don't know where this guy came from, but I hope to see more of his work soonest.

SCALPED #20: This is the final issue of a story arc that was the darkest yet in Scalped. All of the action has basically been cleared up, and this issue is more a denouement than anything. Things are going pretty much as expected for all of the characters, and our long-suffering hero Dash Bad Horse is getting the worst of it on pretty much every front. Meanwhile, his girl Carol, who's got demons of her own, is exposing him to some bad elements, and with no relief in sight, Dash gives in to temptation and gives this comic about the most downbeat ending possible. I actually yelled out, "No, don't do it!" as I read the second-to-last page. I really want to believe that the next arc will introduce some much-needed hope for these beaten down characters, but I don't see it happening. Realistically, there's nowhere to go from here but down. I'll follow it all the way, and I'm sure I will appreciate the talent it takes to create such a fascinating storyline, but I don't know that I'm really enjoying this anymore. I feel like I'm reading the closing chapters of "Heavier Than Heaven" again.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #41: Ed Brubaker's storyline has been complicated and requiring of close attention ever since I started reading this comic around issue #21, and I think I've finally read enough of it that I'm starting to understand everything I need to understand and get every reference I need to be aware of. This is the first issue I've gotten in a while that I didn't feel required my rereading the previous four or five in order to understand. There are a couple of bigtime shake-ups in this issue, too, and they seem to indicate that things are looking up for our heroes, but we won't really know for a while, will we? Either way, the writing is even better than it is complex, and I continue to love Steve Epting's art, so this comic stays solidly in my good graces.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #568: This title has been fluctuating from "Hmmm... I don't know" to flat-out "I fucking hate this crap" ever since the execrable "Brand New Day" concept was unveiled, and that fluctuation has everything to do with who is writing the title at any given moment. They've given the lion's share of the post-BND issues to the worst of the four regular writers, Bob Gale, but every time I'm about to cancel the title entirely, to walk away and never look back, someone pulls me back from the brink. This time around it's been a double-whammy: first a three-issue arc by Marc Guggenheim that was the best writing the title has featured since Dan Slott's opening arc, and now a double-sized issue featuring the beginning of a new storyline by Dan Slott and a backup feature by Mark Waid. OK, OK, I will continue buying this comic--for now. This story is looking pretty good too, though Dan Slott's been forced by the Bob Gale-ization of the title as a whole to retain some of the stupid crappy-writer exposition that Gale loves, and those moments definitely irritate me. John Romita Jr's art is also solid as always. One thing that gets my goat a bit, though--why is it that the big ominous reveal on the last page is the SAME EXACT big ominous last-page reveal as that of Moon Knight #21? The first time I saw it, it was cool, and it would have been equally cool if I saw the second use of this trick two months later, but reading these two comics almost back to back had me responding to this big ominous ending the second time I read it with outrage. That could easily have been avoided. Sloppy executive editing, Marvel people!

And finally, my comic shop did not receive any copies of Anna Mercury #3. In fact, they told me it had been delayed. FUCK THAT.

Spider-Man's Brand New Day.

A more general post about comics I've been reading lately is forthcoming, as well as hopefully some more music posts (I really want to talk about Grade, Carbomb, and Pearl Jam's "No Code" LP, among others), but I'm tired of how slack on content I've been lately, and I wanted to get something up here. Also, I've had a post about this whole Brand New Day thing percolating in my mind for a while. However, I'm pressed for time (and kinda for inspiration as well, at least in the moment), so this will mostly be culled from things I've written elsewhere.

First and foremost, if you didn't catch it, go back and read my rant about Amazing Spider-Man being turned into a thrice-monthly comic: here. Second, here's a message board post from January 15:

"by the way dudes, i hated the ending of "one more day" entirely and completely, which makes me feel really weird about the fact that i actually really like "brand new day" so far. it's just... damn it, what a fucking copout. they could have saved time and just said "hey guys, we realize that the events of the civil war painted us completely into a corner where spider-man is concerned, so we have to make them go away somehow. here, have a mystical bullshit story, and we'll pretend the last 20 years of the comic never happened." GOD, SO LAME."

Not exactly written thoughtfully, but it gets the point across. Finally, here is a letter I sent to Marvel comics about four days ago:

"Hi guys. I've been a bit uncertain about the Brand New Day revamp, and I still feel like you could have done better with the transition from Straczynski's run, but so far I have enjoyed the Brand New Day stories enough that it hasn't really bothered me. However, I have a bone to pick with the current month's story, and it specifically relates to Bob Gale's writing. Now, the plot has been fine--I haven't felt like it strained credibility or got boring or anything else that could have been bad. However, the man's scripting is just driving me nuts.

Let me explain. In recent years, the thought balloon has fallen out of favor, and there's a good reason for it. I read an interview with Brian Michael Bendis where he talked about how he originally tried to eliminate them completely in his writing, because most writers used them as a crutch. I agree with this reasoning--generally, when a character is shown with 5 paragraphs of thought-bubble per page, it's lazy exposition, and it's meant to telegraph plot points or character motivations that the writer isn't demonstrating in other ways. Dan Slott used some thought bubbles (though he made them caption boxes) in his arc a couple months ago, and he used them judiciously, without ever making me feel like I was getting overwhelmed by them. Generally, the characters' motivations were explained well enough through the dialogue and storytelling that very few thought bubbles were necessary. This was fine; it didn't bother me or pull me out of the story at all. However, Bob Gale's current story arc makes me feel like I'm drowning in thought bubbles (and don't even get me started on Freak's dramatic monologues on pages 11 and 16), most of them giving me information I could have figured out without them. You know the old writing maxim "show, don't tell?" Well, Gale is telling, not showing. It's bad writing and it's making his issues a slog instead of a fun read, like Slott and Guggenheim's issues were over the last couple of months.

Something needs to be done about this. I know that all of the writers are involved in an overseeing capacity on every issue, and I further know that, based on their work on this and other titles, at least Guggenheim and Slott are able to get by without this excruciating hackery (haven't read anything by Wells yet, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt). So please, if you're going to keep Bob Gale on the writing staff (and I'm not necessarily saying you should get rid of him), have the other staff writers take a bit more of an active role in the scripts for his issues. Clean up all the lazy exposition and help the Gale issues rise up to the quality of the issues by the other writers. I don't plan to quit reading the title, at least not anytime soon, but the last thing I want is for one month out of every four to be crappy while the other three months are good.

By the way, you're welcome to print this, though I can't imagine that you will."

In summation: I don't know about all this. So far I'm continuing to read, but I'm not at all sure that I will do so indefinitely. Right now, Ultimate Spider-Man is trouncing the original version. But then again, I guess that's been true since Bendis started that title.

I will almost certainly have more to say about this subject in the future.

A new post about comics.

Well folks, I haven't written about comics in a while, but that doesn't mean I'm not reading them. I just haven't had a big idea for a blog entry about them lately. I don't now either, but I feel like writing about them, so this will just be a quick and dirty rundown of some comics I've read lately, with no overarching theme to tie them together. Let's get it started.


Moon Knight #13


This double-sized issue helps to make up for the fact that there were a bunch of shipping delays during the 6-issue story arc that just ended. Those delays, as well as Charlie Huston's roundabout, non-linear storytelling methods, helped to make that arc seem a bit disjointed when read month by month. I'm sure the people who wait for the trade collection will get a nice, unified read out of it, but I found my attention span tested a bit over the course of the run, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Perhaps this is why, according to the back page of this issue, Charlie Huston is out of there as of the next issue. I guess I can understand it, but I'm still disappointed. A year and a half ago when I read the first issue of the new Moon Knight run, I'd never heard of Charlie Huston, but between the outstanding first half-dozen-issue arc of this run and my discovery of his awesome hardboiled-vampire novels starring Joe Pitt (if you haven't read "Already Dead", run do not walk to the nearest horror/mystery themed bookstore and pick that motherfucker up. Now. I don't care if it takes your last $12. You'll thank me later), I've come to love his writing a lot. This issue was a great refresher as to why I feel that way, especially in light of the ambivalent feelings I had about the just-ended arc. It's a dark and spooky story about Moon Knight finally dragging his ass into S.H.I.E.L.D. and getting registered--despite the fact that everyone at S.H.I.E.L.D. thinks he's a nutjob and doesn't want him registered at all. If you're not keeping up with the action in the wider Marvel superhero universe, you'll be somewhat at sea where the wider framework in which this story exists is concerned, and I really don't feel like taking the space to explain it. Google "Marvel civil war" or something. But trust me, if Moon Knight has to exist within that wider framework at all (and I suppose he does, just like Ghost Rider does, though I really prefer to think of both titles as standalone horror comics rather than Marvel universe superhero titles), this is the best way for it to happen. It just makes me that much more bummed that Huston is leaving the title. But I've still got an entire series of crime novels by the guy to check out, as well as a recent standalone hardcover horror novel about a crew of teenage boys that looks really good. Plus, to soften the blow, Marvel's bringing in Javier Saltares and Mark Texiera, the amazing artistic team who've been making me so happy on the recent relaunch of Ghost Rider. If this means they are leaving Ghost Rider, I'm bummed, but it's offset by how happy I am to see them drawing Moon Knight. Hopefully the new writer (Mike Benson, about whom I know nothing) can live up to Huston's prior work and to the gifted artistic team he's getting.


All-Star Batman and Robin #7


Well, I guess the absurd shipping schedule this comic is on (one issue in all 2006. One.) has been alleviated somewhat--this is the second issue this year. It's sad that that actually seems impressive at this point, but I hear Jim Lee is really busy. Whatever. If this comic were half as good as it should be, I'd be tearing my hair out, but as it is, it started off a bit dodgy and keeps getting worse. In this issue, Batman and someone I'm pretty sure is an alternate version of Black Canary (she's been in the book for three issues, you'd think I'd know by now...) have sex. With their costumes still on. What is THAT shit. Dumb is what it is. I keep waiting for Frank Miller to turn this early-years Batman character back into the awesome guy he was in Miller's "Year One" four-issue mini, but let's face it--that was 20 years ago, and somewhere in the interim, Frank Miller overdosed on testosterone and lost his mind. Sin City was pretty decent, but since then I haven't seen a worthwhile comic from the guy. It pains me to say this, and before I read this issue I wouldn't have admitted it, but nonetheless it's the truth. I may very well cancel this title next time I'm at the comic store. Good grief, I can't believe I'm saying that about a Frank Miller-penned Batman title, but there you are. And by the way, no, the sex scene wasn't the only thing that happened in this issue. But it's the only thing that stuck with me enough that I remember it now, four hours after I read the damn thing. Sigh.


Detective Comics #837


Another Paul Dini-penned one-and-done Batman tale. I've enjoyed Dini's work on recent issues of Detective, for the most part--his old-school Batman adventures have made a nice counterpoint to Grant Morrison's innovative work on recent issues of the eponymous title. This issue, though, is a tie-in to Dini's weekly book, Countdown. While I will read most of Marvel's universe-wide big-event crossover miniseries, I generally avoid them when DC does them, because let's face it: they usually suck. Perhaps I'm biased by the fact that I either have no opinion of or actively hate 90% of DC's heroes, but I don't think that's it. If you ask me, the idea of how to construct a superhero universe that fuels DC's superhero line is just not that good or interesting. Batman is grittily realistic enough to be exempt from this as long as he's left alone in much the same way I like to see Ghost Rider and Moon Knight left alone. Unfortunately, he's one of DC's big marquee guys, so they don't leave him alone too often. This issue of Detective is an example of that. I started out reading DC's weekly book, 52, last year because I was interested in some of the characters it focused on (Elongated Man, The Question, Gotham Central's Renee Montoya) and I liked two of the book's writers: Greg Rucka and Grant Morrison. I'm not as big a fan of Mark Waid's, and I think Geoff Johns pretty much sucks, but those two were enough to get me reading. I enjoyed it at first, but it piled up new issues in my comic box so fast that I got hopelessly behind by the time the series was 3/4 of the way through, and didn't catch up until it had transformed itself into the Paul Dini-penned weekly, Countdown. Which is apparently working its way towards Final Crisis, which looks to me like it will suck just as bad as Infinite Crisis did, if it's not even worse. I read the last 10 issues of 52 and the first 14 of Countdown all in one big shot, and the dropoff in quality that occurred with the transition to Countdown was enough to cause me to cancel the title. I'm just not interested. And the reason I just went through that whole explanation was to make clear why I was sorta bummed when I picked up this issue of Detective and saw that it was a Countdown tie-in. I try to believe that Dini is still just as good at the one-shot Batman adventures as he was before I read Countdown, but I can't help but be a little bit prejudiced by the fact that I didn't like his writing on that title as much, and I certainly didn't want this issue of Detective to read like an issue of Countdown. Well, you'll be glad to hear that it didn't, for the most part. There were a few loose threads left by the end of the issue, which denoted ominous goings-on in future issues of Countdown, but I just ignored them because I don't really give a flying fuck. I was left with a satisfying tale that barely featured Batman at all, in which former super-villains The Riddler and Harley Quin (whom I've always had a soft spot for) were the heroes. I actually really enjoyed the storyline, and it's nice to see Harley finally getting her head straight. I know, she's just a comic character, why do I care? Hey, if I didn't, I wouldn't read the damn things.


Apocalypse Nerd #6


I stuck with this one to the end because I love Peter Bagge's old series, Hate, and was overjoyed to see him doing a new series (even if the issues did sometimes come out as far as 6 months apart). However, I never liked it as much as I liked Hate. The storyline (Pacific Northwest is nuked, certain city-fied types miss getting killed by the nuke because they're out in the woods at the time, said city-fied types must now find ways to survive) is less believable than the real-world tales of Hate, the characters are far less sympathetic--even the hero of the story, such that he is, makes me want to reach into the comic and smack him about 50% of the time--and the humor is a lot more mean-spirited than it was in Hate. Or at least, so it seems to me. Maybe if I reread my old issues of Hate now, I'd change my mind, but the fact is that I enjoyed them a lot more when I was reading them. Another thing I didn't like about Apocalypse Nerd--it seemed like death and murder were treated way too lightly and happened way too often. I think Bagge has always had a much more misanthropic outlook than I do, but his vision of the way the world would go if society's laws and constraints were removed just strained at my sense of disbelief. Worst of all, this issue, the final one in the miniseries, ends really anticlimactically. I thought I was going to get some sense of everything being wrapped up, but it didn't happen. Also, I've enjoyed the "Founding Fathers Funnies" backup feature in this title, probably more than I enjoyed the main storyline, but this issue's was far less funny than any previous ones. Even the one-page back cover strip was kind of lacking compared to the ones that preceded it. On the whole, rather a letdown. Still worth checking out for the dyed-in-the-wool Bagge fans, but those of you who haven't checked him out before would do well to start out elsewhere--both Hate and Neat Stuff make way better entry points.


American Virgin #20


This comic has ridden the fence with me from the very first issue. It always features portions of the storyline that are cringeworthy and others that are awesome, sometimes on the same page. However, the most recent story arc really pulled me in, and I was very satisfied with its conclusion, and interested to see where writer Steven Seagle would take things from here. Based on what I'm seeing in this issue, though, I'm starting to think that the conclusion of the last arc was a bit of a bait-and-switch. He's now moving things in a direction that would basically nullify its conclusion, depending on the way things go. And if that happens, I will find it hard to maintain my sympathy for his main character, the always a bit hard to believe pro-virginity evangelist, Adam Chamberlain. This issue's ending leaves the choice in Adam's hands, whether he wants to stand up for himself or let others around him talk him into the nullification choice (I'm trying really hard to keep this write-up spoiler-free for those who haven't caught up with the series--sorry if it leaves me speaking super-vaguely), but it looks like things are going in the direction I don't want. I'm not too into that. But I'll give Seagle one thing--the events of this issue got me really fired up, which means he's totally sucked me into caring about his characters and where their story is going. Even if he makes choices I don't like with the next issue, I'm with this title for the long haul.


Gotham Underground #1


Hoo boy. Not sure what led me to add this to my pull list in advance--perhaps I thought it would be a sort of sequel to Brubaker and Rucka's late, lamented Gotham Central, starring the cops of Gotham City's homicide department with only occasional appearances by Batman. But it's not--it's closer in feel to recent issues of Detective Comics, with their out of continuity standalone Batman adventure stories that nonetheless make me feel like I need to be way more acquainted with Batman's rogue's gallery than I generally am. At least when Paul Dini writes them, they're pretty well constructed, whereas some of the non-Dini writing on Detective in recent years has left me really cold. As does this issue. Bruce Wayne spends most of the issue dressed as a small-time thug named Matches Malone rather than as Batman--what's that about? Is that something that's been done before? In the 60s? Well, who knows at this point (answer: bigger comic nerds than me), but I didn't really enjoy it. Or anything else about this issue, to be honest. There are a couple of big marquee characters that I really enjoy reading about, for each company--Spider-Man is the big one for Marvel--and I often feel like each company churns out an excess of titles for each character, just to get superfans to spend more money. There are some titles that feel essential, and some that don't. Right now, where Batman is concerned, only his eponymous title feels like it's essential. I still read Detective because it's a lot of fun sometimes, but it's less than essential. Gotham Underground is worse than that, though, it's extremely inessential, and I probably won't pick up any future issues.


Suburban Glamour #1


This is Jamie McKelvie's new title. McKelvie did the art for Phonogram, a Kieron Gillen-penned miniseries that I loved. It reminded me of the best Hellblazer issues I've read, but also had a big musical link--the main character was obsessed with Britpop. I had a blast reading it, digging on the references to bands I loved, and even checking out some new bands whose names got dropped in the story but whose music I hadn't heard (I was less than impressed by Sleeper, but Kenickie are actually pretty damn good). McKelvie's art was enough to get me to take a chance on his writing as well, and Suburban Glamour ends up feeling a lot like a high-school version of the twentysomething Phonogram. Main character Astrid has evidently picked up the interest of some demons, or something like that, but most of the comic just focuses on her and her best friend Dave trying to get through high school being the sort of alterna-teens that might grow up to be punks, or indie kids, but right now are still listening to some kind of cliched mainstream-alternative rock. That's not to say that My Chemical Romance aren't fucking great (an offhand reference in this issue gives the idea that they are Astrid's favorite band), but you can just tell that these kids will get way further away from the mainstream once they get a little older. I guess what I'm saying with all this is that I'm reminded of myself and my friends in high school (though these kids are more social and well-adjusted than I ever was), which only makes me like this comic more. And don't get me wrong, I'm interested in the main storyline of the comic, the demons and etc, but most of this issue was just Astrid and Dave hanging out in school and at parties, trying to figure out their place in the world and have some fun along the way. And I liked that. I hope it stays that way through the rest of the series (though I can imagine it might not, as there are already only three issues left). I would definitely recommend this comic to fans of the urban fantasy writer Charles De Lint, whom I love, and whose work this definitely reminded me of.


Doktor Sleepless #3


Warren fucking Ellis continues to be a stupendous badass, not only with his two flagship creator-owned series but also in Thunderbolts and a couple of other places. But it's Doktor Sleepless that is my favorite of his writing right now. Issue #1 led a lot of people to say that this series would be Transmetropolitan part 2, but I didn't see it at the time and I definitely don't see it now. In addition to the darker, creepier sensibility of this comic, I also see a lot of concepts being explored that were either in the background or left out entirely in Transmetropolitan. That comic was basically Warren Ellis pulling a Hunter S. Thompson on the entire world he saw around him, though it was thinly disguised through a veneer of dystopian near-future sci-fi. We've again got the near future dystopian sci-fi veneer, and Doktor Sleepless the character seems pretty angry and monomaniacal, but the resemblance to Transmetropolitan ends there, and anyone who was in doubt of this fact after the first two issues should understand exactly why that's the case after reading issue #3. I don't want to get into it too much for fear of spoiling, but it seems that Doktor Sleepless's viewpoint is not going to be what drives this comic. It may have seemed that way in the first two issues, but the camera is pulling back a bit farther at this point, and it's starting to seem like Doktor Sleepless's viewpoint is but one piece in the narrative tapestry that this comic is constructing. We also are getting the views of his former lover, Sing Watson, and with this issue, the views of John Reinhardt, who supposedly IS Doktor Sleepless, but is apparently at least one other person besides, and maybe more. Then there's the viewpoint of Nurse Igor, Sleepless's assistant, who looks to have her own dark secrets and past traumas to work through. And who is this Albert Cannon guy? Maybe our big villain? Maybe something else? Whatever the answers, I'm on the metaphorical edge of my seat waiting for them. I see big things coming from this title, and I'm very excited for them.


Next time (tomorrow perhaps?), the new EP by Coalesce, and a very old EP by Sunny Day Real Estate. Stay tuned.

Latest complaint.

You know, sometimes I hate superhero comics.

Warren Ellis has a book of essays about the comics industry called "Come In Alone", and I think I've mentioned it in this blog before. In it, he talks several times about how a lot of the reason that superhero comics have such a stranglehold over the comics industry is because so many comic fans continue to buy them no matter how good or bad they are, irrespective of who writes them. I've read that book twice so far this year--because I liked it so much the first time that I wanted to read it again within a few months--and both times, I thought long and hard about how complicit I myself am in what Warren's talking about. I do buy a decent amount of superhero comics, it's true. And sometimes I kind of hate it. I would really rather be reading more stuff like "Scalped" or "Criminal" or "DMZ". Fact is, though, it's just not out there in all that great a quantity. And when guys who write series like that also turn around and write superhero tales on a regular basis, can I really be blamed for wanting to buy those comics too?

Lately, I've been lucky: the titles I tend to buy without regard to who is writing them have been very good. Daredevil and Batman both have A-list writers at the moment (Ed Brubaker and Grant Morrison, respectively), and Detective Comics, while less consistent than Batman's main title, has mostly been written by Paul Dini lately, and Dini's very good at coming up with single-issue Batman stories that stay intelligent and creative even as they hew closely to (somewhat tired) conventions of comic plotting. They make a nice contrast to Morrison's more high-concept work in recent issues of Batman.

The problem: Spider-Man. See, I don't buy the less relevant secondary and tertiary Spider-Man titles (by which I mean Sensational Spider-Man and Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. I DO buy Ultimate Spider-Man, and most of the Ultimate line, in fact, but... well, more on that later). I can keep up with Spider-Man's main storyline, which is written by the talented (if not quite A-list) J. Michael Stracynski, and feel like I'm getting my Spider-Man fix. If someone brilliant was working on one of the other titles, I might actually start picking it up, but thus far that hasn't happened. Apparently, a lot of other people think the same way I do, because Marvel has recently come to the realization that Amazing Spider-Man sells about three times as many copies as their other Spider-Man book. And this has led them to pull a really dirty trick. To wit: in a few months, they are cancelling the other two Spider-Man titles, attaching their creative teams to Amazing Spider-Man, and making that title a tri-monthly. If that is the right term. What I'm saying is, it'll be coming out three times a month.

This really pisses me off. You see, I wasn't born yesterday. I am well aware of what Marvel are doing here. Evidently, someone in their sales or marketing department took a look at the success DC comics had with their weekly title 52, and are evidently continuing to have with its successor, Countdown, and said "It's been proven that they'll buy a comic every week if it comes out every week. So fine--if they won't buy three Spider-Man titles a month, we'll put out ONE Spider-Man title THREE times a month! Then they'll HAVE to buy three Spider-Man books a month, or they won't be able to follow the story at all!"

Now, I love Spider-Man. In fact, out of the three superheroes I love the most, he is probably my favorite. I have explained my reasoning to many of my friends, but I don't think I've ever mentioned it here, so I'll elaborate. See, as a kid, I could understand everything Spider-Man went through. I think it's fitting that Stan Lee bestowed spider powers on a high-school-age nerd. Peter Parker was a brilliant kid, just like me. But he found that it cut no ice in the rest of his life--he had few friends, was a constant target for bullying, and girls didn't know he was alive. When he gained the spider powers, he could do all kinds of wonderful things that benefited society, and in fact felt obligated to do so, but a significant portion of the population of New York thought he was just as bad as the criminals he fought. And even if everyone had loved Spider-Man, it didn't help Peter Parker at all. He and his aunt struggled with money problems in the wake of his uncle's death, and later, when Peter moved out of his aunt's house, he had financial struggles of his own. Girls still didn't know he was alive for the most part (Mary Jane Watson didn't become Peter's steady love interest until years after I started reading Amazing Spider-Man on a regular basis). And he still had to put up with teasing and bullying from the kids he went to school with, because they still just saw him as an awkward nerd. You'd think that being Spider-Man would have meant that Peter Parker's troubles were over, but the fact was that it didn't do him a damn bit of good. This, to me, was a nearly painful reminder of my own life. Like Parker, I was a brilliant yet socially awkward nerd, with few friends and no attention from girls. When I grew up and realized that I had no interest in the sort of prosperous middle-class lifestyle that society wanted for me, I ended up struggling with money in the same way that Peter always did. Reading Spider-Man, both as a kid and as an adult, was a way to read the struggles of a superhero that was, in many ways, just like me. I liked Spider-Man then, and like him now, because I relate to him.

Oh gosh, I've gotten pretty far afield of what I was trying to talk about. Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that I love Spider-Man. But I don't know if I love him enough to buy a Spider-Man book every week. Fact is, it was Brian Michael Bendis's Ultimate Spider-Man that got me back into reading comics a few years ago (after hardly picking any up from puberty until my late 20s), and it's that title that gives me the most Spider-Man-related satisfaction these days. The characters and conventions of the title are the same as they are in the original Spider-Man title, but there's very little backstory baggage to deal with in the Ultimate title. Furthermore, Peter and Mary Jane have been married for years in the original title, and I just can't relate to his happy romantic life. In Bendis's Ultimate Spider-Man, Peter's still in high school, and constantly struggles with romantic issues. Hate to say it, but this has more relevance to my life than a guy who is my age and has been married for years. And you know, to top all of this off, Bendis is a better writer than any of the writers who've worked on Amazing Spider-Man in the time that I've read it. I realize that Stan Lee's work on the first 100 or so issues is probably the best writing he ever did, but that doesn't mean it's really all that great. Stan was an idea man. His plotting is contrived, his characters wooden, his dialogue unrealistic. I can enjoy his work on the early issues of Amazing Spider-Man, but a lot of that is probably due to nostalgia. If I came upon it for the first time now, I would probably find it hard to sustain interest in--and can you blame me?

So--I'm considering dropping Amazing Spider-Man from my pull list, for the crime of going to a 3 issues a month release plan. That's reasonable, right? You might think it's less so, though, after I make this next revelation: I bought every issue of 52, and am currently buying every issue of Countdown. And that's not the worst part. This is the worst part: I still haven't read the last 6 or so issues of 52, and I haven't even begun Countdown. I started buying 52 because Grant Morrison and Keith Giffen were working on the title, and while I enjoyed it at first (especially the Renee Montoya sections--I was a big fan of Gotham Central), I lost interest after a while, and began shuffling every new issue to the bottom of my to-be-read pile. At this point, I've got a stack of maybe 15 or so issues down there. Maybe even more. And before I can get into them, I'm going to have to refresh my memory of the prior issues of 52, which will probably involve starting over from the beginning, considering that it's been nearly four months since I read any of them.

It's this kind of shit that drives Warren Ellis crazy--I know. And I feel guilty every time I think about it. But rather than dropping Countdown from my subscription box, I keep paying for it every week. There's a rationale for this; I always think, "But what if I get around to reading all of those issues I bought but haven't read, and they're good? I'll want the rest of the issues then." It's a legitimate point, but rather than continuing to pile up comics that cost me $3 a week, I should probably just make it a point to sit down and read through them all, so that I know for sure. You want to know a secret? I kind of don't even want to. At this point, it seems like a big pain in the ass, and when I have stacks and stacks of unread comics that I could read instead--most of which I'm sure I'll like better than 52 and Countdown--it's hard to force myself to do it. So far, I haven't managed.

And I'm sort of afraid that, for this reason, Marvel's nefarious plan will work. I might let Amazing Spider-Man stack up for weeks and weeks, or I might read the first few three-issue months and find the quality level drastically lowered. Or maybe both will happen. If so, will I be able to pull the plug, when I haven't been able to do so on Countdown? Or will I keep buying a mediocre comic title in the hopes that it'll get good again? This is why I hate superhero comics sometimes. Not because they suck, but because they put me in awkward positions like this.

Because see, sometimes they're really good. The work-for-hire terms that allow the big two to treat their creative teams as interchangeable, and to value long-running characters over writers and artists, are so terrible that it's sometimes surprising that any half-decent writer or artist will bother to work on superhero comics at all. Then you remember the reality of the comics business. To wit: superhero comics outsell non-superhero comics by at least three to one. And while losing the rights to one's work forever to a faceless company is a truly shitty thing, the truth is that superhero comics pay far, far better than smaller, creator-owned titles. Bendis and Ellis and Brubaker, among many others, may be geniuses, but even geniuses have to put food on the table. So they keep working on superhero comics, and I therefore keep buying them. Sometimes, these purchases are far more rewarding than they have any right to be. For example, in this month's issue of Brian Michael Bendis and Brian Reed's New Avengers: Illuminati mini-series, the first five pages are devoted entirely to a discussion about women between the members of the Illuminati (Charles Xavier, Prince Namor, Dr. Strange, Iron Man, Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four, and Black Bolt of the Inhumans). It starts out serious and downbeat, but quickly turns hilarious, and does much to reveal the different personalities of each character--the kind of thing that was almost never bothered with for much of the history of the medium. By the fourth page of the comic, I was holding my breath with excitement at the prospect of an entire issue devoted to a conversation between the Illuminati about what women want. When an actual plot was introduced on page 6, I was disappointed. The rest of the issue was good, don't get me wrong. But those first five pages were absolute brilliance. And as long as superhero comics continue to present me with moments of brilliance on that level, I'll keep buying them. No matter how much I sometimes hate them.

WARREN FUCKING ELLIS.

No, I'm not talking about the musician, who plays in the Dirty Three and Grinderman. Don't get me wrong, that guy's awesome and all, but he'll always be the OTHER Warren Ellis in my mind. THE Warren Ellis is the writer. Of graphic novels, mostly, which might be why some of you who read books regularly don't know who I'm talking about. But I don't like the idea of calling someone who writes graphic novels... all right, COMIC BOOKS, a "comic book writer". As if I need to differentiate them from REAL writers, or something. They ARE real writers. Warren Ellis is a real writer. An awesome one, in fact.

But he may need an introduction to many of you, since (other than Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman) most writers of the graphic form are not widely known anywhere outside of the (unfortunately) rather well-insulated comic book culture. So, very well: his original claim to fame came from the launch of several brilliantly provocative, originally conceived comic book series during the late 90s, the best of which, for my money, was Transmetropolitan. Imagine, if you will, Spider Jerusalem, a Hunter S. Thompson avatar born maybe three-quarters of a century later than his real-life counterpart. Having retired at the height of his notoriety to seclusion at his compound in the woods, he is called back after the better part of a decade due to some unfulfilled commitments (the wages for which he'd already long since spent). He returns to city journalism and finds a dystopian cyberpunk near future not too dissimilar to that of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. That's the framework for Transmetropolitan. Ellis proceeded to build brilliantly upon it, filling around 100 or so issues with Spider Jerusalem's rants against the corruption and decadence of this alternate universe--most of which parallel that of our own world to an uncomfortable extent.

More recently, Ellis has been pushing the envelope of what is possible in comic writing and publishing with his Image title Fell, which retails for $2 in a $3-plus comic world, and which features a 16-page self-contained tale in each issue, thereby allowing even the most casual, poverty-stricken comic fans and curious onlookers an opportunity to check out a comic without making some huge commitment to the backlog of a series or even an entire publishing company (as so many other comics require one to do). What's more, Fell is almost entirely free of ads, and instead fills its few remaining pages with detailed discussions by Ellis of his writing process, and the details and nuances of the stories he tells. I've always been a sucker for this kind of thing, which might be why Fell persuaded me to check out numerous other Ellis writings. These days, I'm slowly accumulating a complete collection of trade paperback reprints of Transmetropolitan, as well as being on the pull list for every title he writes, from the mainstream Marvel-continuity title The Thunderbolts to DC/Wildstorm's fascinating espionage title Desolation Jones... and Fell, of course.

I even checked out, at the recommendation of horror writer and fellow comic fan Brian Keene, Ellis's book-length collection of comic-related columns that originally appeared on the Comic Book Resources website, entitled Come In Alone. Based on Transmetropolitan, I already had my suspicions that Ellis was the type of guy who, if asked (or maybe even if NOT asked), could offer lengthy extemporaneous discourses on what exactly was wrong with the world, and what could be done to change it. I learned from Come In Alone that, at least where the comic book world was concerned, this was absolutely true. Ellis struck me as a creative, non-linear thinker with tons of expertise in many different areas from which to draw. He seemed like the type of guy who could make a connection between two seemingly-unrelated facts from completely different fields of study and, in so doing, gain insight into issues that would suddenly appear in a completely different light just based on an offhand statement. People who can think and talk in this manner are my favorite type of people, and I strive to be one of them myself. Not only did Ellis navigate this particular evaluative approach to the world with ease, he did it with such charismatic fervor that it made me want to take up arms and follow him into battle. I certainly did a fair bit of re-evaluation when I finished Come In Alone, where my own comic-reading habits were concerned. For a couple of weeks I even found myself wondering why I was wasting my time with so many super-hero titles (I did drop a few, but careful reconsideration led me to realize that I was really only purchasing the ones I considered well-written, for the most part).

I figured Ellis probably had more things that he felt strongly about than the state of the comic industry, and caught broad hints in this direction, chiefly from Transmetropolitan and Fell. But it wasn't until last week, when three new Ellis titles all hit my subscription box at the same time, that I really felt like I was getting the full perspective on where ol' Warren's head is at these days.

First:



OK, technically Black Summer began a month ago, with a $2 preview issue numbered 0. And the sample of art from this title that I will reprint below actually comes from issue 0, page [#]. But I'm accustomed to seeing #1 as the beginning, so who can blame me for feeling like things are only REALLY starting now? Also, issue #1 is twice as mindblowing as #0. Brief plot summary so far: former American superhero team Seven Guns have been disbanded since not long after 9/11 (which they failed to prevent). An explosion killed one of their number, and another was murdered by corrupt police. One team member, John Horus, has remained in the good graces of the US government, while another, Tom Noir, pretty much just sits at home and drinks these days, having lost a leg in the aforementioned explosion. At the beginning of issue #0, Tom is watching a presidential address on CNN as it is interrupted by John Horus, who kills the president just before he is set to go on, then goes on in his place. Horus explains that, to his mind, the US government has become incurably corrupt, and... well, here, I'll let him tell it.



Crazy, huh? I figure that's all the setup you need on this one. It's obvious what Ellis is trying to say about America, the UK, and the general state of our pampered first-world culture with this one. All that remains is to see how crazy the whole thing gets before it's over. And it will be over soon--this is a 7-issue monthly limited series. For the record, it is published by Avatar, which is either a completely new company or a company who've had a much lower profile up until now. They appear to be following the Image template to a certain extent. There's almost no advertising in their comics, and what little there is comes after the end of each story and is generally for other Avatar products. Also, they seem to be going after A-list talent--Garth Ennis and Mark Millar, among others, have upcoming or just-starting Avatar series, and Warren Ellis has his own imprint called Apparat.



It's Apparat who brings us the second of these Warren Ellis prodcuts, a short original graphic novel called Crecy. This book narrates the battle that took place between English and French forces in the French town for which the book is named, in the summer of 1346. According to the back cover, this was England's finest battle of all time, and changed military strategy for hundreds of years. Interesting? Well, honestly, no, it doesn't sound like it, not to me. I really only picked it up because I pick up everything with Warren Ellis's name on it. But, it turns out, I needn't have worried. The story of the battle is narrated to us by a random English longbow carrier, one of the infantry grunts of Edward III's army. He narrates it with full knowledge of we the readers' great remove from the time period, and does not spare us the colorful language and cheeky prejudices of an English peasant from the time period. As a result, what could have been a stultifying treatise on warfare becomes a light, joyous romp through one of the more obscure tangents of Warren Ellis's wide-ranging intellectual interest. I mean, how can you not love a comic that produces gems like this?



Seriously, pretty much every page is like that. Pick this up--it's a real treat.



The final product Ellis has unleashed for the week (by the way, all of this stuff came out LAST week--I didn't pick up my comics until the day before the next batch of new comics were due in. So if anyone's paying enough attention to be confused, that's why I seem to be a week behind) is a much tougher nut to crack than either of the previous two titles. Doktor Sleepless is obviously every bit as serious in nature as Black Summer, and takes place in as dystopian a near-future as did the much more lighthearted Transmetropolitan. But as far as plot goes... I must confess that I'm somewhat clueless at this point. Which is not to say that I'm not enthralled--I am. The brief glimpses of the world in which this comic takes place, and the characters which inhabit that world, that we are given in issue #1, are enough to pique my interest. No, check that, they are enough to leave me fascinated, even transfixed. Apparently there is a website devoted to this title already, a website that Ellis has set up in the form of a wiki, and already contributed background information to. I haven't checked it out myself, but I will be clicking on that link as soon as I finish posting this entry. Like Fell, Doktor Sleepless ends with a section Ellis calls "Back Matter", but unlike Fell, that of Sleepless will apparently focus less on the writing process and more on the fleshing out of concepts that will be introduced in the main plot of the book. Those concepts are amorphous at best right now, but they both intrigue and vaguely frighten me, as this page should illustrate:



One thing on that page that I can explain--instant messenger operates through contact lenses. Another--Heavenside is the city where this all takes place. And a possible third--I'm assuming the reference to Eschaton is to the fictional game David Foster Wallace invented within the pages of his novel Infinite Jest. There are references elsewhere in the title to Beckett's "Waiting For Godot" and the occultist Colin Wilson, as well as multiple Biblical references--and this is just the first issue. It seems Ellis has big plans for this particular series, and I for one am along for the ride for as long as it takes. You'd be well advised to jump on yourself, before the bandwagon gets so crowded that back issues start skyrocketing in value.

Constantine: Hellblazer; Vol. 1, "Original Sins"

There was a time when comic books were my life’s focus. This was in the mid to late 80s, before the onset of puberty distracted me, not with girls, but with a desire for a place in the world where I belonged—and, failing that, heartrending angst over not being able to find such a place. The angst was most easily soothed through immersion in music, especially the varieties of underground or “alternative” music (back when such a term carried an air of intrigue rather than a stigma of dilletantism) that posited their existence as within a subcultural or even countercultural community. I did my best to submerge myself in these supposedly anti-mainstream communities, and forgot all about my pre-pubescent interest in comic books, for a long time.

While I was gone, the medium of comics changed, in a variety of ways. The collector’s market peaked, then collapsed. The creative focus shifted from artists to writers. And somewhere along the way, the comic book industry started creating work of real literary merit on a regular basis. At least, so it seems to me now, looking back over everything that happened in the 15 to 20 years I was gone. It seems somewhat strange to say that a 70-plus year old narrative medium has only been in the habit of producing work with real literary merit in the last decade or so, especially when I was so hooked on the medium 20 years ago, a decade before this increase in quality that I mention. And it is strange, but stranger (and more unwelcome) is the realization that most of the stuff I loved as a 10 year old seems cringeworthy to me now. Granted, there are some gems that stand out—Frank Miller’s work on Daredevil and Batman, which blew my mind as a child, is still some of the best comic writing I’ve ever read, and although I don’t love his art, the work he produced with artist David Mazzuchelli is as outstanding visually as it is narratively. And of course, anything Alan Moore ever turned his hand to is gold, as far as I can tell, no matter how far back in his creative history that you go. I will forever regret the loss (to shifting adolescent interest and the desire to make a quick buck that could be turned around into used LP purchases) of my copy of Miracleman #2, an Eclipse reprint of several stories Moore wrote in 1982 for a British title called Marvelman. That one comic shines in my memory as a long-lost cherished favorite, even though I barely remember any of the story; it’s probably a lot of the reason that, to this day, I reach for comics with Moore’s name on them without a second’s hesitation. Even Larry Hama, whose work as long-running author of the toy tie-in comic G.I. Joe was better than it had any right to be, produced some pretty amazing stuff. But for the most part, I have to admit that the stuff I loved back then is pretty crappy. Tom De Falco and Ron Frenz’s work on Amazing Spider-Man in the mid 80s captivated me at the time, but now seems ham-fisted. Jim Shooter’s Secret Wars story, John Byrne’s Fantastic Four, and the many writers and artists that worked on Captain America during the years in which I subscribed to the title, all fare even worse in my unflinching adult eye.

So what changed between then and now? What’s different about today’s comics that allows me to love them, even though I turn up my nose, for the most part, at the work I loved as a kid? Well, I don’t know enough about what happened in the interim between periods in which I was paying attention, but I have a few guesses. First of all, the writing style changed. The turgid, pulp-influenced style of guys like Stan Lee was perfect for a sort of overcaffeinated, campy rush that would captivate a prepubescent audience, but its ability to translate to adult readers was limited at best, requiring a fair bit of nose-holding in order to get past the cheesy scripting and enjoy the good ideas that were often there, under the surface. However, I think a point must have arrived sometime in the 90s where the medium realized as a whole that its audience was adult rather than adolescent, for the most part, and that, where said audience was concerned, writing of the Alan Moore/Frank Miller style was much preferable to the Stan Lee standard. Ham-fisted narrative captions with frequent winking references to things the reader almost certainly already knew, along with thought balloons that telegraphed the motivations of characters through completely unbelievable inner dialogue, were thrown out the window, and a new technique called “decompression” was introduced. Although, I must admit, I don’t like putting it that way. I’ve read “compressed” comics and “decompressed” comics, and as far as I can tell, the difference is that “decompression” includes room for character developments and subplots that reveal themselves at a realistic pace. Instead of every issue of a comic book seeming to exist solely for the purpose of a dramatic battle scene that takes up a third of the issue, story arcs stretch out over several issues and include a lot more plot and character development than they ever used to. I started to realize how welcome and potentially brilliant this method of storytelling could be when I read a 6-issue story arc from Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man. The arc supposedly revolved around Doctor Octopus, but by halfway through the fifth issue, Spider-Man had dealt with the villain satisfactorily. The last one and a half issues were focused entirely on Peter Parker’s struggles to deal with the fallout his actions as Spider-Man had caused in his personal life. I was hooked. This is the kind of storytelling I like, no matter what the medium. And the more I looked around, the more I discovered that this sort of storytelling was now commonplace. Thank God.

It wasn’t just the narrative form that changed, though. Although it is a bit appalling that comics cost fully 5 times as much as they cost when I first started collecting ($3 as compared to 60 cents), this price increase has been accompanied by a dramatic improvement in printing technology. I never really noticed that the comics I was reading in the 80s looked crappy, any more than I noticed that they almost always featured cheesy writing. But these days, it seems obvious. Comics produced before 1992 or so generally feature lurid, unappealing colors and smudgy lines, which can make even the best art from the time comparatively hard to look at. I hasten to add that the art teams on these older comics were not responsible for this problem—some of it appears to have been the fault of the cheaper paper used for printing at the time, while other aspects seem more likely to have been the fault of now-outdated technology. However, these unfortunate aspects are generally preserved even in modern graphic novel reprints of earlier series. I’ve come to associate these artistic shortcomings with the narrative shortcomings I see as common in older comics, and therefore, I often cringe when I pick up a graphic novel collection and discover the telltale signs of an era I consider subpar. As I’ve said before, I realize that not everything published before a decade or so is crap, and therefore I’m willing to give things a chance most of the time. After all, my copy of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen looks like absolute crap, and yet it’s one of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read (although I think it’s a bit overrated in Moore’s oeuvre—if you ask me, “Promethea” is his true masterpiece. More on that in a future installment). For the most part, though, I go into these older graphic novels with the expectation of doing some slogging. I always hope for enjoyment, but I generally feel like I’ve lucked out if they’re merely mediocre and don’t suck out loud, as a lot of 80s era comics do.

Which brings me to “Original Sins”, a graphic novel collecting the first 9 issues of the Constantine: Hellblazer series. While the character was created by Alan Moore during his work on Swamp Thing, he never wrote for John Constantine’s own series, and “Original Sins” is written by Jamie Delano, a name I’m unfamiliar with. I do enjoy the character of Constantine, but I first encountered him in a storyline that takes place long after his character had been established—Neil Gaiman’s introductory volume to the “Books Of Magic” series. The idea of this snarky, foul-tempered British lout, who chain-smoked and binge-drank and called himself a magician but often appeared to weild no real power at all, was mindblowing to me. I didn’t necessarily seek out his other adventures, but when I came across them, as written by Garth Ennis or Warren Ellis, I enjoyed them quite a bit. In fact, nearly every name I associated with A-list quality in modern comics had written at least one or two Constantine stories in their time. All of which left Jamie Delano with quite a lot to measure up to. And when I opened “Original Sins” and saw that telltale smudgy art and lurid coloring, I had to wonder. Perhaps it was the later work by Ennis or someone like him that made Constantine into the awesome character that I saw him as. Maybe the Delano stories would compare to the Ennis stories in the same way that De Falco’s Spider-Man stories from the 80s compare to Bendis’s of today—flat and lifeless, with one-dimensional characters.

For the first third of the volume, it seemed to be shaping up as exactly what I was afraid of. The double-sized first issue began a storyline that finished up in the second issue, one that reminded me of my recent explorations into Doug Moench’s 80s run on Moon Knight. I was really excited about Charlie Huston’s recent Moon Knight revival, and decided to check out some of the original series. What I found was interesting, and would no doubt have blown me away at the time, but by today’s standards, the writing was tame, and hewed too closely to earlier conventions of comic book writing that drag down the narrative flow. I was feeling the same way about the first two issues of Constantine: Hellblazer, especially when I saw that the storyline ended after only two issues. While some of the more overt horror elements showed potential, I was less than excited about most of what I was discovering, and ended up putting the book down for several days before reading the other 7 issues that made up the graphic novel.

When I eventually picked it back up, I was prepared for a slog. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised by issue 3, a tale in which John Constantine attempted to disrupt the activities of a gambling demon by tricking him into thinking that Margaret Thatcher would lose the 1987 election for British Prime Minister. Now this was the Constantine that drew me to the book in the first place! While I was disappointed that said storyline was over after one issue (someone like Garth Ennis could have made an entire graphic novel out of this premise), I found my enthusiasm for the remaining issues renewed. And things got even better after that. Perhaps it just took Delano a couple of issues to find his feet.

The narrative style that Delano uses for the later issues in the volume, while still not quite on a par with the best of today’s graphic novel writers, is much improved over most 80s comic book writing. Each issue tells a self-contained story, but also contains links to the other issues in the series. In fact, even the storyline of Mnemoth the hunger demon from the first two issues, which seemed so self-contained at the time I was reading it, comes up again in later issues. The reference points are at times minor and subtle, and for most of the volume, it’s hard to tell where the whole thing is leading. While the main storyline of each issue is wrapped up by the end, there are often elements left unresolved, and Constantine is left wondering what their significance might be, with no way to determine such a thing. However, these elements all reappear by the end of the volume, and mingle with other plot details that were seemingly unimportant and unconnected at the time of their introduction to create a much more significant overall picture. This type of writing works well as a graphic novel, once you get used to it, but it seems to be designed for the episodic nature of monthly comics, in a way that comics today often aren’t. Each issue is a self-contained narrative, but also enhances a larger story arc, thereby keeping the reader’s interest for future issues, while also satisfying the casual customer who only picks up an issue every now and again. In fact, while I tend to like the currently popular storytelling method quite a bit, there is something to be said for the idea that modern comic writers could take a few cues from Delano’s approach on this volume.

The art of John Ridgway also stands out at various points in “Original Sins.” While the smudged, lurid look of 80s pages is impossible to avoid reproducing, Ridgway’s unconventional page structures, which often incorporate overlapping panels, manage to look good despite these limitations. His use of double-page spreads, an uncommon technique at the time, is also quite creative, as on pages 58 and 59, or pages 172 and 173.

By far my favorite art in this volume, though, is Dave McKean’s covers for each issue. He uses collage art to mix illustrations with photography and even cut-up letters and numbers, for a psychedelic effect that both suits and enhances the dark, foreboding feel of John Constantine’s world. I actually would have been happier seeing his art fill the entire book, instead of being reserved for covers, but I’m sure the techniques he used to create these covers were too time-consuming to allow for 25 or so pages being produced every month.

In the end, while this isn’t the best work I’ve read in the Constantine: Hellblazer series, I’m glad I took a chance it despite the less-than-perfect reproduction techniques. It’s made me interested to see what Jamie Delano is doing these days, although from checking around the web, it doesn’t seem that he’s doing that much. That’s a shame; anyone able to produce something better than standard hackwork back in the 1980s deserves to be a household name by now.