When Jim Treacher first brought this press release hyping Warren Ellis’s upcoming prose-novel debut to my attention, I read it and thought, “What is this, a parody of the kind of book Warren Ellis would write?” But you know what? American culture’s dark underbelly really is woefully under-toured. I mean, can you think of a single British genre-comics writer who’s toured American culture’s dark underbelly lately? Me neither! Thank God that brave Mister Ellis is there to Abuse Our Illusions, etc!
Heated–and yet intelligent and readable!–debates abound on the Comics Journal messboard today. Here’s the ongoing SPX/Team Comix donnybrook, now centered around the question of whether the current generation of alternative cartoonists holds a candle to the two or three previous ones; here’s a battle over the big anthology Kramers Ergot 4 centered around the question of whether the non-comics material therein helped or hindered the anthology, or indeed whether it’s non-comics material at all; and here’s a thread in which the place of such comics legends as Steve Ditko, Gary Panter and George Herriman is being debated with considerable intellectual gusto. The Journal board is a pretty entertaining place these days. I wonder why…
Jim Henley reviews a bunch of recent comics, and in so doing gets the most recent issue of Captain America completely wrong. I’ll see if I can explain this so everyone understands: What you do with Captain America is not have him run around the country feeling bad about himself, then go cry in a blown-up building in Dresden until some undead schmuck nearly hands his ass to him. What you do with Captain America is also not have him stand around talking to some girl from Atlantis or wherever for five issues until everyone just gives the fuck up on the book around chapter three of the story and waits for your boring ass to go back to writing about people in Iron Man armor blowing terrorists’ heads off and aliens from outer space fucking Cro-Magnon women. What you do with Captain America is put him in a storyline called “Cap Lives” and have him kick the living snot out of Nazis. And God bless ’em, writer (! not quite used to that yet) Dave Gibbons and artist Lee Weeks deliver. Weeks honed his meaty, muscular style to near-perfection during his impressive run on Bruce Jones’s Incredible Hulk, and he gives this “What if Hitler had won?” alternate-history tale the kind of awful pulpy grit and horror it needs to work. Gibbons seems to intuitively understand that to do an effective Captain America, you don’t need to gloss over the terrible crimes that America has committed over the years, but nor should you dwell on them in order to compensate for the fact that during World War II we called Japanese people “Japs”–you just need to depict a man who, dammit all to hell, loves America so much that he’ll make up for those crimes and more–with his fists. (Note: I happened to like Robert Morales’s revisionist take on the Captain America icon quite a bit, but that’s because it seemed tempered with an honest love for what’s great about this country, something that wasn’t coming through in the runs of John Ney Reiber or Chuck Austen. It was also very, very weird, which I tend to like.) It’s a pity that, in a world chock full of genocidal totalitarian theocratic woman-hating gay-hating Jew-hating bastards with not one whit of compunction when it comes to killing civilians willy-nilly because God told them to, this comic felt the need to resurrect the old German bugbears to give Cap someone to beat up, but hey, it’s a step in the right direction.
Anyway, Jim also has some smart thoughts on the most recent real-world-superheroes story, J. Michael Straczynski’s Supreme Power.
Eve Tushnet worries about the results of the infamous New X-Men #146 (Turns out Alan David Doane was the bad guy all along!) Eve, have more faith in Grant Morrison!
New kid on the blogroll David Fiore waxes digressive on an early issue of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. I think it’s pretty impressive how Cage has gone from laughing stock to revered supertoughguy thanks to his recent treatment at the hands of bald Brians Azzarello and Bendis. Perhaps the material was there all along.
Forager adds his voice to the growing chorus of folks who think that when it comes to Marvel’s much-hyped Elizabethan continuity clusterfuck 1602, emperor Neil Gaiman has no clothes. But he also includes a throwaway line that one of Marvel’s recent titles is one of the “most loathsome super-hero comic books” he’s ever read. Which one is it, Forager? With great power comes the great responsibility to call out comic books on your weblog, man!
Finally, some personal and professional developments have made me cut back on the number of comics I’ll be purchasing for the forseeable future. I’m sad that I won’t be able to experiment as much, but glad that I’ll end my Wednesdays without thinking “That was a waste of money” a lot more often. It’s interesting how necessity is the mother of getting rid of deadweight in your pull bag. Today, for example, there were a couple of comics on the list (Gun Theory, Human Target) that I put back simply because of the coloring, in both cases done (as was instantly obvious upon first glance) by Lee “If it’s yellow, put some green in it; if it’s brown, great!” Loughridge. (I’ve heard great things about his work from creators, and I’ve seen the occasional book that looked lovely from him (Kingpin #1, for example), but it simply does nothing for me. Meanwhile, I found myself still buying Superman/Batman, despite not being wild about either writer Jeph Loeb or artist Ed McGuinness, simply because it would appear that at some point in this story arc Batman and Superman will more or less depose President Lex Luthor. That’s pretty neat, in a Dark Knight Strikes Again sort of way.