Lots and lots and lots of good stuff, once again. I’m starting to feel overwhelmed.
If yr interested, here’s what ’90s superstar Marc Silverstri’s art for the final issues of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men will look like. I actually like this stuff a little better than I like Jim Lee’s, though once again I’ll say that a good story (and Morrison’s is one of the best) can make decent art look great.
NeilAlien continues to hold his minions in suspense as regards Dr. Strange’s recent high-profile apperances in Amazing Spider-Man, Thor: Vikings, and David Fiore’s weblog. To paraphrase Godspell, When wilt thou save the fanboys, Neil?
Courtesy of the ‘Alien, here’s a swell bit of “knock it off, knuckleheads” from Bookslut’s Karin Kross, directed toward mainstream-media comics reviewers who feel the need to slag the medium in order to justify their praise of one of its products.
Along related lines, Jim Henley skewers Big John Byrne‘s jaw-droppingly dumb assertion that mature-readers comics like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns “should never have happened,” for the sake of the kids who apparently wander into these books in droves looking for the happy-go-lucky supercharacters they knew from SuperFriends or whatever. Personally, I think no response more detailed than “Jesus, what a tool” need be offered, but good for Jim. Actually, Jim just sticks to a relatively minor technicality in Byrne’s argument, pointing out that virtually no one on Earth even knows that Watchmen was based on goofy old superhero characters from a defunct company, let alone bought and read the book because of that knowledge. But the really egregious thing about Byrne’s line of reasoning (despite its self-serving attempt to explain why poor ol’ John’s books don’t sell–it’s all the fault of those miserable child-corrupting assholes Miller and Moore! Actually, he’s probably on to something there, though not in the way he intends) is the Werthamesque notion that comics–even something as near-universally maligned as the superhero-genre subset of comics–ought not depict certain things. So much great art has been made from taking something seen as “inherently for children” and making it for grown-ups over the centuries that Byrne’s argument is virtually stillborn. Look at the updates of “Hansel & Gretel” that are Night of the Hunter and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the development of the sock-hop genre of rock and roll into Bob Dylan and the Beatles–I mean, need I even go on? I find the notion that some art forms or genres are inherently childish, immature, incapable of or improper for delivering stories of mature and real power to be the most offensive, elitist canard currently swimming its way through the murky waters of popcult criticism and theory; the fact that this notion is apparently shared by some of comics’ retrograde nostalgia-mongers is equal parts disturbing and unsurprising.
Jim also exhorts us to prepare for a Captain America “sermon”. I’m ready.
Eve Tushnet attempts to sell the conventions of superhero comics as potential strengths, not inherent weaknesses, and does so by way of Hamlet. I, for one, am buying–as is, of all people, Marvel president Bill Jemas. In his storytelling guidelines for Epic submissions (as summarized in Marville #7), Jemas instructed would-be supercomics creators to keep in mind that the conventions and tropes of superherodom, particularly the superpowers themselves, should…well, I’ll quote Eve, since it’s basically exactly what Jemas was saying:
The thing comics-about-comics forget is that superhero conventions arise for a reason. They speak to something–sometimes a good thing, sometimes a rotten thing–in human nature. They resonate. That resonance–what it reveals, what it obscures, what it gets wrong about the world and what it gets right–is what your story should be about.
As Jemas put it, stories about a mild-mannered but somewhat obsessive scientist being transformed during fits of rage into a giant green monster–good. Stories about that giant green monster being transmogrified into a smaller, gray, sarcastic, streetwise mob enforcer–not so good.
Waiting patiently for J.W. Hastings‘s take on Squadron Supreme, Mark Gruenwald’s magnum opus and a very early stab at “revisionist superheroes.” I actually enjoyed the book quite a bit more than I thought I would: despite its burden of unnatural and cheesy 70s/80s comicspeak dialogue and narration, and the fact that Gruenwald’s ideas seem to have outstripped his ability to execute them, I thought the book was a very effective (and, much to my delight, affecting) examination of superheroes taking the use of their powers to the logical extreme. The resonance in today’s political climate is perhaps even stronger than it was when Gru wrote the thing. I’d also like to take this opportunity to reiterate that I’m enjoying J. Michael Straczynski’s update of the Squadron Supreme saga (which was itself a knock-off of the Justice League), Supreme Power. Lots of folks have been pointing out that this sort of thing has been done a million times already–here’s Steven Grant responding to the general phenomenon and John Jakala taking down an upcoming Chuck Austen manifestation of the trend–but I’m just not convinced that every revisionist-superhero book needs to be some Bold Step Forward In The History Of Mainstream Superhero Comics, as were Miracleman, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Dark Knight Strikes Again (that revisionist book’s impact won’t be felt for another couple of years, I think), the various Warren Ellis superteams, and (to, I think, a lesser extent) Marvels, Kingdom Come, and the Mark Millar spinoffs and takeoffs from the Ellis-verse. Straczynski’s book has been well-paced and well-written so far, with less anger and more sadness and loneliness than the usual revisionist fare. And Gary Frank’s art has just been a joy for me to look at–like a more obsessively energetic Steve Dillon. I’ll keep buying the thing as long as it continues to entertain, regardless of whether or not it reinvents the revisionist wheel.
Jason Kimble has the latest in a series of posts about “decompression” in mainstream comics storytelling (i.e. every story takes six issues now), focusing on how the schizophrenic nature of contemporary comics publishing means that artistic and financial considerations are not just in conflict, but one in which each side’s victory is often a Pyrrhic one. This is very, very true: I’ve often wondered how much patience Marvel, say, will have with their Epic and Tsunami titles, created in theory for the bookstore audience (with, I think, eventual production as bookstore-friendly manga-format books in mind) but reliant on the Direct Market audience for up to a year before making their first appearance in a bookstore.
David Fiore has posted his completed thesis proposal, on the contemporization of Puritan themes by the Marvel comics of the 1960s and ’70s. Entertaining and educational, as I wish all theses were.
Alan David Doane is right: Bryan Miller is good (even when he’s wrong, which happens from time to time).
Miller’s site-mate Matt Martin offers a critique of Marvel’s recent Captain America output (Jim Henley, pay attention!) from a conservative perspective. Compare and contrast his reading of the John Ney Reiber Cap-versus-terrorists storyline with that of X-Axis’s Paul O’Brien. That two critics coming from completely opposite sides of the political spectrum could look at this story and both come away thinking it represented the absolute godawful worst of the other side shows just what a muddled, pathetic, pointless waste of time the damn thing was. (I happen to think it might also speak to the, how can I put this politely, lack of nuance in Martin and O’Brien’s respective political positions, but mainly, yeah, that story sucked.)
Finally, the threatened jettisoning of dead weight from my pull list has begun. This week I found myself abandoning 1602, 100 Bullets, and Kingpin. Not that any of them were terrible, mind you–I just realized that none of them were the kind of comics I can’t wait to read. That seems like a fair enough criterion to apply, don’t you think?