Monthly Archives: March 2008

All Star Fan Scruff

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I just went to visit my brother, and was able to read all the comics he buys that I’m too cheap to get. Among those are All Star Batman, All Star Superman, and Grant Morrison’s Batman run. These varied a good bit in quality — Frank Miller’s All Star Batman is a completely embarrassing self-parody; All Star Superman is a workmanlike nostalgia exercise which has been denuded of the ambivalence towards super-heroics which characterizes Morrison’s most interesting efforts; Morrison’s Batman is quite entertaining, despite the obligatory and atrocious grand crossover efforts.

But, whatever their merits or demerits, finishing the pile I was struck by (A) how completely uninterested I am in spending my own money on any of them and, (B) how thoroughly repetitive and kind of pointless they all seem. Miller isn’t just rewriting Dark Knight; he’s rewriting his own rewrites of Dark Knight (like Batman: Year One and Dark Knight Returns 2) and his own oeuvre in general (Wonder Woman’s characterization is particuarly painful, not so much because he reflexively dumps the pacifism and wisdom which is a big part of the character, as because his decision to turn her into a ball-busting fetishized dominatrix with a thing for strong men is at this point such a cliche in his own writing, from Sin City on down.) Morrison isn’t just rewriting the Weisinger era Superman; he’s rewriting Alan Moore rewriting Weisinger, and, indeed, 15 years or so of hip fetishization of the goofiness of old Superman stories. And Morrison’s Batman stories — obsessed as they are with the replication of Batman and alternate possibile Batman — seem to just be reworking, with a good deal less zip, similar concerns in the Animal Man stories that Morrison put out there twenty years ago.

Of course, any genre thrives on repetition — but you also need variation, and while American mainstream comics are good at the first, they haven’t been able to deliver consistently on the second in quite a while. Many people blame super-heroes themselves, but I don’t really think that’s the problem. For example, Cardcaptor Sakura combines Judy-Bloomesque girl Bildungsroman with a video-game fantasy tropes and comes up with something which, while not necessarily great art, is certainly a fresh, and even bizarre, take on super-heroics.

So personally, I don’t think it’s the super-hero genre that’s the problem, but rather that, in American comics, the super-hero genre has largely degenerated into fan fiction. Though, really, that’s kind of unfair to fan fiction, which, is usually motivated by real love for the material and a willingness to do all sorts of ridiculous and counter-intuitive things with it (see this sex-changing slash effort by Vom Marlowe for example.) Mainstream comics are actually the worst of all worlds — corporate fan fiction. Often, there’s little love or respect for the original vision and, conversely, a whole set of arbitrary rules in place about what can and can’t be done with them. The result has been a shrinking of the comic audience (fan fiction is always going to have a fairly limited appeal, whatever its virtues) and a stifling of creativity.

Grant Morrison’s one of the genres great writers — why put him on Superman, a character in which, as far as I can tell, he has little interest? And yes, I enjoyed his runs on X-Men and JLA, but wouldn’t it make sense, if you have a talent like that, to give him a chance to create something new? Wouldn’t that, if promoted correctly, create the possibility of new marketing possibilities, new movie tie-ins, and so forth? Similarly, why make Frank Miller go back again and again to the Batman when he’s clearly said all he has to say about him? Wouldn’t it be better to get him to do something new? I mean, it’s not like Sin City and 300 weren’t successful. Surely he could make up a marketable super-hero if he tried.

But, of course, forty or fifty years of this fannish, clannish, corporate bullshit has taken its toll. Super-hero comics are now hopelessly uninteresting to everybody outside of the tiny fan community. Distribution and marketing is aimed at this insular group who wants the same thing over and over, and the opportunities for new creations which might appeal to a broader audience are limited indeed — you can be successful with a television show like Hero, but it’s really unclear how something similar could work with comics. Still, I think that maybe the best thing the big companies could do for themselves is just stop with the endless Superman, Batman, Hulk, Spider-Man, ad nauseum. If people want to read that stuff (as they will), look at reprints of the stories that made them famous. Start investing instead in new creations…and for god’s sake, give the creators ownership, so somebody has some interest in quality control.

Update: Jason points out in the comments that Morrison is in fact interested in Superman, and hand-picked the project.

Halo Jones

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As long as I’m rereading Alan Moore, I thought I’d look again at the Ballad of Halo Jones. I first read it a few years ago, and really liked it. And I still like it a lot on rereading. I like Ian Gibson’s art better than that of many Moore artists, I think — he’s not a super-tight illustrator or anything, but the he’s got a range from cartoony to more naturalistic which works for the varying moods, and the layouts are nicely varied. I just opened up to a very deft sequence where Halo tries to grab a rat, which gives her a withering look and then darts off-panel, its tale quivering behind it. You get the sense that Moore hadn’t necessarily taken over every aspect of panel movement and layout at this point; the art seems more spontaneous and freer than in some of the later projects; everythings not mapped out to within an inch of its life.

I like the writing a lot too. It’s nice to see Moore working in a pulp idiom that doesn’t involve super-heroes; all the pseudo-Nietzsche overman-savior stuff which is so important to a lot of his later writing just isn’t here. Halo’s not a mover and shaker; she’s one of the moved and shook, and while there is an epic sci-fi story of sorts going on here, Halo’s more or less at the periphery of it; just one random person bobbing along as events wash over her. It’s not a new concept exactly (Joe Haldeman’s “Forever War” is a probable influence, for example). But it’s handled very deftly.

And, again, the lack of artistic control is refreshing. In his ABC titles, Moore went again for a more breezy, seat-of-the-pants, lighter tone, but it always felt a little bit like he was slumming — the lack of deliberation just seemed awfully deliberate, and the sense of fun a little forced. Halo Jones seems much more natural; you can feel him discovering what he’s going to do on the fly, building up the world as he goes. There’s a lot of humor (one of the early episodes focuses on a shopping expedition; a zenade that bombs you into oneness with the universe….) but, right from the beginning, it’s also surprisingly dark, and the combination is both unsettling and very affecting. The whole story is structured like a movie in which the comic-relief-best-friend gets killed — over, and over, and over. The last book is a quite effective war story, and Halo comes out of it recognizably older and more bitter than the young girl we started with. The story’s end is haunting, and not exactly paraphraseable without introducing a big fat spoiler, but basically Halo realizes that in her youth she wasn’t nearly as innocent as she thought, after which she murders the last person in the book who she cares about.

So, yeah, I know it’s not generally supposed to be, but I think it’s one of his best (way better than V or Lost Girls, for example, and maybe up there with From Hell, though very different, obviously.) Makes me wish he’d try a straight science-fiction story again….

Big Brother With a Bleeding Heart

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Next week I’m going to pretend to be an academic and go talk to some college students about comics. One of the classes I’m sitting in on is going to focus on Alan Moore, so I reread V for Vendetta and Watchmen for the first time in a while. I hadn’t realized that they were written so close together: V in 1981, I think, and Watchmen in 1986. They have a lot in common: both are cold war parables and turn on a liberal superman causing chaos in everyone’s best interest.

Still, my reaction to the two of them is very different. I’m really, really ambivalent about V. There are certainly a lot of good things in it. Valerie’s letter, in particular, still makes me weepy — tragic struggle against overwhelming odds, love in the face of the apocalypse, a quiet testament to human dignity, all wrapped in direct and beautiful prose — it’s pretty hard to resist. Evie receives the letter in prison; a missive from the cell next door, and it’s a really powerful moment. But then we learn that Evie wasn’t really in prison: it’s all a test, or lesson, by the mysterious masked super-anarchist, teaching beautiful lessons while reading Shakespeare and listening to Martha and the Vandellas. It’s all just a bit too convenient, isn’t it? The cultured lefty icon; intelligent, unstoppable, meting out justice to the big bad fascists who deserve it. Throughout the book, V pulls all the strings; he seems to be responsible for everything that happens, single-handedly pulling down the fascist government and returning England to anarchy. The opposition is too easy, basically. I mean, if one drugged up homicidal hippie with a stupid mask can topple fascism while quoting the Velvet Underground, well, fascism can’t really be much of a threat can it? Maybe, in fact, fascism for Moore has little to do with the historical movement, and is in fact simply a liberal wet-dream, fabricated to justify self-satisfaction and dreams of predictable violence (Parliament blown up! Big Ben blown up!) Evie’s renunciation of violence seems pretty darn hollow when readers are encouraged to take pleasure in scene after scene of facile vengeance.

Rereading this really crystallized for me what I think is the biggest problem with Moore’s writing — his weakness (to paraphrase Borges) for appearing to be a genius. Moore’s an extremely smart writer and plotter, and he fancies himself a metaphysician and political seer. As a writer, he tends to have all the answers, and while that can look pretty amazing when enmeshed in the story, when you take a step back, the discordant cacophony of all the begged questions starts to get a little irritating. Evie occasionally yells at V and tells him he’s a pompous asshole who cares more about puzzles and quotations than about human beings. Of course, Evie always backs down and accepts that V only tortured her because he loves her…but it’s hard not to feel that Moore is loading the dice. It’s Moore, after all, who sits behind that mask; it’s him who’s rigged the game. He can’t afford for us to start judging V as a human being, because then the whole house of cards would come down. We’d be forced to ask whether violence in the name of freedom is really a whole lot different than violence in the name of order. V claims to do what he does to free Evie and England, but do you really free people by kicking the shit out of them and scaring them half to death? It seems to me that most freedom movements worth the name were about building connections between people, not about individually deciding the shape of the world you’d like and then imposing it on folks. Freedom is hard work, and involves lots of compromises, in other words. It’s more fun to think about just imposing it by fiat, of course — but if you’re imposing it by fiat, it’s not really freedom, is it?

As I said, on the surface Watchmen seems to start with many of the same preconceptions and come to many of the same conclusions. But it’s much more ambivalent about the future it imagines, and as a result it’s a whole lot more convincing. For maybe the only time in his oeuvre, Moore’s villain here isn’t the fascists or the right. Instead it’s the liberal one-worlder Adrien Veidt.

Turning the tables on his own political sympathies like this seems to have freed Moore up in a way he rarely managed before or since. In V, for example, all of Moore’s fascists are pretty much stock villains — they’re vicious thugs, mostly sexually perverted in extremely unpleasant ways. (Finch is sympathetic, of course — but he doesn’t really believe in the ideology.) In Watchmen, on the other hand, the fascist nut-jobs are some of the most sympathetic characters. Rorschach is probably the character who gets the most screen time, and he’s…well, lovable. He’s got tons of touching moments, from the grandiose (when he tries to rescue the kidnapped girl) to the small (when he tells Dan he’s been a good friend.) The Comedian’s hard to hate, too; he’s an amoral, violent jerk, but also vulnerable and insightful and, yeah, it’s just not hard to see why Sally fell for him.

Veidt’s sympathetic too, of course, but the point is that there are genuinely different perspectives in Watchmen, and as a result the sense of inevitability and moral certainty that can pervade and deaden Moore’s writing (from V all the way to Lost Girls) opens up. I mean, the idea of time and narrative as immutable is certainly in the book, but it’s tied specifically to Jon, and while he’s obviously cosmically powered diagetically, in the overall composition of the story he’s got much less motive force than V did. Jon can insist that people’s choices don’t really matter and everything is already determined, but the narrative ends on a question mark; Veidt, for all his smarts and planning, isn’t sure if things will work out, and neither are we.

I also appreciate how much effort Moore takes throughout the story to not let Veidt off the hook. V kills lots of anonymous folks, none of whom we ever care about. But Veidt doesn’t just kill half of New York; he murders actual player characters — people who we’ve come to know over the course of the series. The newstand vendor, Joey, the therapist, the detectives; their deaths have weight. They matter. The violence in V is costless; the violence in Watchmen isn’t.

There’s tons of other stuff to like in the series too: I especially noticed the deft handling of the Dan and Laurie relationship, this time — the dialogue is sexy and sweet and quick, a very nicely done romantic comedy within the larger story. And, of course, the way all the little details mesh (the travels of the sugar cubes or the comedian’s button) are lovely. But I think what really makes this perhaps Moore’s best is that it’s the one time where he was both willing to raise big questions and issues and willing not to answer them. For once, and despite the formal mastery, Moore doesn’t really present himself as a magician. It suits him.
*****
If you’d like to read more about Moore, my thoughts here were somewhat inspired by an essay by Bert Stabler which he wrote for the Gay Utopia symposium.

Haunter and Two Sisters

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I’ve been reading, or trying to read Charlee Jacobs’ horror novel Haunter. It was recommended by Ben at Literacity. so I decided to give it a whirl. Ben warned that it would be pretty extreme, which is indeed the case — we’ve got the werewolf eating her son’s girlfriend and then feeding it to the family for dinner; we’ve got the maggots hatching in your skin and eating their way out (with special added bonus points for images of the critters crawling out of the head of the penis); we’ve got villagers being sawed in half and sewn back together in mismatched pairs; we’ve got atrocities in Cambodia and Mexico and Thai prostitutes and, yeah, just gore upon gore. Many of the individual moments are pretty amazingly repulsive…but, alas, I found the whole package kind of a bore. It’s really a lot more like Thomas Pynchon or William Burroughs than like Stephen King. Unlike Pynchon and Burroughs, Jacob has a plot, but, like them, there really isn’t any sense of pacing at all. Every page, every image just about, she goes for the jugular, and it quickly goes from suspenseful or terrifying to humorous and finally just to tedious. Every character (and there are quite a few of them) has some ridiculously violent, disgusting backstory, and, the narrative keeps flashing back — and since every flashback has the same over-the-top emotional content as every other, the narrative drive is completely vitiated. She’s sort of the anti-Lovecraft; instead of unnameable and unimaginable horrors, you get horrors that have been quite thoroughly named and catalogued; it’s like she’s some sort of monstrous horror clerk, checking off monstrosities on some dryly meticulous list.

“A Tale of Two Sisters”, a Korean horror film, is kind of the flip side of Jacobs’ approach. Hardly anything explicitly violent or gory happens — a bloody bag gets beaten and drawn across the floor, a woman appears in a room and menstrual blood slides down her leg, someone claims to have seen something under a sink. It’s much, much more scary than Jacobs’ book, though; the deliberate, agonized pacing and fraught emotional relationships create a painful sense of dread. Ultimately, the narrative breaks itself apart, a la The Sixth Sense or Spider — much of what we see is revealed to be a product of the main character’s madness. I was a bit torn about this; there’s something facile about this kind of psychological slight-of-hand, and I’m not sure it quite manages to support the high-art seriousness and gaping sadness that are at the core of the film (John Philip Bardin’s “The Deadly Percheron” works much better for me, since the pulp psych switcheroos are placed in a much clearly pulp context.) Still, the movie is very affecting, and it’s smart enough to leave a lot of loose ends dangling; what exactly is going on is never quite clear. Plot is something of a red herring here; it’s more about poetic sequences and images. One might say the same about *Haunter*, I guess; but if you’re going for poetry, you really do need to have a lyrical control of pacing and register; constantly screaming just doens’t quite cut it.