Grant Morrison: The Fanboy Years

This review first appeared in the Comics Journal.

“[S]uper-hero comic books…aren’t taken seriously in the critical community,” Timothy Callahan claims in the introduction to his monograph *Grant Morrison: The Early Years.* If that’s true, books like this are the reason. Instead of in depth analysis, Callahan provides his readers with lists of themes, like *chaos* and *sacrifice* (and yes, the themes are printed in italics.) Rather than synthesis, he gives us tedious, page by page plot summaries of every single damn issue. And rather than attempting to arrive at any complex conclusions, Callahan merely gushes out bland fanboy boosterism. As the final sentence states, “…Grant Morrison is, indeed, a master of the medium.” And then there’s this gem: “[*Arkham Asylum* is] a more fully realized combination of words and images than almost any comic-book story every published.” Or, translated, “Manga? Underground? Duuuh…what dose?”

The book is amateurish in every bad sense of the word. There’s no index. The proofreading gaffes are sometimes so overwhelming as to make the text difficult to read. And there are multiple errors of fact. Callahan claims, for example, that “the reader isn’t told” why Cliff Steele’s robot body explodes after a brain transplant in Doom Patrol #34 — but, in fact, Morrison takes a panel to tell the reader exactly that (the body wired itself to detonate in case of brain transplant.) In another instance, Callahan states that Morrison’s filching of older copyrighted characters has made it difficult to collect and distribute the Zenith comics in trade paperbacks. But in an interview at the end of the book, Morrison says that the problem is actually a rights dispute between him and the publisher over ownership of the Zenith comic itself.

This interview at least, is worthwhile. Callahan’s questions are sturdily innocuous, but Morrison is game, talking about his interest in magic, his time on the dole, his relationship with his artists. He also politely punctures several of Callahan’s pet theories, which (given the level of animosity I had worked up after trudging through all 200-odd pages) is quite satisfying. But overall, this book just made me embarrassed of my 12-year old self, who probably would have had enough sense not to enjoy reading it, but might well have written something like it if he’d had the chance.

*Grant Morrison: The Early Years* is supposed to be the first in a series from Sequart “devoted to the study and promotion of comic books as a legitimate art.” From now on, I plan to avoid them all: including the next one, entitled “Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy From Comics to Screen.” ‘Nuff said.

Update: Callahan and others have at me on a thread here. Callahan argues that I have a prejudice against super-hero books. As regular readers of this blog know, that is simply false. I hate everything indiscriminately.

Updeate 2: In comments, Julian Darius, the publisher of the book, notes that many of the errors I point out have been corrected for the recently released second edition. He also provides a lengthy rebuttal, and (politely) upbraids the Comics Journal for its lousy proofreading — a palpable hit.

Will Write for Food

Blogs are all about self-promotion, so what the hey….

I’m currently looking around for freelance writing opportunities. If any blog readers have leads or ideas, let me know. My email is noahberlatsky at hotmail.

Thanks all.

Escape from New York

Finally found another decent John Carpenter movie; Escape from New York isn’t exactly great, but it’s entertaining and intermittently thought-provoking.

It’s especially interesting in light of all the women-in-prison movies I was watching recently. The plot (Manhattan Island turned into a huge isolated prison in a miliaristic/crime-ridden near future) seems more-or-less lifted from Stephanie Rothman’s Terminal Island, about a similar quasi-fascist solution to crime.

Terminal Island does use a smaller, less well-known island to house its prisoners, of course. But the real difference is in the gender politics. Terminal Island is Rothman’s vision of feminist revolution and utopia. The island is under the fascist/feudal control of a white guy and his black vassal; women are owned and exploited for labor and sex, while most of themen are just exploited for labor. A group of outcasts captures the women, and together the multi-ethnic, multi-gendered revolutionary force overthrows the patriarchy, instituting a low-tech paradise of communitarian equality and peace. The end.

Escape from New York is also obsessed with patriarchy and pecking order, but there isn’t any feminist utopian vision. Indeed, there are hardly any females in the movie, period. For a quasi-mainstream, quasi-exploitation director, ohn Carpenter is really, really uninterested in women as sexual objects. There are only two women in the movie; one literally falls down a hole and disappears as soon as she tries to kiss Snake (Kurt Russell); the other lasts a little longer, but doesn’t actually do a whole lot more. Instead, we get to see the leather-clad Snake wrestle big sweaty men or exchange meaningful glances with Lee Van Cleef.

The whole movie, in fact, is one long male-dominance ritual. In part, this is played straight — Snake is a man’s manly man; super-violent, super-tough, speaks in a whisper, and constantly sneers, doesn’t give a shit about anybody, except that he is decent at the core…etc, etc. Anyway, Snake’s the hero and he beats everybody up and screws over Lee Van Cleef; so yeah, he’s super-cool dominant male archetype, hooray!

At the same time, there’s a lot in the film that can be read as a satire of the male pissing-match. The plot revolves around the President of the U.S., whose plane crashes in New York. Snake has to get him out — but before that happens, the Pres is abducted by the Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes, doing a big bad blaxploitation thang.) The President, alpha-dog in his own bailiwick, is tortured and brutalized — given an object lesson in macho maleness. Not unexpectedly, he crumples, constantly shaking, whimpering, shouting on command “You’re the Duke of New York! You’re A number 1!” Even while being rescued, the President remains thoroughly cowed; he never helps or offers any assistance; Snake has to drag him around like some useless…well, some useless woman, right?

The only point in the movie where the President takes any kind of initiative is towards the end. He’s on the top of the wall, about to escape to freedom. But instead of going quietly, he grabs a machine gun, and starts laughing maniacally as he shoots the Duke, who’s stuck down below. “You’re the Duke of New York! You’re A number 1!” he squeals in a high-pitched mocking voice. It’s like Lord of the Flies, or something; except the inclination isn’t that the President’s inner-caveman has been let loose, but that this is who he really is anyway, all the time. That’s macho posturing, and it’s what it means to be President — shooting people who don’t have a chance, mocking them, and then turning around and having the rest of the world pretend like nothing happened.

Of course, you could also argue that the President’s problem isn’t that he’s a man, but that he’s not enough of a man — if he’d been cool when he shot the Duke, that’d be fine. Still, it’s a pretty great take on the Presidency (better than that crappy Tom Clancy movie — what was that called? Air Force One?) I bet this is a favorite Frank Miller movie — it really reminds me of his best stuff, where the extreme machismo teeters on the line between sincere appreciation and parody.

Best of 2007

This piece is so out of date because it’s reprinted from The Comics Journal.

This year I thought I’d use the Journal’s best-of issue as an excuse to go through some of my wife’s giant, teetering piles of manga. Of course, that makes this more a “best-of what I read recently” list than an actual “best-of everything that was put out this year” list. But, surely that’s not without precedent. In any case, here’s the highlights of what I found:

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, by Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki, Dark Horse.

Otsuka’s story blends humor, melodrama, and horror in a style reminiscent of *Buffy the Vampire Slayer* — though you don’t have to watch Sarah Michelle Gellar emote, thank goodness. Five wannabe Buddhist priests without the connections they’d need to get a job at a temple band together to salve the spirits of the dead and make a few bucks in the process. Each of the protagonists has special powers (Kuro Karatsu can speak to the dead, Makino has studied embalming, etc.) and their adventures range from merely improbable to utterly, goofily ridiculous — they battle an evil actuary in one episode. The writing is witty and the plotting clever, but what really carries the series is Housoi Yamazaki’s viscerally detailed, exquisitely composed art. The opening sequence of the opening volume (an establishing shot of a mountain, zooming into a forest with a corpse hanging from a tree, to a close-up of the corpse’s bloated, fly-covered face) has all the insouciant swagger of that first song, first solo on Led Zeppelin I — it lets you know, right off the bat, that you are in the hands of one bad motherfucker.

Forest of Gray City, by Uhm Jung-Hyum, IceKunion

I’ve come to have very high expectations of Korean manga (or mahwa), and Forest of Gray City doesn’t disappoint. Yun-Ook Jang is a young woman trying to turn herself into an adult, with intermittent success — she is managing to make a go of it as a freelance artist, but she drinks too much and her cash flow isn’t all it could be. So she takes in a tenant:17-year old Bum-Moo Lee. Though Bum-Moo actually seems older and more responsible than Yun-Ook at first, he has his vulnerabilities too. Over the course of the first volume, the two housemates tentatively start to rely on each other as friends, and perhaps more.

The scenario itself is exquisitely romantic, and both Bum-Moo and Yun-Ook are given the full shoujo treatment —elegant, languid poses, flowing hair, giant limpid eyes. Their mutual attraction, repulsion and general confusion is pitch perfect — when Bum-Moo deadpans, “Is it okay to have a crush on you?” and Yun-Ook deadpans “no,” it’s funny and uncomfortable in just about equal amounts. It doesn’t hurt that, though this is Uhm’s first full-length story, she is already a masterful artist. Her use of grey shadings, and the way that she varies spacing — dropping borders, using insets, tilting the characters within the frames, even shifting the placement of speech bubbles — makes the narrative moments seem to wash into each other an intimate, dream-like blur. When she slows the pace by using a cleaner layout — as when Bung-Moo stops to look at the daybreak half way through the story — its almost inexplicably poignant. Only the first volume of this has been released, and the second has been delayed several times. If this series ends up getting canceled, I’m going to be really depressed.

The Wallflower, Tomoko Hayakawa, Del Ray.

My wife’s been trying to get me to check out this one forever. I ended up only reading the last four volumes, though I’m not sure it would make any more sense even if I started at the beginning. The plot, such as it is, centers around Sunako, a goth chick who likes to sit in her room and watch horror films. She lives with four bishonen (loosely translated as “effeminate yet hot”) boys, who intermittently try to turn her into a lady because if they do, the high-society landlady (who is Sunako’s aunt) will let them live in the apartment rent free. Oh, yeah, and Sunako also happens to be a frighteningly good cook. Also a deadly martial artist. And when she’s cranky, she spits blood. She’s also drop-dead gorgeous, in the few scenes where she’s not drawn as a hyper-deformed tiny cartoon doll with no eyes.

And if that all makes the series sound desperately incoherent— well, sort of. The whole thing is pulled together, though, by the author’s steadfast refusal to reform her main character. Sunako is a weirdo not because she had a tragic past or because she has low self-esteem or even because she’s a sensitive loner who’s rejected the shallow conformity of those around her. She’s just a weirdo because she’s a weirdo. The book manages the nifty trick of loving, but not judging, its protagonist and as a result, no matter how absurd the plot gets, it still makes emotional sense. Yes, even that scene where Sunako, holding a giant tray of shrimp, festoons herself with lightbulbs in order to confront the bishonen biker gang.

Gerard and Jaques, by Fumi Yoshinaga, BLU

Like most lefty free-speech-loving hipster sorts, I like to think that I’m fairly unshockable as far as porn goes. Trust the Japanese to prove me wrong. Gerard and Jacques opens with an unapologetic, underage rape. That squicky primal scene sets the tone for the series, which breezily wallows in the decadence of pre-Revolutionary France.:open marriages, threesomes, eager boy prostitutes, the whole, um, shebang. There’s also a tender love story, of course — Gerard, an older, experienced, cultured commoner, and Jacques, his ex-aristocratic servant, share philosophical disagreements, sporadic animosity, and barely sublimated lust. Yoshinaga’s very good at balancing character development with unflinching lasciviousness — in one scene, Gerard casually jerks Jacques off, then in the next, the two are back to a distant, charged wariness. It’s this balance, I think, that threw me when I read the book. When porn’s just porn, it’s hard to take it seriously, but when the characters actually have inner lives , the implications of all that sex start to be a bit unsettling. Which isn’t a bad thing.

Besides the above, I’d also unreservedly recommend Ai Yazawa’s Nana, Hitoshii Iwaaki’s Parasyte, and Youngran Lee’s Click. (I’d say more about them, but I’ve recently written reviews of all three for the Journal, and repeating myself seems likely to be tedious for everyone.)

Hard On For Armor

I saw two critically acclaimed masterpieces of world cinema recently: Bergman’s Virgin Spring and Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu. I can more or less understand why they make the critics go “ooooo” — they’re beautifully shot, slow-paced, and larded with BIG SPIRITUAL THEMES. Exploitation for the intelligencia, basically.

Another reason for the critical enthusiasm may be that, in a very SNAG way, they are both really, really enthusiastic about patriarchy — and bizarrely nostalgic for feudalism. Virgin Spring is set in medieval Scandinavia; it’s about a virgin who heads off to deliver candles to church. She’s raped and murdered by low-class brigands, who improbably stop in at her parents house, where the virgin’s mother uncovers their misdeed and the virgin’s father kills them, after which he feels guilty. Ugetsu is set in ancient Japan during a war. It follows two brothers; Genjuro, whowants to make a fortune by selling his pots, and Tobei, who wants to become a samurai. In pursuing their dreams they abandon their wives: Tobei’s is raped, and Genjuro’s is murdered.

Both of these movies are built around violence against women. And yet, neither is really about women. Instead, the violence directed at females is part of a story about men. In Virgin Spring, the murder and rape of the daughter is there to enable the father’s spiritual questioning — at the end of the movie he accuses God, and specifically wonders why God has allowed innocence to be murdered . His daughters virginity (as the title indicates) is very much at issue — as if the crime would be less heinous if the rapee had slept around. Furthermore, to expiate his sin of vengeance, the father promises to build a church, after which a spring miraculously wells up from the ground. The girl has been sacrificed to effect a reconciliation between father figures — the actual father and God, who come to a closer understanding over her broken body.

Ugetsu is similarly obsessed with a feudal past. It’s kind of fun to see a movie in which the ambitious capitalist dreamers are so thoroughly done in — Tobei and Genjuro would be the triumphant heroes in any mainstream Western movie. Still, if we chuck capitalism, do we really have to go back to feudalism? The suggestion that any personal ambition automatically leads to insanity seems maybe a little over done — I mean, who can blame these guys for not wanting to be ground-down peasants all their lives? Apparently Mizoguchi can; the punishment for abandoning their feudal lot is an abrogation of their fedual privileges; their wives are dishonored and killed. As I mentioned, Tobei’s wife is raped — and since she’s dishonored, that automatically makes her a whore, so she ends up in a house of prostitution. Genjuro’s wife is killed…but we get to hear her ghostly avatar babbling on about how happy she is that her husband has given up all his ambition and is now just working, working, working, with no expectation of reward or advancement. Oh yeah, and there’s one more women in the story — a noble lady who compliments Genjuro’s pots, throws herself at him, marries him…and then turns out to be an evil ghost spirit! Bad luck there, Genjuro. Talk about the trophy wife from hell.

In other words, the woman in these movies aren’t woman — they’re spiritual chits, pushed around the board to make the mens’ inner lives look more interesting. I can’t help but think that this focus on the tortured-soul-of-the-male-provider is why these movies get to be seen as So So Serious. It makes you understand why Regan and Goneril were so pissed off at dear old egocentric Dad and his simpering enabler, Cordelia.

Helfer’s Reagan

This review first appeared in the Comics Journal.
I have enormous affection for writer Andy Helfer’s classic run on DC’s Shadow series in the 80s, so I was intrigued to hear he was working on a series of graphic biographies. Nor have I been disappointed. Helfer’s first effort, on Malcolm X , was, despite the difficulty of the subject matter, neither a hatchet job nor a hagiography, but instead a thoughtful treatment of a difficult man.

The most recent bio, of Ronald Reagan, maintains and even surpasses that high standard. Perhaps it’s because Helfer had a more definite position on the subject, or maybe its because the cartoony art by Steve Buccellato and Joe Staton has a workmanlike wit and clarity that was lacking in Randy DuBurke’s drawings for the earlier volume. In any case, where the Malcolm biography was a little dry, this one has a definite bite. The President’s own words are used extensively throughout, and they reveal Reagan to be a vague but ambitious buffoon, whose glowing oratory and genial delivery thinly covered a thorough and self-satisfied ignorance. A running theme throughout the book is the debacle that resulted whenever Reagan departed from his prepared note cards. Sometimes even sticking to them wasn’t enough to save him. During the Iran-Contra hearings, when asked about a particular missile shipment, Reagan looked down and read, word for word, the instructions his staff had prepared for him: “If the question comes up at the Tower board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised….”

I’m no fan of Reagan myself, and though I didn’t know every detail, I was well aware of his penchant for petty corruption, his lack of interest in policy, and the multiple disasters which resulted from both. What was a little startling, though, was that I found myself, at points, rather liking the man. Helfer includes a good deal of Reagan’s self-deprecating humor, and it is undoubtedly charming. Even after being shot, the President was unflappable, jokingly admonishing his surgeon, “I hope you’re a Republican.” One of Reagan’s most famous gaffes — quipping that he was about to bomb Russia in front of a mike that he thought was off — comes across, not as a sign of callous insanity, but rather as a tongue-in-cheek bit of self-parody. And while this biography doesn’t suggest that Reagan single-handedly ended the Cold War, it does show that he was, at least at times, able to get out from under his anti-Communist rhetoric and meet Gorbachev half-way when the opportunity presented itself.

In other words, this is a rarity: a simple, short biography of a controversial figure which respects both its subject and its readers. I’m looking forward to Helfer’s next effort — a biography of J. Edgar Hoover.