Sub-Claremont Hackery

So probably my favorite part of the brouhaha over my dislike of 100 Bullets was that I got in a flamewar with mediocre mainstream scripter Mark Waid. Here’s our back and forth:

Mark:
I, on the other hand, unlike Ross, am happy to just flat-out insult, because this kind of nonsense blogpost, shat out by a self-styled guardian of culture who thinks “mediums” is the plural of “medium,” is largely a waste of electrons and does nothing to elevate any sort of discourse. If there were a FailBlog.org site for reviews, this would lead the list.

The only fair yardstick against which any work of art can be measured is how well it accomplished whatever the hell it set out to accomplish. Every critic’s mileage will vary, but the critics who tend to be worth listening to are the ones who demonstrate, at the very least, enough critical acumen to be able to tell the difference between Ed Risso and Dave Johnson. Particularly when Dave Johnson’s signature is about the size of a matchbook.

Me:
Holy crap. Mark Waid cares enough to post. Hey Mark! I was just reading some of your amazingly mediocre efforts on Justice League. You are the last person whose opinion about writing I would take…I may even keep using “mediums” as the plural just to distance myself from your lameness. Cheers!

Mark then went over to Heidi’s comments to say:

Wow. Just left a reply on the guy’s blog because, as a friend of Dave’s, I was pissed–but I realize now that was a waste of time. He’s just another yutz with a keyboard. But I hope he enjoys the little moment in the sun we’ve given him!

I posted a link to my follow-up post on Heidi’s comments, prompting the following exchange
:

Mark:
“Hey all. I’ve got a follow up post here:”

Or, to put it another way, “HEY!!!! LOOK AT ME, EVERYBODY!!!!!!”

I repeat: I hope this halfwit is enjoying his moment in the sun, since it’s probably the only one he’ll ever get. C’mon, everybody…let the baby have his bottle. Move along. Nothin’ to see here.

Me:
Hey Mark! I’m on my tenth or eleventh Internet brouhaha at this point, actually. But, yes, I’m enjoying the moment, as I hope you’ve enjoyed your run of sub-Claremont hackery. Really, seeing you pop up and offer aesthetic opinions is like that old Dr. Johnson joke about the dog walking on hind legs…you don’t do it especially well, but it’s surprising to see you do it at all.

It’s probably wrong to have enjoyed that quite so much…but so it goes.

Anyway, I thought that as long as I’d raised the issue, I should maybe go back and reread something of Waid’s and see if it was as tedious as I (vaguely) remembered. The one entire book of his I”ve got lying around is “Justice League: Midsummer Nightmare”, written with Fabian Nicieza. I bought it because it’s a prequel of sorts to the Grant Morrison run on JLA. I didn’t remember it as being especially good, but I thought I’d give it another whirl.

Or try to. I had to give up; it’s largely unreadable. The initial idea (everybody on earth is getting super-powers) is okay, but the execution is phenomenally dreary. In an intro, Grant Morrison praises this book for turning its back on the bad-old-nastiness of dark gritty comics from the 80s and 90s, and ushering a new silver age full of fun! and excitement! In fact, though, this isn’t Dark Age, or Silver Age, but a Color-of-Lukewarm-Porridge Age. This is where bits and pieces of comic stories past come to die; zombified tropes wander about, robbed of all meaning and purpose, dumbly watching their own brains leach through their fingers. The putative plot is that Dr. Destiny has brainwashed the JLA, making them forget that they are heroes. This is an excuse to have Wally West (the Flash) be late to stuff (the irony!); to make Diane Prince/Wonder Woman be the head of a girl’s school (does that even qualify as irony?); to have Batman’s parents resurrected (again) before he relives the tragedy of their death (again), and to have the Martian Manhunter lose his family (again). Meanwhile, Kyle Rainer (Green Lantern) is a comic book writer and we get an extended running gag about his being behind deadline — because we have never, ever, in a comic book, seen a story about a comic book writer being harassed by his editor. No, really, we haven’t. Oh, yes, and towards the end, all the super-heroes have to confront their Deepest Fears. It’s so Jungian.

The worst part isn’t so much the inanity, though, as the utter joylessness of the exercise. I’m not a huge Chris Claremont fan, but his X-Men stories are just miles better than this. I remember, for example, one sequence where Jean Grey has been kidnapped while wearing a cocktail dress; she’s trying to tear it so she can run — so Wolverine volunteers to help and slashes it off at mini-skirt length. I think she says “Not so flaming short!” and Wolverine looks exceedingly smug. Not great art, or anything, but you get the sense that Claremont is paying attention to the characters — he’s noticed what Jean is wearing, and has a good enough sense of her and of Wolverine to be able to have them interact around a throw-away detail. It’s cute and a little sexy and I still remember it some 20 years after I first read the thing.

All the interaction in this story, on the other hand, seem leadenly smug; Flash and Green Lantern joshing like teens on a B-grade sit-com (“Big doings gang! Scoop any answers!”), the de rigeur Justice League everybody-burbling-on-about-how-wonderful-everybody-else-is, the insufferable, ritualized, repeated moments of self-actualization (Diana: How can I trust you Mr. Kent?” Superman: You know you can. You know.”) We’ve still got the over-the-top angst of Marvel team books (The Manhunter’s wife and daughter killed again right before his eyes purely to give somebody — anybody– an amped up tragic backstory, would be repulsive if it weren’t so tediously predictable), but we’ve dumped the soap-opera trappings — flirting, personal tension — which made it possible, occasionally, to care about the characters. It’s the worst of all worlds; melodrama with mannequins.

You look at something like this, and you really say, it’s all over for super-heroes isn’t it? They’ve completely lost all purpose or point. We should have just stopped after this…but instead we’ve got another ten years of dragging the same hollowed out characters through the same stupid paces. Super-hero comics have entered their second infancy; drooling, befouling themselves, cackling toothlessly, passing in and out of half-formed, repetitive dreams. This comic reeks of stale bedpans, decay, and a hopeless, numbing idiocy.

I should talk about the art now, I guess…but I don’t think I have the heart. In fact, I think I’m going to have to maybe stop writing about mainstream titles for at least a while; it’s just too depressing. I don’t know how Tucker does it every week. You’re a stronger man than me, my friend.

Update: Mark Waid takes another swing at me on Newsarama:

No one was really interested in rebutting his critique because no one took it seriously. If I were to go into a long rant about how much I hated British Invasion music based largely on the argument that the Rolling Stones sucked–and then I played clips of the Beatles to back up my point–my credibility would be eye-rollingly weak, and it would be pretty embarrassing to watch me get all huffy that no one was willing to listen to anything else I had to say on the subject. You want a rebuttal? Here’s a rebuttal: why should anyone waste their time arguing the finer points of art with a guy who can’t distinguish between Ed Risso and Dave Johnson?

It’s not that he had a momentary brain-blip; it’s not that he got the two confused. It’s that he literally cannot tell the difference between two professional artists, even when they have signed their work. Failblog.org stuff. That’s the story, and that’s what got everyone’s attention.

Mark Waid,
Sub-Claremont Hack

Me:

Mark; you seem to have read my post on our flame-war, and were at least moderately amused. Given that, I can’t really continue to slang you, much as I am tempted. It’s been fun, and maybe we’ll get a chance to do it again some time. In the meantime, good luck to you.

0 thoughts on “Sub-Claremont Hackery

  1. Sorry Matt…I couldn’t hear you over the roar of your mother’s shattering pelvis.

  2. I try not to think about all the things you’d be if Dave Johnson was your mother, Matt.

  3. I was actually thinking your anatomy would be hopelessly inaccurate and you’d have a poor lay-out…but perhaps that’s already the case.

    I appreciate that you’ve been goaded into producing marginally clever retorts, though. If I’m to have trolls, I’d much prefer they be entertaining.

  4. I have to say, I don’t get this review or whatever it is. Aside from the questionable strategy of reviewing someone’s work with whom you’re in an Internet slap fight, Mark Waid isn’t really a Claremont-style writer and comparing moments from a random co-writing assignment with one of Claremont’s best scenes in his best book seems bizarre to me.

  5. Hey Tom. My sense is that “don’t get” here is a euphemism for “ethically dubious and dumb.” I appreciate your kindness in not quite coming out and saying it, though.

    I guess the category I was going for was “mainstream comics team books”…but I’d actually be interested in hearing in what way you feel Claremont and Waid’s writing is different.

  6. Noah

    Speaking as somebody who knows you from your manga reviews and who respects your opinions as far as your manga recommendations go, I must say that I am disappointing by this little internet brouhaha. Not because of your opinion regarding the art of 100 Bullets (I haven’t read the series, so I have no opinion one way or the other), but because of the way you’ve chosen to conduct yourself afterwards. As I mentioned before, I respect your opinions, and much of it is due to the fact that they are so well thought out. This brand of belligerent internet arguments is beneath you. Not only does it demean you as a person, but it makes it that much harder to respond to the good points you do make. For example, the main criticism this post (that Justice League: Midsummer Nightmare is an exercise in self-indulgent nostalgia without much charm, wit or originality) is perfectly valid, but the fact that it’s buried in a sea of personal attacks and, for the lack of a better term, butthurt, makes it hard for me to agree with it. I can only hope that you’ll take some time away from the internet and think about how you’re approaching this situation before you lose any more dignity.

  7. No, when I say I don’t get something it means I don’t get something. Strangely, I also said it was dubious and that I didn’t agree with it even though you seem to be suggesting this is a hidden message, but that’s not part of the confusion. I just have no idea what you were getting at or why you were doing it.

    Off the top of my head, Waid and Claremont have different orientations, approach dialogue differently and emphasize different elements of works given similar assignments. If left to their own device they seek different assignments, even. Just sort of fundamentally different.

    It’s sort of like calling Peter Gallagher a sub-Robert Reed hack because they both played TV dads. You could write 14,000 words on why they’re different, but why on earth should you have to?

  8. The two works used for comparison are lopsided. The Claremont/Byrne run on X-Men is easily Claremont’s best work, while Midsummer’s Nightmare is one of Waid’s weaker efforts.

    Without the contributions of artist John Byrne or editor Jim Shooter, Claremont’s work is very rambling and incoherent, requiring a cheat sheet to keep track of the characters and plot lines that constantly come out of left field. It doesn’t help that aside from the occasional “Bub” or “Y’all”, the dialog is written in one voice. Also, Claremont never met a bad idea he didn’t like, constantly re-using unworkable situations and characters. For example, he constantly uses elements from Alan Moore’s run on Captain Britain, but doesn’t have Moore’s talent to make things work.

    Mark Waid is best known for writing stories that define or re-establish the essential natures of iconic characters. He has done this for Captain America and the Fantastic Four. Most plots are standard super-hero fare, but Waid’s characterizations rise above the crowd.

    I am a big fan of his work on Flash, where Waid picked up the threads started by Messner-Loebs and took it to the next level. He created the definitive version of the character by showing Wally West coming to terms with the legacy of Barry Allen, becoming an adult in the process.

    A lesser known work of Waid’s that I also enjoyed was the Crossgen book Ruse, which a Sherlock Holmes-like character and his female Watson solve crimes on world with Steampunk trappings.

    Waid is not always on target. I did not like his work on large team books like the JLA and Legion of Super Heroes because the characterizations get lost in the crowd and the plots tend to favor Silver Age goofiness.

    I think its a little unfair to single out Mark Waid as a hack. If anything, his work is usually better than his peers at Marvel and DC. I understand your attack was prompted by his comments on 100 Bullets, but personalities aside, it seems your real beef is with the super-hero genre as a whole.

  9. I just wanted to add that I still find all of this very amusing and entertaining. Keep it coming Noah.

  10. If you’ve got Tom Spurgeon and Heidi teaming against you, you’re doing something right. Both are people who don’t form any definite opinions in an attempt to not step on any toes, but will quickly co-sign on others’ opinions, especially if it will gain favor with an industry pro.

    Fact of the matter is, 100 Bullets isn’t Risso’s best work. Dave Johnson has always been mediocre. I don’t care if either guy feeds homeless kittens with ambrosia in their spare time, their work for DC isn’t very good. Mistaking their DC work for one another’s isn’t very hard and doesn’t discredit your observation the cover in question is week. It just means you made a mistake.

    Mark Waid’s comics appeal to people who think the current low the bar is set for superhero comics is acceptable. By that bar, I guess Waid’s stuff isn’t horrible, but it’s not very good. And trying to compare Waid to Claremont is like trying to compare Brittney Spears to Christina Aguilera. What’s the point?

    On the positive side: Mark Waid apparently spends his free time defending his friends; that’s pretty cool. Dave Johnson is an awesome colorist, so maybe he can get a free pass on the cover?

    I dunno, I think the problem with blogging about superhero comics is everyone takes everything *so* personally. You can either walk the Heidi/Tom road and never directly say anything negative and keep everyone nn your good side, or take the Deppey/Johanna Draper Carlson road and have everyone jump on you every chance they get – usually for not pulling enough obscure trivia out. In all of this, there’s never any chance for anyone to say, “hey, the emperor has no clothes” and point out superhero comics have poor sales because they suck. Instead, the emperor keeps walking around with no clothes and comics remain the black sheep of the entertainment world to be kept merely as a guilty pleasure by all those except the most hardcore of social outcasts.

  11. Kenny said: “In all of this, there’s never any chance for anyone to say, “hey, the emperor has no clothes” and point out superhero comics have poor sales because they suck. Instead, the emperor keeps walking around with no clothes and comics remain the black sheep of the entertainment world to be kept merely as a guilty pleasure by all those except the most hardcore of social outcasts.”

    The argument that superhero books suck is valid, but to single out modern superhero books seems silly. Remove the veneer of nostalgia and take a look at all the books published over the last 40 years from Marvel and DC. Most aren’t very good by any standard. At the very least, the general quality of superhero books has always been the same.

    I don’t think monthly comic book sales are an accurate or meaningful indication of cultural impact or quality. It could just mean more people are buying trades at the big bookstore chains or pirating digital copies off the Internet. Or it could just mean that the general reading audience has become more discriminating, but the popularity of Dan Brown would disprove that.

    As for the black sheep comment, what world are you living in? Have you a seen a movie or been to a store lately? You can’t go to these places without being assaulted by superheroes in various mediums and their associated merchandise. I don’t think superheroes have ever been more mainstream.

    That being said, I agree with your general point that the people who live at the comic book store need thicker skins and should stick their head outside the door once in a while and realize that things could be better.

  12. There have been pretty good superhero books over the years…I haven’t read many recently, and none by Mark Waid (that is to say, I’ve read some Mark Waid, but nothing good).

  13. Try Claremont’s SOVEREIGN SEVEN versus Waid’s first 14 issues of LOSH before Supergirl came into the picture.

  14. You know, I would love to be one of those people that never writes a negative review because I'd be super-popular. However, I'm afraid I've not only written plenty of negative reviews I've even written them about Mark Waid's comics, like this one that I wrote back in 1996:

    http://www.tcj.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=133&Itemid=48

    I don't know if you can read equivocation into that, but I can assure you know one did during con season that summer.

    I've also written enough news stories to cause me major grief when it came to future employment and advertising sales.

    It's all part of the job, but I resent the implication I somehow fear to get on anyone's bad side. If that's what I've been doing, I sure suck at it.

  15. well, i'm another regular reader who enjoys your positive reviews, your social-theory analytical pieces (usually) & your snark sometimes.

    i find the flame wars a lot less fun than you do, but part of that is probably being a girl & socialized to hate conflict :). they don't make me think less of you, though, since i've been reading long enough to accept them as a facet of your blogging personality.

    they allow a really charming part of your blogging self to come through occasionally, though; when someone confronts you, you're able to engage reasonably, even gracefully with them, like in the kim deitch thing. you always seem happy to talk with people who disagree with you, rather than slinking away or screaming louder.

    i do regret, & feel somewhat personally guilty (again, being a girl, & raised religious on top of that) that your snarks & flamewars get a lot more attention than your positive or analytical stuff. i really enjoy that stuff, usually, but won't have much to add at the end.

  16. Miriam, you’re just a gem. Really, thank you.

    Strannik; as Miriam says, the snark is something I’ve been doing for a while, and I’m probably not going to stop. I like it, just as I like writing the more thoughtful pieces. It gives me a chance to write in different genres, basically. It keeps me from getting bored. Ideally I’d have a pseudonym for the snark, I guess (the way romance writers do when they write detective novels)…but it’s maybe a little late for that at this point. In any case, I can at least promise that I’ll keep writing the more thoughtful pieces as well, even though, as Miriam says, they don’t really draw the crowds in the same way. I’ll have a post up tomorrow about the Nana movie which will hopefully interest you — and if I’m lucky there should be a blog announcement which will have some good news for manga fans as well.

    Tom, I wasn’t accusing you of nefarious subterfuge; just of tact and generosity. And, as I’ve said in the past, I really enjoy your writing and criticism. It’s always a pleasure when you stop by here.

    I mean, I think you are maybe less confrontational than me…but, geez, who isn’t?

    Kenny and Bryan; I think this is actually a pretty bad time for super-hero comics, though lord knows, as Bryan points out, there have been many awfully bad super-hero comics in the past. The Mark Waid JLA really did depress me and make me feel like we were looking at the end times…which is funny, because I actually find his blog-troll persona engaging and enjoyable. All of which is to say, I appreciate the support, and I’ll probably have another go at some Mark Waid in the future…though maybe not right, right away.

  17. Tom, that Kingdom Come review is really entertaining, by the by. It kind of depresses me that people gave you shit for it. I guess that’s another reason for me not to go to cons. Not that I needed one, exactly.

  18. Seriously, I was just trying to clarify my position, not attack some perceived position of your own. No worries.

    You don’t have to go to cons. When I was a teenager through my early 20s my friends and I went to Chicago Con every year and really looked forward to it. I was talking to one of them a few months ago about those trips and we realized talking through it that it was basically just walking in and buying stuff and then leaving. Nothing like what people think of as visiting cons now. We’d stay about three hours, maybe, driving twice that. But no panels, no getting anything signed, no shmoozing other than getting snapped at by Harvey Pekar. Just walking around buying crap. And it was still an awesome trip.

    Now, they’re fun work weekends, but I don’t think I’d be going otherwise. I’d like to do Luzern someday.

  19. I have no idea if Mr. Berlatsky’s review of Waid’s JLA paints an accurate picture, but even if it didn’t I still want more. Do Starman next! Pleeeease?

  20. Starman is the most hideously overrated superhero book of the past 20 years, and a deleterious influence on superhero comics as a whole.

    Without James Robinson, we likely would not have Geoff Johns.

    THINK ABOUT THAT.

  21. I think I really am going to back off on the mainstream comics for a little bit…but if you want sneering at super-heroes on a weekly basis, you really need to read Tucker Stone’s blog which is extremely funn…hey. Hey, wait a minute. He panned a Jeff Parker comic! But…but…I like Jeff Parker! That’s not…I don’t…damn you, Tucker Stone! DAMN YOU TO HELL!

  22. “Starman is the most hideously overrated superhero book of the past 20 years, and a deleterious influence on superhero comics as a whole.”

    Thank you. That was truly, unduly satisfying.

    (I would argue though that Johns at least deserves the distinction of being an improved 2.0 of Robinson; his dialogue isn’t so unreal and he’s occasionally able to deliver a story premise that doesn’t reek of some dogged continuity driven de-de-constructionism. But my opinions are informed by my seemingly ravenous desire for cape and tight comics that consistently leads me down roads that probably aren’t worth my time.)

  23. Johns is a better writer than the monster that bore him, yes, but he’s cracking up.

    At the very least, though, I don’t see him making a film like Comic Book Villains and then coming back to comics, hat in hand, when his screenwriting career stalls.

  24. Also, Waid, in case you’re reading this:

    You claimed in the Flash Companion that Geoff Johns “loves the characters as much as you do.” How do you feel, then, about Johns making your beloved Wally West an accomplice to triple murder in Rogues’ Revenge?

    After all, if Wally took Inertia to prison instead of sticking him in the Flash museum, he wouldn’t have been in the position to kill those cops, now, would he?

  25. Anyone who joins the police force in a place called Keystone City deserves whatever horrible or frantically comedic thing happens to them.