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SPURGEON: One of the more interesting about the art in your Iron Man is Salvador Larocca's visual references to celebrities--in fact, you've worked with a number of strong stylists. Is there any way that you as a writer will respond to or make choices based on stylistic strategies undertaken by an artist with whom you're working?
FRACTION: I can't stand that stuff, personally -- yanks me out of the story immediately. Not photo referencing, that's not what bugs me, but using celebrities just... it's as intrusive as someone standing over your shoulder reading the word balloons with funny voices. Bums me out.
Wow, on the record and everything. But it really does interfere with my enjoyment of the series, which is otherwise quite good. Hmm, Fraction must also love working with Greg Land on Uncanny X-Men, huh?
* Speaking of Spurge, here he reviews early Daredevil and notes how the creators' uncertainty of what the point of the book was supposed to be gave them a lot of freedom. The funny thing about Daredevil as a character is that most of the great work done with the character, and there's been a disproportionate amount of that, has been tonally consistent from one creative team to another, so it's a momentary surprise to recall that it wasn't always noir and ninjas.
* Don't know why I'm just getting to this now, but the original Blog@Newsarama crew is back and blogging at Comic Book Resources under the moniker Robot 6. Welcome back!
* WoW Among the Ruins: Bruce Baugh takes a look at a less-traveled area of World of Warcraft, one that had once been the site of a lot of action, and notes its post-catastrophic ambiance.
* Jog reviews the first issue of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips's supervillain noir Incognito, echoing my sentiments about the comic in two particulars: 1) It feels a bit shopworn, at least at the moment; 2) It's like Brubaker wanted to see what Wanted would be like if it were written by a good writer.
* Finally, a welcome Real Life Torture Porn update:
We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.
Greetings to all whose Internet usage declined somewhat during the holiday break. Here are some reviews I posted during that time that you may have missed.
The posting of that Spirit review marked the successful completion of one full year of Comics Time comic book reviews going up on this blog every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, without fail. I'm proud to have done what I set out to do a year ago. I had a lot of fun reading that many comics, and perhaps to my surprise I had a lot of fun writing about that many comics, too. I'm certainly a better comics writer than I was when I started, and I think the blog is better overall. For this I'd like to thank all my readers, particularly those who emailed or posted comments. I'd also like to thank all the publishers who generously donated review copies.
In the New Year I don't think I'll be reviewing comics with this same level of regularity. Prose books beckon, as do sizable runs of comics that are hard to fit into your schedule when you've got to have three reviews up a week. That said, you'll see some backlog reviews popping up in the regular slots for a little while, and chances are good that if I read a substantial comic, it's gonna get reviewed here on the blog. (The occasional insubstantial comic will be thrown in for good measure.) I'm going to work my way through the remaining 2008 notables in time to put up a semi-timely Best of 2008 list of some kind as well. But for now, a leisurely re-read of Ed Brubaker's Captain America run beckons...
The Immortal Iron Fist #21
Duane Sweirczynski, writer
Timothy Green, artist
Marvel, December 2008
32 pages
$2.99
The Immortal Iron Fist as co-written by Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction and drawn by an ace team of artists led by David Aja was the most acclaimed Marvel comic to come along in quite a while. It took a largely forgotten character, reimagined and expanded his mythos, carved itself a storytelling space far outside Marvel's current military-industrial superhero idiom, incorporated video game and manga influences, looked lovely, and was both thrilling and funny, which is hard to pull off in superhero comics. (Usually they're one or the other.)
But Brubaker, Fraction, and Aja left the title rather quickly, and pulp writer Duane Swierirczynski took over. I liked his opening storyline well enough. The antagonist, a mystical Iron Fist terminator of sorts, fit right into the kinds of things Frubaker were doing with villains and the Iron Fist legacy, and the tone was right as well. I might have tried to do more with all the other Immortal Weapons that had just been introduced--witness how well Brubaker juggles supporting super-characters in Captain America and Daredevil, for example--but hey, it's his first shot. The much bigger problem was with the art, provided by Travel Foreman. With a wiry line that is often drowned out by thick, murky blacks, it bobbled the two balls that absolutely need to be kept in the air for this iteration of this character to work: character design and action choreography.
This stand-alone issue is more like it. Artist Timothy Green shares enough with Foreman that at first I thought that the latter artist had simply varied his style or had a different inker/colorist support team working with him. But Green's work is both looser (meaning less cramped) and tighter (meaning more self-assured). Yes, the backgrounds often disappear, but that just gives more breathing room for his Seth Fisheresque design flourishes, and for Edward Bola's pretty pastel colors. With the visual handicap removed, you can now really see that Swierczynski gets this character and this concept. A story that takes place a thousand years into the future, pitting a cyborg Fat Cobra against a nine-year-old Iron Fist who uses his chi to form a giant robot, and features as a key plot point a kung-fu punch that takes over twenty years to deliver? It's the exact same blend of majesty, absurdity, and creativity that made the earlier IIF so much fun. If the rest of Swierczynski's run looks like this, sign me up.
* Jog presents his Top 20 Comics of 2008. I don't wanna spoil it for you, but this bit from his write-up of Comic #1 made me laugh:
And I fucking liked the collage! Yeah, that's goddamned right! In fact, I'm calling it now - 2009 is all collage! Fantagraphics? Collage! PictureBox? Collage! First Second? Children's publishing collage!Kramers Ergot 8 is a 60-foot collage propped up against the Marriott Bethesda North Hotel & Conference Center!Ultimatum #5 is the Ultimate Collage! TheBattle for the Cowlis won by writer/artist Tony Daniel and the fists of collage, via collage! Where's my paste? My notebook? My pillow?? Where's the Publish Post button?! I am personally killing 2008 with my two hands, right this second.
* Marc-Oliver Frisch picks the nits out of Marvel and DC's March solicits.
* Happy New Year, everyone. The Missus and I have kicked off 2009 by being as horribly sick as we've ever been. Interestingly, this was also how we kicked off 2000. I don't know what it is about that damn ball dropping that it always has to land squarely on our immune systems.
* Before my life became a David Cronenberg movie, I wrote some things about event comics that kicked off a lengthy discussion in the comment thread by a galaxy of blogospheric stars, including Tucker Stone, Tim O'Neil, Tom Spurgeon, Marc-Oliver Frisch, Sean B., Matthew Perpetua, Ben Morse, Shaggy Erwin, Jon Hastings, Kiel Phegley, and Bruce Baugh. It was still going as of this morning, so pop in and see what you think. O'Neil and Dick Hyacinth have related thoughts at their own blogs.
* If you're like me and you think Abhay Khosla's be-boppin' and scattin' impedes rather than enhances his criticism, you'll really appreciate Tom Spurgeon's holiday interview with him--once you get past the opening answer, the schtick largely evaporates and leaves behind insightful commentary about a wide variety of comics. I particularly liked what he said about whether superhero fans "deserve" being taken advantage of. And even when he's saying things I disagree with, like praising Civil War for being a bona fide "universe breaker" event comic--which is true, but it broke it in bad ways--he's still on to something.
* Speaking of Tom (and over the holidays, when aren't we? dude keeps the comics blogosphere alive singlehandedly between Christmas and New Year's), here's some shelf porn strait outta the Spurgecave.
ACME Novelty Library #19
Chris Ware, writer/artist
The ACME Novelty Library/Drawn & Quarterly, October 2008
80 pages, hardcover
$15.95 Buy it from D&Q Buy it from Amazon.com
My ability to track who visits this blog for what reasons is beyond rudimentary, but I know that there are horror fans who aren't interested in the comics material, and comics fans who aren't interested in the horror material, and general genre fiction fans who aren't particularly interested in either, and so on. I'd like you all to stay tuned because this book concerns all of you. But first let me throw the superhero fans a bone by talking about Nightwing for a second.
A while ago there was a storyline in one of the Bat-books where the ex-Robin named Jason Todd (he had been dead, but he got better) spent a year pretending to be Nightwing, the current crimefighting alter ego of fellow ex-Robin Dick Grayson, and no one knew the difference. In real life this would be totally ridiculous, because a domino mask isn't enough to prevent you from telling the difference between two different people. But in comics, you can't hear people's voices, and character likenesses from artist to artist, and sometimes even panel to panel, are so inconsistent that any two characters with the same basic skin tone and hair color might as well be doppelgangers. In other words, this is a story could only be done in comics is because it takes advantage of comics' unique weaknesses.
The reason Chris Ware's stories can only be done in comics, the reason Chris Ware is the best cartoonist in the world, is because he takes advantage of comics' unique strengths. His is the most naturally comics way of seeing the world I've ever come across. For example: With a few meticulous lines he reduces the descent of a rocket through the Martian atmosphere to a silver circle, a red dot, and an expanding cloud. Through tricks of scale and perspective he then uses that same basic visual vocabulary to depict a ball in mid-flight, a button on an instrument panel, a door, a window, a helmet, a planet, thumbtacks, faucet handles, a tiny illuminated patch in a sea of darkness, a shining flashlight blown up to gargantuan proportions, the entire universe shrunk down and crushed between the silhouetted of two colossal fingers. And far from empty formalism, it's done in service of a vicious, thrilling science fiction*/horror story about a sociopath--in other words, someone innately incapable of properly ascertaining scale and perspective in his own emotional life and that of those whom he hurts. (Perhaps the ancestor of this story's omnipresent circle imagery is HAL 9000, then? Certainly the closet comparison I can think of to ACME #19's horror images--world-class stuff involving freezing, corpses, dismemberment, and isolation--is the cabin-fever coldness of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and The Shining, and that's even before we get to more specific points of similarity.)
In essence, these circular pictograms--and now that I think about it, Ware's unique, complex, trademark panel layout and sequencing, the very stuff of his comics--have no inherent meaning; we determine their meaning through context and assign it to them. But that means that if we falter or get it wrong or simply say "fuck it," it's all quite literally meaningless, as devoid of worth and value as the bogus maps and video communications are to the story's Martian colonists--or as human life is to murderers, or as existence itself is to those who've given up trying to make it mean something.
But there's more. Ware then applies the same shifting-scale trick he's done with the visuals to the entire story itself. He pulls back to reveal the story behind the story, that of its in-fiction author. Now we learn the source of this story's seething rage and deadpan but visceral horror, providing it with context (loved the reveal of why the sci-fi story's description of its female lead didn't match her visual depiction) even as it continues to dismantle the semantic underpinnings of the very notion of context. In much the same way that the sci-fi story's protagonist becomes morally adrift following a dual crisis in confidence over his mission and his fellow missionaries, his author is pushed to the emotional brink by his futile attempts to understand and possess his mercurial "romantic" interest, by his own inability to place his relationship's true emotional content in the proper scale and perspective. Throughout this meta-narrative he literalizes this failing of vision, both physically (our hero's glasses are shattered, leaving him looking at the world in part or in full as an assemblage of Benday dots--those circles again) and psychologically (a flashback sequence in which our hero's life is depicted as leading inexorably toward this ill-fated series of sexual liasons, here viewed as the connection of soul mates).
The business we see in the author's life is small beer compared to the life and death struggles and cosmic forces at play in that of his fictional protagonist, but that's exactly what makes it so devastating. If all it takes to untether us so completely from the notion that our lives have and tend toward meaning is a shitty relationship with an emotionally unavailable and damaged person, what hope do any of us have? By the time you reach the alarmingly proficient prose sci-fi pastiche that ends the collection (it's about time travel's dissolution of the meaning of time and therefore life), or the uncharacteristically blunt and brutal political swipe on the back cover (it's about how the causes, goals, means, ends, and legal framework of torture are completely nonsensical), you've already gotten the point. Gotten it, in fact, the first time you failed to tell the difference between the surface of a world and the tip of a finger.
The Best of the Spirit
Will Eisner, writer/artist
DC Comics, 2005
192 pages
$14.95 Buy it from Amazon.com
Will Eisner's The Spirit is a virtual symphony of dudes getting socked in the head. I think that's what I ultimately took away from my read of this best-of collection of 22 Spirit 7-pagers, assembled by persons unknown using criteria unknown. No matter how far Eisner stretches the parameters of his strip; no matter if it's the masked vigilante/bounty hunter's origin story, or a standalone tale about an ill-fated criminal or plastic toy tommy gun in which the Spirit happens to show up on the final spread; no matter if it's a surprisingly psychologically astute portrait of a soldier who loses it after coming home from the war or society girl whose depression leads her to take up with criminals and then commit suicide-by-shootout, or a whacked-out EC riff about a killer granny with images and dialogue as crazy as anything Frank Miller could possibly put on screen--no matter what, somebody, somewhere, somehow, is gonna get clocked on the noggin.
That all but universal action beat, and the presence of the nattily attired Spirit himself, give you a throughline as you watch Eisner and his studio's style evolve from the barely recognizable 1940 origin story to the trademark caricature, pantomime, and big-city atmospherics of the 1950 capstone strips. By the end, Eisner's Gene Kelly-esque action choreography is at the height of its unique, humorous appeal; it tickles me to observe how naturally he'd apply the same play-to-the-balcony techniques he used for slobberknockers and machine-gun massacres to the body language of his late-period melodramas a couple-three decades hence.
I came into this collection expecting one dominant Spirit storytelling mode to emerge, one style to prove self-evidently definitive. But based on this sampling, the Spirit really could be all things to all funnybook fans: harsh or poignant, stark or silly, realistic or far out, surprisingly rich or divertingly slight, Humphrey Bogart or Tex Avery, a Hero or a Maguffin. Eisner's experiments with form only reinforce the natural diversity of his subject matter. Everyone's entitled to their Spirit. Me, I'll go with the one that entails the most people getting cold-cocked.
This is my final comics review for 2008. Thank you for spending Comics Time with me this year! -Sean
In thinking about the stuff Tucker Stone and I have been discussing in the comment thread here and the things Tim O'Neil is saying here, I laid out a few things in my own head in terms of where I stand on Batman: R.I.P. and Final Crisis. I thought writing them down would help clarify where I'm coming from on all this.
1) There's "Batman: R.I.P." the multi-title crossover Batman event and Batman: R.I.P. the Grant Morrison/Tony Daniel comic. Similarly, there's "Final Crisis" the multi-miniseries DC Universe event and Final Crisis the Grant Morrison et al comic.
2) The sense that I get is that Morrison was barely involved with the planning of the wider R.I.P. event, if he was involved at all; it was a creation of editorial and the direction to the other titles involved was just "there's some bad guys called the Black Glove, and eventually Batman disappears--go to town." On the flipside, Morrison and his friend and sounding board Geoff Johns are writing virtually all of the Final Crisis event, so their involvement is obviously more extensive.
3) I think that the R.I.P. event was badly mismanaged as an event, with tie-ins that actively contradict the main storyline and each other. I'm not as grumpy about the way the main storyline apparently continues through two post-R.I.P. Batman issues and into the main Final Crisis comic, because I already planned to read all of that regardless and have been enjoying it thus far. However, I again think that this was a case of event mismanagement--it should have been made clear to readers far in advance how the story would proceed.
4) I don't think the Final Crisis event has been as much of a mess, at least in terms of getting all the story ducks in a row. Some of the tie-in minis seem to have little to do with the central New Gods storyline, but they haven't contradicted it, either. Obviously there are scheduling problems, but the main problems with this event stem less from stuff that's going on within the Final Crisis umbrella and more with the stuff that's going on outside it. Right now, its relationship to the rest of the line is impossible to ascertain. And there are also a lot of questions about the planned follow-through--all this "Faces of Evil"/"Origins and Omens" business afterwards. It probably shouldn't take a multi-month, multi-event program to explain the status quo of your shared universe, not just after your big blockbuster but at any time.
5) That stuff being said, ultimately I couldn't care less about any of that, either as a critic or as a consumer. That's because, as both a critic and a consumer, I'm under no obligation to follow DC's preferred method of following these stories. I'm quite happy to limit my involvement to those titles I choose to follow and evaluate their stories on their own terms. (One of the nice things about the tie-ins being so peripheral is that it makes such a decision even easier than it usually is, which for me is pretty dang easy.)
6) I've really, really been enjoying the Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis comics proper. To the extent that they are confusing, I think those are deliberate storytelling choices, and I've gotten a lot out of them.
7) On a fundamental level I have no problem with event comics being demanding, because I simply do not believe event comics, or any kind of popular art, must be simplistic to be viewed as successful.
[ 7.5) For what it's worth, I think you put yourself in an awkward position as a critic when your criticism is basically a thought experiment where you purport to speak for the needs of an audience you acknowledge to be slow, or at least slower than yourself, and interested in uninteresting things.]
8) But that doesn't mean I don't recognize that Batman R.I.P. event has been a head-scratching mess, the Final Crisis event less so but st
