Confusing Choices by Major Companies

It amazes me sometimes that major corporations can make choices that seem so obviously misguided, yet they pass through the many layers of approval needed to get a project greenlit. Here's a couple of things that have baffled me recently.

The first would be the just announced X-Men: First Class project. Of all the comics properties, X-Men is my favorite, but I've been generally unmoved by the four films to date. I'd argue that X-Men's serial nature makes it ill suited to film, which requires more structured stories. The X-Men stories that people remember, like Dark Phoenix or Days of Future Past, all draw on a lot of continuity and character development, unlike things like The Killing Joke or The Dark Knight Returns. The major difference between X-Men and other comics properties is the fact that the X-Men characters for all of Claremont's run were actual human characters, unlike most DC or Marvel heroes, which are archetypes.

Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine and many others all grew and changed over the course of the run, and you can't capture that in a film. But, at least the first two X-Men films had a coherent internal mythology and did a decent job of capturing the characters and their dynamic. Last Stand didn't work creatively, but I don't think it ruined public perception of the franchise. So, I'm really baffled why Fox chose to stop making new X-Men movies and start doing prequels. Wolverine makes sense since he was the series' breakout character, but why do a movie about Professor X and Magneto? We all know how it will end, and I just can't imagine a really good movie possibly being made out of that premise. It's something that's interesting in the context of an ongoing narrative, but not in and of itself.

Audiences have consistently shown a reluctance towards prequels, outside of ones that are total reboots. So, why do that instead of just moving forward with 'present day' stories for the franchise? There was a great setup for a Young X-Men movie coming out of The Last Stand, focusing on Rogue, Iceman and Kitty Pryde. I'd have loved to see that, and it seems like the perfect way to target teens and do a soft reboot to alleviate the bad taste of Last Stand. I'm sure First Class will do okay, but I think doing something based loosely off New Mutants, with some of the existing characters in teaching roles and a cast of younger mutants based on the teen characters from the comics would be a much bigger hit with fans and general audiences. I'm as big an X-Men fan as it gets and I have no desire whatsoever to see First Class.

Another recent baffler is the comic book Ultimate New Ultimates. The Ultimates used to be arguably Marvel's premiere franchise, a best seller that was talked up all over the net, even its nonpresence, during the length delays, were a prime talking point. But, since the end of Millar's The Ultimates 2, the branding of the franchise has been absolutely baffling. First, Marvel did the apparently abysmal Ultimates 3 with a different creative team.

After this failure, it might have been smart to bring back the original writer, which they did. But, for some reason, Marvel chose not to go with a simple title that would explain what the book is about. Instead, they made Millar's book Ultimate Comics Avengers, and have another book called Ultimate Comics New Ultimates. As someone who loved The Ultimates, I'd be pretty inclined to buy new Millar Ultimates stuff, but even as a gigantic comic book fan, I have no clue what the content of either book is. And, who was the one who greenlit a book called Ultimate Comics New Ultimates? We know it's a comic and we know it's Ultimate. Why not just call it Ultimate Pages with Images and Text on Them That Are Previously Unseen and Still Ultimate In Case You Didn't Catch That the First Time.

What separates this book from Millar's? How does it draw from the previous Millar Ultimate series? I have no idea, and I'm not particularly inclined to work to find out. And, keep in mind, this is in the line that's designed to be accessible to new readers.

How are these choices made? Shouldn't the goal of branding to make it clear what something is. Apparently not in this case, and that's a big problem in comics in general. Book names are not self explanatory, what separates Uncanny X-Men from X-Men: Legacy from Astonishing X-Men from just plain X-Men? The big problem with any initiative to draw in new readers is that you can put out a book like the early days of the Ultimate line that is supposed to be accessible, but how is someone who isn't already familiar with comics going to know to pick up Ultimate Spider-Man instead of Amazing Spider-Man?

A similar problem from both Marvel and DC is trade paperback chronology. Trying to pick up Ed Brubaker's Captain America, there's a bunch of Volume 1s and 2s, but how do they all piece together? There's no master number system, so where does The Death of Captain of America Vol. 1 fit in comparison to Red Menace Book Two? I can understand not wanting to have Captain America Vol. 20 out there, but make it easier for people to read your books, not harder.

DC usually does a better job, but it can be hard to piece together stuff from company crossovers. I'd love to see an official guide to reading all of Geoff Johns' books or how all of Morrison's fit together. That would help them sell more books, because if you could show the connection between Seven Soldiers and Final Crisis, that expands the audience of both titles.

I'm the kind of person who will do a bit of research to figure out what's going on, but a lot of people won't, and you should make it as easy as possible to follow a series. Marvel and DC aren't really doing that most of the time.

C2E2: Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods Panel

This weekend, I'm making the leap from comicon attendee to comicon panelist, when my Respect Films colleagues and I do a panel/preview of our upcoming Grant Morrison documentary at Chicago's C2E2 Comicon. The panel will be taking place on Saturday from 1:45 to 2:45 in Room E271A.



We're going to be screening about 15 minutes of material from the film, the first time any material will be publicly screened. You'll get to see a lot of interesting visual stuff from Grant's archives, and hear from many of the big collaborators over the years. We'll also be announcing and screening the trailer for a new project at the end of the panel, so you won't want to miss that!

I'll also be signing copies of my Invisibles book, Our Sentence is Up, if you want to grab a copy of that. Matt Fraction recently called it "Indispensable. Belongs on your Morrison shelf right after THE INVISIBLE KINGDOM and right before JLA." You must heed that advice!

Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass the movie is getting some pretty strong heat media wise, to the point that the actual comic seems like a foot note. Thanks to the movie being optioned and produced before the series was even complete, it's easy to feel like the source material is superfluous at this point, and that's increasingly how I was feeling before reading the comic. After reading it, I found a strange, flawed, but deeply personal story. But, what does it mean to have a personal story when the guy who wrote it is kind of a delusional egomaniac?

First off, I'll say that Kick-Ass generally works. It's a fairly strong character based story, but one that at no time is as radical or innovative as Millar seems to think it is. Alan Moore cracked on Geoff Johns quite a bit for retreading his ideas with Blackest Night, but this series really feels like a retread of those late 80s grim and gritty superhero comics that Moore and Miller did, quite literally in this case imagining what it would be like for a superhero in the real world. Of course, that reality lasts for about an issue, by the end, after several superhero team ups, we're firmly in an elevated genre world. I think that undermines the series' basic conceit, but I think it functions in an interesting way as Millar exploring his own fame and success, to suddenly find himself not being a pretender to star status, but actually being a star.

Reading the series in this way requires an understanding of the extratextual Mark Millar persona, something that's been of particular interest to me in the context of working on the Grant Morrison doc. I don't know Millar and have never met him, but I have this picture of him through the people we've talked to that paints him as an ambitious fame hungry guy who got a taste of success and star power in the early 00s and has been rolling to bigger and bigger things ever since. I think his writing has suffered for this, Civil War was terrible, and his Fantastic Four wasn't great compared to the iconic work he did on The Authority and The Ultimates.

The weaker works suffered from feeling a bit generic, his authorial voice was subsumed to the general needs of the Marvel universe in a way they never were on The Ultimates. I didn't want to read about the Marvel U version of Iron Man or Captain America after reading about the Ultimate versions. To me, those are the definitive takes on those characters, and it's telling that the films have drawn so heavily on Millar's work. The Ultimates is a really strong distillation of everything that works about the Avengers concept, and it has interesting things to say about fame and media culture, which is the unifying theme that ties together most of Millar's signature works.

The Authority is the first riff on that, the superhero as rock star, and The Ultimates escalates it to the superhero as tabloid fixture, as modern celebrity. But, both those works are written solely from the perspective of cool insiders, it may be an aspirational text, but there is no reader surrogate. It's key to note that all The Authority and Ultimates characters are sexy, powerful and famous beyond their costumes, they don't have to work to win peoples' admiration, it's inherent to their image.

Kick-Ass flips the perspective on this, showing a character who's spent his life admiring those kind of characters (and in some cases those exact characters to enhance the “reality” of the book), and decides that the best way to become famous and beloved is to become a superhero. For Millar, being a superhero isn't about being a symbol of humanity's best potential as a species (as it is for Morrison), it's about gaining fame, power and notoriety. There's this fixation on MySpace friends and critical heat throughout, and when Dave hangs up the mask early in the book, what brings him out of retirement is not the need to do good, but the desire to one up Red Mist and get his headlines back.

So, the whole thing becomes this strange petty quest of one self-perceived loser to gain social capital in the form of fame. He may pursue a relationship with Katie, but the love that he really wants is not a meaningful emotional connection with one person, it's the dilute adoration of the masses. Either way, he's never able to put his true self out there, either to the public or Katie, it's like he doesn't have the self confidence to let his true self be loved, he needs to hide behind a facade.

The whole pretending to be gay subplot may seem like Millar's excuse to make a bunch of gay jokes, but it seems to be key to the work in many ways. In Kick-Ass, Dave sees the way that a mask makes it easier to do things he never could as himself. The gay persona is another mask, and as the work goes on, we see less and less of the real “Dave,” he fades into this progression of false identities, playing a part to satisfy a particular audience who needs to see him in a particular way.

This has great resonance with the idea of fame itself. The person who becomes famous or beloved by the masses isn't a real person, it's a construct built by PR people and the media to be an accessible, relatable presence for people. Incidents like the Tiger Woods troubles are interesting because of the disparity between the 'real' person and the self that he presented to the world.

Dave's status as a fanboy is emphasized throughout, and the whole work often quite literally deals with the idea of the superhero as adolescent male power fantasy. Only this time, Dave is taking the very thing that makes him a social exile, his comics habit and nerdiness, and is turning it into an asset, showing up the people who socially ostracized him by becoming something cooler and more loved than them, Kick-Ass.

And, you can easily equate the idea of a 'real' superhero jumping off the comics page with Millar's own comics being turned into movies. What was once this niche hobby relegated to dingy shops is now front page news, and comics like Wanted or Kick-Ass are household names. Millar himself is a media figure, and he feels like he's blazing the trail of taking these books to larger and larger audiences.

So, it's appropriate that Kick-Ass is turned into a movie right off the comics page since it's taking the Kick-Ass idea and realizing it into a star studded big budget movie. Even within the comic, there's meta resonance that Big Daddy, the seemingly ultra cool impeccable assassin, the biggest 'star' in the universe, is funding his missions by selling old back issues of superhero comics. This comes mere months after Nic Cage, the actor portraying him in the film, is forced to sell his own back issues to get out of debt. The meta implication is that Millar, and comics, are so cool that even the badass hero, or ultra popular movie star, love them, that deep down all the cool people are really just fanboys.

So, the entire book plays as this strange mirror version of Millar's own fame and increasing media profile. He's got the MySpace friends now, he's hanging out with celebrities, he's been taken out of his regular life and become something more.

One thing I haven't really seen mentioned in conjunction with the book is how structurally similar it is to Wanted. Both books chronicle the story of a loser who gets pulled out of his ordinary life into a world of excitement and adventure. That's a pretty basic story structure, but there's a lot of resonances, particularly the self hatred the protagonist feels. Is Millar writing about this because it's how he feels about himself? Or, is it a calculated way to appeal to the fanboys who comprise his target demo?

Either way, the book itself is always entertaining, if nowhere near as revolutionary or groundbreaking as Millar might think it is. I will give a big commendation to John Romita Jr., who told the story in a really compelling, visual way. I always had to read both the images and the text to get all the information, and that's unfortunately a rarity in today's comics. On the whole, it's a satisfying read, but perhaps a bit too indebted to the 80s style deconstruction of superheroes and offers very little in the way of new insight into the genre.

Comics, Continuity and Complexity

I’ve been reading a whole bunch of new comics lately, mostly stuff I’ve been getting out of the library. So, I’ve read a wide variety of stories, and been straying outside of the safe zone a bit and trying to read some new stuff. Two of the big ones I read recently were Warren Ellis’s Nextwave and Geoff Johns’ recent Green Lantern run, up through Secret Origin so far.

The two works are polar opposites in terms of approaches to comics, one a continuity laden multi-year saga dwelling in the deepest recesses of the DCU, while the other is a done in one, light fun jaunt through a parody version of the Marvel Universe that explicitly rejects continuity. The generally held belief would be that Nextwave would be much more likely to draw in a new reader and engage them, while Green Lantern would likely confuse and alienate someone new to comics. The thinking is that Nextwave is going to make more comics fans than Green Lantern would, and I don’t think that’s the case, at least when it comes to big two superheroics.

One of the most unique things about superhero comics that take place in the DC or Marvel universes is their vast continuity, the fact that each story is the product of thousands of individual issues and choices made by writers many years ago. It’s always exciting to me to see a reference to a story from the past that I’ve read, be it reading about Mon-El in Showcase Presents Titans then seeing him in Geoff Johns’ Superman, or seeing Grant Morrison riff on an Alan Moore Swamp Thing story in Seven Soldiers: Zatanna.

The common complaint is that these stories exclude new readers. I think that can be true for certain writers, but when applied successfully, as I’d argue good writers like Morrison or Johns do, the accumulated history of the universe makes for a deeper, more expansive universe. There’s a common misconception that you have to understand every element of a story to enjoy it, but that’s not the case at all. One of the beauties of a film like Star Wars is the sense that behind every corner of this world are other stories, other characters and lives being lived.

But, if Star Wars was a comic coming out today, people might complain that we have no idea who Greedo is, or who this Jabba the Hutt that they’re referring to is. But, the thing is, it doesn’t matter, we understand who they are through context clues. The best use of continuity in comics is to make it so that someone who isn’t familiar with the stories can understand it from the context, but someone who is familiar gets the added bonus of being able to connect this story to what’s come before.

Just to clarify, I don’t like stories that require you to read another book to understand it, but I absolutely love the way that Morrison and Johns have recurring elements and characters across all their books. It’s fun to see the Squire show up in his new Batman book, and be able to connect her to the JLA: Classified arc, or even his original JLA run. Similarly, in the Sinestro Corps War, we see the further development of Superboy Prime, connecting that story to Infinite Crisis, and laying the groundwork for Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds.

The problem I have with a book like Nextwave, or with the original manifesto of Ultimate Spider-Man as a series of self contained arcs is that it gives you no pleasure beyond the moment of reading it. Nextwave doesn’t ask for emotional engagement with the characters, and the characters don’t develop. One of the big pitches of the series is that you can read one arc or all six and still get the same experience. That’s a sentence you could read as a positive, (i.e. you only have to buy two issues!) or you could read it as a negative, that reading ten more issues gives you nothing you didn’t get from the first two.

People frequently say that self contained issues and arcs are the best way to hook new readers. I think they may be the best way to get someone who doesn’t want to read comics to give them a try, but it’s not the way you’re going to make new fans. It’s possible to be a casual comics fan, to read Maus and Persepolis and not much else, but most people who get into comics become huge fans. And, the kind of people who become huge fans are going to be the ones who don’t say I read this done in one issue and am satisfied, they’re going to be the ones who read an issue of Green Lantern and want to read years of back issues to catch up and fully understand the story.

Particularly with big two comics, but even with ongoing Vertigo series, most major comics fans have a completist kind of personality, a desire to always read more and more, and I think giving someone a series like Green Lantern better activates that desire. When I was a kid, the book that got me into comics was X-Men, I read a few random issues and wanted to know more and more about the world, so I went back and read Claremont’s Essential X-Men 1, then went on and on until eventually I’d read every Claremont book from the 70s to ’91.

The reason I became hooked was not because of a successful done in one story, it was getting an insight into this expansive universe and wanting to fully understand it. Even though I think Ellis’s level of craft is better than Johns, and Johns will probably never write a book as good as Planetary, I prefer to read Johns’ work now because it all builds on each other, it’s part of one masterwork within the DCU.

Most really big fans of any medium are the ones who want more and more. Casual TV viewers will watch a sitcom or procedural, serious fans watch The Wire and savor every detail, every piece of intricate continuity and consider continuity and complexity a sign of a more mature work. In TV terms, Nextwave is CSI, Green Lantern is Buffy.

Now, it’s easy to embrace The Wire as worth your time because it’s socially relevant and something that feels good for you. Is it worth investing the time needed to read 300 issues of Geoff Johns’ comics to fully understand what he’s doing in the DCU? One, I’d argue that he’s skilled enough to make sure you don’t have to read them all, but also, I think it comes down to what you want out a story. Do you want to be entertained and put it down with a complete package, or do you want the promise of more stories to check out? I read Sinestro Corps War and not only wanted to read more Green Lantern, I wanted to catch up on JSA, so I could read Legion of 3 Worlds and then Adventure Comics. I love that all those stories tie together, and I love that each seemingly isolated work builds and enhances the other.

And, I’d argue most people who are going to become comics fans like that too. I don’t think you make people fans of comics by hiding them from that which makes them unique. Nextwave might hook certain people, but I don’t think it has that addictive quality that makes people really need the next issue, the next story. That’s what’s going to get people coming back, and I think people are sometimes scared of embracing what makes comics unique and special. Try to enjoy each individual issue, but also enjoy them as part of a much larger tapestry that’s one of the most complex, ever evolving pieces of narrative in the contemporary world.

Batman and Robin #4: "Revenge of the Red Hood: Part One: Red Right Hand"

The new issue of Batman and Robin features the predicted drop off in art quality, as Philip Tan’s murky, sketchy pencils replace the pop dynamism of Quitely. The story generally works though, the series remains very straight ahead and accessible, without the convoluted psychological insanity of Batman RIP, which most people seem to like, but I’m finding a bit frustrating on some levels.

I’m guessing, and hoping, that this new Batman series will follow a similar arc as the first part of his run, starting with just straight forward fun stories showing Batman on the top of his game, then gradually layer in new problems and issues until it becomes a complex psychological web. I think Morrison’s first couple of arcs on Batman are among the most generic comics he’s ever written. I love Damien, so he spices things up whenever he appears, but apart from that it’s pretty light ninja manbat adventures. It’s not until the JH Williams arc, and particularly the “Space Medicine” arc that the series takes off, and pretty much everything after that is among the best work Morrison’s ever done.

The new series has gone back to the original mode, focusing more on fun and light stories, with occasional moments of character introspection and thematic development. I found the psychological stuff a lot more interesting. I know that Batman RIP got some negative response, but I think it was an ambitious, hallucinatory experience. Reading those issues was like spinning down the insane rabbit hole that was Bruce’s collapsing psyche. It’s also some of the most avant garde content in any of Morrison’s big superhero titles, going further than anything he did in JLA or New X-Men.

But, I respect the direction he’s taking the reinvention and am able to enjoy the journey. It’s just a bit frustrating that it seems like the majority of these issues is action scenes that don’t really go anywhere, and the more intense character stuff is minimized to smaller interludes, very effective interludes, but if every page of this issue was as strong as the scene with Sasha talking about taking off her face or Dick and Damien on the roof, it’d be a much more emotionally engaging experience.

The Red Hood and Scarlet function on one level as another riff on the intrusion of grim and gritty supeheroics in the day-glo world of Silver Age comics. They represent the worst excesses of early 90s heroes, like The Punisher, killing villains that Batman and Robin would bring to justice, and doing so in a very modern way, publicizing their exploits on Twitter.

The Red Hood is very media conscious and sees Sasha’s mask as just another element of their image. In the same way that we wonder who’s under his hood, he claims that people will “imagine the beauty beneath that creepy mask.” That scene is the highlight of the issue, as Sasha’s inner humanity is contrasted with the Hood’s assurance that she’s doing the right thing. These two characters are clearly meant to be a mirror of Batman and Robin, and Sasha’s murders in response to her father’s death echo both Bruce and Dick’s origin. This is what Dick could have become if he was trained by the wrong man, and it’s what Dick is fighting to keep Damien from becoming.

One of the things I like about this issue is the way that Grant continues to expand the Batman universe and bring in new characters and concepts. In addition to the Red Hood and Scarlet, we get the introduction of a mysterious English author, another masked man. The Black Glove mystery in RIP was a lot of fun, and these two characters bring back the detective element to the comic, while also giving Batman some new villains.

The end of the issue builds to a flourish with Batman and Robin brought into contact with their counterparts and raising the question of who is the Red Hood. Jason Todd would definitely make sense, but I feel like Morrison wouldn’t go with such an obvious choice. Perhaps either the Hood or this English author is going to the Joker, he’s still out there, and I’m sure will return before the end of the run.

I’ve got to comment on Tan’s art, which is not a good match for the pop fun the book’s supposed to be going for. Cameron Stewart and Frazer Irving will both be a great match for the tone, but Tan stuff is murky and ugly. I think even the much maligned Tony Daniel was a better fit for the book. I actually liked Daniel, this, not so much.

As a side note, some of my waxing nostalgic for RIP was prompted by reading through Batman: The Black Casebook this week, the TPB collection of the 50s stories that inspired the early parts of Morrison’s Batman run. Why that book wasn’t out when RIP was running I have no idea, but it’s still worth a look. The thing that’s most striking about all those stories is how it’s not actually that far a leap from the strange psychological short stories in this book to what Morrison did in RIP. Many of the stories are about Batman being forced to question elements of himself and his identity, spinning into nightmarish scenarios of identity displacement and loneliness before everything is restored to the status quo on the last page.

My favorite story to date is a surreal one in which Batman wakes up in jail and is told that he’s a crazy man impersonating Batman. He goes to Wayne Manor and talks to Robin, revealing himself as Bruce Wayne. But then another Bruce comes down the stairs and our Bruce runs away. Eventually it’s revealed that Alfred was posing as Bruce, and he and Dick had set up this scheme to stop the real Bruce was dying due to a poison gas he’d been exposed to. It’s totally surreal and like a raw piece of psychological terror. He doesn’t face villains, he faces his own psychological demons. It’s a lot like the Superman stories of the era, just raw drug trip deconstructions of self in comic book form.

I’m sure there were a lot of less successful or ambitious stories from the era as well, but this book is a great compilation of ones that are fun to read and illuminate more of what Morrison was doing with RIP. Morrison has always embraced the absurdity of comics, and managed to find a way to make a story like RIP totally surreal, but still emotionally relevant in a way that more ‘realistic’ superhero comics aren’t.

And, I hope he gets back to that mode on Batman and Robin eventually. Doctor Hurt was teased to return at the end of issue one, and I can’t wait to see him back in action. After this Red Hood arc, at least we’ll have the awesome prospect of Cameron Stewart drawing a story with the Squire, one of Grant’s most entertaining pet characters in the DCU.

Our Sentence is Up Pre-Order

I haven’t had too much time to post here in a while, things have been a bit crazy on many fronts. But, I should mention that my book about The Invisibles, Our Sentence is Up, is going to be coming out in November and is available for pre-order now through Diamond. Check out the Sequart site for more info on how to order.



If you already read all the blog posts I did here, there’s still plenty worth checking out. The text is revised and expanded, with the most in depth look at the series that I think has ever been conducted. It’s also got a 50+page interview with Morrison himself, that covers all aspects of the series, and its place in both the world of the time and our contemporary world. If you’re wondering how Morrison’s world has changed, and how he feels about The Invisibles in the context of his present life and work, this is the interview for you.

I did an interview with Tim Callahan about the book on Comic Book Resources, which I would highly recommend checking out. It covers the background of the book, but also features a lot of interesting discussion about the series itself.

So, if you liked The Invisibles, check out this book, and please pre-order it from your retailers to support it and get it on shelves. And, if any media people out there are interested in doing an interview, just let me know, I’d be glad to talk to you and answer whatever questions you’ve got.

Batman and Robin #3: "Batman Reborn: Part Three: Mommy Made of Nails"

The first Batman and Robin arc wrapped up with another great issue, that again spotlights Frank Quitely as the best visual storyteller in comics history. The overall Morrison Batman story makes some progress, and some great groundwork is laid for future storylines, but this whole arc feels kind of like Morrison and Quitely cutting loose after the very structured, for the ages perfection of All Star Superman and just jamming on various crazy Batman ideas.

As with the other issues in the arc, the majority of the issue is a fight scene, in this case the intercut Batman and Damian fights to open things, then a triumphant reunion of “Robin and Batman” to bring Pyg to justice and firmly establish themselves as the Batman and the Robin, no matter what else happened in the interim.

As with a lot of recent Morrison work, there’s decentralization of the narrative, and an emphasis on singular moments. The threat has already escalated when we get there, and we go right to Pyg ranting at the height of his insanity and Batman mid-interrogation. This style works with Morrison for a number of reasons. One is that it allows him to give you all the pleasures you’d want from a Batman story, but still allow for Quitely to do his astonishing work on the extended fight scenes. The entire issue seems written to allow Quitely to draw something amazing on every page.

But, it also works that way because Morrison has just gotten better and better at summing up a concept or emotion in a single page, or even a single panel. There’s not that much explicit character work done with Damian over the course of these three issues, but by the end here, we can tell that he’s changed. We’re never told that he’s changed, we can see it in what he says and the way he responds to things.

The most haunting moment in the issue is after Damian promises to save Sasha, when he decides to go after Pyg instead of saving her. It’s a choice that may make sense in the moment, and is certainly where Damian’s instincts would lead him. He’s been raised by assassins, trained to kill, and he’s not going to fail in his mission. But, as he jumps on to a roller coaster car in pursuit of Pyg, he sees Sasha left behind, terribly deformed by Pyg’s process, being consumed by the Dolls, yelling “Don’t leave me! You promised!” The most haunting panel here is Damian’s hand reaching back towards her, unable to reach her as the car rolls down the tracks. That visual tells you the emotion of the moment perfectly, we know how much Damian wants to save her, but he can’t. It’s only a three panel sequence, but it’s a pivotal moment in Damian’s arc.

Sasha has lost her father in the same kind of traumatic event that Bruce Wayne or Dick Grayson lost theirs, and in the issue’s final moments, we see that she has become the Robin to Red Hood, scourge of the underworld, who seems to be a more violent version of Batman, gunning down the cops who threaten Sasha. So, because Damian failed to save her, she’s gone to work with someone on the darker side of things, and when Red Hood and Sasha invariably come into conflict with Batman and Robin, Damian’s guilt about failing to save her will come to the surface. We only hear Damian mention Sasha once after he fails to save her, but you can still tell that it phases him.

As I mentioned earlier, Quitely’s work in the fight sequence is just astonishing. I think he sometimes goes too far in drawing grotesques, but the doll people work pretty well, and the choreography is just on another level from anyone else out there. Quitely also manages to make both the Batman and Robin costumes look like the coolest outfits out there, something you wouldn’t mind being caught wearing on the street. His Damian looks like an actual ten year old, and that adds a lot of weight to the action. I love the look of his hood at the end of the issue, and the “Bang!” sound effects written in blood at the end are the capper on the issue.

The entire viral drug thing feels kind of tacked on, but I don’t really mind. That’s not what the story is about, Morrison and Quitely chose to focus on the parts they found most interesting, and then you can piece the rest together with the exposition here. The sequence with Batman and Gordon isn’t really about resolving the Pyg story, it’s about establishing the new Batman and Robin’s relationship with Gotham PD, and confirming that no matter what the earlier suspicions were, these guys are Batman and Robin.

And, with this new fresh start wrapped up, we return at last to a loose end from Batman RIP. It’s been a while since I read those issues, but I’m assuming that between the approach to Bossu’s place and Batman and Robin’s entrance through the ceiling is where the iconic “Batman and Robin will never die!” splash takes place. Either way, it’s great to see that stuff come back, and to get a really badass moment with Dick and Damian enjoying their success.

This issue wraps up Quitely’s run on the title. His art is masterful as always, but this is definitely a more low key Morrison/Quitely collaboration than most of their previous work together. I’m really excited to see what they work on next, be it the wrap up to this Batman stuff or something else, to see them incorporate the more experimental freeform style here into a new project. I can’t say I’m thrilled to have Philip Tan coming on board. I didn’t think much of his art in X-Men, and his aesthetic doesn’t seem a great match for Quitely’s or Frazer Irving’s down the line. But, we’ll see. The series has established its new status quo, now it’s time to play around in that world.

Comics and The Con

It’s time for one last post on San Diego Comicon. I’ve read a bunch of great coverage about the con, a lot of which centers on the idea of what places do comics actually have at the event. With the big Hollywood presentations drawing all the press attention, and everyone talking about Twilight fans ‘ruining’ the con, where’s the discussion of comics themselves? People seem indignant that ‘their’ con has been stolen away by all this Hollywood stuff.

Having actually been there, I think they paint a kind of fatalist picture of the situation. Now, maybe it was really different in previous years, but the way I saw it, there’s essentially two cons. There’s the con that draws all the media attention, the Hall H stuff, the movie studio presentations, all of that is out there, but so is what was likely the same con from the 80s, the comics publishers and creators, still out there selling their wares and meeting with fans.

I think the central flaw in most peoples’ writing is the notion that the media would be covering comics stuff, and people would be going to the comics booth if only that Hollywood stuff wasn’t sapping the attention, that you’d have 100,000 fans buying comics if Johnny Depp hadn’t shown up. But, the reality is, without those Hollywood stars, you wouldn’t have nearly as many people in attendance, nor would you have anywhere near the media presence. The Hollywood section of the con has latched itself on to the existing comics con, and become its own promotional event.

So, it’s illogical to criticize the media for not focusing on comics when they’re not really there to cover the con, they’re there to cover Twilight, or Lost or whatever it is. Comics, despite being a key source for film concepts, still don’t have the cultural cachet that most people would be particularly engaged in whatever news comes out of comicon. The biggest comics story, Marvel’s acquisition of the Marvelman trademark, centers on an influential, but obscure comic that hasn’t even been published in fifteen years, and a character who even most comics readers don’t know. So, if you’re saying the media should cover the comics end of things, what should they report? I suppose there’s always the general check in with various creators, but that’s not news, there’s no urgency to report that someone just showed up to the con, and I don’t think there’s really a mainstream audience out there interested in it.

Back when I first seriously got in to comics, about ten years ago, there was a constant dialogue about trying to “save” comics, to get them cultural respect and mainstream acceptance. The strange thing is that it’s happened to a large extent, every movie seems to be based on a comic, superheroes are cool, and “graphic novels” definitely draw respect from people. I saw people all over reading Watchmen before the movie came out, and Alan Moore has become almost a household name.

The problem is, that apart from reading Watchmen, more people seem to respect comics than actually read them. And, even the people who read Watchmen don’t generally seem to branch out much further beyond the obvious classics like Maus or Dark Knight Returns. Those are nearly twenty-five year old books, surely people should be reading something more current.
So, even if people don’t support comics that much directly, isn’t it good that all these people are cool with going to an event called comicon? I’ve never read Twilight the book or seen the movie, but I love the fact that it’s cultivating the kind of fervor in young female fans that something like Star Wars did for me as a kid. If you’re going to comicon, on some level you’re still that kid who’s just an unabashed fan of something, and it’s great to see properties reaching girls on that level. And, the relative quality of the property doesn’t matter, it’s seeing people engage with something so strongly. Why are the same people who’d camp out for a Star Wars movie criticizing people for doing the same thing for Twilight?

After all, what comics, or any genre work, really need is that gateway work, the one that hooks you and makes you a fan for life. Get someone hooked young and they’ll keep coming back, and if Twilight leads to someone checking out Buffy, or if the Twilight comic leads to someone checking out more comics, that’s great. Isn’t that what ‘we’ always wanted, to see women and girls reading comics and engaging with genre material? To the fifteen year old boy carrying a “Twilight Ruined Comicon” sign, I can only say, where is your own self interest? Are you going to be more likely to get a girl who loved Twilight and thus accepts your comics or anime or sci-fi habit, or a girl who just looks down on that stuff. Twilight is the perfect gateway drug, be happy it’s out there.

I guess the problem is, people want others to engage with comics or genre stuff, but only in one specific way. So, superhero fans wouldn’t want to see someone go and snap up a bunch of Fantagraphics books, any less than someone would want to try to push Jimmy Corrigan on someone and see them go over and read a Geoff Johns comic. I definitely evangelize Morrison’s work and the TV shows I like, but on some level, you’ve got to realize, not everyone is going to engage the same way you are.

The problem for comics is that, particularly on the monthly level, readership levels are so low, and with rising prices, the question becomes, can the medium as we know it sustain itself? When an issue of Seaguy, a comic by the biggest writer in comics, sells 9,000 copies, it raises some questions. Comics may have to die and be reborn in a cheaper, more efficient format.

In the end, the comicon I went to was an amazing experience. Sure, the Hollywood parties may be out there, but the comics parties were there too, and it did still feel like a community. There’s a million things going on, but the con that was is still going strong in its shadow.

San Diego Trip

After roughly ten days out on the West Coast, I’m back in New York, and have successfully made it through my first comicon experience. San Diego was pretty much what everyone said it would be, jam packed with people, a grueling trip and also a lot of fun. We were out there shooting stuff for the Grant Morrison project, and wound up doing twenty six interviews over four days, which is a lot tougher than it sounds when just walking people up to the interview site can be a fifteen minute round trip.

But, I think we got a lot of great stuff, and were able to talk to the vast majority of people that we wanted to talk. Some of the people we talked to were Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Cameron Stewart, Chris Weston, Jill Thompson, Frazer Irving, Matt Fraction, Jason Aaron and many more. I’ll be posting clips of these interviews over the course of the next few weeks, primarily stuff that won’t end up in the film, but is interesting on its own merits.

Because we spent so much time doing these interviews, there wasn’t that much time to spend on the show floor. I wound up buying only two comics the entire show. Wednesday was the day I spent the most time on the floor, and that was insane with people trying to snap up free stuff. I got a free copy of the first JH Williams/Rucka Batwoman issue, and Flash: Rebirth, both of which I wanted to check out anyway, so that was good.

The floor, and show in general, reminded me of basically a double sized New York Comicon. The major difference was the much more significant film presence here. At New York, there were a lot more comics sellers, and the floor felt a bit more manageable. Here, there were basically two cons. On the left side of the floor was film stuff and video games, while the right was more typical comics sellers and random vendors.

Because of the huge crowds, I wound up not making it into any panels at all. Work meant there was no time to line up that early, so I missed getting into Avatar by about five hours, and Lost by probably about a half hour. I’d have loved to see both, but ultimately it was probably not worth the wait.

The weird thing about being at the con is that you don’t get any of the buzz or news that’s covered in the mainstream media. I didn’t hear about the Marvelman announcement until I called someone who was still on the East Coast, I got very little buzz about any of the films, and am just now catching up on which films “won” the comicon buzz war. And, I think that there’s very much two cons. Comics haven’t disappeared from the con, they’re just one piece of a larger spectrum. It would still probably be the largest specifically comics focused convention, it’s just even that huge comicon is dwarfed by the Hollywood presence, or the random anime fans or whatever else is going on.

But on the ground level, it’s the comics stuff that sticks with me, and because it’s a more limited social scene than New York, everyone clusters in one place and by the end of the weekend, you’ve got a very singular scene of comics people hanging out, and that was a lot of fun. It’s tough to go out until two every night, then be up at 8 or 9 to get back to the con, but it’s definitely worth it.

So, where does comicon stand today? It’s still getting bigger and more crowded, but I had a really fantastic time.

I topped it all off yesterday with a trip to Imperial Beach, the town where John From Cincinnati was filmed, and took place. It was pretty amazing to go along and recognize locations from the series, and feel the vibe that the show had. The beach was great, there were a ton of people surfing, and it definitely felt off the beaten path, not the kind of touristy area that much of California is. If you’re in the area and a fan of the show, definitely make the trip. It’s the closest you’ll get to a second season.

Going to San Diego

Today, I’m leaving the East coast to head out to California to do some filming for our Grant Morrison documentary at the San Diego Comicon. As a long time comics/film/TV fan, this is essentially the biggest event I could ever attend. I’d always wanted to get to San Diego at some point, and this year it just happened.

I’ve got a pretty busy schedule of interviews set up, with some really cool people, for the Grant project. Beyond that, I’m hoping to get to the Lost panel, the Joss panel and the Dr. Who panel, and see if the biggest con in the world means the biggest values in the world when it comes to buying some trades. I’ve heard that San Diego is so huge you can’t even comprehend it, so I’ll see if it lives up to that reputation. Either way, I’ll be out in California for ten days, after the ultra crappy weather here for the past few months, that’ll be nice.

So, look for reports out of San Diego, during if I’ve got time, or a big compilation after. And, also hopefully my computer battery will be strong enough that I can do my writeup of the last Lost episodes on the plane. Short take is the finale was amazing, probably the series’ second best episode behind “Live Together, Die Alone,” but with one glaring error, the inexplicable motivations of Juliet. More on that soon.

And, if you’re at San Diego and have something to say about Grant Morrison, shoot me an e-mail and we can schedule a time to shoot with you.

X-Men: Manifest Destiny and The Immortal Iron Fist: The Last Iron Fist Story

Matt Fraction is a comics writer who I’d heard about for a while, and always seemed like the kind of writer I’d be into should I read his stuff. I read the first volume of Casanova a while back, and enjoyed a lot of it, but also found it a bit convoluted, full of great ideas, but without the emotional grounding to make them meaningful. The reason I’d argue Morrison is the greatest comics writer, and I’d go so far as straight up greatest writer around, is that even as he’s spitting out a ton of crazy ideas on each page, he still emphasizes the character’s emotion. A classic case is Robin’s return from the supercontext in the last issue of The Invisibles, the first time through, I didn’t know what was happening, but he made me feel what was happening.

In comics, there’s a lot of lower tier writers who can spin ideas and do the crazy pop Kirby inspired Silver Age madness, think Ellis, Joe Casey or Fraction, but few of them manage to capture very real emotion amidst the craziness. That was my problem with Casanova, I really liked it, but it was too surface cool to really dig in deep emotionally.
After reading the first volume of his Iron Fist run, and the first volume of his X-Men, I’ve got similar feelings, I liked them both, but didn’t quite love them.

Of course, I should add that both these books were co-written with Ed Brubaker. Brubaker’s a guy who is frequently hailed, but I’ve never read anything by him that I loved. The first volume of Gotham Central played exactly as it was pitched, Homicide or Law and Order in the DCU. And, if I don’t watch Law and Order for free on TV, why would I want to pay $10 to read the equivalent of one episode. The first volume of his Catwoman was alright, but I didn’t think much of his X-Men run. Deadly Genesis was yet another attempt to write “The Anatomy Lesson,” playing off past history rather than doing anything interesting and new. As a long time X-Men fan, it’s probably the worst X-Men comic I’ve ever read, just misconceived on every level. The lengthy journey to Shiar space in his run proper wasn’t much better. I hate writers who use the “long lost brother” as a shortcut to build character rather than just making a character who’s interesting on his own terms.

As someone who approaches works from an auteurist perspective, that makes it difficult, particularly when I’m going in with the bias that I want to like Fraction’s stuff and I dislike Brubaker’s stuff. At least in the X-Men, Fraction took over as the sole writer after this batch of issues, so I’m guessing most of the direction was his, Iron Fist I’m not so sure.

I’m getting more acclimated to the DCU, but I’m still not totally sure about all the characters and worlds there. However, I’ve read the vast majority of important X-Men stories ever written, so I can easily jump into that universe. In these issues, we see the X-Men starting up a new status quo in San Francisco, one that follows thematically off a lot of what Grant was doing in his run. In discussing his run, Grant talked about how writing X-Men is like doing jazz riffs on the original Claremont run. These issues remind me the most of the Paul Smith era, where the team had a lot of downtime, and there was a heavy emphasis on personal relationships, mixed with a bit of the Romita era struggle between mutants and humans.

Smith was my favorite era on the book, and transporting that feel to the present day with Grant’s mutants as metaphor for gay people/evolutionary force outracing the ‘cavemen’ works well. This feels very hopeful and progressive in the same way as the early days of New X-Men, before the characters got trapped in their own soap opera. Thematically, this is a more logical followup to Grant’s run than Whedon’s Astonishing run, which had its moments, but felt more like it was looking back. This run feels a bit like Volume III of The Invisibles, in the sense that the X-Men have won the war, they’ve evolved and they’re just waiting for the world to catch up.

I think some moments work better than others, but in general I like the forward thinking celebrity take on the team, and the street level day after tomorrow style reality based approach to the concept. I like how everyone seems so relaxed, and is actually enjoying themselves for once.

I’m also intrigued by the return of Maddy Pryor. I loved the character, and don’t like to see her turned into a villain, but perhaps she’ll function more as a manifestation of Scott’s guilt about both abandoning Maddy, and leaving Jean for Emma.

But, the book isn’t quite perfect. The biggest issue from a narrative point of view is the disconnect between the mutant de-powering and the story Fraction is trying to tell. If there’s only 198 mutants left in the world, why would a group like the Hellfire Cult still exist? Grant’s X-Men hinged on the revelation that humanity would become extinct a few years into the future, so it made sense to build a mutant society. Here, it’s the opposite, and the structure would make so much more sense if mutants really were coming into prominence, not barely surviving.

I suppose the point is that finding a mutant baby gave them hope for the future, but I think with 198 left in the entire world, things would be a bit more dire. This is not to mention the absurdity of so many mutants losing their powers, but none of the major characters getting depowered.

The other issue is the much criticized, and in most cases deservedly so, art of Greg Land. I don’t hate Land’s art at all times, but I find his weird traced air brushed style falls into uncanny valley territory, so close to real that it seems more fake than, say, the randomly placed Terry Dodson pages in #500. And, his much commented on tracing of porn faces definitely shows up in his drawings of Emma Frost. He’s not totally awful, I think the scene in the club with Dazzler at the end works pretty well, but I’d have much rather seen someone like Phil Jiminez on the book, who could bring the pop sexy aesthetic Fraction is going for, without going into creepy un-sexy like Land.

But, I definitely liked it, I think it’s a more compelling new direction for the book than we’ve seen from Brubaker or Carey, and definitely calls back to the Morrison era, which I love. I’ll be picking up the next trade next time I’m at a comic store.

His Iron Fist was objectively a better comic. It’s a more ambitious story, and moves much faster and further than the X-Men issues do. The comic reminded me of Casanova, in its emphasis on pop moments. There’s a lot of scenes in there that are the sort of fanboy “fuck yeah” moments, hundreds of ninjas battling an Iron Fist who can use his powers to charge the bullets of his gun, and blowing up a train with women who turn into birds. This is all great stuff.

The problem is I found it hard to emotionally relate to most of what was going on. Part of it was unfamiliarity with the world, or current status quo of Iron Fist, but it was also due to the art. I think Aja’s art on the book is aesthetically astounding, these are gorgeous, moody pages, that rank among the most striking art I’ve seen in a long time. The problem is, I found it hard to emotionally relate to the characters because of all the shadows and moodiness. If you can’t see Danny’s face in the mask, and can barely see it out of the mask, how can you get a sense of who he is?

But, I definitely liked the story on the whole, and will probably check out the next volume. And I hope we get to see more of Luke Cage, Colleen and Misty Knight, their entrance in the last issue is one of the best moments in the comic.

So, is Fraction the next great comics writer? Perhaps, I’m not totally sold yet, but I’m intrigued by this work, and I’ll be checking out more to see how he develops.

Batman and Robin #2: "Batman Reborn: Part 2: The Circus of the Strange"

Batman and Robin #2 is a lot like the first issue, in that much of the first half is spent on a fight scene seemingly designed to show off Quitely’s unparalleled storytelling abilities, and outré design sense, and then spends the second half picking apart the emotional impact of recent events in the characters’ lives. I like the way that Grant doesn’t do the story as a strictly continuous series of events, you get the sense that things happen off camera and inform the way the characters behave.

Most of the time when I talk about comics, I talk about the writer primarily, with the artist as kind of an afterthought. That’s because most writers don’t take full advantage of what the medium can do, and most artists aren’t doing anything particularly innovative. But, even working with the best writer in comics, it’s Quitely’s work that leaves the biggest impact here. I love the design sense of his Batman and Robin. The costumes are barely altered from traditional looks, but the gray pants on Damian’s outfit, and the green boots make all the difference in turning one of the lamest costumes in comics into one of the coolest. His Batman also looks great, making the classic grey suit look very fresh.

Quitely’s design sense got the most attention on New X-Men, with its emphasis on “pop sexy” characters, and his work there was great, but he always makes his superhero characters look so much cooler than anyone else. He makes their clothes look like something you’d actually want to walk around in, even more so than any of the movie Batman outfits. I still wish that someone would make a line of clothes based on his X-Men outfits, I’d love to wear those.

His storytelling is fantastic here, and the aesthetic he creates is what lingers after the issue. I think he’s just gotten better and better as time has gone on. Something like Flex Mentallo was beautifully rendered, but he’s gotten more and more formally inventive as time has gone on, and the experimental approach of We3 has given way to the almost three dimensional action feel of All Star Superman and this book. This book feels a bit grittier than the day-glo clean of Superman, fitting in light of its subject matter. The one misstep for me is the obese man in a tutu, who feels like a stock Quitely grotesque. But, everything else is great.

I don’t’ have too much to say about the fight scene, it’s fun, particularly the buildup with the roof meeting, but the real gem on a writing level is Alfred and Dick’s discussion in the cave. Here, we see the Dick/Damian relationship as a kind of adopted child thing. Dick can never live up to Bruce, who Damian now deifies, despite having little respect for him when they first met. So, Damian is rushed into both the role of Batman, and the role of adoptive parent of the world’s worst child.

Damian’s criticism only makes it even clearer to Richard what he sees from people like Gordon, he’s only impersonating Batman, it takes something deeper to be the real Batman. Alfred shortcuts that by suggesting that Richard take on the role of Batman, and channel his spirit as an actor would.

This series so far has seemed generally disconnected from the rest of the Morrison’s Batman run. The renumbering signals a clear break, but the approach is also very different. I loved the death metal heavy ambience of RIP, but I think it was smart do a break like this, to reflect the introduction of the new Batman. But, a scene like this one ties back into a lot of the key stuff from RIP. That storyline had a heavy emphasis on Alfred as an actor, raising the question of whether he was behind what the Black Glove was doing. Telling Dick to “play” Bruce calls back to the questions that were raised there.

In addition, it brings the series much closer to Morrison’s core thematic concepts than the first issue was. Much of Morrison’s experiments with magic and drugs in the 90s were about turning himself into the person he wanted to be, through the medium of the fantasy persona King Mob. He chose to abandon his previous incarnation, the low key guy we saw in Animal Man, and reinvent himself as a comics rock star. Did something just click and change in him one day? No, he chose to become the person he wanted to be, and that’s what Alfred is telling Richard here, to just play Bruce until it becomes real.

It ties in to a lot of stuff from previous Morrison comics, the characters in Division X for one, and Magneto’s performance as Xorn in particular. In that case, Magneto played the role so well, he created a character that people liked more than his actual personality. So, the inspirational message here is don’t worry about your “true self,” just be the person you want to be, and the world will catch up. It’s a magical act of transformation.

Things close out with Damian getting overwhelmed by the creepy doll henchmen from last issue. It’s a great visual moment, colored in neon day-glo shades. It also sets up a nice redemptive moment for Dick in the next issue. While those closing images are great, my favorite drawing in the book is Damian speeding along on the bike, a spectrum of color streaming out behind him.

So, I really liked this issue. I think it deepens the world we saw last time, and raises some deeper character stuff, keeping the arcs from the previous Batman stories in mind. It’s a totally enjoyable book, and I’m eager to see where Morrison goes with it next.

Dusk

Dusk is nothing if not timely. Written by David Doub and drawn by several artists, it’s an independent graphic novel about Vampires, and with the success of Twilight and True Blood, there’s clearly an appetite for this kind of material. But, with the plethora of vampire stories already available, what distinguishes Dusk? After checking out this first volume, of which there’s still more to come, that’s not totally clear. The basic setup has main character Eve working as the assistant to vampire Ash, in exchange for a daily dose of his blood to keep herself strong.

As a girl slaying vampires, Eve can’t help but bring to mind Buffy, and in general the first few stories hit territory I’ve seen a bunch of times before. I like vampire mythology, but I preferred the skewed take Buffy had to the more straight forward approach of something like True Blood or this book. There are some attempts at humor, but generally it plays as pretty dark and classical, with Ash in the position of noble, old morally ambiguous vampire and Eve as the girl drawn to him.

The book is structured as four chapters, each a kind of standalone story. The first sets up the world, and later ones delve into Eve’s back story and feature an excursion to a snowy mountain to hunt a vampire. The most compelling of the stories is the final one, which centers on a high school outcast caught up in Eve’s world.

The book has three artists, and the final one, Franc Czuba, is easily the best. The first couple of chapters are plagued by murky art that conveys the action, but doesn’t give us a real sense of character emotion. The third chapter has some strong moments, recalling Chris Bachalo, but isn’t consistent. The characters in the final chapter are more expressive, being able to see their faces instead of shadows makes it easier to empathize.

Unlike the other stories, Eve is only a peripheral character. The story centers on Teddy, a gothy high schoolers who’s hated by the “normal” kids and decides to use magic to get back at them. It sketches out a world efficiently and does a good job of humanizing some potentially stereotypical characters. By expanding the world of the series, the story gives an idea of how things could develop in a subsequent volume.

I think there are some major issues with the book, but there’s also some good stuff. Paired with the right artist, writer David Doub could help the series grow. The audience for this book is definitely out there, and hopefully he can get a boost from people wondering, "Where do I go after Twilight?"

X-Men Forever #1: "Love and Loss"

X-Men Forever #1 came out this week, the much discussed return of Chris Claremont to the X-Men status quo he left in 1991. I considered his entire first X-Men run a satisfying single work in and of itself with an ending that while not totally satisfying does make thematic sense and carries a feeling of finality. But, I definitely wanted to see Claremont continue on from that era, he created a universe that was perpetually renewed and reborn, and could run forever, so why not pick up again and try to take it another sixteen years.

I think most people have the wrong impression of the way that Claremont’s original run worked. Seen today, it’s broken down into greatest hits moments, with heavy emphasis on the Byrne era and Dark Phoenix, and the occasional branch into the later crossovers, or the Paul Smith era. That’s a consequence of the way the run has been collected, but it reads best as a single work, rising and falling over the course of the entire sixteen year run. The series has many distinct eras, but they flow seamlessly from each other, and the real joy of it isn’t in the individual parts, it’s in looking at the big picture, and seeing the characters subtly grow and change over the course of the stories. Storm going punk in the 170s may seem like an abrupt character change, but it’s actually the physical culmination of eighty issues of character development to get her to that point.

As such, I think it’s hard to judge Forever on the first issue. Claremont isn’t like Grant Morrison in the sense that his single issues are so dense and endlessly debatable that each one is an event, his work is all about letting stories develop over time. As such, this issue is largely about laying out a bunch of potential storylines and setting up the dynamic that the team will function under for the foreseeable future. Though narratively, the issue is one big fight scene, he manages to lay down a lot of character threads that will likely be developed as the series progresses. I don’t think it’s as satisfying a first issue as say, Batman and Robin #1, but I think it does the work that’s needed to do to set the stories in motion. You don’t read a Claremont story for the first issue, you read it to watch something develop over time.

I’ve seen some people criticize the book’s premise as self indulgent and confusing. But, I think it’s actually a lot easier for a new reader to pick up this book than a random issue of Uncanny. And, considering these are Claremont’s characters, you could argue that the more recent eighteen years of stories are the alternate universe, and this is the real continuity. I don’t think that this is the book Claremont would have made then, being written in 2009, it’s always going to exist in relation to the stories told in the interim. But, I think it gives Claremont the sort of freedom he used to have in the 80s, the freedom to make real change, and that’s what excites me about the book.

It’s a tricky thing in serial fiction to make you feel like these are the ‘real’ versions of the characters, and that the things that happen to them have actual consequence. Morrison did it with his X-Men, and Claremont certainly had that in the 80s. I think it’ll take me a couple of issues to get into the universe of this book, but I feel like the characters are the ones I knew, and that’s a good sign going forward.

Particularly with the twice monthly schedule, I’m eager to watch the story develop and see what Claremont can do. I don't read that many comic books as monthlies, but I do like the routine of having something to look forward to on a Wednesday. Hopefully the book will be successful enough to sustain itself for a while and give a nice bookend to Claremont’s thirty-five years on the X-titles.

And, in a bit of self promotion, look for a little trailer for my Claremont/X-Men documentary shortly. Once I get the time to cut something together, I’ll put it online so you can see what Chris and his collaborators are looking like today.

Batman and Robin #1

Morrison and Quitely’s Batman and Robin isn’t anywhere near as profound or majestic a work as their recent collaboration, but it is a really fun comic, that sets out an interesting new status quo for the characters, a shift in approach for the next chapter in Morrison’s great Batman novel.

I thoroughly enjoyed the issue, I think there’s a lot of great stuff in there, but I’ll admit that it didn’t move like the over the top insanity of Batman RIP. What the issue does best is set up a really strong world and a new outré threat for the characters. A lot of that change in feel is due to Quitely’s art, which feels so much cooler and futuristic than the Tony Daniel art on RIP. It’s a new pop world, which needs a different Batman and Robin.

Morrison’s economic characterization is a large part of what makes him so great as a writer in comics specifically. He tells everything we need to know about the Dick Grayson/Damien dynamic from their brief interactions with each other. Damien sees himself as the real heir to the Batman identity, and is supremely self confident, while Dick expresses uncertainty about taking on the identity of his legendary mentor. But, it’s not done in a really emo way because they’ve both got a job to do, and that takes priority.

I admire the artistry of the opening action sequence, or the cool cut away view of their Gotham apartment building, but it wasn’t until the ending that the issue really took off for me. The introduction of The Pyg is really creepy, bringing a horror movie vibe to this otherwise rollicking adventure. Morrison described the series as David Lynch directs the 60s Batman TV show, and that’s the sequence where I really felt that coming to life. This is the same doofy theme villain with a gang of identical henchmen you’d see in the series, but with a creepy twist to it that makes it really disturbing.

The first part of Morrison’s Batman was largely about confronting the horrors within. Everything that Doctor Hurt did to Bruce was designed to send him down a self created spiral of insanity, to destroy Batman’s ability to be Batman. In the series, every criminal that Batman fights is really a prismatic reflection of his own confrontation with death, his own thogal. Hurt is designed to be a deliberately ambiguous worst nightmare ultimate enemy for Bruce. So, he may be Thomas Wayne pretending to be the Devil, he may be the Devil posing as Thomas Wayne, either way, he’s the worst threat that Bruce could imagine.

Morrison played with the idea that Bruce was really the one behind the Black Glove, creating an enemy so strong he could never defeat it as a way of preserving his own purpose. The whole thing was that kind of bizarre psychological journey, and I loved it, but I still respect the change in approach he’s going for here. It’s almost like the change in the identity of Batman necessitates a kind of back to basics fighting crime approach. I’m sure things will become more twisted and psychological as it goes on, but for now, I enjoyed this issue as a fun romp.

Though, I’ll admit the most joy I got from the whole thing was seeing Doctor Hurt holding the keys to Wayne Manor on the teaser page. For whatever reason, that character totally resonated with me. I love his outfit, I love his over the top lust for destruction, and I’m eager to see him come in contact with this new Batman and Robin.

X-Men Documentary

I’ve mentioned earlier on the blog about my in the works Grant Morrison documentary project, but that’s not the only comics documentary in development. I’m also working on one about the history of the X-Men, with a primary focus on the first Chris Claremont run. Yesterday, I was lucky enough to get the chance to film with Claremont, Louise Simonson and Ann Nocenti, the three people who presided over the X-Men during its rise in popularity during the 80s. The three of them hadn’t been together in over ten years, and we were lucky enough to be there to film the reunion.

I’ve written a lot about Claremont on here, so it was pretty surreal to be sitting there, watching the three of them talking about working together on those stories, and how they came about. It was really fun to see them talking, particularly when they went through a box of stuff Ann had that had all kinds of artwork from the era, including a bunch of original Art Adams pages, which were just beautiful.

I don’t know that there were any huge revelations, but as someone who loved reading those books, there were a lot of interesting stories detailing specific aspects of their intentions and what happened. But, more than that, it was interesting to hear about the spirit of Marvel at the time. It sounds like it was a really fun place to work, and less of a corporate entity than today. There’s always a tendency to romanticize the past, and I’m sure people like Bendis and Quesada could reminisce in the same way twenty years from now, but the Marvel they described doesn’t sound like the one that exists today.

I’m going to cut together some sample footage and put it online soon, probably not as elaborate as the Grant Morrison trailer, since we don’t have as much footage to work with, but something to check out.

And in terms of the next step in documentary production, we’ve got a few things lined up. In a couple of weeks, I’m heading down to Wizard World Philadelphia, and we’re going to shoot some stuff there for both Grant Morrison and the X-Men projects. Then, in July, it’s out to San Diego Comicon, the mecca of fandom. I’m excited for that, and hopefully we’ll get to interview even more interesting people.

Top Ten Grant Morrison Works

Since everyone’s doing it, I figured I might as well jump into the fray and offer my own Grant Morrison top ten list. It’s not definitive, but this is how I feel about the stuff now…


10. Batman - To speak what may seem like a heresy to some, Morrison’s Batman before Tony Daniel are some of my least favorite comics of his, but starting with the three part torture chamber arc, the run took off into some of the most exciting, darkly psychedelic Batman stories ever told. I totally loved All Star Superman, which was released concurrently, but it was so remote and perfect, it was at times hard to even engage with. Morrison’s Batman is a lot messier, the art is nowhere near Quitely, but it was in some ways more exciting, full of weird concepts and surreal moments that brought the character to new, surreal heights. And, I even think Daniel worked for the story being told. His generic Image style only made it even more surreal when Batman rocked the purple and yellow costume, or Bat-Mite made an appearance.

9. Animal Man - Animal Man is another slow starter for me. The first four issues are really weak, and the mid section takes a while to get going, but the final ten issues or so are right up there with the best stuff Morrison’s ever written, emotionally devastating and surreal, the perfect epitaph for phase one of Morrison’s career.

8. Marvel Boy - Midway through The Invisibles, Morrison segued out of his subdued 80s style into a glamorous pop world, and Marvel Boy was all about bringing that pop approach into the Marvel universe. It’s his best collaboration with JG Jones, full of wild ideas, and really great energy. This is the purest dose of Morrison ever to drop in the Marvel U.

7. All Star Superman - This is in a lot of ways the most well realized Morrison work. The art is perfect throughout, and reading it, it’s hard to believe that a story this definitive could be getting released in the present day. It feels like this story always existed, it’s the greatest Superman story in the characters’ entire seventy year publishing run. Issue #10 in particular is a masterpiece.

6. We3 - This work is a perfect collaboration between Morrison and Quitely, each innovating new methods for telling stories in comics. It’s a technical marvel, but the real strength is the emotion. I don’t even like animals, and this really got to me, it’s one of Morrison’s simpler stories, but perhaps his most emotionally potent.

5. Kill Your Boyfriend - A concentrated dose of teenage rebellion, KYB riffs on films like Natural Born Killers and Badlands, while also serving as a meta commentary on The Invisibles. Unlike a lot of GM’s work, it hews closer to the rules of our world, and the characters are recognizable as the kind of people you might meet, or might have been. I first read it at 17 or so, and it tapped perfectly into this need for rebellion, while at the same time criticizing that violent rebellion. And, the Bond artwork is just sublime.

4. New X-Men - I love a lot of Morrison’s DC work, but I think I’m at a disadvantage there because I didn’t grow up reading or loving those characters. I got to know them in his JLA, but there was no inherent change to reading about Martian Manhunter or the Huntress. The X-Men were the characters I loved growing up, and Morrison’s work on the title is the perfect collision of his philosophy and the soapy character based plotting that typified Claremont’s finest work on the title. The art has its ups and downs, but I think it’s the most satisfying of any of Morrison’s long runs on a major superhero title.

3. Seven Soldiers - This is the book that made me love the DCU, and it’s the core experience of this work that helped me appreciate JLA, 52 and Final Crisis. Seven Soldiers is structurally unlike anything else I’ve read, this book is the next evolution of the interactivity of The Invisibles. Fully understanding the book requires detective work to piece the disparate pieces of narrative that are spread across the seven miniseries. I love bits about all of the individual series, but Zatanna in particular was the one that just blew me away, and in four issues made me totally understand and support this character. And, it’s also got some of the best art of any GM work, with each individual artist perfectly complimenting the story they’ve been chosen to tell.

2. Flex Mentallo - Why does Morrison spend so much time writing superhero comics? The answer’s in here, it’s because they’re out there somewhere, trying to move us forward into a better world, and the only way they can talk to us is through the comics. Simultaneously riffing on the complete history of superhero comics, serving as an alternate world biography of Morrison, and a delirious acid trip origin story for the entire universe, this is the definitive statement about why superheroes matter, and what our fictional heroes have to say about our society. It’s also one of the most surreal reading experiences you’ll ever have. And, Quitely instantly proves why he would become Morrison’s most valued collaborator with his dazzling art. Every other superhero comic he’s ever written

1. The Invisibles - No question here. It’s not only my favorite GM work, it’s my favorite work of fiction period. It’s a living, breathing entity that burrows into your mind in a way nothing else can. Morrison has talked a lot about how he lived the events that went into the book, and hearing him talk, it’s clear that even calling this a work of fiction is a bit off. It’s fiction in the way a dream is fiction, a heightened reflection of the world around, mixing real events and fantasies into something totally unique. It’s a great action story, it’s a great character story, and it’s a great mindbending piece of philosophy. The Invisibles changed my life, without it, and played a role in many key decisions that led me to the place I am right now.

1. The Invisibles
2. Flex Mentallo
3. Seven Soldiers
4. Kill Your Boyfriend
5. New X-Men
6. We3
7. All Star Superman
8. Marvel Boy
9. Animal Man
10. Batman

Grant Morrison Documentary Trailer!

As I mentioned earlier, I’m currently working on a documentary about Grant Morrison. We shot some stuff last month, and are heading out to San Diego to shoot at Comicon in July. The film is still a ways off, but the first trailer’s gone live on the Sequart Youtube channel. Watch it now…

Wolverine: Origins and Pocket Continuity

I saw the new Wolverine movie over the weekend. Short review is it’s not a particularly good movie, but not as bad as others have been saying. In general, I found the Bryan Singer X-Men movies really overrated, I think it’s really hard to capture the essential appeal of X-Men in a feature film. Chris Claremont was Joss Whedon before Joss Whedon existed, and in the same way that Whedon’s work is most interesting as it sprawls and complexifies, the essential appeal of the X-Men is those long running, convoluted narrative arcs, and the sense of family that develops with the characters over time. You just can’t get that family feeling in a two hour film, certainly not one that’s got to cram in the studio mandated action sequences.

I don’t think Wolverine is as strong as any of the previous three X-Men films, though it’s less glaringly nonsensical than X-Men: The Last Stand. I think the project was flawed at a conceptual level, Wolverine works better as a contrast to the more straitlaced X-Men characters, or as a mentor to a younger member of the team. In this film, as the only hero, everything that makes him unique, the rage, the questionable moral code, is dulled since he’s got to try and tone down Sabretooth and the other crazy mercenaries he works with. I’d have much rather seen a Wolverine film that takes place after the other X-Men movies and follows him and Rogue to Japan, or him and Kitty Pryde on some kind of mission.

But, the film isn’t really that interesting on its own merits. What struck me watching the film was how nebulous continuity is in the context of these ongoing superhero narratives. There’s some obvious departures from comics continuity, having Logan and Victor as brothers, having Gambit save Scott on Three Mile Island, but that sort of thing bothered me less than a lot of stuff that was drawn from the actual comics. I don’t like the idea of Wolverine as someone from 1845, or the notion that he fought in all these wars. I also don’t like the idea of the bone claws in general, I think it ruins a lot of what makes the character who he is. But, these are things drawn from the comics themselves, wouldn’t not having the bone claws violate continuity?

I’d argue that there’s a kind of continuity that supercedes the general accepted continuity, and that’s what I’d call ‘pocket continuity.’ Pocket continuity is essentially the idea that you build your own little universe within the Marvel or DC universe as a whole, and you determine what’s in and out of continuity. It’s somewhat along the lines of hypertime, which said that all stories were true, but the better ones are more true because they’re more enduring. But, in this case, it’s more that you pick and choose the aspects of continuity you like, and decide not to mention the ones you don’t.

Grant Morrison is one of the prime people behind this. Final Crisis ostensibly draws on the entire history of the DCU, but most of its continuity is drawn from Morrison’s own works, or the Jack Kirby Fourth World stuff. Morrison built his own conception of the DCU in JLA and Seven Soldiers, and he goes back to that in FC. Beyond his own work, he draws on the stories he likes, the Kirby stuff, some Geoff Johns Green Lantern material, and discards a lot of the material from Countdown or Death of the New Gods that didn’t mesh with his desired continuity.

I can understand why people get touchy with this. To pick and choose the elements you like can invalidate the notion that this is a linear universe. But, I think it makes for better stories, and a more manageable reading experience. You don’t need to have read seventy years of comics to get Final Crisis, just Morrison’s twenty years of DCU work. Doing this makes for a more auteur centric comic, and a more artistically satisfying one.

Even on Batman, where Morrison made a big deal about the fact that every story happened, it was largely about him picking out the stories he liked from the ‘50s, and drawing on those to tell his own story. You don’t have to read every Batman story to understand it, you just have to read the ones that Morrison decided to bring into his own continuity.

Chris Claremont is another writer who did this, crossing the X-Men over frequently with other books he was writing in the 70s and 80s. He built a little universe where characters like Sabretooth and Mystique floated freely around books that he scripted. Only occasionally would he bring in events from the Marvel Universe as a whole, but if he’s writing Misti Knight or Colleen Wing, they’re fair game for the X-Men.

To go back to the Wolverine movie, I, like every other reader, have built my own vision of who Wolverine is. It’s largely based off the zen warrior Wolverine of mid 80s Claremont and Grant Morrison’s run on the title. This is a guy who’s largely conquered his beserker rages, and is a more self aware character. I found a lot of Joss Whedon’s take on the character a bit off at first, because it deviated from this mode for a more animal, violent Logan. But, I’m sure a lot of people thought that was more true to the character than Morrison’s version.

What I will say is that even though the bone claws are in continuity for the comics, they felt off throughout the whole movie. My conception of Wolverine’s backstory isn’t the one in Origins, film or comics miniseries, it’s of a regular Canadian guy who became a government soldier than an X-Man, not a guy who fought in the Civil War. I don’t think the Origin miniseries is a strong enough story to survive in hypertime, it lacks the visceral power of Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X, and I’m guessing a few years down the line, it may be retconned away.

That’s the thing I love about the concept of hypertime continuity. It takes into account the reality of superhero writing. In an ever evolving narrative, things don’t necessarily need to be proven false to move out of continuity, they just need to fade away. The good stories stick around, the bad ones fade away. That’s probably why virtually every X-Men story is still riffing on Claremont’s run, or Morrison’s, they’re the people who told memorable stories, the vast majority of 90s writers, not so much.

The Spirit and Female Superheroes

I watched The Spirit on blu-ray a couple of days ago. The film was enjoyable enough, bouncing between some really strong, fun material that was baffling in the way only current era Frank Miller can be, and some scenes that just didn’t work at all. I think it’s totally understandable why the film bombed, and was poorly received, but for me, it was more exciting to watch than most movies out there.

Reading a bit about the film, a lot of people are knocking Miller for his objectification of every single female character in the film, a trope that goes back to his comics work. Miller definitely falls into many standard men writing about women tropes, the virgin/whore dichotomy and identifying a woman by her ass before her face, as well as dressing most of the female characters in a variety of fetishized outfits. But, at the same time, the narrative action in the film is largely propelled by the female characters, and they invariably take center stage over the rather blank slate hero, The Spirit. The Spirit actually does very little, he is bounced between various other characters who define him, be it Ellen who draws him to a normal life, Sand who pulls him towards adventure or even Silken who tempts him towards evil. Essentially, The Spirit himself is placed in the role traditionally held by women in action movies, of being a pawn the other characters use as an excuse to fight each other.

Now, that’s not to say that the film doesn’t have some problematic thoughts on gender roles. The Spirit flirts with everyone he encounters, and is able to have a climactic kiss with Sand, then walk right over to Ellen and be cool with her, even as he flirts with Morganstern at the same time. And, you could argue that the entire film is Miller putting various actresses he finds attractive in outfits he likes and making them fall in love with a blank slate male protagonist. But, in lavishing so much attention on them, they control the film, in a way you very rarely see in a superhero movie.

I’d argue that the film becomes its own kind of feminism, a distinctly male brand of feminism, but valid nonetheless. It reminds me a lot of a Russ Meyer movie, where female characters are presented as objects of visual pleasure, but also become dominant actors in the narrative, and control the movie, lording their power over generic beefcake men who have little personality and no say in how the movie proceeds. Look at the film’s climax, it’s really about Sand vs. Silken, The Spirit and The Octopus are just there to backup their female associate.

Yes, like a Russ Meyer movie, there’s a heavy emphasis on showcasing the beauty and particularly the tits and ass of the female characters, but does doing so invalidate the agency of the female characters? I don’t think they’re particularly fully realized characters, but no one in the film is, you certainly know more about Sand than you do about Denny.

I’d argue if this movie were directed by Joss Whedon, people would look at it very differently. In the same way they can overlook the way he dresses Echo in everything from schoolgirl to dominatrix fetish because Whedon is a self professed ‘feminist,’ they would hail the strong female characters at the center of the narrative, and write off the photocopying an ass bit as just having some fun, or presenting a character with a strong sense of her sexuality. Because Whedon makes such a big deal about being a feminist, it’s a lot easier to accept the contradictions of his work, to accept the fact that a high school girl is presented in a sexualized fashion throughout the first three years of Buffy. Or, look at River on Firefly, a mentally challenged teenage girl who is consistently sexualized throughout the series. Because Whedon is a feminist, it’s okay, but if Miller did the same character, people would find it objectionable.

Now, admittedly tone is a big part of this. Whedon’s work is much more self aware, and pokes fun at its own indulgence, even as it still gives you the pleasure of that indulgence. People don’t seem to realize that ever since Dark Knight Strikes Again, Miller has been messing around with the ultra-serious image he had in the 80s and 90s. To criticize All Star Batman, or this film, by calling it self parody, is like criticizing Airplane for having jokes, and not treating its aircraft disaster story seriously. He’s intentionally pushing things to the point of total insanity, and when it works, it’s a lot of fun to read.

More generally, I find it interesting that this film gets so much criticism for the presentation of its female characters, when it’s one of the only recent superhero films to have a female character who’s anything more than just the girl waiting at home, worried about her hero boyfriend. Who’s a more interesting character, Sand Serif or Pepper Potts? Silken Floss or Rachel Dawes? The Dark Knight is a particularly notable offender, using its female character as an excuse for the men to fight, then killing her off to motivate the final act of the story. She’s a cipher, existing solely for plot purposes, with no will or agency of her own. As in many recent films, she’s given her own job, but essentially she’s just there to support the man she’s involved with.

A large part of the problem stems from the fact that there aren’t that many compelling female characters in either the DC or Marvel universes. Thanks to the efforts of Grant Morrison and Greg Rucka, there’s more than there used to be, but they’re still not the brand name characters that can headline a film. Still, I’d love to see Renee Montoya as The Question pop up in a Batman film, or see some kind of standalone movie about Zatanna.

Over at Marvel, there’s a lot of great female characters in X-Men, but very few in the Marvel universe in general, where most of their movies take place. Is The Wasp the best we can hope for in the Avengers movie, a woman who’s best known for being a victim of spousal abuse? In the X-Men though, there’s a ton of great female characters, largely thanks to the effort of Chris Claremont, who much like Joss Whedon, has created a lot of really strong female characters, some of whom are fetishized, but no more than the male heroes were in his run.

Claremont most importantly manages to have a wide variety of female characters in his X-Men run. There’s the Earth Mother goddess type, Storm, there’s the everyday girl Kitty Pryde, the powerful and dangerous Phoenix and many others. Jean Grey or Storm are probably the most well known female superheroes beside Wonder Woman.

The X-Men movies never made Storm really work as a character, and Jean existed largely as an excuse for the Logan/Scott rivalry. There haven’t been that many great female superheroes on screen. The best presentation to date was Catwoman in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. The film has an underlying feminist subtext, but melds it with the narrative such that it never seems preachy. And, the dynamic between Catwoman and Batman, Bruce and Selina, is consistently interesting and challenging. She’s the character with most of the agency, the one who defines their relationship and her own identity. He’s the one who just wants to settle down with her in a big house and have a family.

Again, the character is presented in a sexualized, fetishy way, but I think there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. She’s a fully realized character, who dresses that way for a reason, it’s a means to express something within herself. She becomes a kind of grotesque parody of the sort of “bad girl” that men want. Men want a “bad girl” who’s just bad enough to still be controlled by them. It’s the illusion of a dominant woman. She subverts that by then pushing things further, to the point that her power becomes dangerous to the male order that’s trying to control her.

Compare her role in the narrative to Rachel Dawes in The Dark Knight. Selina controls things and actually pushes the narrative forward for her own ends, not just to get together with whatever man she’s interested in. And, though it’s far from the film Batman Returns is, that’s what the women of The Spirit do as well. So, even if you're to say that The Spirit is just pandering to men with its parade of hot women, isn't it better to see hot women who can actually do something and have their own lives, than hot women who exist just to support the male hero?