I begin to think that perhaps I've oversold the Byrne era in the Superman books. Or perhaps that isn't the right phrase -- I still get a kick out of them myself. But as Superman stories, I fear, they make good Byrne stories; that is to say, Byrne is as much a presence in the stories as Superman himself.

It's fashionable to slag Byrne these days for any number of reasons. Certainly, a great deal of the flack is deserved. The catty attitude towards fellow creators, the lackluster runs on forgotten books, the many downright bizarre proclamations -- well, it's become about as popular to mock Byrne now as it used to be to idolize him. And I'm not going to try to defend any of that. But the fact remains that for a long time he was about as popular in the industry as is possible to be, and furthermore, he created some good comics through the years. Most everyone reading comics today who's older than, say, twenty probably read a lot of Byrne when they were growing up or getting old. He was popular enough to influence the house style for both Marvel and DC at a time when both companies were shaking off the influences of the 50s and 60s and casting about for new forms (or rather, new stylistic permutations of the old forms), those same new forms that would eventually culminate in the 90s Image era. There's no love lost between Byrne and the Image crew, but anyone with two brain cells can see that every one of the first-wave of Image artists, without exception, owed an enormous debt to Byrne. To this day Erik Larsen (the only one who stills produces work on a semi-regular basis) still carries a few sublimated Byrne-isms in his work.

So, really, my fondness for the Byrne-era Superman says as much about me as about the comics themselves. I can look back now and see that the majority of the books were very much of their time, but I still have a fondness for them. Not quite as interesting as, say, the first year of Byrne's Namor (which, I think, holds up as an interesting, distinctively moody book) or the best of his Fantastic Four, but they hold my interest. In my post last week when I discussed the odd atmosphere of certain 80s DC books, I have to say that the post-Crisis Superman was also at the forefront of my thoughts. Not necessarily because Supes dealt with a lot of "ripped from the headlines" junk, but because the revamped Superman books, as the flagship franchise for the entire line, set a great deal of the company's tone.

Perhaps some of the books' momentum was flagged due to the exertion of setting the tone -- too much expository detail, not enough actual slam-bang action? But I still maintain that this atmosphere, notwithstanding the regrettable attempts at 80s relevancy, was pretty interesting. They were at least trying something moderately different -- setting different rules, trying to give the line-up of super-characters more of a grounding in a rational universe more closely resembling our own. Of course, as it turned out, this was a futile gesture, and within a few years the planet-hopping, high-stakes cosmic shenanigans would resume in full. But hey, let's at least give them credit for trying, eh?

Which brings me to the ostensible subject of today's rant, Superman #2. This is a Luthor-centric issue, and much like similar issues dedicated to Galactus and Dr. Doom in Byrne's Fantastic Four run, it plays to Byrne's own strengths -- that is, a great deal of mustache-twirling and scenery-chewing on the part of the villain. This issue is as great a summation of the post-Crisis Lex as anything else, but it also showcases one of the weaknesses of character revamps in general. Whereas most characters that have survived any length of time were created over the course of decades by many different creators each contributing to different aspects of the mythos, a revamp is usually just one creative team trying to redo the work of the ages. We don't get to pick, a la carte, what we would like to see, so we have to take the bad with the good -- the emaciated-seeming, constantly depressed and nigh-useless Lana Lang with the plutocratic evil Lex Luthor. Basically, Lana Lang only exists in the post-Crisis universe to give Superman someone to worry about, because otherwise Lana has done nothing but get beat on, figuratively and literally, since 1986.

This issue in particular sees her getting kidnapped, drugged, tortured and dragged into a broom closet, all as part of Luthor's fiendish scheme to learn Superman's identity. That's what I love about this book, even above and beyond the silliness: this is where Byrne gets to thumb his nose at the stupid parts of the Superman mythos, and I'll be damned if it doesn't provide one of the best "gotcha!" moments in Superman history.

Basically, at the end of the issue, Luthor's minions take every scrap of info on Superman they have, including all of his known associates and confidants, and feed it into a giant room-sized Kirby-tech computer the likes of which only really exist in old comic books (because the computing power on display could easily fit in a laptop nowadays). Anyway, after click-ing and whirr-ing for a few panels, the machine pops out with the obvious answer: Clark Kent is Superman. Well, duhhhh.

But then Luthor squints his eyes real hard and throws away the evidence:

"Yes . . . a soulless machine might make that deduction. But not Lex Luthor! I know better! I know that no man with the power of Superman would ever pretend to be a mere human! Such power is to be constantly exploited! Such power is to be used!

And that is why post-Crisis Luthor is the bee's knees. If that isn't the greatest bit of loopy, self-serving villain logic I've ever read, well, I'll eat my hat. Not only does is rather neatly sidestep one of the worst clichés of the old pre-Crisis Superman status quo, but it rather elegantly gives Luthor a motivation for his distrust / loathing of Superman as well as a nearly psychotic worldview that places him squarely in philosophical opposition to every hero he is fated to meet. Post-Crisis Luthor would have made a good Fascist, which says a lot about how we as a society see capitalism, dunnit?

But, alas, Byrne threw the baby out with the bathwater, and the best parts of the revamp were soon being undone along with the worst. Byrne's problem at his peak was that he didn't seem to be able to tell the difference between a really good idea (like the Sub-Mariner being bi-polar, a wonderfully efficient idea that exactly no-one has ever followed-up) and a horrid idea (like summarily dismantling the Vision and Scarlet Witch, therefore rendering the emotional core of the previous twenty five years' worth of Avengers' stories null and void). I remember from my time doing improv that one of the only rules of improv was that you never say "No" - you have to keep the momentum going, even if things go in odd directions, you have to keep moving. Some revamps create room for more stories to be told, others are simply destructive -- which is more valuable?

You could argue about which was a good idea and what was a bad idea all day. Perhaps the problem came to be that he was simply so strongly associated with revamps that he felt obligated to tear things down, even when nothing was actually wrong to begin with -- who knows? I can't read his mind so I won't try to impugn his motivations, except to say that the mania to wreak change for the sake of simply wreaking change has become almost a joke in and of itself, a problem not just with a single creator or company but the whole superhero industry. The constant churn of corporate totems, mandated by reader attrition and market inertia, is slowly but surely strip-mining the best parts of the genre of their potency. You have to rotate your crops or the soil gets worn out.

Serious Things

A long time ago I posed this question to my friends: who would win in a fight between Cthulhu and Godzilla?

OK, it's a given that this is a nerd question par excellence, and the first person in the comments to point out that Goku with a lightsaber powered by a shard of Kryptonite would beat both of them gets a kick in the jimmy.

But seriously - I thought about it for a while and came to my decision. Surprisingly, all the friends whom I asked answered in the opposite manner.

To be brief: they posited that Cthulhu, being a terrible member of the race of Great Old Ones, is endowed with cosmic power incarnate, and would thus have no trouble dispatching a mere nuclear dinosaur such as our pal Gojira. Which is, of course, wrong.

The reason it is wrong is that the very nature of the question frames the answer. Look at it this way: if you ask who is more powerful, Superman or Batman, the answer is obvious. But ask most nerds, raised on a steady diet of Frank Miller, who would win in a fight between Superman and Batman, and most will say Batman. Because, obviously, Superman could twist Batman's head off at superspeed, shit in his neck and deposit the corpse on the dark side of the moon in the time it took Batman to sneeze, but that's not the way the DC Universe works.

Similarly, I'm not asking whether or not Cthulhu is more powerful than Gojira, I'm asking who would win in a fight. And if Cthulhu woke from his terrible slumber and decided to walk towards Japan to begin his plans for universal desolation, he'd run into Godzilla. Undoubtedly the first half hour of the movie would be spent with boring exposition - there'd be an old archeologist with a copy of the Necronomicon explaining all the bits of the Cthulhu mythos. He'd probably have a scrappy nephew or neice who was a lot more interested in reading about Gojira in the Japanese tabloids. There'd be a Gojira sighting somewhere off Tokyo Bay or something and some various other subplots, none of which would have any impact on anything.

In the second third of the movie Cthulhu would show up and start tearing shit up. He'd eat a few thousand people, make a giant throne of their bones, and just generally do everything possible to lower property values in Tokyo. If we're really going for broke, we can have the Japanese government sic Mechagodzilla on him or have Rodan (my favorite) show up to get bitchslapped. But the real fun doesn't start until Gojira shows up. They fight for a minute, Gojira gets in a fews good licks, but then Cthulhu pumps up and delivers a mighty pounding to the green guy, blasting him with cosmic energy and throwing him in the ocean or something to die. Round One goes to Cthulhu, at which point he forgets all about Gojira and goes back to summoning Nyarlathotep so he can fight Yog-Sothoth or something. There's probably a few scenes of the Japanese army getting stepped on or something to kill time in the film.

But then at about the time it looks like Cthulhu's about to destory all of civilization, that plucky young kid(s) from the first reel reappears and cries after Gojira gets beaten. Gojira is, of course, the world's biggest softy and he rises up from the ashes of his stunning defeat and brushes the proverbial dust off at this; it's on. He marches back to Tokyo and then he and Cthulhu get it on for the last twenty minutes of the film, totally demolishing the entire city. Maybe there's a couple other monsters involved, maybe not, it doesn't really matter.

But at the end of the day, there is only one possible victor: Gojira. As soon as the question became "who would win in a fight", the answer is obviously Gojira, because Gojira always wins. Cthulhu may be a being of immeasurably vast cosmic power and ancient evil, but once he steps into the ring with Gojira he's just another kaiju. He's a man in a rubber suit with an octopus head who shows up in the second reel, beats Gojira about 2/3 into the pic, and then gets defeated in a stunning turnabout. If he would just stay in R'lyeh, he would undoubtedly be able to destroy the world without much effort at all. But in choosing to step into Gojira's neighborhood, the meta-textual gods of storytelling demand that he get his ass handed to him. Because there ain't never been a guy in a rubber suit who the Big G couldn't take down if you give him 90 minutes and a plucky kids sidekick.

"there's a norman mailer story in this issue of Well Hung Men"

So, rumors have reached me from distant lands about those strange things which men call "video games". Apparently they are still made and consumed in certain circles, among people unlike you or I.

As I have often said, I will not discuss these so-called "video games" unless there is some sort of Italian plumber involved, preferably in the act of jumping on shelled reptiles or possibly amassing gold coins. You kids with your "Grand Theft Autos" and your "Final Fantsies" -- how can you make a sequel to a game which has the word "Final" in the title? It seems rather to preclude the possibility of a sequel. Either that or someone is lying.

In any event, word has reached me, travelling through my various underworld contacts, of strange and wonderful news. Apparently, scientists theorize that one day there shall be a game system known as the "DS" -- some sort of latter-day interactive entertainment device. And on this system there shall be a game called New Super Mario Bros. And it shall be good.







You had me at "Lakitu".

Realer Than Real



I've got a fondness for the comics produced by DC in the few years immediately following the Crisis. Anyone who reads this blog knows of my rather foolhardy championing of the post-Crisis Superman. But I think the rest of the line was also producing some interesting stuff as well.

But I don't think, for the most part, that "interesting" in this instance necessarily translates to "good". What it means is that for a number of reasons the books produced by DC in the mid-to-late 80s had a peculiar texture and consistency. Not necessarily unique, because I think the consensus is that DC in the 80s was very much influenced by what had been popular at Marvel in the late 70s and early 80s -- lots of Chris Claremont and Frank Miller pastiche. Lots of it not very good. Furthermore, the most popular DC book in the period immediately preceding Crisis was the Marv Wolfman and George Perez Teen Titans revamp -- which, as has been pointed out many times by many, many people -- was essentially a Marvel book with DC characters. There are a few blogs who spend quite a bit of time cataloging the stylistic differences between Marvel and DC, and I'm not really interested in that particular field. What I am interested in is the point at which 80s DC became obsessed with the "real" world.

Superhero comics are fantasies. What's more, there's something eminently fascinating about watching fantasy characters interact with reality, or probably more accurately, a perception of reality influenced by the writer's own preoccupations and prejudices. This was part of the basis and appeal behind the series that defined the 80s for superhero books: Watchmen and Dark Knight, of course, but also Miller's Daredevil, Squadron Supreme, and one of my personal faves, Marshall Law (which was essentially Chinatown with super perverts, a great post-Reagan fairy tale for us powerless bleeding-hearts). We remember these books because, despite their flaws, they were pretty good and worth remembering. But the vast majority of the books that were influenced by these same forces -- and, incidentally, influenced as well by the success of Watchmen and Dark Knight -- were neither memorable or very good, but they're just as interesting. If you are OK with putting "interesting" in scare quotes, that is.

Let's take A Death In The Family. Everyone always talks about this story because it was the death of Jason Todd, who got brained on the head with a crowbar and blown up by the mass indifference of comic fans. Not a great story by any measure, and despite some nice Jim Aparo art, probably not a creative highpoint for anyone involved. But what no one ever mentions is the fact that this was a really weird story for another reason entirely: the villain was the Ayatollah Khomeini. Not, mind you, some stand in or proxy, as is usually typical -- like, Ayatollah Jihadi from Evilstan or something stupid like that. No, the crux of the story was that the Joker was trying to sell WMDs to the Iranians, and after that scheme got busted (which involved Todd meeting his maker) he got picked by Khomeini to be the Islamic Republic of Iran's new UN Ambassador. At which point we learn that the Joker is going to try to kill the entire general assembly of the United Nations under the auspices of Iran. (Superman stops him, of course, with one of the most memorable uses of super-breath on record.)

Now, that struck me as odd when I first read the story and it still strikes me as odd today, but this was hardly an isolated incident of the company injecting "Reality" into their line. One of the Giffen / DeMatteis Justice League's first adventures involved, if memory serves me, a nuclear crisis with the Soviet Union (not exactly "bwa-ha-ha" material). I've got an issue of Blue Beetle somewhere where the Beetle spends half the issue infiltrating Iran for some reason or another. Millennium was a horrible, horrible crossover built on the premise that a large percentage of background and supporting characters in the DC Universe were actually spies -- double agents! -- for the Manhunters. (Commissioner Gordon and Lana Lang were both Manhunter agents, which isn't one of those plot points that gets brought up a lot these days.) The whole structure of the post-Crisis DC line was steeped in late Cold War paranoia. It's all of a piece with the same kind of sublimated jingoism that brought us cinematic classics like Red Dawn and Commando.

Remember, in the 80s street crime was a national epidemic and drugs were going to turn us into a nation of addicts and fiends (The Punisher); the world was being run into the ground by evil plutocrats like Gordon Gekko (fictional) and Michael Milken (actual) (post-Crisis Lex Luthor); and we were at any moment only a hairs' breadth away from total war with the Russians. Well, it goes without saying that by the time Reagan got elected the Soviet Union was hardly the threat generations of Americans had been led to believe (we wouldn't know how badly-off the Russians were until after 1991, of course) -- but man, back in the 80s everyone thought the end of the world was nigh. Superhero comics responded to this attitude just like any other media, and boy were the results wacky.

Looking at post-Crisis DC it seems as if these stories were the result of line-wide decisions to make the books "relevant", influenced by books like Dark Knight as well as the general cultural climate. Well, "Relevancy" -- with a capitol R and scare quotes in full effect -- is a horrible thing for comics to aspire. Everyone remembers the "My Ward Is A Junky!" issue of Green Lantern / Green Arrow, and despite it's questionable "significance", O'Neill and Adams' run is not remembered for it's subtle treatment of political and social issues. (I've always had a soft spot for the story where the old black dude asks Green Lantern why he saves "the blue people and the green people but not the black people" or something similar.) It's all so ham-fisted and well-meaning you can't help but smile, even after you realize that it's essentially little more than middle-class white liberal guilt at work. Similarly with the "political" comics of the 80s -- the country as a whole took a turn to the Right, so the popular media reflected the fears and anxieties of heightened Cold War tension and the perception of lawlessness in America itself. Having the Blue Beetle travel to Iran to kick the shit out of some Islamists is about as effectual as Green Arrow taking a stand against heroin addiction -- i.e., it makes a very powerless person feel like they're doing something important by putting a fictional surrogate up against a straw man. But the hazards of Cold War realpolitik were ultimately too big a target for fictional heroes. You can only see Batman go up against the KGBeast so many times before the readers get depressed at the implication of their own powerlessness in the face of vast international malfeasance. So after a couple years the heroes went back to fighting space warlords and shit like that, and relative normalcy returned.

But man, in the meantime there were some really weird comics.

The King

by Rich Koslowski

I am torn by my reaction to The King. On the one hand, it's hard not to admire the evolution of Koslowski's style. Three Fingers was a cute book that seemed slightly attenuated in the full-length format. The King is far more assured and substantial narrative. Although the art is noticeably less intricate and detail-rich than what we saw in Three Fingers, I think this was a conscious decision made for the book's readability and pacing. The King is a solid chunk of book, over two hundred pages, and it is to Koslowski's credit that the story occupies exactly as much space as it needs, no more or less, and every narrative beat is laid out with perfect aplomb.

The basic plot details the career of a mysterious and charismatic Elvis impersonator who surfaces in Las Vegas, wearing a golden helmet to insure his anonymity. Within weeks of his appearance the faithful flock to the seeming resurrection of their idol, as word of his electrifying sold-out performances spreads across the country -- is it really him, back from the dead after all these years? Finally, Time magazine sends a reporter to investigate, a man with every reason to want to uncover whatever sordid truth lies behind the seemingly impossible reappearance of Elvis Presley.



But as I said, I'm torn. On the one hand, we have a well-constructed pseudo-mystery that explores the nature of faith. But on the other hand, we have a two-hundred page book about Elvis impersonators. My problem with The King is essentially identical to another problem I had with Three Fingers: Koslowski has obviously spent a great deal of effort constructing a well-reasoned and extremely clever thematic undercarriage for what is in actuality a very silly story. Three Fingers was a story about race and the politics of entertainment in America throughout the twentieth century, and the ways that "authentic" ethnic identities are co-opted and twisted by history and money -- but all these ideas were wrapped around a too-clever-by-half Roger Rabbit pastiche that was just too silly to support the weight of "real world" ideas for any length of time. Similarly, with The King Koslowski has wrapped an extremely thought-provoking kernel of an idea within the unbelievably goofy context of Elvis fandom.



To Koslowski's credit, the overriding ideas come through fairly well despite the "Blue Suede Shoe" trappings. Faith is a prickly subject. The King is probably the best Elvis-themed exploration of Kierkegaard's "Leap of Faith" extant (although I could always be wrong). As the plot unfolds and the details of the faux-Elvis' background are teasingly unveiled, the book's central questions take shape: If faith is dependent on mystery, can incontrovertible proof destroy faith? If faith is a positive force in society, should self-proclaimed rationalists have the right to challenge faith on the grounds of empiricism?

The reporter at the heart of the book faces the dilemma of exposing the King's (probably) true and sordid past, or letting the legend itself live and inspire those who choose to believe. This is a conflict that cuts to the core of modern society's worse divisions. I am not entirely sure wether or not The King comes down on the right side of this divide, from my perspective. I'm very much a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist. I don't believe that faith for faith's sake is a positive virtue. I believe that all the Christian existentialists' arguments for the acceptance of supernatural providence, which must by definition exist independent of reason or evidence, are, at best, sheer sophistry. But regardless of whether or not I agree with the book's ending, great pains are taken to build up a rational framework for the final decisions. At the very least, Koslowski doesn't try to sugar-coat the gravity of the dilemma, even if it comes garbed in questionable clothes. (And to his credit, he also places a few scattered hints that the whole thing is just a P.T. Barnum-esque ploy on the part of a mischievous and manipulative Elvis. This seed of doubt is enough to keep the book's ending appropriately ambiguous.) The book is built around a mystery but the only conclusions we are offered are themselves inconclusive, so even those who wish to accept the most rational explanation must exercise a bit of faith in the matter.



As much as I wish I could dismiss the book based simply on the silly trappings of Elvis kitsch, The King is simply too richly-constructed a work to ignore. I will say that, as with Three Fingers, the goofy window-dressing makes appreciating the book's virtues a more difficult proposition than it should be. A good book should require work on the reader's part, but it shouldn't be a matter of great exertion merely to overlook the premise (see Cerebus for the best example of this principle). However -- The King shows enough of a marked improvement over Three Fingers as to make me believe that Koslowski's next project may be even better. He's come a long way since the modest virtues of The 3 Geeks / Geeksville, and has taken to the full-length graphic novel format with a surprising confidence. I think, based on the evidence of this book, he's close to making the final step that'll demarcate his juvenalia from the fully-formed work whose outlines we can faintly see already taking shape in the pages of The King.