How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb

You know, I figured if there was one thing I could do that would get people talking, it would be a salute to Chuck Austen. Huh.

As per usual, Dave at Motime takes exception to something I said, this time in reference to Monday’s brief look at Dave Morales’ Captain America swansong. The odd thing is, I really don’t think there’s as much difference in our opinions as he does.

I have a great respect for just about everything Mark Gruenwald ever wrote. He was one of the true unsung heroes in our industry. I have said before, and I still believe it to be true, that one of the reasons his work is often overlooked/underrated is the fact that he wasn’t much great shakes as a stylist. As a conceptualist and a theorist, he understood how superhero books worked (and should work) better than just about anyone else out there. But his Achilles heel – from my point of view – is the fact that his approach to writing was very much that of a journeyman’s. In terms of the ideas and enthusiasm with which he tackled his books, he was every bit the visionary, but the fact is that there is a very good reason Squadron Supreme is considered Watchmen’s poor cousin. The ideas were there, but the execution was not. "The spirit was willing..."

In a lot of ways, he was sort of caught between generations. He was a bit more high-minded than most of his generation of American writers, but lacked the formalistic rigor of the oncoming generation of British superstars who were able to diversify the stylistic vocabulary of the American mainstream.

But the difference between Morales’s Cap and Gruenwald’s Cap is very simple, and has less to do with any difference in conception between those two writers than with a very slight difference in editorial approach: the lack of thought balloons. I don’t think Morales’ Cap is any less of an interior fellow than Gruenwald’s, but Morales has a lot less to work with because, for whatever reason, the Powers At Be at Marvel don’t like thought balloons anymore. At the risk of opening up an old can of worms, this is where we run into the very real problems with treating corporate comic books like autotelic texts: so many of the creative decisions that go into the making of the books are imposed by external forces at the expense of what you could call a "pure" or "ideal" conception of the story.

Gruenwald’s Cap didn’t brood. He thought a lot, yes, but he had those thought balloons sticking out of his head while he was doing stuff – riding his motorbike or clobberin’ baddies or something like that. I think I recall a few times when Steve Rogers was laying awake in bed and thinking, but that’s hardly brooding. Brooding is sitting atop of gothic Gargoyle and musing about how you will never have a healthy sexual relationship because you keep thinking about those pearls around your mother’s neck when she was shot and where oh where is my sidekick in the shortpants? I don’t like this whole girl Robin thing because they aren’t anywhere near as sexy as prepubescent boy-children.

Anyway.

The essential conflict at the heart of Captain America is the fact that he’s a Roosevelt style socially-proactive and self-confident liberal brought forward into a world where ambiguity is the order of the day and liberalism, as a creed, has lost it’s luster in what has become a very conservative country. (It’s always been ironic for me that people who don’t read Captain America dismiss the character as a jingoistic stooge while people who do read the book dismiss him as a bleeding heart!) Of course, as we all know, Franklin Roosevelt was racked with doubt and self-recrimination. He agonized over every decision, consulted his advisors at every turn and basically accepted the burden of the free world on his shoulders. But to the world, he presented a unified front, acted with resolute action and unwavering resolve. (Which is perhaps the most troublesome aspect of our current president, is that while he makes no secret of his respect and admiration toward FDR, and has adopted FDR's customary resolve and unwavering will, he scoffs at the kind of intellectual and moral rigor with which FDR approached his decision making process.)

So I think that Morales probably stood as close a chance as anyone of returning Cap to the ideologically rich waters once explored by Gruenwald. You may not have cared for Morales’ run, but everything I have read indicates that in his absence the character is being moved back into the direction of rock ‘em-sock ‘em action, straight up with no chaser. So, everybody loses here.

Gruenwald understood the ideologically stunted nature of the superhero comic so well that it was almost intuitive. The fact is, the number one priority of any mainstream writer has to be towards providing interesting conflict – both in terms of fighting and soap-opera. Subtext of any sort is pretty much anathematic to the creative process involved in your average mainstream book – or at least it was until very recently. Writers like Gruenwald understood that if there was any possibility of using the format in order to make ideological statements, then the subtext had to be harnessed to the main action of the story in a very overt manner. Which explains Ronald Reagan being turned into a giant snake.



Cap’s foes have traditionally fallen into three categories. There are unreconstructed Nazis (such as the Red Skull), fascist or neo-fascist organizations bent on world conquest (Hydra, AIM, U.L.T.I.M.A.T.U.M.), and common crooks (such as the Serpent Society or Crossbones). None of these categories leave a lot of room for ideological conflict. No sane person will argue that Nazis, fascists or criminals don’t need to be stopped, and that’s what Captain America is here to do. Which was, of course, one of Gruenwald’s points: regardless of whether Steve Rogers was in the Cap uniform, evil still needed to be vanquished and bad guys still needed to be clobbered. That’s the raison d’etre for superhero comics, after all, whether you like it or not.

But the other side of the coin was that Captain America ultimately added up to a lot more than just a uniform. There was symbolism and morality wrapped up in the office that Johnny Walker didn’t understand, or chose not to understand because of his own psychoses. So while Steve Rogers ultimately didn’t need the costume to combat evil effectively, the costume needed him. Which was a very unsubtle (but no less effective) way of Gruenwald to criticize the bellicose jingoists who seemed to be crawling out of the woodwork in the 1980s and who – either tacitly or blatantly – made great hay out of the concept that American power is by it’s very nature righteous and that the ends always justify the means when American interests are at stake. Nationalistic power is not naturally righteous, and the ends never justify the means – which is why Johnny Walker was such an abysmal Captain America. This may not seem very germane when Cap spends most of his time fighting rather black & white foemen, but it is still a very prominent part of his character.

So no, to go back to the original conflict here, I don’t believe that Captain America should brood. I don’t think Gruenwald’s Cap ever actually did much brooding. He was too busy keeping the world safe for democracy, which is hardly anything to sneeze at. Even when his costume and title were taken away, he didn’t do a lot of brooding. He went off on a camping trip for a while, sure, but even when he wanted some solitude he was still doing stuff and keeping busy. Sure enough, in no time flat he had busted out of his doldrums and was back to busting heads.

(Before we canonize Gruenwald, however, we should remember that as good as the first half of his run is, the second half saw Cap being turned into a woman, a werewolf, and Iron Man, in that order. He didn’t do so much brooding as running around fighting dinosaurs and space monsters. For all the good things you can say about the first half of his run, the second half deletes all that stored-up good will. Seriously, the second half of his run is so very bad that it doesn’t surprise me that most people forgot how cool the first half was.)

I think the turning point was Streets of Poison, maybe my all-time favorite Cap story. It had everything cool you could every want in a Cap story: interesting subtext, meaty machinations involving the Red Skull and the Kingpin (including getting to see the Kingpin beat the Skull like a red-headed stepchild), and the sight of Captain America blitzed out of his mind on PCP and tearing a swath through any-and-all takers. I mean, seriously, he beat Daredevil so bad that ol’ Hornhead had amnesia for six months in his own book as a result (that’s not a joke, either, that really happened). After Streets of Poison, for whatever reason, Gruenwald just lost his ability to write Captain America altogether. I don’t know why, but I think Man & Wolf speaks for itself.



You know, I realize I may come off as a curmudgeon, but the fact is that deep down I really and truly love superhero comics. I think they’re just great. But I think a lot of people in this here blogosphere try to burden them with critical baggage that the vast majority of the medium just wasn’t built to bear. This is an old argument, sure, but it’s one that no less an authority than Mark Gruenwald himself was very familiar with.

If you are old enough to remember Marvel Age, you are probably remember that it was a pretty worthless company mouthpiece/dishrag. But I have two reasons why I will never get rid of my Marvel Ages, no matter what else I cull. The first reason is the fact that every issue had a Fred Hembeck cartoon. But the second, and more important fact, was that every issue also had a wonderful column by Mark Gruenwald, wherein Gruenwald elaborated on any old thing which he felt like talking about. Most of the time, however, he felt like talking about superhero comic books, and there are few people who ever did it better:

"I admit it. The fiction I write is primarily intended for juveniles. But just because it's for juveniles doesn't mean it has to be valueless. I try to imbed my juvenile adventure stories with values I believe in, values that transcend the genre. Sometimes I succeed."

Now surely there are those who will decry his own words, on the belief that the author’s intentions should have a secondary importance when considering the value of a given text. But I don’t quite buy that, I never have and I never will, regardless of how many professors try to foist it off on me. From my way of looking at things, you have to try your best engage a text on the level at which it was written, otherwise you simply risk transferring your own prejudices and preconceptions onto a vessel that was not designed to carry that kind of critical dialogue. Which brings us back, in an odd way, to Warhol’s soup cans. Sometimes something exists merely for the sake of existing, and any deeper meaning you find therein will merely reinforce your own beliefs to the detriment of whatever value the original object may or may not have had.

I believe the Marvel Universe died the day Mark Gruenwald did, because he was the last person who really cared about it as a living, cohesive organism. Right before he died the MU was split into a number of different competing fiefdoms – the X-Books, the Spider books, the Avengers titles, the "darker" Marvel Edge books, and a couple others that weren’t as important to the universe proper (such as the licensed properties and the 2099 books). The fact is, continuity was never really about a constant referencing of everything that had gone on before in an anal-retentive way (which is what folks like Joe Quesada tend to think) so much as the sense that every book in the MU exists in the same space and time. Stan and Jack and Steve always used to have the Fantastic Four meeting the Avengers or Spider-Man meeting Dr. Strange, and it gave the books an immediacy because there was a sense of reality there that had never existed in superhero books before.Not only did the heroes meet, but they seemed to be palpably the same characters when they appeared in other books, not just bit players with fake Spider-Man masks on. Those kind of things give the reader a visceral thrill – stuff like "hey, that guy with the redhead on his arm while the Avengers are flying by may just look like a punk but he’s really the Amazing Spider-Man!" or "boy, wouldn’t it flip the FF out to know that their blind lawyer was actually Daredevil, the Man Without Fear?" When these things stopped happening as often, it got less fun to hang around the Marvel Universe – and for a while there it had stopped altogether. Nowadays there are a few writers who try to keep that kind of fun alive – the dude who writes She-Hulk definitely tries, as does Brian Michael Bendis – but it just isn’t the same. The fact is that the Manhattan in New X-Men is not the same Manhattan as the one in Avengers or the one in Spider-Man, and that realization kills a little bit of the childlike joy I used to find when diving into a superhero book. That’s a big part of what the fans say when they refer to continuity as a dead issue, and as far as that goes they’re 100% right.

In any event, I am as surprised as anyone that I have spent four days in a row talking about this subject. But, in for a penny in for a pound – I guess I’ll spend tomorrow talking about why I believe Mark Gruenwald’s Quasar to be one of the best superhero series ever written (and why it’s in my top two or three). Hopefully tomorrow we’ll also have a look at Adam Beechen and Manny Bello’s Hench. Sometime in the next week I’ll also be tackling Dan Danko and Tom Mason’s Sidekicks series of childrens’ books, and if all goes according to plan I will also be launching a discussion on the second volume of Love & Rockets, now that that series has released it’s epochal tenth issue.

(More of Gruenwald's great columns can be found here, by the way.)

Chuck Austen, Continuity Cop

Continuity is very important.

That might seem a bit odd coming from someone such as myself, with a historic antipathy to the more obsessive branches of comic book collecting. After all, the only people who seriously care about superhero comic book continuity are hopeless nerds with soiled Van Halen T-Shirts and congenital acne, right? Right?

Well, not exactly.

If you’ve read more than one comic book, continuity is very important. How the creators regard continuity, and more importantly, how the editorial support staff regards continuity, is one of the most important factors to keep in mind regarding the change in tone that has occurred in mainstream comics over the past few years.

Used to be that comics continuity was like a brick house. Every new issue added another brick onto the house. Everything built on what had been built before. To change any part of the house required a massively complicated demolition and patching operation (like Avengers Forever or Fantastic Four #319).

Then when it was decided that the company approach to continuity would be streamlined, the house metaphor lost its luster. Instead of making sure everything new was precisely in sync with everything that had come before, the decision was made simply to let the construction take a more organic direction, and to overlook things that maybe didn’t fit in with the ongoing construction. So, some wings of the house were sealed off. New wings were built without complete regard to the total design. Mistakes were made, and those who cared about the overall design were becoming apoplectic.

But a funny thing happened. The new approach, while it may have seem scattershot and arbitrary, actually succeeded in sprucing up certain wings of the house that had fallen into disrepair. By moving to change the tone of the line as a whole, the concept of continuity became a lot more fluid and inconsistent.

But the odd thing is, there is actually precious little differece between this change of focus and from how it had been done all along. For around thirty years now, the Marvel Universe has operated pretty consistently on the principles of selected amnesia. The first major run of any book is usually considered the "template" run, the wellspring from which all the major ideas and concepts spring from. Everything between the template run and the current run exists in a sort of hazy fog, in terms of how modern creators deal with it. When permanent changes are effected, the changes remain, but for the most part this has to occur in order to keep the books fresh.

Lets look at the most obvious example of this phenomena, Fantastic Four. Before being relaunched in 1998, the FF had undergone dozens of creative changes. Every new creative team picked up where the last one left off, to a point. But the major storylines and thematic preoccupations of the last creators were totally forgotten. When new ideas were necessary, the creators would dip back to Lee & Kirby’s first 102 issues. For all intents and purposes, despite whatever interesting, intense and life-altering events had occurred over the last few runs, these events would eventually be forgotten – or at least never discussed again.

Other interesting problems arose when characters had late template runs. For instance, you can definitely say that the Milelr run on Daredevil remains that books essential template. The hundred and fifty odd issues that occurred before Miller ever saw the book might as well not have happened, save for a few constant elements that occurred consistently through the character’s history. When was the last time anyone referred to Mike Murdock?

Whenever a creative team had to play clean-up for the previous run, or set about with the distinct purpose of merely fixing a previous established gaffe, problems arose. Remember the whole Ned Leeds/Hobgoblin episode? They didn’t fix that one for fifteen years. It wouldn’t probably have mattered if the Hobgoblin hadn’t been a very important character in the Spider-mythos. But it did matter, and people did care, way back when.

This was the way things worked. You didn’t contradict what had come before, but that still left a lot of room for people to work. "First do no harm" isn’t just the Hippocratic oath, it was also the mainstream writers’ credo.

Then things changed. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that there got to be so much continuity that just not contradicting it became a chore in and of itself. A generation of creators came up who hadn’t come through the ranks of feverish fanboy – actual professionals with a deep appreciation for the characters but without the obeisance to established writ that had marked every other generation of creators since Stan, Jack and Steve. And the awareness began to seep in that the continuity was becoming a Problem in terms of the books’ accessibility to new readers. Whether or not this awareness was accurate is open to debate, but looking at the types of books that Marvel and DC published during the down times of the mid-to-late 90s, I tend to think it might have been.

Which brings us, from yesterday’s discussion, to folks like Chuck Austen.

It’s not that Austen - or Brian Michael Bendis or Joe Straczynski - disliked continuity. He just had no desire to let continuity get in the way of telling what he thought were good stories. For their parts, this is exactly what the editors wanted to hear.

So you had little burps like the Purple Man being magically resurrected for Alias. It made for a good story, admittedly, but it left longtime readers scratching their heads, wondering how he had been brought back to life since he had been shown to be dead in the pages of Alpha Flight following his stated demise in the Emperor Doom OGN. This wasn’t the only instance of a dead character magically being resurrected. I dropped Bruce Jones' Hulk when the Absorbing Man appeared in a manner that was totally contradictory to how he had been portrayed for the previous thirty years. The most annoying incident for me in recent months has been the new Secret Wars series. There’s a part where Wolverine says he’s never seen Spider-Man without his mask on before. Which would be fine except for the fact that he has. It occurred during the wrap-up of the aforementioned Ned Leeds/Hobgoblin retcon. I can even distinctly remember the panel in which the maskless meeting occurred.

Is it that they don’t care? Or that they are purposefully trying to fuck with our heads? No. It’s pretty obvious that they just don’t know, or they wouldn’t be doing it.

But the fact that it does happen means that a lot has changed. Used to be when something like that happened, someone would write in and try to get a No-Prize. Nowadays the House doesn’t give out No-Prizes, probably due to the fact that they don’t have letters pages to give them out in, and also due to the fact that little burps like this are seen as unimportant. If the story is good, why get wrapped around the axle over comparatively small problems?

But the problems aren’t small. They undermine the fans’ confidence in and enjoyment of the books that Marvel depends on them to buy. Even a reader like me, who really tries not to obsess about these things, gets tripped up when something happens that I know is a contradiction of what has previously occurred. I am instantly taken out of the story and it takes a while to regain my footing. If I could come to every book blank, like it was a fresh new universe, I wouldn’t care. That’s the audience that Marvel is going after, they want very badly for every book to be someone’s first. But the fact is that for longtime readers these things add up, and what we are seeing on messageboards and inside retail outlets across the company is a crisis of confidence in Marvel. Perhaps this crisis would have eventually impacted the bottom line, perhaps not. Fan buying habits tend to be deeply ingrained.

Are people still buying Marvel? Yes. Will this end? No. But its obvious that there is perception of the problem, from the fact that Marvel is taking steps to even out the tonal inconsistencies throughout their line. It’s an economic decision, pure and simple: with their movies doing so strongly in the theaters and their licensed products selling so well, and with more on the way, they need to present a unified front.

Which makes Chuck Austen and his notions of more mature and socially responsible funnybooks redundant. But it is to his credit that he tried very hard to give the fans what they wanted, within the bounds of reason, and no one can blame him for finally having had enough of the constant abuse.

His run on Avengers was pilloried as bad as, if not worse than, his run on Uncanny. Immediately the message boards erupted with their complaints that the Avengers were acting and speaking totally out of character. The fact that he dredged up a twenty-year-old plot point concerning Hank Pym’s spousal abuse did not exactly endear him either.

The fact is, he probably thought they’d love it. Think about it: people thought he paid no attention to continuity, so what, in his mind, would be better than delving deep into an old pile of back issues in order to find a nice and juicy subplot to exhume? The problem is, that’s not how it’s done. It’s like a deaf man trying to play music: he can get all the notes right if you tell him how to play the piano and read music, but if he doesn’t know how it’s supposed to flow, it’s going to sound horrible. To the fans who had been reading Marvel comics for decades, his work seemed unmistakably off to them, and because he was not immersed in the mythos in the same way that these hardcore fans are, he couldn’t fix the problem, try as he may.

Think about it: everyone knows Hank Pym is a nutcase who has half-a-dozen secret identities in addition to a history as a guilt-ridden pseudo criminal and, yes, a wife-beater. He’s probably a manic-depressive. But even though this is established continuity, Austen didn’t know how to broach it. There’s been so much water under the bridge in the twenty-odd years since that story, and bringing it back up to the foreground after all this time just confuses matters. What would happen if Mark Waid suddenly brought back Lyja, Johnny Storm’s skrull ex-wife, with no thought to the havoc it would wreak on the book’s tone? It could probably be done, but what about the fact that every new creative team to take over the book since time immemorial has regressed Johnny to about the point he was when Stan & Jack left? It’s not as if the character growth and trauma of the DeFalco/Ryan years didn’t happen, but it has been effectively put in the past. Similarly, no one would dispute that Pym was a wife-beater, but it was pretty much a settled issue. Bringing it up again brings the current story up by its short hairs. It forces the readers to pay attention to the fact that the architecture hasn’t been very well planned for quite a while now.

So, it’s not that Austen had a disrespect for continuity. He tried, and we must respect this. But the fact that Austen and the other creators who are closely identified with "Nu-Marvel" are also the ones most responsible for the change in tone across the Marvel line is something that should probably be examined more closely.

You either tackle continuity head on, as with Avengers Forever, or you press forward, as creators like Bendis and Austen have attempted to do. The problem is that in pressing forward, the books have also lost some of the signature tone that served them well for four previous decades. For better or for worse, the books can’t keep their naturalistic tone without some concessions to the old style. After the almost complete collapse of the Tsunami launch and the ouster of Bill Jemas, that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Whether it will make a difference to the bottom line and towards the appeasement of fandom is sill something that remains to be seen.





Street Angel #2

I am not the first to sing the praise’s of Slave Labor Graphic’s Street Angel, nor, I suspect, shall I be the last. Leave it be said, however, that every good thing you’ve ever read about this book is 100% true.

For some reason this book manages to push all the right buttons with a lot of people. I think it has something to do with the fact that both Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca look like they’re enjoying themselves, and it’s definitely a contagious feeling. They’re not the first people to try their hands at the semi-parodic semi-serious superhero subgenre. A book like Street Angel can proudly trace it’s lineage all the way back to Cerebus and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, silly ideas that found a great deal of traction – and subsequent success - when their creators plaid it perfectly straight. It’s a tonal mixture that doesn’t usually work in media other than comics.

If you don’t know the set-up, it’s pretty simple. Angel City is pretty much your average comic book city: it’s overrun by mad scientists, super-villains, and ninjas. But the city’s greatest champion is not some gaudily clad defender of justice but a thirteen (or so) year old girl with a tricked-out deck. Amazingly, it works. She’s got the moves of Grant Morrision’s Batman and the attitude of a runaway gutterpunk, and somehow that’s enough to get by. Hell, she does more than get by, she carves a swath of violence wherever she goes.

There’s something so very satisfying about seeing Street Angel kick ninja ass. I don’t know how to describe it other than by saying that perhaps there’s some sort of strange irony at work here, where experienced and jaded comic book readers get their kicks from seeing familiar tropes of superhero books treated like cordwood in a dojo. Whereas there are a lot of comparable books out now that fall flat on account of poor artwork (I’m thinking Tupelo and Scurvy Dogs here, primarily), the art in Street Angel is amazingly apt. Neither overly ornate nor archly minimal, it merely supports the story perfectly.

Street Angel #2 involves a group of Spanish pirates, led by Hernando Cortez, magically transported to modern-day Angel City by the whims of the Incan sun god Inti. They run into some ninjas, and of course ninjas and pirates just got to fight. Then an Irish astronaut named Cosmick crash lands in the ghetto, and chaos ensues. It sounds complicated, but really it’s not. Basically, Rugg and Maruca throw everything they can possibly think of into the stew and watch as Street Angel makes her way through the carnage.

(Oddly, I should point out I’m actually a descendent of Hernando Cortez – great pedigree, huh? I got a great uncle who does all that genealogy stuff.)

There’s really not a lot more to say. It’s pretty simple: Street Angel rocks. I hope it lasts for many, many years to come. If you’re not buying, it, you should be.

Weekend At Bernie’s

So let us now discuss Chuck Austen.

The majority of the mainstream comics community detests Austen with a wrath that burns hotter than the fire of a thousand suns. Because I haven’t read anywhere near all the man has written, I have remained resolutely indifferent on the subject of his skill. But I have quietly admired his work ethic, his admirable persistence and his dogged indifference to the very vocal segment of fandom that chose him as their personal whipping boy.

Does this mean I admire him for being a hack? No, I admire him for being a professional. He was hired to do a job, and he pleased his bosses the best he could. He didn’t lose sight of the fact that his bosses were the men at Marvel who signed his checks, and not the X-Men fans over at Comicon.com. He certainly tried his best to please everyone, however, but in the end he just couldn't do it. Although he was certainly responsible for more than a few boneheaded blunders, I think that anyone in that position, thrown into the most unforgiving and demanding task in all of mainstream comics (writing Uncanny X-Men, the flagship title of the flagship franchise of the number one publisher in the industry), would be in over their head. The fact that Uncanny slipped in prestige compared to Morrison’s New is not his fault, that particular damage was done by Joe Casey, not Austen. (Casey himself admitted he hadn’t been the man for the job in his recent Journal interview.)

I don’t make a habit of reading X-Men comic books. My recent dalliance with New was solely due to the allure of Morrison, and sure enough I quit the book, and the characters, the moment he was gone. But I keep an ear open and I read the occasional issue of this or that off the shelf. I think Austen’s reputation suffered greatly at the hands of bad editing. I haven’t actually read the things myself, but I have read many detailed explications on just why his various Nightcrawler stories (both the anti-pope saga and the bogus origin story) were the most convoluted, nonsensical and contradictory tales ever printed. I feel bad for Nightcrawler fans, I do – to read mainstream comics at all, ever, is to feel the pain of seeing a favorite character manhandled by greasy thugs at some time or another. But the stories would never have seen print if an editor – probably two or three editors, given the way Marvel works – hadn’t signed off on it.

I think the rise and fall of Chuck Austen reveals a lot about the ways the comic book industry has both changed and stayed very much the same over the last five years – pretty much, you could say, since Quesada and Co. came to power. The magic word, the word behind all the controversy, all the fan uproar, the entire hubbub, is tone.

There was a conscious decision made in the corridors of power at Marvel to change the tone of their books. All the controversial points in the last few years of Marvel history - "decompressed storytelling", personnel shuffling, strange creative decisions – it was all part of an attempt to change the way Marvel books were read and perceived.

Chuck Austen embodied the type of tone they were trying to capture. They wanted the books to read more naturally, to be less indebted to ingrained continuity, to be less afraid to change the character status quos, and to be less afraid to take stylistic chances. In other words, and this was undoubtedly a big issue at every step of the process, they wanted to create books that could more easily be picked up and enjoyed by any average Jane or Joe off the street. Austen, with his background in TV and his breezy, conversational writing style, fit perfectly into this plan.

On paper, there’s nothing wrong with any of these goals. But in practice, as Austen learned the hard way, it doesn’t always work like that. In order for the books to read more naturally, you have to change the way people talk. Instead of small balloons with dense narrative exposition, you have more "natural" banter spread over more panel real estate, enabling the writer to at least make an attempt at creating a more conversational rhythm. The problem is that while this is a perfectly valid way of writing your comics, the folks who buy the books might feel slightly ripped off if they start getting less story than they bargained for.

But really, it all has to do with tone. Pick out an average issue of a Marvel, DC or Image comic from ten or twelve or twenty years back. Not a lot usually happened in one of those, either, but it happened in a much more dynamic manner. There’d usually be a fight of some sort, every issue without fail, maybe two. There’d be some time spent going over the soap opera back-story, with heavy expositional captions that put the most information across in the most artless way possible. There’d be a few pages devoted to ongoing subplots. And then – blammo! – another fight and a cliffhanger. Without fail. Any book that delivered on all these elements was considered a satisfying read.

So the Powers That Be didn’t want the books to read like this anymore – fine. But they failed to take into account the fact that even though events of lasting import may not transpire every issue, the old system at least made you feel like something had happened every issue. Maybe it was stupid or contrived or hokey or all of the above, but at least the time passed more slowly. Nowadays, books are much more realistically paced. By realistically paced, I mean that a lot of time is spent waiting for things to happen, and mulling over things that have already happened, instead of having things actually happen.

Take your average issue of Daredevil. Used to be, whatever DD’s relationship problems were, they’d be fleshed out in a series of thought balloons while he was swinging over the city or bashing a bad guy. But now, while thought balloons may not have been totally outlawed, these things are supposed to take a more natural course. People really don’t do a lot of thinking and talking when they fight in real life. Even a short, one-sided fight is probably going to take all of your concentration for the duration. So, you’ve got to spend more time on the soap opera elements since you’ve essentially separated all the disparate narrative parts that used to go on pretty much simultaneously. You’ve got more ground to cover and the same amount of time to cover it in, so naturally people are going to feel like they’re being cheated.

Of course, "writing for the trades" has undoubtedly impacted this as well, but I have to say from my own perspective that this doesn’t really bug me. If I like a superhero book enough to want to read it, I’ll want to read it the moment it hits the shelves. If I don’t care enough to want to read it when it comes out the first time, I most likely won’t care about the trade. Some books, like Bendis’ Daredevil, are good enough that even though I’m getting less "story" per issue than I was ten years ago, I feel like I’m getting more than my money’s worth. If "Born Again" had been produced now, it would have probably lasted a lot longer than a mere six issues – probably twelve, if not twenty-four, to cover all the ups-and-downs of that particular story. Would it be any less enjoyable? That’s one of those questions that you really can’t answer, but I tend to think the answer would be no.

Austen tried his best to give the fans what he thought they wanted. He very astutely reasoned that one of the primary attractions for comic book buyers is the ongoing soap-opera elements. But from what I gathered and read he didn’t have a feel for the way comic book soap-opera is supposed to read. It seemed awkward, out of place. The fact is, what passes for soap opera in most comics is anything but what passes for soap opera in conventional media, and this is the wall that Austen came up against. You can’t surprise people. If a relationship is popular, or even just something that people are used to, you can’t change it. No less an authority than Chris Clarement exclaimed, famously, on his return to the X-Books a few years back: "you can’t fuck with Rogue and Gambit." (Not an exact quote, but you get the gist.) It must have been somewhat galling, considering that he had created and shepherded both characters through their developing years, but the romance that grew between them in his absence was - and is still, I assume - considered sacrosanct. Soap opera in comics is not surprising the readers by separating Rogue and Gambit, soap opera in comics is finding a way for Rogue and Gambit to stay together, even though from a storytelling POV that’s about the most boring development in the universe. But it makes the fans feel warm and mushy inside, and that’s why they buy X-Men..

Same with Jean Grey and Cyclops, and I’m amazed Morrison’s violation of that unspeakable taboo didn’t cause more uproar. But the fact is that there was more continuity supporting Cyclops being a rather immature flake whose romance with Jean, rather than being an immortal love story, was a childhood infatuation that he never grew out of, than most fans probably realize. Here’s an instance where Morrison was using continuity to his advantage, but it still took fans unawares because he was using it to come to rather surprising conclusions. Austen, however, seemed to have a slippery grasp of continuity despite his avowals to the contrary. His understanding of the kind of soap-opera elements that are popular was even worse: I flipped through a few issues of Uncanny, and while I thought that the various characters were acting in interesting ways, I understood in a moment why the fanboys didn’t like it.

The Angel and Husk (who I remembered from my days reading Gen X as a very modest girl, not the kind to wear a red miniskirt in a fight – but I digress) was not a relationship that the fans would go for because it came out of nowhere. Messing with Havok and Polaris was similarly unpredictable, because that is one of those Relationships (in capital letters) on which the backs of the X-franchise is built. Although Polaris has a well-documented history of mental instability (dating back, if I recall, to her first appearance), the normal comic book way out of this would be to have Havok deliver a long soliloquy talking about his "immortal love that has crossed the universes" or something like that. But instead of all that, the issue I read had Havok basically saying what you or I would, "hey, this green-haired bitch is nuts, I am going to make a pass at the cute brunette." Because said brunette chick is not someone who the readers have any attachment to, the relationship is deemed Bad. Because the relationship is dealt with in an elongated, more naturalistic fashion, it is even deemed Boring.

So even though, on paper, these things seem like rational ideas, the fact that they were a breach with "established continuity" was enough to get fans up in arms. I’m referring to the romantic subplots in Austen’s X-Men, but you can take this to apply, really, to any development that occurred under the auspices of Nu-Marvel. Change was always supposed to be transitory: at the end of the day, Cyclops still loves Jean. But even though that’s not the way the world works, that’s the way that the comic book world works. The fact that the Juggernaut and Professor X made up after feuding for forty years makes a ton of sense: the Juggernaut’s motivation was never anything that couldn’t have been resolved in two-page’s worth of well written dialogue. Sure enough, they finally did get past it and the fans think it stinks, merely because it breaks with continuity. Doesn’t matter if it makes any sense - woe betide the plot development that makes sense at the expense of the fans’ comfort zones.

We’ll discuss that eternal bugbear, continuity, and why it’s not actually a bad thing, tomorrow.





Travels With Larry Part XIII

White Death

I am skeptical by nature. What can I say, I can’t really excuse it save to say that I think its prudent to be a skeptic. I’ve read a lot of comic books over the course of my life, and I must say I’ve read a lot of the bad ones and not so many of the good ones.

This is usually the part of the review where I’d say "White Death defies all my cynical expectations", or "White Death lives down to my worst expectations." But really, I found the book good. Not very good, not mediocre, just good. There are some very good elements interspersed with some good ideas and a sound grounding in historical reality, and even if I didn’t find myself totally riveted throughout the course of the narrative I was, on the balance, entertained.

Italy was not a good place to be during either of the World Wars. This is not to imply that any of the different warring nations were particularly good places to be. Certainly, both the disastrous Russian offences of 1914-15 and the horrible Nazi invasion of Russia in WWII were about as bad as war has ever been. But people do seem to forget that Italy saw some of the fiercest fighting in both wars.

White Death takes much of it’s factual basis, as well as a liberal sprinkling of contextual quotes, from Alberto Diaz’s book by the same name, White Death: War in the Trentino. The book focuses on the unbelievable destruction wrought by the use of artillery bombardments to bring down avalanches on enemy forces. It’s a savage and inhumane weapon, and almost uncontrollable to boot, but as with nitroglycerine at the turn of the century and atomic weaponry at the end of the Second World War, the temptation to use such an awe-inspiringly powerful force in the service of war was too great to resist. The morality of the atomic bomb’s usage in WWII is still open to great debate, but for the sake of brevity I will point out that White Death takes the uncomplicated stance that when the forces of nature are harnessed in the service of war, there is really no way to control the forces that may be unleashed.

If the Travels With Larry series has taught me anything, it would be to never again underestimate the versatility of Charlie Adlard. If you had asked me about Adlard beforehand, my memory would have told me that I recognized the name from Topps’ long-running and fairly successful X-Files adaptation. But after reading Codeflesh, Astronauts in Trouble, and now White Death I have come to regard Adlard as one of the hidden talents of the industry. Sure, his faces may seem slightly stiff at times, and his compositions may be crowded, but in terms of a sheer willingness to try anything that comes down the line, I can’t thing of a more dexterous artist currently working. White Death is done with charcoal and chalk on gray paper, which is a technique that I can only really remember Will Eisner using in comics. It works really well at capturing the smoky, dusty fog of war, especially those found in the bitterly cold combat conditions of the Italian mountains. It’s a perfectly fitting technique for what is, essentially, a story of unremitting death and bleakness. Some of the passages are confusing, but I think this is something of an intentional choice on Adlard’s part: it’s hard to tell people apart in the midst of a war. It’s hard to distinguish individuals you know from strangers you’re trying to kill. There’s even a comment towards the end of the book about not looking the new recruits in the face, because most of them are going to die very soon. Sometimes it makes for confusing storytelling, but considering the nature of the story it’s a strategy that works surprisingly well.

My problems arise not so much from the art or any of the well-researched historical detail, but with some of the character moments. I’m not familiar with Rob Morrison’s past work, and there’s no biographical details, but based on the evidence herein I’d go out on a limb and say that he suffers from the same problem that a lot of historical writers wrestle with. That is, he is great at packing the stories with interesting detail and compelling action, but not so great at crafting unique and clearly defined characters.

There are a lot of moments throughout White Death that read very familiar to anyone with a passing acquaintance with war stories. There are the soldiers who get by with good-natured humor, there’s the grim death-dealers, there’s the first trip to a prostitute, there’s the gradual thickening of a raw recruit into a cold-blooded warrior. All the bases are touched on. It’s not that these details are false or untrue – I’m sure these stories unfold on a battlefield with depressing regularity and a startling sameness. But in the context of a work of historical fiction, you are not so much competing with the reality of the actual events but with every other writer who has ever tried to communicate the incommunicable realties of war. So, while there’s nothing wrong, per se, with his handling of the soldier who loses his legs, it’s by no means anything you haven’t seen before if you’ve seen Forrest Gump.

But this is, all things considered, a small complaint. Some of our very best writers of historical fiction, such as James Michener and Leon Uris, have had tin ears for dialogue and perfectly pedestrian characters. I don’t know what Morisson is doing now or may do in the future, but this book shows signs of promise.

There are many good things to like about White Death, such as Adlard’s art, the vivid historical setting, and the surprisingly amoral ending (I won’t give it away, save to say that the quote-unquote "bad guy" not only escapes without his comeuppance, but he is ultimately rewarded for being a royal SOB). Ultimately, the point is made that regardless of the vicissitudes of war, Mother Nature is Not To Be Fucked With. It’s a message with universal appeal, wouldn’t you say? The somewhat predictable character work is nothing to write home about, but all things considered it’s a slight blemish on a good book. Not great, as I said, and hardly mediocre, but definitely a worthwhile diversion for fans of historical fiction.

The Free Comic Book Day Massacre

So, uh, Free Comic Book Day was Saturday, or something. I don’t really know since I’ve never been to one of these things. See, I don’t really think its appropriate for a fellow like me to get excited about an industry outreach program like this because, you know, I already spend lots of money on comic books. Why go down to the store and take a pile of freebie reprints of bad Marvel books that I didn’t buy in the first place, if they could possibly be placed into the welcoming and appreciative hands of Little Jimmy Hunkle, 12 Year Old Cancer Patient? (There’s another problem: young cancer patients are not exactly a growth demographic.)

But seriously folks, I just don’t like leaving the house.

That’s Entertainment, which is where I do most of my shopping (in conjunction with the occasional trip to Newbury Comics), was having a grand old celebration, with Kurt Busiek and Paul Ryan signing comics and clowns and games and real live pony rides (I think I might be making the clowns and games part up, but I’ll never really know.) I thought about going, but really, I’ve met Kurt Busiek before. I’ve even had a few discussions with him online. Other than going to badger him about eventually doing that book on the Australian Gold Rush that he mutters about now and again, what was I gonna do? "Hey, remember me? I was the guy at Wonder Con a few years back who tried to tell you how good the Howard The Duck movie was . . . "

I do slightly regret missing Paul Ryan, because I’ve always liked his work and thought that he was one of the unsung heroes of Marvel, with great runs on some of my favorite books, like DP7, Quasar, and of course, the ever-underrated DeFalco/Ryan run on Fantastic Four. But as I have said before, most of my comics are 3,000 miles away, including my issue of FF #375 signed by Tom DeFalco and Danny Bulandi, but not Paul Ryan. So, that is just one of those things that I will have to deal with as I cry myself to sleep one more time.

You know, re-reading the above passage, I realize it looks like I said that Ryan and Busiek would be signing clowns in addition to comic books. That would have been worth seeing. I wonder where they would have signed.







Captain America #27-28

Robert Morales ends his abbreviated run on Captain America with these two issues, and I have the unenviable task of informing you that they were by far the best issues of his run to date. As I feared, Morales really grew into the book during the course of his eight-issue run – to the point where I feel that his departure represents a serious loss for Marvel.

OK, his first story, the Cuba thing with Chris Bachalo, was a bit slow to start. I’ll give you that. Seeing Cap sit around and talk is hardly a substitute for slam-bang action in the Mighty Marvel Manner. But the second half of that story was a lot better than the first half. There’s something of a visible learning curve whenever a new writer appropriates a series, and for a writer like Morales the learning curve was especially tangible. I’ve discussed it before, but it’s worth mentioning again: how do you make a character like Cap, who thrives in all-ages action-adventure stories, reflect the complications and ambiguities represented by the post 9-11 world? You can substitute Vietnam, Watergate, the Energy Crisis, Iran Contra, or La Affaire Lewinsky when talking about the challenges faced by the creative teams of different eras. It’s not a new question.

I thought the Marvel Knights Cap series started strong, with a few really memorable issues by John Ney Reiber and John Cassady. For whatever reason, however, they just couldn’t capitalize on this momentum, and the series soon devolved into a rather shockingly bad mope-fest. You know you’re in bad shape when Chuck Austen represents a marked improvement over the preceding issues. The series lost its legs very early on, and aside from a rather bald-faced stab at fanboy-pleasing retro-adventure by Dave Gibbons and Lee Weeks, it had failed completely to live up to the promise of its high-profile relaunch and reformatted mission-statement.

In any event, even if it took him a few issues, Morales was shaping up to be the best Cap writer in ages. The thing he seems to have figured out in these past few issues is that Cap should never be standing still. He’s like a doctor or a fireman: he’s always got a beeper and at any moment there are ten places he needs to be. So, in a similar fashion to Spider-Man, he feels a little uncomfortable and a little guilty whenever he’s not in uniform fighting evil or saving lives. But unlike Spider-Man, he doesn’t really have a personal live to give him problems either. He’s Captain America 24-7, and he’s just fine with that. It’s not like Batman, where Bruce Wayne has this whole schizo thing going on where he’s really uncomfortable being anything other than a sexually repressed S&M freak who beats up circus clowns for his jollies. Being Captain America is Steve Rogers’ job, it’s what he does and who he is, and he’s OK with that. There’s no defining trauma, no overwhelming guilt, just the satisfaction of having a job to do and being able to do it well.

If anything, I think liberating Cap from his secret identity has given writers like Morales unlimited potential to actually deal with what makes Cap tick in more naturalistic manner. When he’s sitting there having a cup of coffee, he’s doesn’t have to pretend to be anything other than what he is. In any given situation, Cap is the most comfortable person in the room. He always knows what’s going on. Even in social situations where he has been shown to be something of a klutz, he is still has his bearings 100%. Cap has his share of angst, but he never questions his personal poise or his ability to do his job. That’s the Cap we’re presented with here.

Morales’ last two issues offer up something of a coda to his run on the series, including the Truth limited series. There’s some time travelling and a bit of hijinks at the San Diego Con of the future, including a pod full of tiny and insanely cute super-deformed super-villains. More importantly, these issues allow the readers a look at what Isaiah Bradley – the first Captain America – could have been like if events in Truth hadn’t unfolded as tragically as they did. Undoubtedly there’s a bit of paternal affection here, as Morales says goodbye to his characters and his particular contributions to the mythos. I’d be surprised if anyone – save possibly Christopher Priest – ever mentioned the events in Truth again.

There are some great moments between Cap and Iron Man, perfectly fitting with the characters’ longstanding friendship (and occasional differences). If I were a kid and this were my first Captain America comic book, I’d love it: it’s got action, a little bit of humor, and a reallt cool Iron Man guest appearance. It’s also got a little bit of some political stuff that would maybe go over my head, but the story also has enough bounce that it doesn’t linger over anything for too long. That’s what was missing from the title before Morales took over. The key ingredient to any Captain America story is motion. He doesn’t brood, he doesn’t sit around a lot. He thinks on his feet. He speaks succinctly. He’s a deep thinker when he has the luxury of time but he doesn’t let it get in the way of doing what needs to be done. That’s the Cap Morales presents here and that’s the Cap we know and live, that’s the Cap I’d want to read about if I were ten years old again – finally, after all these years.

Next issue he’s back to fighting Hydra and Co. I wouldn’t perhaps regret the change so much, considering how aimless the MK Cap has been, if it didn’t mean losing such a great writer as Morales. It’s especially ironic considering the fact that he seems to have finally mastered some of the particularly challenging aspects of Cap’s character.

I should also point out that these two issues feature art by Eddie Campbell. Now, I love Eddie Campbell’s work almost to distraction. I think he’s one of maybe the three or four best English-language cartoonists working today. But it is nothing short of surreal to see him working on Captain freakin’ America. He’s got the chops, that’s for certain, even if most readers might balk at his stiff figure work and slightly goofy faces. Those with long memories might be able to realize that what he’s actually doing here is paying tribute to the late, great Don Heck. Although these issues represent an obvious stylistic departure, it’s somewhat interesting to see the connections between someone as distinctive as Campbell and someone as familiar as Heck. Campbell is nothing if not a consummate historian of the form, and everything he does opens up a window onto the history and evolution of the craft of comics. Seeing him ape the super-hero style for this two-issue romp is a particular treat.

Blackout Edition

I was going to post last night, I really was. But the thign is, right when I was sittign down to post (and actually do a bunch of other things as well) the power went out because of this humongous thunderstorm that decided to crouch over the Rutland/Worcestor area. Long story short, the power was out for about eight hours, so you know I got a pile of work done.

Sorry. I did at least update the links bar to the left, to reflect the fact that neither Journalista or the ADD blog are still functioning. Amazing how I didn't notice that all this time before. And I added a few new articles to the scroll as well, for the two of your who care.

See you Monday.