Reconstruction
(Spoilers for World War Hulk #5 ahead*)

Over the last few days I've seen some surprisingly underwhelmed reactions to the final issue of World War Hulk across the blogosphere. I have to admit I don't quite know where from these negative reactions are coming. World War Hulk succeeded at every stage because it knew exactly what it wanted to be and cherished no aspirations to be something it wasn't. Simply on those terms, it was the most purely satisfying superhero book I'd seen in quite a long time. The last issue could hardly be termed a disappointment.

Why is it so hard to make good superhero books? It shouldn't be, since so damn many of the things are produced on a monthly basis, and yet here we are. Many of the most popular creators working in mainstream comics don't really do old-school superhero books - so much of Marvel's output, for instance, is hybridized in some way that manages to dilute the superhero elements while also delegitimizing whatever other genre conventions are at play; ie, crime, horror, fantasy, political soap-opera. More of DC's mainline could be said to be "proper" superheroes than Marvel's, but most of DC's mainline is incompetent gibberish. We've had a weird experiment in superhero books these past few years, wherein the texture and tone of the stories has been almost completely overturned. While the mainline continues to be popular, longtime, returning or semi-involved readers can be forgiven for thinking that at some point these wonderful fantasy playgrounds they remember from their misspent youths have become adulterated in some indefinable yet irreconcilable fashion.

If you are going to ask the basic question, "if there must be superhero comics, what kind of superhero comics should there be?" I think the answer is something along the lines of World War Hulk: the kind of massive, slobberknocker of a spectacle, the emotional resonance of which (such that it is) is dependent on long-term investment in the kind of shared-universe soap-opera content that can't really exist in any other medium. If you have to make Hulk stories, don't make Hulk stories that could live a double life as Sci-Fi Channel original movies (like, say, the majority of Bruce Jones' run on the book): make Hulk stories that couldn't exist anywhere but the printed page. I think the folks involved have succeeded quite nicely at just that.

World War Hulk got as strong a reaction as it did among a number of previously disinterested observers by virtue of the fact that it presented a handful of extremely old-fashioned -- some might even say terminally familiar -- tropes in the context of this new, subliminally alienating status quo. To put it another way: there is nothing more basic to the historical appeal of the Marvel Universe than a story where everybody teams up to fight the Hulk. They've been doing it since Fantastic Four #12, and subsequently every few years since then. It's a well-established tradition. It just so happened that by the time World War Hulk shipped enough people has been seriously disenchanted with the direction of the Marvel Universe -- and Marvel in general -- that they were actually rooting for the Hulk to do some serious damage. People who had been disappointed with Marvel throughout Joe Quesada's tenure were looking forward to something that promised a return to the storytelling values of their idealized youth (whenever that actually was), when Iron Man and Mister Fantastic weren't neoconservative warlords with Negative Zone prison camps. People who didn't know their Civil War from their Secret War were just thrilled that Marvel might actually put out something worth reading again. Something with broader appeal than limp political allegory.

And lo, it was good. Five issues of the Hulk kicking peoples' asses? Sign me up. It actually made me not see the Sentry as an embarrassing pseudo-idea that should never have been resurrected from it's original mini-series -- get that, it actually made me not hate the Sentry. Everyone at Marvel talks about how cool a concept the Sentry is, but in practice he's been a walking deus ex machina who never does anything for fear of totally derailing whatever story he's in. Back in the Golden Age nobody seemed to care that the Spectre was accorded equal status in the Justice Society alongside the Atom and Wildcat, but nowadays it's hard to write a plausible story with such a monstrously overpowered plot device in a team setting. To his credit, Greg Pak actually used the character's awkwardness to the benefit of the story. The Sentry may have seemed like a peripheral character throughout the book, but he actually had a pretty nice arc when all was said and done - which is more than I can say for just about any other book I'd ever read with the Sentry in it. The fact that, when all was said and done, a wild-card like the Sentry had to come in and play clean-up for the ineffective "heroes" who started the problem in the first place was also a nice bit. I saw some complaints that the Illuminati were essentially sidelined by the final battle, but that doesn't bother me, on either a structural or story basis: the book had nothing to do with their redemption, and their actions in regards to the Hulk, the whole reason the Hulk was mad in the first place (his forced exile from Earth), are never really expiated. The Hulk gets more in the way of absolution than Iron Man and Mister Fantastic, which makes a lot of sense.

As for that conclusion? Well, what were people expecting? It certainly didn't end on a "To Be Continued" like Amazons Attack. The last couple pages of foreshadowing for future stories were essentially superfluous -- I don't know if I care in the least about Son of Hulk or whomever that is, and my interest in reading about the Red Hulk is pretty much nil considering he's being "written" by Jeph Loeb**. But that's neither here nor there: the story actually had a pretty good conclusion. It will read pretty well between two covers***, which is more than I can say for Civil War, House of M, Infinity Crisis or 52 which, for all their specific virtues or vices, are all definitively inaccessible to untrained readers. World War Hulk may still be fairly dense, but Pak does a good job of establishing the book's plot and each characters' motivations at multiple points throughout. Plus, you know, things actually happen, and not just isolated plot points lurching around in a vacuum of forced characterization.

Of course, we all knew that the book would end with the Hulk being both defeated and at least partially redeemed. Most of us even had a pretty good idea how that was going to work, considering that the betrayal of one or more of Hulk's warbound allies had been foreshadowed in the last issues of Planet Hulk. But familiarity is really no great sin in the context of serial superhero comics, and it's in this context the reader needs to recognize that a character like the Hulk had to be rehabilitated, eventually. Pak pulled off everything he needed to pull off with enough alacrity that you barely even noticed the creak of plot necessity putting all the pieces back into place, or mostly back in place. There's really no other way the book could have ended, and in all honesty I don't know how people were thinking it was going to end, if not like this -- with a big fight, a "shocking" twist to prove the Hulk was being manipulated by events, and another shocking twist**** to cause the Hulk to turn against his betrayers, all aimed at rehabilitating the Hulk by partially reorienting the moral responsibility for the previous carnage. He's still to blame -- even if the actual casus belli was an act of betrayal on the part of one of his Warbound and not actually the Illuminati's responsibility, well, he still declared war on Earth and demolished Manhattan in the process. Whomever next writes the Hulk will have an interesting status quo on their hands*****.

So was I satisfied? Yes. I got everything advertised, and don't feel like a schmuck for caring, which is what has inevitably happened the last few dozen times I bothered to care about anything like this. I honestly don't know why some of you sound so disappointed -- pretty much everything laid out in the first issue is finished, or has reached some semblance of a conclusion. True -- there is the small matter of the Black Bolt who got his ass kicked back in issue #1 being a Skrull: but those who didn't think there was any way the Hulk could ever defeat Black Bolt will probably be pleased by that development. There was a bit at the end with Tony Stark's weird satellites that seemed a bit hard to follow, but then I have generally not been a fan of Iron Man's generalized "control all machinery" powers.****** These are only qualms, and the fact is that I was pleased by this story every step of the way. Not fine art, but a damn fine superhero story -- for those of us who still enjoy such things, the pleasures are as rare as hens' teeth these days.

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* I think "Spoiler Alerts" are silly, but I'll meet you halfway since the comic hasn't even been out for a week yet. Incidentally, Ozymandius is the evil mastermind at the end of Watchmen.

** "Written" is in scare-quotes to denote how little I care for Loeb's attempts at "writing".

*** Assuming they put in Pak's Incredible Hulk tie-in issues, which had some pretty essential information / foreshadowing concering the characters of Rick Jones and Miek. That's a big "if", but you really get the feeling that it's stuff that probably would have made it into the main series if they had the room; as opposed to, say, World War Hulk: Frontline, which reads more like stuff they thought up at the bar between mojitos.

**** In terms of Rick Jones -- he's about as dead as I am. He survived getting his spine cracked by the Hulk back in the 90s, he can survive getting gutted by Miek. Note that Pak didn't even waste a panel of an incidental character saying "Rick . . . can't be dead . . . he just can't be!" Why bother?

***** But since we know this person will be Jeph Loeb, we also know that nothing interesting will be done with said status quo.

****** Were those a result of Warren Ellis' run? I have to admit I think the whole of idea of having some kind of empathic control of electronic gadgets does a lot to strip the character's appeal -- less "cool exec with a heart of steel" and more "godlike cyberpunk messiah". In many ways the current incarnation of Iron Man seems a lot more like a member of the Authority than the Avengers -- and not merely in terms of his peremptory attitude towards geopolitics, but his new ill-defined deus ex machina set of powers. Iron Man shouldn't even have powers, for fucks' sake. That's as close to a central tenet of the character as you're likely to get.

Well, I'll Be Damned

I don't have words to articulate how odd I find this to be:

All The People Who Died

"Fitzgerald had clearly been an alcoholic since his college days, and he became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking. This left him in poor health by the late 1930s. According to Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, Scott claimed that he had contracted tuberculosis, but she states that this was usually a pretext to cover his drinking problems. However, Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli contends that Fitzgerald did in fact have recurring tuberculosis, and Nancy Milford reports that Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener said that Scott suffered a mild attack of tuberculosis in 1919, and in 1929 he had "what proved to be a tubercular hemorrhage". It may be pure coincidence but two of Fitzgerald's least likeable characters have the initials "TB" (an acronym for tuberculosis) - Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby and Tommy Barban in Tender Is the Night. Given the extent of Scott's alcoholism, however, it is possible that the hemorrhage was caused by bleeding from esophageal varices—enlarged veins in the esophagus that result from advanced liver disease. Fitzgerald's lifelong smoking habit undoubtedly also damaged his health and brought on the heart problems that eventually killed him.

"Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940. After the first, in Schwab's Drug Store, he was ordered by his doctor to avoid strenuous exertion and to obtain a first floor apartment, which he did by moving in with Sheilah Graham. On the night of December 20, 1940, he had his second heart attack, and the next day, December 21, while awaiting a visit from his doctor, Fitzgerald collapsed in Graham's apartment and died. He was 44." (Plink.)

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"Hemingway was upset by the photographs in his The Dangerous Summer article. He was receiving treatment in Ketchum, Idaho for high blood pressure and liver problems—and also electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for depression and continued paranoia, although this may in fact have helped to precipitate his suicide, since he reportedly suffered significant memory loss as a result of the shock treatments. He also lost weight, his 6-foot (183 cm) frame appearing gaunt at 170 pounds (77 kg, 12st 2lb).

"Hemingway attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and received ECT treatment again. Some three weeks short of his 62nd birthday, he took his own life on the morning of July 2, 1961 at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, with a shotgun blast to the head. Judged not mentally responsible for his final act, he was buried in a Roman Catholic service. Hemingway himself blamed the ECT treatments for "putting him out of business" by destroying his memory; some medical and scholarly opinion has been receptive to this view, although others, including one of the physicians who prescribed the electroshock regimen, dispute that opinion.[citation needed]

"Hemingway is believed to have purchased the weapon he used to commit suicide at Abercrombie & Fitch, which was then an elite excursion goods retailer and firearm supplier.[38] In a particularly gruesome suicide, he rested the gun butt of the double-barreled shotgun on the floor of a hallway in his home, leaned over it to put the twin muzzles to his forehead just above the eyes, and pulled both triggers. [39] Despite the circumstances, the coroner, at request of the family, did not do an autopsy." (Plink.)

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"Faulkner served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia from 1957 until his death at Wright's Sanitorium in Byhalia, Mississippi of a heart attack at the age of 64." (Plink.)

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"Following Campbell's death Parker returned to New York City and the Volney. In her later years, she would come to denigrate the group that had brought her such early notoriety, the Algonquin Round Table:

'These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days - Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them....There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn't have to be any truth...'

"Parker died of a heart attack at the age of 73 in 1967. In her will, she bequeathed her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. foundation. Following King's death, her estate was passed on to the NAACP. Her executrix, Lillian Hellman, bitterly but unsuccessfully contested this disposition. Her ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including her attorney Paul O'Dwyer's filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years." (Plink.)

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"In the late 1970s, Capote was in and out of rehab clinics, and news of his various breakdowns frequently reached the public. In 1978, talk show host Stanley Siegal did a live on-air interview with Capote, who, in an extraordinarily intoxicated state, confessed that he might kill himself. One year later, when he felt betrayed by Lee Radziwill in a feud with perpetual nemesis Gore Vidal, Capote arranged a return visit to Stanley Siegal's show, this time to deliver a bizarrely comic performance revealing salacious personal details about Radziwill and her sister, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

"In an ironic twist, Warhol (who had made a point of seeking out Capote when he first arrived in New York) provided the author with the platform for his next artistic renewal. Warhol, who often partied with Capote at Studio 54, agreed to paint Capote's portrait as "a personal gift"—rather than for the six-figure sums he usually charged—in exchange for Capote contributing short pieces to Warhol's Interview magazine every month for a year. Initially the pieces were to consist of tape-recorded conversations, but soon Capote dispensed with the tape recorder and chose instead to craft meticulously composed "conversational portraits" that applied his literary skills to the magazine's dialogue-driven format. Out of this creative burst came the pieces that would form the basis for the bestselling Music for Chameleons (1980). To celebrate this unexpected renaissance, he underwent a facelift, lost weight and experimented with hair transplants. Nevertheless, Capote was unable to overcome his reliance upon drugs and liquor and had grown bored with New York by the turn of the 1980s.

"After the revocation of his driver's license (the result of speeding near his Long Island residence) and a hallucinatory seizure in 1980 that required hospitalization, Capote became fairly reclusive. These hallucinations continued unabated and scans revealed that his brain mass had perceptibly shrunk. On the rare occasions when he was lucid, he continued to hype Answered Prayers as being nearly complete and was reportedly planning a reprise of the Black and White Ball to have been held either in Los Angeles or a more exotic locale in South America. ...

"Capote died in Los Angeles on August 25, 1984, aged 59.

"According to the coroner's report the cause of death was 'liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication.' He passed away at the home of his old friend Joanne Carson, ex-wife of late-night TV host Johnny Carson, on whose program Capote had been a frequent guest. He was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, leaving behind his longtime companion, author Jack Dunphy." (Plink.)

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"In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee suffered the first two in a series of heart attacks, which ultimately claimed his life four years later at the age of 45. He died on May 16, 1955 (while in a taxi cab en route to a doctor's appointment) -- coincidentally two days before the anniversary of his father's death. He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, NY." (Plink.)

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"Tennessee Williams died at the age of 71 after he choked on a eyedrop bottle cap in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York. He would routinely place the cap in his mouth, lean back, and place his eyedrops in each eye. His brother Dakin and some friends believed he was murdered. The police report, however, suggested his use of drugs and alcohol contributed to his death. Many prescription drugs were found in the room. Williams' lack of gag response may have been due to drugs and alcohol effects. (Plink.)

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"Lewis died in Rome on January 10, 1951 of advanced alcoholism. A final novel, World So Wide, was published posthumously." (Plink.)

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"Jack London's death is controversial. Many older sources describe it as a suicide, and some still do. However, this appears to be at best a rumor, or speculation based on incidents in his fiction writings. His death certificate gives the cause as uremia, also known as uremic poisoning. He died November 22, 1916, in a sleeping porch in a cottage on his ranch. It is known he was in extreme pain and taking morphine, and it is possible that a morphine overdose, accidental or deliberate, may have contributed." (Plink.)

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"Kerouac died on October 21, 1969 at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, one day after being rushed with severe abdominal pain from his St. Petersburg home by ambulance. His death, at the age of 47, resulted from an internal hemorrhage (bleeding esophageal varices) caused by cirrhosis of the liver, the result of a lifetime of heavy drinking. At the time of his death, he was living with his third wife Stella, and his mother Gabrielle." (Plink.)

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"The painful editing led Wolfe to abandon Perkins and Scribner's, and to switch publishers to Harper and Row. However, on a 1937 trip to the West, Wolfe was stricken with pneumonia. Complications arose, and he eventually was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the brain. He was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital, but the attempt at a life-saving operation revealed the disease had overrun the entire right side of his brain. He died three days later, never regaining consciousness." (Plink.)

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"Thompson died at his self-described 'fortified compound' known as 'Owl Farm' in Woody Creek, Colorado, at 5:42 p.m. on February 20, 2005, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

"Thompson's son (Juan), daughter-in-law (Jennifer Winkel Thompson) and grandson (Will Thompson) were visiting for the weekend at the time of his suicide. Will and Jennifer were in the adjacent room when they heard the gunshot, though the gunshot was mistaken for a book falling, and so they continued with their activities for a few minutes before checking on him: 'Winkel Thompson continued playing 20 questions with Will, Juan Thompson continued taking a photo.' Thompson was sitting at his typewriter with the word 'counselor' written in the center of the page.

"They reported to the press that they do not believe his suicide was out of desperation, but was a well-thought out act resulting from Thompson's many painful medical conditions. Thompson's wife, Anita, who was at a gym at the time of her husband's death, was on the phone with him when he ended his life.

"What family and police describe as a suicide note was delivered to his wife 4 days before his death and later published by Rolling Stone Magazine. Entitled "Football Season Is Over", it read:

'No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt'

(Plink.)

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"Despite his best writing efforts, however, he grew ever poorer. He was forced to move to smaller and meaner lodgings with his surviving aunt. He was also deeply affected by Robert E. Howard's suicide. In 1936 he was diagnosed with cancer of the intestine and he also suffered from malnutrition. He lived in constant pain until his death on March 15, 1937 in Providence.

"Lovecraft was listed along with his parents on the Phillips family monument." (Plink.

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"On October 3, 1849, Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore delirious and 'in great distress, and... in need of immediate assistance,' according to the man who found him, Joseph W. Walker. He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he died early on the morning of October 7. Poe was never coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition, and, oddly, was wearing clothes that were not his own. Poe is said to have repeatedly called out the name 'Reynolds' on the night before his death. Some sources say Poe's final words were 'Lord help my poor soul.' Poe suffered from bouts of depression and madness, and he may have attempted suicide in 1848.

"Poe finally died on Sunday, October 7, 1849 at 5:00 in the morning. The precise cause of Poe's death remains a mystery." (Plink.

Micrographica
by Renee French

There has always been something in Renee French's work that has discomforted me on a very profound level. I can't point to any specific thing in particular, it's more a confluence of a number of different disturbing factors at work. There are lots of creepy / strange artists in comics whose work doesn't bother me in the least. But something about French's work just disturbs me. Perhaps it's the level of hyper-detailed, gently pencil-etched reality married to the strange, unpalatable subject matter - like a Edward Gorey as interpreted by Barry Windsor-Smith. Unclean.



To this day I've got a copy of The Soap Lady on my shelf that remains only partially read, because I can't quite seem to muster up the courage to make it through the whole thing. It's not scary as such, or particularly horrifying or gory or anything like that - I can take all of those things. There's something particularly effective about French's work because it seems so nice and wholesome on the surface. And then you get down to the faceless monsters and weird soap creatures. The dichotomy is killer.



The devil is in the details. Micrographica is a conscious attempt on French's part to move past the world of detail-oriented hyper-real imagery and into the realm of a more "pure" cartooning - focusing simply on figures and forms interacting on the plane of the paper. To that end, every drawing in this book (except for a few studies at the end) were originally illustrated at the mind-boggling size of one-centimeter square. Given that, the amount of detail she does manage to fit into these panels is mind boggling - if she uses pen-nibs this small for everything she does, she will probably go blind before long. (Think of poor Bernie Wrightson and his quixotic Frankenstein portfolio!)



The story is simple, about as simple as you'd expect given the format limitations: a handful of tiny hairless rats are wandering around a field looking for food. They find some shit, a sandwich, a dead guy, and more shit, roughly in that order. They talk trash with each other as they do so.



I liked the book even if it was a quick read. I think something like this is far more interesting as a formal experiment than as a work in and of itself - although I was amused by the rats' antics, the whimsical plot points seemed more perfunctory than finely wrought. The narrative was initially posted online as it was completed, but I have no idea how it could possibly have read in serialized form. This is fun stuff, but slight.



The most interesting aspect of Micrographica will be whether or not this consciously-limiting experiment will have any effect on French's future work. I think a detail-oriented storyteller like herself can only benefit from flexing her muscles in such a fashion. Which is not to say she should abandon her customary style anytime soon. The fact is that I find her work absolutely repulsive, but I can't hold that against her because it is supposed to be repulsive. I hope she continues finding new ways to be repulsive for a long time to come, and maybe her and Al Columbia can have a big Kaiju battle in downtown Portland over who gets to be the creepiest motherfucker of them all.

Um, what?