Haw Haw!

Well, they did it . . . but boy, I have to admit they didn't do it like I thought they'd do it.

Joe Quesada has been so adamant about ending Spider-Man's marriage for so long that I honestly though that when he finally got the chance to undo it, he'd at least try to make it more convincing. But no, this isn't really any kind of conclusion to the marriage. What this is is a trial balloon with a foolproof escape hatch for when the creators get cold feet. They'll have an easy way to get the marriage back when they need to boost sales in 12-18 months, while also serving as a way to get rid of a few less popular changes permanently. For instance: the whole secret identity blown to shreds in Civil War thing? Organic webshooters? Spider-totems? "Sins Past"? The Other? Aunt May knowing his secret identity? All swept under the rug, and none of them will be missed much. (Maybe the Aunt May thing, that was a popular decision.) But when they undo this undoing they'll be able to take back the marriage while leaving all that other stuff safely in the past.

I am reminded of New Coke. Because, obviously, they want the readers to think they're really invested in doing things this way. I think, probably, Joe Quesada would be perfectly happy to let this be the new status quo. But the fact is it won't stick, and the fact that they left themselves such a huge back door is telling. I imagine - and this is simply conjecture, understand - that as much as Quesada would like to think the change will be popular and lasting, he's not stupid enough to think it couldn't easily be undone. He might even be the one called on to undo it. So: best lay the foundation now instead of having to bend over backwards in the future to undo a more "permanent" fix. Usually when editors and writers want to fool themselves into thinking a change is "permanent", they're just going out of their way to make it as hard as possible for the next set of creators to undo it. Look at Hal Jordan: they screwed him over so royally that his eventual return became of the most convoluted retcon jobs in the history of superhero comics. The Powers That Be at DC circa 1994 really wanted Hal Jordan gone, but even given that, he eventually returned. Just made more work for the next guys.*

I have to admit that even after my interest in the stories has receded to being primarily forensic, I am still fascinated by how these kinds of editorial processes are influenced by / interact with the demands of the marketplace. Has anyone else noticed that The Other has been forgotten? Even before "One More Day", the crossover had been forgotten. Its only real after-effect was a subplot in the b-line Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man book - hardly the paradigm-shifting status-quo upheaval that had been promised. The fact is that while the story itself had little or no impact, it did represent a turning point for the series - perhaps not the turning point the creators had initially intended, but sure enough, after it was over the books were obviously casting about in search of a new direction. When Civil War came around, they leapt at the chance to take Spider-Man in the most extreme direction possible, because they were probably already planning some kind of massive revamp to fix the fact that they'd painted themselves into a corner in a number of different ways. Take everything apart before you put it back together. I knew as soon as they did it - the secret identity thing - that they had a plan to put all these toys back in the box. And, it only makes sense that they'd try to see just how much other accumulated crap they could get away with negating when they did it.

I think one of the reasons why "One More Day" seems so anomalous is that Marvel doesn't make usually do these kinds of sweeping reboots. Since 1985, DC has had a pathological mania for internal cohesion that would put Martin Luther to shame, but Marvel - ostensibly the more "consistent" publisher, at least based on their calcified reputations circa 1969 - has always been much looser. For instance: about a decade ago they revealed that Tony Stark had been, since 1965, a mind-controlled double-agent for Kang the Conquerer. The "real" Stark was then subsequently and replaced with a teenage counterpart from an alternate universe. Thankfully, the whole "Onslaught" / "Heroes Reborn" thing happened, because it gave them a cover with which to back away from the story. And how exactly did they clear up the matter and restore Stark to his previous status quo? They didn't, they just hit the ground running after "Heroes Reborn" and never looked back.

Or, look at the Clone Saga. They went out of their way to repeatedly establish that the Peter Parker who had been married to Mary Jane and had served as Spider-Man for the previous twenty years was in fact a clone. And then, at the end of the of Clone Saga, it turned out that Ben Reilly had in fact been the clone all along. How was this so, after they had asserted so many times that Ben Reilly was in fact the real deal? They never mentioned this surprise reversal again. They also never mentioned Baby May again. (Leastwise, never in regular continuity.) Despite the clamor of a very vocal minority, the issue was dropped like a hot potato.

Joe Quesada probably thinks, if he has any sort of historical perspective, that the end of the marriage will be like the end of the Clone Saga, a quick unsatisfying fix that is ultimately just a means to an end. But I think it's much more likely that, regardless of the success of "Brand New Day", the decision will prove unpopular enough to be eventually reversed. They're smart to give themselves an easy out, because chances are they'll need it.

What is the long-time reader's initial reaction to the newly-single Peter Parker we see at the end of "One More Day"? He's cheating on MJ, whatever else he does. Even Mephisto acknowledges the sacrament of their marriage in the course of the story. It's laid on so heavily, in fact, I have a hard time believing we're really supposed to be able to warm to whatever new blonde hipster chick they're selling as his new romantic interest. They must think we have the collective attention spans of a cocker spaniel. One moment - everlasting love that will endure any hardship; the next - oh I can has blonde hipster chick? I begin to see why J. Michael Straczynski wanted his name taken off this story - there's too many plot hammers striking in contradictory directions. For all you can say about some of the questionable stories he put his name to while writing the book, they were still his stories, for better or for worse. This, however, isn't a story that has any real purpose other than to enable other stories - not the first time that's ever happened, but boy is it obvious.

---

* Of course, it's not like creators haven't been known to complicate things unnecessarily as well. When they "killed" Green Arrow back in the mid-90s, to be temporarily replaced by Conor Hawke, they ("they" being Chuck Dixon) did it in such a way that the next writer could bring Oliver Queen back with no fuss whatsoever: there was a plane crash in Metropolis, no body was ever found, and Hal Jordan / Parallax was seen at the site of the empty grave after the funeral. You had a no-muss, no-fuss resurrection right there: Parallax swooped in to save Ollie before the plane crashed and hid him someplace where Superman couldn't find him. But no, when Kevin Smith brought the character back he had to think up the most ass-backwards convoluted ten-issue-long resurrection story conceivable. I could have done it in the space of a page, and saved the world from a "grim & gritty" update of Stanley & His Monster in the process.

It's Christmas Time in Hollis, Queens

In keeping with the season, I guess I'll take the week off. Not because I necessarily don't want to blog, but because experience has taught me that the audience for comics blogs is severely curtailed around this time of year. And, honestly, that's as it should be - most people are doing stuff that does not involve trolling the internets for Green Lantern-related witticisms. I myself will have time on my hands, and it will be a very quiet Christmas. I do have plenty to keep me busy, don't worry. I purchased a small chicken to bake, and I think that shall be my Christmas dinner.

So, since I probably won't post again until the New Year, I'll take this opportunity to thank you all for coming, day in and day out, and making this blog what it is today. Exactly what it is, I don't know, but it's something - either the most cynical comics blog or the most deluded, I can't tell which? January of 2008 represents our fourth anniversary - who out there thought I'd still be doing this four years in? Anyone? I certainly didn't. It seemed, back in the day, as if new comics blogs were popping up right and left, and this blog was only one of many. Now, there really aren't that many of us left who've been publishing continuously the entire time - even Dirk, the spiritual godfather for so many of us "Class of '03" bloggers, went away and came back. So, ha ha, you lost your seniority, sucker.

So, thanks to everyone for reading. I'd like to extend especial thanks to Tom and Milo for extending the hand of friendship to this blog and myself. And an extra special shout out to Neilalien - who has personally gone above and beyond the call of duty on more than one occasion to ensure that this blog - and this blogger - keep on truckin'. I don't often say thanks - it's not that I'm ungracious, just easily embarrassed. And the support I've gotten from Neil, as well as Milo, Tom, Mike, Dorian and everyone else, simply represents an embarrassment of riches. It's certainly far more in the way of legitimate, lasting friendship than I ever expected to get when I signed up for this chintzy Blogger account lo those many years ago.

So, enough of the sappy shit. Let's go forward and make 2008 the year we finally kill comics for good! Yay!

To Your Scattered Bodies Go

There is no field in publishing more cursed with lame book covers than that of fantasy and science fiction. Even romance novels, for all the lame romance covers in the world, usually succeed in advertising the basics of their contents on their covers with some modicum of dignity (hot, pulsating dignity, but dignity nonetheless). But in the realm of the dreaded fantasy / sci-fi section at Borders, crap is king. And even the best covers are doomed to obsolescence, as they'll only be undone in a few years when the publishers cycle through the backlist and put new covers and trade designs across everything. The "golden age" of sci-fi book covers is undoubtedly the 1960s, but unfortunately you rarely see those classic covers designs used anymore. Big-name authors usually have unified trade-dresses that may look nice spine-out on a shelf but which minimize the effect of art in favor of design. (And, frankly, current series design for authors like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick is abominable.)

This isn't even touching on the biggest bane of the book-cover world, movie covers . . . for about a decade there the only version of Starship Troopers you could find in the store had the 1997 movie poster on the cover. You still can't find a copy of Solaris without George Clooney on the cover (obviously they overestimated the demand for movie tie-ins for an art-house Stephen Soderbergh remake of a Russian film adaption of a highly cerebral Polish science fiction novel. I hate movie covers on principle, as I think most people do.) Anyway, the following covers have been lovingly filched from this site.



By John Stevens. This is the current paperback cover for Philip Jose Farmer's To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first volume in the "Riverworld" saga. This is simply dreadful - while it gets points for attempting to accurately the river valley's dimensions (still kind of cramped), the presence of gigantic orange colored corpses floating through the picture is a poor choice. For the record, there are no gigantic floating orange corpses in the book. And the way the lettering of the title is obscured by what appears to be an attempt at a waterfall design . . . less said of that the better. This would look great airbrushed on the side of a van, however.



By Don Ivan Punchatz. This is the image from the unified paperback trade dress used for the 80s printings. Slightly better, because it's at least not incredibly repulsive. But an especially poor transliteration of Riverworld's physical dimensions nonetheless. The fact that the characters on the cover appear in period clothing is distracting, since there was no way to manufacture culture-specific textiles on the planet, and also, the men should not have any facial hair. And the anonymous Greek dude there is apparently chilling with a male prostitute straight out of the Tenderloin circa 1975 - not that Greek dudes didn't love other dudes, but an odd choice for a mass market paperback book cover nonetheless. Probably not what they intended?



By Bob Eggleton. Mucus! Plus, also, things that don't exist in the book, like giant yellow half-dome brain things.



Here, Socrates and Joe Dallesandro seem to be chilling at midnight. You can sort of hear "Everybody's Talking" in the background.



By Keith Scaife. This is probably the best of the bunch, in that it is 1) a competent painting that seems to have been made by someone with functioning eyes, 2) well-designed with an eye towards not crowding out the text elements and 3) a fairly accurate representation of the physical dimensions of the Riverworld. I'd quibble, again, that the mountains would probably need to be at least twice as high to be in proportion with the river, but it could work if the relative sizes of the boat and grailstones are exaggerated. This is pretty much exactly how I've always envisioned the river valley.



By Joe Petagno. A striking central image but, um, just not a very good one, or a particularly accurate representation of the scene in question. Why so much icky green?



By Vincent Di Fate. And this 1980 book cover design succeeds in showing us things that don't exist in any of the Riverworld books. I mean, is this supposed to be the Grail Tower at the north pole (which isn't even described until the second book)? Why is Big Brother watching over bodies as they are inexplicably being levitated into outer space? And what the heck are those other weird buildings?



By Patrick Woodroffe. This seems to be a metaphorical representation of events and settings that, while appearing in the book, do not appear in anything resembling this fashion. This is an incredibly ugly cover and would probably make most people recoil in horror from having anything to do with the contents of this book. Also, while nudity is pretty much omnipresent in thes series, and it's good to see the cover acknowledge that fact, they could have probably picked a much more tactful way of hiding Sir Richard Francis Burton's wang.



Unknown. This is the cover for the British first edition hardcover. Obviously not the American edition. There is a lot of sex in the book, as well as psychoactive drug use, so this at least has the virtue of being a vaguely accurate representation of portraying an event which actually happens between these two covers.



This is the first Berkeley paperback printing of the book, and it is surprisingly very ugly. I say "surprisingly", because it's a Richard Powers cover, and he usually did good work. This? Not so much. There is apparently only so much that can be done with the motif of showing naked hairless bodies floating in featureless space.



By Ira Cohen. Original hardcover dusk jacket. I like the yellow type, but the rest of it just doesn't work. Remarkably dated and just sort of ugly.

As bad as these English-speaking covers are, foreign printings of sci-fi books usually have covers that are orders of magnitude worse. To Your Scattered Bodies Go does not disappoint in this regard, and you can see some of them here - I really wish the scans were bigger, though. My favorite is probably the Corinne Gosset cover to the Danish printing of Genopstandelsen, although the Hebrew one that looks like a Tool video is growing on me. And the Russian cover by Martinenko & Soinov seems to have wandered in off the street from the back of a high-school composition book, which is always a good thing. It gets bonus points for actually illustrating a scene in the book that doesn't involve naked bodies floating in the ether, i.e. Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves kicking some ass with a bow and arrow. Or at least, that's what I think it is, and not some random illo from a Terry Brooks novel.

To the Citizens of New Hampshire:

I hardly need to remind you of the importance of the New Hampshire Presidential primary -- both to the candidates and to the country. This importance stems from more than the fact of its being first. It stems also from the spirit in which New Hampshire's voters approach the election, keenly aware of their special responsibility, of the broad influence of their votes.

In 2008, your responsibility is greater than ever. The nation is in grave difficulties, around the world and here at home. The choices we face
are larger than any differences among Republicans or among Democrats, larger even than the differences between the parties. They are beyond politics. Peace and freedom in the world, and peace and progress here at home, will depend on the decisions of the next President of the United States.

For these critical years, America needs new leadership.

During fourteen years in Washington, I learned the awesome nature of the great decisions a President faces. During the past eight years I have had a chance to reflect on the lessons of public office, to measure the nation's tasks and its problems from a fresh perspective. I have sought to apply those lessons to the needs of the present, and to the entire sweep of the 21th Century.

And I believe I have found some answers.

I have decided, therefore, to enter the Republican Presidential primary in New Hampshire.

I will try to meet as many of you as I can -- Republicans, Democrats and Independents, those who will vote in March and those who will vote in November. I will invite your comments. I will answer your questions. I will discuss with you my own vision of America's future, and I will ask for yours.

I have visited New Hampshire often -- as a candidate, as a public official, and as a private citizen. I appreciate the many courtesies you have paid me. I am deeply grateful for your support in past elections. But in asking your support now, I ask it not on the basis of old friendships. We have entered a new age.
And I ask you to join me in helping make this an age of greatness for our people and for our nation.

Sincerely,
Richard Nixon

Shortcomings
By Adrian Tomine

I've been sitting on this book for a while. I've wanted to talk about it since I first got a copy, but I haven't really known how to approach the topic. This is one of the year's biggest books. The plaudits have been almost universally enthusiastic. This is obviously a significant work that places Adrian Tomine near the head of the class of modern cartoonists.

And yet . . . and yet . . .

I can't help but feel disappointed. Considering just how many very intelligent people have praised this book, I feel almost miserly. Now, I've certainly never been one to shy away from voicing unpopular opinions -- but the fact in this case is that I really, genuinely like Adrian Tomine. I think the first few issues of Optic Nerve, combined with the early minicomics compiled in the 32 Stories trade, are probably some of my favorite comics, ever. I like them that much: even though Tomine was nowhere near as masterfully skilled a cartoonist as he would eventually become, those early stories remain pretty powerful. Powerful, perhaps, because of the fact that his style was nowhere near as polished as it would become.



"I liked your old stuff better": what a cop-out, what a perfectly insulting thing to say to such a hard-working artist. Hardly the basis for any kind of measured aesthetic judgment. And yet, a funny thing has happened over the past few years: I've come to dread the release of new issues of Optic Nerve. I still buy them, I still read them, but every issue brings with it a faint cloud of unease, the unavoidable acknowledgement that something very essential has gone missing. He's obviously talented, and despite his slow work rate he's undeniably one of the most conscientious cartoonists currently working. He puts a lot of effort into his work, and it shows. But a long time ago it occurred to me that the hard work was a bit too evident for my comfort. And the solidification of Tomine's "mature" style also codified a number of reflexive "ticks" that had annoyed me from the days of his earliest work.

Tomine's style is almost crystalline in its accomplished form. There isn't so much as a single line throughout the whole of Shortcomings that at all out of order. But this sense of order exerts a repulsive effect on the reader. Tomine's dogged insistence on providing such a rigorously mundane perspective for his stories -- setting almost every panel at eye-level with his characters and never deviating from this design -- makes the book, frankly, a chore to read. Add this to the fact that Tomine has some of the least expressive brush strokes in the industry and the result is an overwhelmingly sterile reading experience. Honestly, it looks like he probably spends his free time perfecting his brush-stroke so that it looks indistinguishable from a Rapidograph line. I am reminded of the passage in Eisner's The Dreamer where Billy Eyron and Lew Sharp compete to see who can produce the thinnest, steadiest line, tracing over a single mark on a piece of paper repeatedly until one of them slips up and makes the line thicker . . .

I dislike Shortcomings for much the same reason as I was ultimately disappointed in issues #22 and #23 of Dan Clowes' Eightball, and why I've had a hard time getting excited about much of Chris Ware's post-Jimmy Corrigan work. This is High Formalism at work. But whereas both Clowes and Ware at least use their pinched formal mastery to involving effect (as in Clowes' disparate narrative shifts and Ware's tactile use of the comics' page as temporal maps), Tomine takes the asceticism one step further. His narrative is completely linear. The effect is very prose-like, inasmuch as Tomine seems to be very much in line with the notion of minimalist realism. There is a reason everyone always compares him to Raymond Carver, besides the tendency of blurb writers to repeat twice-told sentiments.

Is this the best use that can be made of the comics form? I wear my prejudices on my sleeve. I cannot say that this is not an excruciatingly well-constructed book, but the result is simply exhausting. I can't help but think that it's not particularly fertile ground for cartooning -- slow, labored, and pained.



I always agreed with the popular assessment that Eric Rohmer was the weakest link of the original "New Wave" filmmakers, and watching the entirety of his Six Morality Tales recently (thanks to their timely release by the Criterion collection) only reaffirmed this opinion. Rohmer had an ear for dialogue, but absolutely no eye for moviemaking at all. Of course, his adherents would say that that's hardly the point of Rohmer's work: he is defined by nothing so much as his dogged resistance to superfluous aestheticism. Be that as it may, his films are nonetheless a trial to sit through. I have no trouble sitting with rapt attention through four-hour long Russian films about crying peasants, but Rohmer's dogged disinclination to create any kind of visual through-line for his viewers crosses over from daring and into monotony really quick. I haven't seen many of Rohmer's later films (can't say I'm rushing to put them in my queue, either), but his early work just doesn't hold up very well at all. I daresay if it weren't for his intimate connection to Godard, Truffaut and Cahiers du Cinéma, he wouldn't even be a footnote today.

As with Rohmer, Tomine's constipated perspective influences the way his characters communicate and are perceived. It's one thing to create unpleasant characters -- that's hardly unusual -- but the way that Tomine illustrates these characters' disreputable station renders them sincerely unpalatable. The omnipresent rectangular panel through which we are allowed to see this world is a periscope into an ant farm filled with rancid asshole termites.

For all the talk about how convincing Tomine's character work is, there are established types that wander through many of his books. You've got the disaffected, borderline surly youth who seems to be almost irredeemably misanthropic save for the fact that the book is told over his or her perspective. They invariably define themselves through their interactions with indefinably less "cool" individuals. Tomine characterizes cool and uncool through the monstrously exaggerated shorthand of musical taste. I am reminded of the grossly unsympathetic musician in Optic Nerve #8 who talked about setting his lyrics to a "trip-hop" beat -- que lastima! As irredeemable as Tomine's misanthropes actually are, they remain inestimably superior to those who actually do things, because invariably those who do are nowhere near as smart / smug / jaded as those who merely sit and wait.

We see this in Shortcomings with the character of Autumn Phelps, a stereotypically vapid blonde proto-hipster who plays guitar in a performance-art punk band. Her band's performance opens the second chapter of the book, and it's pretty dire stuff: naked hippies acting out weird dance moves while the band provides abstract noise; "K-RRANNG", "SKREEEEEE". There is absolutely no doubt in the reader's mind how they are supposed to interpret this kind of stimulus. As Autumn puts it, "We're taking the physicality of modern dance and the improvisation of free jazz and infusing it with a punk sensibility." Do you want to see a show with that description? Me neither. But in Tomine's cosmos it's better to be an ineffectual nihilist than to actually try to do anything, regardless of how silly it may seem.



Which is not to say that Ben Tanaka is supposed to be anything less than reprehensible. He's a pretty despicable character, unable to make a move in his life for fear of revealing his vulnerability, the story's titular "shortcomings". But he doesn't find any kind of resolution or epiphany at the end of the book. We are left instead with a long silent sequence featuring Ben returning to the Bay Area by air, and his view through the window of the airplane. It's a great scene, one of the best in the book. I wish more of the book had managed to hit the same note of ambiguous, mute melancholy.

Tomine telegraphs his ending from the very first pages of the book, in which we see the final moments of a Bay Area Asian film festival over the shoulders of a rapt audience of Asian-American viewers -- all rapt, that is, except for Tanaka. He rebels against the pre-digested, sentimental immigrant narratives on the screen, Asian-Americans coming to terms with the wisdom of their "native" culture, managing to hold onto traditional values while painlessly assimilating. I don't think Tomine directly mentions The Joy Luck Club, but the implication is unavoidable: there isn't going to be any neat resolution here, no tearful reconciliation of traditional and American values.

But wait, Adrian Tomine, I don't think I quite got what the theme of your story was: "It's almost like you're ashamed to be Asian." "It's like you're obsessed with the typical western media beauty ideal, but you're settling for me." "So I'm brainwashed by some insidious media conspiracy into thinking that blonde-haired, blue-eyed women are attractive!" "If you hang out with her one more time and don't make a move, be prepared to be banished to 'Neutered Asian Friend' territory forever!" The sound you hear is the book being scribbled onto the reading list for "Comp Lit 150 - Hybridity in East-West Culture Conflict".



I make light, and perhaps the flip tone isn't necessary. But regardless, there is something plainly schematic in the way Tomine lays out his thematic material. This is obviously a story that's very close to his heart -- these characters and situations keep appearing in his books, and the painful grasping towards a resolution that cannot be achieved is constantly reiterated. I can't criticize his sentiment, but I can criticize the execution, which never misses an opportunity to hammer home the thematic underpinning for anyone who may have missed it. This is well-trod territory.

The fact is, even despite that wonderfully ambiguous ending, the book itself is remarkably unambiguous in its conclusions. Ben Tanaka is a grade-A shit-heel, and it's remarkable he has the girlfriend he has at the beginning of the book. It's entirely unremarkable that he loses her by the end of the book. The fact that he is unable to look past his own conflicted life towards any greater consciousness is also no surprise, and the lack of ambiguity over his absolute worthlessness of a human being makes him remarkably transparent. Perhaps, then, there is something cathartic in Tanaka's failure. Perhaps in his inability to make any kind of separate peace with the world around him -- and the fact that all of his friends and acquaintances all seem to have gotten their act together fairly well by the end of the book -- we can see the stirrings of self-consciousness in Tomine himself, as "The Author". There's just nowhere he can go from here: the stylistic and thematic content here can't really be developed any further. It’s a self-defeating cul-de-sac, and the didactic, constipated results speak for themselves.