Why is the world in love again?



Flood

Chances are very good that the first time you ever heard They Might Be Giants, it was something off this album. Chances are even better that if you own only one They Might Be Giants album, it's this one. There's even a good chance if you're roughly my age that your first exposure to They Might Be Giants may even have been on Tiny Toons Adventures, where two songs off Flood were featured as music videos - "Particle Man" and "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)."

If you need any more proof that the 1990s was a strange decade, reflect for a minute on the fact for a brief moment during the administration of George H. W. Bush the full weight of Warner Brothers' corporate promotion machine was bent towards ensuring that They Might Be Giants sold a lot of records. They took six minutes of airtime on a nationally broadcast children's cartoon and gave it over to free advertisement for a weird New York post-New Wave synth-rock duo.



I have conflicted emotions about Flood. I was one of those folks for whom Flood was their first exposure to the Johns. Although it didn't take me long to track down the rest of their extant discography (which was, at the time, all of three albums - although Miscellaneous T was actually released a few months after Flood, if I recall correctly), this holds pride of place as their first, for me and many others. The problem is that although it isn't hard in hindsight to recognize why exactly this album hit the way it did, it's also easy to discern that one of the reasons it did so was by sawing off many of the sharp edges that had defined their early albums. It is worth noting that Flood has significantly fewer tracks about divorce and despair than Lincoln.

In exchange for the anguish of their second album, we have instead perhaps the apogee of their pop songwriting skills. Excepting "Istanbul" (a cover of the Four Lads' song of the same name), the album presents a series of endlessly catchy pop ditties written in a variety of genres and presenting an incredible stylistic range. Their eclecticism and ability to sell even the most bizarre premise through enthusiasm and panache. Listen to "Letterbox," "Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love," "Twisting" - you'd be hard pressed to find three more different songs, and yet each of them work exceptionally well. I would argue that the variety of sounds on Flood make it at times a difficult listen - it's so disparate, so diverse, that it can be exhausting.

And it doesn't all work. "Your Racist Friend" is still a cringeworthy attempt at - what? sincerity? an "issues" song? Not even a salsa breakdown can save it. I've never been able to get a handle on album closer "Road Movie to Berlin," either. They usually have really strong instincts when it comes to the final song on their albums - "Rhythm Section Want Ad," "Kiss Me, Son of God," Spacesuit," "End of the Tour" - but "Road Movie to Berlin" has always felt flat to me, like a sketch that was never fully developed.

The core of the album, to me, has always been what I've informally regarded as the "working" trilogy - "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair," Hearing Aid," and "Minimum Wage" - three songs dedicated to how much it sucks to work in an office. The personal anxiety of the first two albums has mutated into a more generalized anxiety about wage slavery and the small daily humiliations of working in forced intimacy with people you don't like and with whom you exist in a state of mutual contempt:

More coffee for me boss /
'Cause I'm not as messed up as I want to be /
I've turned off my hearing aid /
Don't say the electric chair's not good enough /
For king-lazy-bones like myself.

One of the band's strong suits has always been their ability to immortalize the most petty and seemingly inconsequential moments of a person's life in musical amber. They have a great deal of empathy for losers and perpetual runners-up - and there is no doubt that their attention to the overlooked ignominies of everyday existence helped cement their relationship to a fanbase seemingly self-defined by their obsession with embarrassment and an inaptitude for daily life.



When you break the album down on a song-by-song basis, it remains enduringly, almost preternaturally strong. It's much easier to pinpoint the tracks that don't work or somehow fall short than to list the songs that remain stone classics - "Whistling in the Dark," "Women & Men," "We Want A Rock." If you've ever heard the album you've probably got one or all of those songs in your head right now. If the album seems slightly patchy in hindsight, a tad scattershot, less focused and more manic than necessary, it's entirely possible that these defects may be entirely of my own imagining.

I suppose my hesitancy regarding the album comes more from familiarity than anything else. I've heard Flood so many times that I could almost certainly recite the entire thing by heart. It's not an album I pull down for pleasure much anymore. Maybe there are only so many times you can hear an album before you can't hear it anymore. Maybe I need to wait a few years before I can ever listen to it again.

Next: Mission to Mars


(out of five)

"We got along."

There's really not much that goes on in the world of comics that the readers really need to be aware of -- we got along for decades without this level of faux-transparency. But this is the world we live in now, like it or not.

Tom Brevoort*

It is an unavoidable conclusion that capitalism exerts an infantilizing influence on our lives.

If we accept these conditions we accept life in a state of perpetual childish anxiety.

If we accept this childish anxiety we find ourself regarding much of our lifestyle choices in the same manner as a child awaiting Christmas morning; the morning will surely bring the revelation that all that has been done under the cover of darkness has been done for our benefit.

If we refuse to accept the "Santa Claus" hypothesis of modernity we our simply excluded.

It is not hard to imagine that contracts drawn up between individuals and corporate interests are inherently unfair; it is far harder to imagine that any such contract ever could be fair.

All contracts are only as good as the litigators you can afford to hire to enforce every clause.

This is why contractual disputes between corporations and all but the richest individuals are usually over before they even begin: the plaintiff must spend years of unceasing exertion in the vain attempt to roll a boulder up a hill, whereas the defendant need merely remain seated on the top of said boulder for as long as he (it) may wish.

(The same principal applies to the government, but under certain circumstances it's actually easier to sue the government than a major corporation.)

If we accept the "Santa Claus" hypothesis we cannot then hold the offender to account for his moral failings: we have already given up the right to express moral outrage through our previous, tacit acceptance and understanding that in all cases the "ends" of consumer gratification outweigh the "means" by which this gratification is achieved.

No one likes seeing how the sausage is made, even the people who make the sausage.

It is to the great advantage of capital that it has assembled a system wherein no single worker can actually perceive at any given moment the nature of the sausage they are assembling.

This moral Fordism allows great injustices to be parceled out in industrial quantities; if no one actually sees the dimensions of the finished product (sausage) before it rolls off the assembly line, then no one can stop it before it is completed; and once it is completed, well, whoever would want to waste such a perfectly nice sausage?

The comics industry is very small, but still not small enough that the balance of power isn't overwhelmingly lopsided.

Other fields in entertainment at least have unions to protect small fish from being entirely trampled; union organization never worked out so well in comics.

Because there's nothing even remotely resembling collective bargaining at any level of the industry, every contract negotiation effectively occurs in a "right-to-work" context.

Contracts are private, and non-disclosure clauses exist to keep any kind of collusion on the part of freelancers from occurring.

Which is not to say that it doesn't happen, as it surely does.

But how many Marvel contracts have you seen? How many DC contracts?

It isn't in anyone's interest to make private contracts public.

The industry is too small to be held accountable for anything, but its small enough that individual actors can be held accountable for everything.

No one has the money necessary to investigate what actually goes into contracts.

There's this thing called "Hollywood Accounting."

Essentially, this is what happens when movie studios (and TV studios and record companies) cook the books in such a way as to avoid paying royalties on even the most successful properties.

There are a number of ways of doing this: one of the most common ways of cheating talent out of royalties is to sign a contract guaranteeing net profits as opposed to gross. The studio will ensure that the movie never, ever, ever sees a net profit, even if they have to go so far as to claim that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix lost $167 million dollars.

If you have any power whatsoever, you get gross points in your contract, because otherwise you'll never see a dime.

Quote from 26 February 2005:

The show, all in, cost about $110 million to make. Each year of its original run, we know it showed a profit because they TOLD us so. And in one case, they actually showed us the figures. It's now been on the air worldwide for ten years. There's been merchandise, syndication, cable, books, you name it. The DVDs grossed roughly half a BILLION dollars (and that was just after they put out S5, without all of the S5 sales in).

So what does my last profit statement say? We're $80 million in the red.

Basically, by the terms of my contract, if a set on a WB movie burns down in Botswana, they can charge it against B5's profits.

But then again, I knew that was the situation going in...I saw the writing on the wall (and the contract) from the git-go. I didn't do this to build an empire, I wanted to tell this story...and that's worth more than anything else.

Doesn't mean I can't tweak 'em about it, though.

jms (J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5)*

It is very rare that anyone actually sues an entertainment company over breach of contract or shady accounting. Even more rare that anyone win such a suit:

His lawsuit, filed Thursday, seeks 37.5% of net profits from syndication. Garner accuses U of deceiving him and suppressing info about syndication.

Garner starred as Jim Rockford in the series that ran 1974-1980. Instead of paying him $25,000 an episode in royalties, U charged him a distribution fee, according to the lawsuit. (Emphasis mine)

The comics industry has been playing the Hollywood accounting game for a long time now.

Only there are a few differences: for one, the issue of ownership is front and central to comics in a way that it isn't for movies - which are almost always the sole property of the studio, royalties notwithstanding - but which more resembles the music industry.

Every now and again a story pops up about Marvel and reprint royalties, usually foreign royalties. These things don't happen because of individual oversight, companies such as Marvel make a lot of money out of systematically pruning every possible source of royalty payments from their contracts.

They can do this because no one (as in, no readers) cares what's in your average Marvel contract. No one knows what's in your average Marvel contract because it is in the interest of everyone working for Marvel on a freelance (read: precarious, paycheck-to-paycheck) position not to share this information.

Everyone likes Christmas morning, no one doesn't want to believe in Santa Claus. We all want very desperately to believe that the men and women in charge of making our favorite superhero comic books are good people, generous and kind-hearted - if you turn your head just right in the Marvel offices you can still see Smilin' Stan in the corner chatting with the King over the plot to the latest issue of Fantastic Four, right?

Most people working for Marvel probably are genuinely good people. But the beauty of working for capital is that you don't have to take the weight of prevarication or disassembly on yourself. Privately, I'm sure most people would agree that certain things are "wrong" or "regrettable," but publicly it's "completely out of their hands."

When Mr. Brevoort says, "we got along for decades without this level of faux-transparency," I wonder how he defines the phrase "we got along."

When Malibu comics started the Ultraverse, creator contracts were written in such a way that creators received mandatory profit participation from the use of any of their characters. This was the reason why savvy creators such as Steve Gerber (!), James Hudnall, Steve Englehart and Barry Windsor-Smith were comfortable creating a slew of new properties for another superhero comics publisher.

Only it turned out that when Marvel bought the company, the hassle of paying creators was too much trouble. After a few years of desultory attempts to revitalize the franchise, the line as dropped. And now in an era of even smaller profit margins and ever higher demands for per-unit profitability, those "perfect" contracts help to ensure that those characters will simply never be seen again.

Corporations don't feel "shame." Corporations can't feel "shame."

Individuals working on the behalf of corporations can only under the most extraordinary of circumstances be made to acknowledge shame, because the structures of capital act to limit negative moral amortization across corporate interests over time.

In other words, everyone else is doing it, so I don't see what the problem is.

But then again, I knew that was the situation going in...I saw the writing on the wall (and the contract) from the git-go. I didn't do this to build an empire, I wanted to tell this story...and that's worth more than anything else.

Thor #10



Is it churlish to point out at this late date just how awful Fear Itself ended up being? It's hard not to be constantly reminded of this fact when so many of Marvel's more high-profile titles are still playing with the story beats imparted by that crossover. Most specifically (but obviously not surprisingly), Matt Fraction's two main books - Thor and Iron Man are deep in the middle of long storylines jumping right out of the final pages of the event. (And, of course, the Captain America titles were also completely rebooted after the event.) So every time you pick up an issue of Thor you're reminded that, yes, Fear Itself is a thing that happened, and no, it isn't getting any better in hindsight.

But if you squint past the boring crap of the main storyline - Thor dead, again, his role usurped by a pretender, again - you just might see something new for a change. One of my pet peeves about fictional kingdoms - and you can pretty much pick any fictional kingdom in the Marvel or DC universes and this will still apply - is that they are all to a fault absolute hereditary monarchies. I know that for many people that's just the default mode into which any fantasy setting should fall, but the fact that we still just take it for granted that people like the Sub-Mariner and Black Bolt are absolute monarchs cut from the same authoritarian cloth as the Saudi royal family, is more than a little bit unsettling. So for once they're trying a different tack: with Odin dead and three women sitting in his throne, the inhabitants of Asgard are actually trying out something resembling to representative democracy. I think that's fascinating, not because I'm a progressive liberal whose heart jumps when he sees democracy taking root in the Third World (you know damn well the Storms of the Jotuns have read their Fanon, fuck this "inalienable rights" bullshit and keep your smallpox blankets to yourself, man), but just because it's something different. Such an obvious idea, and it's amazing no one has ever thought to try it before, at least that I recall off the top of my head. (They did do something similar in a Ka-Zar miniseries last year, but because it's Ka-Zar about as many people read that book as are reading this post.)

Whether or not the idea pans out or is simply swept back the moment Big Daddy Odin makes his inevitable return to the main stage and we can once again indulge in our racial longing for a return to the glory days of paternalistic Nordic feudalism, remains to be seen. Still, his generally acknowledged shortcomings as a mainstream superhero writer notwithstanding, Fraction remains one of the very few guys in that building who might maybe conceivably at some point in their lives have read a book about politics and political theory that wasn't A) Don't Think Of An Elephant, B) A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity or C) The Butter Battle Book.

Justice League #5

I know we're supposed to be jumping on this book like it's some kind of leper. Oh well, it's not that bad. It's not great. It's basically how the Justice League has gotta be these days: loud, dumb, and stupid like a Jerry Bruckheimer film. Only, you know, by modern standards those classic Bruckheimer productions of yore look positively like David Lean. People yell and do stupid things because the plot is a hungry monster which must be fed. Yadda yadda.

The real reason why this is an enjoyable book is the art, but not for the obvious reason. The obvious reason would be that "Jim Lee draws pretty pictures" - which is technically true but not particularly interesting. It's no secret after all these years that of all the original Image artists, Lee was the one with the most actual drawing ability. (Silvestri came in a close second but his skills have atrophied pretty hardcore, as anyone who suffered through his epic one-and-a-half issue run on Hulk can attest.) Lee can still draw but the dilettante's schedule with which he's been operating for the past decade and change has done a lot to drain the interest out of his work. When he draws now, he can usually afford to take the time to make sure everything is perfect - and since he's such a dab hand with composition and texture, that means that he can work over a drawing near to death.

But being once again put into a position where he positively, absolutely has to draw a comic book at a monthly pace is doing strange, wonderful things for his style. (Sure, the book was one week late, but seriously.) He's already dribbled away whatever head-start he had going into the New 52. He's back on the balls of his feet playing catch-up. So a lot of his illustrative tricks are getting thrown out the window. His figures are getting looser and his layouts a lot simpler. It's great to see because he's always known how to draw, but he hasn't always been the best cartoonist: seeing someone with such obvious skill being forced to work past their comfort zone in order simply to get the job done of telling the story is quite something. Don't get me wrong, we're not into complete primitivity yet. He's not suddenly morphed in Gary Panter, and the four inkers roped into the production of this comic attest to the fact that the company is doing their damndest to cover up the fact that the star artist is beginning to falter. But it must be said: the "faltering" is the fun part. Lee has some life left in his bones yet.

Not the only dust my mother raised.



Miscellaneous T

Are there any more dreaded words in the English language than "B-sides collection"? By definition these are albums composed of the stuff that wasn't good enough to make it onto the regular albums. These are the types of albums designed specifically to appeal to fans - many of whom probably own some of the material already, or who come along later in hopes of catching up on what they missed. How do you judge these things? The fans, because they're fans, will love the material in whatever format it is released; casual fans and critics are usually advised to steer clear. Think back for a minute on just how many B-sides compilations you own that actually reward repeated listenings. I'll give you Incesticide, Black Market Clash - I'm sure you can think of a few others. (Sixties groups don't count, for reasons which should be obvious once you think about it.)

They Might Be Giants maybe aren't quite in the same category as Nirvana or the Clash, but the material from their fertile late eighties / early nineties period nevertheless represents their peak, the point where years of hustling in the New York club scene began to pay enormous dividends in terms of skill and songwriting prowess. If there is one element that has defined the group since very early on and through to the present, it's professionalism: as weird as some of their weirdest material can get, their strangest songs nevertheless sound incredibly solid. Their debut was the closest they ever got to actual "lo-fi" material, and from that point forward the band became increasingly professional. By the time they reached Lincoln even their off-the-cuff song doodles sounded focused and rich. The material released on Miscellaneous T represents a snapshot of the band at the exact moment of its transformation from a pair of strange, ambitious amateurs and into the same well-oiled nerd rock machine that recorded the world's least likely platinum record, 1990's Flood.



Miscellaneous T is a B-sides album of the old school: a compilation of the tracks included on their first four singles, with a couple oddballs like a remix and radio edits. Everything except for the single mix of "(She Was A) Hotel Detective" was eventually reprinted in the 1997 box set Then: The Early Years. This disc is out of print and, really, if you have Then you have everything you need. And yet every time I need to rip a copy of Then onto a new iPod or iTunes, I always take the time to replace the tracks from that box set into their Miscellaneous T play order. I wasn't fortunate enough to actually buy the singles on their initial release - of course not - so this album was my first exposure to these songs. And in my mind, after listening to this album so many times in the early and mid 90s, this is how these songs should be heard. It's not a "real" album, but it's a good album that holds together as a cohesive unit shockingly well given its portmanteau nature.

Make no mistake: this shouldn't be anyone's first They Might Be Giants album. But if your first exposure is Flood or Lincoln, this is a perfectly fine candidate for your second They Might Be Giants album.

Many of these songs are obviously what we would consider B-side material: something like their pseudo-industrial synthesizer cover of Rodgers and Hart's "Lady Is A Tramp" would probably have seemed even weirder in the context of a proper album. "Hello Radio" and "Mr. Klaw" are very brief sketches that wouldn't have been out of place on their debut but wouldn't necessarily have added anything, either. Every TMBG fan has a soft spot for track thirteen, the "untitled" skit produced from a long message accidentally left on their "Dial-A-Song" service in the late 80s. "Who's 'There May Be Giants?'" asks a bemused middle-aged New York matron.

But then once you cut away the fat, you're left with a core of tracks that are every bit as good - and in some cases even better - than most of the material from their first two records. "Hey Mister DJ I Thought You Said We Had A Deal," "Nightgown of the Sullen Moon," "It's Not My Birthday," "We're the Replacements" - some of their very best tracks, sloughed off for B-sides. Gave upon their works, ye mighty, and despair.



Next: The Big Time.


(out of five)

SIR

Battle Scars #2

I don't read Malcolm Gladwell but I like the fact that he's so good at thinking up pithy little titles to his books about how incredibly complex phenomena can always be boiled down into manageable chunks of middlebrow pop psychology. Sometimes you blink, sometimes you hit the tipping point, sometimes you look like Andrea Fraser. That kind of thing.

Let's see if we can find our way through one of these, it's been a while:

Gladwell's books are the kind of thing you can imagine business travelers ingesting on their way from Dubuque to Miami for a sales conference: pithy, vaguely quirky but never too quirky to be monstrously optimistic about the world. Someday Gladwell needs to think up some sort of magic formula to cover the concept of creatively bankrupt inertia. Because, man, the idea is strong enough and central enough to our current conversation on mainstream comic books that I wish we had some sort of catch-all phrase we could point to at a moment's notice for mutual convenience. Like, how about "drowning not waving"? This is a story of the comic book companies who kept right doing what they were doing until they noticed the water had already come up to their necks, but by the time they realized what the problem was and started to make some noise, the boat was so far away that everyone on deck just started waving back, thinking the tiny bobbing figure on the horizon was having an awesome time.

Marvel comics have looked so much alike for so long that the idea that they ever looked different from how they do now seems like one of those "we've always been at war with Eurasia" moments. All these little things that seemed so unusual at the time have compounded themselves for so long that we don't even blink anymore.

Think back to the early days of Nu-Marvel: it was the Wild West. There were dozens of different things happening all over the place. I do not want to overemphasize or exaggerate just how good the comics produced during this time were, as I've already begun to see here and there over the course of the last few years - but stop and consider for a moment just how hard it is to make a comic in an environment as complicated and fraught as Marvel Comics. Any comic. Most of them are terrible. Even the ones that are good are still terrible - never forget that! Those of us who know better stick around because we don't have anywhere else to go. Seeing the occasional Good Book poke its head up from under those waters seems to be a miracle of downright messianic significance. This is turning into a crappy history lesson, something about which most people reading this either already know or don't give two shits. The point - there is a point - is very simple: the reason why they did so many weird, different things after the turn of the millennium is that things were pretty bad. The company had just been (literally) bankrupted and had suffered the ignominy of seeing its two flagship franchises - the X-Men and Spider--Man - dragged through years of sewer-gargling shit. (Seriously - just go back and look at the types of stories Marvel was publishing around December 1999, if you dare.) Things were bad enough that they were willing to do anything to make them better.

Whenever you feel like dramatizing the creative output of a corporate entity, it's always good to remember that the best stuff almost always occurs when people are either A) desperate or B) not paying attention. So those things that hit the wall and stick? That's what you build your franchises around. And when it works? When it works you stick the saddle on and ride it for dear life, because there is no telling when (if ever!) these things are going to run out of steam, and in any case by the time the gravy trains stop running on time hopefully you'll be far away.

Somewhere along the line the single most important question at issue in Marvel comics became Who Was In Charge of the superheroes. This is really weird: 2005's House of M was Marvel's first line-wide crossover since 2000's Maximum Security (an event so bad it was terrible), and the plot was basically Who Gets To Be In Charge, the Avengers or the X-Men. The winner was, of course, the Avengers, because House of M ended by kneecapping the X-franchise for years to come. But if the jockeying for dominance was metaphorical in House of M it became literal in Civil War: Who Gets To Be In Charge of the superheroes. If superheroes were real obviously they'd be run like any other branch of the federal government, so who gets to be the guy in charge of that agency (The Initiative). And then when that happens what happens when the guy in charge of the agency falls down on the job and lets a bunch of aliens invade (Secret Invasion) meaning that the new guy in charge is the looney ex-con who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to shoot Space Osama in the head (Dark Reign). And then the looney guy in charge goes nuts and leads his branch of the government right over a cliff (Seige) and then it's time for Daddy (AKA Captain America) to step in and take care of things. And from then on out it's all basically a story about all the characters getting in on Daddy's good side, because of course Daddy is the government and we all want Daddy's approval, right?

Because, you know, if there's one thing I always really wanted when I was a kid growing up reading superhero comic books, it was for stories about superheroes working for the government. There is a reason why, for decades, the idea of "government sponsored super-hero time" was usually synonymous with villains. No real hero would take their orders from a bureaucrat. Spider-Man and the X-Men were outlaws, the Fantastic Four were always having trouble with landlords and lawyers, even the Avengers - Earth's Mightiest Heroes! - had adversarial relationships with their government liaisons and the city of New York. That always worked for Marvel because Marvel wasn't Your Dad's superheroes: Marvel was the choice of the New Generation. There is, perhaps, something in the fact that Nick Fury has never been able to maintain a successful solo series not set in the distant past of World War II: guardians of the status quo just don't work in Marvel as headliners. That's the whole point of Captain America, for God's sake: he's not a symbol of the government, he's a symbol of idealism and rebellion, a man who has more than once given up his costume when faced with the government's failure to live up to his ethics. And now he's In Charge, he's the Daddy signing paperwork in the front office making sure all the different Avengers teams fill out their personnel forms by the end of the government's fiscal year.

At some point Marvel started receiving advertising money from the US Army. So here's the big new launch, one of two series spun out of the final pages of the underperforming Fear Itself event, starring a decommissioned Army officer on the run from . . . well, the government, I think, for unknown reasons that have not yet and do not promise to be explained any time soon. And the bulk of the book is this dude - Staff Sergeant Marcus Johnson, fresh off a two-year stint in Afghanistan - running from other dudes with guns and there's another guy with a sword (Taskmaster, pretty much the definition of the kind of villain you use when it really doesn't matter what villain you use just so long as there's someone to fight Captain America in passing) for reasons which - I want to stress again - we don't know. I know what they think they're doing: they've got this great idea for a story and it requires a slow burn, a long roll-out of pertinent information intended to drive the audience into a kind of tizzy over all the wonderful shit that is being withheld from them. It'll be like Christmas and Marvel is Santa Claus and if only we know how awesome Christmas morning was going to be we'd be so thrilled to be reading this book that we'd basically just plotz on the spot from the excitement.

The only problem is no one - and I mean no one is going to care to stick around six months for the resolution of the most boring mystery in the history of comics. WHO IS MARCUS JOHNSON? asks the advertising copy - my answer remains: someone about whom I know nothing 1/3 of the way through a limited series devoted to telling me the answer to precisely this question. It'd be one thing if this was 1981 and this comic cost 50 cents - fuck, scratch that. Even if this whole story cost $3.00, that'd still be too expensive. As it is, one issue of this book costs $2.99 - meaning, in order to get to the very premise of the story, the explanation as to why exactly the reader should have cared about Marcus Johnson this whole time - one must expend $18 basically on faith. On pure faith that the dreamengineers and fantasybuilders at the House of Ideas sure do have a real humdinger hidden up the sleeves of their viridian wizard's robes.

Remember back when I said that Marvel was buying advertisements from the US Army? I don't suppose on the face of it there's anything particularly wrong with that, per se - that's not on me to criticize children's' entertainment for idolizing men with guns, after all. But what is this? When I went to college - the first time - I roomed with a guy who was obsessed with ROTC, and with the idea of being an Airborne Ranger. Never mind the fact that he was rail-thin and kind of on the short side, he was still COMMITTED to the idea in a way I could only admire, albeit from a carefully-calculated ironic distance. Reading Battle Scars is a bit like having to play an AD&D campaign with that guy, dealing with his rationalizations about why his well-trained special forces character armed only with a Ka-Bar could take down the biggest Orcs in Darkwind Forest because the US Army is the best trained fighting force on the planet. So of course we get plenty of stuff that goes along the lines of "These men may be SHIELD agents, but I'm US ARMY" - not an exact quote, but Jesus who's counting. What little respect I have for this comic would be instantly trebled if they just had the balls to come out and have a page where Johnson rips off his clothes and reveals a giant phallus with the US flag tattooed on the glistening head while screaming "I AM GOING TO FUCK YOU WITH THE POWER OF THE ARMY, TEN HUT TEN HUT BITCHEZZZ." Because that's about the size of things, ahem.

The problem is that at some point Marvel's current approach to making comics became so powerfully calcified that it became impossible for the people involved to realize that they had long since reached the point of terminally diminishing returns. Because there are many worse things than bad comic books: if you like mainstream books at all, you know full well that a bad comic book is better than a boring comic book. A boring comic book is simply a sin. How do you take something with all the raw potential of brightly-colored superheroes bashing into each other for 22 pages with huge sound effects and make it boring? Oh, I know: let's take the superheroes out of the book and replace them with identically uniformed government employees, and instead of having them fight about weird symbolic adolescent displacement, let's have them fight about mishuffled paperwork and redacted government reports. Because you know what kids love? The Pentagon Papers. That right there is exactly what we need to create. Having superheroes talk about their position vis a vis the government worked well for a few years there, I'm sure people will never get tired of them having this conversation.

I just have to wonder about the mindset of the people working at Marvel who can read this book - who can approve this script, see the pencilled pages, see the inked pages, see the coloring, the lettering, see the book at every step of its creation - and not, never once, say, you know, this is boring. This is a comic about generic people in brown civilian clothes running around and fighting about things they don't know and we don't know. There's no discernible villain, the conflict is poorly defined (sure, this guy's running from the government, but why?), characters we do know (Captain America) are acting in inexplicable ways . . . for a big new character launch coming out of last year's major crossover event, this is simply an abortion.

Somewhere along the line the company lost the ability to see that comics like this were terrible. Because it essentially apes the surface qualities of hundreds of other similar comics that were not quite so terrible, it's probably hard to tell the difference at this point. But just because they were "not quite so terrible" doesn't mean they still weren't terrible, and that this whole well of vaguely paramilitary, pseudo-espionage superheroics didn't pass its expiration date a long time ago. To the people involved in making this comic: is this what you want to do with your lives? Is this the kind of story you wanted to tell when you grew up and fell in love with superheroes? All those wonderful stories of brightly-colored gods and men flying between planets and fighting all the metaphorical embodiments of existential fears and anxieties, living larger-than-life soap-opera lives and making out with all the hottest babes on the printed page - this is what you wanted to do? This is garbage - unimaginative, derivative, so purely, unabashedly tasteless as to be complete drivel. If you were involved in any way with the production of this comic book for any reason other than that you needed money to pay your rent, you really need to take a hard look at your life and question your priorities. Is this a story you needed to tell? If that is the case might a suggest that you shouldn't be a storyteller, because this is not a story. It's a hook on which a publisher has hung its logo, a logo which has come to be recognized as synonymous with tired.

The worst part is that I'm almost certain that this isn't a story anyone needed to tell. This is what Marvel does now: makes stories meant to be read on iPads by business travelers on their ways from Dubuque to Miami. Tom Clancy for illiterates. It took three people to come up with the "story" here, another of those three to actually write the "script," before it was passed off to a disinterested penciler who has produced much better work in his time. There were fully five editors involved in the making of this book, to say nothing of a Chief Creative Officer, Publisher and Executive Producer. I'm guessing most of the people involved in the making of this comic book did so because it was their job to do so: in which case, that's perfectly fine, I begrudge no one their right to make a living. But whomever involved in the making of this comic actually thought up the idea for this comic - whichever of you gentlemen (I'm trying to avoid using names here because there's no need to get personal) actually though this story up, you need to maybe have one of those late night / early morning walks along the beach that usually accompany mid-life epiphanies. Because if you can read this comic and not realize that you've wasted your life, you haven't looked hard enough. Drowning not waving.