The Black Diamond: Get In the Car and Go
by Larry Young & Jon Proctor

(Travels With Larry: Supplemental)

I'd be disingenuous if I didn't lead off this review by saying that Larry Young has had a long and fruitful association with this blog. Way back in the early days - as in, the very first months - of The Hurting, Larry was one of the first comic peoples to really get behind the whole "blogosphere" thing. He's a smart man when it comes to selling comic books, and he was one of the first to realize the marketing potential of a whole network of websites dedicated solely to discussing and criticizing comic books - a whole pile of websites devoted to the proverbial "hand sell". I can't say for certain if one of my reviews - good or bad - has ever resulted in the sale of a single comic (save for the very occasional traffic my Amazon links get). The actual value of the internet as a promotions tool for comics is not measured in sales, but "buzz". Marvel and DC figured this out a while back, and the recent jaw-dropping press releases promoting Marvel's latest War Machine revamp serve as conclusive proof - as if any was needed! - that in comics, any press is good press, so long as they spell your name right and print your Diamond order code correctly.



That said, I'm not here to blow smoke up Young's skirt. For all the goodwill Young has cultivated in the blogosphere in the middle of the decade, the last couple years has seen the company remarkably silent. Admittedly, some of the reasons for this can probably be chalked up to personal issues - family deaths, the birth of a son. The company is basically two people, Young and his wife Mimi Rosenheim, so personal issues are, unfortunately, de facto business stumbling blocks. But aside from that, the company just hasn't done a lot lately. The last half-dozen or so OGNs I've received from the company haven't done a lot for me, I'm sorry to say. Some of the bigger names who consistently worked for the company in its formative years have been silent. They lost arguably their biggest name "franchise" - Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan's DEMO to Vertigo. Even Joe Casey's remarkable Codeflesh is getting a new edition, from the series' original home, Image. I don't know the whys or wherefores of these setbacks - and I'm certainly not going to speculate in a public forum, that's Rich Johnston's job - but the fact remains that a company which four or five years ago seemed poised for much bigger and better things is facing the turn of the decade in a position of seeming or actual retrenchment. It's, frankly, a shame, because I like the publisher, and even when I haven't liked every specific release, I've long admired the company's general goals and aesthetics. I actually consider Young to be - if not a close friend - a good acquaintance, so I mean it when I say I want his company to succeed. (There's my reviewer's impartiality, in case you were wondering.)



But I've come here not to bury Larry Young, but to praise him - for whatever the failings of Young the Businessman, Young the Writer remains one of my absolute favorites. I don't think I've ever read a Larry Young comic I've disliked. I still recommend Astronauts in Trouble as one of the best hard-sci-fi series of the last decade, and likewise, Planet of the Capes is a criminally underrated bit of deconstructionist superhero narrative. So, when I met the new year with a recommitment to featuring reviews for this blog, it should come as no surprise that I found Black Diamond sitting at the very top of my too-read pile.

Which does not mean that I wasn't skeptical. I'd read the first couple issues in periodical form before resolving to wait for the trade, and while I enjoyed my initial exposure to the material, I was still a bit wary about something which held every promise of being, well, a bit more of an action story than I usually care for. Not to say I'm a wuss (although I probably am), but many of Young's obvious touchstones - fast cars, seventies road movies, Bullitt - are not really big on my radar. About the only thing I know about cars is when I need to get the oil changed on my 1998 Mercury Sable. (Which is not to say I don't harbor a strange fantasy about one day owning a primo 1964 Chevy Impala, black, but for entirely different reasons altogether.)



But I should have known better than to doubt Young. Black Diamond really isn't a story about fast cars and hard blacktop - although that's certainly a part of it. But I can't help thinking that anyone picking up this book for the promise of Mad Max-style car chases (or, barring that, Blues Brothers-style car wrecks) will walk away sorely disappointed. Young tips his hand almost from the beginning, with his references to Tom Stoppard and Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern - a play about incidental characters who can't quite figure out that they're incidental characters, trying to understand the shape of their narrative when the narrative they're in involves them only peripherally. Black Diamond is itself concerned with a group of characters only peripherally involved in a much larger narrative. That narrative is the story's science-fiction "hook" - the existence of a huge cross-country elevated freeway sometime in the near future, sort of an American Autobahn, only given over totally to outlaws, criminals, transients and punks. The overarching plot concerns the efforts of the federal government to win back the Black Diamond, cracking down on the ne'er-do-wells by sending the military in to restore law and order one mile at a time. Against this background, we see hints of the government machinations involved in these decisions, and the corporate cross-machinations of those involved in supplying the United States valuable petroresources.



It's a huge canvas - sprawling - and certainly the most ambitious thing Young has done yet. My first instinct as a critic is to ask the basic, bottom-dollar question, does it work? Does it hang together on the most basic level? But then, reading the book, you realize these questions aren't really important. Does it work? It's not supposed to work, is the best I can come up with. Much of the book is devoted to exposition, detailing the various factions and concepts involved in this not-so-strange near-future scenario. Contrasted against the macro scale of the global concerns, we have the immediate plot, the story of a dentist out to save his wife, held captive by sinister forces bent on using their hostage as a bargaining chip to keep the road free of federal interference. This story, at least, reaches some form of resolution - the hero sets out from San Francisco heading east, right into the jaws of the imminent conflict between federal forces and the road's outlaw irregulars. He finds what he's looking for, at least.

But the book isn't about resolution. It's about stymieing the readers' expectations of resolution. Just like poor Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern, hung at sea before they ever figure out what's going on, the book ends not merely on a cliffhanger, but on the horns of a proverbial dilemma - how to resolve the irreconcilable, the demand represented by the fiction readers' desire for conclusion tempered with the fiction writers' understanding that irresolvable conflicts often have no solution whatsoever.

All of which means that Black Diamond is less an action story about fast cars in the future, than a metafictional exercise in the impossibility of fiction to properly encapsulate complex systems. The author and audience are essentially immobilized, exhausted by mutual consent, unable to reach a constantly receding conclusion, much like Zeno's namesake paradox. The book is purposefully designed to frustrate on almost every level, up to and including the putative "climax", motivated by the most surprising bald-faced dues ex machina I've ever seen, just about.



So, does it work? Well, yes, sort-of. I've been mulling the story over for a few days since I finished the book, and I have yet to reach anything resembling a satisfactory conclusion. It almost seems like a parallel to Grant Morrison's stated aims regarding "Batman R.I.P." and Final Crisis - constructing a narrative so packed with signifiers and implication that practically all that's left at the end of the book is signal and inference. It didn't work for Morrison's work - as I've already stated - because he sacrifices too much coherence, at the cost of leaving the lions' share of the interpretational work in the readers' lap. That approach, frankly, has only arguable place in any Batman comic (you can, I suppose, make an argument that it works better in Arkham Asylum, but that's still a contentious assertion), and certainly not in the company's tentpole franchise Batman comic. Here, though, it works a lot better - Young doesn't have to be concerned with the audience's expectations regarding how a Batman event comic should read. He does have, admittedly, the audience's expectations regarding how action-packed gearhead speculative fiction narratives should read, but there's a lot more leeway. In any event, as I said, this book is about subverting expectations. From the very beginning, the narrative is filled with signifiers pointing towards the story's open-ended conclusion - it's not like we're promised a resolution that simply never arrives (a la "Batman R.I.P.").



But still, does it work?

I've given a qualified "yes", even though I admit I'm still chewing it over. Ask me again in a few years how the book has aged. It took me a while to "get" Planet of the Capes after my initial read, after all. I "get" Black Diamond: it's a ballsy piece of storytelling sleight-of-hand that almost careens tragically into the "too clever by half" column but just manages to stay on the side of the angels, due pretty much single-handedly to Young's sure hand. I will repeat what I said a few hundred words ago: Young is a much better writer than a businessman (and he's no slouch as a businessman), and it's a shame he doesn't write far, far more than he does. For better or for worse, I could do with another dozen or more comics that challenged and stymied me as much as Black Diamond.

Alex Robinson's Lower Regions
by Alex Robinson

Back in the hazy days of yore, I played Dungeons & Dragons for about a week. I received the basic set for Christmas one year and we (being me and a friend) set about to have some fun. Sure enough, we had great fun, for - as I said - about a week. After that point, we quit by mutual accord. Perhaps if we'd known anyone else who played, more experienced players who could do more than a basic out-of-the-box dungeon crawl, we could have done more. But as it is, I think we got about as much fun as could be gotten from the game, at least for us, considering neither of us were enamored enough with our basic experience to care to seek out more.



More than any other specific brand of fantasy storytelling, Lower Regions is designed to evoke the sensation of role playing, specifically the aforementioned archtypal dungeon crawl. It's a short narrative: there's a woman with a battleaxe and a halfling companion, searching through mysterious catacombs in search of something or other. It's entirely wordless, which is actually a pretty clever choice on Robinson's part, as it allows for a number of surprising fake-out moments that might not have been so surprising if Robinson had allowed his characters the opportunity to speak through their situations. (As in: "By Crom, I sense treachery afoot! Perhaps all is not as it seems on first look . . ." or some other second-hand Howardism.)



Alex Robinson has long been a personal favorite of mine, dating back to his second full-length graphic novel, Tricked. It was such an accomplished piece of work that I reevaluated what I'd seen of his earlier work. Box Office Poison was one of the most overhyped indie series of the 90s (I seem to recall Wizard, of all things, having an extended love affair with it). Once BOP was compiled into a single massive volume, it was easier to get a grip on the work's respective strengths and weaknesses. It was obviously ambitious, but it was equally obvious that Robinson's reach clearly exceeded his grasp. It was simply too much for a freshman creator to pull off in his first at-bat. But reading Tricked, it became possible to see BOP as less of a noble failure and more of as a concrete learning curve, a means for Robinson to learn the hard way how best to produce a cartoon narrative over a long period of time. Sure enough, Tricked was a lot better than BOP - half as big, twice as focused, and with a much better grasp on Robinson's core strengths. Even back in the earliest days of BOP, Robinson had an uncanny knack for character development - using a nice combination of anecdote and dialogue to peel back layers of deceptively transparent feature. It may not be very flashy, and in fact it's probably the oldest trick in the book, but there you have it: Robinson is by no means a trendsetting formalist or an explosive iconoclast, but he is a master of well-plotted character melodrama. Which is nothing to sneeze at.



Despite what I just wrote, Lower Regions isn't a well-plotted character melodrama. But regardless of that, the story still gains strength from the juxtaposition of a recognizable type - Robinson's very real-world, anti-idealized physical specimens - against the fantastic milieu of a second rate Terry Goodkind knockoff. The protagonist - who, lacking a name, I will simply call Battleaxe Woman - may possess a rather formidable physique, but her face is nevertheless all Robinson. The emotional weight of this silent story - such as there is with such a brief narrative - rests on her facial expressions, her anger, exhaustion, relief, fear and happiness. It's really quite accomplished, for all its seeming absurdity. You find yourself sucked into her story, rooting for Battleaxe Woman in her quest to find her schlubby hubby. Despite the story's purposeful brevity, you find yourself wishing there were a lot more. (There is at least a little bit more, in the form of a brief piece here.)



I don't really know what to call a book like this, although it seems to fit nicely with a number of other similarly-themed books from recent years, books like Powr Mastrs, Goddess of War as well as work by former Fort Thunder folks like Brian Chippendale and Mat Brinkman. What all of this work has in common is that it trades on a trove of received fantasy imagery in order to create formally ambitious narratives that consciously play with audience expectations, a trick partially abetted by the fact that so many people in the art comics audience are intuitively familiar with the vocabulary and conventions of fantasy through a lifetime's exposure to comics and other kinds of nerd media. Perhaps Lower Regions is nowhere near as ambitious, but, as I said, Robinson's skill rewards a more subtle agenda. Don't be mistaken: Lower Regions is obviously a trifle, a tiny lark of a pamphlet from a cartoonist who customarily works on a much larger canvas. But still, an immensely fun and surprisingly rewarding trifle, for all that.

Punk Rock and Trailer Parks
by Derf

I think the highest praise I can give to Derf’s Punk Rock and Trailer Parks is that, for a book for which I held absolutely no previous expectations, it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable things I’ve read all year. Prior to encountering the book my sole exposure to Derf had been his My Friend Dahmer, which showed up in an anthology I read a while back (almost a decade if memory serves me well), and which stayed in my remembrance not out of any specific merit other than, hey, it’s a first person reminiscence about Jeffrey Dahmer. I didn’t even remember the name of the guy who did it. But I just happened to be in Cleveland over the holidays, and came across this book in Mac’s Backs and figured it might be interesting. I wasn't necessarily that excited about it - the purchase was overshadowed by a pair of rare James Purdy novels I had also found. But lo, those Purdy novels remain unopened these weeks later, but the Derf has stuck in my mind, far more than the slice of "local color" I initially took it to be.



The book is about Ohio - or rather, a specific time and place in Ohio history, the late seventies, Akron. (My girlfriend gives me shit for pronouncing Akron incorrectly - it just seems more logical that it would be Ack-rawn, not ak-run.) I was not aware, but apparently the area was a hotbed of punk - and not the American-born second-wave hardcore stuff, either, we're talking about the real first-wave stuff like the Clash and the Ramones, with strange offshoots like Klaus Nomi thrown in for good measure. Sure enough, it’s the scene that gave birth to Devo and the Dead Boys and Pere Ubu. It seems inexplicably strange to me that such an unassuming place could be so musically savvy - no offense intended to the greater Cleveland area, but it seems quite an accident of history that they were so integral to the American punk scene and not, say, Tulsa or Omaha or Pittsburgh or any number of second-tier Midwestern-or-thereabouts cities filled with industrial blight and restless primarily white surplus youth.




Derf takes the unlikeliness of this historical fact and builds his fictional narrative around it. The story follows the adventures of a small group of high school pals as they fall into the center of the Akron scene. The ostensible "leader" of the group is a strange, extroverted and unrepentant nerd calling himself The Baron. One of the most uncanny thing about The Baron is the way he seems - despite his preposterousness - to be a genuinely recognizable figure, the type of person who I can remember knowing (some might say I had a few of these qualities myself). Despite his outcast status, he nonetheless possesses a healthy dose of self-esteem, supported by his unapologetic embrace of the "nerd" lifestyle - complete with playing trombone in the marching band and quoting Tolkien at length. He doesn't feel the need to hide or justify what he likes or who he is, he just is. He just manages to skirt the edges of self-delusion, buoyed by the fact that for all his seeming geekiness, he is nevertheless more on-the-ball - perceptive, intelligent, courageous - than anyone else around him. For all the elements of wish-fulfillment in such a unique character (wish-fulfillment, that is, for probably the majority of the folks who will read this book), he's nonetheless fascinating. I knew people like this in high school, folks who managed to get through with perfect equanimity despite their seeming status as outsiders, gifted with a preternatural sense of perspective and able to simply ignore (or pretend to ignore) the daily ignominies of teenagerhood.

Therefore, it makes perfect sense that he would fall in with the nascent punk scene, a scene defined not by its commitment to miserable self-laceration but defiant opposition to the norms and presumptions of "square" society. It strikes everyone in the book as more than a little bit amazing that such a fascinating thing could exist in the heart of Rubber City, USA - the manner with which Derf illustrates the juxtaposition of two such unlikely opposites as semi-rural Ohio and the international punk scene is the book's primary strength. The Baron - a lanky denizen of the titular trailer park, probably the living definition of Midwestern "white trash" - soon takes up residency at The Bank, a decrepit, uh, bank that was repurposed as a punk club and became the epicenter of the regional movement. The Baron, despite his humble origins, meets and interacts with everyone who stops on their way through, and again, the seeming preposterousness of the narrative is checked at all times by the simple fact that there really was such a place as the Bank, and it really did provide a showcase for the Ramones, the Clash, the Plasmatics and Klaus Nomi. The Bank itself doesn't exist anymore, it was torn down in the early 80s as part of one or another urban renewal schemes. But simply the fact that it did exist, against all ludicrous odds, in the most ludicrous of places, is the most fascinating aspect of the book.



So you don't really mind when Joe Strummer and the Baron take a quick trip down the road to the local arena - with Lester Bangs in tow, no less - for the purpose of stabbing the tires in Journey's tour bus. The whole point of the book is to spotlight how weird and crazy a time this was. But nostalgia is a two-edged sword - the last page of the book is filled with capsule biographies of many of the musicians featured on the previous pages. Most of them are dead: Nomi, Joe Strummer, ¾ of the Ramones, Ian Dury, Wendy O. Williams, even the Bank itself has been rubble for decades. It's all basically gone, and for all the critical lionizing that has been heaped on punk's first wave, only one Ramones CD ever went gold (Ramones Mania), but Journey have sold 75 million records worldwide.



For all the agonies of high school depicted herein, it's nevertheless a cozy slice of teenaged life. The only person who seems to understand that is The Baron, ready and willing to leave Akron but not before he gets the most out of his high school tenure.

Derf's style owes a lot to Peter Bagge. Every panel is filled with the type of loving detail that makes the pages practically bulge with personality. You can definitely see that Derf has spent much of his career working in newspaper panels: he knows how to wring the most out of every centimeter of space allotted him. For all the seeming modesty of the book's construction, it's really quite an accomplished achievement.

Albums You Should Own, Part the Third



My Chemical Romance - The Black Parade

Believe me, this one was as much of a surprise to me at the time as it probably is for you. Most of the reviews I have read for Gerard Way's very good Umbrella Academy series for Dark House usually begin with some kind of dismissal of Way's day job, i.e. as singer and songwriter for My Chemical Romance, one of the most popular rock acts of the last five years or so who aren't named Nickleback. I don't listen to a lot - read, hardly any - hard rock anymore, but something about MCR grabbed my attention from the first time I heard their single "Helena", off 2004's Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge.

In the first place, the music is incredibly tuneful. One of the reasons why so much contemporary hard rock leaves me cold is that it just isn't very interesting. Pop music of all varieties lives and breathes on the strength of its hooks. Hooks can be wildly different depending on what genre of music you're listening to - certainly, Leonard Cohen circa 1969 wrote vastly different kinds of songs than Metallica circa 1986, but both Songs From A Room and Master of Puppets are filled with hooks. Whether we're talking about the subtle, deceptively gentle Vaudeville stage hook at the turn of "Bird on the Wire" or the violent, flesh-rending meat hook of "Master of Puppets, there's something there that grabs the listener's interest, something visceral that makes the songs themselves dynamic and alive in a way that remains separate from - albeit extraordinarily complementary to - the lyrical or sonic qualities. I've heard loads and loads of literate, well-written contemporary folk that is obviously heartfelt and even compelling on a lyrical basis that is nevertheless about as interesting to listen to as drying paint. For all Dylan's lyrical acumen, he understood that "Desolation Row" wouldn't have been at all interesting if the words weren't wrapped up in a compelling, deceptively placid melody - one of Dylan's best, actually. Similarly, strong hooks and compelling energy have salvaged any number of rock albums beset by poor lyrics - I mean, seriously, I love David Bowie like a house on fire, but if you printed the complete lyrics to Aladdin Sane in a chapbook completely separate from their music context, they would be laughable. (Admittedly, that's probably Bowie's weakest album - lyrically - from his classic period, but Bowie has never been a great lyricist, and is in fact probably the weakest lyricist among all of his peers in the "classic" rock canon, despite having recorded far more than his share of the greatest rock albums ever.)




So, for all Gerard Way's "weakness" as a lyricist he nevertheless understands the emotive power of pop music like few of his contemporary peers. In some ways, yes, the band betrays its roots in the regrettable early to mid 00s swamp of light metal / punk influenced "emo", a branch of music so enduringly uninteresting to me that I can't even recall the names of any of the bands I don't like. But there's something fresh in My Chemical Romance's sound that sets them apart from any of the similar bands with whom they might be compared. If I had to pinpoint what that "X" factor was, I'd probably say something to the effect that MCR seem to have a healthier relation to their forebears and influences than most contemporary rock acts. Because, if we're honest, we'll admit that almost all pop music is highly derivative of what came before - it's just that some bands manage to be more endearing and honest in their filching than others.

This is, roughly, the same kind of attitude Way uses to approach The Umbrella Academy. It's obvious that Way grew up reading the same "classic" mainstream books that most superhero fans of his age range did - Claremont's Uncanny X-Men, Wolfman & Perez's Teen Titans, Miller's Daredevil. But most contemporary superhero comics fail for the simple reason that they try to pretend they're somehow something radically different from their forebears. Secret Invasion tried to pretend it was something besides a warmed-over version of Invasion! mixed with bits and bobs of every other paranoid late 80s crossover from either company. In the end it couldn't mask the fact that all those other stories at least had a strong enough grasp on the basics of craft and engineering required to tell superhero stories on an epic scale that they remain - if not high art - at least readable and coherent, whereas Secret Invasion was neither readable nor coherent, and couldn't mask these basic faults with all the David Mamet dialogue in the world. The Umbrella Academy makes no bones about its influences - for all intents and purposes it's the jam comic that Claremont and Wolfman never got to make, with some of Grant Morrison's early verve thrown in for good measure. But Way doesn't disregard the mechanical necessities of producing this kind of comic in favor of pretending what he's doing is somehow all that different. It's not, not really. But where it succeeds as more than a pastiche is the way Way uses his influences as the solid foundation for what comes after your influences, that is, his own personal spin on the well-trod territory of a cobbled together post-nuclear family of modern superheroes with deep oedipal issues concerning their father figures. What happens in The Umbrella Academy isn't particularly novel, but I want to read more about those characters and their adventures in a way I haven't cared about the actual X-Men or Teen Titans in decades.

Way takes the same approach to his songwriting for MCR as he does The Umbrella Academy. He begins with an honest appraisal of his basic influences, and then proceeds forward with a strong understanding both of how these influences worked and how to tweak them in order to achieve his individual artistic goals. Again, all art is derivative to some extent or another - it's not a matter of being unoriginal, it's a matter of how you use your influences (because everyone starts out as little more than the sum total of their influences) as a prism to reflect your own sensibilities that dictates your success. Bendis totally failed in his two attempts as creating massive, line-wide crossover epics (House of M & Secret Invasion) because he very obviously didn't understand the basic mechanics necessary to make a story like Infinity Gauntlet or the original Crisis readable in the first place, let alone interesting. My Chemical Romance aren't trying to reinvent the wheel. Rather, they've got their influences pretty obviously written on their sleeves - Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Queen, Iron Maiden, the Smiths, a touch of early 90s pop punk in the vein of Green Day. But the most important thing is that they seem to honestly understand how these bands and albums worked, not merely on the visceral stylistic level but on the nuts-and-bolts level of practical execution necessary to make listeners care about this kind of elaborate and ornate, emotional and theatrical epic rock and roll.

It's comparable, say, to how Bendis thought his two-page spreads in Secret Invasion would work just like previous climactic spreads in previous crossovers, even though he totally failed to provide the necessary scut work to establish setting and context, and rather depended on the audience's familiarity with tropes to provide a story significance that couldn't be guessed without recourse to extra-contextual data. In the original Crisis, for instance, Wolfman goes out of his way to "sell" Superman in a way that you wouldn't think necessary in the context of a story specifically about Superman's fifty-plus years of continual publication. But he understands that every character and every concept needs its justification in the present context or it refuses to be necessary and merely becomes vestigial. Superman works as the emotional center of Wolfman's sprawling, so-big-it's-probably-sui-generis epic because Wolfman takes the time to tell us why Superman is the emotional lynchpin, why the events are important to him and therefore to the reader as well. Bendis just assumes we've already read all the build-up and tie-ins, so the result is lazy, complacent and just about dead. He assumes we care without doing the hard work necessary to ensure that we do.



That's how I'd describe the majority of rock I hear these days - when I actually hear new rock on the radio, that is. My Chemical Romance go the extra mile by not merely suggesting but insisting the listener insert as much of him or herself as possible into the emotional context of the songs. They do this the old fashioned way: constructing their songs with consummate care, not merely assuming their listeners will be familiar with their influences, but approaching every song as if it might be someone's first ever exposure to rock & roll, and therefore their best chance to convince that person of just how awesome - how evocative, how lurid, how grandiose and how epic - rock & roll can truly be. This is why, like early Bowie, Way's best lyrics arise from those simple moments when he addresses the listener themselves, making an honest emotional appeal that, despite its familiarity, never fails to convince.

It's become a cliche of music writing for the past decade, far more so in recent years than ever before, to begin a review by going down a laundry list of the act's influences and forebears (I've done it myself more than a few times). That's because, like superhero comics, rock music long ago entered a state of advanced, attenuated decadence best encapsulated by the music's dependence on the constant bartering of dead symbols to signify present significance. Little care is taken to ensure that these symbols actually remain significant, because the assumption is made that this significance is a given among the remaining, die-hard fanbase. The group's CV is offered with equal significance alongside the work itself.

What significance does a band like Vampire Weekend possess besides the list of their formidable influences? I've got the album, I've listened to it a few times, it absolutely fails to hold my attention despite the protestations of hundreds of music bloggers - including some whose opinion I actually respect - telling me that I should like it and why. The band itself doesn't seem to want to take the effort to convince me why I should care, and it shouldn't be the job of the critic to finish the work left half-accomplished by the artist. On the contrary, I've never read a single glowing review of My Chemical Romance by any member of the ostensible hipster music press, no rundown of their accomplishments and forebears besides what could be easily discerned from listening to the music itself. You've got your Queen, your Bowie, your 80s pop metal (Maiden! Priest!), your maudlin 80s indie (The Smiths! The The!) Those are obvious, and if you've got a strong dislike for any of those types of music, then MCR are not for you. But more than simply name-checking "Bohemian Rhapsody", they understand that Queen's theatricality only works if the band commits itself wholeheartedly to the artifice. They understand that the Smiths weren't just morbidly depressing, they were also fuckin' funny, and the reason why The Queen Is Dead remains such a great album almost two and a half decades later is that Morrissey's punchlines are still as funny as ever. You've got to sweat for every ounce of the audience's suspension of disbelief. You can't get by, like Billy Corrigan, on some kind of faux-grandeur undercut by winking irony. For all their faults, I have never believed anything but that My Chemical Romance are absolutely 100% committed to making the best rock & roll they know how to make, and that they've invested everything they have into making me believe in their ability to do so.

Lightning Round!

Marvel Zombies 3 #4

This was far, far better than it had any right to be. Everyone involved should pat themselves on the back for a job extremely well done. It is really a testament to how well this series was done that I was actually sorry it was only four issues long - I thought it would be five, like the previous Marvel Zombies series, and was disappointed when I turned the last few pages to find it was ending. Seriously, I can't remember the last time that happened.

For all the crap Warren Ellis gets - most of it deserved - he deserves praise for his reconceptualization of Machine Man. From being one of the least well developed Kirby creations - so boring that not even Barry Windsor-Smith could do much with him - Ellis was able to make him into the type of character whose presence can make even boring crap like Ms. Marvel fun to read. I imagine he's really fun to write, which is one reason he keeps showing up now. He was even fun in that X-Men: First Class issue where the old-school overly-earnest Machine Man appeared. Imagine that - a character revamp works so well it even makes the older versions of said character more interesting.

But with all that said, reading this incredibly enjoyable series, only to turn the final page and see the set-up for a new Morbius the Living Vampire relaunch, is akin to waking up to find out the hooker stole your wallet and your car keys. The fact that Morbius spent the previous three issues being repeatedly vivisected by his evil twin from Zombie Earth was one of my favorite parts, considering how much I loathe the character. Seeing him relaunched into his own spin-off - featuring a revitalized Midnight Sons, no less - feels like a cock-punch from Tom Daschle.

The Punisher #1

First, this was not a comic book - this was the opening scene of a larger comic book story which must have gotten mixed up at the printers, sort of like that thing where they printed the X-Men / Spider-Man innards in the Manifest Destiny packaging. Seriously, even though it was a nice piece of action storytelling, it was damn frustrating to realize the story was over at the point where, in truth, the story was just getting interesting. There's cliffhangers, and then there's just stopping the story because you ran out of pages and realized you maybe should have been more economical with your action sequences.

That said, this issue also points to a major problem with "Black Reign". I realize the Sentry is the definition of a "problem" character - i.e., the fact that the guy is a walking deus ex machina whose comically exaggerated power level and cardboard personality make it necessary for every writer who uses him to spend more time rationalizing and extenuating his presence and lack of potency than actually, you know, doing something interesting with him. There have actually been a few good Sentry stories but, surprise, they've been stories about the Sentry and his individual problems, set slightly aside from the superhero universe he's ostensibly enmeshed in (the original Sentry series, corny gimmick aside, was good), and never actually stories involving other characters or his membership the Avengers. The premise of the issue is hamstrung from the beginning.

So - here he is, the Golden Guardian of Good, not merely an apologist for Tony Stark's post-Civil War, at least theoretically defensible New World Order, but an actual active defender of the new psuedo-authoritarian reign of terror perpetrated by one of the Marvel Universe's most infamous murderers. How does that make sense considering that one of the Sentry's few incontestable, unambiguous character traits is the fact that he is supposed to be an archetypal "good guy", a blatant and purposeful Superman pastiche whose problems stem from an extra-textual inability to reconcile the (perceived) Manichean ideals of old-school Golden and early Silver Age superheroics with the morally ambiguous ethical texture of contemporary post-Bronze Age superheroics? That's why his arch-nemesis is a schizoid version of himself, for God's sake, the metaphor isn't that hard to follow. Given that, how does it make sense for the Sentry to ever put himself in the position of defending the life of the man who murdered Gwen Stacy? I don't even mean just preventing the murder - we all know why he's doing it, because we've seen Superman save the Joker's life under similar circumstances hundreds of times, so we understand the logic behind the specific choice. But putting himself in the position of being an apologist for the "Dark Reign"? Working for the man who killed Gwen Stacy? Superman was always able to see through Lex Luthor's schemes, and Norman Osborn isn't even trying very hard.

Even if the Sentry doesn't remember who Spider-Man is, post "One More Day", it's been established that he does know who Peter Parker is. Would you put yourself in the position of taking orders from a man who killed your friend's (for all intents and purposes) fiance? Even if it wasn't a particularly close friend, hell, even if it was just someone you met at your friend's party that one time, wouldn't that still probably make water-cooler conversations a bit awkward? If the character wasn't already practically worthless I'd say that making him a tool for the Osborn regime ruined him for good, but as it is it's just another in a long line of non sequitor plot points in bad superhero comic books.

Invincible Iron Man #9

And again, any suspension of disbelief I may have had about "Dark Reign" dissolves the moment I see Norman Osborn ordering his government goons to murder Maria Hill. For a useful analogy, imagine if incoming Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano ordered Michael Chertoff's assassination. It's certainly possible, say, if you live in Russia or another post-Soviet kangaroo oligarchy, but it doesn't really jibe with my empirical understanding of the way the United States Government, even in the darkest days of the Nixon or Bush II administrations, has ever operated. And it especially doesn't jibe very well if we're supposed to believe that Barack Obama, elected as the champion of responsible, accountable, transparent and ethical government, is also president of the United States in the Marvel Universe.

There are two options: one, Marvel was betting the farm on McCain winning the election, certainly a feasible option if we consider that the details of the post-Secret Invasion Marvel Universe were probably being hammered out during the interminable Democratic primary fight, when it looked not only possible but probable that a divided Democratic party would manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of defeat by putting up a fatally wounded candidate to lose against a weak but well-backed Republican. The second option is that everyone at Marvel is an arch-conservative who sees the election of Barack Obama as the first step in a totalitarian socialist takeover of the American government, a la Michael Savage, or those people who still jack-off when they think about how Hillary shot Vernon Jordan for threatening to go to the press about her lesbian harem. The only other option to explain a storyline so radically out of synch with the country's mood is that the people at Marvel are just not bright enough to understand how a story which is obviously designed to be read in a political light might actually be read in a political light, to the confusion and bewilderment of many. Civil War had a metric shitpile of problems, but the one thing it succeeded quite well at doing was figuring out how to express topicality without being explicitly topical, fingering the pulse of the national mood in a blatant, albeit effective manner. This new storyline is so tone-deaf and preposterous that it's almost endearing, but more likely just disheartening.

Secret Six #5

There's been a lot of talk lately about just why certain books about female characters, or books by female creators, don't sell. I can't pretend to answer that, and I won't try because the answers a most likely depressing as fuuuuuck, but I do feel confident saying that the reason why Gail Simone's Wonder Woman isn't selling better is that it's just not very good. It's not just a matter of exaggerated expectations - the Number One Female Writer in Comics Finally Writing the Number One Female Character in Comics! - but the stories themselves have done precious little to rise above the stinky morass of the DC Universe circa 2008, or even make Wonder Woman's dull-as-dirt status quo seem more than life-threateningly banal.

But then I read a book like this - which, I must stress, is far from perfect - but nevertheless hums along with sufficient vim and vigor, and positively sings at certain moments, and I have to (heh) wonder. Is Simone saving up her A-game for this decidedly B-list book? Stranger things have happened: Bendis still writes a mean Ultimate Spider-Man even while his far more high-profile gigs suffer from attenuated craptitude. Has the pressure of turning around the perpetually sagging fortunes of Wonder Woman - a book every single person in the comics industry wants to see succeed but which nevertheless resolutely fails to do so year after year - cramped her pen, bringing about a series of clenched and constipated autopilot exercises? It's not that there haven't been flashes of interest. Her first arc had some nice ideas - the funny monkeys, the new Amazon arch-nemeses. Genocide, for all the characters' regrettable qualities, seems like she might have the potential to evolve into a genuinely creepy adversary once she moves past the "over-hyped and slightly preposterous debut" stage. But despite those moments, it still seems as if Simone is writing Wonder Woman with one hand tied behind her back. It never takes off like it should.

Secret Six, on the other hand, is a good book. Sure, it suffers from being a bit too reserved in places. There are moments when you wish the story would lose some of its soap-opera trappings and just take off into Nextwave-style ultra-weirdness. It's a book full of despicable villains, supposedly doing despicable things, and sometimes it feels too mannered for its own good. But still, it's a far sight better than her Wonder Woman, and even when it threatens to get dull, it's not long before the fun Gail Simone rattles her chains and something genuinely weird or scary happens - like the scene with the formerly conjoined twins, for instance, which evoked a real honest-to-Gosh chuckle.

Sometimes there is no larger reason behind a book's not selling other than it just isn't good enough to get people to want to read it. Other times, however - and judging from the sales figures for Secret Six, this may be the case - there's no good reason why a superior title doesn't sell much better than it actually does. This is a fun book, the kind of book I can see lasting some sixty or seventy-five or even a hundred satisfying issues, a perennial critical darling like Suicide Squad or Birds of Prey that never manages to break any records but nonetheless pleases a devoted readership for many, many years, the backbone of any successful publisher's strong mid-list. Or it could be another in a long line of series that gets canceled far too early because no one cares. As they say, U-Decide.