The Decade in Comics:
Katabasis



So, after all the recrimination and self-flagellation, what is left?

My Decade is Comics, in hindsight, is a pretty weird place and time. Because, really, my decade in general was a weird place and time. Those who suffered through my Best Music of the Decade articles should have detected a pretty strong running theme throughout my picks for the decade: the music that stands out in my memory is in some manner cathartic, measuring an arc from disaster to redemption. Whether we're talking about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or The Woods or Kid A or Show Your Bones, these are all albums that begin in a place of despair and over the course of the following hour dig themselves out, towards the light, towards something resembling hope, or acquiescence, or maturity. Sometimes you have to be torn apart and burnt to the ground before you can rebuild.

The Hurting recently celebrated its sixth anniversary, the third week of January. Sometimes when I'm in one of my more introspective moods I ask myself what the point of this blog is - not necessarily in the fatalistic way, just in a definitional way: I've been doing this for six years - longer than my marriage, for chrissakes - and I still don't really know what it is, exactly, that I'm doing. It doesn't really look like it's been around for over half a decade - I still use the same damn orange Blogspot default template that I started with, and have no intention on shaking that up so I can look "professional" anytime soon. I don't post daily, I don't have any kind of jocular blogging persona, I've never been asked to pitch a Spider-Man story, and I'm far too scattered to ever actually get a webcomic off the ground of my own initiative. And yet this blog endures: every now and again I wonder if maybe the whole thing has run its course, but that idea never lasts too long. It is what it is, I'm not trying to make a career out of this, I'm not trying to do anything, really, except maybe try to use this platform as a means of making sense of things that don't make sense, or articulating stray thoughts, or interrogating my own worst impulses through dialogue . . . with my audience, whoever sticks around, or even just myself. I'm stick with it, just like I'm stuck with myself.

I'm spiteful, peevish, pessimistic, gleefully contrarian, phlegmatic and wrathful in equal measure. I resent the time spent researching even the most basic factual statements and, as Milo is always gleeful to point out, still am never quite sure about "its" and "it's." And yet, with all that, it's necessary, for me, to continue to do this in whatever capacity I feel like, just because I can, just because I need to.

So when I start out by trying to sum up the Decade in Comics - well, it should come as a surprise to no one that this is my decade in comics. I start out by venting my most unpleasant, antisocial tendencies, then I pull back and vivisect those same negative impulses, and in the process of doing so we end up . . . here, wherever "here" is. We grow up.

Is it wrong to expect my relationship to comics to be the same as it was when I was eight or eighteen or twenty-eight? Undoubtedly so. Is it right to conclude that my own personal misgivings about comics are due almost entirely to my own personal misgivings, period? Yes! But that's what this whole thing is about, really.



(Incidentally: coolest tattoo ever? I think yes.)

I was never judging comics, I was judging myself.

This was a good decade for comics, but a rough decade for me. it started well, it really did, bit it seemed to go off the rails very quickly. I made some bad decisions - I pushed away my family, pushed away my friends - partly out of remorse and partly out of shame - turned away from the "correct" path I was set down in my early twenties and instead went down a really weird and occasionally disastrous road. I got a divorce, I worked the night shift at a childrens' mental hospital, I suffered just about every kind of demeaning misfortune you can imagine without actually losing a limb. And then, somehow, someway, I climbed out of that really weird place - a place of alienation, depression and uncertainty - and painstakingly remade my life in a new mold. Six years ago I was living in a shack in the wilderness during the coldest Massachusetts winter in a decade, huddling around a space heater because that was the only heat I had. Now I'm waiting to hear back after sending out applications for admissions to some of the most prestigious PhD programs in the country. (And a bunch of not-so-prestigeous places too, don't worry!) Six years ago when I began the blog this was a lifeline, and now it's something else - it's about comics, yes, but it's about everything else. It's about mistakes and misapprehensions and about being wrong as often as you're being right, but it's always been about the idea that if you work hard you can think your way out of any corner.

If comics don't fill the same place in my life that they did twenty or thirty years ago, well, whose fault is that? Mine. For not having the imagination or the patience to see past my own conception of comics, my own negative connotations and constrained worldview, my own long-established acceptance of comics as a passive component of my own identity, and not an active field with its own sprawling, diverse and constantly-changing identity.

So it's time for a new beginning. A new decade, a new covenant with comics. If comics are so important to me, then shouldn't I be able to adapt, to fit myself to their new reality instead of wasting my energies in frustration that they are no longer what they were twenty or ten or even five years ago? I think a great deal of my problems stem from the fact that my own reading has been circumscribed by my own circumstances: I've been busy and I've been tired and I've been depressed in equal measures. I've been working hard, especially the last couple years - which is hardly a unique condition for anyone, but when your ability to read comics is primarily limited to your desire for escapist entertainment during long workdays, your perception of comics is warped accordingly. When you just don't have the wherewithal to read so much as a fraction of the "good" new comics released in any given week, you might get fatalistic, and you might become overly judgmental on the good comics you do read. Don't get me wrong: I'm not about to back away from my statement that many of the better-reviewed comics of this preceding decade are overrated, and that the medium's popular success has warped the critical faculties among a large percentage of longtime comics readers who are happy to see comics "accepted" by the larger world. Go Team Comics! and all that bullshit. But even if there's some truth there, it's a small truth, kind of a miserly observation based as much on sour grapes as anything else. Yeah, I've felt for a while as if comics had passed me by, but - to reiterate - that's my problem. I've missed out on a lot, but instead of throwing up my arms in frustration at my inability to master everything, and a sincere dyspepsia brought about by the profusion of popular works that can't all stand head and shoulders with Maus in the Klassic Komics Kanon, well, maybe it's time to dig in and define the next decade of the medium for myself.

And that's what this blog is about, and what it's going to continue to be about for so long as I feel like doing it. It'll be about everything else it's ever been about - the unfunny jokes, the long digressions into music and politics, the weird intimacy issues that make a 17yo Twi-hard's LJ look positively Proustian in comparison - but hopefully it'll be better, because that's all I've always wanted, was to be better, as a blogger, as a thinker and as a human being.

With that in mind - what all this was leading towards - our next feature will be a countdown of the Ten BEST Comics of the last decade - nothing but the cream of the crop, a solid foundation in the past on which to build a newer, brighter future.

The Decade in Comics:
Taking My Toys and Going Home



When I wrote the last post I knew that the next post would be, essentially, a rebuttal to my own ideas: I was trying to articulate particular, uniquely unpleasant associations I have developed in regards to comics over the last few years, associations which I framed in as universal a light as possible despite their avowedly idiosyncratic expression. I've been dissatisfied with comics for a while and I have had a very difficult time explaining why that is, especially to myself. Usually it's easier to just read a pile of crappy superhero pamphlets than to figure out why I just don't feel like engaging with something better and smarter. And then I ask myself the question: why? Why does it seem easier to give up? I've lived with comics for almost three decades now, consistently. It's kind of weird to realize for the large majority of my life, there have been far, far fewer days when I haven't read some kind of comic than those that I have. I can go weeks without watching a movie but even when I'm at my busiest I almost never go longer than 24 hours without reading some kind of comic.

So, as should be obvious to anyone, my dissatisfaction with comics has far more to do with my own inadequacies as a reader than with comics itself. It's been really frustrating to read all the encomiums for the past decade and realize that, all things being equal, most people regard it as a great decade, I've even seen some people refer to it as "comics greatest decade" or some such. And inevitably the list of truly great comics made during the last ten years grows longer than your arm, and the comics are good, and the people making comics can make money making comics, and they make more comics because people with money pay the people making comics to make more comics . . . etc etc.

And what does it all mean? It means comics is grown up. It's not just "comics" anymore, it's basically a huge thing that reaches all across publishing and the arts scene and entertainment and film - it's bigger than any one person. Jog intimidates the fuck out of me because he actually seems to be equipped to take it all in - he's the model of the type of omnivorous reader our new comics industry demands. But if you can't keep up with everything - and who can? - it's really dispiriting. Too much stuff. There's just too much, and I can't keep up with it anymore. Used to be that skimming through Previews on any given month, you could order every new, interesting book or periodical and not spend more than, say, $200 a month. Now, you can drop that money just on the new strip reprint compilations released every other week.

When I talk about how the comics industry almost died, well, it's partly wishful thinking. That must be the craziest thing I've ever said. But bear with me: through the darkest days of the comics industry, when stores were closing left and right, it seemed really apocalyptic. I used to travel around California a lot when I was younger, and I knew where the good comic book stores were in every city and town between Los Angeles and Eureka - Bakersfield, Palm Springs, Sacramento, Santa Rosa, Chico, all points in between. And then at some point all these shops that I used to look forward to visiting on my trips just disappeared. We'd drive into town and there would be nothing left, just an empty storefront and phantom tumbleweeds.

No one read comics, there wasn't even anywhere to buy comics. In order to keep reading comics in the years following the boom and bust, you really had to love comics, and more importantly, you had to fight for the privilege. Mainstream comics were disappearing from grocery stores and 7-11s, comic book stores were fading into the night - even the few conventions I attended in the late 90s seemed like ghost towns. I remember seeing Rory Root at the 2000 Wonder Con and having a brief, depressing conversation about just how dead the whole place was.

That attenuated weakness was invigorating. No one cared, no one paid attention, the only people left in the room were people who had self-selected themselves as fanatics, people who had survived boom and bust cycles and horrible mainstream comics and spotty distribution for good comics and dusty head shops. Comics, or at least what survived, was ours, and it belonged to no one else. No one wanted it.

One of the singular features of the first generations of post-60s "alternative" cartoonists was a knee-jerk rejection of the supposedly commercial values of dominant "mainstream" books. Front and center was the singular focus on the demolished alter-ego: the prejudice against "alternative" comics as poorly-reasoned autobiography focusing relentlessly on the shortcomings and vicissitudes of demasculated protagonists begins here, with Crumb and Spiegelman, with a very real desire to stake out rhetorical space as explicitly differentiated from the steroid-bound muscle cases as possible. Of course, that wasn't all that non-superhero comics represented, or even a plurality. But it was as much a part of our wish-fulfillment landscape as the ultra powerful Kirby-esque demigods. Our self-flagellation was gorgeous.

And that was how we got by. I can't speak for everyone, but for me, personally, comics has for a long time contained an element of exquisite self-loathing - every comic read during my childhood was ten or twenty minutes taken away from doing something else - and over the course of a lifetime all of that "something else" eventually adds up to an alternate lifetime filled with regrets. Why were you reading comics when you could have been paying attention to the scenery on family car trips? Why were you reading comics when you could have been interacting with now-dead grandparents? Why were you reading comics when you could have been out dating girls? But these regrets, and the negative self-image that eventually got up and followed me everywhere I went, was part and parcel of the romance: I had sacrificed a great deal of my life, a great deal of what I could have been, because I got sucked into this damn world. I identified with Captain America when I was a kid and Chester Brown as a young adult, Dave Sim on my worst days - nowadays, I recognize I'm probably somewhere in between. But they're all in there.

So now, it all seems mediocre - there's nothing left there for me to identify with. The artform continues, but despite the supposed vivacity, it seems pallid. It doesn't help that so many of the supposed "great works" of the last decade have been seemingly designed for the specific purpose of alienating my sensibilities. Scott Pilgrim? I've personally rarely encountered a book as insipid, proffering up a familiarity with the rhythms of video games and nerd media as if it was some sort of justifiable postmodern stance and not merely an apologia for a lifetime spent skirting illiteracy. (Besides the fact that its retrograde attitude towards women makes Identity Crisis seem like a Betty Friedan tract.) Blankets? Mewling kunstlerroman based on juvenile identifications and facile sub-Fruedian self-analysis, glossed over by a surplus of admittedly decent craft chops. Black Hole? Even worse than Blankets - wow, how amazing is it that a misfit teenager can be saved by an idealized wet-dream icon of motherly sexuality? The fact that the art looks like a black-light poster conjures up memories of listening to Led Zeppelin IV on a beanbag chair with heavy cans on your head for some, I'm sure, but I never much cared for Zeppelin. Pandering to the collective sense of lost nostalgia of an aging twenty- and thirty-something demographic is hardly great art. Bone? I've never been able to get past the first book - achingly unfunny.

I could go on but really, what's the point? I just sound like a screeching old man, hopelessly out of touch, alienating what few readers are still around this far into such a poorly-thought out and researched slab of hate speech. Some of the best - or at least most well-regarded - comics of the aughts were the products of the 90s: Black Hole and Bone took over a decade each to finish themselves up before they could be compiled between two thick covers. Same with books like Jimmy Corrigan, From Hell, Louis Riel - books I like - products of years of toil. So it's not as if the previous decade sprang full-formed from the head of Zeus. All those good books and critical acclaim was, literally, years in the making. So it's not as if the success of this decade came out of nowhere.

But if I exaggerate how close the industry came to annihilation? Well, if it had died, or at least been cut down so low it couldn't have rebuilt nearly as well as it has - it'd still be ours. We wouldn't have to share it with anyone. We wouldn't have to admit that this thing to which we sacrificed the best years of our lives was really never ours to begin with - that it was just an accident of history that the comics industry grew so weak and emaciated that it ever needed anything so fickle as our undying loyalty to survive. Comics owes me, dammit . . . but then, really, comics doesn't owe me a God-damned thing.

Now if you walk through academia you see comics added to reading lists in English and Comparative Literature departments. Having returned to school some time ago, I've seen Persepolis, Fun Home, Black Hole, even the Luna Brothers, show up on syllabi. But really, Persepolis never impressed me - it strikes me as even more of a "dancing bear" than Corrigan ever was, only the remarkable thing is not that it's a halfway intelligent comic book but that it's a comic book drawn by an articulate Iranian woman with far more interest in communicating her story than ingratiating herself with the fanboy politik, either through open pandering or explicit rejection. She's just a cartoonist who happens to tell stories readily accessible by anyone with a fleeting interest in current events, who happened to hit upon a zeitgeist of interest in that specific region and ride a wave of success. Why do we (and by me, I guess I mean I) resent it? Because she didn't "suffer" - her kunstlerroman ends with a mature, fairly happy and well-balanced young adult who has gained some degree of perspective on her life and narrative - kind of like Blankets, Black Hole, Fun Home. But that's not the story! The real story is Rusty Brown. Happy people don't get to be in comics!

And then I wake up and realize how absurd it is to posit for one second that Marjane Satrapi didn't "suffer," just because she didn't grow up shaped by the dialectical conflict between Gary Groth and Gareb Shamus. She had bigger fish to fry, so to speak. Even if, honestly, I don't think she's anywhere near as good a cartoonist as David B., (and I'd still say the same thing about Adrian Tomine in relation to Daniel Clowes), she came by her story the hard way, and her success, much as I am loathe to admit it, is well-earned.

But it represents a paradigm shift nonetheless. What is comics? Does comics exist for its own sake only, filled with people who have sacrificed a great deal to join a club whose exclusivity is defined only by how much self-loathing you want to express in any given social event? There's this idea in my head of "pure" comics, unbound by any allegiance to any standard other than the ideal of the autonomous artist defined only by his or her own sense of responsibility - but when I take out these prejudices and look at them in the clear light, they make about as much sense as Clement Greenberg's claims that ab-ex represented the apotheosis of western art. Well, dammit, I still think that color fields are the best paintings in the world. When I was in San Francisco we went to the SF MOMA and I spent a good ten minutes staring intently at this canvas, absolutely hypnotically beautiful. But touting this kind of Olympian remove in the arts is kind of old fashioned. All the minimal techno I've cultivated over the last decade is starting to sound, well, dated in a way I would never have thought possible. Likewise, the self-abnegation of mid-to-late 90s alternative comics is probably a movement of its time.

Things are busy and fast now. People like comics, people read comics casually and without really thinking about it. It's probably the best environment in the world to be a cartoonist. But suddenly the clubhouse got crowded - different standards took over, standards that aren't beholden to having decades of familiarity and emotionally-charged history with the medium and particular schools of critical thought within the medium. Basically, books that people might actually want to read actually started getting bought by people who would want to read them for no other reason than that there was an interesting story therein. If it feels at times like the clubhouse has got too crowded, if the Android's Dungeon has been corrupted by outsiders . . . well, tough shit, I guess. There is no more clubhouse. It burnt down.

The Decade in Comics:
Mediocrity Triumphant



The most important fact to remember in considering the just passed decade is that, by all rights, it should never have happened. The comics industry should have died during the 1990s, and in hindsight it was only through the sheerest of luck that it did not.

Anyone reading these words who was not around in comics ten years ago might be scratching their heads, or wondering why the events of twenty years ago should so strongly influence our interpretation of the past ten. It must be remembered that the industry - not the artform, obviously, but the industry - came within a hair's breadth of ceasing to exist in the late 90s. If just a few things had occurred differently, the series of catastrophic decisions and stock market machinations that ended with Marvel bankrupt and something like 2/3 of all comic book stores closed could have ended even worse, with Marvel in chapter 7 instead of chapter 11, and as a direct result many more stores failing. Even if Marvel's assets had been purchased by an entity with a vested interest in maintaining their publishing business and not just strip-mining the properties, any disruption in Marvel comics production at all during those fragile years would have put so many more retailers out of business that the system itself would have probably collapsed. (Marvel has always been the number one publisher by a disproportionate degree, except for a very brief period in the early 90s. Marvel's frantic overreaction to the formation of Image and the subsequent competition for market share was directly responsible for the bust of '93.) At that time, if the direct market had fallen, then all the smaller publishers who depended on the direct market as their primary means of distribution would also have fallen. Think about that for a second: decisions made by Marvel could have easily put Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Top Shelf, Slave Labor and every other non-premier publisher out of business. Anyone without a newsstand presence would have had to scramble to find alternate distribution channels - and while there were a fair amount of independent bookstores and record shops that carried "alternative" comics, there weren't enough to provide sole support for any small publisher. And a lot of these retail outlets went out of business in the next few years anyway, as Barnes & Noble, Borders and especially Amazon consolidated their grips on the retails publishing industry. Even Tower Records / Books, long a consistent supporter of Fantagraphics product, went out of business a couple years back.

When I think back to the first few years of the last decade, I think of an endless series of desperate fire sales on the part of small publishers who were fighting bravely to keep the lights on. It was dicey, for those imprints who had managed to keep the doors open during the late 90s, to keep the doors open during the following years, when just the fact that the industry had survived was considered so much of a miracle that people really weren't going to complain about the lack of market growth in absolute terms.

And then something happened: it didn't happen overnight, but the results were striking nonetheless. In my own mind, I think the first real sign that things were about to change significantly for the better was the publication of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan in collected form by Pantheon. It seems as if that was the last comic to gain mainstream acclaim in the old "dancing bear" mode of mainstream media comics criticism - you know, it doesn't matter how good the bear dances, just the fact that they can get the tutu on is an accomplishment in and of itself. But Jimmy Corrigan was a hit, and instead of being an isolated hit it seemed instead to be the first wave in a movement that refused to subside. Corrigan won accolades, but at the time it was still an atypical success, one of those apocryphal "comics for grown-ups" that crawled out of the woodwork periodically. But it was also the first sign that the industry had reached a tipping-point, not necessarily in the overall quality of the work being produced (that never changed, contrary to popular belief) but the ability of the industry to sell that work to an appreciative, mainstream (by which I mean real world "mainstream") audience. Soon after Corrigan, Kavalier & Clay became both a bestseller and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Then after that - or around the same time? - came Louis Riel, the collected Bone, Persepolis, Black Hole, Fun Home, the American Splendor movie, the Sin City and 300 films - not to mention all the massively successful superhero action movies that clogged up the multiplexes. To say nothing of all the manga that flooded our shores. Shonen Jump, Naruto, Buddha.

Whether it was solely comics or larger comics culture, the subterranean movement that had been building for a long time finally broke aboveground - if Corrigan was the last "dancing bear," every subsequent serious comics work that would reach significant accolades was accepted that much moreso on its own terms. Fun Home was Time's book of the year, and the only notable thing about the decision, for people in the comics industry, is that it really wasn't that much of a shock. Not ten years before our industry had been on death's door, but in just over half a decade the publishing industry had thoroughly metabolized comics. It wasn't merely a legitimate publishing category (as opposed to the annex of the Dungeons & Dragons manuals stuck at the tail-end of the Sci-FI section at Barnes & Noble), it was was a publishing category that sold. Big-name creators were getting book deals with New York publishers that paid out real-world money. Smaller publishers were able to get their stable of artists into actual bookstores.

Another tipping point in a decade seemingly filled with tipping points was Fantagraphics' announcement of the deal to produce The Complete Peanuts series. For decades smaller publishers had been frustrated by an inability to get presumably saleable product into real-world bookstores - and even those that had met with some success, such as the early 90s iteration of Classics Illustrated, were often frustrated, or worse, victims of their own success. Suddenly, a company like Fantagraphics could announce a project whose primary audience was far outside the direct market, a book series that was practically guaranteed massive sales in conventional bookstores, and be confident that these books actually would find their way to an appreciative audience in the wider world. Fantagraphics had signed a distribution deal with W.W. Norton to ensure these things would happen. A far cry from needing to start a porn imprint to stay afloat.

But the question that has gone unasked in the flood of accolades over "comics' greatest decade" is, was it worth it? Team Comics won, right? Things are good now, aren't they?

In absolute terms, it is an unambiguous good that more cartoonists can make a living wage producing comics, and that they are able to get their work into the hands of a larger, appreciative audience. In absolute terms, it is an unambiguous good that so many great comics from the medium's history have been reprinted, that so many of the classic comic strips are now available in durable editions for the appreciation of new generations of fans and scholars, that so many great works from around the world can be feasibly translated and find an enthusiastic audience within the United States.

But I would posit that even though there are far more comics being published now, there are no more truly great comics being produced now than there were at the beginning of the last decade. If you discount the constant stream of reprints and international offerings, new English-language comics are about as good as they've ever been, it's just that there are more of them. In fact, because of the market's rapid expansion, actual average quality has plummeted. It's not a question of having abandoned critical standards in order to gain popular market share: comics never had critical standards. What we have done now is to adopt the standards of the larger book market. Earlier I was careful to distinguish between the comics industry and the comics artform: well, now that the comics industry has been absorbed by the larger publishing industry, we've been forced to adopt their standards, which are wholly commercial in nature. They're the standards of the marketplace, the standards against which every other popular entertainment medium in the world has had to conform or die. Which is great, for someone, I'm sure - but just the other day I saw that the first volume of the new Twilight manga is going to have something just shy of half-a-million copies in its initial print run. That's sure something. But what, exactly? Does it mean a damn thing to anyone besides Twilight fans? I daresay we've reached the point where a big print run like that can be safely dismissed as of no importance to "comics" as a whole, if ever there was a day when it would have mattered. It's a localized phenomena. Comics has fractured.

Comics is no longer "a thing," it's now become multiple things, a whole universe of worlds - far more than any one person can realistically hold within his or her grasp. It means so many different things now that it really has to struggle to mean anything at all. There's no point in being a fan of "comics," because there is no centralized notion of "comics," not anymore. It's so diffuse - and not diffuse in the old-school fake high-art Comics Journal vs. low-brow WIzard dichotomy. As fractious as that seemed, it was still just an internecine quarrel over scraps of the same commonly-held territory. In explicit economic terms, it was about a fight for the wallets of direct market retailers and costumers. Now, there are separate retail channels for separate types of comics - it's not just the same zero-sum direct market game. Art comics are being sold just like art books, and to art-book customers - everyone who cried fowl over Kramers Ergot #7 has obviously never paid attention to how high-quality art monographs are sold and marketed. Literary comics are solid like literature - they even have a volume in the "America's Best" series, so you can put it next to all the other middlebrow "America's Best" volumes designed to sit unread on yuppy coffee tables across the country. And even superhero comics have thrived, in their own way - the analogy I'd use would be that superhero books have grown into their niche as the artform's crass annex, in much the same way that fake sport such as WWE and NASCAR form a neon-colored distraction from "real" sports. But the only distinctions that matter anymore are marketing, now that the industry actually has marketing that doesn't simply consist of ads in Amazing Heroes and Wizard. We can go our own separate ways and never look back.

Think back to that list I made up the page of all the "really good" comics that have been published to wide acclaim and decent sales throughout the previous decade: how many of them are "really good," and how many of them are just mediocre comics that managed to sneak into a recognizable mainstream publishing category like "Memoir / Current Events?" The book industry knows how to sell first-person memoirs with topical subject matter; it knows how to sell underwhelming high-fantasy with a family appeal; it knows how to sell portentous, well-drawn but fatally vapid juvenilia. And that's our comics industry in 2010, or at least, the "good" parts.

I don't have any stake in comics anymore because it's just too big. For the first time ever, I can walk into a comics store and walk out with empty hands - it's not that there isn't stuff, but there's just too much stuff. With so much to choose from, it's far easier to choose nothing at all.

SIR

Outsiders #26

I realize at this point that Outsiders has become my fixation in the same manner as the late Nightwing Was for Tucker. That's OK: I freely admit this comic fascinates me. Why does it exist? Why does it continue to exist when there is no justifiable reason for it to do so? It doesn't sell. It changes creative teams every other month. It changes premise about as often. All it really does is tie-up half-a-dozen moderately recognizable second- and third-string characters who someone at DC thinks should be regularly featured . . . somewhere. But if this is really the best they can think of to do with Black Lightning, Metamorpho and the Creeper? Well, maybe they should just let them lay fallow for a while. And we're not even going to mention Katana, Looker, Halo and Geo-Force, who might as well change their collective name to "we have no popular appeal whatsoever."

(OK, I admit I actually like Halo and Looker. They're have identifiable personalities as well as some small potential - especially Halo in her current iteration - but contemporary DC doesn't have a great track record - in terms of taking underperforming characters and refurbishing them by plugging them into compelling ensemble casts - in the same way that Marvel lately has. Just look at Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: The Initiative for great examples of how to effectively and consistently rehabilitate Z-list characters. DC hasn't had anything like that since 52, and the lack of successful spin-offs indicates that even that series was only partially successful as a rehabilitation engine. End of digression.)

So here we are with another new beginning, another new creative team . . . and the result is strangely schizoid. On the one hand, the book actually does seem to have a new direction and a legitimate new tone - on the other hand, the new direction doesn't make sense and the new tone is just flat-out unpleasant. The new premise is that Geo-Force wakes up one day and decides he's become a joke and is going to become a more effective monarch for the little pissant imaginary country he rules, and in the process turn the Outsiders into an arm of Markovia's newly-muscular foreign policy and defense apparatus. (I think it's called Markovia? I can't remember and I can't be bothered to look it up.) So far so good, except for the fact that no one else in the book is Markovian - everyone else is an American citizen, except for Katana who is Japanese. So, um, why are they sticking around? There are even conversations in this book about the fact that multiple team members have no reason to stick around - so why are they going to stick around and be a part of this new iteration? Especially since their "friend" Brion is acting like a douchebag and in the process severing ties with Batman's extended family? The only reason the team ever existed in its current form was to pick up after Batman's sloppy seconds, so . . . why is Black Lightning going to stick around? So he can risk losing his American citizenship by fighting for a foreign government whose new national policy is overtly belligerent to that of the United States?

Does this make sense to anyone? It really is hard to avoid the impression that this book exists for no other reason than that it currently makes just slightly more money than it loses. But then there's the fact that this is the first issue to be written by DC EIC Dan Didio - which means, basically, that he has taken a personal interest in ensuring this comic does not fail. Again, why? Why is it so important that this comic succeed when it has been proven time and time again that there is nothing but a big pile of steaming consumer apathy where a loyal readership should be? The other option is that Didio really likes writing but couldn't justify giving himself a vanity project unless it was something as low-tier as a failing book like this, a dogsbody assignment that he could take over with little in the way of fuss? I don't actually think there's anything wrong with that: most people working in comics are there because they like comics, and this decade's tendency against having editors freelance on the side marks a very conscious break with accepted practice. Mark Gruenwald, Bob Harris and Tom DeFalco all produced some very fun and readable comics when they were occupying the top three spots in Marvel editorial, for example. Obviously Dan Didio is no Mark Gruenwald, but if he wants to put his money where his mouth is by putting his own work out for public consumption, more power to him. This is a rocky start, no doubt about it, but I live to be surprised.

Deadpool: Merc With A Mouth #7

Why does this book exist? Another good question, only this time there is a reasonable answer: for some odd reason, after having languished in low-selling purgatory for quite a while, Deadpool got moderately hot, so they decided to start pumping as much Deadpool onto the streets as they possibly could. This would be a bad thing, except for the fact that - um - this is actually a very good book.

I know, I know - what the hell? But bear with me: if you absolutely, positively had to have a Deadpool book, what should it be? Why, the most over-the-top, consciously, willfully absurd and exploitive action comic conceivable. Whereas Wolverine, for instance, is at least a nominally sober and self-serious figure (and his endless spin-offs are therefore comically self-serious and unreadable), Deadpool is comic relief, a joke even in his own book. All the people working on the new crop of Deadpool books seem to accept the idiocy of their premise and are proceeding accordingly: no one is trying to write any kind of "grim & gritty" Dark 'Pool Returns, not yet at least. This book here? It's got Deadpool (with his disembodied zombie head in tow) being shot around the multiverse and encountering alternate universe versions of himself, including a humorless hard-ass Nick Fury version, a female version, and even a Wild West version. In the process, we've got a seamless switch between the art of Kyle Baker and Rob Liefeld - yeah, bet you didn't see that one coming. It's positively moronic, and yet it works as sort-of a low wattage Ambush Bug - absolutely wallowing in the worst excesses of crass T&A action comics while at the same time mercilessly lampooning them. It actually seems as if the people involved in this book have put some thought into making Deadpool: Merc With A Mouth a fun, enjoyable comic book in the most unabashedly populist manner possible. I don't even mind the fact that Bong Dazo only shows up for three pages - he's my new favorite mainstream artists, just about, primarily because he seems to be having the time of his life with every page he draws.

How long can it last? I dunno: Lobo was funny, too, once upon a time . . . right up until the moment he wasn't. But in the duration, back when they were putting out massive quantities of Lobo spin-offs, one-shots and prestige-format books (roughly 1991-1994), some interesting stuff snuck out under the aegis of good creators who had some fun with the premise. Deadpool is a similar character who fulfills a similar function, story-wise, so maybe we'll see some similarly interesting results from this current commercial overexposure.

Brave and the Bold #31

I think at some point there must have been a bar bet between J. Michael Straczynski and someone in DC editorial that he couldn't possibly write a series so consistently bad as this - and every month as it gets progressively worse, he wins like, I dunno, ten bucks or something. Here we have the eighteen-billionth hero-has-to-save-the-Joker's-life story, only this time with the Atom. And the story actually begins OK, with a group of doctors telling the Atom that only he can save the Joker's life, and the Atom saying "Hell. To. The. No." The story should have ended there, with the Atom watching M*A*S*H reruns and falling asleep during Leno. But no, he eventually assents, goes in, saves the Joker's life even though he gets a headful of the Joker's memories in the process.

All of which adds up to - wait, wait a second. I thought the Joker didn't have anything resembling a canonical origin, and that this was part of the character's mystique? Now that Ray Palmer has seen the Joker's childhood and family life, with no caveats for it being a possible origin or a possible lie, that sort of changes the character's dynamic. "Hey, Bruce, you know all those times you tried to get to the bottom of the Joker's life and family? Well, have I got a story to tell you!" Seems like a big revelation for such an unimportant story.

But back to the crux of the action. The reason this story exists is due to a wrinkle in the makeup of contemporary super comics, wherein the heroes' moral code was formed in an age of sanitized children's entertainment, and became an absolutely inextricable part of their personality makeup, even as time passed in the real world and their villains' schemes metastasized into murderous, genocidal rampages. The only reason a character like the Atom has to save the Joker's life is his own personal ethical squeamishness, which doesn't even make any kind of sense - are heroes just so incredibly, overly sensitive to their own ethical development that they would lose sleep over passively letting a mass murderer die of an otherwise incurable disease? OK, let's see a show of hands: how many people would expend a lot of effort to deliver AIDS medication to Ted Bundy? I'm about as far left as you can get, I don't approve of the death penalty in 99/100 instances*, I'm 9/10ths a pacifist - but I'm not going to lose one iota of sleep over the life of a psycho serial killer. If you have a clean shot at at John Wayne Gacy? You take the shot. That's not something I think I would regret at all, you know? So when the Atom finishes by saying "I have to save his life, or I'll be no better than him!" it doesn't really make any sense. Or rather, it only makes sense if you consider that these books only exist as little passion plays put on for the sole purpose of testing the heroes' moral fiber. Which, I know, technically they are, and the endless citizen bystanders in these books are just lines on paper - but still. They might as well be admitting that no one else on the planet is as important as them, and that they see no ethical responsibility beyond the consequences of those actions for which they are directly responsible. The categorical imperative - who still does that? The Justice League, apparently.

The Joker? He should die because what is wrong with him is so far outside the spectrum of normal human behavior that his continued existence in any capacity is a threat to the safety of the body politic. And if you think it's wrong to compare real-life butchers with the Joker, it is, but that's the explicit comparison DC makes every time they put out a story with a mass-murdering Joker being held to fairyland ethical standards. Most people, if they saw someone like Albert Fish or Gacy or Bundy walking around on the streets, would not argue the ethics of putting them down like a rabid dog, and neither would you. If Batman has qualms about that, well, who the fuck elected him, anyway?

SIR

ITEM! It's been a day, son. Been to California and back, but didn't see 'Pac.

ITEM! So, uh, Brightest Day? Really? Funny, that - just the day before I read that news I was absent-mindedly thinking to myself, "I guess that's what they're gonna call the sequel, but that's too obvious, it can't really be true." But I guess I can't afford to underestimate these people. So, is this going to be the story of Hal as a White Lantern? Is he going to go back in time and change the course of the Civil War?

ITEM! Honestly, I haven't minded Blackest Night so much - it's pretty much exactly what you could have predicted from the outset, and there's something to be said for a storyline that is very much about meeting its audience's expectations with an absolute clarity of purpose. Now that I've put some time between myself and the level of venom I expelled in my displeasure at Final Crisis, I think the major problem with that series was a fundamental question of expectations: a series called Final Crisis carried with it the expectation of being thematically, structurally and stylistically of a piece with all the previous Crises. it wasn't, and really, the manner in which it flouted the expectations of an audience (including myself) with a very clearly defined idea of what a sequel to the original Crisis on Infinite Earths should look still appears bafflingly combative in hindsight. (Not to single DC out here, Marvel did something similar a couple years back when they revived the Secret Wars brand for an event book that held no resemblance at all to the fondly-remembered original. [And yes, it gets a lot of flack, but the original Secret Wars is definitely fondly remembered by many current fans. ]) But Blackest Night reads exactly as you might have expected a story called Blackest Night to read: if you liked all the build-up in Green Lantern and its associated titles, if you liked the Sinestro Corps storyline, well, this is more of the same only moreso and with everyone else. It's stupid as fuck but damned if it doesn't provide exactly what is advertised on the tin. Makes you wonder if maybe they wouldn't have been better off having Johns write Final Crisis in the first place.

ITEM! Maybe it's a fairly silly qualm, but of all the revived Black Lantern zombies, I have to say the one I most thought would have the wherewithal to resist the ring's programming was Jonah Hex, for some odd reason. I know it probably wouldn't have fit in a one-off crossover book, but it would have been cool to have Hex say something like "I don't kill for free, and I don't wear no damn jewelry," before pulling the ring off his hand and crumbling back into stubborn dust.

ITEM! I've seen a few people express dissatisfaction with Siege so far, stating that for a story claiming to be the culmination of seven years' worth of Marvel stories, it's not really culminating anything so far. Serious question: was anyone expecting some kind of massively dense continuity-heavy saga with all the loose ends from Secret War, Avengers: Disassembled, House of M, Civil War, Secret Invasion and Dark Reign tied up in a neat bundle? All that's going to happen in this story is that in the next-to-last issue Cap, Thor and Iron Man will reunite, yell "Avengers Assemble!" and clobber Norman Osborn at the big finish, before Steve Rogers gives up his uniform for Bucky in order to accept Obama's invitation to be the new head of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Which will probably make Secret Warriors even more useless, but it's already a pretty useless book, I assume Bendis has a plan of some kind.) Then in a special epilogue issue, after Osborn is taken into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, he escapes, finds his last secret cache of Green Goblin gear, and can only be taken down by Spider-Man. See, I just saved you however many shekels.

ITEM! And boy, they sure miscalculated with the whole Hulk thing. Why do you think they're so pathologically insistent on keeping his family of books separate from the rest of the line? How cool would it be if Siege actually featured all of the founding members of the Avengers reuniting? As silly as it seems, the Hulk's absence from the Avengers is one of my little nerd pet-peeves. I'm actually quite fond of the Hulk and am enjoying the current Red Hulk / War of the Hulks storyline for what it's worth - but I can't help thinking it might not have been more effective for them to somehow fold the Hulk's story back into the big Avengers event, if only temporarily.