The Authority lurches on, ever so slowly, ever so infrequently

If this review seems a bit late, a bit short, or a bit lackluster, it's probably because the slow and cautious deliberation with which the Authority is building – combined, of course, with the nearly half-year break between issues 1 and 2 – makes it hard to write with glowing admiration about what the comic does well. It takes some degree of sustained excitement or interest on the part of the reader to sell a slow and subtle narrative progression over the course of multiple introductory issues. And as much as I liked the somewhat baffling and mysterious first issue, I need more than this.

This said, what the issue does do, it does well. Morrison lets us know that, first issue aside, this is still very much the Authority of Ellis and Millar. The team is torn between its ostensible mission to save the world from itself, Midnighter is poised to do some entirely unnecessary damage, and the feature character from the first issue, Ken, is left wondering whether the Authority might actually be ignorant to the fact that they’re actually super-villains. Some spot-on stuff, the last of which has often been addressed but never to my satisfaction, and so I look forward to Morrison’s attempt to answer it.

Also to Morrison's credit, we learn in this issue that he has indeed moved the Authority to 'our' Earth – and proves as much with a so-cute-it's-groan-worthy moment in which Jack and the Doctor steal copies of Ellis’ and Millar’s runs in trade format. (Is it fair to guess that he'll ignore the forgettable stuff that was published in between? My guess is 'yes'.) The decision is a good one, to my mind. While there was a certain sameness for me in Ennis' Midnighter series – how many times can we see him beat up homophobic footsoldiers before it just gets monotonous? – the closing scene here, in which he lines up against 'real' American soldiers in the 'real' Afghanistan, has reacquired the sense of wonder and dread that a team of superhumans capable of conquering the planet should inspire.

(A brief aside: I've read elsewhere that this is an indication of increasing verisimilitude in comics, but I'm hesitant to agree. Am I right, perhaps, to guess the opposite? Given that this first encounter between the Authority and the American armed forces is occurring on an Afghan plain, could there be a 'desert of the Real' joke in here somewhere? Or am I only even noticing this because Jean Baudrillard died a week ago?)

I just wish that it wasn't building so slowly and the issues weren't so infrequent - either would be totally forgivable if it weren't for the other. The issue centers around one room and two conversations with brief interruptions, and is hardly going to win over the people who complained that nothing happened in the first issue. Maybe this will be a better read in trade format. Not that you should wait that long if you care - at this rate, it should arrive in, what, late 2009?

Children of Men, from affect to allegory...

I saw Cuaron's 'Children of Men' back when it was released in January, but find myself appreciating it more on reflection - but for completely different reasons, interestingly enough.

Briefly, 'Children of Men' takes place in a world where no human baby has been born for decades, and so the pressure to locate the source of the problem and its cure has led to widespread hopelessness, anarchy, and the partitioning of Britain - our setting - from the anyone that would seek to enter it and disturb their precarious balance. The movie's selling feature is, of course, the unbelievable cinematography. While it seems the apocryphal claim that several long sequences were done in one continuous take was pure myth or outright deception, the hand-cam-wielding pseudo-documentary shots are impressively visceral - even in an industry where this is becoming increasingly common. From Wikipedia:

It took fourteen days to prepare for the single take where Clive Owen's character searches a building under attack, and five hours for every time they wanted to retake it. The take ended with blood splattered onto the lens, which cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki convinced the director to leave for the final cut.

In the Bexhill refugee camp - where the shot that this quote specifically refers to occurred - the movie reaches perhaps its highest and most disturbing point of simulacra. Where the movie had been a dystopian possible-future and so somewhat distanced, it now resembles something all-too familiar: civil war footage from Afghanistan, Iraq, or the former Yugoslavia. The hand-cam effect also manages to more or less 'embed' us in the action - the screen rumbles and bobs up and down as the camera chases Clive Owen's Theo through the streets and ducks behind walls.

This sort of affect is hardly unique to "Children of Men", though. What brings the film into relief, for me, is the subtle ways in which it rewrites one of England's most foundational myths - King Arthur. This is most obvious at the end of the film, where a dying Theo and Kee - the world's first pregnant woman in decades and a black refugee in a country that has an aversion to both - escape England in the hope that they'll be found by members of The Human Project. (I'd also add that Clive Owen has played King Arthur in the past. Though I can't imagine that he was cast for that reason, it's a wonderful and nonetheless meaningful coincidence.) Appropriately, the Human Project is an entirely speculative organization that, like the mysterious Avalon, may or may not exist and purportedly operates a utopian community from an island somewhere off the coast.

Though this final scene recalls the slain Arthur being cast into the mists of Avalon upon his death so that he might be healed and returned to England in a future time of need, there is a subversive twist to this iteration of the myth. As this is not a myth, we know that Theo/Arthur will not be returning. Instead, Kee's baby - who she has told Theo will be named after Theo's dead son and so maintains some connection to the metaphorically Arthurian line - will be the one to grow up in our pseudo-Avalon and eventually return home. In a way, this is a more faithful interpretation of the Arthurian legend than most; it's generally agreed that Arthur was of Roman birth or decent, and so he himself was a foreign conqueror. It takes a particularly good film to tap that kind of hope and anxiety simultaneously.

Marvel Civil War Wrap-Up...

“I'd like to comment on the Morrison X-Men, but I disliked it. A lot.
Heck, I used to think I hated it. Then Civil War taught me what real hate was...”

-a blogger

Maybe hate is overstating it, but I think that the final issue of Civil War (Did I say final issue? As if this series told a complete, beginning-middle-end styled story? Ha!) filled me with an overwhelming sense of ennui – pure, stupefying boredom. And reinforced my distaste for “Big Event Comics” of all sorts. Civil War, of course, was marketed as the self-contained focal point of a much larger Marvel Universe “Event”, and Quesada claimed long ago that “you don't have to read anything but the CW main series to get the whole story.” This isn’t actually the case, of course.

For one, you had to read or read about a whole lot more than this mini in order to understand what was developing and why. Without the supplements, the Civil War series itself was nothing more than a really long super-fight in the vein of The Infinity Gauntlet, where the composition of each team seems arbitrary, motivations are almost totally absent, and non-fighting sequences are just filler between the widescreen, big-budget battles. (Which, mind you, Steve McNiven manages to lay-out and detail with impeccable skill.) Meanwhile, the explanations – like, as to why is Captain Marvel alive again – come via other mini-series and ongoing titles.

For two, I fail to see a “whole story” anywhere in this series. Certainly, this issue offers very little in the way of closure – though Cap has been captured, some of his group continue to oppose Tony Stark’s new world order. The legislation remains in place, as it was at the start, but it’s still resisted, as it was at the start. We shouldn’t be surprised, though, I suppose. Just as Civil War was spun from the threads of Big Event Comics House of M, Decimation, and Disassembled, it’s also the jumping-off point for more Big Event Comics like World War Hulk. It seems that Marvel and DC are fast at work in creating a state of perpetual Big Event Comics, and the whole story will always be just another massive crossover and mini-series away. (This, not coincidentally, is why the only Marvel and DC comics I regularly buy tend to be wholly disconnected from crossovers and their influence.)

And for a third, I don’t see where they could possibly be going with this. Tony Stark has become Adrian Veidt, near as I can tell, but without any sense of irony or literary purpose. Veidt’s decision to murder millions because it might save billions situated him structurally as the villain of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, but a villain with scrupulous ethics and who remained an enigma. Importantly, the story ends at the moment where Veidt would become its hero and his intentions and feelings would need to be revealed to us – perhaps because the substitution of villain for hero is an uncomfortable or too complicated one, or perhaps because Moore was attempting to tell the superhero story to end all superhero stories and it should appropriately have an ending. There will be no ending here, though – and it’s unlikely that Tony Stark will become the cold, even villainous, logician that Veidt was, especially with a film coming in the near future.

As a single comic, taken in isolation, Civil War #7 reads like the final five minutes of a World Championship Wrestling pay-per-view event from 1998. The nWo’s Hollywood Hogan and WCW’s Sting square off in the middle of the ring while nWo-ers The Outsiders fight the WCW’s Steiner Brothers at ringside. Someone throws a chair into the ring and it becomes clear that all bets are off. Another wrestler emerges from the crowd and joins the fray. And then another runs in from the dressing room to fight him. From now until the end of the show, a steady stream of bodies appears from nowhere to join in the melee, the audience and announcers screaming ever louder with every additional wrestler until, eventually, every single man on the roster is duke-ing it out somewhere in the arena. And then they cut to the credits and the show’s over with no clear resolution. Only we know that it’ll begin again the day. Maybe Sting will be in a wheelchair and cursing his loss, but we know that he’ll get out of it again. Maybe Hogan will have been promoted to president of the company, but we know that it’s only a matter of time before he’s toppled. Maybe it’ll happen at the next pay-per-view – which, conveniently, the announcers plug right before your feed cuts out.

But, then, I stopped watching wrestling a long time ago.

The problem with super-cheap jump-on issues - they leave everyone unhappy

Godland #16 is one of those extra-cheap issues (60 cents, to be exact) that the Big Three seem to offer every once in a while in order to drum-up interest and sales. I can't imagine that these promotions are ever much fun for the people who are already reading month-in and month-out. Typically, they're just full of exposition that's aimed at people who have probably never even heard of the book before. Robert Kirkman's Invincible had one of these issues a year or two ago and it was, to its credit, quite readable. But not terribly exciting.

Godland is Jack Kirbyesque in nearly every way possible. Tom Scioli's layouts, designs, and action sequences are even more evocative of Kirby than Ladronn's art, and the content of the story - cosmically-powered hero Adam Archer seeks cosmically-missing sister, as well as the cosmically-mysterious source of his powers - is no less an obvious and loving homage. (The art seems a little muddled in the same way that Chris Bachalo's overly detailed panels sometimes leave your eye confused as to where it should be looking, but the wonderful coloring does much to minimize the distraction.) The issue does an serviceable job in explaining everything we absolutely need to know, as well as introducing us to Archer's supporting cast, his ambivalent military superiors, and his rogues gallery. Quite readable.

Quite readable isn't quite enough, though. What the book fails to do entirely is give us a reason to care about Adam Archer and his cohort. So much time and space is spent in relaying details that those details never coalesce into an interesting narrative - or at least a narrative worth our interest. Who is Archer, exactly? Is he paranoid and delusional like his sisters seem to believe? Is he really the menace that the military thinks he is? Is he a nice guy? Does he prefer dry wit or slapstick comedy? We really don't know. Archer takes off into space on the third page and never returns. Who are all these villains, government personnel, and quirky aliens that are marched past us afterward? I have only the vaguest idea in many cases, and absolutely no idea in many others.

I suppose that these 'special price' issues should be measured, in the end, by the enthusiasm that they generate in new readers and the success with which they convert that enthusiasm and those new readers into repeat readers. Casey and Scioli have done plenty of work to catch me up on the story to this point, but I can't say that they've given me much reason to want to see how it ends.

Astonishing X-Men 20 as a Love Letter

It's becoming increasingly clear that Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men is just a big 'ole love letter to Chris Claremont and Grant Morrison. This is, of course, both a good and a bad thing.

Note, for instance, how this 12 issue mega-arc continues to unfold like the Dark Phoenix Saga, though with a twist: where Emma Frost occupied Jean Grey's role during "Torn", Colossus has now become the Phoenix-figure who will wreak massive destruction. Like Jean and Scott, it's Peter and Kitty who are all alone in a hostile environment against an alien force bent on killing them. And again like Jean, Colossus is starting to believe that he's capable of the mass genocide that has been predicted. It's also becoming increasingly clear that Whedon was never sincere in advocating a return to the costumes and superheroics that Cyclops suggested in his first issue. If issue seven wasn't enough to confirm that the X-Men would never really be accepted as heroes, then Whedon's gradual destruction and removal of Cassaday's superhero-outfits seem to speak more subtly and undeniably to this goal: Cyclops eschewed his Cassaday-look for Quitely's leather jacket during "Torn" and now Wolverine's costume has been incinerated, leaving both mask-less as they were during Morrison and Quitely's New X-Men. Even Kitty's costume is starting to look more like Quitely's designs to my eye.

There's little new that I can add about Whedon's dialogue or Cassaday's art, as they're consistently fantastic. The only remarkable blunder - and it's a big one - is the final page reveal, which has been an unfailing strength of this creative team throughout their 20 issues. The punch-line to Kitty's unintentional joke that Colossus' future is not "written in stone" is a 100 foot-tall artwork in stone of Colossus destroying the Breakworld. It's a cute ironic gag, but it makes absolutely no sense. Located underground by Agent Brand and looking quite old, it defies all logic that this prophetic picture would be anywhere on the Breakworld - after all, the Breakworld aliens only learned that Colossus would destroy their world from Brand herself, didn't they?

One last note on Whedon/Cassaday's run as a whole and this issue's place in it: It's telling, I think, that every storyline has moved further and further from the conceit of mutant-politics that featured so prominently in the initial story arc. While "Danger" looked at mutancy of a different sort, "Torn" had little to say about mutants and less to say about their oppression. Thus far, "Unstoppable" is another in a long tradition of X-Men space adventures that have absolutely nothing to do with being mutant - though through its intimate connection to an anxiety of influence with regard to previous X-tales and their creators, it has absolutely everything to do with being X-Men.

Exactly what it means to be X-Men outside of being mutant activists and/or not being real superheroes, well, I'm not entirely sure what Whedon is suggesting. The problem with love letters is that what or who they're about is always itself absent. It might be described beautifully or provocatively, but you can only see glimpses of the loved object from a distance.

Now THIS is Superman...

To this point in Morrison and Quitely’s fantastic take on Superman mythology, Superman has been mostly viewed from afar, or at least indirectly – issues have focused variously on Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, or Lex Luthor, but we have yet to see events unfold from Superman’s particular perspective. This issue, the last in what will be the first collected trade of All-Star Superman, finally allows us the opportunity to see Superman’s world as he does himself, albeit from the distance of a story set in the past. “Look at you!” exclaims Pa Kent to his young Superson. “You’re destined for great things Clark…” But like every great epic hero, this Superman must overcome tragedy before he can realize that destiny. And that tragedy is as beautiful crafted as it is devastating – for Clark and the reader alike.

Though it is easily the most sentimental and heartfelt issue of Morrison and Quitely’s run to this point, “Funeral in Smallville” stays true to the larger format of the series through its surprisingly appropriate and seamless incorporation of both touching and absurd tributes to the confused and contradictory mass of the Superman mythos. Both Krypto the Superdog and Superman-Prime – the latter from Morrison’s own DC One Million alternate future universe – make appearances, as well as Ma and Pa Kent and a host of time-traveling Superman’s descendents known as The Superman Squad. But the seemingly mundane and sentimental plots elements – Ma and Pa Kent’s only plot point is their preparation for the harvest – and the utterly fantastic – the Superman Squad are chasing the time-warping Chronovore – meet under the auspices of a theme that is all too underdeveloped in Superman lore: that of family.

Perhaps surprisingly, Morrison is at the height of his abilities in this unabashedly sincere context, and his dialogue has never been so subtle and affecting. Given that we know from the cover of the comic that Pa Kent must die, the exchange between Pa and the Mystery Superman hits a pitch-perfect bittersweet note in Jonathan’s final moments. Equally powerful are Quitely’s contributions. There’s a treasure trove of beautiful wrought scenes from which to choose, but I’ll focus on the moment in which young Superman takes flight after realizing that he can no longer hear Pa’s heartbeat. It must have been tempting for Quitely to devote half a page or even an entire splash to young Superman’s desperate attempt to save Pa’s life, but he and Ma – who is also rushing to Pa’s aid – are given equal-sized panels in the bottom third of a single page. The artistry is sublimely expressive in even this one small instance: where Ma is a tiny figure running across an endlessly gigantic field, the teenaged Clark fills the panels and flies so quickly – his hair actually catches fire – that he seems poised to burst out of the panel. He is forever poised, though, and ultimately unable to accomplish the feat and save his dad. That Clark cannot extend beyond the panel is a visual reminder that even Superman is not without limits. For all his ostensible power, he is still only one person, just as human and flawed as any other. A stunning contribution and new high-point for a series that manages the impossible and outdoes itself with every issue.

Notes on two recently released films...

[I saw these back in December (or was it November?) but never got around to posting some comments on them.]

1. There's a scene maybe two-thirds of the way through 'Running With Scissors' where the protagonist, Augusten, realizes that he dislikes his life for its seeming randomness and utter unpredictablility. It was at that moment that I recognized why I hated the film - it was one of those bitterly ironic moments where a character so perfectly describes everything that's wrong the film in which s/he stars. (would that make it a performative utterance, I wonder?) Staggering from scene to scene with little sense of time or sensitivity to narrative sequence and character, there's virtually no way to anticipate the plot or make sense of its progression. This might be all well and good for the episodic 'real life story' promised by literary biography - this was an adaptation - but it makes for a terribly unsatisfying cinematic experience where certain expectations accompany the demands of inescapably linear, 2-hour long dramatic narratives.

2. 'Stranger Than Fiction' could have been just as hopelessly lost in its own wit, but managed to break free by having fun with itself and the thin line between mainstream affectation and indie aesthetics. The almost-too-clever meta-fictional conceit underlying the film features a self-aware character (Harold Crick) who's learned he's going to die - only he's not simply a character, but also a real live person, and so is able to seach for his writer in order to convince her to not kill him. But changing the ending to one where Harold lives presents a whole different set of problems. Dustin Hoffman's lit professor reads the book with the tragic ending and deems it a classic - but the alternate ending leaves him cold. He begs Harold to read it for himself and tells him that he needs to die for the sake of art, an opinion which Harold eventually comes to appreciate and even agree with. What keeps the film from being too heady and self-indulgent is the way it handles this joke - the way it navigates the difference between the brilliant tragedy where Harold dies or the sappy and less worthy comedy where he lives. Harold eventually lives, but the film itself is presented as the success that follows in the wake of the book's failure - while the story of Harold's survival only makes for a good book, the story of how he survived makes for a great film.

Thoughts on Springsteen, on the re-release of 'Born to Run', and more

During the round-the-room-introductions for one of my new classes this term, I was asked who the 'new' Springsteen is. (The question didn't simply come from out of the blue - I said that I study 'white masculinity', so Shannon asked who had inherited the mantle of white masculine folk-hero) It occurred to me later that, since Springsteen has been undergoing a latter-career renaissance (a new album in 2005, cover album in 2006), that the new Springsteen might be... Springsteen. Combined with numerous abortive attempts by other artists to assume the Springsteen role as voice of a white working-class generation, it seems reasonable that we'd cast our glance backward and simply embrace young Springsteen. Since his classic 'Born To Run' album was recently re-released as a special edition and a live album pulled from that tour's shows was also released last year, it seems a reasonable guess.

What gets glossed over, though, in this re-appropriation of Springsteen is just how ambivalent and angry 'Born To Run' was: in this nostalgic revisiting of young Springsteen, the anger and disaffection of working-class youth has been fully romanticized. (Not to say that this is new - Springsteen has been made out to be something of a joyful rebel from three decades now. His least successful albums have invariably been those that do the most to resist optimistic listening experiences.)

For instance: 'Backstreets', a song that's as much about the abandonment that the singer feels over being left behind by his childhood friend as it is resentment over not being able to escape 'the backstreets' himself, has become something of an anthem for growing up poor and making good. The 'Terry' that he addresses is one of many gender-ambiguous characters, a curious lyrical habit that gets far too little attention and Springsteen uses to increase the anxiety. However, like most pop music gestures of defamiliarization, the music critic/fan's canonical explanation has long been that Terry is a guy and that Springsteen's first lyrical descriptor - 'friends' - should be taken at face value. Lines like 'soft infested summer', 'Valentino drag', and, of course, 'an angel on my chest/Just another tramp of hearts/Crying tears
of faithlessness' are somehow forgotten when people now take up young Springsteen.

But now that I've poked holes in the iconicity of the Boss's image, I think it's also worth noting how Springsteen eventually came to reinforce his own reception as an unproblematically straight white masculine middle-class hero.

Two brief examples: 'Born in the USA', of course, is a scathing critique of Vietnam War-era foreign policy that is overwhelmed by its anthem-rock aesthetic and totally loses its trajectory under a great synth-line and booming beat. When Bruce yells between lines in 'Born to Run', the pain is undeniable; when he screams the chorus to 'Born in the USA', the anger is easily mistaken for enthusiasm. The rhetorical shift in the titles is also important. While 1975's Springsteen is a man without a home - and since he is born to 'run', we can expect that he'll never find one - 1984's is, at the very least, willing to commit to one that he feels uneasy about.

This movement meets its completion in the final song of the '84 album, 'My Hometown', and it's here that Springsteen embraces his folk hero status with little reservation. Though a lot of his lyrical content is the same, his voice is curiously distanced and the song's ending, while hinting at a cylical narrative and so potentially disruptive of a happy ending, seems bizarrely optimistic in its soft and wistful delivery. Where the first song growled angrily about racism, Springsteen sounds almost nostalgic for it in the final one. Or, perhaps, defeated. Fashioned by the media to be somehow emblematic of an American identity category that he himself resisted and criticized, Springsteen relents at the close of the song. Through repetition, 'Your hometown' comes to be less about the characters in the narrative and more of a universalizing gesture that links Springsteen and his listeners. Without a 'Terry' to disrupt an easy identification, the fan and the Boss become interchangeable subject positions and Springsteen allows himself to be the universal subject that people always wanted him to be. 'Born in the USA', remember, was used by Reagan to campaign for the presidency later that year. In this light, it's no wonder that people can forget how 'Born To Run' was a big "fuck you".

I continue to be of two minds on Astonishing X-Men...

I’d really like to be able to write that the newest issue of Astonishing X-Men, and the last issue of the “Torn” story arc, managed to exceed the diminished expectations that I set out in my review of the previous issue. I’d really like to, but I don’t think that I can.

I can say, at least, that it didn’t end with a fastball special, as did the last two. But while I gestured broadly toward some similarities between “Torn” and “The Dark Phoenix Saga” in my last review – whereas I categorized and listed the nearly identical plotlines of all three AXM arcs – the final issue puts those similarities in sharp and undeniable relief. Call it an homage or a reinterpretation if you must, but “Torn” is unmistakably “The Dark Phoenix Saga: 2006”. Rather than draw my own list and risk seeming like I’m repeating myself, I’ll copy-and-paste the list created by X-Universe Message Board poster Omar Karindu:

*Psychic female teammate goes dark and evil.
*Hellfire Club turns up, and swiftly wrecks the team.
*One lone X-Man survives, plunging into the waters below the mansion where the fight takes place.
*A villain who casts illusions into the mind of the X-Man-gone-bad is responsible for their heel turn and is allied with the Hellfire Club.
*A psychic event in Scott's mind involving his telepathic teammate gone bad leads to his breaking loose and free the rest of the cast.
*There is debate about whether the team will need to kill the psychic gone bad.
*Just as the inner conflict of the psychic teammate is reaching the point of resolution, aliens abduct all of the heroes.

To this point, I had been suspecting that Whedon was purposefully re-imagining classic stories and rewriting his own with some end in mind. He did, after all, seem to set a mission in his first issue. When Cyclops discards the leather uniforms of Morrison’s run and decides the X-Men need to dress as super-heroes again, it's with the goal of rebuilding trust between the team and the public – ‘dressing as something they [the people] recognize’. Implicit in his words, of course, is that the costumes are part of an act - the X-Men can never really be super-heroes, but they can try to look like them. The issue of super-heroics and a kind of performance was mostly ignored through “Gifted”, but came up again at the beginning of “Dangerous”, where the team saves the city from a monster but is questioned by the Fantastic Four and fails to make it on to the evening news. Cyclops, for one, seemed disheartened – maybe, then, the slightly crazy Cyclops shown here is our link to that initial plot? Whedon is heading somewhere interesting and new with the team leader, it would appear. Just don’t ask me to explain how it all ties together. Or if it actually ties together.

I'm torn between admiring AXM #18 for its beautiful and idiosyncratic visuals, characteristically snappy dialogue, and wonderful characters – unexpectedly, Danger and Ord are shaping up to be a wonderful comic duo – and admonishing Whedon for plot twists that are increasingly predictable and/or contrived. It’s not that I dislike retellings and reinterpretations – I love The Authority and Ultimates, Marvels and Astro City – but I don’t know that Whedon has a point or goal beyond giving us immediate, visceral satisfaction with his own witty and fun revision of “The Dark Phoenix Saga”. Admittedly, I ask a lot more of Whedon than I do of most comics. And maybe I should realign my expectations – maybe I should just enjoy Astonishing X-Men as pure ‘pop art’, bubble-gum entertainment. I just wish that I didn’t have to.

The Midnighter and the problem of spin-offs

I like the Midnighter. Equal parts Batman and Wolverine, Midnighter is a not-so-subtle parody of both. Unambiguously gay and in a relationship with his teammate, Apollo – himself a Superman trope – he makes explicit and then sends up the sexual anxieties that have surrounded Bats for decades; as an artificially enhanced uber-man with an Asian daughter, there’s also some room for a Wolverine-Jubilee analogy. (Though, again, being that Midnighter is gay, he also troubles the connection between hetero-masculinity and ultra-violence.)

But I only sorta like this comic. Interestingly, it reads more like a ‘classic’ Authority issue than the new Authority series does itself. The narrative style of compression and (un?)necessarily gory battle scenes seem pulled, with minor variation, from either of Ellis/Hitch or Millar/Quitely’s runs. The particularly gruesome ways in which Sprouse – one of the medium’s best storytellers, might I add – renders Midnighter’s conversation with the ‘Technical Advisor’ in Afghanistan carries a distinctly Ennis flavor, and the Advisor’s murder is delightfully ironic (and, again, distinctly Ennis) in the context of the slur that Midnighter muffles with his staff.

So it’s a fun Authority-like read with the requisite twist-ending, sure, but is it anything more than that? Even the arc that it’s kicking off seems too familiar – the ‘living weapon compelled to become an assassin for the bad guy’ thing was featured in Wolverine a year or two ago, and Ennis’ own Punisher stories included a variation on the same theme. Sprouse also seems too obvious a choice – like Tom Strong, for which Sprouse is probably best known, Midnighter and the Authority are often characterized as benevolent super-fascists, meta-fictionally wrestling with the moral-totalitarianism of the super-hero tradition and their own particular super-antecedents. (Remember Krigstein and his very familiar super-human army?)

Despite his appropriateness, then, something seems entirely too safe and self-conscious about Sprouse on this book – maybe because it becomes it all the more clear that this is more Solo Authority than Midnighter sans the Authority. Where Twain makes clear that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is no mere sequel to Tom Sawyer – and is likely even the more challenging book – or where Claremont took steps to justify the creation of a Wolverine title by distancing the solo character’s tales both geographically and thematically from Uncanny X-Men, Ennis makes no such attempt to show us why Midnighter’s stories needed some new outlet. I think that one question needs to be asked of every spin-off and answered to some degree of satisfaction: Does the new title do something so different that it requires its own separate existence? For all of Midnighter’s appeal, this first issue would indicate that the answer is ‘no’.

The bombastic mess of Seven Soldiers #1...

It’s difficult to assess the bookend of what what Morrison has dubbed a 30 issue ‘megaseries’ in isolation. Reaching through the seven mini-series of seven distinct characters in seven different generic forms of storytelling and vastly different styles of art, the challenge to somehow tie it all together was immense from the start. That this issue was about half a year late just compounds the anticipation and expectation of an already heavily invested readership - an impossible task becomes that much more daunting.

It’s even more difficult because Seven Soldiers #1 is an opulent, self-consciously bombastic, sometimes brilliant, and undeniably self-indulgent mess. Which is to say that it’s exactly what you would expect of Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III – especially if we take at face value the report that Morrison’s original script clocked in at something like 100 pages. This is a finale delivered at a level of narrative compression somewhere in the neighborhood of a black-hole-crushes-everything-into-oblivion type of density.

Any explication of Seven Soldiers #1 will suffer from one of two problems:

1.
A concise but coherent review will suffer from a confusing and unfair reductivism that fails to address just how many narrative and thematic lines are being drawn in from the various minis. It would subsequently fail to address this conclusion’s undeniable complexity.

Case in point: you need to have a pretty keen eye to notice that Don Vincenzo from Shining Knight was Kid Scarface from the Newsboy Legion shown in flashbacks from The Manhattan Guardian. You’d need an even keener eye to catch that the dog who inherits the Don’s criminal empire near the end of this issue looks a lot like Millions, the same dog that died while briefly a member of the same Newsboy Legion. And you’d probably need to re-read your issues of Shining Knight in order to recall that Don Vincenzo was killed by the Sheeda because he controlled one of the Seven Imperishable Treasures, the Cauldron of Rebirth and Plenty – and then surmise that Vincenzo used it to return Millions to life. (A complete review would also point out that Grant Morrison appears to be the Unknown Gentleman on the first page, and so he’s writing himself into a comic…again. Who are the other six, though? Are they here to save the DC universe from itself?)

2.
Conversely, a more detail-oriented review would suffer from precisely the same long and rambling tangents that characterize my previous paragraph. By the time we list all the connections and ask ‘what does it all mean?’, we’ve probably lost all perspective and forgotten that the Vincenzo-Scarface-Millions connection that I’ve made out to be so very intricate and ostensibly important occupies only three tiny panels on one page of Seven Soldiers #1. What do we make of the appearance of Ali Ka-Zoom, also from the Newsboy Legion, as a savior for Zatanna and some sort of mentor for the Shining Knight? Or the necessity of Mister Miracle’s death by gunshot so that he could emerge from the ground on the final page? Or, for that matter, of Klarion’s mad cackling as he becomes the Sheeda King – especially when he shows up in 52 with no suggestion that he still holds that power or authority? We could dissect any one of these or more, but where would it all lead us? And would each narrative line lead us in a divergent or even contradictory direction?

The great challenge, and great frustration, offered by Seven Soldiers #1 is precisely this sort of rampant ambiguity and failure to sate any conventional expectation. The narrative closure of the Sheeda Queen’s death is brief and cheap – first impaled on an arrow that’s not even fired by one of the Seven Soldiers, the Bulleteer finishes the job only by sheer accident. There’s something to be said about the way Morrison has weaved coincidence into a complex tapestry of fate, but the sudden and surprising resolution of the primary plot – especially when it’s further diminished by the rapid ascension of Klarion as a replacement baddie – leaves a sour taste after nearly three dozen issues of cataclysmic threat.

All this said, there’s a lot to like in the finale of the Seven Soldiers megaseries. At the heart of the story has been a crisis of genre, as each solo title has had a distinctive visual and narrative style and played up one of a number of generic approaches: The Manhattan Guardian, for example, features clean and crisp art and plays out as a nostalgic Daredevil-type vigilante story, while Klarion’s colors and line-work evoke a centuries-old aesthetic that’s much more typical of a Vertigo book. Tellingly, both styles are problematized by narrative shifts that disrupt their internal continuity: the flashbacks in the Guardian trace its artistic debt deeper to the naïve silliness of the Golden Age, and Klarion’s participation in a Newsboy Legion-like group in New York muddles his own participation in a distinct genre by tapping into the same retro sensibility. The importance of genre is foregrounded even more explicitly in Seven Soldiers #1, as Williams adopts the visual style of every other artist – including Jack Kirby, in a history of humankind and its encounters with the Sheeda – when he draws the characters that they helped to (re)define.

The revelation that the Sheeda are an uber-evolved race of humans from the future, feasting on their own history, resounds even more meaningfully in this context of genre and influence. The implication, I think, is that Morrison via the Seven Unknown Men and Seven Soldiers is railing against a comic book industry that feasts endlessly on the scraps of its own tradition, producing very little of value and certainly nothing new. The aforementioned ‘self-indulgent mess’ is at the very least disruptive of the mainstream approach.

Like Williams’ interpretation of each limited series’ artist, some of Morrison’s exercises are more successful than others – and a few are even baffling disasters. But as a structural reimagining of what a comic series can be in theme and structure – an 30 issue exercise in mass genre confusion and confluence – Seven Soldiers gestures away from the tired and the done, even if not clearly indicating a new direction itself. That final image of Mister Miracle tearing himself free of his own grave is apt, if not immediately apparent in its purpose. The superhero has been recycling its own tropes for so long that it might as well be put to rest. It’s about time for something else to rise from the grave and take its place, isn’t it?

"Lost", pop music, and The Authority v.4 #1

On Grant Morrison/Gene Ha's The Authority #1... (written October 20, originally posted to Comicboards.com)

1. Grant and Warren

Coincidentally, Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s The Authority: Relentless (among other books that aren’t quite so relevant) arrived for me in the mail on the same day that I picked up this first issue of Morrison and Ha’s The Authority (Vol. 4). It’s a totally random but absolutely meaningful confluence: I’d just read on Newsrama that Morrison is looking to Ellis’ run - two-thirds of which is contained in Relentless - for inspiration, and it’s Grant himself who writes the introduction to the Relentless trade.

In describing The Authority as “the first great superhero team book of the 21st century”, Morrison rightly admonishes mainstream heroes for merely maintaining the status quo when they have the opportunity and ability to fundamentally change the world: “traditional superhero teams always put the flag back on the top of the White House, don’t they? They always dust down the statues and repair the highways and everything ends up just the way it was before…” The Authority is the superhero team grown-up (or grown-sideways, at least) – they act like real people might when given ridiculous power and faced with situations of life or death on a regular basis. And they “pump the volume until noses bleed and bass patterns register deep on the Richter scale in Norway”. Before we even crack the issue open, then, Morrison has set the metronome and plugged in the seismograph.

2. “Utopian” and Lost

To this point, the story is quite ambiguous and deliberate – and by no means pounding with the intensity necessary to make your nose bleed, much less move the ground in Norway. In fact, it reminds me more of ABC’s Lost, especially one of those more curious episodes where the ‘cold start’ opening leaves us without any context for understanding what’s happening. In the pilot for Lost, we follow Jack (whose name we don’t yet know) as he stumbles out of the jungle and finds the burning wreckage of a plane (which we certainly didn’t expect to see) and we try desperately to make sense of it all. In the second season’s premier, we follow Desmond, who had a cameo in the previous season, (though we don’t see his face, so we don’t know it’s Desmond) as he goes through the routine of exercising, playing music, medicating himself, and pushing a button in a hatch buried underground (though we don’t know that he’s in a hatch underground until the very end of the sequence). The third season’s premier follows a similar pattern (though you get the idea, so I’ll avoid another detailed summary) of introducing characters that we don’t know and obscuring the identities of those we already do with an aim toward shocking and disorienting us – that terrifying moment of recognition occurring, of course, just before they cut dramatically to commercial.

In the comic we follow “Ken” as he risks his marriage and life to find a downed sub that had been investigating the appearance of a large and mysterious mass on the ocean floor – a search which culminates with the realization (for us, at least) that the mass is actually the Authority’s Carrier. And we’re left breathless, of course, and forced to wait impatiently for the commercial to end. (The fact that it doesn't end for two months is worth complaining about, but the fact that it frustrates us in the way that it does means that it works)

3. Geoff Klock and Wikipedia

On his blog, literary/pop culture critic Geoff Klock writes about the opening scene to Lost’s second season that I described above. Like Morrison writing of Ellis’ Authority, he describes it in a particularly musical way:

One of the things that makes the sequence great it is that it revolves around the Mama Cass song "Make Your Own Kind of Music. […] Pop songs are about building tension through the verses and then exploding into the big satisfying chorus everyone is waiting for. Lost, of course, has built a lot of tension about what is in the hatch and is about to reveal the answer. Much like many ABBA songs, however, "Make Your Own Kind of Music" seems in a rush to get to the big chorus.

Authority v.4 seems to be in no alarming rush to get to the chorus, though perhaps this is more the result of its production schedule than the issue’s pacing – while not exactly brisk, it’s overladen with its own narrative tensions: for the fate of those on the submarine, for Ken’s personal life, for the Carrier (and in the readers themselves, an additional anxiety over the absent Authority). The bass isn’t pumping at full register, but Ellis’ Authority wasn’t one prolonged rave either. An astute Wikipedia contributor observes that Ellis was fond of narrative decompression, a style in which “big, panoramic panels were used to examine action in deep detail, with a slower rhythm and lighter plotting per issue.” If this is true, then the deliberativeness of this issue is possibly indicative of a spectacular send-up to come. Knowing (and sharing) Morrison’s fondness for The Beatles – and riffing on the narrative content of the scene that introduces us to a waking Ken – I’ll take a chance and suggest that Grant is thinking less drum-and-bass, more “A Day in the Life”.

The Ostensibly 'Resonant' Pop-Art of Wildcats

On Grant Morrison/Jim Lee's Wildcats #1... (written October 20, originally posted to Comicboards.com)

Morrison and Lee’s newest incarnation of Wildcats is about surfaces, what they reveal, what they obscure, and how to understand and problematize that difference. “I want to see beautiful people doing amazing things,” explains Morrison of his choice to join Lee on the comic, merging something of an early 90s Image sensibility with a later Vertigo approach. (but isn’t that what the Authority was?) It’s also somewhat reminiscent of Morrison’s Marvel Boy, an experiment in comic pop art where Grant and J.G. Jones ran through all the tricks in the artistic playbook – and invented others that didn’t yet exist. The pop art effects are most evident in Hadrian and Voodoo’s conversation – ‘screen print’ backgrounds and neon painted sex scenes obviously recalling Andy Warhol – but Lee’s pencils are so highly stylized, lush, and even ridiculous that they serve as their own effect of pop art.

I write ‘ridiculous’ because Lee’s art, for me, falls victim accidentally to the same trappings that Warhol fell into willingly: detachment and insincerity. Every Jim Lee line is perfectly placed and every figure is perfectly unreal – ostensibly realistic, yes, but posed and sculpted in absurdly impossible ways. With few exceptions, their symmetrical and proportioned faces are incapable of registering of emotion outside of the same sort of stock expressions you’d find in an issue of GQ or Cosmo. Lee is all surface, and by reflexively calling attention to the superficial through pop art convention – and in emphasizing Wildcats’ “beautiful people doing amazing things” – Morrison takes Lee in a Warholesque direction.

Hadrian suggests that the Authority failed to change the world because “they were tamed by the inertia of ‘things as they are’”, but this is perhaps just as easily understood as a criticism of Lee’s Wildstorm as an exercise in superhero universe building – a failed artistic venture that collapsed under the weight of its own artist-driven artifice. But this new Wildcats refuses a superficial reading as a ‘thing as it is’, as a mere signifier of Marilyn Monroe (which is elevated to something entirely different in a Warhol print) or beautiful heroes saving the world from yet another all-powerful enemy. Hadrian wants to form a team with “the semiotic resonance of the ‘superhero’” in mind, and Grifter is Morrison and Lee’s first semiotic excavation. Lying in a gutter and ironically spouting Wolverine lines – “I’m the best there is at what I do. And what I do… is drink” – Morrison and Lee play up Image’s influences and the original company’s failure to sustain reader interest merely with beautiful people: “The world ran out of room for heroes like me,” Grifter explains. If he’s back, then it better be as something new. When Grifter finally does rejoin the fight at the end of the issue, he does so with a speech in German in which he proclaims himself “chaos” and “death”. Crucially, though, the German words are in German, untranslated. Echoing Morrison and Lee’s new mission, Grifter’s declaration can’t be absorbed by a non-German speaker and requires some sort of interpretive exercise. This isn’t a one-off moment, but rather an indication of the kind work that the new Wildcats requires of the reader – the search for ‘semiotic resonance’.

It’s said that, in calling attention to the mechanics and pretense of pop art construction, Andy Warhol destroyed the self-effacement that was characteristic of mass produced images in the post-industrial era. Likewise, Morrison is mining the glossy Image/image of Jim Lee to destroy Lee’s own representational self-effacement, calling attention to the men behind the comic and their artistic mission. The only question remains, what is there to the mission other than calling attention to itself? We’ve been told, with one eye winking, to be better readers – but is the comic going to have something to say that's worth that kind of close reading?

Astonishing X-Men? Sure. Painfully Repetitive? Doubly so.

On Joss Whedon/John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men #17... (written on September 23, originally posted to Comicboards.com)

There’s a certain element of “been there, done that” to Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men. No, not in the sense of nostalgia for Claremont or even Morrison – both of which are there, by the way, especially in the recent storyline’s allusions to both the Dark Phoenix Saga and E is for Extinction – but rather in the sense that Whedon is simply repeating himself.

So doing my best to channel the structuralist literary critic Vladimir Propp, I present a Morphology of the Astonishing X-Men. Here are my constituent parts, with specific examples bracketed:

Friends and Enemies:
*A wolf in the flock (Danger; Cassandra Nova; Lockheed - the mole throughout)
*The villain knows a secret (Ord knows a mutant will destroy Breakworld, #5; Danger knows Emma Frost is in league with Nova, #10)
*Allies have a secret connection to the enemy (SWORD and SHIELD, #6; Xavier, #12; Emma Frost, #13 and expanded on subsequently)
*The team concludes that their allies can no longer be trusted (#6; #12)

Battles:
*The initial battle is either a diversion or a set-up (Ord fakes a terror-attack to test the team, #2; Danger tricks them into freeing her, #9; the Hellfire Club defeats them in order to gain control of Kitty and free Nova, #14-16)
*An entire issue is devoted to the team being defeated systematically by someone who knows them better than they know themselves (Danger, #10; Nova, #15)
*The previously unbeatable villain is beaten by the physical brutality of a single X-Man (Colossus vs. Ord, #5; Beast vs. Danger, #12)
*A fastball special by Colossus leads directly to the end of the confrontation (with Wolverine, #6; with Kitty, #12)

Storytelling:
*Almost perfectly linear storytelling, the rare flashback or dream the exception
*The return of an old friend (Colossus, #4; Xavier, #10)
*The final page splash with a hero’s surprise appearance (Fury, #5; Xavier, #10; Cyclops, #17)
*The last item might also be a subset of Whedon’s habit of making every final page contain some sort of surprise or revelation, though not one that necessarily takes up the entire page

And the Morphology itself, expressed as a linear story outline (there are minor variations in order, but the steps themselves are consistent on the whole):
*A first encounter with the enemy is not all that it seems
*The enemy, who is from within, easily defeats the X-Men
*A hero’s surprise appearance shifts the balance
*The enemy is overwhelmed by an X-Man’s fury
*A terrible connection to the enemy is revealed
*Colossus throws a fastball special and the battle is quickly ended

But the point of this review is to assess Astonishing X-Men #17 in particular, right? It remains impossible to fault Cassaday’s crisp, filmic framing and sequencing – even the strategic abandonment of deep focus resolution, as exemplified in the two panels where Wolverine stares at a can of beer, is deceivingly suggestive and powerful. This said, an artist can only supply the sizzle – the writer has to bring the steak. And after a few tastes, it’s become clear that Whedon’s plots are mass-produced burgers, the toppings being the only difference.

So is it enough that Whedon gives us all the pickles we want, with Portobello mushrooms and half a dozen varieties of cheese? Yes and no. While utterly engaging in the moment, Whedon’s narratives display all the surprise of a screenwriting textbook’s write-by-the-numbers lesson. The dialogue continues to ring with authenticity and snap with perfect timing – but like the plots, the timing is almost too good. It’s an odd sort of backhanded compliment to say that something works too well, but that’s the case here. Whedon has nothing left to prove and spinning wheels can only prove amusing for so long. Here’s hoping that he steps outside his box and tries something daring and different – another berserker fury and fastball special just isn’t going to cut it.

Marvel's Civil War and the disconnect between 'real' and 'implied' readers

On Mark Millar/Steve McNiven's Civil War #4... (written September 23, originally posted to Comicboards.com)

Let’s get this out of the way – Mark Millar knows what he’s doing. Millar’s Professor Xavier in Ultimate X-Men cribs lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson and pits The Authority against a villain who is self-consciously modeled on Jack Kirby. In doing so, he speaks subtextually to the issues of post-humanism, nostalgia, and influence that inflect much of language used by comic book writers and critics alike. And when you consider that Millar’s reputation was built on the epic, “widescreen” pop-comic stylings of The Authority – a book where the characters’ disagreeable attitudes are dwarfed only by the absurd and outlandish foes they match up against – one can only conclude that Civil War need not be read like your typical sort of Marvel super-hero story.

On Newsrama, Millar explains that this latest issue “radicalized a lot of [heroes] we'll see in the next couple of issues, kind of like the way some Muslims were suddenly radicalized when Iraq got a little shock and awe”. Fair enough, I suppose – Millar and Marvel alike have pushed Civil War as an allegory for American domestic and international policy, and it only makes sense that Millar would encourage people to choose sides in this battle according to the politics that they find most agreeable in the real world. The specific perspective that Millar expresses in the quote above, though, is only one possible interpretation and not necessary the most useful – by obscuring and swapping many of the particulars, Millar creates a space of liminality in which each side carries markers of the patriot and the reformer, the soldier and the terrorist, Big Brother and Winston Smith. The tag-line “Whose side are you on?” is not so simple a question.

Like The Authority, Civil War is also larger than life – the super-heroic id unleashed in all its libidinal glory. It’s no wonder that the Thor clone, brandishing the most phallic super-weapon of all, is the one who should tip the balance. It’s also intriguing that the Invisible Woman – whose very power of invisibility is a quizzically active projection of her “lack” under Freudianism as a woman, or the embodiment of penis envy – should be the one to stifle his attack and defer certain defeat. Already compelled to favor one paradigm or another, we now have to consider that the symbolic order itself is at risk.*

[*October 13th Update: On Comicboards' Avengers Message Board, Omar Karindu theorizes the battle as a crisis of genre - "procedural and law enforcement on the pro-Reg side, and traditional superhero genre standards on the anti-Reg side." This is probably a more productive reading, since it takes a decidedly more meta-commentary approach - which is much more in line with Millar's past work - than my more abstracted psychoanalytic tack.]

Except that this isn’t The Authority – Thor isn’t Apollo, Cap isn’t Midnighter, and Iron Man isn’t the Engineer. And subtext tends to miss its mark when the text itself is so outrageous to the reader that disbelief can no longer be suspended.

What Millar and Co. seem to have completely missed is that Marvel readers are called “Zombies” for a reason – they show up out of loyalty to the characters, not for the high-brow conceit. While casting Iron Man as an antihero in the mode of Dr. Frankenstein (or, given his recent neuroses for contingency planning, maybe Batman) seems like a pretty clever idea, few Iron Man fans will appreciate that cleverness in the face of so much textual contradiction with his past representations.

It appears that Marvel has forgotten – or never realized – that their consumers read for the characters first. The plots or high concepts will only ever be secondary, and so editor Tom Brevoort’s suggestion that “It's human nature to root for the underdog” misses the point. The reality is not nearly so philosophical. For many readers, super-heroes were one of their first points of identification, a mirror stage in their moral development. Millar may recognize this pseudo-psychoanalytic function of the super-hero comic in his symbolic play, but his attempts to deconstruct it seem to indicate a rather stark disconnect between theory and practice. When pushed to choose between two sets of their beloved heroes, characters who they’ve quite often internalized and made fundamental to their own sense of self in some way, fans will invariably detest the side fighting to incarcerate and indoctrinate – and, yes, kill – their friends. There’s no sympathy for Iron Man when he crosses his own line and inadvertently kills Bill Foster, and Cap’s ostensibly irrational and fanatic response to being beaten within an inch of his life seems irrefutably heroic in contrast.

For the fanatic reader – who, it seems, is very nearly the average reader – the allegory collapses under the weight of four decades worth of affective sediment. But pretend, if you will, that these are not Marvel heroes but rather The Authority. Or even better, The Ultimates. Can you imagine how this would read and be received as an Ultimate Marvel crossover, with no over-burdened and over-determined history? My guess it is that it would be received rather well.

'Smartpop'? Given the quality of Unauthorized X-Men, that's ironic, right?

On Smartpop's The Unauthorized X-Men... (written September 9, originally posted to Comicboards.com)

It seems to be an unspoken rule that all popular culture studies books must fall into one of two equally maddening categories: 1) the jargon-filled and nigh-unreadable texts of an uber-academic who over-states his or her case in order to impress upon us the mind-altering importance of their subject, or 2) the fluffy and superficial sort that is dominated by stereotypical personal narratives and succeeds mostly in telling us what we already know. And while ostensibly endeavoring to maneuver his book into some space in between the two extremes, Len Wein’s The Unauthorized X-Men is entirely of the latter sort.

The set-up is reader-friendly enough and even savvy to younger readers who might be frightened off by dense considerations of, say, the feminist implications of the X-Men – which, incidentally, are located much closer to the end of the book than the front. To this end, the book is divided into three sections: ‘Writing the X-Men’ (creators musing on their experience as X-writers), ‘Heroes and Villains’ (character analyses), and ‘The X-Men and Our World’ (cultural and literary criticism). If, like me, it had been your assumption that each section implied a greater theoretical complexity than the one that preceded it, you’d have been wrong. Once you’ve read one my-childhood-geekiness-made-me-feel-like-a-mutant story, you’ve probably had your fill – and this book has no shortage of such instances of anecdote-turned-essay.

In fact, the book rarely progresses past the casual and uncritical prose of the opening pages. Len Wein’s introductory essay is characterized by a suffocatingly self-deprecatory tone – “’All this fuss about the X-Men? But it’s…it’s just mutants’” – that entirely elides the expected epistle in support of the X-Men as a cultural artifact worthy of scholarly study. Instead, Wein takes aim at his readers and mocks their most beloved stories: “Chris killed the asparagus people…If he’d killed a planet of Brussels sprouts people, I might have been a little upset. I mean, I like Brussels sprouts.” Wein claims that the book will reveal why the X-Men are such a fascinating cultural phenomenon, but fails to convince us that he himself is actually fascinated or even interested in this project in the least.

Nearly every article suffers from one of two problems: an overestimation of its own importance or the exact opposite, a fear that comics won’t be taken seriously that results in various efforts to prove the worthiness of the X-Men for study without actually making specific arguments of any kind. Joe Casey’s essay falls into the former category, as it features the revelation that “what mutants are truly metaphors for…are comic book fans.” The statement is not simply cliché, but is embarrassingly presented as if Casey were the first to sense such the obvious and oft-repeated (online, anyway) affinity. Most unfortunate of all, his is not the only essay with such a banal and groan-worthy conclusion.

Charlie W. Starr’s contribution on Wolverine in the ‘Heroes and Villains’ section is emblematic of the latter sort. Starr reintroduces Wein’s “Why?” issue and while his encyclopedic knowledge of Wolverine and listing of Jungian archetypes is impressive – in contrast to his knowledge of social history, which is very much lacking – he does little to answer his own question. Frustratingly, Starr can’t get beyond the question of “why?” itself and seems intent on exhausting most of his limited space in justifying the existence of Wolverine scholarship. (Nevermind that he supplies little of substance that can’t be found in an online biography) If we’re reading the book, can we at least be given credit for agreeing that Wolverine is worthy our attention? And while Starr fills his essay with allusions to Frankenstein, Gilgamesh, and Dirty Harry, he does little in the way of proving that Wolverine is significant or important as something other than a derivative comic book version of these distinct cultural touchstones.

Even the most artfully written papers seem to be unsure of their place in Wein’s collection. Adam Roberts’ essay on the X-Men and Ovid appears to have landed in the wrong book altogether, as he draws some artful parallels but seems more concerned with what the X-Men can offer to scholars of the Classical literary tradition in contemporary popular culture than with advancing the study of comic books as their own unique art form. And while Roberts writes as if he’s out to revolutionize the reading of the X-Men, his words hit with little more than a dull thud. For all of his self-import and refusal to consider the X-Men’s progressive political message – “I’m going to argue that, instead of reading X-Men as an allegory of race or gay rights, it makes much more sense to read it as a version of a 2,000-year-old poem written in a dead language” – the study of comics via Classical imagery and archetypes has been dominant among the literati for decades, and Roberts’ study seems neither new nor particularly effective in convincing us that a much more contemporary or politicized reading of the X-Men is somehow “wrong-headed” or “dangerous”.

These three essays are in fact emblematic of the largest failing of the book – most of the writers never take a chance and no one says anything particularly new, novel, or remotely provocative. While many of the essays feature moments of cleverness or are written from perspectives with which the majority of readers would be unfamiliar – like that of a posthumanist futurist – such contributions seem, as with the Ovid paper, connected to the X-Men only in the service of promoting some other academic agenda. Perhaps my expectations are too high – especially having such gems as Jeff McLaughlin’s Comics as Philosophy and Geoff Klock’s How to Read Superhero Comics and Why on my bookshelf – but these contributions seem no more interesting, and even inferior, to the kind of X-scholarship being performed by people like Julian Darius or many of the folks at any X-Men message board. Maybe these essays will come as something of a revelation to the casual X-reader, one who has never trawled the internet for criticism, read a literary essay, or themselves mused on what the X-Men actually ‘mean’. For any other fan, save your money and stick to the internet.

(Special note: for a kinder, even more detailed, and equally thoughtful look at this book, follow this link to read Jason Powell’s review at Comicboards' X-Universe Message Board)

Analyzing the Man of Steel

On Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman #5... (written September 8, originally posted to Comicboards.com)

Lex Luthor explains that “We all fall short of that sickening, inhuman perfection, that impossible ideal.” Lex’s diatribe is familiar, but his situation is uniquely dire. Having charged himself in Morrison’s first issue with the mission of “getting serious” about killing Superman, Luthor is now on death row. This is a particularly uncontrolled Lex as well, his obsession having surpassed the neurotic and become a full-blown psychosis. The line separating the ice-chilled logic of Luthor and the lunatic genius of the Joker has never been so thin – and it’s certainly never been so gleefully fun to try peeling back the layers and parsing those minute differences.

To my mind, the rather uncomplicated relationship of Lex to Superman – “It’s all very simple” Lex naively declares. “If it wasn’t for Superman, I’d be in charge of this planet!” – has always disappointed when compared to the depth of the relationship between Batman and the aforementioned Joker. Morrison would appear to agree, and the Luthor/Superman relationship under his pen is more psychologically engrossing and entertaining than ever. Enacting a sort of quasi-Oedipal mission to not simply destroy Superman but to replace and become him, Lex’s final interview with Clark Kent – his “Gospel of Lex” – is less an autobiography and more a rant about his attempts to refashion himself in Superman’s admittedly unattainable image. Lex charges recklessly into a confrontation with the Parasite – oversaturated with energy after greedily siphoning from Clark the same power that’s killing Superman – screaming and beating on the super-villain in a heavily symbolic and uncontrolled rage. It’s with just a little bit of irony in mind that a frantically note-scribbling Clark gently asks Lex to calm down, as his “shorthand can’t handle the volume”.

Irony and pastiche at both the textual and aesthetic levels have been the touchstone for Morrison and Quitely’s All Star Superman. Clark saves Lex’s life numerous times through acts of seeming buffoonery, adding a degree of campiness to the issue that’s evocative of Superman’s Silver Age comics (not to mention dialogue and images that recall even the more measured campiness of Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman). The visual gags don’t end with those slapstick exercises, but it would be a crime to reveal some of the most unexpected and absurd moments of incredible campiness. The best of these serve to remind us that Quitely is not simply providing wonderfully detailed and well-laid storytelling, but is also an active contributor to the book’s meanings and messages – the humor in the acts through which Clark saves Lex, for instance, rely entirely on Quitely’s delivery. While a good penciller directs the reader’s attention and avoid distracting from what’s happening in the text, an artist like Quitely builds on the words and adds a depth and texture that encourages and rewards close re-readings.

Perhaps the most interesting ironic commentary is directed at the issue of Lex’s genius and his adequacy as an intellectual, if not physical, replacement for Superman. Morrison’s Lex, after all, is a blowhard who admits that he’s never succeeded in his life’s one ambition (that is, to kill Superman), a man who sucker-punches a defeated Parasite and claims victory, who can’t read Clark’s shorthand (though he brags that he can decipher any code), and even comically misuses the word “ironic” in conversation (!). That he also declares Clark to be the exact opposite of Superman and totally fails to realize they’re the same person is a given – the comic is, as I said, very much an homage to the Silver Age. But Lex actually intellectualizes and acknowledges Clark and Superman’s striking similarities – “You have the eyebrow shape beautician’s call the ‘Superman swoosh’” – and still bafflingly fails to make the connection. Such an inept villain is hardly worthy of beating Superman, much less replacing him. One has to wonder whether the final irony will be that Lex has known Clark’s secret all along, and that his interview and his Gospel is just one more knife-twist in the stomach of a distraught Superman on his last legs.