5.30.2012
Greatest Comic of All Time | Paradax! Remix
This week the greatest comic of all time is both the one whose approach could have saved the superhero genre from total obsolescence if it had been more widely copied, AND the only one I can think of where the color job is presented as being the main attraction. Say hello to Brendan McCarthy and Peter Milligan's Paradax! Remix....
5.25.2012
5.24.2012
Comic Books Are Burning In Hell episode 0.2
After a week of no doubt white-knuckle waiting, it's finally here: the second part of the inaugural, so lo-fi it's hi-fi episode of the Comic Books Are Burning In Hell audio hour, featuring Tucker Stone, Joe McCulloch, and myself. Big ups to Robin McConnell of the legendary Inkstuds podcast for getting this episode to sound a little better than the last one, though we remain the My Bloody Valentine of comic book podcasts. This time the topics up for discussion are:
-last month's MoCCA Festival, our various problems with it, and the amazing Norwegian comic Suicide Joe, which we picked up there,
- the recently concluded Lobster Johnson miniseries, and how it's way better than the Avengers movie,
- the new Grant Morrison Action Comics, which is much less entertaining than Joe's take on it,
- some weird shit called Morgus, a local Detroit newspaper comic by a TV horror host (I was pretty disappointed that my grandmother has never heard of it)
- the relative merits of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics old and new,
- and a return to the deep-level Garth Ennis theorizing of the episode's first half, this time centered around his new Fury Max comic.
Listen up! And when you're done, Joe has posted another highly rewarding bouquet of annotations for your pleasure here.
5.23.2012
Greatest Comic of All Time | Obsolete
This week on my Robot 6 column, I finally get around to shining the spotlight on a comic I've loved for the better part of a year but never found the words to write about. Mikkel Sommer's Obsolete is about as close to perfection as a 24-page pamphlet comic can get, and I tried to do it justice here. After you read my take on it, you should buy it here.
5.20.2012
Nazis Burn Books, I Straight Up BBQ Them
UPDATE: To my great dismay, this particular blog post has ended up becoming the sum total of my critical contribution to comics for a lot of people, never mind the years of hard work and positivity I've put into hundreds of other articles a lot more important than this one. You do one thing people don't like, and they forget everything you did that they thought was good. I'm putting the full text of the article that this post was originally intended as a funny epilogue to up here so people will actually have to engage with the opinions I expressed in it, all of which I stand by. I also stand by burning and eating that fucking retarded Supergods book, but this text is the real stuff. My barbecue was just something all the people who ended up frothing at the mouth about it probably couldn't ever understand; a fun, random way to spend a boozy summer afternoon with my friends and ex-lovers. There was also a kiddie pool, and I totally got pushed in it after we were done taking the photos.
************
While All Star Superman was coming out, I wanted to grow up to be Grant Morrison. Not exclusively -- I also wanted to grow up to be John Cale, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Alain Delon, Scott Walker, Auguste Rodin, and a lot of other dudes besides. Morrison, however, was the one cool guy in the endless parade of cool guys whose magic I would try to capture for myself in thrift stores or Sunglass Hut that came from the world of comics, which is where I ended up. Maybe if I had decided to spend my adult life with some other medium I’d feel the same way as I do about Morrison about the childhood heroes of mine who did their work in that form, maybe not. Either way, since around 2008, when All Star Superman took its final bow, I’ve strongly resented Morrison for turning out not to be the version of himself I idolized as a kid. And as I’ve grown older and older, even the untrue image I worshipped so fervently begins to look like a sham, like something I never would have wanted to become even if the chance had presented itself.
Grant Morrison was never a marginal figure, or even an “alternative” one, having done the overwhelming majority of his work for DC and Marvel, the two largest publishers of comics, and the rest of it for companies whose products share shelf space and genre with them. He never self-published a comic, never put his own work together by stapling Xerox printouts into pamphlets, never crowdfunded a project or took out loans to finance one, never had to face the task of distributing his own work to comics retailers, never did an unpaid job for the love of the medium. Morrison’s public image is all but certainly the one to have benefitted most from the low visibility of and difficulty of access to avant-garde, non-corporate comics in America -- comics by people who actually do all the things listed above. Morrison capitalizes on a culture that discourages innovation and progress by telling a captive audience that his own staunchly unadventurous work represents those very values.
It works like this: the vast majority of comics retailers carry no self-published work whatsoever, and few to none of the books put out by the small circle of publishers that represent the forward-looking, artistically motivated side of comics. The consumer, then, is presented with a highly limited spectrum of the medium’s delights to choose from, most of which is comics about punching created by large committees of artists and writers working in assembly line fashion. It’s easy enough for casual comics readers to spend the entire period of their interaction of the medium without ever being confronted by the existence of true comics, the ones created by single artists and released whether or not they’re going to make any money for those involved. And in a world where it’s all too easy to believe that every comic in existence is published by a multinational licensing firm and features work made for hire assembled by a divided-labor team of specialists, Grant Morrison begins to look a great deal more interesting than he actually is. For those who come to comics in search of the weird, the boundary-pushing, the unimagined and the never-before-seen, the sensible destination is known as “art comics”: single-creator works, most often self-published, that privilege individualized visionary expression over more commercially friendly assets like narrative cohesion or the polish of the drawings. As ever with the avant-garde, though, the obscurity of art comics, while not entirely unintentional, prevents the work from reaching some of those who need it most. And it is Grant Morrison whose comics readers hungry for new frontiers but unable to access them end up with.
Putting their many virtues aside for the moment, Morrison’s comics are corporate and unoriginal to the core, always conforming to traditional format limitations, endlessly retreading the well-worn paths of superhero history, and constantly refining and updating the commercial appeal of the properties their stories are about. His basic aesthetic conservatism, however, is tempered with bits and flecks of the revolutionary’s rhetoric: he writes stories that profess to be anti-corporate for corporate paychecks, he writes comics starring decades-old characters that profess to be about change, he writes books that invite readers to admire their transgression and then submits them to the self-censoring organs of DC editorial and the dreaded Comics Code Authority. Basically, Morrison is just weird and different enough to stand out from the pack without ever having to even consider leaving it. On the contrary, for the past few years he has become the leader of it, mainstream comics’ most beloved figure, hosannaed as a genius and set up as the leader of a corporate-funded cult of personality in which telling stories about superheroes is the ultimate act of rebellion. As I type this, the inaugural “MorrisonCon”, a massively expensive Las Vegas meeting of the writer, his most fervent devotees, DC co-publisher Jim Lee, and dude from My Chemical Romance, is a few months away. Of course, if Morrison really cared about the corrupting influence of corporate culture he wouldn’t work for Time/Warner. If he really wanted to change the medium he wouldn’t write superhero comics. If he really wanted to push the envelope of what kind of content is acceptable in comics he’d go without an editor. Morrison’s is the most dangerous kind of retrograde traditionalism: the kind that gives the audience for revolution just enough of it to dull their appetites, then puts them back to sleep.
As a kid, I fell into the same trap that so many other readers do. Unaware that I was missing out on the revolution in avant-garde comics that was going on at the same time (spearheaded by editor Sammy Harkham’s massively influential, visionary Kramers Ergot anthology), I spent the first seven or eight years of the 2000s coasting through the art form on Morrison comic after Morrison comic -- at times there seemed to be a new one every week -- convinced that I was consuming the most forward-looking and imaginative material that the medium had to offer. It is that conviction, that sense of belonging to something special, that gives Morrison’s comics their broad appeal; when and if a Morrison reader discovers comics that go further than his, a considerable bit of bloom comes off the rose. Given the immense profits Morrison’s books have turned for the corporate publishers, there is no small amount of time and money invested in perpetuating the myth that comics’ most popular writer is also its most outré thinker.
The man himself plays this game with an even greater investment than his publishers. Morrison is gifted with a highly charming knack for conversation and an ear for esoteric and intriguing soundbites, making him one of the most compelling interview subjects in comics (corporate or otherwise) -- especially if the interviewer is one of the legion of critics who buy into Morrison’s construction of himself as a modern-day shaman, using comics to create myths for the modern day. The notion of Morrison as hermetic soothsayer is, of course, ludicrous -- true myth is culturally ubiquitous, not the privileged knowledge of a tiny group of cultish devotees -- but it is enough to convince his readers that the stories they are so obsessed with have a legitimate purpose and meaning beyond their ability to entertain for a few minutes and rake in money for the companies. You can feel okay about reading superhero comics despite the fact that they’re build on the bones of their creators if you buy into Morrison’s cultural-studies 101 twaddle, because after all, it didn’t matter who first thought up Aphrodite and Apollo way back when either; they transcended the imaginations of their individual storytellers. Just like Superman transcends Siegel and Shuster, and ends up with Grant Morrison.
The longest explication of Morrison’s theories about superheroes as tomorrow’s deities can be found in his only prose book, 2011’s Supergods, a critical treatise-cum-history-cum-autobiography whose release marked the moment I stopped merely resenting Morrison for not being the true radical I’d figured him for as a kid, and started actively and passionately hating him. The book positions superhero stories as the only kind of comics that really count (or exist, for that matter), the evolutionary triggers for the coming real-life transformation of humanity into superhumanity. Supergods begins, naturally enough, with the story of Siegel and Shuster creating comics’ first costumed crimefighter, Superman. What follows is nothing less than a virtuosic rhetorical performance, as Morrison manages to remove the guilt of working with a property so heinously wrested from its true owners by putting the blame on Siegel and Shuster themselves, who according to the Man of Steel’s eventual inheritor totally knew what they were doing!
“Like so many artists, musicians, and entertainers,” Morrison tells us, “they were creating a product to sell,” and once the ink hit the back of that check any immorality on the part of the buyer was no longer of consequence. To Morrison, Siegel and Shuster seem to be romantic bits of history, not actual ruined lives. Superman clearly matters more to him, and the idea that he might be in the wrong for participating in the continued unethical use of the character is never brought up. Over the course of the book, however, it becomes clear that someone as smart and self-promoting as Morrison is incapable of playing ignorant for too long. As any good writer would be, Morrison sees the tragedy of Siegel and Shuster -- and simply refuses to care. “Leaving his fathers far behind on the doomed planet Poverty,” a memorable passage runs, “Superman… flew into the hands of anyone who could afford to hire him.” This might sound like a call to arms if it was coming from anyone but a beneficiary of the events being detailed, but for Morrison it’s just another dramatically potent tidbit to drop into the latest bestseller. When the fact that the total amount Siegel and Shuster were ever paid for their creation is about as much as today’s big-name comics writers make in a week, it’s cited not as something the industry deserves to be ashamed of, but “an example of how far the business has come”.
There are no prizes for guessing what big-name writer Morrison’s referring to, as the attitude taken seems to be “it’s okay that it happened to them, because I don’t mind a similar thing happening to me”. And indeed every idea that fills up All Star Superman, as well as the reams of other books Morrison has penned for DC and Marvel, no longer belong to him. When the writer discusses the (still hugely problematic, and recently dismantled) royalty systems instituted at the “Big Two” around the time he entered the business, he uses the forced smile of the true defeatist to tell us that from here on, “creative people adding to the DC or Marvel universe would be ripped off with a little more reward on the back end.”
Supergods is an immensely distressing book in its own right, but more distressing still is the way it puts the lie to all the revolutionary rhetoric of Morrison’s previous works, All Star Superman very much among them. Before 2011, it was possible to view Morrison the way he presented himself, as an agent of a better future doing the dirty-but-necessary job of infiltrating the rotten hive of superhero comics in order to change it from the inside out. There may even have been a time when that was really how things were. But as Alan Moore reminded us in Watchmen -- shortly before leaving DC in disgust rather than continue on there as Morrison has -- when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also. And then, at least in Morrison’s case, it swallows you whole and spits you back out to spit out its poisonous creeds and hypocritical justifications.
In one of All Star Superman’s most powerful moments, the hero reminds us that “the strong have to stand up for the weak… that a good heart is worth more than all the money in the bank… (and) that the measure of a man lies not in what he says but what he does.” These are beautiful sentiments, the kind that stay with you long after the covers of the comic close. And yet when they come from the pen of Grant Morrison they are nothing more than sentiments, empty words with no actions backing them up.
Still, the truth is always more powerful than lies, even when it comes from the mouth of a liar, and that is why All Star Superman transcends the small and miserable man who wrote it. If it were possible to praise the comic without praising or even mentioning its writer, I’d do just that. But I can’t, and beside the ones listed above, All Star Superman teaches us one more important lesson: sometimes, despite themselves, evil people are capable of doing good things.
****************
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. And if you skipped reading the above so you could see the pictures, go kill yourself, wouldn't you?
The major tragedy in my life lately has been that in order to write the piece reprinted above, I had to actually go out and purchase a copy of the book I may very well hate more than any other, Morrison's auto-hagiography Supergods. Last summer the comic shop I work at got an advance reader's copy, so I was able to look at it without buying it then -- but after I was done I threw it in a dumpster, thinking I'd never have need of it again. It was a sorry day indeed when that was no longer the case.
Luckily, mere hours after finishing my jeremiad against Morrison and Supergods, a few of my very best friends invited me to a backyard barbeque in Bushwick Brooklyn (I know), and in addition to bringing over a few twelve-packs, I took the object of my disdain along for the ride. My final revenge would be sweet indeed, though hardly one served cold. The following photos, taken by the lovely and talented Randyll Wendl, depict the carnage.
Things heated up pretty quick once I threw it on the grill...
So I got out the tongs to roast it nice and even.
Ahem. If I recall correctly, the aim here was to "get one of me looking like Satan", which I believe we fell short of.
Then I put that shit on a burger bun and ate it.
The End. As was the case last time I did this kind of thing to a comic, I enjoyed Supergods much more when I destroyed it than when I read it. I highly recommend you try putting your own copy to the same use!
5.18.2012
Life on Earth Q: Love, Childhood, and All Star Superman (part 3)
Part 1 Part 2
4: Poem of Apostasy: Why You Hate Grant Morrison
While All Star Superman was coming out, I wanted to grow up to be Grant Morrison. Not exclusively -- I also wanted to grow up to be John Cale, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Alain Delon, Scott Walker, Auguste Rodin, and a lot of other dudes besides. Morrison, however, was the one cool guy in the endless parade of cool guys whose magic I would try to capture for myself in thrift stores or Sunglass Hut that came from the world of comics, which is where I ended up. Maybe if I had decided to spend my adult life with some other medium I’d feel the same way as I do about Morrison about the childhood heroes of mine who did their work in that form, maybe not. Either way, since around 2008, when All Star Superman took its final bow, I’ve strongly resented Morrison for turning out not to be the version of himself I idolized as a kid. And as I’ve grown older and older, even the untrue image I worshipped so fervently begins to look like a sham, like something I never would have wanted to become even if the chance had presented itself.
Grant Morrison was never a marginal figure, or even an “alternative” one, having done the overwhelming majority of his work for DC and Marvel, the two largest publishers of comics, and the rest of it for companies whose products share shelf space and genre with them. He never self-published a comic, never put his own work together by stapling Xerox printouts into pamphlets, never crowdfunded a project or took out loans to finance one, never had to face the task of distributing his own work to comics retailers, never did an unpaid job for the love of the medium. Morrison’s public image is all but certainly the one to have benefitted most from the low visibility of and difficulty of access to avant-garde, non-corporate comics in America -- comics by people who actually do all the things listed above. Morrison capitalizes on a culture that discourages innovation and progress by telling a captive audience that his own staunchly unadventurous work represents those very values.
It works like this: the vast majority of comics retailers carry no self-published work whatsoever, and few to none of the books put out by the small circle of publishers that represent the forward-looking, artistically motivated side of comics. The consumer, then, is presented with a highly limited spectrum of the medium’s delights to choose from, most of which is comics about punching created by large committees of artists and writers working in assembly line fashion. It’s easy enough for casual comics readers to spend the entire period of their interaction of the medium without ever being confronted by the existence of true comics, the ones created by single artists and released whether or not they’re going to make any money for those involved. And in a world where it’s all too easy to believe that every comic in existence is published by a multinational licensing firm and features work made for hire assembled by a divided-labor team of specialists, Grant Morrison begins to look a great deal more interesting than he actually is. For those who come to comics in search of the weird, the boundary-pushing, the unimagined and the never-before-seen, the sensible destination is known as “art comics”: single-creator works, most often self-published, that privilege individualized visionary expression over more commercially friendly assets like narrative cohesion or the polish of the drawings. As ever with the avant-garde, though, the obscurity of art comics, while not entirely unintentional, prevents the work from reaching some of those who need it most. And it is Grant Morrison whose comics readers hungry for new frontiers but unable to access them end up with.
Putting their many virtues aside for the moment, Morrison’s comics are corporate and unoriginal to the core, always conforming to traditional format limitations, endlessly retreading the well-worn paths of superhero history, and constantly refining and updating the commercial appeal of the properties their stories are about. His basic aesthetic conservatism, however, is tempered with bits and flecks of the revolutionary’s rhetoric: he writes stories that profess to be anti-corporate for corporate paychecks, he writes comics starring decades-old characters that profess to be about change, he writes books that invite readers to admire their transgression and then submits them to the self-censoring organs of DC editorial and the dreaded Comics Code Authority. Basically, Morrison is just weird and different enough to stand out from the pack without ever having to even consider leaving it. On the contrary, for the past few years he has become the leader of it, mainstream comics’ most beloved figure, hosannaed as a genius and set up as the leader of a corporate-funded cult of personality in which telling stories about superheroes is the ultimate act of rebellion. As I type this, the inaugural “MorrisonCon”, a massively expensive Las Vegas meeting of the writer, his most fervent devotees, DC co-publisher Jim Lee, and dude from My Chemical Romance, is a few months away. Of course, if Morrison really cared about the corrupting influence of corporate culture he wouldn’t work for Time/Warner. If he really wanted to change the medium he wouldn’t write superhero comics. If he really wanted to push the envelope of what kind of content is acceptable in comics he’d go without an editor. Morrison’s is the most dangerous kind of retrograde traditionalism: the kind that gives the audience for revolution just enough of it to dull their appetites, then puts them back to sleep.
As a kid, I fell into the same trap that so many other readers do. Unaware that I was missing out on the revolution in avant-garde comics that was going on at the same time (spearheaded by editor Sammy Harkham’s massively influential, visionary Kramers Ergot anthology), I spent the first seven or eight years of the 2000s coasting through the art form on Morrison comic after Morrison comic -- at times there seemed to be a new one every week -- convinced that I was consuming the most forward-looking and imaginative material that the medium had to offer. It is that conviction, that sense of belonging to something special, that gives Morrison’s comics their broad appeal; when and if a Morrison reader discovers comics that go further than his, a considerable bit of bloom comes off the rose. Given the immense profits Morrison’s books have turned for the corporate publishers, there is no small amount of time and money invested in perpetuating the myth that comics’ most popular writer is also its most outré thinker.
The man himself plays this game with an even greater investment than his publishers. Morrison is gifted with a highly charming knack for conversation and an ear for esoteric and intriguing soundbites, making him one of the most compelling interview subjects in comics (corporate or otherwise) -- especially if the interviewer is one of the legion of critics who buy into Morrison’s construction of himself as a modern-day shaman, using comics to create myths for the modern day. The notion of Morrison as hermetic soothsayer is, of course, ludicrous -- true myth is culturally ubiquitous, not the privileged knowledge of a tiny group of cultish devotees -- but it is enough to convince his readers that the stories they are so obsessed with have a legitimate purpose and meaning beyond their ability to entertain for a few minutes and rake in money for the companies. You can feel okay about reading superhero comics despite the fact that they’re build on the bones of their creators if you buy into Morrison’s cultural-studies 101 twaddle, because after all, it didn’t matter who first thought up Aphrodite and Apollo way back when either; they transcended the imaginations of their individual storytellers. Just like Superman transcends Siegel and Shuster, and ends up with Grant Morrison.
The longest explication of Morrison’s theories about superheroes as tomorrow’s deities can be found in his only prose book, 2011’s Supergods, a critical treatise-cum-history-cum-autobiography whose release marked the moment I stopped merely resenting Morrison for not being the true radical I’d figured him for as a kid, and started actively and passionately hating him. The book positions superhero stories as the only kind of comics that really count (or exist, for that matter), the evolutionary triggers for the coming real-life transformation of humanity into superhumanity. Supergods begins, naturally enough, with the story of Siegel and Shuster creating comics’ first costumed crimefighter, Superman. What follows is nothing less than a virtuosic rhetorical performance, as Morrison manages to remove the guilt of working with a property so heinously wrested from its true owners by putting the blame on Siegel and Shuster themselves, who according to the Man of Steel’s eventual inheritor totally knew what they were doing!
“Like so many artists, musicians, and entertainers,” Morrison tells us, “they were creating a product to sell,” and once the ink hit the back of that check any immorality on the part of the buyer was no longer of consequence. To Morrison, Siegel and Shuster seem to be romantic bits of history, not actual ruined lives. Superman clearly matters more to him, and the idea that he might be in the wrong for participating in the continued unethical use of the character is never brought up. Over the course of the book, however, it becomes clear that someone as smart and self-promoting as Morrison is incapable of playing ignorant for too long. As any good writer would be, Morrison sees the tragedy of Siegel and Shuster -- and simply refuses to care. “Leaving his fathers far behind on the doomed planet Poverty,” a memorable passage runs, “Superman… flew into the hands of anyone who could afford to hire him.” This might sound like a call to arms if it was coming from anyone but a beneficiary of the events being detailed, but for Morrison it’s just another dramatically potent tidbit to drop into the latest bestseller. When the fact that the total amount Siegel and Shuster were ever paid for their creation is about as much as today’s big-name comics writers make in a week, it’s cited not as something the industry deserves to be ashamed of, but “an example of how far the business has come”.
There are no prizes for guessing what big-name writer Morrison’s referring to, as the attitude taken seems to be “it’s okay that it happened to them, because I don’t mind a similar thing happening to me”. And indeed every idea that fills up All Star Superman, as well as the reams of other books Morrison has penned for DC and Marvel, no longer belong to him. When the writer discusses the (still hugely problematic, and recently dismantled) royalty systems instituted at the “Big Two” around the time he entered the business, he uses the forced smile of the true defeatist to tell us that from here on, “creative people adding to the DC or Marvel universe would be ripped off with a little more reward on the back end.”
Supergods is an immensely distressing book in its own right, but more distressing still is the way it puts the lie to all the revolutionary rhetoric of Morrison’s previous works, All Star Superman very much among them. Before 2011, it was possible to view Morrison the way he presented himself, as an agent of a better future doing the dirty-but-necessary job of infiltrating the rotten hive of superhero comics in order to change it from the inside out. There may even have been a time when that was really how things were. But as Alan Moore reminded us in Watchmen -- shortly before leaving DC in disgust rather than continue on there as Morrison has -- when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also. And then, at least in Morrison’s case, it swallows you whole and spits you back out to spit out its poisonous creeds and hypocritical justifications.
In one of All Star Superman’s most powerful moments, the hero reminds us that “the strong have to stand up for the weak… that a good heart is worth more than all the money in the bank… (and) that the measure of a man lies not in what he says but what he does.” These are beautiful sentiments, the kind that stay with you long after the covers of the comic close. And yet when they come from the pen of Grant Morrison they are nothing more than sentiments, empty words with no actions backing them up.
Still, the truth is always more powerful than lies, even when it comes from the mouth of a liar, and that is why All Star Superman transcends the small and miserable man who wrote it. If it were possible to praise the comic without praising or even mentioning its writer, I’d do just that. But I can’t, and beside the ones listed above, All Star Superman teaches us one more important lesson: sometimes, despite themselves, evil people are capable of doing good things.
4: Poem of Apostasy: Why You Hate Grant Morrison
While All Star Superman was coming out, I wanted to grow up to be Grant Morrison. Not exclusively -- I also wanted to grow up to be John Cale, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Alain Delon, Scott Walker, Auguste Rodin, and a lot of other dudes besides. Morrison, however, was the one cool guy in the endless parade of cool guys whose magic I would try to capture for myself in thrift stores or Sunglass Hut that came from the world of comics, which is where I ended up. Maybe if I had decided to spend my adult life with some other medium I’d feel the same way as I do about Morrison about the childhood heroes of mine who did their work in that form, maybe not. Either way, since around 2008, when All Star Superman took its final bow, I’ve strongly resented Morrison for turning out not to be the version of himself I idolized as a kid. And as I’ve grown older and older, even the untrue image I worshipped so fervently begins to look like a sham, like something I never would have wanted to become even if the chance had presented itself.
Grant Morrison was never a marginal figure, or even an “alternative” one, having done the overwhelming majority of his work for DC and Marvel, the two largest publishers of comics, and the rest of it for companies whose products share shelf space and genre with them. He never self-published a comic, never put his own work together by stapling Xerox printouts into pamphlets, never crowdfunded a project or took out loans to finance one, never had to face the task of distributing his own work to comics retailers, never did an unpaid job for the love of the medium. Morrison’s public image is all but certainly the one to have benefitted most from the low visibility of and difficulty of access to avant-garde, non-corporate comics in America -- comics by people who actually do all the things listed above. Morrison capitalizes on a culture that discourages innovation and progress by telling a captive audience that his own staunchly unadventurous work represents those very values.
It works like this: the vast majority of comics retailers carry no self-published work whatsoever, and few to none of the books put out by the small circle of publishers that represent the forward-looking, artistically motivated side of comics. The consumer, then, is presented with a highly limited spectrum of the medium’s delights to choose from, most of which is comics about punching created by large committees of artists and writers working in assembly line fashion. It’s easy enough for casual comics readers to spend the entire period of their interaction of the medium without ever being confronted by the existence of true comics, the ones created by single artists and released whether or not they’re going to make any money for those involved. And in a world where it’s all too easy to believe that every comic in existence is published by a multinational licensing firm and features work made for hire assembled by a divided-labor team of specialists, Grant Morrison begins to look a great deal more interesting than he actually is. For those who come to comics in search of the weird, the boundary-pushing, the unimagined and the never-before-seen, the sensible destination is known as “art comics”: single-creator works, most often self-published, that privilege individualized visionary expression over more commercially friendly assets like narrative cohesion or the polish of the drawings. As ever with the avant-garde, though, the obscurity of art comics, while not entirely unintentional, prevents the work from reaching some of those who need it most. And it is Grant Morrison whose comics readers hungry for new frontiers but unable to access them end up with.
Putting their many virtues aside for the moment, Morrison’s comics are corporate and unoriginal to the core, always conforming to traditional format limitations, endlessly retreading the well-worn paths of superhero history, and constantly refining and updating the commercial appeal of the properties their stories are about. His basic aesthetic conservatism, however, is tempered with bits and flecks of the revolutionary’s rhetoric: he writes stories that profess to be anti-corporate for corporate paychecks, he writes comics starring decades-old characters that profess to be about change, he writes books that invite readers to admire their transgression and then submits them to the self-censoring organs of DC editorial and the dreaded Comics Code Authority. Basically, Morrison is just weird and different enough to stand out from the pack without ever having to even consider leaving it. On the contrary, for the past few years he has become the leader of it, mainstream comics’ most beloved figure, hosannaed as a genius and set up as the leader of a corporate-funded cult of personality in which telling stories about superheroes is the ultimate act of rebellion. As I type this, the inaugural “MorrisonCon”, a massively expensive Las Vegas meeting of the writer, his most fervent devotees, DC co-publisher Jim Lee, and dude from My Chemical Romance, is a few months away. Of course, if Morrison really cared about the corrupting influence of corporate culture he wouldn’t work for Time/Warner. If he really wanted to change the medium he wouldn’t write superhero comics. If he really wanted to push the envelope of what kind of content is acceptable in comics he’d go without an editor. Morrison’s is the most dangerous kind of retrograde traditionalism: the kind that gives the audience for revolution just enough of it to dull their appetites, then puts them back to sleep.
As a kid, I fell into the same trap that so many other readers do. Unaware that I was missing out on the revolution in avant-garde comics that was going on at the same time (spearheaded by editor Sammy Harkham’s massively influential, visionary Kramers Ergot anthology), I spent the first seven or eight years of the 2000s coasting through the art form on Morrison comic after Morrison comic -- at times there seemed to be a new one every week -- convinced that I was consuming the most forward-looking and imaginative material that the medium had to offer. It is that conviction, that sense of belonging to something special, that gives Morrison’s comics their broad appeal; when and if a Morrison reader discovers comics that go further than his, a considerable bit of bloom comes off the rose. Given the immense profits Morrison’s books have turned for the corporate publishers, there is no small amount of time and money invested in perpetuating the myth that comics’ most popular writer is also its most outré thinker.
The man himself plays this game with an even greater investment than his publishers. Morrison is gifted with a highly charming knack for conversation and an ear for esoteric and intriguing soundbites, making him one of the most compelling interview subjects in comics (corporate or otherwise) -- especially if the interviewer is one of the legion of critics who buy into Morrison’s construction of himself as a modern-day shaman, using comics to create myths for the modern day. The notion of Morrison as hermetic soothsayer is, of course, ludicrous -- true myth is culturally ubiquitous, not the privileged knowledge of a tiny group of cultish devotees -- but it is enough to convince his readers that the stories they are so obsessed with have a legitimate purpose and meaning beyond their ability to entertain for a few minutes and rake in money for the companies. You can feel okay about reading superhero comics despite the fact that they’re build on the bones of their creators if you buy into Morrison’s cultural-studies 101 twaddle, because after all, it didn’t matter who first thought up Aphrodite and Apollo way back when either; they transcended the imaginations of their individual storytellers. Just like Superman transcends Siegel and Shuster, and ends up with Grant Morrison.
The longest explication of Morrison’s theories about superheroes as tomorrow’s deities can be found in his only prose book, 2011’s Supergods, a critical treatise-cum-history-cum-autobiography whose release marked the moment I stopped merely resenting Morrison for not being the true radical I’d figured him for as a kid, and started actively and passionately hating him. The book positions superhero stories as the only kind of comics that really count (or exist, for that matter), the evolutionary triggers for the coming real-life transformation of humanity into superhumanity. Supergods begins, naturally enough, with the story of Siegel and Shuster creating comics’ first costumed crimefighter, Superman. What follows is nothing less than a virtuosic rhetorical performance, as Morrison manages to remove the guilt of working with a property so heinously wrested from its true owners by putting the blame on Siegel and Shuster themselves, who according to the Man of Steel’s eventual inheritor totally knew what they were doing!
“Like so many artists, musicians, and entertainers,” Morrison tells us, “they were creating a product to sell,” and once the ink hit the back of that check any immorality on the part of the buyer was no longer of consequence. To Morrison, Siegel and Shuster seem to be romantic bits of history, not actual ruined lives. Superman clearly matters more to him, and the idea that he might be in the wrong for participating in the continued unethical use of the character is never brought up. Over the course of the book, however, it becomes clear that someone as smart and self-promoting as Morrison is incapable of playing ignorant for too long. As any good writer would be, Morrison sees the tragedy of Siegel and Shuster -- and simply refuses to care. “Leaving his fathers far behind on the doomed planet Poverty,” a memorable passage runs, “Superman… flew into the hands of anyone who could afford to hire him.” This might sound like a call to arms if it was coming from anyone but a beneficiary of the events being detailed, but for Morrison it’s just another dramatically potent tidbit to drop into the latest bestseller. When the fact that the total amount Siegel and Shuster were ever paid for their creation is about as much as today’s big-name comics writers make in a week, it’s cited not as something the industry deserves to be ashamed of, but “an example of how far the business has come”.
There are no prizes for guessing what big-name writer Morrison’s referring to, as the attitude taken seems to be “it’s okay that it happened to them, because I don’t mind a similar thing happening to me”. And indeed every idea that fills up All Star Superman, as well as the reams of other books Morrison has penned for DC and Marvel, no longer belong to him. When the writer discusses the (still hugely problematic, and recently dismantled) royalty systems instituted at the “Big Two” around the time he entered the business, he uses the forced smile of the true defeatist to tell us that from here on, “creative people adding to the DC or Marvel universe would be ripped off with a little more reward on the back end.”
Supergods is an immensely distressing book in its own right, but more distressing still is the way it puts the lie to all the revolutionary rhetoric of Morrison’s previous works, All Star Superman very much among them. Before 2011, it was possible to view Morrison the way he presented himself, as an agent of a better future doing the dirty-but-necessary job of infiltrating the rotten hive of superhero comics in order to change it from the inside out. There may even have been a time when that was really how things were. But as Alan Moore reminded us in Watchmen -- shortly before leaving DC in disgust rather than continue on there as Morrison has -- when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also. And then, at least in Morrison’s case, it swallows you whole and spits you back out to spit out its poisonous creeds and hypocritical justifications.
In one of All Star Superman’s most powerful moments, the hero reminds us that “the strong have to stand up for the weak… that a good heart is worth more than all the money in the bank… (and) that the measure of a man lies not in what he says but what he does.” These are beautiful sentiments, the kind that stay with you long after the covers of the comic close. And yet when they come from the pen of Grant Morrison they are nothing more than sentiments, empty words with no actions backing them up.
Still, the truth is always more powerful than lies, even when it comes from the mouth of a liar, and that is why All Star Superman transcends the small and miserable man who wrote it. If it were possible to praise the comic without praising or even mentioning its writer, I’d do just that. But I can’t, and beside the ones listed above, All Star Superman teaches us one more important lesson: sometimes, despite themselves, evil people are capable of doing good things.
5.17.2012
Comic Books Are Burning In Hell
Well, after the three of us did like a million podcasts in the space of approximately half a second, it was past time we made it official. Yes folks, I've joined Messrs. Joe McCulloch and Tucker Stone on the new ongoing Comic Books Are Burning In Hell audio hour, to be released on a more or less weekly basis. Our first outing is unfortunately marred by some rather frightening audio problems -- I commented during the run-up to recording that my tuning in from a hotel room in Detroit would lend just the right air of enigma and menace to the proceedings, but I didn't think that I'd be halfway inaudible! -- but there's still more to be had here than anywhere else on the internet (or in the world) you could be today. Big ups to Tucker for managing to even make the thing sound as good as it does. The three of us talked about, more or less:
- Josh Simmons' amazing new hardcover collection, The Furry Trap (a bad one to read on a plane)
- Garth Ennis' return to the only horror comic that matters, and Jamie Delano's current run on the same title
- The way those two comics are similar to one another, and why the mainstream/art comics differentiation is meaningless when the books in question are AWESOEM
- Kramers Ergot 8 and the negative reaction to a book we all loved
- The new "cut-up" issue of David Hine and Shaky Kane's Bulletproof Coffin comic
- Thriller, one of those weird-ass early-'80s DC art comics
- The current state of the Judge Dredd Megazine (I think it needs a Skrillex guest appearance)
- and uh, whatever else crossed our minds, which is a lot of stuff.
Then it cuts off at what might seem like an arbitrary point, but is actually the big lead-in to part two, due next week! Gasp! Click here to listen!
UPDATE: Oh yeah, and Joe has now posted some appropriately massive annotations to the episode. Should we start a betting pool on how long he keeps these up for, you guys? And can I hope it is For Ever?
5.16.2012
Greatest Comic of All Time | Zen Intergalactic Ninja Tour of the Universe Special
How the hell is a Zen Intergalactic Ninja comic something that qualifies for the "greatest of all time" title? Well, this is no ordinary Zen Intergalactic Ninja comic, brother. To start with, it contains images like the one below. That is a double-page spread, by the way. Read all about it in the new installment of my Robot 6 column right here.
5.15.2012
5.09.2012
Life on Earth Q: Love, Childhood, and All Star Superman (part 2)
Part 1
Above: the most important two-panel comic in the medium's history
3: Villains
For all the genre’s wonders, the notion that a superhero comic can change the medium for the better, or have any positive impact on it at all, is in the long run a false one. It is probably the great poetic irony of comics that the segment of the form that focuses most heavily on ideals of justice and freedom is the one that gives the smallest amount of these things to the people who make the art, that the comics in which good not only always triumphs but must continue to do so always are created in, by, and for a culture in which it almost never does. All Star Superman is corporate property, now and forever, and the money I spent buying those comics went into the coffers of the Time Warner Corporation. (Money spent buying comics from the other superhero publisher, Marvel, puffs up Disney.) In corporate superhero comics more than any other artistic field currently doing big business, the consumer’s purchase of a product does nothing to enrich or even advance the careers of the people who created it. This is true for a few reasons, all of which contribute to the Sisyphean boulder-sized grain of salt any positive referendum on All Star Superman must come with.
Comics are a rough business all around. Retailers eke out money month by month in an industry whose most common profit margin is a dollar and fifty cents per item sold. Readers negotiate baffling release schedules, unexpected cancellations, false advertising, and publishing strategies that push as much superfluous product as possible onto them until they inevitably drop out from sheer exhaustion. And the publishers themselves face vast public disinterest and scorn, despite the strides comics have made into the cultural mainstream since the turn of the millennium -- not to mention the extinction threat all print media is pitted against in the digital age. But things are most unfair if you’re an artist.
I remember being a kid and thinking that making comics professionally had to be the coolest life ever -- tons of money, public adoration, and above all else, you get to tell stories about superheroes that are read the world over. That last part is true, but it's got little value when the larder's bare. In comics the only jobs that pay enough to live a decent life on give out nothing more than middle-class accommodations, and publishers do everything they can to de-emphasize the role of living human individuals in the creation of the product they sell. The reason for this is superhero comics’ most pernicious truth, the great shame that it must always carry with it: no matter what you do, how much or great what you create is, once you’re out you’re out.
In the corporate houses that pump out the monthly adventures of every superhero anyone really cares about, the artist does not have the right to own the work her brings forth with his own two hands. After the meager page rate check is cashed, the publishers’ legal obligation to their employees ends, even if an artist’s work sells a million copies, or ten million, or starts a multi-decade publishing franchise, or spawns TV shows and T-shirts and toys and billion dollar movies. And with comics’ position on the bleeding, sink-or-swim edge of American market capitalism, it should go without saying that neither of the corporate superhero publishers has ever followed up on the moral obligations they have to the creators of such work. Not even when men who don’t know how to do anything but draw because they spent their whole lives doing it are robbed of the ability by age or illness or the grief of seeing everyone but themselves enriched by their imaginations. Not even the families comics’ middle class paychecks put up in middle class worlds until the day their breadwinners’ services are no longer required. In the comics superheroes save lives, but in the real world they’ve done more to destroy them. This is why I say there is no such thing as a truly good superhero comic . Even if its creators are paid a generous sum (as Grant, Quitely, and Morrison by all accounts were), even if the work inside is accomplished and transcendent and inspiring (as All Star Superman is), they are all built on human pain. They all feed into a system that treats art as labor, that goes about the making of dreams as if it were an endless hammering of round pegs into round holes. No matter what messages of peace and happiness are contained between their covers, superhero comics are morally inexcusable.
It gets even worse with Superman comics. The Man of Steel’s creation story is pure American myth both on and off the printed page. Called to life by the idle fantasies and crudely powerful pencil drawings of two naive Cleveland teenagers named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Superman was sold to Harry Donenfeld’s National Allied Publications, a failing publisher of sleazy pulp magazines, for a few hundred dollars and a vague promise from the businessman that he would take care of the boys. Then it was sold back to a ravenous American public to the tune of a few million copies, and more the next month, and more the next for years thereafter. Superman was a national fixation, a cultural ubiquity. And here came Siegel and Shuster’s downfall, and with it, perhaps, the real end of any hope for creators’ rights in hero comics.
The earliest Superman stories prominently featured their creators’ last names on the opening pages, and had the boys been a bit cannier, this could have been a springboard to media fame. Given the millions of pairs of eyes those names touched in Superman’s whirlwind first few months of success, it’s not impossible to imagine that if things had worked out differently “Siegel and Shuster” could have become something parallel to what “Walt Disney” did, shorthand for the entirety of the medium they influenced so profoundly. Instead, the two young artists, overmatched by the incredible popularity of their creation, let demands for more work than any two people could possibly handle pile up on top of them, and in short order began to outsource, creating a studio of cartoonists to craft professional-grade Superman stories underneath their guidance. Of course, there were only two paychecks to go around, and as the franchise got bigger the compensation grew leaner, and Siegel and Shuster’s names slowly slid from the masthead of their creation. Character had outstripped artists, and it was National Allied, later DC Comics, who owned him. And that was they way it would be with the heroes, and that is the way it will be. Every superhero comic published since Superman touched earth contributes to the power of this less-than/greater-than algorithm, gives the companies more to own and takes more ideas away from people who deserve better for them. Find somebody who doesn’t read comics, and ask them how many superheroes they can name, and then ask them how many cartoonists. Why would the people who hold both the purse strings and the names that really matter in comics -- not Siegel and Shuster or Morrison and Quitely and Grant or any of those who’ve served in the capacity they did, but the names of fictional men who hide their faces -- why would they do anything to make it any different?
All this is why I find it hard to write about All Star Superman, about any superhero comic. I wouldn’t be writing about this one except for the fact that no comic has ever meant more to me, because I was different in those days. And even though I knew all of this then, I felt as though superhero comics’ place in larger narratives -- both the decades-long sagas of the characters they feature and the great American story of toil and exploitation -- was something grand and powerful enough that my own complicity in it, at $2.99 an installment, was negligible. I didn’t care that my heroes, Morrison and Quitely and Grant, were dancing on the bones of the men who built their hero, Superman. I wanted to be a part of something bigger than the person I was, and I wanted to read comics that were part of something bigger than the people who made them. So I saved the three bucks every few months for All Star and gave up the rest of my money for presents to the girl I could scarcely believe wanted me before anyone else, and I paid billionaires who didn’t lift a finger to help when Shuster ended up blind and penniless and sued Siegel’s family when they wanted the rights to their ancestor’s idea back to tell me stories of a perfect man. Those comics changed my life, but I look back and I wish I hadn’t bought them, because it wasn’t worth the other things that I was paying for.
I tell you these things about myself because there’s no good reason that anyone who knew what I knew then and know now would buy superhero comics -- only rationalizations, hypocrisies, cowardices. These were mine. The act of reading these comics is never going to make anything better. How could it? It can only compound wrongs already done, contribute, however minimally, to an unjust system. The closest you can get to the crystalline morals of the man you’re watching save the world is to find a way to do no harm. If you want to read All Star Superman, steal it from a chain bookstore. Then the only person you run the risk of hurting is yourself.
more
Above: the most important two-panel comic in the medium's history
3: Villains
For all the genre’s wonders, the notion that a superhero comic can change the medium for the better, or have any positive impact on it at all, is in the long run a false one. It is probably the great poetic irony of comics that the segment of the form that focuses most heavily on ideals of justice and freedom is the one that gives the smallest amount of these things to the people who make the art, that the comics in which good not only always triumphs but must continue to do so always are created in, by, and for a culture in which it almost never does. All Star Superman is corporate property, now and forever, and the money I spent buying those comics went into the coffers of the Time Warner Corporation. (Money spent buying comics from the other superhero publisher, Marvel, puffs up Disney.) In corporate superhero comics more than any other artistic field currently doing big business, the consumer’s purchase of a product does nothing to enrich or even advance the careers of the people who created it. This is true for a few reasons, all of which contribute to the Sisyphean boulder-sized grain of salt any positive referendum on All Star Superman must come with.
Comics are a rough business all around. Retailers eke out money month by month in an industry whose most common profit margin is a dollar and fifty cents per item sold. Readers negotiate baffling release schedules, unexpected cancellations, false advertising, and publishing strategies that push as much superfluous product as possible onto them until they inevitably drop out from sheer exhaustion. And the publishers themselves face vast public disinterest and scorn, despite the strides comics have made into the cultural mainstream since the turn of the millennium -- not to mention the extinction threat all print media is pitted against in the digital age. But things are most unfair if you’re an artist.
I remember being a kid and thinking that making comics professionally had to be the coolest life ever -- tons of money, public adoration, and above all else, you get to tell stories about superheroes that are read the world over. That last part is true, but it's got little value when the larder's bare. In comics the only jobs that pay enough to live a decent life on give out nothing more than middle-class accommodations, and publishers do everything they can to de-emphasize the role of living human individuals in the creation of the product they sell. The reason for this is superhero comics’ most pernicious truth, the great shame that it must always carry with it: no matter what you do, how much or great what you create is, once you’re out you’re out.
In the corporate houses that pump out the monthly adventures of every superhero anyone really cares about, the artist does not have the right to own the work her brings forth with his own two hands. After the meager page rate check is cashed, the publishers’ legal obligation to their employees ends, even if an artist’s work sells a million copies, or ten million, or starts a multi-decade publishing franchise, or spawns TV shows and T-shirts and toys and billion dollar movies. And with comics’ position on the bleeding, sink-or-swim edge of American market capitalism, it should go without saying that neither of the corporate superhero publishers has ever followed up on the moral obligations they have to the creators of such work. Not even when men who don’t know how to do anything but draw because they spent their whole lives doing it are robbed of the ability by age or illness or the grief of seeing everyone but themselves enriched by their imaginations. Not even the families comics’ middle class paychecks put up in middle class worlds until the day their breadwinners’ services are no longer required. In the comics superheroes save lives, but in the real world they’ve done more to destroy them. This is why I say there is no such thing as a truly good superhero comic . Even if its creators are paid a generous sum (as Grant, Quitely, and Morrison by all accounts were), even if the work inside is accomplished and transcendent and inspiring (as All Star Superman is), they are all built on human pain. They all feed into a system that treats art as labor, that goes about the making of dreams as if it were an endless hammering of round pegs into round holes. No matter what messages of peace and happiness are contained between their covers, superhero comics are morally inexcusable.
It gets even worse with Superman comics. The Man of Steel’s creation story is pure American myth both on and off the printed page. Called to life by the idle fantasies and crudely powerful pencil drawings of two naive Cleveland teenagers named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Superman was sold to Harry Donenfeld’s National Allied Publications, a failing publisher of sleazy pulp magazines, for a few hundred dollars and a vague promise from the businessman that he would take care of the boys. Then it was sold back to a ravenous American public to the tune of a few million copies, and more the next month, and more the next for years thereafter. Superman was a national fixation, a cultural ubiquity. And here came Siegel and Shuster’s downfall, and with it, perhaps, the real end of any hope for creators’ rights in hero comics.
The earliest Superman stories prominently featured their creators’ last names on the opening pages, and had the boys been a bit cannier, this could have been a springboard to media fame. Given the millions of pairs of eyes those names touched in Superman’s whirlwind first few months of success, it’s not impossible to imagine that if things had worked out differently “Siegel and Shuster” could have become something parallel to what “Walt Disney” did, shorthand for the entirety of the medium they influenced so profoundly. Instead, the two young artists, overmatched by the incredible popularity of their creation, let demands for more work than any two people could possibly handle pile up on top of them, and in short order began to outsource, creating a studio of cartoonists to craft professional-grade Superman stories underneath their guidance. Of course, there were only two paychecks to go around, and as the franchise got bigger the compensation grew leaner, and Siegel and Shuster’s names slowly slid from the masthead of their creation. Character had outstripped artists, and it was National Allied, later DC Comics, who owned him. And that was they way it would be with the heroes, and that is the way it will be. Every superhero comic published since Superman touched earth contributes to the power of this less-than/greater-than algorithm, gives the companies more to own and takes more ideas away from people who deserve better for them. Find somebody who doesn’t read comics, and ask them how many superheroes they can name, and then ask them how many cartoonists. Why would the people who hold both the purse strings and the names that really matter in comics -- not Siegel and Shuster or Morrison and Quitely and Grant or any of those who’ve served in the capacity they did, but the names of fictional men who hide their faces -- why would they do anything to make it any different?
All this is why I find it hard to write about All Star Superman, about any superhero comic. I wouldn’t be writing about this one except for the fact that no comic has ever meant more to me, because I was different in those days. And even though I knew all of this then, I felt as though superhero comics’ place in larger narratives -- both the decades-long sagas of the characters they feature and the great American story of toil and exploitation -- was something grand and powerful enough that my own complicity in it, at $2.99 an installment, was negligible. I didn’t care that my heroes, Morrison and Quitely and Grant, were dancing on the bones of the men who built their hero, Superman. I wanted to be a part of something bigger than the person I was, and I wanted to read comics that were part of something bigger than the people who made them. So I saved the three bucks every few months for All Star and gave up the rest of my money for presents to the girl I could scarcely believe wanted me before anyone else, and I paid billionaires who didn’t lift a finger to help when Shuster ended up blind and penniless and sued Siegel’s family when they wanted the rights to their ancestor’s idea back to tell me stories of a perfect man. Those comics changed my life, but I look back and I wish I hadn’t bought them, because it wasn’t worth the other things that I was paying for.
I tell you these things about myself because there’s no good reason that anyone who knew what I knew then and know now would buy superhero comics -- only rationalizations, hypocrisies, cowardices. These were mine. The act of reading these comics is never going to make anything better. How could it? It can only compound wrongs already done, contribute, however minimally, to an unjust system. The closest you can get to the crystalline morals of the man you’re watching save the world is to find a way to do no harm. If you want to read All Star Superman, steal it from a chain bookstore. Then the only person you run the risk of hurting is yourself.
more
Greatest Comic of All Time: Jack Kirby's Thor #160
As promised, my new Robot 6 column made its debut today. The ever so humorlessly named Greatest Comic of All Time is something I've been wanting to do for ages: a look at the comics that represent what I think is really special about this particular medium, the ripped-up, passed over, brightly colored artifacts of American culture that don't make it onto the cool kids' coffee tables or the eggheads' bookshelves but molder in back issue bins until someone who cares enough comes along to find them. These are the comics that matter, the ones that make comics matter.
First on the docket? Well, it's only Jack Kirby's all time best single issue, as seen below. Click here and get reading.
First on the docket? Well, it's only Jack Kirby's all time best single issue, as seen below. Click here and get reading.
5.07.2012
Life on Earth Q: Love, Childhood, and All Star Superman (part 1)
1: November 16th, 2005-September 17th, 2008
I was sixteen years old when the sixth issue of All Star Superman came out. January 2007 in Berkeley California. I was fifteen when issue one hit the stands, but it’s six that I think of first whenever that comic comes up. Due to artist Frank Quitely’s perfectionistic vigor -- when asked about his artistic process in an interview, he spoke of creating massive numbers of different layout thumbnails for each page, sifting through the infinite possibilities of how a given segment of information could be presented to readers before touching his mechanical pencil to the final page -- All Star Superman came out infrequently enough for each issue to feel more like a special occasion than a scheduled delivery. It was enough of a big deal that my best friend and I made a ritual of picking just the perfect record to play (John Cale, more often than not) and getting as stoned as we could before cracking the covers on a new issue, Corey leaning in to see the pictures as I read the words and did the voices. By issue six my first girlfriend, Olivia, had joined us, bringing with her the idea that we should all dress up in our most stylish clothes before we began.
I remember the three of us sitting on Corey’s bed and opening up “Funeral in Smallville”, me in a tweed jacket and tie, him in a tailored Oxford, her in a green dress and the pearls I’d bought her for Christmas with a month and a half of money from my comic book shop job, and before I read the first word balloon I turned to them, hazy marijuana smile no doubt plastered on my face, and pointed to our reflection in the mirror across the room. “Look at us right now,” I remember saying. “We are exactly the kind of people the Nazis were trying to get rid of. They were found high on illegal drugs, reading American Superman comic books. They were shot on sight.”
I think I flash back to that moment so often because it’s a solid picture of who I was and how I lived during the time the comic was coming out (a bit under three years between late 2005 and late 2008). Looking back at All Star Superman, I can’t help but use the language of pathos in describing the changes in my life that have taken place between now and then, even though I like both myself and my life a great deal better than I did when I was sixteen years old. Still: I don’t get stoned anymore because I’m afraid I’ll get addicted to drugs like I have before. I ditched the suits and ties because at some point it became more important to me that I fit in than stand out. The only time I really listen to John Cale is when his music pops up on itunes shuffle. Olivia and I moved to Los Angeles and got engaged before she broke up with me. I haven’t had a steady girlfriend since because I haven’t felt like I could trust any of the women I’ve dated after the one I fell in love with left, and I’m close to finishing a novel-length comic that I started with the intention of creating something that would make her hurt as badly as she hurt me if she ever happened across a copy on the shelves of some trendy Los Feliz bookstore. Corey is still my best friend. I still work at a comic book shop.
I’ve become a professional comic book critic now too, so I know all about the general consensus that people who write about art should keep themselves and their own personal experiences out of their work as much as possible. But without our experiences of them comic books are nothing more than cheap glossy paper and printer’s ink and two staples each, not much remarkable at all. It’s our lives that make the comics special as much as it is the other way around -- the memories they call up, the new ideas they build onto our older ones, the nostalgia they frequently produce, the pulses they pound and the smiles they raise and quite often the boredom they drape over us. Our readings of comics are experiences in a long, uninterrupted line, flowing in and out of the rest of our lives without ever stopping. Whether you’re more of an art guy or a writing guy or a superhero guy or a art-comix guy, the single reason that all of us read comics is that they mean something to us as individuals. While hero comics, especially, have a tendency to all mean basically the same thing to their readers, no two comics are ever going to have competely identical meanings to anyone who reads them. You can’t read a comic without filtering it and your perceptions of it through the person you are, through everything from your family history to your recurring dreams to your favorite color combinations. Any critical judgment that anyone can possibly express about a comic is the product not just of their mind and their computer’s keyboard, but of a physical body that’s existed in certain spaces for a certain number of years, and been formed by certain experiences. We write about comics because of the people we are, never independently of them, and it’s useless to pretend otherwise.
So All Star Superman came out when I was between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, a time frame during which I began and maintained my first and only committed romantic relationship, wrote four unpublished novels, worked at comic book shops in Berkeley and LA, dropped out of high school, used any number of different drugs, and spent well over fifty percent of my time with either Corey or Olivia, both of them more often than not. Olivia and I had our first date two weeks before issue one came out, and issue two was the one that finally got Corey into comics after years of failed attempts. Issue four came out at the beginning of the summer that I decided I wasn’t going back to school when it started again. Corey left for college after issue eight, so we waited until he was home for Thanksgiving to read issue nine. When Olivia and I drove from the Bay Area to LA to move in together, issue eleven was sitting on the car dashboard, still unread. And shortly after issue twelve concluded the series, she and I took the drive back for our first visit home, during which she confessed that she was developing feelings for a guy in the acting class she was taking. The time period that comic came out over was a strikingly exact mirror to a particular period in my life, that one time when I was a teenage writer who wanted desperately to grow up to be someone people took note of, who loved his hot girlfriend so much he stopped loving himself, who was too cool for school and worried about what life after leaving home would be like and moved the wrong city to follow someone who had decided to follow her own dreams. When I read All Star Superman now, even with my Professional Comics Critic hat on, I both feel like the boy I was again and end up analyzing him as much as I do the drawings’ line qualities or colorist Jamie Grant’s divine digital palette. To separate the two just because I’ve decided to write something new about it would be to betray both that boy and the man I am now.
2: “2”
It’s more interesting to begin with endings in All Star Superman. It is, after all, a book about life’s struggle against the inevitability of death, and I did, after all, read it as the things that made up my final few years of childhood slowly left my life in order to create a newly formed adult. In traditional corporate-comics fashion, the issues’ covers list the creative team’s names hierarchically: writer Grant Morrison first, artist Quitely second, and colorist Grant last. In terms of sheer impact, though, the man with his name at the end outdoes his more ballyhooed cohorts. When one opens All Star Superman in any of its many printed forms, one can’t see Morrison’s story, and Quitely’s linework only registers after the blunt fructose shock of the colors Grant bathes it in. No matter how outré its content may be, a comic has to look different from everything else to be truly unique, and this is what Grant’s contributions bring to the table: a marvelous surface that begs for a word more evocative than technicolor, pages filled up by a visual environment that immerses the eyes and punches them back into your head in equal proportion. Grant functions as both mesmerizer and push man, paradoxically drawing readers into the miniature worlds contained in Quitely’s single illustrations while also whisking us along to the next frame, and the next. More than an exhibition of immense skill, Grant’s color jobs are an unspoken inducement for readers to interact with the comic in the most satisfying of ways, soaking up as much beauty as can be wrung from the pictures without moving too slowly through them to derail the perpetual motion of the story they push forward.
The colors are also what give All Star Superman its heady aura of futurism. Though rarely drawn as subtly and with as much consideration as Quitely’s, mechanical men and Deco-tech cityscapes are hardly anything new to comics. It’s Grant who sells these things as actually existing in a world capable of producing them, a place called tomorrow. Much of this is due to the clearly digital origin of the coloring: no painter can mix colors so vibrant, no human hand can distribute the glow around a light source so evenly or orchestrate the fade from one hue into another with such smoothness. Yet the restraint Grant exhibits is easily as impressive as his pyrotechnics, probably more so when judged against the work of his contemporaries as seen in the rest of the superhero genre in the late twenty-oughts. Flat, uninterrupted areas of bright color cover the open spaces behind Quitely’s figures, little rendering is applied where the linework doesn’t already indicate it, and the tonal combinations are simple and bold, often consisting of a single jump across the color wheel. The effect is like hearing punk rock played by a virtuoso orchestra, varied and complex but to the point and never less than certain of itself.
All Star Superman’s other ending, the final page of the book, is an odd one, and gives no small amount of insight into its writer’s position. More a new beginning than a conclusion, it wraps the story up with the promise of a sequel, giving us a brief glimpse of a project that has devoted unlimited resources to cloning the deceased Man of Tomorrow. The sequel never did and never was intended to materialize, though a few one-shot “special issues” were rumor mill grist for a few years before mercifully evaporating. As an ending, it’s concept rather than content, the “to be continued” finale of every other superhero comic under the sun being reinforced in celebration, not discarded by a superior work. It also reflects Morrison’s penchant for circular narratives -- his experimental magnum opus The Invisibles, to name just the most prominent example, begins with the line “and so we return and begin again,” and ends with the loaded suggestion of a Quitely (un)drawn blank page. As the book’s time travel-based subplots constantly remind us, no story can ever be told completely; we are merely seeing a notable section of the endless continuum of time, as many things or more shown being set in motion as resolving.
It is also a choice informed by the comic whose influence weighs most heavily on Morrison, Alan Moore’s classic Watchmen, which among many other points of pride is complete in twelve issues, a self-contained story that begins and ends between the same set of covers, depending on no other, pre-existing comics to tell its story. Morrison’s twelve issue superhero opus follows the same basic goals, but in places it fondly picks up genre standbys that Moore discarded: mentions of team-ups with Batman and Robin are made though the Dynamic Duo never appear in the comic itself, the cultural ubiquity of the Superman origin story is heavily leaned upon so that exposition can be avoided -- and then there’s that last page, reminding us that this is far from the first or the last Superman comic, only a better one.
Morrison’s commitment to following traditional modes of superhero storytelling is at heart a kind of classicism, a desire to be like what has come before, one that perfectly counterbalances the futurism of Grant’s colors. I spent a year or so in the middle of All Star Superman’s run discovering Winsor McCay’s masterwork Little Nemo in Slumberland (which ran weekly in newspapers between 1905 and 1914), generally agreed upon as the first great work in comics, so the two are linked in my mind, but I think there’s an objective comparison to be made. With their book, Grant, Quitely, and Morrison did something quite similar to McCay, beginning a few short weeks after the centennial of his great strip’s debut: using their era’s dominant comics idiom and the most advanced technology available, they produced an experimental, brightly colored tour-de-force that never lost sight of the audience it was entertaining, affirming the vitality of comics as they stood while pointing the way to a brighter future. All Star Superman may not be the first great comic of the 21st century, but it remains the most viable road map for the development of the form over its next hundred years, the only one which takes advantage of everything available to the modern comics-maker, up to and including computers and the built-in audience for superheroes. All Star Superman is a story about cheating death, and as the market for comics shrinks ever smaller and becomes ever more corporatized, polarized, and conservative, it begins to look more and more like the magic spell that might just be able to change everything back to how it once was, or at least how we like to remember it -- if only it could be incanted once more, in great numbers.
more
find those back issues
I'm going to give this blog over to a lengthy examination of Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant's All Star Superman for the next little while, starting tomorrow-ish. So go re-familiarize (or hell, familiarize!) yourself with that stuff. Oh yeah, and my new Robot 6 column is gonna start this week too, so uh, do that too.
5.03.2012
TCJ Review: Lincoln Washington -- Free Man #1
I just reviewed Benjamin Marra's latest gore-soaked comic book, Lincoln Washington -- Free Man #1, over at The Comics Journal. You should go read it here. Ben's been the most consistently entertaining alternative cartoonist out there for years, but Lincoln Washington, in my opinion, is his first legitimate masterpiece. It's great comics, and as with all such work, it was my pleasure to talk about it.
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