Hardcore

Nina Stone has a thoughtful, outsider's p.o.v.-style review of two recent super-hero comics - Punisher #63 and Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds #2. Her take on Legion is that it is busy, messy, and impenetrable. It got me thinking: even though I think Geoff Johns is one of the best contemporary super-hero writers, I can't think of anything he's done that I could recommend to someone who wasn't already really invested in super-hero comics. He doesn't do "entry level" super-hero comics.

Johns gives his super hero stories their narrative and thematic oomph by positioning and re-positioning various elements of the DC Mythos. But if you haven't already invested a fairly substantial amount of time reading DC super hero comics, most of what he's doing is going to look meaningless (at best).

And, as much as I like his work, I'm not sure that it would be worth doing the "grunt work" necessary to grok it for anyone who isn't still a teenager. For example, Green Lantern: Rebirth sounds like it should be a good jumping-on point for a newcomer to Green Lantern - especially since Johns intended it to be a lead-in to a continuing Green Lantern series which would focus more on the core elements of the Green Lantern Mythos*. However, Rebirth starts very far away from those core elements and Johns' attempt to straighten out Hal Jordan's extremely convoluted storyline won't resonate with people who don't know and/or care** about that storyline.

For me, that's not really a negative. I'm glad that he's writing these super-hero comics for hardcore super-hero fans. As I've said before, I think there's something unique about DC's mythos-centric stories that you don't find anywhere else, and while "unique" doesn't necessarily equal "good", when these stories are done well by someone like Johns, "unique" is definitely an added value.

And because I do place value on their uniqueness, attacking these kinds of comics because they don't work like other kinds of arts and culture stuff rings hollow to me.*** Part of what I enjoy about Final Crisis and other Mythos-centric super-hero comics is that it is a lot harder to get into by picking up a random mid-series issue than it would be to get into, say, House by watching a random episode from the middle of season 4. I don't think that every super-hero comic should work like Final Crisis, but I don't see it as a strike against them when they do.

*This is an excellent series, by the way. If you twisted my arm, it would be the one Johns comic that I'd recommend to non-hardcore super-hero fans.

**I'd note that a lot of the caring would come from people who think the whole Parallax/Spectre story was a completely awful idea and needs to be undone.

***This isn't what Nina is doing in her post, but I'm directing that last paragraph towards people who are making those kinds of arguments.

Black Summer by Warren Ellis and Juan Jose Ryp

Juan Jose Ryp is a real cartoonist, which alone sets him apart from most of the artists working on contemporary super-hero comics. Their focus is on stylish and stylized figure drawing, but Ryp has a genuine style that expresses an all-encompassing vision of the world.

In big picture terms, what Ryp is doing isn't revolutionary. In the context of Eurocomics or even American horror comics, Ryp's work wouldn't necessarily stand out. However, Ryp drawing a super-hero comic is a bit like Gene Colan drawing a super-hero comic: because their styles are not conventional within the genre, they can give us a new perspective on the familiar.

Ryp doesn't fetishize figure-drawing. He gives background and characters an equal emphasis: major and minor details delineated with the same clarity. In his work, the human body becomes just another thing (which is what made him the perfect artist to draw Robocop), subject like every other thing to wear, tear, and destruction. The theme of the comic might be "things fall apart", or, given that this is a Warren Ellis super-hero comic, "things fly apart at tremendous speed with hell of a lot of violence and gore involved".

And the way Ryp draws gore is closer to the way Johnny Ryan draws puke than it is to the way other horror/action artists depict violence. His gore is specific gore: bits of flesh, splatters of blood, splinters of bone are all clearly differentiated, all carefully, clearly realized.

Ryp's style helps to give this comic an underground edge that it wouldn't have had it been drawn by Bryan Hitch, Gary Frank, or Steve McNiven. It makes Black Summer a counter-cultural super-hero comic. It's his style that makes the opening image of the Oval Office covered in blood, viscera, and barely identifiable bits and pieces of bodies more than just a provocation and into a nightmarish vision of wish-fulfillment.

And Ryp handles the more conventional super-hero comics elements with just as much skill. There's a extended sci-fi fight between the central villain and a bunch of fighter jets that beats anything in the Iron Man movie.

The story here is familiar: a riff on the super-heroes changing the world for the world's own good premise of The Squadron Supreme (a premise which Ellis has already explored in Stormwatch and The Authority and probably some other places I haven't looked). And, for people who've read a couple of other Ellis comics, most of his standard themes, concerns, and ticks show up. What's more distinctive to Black Summer is the way Ellis uses this set-up to question the idea of what Thomas Sowell dubbed "the quest for cosmic justice", as opposed to the idea of working towards specific, situational justice*. It's "wanting to help actual people" vs. "wanting to realize ambitious, idealistic goal" (or as one character puts it "to be big, to know everyone, for everyone to be good"). And Ryp's art - where the whole is created out of lots of little, specific details - perfectly complements this theme.

*Although I'd note that Ellis' take on the issue is closer to that of John Guare's in Gardenia and Lydie Breeze than it is to Sowell's.

Millennium #1 - "Over"

Writer: Steve Englehart
Art: Joe Staton, Ian Gibson, and Carl Gafford

After Legends, you'd think I'd want to avoid these DC crossovers, but I was actually looking forward to checking this out. Millennium has a pretty awful reputation, but I have fond memories of it for some reason.

Right off the bat, this is a lot weirder than Legends. Legends was botched in its execution, but at the concept level it had a respectable thesis and seemed to be trying to respond thematically* to the "important" super-hero comics of its era (The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, The Squadron Supreme). Millennium, on a concept level, is much farther out: the Guardians - a race of super-powerful little nerdy men - and the Zamorans - a race of super-powerful Amazonian warrior women - have decided to use the energy created by them having lots of sex to propel humanity's evolution along . But the Guardians' former servants - the mutinous Manhunter androids - want to stop them.

The series' big gimmick, of course, is that the Manhunters have infiltrated the lives of all of Earth's heroes, so, like, we find out that Flash's father and Superman's girlfriend are really Manhunters in disguise. This element of the series really seemed to piss people off. Personally, I don't mind so much, especially since it turns out that Pan (you know, this Pan) is also a Manhunter. That, to me, encapsulates the way that the super-hero genre can thrive on mixing and melding incommensurate elements.

However, I can see why the seemingly drastic revelations might have turned off long time fans.

Joe Staton's work here is very nice: he can handle all the different characters and does a good job putting them in interesting poses for the big standinging-around-in-a-room-talking scenes.

*I.e., "swiped a number of plot point from".

Wolverine #66 by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven

"Old Man Logan - Part One"

Inks: Dexter Vine
Colored by: Morry Hollowell

This is another comic Sean's Kick Ass review inspired me to pick up, in that I thought I should follow-up trying out a John Romita Jr. comic with trying out a Mark Millar comic. And I chose this particular Mark Millar for a couple of reasons:

1. I like the idea of reading a Road Warrior homage with Wolverine and other Marvel characters.

2. This story-arc looks like it stands apart from anything else going on in Marvel comics right now or what was going on in Wolverine prior to this.

3. I'm not usually a fan of Steve McNiven's work, but I flipped through the book I liked what I saw.

What struck me about the Slott/Romita Amazing Spider-Man issue that I read was that it seemed to me to be an example of the kind of book that various people on the internet claim doesn't exist: a straight-forward story about a major, franchise hero that builds on the character's core elements instead of on details drawn from the publisher's shared-world continuity.

This comic seems to be much closer to standard, contemporary super-hero fare. While the Slott/Romita Amazing Spider-Man should appeal to anyone who is interested in a Spider-Man story, this issue of Wolverine is aimed at people who have some knowledge of and/or investment in the Marvel U. A basic indicator of the difference: Wolverine doesn't show up in a costume and even his out-of-costume look here doesn't match up with his look in other comics or in the X-Men movies. A slightly less basic indicator: this story isn't building on Wolverine's "core elements", but instead is playing a "what if" game with those elements. Not only that, but there's a second layer to all of this: at this point, doing "future histories" of Wolverine has become a tradition in its own right. So Millar isn't just relying on our knowledge of the Marvel U: he's also playing around with references to other "what if" stories about Wolverine in the future.

The concept here is that we're in a 1980's-style post-apocalyptic future, where supervillains have beaten all the heroes and carved up the U.S.A. into their own kingdoms. Logan has given up being a hero, has a family, and is trying to eak out a living as a farmer, although it looks like some kind of ecological disaster has made that nearly impossible.

As I said back in reason #1, I like this idea. To drop the calm, collected voice I like to use here favor of the kind of AICN-style fanboy gushing I try to suppress: I think this idea is wicked cool. Wolverine is the perfect character to drop in the middle of Road Warrior pastiche.

A lot of the pleasure with this type of story has to do with seeing how my favorite characters are used.

Hawkeye shows up as an aging counter-culture-type (I kept thinking of Peter Fonda), who, though blind, still insists on driving his car himself. I like this take, even though it owes a lot to Frank Miller's Green Arrow from The Dark Knight Returns. Actually, in this instance, I like it partially because it is derivative.

As an observation, I think it's accurate to say that this is for relatively hardcore fans: people who already care about lots of little details and who will recognize all the layers of references. Given that, I think this is a nicely done super-hero comic and the story seems to have some potential.

Finally, a quick note on Steve McNiven's art:

One of the good things about the "what if" set-up here is that it frees McNiven from drawing a lot dudes-in-tights standing around talking, which is something that very few super-hero artists are able to pull off well. Instead, the concept frees him to do some effective sci-fi/action movie action. I especially like his redneck Hulks.

I should point out that from a sci-fi perspective there seem to be a lot of world building holes. I couldn't quite figure out how this post-apocalyptic economy is supposed to work (although I could say the same thing about our actual hopefully-extremely-pre-apocalyptic economy).

Bonus Question: do these kinds of "Imaginary Story"/Elseworlds-style stories have a name? They aren't completely unique to comics, but they are a pretty strange beast.

Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct by Paul Di Filippo and Jerry Ordway

Generally with these posts, my preference is (a) to try and figure out how these comics are put together and (b) to elaborate on how my own particular p.o.v. affects my capacity to do (a). I've been trying not to talk in terms of this-or-that "working" or "not working", because, IME, those kinds of judgments require making assumptions about how a given comic should work that makes it easier to miss out when a comic is working in a way that is new to me.

But comparing Paul Di Filippo's work on this series to Alan Moore's, what sticks out is not that Di Filippo's ideas aren't as good, necessarily, but that they're a lot more safe, like he knows he's playing with someone else's toys and doesn't want to break them. Or get too attached to them, for that matter: the way the characters are written makes them feel like actors going through the paces in a sequel they're just doing for the money.

So, Di Filippo has a Moore-like overarching A plot, a Morrison-like overarching B plot, and a number of TV cop show-like subplots, but they all feel pasted on. It ends up feeling like the whole thing is badly structured - with an ending that just sort of happens and a lot of scenes that don't seem to add up - but the problem is really that the plot just happens and it isn't grounded the characters or the setting.

And I really like Jerry Ordway's work - Power of Shazam was one of the few super-hero comics I consistently* bought on a monthly basis during the 1990s - but it's never rated very highly on the "sense of humor" scale. So here, while the background jokes are dutifully executed, they're not that funny. Ordway's take on the Top Ten universe is just too literal.

And the whole thing lacks the sense of wonder that made the original Top Ten work: even when it was poking fun at super-hero comics it understood the poetry and majesty of those crazy Jack Kirby images of spandex-clad gods.

*Most of the time in the 1990s I'd follow super-hero titles in bits and pieces and buy up a whole bunch of back issues if something ended up clicking. Ordway's Shazam and James Robinson's Starman were the ones I tried to follow month-in, month-out.

Grant Morrison's Dr. Who #1

"Changes", the first story in this collection is a standard Doctor vs. monster story in two parts. It has nice art by John Ridgway that seems completely in line with (the relatively little I know of) the conventions of 1980s British sci-fi comics. Nothing makes it stick out as a "Grant Morrison" comic, although there is some clever dialogue that plays off the monster's shape shifting abilities.

The second story, "Culture Shock!", is a one-parter and, at first glance, seems more like filler. It also has a standard set-up: the Doctor shows up just in time to help some alien creatures in need. But Morrison's take on the creature and its plight - linking the microscopic to the cosmic by dissolving the conceptual barrier between them - is distinctively his own and anticipates some of the ideas that show up in Animal Man, JLA, and The Filth.

Bryan Hitch is the artist here and his work was the only thing that really surprised me in the entire comic. But that's only because I had forgotten that he used to be a real cartoonist. Hitch is very talented and I like a lot of the stuff he does, but while his current style seems to be pretty suited to an action-movie take on super-heroes - like The Ultimates - it feels out of place in a book like Fantastic Four that (at its best) has never been about "realism" of any sort. Dr. Who is definitely more on the Fantastic Four side of the spectrum, so it's nice to see a bit of "cartoony expressiveness" in his work.

From a completist's perspective, I'm glad that these stories are being collected. But even though I'm a reasonably big fan of both Dr. Who and Grant Morrison, I don't think anything here is essential reading. Neither story added anything new to the way I look at the Doctor or at Morrison's work.

The Amazing Spider-Man #568 by Dan Slott and John Romita Jr.

"New Ways to Die - Book One"

Inks: Klaus Janson
Colors: Dean White

After reading Sean's review of Kick Ass I was reminded of (a) how much I like John Romita Jr. and (b) how little interest I've had in reading most of the books he's worked on in the last few years. But I saw this in the store yesterday and decided to give it a try. It helped that Dan Slott's name was on the cover, because his Spider Man/Human Torch series is my favorite (relatively) recent Spider-Man comic.

For anyone who can accept the existence of Spider-Man comics by people other than Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, this is a pretty good example of a well made Spider-Man comic. Nothing jaw-dropping from either Romita or Slott , but nicely handled all around. Romita's work is relaxed and assured and a little more stripped down than it was the last time he was on this book: he comes off like the genuine cartoonist he is.

I like the way Slott is weaving the workplace storyline - Peter leaving the Daily Bugle (now a tabloid called the DB) for Ben Urich's paper - together with the super-heroics - Norman Osborne bringing his team of super villains to NYC to hunt down Spidey.

Also important: it really does feel like a first chapter. I haven't read an issue of Amazing Spider-Man since sometime around the end of the J. Michael Straczynski run (when I jumped ship), but there was no head-scratching and I relieved that there was no smell of anything Secret Invasion-like.

I guess what's surprising is that I actually am surprised that this book is pretty good. Though it doesn't have as much personality as some of the more idiosyncratic second-or-third tier super-hero books, it's a worthy enough successor to the Amazing Spider-Man comics I grew up reading.

The problem, of course, is that this shouldn't be surprising. This is what the main Spider-Man comic should be like. I shouldn't be moved to blog about how cool is it that they got Dan Slott and John Romita Jr. to work on this comic because Dan Slott and John Romita Jr. are the guys who should be working on this comic. I shouldn't feel relieved that there's no tie-in here to some convoluted crossover event that will cost me hundreds of dollars to keep up with because children of all ages should feel safe that they can buy an issue of Amazing Spider-Man and get a pretty good Spider-Man story without having to worry about following the Super Skrull over to Captain Britain*.

I realize that this isn't an original complaint. And I also think that Todd's argument here (that stuff like Secret Invasion isn't supposed to work like an old-fashioned Spider-Man comic) is pretty interesting. But I'd recommend this comic to all the other people making this kind of complaint .

*A comic I would try out if it didn't have Secret Invasion on its cover.

Plastic Man Vol. 2: Rubber Bandits by Kyle Baker

The second volume of Kyle Baker's Plastic Man series isn't as consistent as the first. I got the sense from this interview that Baker was trying out different approaches to see if he could find some way to (a) connect with the existing super-hero comics-buying crowd and/or (b) find (perhaps create) an audience for his own kind of humor comic. And this experimentation shows in the book itself. Not that it ever feels like he's flailing around, but he doesn't always seem as comfortable with the material. For example, the two-part "Continuity Bandits" story feels forced in a way that the collection-ending Tom & Jerry tribute doesn't.

I think "Continuity Bandits" - in which Baker expresses his skepticism towards DC's going-on-30-years trend away from making super-hero comics for kids - falls into the same kind of in-between zone as those Nextwave comics I wrote about. It's like a MAD Magazine version of a DC comic, but the satire is blunted because it relies on a bunch of in-jokes. Like Nextwave, this seems to be pitched to people who read contemporary super-hero comics, but think most contemporary super-hero comics are kind of silly. I think this is a limited audience, which is not really a problem, but it's also a limited target. The best MAD Magazine parodies go beyond making jokes at the expense of the target and end up making more expansive cultural criticism. "Continuity Bandits" plays to its (imagined) audience, but that's all it plays to.

That said, Baker's cartooning is great throughout the book and he varies his technique and style on a story-by-story basis. "Continuity Bandits" really looks like classic MAD Magazine, while the Tom & Jerry story is done in a stripped down version of the animation storyboard style of On the Lam. That variety is part of what makes Baker's self-reflexive take on this character work so well: I could imagine him transforming the entire history of cartooning into a bunch of Plastic Man stories.

Selina's Big Score by Darwyn Cooke

There are lots of sequences made up of close-ups of faces in this book: sequences carried by little details changing from panel-to-panel - eyes shifting slightly, a poker face turning into a grin. It's a dangerous tack to take in a book like this - that is, a straightforward, almost classical action/adventure/crime story - and it takes a cartoonist as expressive as Cooke to pull it off. I think that Cooke's art is nice to look at, but it's his skill as a storyteller that makes him more than just a retro stylist.

What Cooke is trying to do here - weave Selina Kyle a.k.a. Catwoman into a Donald E. Westlake a.k.a. Richard Stark-style heist story - isn't completely successful. Cooke lacks Westlake's black comic sense of humor, which, in the Parker novels, manifests as a brutal slapstick and a razor-sharp ironic p.o.v. towards all flavors of self-delusion. Cooke also doesn't have Westlake's flair for clockwork precise plotting. Without those things, its easy for that kind of story to turn into an overly romantic take on the independent, self-sufficient outlaw, which is more-or-less what happens here. "Less" only in that (a) we have two outlaws and (b) they turn out to be not as self-sufficient as they'd like to think they are.

Not surprisingly, it's part (b) that is one of the major themes of the Catwoman series proper, but Cooke isn't able to do much more than hint at it here.

So the pleasures to be had here are mostly in Cooke's cartooning: in the great "acting" of the close-up sequences and the staging of the elaborate heist scenes.

As a possible spiritual sequel to this book, I'd like to see Cooke draw a properBatman vs. Parker story from a Westlake script. (And if Westlake won't do it get Steven Grant or Mike Baron).

Ultra: Seven Days by the Luna Brothers

I read this - the Luna Brothers' first series - right after I finished Girls - the Luna Brothers' second series. Looking at this as a warm-up to Girls - which I liked quite a bit and plan to write more on later - makes me want to cut it more slack than I would if it had been my introduction to the Luna Brothers' work. Nonetheless, this is an example of an extremely mediocre comic.

There are a lot of reasons a piece of popular culture might turn out to be mediocre. Sometimes, you get the medicority of competency: work made by professionals that aims to hit as precisely as possible the current, conventional standards of being "well made". Sometimes you get the mediocrity of unreachable ambitions, where a creator can't pull off what they're trying to do. Ultra is arguably more purely, purposefully mediocre than these two kinds of works. It isn't just that Ultra has a high-concept that seems safely different-but-not-too-different from standard super-hero fare. You could make the same claim about Powers. In fact, my guess is that Powers is the inspiration for what the Luna Brothers are doing here: doing a "super-hero world" version of a popular TV genre - police procedural in the case of Powers, primetime soap opera about beautiful, fabulous people in the case of Ultra. The problem is that while Brian Michael Bendis seems perfectly at home writing a police procedural, the Luna Brothers don't have that kind of grasp of the kind of chick lit-influenced soap opera they're attempting here. Because of this, while Powers feels like an attempt for Bendis to do the kind of thing he really loves - write crime stories - and still appeal to the super-hero crowd, Ultra feels calculated, as if the Luna Brothers were looking for a niche they could fill.

This is all speculation and supposition, of course, but for me it's the details that tell the story and in Ultra the details all feel second-hand, as if they were drawn from TV shows and not from life. There's a conversation between Ultra - a popular super-heroine - and a "normal" guy she's going out on a first date with that is indicative of the problem. The guy keeps talking about how weird and cool it is to be on a date with a super-hero and how he can't believe it. To me, that seems like it would be completely off-putting behavior, especially since it has been established that Ultra likes to draw aline between her day job and her private life. But the Luna Brothers seem to be deaf to these kinds of little inconsistencies, which add up over the course of the series.

Ideally, in a genre-mixing work like this, you want the genres to mix in interesting ways: where the conventions of one genre tell us something about the other or where the mixture provides some kind of satirical spark. But that doesn't happen here either. There's no commentary on super-hero comics and , despite the magazine parody covers, no commentary on celebrity culture.

But there are certainly worse ways to try and make a name for yourself, and considering what they would go on to do in Girls (which is neither middle-of-the-road nor impersonal) it isn't so terrible that this feels like such an exercise. Or, rather, reading Girls first I know that the exercise paid off.

This is true from a formal/craft sense perspective as well. A number of the techniques the Luna Brothers try out here - using a computer enhanced "out-of-focus" effect to mimic a rack focus with a camera - are used much more effectively (and discriminatingly) in Girls. And the stripped-down, bare-bones style of Jonathan Luna's cartooning is also a much better fit with the B-movie set-up and rural PA characters and location in Girls. With Ultra it seems a little skimpy.

Ultimately, I think the importance of Ultra and/or any interest in it will have to do with how it fits into our thinking about the Luna Brother's subsequent career and not for its intrinsic value.

Legends #5 and Legends #6

Writers: John Ostrander & Len Wein
Artists: John Byrne & Karl Kesel

I think there's something at least theoretically compelling about pitting Darkseid against the Phantom Stranger. Darkseid isn't just a bad guy: he's a philosopher-tyrant. The Stranger - an otherworldly, occult observer of mankind - should make a decent foil. But there's nothing actually compelling about the way they're used here, partly because there's a major disconnect between what they're saying is happening and the action itself.

So, the Phantom Stranger is telling us - I mean, telling Darkseid - that the heroes will win because the children believe in them (or some kind of garbage along those lines and, come to think of it, "because of the children" is a pretty out-of-character thing for the Phantom Stranger to say - even acknowledging that he doesn't have much character beyond "creepy occult guy" to begin with), but what we see is "the children" being used as a plot device/excuse.

(Oh yeah - Darkseid's plan turns out to have a huge hole in it: if your goal is to turn the people of Earth against its heroes then invading Earth with a super-powered army that only the heroes can defeat is not a good idea because it proves to the people of Earth exactly why they need their heroes.)

There's nothing wrong with these issues that isn't wrong with all of the previous ones: some decent top level thinking but fumbled execution. And, while I'm reluctant to place too much value on "goofiness", this series just doesn't even have that kind of spark to bring it to life. It reads like an assignment that none of the creators particularly wanted.

I started reading this as part of my ongoing attempt to work my way through the entire second volume of the Flash series and, I have to admit, these comics were the first time I really felt bogged down. Baron's work on Flash has its flaws and I think that he never really takes advantage of the benefits of continuity in the way that later writers will, but at least it's a consistent vision for the character and he supports this vision with lots of little details. Baron's Flash isn't as good as Baron's work on his own characters, but nothing about it feels like he doesn't care or didn't have time to get it right.

Quick comics reading auto-biographical note: picking up Legends must have been what got me into reading DC comics, because all of the DC comics I ended up following for any lentgh of time - Flash, Justice League, Suicide Squad - were Legends spin-offs.

Directed by Eric Wareheim

Steve Dillon seems like a pretty cool guy and he sure can draw...

Whenever I see one of the "If I was in NYC I'd go to..." entries on Tom Spurgeon's blog, I always feel a little guilty: all this great comics-related stuff right around me and I hardly ever take advantage of any of it.

Anyway, I knew that Steve Dillon was going to be signing at Jim Hanley's Universe yesterday (which is right around the corner from where I work), so, at the last minute, I decided to swing by and get his autograph. "Last minute" meant that I had to buy a back issue of Animal Man for him to sign (my complete run of that series is in my parents' attic and/or basement in Vermont and/or upstate New York).

This was the first time in years I've ever gone to get a signature from a comics artist. I think the last time was when I drove hours to get a Dave Sim autograph and sketch during his Spirits of Independence tour. I went to a San Diego convention between then and last night, but at that convention I think the only autograph I got was from Max Allan Collins and I had him sign one of his novels, so I'm not sure if that counts. And back when DK2 #1 came out, I stood in line at the Virgin Megastore on 14th St. with a friend while he waited for Frank Miller to sign his copy, but I didn't bring anything of my own to get signed (I think because I found out about it at the last minute and was generally pretty all-over-the-place at that point in my life).

The only reason I decided to go get Steve Dillon's autograph as opposed to, say, Kyle Baker's (which I could have gotten a few weeks ago when he was at Jim Hanley's) is nostalgia. Animal Man was one of my favorite comics and I have a particular affection for the Tom Veitch/Steve Dillon run, especially since it gets so much less love than Grant Morrison's (justly celebrated) work on the series.

Dillon became one of the first artists working in super-hero books whose style I could easily recognize and (more importantly) who I wanted to follow from book-to-book. I even bought and enjoyed the super-hero parody book How to Be a Super-Hero that Dillon illustrated.

I'm not sure why I was really into Steve Dillon's work when other kids my age were into Todd McFarlane.

And the "Welcome Back Frank" Punisher series was one of the two books that got me back into reading super-hero comics fairly regularly after a break of about four years. (The other one was Morrison's New X-Men - 'natch.)

So, yesterday work kind of sucked and I was in a bad mood and figured, "Hey - why not swing by Jim Hanley's and pick up an issue of that Wolverine comic that Steve Dillon is drawing and an Animal Man back issue that I wouldn't mind having a double of and get him to sign them."

Overall it was a good experience: not at all awkward as some of these social/commercial interactions can get. I got there pretty early on in the signing session, but wasn't really prepared for the line to move so slowly. That wasn't really a bad thing, though, because Dillon seemed to be taking his time with his sketches. ("Seemed" because I have nothing else really to compare it to: maybe 8 minutes a sketch is normal. I have no idea really.) He also seemed like he was pretty easy going and that he actually enjoyed meeting his fans and telling funny anecdotes.

I think I was one of the only people there who was really into Dillon's work on Animal Man which wasn't surprising. Maybe a little surprising: the Preacher fans seemed to really out-number the Punisher fans.

Anyway, I'm even looking forward to checking out the Wolverine comic I bought.

Oh yeah - I like what Mike Hunter says about Dillon on this TCJ thread:

He's one of those talents - John Severin comes to mind - who, though not flashy, are rock-solid, compensate in other worthy ways. In his art, violence is no graceful ballet; you can feel the bone splinter, gristle collapse. He can perfectly capture the easeful warmth of friends knocking back some suds in a pub, or an icy sneer of utter contempt, a snarl of feral hatred. He can render a believable schlep or stone-cold killer.

The impossibility of knowing what the fuck is going on in other people's heads...

I really liked Burn After Reading (The Coen Bros., 2008) and have no reservations ranking it among the Coens best work - Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?. It feels a little more open than these earlier movies, though: the performances aren't as tightly controlled, the compositions are a little looser, the Rube Goldbergism of the plot is softer. I'm tempted to describe it as John Updike's version of a Ross Thomas novel, but I'm not sure that anyone but my brother Mike would know what I mean by that.

A couple of weeks ago I had a dream that I had seen the movie and I was explaining to a friend that it was about "the impossibility of communicating with each other", which is actually part of what I think Fargo is about. It turns out that Burn After Reading is not quite about this, but is, rather, an allegory about the failure of the American intelligence system. Communication here is a problem only in as much as no one ever really knows what the fuck anyone else is really thinking, which means that everyone is operating with a severe lack of information. The Preston Sturges influence comes through in that the absence of understanding doesn't stop anyone from making their moves. For a lot of these characters, just standing still would solve all their problems, but standing still is not the American Way.

I have to admit that I found a lot of the writing on this movie pretty puzzling. Going by many of the reviews at Metacritic (where the movie has a 62 aggregate rating), you'd get the sense that this was just a little bit of a step up from The Ladykillers (which had a 56 aggregate Metacritic rating). I like The Ladykillers well enough, but that movie is definite "Minor" Coen Bros. and Burn After Reading is definitely "Major".

I suspect that critics would be a lot more enthusiastic about this movie if it had a helpful voice over to explain its themes to them.

I also suspect that most critics had already figured out what they were going to say about it - some kind of variation on "Coens taking a break with a minor genre spoof after the majestic No Country" - before they even saw it.

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. Volume 1: This Is What They Want by Warren Ellis, Stuart Immonen, and Wade von Grawbadger

Big budget action movie adaptations of super-hero comics tend to be (a) more focused than actual super-hero comics - the continuity is stripped down to its essentials - and (b) a lot less farther out than actual super-hero comics - there's not as much tolerance for the kinds of conceptual inconsistencies that super hero comics thrive on (i.e., the willy-nilly mixing of fantasy and sci-fi, the cosmic and the mundane that gives those Kirby/Lee their particular kick). Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., a slapstick variation on Ellis' Planetary, belongs to a (relatively) recent trend of super-hero comics that take the aesthetics and the focus of the big-budget Hollywood adaptations, but don't shy away from the farther out aspects of the genre.

In terms of execution of concept, Nextwave is just about perfect: Ellis' writing is sharp and the in-jokes - mostly at the expense of Marvel's bigger books - are pointed; Stuart Immonen knows how to handle action sequences and he can draw giant monsters AND giant robots; Wade von Grawbadger helps to give it a manga-esque flow. Despite all this, Nextwave is a book whose qualities I appreciate, rather than one that I really like. I think it's just as well made as The Immortal Iron Fist, but while that book really resonates with me, I'm not on Nextwave's wavelength.

Now, three or four years ago, I could see myself really enjoying a book like this: today, not so much. Not because I've somehow matured beyond it - the book is certainly no less mature than Iron Fist - but because I'm a little weary (and wary) of irreverent super-hero comics that nonetheless rely on you actually knowing quite a bit about super-hero comics in order to really grok. But that's a personal preference thing and not any kind of moral/aesthetic pronouncement.

Still, if I were going to expand on this point of personal preference, I'd say that Nextwave is too cynical for me to enjoy in the way I enjoy Iron Fist or early Ultimate Spider-Man, but not thoroughly cynical enough to take on the genre with real teeth like The Boys or Rick Veitch's super-hero books. (Is there some kind of cute name for The One, Maximortal, and Brat Pack? The Veitchverse? Please let me know.) Nextwave feels a little bit like Frank Miller-Lite.

All that said, I'm planning on tracking down the remaining issues. Ellis is funny, Immonen does know how to draw super-heroic spectacle, and, who knows, maybe I was just cranky this weekend.

Plastic Man: On the Lam by Kyle Baker

Let me start by talking about how I learned to love Blake Edwards' movies:

For most of my movie-buff career, I didn't feel too strongly one way or the other about Blake Edwards and his movies. I didn't dislike them, really, but I didn't see too much in them to get me that excited, either. I had a fondness for The Party and A Shot In the Dark, but I attributed that mostly to my enjoyment of Peter Sellars' performances.

In fact, if I thought of Edwards at all, it was usually as "a guy who made Peter Sellars vehicles".

Anyway, back in April of this year, I started watching a letter-boxed version of The Pink Panther and it blew my mind. All of sudden, I was seeing Blake Edwards as a Great Filmmaker.
What had changed was that I had already come to love Jacques Tati's films and watching The Pink Panther I got the sense that Edwards was doing something similar to Tati. It was "getting" the artsier, more rigorous Tati that allowed me to appreciate what Edwards was doing.

I had had the same kind of experience with Kyle Baker's work. I'd always been aware of it: I'd read Why I Hate Saturn and I picked up some individual issues of his Plastic Man series when they were first out, but I hadn't had a strong reaction to it (in either direction).

But, after immersing myself in some of the artsier comics out there - PictureBox/Kramer's Ergot-style stuff - I started seeing Baker's work in a new light. Watching Tati's movies helped me to see that Edwards' are often about the frame (or about the way he uses the frame): reading these art comics helped me see that Baker's work is really about the drawing.

This Plastic Man book makes that pretty apparent. In Baker's hands, the series is about cartooning and about being a cartoon character. It's an approach that is ideally suited for a character like Plastic Man, because it fits perfectly with his concept - actually, it almost is his concept.

One of my major complaints about contemporary super-hero comics is that they suck all of the visual excitement out of what is, at its heart, an extremely visual genre. IMO, in too many of these books, there's too much reliance on dialogue and narration to carry the story. And when artists are praised, it's often for the style/skill of their illustrations, not for their "comics making"* ability. Anyway, the appeal of Baker's Plastic Man is almost completely in the cartooning. Not that his dialogue is bad or anything: it's perfectly fine, with just the right amount of "groaners" for a tongue-in-cheek comic super-hero comic book, but the best gags here are the sight gags.

Though Baker's use of computers is something that made me lukewarm to his work in the past, I've come to appreciate the fact that he owns it. He isn't trying to obfuscate the technology he uses: its right out there - his process inscribed in the product.

*I know the comics equivalent of "good filmmaker" is supposed to be "good cartoonist", but "cartoonist" doesn't quite fit what I'm trying to get at here.

HWY 115 by Matthias Lehmann

HWY 115 seems to belong, with Gilbert Hernandez's Sloth and David Lynch's Lost Highway to a specific, contemporary noir/fantasy sub-genre. Stories in this sub-genre take place in a nightmarish world, they have multiple "realities" or levels of reality, and they also have a circular, ourobosian narrative - like a recursive waking-up-from-a-dream dream.

They are self-consciously artsier elaborations on a certain kind of Twilight Zone-ish, "trick ending" suspense story.

Sometimes, figuring out the puzzle - determining how the different realities all fit together, deciphering the dream symbolism of the nightmare world, and discovering how cause-and-effect works in that world - is part of the appeal for me of these kinds of works. That was definitely the case with Lost Highway and Sloth - a comic that has grown on me a lot since I first read it (although I still don't like it as much as the still criminally underrated Grip).

With HWY 115, though, I wasn't too interested in "figuring it out" (although I presume it's possible): rather, I was content to just drink in the grungy, noir atmosphere.

The story follows a P.I. and a writer who are on the trail of a serial killer, whose M.O. is to kill his victims by forcing them to choke on various random (?) objects. Their investigation leads through a series of interviews with some of the killer's former fellow inmates at the insane asylum he's just escaped from. Each one tells their story - why they got locked up (which is basically: who did they kill and why) - and provides a clue - part of a dream that the killer had recounted to them. The comic moves among all of these levels: the investigation, the stories of the former asylum inmates, the killer's dream, and, at one point, the P.I.'s nightmare.

The strongest part of the comic might be the inmates' stories: these episodes aren't just creepy, they're viscerally, under-your-skin unsettling.

Something else I like: the unrelenting social bleakness. All of these characters seem to be barely hanging on. Everyone is an outsider and the onlything in the comic that comes close to representing of some kind of "social order" is the dingy, rundown insane asylum. (It really fit my mood this week).

And they say we live in a geek's paradise...

I have a renewed interest in those crazy crossover comics of the 1990s - Batman vs. Predator, Green Lantern vs. Aliens, Batman/Hellboy/Starman, Superman vs. Aliens, etc.

I think comics fans might take for granted how unique and wonderful this particular sub-genre is. Though there are some video games (Capcom vs. Marvel), a few movies (AVP, Freddy vs. Jason), and a few prose novels (The Seven Percent Solution, The D. Case) that give us these kinds of crossovers, they really found their home in comics. The idea of facing Batman off against the Predator is, IMO, pure genius.

I really wish the trend hadn't died out. Here are some crossover comics I'd love to see:

• Batman vs. The Sopranos

• Hellboy: Trapped on the Lost Island

• Predator vs. Deadwood

• CSI vs. The Sopranos

• CSI: NY vs. Batman

• CSI: Miami vs. Predator

• Green Lantern vs. Firefly

• Jennifer Jones from the Alias comic vs. Sydney Bristow from the Alias TV show

• Jennifer Jones from the Alias comic vs. Buffy

• Jennifer Jones from the Alias comic vs. Buffy vs. Sydney Bristow from the Alias TV show

• Jennifer Jones, Buffy, and Sydney Bristow vs. Aliens

• Heroes vs. the X-Men

• Dr. Steve Brule vs. Lobo

• Battlestar Galactica vs. Firefly

• Torchwood vs. BRPD

If only we truly lived in a geek paradise...

Army @ Love Volume 1: The Hot Zone Club by Rick Veitch

Reading this makes me want to wax taxonomical and write out a big list of how different kinds of war fiction use "war". Most of the time, war - or, rather, War - is the subject: what war does to soldiers, what war does to civilians, what war does to society. This is usually the case whether or not a real war is used (WWII in James Jones' trilogy, the Vietnam War in Tim O'Brien's fiction) or an imaginary "symbolic" war is used (i.e., The Forever War's sci-fi version of the Vietnam War).

Army @ Love does something that seems to me to be different from this standard approach. It isn't concerned with the effects of its "imaginary" version of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on soldiers or on American society. Rather, it uses the war as an engine to power its satire of contemporary American culture: more specifically, to satirize what I like to call America's Culture of Awesome. In this way it's more like Mike Judge's Idiocracy than a contemporary version of Catch-22.

The Culture of Awesome is, of course, about the celebration of Bigger and Better, or, rather, Bigger as Better, but it's also about overvaluing things like Intensity and Effectiveness in art, culture, and technology. In Army @ Love, the Culture of Awesome is reflected in the idea of selling the (completely co-ed) Army as a place where you can gain "Peak Life Experience" - living life "turned up to 11" at all times - which means mixing sex into the middle of all that violence. The titular "Hot Zone Club" is the frontline equivalent of the "Mile High Club": you become a member by having sex while under fire.

In industrial terms as much as formal terms, this is the kind of thing that comics can really excel at: Veitch can get away with being farther out than folks dealing with similar material on TV or on film, not only in his subject matter but in how it's presented. For one thing, none of the characters here are that appealing - they're not "likable" - which, in my book, is a good thing.

I don't watch the comics industry closely enough to get a sense of exactly what kind of niche Veitch has carved out for himself, but I've always liked what I see as his attempt to continue the tradition of bringing a weird, underground comix vibe to comics' quasi-mainstream.

I'm really interested in the continuation of 1980s-style "Third Way" tradition, in general. That is: genre-based, more-or-less narratively conventional comics that have no literary pretensions, but are, nonetheless, idiosyncratic and personally expressive. Army @ Love shows that Veitch, who did some of the best examples of this type of comic in the 1980s, is still working to keep the tradition alive.

For Sean, 21 shows off the top of my head that are better than The Wire...

I mean, I like The Wire, but...

1. Fawlty Towers
2. The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
3. Charlie Rose
4. The Twilight Zone
5. Twin Peaks
6. The Muppet Show
7. Star Trek
8. Dragnet
9. The Simpsons
10. The Sopranos
11. Wiseguy
12. The X-Files
13. Cheers
14. The Larry Sanders Show
15. Arrested Development
16. Prime Suspect
17. Deadwood
18. South Park
19. Dr. Who
20. Firefly
21. Blake's 7

Given enough time I could come up with a list of, probably, 100 shows that I think are about as good as The Wire, starting with Seinfeld, The Irish R.M., Fraiser, Inside Winston Cup (when Allen Bestwick was the host), King of the Hill...