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Apocalypse, Purgatory, Pariah! Reading Miller and Mazzucchelli's DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN

After the recent release of IDW’s Artist Edition of DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, I decided to dig out my old trade of it (an edition from circa 1987) and reread the book.  It’s a book I’ve always appreciated but I don’t think I’ve returned to as much over time as Miller and Mazzucchelli’s BATMAN: YEAR ONE, a story I’ve previously thought of as the superior over the two.  Hearing people gush over the Artist Edition, I wanted to pay attention to how Miller, Mazzuchelli and colorists Christie Scheele and Mazzuchelli (although the trade credits Richmond Lewis and not Mazzuchelli as contributing some colors) tell the story about the downfall and rebirth of Matt Murdock, the blind adventurer also known as Daredevil.

With the recent Artist Edition, the spotlight has been put on David Mazzucchelli, which is fine.  He deserves the accolades because BORN AGAIN is visually quite stunning.  It’s probably one of the handful of truly outstanding artist’s books put out by Marvel during the 1980s and still holds up remarkably strong today.  You can even see the roots of the way that Mazzucchelli told ASTERIOS POLYP in some of the pages of BORN AGAIN.  But that’s only part of the story.  

BORN AGAIN may actually be Frank Miller’s best writing because it’s one of his only stories where he doesn’t go for the sensational.  Everything else around this time after, from THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and ELEKTRA ASSASSIN to SIN CITY and THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN is going for big, loud and bombastic storytelling.  That’s the mode that Miller has been in for over 20 years.  With Mazzucchelli here and in BATMAN YEAR ONE, Miller is constructing a story around his character that is only as big as his character’s world.  Whether it’s Daredevil’s New York City or Batman’s Gotham City, Miller builds these stories around the characters and not the legends or myths he perceives his characters to be.

Apocalypse, Purgatory, Pariah!

In the span of the first three issues, we see just how far Matt falls as the Kingpin systematically destroys the life of a prominent attorney.  From a wide, luxurious bed to a flop house to being curled up in a back alley, Miller and Mazzucchelli take everything away from Matt Murdock in the space of three pages. When getting these issues back in the day on a monthly basis, it took a while to realize what Miller and Mazzucchelli were doing here. And while it's not as thematic as here, the image of Matt Murdock sleeping is repeated over and over again in the book, including a sequence where Karen Page is sleeping peacefully while clutching Daredevil's costume, as if the fabric alone is enough to give her the peace and protection that she needs. It's as if even back in the mid-eighties Miller realized how how long the character of Matt Murdock was dragged down after his initial run and wanted to wake the character up into a brand new day.

Snow

When the first issues of BORN AGAIN were coming out as the regular monthly DAREDEVIL series, my friends and I would swear that Miller was doing a lot of the layouts, if not just downright drawing the book himself.  I’m not too sure if I still see a lot of Miller in Mazzucchelli’s artwork but Mazzuchelli was drawing those first issues in a very straightforward superhero style that was reminiscent of the work that Miller did in his first DAREDEVIL run.

I love in this early scene that you get an idea of the creative use of colors (more on this later as well.)  Look at how Christie Scheele uses the white of the page as the snow building up as Daredevil bounces around NYC.  That first panel, with the criss-crossing lines that Daredevil is running along really creates the environment and elements that this story is taking place among.  And that vivid blue background looks like nothing that happens in nature but it makes the red of DD’s costume pop on the page.  

Color

And here, in the 2nd issue of this run (colors credited to Mazzucchelli,) you see colors used in ways that you hardly see anymore.  The bright, flat colors still work in this age of “realistic” computer coloring that takes away so much character in the way it’s used a lot of the time.  There’s no attempt to be realistic here; instead Mazzucchelli (and Scheele in the rest of the book) uses the colors to enhance the story.  It becomes such a key part in how the story is told that I wonder how much of the impact of the story itself is lost in the Artist Edition.  That pinkish-purplish glow in the second panel and then the use of benday dots in the third panel recreates the neon-glow of 1970s/1980s New York, giving the scene a slightly lurid feel without showing any of the nudie bars or drug dens that I like to imagine littered Miller’s Hell’s Kitchen.  

And then in one page, you go from the coolish colors of New York to the hot colors of a junkie in Mexico.  Look at that inexplicable red wall behind Karen Page.  It bathes the whole room in a heat that comics are usually incapable of expressing.  The colors aren’t trying to be realistic or painterly but they’re influencing so much of the feelings the reader has as they’re reading the book.  I want those colors back in my superhero books.

Triangle 1- Pieta

A number of things are so striking here:

  1. The obvious reference to Michelangelo's Pieta.  It’s an image that used over and over again but that’s because it’s such a powerful one.  There’s no question based on the iconography of this image that the nun Maggie is Matt’s mother.
  2. Maggie finds Matt in the old, derelict gym that his father used to box in.  Those wonderful pinkish streaks (again with the powerful use of color) really shows the light streaking through boarded up windows.
  3. This is a raw picture.  The shading in Matt’s pants looks like something Bill Sienkeiwicz would do, not Mazzucchelli.  

This also represents the lowest point for Matt in the book (and in all of Miller’s Daredevil stories.)  Here he is, broken and worn down, a shattered man.  His only rescue is the church/the mother/the angel to his devil.  This is also the first of the re-occuring triangular compositions in the book.  These are images with strong bases (Matt’s legs) that direct the eye up to a single image or concept.  That image here is two-fold.  The first is Maggie’s face, the mother we’ve never seen or even thought to see.  Of course, at this point, we really don’t know who this nun is.  She’s just someone who hangs around old gyms so far.

The other focal point is her cross, bringing back all of that Catholicism into Miller’s story.  I don’t think it’s reading much to look at Matt as a Christ-like figure and this is his version of the three-day descent into Hell, only to rise again after that.  Later on, Miller and Mazzucchelli will make the cross the obvious focal point, something that you can’t help but look at and reflect upon.

“I thank you for listening, Mr. Urich.”

Here, this is what comics do.

Over on The Comics Journal site, Dan Nadel looks at this same sequence of Ben Urich listening over the phone to the sound of a man being killed.  Nadel concentrates on the b/w image out of the Artist Edition and writes, “It’s a radical departure from realism, and one Mazzucchelli takes just enough times throughout the book to make each of those moments important punctation marks in the narrative.”  He thinks it’s “more startling” this way but I think it’s that red face and those shocked yellow eyes that make this sequence work.

For some reason, that third panel clicked with me this time reading the book because you hardly see any artist willing to exaggerate their style or the color enough like this any more.  The world around Ben goes on but he’s pulled out of it, listening to a nurse kill one of the men who could restore Matt’s good name in this book.  Mazzucchelli and Scheele really push Ben forward in the sequence as the reality of the workplace gets pushed even deeper into the background.  

The image doesn’t become a figurative representation of Ben but it becomes a metaphor for him.  It’s symbolic as the drawing of Ben, the details of him, break down the more he hears.  He doesn’t become a person for a moment, he becomes a living emotion of fear on the page.  It’s actually a very expressionistic moment that most artists avoid or fear today.  You hardly see anyone dropping in a panel like this, where the image and colors so strongly convey a state of mind rather than a depiction of a moment.

We’re family.

When Karen Page can’t find the man she sold for a fix, she finds his best friend.  Here it’s that last panel that shows two people finding one another in this crazy, dangerous world.  Even without Matt, this sequence perfectly encapsulates Miller and Mazzucchelli’s story.  Like how the Daily Bugle staff receded into the background during Ben’s phone call, here Mazzucchelli makes the world surround and tower over two people who have only been hurt by a man they both love.  This image isn't about a scene in a diner; it's about a moment between two characters.

Triangle #2- Trinity

Another thing I noticed this time reading the book is how Mazzucchelli keeps on using a triangle composition.  Of course, here he beats you over the head with it.  This image of Maggie praying at her son’s bedside, with the perspective lines still inked in so clearly has always bugged me.  The focus on the cross seems so obvious and heavy handed here.  But the drawn triangle also pushes Maggie and Matt into their own world.  There are borders (boundaries or maybe connections) between them that doesn’t exist between anyone else in this room or in this book.  

And there’s that cross again.  Well, it’s a different cross but it becomes the focus of the perspective lines.  You can’t help but look and linger a moment a moment on it.  A moment of reflection or a moment of prayer?  Cross, son, mother.  Icon, hero, nun.  The dead, the dying and the living.  

KBLAM

I just love this panel of Karen’s drug supplier shooting his gun.  KBLAM!  I need to make that into a site banner.

It’s a simple image and a fairly standard pose but it’s made striking by the way its presented.  Again, you just don’t see this that much anymore.

Triangle #3- Salvation

Triangle #4- Love

Look, more triangles.  Using a similar narrative trick to opening the first three issues with images of the deteriorating condition of Matt’s sleeping, here’s the end of one issue and the beginning of the next, with Matt finally rescuing Karen.  Or is that Karen finally rescuing Matt?  While not quite the Pieta, Matt finds protection and hope in the arms of the two women who have been missing from his life.  These two of Karen play nicely off of eachother.  The first is in the snow, in that heavy blue snow jacket that Matt picked up somewhere off of the street.  Like so much of the book, Christie Scheele colors this one in cool colors.  

Contrast that with the reddish/orangish hue that’s over the second image.  It’s much warmer but it’s also more emotionally charged.  There’s release in the first image.  That’s their world in that moment.  The second image shows two people who desperately love each other but there’s still so much both of them have to go through.  There are tears of joy in the first image but the second image shows how much pain both characters still have to suffer through.

Foggy

In many ways, Foggy is a background character in BORN AGAIN but he’s also a key piece into how the Kingpin has destroyed Matt Murdock’s life.  Miller lays it out so subtly but of course he’s “employed” Foggy by giving him a job and still demeaning him a bit with the illegal work he gives to his new lawyer.  It’s not hard to imagine the Frank Miller of the past 20 years beating this plot point home, making Foggy into the dirty lawyer that Matt was alleged to be.  Maybe we’d end up seeing Foggy doing cocaine before going into court to defend Turk or something like that.  But the Miller of the 80’s just drops a line here or there, showing us that while Foggy may look like he’s just on the periphery of this story, he is actually a key player in the chess game that the Kingpin is playing.

BLAMM  klik

Like KBLAM!, this scene is made simply by the sound effects, the loud retort of the gun and the repeated and familiar shutter of Glori’s camera.  This is also the scene where Ben gets to be the hero.  He’s the daredevil that comes to Glori’s rescue.  It’s not that she thinks she needs rescuing; she’s just doing what she was hired for.  

BORN AGAIN shows us so many comic conventions that were popular and used back in the 1970s and 1980s that have been abandoned, like the sound effect.  There’s a design to the way that these sounds intrude into the image, carrying the violence into a visceral realm in a way that Mazzucchelli’s images just can’t.  You can see and “read” the images above if the sound effects weren’t there but you wouldn’t get the contrast of the gun and the camera. They’re both very common and recognizable sounds that you could fill in with your imagination but Miller stages this in a way that both sounds intrude on the other.

Flag

Back in the mid 1980s, Miller loved to have his villains wrap themselves in the flag and patriotism.  He does it here, in BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and in ELEKTRA ASSASSIN.   I almost believe that the Kingpin truly is the hero of his own story.

Triangle #5- Partners

The triangle again but this time, it’s inverted and upside down.  The point is at the bottom of the image and the strong horizontal is at the top, invisibly drawn between Matt and Ben’s head.  It connects them in this moment of... it’s not victory here.  It’s more of a finish and almost surprisingly, they’re both still alive at the end.  BORN AGAIN is as much Ben’s story, the story of a reporter who may be digging too deep into a new story, as it is Matt’s.  They both have to be brought low before they can see the light of a new day.

This is a book about the attempted murder of men’s souls (hyperbole, I know) and Miller drives so many wedges between Matt and everyone who cares for him but in the end of BORN AGAIN, it’s Matt and Ben who are together, not Ben and Foggy.  Foggy is ultimately a supporting character but you could make an argument that this is Ben’s story almost as much as it is Matt’s.  And this ending drives that home; both men get a certain victory with Nuke thrown on the reporter’s desk.

Freewheeling

As last pages go, this one always bugged me a bit.  Have the characters really earned this moment together?  Karen, predominantly in white, looks clean and sober but has she earned the right to hang on Matt’s arm like that yet?  Of course, finding her is that final push out of the darkness that Matt needed so maybe that’s her purifying moment.  

More than that, just the image troubled me.  The happiness that the two characters are expressing just runs to opposite of everything else in this story that the joy just seems out of place.  But then on the last reading of BORN AGAIN, I realized what this image reminds me of.

And suddenly, this may have become my favorite moment of the whole book, a moment of peace and happiness.  

This Canadian Life-- thoughts on Michel Ragabliati's The Song Of Roland

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In Michel Rabagliati’s comics, life is never easy.  Whether it’s a kid moving out of his parents house to finally be living on his own or a couple facing the possibility that they just cannot have children, Rabagliati’s comics captures life through words and drawings.  Rabagliati finds the stories out of life’s experiences and expresses them in words and pictures.  THE SONG OF ROLAND is the first book that doesn’t center in on his cartoon stand-in Paul but instead finds its focus on Paul’s wife Lucie and her family during the slow death of her father Roland.  As he tells the story about Roland’s life and death, Rabagliati demonstrates how families have to face a certain amount of “life goes on” even as they’re preparing to say their inevitable goodbyes.

The beginning of THE SONG OF ROLAND is about anything but death as Lucie’s family and her sisters and their family get together for a family vacation at her parents house Saint-Nicholas, a sleepy-yet-developing small town.  In his depiction of Saint-Nicholas, Rabagliati sets us up for change, as he contrasts the town that Lucie used to visit as a child against the town they are now visiting.  What once used to be open fields are now small subdivisions.  Rabagliati builds this lovely scene as Lucie gets to return to a place of her childhood and happy times with the family she loves.  When she, Paul and their daughter Rose return to “real” life in Montreal, it’s all about finding a new home, learning of a friend’s divorce and finding out her father’s prostate cancer has returned.

Rabagliati finds honesty in his stories.  There are plenty of truly bad ways to take a story about a death from cancer and make it some melodramatic piece about the meaningless or arbitrariness of life but Rabagliati never falls into that hole.  Instead, THE SONG OF ROLAND is as much about life, Paul and Lucie’s life and Roland’s life, as it is about death.  In fact, it’s probably more about life and how we accept the dying of those who mean a lot to us.  Even Rabagliati’s diversion into his escapades into buying a computer that can get online (this story takes place circa 2002 or so) ends up showing us how much there is to our daily life that we may not really consider.   

As he sets up the reader with funny, amusing and clever stories about everyday life, there’s a sadness throughout THE SONG OF ROLAND.  Just as fun and laughter are parts of life, so are tears and sadness.  Ragabliati shows his brilliantly in Roland, the patriarch with his family of rabbits (his daughters) and l’il rabbits (grand children.)  By introducing us to the family, Ragabliati shows us everything that Roland has and you can’t help but admire it; maybe even envy it a little bit.   Rabagliati’s books show what it means to be a part of a family as a child and as a parent.  

As Roland starts getting sicker, he tells Paul the story of his childhood and the way that he and his brothers and sisters were abandoned by his parents.  Ragabliati really shows us Roland and his life, summing it up in his love for his family.  So by seeing Roland’s love for his wife and his daughters, it makes the last half that much more meaningful as Roland is dying.  You see Lucie and her sisters rally around their father and you can feel the love that they have for him.  That’s the true emotions that Rabagliati is so wonderfully able to capture on the page.  

While telling stories of the events of these characters lives, he reveals the personalities of his cast.  With a simple, almost traditional art style, Rabagliati places his characters in the real world.  You may never have been to Montreal or Saint-Nicholas but Rabagliati’s stories in this book begin with the settings that he conveys on the page.  From there, Lucie and her family come alive by just being recognizable people.  Rabagliati’s semi-autobiography style gives him a rich cast to work from and he portrays Lucie and her family perfectly by showing us what they say and what they do without ever forcing them into an awkward or inauthentic moment.

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A review in search of an opinion-- thoughts on Chester Brown's ED THE HAPPY CLOWN

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In the back of Drawn & Quarterly's new edition of ED THE HAPPY CLOWN, Chester Brown provides notes and commentary about the creation of his comic. It's basically a DVD commentary track about what was happening to him and what was going through his mind during the 1980s when he was writing and drawing this series in his YUMMY FUR comic book. After reading ED, I'm not too sure if I want to dive into Brown's thought process at all. After all, do I really want to know what led Brown to put the miniature head of an alternate universe's Ronald Reagan on the tip of Ed's penis?  Isn't enough that I now that is in the book without getting into Brown's headspace?

Actually, I read enough of Brown's notes to find that he was interested in surrealism and that's as good of a word as any for this book.  Ed the titled happy clown is pulled into mischief involving vampires, homosexual alternate realities, pygmys and just too many other weird things to catalog or to want to remember. In Brown's quest for comic surrealism, he finds a freedom on the page to explore his own dark neuroses. At least, I hope these are his neuroses, such as the fate of Reagan's head and Ed's penis because thanks to Brown, I can now list these and a ton more as my own fears and trepidations.

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At the start of the book, Brown is working inan improvised manner, throwing short stories at the wall.  After a few of these, particularly ones that focus on Ed, a guilty man with a limp wrist and a true-fact science type of show, he brings them together to start his dive into the darkness.  Brown discovers his story as he goes on and it leads down paths that I don’t think any creator could have planned for.  Considering that he started this in YUMMY FUR in the early 1980s, the term “graphic novel” was still something that was being explored.  That this new edition of the book calls it “a graphic novel” is a bit midleading since Brown was just serializing a story in his book, probably not having any idea that 30 years later, it would be still in print or talked about.

“Surreal” is a word that Brown uses to describe his explorations in this book but another book word would also be “absurd” as in he tries to put in any new absurd thing that can eclipse the absurdity of the previous page.  He works himself into these corners with Ed such as Reagan’s head ending up on his penis and has to figure out how to get out of these corners.  It’s hard to find any meaningful story in ED THE HAPPY CLOWN because it ends up being an unfortunate series of events that are ultimately meaningless or capricious because that’s how the world is in Brown’s cartooning world view.  

Actually there are two characters who have something resembling a story.  Chet (not to confused with Chester) is a man suffering guilt over his affair with Josie.  His guilt is so strong that he dreams of his hand falling off during sex with her.  Determined to end the sorrid affair, Chet kills Josie only she comes back as some form of spiritual vampire.  While Ed’s misadventures crosses over with theirs, Chet and Josie’s story seems locked into some great guilt than just those of comic book characters.  

Brown draws out the obvious sacredness and profaneness of their relationship, knowing that Chet is horribly guilty but somehow his sins are transferred to Josie.  While Chet lives, Josie survives as some kind of vampire seeking redemption or another shot at life only to be killed over and over again.  She’s Chet’s guilty desires, Ed’s savior but she’s Brown’s victim.  She dies again and again, the victim of a cruel creator but also as a symbol of some perceived guilt of the characters and maybe even the cartoonist.

All of this oddball story and imagery is wrapped in Brown’s perverse humor, starting off with the title of ED THE HAPPY CLOWN.  There’s nothing happy in this book other than Brown’s freedom to follow the story down these dark paths.  But Brown captures these moments and images that cause a chuckle even as the actions of the story may be a bit repulsive.  His thin, crude line is actually very funny, applying such a simple line to such a perverse story.  He creates this humorous tension between what what’s being told and what’s being shown that things like penis-Reagan become that much more darkly funny as the book goes on.  Without knowing where the early jokes were going, he sticks with them, until he can find a way to incorporate them into the larger story he’s carving out.

Even after 800 words, I’m not too sure if I know what ED THE HAPPY CLOWN is supposed to be about.  I’m not too sure what I’m supposed to get out of it, if anything.  At this point, I can just as easily see this being a book I never really look at again just as easily as it will be one I return to again and again trying to find a clue to deciphering it.  If nothing else, I’ll probably pick up another Chester Brown book to see if there’s anything else here for me to grab onto.  ED THE HAPPY CLOWN is actually very fascinating because I haven’t come away from it with more than a curious confusion and that’s not really a bad thing.  

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What do we do after we Get Jiro?

GET JIRO! by Bourdain, Rose and Foss


In GET JIRO! Jiro is a simple Japanese chef, trying to create a life for himself in a semi-futuristic Los Angeles. Well, he's simple if you accept simple as being beheading customers who can't properly appreciate his sushi. The way that the cops act, this must be a regular occurrence in Jiro's place. Just as there is an art to preparing food, there is also and art to eating it as well and Jiro is a tough critic. Anthony Bourdain, Joel Rose and Landon Foss let us know just what we need to about Jiro, no more and no less and they tell it to us in those first few pages. Jiro is a mystery that rival chefs Bob and Rose (no relationship to the author) fight for.  In developing that Jiro, Bourdain and Rose get to play with the toughness and sensitivity of Jiro; he's a man who will cut off your head because you eat sushi the wrong way but he would rather avoid any a fight that isn't about culinary aesthetics. 

The joy of food part 1 (drawn by Foss)


Celebrity chef, writer and travel show host Anthony Bourdain may get the top billing on GET JIRO! but it’s artist Landon Foss who is the star of this production.  His clear line style, wonderfully colored by Jose Villarrubia, conveys a bright, large, colorful world.  GET JIRO! Isn't some grim and gritty dystopian story but it revels in the joys of life and Foss's art perfectly captures that. With a nice, thick line that’s reminiscent of early Frank Quitely (Flex Mentallo or JLA Earth 2) with a hint of Moebius design thrown in for good measure, Foss captures the joy that Bourdain and Rose find in food.  The way that Foss shows people who are able to enjoy the finer things in life is infectious for the reader.

Bourdain and Rose stumble when it comes to their culinary villains Bob and Rose. Two "chef warlords," they try to manipulate Jiro to grow their own power bases in L.A.  Part of why Jiro works as a character is that he falls into that “mysterious stranger” category of heroes.  He’s the man with an unknown past who comes to town and ends up changing it because of his own dynamism.  The mystery of the hero is ultimately the core of the hero.  But if your hero is going to be an enigma, your villains need to be a bit more than caricatures.  

The villains are the sophisticate and the hippy and, of course, they’re going to be always fighting because that’s what snobs and hippies do.  Bourdain and Rose don’t play enough with the villains as they do the other characters, except for at the very end when it’s too late.  For all of the work that the authors do to create a gourmet-based society, their villains come off more as Snidely Whiplashes, twirling their mustaches as they revel in their own evilness.  Any motivation they have is just to be evil and when the hero is supposed to be the mysterious character, the villains need to carry a lot of the story.  

Besides Jiro, there’s only one other great character in this book, Jean Claude, Jiro’s advisor in the world of gangster cuisine.  In one of the few scenes that does a great job of combining the foodie aspect of this book with the games of cat and mice between the various chefs, Bourdain and Rose give us a character who lives on both sides of the tracks.  With Jean Claude, they get to really indulge in their love of cuisine while they get to establish the powers that exists that Jiro has to overcome.  After that moment with Jean Claude, most other scenes in the book service either the culinary side of the story or the action/adventure side, with the two hardly ever combining together to form some new flavors.

GET JIRO! is the story of two rival gangs battling for one man’s soul.  The lovely thing about GET JIRO! isn’t that the gangs’ powers revolve around guns or drugs but around food, cuisine and restaurants. While the story stumbles a bit over the characters, Foss draws these wonderful pages that create more personality than the story actually has.  With Foss and Villarrubia creating an L.A. of food, glamour and double dealings, Bourdain and Rose’s story becomes this decadent feast of action and color.  Food is the ultimate prize to be obtained, prepared and enjoyed.  Food is power.  Like all prizes though, it’s also got to be fought over and won.  Foss switches easily between scenes that exhibit the joys and scenes that show just what a badass Jiro can be. If only they could have made the villains of this piece just as menacing as cool as the hero was.  


The Joy of Food part 2 by Moebius

Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 2009

All you need to know about Kevin O’Neill’s* THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN CENTURY: 2009 is what you see on the cover.  CENTURY: 1910 showed a proud and still Victorian Mina Murray, the one we knew from the first two of O’Neill’s (and that Moore chap as well) LOEG books.  CENTURY: 1969’s cover was trippy and brash, mirroring the drug experience that Mina herself experiences in the pages of the book.  O’Neill’s covers reflect so much of his work in those books as we follow the adventures of Murray, her lover and legend Allan Quartermain and the sometimes male/sometimes female Orlando through the 20th century.  

But the pride and the stoicism of the first two books have been replaced by something else on O’Neill’s third cover; they’ve been replaced by resignation and fear.  For seemingly immortal characters such as Orlando, Quartermain and Murray, how long is too long?  Orlando is centuries old, holding Excalibur on the cover amidst a fantasm of green disembodied eyes while Murray, only immortal for less than 100 years, stares off with heavy eyes.  In the past two covers, O’Neill put the sword(s) in Murray’s hands.  She’s the hero ready to strike if needed there but CENTURY: 2009 shows a different Murray, one worn down already by her own deathless life.

O’Neill carries the weight of immortality and age into the book, taking these character who have seen such wonderful and marvelous sites and thrusting them into an oppressive and dark world.  The CENTURY books have been about the 20th century, where a large part of our dreams became reality.  In the real world, so much changed between 1901 and 2000 that the world hardly looked the same by the end of the 20th century or even by the beginning of the 21st century.  O’Neill’s artwork, full of that great linework and wonderful storytelling, is the same as we first saw in the first LOEG books and even in THE BLACK DOSSIER but there’s a joy in his world (but not his artwork) that is lost.

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The wonders of the past now the decaying relics of the modern age

THE BLACK DOSSIER, a wonderful art book if only an appetizer of a story, attempts to be about the magic which exists in our stories.  O’Neill visually takes us through an abridged history of stories and narrative while creating a 1950’s thriller/sci fi story for Murray and Quarterman.  He creates a world where stories and fictions are as real as you and me.  In the end of THE BLACK DOSSIER, the “real” world and this world of stories collide and dreams become real for Murray and Quartermain.  The LOEG story which started out as this Victorian meeting-of-the-heroes becomes so much larger than life and the Victorian age as O’Neill shows us a world where all of our stories and so much more all exist in the same continuum.

Even as he visually created a grand narrative universe in THE BLACK DOSSIER, CENTURY: 2009 shows how the world has become this small and petty thing since the heyday of imagination.  After exploring the secrets of everything, CENTURY: 2009 becomes this small story about three used-up people trying to fend off the 21st century monster-- a kid with all of that magic and none of the imagination.  As the century wears on, O’Neill shows us a world that’s rotten and falling apart.  From once magical schools and magical trains to Shakespeare’s Prospero, the world that O’Neill shows us feels like a great weight.  He shows this as simply as having Orlando and Murray’s hair being flat and thin.  

LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN has always been about showing us things that we’d never see.  It’s been about the magic and wonder that exists in our stories.  But something about the modern age in CENTURY: 2009 is different.  Charting the world from 1910 to 2009, O’Neill shows us a world that has little place for the bright, colorful and psychedelic magic of an earlier age. There’s an innocence lost as our fictions start to look more and more like everyday life.  That’s what happens to the characters in CENTURY: 2009 and that’s what happens for us, the readers of this comic book.  The wonder of seeing a Victorian all-star team of heroes has been replaced by seeing our aged yet ageless “heroes” dragged into a time that isn’t their own.



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*Yes, yes, yes.  Alan Moore is the writer and most likely the driving force behind most of what O’Neill draws but O’Neill still has to take Moore’s story and bring it to life.  I mean, have you ever actually seen a Moore script?  It’s like forgetting that Dave Gibbons, David Lloyd or Eddie Campbell actually had to make a comic out of Moore’s lovely words. 

 

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All art by Kevin O’Neill
Cover images from Comics.org
Martian monument image from Top Shelf Comix’s website

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Comics, Movies and the new Super Alternate World Order

Congrats, nerds, you’ve won.  The war is over and the New York Times has declared you the victor.

What the defensive fans fail or refuse to grasp is that they have won the argument. Far from being an underdog genre defended by a scrappy band of cultural renegades, the superhero spectacle represents a staggering concentration of commercial, corporate power. The ideology supporting this power is a familiar kind of disingenuous populism. The studios are just giving the people what they want! Foolproof evidence can be found in the box office returns: a billion dollars! Who can argue with that? Nobody really does. Superhero movies are taken seriously, reviewed respectfully and enjoyed by plenty of Edmund Wilson types.

A.O. Scott in “Super Dreams of an Alternate World Order” 6/27/2012


O.k., maybe it was an argument more than a war but A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis once again, as they’ve seemingly done over and over recently when super hero movies com out, decry the “hegemony of the superhero” as Avenger’s $600 million box office sits comfortably in our rear view mirror and we’re looking down the dark and uncertain tunnels of “Amazing Spider-Man” and “The Dark Knight Rises.”  Basically their premise is “superheroes have won.”  

It’s actually a fun article to watch them dance around and show how hip they are to the superhero popularity.  Dargis demonstrates this by relating the audiences love of superheroes to the longing for an American mythology:

On one level the allure of comic book movies is obvious, because, among other attractions, they tap into deeply rooted national myths, including that of American Eden (Superman’s Smallville); the Western hero (who’s separate from the world and also its savior); and American exceptionalism (that this country is different from all others because of its mission to make “the world safe for democracy,” as Woodrow Wilson and, I believe, Iron Man, both put it). Both Depression babies, Superman and Batman, were initially hard-boiled types, and it’s worth remembering that the DC in DC Comics was for Detective Comics. Since then the suits have largely remained the same even as the figures wearing them have changed with their times. Every age has the superhero it wants, needs or deserves.

Manohla Dargis in “Super Dreams of an Alternate World Order” 6/27/2012


After that, Scott shows that he’s one of us by talking about the history of comics.  Dargis and Scott actually get a bit about what superheroes are about, maybe even more than a lot of the writers and artists of those comic books today do.

It’s funny to read movie critics in 2012 decrying the dominance of super heroes in their medium-of-choice, something that fans of comic books have been struggling with for decades.  There’s actually nothing wrong with the way Dargis and Scott dissect the current state of super hero movies but it all sounds so familiar, like almost any of Gary Groth’s Comic Journal rants from the late eighties or most of the nineties, only we not just talking about comics any more.  

Whether we’re talking about the comic shop circa 2002 or the movie multiplex circa 2012, super hero stories have become their own powerful genres, capturing mass popularity in their respective fields and crowding out unique voices that don’t conform to their brightly colored philosophies.  Responding to Dargis and Scott’s piece, Jim Emerson wrote:

Comic-books were once a juvenile pastime, a lowbrow and more-or-less underground form of pulp publishing. That disreputability has long been a big part of their attraction, and essential to what I've always love about horror and science-fiction. Now, so-called "comic-book movies" are most definitely above-ground, mainstream, big business. They represent the establishment, the status quo. You can argue that has diminished them, or has magnified their influence, but if you're dealing with the place of movies in modern culture, they can't be entirely ignored or dismissed.

Jim Emerson “It’s Not Nice to Call a Superhero a ‘Unitard”  6/29/2012


While Emerson’s piece goes on to talk more about critical thinking and the idea that movies are “critic proof” and the inability of some to actually have productive conversations about comic books movies as capital A Art, we’re seeing the same discussions on movie blogs that we’ve seen on comic blogs and magazines for years.

I almost want to say “Welcome to our world, Manohla, A.O. and Jim.”  Personally when it comes to comic movies (and the comic books more and more these days,) I find myself nodding in agreement with these writers.  Comic book movies are our popcorn films now, full of bright colors, costumes and characters but where is our Watchmen of comic films?  The Watchmen movie wasn’t even able to be that.  Thanks to Marvel’s cookie cutter formula to film making and DC’s inability to figure out their characters on the page or on the screen, we have a super hero movie scene that resembles their comic counterparts around Marvel’s Secret War comic book.  It’s a lot of flash and bang.  But not that super hero movie franchises have to be rebooted faster than comic book franchises, we’re at a point where it’s not the stories or the characters that matter in the movies.  It’s the costumes and the action and that sounds all too familiar to me.  

Of course, in a couple of weeks, I could be chanting “I trust Gotham City.  I trust Christopher Nolan.”

What would you do if God told you to open the door? A review of Zak Sally's SAMMY THE MOUSE


Sometimes comics are just weird, twisted views of reality.  And when that reality starts out as Disney cartoons, the comics just become that much more disturbing.  Zak Sally’s Sammy the Mouse Book 1 starts out looking like one of the old funny-animal comics as a mouse Sammy sits at a table, staring at a doll when there’s a knock on the door.  But Sally immediately shows you that something else is happening here as a voice from somewhere tells Sammy to open the door.  Omniscient narrator?  God?  Sally himself trying to direct the character? From the moment that the voice tells Sammy that he should open the door, Sally takes us on a dizzying trip through Sammy's life that is often amusing but just as disorienting for us as it is for Sammy himself.

Sammy the Mouse Book 1 is some absurdist dream, filled with characters who look like they've stepped off of the set of some children's cartoon and now are going to spend their free time getting drunk and cursing at everything.  It's those cartoons gone horribly wrong and reflecting more than the sweetness and niceness of the world. Sammy is our hero, our Everyman and maybe even ourselves, trapped in a life that he has little control over.  Wanting to spend his day alone in his house, Sammy is forced by the voice to open the door for Feekes, a drunken, foul mouthed duck who wears a stove pipe hat. Feekes drags Sammy to buy more gin and the find Puppy Boy lying in front of a store's cooler. 


None of this, starting at opening the door, is anything that Sammy wanted to do with his time.  The book, a self-printed collection of three issues that are really just 1/3rd of Sally’s planned story, is all about Sammy getting pulled and pushed into a bunch of situations when all he really wants to do is sit at home and do nothing.  Sammy wants to be inactive but Sally, the “voice of God” or maybe it’s just Feekes wants to pull him into a world of uncertainty and pain.  It most definitely wants to pull him to the Baby Bar (yes, a bar that looks like a giant baby doll) and dull the world with alcohol.

While showing us the “wacky” misadventures of Sammy and his friends, Sally is playing out his story on multiple levels, including one that may honestly and truly be the our “reality.”  Just as the voice from above prompts Sammy to open his door or coerces him into cleaning his bathroom, the giant hand from above comes from out of the clouds and transports Sammy back to his living room.  An authorial or narrative force, this voice and finger push Sammy in directions he needs to go.  It’s like Sammy is trying to defy his fate or his author but he just is not strong enough to defy the universe around him.

But there are a couple of “universes” at play in this book.  If it’s not puzzling enough to have a voice of “god” and a hand of “god” show up (same “god?” Different “gods?”) there is the mystery Sally puts into the book of these quick panels that seem to be our “reality” and another voice, but different than any of the other voices we’ve heard,” asking “... is anyone home?”  and “why are the lights off?”  These brief, fleeting glimpses into a different world than Sammy’s  constitute a “what the f**k” moment but also hint at something larger than the simple idea that Sally is just riffing on old cartoon characters.

Through the absurdity and the aimlessness (Sammy’s life, not the story) of Sammy The Mouse Book 1,  Sally gives his characters a life on the page that is planned and yet spontaneous.  The way he pushes the characters around and the way that they react to it creates the tension between what they want to do and what they end up doing anyway.  On a comic page where we can accept that a giant hand can come out of the clouds to push a character back to his living room floor where he needs to be for the next thing to happen, Sally delivers a puzzling book that that feels more real than most comics.  The way that Sammy is pushed around by forces outside of his control is the same way that you’re pushed through this book by Zak Sally.  He’s the voice that’s telling you that he thinks it’s a good idea for you to turn the next page and see what happens next.

Prometheus and the myth of creation

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

Genesis 1:26 New International Version



Prometheus tries to have a lot of questions but it doesn't really understand what the questions are. Who created us? Where did they/he come from?  Why did they/he abandon us?  These are standard questions that are far more complex than “aliens” as the answers.  Finding signs and cave paintings that point to the stars, Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Halloway kind of lead an expedition to an alien world to see where their vague and easy questions lead.  These signs and portents lead them to a world where their supposed makers, or "engineers" came from but they hardly find any real answers there.  It’s like director Ridley Scott was using this movie to figure out what he wanted to do in a sequel to Prometheus instead.

There are really only two characters in this movie that are searching for anything substantial.  Shaw is the scientist looking for meaning and David is the robot who wants to be a real boy.  In and of themselves, both characters have interesting journeys and questions throughout this movie that would probably be better suited for something that didn’t involve big, rubbery looking CGI effects.  But this being the “Alien prequel” and all of that, we have to have weird, odd monstrosities that are 30 years removed from H.R. Giger’s masterful alien creature.

Shaw is the rational scientist who continually wears a cross because she essentially has to believe in something.  From cave drawings of giants pointing to floating orbs, she deduces that these are the beings who created mankind and she wants to find them.  Even when her boyfriend is killed by the curious android, her cross stays with her. Whether there's belief behind that cross or it's just an affectation carried over from her father is never really made clear. Over at Think Christian, Josh Larson calls this the "God MacGuffin."

She’s referred to as a “believer” and towards the end, after the planet is revealed to be far more menacing (and gooey) than she expected, she’s asked, “Even after all this, you still believe?" The movie tosses around a lot of dialogue like this, yet the notions behind the words are never explored in any serious way. Prometheus purports to be about big ideas, but if you’re really curious about something, you do more than mention it.


She's looking to find the face to put with the idea of her "creator" and whether she truly finds that or not is just one of the many dangling threads the movie leaves to be answered in some projected sequel. When she is asked about her cross in light of these aliens that may have created humanity, she answers that something had to have created them. Maybe we're just the creation of a created being, two or more steps removed from any actual God.

Maybe that's what we are but we know that is exactly what David is. Scott introduces us to David by showing him playing basketball, riding a bike, playing basketball while riding a bike and watching Lawrence of Arabia.  All this happens while the real crew of the Prometheus sleeps in hibernation pods. When the crew is awakened and their mission revealed to them, David is said to be like a favored son to Peter Weyland, the geriatric founder of this space exploration. He's only like a favored son because he is not human; he is a robot built to serve his crew. 


David is the ultimate reflection of his creator.  You can almost picture a young Peter Weyland looking like him, set out to explore parts of the universe that Weyland’s now old and fragile body never could.  Some members of the crew look at David and see just another tool to use.  Some find a curious boy without the knowledge or morals to truly understand his actions.  One even seems him an obstacle to getting her father’s real love.  David is all of those and maybe those elements are the things that make him the most human character in this movie.

Shaw is looking for her absent creator while David is never that far from his own “father.”  The search for a god is a MacGuffin like Larson writes about because there’s no discussion about creation vs. creator but Ridley Scott tells a story about characters just wanting to know why they exist, why they’re on the paths that they are on.  Shaw may verbalize it but David, through a masterful performance by Michael Fassbender, shows that journey.  David is a much closer representation of his creator than Shaw is of the Engineers.  Of course, Scott never gives us a clear answer on the origins of mankind as God remains a MacGuffin of Prometheus.  The movie tries to pose the question on the origin of humanity without ever wanting to actually answer it.

@ Newsarama: The Massive #1

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My review of Brian Wood and Kristian Donaldson's The Massive #1 is now up at Newsarama.

Donaldson's is not as stylized as it was in his first collaboration with Wood, Supermarket, but his solid storytelling makes this a world that is very easy to believe. With Dave Stewart providing the colors, Donaldson creates a realistic world that feels like it should be better than it actually is. It's a fascinating dichotomy that Donaldson's line is the cleanest that we've seen in any of Wood's books like DMZNorthlanders or Conan. It's similar to Rebekah Isaac's on Wood's DV8 miniseries, very clean and sure of the world it's building. Stewart creates the moods with his vivid coloring, setting a fog over the present day, hiding the world from our view.

You can read the full review by clicking on the link above.

@ Newsarama-- Dark Avengers #174

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Last week over at Newsarama, I wrote a few words on Dark Avengers #174.

Shalvey draws the fight between knock-offs of Spider-Man, Thor and Hawkeye and the real Luke Cage but there’s this looming sense of been there/done that in this issue.  After an early great line for Luke Cage — “Did I just see Troll riding a dragon?” — as he and Hank Pym try to find the lost-in-time Thunderbolts, the introduction and fight with the new Dark Avengers falls back into Superhero Comics 101 and images of heroes (or hero imitators) fighting heroes. 

Thunderbolts/Dark Avengers is a book that now has been around forever but that seems to need to be reinvigorated every 2 or 3 years now.  I still love the original concept of this book under Busiek and Nicieza but it's not been a book I've had an easy time trying to get back into over the last 3-4 years.