In which the blogger concludes his discussion of 10 books he can find nothing bad about at all to speak of. The imaginary rules which guided these choices, and the first 7 comics on this list, can be found in the previous two blog entries below;


8. "Detective Comics", # 478; "Sign Of The Joker", writer, Steve Engelhart, artists, Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin

I was fifteen years old when I first read "Sign Of The Joker", and there were two things about it that really did puzzle me. Firstly, whyever was Silver St. Cloud running away from a love affair from The Batman, and, secondly, why didn't I feel that she'd in any way made the wrong decision?

Now, of course, I know that she was better off out of it. The constant sense of threat, the endless conflict, the inevitability of psychological if not physical harm; watching Bruce Wayne dressed in his bat costume balanced on a girder suspended above Gotham River dodging both acid spray from the Joker's lapel and lightning bolts from the heavens merely confirmed for Ms St. Cloud that a sane existence isn't compatible with a Batman for a groom.


Silver St. Cloud knew that she needed a saner existence than that, and she quite rightly escaped from what would have no doubt been a short and tragic career as Mrs Batman, the dearly beloved hostage and victim. Only a superhero fan used to staring at a comic-book world through the point-of-view of the folks wearing the costumes could ever see such a choice as anything other than sensible.

But then, to superhero fans, it was hard to make sense out of Silver St Cloud in so many ways. She simply didn't behave as the girl-friend of a superhero should. She was loyal, but she wasn't in any way deferent. She was demonstratively brave, but her courage seemed to exist as a quality of her own rather than as a means to propel her into conflicts which only a boyfriend in a pointy-eared mask could solve. (She could prevent a security guard from calling the police to arrest Batman and fiercely insult Boss Thorne without any sign that she needed a superhero to chaperon her.) She was admirably independent enough to hand


back a lifetime's pass to the Bat-Cave, and yet she didn't weep when she did so. She was upset, but she was dignified and she didn't weep. But that's what most women did in superhero books in such circumstances. Whether it was a tiny sniffy jewel of a tear, or great tidal waves of sobbing, most women wept.

Silver St. Cloud had none of those markers of absolute dependence, of a lack of initiative and the absence of secure attachment, which allowed us to readily believe that, for example, Janet would fall for Henry, or Carol for Ray. Ms St Cloud was a woman and not an adolescent girl. She was intelligent,


independent, competent, beautiful and exceptionally rich. Her life wasn't ever going to be empty of meaning and achievement even if she didn't chose to marry the millionaire and clearly-deeply disturbed Bruce Wayne. She was tough and she was smart. She'd survive. She was nobody's sidekick and deserved to be nobody's much-missed victim of a vengeance-justifying super-villain attack either.

There might be a temptation to look down on Silver St. Cloud, to consider her weak for not standing by her man. To such a judgement might be added a measure of the contempt that's often granted to those who've been blessed by the good fortune of unearned great wealth and considerable beauty. But for all that I fall far more on the side of the cause of egalitarianism than I do to the creed of the New Right, I can't see how Ms St. Cloud can be blamed for being born rich and the owner of those fine genes which promote good teeth and high cheekbones, especially given that she shows evidence of so many personal qualities worthy of respect.

No, even though I couldn't work out how anybody wouldn't love, marry, cherish and be murdered for a super-hero, I also knew that she was right. Silver St. Cloud was better off out of it.


9. "Swamp Thing", book 57; "Exiles", writer, Alan Moore, artists, Rick Veitch & Alfredo Alcala

There's nothing more frightening in any comic book than a Thanagarian diplomatic mission seeking a "free exchange of information". The fascist, imperialist Hawkpeople of "Exiles" remain a far, far more terrifying threat than any Dracula, Dr Doom or even Darkseid could ever be, because they're so recognisably of our own world. They're the amoral and militaristic practitioners of realpolitik. They're the Greeks bearing gifts. They're the folks

without mercy, but with the grand strategic plans, and they have the same contempt for the ordinary women and man as Keel Roo and Scira Ek have in "Exiles" for Adam Strange. The appalling attack of these Hawk creatures upon the Swamp Thing as he tries to heal the ruined and radioactive eco-system of Rann is for me one of the few superhero fight scenes which can still inspire genuine anxiety. The stakes are so high, the weapons being used so disgustingly invasive, the revulsion inspired by the Thanagarians so intense; it's as if Alan Moore had abstracted everything that's depraved and repellent about the culture of Nazism and then fused it with this imaginary off-world society in order to bring home with the shock of the new how these people, or any people like them, from any political system of any kind, must never be trusted or tolerated.

Mr Moore's wasn't presenting an entirely new version of the peoples of Hawkworld in "Exiles". The Thanagarians had been depicted as an authoritarian race before, more notably in Tony Isabella's thoroughly enjoyable "Shadow War Of Hawkman" series, which really does deserve to be reappraised and reprinted. But Moore turned a formidably hostile alien race into a


recognisably fascist culture. Instead of a people of mostly-identical Hawkmen prone to be corrupted and then redeemed by various individual leaders, Mr Moore and the exquisite art team of Rick Veitch and Alfred Alcala provided us the informing details of Thanagar's military/diplomatic hierarchy, with its language of deception and domination, and with the stomach-turning stench of the assumption of racial superiority which marks every panel of the Hawkwomen and men in this book. Here is the rank and protocol and phraseology of the fascist state, and the straight-faced and yet clearly sneering contempt by which these Thanagarians judge everyone and everything beyond their own narrow mission is enough to make this reader's fists begin to ball. Alan Moore's loathing for the authoritarian mind-set saturates this book, and it will give nothing away to a reader who's never read "Exiles" to note that things do not end well for these Hawkpeople.

"We Terrans may not be much on the eight basic principles of aerial inertia tactics ... but we are complete bastards." explains Adam Strange to the drowned corpse of Keel Ro.

Well, she deserved it.


1o. "Superman Adventures, # 25; "(Almost) The World's Finest Team", writer, Mark Millar, artists, Mike Manley & Terry Austin

Mark Millar's "Superman Adventures" aren't simply a joy to read, though they certainly are that. They're also the irrefutable proof that he's a highly skilled professional craftsman with an impressive command of the more traditional forms of comicbook storytelling. Too often he's judged solely with reference to a partial understanding of his post-millennium style, to his widescreen, summer-blockbuster approach to harnessing much of the appeal of the movies while maintaining the distinct strengths of superhero comic books. And because much of that more recent work, from "The Authority" through the "Ultimates" and on to the Millarworld superbooks of today, is so very idiosyncratic and single-minded in its approach, there's a tendency at times for folks to miss the fact that Millar's 21st century work is built upon an absolute command of the basic language of the Silver-Age superhero tale. He can pull off the grand extremes of a "Nemesis" or a "Kick-Ass" because he knows, and has clearly and consistently shown, how to write the likes of the Flash, the Justice League and, in particular, Superman in an intensely respectful and concise form.


In "(Almost) The World's Finest Team", Millar has The Mad Hatter kidnap Bruce Wayne, a conceit which allows him to convincingly pair a feisty and impressively competent Batgirl with his own take of a thoroughly decent and dignified Superman. There's nothing arch about how Mr Millar approaches these characters; there's no irony on show, or knowing nudges in the text to show that he's a more sophisticated and modern-minded writer than the subject matter might otherwise allow. In fact, his work on "Superman Adventures" was as likely to escape critical acclaim because it didn't seek to draw attention to itself as his later work is often attacked for being the product of a man with no respect for tradition and too much concern for himself. The question isn't, of course. which of these writers is the "real" Mark Millar, the modest scribe or the Hollywood hustler? The fact is that different properties require different approaches, just as writers at different stages of their lives have distinct and different things to say for themselves in their work. Here, Millar was intent on establishing that he was a reliable pair of hands with a trustworthy command of scriptwriting, as well as presenting a take on the character of Superman which reflected Millar's fundamental affection for the man of steel and the moral values most commonly associated with him. It's a version of Superman which deserves to be ranked in the front row of work on the character, but sadly, because of the title's low profile, and because of the fact that "Superman Adventures" was supposedly a "kid's" book about a non-continuity version of Kal-El, it's a comic that's rarely granted the respect it's owed.


Present in this all-ages, will-not-frighten-the-censors, comic book are a great deal of the techniques which would later come to be associated with Millar's writing style. The splash page is a typically intense affair, the story is arranged around a series of spectacular superhero-fan-pleasing scenes, and Millar works hard to make sure each character on display has an absolutely distinctive personality on the page. Readers new to "(Almost) The World's Finest Team" will note, for example, water-cooler moments the likes of which would be quite familiar components of Mr Millar's later work; the scene in which Robin launches the Bat-Plane with a cry of "Let's party!" is in many ways the equivalent of Tony Stark blasting off in his ultimate universe armour, a great celebration of the opportunities for fun that the superhero can bring. (The exuberance of the art by Mike Manley and Terry Austin perfectly matches the sheer good cheer of the script.) Yet, matched with these superheroic moments here is a conscious and constant fidelity to the moral principles historically associated with the World's Finest team. A stern but decent Batman's closing speech in praise of Superman's effectiveness is one example of that, as is Superman's advice to Batgirl that "you don't have to break someone's ribs to solve a case".

Unpretentious, disciplined, life-affirming and fun. I'd recommend it.


Thank you for reading. I really do wish a splendid day to you all. "Stick together!", as Superman would say.


.

1.



I know nothing now, and I knew nothing then too.



2.



Why 1985? I blame the "Amazing Heroes 1985 Previews Issue". It promised so much for the mainstream of superhero comic books, it contained page upon page of commitments to radical change which were so exciting and so sweeping in scale that it seemed, compared to what had gone before in at least the previous decade, that the comic-book Millennium was just about to arrive.





There was talk of the soon-to-be-published "Crisis On Infinite Earths", of which Marv Wolfman was quoted as declaring "I know it's going to change things, and change them permanently." Change? Fundamental change had been anathema to the mainstream form for what seemed like time out of mind, and permanent change was surely an oxymoron. Consequently, the very concept of change was intoxicating in itself. And change seemed so necessary in the superhero worlds of the Big Two, which had been spiralling further and further into their long and painful creative and commercial declines since at least the mid-Seventies. Even the reinvigorated team-books which had helped to carry the superhero through the doldrums of the early Eighties, from X-Men to Teen Titans, from Legion Of Super-Heroes to the Fantastic Four, were hemorrhaging vitality with every passing month by the closing of 1984. "Change" was desperately needed.



And now it seemed as if, impossibly, the revolution was already here, or, at least, already beginning to roll off of the printing presses. Even Frank Miller was returning to the superhero, as promised in the Previews '85 piece about a "Batman Special Project", a three issue "limited series" which seemed to promise to free Bruce Wayne's alter ego from the character's slow degeneration downwards into a taciturn loner with a terrible attitude to any social activity he couldn't control. "Batman is not a psychotic", Miller declared, "He's not out for revenge against criminals", which all seemed very promising indeed. In fact, Miller's approach seemed quite thrillingly heretical, drawing on popular entertainment outside of comics as much as the stultifying continuity of the past 45 years, with his promise that Alfred would be portrayed in the light of John Gielgud's butler from "Arthur", while Catwomen would be "... 50 years old, and if you like Joan Collins, you'll like her."





John Gielgud, Joan Collins; the future was not just going to be radical and intelligent, it would incorporate a Batman characterised by humour as much as darkness! It almost seemed as Mr Miller's "Batman Special Project" was going to alter everything on its own, just as his "Daredevil" had promised to at the turn of the decade.



And then, then, as the excited reader reached page 134 after devouring the close-typed text of every previous page before it, and just before reaching the end of the "Special Issue", there was two-thirds of a page and three fantastically enticing columns concerning "The Watchmen" a new comic book by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, of which the writer said;



"Dave and I are really excited about The Watchmen; it'll be a great book ... People who've been reading standard superhero comics for 20 years will have one or two surprises with "The Watchmen."



And if they were excited, then I was excited. Because the mainstream had, with the exception of Miller's "Daredevil" and Moore's "Swamp Thing", been bereft of excitement, of the shock of the new, for so many years, and this sense that even the long-moribund mainstream companies were knowingly evolving, becoming perhaps daring at best and competent at least, charged the times in a way that I'd not known before and which I've certainly not experienced since.





After all, if "Daredevil" and "Saga of The Swamp Thing" could have been transformed into the very finest comics on the newstands and in the comic shops, then what wasn't possible? Because those books had been absolutely dead in the water, dull and time-serving despite the very best efforts of some exceedingly laudable writer-and-artist teams, and yet the right creators even in the worst of times had made something quite utterly unforeseen, something unimaginably fine of both of them.



Well, why couldn't everything be transformed that way? Why couldn't every month bring not one or two outstanding comic books from the Big Two, but 50 or 60?



Why ever not?

2.



The Big Two were undoubtedly economic as well as creative dinosaurs in late 1984, with Jim Shooter's Marvel trying to outmuscle and indeed bury the new independent sector by crushing it under a wave of expensive reprints and supposedly high-prestige projects. And for all that most of them were soon to fail, and usually fail messily too, the independent companies faced with Shooter's economic warfare had substantially raised the stakes where the superhero, and superhero-like characters, were concerned. If there were barely a handful of Marvel and DC books capable of accelerating the pulse-rate in December 1984, there was a host of what only a coldblooded capitalist cynic would define as "product"from the smaller publishers. The 1985 Preview, after all, listed the following prospects for the "alternative" superhero and its brethren from beyond the command economies of Marvel and DC for the coming year;

• "Alan Moore's Comic" (Fantagraphics)
• "American Flagg" (Howard Chaykin)
• "Aztec Ace" (Doug Moench, Dan Day)
• "The Badger" (Mike Baron, Bill Reinhold)
• "Cross fire" (Mark Evanier, Dan Spiegle)
• "Dalgoda" (Jan Strnad, Dennis Fujitake)
• "Flaming Carrot" (Bob Burden)
• "Grimjack" (John Ostrander, Tim Truman)
• "Groo The Wanderer" (Sergio Aragones, Mark Evanier)
• "Jon Sable, Freelance" (Mike Grell)
• "Mage " (Matt Wagner)
• "Love And Rockets" (The Brothers Hernandez)
• "Marvelman" (Alan Moore and Alan Davies)
• "Mr Monster" (Michael T Gilbert)
• "Moonshadow" (J Marc De Matteis, Jay Muth)
• "Mr X" (The Brothers Hernandez)
• "Nexus" (Mike Baron, Steve Rude)
• "The One" (Rick Veitch)
• "The Rocketeer" (Dave Stevens)
• "Scout" (Tim Truman)
  
  
• "Starstruck" (Elaine Lee, Michael T. Gilbert)
• "Strange Days" (Peter Milligan, Berendan McCarthy, Brett Ewins)
• "Warrior" (Various)
• "Whisper" (Steven Grant, Rich Larson)
• "Zot!" (Scott McCloud)

In fact, a more rational, and perhaps less youthful and naive, mind might have asked itself just how many bright and enjoyable comic books can anybody possibly need month-in and month-out? But my mind had its eye upon an ever greater bounty, the prospect of pretty much every book being produced by the previously dead-in-the-water Big Two being every bit as good as those of their "Third Way" independent competitors. (*1) Sixty books, ninety books, god-knows-how-many-books, every month, all excellent, all splendid, a comic-book utopia. Because if the Swamp Thing was savable, and capable of being transformed by Mr Moore, Mr Bissette and Mr Totleben into the month-upon-month mind-expanding wonder it was, then what couldn't be made into a thing of wonder? After all, Alan Moore was, we knew, safe in his Northampton arm-chair and enthusiastically producing story bibles for DC comics that he himself was never going to write;



"Alan Gold phoned me up and asked me if I wanted to write The Omega Men, but I couldn't because I've got a lot of other stuff and The Omega Men is not something I could see myself do easily without making some really really major changes ... But what I did was, I offered to write a synopsis of a possible way that the Omega Men could be sorted out and made into a more viable sort of concept. I wrote about 27-30 pages." (Amazing Heroes # 58, October 1984)



And where "Swamp Thing" had gone, and where "Omega Men" was undoubtedly going, then anything and everything would surely follow? This was the comic-book coming of age, and, very very dangerously for the easily self-deluded reader, there was evidence that the process was thrillingly underway.



*1 - If you're at all curious about this phrase "Third Way", please do check out the July archive for the piece entitled "Nexus, Zot! The Rocketeer, American Flagg & Mr Monster.





3.



You didn't have to be a coldhearted capitalist cynic to see the overwhelming mass of Marvel and DC books in 1984 as little if anything more than "product". Of quite everything being published, only "Swamp Thing" stood as a comic book that could have been passed among non-comic book reading friends as a proselytising text. Nothing else from Marvel or DC came anywhere close to the sheer incandescent, genre-shredding brilliance of that book, though there were a few highly entertaining and well-crafted books holding their ground in the ranks, of which Walter Simonson's "Thor" stood a winged-helmet's worth above any of the other competition. And of all those comics being churned out through the 52 delivery days of 1984, there weren't more than 10 or so that I'd pick up through anything more than a sense of nostalgia and a need for a comic-rush;



* Atari Force (Gerry Conway, Jose Garcia-Lopez)

* Star Trek (Mike W. Barr, Tom Sutton)

* Crisis On Infinite Earths (Marv Wolfman, George Perez)

* Avengers (Roger Stern, John Buscema, Tom Palmer)

* Power Pack (Louise Simonson, June Brigman)

* Daredevil (Dennis O'Neil, David Mazzucchelli)



Now, that's not a long list, and supplementing it with books where artists like Jim Aparo and Alan Davis carried stories which I cared little for still didn't make for any meaningful journey to the local newsagents for the monthly deliveries of thin, poorly-printed and overly-familiar comics. It was a cold time for those of us who refused to believe that the Big Two simply couldn't produce good books. After all, there were so many fine comics being produced beyond NYC's corporate offices, and if the fanboys, the amateurs and the new-to-the-business enthusiasts and pop-thinkers could do so well, then what couldn't the companies with the know-how and financial muscle achieved if they wanted to?



4.



But take a step ahead in time to 1987 and nothing seems to have quite gone as expected. "Crisis On Infinite Earths" and "The Dark Knight Returns" have both arrived and disappeared and the last quarter of "Watchmen" will be published in this year, but a glance at the comic books being produced doesn't provide any valid evidence for the presence of the new Millennium. For not only have so many of the Third Wave independent books gone under, but Marvel and DC are still locked into producing pretty much the same quality of books that they always have. In fact, Marvel had celebrated the year of the "Dark Knight Returns" with their suicidally poor "New Universe" line, a package of fourth-hand concepts and soulless production-line comics which wouldn't even convince as a satirical invention for a comedy piece on the Imperial Years of Jim Shooter's fading reign at The House Of Ideas. (Kicker, Inc? How was that possible?) And if there was a slight rise in the quality in DC's books, in the measure of enthusiasm and seriousness of tone which made their post-Crisis comics carry some sense of the new, it couldn't be said that every "Omega Men" had been made a king or Queen of comics. (In fact, the "Omega Men" title was cancelled in 1986, Alan Moore's notes or not. How was this possible?) Overall, the casual as well as the committed reader would be hard pressed to make an objective case for the world having changed in a very substantial way for the better at all. "Swamp Thing" and "Thor" continued to head the Big Two's products, indicating that little had really changed. There were revamps of familiar products, such as Andy Helfer's "The Shadow", Howard Chaykin's "Blackhawk", Mike Grell's "Green Arrow", John Byrne's "Superman, George Perez's "Wonder Woman" and John Ostrander and Kim Yale's "Suicide Squad", all of which delivered entertaining stories month in and month out for a period of time. And "Kraven's Last Hunt" in Spider-Man, by Matteis and Zeck, seemed to promise that Marvel were considering raising their sights where the content of a few of their books were concerned.





But the trumpet hadn't sounded so much as parped while the trumpeter was clearing their throat, and the dead hadn't risen so much as shuffled around a touch before settling down for a few more years sleep. And it seemed undeniable that 1985 and its promise had been frittered away at the very same time as it had appeared, invested into a few headline-gathering books while the underlying reality of the mainstream comics stayed locked on pretty much the same course as they'd been since Gerry Conway had spent his short time as Marvel's editor clearing out the mavericks who either couldn't get their work in on time, or who were writing the books he wanted to, or both. For all that DC had relaunched its key books with some determination and energy, they were mostly merely producing a slightly less complacent and a slightly more energetic version of what had gone before. Certainly, at no time did the reader experience the world-turned-upside-down exhilaration of reading Alan Moore's "The Anatomy Lesson", which he'd effectively relaunched the Swamp Thing with. If things were better, they were better versions of what had gone before. This was not the revolution at all.



Soon enough, in just five years, and instead of comic shops bursting with thrilling and bright mainstream comics, and rather than a luminous independent range of superhero books, there'd be the Image revolution and the rise of spectacularism over content and enthusiasm over craft. And then, memory assured me, the mainstream responded at it usually had, aiming low and swerving only to avoid being utterly flattened by each new threatening trend, while the Third Way dissolved into a couple of surviving books and a great deal of thwarted hope.



Ah, well. The memories aren't particular good ones.



5.



But memory simply isn't to be trusted. Take those Image years, for example. My memory is of long years of books from all companies, independent or not, containing little but impossible muscles and poorly-designed spandex, a plague of shallow storytelling and the horrible sight of the Big Two falling into line behind the flash and fireworks of McFarlane and Lee and company. And yet, taking but 1993, the year after Youngblood's astonishingly high-selling debut, I was shocked to realise that it's the year which saw the publication of the greatest number of quite excellent superhero titles I that know of since my childhood;



* "Batman Adventures: Mad Love" (Bruce Timm & Paul Dini, my favourite comic of all time!)

* "The Golden Age" (James Robinson, Paul Smith)

* "Marvels" (Kurt Busiek, Alex Ross)

* "Sandman" and "Death: The High Cost Of Living" (Neil Gaiman)

* "Doom Patrol" (Grant Morrison & Richard Case)

* "Flash" (Mark Waid & Greg LaRocque: "The Return Of Barry Allen!)

* "Green Lantern: Mosaic" (Gerard Jones & Cully Hammer)

* "Sandman: Mystery Theatre" (Matt Wagner & Guy Davies)

* "Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo" (Tim Truman, Joe R Lansdale)

* "Spider-Man" 2099 (Peter David & Ric Leonardi)

* "Hulk" (Peter David, Dale Keown & various)

* "The Spectre" (John Ostrander, Tom Mandrake)





That's a fine, fine selection of books, and these are of course only those which caught my eye from Marvel and DC. And it's not what I expected to find at all. Memory lied. In fact, it would seem from the examples above that the mainstream companies were in the rudest of health, or at least in some small part of it, even given that many of those titles must have been commissioned before the truth of how successful Image was had been processed by management. And the excellence didn't peter out in 1993 either, even if it never stretched beyond a handful of books; the year afterwards, for example, brought the likes of Mike Mignola's "Hellboy" from Image and "Starman" by James Robinson and Tony Harris. The history I'd taken as gospel was obviously quite incorrect, for if none of the above shone quite so intensely as Alan Moore's "Swamp Thing" had, still all of them would have sparkled in its orbit on the newstands of 1985 as they did in their own company in the comic shops of 1993. These were smart and moving books which if they'd been published in the mid-Eighties would have been remembered today as the markers of a period of remarkable conceptual fecundity and craftmanship.



So, in a sense, the millennium did occur, just as of course it hadn't.



Or; the selective sampling of comic books picked on the basis of personal taste and recalled by an all-too-fallible memory is no foundation for an understanding of the history of a period at all. For, to take but one other example, 1978 can be read as the absolute nadir of the superhero's existence, but there was the first run of Levitz on the LSH, and the counter-intuitively smart and thoroughly entertaining Mantlo/Golden "Micronauts", there's the Gerber "Mr Miracle" and the Fleischer "Jonah Hex", Kubert and Rodgers absolutely on top of their game, Claremont and Byrne's X-Men was at its height, and say what you like, I loved Ernie Colon's art on "Battlestar Galactica".



But change the reader, of course, and the same books are watertight evidence to the quite opposite conclusion.



6.



History is one damn comic book after another.





7.



The ridiculous flaw in my thinking, for whatever little its unravelling is worth, was that I was distracted, indeed mesmerised, by genius. The comic book "millennium" of 1985 was never going to exist, the line-wide books of incredible achievement were never going to happen, because the assumption that I made was that everybody could be, if not Alan Moore, then at least creators who could operate at a significant fraction of Alan Moore's abilities. And just as the subsequent writers of "Omega Man" had Moore's notes and yet couldn't produce a comic that's lodged in the historical memory, so too the industry as a whole couldn't grasp what he was doing, or how he achieved what he did.



The "Swamp Thing" hadn't succeeded because of some long-ignored potential buried where the journeyfolks and the breadheads, man, couldn't see it. Every book has hidden potential, but that doesn't mean that the potential is that considerable or particularly commercial. The "Omega Men" no more carried the promise of greatness within it than did "Swamp Thing", or any other fondly conceived if relatively commonplace idea launched with a measure of sweat and a prayer for success into the marketplace.





The secret ingredient wasn't anything to do with the properties of DC Comics at all. It was Alan Moore and his closest collaborators that created the illusion of promise in 1985, as he threw around stories as if they were nothing of consequence at all, as if his first-thought-best-thought premises were of no real importance when they were in fact more substantial examples of the comicbook writers craft than just about anything his contemporaries could ever conceive of for themselves. In those four years at DC, he effortlessly grafted onto the Green Lantern mythos a conceptual framework that informs so mucn of what the estimable Geoff Johns is doing today, a quarter-century later. His Chimera of the DCU Elemental has been explored every which way and still no-one else has been able to make it work again. His Superman is a fond, touching and surely definitive take on the character. From Adam Strange to Thanagar, the Joker to the only substantial modern-era Vigilante tale ever spun, the DCU is in many ways Alan Moore's child even now.



In fact, if he hadn't proven so unable to get a grasp on Batman's character, he'd be quite beyond any slither of criticism at all.





7.



Take away the false and impossible self-invented promise of 1985 and today's business by the Big Two suddenly doesn't look half-as-bad as it did to me just a few hours ago. In fact, if I'd've been picked up in 1984, or 1994, or 2004, and shown the spread of mainstream superhero comic books today, I would have been as impressed by the base-level competence as I would have been disappointed by the absence of genius. But there's never been a host of such fine writers as we have today, writers whose work far outstrips that of just about every wordsmith mentioned in the Amazing Heroes 1985 Previews Issue. There's Gail Simone and Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Millar and Paul Cornell and Jeff Parker, Matt Franction and Grant Morrison, Jonathan Hickman and Rick Remender, Geoff Jones and Ed Brubaker, Warren Ellis and Peter Milligan, Adam Beechum and Brian Azarello and Allan Heinburg, JMS and Peter David, Jimmy Grey and Jimmy Palmiotti, Dan Slott and Bill Willingham, and all those who've I've regretfully forgotten to mention. And, and!, there's quite frankly too many highly-competent, if not always entirely-distinct, artists to list here from today's ranks, and again, there's far far more of them than at any other time since at least the middle of the Seventies.



These are, in truth, unexpectedly good days.





In fact, if transported forward in time 25 years from 1985 to today, I might not have thought that the mainstream comic book millennium had arrived, but I'd have believed that it was far far closer than perhaps my new contemporaries would believe. I'd know how much progress had been achieved, for all the disappointments and compromises. And short of being dumb enough to imagine that there could ever be three or four dozen Alan Moores slaving away at three or four dozen Omega Men books, while another score or so Frank Millars pick up the slack on the night shift when the Moore clones need their sleep, I'd have been rather pleased to be here, in 2010, for all of its weaknesses as well as its strengths.





8.



Of course today's mainstream superhero books are far from perfect. The text is often too sparse, continuity's regularly and regretfully the sole driver of story, diversity can still be a matter of tokenism, books too often carry worrying moral meanings, many comics are far too expensive, some artists seem committed to money-generating and time-saving splash pages and cheesecake, and, god damn it, I miss a host of writers and artists from Steve Gerber to John Ostrander, from Mike Golden to John Buscema, from Stan and Jack and Steve and pretty much everyone before them and after, and somebody's got to get the blame for why I can't have exactly what I want all the time and every time I howl for it.



But then, that's pretty much how I felt in 1985 too, give or take a problem or two from the list directly above, and, despite what I believed when I started to write this, things are so much better now than they were then. There's been progress, there's been quality, and if the world of mundane mainstream superhero comics wasn't consumed in a healing Last Judgement and a more perfect era set into train afterwards, well, it was never going to, was it? And I can't judge the success or otherwise of a genre by whether or not it's lived up to my naive preconceptions of 25 years ago, although I fear, without realising it, that I may well have been doing so for longer than I'd ever care to admit.



9.



What if the End Of History came and went and nobody noticed, and everybody just carried on, and did a pretty fair job too?



What then?





Next off: "Ultimatum". And then perhaps a look at the end of the week at some of the new week's books, and there's a piece on the Broons strips from World War II that's perculating. Why not? If I know nothing, it means that there's lots to get round to and pay attention to. My thanks to everyone that's left a comment. Should anyone care to join in here or in the older threads, please do. Every word's appreciated, as is every reader who pops in and doesn't feel that the comment boxes are for them. Why should they be? My splendid best wishes to anyone who's read down this far, and to everyone who hasn't too, from the Splendid Wife's Central Command Bunker here in the windswept East of England!





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1.

I don't know why, but I do still want to do it. Though it's just about the very last thing that anybody needs, I keep wishing that I wrote a weekly review column about the latest comic book releases.

Nothing too epic, of course. A few thousand words at most. I'd grab two or three comics from the racks when they're fresh out of those Diamond boxes and then, of an evening, take a few hours and a couple of hundred words and puzzle some sense out for myself from all of what's happening this week.

Not exactly "First thought, best thought.", but as close to the principle of spontaneity as I'm ever likely to get.

It sounds like fun, if your definition of "fun" can stretch to the idea of writing a weekly comic book review column.

2.

(a) I didn't drive all those miles to "Abstract Sprocket", Norwich's own very fine comic shop, because I was thinking of writing some reviews.
(b) The Earth orbits around the sun.

One of the above is incorrect. Can you tell which one it is?

3.

I thought I was doing quite well in keeping up with things. But leafing through after-the-fact collected editions bound together months beyond their initial publication, and reading them in isolation from the monthly competition faced by each individual issue in the peace of our quiet front room, says nothing about the frenzied evolutionary pond-fight that a wall of new comics constitutes. The it's-all-over-now trade paperback no more gives the sense of the throat-slicing and grappling for position that's each week's new comics than the distant roar of a crowd at Lord's explains the nature of the drama of a last-day Ashes Test.

There's so many superhero books and they're all shouting at one another at the same time as they're shouting at their prospective readers.

"Me! Me! I've got the end of the world! I've got it twice! Superheroes are dying by the dozen in me!"

Muscles, costumes, grimace and pose!

I paid for a handful of what I was kindly assured were last week's bestsellers and tried not to stagger as I trod the seven steps to outside, where the sunlit summer street felt as relaxing on the eyes as a pitch black bedroom to the badly hungovered.

4.

Safe at home, I took the "Fantastic Four" 582, Avengers 4, and Batman 702, and, laying each a safe distance from the obviously combustible others, set out to discover how I might review them in the unlikely event of a column being what I really wanted to do.

It was, shall I say, something of an intense experience.

Time travel! Time travel within time travel! Multiple character incarnations! Alternative realities and mass continuity implants! More time travel! Iron Man stabbing Iron Man! Dr Doom killing Reed Richard's dad to save Reed Richard's dad! Batman shooting himself in the head, falling through time, and becoming an amnesiac wall-painting caveman! Techno-babble, a reference to a Bill Mantlo Marvel Team-Up, and a permanent sense of intense foreboding only interrupted by the arrival of absolute disaster!

So much intensity, and so little of pacing and quiet, and I'm struggling to breathe let alone comprehend what's going on. How confused, for example, could that "Batman" possibly leave me, how little beyond the fact of continuity shenanigans in "Fantastic Four" could I grasp? Where were the reversals of mood and the second and third plot strands in "Avengers"?

Martian Tripods, dead Gods and endless reality revisions! Same as it ever was, but exceedingly and excessively and explicitly more so! All the time, even more, and shouting too!

5.

In the winter of 1977, my imposing and surreptitiously benevolent art teacher Mr Brettingham took me aside and asked me, "What is this Punk Rock, Smith?".

I didn't have the common sense to be flattered that he'd chosen to ask me, but I was immodest enough to pontificate about faux-nihilism and the charge of extreme volume to him.

Mr Brettingham, I realise now, had probably reached the point where the speed of cultural change had exceeded his will to engage with it. His curiosity could now be sated by 5 minutes of Bill Grundy fighting with the Sex Pistols on the TV and the idiot babbling of a half-wit art student.

Yet he'd undoubtedly been something of a radical in his day, and he still carried the telling if subtle markers of a determination not to entirely compromise with bourgeois sensibilities. His white hair, for example, revealed the faint tint of blue and scarlet dye when illuminated from behind by the sun. He obviously had another life, and, beyond the odd and regrettable schoolboy gags cracked way behind his back, I think many of us rather respected him for that.

But the noise, and the fuss, of what he called "popular" music was certainly not invigorating or informing to him beyond a passing curiosity, and he felt no need to maintain the mental sprint necessary to stay in front of the endless "one damn thing after another".

6.

I'd quite lost track of how comics have for a very long time existed simultaneously in two quite distinct forms in the market-place. On the one hand, of course, they're the contents of the to-be-considered-at-leisure collections, and on the other, they're the atomised individual issues that live or die for one key week every month in what's literally mortal combat with their fellows on the comic book shop's shelves.

Scream too quietly, kill too sedately, explode too few full moons and there's 60 other books and more screaming louder, killing more intensely, and exploding entire galaxies with all the full-in-your-face-with-a-cape intensity that their creators can distill in their backstreet comic-book-crack laboratories.

Everybody knows this, of course, and I did too. But I wasn't conscious of it.

I was thinking of comics as literature, which of course they are, to a greater or lesser degree, but I was missing that fact that they're also and equally these ever-evolving weapons of economic warfare in a constantly-shrinking and strangely specialised market-place.

Look out! Incoming!

7.

It's as if we bought Hollywood blockbuster films by the five-minute segment, and consumed them according to how intensely attention-grabbing and lid-retractingly spectacular each of those five minutes were.

And if that were so, and even more so than the movies' excesses of today, those films would be nothing but 9-D glasses, blinding and gory combat, and constant if improbable sex. There wouldn't even be those slim seconds-long moments of breath-gathering contemplation that punctuate that scene of giant brawling robots from this one anymore.

Full-on, all the time, for all of your life.

8.

But I do want to understand each one damn thing and the another that follows. And no matter how fond of the memory of my old art teacher I am, I can't relish the prospect of my collaring some whippersnapper and asking of him; "This metatextual predominance within the modern superhero epic; do you not find it somewhat repetitive and alienating?"

9.

I. It is of course quite impossible to fully recall the shock of the new, but I wanted to try. I thought that if I could show myself that even the very best of the comic books of the past, oh, 25 years were similarly careless of the casual reader's needs and saturated in their own form of spectacularism, then I'd know that the problem was mine and not that of today's monthly market-leaders. For if I was willing to put up with confusion and indulgence in the likes of "Sandman", "Watchmen" and even "Kingdom Come", then I surely ought to be open to doing so with "Avengers" # 4 and "Batman" # 702?

And I even did my best to fix the argument by beginning with "Brief Lives", one of those stretches of "Sandman" which I'd skipped lazily through when it was published and never returned to since. I picked chapter 7 to read again, of which I could recall not a single panel, and of which I presumed that the progression of the plot would've long overtaken Mr Gaiman's desire to constantly recap events for new readers. (I assumed that chapter 7 of a very long story is probably well past the point where a writer believes that new readers are likely to appear and need to be accommodated.)

Of course, "Sandman" wasn't ever a superhero book, so I wasn't comparing like with like, but it did carry with it a famously complex and self-referential narrative, and it would surely prove, I thought to myself, as confusing as first reading as anything today. And if Neil Gaiman can be knocked for obscurity and indulgence, then today's books in a far more popularist genre could hardly be blamed for doing so either.


II. But I was quite wrong. The script for Sandman 47 may have been primarily concerned with furthering a very long story, but it was so carefully and skillfully constructed that it functioned both a stand-alone episode and as a chapter for a then-coming collected edition. Within the first few pages, following a teaser involving a splendidly scornful talking dog, the prospective new reader has been provided with all the necessary details of who's who, what they want and how they intend to get it. And it's all achieved without info-dumps, but through subtly informing dialogue masked by engaging characterisation.

Nor is that one single chapter of a very long story concerned with, or padded out by, spectacle. There are no gratuitous and story-slowing full-page spreads, not even of the Sandman looking moody with a stormy sky behind him and a billowing cloak rendered with great fetishistic detail. Lesser creators than Mr Gaiman and Ms Thompson might have turned Destiny's garden into a moody two-page indulgence, for example, but here it's shown only as an informing backdrop to the action. And the "action" itself isn't any constant blur of movement and threats, but the product of skillfully placed enigmas and endearing personalities placed in conflict with themselves if not each other.

This was, as millions might have told me, a comic book which could and did serve perfectly as both stand-alone comic book and as a perfectly-integrated chapter of a collected edition.

10.

But the Sandman isn't a superhero comic, and, no doubt it's unfair to not compare like with like. And so I reached for Mark Waid and Alex Ross's "Kingdom Come", an acknowledged milestone of the genre and one unlikely, one would presume, to be so very different from its kin on the shelves today.

And there's certainly aspects of "Kingdom Come" which seem of a kind with many of the superhero stories of 2010. It's a unremittingly, though purposefully, grim and glum tale, with little attempt to vary the emotional tone from scene to scene. And there's no escaping from the fact that much of the book's appeal lies in those great obsessional and lingering shots of familiar-but-stranged-up superheroes and stage-sets, such as the super-villain gulag, the full page shot of which adds nothing to the content of the story or the progression of the plot which a single-panel establishing shot couldn't.

But the story itself is quite superbly transparent. I'd be shocked if even an ill-meaning reader determined to be confused by it could generate any bafflement at all. The script is scrupulously careful to make sure that every single scene is explained in terms of itself as well as related not just to the tale's wider plot, but to its themes too. And if the device of using old Norman McCay as an omnipresent narrator can grate at times with portentous dialogue and the repetition of his despair and frustration, he's an endearing character in himself. Indeed, the tale itself makes perfect sense despite its own complexity and the challenges of distraction posed by the marvelously dense and continuity-obsessed artwork.

11.

And there's no confusion at all for even the neophyte reader where the penultimate book of "Watchmen" is concerned either. Just as with Mr Gaiman, Mr Moore spends his first few pages delivering the key information for any latecomers to "Watchman" with a kind diligence. "Who are these folks, in and out of the snow?", "Where are they?" and "What are their goals?" are all precisely nailed in just three pages. Indeed, from the perspective of a shocking can-it-really-be-twenty-five years after the tale's publication, what's remarkable is not the much-discussed complexity of the story, but rather how carefully the story's been deliberately structured to leave no reader behind. (A long-future generation possessing nothing but chapter 11 could quite effectively re-create the bones of previous issues from Veidt's speeches alone.) And if the few disconcerting panels of "The Black Freighter" placed later in the tale might puzzle a completely new reader, then everything else is so well-explained and so well-worked that "Watchmen" can almost read more like a textbook discussion of how to construct a comic book than, in places, a comic book itself. It certainly does seem to utterly demolish the argument that complex stories can't be recapped in elegant and productive ways without recourse to the oh-too-familiar flashback or the gratuitous info-dump.

Neither does "Watchmen" bear any sign of the collapse of the superhero narrative into a sequence of pin-ups, poses and grand stage-sets. Where spectacle does enter the tale, it's absolutely subservient to the plot, as in the scenes acted out in Veidt's Antarctic lair, where every aspect of design and execution tells us more about the story rather than slowing it for a money-shot or two. (The painting of Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot, for example, may seem at first to be telling us of Adrian's opulence, but it's swiftly obvious that it's been lightly buried in the sub-text to also warn us of some drastic and destructive action approaching.)

In fact, there's something shocking on this reading about how little relation today's frontline mainstream books bear to "Watchman". Hailed by nearly all and sundry as the masterpiece of the superhero genre, there's actually a clearer line of descent from Lee and Kirby's work than there is from the more recent "Watchmen" of Moore and Gibbons. Of course, Lee and Kirby wrote and drew a good deal more comics books, but even so, wouldn't we expect such a constantly-proclaimed classic as "Watchman" to have lent more of its form and content to the very genre it appeared to define, and in doing so, once fleetingly seemed to threaten to extinguish?

12.

So, at least where those three much admired comic book milestones are concerned, the past is very different from today when the issues of clarity and visual self-indulgence are concerned. My hypothesis, so unethically designed to give me encouragement to engage with the new, by establishing that it's no more challenging than the past, is patently refuted. For good or ill, the long years since the publication of "Watchmen" have seen a regrettable transformation in attitudes to comprehensibility and artistic discipline where the single issues of longer story-arcs are concerned.

Or at least, that might be what's happened. But perhaps, for example, other chapters of "Sandman" might find Mr Gaiman and his co-conspirators gratifying themselves in great crescendos of wasteful and shallow pages. I simply don't recall. And perhaps every week's new deliveries don't bring with them a tsunami of paint-blisteringly lurid superhero epics. (*3) I couldn't swear one way or another. And maybe I'll re-read this week's comics again after a day's breathing space and find they're not so challenging after all.

But I can't say, because I don't know. Yet.

All of which might, by accident and certainly not design, be one way of answering my own question right at the beginning of this blog, though you have my word that no such easy symmetry was imagined before I started writing this. Perhaps the point of a regular review column is that it wouldn't give a blogger time to be reflective, to fall back into well-considered paradigms in order to explain the inconsistencies of this and the mysteries of that. In fact, perhaps reviews might not be a good way of grappling with each fresh wave of new books and making sense of them at all. Instead, a review might be a good way of reminding the blogger even more forcibly that he knows nothing, and that he needs to think alot harder and dig alot deeper before opening his mouth or engaging his typing finger.


*3:- I've certainly reviewed quieter comics by Mr Bendis, and more comprehensible ones by Mr Morrison, and you can find those mostly favourable reviews in the archive.

I have no idea why it seemed a good thing to post a piece about how I failed to make sense of the very things I started out trying to make sense of. But in the end, it felt like a healthy thing to do, to post a blog where the blogger owns up to hitting several brick walls and failing to come to any kind of conclusion. I hope it was worth your while, and to those who did and those who didn't persevere, a personal and warm "huzzah!" is echoing out from the Splendid Wife's Central Command Bunker at this very moment.

Next, and soon; the conclusion to the Crisis/Onslaught/Ultimatum piece!


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