skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Earlier this week I read Kevin Smith’s new collected Batman tale, Cacophony, which takes the villain Onomatopoeia from his run on Green Arrow from about ten years ago (!) and sends him after the Caped Crusader. Smith acknowledges in his introduction the series’ main weakness, the excessive dialogue in the first issue, but he then overcorrects in the final two, leaving too much unsaid. The guy can write dialogue, and while I cou
ld have done without the reference to a green merkin, the shift made the later issues seem too sparse.
Anyway, Onomatopoeia really serves as a catalyst for a Batman/Joker story in which the Joker is shot, the bullet nicking his aorta, and Batman must decide whether to seek help for him or pursue Onomatopoeia. Knowing what one does about Batman, that he is a thoroughly good person despite the fact that he beats the shit out of petty criminals on a regular basis and spends millions of dollars on gadgets that could otherwise be used to clean up Gotham’s slums, it’s obvious what decision he makes. Even with Jim Gordon arguing forcefully that the Joker is a horrible person who killed a school full of children earlier in the series and should be left to bleed out, Batman can’t do it. This leads to a pretty good scene at the series’ end where the Joker, filled with anti-psychotics, explains to Batman that he will never be at peace until he is able to kill him. So the dilemma is that Batman can’t live with himself by killing the Joker, but if he had killed him then the Joker would be at peace and Gotham would be (relatively) safe, or if he himself was killed then the Joker would be at peace. Not terribly compelling, but Smith did a reasonably good job with it.
But what bothers me is that such a conversation is so blindingly obvious that it needn’t have happened. Of course Batman couldn’t kill the Joker, for his character is good while the Joker is evil. There’s no grey area, and thus by not protecting all life, the character would be forever tarnished. But placing such a virtuous character in such a situation makes for a disingenuous story, because who among us wouldn’t let the Joker bleed out in that situation? Batman didn’t shoot him, in fact he let the shooter escape to save him. So we, the audience, are Jim Gordon arguing for real justice and the understanding that moral absolutes are at times counterproductive, while Batman remains better than humanity. This of course may mean that as a result of his moral stance, Batman isn’t so much better than humanity, but that he stands apart from it as an Other.
This sort of thing isn’t unique to Batman and comic characters, but also infiltrates the realm of the utopian future society in Star Trek. So-called evolved humanity at times seems so distant from current humanity as to be unrelatable, something that obviously doesn’t click with viewers as exemplified with Voyager and Enterprise. The Federation has moral absolutes about how other people should be treated, how a society should act, so it prevents them from violating said morals for the greater good. In fact, some of the most popular and resonating episodes of Star Trek involve someone breaking the moral code to effect a necessary change, like the members of Section 31 or Captain Sisko conspiring with Garak to bring the Romulans into the Dominion War.
I don’t want to get into a metaphysical discussion about why the ends can sometimes justify the means, not just because it is an unwinnable argument but also because it’s not important here. I merely want to make the point that by setting up characters or societies with moral absolutes that are inviolable, an honest portrayal of the human experience will be near impossible to convey, for while we may one day hope to be like Batman or to live in the utopian Federation, it nevertheless will be difficult to ever relate to these types of characters as their experiences and worldview are necessarily so different from our own.
Over the past few months, I have pondered whether or not to cede this forum to wherever it is all the abandoned internet observations go to die. However, I still have a readership of a few dedicated friends and colleagues and I do not want this forum, and the specific connections it engenders, to go away and therefore be of no use to me or anyone else. At the same time, a resounding emptiness has settled over the intellectual part of my brain as I have finished my thesis and all that remain are the formatting changes the graduate college will invariably cast 
upon me whether I followed their style guide to the letter or not. However, such a project leaves many future avenues for investigation, hopefully by me as I further my academic career, so I have decided to use this space to write, in short pieces, about the questions I hope to answer.
My thesis dealt with the influence of the digital on print, specifically how such influence affects composition and narrative in contemporary novels like House of Leaves and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that contain a variety of visual media. Meanwhile, I have become a fan of the films of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, in which narratives are related in a nonsequential and often disjointed manner, especially in 21 Grams. Rudimentary research revealed to me the existence of a genre of film called hyperlink cinema, of which Inarritu's films are primary examples. As I already am interested in what Jay David Bolter has called the 'remediation' of the digital into other media, such a term suggests that hyperlinks, which are a component of hypertexts, are being remediated into film and influencing their narratives. I am skeptical of a straightforward interpretation such as this, but it bears investigation, and I will hopefully be conducting it here with the intention of presenting a paper at the 2010 PCA/ACA Conference in St. Louis this March.
With my primary research interests centering around the graphic construction of narrative, it should surprise no one that I have a scholarly interest in comic books. In yet another attempt to develop a conference paper for the University of Florida's ImageNext (which I hope to attend assuming I can get a travel grant), I want to investigate the use of the nine-panel (or even six-panel) page in contemporary comics, especially as it is used to as individual panels and a larger cohesive picture at the same time. This is much less grounded in theory at this stage, and much more supported by my singular amazement at one particular page in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. But as proposals are due at the end of the year, I should hopefully stumble upon something before too long.
Several colleagues have expressed surprise at my willingness to put all my scholarly ideas in a public forum before I take steps to insure they are published (thereby giving me all the credit). I find that a bit of an antiquated view, and think the benefits of outside discussion greatly outweighs the slim chance that my work will be hijacked or plagiarized. In addition, writing is a lonely business, and working out ideas here will allow me to keep plodding towards my ultimate goal of working full time as an academic, hopefully helping me deal with the fact that I have to work more and more in my service industry job just to make ends meet. Help keep the eyes on the prize, so to speak.
Please, let me know what you think about this decision, and more than that, feedback will do nothing but help me as I implement these plans. Many of you are academics, or at least academically inclined, and I suspect that you have an idea or two about such topics already. In fact, I would be open to using this space with other authors who are attempting to jumpstart their own research in a similar fashion, assuming of course that the content was relatively the same.
With alternate versions of our heroes being popular in just about every television show ever broadcasted, it’s no surprise that the same would hold true for a franchise like Star Trek, who has gone to that well many a time. Last year, Pocket Books published six short novels set entirely within universes that had been irrevocably altered due to some major event with which readers are familiar having a different outcome. Overall, I enjoyed the two collections (which I reviewed here and here), and look forward to a third that hopefully will be produced next year.
So I guess it is no surprise that IDW would choose the Myriad Universe format for its first ‘crossover’ 
with Pocket Books. Entitled The Last Generation, the five issue collection tells the story of what Jean-Luc Picard’s universe would be like had Captain Kirk not stopped the planned Klingon assassination of the Federation president in Star Trek VI. As you might imagine, it doesn’t turn out so well.
Klingons conquered Earth in the interim, and Will Riker and Geordi LaForge have somehow come across an android named Data and are trying to get him into Resistance hands while keeping him away from Klingon ones. Their cell is none other than that run by Jean-Luc Picard, a single ‘father’ for his nephew, Rene, after his brother was killed by Klingons. Everyone else is pretty much in the resistance cell too: Beverly Crusher, a battle hardened Wesley, Yar, O’Brien, etc. Even Ro Laren, though how a Bajoran made it into an Earth resistance cell against Klingon imperialism is never addressed. Though not necessarily a bad start, it seems like only a slight deviation from Yesterday’s Enterprise, where the Federation was about to fall to the Klingons rather than it already being the case.
Just before Riker and LaForge lose Data to the Klingons, Captain Sulu of Excelsior shows up to save him. Apparently he has a cloaking device and has been fighting the Klingons for seven decades even though his ship looks like it is in perfect condition. Data was apparently created to be able to detect errors in the timestream, and he has pinpointed the death that Kirk failed to prevent as the deciding factor that hey must risk everything to go back and fix. Thus the crux of the series relies on a plot device that has been well used before now, and the obligatory twist at the end makes little sense. (I know that character is insane, but he doesn’t seem to ever work in the stories in which he is used.)
There’s a lot not to like about the execution, especially the way Wesley is treated. He is just a teenager but a good fighter who looks up to Picard as a father except when he doesn’t. After his girlfriend is killed, we are treated to a completely unbelievable scene in which he blames Picard. Later he shaves his hair into a Mohawk and puts on warrior paint, convinces O’Brien and others that Picard is crazy and they should subvert his plan to go back in time and change history, and then screws everything up before being taught a lesson at the end.
While I can handle a slight derivation of an old plot, writer Andrew Steven Harris seems to have missed the whole point of Pocket’s series. Rather than taking characters we know from an alternate universe and have the
m attempt to put right what once went wrong, the idea was to see how characters we know would have been different if history had gone a different direction. The six novels did this in different ways, but were about characters in their own universe, not in a changed one. By turning his whole story on trying to change what happened differently, Harris loses what made the whole concept so interesting and dooms his project to be written off as a rehash of a plot we’ve seen ten too many times. It reduces the emotion we might have for these characters because their entire history is treated as imaginary and derivative. And if Harris just had to go this way, why not complicate the issue a bit: sure Picard could change the past, but that would mean a universe where his nephew is dead because of a fire. Sure the life Rene has now isn’t ideal, but at least it’s a life.
Old DC Star Trek artist Gordon Purcell pencils the series, and he is as good as he was back in the old days. The characters look remarkably like their actual counterparts, with the exception of Wesley who just didn’t really work for me. That said, the layouts are occasionally confusing, with important panel divisions being lost in the gutter. The series also had some creative cover designs, like a refashioning of the sixth movie poster as well as the reimagining of the X-Men ‘Days of Future Past’ cover that is shown here.
All in all, a disappointing execution of a story that seems to have been misconceived in the first place.
Jeff Smith’s comic saga Bone is one of the best fantasy stories I have ever read; sort of Lord of the Rings meets The Smurfs. After wanting to pick up the ancillary volumes for some time, I finally did this week. It’s a mixed bag, with neither coming close to the magic of the core titles.
Jeff Smith penned Rose and brought in Charles Vess to do the artwork in a prequel starring t
he title character, who readers will know better as Grandma Ben. Basically, this story fills us in on exactly how Rose’s sister Briar becomes the embodiment of the Lord of the Locusts as depicted in the main comic. Unfortunately, nothing much is added to what we already knew, and as such the story is a bit disappointing. In fact, the only major characters not to be shown in the main comic are two dogs that Rose can speak with telepathically.
Vess’s artwork is different stylistically from Smith’s, and it is a better match since the story lacks the humor prevalent in Bone. But it caused this reader to feel like he was reading something that didn’t mesh well with the original saga, something that took characters he knew and interpreted them differently. The magic of Smith's series is in the blend of the cartoonish with the Bone cousins and the rat creatures paired with the fantasy element of just about everything else. That blend isn’t here, Vess’s artwork is anything but cartoonish, and certain events were surprisingly graphic and violent for what is aimed at a younger audience.
If Rose is missing humor, Stupid, Stupid Rat-Tails has it in abundance. Written by Tom Sniegoski and drawn by Smith, this comic manages to seem familiar and yet new, with the founder of Boneville, Big Johnson Bone, as the lead character. As he explores with a newly won monkey, Big Johnson must help a collection of baby animals find their parents who have been taken by the rat creatures. And unlike Rose, we learn things here, like why the rat creatures are depicted as having no tails.
Obviously intended for a younger audience than the main series, this volume can make one a bit weary at times. Big Johnson is the stereotypical exaggerator, and while Sniegoski manages to make this work in action scenes, it doesn’t so much work in the relative peace at the start of the comic. That said, this would make a nice volume for a younger reader, especially as it includes another story called 'Riblet,' about a young boar who bullies the other baby animals until he turns his antics on the rat creatures.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any more Bone-related material out there for me to look into, which is sad because I enjoyed the original collection so much. I’ll be glad when Jeff Smith puts out some new material, hopefully before too much longer.
Japanese culture, at least here in the west, seems to be portrayed as fairly monolithic. When the current lament of lazy youth is heard, it refers to the seemingly inability that Magnavox or some other company will have in maintaining their cutting edge efficiency. Perhaps for this reason, the stories of sewer workers and prostitutes’ husbands in Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s The Push Man are so shocking; we see a side of Japanese society that obviously exists, but is almost always hidden. In a culture of conformity like Japan, an individual can be more lonely and isolated than one c
an imagine.
The sixteen stories here are consistent in their style. Many are set in an industrial Japanese city and feature a mostly-silent man who works in a factory. For example, in the first story, ‘Piranha,’ a factory worker comes home to his wife, and she tells him she wants a million yen to start her own business. He reads in the newspaper about an insurance payout when a bus rolls over, and the next morning he thrusts his arm into his machine. He gets a million yen as compensation for the ‘accident,’ and his wife is happy. He now stays home while she works, and entertains himself by buying some piranha fish. Soon she starts complaining about him sitting around all day looking at his fish, and threatens to leave him. He becomes furious and grabs her arm, forcing it in the fish tank. When he lets go, it is covered in blood, and she leaves him. He kicks over the fish tank and goes searching for a new job at another factory, this time one especially for the disabled.
All of the stories are dark in tone, showing people hurting each other, failing to communicate, cheating, selling themselves or having their hopes dashed. It is often sexual desire or the duplicity of women that cause men to rush into disaster. However Tatsumi is not a misogynist. The men's downfall stems not only from women, but also from their own lust, aggression and stupidity, and so the author is an equal-opportunity misanthrope.
Like all Japanese comics, they were originally printed to be read from right to left, but as editor Adrian Tomine explains in the introduction, such a layout is usually met hostilely by Western audiences, so Tatsumi rearranged each panel to be read in the traditional Western way. This works fairly well, as the frames are all independent of one another, yet I think I would have preferred to read it in the original layout. I disagree that Westerners are inherently hostile to the format; take a look at the Manga section of the bookstore the next time you’re there.
I decided to read Tatumi’s work because I realize that I have almost no knowledge of Eastern comics and wanted to rectify that. However, instead of reading authentic Japanese comics, I got the Americanized version that doesn’t help me gain any insight into how the comics are laid out, a particular research interest of mine. I suppose I will have to seek out an education in Eastern layout through another artist.
Tomine edited this book as well as others, expected to be released by Drawn & Quarterly once a year. While I enjoyed this collection, the brevity of the pieces coupled with reading them in a condensed timeframe caused a bit of overkill. In the second collection, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, the stories are more substantial, and I am looking forward to that.
Though it took a while to track down a copy, I managed to lay my hands on Tales of the Sinestro Corps this week and was fairly pleased with what I found. This collection reprints the companion material that was released during the Sinestro Corps War series last year, which I discussed here and here. Yet aside from the content in this volume, I have begun to have serious questions about how the various comics from such events are compiled and then marketed in the collected editions.
Throughout the Kyle Rayner arc of the Sinestro Corps War, much emphasis is given to a painting from Kyle’s childhood that was so important to him that other Lanterns took great steps to get it for him after he managed to fight off Parallax. Yet not until the Ion special reprinted here do we find out just what is so meaningful about the painting, something that a dedicated reader of the individual titles would have already known because though the story takes places within Kyle’s mind as his body is held hostage by Parallax, it takes place concurrently with the main action and so this individual issue was released at a time to make reading the concurrent events side by side would have more resonance and make more sense.
Yet when DC put together these volumes, the Ion special was reprinted here is what is essentially a collection of side-stories from the Sinestro Corps War. As such, some of these tales were much less moving than they could have been. The specials involving the Cyborg Superman and Superman-Prime also are told somewhat concurrently with the main action, but from the perspective of the villains. There is a historical component to the issues to help orient readers unfamiliar with what has come before, but most of the content is germane to the actual storyline of the war.
What I am getting at is that with the way such comic events are published, with a main narrative and then half a dozen secondary ones, simply compiling the issues into a linear form doesn’t really do the material justice. While I understand that dropping the Ion special into the middle of one of the first two volumes might have hampered the flow and tension, not including it robs one of the main character’s arcs of necessary content.
The problem is that there isn’t a logical way to consolidate all this content. At first I was going to recommend that instead of two volumes and a companion one, the Sinestro Corps War be printed in three volumes, but to be fair there is a lot of content here that would do more harm than good in the primary narrative. But what I have realized is that this story wasn’t conceived to sell collected editions, at least not primarily. Instead, the idea was to sell individual issues, and from what I have been able to find, it was a huge success.
In many ways I am beginning to reconsider whether or not I want to continue to wait for the collected editions or instead start hitting the comic shop every week gain and read such stories the way they were conceived to be read. As I anxiously await the Rage of the Red Lanterns and Agent Orange collected stories that lead directly into Blackest Night, I am delaying myself from reading something available right now, in a purer form. It had been my thoughts that comic series were being conceived more and more as what would sell as a collected edition, and while this is true, it hasn’t changed the way that stories are being told all that much. Apparently, direct sales of individual issues are the lifeblood of superhero comics and much more influential than I had realized.
While I enjoyed Superman: The Movie quite a bit when I saw it as a kid, Christopher Reeve was never the embodiment of Superman for me. Instead, that fell to George Reeves, the actor who played Superman in the 1950s television show that I watched with my father many, many times growing up. I say this because while I am intrigued by Richard Donner’s mythos about Superman that was shown in the first film and in much of Superman II, I am by no means a purist.
When I found out last week that Donner had co-scripted a Superman tale with Geoff Johns, titled Last Son, I took steps to secure a copy with all due haste. Reading that the story involved General Zod, I was expecting essentially Donner’s Superman III (sans Richard Pryor). Again, his vision isn’t scripture to me, but Superman is a character so transcendent that no one mythos can contain him. Like the old Greek myths, Superman’s tale can be told in many different ways and still be true to the character.
The story starts promisingly, with Superman reminded by the Fortress of Solitude’s AI, in the guise of his father Jor-El, that despite his appearance he is not human. Returning to Metropolis, he stops a strange meteor from crashing into the city only to find within it a young boy. After the boy is analyzed by the government and later kidnapped by Superman to prevent him from being harmed, he and Lois briefly discuss adopting him and then name him Christopher.
We get another dose of Donner when three more ships/meteors crash, and who would emerge but Zod, Ursa, and Non. Enraged by their depiction in the Fortress of Solitude’s AI, they vow to destroy Superman and take their place as rulers of Earth. Eventually, they trap Superman in the Phantom Zone from which they have emerged.
Trapped, Superman witnesses the Kryptonian invasion, and he can't do anything to stop it. Mon-El, whom Clark sent to the Zone when he was younger, appears before him. Last I heard, Mon-El was named M’Onel, and was a member of the Legion in the 30th century. He explains what is going on and then using one of the same ships/meteors, Superman returns from the Zone to find the city enslaved and the buildings transforming into Sunstone structures. He turns to Lex Luthor for help against the criminals when he is attacked by Bizarro, the Parasite and Metallo.
As the squad moves out, Metallo uses various forms of kryptonite to kill the Kryptonian outlaws. When using gold, a half dozen of the criminals fall out of the sky with a ‘splat. When using red, one criminal's DNA shifts irregularly changing him into a bug, allowing Metallo to step on his head and crush it. Parasite takes pleasure in siphoning Kryptonian powers from many of the escapees. Bizarro goes toe-to-toe with Non, another mindless brute, as they exchange grunts and tests of strength. Luthor goes after Zod's main fortress, seeking to have the Phantom Zone forcefully ‘recall’ all who had been inside of it. Speaking with Lois, she discovers that as a side effect, Luthor intends to trap Superman within the Zone along with all of the escaped criminals.
For some reason, he doesn’t get sucked back into the Phantom Zone, but Christopher must return to close the breach. Later, speaking with Mon-El, Superman asks for help in locating the boy in the vast Zone.
Since Johns is such a pro, it I hard to see Donner’s input into the script. What seems like his touch could be read as homage, so it is quite hard to critique the director’s role. But what makes this story really suffer is that it is so bogged down in post-Infinite Crisis changes that a casual reader like myself was often lost. When did Mon-El get trapped in the Phantom Zone? When did multicolored forms of Kryptonite reappear? (Though in their defense, the way it was introduced with the ‘splats’ of the Kryptonians was pretty cool.) Since reestablishing these things is of some importance, it’s hard to fault the inclusion, yet for something supposedly so big (from a marketing standpoint at least), perhaps this tale should have been told out of continuity. Yet even as I type this, I realize that I was really excited to think about how different Superman’s life would be if he had a son, and since it was an in-continuity tale, I was interested from that perspective.
There are some other issues as well, most noticeably Luthor’s claim that if he weren’t constantly being foiled he would have cured cancer and ‘helped those who can’t walk walk again.’ First of all, this sort of wink to Christopher Reeve’s unfortunate quadriplegia is a bit unsettling, yet I am pretty sure that Reeve was already dead when this comic went to press. It just struck me as in poor taste.
In all, Last Son is disappointing mostly because it doesn’t decide what it wants to be: a follow-up to Superman II or a story reestablishing things post-Crisis. Trying to do both made both halves suffer. That said, I would be interested in seeing Donner do some more work with comics in the future.
Since reading a few of the very short stories by J. Robert Lennon in Michael Chabon's Best American Short Stories, I've been yearning for the full collection, Pieces for the Left Hand, to be published here in America. It finally arrived last month, and the other 92 stories (called 'anecdotes' on the front cover) don't disappoint. Lennon's storie
s are a bit unsettling for the very reason that they are so entertaining. An escalation in a high school rivalry leads to kidnapping. A woman who used to allow some mice to be killed in traps in order to save others is haunted when as a obstetrician she must advise mothers of multiples to cull a few to let the others live. You see how it is.
While the collection is enjoyable, the short nature of the anecdotes can make sustained reading problematic. Best enjoyed the way they were presented in BASS, my advice would be to only read a handful at a time. Rapid succession of the stories causes them to lose resonance, and sometimes the best thing to read before going to sleep is something just unsettling enough to make you pray for calm dreams.I've never kept up with the X-Men on any sort of regular basis, but browsing a few of the recent collections has piqued my interest. Endangered Species takes place after the Scarlet Witch has reduced the number of mutants in the world from tens of millions to a couple of hundred based solely upon her words. Beast is consumed with the desire to preserve his race, going so far as to solicit help from some of the X-Men's staunchest foes. While the story is fairly moving and one cannot help but empathize with Hank McCoy, the inclusion of so many characters out of any broader context was very confusing. This is especially true of Dark Beast, a sort of mirror universe Beast who has dark brown fur and no conscience w
hen it comes to experimentation. As one might expect, the mutant/Jew angle is played up and after so many times down this road it just isn't as powerful as it once was. All this said, I am taking effort to go back and read the tales that preceded this one in order to help make sense of the current Marvel universe. Perhaps this will change my opinion of the collection, but for now I give it a moderate thumbs up.
There is only one reason that I watched Charlie Wilson's War earlier this week: Aaron Sorkin. He writes some of the best dialogue being filmed today, but you wouldn't know it from watching this film. Tom Hanks plays Rep. Charlie Wilson from Texas who pretty much single-handedly arms the freedom fighters in Afghanistan in their battle against their Soviet oppressors. An interesting story, one that seems pretty much accurate to the true events, but just lacks the sort of verve one wants in a movie experience. Julia Roberts plays a completely unbelievable rich Houston woman, while Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in another fantastic performance as CIA agent Gust Avrakotos. If for anything, you should watch this film for his performance.
Maybe it isn't fair that I am against it Sorkin's script just because it didn't dance like The American President or The West Wing even though it's about politics. But what really didn't work for me was the sort of moral stuck to the end. After the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall fell, Americans wouldn't spend even a few million dollars to help the Afghans rebuild their infrastructure: read here schools and hospitals. As a result, Sorkin draws the obvious line between those decisions almost twenty years ago and the state of Afghanistan today. Anyone who has read anything about the Mideast country in the past seven years already knows this, and playing out this little piece of history, despite its entertainment value, didn't serve to drive home the point any more directly for this viewer. Instead, I felt like my intelligence was insulted.
I am a big fan of Brian Azzarello. His name will make me pick up a comic that I otherwise have no interest in reading. Perfect example is For Tomorrow, a Superman collaboration with Jim Lee that came out a few years ago. As a kid I used to be a huge fan of Superman, but as I have gotten older there just seems to be a missing element to the character that bothers me. I understand that he got the great values from his Kansan parents, but there has to be
something deeper as to why he acts the way he does, something that so many have tried and failed to convey before, and something that Azzarello and Lee attempt again here.
While Superman is off in space, millions of people across Earth suddenly disappear. He returns too late to stop the disappearances that devastate the world, but discovers quickly that the global tragedy struck all-too close for the Man of Steel. Lois Lane is gone and Superman is so despondent about his failings that he visits a priest for an ongoing confessional that runs the length of the story.
Superman is always most interesting when his superiority is put into question, and Azzarello poses the perfect question at the start: what happens when the Man of Steel fails? It’s not like losing a fight with the Parasite or something, but instead that he was powerless to prevent a global act of terror. As many of us felt after 9/11, the big guy is left questioning his abilities and purpose. This is played out in his confessional type conversations with the priest and is stirringly effective.
Yet the problem with For Tomorrow, as with so many other stories, is that the mystery is more interesting than the truth. Since the first volume is primarily told in a flashback, the second catches up to the present and we lose the troubling reflections by the Man of Steel. But the real issue is that it doesn’t feel like a Superman story. Instead it feels like a Brian Azzarello story that just so happens to have a Superman-like character in it. The brooding character is welcome, but in the end the appeal of the character is one of hope and wonder.
Azzarello wastes the character of the priest, turning him from a compelling person to a science fiction cliché. To me, this character provides the heart of this book, the touch of humanity, and to have it thrown away irrevocably mars the tale.
Jim Lee’s artwork is top notch. It really feels like he has a handle on Superman and Lois Lane in a way that he didn’t while drawing Hush. While some of the villains aren’t conceived too well visually, the layouts are stunning and his mastery of storytelling is easily apparent.
All in all, another disappointing stab at what makes Superman the sort of person he is. That said, I hope that DC continues to mine stories in this vein because when someone finally does nail it, it will be one of the best comics ever written.
Since DC Comics sold thousands and thousands of issues with their Infinite Crisis super-crossover, universe-altering event a few years ago, comic publishers haven’t been able to get these sorts of stories out fast enough. I for one think these sorts of ideas rarely are successful, but with the conclusion to The Sinestro Corps War, I may
have to adjust my thinking a bit.
The premise of the series is pretty straightforward. Former Green Lantern Sinestro forges hundreds if not thousands of yellow power rings that are powered by fear, much as the Green Lantern rings are powered by willpower. Bent on subjecting the multiverse to order with the threat of harm, Sinestro and his people set off to make it happen. I talk a bit more about the premise here, where I reviewed the first volume.
In the second half we see the inevitable tide turning against the villains and for our heroes, though Johns does an excellent job with that victory seeming anything but certain and in many ways pyrrhic. The green power rings are unable to be used in order to kill another living thing, but the Guardians decide to remove this restriction in order to ensure the victory over Sinestro. This has all sorts of fallout for future stories, especially the idea that sometimes men and women fighting for good must take a life in order to preserve the greater good. It’s something police officers struggle with each day, so it is obviously more believable a scenario than the previous ‘we’d never kill anyone, we are the good guys’ scenario that has been the case up until now.
But the most groundbreaking changes are to the entire mythos of the Green Lanterns. An ancient prophecy foretells the rising of all sorts of other Corps marked by different colors of the rainbow spectrum. Instead of just green and yellow, we witness the birth of the Blue Lantern Corps, powered by hope, and the beginnings of an orange, sapphire, red, and even black corps to come in the future. This is all playing itself out in the monthly issues, yet I am content to wait until the various collections are released to get the whole story.
Despite my praise, the collection does have some flaws. First of all, it’s likely inevitable that such a big story would drag in some places and move much too quickly over others. A few plot points seem to be dropped, and certain characters, which may be familiar from other series or the expanded universe, aren’t contextualized. And let me also say that since Galaxy Quest already covered this, it is no longer cute to have a superhero battle crash into a comics convention. As in the first volume, Ivan Reis’s artwork is detailed and fantastic, but this attention to detail can make it difficult to make sense of some of the more complex scenes difficult to parse for the important things.
Yet what really makes this a successful crossover event is not only the creation of the other Corps, but the fact that such a crossover was limited to the extended Green Lantern universe. As the fight moves to Earth, we see heroes such as Superman and Batman fighting alongside the Green Lanterns as makes sense, but Johns is careful to make them so peripheral as to be almost superfluous. Could DC have sold some extra books by tying in some of these battles to their lesser selling titles? Of course, but that would have diluted and perhaps corrupted what came off as an excellent event.
Now if I can just keep myself from buying a Blue Lantern t-shirt until I read a story that expands on their new mythos even a little bit…
I’ve given up on superhero comics about a dozen times now, yet they always find a way to get me back. As a longtime fan of the Green Lantern, I must admit that the idea of bringing back rogue lantern Sinestro and having him lead a corps of yellow lanterns in a massive intergalactic war was quite appealing to me. After I read somewhere that blue and red lanterns show up in the series, I made the educated decision to rescind the superhero ban (at least temporarily) and pick up the first volume of The Sinestro Corps War.
Being out of the loop in the DC Universe since the end of Infinite Crisis, Geoff Johns did a pretty good job of filling me in on the state of events without an expositional info-dump. Apparently the multiverse being restored has lead to 52 distinct universes being centered on Earth. Exiled to the antimatter universe, Sinestro arms hundreds of aliens with yellow power rings and teaches them to use fear to control the universe.
Here’s the basic gist: the Lanterns are essentially space cops that patrol the universe, armed with magic rings that create anything their bearers imagine. Each member of the corps is selected based on their ability to know no fear. One of the greatest Lanterns of all time, Sinestro, went rogue after his idea of law and order drifted too close to fascist territory. Convinced that his way was right, Sinestro set out to start his own ring-wielding army, tasked to eradicate chaos through a more violent path—by instilling fear. And thus the drama begins.
Seeing the massive Sinestro Corps battle the Green Lantern Corps is pretty awesome, but the art here can be a little crowded to really get the sense of what is really happening, even in a two-page spread. It doesn’t help matters that most of the aliens are bizarre creatures who only remotely are discernable as actual beings. For instance, one Lantern is a huge rectangular cube with the symbol printed on it. How is a reader supposed to empathize with that?
Johns doesn’t forget to throw in a couple of interesting additions to the Sinestro Corps. First is Superman-Prime, the evil Superman from Infinite Crisis, who just wants to destroy everything. But more compelling is Hank Henshaw, the Cyborg Superman who blew up Hal Jordan’s home Coast City and was an imposer to the Superman name when the character died 16 years ago. He wants to eradicate life because without it no one will be able to feel pain. His character is handled quite well, and I really do hope that he gets what he wants at the end of this saga.
The first volume concludes with the Sinestro Corps preparing to attack Earth, causing me to fear that the conclusion will focus heavily on help from the Justice League and the rest. The mythology of the Green Lanterns and the greater ramifications of their existence on the universe is the most compelling aspect of a huge story like this. I hope that such matters are not forgotten and that characters like Superman play a small role, if any, in the rest of the story.
Looking forward to Volume 2, which maybe I’ll get a chance to read next week. I also hope to look into the Tales of the Sinestro Corps collection, which focuses on Superman-Prime and the Cyborg Superman to a greater extent. Hard to judge without reading the concluding volume, but my tentative thumbs up for now.
Just Why Exactly Are They So Bad?In his recent book Cultural Amnesia, Clive James notes that celebrated screenwriter William Goldman has written entertaining books demonstrating how even the most entertaining film can’t be written like a book. If the story isn’t first worked out to make cinematic sense, no amount of excellent dialogue will save it from being an utter pile of crap. James later says that in films, “the dialogue is a secondary source of narrative, not a primary one” (436).
While I am far from even a lay expert on film, I do know a fair amount about visual narrative, and I would have to say that James eloquently sums up the primary driving narrative of films: the images. I have resisted conflating the image/text nature of comics and films for a while now, believing that the forced sequentiality of film limits the form in a way that the multi-linearity of comic books aren’t and thus discredits much of the comparison, but I would think that James’s adage about film applies: dialogue in comics is a secondary form of narrative.
While this may seem unsurprising, it does give us a lens by which to view the recent Star Trek comic work of David Tischman. I have often criticized Tischman for his inability to write well in the comic format, which is another way of saying that his comics don’t make comic sense, in the same way Goldman warns against trying to write a film as anything else. Of course, I am not privy to the way Tischman constructs his stories, but they seem to me to be plotted out like a prose writer would plot a short story.
By treating the visual elements of the text as secondary forms of narration, he violates the very nature of comics; he dooms them to fail on this alone, despite whatever other merits they have. It doesn’t matter if the stories are exciting (which they aren’t) or if the dialogue is good (it isn’t). Tischman is not writing his narratives as visual narratives first, with all dialogue supporting the framework a secondary element. And as a result, he and IDW have put out some pretty atrocious comics.
ld have done without the reference to a green merkin, the shift made the later issues seem too sparse.
