A few thoughts on The Essential Thor vol. 4

The Essential Thor, Volume 4. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, John Buscema et al. Marvel, 2008.  $19.99, 600 pages.

Of all their collaborations, it’s the Kirby-Lee Thor that is my favourite. Yes, that means I like it more than their Fantastic Four. Not that I don’t like their Fantastic Four, but when Kirby cuts loose in Thor, he really cuts loose. There’s a savage, primal energy to the best of Kirby’s work on Thor that seems only fitting for a series about a Norse god with a really big hammer and a penchant for talking smack — ye olde schoole style.

Kirby’s pencils on Thor are so strong that they can even, for the most part, overcome inks by Vincent Colletta, surely Kirby’s least popular inker. Colletta’s inks actually work fine over Kirby’s romance comics — he softens the sharper edges and smooths out faces into something more conventionally attractive — but they are catastrophically ill-suited for the gotterdammerung of Thor. Colletta’s line is too feathery, too scratchy for the bombast-turned-up-to-eleven that fills the pages of Thor. (And that’s without even getting into Colletta’s overzealousness with the eraser)

So it should come as some relief to find that many of the Kirby-pencilled tales in Volume 4 of The Essential Thor are inked by Bill Everett. It should, but it doesn’t. While there are some nice panels here and there, Everett’s inks are, overall, too crude to do Kirby justice. Everett may have had considerable cartoonist chops himself, but he doesn’t acquit himself too well here.

Or maybe some of the blame for crude rendering should go to the great man himself. Kirby certainly seems to have run out of enthusiasm for the character in his last year and a half (collected here). He recycles characters and plots from earlier issues and, when he does create new characters, the results are, uncharacteristically, visually dull. It’s dispiriting stuff, really, much in the way that his last year and a half on Fantastic Four (reprinted in Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 5) is dispiriting. It all smacks of someone who was just going through the motions. Granted, Kirby going through the motions is still better than anything else Marvel was probably printing at the time, but it’s a long way from the feverish pitch of earlier issues. Unlike those earlier issues, these ones don’t shimmer with invention, or that mad headlong rush into new territory that we associate with Kirby’s best work.

But that’s only the first half of the stories in this volume. As for the rest of them, they’re fairly typical of the sort of thing that filled Marvel’s books once Kirby and Ditko left. Neal Adams turns in a very restrained two issues, with nothing much to recommend them; he’s followed by John Buscema who does yeoman but unremarkable work.

In all, it’s a disappointing end to an otherwise excellent body of work.

Recommended? Kirby completists will still want it, caveats and all. Others should stick to the earlier, better volumes — particularly volumes 2 and 3.

My hottest 10

Triple J is the government-run, youth radio network in Australia, specialising in various kinds of “alternative” music. It’s sort of like a national version of US college radio, I guess. Anyway, every year for the past 20 years they’ve been running the world’s largest music poll, the Hottest 100, in which listeners vote for their favourite ten tracks of the last year. This year being the twentieth anniversary of the competition, they’re doing something different: a Hottest 100 of all time.

These are the tracks I voted for, in no particular order, my favourite ten songs of all time:

• Aesop Rock “Daylight”

• Bjork “Storm” (I couldn’t find a video of the studio version, so here’s a live one instead)

• Aphex Twin “Avril 14th”

• Dalek “Paragraphs Relentless”

• The Beatles “Tomorrow Never Knows”

• Massive Attack “Rising Son” (Can’t embed the video, so have a link instead
• Justice “D.A.N.C.E.”

• Sly and the Family Stone “Everyday People”

• Elvis Costello “Couldn’t Call it Unexpected no. 4″ (I couldn’t find a video of Elvis singing this, so here’s some other guy playing it on his banjo)

And, finally, probably my favourite track of  all:

• Madvillain “Shadows of Tomorrow”

I will become small

Showcase Presents the Atom. Gardner Fox and Gil Kane. DC, 2007. $16.99, 528 pages.

Everybody knows that superheroes are wish-fulfilment figures. First, there’s the secret identity. Everyone wants to be special, and the secret identity cleverly embodies both the fantasy and the reality: in reality, I may be just schlubbish Clark Kent but in fantasy I am Superman. Whoosh—that’s the sound of me flying away to fight crime.

In my mind.

Second, the adventures. Saving a world that hates and fears you, scaring the superstitious and cowardly lot, making a deal with the devil to ruin your marriage and save your aunt from her three-hundredth brush with the grim reaper, and so on—all more interesting than humdrum everyday life. In principle, anyway.

And third, the most distinctive feature of superheroes, the superpowers of course. Who hasn’t ever dreamed of flying like Superman? Running like the Flash? Eating matter like Matter-Eater Lad?

Er, okay, maybe you haven’t dreamed of eating matter. Still, at the core of every superpower is a fantasy of power and being special. I am not like everyone else. I can bend steel bars/control the elements/shoot laser beams out of my eyes. Whoosh.

Even lame powers—even proverbially lame powers—are still powers. Talking to fish or bouncing around or turning into different “forms of water” might not keep you from getting your arse kicked by Doctor Doom. Or Turner D. Century, for that matter. But they’re still powers.

Which is what makes a book like DC Showcase Presents The Atom such an odd read. For what is the Atom’s superpower? He can shrink.

Now, shrinking certainly opens up plenty of opportunities for adventure, as seen in comics like the fondly-remembered Micronauts. And shrinking has a long history in comics, stretching back to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (and, to a lesser extent, his Dream of the Rarebit Fiend).

It’s worth talking about McCay a bit more, since little Nemo seemed to dream about shrinking every other week. The early Slumberland strips are structured with the pacing of a nightmare, the perils growing ever worse until the sleeping Nemo can handle no more and wakes himself up in the inevitable final panel. Shrinking was the perfect tool for McCay’s purposes: as Nemo grows smaller and smaller, even everyday objects or animals loom more and more dangerously. (Plus, McCay just loved messing with perspective; Nemo grew to giant-size as often as he shrank).

And that’s exactly the problem with shrinking as a superpower: it isn’t one. Sure, the Atom can control his mass when he shrinks so that his punches carry more force. But he’s still a teensy tiny little guy; he can be trapped in a test-tube (and sometimes is). Shrinking is a super-weakness, not a super-power. It makes you vulnerable. It’s like being made out of glass. Certainly, life would be dangerous if you were made of glass. It might well be interesting to read about how a person made of glass would navigate the dangers of everyday life created by her condition. But such a person could never be a superhero. There’s a reason it was Bruce Willis’ character, not Samuel L. Jackson’s, who was the hero of the (dreadful) film Unbreakable. Being made of glass, literally or metaphorically, kind of puts a damper on the whole fighting crime thing.

(While being allergic to water—as Jackson unforgettably tells Willis, “water is your kryptonite!”—apparently doesn’t. But I digress.)

In the stories reprinted in the Showcase volume, the poor little Atom is constantly being menaced by everyday objects, newly dangerous to him in his reduced state. The Atom is threatened by tweezers, light bulbs, domestic animals and, for all we know, specks of dust, feathers and powder puffs. What a revoltin development.

Not only is The Atom not a symbol of power-fantasy for a child reader, it symbolises the grim reality instead: you are a small thing in a world of giants, and their ordinary artefacts are dangerous to you. Obviously kids can relate to that, but why would they want to?

No wonder, then, that the Atom never managed to sustain his own title for too long. Nor did his Marvel counterpart, Ant-Man. It wasn’t long before they changed him into Giant Man. Come to think of it, when DC revived the Atom in the 80s they transformed him into a fantasy adventure hero and called the series Sword of the Atom.

Hmmm, Ant-Man becomes Giant Man, the Atom gets a sword. Psychoanalysts would call that overcompensating.

Thanks very much, I’ll be here all night. Tune in next time, when I suggest there may be something going on between Batman and Robin and that the Marston/Peters Wonder Woman sure did like getting tied up.

But, really, my point isn’t that there’s a sexual subtext to shrinking. I don’t actually buy that (notwithstanding Craig Yoe’s old gallery of suggestive Doll Man covers). The point is rather just that shrinking and superheroes don’t mix.

On the other hand, The Amazing Glass-Man would probably sell like gangbusters.

EXCLUSIVE! ANNOTATIONS FOR LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN CENTURY: 1910

Page 1, Panel 1

The bed in which Carnacki sleeps will eventually be thrown away, and then scavenged by Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum.

Page 1, Panel 1

Through a strange course of events, the bedspread under which Carnacki sleeps will later be used by the murderous Moosbrugger.

Page 1, Panel 1

The pillow on which Carnacki sleeps once belonged to Leonard Bilsiter.

Page 1, Panel 1

The oxygen molecule in the bottom left of the panel was once inhaled by Alphonse van Worden

…

etc. etc., for 80 fun-filled pages!

No, really, I’ve got so much to offer

Hire me, please

Capturing continuity II: This time it’s personal

Last time I wrote about fictional universes, and how we know all sorts of facts about them that we’ve never been explicitly told. We know, for instance, that in the DC universe Pythagoras’ theorem is true, even if it’s probably never been stated.

(Although, come to think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if Gardner Fox had used it as a crucial plot point in an Adam Strange story)

I said that we should think of reading a comic (or any other narrative, for that matter) as though we were making a big list of all the facts that are true in the world described in the comic. First we write down all the facts that are true in our world: e.g. 2+2=4; elephants are big; Superman Returns was arguably the best Superman-as-Jesus movie ever made. Then we add the facts that the comic explicitly presents to us: e.g. the Blue Beetle got shot in the head; Guy Gardner has a stupid haircut; Superman can, like, fly and punch through walls and stuff. Then we subtract any of the earlier facts that are inconsistent with these new facts: e.g. there was a Superman movie; Superman is a merely fictional character; there’s no such planet as Krypton. The result is the fictional world described by that comic (or novel or whatever)

Now I want to ask a stupid question: why bother with that third step? Why not just imagine a fictional world where it’s true both that there’s a guy called Superman who can fly around and all that jazz and that Superman is a merely fictional character?

The answer to the stupid question is, I hope, obvious: because such a world would be crazy! Or, rather, it would logically inconsistent, and we can’t imagine such a world. What, on the one hand, in this world Superman is flying around, saving the world, but at the same time he doesn’t really exist in that world? That doesn’t make sense!

So there’s an important constraint on creating and understanding a fictional world. To wit, a fictional world has to be logically consistent. When we, as readers, try to picture the world that the creators are trying to describe, we can only understand logically consistent worlds. And that means that we have to ferret out inconsistencies in our understanding of the world. For instance, if the story says there’s a guy called Superman, then we infer that, in this world, Superman is not a fictional character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and that a “great soul has simply nothing to do” with consistency. In which case, we’re all little minds when we read, because consistency is exactly the one thing we all care about when we read, or watch a movie, or otherwise think about a fictional world.

And we don’t just check for consistencies between story-facts and real-world-facts. The story as a whole has to be internally consistent. You can’t tell me on page 1 that the butler did it and then, on page 22 that the Joker did it—unless the butler is the Joker. Just as we have to throw out some real-world facts if they contradict story-facts, so we may have to throw out some story-facts if they contradict other story-facts.

And, lo, continuity is born!

The shared universe, with characters interacting and stories intersecting, is just an extension of the single, self-contained story. And so is “continuity” as superhero readers think of it just an extension of the internal continuity of a single story. If we read a single story about Superman, we expect it to be consistent from start to finish. If Lex Luthor shows up on page 2 with a broken leg and then again on page 21 with no broken leg, there had better be an explanation for it. The same goes, by extension, for continuity across stories and even across different series. If Lex Luthor shows up in Action Comics with a broken leg and in Teen Titans with no broken leg, then there’d better be an explanation for that too. Maybe the Teen Titans story happens before the one in Action Comics. Maybe he invented a broken-leg-healing ray. Maybe there’s really two Lex Luthors, and one of them is an evil counterpart from another world—nah, no one would ever believe anything as stupid as that. But one way or another, if these events are all happening in the same world, there has to be a way to reconcile them with one another. Otherwise we’re being asked to imagine an impossible world, and that’s something we simply can’t do.

So have I reclaimed continuity? Is the message: forget about the image of continuity-hound as Comic Book Guy and the ridicule of popular culture (not to mention Emerson)? It’s okay to wallow in your continuity-porn?

Hell no. Find out why next time.

Capturing continuity

Freud used to say that the repressed returns. In today’s comic book marketplace, you don’t even have to be repressed. Indeed, scientists predict that, at the current rate of reprinting, every single comic book ever published will have been reprinted by March 2016. At which point the entire surface of the North American continent will collapse under the combined weight of unsold copies of World War Hulk: Frontline, The Essential Star Comics: ALF, and Bazooka Joe: The Classic Years: Volumes 1-37.

One of the odder reprint projects in recent years has been the decades-old continuity handbooks. Marvel has Essential-ized its Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and DC was at one stage planning to Showcase its equivalent Who’s Who. DC has already reprinted Michael Fleischer’s quixotic Encyclopedias from the 1970s which exhaustively, and exhaustingly, indexed every Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman story up to the 1960s.

These volumes are doubly redundant nowadays: first, because they’re out of date but, second, because of the internet—and wikis in particular. Pretty much every obscure detail of continuity is available somewhere online, if you’ve only the patience to find it.

So let’s have a trivia quiz about facts in the DC universe. We’ll start it off with an easy one:

1) Who is the alter ego of Superman?

Okay, you probably didn’t have to look up anything to answer “Clark Kent”. So try this one:

2) Who is the alter ego of Chameleon Boy?

I admit, I had to check that on wikipedia. What about this one:

3) Which of the following two cities has the higher latitude: Paris or New York?

Your first reaction might be: well, hang on, what? That’s not in the Who’s Who.

But, if you think about it, you’ll see that it is a legitimate question about the DC universe. In the DC universe, there’s a place called Paris, and a place called New York. So there’s got to be a fact about which city is northernmost, even if it’s never been explicitly mentioned in any DC comic [although perhaps some eager reader will direct me to an obscure panel from an old issue of JLE].

A bit of searching on the internet shows that, in our world, the answer is “Paris”. So it’s probably true in the DC universe, right?

Now, how about this question:

4) What is two times pi, to two decimal places?

Again, not something in Who’s Who, and probably not something that’s ever been explicitly mentioned in an issue of Booster Gold or whatever. But, in our world, two times pi is 6.28. So that must be the answer in the DC universe too.

This shows something important about fictional universes: their authors never tell us all the facts about them. As a matter of fact, they couldn’t possibly tell us all the facts, since there are indefinitely many of them. So how do we know that, in the DC universe, Paris is north of New York and twice pi is 6.28, if no comic about the DC universe has ever told us as much?

Here’s a simple answer: when we are told a story, we assume that the world it describes is just like ours. When Siegel and Shuster drew their first Superman stories, they didn’t need to tell their readers that physics and mathematics worked pretty normally in their fictional world, or that America had fought a bloody civil war in the nineteenth century. Their readers just assumed it, in the same way that we just assumed that Paris and Washington are located in roughly the same positions on DC-earth as they are on real-earth.

But clearly the simple answer is too simple. Consider the next two questions:

5) Is Superman a fictional character published by DC?

6) Do lots of people know that Superman is Clark Kent?

In our world, the answer to both questions is “yes”. But in the DC universe, the answer is “no”, of course. In the DC universe, Superman is a real guy and very few people know his secret identity (that’s why it’s a secret identity).

Here’s a slightly more complicated answer, then: when we are told a story, we assume that the world is just like ours—except when it’s not. So what do you do when you read a comic or watch a film? Think of it as writing out a list of all the facts that are true in the world that’s being described. First you assume that it’s just like our world, so you write down all the facts that are true in our world (of course you couldn’t literally do that, but it’s just a metaphor). Then you start adding facts that the authors tell you: all right, there’s this guy Superman. And he’s really strong. And he comes from some planet called Krypton. There’s three additional facts right there, additional to the facts in our world. Once you’ve added all the facts explicitly given in the story, then you cross off any of the earlier facts that contradict these new facts—so you cross off the fact that Superman is a fictional character, that no one has superstrength, and that there’s no such planet as Krypton.

And that’s what happens when you read a comic. What does this have to do with continuity? Find out next time, because this post is…to be continued.

Regression to the mean

Final Crisis #6. Grant Morrison and the entire Bullpen Bulletin. $3.99, 34 pages.

Warning: There will be SPOILERS in this review

This is a comic with plenty of sturm, lots of drang but precious little und. I mean, there’s a lot happening but very little connective tissue to tie it together. By my count, there’s over a dozen different plotlines running through this thing;* the reader is expected to give a damn about any of them because — well, let’s face it, it’s not clear why the reader is expected to give a damn. Most of the subplots over the course of this series certainly haven’t  earned any of the emotional heft that the similarly fractured threads in Seven Soldiers #1 had.

Given the way the series is constructed — all jump-cuts and tiny bursts of scenes — it seems almost inappropriate to give it a standard review. To match its pace and confusion, I should instead just write a series of declarative outbursts: Ungood! Rushed! Morrison better! and let the reader fill in the details. Morrison hasn’t really given us a story throughout the series; he’s given us a set of story notes in the form of bullet points: and then this happens! And then this! Oh, and did I mention this! And what about this! Oh, and I forgot to tell you this!

It must all be very Important and Meaningful to the DC Universe because characters keep telling us that it is. Indeed, without the occasional bit of expository dialogue this series would be even less coherent. For instance, the Big Bad for the series — Darkseid — apparently dies three-quarters of the way through, so you would think that the threat was over. Apparently not, though; it’s still “the end of the world” although God knows why, and we certainly wouldn’t have known that except for the helpful Hourman telling us. Thanks, Hourman!

Indeed, the fate of Darkseid is a low point in an issue filled with low points. IIRC, I’ve heard Morrison in the past say that he wanted to make the New Gods seem truly awesome, truly like gods, since they’d been cheapened by their usual appearances in the DC Universe. Accordingly, the coming of Darkseid was made out to be this great and terrible thing, the catastrophic peak to which the series was building; and so he only came onto the stage in issue 5. And then he’s apparently dispatched in two pages by a guy with no powers. Yeah, that was some awesome threat there. He came, he appeared in about three panels, and was conquered.

And what was the point of the Flash scene about how they’re going to race to Darkseid, if Batman could breach his singularity and take him down like a punk? And what’s up with that cover, promising a match-up between Darkseid and Superman? And, while I’m on it, what the hell does DC have against people of colour — viz. Renee Montoya and Shilo Norman?

As a superhero comic, this is bad stuff. As a superhero comic written by Grant Morrison, who can do so much better than this trash, it’s just fucking awful.

Recommended? Hell, no.

* Superman and Brainiac 5; the last stand of Black Canary and the Tattooed Man; Supergirl and the Marvel Family versus Mary Marvel; the JSA et al. holding the line; Tawky Tawny versus Kalibak; Mister Miracle and his Japanese pals; Renee Montoya, the Atoms and the Omega Offensive; Luthor versus Libra; the Flashes; Batman versus Darkseid; Nix Uotan and Metron; and the return of Superman. And that’s not even including the the Hawkpeople or Green Lantern bits.

Most disappointing of 2008

Any idiot can do a best-of list. In keeping with the relentless negativity of this site, here’s my list of the biggest disappointments of 2008:

10. Final Crisis

It only started to get readable with #4, and #5 was actually quite good. Shame #1-3 were all teh suk.

9. Acme Novelty Library #19

After branching out into other voices with the last two volumes, Chris Ware takes a step back into familiar territory with this depressing study of a fat, nerdish social misfit. Which is totally not the same as any of his other studies of fat, nerdish social misfits. I’ve been reading Ware since 1996, and this is the first time I’ve felt like he was spinning his wheels.

8. Bourbon Island 1730

Trondheim’s line was too chaotic for me; I found — or rather, couldn’t find — the characters tangled up in the sameness of lines.

7. Dungeon Monstres 2: The Dark Lord

Not so much a reflection of its intrinsic quality, as of the insanely high expectations built up by previous volumes. This is the first volume in the entire series that has felt less than essential. Maybe the Dungeon formula is starting to wear thin; maybe I was in a bad mood when I read it.

6. Naoki Urasawa’s Monster Vol 18

Speaking of insanely high expectations… Good on its own rights, but a little anti-climactic compared with what went before.

5. Cat-Eyed Boy Vol. 1

As I recounted here, I was disappointed with the first volume. It’s no Drifting Classroom, that’s for sure.

4. No new volumes of Little Lulu from Dark Horse.

Although apparently they’re starting up again in 2009. Don’t toy with my affections, Dark Horse.

3. No new English volumes of Cromartie High School.

‘Nuff said.

2. Later volumes of Welcome to the NHK

I liked the first few volumes of this series a LOT, for reasons I might get into one day. The rest, not so much.

1. Only nine posts all year.

Seriously, Jones, what the fuck?