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These volumes are doubly redundant nowadays: first, because they’re out of date but, second, because of the internet—and wikis in particular.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?

Random Review

Steve Canyon: 1953. Milton Caniff. Checker, 2006. $17.95, 170 pages.

Steve Canyon is a comic like Cerebus or Little Orphan Annie. If you’re going to enjoy it –  and there’s a lot to enjoy — there are some hurdles to overcome. With Cerebus, it’s Dave Sim’s misogyny; with Annie, it’s Harold Gray’s anti-New Deal-ism; and with Steve Canyon, it’s a combination of Milton Caniff’s orientalism, militaristic jingoism and firm belief in American manifest destiny. During the Second World War and in the years immediately following, this no doubt struck a chord with Caniff’s readership, but to modern readers, after a half-century of dubious American adventurism, it looks — well, let’s be generous and call it a little naive. In Caniff’s world, the American Air Force (which by 1953 has re-enlisted crack pilot Steve Canyon) is an unquestioned force for good, fighting oppressive regimes and the rise of communism across the globe. Canyon is Alden Pyle with a pilot’s licence.

Still, if you can get past the political angle, this is a damned fine adventure comic, drawn by one of the greats. The action sequences are exciting, the cliffs well hanged, and the strips themselves always clean and easy to follow. If nothing else, you could appreciate Canyon as a master-class in how to do “talking heads”. For this is a very talkative strip, given that it’s an adventure strip about a two-fisted Army pilot. Strip after strip shows nothing but folks talking, but it never gets boring as Caniff switches “camera-angles”, throws the characters into silhouette, cuts between “close-ups” and “long-shots” and uses a hundred other tricks to keep things visually interesting. (The filmic terms are actually a propos here, as Caniff was a pioneer in bringing cinematic techniques to the comics page.) Alex Maleev et al., take note: this is how you do it.

In the current Golden Age of Reprints, Caniff’s work–reprinted here and in Terry and the Pirates volumes from IDW–seems to be getting overlooked a bit, compared with the attention given to Little Orphan Annie, Krazy Kat, Peanuts, Popeye et al. Perhaps it’s because his visual vocabulary have become so familiar to modern readers, from his countless imitators, that it no longer looks as exciting and new as it did when it first appeared. Or maybe there’s no longer a market for military adventure comics. In any case, Caniff’s work is well worth your consideration, and the inexpensively priced Steve Canyon volumes are a good place to start.

Recommended? Yes, even if just to ogle at Caniff’s serious cartooning chops.