Sophisticated Badness

I was reading the Jog's critique of the end of the Ennis run on The Punisher. I can't really talk about Ennis' work on The Punisher because I don't particularly like either the writer or the character, but in the course of the review the character brought up Grant Morrison with great praise. The same critic also critiqued one of Morrison's Batman comics, again quite glowingly. The upshot is that Morrison does all these really cool things, or so the Jog says, and that is perhaps true - but at the end of the day I seem to be dissatisfied with Morrison's work. It took me a long time to figure out, but I finally did, and it's true not only of Morrison, I feel, but a number of comic book writers nowadays - they're bad in a more sophisticated way.

In particular, Morrison will have all these big ideas and concepts and the miss out on a lot of really basic things. So when people argue about whether "he made the Beast gay" or whatever, they never think to ask, "Why on earth have the X-Men accepted into the highest positions of authority a petty, vain and vindictive mass murderer like Emma Frost?!" So while people are going on about how Morrison was trying to make a point about the plight of people who are discriminated in society without the support mechanisms of gay people, I'm sitting back boggling how he put a mass murderer in charge of a bunch of children. Which is literally criminally stupid. Or the way that, y'know, relationships born in adultery are corrupted from the get-go. Stuff like that.

I feel roughly the same way about, say, Warren Ellis. In my opinion, he totally trashed the Thunderbolts - which had hitherto been a campy book about a fairly sophisticated subject, itself: how do people who know only how to do bad get redemption? They suck at it. Even when they are honestly seeking it, they suck at it. Which is a fairly intelligent social commentary relevant in a society which imprisons more people than China - even prisoners who might legitimately wish to change their ways are stuck with all the natural responses and knowledge and behavior that make it nearly impossible for even the most honest amongst them to reform. Yes, yes, the book had a lot of camp, but the point was significant and meaningful.

Ellis' run, however, is nasty people doing horrible things to each other. And then you find Ellis' Internet cult saying it's "realistic". Which is a stupid argument in comics where people have superpowers - wouldn't real realism, y'know, confine itself to the actually possible? - but also stupid because nothing like what happened in the Thunderbolts happens in life. Or, at least, I can't think of a government run program that transforms the most hardened criminals in our society into slaves of the government to hunt down other hardened violent criminals being run by an insane mass murderer. So, it's not realistic. It's so far from realistic that you can't see earth from where it's at.

Which is the problem for me. Not that it's not realistic, but that it's stupid. A government run program that transforms the most hardened criminals in our society into slaves of the government to hunt down other hardened violent criminals being run by an insane mass murderer. That's what Ellis' Thunderbolts are. And it has these profound implications. For instance, it implies that the US government is the kind of government that is okay with law enforcement agencies being run by insane mass murderers. Tony Stark is behind it, too, so he's also okay with an insane mass murderer running a government law enforcement program. It means that Tony Stark and the US government are too blindingly stupid to notice when this insane mass murderer goes on killing sprees and murders fifteen government agents or so evil they don't care. It means that these people are legally responsible for the actions of Norman fucking Osborn! I mean, for me, that's the story. The story isn't how much of a whore Moonstone is or whatever. The story is the profound and multifaceted corruption that would be necessary for Tony Stark's SHIELD and the US government to legally sanction Norman Osborn with law enforcement powers that he immediately abuses.

It's bad. Very bad. Stupid, even. But bad in a more sophisticated way than you'd find in comics from, say, the 50s. Bad in a way that acknowledges that these characters might have a few marbles loose (but always in a heavy handed way - far more interesting to me than Batman's potential insanity is, say, Reed Richards' psychological abuse and neglect of his wife and children), but then ignores even the most basic rules of internal logic and verisimilitude.

And I find myself surprised by it all, though I suppose that I shouldn't be. Comic book fans are desperately seeking approval for their medium (and, generally, these days finding it), and the sophisticated pose of comic book writers since, say, Frank Miller helps them get this respectability. This sophistication provides for many insecure comic book fans, who have some guilt over their fantasies about superheroes, social validity. I don't even mind that. What I mind is that this sophistication gets in the way of what I feel are basic storytelling skills. Worse, by it's very nature, sophistication encourages us to think about the stories - what do the writers mean? And when they do that, when guys like Morrison and Ellis do that, I find myself going, "That's a nice point, Grant, but you realize that the story falls apart?"

I believe that this is allowed to endure because of a certain elision that many fans are expert at saying that the senseless is the greatest form of sense. Not just comics fans but pretty much everywhere amongst fans (and especially amongst anime fans). What they do is work very hard to make sense from the senseless. If it doesn't make sense what they'll do is pretend it does make sense (and is, indeed, quite significant), and then criticize anyone who doesn't agree it makes sense by saying that they don't "get it".

(I also personally hate that, and it's wrong. I will look them in the eye and say, "I got Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit. I get Bergman's The Seventh Seal. No, really, I get it. I just think it's dumb." And then they shut up because none of them have the faintest idea of who Hegel is but they think they should or something. Sometimes I also ask them to explain it, and we can talk about that, but that's generally pretty bad for them.)

What I get is that the pose of sophistication in comic books is eroding basic coherent storytelling with internal logic and verisimilitude. And I wish people would start to say this basic and easy to understand fact!

Conversation Stoppers in the Comic Book Shop - Talkin' About Magneto and Cyclops, and Generalized Critique of Marvel Comics

Over at Comics Should Be Good there was an review of Fantastic Four 1234. This bit isn't about the article, but the weird flame war that went on afterwards. Or weird to me, anyway. In the review, the author opines that Magneto and Doctor Doom are villain terrorists but that a number of comics fans will launch into apologia when confronted with their villainy. A flame war ensued when, of course, some of the fans did launch into their various apologia, hehe. This is predictable as clockwork.

But I found it interesting, given recent comic book history, that no one turned the apologia for especially Magneto on it's head. I expressed this for the first time at the local friendly comic book store here in downtown Santa Cruz when my friend Peter brought up, y'know, stuff like Iron Man vivisecting people and whether this editorial trend would continue (the answer from the comic store guy was "yes, it will continue indefinitely", which is likely true for the short to medium term).

I said this, "To me, the more interesting question is how is Cyclops going to confront Magneto when he appears doing villain thing. Now that Cyclops is running a black ops assassination squad and condoned the use of torture to get information, how can it be said that he has the moral authority to condemn Magneto's actions. Cyclops is at least as bad as Magneto, now, killing and torturing people who get in his way for the good of the mutant 'species'."

Silence followed. No one at the comic shop really knew how to answer that - and I suspect that the X-fans won't know how to answer it - but I found it really interesting that, so far, no one appears to be even asking the question. Like it's somehow irrelevant that Cyclops and Magneto are now behaving the same way, or if anything Cyclops is behaving much worse than Magneto.

Also at the comic shop, Peter asked about comics where the heroes were more heroic. The counter guy said, accurately, that Marvel is moving heroism over to their children's comics. Tho' he also said, "Tho' Whedon in Astonishing X-Men was trying to insert some old fashioned heroism into the book." And I said, "But now Ellis is writing it so that's fuckin' over." And there were weary and heavy-hearted nods.

And forgive me if I am rambling here, but I think that this editorial decision will be bad in the long term. I mean, first off, it's just not particularly sustainable, as shown in the recent Wolverine's where he was sent to kill Mystique. He doesn't. Why? Because it would be a very bad literary decision to kill a villain as interesting and storied as Mystique. So, despite Wolverine having her entirely at his mercy, nope, he just wounded her and left with a little sassy diatribe about how she had no friends and he did, neener. It just doesn't work for the genre if you kill off villains (and is one of the persistent problems in Punisher comics - there's no real way for him to do his gig and keep his enemies alive, so they get no histories and aren't particularly interesting). Second, it'll drive away the people who don't want to see the heroes act like villains. I number myself amongst that lot. For a while, a lot of readers - young men in particular - will jump on the bandwagon. But they don't have endurance.

Alternately, there's the Real Power of the DC Universe:



In addition to this picture being pure fucking class, it demonstrates some of the differences - the editorial differences - between DC and Marvel. Since the Infinite Crisis in the DCU, there have been editorial decisions that are pulling back from the black on black attitudes that have been growing in comics. They have also been promoting powerful female protagonists a lot more than Marvel.

The black on black grim and gritty attitude has come to almost entirely dominate Marvel's editorial decisions for most of their lines. When those people get tired of that black on black attitude, where will they go? It doesn't take a genius to figure it out.

DC's New Frontiers vs. Marvel's Civil War

I'm putting a spoiler warning right here, and in bold letters so if you don't want anything spoiled about either New Frontiers or Civil War you should stop reading now.

It's kind of hard not to see DC's mini-series New Frontiers as being anything other than a response to Marvel's Civil War. I know that the two big comic book companies have been sorta having a strange conversation for a long time, but in recent years I believe that the conversation has grown in intensity.

For those who don't know, and to recap in my own unique style, Marvel's Civil War was this fairly contrived mega-event where, in order to promote a professionalization of superheroing after a tragedy, a Superhuman Registration Act was passed in the United States. The prime mover for the SHRA was Iron Man, under the hypothesis that as a "futurist" he knew that unless superheroes were professionalized immediately that horrible things would happen to them all. Opposing this position was Captain America, who felt the act was tyrannical.

Well, maybe the act wasn't tyrannical, but it's enforcement was. If you didn't register, you were declared an "enemy combatant" and sent off to a prison in the Negative Zone where Iron Man bragged about how people didn't have civil rights so it was perfectly fine to incarcerate them indefinitely.

In the end of Marvel's Civil War, Iron Man's faction won. Most comics ended up treating this like an advance. Whether or not registration was a good idea, it's implementation was downright evil. If you don't register, y'know, indefinite imprisonment in another dimension where you don't have civil rights, and that dimension eats people's souls. Ouch. If you do register, well, you get enslaved. I mean, drafted to perform involuntary and indefinite service in US government approved superhero teams. One of these government teams, the Thunderbolts, is lead by the Green Goblin, and innumerable people have been crippled or killed by the Green Goblin and his equally psychopathic charges, including something like fifteen federal agents who were killed with the Goblin freaked out and started slaughtering people. I actually find the denouement baffling because of the indefinite imprisonment without civil rights, the indefinite involuntary servitude of those who do register combined with employing mass murderers as the first government sanctioned team. Bear in mind, this has been going on for about two years, now. It's not like it's like where some supervillain turns New York City into fantasy New York City for three issues before Morgan le Fey or Kulan Gath or whomever else is doing it this time gets their ass kicked. It's been two years in almost all titles to some extent or another. It feels like editorial policy that the Civil War is a good thing.

In New Frontiers, which takes iconic DCU characters an imagines them in a post-WWII environment. There, Hourman - a member of the WWII era Justice Society of America - while chasing a crook messes up and some cops die, causing legislation similar to Marvel's SHRA to be published. Many, even most, of the "masked mystery men" go into retirement to avoid having to register with the House Un-American Activites Commission. Some, like Superman and Wonder Woman, register with the government. Obviously, Batman doesn't. Illegal superhero activity is classed as treason.

By the end of New Frontiers, the iconic DCU characters have decided to fight against the criminalization of superhero activities. Superman monologues about how it is their obligation to fight injustice everywhere, whether official or government.

To me, it strongly came off as commentary on Marvel's Civil War. The tyrannical enforcement of New Frontier's laws equating superheroing with treason were initially embraced but subsequently and forcefully rejected. The message was clear: equating citizens from helping other citizens with treason is both stupid and immoral.

I find it fascinating the way that DC and Marvel are trading talking points about these sorts of things. It really makes me wonder what's going on over there. I know that, y'know, most writers and artists of superhero comics work pretty much interchangeably between the two companies. So I'm wondering where this is coming from and if my perceived increase in the intensity of the exchanges is real and if real what underlies it.