Geoff Johns

Johns’s Jawns

by David Uzumeri of Funnybook Babylon

Geoff Johns is a complex writer, albeit not particularly a subtle one.

In the aftermath of Sinestro Corps, and now the Alpha-Lanterns story, we’re starting to rocket into the third act of his grand Green Lantern epic that started all the way back in 2004 with Green Lantern: Rebirth #1. It’s been a huge commercial success for the company, firmly raising both Hal Jordan and the entire Green Lantern mythology into DC’s conceptual A-list while also performing huge acts of world-building and defining the modern ideal for a DC crossover event with Sinestro Corps War. It’s been, undoubtedly, a success for the company.

On a commercial level.

Critically, the book has been more than a little bit beleaguered largely due to its scribe, Geoff Johns. Make no mistake, Johns can be - and largely completely was back in 2004 - a fan’s writer. His enthusiasm for the characters he writes can be either infectious or obnoxious, and when he returned Hal Jordan to the lead role in the franchise, many people felt his enthusiasm for Hal bordered on blind hero-worship. It was a similar concern that Rebirth largely signified that the Green Lantern franchise would forget about more recent characters and devolve into simple Silver Age nostalgia.

Three and a bit years later, it’s pretty clear that wasn’t the case. Johns has, in a manner similar to Braction/Frubaker on Iron Fist, extended the mythology of his corner of the DC Universe to such an expansive system that it doesn’t even really need the containing universe anymore. He’s made a large number of retcons that haven’t discounted early stories but rather just exposed new perspectives on them and incorporated them into a whole - using the emotional spectrum not only as the thread with which many previous enemies and events (Parallax, Star Sapphires, Black Hand) are sewn together, but as the springboard for what was DC’s most successful event since Infinite Crisis. (I realize that was only 2005, but we’re in Event Country now and that’s forever ago.)

It certainly doesn’t take an English professor to figure out the central theme of Green Lantern is overcoming fear. As Johns grows as a writer, his stories’ reliance on and willingness to explore these kinds of themes strengthens. It’s a theme that’s reflected in every aspect of the book, from Hal’s relationships with his family to the internal politics of the Corps to the Star Wars-esque mystic mumbo-jumbo that forms the core of the book’s newly expanded mythology. Nothing he comes up with is out of thin air - the Guardians always rejected emotion, the yellow ring was already in play, the Star Sapphires and Effigy didn’t take much tweaking to fit into the framework Johns built. Honestly, I think it simplifies things, too - if you’re trying to explain where these different aspects of the Green Lantern mythology relate to the central concept, all you really have to do is point at a color wheel. A little Power Rangers, yeah, but it’s more succinct than explaining the history of Maltus and why the Controllers and Zamarons left Oa.

Another very common complaint against the series is that Geoff Johns has some kind of “hero worship” for Hal, and therefore is incapable of portraying him as a flawed character. This is a reading that baffles me - while Johns may not feel that turning Hal into a drunk driver (Emerald Dawn) was the best course of action, his interpretation is still an immature, stubborn, selfish hotshot that very unglamorously tore his family apart, continually wasted Air Force resources, and arrogantly refused to wear his ring while flying, leading to a months-long stay in a Chechnyan prison camp with his friends. He’s been a bad brother, a bad son, a bad soldier and, thanks to Parallax, a really shitty space cop. He’s certainly not perfect.

This imperfection and why Hal keeps on going have been the fuel for his journey over the course of Geoff Johns’s tenure. In Green Lantern: Rebirth #6, at the end of a pitched battle, Parallax implores Hal to give up and he responds he “doesn’t know how.” It was a line that many dismissed as an action movie cliche, but it’s a philosophy that’s formed the core of his decisionmaking process since. No matter how much he fucks up, he’ll try again, and that’s the lesson he learned from Parallax. Before, Hal Jordan had no fear - his cockiness stemmed from an innate urge to utterly deny its existence. To bottle it up deep inside, to never let it affect his thought process. And when the chips came down and the hits kept coming, and he lost his hometown, he completely snapped and gave in, and Parallax had him.

Now, Hal recognizes it and overcomes it. It’s not about pretending the threat and the fear aren’t there; it’s about recognizing them, rationally weighing them, and going ahead anyways. Fear has always been a powerful weapon, and that’s no less true today - and as long as it is, the book’s theme remains relevant. On top of that, Hal’s journey isn’t even over. Johns has stated this is his most personal work right now, and from the fireworks and Photoshop effects of Sinestro Corps War, it’s easy to see how that could be a mystifying claim. However, I think that, like all great science fiction and superhero epics, the large-scale conflicts act as effective metaphors for the personal struggles that give the story resonance.

Geoff Johns isn’t a perfect writer, but he’s learning. Every year, I see more and more complex and varied comics coming from him, from the Norman Rockwell Americana charm of Justice Society of America to the tongue-in-cheek character humor of Booster Gold. While his recent work has certainly improved his critical cachet, there’s still a strong undercurrent within the community that he’s still a “fan’s writer”. While I think his work on Zoom back in Flash was evidence to the contrary, the negative reaction to much of his 2005 work (especially Infinite Crisis) really set this impression into stone for a while. The phrase “big dumb crossover” was used to describe SCW a great deal, but the role that story played in thematically tying up the journey of Coast City in overcoming its own fear, as well as the implications of Sinestro’s master plan, fit into Johns’s grander narrative in a way that is hardly dumb.

Geoff Johns is a very good writer. Within a few years, he’ll be truly great. I really wish he’d give creator-owned concepts a try for a little while, just because I think it would expand his horizons as a writer, but with each new project his understanding of structure and narrative improve to a huge degree. The genuine enthusiasm that fuels his craft is not only infectious to the reader but also the driving force behind his constant (and stated) desire to learn. There is a reason Grant Morrison is mentoring this guy - he has the potential to be far more than another Roy Thomas, Kontinuity Kop (I’d say he’s already there). His work isn’t empty - there are ideas, themes, hooks to all of his stories. They may currently lack subtlety sometimes, but that will come with time. The more his work is treated as something real, the more likely it is to become that. I can’t wait to see what he’s doing in three years - I just hope it doesn’t take that long for people to realize he can get there.

The Ten Cent Plague

So What If They’re Just For Kids?

by Bob Proehl of Diagnosis: No Radio

Like jazz, the other great indigenous American art form, comic books started out produced almost exclusively by and for outsiders. In cramped New York City offices, young, hungry artists, unable to find work in the more established and lucrative field of formal illustration and largely of Jewish or Italian descent, with names like Eisner, Kane, Siegel, Schuster, Infantino, worked long hours for page rates, inventing the visual language of a new medium, unrestricted by the formal constraints of tradition or the content supervision of outside parties like the MPAA or the FCC.

Their audience was a group that had yet to be defined as a distinct demographic; “children’s entertainment” in the 1940s amounted to little more than guidebooks for teaching kids how to become well-adjusted adults. The idea that children might have tastes, might desire something in their entertainments other than primers on cultural conformity, was revolutionary. And like most revolutionary ideas, it quickly came into disfavor with those interested in maintaining the status quo.

In his latest book, “The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America“, David Hajdu, author of “Positively 4^th St” traces the rise and fall of the early comic book industry in post-war America. While most long-time comic book enthusiasts know some version of the story and can name check Wertham, the Code and EC Comics, Hajdu goes into painstaking detail in an attempt to tie the comic book scare to other oppressive cultural and political forces in 1950s, as well as mapping the rise of comic books onto the birth of youth culture.

Hajdu presents early comic book artists simultaneously as hacks and rebels. Many took work in comics to simply to pay the bills, shunning the idea that comics could ever be considered art, and even before the backlash against comics, working in the industry had a certain social stigma attached to it, due in part to anti-Semitic sentiments that persisted in the US even after the revelation of the Holocaust. Regardless of their artistic aspirations, these creators were, for the first time, giving kids what they wanted, and the kids were buying in droves. Even at 10 cents a copy, the comic book industry was making millions of dollars and reaching millions of readers in the early fifties. For a time, it was a more successful form of mass media than traditional print books or television.

Starting from this freewheeling period, when the market embraced superhero comics alongside romance, westerns, crime and horror, Hajdu slowly paints the story of the industry’s decline into violent self-censorship. The book centers on three characters: the iconoclastic Will Eisner, a business pioneer and artistic innovator, frustrated in his pursuit of artistic recognition to go along with his financial success, the tragic Bill Gaines, determined to make his company successful if only to spite the Christian conservative father he’d inherited EC Comics from and bullied into near bankruptcy by forces inside and outside comics, and the spectral Frederick Wertham, once a liberal minded clinician who opened the first mental health clinic in Harlem, convinced comic books were at the root of the rise in “delinquency”, a blanket term which covered every form of what we now accept as the standard rebellious nature of youth. Hajdu evokes an atmosphere of paranoia through descriptions of book burnings in the American heartland, only years after WWII and Senate hearings on comic books, sandwiched neatly between hearings on organized crime and the McCarthy hearings on the communist infiltration of the armed forces. The culture at large seemed to be strictly enforcing hegemony, eliminating anything outside the norm. “It was a bad time to be weird,” artist Al Williamson put it.

With an overload of detail, including a list of nearly 800 writers and artists eventually put out of work once the Comics Code eliminated most books on the shelves, Hajdu presents an almost untold story which makes the more well-known outcry against rock and roll seem like a faint echo. In fact, it’s a fight that has recurred throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first: a form of media specific to youth (heavy metal in the eighties, video games in the nineties) comes under fire from adult “watch-groups” who fail to understand something novel as anything but strange and therefore evil. Culminating in the introduction of the Comics Code, one of the most oppressive forms of regulation any media industry has imposed upon itself, the book expands on the standard narrative of Wertham as demonizing the evil trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman as representatives of Fascism, Homosexuality and Sadomasochism (probably not how Kurt Busiek will be presenting the trio, but one can hope), to show an entire apparatus of parent’s groups, media groups and legislators, trying to make the case that taste lies solely in the hands of those in power; the tastes of comic book readers and creators are, by definition, “deviant”. The book shows one of the earliest battles between youth and authority. Authority may have won out, cursing comics with decades of Code-approved super heroics instead of the beautiful chaos of imagination that came before, but, inspired by the sheer uniqueness of comics, a medium all their own, youth was prepared for the next round.

Alan Moore’s Black Dossier: Another Look

Alan Moore Is At It Again

by Dyfrig Jones of http://bloganswyddogol.blogspot.com

First of all, apologies for being late. This being the Internet, there’s no excuse for falling behind. And since League of Extraordinary Gentlemen : Black Dossier was originally published nearly four whole months ago, this piece is seriously behind schedule. But then I do have a defence – I’m British, and getting my hands on a copy isn’t as simple as walking in to your average neighbourhood comic store. Alleged copyright infringement by the author means that while the book has surfaced in the US, DC have decided not to run with it in the UK.

There has been a predictable amount of speculation and rumour-mongering regarding these legal wrangles. Some fans have questioned whether there is a genuine problem, while others have asked how the first two volumes managed to get around infringing the copyright of existing fictional characters while the third book failed. For what it’s worth, I think the answer to this second question is fairly straightforward. In the previous books, Moore chose to work with characters that were out of copyright, or with characters whose identities were tweaked sufficiently to separate them from their source material. Moore has taken a similar approach in the Black Dossier, but may have sailed a little close to the wind.

There can be little doubt that one of the main villains of the book is fairly closely modeled on England’s most famous secret agent. His surname is never mentioned, but there are plenty of heavy-handed hints to his identity, including a reference to a Jamaica based Asiatic super-criminal that was “No Doctor”. In and of itself, the publisher may have got away with it – as they did in volumes 1 and 2 – had “Jimmy” the spy been a slightly more sympathetic character. But making him a rapist might not have been the wisest way of currying favour with the copyright holders, and may be the reason for DC’s nervousness. Their legal counsel may have come to the conclusion that imitation may be permissible as long as it is flattering, rather than venomous, in tone.

Whatever the reason, the Black Dossier remains, officially, an exclusive treat for American readers. Which is a curious state of affairs, considering that this is a book that exists, essentially, as a compendium of mid-20^th century British popular culture. This is not, after all, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 3. It is, to borrow a wholly anachronistic classification, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Version 2.1 – a strange combination of graphic novel and background source book.

Set in England in a post-Nineteen Eighty-Four 1958 (if that makes any sense) the narrative follows Mina Murray and a rejuvenated Allan Quartermain as they steal the eponymous Black Dossier. The book, which details the history of the many incarnations of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (among other things), is in the possession of the British government, who have recently ousted Big Brother’s Ingsoc tyranny. As our two heroes make their escape, they frequently pause to read extracts from the dossier, re-prints of which make up the majority of this book – a combination of prose, retro comic book pastiche, and literary ventriloquism.

So far, so Alan Moore. Mixing media has always been a hallmark of Moore’s work, and part of what gave Watchmen it’s appeal was the back and forth between the main plot, the “source material” – Hollis Mason’s Under the Hood, pages from the New Frontiersman – and the secondary narrative, Tales of the Black Freighter. To be fair, the same device was present in the first two volumes of League as well, in the form of the story Allan and the Sundered Veil and the mock travelogue The New Traveller’s Almanac.

Now this is where I make my confession. Until recently –until I sat down to write this piece, in fact –I had never read The New Traveller’s Almanac from beginning to end. Neither did I bother with Allan and the Sundered Veil. I began to read both of them, but found that they lacked the interest of the main narrative. Unlike the prose section in Watchmen, they seemed supplementary, appendices that – like their anatomical equivalents – weren’t really necessary. If you wanted to write an academic paper about Alan Moore, you’d need to read them. But for the general reader’s convenience, they were tucked away in the back of the book, to be ignored.

The problem with Black Dossier is that the same sections are no longer tidied away neatly. While the first few page of main narrative is classic Moore, once our heroes get their hands on the book itself, it simply becomes a device for getting us from one piece of source material to the next. If you start skipping them, you miss the point of Black Dossier. To do so would be like watching commercials on TV and then fast-forwarding through the programme itself. Now this wouldn’t be a problem, if the source material was any good. But the sorry fact is that it doesn’t make for very interesting reading. And it illustrates a central point about Moore as an author.

Moore’s problem is that while his work is always well written, it isn’t always enjoyable. Now a statement like this raises a point about writing in general. Does “good writing” exist, or is anything you enjoy reading, by definition, good writing? I would argue that there are certain criteria that mark out good or bad writers. Originality is certainly one, but the ability to structure a story well; to ensure that characters act in a way that is consistent with their motives; to string words together in a coherent and stylistically interesting manner; to explore themes in an implicit, subtle, manner; and to weave together disparate storylines are all necessary skills for a good writer.

The problem is that a book can contain none of these elements – it can be predictable, ridden with clichéd language and characters, and lack any narrative unity – and people will still enjoy it. Bad writers produce books that people like –the enduring career of Frank Miller is testament to this fact. And likewise, good writers can produce books that contain every element of great literature, and be phenomenally dull to read.

Perhaps the central problem of Black Dossier is that it is the work of a man who is determined to prove what a good writer he is. Moore’s most disappointing work often feels as if it is trying to make a point. Reading Supreme or Tom Strong , you feel that you’re watching a man desperately trying to answer his imagined critics, a man who is screaming at them – “Look at how clever comic books can be. Notice the post-modern intertextuality. Bow down before the deconstructive knowingness.” And like the super-villain of old, he becomes crazed by his power, and it destroys him.

Black Dossier falls firmly into this category of Moore book. It is heavily inter-textual, and stultifying dull; as much of a puzzle book as a story. It contains well observed pastiches in many literary styles – from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac – and is engorged with tiny references to 1950’s British pop culture. But how many of Moore’s readership are sufficiently familiar with either Shakespeare or Kerouac to truly appreciate how well Moore has managed to mimic their voices? How many of his readers will recognise one percent of the supporting characters? Some may argue that the fun is in the finding out, but I suspect that the answer is much simpler, and more disappointing. The fun of Black Dossier was probably in the writing. It’s only a pity that there’s none left for the reader.

What If? Why?

Everything You Know Is Wrong

by Gavin Jasper of 4thletter!

I’m new to the PopCultureShock family, so chances are you don’t know me. Those of you who do know me know that I have an unhealthy fixation with Marvel’s What If series. For those of you who don’t know me… well, I have an unhealthy fixation with Marvel’s What If series. Unhealthy to the point that a while back I decided to read every single issue released and write up a list of the top 100 issues.

What’s the appeal? It’s a loaded question, but a lot of it has to do with the ability to play with continuity where you usually can’t in mainstream books, including having writers expand on a character’s depth by showing what it would take to truly change their composition. We can see what it would take to make Frank Castle throw aside his career as the Punisher and act as a wholesome hero. We can see what could make Victor Von Doom refrain from being a tyrant and instead act as a hero, though still a hero full of himself. Or we can see what kind of horrors could finally break Peter Parker to the point that he would actually go through with murder rather than the predictable fake-out we get every year or so. Did anyone really expect him to kill the Kingpin in Back in Black?

Then there’s the outlandish factor. You can see continuity stray in ways that make you want to read the continuations, sometimes to the point that you wish they really happened in regular Marvel continuity. Stuff like Richard Fisk becoming Daredevil or Living Laser becoming Iron Man or having every single superhero on Earth team up in a far more epic Kree-Skrull War than the one we actually got. Even with that, a lot of issues seem to be the inspirations for other Marvel storylines from over the years, such as Infinity Gauntlet, the Clone Saga, Onslaught, Wolverine in Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Punisher’s background and others.

For the past couple years, Marvel has been releasing new sets of What Ifs every December or so. The first set in 2005 was off to a rocky start with Claremont’s rather pointless What If Professor X and Magneto Formed the X-Men Together? and proof that Brian Michael Bendis’ writing style just doesn’t jibe with loaded one-shots. The next year they tried making them less about continuity and just making Elseworlds stories, such as showing Daredevil as a samurai in feudal Japan. That’s not to say that it didn’t have its little gems, such as that Daredevil story and Kirkman’s take on Thor being the herald of Galactus.

The next set went back to its roots, though based on more epic Marvel events. They were a mixed bag. Hine’s alternate aftermath of Deadly Genesis is brilliant stuff and Peter David’s new version of Spider-Man: The Other is enjoyably creepy, if a little too short. It’s just that the Age of Apocalypse issue was hilariously awful and the one based on Avengers: Disassembled was an insulting attempt to retcon mainstream continuity.

Let’s take a good look at the batch of issues that came out over the past winter. First up is What If: Planet Hulk, thankfully written by Greg Pak. Here we are given three stories, though really, the third one barely counts. Come on, Marvel. Don’t solicit what could be a potentially good short story when you’re really just giving us a Fred Hembeck page that’s worth half a laugh.

The first story is about Hulk tossing his queen Caiera to safety when the ship explodes and therefore sacrificing himself. Most Hulk What Ifs are pretty depressing, but when you think about it, this little scene isn’t all that pessimistic. It’s actually the perfect death for the Hulk. He became cursed with his lone wolf situation because he selflessly saved a stranger from an explosion. How fitting that he would die the same way, only after breaking the curse. Not only that, but his legacy lives on with his son.

As optimistic as that may sound, it’s lost on Caiera, who absorbs the energies of the planet Sakaar and makes a beeline for Earth. From there, it’s just like the cover suggests. Caiera easily kills off Black Bolt, Dr. Strange, Sentry, Iron Man and Reed Richards in the time it takes to tie a shoe. Black Bolt talking shouldn’t exactly kill the Sentry, but don’t let that get in the way of a simple 90’s-style killfest. It is Hiroim the Shamed whose actions make the story end on a slightly less dire note.

It’s really not all that good. The art is nice, but it reads like a Sparknotes version of World War Hulk as read by Johnny 5. It may have worked better if it had taken a full issue to tell, but I’m glad it didn’t, since it would have cheated us out of the second story.

Something interesting about this story is that it’s the first appearance of Skaar, who will soon be starring in his own miniseries. I don’t think I’d give a single damn about that miniseries if it wasn’t for Pak giving me blue-balls via his minor appearance here. Well played. He looks a lot like Nathan Explosion from Dethklok here. Is it just me?

The following story is loads better, based on Hulk landing on the planet the Illuminati intended for him. The irony is that while the Illuminati figured that Banner would be for this and Hulk would be against it, once they get on the planet, it’s the opposite that’s true. Hulk loves the creatures on that planet and plays protector. Banner wants off and only works for survival. The two personalities argue as they always do, leading to an adorable ending and an even more heartwarming aftermath. In the end, we get a glimpse at what I can only describe as the Anti-Maestro. I had no idea this piece of the issue was going to be as great as it turned out to be.

The next one to come out was What If: Annihilation. Despite the kick-ass cover, the concept seemed too good to be true, so I was cautiously optimistic. A lot of seemingly awesome What If concepts from the past couple years have ended up being lukewarm in action. Luckily, this exceeded expectations. The change in continuity has to do with Drax attempting to free Galactus instead of Silver Surfer. That one decision leads to all their deaths and the inability to stop Annihilus’ reign of galactic terror. On Earth, Captain America is hesitating on whether or not he should take out his former best friend Iron Man as part of the Civil War climax. A taste of the Annihilation Wave comes to Earth, much like some fans expected to happen during the actual Civil War miniseries.

Nova does the impossible by joining together nearly every pro-registration hero, anti-registration hero, Inhuman and a whole bunch of supervillains for the sake of fending off against eradication on a cosmic scale. This gets the full attention of the Annihilation Wave, which makes a run for our planet. Uatu the Watcher steps in with his own little device to destroy the alien threat and as you can figure, Earth ultimately wins. That’s all well and good, but it’s just a bit lacking as a story of this scale. It just feels pointless and hollow.

Thankfully, that isn’t the end of things. There are still six pages left. The rest of the issue and the reason why I love it so much, tie into Uatu. While Uatu is a good enough character, there is only so much that he actually does. He can narrate, tell everyone that he can only watch but not interfere or interfere by giving the heroes information and/or a weapon. Though in one What If he did interfere by physically fighting Galactus. Still, all those examples of his interference are based entirely on him trying to save mankind – or the universe – from complete destruction. This story is very different.

Usually the Uatu we see in What If is the Watcher from the mainstream Marvel Earth, showing us other realities. Not this time. It becomes more apparent that this Watcher narrating is the one from this comic’s reality. During the final pages, he isn’t breaking his oath to ensure our survival so that he has something to watch. He’s doing it for the sake of making us feel better about who we are. This cold being is trying to give us hope when he doesn’t even need to. That’s inspired.

All the dialogue and moments in those last pages make What If: Annihilation one of my favorite comic issues of 2007. Even with its small size, it manages to remain epic and pleasing.

The best of the batch is then followed by what I’d consider the worst. What If: Rise of the Shi’arr Empire is based on Vulcan getting knocked into the M’Kraan Crystal and absorbing the energies of the Phoenix. Personally, I love Vulcan. In fact, it was What If: Deadly Genesis from a year prior that convinced me to read the character’s stories. The idea of Vulcan being the Phoenix is full of potential.

The story isn’t horrible, but it’s just very… easy and plain. Vulcan with the Phoenix powers leads to him fighting every living Summers character on Krakoa for the final battle. The solution is what you’d expect and the whole thing just comes across as paint-by-numbers. Though I’m still not sure I get Vulcan’s physical transformation towards the end.

What really makes this one hard to read is the art by Larry Stroman. It’s a very EXTREME! 80’s style with lots of instances of bad facial anatomy, characters hunched over like zombies and other deformities. Don’t take my word for it. Take Rachel Summers’.

Don’t get too distracted by her face or you’ll miss whatever the hell is going on with her hand.

After that Vulcan mess, we move onto the well-hyped What If: Civil War. I have very mixed feelings about this one. We are given two different stories and a framing device. The first story, written by Kevin Grevioux, is based on the idea of Tony Stark dying from injecting himself with the Extremis tech. Captain America leads the other heroes towards taking down Mallon, the super-criminal from the Extremis storyline. The prelude to Civil War goes as scheduled, though this time it is Captain America running against the government unopposed. He’s able to convince every single superhero to follow his lead.

What happens is exactly what Tony Stark feared would happen if he didn’t take his stand: the war between heroes and the government still takes place, only more extreme and violent. If you look at it, all the players in the story (Captain America, Jim Rhodes, Gyrich, Maria Hill and I suppose Reed Richards) are all little pieces of Tony Stark’s place in Civil War, only warring against each other in chaos instead of working together as one man. As expected, the ending is a big downer, lending itself to a world that’s more than likely about to get worse.

Two things about the story get an unintentional chuckle out of me. For one, the art tries to be very McNiven, but sometimes characters have overly animated facial features. This is fine for rubbery Reed Richards, but Thing’s face shouldn’t look like it’s melting off when he’s all sad like that. The other thing is how at one point Captain America breaks out the old Iron Captain America armor in honor of how he feels Iron Man would have backed him up on this. Not only does he forget about it completely by the next scene, but it looks nothing like his old armor. It’s just Greviox trying to tie the story in with the cover image.

Christos Gage takes up the next story, taking off from the incident where Captain America zapped Iron Man during their handshake when Iron Man just wanted to talk things over. Iron Man chooses to admit that although he’s sure he’s doing the right thing, he needs Cap to make sure he’s doing it the right way. With this honesty, Cap turns off his device and legitimately shakes his hand. Due to a misunderstanding, the Thor clone is released and hell begins to break loose.

No doubt about it, the image of Captain America holding his shield in defense of an ailing Iron Man and telling the Thor clone, “You want him? You’ll have to go through me,” is a feel good moment. Though I suppose that’s the problem here. This isn’t much of a story. It’s just a series of feel good moments, showing how awesome things could have been. It’s like the Marvel Adventures version of the story.

It wouldn’t have been very effective if it wasn’t for Ed Brubaker and Marko Djurdjevic’s framing scenes that portray the Watcher visiting Tony Stark at Steve Rogers’ grave, showing him these stories to prove his own little point. This whole bit is an homage to Frank Miller’s What If Elektra Had Lived?, a story that I STILL don’t understand its popularity. By putting this and the two stories together, you get a reasonable showing of one of Civil War’s main themes: Tony Stark may have been right, but he certainly wasn’t right enough. Now the world is suffering for it.

The final recent What If is What If: Spider-Man vs. Wolverine. That title isn’t very literal, as the two don’t exactly fight each other here. It’s based on a one-shot from 20 years ago where Spider-Man’s hero-vs.-villain mentality got mixed in with Wolverine’s shades-of-gray lifestyle while in Europe. Wolverine hoped to protect a former KGB agent and love interest Charlie (it’s a female, I swear) from being captured by the Russians and enduring a slow and painful death. His solution was to kill her first. Spider-Man tried to stop this, but in all the confusion, he accidentally punched Charlie in the head so hard that he killed her. The two heroes went their separate ways and Peter sulked over having taken a life.

This story, written by everybody’s friend Jeff Parker and illustrated by Clayton Henry, deals with Logan making the decision to help Peter redeem himself before he can return to America. Charlie has a sister, a captured CIA agent named Alex, and they need Spider-Man’s help. He makes the decision to stick around and his whole life changes. The more he’s trapped in this world, the darker he gets. It all begins with accidentally killing the latest Crimson Dynamo and gets worse from there. Once he has Alex freed, he latches onto her and they become inseparable. It’s figured that by keeping her alive, he validates all the killing, plus she has a noticeable resemblance to a certain blond bridge victim from the old days.

In fact, I think I can sum up Spider-Man’s change with this image.

Notice that his black ops costume is based on Alex Ross’ concept sketch for the first Spider-Man movie.

Through the teachings of operative genius Nebo, Spider-Man enhances his skills and powers to the point that his little family is nearly unstoppable. And they are something of a family. Wolverine doesn’t do all that much in the story other than supply dialogue and play off Peter, but the two develop an almost brotherly relationship.

The real reason I enjoy this issue is because for once, the other shoe doesn’t drop. In all the other What Ifs, Spider-Man is never allowed to stray away from type. If he goes for the kill, it destroys him. If he shirks off responsibility, his existence becomes even more of a nightmare. So to see him become a killer, you expect a whiny ending about Spider-Man crying over all the mistakes he made. Thankfully, we don’t get that.

The ending we do get shows that the kind wise-cracker we all know and love is gone, but maybe it’s for the better? Everyone who matters is happy, the world may possibly be better off and maybe, just maybe, the ends have justified the means.

Again, it was a really good batch this year. Makes me wish they’d just make the series monthly again. I’m just kidding. I’ve been wanting a new monthly What If series for years. This just pumps up my morale.

Next month Marvel will be releasing all five issues under the trade What If: Civil War. You should pick it up.

Alternate Current is a series of weekly posts on thought-provoking, or simply fun, topics from bright minds all throughout the blogosphere. We take submissions and responses, so if you’d like to get into the mix, send an email to David Brothers. This week comes courtesy of Gavin from 4thletter!. Check back tomorrow morning for the first of Gavin’s regular columns in Comics From The 5th Dimension!

Hanging on The Wire

Everything is Connected

by David Uzumeri of Funnybook Babylon

HBO’s The Wire, co-created by David Simon and Ed Burns, finishes up its five-season run on Sunday. For its small but incredibly devoted viewership, this provides closure to over five years’ worth of emotional investment in an intricate serialized story about countless people from all walks of society and how they mingle, relate, love and kill. Propelled by a single artistic vision, five seasons, each with their own theme, build on each other to form a single complex and unified tale, manipulating existing genre conventions to create something wholly new and different.

Sound familiar?

It’s no surprise that television and comics have become kissing cousins over the past few years, sharing talent, ideas, and sometimes whole properties – they’re both serialized visual media that extend a story over a long period of time, creating a natural back-and-forth between the creators and the fanbase/viewership. They can be open-ended or finite, deliberately paced or created one at a time, episodically self-contained or continuity-laden.

So what makes The Wire unique? Largely its ambition. Meticulously plotted and incredibly complex, The Wire engages the viewer eloquently, trusting him/her to stay alert, put together the pieces and follow the narrative without the consistent recapping and handholding that often permeates network television. Each season introduces a new cast of characters that supplements rather than replaces what was already there and exposes a new layer of the interrelated machinery that runs the city of Baltimore.

So what does any of this have to do with comics? To look forward, we must first look back. In 1993, David Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets was published, leading to both considerable acclaim and the seven-season NBC police drama Homicide: Life on the Street, which Simon left journalism to work on himself.

In the late ’90s and early ’00s, a few hotshot young turks entered the comic industry with backgrounds in crime fiction: namely Brian Michael Bendis, Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker. They didn’t all come in at the same time, or at the same place, but they fairly quickly found each other and started to collaborate. Their writing was detail-oriented, their dialogue as realistic as possible considering the context of the standard superhero comic, and their plots were always planned out far in advance. All of them, in terms of influence, were disciples of Simon.

In the Powers v2 #12 50th-issue blowout interview, Bendis states that “HOMICIDE: A YEAR OF KILLING on the Streets by David Simon … started my absolute love affair for the idea of a homicide detective and his life.” Brubaker and Rucka have both cited Homicide as a major influence on the dynamic and structure of the Eisner award-winning Gotham Central. These three would later go on to work on a variety of projects, both somewhat related to crime fiction (Daredevil, Crime Bible, Detective Comics) and not (Wonder Woman, Uncanny X-Men, Mighty Avengers). Wherever they went, however, the humanistic perspective and attempt at verisimilitude fostered by their crime work would go with them, no matter how bizarre or alien the project.

Additionally, particularly Bendis is often tagged with the reputation of being responsible for what’s known as “decompression”: which is seen as either dragging out scenes or giving them room to breathe, depending on your perspective and the quality of the work. Where before a particular story or conflict would tend to take up one or two issues, with plot threads leading from and to the next issue separate from the particular episodic story, runs would be built as successive arcs, usually four to six issues, which tell a single story, with plot threads running between them. Any attempt at making each issue immediately accessible was abandoned, a necessary sacrifice in the name of verisimilitude and narrative complexity.

This approach, rather than alienating readers, combined with the newfound proliferation of trade paperback collections to shoot Bendis, and later Brubaker, up to the top of the sales charts. These extended stories, heavy on realistic dialogue and character interaction, were hugely popular in collected form and drew tons of new readers in. Which brings us back to The Wire.

It’s interesting to note that, unlike comics, television hadn’t really – and still hasn’t – made that switch completely yet. DVD box sets are replacing trade paperbacks in the metaphor, and certainly shows like Lost or Arrested Development are far more enjoyable when watched in order, but they still make an attempt for each episode to tell its own story. They still act on the unspoken assumption that every episode could be someone’s first, and that as writers they have an obligation to hook them. This is an attitude very much encouraged by the networks. As a result, many shows get bogged down in episode-specific details to maintain the fractal nature of their storytelling – to serve the needs of that single episode’s story, the stories of the multi-episode arcs around it, and on top of that the main driving throughline of the show. This nearly crippled Battlestar Galactica during the back half of season three, as all momentum from the midseason climax was lost in a sea of forgettable one-episode stories with no impact slotted into the story just to fill out a schedule.

The Wire, despite being ostensibly an ongoing television drama (well, ongoing to five seasons, the same way you could consider Y or Ex Machina an ongoing comic) never went with that route. Each season had its own arc, but even though each episode had a different writer and director, they would flow together to create one cohesive story – no episode-specific crises, no tangents slotted in to make the series more “accessible.” It was full speed ahead from the word go, and to say it was critically lauded would be a fair understatement. Unfortunately, unlike Bendis – who got to prop his experiments with comic pacing on the marketing giant known as Spider-Man – David Simon had an HBO show with unknown actors and unknown characters, so that commercial success largely eluded him.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this relationship continues to develop. It’s easy to say that Simon, his writing partner Ed Burns and their staff are unaware of this connection, but considering the Ultimate Spider-Man shout-out in season two I’m not wholly convinced. People always accuse the comics market of being infantile and underdeveloped, but the aspects that made The Wire so unpopular with the general audience have been hugely successful in the comic industry, both inside and out of the corporate-owned superhero market. Does this speak just to the talent of the creators involved? Increased marketplace awareness within comics fandom? Or simply luck? I have no idea.

But I do know I’d kill to see Simon and Burns do a comic.

Alternate Current is a series of weekly posts on thought-provoking, or simply fun, topics from bright minds all throughout the blogosphere. We take submissions and responses, so if you’d like to get into the mix, send an email to David Brothers. This week comes courtesy of David from Funnybook Babylon.

Don’t Pump Your Brakes Yet, Marvel

by David Brothers

Michael San Giacomo’s latest column on Newsarama, Journey Into Comics: I Have A Dream, is an interesting one. He posits the idea that what Marvel really needs right now is a story to “pull together all its disparate, raggedy-edged storylines into a whole, complete, satisfying finale.” Go and give it a read. I may not agree with his point, but it is an interesting read.

I really don’t agree, though. The beauty of the Marvel universe is its disparate threads. It has been for years. It’s even one of the big differences between Marvel’s way of doing things and DC’s. Where DC Comics has Crises and “narrative spines,” Marvel is perfectly content to let their stories flow freely and separately. They may cross over occasionally, but not quite to the same extent that DC’s stories do.

There are a few separate narrative threads running through the Marvel Universe now. There is the chaos in outer space due to Annihilation, civil unrest in Captain America, current event analogues due to Civil War, the wreckage in NYC due to Planet Hulk, and Red Scare-style mistrust due to the oncoming Secret Invasion. These are just the major stories– I’m leaving out the dissolution of the X-Men, kung fu kickery in Iron Fist, or the shenanigans in Amazing Spider-Man.

This is a huge part of why I love Marvel’s comics. Their motto just seems to be throwing everything at the wall, seeing what sticks, and then throwing even more stuff at the wall. It gives the feel of a fast-paced, hectic universe, and also one where you can always find the cure for what ails ya. If you don’t want to read about Skrulls invading, pop on over to The Order for some post-Civil War intrigue. Are you still mad about the death of Cap? Well, the X-Men just went through a big upheaval, maybe there’s something there for you. Don’t dig on outer space epics? Amazing Spider-Man is about as street level and old school as it gets.

I’d hate to see Marvel tie all this together. With DC, at least, the stories are planned to coincide at certain points. With Marvel, it’d be a disaster. It’d be continuity pandering in the worst way. It doesn’t matter that Nova is off doing outer space things while Spider-Man is busy resetting his life– they’re separate stories by separate teams. They are both fulfilling a different need.

Yes, Mephisto rewrote the universe, or at least the past. But– why should that impact Wolverine? Why should the problems be solved by a team of heroes? There are continuity questions involved in Brand New Day, but those should be able to be handled in Brand New Day. Magneto destroyed a bit of Manhattan back during New X-Men, but that’s no big deal. It’s contained continuity at work. Each book exists in its own sub-continuity, giving it its own shape, feel, and form.

We don’t necessarily need Marvel Secret Crisis to wrap up these loose ends, in large part because they aren’t loose ends. They are plot points. We are going to find out what’s happened to the Hulk, Spider-Man, and the Skrulls in due time. However, it should happen in their own books. We don’t neccessarily need to see Hulk popping up in New Warriors, asking what’s up with registration and explaining the whole red thing. It’d be weird and disorienting.

Tying everything together makes for an interesting experiment. The Superman books did it for years, for example, and DC has kind of made a big deal out of interconnecting their storylines, as we can see with the coming of Final Crisis. I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing at all– DC has had a nicely cohesive universe ever since Infinite Crisis. However, that isn’t Marvel’s thing. Marvel provides a different experience. Their universe is crowded, hectic, over the top, and fast-moving, which gives you a chance to dip your toes into a bunch of different stories at once.

Let’s keep Marvel’s plate full to overflowing. Why clear the plate when you can sit down at a buffet and stuff your face like it was ancient Rome?

Alternate Current is a series of weekly posts on thought-provoking, or simply fun, topics from bright minds all throughout the blogosphere. We take submissions, so if you’d like to get into the mix, send an email to David Brothers. This week comes courtesy of David Brothers, the Senior Comics Editor for PCS.

All-Star Batman and Robin Is Amazing.

(no, i am not trolling you)

by Jon Bernhardt of Funnybook Babylon

The ninth issue of Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s All-Star Batman and Robin came out this Wednesday, and finally, at long last, it looks like we’ve got enough material here to accurately gauge it. Its release schedule is still highly irregular — though it’s been rapidly getting less so — and sure, it’s taken us over two years to get to this point. But here we are, and from all appearances, Miller and Lee have handed us something a hell of a lot more complex than most people thought they’d get when they picked up the first couple issues. Really, though, this is Frank Miller we’re talking about. You should have known by now there’d be something lurking there underneath all that sex and violence.

After the first couple issues of ASBAR (God I love that acronym) hit, the conventional wisdom stated that Frank Miller had, quite frankly, gone insane. That’s fine. That was more or less the conventional wisdom that followed The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Not so much following Batman: Year One, but there was still some kvetching about how Miller portrayed Catwoman. What people seemed to miss about Miller’s latter day Batman work — especially the oft-maligned DKSA, which is right now competing against itself and only itself for “Most Disappointing Comic” in some silly poll Wizard Online is running — is that Miller is doing something most comic writers seem incapable of doing: he is reacting. DKSA is a reaction to DKR and its rather blind, unconsidered acceptance by both creative forces at DC Comics and the comic community at large; the book is a mockery through absurdity. Not a lot of people got this message, and many of the ones who did still disliked it, because they found the writing or art off-putting. And to be fair, Miller’s exaggerated “ugly” style that he pulls out these days is something that takes a little getting used to.

But a lot of people — including, I’m assuming, the bright minds and hearty souls over at Wizard — disliked Dark Knight Strikes Again because they came into it expecting something they were never going to get, based, perhaps, on their misunderstanding of what Miller actually did with the character in Dark Knight Returns. The absolute worst way to engage with the text of DKR is to read it like Miller is saying that Batman’s a cool dude, totally ripping around town and kicking all sorts of asses, thinking that it’s a war and his kids in it are soldiers and that this is how things should be, thinking that creepy memorials are the way to go when a child in his care dies. DKR is not an endorsement. DKR is a cautionary tale.

So when the main line DC Comics version of Batman got his sidekick killed, it must have been bizarre for Miller to see that memorial show up, because that memorial was not a good thing for the character. What happened when that memorial went up in Dark Knight Returns was that Bruce Wayne stopped being Batman. So when DC killed Jason Todd off on their main line, and someone realized this would be a great opportunity to do a throwback to that wildly successful miniseries that Frank Miller did — which, along with Alan Moore’s Watchmen, comprised a late-eighties sea change in comics, for better or for worse — they essentially betrayed the memorial’s symbolism. Sure, they kept the inscription, the glass case, the creepy costume, all that physical stuff, but they botched the context. In DKR, that event makes Batman hang up the mask. In the main DCU, that event makes him…try to kill Joker, but get stopped by Superman because Joker is part of the Iranian delegation to the United Nations (or the one from Qurac, or Khandaq, or whatever made-up fake Arabic state is standing in for Iran these days). Then he continues soldiering on, getting kind of nutty until Tim Drake saves his soul. And there the memorial stays.

The memorial looms, now; it’s pretty much replaced the T-Rex and the giant penny as the standard stage prop you see when any DC artist does an interior of the Batcave. That’s a powerful message, and one that doesn’t seem to be that considered. And in the late nineties, dreck like Bruce Wayne: Murderer? and Batman: Fugitive cemented the bizarre, one foot in the room, one foot out the door approach Batman’s editorial handlers, Batman’s writers, and a large group of Batman’s fans took towards the character, perhaps best summed up in what was maybe the most misguided, character damaging single issue of Batman ever penned — Batman #600, the climax of Bruce Wayne: Murderer?, written by none other than Ed Brubaker. Let’s be clear: “Bruce Wayne is the mask” is perhaps the most tedious, surface-level, purely lazy interpretation of Frank Miller’s legacy with this character that you can make.

I think that is why after Dark Knight Strikes Again failed, Miller felt the need to come back and try it again, in a way that would appeal to the baser natures of some the people that gave DKSA the heave-ho. It’s slick and beautiful; Jim Lee at his finest, most insane, and fundamentally sound. Miller has Lee doing things that Jeph Loeb wishes he had the imagination to ask for in Hush. And Lee’s style fits the new approach Miller is taking to the material perfectly. Instead of using intentionally ugly art to contrast with the sickly-sweet over-pop portrayals of superheroes in DKSA (and anyone who thinks that art wasn’t intentional should reread not just his first run on Daredevil, but the issues immediately preceding it, when he was the book’s penciller; every choice Miller makes is a matter of style and is done by a man with a very, very solid grounding in his craft), Miller and Lee are using the art to emphasize the slick, fuel-injected, ultra-violent, over-the-top creature Batman has become. Everything about this book, from Batman’s ridiculous inner monologue to the 12 year old boy who’s the closest thing we have to a character we can identify with, to a six-page fold out of the Batcave, indicates that there’s something behind all this sound and fury, and that it’s something important.

The Batman of All-Star Batman and Robin is not just a dude who can bust some heads. He’s not one-dimensional. And like most characters that are not one-dimensional, he should not always be taken at his word. As we’ve seen so far, this Batman is a troubled individual in an utterly insane world — an updated analogue of the Silver Age, where the whimsy that characterized that era’s climate has been replaced by the exaggerated faux-maturity that characterizes ours. This character has built a reactive persona that he hides behind, and in Issue #9, for the first time in the run, it comes down, and we see Bruce Wayne. Issue #9 is also the first time we see a recognition that violence has consequences, which starkly contrasts with the extremely funny, over-the-top scene that comes before it. Basically, Issue #9 is the turn that the first eight issues were building to, where Miller pulls back the curtain and makes how he sees these characters explicit. Seriously. Go back and read Issues #1-9 in one sitting, and see how he does it. Miller is a master — he’s crafted a ludicrous comic that’s not only viscerally entertaining and amazingly funny, but carries on the tradition of the old DC Universe, translated into the modern era, while also giving a spin on the character that has as much weight and consideration as his work in Dark Knight Returns. Probably not as much impact, but that’s a good thing. Let’s be honest — just like with its contemporary, Watchmen, fans are a bit too blindly rabid when it comes to DKR.

It’s a good time to be a Batman fan. Grant Morrison and Frank Miller, with generally solid work by Paul Dini on the side? Yes please. It’s taken way too long, but Miller and Morrison, who are far and away the best two minds currently working on superheroes for DC, are taking a character that has honestly been doing nothing of note for almost fifteen years and breathing major life back into him (with assists by guys like Darwyn Cooke and David Lapham, of course — Batman: Ego and Batman: City of Crime complete the essential post-Knightfall Batman). This should have sea-changing effects on the Batman franchise — complete with people trying to drag it kicking and screaming back to the way he was in the nineties. But that’s cool. We won’t see the real way Morrison and Miller are changing how people view these characters until a new crop of writers gets in and starts wrecking shop. And that’s the way it should be.

Alternate Current is a series of weekly posts on thought-provoking, or simply fun, topics from bright minds all throughout the blogosphere. We take submissions, so if you’d like to get into the mix, send an email to David Brothers. This week comes courtesy of Jon from Funnybook Babylon.