On Evaluating

It seems to me that comics fan culture and publishers have three basic criteria for evaluating and marketing both weekly and collected comics. In the following post I provide a brief sketch for these three modes of evaluation. They are by no means encyclopedic in their nature, but I do believe that I get the broad strokes correct.

I. The Important Work

The "important" work has its origins in the mid-1980s and is mostly tied to the emergence of the direct market and an aging fan base well versed in the history of comics lore. The "important" work only makes sense if its audience is aware of the tortuous histories of copyrighted characters and if the comic magazine - either in its individual or collected form - has to be perceived as more or less a permanent object. The importance of this work rests on the permanence of the artifact and a deep knowledge of comic book history because it often promises grand scale action which will guarantee some irrevocable change. As such, it needs to remain on the stands so that it can remain as a sign of some turning point.

Due to its size and its interest in operating on a large scale, the "important" work pays minimal interest in character development and tends to stress spectacle, size, and generally, crossovers. Archetypal "important" works are Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret War. As of now, this is generally preferred storyline with the Big Two, and given the sales of titles like Civil War and Infinite Crisis, the fans themselves.


II. The Quality Work

The "important" work promises to bring big changes and sells itself as a "must-read" for fans. However, it makes little promise to actually being any good and often fails to institutionalizing the changes that it promises to deliver. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this, but I do not know anyone who is dying to pick up an old copy of Armageddon 2001.

Unlike the "important" work which makes promises to its own importance, the quality work is a little less showy about its promise to quality. Indeed, quality works often have no claims made about them by their publisher because they are often created and sustained in the shadow of cancellation. However, like works of great literature, it implicitly makes a contract with the reader that it will enlighten them about the medium or life in general. The mainstream variation of this type of work is generally cloaked in the trappings of the superhero genre, but it is not principally concerned with good guys beating up bad guys. Thus, Sandman is principally a mediation on free will, Starman is concerned with family relationships, and Alias is preoccupied with living with personal trauma.

The quality work is equally indebted to the direct market and the need for a permanent comic artifact. It requires a sophisticated audience, but its sophistication does not come from its arcane knowledge of character histories. It instead requires an audience who can read for theme and is willing to be devoted to a creator who is recognized as an artist. This is different than the "important" work which is more likely to be sold on the basis of an "event" and while the writer or artist might be part of the appeal, it is a secondary one. Furthermore, the creators behind an "important" work are likely to have mastered a recognizable house style.

In contradistinction to the "important" work, the quality work tends to be idiosyncratic, both in terms of style (although there are certain conventions that normally employed in some way or another) and in character. hile the important event might be long in terms of pages, its time frame is usually relatively short; no "important" work has lasted more than a year. Because of this and its usually diffuse and multi-character structure, the important work minimizes character in favor of spectacle and variety. We are promised that our favorite character will appear, however briefly. In contrast the quality work will often focus on one character or a small family of characters who over the course of five to six years will be fully realized as individuals, who will be distinct, and will often be untouched by future writers. Although they are owned by a media conglomerate, they remain intrinsically their auteur's characters both to fans and to the heads over at corporate.

Besides Fables, I cannot think of any work presently being published that has achieved any level of recognition that we would call a quality work.

III. The Consistent Work

Finally, we have the consistent work. This model of evaluation and creation relies less on any relationship to the direct market or an understanding of complex history. The consistent work might be the product of an aspiring auteur or someone who wants to write the next "important" work, but it is more than anything the writing of a competent comics craftsman who writes with the single issue in mind. He delivers his work on time and in working order. The work may at times be uneven, but at times it rises to near greatness. It has no pretensions either to importance or to extreme quality. It aims to be entertaining. Mark Waid's first run on The Flash might be an example of this in terms of writing and Don Kramer's present performance on Nightwing might be an example of this in terms of art.

While there are plenty of good examples of consistent workmanship in comics today, as the single issue becomes devalued as a moneymaker, this becomes less and less of a priority for companies if not for fans. The "important" work seems more likely to not also strive to be consistent work as its creators and publishers know that it will eventually be collected and published in trade. The "important" work that also strives to be, at some level, a quality work seems even less likely to meet a "consistent" standard.

IV. What The Future Holds

As the value of the single issue continues to fall, the value of consistency will be sure to go with it. Who needs to be consistent or timely when the real money lies in the collected product? As more and more fans begin to wait for the trade, it seems unlikely that anyone will much mind if they have to weight a little longer.

The "important" work, because it can so easily be collected, and because it proves to be so effective in capturing the attention of fanboys also seems to face no serious form of decline and will remain a valuable way of understanding, marketing, and evaluating works of comics fiction.

However, one wonders if the quality work will survive. Marvel has always been less interested in serious character studies (hence Johnny Storm and Peter Parker seem permanent juveniles in a case of arrested development) and DC has for the last few years dedicated itself to "crisis" management. Their current strategy for producing quality work is to repackage their previous successes in the omnibus forms of Starman and Sandman and to dub, previous "consistent" work by Jack Kirby as quality and give it the star treatment in deluxe reprinting. However, where is the new quality? With their Vertigo imprint a shadow of what it once was, and their mainstream line dedicated primarily to sea of inanities and half-thought through concepts, where will the new quality come from?

Final Crisis #1 & #2

Two issues into Final Crisis and I can say without hesitation that Grant Morrison and J. G. Jones have - despite the better efforts of DC Corporate - managed to craft a compelling tale.

Previously, I had expressed my conflicted anticipation for the series. Grant Morrison I like; DC's latest endless cycle of EARTH-SHATTERING extravaganzas have often been exhausting and frequently nonsensical. Of course, Morrison and Jones have not entirely avoided the problems of DC Corporate, but read as a self-contained textual artifact, Final Crisis holds together as well as any comic with sixty years of stories behind it can.* Readers of Countdown to Final Crisis and Death to the New Gods did encounter several contradictions and major plot holes which were essentially the product of editorial fiat and failure. The most flagrant gaff so far is that they had to see the the soldier god of New Genesis, Orion, die twice and in different ways. Morrison explained the situation to the comics website, Newsarama thusly:

Although the 52 writing team was asked to contribute to Countdown, we were all seriously burned-out by the demands of the weekly schedule and I think we all wanted to concentrate on our own monthly titles for a while, so when Countdown was originally being discussed, it was just a case of me saying ‘Here’s issue 1 of Final Crisis and a rough breakdown of the following six issues. As long as you guys leave things off where Final Crisis begins, we‘ll be fine.’ Obviously, I would have preferred it if the New Gods hadn’'t been spotlighted at all, let alone quite so intensively before I got a chance to bring them back but I don’t run DC and don’t make the decisions as to how and where the characters are deployed.

However, seeing as I read neither Countdown or Death of the New Gods (both had the stink of surplus crossover on them), none of this has actually impended on my enjoyment of Morrison's script or Jones pencils.

What Morrison and Jones are striving for - and accomplishing with a good deal of success - is to tell the story of when evil finally defeated good in the ultimate battle. The catch to the series relies on the fact that the battle has already been won by the forces of evil, but the good guys just don't know it. In order to tell this story, Morrison and Jones need to establish a darker mood than the DCU normally accommodates. On this account, they are more than successful. Martian Manhunter is inglorious slaughtered and Batman is brutally, and yet casually, tortured. With these narrative acts, Morrison and Jones establish that the age of heroes is over. Indeed, the only betrayal of this tone might be in the fact that Jones's heroes remain too heroic looking. Chris Weston, who worked with Morrison on the absolutely depressing and revolting The Filth, might have been a better choice. His figures, like Jones's, tend towards the photo-realistic, but Weston's spandex-wearing warriors always have a seedy awkwardness to them that would have really captured the tone of the series.

Adding to the creepy mood of Final Crisis is that much of the series is told from the perspective of Dan Turpin, a retired Metropolis cop turned hardboiled investigator. Morrison uses Turpin to ground the series in the nitty-gritty of daily life and its his sullied view of the world that matches the tenor of much of the plot. Hot on the trail of some missing kids, Turpin discovers a far deeper mystery concerning the battle between good and evil. Running into the transformed evil gods of Apokolips in a kind of near dream-like logic, Turpin is told again and again that evil has won; however Turpin, like the apostles in the New Testament, seems unable to understand that the bad news has come no matter how clear the Bad Gods make it known.

Now, all of this has proven to be interesting, moody, and in many ways really quite disturbing. But the voice of doubt in the back of my head keeps on telling me that the series is going to hit the skids under editorial mandate. As of the first issue, and continuing on into the second, Morrison has established for himself four different plot threads for the series:

1) The transformation of the New Gods after their death and the victory of the evil gods.
2) The interference of the New God Metron in the development of human beings, and the necessity of such interference sometime at the end of time.
3) The re-establishment of the Society of Super-Villains by Libra (presumably working for the Darkseid the evil god supreme)
4) The mismanagement of the mutliverse by unscrupulous monitors.

Now presumably, 1-3 all go together easily enough. One imagines that Metron's involvement with the caveboy Anthro will help solve the plot complications that result from plot thread #1. Furthermore, its easy enough to see that Libra is in someway responsible for the events of plot thread #1. The events of #4 however seem like another attempt by DC Corporate to rearrange the byzantine architecture of their fictional nomos. As of yet it seems to have nothing to do with the other three plot threads.

Instead of expressing an interest in telling a Crisis-style story, Morrison seems to be using Final Crisis as an endcap for most of his DCU work to date. The connection between the Society of Super-Villains and Darkseid's victory over the earth resonates strongly with his "Rock of Ages" storyline in JLA ten years ago. Furthermore, the transformation of the New Gods hearkens directly back to Morrison's groundbreaking work in Seven Soldiers - elements of which seem to be in conflict with the plot points of #4.

Nevertheless, these are two solid issues and Morrison and Jones have me, presumably, until the end of this series.

* I realize that this is paradoxical.

Last Week in Comics #4: DC Universe 0

DC Universe 0
W: Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns
A: Various
I: Various
Ed: Dan Didio


DC Universe 0 is purported to be the kick-off point to DC Comics's summer miniseries and crossover Final Crisis. Like all of DC Comics' crises, this one promises to fix the complicated continuity of the DCU once and for all. As the captions in the page to your left summarizes:

The first crisis brought death to nearly all of creation. One lone universe was spared. A second crisis witnessed the violent resurrection of 52 new parallel universes. And so begins the final chapter in the sage of the multiple earths. The final crisis.

Why any one would believe that Final Crisis will solve the "problem" of the multiverse is beyond me. While the page to the left has a certain narrative economy, it actually ignores two other attempts to clean up continuity between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis: 1994's Zero Hour and 1999's Kingdom. By the end of the summer that means there will have been five attempts to clean things up since the mid-1980s. On average, there has been a "crisis" every four years with the duration between crises getting shorter and shorter. Either this means that the creators at DC Comics have managed to tell increasingly convoluted stories since the mid-1980s, or these crises have not adequately done their job, and/or these events are profitable and thus have a commercial worth that makes up for their artistic and functional demerits.

In a very real sense these projects are doomed to failure. None of the crises have been truly revolutionary acts as none of them have rolled back the clock to the year zero. They have tried to solve the problem of having a complex 40-year old narrative structure by telling another narrative. In a very real sense, they have tried to dig the DCU out of a hole by digging deeper. All that these crises do is to add an extra lawyer of narrative on what has come before. Nothing becomes streamlined; the ontological structures within the narratives themselves become increasingly more byzantine, more complex. The forms of the DC's Modern Age (1986 -present?) rests not on the supposed ashes of the Silver Age as the above page would make you believe, but on its very fertile and sprouting ground. Unless Final Crisis is preprepared to say goodbye to all the stories since the late 1930s than this crisis will only create a new, but temporary status quo. And even if it was willing to take this daring step it would only be a half-victory. As Kingdom's Hypertime revealed with some insight if not elegance: these are all just stories and we remember them even if they aren't "official" anymore.

If we cannot count of Final Crisis or its lead-in DC Universe 0 to make good on its mandate to rearrange the DCU in a more intelligible way, we should try and understand it on a more local level. We should instead ask, "How does it read as a story and only a story?"DC Universe 0 manages to be both an expression of Faulknerian modernism and nothing more than a shameless in-house ad for this summer's story lines. I suppose this might be the inevitable fate for any comic that is co-written by the inventive mind of Grant Morrison and the mainstream, nostalgic wasteland of Geoff Johns's talent.

Let's start with DC Universe 0 the commercial before we get to DC Universe 0 the modernist experiment. To be frank, there is no organic story to DC Universe 0. It consists of a host of fragmentary episodes that spotlight or foreshadow coming events in several DC books, most of which will probably have little to do with Final Crisis. Each section is then followed with a purposeful house ad in a unified style promoting said storyline. The difference between the house ads and the "content" comes down to little more than length. The connection between these storylines is of course never made clear and if Final Crisis does attempt to do so, it will probably do so unsuccessfully. This of course means that the narrative of DC Universe 0 is fragmentary and as any good student of modernism will tell you, fragments are part and parcel of the modernist aesthetic.

What holds together DC Universe 0 is a disembodied consciousness that slowly becomes self-aware as it narrates the issue's events. The first page of the issue features a splash page of a a galaxy with a small lightning bolt rushing across from it. Two captions collectively read, "This is everything. This is me." This disembodied consciousness who elides his identity with the totality of the universe allows Morrison and Johns to essentially link together this heap of unrelated images. As the issue continues the narrator becomes self-aware and the captions shift from black to red until the identity of the narrator, now separate from the universe, becomes apparent.

While this does show some formal inventiveness both on the part of Morrison and Johns, and on the part of letterer Nick Napolitano it does not mean that the issue's utter commercialism is mollified by its turn to stylistic modernism. Instead this stylistic turn in fact aggrandizes the very reader who would taken on the task of the disembodied consciousness. For the managers and editors of DC Comics are hoping that someone else will read the legion of comics that DC will put out this year. Reading all these titles, reading across the universe, subsuming oneself into this universe is at once the ultimate act of modernist self-effacement and at the same time the ultimate act of comic book consumption.

Portrait of the Comics Reader as a Young-ish Man

1985. My apartment in New York City. A sudden realization, and not a pleasant one. My thirtieth birthday is right around the corner. I’m posted to turn one year older than Batman… I’ve come to accept, in recent years, that Spider-Man is younger than my brother, but Batman? Batman? My favorite childhood hero? The lantern-jawed wise father figure? I’m actually gonna be older than Batman? This was intolerable. Something had to be done.

With these words Frank Miller opens the collected edition of his most memorable contribution to comics, The Dark Knight Returns. The work presents perhaps, the most elegant solution to Miller’s problem. Miller makes Batman older, which in the parlance of graphic novels (née comics) means somewhere around fifty. Thus, we get a Batman, much older than Miller’s thirty, a Batman who worries about his knees when climbing up his bat-rope, who needs Bat-ifocals glasses to ensure that his batarangs hit their targets, and will probably need to go to Bat-cross for his medical needs. However, nothing in comics but the status quo lasts. DKR was only a few issues long and it was not long before Bruce Wayne stopped being a Dirty Old Man and became a dashing millionaire playboy again. The number one rule of comics: you get older, but Bruce Wayne will never collect Social Security.

It was only after college when I had some sense of what Frank Miller was writing about. I found that I could no longer identify with the teen sidekicks. My life had passed them by and unless their emotional plight hit some type of universal cord, I just could not identify with them. Yes, it could be exciting to see Robin fight a Yeti in the rocky mountains of Tibet, but in the end I could not care about his fights with his father or the bad grades he got because he was out fighting crime. Even for comics, it seemed trivial. I had my B.A., was working a crappy administrative job at UCLA, and was hopping that I would get into graduate school so that said job would be over. Robin was fifteen, worrying about getting his driver license, and was hopping the Teen Titans would ask him to join. I was simply too old to be hanging out with the Boy Wonder. I had Big Boy concerns.

But, if comics eventually make you feel old because you outgrow the characters, things get even worse when you realize that your mastery over the storylines has grown out of date. Every 10 years DC Comics does what fans call retconning, meaning that they retroactively change their company wide continuity; they change the narrative past. Small retconning is common place in comics to allow for creative growth, however every ten years it seems DC attempts to do it in a comprehensive way. Since DC Comics overhauled their line last year I’ve found that things I could recall with a frightening level of encyclopedic detail – things such as Superman’s origin story – have been, if not fundamentally altered, significantly tweaked. Now, if you asked me to give you a description of what Krypton was like, I honestly could not tell you with any veracity. This is after a lifetime of reading Superman comics. Things I used to know, I don’t know anymore. What really makes you feel old as a comics is fan is not growing older than the perpetually young heroes of your childhood, but that comics companies force an odd form of senility upon you. It’s nerdy, fictitious Alzheimer’s and I don’t know my way around the House of Mystery.

The cure: read more comics. But with my healthcare, how could I afford it? Anyway, can’t I die with dignity and just read the reprints?