Zot and Geography

"Jenny said, when she was just five years old
There was nothin' happening at all
Every time she puts on the radio
There was nothin' goin' down at all, not at all
Then, one fine mornin', she puts on a New York station
You know, she couldn't believe what she heard at all
She started shakin' to that fine, fine music
You know, her life was saved by rock'n'roll."
--Lou Reed, "Rock'n' Roll" 

In my last post, I wrote glowingly about Scott McCloud's Zot! (1987-1991). I'm not about to change my mind about what I think about the merits of the book, nor am I going to retract my belief that mainstream superhero books have a lot to learn from the lessons of Zot! However, I would be remiss if I did not also share my thoughts about how geography structures the book as a whole.

Last time I wrote about Zot's interest in geography and world-building. Clearly, the series juxtaposes the futuristic and utopian urban environment of Zot's planet and the humdrum planet that Jenny lives on to make its point about futurity and fantasy. Zot's planet stands-in for fantasy and romance while Jenny's suburban existence represents a Cheever-esque realism. Taken on its own terms, there seems nothing wrong to me on how McCloud differentiates these worlds in terms of genre.

However, Zot! produces another set of geographic binaries that is more problematic. McCloud places in opposition the suburbs of New York where Jenny lives in and the urban-core of Manhattan. Jenny, like the central figure of Lou Reed's song "Rock'n'Roll" is a suburban kid, but for her the city doesn't promise the musical kicks of the AM station or the darker thrills that Reed depicts in "I'm Waiting for My Man." Instead the city remains alien, a violent place marred by crime, institutionalized dysfunction, and racial antagonism. Where Zot's Earth is paradise, and Jenny's suburb is merely mundane, the city is a dystopia.

While McCloud expresses far more antipathy toward the city than Reed, both are united in that they depict the city as primarily a zone that is made distinct from the suburbs by its racial otherness. For Reed, New York City is the cite of soul-enriching black music and, more problematically, Harlem drug dealers. McCloud too fixates on inner-city crime, but he finds no pleasure in it.What makes Manhattan dystopic is that it remains, essentially, racially other and that confronting this difference seems to be the only thing that seriously harms Zot, both physically and emotionally.  

Zot's first defeat at the hands of the city comes when he attempts to stop a mugging in New York City. All to predictably the mugger is a black teenager (with an odd karate headband) and his victim is a white woman. Zot manages to stop the mugging, but things turn for the worse when he is attacked by the black teenager's older, bigger, and stronger accomplices. These gang members beat Zot into the ground and continue to beat him once they've got him there. Zot, normally so full of confidence, has suffered his first real defeat. However, even more disturbing for Zot is when he calls out for help the crowd of strangers around him is too afraid to help. Zot is more devastated by the crowd's lack of intervention then he is by the beat down. Commenting on this particular episode in the collection, McCloud wrote that he was embarrassed by the scene: "The would-be purse-snatcher and his bigger gang member friends were just lazy stock characters of a sort common in  the mainstream titles of the day, and they strike a false note to me now."

However, in the final chapter of the collection Zot is made again victim to the city's violence. Once Zot is stuck on Jenny's Earth for good, he tries to make a life for himself as an urban superhero. Apparently, the 'burbs are a crime-free zone. Zot finds this task more difficult than he does at home on his own Earth. Instead of being attacked by mad scientists or crazed robots, Zot has to seek crime out and he does not always find it. In these sections, it's obvious that McCloud is satirizing superhero story conventions where the hero manages to always stumble upon a crime in progress. However, Zot does find crime and he nearly dies for the privilege. Assisting the police on a raid on a crack-house, Zot is shot and seriously wounded. While these events happen off-panel, the crack-house and the surrounding crime are clearly racially coded as black.

If the book's geography betrays a series of assumptions about crime and race, this is pointedly not to say that McCloud is a racist. At times, McCloud tries actively to address the negative implications of racism.In one scene, Zot is riding the subways when he makes a disturbing discovery about residential segregation. Zot is an innocent and on his world racism is not a problem and thus, he cannot fully comprehend why the racial composition of the subway trains shift depending n the neighborhood he is in. This issue too would later embarrass McCloud. In the collection he writes, "When I look at it again, all these years later, I want to reach over and pat my younger self on the head and say: 'Nice effort, but let's try sticking closer to home from now on, okay?" Although this scene seems borrowed from Brother from Another Planet (1984), it seems like an observation that a formerly New York-based cartoonist would be able to make.

McCloud takes far more of a risk in writing Ronnie, a black kid living in the white 'burbs, and this risk pays off for him far more than the subway scene. Ronnie is the son of a teacher and a hardware store owner and is thus a member of the black middle class that has left the city. However, Ronnie's father would still prefer it if his son's friends were black. McCloud illustrates this compelling in "Clash of Titans" (Zot! #31):

FATHER: Why do you hang out with those kids, Ronnie? They're not your kind. . . 
RONNIE: They're my friends. Dad. It's a white town. . .
FATHER: I know. . . I know. . . it's my fault for raising you here. But do all your friends have to be white? The kids from the city. . .
RONNIE: I'm scared of those kids, Dad. Those kids hate me. I'm not like them. Can I go to my room now, please?

Although this scene reproduces the geographic binaries that render the suburbs white and safe and the city dangerous and black, it also complicates those boundaries. There is a hint of honesty here that the stock figures of Manhattan do not have, cannot have as they're written. Ronnie is a fully developed character who must contend with the class aspirations of his family and his father's call for racial solidarity. He must figure out how to be black, while being groomed to wear a white collar. At the same time, Ronnie is trying to figure out who he wants to be and this doesn't always coincide with the professional and social ambitions that his father has for him. Ronnie's story illustrates the strength of the series, but it also points out the deficiencies that are inherent to Zot!'s troubling geographic distinctions.

x-posted with Narrative Review.

Zot

A backward glance, a compassionate caress. In this panel from Zot!, Scott McCloud depicts his titular hero bidding goodbye to his romantic interest,  Jenny. Zot must return to his own utopian version of Earth, leaving Jenny to deal with her mundane problems back home. If ever there was a panel that could best encapsulate the collected black and white run of Zot! it is this one. If our hero Zot represents anything, he represents hope and the possibility of change. He is the symbol of better times to come. In contrast, Jenny is a figure grounded in realism, a pessimist at heart who hopes to expatriate herself to Zot's idealized world. In this image, the pair embraces and readies themselves for a kiss that will be all too brief. The issues anthologized in Zot! (1987-1991) deal with teenagers struggling with their own problems, wondering where the future will take them and if they will make their dreams come true.

Scott McCloud is probably better known as a comics aesthetic theorist rather than as a comic book artist.  Although academics have taken issue with some of his more hazy generalizations, Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2005) remain bold efforts to explain how comics work as a medium. Unquestionably, McCloud figured out how comics worked first hand when writing and drawing Zot! in the late 1980s. The book shows the maturation not only of McCloud's characters, but also illustrates the maturation of his artistic talent. While the early stories remain committed exercises in genre, the second half Zot! takes on a quieter more introspective tone that is rarely achieved in today's mainstream, superhero-heavy comic book marketplace.

The first half of Zot! focuses almost entirely on Jenny's trips to Zot's futuristic Earth of "1964." It is a planet that never ages, but is always making social and technological progress. This fantasy Earth serves McCloud's purposes in two ways. The first way is that it allows McCloud to imagine future problems that may besiege mankind in the future. Thus, Zot's super villain adversaries all represent some future menace that mankind better avoid, whether that be primtivism, hyper-capitalism, technological supremacy, or a dehumanizing aestheticism. While the villains are all a lot of fun, they are not the real strength of the first half. Zot's utopian version of Earth provides him a means to talk about the nature of escapism. Jenny's desire to live on Zot's world is really just a way to avoid her own problems. Rather than go into what these problems are exactly, McCloud only hints at Jenny's difficulties. In the first half of the collection, we learn about these problems only from Jenny's thought bubbles or from her conversation. We experience her dilemmas primarily as baggage that she brings with her on her trips to Zot's world. It's a smart move.

In the second half of the collection, McCloud changes the tone of the book radically. Doing so was a risk for McCloud and it took some real chutzpah to do so. The second half of the book finds Zot stranded on Jenny's planet, unable to return home or to facilitate her visits to Earth 1964. Zot remains a fantasy figure in these stories, but his potency as a symbol for escape is not what it once was. Instead, McCloud turns his attention to Jenny's other friends and the mundane but painful struggles they have to endure. Each of McCloud's "Earth Stories," thus focuses on a member of Jenny's nerdy and socially-maladjusted clique as they deal with problems such as family substance abuse; divorce and dysfunctional families; homophobia and coming out; and teenage dating and sexuality. Although these stories are more down-to-earth (or down to our Earth, anyway), McCloud is still extending his original theme. The new characters that McCloud introduces are, like Jenny, trying to make sense of the world while at the same time trying to figure out who they want to be. While the science fiction elements of these stories are minimized, the series remains squarely focused on the future.

One of the aspects of Zot! that made it noteworthy in its day was the influence manga had on McCloud's stories. In the late 1980s, manga was still fairly hard to find in the United States. These days, manga is easily found in chain bookstores and when I walk down the aisle I usually see a good number of teenagers sitting on the floor, working their way through book by book. Manga has also become a stronger visual influence in American comic books as seen in the work of comic book artists like Humberto Ramos, Carlos Pachecho, and Salvador Larroca. However, what seems to be missing in most mainstream comic books today, and what should serve as the real lesson of McCloud's early work, is that character has to come before both marketing and spectacle. McCloud's stories still work today because human emotion remains central to their drama. Reading an issue of Zot! I never get the sense that "nothing-will-be-the-same-again" or "everything-I-knew-was-a-lie," but I do come to understand a character better and I do see the consequences of their simple maturation.

On being a fan and then not talking about it

One of the most common moves of cultural studies in the 1990s was to write about one's self. This was usually done in identity and meant mentioning one's race, class, and gender. When academic's attention turned to fandom, it usually meant declaring their own fandom. Over at Aca/Fan, Henry Jenkin's website, Will Brooker talks about why he declared his fandom in Batman Unmasked and why he did not in his second book, Hunting the Dark Knight. It's worth checking out. 

Who is the Black Panther?

x-posted with Narrative Review

Title: Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther?
Author: Reginald Hudlin & John Romita, Jr.


Inspired by the decolonization of Africa, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced a new character into the pages of The Fantastic Four in July of 1966. The first prominent black superhero to appear in American comics, the Black Panther was really T'Challa, a costumed adventurer who ruled the fictitious African state of Wakanda. Since his introduction, Black Panther has attracted a solid fan base, but he has been most successful as a supporting character. Whether this is because comic book fans are reluctant to pick up a book that stars an African character is a subject much debated by comic creators and fans alike.

Reginald Hudlin's Who is the Black Panther? (2006) is an attempt to both streamline the character's storyline and to make him a more prominent figure in Marvel's publishing line. In the back of the collection, Marvel has provided readers with what I assume is Hudlin's pitch for the series. Here, Hudlin establishes that he wants his run to be an iconic version of the character--something that Marvel could base a film franchise upon. (In 2009, the series would serve as the basis for a cartoon on NET). No doubt, this was a smart move given Marvel's recent forays into film. In his attempt to define the character for his editors, Hudlin writes:

The Black Panther is the Black Captain America. He's the embodiment of the ideals of a people. As Americans, we feel good when we read Captain America because he reminds us of the potential of how good American can be, if, of course, we have the conviction to live by the principles the country was founded on. As a black person, the Black Panther should represent the fulfillment of the potential of the Motherland.

For the most part, Hudlin succeeds in writing the "movie version" of the character. Who is the Black Panther? has a strong narrative thrust that would play well on the big screen. Of course, Hudlin is assisted admirably by veteran comic book artist John Romita, Jr., who uses wide panels to reproduce the experience of cinema. In the first chapter of the collection, the pair effectively defines not only who the Black Panther is, but what makes the nation of Wakanda so significant. Unlike the rest of Africa, Wakanda is a technologically advanced society that has never been conquered by another nation. They have always remained free of colonial rule. Hudlin's plot hinges on whether or not that will remain the case.

At times, Hudlin and Romita are capable of subtlety. When the United States plans an invasion of Wakanda and the assassination of T'Challa, we can see a sense of conflict on the face of Secretary of State Ms. Reese (an obvious surrogate for Condoleezza Rice). She is simultaneously disgusted by a racist U. S. military culture, proud of Wakanda's accomplishments, and perhaps, willing to attack the nation simply to prove her patriotic bona fides. Similarly, Hudlin is also willing to showcase the xenophobia of the Wakandas whose technological superiority manifests itself in arrogance and disdain for the outside world.

However, more often than not Hudlin goes too far in his effort to establish T'Challa and Wakanda as real "bad@asses" (his word, not mine). Instead of simply invading Wakanda, the U. S. covertly funds a crack team of super villain mercenaries. Super villains are a natural fit for any superhero series, but Hudlin goes too far by making the villains representative of Africa's colonizers: Belgium, Britain, France, and the United States. This is heavy handed and in the case of the U. S., not entirely accurate historically . Even here, Hudlin doesn't leave well enough alone and also attempts to indict Christianity's role in colonization of Africa. Thus, Hudlin creates a Church conspiracy (shades of The Da Vinci Code) in order to indict Christianity's troubling past in Africa. In doing so, he makes the British villain, the Black Knight, the Church's sworn servant. Readers are conveniently supposed to forget that England has been a Protestant nation since the 16th century. And then, at the end, there are the zombie cyborg marines whom T'Challa scares off with a few words. Is that too much? I suppose that depends on your sensibilities.

All and all, Hudlin's Black Panther is an engaging read, but at times its politics are--if not black and white--capable of only four colors.

Sexual Harassment and Fandom

The following comes from Bully Says: Comics Oughta Be Fun! but it bears re-posting and people ought to be aware of what's going on there. -The Editor


Overheard at San Diego Comic-Con while I was having lunch on the balcony of the Convention Center on Sunday July 27: a bunch of guys looking at the digital photos on the camera of another, while he narrated: "These were the Ghostbusters girls. That one, I grabbed her ass, 'cause I wanted to see what her reaction was." This was only one example of several instances of harassment, stalking or assault that I saw at San Diego this time.

1. One of my friends was working at a con booth selling books. She was stalked by a man who came to her booth several times, pestering her to get together for a date that night. One of her co-workers chased him off the final time.

2. On Friday, just before the show closed, this same woman was closing up her tables when a group of four men came to her booth, started taking photographs of her, telling her she was the "prettiest girl at the con." They they entered the booth, started hugging and kissing her and taking photographs of themselves doing so. She was confused and scared, but they left quickly after doing that.

3. Another friend of mine, a woman running her own booth: on Friday a man came to her booth and openly criticized her drawing ability and sense of design. Reports from others in the same section of the floor confirmed he'd targeted several women with the same sort of abuse and criticism.

Quite simply, this behavior has got to stop at Comic-Con. It should never be a sort of place where anyone, man or woman, feels unsafe or attacked either verbally or physically in any shape or form. There are those, sadly, who get off on this sort of behavior and assault, whether it's to professional booth models, cosplayers or costumed women, or women who are just there to work. This is not acceptable behavior under any circumstance, no matter what you look like or how you're dressed, whether you are in a Princess Leia slave girl outfit or business casual for running your booth.

On Saturday, the day after the second event I described above, I pulled out my convention book to investigate what you can do and who you can speak to after such an occurrence. On page two of the book there is a large grey box outlining "Convention Policies," which contain rules against smoking, live animals, wheeled handcarts, recording at video presentations, drawing or aiming your replica weapon, and giving your badge to others. There is nothing about attendee-to-attendee personal behavior.

Page three of the book contains a "Where Is It?" guide to specific Comic-Con events and services. There's no general information room or desk listed, nor is there a contact location for security, so I go to the Guest Relations Desk. I speak to a volunteer manning the desk; she's sympathetic to the situation but who doesn't have a clear answer to my question: "What's Comic-Con's policy and method of dealing with complaints about harassment?" She directs me to the nearest security guard, who is also sympathetic listening to my reports, but short of the women wanting to report the incidents with the names of their harassers, there's little that can be done.

"I understand that," I tell them both, "but what I'm asking is more hypothetical and informational: if there is a set Comic-Con policy on harassment and physical and verbal abuse on Con attendees and exhibitors, and if so, what's the specific procedure by which someone should report it, and specifically where should they go?" But this wasn't a question either could answer.

So, according to published con policy, there is no tolerance for smoking, drawn weapons, personal pages or selling bootleg videos on the floor, and these rules are written down in black and white in the con booklet. There is not a word in the written rules about harassment or the like. I would like to see something like "Comic-Con has zero tolerance for harassment or violence against any of our attendees or exhibitors. Please report instances to a security guard or the Con Office in room XXX."

The first step to preventing such harassment is giving its victims the knowledge that they can safely and swiftly report such instances to someone in authority. Having no published guideline, and indeed being unable to give a clear answer to questions about it, gives harassment and violence one more rep-tape loophole to hide behind.

I enjoyed Comic-Con. I'm looking forward to coming back next year. So, in fact, are the two women whose experiences I've retold above. Aside from those instances, they had a good time at the show. But those instances of harassment shouldn't have happened at all, and that they did under no clear-cut instructions about what to do sadly invites the continuation of such behavior, or even worse.

I don't understand why there's no such written policy about what is not tolerated and what to do when this happens. Is there anyone at Comic-Con able to explain this? Does a similar written policy exist in the booklets for other conventions (SF, comics or otherwise) that could be used as a model? Can it be adapted or adapted, and enforced, for Comic-Con? As the leading event of the comics and pop culture world, Comic-Con should work to make everyone who attends feel comfortable and safe.

–John DiBello
Crossposted From Here

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?

Second Post: The Dark Knight (2008)

My wife often likes to say that a single shot can justify an entire film. Because of this, I have dubbed her a formalist. She is OK with this, even though I make this comment as a fairly committed historicist.

That being said, there is a shot in The Dark Knight that would justify the film, if of course the film needed it. Let the gushing and the spoilers commence:

At the end of the film, the Joker falls off the side of a building after battling with the Batman. Unlike "the poetry" of Batman (1989), Nolan's Dark Knight does not leave the clown prince of crime to fall to his death. Instead, Batman rescues Joker from his demise by pulling him up with a grappling hook. Hoisted upside down from his leg and flapping in the wind, the Joker explains his philosophy of life. However, tellingly, the image that the audience sessis not of the Joker hanging upside down. The image has been inverted so that he appears right side up, with his jacket floating up behind him and flapping eerily in the wind. For the audience, this simple trick of inverting the negative's direction produces a certain amount of estrangement. The Joker appears at once normal, but the world appears strange. More tellingly though, is that the shot is from Batman's point of view. As I discussed in my last post and over here, the real tragedy in the film comes when Batman accepts the Joker's view of society. This shot is brilliant, and again would justify the film if it needed it, because it manages to formally suggest the thematic circumstances of that part of the film.

I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight. . . .

Very Serious: Batusi vs. Bat Dance

This year is an election year and America faces a very important decision. Will we choose between something that is tried and true or something that is a flash in the pan? Will you be doing the Batusi or the Bad Dance? The choice is yours. But remember, the safety of our nation is in your hands.



THE BATUSI

THE BATDANCE



VOTE NOW!

And T. S. Eliot once had the audacity to say that art never improves. Humph.

The Dark Knight (2008)

I.

In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, critic David Denby states that the latest installment of the Batman franchise, The Dark Knight (2008), is little bit more than a ponderous excuse for "thunderous violence." For Denby, watching The Dark Knight is to see the Batman franchise polluted. The new film, Denby writes, "continue[s] to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton's original conception for Batman (1989), completing the job of coarsening the material into hyperviolent summer action spectacle" (92).

There are a number of problems with this statement, and we would be good to point out the most blatant of these first. Batman was just as much a summer action spectacle as the current film. While time may have shrouded Denby's memory, I distinctly remember that the film came out in late June, which is very much a part of the summer. Furthermore, while The Dark Knight promises to be a commercial success and does have its fair share of crass merchandising, this latest production does not seem nearly as coarse or "un-poetic" as this nation's second wave of Bat-Mania.

More importantly, we must note that, while it is true that Tim Burton had a conception for Batman in the late 1980s, it would be false to say that he ever had the"original conception" for Gotham's protector or that his should be held up before all others. In 1989, the character was some 50 years old, and while Burton's take on the caped crusader had its own idiosyncrasies, much like director Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight, Burton's Batman drew its inspiration from equal parts Bob Kane and Frank Miller.

Denby's true critical sin lies, however, elsewhere. The fact that he credits Batman with greater artistic purity and Burton as the prime Batman artiste is not the true problem of his evaluation.
Denby's ultimate fault is that his review commits the ultimate failure of criticism: he fails to see the aesthetic object for what it truly is and instead critiques it against the object that he truly desires. In doing so, Denby commits the same error that all bad fan-criticism does: he demands that the film bend to the needs of his aggressive nostalgia. Many readers of superhero texts do this because our first introduction to a character usually strikes us as the truest. For me, the original Green Lantern will always be Gerard Jones's Hal Jordan, but Showcase Presents: Green Lantern more than illustrates that this version of the character is as deviant from Jordan's 1959 first appearance as Nolan's Batman is from Burton's. However, I do recognize that Jones's interpretation is just as valid as the original and just as valid as the contemporary version of the character. The later writers have surveyed the history of GL stories and have taken those parts of the character's history that seems most useful and speaks most to them and their age.

For Denby, as far as film goes, Burton's vision of Batman is his prime model. It is the Batman that feels most genuine because it meets those expectations of what Batman should be; but of course these were established by Burton and no one else. We must be aware that Burton's Batman is not the Batman, just as it would be impossible to say that Bob Kayne's Batman is the only Batman, even though Kane was the originator of the character. By this point in time, Batman has become a piece of industrial folklore. He is not the common property of the folk, although many people may feel or think that he has become legendary. Indeed, in many ways he has. The character is a legend, but he is also a copyrighted piece of intellectual property owned by a major media corporation. Nonetheless, while there are an infinite amount of Batman's running a long the rooftops of our collective imagination, there are also many different official versions of Batman that DC Comics and its parent corporation Warner Brothers have propagated. Each of these visions are equally valid. All that defines Batman in his purest form is his origin story (a boy swears to rid the world of crime after his parents are murdered before his eyes) and certain costume elements (the cape, the cowl, and some type of bat insignia). All other elements, including Alfred, Robin, Commissioner Gordon, and even Gotham City are superfluous. As a character, Batman has survived without them at various times in his publishing history and it is likely that one or more of these elements will disappear briefly in the future, although probably not for long.

Burton's Batman is, of course, a Batman that we can all recognize, and which a great many of us delighted in when it first came to theaters. It has all of the essential features of Batman, and has a great many of the secondary ones as well. Furthermore, unlike many comic movies that seem principally ashamed of their source material, Batman does not run from its comic origins or even what we might call their own internal logic. Much like those GL scribes listed above, it takes what it needs from the larger history of Batman and Burton makes it his own. It is this action, making Batman one's own, which allows the 1989 production to fit almost perfectly within Burton's larger oeuvre. Batman is principally concerned with outcasts, moodiness, and masquerade. And while, Nolan's Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight are interested in these themes to a certain degree, I am more than happy to see them moved to the background than have them dominate the foreground. For Nolan's preoccupation with Batman is not with the Dark Knight's personal pain - although his mission does drive the plot - but with how cities function and how they need good people to function properly. Much as I find Burton's Batman to produce its own brand of poetry, I am less drawn to its aesthetic and its message, than I am to Nolan's more useful depiction of Bruce Wayne and his effect on Gotham. For while Burton and later Joel Schumacher were preoccupied with Wayne's pain and demons, and while this can make for interesting storytelling, not many of us are going to find ourselves avenging our parents as masked vigilantes. In contrast, Nolan's Batman series, like a heightened, more fantastic vision of David Simon's The Wire might actually teach us something about our present condition more generally.

II.

If we are going to compare The Dark Knight to a superhero film a more profitable comparison exists between The Dark Knight and the last (and hopefully final) installment of the X-Men franchise, X3: The Last Stand. At the core of the Brian Singer/Brett Ratner trilogy is a political meditation, much in the same way that Nolan's Batman films are preoccupied with the politics and corruption of a single American city. As in the latest Batman installment, X3: The Last Stand also considers what happens when the conception of politics is undermined by something more primal.

In Ratner's production, political issues are mapped along multicultural conceptions of identity. Viewing difference as sacrosanct, many of the X-Men and all of Magneto's terrorist vanguard feel that the newly manufactured mutant "cure" is tantamount to genocide. In many ways, they are right if they limit their claims to cultural genocide, but that is a more complicated matter and deserves a separate post of its own. What is important for our purposes is that amidst the hullabaloo of a mutant cure, is the resurrection of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) as a primal psychic force known as the Phoenix. Unlike sensible Jean Grey, who is dedicated to Xavier's dream of peaceable coexistence between humans and mutants, the Phoenix is overcome with desire for powerful sensations. Represented as pure and nearly omnipotent id, she wants to experience life unrestricted by societal and political constraints; nearly invulnerable, and thus living without consequence, the Phoenix wants to experience "bare life."

This desire causes her to reject the stern political doctrines of Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), and in a fit of excessive rage, to tear him apart atom from atom. From the rest of the film the Phoenix travels with Magneto (Ian McKellen) and his acolytes. However, she does not do this because she has had a political change of heart or because she shares Magneto's desire to exterminate the human race. She travels with him merely as a means to seek out new experiences. The central problem with X3's thematic construction is that Magneto never recognizes that Phoenix is not interested in his political machinations and that he never pays for this lack of recognition. Of course, Magento is defeated, made into a normal human being by the X-Man Beast (Kelsey Grammer), but Jean Grey plays only a little part in this. The film's identity politics are not challenged at all by the presence of the Phoenix, and this makes the whole plot point superfluous to the film's overall action.

In comparison Nolan's Dark Knight presents us with a Joker (Heath Ledger) who is a self-described "agent of chaos." Much like the Phoenix, Nolan and Ledger's Joker imagines himself as outside the bounds of political order and rule. However, it should be noted whereas Phoneix is depicted as being pure id, Joker's disorder is portrayed more as a Hobbesian in nature. It is the Joker who sees beyond the facile lies society tells itself in order to constitute itself.

It is into Gotham City that Nolan drops this vision of the Joker. Although Athenian in its conception of publicity, Nolan's Gotham is very much that vision of the city that the great Naturalist writers of the late 19th and early 20th century taught us to see. Gotham City, corrupt and dangerous, lives by pumping money in and out of its coffers. While its economy and geography are based around the virtuous model of corporate responsibility, Wayne Enterprises, for too long the city was corrupt and violent. Into this mess, the Batman (Christian Bale) came to rid the city of the mob, to clean up corruption, and most of all to inspire other people to action. Batman's ability to inspire is what makes up the action of the film. For while Batman inspires the virtuous District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) to take action, he also inspires a group of unfortunate copycat vigilantes, and of course, he inspires the mob to hire the Joker to kill Batman. What the mob doesn't realize is that despite the fact that the Joker offers to work for money, his passions are not economic but sadistic in their nature. What the Joker wants is to spread chaos and fear, to show society through sadism, that underneath the thin bedrock of society is a mess of chaos and animal urges. The mob pays for this lack of recognition, but so do many Gothamites, police officers, not to mention Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), Harvey Dent, and the Batman.

In wanting to spread fear, many commentators (Denby included) have wanted to read the Joker's action against our current political climate and declare him a terrorist. Scipio over at The Absorbascon has gone so far as to state that the film makes a real comment on terrorism. What this comment is, he does not tell us, but then again, to be fair, that is not the purpose of his post. These comments are of course not made erroneously. Although they do not elaborate much, their writer's may very well be on to something. There are at least two points in the film, when the Joker is explicitly called a terrorist. But as much as the film wants him to be one, the Joker is not really a terrorist, at least not as we understand the term conventionally to denote. Yes, the Joker spreads terror, but he does so to no political end. His murder and mayhem serve no other purpose than their own ends. Besides his point about society's delusions about itself, Joker is violent for the sake of being violent.

This extra-political activity seems to be rooted in Joker's own familial background. While in keeping with his various origin stories from the comics, Nolan's Joker has no definite origin or motivational incident. However, the one commonality in all of Joker's own given explanations for his behavior lies in a twisted family dynamic, which is essentially, outside the bounds of what we normally consider politics (although it certainly is not untouched by it). Indeed, the political world, even the political world of Batman, rests on top of this uncertain structure: the individual mind which is molded both by society and uncertain forces.

[SPOILERS!]

Where this film truly succeeds is that it concedes some of the argument to the Joker. Unlike Phoenix who is sentimentally dispatched by a tearful Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), the legacy of the Joker is dubious. His mission was not only to kill Batman, but to show that both the high and the low could easily be brought down to their most bestial. At the film's climax he arranges a type of prisoner's delima between Gotham's criminals and its regular citizens. One boat is filled with criminals, the other everyday decent people; both have detonators to the others' boat. If they do not act, the Joker will blow up both ships. Both groups manage to survive the other and the Joker. They are not corrupted. On the other hand, the Joker has also attempted and succeeded in corrupting Harvey Dent, bringing down the city's "white knight" and turning him into the crazed madman Two-Face. Aware of the city's ability to produce publicity, both Gordon and Batman agree that the city cannot sustain the shock of knowing the truth of Dent's fall. It would ruin all the work that the three of them have done to inspire and unify the city against crime and corruption. After Dent's death, Gordon and Batman agree that Batman should receive the blame for Dent's crimes in order to hold the city together. Batman will continue to act for good, but he will be chased and hunted actively by the police in the memory of a Harvey Dent who never truly existed.

In the end, the Joker wins half of the argument, but one hopes not the better half. While the people on the boats never act, Gordon and Batman are persuaded that Dent's fall would undermine the city. It is only through producing an elaborate lie that the city and by extension society is able to hold itself together. Underneath all the political order, rests a falsity we tell ourselves. How we constitute a just society and a political frame work in spite of this, is the problem the film sets forth for us. For in the end, we might acknowledge that society is held together with little more than a series of linguistic acts, but this does not make the bonds, bounds, or rules of a society any less significant. Indeed, the real question of morality will always be one of action, but we ought to think back upon what linguistic acts we make which thus set the boundaries of our actions, and we might want to question the necessity of Gordon and Batman's ruse. After all, while the film implies the consequences of their actions are successful, we will never learn what would have happened if the linguistic act Gordon and Batman rebuilt Gotham society had been less duplicitous and more honest.

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.

On the Latest Weekly Comics

cross-posted with Narrative Review

Up above DC Comics Editor-in-Chief Dan Didio discusses with Mike Carlin about the upcoming weekly series Trinity. Written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by Mark Bagley this series will focus on DC Comics's Big Three: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

Over the past years DC has experimented with the weekly format in both 52 and Countdown to Final Crisis. Although they have been commercially successful, artistically and critically they have been failures. The disappointments of these series have come from the fact that both 52 and Countdown were written not with their own stories in mind, but as an explanation for a story to follow - a prequel before the original as it were. Thus, 52 was meant to set up the One Year Later time line that was already being told in DC's monthly output and Countdown was written to setup this summer's blockbuster miniseries Final Crisis. Unfortunately, 52 was written by a committee of overextended writers and artists and none of the various story-lines running through 52 adequately hung together, nor did it really set up the One Year Later time line effectively until the last two issues. The less said about Countdown the better.

So what can we expect of Trinity? I remain cautiously optimistic. Unlike the other efforts which were produced by multiple over-committed writers and artists, Trinity will at least have the benefit of a unified creative vision in Busiek and Bagley. As far as I know the series does not have to end some place that is mandated by a corporate crossover. Hopefully, this will allow Busiek to tell his own story which will actually have something of a resolution.

While my hopes are considerably higher for Trinity than they ever were for 52 or Countdown, I think that the weekly episodic format might just be too much for comics. Can one story really last a full year and have the necessary stopping points that the weekly format provides? I'm not so sure. Television manages the weekly format, but then again, the over all plotting of a sitcom or a television drama is a) never a full year and b) not usually totally dependent on an overarching plot structure. But who knows? Maybe I'll be surprised?

This Week in Comics #3: Catwoman 74

Catwoman #74
W: Will Pfeifer
A: David Lopez
I: Alvaro Lopez
Ed: Nachie Castro

Without a doubt Catwoman #74 was the best title that I read all week. Written by Will Pfeiffer and illustrated by David Lopez's beautifully expressive pencils, this title continues to provide high-caliber action sequences while grounding these within a relevant and affective emotional foreground. It is good to see the title this good again.

When the 2001 revamp of Catwoman first came out, I was initially nonplussed. In order to make Catwoman palatable as a protagonist, writer Ed Brubaker stripped her of her status of a thief and made her the reluctant protector of Gotham City's particularly seedy East End district. Although there's nothing wrong with this as a premise, the story took awhile to get going as Brubaker and collaborator Darwyn Cooke spent the first story arc having Catwoman (Selina Kyle) taking on a fairly disposable serial killer who preyed on prostitutes. However, the series progressed and I eventually became a devoted follower. Brubaker made Selina's connection to her side of Gotham palpable and I became generally interested in the bond Selina had with her sidekick Holly and her emotionally troubled connection with the down-on-his-luck PI Slam Bradley.

Ultimately, all the problems that faced Brubaker's tenure can be traced to a problem of momentum; he simply ran out of gas. It was good to see Catwoman rid the East End of its crime lord and heart-wrenching to see her relationship with Slam Bradley sizzle and then fizzle. But this can only happen once or twice. Catwoman can only break a man's heart so many times and introducing Bradley's son for her to have an affair with instead of Slam only feels icky as opposed to morally complicated.

Similarly, Catwoman can only free the East End so many times and new crime lords can only
try to fill the power vacuum before Catwoman really just looks inefficient. Really, all of this should happen once. After all, it's not like people are being under served in their need for crime. Are they? No, the real missed opportunity of Brubaker's tenure on Catwoman is that he did not show the problems that would have come with a successful limited crusade on crime. The logical outcome of cleaning up a small area of town is not a limitless waves of crime, but in fact gentrification. How would Catwoman have felt when the rents went up in her small part of town and the down-and-outers that she identified with and swore to protect got driven out of town because yuppies and Bruce Wayne's dinner guests started to move in? But perhaps this is too much to ask of any DC Comics's writer outside of James Robinson, and only then when he was writing Starman. No one has developed a "contexutalizing city" (to borrow Scipio's terms) to the degree that Robinson did when he wrote Starman, although Brubaker tried with some success when he had Selina and Holly go on a road trip through the various burgs of the DCU.

While the return to greatness that I mentioned at the beginning of my review has been building for quite some time, I think this issue in particular manages to serve as the highpoint for Pfeifer and Lopez's run, just as the title character is at her lowest. The depths of Selina's situation is nearly summed up at the beginning of this issue with the following recap: "Apartment? Robbed. Building? Burned. Me? Desperate. Calculator? Weasel. Coffee? Drugged? Trap? You Bet. Oh, and I almost forgot. Gun? Loaded. Definitely loaded."

Issue #74 finds Selina just after she has faked her own death, given up her baby for adoption (there are of course major safety concerns for any tot who's mother is a super-villain), and has been sold-out by a villain known as the Calculator, who has been hired by a hot-shot new talent in town known simply as "The Thief." The Thief wants to establish his cred in town by taking down Catwoman. Selina, finding herself trapped, manages to escape, get her gear, and convinces (re: threatens his death) the Calculator that he should tell her how to wage her revenge on the Thief.

However, all of this is just plot, and in the wrong hands could read as just another mechanical exercise in super hero storytelling. Where this issue manages to succeed is in marshaling the emotional forces that Brubaker had set up as a title standard in the 2001 relaunch. The first of these two scenes that really sells the issue is in when Selina cuts her hair (featured above). This act recalls the title's relaunch when Selina remakes herself as an anti-hero and defender of the East End. Here, Selina in an emotionally touching scene, remakes herself not into a hero, but into a woman without a daughter. She murders a little bit of herself, so that she can keep on living with her decision to give up Helena for adoption.

This type of pathos rises again when Selina has planned her revenge on the Thief and is about to strike. Her plan is perfectly laid out, but she is attacked by a trio of "reformed" government-sponsored super-villains before she can strike. What could read as a straightforward action scene is given weight because this comes as a particularly ignominious end to Selina's plan. Just as she's about to strike her revenge on a practicing burglar, she's arrested by fellow rogues. When told of the arrest (which involves her being drugged) she mumbles "Arrest. . .? But I'm not the one you. . ." implying that they should be going after the Thief. However, Selina and we find that neither justice nor vengeance will be fully executed that night. Selina will not have her revenge on the Thief and the Thief will not be harmed as he hastily retreats from a botched job. Instead, the already suffering Selina will pay for improprieties committed long ago.

This Week in Comics #2: Jonah Hex 26

There is something that keeps me coming back to Jonah Hex, besides the fact that I get it in my mailbox monthly. This is something of a surprise to me, given the fact that I've never been one for Westerns and I have always been more attracted to heroes than anti-heroes. When I picked up the first issue more than two years now, I figured I would read the book for a little bit, get bored, and then drop it as some of the other members of the on-line community have done. If I had to put my finger on what I like about the title, I suppose I would have to trace my interest to the fact that nearly each issue has been self-contained, the stories move briskly (and sometimes satisfyingly), and the book is a break from the usual superhero fare that the big two usually bring out. I suppose there is also something attractive about the title character, Jonah Hex, the horribly scarred bounty hunter who operates on a moral code which is motivated by money as much as it is by ethics.

However, I would say that my surprise that I'm still reading Jonah Hex two years after its relaunch is that I'm surprised that I am still reading a book, which I don't think is always very good. Ever since, say, issue #9, the consistency of the title has been hit and miss. Now, some of the issues are very, very good. Take for instance, issue #24, this year's Halloween issue; that issue seamlessly combines the series's standard Western action with the supernatural without it seemingly like an overt gesture to the holiday. However, while some issues have been good, others have been merely OK, and others still (far too many) have been quite dreadful. Many of those bland and putrid stories have relied on a simple formula, which like many, I have found entirely too repetitive. The basic structure of that formula: Jonah Hex saves a rapped woman. There are variations, often minor, such as the woman is German or Mormon, but this isn't really enough to redeem the fact that it gets old and insulting over time. While I do not object to the portrayal of rape, and it certainly seems like a crime that fits the title's savage Western setting, the usage of rape in the title seems overused and frankly it sometimes appears as if writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti ran out of ideas around issue #10. In the meantime, sure, they have come up with the occasional new idea, but when in doubt, have Hex save a raped woman and hopefully the rapist is also a man who Hex has a bounty on.

Unfortunately, this week's issue of Jonah Hex falls into the later category in that it is both bad and relies on rape to advance the plot. I suppose Gray and Palmiotti thought they were being clever by playing with the formula. Here instead of rescuing the raped women (neither German nor Mormon), Hex falls victim to them. Hot on the trail of a bunch of horse thieves, Hex stumbles upon a farm house in the middle of nowhere. There he is befriended by Holly, a (seemingly) lone woman who gets him drunk. After passing out from drinking too much liquor, Hex awakes in a barn filled with other men. Holly and her partner Hannah, victimized by men in the past, now have a collection of men in their barn, who they have mutilated by chopping of their lower appendages. Left in tact in the barn while Holly discusses with Hannah what to do with him, Hex is freed by the men (the very horse thieves he's been chasing) who chew through the ropes. Hex then enacts his revenge by capturing the two women and letting the men chew them to death. But Hex is no sentimentalist. The story does not end with the women's murder; the story ends with Hex scooping up the mutilated men, putting them on horses, and ridding into town to collect his bounty.

Certainly, part of the appeal of the Jonah Hex resides in his inhuman lack of sympathy and his almost incalculable desire to collect on his bounties, but this issue goes too far and becomes lurid, nearly pornographic in its appreciation of violence. While I'm certain there are others who could point to other disturbing, and gratuitous examples from other issues, this episode does seem to be the worst of them. This is a new low for the series, and I'm almost dreading the next month's issue which will arrive in the mail whether I want it or not. Will it be good like October's Halloween issue, or will it hit the gutter lows of issue #26? The advance copy promises that it will be about a cop killer of the Old West. Hopefully, that will at least take out the rape element.

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This Week in Comics #1: Batman and the Outsiders #1

This week begins a new quasi-weekly feature. Much like Chris's Invincible Super-Blog and The Absorbascon I will be giving weekly reviews of the comics that I read for the week. Luckily for my wallet and my typing fingers, my usual Wednesday stack is something like .5 comics per week and the most I think that I've ever bought was something like six issues, so the reviews will be relatively light and again, quasi-weekly.

This week's purchase is DC Comics's Batman and the Outsiders #1 and comes to us from the creative mind of Chuck Dixon and the talented hands of Julian Lopez. Overall, I found this first issue to be a promising start, but a little slow. Clearly, this first storyline will go for five or six issues when it could probably be parred down to three and be more enjoyable.

The series brings back a title from the mid-1980s. The concept for the original series was that Batman had started his own super-team after his own relationship with the Justice League became strained. While the series was popular for awhile, eventually sales dropped and the title was canceled. Having read a few issues of the original, it's hard to say why the series was ever popular. While there were a few interesting characters on the team, most of them were more super-lame, then superheroes. Take for instance one of the series's more "popular" characters, Halo; Halo's powers literally consist of being schizophrenic and looking like a refugee from an Abba video. The most recent reiteration of the team previous to this new series, ended only a few months ago. This title, scripted by Judd Winnick, presented the Outsiders more as a grown up version of Teen Titans, with a good deal of the team's membership coming from that title. Think Slackers meets Mission Impossible and you'll have a good idea of what was going on.

Thankfully, this new Batman and the Outsiders is taking a much different direction. The current series is un-acknowledgedly built on the back of Wildstorm's The Authority, a titlethat featured characters remarkably like the original Justice League who pretty much extort the world's governments to be peaceful and socialistic. It was in short, a leftist's wet dream. During The Authority's original run, DC (Wildstorm's parent company) found the title's radical politics too much to bear and began censoring the title until it lost much of its audience. However, since the appearance of The Authority, DC has consistently tried to build an Authority-lite team into its mainstream books. Books which have tried the Authority-lite formula have had a hard time finding their voice. Playing within the confines of the DC Universe (DCU), these team books could never be as radical as their Wildstorm equivalents and thus the aesthetic and the supposed "bad-assness" of the series always felt hackneyed.

Luckily, Batman and the Outsiders manages to find the proper balance between the bright spandex view of reality that is the DCU and the proactive stance that was necessary for a book like The Authority to work. Chuck Dixon has managed to find the right scale. The Outsiders cannot blackmail the Russian government to relent in persecuting the Chechnyan people like The Authority, and luckily Dixon does not give us the DCU equivalent (as of yet) of having the Outsiders liberate one of DCU's many fictional third world banana republics or Eastern bloc countries. Instead, the villain here is a corporation which seems to be engaged in some highly suspect research and so Batman sends his newly formed team to investigate. It's not something the JLA would normally do as it involves some espionage and undercover work, but its also not on the same scale as The Authority and so the story does not become ridiculous or parodic. It's not too big and it's not too small. Dixon has managed to find the right niche for this incarnation of The Outsiders.

While much my interest in the book has come from Dixon's ability to blend Authority style action into the DCU mainstream, most of the discussion of this book has been focused on the book's supposed homophobia, and I think it's only fair to mention this in my own review. Feminist comics bloggers like Kalinara have criticized the first issue for its disrespect of lesbians and even relatively apolitical bloggers like Chris Sims have complained that the series seems to have a moment where things become derogatory.

Most of this controversy stems from the fact that Chuck Dixon is one of the few openly right wing comic books who has chided writers for including openly gay characters in their work. Now, most of Dixon's complaints stem from his discomfort with sexuality of any sort being openly stated in comics, but it is clear and clearly lamentable that there does seem to be a double standard at work. Much like the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, Dixon's rules about representation seem to allow for open heterosexuality without it being indecent, but homosexuality always seems to be sexual or sensual and thus a big comic no-no. This does present Dixon with a noticeable problem in writing The Outsiders because he's inheriting the title from Judd Winnick, an author has had gay-rights themed issues in other titles and has made The Outsiders at times, sexually explicit. As such, Dixon inherits a book that used to be everything he hates: it was sexually explicit (although not graphic) and it had two lesbian characters.

Now the immediate controversy at hand stems from Batman, supposedly unintentionally, goading his lesbian teammate Thunder into outing herself and her girlfriend/teammate Grace. Thunder is enraged when Batman refers to Thunder and Grace's "special" relationship. According to Batman, he only meant to say that they were good friends. Thunder is the one who misunderstands and believes that he is speaking euphemistically and thus, degradingly. Much of the criticism from Kalinara and Sims has to do whether or not Batman would know about their lesbian relationship and whether or not Batman would ever speak like this. I've come to understand that this level of nuanced true-to-character stuff will vary from writer to writer, particularly in an age when DC editing is as bad as it is. Would Batman would refer to someone as being "special" friends without understanding the implication of the word "special"? One would think that he would be quite sensitive to these type of implication given the fact that he's spent most of his adult life as a single man living with young boys and a domineering, elderly gentlemen; but I cannot say for certain whether or not Batman does know about what the word "special" implied beyond what I read in the text. Dixon's version of the character seems not to know what he was doing, even if as readers we think thinks this makes Batman an idiot and not the world's greatest detective.

Kalinara particularly criticizes Dixon for Thunder's reaction to Batman's usage of the word "special", which admittedly, does seem so over the top that it paints her as irrational. There seems to be more truth to this critique then whether or not Dixon is being true to Batman's character. Thunder does seem to be unhinged at Batman's remark, even when you do consider that she is rightfully upset that Batman is trying to fire her from the team.

However, is this as homophobic as Kalinara makes it seem? I don't think so. Or at least, I'm reluctant to say from this one issue, or rather from this one scene which consists of little more than a few panels. I'm willing to wait and see what happens over the next few issues to see whether or not Dixon's ideological biases (which I clearly do not agree with) override his ability to tell a good story. What I can say for now is that the scene is awkward and it is a blemish on what is an otherwise good story. Whether or not it is awkward because it suffers from Dixon foisting his beliefs onto the story, I am at this point, undecided. In the past I have seen Dixon portray right wingers as political nuts and I've seen him write what I thought was one of the best girl-positive series in a long time, Batgirl: Year One. I have high hopes for this series; I think it might be able to make some minor advances in the superhero genre, at least in terms of the DC mainstream. That being said, I take the critiques of Kalinara with more than a grain and salt and I do have my reservations.


Addendum: Boy, was I wrong about Dixon. As later issues showed, Dixon took a kind of sleazy interest in the sex lives of his lesbian characters. Rather than succumb to homophobia, Dixon's Outsiders read like a hastily executed frat-boy wet dream.