Comics Out 31 January 2007

I did not see anything out this week that I need a copy of; if there is anything I am missing, let me know.

In comics news, Newsarama is discussing some mysterious intriguing teaser image DC released of some major heroes, Frank Miller will be at the New York City Comic Con (which I will be at too, with a press pass), and they also gave a link to an unintentionally funny website where the Las Vegas Police Department totally ripped off Frank Miller.

In news closer to home Brad Winderbaum's next installment of Satacracy 88 is up at itsallinyourhands.com (link to the right), and our own Mitch is now working at Marvel Comics.



For my own contribution this week I am going to recommend Spiderman Loves Mary Jane by Sean McKeever and Takashi Miyazawa. I picked these up on a whim last week and loved them. The target audience (imagined or real) is teenage girls, but it is well plotted and paced and well drawn, and fun, which is what I want out of a comic book. In a minor way, it is nearly perfect: it aims at something simple, and succeeds gracefully. On the one hand it is exactly what you expect -- Mary Jane has boyfriends, knows this guy Peter Parker at school, looses the boyfriend, wants to date Spiderman, complains to Peter about this (not knowing he is Spiderman of course), has a date with Spiderman that does not go well, realizes she loves Peter Parker, discovers Peter kissing the new girl Gwen Stacy before she can tell him, and so on. It's simple, but it's lovely and the art is cute but not too cute. You would have to have a heart of complete stone not to fall in love with this book.

Oh, and for the record, I am adding one more character to my list from last Friday: Takashi Miyazawa's Mary Jane.

From Thomas Pynchon's Slow Learner (Commonplace Book)

What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux. Maybe this small attachment to my past is only another case of what Frank Zappa calls a bunch of old guys sitting around playing rock 'n' roll. But as we all know, rock 'n' roll will never die, and education, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever.

Grant Morrison's New X-Men 118

[This post is part of a series of posts looking at Grant Morrison's New X-Men run issue by issue; to see related posts, click the New X-Men link at the bottom of this post. ]


I said this of 116, but 118 is also one of the great X-Men covers: Cyclops could not look more cool. Just as a series of design ads I cannot remember promise to build your home around a single object, New X-Men should have been built around this issue's cover. This is a run that is best captured in the form of it's Quitely covers. Nothing lives up to their promises.




We open with a kid wearing a Magneto tee-shirt shooting a kid at a school assembly. Actually, VanSciver has him shooting US, the reader, and saying "So ... Anybody else want to sneer at my comic book collection." This is a strange point of view to locate the (by definition comic book reading) audience -- Morrison and VanSciver are on an attack that will continue in the next few pages. The kid gives a speech summarizing his life (all very convenient for the reader, who has just come upon the scene): he is a geeky, comic book nerd obsessed with "Mutant Culture" (just as the reader is likely obsessed with the X-Men comic books). Uncool is the new cool, he is proud to be a geek and he has killed his classmate to take his X-Ray eyes and join the U-Men. Then he gets shot by the police. Morrison is clearly going after the continuity obsessed X-Men audience angered at all his changes; Morrison is going after the people who are holding his New X-Men back with their conservative objections.

VanSciver gives us a two page fashion spread, but is not up to the task. Later in the issue he does give us a nice image of Jean Grey eating chips in Cerebra, and he gets points back for that. Unfortunately, he once again goes for the painfully literal as Jean looks into the fantasies of two newscasters -- she is reading their crystal clear cartoon fantasies through their OPEN BRAINS.

Once again we have lame graffiti and signs, and a lame confrontation with the poorly defined mob outside (a sense of one individual in the crowd would help). These people are like the citizens of South Park and are so stupid as to have "Mutants go Home" signs. Meeting with lame mob only lowers the cool factor Morrison had been building for his main characters.

We get a great moment when Scott implies he had sex with Emma, and then we are off to meet the new Angel.

Morrison likes his core group: when he couldn't have Hawkman for the JLA he invented Zauriel. On New X-Men he has replaced Iceman with Emma (slang for diamond is "ice", her new power); now he will replace Angel with a poor pregnant mutant whose name is Angel. It's a cool idea, but I don't care for how it plays out. We already had a discussion about Beak last time, and I don't want to go over it all again, but the scenes with Angel and her crummy life, and her mutant power to vomit acid, and her crashing into the power lines, return me to Morrison's initial Manifesto in frustration: everyone else has gotten over the change in direction, but I want to know where my cool, pop-sexy X-Men went. I was really looking forward to the book I was promised in those lovely lovely covers. Perhaps I am the audience he is angry with, the audience he is attacking for holding him back.

VanSciver ends the book on a weird note: Wolverine's claws popping out to take out the U-Men. It is oddly anti-climatic: with no opponent of value we have no sense he COULD lose. It's like an empty parody of all the times a book ended with Wolverine ready for a throw-down -- it now ends with him ready to throw-down with three nobodies. It is a kind of commentary, but the first lines of Morrison's New X-Men was Cyclops saying to Wolverine "You can probably stop doing that now [e.g. the cliched scenes you usually do]." I can't quite figure out why Morrison still has him doing those scenes. VanSciver has THREE scenes of BIG FISTS, just to make it more noticeable. Emphasizing how lame those scenes are is not helping my enjoyment at all. I came to the party for something new, not bitching about old stuff, if that is what it is.




Finally there is this little website, which taught me a new level of hatred for VanSciver. Apparently VanSciver encoded the word SEX into the incidental art work like 18 times. Ugh. Hunting for secret "codes" in art is already geeky and lame, and having the thing you are searching for be the word SEX is just appalling, and makes me embarrassed all over. I suppose it could be a continuation of attacking the audience -- the conservative fans alluded to in the opening of the issue are the ones looking for it, and entertained by it -- but now that I know it is there it just annoys me. And I am supposed to be Morrison's target audience, one of the ones eager for his Brave New World. Or maybe this is all some kind of Rorschach test, and I am revealing myself to be one of the bad guys by not playing along or getting the joke. I did, after all, ask for the pop-sexy X-Men he promised; maybe the joke is on me.

Free Form Comments

Self-promote, make anonymous personal attacks, ask questions, make suggestions, post off topic thoughts, whatever. Now that I have written about the first five Morrison New X-Men issues, feel free to let me know if another 35 posts like that might be too much, or if you want to keep going.

In the announcement department I will be turning my posts on Frank Miller's Batman and the Grotesque into an essay in a collection on Batman for BenBella Books and the proofs for Imaginary Biographies have arrived from Continuum. On top of that I have a new class to teach that starts Monday and my supervisor's notes on my Oxford thesis arrived this morning. I am going to try and make sure that this new work does not interfere with the blog, but in case it does, you know why.

Grant Morrison's New X-Men 117

[This post is part of an issue by issue look at Grant Morrison's New X-Men run. To read the other posts, hit the New X-Men label at the bottom of this post.]

I think I made a mistake to talk about the New X-Men Annual last time in the context of Magneto, because it obscured something fundamental -- the Annual is a wonderful issue and my small complaint about Sublime feeling like the wrong kind of villain was the only thing keeping Morrison's first four New X-Men issues from perfection. That needs to be kept in mind.

It is in New X-Men 117 that the tiny crack of Sublime in the annual grows into a bigger problem. 117 does not sink the ship -- that comes in the next issue, with the Korday art -- but it is with 117 that we begin to sense something has gone fundamentally wrong.



The hauntingly beautiful cover by Quitely gives way to a first page that in any other X-Men book would be fine: a chicken-man mutant is running through the snow.



I imagine people will jump all over me for being insensitive here, but I think it needs to be said -- while the X-Men have always been about freaks and outsiders like Beak, I was surprised and disappointed to see him become a focus in Morrison's New X-Men, which is supposed to be about pop sexy post-human cool. There are certainly cool ways to do freaks -- Coney Island comes to mind -- but this does not seem like one of them. Like Mr. Sublime, Beak seems like a holdover from an earlier, pre-Morrison era. Morrison will redeem him in the end with an ultra-cool descendant, but for many issues Beak will be there, making me feel something is off on every page on which he appears. What happened to Quitely's fashion model spreads?

We are then treated to a two page spread of the freak students and human protesters, and again, the whole thing feels ancient. Morrison injected a lot of life into the X-Men with his first four issues but a good bit drained out with protesters with signs like "It's not murder if its a mutant." That's lame, and sadly realistic, but lame and sadly realistic are not the tone for this book. That is the tone for much of Watchmen, or Jimmy Corrigan. These are small complaints so far, just hints that something has gone wrong, and I don't want to make too big a deal of them. Much bigger problems appear in the next pages.

VanSciver's Beast -- like VanSciver's art genreally -- does not look nearly as cool as Quitely's, probably because he does not have Quitely's weird design sense, or Quitely's magical ability to make anything work. VanSciver also does not work with the script: Xavier says to Hank that he looks happy, and Hank agrees, but he looks positively depressed. Then his girlfriend breaks up with him over the answering machine while he is admiring himself in a mirror -- Morrison wants pathos, I think, but the sitcom staging descends into bathos (though I am not 100% sure Quitely would have saved Morrison here as the moment seems unredeemable, but Quitely does work miracles). VanSciver also draws a wooden bat, when a character refers to it as aluminum, and again slides into bathos when a tormented Beak is on his knees, clutching ripped feathers and holding them up to god as he screams at the sky like King Lear. King Lear the chicken man. Thanks.

And then we get Casandra Nova hiding in Xavier's brain. Like fifteen minutes ago she was -- horrifically and shockingly -- to mutants what mutants are to humans. Now, suddenly without warning, she is Xavier's evil twin. And not a metaphorical twin (at least not yet, but give it a few issues) -- she is his evil genetic twin. Morrison has abandoned a great idea for a cliche. He might have saved the cliche -- he is very good at that actually -- but changing to one midstream is just mind boggling, in the worst way. He will fumble this ball a few more times before the finish line.

VanSciver is again a big weak point, not exactly selling the "Nova Revealed" moment (a key moment in the run). Nova uses psychic powers to attack Hank's self-esteem (there is that lame old-fashioned theme again). VanSciver decides to dramatize this by drawing Hank surrounded by upsetting words: Pain, Ugly, Stupid, Bad, Child, Nightmare, Hurt.



This fails on a number of levels, the most obvious being (1) it reminds me of a Nicktoon commercial telling kids how words can't hurt them, and (2) it is painfully literal. This second problem is best illustrated by the Beavis and Butthead episode when they watch the video for Tag Team's "Whoop There It is" and Butthead says sagely that it would be a great video to teach kids to read because they say "Whoop" and then the word "Whoop" appears on the screen.

The final page spread is a marvel of terror and wonder as we see Nova, in Xavier's body, looking at the Shi'ar battleship -- and the aliens that have come to get him -- like a cat with a canary. Sadly, the previous 21 pages suck a lot of the promise out of a powerful moment.

EDIT: Two mistakes. I wrote "Scrivner" but the artist's name is VanSciver. That has been changed. Also we have one more issue with VanSciver before Kordey shows up, and so I deleted the last sentence of the post which was "The next issue will take that promise, and beat it to death in an alley with a chain."