Fantastic Four 17-18

[Jason Powell continues his Claremont epilogues. This is a good case for these issues. I want them now.]

Okay, this is kind of a weird one, I’ll admit.

Remember in 1996, when Marvel reunited with all those Image artists, and gave them control of “Heroes Reborn,” a quasi-reboot of their major characters? Liefeld got Captain America, Portacio got Iron Man, and Jim Lee got the Fantastic Four. Then when they collapsed the “Heroes Reborn” idea, they rebooted everything *again.* Scott Lobdell and Alan Davis were given control of the Fantastic Four this time, but after only three or four months, that team was replaced by Chris Claremont and Salavador Larocca.

Apparently the assignment just sort of dropped into Claremont’s lap; this was 1998, when – as I recall -- Claremont was working as an editor for Marvel rather than a freelance writer. He didn’t seem to have any FF ideas, and so for the first few months the title was in danger of becoming Excalibur redux. Perversely, Claremont started using material from the Alan Davis-penned issues of Excalibur, as well as the issues he wrote himself. There was even talk of Kitty Pryde joining the cast. The first full FF arc that Claremont wrote took them to Genosha of all places. It was a mess.

Eventually Claremont started to find his FF voice, and while he never came close to making any kind of masterwork, there were two issues wherein I think he just nailed it.

FF 17-18 seem to have been influenced by The Matrix. That’s assuming the dates work out … I’m not sure if the movie was in theaters yet at this point in 1999, but if not Claremont could easily have been influenced just by teaser information about the film’s premise. It’s possible that Dark City was influencing Claremont here as well.

So the FF end up in a shared virtual reality scenario. As in the Wachowski Bros. film, the populace of this world are actually all unconscious, each one secure inside one individual chamber of a massive hive. They are all plugged into a fake city, playing roles that they do not know are fake.

But here’s the twist: The city in question is basically a virtual Gotham, complete with its own versions of Batman and Robin, called – respectively – Lockdown and Rosetta Stone. (There are shades here as well of the old Bottle City of Kandor stories where Superman used to become a Batman-like figure to protect the Kandorian populace.) When the FF – during one of their characteristic treks across various dimensions – wind up getting plugged into this virtual scenario, the master computer that runs the show does the logical thing: Makes each member of the FF into a new villain for Lockdown’s rogues gallery. And while Sue, Johnny and Ben are brainwashed into playing these new roles, Reed manages to retain his own identity – but he still has to play along in order to figure out a way to escape.

Lockdown, meanwhile, becomes fascinated with Reed, realizing that this is the first “villain” he’s ever faced that qualifies as his intellectual equal. He’s found his perfect arch-enemy basically, and he doesn’t want to let him leave.

So it’s Batman vs. Mr. Fantastic inside The Matrix. That’s the kind of high concept that would have the modern-day comics community going insane if it was being done by, say, Matt Fraction or Jeff Parker [Ed. note: Fair point.]. Claremont, however, just doesn’t inspire that kind of excitement in modern fandom. (And I understand there are reasons for that, I am simply not persuaded by any of them.)
It just ain’t right. This story is kick-ass by any standards. Everyone should go grab these out of their local LCS’s dollar bin. Granted, it is part of a longer arc that features the FF wandering through different worlds, and because of that there are a few subplots that are brought in from earlier installments. And FF #18 kind of ends on a cliffhanger as the FF move on to the next weird world.

It doesn’t matter. These two issues can easily be enjoyed on their own terms, without buying any of the rest of the run. And Salvador Larocca’s art is really fun, too. Go get these comics, guys. They’re a hoot!

Two Mamet quotes on Teaching

From David Mamet's Redbelt:

Chet Frank: Ah, but you train people to fight.
Mike Terry: No, I train people to prevail.

From David Mamet's Spartan:

Scott: What they gotcha teachin' here, young sergeant?
Jackie Black: Edged weapons, sir. Knife fighting.
Scott: Don't you teach 'em knife fighting. Teach 'em to kill. That way, they meet some sonofabitch who studied knife fighting, they send his soul to hell.

I like the idea in both of these quotes that what it appears you are teaching, what you think you are teaching, what you think are are learning, is not the real thing. The real thing you should be teaching is something else, something more fundamental. I wonder if when I teach writing I am really teaching something more basic, like thinking.

Post 1991 Claremont part 2

[Jason Powell continues to epilogue away. Three more after this one.]

Continuing a look at Claremont’s post-1991, non-X-Men work …

This week, the “High Frontier” trilogy.

Claremont wrote three sci-fi novels all set in the same universe that was – at one point – marketed by publisher Ace under the umbrella title “High Frontier.” The individual titles are:

FirstFlight (1987)
Grounded (1991)
Sundowner (1994)

It’s cheating a bit to include FirstFlight in this “post-1991” series, but what the hell. Grounded I guess technically shouldn’t count either, as I think it was released before Claremont’s last X-Men issue was published. Ah well.

This series is probably the very best demonstration of Claremont’s ability to create a fully-fleshed out fictional universe, something he wasn’t able to ever fully show off when writing within the Marvel Universe.

The world of “High Frontier” is marvelously well-realized in Claremont’s prose, each novel building consistently on earlier material, making it clear that even from page one of FirstFlight, Claremont had put a lot of work into developing a coherent milieu.

The timeframe in which the books take place is never explicitly spelled out, though most of the clues suggest sometime circa 2050 (which, of course, felt a lot further away then than it does now). The backstory for “High Frontier” involves the unexpected invention, well ahead of its time, of a practical means of faster-than-light travel, which has in turn led to radical upheavals in the space program. Claremont’s lead character is a female (naturally) pilot named Nicole Shea, whom we encounter just as she’s about to be given her first off-world mission.

FirstFlight is a straightforward adventure story detailing the increasingly surprising events of that mission (well, surprising if you don’t read any of the spoilers on the back cover or front-page teaser). X-Men fans will enjoy Claremont’s dedication in FirstFlight – “to Charley, Scott, Jean, Ororo, Logan, Peter, Kurt …”. And there are some Easter eggs (or, less charitably, just plain old duplicates of X-Men characters) amongst the novel’s cast. The Wolverine analogue, Ben Ciari, is particularly noteworthy. And there’s another familiar name dropped right in the opening chapter, when we learn who Nicole’s favorite musician is.

The book is a brisk 250 pages, and the story jumps quickly from one set-piece to the next. The tangled complexities that one expects from a Claremont story are mostly missing here – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The prose is strong, albeit not nearly as solid as Claremont’s concurrent comic-book work was.

Grounded is something else. This one features a Claremont who seems very assured in the medium of prose, and he produces a much more characteristic piece here. His use of language is masterful, expertly exploiting the poetry inherent in both sci-fi and real-world technical jargon. The cast this time around is quite a bit more well-realized, and the storyline more layered and complex. Compared to the narrative straight-line of FirstFlight, the trajectory of Grounded is multi-vectored, even recursive at times. But the pay-off is there: an exciting, fully realized climax that incorporates every narrative thread, even those that seemed more like digressions at the time. A spectacular effort, this one is; the best of the three books.

(And as with any good speculative fiction, Grounded features some shrewd predictions about the world to come. Published in ’91, it gives us a universe of PortaComps – basically iPhones and Blackberries – and cars with built-in GPS trackers. There is even a direct reference to the Second Gulf War, which seemed like a perfunctory “Look, we’re in the future!” sort of detail when I read the book in 1991. Rereading it in 2010, I found it pretty darn striking.)

Sundowner ended up being the final volume of a trilogy, though I am not sure Claremont planned on stopping at three books initially. The story certainly leaves things open, but at the same time there is an “everything but the kitchen sink” quality to this novel that makes it feel suitably “grand finale”-ish. The major characters from FirstFlight that had been absent from the sequel return here, and the villain from Grounded is given a chance to be redeemed. The ending actually recalls that of Deadliest of the Species, basically leaving things open for the cast to engage in more adventures. Come to think of it, this is how his X-Men run ended as well: All three of these Claremont epics feature the cast in an aircraft, flying optimistically toward the future.

Overall, the ending of Sundowner feels a bit rushed to me, and I think Claremont kind of botches what should’ve been a really fantastic twist in the final chapter, because his writing is too opaque. Still, it is one eventful finale – kind of reminiscent of the final episode of Angel, with that same spirit of “the adventure isn’t over yet.” A worthy ending to the saga, albeit Grounded is more the quintessentially perfect Claremont sci-fi novel.

Overall, like “Deadliest,” this trilogy is a great sci-fi epic, loaded with great ideas and clever twists.

Antichrist is to Horror what Dark Knight Returns is to Superheroes

So you read Batman comics and you start to notice it is the story of a guy who hides his identity and tramples over people's civil rights and beats them up till they do what he wants them to do, all in the name of a higher order of morality that the police are incapable of serving because they are inept or corrupt or whatever. Superheroes are sort of like the KKK. You start to notice that there is something politically questionable about all superhero comics.

Then Frank Miller makes the Dark Knight Returns and there is something just crazy about how the characters in the story are suddenly engaging in debates about whether Batman is the spirit of American heroism or just a crazy fascist psychopath. Meanwhile Batman is still totally being BATMAN: kicking ass with Batarangs and Batmobiles, and yeah its TECHNICALLY illegal but it's BATMAN for christ's sake. It's a superhero comic book made from theories about superhero comic books, and it leaves things maybe a little ambiguous, before Miller went more clearly conservative. The whole genre is pumped up to ELEVEN, which means it can read as a satire, or just a really hardcore version of what you have been loving this whole time.

You watch enough horror movies and you start to notice that these patterns emerge: nature is evil, sex is evil and will get you killed, women are connected to nature, violence is sexually charged, the reason and logic and science of men is overturned by cthonic forces they think they can control or understand, but can't.

Then Lars von Trier's Antichrist comes out and you have these characters totally talking about the theory of horror movies. The characters are talking about the conflict between Men-Reason-Good and Women-Nature-Evil, like something out of Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, or one of Slavoj Zizek's pieces about the symbolic order of language barely covering up the horror of THE REAL. Or Nietzsche talking about Apollo vs Dionysus. And you totally get the stuff of a horror movie: extreme violence, sexualized violence, helpless people being chased through the woods by someone who wants to torture and kill them. It's a horror movie made from theories about horror movies. And it leaves things maybe a little ambiguous because the whole thing is so over the top. The movie is called ANTICHRIST and at one point a dead fox speaks "CHAOS REIGNS." Because it is so over the top it can be read as satire of the misogyny of horror movies, or just a really hardcore version of what you have been loving this whole time.

PROFESSOR SEES PARALLELS BETWEEN THINGS, OTHER THINGS

Repetition and Irony in Frost and the Mountain Goats

Here is Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy evening.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there's some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The famous final pair of lines are justly famous because although the words are exactly the same, the final line means something more than the second to last one. The second to last line means something like "And I have a lot of things to do, and traveling to get in, before I get home and go to bed, and I don't have time to be looking at nature." The last one, terminating the poem, makes you remember that sleep is a famous metaphor for death ("to sleep, perchance to dream"), that darkness and winter and silence ("the rest is silence") also mean death, and so it means something like "death is very attractive right now, but I have a lot to do before I get the sweet release of death."

I was reminded of this listening to a Mountain Goats song today.



Here are the lyrics

on the morning when I woke up without you for the first time,
I felt free.
and I felt lonely.
and I felt scared.
and I began to talk to myself almost immediately,
not being used to being the only person there.
hmmmm

the first time I made coffee for just myself,
I made too much of it.
but I drank it all,
just 'cause you hate it when I let things go to waste.
and I wandered through the house, like a little boy lost at the mall.
and an astronaut could've seen the hunger in my eyes from space.

and I sang oh
what do I do?
what do I do?
what do I do?
what do I do without you?

on the morning when I woke up without you for the first time,
I was cold, so I put on a sweater.
and I turned up the heat.
and the walls began to close in
and I felt so sad and frightened,
I practically ran from the living room out into the street.

and the wind began to blow and all the trees began to bend.
and the world in its cold way started coming alive.
and I stood there like a businessman waiting for a train.
and I got ready for the future to arrive.

and I sang oh
what do I do?
what do I do?
what do I do?
what do I do without you?

He is like a little boy because he feels lonely and scared without a woman to take care of him. She obviously made the coffee. And so his metaphors are appropriately boyish: the astronaut, the non-specific "businessman." He is heartbroken and more than a little pathetic. The thing about drinking too much coffee threatens to distance us from him. But ultimately, once he gets out of the house he starts to feel better: the world comes alive again, and his world won't be like this forever: the future is coming. The second "What do I do without you," though the words are the same, and it is sung in almost the exact same way, is subtly more hopeful than the first. The first "What do I do without you" suggests "nothing" as an answer, where the second is almost imperceptibly answered by a tentative "well actually I have a lot of options."

Other examples?