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Friday, August 20, 2004
Continuity Streatched To Its Limits
Alright, I promised more content in the posts so here we go with a look at the last two issues of Plastic Man.
BUT WAIT!
First I've got to get some stuff out of the way.
I want to say thank you to Mike and Neilalien for linking to the Batman squirt gun picture. Truly it is a sight to behold.
Congrats to Sean T. Collins on landing a new job. We'll all miss your blog, it was one of the finest.
Courtesy of artist Brick Mickasso here's a Kirby drawing of Mr. T probably done during the Ruby-Spears years. Is it against the law if I don't put an "I pity the fool" line here?
Now, on to the plastic:
I was real excited when I heard that Kyle Baker will be doing a Plastic Man book, and without any collaborators to boot. There really seemed to be no Plas stories that took full advantage of the character since the original Jack Cole stories. While I enjoyed Grant Morrison and Mark Waid's respective runs on JLA, the idea of Plas being a funny character in a very serious world didn't seem as satisfying as the original incarnation of the character. In the Cole stories the former Eel O'Brian was no wackier than your average superhero (although he could never be the type to turn real grim like Batman). Instead, it was the world around him and the powers that he used to catch these insane criminals that were strange and weird. Plas just reacted to that environment. From R.C. Harvey’s essay on Cole from The Comics Journal #216:
”Everyone says Platic Man was wacky. And that was the secret to Cole’s success. But Cole’s Plastic Man wasn’t wacky. In fact, he wasn’t wacky at all. Not Ever. Not even in the dim recesses of his beginnings in Police Comics #1”
The spirit of that strange and often times dangerous world Cole first presented us is found in the first issues of the Baker series as we find a comic book that is unafraid to look like something Tex Avery would have created. Plas himself is not short on wisecracks, but the dynamic of those JLA issues where this smiling jester pals around with the grimacing likes of Batman and Martian Manhunter is gone. In fact, instead of a Howard Porter-drawn slugfest, so much of those early issues felt like animation cells and storyboards for a cartoon that will never be made. It didn’t feel like the same quality work Baker has done in the past, it seemed like the man was spending too much time with Photoshop. Combined with the fact that it followed the trend of inaugurating its run with a six-issue storyline (I often time wait for the trades but I don’t like it when the trades wait for me) and I felt the book was just not worth my time.
Other people were buying the book though, such as Tom, Mike (linked above) and Tim O'Neil. They all wrote great raves of the book, and Tim especially seemed disappointed in the book's low sales (Plastic Man is item number 150 and is the DC book with the largest drop in sales in a 6-month comparisons chart). Well, I've always felt for the underdog so I decided to try the last two issues of the book, encompassing the story Continuity Bandit.
Plastic Man #8 starts us off with a parody of those oversized Alex Ross/Paul Dini books. Right off the bat Baker is telling what this book is not. That being, it is not a book that looks at superheroes like mythic gods (I am really tired of people saying that) but instead something creators and readers can have a lot more fun with. To me, it sounds like the "more fun" way of doing superheroes leads to more quality stories so count me in.
The plot soon kicks in when a woman and child claiming to be Plastic Msn's wife and son barge in. This is Baker's glorious way of thumbing his nose to the continuity nerds. Many times we find those with encyclopedic knowledge of comic book minutia try to demean quality work by bringing up much more mundane books only because the former seems to be created by ones who have the same knowledge of such trivia. As much as I don’t appreciate the fact that so many comic book discussions seem to be in the shadows of these fanboys, we can’t help but recognize the stranglehold they have on Marvel and DC (or the stranglehold those companies have on them, it’s a horrible chicken and egg thing).
Plas, Woozy Winks and the FBI agent introduced in the first storyline, Morgan, soon find out that the Time Trapper is causing all this trouble with continuity. What’s more, that villain has kidnapped the woman claiming to be Plas’ wife and has left the gang with Abraham Lincoln!
A trip to the JLA satellite follows where we get a very funny sight gag (Plas and his “son” playing rock-paper-scissor with their own malleable bodies) and a very funny line from Woozy about Dick Grayson aging while Bruce Wayne stays the same age. Looking around the JLA satellite the reader finds that things have to regress back to the early days of the super-team as Wonder Woman is nothing more than a maid with super strength and the all the heroes are as white as a Friends marathon. Even worse, it turns out the Time Trapper left Plas and his friends with John Wilkes Booth, who was only disguised as Lincoln. Plas, Woozy and Morgan deduce that the Time Trapper must be stopped else the timeline of the DC Universe will be too hard to follow! Back in time they go to set thing right. That includes killing Abraham Lincoln.
Issue number 9 starts with a little mishap with the time machine the group uses to get back to 1865. If you longed for a comic where Moses runs into a cowboy, this book is for you.
The payoff from Baker giving Plas this madcap world to adventure in shows up when he gives us gag after gag based around how Plas and Woozy are going to kill Lincoln. They treat the assassination of The Great Emancipator as if it was a Scooby-Doo mystery, and that’s ok. The whole concept and execution (no pun intended) was so audacious that I couldn’t help but laugh.
Soon enough, the Time Trapper is found, Lincoln is killed off and the mystery of who the people pretending to be Plas’ son and wife are all solved in the last two pages. As Tom points out the ending does seem rushed.
Did Baker plan for the story to be much more complex and longer and had to cut it short? Looking at the sales figures linked above it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if this book is cancelled in the next few months. Perhaps Baker needs the few issues he has to come up with a story that will be even more of a scathing attack on DC and the mainstream comics world.
There seems to be no room for a superhero book, even one about Plastic Man, which features bigfoot-style artwork and the ability to actually poke fun at the genre while making some points about it at the same time. It’s called satire and I doubt if most fanboys, again they show up even when we talk of excellent superhero comics, would recognize it. Hell, if they hated it when Frank Miller did it (and I’m not trying to start another DK2 debate) what hope does Kyle Baker and Plastic Man have?
Let’s have Mr. Baker have the final word:
“Working on superheroes is interesting, because it’s a different audience. It’s an audience that seems to be only interested in superheroes, and nothing else seems to work. I’m not making any value judgments on fans by saying that – I see messageboards all around where fans think pros don’t like them or are picking on them. I’m not picking on them at all – I want their money. But I’m just trying to figure out what’s going to work as a monthly book. If anything, Plastic Man will be a re-learning experience for me, because superhero comics have really changed. Let’s see if I still got what it takes.”
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