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Monday, September 12, 2005
Wha…Huh?
Never before have I appreciated a book that I thought failed so miserably at what it seemed to set out to do.
The jokes in Wha…Huh? are hit and miss and I must report that there are far more misses than hits. There are two stories in here that are only two pages long and yet I still couldn’t bother myself to finish either of them. I knew that applying even that small amount of effort would lead to little rewards in terms of amusement. A lot of the quick jokes which I did read were just too obvious or didn’t cut sharp enough to be really funny. The bits about the aborted Batman/Daredevil crossover and the lateness of Ultimates were just flat. The silly insights into the Marvel characters harkens back to other humor books like Not Brand Echh or issue #34 of both volumes of What If?. Those books had a corny charm to them not unlike the appeal of reading Stan’s Soapbox. Even the inclusion of Stan Lee in this book, in another unfunny one-pager, doesn’t bring back that feel. That’s not to say the book doesn’t have a charm of its own. It does but we’ll get to that later.
Jim Mahfood’s art style is appealing for a little bit but after awhile I was wishing they had changed up the artists on the book like they had changed up the writers. He can make the heroes of the Marvel Universe seem both cute and funny looking as with the expressions he gives Captain America in “What if Black Panther were actually white?” He has a talent for squeezing in fun sight gags into panels, part of a tradition among cartoonists that stretches back to Bill Elder. It’s something that would work with a few pages but making him the sole artist for a 30+ page book was overkill. It’s got a fun feel of being dashed off while the teacher’s not looking but it’s not strong enough to support a whole book. There’s some variety when Spider-Man’s origin from Amazing Fantasy #15 is reprinted yet again but that would only be effective if they just ran the story as a whole and not interrupted it with more smug insider humor. Although let’s not declare a profuse use of inside humor such a bad thing right now. The way I see it…no, that’s for further on down.
There are moments where the book is funny, many of them brought to us by Brian K. Vaughan. All of his scripts are quick and witty enough so that nothing seems forced or too pleased with itself. Hell, the best moments Brian Bendis and Marc Andreyko’s Wolverine bit was when Vaughan showed up.
Mark Millar and Brian Bendis do a lot of the jokes for this book, mirroring their high output for Marvel’s whole line of books. Also mirroring their output, they both only have one good contribution apiece among the many that are there. To be fair both of there own one good idea are funny. Millar’s sequence about adding Andrew Jackson to the Fantastic Four was just random and silly enough to have me laugh out loud. It actually reminded me of Michael Kupperman a bit.
As for Benids, I almost forgive him for the many stupid things he comes up with in this book by creating the very funny centerpiece, “What if the Identity Crisis happened in the Marvel Universe?” In three pages the worst tendency of modern super-hero writers is given a good skewering. The caption boxes filling the pages telling us over and over again that something important is happening and how we must look into the characters’ minds become absurd as they pile on top of each other. It’s wonderful in how it points out the weakest aspect of Identity Crisis (Meltzer successfully slowed down a bunch of super-heroes fighting Deathstroke and many other scenes with his bloated prose spread out all over the page)as well as many other super-hero titles like Superman/Batman and many of Bendis’s own books.
It’s not the few times the book gets humor right that makes Wha…Huh? so wonderful to me. It’s that this book is such an authentic snapshot of a certain part of the comic book industry in a certain period of time that will make it enjoyable. “Will make it enjoyable” as in it’s not as easy to enjoy now. Right now we have people thinking about big event books that “darken” super-heroes’ worlds, the omnipresence of Millar and Bendis and their respective on-line behavior and the message boards of those two and others’ that are cluttered with complaints and unfunny snark. It’s all around us now so this book is hardly memorable. So store it away in a longbox for now and break it out eight to ten years from now. Now see there’s a new dimension of this book to enjoy.
We’ll look back in a mix of nostalgia and embarrassment, two notions that often fill the comic reader’s mind, at what those crafting for Marvel thought of themselves and their side of the industry. There’s as much humor about those behind the books as there are the characters that are meant to be the main selling points. One of the last pages is just poking fun at Mark Millar’s career. It’s not really that funny now but it’s so brilliantly dates itself that it becomes a reference point for what life was like for a super-hero fans and creators in the ‘00s.
Wha…Huh? bleeds its ephemeral nature. If you’ve ever seen a panel that groups Marvel or DC creators together on stage you’ll notice most of the discussion is devoted to a bunch of guys laughing it up and breaking each other’s balls. This book feels like it’s an attempt to recreate that in a book. It won’t really hit until the due change for these books come and Millar, Bendis and Vaghan go the way of Len Wein, Marv Wolfman and Doug Moench. Then we can look at this book and have a certain part of all our lives rush back to us. Most of this book is pretty stupid but all of it is invaluable.
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