Brill Building: You're trying too hard

You're trying too hard

I didn’t pick up Infinite Crisis #2 on Wednesday, but perhaps I should have. It and the previous issue have led to some great punditry found on the internet. There’s Jim Roeg’s personal and political take on it and the original Crisis. Mark Fossen ponders the point Geoff Johns might be making with Earth-2 Superman’s speech at the end on the second book. Abhay Khosla, the Lester Bangs of comics, sets his targets on the book (scroll down) and comes away with “not completely bad.” The funniest post goes to one Tim O’Neil and his recommendations for new superhero to populate the DC Universe (who doesn’t want to see Greg Rucka work Gotham Central around Shamus O'Flatfoot, Police Leprechaun?).

Fossen’s post got me thinking the most. Is the point of Infinite Crisis going to end up being this meta-commentary of the “darkening” of superhero comics in the past 20 years or will it be something else? It got me thinking of other comics that have decided to take on the purported “maturity” of superhero comics that arose in the 19080’s. The term I came up with (and if you have a better one please share, this one needs improving) is active re-constructionist.

One of the first and so far the best of active re-constructionist books is Alan Moore and Don Simpson’s “In Pictopia,” which was first published in Fantagraphics benefit book Anything Goes #2 and reprinted in Best Comics of the Decade 1980-1990 and the Moore interview book The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. If I recall the story correctly, understand that most of the books I’ll be taking about didn’t make the move I recently made, it features a character not unlike Mandrake the Magician combing a town that fictional comic strip characters inhabit. He sees the city go to ruins, such as where the funny animals live. He meets up with a Plastic Man stand-in but is shocked to see that the second time they meet the rubbery fellow has now joined a gang of superhero thugs that now rule Pictopia. Simpson anticipates the Image art revolution of Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld in the visual change of the character. Jose Villarubia re-colored the comic for its inclusion in Extraordinary Works and his in intro for the story he declared it just as relevant now than when it first appeared in 1986, a claim that doesn’t seem hard to back up.

(It is curious that, as far as I can tell, Moore wrote this story before The Killing Joke. On a BBC interview program Moore talked about how he didn’t like The Killing Joke because it plunges into the dark psychology of Batman and The Joker but doesn’t come up with anything meaningful for all its seriousness. It sounded like Moore was describing the stories he took to task in “In Pictopia.”)

Many thought that Mike and Lee Allred’s story “Batman A-Go-Go” was a commentary on modern superhero comics but I thought it was about the generation gap and culture war of the 1960’s. For a story that does take the William Dozier Batman show to question what directions superhero comics are going in I suggest you see Neil Gaiman and Bernie Mireault’s story “When is a Door…?” from Secret Origins Special #1, reprinted in the quickie movie tie-in book Batman: Featuring Two-Face and the Riddler. The Grand Comics Database Project dubs it “a somewhat goofy version” which is one of putting it. The Riddler is evasive during an entire interview with a television news crew and only seems genuine when he laments no longer seeing villains like Egghead or having sidekicks based on punctuation marks.

Those were just short stories appearing in anthologies. In 1996 Mark Waid and Alex Ross produced Kingdom Come a fully-painted, prestige-issue mini-series that got plenty of hype from DC and Wizard when it arrived. The commentary wasn’t hard to see. Waid and Ross were pitting the classic heroes of the DC Universe, all of them showing the wear of time, against younger “heroes” who acted ruthlessly in their roles of protectors of society. If “In Pictopia” anticipated the early years of Image, Waid and Ross are all but explicit in their dissatisfaction with superhero comics like Youngblood and Spawn. The sequel The Kingdom, which Waid wrote but didn’t have any involvement from Ross if I remember everything correctly, even trots out our man Earth-2 Superman as this excellent analysis of Infinite Crisis #1 from Newsarama points out.

Waid and Ross might have decried Image, which has since become a much different publisher, on a grand scale but an even more effective damnation of this era of superhero comics was in Judgment Day by Moore and various artists. Published by Liefeld’s Awesome Entertainment and featuring Liefeld drawing much of the story itself Moore employs a courtroom drama to scold the Youngblood characters for being the degenerates they were always written as being. The book reveals that a disturbed young man took a book that creates reality and ended up turning himself into a superhero that followed his own brand of justice, surrounding himself with others who felt the same way. Moore was stating that the Awesome Universe was the creation of a dysfunctional, immature mind. It was Liefeld who drew this sequence.

Perhaps the reason that active re-constructionist stories appear from time to time (just recently Drawyn Cooke created one for The Toronto Comics Art Fair’s Free Comic Book Day issue) is that the deconstruction of superhero stories betrays so much of what is appealing about superheroic fiction. No doubt there can be great dark superhero stories but so many try to appear mature by absolving themselves of the over-the-top style and charm that abounds so many comics from the Silver Age of superheroes. One exception, and the reason why this book is so good, is Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Many creators tried to replicate its success by re-creating established corporate properties in a darker mold but most didn’t get that the grim ‘n’ gritty 1986-ness of DKR was only half of what made the book good. Miller also infused his tale with plenty of smirking comedy and operatic sensibility to create a story that celebrates the superhero as much as it subverts it. Where’s the comedy, intentional that is, in “A Death in the Family” (which Miller declared in The Many Lives of Batman as one of the most cynical things he’s seen a major comic publisher do)?

Could Infinite Crisis become, like Kingdom Come, uses high notoriety to put back a brighter world of superheroes? We’ll have to wait and see now, won’t we?

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