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Monday, June 26, 2006
Something I've noticed
This past Wednesday I picked up All-Star Superman #4, Casanova #1 and the trade paperback to Fear Agent (read the first issue). The books were all enjoyable, but reading one after another I started noticing something they all have in common. It’s something they share with Godland and perhaps other books I haven’t read yet.
All these books are influenced by past comics or movies but the way the creators use that influence is much more exciting and successful than how other comics have looked to the past. We’ve seen fannish adoration of past comics, usually the superhero stories of the fifties and sixties, and creators try to recreate those types of stories with a few modern touches. The best example of this would be Kurt Busiek’ and Pat Olliffe’s Untold Tales of Spider-Man, which for a long time was the only Spider-Man book worth reading. Other creators have taken the path of deconstruction. To make a story seem powerful you just take a character that’s been around forever and put them in a wannabe Frank Miller story. I always found this type of storytelling to come from an insecure place. In an effort to prove critics, most of which tend to reside in the creators’ minds, that comics are real adult stuff they’ll have Green Arrow avenge Black Canary’s rape. Because after all, this stuff never happened in Gardner Fox’s stories. The “reconstruction” trend that Busiek, Mark Waid and others were a part of was in some ways a reaction this. I prefer the stories from that era but they provide a reading experience that’s less ambitious than the comics I’m writing about in this post.
I’m now noticing comics that go for something more than just recreating the style of certain past stories. Casanova and Fear Agent, perhaps it is telling that these aren’t superhero books, are not just going after a certain aesthetic but also the immediate feeling one gets thinking about ‘60s spy movies or old sci-fi EC comics. Fear Agent doesn’t seem influenced by EC books as it is influenced by the covers of those past books. Reading Rick Remender’s writing you won’t find any of the endless narration in blocky type or twist endings that seem more than a bit hard to swallow. Instead Remender and artist Tony Moore share that same wonder when you look at a Wallace Wood cover and think “what the Hell is that?” From there Remender and Moore fill panel after panel with multi-tentacled creatures and pointy spaceships. The feeling you get seeing that Wood cover is repeated throughout. Our guide isn’t some stiff omniscient narrator but rather the hard drinkin’ Texan Heath Huston (Russ Heath + Hosuton, Texas) who isn’t above the action but very much in it, providing a sense of urgency few EC stories had.
I think this is what the always insightful Jim Roeg meant when he saw what was “hyperreal” about Godland. An audience absorbs an original work. Their reaction to it is mixed in with whatever emotional buttons that have been pushed. Now part of that audience has their own book that combine the most memorable bits of the original work in hopes to create a more refined type of storytelling. To see how a creator sets out to try and recapture these past sensations read Matt Fraction’s essay at the end of Casanova #1.
Usually this quest benefits from a much more modern narrative sense. Compare Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly’s All-Star Superman, the greatest superhero book now being published, to the actual Mort Weisinger books that stand as inspiration. There’s a type of stiffness found in those older stories, just as I suppose American society as a whole was more stifling than it is now. Those books are worse offenders than EC in terms of suffocating their crazy ideas with plodding dialogue and characterizations that rarely get past bewildering immaturity. At least EC’s book had a certain charm to their antiquated style. I enjoy the Weisinger books in small doses, usually the ones with Jerry Siegel writing and Curt Swan on art, but reading page after page in the first Showcase Presents: Superman book I was getting tired of stories that had so little respect for their audience’s intelligence, something you should never do when writing for young people. All-Star delivers on the promise of the Superman-Lois-Clark love triangle, Jimmy Olsen’s many transformations and the whole idea of a superhuman that could move a million suns with his index finger. There’s genuine comedy and drama, stemming from how human Morrison writes all the characters regardless of how human they might actually be, and the stories move briskly with enough set-up and payoff in a single issue. These allow concepts such as Hercules and Samson vying for Lois’s attention or Jimmy becoming Doomsday to shine.
I don’t know if I’ve been totally clear in this post (remember writing from an insecure place?) so let me put it succinctly: Watch a Republic movie serial. Then watch Michael Anderson’s Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Then watch Steven Speilberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Notice the difference? That’s what I’m talking about.
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