A colleague asked me what to call the genre of superhero stories that seem to incorporate realism or a sense of populism. He was specifically referring to the Marvels line, but I think the name, if we can come up with one, would apply more broadly, as well. So, here begineth a long-winded ramble about genre theory:
To be honest, I hadn't put much thought into a name, and I haven't actually read Marvels. Structurally, it is part of a larger movement that strategically injects fantastic, often 'gutter,' genres (space opera, superheroes, pulp fantasy, etc) with bits of realism.
I've jokingly been calling this 'realistique' for a few months. Sounds like an ad campaign, "It's not realis, and it's not realistic. It's realistique! Fun for the whole family!" Kinda, almost, sorta real. Total fantasty with a splash of reality.
I don't want to call this 'pseudo-realism' because that implies that it's, somehow, 'not quite' realism. As if it was trying to be, but failed.
I also don't want to get sucked into the 'magic realism' label, not because I don't love magic realism, but because it has a seperate history that I don't think I'd want to invoke in this context.
People have been calling the mid-80s, political/adult comics 'revisionist' for quite some time, but that's not a usefully descriptive title.
The interesting thing about, say, Supreme Power or BSG (Battlestar Galactica) is that they manage to handle both the psychological drama and powerful political and social commentary that people expect from period films or historical fiction, for example, but they also do the large-scale iconic, metaphorical, and often 'cosmic' work of mythology or really good sci-fi/fantasy. The psychological depth in LotR is nothing to write home about, but the implications on a grand scale are phenomenal. BSG does both. Perhaps there's a name that combines that sense of combination of small- and large-scale themes? Like, "iconic realism" or "realist myth"?
Suggestions or thoughts on this would be great!
Over the course of the 1990s, Alan Moore went slowly, beautifully, batshit insane.
You can see it as far back as his early work at Warrior, of course, but the specific transition from his surprisingly good word at Rob Lefield's Awesome Comics to his mind-numblingly amazing work at America's Best Comics (ABC) shows a man on a mission.
Supreme and the unfinished Glory are both pastiches of familiar supeheroes, Superman and Wonder Woman, respectively, that go into the constructed and fictional nature of the characters. Supreme's world betrays, as it would, the fact that he's not only a fictional character, but a product of an industry in which artists change their minds, are replaced on a regular basis, and go through specific, identifiable eras of storytelling. Supreme actually meets his previous incarnations and acknolwedges them as such. The fact that Moore took over the title mid-way through, much like DC's last-minute decision to not let him use the Chartlon Comics characters for Watchmen, is a happy accident that leads to a way to rewrite Supreme, and, in the process, a way to reveal the rewriting itself.
Moore seems devoted to pulling back the curtain, revealing the stitchwork, generally displaying how literature, and by extension symbol and metaphor, actually function, rather than smoothing them over. Gaiman is absolutely brilliant at knitting fictional worlds together in such a way that you'll never see the join. He's a true craftsman, that way. Moore is a little more post-modern; he not only wants us to see the join, but he wants us to understand what the join, seeing the join, and having an artist show it us actually means in regards to how we understand the universe, and (therefore) how the universe functions.
Also, he converted to wizardry as his religion at some point in the late 80s/early 90s. So, you know, batshit insane.
But as he said in an interview on BBC radio last year, although it sounds crazy, magic really is exactly what writers do. They create things out of nothing using only words. The same is true of any artist. And I think he and Gaiman are very much on the same page on this.
Compare the work with symbol and metaphor in fictional fantasy worlds in Moore's Promethea and Supreme to Gaiman's Sandman and Books of Magic: The Prequel, and we will see some very specific common themes.
First, the desire to locate it all within British/European literature, which is a little annoying because it has a tendancy to cast faulty universals onto the rest of humanity. To their credit, both writers extend themselves past the Western tradition and they do so with the same respect and talent as they do with everything, but Moore's magical history of the world in Promethea #12, which follows the birth of the universe through to the post-modern revolution through Tarot cards, Alyster Crowly, and the Kaballah, pretty much assumes that Western history is a universal path, while never once mentioning China or India or anywhere East of, well, Germany. There's nothing wrong with talking about Western history, of course, but I'd prefer a teensy bit more of an admission that is what he's talking about. Gaiman has similar moments, and I have similar complaints about them.
Past that, though, the insistance that it's all metaphor anyway is fascinating. Over and over again, their characters remind each other that we see things a certain way because we are trained to do so. The snake and the woman, for example, are very potent symbols in Promethea, conveniently stand in for the mind (creation, imagination, conception) and the material (the twin snakes of the Cauduceaus become the double-helix of DNA, and therefore of living matter). However, they're just one way to percieve that split, and the very split itself is just one way to see the universe. Despite how heavily invested Promethea is in that particular metaphorical perception of the world, the content of the book still leaves the door open to a different kind conception. The woman/snake image is just this book's way of representing what this book has to say about a particular thing.
The magic is the creation, the fact that a different kind of perception effectively leads to living in a different universe. This is not to claim that the external, objective world actually changes but merely to acknowledge just how powerful our perception of the world is in determining how we function in it and what decisions we make. How we percieve the universe just is as close as we'll ever get to understanding it objectively. No matter how accurate our perceptions are, they're still perceptions, and still bound by the way that humans think, which is based on the filters we create in our brains that allow us to interpret the raw information fed to us by our senses.
So, if our concept of the 'objective' is always based on a conceptual construct, then changing our conceptual construct really does change the world in which we live, because that's all we are, at a certain level, concepts, perceptions, and ideas.
This book is a little like Waid and Kitson's Empire. It's with Image, which means that the artists only make money if the book makes money. As Ellis says, "If you're th eonly person who bought this comic, then I'll make neough off this project to buy a pack of chwing gum. If they take a couple of sticks out of the pack" (Fell, "Back Matter"). So, on that level, I have to respect both Ellis and Templesmith (the artist) for putting it all on the line.
Of course, we already know that the sales were quite good. A lot of stores ran out. When you have your own email-out that goes to 8,000 mailboxes around the world, you can be assured that your work will at least get a cursory look at the stores. Ellis, for all his deliberate offensiveness, is the most approachable of the "crazy British comic lunatics with scary hair" (of which there are a few). Gaiman is the golden boy of comics right now. Charming, handsome, impecably polite and well-spoken, not to mention mind-numbingly talented. Everybody likes Neil.
I suspect that if Ellis did more interviews he'd be less famous. "A face made for radio" as a friend of mine put it. I actually have no idea what the man looks like, but that's not the point. The point is that Ellis play to his strengths. He's actually interested in talking to fans and fellow artists, so he does. He uses the technology available. For god's sake, the man emails us the blow-by-blows of fights at his local bar using a blackberry. That's dedication. Plus, he can reportedly raise entire cities. With his cock. That's his report, of course, but still. You gotta respect that.
The book itself is quite good. I've been a little dissapointed with Ellis' recent minis. Ocean was fun and all, but by the end it didn't feel like it 'meant' something, and I can find 'meaning' in anything. I'm a pop culture scholar. Jack Cross made me nervous at first. I was afraid it would be yet another 'xtreme' espionage story, like 24, in which people who yammer about human rights are pussies and cowards, and shooting people in the leg is a legitimate interrogation technique, but I trust Ellis to make it about something more than that. It better be.
But I was talking about Fell, I think. I should get to that. The first hurdle is the art. It might put you off at first, but the scetchy, slightly 'off' style is perfect for a scetchy, slightly 'off' story about a scetchy, slightly 'off' detective living in a scetchy, slightly 'off' part of some unknown American city. Presumably American; I can usually read the accents that Ellis writes into his characters, deliberately or not. Moore and Gaiman do it, too. There's some interesting slips in The Killing Joke where suddenly Batman is using Britishisms (Britisms? Britms?).
Oh, right, shit. Fell. My circomlocution isn't because I didn't like the book. Not at all. Loved it. I think, though, that because I just read it, I haven't processed it yet. I have two readers in me, you see. The fanboy and the critic. So far, Fanboy likes what he sees, but Critic is still on the crapper, mulling it over (just to bring in a totally unrelated coloquialism that might not make any sense).
At first glance, this is the fairly standard 'cop goes to a dangerous neighbourhood and thinks he'll be fine but discovers that this neighbourhood might be too much for him.' I can't think of a single example, but I'm sure I've seen this before.
The difference, though, is that Ellis is aware that he's playing with these kinds of clichés, as any good writer should be (especially one in a cliché-ridden medium like comics). We're already getting hints about just why Det. Fell thinks he can handle anything, that there's more to it than "dedicated public servant." We won't see him righteously beating a suspect to find out where the little girl is buried alive so that he can save her little blond-haired, blue-eyed butt just in time, I suspect.
If the first issue is any indication, the people he saves will be almost as fucked up as the people he puts away. The victories will be small in scale but large in the lives of those he effects, and so will the defeats. I love iconic stories. I love when the scale is cosmic, historic, mythic, but the shy, unpresumptuous Canadian in me also really likes little stories about little people with little problems that are, because of their scale, never the less, the biggest things in their little lives.
There's nothing wrong with the little people. They're the vast majority of humanity, after all. Perhaps that's what Tolkien was on about when he invented Hobbits? I mean, other than trying to make the English look like just about the most lovable 'race' on the face of the Earth (despite the fact that the man grew up in South Africa!).
Anyway, buy Fell. Support artists who take chances, not just economically but creatively. If you like it, keep reading. If not, you're only out a buck-fifty.
What's amazing about the really hot writers in comics these days is that they grew up with superheroes, but they also just plain grew up. Moore's 'Supreme,' just like JMS' 'Hyperion' or Ellis collection of analogues in Planetary or Gaiman's side-long Superman references in Sandmand: Endless Nights show that they not only love these characters, but they see the iconic and mythic depth of them, and are excited to work with that depth, to play with it, to have fun and respect it all at once.
Moore's said that Watchmen and M*****man are both his 'last word' on superheroes, that after them, maybe people would get on with their lives, but he and many others have spent twenty years since them futzing around with the same characters and doing amazing things with them. Supreme and Supreme: The Return took Lefield's hackneyed rip-offs of the DC and Marvel universe, and revelled in their stolen nature because, just like Dr. Manhattan and Night Owl, their power lies in the fact that they are rip offs.
Morrison's Animal Man ends with the hero meeting the artist, his de facto deity, and discovering that that deity, Morrison himself, is very mundane. Not totally in control of the work, not always writing well, but still more power than Animal Man could possibly be.
Moore's version of the same gag is more playful, less angst-driven. He allows his characters, copies of DC's biggest heroes, to finally have nominal awareness of their own history and their own constructions as literary characters, while still retaining their own lives. In the process, he pokes fun at American history in the 20th century, at least as seen through comics, and even manages to turn himself into a super-villain, by proxy.
I honestly don't know what it all means yet, if anything, but I'm starting to find that other artists' commentaries on Superman, Batman, et al, commentaries that consist of parody, pastiche, and satire, are some of the most accurate of anything I've ever seen.
I really never thought I'd take on a topic like this. I mean, it's really not my 'area,' you know? I'm by no means an expert in gender theory and all that stuff. I pay attention, I have my own theories about how people build gender identities, and all of that, but it's not 'what I do.'
And yet, here I am. Transsexual cows. It's a wierd one, I know. First, you have to watch the trailor for a new Nickelodeon movie called Barnyard, then we can start.
Okay, looks like yet another silly little 'talking animals' flick. It has the standard elements: a little bit of rockish music, some 'smack-talking' friendly animals, computer animation, and, of course, the announcer who sounds like he's been smoking ten packs a day since he was five. Nothing unusual there.
But am I the only one who gets kind of a wierd feeling off of the fact that all the cows have male voices? I mean, they're cows, female bovine. And the tagline, "what happens in the barn stays in the barn," is a clear reference to closet homosexuality. Now, far be it for me to scream "think about the children!" in that screatchy, mindless voice that only the truly moronic can achieve. That's not my point.
What confuses me is this: do the producers of kid's movies even know what cultural references they're invoking anymore? For that matter, did they ever? What bothers me is not gender-bending in kid's movies. I've watched Bugs Bunny put on a dress and seduce Elmar Fudd a millions times and I seem to have come through emotionally unscathed.
No, what bothers me is filmmakers, and TV producers, creating stories that have obvious, if muddied, references in them, to pop culture, to sexuality, to politics, that don't make any damn sense, that don't add up to a coherent narrative, that are just grabbed at random. If they're really that oblivious, what the hell else do they toss in there, just 'cause they think it's funny?
I mean, jebus, guys! Pay some freakin' attention.
I'm sitting at my desk next to $40 worth of comics. For that much money I could have bought a flash drive. Oh well.
I haven't yet found a way to explain the difference between reading comics once a month (or twice a year, if it's Moore or Ellis), reading comics in great piles all at onces, and reading them in collected editions.
When you read Transmet by the trades, you get a sense of theme, of narrative structure, of internal references, and of the arc of the whole story.
When you read them one-by-one, though, you're in the story in a whole different way. You live these narratives in, not real time because six issues can take a year but still only cover a few days in the story. Instead, you experience magnified time. Every little thing, ever subtle nuance, is more important, more (oh gods I hate this word with a pasion) 'impactful' (oh I feel dirty for even typing that).
I'm currently in the middle of at least dix different, on-going story arcs in Spider-man, Fantastic Four, Supreme Power (the JMS books), Planetary, Jack Cross, JLA: Classified (the Ellis books), and in Powers and Ultimate Spider-man (Bendis), X-Men and Serenity (Whedon), and finally Neverwhere (adapted from Gaiman).
Holy shit, that's a lot of comics. That's not even the full list. That's just off the top of my head.
Some books are better than others at sticking in my mind. Partly that's because the artists actually stick to their schedules, and some take six months to produe 24 pages because they bite off way fucking more than they could ever hope to chew at once (I'm looking at you, scary British men with scary hair! You know you who are!).
The point is that all of these stories are in the 'present' for me. Comics are told in 'real time,' like movies. I don't mean like 24 is told in real time (and boy is that show unwatchable now. Should have quite after season one). I mean that the events in comics are not depicted in the past tense, like prose. I can think of one that was, Rising Stars, but that's specifically because the events are the re-telling of Poet, and the story does, in fact, meet Poet back in the 'present' by the last issue, which made me cry. Damn you, Straczinski!).
Maybe that presentness (as opposed to 'presence'?) is why I can jump back into them so easily. If introduced well, a story I haven't even thought about for months can leap back into my mind, almost fully formed, at a moment's notice. It's pretty cool, actually. Capitalising on that presentness might be how some writers manage to stick in my mind better.
The 'recap' pages in Marvel's comics, however, are stupid waste of paper. Mark Waid's Flash books spent two panels explaining what was happening through the device of Wally West's narration boxes, and they contained new action, too. So, hey you! Marvel! Blow me. The intro pages are stupid.
Okay, I'm officially rambling now, so I'll just stop.