DC Expands Alan Moore's Superhero Masterpiece

I'm not against it.
But I ain't entirely for it either.

DC Comics' announcement last week that there will indeed (no longer rumored) be an expansion to the original 1986 comic-book mini-series "Watchmen" rather stunned the comics world. It certainly did this comics commenter.

In fact, there will be seven new "Before Watchmen" prequel mini-series each focusing on a different character or group from the back story of the original 12 issues. The most exciting of these, to me, is: "Minutemen" written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke [released cover at right].

Sign me up.

[via DC's The Source blog]

(That awful, simple title "BEFORE Watchmen", by the by, only makes sense if you're familiar with DC's "AFTER Watchmen" program which I mentioned early on here.)

The reaction has been blown-up into something more polarized in appearance than it truly is in reality. Most everyone fall into one (or more) of three camps:

1. It's a disgraceful cash-grab.

2. It's not a bad idea.

3. I'll wait and see.

Josh Flanagan (one of the iFanboy boys) does a beautiful job of summarizing many of the main points of this strange little news item of last week. Read his editorial.

Josh F's main point there is that the comics industry is a business. No one can be faulted for trying to make money and keeping everything afloat. The only thing I have to add is: in any business choices must be made, and made publicly, and we all make examples of ourselves when we do so. Sometimes foolishly.

Moore has publicly stated:

“I don’t want money” ... “What I want is for this not to happen.”

[via The New York Times]

Can the choice to produce these comics be seen as an ethical one under the circumstances? He created the characters but never gained legal ownership of them.

Perhaps more importantly, can these new comics live up to the original? No, quite frankly I can't imagine how they possibly could, in no disrespect to the very talented assemblage of folk they have to work on them. Just a comparison of the released covers with the original series' covers belies a lack of the detail-oriented thinking that was so integral to the make-up of the original.

That doesn't mean no one should ever try to expand on previously published high-quality characters as a rule, I just wouldn't have imagined rolling several of them all out in a short burst of months was the wisest way to do it. These 'prequels' will come out in far less time than Moore and Dave Gibbons took to produce the twelve issues of the original series...

Frankly? This whole thing seems a risky mess.

We'll see how they do come summer.

~ @JonGorga

Review: Prophet #21

Before Wednesday, I knew nothing about Prophet. I'd heard some rumblings, I think, from the dark corners of the comics blogosphere, but nothing that really caught my attention, not even when the book moved into the light. No, none of that was all that interesting, and none of it would have made me go out and by the book.

My guy, though, he hooked me up. You see, I have an at-home-guy and an at-school-guy. Both are really good dudes, both run really great shops. But I see my at-school-guy a lot more. What's great about my at-home-guy, who runs my at-home-store, what's great about him is that he sort of knows me, even though I go in to his shop six times a year at the outside, once or twice over the summer and on breaks. In part, he knows me because we have similar taste, but in part he knows me because he's very, very good at what he does, but, anyway, when he asked me if I had ever read King City and I told him that I hadn't, but that I had heard good things, he told me about this Rob Liefeld relaunch stuff that actually looked like stuff he wanted to read, and so I took a copy and...

...well, sure enough, this is stuff I'd like to read, which is amazing considering how generally and utterly miserable I find Rob Liefeld's work. What's so amazing about this John Prophet, though, the first we've heard from the character since Rob Liefeld's last period of general relevancy, is how much gold Brandon Graham and Simon Roy have panned for out of what was apparently a shit river of a Cable clone. This stuff is really good, as if the apparent volume of John Prophet's muscles is inversely proportional to the quality of the book he's in. Obviously, part of what makes it so good is Roy's art, which about as far from Liefeld (that's the last time his name will come up, I promise), as you can get; it's got this fantastic and malleable thin line, with a deliberately sloppy hesitancy that reminds me of Frank Quitely. That line is what makes the book work: it defines a world that appears to be like ours (and in fact is, in a technical sense, ours) but which is actually nothing like the world that we inhibit. Roy's compositions, too, tend towards mid-range and distance shots: John Prophet, in other words, is inhabiting a world, rather than moving in a world that appears to exist only because of him (although, of course, this is precisely what is going on). Of course, what helps the world Roy made be so convincing is how willing he appears to simply stay out of his colorist's way, and the ambiance that Richard Ballermann gives to the book only just stops short of magnetic.

Brandon Graham does an excellent job, too, considering he's had not only to remake someone else's concept, but explain that remaking to both a brand new audience and those people who actually did like Image Comics in the nineties. I expect he failed on the second front: anyone who dug Youngblood is probably not going to like this too much.

Obviously, this is a good thing.

Prophet's joy is in its subtlety, which is sort of a weird thing to say about a comic that features post-coital cannibalism (did I mention that the sex was with a creature that was definitively non-human? And that the scene transitions with the alien smoking her equivalent of a pipe, and then cutting John Prophet open in order to retrieve an organ that belongs to her? An organ helps her reproduce?). At the end, all we're left with is a man (familiar to some, although only vaguely recognizable) on a mission in a strange new world.
And its a big, wide, dangerous, wonderful one.

Review: Fatale #1

For years, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips have been making, on and off, what may be the best straight crime stories in post-Code comics. Criminal, at the very least, runs neck and neck with Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s work on 100 Bullets and, although the two series were good at very different things and had very different styles, publishing schedules, and kinds of serial narrative, they shared the same sort of mentality, a quality that I’m just going to go ahead and call “high pulp.” Now, pulp has come to mean a lot of things and, although I’m sure this will be maddening for some you, I’m not going to fight through an attempt to actually define it, only to come up with an overdetermined clunker or a meaning so broad as to be functionally useless. Instead, I’m going to hope that some of you have read Criminal and 100 Bullets or both and know what I mean, that is, that the two share a general luridness and violence which is definitively in the grand tradition of the lowbrow dime-store novel but done so well, with such care and of such obviously quality, that they force a reader, even a reader disinclined towards comics, to remember that sex and murder are two of the great themes of Western literature. Thus, high pulp. 

Of course, the fact that 100 Bullets and Criminal are pulpy doesn’t say very much about their genre, but you don’t have to think very hard to realize that both are, over and above their general pulp qualities, ultimately crime stories (that is, as opposed to detective stories or procedurals). Similarly, although clearly influenced by pulp super heroes like Doc Savage and the Shadow rather than their perhaps better known comic book counterparts, Incognito, the second creator-owned universe to spring from the imaginations of Brubaker and Phillips, is unquestionably a superhero story which strives towards (and achieves) a specific kind of aesthetic, a certain recognizable quality.

All of this is basically a long way of saying that pulp, although you sometimes see it used this way and despite the fact that it has some relationship to genre (or at least a certain number of genres which, at the beginning of the twentieth century through to today, tended to be published in anthology magazines or inexpensive paperbacks on low quality paper), is definitively not a genre in itself, not a word that can be used to describe the type or essence of a thing, but one that can be used to describe the way something looks and feels. Or, at least all of this is typically true: with the publication of their new series, Fatale, Brubaker and Phillips have brought their considerable collaborative talents to Image, and have turned those talents away from legitimizing pulp (something I would argue that they were successful at, although, if I’m being completely honest, its pretty obvious that filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino have a lot more to do with this cultural shift than any writer or artist of comic books, although I would also argue that Brubaker and Phillips and Azzarello and Risso and also people like Warren Ellis were at the vanguard of a movement to repulpify comics after the more overtly grim ‘n gritty realism of the eighties and the stylistic excesses of the nineties) towards attempting to transcend pulp’s almost century old status as a style, as a mere lowbrow window dressing, and to reframe it as a genre in itself. 

I know this is a pretty bold claim, and I am also going to admit upfront that what I’m going to talk about has pretty obvious precedents (Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy being examples that I can think of without having to strain myself). But, with that said, bear with me for a second. Fatale is a pretty clear coming together of many of the stock elements that make up pulp stories: there’s the accidental protagonist, there’s a mysterious and beautiful woman (presumably the Fatale of the book’s title), and that woman may or may not be the same as another woman who’s a damsel in distress, there’s a reporter who is nosing around in business that he shouldn’t be, there are crooked cops working a gorey and occult multiple homicide, and an oblique reference to World War II and Occult Nazism and very mysterious strangers and magic and so on. Even more than that, though, I think Sean Phillips has expanded his style a little bit, so that it has the not only the stilted action and comics classicism that is essential to the “high pulp” of Criminal and Incognito but also what looks to me like influences from romance comics, so that not only is the story (that is, the literal story, the plot) a chop shop coupe, but its not trying to hide it, either, and, in fact, it takes a certain pride in emphasizing what it is. Now, the kinds of stories that are labeled “pulp” tend to share elements; this is why I think sometimes the description ends up being totalizing (well, that and the fact that some people just dismiss stories that carry such a label out of hand), but what is going in Fatale is different because it doesn’t appear to have any recognizable genre, or, maybe, because it has bits and pieces of so many recognizable genres and because none of those dominate it, that calling it a horror-romance-procedural-noir seems absurd and that calling it pulp is so much more reasonable and satisfying. 

Here, another comparison with Azzarello and Risso seems enlightening: their new series, Spaceman, is also a nine issue mini (or does nine issues a maxi make?) that features the two creators operating inside the language of dystopian science fiction, that is, outside their typical location at the intersection of sprawling crime epic and allegorical (and, initially, startlingly real) ethical dilemma. Now, if you’ve read 100 Bullets or some of their other work, together and apart, you might be able to see why the two of them might be attracted to this new genre: the application of allegory (a technique, I might that add, that is complicated and almost by its very nature highbrow) was something of an innovation in crime stories, but is a basic part of what makes sci-fi tick. It makes sense, too, that the two creators have added some crime and procedural elements to Spaceman as well. Despite this, however, the story is definitively science fiction, although I suppose the argument could also be made that its a crime story merely set in the future, but it does beg to be labeled as one or the other. Fatale, on the contrary, seems perfectly happy to just be a pulp and, more importantly, pulp seems to be a perfectly satisfying way to describe it.

The two books have other things in common as well, namely a problem with pacing: the second issue of Spaceman followed through on a couple of elements which were introduced in the first, but some of the others were left by the wayside for the third issue. Azzarello and Risso handled it pretty well, though, and it wasn’t as disastrous as it might have been, and that gives me hope for the next few installments of Fatale; still, I would like to have seen some more definitive horror elements. Presumably, they are coming, but after seeing everything else fall into place so nicely, there is a sort of interesting, if expected, small reveal at the end, in the place of what I had hoped would be a much more shocking, much more clarifying, ending. One of the joys of serial storytelling, however, is that pacing is important in the long run as well as in the short and, since one of the other joys of serial storytelling is the consistently awesome team-up of Brubaker and Phillips, I have little doubt that they’ll recover with no problem and in good time.

New Dawns

These early days of the new year find me once again reading as many of the past year's comics as I can in feverish preparation for the decisions (both very easy and very hard) behind my annual Best of the Year post.

A large number of what I'm reading is from DC Comics this year as their New 52 reboot was one of the big news stories of 2o11 and a lot of the titles excited me but I burned myself out on their characters writing a long retrospective of the first 75 years of the publisher's characters that posted as the second month of the relaunch hit comics stores.

So here I am at the start of 2o12 reading the start of DC's new universe/status quo as well as many other comics I've never read or haven't read much of: "Spontaneous" from Oni Press, "T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents" (which may or may not take place in the DCnU), and "Mudman" by Paul Grist.

2o11 was a strange year.

We saw DC claim they were about to become the new hotness then actually become the new hotness.
(Yeah. I just used 'the new hotness' to describe an American comics publisher. I'm a little bit embarrassed too. You can deal with it.)

We saw the return of Craig Thompson to the full-length graphic novel format in "Habibi".

We saw Ultimate Peter Parker die and be replaced as Spider-Man by a new multi-racial character.

We saw Batman dress up in a new costume for the start of "Justice League" #1 and then promptly get undressed in a semi-sexually explicit scene at the end of "Catwoman" #1.

And that just about all happened in or around September, folks!

DC Comics' share of the monthlies market nearly doubled in September 2o11 then actually grew in October, shocking us all. Unfortunately the high was not to last. November brought them down to a slim, slim margin above Marvel's share and last month's number sees the company returned to where they were before: below Marvel's percentage.

[see article with details by Nicholas Yanes (@NicholasYanes) here]

What will this mean for 2o12? What will this mean for my annual Best of the Year post?

Only time will tell.

~ @JonGorga

Charles Addams' New York - or- Danana ::Snap:: ::Snap::

Yesterday (January 7th) was the 100th anniversary of the birth of one Charles Addams, a The New Yorker cartoonist whose most famous creations spawned a live action television show (one of my favorites), animated cartoons, movies and, most recently, a Broadway musical. Google recognized the milestone with a Doodle, and I thought that we here at the Long and Shortbox of It! should celebrate the master's birthday by posting a conversation Jon and I started, and never quite managed to finish, about "Charles Addams' New York," an exhibit that ran at The Museum of the City of New York almost two years ago. Enjoy.

Ever since Scott McCloud's brilliant "Understanding Comics" graphic novel was published in 1993 comics scholars have argued over his assertion that single panel cartoons such as most examples of "The Family Circus" and the large majority of cartoons that appear in The New Yorker are not categorically comics because the medium is "sequential art" and "there's no such thing as a sequence of one!" (McCloud, 20)

One of the most prolific cartoonists to work on The New Yorker magazine was Charles Addams. That enigmatic and unique artist whose characters are best known as the inspiration for the famous "The Addams Family" television show (which itself spawned a cartoon, two major motion pictures and, recently, a Broadway musical) is the subject of a new exhibit being housed now at the Museum of the City of New York from March 4th till May 16th. Both his 'Addams Family' cartoons and general delightfully weird cartoons were on display focusing on those that portrayed New York City, as the exhibit's title is "Charles Addams' New York" and attempts to display a sort of semi-cohesive 'alternate universe' NYC springing from Addams' imagination.

On this most recent comics-related foray into the jungles of New York City I was joined by the inestimable Mr. Joshua Kopin. He and I arrived in time for a guided tour of the exhibit given by the dual curators Sarah Henry and Kevin Miserocchi, who is also the executive director of the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation. Because we were both there and we have so much to tell you about the exhibit along with so many open-ended questions about the nature of the medium for us to discuss, we felt it would be great to cover the event in dialogue format, Plato style!

Gorga: I really enjoyed the exhibit. Josh, what did you think of it?

Kopin: First of all, Jon, if this is a Platonic dialogue, than which one of us is Socrates?

Seriously though, I really dug the exhibit. Having had a limited exposure to Addams' work in the past, I figured I would (the morbid absurdity of the cartoons appeals to both to my sense of humor and my sense of wonder), but I didn't realize I was going to like the exhibit as much as I did. I know you had an even more limited exposure to Addams' cartoons than I had had, Jon, and I'm curious: what was it like going in cold?

Gorga: You know... A bit weird, yes, but after the first two or three cartoons, I just began to laugh with you. The wonderful 'Pete's Place' one got me right in the funny bone and after that it was pretty smooth sailing. I really dug the "alternate universe" concept the curator's were trying to put forward.

Kopin: Is it an alternate universe, though? Or is it just a vision of our universe that's a little strange?

It seemed to me that what Sarah Henry was telling us when she emphasized the normal observer in Addams' work (and he or she isn't hard to spot- just look for the figure that seems in place rather than out of it) was that Addams' world is our world- and that's part of the reason his cartoons are so jarring and funny. When its considered in addition to the amount of detail that the artist gives not only to the subjects of the cartoons but also to the backgrounds this becomes even more clear- the normal is contrasted with the abnormal, the strange with the everyday, and what results is less of a window into an alternate universe and more of a commentary on our own.

Gorga: Now Joshie, you wouldn't be challenging the Official Museum-Certified Statement of the Nature of the Artist's Work, would you? I think you're correct, at least in part. We did discuss during our visit the way in which certain cartoons and strips appeared to be depicting an alternate universe, while some were merely a weird POV on our world, and others played on the borders. 'Stan's Place' being of the last type, while this wonderful four panel strip of a woman 'decorating' the advertising in the NYC's subways is entirely plausible to my mind! And the one that had us most excited was a very cool eight panel strip we will get to soon.

Kopin: I'm not sure the distinction you make between the "Stan's Place" cartoon and the bearded lady strip (incidentally, are we sure its a lady?) are necessarily meaningful- in their own way, aren't they both plausible? In fact, I think that's what I like about Addams' work the best: when he's at the top of his game, all of the cartoons are plausible, and they all sort of lull you into a false sense of normalcy. There's a kind of double take that's essential to appreciating these cartoons (and we'll return to this double take in a little bit.) With that said some of the work, particularly those images that lack the "normal observer", is just a little bit strange, isn't it?

Gorga: I think there's a slight but important distinction between the cartoons that live entirely in that 'strange and wonderful' space, i.e. the cartoons living in the Addams 'alternate reality' and the ones somewhere in-between on the spectrum, but that's a pretty fine difference and I won't hesitate to admit a pretty esoteric one.

Speaking of esoteric, I noticed that some of the strange and spooky elements that Charlie Addams allowed to interact with everyday New Yorkers were borrowed from Horror or Science Fiction Cinema and Literature. The Wolfman, for instance. Or the robot hilariously doing his Christmas shopping at Macy's! In a way, Addams was creating an intersection between fiction and reality here not unlike what we find in a lot of contemporary comics, like those I talked about in this post a few weeks back.

Thoughts, Josh?

Kopin: Yea, I think that's true: whatever reality its supposed to take place in, its not so weird as to be bizarre or even all that out of place. Everything fits so well partially because we're so familiar with all of it. It could be that what we were struggling with above has to do with this intersection- where do we place work like this? It's not exactly a traditional cartoon, is it? But if its not a cartoon, what is it? Or is it a cartoon? Or something else?

~ @JonGorga
~ @IamJoshKopin