Weasel Words

August 22, 2004

If you, dear reader, after reading the previous batch o’ comic reviews, are thinking to yourself, “Dude! Has there been a comic written that this guy doesn’t like?”, I’m pleased to say that you’re about to get your answer, as I’ve just read three books that I was disappointed by.

First — and worst — of the most recent spate is Mark Millar’s Ultimate X-Men, vol. 3 . This book was just bad, through and through. The art was awful, with characters who looked completely different from panel to panel, but who all pretty much looked like each other; the micro-writing was bad, with clumsy expository dialogue; and the plotting was absolutely terrible, with characters acting in totally out-of-character ways to advance the plot. The plot, incidentally, involves the X-Men being taken for bad guys and (thanks to plot-characterization like Captain America becoming a genocidal psychopath) fighting the Ultimates. Now, the mistaken battle between superheroes is a classic trope of the superhero genre; but it’s also a pretty cheesy trope, and since the Ultimate line is supposed to be all about the de-cheesing, it’s disheartening to see that plot done here as cheesily as it’s ever been done. I nearly put this book down before I finished it, and if I buy the next volume, it’ll only be because ongoing series have to get really, really bad before I quit reading them.

Much less bad was Alan Moore’s Tom Strong, Book Three . I’ve really enjoyed the first two volumes of Tom Strong, and objectively speaking, this one probably isn’t much worse than those. So why didn’t I like it as much? It’s possible that I was just in the wrong mood for it; that happens. But I think a good part of it is that Tom Strong is a bit of a novelty comic, with all its era-hopping and meta-references and such-like. And novelties, no matter how good they are, wear out their welcome quickly. Affectations that are initially charming eventually just become affected. This series is still in the “enjoyable” category (unlike Moore’s dreary Promethea), but not much more than that.

“Enjoyable” is a charitable description of Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics , a little compilation of one-offs that shares its name with his publishing company. Basically, you get in this volume: 1) A decent-but-unspectacular Tom Strong story, and 2) an anthology of four-page stories featuring each of his recent character sets (Strong, Top 10, Promethea, and the various characters from Tomorrow Stories). It’s all fine, but very slight; I think I finished the book in a half hour. If somebody gives this to you, go ahead and read it; but I can’t recommend spending the money to buy it yourself, unless you’re a total Moore completist.

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August 21, 2004

Comics Month apparently continues with a Bendis-fest: Brian Michael Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man, vol. 4 and Alias, vol. 1 .

Ultimate Spider-Man continues in its superheroey goodness (I’ve reviewed the previous volumes already), but the series is starting to change somewhat in character: In the first volumes, Bendis was very consciously reinventing the Spider-Man mythology, but at this point, he’s done with that project. The mythos is reinvented, and now he’s just telling stories set in it, without worrying too terribly much about retelling old storylines in new ways. So we have a bit of an X-Men crossover, some Kingpin stuff, and the beginnings of a Black Cat plot, but they feel like organic developments flowing out of the situation, not Classic Spider-Man stories retold for a new audience.

And speaking of Classic Marvel, Alias (which is not connected to the TV show, despite a similar logo) is an interesting take on that familiar old Marvel Universe. The protagonist is a private investigator with a superhero background, which is the same set—up as Bendis’s unimpressive Powers books, but here it works. Why? Well, the foreword burbles on about how amazing it is that Bendis is writing an adult book that says “fuck”, but goes on to say that, okay, it’s not amazing in general, it’s amazing because it’s Marvel.

And so it is. Reading a book about the seamy underbelly of random superheroes isn’t very interesting any more, but reading about the not-all-that-seamy underbelly of Marvel superheroes is. Plus, the dialogue is just great here, with lots of genuinely funny moments that nicely offset a tone that could otherwise be too grim. As with Busiek’s Marvels, I suspect that this would lose much of its appeal for those who aren’t familiar with the Marvel Universe, but for those who are, it’s very much worth reading.

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August 16, 2004

More graphic novels! Like the last batch, both Mark Waid’s Empire and Mark Millar’s The Ultimates, vol. 2 are explicitly superhero books; but they’re superhero books with a political twist.

The political side of Empire is fairly obvious — the premise is that a super-villain has, for once, succeeded in his goal. He’s taken over the world and rules as dictator. So... now what? Despite the super-powerful premise, the actual meat of the story is largely personal. Waid isn’t concerned about the effects that super-villainous domination has on the world; he’s concerned about the effects it has on the super-villain and the people around him. While it’s definitely not a modern classic, Empire is an enjoyable, above-average read due to the well-drawn, complex characters.

The Ultimates is closer to a conventional superhero book. On one level, this is an Ultimate universe reboot of the Avengers — it’s the story of a super-group featuring Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, the Wasp, and Giant Man. But, like all the Ultimate books, it’s been dehokified. This isn’t just a band of do-gooders who decided to join together in the purity of their hearts, it’s a media-savvy team put together largely for PR purposes by an intelligence arm of the U.S. government. And while Captain America is still noble and pure of heart, as befits an idealized World War II hero, the rest of the crew is a bit less so. Bruce Banner obviously has some issues, Giant Man’s a wife-beater, Iron Man’s more than a bit feckless, Thor’s a hippie (and his purported divine status is considered by the other characters to be an eccentricity), and so on. This could have played out as nasty and cynical, but (one really horrible France-bashing line of Captain America’s aside) it doesn’t. I don’t know how well the book’s narrative will be sustained over a longer run, but so far, it’s right up there with Ultimate Spider-Man in the top echelon of superhero comics.

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August 15, 2004

I’ve just finished a big wodge of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, volumes 3-7 to be precise. This is the rest of the run that began in E Is For Extinction. You’ll recall that after reading the first volume, I was wondering if all the setup was going to pay off; and after the second, I thought it was just your basic competent comic book story. After reading the rest of this story run, I have to say that it’s better than I’d given it credit for.

Make no mistake: It’s still a comic book story, and people who don’t like superhero comic books will find absolutely nothing here to change their minds; this isn’t the sort of thing that’ll make people say “You know, I don’t really care for superheroes, but...” like Astro City or Watchmen. But as a superhero comic book story, it’s pretty damn good. Lots of involved setup and payoff, lots of use of the rich background mythos, and a willingness to rise above the two bugaboos of the superhero genre: cliche and stasis. Cynical teenagers make fun of a villain’s “Shakespearean” declamations; characters die (with various levels of permanence) and the world around them changes. It’s good stuff, and rises far above genre hackery.

The main problem I had with this series was the abrupt pacing. At times, it felt like Morrison was giving us a story outline more than a story — there’s so much for his story to do, and not enough time to do it all in, so panel transitions skip ahead abruptly, conversations are too terse, and there’s not enough time to savor the impact of major events before focus changes to something else entirely. The result is that the reader is kept slightly off-balance and slightly unsettled. Which, I suppose, actually works fairly well for Morrison’s purposes.

The more I think about this series, in fact, the more I revise my opinion of it upward. Even in the course of writing this little reviewlet, I’m sitting here thinking, “You know, that really was damn good.” So strike out all those vaguely weaselish praise words above and put in more emphatic versions. I’m sticking to my guns on this being only for superhero aficionados, but those aficionados owe it to themselves to give New X-Men a read.

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August 14, 2004

I have mixed feelings about Roger Zelazny, and I have them about Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light , too. On the one hand, he’s clearly an amazingly inventive guy, writes with verve and wit, and is a great prose stylist; on the other hand, it’s all too abundantly clear that he’s frequently making shit up as he goes along.

It’s perhaps a quirk of mine that I demand my fantastic worlds be “real” — it’s perfectly fine for there to be mysteries and unexplained things in a book (after all, there are mysteries and unexplained things in real life), but I want for those mysteries to be backed by an explanation in fiction just as they are in reality. Sure, I don’t know what’s up with Tom Bombadil, but J.R.R. Tolkien damn well better have; and when David Brin admitted that he didn’t know what the central mystery of Startide Rising was (and had to make up a bullshit unsatisfying explanation later), the book was retroactively degraded massively.

So it bothers me that Zelazny feels like he’s creating his world on the fly, rather than gradually revealing a thoroughly created world. Lord of Light is way, way better in this respect than Amber (which piled retcon on top of retcon, and where way too many things made basically zero sense), but it’s still a bit problematic.

Apart from that, though, it’s superb. The characters are great, the setting is novel, and the story is grandiose without feeling adolescent (unlike the broody-teen Amber novels). Plus, importantly, it’s very well told in a distinctive and occasionally humorous narrative voice. Highly recommended, particularly for those who don’t feel the need for fiction to have objective reality.

Also, this has nothing to do with anything, but I feel obliged to say that this book contains A Pun. It is a pun that is incredibly awful, requires lengthy setup, and — amazingly — advances the plot. I’m genuinely in awe of this pun.

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