* Here's that follow-up Grant Morrison interview mentioned yesterday, and here's what it says about his project with the Charlton characters, the same ones that inspired Watchmen:

I’ve just been doing an Earth Four book, which is the Charlton characters but I've decided to write it like 'Watchmen.' [laughs] So it's written backwards and sideways and filled with all kinds of symbolism and because of that it's taking quite a long time to write.

* Speaking of which! Morrison's seemingly abortive stab at the one-time Alan Moore series Wildcats is actually going to come out! This collaboration with creator Jim Lee managed to produce all of one issue before going dormant and basically taking the entire WildStorm Universe down with it; now it's being prepped as a graphic novel that will be solicited upon completion. It beats having Lee do random covers, that's for sure; I've read the pitch/outline and it sounds like the rest of the series will be a hoot.

* Also at that link there's some info on DC's next weekly comic, a 12-issue summer project called Wednesday Comics that will serialize 15 stories by various prominent creators one page per newsprint-broadsheet issue. On the one hand this is a really neat idea, especially since it's going to contain a Paul Pope comic and that ridonkulously good-looking Kyle Baker Hawkman project, but on the other hand I remember how much I hate newspaper comic books--they're chintzy and unpleasant to look at and touch. I can't imagine collecting a book that looks like the Comic Shop News.

* Ed Brubaker is leaving Daredevil with issue #500; Andy Diggle is taking over. This robs the weekly comics reviewers of the world of the opportunity to call the book "solid" or "boring" once a month. (I was definitely on the "solid" side.) Brubaker seems to be paring down his projects somewhat--he obviously left Immortal Iron Fist a while ago and even before that Matt Fraction was really scripting it, he's leaving Daredevil, and since I haven't cared for his Uncanny X-Men work I haven't been following it but I think he handed that book off to Fraction too. But man--Captain America, Daredevil, Immortal Iron Fist, and Criminal? That was a solid line-up, the best since Bendis's Alias/Powers/Daredevil/Ultimate Spider-Man halcyon days.

* Tim O'Neil keeps on halving the infinite distance between him and a Kingdom Come review. This time around he provides a visual contrast between KC and Marvels' Alex Ross visuals what else you could find on the stands at the time, and it's truly striking.

* In a mind-meld of wildly talented curmudgeons, Tom Spurgeon says he's tempted to agree with Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell that the comics industry is a lost cause. I think that this stems at least in part from some disagreeable "Where has it gone, the beautiful music of our grandparents?" sentiments on the aesthetic end, and I've expounded upon that in the past to pretty much everyone's chagrin, but Tom mainly focuses on the business end: How corporate executives essentially loot the creative legacies of an army of craftsmen and geniuses and are applauded for it, while striving to maximize short-term profits in a way that may have already sown the seeds of future irrelevancy or insolvency.

Since I returned to comics blogging I've tried to steer clear of these kinds of arguments, because I really don't know what I'm talking about and lack the access and intelligence to learn. As a result, while I occasionally agitate about ethical matters and business matters that pertain directly to ease of access to good comics, it's really that last point--access to good comics--that is all that matters to me. I tend to believe, for whatever reason, that good comics will continue to come out and I will continue to be able to read them.

However, looking around me right now, I see that we're probably witnessing the death of the newspaper, and with it two historically prominent forms of comics: the funnies and editorial cartoons. This hasn't fazed me all that much, because I haven't read the funnies with any regularity ever, and not even semi-regularity since the end of The Far Side, really the only strip that was even close to "appointment reading" for me. Meanwhile, I actively dislike editorial cartooning as a discipline; I think it inherently dumbs down complex issues into strident preach-to-the-choir imagery in a way that is very bad for overall political intelligence, like Glenn Beck with crosshatching, and I think there have been maybe half a dozen consistent exceptions to that rule in the form's entire history. But comic books and graphic novels are things I do care about. Now I see that something that once seemed untouchable can in fact be lost, and comic books haven't seemed untouchable for decades. I don't want to wake up one day and realize "wow, comics really were a lost cause, and now we've lost them."

* Curt Purcell continues his own series of posts on superhero comics, this one examining the notion that deconstructionist superhero comics like Watchmen and Brat Pack take the genre to its "logical conclusions." The thing is, I usually understand the use of that term in that context to refer to the in-story ramifications of the existence of superhumans, costumed vigilantes, super-science and the like. How would a group like the Justice League deal with quotidian social and political crises? How would godlike beings and scientific geniuses interact with the military or the automotive industry? So, you get books like Squadron Supreme and The Authority where the heroes just say "fuck it" and take over the world; you get books like Watchmen where Dr. Manhattan singlehandedly creates a viable electric-car industry. The ideas are what's been taken to their "logical conclusions." I think where people go wrong--creators and critics alike--is by conflating those conclusions with the idea that the genre itself reaches its "conclusion" with such stories. I believe the idea is that once we see what superheroes would "really" do, we can never go back; in reality, I think most readers made their peace with the idea that superheroes are an impossibility just like vampires or zombie apocalypses or alien invasions, so following the logical ramifications of their existence further down the track than we usually go doesn't do anything that the standard suspension of disbelief we employ when we read superhero stories can't undo the next time we want to read a more traditional super-tale. Of course, the big difference between superheroes and other fantastic fiction is that superheroes require a certain suspsension of disbelief not just in terms of what's physically possible, but in terms of basic human behavior. There's really nothing preventing someone from becoming Batman, for example, and yet nothing like that has ever happened in the entire course of human history. But generally speaking, that's not what the books that take superheroes to their "logical conclusions" are usually addressing. Sometimes they take to task the kinds of personality traits that might lead one to wear a mask and assault strangers, but that's not saying anything we don't already know about people in positions of authority who use violence as part of their jobs--if you were to directly address the implausibility of the kind of costumed one-man-war-on-crime represented by Batman, you couldn't actually do the comic.

Posted by Sean T. Collins at 6:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (1)