Cult of the Author, Death of the Character?
Apr 12[Occasionally, Jeff punches up posts from his personal blog and posts them here because his readership doesn’t care about comics and junk like you guys do. This is one of those posts.]
It’s not a book that’s going to launch you to superstardom or put you at the top of the sales chart but I was really proud of what I was able to do on that book and hopefully it will hold up for Ghost Rider fans. I also was happy because I think we brought some new fans to the character.
–Jason Aaron, on his Ghost Rider run.
I’m a fan of Jason Aaron. I have been since The Other Side, and I have followed basically all of his work at Marvel Comics and am reading Scalped – his Indian reservation-set crime saga – in trade format. Of all the writers to touch the character in the past decade, I think that he’s come closest to providing a ‘definitive’ Wolverine, and well, any reason to not be embarrassed about having a soft spot for Wolverine is good news in my book.
It got me thinking, though: I’ve read Aaron’s work on Ghost Rider. I liked it. I thought it was a pretty great Ghost Rider story, but it didn’t make me a Ghost Rider fan, just cemented that I’m a Jason Aaron fan.  It’s interesting I’ve shifted from being character-loyal to creator-loyal, specifically writer-loyal. There are exceptions – I’ve always read Uncanny X-Men even during some of the bleaker creative periods in the book’s history; I’ve always been loyal to Legion of Super Heroes in the same way. However, The Thing is one of my favorite comic book characters of all time – maybe even my absolute favorite (if Batman didn’t count) – and yet I don’t read Fantastic Four on a regular basis and haven’t for a few years. Yet, at the same time, if you told me that Brian Wood was writing a book starring NFL SuperPro, I’d pay my $2.99 per issue to read it.
Comcis, I hear pretty often, are like soap operas: the evil twin scenarios, the melodramatic romances, the deaths that never quite seem to stick and, of course, the fans’ fervent belief that either this one will be the one that does or that Greenlee will be back any day now. Time is fluid in Pine Valley and Port Charles and relationships are, too.  The improbable happens as if it were the natural, and every once in awhile, there are vampires or angels or something to spice it up a bit. They both lean on serial storytelling staples and so it’s nor surprise that they have them in common.
There’s a certain simplicity to the ‘comics are like soap operas’ viewpoint, with the insinuation that you’re expected to not really care about the quality of what you’re consuming, but rather bask in the comfort of the familiarity. But I’ve watched soap operas, and my general opinion of them is that they are absolutely fucking terrible and nonsensical (Colby’s in college? She was three years old two weeks ago!) a vast majority of the time. Their saving grace is that they’re free, not three bucks every thirty days. I’d rather have a good story, dammit. The truth of the matter is that open-ended serial storytelling is not often concerned with telling a good story, but rather on being consistently entertaining from issue to issue. Telling a good story, sometimes, yes, but not the good story.
I was reading Kevin Rubio’s Tag and Bink Star Wars comics recently, and at the end of the first issue, the titular protagonists are killed in the explosion of the Death Star. The meta-joke becomes that there’s one issue left in the series and the main characters were just killed off.* Rubio starts off the next issue by spending a few pages explaining why the characters didn’t actually die (Vader selected the troopers standing behind Tag and Bink in the background to fly his wing while they slipped away on a stolen Imperial shuttle).
There’s definitely value – both from the POV of the writer and the reader – in the occasional “Cyclops is dead!”/”Cyclops is still alive!” fake-out**, but relying on that kind of cliffhanger as a crutch (and I’m not saying that that’s what Kevin Rubio is doing, since Tag and Bink Are Dead is a two-issue miniseries, after all; I’m just using it as an example because it’s fresh in my mind) seems a bit like spinning the wheels without actually going anywhere. I have a profound attraction to the shared universe of Marvel and DC, but an equally strong attachment to contained stories with a beginning, middle and end. Batman doesn’t have that. Batman persists instead because he is a myth and not just a story, just like every other superhero icon we’ve created in the modern age***.
That shift in perception has accompanied my shift from character devotion to creator respect. I don’t have to read every Batman story, so I will just focus on the Batman stories that I want to read, and those are typically from people whose work I like, regardless of where I found it before. And if I stumble across something I do like, I’m going to seek that creator out elsewhere. Demo is one of my favorite comics ever, and I’d never have found it if not for Generation X.
What’s important to you when you read comics? I was looking through a few random 90s comics not too long ago and a lot of them listed the penciler before the writer. In that era of our fandom, it was the cult of the artist. Is it a cycle? Will we see this come back around?
*This is not, mind you, an indictment of a comic whose main character dies at the end of each issue. Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s Daytripper – a comic where that exact thing happens – is aggressively excellent in basically every way.
**This is a real thing that happens during Uncanny X-Men’s “Dark Phoenix Saga” – Scott is ‘killed’ on the last page of one issue and proclaimed to be not actually dead on the first page of the following one.
***Or, as Grant Morrison puts it during his “Batman, RIP” story, “Batman and Robin can never die!”
Lost 6.11 – "Happily Ever After"
Apr 08Last time on LOST:
In every universe, Jin and Sun are in love.
In every universe, Patchy loses an eye.
Everybody loves Keamy.
Jungle Strike Tina Fey is bad at planning, raiding, following orders.
Sawyer likes cocoa.
Widmore wants Jin to see his package.
The Island? Totes not done with Desmond.
So, what about this week, brother?
Corporate bagman Desmond Hume needs to get rocker Charlie Pace to skinny-tie-wearing Daniel Widmore’s bash in time. But can a straight-laced businessman and a strung out bass player do anything by the book? Unless that book is titled “How To Crash Your Car Into The Fucking Ocean,” the answer is a resounding NO. And who is Penny?
Meanwhile, on the island, C. Wids is experimenting with electromagnetism to see if it will kill Desmond (it doesn’t) and Sayid rescues Desmond just before he could learn useful information about what Widmore is up to. Typical! Oh, LOST, can’t you ever avoid a comedic timing mishap? Wah wah wah.
“Happily Ever After” may be the best episode of the season to date. Desmond episodes are always some of each season’s stronger episodes and are usually the episodes that help to construct the spine of LOST‘s mythology. Instead of just flashing through time, as he’s wont to do, this episode focuses on Desmond flashing between the 2007 Island timeline and the 2004 mirror universe. And of course, we find that Mirror Desmond’s life is great on the surface…but it’s not as rosy as you’d expect. Desmond is working for Charles Widmore in an ill-defined ‘right-hand man’ role that gives him a giant pile of money, lots of travel and absolutely no friends or family. Contrast this with our Desmond, who lived a pretty mendicant life (ex-monk, ex-military, ex-sailboat racer, ex-button pusher) in order to earn the loving family that he eventually gets and always wanted.
Or did he?
As the cryptic and canny Eloise Widmore (formerly Hawking) points out to Desmond, the universe has given him what he wants – the approval of Charles Widmore. With that revelation – clack! – the pieces fall into place. That’s what explains the major divergences in the mirror lives of our losties. Hurley is lucky. Sawyer is a white hat. Jack is a parent. Locke has a relationship with his father that apparently doesn’t include attempted windowcide. It makes sense, but how does Eloise know this?
Out of all of the outstanding mysteries that I don’t expect we’ll ever get answered, ‘what is her deal, anyway?’ is the most frustrating. I mean, she shows up, gives cryptic info about the metaplot like it’s Halloween candy and then bam, nothing. This is a woman who orchestrated her own son’s murder at her own past self’s hands and who knows unknowable secrets about ‘the universe’.
Another interesting element of this week’s ep is Desmond’s flashback (flash-forward) to Charlie’s death in the season 3 finale. In most of our other flash sideways scenes, we’ve had characters experiencing odd deja vu moments where they almost recognize that something’s off before their reality reasserts itself. Usually, these happen in front of mirrors. They’ve been ambiguous – how much do the characters know? But this week’s deja vu moments makes it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mirror Desmond remembers at least a flash of the other timeline, as evidenced when he wigs out when drowning Charlie presses his hand against the glass and Des recalls “NOT PENNY’S BOAT.” We get further confirmation of this when Daniel confesses to having a similar dissociative experience after seeing Charlotte for the first time. The universe, Eloise told us way back in season 3, course corrects, and if the sidewaysverse isn’t the way it’s supposed to be (as strongly suggested by this episode) the continued cute intersections of our losties back in LA is not just coincidence. And now that the lid is off that particular revelation, it looks like Desmond’s going to start kicking the back end of the season into high gear, brother.
No One Loved Gorillas More
Apr 08
(Inspired by Fred Van Lente on Twitter)
#GorillaManHasAPosse
Head In the (Story) Clouds
Apr 06With the Irish wake that Marvel (with the “seven years in the making” Siege) and DC (the sprawling, obese baby that is Blackest Night) are giving the “event comic”*, I have been thinking about how the impact of these projects is felt across the line and how the ripples that come out of them affect a title’s normal continuity. This is partly because I think too much about comic books and partly because I’m devoting some serious thought to writing them right now and, as such, trying to crack the nut of what exactly makes the whole “Worlds Will Live. Worlds Will Die”, “Nothing will be the same”, “Break the Internet in half” kind of thing work (and it does work; I’m a sucker for it, even if I end up being disappointed).
Last night, Marvel editor Jordan White (whose handlebar mustache may be the most intimidating facial hair I have ever seen in person) was tweeting about his feelings on Blackest Night after reading thirty-eight parts of the eight part series in one week. In talking about the disjointed structure of the story within its own self-contained titles (Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, and the Blackest Night miniseries) he referred to the whole thing as a “story cloud.” He defines the term like so:
It was not written with each issue being its own story–clearly each issue was only part of a greater whole. You don’t get the full tale.
BUT–it was not written for the trade, either. Even a trade won’t have the full story. The GL trade will be missing a lot of story.
Even the “main” Blackest Night book is going to be a lot of other heroes reacting to things that are REALLY spinning from GL’s book.
The story cloud has been a trend that has become more pervasive at Marvel and DC over the past 5-7 years, what I think a lot of fans will recognize as the beginning of the Johns and Bendis dynasties. Both publishers invested some of the revitalizing momentum they were building up into annual events that involved the casts of several of its flagship books and promised vast changes – no more mutants, mustache-twirling government shill Tony Stark, Aquaman is dead/Aquaman is alive, et cetera ad infinitum. The rhythm that both DC and Marvel fell into was one of replenishing the story cloud.
The difference between the two -Â one I’ve written about before but not one I’ve been able to articulate well without a name like ‘story cloud’ to give it – is that while DC’s events are the story cloud, Marvel uses its events to create the cloud.
On one hand, you have Blackest Night – it’s a story cloud. It has 6 miniseries that tie into it, an arc in nearly every ongoing that DC is publishing and each of the ‘resurrected’ one-shots that were released in January. With CoIE, the cloud started with all of The Monitor’s shadowy appearances in books like New Teen Titans a year before and continued through the event and its various ‘red sky’ tie ins and into the relaunches of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman and the Justice League in the aftermath. But then a regular status quo reestablished itself until the next big event came along. This is great at ramping up the ‘need it’ factor of an event, where the fans’ loudest complaint is that they only want to buy the books that are absolutely necessary for them. In the case of Blackest Night, that was the mini itself and the two Green Lantern titles – 18 issues at the very least over a 9 month period. The story is written in such a way that you have to read each of those to get a reasonably full picture of what happens – events that start in one are resolved in another or bleed through all three. Some important beats get doled out in issues like the ‘skip month’ Atom and Hawkman issue or Adventure Comics. When fans say they feel like they “have to read everything” this is what they are talking about.
Siege, on the other hand, and Civil War, Secret Invasion and House of M before it, are mostly self-contained events. There are plenty of tie-ins, but none of them have a major plot impact on the stories, although some of them (the Pulse tie-in to House of M is a good example) have emotional resonance that can frame the story in a certain way. The example that I gave, though, is a Hawkeye story and if you don’t like Hawkeye, it’s easily skippable. In my experience, there hasn’t been a vital tie-in to any of Marvel’s recent events that has changed the essential fabric of the larger story. With these events, the line-wide plot contracts around one title for a few months and then expands out into a new story cloud – a massive status quo change like the passage of the SHRA and the Initiative or the rise of Norman Osborn – big developments that steer the direction of the overplot for the next year and beyond (this summer’s Shadow Land story – which presumably spins out of Daredevil – has its origins in things that happened during Dark Reign) and its umbrella covered everything from the Avengers to the X-Men to the Agents of Atlas. In that atmosphere, readers really can pick and choose what they want to interact with without feeling like they’re missing something vital to their reading experience. That’s the vital distinction that I think gets missed sometimes – it’s less about keeping up with ‘the universe’ as much as it is keeping up with the reader’s universe, the one that contains the characters, creators and titles that he or she follows. So much of what con-goers tell panelists is the feeling of being ‘forced to buy’ comes from a storyline trying to steer that reader out of his or her defined comfort zone.
Story clouds seem like they’re here to stay on a macro level, at least until the next major shift in the way we consume comics. At their best, they can be incredibly engaging and at their worst they’re irritating cash sinks, but are they inherently good or bad or is it all in how they’re executed? What do you think? Do story clouds work for you or would you rather see them go the way of the holofoil cover? Let us know in the comments.
*The event comic itself is an artifact that is still less than 30 years old if we’re going to point to Crisis on Infinite Earths as the first true event comic.**
**A self-contained story that effects the entirety of a shared universe whose outcome changes that universe’s status quo, usually through the abrupt addition or subtraction of characters or concepts.
Acceptance of a Higher Power – LOST 6.9: Ab Aeterno
Mar 25The metaphor of The Island as a stoppered bottle of wine containing uncontrollable evil has me in the mind to think of LOST through the lens of AA – and, as we have a few characters with drinking problems (and a few actors, too), why shouldn’t it?
What has this show been if not an examination of broken, powerless people being given a second chance to accept a higher power and make amends for their past misdeeds and missteps? In Sawyer, in Jin, in Jack and most recently in Ben, we’ve seen redemptive arcs come to fruition. The Island makes the lame walk, brings estranged spouses and fathers and sons and siblings back together, allows the haunted and unlovable to find love. But it always allows for the choice to reject it, which we saw Sayid do in “Sundown” – no strike that, as far back as season 4 when he chooses freely to become Ben’s hired gun.
That this is exactly what Jacob’s agenda is (at least, as he describes it to Richard; Mark Pellegrino’s Jacob is as mystic and inscrutable as ever; he’s not a liar, but he rarely says everything) is a welcome confirmation, but hardly a surprise.
Redemption is a major theme in “Ab Aeterno” (which literally means ‘from eternity’ and colloquially means ‘for a really long time’). Instead of parallel-world hijinks that we still aren’t sure are relevant to what has been a disjointed and lumbering (if still highly enjoyable and packed full of Moments) A-plot, instead we get a taste of LOST’s old bread and butter – the flashback. In it, we see Richard (who might also be Ricardo, Ricardus or Rick Astley depending on who’s addressing him) wrestle with his own inadvertent damnation and his struggle between TMIB’s easy path to salvation (which involves stabbing someone to death) versus Jacob’s eternity of service pitch.
In the present, not much happens beyond a frame to enwrap the flashback, at least until the end of the hour, where Hurley comforts Richard by acting as an intermediary between he and his dead wife. I am going to resist making a Ghost joke, because I’ve already seen like five thousand of them in regard to this scene. This finally helps Richard to get his head on straight after a moment of shouting-at-the-jungle doubt. And it’s an understandable doubt. As has been pointed out about Avatar, religion is not faith on Pandora, but rather fact. It is the same on The Island, especially for those like Richard who have had a close relationship with its primary inhabitants. With his god dead, his people scattered or massacred and his life dependent on a snarky-ass interloper like Jack Shephard, what else can he feel but despair?
And thus, with 9 hours behind us, we move into the second half of the final season. Team Jacob’s can do spinal surgery, talk to dead people, stare creepily and have impressive eyelashes. Team Flocke has Zombie Sayid, Kate, Clairzy (Claire + Crazy) and Cindy the Stewardess. Sawyer’s running his own game. Jin’s been bear-trapped into uselessness. Real Locke is still dead and buried. Widmore is back and has a Flocke-proof fence set up. We’re moving inexorably toward a showdown and the outcome is still anyone’s guess. Will it be Lostie vs. Lostie? Will the good guys keep the wine in the bottle, or will evil overdramatically smash the hell out of it? It’s too close to call, but it’s going to be a hell of a ride.
