On Hermann's The Towers Of Bois-Maury: Eloise De Montgri

    
Only a few of the graphic novels in Hermann's masterful The Towers Of Bois-Maury series have ever been translated into English, although Dark Horse are currently promising to take a crack at releasing a far wider range of the artist's work than has ever seen print in America before. Given that the second book is the sequence -  Eloise De Montgri - is set at the end of a hard Medieval winter which seems unlikely to ever dissolve into spring, I thought it would be a good candidate for this week's The Year In Comics piece. I do hope you might consider popping over to Sequart - here - where I've taken the opportunity to discuss how bleak and yet strangely inspiring Hermann's take on the Middle Ages can be, and of how his work can remind us of why we're incredibly fortunate to be living in a time full of creatures such as lawyers and law-makers, who our culture so often chooses to despise as a matter of principle. With all that can be so dispiriting about the culture of the West in the present day, it's good to be reminded of how things might be more than just considerably worse.

         
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On Justice League #6, Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1, & The Authority vol: 1

 

First, the maths. Of the 23 pages in Justice League # 6, five are taken up by full-page splashes and four by two-sided spreads, meaning that 39% of the issue is taken up by what are effectively story-light pin-ups. Of course, that doesn't mean that the unimaginatively titled Justice League Part Six is doomed by that statistic to be anything other than a masterpiece. The ranks of the super-book's very best comics contain a host of splash-heavy, fight-centric issues. The first Amazing Spider-Man Annual, for example, from March 1963, contained what was then a shocking 6 single-panel pages, with none of them serving as chapter-openers, as was then the custom. But then, The Sinister Six also contained 35 other story-sides which each featured an average of 6 panels of peak-era, if occasionally sketchily-finished, Steve Ditko art matched with the best of Stan Lee's soap-operatic hipsterisms. With the comic already crammed with good-humoured cameo appearances by all of Marvel's other early-sixties headlining superheroes, and with pretty much all of Peter Parker's supporting cast and rogue's gallery on display as well, the then-untypical series of splash pages, totalling just 15% of the book's story-content, supplemented an already incident-dense and smart-minded tale with an eye-catching measure of novelty. Nothing so extravagant and little as powerful had ever appeared in a Marvel Comic before, and the sheer surprise of the annual's tradition-breaking contents counted for a great deal. Ditko's beautifully composed shots of Spider-Man facing down each of the Sinister Six in their turn presented the book's leading super-men as massive, kinetic presences dominating the pages upon which they featured. As such, those 6 almost-posters added to what was, in surely anybody's terms, a 25 cents already well-invested.

The double-page spread of Superman flying into Darkseid - top of page - & that one -sided affair showing Spider-Man assaulting Mysterio -  above - have a great deal in common. Both feature superheroes attacking their enemies at great speed and with considerable force, crashing through from one distinct environment into another. The differences between the two are more telling. We can choose to ignore the fact that Ditko's work is clear and direct whereas Lee's is confused and confusing, and in doing so decide that the virtues of each piece are nothing more than a matter of taste. But the Amazing Spider-Man Annual # 1 presents its full-page shots in the context of an incident-packed tale, whereas Justice League #6 is a shoddily plot-thin, character-light pamphlet. In the former, the pin-up pages are the icing on an already-considerable cake. In the latter, the facilely indulgent pin-up pages are actually supposed to be carrying the plot, leaving the comic as lacking in story as it is in sense.

      
By contrast, the seemingly endless parade of largely purposeless splash pages in Justice League #6 don't supplement the experience of reading the comic so much as ineptly constitute it. The issue's plot is both insultingly threadbare and, as Martin Gray has shown in his fine review, often slapdash and indeed nonsensical. Having taken five previous issues to cover the kind of set-up which the likes of Lee and Ditko would've dealt with in perhaps half-a-comic at the most, writer Geoff Johns and artist Jim Lee shamelessly offer the most emaciated of stories combined with the most generic and unrewarding of visual non-experiences. Superheroes punch superbaddy, Superbaddy rages back. Superheroes stab Superbaddie in one eye, and then do it again in the other. Superheroes win the day and receive a Presidential award. Superheroes senselessly bicker as if they were aggressive and low-achieving nine year olds challenged by limited attention spans compounded by regrettably low IQs. Both Johns and Lee have crowed about the New 52 being a line of comics where experimentation, inclusiveness and excellence are the order of the day, but their work here is empty of anything but a purposeful attempt to fulfil the incredibly limited expectations of a narrow niche of adolescent-minded blokes. Those artistically ambitious and socially progressive ideals which were used to help justify last year's DCU reboot are reduced in JL#6 to a sequence of impossibly familiar markers of manliness, as costumed idiots threaten, snarl, tighten buttocks, punch, hurt, growl, win, pose, bitch and wisecrack for no better reason than that's what super-people do.

If you've not read Justice League #6, you'll need assuring that the scene scanned in above takes up an entire page in the book. Not only is it clearly the product of 5 minutes planning and execution, but it makes little sense in the context of the comic's story. On the preceding page, Darkseid is shown being dragged back into a Boom Tube. On the page after, Wonder Woman declares, "They're all .. gone." Presumably, Darkseid and his minions have all been removed from the Earth, but how that looked, and the emotional meaning of it all, has been sacrificed for the scribbles above. (How the sight of stick figures fighting shows us Darkseid's departure, let alone that of his troops, escapes me.) I wonder how a professional would respond to an ambitious amateur artist who presented the above to them for criticising.

                        
Perhaps it's unfair to compare Justice League #6 with the Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1, perhaps there's so many years separating the creation of the two that any form of comparison is inevitably juxtaposing oranges and apples. As such, it might be fairer to compare Johnfirst s and Lee's work with The Authority by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch, given that the latter is the book which popularised the very widescreen method of storytelling which has reached its empty-headed nadir in today's Justice League. Those first dozen issues of The Authority might seem at first to be remarkably similar in terms of their form to Johns and Lee's contemporary work, containing as they do a series of double and single-page splashes, but that's as far as any comparison can stretch. As surprising as it might seem to those who can remember the first appearance of The Authority, and who can recall feeling that the book's substance rather than its style was somewhat lacking, Ellis and Hitch's work is far more dense and rewarding than that of Johns and Lee. There's a great deal of wit and cleverness in the first dozen issues of The Authority, combined with a willingness to be playful with the sub-genre's narrative traditions, a strong spine of story-logic, and the presence of admittedly broadly-drawn and yet sympathetic characters who challenge rather than reinforce the standard-issue macho-bias of the super-book. In the Justice League, by way of comparison, one-dimensional costumed boneheads pummel one another and then do it again, and again.

Bryan Hitch's splash page for the seventh issue of The Authority carries more emotion and meaning and sense of place than any visual in Justice League #6 of any size, and that's despite the fact that the only characters in sight in the above are distant silhouettes. Just to focus on one key difference between the work of Hitch and Lee, the latter's work on JL#6 contains just one example of a well-worked background in all 23 of the book's pages. Most of Lee's work contains no environmental features at all, except for the odd scattering of rubble and the most generic of comic book ruins. Lee's art consists of little but super-people posing in each other's company, and it's often difficult to tell what even his front-line brawlers are feeling in the most basic of terms.

The Authority works as a critique of the super-book every bit as much as it celebrates the same, whereas Justice League #6 mindlessly regurgitates the very sub-genre-killing cliches and indulgences which the work of Ellis and Hitch so successfully challenged. Johns and Lee's take on widescreen is essentially that of Ellis and Hitch's with all of the latter team's intelligence, good humour and measured storytelling removed. Where Hitch presented the reader with huge establishing shots which transmitted a sense of wonder, which were as detailed and imaginative as they were fantastically well-composed, Lee presents knocked-off money-shot after knocked-off money-shot without the slightest sign of knowing that a story can be anything other than a sequence of obsessive fanboy doodles. Johns and Lee use the splash page not as a deliberately-chosen aspect of storytelling so much as a way of adding a maximum of force for a minimum of effort to an entirely predictable and hollow indulgence of a tale. Rather than choreograph a visually compelling fight scene, they produce bloated, static cliches which shriek that something really thrilling and important is happening on the page, when the truth is exactly the opposite. Worse yet, as the scans on this page will show, it's often simply impossible to tell what's happening in terms of a specific narrative rather than those of a general punch-up.

Perhaps the most successful of Lee's full-page shots in JL#6, the above splash page only falls down when the reader wants it to make sense. Diana's pose, for example, seems absurd, as if a shot of somebody practising the long jump had been superimposed onto a battling take of Darkseid. How can she be stabbing Darkseid in the eye when she's not only looking away from him, but closing her eyelids? Is she swinging on the weapon she's thrust into his eye, or has she somehow stabbed him as she runs swiftly past him? (If so, how is that physically possible?) Her expression is one of entirely unthreatened joy, with no effort or distress showing. Putting aside the distasteful sadism of this, the apparently all-mighty Darkseid is revealed by this to be a completely ineffective warrior, unable to do the slightest harm to the woman's who's attacking him, which contributes to the book's complete of tension. The big baddie of the book's first arc turns out to be quite useless in a punch-up, and then keeps establishing his lack of threat until the issue's close. Finally, and predictably, it's hard to take Wonder Woman as a powerful warrior when the artwork focuses so upon her sexual identity rather than her actions.

            
No, it's not that it's impossible to create a fine comic-book from a mass of splash pages and a plot stitched together from nothing but the details of an almighty melee. But Johns has so little story to tell, and he does it with so little humour and subtly too, and Lee is so unconcerned to make that tiny degree of plot clear and meaningful, that all that's left is a mind-deadening, heart-sinking howl of fanboy-pleasing white noise. Justice League #6 is the year's most complacent, exploitative, and joyless superhero comic so far, and that's no little achievement given how generally poor the mass of its competition has been. The innermost circles of the Rump and the next-quarter bean-counters will adore it, no doubt, but then, they would, wouldn't they? Everyone else, and this surely includes most fans of Johns and Lee alike, are going to feel that, at the very least, the creators of Justice League have been, in the immortal words of James Brown, talking loud and saying nothing.

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On Urasawa's 20th Century Boys (Part 2 of 2)

In which the blogger concludes a brief look at Urasawa's 20th Century Boys, which began here;

      
Nothing much is happening, or so it seems, and yet the very first page of Urasawa's 20th Century Boys: Friends is as enchanting as it's compelling. That Urasawa achieves this without the slightest obvious visual sign of conflict and jeopardy in his narrative is a mark of his genius. After all, a brief description of these six panels would be unlikely to inspire enthusiasm amongst those unfamiliar with Urasawa's work. First there's an establishing shot of a Japanese school, an external view of characterless classroom windows overlooking an unused football pitch. Then, a row of three close-ups showing students during their lunch-break, with the most dramatic panel presenting two lads taking an enthusiastic, if hardly boisterous, interest in a copy of Heibon Punch, a men's magazine. Finally, we're presented with a view of the calm dining room in which the children sit, before we finally exit the side with a frame dedicated to an entirely unremarkable wall-mounted speaker. It's not, you might imagine, the most promising of tale-opening scenarios.

         
Urasawa creates a perfectly subtle snare of an opening panel by juxtaposing the actionless exterior shot of the apparently deserted school with an intriguingly unattributed caption stating "I thought something would change." Doing so forces the reader from the off to ask questions of the story rather than waiting to be told what's going on. Who's speaking? Why did they expect change to occur? Why didn't it come about? What's so important about the scene-setting date of 1973? The eye searches for the slightest clue, and yet the panel suggests nothing except for the suspicion that the very placidity of the situation might be to blame for the hope of something happening. Even the wire-mesh fence around the football pitch comes to an end as the reader's eye reaches the far-left of the panel, meaning that there's not even a hint that this is more a hemmed-in prison camp than school. Escape, it seems, would be as easy a matter as walking out of the front door. As such, Urasawa begins 20th Century Boys with a sense of quiescence and drowsiness coloured by dissatisfaction, which immediately establishes the book's theme of how difficult it is for individual longing to co-exist with mundane reality.

      
The following three frames, showing absolutely typical students enjoying their break, appear to confirm that there's nothing out-of-place here. Each panel in the sequence emphasises not just their individual personalities, but the fact of their freedom too. There's no obvious bullying or snottiness, no teachers stamping on the slightest expression of individuality, no sign of why change might have been expected, or even of why it might have been longed for. If the outside of the school suggested an unremarkable, characterless world, then this row of panels reassures us that nothing so alienating can be true. Each shot in the row presents us with a greater measure of sociability on the part of Urasawa's subjects, lending the page a sudden sense of momentum and joy. From the boy choosing to focus on nothing but his food, through the girls quite clearly enjoying each other's company as they eat, to the lads for whom food is evidently less important than more carnal concerns, Urasawa contrasts the school's silent exterior with the friendly hubbub inside its walls.

          
It's the fifth panel which resolves the apparent contradiction between the empty school grounds and the institution's sociable interior, between its amiable students and the voice-over suggesting what just might be frustration and boredom. Presenting us with a wide, high-angle shot of the dining room, Urasawa suddenly shows us how compliant the students are. No-one is moving around, no-one is standing, no-one is thinking of doing anything more daring than to talk to a friend at another table.In the complete absence of adult supervision, we're made aware that these are children who've so completely internalised the things that are expected of them that they don't need to be told to behave. They police themselves, and within the rules that they're barely if at all aware of, they act as if this were the only world that there might be. It's a youthful society made peaceful through the invisible, iron hand of conformity, safe but unchallenged, peacable and yet constricting and confining. We watch the scene as if we were the adults who'd laid down the expectations for these students, the high angle of the shot lending us a sense of the power which the school's teachers carry even in their absence. And over the student's heads hang effect balloons each carrying no more than two unthreatening, limp notes, the meaningless components of the calming mood music which pumps from the speaker in the page's final frame. These are students programmed not to think for themselves, content with their safe and uninspiring lot, happy and yet in so many ways barely awake. It's the smartest, least showy, most compact expression of what homogeneity actually means that I can recall ever experiencing, and of course, it sets up perfectly both the act of hopeful, cruel and futile rebellion which follows and the lack of response which it earns.

Six largely-wordless panels to express a sense of homogeneity and alienation while ensuring that the reader feels compelled to turn the page and move on? That's quite simply the expression of genius.

           
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That Comic Book # 1: Emmet O'Cuana On How X-Factor #65 Turned A Comics Reader Into A Comics Fan

In which I'm privileged to present a guest blog by the estimable Emmet O'Cuana, who can be found on Twitter as @emmeto_cb. I first came across Emmet's writing, and industry too, in his A Book A Day Until I Can Stay blog. Since then, as his portfolio will attest, he's continued to take on a broad variety of gigs, including writing about film, at Filmink, and directing the Comics Booked Podcast, whose latest edition features Kill Shakespeare creator Connor McCreary;

        

I can remember perfectly the moment my 5^th class teacher leaned over my shoulder to observe me reading X-Factor #65. It was some time in May 1991 and I was taking part in a school trip to Hollyhead (and heady days those were….) My teacher looked at the garish cover, with the statement ‘The End Game Begins’ emblazoned over the costumed characters in an ornate pose, saw me turning the already yellowing pages  (the things we did to our comics as kids, oh it would make a collector weep) my eyes rapt and he let out a snort of contempt. 

‘Comics!’ His voice dripped with disdain and I knew then and there that I had somehow made a mistake. I reached into my bag and took out a collection of Irish mythology. That met with his approval. Although where one draws the line between mutants taking part in life or death Danger room simulations, and the Red Branch Knights testing their applicants by forcing them to run through a forest without breaking a twig…well it escapes me. 

Scans courtesy of the Marvel Wiki: http://marvel.wikia.com/Category:X-Factor_Vol_1_65/Images

        

That is my memory of a moment from my life. It has a number of notes that I suspect are common to many of us. There is that dawning awareness that the adult world does not really make much sense. The strange rules about what things are acceptable and what is not, even down to reading materials. Of course there is the arbitrary authority figure of the teacher and the growing sense of resentment in my child self towards this person sitting in judgement over me. 

But it was the comic itself - X-Factor #65 - that I remember most clearly. I remember it because it was my first ever X-title. I did not know what mutants were, did not recognize the word. I think I recognized some of the characters from Marvel cartoons. In fact I am pretty sure I bought X-Factor from my local newsagent (yes children, we used to buy our comics from the local shops, not specialist stores) because it had Iceman on the cover and I was still a fan of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. Secondly it was the moment when I realized comics were not just for children. 

       

Just as I detected an arbitrary divide between my childish world and that of the adult one my teacher inhabited, Chris Claremont and his collaborators Jim Lee and Whilce Portacio had introduced me to characters who reflected on the passing of time. Jean Grey and Scott Summers have a scene together where they discuss the previous adventures of the X-Men, describing events that I was later to learn were published during the 1960’s. Claremont clearly has them express how their lives have changed – they have grown up – and the problems of the world have grown up with them. It was a perfect storm of significance for me and I was suddenly hooked. I needed to know more about these characters. They had stories, long life stories, dating back decades, and if I saved enough money I could buy one of those large Marvel compendiums with dozens of issues bound together. 

Claremont is the writer most clearly associated with the Uncanny X-Men title. He is often spoken of as having defined the book, surpassing creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, his title still held despite stiff competition from Grant Morrison in recent years. Personally I am holding out for Kieron Gillen to really leave a mark on the book, but only time will tell. Claremont achieved this not simply by telling exciting stories – his career is married to the book, his tenure on it a rare novelty in these times. When he has Jean and Scott, or Marvel Girl and Cyclops by their superhero names (but we’re all friends here, so we can drop the handles) reminisce he himself is reminiscing. Those comments on how more vicious the villains they face have become reflects on the difficulties the writer faced trying to keep the quality of the material fresh and interesting for readers. 

Scan courtesy of Spacebooger, where Fred pointed out that the computer stage-right is a Lexcorp model. http://www.spacebooger.com/2009/12/03/lexcorp-makin-money-in-the-dcu/

    

Fundamentally this makes the X-Men a nostalgic work. We do not read it to enjoy a tale of oppressed mutants fighting for their rights. It’s a cornerstone for generations of comic readers, a time capsule. The marginal ageing process thanks to Marvel time even keeps the mutants looking young – keeping the association with our younger selves when we read these books intact. 

When you consider that Watchmen was written a half a decade before I peeled open the pages of X-Factor #65, a work which aggressively attacks the idea of nostalgia, even identifies it as a tool used to manipulate the media saturated public by Ozymandias – the villain we hate to love – it is curious to consider how little of this aspect of Moore’s book has sunk in. (The greatest betrayal of Before Watchmen is that it embraces nostalgia, a looking backwards, an attempt to reclaim the past.)

     

The X-Men and its sister titles, including X-Factor, are supposedly metaphors for societal change. Yet the literal conservatism of Claremont – attempting to enshrine the past by having his characters looking backward to glory days, suspicious and wary of what is coming next – defeats that theme quite soundly. The X-Men as a concept are stuck in a time, old but not growing old, with younger generations of heroes bottlenecked by the mid-twenties frozen age of their surprisingly unphased mentors. If ever there was a book that should be about living and dying, growing old and passing on lessons to the new students arrived at Xavier’s conveniently stately home – surprisingly little hardship for these private-school educated victims of bigotry – it is this book. Take a leaf from the Doctor, have routine changing of the guards every couple of years. Why do we as nerds focus so much on the coherency of decades of narrative continuity? Why can’t new stories with new faces be told? Wouldn’t Marvel’s merry muties be the perfect vehicle for that?

The book I read in 1991 had the title ‘The End Game Begins’. That excited me. Kids are aware of endings, of change that comes suddenly, but it’s something they treat with native curiosity. They haven’t learned to fear it yet. Of course the end game proved not to be so final. Scott, Jean, Bobby, Hank and Warren have all lived and died and come back again – sometimes misjudged, but still eminently marketable as trademarked creations. Reading that book was when, as I said, I learned that comics are not just for kids. Because kids don’t hold on to the past as fiercely as we do. 

My sincerest thanks to Emmet, who, in in his generosity, unknowingly bought me the time to pitch for a dream job when he sent me the above. He's one of the blogosphere's gentle-folks, and I do recommend his work to you. I'll be back v. soon with some recent reviews. I hope all is well and, as used to be regularly said in this parish, Stick Together!

On Seth's "It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken"

 

Of course, prejudice operates on a level that it's hard for the unwittingly prejudiced mind to monitor. Take It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken. Consciously, I'd no doubt at all that I'd be glad to have read it. But having so enjoyed Seth's "picture-novella", I'm suddenly aware of how completely it contradicted my expectations, which is something of a surprise, because I didn't know that I was carrying those expectations in the first place. Now I can see that I'd unconsciously pigeon-holed it as a potentially elitist, point-scoring celebration of a more supposedly adult and artistic approach to graphic storytelling than that typically found in the common-or-garden action/adventure comic-book. Whatever its more positive qualities were undoubtedly going to be, some fragment of my pathetically wounded inner fanboy had already decided that Seth's work would prove to be at least in part an expression of disdainful snobbery matched with indy-cartoon one-upmanship.

   
It's not, as anyone who's visited this blog before will know, that I'm a rabid apologist for the superhero book, but I do refuse to damn the sub-genre's worth and potential just because of the poor quality of most of the product inspired by it. Similarly, I cringe at would-be hipsters measuring out their aesthetic distinction over that of the dumb masses in terms of how intellectually Olympian and challenging their preferences in comics are, and yet, there's a clear distinction between the value of a work of art and that of the snobs who associate themselves with it. Why would I pre-judge Seth's books according to the way I've seen them used to sneer as the proles with their super-blokes and wonder-chicks? I've a well-practised, deliberately maintained loathing for anyone's art or criticism which expresses the superiority of one particular medium over another, or of any one genre over all of its competitors, and with such a high-handed neutrality, it seems, has come a temptation to judge work as snotty and self-aggrandising long before the evidence of any hauteur and pseudo-intellectualism is in.
 
I could, perhaps, squirm out a defence that I spent my youth knowing that the art I most adored was regarded with contempt by the mainstream media and academia alike, or by describing a life in teaching spent forever bumping against the highbrows to whom the bloodless Hampstead novel was the highest expression of creative worth. I could even point to times when the only comics readers I knew were so against the very idea of a panel without a costumed crime-fighter in it that the likes of Jonah Hex and Nick Fury: Agent Of S.H.I.E.L.D. were regarded as heretically pretentious. (Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, or so I thought.) In short, I admit to being weary of the fact that a great deal of the pop culture I most value has been consistently defined as being either pablum for half-wits or pretentious artistry for the chattering classes. It's always either what Gore Vidal called the P-Novel or the U-Novel, the unashamed and populist or the self-conscious and excluding, and I've never felt comfortable with either front in that particular culture war. In fact, I've always failed to be able to distinguish between the ultimate worth of, say, Ditko's many super-men and the novels of Jane Austen, despite knowing how ridiculous the dilemna will appear, and I rather resent feeling as if I ought to be able to do so. As such, the unexpressed suspicion that Seth's work might read as yet another example of one kind of cartoonist establishing his superiority over less exalted product was enough to keep me unwittingly away from It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken without my ever realising that that was so.

           
Or, to put it in its least complimentary and most objective way, I'd matched the snobbery I detested so thoroughly that I wasn't even aware of my own mutton-headedness. Worse yet, my prejudices were entirely unfounded, as I'm sure that everyone reading this has long known. It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken couldn't be less of a book designed to show the inherent superiority of a small cadre of art cartoonists and their rarefied, exclusive tastes. In fact, Seth's story is as touchingly critical of any such monominded high-handedness as it's hauntingly moving on the topic of how pop culture obsessions can intensify our alienation from the positive human aspects of the world around us. That Seth has no time for the action/adventure comic book, with its emphasis, as he told the Comics Journal, upon "confrontation", is entirely irrelevant here, for this is a story of how any life-swallowing infatuation can leave its bearer isolated and dysfunctional. That would be as true for the entirely besotted acolyte of widescreen superhero books as for the nostalgically-befuddled lover of fifties New Yorker cartoons and obscure romance titles. Rather than a fetichisation of the exalted taste and fashionable emotional despair of the art-cartoonist, It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken is a smart and compassionate critique of any such a proposition.

         
It's not just that Seth's work quietly but forcibly woke me up to the shameful presence of my own bias, though for that alone I'd be exceptionally grateful that I'd read his book. For it's such a wonderfully judged examination of a man who's attempting to live his life through his art rather than through his relationships with those around him, and in that, it's a moving wake-up call for all of us who are too busy thinking about anything at all that isn't directly connected with real, solid, dangerously individual human beings.  "Pretentious" and "elitist" are the very last words that I'd use to describe this genuinely moving and, at times, disturbingly telling tale, and yet something in me was sure that that's what I'd find.

How more wrong could my lurking suspicions have been? What were they doing lurking there in the first place? Mea culpe.

This week's instalment in The Year In Comics series over at Sequart concerns Seth's It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, which I really have been touched by in a way that I didn't foresee at all. You can visit that piece, and I hope you'll consider doing so, here;

         
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On Mark Millar's Tyrannical Justice League, "Wanted" & "The Secret Society Of Super-Villains" (Part 2 of 2)

Continued from last Friday's piece, which can be found here;

The flashback scene by Millar and Giordano in "Wanted" #6 makes it plain that the world before the super-villains took over was a distinctly Silver-Age one. "The skies were so blue in those days" remembers The Killer, and it seems certain that "Wanted" is in part a commentary, if not a criticism, on the post-Crisis, post-1986 tendency towards bleak and bloody super-books.

       
In order to shift his reader's sympathies from the side of the traditionally noble super-gals'n'guys to that of their typically abhorrent opponents, Millar makes sure to avoid presenting most of the various members of the Secret Society as the entirely murderous and often flat-out psychopathic creatures they really are. It's not that they're mischaracterised, but rather that Millar carefully chooses the moments at which we encounter them. They're shown functioning as a community of ill-conforming individualists, characterised by relatively friendly bickering and telling bursts of sociable good humour, as well as by an entirely understandable air of uncertainty and fear.  As such, Millar makes it hard for the reader not to empathise just a touch with the intense anxiety shared by each of the super-villains, while being careful not to mention that the same super-villains wouldn't ever empathise with the fear that they themselves inspire in the typical inhabitants of the DCU.

Millar uses the idea of children once again to suggest that the DCU's super-villains are far kinder and more generous-hearted individuals than we've previously considered. No matter how facile Amos Fortune's concern for "the youngsters" is, it helps pull our sympathies just a little further in the direction of the Society rather than the League.

           
In their responses to the reunification of the League and its new pro-active policies, the super-villains put forward the same political arguments that you or I might in response to the unlimited power wielded by this new super-national crime-fighting agency operating outside the bounds of any national code of law. "Is the President going to argue with the fastest man alive, or a kid with the most powerful weapon in the cosmos on his fingers?" they ask each other, and though they're only thinking of themselves, they're also expressing the fears which anyone with even mildly democratic sensibilities might express. As the Martian Manhunter announces while masquerading as the super-villain Brainwave; "I think we all agree such awesome power in the hands of the few is undesirable ..".  And of course, that's true, just as the possession of such power by the likes of the Secret Society Of Super-Villains would be an even more terrifying prospect. Superhero comics work on the premise that the politics of their worlds would be pretty much the same as ours, and yet it's obvious that nothing of the sort could ever be true. A world where the Justice League could travel anywhere and detain anyone they chose to would be an entirely different globe to ours, and the causes of super-villains and adherents of civil liberties alike might just happen to coincide there

The over-people.

           
In the end, the effectiveness of Millar's script for The Secret Society Of Super-Villains lies in its capacity to make us frightened of the folks that Alan Moore called "the over-people". The superhero narrative typically relies upon the collective delusion on the reader's part that power rarely corrupts where the sheriffs in the white hats are concerned, and that that's true even when so many of the over-people are showing consistently behaving in appalling ways . But even if the reader's happy to accept the premise that Morrison's JLA is both entirely trustworthy and perpetually incorruptible, it's obvious that somewhere down the line, as the Justice League evolves and new members join, Lord Acton's Dictum is going to apply, and absolute power will corrupt absolutely.

The Martian Manhunter, disguised as Brainwave, makes a profoundly dangerous suggestion to a room full of super-villains ...

          
We do know that Millar  made a serious attempt to pitch The Secret Society Of Super-Villains as a limited series to DC Comics in the years leading up to the turn of the century, although whether the story which was printed in the first JLA 80 Page Giant #1 was anything more than a one-off tale eludes us. Millar has said that little remains of his original proposal for the Secret Society in the pages of Wanted, despite his explaining that the first very much led to the second project. And yet, there are clear connections between the only Secret Society story of Millar's that ever saw print and Wanted. In particular, the super-villains in Secret Society accept the Martian Manhunter's bait of a plan to join together into a great army to slaughter their right-serving costumed opponents, which is exactly how the world of Wanted ended up entirely denuded of super-heroes.

While in the first issue of "Wanted", we discover that the same strategy as J'onn J'onzz proposed to the Society has been adopted to wipe a planet free of super-heroes.

            
To the Justice League, the suggestion that the various super-villainsof their world might subsume their individual interests in a war upon the JLA is nothing but a scheme to fool the Society into gathering together in a convenient trap. Yet Wanted shows us a world in which such a design was adopted and did result in the extinction of the more benevolent super-people. Over time, the Justice League and their various allies had succeeding in convincing their various opponents that the combined likes of Superman and Batman couldn't ever be overwhelmed by force of numbers, for, as the Wizard says to Brain-Wave/Martian Manhunter when the plan to "finish these clowns once and for all" is announced; "Odds of five to one haven't made any difference to our fortunes in the past." What an irony it would be, if the obliteration of the costumed crimefighter class in the world of Wanted had been the result of a similar ruse that the super-heroes there had once arrogantly spun.

Having given the Society a plan for the extermination of the DCU's super-heroes, the JLA then proceed to terrify, mock and assault their opponents. Not, it might be suggested, the most prudent of policies.

           
We don't know the details of Millar's proposal for The Secret Society Of Super-Villains, but unless he'd suggested an Elseworld tale, there's of course no possibility that his original story could have ended with the deaths of all of the DCU's super-heroes. But it's hard not to believe that the small, and yet wholly enjoyable, 10 page story printed in 1998 isn't intimately connected to the notorious Wanted. Doing so means presuming a through-line between short feature, series pitch, and limited series, but Millar is well-known for never wasting a promising idea. In The Secret Society Of Super-Villains, the super-heroes surrender to hubris and create a united, fearful and murderously committed opponent out of a previously loosely-affiliated network of largely intimidated antagonists. In Wanted, versions of the same Justice Leaguers are defeated by a well-marshaled army of super-villains, before being mind-wiped and reduced to tortured, helpless amnesiacs. The line from the product of one publisher to that of another, from 1998 to 2003, may be an illusion created by hindsight, but it's a convincing illusion all the same.

           
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On Mark Millar's "Wanted " & "Secret Society Of Super-Villains" (Part 1 of 2)

In which the blogger continues his discussion of 10 comics to recommend even to the most Mark Millar-adverse of readers, which began here with Swamp Thing, and continued with Zuariel and Old Man Wolverine;

Chris Jones and Mark Stegbauer's rejection of comic-book realism for "The Secret Society Of Super Villains" strengthens scripter Mark Millar's purpose. For unlike the purposefully intimidating antagonists in JG. Jones' work on "Wanted", the super-villains of the 1998 tale are as endearingly odd as they're threatening, as amusing as they're disordered, which leaves the reader free by contrast to distrust the intimidatingly powerful ubermenschs of the Justice League.  (There's something of a smart nod to the first team-up of the super-people in 'Crisis On Infinite Earths" #1, pages 26-27 in the above, and that's true down even to factors such as the figures on the balconeys and the casual chit-chat among characters who're rarely seen together as the main event threatens to begin.)

            
It's a shame that the 10 page The Secret Society Of Super-Villains feature from 1998's JLA 80-page Giant won't ever, for obvious reasons, be collected together with Wanted. Because in so many ways the former reads as a prequel to Mark Millar and J. G. Jones' deliberately provocative tale of how the whipped Wesley Gibson is converted to the do-as-you-will side of the hero/villain divide. For all that it's an in-continuity, comics-code authorised, and apparently throw-away extra feature placed nearer the back than the front of the book it appears in, Millar's The Secret Society Of Super-Villains is a genuinely thought-stirring story of an Earth that's apparently falling under the control of an authoritarian superhero elite. It more than explains why the DCU's super-villains would bind together as an army to entirely eliminate their opposite numbers, and because of that, it appears to begin the story of the criminal seizure of the globe which serves as the backdrop to the events of Wanted, where such a rebellion has succeeded in wiping reality free of the very idea of the super-hero. (*1) Because of this, it's hard not to believe that the universe of Wanted and that of Secret Society are really one and the same, with the names and the faces changed just enough to save Millar from a we'll-take-your-own-eyes-too law-suit. After all, the characters in Wanted are nearly all precise analogues of DC's own trademarked-to-the-hilt properties, and much of the force of its narrative relies upon the reader recognising, for example, that it's really Superman who's been left brain-damaged and tragically abandoned in a home, and that it's truly Batman and Robin who've been shown being fed to a giant octopus. (*2)

         
*1:- Of course, Millar also tried to pitch a Secret Society of Super Villains series to DC at the turn of the millennium, and that proposal eventually became "Wanted". It's something which we'll turn to in the second part of this piece.
*2:- The date that Millar gives in "Wanted" for the extermination of the superheroes - 1986 - suggests that what we're seeing there is the fate of the pre-Crisis DCU. It's tempting to wonder whether the transformation in "Wanted" of the universe by the triumphant super-villains isn't a writerly comment on the DCU of the post-Crisis period. ("By morning, all the magic in the world had gone ...") Certainly the young Millar expressed in the UK fanzines of the late Eighties a disillusionment with the grim'n'gritty super-comics of the period. A long-shot of an idea, of course, which is why it's here, in italics, in a foot-note.) 

The success of Millar's super-heroes in dominating the ideas of their culture as well as its streets and air-lanes is shown in how even the children of their opponents play with toys of Superman and Batman, at war with Darkseid, in front of their parents.

          
The plot of The Secret Society Of Super-Villains is a transparently straight-forward one. The JLA have reformed, and the story begins with Superman announcing to the world that;

"A permanent watchtower has been erected on the moon with surveillance equipment unlike anything the world has seen for maximum global security. Your leaders have given us authorization to ... "

His sentences are loaded with words which we might more normally associate with state oppression; "surveillance", "permanent watchtower", "maximum global security", "authorization". To the less conservative mind that's experienced the consequences of the War On Terror in the wake of  9/11, the Justice League's global mandate to endlessly intrude into everyone's privacy in order to serve the greater good carries a sense of the profoundest unease. When Superman states that "The basic philosophy behind the new league is zero tolerance of all super-crime. A radical membership drive has been launched to increase (the JLA's) numbers so that Earth can be protected more effectively ..", the reader becomes immediately aware that such a policy involves the League perpetually overseeing everyone else's business at every level while endlessly expanding its own numbers. The JLA will be forever watching from their secret base high above the world in what's effectively a new nation-state existing quite independently of any Earthly power, and whose self-selecting citizens will be endlessly primed to descend on even the slightest crime which they define as unacceptable. As Per Degaton quite convincingly argues, "Democracy has just been given a death sentence. The world has a new cabal of masters now."

Part of Millar's success in partially shifting the reader's sympathy away from the Justice League lies in his decision to place apparent liberal sympathies into the mouths of super-villains who are of course anything but liberal. Yet it's entirely feasible that Per Degaton would view the power of the new Justice League in such a political sense. He's not suggesting that democracy is a system he supports, but rather expressing his belief that the human race had just lost the choice to choose which of the two classes of super-rulers it wanted to grovel to.

          
It was of course Grant Morrison's 1997 reboot of the Justice League which Millar was playing with here, and it's notable how very different the two men's take on the same situation is. As with his scripts for Wanted from five years later, Millar was constantly encouraging the reader to view events at least in part from the perspective of the catastrophically anti-social. Where Morrison consistently, and deliberately, presented the JLA as gods, as noble creatures who by their very nature occupied the ethically laudable uplands of virtue (*2), Millar encourages us to see them as the super-villains would, as fascists imposing terror rather than order upon a defenceless world. It's not just that Millar is suggesting the perspective of the likes of Deadshot and Crazy Quilt might be closer than we might expect to our own: he's also challenging Morrison's view that the Justice League could ever be regarded as an implicitly and entirely benign organisation. Until the tale's conclusion, the superheroes of the DCU are a constantly-seen presence intimidating their fearful opponents at a distance, They declare their intentions through the media while the various members of the Secret Society sit with their children, or bed down as lovers, or congregate and gossip on roof-tops beneath colourful advertising billboards declaring that "The League Is Here For You!". There is, it's being made apparent, no escape from the new pro-active Justice League Of America, and no-one to ensure that the JLA fulfill their mandate in an ethical fashion.

*2:- With the exception of The Huntress, and the occasional hissy-fit from Orion, of course.

             
There's a great deal of the totalitarian in the JLA's determination to stamp out the threat of super-human crime. When Amos Fortune is shown discussing "supervillain clearances" that have been "organised on this scale", it's impossible not to wonder about the League's means and ends. For what's being transmitted is the sense that there's a new world order which cares little for traditional notions of politics and law, and which might not care for any long-established notions of due process. Even when the League finally bursts into the narrative as actors rather than distant presences, they're shown to us as arrogant, terrifying bullies, sneering at their prey, smiling at their suffering, hammering their enemies into unconsciousness. That the Martian Manhunter had infiltrated the Society disguised as Brain Wave and entrapped the super-villains accordingly, inciting them to a murderous assault on the Watchtower before smilingly enjoying their capture, only makes the whole business feel all the more disturbing. What the Manhunter is doing there is redolent of an agent provocateur in spirit if not fact, and regardless of the fact that the super-villains are guilty of conspiracy to murder at the very least, there's a sense that the difference between right and wrong isn't anything like as clear as Grant Morrison's work in the period would have us believe.

Of course, Millar's skill here lies in how he has us sympathise with human beings who'd never care to sympathise with us, and it's that deliberate misdirection which we'll return to next time.

The world in "Wanted" after the super-villains have taken over, with all the silver age colour and magic gone.

        
To be concluded on Sunday 26th February;

The Martian Manhunter unsettlingly enjoys watching the members of the Secret Society get theirs.

  
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