Batman Loses A Robin, Dr Manhattan Slips Through Time: On The Canon & The Dark Knight Returns, Watchman, and - eventually - The Sandman (Part 4)

In which the blogger continues his discussion - begun here and here and here - of that tiny number of super-people comics books which always seem to be there or there-abouts when the "best-ever" lists are compiled;
               

              

It’s not just that love for the superhero sub-genre and that commitment to ethical debate which marks out both Watchman and The Dark Knight Returns as strangely traditional fantastical comic-books. There’s also the fact that each was designed to be perfectly welcoming and understandable even to a neophyte entirely ignorant of the business of the super-people and their hyper-conflicts. In the fact that that storytelling inclusivity was matched with a commitment to providing a complex and satisfying reading experience lies a great deal of the explanation for why both comics remain so very well regarded.

           
It’s this purposeful and nurturing maternalism, this sense of a responsibility felt towards readers from far beyond the ranks of the die-hard fanboy and his fellow travellers, which is so rarely shared by today’s creators of superhero comics. For the regrettable fact is that most of 2011's collected editions, strung together with a sequence of written-for-the-trade single issues, rarely manage to provide a reading experience comparable in satisfaction if not kind with that offered by the likes of film and the novel. Yet that's exactly what Watchman and The Dark Knight Returns offer to their readers, and that's in large part why they remain such successful ambassadors for a product which doesn't actually seem to very much want to be represented to anyone beyond the closed ranks of its own.

        

Because for all of the narrative complexities of Watchman, and for all of the innovative kineticism of The Dark Knight Returns, the qualities which first enable those books to appeal to a broader audience are the most basic of all comicbook virtues; they make clear sense, and they offer a rich, rewarding, and literate reading experience. Whether it's Messrs Moore and Gibbons showing us how the linearity of time is fracturing for Dr Manhattan, or it's Frank Miller subtly seeding without over-explaining the importance of Jason Todd to the Dark Knight's character, the stories in these oddly canonical texts are always transparently and involvingly told.  In them, the straight-forward is made interesting, the complex is clarified, while the innovative and the spectacular never obscures the progression of the story or the clarity of its meaning. To state this, of course, is to be in the position of emphasising the utterly obvious, and yet, how many comparable comics does the industry produce these days where even these basic qualities are concerned? To what degree is it commissioning and publishing work which is lucent and yet intricate, ethically informed and yet pop-culture exciting, fantastical and yet deeply concerned with far broader real-world issues than those of crossovers and shocking moments?

             

If the point of discussing the de facto canon of the fantastical comicbook is to ask ourselves why there's been so few nominees to its membership in the years since 1986, then at least something of the answer surely lies in a catastrophic refusal to engage with the primary responsibilities of storytelling in the heroic sub-genres. Sadly, today’s comics are often so deconstructed and ethically disengaged that the act of turning the page might take the same amount of time and energy as does the business of reading it. A literate consumer who's learned to expect  a considerable return from their investment of time and money in more socially-respectable mediums will most likely shrug and tune out at such empty-headed product, their prejudices concerning these silly little superhero comicbooks having apparently been confirmed. Similarly, a text knee-deep in continuity and threadbare where the logic and emotion of story is concerned is hardly likely to speak to anyone beyond the Rump. Yet the canon of Watchman and The Dark Knight Returns crosses over to each subsequent generation in the broader marketplace as well within the ranks of the committed, and it does so in part because its pages provide an experience which is meaningful, clear, intense and immediately rewarding to both the long-committed and the less-fanatical reader.

    

To compare either Watchman or The Dark Knight Returns to the vast majority of modern-era comics isn't just to be shocked by today’s lack of invention, but also by an inconceivably common absence of basic competencies too. In this, today's superhero book can be very much the worst of both worlds; unimaginative, unsatisfying, and yet so often difficult to understand too. Surely material that's so regularly crass and unambitious could at least be easy to follow, be internally consistent and sensibly thought-through?

        
Yet for all that the pages of the duopoly are easy to engage with and entertaining to experience, it’s obvious that the demands which their creators placed upon themselves while producing them were considerable and undoubtedly often exhausting. Clarity matched with content comes at a considerable price, while of course empty-hearted spectacle and an uncaring obscurity is easily achieved. To compare any single issue of Watchman or The Dark Knight Returns with so much of the everyday super-person product is to suddenly come face-to-face with a collapse of craft and ambition which makes it appear as if a new Dark Age has blighted the American comics mainstream.  Somewhere along the line, essential components of both manners and comicbook literary have been lost, and that’s as true for most of today’s limited series as it is for the monthly issues. Whatever the deadlines that creators are working under or the format which they're working to, the end result is often as banal as it's complacent and unimaginative.

    
Put frankly, the superhero comic book is no longer capable of crossing over to any significant degree because it is no longer literate or rewarding enough in its fundamental aspects. That there are exceptions to this rule is of course a given, and yet, as a rule, the lessons which ought to have been learned from the canon and the tradition which it embodies have been ignored for so long that their very existence is now nothing but some kind of heartening and yet obscure folk memory.  No matter how reviving the experience of coming across, for example, Daredevil # 4 or Gen Hope # 9 can be, the fantastical comic book is in terrible straits  For now we have comics which, rather than playing to the strengths of the medium and its sub-genres, ape more and more the conventions of film, TV and computer games, and that's true even down to the domination on the page of the usually-inappropriately placed widescreen panel.

          

In order to attempt to crossover to anything of the audience which exists beyond the comic shops, or so it appears, the industry has, by design and chance, effectively abandoned producing experiences which are both comparable in value while unique in virtue to even middle-brow books and TV. Instead, the industry has too often taken a medium and a range of storytelling options already widely associated with dumbing down, and it's dumbed them down further. Deconstruction at its least worthwhile, senseless posing money-shots, shallow and slapdash plotting, and a collapse which appears almost Baudrillardarian in the very basics of the language of graphic storytelling on the page mark what often feels to be the worst of times.

Because, of course, the best way to attract a smart and influential audience which has only ever bought into the superhero book when it was smart and rewarding is to produce more and more Rump-pleasing pap.

          

It is of course perfectly easy to imagine any of the duopoly’s creators producing the equivalent of a standard-issue modern-era superhero book in very short amount of time indeed. (A cynic might even suggest that Frank Miller himself has become a past master at producing work which is as shallow as it is difficult to perceive the point of.) Yet I wonder how many folks working on today’s be-caped properties could present a sequence of pages which even succeeded in aping the basic forms of Watchman and The Dark Knight Returns, let alone challenging those comicbook's per-eminence by adapting and innovating within those structures.

The de facto canon was established by work which reflected an ambition which was grounded in competence, a creativity which was framed by knowledge and skill, and a love of the superhero which was matched by a deliberate and passionate engagement with the social and political realities of the real world. Until today’s super-people comics can match that basic inclusiveness and those intensely-felt aspirations and that admirable level of craft, the canon’s ranks are likely to remain uncluttered by any great number of legitimate successors, or even convincing pretenders..

               

To be continued, with a look at those aspects of the canon which are very much not conservative in nature;


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