Termite (Sequential) Art: Jack Kirby's The Losers

Yeah, it's a film blog. Guess what: I like comics too.

Decades after World War II, legendary comics artist Jack Kirby -- best known as the co-creator of The Fanastic Four and The X-Men with Stan Lee - still had nightmares about it. A seemingly routine assignment to one of DC's war series in 1974 gave Kirby the forum to put those nightmares to paper and resulted in some of the most personal and powerful comics of his career. The book was Our Fighting Forces, home to The Losers, a platoon of misfit World War II soldiers created by writer Robert Kanigher in 1970 (their name would get repurposed in 2002 for an unrelated Veritgo comic which served as the source material for this year's action film of the same name).

At the time, Kirby was required under the terms of his exclusive contract to DC to write, draw, and edit fifteen pages of comics art a week, about as insane a deadline as you could possibly have (today, many extremely popular and successful comics artists struggle to draw -- and just draw -- fifteen pages a month). Most would crack under that kind of pressure; according to the introduction to the hardcover collection of Kirby's OMAC: One Man Army Corps, the pressure to keep up with Kirby was too great for his regular inker, Mike Royer, who quit to escape the endless grind. Kirby, though, channeled that stress, refracted it through his nightmares, to create one of the most urgent, anxiety-laden comics I've ever read.

The de facto mode of comics was, during Kirby's heyday, action and adventure. More than almost any artist in the medium's history, Kirby had a gift for using the language of comics -- pacing, panel size, sound effects -- to evoke excitement in the reader. But where most of Kirby's work is escapist -- and with his flair for elaborate mythologies, alien races, and grand, otherworldy vistas, it's often a literal escape -- Our Fighting Forces applies those skills to horrify readers instead of entertain them. Instead of granting us escape, it traps us in the sweaty frenzy of war. Consider this page from Kirby's best Losers story, "A Small Place in Hell," from Our Fighting Forces #152:


In the story, the Losers have wandered into a town they think the Allies have captured for a little R&R. Instead, the village is a Nazi stronghold where they're quickly surrounded and heavily outnumbered. Note the way Kirby pins that soldier to the corner of panel three with the exaggerated muzzle flash and the enormous sound effect (of his own scream), creating a sense of claustrophobia and tension. Also notice the absolute chaos of the last panel, which is choked with soldiers, and bullets. Every single centimeter of available space is covered, conveying the idea that The Losers have nowhere to run or hide.

There are a couple questionable choices -- I would love to know the thinking that went into the creation of The Losers' nemesis "Panama Fattie" -- but there are also more than half-a-dozen outstanding issues in Kirby's year-long run (now collected in a gorgeous hardcover) that reject the glamorous, consequence-free violence of most comics for the bleak realities of war. Interestingly, with the exception of one two-part storyline, there are no connections between any of Kirby's issues of Our Fighting Forces. One mission might be set in Europe, the next in the Pacific. As to how The Losers get from one place to the other, the book offers no explanation. Nightmares rarely do.

(The scan from OFF #152 is taken from this impressive analysis of the issue that is definitely worth the time of anyone looking for further reading on this subject.)

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

Turns out Wolverine's not so indestructible after all. Oh sure, he's impervious to bullets or knives or claws, but against up against foes like unsure directors and careless screenwriters, the popular X-Man is just as mortal as any other movie character. He may walk away victorious at the end of X-Men Origins: Wolverine but he's clearly lost the more important battle against listless big budget filmmaking. Like Wolverine's own mutant powers, the film devoted to his story (or more accurately his backstory) is more curse than gift.

Allegedly, the movie serves to explain just how the man known only as Logan (Hugh Jackman) arrived at the X-Men's doorstep before the franchise's first film. A brief prologue, culled from the pages of Marvel Comics' Origin series, shows him as a sickly young Canadian boy discovering his claws in the mid-nineteenth century. Another, slightly longer prologue picks up the thread as he's fighting in a series of twentieth century American wars beside his bloodthirsty brother Victor (Liev Schreiber). Yet another still longer prologue finds Logan and Victor recruited into a secret government program where they perform black ops for Colonel Stryker (Danny Huston, playing the younger version of Brian Cox's character from X2) before Wolverine quits and retreats to the Canadian wilderness where lives the quiet life of lumberjack and paper towel spokesman for six years until Styker and Victor claw their way back into his life and the film proper begins.

When it does, it is all what and no why. It's like the screenwriters went grocery shopping at the tortured hero store: bloody past, lost love, Oedipus complex, rides a motorcycle, etc. Those early sequences hope to cast Wolverine as a man tormented by the death he's seen and the pain he's caused, but trying to express that in an excessively stylized opening titles sequence is easier said than done, and the result is a lead character that looks more confused than conflicted; one moment, he's a dedicated soldier and the next, he's the voice of moral restraint. In its rush to cram as much as it can into its brief runtime, X-Men Origins often raises as many questions as it answers. What, for example, are the actual details of Wolverine's family tree? How did Logan meet his beloved girlfriend Kayla (Lynn Collins)? Why did he even pick the name Logan, since he's initially referred to as James? How did Victor a.k.a. Sabretooth transmogrify from sardonic and sleek Liev Schreiber to silent and shaggy Tyler Mane in the first X-Men? Meanwhile, most of Wolverine's actual revelations are irrelevant minutia dressed up as shocking discoveries, like the lengthy scene about how Wolverine acquired his jacket. Spoiler alert: he got it from some kindly Canadian farmers!

Despite spending most of the film's second half as a roiling cauldron of rage, Jackman's lost the charismatic spark that made his Wolverine such a fundamental component of the X-Men films' success and his own rise to stardom. Where the Wolverine from the first X-Men trilogy brooded, this Wolverine sulks; most of his badass attitude and winds up instead in Schreiber's enjoyable performance as Sabretooth. Jackman's actually upstaged a few times, with various characters like Ryan Reynolds' wisecracking mercenary Deadpool and Taylor Kitsch's playing card throwing Gambit nudging him to the edges of the frame as they vie for their own spin-offs. With so many hard-bodied dudes vying for the testosterone crown, maybe Jackman felt threatened. Then again, it's hard to play the tough guy when your character's so damn gullible – cool people don't get duped, played, gamed, and tricked as frequently as Jackman's Wolverine does in X-Men Origins. If this guy was angry in the X-Men movies about losing his memory, he's going to be really peeved when he gets it back and realizes how idiotically he used to act. And make no mistake: nothing we, the audience, learn in Wolverine has any impact on the character in the present; there's no framing story set in the modern day with Logan searching for the truth about his past. There are no stakes and nothing gained, only pointless things done and then forgotten.

Marvel Comics' produced their Origin comic book series about Wolverine in 2001 out of fear that the movies' X-Men franchise would beat them to the punch and screw it up. On the basis of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, their fears were very well founded. Director Gavin Hood, with his background in character-driven indies like the award-winning Tsotsi, may have been the right choice on paper to capture Wolverine's wounded psyche, but he doesn't draw any emotional weight out of the material and his action sequences and special effects are several steps down from the series' past highlights (Wolverine's claws looked more convincing in the first X-Men nine years ago). Spinning the ever-popular Wolverine off from the rest of the X-Men may have been a no-brainer business decision. Too bad the movie itself is a no-brainer too.

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

In their rush to praise The Incredible Hulk, the nominal sequel to - and technical reboot of - Ang Lee's widely disliked 2003 film about Marvel Comics' Jade Giant, critics and audiences seem to have overlooked one important detail: the movie is a piece of junk. Oh sure, Lee's version of the Hulk was a piece of junk too. But just because that movie was bad doesn't make the new one automatically better. It's just bad in different ways. Just because chlamydia isn't as bad as herpes doesn't make it "good," y'know? I'd rather have neither.

If you wanted a Hulk that toned down Lee's fascination with Freudian father-son interplay (and completely excised Nick Nolte's longform reenactment of his notoriously wackadoo mugshot), Louis Leterrier, whose testosterone-driven Transporter movies carry an undeniable dopey charm, would seem a good choice for director. And he certain obliges by smashing all of Lee's cinematic Hulkian mythos, although he too deviates from the original Stan Lee-Jack Kirby origin in several key ways which we'll discuss later. And he definitely amps up the action, even adding a big chase sequence involving Hulk alter ego Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) running for his life in the back alleys of Rio. But, for my taste, he dumbs the material down too far; if Lee's Hulk was a movie too brainy to be appreciated by anyone but Bruce Banner, Leterrier's Incredible Hulk is pitched right at people with Hulk-like brains: responding only to bright lights, loud noises, and the sizzle of pyrotechnics.

I'm with everyone who wanted a Hulk that delivered more of the goods in the whiz-bang action department but would it have killed Leterrier to make something out of the notion that Edward Norton's transformative episodes are classic addictive behavior beyond the cute use of an onscreen graphic that reads "Days Without Incident"? Or to flesh out the relationship between Norton's Banner and Liv Tyler's Betty Ross in a scene that doesn't involve someone looking longingly at the other's photo? Or to give us any sort of counterpoint to the idiotic military decisions made by General Thunderbolt Ross? I know we're supposed to think the guy is some sort of tactical badass, but he makes one boneheaded blunders after another. Where are this guy's superiors? The answer is: he's played by Samuel L. Jackson, who was only willing to put in one por gratis cameo this summer and he already did it in Iron Man. Much has been made of — and many have try to dismiss — Norton's disappointment with the final cut of The Incredible Hulk, and the fact that the studio ultimately cut 45 minutes out of an early version of the film that he preferred. If I was Norton, I'd be disappointed too; I suspect a lot of the stuff I wanted to see was left on the cutting room floor.

After two of these clunkers, I'm beginning to wonder if the whole Hulk-on-screen model is flawed. You cast these appealing actors as Banner — Norton, and his predecessor Eric Bana — and then you lose them for large swatches of the movie, including the big emotional climaxes, because he's completely replaced by a computer generated effect. And unlike, say, Spider-Man or Iron Man, where the loss of the actor's physical presence is compensated for by constant comments on the soundtrack which reinforce the idea that, yes, these guys we were watching without the masks are still the guys wearing them, the Hulk doesn't talk at all. In the comics, the Hulk tends to speak a lot. In both Hulk movies, he never speaks until the end. The rest of the movie he's just a whirling dervish of destruction whose motivations are kept away from the audience. We can sympathize with Spider-Man; we can delight at Tony Stark's freedom inside the Iron Man suit. And of course, both of the human beings inside can be hurt. All we can do when the Hulk goes on another one of his interchangeable rampages is savor the carnage as pure destructive spectacle. He's unstoppable and invincible (the madder he gets, the stronger he gets) so there's certainly no suspense in any of his fights. And though Lee's Hulk got a lot of flack for the computer effects, I think the ones in Leterrier's are more cartoonish, less believable in the interplay between the computer world and the real world, and certainly less involving.

Now, about that origin. In the classic comic book version, Bruce Banner is irradiated with gamma waves after saving a teenage who accidentally wandered into a bomb test field. Though Ang Lee's interpretation added some totally unrelated backstory mishegas involving Banner's crazy-ass pops , the basic structure holds: scientist saves another in an experiment gone awry and gets fried in his stead. Leterrier's reimagination of the Hulk's creation — heavily inspired, both visually and thematically, by this — removes the element of heroism and accident. Instead, Banner willingly experiments on himself. To my mind, this makes Banner a less tragic figure; instead of someone who was trying to do right and was punished for it, he was someone who was trying to do stupid and was duly rewarded for his goof. Instead of "Poor Bruce!" it's a little bit "Serves him right!"

Leterrier also throws in a few lines between Banner an Betty, or Ross and his underlings, about how Banner thought he was working to help aid victims of radiation, but the military wanted his research's military applications. This element, not really drawn from any Hulk comics I know, aligns Banner's character — who takes extreme steps to prevent anyone from coming into contact with his tainted blood — with the Tony Stark of the movie version of Iron Man, the remorseful weapons maker. That sort of makes The Incredible Hulk interesting in a meta way, by suggesting a larger thematic tapestry being interwoven between this first batch of Marvel Studios movies, but it doesn't really add anything to this text itself.

I'm a bit surprised people have reacted to this movie as favorably as they have. It is not that the movie is too low-brow; it's that it goes for low-brow and doesn't deliver the goods. Low-brow still needs excitement, emotion, and character; thrills, laughs, and real stakes in the action sequences. The Incredible Hulk has none of that. It's just a very fancy digital puppet show.

Termite (Sequential) Art: The Man With No Name #1

Yeah, it's a film blog. Guess what: I like comics too.

Written by Christos Gage
Illustrated by Wellington Dias
Lettered by Simon Bowland
Colored by Bruno Hang

The movies has never been busier poaching comics for adaptable material — in the next ten weeks there's no less than five different movies directly or indirectly inspired by graphic novels — so it's only fair for comics to do the reverse. Licensed comics have rarely branched out beyond the Lucasfilm stable of properties, or whatever is the big movie this summer: a trip this week to the local comic store could net you plenty of recent comics about Indiana Jones or Speed Racer; last year, you would have had your pick of half a dozen Transformers books. But I like what publisher Dynamite Entertainment is doing by picking out some older properties that might lend themselves to graphic storytelling. They've done books about Zorro and The Lone Ranger, Re-Animator, and even projects based on comics-friendly Sam Raimi's movies like Evil Dead and Darkman. Their newest series, The Man With No Name, based on the trio of iconic spaghetti westerns from Sergio Leone, is their most inspired choice yet as it's the most ideally suited to the comic book format. But the execution has a long way to go before it can be considered a worthy successor to Leone's work.

When you think of think of those classic Leone films, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars Movie (1965), and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966) your mind immediately fills with indellible images. Leone's camerawork is even more exciting than the gunfights in these movies: the composition, the angles, there really is nothing else quite like it. When you see a Leone movie of this period, you know from the visuals alone. A quick Google Image Search yielded a bounty of beautiful examples:






If you can tell a story in pictures, as the great comic book artists can, Leone's mythic canvas would be a great place to start from. Additionally, the way that Leone shot his action, elongating the stillness and silence before gunfights until the audience was boiling over with suspense, also seems suited to the comics page, where time can dilate as far as the artist sees fit. The Man With No Name comic, to my mind, should be filled with huge scenic vistas, speckled with tiny men, wide angle frames with lots of play between foreground and background, huge double-page spreads that would fill my eyes with a vision of the Old West, and lots of gritty, sweaty close-ups of sweaty brows and itchy trigger fingers. This would be a comic book I would love to read.

The Man With No Name book I did read earlier this week left me a bit disappointed in comparison. The writer, Christos Gage, has delivered a premise suitable for the character. It's entitled "The Good, The Bad, & The Uglier" (though it also has a totally unnecessary subtitle called "Saints and Sinners" — just pick one guys) and it is a sequel to the final film of the trilogy. The Man With No Name — who does, in fact, have a name in all three of the pictures — is on the run from the Confederacy, who want their gold back, and the Union, who don't take kindly to people who blow up their bridges. A chance encounter with a dying priest sends him off to San Antonio to defend a helpless mission. I buy the concept, and even the dialog though there is far too much of it, particularly at the very end of the book where the normally reticent The Man With No Name starts talking out loud to himself. But I'm having trouble reconciling the artwork, by Wellington Dias, with the source material. Here's an example page I pulled from comics website Newsarama (Click to enlarge):

The image is basically identical to the printed version, save for the fact that it's missing the dialogue ballons, which are minimal (two in the third panel, one very brief one in the fourth). The problem — beyond the fact that The Man With No Name looks nothing like Clint Eastwood — isn't that the art is bad, merely that it is generic and totally indistinguishable from any other action sequence in any other comic. For my taste, it's a bit too cartoony and nearly all of it exists in the bland middleground, not in the exciting extremes of perpsective where Leone staked his claim. Leone was great at making you feel the depth in his two-dimension artform; Dias, regrettably, does not share that skill and his work has a flatness that doesn't fit the material. The only portion of the book that really approaches Leone's vision is the end, where a makeshift cross in the extreme foreground marks a grave that weighs on The Man With No Name's conscience as he gallops back and forth through the background on his horse (it's still hampered by the aforementioned soliloquizing).

Again, not the worst comic I've read but one that is busting at the seems with potential that it's not reaching. And that, sometimes, can be even more frustrating than something really bad.

Termite (Sequential) Art: Secret Invasion #1

Yeah, it's a film blog. Guess what: I like comics too. Also, this post contains SPOILERS where noted.

Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Pencils by Leinil Yu
Inks by Mark Morales
Colors by Laura Martin
Letters by Chris Eliopoulos

Every year or so, it seems, the big comic book companies (that'd be DC, the guys with Superman and Batman and Marvel — our subject for this post — who have Spider-Man and the X-Men) throw one of these big hoo-hahs that changes the entire landscape of comics for a year until the next one of these ring dings comes along to right everything and then changes it once again. The latest is Secret Invasion from one of my longtime favorites, Brian Michael Bendis, in collaboration with the fine artist Leinil Yu.

The story, which Bendis has apparently been sowing the seeds for since at least 2005, centers around an alien race known as the Skrulls, who were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby all the way back in Fantastic Four #2. As Marvel concepts go, they're as old as they come; predating even the Fantastic Four's signature costumes (when they clashed with the Richards clan for the first time, the book was still more science-fiction than super-hero, and the characters still dressed in street clothes to fight evil). These green-skinned extra-terrestrials with lumpy chins have the ability to change their shape to perfectly resemble anyone or anything, from the President of the United States, to a desk lamp in the offices of Bear Stearns, making them ideally suited for stories about paranoia, which is exactly how Bendis is using them. In the past, their abilities were limited in certain ways: they could mimic someone's appearance, but not their powers, for instance. But a few months ago in one of Bendis' regular monthly series, The New Avengers, our heroes found that when the ninja assassin Electra was murdered, she transformed into back into a Skrull. Somehow this new breed of Skrull had evaded Wolverine's heightened sense and Doctor Strange's spells. Eventually, more Skrulls are revealed and the Avengers fear that a full scale invasion has begun. Worst of all, everyone and anyone they know could be a Skrull. So, who do you trust?

The idea of an enemy hiding among us, and the dangerous effects of the fear of such an enemy, is obviously one that has a lot of cultural weight nowadays (The title of the series, Secret Invasion, seems an obvious nod to the famous invasion of a certain race of interstellar body snatchers). And from the very start, Leinil Yu's art reinforces the idea of masks and hidden identities: Iron Man's full-page introduction on page 3 is a series of images that show his armor's faceplate lifting up to reveal his human face underneath. It's a beautiful and subtle encapsulation of a lot of Secret Invasion's motifs, one I hope is repeated with each issue.

The sense that you can't trust anyone on the page, even beloved, decades-old characters, is heightened by the fact that Bendis' comics, like most nowadays, do not employ thought balloons. Once a standard device used to allow readers inside a character's head, thought balloons have almost completely vanished from American comics. Now when a character wants to bring us inside the protagonist's head, he's much more likely to use some much less invasive captions. Thought balloons may strike some as a simplistic device, but there's also something quite intimate about them. And if you're hearing a character's thoughts, it's difficult for them to shield duplicitous intentions. But the hidden villains of Secret Invasion don't have to worry about such things anymore.

(NOTE: Interestingly, after eschewing thought bubbles for most of his career, Bendis revived them for his recent book Mighty Avengers, one of the series that directly led into the events of Secret Invasion. It should be fun in the coming months to go back and reread the book with this very idea in mind, to consider which characters' heads we get inside, what we think they're sharing with us and what remains hidden.)

This issue contains several more Skrull outings and after reading the issue twice I have an interesting and potentially wackadoo theory as to how to identify a few more (and thus here come the SPOILERS). Of the characters who are revealed in Secret Invasion #1 to be Skrulls, all appear at least once in the foreground of a panel, completely in shadow. These images are, without exception, completely unmotivated by the lighting in the scene. I'm talking specifically about the shot of Dum Dum Dugan on page 6, panel 2, the one of Jarvis on page 6, panel 4, the one of Sue Storm on page 31, panel 1, and the one of Hank Pym on page 39, panel 4. Here's an example of what I mean:



The character in question is the one on the left. Notice that he's completely in shadow in the top panel, yet in the next panel he's perfectly visible, even though the camera has done little more than pull back slightly to reveal a guy sitting at a computer console. There's no diegetic reason for Dugan to be completely dark there, but it could be a rather literal case of foreshadowing.

Every character who is revealed to be a Skrull gets one of these odd little moments. But, then again, several characters who aren't turned also get them as well: Wolverine on page 10, panel 1, and again on page 16 panel 5, Johnny Storm on page 31, panel 2, and the Sentry on page 34, panel 3. Does that mean these characters are Skrulls? Could this be an elaborate red herring? Either way I think small little choices like this aid in the effectiveness of the book: the invasion, after all, is based around the fear the characters now have for one another. They look for clues in the smallest of places. And basically, these odd little shadow figures had me doing the exact same thing.

We'll have to see how this shakes out in future issues. I, for one, will be reading.

Termite (Sequential) Art: Ghost Rider #20

Yeah, it's a film blog. Guess what: I like comics too.

Written by Jason Aaron
Illustrated by Roland Boschi with Dan Brown

Until a few minutes ago, I had never, in my entire life, read a good Ghost Rider comics. Not for lack of trying; I probably own at least two dozen of them, purchased every couple of years when they dust ol' Flamehead off for another go around. Every one of them stunk. Back when I first started getting into comics in my teens, Marvel had two "cool" characters: the Punisher and Ghost Rider. Punisher I get (and I've read plenty of good-to-great Punisher mags in my day) but the appeal of GR has eluded me to this day. Okay yeah, he looks super cool, he's this "spirit of vengeance" who got his powers from an effed up deal with the devil, and he's this crazed firey-headed skull dude riding a Harley through the American West, but if that's all I'm gonna get out of a book, I can glance at the cover in the store and move on. I need something more.

At one point, there was a whole line of Ghost Rider books, called "The Midnight Sons" — you had the main Ghost Rider series, then one called Spirits of Vengeance where GR teamed up with Johnny Blaze, the former (and now current once again) Ghost Rider, plus one just for Blaze. Not to mention that all these other books where Ghost Rider would pop up for 22 pages, shout something like "TASTE VENGEANCE DEMON!" and then ride off into the sunset. In particular, I remember those god-awful story called "Midnight Massacre" where Ghost Rider lost his shit and then went around killing all the other characters in his line of books, but in the last issue, a deus ex machina brought them all back to life, meaning you'd literally wasted $15 (a lot of money to a kid whose allowance was — I shit you not — one or two bucks a week).

The crazy part? That's the stuff Ghost Rider fans look back on as the good old days. That should tell you something about how the character's been treated over the last decade or so, and that doesn't even touch on the debacle that is Nicolas Cage getting his Wicker Man on all over their beloved character. In his most recent incarnation, Johnny Blaze became Ghost Rider again (probably because that's the version Cage played in the film adaptation) and then, just recently, a writer dropped a bombshell: the character hadn't, as has always been the tale, sold his soul to the devil. Rather, Mr. Blaze's condition was all the result of the machinations of some "rogue angel" and Ghost Rider, is, in fact, an angel of vengeance.

Sounds like a pretty noxious idea to me but that's why they pay Jason Aaron to write the book; his first issue is #20 and it's this poor guy's job to pick up the pieces and make something interesting out of this whole new status quo. Somehow he did it.

The secret, I think, has nothing to do the way he's writing Ghost Rider, and everything to do with writing Johnny Blaze. When I was kid, the humans in Ghost Rider were all bland, generic protagonists. They were supposed to be tortured, I guess, saddled with this hellish burden, but as written they just sounded like whiners. Not Aaron's Blaze: this dude sounds like a badass biker who's PISSED OFF about the fact that his head catches on fire anytime shit starts to go wrong around him. Issue #20 opens with Blaze confessing to a priest as a means to try to get a message to heaven: he doesn't know how, but he's coming up there to settle the score. And when he gets there it ain't gonna be pretty. The dude's basically Howard Beale by way of Sonny Barger. If that doesn't sound like a pretty amazing subject for a story, well I can't do nothing for you.

There's a lot of groundwork laid here — you gotta pave the road before you can drive your hellcycle across it I guess — but I love the world Aaron's building. He hints that the "angels" in heaven may be even nastier than the demons in hell, and he creates this whole crazy cult of Nurse Ratchets with shotguns who are doing their bidding. In short, it's a nasty little world with horrible people in it: the only sort of place, in other words, where a guy on a bike fueled by hellfire might be considered something of a hero. And I kinda get this guy now: he's the guy who sees the "Caution! Hazardous Road Ahead!" sign on the side of the road and hits the gas. Because he just doesn't give a shit.

The art by Roland Boschi isn't phenomenal; his scratchy style isn't really to my taste and he seems to be allergic to drawing anyone with a neck, but his storytelling is fine and his layouts work with Aaron's script. The whole book moves; sometimes a comic that read quick annoys me because I'm paying $3 I should at least get a few minutes of enjoyment out of it. This one flows nicely, and it picks up steam as it hits the big action sequence in the hospital with the psychobitch nurses and the creepazoid cliffhanger.

It's just a great read and look, it got me all pumped up. About friggin' Ghost Rider. This is what a good art does. It excites you. It makes you want to share it. It makes you want to get on your computer at 12:30 AM on a Saturday morning when you could be writing something for money, or playing Super Mario Galaxy or (heaven forbid) sleeping to tell people how freaking good it is. So here I am. Telling it.

Termite (Sequential) Art: Spider-Man: One More Day

Yeah, it's a film blog. Guess what: I like comics too.

Written by J. Michael Straczynski and Joe Quesada
Illustrated by Joe Quesada with Danny Miki

The greatest villainy in all of comics, the fiendish "illusion of change" strikes again, and this time it's erasing some twenty-odd years of continuity. In one misguided, poorly written, and downright upsetting storyline, all those decades of stories, including many of my personal favorites, have vanished as if they never happened in the first place. The reason seems clear, at least to me: in the eyes of some, Spider-Man was getting a bit too manly.

Editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, Joe Quesada has, for years, argued that a married Spider-Man/Peter Parker (as the character has been since the late 1980s, when he wedded longtime girlfriend Mary Jane Watson) is less viable than a single Spider-Man/Peter Parker. A while back, Quesada helped launch the "Ultimate" line of comics, stripped-down versions of popular Marvel properties with streamlined continuity with no ties to the regular Marvel Universe. In other words, while the Amazing Spider-Man could remain married to Mary Jane the Ultimate Spider-Man was a high school teen dating Mary Jane (and other girls) for the first time. For readers like myself, it was a superb arrangement. The books were different but both, thanks to writers J. Michael Straczynski and Brian Michael Bendis, respectively, were good reads. One would have thought this an ideal compromise, particularly because it doubles the amount of money the company can get out of a rube like me.

The situation probably could have gone on forever were it not for one Sam Raimi and his remarkably successful and popular films about your friendly neighborhood wallcrawler. Suddenly the Spider-Man most familiar to people isn't the one gracing the monthly pages of Marvel Comics; it's the one gracing the biannual silver screens of multiplexes around the world. And that Spider-Man isn't married, has never been married. Now, in addition to whatever personal preference Quesada might have held, there was a clear commercial imperative for a breakup: the move alligns the world of the comics with the world of the films. At the end of One More Day, the story that tells the end of Peter and Mary Jane's marriage, Spider-Man's world has literally been transformed all around him, into one that looks remarkably like the one Raimi presented onscreen. In the final scene of Part 4, for example, Aunt May's house in Queens looks exactly like the one from the first two films, right down to the stairwell just behind the kitchen table. That sort of synergy has got to be good for business. From that perspective, the move makes a whole lot of sense.

From a story perspective, not so much. The concept Quesada and Straczynski cooked up to break the two apart is truly a bizarre one. It spins out of Marvel's recent Civil War series, where a new law required all super-heroes to surrender their identity to the federal government. Peter Parker revealed his secret on national television, but later decided to rebel against the so-called Super-Hero Registration Act, turning him and his family into fugitives. While on the run from both friends and enemies, a sniper aiming for Peter accidentally shoots Aunt May instead. In One More Day, Peter learns that Aunt May's injuries are fatal and there is nothing medical science can do for her. Feeling responsible for her impending death (just as he still feels responsible for his Uncle Ben's death years earlier), he seeks supernatural assistance and eventually encounters Mephisto, the Marvel Comics version of Satan. He offers Peter a choice: Aunt May's life for his marriage to Mary Jane. After a couple of pages of half-hearted hand-wringing the deal is done, the history of the world is rewritten and now it is as if Peter and MJ were never hitched at all (and as if Peter had never told Aunt May he was Spider-Man, and so on).

What might be most galling in this entire sordid affair is the fact that this storyline was pitched to readers as a grand send-off to Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5 and the regular monthly writer of Amazing Spider-Man since 2000. After years of stories so dreadful even I, hardcore Spidey fan that I am, stopped reading the series, Straczynski gave the book a renewed sense of purpose and its central character a clear, expressive voice. Most importantly, he was willing (some might say too willing) to push Peter Parker in new directions. He eliminated most of Peter's time at the Daily Bugle, where he'd spent decades as a freelance photographer and set him up as a science teacher at his alma mater, Midtown High School. He pushed the character through an otherworldly metamorphosis (in a storyline called "The Other") giving him enhanced powers. Most significantly, he finally revealed Peter's secret identity to his Aunt May (this was prior to the series of events where he ripped off his mask in front of the entire world). As part of the bargain with Mephisto, all of these changes were wiped away, as if they'd never happened in the first place.

For better or worse — and, without question, Straczynski's run, particularly in the last couple years, had some lackluster moments — Straczynski's Spider-Man was one that ventured into new territory and explored new avenues. The status quo established at the end of One More Day by Quesada and his new writers is a deliberate return to the past. Even ignoring the troubling moral implications of having your company's most popular super-hero make a literal deal with the devil, the story establishes a new continuity that is not only old-fashioned, it completely erases the accomplishments of a particularly progressive writer. What kind of happy send off is that? The final page of Amazing Spider-Man #545 is stacked with quotes from J.M.S.' peers, celebrating his achievements on the book. This is the proverbial gold watch; he's barely out the door and they've already made it so he never even existed.

The obvious disconnect between the editorial intent and the writer's was made unusually clear during a rather candid message board post written recently by Straczynski in response to widespread displeasure with One More Day. He'd actually asked to have his name removed from this so-called "tribute":

"...there's a lot that I don't agree with, and I made this very clear to everybody within shouting distance at Marvel, especially [Quesada]. I'll be honest: there was a point where I made the decision, and told [Quesada], that I was going to take my name off the last two issues of the One Mre Day arc. Eventually [Quesada] talked me out of that decision because at the end of the day, I don't want to sabotage [Quesada] or Marvel, and I have a lot of respect for both of those."

Quesada responded by insisting that Straczynski knew full well what sort of story he was getting hired to write, and that they disagreed only in the particulars and not in the execution. He also explains that a lot of their differences grew out of the fact that much of One More Day's ending had to be rewritten to reflect the new Spider-Man books that were already being produced months before the series actually finished; to change the conclusion now would mean to scrap months of already completed work. Once again, it's a decision that makes perfect business sense and terrible story sense.


But then narrative corners were cut anywhere Quesada (and, yes, Straczynski) could. One More Day is a four issue story in which the first full issue (cover price $3.99) is little more than a well-illustrated prologue. According to the title ("One More Day"), this is a story about what someone does with the love of their life when they have only one more day to spend with each other. Straczynski and Quesada's space management is so bad, and the execution so poorly botched, that we don't actually get to see what Peter and Mary Jane would do with the day. Even if you resigned yourself to the story's outcome; heck, even if you wanted to see it because you agreed with Quesada's rationale, you couldn't even savor that last day the title promised because it wasn't in the book.

Now Amazing Spider-Man takes off in a new — or rather old, but made to look contemporary — direction with a host of new writers (the series will now appear three times a month, replacing the prior format where Amazing was joined by sister series Sensational and Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man). They will attempt to pick up the pieces and move on. These stories may be good. But if fan reaction remains as negative as mine (and if you do a Google search for "Spider-Man" "One More Day" and "sucks" you'll see what I mean) the comics franchise could be in long-term trouble. This shameless deus ex machina wiped away decades of stories in a single stroke, but the creators following it may find the damage caused in its wake a bit harder to erase.

The Dark Knight Returns: A Second Look at Batman: The Animated Series

For those who remember the Batman cartoon from the 1990s as an entertaining childhood diversion, it is time to look again. Batman: The Animated Series airs nightly on ToonDisney (at 7:30 PM, check your local listings) and I can promise if you have any affection at all for the character or for good television you won't be disappointed.

I've caught around 30 episodes the past couple weeks and would classify just two of the bunch as "bad" or not worth watching. The rest vary from diverting (as in the jaunty "Prophecy of Doom" about a phony baloney prophet who cons Bruce Wayne's rich friends) to poetic ("Appointment in Crime Alley" about Batman's annual remembrance of his fallen parents) to the flat-out brilliant ("The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy," a beautiful little thriller about a criminal trying to steal Batman's cape and cowl, has a devilishly clever denouement). Nearly all the episodes I've watched — even some of the more uneven ones — are way better than the vast majority of Batman comics I've ever read (excluding a couple of classics, like these). I think that's reflected in the fact that in the wake of the show's critical, commercial, and artistic success the DC comics were reshaped to reflect the reality of the series (such as adding characters like Harley Quinn, the Joker's deranged girlfriend and sidekick, who was invented specifically for television and then transplated in nearly-identical form to the printed page).

There's a lot of cultural origins to this work, and the stuff that comes from comic books often seems more indebted more to EC horror than the Dark Knight; like "The Clock King" which transforms the origin of a silly old villain whose gimmick stems from his love of time pieces (on the other Batman TV show, Walter Slezak played him with much personal panache but little menace) into a miniature morality tale. Temple Fugate (approximately the Latin phrase 'time flies') is a efficient businessman obsessed with punctuality, convinced by a stranger he meets on a train to relax a little bit. So Fugate does, and promptly muffs a court case and loses everything. A few years later, he swears revenge on the stranger who he blames for all his troubles; in the interim the man's become the mayor of Gotham City and Fugate uses his knowledge of schedules to sabotage his reelection campaign.

Batman: The Animated Series is well-respected for its strikingly atmospheric visuals and gritty action sequences, both unique to an animated cartoon supposedly geared toward children. And though the series operates from a uniform style, it's easy to spot flourishes and personal touches from the Batman's signature directors, particularly in wide variety of representations of old Bats himself. Frank Paur's Batman, with his even-squarer-than-usual jaw and a flurry of low angles, looks like something dreamed up by Alex Toth. Kevin Altieri's looks more like a ninja; he wears his cape as a cloak draped over his shoulders, helping him to blend in with the shadows of the city. Some of the directors even have clear thematic specialties: Boyd Kirkland's episodes almost always involve some sort of obsession with the past, from "Beware the Gray Ghost" about a team-up between Batman and Bruce Wayne's childhood idol to "It's Never Too Late" about a crime boss wracked by the guilt of a bad decision from decades before, to "Nothing to Fear," which introduces the Scarecrow to the show and gives us Batman confronting his greatest fear, disappointing his dead father. Even better Batman responds to his vengeful dad's accusations by howling "No! I am vengeance! I am the night! I...AM...BATMAN!" Hell yeah you are dude.

My one gripe: freaking Toon Disney stopped airing episodes in order after the three dozen shows I saw and went back and started showing the same ones over again, even there's some sixty episodes left in the full run. Guess I'd better turn to Netflix, or set my DVR for Superman: The Animates Series, also airing nightly on ToonDisney and from many of the same very talented creators.

Termite (Sequential) Art: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier

Yeah, it's a film blog. Guess what: I like comics too.

Written by Alan Moore
Illustrated by Kevin O'Neill

I just finished Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's long-awaited third volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen entitled, simply Black Dossier, and I've yet to come down from the giddy high. The story, which isn't really all that important on the pages that address it at all, involves a man and a woman in 1950s England searching for the titular files, which contain the secret history of the League that Moore and O'Neill chronicled in volumes one and two , but really Moore and O'Neill are more interested in taking readers on a kaleidoscopic (and, eventually, stereoscopic) journey through literary history from their own unique perspective.

The previous Leagues were more straightforward adventure stories; Black Dossier's pulp (which is an extensive chase through a post-Orwellian society featuring significant references to Fleming and Greene) is interwoven with lengthy excerpts from the various materials in the Dossier itself, which allows for a more leisurely exploration of mysticism and pornography and the arts, ideas that Moore has also explored elsewhere. Basically, when the characters take a break from the action to sit down with the Dossier, we do as well. These redacted items include a lost, unfinished work by Shakespeare concerning Prospero (a character longtime League readers know played a role in the formation of an earlier incarnation of the team) and an excerpt from a "beatnik" novel by Sal Paradyse, protagonist of Keroac's On the Road. If the narrative seemed like anything more than a cheeky clothesline here, you could say the Dossier portions interrupt its flow. But I imagine Moore sees it much the opposite way.

This project finally arrives over a year after its initial release date and you can see where all the time went; this is a scrupulously designed book, from the cover (which matches the cover of the Black Dossier in the hand of one of the characters on the dust jacket of Black Dossier) to the different stocks and even sizes of paper of the various sections of "reprinted" materials, to the flat-out bitchin' 3-D segments that conclude the narrative with a hallucinogenic bang (the book comes packaged with its own incredibly stylish red-and-green spectacles) and include some of the niftiest effects of this kind I've ever seen. I think a lot of trade paperbacks and especially original graphic novels are overpriced; you definitely get your money's worth here.

There's so much more that could and should be discussed, but it probably needs to come from a savvier reader than myself (Moore's references in League comics are so vast and intricate that there are even published books of annotations). Still, one of Moore's central achievements with the series remains its remarkable accessibility even in the face of almost cover-to-cover cross-cultural references; even in this, the weirdest and densest book yet, it's far from a League of esoteric gentlemen. And for all of the author's past uses of prose within the structure of a comic book, he's never integrated the two as seamlessly or as successfully (not to mention as fascinatingly) as here.

There's also something uniquely fun (and very Alan Moore) about centering an entire story about a series of documents so dangerous they must never be read and then actually letting the reader dive into the text in its entirety — not just excerpts or glimpses but the full, unabridged passages. Just about any other author would probably give us the equivalent of the shots of Jules and Vincent looking in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, because prevailing wisdom states the audience's imagination will always be more vivid than the author's. Thankfully, that is still not the case when it comes to Alan Moore.

Termite (Sequential) Art: The Flash #231

Yeah, it's a film blog. Guess what: I like comics too.

Written by Mark Waid
Illustrated by Daniel Acuna

Comic book writer Mark Waid has an uncanny knack for turning me onto characters I'd previously had no interest in or desire to read about. Waid has a legendarily encyclopedic knowledge of comic book continuity, but he applies it to his work in a way that is inviting rather than restrictive. You don't need to know as much as he does about, say, Captain America to enjoy his ludicrously good run on the book in the mid-'90s. On the contrary, he is, in some ways, the perfect writer for a neophyte reader because he brings the character to you: Waid knows what works about a concept and what is unnecessary, and he can mine those back issues for ideas that were always clever, but never properly exploited. His run on Flash in the mid-90s made a big impact on the way I looked at comics back then, opening my eyes to the idea that rather than following artists I liked or characters I thought were cool, I should really be reading stuff based on who was writing it.

This may sound incredibly obvious but cut me some slack: I was 14 and, at the time, the "cool" comics were the ones by the appropriately-named Image Comics, whose business model at the time hinged on the fact that if Jim Lee or Todd MacFarlane drew a book it didn't matter if a semi-illiterate homeless person wrote it, because nobody would care. For a good long while they were right, too.

Mark Waid was one of the first comic writers who, purely through the quality of their work and the size of their talent, taught me to see through that Image stuff. His run on The Flash was terrifically entertaining but, with the exception of his first artistic collaborator on the book, the phenomenal (and now, sadly, late) Mike Wieringo, poorly drawn. The Flash wasn't particularly fun to look at it, but it was fun to read, an important distinction as well as a good lesson to learn for a 14-year-old weened on cross-hatching.

Anyway, Waid had a long and very successful run on The Flash, before he meandered through some rough stories about one too many alternate reality Flashes (The Flash of the future! The Flash of a world gone mad! The Flash of a universe populated solely by former game show contestants!) He left the book in the hands of the capable Geoff Johns, who also contributed some very good stories before he, too, ran out of ideas. But when Johns left the book, DC killed this version of the Flash (Wally West) and replaced him with a new one (Bart Allen, a younger and, I suppose, "hipper" speedster). The fact that just one year later, DC scuttled the new Flash and brought back the old one — along with Waid back behind the word processor — tells you all you need to know about how creatively and financially successful that dunderheaded decision was.

But Waid and Wally are back and it looks like the time away has done them both good. Waid has reinvigorated the book with a fresh take on his old subject: Wally is now a husband and father dealing with a frustrated wife and two precocious and incredibly powerful rugrats. Though comics' audience have grown older and older the characters have remained, in most cases, completely static, both physically and emotionally. Waid's new twist on The Flash will hopefully give him the chance to use the language of super-hero comics to talk to his older audience about previously verboten subjects. His first issue jabs at diaper changing and home schooling are certainly steps in the right direction.

This first new issue from Waid hints at the uncharted areas the writer will explore and it also signals Daniel Acuna as one of the most talented young artists around. Just look at the work on the expressions in that big panel to the right. His style is airy, his designs are stylish and hip, and if the credits in the book are to be believed he's also his own inker and colorist which means he's also responsible for all the computer effects used to augment the depictions of The Flash's speed.

The cover reads "The Beginning" but it's really more of a return to form, for the writer (who, admittedly, has also been tearing it up lately on the new team-up seriesThe Brave and the Bold) as well as for the book. A dozen years ago, Mark Waid taught me that The Flash and smart writers were cool. Today, he's reminded me why.

Read the IFC News Comic!

I thought I posted this but I guess not. This year as part of our coverage of San Diego Comic-Con, we created our own mini-comic and filmed the process of making it for this year's Comic-Con Chronicles, our yearly half-hour special about SDCC.

The special is just about finished and will start screening later this week and run all this month on IFC (I will post links and showtimes once they're available). But in the meantime you can read the entire comic for free online. Click this link, and scroll down to the little comic version of yours truly and click it to get a pop up window to read the story of me trying to interview Spider-Man and Evil Dead director Sam Raimi. The art, by the way, is by my good buddy Robin Enrico.

And, in case you are curious, the story of the comic continued at this year's Con. Raimi was at this year's con with his latest project 30 Days of Night — but you have to watch the show to find out whether or not we were able to track him down and give him a copy.

IFC at Comic-Con 2007!

Hey guys, I am writing you live from the floor of San Diego Comic-Con. Go to IFC.com and watch our webcam from the floor. When I'm around I'll wave hello!

Also you can read our IFC comic there as well. Written by yours truly and drawn by my good buddy Robin Enrico.

Gotta run, the geekiness awaits.

Odds and Ends

-Recommended reading for comics fans: a discussion between Douglas Wolk and Timothy Callahan about "bad readers" and "bad creators" in comics, with regards to the new issue of Marvel's New Avengers. Wolk is basically the best comic book critic around — accessible, witty, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the medium — and Callahan, who I wasn't familiar with before, is clearly no slouch either. This may be total gibberish to anyone whose not interested in super-hero comics and its criticism, but to those who are (like myself) it's quite exciting stuff indeed. I just bought Wolk's brand-new book, Reading Comics as well — that's gonna be the centerpiece of my beach reading on my vacation this summer. Can't wait.

-One addendum to last week's IFC News Podcast (you can always subscribe on iTunes too, y'know). Alison Willmore and I discussed some trailers: the idea was with Cloverfield getting all this hooplah, it'd be a good time to look at some other trailers and see how well they sell their respective films. Upon going back and listening to the podcast, I think it's one of our very best in terms of entertainment value, but I'm a little upset about one thing: we spent 25 minutes talking about trailers but didn't list a single one we actually liked when in fact there were several we really enjoyed while doing the research for that podcast. My personal favorite was for a film I wasn't familiar with before, but now very much want to see (and isn't that the purpose of a trailer), a law thriller called Michael Clayton. You can watch the trailer here.

-This brings me back.

Termite (Sequential) Art: 52 1-52

Yeah it's a film blog. Guess what: I like comics too.

Another major super-hero saga, another opportunity to sound like a broken record. I recently wrote at length about Marvel's latest attempt at relevancy and smarts amidst the tights and capes, Civil War. Though I admired the project's ambition, I was deeply unsatisfied by the execution, and I find myself in the exact same position as I'm about to discuss their competition's latest big'un, DC Comics' 52.

52 spun directly out of the events of DC's last major crossover, Infinite Crisis, another book I've written about. Essentially, Infinite Crisis was a conscious return to some sort of old-school comic book style: after years of increasingly dark behavior, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman realized the errors of their ways, and reteamed to overcome a threat that looked and sounded a great deal like the legions of nerds who read their serialized adventures. Immediately after Infinite Crisis, all of DC's regular monthly comic books instigated something called "One Year Later," whereby all stories jumped ahead 12 months in the characters lives. All of a sudden there was a new Aquaman, a new Flash, a new Wonder Woman, all without explanation. The "OYL" stunt allowed DC to shake up some stale titles while maximizing their visibility in the wake of the very commercially successful Infinite Crisis.

But what to make of that missing year of continuity? Enter 52, a 52-part, weekly serialized novel, written by four different writers working in collaboration (Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, and Mark Waid) with a host of artists (led by Keith Giffen). Using several underutilized but potential-laden DC characters (a mysterious detective named The Question, a grief-stricken super-hero named The Elongated Man, a Superman colleague named Steel, Captain Marvel's complex nemesis Black Adam, and a foolish hero for hire named Booster Gold), they would tour the universe of DC Comics, show what significant events happened in the missing year to explain the radical changes, and fully delineate exactly what changes Infinite Crisis made to the company's overarching mythology.

Before going on, let me first pause to celebrate what a remarkable logistical achievement 52 was. There have been weekly comics in the past (Will Eisner's classic Spirit insert, for example) and DC itself tried the format about twenty years ago when it converted its flagship title, Action Comics to a weekly for a short-lived experiment. But at a time when an increasing number of monthly books seem incapable of meeting their shipping dates, when some books have even taken the drastic measure of interrupting or even dropping incompleted stories from titles so that new creative teams can keep the book coming out while slower writers and artists spin their wheels, 52, a standard length comic book, came out on time, every Wednesday for 52 straight weeks. I, and many others, assumed when the project was announced that it would crash and burn. To all its creators' credit, it never did, even when the book's editor jumped ship to go work at Marvel about 2/3rds of the way through the year. That alone deserves a delicious Kudos granola bar.

The book was also an unmitigated financial success. 52 hooked readers early and never let go. According to the sales numbers on Publishers Weekly's The Beat. 52 settled into a very healthy 100,000 copies sold per week. 100K is roughly the equivalent in the comics world of a $100 million movie, i.e. a numberical benchmark for a blockbuster. But remember that even the bestselling title typically only sells 100,000 copies a month and 52 did that each week. If you go to the link to The Beat — and if you're at all interested in this topic, you should — you'll see that most comics are in a perpetual state of declining sales, a big reason why they're constant throwing new innovations like costumes and puffed up phoney baloney deaths at the reader to spike interest and sales. But 52 bucked that trend too.

Sadly, 52's creative accomplishments are a bit murkier. As I mentioned, 52's original stated purpose was to explore the missing year in DC continuity. It barely did; in fact, with a couple months left in 52, DC rushed into production a 4-issue miniseries called World War III designed to help explain all of the OYL changes that should have been addressed in 52 but weren't. In addition, as 52 progressed and began to take on a life of its own, it developed more unsolved mysteries than a mid-90s anthology series hosted by Robert Stack; after all, to keep readers coming back every week they needed an awful lot of cliffhangers. The writers piled mystery atop mystery, but their questions began to outpace their answers. Threads were picked up and dropped, ideas were floated and forgotten, characters were introduced and ignored. After week 44, comics scholar Douglas Wolk, who examined 52 weekly and in real time in impressive fashion on his blog 52 Pickup, assembled a list of 100 questions that 52 had posed and hadn't answered. The final handfull of books covered some of them, but probably no more than a third.

As the quartet of writers juggled more and more threads, the strain began to show, particularly in the pacing department. Steel's storyline, about an evil plot by Lex Luthor to give everyone in the world super-powers, including Steel's rebellious niece, dragged on with little forward progress for weeks and weeks; same for The Question's slow death via lung cancer; same for an additional storyline about a trio of heroes stranded in deep space after the events of Infinite Crisis. Meanwhile, the best storyline, The Elongated Man's, was severely truncated and wound down more than two months before 52's end. A lot of issues are only as good as the characters' chosen to feature in them.

The writers have made no bones about the fact that they were essentially commissioned to write one book, and ended up handing in another, owing to the fact that they were writing it on the fly. This is not an unprecedented publishing paradigm; novels were commonly serialized in the past, and at least according to one Dizzy, Tom Wolfe wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities in this way, every two weeks in Rolling Stone, "and you can see how certain things that seem like they'll figure big in the story fade out as he figures out what his focus should be." That sounds awfully 52-like to me.

Equally important was the relative mediocrity of 52's art. In an age when some of the most accomplished draftsmen in the industry can't complete 22 pages a month, it's would have been too much to expect any artist, or any two artists, to handle this book's workload. 52 employed a veritable army of artists, all operating from breakdowns (basically storyboards for comics) drawn by Keith Giffen. Giffen's presence kept a relatively uniform product, but McDonald's has a uniform product, and that's not fine cuisine. A few issues stood out when talented artists were brought on board for special issues — like Week 42's Elongated Man story pencilled by the Darick Robertson. The rest were notable only for their mediocrity.

In a lot of ways, 52 is the anti-Civil War. Where Civil War was plagued by scheduling delays that pushed back not only the main series, but the myriad monthly Marvel series that were affected by it, 52 came out on time every Wednesday as advertised. And where Civil War strove to be modern (invoking the War on Terror age debate of freedom versus security, willfully ignoring past bits of continuity or characterization), 52 specifically invoked the past by focusing on forgotten characters like Doc Magnus or Egg Fu (you know you want to hear more about a character named Egg freakin' Fu!!) who haven't been popular in decades if at all. Other than a few bits of mild profanity (a sprinkling of hells and asses, nothing worse than you'd get on primetime television at 8:00 PM) and some violent deaths, 52 could fit in with a lot of the decades old books that provided a lot of its inspiration. If Civil War was timely, what does that make 52? Old-fashioned? Classical? Timeless?

That's sort of a funny way of putting things, since 52 is so much about the nature of time itself. The title, which pops up in numerous clever references throughout the run refers to a lot more than just the weeks in a year, or the number of issues in the series. That, too, was a satisfying aspect of the book's conclusion; or, rather, it would have been if DC hadn't already spoiled it just that a few months ago in editor Dan DiDio's weekly back matter column. 52 is filled with missteps and bungles like that, but you want to forgive stuff like that because of the way the book accomplished its simple yet audacious goal: to just come out on time every week for a year. Of course, DC is giving its core audience no time to relax; tomorrow a brand new year-long weekly series begins. It's called Countdown. What an appropriate title. Readers are probably checking their watches against their wallets to see how long they can be satisfied by cleverness and timeliness. At a certain point you need a bit more substance too.

Slightly More Termite (Sequential) Art: The "Death" Of Captain America

From the partner-in-crime:

The Death of Captain America is on the front page of the NY Times website right now. I need your sage commentary on the significance of this.

I would have loved to write a whole addendum to my original post on this, but this hasn't been the week to do it, I'm just too busy. But briefly...

First of all: either the American news media are total idiots or Wednesday was the slowest news day in the history of the free press. Listen very closely:

Captain America is not dead.

He looks dead. He sounds dead. He probably smells dead. But he is alive. Or he will be. I've got the over/under on his return at eighteen months right now, and I'm feeling very generous. Disco is dead. Captain America is just taking a little nap.

Now, if this sort of event hadn't happened before, you couldn't fault the media for reporting it. It sounds, however superficially, kind of interesting. Captain America, one of the few true patriotic symbols our country has in literary form, dies. Big deal, right? People would probably want to know about this. That makes it sort of news. Fair enough.

But don't these people remember November of 1992, when Superman was "killed" and every newspaper and 24-hour newschannel got up in arms and freaked out? People were legitimately surprised by that, and had a right to, he was freaking Superman for crying out loud. And DC really sold the hell out of that thing, and in the comic itself it seemed pretty conclusive. Superman got his ass just straight-up beat.

He was alive and well less than ten months later, basically the same dude, only now he had a mullet. So his fashion sense died, but Superman did not.

Unfortunately, whatever character it is is irrelevant. It happens all the time. No one in comics stays dead. No one. It was a big deal when Marvel Comics killed Jean Grey a.k.a. The Phoenix, in the pages of 1980's Uncanny X-Men #137, sacrificing herself so that the power that was consuming her wouldn't cause anyone else any harm.

She stayed dead until 1986, when she was discovered by the Avengers in a cocoon at the bottom of the ocean in Avengers #263. Turned out she'd never died at all, an alien had taken her place. She's actually dead right now though, for real, and has been for about two years, but, again, probably not for too much longer.

Her compatriot Colossus died a few years back, and the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, Joe Quesada, PROMISED he was dead and staying dead. He had this whole editorial edict: if you're dead, you're dead. Period.

Colossus is currently appearing monthly in Astonishing X-Men.

The DC Comics hero Green Arrow, a character with no super-powers other than really good aim, was blown up by a bomb, died. He was atomized. Poof.

Still, he found a way to come back to life — it involved demons and heaven and some help from his buddy Hal Jordan, who used to be Green Lantern, then died, became another hero called The Spectre, then came back to life and is now Green Lantern again.

In the entire history of super-hero comics, three prominent characters have stayed dead: Bucky (Cap's old teen sidekick from WWII, who died at the end of WWII saving Cap and the world from a deadly rocket), the second Robin, Jason Todd (Killed by a bomb planted by the Joker), and Uncle Ben, the guy whose death inspires Peter Parker to become Spider-Man.

And guess what: in the last two years, two of the three (Bucky and Jason Todd) came back to life, and the third one sort of did too (someone who looks like Uncle Ben is currently running around the pages of the surprisingly decent Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man).

You don't even have to be a hero. Peter Parker's beloved Aunt May died in a very emotional issue of Amazing Spider-Man. Aunt May was just an old lady; really she was frailer than an orphan in a Dickens novel.

And even SHE came back to life! And she just got shot AGAIN! Or dear...I hope she'll pull through! Eek!

I sound really mad, but I'm not. It just cracks me up. Death means nothing in comics. Nothing. Death is like the coffee break room of comics; head in there, smoke a butt, drink a Coke, take a load off for a half hour, and then boom you're back on the clock. Captain America will be back. Sooner than you think.

Oh wait, I just read Civil War: The Initiative #1, released the same week as Captain America#25, the book where Cap bites it. Here's some dialogue (all bolds are theirs):

Spider-Woman: Captain America is dead. Now tell me again what you're doing.
Ms. Marvel: He's not.
Spider-Woman: What?
Ms. Marvel: He's not.
Spider-Woman: You're lying.
Ms. Marvel: He's tucked away safe on the Raft. No one knows. No one. They're trying to save his life even as we speak.

Repeating our top story: CAPTAIN AMERICA IS NOT DEAD. We now return you to our regularly scheduled movie nerd talk.

Termite (Sequential) Art: Civil War 1-7

Yeah it's a film blog. Guess what: I like comics too.

I had the incredible opporunity to write extensively and, I hope, intelligently, about Infinite Crisis, last year's company wide crossover from DC Comics, for The Village Voice. IC, by Geoff Johns, Phil Jimenez and a host of supporting creators, wasn't a particularly entertaining comic, but it was, at least, infinitely fascinating in the ways in which it addressed, dismissed, and validated comics' notoriously vocal audience. Would that things were different there, I'd like to think I'd have gotten a second opportunity to pull a similar trick with Marvel's just completed, even less entertaining, even more fascinating version, entitled Civil War. But hey, this is why God (a.k.a. R. Emmet Sweeney) created Termite Art. To serve as a place to write about crap that others wouldn't pay us to write about.

Civil War, a seven issue mini-series that spun off into companion issues in just about every in-continuity comic Marvel publishes, concerns a battle, as much ideological as physical, between the Marvel Universe's super-heroes. After an accident involving the super-hero group The New Warriors (basically a bunch of young, ill-trained novices) leads to the deaths of hundreds of innocent people, the United States passes a law decreeing that all super-powered individuals must reveal their secret identities, register with the government and become licensed agents of the state. Some welcome the idea as a natural evolution of the super-hero's role in society: this group is ultimately led by Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man (a billionaire playboy industrialist who didn't have a bat handy to inspire him to fight crime, so he built a high-tech suit of armor instead). Others see the Registration Act as an infringement on civil liberties, refuse to conform to it, and head underground to fight it, thus becoming fugitives from the law who must be hunted down and captured. This faction is led by Captain America, a biogenetically engineered perfects soldier from World War II, frozen in ice for decades (whatever, it's a comic) and thawed out in our times.

The idea is sort of a comic book lover's wet dream, in that it takes the notion of super-heroes as seriously as its fans do and it addresses, in ways that were rarely addressed before some very fine books in the last several years, what life would really be like in a universe populated by beings powerful enough to melt steel just by looking at it. Since its explosive growth in popularity during the 1960s (thanks to the creative contributions of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others), Marvel has prided itself on being the comic books that take places in "the real world." DC's Batman lives in Gotham City; Marvel's Spider-Man lives in New York City. DC's Superman protects the underprivileged in Suicide Slum; Marvel's Daredevil watches the rooftops of Hell's Kitchen. Generally this is more a marketing tool than a reality borne out by content; for all the bluster, the Marvel Universe has plenty of its own made-up crap that has no basis in our world, not the least of which is the dude's in red and blue tights flitting about the Manhattan skyline on lines of adhesive string.

Civil War was a legitimate stab at a story with direct correllations to contemporary American society. It weighed issues of privacy versus security, personal freedoms versus mass protections. The series' tagline — "Whose side are you on?" — suggested Marvel brass hoped to instigate a full-on political debate, and, for a few moments at least (most of them before the first issues were released), the inter-web's comic book message boards were abuzz with actual dialogue about rights and ideas, rather than things like "Dude, Spider-Man's costume is LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME!"

Then it all went horribly, horribly wrong. Like NFL SuperPro wrong.

Rather than portraying both sides equally, writer Mark Millar weighted the deck in the favor of Captain America's forces while basically portraying Iron Man's crew as a bunch of facist thugs with the morals of ill-bred Nazi hookers. When Cap's buddies refuse to register with the government, Iron Man's cronies enlist psychopathic super-villains who are willing to cooperate with the government in exchange for pardons including such upstanding citizens as Venom (vengeful alien symbiote currently in the possession of Mac Gargan, formerly The Scorpion, so it's like two douchebags for the price of one) and Bullseye (Favorite hobbies: murdering Daredevil's girlfriends in brutal, ironic ways, canasta). When they capture fugitives, they skip over the whole "fair trial" thing and send them directly to a super-prison in "The Negative Zone" (a desolate, empty anti-matter universe where no life grows. Sort of like North Dakota.). They invent a clone-slash-cyborg of their dead god-chum Thor, who promptly goes on a brutal killing spree and murders Cap ally Goliath (big dude with can grow real big with his big pills) and then Iron Man's bros don't even give him the dignity of shrinking him down for a proper burial, they just dig up like a football field and bury him as is.

Now if Civil War was intended to make Iron Man and his followers look like a bunch of Big Brother-loving tools, this would be totally appropriate. But, remember, the stated purpose was to provoke a political debate: this isn't the Green Goblin taking on Captain America, this is Iron Man! Scratch that; Iron Man starts working with Green Goblin, who becomes the leader of the Thunderbolts, the team of "reformed" villains that includes Bullseye and Venom and other mighty warriors like Radioactive Man (self-explanatory) and the Swordsman (He will cut you! Stab!). Pretty quickly everyone noticed the imbalance and the fact that Iron Man and formerly sane heroes like Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four had turned uncharacteristically dickish. Soon the only people claiming they were pro-registration were guys who worked for Marvel desperate to convince the audience that they hadn't already screwed this up.

Then they screwed it up worse. Rather than building to some sort of ideological battle, the seventh issue of Civil War climaxed with a big-ass imbroglio in the middle of New York City which looked cool and solved nothing. Captain America gets the edge on Iron Man but before he can kill him or beat him up real bad or whatever, a bunch of people, each with a different 9/11-invoking uniform (Firefighters, cops, EMTs, etc.), tackle him to save their beloved Iron Man. Suddenly, Cap realizes how wrong he's been; surveying the destruction the fight's caused he surrenders, and, tears in his eyes, admits he was wrong. "We're not fighting for the people anymore...we're just fighting."

Of course, a month earlier, in Civil War tie in Amazing Spider-Man 537, Cap pulled Spider-Man aside and gave a stirring speech about patriotism, inspired by something he'd read by Mark Twain, that totally contradicts everything he was about to do (storywise) a few hours later. And his basic rationale for surrender — that the people wanted the super-heroes to register and so that's what they should do — is a disturbingly small-minded and borderline bigoted one. Rounding up a bunch of people and sticking them in the army or prison because other people want them to? Consider if Marvel tried to publish a book that showed the denizens of the Marvel universe terrified of mutants and demanded they register themselves and go into forced military camps and portrayed the regular citizens as the heroes and the mutants as the villains. They'd get hammered! In fact, Marvel's probably printed that exact story dozens of times with its X-Men characters with the reverse moral. Mutant is just a Marvelism for a minority — what if instead of 'mutant' I used a real minority? What if the citizens of the Marvel universe wanted all Muslims to register? Or Jews? Or people with pituitary gigantism? What's the difference?

SIDE NOTE: I find it interesting that the X-Men characters barely appeared in Civil War, claiming "neutrality." This, I suspect, means the creators couldn't think of a justification for them to join Iron Man's side and couldn't write their way out of the corner putting them on Cap's side would have created.

Captain America has always served as something of a moral compass and he's lost his way before; in the 1970s, following a very interesting storyline that borrowed heavily from the Watergate affair (I love when things in real life sound like comic book stories), he quit his gig as Captain America and became Steve Rogers: Nomad, tooling around the country trying to find himself. So it's not that the guy should be infalliable, but that he should be a bit tougher than how he's portrayed in Civil War 7, where a couple of angry people and a bunch of broken buildings shatter his self-confidence. He's Captain America for crying out loud.

The idea for Civil War belongs to Millar, and he deserves all the credit in the world for inventing what is easily the most promising concept for an epic super-hero comic in years. But his execution exposed his flaws as a writer. All his best previous work was in books like The Authority (a twisted version of the Justice League of America) and The Ultimates (a twisted version of the Avengers). He's very good at using analogues of existing heroes to tweak their conventions and their flaws. Here he's forced to use the real characters and none of them sound right. He can critique the classics, but he can't seem to convincingly write them himself. Comic fans are always complaining that they know more about the characters than their writers; that so-and-so "would never do that" or "would never act that way" and typically this is sour grapes. Perversely, most comic fans are most happy when they have something to complain about. But in this case they were totally right: Millar uses the characters to his own ends and doesn't particularly concern himself with how his interpretations jive with conventional ones, or even the ones presented in the characters own current books; thus writers of the Civil War tie-in books often present wildly different takes on the characters — Captain America's best speech in all of Civil War was that one that appeared in Amazing Spider-Man, not within the series itself.

For a window into a big reason why so much of the great-sounding but poorly-executed Civil War is exactly that, I recommend you check out a series of interviews with CW editor Tom Brevoort about the book. The questions come from fans and they are often literate and thoughtful, but Brevoort's answers are often dismissive and defensive, particularly when readers point out significant flaws in the book. When people complain about inconsistencies between Civil War and the myriad tie-in books they were convinced they needed to own, Brevoort explains that sometimes things change in the planning, or that it's a matter of perspective, or he sees no inconsistency. In one instance, he prints a portion of the script for a scene that was cut from the series to clear up confusion, which is sort of like claiming to people who pay to see your movie that it'll make a lot more sense if you just buy the DVD too and then watch the deleted scenes. My favorite bit comes when Brevoort explains how the spin-off one-shot The Return, a widely despised three dollar magazine that features the totally unnecessarily, mostly illogical, and hugely unsatisfying return of the long-dead character Captain Marvel and sets up a payoff of an appearance in Civil War proper that consists of exactly one (1) panel, was conceived in a day. He boasts at the incredible speed that Marvel made the comic; seemingly unaware that the obvious reason the book was so crummy was the fact that it was apparently conceived and approved in less than a day and nobody took the time to think its self-evident flaws through!

It seems that Marvel bit off a bit more than it could chew: logistically and ideologically. I want people to respect comics more than anybody, and I wanted to hold up Civil War as a glossy, card-stocked example of what happens when smart people use these disreputable ideas to tell a good story about relevant issues. The result was a well-drawn mess.