I Know Nothing

1.

I don't know why, but I do still want to do it. Though it's just about the very last thing that anybody needs, I keep wishing that I wrote a weekly review column about the latest comic book releases.

Nothing too epic, of course. A few thousand words at most. I'd grab two or three comics from the racks when they're fresh out of those Diamond boxes and then, of an evening, take a few hours and a couple of hundred words and puzzle some sense out for myself from all of what's happening this week.

Not exactly "First thought, best thought.", but as close to the principle of spontaneity as I'm ever likely to get.

It sounds like fun, if your definition of "fun" can stretch to the idea of writing a weekly comic book review column.

2.

(a) I didn't drive all those miles to "Abstract Sprocket", Norwich's own very fine comic shop, because I was thinking of writing some reviews.
(b) The Earth orbits around the sun.

One of the above is incorrect. Can you tell which one it is?

3.

I thought I was doing quite well in keeping up with things. But leafing through after-the-fact collected editions bound together months beyond their initial publication, and reading them in isolation from the monthly competition faced by each individual issue in the peace of our quiet front room, says nothing about the frenzied evolutionary pond-fight that a wall of new comics constitutes. The it's-all-over-now trade paperback no more gives the sense of the throat-slicing and grappling for position that's each week's new comics than the distant roar of a crowd at Lord's explains the nature of the drama of a last-day Ashes Test.

There's so many superhero books and they're all shouting at one another at the same time as they're shouting at their prospective readers.

"Me! Me! I've got the end of the world! I've got it twice! Superheroes are dying by the dozen in me!"

Muscles, costumes, grimace and pose!

I paid for a handful of what I was kindly assured were last week's bestsellers and tried not to stagger as I trod the seven steps to outside, where the sunlit summer street felt as relaxing on the eyes as a pitch black bedroom to the badly hungovered.

4.

Safe at home, I took the "Fantastic Four" 582, Avengers 4, and Batman 702, and, laying each a safe distance from the obviously combustible others, set out to discover how I might review them in the unlikely event of a column being what I really wanted to do.

It was, shall I say, something of an intense experience.

Time travel! Time travel within time travel! Multiple character incarnations! Alternative realities and mass continuity implants! More time travel! Iron Man stabbing Iron Man! Dr Doom killing Reed Richard's dad to save Reed Richard's dad! Batman shooting himself in the head, falling through time, and becoming an amnesiac wall-painting caveman! Techno-babble, a reference to a Bill Mantlo Marvel Team-Up, and a permanent sense of intense foreboding only interrupted by the arrival of absolute disaster!

So much intensity, and so little of pacing and quiet, and I'm struggling to breathe let alone comprehend what's going on. How confused, for example, could that "Batman" possibly leave me, how little beyond the fact of continuity shenanigans in "Fantastic Four" could I grasp? Where were the reversals of mood and the second and third plot strands in "Avengers"?

Martian Tripods, dead Gods and endless reality revisions! Same as it ever was, but exceedingly and excessively and explicitly more so! All the time, even more, and shouting too!

5.

In the winter of 1977, my imposing and surreptitiously benevolent art teacher Mr Brettingham took me aside and asked me, "What is this Punk Rock, Smith?".

I didn't have the common sense to be flattered that he'd chosen to ask me, but I was immodest enough to pontificate about faux-nihilism and the charge of extreme volume to him.

Mr Brettingham, I realise now, had probably reached the point where the speed of cultural change had exceeded his will to engage with it. His curiosity could now be sated by 5 minutes of Bill Grundy fighting with the Sex Pistols on the TV and the idiot babbling of a half-wit art student.

Yet he'd undoubtedly been something of a radical in his day, and he still carried the telling if subtle markers of a determination not to entirely compromise with bourgeois sensibilities. His white hair, for example, revealed the faint tint of blue and scarlet dye when illuminated from behind by the sun. He obviously had another life, and, beyond the odd and regrettable schoolboy gags cracked way behind his back, I think many of us rather respected him for that.

But the noise, and the fuss, of what he called "popular" music was certainly not invigorating or informing to him beyond a passing curiosity, and he felt no need to maintain the mental sprint necessary to stay in front of the endless "one damn thing after another".

6.

I'd quite lost track of how comics have for a very long time existed simultaneously in two quite distinct forms in the market-place. On the one hand, of course, they're the contents of the to-be-considered-at-leisure collections, and on the other, they're the atomised individual issues that live or die for one key week every month in what's literally mortal combat with their fellows on the comic book shop's shelves.

Scream too quietly, kill too sedately, explode too few full moons and there's 60 other books and more screaming louder, killing more intensely, and exploding entire galaxies with all the full-in-your-face-with-a-cape intensity that their creators can distill in their backstreet comic-book-crack laboratories.

Everybody knows this, of course, and I did too. But I wasn't conscious of it.

I was thinking of comics as literature, which of course they are, to a greater or lesser degree, but I was missing that fact that they're also and equally these ever-evolving weapons of economic warfare in a constantly-shrinking and strangely specialised market-place.

Look out! Incoming!

7.

It's as if we bought Hollywood blockbuster films by the five-minute segment, and consumed them according to how intensely attention-grabbing and lid-retractingly spectacular each of those five minutes were.

And if that were so, and even more so than the movies' excesses of today, those films would be nothing but 9-D glasses, blinding and gory combat, and constant if improbable sex. There wouldn't even be those slim seconds-long moments of breath-gathering contemplation that punctuate that scene of giant brawling robots from this one anymore.

Full-on, all the time, for all of your life.

8.

But I do want to understand each one damn thing and the another that follows. And no matter how fond of the memory of my old art teacher I am, I can't relish the prospect of my collaring some whippersnapper and asking of him; "This metatextual predominance within the modern superhero epic; do you not find it somewhat repetitive and alienating?"

9.

I. It is of course quite impossible to fully recall the shock of the new, but I wanted to try. I thought that if I could show myself that even the very best of the comic books of the past, oh, 25 years were similarly careless of the casual reader's needs and saturated in their own form of spectacularism, then I'd know that the problem was mine and not that of today's monthly market-leaders. For if I was willing to put up with confusion and indulgence in the likes of "Sandman", "Watchmen" and even "Kingdom Come", then I surely ought to be open to doing so with "Avengers" # 4 and "Batman" # 702?

And I even did my best to fix the argument by beginning with "Brief Lives", one of those stretches of "Sandman" which I'd skipped lazily through when it was published and never returned to since. I picked chapter 7 to read again, of which I could recall not a single panel, and of which I presumed that the progression of the plot would've long overtaken Mr Gaiman's desire to constantly recap events for new readers. (I assumed that chapter 7 of a very long story is probably well past the point where a writer believes that new readers are likely to appear and need to be accommodated.)

Of course, "Sandman" wasn't ever a superhero book, so I wasn't comparing like with like, but it did carry with it a famously complex and self-referential narrative, and it would surely prove, I thought to myself, as confusing as first reading as anything today. And if Neil Gaiman can be knocked for obscurity and indulgence, then today's books in a far more popularist genre could hardly be blamed for doing so either.


II. But I was quite wrong. The script for Sandman 47 may have been primarily concerned with furthering a very long story, but it was so carefully and skillfully constructed that it functioned both a stand-alone episode and as a chapter for a then-coming collected edition. Within the first few pages, following a teaser involving a splendidly scornful talking dog, the prospective new reader has been provided with all the necessary details of who's who, what they want and how they intend to get it. And it's all achieved without info-dumps, but through subtly informing dialogue masked by engaging characterisation.

Nor is that one single chapter of a very long story concerned with, or padded out by, spectacle. There are no gratuitous and story-slowing full-page spreads, not even of the Sandman looking moody with a stormy sky behind him and a billowing cloak rendered with great fetishistic detail. Lesser creators than Mr Gaiman and Ms Thompson might have turned Destiny's garden into a moody two-page indulgence, for example, but here it's shown only as an informing backdrop to the action. And the "action" itself isn't any constant blur of movement and threats, but the product of skillfully placed enigmas and endearing personalities placed in conflict with themselves if not each other.

This was, as millions might have told me, a comic book which could and did serve perfectly as both stand-alone comic book and as a perfectly-integrated chapter of a collected edition.

10.

But the Sandman isn't a superhero comic, and, no doubt it's unfair to not compare like with like. And so I reached for Mark Waid and Alex Ross's "Kingdom Come", an acknowledged milestone of the genre and one unlikely, one would presume, to be so very different from its kin on the shelves today.

And there's certainly aspects of "Kingdom Come" which seem of a kind with many of the superhero stories of 2010. It's a unremittingly, though purposefully, grim and glum tale, with little attempt to vary the emotional tone from scene to scene. And there's no escaping from the fact that much of the book's appeal lies in those great obsessional and lingering shots of familiar-but-stranged-up superheroes and stage-sets, such as the super-villain gulag, the full page shot of which adds nothing to the content of the story or the progression of the plot which a single-panel establishing shot couldn't.

But the story itself is quite superbly transparent. I'd be shocked if even an ill-meaning reader determined to be confused by it could generate any bafflement at all. The script is scrupulously careful to make sure that every single scene is explained in terms of itself as well as related not just to the tale's wider plot, but to its themes too. And if the device of using old Norman McCay as an omnipresent narrator can grate at times with portentous dialogue and the repetition of his despair and frustration, he's an endearing character in himself. Indeed, the tale itself makes perfect sense despite its own complexity and the challenges of distraction posed by the marvelously dense and continuity-obsessed artwork.

11.

And there's no confusion at all for even the neophyte reader where the penultimate book of "Watchmen" is concerned either. Just as with Mr Gaiman, Mr Moore spends his first few pages delivering the key information for any latecomers to "Watchman" with a kind diligence. "Who are these folks, in and out of the snow?", "Where are they?" and "What are their goals?" are all precisely nailed in just three pages. Indeed, from the perspective of a shocking can-it-really-be-twenty-five years after the tale's publication, what's remarkable is not the much-discussed complexity of the story, but rather how carefully the story's been deliberately structured to leave no reader behind. (A long-future generation possessing nothing but chapter 11 could quite effectively re-create the bones of previous issues from Veidt's speeches alone.) And if the few disconcerting panels of "The Black Freighter" placed later in the tale might puzzle a completely new reader, then everything else is so well-explained and so well-worked that "Watchmen" can almost read more like a textbook discussion of how to construct a comic book than, in places, a comic book itself. It certainly does seem to utterly demolish the argument that complex stories can't be recapped in elegant and productive ways without recourse to the oh-too-familiar flashback or the gratuitous info-dump.

Neither does "Watchmen" bear any sign of the collapse of the superhero narrative into a sequence of pin-ups, poses and grand stage-sets. Where spectacle does enter the tale, it's absolutely subservient to the plot, as in the scenes acted out in Veidt's Antarctic lair, where every aspect of design and execution tells us more about the story rather than slowing it for a money-shot or two. (The painting of Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot, for example, may seem at first to be telling us of Adrian's opulence, but it's swiftly obvious that it's been lightly buried in the sub-text to also warn us of some drastic and destructive action approaching.)

In fact, there's something shocking on this reading about how little relation today's frontline mainstream books bear to "Watchman". Hailed by nearly all and sundry as the masterpiece of the superhero genre, there's actually a clearer line of descent from Lee and Kirby's work than there is from the more recent "Watchmen" of Moore and Gibbons. Of course, Lee and Kirby wrote and drew a good deal more comics books, but even so, wouldn't we expect such a constantly-proclaimed classic as "Watchman" to have lent more of its form and content to the very genre it appeared to define, and in doing so, once fleetingly seemed to threaten to extinguish?

12.

So, at least where those three much admired comic book milestones are concerned, the past is very different from today when the issues of clarity and visual self-indulgence are concerned. My hypothesis, so unethically designed to give me encouragement to engage with the new, by establishing that it's no more challenging than the past, is patently refuted. For good or ill, the long years since the publication of "Watchmen" have seen a regrettable transformation in attitudes to comprehensibility and artistic discipline where the single issues of longer story-arcs are concerned.

Or at least, that might be what's happened. But perhaps, for example, other chapters of "Sandman" might find Mr Gaiman and his co-conspirators gratifying themselves in great crescendos of wasteful and shallow pages. I simply don't recall. And perhaps every week's new deliveries don't bring with them a tsunami of paint-blisteringly lurid superhero epics. (*3) I couldn't swear one way or another. And maybe I'll re-read this week's comics again after a day's breathing space and find they're not so challenging after all.

But I can't say, because I don't know. Yet.

All of which might, by accident and certainly not design, be one way of answering my own question right at the beginning of this blog, though you have my word that no such easy symmetry was imagined before I started writing this. Perhaps the point of a regular review column is that it wouldn't give a blogger time to be reflective, to fall back into well-considered paradigms in order to explain the inconsistencies of this and the mysteries of that. In fact, perhaps reviews might not be a good way of grappling with each fresh wave of new books and making sense of them at all. Instead, a review might be a good way of reminding the blogger even more forcibly that he knows nothing, and that he needs to think alot harder and dig alot deeper before opening his mouth or engaging his typing finger.


*3:- I've certainly reviewed quieter comics by Mr Bendis, and more comprehensible ones by Mr Morrison, and you can find those mostly favourable reviews in the archive.

I have no idea why it seemed a good thing to post a piece about how I failed to make sense of the very things I started out trying to make sense of. But in the end, it felt like a healthy thing to do, to post a blog where the blogger owns up to hitting several brick walls and failing to come to any kind of conclusion. I hope it was worth your while, and to those who did and those who didn't persevere, a personal and warm "huzzah!" is echoing out from the Splendid Wife's Central Command Bunker at this very moment.

Next, and soon; the conclusion to the Crisis/Onslaught/Ultimatum piece!


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