An Auspicious Debut in the Penny Press!

It’s an opening that would sit more comfortably at one of our estimable sister-blogs like PopWired or Pink is the New Blog, but nevertheless, it must be stated up front: actor James Franco (whom some of you might remember as the world’s bitchiest Green Goblin, or the world’s mumbliest Tristan, or the world’s least animated American WWI fighter ace, or as Robert DeNiro’s most hysterical co-star, but who is, nonetheless, a better thespian than you give him credit) is a nice guy. This is worth mentioning because a) he’s very handsome, and that can stop young men from bothering to be nice even if they remain obscure bank employees in Carol Stream their whole lives, b) he’s famous, which is a state notoriously lethal towards any kind of genuine niceness. Franco has avoided the pitfalls of nature and nurture and remained the nice guy I suspect he’s always been.

Which isn’t to say he walks on water; he can be filthy, and he does his requisite time as a partygoing lounge lizard, and more endemically, he routinely tries on and discards all the usual ridiculous rags of reinvention intellectually curious young men have always wasted time on throughout the ages – in this he’s no different than Alcibiades was at his age. Young actors are particularly vulnerable to this chameleon phase, and it’s never helped – or shortened – by having an excess of money.

That chameleon phase has lately prompted Franco to make some idiosyncratic movie-role choices, and, in a move that’s flatly baffled the Entertainment Tonight crowd, it motivated him to go back to school (his fellow actor Martin Sheen – with whom he has more in common than he’s so far allowed himself to see – did the same thing). Not to pursue acting, but to write fiction. And the fact that he’s famous – coupled with the fact that he’s not only nice but largely perceived to be friendly – creates a blurring cloud of preset reactions among those who will be the critics of that fiction: either they’ll like it because Franco’s a star, or they’ll like it regardless and be called sycophants, or they’ll hate it because he’s a star, or they’ll hate it regardless and be called jealous. It can make you feel sorry for the guy: he’s got to be wondering if this stuff he’s sweated and labored and cared over creating can get a fair hearing anywhere.

And it’s not just a question of venue, it’s a question of timing. His world-debut short story “Just Before the Black,” comes out this week in Esquire, which arrives in subscribers’ mailboxes at the same time as the 22 March issue of the New Yorker.



This would ordinarily be just another coincidence of publishing – after all, no matter when it arrives, it’s going to overlap with an issue of the New Yorker. But the 22 March issue of the New Yorker is one of those rare issues I’ve mentioned here in which every single thing goes right, in which the dreams of countless editors and sub-editors and fact-checkers and subscribers for the last hundred years all fulfill simultaneously. The New Yorker has been called the greatest magazine in the history of the world, and in issues like this one, it’s actually true.

Nobody makes a misstep, in the whole length of the thing, and we’re forced to realize that, like them or not, these writers are giants – and they’re creating an almost spooky synergy by working together right at this time. Showboating main editors come and go – several of these writers have worked for several of those editors – but quality like this is, or ought to be, eternal.



There’s the moodily evocative cover by Jorge Colombo; there’s Hendrik Hertzberg writing about nuclear power (“Converting mass to energy by atomic fission in order to achieve temperatures normally found only on the surface of stars like the sun and then using that extraterrestrial heat to boil water – well, it smacks of (to borrow a term from the nuclear dark side) overkill”); there’s an essay – doesn’t really matter on what – by the already-legendary John McPhee; there’s a piece by Jeffrey Toobin, the greatest living chronicler of America’s highest court, this time profiling Justice Stevens (“He’ll say something like ‘This is probably obvious, but I have this one question. Could you help me with this one point?’ An experienced advocate knows that you have to be on your guard, because he’s probably found the one issue that puts your case on the line”); there’s a hilarious, wonkily paranoid cartoon by Roz Chast; there’s a masterful theatre review by Hilton Als; there’s an exhibit review of the weird German artist Otto Dix by one of the greatest working art critics alive today, Peter Schjeldahl (“To truly appreciate Otto Dix, the most shocking major artist, against stiff competition, of Weimer Germany, it may help to loathe him a little … By disliking Dix, you may balance a sense that he dislikes you, too.”); there’s a great overview of the recent ‘unofficial orchestral Olympics’ recently held at Carnegie Hall, all in the mad pursuit of a nonsensical ranking as #1:

Not long ago, the British magazine Gramophone asked music critics to rate the world’s orchestras, and when the results were published there were whoops in some places and laments in others. The burghers of Amsterdam took quiet pride in the fact that the Concertgebouw placed first; their rivals in Berlin and Vienna fumed at being second and third; and Philadelphians were scandalized to find their honey-toned group nowhere in the top twenty. (I participated in the poll, but I am not about to reveal my list, for fear of being detained by the Austrian or Pennsylvanian police).

There’s even stuffy old David Denby, turning in his usual rock-solid dissection of some new movie starring one of his weird bête noirs, the cinematic non-event known as Ben Stiller (like a critical version of Stiller’s grandmother, Denby keeps urging the star, in review after review, to be more Jewish).



And perhaps best of all, perhaps the most tell-tale signal of the strength of this particular issue, is the luminously, almost sloppily brilliant short story by Junot Diaz, who in this kind of company we’re forced to consider as one of our finest living practitioners of fiction. The short story in this issue, “The Pura Principle,” is a wonderful return to form for Diaz, an utterly unsentimental account of a young man dying of leukemia and the predatory girlfriend he marries during a recuperative stay at his mother’s place. The prose is a marvel of sure control and funny as hell – an exciting experience utterly unlike the usual New Yorker angst fest.

So its appearance is great news for readers, but perhaps a bit bittersweet for Franco, because his own debut short story in Esquire is very, very good and would look dominating if it weren’t appearing in the same week as one of our greatest writers at the top of his game.

That’s just unlucky timing, though, and it can’t be held against “Just Before the Black,” which is, on the surface, noticeably Junot-esque: depressed, distracted, down-market characters talking lingo and getting wasted and bullshitting as they aimlessly wander through their lives. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this type of fiction – and it’s lucky there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, because it seems hard-wired to be the kind of fiction attractive young men write first, before they start writing the far more individual stuff that will be their literary mark on the world (before they even know if they can write that stuff). Booth Tarkington, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Richard Farina, Ernest Hemingway … the list is a long one (for all I know, Alcibiades belongs on it), and again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It’s a legitimate enough sub-genre, and only very, very few writers can successfully mine it for longer than the one book, although many try. Nothing becomes derivative faster than simulated anomie and the reason for this is simple: there’s a waiting line a mile long behind every such author. It hardly seems like Bret Easton Ellis has time to sprout a single gray temple-hair before Nick McDonell is elbowing him out of Disaffection Central, and that’s as it should be.

Franco’s story (the whole forthcoming collection from Scribner’s unless I’m much mistaken) is firmly in this mode: two young guys, Michael and Joe, are just hanging out doing nothing at night. Michael is the narrator, and his almost inarticulate dissatisfaction with his life suffuses the whole story almost to the choking point (“I am friends with a slug,” he thinks, “and my other friends are pigs and wolves. I never make friends with nice things. Just the shit”). The portrait of Michael is alarmingly accurate of a certain type of aimless young man who wonders if he even feels anything. His reverie while driving is one many such men have had (indeed, it’s one not-so-young men have had and perhaps shared with the poor saps trapped in the car with them):

I love driving down an empty dark freeway, lit up intermittently by the lights at the side of the road, and when I see the lights, I think of all the little worlds out there, all the little animals living in their habitats out there, and how we could pull over and have an adventure at any one of those forgotten pockets of the world, just nothing zones, backwash refuse property in the wake of the great freeways, and I like passing all of them, racing down the freeway, like a tunnel into the night…

Eventually, Michael and Joe end up getting high with their dealer friend Hector, and in the drifting conversation that follows, Michael introduces into a series of hypotheticals the one hypothetical most young men couldn’t get high enough in their lives to introduce, and it stops both Joe and Hector, and it cracks open a light of revelation on Michael, and the whole of it is accomplished with a sure, caring hand. There’s some very good imagery here, and a palpable sense of longing to change.

Naturally, it’s tempting to read this story and ascribe something of that longing to Franco himself, but the story – and its companion pieces in the upcoming book – is not a psychological hypothetical, it’s a fact. And it’s not some air-thin Hollywood vanity project, as young male movies stars are unfortunately prone to perform (the hollow efforts of Ethan Hawke, the twee little curiosities of Crispin Glover, the shudder-inducing poetry of Craig Sheffer, etc.). Don’t get me wrong: Franco’s celebrity status no doubt made some aspects of this whole process undeservedly easier (getting your first story published in Esquire, for instance), but those things don’t define the end product – readers would have to take a story like “Just Before the Black” seriously no matter who wrote it.

So congratulations are in order for our new young author! A fine inaugural effort, and I, for one, am hoping there’s lots more to come.

kingdom come!

It's been over a year since I last sang the praises of DC's Kingdom Come, and in that year, three things have happened that marginally justify my singing its praises again:

1. Batman: Dark Knight did boffo business at the box office and caused a tsunami of geek-gasms all over the known world, and it accomplished these things mainly by being smart, stylish, largely faithful to its comics inspiration, and most of all not exceedingly dumb. That, plus the surprise success of Iron Man (and the lesser but still entirely respectable success of The Incredible Hulk) and the ongoing blossoming of sci-fi on TV and cable, has further eroded the ages-old preconception of comics (and graphic novels) as inherently trite, unworthy reading material fit only for pimply prom-rejects and mouth-breathing virgins. Put simply, more people are willing to read a graphic novel in 2008 than were willing to do so in 2007.

2. The basic premise of Kingdom Come, a dystopian world on the brink of dark and sucking chaos, has never looked more similar to our own world than now, with international terrorism and violence matched recently by the burgeoning collapse of the world economy. In Kingdom Come, virtuous everyman preacher Norman McCay sees visions of a looming apocalypse, the fate of the world teetering on the outcome of a fateful battle between good and evil. In the real world, a presidential election is about to be held that increasingly seems to represent exactly that scenario, and in that battle between good and evil, to quote Dr. "Bones" McCoy, "Evil usually wins ... unless good is very, very careful."

and 3. It has a cool new cover! Alex Ross found an extra fifteen minutes, whipped up a nifty fold-out cover showing our heroes gathered around their conference table (with the villains neatly caught in the reflection), and pocketed what was no doubt a much-needed $50,000. Surely a new cover is sufficient grounds to praise this book again, especially since it'll be a while (or maybe never) before DC brings out any kind of paperback version of the deluxe hardcover I praised back in 2007.

And the cover might be new, but everything inside is just as wonderful and stirring as ever: the whip-crack pacing, the great treatment of our iconic core cast, and even the book's dedication to Christopher Reeve, which brings an even greater lump to the throat when you realize he was alive when the dedication was first made. I can only hope he read enough of the book itself to be proud of the dedication (it goes without saying he would have instinctively pictured himself in the movie-role of the older, more jaded Superman ... as it is, who knows who we'll see in the movie that, after Dark Knight, is sure to be made someday?), and I can likewise hope all of you who haven't yet read this book (ahem ...) will take this totally spurious opportunity to do so. You won't be sorry.

Absolute Kingdom Come

Our book today is the ‘Absolute’ edition of DC Comics’ graphic novel ‘Kingdom Come.’ The four issues of the mini-series by writer Mark Waid and artist Alex Ross have been collected in a great big deluxe slip-cased hardcover, complete with oversized pages, superb color transfers, and nearly a hundred pages of ‘extras’ bringing up the rear. It’s like having a playground pressed between two covers.

The nicest thing about “Kingdom Come,” at least in terms of explaining it to non comic book fans, is that most of its main characters are familiar to them anyway. Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, and the Joker - everybody knows at least something about these characters - they’ve been somewhere in the American subconscious for the better part of the 20th century: you don’t need to know anything about comics to get at least a vague lay of the land from those names.

And those names more or less form the supporting plot of “Kingdom Come”: the Joker walks into the Daily Planet and slaughters everyone inside, including Lois Lane. A grief-stricken but law-abiding Superman lets the courts take their course - until a new super-powered character confronts the Joker on the courtroom steps and shoots him down. Superman, demoralized, retreats from the world, and the rest of the super-hero community goes to hell in a handbasket. The other heroes mostly balkanize, and ten years later the next generation of super-beings, punks with godlike powers, are conducting their internecine warfare anywhere they please, regardless of the civilian population. That civilian population is represented by our everyman touchstone, preacher Norman McKay, who’s granted visual access to past, present, and future by the supernatural Spectre.

A weathered Superman (Ross paints him with the face of a Manhattan beat cop and the body of a Midwestern football coach) returns to this harried world with his sense of right and wrong firmly in place and therefore wildly out of fashion. What he has on his side is the fact that, well, he’s Superman, and in the last ten years he may have been disillusioned, but he was also getting stronger the whole time. When he returns to the world, the super-powered punks he confronts, with their morphing bodies and their explosive weapons, get brushed aside like cobwebs.

This is the age-old revenge storyline Waid taps into and so expertly retells, and it’s as old as Homer’s Odyssey: that there’s a scattered and outcast older generation easily more powerful and resourceful than the callow new generation that replaced them (for what it’s worth, that same premise is what makes “Star Trek III - The Search for Spock” such endlessly rewatchable fun). Superman returns, and his return sparks the return of many other titans of old, who set about imposing a new world order on the prevalent crop of lawless super-riffraff.

This is good stuff, and it makes for a fun chapter to watch the old titans - Hawkman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and most of all of course Wonder Woman (statuesque, ageless, and very, very angry) and Batman (unmasked, crippled, and exoskeletoned) - follow Superman out of retirement and begin to change the world.

A great deal happens as a result, and we here at Stevereads are reluctant to spoil the plot for any of you small-minded or snobbish (or simply unlucky) enough not to know it already. Suffice it to say, the clouds darken before the sun shines, and the tense, horrible process Waid mines for his trademark specialty, iconic figures under unprecedented stress, uttering essential truths about themselves.

This book has a huge cast of characters - indeed, as obsessive fans spotting faces in all of Ross’ crowd scenes can attest, the cast features virtually every DC character ever dreamt up in the last sixty years - but the heart and soul of the story is the trinity that has sat atop superhero stories for the entire 20th Century: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

Waid write all three of them in such distinctive voices and with such perfect control that you wish he could somehow write their own monthly comics for the rest of time. Although this way is undoubtedly better: the sense of a special occasion just makes it all sweeter.

The greatest thing about this trinity of characters - a thing Waid mines perfectly - is the endless ways in which their backgrounds and natures combine to be invigoratingly unpredictable. Superman is an alien, but his Kansas upbringing has made him more human in many ways than the remote, forbidding Batman. Batman is a human being with no special powers, but his aristocratic background of wealth and privilege give him far more in common with Wonder Woman than with Superman. And Wonder Woman’s the toughest riddle of all (which is probably why writers have done her scant credit over the decades), an Amazon princess as powerful as Superman, as elite as Batman, but more alien than either of them to the world of ordinary people.

This mix is perfect for plumbing - Superman and Wonder Woman are the most powerful super-heroes in the DC universe, Batman the most dangerous, and the combination works absolute wonders. Waid does his job so well that even in an epic story with a cast of thousands and the world itself coming to an end, the tension between these three characters very often eclipses everything else.

Wonder Woman wants to meet the chaos of the new world order with militaristic violence. Batman wants to sift and manipulate. Superman wants to heal it all.

As noted, Waid’s greatest trick as a writer is to let extreme pressure prompt characters to tell each other things they’ve always left unsaid.

Perhaps the greatest of these moments happens in the final chapter, when tensions are at their highest, and Superman confronts Batman in a last-ditch attempt to enlist his help. Face to face in the ruins of the Batcave, Superman pours out his heart on the subject of his problematic best friend:

“The deliberate taking of human life - even super-human life - goes against every belief I have - and that YOU have. That’s the one thing we’ve always had in common. It’s what’s made us what we are. More than anyone in the world, when you scratch everything else away from Batman, you’re left with someone who doesn’t want to see anybody else die.”

Countless writers over the decades have had their chance to define Batman in two sentences. Nobody else has ever done it but Waid.

But the best thing in ‘Absolute Kingdom Come’ (beating all the neat extras, which for once are actually worthy of inclusion) is still and always will be the ‘one year later’ vignette at the very end.

The crisis has been averted, some semblance of normality has been restored, and a plaid-clad Clark Kent and a gorgeously-draped but anonymous Wonder Woman enter a gaudy superhero-themed restaurant for a pre-arranged meeting. None of the costumed waitstaff of course recognize the titans in their midst, and so they seat their charges with no fanfare. They’re waiting for a third party, and Clark is uncomfortably aware of that fact. “So where is he?” he edgily asks. “You’re the one with the X-ray vision,” Wonder Woman chidingly reminds him. “Did you look behind the Giant Penny?” When Clark says “You didn’t tell him, did you?” she gamefully responds “Of course not. If it actually means seeing him surprised, who am I to hoard the moment?”

Of course the third party is Batman, who shows up a moment later right behind the seated Clark Kent. And the World’s Greatest Detective has already figured out the momentous reason for the get-together. The brief scene is handled perfectly, ending with our three heroes walking out into the sunlight.

“Absolute Kingdom Come” isn’t something you’d hand to the comics novice. It’s a long, detailed love note to DC Comics, something best savored by those who’ve been absorbing comics for years. But it’s a testament to the book’s staying power that even a novice, stumbling into it, would be spellbound.