Comic Snobbery in the Penny Press!

Well, despite its grotesque cover (that's Robert Pattison, star of the hit movie Twilight, and for the occasion of his photo-shoot, he decided to show up a) unshaven, b) unwashed (hair helmet-hard with filth and, I'm guessing, live vermin), and c) very visibly high as a kite), I of course perused the latest GQ. How can I not, when I so often find gems of quality in each issue? This time around is no exception, although the cover interview itself is a standard chunk of bald-faced lying in virtually its every word. There are two things a celebrity interviewer must do in order to stay in the job, apparently: first, you have to create the impression in your piece that you've become part of your subject's world, that you've bonded somehow (the most common way to do this is the old 'there I was writing my piece two days later when the phone rang - it was Famous Person X, just calling to see how I was doing' ... pay attention to the next few full-length celebrity interviews you read: you'll see it everywhere, including in the Ben Affleck interview in this month's Esquire), and second, you have to hide your subject's dirty laundry from view, even if it means airing fake dirty laundry in its place (take this interview, for instance: before the meal the two share, during the meal, in between bites of food during the meal, instantly after the meal, and for every moment until they parted, Pattison was continuously smoking cigarettes - but our writer, Alex Pappademas, never mentions it, because although some smoking might be spinnable as cool ... there's one photo to that effect, accompanying the article ... constant smoking might suggest the star is addicted or something, and that might hurt tween box office - but instead of simply remaining silent on the whole subject - because who knows what twitching, amputated stump of journalistic integrity Pappademas might still retain? - he transmorgrifies the smoking into coffee-drinking and has that be the compulsive thing, and the only compulsive thing, Pattison does the whole time they're together)(although it's not all bad: when Pattison ass-shits on and on about not being able to lie, about not understanding, just plain not understanding where all these rumors about his incessant late-night partying come from, Pappademas' writing makes it clear he, at least, wasn't fooled by the enormously transparent liar sitting across from him) (needless to say, this lying applies extra-strong to your subject's sexual secrets ... if, for instance, you're interviewing, say, one of the macho young stars of Baywatch back in the '90s and he begins groping and then French-kissing your male waiter, you'd better make with some snappy patter about unnamed Brazilian actresses and the like).

Fortunately, I wasn't totally reliant on chain-smoking pygmy vampires to carry the issue! There's a really good piece on the "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, and of course any profile of the comic genius that is Amy Poehler is welcome. And then there's the article that most caught my eye: it's Alex Pappademas yet again, but he's not redeeming himself in my eyes one little bit (except with honest-to-gosh work ethic! For that, he gets two thumbs up and an invite to write for Open Letters!), because his second article, "The 20 Graphic Novels You Should Read (after 'Watchmen')," is so choked with lame pretension and latent contempt for the comics genre that only sheer, seething rage kept me reading. Pappademas co-wrote this piece with Kevin Sintumaung, but somewhere our very own Kevin the Comic Snob is smiling, because the 20-graphic novel list here is absolutely fraught with the kind of plotless, narcissistic, "indie," too-cool-for-school sequential garbage that can be relied upon to get Kevin's Flexographic press running.

When Kevin indulges in his weird love of this crap, I cut him some slack (I know it's not exactly noticeable when I do this; it's more of an interior thing), because he himself is a talented comic artist. When Pappademas and his co-conspirator the great Steve Ditko Doctor Strange supervillain the Merciless Maung do it, I declare Open Season on pretentious Android's Dungeon nersteins everywhere.

If you know anything about the comics world (aaaaaaand Beepy just began drifting away toward a different bed of seaweed ...), you'll be able to guess most of the titles on the Dastardly Duo's list. Just keep the criteria in mind: no action, preferably done in black and white, copious sexual dysfunction, endless fetishizing of one's own childhood, and absolutely, positively no superpowers. If you need more specifics, just go to your nearest comic book specialty shop, try your best to shrug off the projected contempt of the sales staff (trust me: The Simpsons understates the matter entirely), pick up the latest issue of Croatian Lesbian Cancer Victim (it's a year late, but if you even so much as notice that, you're an intolerant lesbo-hating Communist), turn to the in-house ads (in this issue, as in every issue, they'll be the last 15 pages of a 25-page comic that's, as we've already noted, one year late), and there you'll find most of the titles Pappademas and the Merciless Maung want to take to the prom.

There's Charles Burns' craptastic Black Hole, of course, and that bane of my existence, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. There's Concrete and Pyongyang (because the purpose of comics should always be to remind us how much life sucks). Saturday Night Live comedian Bill Hader recommends Jason Aaron's Scalped, even though if he actually grew up liking comics, those comics certainly bore no resemblance whatsoever to Scalped. The wan and pointless Bottomless Belly Button (I mentioned dysfunctional families already, didn't I?) of course makes the list, as does It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, about which the Dastardly Duo actually write "Ignore the title - this is not the indie mope-fest you'd expect" - even though that's precisely what it is, for page after interminable page. Y the Last Man wanders into the article even though it was mostly good, and there's one single super-hero: the Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely All-Star Superman, and don't kid yourself that this is on the list despite the fact that it not-very subtly mocks the very superhero conventions it's appearing to honor - it's on the list because of that fact (the book itself is worthless, from Morrison's cavalierly continuity-screwing 'I swallowed a baby universe and it allowed me to recover memories that show that not only am I a fallen angel rather than a Kryptonian but that I actually killed Jesus Christ' insano-plots to Quitely's endless parade of eensy-weensy heads stuck on top of fat bodies).

So I thought I'd append here a list of my own, a morning-after remedy if you would. The following graphic novels are brought to you all in color for a dime!

First, three about the greatest superhero of 'em all:

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? by Alan Moore, Curt Swan, George Perez, and Kurt Schaffenberger - Way back in the mid-'80s, when DC Comics decided to revamp the entire Superman concept, they published this two-part 'what if' story about the way you might write a finale to the career of the old, traditional Superman (prompting some critics to point out that if the character had been done this well all along, no revamp would have been necessary). The result is a tender, thrilling comic about the costs of heroism.



Superman: Birthright by Mark Waid and Leinil Francis Yu - Cynical souls might see this 2004 production as DC Comics' response to the ratings of the successful TV series Smallville, since here we have a Ma and Pa Kent who look a lot like their TV counterparts, here we have the same premise of a farmboy/football star named Clark Kent who's secretly possessed of unearthly powers, and here we have a brilliant, outcast Lex Luthor who's initially Clark's friend. But many such elements handily pre-date both the TV series and the aforementioned character revamp, and Waid and Yu breathe new life into them. This is the ultimate retelling of the mythologically familiar Superman origin story - and it's got a lump-in-the-throat ending for good measure.




Superman: Secret Identity by Kurt Busiek and Stuard Immonen - what would happen if you lived in the everyday real world and your name was Clark Kent? And what if, after years of suffering all the lame jokes by friends, classmates, and co-workers, you actually developed Superman-style superpowers? Busiek and Immonen (his best artwork to date) take the one-issue throwaway pre-Crisis concept of the so-called 'Earth-X' Superboy and flesh it out in glorious detail, as the story of what might happen if somebody actually developed the powers of Superman in the real world.

Now let's go from one character to a big ensemble:


Marvels by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross - the ultimate Marvel Comics graphic novel, this book tells the story of the rise of Marvel superheroes, from the likes of Captain America and the Sub-Mariner during the days of World War II to the mutant X-Men to the company's flagship character, Spider-Man. Busiek's writing and Ross' painted artwork combine to form a perfect extended tribute to all the creators who made the Marvel mythos - and the book also tells a touching story, of one man's grappling with the phenomenon of super-heroes.



Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross - I've praised this book before (just follow the labels at the bottom, people! they'll lead you to a treasure-house of wit and wisdom!), and it certainly belongs on any list like this one, no matter what the Dastardly Duo might say. Set in a near future in which the line between hero and villain has become irretrievably blurred, Busiek's sharp writing and Ross' stunning visuals dramatize the return of classic heroes like Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman to a world they may no longer understand. No matter how many times I read it, the powerful climax still gets to me.


The New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke and Dave Stewart - Another killer premise: what if the story of DC Comics superheroes unfolded in real time, running from the 1940s to the present, complete with the Cold War and the Space Race and Vietnam? Cooke and Stewart re-imagine the icons of DC continuity (virtually everybody makes an appearance in the two parts of this book) set firmly in the real world, and the result is incredibly entertaining - with one panel at the very end that's worth the price of admission alone.

And how about some single-character focus for a change:


Blood & Judgment by Howard Chaykin - Comics great Chaykin does a four-chapter update on the classic pulp character of the Shadow, with stunningly entertaining (not to mention violent and just a bit sexist) results. DC Comics hasn't seen fit to re-issue this classic for a long, long time (nor have they collected the first ten issues of the monthly comic it spawned, despite the fact that those issues are drawn with flair and enigmatic style by Bill Sienkiewicz), but if you attend Boston's Comic Con in the first week of April, I'm certain you'll be able to find a copy, and it's well worth the effort (and the disdain you'll endure from people like the Dastardly Duo).


Born Again by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli - Miller of course achieved comics fame by creating one of the greatest graphic novels of all time, Dark Knight Returns, but this story-arc featuring Marvel's blind superhero Daredevil is every bit as good and considerably less hammy. It's a superb character-study of Matt Murdock, who fights crime as Daredevil and who, in this book, watches his life entirely fall apart. As the title implies, this is fundamentally a story of redemption, and it's one you'll find yourself re-reading.


The Frost Giant's Daughter and Other Stories by Kurt Busiek (him again! and yet, the Dastardly Duo has apparently never heard of him) and Cary Nord - Here are some classic Robert E. Howard short stories of Conan the Barbarian, brought fantastically to life by Busiek's extremely restrained scripting on top of Nord's gorgeous artwork. The Conan character has never been handled better than this, and that's a tough thing for me to say, considering how fond I am of the long run Marvel did on the character in the '70s.

And as a sop to all the Jimmy Corrigan loseroids out there - and to Kevin the Comic Snob, who never met a non-superpowered character he didn't love - I suppose I should include two more-or-less "indie" choices that, unlike those of the Dastardly Duo, are actually good:



Bone by Jeff Smith - in page after page of stunning black-and-white artwork, Smith tells the story of Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone, three cousins who find themselves in a fantasy kingdom full of complex characters and even more complex politics. Some of Bone is pure slapstick, some of Bone is pure high fantasy, and lots of Bone is socio-political commentary ala Cerebus the Aardvark, only here brought to life by somebody who isn't a raging A-hole. Bone has it all: an appealing heroine, some props given to Moby-Dick, and two of the flat-out funniest villains in all of comicdom. The big fat one-volume collection is the best money you'll spend all month.

Hard Times, once again by Howard Chaykin - in this case, his seminal science fiction creation, American Flagg! Chaykin paints an enjoyably bleak and fragmented near-future of gangs and high-tech crime, and he adds his usual standards: sexy gun molls, one tough-but-fair central character, lots of fast, brutal action, and a talking cat. The other American Flagg! story-arcs are just as good as this one, but this is the place to start.

And so, too, is this short list a good place to start! It at least gives you an alternative to page after poorly-drawn page of hapless losers standing out in the rain, the victim of the consequences of their own inexplicable life-choices. Virtually every graphic novel chosen by the Dastardly Duo brims not only with pointless anomie but with the unspoken assumption that comics - sequential art, sorry - can only be good if they entirely forget where they came from ... in other words, that no good can ever come from superhero stories. Needless to say, as a big fan of both fantasy and mythology, I completely disagree with such snobbery, and this partial list is offered as an antidote. Like it or not, the comics genre is and always will be - and should be - about heroes and villains, about right versus wrong ... and those things can be complexly and richly done even without grotesquely late and overrated Croatian lesbian cancer victims.

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.