Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality Review
Modernism and self-referentiality have been rampant in superhero comics for a good twenty years now; Alan Moore was the main instigator, with his great final Superman story and the Watchmen “pirate comics” motif. Some of the best and most entertaining stories since then have been knowingly "comics," from Grant Morrison’s "The Coyote Gospel" in Animal Man to John Byrne’s pleasant run on She-Hulk. But self-referentiality can also curdle like milk, or gnaw away its own belly like the fox under the Spartan boy’s cloak. There’s a huge streak of allegory in modern superhero comics – actually, "allegory" gives it too much credit; what we actually find are naked bids for audience identification and equally naked scornings of any connection to or interest in the supposedly puerile and retrograde wishes of that audience. (Pop quiz: who does Superman-Prime represent and why?)
Mainstream superhero comics have become a high-speed whirlwind of reader-response feedback done mad, with convoluted continuity one week and shredded history the next, and, no matter what, the anvil chorus of comics bloggers complaining that something or other is “raping their childhoods.” Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality is not the first series to dive into the middle of that debate – hell, most of the big crossovers now are thinly veiled attempts to seduce the audience into believing in one propaganda version of continuity or other. (“Marvel has always been at Civil War with Eastasia.”)
But Doctor 13 does have the advantage of trying to be fun – and, even better, at generally succeeding. It does feel a bit like special pleading in the end; Azzarello is yet another guy who grew up with comics and wants to celebrate the stuff he loved as a kid. (Exactly the kind of comics writer, I’m afraid, that we need less of today.) The art is also very nice: Cliff Chang has clean, confident black lines defining crisp space, and is particularly good at drawing people. (more…)
I’ve taken a break from my promised sequel about comic book artists whose current work I like because (1) I still haven’t made it through the most recent DC comp box, (2) it’s not like there’s a huge clamor for it. and mostly (3) I’ve been in a sort of weird transition mode and needed to write about that because it’s never far from my mind, but is thrown into special relief during the upcoming holiday season.
This week it’ s all about the shopping (and maybe that eating thing, too, but…) – ComicMix Radio kicks it off with our preview of new comics and DVDs that hit your stores even before the bird is stuffed or the parade kicks off, plus:
To…oh, say, King Arthur, if he ever existed, you would have superpowers. I mean, look at you. You can travel 100 miles an hour (but that red light flashing in your rearview mirror can’t be good) and you can cause a blank pane of glass to light up and show you what’s happening on he other side of the world, or what happened last week, or both, and you can twist your wrist and cause flame to appear atop that table-thing in the kitchen, with no protracted fussing with flint and stone… To Arthur, it would appear that you’re employing magic.
Last Thursday, Alex Rodriguez signed a 10-year contract in excess of a quarter billion dollars that allows him to continue working for the New York Yankees, a team about which, in the interest of full disclosure, I couldn’t care less. A couple hours later, the government indicted San Francisco Giants player Barry Bonds for lying to a grand jury.
It’s the lull before the holiday week, as we recover from being jam-packed and roasted at The NYC National convention. Most of the table talk in The Big Apple centered on how life was or will be affected by the WGA strike. Still, we managed to dig up a few nuggets of interest:
