Tagged: comics

Even in a comics superhero continuity entirely controlled by one creative team and contained in one series of stories, there can be retcons and changes. And sometimes you don’t notice them unless you’re specifically looking for them.

Take Strong Female Protagonist by writer Brennan Lee Mulligan and artist Molly Ostertag, originally a webcomic, which has been collected into two big books so far. When I read the first book a few years back, here’s how I described this universe’s White Event:

a worldwide band of thunderstorms hit, impossibly, about a decade ago — soon after 9/11 — and in their wake a whole lot of tweens and young teenagers suddenly had superpowers and strange transformations, all over the world. No one knows if there’s a cause-and-effect relationship there, or which way it would run. But some nations now have gods, and some presumably have very scary government enforcers, and some probably have unstoppable criminals. In the US, we got superheroes and a comic-booky strain of supervillains, who appear to have all gone in for the world-domination racket.

But in Book Two , there’s some throwaway dialogue about all of the affected kids all having been in utero at the time of the event, which either means I badly misunderstood the first book, or there was a different, much earlier event that actually created all the super-people.

This doesn’t actually matter to the story, obviously. But I’m fascinated by the change, and the impulse to change something (or clarify it) that is so unimportant. In both cases, something happened, inexplicable and worldwide, and a bunch of people in a very tight age cohort get superpowers — none of that changed.

I do wonder why having all of the superfolks be precisely the same age is so central — it’s not like they’re all in college together now. I suppose the point was to have this group be the first superpowered people, and to have there be a bunch of them, worldwide. This is a Wild Cards-style superhero universe, without the obvious single-point event causing it. A thing happened, and then a whole bunch of people manifested powers at puberty — some became heroes, some villains, some just hid, and some did other things.

Allison Green was one of the heroes, the high-powered brick Mega Girl, conscripted by the US government and assigned to a super-team for the duration of her adolescence. But now the supervillains have been defeated and the government regulations seem to have switched to “keep track of” rather than “use as strike force,” so now she’s retired, just one more, slightly older than usual, sophomore at NYC’s super-liberal New School. [1]

This book collects Chapters 5 and 6 of Allison’s story, which are as much about what it’s right for superpeople to do — through arguments, discussions, and some strong-arming of a reluctant superperson — as it is about the things they do. Chapter 5 in particular is a #MeToo story…except that I’m pretty sure those comics originally appeared online starting in 2014 or so, well before that hit the media and became a hashtag. (That’s because sexual abuse, and toxic masculinity, was not actually a new thing then — it’s just when a wider world started paying attention and decided it was important now.)

Since this is a superhero story, the initial hook is violence: someone is killing men who have been accused of sexual assault or rape and then been acquitted in court or otherwise “gotten off.” And Allison soon gets connected to the mysterious killer, when one of the victims is the potential creeper she saved a drunk girl at a party from (and saw it all blow up in a shaky YouTube video, of course). It gets a whole lot more complicated than that quickly, with Alison’s new mentor/partner/friend/independent-study-professor Lisa (aka the tinkerer Paladin) and the break-up of her old superhero team the Guardians and her suspicion that this new killer is her old teammate Mary, aka the invisible superheroine Moonshadow.

In the end, there is superhero violence and long conversations about the right thing to do — but much more of the latter than the former, as usual.

And those discussions lead into the ones in Chapter Six, in which Allison butts heads with a new philosophy professor who pushes all of her buttons. And dates a boy briefly who turns out to be a massively entitled rich asshole…and more than that. And attends a conference run by her old teammate Brad/Sonar for the “biodynamic” folks who don’t look like humans anymore. And a few other things, including finding a new life for her old friend Feral.

Strong Female Protagonist is very much the story of a young person, deeply concerned about meaning and justice and what should be and what’s meant to be. Allison is passionately committed to doing the things she was put on Earth to do, but not as clear about what those are. There’s no sign that she’s thought about the possibility that there is no teleology for humans. But she’s young: she’ll have plenty of time to figure out that life is pointless and painful and random and horrible.

[1] Which used to, and maybe still does, have an official name that continues “…for Social Research,” if you’re wondering what I mean by super-liberal.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

More time has passed since these stories per published than had passed for the whole history of the Doom Patrol to that point. As with so many things in corporate comics, in 2018 we’re now deep in second- or third-order nostalgia, memories of particular revised versions of things that have been around, and generating income for some corporation, for five or eight decades.

I tend to think Grant Morrison, and his Doom Patrol characters, would be just fine with that: they already think the world is random and bizarre and mostly unbelievable, a thin scrim over chaos and madness and conspiracy theories and various kinds of unlikely mysticism.

Doom Patrol was always pretty weird, right from the initial ’60s version by Arnold Drake, Bob Haney and Bruno Premiani. Introductions in the current editions of the Morrison run lean heavily into that: the idea that this team was always “freaks” and “misfits,” the ones fixing weird and surreal problems that more conventionally superheroic characters couldn’t handle. I haven’t read much of the Drake/Haney/Premiani run, so let’s say that’s correct: it sounds a bit like special pleading to me, but clearly it was weird by the standards of the time.

Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol, on the other hand, is weird by any standard. A hundred or more years from now, if people are still around and reading comics, they’ll still think this stuff is really out there. And it is.

Morrison took over what was a more-or-less conventional superhero team with declining sales in early 1989 and bet all of his chips on the freaks — it worked out, with the Morrison Doom Patrol  becoming an immediate success and eventually becoming one of the core books of the new Vertigo line a few years later. Morrison’s issues ran from early 1989 (#19) through early 1993 (#63), plus a piss-take of the then-popular X-Force called Doom Force.

The Morrison run has been collected twice in the last decade: first as six volumes from 2000-2008, and then as three double-sized books in 2016 and 2017. (There’s also, as there must be, the single big-crushing volume for those who must own something larger than anyone else.) For various quirky reasons that are very Doom Patrol appropriate, I read the first two big books and then volumes 5 and 6 of the previous series — all of the Morrison stories, in order.

It begins, very much corporate-comics style, in the aftermath of a crossover: Invasion! in this case. The members of the old team are dead (Celsius, Scott Fischer) or retired (Tempest) or comatose (Lodestone) or depowered (Negative Woman). Left standing alone is Robotman (Cliff Steele), who, maybe because of that, has since become the iconic character who is in every version of Doom Patrol. And the Chief (Niles Caulder) who originally formed the DP, is back to run it again.

Cliff is in some kind of psychiatric facility — modern and rehabilitative, so I won’t call it an “insane asylum” — where he meets Kay Challis, a woman who was systematically abused in childhood and developed sixty-four personalities from that abuse. And, from the “gene bomb” in Invasion!, all of those personalities now have independent superpowers.

Meanwhile, Larry Trainor, once Negative Man before the “Negative Spirit” left him, is also recuperating from his own problems when that spirit returns and forcibly merges Larry, itself, and a doctor named Eleanor Poole into a single entity that starts calling itself Rebis.

The three of them will be the new Doom Patrol team — Robotman, Kay as Crazy Jane, and Rebis. The former Tempest, Joshua Clay, becomes the team doctor but isn’t active even though he still has his fire-energy-beams-from-his-hands power. And they’re soon joined by Dorothy Spinner, a pre-teen with a deformed face who can bring her dreams and ideas to life (sometimes even on purpose), who is also what the Chief calls “the support team.”

They battle weird existential menaces for a few years of comics time — the Brotherhood of Dada, trying to drag the world into a painting; the Scissormen, foot-soldiers of a rapacious metafiction; Red Jack, who claims to be both God and Jack the Ripper and abducts the former Lodestone as his new bride; the Brotherhood of the Unwritten Book, in a semi-parody of Alan Moore’s post-Crisis Swamp Thing story about a magical apocalypse; the inter-dimensionally warring Geomancers of the Kaleidoscape and the Orthodoxy of the Insect Mesh, who also have plans for a now-awake and -transformed Lodestone (who is called by her real name, Rhea, throughout); the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E., who want to make the whole world “normal;” and a few more variations of the same themes.

Along they way, they meet the sentient dimension-hopping Danny the Street, who becomes something between their new HQ and a member of the team. And they meet the long-lost Flex Mentallo, man of muscle mystery, who wandered off for his own mini-series and I don’t think has been seen much since. (Or maybe he’s in the Teen Titans now; stupider things have happened in the DC Universe.)

In the end, the last villain of Morrison’s Doom Patrol run is inside the team, of course, and he gets to run through one more level of deconstruction before ending his Doom Patrol stories with a bang. (And then, to close out all of these books, comes that Doom Force one-shot, a deliberately ugly and dumb takedown of the stupid comics from the people who would very soon found Image and get rich very quickly.)

There’s not much else like this Doom Patrol: it’s the first major flowering of Morrison’s tropism towards metafiction and superhero-as-mythic-figure and a strong example of a case where his magpie gathering of every last random thing he reads or experiences really works well. And he’s ably assisted on art through this long series — primarily by Richard Case, who pencilled the majority of the stories, with other contributions by Simon Bisley (most of the iconic covers), Kelley Jones, Jamie Hewlett, Ken Steacy, and Sean Phillips.

For me, this is the quintessential Grant Morrison Big Two comic. I like to pretend that these are the kinds of characters and stories that his career focused on, that he didn’t turn to telling ham-handed episodes of superhero porn. Remember: we all create our own canons in our heads; we don’t ever need to let anyone else tell us what matters.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Disclaimer No. 1: I’m not related to Shannon Wheeler, as far as I know. We both carry an ancient Anglo-Saxon name, and probably have at least one ancestor in common, somewhere in the misty dawn of time, but there are a lot of Wheelers in this world.

Disclaimer No. 2: Wheeler has a recent book about Our Current President, but this is not it. If that’s what you’re looking for, may I direct you to Sh*t My President Says ?

Memoirs of a Very Stable Genius  is a collection of Shannon Wheeler’s cartoons, both comics-format and single-panel. The supposed connection, according to the back cover, is that these are all “personal comics,” but I’m not sure what makes these single panel cartoons any more “personal” than, say, the ones in I Told You So  or I Don’t Get It  or I Thought You Would Be Funnier .

The longer stories all are autobiographical in some way or other, so they’re more obvious. But, if the single-panels all really do come out of Wheeler’s life somehow, it would have been good to have an introduction, or endnotes, or something to make those connections clear. Wheeler does have a fair number of mildly political cartoons, mostly reacting to the frighteningly authoritarian bent of the current US administration — but the majority are just regular single-panel stuff, from desert islands to couples (in bed, or on a couch, or out at a table) to kids to cocktail parties to crime (and superheroes) to death and cupids.

Well, we didn’t get that, so any reader will just say “huh, this cartoon of a guy and his pet fish on a desert island is personal. Wonder what that means?” to herself without getting any answer.

Also quirky and not entirely clear: the book is divided into a number of numbered chapters, without any indication of why or for what purpose. There may be a theme for each chapter, but, if so, I couldn’t detect any of them. Or they may be excuses to run Wheeler illustrations on the chapter-title pages without those having to be jokes.

The longer stories start with the opener, “Camp Micro-Penis,” about a boy with an unfortunately tiny male appendage who Wheeler knew as a boy at summer camp. Also included are the self-evident “My Meeting with Congressman John Lewis” and “How to Pack for a Trip” and “Paris ’89” and “San Diego Comic Con!” and “The Dirty Little Secret Origin of Comic Books” and “How to Sell a Love Doll.” Slightly less obvious are “Cubana” (about a 1996 trip to Cuba) and “Portugal” (ditto, year unspecified) and “The Urine Squirt Gun” (a Chekhovian story about Wheeler and his kid friends and a horrible weapon) and “Dog Bully” (A teachable moment with his kids) and “How to Choke Your Chicken” (in which Wheeler had to kill his ill egg-layer).

All of the long stories are amusing; all of the cartoons are at least amusing, and I laughed at a few of them. Wheeler has a nice cartoony style which works well in both formats, and a lot of this book is in color, too, which surprised me.

Given that he is a Wheeler, I was inclined to like this book anyway. But I can do that without any qualms: there’s a lot of good stuff here. I can’t judge the claims of “very stable” or “genius” from these works, but, what the hell! let’s let him claim that. He’s definitely not the worst person ever to do so.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Alan Moore famously has a love-hate relationship with superhero comics. Well, I mean, a lot of people love or hate superhero comics, and plenty do both. The difference is that superhero comics hates and loves Moore back.

In the late ’90s, after he’d cast a magic incantation cursing DC Comics and all of its wares, swearing never to work for them again under any circumstances, Moore started his own line of superhero comics, under the not-at-all-self-aggrandizing label of America’s Best Comics. And then his publisher sold the entire company to DC anyway, pretty much simultaneously with the launch of the ABC line.

(It’s almost enough to make one believe that deep Northamptonian magic doesn’t actually do anything!)

One of those ABC books was Promethea, with art by J.H. Williams II and Mick Gray. I read the first collection sometime in the early Aughts, and didn’t remember a whole lot about it. (I do remember that nothing I saw of America’s Best Comics, then or later, impressed me all that much. But I can be hard to impress when it comes to superhero stuff.) Since I’m reading giant stacks of comics-format books this year to feed the maw of Book-A-Day, I figured I might as well try Promethea, Book 1 again.

(I’m still not that impressed. This is not a surprise.)

Promethea the character is a legacy hero, one of many in Moore’s work — he’s been very fond of having his main character be one of a million versions of the same thing, from the Captain Britain multiverse to the Parliament of Trees. This time, the original of Promethea is a fourth-century girl in Egyptian Alexandria bodily transported to the realm of story by the god Thoth-Hermes, and somehow because of that gets to be the template for a series of mystically-powered superwomen starting at the end of the 19th century in the US. Since Moore always has miles of notes, I’m not going to ask what Promethea was doing for the intervening thirteen centuries, because he’d probably tell me in great detail in some tedious end-of-book text feature.

Our brand-new Promethea is Sophie Bangs — that name sounds much more like a camgirl than a superheroine, but OK — in a mildly science-utopian 1999, a slightly alternate comic-book-universey version of the real world her story was published into. She’s a college student researching the legend of Promethea, providing both the natural opportunity for a lot of infodumping and the reason why she gets saddled with the glowy caduceus staff and form-fitting bronze armor.

There are, of course, equally mystical evil people who want to snuff out this new Promethea before she comes into her full powers, and they try to do so. But most of the story here, from the first six issues of the Promethea comic, is an extended tour of the Immateria, the lands of story and myth, in the company of each of the recent dead Prometheas in turn.

That tour is not over at the end of this book; nothing is actually resolved by the last page here and Sophie/Promethea is heading out into a promised two more sections of the Immateria to learn more lessons from more dead predecessors. Why this is where the vast and cool intelligences of DC chose to end this particular book is beyond me; I suspect they believe that their target audience doesn’t understand the idea of stories “ending” anyway, and so don’t bother wasting time with such things.

But I am a well-known cynic.

Promethea is a perfectly adequate superhero comic, with powers and characters that make more sense than many of its competitors. Williams and Gray draw well, and get some inventive page designs out of it. You could certainly do worse than this.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.