In short – this volume of ancillary documentation for Moore’s popular “League of Extraordinary Gentleman” series reads less like a comic book story and more like a collection of the ephemera and ancillary documentation Moore typically includes with each of his exemplary comics. Included are 3-D glasses for a section riffing on the popular fiction of 1958; a “Compulsory Enjoy!” pornographic comic book from the oeuvre of Orwell; and even a clever “lost” Shakespeare play by the title “Faerie’s Fortune’s Founded.” Fans of the ongoing series will find scattered bits of character development (most notably Allan Quatermain’s mysterious rejuvenation) that keeps the “League” series alive, but for the most part Moore treats this work like an intellectual playground.
Having broadened his mandate from the original “Justice League of the 19th century,” with which he conceived the original League comics, Moore now envisions a universe of heroes drawn from all corners of Britain’s literary history (and some from other continents, as well): Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, and from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Prospero, the Duke of Milan. Moore’s erudition fills the pages to bursting, and Kevin O’Neill’s artwork is evocative and, in places even unnervingly plain and severe. But Moore’s talents better serve the generation of fresh stories and, to paraphrase a co-contributor to this blog, characters that seem like they existed even before he wrote about them. Here, his stories only work as a thin scaffold for the volumes of entertaining, but sometimes Byzantine, back matter.
In any case, this reviewer eagerly awaits the League’s next volume, “Century.”
So while the teenage Peter Parker and Jaime Reyes, the third and newest Blue Beetle, may never get together to cram for the physics test, at first blush they seem like kindred spirits. Both are given to occasional gnashing of the teeth over lost opportunities to save lives. Both enjoy peppering their enemies with brain-numbing quips along with their knockout punches, although Jaime trips over his words while Peter Parker, as Spidey, never runs out of puns. Both would love to know why, of all the young would-be superheroes in all the world, these powers had to come to them.
sprout of goatee on his chin; without a steady girlfriend, Jaime Reyes never questions his likability and manages to stumble into romantic connections without trying too hard. Jaime’s super-heroics are not kept secret, but rather, fashioned into the center of his community. Family, friends, and Internet acquaintances all know his “secret,” which he fairly rushes around the state of Texas trying to share with people who might help. In contrast to Spider-Man, who was famously vilified by J. Jonah Jameson and whose closest super-friend might have been the snide, deprecating Human Torch, the Blue Beetle enjoys the respect and occasional attention of the entire DC 
Universe (which he ostensibly had a hand in saving during the events of “Infinite Crisis”), and even gets challenged by Superman to a friendly race in his spare time. And while Parker was an unrepentant science nerd, Jaime Reyes appears to be nothing more than an average student — therefore escaping the awesome expository responsibility of inventing any part of his costume.
1963 counterpart. “Different” heroes like Peter Parker, once seen by teenagers as more identifiable than forbidding icons like Batman, have given way to those with lives that actually resemble real ones. Perhaps teenagers no longer want to read about a loser. Or, more likely, perhaps today’s readers can best relate to a hero who has consumed the same popular culture they gorge themselves on. Joss Whedon, whose “Buffy” could barely slay a vampire without referencing Scooby-Doo, might agree.
On a broad level, this Blue Beetle collection largely consists of month-to-month storytelling, with sporadic appearances by villains like the Ultra-Humanite and Livewire in addition to an overarching story. (Ten bonus points for working in Giganta, possibly my favorite villainess, and ten more for playing up her tendency to whine about fairness whenever she loses the upper hand.) John Rogers’ writing, which manages to be knowing without straying into Whedon territory, has the same light touch of continuity that enlivened Spider-Man’s early days even as it satisfies the usual multi-issue storyline requirements. Jaime’s team-up with Guy Gardner comes close to unforgettable, and Rogers renders the alien invaders as familiar and new at the same time — principally by granting them a sense of humor. For this we might even be able to forgive Rogers, a Hollywood screenwriter, for working on Transformers.
(By the by, was Brubaker the writer on that arc? I thought it was someone else…) Anyhoo… it was a rich, dense story with goofy martial arts action. Northlanders, on the other hand, was a lazy piece of crap. It basically read like a successful movie pitch executed by a screenwriter who had cashed the check and really had no idea what story he was telling, other than the vaguely high-concept notion of Vikings who use modern slang. There’s no real character development — Sven doesn’t seem to go through any development arc or maturation in the course of his adventures — and even his backstory in Constantinople feels superfluous. Hell, even his reasons for leaving his life of luxury and hot, well-hygiened babes for this northern armpit of civilization are sketchy at best. And too much of the story seemed to happen more for the author’s convenience than because of any narrative rationale — like the one about that Viking assassin making his way to Constantinople and back with the head of Sven’s girlfriend. Really. Like some Nordic hick isn’t going to stand out like a sore thumb in Constantinople, and is actually going to get close enough to this wealthy, assumedly powerful woman to cut her head off? And as if the journey wouldn’t have taken a couple years at least. And I take offense at the comparison to a spaghetti western — and by spaghetti western, I’m basically going to focus on the Clint Eastwood oeuvre, or even on the Japanese samurai movies that some of those are based. Intrinsic to the appeal of those movies is the fact that the antihero/protagonist has no back story, or even a name. The movies have a sketchy or inverted morality, and it’s this quality, contrasted with the traditionally resolute, virtuous American Western, that makes them resonate. Northlanders doesn’t have any of that, and it’s not 
really playing against some established genre. I don’t totally understand why, at the end, Sven unites the tribes against the Normans (or something, I don’t even really remember what happened), and then just takes off in a tiny boat with his pregnant wife. I mean, what a great plan. By the final scenes, Sven is looking somewhat infirm, while his son is still an infant, so I’m guessing he and his wife will die of old age or something by the time the kid is about eight, probably leaving him to die a slow death by starvation, after eating their corpses. I think Brian Wood is a shitty writer with a talent for the provocative set-up: I disliked his DMZ series, basically an Escape from New York ripoff, for the same reasons. Cool idea, bewilderingly inept follow-through. Funny, the simple act of writing this review has made me hate Northlanders more than Iron Man — this comic didn’t even have the saving grace of Robert Downey Jr.
makes a moral compromise that serves as this arc’s dramatic resolution. (Let’s try to ignore the profanity-laced dialogue, which might as well be cut from “Deadwood.”) Apart from the sense of narrative spontaneity, achieved as the story searches for an ending, Wood’s mild achievement in “Northlanders” relies heavily on his artist, Davide Gianfelice. His effortless landscapes and fierce, slashing action scenes carry the read, supporting its redundant action bits.
A first look at “Justice,” with its high-falutin’ one-word title, high-profile Alex Ross art, and three highly-promotable trade paperbacks with matching, foil-stamped covers, reveals nothing so much as another comic book “event” release that may or may not live up to its billing. On its back cover, “Justice” features three press quotes, and each one duly touts Alex Ross’s painted artwork. (Ross has been an industry superstar since he teamed up with Mark Waid for “Kingdom Come” in the late 1990s.) His characters are thoroughly well-proportioned, dressed in believably rendered costumes and possessed of faces that are individually modeled. (It’s fun to examine these faces and to guess at which real-world celebrity might have provided the inspiration for each one. I’ll take a stab right now and say that John Stewart, the backup Green Lantern, was drawn to resemble Muhammad Ali. Luthor is easy: Telly Savalas.) However, in contrast to the critics I would argue that Ross’s artwork is not actually a selling point here. He’s a fantastic cover artist, naturally, but cover art and interior artwork differ in one important respect. The art filling individual comic book panels must appear to move. Ross is skilled at musculature, iconic poses, and faces with real superheroic grandeur, but his rich and detailed style makes smooth action storytelling difficult. Is it possible that simple pen-and-ink linework, with colors as flat and ordinary as those produced with an old-fashioned halftone screen, can generate a more dynamic, fluid and clearly rendered story than Ross’s paintings? Think back to Steve Ditko’s early work on Spider-Man: his complex fight sequences were so clear they could have been storyboards for an action movie. And with line work, an artist has the luxury of leaving out unnecessary elements; Ditko wasn’t afraid of blank space. By contrast, Ross and his penciller, Doug Braithwaite, have to complete each panel as if it were a Renaissance landscape, with every detail of the background carefully filled in. Is it any wonder that action sequences taking place against this welter of colors and shapes are so confusing and difficult to parse?
“Justice” is clearly written for readers who grew up on “Challenge of the Super Friends.” His Legion of Doom meets in an updated Hall of Doom, and each one of them is costumed just as they were in the 1970s cartoon. (Even Brainiac, who spends most of these 12 issues in a dignified white lab coat, eventually sheds it in favor of the pink long-sleeve polo tee and Speedo shorts, which always made him look like a pervert at the yacht club.) Some of the character designs receive much-needed updates: Toyman, for instance, is cleverly reworked as a giant robotic marionette, controlled remotely. To look at him, one can almost hear the simpering cackle of his 1970s animated counterpart. And the plot structure is familiar: the Super Friends (ahem, the Justice League) discovers that a Legion of Doom plot is afoot, makes an effort to stop it and is very nearly defeated — just before rallying to save the day. Written by Jim Krueger, the story is a bit attenuated; without quite enough plot to fill 12 issues, he relies on a few too many Alex Ross splash pages to retain reader interest. Aquaman is featured prominently, and readers may smirk as other characters marvel at how impressive he is. This tactic comes across as transparently cross-promotional, intended to shore up a piece of intellectual property that never quite took off the way it should have. Captain Marvel, and his “family” (including the black sheep, Black Adam) receive solid treatment; I’ve never quite figured out what makes Shazam’s facial features so distinctive, but here he is once again, as recognizable as your next-door neighbor. (After many years of disuse Captain Marvel, with his devastating yet self-compromising lightning attacks, may now be more interesting than Superman.)
This series, begun by Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely, works as a quasi-canonical companion piece to Alan Moore’s “Supreme.” It utilizes Superman in the classic sense: invincible, dignified, and infallible, running off to the Fortress of Solitude to rest up and perform scientific experiments for the benefit of mankind, aided by robots built to resemble his friends and allies. He comes complete with the bumbling Clark Kent persona, surreptitiously saving lives while making an ass of himself. (There’s even an issue dedicated to Jimmy Olsen, which ends up partially redeeming this otherwise irritating character.) As such, Morrison’s Superman pays homage to Christopher Reeve, to the classic Superman stories of the 1950s and 1960s, and even to his own work on DC One Million. Perhaps nostalgia provides the greatest enjoyment here, as Alan Moore may have wrung more juice from the concept without even using Superman himself, but it’s still fun to watch him declare his secret identity to Lois Lane and interview Lex Luthor in jail as Clark Kent. Morrison always goes in for overcomplication, and here he throws in multiple future versions of Superman (again, self-consciously referring to his own previous work). As for the art, Frank Quitely’s characters look more like each other than anything else – is that Lex Luthor or Professor X? – and often carry themselves in a strange, fey manner. Here, his backgrounds are largely blank and empty, which may be intended to suggest futurism but ends up recalling Rob Liefeld’s lack of imagination. Overall, the first six issues of All Star Superman are a fairly straightforward evocation of the classic Superman mythos: pleasant, but a bit anodyne in the end.
“I’ve never really connected with Captain America. At best, he seemed something like Superman, a great iconic figure, but as a dramatic character, a bust. Like Superman, he seemed too constrained by his own myth, his own self-proclaimed identification with eternal, unchanging American virtues and values (and thus, an insistent and unchanging American self-regard) to be able to undergo the sort of dynamic transformations required of compelling drama. And in this election season, when the nature of America and the qualities that must be exhibited by “true Americans” are the issues at hand (combined with my first encounter with David Halberstam’s history of Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest), I found myself deliberating the significance of Captain America, and arriving at this conclusion: for all that Captain America is as mummified and irrelevant as our current political discourse, with all its discussion of “who loves America more,” Captain America is not dead. Rather, the true Captain America, in terms of being the embodiment of the national character, and its hopes and fears, is Garth Ennis’s Punisher.
It wasn’t always thus. The original Captain America, rolled out during the lead up to World War II, embodied the spirit of a can-do America, a country that was just beginning to awaken to the possibilities inherent in its extravagant labor force, wealth of natural resources, secure frontiers, and technological innovation. Just as the country was transformed from a quiet, unsophisticated, militarily weak society whose national identity had not yet been crystallized by the external pressures of war (both World War II and the Cold War against “global communism”) into that of a robust, nuclear-tipped superpower, so Steve Rogers was transformed from a spindly specimen rejected by the draft into a super soldier. Even so, the original Captain America, like the nation he served, was a somewhat reluctant warrior. Despite FDR’s efforts to nudge the nation into an alliance with the European allies against Germany, most of the country wanted nothing to do with it, and only with the attack on Pearl Harbor did America enter the war. So just as the country did not see itself as the aggressor, but was merely fighting to defend itself, so Captain America was initially armed only with a shield, a purely defensive tool. It’s interesting to note that as the country’s idea of itself evolved, from reluctant ally to global defender of freedom, willing to use its considerable power not only to defend, but to attack in order to forestall the need for defense, Cap’s shield evolved as well, first adopting a circular shape that allowed it to be used for offense as well as defense. And of course, in the latest version of Captain America, we find that the captain outfitted with a firearm as well as the traditional shield; just as with his country, the shift from to a primarily defensive to a primarily offensive identity, is complete.
Consider as well the circumstances of Captain America’s renaissance: for example, who was it that found and revived him? None other than Tony Stark, superhero and (more importantly) millionaire arms manufacturer, a living embodiment of the military-industrial complex. So of course, as war profiteers have done since the Civil War, Stark not only found a flag within which to wrap himself, he found the best of all possible flags, the human essence of America, the symbol not only of America but of her military rebirth. And in his lifestyle and adventures, Captain America continue to symbolize America — perhaps not the real thing, the one torn apart by race riots, CIA assassinations, and proxy wars, but certainly a very agreeable illusion. In Steve Rogers’s America, the superhero lives in a mansion (not for him the rent-scrounging of Peter Parker) and fights vague, abstract, but always (we are assured) highly menacing villains obsessed with world domination. More often than not, these villains come in the form of organizations, such as Hydra or AIM, much like the vague shadowy organized Communism that we were purportedly fighting in Vietnam, Latin America, China, and other places. Much like this so-called “global Communism” in which regional political differences were ignored in order to market the Communist threat as a coherent, organized, monolithic entity (as opposed to what it really was, a set of discrete political movements that had nothing to do with each other and were just as suspicious of each other as they were of us), the foes that Captain America faced generally presented global or national threats. Not for him the provincial villains, stuck in their cities, robbing their banks: Captain America’s adversaries generally presented a threat to our very existence, or at least to the country’s existence. Much like America itself, Cap’s job was to be out there making the whole world safe; he was a neocon before the term was coined, a global interventionist, jetting out with the rest of the Avengers while America itself fell apart, foreign policy taking precedence over domestic policy, the citizens of bankrupt 1980s New York resigned to watching Quinjets fly over Bryant Park, its junkies and prostitutes, wondering if one day Captain America will come save them too.”
I am currently reading a compilation of Alan Moore’s work at Wildstorm Comics, with characters like Spawn and WildC.A.T.S. (sic?). Not much to say yet about the writing, which could still go either way, but I will say beyond a doubt that this is the worst-illustrated set of comics I’ve yet set eyes on. It literally, and I actually mean literally, made me nauseated to look at. The women have breasts that seem to depend from their collarbone areas. Their waists appear to be about six inches in diameter. The men’s muscles have overwhelmed their bodies to the point where they seem to have giant striated worms writhing beneath their skin. And not only does everyone look alike, all their eyes are about four inches apart.
I have to confess, I’m very disappointed in you for your recommendation of The Forsyte Saga — Jessica and I watched not only the first, but the second miniseries as well, and were dismayed to find, rather than a stirring tale of Victorian superheroics, a stirring tale of Victorian family dynamics. The production was nothing more than a series of missed opportunities. For instance, we meet the deliciously villainous Soames Forsyte, and eagerly anticipate his disfigurement (hopefully from a boiling lava pit) and subsequent adoption of an iron mask of some sort, but instead are treated to nothing more than a brilliantly restrained performance of facial twitches and barely repressed longing and self-loathing. And what of Irene? When brutalized by Soames, how could she not suddenly manifest amazing psychokinetic powers, and fling him across the room or make his head explode? Witnessing her quiet dignity in the face of such adversity was small compensation indeed for forgoing such an obvious and welcome plot point. Most cruel was the casting of Ioan Gruffud (Mr. Fantastic himself!) as a dashing young architect, who not once displayed the amazing powers of elasticity for which he is famous (making his death all the more incredible, I might add, as the audience is fully aware of the fact that he could’ve easily stretched his way out of danger!) All in all, a superb Victorian drama, but a really disappointing superhero epic.
Storytelling that aspires to the epic must always contend with the balance between scope and weight: increasing the breadth of a story tends to diminish its depth. Nowhere is this more apparent than in DC’s Elseworlds series, and specifically in Superman: Red Son. The series repeatedly asks the question “what if,” namely, what if such-and-such a superhero were to have grown up under different circumstances. What if Superman, as an infant in his runaway spacecraft, had landed in the Ukraine and had become a tool and symbol of Mother Russia? An excellent question, since Superman is so commonly affiliated with “the American Way.” Take America out of Superman, and what do you get?
