Randomized Superhero Comic Thoughts.

So, if none of you have noticed, “words” have been in short order on my internet website of the last week or so. Some of this has to do with the fact I’ve been pumping out tons of words for documentation that had to be revised and re-revised and indexed, so getting home and typing or doing work with Rage Engine One have seemed less than appealing. I’ve also been going through the books I picked up at MoCCA – expect reportage on that over the next week or so.

Anyhow, last night I reread the old Stern/Buscema/Palmer Avengers trade paperback Under Siege. That’s good comics right there, even if Jarvis gets the living tar beaten out of him. Under Siege is the sort of story that wouldn’t be out of place nowadays (even if it is a particularly old-school Marvel story) – Zemo leads a revived and improved Master Of Evil, but with current trends it would be a year of lead-ins and hints, leading to something ultimately unsatisfying instead of being just an event in the regular comic. I know, I know – I’ve made these complaints before, but I’ve narrowed it down to one specific complaint: “mainstream,” superhero comics storytelling has reached a level of sophistication in its storytelling that rivals Hollywood, but so few writers know exactly what to do with it.

The narration that Miller invented, or at least popularized, in material like Daredevil and Batman: Year One has replaced the thought balloon, but it seems like the storytelling shorthand – allowing the reader to make logical leaps with the protagonist and filling in pieces of the story – is pretty much forgotten, excluding writers like Ennis and Brubaker – authors whose material isn’t very superheroic most of the time. Instead, the narrative boxes find themselves conscripted – being used for Bendisian character riffing that does very little for the story; it’s chopping wood, as Mamet would probably say.

This bit of unwillingness to explain or elucidate plot points even the tiniest amount makes things like the other big comics universe event Infinite Crisis frustrating for me. I’m not a stupid person, believe it or not – I’ve read Proust and Joyce and love me the sprawling, drug-spiked narrative of William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson, but Infinite Crisis and Rann/Thanagar War were completely opaque to me. Those works were littered with these loud, jagged bits of plot that are roughly linked together by other bits of plot, but story – how it affects the characters and why the casual reader who’s not pored over back issues and drank the Kool-Aid should care – is left completely out of the equation. When “they” manage to kill off the Superman of Earth-2 and I don’t even manage to feel the slightest twinge, then they’ve failed in their duties to me, the guy that likes a superhero slugfest but shouldn’t have to do years of homework before picking one up.

Johanna Draper Carlson (who removed me from her sidebar – don’t think I didn’t notice) mentioned that the adult audience that DC is aiming at doesn’t have the time to devote hours to things like Who’s Who and tracking down back issues anymore, yet they’re doing quite well of late. Maybe it’s the culture of cool they’re raising – the idea of a mass-kept secret that lets readers feel like they’re part of something elite and somehow valid – sort of like me and the Peter Saville-designed record sleeves I obsess over. I’ve heard rumors of an unofficial policy in place at DC – writers are to refer to events in other books without directly saying where or when they occurred, effectively making it so that a reader will only completely “get” the story if they’ve picked up other books at the time of their publication, and that sort of in-jokeyness probably appeals to a lot of the people who spend the majority of their entertainment dollar on pamphlets of spandex material.

Hell, I know I’m grousing over stuff I don’t really need to – I find it somewhat interesting that they’ve leveled the playing field to a large extent with One Year Later – storytelling gaps are in place that are getting filled in with 52 and a new tone that’s more accessible seems to be in place. Both the main Superman and Batman titles are allowing people to just drop in and be engaged directly without the hook of a Byrne-style complete reboot and outside of Black Adam repeatedly proving that he can, indeed, rip people apart when he feels like it, there’s a lighter touch to a lot of the material.

Mind you, it’d not hurt one bit to use editor’s notes or have a character say “Strangely, the same events happened to Green Arrow about three weeks ago…”