Feeding the Superhero Readers

Greg Gillis makes records under the pseudonym Girl Talk. What Gillis does is popularly known as a “mashup” but where many people are happy to take two or three songs, beatmatch them in Ableton, and create melodic tracks like the Kelly Clarkson/Depeche Mode mashup “Since You Been Gahan,” Gilis takes twenty or more to create a 4-minute survey of pop music, snatching bits from Queen, Tones on Tail, Paula Cole, and The Cure and creating something that’s not so much a whole as an amalgam of moments – bits of things that you know (and like, at least out of context) played in a very tight sequence. His music is schizophrenic and celebratory, occasionally recontextualizing material in surprising ways (the clipped strings and sped-up symphony of “Girl/Boy Song” by Aphex Twin under Rich Boy’s “Throw Some D’s,”) but it generally consisting of Ginnis putting something familiar with against something else the audience is likely to know to create a pleasing fifteen or twenty seconds of synchronicity, like the swingbeat smash “No Diggity” meeting Kanye’s “Flashing Lights” in “Still Here.” While I’ve been enjoying Girl Talk’s latest, Feed The Animals, quite a lot, it feels disposable in a way I was having trouble putting my finger on, until I was in the middle of the last trade of Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men.

What makes that title successful frequently transcends the (undeniable) craft applied to the material – it’s that sense of seeing something familiar treated slightly differently. Astonishing features a team that is very much “our” X-Men: Cyclops. Wolverine, Colossus, Beast, and Kitty Pryde along with Emma Frost go and have big loud adventures, exchange quips, and very rarely do something that’s a genuine surprise to the readers.  This is franchise superhero comics at their best.  Even the ending, which features an blatantly set-up solution to the whole “bad guys firing a fuck-off huge bullet at the planet” problem, manages to make one gape a bit, thanks to John Cassaday’s ability to render the most unbelievable moments in a down-to-earth fashion.  It’s well-done and a great example of the X-genre, but at the same time it feels hollow, especially when compared to another trade paperback release from this week, Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba’s The Umbrella Academy.

It’s simultaneously difficult to understand and completely believable that The Umbrella Academy is  Gerard Way’s first major comics work.  Way’s comics-related output was limited to some material with Boneyard Press in his teens and some work for Cartoon Network prior to forming the hugely-popular My Chemical Romance, whose rapid rise to the top of the modern rock charts left little time for the medium. There’s a freshness to The Umbrella Academy that’s undeniable, even if one detects notes of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Bob Haney’s batshit scripting in this high-concept story of a tight-knit superpowered “family” who share a tragic past. It’s unclear if it’s unabashed enthusiasm combined with ideas that have been gestating in Way’s head for years or if the tone and world presented are calculatedly different from other takes on the superhero, but where Astonishing X-Men is a remixed and mashed-up take on what’s gone before, The Umbrella Academy is something set firmly in its own world.

While it’s clear why so many enjoy Astonishing X-Men and The Sinestro Corps War and All-Star Superman for their very nicely-done takes on corporate-owned characters, the experience can seem a bit hollow, particularly during times like the present, when every editorially-mandated event is hyped to the nth degree and things that should be straightforward, fun adventure comics become recycled 10 o’clock drama cliches with some spandex thrown in for variety.  Even at their most enthralling peaks, it’s blatantly clear that no permanent change will ever occur and that the status quo of seventy years of superhero storytelling and that the audience likes it that way.  They want new versions of things they’ve enjoyed in the past, mashed-up beats and hands-in-the-air moments, not original compositions that are unfamiliar and require something besides appreciation for what has happened before.