Comics are not movies: obviously. The two forms do have some things in common, and can use similar visual language — they’re both storytelling mediums with limited space for dialogue and various ingenious ways to show time passing, among other parallels.
But, even at best, they’re parallel: they can do similar things in different ways. So when a creator continuously evokes cinema in his comics, as matter and style, the reader starts to wonder what is up.
By 2010’s Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 3, Gilbert Hernandez had been telling movie-inspired stories for about a decade. His major character Fritzi had become a B-movie star, in at least a minor way, and he’d not only told stories about her life and work, but he’d “released” several of her “movies” as separate graphic novels: Chance in Hell (2007), Speak of the Devil (2008), The Troublemakers (2009). And, in the previous year’s No. 2, he’d launched another young buxom starlet on a Hollywood career, in Dora “Killer” Rivera, daughter of Guadalupe and grand-niece of Fritzi.
Killer is back in Gilbert’s two stories in No.3: “Scarlet in Starlight” is the comics version of what in-continuity is a ten-year-old SF movie that Killer is being considered for a sequel/remake of, and “Killer * Sad Girl * Star” explains that. They’re both intensely late-Gilbert stories, full of people talking about the things that they want to talk about, having endless meta-conversations about the things they’re doing and feeling and saying to each other. I’m finding this is getting more airless and hermetic at this point, as if Gilbert is circling the same material ever closer — the re-run of Fritzi’s movie career in miniature with Killer is another example — and I hope he broke out of that cycle between then and now.
Jaime’s half of No. 3 is the first two pieces of “The Love Bunglers” (set in the modern day) and the flashback “Browntown,” part of the same overall story. I’ve already read the second half — both in the Angels and Magpies omnibus a few weeks ago and in No. 4 this morning before I got to typing this very post — so I’m mostly going to save my thoughts about that overall story for the conclusion.
But I will repeat what I said before: “Love Bunglers” is Jaime’s masterwork, even more so than the previous high points like “Flies on the Ceiling” and “The Death of Speedy.” And if you think this first half is emotionally strong, you don’t know what you’re in for.
(And I note that I, like nearly everyone else, found “Browntown” the standout when I read No. 3 new in 2010: none of us realized it was part of the same story of “Love Bunglers” and that the latter was not nearly as light as it seemed.)
I’m going to start out with a potted rant; regular visitors may want to skip it.
A graphic novel is not “by” the writer. It is not “illustrated” by the artist. It is an inherently collaborative work equally created by both of them. (Assuming there are only two: it could easily be more.) Crediting a book that way is a mistake: even if the writer does detailed thumbnails of every single page and the artist follows them scrupulously, what the artist brings to the table is crucial to the telling of that story. It is not secondary; it is not “illustration.”
The Imitation Game is a biography in comics form of British mathematician Alan Turing. The copy I have is credited as “by” Jim Ottaviani and “illustrated by” Leland Purvis. Now, I have an uncorrected proof, so the final book may have changed that.
But, if not, this is me looking sternly over my glasses at Abrams ComicArts and saying “tsk-tsk” while I do that little one-finger wave. This is Not Proper. This is Not Done. And we are Not Amused.
But on to the book itself. (If skimming to find the end of the potted rant, this is it.)
Alan Turing, I think, was born at either the exact right time or the exact wrong time. Professionally, he couldn’t have turned up at a better moment to turn his particular genius into reality. But socially and personally, he might have had a quiet happy life in some earlier time and he definitely would have been better off born a decade or three later, when his condition would be better understood and accepted. (I mean his mental condition, since he seems to have been somewhere on the autism spectrum, but his homosexuality would obviously have been less of an issue.)
Ottaviani tells Turing’s story at a slant, or at least starts that way: he opens with (and occasionally returns to) a conceit that he, or someone, is interviewing Turning’s friends and family after his death. But most of the book is just his life dramatized, with lots of explanatory captions (sometimes voiceovers from those interviewees) and a tight focus on his work during WW II.
Imitation Game doesn’t get into the math; it just shows what Turing did, and is particularly interested in the title experiment, better known to us as the Turing Test. It’s also very much a serious biography in comics form, and isn’t afraid to get a little artsy in presentation here and there. Turing’s suicide — I might note that there is now some scholarly doubt as to whether it was suicide — is presented in a particularly elliptical way, and readers who don’t know what he actually did will probably not be able to tell what he actually did.
(On the other hand, I read this in a black-and-white proof, and sometimes color can make things clearer in comics.)
I think biography, particularly of a thinker, is an odd subject for comics: it’s harder to show interior life in comics than in prose, so it’s a slightly less useful tool for the job than the usual one. That said, Imitation Game is a good, thoughtful biography of an important, quirky man, told well and using the form’s strengths well.
I don’t have an accurate record of when Dave Sim first said Cerebus would run for 300 issues. But my guess is that his plans became real during this storyline.
The first volume of Cerebus, which I covered last month
, saw Sim moving rapidly from an amusing Thomas/Smith Conan parody with an oddly funny-animal main character to something more detailed and particular, and those twenty-five issues moved from standalone stories to trilogies and ongoing continuous plotlines.
No one expected Sim would then embark on a new story that would be as long as all of Cerebus to date. My guess is that not even Sim knew, when he was writing and drawing issue #26, “High Society,” that that would be the title for a much longer story. Somewhere in those first few High Society issues, though, it clicked: he wasn’t just making a somewhat longer story: his narrative would stick around the city-state of Iest for more than two years of serial comics, over five hundred pages, and more political machinations than anyone had ever seen on the comics page.
So it became High Society. And a storyline many times longer than the previous ones posed a problem to Sim in the mid-80s. He was already a pioneer in reprinting his comics in permanent book editions, with the Swords of Cerebus series. But the sixth volume of that was already longer than the previous ones, reprinting five issues instead of four. Swords of Cerebus Seven would either be five times as long as the previous book or would break in the middle of the story.
Obviously it didn’t. Instead, Sim invented the “phone book” format — one little-used by other creators since, mostly because very few comics-makers have series with multiple five-hundred-page long plotlines to begin with. (He also annoyed the comics distribution network by going entirely direct-to-consumer for the High Society first printing, an innovation that made him money immediately but caused hassles for a while afterward.)
We tend to forget all of the business things Sim pioneered in independent comics, but there’s no Image without Sim, without that model of doing your comics your way, and then collecting them permanently. And this is the era when Sim was still exciting and vital and fizzy and Zeitgest-y, telling his own story and making sarcastic comments on the current comics scene at the same time.
High Society is probably the single highest point of Cerebus: a graphic novel that can stand alone and that a new reader can come into cold. Cerebus is this guy arriving in a new city, and then stuff happens to him: you don’t need to know more than that, and the first page tells you that much.
“Stuff happens” gets very baroque very quickly: Cerebus is caught up in other people’s schemes, as had been more and more central as the comic Cerebus went on the early ’80s, and the ultimate mover of those schemes was Sim’s brilliant re-imagining of Groucho Marx as Lord Julius, ruler of Palnu. [1]
High Society is a story about money and power, and particularly the power of money. Palnu is the only fiscally sound city-state in the entire Feldwar valley; every other country is running massive deficits and getting further and further in debt to Julius. Cerebus is the perfect counterweight to Palnu’s soft power, since he’s instinctively a creature of hard power: he knows armies and mercenaries and war tactics deeply, and his first instinct in any situation is to find and army and conquer something.
(This is not a good impulse in a modern world, obviously. But that raises the question of how modern Cerebus‘s world is. Is it modern enough that wars of conquest primarily smash economic activity and leave everyone poorer, or is it still medieval enough that conquest can be lasting and profitable?)
So Cerebus is first the Ranking Diplomatic Representative of Palnu to Iest, named as such without his knowledge. And then there’s a confusing plot where he’s running to keep that title, even though it’s pretty obviously a role that is going to always be in the direct remit of the ruler of the sending country. (How could it be otherwise?)
But that campaign ends up being the warm-up for the real one: Cerebus runs for Prime Minister of Iest, a job that has first slowly and then suddenly transformed from being a minor adjunct to a theocracy to being the center of secular power in the city-state. And that “suddenly” is because of Cerebus personally, in the sideways complicated manner common to Cerebus plots.
Like the best Cerebus plots, High Society is a one-damn-thing-after-another story. Cerebus is always his own worst enemy; he’s never satisfied with what he has and is the epitome of the guy who hits on sixteen every damn time. And Sim was notably never on Cerebus’s side, which is rare for a creator so closely identified with a single character. Cerebus is a horrible person in a whole host of ways, and was like that right from the beginning: Sim made him that way, and kept putting him in plots that exploited his flaws and worst tendencies. For about the first half of his adventures, Cerebus is the greatest anti-hero in comics.
Alongside all of the politics and plotting is Sim’s characteristic humor: he was the most consistently funny comics humorist of the early ’80s, and this volume has a string of his greatest hits. Sure, a lot of that humor was odd adaptations of other people’s characters — every funny character in Cerebus is based on a comedian or outside source — but Sim turned it all into comics, made it all work in his specific invented world, and gave all of those characters new, setting-appropriate jokes to tell. It’s hugely idiosyncratic, but it works amazingly well.
If you’ve never read Cerebus, and you’re willing to give Dave Sim one shot, this is the shot to take. Some parts of it are more meaningful, or funnier, if you’ve read the stories in the first collection, but I don’t think anything will be incomprehensible or particularly obscure. This is a great story about a grumpy, self-destructive guy who falls into politics in the worst way, in a vaguely late-medieval world where parts are rapidly modernizing, and has a masterful mix of humor and seriousness. If any of that sounds appealing, give it a try.
[1] Julius would make an interesting contrast to Terry Pratchett’s Patrician: both rule completely and capriciously, and both are shown to be master manipulators who always come out on top. But the Patrician works by extreme clarity and veiled threats, while Julius is his world’s master obfuscator and equivocator and either is the most Machiavellian planner of all time or just extremely good at thinking on his feet.
In a serial medium, there’s always the need to make sure the audience keeps up. So each new installment needs to do some work to give backstory, either with the potted “who they are and how they came to be!” box or flashbacks or whatever.
And when the story is moving quickly, one of the ways to do that effectively can be to slip back in time slightly at the beginning of each new installment, so the end of Section X and the beginning of Section Y tell the same moment in time, and overlap.
Jeff Lemire does that for every single transition in Descender, Vol. 5: Rise of the Robots, which I’m taking as a sign that he’s stomping his foot down on the gas and charging towards an ending in the not-too-distant future.
(I might as well throw in links to my posts on the earlier books, for those of you who are lost or just want more details: one
and two
and three
and four
.)
If you haven’t read Descender before, it’s soft-ish medium-future SF (intelligent but not godlike AI, some kind of unexplained FTL, various alien species, a galactic scope) in which planetoid-sized robot “Harvesters” appeared mysteriously about a generation ago, killed a large proportion of the organic sentients in the galaxy, and then went away. Since then, the robots created by those sentients have mostly been hunted and destroyed, for understandable if not strictly logical reasons.
(It’s a second cousin of the Butlerian Jihad, I suppose.)
Our main characters are on the human/robot interface: one special robot boy who was in hibernation since the attacks, the man who was his human companion as a boy, the roboticist that created that robot boy. Plus, of course, a larger cast of soldiers and schemers and killers on all sides of the conflicts — what was a fairly unified, advanced multi-species civilization shattered into a dozen or more nastier shards in the aftermath of that attack.
And it’s all coming to a head now: the Harvesters may be coming back, the local robots have definitely organized and are ready for their own counter-pogrom, and more individual acts of violence are also happening quickly.
Descender is a strong, somewhat space-operatic comic, a little more conventional and action-oriented than I’d expect from Jeff Lemire — but, then again, I’ve never read his Big Two work. It shows every sign of having a real ending, and to be barreling at top speed towards that ending. It’s good stuff: if you like SF, you should check it out.
I don’t want to call Multiple Warheads just a stoner comic — for one thing, I’m about as far from a stoner as you can get, and I like it quite a bit. But there’s a definite free-and-easy, anything-goes vibe to it that will appeal to the cannabis-inclined among us.
Brandon Graham started Multiple Warheads as a sex comic — I was surprised, several years later, when reading the first collection
to find that hardcore-sex scene embedded in the middle of it — but it mutated after that first story into something less gonad-centric [1], a medium-future amble through what seems to be the radically changed former USSR, full of weird technology and various kinds of sapient creatures and lots of dodgy schemes and little-to-no effective government.
After a hiatus, Graham came back with a second cluster of Multiple Warheads stories over the past year or so, and those were collected this summer as Multiple Warheads, Vol. 2: Ghost Town. (The cover seems to make that last bit “Ghostown,” but I think that’s just Graham’s design-style, which leans heavily on punny misspellings and similar wordplay.)
Our main couple, Sexica and Nikoli, are on an extended journey: Sexica is delivering “the warhead” somewhere for a reason that I don’t think was deeply explained in the first volume and definitely isn’t here. They’re “on vacation,” as they put it — Nikoli is definitely away from his usual work, though Sexica’s stealing and sneaking is the kind of thing she can do a bit of no matter where she is.
And so she does.
She connects with some people — both bipedal, neither anything like human, which is par for the course in Multiple Warheads — who want to get into a “wizard’s lair” to retrieve something ancient and valuable. Meanwhile, Nikoli wanders around, get roped into doing some mechanic work, and has a surprising transformation near the end. The staff of the place (hotel?) where they’re staying and the intersecting dancers at a club where Sexica has a meeting with her new partners also get some featured scenes — the whole thing is loose and flowing, with an extensive cast who have complicated interrelationships.
Graham presents this all a bit sideways: he is fond of puns and wordplay, and that comes up in dialogue and the names of things (the restaurant All’s Whale That Ends Whale, one guess as to the main ingredient; a local bodega-ish place is the Manticorner) as well as in labels and other “throwaway” text. So this is a world full of wordplay, where things are named quirkily and those quirks are important.
Ghost Town is, at its core, a caper story — assemble the small team of experts, learn the secrets of what they’re trying to do, and watch them go do it — but there’s a lot of other stuff going on around that. Graham gives Multiple Warheads an everyday, lived-in feeling: his world may be a weird mix of technology and what looks like magic, and his people may look like anything and everything, but they’re all still people, trying to make it through their days and get back to the ones they care about.
Despite the big caper stuff, Ghost Town is quieter than the first volume: there’s a lot here that could potentially have been overly dramatic, but that’s not how Graham plays it.
Multiple Warheads is an intricate delight, full of tiny details and silly sidebars. Each page is a moment to be savored…though some, occasionally, almost need to be decoded. This is definitely not a comic for everyone, but its joys are real, deep, and unique.
[1] Though the sex scene is still completely in continuity, and is referenced on the first story page here — the fact that Sexica got a werewolf penis through her nefarious activity and sewed it onto her boyfriend Nikoli is central to a lot of Multiple Warheads in general and Ghost Town in particular.
What do you do with the quirky minor failures of a major creator?
Well, you can ignore them, and that’s what happens most of the time. You can also try to spiff them up a bit, and get them walking two by two, in hopes that they’ll look more impressive in company. If the creator is major enough and his backlist extensive enough, you might find yourself doing that.
In this case, you did — if “you” are DC Comics and “the creator” is writer and self-proclaimed chaos magician Grant Morrison. And you probably made a bit of money out of it, which is the whole point of the exercise.
But these are still quirky minor failures, even twenty-five years later, and perhaps at this remove even more clearly show Morrison’s characteristic failure modes: a reliance on high concepts even when they don’t make narrative sense, a tropism to stylishness as an end in itself, an unwillingness to actually explain anything that might make his worlds actually plausible, provocative dialogue that neither sounds like human beings talking nor has any solid meaning, and, above all else, the love of flash over substance.
The book is Sebastian O/The Mystery Play. The two things collected are 1993’s three-issue alternate-Victorian serial-killer [1] frivolity drawn by Steve Yeowell (who also did the much better Zenith with Morrison) and the 1994 spooky, sophomorically “philosophical” bad detective story graphic novel drawn by Jon J Muth (who later fled comics for illustrating children’s books, possibly because of tripe like this).
Both of them are stylish in their own ways; both are entertaining on their own levels. Both also fail on basic levels of plausibility, much like other Morrison works up to his famous JLA run. So maybe his fans will love these oddball early-90s stories, but I tend to think they’re not the right kind of weird — no superheroes, not set in a cool version of the modern world, not obviously transgressive.
Sebastian O is set in a steampunky alternate-Vistorian world that doesn’t seem to have any real reason to be alternate. The title character, a melange of Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and Jack the Ripper, is supposedly a genius, but we only see him run around, murder people, and talk about his clothes. He escapes from jail at the beginning of the story, where he was incarcerated for what seem like vague and trumped-up “being gay and subversive” reasons. We readers would thus be on his side, if not for the randomly violent ways he does escape, and rampages through the secret gay-cult society that apparently betrayed him.
I say “gay,” because the narrative makes that clear, though in the usual Mauve Decade euphemisms. But neither Sebastian nor the people he chases show much affection for anyone who is not themselves, and their choice of sexual partners is not particularly important for this thriller-chase plot. Like so many Morrison stories, it seems like an affectation or a signpost rather than anything intrinsic to the story.
Anyway, Sebastian murders his way out of prison, murders his way through his former friends, and finds the fiend behind the whole thing, who frankly seems somewhat unpleasant but not nearly as bad as Sebastian. There is a Shocking Revelation at the end, which, as often with Morrison, doesn’t actually make any sense, and which is ignored anyway. So we’re left with the story of the murderous rampage of a Victorian dandy — if you’re looking for that, you are in luck.
The Mystery Play is more sedate and grounded. The small Yorkshire city of Townley, struggling for whatever reason, is putting on a large-scale production of traditional medieval mystery plays for the Christmas season, dramatizing what seems like most of the Bible for the entertainment of tourists. On the night of the debut of the first play, someone murders the actor playing God.
And, yes, every single person in Townley who talks about this event afterward refers to this as “the death of God.” Not the death of a prominent local doctor, who they all knew, but an amateur acting part that he just took and died in the middle of. And it is Ontologically Important to every single one of them. Morrison’s greasy thumb is particularly prominent with this element, and it overwhelms the entire story.
A single Detective Sergeant is sent from vaguely somewhere else, with no driver and no lines of reporting back to his superiors and no paperwork and no connections to the local coppers. This is of course A Whopping Great Clue, and only the dimmest readers will miss it. It’s also entirely stupid, and wouldn’t actually work for more than five seconds, even before “Detective Sergeant Frank Carpenter” spends all of his time in philosophical musings about God and the Devil.
Eventually, there is another play performed “on-stage” in the story, and it of course is the very end of the mystery cycle, in which Jesus is crucified. Nudge nudge wink wink!
It’s unfortunate that the story is such bullshit, because Muth delivers stunning work here — moody painted pages with stunningly real faces, a fantastic mix of levels of abstraction. Every single page here is absolutely gorgeous, and a masterpiece of the comics art. Shame about the words thrown on top, though.
So Sebastian O is an answer to the question “What if Oscar Wilde was a man of action?” and The Mystery Play similar investigates “What if God were killed during a mystery play?” Neither of those are particularly good questions, and Morrison’s attempts to imbue them with deep meaning fall flat. This is probably why they were quietly out of print for much of the last twenty-five years, and why they will probably slip back into that abyss once the stock of this 2017 omnibus are depleted. Morrison has some little-known gems in his backlist — I mentioned Zenith before, also with Yeowell, for one example — but these are not among them.
[1] Morrison’s main character is a serial killer, and a deeply unrepentant one. Some of the people he kills “deserve it,” but he’s also happy to just slaughter anyone in his way. Since he’s incredibly shallow otherwise, it’s the defining characteristic of his personality.
