Martyn Pedler

CRITICAL SURVEY OF GRAPHIC NOVELS: DOOM PATROL

Writing on Grant Morrison and Richard Case’s Doom Patrol for the new Salem Press reference collection, 2012.

Perhaps the major theme throughout Morrison and Case’s Doom Patrol is best summed up by Cliff in issue #21: “Is this real or isn’t it?” The Doom Patrol face threats from extra-dimensional or imaginary worlds, and Cliff regularly expresses confusion caused by these events, wishing for more traditional superheroic adventures. Much of Doom Patrol serves to praise imagination and creativity. As the Doom Patrol fight villains from various other realities, they must use creative, untraditional means to defeat them such as logic puzzles or William Burroughs’ cut-up technique. The hero Flex Mentallo is comes to life from the pages of a child’s comic book, and Dorothy uses an “imaginary gun” to fight imaginary enemies.

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Read more on Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: Heroes and Superheroes.

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GRIFF THE INVISIBLE AND THE LEAGUE OF DELUSIONAL SUPERHEROES

Discussing everyman superheroes in Special, Defendor, Kick Ass, and Griff the Invisible  for Metro Magazine #168, 2011.

Griff the Invisible (Leon Ford, 2010) boldly announces itself as a superhero story. We see Griff (Ryan Kwanten) running towards the audience, opening his shirt to reveal the costume beneath, mimicking the pose made famous by Superman. He performs a monologue about a promise he made “to rid this city of evil”, saying that “it’s not a choice. It’s a responsibility” – echoing Spider-Man and his adopted creed “with great power comes great responsibility”. Griff also speaks to the city’s police commissioner on a bright red telephone, just like Adam West regularly did as Batman on the cult 1960s Batman TV show. 

Despite Griff successfully preventing a mugging, it’s also obvious that he isn’t a traditional superhero. He’s not an alien, mutant, or tortured billionaire. He lives in a tiny Sydney flat and collects his crime-fighting supplies from the local hardware store. His well-meaning if patronising brother, Tim (Patrick Brammall), wants Griff to give up his strange adventures. Griff isn’t even sure of his own superhero identity, and practices variations at home, such as “Griff the… Defender!” and “Griff the… Hidden!” Griff seems to belong to the legion of cinematic superheroes memorably described by The Shoveller in the parodic Mystery Men (Kinka Usher, 1999): “We’re not your classic heroes. We’re the other guys.”

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Read more about Metro Magazine.

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OUR HERO: SUPERMAN ON EARTH

Reviewing Tom De Haven’s contribution to “Icons of America” for Screening The Past #28, 2010.

The final chapter of Tom De Haven’s 2005 novel, It’s Superman, begins like this: “And here, at last, is the point where our version of the story merges with all of the others…” (p. 424) It is a self-aware admission that what he has written – an emotional period piece of Clark Kent’s super-powered youth during the 1930s – is only one of tens of thousands of stories about Superman since his first appearance. Now De Haven has written a non-fiction addendum of sorts to his novel in Our Hero: Superman On Earth, part of the Icons of America series for Yale University Press. De Haven knows that heroes like Superman have become such a part of popular consciousness that many will know the basics of Superman’s story, be it from film, TV, childhood comics, or other unconsciously-absorbed references. He also knows the same holds true for Superman’s basic subtexts.

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Read the rest.

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FAKE POLITICS FOR THE REAL AMERICA

Frost/Nixon, W., Milk and the 2008 US Election in Metro Magazine #160, 2009. This essay won the 2009 Australian Film Critics Association Award for ‘Writing on Non-Australian Film’.

“It was an election night like none other,” crowed CNN. “In addition to the obvious – the selection of the nation’s first black president – Tuesday night’s coverage on CNN showcased groundbreaking technology.” Host Wolf Blitzer conducted interviews via hologram, ringed with a blue, sci-fi aura – an aura intentionally added to “avoid confusion” with the real hosts. Days later, it was revealed that these weren’t actual holograms, just effects visible to those watching at home.

It’s a perfect summation of the ways in which reality was framed and reframed throughout the 2008 American election, used as both boasts and attacks. It saw artist Shepard Fairey boil Barack Obama down to a single image and a single word to create a “cultural phenomenon”; John McCain repeatedly demanding to know “who is the real Barack Obama?”; and Obama appearing on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart’s satirical, self-confessed “fake news” program, giving them their highest ever ratings. The US election was therefore perfect breeding ground for what Jean Baudrillard calls hyperreality: “a substitution of the signs of the real for the real itself”.

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Read the full essay at the AFCA. Or read more about Metro Magazine.

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THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE

Stasis and Speed in Contemporary Superhero Comics for Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2009.

Whether Barry Allen or his successor, Wally West, the Flash is defined by his motion. As Barry’s girlfriend once pointed out: ‘The Flash doesn’t sit around – he does things!’ (Flash #113, 1959). Yet superheroes are born into a medium that appears to consist of static images. Without the ability to show literal movement, superheroes like the Flash are instead animated by the powerful techniques employed by comic book artists to create time and motion across the page. A favourite conceptual trick is to show two panels, a millisecond apart, but between which the Flash is implied to have invisibly performed lengthy tasks; sometimes, even within a single panel, as when he says ‘Be right back’ and ‘Okay, I took a quick look’ almost at once (JLA #20, 2008). The Flash tries to put it into words: ‘Catch lightning in your hands sometime. Spend a month between the ticks of a second and tell me what noise you hear when you crack the sound barrier’ (Flash #80, 1993).

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More on the ‘Comics and Animation’ issue.

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MORRISON’S MUSCLE MYSTERY…

…Versus Everyday Reality… and Other Parallel Worlds! in The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero anthology, 2009.

Despite my childhood wishes to the contrary, I live in the real world. It’s no Metropolis. The skyline is free of flying men or flashes of inexplicable light. I wonder: do all comic fans, deep down, believe that superheroes are real? As a child – and yeah, probably as a teenager too – I rationalized their absence. They were missing from the real world, but there must have been another world in which they’re as real as you or me. A parallel world. A possible future. An ‘Earth-2′.

These are the same ideas that populate the superhero comics of writer Grant Morrison. In his work on Animal Man (1988-90), the Doom Patrol (1989-93), Flex Mentallo (1996), and even the Justice League of America (1997-2000), the heroes face the difficulties of these other realities that encroach upon their own, with surreal, ludicrous, and terrifying results. They are threats that cannot be solved with heat-vision, repulsor rays, or a swift right hook. Worst of all – what happens when the alternative reality is actually our reality, out here in the so-called real world? Can any hero remain intact when faced with our mundane bodies, physics, and colour schemes?

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More information at Routledge.

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THE TEARS OF DOCTOR DOOM

Looking at comic book superheroes battling the mainstream for Overland magazine, 2008.

It’s May 2007 in New York City. There are rare comic books on display in the New York Public Library. Central Park Zoo holds special Spider-Man location tours. Urban poets compose superhero-themed raps at the Apollo Theatre. The mayor appears on breakfast television to officially declare ‘Spider-Man Week’. The celebration centres on the premiere of Sam Raimi’s blockbuster Spider-Man 3 in Peter Parker’s home town of Queens, filling the borough with celebrities like the movie’s star, Tobey Maguire, alongside public displays of superhero iconography and posters reading “A Hero Comes Home”. It’s a major shift from the subcultural niche that comic fans once inhabited. In their song ‘Can U Dig It?’, Pop Will Eat Itself – a 1990s group with a name that already sounded Baudrillardian – used lines like “We dig Marvel and DC” and “Alan Moore knows the score” as subcultural slang, gaining credibility with those familiar with comics culture. How could the band have guessed that comics auteur Alan Moore would become sufficiently famous to guest-star on The Simpsons?

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More on Overland Magazine.

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STRAW MAN AND OTHER SUPERHEROES

A response to Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics for The Valve‘s online symposium, 2008.

Right now, respectable graphic novels are winning enough awards that it’s no longer shocking, and superheroes loom larger than ever in the popular imagination. Douglas Wolk’s book Reading Comics straddles both extremes of comic-bound stories. One of the pleasures of the book is his wide analytical sweep – from Tomb of Dracula to David B. to Grant Morrison to Cerebus the Aardvark. It’s wide enough that Wolk interrogates himself about exactly what he will and won’t include, creating a handily-labelled ‘Straw Man’ who asks questions like: “Have you noticed that that’s mostly a description of what you’re not writing about?” I don’t doubt the need to clarify this point, as defining what the hell ‘comics’ actually are is a herculean task. I do find it interesting that the first section of Reading Comics shares so much in common with Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and that the authors of both books build themselves straw men with which to argue.

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Read the full text.

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SUFFERING AND SERIALITY

A paper on ‘Memory, Continuity, and Trauma in Monthly Superhero Adventures’, presented at the Media In Transition 5 international conference at M.I.T., April 27-29, 2007.

A respectable bookshop stocking nicely-bound superhero stories on their shelves is a recent occurrence. Comic fandom used to be a very different beast: collections composed of individual issues, mostly 20 or so pages a piece, sometimes glossy, sometimes not, fastened with a pair of ordinary staples. It’s hard to imagine any book held together so haphazardly. And this kind of collection is heavy. Do the math. A long-running daily soap opera might show the equivalent of around 1300 feature films in a ten year run. For superheroes like Batman and Superman, who have been fighting crime monthly for over half a century each, the equations are more complicated. At times they had one monthly comic; at other times, over five monthly titles, a generous handful of miniseries, guest cameos in others’ adventures, and ensemble roles in the Justice League of America, all at once. Thousands and thousands and thousands of pages. Imagine the weight of it. Imagine all the punches thrown, battles won, and worlds saved. Imagine all the lives lost along the way.

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