Posts Tagged bookslut
Outtakes: Matt Fraction
Over at Bookslut this month, I forego my usual column for an epic interview with writer Matt Fraction about the return of his comic Casanova. It’s amazing what a difference it makes when someone happily gives you over an hour to chat instead of the twenty minutes common to film and TV interviews. I hope you agree.
As always, there was plenty we talked about that didn’t make the final cut, mostly because I try to keep my Bookslut stuff from becoming too seeped in superheroes. (I fail at this with embarrassing regularity.)
Here’s a little more of our conversation about comics as cinema, accelerated storytelling, his superhero writing on Iron Man and Fear Itself, and his appreciation of Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis.
One thing I admire about Casanova is its crazy economy of storytelling. And that’s one reason why I can’t imagine Casanova: The Movie – unless it was something like Total Recall was to Philip K. Dick. Casanova feels more comic-specific than, maybe, your superhero stuff. Would you agree?
I hope not. I think that’d mean the superhero stuff fails on some level.
Perhaps it’s just that your Iron Man seems born out of the Robert Downey Jr. take on the character.
That’s an illusion of publication schedule. I had four or five issues in the can when the first film came out. I had no special access; I saw the trailer when everybody else saw the trailer.
So why does Iron Man feel more ‘cinematic’ to me than Casanova?
I think that’s the grammar of superhero comics right now – or, rather, it was when I came in. Over this last year, from issue #500, Iron Man’s started to change. You can see the pages changing, the density change. As Fear Itself came along it kind of had to grow backwards a little bit, but you’ll see change coming out the other side. That’s my own proclivities as much as anything else. That was the grammar – or the accent, maybe – of the language that superhero comics were speaking. Three, four panel pages.
I got a really fascinating note from Joe Quesada on the first issue of Fear Itself: that I write so close to the bone, I carve away so much, we had a 48-page event that read like a 22-page comic. And that was a problem. I’d cut away so much in the interest of keeping things super-accelerated that I’d crossed the threshold and he found it too brisk. Fear Itself #1 is huge. It’s a big comic where a lot of things happen. It’s not slight – it’s lean. So I did a draft where I went back and added, which I hardly ever do, you know? And he was absolutely right. It was an incredibly trenchant observation. My natural instinct is to cut away, cut and cut and cut, until acceleration is almost a character.
It’s funny that in blockbuster crossover comics like Fear Itself – or Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis – you get to have an economy that you mightn’t in regular titles. They deal with so many characters, so much appearing on every page…
Final Crisis is a great example. Look at what Morrison cut out, and look at the backlash that particular book received. Now, I’ve studied Final Crisis like the Torah. I love it for what’s not there as much as for what is there. I suspect that’s why people wail and bitch and moan that they don’t get it, they don’t understand it. Never mind the inherent absurdity they can keep track of, say, thirty years of Legion continuity or four series of Star Trek or thirteen different Doctors Who – but a single Grant Morrison comic that doesn’t take the time to point out that those are Eclipso Gems? It somehow causes paroxysms of confusion and rage.
You can read the rest of the interview at Bookslut.
Superman For Everybody
Has there ever been an industry that treated its founding fathers as badly as comic books? And what would their superheroic creations think of these injustices?
This month, my Bookslut column looks at some of the grand ironies of corporate-owned superheroes. It barely scratches the surface, and there were a dozen other half-formed ideas and outrages that didn’t make it into the finished version.
The letter that inspired me – Joanne Siegel’s angry response to the chairman of Time Warner – can be read in full here. And in his book Our Hero: Superman on Earth, Tom DeHaven describes how Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel’s fury with DC Comics had begun decades earlier:
In October 1975 he sat down at his old typewriter and composed a screed of malice and grief, a cry for recognition and justice, and a thundering imprecation: “I, Jerry Siegel,” it began, “the co-originator of SUPERMAN, put a curse on the SUPERMAN movie! I hope it super-bombs. I hope loyal SUPERMAN fans stay away from it in droves. I hope the whole world, becoming aware of the stench that surrounds SUPERMAN, will avoid the movie like a plague.
Want more? The long history of court cases involving comic creators is summarised in this massively depressing article by Paul Slade.
(There’s an intriguing theory towards the end, too, wondering why we’re seeing more and more comics of Superman in black-and-white variations of his costume. Warner won a legal victory over an early monotone ad showing a preview of the famous cover of Action Comics #1 – so is DC now “already preparing for a world where it may wish to minimise any aspect of Superman it doesn’t fully own”?)
The Comics Reporter added some welcome comments to my piece:
Mainstream comics publishers such as DC and their communities have ascribed a real-world moral authority to these fictional characters for years now. Why shouldn’t that extend to broader ethical issues involved in their creation, publication and distribution? If Superman, Batman and Spider-Man are presented at times as moral agents capable of instructing and inspiring their readership, why wouldn’t the expectations they engender apply to a situation where the press of ownership concerns has taken precedence over the greater morality represented by treating people with compassion and gratitude?
And for some ideas of how public domain superheroes have always existed in the Marvel and DC universes, check out this piece on IO9, inspired by the release of Marvel’s new movie Thor. Of course, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s smash hit The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen forged a Justice League-style supergroup from famous fictional characters from around the turn of last century: Stoker’s Mina Harker, Wells’ Invisible Man, and so on. I wonder if we’d ever see something similar combining characters from Marvel, DC, and whoever-the-hell-else in a hundred years.
For my money, Moore’s best work on Superman wasn’t when he was writing the official version for DC Comics. It was when he was working with an obvious knock-off – still Superman, just with the colours changed and logo filed off – in Supreme. Imagine if he’d been able to tell these stories with the real thing. Wouldn’t they have meant more?
Writing this piece, I found it painfully difficult to reconcile this history with the unbridled optimism that powers the best superhero stories; with my childlike love of these characters and their worlds. I kept thinking of the court case over Flex Mentallo, Grant Morrison’s “Hero of the Beach!” from the pages of Doom Patrol. In the court’s ruling over the character’s copyright, it highlighted a particular line from the background material provided by DC Comics. It said that Flex “…represents Morrison’s argument for a space beyond critique”.
A space beyond critique: pure optimism, pure altruism, pure imagination.
Do You Deserve That Hardcover?
“Earlier this year, my publisher informed me that my book 32 Stories was about to go out of print. “Thank god! Finally!” I replied, a wave of euphoria and relief washing over me.”
That’s Adrian Tomine talking about the last collection of his early Optic Nerve mini-comics. Now Drawn & Quarterly – the publishers holding the title for the best / worst pun in the business – have released a new version of the same work.
I don’t want to talk about the stories. I want to talk about the packaging. (I’m shallow like that.) Because now instead of a fancy book, they’ve been collected as loose facsimiles of the original photocopied comics in a brown cardboard box.
Tomine explains why in his new introduction:
“But it’s not just the content of the book that makes me cringe. It’s the book itself. The format – the very thing that tempted me in the first place – seems too professional, too aggrandizing for the material. […] Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like there’s a different criteria that we apply to a little Xeroxed pamphlet versus a fancy-pants book, and in the translation from one iteration to the other, these comics of mine suffered.”
If you want to go back and read his early work, Tomine wants them read right. It could be seen as an annoying, pre-emptive apology: like a first year creative writing student standing up before the class and beginning their reading with a mumbled uh it’s not very good so uh you know.
But I think it’s genius. It illustrates the importance of context. Some films are perfectly charming and engaging, but stagger under the weight of too much acclaim. Everyone’s had a perfectly good album ruined by the expectations of oh-my-god-dude-best-album-ever hype, right?
Now let’s look at the exact opposite impulse. Marvel and DC’s determination to throw more and more of their comic book runs into giant, deluxe, slipcased hardcovers. I wrote about this over at Bookslut:
“More and more comic series are now reprinted in collections for your reading convenience. Not just paperbacks; oversized ‘collector’s editions’ with recoloured art and thicker paper between embossed hardcovers. You don’t have to be a cynic to suspect these editions are a way to let older, cashed-up fans repurchase their favourites – and to help justify their habit with handsome, not-for-kids, objets d’art.”
Some of these stories can support this new weight of greater expectation, but others seem vaguely ridiculous. It’s the contextual equivalent of seeing teenage boys forced into ill-fitting formalware.
It’s like the old equation: the more pretentious the literary quote in the front of a horror novel, the more terrible that novel will be. Many of these comics are perfectly fine – good, great even – for monthly adventures. But collected all important like this? It brings their flaws into focus.
There’s another side-effect, too. Remember in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, when Mace (Angela Basset) is trying to shake some sense into Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) about his addiction to the past? “Memories are meant to fade,” she says. “They’re designed that way for a reason.”
Comic book continuity works the same way. I’ve spoken about this before, but I admit I’m still thinking through the ramifications. Superheroes need to be able to forget, otherwise continuity stumbles under the weight of their backcatalogue. It becomes an unpleasant tangle of personal tragedies and pointless minutia – and requires an endless stream of cosmic reboots that can hurt more than help.
How do you balance this, though, with the pleasures of a shared superhero universe? That’s a big part of the fun of Marvel or DC; and an even bigger part of what makes superhero comics a unique literary artform.
For superhero writers, it’s both blessing and curse. Knowing your work will be collected, rather than disappearing off the shelf of popular memory, means you’ll try harder to create quality that’ll pass the test of time. However, it also seems to encourage some of the worst tendencies in comics – especially the urge to produce stories based on tiny details of past narratives, designed to resonate only with a rapidly aging fanbase.
As much as it pains what’s left of my collector’s heart to say it, I think that some stories work best when read, thoroughly enjoyed, and then remembered as half-forgotten background noise.
Enough Fidelity Already
My first piece as comic book columnist for the literary site Bookslut is now online. It’s about the successful adaptation of prose into sequential art, and you can read it over here. (It’s kind of long. I’ll wait. Pack sandwiches.)
I begin with a mention of Slate’s Sarah Boxer and her fury over an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 – one she found to be an “extended, ironic, illustrated joke.” While I happily admit that many adaptations are god-awful, I say that:
“…her hilarious complaint that ‘…the text is almost always shortened to make way for pictures’ suggests that she either doesn’t understand the difference between an illustrated book and sequential art, or doesn’t understand the concept of ‘redundancy’.”
It turns out, however, that there’s a title being released that will make her day: a new adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Boom! Studios. The art is solid, the story well-deserved of its status as a sci-fi classic, and its first collected edition has already been listed as essential reading. Inside, it proudly announces that it is the “complete text” of the novel, just “presented in graphic form”.
What does that mean? It means, bizarrely, you’ll see panels like this one from issue #3:
We see Rachael examine her wristwatch, next to narration explaining that she examined her wristwatch. We see that it’s Eldon Rosen who says “Half an hour”, but the speech balloon with its little attributive tail is supplanted by more narration explaining that, yes, he’s the one who said it, all right.
I have no idea what’s gained in this strange hybrid, except for the right to boast that nothing’s been cut from the book. Why not just publish a version of the novel with handsome illustrations on every second page? If you really want to be redundant, why not print all the dialogue twice: once in a text box, and once in a word balloon?
Fidelity can go too far.
Ask Zack Snyder. The fact that he was so visually faithful to the source material when adapting Frank Miller’s 300 won him many fans – but his determination to keep the comics’ narration left the film with an often pointless voiceover, explaining things we could already see. Much of the pre-film hype around his next movie, Watchmen, was pitched to placate fans of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s comic with the fact that it ‘looked’ just the same as it did on the page.
If you find yourself eavesdropping online on a superhero-casting discussion – you know, which actor should play who – you’ll find that most fans seem to be basing their choices on who looks right, and acting ability be damned. (This is why these casting discussions always seem to have a lot of professional wrestlers in the mix.) Do we really want nothing more than to see movies that are comic books forced into motion?
Say what you will about the Watchmen film, but it delivered that in spades. Its blu-ray release features Snyder giving a guided tour of every last detail he embedded in each frame. Maybe Vanity Fair was right, and Snyder “love[d] Watchmen too much” to make a truly successful movie.
Any adaptation requires massive change. One medium is astonishingly different from the next. Too much fidelity to the source material can result in weird redundancy at worst, but even the best case tends to be a dreary, paint-plot-points-by-numbers slog. (I’m looking at you, Chris Columbus’ Harry Potter films!)
If you really crave an adaptation that’s exactly the same as the source material, you know what’s perfectly faithful to the book?
The book.