Posts Tagged comics
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.
The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.
Inside the building at 372 5th Avenue Brooklyn, there’s a secret door. (I won’t say where because it’s a secret.) Behind it, there’s a large room where children sit and finish their homework, get help from tutors, or embark on ambitious extracurricular creative writing projects. When I visited, posters from their most recent batch of films were hanging around the walls. This is 826NYC.
Others have explained the make-you-all-warm-inside, bring-a-tear-to-your-eye, maybe-the-kids-will-be-alright-after-all charity work done at 826 National. There are seven locations around America, each fronted with its own theme. San Francisco has the Pirate Supply Store, Los Angeles has the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, and Chicago’s Boring Store does not sell spy equipment for secret agents. No sir.
But it’s the Brooklyn store that also houses the Superhero Supply Co., providing everything a young superhero needs to combat neighbourhood evil. As the sensibly-lettered sign outside says: “Costumes. Eyewear. Invisibility. Instruction Manuals. Dastardly plots will be foiled. Underground lairs will be found. ‘Ever vigilant, ever true.’”
There are X-ray goggles, wrist-communicators, industrial strength suction-caps, and secret identity kits – in case you need extra documentation to prove that you’re actually Ruben Fletcher, 46, an appliance salesman from Iowa City. There are other products that are a little more conceptual, too, just a jug of pure chaos from Bugayenko Laboratories.
There’s a selection of capes – and a cape-tester to see how it looks billowing dramatically behind you – and a Devillianizer machine in case you need to work on those occasional villainous tendencies.
I love the attention to detail, the utterly convincing graphic design, and the quips scattered around the store for those who are paying attention. (“Please ask a clerk for assistance with products on the higher shelves. Do not levitate, hover, or stretch.”) I love that you’re required to give your superhero name and recite the Vow of Heroism before leaving the store with your purchases. They frown on irony, too, so be prepared to say it with gusto.
Most of all, I love how democratic it all is. Too much fantasy seems to requires that its heroes are born special. Secret royalty; chosen one after chosen one; you know the drill. The division between who’s worthy and who’s not seems impossibly wide. Once you’re one, you can never be the other. Batman and Iron Man might be self-made heroes, but they’re the exceptions – and still chosen by tragedy. If you want superpowers just to help people, have fun, and save the world? You haven’t earned them. Look at anyone who takes Mutant Growth Hormone (in the Marvel Universe) or joins Lex Luthor’s Everyman Project (over at DC). It never seems to end well.
It’s also what made me wary of Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, even though I rank his earlier Iron Giant as one of my all-time favourite movies. It’s difficult to root for the stars when you know you’re just one of the mundane many who are holding them back from their heroic destinies.
I’m more of a sucker for the end of the good-hearted and much-maligned Mystery Men from 1999. The last thing these misfit heroes do in their film is assure everyone out there that they too have got what it takes:
“I think we would all like this victory to go out to all the other guys… and I’m talking about the people in this city who are super-good at their jobs, but never get any credit. Like the lady in the DMV. That’s a rough job.”
“For the people that remember jingles from tons of old commercials!”
“And for people who support local music and seek out independent film.”
Besides, at the Superhero Supply Co., they don’t look down on you just because you can’t fly. You don’t have to cross your fingers and hope that you were born special. Why wait for an origin story? Go and get one!
You might have to cough up some spare change for the gadgets and tights out the front, but it’s all to raise money for 826NYC’s free programs out back – and that means just by wanting to become a superhero, you’ve already made the world a better place.
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.
Crooked Little Vein: Warren Ellis, without pictures
It’s always interesting when comic book writers attempt a first novel. It starkly shows the differences between writing comic books and writing prose. Even Neil Gaiman – and I’m a fan, don’t get me wrong – seemed to overwrite in his early novels, compensating for the lack of pictures on the page; it’s why his stripped-back kids(ish) novels like Coraline started strongest.
Now that Warren Ellis (of Transmetropolitan, The Authority, and a frankly ridiculous amount of others) has written his first novel, Crooked Little Vein. What’s it like? It’s exactly what you’d expect. Swearing, smoking, sexual perversions, hyperbolic insults, characters popping up to mention facts from New Scientist – Ellis draws from a well-worn box of writing tools. If you’re a fan, you might say his unique style is never less than bitingly memorable. If you’re not, you might say he’s been mining the same material for too long with diminishing results.
(I’m somewhere between the two: I enjoy most of his writing, but find myself drawn more to his ideas than his execution, and like him more when he’s not playing for laughs. There’s no denying, though, that Crooked Little Vein contains its fair share of extremely lovely sentences.)
Working with different artists gives comic writers a sense of variety that the writing itself mightn’t earn, kind-of-but-not-really like a screenwriter’s work being filmed by different directors. The fact that this is a prose novel provides an automatic gulf of difference from the rest of Ellis’ comic book writing.
For one, comics are separate from ‘photographic’ reality – something we can match more easily to our everyday experience – because they’re drawn. Academic David Carrier calls this the “aggressive caricature” inherent in comic book art. It’s part of the reason why superhero comics are able to be so spectacularly insane without batting an eyelid. I mean that in the best possible way.
Combine that with the fact that Crooked Little Vein is somewhat set in the ‘real’ world – without the leeway provided by Transmetropolian‘s future, or The Authority‘s heroes-become-gods, or even X-Men‘s Marvel Universe madness – and Ellis has to jump through conceptual hoops to justify his book’s narrative oddness. Exhibit A: McGill, the battered, Chandleresque private eye protagonist, says that he’s attracted weirdness all his life:
McGill’s mission takes him on a journey through various strange American subcultures, giving Ellis leeway to explore his usual filthy interests. (Most memorably: Godzilla bukakkeists.) Ellis pushes this logic further, however, and sharpens the premise of Crooked Little Vein to a point that could summarise his whole career so far.
He suggests that there’s no longer such things as a subculture any more. Everything – every perversion, every obsession, and therefore every subject that Ellis finds fascinating – now sits on the surface of society. As he puts it in the quick author interview filling the back pages, “This is how life really is lived in America, no matter what the news tells you.”
What better way to justify the whole world as his particular literary playground?