Waste Not
Doc Nebula spun a post off another article concerning, essentially, Must-Read Comics. (An article he'd been pointed to by Tony Collett.) As my casual reply (left in the Comments there) ran on longer than a comment likely should I've decided to post it here, too. Why? It feels as if I'm getting more mileage out of it - it's been a while since I've written anything about the medium - and maybe it'll help nudge me closer to writing something about comics recently bought and read.
For the most part this is a comment on Doc's entry, and so will make references accordingly. I may take five minutes to make it slightly more friendly to someone just reading this part, but no more than that.
I continue to resist coming up with a Top 8, 10 or 100 list of comics, knowing that my tastes shift over time and I almost always tailor recommended reading lists to the person I'm addressing. So it is that I won't be attempting to make up such a list here.
That said, I'm with you on Miller's work on Daredevil - both on the Born Again arc being generally better than his first bit of major continuity surgery on DD, and on Batman: Year One being the superior work.
Still, what bothered me about Born Again were the Roman Catholic elements (in this tale, specifically, laying the groundwork by having his mother turn up as being alive and now a Catholic nun), which I don't so much immediately fault Miller for as I do find it immensely regrettable because it's just the sort of horseshit that seems to almost inevitably attract Kevin Smith. Smith's work on the character years later rendered Matt Murdock/DD almost unrecognizeable to me save for the visuals and name references. Ghastly stuff. But, hey -- "fan favorite" stuff, so what do I know? (I like many of Smith's movies and hope his Reaper series survives the writer's strike and ratings to go on for a while, but nothing I've read from him in comics was a happy time for me. Maybe I should have looked at his Green Arrow series since, frankly, I've never really given much of a crap about Ollie Queen.)
I was fine with Alan Moore's Swamp Thing past the point you were (beyond the protracted American Gothic arc), enjoying both him being exiled from Earth's "green" via the last creation of the Silver Age Lex Luthor (still a scientific genius in his own rights, and not the less-hefty financial Kingpin John Byrne had remade him as at DC's behest in '85) and aspects of Swampy's space journey as he slowly learned how to control his frequency and eventually be able to return to Earth. It's been years, though, and I'm not sure how the re-reading would go.
My sense of the decline of Busiek and Ross' Marvels beyond the first couple issues was due to the source material. The broad, grand, strokes and generally underpopulated landscape of the Golden Age worked. The dense, character- and event-rich Silver Age -- well, that could have sustained over more issues than they did, but I understand the pacing they were shooting for. However, after that the characters focused on and their stories (largely Spider-man) were from a far less satisfying period. (There may be some shakiness there in our interpretations as I believe you roll the Silver Age into the seventies while I tend to go with the more traditional 1970/Kirby-lights-out-for-DC endpoint, not bothering to come up with an era tag for the next wave as Stan largely faded out and more voices than Roy's were heard from.)
Really, once Gwen and Norman were done in (and, actually, for most of the previous couple years) Spidey (especially Amazing Spider-man)really hit the skids despite him going on to star in more monthly books than ever.
I think Kurt had a problem at the point of reaching a stage where his deep fan interest in the Marvel universe had faded, even if he hadn't realized it at the time.
Bone never really impressed me, either. Passable entertainment in the very short term, but horribly over-hyped by people who should have simply viewed it as a nice little modern entry point to comics for people who didn't care for the other, prevalent genres. Repeated references I'd seen to it being reminiscent of Pogo still raise a chuckle.
I continue to think very highly of Watchmen, but years of passing it in front of newer readers has shown me that it is very much a creature of its time and only maintains its status in that bubble. The themes explored there have been so pored over and rehashed that were ground-breaking at the time have become quaint. Moreover, I've found that readers who are even just six or seven years younger than us (Doc and I are each looking at birthday #47 this year) -- much more those who are now only in their thirties or twenties -- lack the Cold War context that's so essential for the backdrop. From the U.S./Soviet tensions with the globe polarized and divided as it was, on through the nuclear clock approaching midnight -- all of that is largely lost, especially at an emotional level, on the younger reader.
I have From Hell - I can see it over on one of the bookshelves from here - and while I read it through and enjoyed it I don't believe it occur to me as something I would laud to the level you have. I certainly agree that the illustration and lettering style make it a wonderfully thematically-matched work, and it provides a fairly large, complete work, making it satisfying on that level. However, the tale's not going to be for everyone, though, and I wouldn't put it in someone's hands without noting that even the author has noted that while it's rich in details it's not intended to be an historical piece where the writer-as-historian has presented a best-case scenario for the Truth behind the Ripper murders.
Moore went with the elements that most interested him as a storyteller and worked out from there. There are already too many people out there who've read series of what are historically-placed romance novels and believe themselves to be students of history; I'd want to be careful of not adding to that delusion. Then again, Moore definitely doesn't skimp on genuine details, so they'd be better off in that respect than with those other "historical" novels.
While hardly the highest examples of graphic storytelling arts, I've been enjoying The Walking Dead, published by Image, so that's at least one Image title I enjoy.
Thusfar I've found it to be the only work by Robert Kirkman worth reading, and even then it likely has much more to do with the appeal of the genre than Kirkman's talents as a writer. His work at Marvel has been a wall to wall creative waste (though I know those miserable Marvel Zombie titles have made them a small fortune), and such charms as his Invincible holds owe more to his apparently being at heart a Silver Age Marvel fan. I suspect we'd find that we have many of the same favorites among us from that era, but his own attempts at doing the same... eh.
We're simply going to have to disagree about Avengers Forever. You've already had your say about it in at least a couple of the Martian Vision pieces as I recall. (One of them being within this piece on The Vision. I thought there was a more concentrated piece on the miniseries, and there may very well be, but I can't immediately locate it.)
When I look at it, besides seeing a very visually appealing work (thanks to Carlos Pacheco and Jesus Merion)I also see Stern and Busiek simultaneously revisiting some items of interest going back to at least Kurt's days as a fan, trying to resolve the elements they liked and those they didn't into a healed whole, and bringing it all through in an entertaining package while trying to tie it to possible future events that I imagine he/they would have liked to be in a position to explore.
In the end, that he resorted to Space Phantoms as a means of explaining some uncharacteristic/untruthful behavior for some characters simply didn't bother me anywhere near as much as it did you. I accepted it to the extent that it was used rather than damning it as a tool that others might subsequently misuse.
Certainly it wasn't a perfect solution, but a malleable mechanism for erasing some problems and at the very least effectively duct-taping the disjointed edges. I suspect more elaborate and intricate measures came to mind along the way, but they almost certainly would have resulted in having to go too far down the This Old Universe path of detailed fixes and could have resulted in the project being killed -- or at least trimmed, nullifying the attempts to make the fixes or, more likely, forcing him back down the path of coming up with another, single mechanism for explaining away continuity problems.
I'm also fairly sure that Kurt was already having to work all this past people at the editorial and above level who really would have been just as happy with simply reinventing everyone anew, keeping not much more in place than the names, powers and iconography that the boys in Marketing would demand.
In my view the attempt to reconcile the pieces, including elements he plainly didn't care for, rather than simply ignoring them and declaring they simply didn't happen, is laudable. Knowing that the story was being told by someone who not only cared about the characters but who'd actually read the stories -- my god, I only wish we had more of that in modern comics and especially at Marvel.
If Marvel's "editorial" crew had given Kurt (and, later, Geoff Johns) the creative freedom and support they've subsequently given Bendis, Millar, etc. in their various attempts, while working on Avengers, well, I'd likely be a much happier comics fan -- and more of a Marvel comics fan -- now.
Just to throw something out to consider -- not even necessarily to respond to: Kurt was approaching the characters and stories as someone looking to save as much of the past as possible as he moved forward. (His moves during the course of writing the main Avengers title, however much ignored by later writers, to heal Hank Pym's psyche, are among those I remain appreciative of, and this was part of what he was aiming at in the long term.) You, despite coming back as a reader for a while, had as a fan already buried the shredded, rotted and burned remains of Marvel Universe and held services for them years earlier. While some flicker of hope and nostalgia may have remained deep within, you'd essentially written it off as so thoroughly fouled and despoiled as to be beyond redemption. Pretty much only a jump back to some point in the mid-to-late '70s (depending on the series) and a declaration that nearly all of what had come after to never have happened really would have been enough.
Doc Nebula spun a post off another article concerning, essentially, Must-Read Comics. (An article he'd been pointed to by Tony Collett.) As my casual reply (left in the Comments there) ran on longer than a comment likely should I've decided to post it here, too. Why? It feels as if I'm getting more mileage out of it - it's been a while since I've written anything about the medium - and maybe it'll help nudge me closer to writing something about comics recently bought and read.
For the most part this is a comment on Doc's entry, and so will make references accordingly. I may take five minutes to make it slightly more friendly to someone just reading this part, but no more than that.
I continue to resist coming up with a Top 8, 10 or 100 list of comics, knowing that my tastes shift over time and I almost always tailor recommended reading lists to the person I'm addressing. So it is that I won't be attempting to make up such a list here.
That said, I'm with you on Miller's work on Daredevil - both on the Born Again arc being generally better than his first bit of major continuity surgery on DD, and on Batman: Year One being the superior work.
Still, what bothered me about Born Again were the Roman Catholic elements (in this tale, specifically, laying the groundwork by having his mother turn up as being alive and now a Catholic nun), which I don't so much immediately fault Miller for as I do find it immensely regrettable because it's just the sort of horseshit that seems to almost inevitably attract Kevin Smith. Smith's work on the character years later rendered Matt Murdock/DD almost unrecognizeable to me save for the visuals and name references. Ghastly stuff. But, hey -- "fan favorite" stuff, so what do I know? (I like many of Smith's movies and hope his Reaper series survives the writer's strike and ratings to go on for a while, but nothing I've read from him in comics was a happy time for me. Maybe I should have looked at his Green Arrow series since, frankly, I've never really given much of a crap about Ollie Queen.)
I was fine with Alan Moore's Swamp Thing past the point you were (beyond the protracted American Gothic arc), enjoying both him being exiled from Earth's "green" via the last creation of the Silver Age Lex Luthor (still a scientific genius in his own rights, and not the less-hefty financial Kingpin John Byrne had remade him as at DC's behest in '85) and aspects of Swampy's space journey as he slowly learned how to control his frequency and eventually be able to return to Earth. It's been years, though, and I'm not sure how the re-reading would go.
My sense of the decline of Busiek and Ross' Marvels beyond the first couple issues was due to the source material. The broad, grand, strokes and generally underpopulated landscape of the Golden Age worked. The dense, character- and event-rich Silver Age -- well, that could have sustained over more issues than they did, but I understand the pacing they were shooting for. However, after that the characters focused on and their stories (largely Spider-man) were from a far less satisfying period. (There may be some shakiness there in our interpretations as I believe you roll the Silver Age into the seventies while I tend to go with the more traditional 1970/Kirby-lights-out-for-DC endpoint, not bothering to come up with an era tag for the next wave as Stan largely faded out and more voices than Roy's were heard from.)
Really, once Gwen and Norman were done in (and, actually, for most of the previous couple years) Spidey (especially Amazing Spider-man)really hit the skids despite him going on to star in more monthly books than ever.
I think Kurt had a problem at the point of reaching a stage where his deep fan interest in the Marvel universe had faded, even if he hadn't realized it at the time.
Bone never really impressed me, either. Passable entertainment in the very short term, but horribly over-hyped by people who should have simply viewed it as a nice little modern entry point to comics for people who didn't care for the other, prevalent genres. Repeated references I'd seen to it being reminiscent of Pogo still raise a chuckle.
I continue to think very highly of Watchmen, but years of passing it in front of newer readers has shown me that it is very much a creature of its time and only maintains its status in that bubble. The themes explored there have been so pored over and rehashed that were ground-breaking at the time have become quaint. Moreover, I've found that readers who are even just six or seven years younger than us (Doc and I are each looking at birthday #47 this year) -- much more those who are now only in their thirties or twenties -- lack the Cold War context that's so essential for the backdrop. From the U.S./Soviet tensions with the globe polarized and divided as it was, on through the nuclear clock approaching midnight -- all of that is largely lost, especially at an emotional level, on the younger reader.
I have From Hell - I can see it over on one of the bookshelves from here - and while I read it through and enjoyed it I don't believe it occur to me as something I would laud to the level you have. I certainly agree that the illustration and lettering style make it a wonderfully thematically-matched work, and it provides a fairly large, complete work, making it satisfying on that level. However, the tale's not going to be for everyone, though, and I wouldn't put it in someone's hands without noting that even the author has noted that while it's rich in details it's not intended to be an historical piece where the writer-as-historian has presented a best-case scenario for the Truth behind the Ripper murders.
Moore went with the elements that most interested him as a storyteller and worked out from there. There are already too many people out there who've read series of what are historically-placed romance novels and believe themselves to be students of history; I'd want to be careful of not adding to that delusion. Then again, Moore definitely doesn't skimp on genuine details, so they'd be better off in that respect than with those other "historical" novels.
While hardly the highest examples of graphic storytelling arts, I've been enjoying The Walking Dead, published by Image, so that's at least one Image title I enjoy.
Thusfar I've found it to be the only work by Robert Kirkman worth reading, and even then it likely has much more to do with the appeal of the genre than Kirkman's talents as a writer. His work at Marvel has been a wall to wall creative waste (though I know those miserable Marvel Zombie titles have made them a small fortune), and such charms as his Invincible holds owe more to his apparently being at heart a Silver Age Marvel fan. I suspect we'd find that we have many of the same favorites among us from that era, but his own attempts at doing the same... eh.
We're simply going to have to disagree about Avengers Forever. You've already had your say about it in at least a couple of the Martian Vision pieces as I recall. (One of them being within this piece on The Vision. I thought there was a more concentrated piece on the miniseries, and there may very well be, but I can't immediately locate it.)
When I look at it, besides seeing a very visually appealing work (thanks to Carlos Pacheco and Jesus Merion)I also see Stern and Busiek simultaneously revisiting some items of interest going back to at least Kurt's days as a fan, trying to resolve the elements they liked and those they didn't into a healed whole, and bringing it all through in an entertaining package while trying to tie it to possible future events that I imagine he/they would have liked to be in a position to explore.
In the end, that he resorted to Space Phantoms as a means of explaining some uncharacteristic/untruthful behavior for some characters simply didn't bother me anywhere near as much as it did you. I accepted it to the extent that it was used rather than damning it as a tool that others might subsequently misuse.
Certainly it wasn't a perfect solution, but a malleable mechanism for erasing some problems and at the very least effectively duct-taping the disjointed edges. I suspect more elaborate and intricate measures came to mind along the way, but they almost certainly would have resulted in having to go too far down the This Old Universe path of detailed fixes and could have resulted in the project being killed -- or at least trimmed, nullifying the attempts to make the fixes or, more likely, forcing him back down the path of coming up with another, single mechanism for explaining away continuity problems.
I'm also fairly sure that Kurt was already having to work all this past people at the editorial and above level who really would have been just as happy with simply reinventing everyone anew, keeping not much more in place than the names, powers and iconography that the boys in Marketing would demand.
In my view the attempt to reconcile the pieces, including elements he plainly didn't care for, rather than simply ignoring them and declaring they simply didn't happen, is laudable. Knowing that the story was being told by someone who not only cared about the characters but who'd actually read the stories -- my god, I only wish we had more of that in modern comics and especially at Marvel.
If Marvel's "editorial" crew had given Kurt (and, later, Geoff Johns) the creative freedom and support they've subsequently given Bendis, Millar, etc. in their various attempts, while working on Avengers, well, I'd likely be a much happier comics fan -- and more of a Marvel comics fan -- now.
Just to throw something out to consider -- not even necessarily to respond to: Kurt was approaching the characters and stories as someone looking to save as much of the past as possible as he moved forward. (His moves during the course of writing the main Avengers title, however much ignored by later writers, to heal Hank Pym's psyche, are among those I remain appreciative of, and this was part of what he was aiming at in the long term.) You, despite coming back as a reader for a while, had as a fan already buried the shredded, rotted and burned remains of Marvel Universe and held services for them years earlier. While some flicker of hope and nostalgia may have remained deep within, you'd essentially written it off as so thoroughly fouled and despoiled as to be beyond redemption. Pretty much only a jump back to some point in the mid-to-late '70s (depending on the series) and a declaration that nearly all of what had come after to never have happened really would have been enough.
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Comments
I am fully on board with your observation that SWAMP THING's enjoyability spiked upward again agreeably with the "Swamp Thing takes over Gotham City" story, and that brief cameo by the pre CRISIS Lex Luthor (still an outlaw, still a criminal, still a renegade scientific super genius, not yet a mainstream billionare businessman with Presidential ambitions) in the weird lacunae that the post-CRISIS, pre-MAN OF STEEL DC Universe was then is perhaps the finest post-CRISIS Lex Luthor moment ever, and probably among the finest to occur anywhere at any time. ("You don't know invulnerability. I know invulnerability, and this swamp creature ain't it." Heh-indeed.)
Still, so much of the "American Gothic" storyline has become jumbled up in my mind with idiotic phrases like 'the sound of the hammers must never stop' and 'pick a number' that it's all become a nearly universal bad memory for me. You're right to point out that it wasn't all as bad as much of it, but, still, after the initial brilliance of Moore's first year on the book, it seems to me that the first CRISIS largely came along and took the legs out from under him entirely.
I also agree that the Roman Catholic elements introduced by Miller in BORN AGAIN are regrettable, but there's some grain of truth to the fairly constant conservative/religious critique that comic book superheroes rarely or never seem to be at all religious, and I suspect Miller was trying to walk that back somewhat, and, at the same time, do some naturalistic characterization using materials that other writers hadn't gone to at that point. That the lamentably untalented Kevin Smith would roll the whole thing up and smoke it years later is, well, one of many lamentable things about Kevin Smith's career. If only one could somehow restrict him to only having a very small budget in comics, he might produce something of worth, but I'm not sure how to do that... maybe assign him South Park's Timmeh as an artist, or something.
For what it's worth, I have no trouble with the concept that superheroes are such exceptional people, and generally, such internally STRONG people, that they would generally eschew the religious/superstitious crutches embraced so avidly by the common man. This pretty much flies in the face of everything Alan Moore tried to show about 'realistic' superheroes in WATCHMEN (which elements of essential weakness/sexual dysfunction have been largely adopted as being the very heart of the so called Post Modern Superhero by all of Moore's avid would be imitators) yet, oddly, Moore wasn't one to make his superheroes religious, he simply wanted them to be perverts. I hate to regard that as a mercy at this late remove, but, honestly, it probably was one.
As to AVENGERS FOREVER, well, we've tread this ground into canyons already. I would like to say that I've never doubted that Busiek and Stern had only the best intentions in their approach and execution, but, well, roads to hell and what have you. For me, while intentions are important, results are more so. A Marvel Universe in which as poor a writer as Brian Michael Bendis can, if he wants, simply decide that, say, twenty years of Spider-Man behavior can be dismissed as that of a Space Phantom with an outside agenda even it was unaware of all that time... nrrmm. Not a Marvel Universe for me, certainly.
But, then, much of the last thirty years has been a recurrent exercise in re-grasping THAT essential point. Now, Steve Rogers is dead, and Bucky Barnes is taking his place behind the shield... whoa! Can we just have everyone turn into a zombie and get it over with?
(As a note, it's with some relief that I note that AVENGERS FOREVER has ultimately been a failure, by the only real measure I've ever been able to find valid within coherent fantasy multiverses like Marvel's and DC's... for all its commercial success, I have yet to see a subsequent writer make any real use of any of the myriad continuity inserts created by Busiek or Stern within its confines. Nobody else seems to have wanted to touch anything they tried to establish, and, in fact, it would seem that the future Avengers we saw towards the end, with Jack of Hearts AND Songbird both in the line up, can't ever come into being now. As to the omnipresent Space Phantom infiltrators, well, that seems to have met the same warm universal acceptance by Marvel's writers and editors as DeMatteis' Morgan MacNeil Hardy character got back in the 80s. And thank Whoever for that, too.)