My Bags are Packed, Etc…
It's always nice when really smart people have nice things to say about you--both Dirk and Jog paid me very kind compliments today (re: the return of the Comics Column), particularly given that the final product found its way online riddled with my typos and lazy grammar mistakes. Thanks to both of you.
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Speaking of Moore and Morrison, as that column continued to do, I just saw this post, which reaffirms some of the things I've said in the column thus far. Between this recent column and the earlier Gurren Lagann review, I've leaned on that Moore/Morrison thing a little hard lately, and I'm hoping to go someplace else in future columns. Morrison shows up a bit more than I planned in the next two installments, but it was a little unavoidable based on format--beyond those, I want to get a little further away before I'm permanently branded as an advocate of the same half-dozen comic people. The next column is in my editor's hands and the next is underway, but beyond that I'm not sure exactly where I want to go next.
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I'm going out of town for a week--not sure if I'll be updating, even if the column's next installment goes up at the House in my absence (and I'm not sure exactly what the timetable on that is going to be). I'll be working on some reviews and things offline while I'm gone, but I might not be heard from until my return. That said, best way to reach me if necessary will probably be Twitter (see the sidebar). Let's meet back here next week, under the old oak tree.
Review – Batman: Dark Knight, Dark City
You know, I held off as long as I could with The Unwritten. Other people have spoken out against the book, and opinion has dropped quickly on the title since its launch, and there have been some serious flaws--the first arc was a mishmash of character introductions and both of the following arcs would get things going only to turn around and massacre all of the characters except for the book's lethargic protagonist--but there was the germ of a solid idea in there and occasional grasps further up the ladder. Unfortunately, the most recent issue is where I get off the train.
The plot point of the current arc revolves around a fake novel released in the "Tommy Taylor" series, and the publisher admits in the latest issue that the fake is poorly written cobbled together from stolen ideas, including from J.K. Rowling, and the real author of "Tommy Taylor" would never stoop so low. Except that "Tommy Taylor" is an unabashed pastiche of Rowling. That Tommy Taylor and Harry Potter are basically the same character works fine for the conceit of the series, but only if Rowling doesn't exist in the book's world, which until now seemed to be the case. But to say that Harry Potter exists in this world and the Tommy Taylor series is the exact same material, but written better and for longer, leading to an even more rabid fanbase, with no acknowledgement of their similarity--it shows a lack of self-awareness that I honestly thought writer Mike Carey was above. A shame.
Anyway, a real review:
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Batman: Dark Knight, Dark City (Batman # 452-454) - Peter Milligan/ Kieron Dwyer
This old Batman arc has been talked up quite a bit lately, as it serves as direct influence and prologue for Morrison's current Batman saga (along with the divisive Starlin/Wrightson Batman: The Cult and Morrison's own Batman: Gothic - actually, Dark Knight, Dark City has never been collected, and it would fit well in a bound volume with Gothic, as they share similar ideas and conceits). It's a pretty well-liked series--even Tucker made a point of telling me on Twitter that he thought it was pretty rad when he read it.
And there's plenty to recommend it: the premise is a solid one, that there is a demon ("Barbathos") whose invocation cursed the fledgling Gotham City in the eighteenth century, leading to Gotham's blight of madness today, and also that the demon, as personified by Gotham City, created Batman as a means to free itself. That's some solid stuff right there, and the demon possessing Riddler as a means of getting Batman to go through the ritual that will free him is also a nice touch--could this be retconned as the reason that Riddler started taking the venom drug, to deal with his possession? Does the chronology work for that?
Milligan makes some missteps, however, which detract from the story's now-classic status. That Barbatos makes Riddler into a more bloodthirsty villain is fine, and it seems like it's fed into Morrison's current thesis--we're leading up to, one would think, a final confrontation with Barbathos via Simon Hurt, representing the reason for the poisonous darkening of Batman stories (cf Batman #666 via Seven Soldiers & Final Crisis)--but it's not established until the second of the three issues. In the first issue, Riddler's casual amorality comes off less like a mystery than a mishandling of the character that is explained after the fact, when Milligan is clearly smarter than that. Also, the literary reference motif he uses falls flat: In Cold Blood, The Trial, Seduction of the Innocent, The Crying of Lot 49, and A Clockwork Orange are all referenced in ways that feel out of place--the Pynchon one may be the worst offender, since it muddies the themes that Milligan seems to be getting at. More petty complaints come with John Costanza's lettering--there are overlapping sources of narration here, and in differentiating them, he uses an overly-muddy handwriting for the eighteenth-century diary and an oddly formal typeface for the demon/city. Also, in the classic "connecting dots on a map" bit, one of the dots appears to be in the wrong place in one panel, so that the pattern gets temporarily confused.
That said, what's fascinating going back to the story now is how fully prescient it seems to be. The Barbathos ritual is all about washing in blood, threatening babies, and battling zombies--2010 superhero decadence in microcosm. What Milligan does, of course, is make a point about the whole thing being out of character, out of tone, and poisonous, something Morrison is still trying to get across twenty years later. There's a distinct impression that Milligan, though, can't quite take the whole thing seriously to begin with, given the black humor that pervades (zombie robots, the bit where Batman almost can't brake the Batmobile fast enough to avoid running over a baby, and Dwyer has one panel with a Batarang held out in a phallic way which I hope is coincidence).
The similarities between the story and Gothic are notable, as well, and they came out in the same year. Both posit that Batman was formed by something from the underworld and despite his noble aims carries something of the avatar of evil. What's interesting, though, is that each ends the story differently--in Morrison's story, Batman casts the whole thing away and on some level denies the metaphysics of what he's gone through, and given the fact that some part of Gothic exists as a response to Arkham Asylum, which went so far (or too far) in the other direction, that makes sense. But Milligan's Batman largely just resigns himself to what may be true, deeming it unimportant in the face of his obsession. It's probably a more accurate take on the character for that, and I wonder somewhat if Morrison agreed, given the denial or acceptance of mystery is a large part of what fueled the whole "Black Casebook" bit and thus the core of Morrison's "incorporate it all" take on Batman in his current run.
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Also: I recently put up a comics newspost on Mediaelites, regarding the Pat Lee thing and the webcomics app embarrassment and such--the permalink is here--but the site appears to be wacky as all Hell right now, and links aren't working right. Hopefully it'll get cleared up soon, but I'm not sure what's going on there.
Empowerment Fantasies: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Over at The House Next Door, I take a look at Gurren Lagann and what it has to say about its own genre:
If Evangelion is shonen giant robot fare through the lens of Alan Moore, a dissection and a dangerous swerve towards an underlying emotional reality, then Gurren Lagann is the same material through the lens of Grant Morrison: reactionary in part, but a distillation, mad and a little messy but more fun and a reminder of the original concept's power with a modern (and occasionally postmodern) gloss. (The image of Yoko in the virtual reality tank in the music video even inadvertently recalls Morrison's counterculture opus The Invisibles, in which a very different redhead uses the system to, appropriately enough, rewrite her own history).
The Unforseen Politics of The Prisoner
Trapped in a community which, if tight-knit, is only so because of the shared spiritual cost of their situation. Attempts to subvert the system from within prove useless. You are made into an interchangeable part, a cog in a system of which you cannot even see the full shape--that is, assuming that you were not already. Individuality and rebellion are regressed over time to the state of a child's tantrum, and thus ever more easily dismissed. You lose the ability to trust even your fellow sufferers, and so soon you do the work of your minders for them, in grinding each other down. It is by design a life sentence: even if you are to escape, or are ejected, released, your time there has changed you.
I quit my job, recently.
And while comparing the dehumanizing corporate policies to that of The Village would be a banal observation at best (and melodramatic at its core), the obvious and prosaic similarities between the two has heightened my sense of kinship with Number Six as I rewatch the series this month. I'm showing it to my wife, who is seeing it for the first time, and it certainly took her no time at all to understand, as many of us do, that the series is as relevant and as important now as it has ever been.
But... here's the thing. Coming back to the series now, at a synchronistically opportune time in my life, I find that I view the series differently than I have before. I grew up with The Prisoner hard-wired into my cultural lexicon, not only because it had been long-cemented as a classic by the time I was born, but also because I spent my youth following a certain prototypical counter-cultural template. The Village as metaphor for conformism, for nameless authoritarianism, all of the works that have followed, ones keyed closer to my generation (say, Grant Morrison's The Invisibles), draw from that metaphor just as Patrick McGoohan's show drew from the potent works that had come before it (Huxley, Orwell, et al). But in more closely-empathizing with The Prisoner than I have in years, putting myself in the place of McGoohan's Number Six (however fatuously)... it occurs to me, you know, most of it's his own damned fault?
I'm thinking of "The Schizoid Man," here, but it doesn't really matter which episode you choose. One reason I use this example is that it's one of the best episodes that wasn't in the original seven, as it understands the conflicts at the heart of the series in the way some of the other extraneous episodes don't. In "The Schizoid Man," every one of Number Six's flaws and many of his strengths are played against him (see also "Checkmate").
Number Twelve (As Six): You know what, why don't we settle this like gentlemen?
Number Six: You're claiming to be a gentleman too?
Number Twelve: Oh very good, very good indeed. That line is very worthy of me.
One of the side-effects of Number Six's individuality and intelligence, the two things that form the spine of the show and the reasons that his struggle is so compelling, is that Number Six is one arrogant son of a bitch. That's the thing about righteous indignation, isn't it? You have something to hold over, a moral superiority. This is often in Number Six's case expressed through a dry-as-desert wit, a sneering satisfaction. We're so fully on his side that it's difficult to notice the first time through, but he's kind of an asshole (unless, I presume, you're attempting some kind of feminist reading of the thing).
Thing is, Number Six spends so much time lording it over the forces of conformity and institutionalization that he never actually does anything. Episodes like "Hammer Into Anvil" and "The General," in which he aids the community, frequently feel forced because the story's not about a hero overthrowing a ubiquitous villain, it's about victory over those forces merely in the act of surviving and living (If you're still holding that Morrison cheat-sheet, the closest analogue would be Boy, who ejects from the whole thing entirely while staying aware of what she's seen).
The thing about absurdist television - and The Prisoner is definitely absurdist, particularly in its finale - is that the audience is liable to walk away with more than what actually impresses upon them. In one particular case, I'd suggest that we maybe took too much from the show. If it was prescient about so much, from the surveillance state to credit cards, it was unfortunately also dead-on in how we would respond to being controlled. Not solely in the faceless mob that populated much of The Village, but also in Number Six's condescension and his use of humor to supplant action.
We view comedians as our only honest reporters, respond to tragedies with dark humor on Twitter, blah blah di blah... this part doesn't need me lecturing. The U.S. in particular is divided more than it has been since perhaps the Civil War, and our self-righteous arrogance (on either side) diminishes the ability to argue against a crumbling society. We wind up like Number Six, tap-dancing as we're led from a small prison to a larger one--a metaphor especially potent for liberals (like myself), missing only a carton of "Yes We Can" T-shirts.
Postscript: A note about self-righteousness... if The Wire is our great post-9/11 drama, peering under the carpet at everything we've swept underneath, then surely our great post-9/11 comedy is Arrested Development, which in its portrayal of a Nero-fiddling upper class is offset by Jason Bateman's portrayal of the "good son" whose self-righteousness slowly reveals itself to be a maladjusted arrogance that places him firmly in the same dysfunctional place as the rest of his family--its deliberate Godfather parallels have been used to dangerously acerbic effect. But, of course, the cult obsession over Arrested Development, even with its struggles on the network, dwarves the critical fervor for The Wire, which didn't need the subtext. Just goes to show you.
Comics Column, House Next Door
In '08-'09, I posted a very infrequent comics column, focusing in part on comics in relation to film, over at The House Next Door (now a part of Slant Magazine). I'm still a contributor over there (link to a new review when it goes up) but I'm not yet sure what the state of this column is. Editor Keith Uhlich, who has been incredibly supportive, has left the door open, but I'm not yet decided whether the column is actually filling any kind of niche - most of what I've said has been said elsewhere, and better.
Here is the archive:
- #1: Windows on the Other Art
- #2: Poetry and New Languages
- #3: A Question of Accessibility: Studying Pathology and Archaeology
- #4: Mapmaking and the Hoi Polloi
- #5: Untitled (Pluto, Scott Pilgrim, Watchmen)
- Special: More Than Meets Few Eyes At All - The Legacy of The Transformers
The column received some kind press in its time: Jog still has it in his linkroll, I made it onto Journalista! once or twice, and Savage Critic Abhay Khosla pointed me out twice, here and here. I've also received kind words from Top Shelf's Leigh Walton, and an earlier version of column #2 found its way into David Mack's "Best of Letters" collected in Kabuki: The Alchemy.