Politics in Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan
Posted: May 1, 2022 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, cyberpunk, DC, journalism, Labour Day, politics, science fiction, Transmetropolitan, US, Warren Ellis Leave a commentIn this year’s Labour Day / Warren Ellis blogpost, we’re going to examine what might be considered his chef d’oeuvre, Transmetropolitan (penciled by Darick Robertson and published in 60 issues from 1997-2002). It’s also probably Ellis’s most overtly political comic, so it comes as no surprise that there are already many texts, even some academic ones, on politics in Transmetropolitan. Most of those focus on the presidential election story arc (with a noticeable spike in 2016, on the occasion of Donald Trump’s candidacy and win), but I’m going to stick to the very first self-contained story which spans issues #1-3, as it already exhibits the main political mechanisms at work here.
The first issue serves mainly to introduce the protagonist, Spider Jerusalem, a journalist writing political columns for a newspaper in an unnamed American city, in a future that seems not too far away (but is apparently supposed to be the 23rd century). In issue #2 he pays the Transient community a visit – humans who, for some reason, chose to have their bodies genetically engineered to gradually take on the shape of aliens. Now these human-alien hybrids “can’t get jobs” and are “forced” to live in the slum quarter Angels 8, according to their leader, Fred Christ. They feel discriminated against by Civic Center (the City government), and their solution is to announce the secession of Angels 8 to the Vilnius Colony, a sovereign alien territory. “The threat of secession will force them to treat us decently”, says Fred.
The Transients erect barricades around Angels 8, but Spider already fears that the police are going to stifle that uprising: “It’s an election year for a law-and-order president. They’ll come in and stamp on your bones, Fred.” And indeed, bombs are thrown at a Transient demonstration, which prompts the police to crack down on the “Transient Riot”. Spider, however, realises what is actually going on in the district. He has witnessed how individual Transients got bribed to incite the riot. Otherwise, “It would never have happened. The Transients were too confused, gutless and dim to start a real confrontation on their own. Until some money changed hands.”
Spider goes to the scene of the crime to report, in a sort of live newsfeed, on the extremely and unnecessarily violent police action, and also to provide his background information on the cause of the riot (“They paid a few Transients off to start some trouble, deliberately marring a non-violent demonstration.”) People read his newsfeed, call Civic Center to complain, and the police are withdrawn from Angels 8 at last.
Comparing this story to the other Ellis comics we have covered here before, we find similarities as well as differences. The major commonality is the ‘abusive government’ trope: while we don’t know for sure whether the bribing lawyers who instigated the riot work for the President, we see the City government personified in the policemen who quash the Transient uprising. Not only do they beat unarmed men, women and children to death, they even enjoy doing it. The big difference to Ellis’s more supernatural and fantastical narratives seems to be that the protagonist who stands up to the government is not a superhero – it’s a journalist. Some people have read Spider Jerusalem’s character as an inspiration for ordinary people to do what they can and make a stand against (Trump’s) government. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that such readings are misinterpreting Spider’s character a little.
Spider Jerusalem is not an ordinary journalist but rather, for all intents and purposes, a kind of superhero. He is the only journalist brave (or mad, as he himself puts it) enough to enter the Angels 8 district. His astounding hand-to-hand combat skills allow him to overcome not only the Transient barricade guard but also two Transient bouncers at once, not to mention his proficiency in operating rocket launchers, hand grenades and handguns. And, perhaps his most superheroic trait: when at the end of the story he gets assaulted by a police squad and severely beaten, he is not intimidated at all – “I’m here to stay! Shoot me and I’ll spit your goddamn bullets back in your face!”
Without Spider, the public would never have learned the truth about the orchestrated Transient riot. Instead, the citizens would have been the CPD’s partners in crime, according to Spider: “You earned it. With your silence. […] Civic Center and the cops do what the fuck they like, and you sit still. […] They do what they like. And what do you do? You pay them.” Without Spider, there would be no critical journalism in the City, only “papers and feedsites that lie to you”.
In Transmetropolitan, there are evil individual politicians, but Ellis makes clear that it’s the complacency of the populace that allows them to thrive. Once more, society on its own is helpless against an oppressive government and needs the ‘strong man’ to protect them.
Alois Riegl’s group portraiture of Holland – in comics?
Posted: September 30, 2021 Filed under: review | Tags: Alois Riegl, art history, Batman, Batman/Superman, comics, DC, Gene Luen Yang, group portrait, Ivan Reis, portrait, superheroes, Superman, theory, US 1 CommentOn the surface, Alois Riegl’s 1902 book The Group Portraiture of Holland (German full text here) is about a quite specific kind of artwork – Dutch portrait paintings from the 16th and 17th century. However, it also provides some concepts and terms applicable to any group portrait. Among those, the following three oppositional pairs are arguably the most intriguing:
- subjectivism vs. objectivism: in a subjective mode of depiction, the figures in the portrait present themselves as they would to a spectator present at the same site. They are embedded in the landscape and affected by their surroundings, so that e.g. their outlines may “evaporate”. In the objective mode, in contrast, figures appear in a sort of ideal or neutral view and are detached from their surroundings, resulting e.g. in clear outlines.
- subordination vs. coordination: in many groups there is a hierarchy, e.g. different ranks in a military unit. When such a hierarchy is clearly visible in a portrait, for instance by gestures, dress, symbolic objects, or placement of figures, Riegl speaks of subordination.
- symbolism vs. genre*: in 1902 the Symbolist art movement was in full swing, but that’s not what Riegl means by this term. Figures in a group portrait often perform actions and/or hold objects, and when those actions seem believable, i.e. when it looks as if the sitter actually performed that action, the action itself threatens to overshadow the individuality of the figure and the painting is in danger, so to speak, of becoming a genre painting instead of a portrait. Symbolic actions and objects, however, are metonymic signifiers of something else, most often character traits of the respective sitter. A telltale sign by which symbolism and genre can be told apart is how much attention the figure is paying to the action it performs or the object it is holding: if the figure is looking somewhere else (e.g. out of the picture), the action/object is probably symbolic.
Does it make sense to look at comics the same way Riegl looks at paintings? It is not unusual to compare individual comic panels to paintings, and many panels feature three or more figures. It can be argued that such panels sometimes resemble portraits – for instance, superhero comics books often contain a splash panel that introduces the main characters.
Let’s look at two examples from a fairly standard current superhero series, Batman/Superman by Gene Luen Yang and Ivan Reis. In issue #17, our protagonists encounter a supervillain team on a parallel world. This is the panel that introduces the villains:
Is the subjective or objective mode of depiction at work here? On the one hand, all four characters are bathed in the same turquoise light, which suggests subjectivism. On the other hand, the composition ensures that most of the figures is clearly visible, especially their faces, and there is no interaction between them – the Penguin is pointing upwards, but the other three are looking elsewhere – so that each is shown in isolation, as it were.
The composition also emphasises subordination: the foremost figure, and also the one who seems tallest (i.e. who is drawn to the largest vertical extent), is that of Warden Luthor, the leader of the quartet. The quality that definitely allows us to speak of this panel as a portrait, though, is its symbolism. As mentioned before, the only real action of the Penguin pointing to the sky is unrealistic because the others are not able to perceive it. Joker, Warden and Jones appear to be engaged in conversation with Batman and Robin, but their gestures have little to do with that conversation. Instead, the gestures tell us something about those characters: Jones is holding a bauble because that’s the weapon he throws at his opponents, Warden Luthor is depicted adjusting his tie and having a hand in his pocket to show how conceited and overconfident he is, and the Joker is laughing because that’s what he always does.
A few issues later (#20), the arrival of our protagonists on another parallel world is shown in this double page spread:
Despite the orange reflections of the fire on the figures’ clothes and skin, the subjectivism of this image is doubtful: while the threatening demons are situated next to and behind the heroes, the latter don’t interact with them (nor with each other really) and look towards the picture surface, as if they are posing for us, each on his or her own in empty space.
Again there is a clear subordination, with Superman – normally Batman’s equal, but temporarily the leader here on his home turf in the Metropolis of the “World of Tomorrow” – depicted much more prominently than the others, especially the diminutive figures of Alanna and El Diablo (throwaway sidekicks introduced in #19 who now tag along with Batman and Superman on their inter-dimensional journey).
As for symbolism, this is again the dominant mode in which the figures’ gestures are depicted. Everyone has this mildly concerned look on his or her face and isn’t really interacting with anyone or anything. Even Alanna, who carries El Diablo with her jetpack, isn’t all too focused on her task. With the exception of Superman and his wide-open mouth, one could cut each figure out and stick it on a poster against a neutral background, each character a model of typical superhero stoicism.
Just to show that not all comic panels serve as portraits, here is another panel from earlier in the same issue that features the same five characters (who are wearing cowboy hats now because they’re in yet another parallel world):
Here the figures are very much absorbed in their respective actions – firing grapple guns, swinging a whip, flying to escape the quicksand – and we don’t get a clear view of all of them; poor Alanna in particular is mostly concealed. In this panel, the focus is on what happens, and not so much on who the characters are. This only shows that in typical superhero comics like Batman/Superman, creators purposefully insert panels resembling group portraits only every now and then.
Index to all “[theory] – in comics?” posts on this weblog
* ^ More precisely, Riegl presents a multi-tiered model of the development of Dutch group portraiture in which symbolism and genre are only two of the stages, the other two (sometimes combined into one) being ‘novella’ and ‘drama’. Genre, novella and drama are all in opposition to symbolism and the status of the painting as a portrait.
Article on animal liberation in comics published
Posted: December 3, 2020 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: animal liberation, Animal Man, animals, comics, Daredevil, DC, environmental activism, Grant Morrison, Pride of Baghdad, publication, US, We3 Leave a comment
The latest issue of Closure. Kieler e-Journal für Comicforschung contains a special section on “Eco-comics” to which I contributed one of its four articles. According to the issue introduction,
Martin de la Iglesia’s »Formal Characteristics of Animal Liberation in Comics«, which closes the special section, shares with the preceding articles a concern with the comics form. Particularly, de la Iglesia investigates if comics associate the specific scenario of animal liberation with a formal correlative – and if the comics form is geared towards a presentation of »animal communication and perception« (91) at all. And indeed: some commonalities emerge from the analysis of open cages, sudden flight, and abject suffering in Animal Man, Daredevil, We3, and Pride of Baghdad. In its detailed close readings and search for an overarching graphic rhetoric of liberation, the article pays particular attention to the ›expressive‹ potential of comics devices and the degree to which observers alternately share and are distanced from animal minds.
Read my article “Formal Characteristics of Animal Liberation in Comics” for free in HTML or PDF.
Comic book reviews, Fête de la Musique edition – part 3: Hellblazer #20-22
Posted: July 7, 2018 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, Davide Fabbri, DC, Hellblazer, music, Tim Seeley, US Leave a commentHere’s one more brief review of a current comic in which music is represented.
The Hellblazer #20-22
Language: English
Authors: Tim Seeley (writer), Davide Fabbri (penciller), Christian dalla Vecchia (inker), Carrie Strachan (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Publication Dates: March – May 2018
Pages per issue: 20
Price per issue: $3.99
Website: https://www.dccomics.com/comics?seriesid=396186#browse
The music: In this Hellblazer story (“The Good Old Days”), John Constantine’s ex-girlfriend Margaret Ames is possessed by the soul of a criminal that has escaped from hell. John tries to magically locate Margaret through an object, a t-shirt that she had worn. It is a band shirt from John’s old band, Mucous Membrane, and this shirt is the only representation of music in those three issues. But it works remarkably well: not much is disclosed about Mucous Membrane (the members of which were last featured in Hellblazer a couple of issues earlier) except that they hadn’t been particularly successful, as evidenced by John having had “fifty of [these shirts] sitting in a moldy box” and having stayed at “rot holes” at that time. But from our knowledge of John’s background as an angry punk in late 70s England, and from their name, we get a pretty good idea of what their music must have sounded like. Interestingly, the band logo looks slightly different in each issue, event though it’s supposed to be the same shirt and it’s the same art team on all three issues…
The rest: It is a sick joke that DC cancelled Hellblazer just in time for its 30th anniversary special. But the writing had been on the wall for some time. While Tim Seeley (and his predecessor, Simon Oliver) nailed the dialogue more often than not, DC assigned a string of artists to this book who were mediocre at first and then gradually became worse. Which makes me wonder why they bothered to “rebirth” Hellblazer in the first place.
Rating: ● ● ○ ○ ○
Politics in Warren Ellis’s Planetary #2
Posted: May 1, 2018 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, DC, Japan, Labour Day, Planetary, politics, superheroes, US, Warren Ellis 1 CommentHappy May Day everyone, or ‘Warren Ellis Day’ as for some reason it has come to be known in this little corner of the Web. This time we’re going to look at politics in Warren Ellis’s classic, Planetary (art by John Cassaday). Planetary was published in 27 issues by Wildstorm/DC from 1998-2009. As far as the main story is concerned, the political setup of Planetary is a standard Warren Ellis one: it’s a conspiracy of supervillains who pull all the strings in this world, and the democratically elected governments of the world are powerless against them. It takes superheroes – vigilantes, rogues, operating outside of the law – to protect the world from these supervillains.
There is more going on here, though. Among the earlier issues (collected in Planetary Book One, not to be confused with Planetary Volume 1 which only contains #1-6), some stand out in particular from a political perspective because they comment on real-world political events and figures. Of these, we’ll discuss issue #2 (“Island”) here (but #7 and #8 are also noteworthy in this regard).
“Island” is mostly set on “Island Zero”, a fictional island that “forms the far north-western tip of the Japanese archipelago. Also the closest island in the group to the Eurasian landmass – specifically, Russia”, says Shinya Fukuda, a Tokyo-based employee of the Planetary organisation. He continues, “It’s off-limits, due to an issue of war legality still under arbitration. Basically, we think it’s ours, and the Russians think it’s theirs. One of our prime ministers visited Yeltsin to try and iron it out last year, but, you know…”
Another Japanese character, the terrorist Ryu who plans to overthrow the Japanese government, describes Island Zero like this: “The last island between Japan and Siberian Russia. Unpopulated because of its nature as a political football. The Russians claim it as spoils of World War Two. We, naturally, claim it as part of Japan. Legally, this island is a nowhere thing.”
Ellis probably alludes to the Kuril Islands dispute here, even though they are located north-east of Japan, not north-west. The status of the Kuril Islands has been settled in several treaties which say they belong to Russia (as the successor of the Soviet Union). The Japanese government accepts these treaties, but claims that the four islands closest to Hokkaidō do not belong to the Kurils and are therefore not part of the treaties. Another difference between the disputed Kuril Islands and Island Zero is that the former are not entirely uninhabited: almost 20,000 people live on three of them, while on the fourth there’s a Russian border guard outpost.
The interesting thing in Planetary, however, is how the two aforementioned Japanese characters – only one of which is a fanatic nationalist – talk about Island Zero: “we think it’s ours”, “we claim it as part of Japan”. Why do they include themselves in the pronoun? It’s the government that does the claiming, so why do Shinya and Ryu adopt this claim as their own? What would Shinya and Ryu specifically gain if Russia ceded Island Zero to Japan? Sure, if Island Zero was part of Japan, Ryu could go on his hiking trip there without the risk of getting caught by the military, but the reason he goes there in the first place is precisely its remoteness due to its disputed status.
For Shinya and Ryu there’s nothing at stake in the dispute over Island Zero, so they probably don’t really “think” and “claim” much about it. More likely, there are some common but oversimplifying conflations at work here: of state and nation, of individual citizen and nation, and of state and individual politician. As abstract entities, states can’t think or claim anything – politicians such as the Japanese prime minister mentioned by Shinya can. And while it can be said that some views are more prevalent in a given nation than others, the assuredness with which both Shinya and Ryu include all Japanese people in their “we” creates the illusion of a completely homogeneous society in which everyone agrees with their government.
It’s particularly problematic that it’s the Japanese society, because this basically repeats the old prejudice of a purported Japanese conformity that borders on blind obedience. It seems like in the world of Planetary, governmental authority is only questioned by superhumans (who are powerful enough to stand above it anyway). Ryu says he wants to topple the government and become “paramount leader of Japan”, but he never says what his problem with the current government is. He is dismissed by Shinya as having “that Yukio Mishima, Aum Shin Ryko [sic, i.e. Rikyō] smell about” him. However, Aum Shinrikyō had their religious doomsday beliefs and Mishima wanted to restore the divinity of the Emperor. What does Ryu believe in? One of his followers says to him, “I believe in your theories. I believe in armed resurrection and revolution and nerve gas and acceptable casualties and all the rest of it.” But what are Ryu’s theories? Ellis doesn’t say. Ideological debates don’t seem to interest him. Apparently ideology is something for fanatics and terrorists, who make for good plot devices – but these characters must be wrong, because they’re the villains, so their ideology must be wrong too and doesn’t need to be discussed. Neither do we learn much about the political beliefs of the protagonists, the three superhero members of Planetary – they’re the good guys, so if they believe in anything, surely it must be right after all…
Judith Butler’s gender performativity – in comics?
Posted: March 27, 2018 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, critical theory, DC, feminism, Frank Miller, gender, Rōnin, sexism, theory, US, Women's History Month 1 CommentJudith Butler’s article “Performative Acts of Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” from 1988 (Theatre Journal 40.4, pp. 519-531) is, of course, a classic. But when it gets reduced to the buzzword of ‘gender performativity’, there’s a danger of missing all the implications of this concept, so it’s still worth reading the original article. Building primarily on Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Butler’s basis in this essay is the sex/gender distinction: a gender isn’t something one is born with – it is constituted during one’s lifetime. Furthermore, Butler says, the gender binary (the idea that there are exactly two genders, male and female) is likewise artificial. As is the prevalent “system of compulsory heterosexuality” in which “‘attraction’ to the opposing sex/gender” is seen as “natural”. (The term ‘heteronormativity’ isn’t used by Butler yet.)
Butler’s groundbreaking idea is that, as the title already says, gender is consituted through acts of performance. What is a performative act? Butler doesn’t explicitly define that, but hints at a wide range of possibilities: “acts, gestures, the visual body, the clothed body, the various physical attributes usually associated with gender”. Her only example is a “transvestite” who is not further described. This transvestite challenges the binary male/female distinction by combining traditionally female clothes with physical features usually seen as male, or vice versa.
This seems to be a crucial point that often gets overlooked: performative acts aren’t only ways of speaking, dressing and moving, but “the gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space”. While these corporeal restrictions can be overcome to some extent through clothes, make-up and surgery, it’s important to always consider physical attributes as potential acts of gender constitution. Comics might be interesting objects to analyse from this perspective because they’re good at rendering visual performance acts but not so great at depicting movement or sound (e.g. the tone of one’s voice – though this can be used for humorous effect, as I’ve noted here).
Frank Miller’s comics have frequently been accused of misogyny and sexism, but his Rōnin (DC, 1983-84, colours by Lynn Varley) has been lauded for a strong female main character, Casey McKenna. Casey isn’t exactly a feminist role model either, but that’s not the point here – let’s look at how her gender is performed.
As head of security of a futuristic corporation, Casey wears a gender-neutral uniform that isn’t much different from those of her male subordinates. (At least for most of the first half of the comic – things get weird after that, including her clothes.) It isn’t so tight as to reveal much of her physical features as female either. Only when she stands next to them, the shape of her body appears female, with a waist-to-hip ratio usually associated with women, and the subtle curve of her chest. The pose she strikes, hip slightly thrust, might also be read as female. Her face is a combination of traditionally male (bushy eyebrows) and female (long eyelashes) features; others such as the angular jaw and full lips are more of a stylistic peculiarity of Miller’s applied to male and female characters alike. Thus Casey’s gender is indeed somewhat complex. It needs to be, if 1980s superhero comic readers were to accept her as both tough (a traditionally male trait) and sexy (traditionally female).
The gender of two other characters in Rōnin is interesting because they are not human (three if we count the rōnin himself, but… it’s complicated; if you’ve read the comic you’ll have noticed I’m trying to avoid spoilers this time): the demon Agat, and the Artificial Intelligence Virgo. Agat’s ‘natural’ form is roughly human, but without genitals. His (Agat is referred to with male pronouns) overly muscular, broad-shouldered body can be read as male though, and consequently he later assumes the form and identity of male human character.
Virgo, on the other hand – referred to with female pronouns and even jokingly called a “lady” (and, later, a “bitch”) – is “the sentient computer who commands every function of [the corporate complex,] Aquarius”. She interacts with people both through voice alone and through an audiovisual screen signal on which a blurred, ‘scanlined’ head of a maybe elderly, perhaps female person is visible, possibly wearing earrings. This character is reminiscent of the AI “Mother” in the film Alien (released only four years before Rōnin), but it’s unclear whether Virgo was programmed by humans to look that way – as a powerful and wilful AI, she might have chosen her screen persona herself.
All that being said, we haven’t even talked about the characters’ words and actions as performative acts yet. A scene highly relevant to this matter, for example, is at the end of the comic when Casey accuses the rōnin of unmanly behaviour. But I’ll leave this analysis to others.
Butler’s concept of gender performativity doesn’t explain everything about gender and sexuality, but reading comics with her theory in mind helps us to ask important questions in this context: which characters can be identified as male, female, or something else? (And which can’t?) On which criteria (i.e. performative acts) are these identifications based? Do these acts conform to a traditional gender attribution in a character or are they conflicting? Is the gender attribution of a character stable or does it change in the course of a story? Is all this likely to be the creators’ intention, or a product of their subconscious, or a reading “against the grain”? If the gender configuration in a comic is presumably intentional, what is its function in the story? And is Frank Miller really a sexist?
Index to all “[theory] – in comics?” posts on this weblog
DC’s Rebirth – cool or not cool? Part 2/2: Justice League and Hellblazer
Posted: October 9, 2016 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, continuity, DC, Hellblazer, intertextuality, Justice League, Rebirth, remakes, superheroes, US Leave a commentIn part 1 of this two-part review post, I was reluctant to recommend the recently re-launched Flash and Batman comic book series to new readers. Let’s see if Justice League and Hellblazer do better. (Again, I read both with the prequel DC Universe Rebirth #1 in mind.)
Justice League: Rebirth #1
Language: English
Authors: Bryan Hitch (writer/penciller), Daniel Henriques (inker), Alex Sinclair (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Cover date: September 2016
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Website: http://www.dccomics.com/comics/justice-league-2016/justice-league-rebirth-1
I picked this book up because I thought it was a continuation of Bryan Hitch’s JLA (apparently officially titled Justice League of America, but on the cover it says JLA, so I’ll stick to that). And I think it was intended this way and will eventually become a sequel to JLA, because the funny thing is, JLA is still being published. Justice League: Rebirth references some events in JLA so it clearly takes place after JLA – a paradoxical situation probably due to JLA having been shipped late for some months. Right now, reading both series is confusing: in Justice League: Rebirth, Superman is dead and Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz are the Green Lanterns, whereas in JLA, Superman is still alive and Hal Jordan is Green Lantern.
Anyway, the story in this comic book is a one-shot about the Justice League fighting some giant alien in New York. There is very little connection to DC Universe Rebirth, except for the sub-plot about a second Superman getting ready to follow in the first one’s footsteps.
Justice League #1
Language: English
Authors: Bryan Hitch (writer), Tony S. Daniel (penciller), Sandu Florea (inker), Tomeu Morey (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Cover date: September 2016
Pages: 24
Price: $2.99
Website: http://www.dccomics.com/comics/justice-league-2016/justice-league-1
Bryan Hitch stays on board as writer while the art team is exchanged completely, and a new story starts that only vaguely builds on Justice League: Rebirth. The characters are the same though. And that’s the problem here: because it’s a superhero team with eight members, we don’t really learn anything about the individual characters. While Superman may still be deliberately kept in the background as a mysterious figure about whom more will be revealed in later issues, it’s frustrating when you keep wondering who these new Green Lanterns are and how they ended up in the Justice League (not to mention what has become of the old one).
The Hellblazer: Rebirth #1
Language: English
Authors: Simon Oliver (writer), Moritat (artist), Andre Szymanowicz and Moritat (colourists)
Publisher: DC
Cover date: September 2016
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Website: http://www.dccomics.com/comics/the-hellblazer-2016/the-hellblazer-rebirth-1
There is only one panel in DC Universe Rebirth that shows John Constantine; in it, he talks with Swamp Thing about Abigail’s disappearance, a plot which is continued in The Hellblazer #1. The Hellblazer: Rebirth, however, is a self-contained story about Constantine outwitting a demon with the help of Mercury, a character apparently introduced in the old Hellblazer series.
Once again I have no idea what the purpose of this Rebirth book is, as it is irrelevant to both DC Universe Rebirth and The Hellblazer.
The Hellblazer #1
Language: English
Authors: Simon Oliver (writer), Moritat (artist), Andre Szymanowicz and Moritat (colourists)
Publisher: DC
Cover date: October 2016
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Website: http://www.dccomics.com/comics/the-hellblazer-2016/the-hellblazer-1
Constantine takes Swamp Thing to Mercury so that she can help him find his love interest Abigail. Meanwhile, two immortal beings who were present at the assassination of Franz Ferdinand meet again in the present day. Both of these sub-plots are merely set up here and will probably be continued in the following issues, but it is remarkable how they do not build on the Rebirth event at all. At the same time, Mercury is written as if she was supposed to be familiar to the readers (even though she didn’t appear in the pre-Rebirth Justice League Dark, for instance). Furthermore, this book is not a good introduction to the character of John Constantine, as we learn little about his backstory and the exact nature of his powers.
Summary: So was this whole Rebirth thing a good idea? If the point was to attract new readers, DC could have done much better. Instead of the unnecessary Rebirth issues (which will be collected in the first trade paperbacks of the individual series), they should have started the re-launched series with proper origin stories to fill the readers in on who the protagonists actually are. That would have been helpful for continuing readers too, who have only been left confused by DC Universe Rebirth.
Commercially, Rebirth seems to have worked for DC so far, but it remains to be seen if any noteworthy comics emerge from this mess. At any rate, the concept of continuity in superhero comics remains endangered.
DC’s Rebirth – cool or not cool? Part 1/2: Flash and Batman
Posted: September 20, 2016 Filed under: review | Tags: Batman, comics, continuity, DC, intertextuality, Rebirth, remakes, superheroes, The Flash, US 1 CommentIn 2011, when DC ‘rebooted’ all of their comic book series (‘The New 52’), their sales figures improved drastically, at least for the first 1-2 years or so. Recently, with sales back on a low level, they must have thought: if it worked once, it must work twice. So DC relaunched/renumbered every title once again (with Action Comics and Detective Comics going back to their old issue numbers in the 900s), and indeed sales are up again. However, this ‘Rebirth’ is – once again – not a clean reboot. The stories don’t start from scratch, but rely on previously established continuity, or at least on bits and pieces of it. Are the Rebirth comics intended as jumping-on points for new readers, or to ‘fix’ continuity for old readers? Or will nobody be able to make sense of them? Let’s find out by looking at some of these new titles. Disclaimer: I have read neither Flashpoint nor Convergence, the two crossover events that bookend The New 52, which would have probably made it easier to understand what’s going on in Rebirth.
The starting point for it all is the prequel one-shot, DC Universe Rebirth:
DC Universe Rebirth #1
Language: English
Authors: Geoff Johns (writer), Gary Frank, Ivan Reis, Ethan van Sciver and Phil Jimenez (artists)
Publisher: DC
Cover date: July 2016
Pages: 66
Price: $2.99
Website: http://www.dccomics.com/comics/dc-universe-rebirth-2016/dc-universe-rebirth-1
“There’s something wrong with history. Someone has infected it and you all forgot things”, says Wally West (one of currently at least three characters named The Flash), who had been trapped inside the Speed Force. So both what happened before Flashpoint as well as what happened in The New 52 is ‘in continuity’ now, but this infection of time and memory loss are supposed to explain why everything was suddenly different in The New 52. DC Universe Rebirth is one big retconning attempt that even incorporates the Golden Age Justice Society of America, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Watchmen. Which shouldn’t make things easier for new readers, but let’s see…
For each new/relaunched series there is a prequel titled …: Rebirth, e.g. for The Flash:
The Flash: Rebirth #1
Language: English
Authors: Joshua Williamson (writer), Carmine di Giandomenico (artist), Ivan Plascencia (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Cover date: August 2016
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Website: http://www.dccomics.com/comics/the-flash-2016/the-flash-rebirth-1
The Flash is at the center of the Rebirth crossover event, so it makes sense to begin with his series. This series, like its New 52 predecessor, starts centered on Barry Allen, not Wally West. It then repeats the scene where Wally West manages to escape from the Speed Force and meet Barry Allen. However, instead of simply reprinting the two pages in question, they are redrawn by di Giandomenico, with the text remaining unchanged. It’s a rare treat to see a part of the same script handled by two different art teams, so there’s no reason for the reader to feel cheated here. As for the story, not much happens. Wally does some more explaining/retconning: “There are pieces of our memory missing from both of us. They didn’t just take time – they took our lives, they took our friendships, our loves…”
The Flash #1
Language: English
Authors: Joshua Williamson (writer), Carmine di Giandomenico (artist), Ivan Plascencia (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Cover date: September 2016
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Website: http://www.dccomics.com/comics/the-flash-2016/the-flash-1
This comic shifts the focus back to Barry Allen again, and to yet another Flash, confusingly also named Wally West, who apparently had already been introduced at some point in the New 52 Flash series. While the other Wally West, together with Batman, continues to investigate this whole Rebirth mystery off-panel, an unconnected story with a new villain begins for Barry Allen.
This could develop into an entertaining series, as long as you’re willing to forget about the more exciting story that started in DC Universe Rebirth and The Flash: Rebirth.
Speaking of Batman…
Batman: Rebirth #1
Language: English
Authors: Tom King and Scott Snyder (writers), Mikel Janín (artist), June Chung (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Cover date: August 2016
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Website: http://www.dccomics.com/comics/batman-2016/batman-rebirth-1
The story told in this comic is completely unrelated to DC Universe Rebirth. It feels like the epilogue to a previous story, but I don’t know how the New 52 Batman series ended. Batman fights an interesting supervillain, Calendar Man, then hires Duke Thomas as a new Robin (just don’t call him Robin), and performs some unlikely stunts. Reading The Flash and Batman side by side, it’s striking that both new sidekicks, ‘Wally West II’ and Duke Thomas, are African-Americans; however, both were created before Rebirth.
From here the Batman series splits into two new comics, All-Star Batman (written by the old Batman writer Scott Snyder) and Batman (written by Tom King). I picked the latter:
Batman #1
Language: English
Authors: Tom King (writer), David Finch (penciller), Matt Banning (inker), Jordie Bellaire (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Cover date: August 2016
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Website: http://www.dccomics.com/comics/batman-2016/batman-1
And once again, a completely new story (about Batman trying to avert a plane crash over Gotham and meeting two new rivalling superheroes) starts with no connection to either Batman: Rebirth or DC Universe Rebirth, except for the previously introduced Duke Thomas who makes a brief appearance here.
Even more so than The Flash #1, this comic book looks like a good jumping-on point if and only if you ignore the two Rebirth prequels.
Review, Darwyn Cooke memorial edition: Batman: Ego and Other Tails
Posted: June 28, 2016 Filed under: review | Tags: Batman, Batman: Ego, Catwoman, comics, Darwyn Cooke, DC, superheroes, US Leave a commentDarwyn Cooke, who passed away last month, was perhaps best known for his masterpieces, DC: The New Frontier (2004), the Parker series (2009-2013), and Before Watchmen: Minutemen (2012-2013). His lesser known earlier stories for DC are collected in the trade paperback, Batman: Ego and Other Tails (2007).
Ego: A Psychotic Slide into the Heart of Darkness a.k.a. Batman: Ego (first published 2000, 62 pages)
After he fails to capture a criminal alive, Batman returns to the batcave, where Bruce Wayne is haunted by a monstrous version of his Batman persona. Like the ghosts in A Christmas Carol, this apparition lets Bruce revisit traumatic past events, and urges Bruce to renounce his ‘no killing’ creed.
In the introduction to the TPB, Cooke considers Ego “an earnest yet flawed first effort”. The biggest flaw is probably the colouring, which was apparently done by Cooke himself. An overuse of gradient effects and some unfortunate tonal choices considerably weaken the overall impression despite the beautiful line work. There’s also some heavy-handed dialogue. Apart from that, Ego is an outstanding Batman story.
Rating: ● ● ● ● ○
Here Be Monsters (2002, 8 pp.)
Another Batman comic, albeit written by Paul Grist and drawn in black and white by Cooke. Once again, Batman experiences mental breakdown and is haunted by hallucinations, this time induced by poison. And once again, his fierce side threatens to take over. Here Be Monsters is a nice little story with striking artwork, but reading it after Ego feels redundant.
Rating: ● ● ● ○ ○
Catwoman: Selina’s Big Score (2002, 85 pp.)
Catwoman and some accomplices set up a major train robbery, but of course things go terribly wrong. Though ostensibly set in the present day, the overall design and some anachronistic references to e.g. I Love Lucy and Angie Dickinson betray Cooke’s fondness for the 1950s. This is the longest story in this TPB, and there’s (almost) no Batman in it. In comparison to Ego, it benefits immensely from Matt Hollingsworth’s colouring. The only problem with the artwork is Cooke’s character designs, as two of the major male characters, Stark and Slam Bradley, are hard to tell apart. As for the content, I found the relationship between Catwoman and Stark unconvincing and at odds with my perception of Selina as a strong and independent woman.
Rating: ● ● ● ○ ○
The Monument (2002, 8 pp.)
Another black-and-white comic, written by Cooke and drawn by Bill Wray, this delightfully silly little story is about a statue erected in honor of Batman. While Wray’s over-the-top, cartoonish art style fits the tone of the story, it dominates the comic to such a degree that it doesn’t feel like a Darwyn Cooke comic (or a Batman comic, for that matter).
Rating: ● ● ○ ○ ○
Date Knight (2004, 11 pp.)
Another silly short comic written by Cooke and illustrated by Tim Sale, in which Catwoman likens a fight with Batman to a romantic rendezvous. Not much of a story, but it captures the essence of the protagonists’ love-hate relationship.
Rating: ● ● ○ ○ ○
Deja Vu (2005, 13 pp.)
This comic is a remake of the 1974 Batman story “Night of the Stalker” by Vin & Sal Amendola, Steve Englehart and Dick Giordano. Composed in a rigid 2 × 4 layout, this remake is written, drawn and coloured by Cooke, and this time it’s a pleasure to behold. Particularly as a colourist, Cooke seems to have had learned a lot since Ego. Once again there’s not much of a story here – Batman hunts down a gang of jewel robbers, some of which also appear in Selina’s Big Score.
Rating: ● ● ● ○ ○
Overall verdict: Obviously, Batman: Ego and Other Tails is highly relevant for those interested in Darwyn Cooke’s comics, and – while not on the same level as his aforementioned later works – will not disappoint them. Apart from that, this trade paperback can be considered required reading for readers with an interest in the characters of Batman (mainly due to the title story) and/or Catwoman (due to Selina’s Big Score, although this story has also been published as a standalone TPB).
Rosalind Krauss’s grids – in comics?
Posted: April 5, 2016 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, Darwyn Cooke, DC, DC: The New Frontier, grids, Karuho Shiina, Kimi ni todoke, layout, manga, Rosalind Krauss, theory, US 2 Comments[This post was originally planned to be published in March in conjunction with Women’s History Month, but then I became ill and couldn’t finish it in time.]
Whenever comics scholars hear the word “grid”, they immediately think of comics. This is due to panels on a comic page often forming a grid-like layout. One of the field’s journals is even named The Comics Grid, which only shows how strong this perceived connection is. People outside of the comics world, however, might have a somewhat different idea of what a grid is. Take Rosalind E. Krauss, for instance. In 1979 she published an essay titled “Grids” (collected in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernists Myths, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986, pp. 11-22) and returned to the topic two years later in “The Originality of the Avant-Garde” (in the same book on pp. 151-170; the section on grids is on pp. 157-162). Here’s a quote from the latter (p. 158):
The absolute stasis of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of center, of inflection, emphasizes not only its anti-referential character, but – more importantly – its hostility to narrative. This structure, impervious both to time and to incident, will not permit the projection of language into the domain of the visual, and the result is silence.
That doesn’t sound like comics at all, does it? Part of the problem might be, Krauss never defines what she means by “grid”. This would have been a good idea though, because even in mathematics there doesn’t seem to be a commonly agreed definition.¹ From the examples pictured in her essay, it looks like she means two different types of grid images: one in which a grid is formed by sets of drawn (or painted, etc.) parallel lines (e.g. Agnes Martin’s paintings), and another in which these lines are only implicitly formed by the borders of rectangles (e.g. Jasper Johns’s Gray Numbers, to which we’ll get back later in this post).
Both types can be found in comics, too. The former is the more common layout. However, the following example might look unusual at first:
a page from Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier, vol. 2
More on this layout in a minute.
For the second type of grid, the one with the implicit lines, consider this example:
a page from Karuho Shiina’s Kimi ni Todoke, vol. 7
Once you start paying attention to these things, the variety of Karuho Shiina’s layouts is amazing. It would be fun to see how many pages into Kimi ni Todoke a page layout is repeated for the first time, but I’ll leave this exercise for another time.
Krauss doesn’t expressly distinguish implicit and explicit grids, but she makes another interesting distinction: centrifugal vs. centripetal.³ A centrifugal reading of a work of art assumes that “the grid extends, in all directions, to infinity” (p. 18). The image is “a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric”, thus “compelling our acknowledgement of a world beyond the frame”. A centripetal work of art, on the other hand, is “an autonomous, organic whole” (p. 19).
From the examples discussed by Krauss, it looks like this distinction is simply a question of cropping: if the grid lines end where the image ends, it’s a centrifugal image. If the grid lines end within the image borders (so that they’re strictly speaking only line segments, not lines proper), it’s a centripetal image. If we want to apply this categorisation to comics, we have to once more be careful not to confuse panel borders with gutters. On Cooke’s New Frontier page, all panel borders are visible, but the imaginary rectangles that continue the grid in all four directions beyond the three panel rectangles are not. Therefore, we cannot say that the gutters (which form our grid here) end at certain points, e.g. the page borders. Thus this page is a centrifugal image. With Shiina’s Kimi ni Todoke page it’s not so easy to tell: here, the white page background on the right acts as a delimiter of the (implicit) grid rays, which exit the page only to the top, left, and bottom. To visualise this view on the page, I coloured each of the 5 panels and the page border differently:
Perhaps the overall character of this page is still centrifugal, but not quite as much so as in the New Frontier example.
One final remark about the purported “hostility to narrative” of the grid: I think Krauss proves herself wrong by picturing Jasper Johns’s Gray Numbers. In this painting, each rectangle of the grid (except for the top left one) is filled with a numeral between 0 and 9. Let’s look at a random rectangle, say, the middle one in the bottom row. It’s a 4. The rectangle above it is a 3. The one on the left is also a 3. On the right there’s a 5, and next to the 5 there’s a 6… You get the idea. Obviously, there is a pattern here. From the top left to the bottom right corner, the numerals form a sequence – either horizontally or vertically – in which the number is increased by 1 until it is reset to 0 when it would otherwise reach 10. My point is: it matters little what’s inside the rectangles, because we have a tendency to see grids as sequences. And (while the precise meaning may be a matter of debate) a meaningful sequence at that – which amounts to, for all intents and purposes, a narrative. Only completely empty or uniform grids (e.g., again, Agnes Martin’s) resist this reading as a narrative.
All that being said, it should be noted that none of it is really the point of Krauss’s essays, which are more concerned with the grid as a typical form of modernist painting within the discourse of originality and repetition.
The 650-Cent Plague 