A Pithy Quote From "Shoplifters Of The World Unite" By The Smiths
So, the Joelle Jones thing.
Before we go any further, let's make sure everyone is caught up: last Friday, DC put out some promotional art by Joelle Jones for the upcoming Trial of the Amazons event that's going to run through the Wonder Woman books in a few weeks' time. Shortly after, people on social media started noticing that some of the figures in that promo piece were nearly identical to figures Pepe Larraz had drawn in one of the many impressive pages of 2021's X-Men #1. And once more people started looking, more examples were found with incredible quickness. Here, a Gary Frank cover jacked in Supergirl: Being Super. There, a Patrick Gleason Superman arriving in the pages of her issues of Batman. Everywhere, shock, horror, and anger, paired with the suspicion that more was to be discovered.
I understand where the anger is coming from. One of the foundational fictions the comic book industry likes to tell about itself is that it puts together the greatest creatives in the world, and gives them the means to tell the greatest stories in the world, through the greatest medium ever devised for storytelling. Plagiarism of any kind feels like a betrayal of that promise, which by extension means a betrayal of fans and peers alike. And the more you're emotionally invested in all of this, the more it hurts. Plus there's the violent misogyny of comics' professional fascist class, who saw dollar signs the moment they realized a woman had done something. That always makes the environment a worse place to try and figure things out.
But figure them out we must, and the key fact I keep coming back to is this: when put against every other crime, whether legally actionable or not, that have been committed in the comic book industry throughout its entire history, the defrauding, the scams, and the actual material theft, someone tracing someone else's work feels relatively minor. It's shoplifting by way of Photoshop filters, a practice basically as old as comics themselves. In days of old, before the culture wars made us take everything far too seriously, it was commonly accepted practice. Jack Kirby did it, Wally Wood bragged about it, and there were countless others, all favorites of someone somewhere. Making it some kind of deep moral failure only serves to obfuscate the structural factors that are at play here.
It's a pretty fucked time to be a comic book artist. On a daily basis, you're being asked to do more, to do it faster, and to do it at higher and higher standards of quality. Every page needs to be a richly detailed work-intensive masterpiece, and you need to deliver at least one issue a month, in an environment where last-minute changes and contradictory demands from editorial, itself overworked by the whims of C-Suite fucks, are a constantly looming threat to your ability to hit a deadline. (Don't believe me? Ask Greg Smallwood.) And since this is corporate comics, you're most likely being paid below what you're actually worth to some Billion Dollar Corporation. Taking shortcuts, and getting away with it, is a massive compromise, but it is also a fast and easy way to get something out.
The question must, then, be turned on us. Is this what we want? Can we accept fewer comics, or slightly less ambitious comics, or both at the same time? What should our standards be? Are we okay with people overworking themselves in the name of Pulp, or is there a way forward where we can accept that these big dumb comics of ours don't have to be perfect? I genuinely don't have an answer. I genuinely don't know what to make of this, as a fan or as a critic. But I'm sure more violence will solve the problem. For sure.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: THIS WHOLE BIT I USE AS A TRANSITION BETWEEN THE NEWS AND THE REVIEWS? YEAH I STOLE IT
The best way to start this one, I think, is to begin with the conclusion: Batgirls #3, much like the rest of DC's recently relaunched Batgirls vehicle, is entirely too cute by half, to the point where it's getting on my nerves. It is a good comic, mind you: it's bright and colorful, it moves at a breakneck pace, it's got humor and heart in equal measures, and it feels pop in the way all the cool webcomics and Scott Pilgrim feels pop. Let's bring in the particulars to give everyone their due: Jorge Corona is a joy to behold, his art is cartoony, dynamic and expressive in equal measures, usually all at once; there's a mastery of composition and body language, which when paired with a great sense of detail (watch how the capes are drawn! it's A MINDBLOWER!) makes the whole thing look undeniably cool. It's also got some grime on top of it all, which adds a certain Jhonen Vasquez flavor to it all. On colors, the team of Ivan Plascencia and Sarah Stern get bold and fluorescent in a way that has not been seen in a Gotham City book since FCO Plascencia rewrote the rules of what the palette could be in Capullo and Snyder's Zero Year.
And yes, obviously, Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad can write a fun comic. Wonder Woman, which they also write, is the most fun than it's been in years! In Batgirls, they find an avenue for their goofier sensibilities, with an added attitude that keep things consistently playful, while still indulging in pretty earnest character drama, which feels especially welcome when dealing with Cass and Steph. It's light and breezy, but it's got enough crash-bang-wallop to satisfy. By the objective measures, it's not only a good comic: it's the kind of comic there should be more of. It's accessible, it's new, it's fun. And yet, here I am, kinda cold. In some ways, this is a book that is trying too hard. This is a book that does too much for its own good. It's got ambitions, but not the definitive ideas that would back them up. It is the comic book equivalent of glomping: a gesture of aggressive positivity, coming from a place of kindness and love, which I'm sure posters of certain generations, the earnest DeviantArt posters of the early aughts, and the tumblr users they influenced, will be all about. But, on some level, I can't fucking stand it. But I like it! And it's good!
Let's get the facts out of the way: I will mourn the Bellaire, Campbell and Spurrier run of Hellblazer for as long as I live, and yes, in some ways, this newsletter is my way of avenging its early death. You are all to blame, obviously, but I can understand why it happened: John Constantine comics are for a very small niche in the first place, and that just gets smaller when you make it about reactionary politics in the post-Brexit United Kingdom. It was beautiful, it was doomed, and it's over now. The good news is: the team is back together, and their new book, Suicide Squad: Blaze #1, is tailor-made to be the hit Hellblazer could never be. For one, it's a Suicide Squad book, and people seem to like those. For two, it's a book that is laser-targeted at the Here and Now, and the way it integrates the day's most pressing obsessions to its proceedings is almost genius.
To wit: this is a book where a select group made from the disenfranchised of society fight to the death in order to get a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This is a book where power gives way to violent hedonism. This is a book about people facing certain death, and trying to make the most of it. The more clever among you will have realized that each of the previous three sentences also describes some work that has been massively popular in the past couple of years. It is Squid Game and its killer class metaphors by way of The Boys and its slapstick hyperviolence. It is The Suicide Squad, obviously, but it is also The Wicked + The Divine. On top of it all, Si Spurrier brings his obsessions about stories and how they're told, carried over from many of his greatest works, from Six Gun Gorilla to The Dreaming, as a way to probe into something deeper.
And of course, this is all executed at the highest possible levels of the craft; it's moody, it's gritty, it's unlike anything in comics, and it's going to stay with me for a while. If this one doesn't work out, if this one doesn't become a landmark in comics, I swear I'll start doing something bad. Don't test me.
Wow! That's it! It's one of those! I've done it! Thank you for reading, thank you for subscribing, especially if you did so because of that one weird loser. If you wanna help me get more of this to the people, subscribe and tell your friends about this! We have fun, we make jokes, we learn something along the way! And after all is said and done, we tell all the nice people what we've always told them! The message goes like this: HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!