At Last, The Worst Comic Of All Time
The big news this week is depressing as all hell, and I'd rather do anything else than talk about it, because I don't want to admit to myself that our time on Earth is always too short. You know what happened, and we can deal with it in due time. I don't want to talk about it to such an extent that this week, in lieu of the usual jokes and japes about current events in the American comic book industry, I'm going to tell you about the worst comic I own, which is possibly the worst comic of all time. For context: I own first print copies of every single issue of Before Watchmen, an entirely woeful moment in comic book history best summed up by the one panel in Brian Azzarello and J.G. Jones' Before Watchmen: The Comedian where Eddie Blake goes "It's time to shit.", an actual line from an actual comic that DC editorial thought was a worthy prequel to Watchmen. We're going to talk about a comic that is worse than that. We're going to talk about Asterix and the Falling Sky, the final comic by Asterix co-creator Albert Uderzo, released in 2005.
I think I have been told several times over the course of my life that, all volumes combined, Asterix is one of the highest selling comics on the planet. I don't know how true that is anymore, but I can understand why that would be: René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's Asterix is an incredibly good comic. The reasons for all of this are easy enough to grasp: Uderzo is a complete powerhouse of a cartoonist, who does a whole lot with but a few well-placed lines. The characters are instantly memorable and incredibly expressive, the action is always clean and satisfying, and the locales in Asterix's many travels always impress by their scale and fine detail work. Meanwhile, René Goscinny is the single greatest comic book writer that has ever lived, whose gift for social satire is only matched by an absolute commitment to the craft of the gag. It is so good that the only thing that would betray its age are a bunch of dated ethnic stereotypes pulled from the imagination of 1960s still-a-colonial-empire France.
Here's the thing, however: Goscinny and Uderzo's Asterix is not Uderzo's Asterix. When Goscinny passed away, and Uderzo continued the series solo, things got a lot clumsier. The plots became a lot more self-indulgent, the gags relied more on Uderzo's gift for caricature than they did on the sound structure of characters and situations. The art got sharper, until it didn't, and worst of all: the social satire turned wholly incoherent, a product of Uderzo losing his focus as he became driven by whim. When comparing and contrasting a work of sheer genius like Asterix and the Roman Agent to one of the later books like Asterix and Obelix All at Sea, you can see the series' sharp edge get duller and duller, until there is nothing left but a very blunt and very dumb instrument. And then it got worse.
2005's Asterix and the Falling Sky wants to be about many things. It wants to be a tribute to the American comic strips of Uderzo's childhood; it wants to be a satire of the then-recent American invasion of Iraq and of American imperialism in general; it wants to be a rebuke to the ever-growing importance of manga in the French comic book market. A younger creative force would struggle to make a book like that work. Albert Uderzo, aging and ailing, to the point where he's being assisted by an inker for the first and only time in the series, absolutely couldn't. There isn't really a story, not in the traditional sense, it's more of a collection of vignettes (I dare not call them gags) where an idea gets introduced and nothing much happens. There are American aliens, whose designs recall Mickey Mouse and Arnold Schwarzenegger by way of Superman, who are mostly nice but kinda dumb, who speak perfectly coherent French (or English if you're reading the English translation). Then there are Japanese aliens, whose ships look like Uderzo tried to recall what little of UFO Robo Grendizer he had seen during its historic first airing on French television in 1978 and then filled in the gaps with giant rat heads because of a pun that's not even worth explaining; they are bright yellow bug-like invaders, full-on racist caricature stuff, and they talk in the broken language of the foreign other. They clash, pointlessly, evenly matched, with only our Gallic heroes in the middle able to mediate. It goes nowhere, and it keeps escalating until it can't anymore because we've reached the page count.
The art is just as miserable; the parts that aren't retreading on past glories in the Gauls' timeless village mostly feature figures against empty backgrounds, contextualized only by color. The larger than usual panels aren't only for emphasis: they're covering up a fundamental lack of anything worthwhile. It's lifeless, even in the parts that aren't meant to be. Once, Uderzo was so skilled he could do pitch-perfect mimicry of any number of comic book styles. By the time he made The Falling Sky he had become a shadow of his former self, fundamentally incurious and unwilling to challenge himself. Meanwhile, I was 13 years old, and my friends were getting into Naruto; our paths were diverging. I was losing interest in a style of comics that seemed determined to remain insular. Eventually, I'd arrive at American superhero comics, the one form that seemed to exist beyond itself and its creators. (Story for another time; it's kind of a bummer on a personal level but it ends on Grant Morrison saving my life.) But my time in European comics ended as it had started; on Asterix.
Y'know what? I think we had fun out there, and we learned a little something along the way. It feels good to get some version of that story out; it feels good to take a moment to torch some complete trash-ass comic that had it coming. Maybe there's something to this "being a nasty little hater" thing! Let's put a "to be continued" on that one.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: DO NOT ASK ME TO EXPLAIN UDERZO'S BEEF WITH THE GUY THAT DID THE BEYBLADE MANGA, IT IS AS INEXPLICABLE AS IT SOUNDS
If there was an overwhelming theme to last week's Batman: Fear State Omega, James Tynion's final word on his past year of Batman comics, it was the idea that one didn't have to be scared of the future. There is an entire world of New out there and the best thing you can do is allow it to flourish. It's a simple idea, but the way it pulled everything about those comics and the many new characters they introduced into focus was hopeful and elegant in a way few runs of comics ever get to be anymore. And one week later, here's Batman #118, a comic that is almost entirely dedicated to picking up loose threads from the recent past. There are reasons for this, obviously: being the first issue of Jorge Molina and Joshua Williamson's tenure, and being the beginning of a run filled with hints of a coming giant company crossover, you have to make the onboarding process for new readers as frictionless as possible, I get it. But it's not just a matter of picking up in the immediate fallout of Fear State, and it's not just about acknowledging the events in Detective Comics, Justice League, and the Chip Zdarsky feature in Batman: Urban Legends. This is a book that wants to return to the Grant Morrison, Batman Incorporated era of Batman comics, so much so that it is at its heart a murder mystery featuring the former members of the Club of Heroes. It's no The Island of Mister Mayhew, not yet, and it probably won't be, because of a few well-placed twists that bring a game-changing ambition to the proceedings, but it is perfectly devised to speak to fans of that particular story. And hey: that's me right there. This is a beginning, and so it's hard to judge, but there's something there I want to see more of.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that, in addition to all of that, the book looks fucking fantastic. Jorge Molina is incredible at delivering stylish Batman action in the figures and in the layouts, but the real star of the show is Tomeu Morey, who continues to push himself further and further. It's fireworks all the way through, from the neon lights of Gotham to the darkness of a faraway crime scene, from the actual fireworks to the punching and kicking, there is an incredible range of colors and situations and Morey nails it on every single page. Because the story takes the space of one feature and one backup, Mikel Janin gets tagged in for the last few pages, and under the new hues (his last few works were colored by Jordie Bellaire), it's a revelation. Batman, being the comic book industry's best foot forward, should always look this good. This is a great comic. Tell your friends to pick it up. They're going to like it. I guarantee it.
Complaining about Marvel Comics saturating the shelves with big crossover events is one of those things that feels overdone, because it is, but it remains necessary, especially now. In December alone, someone who wants to keep abreast of current goings-on in Marvel Comics will be asked to follow Darkhold, The Death of Doctor Strange, the upcoming Avengers Forever, in addition to storylines like The Last of the Marvels and Infinity Score. It is a strategy that is exhausting by design; it wants to overwhelm your bandwidth and your budget so you don't even dare look at anyone else's comics. But turning your entire comic book publishing operation into an overwhelming content slurry creates a big problem: your big crossover events don't stand out against the rest of your offerings as well as they used to. And so you end up with something like Devil's Reign #1, which for my money is the best opening chapter of a comic book event released all year, not feeling like a big deal, when it absolutely should by dint of having done everything right.
The key here is in a remarkable clarity permeating every aspect of the book. Within the first few pages of this first issue, you get a perfect picture of the events leading up to this story and you have a clear set of rules to underpin the forthcoming action. Because of events surrounding the ever-escalating feud between Daredevil and the Kingpin, the Kingpin has outlawed all superhero activity in New York, and he has loosed a bunch of villains under the guise of the Thunderbolts to make sure it sticks, while his eyes are on a bigger prize. Because that setup is so simple and clean, the rest of the book can be about having the biggest names available react to the news and do what they do best. So we start at Daredevil, but Captain America, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four and Luke Cage get to show up, and as always Chip Zdarsky reveals himself to be a far better steward of Marvel's First Family than the sentient bag of gas currently writing the Fantastic Four ongoing. Holding together the full range of Marvel's New York requires an art team that can deliver it all, and Marco Checchetto, supported by Marcio Menyz's colors, pulls it off with incredible ease. There's gritty urban drama, cosmic mystery, and blue sky science adventure in there, all executed at a high level.
It's all your favorites together in one book, like all the great comic book crossovers, and there are several machinations that will stand in their way and make fertile ground for a series of tie-ins of dubious importance. It's the fundamentals, realized with the same low-key excellence as the rest of the Daredevil run that precedes it. You come to a crossover comic book event because you want something that has it all. This has it all. In a less busy marketplace it would be the kind of landmark event we haven't really seen since the original Civil War. AH WELL.
And that's another one done and dusted! There's no stopping us, sorry haters! That new Destiny mini expansion is good, but not "kill the newsletter" good! There's a couple more Wednesdays between us and one full year of this nonsense, so I don't know how much time there will be for reflection, so we'll play it by ear, as always. That's just how it works! Until then, you know what to do! You tell your friends, you subscribe, you HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!