Further Tales From The Supplypocalypse
I went into this week assuming things would get better; I'd line up two weeks of reviews from this week and the week past, we'd get back on the horse, and things would return to normal. That didn't happen, for reasons that I wish I was surprised by. (I mean, come on, who would really be shocked if Known Mia Khalifa Reply Guy Steve Geppi Of Diamond Comics Distributors fell victim to a phishing scam?) I don't really have anything for the news part of the newsletter. Sure, the fascists that keep talking about comics have an entirely new and entirely baffling conspiracy theory that's so incoherent it's almost entertaining, but mining those fuckers for content is unfathomably depressing and I will not subject you to this. So, if last week was just the editorial, this week is just the reviews. That's one newsletter, splayed across two weeks, and let's hope it doesn't get any worse.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: A WELCOME BIT OF ABSOLUTE INANITY IN THE COLD, DEPRESSING WINTER
Ever since the Walt Disney Corporation launched its bid for the ownership of every single one of our aspirations, most notably through its exploitation of the Marvel Comics catalogue of intellectual properties, there have been questions about whether or not superhero stories were too limited in range or scope to tell stories of any meaningful impart, the matter growing further in further in urgency as the Marvel Cinematic Universe took more and more of the limited space of even your most luxurious multiplex. This involves the assumption that "superhero" is a genre in and of itself. I very strongly disagree. "Superhero" isn't a genre, it's a framework, inherited from a primordial tradition of capital-P Pulp, which you can in all likelihood trace to a place far older than even the printing press. With the proper care and just a little imagination, you can use any character in any long-running shared universe to tell just about any story you could devise, in any genre you wish to explore. I have believed this for a while, and it is why I love comics so much.
One writer who has understood this maybe better than anyone currently working at the Big Two is Kieron Gillen. I've been thinking about his works for a while, for a reason that now completely escapes me, and I noticed that the man has thrived in leveraging those maximalist expanses of storytelling to walk off the beaten path. Doctor Aphra, set in in the patchwork of influences that is the Star Wars universe, is a pulp adventure in the style of the Indiana Jones films. Journey Into Mystery, being the story of the story of Loki, routinely played with genres and settings through Marvel's many mythical realms. His affection for the Warhammer universes comes from a sincere appreciation of places where every possible apocalypse is happening at once, provided it is grim and dark enough. Give him the Eternals, which is about figures at the root of every tale in every mythology, and just watch how the sparks fly.
In Eternals #7, he continues his critical look at the beautifully absurd rules and systems by which the Eternals live, by considering the matter of the Uni-Mind, and the way in which the Eternals band together to make decisions about themselves as a group, through the prism of the political thriller. Think The House of Cards, except Sir Francis Urquhart is a mad alien bastard who wants the deaths of everyone in the Universe, and also he's Thanos. There are machinations galore, displays of power in the personal and the political, and solemn reminders of the human cost of it all, to both heighten the stakes and to make a point about the many immoralities inherent to the exercise of any power. It is mostly an issue of people talking, which gives Esad Ribic an opportunity to flex his considerable talent to lend an operatic theatricality to the proceedings, all in big gestures and big expressions. There is still a bit of wild imagery in there, and eventually people fight to the death, but those are very quick affairs, really just a couple of pages. It's a very heady comic, it makes you think, and I just don't see why that couldn't be true of all superhero stories.
To my great surprise, I ended up pretty dang impressed with Action Comics #1036, in which "The Warworld Saga" begins in earnest. It took a pretty awkward gear shift of a Batman/Superman special to arrive there, but here is a comic that does a couple of things that I like a lot. First, the one you'd expect: Phillip Kennedy Johnson's dark fantasy take on Mongul and the world under his thrall continues to impress, through both his usual obsessive fantasy writer kind of detail work and through sheer lyrical bombast, because there's nothing quite as self-evidently kickass as telling someone "your bones will adorn my banner-spear for a thousand thousand years". That's a beautiful sentence right there, in a comic that has so many more. If you're a fan of verbose posturing, it's an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Second, there is the big surprise: this is as The Authority a comic with a team calling itself The Authority has been in a hot while. Visually, Daniel Sampere operates in the widescreen style that Bryan Hitch pioneered, and delivers both in the ludicrously detailed landscapes on a gigantic scale, and the super-wide double page spreads that give each awe-inspiring moment ample room to breathe and be appreciated in full. Spiritually, much like its forefather, this is a comic about a group of radicals appearing from seemingly nowhere and proclaiming to the planet below that they are here to make a better world, and that they cannot be stopped. What Warworld provides is an interesting defamiliarized playground in which the in-continuity Superman can do the Authority thing, and it doesn't seem as dangerous as putting the same ideas into execution on Earth. It's a smart way to follow up on the Grant Morrison miniseries, and it makes for a read that I found satisfying on a visceral level. This is maybe the most I underestimated a comic this year, and it turns out I was way off! Gotta love it.
It barely needs to be said that What's The Furthest Place From Here? #1, the new comic by Tyler Boss and Matthew Rosenberg, is one of the best things you'll read all year. Where 4 Kids Walk Into A Bank was a pretty straightforward story told in a plethora of playful ways, this does the opposite: this is a somewhat bleak book, it plays its mysteries close to the vest, and, while it is pretty stylish (Tyler Boss couldn't make a dull comic even if he tried really hard, and why would he?), it doesn't indulge in any stylistic extravagance. What you see is what you get, and what you get is indeed a tale about kids and irresponsible use of firearms, it is still mostly a comic about the end of the world, music, and getting older, which is in its own way an apocalypse. Being the first issue in a series, it's mostly about introducing you to the situation, and getting you to ask a few questions, and it does that extremely well. Being a triple-sized issue, it also gives you a lot of comic for the money. It's a great deal. It's a great comic. I already want more, and that's not even going into the fact that this is a comic cool enough to have its own vinyl record.
Wow! We pulled it off! We did one that was just reviews from last week! Maybe we'll do another one just like this one next week! At this point I'm honestly not sure and getting it wrong this week got me pretty upset so I'm not even going to bother! We'll see you when we see you, and we'll tell you about what's there when we see it! Why am I talking like this? It's been a rough week. If you haven't, please subscribe, and if you have, tell your friends that we're still here! Tell your friends that you're still here! We're going to keep doing this, because it's all I can do. In the mean time, take care, and HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!