More Like Jumpacurrency Am I Right People? (It's A Joke About The Super-Pets)
Living the life of an idle debonair aesthete, as I do, leaves very little time to keep up with whatever nonsense the computer touchers have come up THIS time. These things tend to be of very little beauty, and are therefore not really worth paying attention to. But when the art world, seemingly as one, starts telling tales of a new online El Dorado, where the streets are paved with digital gold, and artists feast on meals fit for the new kings of the digital frontier, one has to take a look, right?
The hot new game is called “non-fungible tokens”, NFTs for the unfamiliar, and NiFTy for the total assholes. It’s played like this: Artist makes art. Artist turns the art into a unique digital token through a massive waste of time and energy that is likely to kill all life on Earth in the long run. The unique digital token makes the art a good that can be bought and sold on the market and priced accordingly. That gets turned into Ethereum, which is some kind of hipster bitcoin, and then the Ethereum can get exchanged on the Ethereum market for cool Ethereum goods like horse ketamine and child pornography.
Now, is that a good deal for artists, which are the only people worth caring about in all this nonsense? I don’t know. I feel like, once you bring “the end of all life on Earth” into the equation, things always tend to get a little dicey, no matter how much you’re getting paid. I don’t trust speculative bubbles as a matter of principle, and all the worst people on Earth have been getting in on the action, feeling there’s serious money to be made. What does it all mean? I’m not sure! Can you get enough horse ketamine to numb yourself to life under this hell called “endgame capitalism”? I sure as shit hope so for the sake of anyone getting into this.
But where does that leave us? Well, I’m not an artist, I’m not an economist, I’m not a computer expert and I don’t know much about environmental science, but, based on my understanding, cryptocurrency is a unique kind of evil plaguing our modern times and it’s a fucking bummer to see so many artists I respect jump face first into the grift because this piece of shit industry doesn’t pay them what they’re worth! So, you know, don’t get into NFTs, please.
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And so, here we are. They gave the Joker his own dang book. There’s a book out there that’s all about the dang Joker. Is it madness? Do they not realize that the Joker is a bad guy? This is a man to whom the idea of CRIME is FUNNY! We should all be terrified! Okay, so, fine, the idea of a book all about the Joker is not worth the fake moral panic. But it does feel pretty cynical and/or creatively bankrupt. I’m not sure that the book does anything to alleviate that feeling, but I sure as shit had fun.
Getting to the facts: The Joker #1 is the beginning of a a companion piece to the current Batman storyline, written by James Tynion IV and illustrated by Guillem March, with colors by Arif Prianto. It is about the Joker, but its protagonist is Jim Gordon, on the verge of retirement and being paid a suspiciously large amount of money to work one final case. So, don’t worry folks, it might say Joker on the cover, but this is first and foremost a Detective Comic.
Is it a good one? Well, really, it is two good ones, since the story takes its cues from the single two biggest Batman comics ever. From Year One, it takes the noir aesthetics, the flashbacks to Jim’s younger days, and Jim’s particular lowercase lettering. From The Killing Joke, it takes the trauma, which March manifests through twisted nightmares chopping and screwing Brian Bolland’s original imagery they become monsters, hovering over the commissioner’s every thought.
None of this feels particularly creative, but it’s solid storytelling. Luckily, there’s a bigger picture here. There’s the connections to the main Batman story, which give us a chance to see more of the aftermath of the attack on Arkham Asylum. But, more importantly, there’s the series’ actual hook: a globe-trotting chase between Gordon and the Joker, which begins in Bolivia and promises to go many places. That’s ultimately what’s gonna keep me coming back. Plus the back-up is pretty good.
Speaking of Guillem March, I’d be remiss if I didn’t throw a quick shout-out to Karmen #1 in here. It’s not exactly new material (the comic was published all around Europe last year), but it’s as good as it gets. It’s a book about many things, but mostly love, death, dreams and memory. It’s about a woman named Catalina, who’s dying, and a woman named Karmen, who might be Death. The premise is pretty dour, but it’s executed with a joyous sense of playfulness, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the ways March plays with space and time in his layouts.
All the tricks are out there. Places get laid out in staccato over a series of short panels, or they’re spread across a single gorgeous splash, delineating the action with seamless elegance. A life flashes before Catalina’s eyes like a ribbon of panels, while comedic touches happen in small inserts. The book is full to the brim with visual storytelling ideas like that, and it’s all to pay tribute to two of March’s favorite subjects: nude women and Palma de Mallorca.
So, yeah, it’s very much one of those pretentious European comics, which I’m cool with, being as I am, both pretentious and European. I could go and see if this keeps up the whole way through right now, but hey, why not take the journey? Palma de Mallorca isn’t as good a place to die in as Paris, but you know what? It’s pretty close. Solid number two.
It’s been confusing at times, but, and I probably should have seen this coming, The Green Lantern Season Two #12, which closes out Grant Morrison, Liam Sharp, and Xermanico’s Hal Jordan epic, hit me with remarkable clarity. If you’re familiar with any of Morrison’s work, you’ll probably see the themes coming: it’s forward progress through synthesis, accepting you’re only one part of an infinite cycle, and accepting to leave the past where it is.
The specifics never really mattered, even as they make the subtext text and turn heroes and lovers into toyetic plastic monstrosities for the benefit of ethereal beings of pure destructive consumption. We are in this together, and ultimately, that’s all that should matter, right? It’s a simple solve, but simple works, especially when it’s done with Liam Sharp’s eye for psychedelia.
More than maybe any other of their comics, this Green Lantern comic has been an occasion for Grant Morrison to work out some shit about themselves, from comics, commerce, and capital to their own relationship with gender, and perhaps there is no more fitting and beautiful ending for it than the actual events, than coming out and reckoning with the truth of one’s self? Maybe that’s the ultimate freedom? It’s worth thinking about.
I wasn’t gonna deliver another one of my rambling raves about Rorschach #6, but then I thought about it, and I realized I had to, for reasons that I hope will appear obvious. It’s a walk, and we better start at the start. This is an issue all about language, and it puts two events in parallel. In the foreground, the Detective looks at the correspondence between gun crazy sharpshooter Laura Cummings and reclusive cartoonist Wil Myerson. In the background, the presidential debate between Turley and Redford. In both, a narrative is formed. In one, a candidate ends up ascendant. In the other, two people are dead.
The centerpiece of the issue is, as one might expect, the latter. Laura and Wil, letter after letter, looking for something between the two of them, and finding a fearful symmetry, not just in the fact that they find themselves both afraid of having looked at the misery of the world and done nothing, but in the fact that, through lettering and layouts, Clayton Cowles and Jorge Fornes are very deliberately calling back to Watchmen #5. Laura and Wil’s stories mirror one another, one responding to the other, until the two meet.
And at the heart of it is a language below language. Our inciting incident, and the thing underpinning the whole affair, is The Citizen and the Unthinker. It is comic books. So, when the Detective finds himself chasing a lead among the actual real-life attendees of an actual real-life séance at Otto Binder’s house, is it really surprising? No. Is it completely fucking buckwild? Yeah.
So I wasn’t gonna do all this, but then Rorschach #6 kinda validated everything I’ve ever said about comic books. That stuff about language? IT’S THE FUCKING HYBC MANIFESTO. The symmetry? I SAW IT BECAUSE I WAS READING PHYSICAL. When a comic says I have been correct always, I have to talk about it. And here we are.
Finally, we close out the week with a little treat: Vampire The Masquerade #6 is the beginning of a new story arc in Vault’s adaptation of the storied role-playing game franchise, and it’s just my idea of a good time. It’s got all the intrigue and the jargon that I love, with the fun twists on the clichés of vampire fiction that you can expect from the World of Darkness. It’s cool vampires doing cool vampire shit and sometimes feeling bad about the cool vampire shit that they do, or that others do at them! I don’t really have much to say about it! I just like it! Fuck you! It’s my newsletter! Sorry, I’m sorry, I just like Vampire The Masquerade a lot.
And that’s another newsletter jam-packed full of goodness done! Thank you for reading, thank you even more for liking, sharing, and subscribing! Tell your friends! We’re doing this! Forever! And if you’ve already done it, do the other thing! You know it! You love it! HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!