THE HEAT OF BLOOD: A HYBC Mystery
I know this line of work has never been good to the washed-up, so, since I'm at the end of my rope anyways, I might as well come clean: I've never been good at stomaching the filth and misery of this world. I've always hated the summer for this exact reason. Days getting longer means having to see everything that's awful about your fellow man under the light of the Sun for just that moment longer. Working in truth is all well and good, but it eats away at your soul like a rabid dog, and I was a real feast back then. I should have expected it would all go to hell in a handbasket, but getting beaten down by heatwave after heatwave has a way of making you dumb as a bag of rocks.
For all of that fateful day, I was steaming alive in the mouse hole my landlord calls "an office" and which I call "a glorified cupboard that smells of death". I was practically melting, begging for a tall drink of water, and there she came, dressed for a hard day's rain, in a coat so large it told me she made the world work to her needs, and not the opposite. Barely had time to pick my jaw up from the floor before she gave me the usual tale of woe. She'd been done wrong, she needed answers, and a man that could provide, with maximal discretion and minimal fees. Heard I was the right sucker, and that's how she got to my front door, three mysteries in hand. I can remember it like it was yesterday.
MYSTERY ONE: WHICH DC COMICS CREATOR IS A TOTAL RAT FUCK?
Last week, the Hollywood Reporter's ever-excellent "Heat Vision" vertical released a piece about how creators at DC Comics and Marvel get compensated for creating characters that end up at the heart of billion-dollar film and television projects. The picture it paints, of creators having to scream and shout until a corporation pays them to go away, is as grim as anything endgame capitalism can conjure. But not for everyone, as the piece goes on to reveal that one DC creator tried to ice out their co-creator, which was only noticed once a big-time movie featuring that character was about to drop.
Thankfully, the situation has been fixed since then, but still: one of the co-creators of one of the world's most lucrative characters tried to pull a fast one. That's rat fuck shit, and we don't care too much about that over here! One DC Creator is a rat fuck! We need names! We need answers! It can probably be deduced!
MYSTERY TWO: DOES ANYONE READ "BRZRKR"?
It's a time of incredible upheaval for the distribution of comic books in the direct market, and it's thrown all commonly-used industry indicators out of wack. Where once we were working with Diamond's actual shipping numbers, we now only have surveys and estimates to try and guess at the current shape of things. And for the past few months, those have told us that BRZRKR, the Ron Garney, Matt Kindt, and Keanu Reeves book about a man who has guns, is an industry phenomenon, regularly outselling Batman, a book which is right now at an unprecedented creative and commercial peak. But do you really believe it? I don't.
I go to shops every Wednesday. I see the market. I check out the discourse. I've never seen anyone pick up a copy of BRZRKR, read a copy of BRZRKR, or talk about BRZRKR online. If estimates tell you a tree fell in the forest, but you don't hear it, despite being pretty close to the forest, and no one you know in or near the forest has heard of the tree falling, does anyone even read BRZRKR?
MYSTERY THREE: MY DOG OF A HUSBAND IS SLEEPING AROUND ON ME, BUT IS HE ALSO INVOLVED IN THE AMPHETAMINE TRADE?
I don't even know what she expected with this one seeing as I am in fact a newsletter-based comics critic. I did try to tail the husband, because I thought I could help, but he shook me off a couple of times. I tried one more time, and he did catch me, and I guess I can report that the thing about the amphetamines is true, because the guy he met had a couple of armed goons, and they shot me in the gut and left me for dead. I'm bleeding and I hurt everywhere, and I need urgent medical care. Please help.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: BARELY SOFT-BOILED AND VERY LEAKY
Time is fucked up, right? You spend so long reading comics that are very ostensibly about a young Grant Morrison working through the big ideas about identity, art, commerce, and everything else, and all of a sudden, here comes Superman and the Authority #1, heavy on the Old Them Shit, written atop every single one of the sixty-one years it took for the Glaswegian to get to this point. And while the playfulness is still there, going from JFK's Camelot to King Arthur's Camelot in search of Superman's own Camelot, with great irreverent swagger, this is as straightforward a comic as there has ever been, centered to the point of obsession on one question: "I'm on my way out and the world isn't in a better place, what should I do now?".
It's a Grant Morrison Superman story, so, unsurprisingly, the answer involves a lot of radical idealism. This is where it gets interesting, because, as the title implies, this book is looking for it in The Authority, which it invokes by way of What's So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way? and its lead antagonist Manchester Black. The bulk of the issue is dialogue between the erstwhile arch-foes, with Black putting up walls after walls of posturing and fashionable cynicism, and Superman breaching past those defenses through kindness, honesty and compassion. Mikel Janin's remarkable plasticity and dynamism, bolstered by Jordie Bellaire's always in-tone color choices, keeps it all from getting too ponderous, and there's also a big robot fight in the middle to keep things interesting.
Since this is supposedly Grant's final statement on DC Comics, at least for a while, for this time, it will remind many people of many books. The big obvious one is All-Star Superman, since this is about a fading Superman trying to make people see the world as he sees it, and I've already seen some putting the series' historical perspective in parallel with Flex Mentallo, but the juxtaposition of imagery and the search for commonalities of meaning as one generation of thinkers gives way to the next screamed The Invisibles to me. I can tell you right now that the key to the whole thing will be that Superman and The Authority don't stand in opposition to one another, as Joe Kelly or Mark Waid put it in their seminal works, but that they are in continuity with one another, and that the way forward is a synthesis of the two. That's the easy part. I say this from force of habit, and because it's pretty obvious that Mikel Janin redesigned Manchester Black to evoke a young Grant Morrison. Count on it.
Last year, upon realizing that his legacy carried further and wider than I had previously thought (they turned his post-Convergence Superman comic into a show that people have to pretend is good), I made the vow to never sleep on Dan Jurgens ever again. Then those Generations comics came out and, as long-time readers of this newsletter will remember, I got burned pretty bad. But a vow is a vow, and, as it turns out, Blue and Gold #1 is a pretty dang good comic starring these two goofballs you know and love (It's Blue Beetle and Booster Gold).
The premise has every opportunity to get hackeneyed, dealing as it does with our heroes using social media to make something of themselves, and maybe get paid along the way. Somehow it works, for a couple of reasons: first, Ryan Sook is pitch-perfect the whole way through, hitting somewhere in-between the throwbacks to Kevin Maguire's Justice League International work and the more contemporary widescreen blockbuster style. It's charmingly expressive the whole way through, but it also provides the raw thrills of defeating an alien invasion. Second: I think that our modern times and their hustle-and-grind culture are just dumb enough that even overly-broad satire will land, so this is a pretty funny book. It's a really fun time, and sometimes it really is that simple.
For the past ten years, ever since Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev first got a crack at it, every new creative team on a Moon Knight ongoing has come in trying to rewrite the character from the ground up, in order to do whatever cool weird thing they had on their mind. In their 2014 run, Jordie Bellaire, Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey accelerated the trend, packing their reinvention of the character into six statement-shaped issues, and then it was off to the races. Moon Knight was a lot, and then he became even more. He's even getting a TV show now. It's kinda batshit.
It's 2021, and the team of Alessandro Cappuccio, Jed MacKay and Rachelle Rosenberg are, once again, introducing Moon Knight, following a story in Jason Aaron's Avengers run that you couldn't pay me to read. Their take feels like a synthesis of what has come before. Stylistically, it carries the boldness of Bellaire and Shalvey, the bright loud primary colors clashing against the darkness of night, underscoring sharp, punchy action, and Moon Knight rendered in nothing but pencils and ink, being impossibly brighter still. In substance, it's following up on the runs that came before: from Max Bemis, you have the idea of healing and fostering a community -done this time through a Midnight Mission, helping anyone asking for help,- and from Jeff Lemire and Jason Aaron, you have all the machinations around Khonshu and what they're doing to Mark Spector.
The result is punchy, breezy, intriguing and fun in equal measures. There's vampire pyramid schemes, intense scenes of therapy, and statements galore as the stage is set for intrigue. It should be a fun one. It will be a cool one.
As you might have inferred from earlier musings in this very newsletter, I've generally been wary of celebs doing comics. And yet here I was, completely entranced by M.O.M.: Mother of Madness #1, from the creative team of Marguerite Bennett, Leila Seiz, and Emilia Clarke, star of TV's "The Game of Thrones". The setup is so convoluted it comes with a diagram in the back-matter, but at the heart of it, it's about a woman, Maya Kuiper, who by day faces the many indignities of life in the permanent crisis of our near-future, and by night reclaims her autonomy over her body and her emotions by fighting human traffickers with uncanny powers drawn from her moods.
The storytelling is the real star here. It's fluid, playful, and heartfelt in a way few comics have been since Peter Milligan was at his peak, and it's got the gleefully bitter satirical bite of The Filth-era Morrison. This, however, is wholly and authentically a book from the point of view and the experience of women. That's cool enough on its own, but, coming from the star of literally the single biggest television show there has ever been? It's a statement, and it's one I'm going to listen to.
LATE UPDATE! Rick Remender isn't the scumfuck rat bastard I'm talking about earlier in this, but he IS a rat bastard and he did try to ice-out his collaborators, so fuck him! More next week maybe? Or maybe not! The only way to find out is to subscribe! Thank you again for bearing with my nonsense! I'm gonna play the yoyo for a bit, let's meet same time next week? Until then, HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS