[Untitled Frosty The Snowman Newsletter]
For the longest time, I was a Geoff Johns apologist. I’m not anymore, for reasons that we’re going to go into, but that you’re likely already familiar with. You would think defending the biggest name in monthly superhero comics was an easy endeavor, but it never really was. Because Geoff Johns always straddled the line between populism and demagoguery. Depending on the observer, his writing was either brilliantly simple in its monomaniacal dedication to an idea or a theme, or too stupid to show any depth. Take what is likely going to be one of his final additions of note to the DC Comics Universe: Simon Baz, the gun-toting Green Lantern that first appeared in the final part of his landmark Green Lantern run. It doesn’t take any sort of qualification to ask aloud whether a story about an Arab-American who accidentally gets involved in an act of terrorism and then goes around with a gun and a balaclava to do his superhero nonsense might read as a touch offensive. But it is also a story about growing past the paranoia of post-9/11 America, going from the embodiment of White America’s fears to becoming the greatest goddamn Green Lantern there ever will be, told with an admirable bluntness, and as much talent as the team of Johns and Doug Mahnke can provide.
His relationship with the works written by one Alan Moore is also worth studying: the aforementioned Green Lantern run basically set out to pay off as much of Moore’s lone Tales of the Green Lantern Corps annual as it could. When Moore noticed, and threw his usual partly-joking invective at the contemporary industry and at Johns in particular, Johns seemingly set out to address him more directly. Doomsday Clock and The Three Jokers aren’t just corporate-sanctioned sequels to Watchmen and The Killing Joke, they’re rebuttals, directly addressing the supposed failings of these works and their effect on the books that followed. And, again, depending on how you see them, they’re either self-serving hypocrisies meant to obfuscate Johns’ responsibility for the immaturity of his chosen milieu, or they’re a more serious reckoning with Johns’ place in the greater literary project that is the DC Universe.
I was a Geoff Johns apologist, because, well, his name sold by the hundreds of thousands, so, he had to have been doing something right, right? His ability to make work that resonated among so many should have been the evidence that he was doing something good, right? Well, there is the matter of the insurmountable evidence that he’s a petty tyrannical racist studio flack that thinks he knows better than everyone, will stop at nothing to get his way, and who has the full support of the powers that be at Warner Brothers. For the sake of completeness, let’s name names: Jon Berg and Toby Emmerich then, Walter Hamada now, and of course, the people above them, slightly further away but sharing in the blame every day they don’t take action. Ray Fisher’s testimony, which as far as I’m concerned is completely correct morally and factually, paints the picture in all its ludicrous detail. Beyond the ghastly anecdotes, beyond the tone-deaf crisis communication, it reveals the deeper truth of Geoff Johns. It is that of the fanboy gatekeeper, that ever-present plague in Comics.
And once revealed, that truth irrevocably puts everything else in context. What seems suspect is now evidence of a darker revisionist project. Whatever memory you had of Geoff Johns, it’s infected by the fact that this dipshit, who doesn’t even understand Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame De Paris, was willing to do anything and hurt anyone to get characters to act the way they did in his old comics. He is, and always has been, that kid who wrote that they should make Superboy a clone of Superman and Lex Luthor, gained the power to make it happen, and took that to mean that no one could tell him no ever. It’s unacceptable, and we do not have to accept it. Fuck off forever, Geoff Johns.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: SO, YEAH, WE’RE NOT REVIEWING GEIGER #1
I’ve been sitting here wracking my brain trying to find a point of entry on Green Lantern #1, but I realized that my best option is probably to follow the book’s lead and get right into it. On a base level, this is as simple a single-issue Green Lantern story as you can find. There’s an alien weapon that threatens the peace in the galaxy, a brave green-clad hero taking charge, and the problem can only be solved by a plan that’s just crazy enough that it might work. None of this is surprising in any way, because that’s what you pay your hard-earned money for when you ask for a Green Lantern comic. But it is only eight pages, in a book that has thirty. Marco Santucci, Dexter Soy and Geoffrey Thorne are interested in something a lot bigger than your average Green Lantern tale.
Quite ambitiously, it sets itself the task to do something of every loose odd and end in the grand tapestry of DC’s cosmos. The Guardians are concerned with the reshaping of the Omniverse and the greater Infinite Frontier saga, the early days of the United Planets following their founding in the pages of Bendis’ Superman books, and that Teen Lantern from Young Justice, with her unexplicably powerful gauntlet. And while the first one is left on the back burner for now, the latter two get tackled on head-on, with ample references to the continuity set by those books. The genius in doing so is that it makes Green Lantern immediately feel essential for anyone interested in any sort of bigger picture.
But wait, there’s more. Because, in its most interesting turn, it also sets up a potential conflict between science and magic, and while it’s very much in the vein of every other clash between Order and Chaos, feels fresh and new in a Green Lantern comic, and, most importantly, it makes a fairly solid case for putting John Stewart at the center of it all, while doing its best to draw out everyone’s voice. There’s a lot to like about this comic, and there’s also a lot of this comic. It’s the best of both worlds.
It’s not for lack of quality that I did not talk about the first issue of the new Suicide Squad, by Eduardo Pansica and Robbie Thompson. It’s just that my time is limited, we had a lot to talk about, and that issue was a lot of setups. Well, it’s a month later, and, in a move so satisfying I think every new series should rip it off, Suicide Squad #2 is practically all lowercase-p punchline, and it is all the more glorious for it. The mission, taking place during the Joker gas attack on Arkham you’ve heard so much about if you’ve been reading Batman or Infinite Frontier #0, has gone horribly wrong. Several colorful dirtbags have already died for Amanda Waller’s attempt at creating her own Justice League, and it’s up to Peacemaker to finish the job. Inevitably, things take a turn for the worse.
Enter Superboy with the reinforcements. The result? Well it’s a lot of appropriately splashy and gory violence executed with impactful panache by Pansica, paired with Robbie Thompson’s finest grim character conflicts, clashing anti-hero moralities and gallows humor. Having killed enough people in two issues to keep people on their toes, the team have set themselves up for success in nailing that core Suicide Squad feeling of excitement and dread. Anything can happen, because Amanda Waller will stop at nothing to get her way. No one is safe and the ends justify escalating to the extremes. I can tell that this is gonna get messed up.
I don’t want to spend too long gushing about Batman #107, mostly because what I’d say would end up pretty close to what I said about Batman #106 in the instant-classic newsletter #9. I could tell you that it trades the stylish action setpieces for just as stylish scenes of detective work, character study and the elaboration of greater plans, with a few nice teases thrown in to get the fanboy mind racing. I could tell you all that, and it would not surprise you, because Jimenez, Morey and Tynion’s Batman run is still as good as it gets when it comes to superhero comics. It’s fact, it does not need debating or elaborating upon.
But we have to talk about the eight-page Ghost-Maker backup by Tynion and Ricardo Lopez Ortiz. Because holy shit, for my money it is the closest anyone has come to replicating the sheer excitement and imaginativeness of a Grant Morrison comic from their Marvel Comics period. It’s an impossibly stylish and unabashedly queer burst of hot action and cooler than cool one-liners, featuring a wild cast of wacky villains and their fiendish plots to kill the unkillable man. And while Tynion wears his influences on his sleeves (you can’t have a villain named Madame Midas and tell me with a straight face you’re not trying to do Marvel Boy, if just a little bit), Lopez takes it to a whole new territory when he reinterprets the story through an anime aesthetic that borrows from just about everything that’s been cool in the last decade, with the works of Studio Trigger ranking high on the list. It’s unlike everything you’ve ever seen, and it’s more fun than just about everything you’ve ever seen. I love it, I want way more of it, and if this helps in any way getting me more of it I’ll tell you all about it every single time it comes up.
And finally, while it would be foolish to judge an anthology series on its first entry solely, I thought The Silver Coin #1 was worth highlighting and discussing. One, because the project (a horror anthology written one issue at a time by a bunch of cool people and all illustrated, colored and lettered by Michael Walsh) still sounds completely bugnuts and that’s just the kind of thing I love. Two because the first issue, a Chip Zdarsky-penned tale of a punk confronted with the birth of disco running into the titular Silver Coin and falling prey to its promises of fame and fortune was, all things considered, a lot of fun.
We’ve all absorbed enough Twilight Zone to know how it goes, how dangerous it is to lose yourself in a desperate mad dash to cash in on any little flash of beauty or truth you find within yourself after years and years of practice. You bleed and you bleed, and in the end it burns you up; it burns everything up; it’s a curse. Maybe it resonated with me for fucked up reasons. It’s really good looking, is the thing. It’s cliché, but Walsh carries it on the pitch-perfect mood. It’s the strategic use of pitch-black shadows and crimson red blood, coupled with tones that grow colder as the horror of the story sets in. This is top-notch work, and I can’t wait to see what changes with another writer in the proverbial rotating chair. It’s a fascinating experiment regardless.
That’s the books done for the week! That’s the newsletter! Please tell your friends about it! Subscribe if you haven’t already! Send your feedback if you have any! In the mean time, kill the Geoff Johns apologist in your head! And then, HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!