Blah Blah Flowers

You may remember that some four weeks ago I started talking about why comics were shit and had two reasons for which, the first of which I only got part way through explaining before losing too much enthusiasm to carry on.

So Spidey makes a deal with the devil to save his hundred-year-old granny, bloggers frothed and Joe Quesada sits back and waits for the quality of the stories to magically improve.

What really irritates me is that the inbuilt resistance of comics to change. Soap operas try to restrict change to when an actor wants to leave or drops dead, having no such constraints comics can go round in circles until the publisher turns the lights out. It's a valid argument that Spidey was married so long that breaking it up goes against this point but by and large most comics have tinkering around the edges with hasty back-steps (or 'retcons') when something proves unpopular, they actually killed off Aunt May many years ago, only to reveal a while later that that Aunt May was an imposter and the real one was safe and sound. A few years ago they published a very well done issue where Aunt May finally discovers that Peter is Spiderman and, rather than fainting and/or having a heart attack, as had been the working assumption for years as to her response, dealt with it. A bonus of the Mephisto deal is that no-one remembers Peter is Spiderman, undoing that little story.

So Superman saves the world, so why can he never get the girl? Even Grant Morrison thinks it was a bad idea to finally allow, after some fifty years, Superman to marry Lois Lane, though he doesn't say why. Again, why should a married couple lead to less interesting stories than an unmarried one? Thanks to the interweb you can see any number of the so-called Silver Age Superman stories where the two of them dance around each other, Superman not wanting to be 'ensnared' into marriage but not wanting Lois to give up hope either. It's not necessarily 'more adult' to have the two of them married but if you work on the assumption that it was going to happen some day why not make that some day today?

The worst and most egregious example of this is DC's caving in to HEAT. In the 90s, DC killed off (alright, turned evil, turned good and then killed off) one of their underperforming heroes, Hal Jordan the Green Lantern and brought in a new character. A bunch of fatbeards took umbridge and, a decade later, Hal was back. Never mind that he was got rid of because he was a consistently boring character who wasn't selling comics. But he was Green Lantern when the people complaining were kids, so he had to be Green Lantern now. Change is bad.

I suppose all that aggravates me is the superficial trappings around the story, I'm not suggesting that Superman/Spiderman/Whoever stop their eternal battle against evil, I suppose that really, I'm annoyed that the people making comics aren't making more effort to disguise the fact they are selling me today what they sold me yesterday. Which makes me as much of a fool as the next comics collecter, or would do if it wasn't for the fact that I don't buy more than a trickle of comics these days and, when I do it's stuff in limited series with a beginning, middle and end planned.

The other point I was going to use to argue that comics was shit, was one of the big black-and-white phonebook sized collections that DC are doing of their old stuff, in this case DC Showcase Presents Metal Men but it's not really worth the time. Most of all comics at any time are rubbish and these are no different. Of course the artwork is appalling and the stories are repetative, they weren't written to be read again in a month, let alone forty years later. So they could afford to have each story follow the same basic pattern, but why anyone would part with money for it defies common sense. Even dialing down my expectations as far as I could manage and reading it based on my memories of more recent appearences by the characters I couldn't last more than about a hundred and fifty pages before tossing carefully placing the book aside.

What I would recommend is Good as Lily by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm from DC's appallingly titled 'Minx' range of comics aimed at women. School aged Grace Kwon suddenly finds herself meeting herself at three different ages, one a brattish pre-teen, one a twenty-something and one an old lady. As she struggles to help put on a school play she and they come to terms with the history they all have in common. Unlike the samples of other titles in the series at the end of the book which all look like they are entirely generic stories with 'teenaged and female' pasted into the lead character's position this somehow manages to have an 'everywoman' feel about it, with each of the four ages of Grace's clearly defined. Where it does fall down is in the relationship of Grace and Lily, her dead sister. This gets all of a couple of brief mentions in the story and doesn't occupy Grace's thoughts much, I did wonder if Kim meant to beef that up in a later draft of the script and forgot, it's a plot point that could be excised with absolutely no harm to the story. The artwork is halfway between cartoon and 'realistic', but Hamm has a gift for expressing emotion through a character's body language. It's dei=finitely worth your time, unlike most of the rubbish out there.

Labels: comics, DC comics, Marvel Comics, Spiderman, stupidity, Superman

You know how when you have a kitchen where the hob is next to the draining board and you think "Shall I put all this dry washing up back in the cupboard before I start making dinner?" and you're lazy and/or have testicles so decide you won't, and then you make something which spits a lot of oil everywhere so you end up not only washing up the dinner stuff but all of the stuff on the draining board which now has a lovely patina of grease? Mmm, yeah.

So, two things lead me to the conclusion that comics are shit. Neither are new. The first is One More Day, a clusterfuck of an 'event', what we old-timers used to call 'a bad story', that, in this case, ran through Marvel's Spiderman comics with all the care of Ian Brady in a children's ward with all the axes he can carry and a promise that the police won't be turning up until after they've had their breakfast. As with all things there's a bit of a back story to this. The universe began, the earth formed and then, a while later, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby made comics about superheroes that had issues and problems, except for the Fantastic Four who have always been teeth-grittingly anodyne and perfect it makes me want to vomit up the contents of both my, and several other people's stomachs. As time passed they started the speculator market by sticking an 'x' on any turd that came out of the office (The Astonishing X-Turd #1: 'If This be a Plumber!') until the turds left Marvel to set up Image comics and the company collapsed.

These day the company exists as a machine for letting Fox make really bad movies with the creating of comics as a license-fulfilling mad lady in the attic. Chief Mrs Bates these days is Joe Quesada who really should never have sought to become famous with hair like that (note to self: Destroy all photos of myself with long hair when I was under the misapprehension it made me look like Antonio Banderas in Interview With The Vampire and not a heavy metal fan who drank too much Diamond White). Joe spent his time as Chief Turd-Polisher by announcing that the turds had a much better consistency back when Peter Parker was single, he having got married so long ago that Mohammed supplied the booze for the bachelor party. After several years of going on about having Peter married to Mary-Jane Watson-Parker was a fucking sacrilege in a manner akin to your drunken uncle at family get-togethers never getting over the fact that his wife left him a decade previously and is now doing swimmingly with another man who knows how to give her orgasms, Joe finally issued a dictat that last year would be the year where the marriage was undone.

But it was complicated by reasons that Joe came up with in his brain. Despite the fact that the only people reading comics are overweight men in their mid-forties who still live in their parents basements (or in the UK loft-conversions) Joe harboured this strange delusion that the reason Spiderman comics are shit these days was not due to the writers but due to them having to write a married 'web-slinger' (ugh, I feel dirty). It seems that if there wasn't the frisson of the posibility of Spidey getting off with The Incredible Hulk then it really wasn't worth Joe coming to work in the morning. Joe thought kids of thirteen who read Spiderman wouldn't relate to a character who was married, although if the kids I know are anything to go by, his lack of a Wii, the fact that he never says 'fuck!' and doesn't shoot people he thinks are 'disrespectin' him blud' are probably bigger concerns. But he didn't want to have Peter and MJ divorce, because what child could possibly relate to two adults deciding that they lived different lives and no longer having anything in common?

So, due to the dictates of a company-wide storyline Spiderman revealed his identity to the 'imaginary world' that Marvel comics operate in. His Aunt gets shot a few issues later. While Peter Parker is a perpetual man-child aged in his mid-twenties his Aunt is about three hundred years old, showing that freaky genetics in the Parker family didn't start with his being bitten by a radioactive spider. So she's not doing well, and Peter isn't getting any help from the various superheroes he tries calling, sure they can travel through time and space but they can't help with his Aunt. And then Mephisto, the Marvel comics Satan-that-they-can't-call-Satan turns up and offers Spidey a deal. He'll save Aunt May's life, and he'll toss in making everyone forget that Peter is Spidey, but in return he gets to magically undo Peter and Mary-Jane's marriage, because that sort of thing gives him a massive hard-on for evil. The catch is that, deep in their souls, at a subconscious level, Peter and MJ will remember they were married, even if consciously they, and the rest of the Marvel Universe don't, and they'll feel a little bummed out and that will make Mephisto happy. Oh and to pad the story out Peter meets alternate versions of himself if he'd grown up without either super-powers or a wife (basically he turns out like the sort of man who reads Marvel comics) and 'the daughter that he and Mary-Jane will never have' who, due to some dodgy artwork looks like the sister of the butler from The Prisoner.

Anyway, I've momentarily run out of bile, so I shall return to this subject when I've refilled. Don't go away!

Labels: comics, Spiderman, stupidity