Mostly Comics

This one's going to get geeky, so let's start by establishing that yes, I do sometimes engage in more socially well-adjusted activities. Well, if you can count going to the V&A (they have so much pretty stuff, but what is it *for* when lots of that stuff would be equally at home in the British Museum?), or attending a Britpop night in a Geneva t-shirt, or hanging out with fugitivemotel and at one stage uttering the phrase "Oz Season 7, starring Wizbit". And OK, at the party I attended on Saturday I did have a conversation about the Sisters of Mercy's much-better-than-other-bands-called-Sisters cover of 'Comfortably Numb'. So yes, it would seem I am in fact a hopeless case. Oh well.

It was September when I last posted a general State of the Comics Union moan. Since when, not much has changed. I've dropped an increasing number of series which, even if I vaguely want to read, I know I'll never want to reread. More are coming - when Astonishing X-Men and Ultimate Avengers reach the end of the current stories, they're out, because they're not bad little superhero romps but nor are they worth more than a quick read courtesy of the library and, if I've mis-guessed what the library will get in, I'll live. Buffy was in line for the same treatment after the sheer galling idiocy both of the identity of the season's Big Bad, and of the manner in which said identity was revealed (online via fake leak, not in the comic itself) - but Joss Whedon wrote the most recent issue himself and reminded me that it was seldom the big stories which made Buffy so much as the little moments, and this was they. Of course, the next arc is by Brad Meltzer and is going to have a Mature Readers warning, between which and his previous work we can doubtless expect some gratuitously rapey mess which gets me right back to quitsville.
But there's just so much coasting going on - and miserable coasting at that. Both DC and Marvel claim that a bright new direction is coming once the grim'n'gritty carnage of current events is done, but I've heard it all before (and I'm barely been reading anything from DC in ages, they're in such a joyless tangle). At Marvel what seemed like a brilliant idea for a while (businessman Norman Osborn aka the Green Goblin talked himself out of responsibility for his crimes and ended up effectively running the country, as the very rich always seem to manage - ring any bells, bankers?) has just been plodding on and on and remorselessly on. And now it has finally reached its endgame - Osborn and his forces attacking Asgard, home of Thor and his fellow gods, which J Michael Straczynski's run on Thor had relocated to Oklahoma. But the comic telling this story, Siege, feels from its first issue more like it's going through the motions of amending the status quo than like the epic story it should be. Brian Bendis, the writer, has previously had problems with the pacing in the middle acts of his big event comics, and this one was shorter so should have been better, but it's as if he's cut not the padded kidriff, but the kick-ass opening.
There's still good stuff, of course; of the titles I praised in September, Ultimate Spider-Man and The Boys are still delivering. The Walking Dead gets better and better, and I don't even much like zombie stories. Vertigo, previously responsible for Sandman, Preacher and The Invisibles among others, has become relevant again with Mike Carey's The Unwritten and Peter Milligan's Greek Street, two very different examinations of the unexpected legacy legends and fictions can have in the modern world. But, will either of them last? The economics of comics are so horribly marginal, it can never be guaranteed; both writers have a string of prematurely-cancelled titles behind them. Word of another casualty has just come in; Phonogram's Kieron Gillen has been doing some lovely work on a space-based screwball comedy X-Men spin-off called S.W.O.R.D., but weak sales mean it ends with the fifth issue. Meanwhile, he's trying his best on Thor but the aforementioned Straczysnki run left him with having to pick up from such a moronic start point (Latveria Is So Bracing!)* that he's really swimming against the current.
Another writer I usually think of as reliably great, Grant Morrison, is in more position to be master of his fate and work, but isn't really putting it to best use. His Batman & Robin hasn't maintained its strong start, getting bogged down in themes he's already done better elsewhere; I feel a real lack of anticipation for the imminent Joe the Barbarian; and as for his Authority...well, OK, it's not really his anymore. It's Keith Giffen scripting Morrison's plots, because Grant stormed off in a huff. And Giffen's a competent enough writer, usually, but it turns out that he can't write British. So Morrison's most thoroughly, heartbreakingly British lead since Greg Feely in The Filth now talks about leaving things in his other 'pants', and his first 'apartment'. The issue of The Boys set amidst the baguette-jousting inhabitants of the village of Franglais had a better ear for dialect than this.

And as if that little diatribe weren't bad enough, today the main thing lifting me out of the sense of 'meh' which comes with this horrible sinus-y cold is the storming victory my new-look Tyranid army managed in last night's game of Warhammer 40,000.

*I love Babylon 5 - mostly - but JMS' comics career has been one frustration after another. Either he loses the plot, or he falls out with the publisher and storms off, or in extreme cases, both. People told me his Thor was excellent but having been burned before, I waited. And I finally read the first two collections recently and lo and behold, this was one of the cases of 'both'. There's a lot to love: instead of talking in cod-Shakespearean English as previous writers so clumsily attempted, his Asgardians speak formally but coherently; it's the themes which echo Shakespeare now, with the prince uneasy on his father's throne, the adviser who whispers poison in a good but naive ear. And the abiding question: what do gods do when their legend is over? If they survived Ragnarok, what now? Yes, in a sense it would have been a better theme back in those days when we were told we'd seen the End of History, but it's still a fascinating one.
However. There are scenes in post-Katrina New Orleans and war-torn Africa which demonstrate that Straczynski hasn't learned a damn thing since his legendarily bad Amazing Spider-Man issue where Doctor Doom stood in the wreckage of the World Trade Centre and wept. And, though I've yet to read the third volume which fully explains how he got to where he left the series, I've seen enough to know that yes, what looked like a stupid idea which Gillen was obliged to pick up, was also a stupid idea approached from the other end.