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alexsarllSo: DC have just relaunched their entire comics line. As part of a bold and/or desperate attempt to draw in new readers, a fictional world with a publication history stretching back to 1938 just began again from scratch*. Last month's Action Comics was issue 904; this month, like all their other comics, it resets to issue 1. The sense of a vast and complex, and in places beautiful, sandcastle erased by the tide is, of course, a little melancholy. But the advantage to this is that, whereas 1938's Action Comics 1 might have been the birthplace of Superman (and through him a concept - the superhero - which gave the West gods again after two millennia of a pallid Nazarene death cult)...it wasn't actually very good. Superman's creators, Siegel and Shuster, were pioneers, not professionals. 2011's Action Comics 1, on the other hand, is by Grant Morrison - visionary, comics scholar, and mad brilliant bastard. Unlike me, he likes the original Action Comics 1 - but he still retools it, makes something fit for modern purpose, compresses its kineticism and ambiguities down into something bright and shiny and *now*. This is Superman not as establishment superhero, a statuesque head of the superheroic pantheon, but as the bold young Horus-figure, the upsetter, the radical who takes down corrupt businessmen (just like Superman did back in the thirties, before being smoothed down). Whether this energy will last, I don't know, but the first issue is definitely the way to begin.
The rest of the relaunch...well, obviously I'm not buying all 52 titles, because some of them looked like guaranteed stinkers, and plenty more like strictly the sort of generic superheroics which I'll read from the library but wouldn't want cluttering the place up. Of the ones I have picked up, some of them don't seem to be bothering with the reboot angle very much - Swamp Thing feels like a continuation of Alan Moore or Mark Millar's take on the character, and Animal Man follows directly from what Grant Morrison and Jamie Delano did with the character, both creating effectively eerie little superhero-horror hybrids (which maybe overlap a little too much in places). Peter Milligan's Red Lanterns takes the most unsubtle characters in superhero comics - THEY ARE ANGRY - and uses them to tell a very Peter Milligan story in which the galaxy's foremost embodiment of rage starts to feel like he's going through the motions and just isn't that angry anymore. Even with the extra sales it gets from being a Green Lantern tie-in, this will be quietly cancelled in about ten issues, like almost all Peter Milligan comics.
And then we get to the Paul Cornell comics. Now, those of you who watch Doctor Who will know from Human Nature/The Family of Blood that Paul Cornell can be an excellent writer. In comics, this is especially true when he writes things that are deeply British. So, Demon Knights - set some time after the fall of Camelot, in a Dark Ages that feels quite like a modern sitcom take on the era - is excellent. Like all good bands of mediaeval heroes, our mismatched protagonists meet in a tavern, then get thrown into the deep end of a fight, swearing Britishly throughout. One of them is the Shining Knight, convinced that nobody knows she's not really a 'Sir', even under that figure-hugging chainmail. Another is Madame Xanadu, who was one of the hooded ladies on the boat bearing the fallen Arthur to Avalon, but dove into the water with an unladylike 'Sod this!' It is top fun, while never feeling quite like outright pastiche. I approve.
But those of you who watch Doctor Who will also know that Paul Cornell can write some utter dross, cf 'Father's Day'. And the one real dud I picked up was his relaunch of Stormwatch. Warren Ellis didn't create Stormwatch, but he defined them, creating a black-ops superhero team who dealt with all the threats too crazy for the bright and shiny heroes in tights. Then he tore them down, and made them into the Authority instead, the ultimate liberal fascists, as happy to save the world from a corrupt dickhead US President as an alien tyrant. Cornell now seems to be writing an anodyne hybrid of both, something with the appearance of edginess rather than the thing itself - Nurse Jackie with powers. Worse, he's doing it with what looks like a retread of Warren Ellis' final Authority story, in which our heroes essentially end up in a fight with the Moon. And the art, from one
Miguel Sepulveda, is barely even competent - I think it's maybe going for cartoonish (not that that would suit the book), but it just looks like rushed sketches. A dismal effort.
In summary: I still have no idea what the Hell DC think they're doing, but they have managed to get five good comics out of it so far, which was more than they've managed any time in recent memory. So...yay?
*Well, sort of. This is part of what makes the entire enterprise even more puzzling - some of the events of the past 73 years of comics, already reset and tweaked multiple times, are still part of the universe's history. But we don't know which ones. And the in-story explanation for the reset means there are big, complicated, not-new-reader-friendly machinations behind the scenes, linking all the different comics to varying degrees. Which, again, is not really the way to win over a possible new reader who just saw The Dark Knight and wants to read a Batman comic.
The rest of the relaunch...well, obviously I'm not buying all 52 titles, because some of them looked like guaranteed stinkers, and plenty more like strictly the sort of generic superheroics which I'll read from the library but wouldn't want cluttering the place up. Of the ones I have picked up, some of them don't seem to be bothering with the reboot angle very much - Swamp Thing feels like a continuation of Alan Moore or Mark Millar's take on the character, and Animal Man follows directly from what Grant Morrison and Jamie Delano did with the character, both creating effectively eerie little superhero-horror hybrids (which maybe overlap a little too much in places). Peter Milligan's Red Lanterns takes the most unsubtle characters in superhero comics - THEY ARE ANGRY - and uses them to tell a very Peter Milligan story in which the galaxy's foremost embodiment of rage starts to feel like he's going through the motions and just isn't that angry anymore. Even with the extra sales it gets from being a Green Lantern tie-in, this will be quietly cancelled in about ten issues, like almost all Peter Milligan comics.
And then we get to the Paul Cornell comics. Now, those of you who watch Doctor Who will know from Human Nature/The Family of Blood that Paul Cornell can be an excellent writer. In comics, this is especially true when he writes things that are deeply British. So, Demon Knights - set some time after the fall of Camelot, in a Dark Ages that feels quite like a modern sitcom take on the era - is excellent. Like all good bands of mediaeval heroes, our mismatched protagonists meet in a tavern, then get thrown into the deep end of a fight, swearing Britishly throughout. One of them is the Shining Knight, convinced that nobody knows she's not really a 'Sir', even under that figure-hugging chainmail. Another is Madame Xanadu, who was one of the hooded ladies on the boat bearing the fallen Arthur to Avalon, but dove into the water with an unladylike 'Sod this!' It is top fun, while never feeling quite like outright pastiche. I approve.
But those of you who watch Doctor Who will also know that Paul Cornell can write some utter dross, cf 'Father's Day'. And the one real dud I picked up was his relaunch of Stormwatch. Warren Ellis didn't create Stormwatch, but he defined them, creating a black-ops superhero team who dealt with all the threats too crazy for the bright and shiny heroes in tights. Then he tore them down, and made them into the Authority instead, the ultimate liberal fascists, as happy to save the world from a corrupt dickhead US President as an alien tyrant. Cornell now seems to be writing an anodyne hybrid of both, something with the appearance of edginess rather than the thing itself - Nurse Jackie with powers. Worse, he's doing it with what looks like a retread of Warren Ellis' final Authority story, in which our heroes essentially end up in a fight with the Moon. And the art, from one
Miguel Sepulveda, is barely even competent - I think it's maybe going for cartoonish (not that that would suit the book), but it just looks like rushed sketches. A dismal effort.
In summary: I still have no idea what the Hell DC think they're doing, but they have managed to get five good comics out of it so far, which was more than they've managed any time in recent memory. So...yay?
*Well, sort of. This is part of what makes the entire enterprise even more puzzling - some of the events of the past 73 years of comics, already reset and tweaked multiple times, are still part of the universe's history. But we don't know which ones. And the in-story explanation for the reset means there are big, complicated, not-new-reader-friendly machinations behind the scenes, linking all the different comics to varying degrees. Which, again, is not really the way to win over a possible new reader who just saw The Dark Knight and wants to read a Batman comic.
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 10:26 pm (UTC)However its still an expensive hobby, and I suspect one does not just walk into a newsagent/wh smiths and buy them theses days...
Where do you get comics from? (library excepted)
no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 07:23 am (UTC)Certainly this would be a good time to dive in, but do a quick hunt for reviews ahead of getting any of the #1s, because some of them are pretty much universally agreed to be horrendous...
no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 07:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 07:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 07:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 07:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 07:27 am (UTC)