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I've been getting ready for something next week. I give you...

Jack Kirby in the 1970's!

Review - Watchmen

Watchmen
by Alan Moore (writer), Dave Gibbons (illustrator), and John Higgens (colorist)
1988 Hugo Winner for Other Forms

And so we come to a unique award. 1988 was the only time that the Hugo for "Other Forms", a category intended a catch-all for works like comics and anthologies that were not appropriate for the other award categories. The fact that it hasn't been continued has been disappointing to me since there are fine efforts that are ignored but it's understandable since a such a broad category can be difficult to manage. It certainly isn't appropriate that a work dependent on the connection of both images and writing to be nominated in the regular fiction categories; it's a different art form.

So let's get to Watchmen. One of the few graphic novels to achieve mainstream success. Often cited as the greatest comic book ever made. Watchmen lives up to its reputation by featuring some sharp writing, a challenging moral quandary that gets at the heart of all heroic fiction, and a deconstructionist take on the concept of superheroes. It's been copied many times since and so it's lost a bit of its impact but it's a comic book that any comic fan should read and a work of fiction that will stand as a major achievement.

In Watchmen costumed vigilantes ran wild starting in the forties. They were normal people who for a variety of reasons (mainly psychological problems) dressed in gaudy costumes and beat up criminals. At the end of the fifties the first superhero appeared, a human who through apothesis gained effective omniscience and omnipotence. The US took advantage of having god on their side to dominate the cold war.

By the 1980's the heroes have gone away, most forced into retirement when a new law against vigilantism was passed. One of the most extreme refused to quit and when he finds that a murder victim was a vigilante who worked for the CIA he begins to suspect that someone is killing heroes. A few days later the superhero is implicated in a cancer scare and he abandons the Earth, the Soviet Union unleashes thrity years of pent up hostility, and there may be only days to find the killer before the end of civilization renders the question moot.

Perhaps the most noticeable quality to the writing is how multiple threads are constantly juggled. It's the rare panel which does not have some subtle link to what came immediately before it. This extends even to the covers of the individual issues (referred to as "chapters" in the collected form) which offer visual motifs that book end that issue and reoccur throughout. The story dances from the main thread to a greek chorus (which has it's own chorus in the form of a pirate comic) continually. It's dizzying how tightly images and words tie together with different contexts.

This would just be artistic gimmickry without a solid story to tell and Watchmen has that. The murder mystery at the heart of Watchmen is interesting but it's also wrapped up in the history of vigilantism, an omniscient viewpoint that the reader gets inside for one chapter, and some incredibly sharp dialog. Most chapters give one character a viewpoint and explore their history which come together as a sharp image in the end.

I need to also mention that Watchmen is notorious for its subversion of genre conventions. It ask what does it really mean to be a hero and what the consequences of vigilantism are. It also has one of the most chilling lines ever at the end of its penultimate chapter; anyone who has read it will remember their expectations being completely destroyed at that moment.

So it's really well written and then there's the art. Gibbons confines almost all of his page composition to a nine panel frame and then builds off of that. This tight confined space reinforces the comic book feel but it also lets him play tricks with panel continuity as each feels less like a posed action and more like a frame of a movie. In addition each tiny window is packed with enough detail to stun someone (on that note, if you can justify the expense the Absolute Watchmen edition has pages that are 50% larger letting those cramped panels really shine). And Higgin's coloring work is exceptionally moody as well despite not having access to modern coloring techniques.

There are some people who say that Watchmen is the comic book to read if you don't like comics. I think they're wrong since it is a deconstruction of the genre and the impact is lost without the cultural knowledge. It is still one of the greatest graphic novels ever done and anyone who has ever enjoyed a superhero comic should appreciate this.

Iron Man on Foreign Policy

With the Iron Man movie opening tomorrow there's been a bit of talk about why Iron Man has always been a marginal title. Like so many other comic fans I've never really been interested in Iron Man and it comes down to the fact that he has never had a hook that I liked (trying to write a hero around technology when the standards change from week to week is admittedly a rough task) and most writers have settled on a characterization of him as a warmongering jerk. Here is how he reacts to enemies of the United States (before Civil War reduced him to a weak strawman for fascist politics):

Nerding Out Over Secret Invasion #1

Okay, I'm not actually reading the new Marvel crossover where Skrulls are replacing people (again) in order the world (again again). It's been a standard comic book plot since Fantastic Four #2 and that's just the Skrulls. I've seen it before and I'm sure it'll be done again.

Still if you read any comic book sites it's been impossible to avoid. People have been going crazy over one particular image that they think implies which heroes may have been replaced.

Either they're completely wrong or the author of the series (Brian Michael Bendis) isn't doing the basic groundwork on the character's histories.

Here's the shot which features a group of heroes (wearing 1970's and early 80's versions of their costumes) emerging from a crashed space ship:


I'm not completely familiar with every aspect of all of those characters but the majority of them have had events occur to them since this point which mean the hero we've been reading about can't be a Skrull.

Before I get into that I have a few notes on continuity. My feeling on comic book continuity is that the major events involving characters have to count but the tiny details can slip. By dropping in characters from the past like this Bendis has opened himself to continuity complaints. So while I'm ignoring the fact that the Skrulls all had their shape shifting abilities removed in the mid-80's and were stuck in their natural forms (everyone seems to ignore that brief storyline) I'm not ignoring the story lines for character's first appearance and other major transitions.

In addition I'm assuming that the Skrulls are not omnipotent and that supernatural beings are not going to bother covering up for their plans in order to screw with people.

So let's get started.

White Queen
Replaced by Skrull? Impossible.
Since she wore that costume the White Queen has swapped bodies with multiple people.

Spider-Man
Replaced by Skrull? Impossible.
Recently sold his soul... er... marriage to the devil.

Beast
Replaced by Skrull? Possible but unlikely.
I'm not aware of any specific events that exclude the possibility but the Beast has been directly involved with a lot of people who should be able to tell the difference.

Luke Cage
Replaced by Skrull? Could be.
Cage has some nice gaps in his life which could be used to justify a replacement and I'm not aware of anything that means he could not be a Skrull.

Thor
Replaced by Skrull? Not a chance.
Since that point he gained the power of Odin, triggered Ragnarök, been revived from the afterlife, and that's just the obvious ones. As a god Thor would be particularly difficult to replace successfully.

Wonder Man
Replaced by Skrull? Impossible, but if there's a character for them to get wrong I'd bet on him.
Wonder Man has died and gone to the afterlife since he wore that costume. Repeatedly. Since dying reveals if the person is a Skrull we know Wonder Man is not.

Invisible Woman
Replaced by Skrull? No way.
Went to heaven and met God recently. I think he'd mention something like that.

Phoenix/Jean Grey
Replaced by Skrull? You're kidding, right?
Phoenix is a cosmic entity and after she died it was revealed that she was a substitution for the real Jean Grey who returned. I can't even wrap my head around the problems caused by saying she was replaced by a Skrull.

Hawkeye
Replaced by Skrull? Seems the most likely.
There's a few minor events that would preclude the possibility but his continuity is so tangled now that it easily allows for a few replacements.

Iron Man
Replaced by Skrull? Could be but don't bet on it.
I'm not aware of anything in Iron Man's history that specifically prevents him from being a Skrull (the Crossing's multiple layers of retcons can still work with a Skrull) but since it's the obvious one then he won't be.

Vision
Replaced by Skrull? Impossible.
Got married and had children who in a pointless retcon of their own were a chunks of a demon. For him to be a Skrull requires that Mephisto is in on their plan and helping them with it.

Scarlet Witch
Replaced by Skrull? No way.
Responsible for reality shifts at the heart of two recent Marvel large scale crossovers. If the Skrulls can rewrite reality to their whim then why bother with the invasion plan?

Jewel
Replaced by Skrull? Interesting but unlikely.
One of Bendis's own creations, she's retconned into Marvel history. Since she's one of his favorite characters I think it's unlikely that Bendis would invalidate her entire history but it would work and be an interesting choice.

Mockingbird
Replaced by Skrull? Impossible.
Died, went to hell, and has interacted with many characters who were on day trips there over the years.

Captain America
Replaced by Skrull? Nope.
Besides the fact that he had a very public "death" which would have revealed a replacement there's the meta reason that he, like Iron Man, is a character people are supposed to think has been replaced so he won't be.

Ms. Marvel
Replaced by Skrull? Not possible.
After she changed costumes and joined the Avengers she had her personality and powers completely drained by Rogue. Rogue kept her powers indefinitely and had a split personality with her for some time and didn't gain Skrull shape shifting.

Wolverine
Replaced by Skrull? Well...
Not by "a Skrull" but by an elite team of seventy Skrulls which allow Wolverine to be an active member of four different superhero teams while pursuing his own adventures in three different books and guest appearing in half a dozen others each month.

So in conclusion, just about everyone on that ship will be a Skrull except for a couple token surprises, and most of the people who saw them come out of should realize this with just a few seconds.

Review - Superman

Superman
1979 Hugo Winner for Best Dramatic Presentation

Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!

So that's really the opening to the radio program rather than something from the movie; it still tells you what you need to know about that iconic figure Superman. He had last been on a movie screen in movie serials but the time was ripe for his triumphant return and film goers received what is easily the best movie based on a comic book released to that point. It's been superseded by a handful of better efforts since but Superman is still the model that superhero films follow.

Rocketed as an infant from the distant planet Krypton moments before its destruction, found and adopted by Kansas farmers, disguised as mild mannered reporter Clark Kent, Superman fights a never ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way. The film spends quite a bit of time dealing with his early life (the origin, if you will) and it is nearly an hour into the movie before the costume appears. From there it speeds to a confrontation with criminal mastermind Lex Luthor who plans to sink California.

People who have told stories about Superman always run into a common problem: the lack of conflict. Superman is power personified and unless handled very carefully dramatic tension is drained out of the film. Donner is not entire successful at dealing with this; the best portion of the film is in the middle as Superman goes around helping people but the climactic confrontation against Lex Luthor just isn't that interesting. In an odd contrast Superman saving cats from trees, catching falling planes, and the like is interesting because it's about him being a samaritan, the kind of helpful person we'd all like to encounter, while confronting Lex Luthor makes it about the conflict between the two which (at least in the film) isn't interesting. Even armed with a weapon that may kill Superman, Gene Hackman's Luthor never is believable as a threat.

Perhaps part of the problem is that Donner was very good at portraying Superman's power. The film's tagline is "You will believe a man can fly," and while I'm not sure that a modern audience will believe I do find the effort that goes into making it feel natural goes a long way. Some of that is in Christopher Reeve's performance, but the majority of it comes from the direction and cinematography. Everything is done with an effortless grace that feels like a god descended to earth.

Speaking of Reeve this was easily the role he was born to play. He was cast both for his look and his ability to portray the Clark Kent/Superman dichotomy and he became the standard for depictions of Superman afterward.

If there's one thing I have to single out in the film it's the cinematography. Even beyond the effects of presenting Superman's power there's a scope to the movie that is incredible to view. Watch those wide vistas and the complicated tracking shots; Donner took the lessons of Star Wars and applied them with greater skill. The only major misstep is the time traveling sequence where to this day I encounter people who think that the film showed Superman spinning the world backward.

Superman is the definitive film version of that iconic character and the pattern that so many superhero movies since have followed. Despite my reservations of the weak climax to the film I still find it to be entertaining.

Review - Justice League: The New Frontier

To start their new direct to video animated feature group Warner Brothers took a pretty weak comic book story line and made it into the pretty good Superman - Doomsday. So when they start from a really good comic book and turn it into a movie then the results have to be that much better, right? Well, no.

Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier (the comic) was a celebration of those early days of the Silver Age. Every major character that was revived in the early fifties was brought into play and he drifted from sequence to sequence showing us tiny fragments of their lives. Even with the sinister undertones of the politics of the 1950's Cooke's story was bright and cheerful, full of promise and hope.

The animated movie apes the distinctive style of art but carries with it little of the storytelling. I'm not so foolish as to think that things can shift medium without changes and the overall concept of the changes is good. Most of the minor characters are cut except for cameos and the movie focuses on the first three new superheroes to emerge in the 1950's: Martian Manhunter, Flash, and Green Lantern. That focus is needed but instead of keeping things in that tight focus the movie continues the awkward transitions and plotting. Cooke used it because he was telling us about a setting, the movie is trying to use it to tell a narrative and so it fails.

Perhaps the best example of this is the ending. In the original comic the villain shows up about 95% of the way through the book but in the movie it shows up about two-thirds of the way in. The villain is a complete non-entitity; a generic, faceless Lovecraftian beasty that works better off screen than on. The battle with it is anti-climactic and probably the biggest weakness in the original work. With a full third of the movie dedicated to the fight (and not animated nearly as well as the fight scenes in the recent Superman animated feature) the anti-climax drags on and on.

Another real problem I had with the movie was the violence. Cooke in the original series didn't shy away from it but the violence and gore was used for moments of impact, a punctuation mark on top of the fifties style comic book violence. No one got hurt... until someone did. In the movie blood is flying everywhere even if we don't typically see it emerge from a body. It's a modern sensibility applied to a silver age style and the result is jarring.

Enough griping about the film, I do think the art design which was taken almost exactly from Cooke's work is done well. The cast assembled for this animated movie is superb and there's hardly a weak note among them. But these qualities are diminished by the fact that the film tried to make Cooke's work into something it wasn't and failed.

The True Face of Doom

Alrighty, I had time to dig out and copy all the references so now I give you the single most persistent question in all of comics: how badly scarred is Dr. Doom's face?

Most creators present what little we see of it as completely hideous but Jack Kirby who certainly created the look of Dr. Doom if not the entire character often said that Doom's face only had a small scar but his vanity caused him to hide it. So what can be said about that?

I'm going to avoid the authorship issues of the Lee/Kirby era of Marvel comics because that's a fight that would require a post of its own to cover. My personal opinion is that Lee had to sign off on the books as editor-in-chief and Kirby for all of dynamic art was churning out pages as a draftsman at that point so Kirby was unlikely to just turn in pages with a new character that Lee would appropriate. They were working close together as partners in those days and there would be give and take with Kirby having close hand in plotting. So my take is that the stories in these very early Fantastic Four issues that I'm going to reference were mainly Lee with Kirby's input. Kirby's creative control would increase as Lee and Kirby continued to work together until that golden year of 1966 where they synchronized perfectly.

Okay, back to Doom. Here is his origin as given in his first appearance:

It's pretty standard mad scientist stuff. You'll note we don't even see his original face in this. As appearance went on it was made clear that Doom's face was about as hideous as you could get. Here's one from a year on in Fantastic Four #10 of Doom visiting the Marvel comics offices (Fantastic Four was bi-monthly for that first year):
Of particular interest is that sixth panel. If we assume, like some people do, that Kirby was completely responsible for all of the Fantastic Four plotting then he was responsible for that panel where Lee and Kirby react in abject horror to Doom's face. Also note the scarring in the tiny glimpse of Doom's head in the seventh panel. At this point it is clear that Kirby is handling Doom as hideously scarred.

We start to see a little more depth in Fantastic Four Annual #2:



There's several important things on these pages. First, the glimpse of his head that we get when he's smashing the mirror isn't bald and scarred. Could Kirby's choice of how to depict Doom have changed?

Also note that Doom immediately puts on a metal mask lifted out of a smoking urn. It's still burning when they put it on his face. That will be important in a moment.

So from this point on Doom's origin is pretty much set and this version is what we see. Kirby left Marvel comics in 1970 and sometime after that the story starts circulating from convention appearances that Doom isn't badly scarred at all, he just has one mark on his face. While it's possible Kirby started saying this before leaving Marvel comics the earliest reference I have been able to find is the early seventies which is when he was working for DC comics. Kirby did a few sketches like this of Doom without his mask:


Fans like this idea since it adds another layer of depth to the character but it doesn't fit in with the printed stories. There have been several which have plot elements that rely on Doom's face being disturbingly ugly. So then along comes John Byrne. He gets villainized quite a bit for retcons (many of them justifiably), but in this instance where all he does is pull together the two versions of Kirby's story I think it works. Here's Byrne's version from Fantastic Four 278:


You'll note he uses the exact same dialog as Fantastic Four Annual 2 and really I think it does a nice job of resolving things for the sake of continuity. As cool as Kirby's revision is it can't be made to fit with old stories but including it in a revamped version of the origin is a nice acknowledgment of it.

Finally, the second biggest question about Dr. Doom is what exactly is his doctorate in? As we've just seen repeatedly he was kicked out of college before getting it so did he go through a Guatemalan diploma mill? That was officially answered a few weeks ago: Doom lies about his credentials. For shame, "Doctor" Doom, is there no end to your villainy?

Waugh

Comics legend Steve Gerber died over the weekend. I haven't been a big Gerber fan but I had considerable respect for him. He was on the cutting edge in the 1970's bringing a kind of underground sensibility to mainstream comics. His work on Man-Thing, Omega the Unknown, and The Defenders (my personal favorite) was interesting but what he'll be remembered for is Howard the Duck.

The scan above is from Howard the Duck #16 which threw the format to the wind for a set of double page images accompanying a Gerber essay (apparently this was the result of a very tight deadline) and it sums up Gerber perfectly. He was willing to break the format, experiment, and go in new directions but there were as many missteps as there were clever ideas.

What made him daring has become mainstream and for that Gerber deserves to be remembered. He is one of the key figures of that 70's generation of comic writers who pushed things further rather than aping the silver age. For that comic book fans owe him a debt.

The Secret of One More Day Revealed!

Comic fans are up in arms over Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada's demands to remove Spider-Man's marriage. Besides One More Day being a rotten story requiring that bother Spider-Man and Mary Jane be willing to betray their spouse to the devil it just shoves the book back to the same point that it was at just after Gwen Stacy died back in 1974. That got me to thinking about the fan reaction to that first removal of a love of Spider-Man's life and I found this in the letter column of Amazing Spider-Man #127:




And so the truth (or something that doesn't really resemble it) is revealed at last!

The History of the DC Universe in 30 Seconds

As part of the Invincible Super Blog's anniversary there is a contest to recap a comic book story in "30 seconds" using quickie crayon drawings and hopefully a dash of humor (many of the recaps take longer than 30 seconds but you can scan through them that quickly).

Not being one to do things small I thought back to a problem that every comic nerd faces every so often. Someone wants to know a bit of the ways DC comics have progressed ("What is this 'Pre-Crisis and Post-Crisis?'"). So I give you: