Make Good Art

Wagner was an anti-semitic proto-Nazi. I understand why some people don’t want to listen to music composed by anti-semitic proto-Nazis. I even understand if some people think that no-body else should listen to music composed by anti-semitic proto-Nazis. My difficulty comes when they say that Wagner was an anti-semitic proto-Nazi and therefore Ride of the Valkyries is not a very good tune.

Unless you think that art is always and only an expression of the artist’s personality: that Wagner’s music is Wagner’s soul transmuted into sound, and that if Wagner had a fascist soul then Wagner’s music is fascist music and would be fascist music even if you knew nothing about Wagner’s life.

Or perhaps you think that Wagner’s music has been irrevocably tainted by the uses it has been put to? Ride of the Valkyrie may not have been fascist music when Wagner composed it, but it sure as hell became fascist music once Hitler got his hands on it.

The story of Noah’s Ark means what Jews and Christians have understood it to mean for the past three thousand years. Some lost Babylonian poet may have originally meant it to mean something entirely different. But that’s neither here nor there. It’s not his story any more. Sensible scholars sometimes claim to have found traces of the original story, and what it meant, in the surviving text. That is, of course, terribly, terribly interesting. But I grimace when someone assures me that the God of the Jews is really a red headed giant with a gigantic cock because there may have been a deity with those attributes in the texts which may underlie some parts of the Old Testament.

Wagner’s operas are only encountered in production. The author’s ideas are mediated through the ideas of the producer and the performers. This is true if the singers wear their street clothes and stand in a row and sing the exact notes in the score, and it is true if Tristan and Isolde meet in a Berlin public lavatory and Lohengrin’s knights are giant rats. The absence of interpretative ideas is itself an interpretative idea.

But books, by that argument, exist only when they are read. The author’s ideas are mediated through the mind of the reader. If I go to the theatre, I don’t see Hamlet: I see Olivier’s Hamlet or Branagh’s Hamlet. But if I sit in my book nook with a copy of the Penguin Complete Shakespeare, I don’t just experience Hamlet: I experience Andrew Rilstone reading Hamlet.

Imagine that JK Rowling had written a Harry Potter book every year since 1997—so we are now up to volume 28. And imagine that each volume had been better than the previous one, that the books had grown up with the audience, that the wizarding world had become progressively less important, and the books had become character-centred experiments in literary form. Imagine that very respectable critics felt that the writing in the later volumes was possibly as good as James Joyce—certainly as good as Salman Rushdie. But imagine that J K Rowling’s obsessive gender essentialism was just as obsessive and just as essentialist as it is on our time line; and that the latter Harry Potter volumes had taken Rowling’s obsessions as their primary theme.

I have a full sized figure of Cerebus the Aardvark in my front room. I once had a post-card from Dave Sim. I feel your pain.

I remember a silly essay by a silly vicar in a silly newspaper. He’d just found out that Sylvia Plath was on the A Level Syllabus. Oh no, no, no and thrice no, quoth he: Sylvia Plath wrote about neurosis and morbidity. English Literature is about giving children the brightest and the best, not the maddest and the most suicidal. Why show them the outflowing of a diseased mind when you could give them words which flew out of the mind of the greatest and most healthy mind ever to grace this great country of ours, that belonging to Mr William Shakespeare of Stratford?

Are there any writers apart from William Shakespeare, I sometimes wonder? Educational vigilantes sound like KJV fundamentalists. Every book in the world either says the same thing as the Bible, in which case it is superfluous, or else it says something different from the Bible, in which case it is blasphemous. So get rid of any book which isn’t the Bible. Or, at any rate, like F.R Leavis: as long as Middlemarch exists, there is really no reason to ever waste your time reading Our Mutual Friend. Shakespeare’s poetry is wonderful poetry because it was produced by Shakespeare’s mind. Shakespeare had a wonderful mind because it produced Shakespeare’s poetry. Only the great poetry is truly Shakespearian: the silly bits and the dirty bits were inauthentic, forced on him by theatre managers and people in the cheap seats. As long as This Royal Throne of Kings and We Few We Happy Few exist, why on earth ever read anything else?

Sylvia Plath was a good (albeit obviously minor) poet precisely because she put her state of mind, unhappy as it undoubtedly was, into poetry. She may have been at times unhappy and unwell, but she made good art.

Did history, in fact, pardon Paul Claudel?

It would make a difference if it turned out that Alan Moore had all along been a mild mannered Church of England vicar who put on a false beard and adopted the magus persona as a prank. And it would make a very great difference indeed if it turned out that the Diary of Anne Frank was a purely literary creation—a well-intentioned hoax, perpetrated decades after the event. The actual words themselves are not quite the point: the point is that they are the actual words of a particular person in a particular situation at a particular time. “People are really good at heart” isn’t a very profound statement in itself: it’s a profound statement because it is spoken by a very young woman about to be murdered by one of Wagner’s fan-boys.

“Death of the Author” is a literary theory. Books can be read in more than one way: you can’t invoke the supposed intention of the original writer to disallow a particular reading. Olivier’s Hamlet and Branagh’s Hamlet and (most especially) Andrew Rilstone’s Hamlet are all valid. This doesn’t mean I am free to say “In my reading, Winnie-the-Pooh is a shark and Piglet is an exiled Jedi Knight.” But I am entirely free to like Rorschach and think that he got the better of the argument. The Rev Alan Moore has no right to tell me that I am wrong and that I am not allowed to have those thoughts about his story. It doesn’t belong to him any more.

What we now know about Marion Bradley makes it impossible to re-read the Mists of Avalon. Literally impossible: the book we read in 1983 no longer exists. What we now know about David Eddings doesn’t change the Belgariad in quite the same way. Partly, because Mists of Avalon is very much about sex, where the Belgariad is not particularly about cruelty to children. But also, I think, because the Belgariad is just not a very good book. The author doesn’t matter in quite the same way.

If you didn’t live through the 70s you can’t possibly understand how important Jimmy Savile was. It really does feel as if a whole chunk of your life has been overwritten. I can’t think about old Doctor Who without thinking about what was on directly before it. I can’t smile affectionately and tell the story about how there was Jim’ll Fix It stunt at my school ever again. (I can’t even laugh at Basil Brush singing The Noses on the Faces of the Ladies of the Harem of the Court of King Caractacus.) I am far from certain that pixellating faces out of old footage helps but I understand the urge.

At the turn of the 1980s, comic book writers started to acquire a rock-star status they had never had before. Stan Lee had inserted himself into his stories, of course, and given himself a Walt Disney status as Marvel Comics’ presiding spirit; but it was clear to everyone that this was mostly bluster and self-parody. The British 2000AD creators headhunted by DC had youth and good looks and a kind of post-punk prestige. I went to some comic conventions in the years after Watchmen changed everything. John Byrne (Superman) and Chris Claremont (X-Men) were firmly of the old-school, middle-aged, jobbing hacks who were quite willing to chat affably to fan-boys about the writing trade. Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman were cool and slouched and looked like characters in their own comics and had just the right mix of arrogance and self-deprecation and fashionable clothes. It was Cliff Richard, wasn’t it, who said that Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby were people you could listen to and admire: but Elvis Presley was the person you wanted to be.

We engage with popular culture in very particular ways. Doctor Who isn’t just a TV show; Star Wars isn’t just a movie; Harry Potter isn’t just a book. All fiction is about vicarious experience to some extent: but I don’t think Scandi-Noir enthusiasts long to have serial-killer themed wedding receptions. You don’t just read about Hogwarts: you imagine yourself to be a pupil there. Harry Potter wasn’t a character in a book, he was your only friend in teenaged night. There is a story about the little boy who told Alec Guinness that he had seen Star Wars a hundred times; and Alec Guinness told him to maybe consider not seeing it again. I can put myself on both sides of that argument. I saw Star Wars, not a hundred times, but certainly twenty: not to admire the cinematography; not even to have my breath taken away by the spectacle, but because I wanted a lightsaber of my own.

One of the kids in Skeleton Crew gets a lightsaber of his own. I wouldn’t be watching a TV show which amounts to The Famous Five In Space if it didn’t have a spurious theoretical connection to the movie I saw in 1978.

It has been quite a wrench to acknowledge that the thing which now goes by the name of Doctor Who is no longer connected with the TV show that I once loved. There is a kind of fan who believes that a single thing called Doctor Who exists forever through a kind of apostolic succession. Either there is no such thing as Bad Doctor Who and anyone who doesn’t love the current season is an apostate and a schismatic. Or else the current custodians have violated the holy church by introducing a new bad guy, altering the deep lore, casting a black man in the lead, making it, as they say, endlessly, “woke”. But I have come around to the idea that what is really happening is that a very clever and talented man is utilising tropes and signifiers which have existed for half a century to create his own new thing, a thing which some people evidently like although I happen not to. My memories are not changed or violated or overwritten, and I still have the DVDs.

But sometimes I think. These aren’t new adventures of Doctor Who. These aren’t new adventures of Luke Skywalker. This is something that someone has made up. Someone who used to read the stories is now telling them. What makes his made up story more valid than, say, mine?

You all know what I think about Sandman. I liked the TV show fine. I haven’t reread the graphic novel in thirty years. I always thought that it was good of its type, and in some ways very good indeed, but lacked patience when it was over-praised, particularly when it was over-praised by people who hadn’t read any other comic books, or, indeed, any other books. I don’t think I ever quite cared about coolness in quite the right way.

At that same convention, a joke went round that Alan Moore had long hair, a long beard, and didn’t wear glasses; and that at exactly the moment he announced he was quitting comics, a new English writer, with short hair, no beard, sunglasses and a slightly over-embellished writing style appeared and started reinventing moribund DC properties. Who, the joke went, are they trying to kid?

I never totally shook that thought. Neil Gaiman was a slightly inferior, milk-and-water version of Alan Moore, in the same way that Terry Pratchett is a slightly inferior, milk-and-water version of Douglas Adams.

Sandman was fine. It wasn’t Watchmen. It certainly wasn’t Cerebus. To some extent I preferred the in-your-face visceral lavatory wall philosophising of Preacher. Some people loved it to Death..

There was a meme went round: Harry Potter was never good. You were nine.

This missed the point completely. Star Wars, I think was genuinely good: and I happened to be twelve. A.A Milne was very good indeed, and I was, in fact, six. And the Beatles clearly would have been very good indeed if I had been sweet little sixteen.

But whether Harry Potter was “ever good” is not the point. The point is that you bonded with Dumbledore at the same age I bonded with Ben Kenobi, and wanted a wand as badly as I wanted a lightsaber.

There are I suppose a very large number of people to whom this kind of talk is meaningless. “These are just books and TV shows and effing comic books you are talking about.” Literary people, I suppose, who have read Jane Austen frequently but wouldn’t want to live there; movie buffs who think that Star Wars was definitely one of the top five movies of 1977. What fills the hole in their lives I couldn’t say. Sport, maybe? Pets? Actual three dimensional human families?

Christopher Milne, remember, didn’t feel any need to hang on to his toy bear and his toy donkey: he wanted the things that were precious to him now, the things which were precious to him as a grown up, not the things which had been precious to him When He Was Very Young. And there may be people who loved Harry Potter and Star Wars and indeed Sandman and never loved anything else; and perhaps we could say that their imaginative growth has been stunted. Larry Marder said that Jack Kirby’s visual language was so awe-inspiring that some comic book fans never bothered to learn any other, which is a wonderfully nuanced way of putting it. I think they are like that fellow who keeps his decorations up in July and eats turkey three hundred and sixty five times a year. He has rather missed the point of Christmas.

I was too old for the Harry Potter books. But I read them, because everybody else was reading them. When Sandman was a thing, I was jaded and purist about comics and thought that nothing again would ever be as good as Stan and Jack. Now I am very nearly a hundred, which means that Pooh is very nearly ninety nine, but I will never quite get over thinking that the Hundred Acre Wood is my true home.

In a few weeks, the boffins will have perfected Artificial Intelligence software — predictive text algorithms — which can generate entire novels without human involvement. They may already have done so: it would certainly explain Rings of Power.

Genre fiction and formula fiction exist. Lots of freelance hacks think that they can take a corrupt sheriff, a call girl with a heart of gold, a whisky priest, a stage coach, some Indians, a nineteen year old cowpoke keen to prove himself, an innocent man headed for the gallows, a wise bartender and some wholesome homesteaders, shove them into their Nutribullet and blitz out ten volumes of the Wild West Library as quick as they can type them. In golden age of pulp that may even have been true. So why not cut out the middle man and sell an AI predictive text app that can generate an infinite number of brand new cowboy stories at the click of a mouse. Or, at any rate, the same cowboy story with minor variations. But isn’t that what Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour spent their entire careers doing? Isn’t that what genre fiction means?

If the author isn’t literally dead, he is certainly very poorly: author-less texts are just around the corner.

It’s not an entirely unattractive proposal. I would be very interested in feeding the whole corpus of 1960s Marvel Comics in at one end of the Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Mill and seeing what narrative chocolate biscuit emerge at the other. New Lee/Ditko Spider-Man stories? Or, at any rate, very, very good pastiches? What’s not to like?

There are now more than two hundred Rainbow Fairy books, all written by the redoubtable Daisy Meadows, who lives in a rose bedecked cottage with a two cats and two dogs. Except that no such person as Daisy Meadows exists: she’s a pseudonym adopted by at least fourteen different children’s writers. But perhaps she is a necessary fiction? Perhaps little girls need to think that there is a story-teller behind their stories? Perhaps every time someone says “Daisy Meadows doesn’t exist” a fairy drops down dead?

I once read about a man, a decent writer, who read a few dozen Mills and Boon romances and tried his hand at writing his own. He got a polite rejection letter saying that while he understood the formula, it was obvious that his heart wasn’t in it.

I think that the lady with the cottage and the cats is part of the Rainbow Fairy stories, and that if she went away, part of the story would go away, too. I think that Stan and Jack and the Bullpen were a big part of Marvel Comics, even though Stan and Jack hated each other and the bullpen didn’t exist. And the diffident nice guy with the leather coats and the dark glasses who wants everyone to just make good art is a big, big part of the Sandman saga, even though he never appears in it. It never quite was just Sandman, it was always Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

Sandman is, of course, very much about mythologizing the special power of Story and therefore of the Story Teller. Morpheus is Lord of Stories and there is a certain amount of entirely intentional confusion between the Author and the Character. If Sandman turned out to have been written by a committee or generated by artificial intelligence, it would no longer be Sandman.

This is even more true of Uncle Terry Pratchett.

If you loved Sandman then no-one can take from you the experience of having read it. But (it appears) no-one can ever give back to you the experience of having read Sandman in the voice of that particular storyteller because (it appears) that particular storyteller didn’t exist.

If you decide that you can still enjoy your memories of the stories, then I will support you. If you decide you can re-read those orphaned stories, I will support you. If you decide that the experience is tainted; that Sandman must be pixellated out of your life then will support you. If you decide that the physical artefacts must themselves be put on a bonfire then I may politely dissent. That sounds too much like the kind of thing Wagner’s number one fan might have done: but I understand the impulse. I think that I think that stories are stories and that once in the world they are in the world and that the Hundred Acre Wood would still be my true home even if something horrible came to light about A.A Milne or Christopher Robin.

Taking away Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker or Morpheus from a true fan is not like reassessing a work of literature or giving up on a TV series which has jumped the proverbial. It is closer, I think, to de-conversion.

I have a life sized figurine of Cerebus the Aardvark in my flat. Ride of Valkyries is a very good tune.

Andrew Rilstone is not an AI. If you enjoy his writing, please consider supporting him at www.patreon.com/rilstone.

The Penguin

Watching The Penguin is a deeply unpleasant experience. 

That's not a criticism. Presumably, it is supposed to be. The protagonist, Oz Cobb (nee Oswald Cobblepot) is portrayed as a genuine monster. His own mother thinks he's the devil. Normally, when villains and gangsters take centre stage, they are shown to have redeeming features. The Penguin has none. He's so amoral he makes Richard the Third seem like a nice chap.

Batman is probably more than any other character defined by his Rogues Gallery. Even if you aren't a fan you have heard of Joker, Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman.... If you read graphic novels you can list half a dozen more. Superman really only has the bald guy; and possibly the guy with the unpronounceable name. Most of Batman's enemies are grotesque and comical and very probably mad. The Penguin is posh and aristocratic. He wears tuxedos and top hats. He has a cigarette and a cigarette holder and usually carries an umbrella. In the Silly Era, gimmick-laced umbrellas were his modus operandi. Unlike Joker and Riddler, he's not a clown, although Burgess Meredith brought a large touch of W.C Fields to the 1960s TV characterisation.  

One could see the point of giving The Joker his own movie franchise. The Joker is iconic. The evil killer clown has a certain archetypal charm even when isolated from Bat-lore. The guy with the hat and the nose and umbrella, not quite so much. Especially when you take away the hat and the umbrella. 

In the last but one cinematic version of Batman, Penguin was the secondary antagonist. The main bad guy was the Riddler. The Riddler was a very minor comic book villain made unavoidably iconic by Frank Gorshin in the TV show. The comic book and TV versions of the Riddler wore silly green suits with silly question marks all over them. The movie version didn’t. He was a psychotic serial killer who turned out to have a political agenda. He did, however, leave riddles at the scenes of his crimes. Not that a serial killer who obsessively provides his antagonist with clues is a particularly unusual plot device. But you can see the point of connection between the guy in the film and the guy in the comic. He even says “riddle me this” at one point.

That seems to be the unique selling point of Ther Batman. Characters who are a little bit suggested by characters in the comic book, but properly frightening and without the fancy-dress costumes. (Except the Batman. The Batman dresses like the Batman.) 

Oz/Penguin runs a night club for the top gangster in Gotham. He doesn’t wear a suit, particularly, or have a top hat or an umbrella or talk about his fine feathered friends. He does have a big purple car but he doesn't call it a Pengy Mobile. He does have a big nose, and he waddles a bit due to his bad leg. He's still alive at the end of ther Batman, and clearly lined up to be the main villain in ther Batman 2, currently expected in 2027.

Edgar Rice Burroughs thought that Tarzan films ought to come out each year so kids could look forward to them in the way that they looked forward to the circus. (There were silent movies in 1918, 1919, 1920, and 1921. Johnny Wiesmuller made twelve talkies in sixteen years.) Five years is a hell of a gap between a movie and a sequel, particularly if the movie and the sequel are meant to form one coherent narrative. 

A superhero movie costs, like, two hundred million dollars to make (two! hundred! million!) but stands to earn six or seven hundred million (seven! hundred! million!) if people like it. We spent far more time and energy looking forward to these movies than actually watching them. There are teasers and magazines and web sites dedicated to this Looking Forward process. But in the end two hundred million dollars and five years boils down to a hundred and eighty minutes in the cinema. I don’t see how any film can possibly carry that weight of expectation. I don't see how any film can ever be anything but an anticlimax. We waited a decade for the Force Awakens and there are now people whose whole identity is disliking it.

Big Dinosaur Movies work best. You can go and see Big Dinosaur Movies over and over again because you are only there because you like looking at Big Dinosaurs. You wouldn't say you'd seen the Big Dinosaur once and don't need to see it again, any more than you would say that you once ate a cheeseburger and don't ever need to eat another one. If there is Another Big Dinosaur Movie, well, that refreshes the experience. I saw Star Wars eight, ten times during its first release. There is a story about Alec Guiness meeting a little boy who'd seen it a hundred times. Does anyone really need to re-experience Batman and the Riddler simmering at each other through the bullet proof glass in Arkham over and over and over again? 

Three hours every five years. 

Gotham City exists in a kind of no time at all. Everyone has a mobile phone. (Everyone has the same ringtone, and if you have a soundbar on your TV, it can be rather confusing.) But Arkham Asylum is a kind of nineteenth century lunatic asylum, men in white coats and bare walls and inmates who kill each other without anyone seeming to care a great deal. The tabloids tell us that prisons are like luxury hotels and borstels are like summer camps, so maybe its essential for Batman to deposit bad guys in a nightmarish fortress. Otherwise he would seem to be rewarding crime and would have to become a freelance executioner like the Punisher and the Crow. In the second Joker movie, Gotham appears to have an anachronistic electric chair. 

Or perhaps it's all a metaphor. Arkham represents Gotham's collective unconscious; and the villains are all symbols of Batman's own madness; grinning laughing ha-ha-ha-ha- bedlam madness, not human beings with mental health condition. But then Batman himself has always been a metaphor which is why those memes in which Alfred tells him to spend his dough on drug rehabilitation programmes rather than Batcopters are so senseless. Is there any point of bringing social realism into a world built of metaphor? 

The Nth Batman movie, the one with Heath Ledger, did as good a job of being The Godfather Only With Capes as any film is ever likely to. Ther Batman did the same kind of things very nearly as well. I rewatched it as a warm up for the TV series. I still don’t buy the man in the silly suit standing around crime scenes with hard-nosed believable cops, one of whom may or may not be Commissioner Gordon, but that may be the point.  

So, Penguin, the one really memorable character, now has his own TV show. Only it isn't really a TV show: it’s an eight hour movie released episodically. I rather approve of eight hour movies: I think they are probably what young people in the next century will have instead of books. The Daily Telegraph, which complains endlessly about young-people-nowadays having short attention spans, complained that Penguin was long and boring. And it was long. And it did require a sort of commitment, a sort of buy-in, without ever making it quite clear why we ought to invest in it. I don’t think we should praise films for being novelistic any more than we should praise dances for being architectural, but I do think that the eight-hour-TV-show is the place where the depth and complexity of Mr Dickens and Mr Hardy is most likely to survive. 

I do not think The Penguin is as good as Our Mutual Friend, although it is arguably the story of a city, and quite interested in questions of class. I do not think that The Penguin is as good as Jude the Obscure although it is very nearly as depressing. But it does says “let's spend some time with these characters even though they aren't doing very much". And it says "lets suspend the action and go into a completely gratuitous flash back". That only happens when you have four hundred and eighty minutes and the winter number of Strand Magazine to play with.

Actual comic books go on and on forever but only in twenty page segments.

Clearly, the reason the Penguin has his own TV show is that he is going to be the main antagonist in the Ther Batman 2. Did someone think that audiences would have found it implausible for the night-club manager in part one to have risen to be Kingpin of Gotham by part two? But it would be too boring to waste some of those precious once-in-five-years minutes showing or explaining his rise to power, and therefore the backstory has to be dumped onto Now or Sky in the hope someone will watch it there. Or at any rate, know that it exists. 

Maybe Colin Farrell just had so much damn fun being evil that he begged for the chance to do it again, more expansively? 

Or is this, perchance, just the movie someone wanted to make, back-story and franchise and audience expectation be damned? 

Many, many, many years ago, when we were young and Batman looked like Michael Keaton, I said in some fanzine or other that Batman was a marketing campaign with a movie attached to it; that so long as there was a Batposter on every hoarding and a Batshirt on every tennis crowd, the film didn't need to make sense. It's only function was to not be boring -- to distract people's attention while they were in the cinema. But Ther Batman and The Penguin are too long and frankly too dull to appeal to the mainstream popcorn consumer: if you don’t to some extent, care what happens to Oswald Cobbedecook and his cute stammering sidekick you won't get to end.

I am compelled. I am engaged. I cared. It helped that I was by myself over Christmas had had time to binge watch with rather too much rum and stilton. I don't know if, under normal circumstances, I would have stayed the course. 

Game of Thrones created a genre which could be called “cinema of of ordeal”. You don’t so much consume it as try to get through it. The characters are believable and human and realistic—if they weren’t, it would simply be one more splatter movie. And then horrible things happen to them. Relentlessly. Over eight gruelling hours. People are set on fire; and have their arms amputated with razor wire; and have their fingers cut off with wire-cutters. Many, many heads are smashed into walls. Many, many brains are blown out with guns, Broken bottles are thrust into abdomens. But the violence is mainly release from the psychological trauma. Victor, Penguin’s adopted teenaged side-kick, at one point decides to do a runner and leave the state with his girlfriend. It's at just this point, naturally, that the Penguin starts telling Vic how much he trusts him and how much he looks on him as the son he never had and how much they are going to achieve together for Gotham City. It’s the “what will Oz say and how will he react?” which grabs us by the throat; not the “will Oz kill Victor when he finds out?” One of the flashbacks into Oz’s childhood I found myself having to fast forward through. The last time that happened was in one of the sex dungeons scenes in the Boys. Sensitive readers may care to know that although there is lots and lots and lots of violence and lots and lots and lots of trauma in the Penguin, there are hardly any breasts and no penises at all.

The gangster thing, has, truthfully, been done before. The Penguin kills the heir apparent to the crime empire from the last movie, and spends eight episodes playing everyone else off against everyone else. His amoral machiavellianism is very clever indeed. But it's very slow burn. Oz's rival for control of the mobs, and the sister of the guy he killed, Sofia, is an even bigger psychopath than he is. She's released from Arkham in the first episode: I don't think I was properly hooked until an extended flashback in episode four revealed how she came to be in there in the first place. The Godfather taught us that Mafiosi are violent and scary but that’s okay because they are honourable and loyal to their families. There is nothing even slightly okay about either Oz or Sofia. At best we can pity them, a bit, because Oz was poor and Sofia was abused. 

Oz's one redeeming feature is that he visits his old mother who has dementia. By the final part, his relationship with her is revealed to have been a complicated oedipal vortex. His final action in the final episode is pointlessly, gratuitously evil, and comes from nowhere, and yet is somehow in character. Is the plan that by the time we get to see Ther Batman 2 we will hate Penguin so much that we will be fully on board with whatever vengeance the caped crusader exacts, content in the knowledge that nothing, literally nothing, not even that Victorian mental institution, can possibly be worse than what he deserves? Or are we supposed to feel some level of empathy for him? This too is a human being. 

Meanwhile, there is a trailer for the sixth Superman reboot, due out next July. Superhero fans are very like Charlie Brown and his football: however many times we've been hurt by faithless adaptations we are quite sure that this time we'll have a Fantastic Four movie that is true to Stan and Jacks original vision and this time someone will do Superman justice. But certainly, the vibes that the trailer has generated have been universally positive. The Penguin is an extended setup for a proper serious gangster movie that happens to have Batman in it. But Superman may render all that passe. By 2027, the peanut crunching crowd may be expecting red telephones, Batpoles, visible sound-effects and Ace the Bat-hound.

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Deadpool vs Wolverine

First X-Men movie; first modern superhero movie; first summer of the second millennium. Our mutated heroes go into action in smart shiny leather uniforms. Logan the cool tough one with claws demurs; and Cyclops, the strait laced one says "Would you prefer yellow spandex?"

Wind forward a quarter of a century. 

My life flashes before me like Huge Ackman's showreel over the closing credits. Seven years old: Grandad brought me a Spider-Man comic and no-one in the world knew who Spider-Man was. Eleven years old: Nicholas Hammond is on the TV and Don McClean and Peter Glaze are making jokes about the Incredible Hulk. Twenty three years old: Watchmen and Dark Knight: zap kapow comics aren't just for kids any more. Early middle age: SIR Patrick Stewart and SIR Ian McKellen are openly treating mutants as a metaphor for Dr Martin Luther King. Samuel L Jackson pops up at the end of a Hulk movie and births the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Guardian's actual proper grown up movie critic compares Avengers: Endgame with Sophocles. And suddenly I'm sitting in a movie house full of old people watching a movie entirely made up of comic book in-jokes. Comic book in-jokes and jokes about wanking and blow jobs. Comic book in-jokes, jokes about wanking and blow jobs and incredibly over the top violence. And Wolverine actually is wearing yellow Spandex.

How could you do this? How could you take a story which is of such very deep importance to millions and millions of people and use it as a vehicle for fifth rate undergraduate humour?

No, I'm sorry. That was Malcolm Muggeridge talking about Life of Brian.

Think of it: through the golden years of Marvel Comics, the whole Stan and Steve and Jack era -- there was no such character as Wolverine. Wolverine is from a historical perspective a johnny-come (fnarr-fnarr) lately. But if there had been no Wolverine there would have been no Chris Claremont, and if there had been no Chris Claremont the Marvel universe would have trundled to an end before the 80s were out and the Marvel Cinematic Universe would never have existed.

"This movie acknowledges Len Wein, for the significant contribution he made to the X-Men ."

Well, quite.

I'm truthfully not sure that I can remember who Deadpool originally was. I think I saw the first movie, though not the second one. I think he started life as a perfectly serious second tier X-Men bad guy? (But then Wolverine started life as a perfectly serious second tier Hulk bad guy.) He pretty rapidly became a meta fourth-wall breaking har-har stop it you're killing me spoof character. The most recent graphic novel has him invading the cover of a Classics Illustrated edition of Tom Sawyer.

Yeah, meta-textuality and deconstruction. Grant Morrison did it very well in Animal Man. Chuck Jones did it in Daffy Duck. John Byrne's She Hulk knew she was in a comic, could comment on the cliches of the genre, an on one occasion, escaped from the baddies by tearing through the page and running across a spread of adverts. She does a similar trick in the TV show, getting out of the episode and running through the Disney+ menu screen. Deadpool's whole existence is a commentary on Deadpool. No scene passes without him pointing out that someone is doing exposition or that such-and-such an object is a McGuffin and that the people being killed are only extras. When he does, finally, fight Wolverine, he not only tells us that this is the scene we bought our tickets to see, but that "nerds will be getting out their special sock".

Did you get that, guys? You bought a ticket for the movie and the main character just called you a wanker. Except, obviously, he meant present company accepted: it's everyone else in the cinema apart from you who is going to enjoy the big fight scene in exactly the wrong way.

A lot of Radio 4 sketch comedy writers have a fallback gag in which characters in some TV show comment explicitly on the conventions of the genre that they are in. You know the kind of thing. "I'm going to drink half a bottle of whisky before the big match, because this is a sports movie and I'm the one with inner demons." It can be perfectly funny. I am fond of John Finnemore's cynical hard bitten won't play by the rules store detective trying to work out who stole the jaffa cakes from the biscuit aisle. The famous Mitchell and Webb "are we the baddies?" skit is a smarter take on the same joke. But it's a bit obvious. Even a bit cynical.

Deadpool vs Wolverine is just an incredibly cynical piece of film making. Which is not to say that it isn't funny: it is funny, very funny indeed in places. And I'm not saying that it isn't entertaining: it's lively and inventive and I was never bored, although, like many superhero movies, a certain desperation sets in when the last plot thread is tied off and you realise there is still forty minutes to go. The action sequences in serious action movies have become so unreal and  so over the top that parodying them or exaggerating them seems gratuitous; but the fight scenes in Deadpool vs Wolverine (and there is hardly anything but fight scenes) are kinetic and exhilarating and ludicrous and very, very, very, violent. Deadpool and Wolverine are both indestructible, and spend much of the movie sticking claws and katanas into each others face, arse, and groin with very little ill-effect. It's graphic enough to merit a 15 cert but honestly feels more like a Road Runner cartoon than a video nasty. I remember when you couldn't legally buy the Lone Wolf and Cub movie in this country because of all the tomato ketchup.

I kept thinking of Kick Ass, in which the violence made you wince and an eight year old girl said "cunt" and which still ended up feeling like a joyous love-letter to comic books.

The meta-in-jokes are very meta, very in-, very clever and very, very funny. We get a forced perspective Huge Ackman, because at one point Wolverine was said to be very short; we get a drunk Wolverine going by the name of Patch, because in the 1980s mini-series he used that identity; we get a Wolverine standing in front of a graffiti strewn post-apocalyptic wall because Days of Future Past. (We get jokes about Huge Ackman's singing career.)  After about ten minutes it all becomes a bit relentless and over-whelming and exhausting. Like being beaten not unpleasurably over the head with the Complete Handbook to the Marvel Universe.

In the 50s and 60s there was an academic thing called New Criticism which said that you had to look at the actual texts of poems and plays, and talk about the actual words on the page and damn what the author might have meant by them. Damn, indeed, the whole concept of the author and the whole concept of a world outside the book. I have often thought that modern science fiction franchises could provide a test case for this kind of thinking. Is Ahsoka intelligible if you have never seen a Star Wars cartoon? Is the Acolyte intelligible if you didn't know there was such a thing as Star Wars? It is probably feasible to watch a cowboys in space TV show and tacitly say things like "This is obviously a good guy, who has presumably had previous adventures which I don't know about; and the guy with the black cloak is obviously a bad guy who she's encountered in the past." You probably don't miss too much watching in that spirit. You might miss some nuances if you didn't know who Anakin was. But I must admit that I have sometimes been put off watching new episodes of Marvel TV shows (I am looking at you, Secret Invasion) because I have lost track of who everyone is and don't have time to put in the necessary homework. 

Do you need to know who Gambit is to understand the scene with Gambit in it? Probably not: he's introduced as a French superhero with magic playing cards, and  that's really the only thing you need to know about him. For the purposes of the scene she appears in, Elektra is a tough martial arts lady with not enough clothes on; you don't specially need to know that she's Daredevil's lover and a key player in ninja politics and once recovered from her death. Although for those of us who were traumatised by Daredevil #181, the reduction of Elektra to a tough martial arts lady seems a bit of a shame. A bald telepathic lady bad guy turns out to be related to a bald telepathic male good guy. Probably the scene loses some of its sting if you're reaction is "Who is this Charles Xavier of which you speak?" But you can deduce from internal evidence that Wolverine had a very close relationship with the baddies brother and feels he let him down, which is strictly speaking all you need to know. (Did Prof X have an evil twin in any of the comics? I know he had an evil step-brother who smashes through walls a lot. It may not matter.) A huge punch line depends on the fact that we, and therefore Deadpool, assume that a certain famous actor is cameoing in a particular role which he is very strongly associated with; but turns out to be playing a different role he is associated with much less strongly. If you don't know, you don't know. But then if you don't know you probably don't know you don't know. He swears a lot and dies in a particularly horrible way.

I don't know how comfortable I am with the idea of a cool psychotic mercenary with a soft interior, and I absolutely grant that that's the whole point of the movie. It's not like "charming bastard" is a particularly new idea. James Bond was a charming bastard; so was Han Solo. So is Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy and so is the Chris Pine character in the much-better-than-it-ought-to-have-been Dungeons & Dragons movie. (Peter Quill's name literally and intentionally means "prick".) I preferred D&D: it is quite clear that Edgin is a good guy pretending to be a cynic; where there is a suspicion that we are supposed to think Star Lord is cool because he is an immoral psychopath. Deadpool is vulgar and psychotic and cynical but he likes kids and puppies and sacrifices himself to save the universe. (SPOILER: He gets better.) But he kills a lot of people a long the way. A lot. I bet there is a trivia page where someone has worked out the body-count.

The movie insulates itself against criticism. It's in terrible, offensively poor taste: but it's supposed to be. It's cynical and amoral and undercuts the whole genre it's celebrating -- but it's supposed to be. To complain about it is to reveal yourself as a humourless old such-and-such. The opening scene -- in which Deadpool overtly asks if the film is going to respect the memory of Logan and proceeds to desecrate his corpse, comprehensively, literally, and in slow motion, is a masterpiece of terrible taste.

Fuck the whole idea of the multiverse. No, that isn't nearly vulgar enough for a Deadpool review. "Give the multi-verse a blow-job up the arse while suffering from an incurable sexually transmitted disease." The many worlds hypothesis has some narrative uses: of course it does. It's fun to jump timelines to universes where Hitler won the war; where all the mutants have been exterminated; or where Superman landed in Weston Super-Mare as opposed to Smallville. And yes, the multiverse has been a convenient way to iron out inconsistencies, to say that those comic books over there are set in Universe A where these comic books over here are set in Universe B and that's why Hyperman's underpants are three different colours. Into the Spider-Verse is the most interesting thing that anyone has ever done with Spider-Man, or indeed, with superheroes more generally. I didn't even hate the Flash, though everyone else seems to have done. 

But oh, how wearisome the thought that all the different versions of Wolverine there have been over the years must of necessity be actually-existing-Wolverines-in-different worlds. How wearyingly obvious the idea of a Time Police patrolling the time lines for inconsistencies as a sort of metaphor for comic book continuity. I know the original thought was "It would be cool if all three cinematic Spiders Man were real, but in different dimensions" but the overall result is remind us that nothing we are currently watching matters, that every death is temporary and can be easily undone. 

And underneath it all, there is an actually quite good superhero yarn; which kind of manages to take itself seriously despite it all. Huge Ackman has the micky extensively taken out of him; but he never takes it out of himself. Wolverine diminishes and goes into a different continuity but remains Wolverine. Some of his Big Character Moments  -- about how this version of the character failed to prevent the deaths of the X-Men, and how he wants to live up to the faith that Prof X put in him -- are actually well done and quite effective. And the climax, in which, for good an adeqaute reasons, our heroes have to mutually sacrifice themselves, has a bonkers epic morality that reminds us why, in a peculiar way, superhero movies still matter. 

A serious epic wrapped in a violent, smutty action movie wrapped in an infinitely prolonged meta-joke? I don't know whether the Marvel Cinematic Universe can ever recover from this. It probably doesn't matter very much if it can't. I actually enjoyed Deadpool vs Wolverine  quite a lot. But oh dear oh dear. If the Dungeons & Dragons community is allowed an Old School Revival, can those of us who still enjoy the funny books hope for a Silver Age Revival? A line of superhero comics and superhero movies that actually, you know, told stories about superheroes? I propose calling ourselves the "Pre Watchmanite Brotherhood."

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Stan stans Stan

Stan Lee

Disney+

In the 60s, Marvel Comics was known as the House of Ideas.

It's a telling phrase. Not the house of writers or the house of artists or the house of editors. The House of Ideas.

That's what made the decade from 1961-1972 so seminal. Not the pictures; not the dialogue; not even the plots. The ideas. And the source of those ideas was the son of a pair of Jewish Romanian depression-era immigrants: Stanley Martin Leiber.

"I have always thought I was the creator of Spider-Man because I am the guy who said 'I have an idea for a strip called Spider-Man an so forth'...." explained Lee. "You dream it up and then you give it to anyone to draw it."

Walt Disney's Life of Stan is not as bad as I expected it to be. It ends with the voices of Kevin Feige (director of the Marvel Cinematic Universe) and Roy Thomas (Stan Lee's anointed successor at Marvel.) Both of them distance themselves from the doctrine of Stan Sola.

"I often think of the 1960s and the famous Marvel bullpen" says Fiege "and think about the characters that came out of the imaginations of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and all of their co-creators, it's incredible. I often find myself thinking 'boy if we could just tap into just five per cent of that crucible of imagination' ".

"The seeds of all that stuff are all set back in what Stan did with Jack and Steve" says Thomas. "You know, you could always trace anything that they do now. It all kind of flows from that fountain that was unleashed when Stan and Jack and Ditko, you know, got together and suddenly became this wonderful triumvirate, creating a whole universe, and neither of them could have really you know done it without the other."

This represents one hell of a climbdown: Lee himself acknowledged Ditko as co-creator only with the utmost reluctance. ("I'm willing to say so".) I wonder if there is an element of arse-covering going on: a last-ditch attempt to shore up what remains of the myth? Stan Lee was not the sole auteur of Marvel Comics. No-one who has studied the evidence thinks that he was. Very many people would be prepared to argue that Ditko and Kirby could very well have created Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four without input from Lee. There are even some who think that they did. But talking about a triumvirate allows us to keep hold of Uncle Stan. He may not have done everything, but he still did something.

The choice of metaphor is interesting. Thomas talks about seeds. The Blessed Trinity didn't create the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but everything that came afterwards was implicit in their primal creative act. He talks about fountains. Whatever we mean by Marvel Comics already existed; the Founding Fathers merely channeled and released it. Fiege talks about a crucible. I prefer that as a metaphor: Lee, Kirby and Ditko as three radically different metals that were superheated into a single alloy.

Fiege and Thomas are careful to talk about creators in the plural. But their summing up is bookended by the singular Stan Lee, enjoying the glamour of the Marvel movies and looking back on his long career. 

"In the days I was writing those books..." 

"That's a camera-wrap on the creator of Iron Man, Mr. Stan Lee" 

"The fact that I'm working with characters I've created..." 

"You can only do your best work if you are doing what you want to do, if you are doing it the way you think it should be done" 

"If you can look at it and say 'I did that and I think it's pretty damn good, that's a great feeling."

I, me, my...

The documentary is very well put together. Lee ceased to be an active comic book creator in 1972: for the last fifty years of his life, talking about himself was basically what he did for a living. There must be a thousand hours of recordings of his voice. Director David Gelb has, with some ingenuity, collated a tiny fraction of this material into a fairly cohesive first person narrative: Stan on Stan. Not such a monumental undertaking as Peter Jackson's Get Back, but a substantial editorial task. A computer may have been involved to make the sound consistent, but it's all based on actual recordings. We are not told the provenance of the voice-over, so a remark made in 1960 and a remark made in 2020 might well be placed side by side. We also get film clips of Lee on chat shows and conventions and personal appearances, where the context is much clearer.

Stan Lee was a professional raconteur. He created a persona on the pages of his comics and then adopted it in real life. Self-deprecating and egoistical in the same moment; never more arch than when he's being sincere, never more light-hearted than when giving a straight answer. We hear the voice of Joe Simon complaining that the Very Early Stan Lee used to incessantly play the piccolo in the office. We don't otherwise hear of an interest in music: he must have been inhabiting a persona even back then. I don't know if there is really a unique New York Jewish style of humour, but one can't help thinking of the later Groucho Marx when Stan speaks. Later on he dropped the flute and affected a cigar. If you fell in love with Marvel in the 60s, then Stan's voice is what you fell in love with. This is a strength and a weakness in any documentary. It is great fun to spend time in Stan's company: the ninety minutes shoots by. But we are drawn in. We want to believe the yarns he is spinning. It feels mean to interrupt and say "But wait a minute....?" and "Says who...?"

Jack Kirby and Joe Simon pointedly refer to him as Stanley. Stan Lee is a made-up character.

Lee's reminiscences are illustrated by static figurines in elaborate tableaux. (I don't know who made them, and if they are physical models or clever CGI, but they are terribly well done.) So as Lee talks about reading the pulps in his parent's tenement while his dad desperately looked for work; we see the scene enacted by the little plastic figures who normally populate model railway stations.

It's a clever stunt. Stan tells us. The pictures show us. But the artificiality of the pictures gently whisper "it ain't necessarily so".

We see a Steve Ditko figurine, hunched over a model writing desk, pencilling a comic book. To one side is a Stan Lee figurine, adopting a Spider-Man pose, demonstrating how he imagines a particular scene. The comic that toy-Ditko is working on is quite clearly Amazing Fantasy #15; the last page of the first section, when Peter invents his web-shooters. At his side are pencils, a protractor...and a typewritten script, several pages long. It's clearly based on the sample from Stan's 1948 Writers Digest Essay, There's Money in Comics, which envisaged a comic book script as a movie screenplay, with panel descriptions down one side and dialogue down the other. ("Panel 1: Louise in office, clearing her desk. Louise: (Thought.) He never notices me!") Elsewhere in the big open-plan Marvel office, there are four or five other artists, similarly hunched over drawing boards.

We would love it to be true. What Kevin Feige calls "the famous Marvel Bullpen" was such a big part of what made Marvel Comics so special -- a men's clubhouse that us little kids were allowed to peek into. But it never existed: during the Marvel decade the artists were freelancers working from home. Stan Lee didn't provide Ditko or Kirby with screenplays to work from: he provided them with short summaries or single line ideas. According to Flo Steinburg (Stan Lee's very own Betty Brant) Lee did sometimes stand on tables and mime scenes to artists. But there is something pernicious in the idea that Steve Ditko was drawing Spider-Man in poses that Stan Lee had first demonstrated to him. The one thing which characterised Steve Ditko's Spidey -- a flexible body perpetually twisted into unlikely shapes -- is implied to have originated in the Mind of Stan. Note that Lee has his third and forth fingers in the palms of his hands, in the classic "web-shooter" position: the idea that Lee suggested those kinds of details corresponds to nothing that we know about the pair's working practices. 

Ditko really did have the word THINK pinned to his drawing board, but that was in his home studio, not the Marvel office.

We hear a big chunk of the Merry Marvel Marching Society record, in which Stan Lee pokes heavy handed fun at the other creatives. This doesn't pretend to be anything other than a skit. At one point Steve Ditko, who characteristically refused to participate, is said to leap out of the window, to the sound of breaking glass. ("Maybe he is Spider-Man!") But the scene is lovingly recreated with the little Lego men. Perhaps that's a signal that the vignette of Lee and Ditko should be seen as part of the same, mythical, Bullpen play-world. 

But it's a vivid ideogram; visually conveying the idea that Ditko's job was to transmute Lee's thought into pictures. Which is. Just. Not. True.

"My mother said I would read the labels on ketchup bottles if there was nothing else around" says Stan. I am sure she did.

"I got a job as an office boy at the second largest trouser manufacturer in New York." I have no reason whatsoever to doubt this.

"When I graduated High School, I had an uncle, and he worked for a publisher, and he told me they were looking for an assistant, and I figured 'Gee, I'm going to apply', so I went up there, and I found out they also published comic books, they had an outfit called Timely comics, and they hired me to run errands, to proof read, fill the inkwell, whatever had to be done." By all accounts, this is perfectly correct. Stan's Uncle Robbie (Robert Solomon) worked for Martin Goodman, who published Timely Comics. 

What Lee fails to mention is that Goodman's sister (Sylvia Solomon) was Robert's wife. That makes Lee the boss's nephew-in-law. And rather confusingly, Goodman's own wife, Jean, was Stan Lee's cousin. Making him the boss's cousin-in-law as well. There is nothing sinister about this. It's how second generation immigrants found work during the depression. Once Lee is ensconced as a gopher, sharpening Jack Kirby's pencils and bringing him cups of coffee, he slips into the royal plural. "We had the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner and the Patriot and the Angel and the Destroyer, but the main character we had was Captain America."

But hey. It's a good story. Office boy to world-wide icon. Isn't that exactly what we mean by the Great American Dream?

Stan Lee was definitely given the role of "Playwright" by the US Army during World War II: we are shown his discharge papers with the job title on them. He was writing instruction manuals and training-film scripts while Jack Kirby was actually getting shot at by Nazis. (Another "playwright" was one Theodor Geisel, who would later do quite well for himself writing children's books.) But is it really true that adding light-hearted cartoon characters into accountancy training books shortened the training period for army finance officers from six-months to six weeks? This is, of course, spun as a eureka moment; indeed, as an origin story:

"It was then I realised that comic books can have a tremendous impact; you can convey a story or information faster, more clearly and more enjoyably than any other way short of motion pictures."

With great power comes great responsibility. Thus were born the Fantastic Four and the world will never be the same again. 

Abraham Riesman mentions in her biography that Lee's most widely distributed army work was actually a poster with the punchy slogan "V.D? Not me!" No-one doubts Stan Lee had a way with words.

In Origins of Marvel Comics, written in 1974, Lee tells the story of how his wife, sometime in 1960, pointed out that he'd been writing comics for twenty years and still treated it as a temporary occupation. (Significantly, he was still pitching screenplays and novel ideas; equally significantly, none of them got picked up.) Why, asked Jean, didn't he fully commit to the industry he was actually in? The result was the Fantastic Four. 

It is sweet that Stan wants to say that he owes it all to his wife; but it strikes me as the sort of conversation two people might actually have. Half a century later, in a BBC interview, the story had evolved. Now, Lee had actively decided to quit comics and his lovely wife suggested that if he was going to do that anyway, he should "do one book the way he wanted" before he finished. The result was Spider-Man. 

Corollary: Stan Lee always had Spider-Man "in" him; but he had spent many years doing comics in the way he thought his publisher wanted. (*)

In the present documentary, we get the story from Jean Lee's own mouth. (I hadn't realised that she had such a wonderful cut-glass English accent!) And the choice of words is very telling:

"Why don't you create characters who you like?"

In the beginning was the idea. The Fantastic Four differed from the characters who came before because Stan Lee liked them. Because they were his personal vision.

On this timeline, Stan goes to Jack and says "Jack, wouldn't it be nice if you had good guys who occasionally make mistakes, who occasionally trip at the last minute and let the bad guys get away?" This is presented as the key moment: when the seed was planted, the fountain unleashed and the crucible heated. It is illustrated with a panel from the 1947 Secrets of the Comics strip about how Martin Goodman created Captain America in a single eureka moment.

"That was really the start of everything" says Stan.

So: that was the Big Idea. Not the idea that there should be a team consisting of a stuffy scientist, a beautiful lady, a cool, hot-headed younger kid and strong, bad-tempered older kid, and that together they should fight monsters. Not even the idea -- that Lee is inordinately proud of -- that the Scientist and the Lady were already engaged when the story started. The light bulb moment was when Stan Lee went to the guy he used to run errands for and told him that the Fantastic Four would be realistic and fallible

In fairness, we do get to hear Lee talking extensively about the Marvel Method; and acknowledging Ditko's primary input into the majority of Spider-Man's adventures. This is spun in Lee's favour: because he didn't know what was going to be in the comic until Ditko handed him the art, Spider-Man took twice as long "to write" than any of the other books. Lee says that Marvel Method was introduced as an emergency measure -- introduced because Marvel were putting out more books than he could personally keep track of. The chronology of the documentary implies that this happened after the post-Fantastic Four superhero explosion: but Lee has said elsewhere that he was already feeding Kirby and Ditko single-line story ideas (for monster comics and twist-ending horror titles) from the middle-fifties at least. The provenance of Stan's outline for Fantastic Four #1 is contested: but it's definitely a synopsis, not a script.

We hear Lee's side of the Jonathan Ross interview; which acknowledges that Ditko believed himself to be the co-creator of Spider-Man. We hear the infamous moment when Stan and Jack nearly come to verbal blows about "who did what" on live radio. Lee accuses Kirby of never reading the finished comics, which Kirby does not deny. Kirby honestly believed he was the sole creator of the Fantastic Four because he genuinely didn't know what Lee was bringing to the table.

The trailer for the 1978 Christopher Reeve movie strongly implied that Superman's appearances in comic books, on radio, and on TV had been a preliminary, gestational period from which Superman-The Movie had finally emerged. Similarly, the 2018 Double Fantasy exhibition presented John Lennon as a peace campaigner, guru and avant garde artist who had served an apprenticeship in a British pop group. And clearly, it suits Walt Disney to present Stan Lee's story as a single creative decade, followed by forty years of obscurity, and universal adulation as an octogenarian. The documentary skips the years between 1972, when Lee ceased to be a regular writer, and 2008, when he started to cement his mainstream fame with a series of Hitchcockian cameos in the Marvel Universe Movies. We hear nothing of the decades of pitching ideas for characters and movies -- none of which get made -- and certainly nothing of the failed Stan Lee Media or POW Entertainment. 

Marvel Comics was the egg from which the Marvel Cinematic Universe hatched.

"In the days I was writing those books I was hoping they'd sell, so that I wouldn't lose my job, that I could keep paying the rent. All of a sudden, these characters have become world famous; they're the subject of blockbuster movies, and I'm lucky enough to get little cameos in them..."

"It's certainly nice to see the world catch up with what Stan Lee did" adds Roy "Even if it took movies and TV shows to do it. The world has to kind of admit now, maybe there is something to some of this stuff."

The final moments of the film juxtapose images from the movies with images of the same characters from 60s Marvel. But this only underlines how little the comic book characters have in common with the figures in the movies. The evil mutant with the silly red tiara unrecognisable as the tragically crazed witch from Wandavision. The lumbering cold-warrior in gun-metal armour has hardly anything to do with Robert Downey Jnr's sleek cyberpunk hero. The Hulk who Stan Lee dreamed up wasn't powered by anger and wasn't green. One of these things is not like the other one, but we are asked to suppose they have a unique essence which makes them kind of the same. Stan Lee's theory of Ideas which fall fully formed like mana from heaven is a necessary component of that essentialism. 

Jack Kirby created Captain America as a wartime hero; Stan Lee brought him forward to the 60s and killed off his annoying kid side kick; Ed Brubaker brought Bucky back from the dead as a psychotic brainwashed assassin. Gene Colon created the Falcon, and Steve Englehart made him Cap's partner and Rich Remender made him Cap's replacement. The very fine 1941 Captain America comic and the very fine 2021 Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV show are only instantiations of the same idea in the way that Trigger's broom (which has had fourteen new heads and seventeen new handles) is still the same broom he bought twenty years ago.

There's a political dimension to all this. The belief that there is a one true Spider-Man, who appeared in a snap-your fingers lightbulb moment feeds into the mentality which sets fire to action figures if a once-light-skinned character is played by a dark-sinned actor.

There is a really very touching epilogue in which Stan, now in a wheel chair, gets an ecstatic standing ovation from a college graduation cohort. His closing address turns the story-of-the-idea into a morality play, like one of those picture books about how Mother Theresa was a little girl who followed her dreams but doesn't mention that she was a Roman Catholic. 

"If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don't let some idiot talk you out of it. That doesn't mean that every wild notion you come up with is gonna be genius, but if there is something that you feel is good, something you want to do, something that means something to you, try to do it. Because you can only do your best work, if your doing what you want to do, and if you're doing it the way you think it should be done."

And that's the message. Where the whole trajectory of Stan's career is collaboration, pragmatism, following trends, selling a product, the final message is individualism. Spider-Man was great because Lee had a singular vision and he stuck to it. Bull. Shit

And the pity of it is this: if anyone reads to the end of this essay, they will call me a Ditko hater and a Stan Lee shill. Because I do believe that Stan Lee was a creative genius. I do believe that Kirby and Ditko did better work with Lee than they ever did solo or with different collaborators. I do believe that Marvel Comics from 1962ish to 1972ish reads as a single text, adverts and letters pages and all, and the soul of that text comes from Stan Lee. Stan Lee's voice formed the soundtrack to my childhood, if not my whole life. Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four are great because of Stan Lee's ironic meta-textual self-insertion. The endless peddling of the myth of the auteur who never actually auteured anything is insulting to Ditko and Kirby. And it does no favours to the very talented man whose name is on the tin.

Stan Lee was a copywriter. Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were draftsmen. What they produced was not ideas, but texts.     

(*) It also follows that he was not "doing" the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, or Thor in "the way he wanted" and that he became disillusioned with comics when he had already "created" Doctor Doom and reintroduced the Submariner.

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Doomsday Clock #11

This issue is exposition, mostly.

Doomsday Clock #9 & #10

 You've been a Batman fan since you were a little kid; and a jobbing comic-book hack since you left college; and it has finally happened: you are going to write your very own Batman Story. (Page 1, panel 1: "The Bat Cave..." You've waited your whole life for this moment.) The most -- the very very most -- you can hope for is that it will be a story that is fondly remembered by future generations of Bat-Nerds. "Of all the stories in which the Penguin has kidnapped Barbara Gordon" you imagine them saying "That was definitely in the top fifty."

But that's not enough, is it? You don't want to be remembered as one of the good Bat-writers. The Bat-myth is much more important than any actual story: you need to leave your thumbprint on the Myth itself. You have to find some way of binding your successor: your Penguin story has to influence all other Penguin stories for as long as Batman endures. "That was the story which first revealed that the Penguin was Thomas Wayne's estranged brother and therefore Batman's wicked uncle" they will say "And now all us Future Batman Writers have to stick with that." (NOTE: That is a made up example. At least, I sincerely hope it is.)

But even this may not be enough for you. With the growth of the Insatiable Continuity Beast the truly hubristic Bat-scribe has an even more grandiose way of exerting control over the Tradition. If you are clever enough, and if you can get yourself commissioned to write this decade's Universe Defining Mega Continuity Crossover, you get to define what stories can and what stories cannot be told for decades, or at any rate weeks, to come. Penguins will live. Penguins will die. And the Bat Universe will never be the same again. You will be remembered as the writer who wiped out Earth-2 and thereby stopped the Future Writers from telling tales about a grey-haired Dick Grayson and the late Bruce Wayne's daughter. It was you who dissolved the multiverse so that no story involving the Flashes of Several Worlds could ever be written again.

Actually, the only thing which determines the influence one writer has on the writers who come after him is a certain sort of Darwinian fan consensus, survival of the least uninteresting. Frank Miller successfully turned Daredevil into a Ninja because the idea of Ninja Daredevil is manifestly more interesting than Very Slightly Grimmer Version of Spider-Man Daredevil. If the idea hadn't worked it would have been discretely forgotten. We can Crisis as much as we want to; but Superman's human parents will always be alive; because a Superman who can go and visit a sweet little grey haired old homestead in Kansas is much more interesting than one who swore to use his powers only for good on his father's deathbed. That is John Byrne's legacy. Everyone has forgotten his Krypton because it was krap.

Doomsday Clock #9 and #10 amount to two solid issues of exposition, building up to a sort of literary meta-theory about how DC Comics now work. Less of a joyless slog than the previous ten issues, I must admit: some of the ideas are borderline interesting, and Geoff Johns is unquestionably more comfortable writing about the DC characters than about Alan Moore's. But 40 pages of exposition is 40 pages of exposition, even if the ideas being exposited are not entirely uninteresting.

I thought that Grant Morrison was supposed to have sorted out DC cosmology a decade ago? (Hypertime, was it?) Are we already due for a meta-reboot?

We start with three wordless pages -- nine long thin panels -- showing different groups of heroes on different kinds of spaceships. One ship has Hawkman and Big Barda and Mr Miracle; another has some Green Lanterns and Wonder Girl; one has the JLA; another has Shazam and all the little Shazams and one even has Swamp Thing and John Constantine. (Does the idea of John Constantine on a spaceship to Mars go against the whole idea of John Constantine? Can any such character as Spider-Man continue to exist in a Universe where a character called Spider-Man can fight Thanos in Outer Space?) I thought this was quite fun; recalling the endless shifting battle fronts in the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, but it is also a pretty cheap way of getting my attention. Hey kid, here are some superheroes. And here are some more superheroes. And here are even more superheroes! Superheroes! Superheroes! Superheroes!

Last issue, Firestorm apparently lost control of his powers and nuked Moscow -- and incidentally put Superman in a coma -- which the Russians are treating as an act of War. But in fact the explosion wasn't caused by Firestorm: it was apparently caused by Doctor Manhattan. On Mars. Except it may not have been. So all the heroes who are still standing fly off to Mars to confront Doctor Manhattan. Batman isn't convinced this is a great idea.

Bits and pieces of what follows are not unfun. Green Lantern envelopes Mars in a big green sphere and Firestorm turns the atmosphere into something the humans can breathe. Guy Gardner punches Doctor Manhattan. One of the younger Shazams finds his nudity "gross". Doctor Manhattan provides a scientific explanation for "magic". Captain Atom kills Doctor Manhattan, but he gets better. Once everyone has had a go, Doctor Manhattan knocks them all out with pretty much a wave of his hand.

The next issue primarily consists of Doctor Manhattan talking to himself. Since he ran away from Earth-WM and arrived on Earth-DC he has been observing all the ret-cons and reboots from the inside. He arrives on Earth-DC in 1938 and hears news reports of Superman's first appearance. (A man in a wrestling costume so strong that he can lift a car!) But when he follows the news story up, Superman is not there: because his arrival on earth has been pushed forward to 1956 and then to 1986. Each time the date of Superman's nativity changes, Earth-DC changes around him. It's quite fun to see the different iterations of Superman laid out side by side -- Pa and Ma Kent finding a pointy space rocket in one of their fields; and Jonathan and Martha stumbling on a John Byrne incubation sphere; Superman's dad telling him to go to Metropolis and become a Superhero from his death bed; Superman's ageing Mum knitting his first Superman costume for him. Doctor Manhattan witnesses the first meeting of the Justice Society (which is of course a lot like the first meeting of the Minute-men, only less rapey). In one version they are waiting for Superman to turn up; in another version Superman is not invited because he doesn't exist.

Doctor Manhattan himself starts to deliberately affect changes in continuity. He prevents Alan Scott becoming Green Lantern; which appears to prevent the formation of the Justice Society; and due to some jiggery pokery with a flight ring that went completely over my head, he prevents the Legion of Superheroes from coming into being as well. He also seems to cause Superman's earth parents to die in a car crash just before he leaves high school, as foreshadowed in Clark's dream in issue #1. The result is that the Superman of Doomsday Clock is more detached from the rest of humanity than the standard DC version. More like Doctor Manhattan.

So, are you ready now: here comes Geoff Johns' Great Big Idea which will change the DC universe forever, or at least until next summer.

This could count as a Spoiler.

We all know about the Multiverse. Alongside our world, there is a world where Hitler won the war, a world where Rome never fell, and also billions of worlds exactly like each other except that one particular tree in the Bazillion rain forest has one slightly different shaped leaf. Up to now, the various version of DC mythology have been regarded as different branches of the multiverse. In one branch Superman is a muscular reformist who sends gangsters to the electric chair; in another he is a camp nice guy who does super-chores and frolics with his super-pets.

But no, says Doctor Manhattan: this world, the world of Doomsday Clock is the world on which all the other worlds are based. It is not part of the Multiverse. It is -- get this -- the Metaverse. It is the world all other worlds derive from. And Superman is crucial and central to the Metaverse.

What are the chances? DC's most famous super-hero is the central pivot point of the entire multiverse.

It's a not un-clever idea, I suppose, but its too...knowing. Too meta. Yes, obviously all worlds in the DC canon are copies and variations of one original DC universe; and yes, obviously that DC universe wouldn't exist if little Joey and Jerry hadn't thunk up Superman in 1938. But trying to make that a cosmological principal that is true from a story-internal perspective....? Its too much like someone in Thunderbirds saying "How come our facial expressions never change?" or DCI Barnaby becoming obsessed with the idea that Midsommer has been built over a Hellmouth because of its statistically improbable murder-rate. And if you aren't a hard core comic book fan, it's pretty impenetrable. It's one thing to tell a new reader "On Earth-X, Lex Luther is the goodie and Superman is the baddie." It's quite another to expect them to swallow "The multiverse reacts to this universe. There have been endless parallel worlds. None, fifty two. Dark multiverses all created by changes to this universe."

You had stories about the Flash, who was the fastest man alive. And then you had stories about the Flashes of Two Worlds, because, well, two versions of the same hero is obviously more fun than just one. And then you had more worlds and more Flashes and an annual cross-universe crisis. And then you had Crisis on Infinite Earths. We went from "parallel worlds are a plot device because a story with two iterations of the same hero in it is kind of cool" to "stories which are mostly about the idea of parallel worlds" to "stories which exist mainly to sort out the confusing tangle that all these parallel worlds have become." From stories, to stories about stories, to stories about stories about stories about stories...

So Manhattan is by himself on Mars, waiting to confront Superman. I suppose the only remaining question is "Will Doctor Manhattan's meddling leave us with a DC universe which is cynical and dark, like Watchmen" or "Will Doctor Manhattan realize his mistake and return us to a more hopeful, four-coloured comic-booky DC Universe."

There are still two issues to go.

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. 

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Watchmen and Doomsday Clock are copyright DC Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copyright holder.

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