Monday, November 12, 2018
Monday, January 29, 2018
Doomsday Clock #3
Ernie: Yes. But I shall do it just that little bit better.
Watchmen |
Doomsday Clock |
Detail |
Detail |
Watchmen |
Doomsday Clock |
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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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Monday, January 22, 2018
Doomsday Clock #2
Did I even know who Superman was? I suppose there were annuals, and second hand imports in markets, and a TV cartoon, voiced by your actual Bud Collyer, so I knew the basics. It was a smart piece of work: it knew what Superman Versus The Amazing Spider-Man had to deliver and by Rao it delivered it. Rather pointedly it started with a standard issue Spider-Man solo story of the period and followed it up with a standard issue Superman story so we could see how different the two guys were before we saw them together. Spidey sent Doctor Octopus back to prison and Superman sent Lex Luther back to prison and the two villains ended up in the same prison plotting a horrible revenge. When Peter Parker and Clark Kent both end up at the same newspaper conference there is a massive misunderstanding which results in Spider-Man punching Superman. Kryptonite becomes involved. But they make friends in time to join forces and foil their respective villains. Lois Lane and Mary Jane have a girly chat, and J. Jonah Jameson talks photographers and news reporters with Perry White in the bar.
The real Ozymandias told Nite Owl that he wasn't a Republic Serial Villain. The line was changed to "I'm not a comic book villain" in the movie, presumably because most people wouldn't know what a Republic Serial was. Lex Luther actually is a comic book villain, but Doomsday Clock consistently encourages the reader to see him as the plausible figure and to see Ozymandias as a little absurd. “If you are the smartest person on your earth, I would hate to meet the dumbest” says Lex. The point of Watchmen is that Ozymandias creates a brilliant plan, but Rorschach (just possibly, we never know) spoils it by sending the confession to the conspiracy theorists. Everyone in Doomsday Clock seems to take it for granted that it was a bloody stupid plan from the beginning. (The plan is framed as “scaring everyone with an arse-faced squid”. No-one has grasped any of Alan Moore’s metaphors about fiction and reality and idea space.) This isn’t the wholesome proper traditional four coloured DC Universe fighting back against the much too dark, much too cynical Watchmen. It’s more like the DC Universe and the Watchmen Universe vying to see who can be more cynical. Watchmen is if anything the naive younger brother.
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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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Tuesday, December 12, 2017
Doomsday Clock #1
Including…
Well, for example…
I’ll get right back to you on this.
We are in an alternate America; 25 years in the past but somehow a dark reflection of 2017. There is an international crisis going on, but the President is playing golf; “the wall” has come down and people are fleeing from the USA into Mexico; someone is holding a placard saying “make America safe again”. In the foreground, a riot is going on, possibly between liberals and conservatives; in the background news reports talk of Russia invading Poland and the US preparing a nuclear strike. The narrator, a masked man, leaves the riot zone and breaks into a prison; he rescues a woman, claiming to be able to reunite her with her infant son; and then her husband, who is mute and communicates in mime. The narrator expects to be dead by the end of the day. They travel through forests and sewers to a secret base where another masked man is waiting for them. There is much talk about other masked characters, some of whom are dead and some of whom are in hiding. The two masked men have a scheme to save the world by “finding God”. There is a final cutaway to two other characters, sharing a bed, one of whom has just dreamed of the day his parents died in a car crash. There is no suggestion of how these two characters connect with the rest of the action, although the dream-father tells the dream-son that whatever happens is part of God’s plan.
But this is not a comic book. It is a piece of conceptual art. It’s content is unimportant; it says what it says by virtue of existing.
There is no shame in being an inferior talent. When we are talking about Alan Moore or Jack Kirby or even Steve Gerber more or less everyone is an inferior talent.
Swamp Thing was created by Len Wein. Len Wein also edited Watchmen as well as creating some character called Wolverine. The first issue of Doomsday clock is rather pointedly dedicated to him.
If you haven’t held the thing in your hands, it is hard for me to convey the sheer horror of the Doomsday Clock artifact. The title is printed in yellow on black text down the left hand side of the cover. There is a little yellow doomsday clock under the title, and a big doomsday clock on the back page, which is otherwise black. There is four pages of diegetic text after the main comic strip. There are four pages of in-house adverts, black and white with a single quote from each character.
Watchmen, of course, ended on a big question mark. Ozymandias has forced America and Russia to bury their nuclear differences by staging a fake alien invasion, but Rorschach has discovered the plan and posted his diary through the mail box of a right-wing newspaper. We are left not knowing if this package will ever be opened. Many interesting questions are thus left hanging: was Rorschach right to never compromise even in the face of Armageddon? If the paper discovers the truth, should they reveal it? Is the killing of millions to avert nuclear annihilation at any level justified?
Alan Moore didn't foolishly forget to tell us if anyone ever read Rorschach's diary, any more than Ibsen carelessly omitted to tell us whether or not Mrs Alving administered the suicide pill to her dying son. The whole point of the book is that it asks a question and doesn't answer it -- that it leaves both outcomes suspended as eternal possibilities. No one reads the diary; nuclear war is averted; but it is based on a lie and Ozymandias gets away with a million murders. Someone reads the diary; Ozymandias is exposed; everyone knows the truth; the world has to face the very real possibility of annihilation.
There is a riot going on, and we pick up a few things from news stations: Ozymandias is wanted for genocide; Robert Redford really is president; America and Russia are gearing up for war; American politicians still use the term "Ruskies".
Rorschach is still the main character, and still keeps a very wordy diary ("we split open the world’s belly, secrets came spilling out, an intestine full of truth and shit strangled us” etc etc.) He keeps making reference to “God” having turned his back on the world, and intends to somehow "call God down". Of course, at the end of Watchmen, Rorschach was inconveniently dead — atomized by Doctor Manhattan. This character insists that he is truly Rorschach, but he very definitely isn’t Kovacs — at one point he takes off his glove and reveals that he’s a black man.
(Please, god; please don't let him turn out to be the kid at the news-stand.)
How they are going to spin this out to 360 pages I cannot imagine.
I have no doubt you could augment an earwig to the point where it understood nuclear physics, but it would still be a very stupid thing to do!
The Second Doctor
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Sunday, October 29, 2017
Bright College Days
Peter is in a bad mood because he has lost his costume and had a silly row with Betty Brant: but that doesn’t really explain what sets him off. Flash mildly taunts him for running away from the fight in issue #25, and Peter over-reacts massively.
--Look in the mirror and find out!
The fight isn’t resolved. Liz tries to stop it, saying that Peter is just as bad as Flash and that she never wants to see either of them again; and the Principal (who we haven’t seen since issue #3) demands to see Peter in his office. (And don’t we all recognize the self-righteous schadenfreude of the kid who brings the message?) Peter — now very ashamed of himself for mis-using his spider-powers — tells Mr Davis that the fracas was entirely his fault. But Flash (who tells the others that he is going after Liz) goes straight to Mr Davis and admits that he started it. The whole thing is dried and dusted in ten panels.
And this is very last time we will see Peter, Flash Liz and their cohort in the schoolyard together. Only when we realize that does the scene begin to make any kind of sense.
I suppose this is what Flash told the Principal. It may have looked to you as if Parker attacked us for no reason; but in fact, I’ve been trying to get him to fight with me for days. What looked to you like a smaller boy picking on a group of six larger boys was actually an agreed fight between two consenting adults. The Principal treats this admission as an occasion to put his hand on Flash’s shoulder, call him “my boy” and have a little chat. Perhaps he also believes in Flash's honor-code. This is the kind of school which positively encourages supervised fights as a way of settling differences between young men, after all. Or maybe he is just one of those grown-ups who is so moved when someone admits an otherwise undetectable wrongdoing that all his anger is assuaged? Honesty is the best policy, I can tell by your face you’ve been punished enough.
The wedding of Mr Fantastic and the Invisible Girl was gatecrashed by every single character in the Marvel Universe, so it is greatly to Lee and Ditko's credit that nothing whatsoever happens at Peter Parker's graduation. No villains; no last minute angst; no anything. Ditko has a great time drawing the crowd scenes; J. Jonah Jameson makes a predictably awful speech, and Lee perfectly captures the after-show banter. Aunt May’s first meeting with J.J.J. is particularly charming.
--My, you’re such an important man!
--Ah yes! Indeed I am!
Principal Davis announces that Peter Parker has won a scholarship to Empire State University and that Flash Thompson has won an athletic scholarship to the same institution. (Gosh! How ironic!) There was a reference to Flash playing football for the school back in issue #18, but he’s never particularly been represented as a top athlete before. The only hint we have had that Peter Parker is making college applications is a three frame cameo in, of all places, Fantastic Four #35 where he bumps into the Human Torch at State University (a different institution) and says that if Johnny is planning to study there he will apply somewhere else. It is nice to know he takes his academic career so seriously .
Not now. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
And perhaps I am.
We are dealing with a soap opera, so an ending is never quite an ending. Liz pops again in issue 30, trying to avoid Flash. (She seems to be working in a department store.) Peter actually starts college in #31, and Liz is never seen again. Well: not for a hundred issues.
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Amazing Spider-Man was written and drawn by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and is copyright Marvel 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 copywriter holder.
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The Leopard from Lime Street
“I’ve hud thes idea fur a freish comic strip. It’s abit a skale bairn aboot ages wi’ oor readers! N’ gie thes — he’s naughty! An’ gei thes — some weeks he gits aw’ wi’ it, and some weeks he gits intae trooble!”
“Brilliant jimmy, stoatin! It will rin fur sixty seven years!”
Mike Taylor recently wrote a piece about an early 2000AD strip called Harlem Heroes and said that he was still struck by the visceral power of the story and art. 2000AD was, by the standards of 1970s comics, very naughty indeed: the violence of it can still take your breath away. But how did an English comic strip by a white artist for mainly white kids come to be called Harlem Heroes? Basketball wasn’t very widely played in England although Globetrotters exhibition games had been shown in late night slots on BBC2. But 2000AD's target demographic would be more likely to have remembered a cut-and-paste Hannah-Barbara cartoon series which had been on children's TV a couple of years before. Harlem Heroes is simply the Harlem Globetrotters playing futuristic death basketball. It’s hard to say if Pat Mills was being shamelessly derivative, or producing a shockingly poor taste parody.
It wasn’t so much a question of cultural appropriation as of grabbing everything within arms reach and running away with it. If there had been a summer blockbuster about a shark them the English comic book artisans would scribble out a violent strip called Hookjaw and a silly strip called Gums in time for the Autumn specials. If that year's hit movie involved a marooned alien making friends with some American schoolkids, then some hack would rush out a comic about some English kids and a crashed flying saucer occupant. I don’t know if the kids noticed, or were supposed to notice. I don’t think we engaged with the material to that extent. Comics had always been, and cold only ever be, mildly diverting knock-offs of better books, or anachronistic little squibs about pea-shooters and canes and German spies. That was why the launch of American style superhero comics made such a massive impact on us.
Buster was typical of the era. When it launched in 1960 the title character had been the son of Andy Capp, the outrageously un-PC Geordie who appeared (and still appears) every day in the Daily Mirror. But by 1976, he was just a generic Dennis the Menace character who played pranks and clashed with authority figures. A list of the other features in the comic is enough to generate feelings of suicidal ennui: Ivor Lott and Tony Broke (with Milly O’Naire and Penny Less); Kid Kong; Lucy Lastic; X-Ray Specs; James Pond... Adam Adman was “A young man obsessed by advertising”; Jack Pot was “a boy with exceptional luck” and Joker was “a boy obsessed with jokes”. This is how young people amused themselves before Minecraft was invented.
The Leopard from Lime Street appeared in Buster from 1976 to 85. (The first year's worth have just been reprinted by Rebellion.) He is often said to be “England’s first superhero” or “Britain’s answer to Spider-Man”. But reading these episodes 40 years later, it feels less like a British attempt to do Marvel Comics and more like a gag strip that accidentally got drawn in a serious style. Yes, the Leopard wears a costume and, on occasion, catches robbers. But he’s also a schoolboy who deals with bullies and outwits nasty grown ups and earns himself treats by means of a special gimmick.
If British comics are a celebration of naughtiness, there is a joyful shamelessness in the way writer Tom Tully scrumps the good bits from his more famous American template. Peter Parker has the proportional strength of a spider; Billy Farmer is as strong as a fully grown jungle cat. Peter Parker has his spider-sense: Billy gets danger signals from his Leopard’s sixth sense. Spider-Man has his webbing; Billy has a grappling rope. In the early installments, artist Mike Western even makes use of a Gemini motif, showing Billy’s face as half-human and half-leopard. It’s all so outrageous that it sometimes feels less like swiping and more like dead-pan parody. Viz is still twelve years in the future.
Spider-Man is a timeless classic. The Leopard of Lime Street seems like a dispatch from a different world. But as a piece of archive material, it’s worth acquainting oneself with.
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Friday, October 13, 2017
Amazing Spider-Man #28
Villain
12.00 (”a few hours later”) Class dismissed to prepare for graduation
1300 (”later”) Peter visits Spencer Smythe’s lab
1500 (”a short time later”) Pete goes to Aunt Mays house
1530 Graduation ceremony
It is possible to make a decent episode of Spider-Man out of a big fight scene and not much else. (Next month's Scorpion story will demonstrate that very nicely.) But for a fight scene to work, there need to be dramatic stunts; clever dialogue; an ingenious denouement; and something riding on the outcome. This fight seems largely to consist of two characters hitting each other, for no more reason than that one guy is a hero and one guy is a villain and villains and heroes are meant to have fights. There’s a bit where they crash through the wall and fall downstairs; that’s okay. And there’s the bit where Spider-Man switches off the lights and relies on his Spider-sense to fight Raxton: that's okay too. There are some frames showing Spider-Man’s red and blue costume and the Molten Man’s yellow skin against a black background: they are quite pretty. On the cover, all we can see of Spider-Man is the web markings on his suit and the spider-insignia. That's very pretty indeed: it must have looked incredibly distinctive alongside all the other comics books on the newsstand that month. There was a fashion in the 70s for “black light” posters, which this cover rather resembles.
In the old time radio serials, characters would often tell each other what was going on, to make up for the lack of visuals. “That girl. Tied up on that rickety old chair in the corner of this sleazy bar-room. It’s Lois Lane. Well, that shady looking guy will talk when I lift him off the ground with one hand. Like this!” (That is where you get catch phrases like "Up, up and away..." and "Hi-ho silver, away...." from.) Reading this issue, you could almost believe that Stan Lee thought he was writing a radio script:
—It wouldn’t stick to his slick molten skin! Now what do I do?
— When I’m through with you, you’ll wish you were fighting one of your old-time pushover enemies!
— Now wait a minute! I feel real sentimental about my old sparring partners! So let’s hear you speak a little more respectfully about them!
—I knew it! You’re nothing but a full time nut!
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Amazing Spider-Man was written and drawn by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and is copyright Marvel 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 copywriter holder.
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