Captain America 2004-2015

Captain America vol 5 #1 (Nov 2004) 
"Out of Time"

In this new First Issue,  Captain America goes after some terrorists, who’ve loaded chemical weapons onto a train and are promising to crash it into Coney Island. 

Cap leaps from a bridge onto the moving train and runs along the carriages. While doing a back-flip he takes out a helicopter (which is shooting at him) with his shield; he punches out two of the terrorists; and intimidates a third into defusing the bomb.

This sequence could have happened in literally any episode of Captain America from 1942 onward. Okay, the terrorists might have had sillier costumers and spikken mit de zillier accent, but it’s still pure Kirby action.

Except it isn’t drawn in the Kirby style: there are no shields bursting out of the frame, no motion lines or sound effects and the backgrounds are as clear and distinct as the heroic figures in the foreground. It’s only one step away from photo realism: a sequence of moments in time frozen on the page. 

This isn’t exactly new. Alex Ross has been plowing the photo-realistic furrow for two decades. But no one has ever really worked out what Alex Ross is for, except really beautiful covers. But something very new is being done to Captain America.

The terrorist plot isn’t where the story starts or ends. It starts with a former soviet general meeting up with the Red Skull to sell him weapons. (The gun which sends people to the Negative Zone turns out to be important later on.) They talk for six pages. Then we flash forward to the present. The Red Skull is in New York, gloating over the Cosmic Cube (which is now “one of the cubes”). This is not a “re-imagining” of the Skull. It’s clearly the same Skull who died in issue #300 (”that’s our destiny after all: the two of us locked in eternal conflict down through the years”). But it's like all the previous artists showed us a a cartoon approximation of the Skull and Steve Epting is finally letting us see the real thing.

We also have Sharon Carter counselling Cap, who has gone all soliloquy because his buddy Hawkeye from the Avengers is currently dead. So in one issue, that’s the Skull, the Cube, Carter, SHIELD, the Avengers, and, in a flashback, Bucky. Oh, and a minor supervillain called the Red Guardian who expires on the first page. Over the next few issues we'll also get Union Jack, Hydra, AIM and the Invaders. We'll get Cap visiting the graves of Spirit of '76 and the Patriot. All done in the same slow-paced, photo-realistic, present-tense style. Every single line of every single incredibly silly episode of Captain America -- everything in the Marvel Universe, if it comes to it -- is taken seriously. As if it really happened. In real life. 

In Stan Lee's day, being a superhero was like a series of sporting fixtures; specifically, like a series of wrestling matches. THIS WEEK see Captain America vs the Red Skull (to the death! the battle of the century!) NEXT WEEK, when the we've put the Red Skull back in his box, see Captain America vs The Winter Soldier (the battle of the century! to the death!) This isn't like that. This is a world where the Red Skull and Doctor Faustus and SHIELD are permanent, fixed power blocks, doing stuff whether Captain America is there or not; where Cap's old supporting cast like Bernie Rosenthal and the Falcon keep on keeping on even when they've been written out of the comic book.

Which is, of course, what it must always have been like. This is not so much a deconstruction of the Marvel Universe as a reconstruction. 

I first read these comics because the press was making a big deal out of the Death of Captain America. I thought I'd better take a look and find out what was going on. I was not expecting to like it: I hadn't liked any mainstream Marvel comic for years. "Quite interesting in places" I was expecting to say "but no substitute for the real thing." Instead, it felt like coming home. 

The episode ends with a mysterious assassin killing the Red Skull to death. A few issues later, the same assassin takes out 1950s psycho Bucky (reformed) as well. This was a very strong hint as to what was coming next.

Captain America 5 #12 (Nov 2005)
"The Winter Soldier"

In the end the identity of the Winter Soldier wasn't that big a shock. The damage had been done in issue #5. 

Bucky. It seems he was never just Captain America’s little friend. We can still believe in Super Soldiers and Mental Organisms Designed Only For Killing and Nazi sleeper robots, but we can't believe in eight year old kid sidekicks any more. Bucky was really a symbol intended to counter the rise of Hitler Youth. And he was also a highly trained assassin. While Captain America concentrated on being red white and blue and inspiring the troops, Bucky snuck off behind enemy lines and garroted Nazi snipers.

Brubaker pulls it off. This Bucky is not the Bucky of folk memory and he's certainly not the Bucky of the 1940s comic books, but we totally accept that he's Bucky. (By now, some readers probably believe that this is how Bucky always was, in the same way the probably believe that Zemo was a golden age character.) 

And then in issue #12, quite casually, as if he wasn’t wiping out 60 years worth of continuity, he tells us Bucky's origin. No, obviously, he didn’t sneak into Steve’s tent and blackmail the Sentinel of Liberty into making him his kid sidekick. And he wasn’t a little boy. He was 16. Steve Rogers was only 20. The top brass spotted what a brilliant fighter he was, sent him off to train with the SAS and then introduced him to Rogers. The whole “you’ve got to let me share your little mission” thing was only ever a cover story.

Comic book continuity is a strange thing. Kirby showed Steve Rogers being injected with the super soldier serum; Lee showed him drinking from a test tube; so John Byrne showed him being injected and then drinking it. Everything is literally true; all contradictions can be harmonized. There is only one creation story in the book of Genesis. But the more desperately you try to make Captain America real the more inexorably he becomes a comic book character. Steve Engelhart physically pasted pages from Captain America Commie Smasher into Captain America #155 to show that he wasn’t changing anything: just providing a wider context in which both stories make sense. Hell, he even had Captain America wandering around Europe for months after the death of Bucky because Stan Lee had said he was frozen near Newfoundland. Brubaker makes sure that the seminal 1942 - 1945 Captain America stories are real and part of the continuity: by ensuring that they are not real and not part of the continuity.

He's slipped a camera behind Jack Kirby's artwork. The classic comics are shadows; these new episodes are the Platonic forms.  

It turns out that the assassin who killed the Red Skull and Jack Munroe is William Buchanan Barnes, known to his friends as Bucky, the one character who can never come back from the dead. He also survived the plane crash, but was brainwashed and trained as a cold war assassin named The Winter Soldier.

And Sharon Carter kills Captain America. (He gets better.) 

Captain America vol 6 #19 - (Oct 2012)
"A Goodbye to Cap"

Brubaker’s final episode has Steve Rogers visiting William Burnside (50s psycho-Cap) in hospital. Turns out his most recent death was only faked. There’s been a funeral and everything; but the government is going to provide him with a new identity and try to give him his life back. 

It’s a nice story; a story which stands on it’s own feet; a story which allows Brubaker to take a gentle stroll through Captain America history and revisit some of the themes he's developed over an eight year run.

But it also illustrates what a gordian knot Captain America has become.

Burnside became Captain America because he was Captain America’s biggest fan. But we now know that what he was a fan of was the comic book Captain America, the one where Cap punches Hitler in the face: which we now know never happened. (In this issue, we actually see the real 1940s Cap and Bucky reading the comic. "Oh c’mon, they made me some stupid kid sidekick” says the stupid kid sidekick.) Psycho-50s Cap, created in order to make the 1950s comics part of "continuity" has completely over written anything that actually appeared in those obscure issues of Young Men. The whole reason for Steve Rogers getting frozen in ice was to allow Stan Lee to pretend the the Captain America of the 1940s was the same person as the Captain America of the 1960s. But the Captain America of the 1940s never happened. In the 60s and 70s and 80s, Captain America frequently remembers how Bucky blundered into his tent in the autumn of 41. Is he remembering comic books that never happened? Or is the Captain America of the 60s and 70s and 80s "only a comic book character" as well? Will some future episode reveal that he never did wander the streets soliloquizing about being part of the establishment? Will, indeed, we one day see a flashback revealing what "really happened" during his big allegorical fight with 1950s Cap and relegate Englehart's issues to being "only comic books"?

We're looking at a copy of a copy of a copy and there's no original.

And yet when Captain America, our Captain America, the real Captain America says goodbye to Burnside and motorcycles off  (past a bar selling "American spirit"), it really doesn't seem to matter.

"Tomorrow you'll go to another hospital, for more healing...And they're going to do their best to restore you mind. To give you a new life to go with your new name. Because you don't have to be Captain America anymore, William. You have my eternal gratitude. But someone else will carry that burden from now on. For as long as I can."

Captain America vol 7 #1 (Nov 2012)
“Castaway in Dimension Z”

Rick Remender decides the best way of following up the superlative Brubaker era is to give up on Captain America altogether and start up a new comic about a guy in a Captain America suit who gets dumped on Apokalips (or somewhere of that sort) and has to inspire the natives to take a stand against Darkseid (or someone of that sort.)

He says he wanted to pay tribute to the 1976 Kirby issues; and in so far as he uses Cap as a generic superhero and throws miscellaneous weirdness at him, he somewhat succeeds. 

All this, and unresolved Daddy issues too. It turns out that Captain America has spent his whole life running away from his father's shadow. And now he adopts a little boy in the alien dimension and has to learn how to be a father himself. Please, please, make it go away.

Captain America is now explicitly Irish. (All the other superheroes are more or less explicitly Jewish.) He grew up in one of the New York immigrant quarters, like his creator. Indeed the flashback sequences draw heavily on Kirby's autobiographical Street Code. All superheroes have to have miserable childhoods, so I suppose that Captain America might just as well have had a miserable Irish childhood; and even a miserable Irish Catholic childhood. But couldn’t we maybe just once, just once, have a character who was hit by his perfectly sober father? Or by his drunken mother? Or by a wicked uncle or something? Or perhaps we could lose the violence and Larkin him up in some other way? Maybe his parents were home schoolers, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or naturists, or something?

Captain America spends ten years in the the Alien Dimension; but when he comes back through the wardrobe, it turns out that only a few minutes have passed on earth. But those ten years were real to him, so he feels that Dimension Z is more his home than 21st century earth. [*] Now, more than ever, he is a man out of time.

Oh, is there never to be an end of it?


[*] If you believe in Marvel Time, then it is always a bit less than 10 years since Captain America was defrosted. Which is why you really, really shouldn't.

Captain America vol 7 #25 (Oct 2014)
"Who Is The New Captain America?"

Captain America has had the Super Soldier Serum sucked out of him and has aged into a very sprightly 90 year old. 

He announces that he is handing the shield over to his old friend Sam Wilson. The Falcon. 

Since there have been at least four Captains America apart from Steve Rogers [*] since 1942 the cries of “it’s political correctness gone mad” are more than usually stupid. Indeed, the really surprising thing is that the Falcon has never had a shot at being Captain America before. 

The obviousness of the development is lamp shaded in the comic itself. 

"You guys all knew, didn’t you" says Sam "There’s literally no drama in this reveal.”

The Avengers are trying very hard to be the movie Avengers, to the extent that Nick Fury has turned into a black guy while I wasn’t looking. Writer Remender tries to give them Joss Whedon dialogue; demonstrating that the only person who can write Joss Whedon dialogue is Joss Whedon. 

There was a great deal of fuss in the secular press when Captain America “died” in 2007. He remained dead for an unusually long 3 years. (Superman had barely managed three months.) Does anyone think Sam will manage as much as 12 months as shield-bearer?

The new costume looks exceptionally stupid.

[*] Steve Rogers; William Naslund (Spirit of ‘76); Jeffery Mace (The Patriot); William Burnside (1950s Captain America); John Walker (Super Patriot / U.S Agent); Sam Wilson (The Falcon)

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The Superheroes are having a rare moment of recreation. Jarvis opens a bottle of wine.

"Who would have thought, seventy years ago" says Superman, "That we'd all be here in Stark Mansion drinking  Château de Chasselas."

"We were poor in those days" says Captain America. "I grew up in a one room tenement on the Lower East Side at the height of the Great Depression; and every night, my father would come home drunk and beat me."

"Father?" says Spider-Man "You were lucky to have had a father. The only Father I ever knew was my uncle, and he was murdered when I was still a schoolboy."

"Luxury!" exclaims Batman "Both my parents were murdered before my very eyes when I was a small child. I had to bring myself up. With only a stuffy English butler for company. In a cave. Full of bats."  

"Cave!" interjects the 1950s Superman. "You were lucky to have had a cave! My entire planet exploded when I was a toddler, vaporizing my parents, my grand parents, my dog, and everyone else I had ever known or loved!"

"Well, of course, I had it tough" chimes in the 1980s Sperman. "I came from a planet where parental love was prohibited by law. And my whole planet exploded, vaporizing my entire family and everyone else I ever knew, before I was even born." 

"Yes" said Captain America contemplatively. "And try and tell that to superheroes nowadays, they just don't believe you." 

Captain America 1980 - 2000

Captain America # 250 (Oct 1980)
"Cap For President"

Some people try to persuade Cap to run for President. He decides not to.

Captain America # 275 (Nov 1982)

"Yesterday's Shadows"

Captain America is walking home with his Jewish girl friend and his Jewish landlady when he finds that a nasty symbol has been painted on the door of their synagogue.

“It’s…a nazi swastika!” he helpfully explains.

Fairly unusually for a 1980s “issue” story, there is no villain called “Zion Smasher”. The outbreak of antisemitism was not caused by the Hate Monger or a Madbomb, but by some rather pathetic neo-nazis. Cap is, throughout, the voice of reason: Captain Liberal.

"I agree that these neo-nazis are a vile breed —  but if we deny them their rights, where would we draw the line? Who decides which beliefs are acceptable and which aren’t? A free society has to allow all ideas— both noble and ignoble!" 

I despise what you say, but will literally defend to the death your right to say it.Believe it or not, that was how we liberals still thought in the Olden Days.

But in case we thought that "liberal" means "soft on Nazis", Steve Rogers (who is working as a commercial artist) rips up some pages of art when his prospective employer makes a mildly antisemitic remark. He goes on protest against a Nazi rally, but realizes that the counter-demo is counter-productive. (We’re handing these fools free publicity").

The Nazis and Commies of the 40s and 50s were cardboard villains; and in the 60s and 70s this kind of thing would probably have been handled through thinly disguised metaphor, but writer J DeMatties depicts racist rhetoric directly — too directly, perhaps, for what was still supposed to be kid-friendly book.

"Does that mean that the blacks — with their delusions of equality — and the Jews — with their my of the six million holocaust victims — should be allowed to walk beside us on the street? To control what we read in newspapers and see on the television?” 

When someone in the audience starts throwing bottles, Captain America has to jump in and play mediator and devils advocate

"Can’t you see that in stooping to your enemies level, you’re being made over in his image”.

All quite nice and earnest and well-done, I have to say. I like it best when Captain America wins the day by being honest and sensible and good, not by having serum boosted muscles.

But the most notable thing about the issue is episode is the final panel in which something happens which hardly ever happens in a comic books....

Back in issue 237, with Sharon Carter dead once again, Captain America had gone off in another of his bold new directions. He moved into an apartment; got a job as an artist (even drawing Captain America for Marvel Comics at one stage) and acquired a kind of supporting cast.

"I’ve done a lot of thinking these past few days — and I think its time I stopped hiding behind a blue and white mask. And maybe; just maybe; I’ll even settle down one of these days, marry and raise a family.”

Ten issues later, John Byrne gave him a new neighbour, Bernie Rosenthal, who everyone, including Steve, recognize instantly as the New Love Interest. (Just look at the fear in his eyes when he first sees her.)

The romance staggers on for a number of issues, with Bernie intermittently spotting that there is something odd about her new boyfriend — he lets slip that he can remember when movie tickets only cost ten cents —  and Steve suffering from the usual Marvel Comics commitment aversion. 

The neat thing about issue 275 is that Bernie, while listening to Captain America speech-making, realizes that he has the same voice and mannerisms as Steve Rogers. She just spots that they are the same guy, as one presumably would. There is no big unmasking scene: the two characters just catch each others eyes, and she knows that he knows that she knows. After a couple of false starts, Bernie announces that she loves Steve even more now that she knows about his double life.

I never really bought the idea of Captain America living in a bachelor pad in a tenement building. The only secret identity I’ve really believed in is the hopeless U.S Private being yelled at by the Sergeant; although I think the New York cop being yelled at by the police Sergeant should have been given more of a chance to take. The best idea, actually, is the one which pops up during the unfairly reviled Rob Liefield issues, where Steve Rogers is an all-American dad in a suburban house with a nice lawn and a nice fence and a nice wife and two nice kids. If I’m-loyal-to-the-dream lives anywhere, that’s where he should live. But that turns out to be a fake identity created by SHIELD; the wife and kids are robots. And the whole thing is actually a bad dream Franklin Richards is having.

Could we have bought into Steve and Bernie living happily ever after? Perhaps. We've accepted Lois and Clark and Mary-Jane and Peter, after all. In the event, Bernie decides to make the logical career step from glass-blower to criminal lawyer; and the relationship comes to a more or less amicable ending. Cap leaves the apartment and moves back into Avenger Mansion in # 317. We see Bernie a few more times, generally when Cap needs a walk-on lawyer, but it's taken for granted that they have Grown Apart. Although he’s had flats and apartments since, there has never really been another attempt to give Captain America a life.

Captain America #300 (Dec 1984)
"Das Ende"

Almost the last genuinely good instalment of the first "volume" of Captain America. The Red Skull has been reconfigured as a full scale gothic villain, complete with Germanic castle and redefined —  no longer as Hitler’s bellboy, or a Nazi revivalist but a force of nature who fights Captain America because it's his destiny to fight Captain America. 

“The fire of cosmic loathing, of divine madness! You finally see that this is the way it must be, two gods locked in raging battle, for all eternity…” 

“Shut up! We are not two gods! We are just two old men.” 

The Skull's "plot" to bring Captain America down to his own level by making him kill him has been done before. The resolution, where Cap refuses to kill the Skull at the very last moment, but the Skull obligingly dies of a heart attack anyway, has been done seventeen or eighteen times before. But there was a pretentious importance to it, as if something really big had just happened. We see the Skull’s daughter unceremoniously burning his body in the next issue, and the twisted-attractive Nazi aesthetic felt about right.

If only comic books allowed stories like this to stand. If only this could really have been the final final final appearance of the Red Skull. But we are still in the Marvel Universe, where only Bucky dies forever.

Daredevil #233 (Aug 1986)
"Armageddon"

This comic re-defined Captain America far more than many of the self-proclaimed changes of direction in Cap’s own title did.

Everyone remembers the scene where the officer appeals to Captain America’s loyalty, and Cap replies “I’m loyal to nothing general —  except the Dream.” "Loyal to the dream", which has actually been used as a tag-line once or twice, is actually a summary of the speech from #250 where Cap turned down the chance to be President.

"I have worked all my life for the growth and advancement of the American Dream. I believe that my duty to the Dream would severely limit any abilities I might have to preserve the reality."

But for me, the real defining moment is a descriptive caption (implicitly written by Daily Bugle journalist Ben Ulrich) when the Avengers appear in Daredevil’s down-and-dirty Hells Kitchen environment.

“Out of nowhere they come: a soldier with a voice that could command a god … and does”

(Thor is in the Avengers, geddit?)

From this point on, Captain America started to walk away from being Metaphor Man. The point of Captain America became more and more that he was Captain America (exclamation mark exclamation mark). Where Spider-Man and the Hulk are just folks or at best celebrities, Captain America is a mythical figure who stuns people by the sheer force of his Captain America-hood. (When the Avengers and the Justice League have a war, Captain America and Batman leave the others to get on with and go away and quietly sort things out between themselves.) Everyone else would say that the essence of Captain America resides, not in the shield, not in the super-soldier serum, not in the years of training but in the person of Steve Rogers. Steve, on the other hand, is increasingly convinced that Captain America is merely a symbol that it is his job to embody. 

“I am not Captain America" he would say, many years later "I’m just the guy who wears his costume.”

Captain America # 313 (Jun 1986)
"Mission - Murder Modok"

Captain America comes into some money (40 years of back pay from the US Army!) and decides to set up a phone hotline so Ordinary Americans can call on him when they are in trouble. He is overwhelmed by more cries for help than he can cope with, and finds that his computer is being tapped. It turns out that the culprit is a young man who styles himself “the biggest Captain America fan in New Jersey.” Cap decides to recruit the young scalawag, so he can use his computer expertise to filter the calls and pass the important ones on to him. (A sort of call-back to Rick Jones "brigade" of radio hams in the earlier Avengers, which was itself a call back to Kirby's teen-gang comics like Newsboy Legion.)

This is another valiant attempt to give Captain America something to do which isn’t following up rejected Avengers and Agent of SHIELD story lines. It doesn’t take. But it’s rather lovely to go back to a time when home computer’s were an arcane piece of technology which required explanation. (A MODEM is a device linking computers to the telephone, apparently, and “hackers” are “computer enthusiasts".)

Captain America #314 - #443 (1986-95)

Not more  bloody Serpent Society?

Oh, is there never to be an end to it?

Captain America vol 4 #1 - Jun 2002
"Dust"

There was always a danger that the 11th September 2001 attacks on America would send Captain America off into a new cycle of gung-ho patriotism. This directly post-911 issue begins with Cap digging survivors out of Ground Zero with his bare hands and punching Nick Fury when he suggests his powers would be better employed fighting the Taliban directly. He walks home, and sees some white thugs about to stab an American Muslim: in a genuinely arresting image, the knife breaks on his shield. “I understand you want justice. This isn’t justice. We’re better than this.” As would-be attacker and victim shake hands, Steve walks off in full Captain Soliloquy mode.“

"We’re going to make it through this. We, the people. United by a power that no enemy of freedom could begin to understand. We the people. We share... We are... The American Dream.” 

Captain America Muslim Smasher remains firmly in a parallel dimension.

Having said that, I have to admit a sneaking liking for the gung-ho Captain America of the Ultimates Universe. 

"Surrender? Surrender??!!

"Do you think this letter on my head stands for FRANCE?"

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Why Jonathan Jones is a Whey-Faced Coxcomb (Redux)

"Get real! Terry Pratchett is not a literary genius."

1: He thinks that choosing books is a zero-sum game.

The good is not the enemy of the great. Suppose that Jane Austen has a quality called “greatness” which Terry Pratchett lacks. (I think this must mean something like "the ability to stand up to multiple re-readings" and "the capacity to mean different things to different readers.") It does not follow that any time you are reading Pratchett you are somehow depriving yourself of a reading of Austen. I suppose some people might live on that elevated a plain. A holy man who wants to read the Bible ten thousand times in his life may have sworn to read nothing else. A concert pianist might conceivably listen to nothing but great piano concerts. F.R Leavis famously reduced the canon of English literature to four authors: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and D.H Lawrence. (Modern English literature courses have reduced it further, to To Kill a Mocking Bird.) Leavis' idea Middlemarch has such depth that you will see things on the tenth or twentieth reading that you can’t see on the first. That being the case, there is no excuse to waste time re-reading Oliver Twist or reading the Mayor of Casterbridge at all. 

Leavis is not much respected in English literature departments today. 

Most of us use different books — and music and art and food — in different ways. We read Mort for one reason and Malone Dies for another. Parsifal certainly has a quality called “greatness” which the Birdy Song lacks. But it doesn’t follow that you want the dance band to play the overture at your wedding. 

2: He thinks that there is a thing called “literature”.

That is, he thinks there is some essential quality that makes some things “literature” and some things "not literature".

But surely, the only workable definition of “literature” is “what they study in English Literature departments.” 

It comes down, as everything always seems to, to  canon. Hamlet is definitely literature because it has been around for a long time; because lots of people have read it and seen it and appeared in it and even denounced it. It’s important. You’ll probably enjoy it, actually, but you need to read it even if you don’t, because it matters. Same goes for Pride and Prejudice. But Pride and Prejudice wasn’t "literature" when it was published. It was just a very witty book that ladies liked. 

At one end of the list is the Bible (so important you have to read it even if you don't enjoy it even a little bit). At the other end of the list is The Soldier's Rebel Lover (so unimportant that there is no point reading it unless you enjoy it.) Everything else comes somewhere in between.

Pratchett may become literature. Or he may not. The reasons that some things become literature and some things don’t is one of the things they study in English literature departments. 

3: He thinks that there is a thing called “style” which is distinct from plot, characters, setting or ideas — that determines whether or not a book is “literature”.

People who don't understand Art sometimes ask “why on earth should I be interested in that particular bowl of fruit?” They think that a painting is about telling you information — that it’s a rather old-fashioned form of photography. But the true art lover hardly perceives the work of art as a bowl of fruit at all. It's all about colours and form and composition and negative space. 

Un-artistic people sometimes think that some painter is a genius because he can paint kittens so accurately that you'd think that they were photographs. The art-lover hardly regards those kinds of paintings as Art at all. They don’t tell you anything about the artist. The art-lover would prefer six sketchy lines that capture the pussy cat in an unexpected way. 

Jones is an art critic, so he may think that books are like that as well. But it's obvious bullshit. A book might talk about something quite ordinary in elegant prose. But it might use the most ordinary, cut down prose in the world to talk about something amazing. It might be a great book because of the clever story. Or the convincing characters. The list of great writers who were not particularly great stylists is legion. Daniel Defoe wouldn't past the Jones test ("I flicked through a few pages in the bookshop to see what all the fuss was about, but the prose seemed very ordinary") for one moment. We read him because of his imagination and narrative ability: because we want to hear about prostitutes being shipwrecked by pirates during the plague year. 

4: He thinks that this thing called "style" can be spotted by glancing at a few pages of a book

Maybe an art critic can tell if a painting is “art” or “just drawing pictures” at a single glance. I guess an opera critic does not need to hear more than three lines to be able to say “this fellow can’t sing” --in the sense of "can’t produce the right notes in the right key". In pop music or folk music that might not be the last word on an artist, but in opera or classical music, there’s nothing more to be said. But books contain effects that build up over pages, over hundreds of pages, in Pratchett’s case, over multiple volumes. Isn’t the point of Granny Weatherwax that she starts out as a one-note joke and grows into a rounded out character? 

It might be that a single glance can tell you that a writer is so bad he’s not worth bothering with. Some people say that you can tell the Da Vinci code is going to be a bad book on the basis of the first word. But a humane person would draw the conclusion “Gosh! If the prose is that bad and it still got published, the story must be an absolute humdinger.” 

5: He is responding to an argument that no-one ever made.

A.S Byatt wrote a long, intelligent essay on The Shepherd’s Crown explaining what she thought Pratchett’s strengths were, and why this book wasn’t his best. I have long suspected Byatt of over-praising Pratchett — of imagining the book that she would have written based on his ideas, and giving a glowing review to that. But she doesn’t particularly claim that it is Great Literature. 

I don’t even particularly like Pratchett. I’ve read half a dozen of his books. I don’t think he is a master of the comic sentence, like Wodehouse; and I don’t think he is anywhere near as good as coming up with comic ideas as Douglas Adams. I do think he can produce a fine one-liner and no-one can not respect the way he dealt with his illness. (No-one except J.C Wright, who compared him with Hitler.) I don’t specially like Jane Austen, either. Give me a manly tale of oakies trekking to California or mad puritans hunting white whales any day of the week. But what I really don't like is inane, illogical journalism. One wonders how Mr Jones would feel if someone said that, while they themselves had never been to a modern art exhibition, they knew perfectly well that modern art was not really “art”.

Oh, but actually people say that sort of thing all the time, don’t they? 

I don’t know much about Pratchett, but I know what I like.

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