Rock Of Ages - Darkseid's New Clothes

So, before my own verbosity got the better of me, what was I going to say about Rock Of Ages? (For those who are wondering, I'm writing this before getting to the comic shop this week. I'll be looking at Final Crisis 2 probably on Monday).

One of the descriptions I've read of Morrison's JLA run is that it's a 'Cliff Notes for the Invisibles', and nowhere is that more true than in Rock Of Ages. The connections between the present-day story and the Invisibles are obvious, of course, but it's the near-future dystopian story that covers a lot of the same themes. Fundamentally, Rock Of Ages is about the impossibility of totalitarianism.

Morrison is one of the few writers in comics who actually seems interested in science, and appears scientifically literate. While many comic writers use 'scientific' terms seemingly at random to handwave away problems (and to be fair Morrison does this to in New X-Men with the extinction gene, although there he was playing with a Marvel genetics that has been established as very different from real genetics) - see for example Byrne's 'Godwave' which was somehow able to cross the universe twice in 40,000 years - Morrison uses scientific ideas as jumping off points for new stories. Sometimes those ideas will be fringe ideas rather than mainstream (see his use of Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis in Animal Man) and quite often the interpretation he uses of (say) quantum physics will not be the most mainstream one, but he's clearly actually interested in science.

And one of the sciences he seems to be most interested in (although he doesn't namedrop it in the way he does 'cooler' ideas such as brane theory) is cybernetics - not computing, but cybernetics in its original meaning of regulating systems.

And cybernetics shows that totalitarianism - and indeed any attempt to control human beings - has some inbuilt flaws. Any system that doesn't allow for feedback will eventually go off the rails, and any authority relationship is one where accurate feedback is not possible - if someone has the power to sack you, or have you imprisoned, or have you killed, you're going to be very careful about what you tell them. Authority breeds lies - the cheque's in the post, the dog ate my homework, it's my grandmother's funeral - and then the person in authority has to make decisions based on those lies. Garbage in, garbage out. (This, incidentally, seems to explain the decisions made by a lot of political leaders, and may also explain the apparent paranoia often exhibited at the very top.)

Robert Anton Wilson - a big influence on Morrison - called this 'the burden of omniscience' and contrasted it with the 'burden of nescience' in the people who are being controlled. In any system where total control over people is attempted, the person doing the controlling has to be aware of every factor relevant to the decisions. Those being controlled, on the other hand, have to do what they're told even when it goes against their own experiences.

Darkseid, of course, wants absolute control of the universe. As he puts it, "I will remake the entire universe in the image of my soul, Desaad. And when at last I turn to look upon the eternal desolation I have wrought... I will see Darkseid, as in a mirror... and know what fear is."

The problem with this kind of ambition of course is that it depends on everyone else being deaf-blind-mute - or acting like it. The future portion of Rock Of Ages is ultimately a rewrite of The Emperor's New Clothes - as long as no-one tells the emperor what's going on, everything looks fine from his perspective, but as soon as one person tells the truth the whole edifice of control comes tumbling down.

This is, of course, why the 'zombies' in Rock of Ages, in possibly the most disturbing image Morrison has ever come up with, come out of the 'Wise Monkey' factory with their ears, eyes and mouths covered up by hands. And it's in this context that Darkseid's defeat is so interesting.

Firstly, because the efforts of the superpowered time-travellers are actually unimportant in his defeat - it's the literally powerless who bring him down. And secondly, he's defeated by Ray Palmer shrinking to the size of a photon and entering through his eyes and into his brain - in other words, he's defeated by information.

The whole of Rock Of Ages in fact is about control and information, and about attempts to reform the universe or part of it in the image of someone's mind - from the holograms controlled by the Joker, to Darkseid's plans, to the Philosopher's stone - and the defeat is always by people understanding those systems better than the controllers - J'Onn changing his brain to match the Joker's, Batman getting Desaad to put his mind into a reprogrammable computer, persuading Metron to become human.

It's also about disguise and replicas - Batman as Desaad, Plastic Man as the Joker, the duplicate Philosopher's Stone, the holograms of the League at the beginning, the hologram of Luthor at the end. J'onn making himself think like the Joker also plays into these ideas of identity.

In the end, the comic shows that attempting to control people by imposing your will on them with brute force is stupid - the way to get what you want is to attempt to understand your enemies, to walk in their shoes, and to understand the world around you. Luthor is shown as more intelligent than Darkseid, with his 'corporate takeover' plan and his way out of criminal charges, but Batman is shown to outthink both of them.

These themes turn up all the time in Morrison's work, and we'll definitely return to them as I continue looking at Final Crisis, the second issue of which I'll be getting to shortly.

Excuses, excuses...

Yes, I know it's been a while...
Since I last posted, my life has been full of unpredictable events. I've had to travel to Wales, London, the Lake District and York, had my in-laws fly over from the US, had a friend die suddenly, seen Leonard Cohen, had a famous TV presenter pretend to know me, been threatened at gunpoint by a soldier... leaving me not in the most coherent state to post my thoughts on Batman. By the time I got any free time, the comics on which I wanted to comment were *so* yesterday to the rest of the blogosphere.

Equally important was the fact that I didn't want to comment on the Dan DiDio pecking party that was going on for much of the last few weeks. As many of you may have gathered I am not a wholehearted supporter of DiDio's editorial regime, but nor do I think it's been all bad. For every bad decision (letting Judd Winick write anything at all) there's been an excellent one (letting Grant Morrison essentially have free run of the DCU).

DiDio's job is pretty much guaranteed to make him one of the most hated men in comics, at least among the comic blogosphere, and there's been an undertone in many of the posts of "Well, Jimmy Palmiotti is the kind of person who'll recognise the genius of my proposed twelve-issue series about an alternate world where Zatanna and Barbara Gordon are lovers but they're both cats! Damn you DiDio for turning down Pussies Of Prey!"

Anyway, DiDio's job appears safe for the forseeable future, and I've not had a major shock to the nervous system in nearly four days, so I'm going to talk about comics.

Specifically, I'm going to talk about Grant Morrison's big epic story featuring the New Gods going up against the big guns of the DCU, where we see a world where evil has won, that doesn't tie in properly with the weekly comic it was meant to tie in with.

I'm referring of course to Rock Of Ages.

One of the big criticisms people have had of Final Crisis is the way it doesn't quite tie in with Countdown To Final Crisis, and it's true that that could have been handled better. However, the two comics are doing fundamentally different things. Final Crisis is an attempt (and, I believe, a largely successful one) to create art (pop art, but art nonetheless) - it's written to stand up to repeated readings, and the intention is presumably that it will remain in print indefinitely, outside of its context.

Countdown, on the other hand, was an attempt to create comics-like product that would keep people going to the comic shop. The Countdown trades will presumably go out of print within six months or a year or so. In those circumstances Morrison is absolutely right not to alter his work because of continuity issues created by others.

Rock Of Ages here provides a point of comparison. When it came out originally, it was contemporary with a four-week DC crossover called Genesis, which I reread last week in preparation for writing this post and have already forgotten - it was a John Byrne thing and DC might as well have just put out a circular saying "John Byrne desperately wants to be the next Kirby, but in fact he's a less-good Jim Starlin" as that would have had the same effect as actually publishing the story, and at less expense.

Anyway, both stories deal with the New Gods, and while Morrison's story pays lip-service to the crossover (mainly by putting in a few pages at the end of the first issue, not reprinted in the trade), reading the two stories back to back is a very confusing experience, as everyone in Morrison's story is being told who this 'Metron' fellow is directly after just spending four issues doing some ... stuff... involving godwaves or something with him.

The interesting thing here is how much light Rock Of Ages sheds on Morrison's writing methods, and on his take on superheroes and the New Gods, when compared to Genesis.

In Genesis, it's explained that all superheroes are in fact demigods, created by a Godwave that now threatens to destroy the universe for rather poorly-defined reasons. They have to team up with Darkseid and then against him, there are double-bluffs and stratagems and so on, and it's just like every other 'cosmic' crossover ever created.

But that reveal, that the superpowered people are demigods rather than humans, much like every other Roythomasism that's tried to tie all superheroes together (the meta-gene, homo magi, etc) is a profoundly dispiriting idea. Superheroes, in this view, are superheroes just because they were born special. You can never be as special as they are, in their special specialness - they're just *better* than you. You're disgusting, aren't you? Why don't you just die?

(To be fair, Byrne does make a half-hearted stab at having the non-powered heroes say things like "We mustn't be downhearted - we must fight on regardless!", but still the ideas that remain in the memory (to the extent that such an unmemorable story remains in the memory at all, and I feel here like the protagonist in Memento, trying to reconstruct a story that's slipping from my grasp even though I read it only this weekend - "I must have read a big cosmic crossover recently, because I have a profound feeling of ennui. If only I could recall what it was...") are the ones about how superheroes are really gods).

This message - that some people are just born special and better than everyone else - is at the core of Joseph Campbell's 'hero of a thousand faces', which thanks to George Lucas is now the accepted formula for every piece of mass entertainment (which in turn is why I go to the cinema maybe every couple of months, if that).

The formula can be used well - Neil Gaiman uses it passably, though the more you read of Gaiman's writing the more obvious his use of it and similar formulae becomes - after all, if it was incapable of being used well, it wouldn't have become a formula - but more often it gives us dreck like Superman Returns.

"But Andrew!" the three of you who've read this far are shouting "Doesn't Grant Morrison also have an unhealthy obsession with this misbegotten formula? He sometimes goes back to its Jungian roots, but All Star Superman, which you like so much, is a hero's journey if ever I saw one. Death of the father, journey through the underworld, death and rebirth motif, it's all there, isn't it?"

To which I can only respond by analogy.

The I-vi-ii(or IV)-V chord sequence has been the basis of innumerable terrible songs over the years, and one or two decent ones as well - it's the sequence used in every doo-wop song and bad ballad ever. That sequence or a slight variation is used in Duke Of Earl, Blue Moon, I Will Always Love You and a billion other songs you know. It's a cliche, and even though it's been used well in the past, I could perfectly happily go a lifetime without hearing it again.

But Brian Wilson, in the song The Warmth Of The Sun, managed to make something new. He started that progression in C, went through the first two chords, then *started it again*, a minor third up, going through the changes again before returning to the original key and finishing the progression. A twist as simple as that can turn something from the most obvious of cliches into something quite extraordinary.

In the same way, it's possible to use the hero's journey as something to build upon, to twist, to play with, and come out with something interesting. If you take it as a description of what other people have done (as, to be fair, Campbell appeared to intend it) rather than as a prescription of what you must do, you can get something interesting out of it. This is what Morrison does.

While sometimes, in Seven Soldiers for example, Morrison does fall into the trap of the hero just being born special (though in Seven Soldiers this is mitigated somewhat by the fact that there are *seven* 'unique' people, and actually many more playing important roles), more often he focuses on normal people, or on people who are special not because of any powers but because of their character. The occasions where he has most obviously written a hero's journey - things like The Invisibles - have been ones where the journey is clearly subordinate to other elements (few people would say that Jack Frost's growth as a character is anything like the most important element in The Invisibles).

And so in Rock Of Ages, straight after John Byrne has revealed that Wally West and Eel O'Brien were just born special and better than the rest of us, Morrison has Darkseid - as powerful and 'special' a being as exists in the DCU - destroyed by Green Arrow, Batman and the Atom, three people who have no powers other than their own intelligence (yes, yes, I know, Ray Palmer had the metagene and so on - it doesn't matter. He got his powers from his own scientific knowledge, he wasn't born with them).

And the way in which they defeat Darkseid is something I'm going to go into a lot more in my next post, because this one's grown into something of a monster already. I've got most of that post written (this was a much longer post that I've split up), and I *hope* to have it up tomorrow, but given my recent history I'll probably be kidnapped by sentient alligators or something, so no promises.

If anyone's still reading this, I recommend you go and read Andrew Rilstone's recent posts on Dave Sim - as always, Rilstone is writing some wonderful stuff over there.

Final Crisis 1 - It Goes Like This, The Fourth, The Fifth, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift

Now that the terrible Countdown has concluded (our long national nightmare is finally over!) I'm hoping we'll start to see more comics of actual substance coming from DC, rather than endless tie-ins and continuity patches to make sense of bad comics which in turn introduce more continuity errors to be patched by more bad comics. Final Crisis is obviously infinitely better than that kind of thing, and Trinity, while (probably rightly) being promoted as totally separate from Final Crisis, looks to be dealing with some of the same multiversal hijinks I love, and by at least competent people. It also looks like it'll feature some of the Big Giant Hand stuff that's been going on at various levels in various comics.

Kurt Busiek has been very impressive recently with his work on the Superman titles. Those titles have been almost a perfect storm of editorial problems recently, with delays, last-minute rewrites, art problems, Countdown tie-ins and continuity changes meaning that not only has Busiek been writing his own title, he's had to write fill-ins for Action, he's had to write fill-ins for himself when there have been art delays, and he's had to write *replacement* fill-ins when fill-ins have been dropped. Despite all this, he's managed to produce work that is at worst decent and at best excellent. Although the strain has clearly shown at times, his work has been some of the best on the Superman title in decades. So I have enough faith in Busiek's reliability to have at least some enthusiasm for Trinity.

So my plan, for now, is that this blog will go back to more-or-less weekly (or more) posts dealing with the various big DC events that interest me - so far this would be all Morrison's work, possibly the tie-ins to Final Crisis and Batman RIP, and at least the first few issues of Trinity and whatever the Wonder Woman Big Event is. This won't be annotations ( Douglas Wolk is doing a fine job of that at http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com ) but reviews and talking about the themes and so on. I'll also be looking back over the next few months at a variety of earlier comics that relate in some way to these titles. In the case of Final Crisis that will be 52, Seven Soldiers, The Filth, DC One Million, JLA: Earth 2, Morrison's JLA, The Kingdom, Marvel Boy and maybe some others. In the case of Trinity I'll look over JLA/Avengers and Syndicate Rules, both of which Busiek has said tie into the story. Those posts will mostly be in weeks when not much new is happening. I'll also continue to review any non-DCU stuff that seems interesting to me as and when it comes out.

This week was possibly the best week for new comics in years. Judenhass (which I've already reviewed a couple of months back) came out, and on top of that three comics by Grant Morrison. The reason it's taken me this long to post a review is because I've spent every second since Friday just running around saying "ohmygod flyingluthoranddeicideandalfredasbrucesdadandsupermandyingandthedeathofthefourthworldandkamandiandaaaa!!!" which I didn't think would live up even to my normal inarticulate level.

I'll be writing this as a couple of separate posts - this one about Final Crisis, and the next one tying it into All Star Superman and Batman, as well as the bigger picture links between Morrison's work at the moment.

Having read a number of reviews of Final Crisis before reading the comic itself, I was amazed to find it is actually one of the best single issues of a comic I've read this year. Most reviews, even those by people whose opinions I ususally respect, have said that it's too slow and that nothing happens. While it's not on the same scale as Crisis On Infinite Earths, and there's comparatively little Action (in the sense of things blowing up and people punching each other), the story is full of events and ideas.

(Some people, incidentally, have also complained that the events here don't match up well with/lose impact when placed alongside the execrable Countdown. That may be true, and is a fair criticism to lay against DC editorial, but not against the creators of this comic, which was apparently written before the terrible Countdown even started. Presumably whatever the events were in the egregious Countdown, it was what Morrison was talking about when he complained of the New Gods being 'passed around like herpes').

But really, seriously - 'nothing happens' is simply not a valid criticism here, in a story where huge swathes of the DC Universe come together in new combinations, bringing out thematic links that were never there before.

You've got a reworking/revisiting of the Kirbyesque New Gods as Eternals as Von Daniken Chariot Of The Gods stuff from Seven Soldiers with Metron as Prometheus, bringing The Human Flame (divine inspiration, as well as literal fire). Is the Prometheus angle going to tie in later with Frankenstein (who appears later in the series). The Human Flame is also the villain that kills Martian Manhunter, and fire is being linked throughout with both death and creation - fire representing chaos as well as inspiration (this ties in with a lot of the stuff in Seven Soldiers).

Death through fire always inspires thoughts of the phoenix, and rebirth, of course.

The Green Lanterns have a *code* for deicide! And note the death of Orion - the 'God of War', at the same time as the death of J'onn J'onzz, the last survivor of Mars, named after the God of War. And of course Mars is the Fourth World in our solar system, and this story is about the destruction of the Fourth World and its rebirth as the Fifth.

Incidentally, a lot of Morrison's previous work, especially The Invisibles, has referenced the idea that there will be a big change at the end of 2012, an idea that seems to come from lots of sources (pop-anthropological looks at Native American beliefs combined with now out-of-date predictions about information and technological growth). Part of that comes from what has been reported (in various new age sources whose credibility I haven't got the knowledge to verify - I'm talking in these bits not about what I believe to be true but about ideas Morrison has drawn on) as a Hopi belief that we are now living in a Fourth World that is about to change to a Fifth World.

Looking around for information on this (which Morrison may or may not be drawing upon, but I suspect he is) Hopi rituals relating to this change apparently include a 'new fire ceremony', and there is this rather interesting bit from Wikipedia:

"The coming Fifth World (where our present World is presented as the Fourth) is said to arrive following a cycle in Nature affecting our entire Solar System, where our Earth births an Egg (Mystery Egg, Hidden Egg) and then moves "up" within our system to reach its crowning place. All of the Earth's life is then said to be "raised" to its perfected-eternal form. Some tribes refer to this period of change as "Purification Time." During this period of Purification, Time is said to change where we must choose between the natural Time we have now upon our Earth (meant for us) and an unnatural Time structure which removes us from Nature and our opportunity to reach the Fifth World. It is told that everyone will have to choose between the two Time frames-- one leading to the Fifth World with our Earth, and the other (which will be very alluring, deceiving many) which will remove us from our Earth, taking us to oblivion."

I would be very surprised if these ideas didn't come into play as Final Crisis continues. It certainly *sounds* Crisis-like, doesn't it?

Some other notes on bits of the story:

I do not like Doctor Rapey McRapeRape, and never will, even with Morrison writing him. However, Jones' depiction of Mirror Master is absolutely wonderful. Looks like Terry Gilliam playing him.

The stuff with the secret society ties in with JLA:Earth 2, which I will look at soon. Also, Grodd's expressions are drawn perfectly.
"I am not averse to the taste of human flesh, sir!"
Damrung brand phone!

Orion appears to have 'infected' Terrible Turpin with a bit of his own essence.

That's no Monitor, that's Rhodes Boyson.

More on this tomorrow, as I have a LOT to say about this. I've not even really touched on the plot, or all the things that echo back and forth between this and Morrison's other works, or the art. But this issue is so densely packed with meaning and resonances without even getting into that that I'm having difficulty seeing how *anyone* could think 'nothing happened'. This is really what superhero comics *should* be.

This has still, of course, been incoherent - I hope that the later posts will be more organised, but this is the kind of comic that sets off my inner fanboy, with my thoughts racing in a million directions. It's exactly the kind of comic the industry needs right now, and I love it.

Black & White & Red All Over

I've more or less avoided the Big Overarching Story in DC Comics over the last few months - since dropping the appaling Countdown with the tenth issue, I've made an effort not to read anything that tied itself in too strongly to that storyline. However, I've been looking forward intensely to Final Crisis, and I'll read anything by Grant Morrison, so I picked up DC Universe Zero with a reasonable amount of hope.

Written by Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns (who's shown signs recently in Action Comics and Booster Gold of actually being the decent, solid writer his admirers claim rather than the incompetent I thought of him as previously) and drawn by eight different artists, this is meant to be a fifty-cent preview of what's to come in DC's superhero titles for the next year or so, something you can hand to anyone and get them up to speed and interested in the titles.

On that score, it's a total failure. Because of the sheer number of different storylines it's teasing (along with a framing sequence), none of the previews could be comprehensible to anyone who isn't already reading those titles. It's a shame, because there's a clear attempt to give some unity to a fundamentally disjointed comic, but there's no way to tie all this information into a single narrative.

There's a framing 'story' here (Barry Allen is back... or is he? Or... is he? ) and some clear attempts to tie everything together thematically (the colours red and black appear a lot, and Morrison's recurring obsession with hands turns up again) - Douglas Wolk has provided a good set of annotations to this at http://savagecritic.com/2008/04/all-systems-intact-red-and-black.html - but it all seems forced.

The narration is on the level of "There is good, and there is bad. Bad and good. Dark and light. Shadows and some more light. Black and... red? (go with it) The dark and the light are in balance. Balance is important. It's in his hands now. He'll have to take it in hand. His left hand and his right hand. Two hands. For balance. Balance. Good Superman and bad Superman. Good me and bad me. Shadows. Black. Red. Like the suits in cards DO YOU SEE?"

Possibly not *quite* that subtle, but on that kind of level.

It's not really fair to judge this as a unified whole though - it's structured as a four-page intro plus a sequence of three-page previews (of stories in many cases not written or drawn by the people creating the comic) so it's probably best taken in that way.

Intro:

This manages to sum up quite effectively both previous Crises in a mere four pages, and assuming we need to know anything about that for Final Crisis it does a good job of bringing people up to speed. However, already I'm getting a sense that this has been put together with a lack of attention to detail. The image at the bottom of page three, of parallel earths exploding, probably looked fine as pencils. But someone's dropped a photo of the Earth in, repeatedly, with Photoshop, so now we have five earths breaking apart with giant cracks over their surface that manage also to be visible on the water, with no distortion whatsoever of the shape of the continents, and with giant plumes of flame shooting out as far as the moon while causing *no disturbance at all* to the atmospheric patterns from the previous panel.

Final Crisis: Legion Of Three Worlds
This preview has three pages, and two of them are taken up with a double-page spread of a fight scene. In the one page of narrative we get to see some Patent Geoff Johns Dismemberment and discover that Superman is in the 31st century, fighting what look like shadow demons with the Legion, and that's about it. It looks pretty, but gives no real reason to read the comic.

Batman: RIP
This is much more like it. The symbolism is actually at its most overt here, and the dialogue is frankly ludicrous (Batman actually getting lines like "Red and black. Life and death. The joke and the punch line.") but it works for Batman in a way it doesn't for other characters.

There is more in this three-page sequence than anything else in the comic. It's almost a textbook in how to construct a talking-head sequence in a superhero comic. It contains allusions to other comics, but in such a way that anyone who hasn't read them won't be missing anything, it stays with the established characterisation, and it makes great use of the page.

Sticking with the duality theme, Morrison has Batman on a checkerboard floor seen through red-tinted glass by the Joker, who's in the dark with only spot lighting. The panels are done as powers of two (first two panels with a four panel inset, then eight panels on the next page, then sixteen on the page after).

Hands are used here as a means of expression - the Joker's body language reminding me in some ways of William Hartnell, who always used to keep his hands close to his face because the TV camera could then pick up both. The Joker barely speaks, gesturing to make most of his points, a creature of the body rather than the mind. Batman on the other hand only has his hands shown in two panels - the first panel in the sequence and one close-up panel of clenched fists when he gets angry and his emotionless facade breaks down. Instead we see only his mostly-covered face, or his body in silhouette. We know Batman only by his words, but the Joker only by his actions.Close-ups on Batman's eyes (another recurring feature of this comic) show nothing, of course, while the Joker's eyes are cracked, red and bloodshot.

The increasing number of panels, and decreasing number of words as the Joker appears more and more in control of the situation, ratchet up the tension, while allowing Morrison to homage several different comics (the situation is clearly referencing The Killing Joke, the last panel is meant to make us think of Watchmen, while the 16-panel last page is laid out in the same manner as The Dark Knight Returns).

This makes me want to read more of this story, and is by far the best thing in the comic.

Wonder Woman: Whom The Gods Fail
"She is peace and she is war" apparently. This seems like it could actually be teasing quite a good story (or a terrible one - tying real-world genocides into a superhero story could be a very tasteless decision) but the single-panel bits will only make sense to people who've been reading a lot of other comics. It might make people who read 52 want to read Wonder Woman but it won't bring in any *new* readers. And the last panel just says to me that someone wants some of that 300 money for themselves.

Green Lantern: Blackest Night Prelude
I have no idea what is going on here at all, having not been reading Green Lantern, except that I would be very surprised if the Black Hand (mentioned here, an old Green Lantern villain) and the Black Glove (the behind-the-scenes villain of parts of Morrison's Batman run, mentioned earlier) were either unconnected or the same character. The two-page spread of 'refracted light' is more-or-less incomprehensible, except that someone (or someones) are going to be followed. Given that Final Crisis is meant to tie into Seven Soldiers the colours-of-the-rainbow thing here might be interesting later on. This seems actually to tie in to some of the other stuff, but I'm left confused.

Final Crisis: Revelations
Nigel Blackwell said it best:
If you're gonna quote from the Book of Revelation
Don't go calling it the Book of Revelations
There's no 's', it's the Book of Revelation
As revealed to St John the Divine
See also Mary Hopkin
She must despair

Final Crisis
This, along with the Batman section, is one of the more comprehensible sections, and actually gives me a sense of anticipation. It appears to follow on from events and concepts from 52, with Darkseid being equated with Lady Styx in some way and with Libra trying to get the Secret Society of Super Villains to join the Crime religion. The foreshadowing suggesting that Libra is Barry Allen is so obvious that it must be a bluff.

As for that last page 'reveal', Mark Waid, the only one of the four 52 writers not involved in some way with this latest crossover, said just before this came out, about The Flash

"Tom will make that book shine. And he’ll do it on the strength of Wally, not on some creatively bankrupt, desperate stunt like bringing Barry Allen back to life or something."

While there appears to be no love lost between Waid and DC editorial right now, he still appears to be friendly with Morrison (and presumably Johns), and I don't see him using terms like that about an idea that would have come from those writers. So either the 'return' is no return at all (most likely as far as I can see) or it's been forced by editorial edict against the writers' will, or I'm completely misreading the situation. We'll see.

I intend to buy Final Crisis and possibly several of the other comics trailed here, so you can expect more regular posts from here on in. I think, though, that this comic would have been infinitely more successful had they cut out the Revelations and Wonder Woman sections, and maybe the framing material, and concentrated on the Legion, Batman, Green Lantern and Final Crisis sections. They all seem to fit together, and a little more work could have fit those four sections into a 22-page narrative with some actual point to it, rather than this collection of sketchy trailers.

This Is Going To Change Everything

Before I start this rather long post, some of you might like to know that I've written another post about Brian Wilson over on my music blog.

DC comics have not really served Superman very well. In fact, they've been positively negligent. Given that he's 'iconic', the most recognised comic character on earth, that everyone knows the character and his supporting cast, how many good comics have there been about him in the last twenty years or so?

People go on about the 'triangle number' era, and when I was eleven or twelve I must admit Dan Jurgens' overwrought melodrama had a powerful effect, but those comics don't stand up at all to rereading. Other than that, how many good - not even great, just good - comics have there been about Superman in that time?

Oh, he's been a character in a few good comics - Morrison's JLA, for example - but as far as his own titles go the pickings have been very slim indeed. I would be very surprised if out of the hundreds upon hundreds of comics worth of 'product' that have been turned out during that time more than at most twenty or thirty are actually any good. That's a horrible hit rate.

Recently DC have been doing better about this. Kurt Busiek must have written or co-written close to fifty Superman comics in the last two years, thanks to delays, fill-ins and covering for other writers, and he's a decent choice. He knows what makes Superman tick, and at least his first (co-written with Geoff Johns) story was actually very good. The rest have been variable, but they've been decent. Now he's moving on to Trinity, he's being replaced by James Robinson. I'm sure Robinson will be very good too. Superman comics are currently the best they've been in decades.

But it's hard to write a Superman story. After all, he's seventy. He's getting old.

Back when he was a youthful forty (and when his good friend Mickey was fifty, and I was busy being conceived), US copyright law changed. It still took thirty years before Jerry Siegel's rights reverted to him. That's a long time. Twelve years more than Siegel lived, in fact. Still, he got well-paid when he was alive - $35,000 a year is hardly peanuts, is it? Why, that's even more than I make, if I don't work overtime.

As is the nature of these things, the debate around this on the internet has pierced right to the crucial points, with people falling roughly into two camps. On one side there are those who think that using the courts to enforce your legal rights against a multi-billion-dollar corporation is un-American, while on the other side there are those who think it's fine so long as they get their comics.

Me, I'm wondering if Ub Iwerks has any family.

Because, really, does it matter if we don't get any more Superman comics? After all, what more stories can there be to tell about him? After seventy years, what's left to say? Superman's grown old. He's a relic of a previous time. Better to just put him out of his misery.

Because fighting over the ownership of an idea as powerful as Superman is both important (for the money for Siegel's family, and the money Time Warner stand to lose) and utterly unimportant. DC Comics no more control Superman than they control Hamlet. Superman is surviving not on the quality of the comics, but on his 'mindshare'. Even though nobody's reading the comics, everyone knows who Superman, Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor are, what Krypton and Kryptonite are. Despite what many comics fans think, he's independent of context and certainly of 'continuity'. He's a myth, in the category of Robin Hood or King Arthur rather than of Green Lantern or Firestorm. He's Christopher Reeve, a Curt Swan drawing, a Max Fleischer cartoon, John Williams' theme, "Look, up in the sky!"

Apparently in the 1990s Ted Turner wanted to move ownership of Superman and Batman away from DC Comics and to Cartoon Network, on the grounds that they'd look after the characters better.

The logo of All-Star Superman has changed over its ten issues. The Superman has got bigger, the 'All Star' smaller. The implications are clear - this is the real Superman, not that impostor in those other comics.

Van-Zee, Superman's Kandorian double, says "In Krypton's second Golden Age, men and women lived five hundred years and performed mighty feats of great renown. I found another gray hair today" as Superman's compassionate eyes look on from the sky.

Meanwhile, in Metropolis, "the true man of Steel! The authentic man of tomorrow!" is chasing Luthor. He has to drive a giant robot, of course, because he's only an old man with Alzheimer's.

Is it only me who thinks that Kandor on Mars looks like Dr Manhattan's structure from Watchmen 9? Possibly a stretch, but both men do decide to create life. (Edit - Marc Singer thinks so too) .

Do people really name their daughters Regan? That's just asking for trouble.

We've already seen Earth-Q, of course, in Morrison's JLA Classified prequel to Seven Soldiers. And we knew Superman had entered our world to try to prevent the evil seed that had entered there from spreading. And Superman has been presented throughout the series as a solar deity, more Mithraic than Apollonian in nature, descending from the sun into the darkest depths of the underworld before slowly rising back up. At this point in the series, he has returned to the level of normal humans (though as with the 'as above, so below' nature of the whole story, events affect and are affected by events on many other scales), and this is the issue in which he creates the world (in only one day - he doesn't have time to spend six days on it, and certainly can't afford a day of rest) and in which he dies for us.

And the last we see of him, he's stretching out his hand to us. But unlike Zatanna, he isn't reaching out for our help, but even when he knows he's dying he's reaching out to help - to cure sick children, because that's what Superman does.

Yet ten minutes after his death is reported, but a page before, a young man sketches an image. It's an image of a muscular man with a friendly smile, in a tight-fitting costume, with a shield on his chest and a cape on his back. He looks strong, but utterly relaxed, confident but with no arrogance at all. He's a man who can take on the world, and he's being born again.

The legend under this birth reads 'Neverending', but this series only has two more issues to go. You see, it's not the 'real' Superman - even as Morrison obviously thinks of this story as belonging in the same world as his JLA and Seven Soldiers stories - it's 'out-of-continuity'. An imaginary story.

Of course, Grant Morrison did once ask to write the 'real' Superman comics. He submitted a detailed proposal with Mark Waid, Mark Millar and Tom Peyer, but they were turned down flat. DC decided instead to do stories like President Luthor and later Infinite Crisis, in which Siegel & Shuster's original Superman is beaten to death by Superboy. But they told Morrison, Waid, Millar and Peyer that they would never be allowed to write the 'real' Superman comics. They'd have shaken things up, been too daring.

And after all, they had to protect the copyright.

I Don't Know Who He Is Behind That Mask, But We Need Him And We Need Him Now... Morrison (and others) on Batman Part 1

After that slightly-longer-than-expected hiatus, it's time for us to continue our look at the DC Morrisonverse. Today, I want to start looking at Grant Morrison's work on Batman.

One of the complaints a lot of the more intelligent comic-bloggers make is that most online comics criticism seems to take comics as a branch of literature rather than as a medium in its own right (the pedant in me cringes at that sentence and its mixture of singular and plural - the one real reason I can see for wanting to get rid of 'comics' as the name for the medium). They're right of course, but to a large extent they're beside the point.

Disregarding for the moment the regrettably large number of internet 'reviewers' who in fact are just preparing book reports, listing the events in the story rather than dealing with it as a piece of art (and I know I've done capsule 'reviews' like that myself, but I hope my longer posts do contain something approximating analysis) , one would at first thought assume that most comics reviewers would have at least as much to say about the art in comics as the writing.

The problem is, while comics as a whole have room for as many different types of art as there are people in the world, superhero comics, which are the bread and butter of most comic blogs, have traditionally allowed only a small fraction of those styles to be used. With some exceptions, almost every artist working for Marvel or DC (or the other companies feeding on the crumbs from under their table) would fit into the bottom left corner of Scott McCloud's "Big Triangle" .

In fact, for superhero comic artists, rather than a 'big triangle', almost all fit into a 'little square', defined on one axis by the number of tiny little lines and on the other by how distorted the anatomy is. Roughly the four corners of this square would be Jack Kirby (no little lines, ultra-distorted anatomy), Darwyn Cooke (very few little lines, relatively accurate anatomy), George Perez (millions of little lines, relatively accurate anatomy) and Rob Liefeld (millions of little lines all over the place, wrong number of knees).

Anything outside this box would not get published by the mainstream companies, and despite the obvious differences in ability between those four gentlemen, there's really not a huge stylistic difference between them when compared to the full range of possibilities out there. Korn don't sound much like the Beatles, but both sound more like each other than like Edgard Varese.

Comic art also has a relatively low entry threshold. Given its low rate of pay compared to commercial art, and given that every fan thinks they could write the perfect Green Lantern story and submits it to DC, but most have a more realistic assessment of their drawing skills, the talent pool on which the big companies are drawing is relatively small, and mostly made up of amateurs, be that in the true sense (working in comics for love when they could earn more in other fields) or in the pejorative (barely competent).

Most superhero artists, therefore, are concentrating firstly on making the thing they're drawing look something like it's meant to, and secondly on their panel-to-panel storytelling, ensuring the reader can follow the story. It's actually only exceptional artists (two examples off the top of my head are Frank Quitely and J.H. Williams III, but there are others) who go further than serving the story and actually try to create something that has an aesthetic value in and of itself, something capable of producing an emotional reaction independent of its context within the story - something, in other words, worth criticising on its own merits.

This means that even the more visually literate comics reviewers will often treat a comic as if it were essentially a prose work, because they have nothing really to say about the art. However, this results in reviews that are unintentionally dishonest.

The treatment of the recent Club Of Heroes storyline in Batman is a perfect example. Most reviewers have praised this story to the skies, and (either explicitly or implicitly) compared it with the earlier Morrison-written issues of the title, with the latter suffering in comparison.

And this is a good assessment of them as comics, but that's not the fault of either Morrison or of Andy Kubert, the artist on the earlier issues, but rather of their pairing. Grant Morrison is a writer who, more than any other non-drawing writer I can think of in comics, takes advantage of the visual aspect of the medium by making details matter.

Generally speaking, comics writers working in full script have one thing happen per panel. Sometimes there'll be a background detail or two for world-building or as a joke, but even Alan Moore, who's known for his incredibly detailed panel descriptions, tends to work in foreground/background terms. Watchmen is made infinitely richer by the background detail, by the way panels echo and reflect each other, but only rarely (the scenes by the newsstand in issue 11, for example, when all the plot threads come together) does the background detail or figure placement convey information about the main plot itself.

Compare and contrast this with, for example, Morrison & Quitely's All Star Superman #1. In this, there's a whole series of intricately choreographed moments which require paying attention to every detail. Most superhero comic readers have been trained to see the figures of the major characters as foreground and everything else as background. You can't do this with Morrison & Quitely's work and have any hope of following what's going on.

Unfortunately, this kind of work requires a particular type of collaborator in order to succeed. It was revelatory, for example, to see Morrison's script and thumbnails for Arkham Asylum in the 15th anniversary trade a few years back. Dave McKean's art, while gorgeous, was utterly unsuited to the story as written. Important plot points in the script were simply not drawn, resulting in the finished work being incoherent and coming across as a lot more pretentious than the script would suggest.

It is entirely probable that the comparative lack of response to Morrison & Kubert's Batman has a related cause. I'm not suggesting that Kubert didn't follow Morrison's script to the letter, and nor do I think he's a bad artist (while his style isn't to my taste, he's one of the best of that type of artist out there), but his style is fundamentally unsuited to Morrison's work.

Andy Kubert is in the ultra-distorted, millions of little lines corner of our hypothetical square, and that style isn't suited to the type of subtlety Morrison's scripts require. To parse the action correctly, we need to take in a minimum of visual information. The extraneous detail that Kubert adds actually detracts from our ability to process the image at a glance. I can't speak for anyone else, but to me those little lines paradoxically make me gloss over the image - everything in the picture is of about equal importance, and thus equal unimportance. A lot of detail in Morrison's stories also comes from characters' body language and facial expression, and Kubert simply isn't a nuanced enough artist to show these things. He's great on action (which is why the most impressive sequence in his run on the title is the fight in the museum), but his 'actors' are all scenery-chewing hams.

I suspect that further down the line, we will discover that (much as in his runs on Animal Man, Doom Patrol and especially New X-Men) Morrison has planted a number of time-bombs in his scripts, subtle details that will make us look at these early issues in a new light. And they will be there when we go back and look at the issues, but the art style will have stopped them registering with us.

So Morrison's pre-Club Of Heroes issues are, overall, at best qualified successes as comics. But that's not the fault of the writer, or of the artist, but of the system by which mainstream superhero comics are produced. While the production-line system exist, there will be occasions on which talented people, doing their best to produce good material, end up working partly at cross purposes.

But they are still better than the vast majority of superhero comics being produced at the moment, and they've provided an intriguing basis for the work that's followed. I'll look at them (and the Clown At Midnight issue and Club Of Heroes) in more detail in my next few posts.

The DC Morrisonverse 5: They Fuck You Up...

Most of the things I've posted so far in the look back over Seven Soldiers have been about fairly obscure elements in the series, things that have in large part been ignored by other writers on the subject (possibly, I accept, because they're not as interesting as those subjects they have focussed on).

However, to move on to Morrison's other DC work (and, eventually, to Final Crisis) I think I need to cover one of the most covered aspects of Seven Soldiers, (and in this post I'll draw a lot on the posts of both Jog and Marc Singer ), fatherhood and influence.

If we look through the seven soldiers and their fathers, we see a pattern in those where they're mentioned:

Shining Knight - no mention is made of Ystin's parents, but Ystin has to kill the undead King Arthur, the most important authority figure in the young knight's life.
Guardian - No mention of his parents, but has to let his father-in-law, who is also his mentor, die.
Zatanna - Goes on a quest to find her dead father('s bequest) , ends up killing people in a recreation of his death, meets an evil counterpart of her father and finally has to come to terms with his death.
Klarion - Goes in search of his father and discovers him to be evil. Kills him. The only one of the seven whose mother plays a role in the story, but her role is minor. Ends up taking the place of his evil ancestor Melmoth (who introduces himself to the puritans with "Daddy's home!") after Melmoth dies.
Frankenstein - Had two fathers, both evil, and killed them both.
Bulleteer - No mention made of her parents, but her oldest ancestor, Aurakles, is portrayed as a once-great god who's now an accidental destroyer who needs to be killed.

Now the interesting thing about this is that Aurakles is also drawn as looking exactly like Alan Moore.
Morrison's relationship with Alan Moore is a tricky one, and he knows it. Morrison has said in interviews that he was inspired to start writing comics by Moore's work in Warrior, and his early work shows Moore's influence very heavily (for example the Watchmen visual references in Animal Man, and the striking similarity between The Coyote Gospel and Pog) but has also on a number of occasions been absolutely scathing about Moore's magical practices and later work. In fact much of Morrison's career can be seen as a reaction to Moore's work (for example his championing of Robert Mayer's horrible novel Superfolks makes sense when you consider it a stick to beat Moore with - Moore 'borrowed' more than a bit from the novel).

Much of Seven Soldiers can be seen as a reaction to Moore, or as homage, depending on the part of the work in question. Zatanna #1, for example (which I just typed as Promethea in a Freudian typo), contains the famous cutting parody of Promethea and the line about Zatanna's writing about magic being 'non-preachy', but it also contains an almost exact recreation of Zatarra's death-scene from Moore's Swamp Thing run. In fact a lot of Swamp Thing makes its way into the series - not only is Frankenstein very much in the same vein, but Zor is reborn as Solomon Grundy in much the same way that Alec Holland becomes Swamp Thing (in, of course, the origin story by Len Wein, who Morrison also claims as an influence) and Alix Harrower's job is working with autistic children, as Abby Holland (note the initials) did in Moore's Swamp Thing run.

But the aspect that has had most people talking is what has been interpreted as the inclusion of several avatars of Moore within the story, usually in negative roles. While the similarity in appearance of Aurakles to Moore might be charitably viewed as coincidental (and the similarity of Melmoth that some have pointed out extends only to him having a beard), and even the rivalry between pirates All-Beard (with his huge bushy beard and big hair) and No-Beard (bald like Morrison) can be seen as people reading too much into it, Zor is another matter.

Zor (rhymes with Moore) is one of the major villains of the piece (and in fact is also the person directly addressed by Morrison's avatar in the last issue), a magician who was one of the Seven Unknown Men ( who are all DC writers) but went renegade, who is responsible for much of the darkening of the DCU, and who has a beard of which he is comically proud. I wonder who that could be?

From The Comics Journal 176 (as quoted in a post on Barbelith):

Actually, at one point there was a sense that we were all marching into the future together waving the same flag, then I realized that we weren't, which is probably why I criticized Alan quite a lot, which is why he doesn't speak to me anymore. But I really felt the need to get out from under his shadow, because it had become so oppressive, and we were all being expected to do as he did.

This need to get out from Moore's shadow characterises huge chunks of Seven Soldiers, but another creator is equally present - Jack Kirby.

At first sight Kirby appears to be treated better than Moore - three of the minis ( Guardian, Klarion and Mister Miracle) are updatings of Kirby's concepts, and Kirby's avatar in the story, Ed Stargard, is one of the heroes - he has behind the scenes put together the seven soldiers who will defeat the Sheeda.

However, Ed is also trapped in the body of a child, grown wrinkled and decayed, but still a baby - a pretty potent metaphor for the US comics industry that has largely been built on the back of Kirby. He is also revealed as possibly having contributed to the death of an old friend, and is generally a far more ambiguous figure than he at first seems.

Kirby and Moore could be seen as the 'fathers' of Morrison-the-writer, and Seven Soldiers as a whole says that 'fathers' are to be distrusted - as is all authority. The work undercuts authority figures at every turn (the Submissionaries are tools of the Sheeda, Stargard isn't the imposing man he presents himself as, Shilo Norman's psychiatrist is a minion of Darkseid, Melmoth is a slaver, the expert on the past in Shining Knight turns out to be the Sheeda Queen) and over and over the message that's hammered home appears to be 'don't trust anyone over thirty'.

Remember, as well, that in Morrison's evolution, Seven Soldiers comes after Seaguy (which it resembles in many ways), with its apocalyptic conflict with 'the Anti-Dad'. This ties in with the big themes of the series - to live we must change. We must outgrow the influences that formed us, and become ourselves. Zatanna is the books her father wrote, but she is not her father. Frankenstein is immortal because of Melmoth, but he still kills Melmoth. And Grant Morrison has been shaped by Alan Moore and Jack Kirby, but he has to move beyond them (whether he does or not is a different matter).

Oh see ye not that narrow road so thick beset with thorns and briars?
That is the path of righteousness
And see ye not that broad broad road, that is the path of wickedness
... though some call it the road to heaven.

But don't forget... there's a third road.

(Next in this series - 52).

The DC Morrisonverse Part 4: They All Float Down Here

This entry isn't going to be as in-depth as the other posts I've been doing on Seven Soldiers as I'm not identifying any new themes or ways of looking at the material, merely pointing out a novel that I think almost certainly provided some of the inspiration for the series, but that I don't recall being mentioned anywhere else. As a result, it's only a few paragraphs long, and I'm just pointing out similarities, not drawing conclusions. I'll be doing more of that in tomorrow's post, which will be much longer than this one.

Morrison has described the structure of the collected versions of Seven Soldiers as being "like a Stephen King book", and I'm pretty sure he had a specific Stephen King book in mind when he said that, because the parallels with King's book It are much greater than most people appear to have picked up on.

It is represented as the personification of destruction and consumption, somewhat equivalent to the personifications of entropy scattered throughout Seven Soldiers, and is also portrayed as a giant spider. It is from a realm outside spacetime known as the Macroverse.

All these things are parallels, as is the fact that It mentions a Roanoke-like event in Derry' s past. But there are closer similarities.

It, like Seven Soldiers, deals with a team of seven. In fact their story in many ways parallels that of the Newsboy Legion - working together as children to defeat a menace that the adults don't believe in, but drifting apart after that, then working together when the menace resurfaces. The seven are all damaged in some way by the event, but most go on to wealth and fame.

In both stories when the menace returns in the present day, it is fought by a team of six, rather than seven.

Almost all King's characters have fathers who are absent or outright evil.

I'm not sure what to make of these similarities, but I thought I'd throw them out there for people to comment on - a more thorough, analytical post will be up tomorrow.

The DC Morrisonverse 3: ytilautxetatem dna annataZ

Before I start this post, I'd just like to put in a quick plug. My own webcomic, Dumb Angel, is finally restarting after a lengthy absence. The latest page is drawn but I'm having problems getting it on the site - by the time you read this it may well be there, though. Let me know what you think of it...

One of the most common complaints about Seven Soldiers concerns Zatanna's role in the story. While the Zatanna mini itself is possibly the best-received of the minis (in part because its mild attacks on Alan Moore allow some reviewers to use Morrison as a proxy for their own assertions that the Emperor has no clothes, which says more about them than it does about Moore, Morrison or the mini), it has been asserted by many critics that Zatanna plays no role in the final issue, Seven Soldiers 1.

In fact, Zatanna may be the most important character in that issue.

Morrison has spent the whole of the Zatanna miniseries having her travel between dimensions, popping out of flat surfaces (the 'brane universes in issue 1) and, in the climax of her miniseries, meeting the Seven Unknown Men, who are the personifications of Morrison and his fellow DC writers.

Now, several DC characters had met their creators over the years, with for example the Flash meeting Cary Bates and, in one memorable issue of The Brave & The Bold, artist Jim Aparo being held hostage and forced to draw the comic in the way the criminals wanted. But this kind of thing has usually been played as a joke - just a throwaway idea, with no real significance.

The two big exceptions in comics have been Morrison's own Animal Man and Dave Sim's Cerebus, both of which had creator/creation meetings as the climax of their respective storylines. However, both these comics came from the same source - the classic cartoon Duck Amuck, and carried over a good chunk of Chuck Jones' moral (such as it was) - "like flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods - they kill us for their sport".

Zatanna's reaching out to the third dimension is something else though. It brings the readers, as well as the creators, into the story - we can no longer be voyeurs, but have to choose sides. And it does so extraordinarily effectively - I've read time and again that readers of Zatanna, when they get to the crucial point, have placed their hands against Zatanna's. (I, of course, am a rational adult who would never do such a childish thing. Of course.)

And at the climax of Seven Soldiers 1, Zatanna interacts with the readers again, and this time actually becomes three-dimensional.

Or rather she doesn't. She attains the illusion of three-dimensionality - and she does so at precisely the same time as she says "it's not about illusion or trickery". Words, as have been shown throughout Zatanna's story, can be untrustworthy.

Zatanna is absolutely essential to the story because she is the only character in the DCU who is capable of literally rewriting reality (which is why she is able to join the writers, however briefly, in her own series). Something that Morrison has noticed that I believe had never been made explicit before is that Zatanna's reversed speech bubbles look exactly like a speech bubble would if coming from someone facing her - that is, coming from outside the page, from 3-space.

This is made explicit in her climactic scene in SS1, where the reader actually responds 'ydaer', with the lettering, as well as the letter order, reversed. But few people have noticed what this implies - whenever Zatanna is casting a spell, she's projecting her words into our reality. In other words, she's changing the script.

This makes Zatanna one of the writers, as well as one of the characters, of the DC Universe, and thus we can see her as one of Morrison's 'fictionsuits' (Morrison's term for characters who are essentially avatars of the writer). It is notable that Morrison makes Zatanna a published author (whose Hex Appeal sounds very like Morrison's own proposed Pop Magick book) . Zatanna's whole story is about the interchangeability of words and reality within the DCU - she is searching for her father's books, the Libri Zatarae, only to discover that she is the book he has written in the universe. Gwydion is also portrayed at one point as being living words in a book.

When she calls on the universe to awake and the seven soldiers to strike, then, Zatanna is Morrison, trying to complete the story and also trying to bring about his project of making the DCU sentient. But she needs the help of the reader.

Morrison's point (well, one of them - nearly everything in Seven Soldiers admits of three or four different readings) couldn't really be more explicit - we can have comics full of hope, where good triumphs over evil, or we can have dark Sheeda 'raping our childhood' (which is literally what the Sheeda are doing with their wholesale destruction of previous times, but also a common accusation from the more unreasonable type of comic-book fan aimed at the powers that be at DC after series like Identity Crisis), but only if the fans, as well as the writers, want them.

Zatanna's spell is the point where everything starts to come together, where everything that had previously looked hopeless starts to brighten up. The split between Jake Jordan and Carla had been the biggest symbol of hopelessness in the series (used as an example of 'anti-life' in Mister Miracle) yet on the very next page after Zatanna's spell, they are reconciled. Zatanna has reached out into the third dimension and changed the script, chosen to use her free will rather than being the puppet of others. She's escaped from the Life Trap, and taken everyone else with her.

More on this tomorrow.

DC Morrisonverse Part 2: Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold

Before I start this post, I just want to let people know I've started a second blog, at http://olsenbloom.blogspot.com , where I'm going to be posting about music and songwriting. If you're interested, check it out - the first post is on Brian Wilson.

Anyway, on to the second of what appears to be an interminable series of posts about the themes of Seven Soldiers.

I finished my post from Friday by talking about entropy. Entropy has been a recurring theme in Morrison's work (see for example the Invisibles volume Entropy In The UK) but never more so than in Seven Soldiers.

For those of you who don't know, entropy is a measure of the amount of chaos or disorder in a system. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, possibly the single most fundamental law of physics there is, says that in a closed system entropy must increase.

I've written before about how this applies to the Mister Miracle mini - and how that only made explicit what was implicit in Kirby's original conception of the Fourth World characters - so I won't go over that material again here, save to say that Morrison's relationship with the concept of entropy appears a very ambivalent one.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics means that no authority can ever have ultimate control - there will always be a random factor outside their control, and that random factor will always increase until there is no authority - definitely an idea that would appeal to someone of Morrison's politics (I've not seen Morrison put a label on his politics, so I don't know if he regards himself as socialist, anarchist or what, but all his interviews and writings place him pretty firmly in the lower-left quadrant of the political compass ...). In that sense, the second law is undoubtedly A Good Thing (if you share Morrison's anti-authoritarianism, as I do).

However, Morrison is also a hopeful writer, in the most fundamental sense. And the Second Law is a fundamentally pessimistic law. It says that in the end, the universe will simply fade away, that everyone and everything in the universe, everything that has ever existed or will ever exist
, everything will decay, crumble, and vanish and there will be nothing at all left. Any effort to stop this can only make things worse - every single act increases entropy. Even by reading this, increasing the information in your brain, you are contributing to the heat death of the universe. Everything is futile and life is a hollow joke. In comparison to the Second Law of Thermodynamics seen in this light, Ozymandias is positively Norman Vincent Pealesque - after all, those two vast and trunkless legs of stone are still standing, even if nothing else is. The Second Law is a true Anti-Life Equation.


So throughout Seven Soldiers there is a tension between these two views. In Zatanna #1 entropy is represented as the ultimate Big Bad:

"Doesn't the red god look just the way he's described in the Omninomicon?"
"...I'm witnessing large-scale entropic decay"
"Thank Tahuti your father trapped the beast here when he did"
"Well, see, that's the thing... dad couldn't stop the red god. All he could do was freeze him. He'll eat the universe in the end."

And throughout the series, entropy and decay are portrayed as something negative, but fighting against them as being pointless or outright evil. Alix Harrower's husband tries to preserve her perfect physical form from decay, but ends up killing himself - he can't breathe once his superskin is applied (breathing of course being an oxidation reaction, as are most forms of decay - again going back to the theme throughout that the only way not to change is to die). The world of the Sheeda, a billion years from now, is "steaming in the squalid, luscious decay of the refuse-littered slopes at Summer's End".

But at the same time, entropy can be used to the advantage of the forces of good. I've gone into this in the Mister Miracle article linked above, but there's also Ed Stargard's plan - making sure the Seven never meet, so they remain a random factor, unaccounted for by the Sheeda.

But in the end, though, Morrison points out the get-out clause - "In a closed system entropy will always increase". From the same double-page spread as the above Zatanna dialogue, the line straight after what I quoted before is "I'm hoping we all get a bigger place to stay in before that happens". Later on the same spread, we get:

"No way out of a closed system! Don't you see how it all has to fall down in the end?"
"teg su tuo fo ereh! If I say there's a way, there's a way."

I'll go into this more tomorrow - there's much more to say here. But in Seven Soldiers Morrison is talking about closed systems - systems of thought, the DC Universe that endlessly recycles the same tropes with little or no influence from the larger culture, and our universe as well - and saying that there are two choices - stagnate and die, or open up to new possibilities and live free.

Tomorrow, I'm going to talk about magic, metatextuality, and Zatanna...

The DC Morrisonverse Part 1: Seven Against Gravity

I'm sorry it's been a little while between posts here. I tried to write a post reviewing last week's comics, but junked it - I had nothing to say about most of them that wasn't just surface-level stuff, with the exception of Batman, and I want to wait until next issue before discussing that.


What I would like to do, though, is discuss Grant Morrison's DC Universe work.

Morrison is almost unique in his generation of comic writers (those who started in the late 70s and came to prominence in the mid-late 80s) in that almost all his significant work has been done in mainstream superhero comics. Morrison has been hugely prolific, of course, and worked in a variety of genres and for a variety of publishers, but while, say, Alan Moore has done almost all of his important work outside of the shared superhero universes, Neil Gaiman found his own little corner of the DCU and played there without interacting with the rest, and Dave Sim wrote his own indie comic and never ventured into the shared-universe arena at all, Morrison has produced a staggering amount of major work planted firmly in the mainstream DC (and to a lesser extent Marvel) superhero universe. If you read only Animal Man, Doom Patrol, JLA, Arkham Asylum, All-Star Superman, New X-Men and Seven Soldiers, and never read another word Morrison wrote, you'd have a fair idea of his strengths, weaknesses and preoccupation as a writer. Read The DC Universe Stories Of Alan Moore and Swamp Thing and you'll certainly be impressed, but you'd have no idea why their writer was considered the finest ever to work in the medium.

While this has caused any number of problems with Morrison's work - too much of his work shows the signs of editorial edict, and he has often been forced to work with unsympathetic collaborators - it has advantages. Working in what we laughingly call the mainstream means that Morrison has been able to expose a large proportion of the comics readership to his ideas in a form that makes them palatable. Morrison, for example, said that his run on JLA was intended as a 'Cliffs Notes' version of his creator-owned magnum opus The Invisibles, the action and concepts in the two comics often paralleling each other closely. (Personally I use them the other way round, finding the storytelling of Steve Parkhouse, Frank Quitely, Steve Yeowell, Phil Jiminez, Cameron Stewart et al much easier to follow than Howard Porter's Image-isms).

This also means that, at least to a greater extent than his peers, he is regarded as a 'good company man' and is given the keys to the company's most important intellectual properties on occasion. This is particularly true at the moment - Morrison is writing both Superman and Batman, and is in charge of two major crossovers (which will probably tie into each other) - this year's Death Of Ra's Al-Ghul running through all the Batman titles, and next year's Final Crisis (to which the whole DCU is patiently counting down).

Given that Morrison will effectively be guiding DC comics for much of next year, I think it could be valuable to look over some of his earlier ventures into the DCU and see what, if anything, we can glean from them.

To start with, I'd like to do a few posts about Seven Soldiers. I wrote quite a bit about this series when it first came out (some of you reading this will have read those posts) , and it's been talked about by some of the most intelligent commentators in comics criticism - Jog and Marc Singer in particular have done an extraordinary job of covering the themes in the series, and the annotations at Barbelith are absolutely essential. I also strongly suspect that Douglas Wolk's coverage in his book (which I have on order at the moment) will have much of interest to say.

I have no hope of bettering what those excellent writers have already said on the topic, but what I find fascinating about Seven Soldiers, and what I hope to show over the next few days (I've got a few days off work and some important procrastinating to do, so I expect to write several posts) is that no matter how much you write on the subject there's always more to tease out of it. Morrison's writing is hugely dense, with allusions to folklore, mathematics, physics, superhero comics, occultism and, for all I know, Belgian clog-dancing, and at times the writing in Seven Soldiers reaches that Finnegans Wake-esque state where there are so many references and allusions that connections that almost certainly weren't intended by the author become apparent.

I'm going to deal with those connections, and more, over the next few days, but in this post I want to focus on a theme that appears to have been ignored by most commentators on the series - gravity. (This will come back into play when I finally get around to writing about All Star Superman).

A lot of commentators on Seven Soldiers have mentioned the parallels with Newton's theories of colours that can be found in the comic, but something I found quite interesting is the role of gravity in the series.

The very first speech bubble in JLA: Classified #1 reads "F= γ(m1m2/r^2)" (allowing for my inability to represent formulae in HTML. This is also repeated as a thought bubble in Frankenstein #1 . Anyone who's studied any physics at all will recognise this as the formula for gravitational attraction.

Now, there could be several reasons for the prominence of this equation (which, as far as I know, has not been picked up by any other commentators on the series, which is why I'm leading off my analysis with it). It could be to make oblique reference to Newton, whose obsession with the number seven is well known (the reason why we differentiate between indigo and violet when looking at a rainbow, despite the two colours being almost identical, is so there would be seven colours to fit in with Newton's numerological ideas).

It could also be because Newton's ideas about gravity stemmed from Newton's occult investigations - the whole concept of forces acting at a distance is one that comes from Newton's magical beliefs.

But I suspect there's a deeper meaning. Gravity is referenced in many places in the story, but most prominently in Mister Miracle. On the first page of this mini we are told "nothing can escape the deadly gravitational pull of a black hole!" and asked "Can he cheat gravity itself and free himself from the crushing oblivion inside black hole X?!?"

The latter is, of course, the main question in the whole Mister Miracle miniseries. Gravity here is the life trap, a crushing force that we have to fight or die, a force that should by rights overwhelm us. In fact, much of the Seven Soldiers story involves the characters in orbit, sucked in by the gravitational pull of 'black holes' - absences (the missing god of the witch-people, the missing eighth soldier, Zatanna and Klarion's absent fathers) and occasionally pulled in by each other's force before swinging off in their own directions, their orbits perturbed by the presence of characters of whose existence they are unaware.

But I think there's a deeper meaning to gravity here. Much as Morrison used JLA to explain The Invisibles by paralleling it, I think gravity - a natural force against which our heroes have to fight - is being used for its resonance with a lesser-known concept in physics, one that I think is the theme - or at least one of the overriding themes - of the story.

I'm referring of course to entropy, and that shall be the topic of my next post.

Capsule Reviews For The Last Two Weeks

The personal problems alluded to in the post before last meant I was unable to get to a comics shop for a couple of weeks, so I'm now going to review two weeks' worth of comics (and skip the weeks previous) in an attempt to catch up. Almost all of these are DC titles, and I'll discuss their relevance to Countdown-the-event (which is still metastasising little mini-Countdowns - the most recent of which is the newly announced Countdown: Arena) tomorrow, but for now I'll just be talking about their quality in and of themselves.

Booster Gold #1 by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz, Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmond (DC) was the biggest positive surprise I've had in a long time. I'm normally not a fan of Johns' writing at all, but I've noticed he's capable of very good work when co-writing - he had a few good moments in 52 and his Up, Up And Away in the Super-titles last year with Busiek was excellent - so I gave it a try.

It's actually a very competent, fun superhero first issue, although it did feel a bit like a 52 hits medley - Supernova! Booster pretending to be selfish when he's really being good! Rip Hunter's blackboard! Time is broken! I also wonder how long the title will be able to run given that the only plot that current writers appear able to conceive of for Booster is act selfishly - have a change of heart - become good but get no credit.

It's also a worrying sign that this comic contains more snide digs at other comics - including ones written by Johns himself - than any other I've read recently. Most of these (including the new title for this blog for the next week or so) come from the mouth of Rip Hunter, so I wonder if this is some kind of meta-thing, but still, there's only so many times characters in a comic can point out how bad other comics those characters appeared in are before the whole suspension-of-disbelief thing collapses in a jumbled mess like this sentence.

But there's a lot to like about this title (Johns & Katz are doing nothing original - the relationship between Booster and Daniel, for example, is straight out of Hero Squared, hardly the most original comic in the world itself), and the hints about future issues suggest Booster Gold could be a great source of rip-roaring light-hearted adventure through time and space. It's a flawed first issue, but suggests the series has a lot of potential.

In particular, I liked that Batman was portrayed as the only member of the current Justice League of B-Listers to have some faith in Booster Gold and some decency. I'll be talking soon about how Batman has been portrayed post-IC (and in particular how the revamp of his character has been seen as much in his guest appearances as the main titles), but it's very consistent with Morrison & Dini's ideas of how the character works.

Batman #667 (by Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III, DC) is a perfect example of this - Williams throughout draws Batman to look like the Dick Sprang version (although coloured by Dave Stewart to highlight the similarity between the Sprang and Frank Miller interpretations), even laying out the double page title in a variant of the old Batman-head logo. This is a Batman with a sense of humour and a desire to socialise, very different from the Dark Avenger of Darkness and Vengeance who Wreaks Terrible Vengeance in the Dark because the world is Dark but he is Darker of recent years.

Morrison's Batman has so far not had the impact one would expect, and I suggest this is largely down to the choice of Andy Kubert for the art. Kubert's art, while popular, is stronger on atmosphere and dynamics than on clear storytelling, and Morrison is telling the kind of story that relies on readers being able to pick up on some quite subtle details in the art.

Thankfully, J.H. Williams III is on the title for a few issues, and as regular readers will know I consider him easily the most inventive artist working in comics, who can tell a story with the utmost clarity while at the same time making each page a thing of beauty in itself. This storyline appears to be a riff on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (originally published under a title I won't repeat here), but featuring international versions of Batman, thus continuing Morrison's ongoing theme of identity, and showing us yet again who Batman is by showing us who he isn't.

Incidentally, I'd love to know how the Knight's appearance here works with his JLA Classified appearance, and if his surname is a reference to Morrison favourite Rupert Sheldrake. We shall have to wait and see, but this was a promising start.

Brave & Bold #6 (by Mark Waid & George Perez, DC) is the end to the first story, and thus impossible to review on its own - the issue only makes sense if you read the first five. I would find it difficult to review anyway, as this series simply hits too many of my buttons. If someone asked me to explain what I meant by superhero comics, I would give them the first six issues of this series, as they're quite close to being the Platonic Ideal of superheroics.

In precisely the sort of universe-spanning story I was hoping for from Countdown, these six issues have gone from a locked room mystery to an interplanetary war being manipulated by cosmic beings in order to remake the universe to their own ends in a thousand years. The story has taken in Batman, Green Lantern, Supergirl, Lobo, Adam Strange, Blue Beetle, the Legion of Superheroes, Destiny of the Endless, and the Challengers of the Unknown, and done so in a way that lets even those readers who know nothing of these characters grasp their essential details, and doesn't conflict with anything in other titles.

It's not the best comic ever or anything, but it does what it does as well as it's possible to do it. I simply can't imagine anyone liking superheroes (at least anything published by DC or Marvel between say 1970 and 1990) but not liking this.

Action Comics #854 (by Kurt Busiek & Brad Walker, DC) is something I'm going to discuss in more detail in the 'Countdown roundup' post, as it ties in with Countdown, but suffice it to say it's a story of Jimmy Olsen and Krypto fighting Titano, which should tell you instantly whether it's the kind of thing you want to read or not.

What I will say though is that the last year or so of Supertitles have increased my respect for Kurt Busiek enormously. Busiek's work on Superman has been wildly variable, and has ranged from extremely good (some issues have been almost All-Star Superman good, though these have been the exception rather than the rule) to the fairly poor (the various religiously-infused stories). But they've always been readable, and more often than not enjoyable.

But the thing is, Busiek's been trying to tell one shortish (six part or so) story, Camelot Falls, for most of the last 18 months. But in that time he's produced what must be close to thirty Superman titles as writer or co-writer. He's had his story interrupted by art problems and had to do fill-in stories, he's had to cover Action, whose supposed regular permanent writing team have produced I think four (maybe five) issues since Infinite Crisis, and he's even had to do fill-in stories when his fill-ins got postponed (the original Krypto story he wrote). And then on top of that he's having to tie all this in to a mega-crossover.

In the circumstances, the stories having any kind of coherence at all would be an achievement worthy of praise, but the fact that at his best Busiek has produced some of the best Superman comics of recent years, while at his worst he's produced competent enough journeyman work, shows a rare level of professionalism.

JLA: Classified #41 (by Pete Milligan and Carlos D'Anda, DC) is part five of the disappointing Kid Amazo storyline. D'Anda's art style is too cartoony for this kind of material, but even were it not Milligan is just going through the motions here. Someone needs to decide what the point of JLA: Classified is, exactly. Early on, it was simple - almost 'All-Star Justice League'. The best creative teams tell stories free from continuity, using any era of the League. Sometimes these could be file stories (as in Ellis and Guice's New Maps Of Hell), but even so the first twenty or so issues of this title were extremely good - Morrison's Seven Soldiers prologue, I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League and New Maps Of Hell were all excellent, interesting work, and Engelhart's Detroit League story, while bad, was at least different.
But since then it's settled into a comfortable mediocrity, with competent creators writing stories about the League as it was immediately pre-Infinite Crisis, with most of the stories following the same patterns. The only exception was Slott & Jurgens' Red King Rising story, and that was better in the concept than the execution (which may well have lived up to the concept had Slott written the whole thing rather than only plotting the last few issues).
A rotating-teams, non-continuity title like this can't survive on reader inertia, and JLA:Classified is getting dangerously close to trying to do just that.

Modok's Eleven #2 (by Fred Van Lente and one or more artists who might be any or all of the nine other people credited but without their job titles in this comic, Marvel) is a decent but not great issue by itself. This comic is sticking very close to the traditional heist movie plot, and so this issue is the planning section, which doesn't work so well as a single issue. But I'm sufficiently intrigued that I want to pick up the rest of this series to find out how the story goes. Plus, it's Fred Van Lente, so it's subsidising stuff like Action Philosophers. And there's a They Might Be Giants reference.

The Boys #9 (by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, Dynamite) is exasperating. Ennis appears to be trying to tell what could be an extremely good story about non-powered people hitting back at the super 'heroes' who show no concern for the collateral damage they cause. This story is livened up by Ennis' trademark dark and often scatalogical humour. When the balance is right, The Boys works. However, when, as in this issue, the balance tips too far toward the kind of humour Ennis uses in comics like Kev or Dicks, it just becomes tedious. Even back when applying gross-out humour to corrupt superheroes who aren't anything like their public image was a new idea, when Rick Veitch was doing it in Brat Pack, it wasn't especially funny. Now, someone getting caught short and having to go to the toilet on the floor of a Batcave-analogue is tedious and unoriginal, and distracts from the genuinely good stuff. A weak issue.

Much of what works in this issue is Darick Robertson's art, which has some extremely subtle facial expression work (see for example the bottom tier of panels on page 14). But even here, Robertson appears to be inking in a notably more slapdash way than his other work (see the bottom tier on page 12). This may be an aesthetic choice, but if it is it's not one I would have made. If not, it may be because Dynamite can't pay the advances Wildstorm can, and so Robertson can't put in the same time he did on the earlier issues. I hope the latter is not the case.

About Flash 231 and Shadowpact 16 I have little to say by way of review - both are competent and enjoyable but forgettable comics. I will, however, discuss both in the Countdown-event post tomorrow.