I have a stockpile of columns ready in the pipeline for Scary Monsters.
I wrote something like six of them before posting the first one, and have continued working on, starting, and completing at least two of them a week, with a few more ideas percolating and working out on paper. It's basically how my brains works, I have to be juggling at least four balls at a time, otherwise I'm useless. Anyway, it was basically my idea to have a head start in case something like pesky exams or something as trivial as completing an honour's thesis cropped up and I couldn't just sit down and crank one of these suckers out on a Sunday with Monday fast approaching.
As they say, "Even the best laid plans..."
Since I decided that I was going to run this column, back last Tuesday, or something like that, I think I've successfully rewritten it about four or five times, often razing complete sections and rewriting them from scratch. In essence, I may have well have just written it on the Sunday beforehand with the amount of time I've spent putting it together for publication. I mean, when I'm writing on the fly, having to get it in under the crunch, I second guess myself a lot less, and what appears may be more raw, but it'll be as concise as I can be due to time constraints, and won't suffer from the "elephantitis" that usually occurs when I have time to rewrite myself.
I mean, this should be a case in point -- I've added a bloody preamble to the entire thing.
1. Diagnosis
a. Obsession
It runs rampant in the comics industry.
I don't know if it's part of the "collector" mentality instilled in a lot of people buying comics, or if it's the blurry lines and close contact between fan and creator, but there's often this hubris amongst fans that due to the fact that they read, follow, or actively like a given character or title, it automatically enables them to more accurately chart the course of a character than the writer of the book. ...and no matter what, they'll get you coming or going. If you change a character just a little bit or deviate from what they see as the "norm", they'll be screaming bloody murder that, "Damn you! That's not Batman!" On the other hand, if you "play it safe" and continue on continuing on, you'll also be accused of doing nothing new and often a rip-off of whomever's "vision" of the character that the fans seem to think you're ripping-off. It's really rather ridiculous.
Comic fanatics are a cowardly and superstitious lot.
b. Devotion
The flip side of the coin with less negative connotations.
They love and care about the characters and titles like they're their own children. They grew up with Peter Parker, followed him through high school, fell in love with Gwen Stacy with him, and were utterly heart-broken when she died at the hands of the Green Goblin. Through thick and thin, Ditko and Romita, Buscema and Bagley, jackals and clones, they were there at the side of the web-head. I'm just using Spider-Man as an example, but the same could be said to be true of any comics property -- Savage Dragon, X-Statix, Youngblood, or Pogo -- it really doesn't matter. As long time followers of a character, to the point where the reader could practically consider them family, who better to judge whether something deviates from the character's "path" and deliver swift and harsh "justice" to any creator who dares walk a different route?
Comic fans are brave and noble flag bearers.
c. Reconciliation
There isn't any.
That much should be clear. Maybe both sides of the coin are correct, maybe both are wrong, it's all really a matter of perspective and context. Sometimes one may be the correct path, sometimes the other. What may seem like a tyrannical abuse of power in imposing your will on something, in imprinting your "reality" of a character, is in fact the right thing to do...or perhaps speaking out against a true misuse of character is the best thing you can possibly do, staying true and loyal to the ideals underlying everything. Who knows?
Maybe I'm not even talking about comics.
2. Metastasis
It's kind of superfluous to say, it's really one of the givens of the industry, but "mainstream" comics are based on wish-fulfillment, or some variation on it. All of the capes and tights, supervillains, and having to save the world on a weekly basis, it all emanates from basic escapist dreams and power fantasies -- the wish to be something other than yourself for a fifteen minutes or an hour, or however long it takes you to read a stack of words and pictures. It's one of the truths of a lot of entertainment, actually, whether the audience admits it to itself or not.
It's come to a point in comics where writers have begun deconstructing the stages of wish-fulfillment beyond even the simple moral of "Be careful what you wish for..." It has become partially a comment on the critics, on the fans, on the readers, on the dreamers, bizarre wish-fulfillment in its own right of "deconstructing" idols and symbols, obscure metafiction, and intentional and unintentional irony, where you've gotten to a point where you're not even sure anymore what you're being ironic about. It's a large conflicted morass of obsession and devotion. You're not sure where one ends and the other begins.
One of the unwritten themes that have become a staple of DC comics, and of Marvel of late, is revisionism. Sometimes it's as simple as just bringing out a new book with an old character whose title failed, but somehow still garners a certain amount of fan interest, like say Aquaman or Firestorm. Essentially the same, still destined for failure, and as they say, "the definition of insanity is someone who keeps doing the same thing over and over and expects different results."
The more common kind of revisionism, -- more than just simple reintroduction -- is what many call "Vertigo-isation". Basically, you take an old or outdated concept or even just a name, maybe something that most of the comics community has forgotten about completely, and give it a fresh spin. Sometimes it's a complete overhaul like Neil Gaiman's Sandman at other times it may just be an update to the concept, shoehorning it into contemporary storytelling techniques like Will Pfeiffer and Kano's recent update of HERO.
At its most basic, the original Dial H for Hero, was the epitome of wish-fulfillment comics of the time. Every month, you'd have a new person transform into a new hero at the behest of the H-Dial. There were infinite, new and different brightly coloured characters to magically become at the push of a button. Ordinary people could become a Superman-analogue and fight crime. In the modern HERO series, though, that concept has kind of been turned on its ear. The principles are still the same, you've got an updated H-Dial transforming people into heroes, but it has become darker, a new kind of "Be careful what you wish for..." scenario in which everyone is miserable, all the time.
This is, of course, a grand generalisation based on only the first two issues that form the first half of a story-arc, but so far the deconstructionist almost pathological hatred of spandex, is in full swing. Where Pfeiffer is going with it, I couldn't say. It's interesting, but depressing at the same time. In its strive to make things more realistic, to try and ground some of the more fantastical elements, a certain sense of wonder to the comics industry has disappeared. You're no longer awed by four-colour fantasies, the innocence lost.
HERO is but one example of the phenomenon, it abounds across the medium creating dark reflections of its icons.
Hopes and dreams are rarely what they seem to be anymore. They're categorised as pipe dreams, not worth living, or are seen as being superimposed over the harsh light of reality, such as recent issues of Mystic and Stormwatch: Team Achilles have portrayed them as. Mystic taking the idea of a fanboy, ridiculing it, and shoving it into a magical world in which the delusions of what "should be" is made manifest, the fanboy rewriting the plot.
In Stormwatch: Team Achilles, though, the nihilism runs deeper. The core concept presents itself as a military group sanctioned by the UN to take out superpowered beings -- regardless almost of which side of the battle, "good or evil", they happen to fall on -- due to distrust and fear, and a pre-emptive strike against the "gods" who might one day decided to rule us instead of protect us. That's just the concept, in a recent issue, imposition of will, living out fantasies, and the fact that "everything is wrong" comes crashing down around the head of the story's antagonist -- a man who has the power to transfigure reality within his town to his whims.
A writer even, taken down by a militaristic group.
There's an irony to the whole thing that verges on being pathetic. Pop will eat itself, indeed. I think I just lost my point.
3. Remission
...and for my next trick I will make world debt, human suffering, and Richard Simmons disappear.
When you're a child, you often gravitate to certain ideologies whether consciously or not. You focus on specific memes that interest you, and get passed on through your behaviour, and the types of things you play with. Often times, it will be an iconic character such as Spider-Man, Batman, or Superman, despite children these days not reading many comics, if reading comics at all. Batman himself is such a huge cultural image that regardless of the source, -- the comics, the television show, the animated series, or the films --, he is often considered comics' "most popular character. His influence, design, and stature just lend themselves to the iconography of Western culture. Very few people in North America would fail to recognise the Bat symbol (or the S-shield for that matter).
It seems only fitting and inevitable that such an iconic character would be adapted and integrated into other means of storytelling: comics, film, novels, and now manga. Kia Asamiya's Batman: Child of Dreams isn't the first time a manga artist has taken on Batman -- Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame had a short story in Batman: Black & White -- but it certainly is the longest, clocking in over three hundred pages. Also, strangely enough, it's not a work that shows us the excesses of manga, although it does incorporate many of the sparse backgrounds during action sequences, and is told in a fairly measured "decompressed" manner. Honestly, it's not a work that's too far removed from something like Ed Brubaker's current run featuring the Charlatan systematically removing Batman's rogues gallery in Detective Comics. It's a well-crafted story, no matter which side of the Pacific you're on.
Essentially, as how it was originally produced and published, the book is told in two halves. The first half is a sort of East meets West, as a Japanese news crew comes to Gotham City in order to get an interview with Batman. In it, despite largely being set-up the book moves at a fairly frenetic pace, seeing him run through the gamut of many his major rogues -- Two-Face, the Penguin, the Riddler, and the Joker. ...but they're not his foes. That's part of what adds the intrigue and will propel the story through the second half, turning it around to be West meets East, as Batman must track down the one responsible for "creating" the villains in Tokyo.
Asamiya's artwork throughout the piece is gorgeous. As he said in the interview that accompanies this volume, he was highly influenced for the work by the artists, Frank Miller, Mike Mignola, and Todd McFarlane, which shows in the highly iconic, darkness of Gotham City. There are snippets of capes, shadows, and silhouettes filling the pages. This is not to say that you should expect to see copies of Mignola, Miller, and McFarlane on the pages, but the spirit and approach of their artwork shines through on the page. When we arrive in Tokyo, though, the pages -- and skies, I should add -- open up. Everything becomes brighter, more expansive, and in a way less space is used per page, more room left in the panels. It's a shift in the visual style of the work that instantly tells us, we're somewhere else.
Now, the story itself embodies the ultimate of fan wish-fulfillment. You get to live out your fantasy by literally becoming duplicates of the villain you choose and play out your last moments battling wits -- or just plain battling -- with Batman. There's a certain level of pathos you feel for these wannabe villains, in just how pathetic they are in comparison to the "real thing". It shows that no matter how much you want it, no matter how far you go to achieve it, you can never be the original, and you'll only be a copy that will eventually wind up destroyed.
There's an interesting undercurrent running through Batman: Child of Dreams over this that I don't think I would have noticed were it not for Jonathan Vankin's Vertigo Pop! series, Tokyo. This is the idea of the "visual kei", or the extremes of odd costumes that Japanese pop stars go to and which their fans copy to minute details. In a way, this idea of extreme emulation, extreme fanaticism, is carried over into Child of Dreams with Batman and his villains as the "pop stars". I'm not sure if Asamiya was perhaps inspired by this cult of personality, but it adds an interesting realistic flavour that alludes to the pop culture of Japan. I'm not sure if I were well versed in Japanese culture, I would have noticed more, but this seems to be the predominant one.
At the end of the work, though, Batman is faced with an insane and perverse, dark reflection of himself, one brought about by obsession and fanaticism, delving into the depths of a driven collector's psyche. The original dreamer prevails over a nightmare, showing that hope still can come. I'll leave you with the last words spoken to Batman's "#1 fan":
Careful what you wish for, they say, and take care, lest your dreams consume you.
Next Week: Who knows what lurks in the hearts of men?
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment