We Are Glass

From flashbacks to footnotes, it seems the comics reading audience is too used to being spoonfed its stories. Brent Keane wants his expectations confounded - and his Grant Morrison undiluted.
20 May 2002

Some weekends ago, I viewed in rapid succession several examples of Hollywood's recent output, including SCARY MOVIE, JOSIE & THE PUSSYCATS, and M Night Shyamalan's UNBREAKABLE. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was UNBREAKABLE that made me sit up and take notice - but for all the wrong reasons.

There's a sequence halfway through the film where, in a fairly obvious bit of exposition, Elijah Price (Samuel L Jackson) discloses the nature of the supranatural talents displayed by security officer David Dunn (Bruce Willis).

As the plainsong title gives away, Dunn is invulnerable to all harm, but not without a weakness: water (i.e. death by drowning). Price relates this in terms of the comic book superheroes he has made his life's work, stating that for all intents and purposes, water is Dunn's 'kryptonite'.

And with that one line, the movie loses any and all verisimilitude. Shyamalan spent the best part of an hour building and reinforcing the reality in which these characters exist, and then undoes that work for the sake of making sure the audience gets the point.

It smacks of test marketing and script doctoring, and weakens the film severely. Never mind the laughable statistics presented about comic books and their readers at the film's opening, the 'twist' ending, or Robin Wright's one-note performance (essentially Jenny from FORREST GUMP reheated and reprised) - in that one moment, you can see the strings. Once that happens, suspension of disbelief goes out the window.

In comics, seeing the strings is something we don't tend to notice as much - because we've come to expect it, even appreciate it. Footnotes. Flashbacks. Long-winded exposition (which more often than not combines the previous two). Editorial in-jokes. References to other titles. Dated pop-culture name-dropping. Some of it subtle, most of it painfully obvious. Always with the intent of making sure the audience gets the point. It's a security blanket, a means of making sure that the readership feels comfortable while observing their fictional spectacle of choice.

This can be traced back to the early days of Marvel Comics, where Stan Lee stepped out from behind the editor's desk and took on the role of a vaudevillian huckster, whipping True Believers into a frenzy of anticipation.

This trend of 'editor-as-host' has continued through to the present day, one hand guiding the reader to his intended destination, the other pickpocketing the reader's wallet. Not a terrible thing, in and of itself - truly it has been said that nothing succeeds like excess - but it's also become something of a double-edged sword.

If readers are unhappy, they entreat the editorial staff to make changes (witness Lee's frequent proclamation that "You guys (the readers) are the real bosses!") - but if those changes do not meet audience expectations, the editors are then pilloried, charged with the heinous crime of 'editorial interference'. Damned if they do, damned if they don't; GREEN LANTERN's whole Hal Jordan/Kyle Rayner debate being an excellent case in point.

It's not that much of a stretch to state that the audience for superhero comics (to cite one genre) expects certain things from its entertainments, much like the audiences for pro wrestling, country and western music, or certain sci-fi franchises. If those requirements are met, then all is right with the world. When those expectations are confounded - well, that's when the trouble starts.

Take for example 'Rock Of Ages', one of the JLA arcs scripted by Grant Morrison - it completely befuddled the superhero readers, leading the story to be roundly slated in the pages of Wizard Magazine (although I suspect that speaks more to the mentality behind Wizard than anything else).

Descriptions such as "confusing," "hard to follow" and "needs a roadmap and a case of aspirin to make sense of it" were bandied about freely, which did 'Rock Of Ages' a disservice; it was a triumph of considered storytelling, which benefited from having close attention paid to its proceedings.

In stories like that and, most famously, THE INVISIBLES, Morrison has chosen not to signpost the intended direction of his plots, instead leaving the readers to make their own connections and conclusions. This Morrison trait is equally evident in books such as KID ETERNITY and ARKHAM ASYLUM, even going back as far as ZENITH: PHASE TWO. Morrison chooses not to underestimate the audience's intelligence, and his current work on NEW X-MEN continues the trend.

Going further back: does anybody remember TYRANNY REX? It was a short-lived 2000 AD serial - the brainchild of John Smith (VAMPIRELLA) and Steve Dillon (PREACHER). The first two adventures of Tyranny, a saurian artist/assassin, were lightweight filler, but the third was a deliberate exercise in testing the audience's patience.

'Soft Bodies' was five episodes of random violence and snide remarks, and it isn't until the next-to-last page that it's divulged that we've seen just that: random episodes from Tyranny's career. No context or rationale is given - we just accept this as a fait accompli.

And that is essentially the thrust of it: it's about the journey, not the destination. There is no pat ending (the last page of 'Soft Bodies' is even more of a head-scratcher), and this is something to be applauded - especially in a day and age where we can intuit how a story will end by reading a review, blurb or solicitation. It's all well and good to have the audience in on the joke (as was the case with SCARY MOVIE), or to tell jokes in order to distract from the inane plot (cf. JOSIE & THE PUSSYCATS), but to tell the same joke repeatedly - as a lot of superhero comics have done and continue to do - borders on insulting. UNBREAKABLE mis-stepped on the side of caution by repeating the 'joke' to make sure the audience got the point. And I didn't laugh.

We don't pay our money to be treated like glass. Publishers should take off the kid gloves and be willing to experiment - there's no reason that expectations can't be met, surpassed or even confounded.

Most readers are probably smart enough to work things out on their own - so challenge their expectations once in a while, instead of singing the same old song. Novelty, as opposed to comfort. Different, rather than same.

Get the point?

Brent Keane is a regular contributor to Ninth Art and PopImage and has also written for Opi8, Sequential Tart and Nerdbait.

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