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Editorial: Camera Obscura - All Action
UNSPOILT BY PROGRESS I'm no longer writing columns, apparently. I'm writing editorials, in the shiny new format that Antony debuted last week. This is a huge blessing to me, as with any luck, it'll give me leave to write a little less about comics, and more about some things that actually interest me. Did I say that out loud? Whoops. Oh, don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't enjoy reading comics. It's just that I'm finding it next to impossible to write even 1000 words a month about them. There's very little I have to say about them that'll fit into that, either because there's just not enough material in one topic, or because I'd need to ramble for pages in order to work out what I'm thinking. So here's a new take. Shorter things. Probably. This time round, a quick look at a few different takes on the superhero/action genre. SATELLITE ECSTATICA I bought PROMETHEA #23 yesterday. PROMETHEA is one of only two comics I buy in hardcover, when the collections come out. It's the only one beautiful enough to justify it. It's just about the only comic I read that utterly astounds me with every issue. This despite the fact that I've known the basis of every issue for the last ten or so. Magical bollocks to half of you, sure, but a fucking blinding display of craft. I would sell my mother to get to read the scripts, because even with Alan Moore's legendarily verbose script writing there's still at least one page every issue where I'm left wondering how he communicated the look and layout to the artist, because even with the thing lying in front of me, I can barely describe some of this shit. I really don't care what other immensely clever and worthy comics you're buying. If you're not buying this, then you're immensely stupid, and I don't want to speak to you. It is the only comic on the market that provides me with any kind of sense of awe and splendour. This is how you do superhero comics right. By not doing superhero comics. GET THE GIRL! KILL THE BADDIES! In a similar vein, last week's GLOBAL FREQUENCY. I don't know that it's going to have anything like the impact THE AUTHORITY had on storytelling and the approach to action comics, which is a shame, because as much as I enjoyed THE AUTHORITY, it was much less impressive than this. Warren Ellis, talking in his Bad Signal email newsletter, described the book as "informationally dense" and points out that he thinks "it shows that a commercial action book can be done without pervert suits". I'm not ready to be quite as effusive about this as I am about PROMETHEA. But as I said, this is another impressive display of craft, packing an awful lot into its 22 pages, and demanding a lot more effort, I suspect that the much bigger and more "widescreen" efforts in most superhero comics these days. This pleases me, because I was starting to feel like action comics had got locked in to the notion that serious action had to be "widescreen" or nothing. So I'm hoping that this marks the start of a bit more variation in mainstream action comics. Yeah, for the most part that means superheroes, but I'm still hoping that we'll grow out of that, too. ORGONE ACCUMULATOR THE FILTH continues to entertain and derange as Grant Morrison take us into a world of perversion and psychoses, and with Chris Weston's aid, manages to make it work while half the cast looks like something out of Thunderbirds on bad acid. This one has my attention just for being bloody weird. Morrison is always madly inventive, and there's the sense here that he's been told he can go almost as wild as he likes. What interests me, though, is that after THE INVISIBLES spending so much time making the point that "Us/Them" or "Good/Bad" is not a useful model to apply, and that binary thinking is not really helping, this book is unashamedly black-and-white, at least up to this point. Sure, The Hand aren't the nicest people in the world, but they're better than the people they're fighting... For all this is a Vertigo book, and is clearly for "mature" readers, it's actually more morally straightforward than a lot of Morrison's superhero work (judging, I admit, on the basis of an incomplete series). It's a weird blend of costumed action and sexual horror story, and I'm enjoying seeing how he makes this unlikely mishmash work. But, and this is the important bit: It's massively funny, and very pretty. And I want those covers blown up into posters. DEF CON ONE I couldn't talk about slightly different takes on action comics without mentioning QUEEN & COUNTRY. What makes QUEEN & COUNTRY different, of course, is its higher level of realism. Every bullet fired has a consequence, every action a repercussion. While the previous three books have aimed for the traditional angle on action/superhero stories, and the idea that there's at least a hint of glamour about the proceedings, QUEEN & COUNTRY moves in the opposite direction, trading on a bleak honesty to make the reading as much compelling as exciting. What this leads to is a stronger "soap opera" element in this book than in the others. While there are plenty of tense moments, of action sequences, the interest is as much in watching the characters deal with the lives they lead, and interact with one another away from the action. The danger in this is that the desire to watch them interact away from the firing line, as it were, would pull against the demands of the plot, the need to keep events moving and keep the tension up, so I'm enjoying watching this book balance the two beautifully. X Y & ZEE Nothing to do with action comics, this last one, but Raymond Briggs was in the papers with week, talking about how he'd like to be a 'proper' author. I'm really not sure how well known Briggs is in the rest of the world, but over here, he's one of the nation's most respected children's authors, despite being responsible for Aled Jones singing "Walking In The Air". He doesn't think of himself as making comics, and I'm not about to tell him he should - but I find it interesting that he finds it so hard and painstaking to produce the sort of works he does. In comics terms, he works astonishingly slowly, producing a new book every year or two. In fairness, these books are always exquisite looking, and generally utterly captivating to young and old alike. But they're published by book publishers, and promoted properly in bookstores and in the media. And as a result, he can spend years working on them, rather than being forced to rush and meet some arbitrary deadline. Obviously, really, when you think about it... Alasdair Watson is the author of the Eagle Award-nominated RUST. Ninth Art endorses the principle of Ideological Freeware. The author permits distribution of this article by private individuals, on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice. Back. |