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Comment: Shock And Awe
FEED 'EM, AMUSE 'EM OR SHOCK 'EM Hush, children, for the angel of death is abroad in comicsland. You may almost hear the beating of his wings in the turning of the pages: Hawkeye was killed for being unable to sustain his own miniseries; some blonde bint called Gwen who died in a comic published before I was born was revealed to have had sex with a man with a very bad hairdo, causing the spider-folk to be up in arms; and a case of creative bankruptcy resulted in a female z-lister getting raped and killed pour encourager les autres.
Ah, the joys of cheap surprise. As Fitzgerald said about audiences, you gotta feed 'em, amuse 'em, or shock 'em. This year's fashion seems to be shock. It makes sense: you can't exactly tape candy bars to comic books, and comedy writing takes real skill. The problem is that shock is a devalued currency in comics. Magneto dies! ... For about three issues. Hal Jordan has been resurrected, and sooner or later Jean Grey, Hawkeye and, if Keith Giffen has his way, even poor Sue Dibny will be dragged back from their brief and unquiet stay in the dirt. In comics, the Big Sleep is more of a Big Nap. Although IDENTITY CRISIS promises that its deaths will have permanent and far-ranging effects on the DC Universe, it's hard to take these promises seriously. THE CURRENTLY DEAD The angel of death takes his victims from the ranks of the human, as well: Superman, in the form of the immensely brave actor and activist Christopher Reeve, also fell beneath his touch last week. But nothing can stop Hollywood. A new Superman is already being prepared to replace Reeves' incarnation on our silver screen, and it isn't Jim Caveziel - which is bad news for Mark Millar's pocketbook, after he bet $1000 that it would be. According to the latest reports, the role will go to a relatively unknown actor named Brandon Routh. We won't see Jesus as Superman anytime soon. It's a pity, because Jesus could teach people a lot about comics. I've always believed that what people want to see in comics (and, indeed, in any story) is people prettier than us, who suffer more than us. That's why there was such an outpouring over the death of Christopher Reeve. A star actor, handsome by anyone's estimation, struck down in a terrible accident while doing the thing he loved. He struggled back against his paralysis to have a meaningful life in the spotlight. Prettier than us; suffered more than us. Gave us hope and inspiration. Same thing with Jesus. Christianity works only if we believe that Jesus suffered more than we did. That's why if you go into St Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, there's only an itty-bitty crucifix and Jesus is just lounging around on it, looking bummed that he's got last year's Nokia. But if you go into a poor village, the crucifix is massive and dominates the space, and Jesus is up there bloody and twisting in pain. That was Mel Gibson's stroke of genius in filming THE PASSION as a Catholic splatter film - no matter how bad your life was, Jim Caveziel was suffering more than you. Bloody, but unbowed. So if you're going to give us pretty spandex people, and you want to shock us, do not devalue the coins of truly horrifying things like a hero's death, or a heroine's rape, which for many women would be a fate worse than death. I'm told some comics companies keep lists of their active and inactive characters, with the ones that have been killed off listed as "currently dead". I love that: currently dead. The grave has become just a brief inconvenience, and rather than feeling pathos for these beautiful creatures who face situations so much worse than our own, yet who struggle on nonetheless, we just count the issues until the inevitable reboot. Compare the use of shock and death in recent spandex comics to how it's used in MONSTER, the book you'll all be talking about next year. Naoki Urasawa's tightly-paced serial-killer thriller will be out in English from Viz in 2005, but Eurofilth like me can buy them from France of Spain, where all sixteen books are already available. The book positively drips with blood, but it works for two reasons. First, Urasawa makes us really care about the secondary characters, and it really is surprising when they die. There are no "fodder" characters. Everyone has an arc, especially the victims. Second, people stay dead, and their death deeply affects the other characters. MONSTER really is the best thing on the shelves right now. DECOMPRESSION DEPRESSION While we're on the subject of devalued coinage, I might as well mention decompression - a fad that has hopefully had its day. All week I've been laughing at this parody of AVENGERS #503. Once the cheap shock has been used, the lack of story in many of these decompressed books shines through. Is it worth spending $3 to buy the single issue, when you'll read it in under two minutes? Of course, only a handful of other books on the shelves suffer from the sort of flaccid writing seen in AVENGERS #503, but they tend to be very high-profile ones. I find it amusing that Marvel is only charging $2.25 for this double-sized issue of Avengers, possibly recognising the amount of padding in the story. Compare AVENGERS #503 to another Marvel comic: Steranko's first NICK FURY trade. There was so much story in one 24-page Fury book that you were actually tired after reading it. A single issue took as long to read as the average decompressed six-issue trade. Where story is concerned, less isn't more. More is more, and all the double splash pages in the world (or, if Bendis, pages and pages of cute repartee with no story) can't make up for nothing happening. Here's a game. Take AVENGERS or ULTIMATE NIGHTMARE or latter-day PLANETARY or SECRET WAR or one of the other "someday, my plot will come" books, and see if you can rewrite them like Stan Lee. It's amazing how often you can take an entire 22-page book and bring it back down to one six-panel page of Stan-the-Man-style condensed action, without losing a thing. And remember, $3 is one third the price of a cinema ticket and one third the price of a manga - both of which give a good couple of hours of entertainment. The buyer's cost/benefit ratio for decompressed series doesn't measure up against other forms of entertainment, and fans are starting to realise this. PASSING STORMS This week Dan DiDio was made 'Vice President - Executive Editor, DC Universe', reflecting the major positive effect he's had on DC since coming on board in January 2002. DiDio was previously responsible for all of DC's output, core DCU or otherwise. He is clearly (and deservedly) flavour of the month at Warner Brothers, and his promotion sends interesting messages about Vertigo and WildStorm - especially WildStorm. It hints that they are no longer priorities at DC. Let's face it, DC now have what they wanted when they bought WildStorm: Jim Lee is back in the fold, chained to his drawing table, and helping to push books like SUPERMAN and BATMAN above the 200,000 sales level. So what use is WildStorm to them? Also, WildStorm is publishing a comparatively scant number of comics these days, none of which sell over 30,000 copies (most sell below 20,000). By comparison, Marvel tends to axe anything that sells below 30,000 copies a month. (Remember that one issue of a Big Two comic book costs upwards of $12,000 to produce, just in terms of fees to the writer, artist, colourist and letterer. Then there are editorial costs, promotion, printing, distribution, retailer discounts...) Also, WildStorm is seeing previously faithful creators such as Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips take their new projects to other publishers. Lastly, it's rumoured that WildStorm is increasingly being used as outsourced editorial for sub-editing the English-language translations of CMX and Humanoids books. It'll be interesting to see what happens in San Diego over the next year. Vertigo is on safer ground, of course. It has the goth dollar sewn up, and the CONSTANTINE movie (love it or hate it) means that Warner Brothers thinks there may yet be gold in some of them thar adult funnybooks. But still, not one of its books regularly sells over 30,000 copies. HELLBLAZER sold less than 15,000 copies in August, and HUMAN TARGET limps along at below 9,000 copies. The problem for Vertigo is that it used to be the only game in town for what it did: interesting, often creator-owned, cutting-edge mature reader books. Now it isn't even the best at what it does. Oni, IDW, and a number of others have overtaken it. Vertigo has become a place for occasional revamps of DCU characters, SANDMAN PRESENTS: THIRD DEMIGOD ON LEFT, NEXT TO DINOSAUR, PAGE 76, SEASON OF MISTS, and side projects for Shelly Bond's British friends. That's fine, but I remember the old Vertigo, and I keep wishing they would light the comics world on fire again. This raises the question of whether the Big Two should even bother with creator-owned series, other than occasionally indulging 'Very Big Names' by bringing a proven-success side-project in house, like POWERS. The fans of DC and Marvel don't seem to want creator-owned projects, while fans of other, smaller publishers seem much more open minded. Though creators may think that having a DC or Marvel logo on their creator-owned book automatically translates to higher sales, Judd Winick's CAPER and Joe Kelly's ENGINEHEAD both sold only 7,500 copies in August. There's nothing wrong with a publisher focusing purely on its cache of existing characters. Hell, Shakespeare only wrote one 'creator-owned' play in his life: THE TEMPEST. Everything else was a revamp or a re-telling of an existing story. But will the Big Two ever admit that the creator-owned story is something they're no good at? Now that would be a shock. Alex de Campi is a comics writer whose projects include the Eisner-nominated SMOKE with Igor Kordey and the forthcoming KAT & MOUSE with Federica Manfredi. 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. |
