Hey there, special internet friends. Justin again. I can do more than just make lists and slight Will Eisner’s contributions to comics as a medium, you know! I can also talk a little bit about the superhero comics that grabbed my imagination by the yarbles as a youth, and how I engage with them as an adult.

For example:

People are still hacked off about Amazing Spider-Man and the “unmarriage,” right? Aside from the continuity issues (which, you know, whatever), the most common complaint I’ve seen is the allegation that Peter Parker has become a shiftless, pathetic loser who’s in his mid-twenties but hasn’t matured at all since high school.

However, scarcely more than a year before, a Peter Parker who had managed to snag a full-time roster spot on the Avengers (complete with rent-free living) and become Tony Stark’s protégé was making fans equally uncomfortable.

Do you see, like I do, the weird sort of pulling that’s always been at the heart of Spider-Man as a continuing narrative, threatening to tear decades of uninterrupted stories apart? In order for fans to be happy, Peter Parker has to grow and change, but not too much.

The conceptual hook of Spider-Man back in the sixties, of course, was that he was a fallible superhero. Unlike Superman or the Flash, Spider-Man could make mistakes, and this made him relatable, because if you were a superhero, you’d probably screw it up once in awhile, too. This is all well and good, but it’s complicated by the Marvel innovation of having these characters change with the times and age, however slowly. See, Peter Parker’s been Spider-Man for … ooh, let’s be charitable and say ten years, comic-time.

Shouldn’t he have gotten really good at this at some point?

I mean, surely Peter should have learned how to juggle his private life and his superhero life by now. Stable relationships. Should probably have finished college, gotten a cushy job at a research laboratory; at the very least, he should be the photo editor at the Daily Bugle and not still freelancing.

But something about that doesn’t sit right: This portrait of what Spider-Man should be assumes a constant line of upward success. And that doesn’t always happen in real life, does it? We get laid off, get sick, get a run of bad luck. Get set back. This is what Spider-Man, after 47 years of stories or so, represents. Because Peter Parker’s life isn’t really one unending train ride of agony and torture…

…it’s one of mediocrity.

Imagine his life from an outside perspective (Mark Waid, it should be noted, does this very well). Peter was picked Most Likely To Succeed in high school, I’ll bet. Preternaturally gifted in science, backed by a strong work ethic. Even Flash Thompson and his pals, on some level, must’ve had it in the back of their heads that it’s kids like Parker who go on to become millionaires. But then one day, Peter seems to change. His work gets shoddier, he becomes undependable. Sure, there’s bound to be a rough patch when his uncle just got killed, but this change in behavior lasts long after any recognizable period of mourning. Suddenly it’s years later, and he never seems to have any money, he freeloads off his aunt, and he can never keep a damn appointment.

You might know somebody very much like that. And sure, he could just be lazy. But it’s possible, if you were to look into it, that you might find out that she was in an accident as a teenager and suffers from debilitating headaches that keep him from holding down a job. You might find out he had his credit card stolen and had his credit rating ruined. You might find out she moved out to Montana to be with this guy, but he took all her savings and invested it in his friend’s business that tanked, and when she moved back home she was penniless and alone. You might find out he suffers from clinical depression but has never been diagnosed.

You might find out he’s Spider-Man. And, if you’re the one that everybody’s written off, you might find out you’re Spider-Man, too.

And that, I believe, is how you reconcile “growth and change” and “not too much.” Because Peter Parker gets knocked down by the world all the time. When I was a kid, I remember when he’d quit being Spider-Man, gotten a swell research job in Oregon, and was expecting his first child with Mary Jane. And within a couple of months, Norman Osborn had basically rigged it so that the baby was gone and Peter was back freelancing at the Daily Bugle, taking classes part-time at college, and living with an elderly aunt (albeit a different one) again. Granted, most of our setbacks in life aren’t caused by psychotic, billionaire industrialists (or possibly they are and I am just extremely naïve), but look, the conflicts in superhero comics are entirely symbolic anyway, all right?

(Aside: The problem with the changes that came about from “One More Day,” of course, is that instead of being caused by an external agent like the Green Goblin, Peter Parker basically asked for them himself. I understand that, and I agree that, with all of the reality-warping, way-out-there ways of retooling continuity available to you in a superhero universe, Marvel having its flagship hero make a deal with the devil is a dumb way of doing it. But I’m really enjoying Amazing Spider-Man right now, and at some point, don’t you have to stop punishing Dan Slott, Mark Waid and the rest for things somebody else did a couple years ago?)

Spider-Man is a million-dollar franchise, and don’t you forget it; Marvel can’t have it stray too much from whatever they’re putting on backpacks at Target, or what made the character so popular in the first place. So you get cyclical growth: they let him mature a little bit and send him off in new directions, but then they have to hit the reset button every few years. And that is Peter Parker’s Damn Good Excuse: he’s never going to grow up because he’s never going to be allowed to grow up.

But just like Sisyphus, he keeps rolling that rock up the hill. Sure, maybe I’ll try to go back to college, maybe I’ll try to get that new job, maybe I’ll try to strike up a meaningful relationship with that girl, even though I know the Green Goblin or Mephisto or a nostalgic editor is going to take it all away from me eventually. That sounds paranoid, but it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you, is it?

But Spider-Man tries, dangnabbit. And if we’re supposed to leave the cosmic, epic triumphs to the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, maybe we can let “the superhero who could be you” have those small, moral victories.

Hi, I’m Jaime Weinman, of Something Old, Nothing New and TV Guidance; thanks to MGK for inviting me into his domain.

Now, I love snarky comments about Betty Cooper’s insanity, or Archie comics panels and the improvement thereof. But I’m also interested in trying to learn more about the non-official history of Archie as a company and a force in comics, something that can drive a person almost as crazy as Betty Cooper. Trying to do research on Archie comics is frustrating for two reasons. One is that the company’s great artists and writers — and they really did have some of the best in the ’50s and ’60s — mostly died without being interviewed by anybody. Harry Lucey’s mastery of body language and comedy has been rediscovered in the last few years, but he died in a town in Arizona without so much as an obitiuary or a press release from the company. Samm Schwartz (Jughead) was one of the funniest cartoonists in comics history, but there was only one short article on him in his lifetime, and at least one book mentions him mainly as a guy who didn’t like Steve Ditko’s artwork when he was an editor at Tower Comics. (Interesting, but not really the most important aspect of his career.)

The other problem is that the company itself has always treated artists as interchangeable cogs, even more so than most comics companies, and even now they have little interest in promoting the reputations of particular artists and writers. This is, after all, a company that made up the story that John Goldwater “created” Archie once Bob Montana was no longer alive to point out otherwise.

A happy exception is Bob Bolling, creator of Little Archie. Bolling is the exception to a lot of rules. The Archie company allowed him to sign his work at a time when almost nobody else got that privilege; they let him cultivate an extraordinarily personal, quirky style of writing and drawing in their pages, and they’ve even given him some promotion, as you can see in the image above (from his second issue of Little Archie). The happiest part is that he’s still alive and working, and therefore has been able to give interviews and get some acclaim for being one of the greatest and most distinctive talents in comics.

continue reading "Bob Bolling And The Pursuit Of Melancholy Innocence"

“In the early years of the 21st Century, America and the world reeled in horror in response to a vicious, unwarranted attack to some of the country’s most cherished institutions. I refer of course to Marvel Comics miniseries Ultimatum …”  – Introduction to the Jeph Loeb chapter of Lloyd DeGroot’s “They Really Mean It: America’s War on Subtext”

I’m pretty sure it was during the scene where Batman and Black Canary have sex in costume after mercilessly beating the living shit out of a bunch of thugs that my mind broke. In that moment of epiphany, I recognized All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder for what it was. And I knew, with a cosmic certainty, that my prior view of the series, informed as it was by the quaint notion that mainstream superhero comic books were vehicles for stories, was based on a faulty premise.

Frank Miller wasn’t writing a story in ASBARTBW, I realized. He was making a joke, making it quite literally at the expense of DC and the book’s readers. The joke starts like this: Frank Miller, creator of The Dark Knight Returns, walks into a bar and–no, sorry, that was what happened prior to the ’06 Eisner Awards. Bugger. I’m terrible at telling jokes, but the point of this one was for Frank Miller to see just how far he could go, how many lines he could cross using one of North America’s best-known comic book characters, before someone made him stop.

“OK, first up I want the first issue to feature a serious reporter lounging around in lingerie and high heels, and there’s got to be at least one ass-shot. Also, Batman’s going to abuse Dick Grayson. Is that all right…? Yeah? How about Batman and the Canary having on-panel sex in costume? No problem, huh…? OK, I want Batman and everyone else in the book to not call him Batman, in this book, he’s the God-damn Batman (and he’s got the superpower to grow a beard inside five minutes.) Really, I can do that? Hmmm… Well how about this: I insist that you actually print the four-letter words I write and then put black bars over them, rather than just printing black bars, so that I’ll be the first writer ever to get the c-word printed in a Batman comic… ‘Sure thing, Frank’? Wow. Times have changed. OK… in #12, I want a full-on orgy between Batman, Black Canary, Batgirl, Robin, Ace the Bat-hound and , what the hell, let’s throw Commissioner Gordon in there wearing a dress…”

I bet DC would let him do it, too, as long as it stayed in the top ten. Anyway, it’s clear to me now that it’s all a joke, one that, like the comedy of Andy Kaufman, is probably funnier to think about than to actually experience. Fortunately for the sanity of people that actually care about the wellbeing of 40 to 70-year old corporate trademarks, Miller seems to have gotten bored with the whole thing and moved onto doing comic and/or film sequels to 300 and Sin City, presumably in the hopes that one or the other will help people forget what he did to The Spirit.

On the surface, Marvel’s Ultimatum has many similarities to All-Star Batman and Robin The Boy Wonder: it wallows in excess; it features well-known characters acting wildly out of character; both have artists that want to be Jim Lee. But while it would be nice to think that Ultimatum, like ASBARTBW, is an elaborate joke, I… can’t. I mean, I could, and I started writing a post that treated it as such (it was going to feature the “Ultimatum Truth Movement”, full of people with wildly differing conspiracy theories regarding why the series was so bad and who was secretly responsible.)1 But that post wasn’t coming together, and in kicking it around, I gave way too much thought to Ultimatum, and god help me, I think I actually started to understand it, at least a little…

Ultimatum poses a variety of questions for its readers:
-Which tastes better: Blob or Wasp?
-Was Ultimate Magneto always a total pussy?
-When did Jeph Loeb start doing crystal meth?
-Did they just–? They couldn’t, could they? I mean, what the fuck…?”

It even forces the reader to ask some serious questions, most of them variations of “How could this happen?”

Remember when people were afraid Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada were going to close down the “616” Marvel Universe and make the more modern, less continuity-laden Ultimate line the “official versions” of the characters? That was a good idea, what happened to that? It seems like, somewhere along the way, it was decided that the one thing that would make Ultimate-style stories better was decades of convoluted backstory. Instead of shuttering the Marvel Universe after Civil War (which ended on exactly the kind of upbeat note that a major superhero-centric continuity should end on)2 , everything in the Marvel Universe got Ultimatized.

Meanwhile, the Ultimate Universe was increasingly watered down. A creative brain-drain saw Ultimate U creators put to work on 616 Marvel titles and/or hired away from the company. Writers other than Ultimate architects Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar added a bunch of stuff to the mythos, some of which was interesting, most of which was unnecessary, all of which made the whole endeavour more convoluted and less welcoming to new readers.3

Eventually, all the hot creators (Bendis notwithstanding) were working elsewhere, while the Ultimate Line was left to guys like Robert Kirkman and Mike Carey (rock-solid talents, the both of them, but outside of Walking Dead and {knock on wood} The Unwritten, writers that didn’t have the kind of fanbase of a Bendis or a Millar and frankly weren’t going to get them, as Bendis and Millar largely did, based on their Ultimate contributions.)

Eventually, someone at Marvel likely noticed that the original versions of the company’s franchises were selling better than the Ultimate ones, and probably started wondering what the point of the Ultimate Universe was. The obvious answer was, “It’s a place that Bendis can write Spider-Man as a high school kid, which he seems to enjoy.” Nice for Bendis, but it’s not much of a raison d’etre for an entire imprint.

They could’ve shut things down then, or mostly shut them down, letting Bendis continue to do that thing he does so well on Ultimate Spider-Man. Or they could’ve kept the line going as it was, until it stopped being worth it at all. Instead, they decided to try and resuscitate the Ultimate books by making them even more Ultimate.

I am not without sympathy for Jeph Loeb. He had a thankless task, trying to find a way to differentiate the Ultimate Universe from its Marvel counterpart after that counterpart had co-opted most of the Ultimate line’s positive aspects. Loeb was ready to take things to the next level, but all that was left to take there were elements that, uh, maybe weren’t so good.

That didn’t stop them from getting taken to the next level anyway. Mark Millar’s Ultimates was a Michael Bay film in comic book form. Jeph Loeb’s Ultimate output apparently took its cues from Eli Roth.

It’s easy to get snarky about Ultimatum’s descent into depths of superhero decadence previously unexplored in a mainstream capes ‘n’ tights comic. So I have, because I like doing easy things. But I believe a critic who’s looking for something more than a punchline has to consider what the intent behind a given piece was, and base their criticism on how successful the creators were in achieving their goals. Looking at the big picture, assuming Loeb was tasked with taking the Ultimate line and doing something that could only be done there, something that would get a lot of attention… in that context, I can see where the arbitrary wholesale murder of numerous major characters might not automatically register as the apocalyptically bad idea it obviously is in retrospect.

That said, most ideas, even great ones, can’t carry a story on their own. Even giving Marvel and co. the benefit of the thematic doubt, when it came to execution, for whatever reason, Ultimatum was a swing and a miss. I’m just not sure it wasn’t a swing worth taking under the circumstances, or how much it actually missed by.

So what happens now? Obviously, just ending the Ultimate Comics imprint is a non-starter. If Marvel’s going to do multiple Noir books, there’s no way they’re letting something as once-popular as the Ultimate U go. So: do they embrace the New Direction of the Ultimate line? Do they try something altogether new and different? Or do they do they fall back on the creators who made the line a success in the first place while trying to distance the line from Ultimatum by making “Ultimate” branding as unobtrusive as possible without eliminating it altogether?

Yeah, if I were them I wouldn’t be trying new and different right now, either.

-Foley

1. Dan Didio figured prominently, as the brilliant puppetmaster who activated DC’s secret sleeper agent, Joe Quesada. [↩]
2. Which isn’t to suggest Civil War itself didn’t have a very Ultimate line philosophy underpinning it, or even that it was a particularly good story. All I’m saying for the moment is that it would’ve been a decent place to stop telling a fifty-year long story and concentrate on stories that didn’t revolve around which cafe Peter Parker hung out at in the sixties. Or his wife. [↩]
3. Bendis himself didn’t help things when he rushed headlong into Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, then reversed course and decided some, most, or all of it never happened–I’m not entirely clear on that myself… [↩]

It’s rare that you find a historical hero who is instantly anachronistic, but Miss Liberty is that hero. Count the stars on her top (which, at the time, would have probably only have been suitable for a really, really weird prostitute, but never mind that now). At a bare minimum she has sewn 24 into the fabric. This, at a time when there were thirteen states. Presumably Miss Liberty was either innumerate or very, very optimistic.

But she can’t be optimistic, because her reasons for wearing the ridiculous costume in the first place are inherently pessimistic – she was worried that if she openly opposed the British, that the British would retaliate by doing bad stuff to her brother who was captive in Britain. Given the even-then large population of the colonies and the multiple-week travel time, this seems terribly unlikely; given the general lack of anything resembling a census or organized databases of geneological information it seems nearly impossible. Perhaps this was merely an excuse; Ms. Lynn decided that, by gum, she was going to put on her ridiculous costume better suited to the mid-18th century (at least in terms of state count) and fight the British with a sword and whip.

Also note that Miss Liberty was eventually crushed to death by the Liberty Bell, which definitely earns her a spot on the Stupidest Superhero Deaths Of All Time roster. I mean, at least Batman was shot with magic death eyebeams rather than, say, being smothered by bats. Miss Liberty’s Liberty-Bell-themed death is worthy of The Puzzler. “You called yourself Miss Liberty and your real name is Bell! Now you’re dead because of the Liberty Bell! PUZZLER!”

Although she is quite sad, she is a patriotic-type hero, and the bar is set lower for them. I didn’t make the rules. Well, I did, but in this case it’s more of a societal trend re: comical books.

Bullseye. I ranted about this on a podcast a while back but fuck it, he’s still here so let me say it again: I do not know when Bullseye became the new Joker and I don’t care, because Bullseye fucking sucks. Bullseye was always perfectly decent in times of yore, and it wasn’t because the writers were golden gods or because I was twelve1; it was because Bullseye was used properly. IE, he would show up, kill some people, get his ass kicked by Daredevil, and then not appear for a year or two. Bullseye, back then, was something you could look forward to. He didn’t get tossed into world-beating events because he wasn’t a world-beater. He was a guy who the Kingpin hired. That was his niche.

Nowadays? He has his own miniseries. He’s in Dark Avengers, and being one of the Dark Avengers means he’s in six other comic books every other month as well. (It’s not like he was underexposed previously, either.) And every time Bullseye shows up, writers have to dance around the fact that Bullseye is fundamentally kind of a joke. “He can turn anything into the deadliest thrown weapon on earth!” Hooray for him. Half the people in the Marvel Universe are fucking bulletproof and the other half can dodge anything he throws, which basically makes Bullseye really good at killing Karen Page and people with their back turned.

At least when the Joker was this overexposed, you could kind of justify it mentally with a “okay, maybe he doesn’t have powers, but his sheer craziness makes him so unpredictable he’ll survive anything!” (See: Salvation Run, wherein that plus the reliable fact of the Joker’s odd charisma makes him not being killed in the first five minutes plausible.) Plus, even when the Joker is totally outmatched, he’s at least usually pretty entertaining; great Joker writing may be few and far between these days but even mediocre writers can usually manage one or two decent gags and maybe a clever double entendre.

Bullseye is just a cunning thug. He’s not particularly special; he’s just your garden-variety psychopath with a bit of extra talent. There is no reason he should survive any of these superhero fights. And most of his gag lines are “HA! I shot you in the face!” or about on par with that level of ingenuity. Having him elevated to the level he’s at would be like Mr. Zsasz being a big-time deal over in the DCU. People would be all “…so he kills people with a knife. Why doesn’t someone just toss him in jail?” And the Zsasz fanboys would be all “SHUT UP YOU DON’T KNOW HIM LIKE WE DO.”

Tucker Stone recently said that Marvel writers these days were mostly more interested in writing espionage and crime stories than superhero fiction, and he’s right. Which explains a lot about this, really: in crime fiction, Bullseye fits in just fine. He’s the Wack Job, the third-tier mope who gets memorable scenes for being the crazy guy who will do anything. But even with all the trappings, superhero comics are still superhero comics, and Bullseye in anything outside of an issue of Daredevil (or very possibly Amazing Spider-Man) is just a waste of space.

1. Actually I didn’t read any of the classic Daredevil runs until my twenties. Does that still count? [↩]

I CAN MAKE LISTS TOO YOU KNOW

1.) Jerry Siegel. For superheroes in general, but also the idea of superhero “families,” lifespan histories (remember: he invented Superboy as well, not to mention tons of the Superman mythos) and the idea if not the rigorous application of continuity, which has extended beyond superheroes to all aspects of comics, for better or worse. Mort Weisinger gets a lot of credit (sometimes I think too much) for things Siegel initiated.

2.) Stan Lee. There was a ferocious debate in Justin’s post about how much credit Stan deserves versus Steve Ditko or Jack Kirby, but The Man worked with both of them plus Bill Everett so he certainly isn’t chicken feed. Like it or lump it, the melodramatic dialogue style that more or less dominated comics for thirty plus years is down to Stan Lee; more importantly, so is the notion of “lasting change” in an ongoing comics narrative. (This is the “it wasn’t Jack Kirby who killed off Gwen Stacy” argument.)

3.) Osamu Tezuka. It blew my fucking mind that Tezuka didn’t merit so much as a single mention even in comments on Andrew’s post. What are you all thinking? The guy was the father of modern manga! Astro Boy, Adolf, Black Jack and Buddha should earn anybody a slot on this list as it is, but one as enormously important and influential as Tezuka could be on it for a hundred more reasons besides.

4.) Chester Gould. Dick Tracy introduced true hard-boiled crime and noir pacing to the comics world, where it has made itself a comfortable niche ever since; Gould’s dedication to details of law enforcement marked the genre’s love of verite that has marked it from the beginning; when you thrill to the details in an Ed Brubaker crime comic, it’s because of Gould. Furthermore, his penchant for colorful and even freakish villains was one that superhero comics of the time soon copied; Batman’s rogue’s gallery in particular owes a debt to Gould.

5.) Bob Kanigher. You want war comics? Bob Kanigher gave you war comics. Just about every long-lasting war comic of the 20th century has Kanigher’s stamp on it, everything from standbys like Sgt. Rock and The Unknown Soldier to the freakish outliers like The Haunted Tank and the Creature Commandos. He wasn’t the only one, to be sure, but he wrote war comics for so long that anybody during the time or since imitates or is influenced by his style. And of course, he was also responsible for creating the Metal Men. And Black Canary. And Poison Ivy. And…

6.) Carl Barks. Barks isn’t just responsible for creating great work, but for the idea that funny animals and light, cartoony stories could nonetheless have serious dramatic heft. Herge, Goscinny and Uderzo, and most of the major European comics community will all tell you that Carl Barks was the fucking man and that they slavishly worship him. And this is obvious; they do.

7.) Bill Gaines. Justin pegged both Gaines’ birthing of the incredibly important horror genre and his cultivation of early fandom, but let’s not forget the third important reason to put Bill Gaines on this list, and I’d argue the biggest: motherfucking Mad Magazine, am I right? Damn straight I’m right; Mad’s cynicism and satirical outlook is so pervasive you might almost forget you see it everywhere you look.

8.) Charles Schulz. Because duh.

9.) Will Eisner. Eisner’s influence is hard to track mostly because a lot of it comes out of his intersection with his work as an artist; the extent to which his two disciplines overlapped and fed upon one another is one that I think hasn’t been seen since. I’d argue that Eisner’s premiere influence as a writer was his vast bag of narrative and visual tricks into which every good comics writer dips on occasion.

10.) Robert Crumb. Some might argue that Crumb is more influential as a publisher of underground and alt-comix than as a writer, but I disagree: Crumb’s oft-abrasive, up-front style (but one from which he could shift effortlessly when he felt the need) has been almost copied to death.

11.) Alan Moore. Blah blah Watchmen reinventing superheroes with modern-day story requirements blah blah constantly imitated blee blee blah you know this shit already.

12.) Chris Claremont. Soap-opera plotting married to comical books? It was a revelation back in the day and one that has since been done again and again and again until you just wish they’d all give up and go write slashfic instead sometimes.

13.) Harvey Pekar. Justin said it best: Pekar might not have invented biographical comics (the alt-comix movement was already cranking them out before Pekar ever picked up a pen), but his popularization of the form led to its explosion in the independent comics movement. No Pekar means, I think, no Alison Bechdel, no Marjane Satrapi, no Joe Matt, no Guy DeLisle – or at least, not as we’ve seen them work. And that would suck.

14.) Rumiko Takahashi. Imagine if J.K. Rowling had written and drawn Harry Potter as a comic and achieved the same level of success. Now imagine if she had done it four separate times. That’s what Rumiko Takahashi did with Lum, Maison Ikkoku, Ranma 1/2 and Inuyasha. Tezuka might be the godfather of manga, but it was Takahashi started the true and lasting popularization of manga outside of Japan with her lengthy romantic comedy-fantasy adventures (a formula since imitated by constant mangaka).

15.) Roy Thomas. Other comics writers might be continuity creators or continuity fiends, but Thomas was the first to treat continuity as a purpose in and of itself: stories generating stories with a sort of terrifying rock-rolls-downhill momentum. Nobody has quite approached it the same way since, and it isn’t for lack of trying.

16.) John Byrne. Dislike Byrne all you like (and you have good reason to do so), but he’s dramatically impacted just about every major comics franchise there is and usually in ways that remain memorable and lasting. She-Hulk as a fourth-wall breaker, Doom as noble despot, his powerful reinterpretation of Krypton – the lasting popularity of all of these (even in an era where desperate reattachment to “original concepts” are growing more and more fevered) and more are proof that Byrne, in his glory days, was almost unstoppable.

17.) Dave Sim. Re-envisioned comics storytelling as a marathon rather than a set of sprints. Comics like Y The Last Man or The Invisibles or even The Punisher being obviously intended as one long story arc, told in smaller chunks? That’s on Sim.

18.) Howard Chaykin. Chaykin’s dark, nihilistic work is the spiritual brother of Alan Moore’s at times, but where Moore ultimately still has faith in his protagonists for the most part, Chaykin absolutely doesn’t. Chaykin brought realistic sex and violence into ostensibly superheroic works and changed things.

19.) Frank Miller. Specifically popularized noir as a specific superhero subgenre and one that’s remained popular ever since.

20.) Neil Gaiman. I have Gaiman this low because he’s inspirational rather than influential; nobody really apes his storytelling style or “does it like in Sandman.” That having been said, he popularized the idea of a multiple-protagonist long-form comics story and the use of unconventional points of view. And that’s not nothing.

21.) Grant Morrison. Morrison is in the same boat as Gaiman: more inspirational than influential. What’s more, a lot of reaction to Morrison’s work has been to sharply reverse it rather than revere it (see: New X-Men). On the other hand, it seems like it’s been more than fifteen years since anybody wrote Batman as anything other than Grant Morrison’s version of Batman most of the time (for good or ill), and his vision of Superman seems to similarly be taking hold. Some people can make things stick.

Howdy, MGKommunity. The following is a revised version of a post that first appeared on my blog. Thanks for having me.

The Onion AV Club recently compiled a list called Reinventing the pencil: 21 artists who changed mainstream comics (for better or worse). The purpose of any such list in a magazine or website, whether it’s “100 Greatest ’80s Dance Hits” or “Top 10 Worst-Dressed French Revolutionaries”, isn’t to generate some sort of set-in-stone canon, but rather to invite spirited yet respectful debate and discussion among its readers. (Also: a paycheck for the writer.)

Of course, the result is also a lot of HOW COULD YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN ________ YOU IDIOT THIS IS A LIST OF LIES, but what can you do?

In the same spirit, lucky people that you are, I’ve come up with a list for comics writers in the same spirit as the Onion piece with some things to keep in mind:

1.) These are not ranked in any order, although the top four are set apart as being, I think, harder to argue.
2.) These are going to be superhero-heavy because the original article says “mainstream,” and I tried to keep to that.
3.) This is a “for better or for worse” situation. There’s writers on here I don’t care for and writers I do, writers whose work I like but who’ve influenced a lot of lesser writers, and so on.
4.) There’s going to be editorializing, but it ultimately it’s a non-academic list made by one human guy who has not read every comic book ever. There would be editorializing whether I meant for it or not.

Let’s begin.

1. Stan Lee
’Nuff said? Again, these aren’t really ranked, but I don’t really think there’s a bigger game-changer than Lee. His once-wild innovations and experiments have become the very basic building blocks of mainstream superhero comics. He’s the Beatles of comics writers; you’re influenced by him even if you do not intend to be.

2. Alan Moore
Introducing new levels of literary sophistication to mainstream comics, Moore’s almost inarguably number two behind Lee, though I think (and Moore seems to agree in interviews) that his influence has been mostly destructive. To me, Watchmen demands that you either reject superhero comics for their disconnect from real life and their inability to tackle morally complex situations, or you accept the trade-off of simplicity for symbolism and power. The third option, of course, has been the most prevalent, and that is to simply graft “mature” themes onto “immature” superhero comics and hope that the resultant birth favors the mature side. It usually does not.

3. Chris Claremont
Things Claremont pioneered – or at least popularized – with X-Men: 1.) “Voice” in comics, no matter how hideously purple some of his prose and dialogue can seem today. 2.) Plugging his own interests (Japan, etc.) into the work, often veering into self-indulgence. 3.) Moral ambiguity, resulting in villains who are sympathetic (Magneto) and heroes who cross lines traditional superheroes after the ’40s never would (Wolverine, Gambit). 4.) Probably most importantly, true soap-opera-style plotting over a long run of comics, with complicated character arcs taking years to pay off.

4. Neil Gaiman
On this list for some of the same reasons as Alan Moore but with some distinct differences. For one, Gaiman wore the literary business on his sleeve a bit more, to the point of threatening to become overly showy. For another, Watchmen, for all its achievements, is still a superhero story (or at least a story about superheroes), while Sandman is a fantasy comic. His mature-readers work showed that comics could, after decades of absolute dominance by superheroes, reach a different audience (including that elusive, nigh-mythical female reader).

Those are some of the more obvious ones. Here’s some that I’d think could invite a little more debate.

5. Jerry Siegel
For inventing, along with Joe Shuster, the most basic building blocks of the superhero myth – the costume, the secret identity, the powers, the very name “Superman,” which gave us the word “superhero.”

6. Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson
Because everything that we associate with Batman comes pretty much from them (and I’d say it’s probably the most powerful mythos in all of comics), and for the advent of the superhero with his motivation in tragedy.

7. Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein
For essentially inventing the horror comic with EC’s New Trend, creating a craze that really only lasted a couple years but is still immensely influential. For being one of the reasons why there was a Comics Code. For the “We’re all pals here” approach they took to fan interaction, which would pave the way for Stan Lee’s jocular narration and editorial style.

8. Harvey Pekar
If American Splendor wasn’t the first autobiographical comic, it’s the first one anybody seems to remember. Stretching the definition of “mainstream”? Perhaps, but given the sheer abundance of autobio comics (especially webcomics, which may or may not be the new mainstream), I’d hate to leave him off just so Mark Millar or somebody could get on here.

9. Warren Ellis
I don’t think Ellis gets enough credit for being influential. When superhero comics seemed mostly to be trying to do some sort of Silver Age revival in the late ’90s, Ellis gave the middle finger to nostalgia and invented “widescreen comics” with The Authority. Ellis’ Authority begat Mark Millar’s Authority, which begat Millar’s Ultimates, which begat Millar’s Civil War, which begat the return of the massive crossover. So about half of the most awful stuff Marvel and DC are doing these days is traceable back to Ellis. Not that he’d care, I suppose.

10. Gardner Fox
Stan Lee created the first comics “universe,” but might Fox’s Earth-1/Earth-2 stuff have been the first comics cosmology? For good or ill, the idea of complex continuity you can actually catalogue stems from him.

11. Mort Weisinger
Not technically a writer, but all that wacky ’50s stuff we associate with Superman reportedly came from him (and, if rumors are to be believed, as some sort of odd therapy), and ’50s Superman is arguably the most infamous of all Supermen. Writers keep trying to shy away from the Fortress of Solitude and Super Pets and multicolored Kryptonite, but Weisinger’s mythology inevitably creeps back in.

12. Len Wein
Perhaps less for his work itself and more for what it led to. He created, after all, Wolverine, the X-Men, Swamp Thing and others, and as an editor helped bring Watchmen into being. Grant Morrison credits him as a big influence, and hey, speaking of him…

13. Grant Morrison
Superhero comics’ foremost re-imaginer freshens up stagnant properties by reintegrating elements that might have been dismissed as outdated seamlessly into a modern aesthetic, while at the same time taking the franchise in uncharted directions. His ultracompetent Batman is still the standard characterization for Bruce Wayne, and he made people believe that you could do an A-list Justice League roster again. Even on books like New X-Men where his work is largely undone after he leaves, the abrupt break from years of wheel-spinning gave creators a new starting point, if only to reject everything Morrison’s done.

14. Brian Michael Bendis
Probably the biggest writer shaping Marvel today. His superhero work seems to de-emphasize plot; villains and fights are really only MacGuffins to facilitate characterization and interaction, and shuffling around the status quo. However you feel about this approach, and the rise of “showrunners” at Marvel and DC, it’s here to stay for a while longer, at least. Bendis works long-term on a scale even Claremont never dared.

15. J.M. DeMatteis and Keith Giffen
People still use “Bwa-ha-ha” to describe superhero comics like their Justice League that lampoon conceits of the genre while still playing by their rules. At best, DeMatteis and Giffen let the air out of the tires and keep us from taking our beloved superhero narratives too deadly seriously. At worst, it makes us complacent, believing that laughing at the occasional goofy third-string character is all it takes to make a comic book “mature.”

16. Roy Thomas
Roy the Boy set a precedent for how a writer follows up on the Stan Lee stories that make up the foundation of the Marvel Universe (and thus defined how DC writers would eventually make use of their own continuity).

17. Steve Gerber
For bringing personal politics and satire into it, and showing that superhero comics could be a vessel to explore greater themes (while still being good superhero comics in their own right).

18. Denny O’Neil
O’Neil introduced “relevance” to superheroes (by which we usually mean “superheroes dealing with real-world issues”) to modern comics with Green Lantern/Green Arrow, however hamfisted. Also, I suppose, for his ’70s refocusing of Batman as a grimmer sort of chap.

19. Frank Miller
His development of the “grim ‘n’ gritty” approach alone would make him on the list, as would Dark Knight Returns, but both of them together?

20. Carl Barks
He’s on the Onion’s list for the art, but he wrote all those stories, too! Aside from his contributions to Disney’s catalogue of trademarks, he showed that sheer quality could rise a comic creator from anonymity … that the people working on the comic were just as important, if not moreso, than the characters themselves.

21. Geoff Johns
I’m not totally confident on this one; at times he seems so backward-looking that it can be difficult to say what new he really brings to the table, but it’s hard to argue his approach is becoming influential. Time will tell, but I think Johns will be remembered as important … for better or for worse.

So … who did I leave off, and why am I an idiot for having done so? (Edit: Also, who would you take out of my 21 to add your pick?)

LIKED

– Ghost Rider: Heaven’s Fire seems a bit gratuitous in some ways (was there a reason this couldn’t just be in the regular Ghost Rider comic instead of pumping the price to four bucks because you included a measly 70s reprint in the back, Marvel?), but who cares if it’s a bit of a money grab because at least it’s a justified one: Jason Aaron is really pumping this comic full of pure nitrous and putting pedal to the metal in the best possible way. He just keeps upping the ante more and more with every issue of Ghost Rider and it never disappoints.

– Everybody else has already given Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of the first Parker novel, The Hunter, big ups so I might as well jump on board: holy shit what a great read this is.

– Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is the second Call of Juarez game, and aside from the boring gunfighter duel mechanic, this is a goddamned great first-person shooter game just like the first one was. Maybe I could have stood to see more types of gun or more instances where Thomas’ ability to use an Indian bow would have been important, but even with those issues it’s still a fine game where you shoot many bad people with bullets, and there is never anything wrong with that.

DIDN’T LIKE

– Face The Ace is as bad as you think it is: take all the excitement of watching regular TV poker (hint: there wasn’t that much to begin with) and knock it down a few notches by having one person in the match be a giddy housewife or clueless frat boy type who barely knows how to play the game. And the host – one of the second-tier guys from The Sopranos who now has no career – is ridiculously annoying. Just a dreadful show.

How Cry For Justice #2 is possibly the most emblematic comic book of this age:

1.) The narrative presents to the reader two fights.

2.) Of these two fights, the reader enters the first (a traditional hero v. hero misunderstanding fight between Mikaal Tomas and Congorilla) at about the 95 percent finished mark, after the two have been fighting for a while. Two pages after the reader enters upon the action, they stop fighting and decide to team up. You miss out on most of the actual superhero fight.

3.) The second is Green Arrow and Green Lantern versus a whole bunch of second-rate superbaddies. Sounds like a fun fight, right? Which is apparently why, rather than show us the fight, James Robinson cuts away as Hal and Ollie leap into the fray to spend a bunch of pages of Ray Palmer whining to Jay Garrick. Immediately after Ray Palmer is done whining, Robinson cuts back to the Hal/Ollie fight, which is now completely over with all the villains unconscious.

If there was ever a comic that seemed to utterly embody the idea that superheroes being super is boring compared to them whining, Cry For Justice is it.

It’s an odd feeling to realize you’ve been reading a comic for more than twenty issues based entirely on inertia. As I flipped open Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight #27 yesterday it occurred to me that I had no real memory of what had happened in the last issue, or much genuine interest in what would happen in this one. And yet I keep reading, even though I dropped the parallel Angel comic after the first storyline (largely due to the art — I watched the last season of Angel on a thirty-year-old, aerial-only TV on a UHF channel coming from 200 miles away, and it still looked better than the comic.)

How did things come to this? I was a die-hard Buffy viewer back in the day, following plotlines eagerly, laughing at clever dialogue and making fun of American viewers who had to wait months to watch the Season Three finale. I had never checked out the spin-off comics until the announcement that Joss Whedon himself would return to launch a new comic which would be an actual continuation of the series, rather than stories that stood awkwardly around in the darker corners of the TV show continuity and tried to keep their heads down. Now here we are, three-odd years later, and I have next to no memory of any of the stories, up to and including the latest (I hazily remember something about a submarine in Tibet.)

The most obvious answer is that when we wished for more Buffy the Whedon Genie, wanting to teach us to be careful what we wished for, gave us more of the show’s last season — the one that spun its wheels for months on end before wrapping up with a twist ending that basically ignored everything that had happened before. It’s true that the last season is part of the problem, because the ending left the writers with an almost unsolvable problem: suddenly every potential Slayer in the world was fully-functional, which means that in the comic they have to deal with hundreds of superhuman vampire killers. (Of course, even that ending was an unfortunate compromise: what they should have done was make every woman on Earth a Slayer, the logical conclusion of the show’s female empowerment fantasy.) Not only does this make it hard to come up with believable villains, but it makes Buffy herself a lot less special.

How have the writers dealt with this? By ignoring it, mostly. The Slayerettes make plenty of appearances as spear-carriers (should that be stake-carriers?) and cannon fodder, but somehow when there’s constabulary duty to be done they’re never around. This frees the writers to recycle plots from the series or, if they’re feeling unusually creative, borrow well-worn tropes from other comics. Xander falls in love! Then his girlfriend is killed! But he’s okay, because in the next issue he’s wisecracking as usual. (Probably because his girlfriend had absolutely no personality, so it’s reasonable her death would affect him less than getting a stain on his favourite T-shirt.) Buffy and the others are pursued by an evil being too powerful for them to defeat! (Again?) They’re on the run from the law! (Hey, guys, how long has it been since we last did “Legion on the run”?) They’re hated and feared by the society they’ve sworn to protect! (Did Whedon have it written into his X-Men contract that he could take that with him when he left?)

That last is an interesting one, because it is a great example of how the comic has gone completely wrong. Apparently the world has gone ga-ga for vampires and, consequently, decided that Slayers are icky. This happened because Harmony did a reality show about vampires and, because people love reality shows, they’re now cool with the idea of people who see them as ambulatory Big Gulps. Now this could have been a good idea, a joke on how things like Twilight have defanged vampires, except that the writers don’t seem to realize that in order for something to be satire it has to, you know, satirize something. What might have worked is if someone had written a Twilight-ish novel based on Angel and Buffy’s relationship, casting Angel as the brooding, tortured character and Buffy as the heartless Slayer who eventually spurns him, but instead we get a simple shot at reality TV in the apparent belief that name-checking something is the same as satirizing it.

In the end, I think the problem is pretty simple: Joss Whedon hasn’t written anything particularly good since the last season of Angel. He’s written things that were good in spots, or that had the potential to be good, and his genius for casting is as strong as ever, but if you look honestly at his post-Buffy/Angel work there’s nothing that would, for anyone who wasn’t already a fan, rise much above a “meh.” Whether this is because since becoming JOSS WHEDON he’s started to believe his own press, or whether he just had a few good ideas in him and is now slowly joining Kevin Williamson in aging-wunderkind-land, is hard to say, but he’s certainly not bringing his A game to the Buffy comic.

I don’t really need to introduce the Phantom Stranger to most of you, I think, so I just want to say something about him.

The reason the Phantom Stranger is great is because he is the elemental expression of something we all, deep down, want to believe is true (even if we don’t), and that is that the universe gives a shit about us.

In recent years, the Phantom Stranger has gotten more exposure than he ever has since his series (which he shared with Dr. 13 – man, that was some awesome old-school comics), but with that exposure has come – not surprisingly – the need to explain the Stranger a little more than he has been. This is the biggest mistake that could possibly be made with him. The Phantom Stranger is remote and unknowable. That’s not a minus; that’s who he is and who was designed to be. There’s a reason his issue of Secret Origins contains not one but four separate possible origins: we aren’t supposed to know who the Phantom Stranger is, and it doesn’t matter who he is.

What matters is what he is: he’s the purest possible expression of hope in superhero comics. He only shows up when things are at their absolute worst, when it looks like there’s no possible way the good guys can win, whether those good guys are the Justice League or a single mother and her only child stuck in a house of horror or a lonely policeman on the brink of personal despair, and he helps. He never outright saves the day; he just gives the good guys a bit of a nudge, exactly as much help as they need to get themselves out of trouble, and then he disappears again before he can even be thanked. Oftentimes he doesn’t do much more than remind the heroes of how strong they really are.

And it’s cool because you know that the Phantom Stranger is crazy-go-nuts levels of powerful. He could solve all of the heroes’ problems for them. But he doesn’t, because to do so would be to take away the opportunity to triumph from them, and what kind of help would that be?

That’s a wonderful thing. That it comes in one of the best superhero costumes ever is only a bonus.

Lister Sage asks:

The Jason Todd post had me thinking: Does this DC Universe need a Punisher?

Not really. The DC Universe has had Punishers before: Mad Dog, the second Vigilante, the latest iteration of Manhunter to an extent, and you can even make a case for Tommy Monoghan. Almost universally they just don’t work in the long run (Chris Sims’ odd love for Mad Dog aside) unless the story is closed off (IE, the end of Hitman). Partially it’s because the idea of a Punisher in a universe with Superman in it is ludicrous. Partially it’s a matter of tone. And partially it’s because the Punisher concept is pretty wack to begin with unless you go the Garth Ennis route and decide on either dark comedy or ultradark violent noir, and neither of those modes can work longterm within the DC Universe, which has two settings: bright adventure and dark melodrama.

LIKED

– Someone in the requests post asked for a general investigation into what I like and don’t like in music, and that’s coming later this week, but for the meantime? I really got into listening to Orishas this week. I really like hip-hop combined with traditional musical forms and Orishas do it very well, mixing Spanish rhyming (which admittedly I can’t follow, but their flow and performance is excellent even without understanding the words) with Cuban rumba- and salsa-style beats. “El Kilo” is probably my favorite single of theirs so far, but “Bruja” isn’t far behind.

– I’m really enjoying Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris. It’s funny and clever and hard to put down, and that’s what I want out of a light novel.

– I’ve always had an inherent fondness for poker-dice type games, and Lock N’ Roll is one of the best I’ve seen in quite some time. Current high score is 7622, for those interested in beating me.

MEH

– I got Britannia this week at a discount, which is great, and of course the new Fantasy Flight edition of the game is gorgeous in most respects. My complaint, however, is that this is a game with eleventy billion tokens, and the plastic insert which is supposed to store the pieces is entirely random and doesn’t actually have anything to do with the various types of pieces, so you end up kind of mixing things together in untidy clumps. This isn’t a small deal, because Britannia is a looooong-ass game, and anything that can reduce its playtime – like, say, simplifying the storage of it – is welcome.

– I finally got around to reading all of Jack Staff this week and… it’s not bad, I suppose, but I don’t see why this comic gets so many raves. It’s a perfectly average, okayish superhero comic. If it was a Marvel or DC book it would be completely unmemorable. Paul Grist’s art gives it an additional sort of original character, sure, but I was expecting an A-plus book and got maybe a B-minus. Is this like Walt Simonson’s Thor – is it one of those comics everybody else jerks over and I just read it and think, “eh, whatever?” (Other than Beta Ray Bill, of course.)

DIDN’T LIKE

– Whenever I see one of the old Big Books that Paradox Press used to print (The Big Book of Death, The Big Book of Hoaxes, The Big Book of the Weird Wild West, et cetera) in a used bookstore, I make a point to pick it up because they’re out of print and they’re always awesome: clever stories about real, obscure things, people and happenings. However, The Big Book of Urban Legends is just terrible, because it is full of boring stories about fake things that never happened that you have already heard half a dozen times. It’s like reading a book of knock-knock jokes when you’re older than eight; you know them all already, so it’s not fun or cool. It’s just bad.

The Dummy isn’t handicapped – he’s handi-capable! Or possibly handi-killifying. I don’t care what anybody says: you have to admire a deformed midget who takes a look in the mirror and says “I think I can make this work for me,” and then doesn’t go into a life of circus work. The Dummy figured out that he was freaky and that people would naturally recoil from this, and so chose to use that to scare people when he got into gunfights.

Of course, the Dummy was also really intelligent to boot. That’s why when he started up his own crime ring, he pretended to be just a ventriloquist’s dummy, with the real boss hidden in the shadows. (As this was the Golden Age, it is entirely possible that the Dummy was the eventual inspiration for the Ventriloquist’s personal brand of insanity – although the Dummy doesn’t look anything like Scarface, of course.) This was brilliant because when hoods would go gunning for “the boss,” they’d ignore the dummy on the floor just lying there – except the dummy was The Dummy, and he would then shoot them in the back. That is planning.

Plus, the Dummy would invent super-weapons. Net guns, electric traps, fire machetes, that sort of thing. Okay, maybe these aren’t the most impressive things in an era where you have the Metal Men walking around, but again, for the Golden Age this was pretty wild stuff. They were impressed by robots who took off their pants back then, you know.

And the Dummy had a great nemesis: the original Vigilante. The original Vigilante is awesome because he’s a cowboy on a motorcycle who fights crime. He’s so cool that in Justice League Unlimited he was voiced by Nathan Fillion; that’s how cool he is. The Dummy never got a speaking role in JLU, but you know that if he did he probably would have been voiced by Alan Tudyk for nerd humour value.

Top comment: A top hat? Classy.
Suit? Classy.
Monocle? Classy.
TWO MONOCLES? Classiest motherfucker to ever stride across the earth. — chenry