And then the Funvee gets blown up.

The economy may be collapsing, climate change accelerating, and Cthulhu may be turning up soon to eat everyone’s heads, but none of that matters because, with a big old load of cockrock, the Journal lurches back into existence. I’ll skip the deadly sin of blogging-about-blogging; needless to say, I haven’t been around for a bit, but now I am. Probably weekly from now on.

A couple of things of note:

Council leaders have compiled a banned list of the 200 worst uses of jargon, proving once again that people have too much time on their hands, despite the best efforts of Twitter, Facebook, and people who play with their toys on the internet. While there’s a lot of management bollocks on there, I’m not sure we should start banning various terms because people are too fick to know what words mean. Councils in Scotland are going to have a bastard of a time instructing lawyers if they can’t use “Advocate”, for a start.

Also, by implication the following unlisted phrases must be perfectly acceptable for everyday use in Local Government: “Willy-wobbling”. “Turdfaced fuckwit”. “Felch”.

2009 film previews: Only one thing could top not only a new Trek film, but also the Transformers sequel. And that’s THIS:

SO RIGHTEOUS.

The pause in blogging really wasn’t meant to be this long. Talk about things getting away from you. Better update next week, promise.

Computer trouble, ineffective excuses, etc., etc.

Hi folks.

Sorry for the sudden disappearance again. A few issues between my current hosting company and the old one. Things may get a little rocky with the site this week, but hopefully just for a short while.

Nothing for you good folks today, except this: I hope President Obama follows in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessors Josiah Bartlett and Matthew Santos.

All I’m saying is that my primary feeling today isn’t so much one of hope, as of relief. And I don’t care what side of politics you come down on, the man on his way out was a fucking baboon.

More on this over at the Toybox.

On a similar note, via Aint It Cool (I know, I know), the CBC are planning a reality show where former Prime Ministers judge individuals on whether they’d make good PMs. While I was hoping to rib chum Plok about this, it turns out the Beeb has already bought the remake rights off of them. Oh dear. I am half hoping S4C will nick the idea for the Assembly, but we’re not that far away from Rhodri’s retirement; it’s quite possible someone will take this seriously and the next First Minister will get in on a phone vote.

I assume this is one of those let’s-get-The-Kids-into-politics things, ignoring the fact that The Kids are busy wearing hoodies and knifing grannies for their iPhones. Or something. I lose track.

Click here for the Alhazred Heights archive page. Fonts from Blambot.

More strips over at the Toybox, which will start back on its Tuesday/Thursday schedule tomorrow.

Wolverine gets a lot of stick, some of it deserved. Though I’ve never been much of a fan, there’s obviously something going on there because there aren’t many characters created specifically to fill a team role who go on to sustain not only their own books, but who can be deployed as a guaranteed sales-raising guest star. Whether or not this is a good thing is, as always, open to conjecture.

Core Genre: Wolverine is the super-hero version of the Man With No Name, an outlaw with a violent, uncertain past in line with the darker, more ambiguous post-Leone kind of cowboy. So I’m enclined to place him under Western, although considering his nationality that’s more of a North Western. The Frontier Fiction of Jack London, maybe.

Before the Jemas/Quesada/Jenkins/Kubert Origin, it was accepted that to give Wolverine a definitive backstory would kill the mystery of the character, and take the character with it. I’ve seen the series criticised by some for doing exactly that. I disagree.

First of all, the idea that Wolverine’s backstory is in anyway mysterious is wrong. From the very beginning his creator Len Wein intended for him to be a mutated wolverine, though thank fuck they didn’t follow through on that. Claremont and Byrne, the creators most responsible for shaping the character’s early days, also intended for the character to be old enough to have fought in the Second World War.

Of course, the readers didn’t know all this yet, but it wasn’t long before the gaps started to get filled in. Alpha Flight, Weapon X, a long history with Sabretooth, fighting alongside Captain America in the ’40s; not a definitive timeline, perhaps, but plenty of things to delineate his history. Heavy hints of wetwork for intelligence agencies. And as soon as we get into his solo series we have the Japan stuff, a bizarre story about a boy raised by actual wolverines, life with Silver Fox and her subsequent murder, and so on. Although how much of this come under the ‘implanted memory’ get-out clause is anyone’s guess.

Regardless of how much of this is later retconned or proven false, it shows how his writers have been playing around with his origins for a long time. Considering how much fans and creators protest that his backstory should be hidden, they’ve certainly engaged with a lot of books over time that deal with possible origins. Ditto for the ‘angry loner who hunts alone’ thing. Guy’s supporting cast is bigger than the Batman Family.

A) Healing factor
B) Animal senses
C) Claws
D) Adamantium-laced skeleton
E) Berserker rage
F) Is (sigh) the best there is at what he does, and what he does isn’t pretty.

If nothing else, Wolverine is a survivor. His healing factor is the centre of his character, survival as mutant power. I like the idea that the reason for his memory issues is the healing factor crudely patching up a damaged psychology.

Who are Wolverine’s villains? Every damn thing. Everyone he’s ever met, every situation he’s ever been in. He’s his own worst enemy, and that doesn’t just mean the character as he’s defined in his present, but also the person he used to be. Every different aspect of his past, whether nobleman, frontiersman, assassin or samurai, becomes a different enemy, and creates a new conflict that Wolverine has to survive. Wolverine never triumphs. The best he can hope for is that he sees another day.

Actually, considering everything he’s been through, maybe that’s wrong. He can’t really be killed, not considering his core power, so he can’t escape any of his actions. He won’t even get the peace of the grave. Even survival itself becomes his enemy, because the best he can hope for is achieving a measure of peace.

There’s some depressing stuff behind that yellow spandex.

But it’s not really the nihilism people come for. Everyone likes a rogue, and if we think of the action movie culture that brought characters like Wolverine and the Punisher to prominence in the 80s we can see that the attraction was mostly a surface one. Blood, rage and Rambo. Luckily for Logan, there was still enough to him that he stayed popular after circumstances changed.

Comics writers are fond of bringing in Z-list heroes without their own titles into their team books. There’s more than one reason for this. Dan Didio, referring to the new Teen Titans line up, is right in saying that this is a way to keep telling stories with characters that have potential, but can’t sustain their own books. Other writers continually site the difficulties with progressing character when progress is only allowed to happen in the home title, with a completely different set of editors and writers.

All true, of course. But you have to ask yourself whether your readers want to read a book about Blue Beetle, or Huntress, or fucking Geo-Force. The realities of day-to-day publishing may get in the way, but if people want to read about the Magnificent Seven then maybe that’s who should be in the JLA.

Sorry, got a bit distracted there.

The point is, the practicalities of juggling characters spread over various titles make Big Gun team books difficult to handle, making runs like Morrison’s JLA even more impressive. This isn’t a new problem, and is the main reason why Avengers isn’t really expected to be a Big Gun title in the same way Justice League is. Hawkeye and Wonder Man and whoever allow the team book writer to own some characters.

The best execution of this kind of team book has to be the X-Men. The mutants are so successful, in fact, that they’ve been able to spin off several characters that can stand on their own feet, although Wolverine’s probably the only really successful one (and more on him next week). But most of the X-Men are resolutely one-note, in both power-gimmick and character, and this is very deliberate.

Core Genre: Science Fiction, with the usual Marvel mixture of everything else.

The X-Men should be taken as a single character, a plural protagonist in the nomenclature of screenwriting. Their conflict occurs on two levels; drama between the various X-Men themselves, and the external conflict with their villains. The operatics of the X-Soap has always been the most-discussed element of the book, and it probably goes without saying by now that the psychology of the thing isn’t what I’m going to concentrate on, so as usual I’ll skip over that in favour of the mechanics of the thing.

A) A team
B) of mutant
C) students
D) with distinct powers
E) and access to advanced technology
F) defend a world that fears and hates them

Considering the complexity of its implications, that’s one of the most elegant concepts you’re going to find in comics. Stan Lee and his various colleagues really were that good.

What’s interesting here is that every element here is the root of both internal and external conflict. Hmm, it looks like I will be talking psychology after all. Well, it’s the X-Men. You just can’t avoid it. Their personal conflict stems from their powers, or their race, or their relationship with non-mutants. They argue with each other as well as the outside world. And this is mirrored in their conflict with their antagonists.

Factor A tells us their mode of interaction, a gestalt identity. B is the source of their abilities, and also the inciting element of their conflict, either with other mutants or with non-mutants. B leads to both D (how they interact with antagonists) and F (which gives context to the interaction). Personally, I could live without the advanced technology of factor E, but the jets and the danger rooms and Cerebro/Cerebra have been integral from the start, shaping how the villains are located and put into context.

And their villains are very interesting. Intolerant Homo Sapiens, and intolerant Homo Superior. Peaceful integration is the ultimate goal, even if it has to be fought for. It’s easy to cast a cynical eye over superheroes and their drive to solve problems with their fists, but I’m reminded of a quote from author (and daughter of the Fair Country) Jo Walton, as found in the sidebar of Making Light: “Peace means something different from ‘not fighting’… Peace is an active and complex thing and sometimes fighting is part of what it takes to get it.”

Factor C is the controlling element of the stories. The adventures are all centred round a school or academy, a place of learning. It gives the team its character. It’s also the thing that gives the book a sinister edge.

The idea that a trusted teacher of children sends them out to war is unavoidably creepy. It’s a concept that’s been played with many times since Claremont. I don’t know if this odd vibe was deliberate on the part of Lee and Kirby or just another oddity of 60s Marvel, but it plays to other themes present since the beginning. I’m not sure it can all be considered coincidental, though it may be subconscious rather than conscious.

Student unrest tied in with movements wanting to change the status quo is one of the primary images we have of the Sixties, not only in America but across the world. Stan Lee explicitly wrote this into Spider-man, so it wasn’t something he was oblivious too. I wonder how much this informed the structure of the X-Men. The radicalisation of the young by influential figures is a perennial concern to the Daily Mail crowd, something that can be found in modern hysteria regarding Islamic university organisations, Victorian political concerns, right back to Socrates and Plato.

I’m probably reading too much into it, but the X-Men concept does play into anti-intellectual fears of an educated populace, with university education seen as a threat. Like I say, it’s nothing new but there’s been a lot of it in recent years (and if I was feeling particularly tin-hattish, I’d say it’s yet another tactic to discourage the masses from bettering themselves and to keep education strictly for the privileged few, but that’s just crazy talk isn’t it now.)

Also, the world is run by lizards.

Conclusion: If we dig around there’s some ugly things lurking in the X-Men concept. Of course, that can only help in terms of drama, action and conflict. It shouldn’t be a surprise that, when handled properly, the books are amongst the most popular ever made.