The Fractal Hall Journal

I still quite can’t get my head round the monumental error DC made in the late Nineties not to give Grant Morrison, Tom Peyer, Mark Waid and Mark Millar the four core Superman titles. But more than that, even if they had I suspect that editorial interference would likely have squished the really good stuff.

I’ve got no idea what went on behind closed doors, but I remember what it was like being a reader at the time, and bits and pieces that have been reported in various places since then. But that said, is there really any doubt that companies like Marvel and DC prefer to keep a tight rein on their intellectual properties? Except, of course, for a brief period at Marvel when they let the writers do whatever they wanted…

After Waid’s Flash, Morrison’s JLA is probably what I’d say is the best example of the kind of superhero stuff I like. The first story arc is just about the best JLA story of all time, and there’s plenty to like in the rest of the run. But after the Rock of Ages, some things crept in that I wasn’t so keen on. Like why the fuck Huntress was on the team, or the New Gods. I remember me and dear friend Paul C assuming that editorial had told Morrison who he should be using, because we couldn’t believe anyone would pass over use of the Magnificent Seven for a pack of D-listers.

After a while, both Waid and Morrison left DC, and in an interview for Mark Salisbury’s Writers on Comics Scriptwriting the former said he almost quit writing comics because DC had refused to let him or Morrison write Superman, going as far to say that he’d never get the character because he was too “high profile”. It’s the kind of thing that I just cannot believe, and perhaps one of the clearest signs that some of these companies are not being run by business people. There’s no doubt that stories like this coupled with the odd behaviour of some professionals when they get on the internet suggest that the comics “industry” is deeply, deeply weird if not outright unpleasant.

I’m not one hundred percent sure of the timeline, but from what I recall this was happening around the same time as Marvel’s bankruptcy, or certainly in the lead-up to it. What I do remember is Joe Kelly moving from an amazing run on Deadpool to one of the main X-Men titles, with Steve Seagle on the other. I was really looking forward to this even though I’ve never followed the X-Men, but again it went to shit thanks to editorial interference despite showing occasional promise. It was the same kind of interference that led to Mark Waid leaving Captain America and demanding his name be taken off the later collections.

This is the background to what I honestly believe to be the decisions that have shaped the two companies’ superhero universes today. If Morrison and the others had been left to write Superman without editorial interference, All-Star Superman could have been the norm rather than the non-continuity exception. And bear in mind that Millar and Morrison were just about to hit the big time with their Marvel work. All that energy could have been directed into DC’s flagship titles.

Because it didn’t what we got were more lacklustre editorially-driven storylines (and once again poor old Joe Kelly went from the frying pan to, well, another frying pan). Jeph Loeb’s Superman set the foundations for President Lex, Superman/Batman, and through them the current Crises. In short, everything that the DCU is today. And regardless of my dislike of Marvel’s recent storylines, there’s no doubt they are far more popular than their rivals.

More tomorrow.

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I grew up reading The Flash. The comic is the only one I’ve bought consistantly for, what, fifteen years? It even edges Green Lantern out as being the title I’ve got the most issues of. There’s little in comics that would excite me more than for the Flash to undergo a spectacular return.

Of course, the Flash I’m writing about is Wally West.

West’s been the Flash for twenty-odd years. Long enough that he’s the Flash to a whole generation (and let’s face it, probably the last generation) of comic book readers. And I understand why people like J. Michael Straczynski want to see Barry Allen return, really I do. Hal Jordan’s return was brilliant, and I’d like Tony Stark back too. But again, like the Legion of Super-heroes, I’ve got no sentimental connection to poor old Barry.

From recent hints, I wouldn’t bet against JMS being the one to bring him back, presumably in yet another relaunch. Regardless of anyone’s opinion of his writing (and even though I dropped the title around Civil War his run on Amazing is the longest I’ve ever bought a Spider-Man title for because as much as I like Spider-Man, I’ve rarely found the comics to be any good), the man is high-profile enough to shift a heck of a lot of comics, which is something the Flash really needs at the minute from looking at the sales figures.

The question is where did DC go wrong with what used to be one of the most consistantly good titles of all time? I think part of the problem may actually be down to the very thing that made the comic so good for so long: Mark Waid.

If it wasn’t for Waid, I doubt I’d still be reading comics. His and Mike Wieringo’s run was so far above what anyone else at the Big Two were doing in the 90s it wasn’t funny. He foreshadowed Grant Morrison’s legendary JLA run, and it was a shitty, shitty decision on DC editorial’s part that the four Superman titles weren’t passed to him, Morrison, Mark Millar and Tom Peyer to do whatever the hell they wanted to do. In fact, I’d go as far to say that the ramifications of that decision are without doubt the foundation of DC’s current troubles. Grant Morrison’s New X-Men and Millar’s Ultimates fundamentally altered Marvel’s approach to their comics (for better or worse), inspiring the current Big Events that are making the company so much money.

Going back to Waid, what made his Flash so engaging was the long-form story that he told over a hundred issues or so, of how Wally West grew up. He took the work started by Mike Barron in the very first issue of the series and progressed it to it’s logical conclusion. And that was the problem: West’s story arc was essentially complete. There was nowhere really for the next writer to go.

Geoff Johns, after a seriously poor first arc, solved the problem by making his story arc all about the Flash’s Rogues Gallery. He extrapolated on events and themes Waid had explored, at first addressing the Rogues individually and then as a group in the Rogues War. It’s in these issues we see the blueprints of greater plans for DC’s current Crises (once again, for better or worse). Sure, the magical recreation of West’s secret ID and his wife’s pregnancy moved his story forward, but ultimately incrementally, and not on the scale of Waid’s work or indeed the focus Johns’ reserved for the villains.

It all went to crap after Infinite Crisis and the elevation of Bart Allen to main character. Despite the promise of Issue 1’s awesome cover, the Fastest Man Alive was just rubbish. The plot didn’t make a huge amount of sense, and Allen’s character was both boring and at odds with what had gone before. Twelve issues later and it all ground to a halt with his death, the only tragedy that the event was so inconsequential.

Impulse was always a bit of a wasted character. Oh, he was good enough in his own title and in Young Justice, and I’m sure Johns did a decent job with him in Teen Titans (though I’ve never read it). But he was never Wally West’s sidekick, and that really should have been his purpose. Instead of shuffling him off into a different book after his introduction, Waid really should have made him an integral part of the parent title. In fact, I suspect that some of the less effective later Waid issues would have been improved by using Bart as a dramatic device: Wally West’s next challenge should have been as a father.

Which is exactly what Waid tried to do on his return to the title after Fastest Man Alive got the boot. Unfortunately the damage has already been done momentum-wise, and besides, I get the feeling that Waid didn’t really want to come back. The first six issues have been lacklustre and have finally convinced me to drop the title. Like I’ve said before, buying things just because I always have isn’t a good enough reason anymore.

But not to end on a down note, you know what I think would work? The Flash as a team book. If we have to have Barry Allen back, let’s bring his grandson back too. Let’s do a Green Lantern: if there’s no reason to get rid of Kyle, there’s no reason to boot Wally. And depite my ambivalence about JSAers, Jay Garrick’s awesome, so get him in too (in fact, I still believe the best solution following Infinite Crisis wasn’t giving the teenager his own series, but rather the old guy). If the conclusion of one character arc ultimately crippled the old series, let’s start again with many.

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You may spot a theme to the posts this week, but I have been watching a lot of X-Files episodes so it shouldn’t be surprising how much of it is filtering through. The world is beginning to feel distinctly out of joint. It’s not as bad as the time when I tried to read Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time series in one month (I managed six volumes in two weeks before I started dreaming about the characters and feeling queasy every time I picked up volume seven), but it may well get there by the end.

Dana Scully is one of the best characters in SF. The fact that there are very few female characters as strong as her to come along in the years since the programme began is a shameful indictment of not only genre work but popular culture as a whole.

I’ve seen it written that Scully was the kind of character who tended to get tied up, kidnapped, or generally into situations where Mulder needed to save her. This is bollocks. She gets Capital A Abducted in the second series (famously due to Gillian Anderson’s pregnancy), but a similar abduction/medical test/mindwipe happens to Mulder in the very second episode of the show. Both main characters get knocked out and chucked into car boots so many times it’s a miracle they don’t have brain damage. And more than once Scully frees herself rather than waits around to be saved. Hell, for most of the first season it’s her who’s saving Mulder from whatever idiotic situation he’s managed to get himself into. And it’s him who’s breaking down into tears all the time. Every single time someone mentions his sister. In passing. Like a little baby.

Anyway, apologies for the shortness of posts the past couple of days. Tomorrow’s will be one great big block of text.

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The post-Easter malaise has been shaken off, and we’re back in the room.

A lot of X-Files episodes have been watched recently (with a Series 2 overview coming soon), and it’s made me think that it’s about time we had a new “unexplained” show. You know what I mean: UFOs, Bigfoot, Ghosts and Ghoulies. Because while Chris Carter’s creation set the benchmark for that kind of thing, it didn’t really follow through on everything. The UFO plots became more about colonisation than flying lights, and of all the “famous” phenomena they dealt with they never managed to pull off ghosts. There’s a hell of a lot of potential in cryptozoological stuff, inevitably squandered in substandard episodes about a swamp monster, the chupacabra and the Jersey Devil.

With this in mind, I’m certain a programme could be made that covers the same subject area while managing to be more than an X-Files rip-off. I’ve heard that JJ Abrams may be involved with something like that, hopefully more like Lost Series One than Lost Any Other Series.

It’s difficult to pin down this kind of thing in genre terms. Horror’s the most obvious tag for the monster type things, while anything alieny is going to be SF. I think I prefer tagging it as Weird Fiction (WeiFi?). While a lot of X-Files episodes are explicitly horrific (there’s some seriously vile stuff towards the end of the second series), the “unexplained phenomena” vibe strikes me as different to zombie/monster flicks, or anything that’s all about the gore and body parts. In fact, I can’t think of anything off hand that has the right feel; The Mothman Prophecies, perhaps.

Thinking about it, the atmosphere of the latter is exactly what I’m talking about. Unexplained supernatural events that aren’t quite ghost stories but aren’t quite monster stories either. And the original book’s damned creepy too.

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Looks like business will have to resume tomorrow.

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Still a little bleary from an action-packed Easter weekend. Check back later for a little more coherence.

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Another image-heavy (and effort-light) Monday, this time relating to the funnest internet meme ever.

The short version: A) Take the first article title from a random Wikipedia page.

B) Take the last four words from the last quotation on a random page of quotes.

C) Take a random image tagged as “interesting” on Flickr.

All of this gives you a band name, album title and cover picture. Stick them all together in Photoshop to get awesomely accurate Indie LPs. Here’s mine, and I didn’t even have to cheat once.

Oh, and many thanks to the owners of the original pictures for putting them up under a Creative Commons licence. In keeping with that, the following derivations are all posted under CC licences identical to the applicable original image.

Original image (thanks to Sevenbrane)

Original image (thanks to TIO)

Original image (thanks to Flounder Whistl)

Original image (thanks to Mrs Magic)

Original image (thanks to Marilynnm63)

Original image (thanks to Jose Goulao)

Go on, everyone. You know you want to.

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Click here for the Alhazred Heights archive page.

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Didn’t realise until today, but this week marks six months of consistant blogging. So I’m celebrating. Thinking about it, as the comics industry thinks 25 issues are noteworthy I might start partying every three months.

Transformers fandom is the source of a lot of bewilderment among even the nerdiest adherents of comic shop culture. Part of it is a generational thing (in that if you didn’t grow up with the toys your stunted emotional development is likely focused elsewhere and I’m looking at you, sports fans), part of it is that robots don’t float everybody’s boat. Which is fair enough. I mean, I don’t have the first clue why superhero comics folk go nuts over monkeys, and I’m finding the announcement of Congorilla as a member of a new Justice League team somewhat underwhelming.

Speaking of which, at the Wizard World LA DCU panel writer James Robinson announced that “People are going to love this character by the time I’m done with him”. LXG aside, I rate Robinson highly as a writer, but he’ll have to pull off something pretty fucking special to make an Imperial era Kiplingesque white supremacist appealing to me.

Enough apes. I’m certain that the continuing popularity of the Transformers is due to Simon Furman’s writing. He’s an under-rated creator, and it’s difficult to impart how mind-blowing it was to read his stuff at a fairly early age. Because no one gave a crap about a toy licence, he was given huge scope to write whatever the hell he wanted. Sure, the toys were popular without him, but it was the epic, grand-scale vision he brought to the title that were used as the foundation of all subsequent iterations. A hell of a lot of his concepts have been used in not only the cartoons of the 90s and 00s, but the film itself. The hugely popular film, which wouldn’t have been made if it wasn’t for the unanticipated success of the Dreamwave revival, greatly influenced and bought in droves by fans of Furman (FoFs? Someone should make a badge. And a fanclub newsletter).

I think the reason for their popularity outside of Furman’s influence is their nature as not only both a toy vehicle and action figure (a two for one deal), but also a kind of puzzle. A way of rearranging and altering elements from one pattern into another that appeals to a mindset of construction and applied reasoning that I’d argue is related to the popularity of jigsaws, Lego and Nintendo Brain Training. Just look at the movie designs; graphic aesthetics were not the first box that needed to be ticked.

Michael Bay’s robots weren’t designed to be simplified or even elegant (compare to the more organic and trimmed down look of Transformers Animated, or even The Spectacular Spider-Man). They were designed from an engineer’s perspective, the emphasis being put on figuring out how one element can be splintered then moved and rotated into a different configuration. The robots are all huge puzzle boxes, and although the busy designs have been rightfully criticised as over-complex and confusing the intricacy of their creation nevertheless impresses.

And that concludes today’s earnest analysis of extra-long product advertisements.

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Yesterday, I said that John Connolly’s works are ambiguous about the supernatural. That’s not quite true. I think there’s a reading of the work that Charlie “Bird” Parker, the investigator and main character, has actually broken his brain with all the slaughter he’s had to deal with, but so much of the atmosphere of the novels relies on ghost story and horror scenarios that it’s fair to say that it won’t really be for anyone who’s not keen on that sort of thing, and prefers their thrillers to be more (and it’s a pretty laughable use of the word, all things considered) realistic. Luckily for me, I like this kind of stuff although, again, it’s not particularly clear on the cover, so I wonder how many people get annoyed when they realise what kind of book it is, and how many extra sales the publishing company actually get from the tactic.

I’ve been a fan of Connolly’s since his first Parker novel, Every Dead Thing. Even then, there were supernatural overtones that have increased in occurrence over the series. I think the last one, Black Angel, went a little too far in that direction by suggesting that (spoiler on the way) Parker was an incarnation of a fallen angel. It was also the only one of his novels that lost me a bit halfway through, as I recall putting it down for months before picking it back up again.

The current book, The Unquiet, is much better. The events of the previous novel are skirted around, which is for the best, really. The same themes of betrayal and the cycle of violence are present, and there are few other writers that can create such a dark, corrupt atmosphere from almost poetic prose. That’s probably the biggest difference between this book and Michael Marshall’s The Intruders. Although both are excellent writers, I think Connolly’s style is more elegant and readable, while Marshall’s is deliberately jagged and uneven. It’s interesting to see two different ways of creating something thematically similar.

Connolly’s greatest strength is in his characters, the standouts being Louis and Angel, the hitman and the thief. They’re easily two of the best supporting characters in crime fiction, with the author’s next novel focussing on them. And it’s not just the good guys, either. Connolly has a knack for creating seriously evil antagonists, and uses iconography that’s pretty close to the technique used for comic book villains, a demonic rogue’s gallery not a million miles away from Batman’s, or Dick Tracy’s, and includes the demonic Reverand Faulkner and the corpse-mutilating Travelling Man, the killer of Parker’s wife and child. Merrick, the assassin out to avenge his dead daughter, is a suitable addition to their ranks, and the book is a great continuation of Parker’s story.

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