The Fractal Hall Journal

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.

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Blue Beetle #26 is out this week. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking forward to it, even if it’s a fill-in issue. Because it’s written in Spanish, with an English translation in the back. I don’t have the first clue about the language, I just think it’s a neat experiment. I find differences in language and culture absolutely fascinating, to be right at the heart of human experience.

Of course, I’ve already seen some annoyance about this on-line (annoyance? On the internet? Incredible, I know), that maybe people won’t like the hassle of flipping to the translation. I don’t get this. I just don’t get why people don’t find something like this fun, or at least interesting.

But that’s what humans are like, I suppose. We’re not mad keen on something that’s different. And languages, boy, as a bilingual Welsh speaker I can tell you some stories about the animosity that languages, that translations of languages cause. We’re a funny old people sometimes, the Welsh.

I’m not keen on generalisations (he says immediately before launching into an analysis based on generalisation). I think it’s foolish to characterise an individual’s behaviours, quirks and tendencies based solely on what we consider to be the stereotypical attributes of their nationality. That said, of course there are certain factors that effect certain groupings of the human populations that don’t effect others, even down to simple geography, and I wonder if this doesn’t produce a variety of behaviours that can be identified in a proportion of that population.

I’ve heard the Welsh people characterised as tribal, overly-sensitive, contradictory, hot-headed, fiercely patriotic, warm-hearted, and insecure. Oh, and really enjoying singing. And it’s easy, if you’re Welsh, to play up to the stereotypes. The good ones, obviously (who doesn’t want to be proud of their nation? Who thinks musical skill of any kind is a bad thing?), although there’s still a motivation to play down to the bad ones too, if only as a way of raising the metaphorical flag and emphasising your identity.

The “tribal” thing is interesting. Warren Ellis in Crecy brings up belligerent tribalism as being particularly Welsh. The thing is, whether it’s political parties, football teams or Marvel and DC, human beings tend towards belligerent tribalism, presumably a evolutionary advantageous trait back in the day (though I’d suggest that our reasoning nature should tells us that overcoming this tribalism is a better trait in modern society). So why does it follow the Welsh around?

Two reasons, I think. Firstly, the notion of the “tribe” suggests a primitive, backwards people, an insulting undertone the “sophisticated” can aim at the lower classes or country folk, two groups that make up a sizable chunk of the Welsh population. Secondly, it’s not necessarily an insult: the concept of a tribe or clan ties in to a Welsh tradition of close families and tight-knit communities (and no sniggering at the back, I know what you’re thinking), to notions of national pride and connection to a Celtic past as part of the Welsh identity. So the “tribal” description, while far from uniquely Welsh, is perpetuated not only by people wishing to insult us.

A short way of putting it is that we do it to ourselves. The cultural (and political) damage that the Welsh have done (and continue to do) to their own nation ultimately outweighs damage done by external factors. We are the ones who don’t vote for independence, who choose devolution only reluctantly, who tie our fortunes to how well our team does in the national sport. And that ties into one of the above characteristics, one I find particularly pronounced in our culture: contradiction.

I’ve had more than one conversation with various friends about our own conflicting views on national identity. There are days when I love my country as blindly as any patriot, and days where I am sick to death of every last Welsh person on the planet. We irritate quickly if identified as belonging to another British country, if we aren’t given our Celtic due, and at exactly the same time the majority of us are terrified at the idea of seperating from Britain. So many contradictions.

But again, these things are not really different to the issues of every single other human being, regardless of race, nation or identity. The reason I flag it is because I believe that certain social factors occur within Wales that exacerbate this, well-worn channels dilligently carved out over the centuries that ensure our insecurities flow in the same stereotypical ways.

Sensitive, insecure, hot-headed, tribal; why do we expect to be any different? We’re a nation with its own cultural identity, its own flag, its own anthem, its own language, yet we aren’t politically a country on our own. We routinely refer to ourselves as being “Welsh”, even though it’s a derivation of an old German word for “foreigner”. How many other people refer to themselves as foreigners in their own country? (Well, Wallachians for a start. Same root meaning.) We’re heavily industrialised, and at the same time mostly rural. Our heavy industry has gone away to be replaced by nothing, while we seem unable to capitalise on our agricultural history as our farming tradition is slowly being lost, even in the face of a global food crisis. There are no efficient transport links between the North of the country and the South, and there is still, if not outright animosity, then mutual ambivalence between the two. We are very much a divided people, just not necessarily in the obvious usual ways.

Which brings me back to the language. Holy shit, does that polarise people. I know it’s cowardly and achieves nothing, but I’m so fed up with the fucking endless round-the-houses on the issue that I don’t engage in any conversation that goes near the subject any more. There is so much defensiveness, misunderstanding and anger that I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to have a sensible conversation without someone fucking losing it. You know what really gets up people’s noses? Road signs. Fucking road signs. People come into the country and whinge because the signs are bilingual, people in the country whinge that they can’t understand the signs, that they’re being discriminated against because there’s Welsh on the signs, that adding Welsh place-names on signs is prohibitively expensive and for fuck’s sake people, they’re road signs, this issue shouldn’t paralyse sensible debate about the future of the pissing nation.

You see what happened there? I got defensive and angry. Even I’m able to spot the craziness of that. So believe me, I understand very well issues that surround culture and language, about how they complicate issues of identity. I just wish that these differences didn’t cause the animosity they do.

And while I’m wishing, I’d like a fucking pretty fairy pony too.

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You know, I was staring at the front page of the Journal this morning and I couldn’t figure out what was missing. Turns out it was the post below. So apologies for the slight Slight Technical Problem that caused the delay, by which I mean inability to post-date.

A couple of things prompted this post. Firstly, J. Michael Straczynski coming to DC has prompted speculation as to what he’ll be working on. The Flash has been a big topic round here recently, and JMS has mentioned his preference for the Barry Allen version, so that’s got be a possibility. There’s Aquaman: a big name is about the only thing that will save the character at the moment, and if you think the New Avengers turnaround was big, imagine the craziness of an Aqua-title selling over 100,000. How about JLA? Is Dwayne McDuffie a permanent addition, or there for just 12 months? Is James Robinson going to be on Superman for the forseeable future, or just as long as he was on the Bat titles?

Secondly, I mentioned in comments not long ago that I’d like to see an Ed Brubaker Green Arrow title. Which has led to this question: given the chance, who should switch companies and work on a different title?

Brian Michael Bendis and Leinil Yu on Blue Beetle: Nope, not Batman. I’m not sure why Bendis seems to be a lot of fans’ choice to take on Gotham based stories. I can kind of see Miller’s 80s Daredevil being a good fit for 80s Batman, but not Bendis’ take. Good grief, can you imagine what the dialogue would be like? But he wrote the book on 00s era teen superheroes with Ultimate Spider-Man, and this kind of star power on the title would save what is probably my favourite current DCU ongoing. Even if it meant the main character inexplicably swearing in Hebrew. Second choice: Joss Whedon and Michael Ryan. Would be choice #1, but it would never ever come out.

John Rogers and Rafael Albuquerque on Runaways: Whedon’s run has been brilliant, of course, but oh so very delayed. His run was always meant to be short, so why not replace him with the team behind the other awesome teen-hero title? Just a damn shame Rogers is likely to be tied up with TV work for the foreseeable future (and also a damn shame he won’t be getting a crack at the Flash. He may very well be the perfect match for the title with his science background).

Brian K. Vaughan and Mark Bagley on Batman: I really like the current writing team on both Batman titles. It’s just a shame about all the bloody fill-ins. So the only guy I’d like to see take over would be Vaughan, who’s probably my choice for best current comic writer behind Morrison. And I know that Bagley’s already at DC for the new weekly; I’d just rather not have awesome and consistant on a Bat-title (something that they currently have a little trouble with) than burned out on Trinity.

Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch on Superman: Oh, come on, they’ve been begging to have a crack at it for years. Let’s see what they’ve got. Millar’s not going to screw up the chance by Ultimatising Superman. Sure, his last Superman run was uninspiring (way back during Loeb’s tenure on Superman, Millar either plotted or dialogued one of the other titles- Adventures?) but he was hardly left off the leash to do his thing. Besides: (a) his Swamp Thing run was brilliant, (b) Aztek and the Flash with Morrison were also brilliant, and (c) he’s already proven he knows what makes Superman tick by deconstructing then reconstructing the character’s conceits so brilliantly in Red Son.

This is fun. I’ve got something queued up already for tomorrow, but I think I’ll carry on with this on Friday.

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Writing about the Flash and the developments in DC and Marvel’s comics that I haven’t been too keen on last week got me thinking about what work I actually liked. I mean, there’s a reason I’m still buying some titles, right?

At the moment, the number of monthly issues I buy is dropping as the titles hit obvious trade collection points. The Superman titles have already been dropped, and I’ve promised dear friend Paul C that I’ll pick up Geoff Johns’ Legion story in trade, and I suspect the Morrison Batman run will be another one. Blue Beetle’s gone after #26 until John Rogers comes back on, and I may do the same with Daredevil. Eventually, the only stuff I’ll be getting month after month will be the two GL titles.

I don’t really want to drop Daredevil for, and believe me it sounds odd just thinking about a product this way, sentimental reasons. It was the first American-sized comic my Dad got me when I was a kid, for a start, and I kind of regret the last time I dropped the title. I loved the Kevin Smith/Marvel Knights reboot and kept on getting it up until I’d overdosed on Bendisism around the “Golden Age” story arc and dropped it. Problem is that on re-reading the issues were so much better when put together (probably the worst written-for-trade offender I’ve ever come across) that I ended up picking up the gap issues as paperbacks when I started picking up Brubaker’s run. And speaking of Brubaker, even though I only have a casual interest in the X-Men, his recent writing has been so good I’m tempted to get his Deadly Genesis/Shi’ar collections, and the Captain America hardcover.

Superman’s a good example of why trades make more sense to me, actually. As much as I loved the One Year Later story, my enjoyment was seriously impaired by delays, crap Countdown tie-ins and rushed fill-ins dropped on poor old Kurt Busiek (same complaints with both Batman titles, actually). Trades would have at least given me a whole story in one.

The other big one to get the boot is Ultimate Spider-Man. With the exception of the Flash (now that they’ve gone back to the Waid-run numbering) it’s the title that’s got the most big number momentum, by which I mean I’ve been getting it from the first issue right up to #118, making it a hell of a habit to break. But like I’ve repeated many times, habit ain’t a good enough reason to carry on shelling out the dough. Besides, I think the title’s lost a lot of its mojo recently, and not only due to Mark Bagley’s exit. There just doesn’t seem to be much forward going on with it.

Of course, that’s the thing with Bendis. Occasionally, it’s not clear what he’s getting at until you read everything together, so I’d be surprised if I don’t start getting this in a shelf-friendly format. Which is yet another significant advantage to trade paperbacks. I’m damn near out of longbox room, but there’s always space for another bookshelf.

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I don’t like writing negative reviews of things. You know, apart from the I Am Legend one. Oh, that was a fucking pleasure. I feel a little bad about going after comics based heavily on the 70s satellite-era yesterday: my point isn’t that they’re not necessarily good comics, it’s just that there’s a significant element to them that not only leaves me cold, but is almost deliberately ambivalent to me as a reader, in that it isn’t really for me.

So I don’t mean to be critical when I say that there are some writers that I don’t find as engaging as others. There are a lot who I think are objectively pretty poor, and that’s usually confirmed by the views of others. But what I find interesting are the writers championed by people I respect whom I don’t necessarily feel the same way about.

Forgive my less than incisive critical insight, by most of the time I couldn’t really tell you why I like some of the writers I do. The example I always use is Tom Clancy: a hackish doorstop-crafting right winger whose work I really dig for no good reason at all. It doesn’t even make sense to me.

In comic book terms, there are a number of writers who I really rate. Grant Morrison, of course. Mark Waid, John Rogers, Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern, Matt Fraction, the Phonogram guys. And there are just as many who I don’t really get: Sean McKeever, Tony Bedard, most of the Marvel Adventures writers. Here’s a couple of controvertial ones: Dan Slott and Gail Simone. Both are excellent writers that just don’t really click with me, even though I like some of their work well enough. And I have no idea why, other than the fact that somethings don’t click, and that’s just that. And I’m really not having a go. I mean, I didn’t get a hang of Shakespeare until last year, and that’s not bad company to be in, fiction-wise.

It’s not to say that there aren’t greyish areas. I think some of Mark Millar’s work is really good- Swamp Thing and Red Son in particular- and some of it I’m not keen on. As much as I love Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-man, I was a bit luke-warm on his Daredevil, and by virtue of familiarity some of his dialogue ticks have started to get a little annoying. I’d assumed Ed Brubaker was just another mediocre Bat-hack, but you don’t need me to tell you that Criminal is amazing, and his Daredevil may well be the best since Frank Miller’s.

I mention John Rogers above, and it’s his and Keith Giffen’s Blue Beetle that’s prompted the post in a way. I’ve said before that I’m never picking up a title just to keep the run consistent, and I’m certainly not getting any fillers ever again. And unfortunately, as much as I want to support the book, I don’t think I’ve ever read a filler comic I’ve ever liked, and I’m not liable to pick up Will Pfeifer’s issues.

That said, and in complete contradiction to the above, I’m absolutely picking up the Spanish-language one-off because it sounds like a fantastic and intriguing experiment. Maybe fill-ins would have a better rep if they all tried to do something a bit different.

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Don’t know about you, but I’d certainly pay to see the film.

Last Christmas, the highstreet record shops all decided to clear out the Bowie back catalogue at less than a fiver a pop. I binged like a politician at a half-priced cocaine festival. At one point I had five discs queued up in the car, and brothers and sisters, that is far too much Starman for any one human mind to cope with.

A David Bowie hangover is brutal.

Listening to these albums (these many, many albums) makes me realise how they really are complete works, in the sense that every track fits together as part of a whole. The major songs stand out of course, Changes, Sound and Vision, Golden Years and so on, but while these tracks have a seperate existence outside of the album they also take on a different significance when played as part of a larger piece of work. Not even necessarily in terms of an ongoing narrative, like the story thread that runs through The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, but also as thematically complete albums, like Station to Station or “Heroes”.

Even accepting that Bowie is a one-off, it’s difficult not to descend into old-fartery and moan about the lack of consistency over modern albums. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard plenty of brilliant singles over the past couple of years , but they rarely come from an album worth listening to in its entirety.

It isn’t surprising. We’re in the iPod era now. It won’t be long before the album concept will be the exception rather than the norm, when the need to buy physical objects to gain access to music becomes irrelevant. Entertainment becomes fragmentary, bite-sized downloads making up what Warren Ellis described as ‘burst culture’.

Blogs, mp3s and webcomics are all part of this culture, but monthly comic books and collections are not. Individual issues may have been the forerunner of this type of culture, but with a few exceptions the days of standalone issues are long gone. I don’t mean it as a criticism as I far prefer multi-part stories myself, but God knows the increasingly convoluted continuity and never ending multi-part crossover have long outstayed their welcome.

My biggest problem with these swollen and bloated stories is their lack of coherence. There are too many broken links and inconsistencies, and the more titles that crossover, the less you feel you know or understand. The more information you’re given, the more information you feel you lack.

Every issue should act like a track that builds to a complete album. They shouldn’t all be attempts at a barnstorming single, because that gets old quickly too. All the seperate parts should fit. There’s no doubt this approach works, inevitably in titles that are either completely seperated from an external continuity (like All-Star Superman, or Y: The Last Man), or at best only minimally affected by endless crossover (Green Lantern or Blue Beetle, while not completely divorced from the DCU, to date have had very little interference in the main run, i.e. we haven’t been expected to pick up seperate titles to get a full story, and even when we have the issue’s remained relatively self-contained. The exception of course being the recent Sinestro Corps, but even that stays pretty much within the GL titles).

Which brings me to Tomb of Dracula.

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