The Fractal Hall Journal

I notice that the World War 2 Marvel film is provisionally titled “The First Avenger: Captain America”, or something to that effect. I assume that it’s only a step from here to retitling it “The First Avenger”, or maybe just “Avenger”, in non-US countries.

Interesting, in a way. In an attempt to appeal to us UnAmericans the new GI JOE film involves an “international” team, something that’s irritated fans and caused some wholly irrelevant farting around from the kind of people who lost it when Perry White didn’t say “American Way” in Superman Returns. I’d be curious to know whether they honestly think the rest of the world will flock to see the film because the American paramilitary fetish has now been lightly veiled, whether we’d all go to see it even if it was all Starred and Spangly because everyone (at least, everyone with the taste in entertainment of a 10 year old) has a paramilitary fetish anyway, or even whether the rest of the world cares. The biggest mistake they may have made is that the brand just doesn’t have the mass appeal or fuzzy nostalgia of Transformers, though I concede I could be wrong about that.

I suppose my point is that, sure, considering recent actions the rest of the world isn’t inclined to get all rah-rah about the US army. And believe me, if the Eurovision Song Contest results are anything to go by, the Brits don’t have a fantastic rep either. Does it matter in terms of a Captain America film? Probably, although I don’t think the Iraq debacle has soured anyone on the fun to be had in Razi-bashing. I don’t think trying to obscure the title will make much difference to this. A title change won’t make people miss which hero is being featured in the film, and in fact a title change will just bring round a news cycle of aforementioned irrelevant farting. Maybe that’s the plan- they say any publicity’s good publicity, after all.

Superman isn’t always effected by his status as an American avatar. While the American Way stuff is an intrinsic part of his character these days, it doesn’t take much rationalising for the rest of us to be able to relate to him regardless of nationality. Captain America’s a little tougher because, well. He’s called Captain fucking America.

Is that a bad thing? Hells no. Of course not. That’s his entire raison d’être. What goes with that is the character has to carry that too, good times or bad, and tough shit if you’re the movie’s marketing guy.

On a slightly related note, not too long ago a friend of mine tried to get me to pick up the new Captain Britain comic, written by Paul Cornell, a thoroughly nice bloke and an excellent writer whether of books, comics or on the new Who. Problem was, my friend also said something along the lines of “And he’s a British superhero too- don’t you want to support that?”.

And that, there, is the heart of the problem. I have no particular animosity to the character. I’ve got no particular animosity to anyone who feels they are “British”, or to the concept of “Britain”. But that’s not how I identify myself. That’s not who I feel I am. And no, I don’t really want to support the concept of a Captain Britain (I hasten to add that’s a very subjective personal opinion, and not something I expect anyone else to subscribe to), because I already feel that the Welsh, the Scots, even the English themselves get short changed, culturally, by anything that lumps us all in together.

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I haven’t read an X-Men comic since the unintelligible mess that followed Grant Morrison’s departure from the flagship title. And that was a while ago.

It’s odd to think of the Avengers being the biggest brand Marvel currently have, considering the way their mutant line has dominated the company for twenty-odd years. With the cartoon and then the movies it seemed they were also the highest-profile property beyond the source material too.

And then came Spider-Man, and the Scotsman’s departure, and the next thing you know Brett Ratner’s cocked up the gravy train and even Captain America (Captain America?) is kicking your arse in the Diamond sales chart.

Funny, but I’ve never been the biggest X-Men fan. I’ve never disliked them, but I can’t say I’d rank them in the top ten, maybe even top twenty of characters or titles. But I’ve read a lot of their comics over the years, mostly thanks to dear friend Triggi and the British reprint titles he bought through the 90s.

Outside of pressed trees, I enjoyed the cartoon for what it was, and went nuts for the first two films. Thanks to a lack of reverence for the Claremont years (just never really got his work, I suppose, which so informed the X-Men’s world that it probably explains why I’ve never rated them all that highly) I wasn’t horrified by Morrison’s take. The opposite, really. So there was no way to be anything but disappointed with what followed, and after a short time I dropped the title. I wasn’t as taken by the Whedon stuff as some (although the art was very pretty), but then I don’t quite understand the Kitty Pryde fetish readers who are slightly older than me seem to have.

After spending about three hundred words telling you about why I find the X-Men a bit meh, imagine my surprise that recently I’ve been missing them. Because there really is a unique atmosphere to Xavier’s team. More often than not the soap-operatics are cringe-worthy, the dialogue (for the international characters in particular) awful, the reoccurring situations tiresome (the Savage Land again?) and worst of all, the continuity impossibly convoluted even in an industry that thrives on minutiae of detail.

Of course, you take that all together and there’s a familiarity to all of that, something that plays to the mindset of someone who, for example, spends decades reading the same damn kids’ stuff over and over. The X-Men are like super-hero comfort food (well, insofar as super-hero comics are all comfort-eating of a kind), everything you’re addicted to in one easy package.

I picked up X-Men: Deadly Genesis on impulse. I mean, the aftermath of House of M wasn’t so interesting to me that I need to know what happened next, and further twists to Summers family history isn’t exactly compulsive, but damn if Ed Brubaker hasn’t earned some credit thanks to his exceptional work on Daredevil.

Turns out, the collection is exactly what’s needed to get me back into the X-Men. Brubaker’s talented enough to sidestep the annoying pitfalls usually associated with the characters (although, great big FAIL for regional accents), writing a pretty straightforward mutant adventure. It’s far more traditional than Morrison’s take, a lot more nostalgic, but still streamlined enough for modern sensibilities. Nothing hugely consequential happens (though the marketing material wants you to think so) besides Banshee’s death (but come on, did people really freak out about that? An X-Man dying? Seriously?), and that’s OK because all we put our money down for Beast being smart, Wolverine being stealthy knife guy, and everyone else standing round looking angsty. Professor Xavier comes across as a bit of a dick, but come on, he sticks teenagers in leather and makes them fight. He is a bit of a dick.

All-in-all, a comfortable comicky read.

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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 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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So, the condensed version of last week’s Fractal Furlough: we walked up and up and up until there was no more Up left in the nation. That’s an obscure way of saying we went to the top of Snowdon, Wales’ tallest mountain, and returned to tell the (abbreviated) tale.

But you don’t want to hear about fresh air and clambering over things. It’s Indoor Nerd time, and here’s the comic-based entertainment enjoyed on holiday:

Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr.’s Kick-Ass: I’ve seen a fair bit of negative response to this online, but to be honest it seems a little like people objecting to Millar’s over-enthusiastic marketing and his past sins rather than the work in question. The premise of real-world vigilantism and the incredibly fucked-up things that inevitably follow is exactly as promised, and exactly as expected. I really enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to the next issue in a way that I don’t for most other super-hero comics these days.

I think a lot of people don’t like Millar’s writing style, which is fair enough. But while I don’t like his brand of fucked-upedness as applied to, say, Captain America, I’m more than happy to see him play around when he’s off on his own thing. All-in-all, much like Rambo (or Cloverfield, for that matter) the title’s exactly as promised so I don’t see what the controversy is, and I think a dislike of Millar’s self-promotion and his treatment of mainstream characters is the subtext to some of the bad reviews. And needless to say the art is brilliant.

The only other thing I will say is that sometimes, as with Wanted, some of Millar’s stuff starts off strongly and then runs out of steam. So there’s always a chance of a cock-up, but I hope not.

The Punisher: Saw about half of the film before I switched off. It wasn’t like it was a massive Batman and Robin level stinker, it was just that so much of what makes Ennis’ run interesting is removed to make an absolutely non-dangerous film. I thought Thomas Jane would actually have been pretty good if they’d let him be the merciless stone-cold killer of the Max title, and some of the visual touches echoed Tim Bradstreet’s art pretty well.

But if you’re watching a Punisher film, you want super-violent gunplay. Deeply, deeply evil bastards and bastardesses eating a hail of hot lead. Not Frank Castle nicking cars and taking incriminating photographs. The film should have covered mindless violence and pitch-black humour. Anything else would be a bonus, hopefully taken from the character-study touches Ennis writes into the series. That said, maybe it was building up to a big ending and I switched off too early, but that’s the film-maker’s cock-up. Ultimately, Castle didn’t appear to be an unstoppable force of nature, and that’s all the Punisher is. If he isn’t, then you’ve just made a mediocre vigilante movie.

And before I forget, and just incase you miss me, tomorrow’s post will be up a little later than usual too.

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