The Fractal Hall Journal

I’ve said before that I’m not likely to be doing a delineation on Spider-Man. The character’s one of the most over-examined in comics, and writing a breakdown of the basics doesn’t strike me as worthwhile. Spider-Man seems to be forever getting back to basics, most recently during the notorious Brand New Day thing. Add in the discussions about the roots of the character that have been occuring over the past few years outside of the comics “community” due to the popularity of the films, then I’d guess another go around by me wouldn’t interesting to read, or all that interesting to write.

There is one thing I do fancy a crack at, though. Let’s posit, as I have been doing, that Spider-Man is Peter Parker’s arch-enemy, and vice versa. What does this tell us about what villains are for, and what does it tell us about their purpose in superhero stories in particular?

Let’s accept the truism that the mechanism of story is conflict. The primary conflict in superhero stories is between the heroes and the villains, obviously. And what is Spider-Man, as a character, always praised for, ad nauseum? Peter Parker’s real life (ho ho) problems. Can’t pay bills, can’t look after his aunt, can’t bring assault charges against Flash Thompson. The reason these problems are compelling in a superhero story, as opposed to being seen as an annoying tangent, is because they are Spider-Man’s difficulties. By a similar token, Spider-Man’s actions have repercussions for Parker. I’m not saying we’re dealing with separate personalities here; I think of all the superhero identity dichotomies, Spider-Man has probably the most integrated personality consistant across both identities. I’m saying that the two identities, while the same person, are in conflict with each other. And conflict in a superhero story means conflict between heroes and villains.

So, how do we define what a villain, or a hero, is? Not exactly an easy question. Maybe back in the day we could identify the two according to the colour of their hats, but it didn’t take long for ambiguity about even that to creep into popular culture. There’s plenty of things about modern culture that we can moan about, but one thing we have got right is that, regardless of our tendency to label anything we’re broadly unfamiliar with as strange, unnatural, even sinister, it doesn’t take that much time for a vocal opposition to that standpoint to spring up. I suspect that we’re good at pre-judgement, but we’re better at picking a fight. I suppose both things rise from the same instinct.

Why have superheroes, or supervillains, at all? At the most simple level, they were created to make money, obviously. They were successful- hugely successful, by any metric, and continue to be- because they’re a relatively simple way to show the extraordinary. Even today, the cinema fulfils the same purpose. We could argue that there’s nothing simple about the lengths a production goes to to film something that costs over a hundred million dollars, but I’d wager it’s a hell of a lot simpler than figuring out how to actually make someone fly.

People respond to the demonstration of the extraordinary. That’s the key. The drama of conflict is the simplest template to use, and the almost comical simplicity of good vs. evil the most efficient engine. Using incredible powers against plain criminals soon becomes too easy, offering no challenge, so soon we have villains that mirror the heroes, less altruistic characters with fantastic abilities.

There’s an elegance in symmetry, and as we’ve already fallen hook line and sinker for a black and white world, we begin looking for characters that mirror and invert our heroes. Was the Joker ever really meant to be the Batman’s arch-enemy? Did Bill Finger sit down and decide that a dark hero needed a bright villain, a twisted inversion? I have no idea, but organically that’s what the Joker came to be, perhaps not deliberately but as the most obvious vessel for the concept.

A shortcut to giving a hero an arch-enemy is to either mirror or invert the character. I doubt this is an original observation, by the way. It strikes me as the kind of thing that would have come up over at the Absorbascon, say. I don’t recall reading it elsewhere, though apologies if I’m repeating something someone else has already talked about.

An inversion of a character is the character’s opposite. The Joker is the antithesis of the Batman, and I’m sure we don’t need to go over the whole dark/bright, order/chaos thing to prove this. A character’s mirror, on the other hand, is essentially identical, but has opposite motivations. Batman’s most direct mirror would be the Wrath, though he’s rarely used. I suspect Catwoman would be the most obvious equivalent in his classic rogue’s gallery, or maybe Simone’s take on Catman.

There are plenty of others to be found. Luthor is Superman’s inversion, a man who thinks he’s a god to Superman’s a god who thinks he’s a man, while General Zod is his mirror. Iron Man has many mirrors, from the Crimson Dynamo through the Iron Monger to the Armour Wars’ Firepower (anyone remember him?). The Mandarin is his most obvious inversion, though time has weakened this. In the past, he was a communist sorceror to Stark’s capitalist science-adventurer. These days, communism isn’t an issue and his magic is just alien technology. Here’s an idea; Stark needs an inversion, a Mephisto-like being of magic. By the same token, actually, Dr Strange could do with a technology-based nemesis (his mirrors being numerous, Baron Mordo chief amongst them). Along with, you know, an ongoing title. Actually, I can’t believe he doesn’t have one, so it’s probably just me having not read enough of his comics. Suggestions in comments, please.

Thinking about it, I think this is the very thing that Mark Waid realised when he thought up leather-clad Magical Mister Doom. Change the Fantastic Four’s nemesis from mirror to inversion, open up new avenues of conflict. I know some criticise, but I liked the leather-Doom stuff and I think a lot of Waid’s FF work was spot on, although I lost interest during the somewhat hamfisted WMD-laden invasion of Iraq Latveria.

But back to the Spider’s “real life” problems. Spider-Man and Peter Parker’s conflict is between two halves of the same person, and as such the are both mirrors and inversions of one another. Which isn’t to say we don’t see external examples of this, of course, Venom being the mirror and the Green Goblin (perhaps) being the inversion. But Spider-Man and Parker are mirrors of each other (they have the same powers in and out of costume, and the same personalities) and inversions (Parker is seen as a kind, clever but dopey and largely useless man who’s secretly a criminal and who lies to everyone who’s close to him, Spider-Man is seen as a criminal but is in fact a selfless hero, and so on) at the same time.

Click here for the Delineation Archive.

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Halloween is finished for another year, and winter has begun. With the spirit night shenanigans done with, we’ll be returning to the delineations this week. And as you may have noticed, the site has undergone a couple of changes. Very, very purple changes.

I started this Journal in June 2007, although I suppose the real anniversary is October 15th, when regular posting began (and for those interested, we’re fast approaching the 300th post, which is hard to believe). I would have mentioned something a couple of weeks ago, but we were in the middle of the delineation posts and I was on a roll, so I forgot. I think a bit of a change after a year is a good thing, although I may get fed up of the new layout and go back. For the moment, we’ll see how this goes. Anyone spot any problems or issues, or if the new template borks things up for anyone, or if you just find it unbelievably hideous, I’d appreciate a comment or an email and I’ll see what I can do.

A few thoughts on superheroes, as we’ve been discussing them a fair bit recently. With the secret identities that almost always go along with them, they’re an excellent tool for examining themes of duality, dishonesty, masks, and identity itself. I think that in recent years, the superhero genre has become obsessed with these themes, and with good reason. If you want to look grown-up and artistic, you need to define a theme, and this is the easiest and most obvious one.

How many times do we need to see the concept of ‘dichotomy’ addressed in strip form? At which point can we move on from the first ‘artistic’ interpretation of superheroes creators have been eager to play with? At some point, it needs to stop being good enough to crap out something that gives lip service to psychological analysis in order to be complemented on insight. You don’t need a story that can be dissected on multiple levels, anyway (says the man who’s been dissecting away for a couple of weeks). You just need a good superhero story.

I find myself repeating this point over and over, but it is the heart of these posts: superhero stories boil down to interactions between heroes and villains. The drift towards writing stories about how superheroes interact with themselves, how they resolve inner conflicts, is the natural extension of psychological analysis. But it’s very inward-looking, and not the ideal way to tackle a set of characters who were created as a way of externalising various things. Heroes fight with themselves, heroes fight with each other, but rarely do their comics show anything meaning from their fights with supervillains.

This is a deliberate decision on the part of creators. It’s very post-modern to characterise fighting villains as pointless, as a kind of distraction. Millar’s Spider-man sees villains deliberately created by Norman Osborn to divert heroes from doing anything meaningful (oh, by the way, Geek Fail of the day: I had to check what spelling of “Osborn” the character uses. I suppose Norman Osbourne sounds more like a banker, or a dodgy MP). Joe Casey’s Iron Man miniseries The Inevitable has Stark growing ‘beyond’ old fashioned villains. Superman and Lex Luthor’s eternal cycle of battle wastes the potential of both of them.

Very modern, very self-aware, very cynical. We must only enjoy these stories ironically, or not at all. We all have to giggle at a dumb guy in a dumb goblin costume. We are all meta now.

But I tell you, the best stories are ones where Galactus is about to eat the planet, and only the Fantastic Four can save us. Where the Joker’s burning Gotham, and Batman puts out the fires. We don’t need an excuse to enjoy this, or a way to laugh at ourselves. It is more than good enough to engage with the material within its own context. This isn’t to say I don’t like a bit of Clever in my comics. I just don’t want the same fucking Clever I’ve been reading since Alan Moore thought that having Alec Holland be really dead was Clever.

Galactus is a good example, actually. He is coming to eat your world, and you’d better find a way to stop him or everyone’s dead. Conflict doesn’t have to be dumb, just two people slugging it out. Think of the mechanics of dealing with a cosmic threat. Man versus god, Mr Fantastic’s advanced intelligence versus a mind eons old. Brute force and power in play, the Thing becoming a breed of immovable object. And the Surfer: a superb villain, one that is eventually won to our side at an enormous cost to himself. And how evil is Galactus, really? Any more evil than any creature that requires sustenance? That realisation that Galactus has an important purpose comes later than in Fantastic Four #48-50, but the seeds are there. Sure, the resolution via the Ultimate Nullifier is copoutery of the highest order, but it doesn’t negate anything that comes before. There’s a lot in here, and that’s not bad for disposable kid’s entertainment.

So let’s get our superheroes out of their own heads. Let’s have some meaningful external conflict, and not worry quite so much about how our heroes war with themselves. We’ll be addressing the matter of the Hulk this week, and it will be worth bearing some of this in mind for that, because the Hulk is perfect for both these elements: at one level, he’s at war with himself, and as a creature of almost limitless strength, he’s at war with the rest of the world, too.

That reminds me: I’ve been meaning to do some posts to illustrate what I mean by some of the concepts I’ve written about here, by way of good (and bad) stories. I haven’t so far because (a) using the scanner’s a bit like hard work and (b) I don’t tend to use many images here because I like to keep the Journal optimised for sneaky reading at work. Of course, my consideration for where you good people may be reading this blog has just gone straight out the window with the big purple manor house I’m now using as a background, so, you know. Bollocks to it. Time for some pictures.

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Some (non-Alien/Predator for once) tat I really, really need to own, spotted at io9: An incredibly detailed Iron Man toy.

Other news has Kenneth Branagh in talks to direct Thor. This is a great idea. His Frankenstein film came up as a conversation topic the other day, and although I remember it having a lukewarm reception, it really was a decent film, with a great cast, and probably one of the steam-punkiest films to ever have a wide release. If Branagh brings that kind of atmosphere and imagination to the Asgard scenes, the film’s going to be amazing. On one hand, I’d love to have a crazy Kirby-fest, but until someone gets Pixar to make Michael Chabon’s 60s set Fantastic Four film it’s not going to happen, so I’ll settle for Oddly Gothic.

The Green Lantern film appears to be ramping up. I don’t see why they don’t just adapt the recent Secret Origin storyline, because I really love that story. I mean, I’m one of the (apparently few) people who quite liked Emerald Dawn, but I don’t really want a screen adaptation of it, and I’m glad the crippling-his-mate-while-drink-driving thing’s been retconned (ret-retconned?) away. I’d be interested to see who they tap for the aliens. I bet Weta’d do an awesome job, but I’d be happy with the Henson Creature Shop too. No news on Sinestro, but he’s got to be in it. Presumably as Hal’s mentor in the first one, and the antagonist in GL II.

Johns has been playing down Sinestro’s alien-ness in Secret Origin so far, in that when he turned up in Rebirth a big deal was made of his, well, sinister demeanor and alien unknowability. Which was really cool, playing up the idea that not every alien species in the Corps was just humanity with a funny skin colour. It gave a sense of original Star Trek-type mystery, the vibe that it’s cold and scary out in space, something that doesn’t always come through in space comics. Of course, that spin doesn’t quite fit with the other Korugans we’ve seen, or Sinestro back when he was a Lantern. Perhaps the cold freakishness isn’t an alien thing, but a symptom of his time spent exiled, either on Qward or inside the Battery. Which is quite cool, too.

Quite looking forward to Neil Gaiman’s new book. It looks a bit more up my street than some of his other work. I think Gaiman’s a great writer, and when he’s good, he’s brilliant. I love Neverwhere, and the original Books of Magic, Anansi Boys was a lot of fun and I’m making my way through his Sandman stuff in the Absolute editions. But I never really got American Gods, I found Eternals a bit lacking and 1602 was let down by a weak ending after a great start. I always meant to go back and read Gods again because I’d probably get more out of it second time round, but I can’t find much enthusiasm for it, really. I think I’d be too busy trying to figure out where all the different gods came from, and while a little bit of that can be fun, the sheer amount of them in the book makes the whole thing too much like hard work.

But a story about a kid raised by ghosts in a graveyard? Kind of thing you wish you’d thought of yourself, really. I’m a little underwhelmed by the McKean cover, but it’s ok because they’re also offering an alternate one by artist Chris Riddell. Riddell’s a fantastic cartoonist, one I remember really clearly from my time as a bookseller. He really stood out amongst the children’s illustrators, his “Rabbit and Hedgehog” books in particular. Even if they may skew a little young for the Journal’s readership.

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Joe Kelly’s departure from the X-Men marks the point where I’d given up on Marvel titles. Let’s not even think about what the fuck was going on over in Spider-Man.

The bankruptcy was the best thing that happened to the company.

For a while during the early 00s, it seemed that Marvel were willing to do anything, no matter how nuts, to their characters. Daredevil was better than it had been since Miller, Priest’s Black Panther was (and still is, to this day) the most intelligent political thriller ever to be written in a superhero title; maybe one of the most sophisticated runs of any comic ever. Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man was just brilliant, and with Ultimate X-Men first and the Ultimates later Mark Millar was about to define what became Marvel’s house writing style for the decade.

I was a massive fan of Babylon 5, so you can imagine how much I was looking forward to the Great Maker’s Amazing Spider-Man. But hands down the craziest, and best, decision was to get Grant Morrison on New X-Men.

I’m not a Chris Claremont fan. So it’s incredibly easy for me to say that Morrison’s X-Men is head and shoulders above every other attempt to write with those characters. It seemed that he was willing to do anything with the title, an exercise in sheer imagination and possibility. Never mind Millar on Fantastic Four: Kirby’s legacy was carried forward in this title.

I’m not sure whether, from a creative standpoint, Marvel learned the right lessons from their successes. Jemas-era Marvel shows the incredible possibilities of writers left to do whatever they want. Instead, it seems that interesting elements of the Ultimates, New X-Men and Straczynski and Bendis’s work have been cherry-picked and then applied to years of interminable “events”. I can’t fault the marketing/business side of things; the sales figures say it all, and who’d have thought that the Avengers would become a brand to dominate even the mighty X, and without a film to back it up?

Like I say, I like new and fresh perspectives. It’s even important that the “industry” is more switched-on in business terms (Christ, I remember when the X-Men movie was a huge, global success, yet the comics of the time not only ignored it, but went out of their way to be hostile to any possible new readership that may have happened along). I’m not sure that the correct way to exploit this is to just overlay a style that was interesting five years ago on every fucking title that’s released.

Because what we have now, once again, is editorial-driven comics. Civil War/Secret Invasion dominates everything, and stifles the creativit of the individual titles that are meant to support it. To my mind they just aren’t enjoyable to read, or at the very least nowhere near as enjoyable as Morrison’s X-Men or JLA, or even Bendis’ first hundred Ultimate Spider-Man issues.

If I’ve got any conclusion to arrive at, it’s this: DC and Marvel have both chosen to stick to editorially mandated paths, the only difference (and the heart of why one company is doing better than the other) is that DC chose their path ten years ago rather than five, which makes it appear less “fresh”. But it’s only relative, because God knows Marvel’s approach started to look stale before World War Hulk.

Damn, I’ve gotten all pessimistic again. But one thing cheers me no-end. There’s never been a better time to be a Transformers fan.

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The first Authority paperback is still the only comic collection I’ve ever picked up on the strength of the artist alone. Although it eventually won me over to Warren Ellis’ writing, I’d bought it specifically due to an interview Bryan Hitch had done for Mark Salisbury’s book Artists on Comic Art.

Hitch’s style is incredible. He defined “widescreen” comic art, and to paraphrase from the above book: while the typical 90s style artwork would have a huge guy flying up away from the Earth filling a full page splash with the planet a small circle in the background, Hitch’s style would be to draw a the curve of the Earth filling up a double page spread, with a tiny figure flying out of it. A far more majestic way of suggesting something huge and epic.

While his Ultimates work is probably his best to date, I think I prefer the Authority stuff with Ellis, in particular the sense of scale he brought to the Shiftship invasion in the second story arc. I don’t think anyone’s ever pulled off the size of an alien armada quite so well. It’s this that makes me think his upcoming work on Fantastic Four has mind-blowing potential.

The only real weakness, I think, could be in the writing. Hitch’s time on JLA was unmemorable, but I’ve read that’s likely because he and writer Mark Waid didn’t quite mesh. I think he needs a huge idea or image to play off, something Mark Millar was able to provide in Ultimates. I don’t think a vague direction to draw something cosmic works with any artist who isn’t Jack Kirby. I hope Millar’s able to give his artist something to get his teeth into. Something we’ve never seen before. And maybe a little less of Reed Richards as an autistic supervillain.

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