The Fractal Hall Journal

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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I notice that Wildstorm never followed up on their reimaginings of the various old British comics characters that Time Warner ended up with the rights for. It’s not a massive surprise, really, as I don’t think the titles did that well, although full marks to Virgin for relaunching Dan Dare. I hope they’re planning a trade for it, because it’s high on the acquisition list this year.

I didn’t think the main Albion title was that good. I can kind of see what they were trying to do, tying obscure old characters together into one world LXG style, but they were so obscure that I have no idea what the target market was. They were dredging up things that not even the Brits recognised.

It didn’t matter so much with Battler Britton or Thunderbolt Jaxon, in that both had pretty straightforward concepts and were written better than Albion. You can’t go wrong with Garth Ennis on a war title, and I think Dave Gibbons is a really strong writer as well as penciller. Thunderbolt Jaxon I liked in particular, and it was in that book that I kind of understood what they were aiming for. Because it really had the same kind of atmosphere and tone of the old Eagle comics (unsurprising, as that was the type of comic that shaped Gibbons’ style).

The thing is, I don’t think many Brits around my age would remember characters like Jaxon, or whatever they were on about in Albion. Alan Moore might, but I don’t. The target audience is just too small to get a nostalgic reaction from; in fact, they are pretty much the last generation to grow out of buying comics. But the generation that followed belong to man-child culture, and may well be worth targeting stuff towards.

Because most nerds this side of the pond know about 2000AD, Judge Dredd and his Megazine, Battle, Starblazer, Crisis (I’ve never read the last two myself, but I at least know of them and the influence they had on British talent in particular), the UK Transformers and Action Force titles, even the venerable old Eagle was still going in one form or another for a while (I remember collecting it around ‘91, when they were doing exceptionally spooky and surprisingly violent horror stories). And Gibbons’ storytelling in Jaxon was definitely coming from that direction.

I suppose there’s an argument to be made that the dark SF Britishness of some of these magazines ended up being funnelled either into Vertigo following the “invasion” of the 80s or back into 2000AD for those who stayed behind, the latter essentially being the last comic standing after comics in the UK went pretty much completely over to US reprints. But it would be great to see a comic that tried to harness that kind of vibe. How awesome would it be to have a comic that tried to knit together everything from Doomlord Vek to the 13th Floor, via Charley’s War, Storm Force and MACH-1?

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Just a few follow-up points to yesterday’s post:

• I rank both Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis highly as writers, but I liked neither of them about ten years ago. As a teenager, I found their work far too mean-spirited, but as with Sandman, I’ve found myself appreciating them more now I’m older. The turning points for me were Preacher round about the time Alamo was released, towards the end of the run, and Ultimate Fantastic Four. Unsurprisingly, I first understood the strength of their writing when they weren’t tediously reiterating why they hate superheroes so much.
• Regarding Neil Gaiman, while I’ve only begun to appreciate Sandman recently, even at the time they were originally released I loved The Books of Magic, Good Omens, and Neverwhere (both the novel and on the telly). With the other two writers, I didn’t seem to like anything they did.
• It’s really difficult for me to describe Ennis’ strength as a writer. I keep going round and round on this point. I will say he’s better read in collected form than individual issues, where you’re able to immerse yourself in his somewhat skewed worldview. There’s a lot of substance to his characters, considering how cartoonish the violence is on the surface.
• It’s a credit to Ennis that I’ve started to enjoy his Punisher run as much as I do, because I fucking loathe the character. Really, really fucking loathe him.
• With indescribable fucking loathing.

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Garth Ennis and Darick Robinson’s title The Boys came as a surprise, to me at least (see also Ennis’ stint on Midnighter). Considering his views on superheroes, I wouldn’t have expected him ever to write another one.

Along with Warren Ellis, Ennis has been vocal in his contempt for the genre, and the premise of The Boys (covert agents beat, humilate and/or kill anyone with powers) plays to this. It’s easy to get impatient with both these writer’s superhero work, as the disdain is obvious in every issue, and the comment had been made time and again that if they dislike the work so much, then why don’t they do something else? The simple answer is that Marvel and DC is where the money is, and ultimately you can’t begrudge anyone a job.

With this in mind, Warren Ellis in particular has developed a coping mechanism for his superhero writing: try and make it about something else. In the same way Frank Miller wrote Daredevil as a crime comic because that’s what his interests went towards, Ellis has written a high-tech thriller (Iron Man), prisoners-on-a-mission (Thunderbolts), even young-adult style SF (Ultimate Fantastic Four). The latter in particular is a great direction to take, and really should have pointed Marvel’s talent search towards the many authors who write teenage science fiction (Stephen Baxter, to name an example off the top of my head).

Ennis, on the other hand, can’t help but have a go everytime he deals with the underpants crowd. His writing is dark- very funny, but very dark- and it’s in this vein that he writes his superhero stuff. Problem is, it can get a little tedious.

But when he’s on form, he’s one of the best writers in the business. His and Steve Dillon’s Preacher is one of the best complete runs of a series ever. His character-defining run on Punisher, with Frank Castle as an unstoppable death-bringing machine was actually able to make the character interesting, examining the heart of Castle’s psychopathy as well as that of the criminals he eliminates. The master stroke was in making Castle more understandable, perhaps even in some twisted way easier to identify with, by removing every last shred of his humanity. But really, Ennis’ heart is in his war stories.

His work on Fury and (to a certain extent) the Punisher emphasises their military roots, with a number of strong flashback stories. But his best work is done in straight military titles, like Battler Britton, or Garth Ennis’ War Stories. The latter, in particular, are absolutely riveting, a number of single issue stories that focus on various soldiers and battlegrounds, from the Spanish Civil War, to the Italian campaign of WWII, to the Naval convoys in the Baltic sea. Every single one is an excellent study of humanity under extreme circumstances, of the resilience of the common soldier, and the devestation of war. All have an authenticity to them, whether through deliberate research or simply because this is an area the writer knows a lot about.  It’s a testament to the strength of the stories that they need very little of Ennis’ trademark black humour to prop them up, in the same way that work like The Boys would collapse without it.

The Boys itself is a good enough read, by which I mean sickeningly hilarious. You don’t have to read much to realise why DC got sqeamish publishing it, and let the title switch publishers to Dynamite. By all accounts, it’s a hit by the usual creater-owned standards, and I can see why as Ennis out-Ennises himself with every issue. While I doubt anyone could have expected the level of success the title’s achieved, I think its creation was a deliberate attempt to give Ennis’ fans what they want, and to that extent he was willing to write about superheroes again. Again, you can’t begrudge someone a living and the comic book market is a business like any other. If anything, clever marketing with creators playing to their strengths is exactly what’s needed.

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