The Fractal Hall Journal

Following on from Wednesday, and good Lord do the post tags get long when I write about comic characters and creators.

Geoff Johns on X-Men: One: Johns has a solid history with team/squad titles. Two: He’s really good at delving into a character’s backstory, and not only coming up with a different spin on things but also in streamlining and simplifying what can sometimes be pretty confusing and contradictory stuff. Three: Isn’t this exactly what the X titles need?

John Romita, Jr on Wonder Woman: One of the best, most consistant pencillers of the last twenty-five (if not more) years, yet never worked on a mainstream DC title. While he’s be an awesome fit on damn near anything, I suspect the title that would benefit the most would be Wonder Woman.

Grant Morrison on Daredevil: And everyone just starts looking at me funny. No, honestly, I’m serious. The fact that it’s not the kind of thing anyone would expect would work in its favour, because any way the coin falls would benefit the reader. Either Morrison would channel the best of his Batman work into a crime title (it’s not all sci-fi closet flying saucers; think Gothic), or he’d get odd (as it were) with Daredevil, and give us a fresh take. I mean, how much grim and gritty crime drama can the character really bear? Well, loads more. But you get my point.

Mike Mignola on Aquaman: Widening the net to outside the Big Two, and I reckon a Lovecraft-style horror spin on Arthur Curry/Orin/Whomever would be a great direction to take the character in. Not as a permanent status-quo change, but just for a year or so. Because we never really get a feeling of how cold and dark it is in the deep sea, or of all the squiddy-headed nasties that are down there. Half the time it looks like the Little Fucking Mermaid in Poseidonis. The Dweller in the Deep was practically Cthulhu in an orange shirt, after all.

James Robinson and Marcos Martin on Silver Surfer: He proved he could do cosmic stuff with Starman, and I think a long term 60-odd issue run in that kind of vein would be the perfect way to explore a great (but famously tricky) character. As for Marcos Martin, the last work of his I saw was for Marvel, on the excellent Doctor Strange: The Oath, although the first place I saw his extraordinary art was on DC’s Breach. He’d fit the Surfer book perfectly.

Matt Fraction on The Flash: Another writer who, as far as I know, hasn’t done any work for DC. As per the other posts about the Flash this month, the title should be (a) about big, crazy ideas, (b) have a lot of heart, (c) be electrifying and/or hyperkinetic, and (d) always seems to benefit from fresh perspectives and very individual writers. Fraction’s one of the few comic writers working today that ticks all those boxes.

Michael Alan Nelson on Doctor Strange: Great on BOOM! Studios’ Fall of Cthulhu, can’t imagine he’d do a bad job on the sorceror.

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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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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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