On Superman

Hello and welcome to Hoopla!


So, there's a ten-part interview with Grant Morrison being posted over at newsarama which is all about the recently completed All-Star Superman series he and Frank Quitely have been working on for the past few years. The whole interview is certainly worth reading, but I found this excerpt particularly lovely...


In the end, I saw Superman not as a superhero or even a science fiction character, but as a story of Everyman. We’re all Superman in our own adventures. We have our own Fortresses of Solitude we retreat to, with our own special collections of valued stuff, our own super–pets, our own “Bottle Cities” that we feel guilty for neglecting. We have our own peers and rivals and bizarre emotional or moral tangles to deal with.


Ah, Grant Morrison. There's plenty of his work that is not to my taste (Invisibles, Final Crisis, Batman: RIP, his four-issue Mr. Miracle and Bulleteer series), but when he's on, he's on.


My only other comment for this very brief Hoopla! is that the January 2009 solicitations have come out and I am underwhelmed.

I suspect that it's a January thing. I have noticed, over the years, that the Big Two Companies don't tend to have much to offer each January; presumably the thinking is that everyone just spent all their money on gifts and so sales are going to be down in any case. And, hey, that may be true... who knows?

But one thing that did catch my eye is this...

WOLVERINE AND POWER PACK #3 (of 4)
Written by MARC SUMERAK & CHRIS GIARRUSSO
Art by SCOTT KOBLISH & CHRIS GIARRUSSO
Cover by GURIHIRU
Jack Power and Franklin Richards take a wild trip through the timestream and end up face-to-face with a pre-teen Wolverine! But since young James Howlett is nothing at all like the hero he is destined to one day become, it'll be up to our time-tossed troublemakers to teach the once-and-future-Wolvie how to kick some butt! Plus...MINI MARVELS!32 PGS./All Ages ...$2.99


I have never purchased a Power Pack comic before, but I honestly don't think I can pass up a story about Power Pack teaching a young Wolverine how to fight. I just can't.


Does that make me a bad person?


- Paul

Hoopla! - Episode 17: In which Grant Morrison and I collaborate on a very special story...

Hello and welcome to Hoopla!

This week I'm going to help out my good friend and highly-regarded comic-book writer, Grant Morrison, with a recent comic-book fart that he inadvertently released. I'm speaking, of course, about Batman #663, which consisted of pages and pages of prose, with occasional illustrations tossed in somewhat randomly.

It was an experiment and there are many who would argue that it was a failure. The prose was too dense, the metaphors and similes too cliche, and the whole thing was just kind of... dull. And crappy.

In Morrison's defense, however, I think the problem lies not with his prose, but with the illustrations provided by John Van Fleet. He simply wasn't up to the challenge of interpreting Morrison's vision.

And so it is that I, Paul Weissburg, shall now share excerpts from the aforementioned comic-book, but provided with all new illustrations which will, hopefully, better serve the story.

Excelsior!

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Rain goes clickety-clack-tack through the sticks and branches of bare, bony graveyards elms, the kind that stand as if ashamed, like strippers past their best--danced out to a standstill in the naked lights, all down to nothing but fretwork and scaffolding, jutting hips, nicotine-stained fingers, and summer gone south for the winter.

Welcome to Gotham City, a party ten miles long and six miles wide. From The Hill to Cathedral Square, from Amusement Mile to Blackgate Penitentiary, a 21st-century American Babylon has shouldered its way up from the mudflats and sauntered into the spotlight, eager to dazzle and seduce the world.


Gotham City, where the greasy electromagnetics of human need, hope, and fear radiate into a new January night so rank you can taste it like tinfoil on your fillings. Where crime swaps spit with high society and everything's for sale. Where grimy clouds snag and burst on the vicious needle points of world-famous Deco-Industrial superscrapers on Wall Street and Levi and spill out more, and more, and more of the burning, glamorous downpour Gothamites call rain and know so well.

Deep in the dense architectural reefs of midtown, primary reds and yellows and the hot purples of gigantic moving advertising hoardings are turning the rain to something that might as well be liquid stained glass, braiding it through the wound-tight sinews of the Aparo Bridge, scything across the docks and railway sidings, then crowding into the narrow floodlit canyons of 8th Avenue, Finger and Crescent, to rise the lowlifes and the high rollers off the bustling streets and back into the bars, the theaters, the crack houses, restaurants and clip joints, as if the sky itself, in some spontaneous creative frenzy, has chosen to empty an ocean of raw printer's ink on the gaudy, just and unjust citizens of Gotham alike.

He goes in, and they slam the door behind him, as quickly as they can, the way you would if you thought something might escape in the form of a cloud of evil gas if you didn't act fast to trap it.

Batman nods curtly, very still and silent, scanning for the pattern he knows is there. When he finds it, the corners of his mouth twitch upwards. The Joker always plays to his theme. Rebirth. Snake scales, red and black. Blood on the tuxedo. Red Hook and Black Brothers and the Red House. And red, and black. The big game is there in plain sight, as always. Life and death transformed into one more ugly, unfunny gag.

Like a grub growing all wrong in a tiled cocoon, like a caterpillar liquefying to filth in its own nightmares, or a fetus dissolving in sewage and sour milk, the Joker dreams. His is the mal ojo, the evil eye. He wills Death upon the world.

In less time than it takes for this second to become the next, Lou Perroni (37, a bodybuilder and collector of Ramones momorabilia, GSOH) is pedalling backward, making the noises cattle make at the slaughterhouse gate, clawing at his face where the adhesive spit burns black holes in his skin.

He's laughing red and balck and red and black till there's nothing left to laugh. Until, almost tenderly, he turns inside out through his mouth.

Sliding in the rubbery red chaos that was lately a drinking buddy, Cassius Collins (26, fond of violence, karaoke, conflicted) performs a spectacular, impromptu pratfall, then, astonished, watches the Joker rising from his wheelchair, the way a rabbit watches car headlights bearing down, unable to move a single, spotlit muscle.

"You're going nowhere," Batman says. It's the sort of all-purpose, semi-hypnotic phrase he often uses to draw fetish-compulsive criminals like the Joker into familiar patterns of interaction, to elecit familiar chains of response.


The eyes of the two men lock into place like dancers in a tango. It's as dangerous to look the Joker in the eye as it is to train a telescope on the sun, they say, but Batman has faced down this blue-hot blinding lunacy before.

"Clickety-clack-tack," replies the rain.

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See what a difference the right artist makes?

And now for a very special treat... in keeping with the theme of this week (our homage to Grant Morrison, that is) I very proudly present...

WHAT IF... Grant Morrison wrote comic-book reviews?

Civil War: The Initiative

Written by Brian Michael Bendis and Warren Ellis

Art by Marc Silvestri

Fingers fumble nervously with the first page, like a teenager trying to unclasp his first bra, so anxious am I to inhale deeply of that comic-book scent--old paper and nostalgia and something else... some essential ingredient of lost childhoods that vanish like the opening credits to the Star Wars movie--but my olfactory senses are immediately assaulted by the techno-chemical bitter stabbing odor of slick Kraft-American-Cheese-textured paper and perfect inks, frightening in their clarity, vicious in their perfection.

Page One. Previously.

Summary scrolls past my eyes, recounting events long debated on the internet--Whose side are you on? I'm on the side of good old fashioned storytelling and once upon a time's and the heroes never surrendered to facism or sales boosting marketing campaigns--I'm on the losing side, Quesada.

We all are, this time.

Captain America is dead, like Bela Lugosi and Gene Siskel and Mark Twain. Like Carl Sagan, eyes fixed on the stars like some prehistoric prophet reading morse code in the solar flares too far away to see without a telescope.

Captain America is dead, and I turn the page, eyes glazed over like cheap pottery.

Opening shot of Iron Man, racing across the sky, the righteous fuhrer, the triumphant scab. Words scattered across the page like mosquitoes at a picnic on the Fourth of July. A single word balloon hides in the bottom right corner, seemingly from out of Tony Stark's eye, as he says, "Show me."

Next page features a bald man confronted with a smug Reed Richards but my eyes are pulled to the cross page where I'm notified that "Casino Royale is the most exciting Bond film in decades." A grim face and an undone tie, a gun in his hand, and a backdrop of some European stereotype utopia, Disney-fication of all our hopes and dreams. Captain America is dead and James Bond is a nancy-boy.

I turn the page.

I brace myself like a camel in the desert about to be whacked over the head by an angry Arab on an angry day as images of Alpha Flight's demise force their way through my consciousness, like angry computer viruses, assaulting my synapses, reprogramming me to purchase the upcoming Omega Flight limited series. Or is it? Omega Flight was originally solicited (like a call-girl with chapped lips and a strangely oozing scab) as an ongoing series, but then Quesada (head imperial sultan of Spider-Man's unmasking) changed his mind like a street light changes colors when you're only halfway across the road.

Captain America is dead and so is Alpha Flight. No one's left living but Sasquatch and a host of b-grade characters stuck posing in a c-list double-spread.

It's time for Warren Ellis' chapter.

Two pages stick together between my fingers like desperate lovers clasping hands as the Titanic seeks. I force them apart (wave goodbye, fretful lovers, wave goodbye) and read of villains who beat and maim heroes while worshipped by the general public, who are blind like three blind mice in a dark room. Penance was once Speedball (named-for-narcotic comic-relief) but now the New Warriors are dead and he inflicts pain upon himself like an angry priest with a barbed whip and a secret to hide.

Moonstone's breasts heave forward, swollen like alien eggs, waiting to hatch.

I turn the page.

Life is one great big Blue Plate Special and Civil War: The Initiative is no different; a series of advertisements interspersed with more advertisements, selling themselves, selling each other, selling the American dream for a price not worth the paying. Selling World War Hulk to the frightened masses.

War. What's it good for?

It's good for sales, of course. Just ask Quesada, laughing his way to the bank like a fat man laughing at a racist joke.

Spiderwoman snaps the Grey Gargoyle's head like the brittle cold shattering a dead man's face in a mirror of cracked reflections made rebellious by antibodies poured out, limp and flacid, from the blood that once spilled from his body, now dried like crusty brick-colored paint on the cold, wet pavement. The blood, that is. The blood is dried. Not the Grey Gargoyle's head, which has been THUMPed onto the pavement with a single "Agh!" to mark his fall.

Ms. Marvel appears, her tight, black leather costume clinging to her butt-cheeks like the skin of an apple. The two women argue, thick red pouting lips hinting at a kiss that will never come, keeping the fanboys hoping, like a gambler at a horse-track where every horse is a loser and midgets pass out cheap cigars like pig's intestines.

The back cover advertises the U.S. Army, and why not? This techno-colored glorification of war is all part of the plan, ennit? Recruiting pot-bellied teens with thick glasses and names like "Chad" and "Brett" and "Pete." The final words ring with false truth: Army strong. Captain America is dead and there's no one left to aim the spotlight on the hypocrisy of a nation gone overboard, gone mad with greed, gone fat and bloated like a fat and bloated mosquito that's sucked all the life out of third world nations and now needs to quick launch missles at Mars and faraway planets, like some madcap science fiction wet dream, so that it can find new lifeforms to feed off of.

All told, I give Civil War: The Initiative a 3 out of 5.

----------------------------------------------

Well, that's all we've got time for today... I hope you enjoyed our special Grant Morrison homage column. Just for the record, I think Morrison's an awesome writer most of the time; he's written some of my all-time favorite comics (Sea Guy, Doom Patrol, Animal Man, All Star Superman, The Guardian, Klarion the Witch Boy, etc.) and blah blah blah.

But, man, the prose on Batman #663 stunk like a cloud of evil gas that you can't quite close the door on, y'know?

Anyway, until next week, I leave you with this heart-warming photograph of Saddam Hussein and a rabbit, back in the day.

Back then, who knew?

- Paul

Hoopla! - Episode 16: Life is good.

Hello and welcome to Hoopla!, the comic-book review column with a song in its heart and a stain on its t-shirt.

This past week has been an extra-especially good one for me... Mie (the woman I recently started dating and about whom I wrote that lovely song many weeks ago) and I are getting along wonderfully and spent last Tuesday strolling around, looking at the Cherry Blossoms.

Sweet, sweet bliss.

Also, a big ol' box of comic-books arrived a few days ago, with some mighty fine new comics in it. And my dissertation is coming along well, and I'm not sick anymore.

Hurray for life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway, I just placed my order for June and WOW! there are a lot of good comics coming our way. My pull list, by far the longest I've had in years, looks a little something like this:

ALL NEW ATOM #12

ALL STAR SUPERMAN #8

ANNIHILATION CONQUEST PROLOGUE

AVENGERS INITIATIVE #3

BATMAN #667
Batmen of America! See my column from two weeks ago.

BIRDS OF PREY #107
I don't normally buy this, but I'm picking it up for the Secret Six storyline.

BLACK PANTHER #29
Zombies, continued.

BRAVE AND THE BOLD #4
Really, really enjoying this series...

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #4

CAPTAIN AMERICA #27

CLUBBING
The Minx title I talked about a couple of weeks ago...

COUNTDOWN #47

I continue my bizarre policy of buying approximately one issue per month. Why does this make sense? It doesn't, unless you're me. Which I am. See, I figure that if I actually picked up every weekly issue, it would quickly bore me. I just don't think it's going to be that good a story.

But, if I just pick up an occasional issue here and there, mostly at random, it will make the story more interesting. I'll have the fun of filling in all the missing pieces in my head.

This is the sort of thing that makes perfect sense to me but that makes my friends scratch their heads in confusion.

Silly friends.

DAREDEVIL #98

DETECTIVE COMICS #833

FABLES #62

GREEN LANTERN SINESTRO CORPS SPECIAL #1
Haven't been enjoying the ongoing series for a while, but I think the idea of a Sinestro Corps. is pretty neat and the art is by Van Sciver. My guess is that this is going to be a LOT of fun!

INCREDIBLE HULK #107

IRREDEEMABLE ANT-MAN #9
Yaaay!

JUSTICE COVER A #12 (Of 12)
Last issue. Sigh.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #10

LEGION OF SUPER HEROES IN THE 31ST CENTURY #3

MARVEL ADVENTURES AVENGERS #14

MARVEL ADVENTURES FANTASTIC FOUR #25

NEW WARRIORS #1
I have no interest at all in this title, but it's one of the featured titles from the company I order my comics from, so it's only 74 cents.

RUNAWAYS #27

SHAZAM THE MONSTER SOCIETY OF EVIL #4 (Of 4)
Last issue. Double sigh.

SHE-HULK #20

SILENT WAR #6 (Of 6)
Last issue. Why are all my comic-book friends abandoning me?

SPIDER-MAN FANTASTIC FOUR #3 (Of 4)

SPIRIT #7

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #110

WORLD WAR HULK #1 (Of 5)

X-MEN FIRST CLASS HC
Collecting the Jeff Parker limited series. Yes!!!

X-MEN FIRST CLASS Vol. 2 #1
And this starts up that series again as an ongoing. Extra-triple-super-deluxe Yessss!!!

Our LINK OF THE WEEK is a sequel, of sorts. A couple of weeks ago I linked to a review column by Tracy and her two kids, Sarah and Shelby, called All Ages Reads. As you may recall, I lamented at the time that there's no archives for their column, which made me weep uncontrollably.

Well, I just heard back from Tracy and they have now archived their past reviews and so, as promised, here's the link. I really cannot recommend their columns enough. They're funny, clever, and it's the only source of reviews I know of that almost always discusses comics that I'd never heard of before but, after reading what they have to say, I realize that they're exactly the kind of comics I'm looking for.

Hurray for All Ages Reads!!!

Anyway, we've only got time for two comic-book reviews this week (insert usual excuses) so I thought I'd pick one that nobody's really talking much about, that being Silent War #3. Written by David Hine with art by Frazer Irving, Silent War has been consistenly unpredictable since the very first issue. A part of that is because the story features the Inhumans, who are such peripheral characters in the Marvel Universe that Hine is free to do pretty much whatever he wants with them. There's no firmly set status quo that needs to be restored by the end (it's a six issue limited series) so that opens up a lot of possibilities.

As mentioned in a previous column, the opening premise of Silent War is that the Inhumans have declared war with the U.S. government. [Actually, everyone in the comic keeps insisting that they've declared war with Earth, but thus far there's been no mention of any country other than the U.S. and no real reason why the Inhumans would want to pick a fight with, say, Uzbekistan or Somalia.] They want to retrieve the Terrigen Mists, which were stolen by Quicksilver and then taken from him by the U.S. military (hence the conflict).

In issue #3, the Inhumans have tracked down Quicksilver only to discover that he's... um... well, you really need to see what he's done. Suffice it to say, he has a few fragments of the Terrigen Crystals (from which the mists come) and he's sort of... er... well, let's just say that getting them back doesn't seem to be a viable option. And, too, that Quicksilver is perhaps a little bit nuttier in the cabeza than anyone originally suspected.

The Inhumans are rather unhappy about this situation and things only get worse when Madrox and Layla (of Peter David's X-Factor) show up, we get some weird time paradoxes tossed into the mix (courtesy of Pietro's new powers and Layla's manipulations) and meanwhile, from behind the scenes, Black Bolt's creepy brother, Maximus, is mucking around with people's minds.

Despite everything that's going on, the story reads well; I had to go back a second time to fully understand what had happened with Pietro's time-jumping, but it all made perfect sense the second time around. The art, as mentioned in the previous review, is gorgeous. Frazer Irving is not an artist I'd expect to see on a (sort of) mainstream Marvel title like this, but his art really brings it to another level. Pietro looks totally deranged, Black Bolt looks super creepy (especially on the bottom of page six, when seen through Luna's eyes), the Inhumans all look thoroughly pissed off, and that final page of Maximus is phenomenal.

Frazer Irving, I salute you.

The second comic I wanted to talk about is Batman #664, written by Grant Morrison with art by Andy Kubert.

I didn't like it.

The opening seven pages are a quick glimpse of Bruce Wayne skiing and then eating dinner with a beautiful woman named Jezebel. I don't think we've seen her before, so perhaps Morrison is setting her up to be a reoccuring character? Or, then again, perhaps not. It's a cute scene but there's nothing particularly noteworthy about Jezebel or about the scene itself. It's just kind of... there.

From there, the scene shifts abruptly to Gotham City at night. It's raining and Batman is watching some cops argue with a pimp and some prostitutes. It seems that the prostitutes are being killed by some kind of monster. Batman investigates.

I'm not quite sure what Morrison is going for but the whole scene is kind of ugly and not at all entertaining. One of the prostitutes is a young girl who looks to be about 12 years old, with a clown face, who's trembling with fear as she huddles near a garbage dumpster. On the following page, as Batman goes in to find the big bad, we see one prostitute (again with a clown face) lying dead amongst a pile of pizza boxes and another, blood dripping from her many wounds, hanging from a couple of ropes.

Are we having fun yet?

The villain, when we finally do see him, is a cop wearing a Batman mask and who's pumped up on that testosterone-ish drug that Bane uses. There's a brief fight and quasi-Bane stamps his foot down on Batman's back and wanders off.

To be continued, I suppose.

Clearly I'm not the target audience for this, and that's fine, but I'm not quite sure who the target audience actually is? The few reviews I've seen of this particular issue have focused on the humor of the James Bond line from the first half of the issue and the 'wacky' pimp in the second half, but to me the whole thing just doesn't fit together very well. It's not as if the lightness of the first half and the darkness of the second half are being used as a sort of juxtaposition; they're just two unrelated pieces stuck together with some Grant Morrison Crazy Glue. And neither of part is insightful, clever, or fun.

So, I say "Blah" to that.

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Before I go, I want to say a very special Happy Birthday! to my friend Sarah... she's one of the coolest people I know, has almost perfect taste in comics (despite a fatal weakness for Strangers in Paradise) and if the Celestials (from the Marvel universe) ever come down to Earth to judge if our species deserves to continue living or not, Sarah would be my number one argument for why they shouldn't end the experiment just yet.

Happy birthday, Sarah. You rock.

Chompy the Crocodile says, "Happy birthday, Sarah!"

See y'all next week!