It's not the things of childhood, it's the things of adolescence I'd like to put behind me

No doubt I should have posted an end of year round up on favourites of the year just past, but we're a few days past the beginning of the year, have reached twelfth night in fact, with the tree and decorations coming down, so I think I'll dispense with that for this year and indulge in a little more rueful solipsism.

Two more reviews I wrote for amazon a while back, in lieu of actual content:

Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz – Elektra: Assassin

This must be the stupidist, most tiresome comic I've read in a long time. Painted comics were something of a fashion from the late-80s through mid-90s, but few of them hold up now. Most come off as pretentious. Bill Sienkiewicz is better than many perhaps, but his exaggerated expressionistic figures and murky palette aren't to my taste. Also, he doesn't seem particularly capable at depicting action, which is rather unfortunate given this is a comic obsessed with action and violence. Perhaps that's just the paint, as his subsequent pen and ink work on the early issues of the late 80s Shadow comic is far more dynamic. Frank Miller drowns typically trite (g)libertarian politics and shallow satire with gonzo sci-fi ultra violence and disjointed storytelling to little effect. For years, ever since I read (and loved) The Dark Knight Returns I've been hearing how great this book is, but it really isn't. It felt like a chore to get through, which is really not what an over the top action epic about a psychic ninja should feel like.

I really didn't like this, did I? On Facebook a few days ago, I saw a friend of a friend criticising The Dark Knight Returns and other works by Miller for his art. Which is not the obvious criticism I would think of making about his work. His main failings surely are as a writer. The few times I've tried to read any of his Sin City work, I've found myself repelled by the awfulness of the poorly written hardboiled noir cliches. I don't even like The Dark Knight Returns anymore. It's currently up for sale on amazon, if anyone else wants it.

Ian Watson – Space Marine

It's difficult to imagine that Ian Watson didn't have tongue firmly in cheek when writing this gloriously trashy extravaganza. Reading like an amalgamation of different bits of the then current Warhammer 40,000 universe circa '91 (Necromunda, Space Marines, Tyranids, Squats etc.), the narrative seems to take a perverse delight in coming up with ever greater excess with which to confront its thuggish protagonists, climaxing with an absurd scene of self mutilation. 

Despite what we might believe when we're 13, the gothic future of total war and nihilistic fascism that is Warhammer 40,000 isn't especially profound, and Ian Watson's hyperbolic prose seems perfectly suited to simultaneously indulging and sending up the absurd machismo of its characters. Don't get me wrong, I did love this book! If I describe it as adolescent that's meant as a compliment! By the time it was originally published, I think I'd already lost whatever passing interest I'd had in the games it was inspired by, but the universe the games designers came up with within which to set their games was still fascinating. I never read this at the time, but picked it up recently in Oxfam. Reading it now, I can't help but take it mainly as a horrible black joke on the fictional Warhammer universe, and by extension on the adolescents who enjoyed it. It's as if it's saying, "This is the world you find such fun: And it's meaningless! And it's really stupid!"

With both of these reviews, I remember being somewhat out of step with what all the other reviewers on amazon were saying. Of course, we're all entitled to like things in our own ways, but it's still hard to imagine anyone missing the tone of Ian Watson's contribution to the world of Warhammer 40,000. In his own words, he apparently had 'enormous mad fun in broodingly, Gothically, luridly going over the top', when writing this and his Inquisition War books. Clearly though, within the context of the game world, there are readers who take the kind of fascistic machismo the Space Marines represent entirely at face value. Which is a little scary in some ways. To be fair, when I was 12, I'm sure that I didn't notice the extent to which Watson was non-too subtly just taking the piss out of the world he was being paid to write about, but that's ok. I was 12 at the time.

I'm currently just over 40 pages into Swastika Night, Katharine Burdekin's 'what if Hitler won the war' dystopia from 1937. The introduction makes great play of comparing her novel to Orwell's 1984, a reasonable comparison, but there are other useful comparisons we can make. Her medieval Nazi future history also reminds me of the childish world of Warhammer 40,000. The text draws a comparison with the militaristic world of Sparta, underlining the point that the critique contained in her novel is directed not only at Nazism, but at a larger culture of masculinity and violence. I don't think I'm the first to notice that at the heart of this game world - a world which after all was designed solely as a landscape within which there would be constant war, thus justifying the table top conflicts its consumers reenact - is something deeply unpleasant, redolent of many of the worst aspects of humanity.

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...and here I'll continue to chart my disillusionment with the work of Grant Morrison

These fragments would appear to have themes in common.

In the recently published Batman, Inc. #6 our hero singlehandedly fights an entire building of his enemy's foot soldiers, whilst the voice Talia, his former lover and leader of the global terrorist organisation Leviathan gloats to him over a hidden microphone. There's a clear class argument being made. Bruce Wayne is criticised for his 'patronising attempts to elevate the poor', whilst Talia herself gives such people a 'purpose' through providing 'guns and slogans to chant'. The use of Talia and Leviathan has very obvious real world analogues. Talia is never given a clear ethnicity or religion, but it's clear that the character is descended from Sax Rohmer's villain Sumuru. Her villainy is elided with an identification with an ill defined 'East' as well as her femininity. It's not much of a stretch to compare her global criminal/terrorist empire Leviathan to the fantasies many commentators have indulged in about Al qaeda.

Talia's final threat presents Batman with a typical villain's dilemma, ordering him to choose between saving a city (Gotham), or his son, (Damian), but who cares about that. It's all part of the typical superhero narrative. What leaped out at me though was the language in which her threat to Gotham was framed: 'When the global economy shifts. The 21st century belongs to me. ...The U.S. economy will stagger and fall.' So, the threat is explicitly framed in economic terms, entirely in line with hysterical right wing fears about the so called decline of 'the West'. This is a superhero narrative explicitly in defence of Western hegemony and crudely defined economic power. Obviously, Morrison places this in the mouth of a villain, so perhaps his intention is to parody such hysterical rhetoric. Certainly, much of Morrison's work has displayed an ambivalence to established hierarchies and power structures. This isn't The Invisibles, though, and I'm finding little sense of irony here. For all his undoubted narrative flair, this is still a relatively straightforward superhero adventure, in which Talia has been labelled a villain in a largely uncomplicated manner. The threat to Gotham only really works if on some level we can take it seriously. Perhaps Morrison will complicate some of this as his extended run on the character seems to be finally reaching some kind of conclusion, but it strikes me that it is actually nothing more than yet more evidence for how Morrison's creative vision has been subsumed by modern corporate rhetoric and ideology. After more than 5 years, I'm not going to give up on his Batman story now, which has certainly had it's moments, but I think I will be glad when it's finally over.