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.

*

...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.

A few more thoughts on adventure stories...

Thinking about Leigh Brackett's heroes, I might say that however disillusioned they often find themselves at the end of their adventures, their heroism resides in their capacity to remake the world in which they find themselves for the better. Or perhaps that's putting it too strong. Saving a world doesn't automatically improve it, which is why many adventure stories can be read as in some ways fundamentally reactionary. Sometimes Brackett depicts failure, and whatever her heroes' success, their achievements are always within worlds which are subject to history. It's explicitly stated in at least one story that the romantic world of Mars in which their adventures take place is slowly dying. Over a period of centuries, even millenia, this landscape will disapear. Innocence is already lost.

But think about this more generally. All the various permutations of adventure stories that I've read by this point. Success or failure, it's always an isolated individual who is at the centre of the narrative. Part of the promise of an adventure story is that individuals can save their worlds, even improve them, making their worlds more just. Thinking about heroism in the real world, it's easier to see how seductive such a vision is. Not to take anything away from the heroism that exists, but most heroism occurs within social structures. The heroism of soldiers or firemen  for example, is intensely social. Their professions place them in situations where heroism is possible, which is obviously less open to those of us who spend most of our days in an office. Which is not to say that heroism isn't found in other places. For some of us, ordinary life can require quite astonishing acts of bravery, and that's not to be slighted. Still, the kind of heroism that's celebrated in adventure narratives is rarely performed by romantic individuals here in the real world, where it is more likely to be the work of capable professionals who are trained to perform such acts.

If our sensibility is essentially romantic however, then living in a modern world which is currently largely run for the convenience of an essentially sociopathic elite, and in which heroic action can feel severely limited, the appeal becomes obvious. Think about the words which are used to justify the way the world is at present. So often we seem to be told we must be 'realistic', of the need for 'efficiency'. It's also a concious disavowel of romanticism and fantasy. At several points in reading Leigh Brackett's stories, I was reminded of the work of Graham Greene. Greene's characters are found in a world which is closer to the real (which is no doubt why some would argue his work is more mature), but I don't see how his dissillusioned characters are any less romantic. It's just that they exist in a world in which the kind of heroism available to those in a story by Leigh Brackett is no longer possible. That's what happens to heroic action in a world which is realistic.

In all likeliehood, individual heroism of the kind celebrated by adventure fiction has always been a romantic fiction, which might explain why the best of these kind of stories seem to belong to the past, either through their setting, or because that's when they were written. By their very nature perhaps, many adventure stories are looking backwards to a remembered past. As I noted in my previous post about adventure stories, adventure stories promise is a vision of freedom, a freedom from modernity. Which is not to say that the form is automatically reactionary. My admittedly limited awareness is that these days we don't seem to be able to do adventure stories, at least in the more high profile examples of the form where they're hedged about with irony in one way or another. A proper adventure can contain irony, but it still needs to be told straight.

This Weeks Comics

The Rocketeer Adventures #2

I'm unfamiliar with Dave Stevens' original comics, apart from what I've read about them here and there, although now that they've all been collected into a handsome hardback I may get hold of it some day, funds permitting. Inspired by 1930s pulp adventure fiction and Saturday matinee serials, the appeal is mainly the artwork and the nostalgic creation of an earlier fictional milieu. Dave Stevens seems to be one of a number of comics artists who emerged in the 70s and early 80s whose wrok self-conciously harks back to earlier pulp traditions. A whole raft of stuff about which I am largely ignorant except through its recycled imagery. And frankly, I imagine this is an instance where I'd prefer reading the pastiche to the original. I'd put Stevens next to people like Howard Chaykin or Mike Kaluta, artists whose work similarly invokes and appropriates from older pulp fictions, if for different ends.

The Rocketeer seems to be aiming at little more than entertaining its readers. As is usually the case with tributes of this nature, it's the art which makes the biggest impression. Chris Weston, Darwyn Cooke, Gene Ha: how could it not be visually ravishing? That looks to be the main point of the appeal of Dave Stevens' original comics. Which is not to say that there was anything particularly bad about the writing. Darwyn Cooke, writing for his own art, makes probably the best stab at it, representing his 8 pages as the latest episode in a long running movie serial. It's both a homage to some of the character's original inspirations, and a nod to the way that such adventure characters seem to operate in an eternal present. The story's climax is merely the end of this episode's cliff hanger: Holy Moley!! Will our courageous couple escape? Join us next week for Episode Seven: Nazis in the Hospital!

It's always Nazis of course.

Cooke's story is also the one which is most guilty in objectifying the female lead. Then again, she is modeled after Bettie Page, so it must be a temptation that is hard to resist. Throughout, we are repeatedly invited to lasciviously gaze at and fetishesize her appropriately period style underwear:

This is mirrored by our Saturday matinee lead Cliff Secord who ends up clinging onto the jacket his girlfriend has ended up wearing and enjoying the view of her underwear:

It's not subtle, or even especially politically correct, but it's something that feels hard to get especially worked up about. It's of a piece with the narative's depiction of the past, a point which is underlined in Cooke's story when he presents it as a fragment of a a larger serial. These stories aren't set in the real past of the 1930s but rather in a simulacrum created from memories of 1930s pulp adventure serials. It's the past as a child's playground. And is there anything more childish than a suposedly adult male getting exited by the glimpse of a girl's knickers?

Alias the Cat

Appropriately perhaps, this week I also read Kim Deitch's Alias the Cat. My knowledge of American underground cartoonists is woefully small, but it's not an area of comics that I've ever had much interest in. On the basis of this, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and a couple of other short pieces I love Kim Deitch's work. Alias the Cat was originally serialised as three issues of Stuff of Dreams, which might be the more apposite title since that's what the comic is really about: Stuff. The cultural detritus left behind from earlier eras of popular culture. Spinning out of an apparently autobiographical tale of obsessive ebay hunting the narrative transforms into a fantasy of early twentieth century popular culture where the borders between dream and reality become permeable.

Kim Deitch would hardly be alone amongst alternative cartoonists in expressing a cultural nostalgia. Nostalgia rooted in the objects which have been left behind by earlier cultures seems to be central to the work of many of the most prominent underground and alternative cartoonists, from Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman to Chris Ware, Seth and Ben Katchor. However, in a piece written for the Comics Journal website just this week, Deitch denies that he is a nostalgic person. Yet at the same time, he writess of a feeling of being "born in a world of great popular culture already in decline". It could be that Deitch disavows nostalgia in his article because of a general cultural trend which has tended to dismiss nostlagia as something weak and trivial. We live in a culture which for a variety of reasons tends to privilage the present over the past in terms of its importance for our culture. I suspect that this isn't the case here. As far as these things can be determined, Deitch strikes me as a 60s radical and liberal, given the underground comics scene in which his work originally appeared. And if he feels popular culture was already in decline when he was born, then presumably that decline has gone on unabated.* Or perhaps for whatever reason he just doesn't think of himself as a nostalgic person, for all that the past, and the cultural products of the past, is at the centre of so much of his work.

Personally I suspect there's more than one way to define an emotion as complext as nostalgia, and that the quote above does capture a nostalgic quality. If you're privilaging an aspect of the past over what's available in the present then surely on some level you are partaking of a discourse of nostalgia? Certainly, Deitch's work has a complex relationship with both the past and the cultural objects which his work fetichesizes. Alias the Cat exposes a fantastical secret history of exploitation and oppression which has produced such cultural artifacts and is part of their meaning. Deitch's art, which possesses a stiff but appealing blocky quality, also treats everything the same. The past and the present, whether it's a real past, a drawn past or an imagined past, are all presented on the same level with nothing to distinguish between them. The past isn't a playground in Deitch's work, or not just a playground, but something real, connected to the present, both cosy and threatening.

* On the other hand, in at least one interview I found online, published around the time of the publication of The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002), he was also overwhelmingly positive about the quality of then current alternative comics, seeing them as superior to the general quality of the original undergrounds. Whatever I might get from his work, the man himself is clearly no simple nostalgic.

'Adventure stories'

Now that I think about it, two of my favourite series as a child contained the word 'Adventure' in their titles. One was by Willard Price, whilst the other was by Enid Blyton. And I loved Robin Hood, whether it was written by Richard Carpenter or Roger Lancelyn Green. And The Three Musketeers, although that was perhaps more Dogtanian. I've still never actually read Dumas. And a little later on Strider was the coolest character I'd ever met in fiction, the character I most wanted to be when I grew up. Before he was superseded by Elric of course.

And at the age of 32 I find I still read superhero comics. In fact, I've read more superheroes in my twenties than I ever did growing up. My self righteous teenage self would never have wanted to read such things for a start. Although my interest does tend to fluctuate somewhat, and I'd like to hope I'm discerning in my taste. I do wonder sometimes.

...all were in pursuit of the dream nurtured by every Spaniard: to live without doing a stroke of work, to pay no taxes and to swagger about with a sword at their belt and a cross embroidered on their doublet

Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Man in the Yellow Doublet, p.57

Inigo Balboa may be dismissive of his countrymen here in the latest Captain Alatriste, but I also wonder if he doesn't also capture something of what an adventure story promises: freedom from responsibility and normal social cares and pressures. Of course, the hero of any adventure story, no matter how morally compromised they might be, also holds to a code of honour. This code of honour is often absurdly stern, and brings the hero into conflict with much of the world which falls beneath such high standards.

But it is a vision of freedom. Even when the hero is part of some kind of formal hierarchy, such as Hornblower or Sharpe, they also assert a freedom and independence from the hierarchies of which they are a part. They are the repositories of moral rectitude and correct behaviour in their respective narratives.

And before this becomes rather too macho and sweatily masculine, I must point out that the biggest fans of Hornblower and Sharpe that I've met have been female. Also, now that I think about it, I wonder if this vision of absolute freedom isn't part of what Libertarianism appears to promise its adherents, which perhaps only goes to show that some ideals shouldn't be inflicted on too much of the real world.

But frankly, I don't really want to peer too closely at the ideology of adventure stories. When done well, and Captain Alatriste is certainly done well (given my earlier love for the Strider the choice of actor for Alatriste in the 2006 film is almost too perfect), then it's just a very pleasurable narrative form for me. Perez-Reverte creates a dirty and gritty early seventeenth-century Spain in which to set his adventures. Alongside this we get lectures on Spanish history and classical literature. That these don't seem out of place works because they're all told from the retrospective point of view of an older battle scarred and weary Inigo. What might otherwise seem like an author dumping his research on his readers works here because it makes perfect sense that our narrator would want to tell us about the vanished world which meant so much to him.

Yes, Inigo does excuse, even celebrate the imperialism and misogyny that the culture he eulogises also contained, but his narratives also celebrate loyalty, friendship and the need to perform right actions no matter how difficult their performance might be. There is a virtue here, for all that it might be easy to dismiss it as childish in a different context.

But surely, the real reason for reading a novel such as this is just for the sheer pleasure of it's telling.

Diego Alatriste was in a devil of a hurry. A new play was about to be performed at the Corral de la Cruz, and there he was on the Cuesta de la Vega, duelling with some fellow whose name he didn't even know.

ibid.

Honestly, how could you read such opening sentences and not desperately want to know what happens next?