Missing Margate

In London the meetings never end; the curiously stylised self-importance that patinas the fundamental banality of their careerist participants must be endlessly serviced by ritual, an egomania masquerading as the exchange of information.

Michael Bracewell, Missing Margate

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.

This Week's Comics

Batman, Inc. #0

Recently, I've been observing something of an online critical backlash against Grant Morrison, directed both at his work and his person. He's always had his critics of course, for a supposed obscurity in his writing. This though, is clearly different, since it's coming from people who have been fans of his work in the past, who in some cases still purchase and enjoy his work. The tipping point was clearly the publication of Supergods, his quasi-autobiography/history/eschatology of the superhero genre, in which, in contrast to anything that I've ever read on the subject, he chose to defend the actions of the company which became DC in their success in taking the rights to Superman from the character's creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. What's made it worse has been his generally dismissive attitude towards anyone who has made the opposing point of view (the generally accepted view that Siegel and Schuster were, like many others since in the comics industry, ripped off by an uncaring company). In interviews he comes across as basically uncaring, shrugging: 'I wasn't there. I get on with the people who work at DC now. They've always been good at paying me on time. How can I be held accountable for any of this?' Well, you could start by owning the opinions which you published in a book, or else acknowledge that you might have got something wrong.

Whilst, like many, I might have been disappointed in Morrison's expressed opinions, and feel that they don't seem to fit with the image of the counter-cultural author who once wrote The Invisibles, it's also chimed with a general indifference I've been feeling towards the superhero genre as a whole. As I think I've said in an earlier blog post, apart from the Adam West Batman tv series I watched as a kid, I didn't really start reading superhero comics until my late teens, early twenties, as I followed the work of the British writers I'd first encountered in 2000AD. I was always sort of interested in the genre, but never wholly committed. It's only really in the last seven years that I've read more, partly because of the influence of some of the comics blogs I've followed. Partly because individual comics issues are cheaper as an individual purchase than a more expensive graphic novel (which is now the general format for most comics published outside the genre), even when that's work which I find more satisfying, and partly because the writers I've followed and enjoyed have written more superheroes. I've never followed individual characters, but I have followed specific creators, and no writer is going to be so consistent that you'll love all their work (even Alan Moore nods). Grant Morrison has probably been the biggest offender in that regard, almost all of whose work over the last decade has either been filtered in some way through the genre, or else directly situated in it. Of all the creators whose work I've followed, he's also one of the hardest I've found to avoid that feeling that I need every last thing he's published.

A few months ago, we moved out of my Dad's home (the family home I'd been living in for most of my life up to this point, even if it was across several different residences). The only thing we've not been able to fit into our little flat has been my comics collection. It's currently being stored in two different places, but the move also inspired me to consider whether I really need all of them and whether some of it couldn't be sold off. A more permanent cull of this collection than those I've managed in the past (the cull is something I have the impression that many long term comics collectors periodically indulge in). It would be a reconsideration of just how much enjoyment I really got out of some of the comics I'd bought if I hadn't already made up my mind on that question: my previously alluded to disenchantment. Boredom might be a more accurate term. So many of the comics I want to get rid of are superhero comics. Alongside this, with more bills to pay, there were also obvious financial considerations. I dropped several titles from my standing order a few months back. The only mainstream American superhero titles to survive the chop where Grant Morrison's current two titles, but then I dropped Action Comics too when I realised I just wasn't enjoying it very much. Written in that breathless style Morrison perfected back when he was writing JLA, it also felt somehow drawn out, taking too long to tell a rather simple story.

And then we come to Batman, Inc., the reason I started writing this piece. The title which was promised to consist of the final wrap-up of the epic ever-evolving story Morrison has been telling over the course of multiple titles for the last however many years. This, a special prequel issue which is part of a line wide stunt imposed on all DC comics for this month, has disrupting a narrative which has already been subject to various disruptions and delays. The title, 'Brand Building', gives a clear indication of the story's point of view. The global franchise of Batmen Bruce Wayne has instituted is clearly defined as a 'good' corporation. Just as an abstract term that's interesting, because such a formulation clearly defines all (most?) corporations out here in the real world as somehow 'bad'. Even before the main titles in the comic however, we get the line which enraged me.

Page 4: Bruce Wayne is addressing his board of directors and invites Lucius Fox to justify the funding of a group which, if considered within a real world logic, has a questionable legality. Fox acknowledges that: 'Some of you [have] voiced concerns about the idea of funding vigilantism...but think of these as Wayne security personnel working alongside the police.' Of course, here in the real world, we already have such privately financed groups. It's the private security industry, and it is, frankly, evil, a product of a neo-conservative culture and ethic which personally I find utterly poisonous. Of course, Batman, Inc. is a 'good' corporation, so nothing to worry about there. And obviously, within the context of a fantasy, I don't. In which case, it's probably best not to consider the real world implications, unless you have more considered point to make about the nature of that fantasy.

I also didn't like the art particularly. Don't get me wrong. Frazer Irving is obviously talented, a slight stiffness in his figure work amply compensated by a fantastic design sense and imaginative use of colour. Especially since he started using computers more, he's deployed a far more adventurous use of colour than most colourists of superhero comics. The problem I've always had with his work is that it somehow feels just a little too slick, a problem which has only increased with his increased reliance on computers in the composition of his pages. There's some beautiful work here, but it also feels rather weightless, with backgrounds reduced to geometric shapes. It seems entirely of a piece with Morrison's corporate superheroes. In both writing and art, this comic feels airless, void of anything approaching real life.

Perhaps it might be argued that 'real life' is something which one shouldn't go looking for in a superhero comic. An argument with which I'm not wholly unsympathetic! And to be fair, Morrison has always placed his own artistic credo firmly in opposition to any facile realism. But then, that's not what I'm talking about. The superhero comics I've always enjoyed, and still can enjoy, all have some modest connection with the real world, whether in setting or character, or else in the ideas and moral conflicts which animate it. Shrill didactism can even be a virtue in such a context. I've seen parts of Marc Singer's recent study of Morrison's work, but the argument he sees embedded in it, a balancing between on the one hand a totalitarian collectivity and on the other an excessive romantic idealism is one which very clearly relates to the real world. Similarly, blogger Andrew Hickey's reading of the end of The Return of Bruce Wayne as a metaphor for the ideal of a communal resistance to individual despair is one which, as someone who has experience of depression, is one which I find inspiring. More inspiring, if I'm honest, than I found the actual comic.

Batman, Inc. #0 felt like a perfect example of what Mark Fisher has described as 'capitalist realism'. Morrison's writing has always had an ambivalent relationship to modernity, critiquing it at the same time as it revels in a certain decadence. In the last few years, that revelling seems to have transformed into a wholesale endorsement of capitalist and corporate culture, as his work has become much more inward looking in it's focus on nothing beyond introverted superhero continuities. I can't say where the change began exactly. I've not read Supergods, but I have flipped through it, and the bit which stuck in my mind was the point where he bought his first Armarni suit. About 1999-2000, if my memory serves, when he realised that the way our culture was going was becoming 'more corporate', and he felt the need to change his style in line with that. And The Invisibles does after all end with King Mob in 2012, happily ensconced within the walls of his corporate kingdom.

Of course, times change, people change. The narrative of an arty working class guy becoming hugely successful in his chosen artistic field and then having his later work or pronouncements disappoint his middle class admirers is one which is now at least as old as The Beatles by this point, and is hardly a major concern. My disenchantment here isn't solely down to a feeling that Morrison's work has changed, because in some ways I do think he is consistent with some his earlier work. Work which I still appreciate. It's also, as I noted above, that I've changed. I just can't be bothered with following these comics anymore when I find I get so little pleasure out of them. Not the things of childhood, but those of too long protracted adolescence. Yes, those I can do without now.

Addendum (14/11/12):

A few weeks ago I read a very good piece on the arguments around the rights of Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel, which unusually, does a good job of respecting both sides of the story and, whether or not you agree with all of the writer's conclusions, does a good job of showing that both of these creators were far from the innocents duped by an evil corporation that they've so often been portrayed as. That's not to say that they weren't exploited to some extent, but just to acknowledge that sadly they probably did have some complicity in their own exploitation. Which does actually seem somewhat typical of how these kinds of situations occur.

So, the typical 'fan version' of the story, which even appeared in a disguised form in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and which I certainly always assumed to be basically true if I ever gave much thought to it, may actually be wrong. The truth of what happened could well be more in line with how Grant Morrison appears to have characterised it in Supergods. Or at the very least, there's good reason for believing so, but I don't think that really excuses much of his attitude as it came across in his interview. What pissed me off was the way he refused to be held to account for things he'd written and published in a book. His dismissal of the people who'd expressed displeasure about it, implicitly characterising anyone who might want to criticise him as petty and naive. Underneath the humour with which he expressed it, it was a really superior, sneering attitude, which does feel very much at odds with the egalitarianism I've taken from so much of his work. Was I mistaken? Or has he, like so many before him, been seduced by his own success?

So yes, the more I've thought about this, the more I think we have every right to be disappointed in Morrison for his currently expressed attitudes.