It may not be a big consolation in these troubled times, but Gotham Calling will continue its mission of drawing attention to the wonders of pulpy fun. In the hope of bringing a smile and brief distraction to those struggling to cope with the current pandemic, I’m temporarily changing this monthly feature to a weekly schedule, so that every Monday you’ll find here a reminder that, at least, comics can be awesome…
When I last wrote about The Unknown Soldier – DC’s cult comic about the top US secret agent in World War II – I mentioned how David Michelinie briefly turned the series into a vicious anti-war parable, casting the hero as an anti-hero and rendering the structural brutality of war as independent of each side’s morals. In 1977, however, when the series went back to one of its earliest writers, Bob Haney, he retreated into a more morally comfortable ‘just war’ mentality just in time for the feature to be promoted to the magazine’s leading title (i.e., the comic continued to be an anthology and even kept the numbering, but instead of Star Spangled War Stories, it was now called The Unknow Soldier).
As if to signal the shift in no uncertain terms, Haney penned his comeback story, ‘The Unknown Soldier Must Die!,’ as a full-blown reversal of the spirit of Michelinie’s recent run. Instead of an opening narration contesting war, the caption above the title explained that, even though soldiers feared and questioned every battle, they always fought ‘to gain the victory,’ for that was ‘their only true glory!’ The plot illustrated this point by condemning divisionism, as Chat Noir – an African American sergeant often partnered with the Unknown Soldier – was brainwashed by the Nazis, who used ‘his deep resentment… against the Amerikaners for treating him as an inferior person because of his color.’ After betraying the Allies and trying to kill the Unknown Soldier, Chat Noir eventually regained his senses, coming around to the fact that ‘for better or for worse, the States are my home… and home is always worth fighting, and if need be, dying for!’
Gone was the Unknown Soldier who questioned his mission and regretted some of his actions, recognizing himself in the enemy. We now got tales of valor and righteous sacrifice, with the American military and their courageous allies outsmarting the evil Nazis and the sadistic Japanese, thus fighting for a freer world. (When Hitler showed up, he acted like an excited child.) The tone harkened back to a simpler era, as you can tell by the covers, which no longer featured the Unknown Soldier’s deformed face in the upper left corner – since he was back to being a straightforward hero, we no longer had to see his ugly scars. The real face underneath the bandages and disguises was also gone from the main images, where Joe Kubert typically depicted serial-style cliffhangers, often complemented with dialogue or thought balloons:
Bob Haney was quite at home here. A WWII veteran himself (he served in the Navy and saw action at the Battle of Okinawa), Haney had aleary penned tons of war comics since he had first joined the industry, back in 1948.
His second stab at The Unknown Soldier was still very much a product of its time, though. For one thing, it was clearly post-Civil Rights movement, both in the sense that it absorbed some of that movement’s lessons and in the sense that it deliberately tried to move away from its more radical implications. On the one hand, Chat Noir’s recurring presence could be seen as progressive, given that he was a resourceful and outspoken black character at a time when there weren’t all that many in comics. On the other hand, he ended up fulfilling the reactionary role of the black sidekick who legitimized the white lead (and in the process, despite sporadic complaints, underplayed the segregation in the US forces during WWII).
Above all, however, this was a post-Vietnam War comic, seeking consolation for the recent defeat – and for the moral doubts ushered in by that conflict – by revisiting a war that could be seen as a source of pride rather than a source of shame and frustration (the same went for backups like Robert Starr, Frogman and Andy Stewart, Combat Nurse). In other words, by the late 1970s, The Unknown Soldier’s World War II was no longer a metaphor for Vietnam but, at its best, nostalgic escapism and, at its worst, a militaristic fantasy about winning with the proper support.
I don’t mean to say the series anticipated the kind of nationalist super-soldiers played by Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris in the Reagan era. Rather, like Haney’s earlier comics, this run feels like a throwback to the propagandistic thrillers the Allies put out during WWII. (For instance, one of my favorite stories, ‘The Savage Sea!,’ is a small whodunit set in a convoy that brings to mind the Bogart movie Action in the North Atlantic.) This means that, yes, there is a clear message about the need for unity and war, but it tends to be mixed with an almost perverse sense of excitement and entertainment, as the Unknown Soldier fights a sumo wrestler, performs a daring escape by posing as a circus acrobat, and keeps resorting to all sorts of surprising disguises:
The Unknown Soldier #218Hell, Haney even introduced a recurring foe, Major Klaus von Stauffen (aka the Black Knight), who owned up to the idea that this version of the war was ultimately a game, with the whole of Europe serving as a kind of huge board for a real-life chess match against the titular gauze-shrouded super-spy. This led to a preposterous puzzle-like plot in which Chat Noir and the Unknown Soldier found a cryptic clue in Paris, quickly moved to Normandy, and then, based on a guess, immediately went to England, constantly bumping into the Black Knight along the way. But hey, if you’re willing to forgo logic and realism and just throw yourself into the story (which is usually the best way to read Bob Haney’s comics), it’s a thrill-a-minute ride!
That said, having firmly reestablished the series’ gung-ho approach to WWII adventure, Haney wasn’t afraid to gradually mess with the formula. Some of his stories did complicate the conflict’s politics, even if mostly as grist for drama that typically culminated in the reaffirmation of a larger sense of duty. ‘An Honorable Betrayal?’ acknowledged (albeit with disturbingly pragmatic resignation) that the internment camps for Japanese-Americans were ‘no way to treat people’ and briefly presented a more understanding look towards treason and empathy with the enemy. In ‘No Exit from Stalag 19!,’ a bunch of POWs in a Czechoslovak camp agreed to work on a Nazi infrastructure project, reasoning that they were ultimately contributing to eventual post-war prosperity (a subchapter had the cheeky title: ‘Barbed Wire is Neutral!’). Yep, it was The Unknown Soldier’s version of The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Regardless of the ideological slant, I admit I have a lot of time for Bob Haney’s sheer sense of spectacle. Each tale burst with chases, shootouts, and explosions. There were elaborate passwords, ingenious secret codes, and reworked set pieces from famous movies (‘The Invisible Traitor!’ borrowed one from Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, ‘Mission: Incredible!’ seems inspired by the premise and ski action of Anthony Mann’s The Heroes of Telemark). Practically every page had a death-defying stunt or a switcheroo. The narrative usually began in media res and, after a brief expository flashback, the Unknown Soldier – or, as Haney’s narration sometimes called him, ‘the Immortal G.I.’ – hardly ever stopped moving…
The Unknown Soldier #207Well, I suppose he did stop for the occasional moment of patriotic contemplation… and, of course, during those countless times when he was being ruthlessly tortured…
The Unknown Soldier #231For the comic’s sense of restless momentum, you should especially thank the art team of penciller Dick Ayers, inker Gerry Talaoc, and colorist Jerry Serpe, who always brought to the surface the contagious liveliness required by Haney’s frantic scripts. Securing a visual continuity with the previous run, Gerry Talaoc, in particular, imbued the artwork with a compelling, not-quite-cartoony style. (To appreciate Talaoc’s impact, compare his issues with those inked by Romeo Tanghal, which are rendered much more blandly.)
Also, I assume letterers Erick Santos Jordan and Esphid Mahilum provided the bombastic sound effects, which helped nail the action beats:
The Unknown Soldier #209
The Unknown Soldier #212
The Unknown Soldier #226Again, you can spot Erick Jordan’s and Esphidy’s contribution by comparing their work with that of guest letterers like Milt Snappin and Jean Simek, who didn’t deliver the same oomph:
The Unknown Soldier #214The best story of the lot is probably ‘Sunset for a Samurai!,’ in which the Unknown Soldier infiltrates Japan (yes, this means resorting to yellowface, although fortunately Jerry Serpe’s palette is relatively restrained in this one) to meet a local double agent torn between contradictory loyalties. That comic feels like a whole blockbuster crammed into sixteen forceful pages packed with battles, twists, traps, mysteries, McGuffins, and high drama.
I also have a soft spot for ‘Get the Desert Fox!,’ which amusingly turns real-world General Erwin Rommel into a full-on comic book villain. That one has a hell of an opening:
The Unknown Soldier #229Given the title of this blog, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the Unknown Soldier also teamed up with Batman in ‘The Secret That Saved a World!’ (The Brave and the Bold #146, cover-dated January 1979). By then, it had been amply established that Bob Haney’s version of the Caped Crusader had been active during WWII, so the writer built on this idea by having Batman investigate a ring of Nazi saboteurs in Gotham City, which led him to none other than Klaus von Stauffen (who had come to the US to spy on the atomic program). The climax involved the Unknown Soldier posing as President Roosevelt!
That tale eventually led into the epic ‘Jungle Showdown!’ (The Unknown Soldier #234, December 1979), which not only featured our hero fighting an alligator, but it finished off with him trapped in an exploding airplane! It’s a pretty awesome issue, although perhaps not as much as the issue where the Unknown Soldier came across yet another brainwashing operation, this time run by Nazi Vikings:
The Unknown Soldier #224I suppose Haney could only write the comic for so long before giving in to his flair for delirious bizarreness… It’s why his run’s final years deserve their own post, some other time.
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread, I keep hearing people claiming that this all feels like a movie. They’re probably thinking of medical disaster dramas like 1995’s Outbreak or 2011’s Contagion (Jason Read wrote a few insightful remarks about the latter here). Or, if they’re cinephiles concerned with the virus’ link to xenophobic paranoia, perhaps they’re thinking of the powerful film noir Panic in the Streets…
Such comparisons may sound heartless and naïve, but I’m the last person who can deny pop culture’s appeal as a mediator for our perceptions and as a source of provocative imagery to discuss what’s going on in the world around us. Hell, the first thing that came to *my* mind was Batman comics’ own take on this subgenre, namely 1996’s crossover Contagion, in which the Dynamic Duo struggled to contain the spread of the seemingly unstoppable Apocalypse filovirus (also known as ‘The Clench’) in Gotham City.
In turn, that got me thinking about Batman-related books that would make for an ideal reading experience at the moment, especially for those interested in the franchise’s quirky history of mixing all-out action, dark comedy, and social commentary.
CONTAGION
Like I said in the intro, the reason for picking this book, which collects an arc about an epidemic, should be pretty obvious for anyone who has been watching the news. Still, some readers may be skeptical of a storyline where the Dark Knight ends up fighting a disease, that is to say, a villain without motivation that cannot technically be outsmarted and certainly cannot be punched or kicked in the head. In part, the whole thing worked at the time because, under the remarkable editorship of Dennis O’Neill, writers Chuck Dixon, Alan Grant, and Doug Moench had been fleshing out Gotham’s population and institutions for a while, so it was fun to see all these familiar characters deal with the challenge at various levels. It’s one of those tales in which the city itself is the protagonist!
Although this means that new readers may occasionally find themselves a bit lost among the expansive cast, the overall plot is still quite easy – and gripping – to follow, even if you miss some of the background about the bumbling new police commissioner, Andrew Howe, or Azrael’s complicated history with the sinister Order of St. Dumas… (The 2016 collected edition features a handful of extra stories set after Contagion‘s events, but it probably would’ve made more sense to include a few comics that preceded them.) It helps that all the creators involved knew how to spin a damn entertaining yarn: not only do the heroes go on a globetrotting quest to find survivors whose immune system can provide a cure, but they also have to compete with mercenaries hired by the city’s elite, who are trying to save their own skin after having accidentally sealed themselves in with the Clench in a luxury complex called Babylon Towers. The latter subplot provides both an original setting *and* an effective vehicle for Land of the Dead-style satire.
As usual with this sort of crossovers involving multiple series by different creative teams, the artwork is all over place (Tommy Lee Edwards’ angular pencils are a world apart from Kelley Jones’ round, caricatural style, as are Robin‘s bubblegum colors from the oversaturated shadows on the pages of the Batman issues), but at least the writing is generally pretty tight and consistent. I am also a big fan of Contagion’s sequel, Legacy, which was itself collected into a couple of graphic novels not that long ago.
BIRDS OF PREY: VOL.1 (2015 edition)
Whether you’re a fan or a detractor of DC’s latest movie flop, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), you could do worse than to track down the original source of the material, by which I mean the mid-to-late 1990s’ Birds of Prey comics, way before Harley Quinn joined the team and stole the spotlight. Collecting the first batch of butt-kicking team-ups between Oracle (Barbara Gordon) and Black Canary (Dinah Lance), Birds of Prey: volume 1 is thrilling high adventure at its finest, with a fair amount of humor, a dash of politics, and the added bonus of focusing mostly on female heroes and villains (including cool guest appearances by Lois Lane, Catwoman, and the Huntress).
Writers Chuck Dixon and Jordan B. Gorfinkel do an especially good job with the characterization of the spunky Black Canary, who finds herself seemingly in way over her head time and time again. We also get a sense of the shifting geopolitics of an increasingly globalized world, as she investigates terrorists in Africa, fights mobsters in the former Soviet Union, and faces a revolution in the Caribbean. The art – by Gary Frank, Jennifer Graves, Matt Haley, Steffano Raffaele, Dick Giordano, and, in the last chapter, Greg Land – is as slick and punchy as required from such an action-heavy comic.
ARKHAM ASYLUM: LIVING HELL
One of the leitmotifs of the ongoing campaign for the Democratic nomination has been the indignation over the prepotent attitude of billionaires, from the ones trying to buy their election to the one who already sits at the top of the political chain, not to mention all the other ones who exploit the current system with little consequence for themselves. It can therefore be quite cathartic to go back to the saga of Warren White, a rich bastard who pretended to be insane in order to dodge jail, only to find himself sentenced to the gothic mental institution where Batman’s rogues are kept between stories, in 2003’s mini-series Arkham Asylum: Living Hell.
Many great creators have sought to imagine everyday life in Arkham, but nothing beats this hilariously pitch-black prison yarn by Dan Slott and Ryan Sook, with moody colors by Lee Loughridge. With a mosaic structure that keeps shifting perspectives, Living Hell populates the titular madhouse with a host of fascinating new characters (like the traumatized security guard who lost a hand to Killer Croc) while also providing amusing takes on classic rogues (Two-Face cuts his hands, so he has to find someone to flip a coin for him; the Joker decides to kill everybody whose name is a palindrome, just for the sake of it…). In addition to crafting a number of witty set pieces, Slott’s clockwork-like script manages to bring it all together into an apocalyptic ending, with a smooth leap into horror fantasy (including a visit from the demon Etrigan) that gives the book’s title a surprisingly literal meaning.
The conversation in the comments section of The Tempest’s post back in January got me thinking about how much of Alan Moore’s career was spent playing with other creators’ toys, providing some of the greatest gun-for-hire work in the medium… This involved relatively lengthy runs that comprehensively expanded a pre-existing mythos (Captain Britain, Marvelman, Swamp Thing, Supreme, WildC.A.T.S.), but he also wrote several hit-and-run shorts that succinctly developed small corners of large universes or even lastingly retconned bits of a series’ continuity. These are often neat comics, working as punchy short stories (Moore is a master of the format) while also drawing on our knowledge of the wider narratives in which they fit.
A few years ago, I praised Moore’s story ‘Last Night I Dreamed of Dr. Cobra,’ which brilliantly imagined a future for Will Eisner’s The Spirit. Here are another ten gems:
‘Rust Never Sleeps’ (originally published in The Empire Strikes Back Monthly #156, cover-dated May 1982), with Alan Davis (art) and Jenny O’Connor (letters)
One of Alan Moore’s earliest gigs involved writing shorts for Marvel UK’s Star Wars comics, of all places. While they’re generally readable-yet-forgettable, what makes these comics interesting is that they explore a side of the franchise that is not the one George Lucas (and his successors) ended up developing. Instead of dynastic soap opera and galactic politics, most stories revolve around different forms of fantasy beyond the Jedi mythology, positing a universe with a wider array of godlike entities and physics-defying phenomena than what we’ve seen in the Skywalker saga, which makes them pretty off-kilter from today’s vantage point. I have a fondness for ‘Rust Never Sleeps,’ in which C-3P0 and R2-D2 come across a kind of droid religion at a planet-sized junkyard. It’s an amusing tale that not only fleshes out Star Wars’ world a bit more, but which works precisely because we know about the larger conflict out there, so we realize what’s at stake better than some of the characters involved.
(The notion of exploring the outer corners of this galaxy far, far away appeals much more to me than endless retreads of world-shattering confrontations between chosen Jedis and Sith emperors, which is why I found greater satisfaction in Jon Favreau’s scaled-backed space western The Mandalorian than in the bloated, unimaginative Rise of Skywalker.)
‘Protected Species’ (originally published in The Super Heroes Annual 1984, cover-dated 1984), with Bryan Talbot (art)
Besides Marvel UK, Alan Moore also did some early work for DC UK, a British publisher that mostly put out reprints of DC’s American material, plus the occasional original story. One of those originals was Moore’s Batman tale ‘The Gun,’ which I’ve discussed before. Another one was the illustrated text piece ‘Protected Species,’ written as a resignation letter from an alien hunter assigned with capturing one of the last Kryptonians alive.
It’s a pretty funny story and well worth tracking down, as Moore indulges in his underrated flair for whimsical comedy (coupled with a surprising amount of world-building): ‘Last season you sent me after those Lesser Iridescent Snicker-Fish that live out on the frozen Methane-Flats of Snorky’s Planet. Yeah, I know there’s only five of the things left in the whole Universe, but that’s not the point. The point is that I had to spend three weeks wading thorax-deep in frozen, stinking methane, looking for some ugly, radioactive-looking little squirm-ball that just giggled at me when I finally found it.’
Needless to say, the main joke is that, unlike the narrator, DC fans know exactly what he’s up against. It’s a simple two-page story, but the shift in perspective is enough to earn some solid chuckles.
‘Red Planet Blues’ (originally published in 2000 AD Annual 1985, cover-dated 1985), with Steve Dillon (pencils), John Higgins (inks), and Steve Potter (letters)
The British cyberpunk magazine 2000 AD made a name for itself with a distinctly grungy sci-fi/horror vibe, geared towards teenage boys through a misanthropic, working class attitude (you can see how the comic went on to inspire stuff like Attack the Block and Love, Death & Robots). Alan Moore fit right in, honing his craft by penning several short stories – mostly standalone ‘Future Shocks’ – as well as a few multi-part sagas. He also contributed with quick instalments for the strips Rogue Warrior, Ro-Busters, and The A.B.C. Warriors.
One of the latter, ‘Red Planet Blues,’ is a concise yet poignant tale about the human colonization of Mars. Neither the use of space as a parable about colonialism nor the move of gradually looking at the monsters as victims are exactly groundbreaking approaches (surely not on the pages of 2000 AD). However, the whole thing works because it’s told through Hammerstein’s supposedly dispassionate point of view, which ironically captures the very injustice he claims not to feel. It also helps that Steve Dillon draws him as one of the saddest-looking robots to ever grace a comic.
‘Brief Lives’ (originally published in The Omega Men #26, cover-dated May 1985), with Kevin O’Neill (art), Carl Gafford (colors), and Todd Klein (letters)
This one was made for DC’s The Omega Men (a series that unfortunately had no relation to the psychedelic futuristic thriller starring Charlton Heston), more specifically for the ‘Vega’ backups set around the titular planetary system. Although it features the Spider Guild (a coalition of imperialist alien arachnoids created in Green Lantern), ‘Brief Lives’ could’ve been a 2000 AD ‘Future Shock’ or ‘Time Twister’ quickie – a genuinely great one, by the way. It even includes artwork by 2000 AD alumnus Kevin O’Neill!
The premise is that this tiny spider-like species is trying to take over a planet inhabited by giants who operate in a whole different time frame, where the mere blinking of an eye lasts for ten of the invaders’ years. Their vantage point is so far apart that the Spider Guild’s challenge becomes to make the giants actually aware that they have been conquered. The result is a fun little sci-fi mind-bender that – in just four pages – amusingly tackles the relativity of time and perception (and the futility of war, from a long-term perspective). I keep waiting for people to bring it up in discussions of the Anthropocene.
‘In Blackest Night’ (originally published in Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual #3, cover-dated 1987), with Bill Willingham (pencils), Terry Austin (inks), Gene D’Angelo (colors), and John Costanza (letters)
A beautiful example of Alan Moore’s knack for taking an existing concept and considering its implications in novel and clever ways. In this case, he wonders how the intergalactic space force Green Lantern Corps could possibly go about it if they wanted to recruit a member from an area of the lightless, starless cosmos, where there would be no concept of color or light – and so, by definition, where even the Green Lanterns’ name (not to mention their oath) would be untranslatable. The result is both playful (especially the final punchline) and possibly allegorical in its respectful treatment of cultural barriers.
Yes, it’s another tale about subjectivity – a recurring motif that matches Moore’s continued efforts to push readers’ perceptions (of comics, genre, and the world beyond them) in new directions.
‘Footsteps’ (originally published in Secret Origins (v2) #10, cover-dated January 1987), with Joe Orlando (art), Carl Gafford (colors), and Bob Lappan (letters)
The Phantom Stranger is one of DC’s most mysterious characters and that mystery is part of his appeal, so when editor Bob Greenberger decided to devote an issue of Secret Origins to the Phantom Stranger he wisely chose to retain some of the ambiguity by providing, not one, but four possible origin stories (by four different creative teams). Alan Moore wrote ‘Footsteps,’ which presents the Stranger – as well the demon Etrigan – as an angel caught in the War in Heaven.
There isn’t much meat on the bone, but once again it’s all in the execution. ‘Footsteps’ keeps shifting from the Phantom Stranger’s recollections of the time of Satan’s fall to a current day story about a guy torn between the NYC subway Guardian Angels and a gang of sewer survivalists. The parallels between the two tales – highlighted by Joe Orlando’s symmetrical layouts – follow the kind of symbol-laden formal exercises characteristic of Moore’s style at the time (most notably in Watchmen, The Killing Joke, and Superman’s ‘For the Man Who Has Everything’), as do the poetic narration, the tight scene transitions, and the multilayered dialogue.
(The other writers went with biblical origins as well, except for Dan Mishkin, who counterbalanced this theological slant by linking the Phantom Stranger to the Big Bang!)
‘Act of Faith…’ (originally published in The Puma Blues #20, cover-dated 1988), with Stephen Bissette (pencils) and Michael Zulli (inks)
Given Alan Moore’s reputation, some of you may be surprised that we’ve made it so far with practically no sexual content. That’s about to change!
Through the eyes of a masturbating narrator, ‘Act of Faith…’ imagines, in rich detail, the mating habits of flying manta rays in a post-nuclear-incident year 2000. Somehow, though, this comes across as profoundly melancholic (aided by the gorgeous art!), culminating in a lovely meditation about the sense of risk and hope inherent to human reproduction at a time of deadly STDs and climate change.
I don’t know if Moore ended up writing this 4-page story because he was an avowed fan of Stephen Murphy’s and Michael Zulli’s ambitious, experimental indie comic The Puma Blues or just because he wanted to make a statement in his crusade for creators’ rights by giving the series a commercial push after Diamond Comics Distributors had refused to distribute it. In any case, the result feels deeply personal and nothing short of wonderful, creating a powerful reading experience that lines up perfectly with the humanist and environmentalist themes of this cult comic.
‘The Mirror’ (originally published in Taboo #5, cover-dated 1991), with Melinda Gebbie (art, colors) and C.D. Alexandar (letters)
Lost Girls was also a case of Alan Moore playing with other people’s toys, albeit this time around without any official authorization and not as part of anyone else’s ongoing franchise. Still, the comic does star (public domain) characters that he did not create, taken from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. In fact, Lost Girls can even be read as a proper sequel to those works, set in their future 1914 (even if it retcons bits of their continuity). That said, while those are classics of children literature, Moore’s comic is, in turn, a very adult-oriented piece of hardcore pornography.
Lost Girls started out in the indie anthology Taboo back in the early ‘90s and, after a long hiatus, was finally completed and published as a massive graphic novel in 2006. It tells a full, cohesive story, but some of its sub-chapters are so neatly self-contained that they do work as autonomous tales as well. For instance, the very first one, the 8-page ‘The Mirror,’ can be read by itself as a bittersweet (if naughty) take on an older Alice, with an ambiguous magical twist at the end.
Moreover, unlike the rest of the book, this section is still a relatively restrained slice of erotica rather than a full-blown display of depraved sex and filth, so it may even appeal to people who aren’t that keen on reading the rest. As you can see above, it’s all framed by Alice’s mirror (a nod to Through the Looking-Glass) and tastefully illustrated by Melinda Gebbie, who elegantly sets up the comic’s precise mise en scène and fauvist tones.
‘The Crazy Wide Forever’ (originally published in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, cover-dated 2008), with Kevin O’Neill (art), Ben Dimagmaliw (colors), and Todd Klein (letters)
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen took the idea behind Lost Girls all the way by stealing hundreds of characters from all sorts of creators and building on their established history, making it the ultimate example of Moore playing in other people’s sandboxes (or, if you prefer, ransacking those sandboxes and then bringing other people’s toys into his own sandbox). Notably, he didn’t just use pre-existing concepts and characters, but also mimicked formal styles, especially in Black Dossier, which was essentially a loosely connected anthology of pastiches merging different intellectual properties. This included an excerpt of ‘The Crazy Wide Forever,’ a book-within-a-book written by Sal Paradyse (Jack Kerouac’s fictional stand-in from On the Road) in a beatnik style reminiscent of Kerouac’s and William S. Burroughs’ prose (Burroughs, in particular, being a major influence on Moore).
This 5-page short story (plus the mock cover you see above, by Moore’s regular partner in crime, Kevin O’Neill) is kind of an epilogue to LOEG’s first volume, in which Professor Moriarty tried to blow up Fu Manchu, but was prevented by Dracula’s Mina Murray and King Solomon’s Mines’ Allan Quatermain. In ‘The Crazy Wide Forever,’ the titular lead of Kerouac’s Doctor Sax (here called Dr. Sachs), who turns out to be Fu Manchu’s grandson, goes after Moriarty and ends up almost unleashing H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.
If you think this already sounds delirious, wait until you get a load of Moore’s version of beatnik spontaneous prose: ‘…Dr. Sachs flaps back above the chimney stacks and sacks the railroad tracks what run like suicide into the weeds he feeds on needs an greeds bleeds into telegraph transmissions scrambles messages to random voodoo poetry he is the scrawled phone number what makes lovers fight and I will tell you this of infamy he is Mahatma in the Mission district’s tinders he makes winos dream that there’s no cigarette alight between their fingers uz they slobber down to sleep…’
‘Grandeur and Monstrosity’ (originally published in God Is Dead: The Book of Acts #Alpha, cover-dated July 2014), with Facundo Percio (art), Hernan Cabrera (colors), and Kurt Hathaway (letters)
One of Moore’s last safe havens of indie publishing was Avatar Press, which specializes in a particularly extreme brand of taboo-breaking horror, packed with no-holds-barred nudity, swearing, graphic violence, and gleeful blasphemy (notably, the publisher’s catalogue includes Über, Crossed, Strange Kiss, and Chronicles of Wormwood). A few years ago, one of my guilty pleasures from Avatar was God Is Dead, in which all sorts of gods came to life. Created by Jonathan Hickman and Mike Costa, the series was basically a religious crossover pitting the pantheons of various mythologies against each other… Like in your average large-scale multi-company event, most characters weren’t particularly well-developed, so your enjoyment relied on the geeky pleasure of recognition and the shock value of seeing familiar figures mercilessly slaughter each other (look, the Valkyries are slaying Atlas!). I appreciated God Is Dead’s iconoclastic exuberance for a while, but eventually dropped out because it amounted to so very little more than the occasional puerile thrill.
Along with the regular series, though, Avatar published a couple of specials in which guest creators contributed with side stories. Alan Moore, who has famously proclaimed himself the High Priest of a one-person cult to the Roman snake god Glycon, went with a surprisingly personal, metafictional approach: in the story, Moore’s fans, still confused about how literally to take his odd religion, ask him whether his god, too, has come to life. In response, Moore gives a performance at the O2 Arena which consists of him holding a puppet of Glycon that lectures the crowd about Neo-Platonism (which saw gods as conceptual essences without material form). The whole thing is crammed with inside jokes and absurdist wit, like when the narration tells us that ‘the show started slightly later than advertised. Long enough, in fact, for some audience members to write lengthy dissertations on the empty stage as a conceptual art statement.’
Of course, if gods are ultimately ideas expressed through representation, then the fact that Glycon is admittedly a puppet doesn’t make it less of a god (only a more honest, revealing one). Yet that also means that the notion of gods coming to life in the flesh makes little sense, since, according to this interpretation, their godliness is defined precisely by the fact that they can only manifest themselves through the works they inspire. In other words, ‘Grandeur and Monstrosity’ both mocks God Is Dead and nicely delves into the series’ themes. Thus, in a pleasing balancing act, Moore manages to do a humorous short story set (and published) in the periphery of a trashy comic that also cogently conveys one of his oeuvre’s major running philosophical motifs: ‘Are gods unreal, then? Not at all. As ideas, we have changed your world beyond all recognition. We have brought enlightenment and slaughter. Do not doubt our power. Just try not to be so literal.’
Your noirish reminder that comics can be awesome…
A while ago, I did a post about violent superhero movies that explore how scary it would be if there were actual super-beings around, especially ones less bound by old-fashioned morals than your regular mainstream heroes… This line of speculation has a long tradition in comics, from the brutal classic Miracleman #15 to the unsettling graphic novel A god Somewhere, not to mention the entertaining Superman-gone-bad series Irredeemable. It’s not just the odd comic, either: there are entire shared superhero universes – like WildStorm and Valiant – where morality is practically a secondary thing, as most protagonists will nonchalantly slaughter anyone who gets in the way and many are part of shady teams run by ultra-cynical bastards.
The greatest example in recent times is, by far, Joshua Dysart’s epic, Imperium.
Imperium is the culmination of a certain subgenre of morally ambiguous superhero fiction whose lineage goes back to the 1980s’ deconstructionist movement (spearheaded by Alan Moore) and the 1990s’ Image explosion (where nihilism was part of the whole edgy, ‘extreme’ attitude), but which reached a peak in the early 2000s, most notably with WildStorm’s revolutionary ‘widescreen blockbuster’ extravaganza The Authority. Following that comic’s lead, the rest of WildStorm’s output sought fresh and thought-provoking ways of reimagining the superhero genre, resulting in some of the most experimental works in the field, both as part of The Authority’s universe (Planetary, The Intimates, Wildcats version 3.0, Sleeper, The Establishment…) and beyond it (The Winter Men, Ex Machina, and Automatic Kafka, among others).
Overall, the emphasis was really more on the ‘super’ part of ‘superhero,’ with the main appeal being the catharsis of watching incredible powers unleashed in inventive ways, as well as of thinking through the widespread sociopolitical implications that could come out of such supernatural phenomena (thus breaking long-established taboos in the genre). What made WildStorm so special was also the audacity of engaging with long-term global transformation at the level of an expanded universe with dozens of series, upstaging the short-lived ‘events’ of DC’s and Marvel’s core continuities.
After that version of the WildStorm Universe was brought to a close (in part collapsing under the weight of all the massive destruction it had accumulated), its spirit of cleverly blending the excitement of superhero fantasy with more mature sensibilities was kept alive in 2012’s reboot of the Valiant Universe. Many of the books to come out of that reboot presented super-powers in a terrifying way, avoiding the genre’s more simplistic morality plays. For instance, despite the title, in the early stages of Matt Kindt’s Unity – one of Valiant’s core team books – there was hardly an issue in which one of the stars of the series wasn’t trying (or plotting) to kill at least one other major property (they finally settled into a more cohesive group later on, with the ‘Homefront’ story-arc doing a particularly neat job of conveying their increasing sense of belonging to a team).
Among Valiant’s catalogue, however, I would say that 2015’s limited series Imperium – including the 2019 sequel The Life and Death of Toyo Harada, which was basically the second part of the story – manages to stand out as the most sophisticated corollary to The Authority’s push to move superheroes into a more politically conscious, morally uncertain mold of storytelling while at the same time preserving (or even escalating) the spectacle that defines the genre.
Imperium #2The series’ premise is that, after his decades-long cover as a philanthropic businessman is compromised, Toyo Harada, the most powerful super-being (aka ‘psiot’) in the Valiant Universe, decides to bend the world’s will by force in order to usher in his vision of post-scarcity utopia. For that, he gathers a host of followers with psionic abilities and declares an all-out war on all sorts of fronts, from messy African politics to the shadowy world of military contractors like the sinister Rising Spirit corporation. Along the way, we get a maximalist barrage of mind-blowing sci-fi concepts, hyperbolic dialogue, and sheer carnage.
You’ll find no decompressed storytelling here: each issue is filled to the brim, as Imperium relentlessly pits telepathy against telekinesis, out-of-this-world brilliance against ruthless cunning, and futuristic technology against unbelievable brute force. The conflict keeps moving and escalating, as double-crosses pile up and key characters are removed from the picture. It makes sense to think of Imperium as a smart superhero version of Game of Thrones – for one thing, Joshua Dysart (one of the most interesting writers working in the medium at the moment) makes sure there are always a few redeeming motivations and likable (or at least charismatic) characters on each side, so that your allegiances are likely to shift as we change perspective, even within a single issue. If there is such a thing as ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ they are all over the place – rather than root for them, you just sit back and dread as you watch them destroy each other.
Indeed, as with those WildStorm comics from the turn-of-the-millennium, a big part of Imperium’s appeal is to watch large-scale exhibitions of devastating power, be they in the form of over-the-top industrial espionage, international politics, psychological mind games, cyber-warfare, or time-manipulation… It’s all robustly rendered by Valiant’s regular artists: Doug Braithwaite, Scot Eaton, CAFU, Juan José Ryp, and Khari Evans. As for Brian Reber’s and Ulises Arreola’s dreamy, blinding colors and Dave Sharpe’s versatile lettering, not only do they secure the series’ visual coherence, but they also enhance its bombastic vibe.
The dialogue is in tune with the comic’s go-for-broke tone. At one point, when a character is about to shoot another, he yells: ‘Time for some high-velocity, transcortical lead therapy!’ Even better: during a particularly thrilling submarine heist (in which Toyo Harada tries to steal a psiot’s brain), the director of Rising Spirit utters these immortal lines to the crew: ‘Every single one of us has to be willing to die to keep that brain in our possession!! The world and the stock value of our company is at stake here, people!’
Joshua Dysart wastes no words, with every line seemingly designed to convey as much information, characterization, and exhilaration as possible. Taking a page from the Warren Ellis/Jonathan Hickman playbook, there is barely a balloon or caption that doesn’t elicit some kind of amazement or amusement in the readers…
Imperium #4Perhaps I make it sound shallower than it is. Toyo Harada is presented as an authoritarian, megalomaniac superhero/villain, but also as a tragic figure who is resorting to extreme methods in a laudable fight against global injustice and poverty (gathering support from India, Brazil, Indonesia, Iraq, Ukraine, Mexico, Kiribati, Cuba, and the Democratic Republic of Congo along the way). Questioning whether ends can ever justify the means, Imperium shows us both the benefits and the sacrifices inherent to Harada’s proto-socialist crusade, as well as a host of unintended consequences, with the series repeatedly commenting on the link between conflict and economics.
Moreover, like all the best fantasy and science fiction, not only does Imperium conjure up imaginative scenarios, but it then gets a lot of dramatic mileage out of the complicated feelings they would generate. It can be truly absorbing just to watch characters engage with utterly original situations and, in the process, develop original emotions. Just like in the brilliant TV show Counterpart you get a whole range of reactions to the existence of doppelgängers (starting from scientific curiosity, identity crisis, theological interrogation, anthropological distrust, political pragmatism, and existentialist revelation – and then building up from there in increasingly nuanced and personal ways), in Imperium there is a remarkable plurality of ways in which people – and aliens and forms of artificial intelligence – relate to the (super)power struggle taking place around them.
In fact, amidst all the kickass action and geopolitics, the series actually has plenty of moments of tenderness and comedy, usually involving Harada’s medical robot Mech Major, whose A.I. has developed consciousness and insists on being called ‘Sunlight on Snow.’ My favorite scene involves Sunlight on Snow talking to a plant (later revealed to be the seed of a sadistic alien monster):
Imperium #3Besides setting up a later plot point, the scene manages to be both melancholic and funny. The fact that Doug Braithwaite, Brian Reber, Ulises Arreola, and Dave Sharpe play it completely straight lends even more humor to the abrupt contrast between the sensitive robot and the cold-hearted, logical human. (The tension between Toyo Harada’s humanitarian ideals and his ultra-pragmatic mind is, of course, a key running motif in the whole series.)
Indeed, a major reason for Imperium’s creative success has to do with the fact that Dysart’s scripts are so sharply illustrated. Even when dealing with the most inconceivable creatures and powers, the artwork remains somewhat naturalistic, albeit not meticulously detailed (except for the bits by Juan José Ryp, whose style comes the closest to the Chris Weston/Geoff Darrow school of drawing). For all the sci-fi elements, the comic is certainly set in a recognizable version of our world, with Khari Evans actually working several photographic samples into his backgrounds.
The artists switch dynamically from ‘talking head’ close-ups to splashes and heady sequences, including a dazzling flashback about an exploration mission to a higher dimension (again, by Braithwaite), a cosmic clash between Harada and a godlike Soviet cosmonaut (by Scot Eaton), and a memorable scene inside Albert Einstein’s dying mind (by guest-artist Adam Pollina). The ensuing look cements the idea that, as far as superhero comics go, we couldn’t be farther from Kirbyesque bluntness – instead of stylized blocky figures and stark colors histrionically expressing clear, melodramatic conflicts, every element of Imperium speaks to a slipperier and more elaborate worldview.
See how CAFU – here working with colorist Andrew Dalhouse – practically depicts this siege as a color-coded infographic:
The Life and Death of Toyo Harada #1As if all this wasn’t enough, Imperium’s fourth arc prominently features Livewire, one of my favorite characters in the Valiant Universe. Much like The Authority’s Engineer, Livewire is a psiot who can control machines with her mind, which means that we keep getting quasi-poetic slices of technobabble like this one:
Imperium #15Valiant fans, in particular, are bound to have a field day with Imperium and The Life and Death of Toyo Harada, since they tie into various corners of the company’s shared universe, including a major plotline about the alien Vine (from X-O Manowar) and even a nifty sort of crossover with the first Divinity mini-series. That said, these comics aren’t hard to follow on their own, even if you’ll get much more out of them if you’ve at least flipped through the pages of Dysart’s earlier runs on Harbinger and Bloodshot.
The Batman Adventures #28While gun control has certainly been a running theme in Batman comics throughout the ages, their relationship with this issue is not as straightforward as some seem to think. I don’t mean Batman’s relationship with gun control in the comics, which is actually relatively clear: he’s an adamant advocate that civilians’ access to firearms should be, at the very least, seriously restricted.
Yes, the Dark Knight – initially a rip-off of the Shadow – carried and used guns in a few of his very early stories, before he got his traumatic origin. Yet I think it’s fair to disregard those as out-of-continuity missteps from a time when the character was still taking shape. (In one of the many intertextual in-jokes of the Brave and the Bold animated show, the magnificent episode ‘Game Over for Owlman!’ recontextualized the image of the Golden Age Dark Knight holding a gun by making him an evil Batman from a parallel Earth.)
As far as the archetypical incarnation of the Caped Crusader goes, it has been firmly set that he hates guns:
Batman #489
Detective Comics #748Indeed, busting up gunrunners is – together with beating up drug dealers, muggers, and rapists – a pretty central chunk of Batman’s average nightly activities. In part, this has got to be a calculated move: the Dark Knight knows that, although you can have violent crime and even murder without firepower, access to guns massively amplifies the scale of violence and likelihood of casualties.
Additionally, you can tell the fact that Bruce Wayne saw his own parents gunned down in front of him as a child is always in the back of his mind when he goes after these guys!
Catwoman: Trail of the Gun #1The anti-gun feeling is up there with ‘no killing’ and the fact that Bruce Wayne is a socially conscious philanthropist (and not just a brutal vigilante) as one of Batman’s most defining character traits.
It’s a trait that, as I’ve argued before, both suits his personality and can serve as a nifty storytelling device, depriving Batman of quick, easy solutions when he’s apparently outmatched in a fight and forcing him to think on his feet. It also plays well with the notion that he’s an outlaw hero: because the Caped Crusader doesn’t carry guns or deploy lethal force, he can come across as an imaginary alternative to the police rather than as an extreme type of cop, terrifying and unbound. Sure, many people consider guns important crimefighting tools, but the whole point of the Batman fantasy is that he’s operating on a whole other level – this is a guy who uses smoke bombs and grappling hooks and batarangs!
That said, there’s still some room for manoeuvre in terms of the Dark Knight’s attitude towards fire weapons. For one thing, even though he despises them, he has made sure he knows how to use them if necessary, as established in ‘The Death Lottery’ (Detective Comics #708-710). And, in particular circumstances, he has been known to exploit guns’ threatening power:
Batman and the Outsiders #28Batman’s attitude is not the reason I say his comics don’t always put forth an unambiguous anti-gun message, though. It’s also not because of the fact that, in the 1970s, it was fairly common for those comics to feature ads for toy guns. The main point I want to make is that the Caped Crusader isn’t necessarily the only character in the stories to elicit readers’ sympathies.
Batman’s stance sometimes feels like little more than the idiosyncratic option of one character, which can be counterbalanced by that of others, including that of fan-favorite cops like James Gordon and Renee Montoya, who often save the day by shooting people. Yes, they’re trained officers, but they nevertheless play into the ‘good guy with a gun’ trope – and they generally do it with the Dark Knight’s acquiescence.
Batman #259The same goes for Detective Harvey Bullock, although he is typically more of an offbeat cast member – a sort of crummy remnant from an old-school strand of hardboiled fiction, cutting corners and not always on the right side, so not exactly a shiny example of a heroic cop.
Bear in mind, by the way, that this didn’t prevent Doug Moench (who created Bullock back in the 1980s) from giving him a couple of stringent anti-gun lines when trying to convince a robber to drop his weapon:
Batman #547Other sympathetic characters who have prominently displayed very different attitudes towards the gun issue are Barbara Gordon, Sasha Bordeaux, and Alfred Pennyworth. The latter, for example, has been repeatedly shown to own a shotgun and to rely on it for protection whenever he feels particularly threatened…
Batman vs Predator III #4The fact that Alfred Pennyworth uses a shotgun to protect himself and Wayne Manor has been a staple feature of the character at least since the 1990s. It was taken to the extreme in Batman: Earth One (leave it to Geoff Johns to take everything to the extreme), but Chuck Dixon in particular has often reminded readers of this little bit of continuity.
While it is tempting to see in this merely an expression of Chuck Dixon’s famously conservative, gun-totting views, I suspect it comes from another place altogether. After all, if there is one thing Dixon generally excels at, it’s writing characterization, so it’s not too much of a stretch to see this as a character-based decision. It highlights Alfred’s autonomy – not just in the sense of wanting to take care of himself (instead of merely relying on Batman), but also in the sense of displaying a different ethics code than the one from his ‘Master Bruce.’ Moreover, it suggests there is more to Alfred’s background than being a servant (in pre-Crisis continuity, Alfred had been to war, which is something that still pops up in the recent iterations every now and then).
Plus, the contrast between Alfred’s and Bruce’s attitudes can be a recipe for a fun character dynamic…
Legends of the Dark Knight #145Going in a whole other direction, Chuck Dixon was behind the creation of a couple of villains whose whole gimmick revolved around their infatuation with firearms: Gunhawk and Gunbunny. Mocking gun culture, he introduced these two deranged snipers in ‘Outgunned’ (Detective Comics #674), which featured a tongue-in-cheek scene at a military expo:
Detective Comics #674(I’m pretty sure that’s Dixon himself in the top panel…)
Chuck Dixon, in fact, has populated his comics with a number of diverging perspectives, cleverly exploring the cast’s diversity. When writing Robin (Tim Drake), whose crimefighting stems for an admiration for Batman, from a constant desire to do what’s right, and from a general empathy with those around him, Dixon kept the intrinsic reluctance to resort to firearms:
Robin (v4) #14Dixon’s excellent run on Robin actually includes one of the most striking tales about this topic. In issue #25 (‘Sophomore Lethal’), Karl Ranck, a jock from Tim Drake’s school, starts packing a handgun to Gotham Heights Highschool because he’s worried about street gangs (to be fair, nobody can deny that Gotham City does have a deeply entrenched, interminable gang problem, what with the Street Demonz, the Wardogs, the Gangstas Nine, the Anti-Batz, the Molehill Mob, and countless others…). That gun gives Karl the misplaced confidence to face a local gangbanger and, sure enough, he ends up getting shot, culminating in a heartbreaking final splash page.
The result is more nuanced than a mere indictment of firearms. At the heart of Dixon’s story appears to be something more specific, namely a concern with school violence and the notion that, no matter how you feel about adults carrying weapons, teenagers certainly lack the necessary maturity. This last point is addressed in a subplot where Tim’s dad confronts Karl’s father, who gave him the gun (for Christmas?) in the first place.
Robin (v4) #25I remember reading that Dixon was one of the writers approached by DC to do a gun-control benefit one-shot in the early 1990s, so I’ve always suspected ‘Sophomore Lethal’ was a recycled story idea from that project.
The comic that did come out of that, titled Seduction of the Gun, ended up being written by John Ostrander and illustrated by Vince Giarrano, with a tone that – contrary to what you might expect – is more gritty than sentimental. I won’t pretend like it has the sophistication and poignancy of HBO shows like The Wire or Our Boys, but it’s still a hard-hitting crime yarn, even as it makes a point of discussing various aspects related to firearms in America, such as the implications for the police, for manufacturers, or for teens attending schools where guns are commonplace. There is even a bit about the glorification of guns in mainstream culture that includes jabs at Lethal Weapon and The Punisher:
Seduction of the GunIn a way, John Ostrander had already approached the issue of gun violence a couple of years before, albeit with quite a different focus. Working with Kim Yale, he had introduced into the pages of Suicide Squad a post-Batgirl Barbara Gordon who had recently lost the use of her legs after getting shot by the Joker in The Killing Joke. Although Barbara was clearly traumatized by those events, she was nevertheless also defined by her pragmatism and rejection of victimization. One issue even had her go on a shooting range in preparation for facing a telepathic psychopath, whom she was thinking about killing – thus turning gunfire from a symbol of her victimhood into a tool of empowerment. She ended up not pulling the trigger on the guy, but the point of the story still stood: Barbara Gordon would take control of her own narrative, refusing the trope of the passive female whose brutalization only serves to advance the male hero’s journey.
Norm Breyfogle’s cover for that issue effectively illustrated this perspective by sort of reversing the POV of Brian Bolland’s classic cover for The Killing Joke:
This strong – if sometimes conflicted – characterization of Barbara Gordon was later picked up by writers Chuck Dixon and Devin K. Grayson. For instance, when her dad was shot, Barbara kept her cool while handling the investigation. Grayson made a point of showing readers that Babs knew her stuff when it came to firearms, which she didn’t treat as a taboo:
Nightwing #53Curiously, around that time, in the alternative continuity of Gotham Adventures, Ty Templeton also went to Barbara Gordon in order to briefly tackle the misleading sense of power and safety that weapons can provide. That version of the character hadn’t been shot, so she was still Batgirl and she tagged along with the Dark Knight when he went to Tibet in search of the hidden headquarters of the League of Assassins. Because it was such a dangerous mission, however, Barbara decided to arm herself, leading to a few tense exchanges with Batman along the way.
Gotham Adventures #9Spoilers: in the end, Batman was proven right. Relying on a gun meant that Barbara put herself in a position where, once disarmed, she basically gave her adversary access to a fire weapon, which he could then turn against her (fortunately for her, he was a martial artist who preferred to fight with his fists anyway!). The comic didn’t come across as too preachy, though, because the discussion was neatly integrated into the story and, more importantly, into believable character dynamics.
Likewise, it made perfect sense that Batman would discuss the issue with Sasha Bordeaux, Bruce Wayne’s short-lived bodyguard from the early 2000s. Those conversations had a whole other slant, however. Writer Ed Brubaker used them to criticize facile gun control rhetoric as well as to point out the childlike logic of Batman’s general worldview…
Batman #595This story, ‘Out of the Past,’ is consistent with Ed Brubaker’s overall comics-writing agenda, which has typically targeted a relatively mature readership, imbuing even superhero books with a pseudo-realistic sensibility (even if, in his Batman run, Brubaker’s style was uncomfortably at odds with the exaggerated, lighter art of Scott McDaniel). Thus, while Bruce Wayne did get the final word, he didn’t change Sasha Bordeaux’s mind. In the end, the comic still seemed to stress that there was something grown-up about her position.
Batman #595I don’t know if they were originally designed to play off each other, but this issue ended up tying in with ‘The Devil You Know’ (Gotham Knights #24), which was published a few months after ‘Out of the Past’ (yet set only a week later). Using a device similar to the one in Darwyn Cooke’s then-recent Ego one-shot, Devin Grayson built ‘The Devil You Know’ around a conversation between Bruce Wayne and a psychological projection of Batman, who taunted him about his phobia of firearms. In line with the turn-of-the-millennium’s typical characterization of the Dark Knight as mentally unstable and stuck in a narcissistic state of arrested development, the comic suggested not only that Bruce had a split personality, but also that his relationship with guns stemmed as much from an unhealthy, irrational fear as from more practical and/or ideological arguments.
‘The Devil You Know’ was an introspective tale with some nice visual storytelling (Roger Robinson and John Floyd made for a fine art team, even if their work paled in comparison to Cooke’s approach to this kind of narrative in Ego), which also fitted in terms of the grander Batman narrative: on the one hand, Bruce’s self-doubt could be read as a fallout from his argument with Sasha Bordeaux in ‘Out of the Past;’ on the other hand, Bruce’s decision to purchase a weapon served to set up a plot point for the upcoming Bruce Wayne: Murderer? crossover (and to reinforce the shocking dimension of Bruce’s accusation in that storyline). While I’m not in love with either of these tales, I appreciate that Brubaker and Grayson sought to work in a discussion of the gun issue in ways that felt interesting and organic to the Batman franchise.
By contrast, 2004’s Catwoman: Trail of the Gun mostly addressed the topic by having Catwoman watch television:
Catwoman: Trail of the Gun #1Sure, there is also a convoluted story about Catwoman searching for a one-of-a-kind ‘smart gun’ that can revolutionize fire weapons. Seriously, though, a huge chunk of this prestige two-parter is little more than a comic about Selina Kyle watching TV. It’s almost postmodern, in a way, eschewing the plot for pages in a row while trying to mimic the experience of following televised debates about gun control.
At least in The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller’s use of talking heads on TV screens had a playfulness and a sense of crescendo, moving the story forward in an original (at the time) and entertaining way. Trail of the Gun, however, seems so devoid of irony that it actually makes you feel like you’re just watching mainstream television. And not even watching engaging contributions like the Bowling for Columbine documentary, but the blandest, most generic news programs that happen to be on:
Catwoman: Trail of the Gun #1Generally, I’m quite the fan of Ann Nocenti’s sensationalistic writing style (especially in her Daredevil run), but Trail of the Gun is a surprisingly painful slog. Despite the liberal slant, it’s one of those comics that tries to ‘show both sides’ of the argument, so the dialogues are full of hamfisted statements about the central topic – one character will say that ‘guns are for jerks and cowards,’ the other will explain that in his milieu ‘guns are the great equalizer,’ eventually someone will conclude that ‘guns empower people that have no power,’ etc. Practically every exchange is an explicit comment about some aspect of gun control, from the argument that manufacturers should be accountable to the charge that references to the 2nd Amendment are ultimately disingenuous and unproductive.
Mind you, I largely agree with many of the points made in Trail of the Gun (a few of them are even quite thought-provoking). I just wish Nocenti could’ve found a more appealing way to put them across than to just have characters spout them at each other all the time…
Catwoman: Trail of the Gun #2(Trail of the Gun is also a waste of Ethan van Sciver’s talent as an artist… Given his over-the-top reactionary politics, however, I do find it amusing to see him try to visually salvage such a liberal project.)
I’m not saying you cannot directly thematize the issue of gun control in mainstream comics. For instance, Saga of the Swamp Thing #45 (‘Ghost Dance’), with its EC-style haunted house tale based on the Winchester Mansion, remains a powerful and original visualization of the weight of firearms in American history. Hell, even ‘Forgotten Paths,’ a comic in which Green Arrow travelled to Gotham City and met a bunch of victims of gun violence, isn’t all that bad, although perhaps I just feel this way because I have a soft spot for Anarky…
Green Arrow #89
Last month, I wrote about the remarkable ending of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but that was not the only cool sci-fi/fantasy series to wrap up in 2019. Rick Remender’s and Matteo Scalera’s Black Science finished its blustery, dreamlike barrage of alternate dimensions (in which each individual panel seems ripped from one of those old illustrated mags full of surreal creatures and ray guns, like Tales of Wonder, Future Fiction, and Astounding Stories of Super-Science) with a denouement that lived up to its core theme of an ageing punk dealing with family responsibility. Likewise, Brian K. Vaughan’s and Cliff Chiang’s Paper Girls, one of the best things to come out of the ‘80s revival craze (alongside the awesome Netflix series GLOW), brought its coming-of-age adventure yarn about time-travelling teenagers to a bittersweet end.
Neither of these comics is as brilliant as LOEG, yet they’re both super-stylish, not least because of the spectacular work of colorists Dean White, Moreno Dinisio, Matt Wilson, and Dee Cunniffe. While also drawing on a number of intertextual references (like Paper Girls’ fun letter pages, framed as a publication from The American Newspaper Delivery Guild), the emphasis is on more mainstream entertainment – these are serpentine, adrenaline-charged page-turners that capture a more immediate sense of thrill, dynamically pushing readers along with non-stop cliffhangers, plot twists, and stunning splash pages.
This got me thinking about thrillers that take this approach even further… And since it has become a winter tradition here at Gotham Calling to do a yearly post about sci-fi war comics, I figured this time around I’d focus specifically on books that feel like trashy science fiction! Here are three series that, although derivative and problematic on many levels, do reflect an appealing sort of gusto, unashamedly reveling in ultra-violence and poor taste. They’re worth checking out if you’re looking for a quick shot of exploitation that turns the darkest corners of our world into grist for visceral excitement:
ANT WARS
This comic probably delivers everything you can expect from a science-gone-wrong story about mutated ants going on a killing spree in the Brazilian jungle. The giant insects are seemingly unstoppable, a bunch of people get eviscerated, and the stakes keep escalating. There are various artists (José Luis Ferrer, Alfonso Azpiri, Luis Bermejo, Lozano, and Peña), but they all stick to a consistent approach of depicting the ants in a realistic style, with predictably creepy results.
Even though the series was originally published in 1978 (in 2000 AD #71-85), its themes fit quite comfortably in this Jair Bolsonaro era of assault on the Amazon rainforest and on Brazil’s indigenous communities. On top of the obvious nature-fights-back-against-humanity motif, there is a riotously heavy-handed commentary on colonialism: while one of the protagonists – an arrogant officer called Captain Lobos Villa – often refers to a young native as a savage Indian who doesn’t understand civilization, the kid’s cultural background keeps saving his life. (Now that every comic seems to be on the way to the screen, I expect a film adaptation by the people who made Bacurau at any moment.)
That said, Ant Wars is still very much a product of its day. It feels cut straight from the cloth of the huge-animals-on-a-rampage horror subgenre trending in British pop culture at the time, not just in the form of novels like James Herbert’s The Rats and Guy N. Smith’s Night of the Crabs, but – above all – in the form of the outrageous environmentalist comics created by Pat Mills in retaliation against Jaws’ man-versus-nature theme (Hook Jaw, Shako, Flesh).
It’s also a clear throwback to American 1950s’ ‘killer bug’ movies like Them! and Tarantula. Villa sometimes resembles Charlton Heston, who played a similar racist character in 1954’s eerie gothic drama The Naked Jungle (whose climax involves an ant attack on a Brazilian plantation). Those films reflected early Cold War paranoia, including a deep-rooted fear of uncontrollable nuclear power and of an enemy that could not be reasoned with. Yet Ant Wars reflects a different context: published at a time when the Cold War had become much more global, it sets its sights on US imperialism in the Third World while also poking fun at anti-imperialism – once the story moves to Argentina (starting with the gratuitous slaughter of a couple of Scottish soccer fans who were there for the World Cup), the protagonists cross paths with a surprising caricature of Che Guevara:
Hell, you can read the whole ‘giant ant army’ thing as a chaotic allegory about the murderous, ruthless dictatorships cynically empowered by the United States in Latin America! (The bleak final pages, at least, lend themselves to this reading…)
Don’t get me wrong: I won’t pretend like Ant Wars was conceived as anything more than an unpretentious pulp adventure strip aimed at young boys or that writer Gerry Finley-Day was necessarily sensitive about some of his un-PC word choices (his narration uses the same terms as Captain Villa, which is not to say they aren’t soaked in venomous irony). Still, there is something anarchic about this comic that remains captivating – like much of early 2000 AD, it’s vicious, unsentimental, and even funny in a grotesque sort of way, brutally pitting unlikable characters against unspeakable threats and letting god sort them out.
BLOODY MARY
A couple of 2000 AD alumni were behind this nasty four-issue mini-series about a mission to find the ultimate weapon during World War III, headed by the weary American Corporal ‘Bloody Mary’ Malone and an overenthusiastic amnesiac British officer who just goes by the name of Major.
Originally published in 1996 as part of DC’s short-lived sci-fi imprint Helix, Bloody Mary’s imagined future feels both outdated (war started in 1999 and lasted until 2012) and like a topical parody of current trends, as a Franco-German-dominated European Union (true enough), whose leader had been ‘swept to power on a wave of racial hate and reactionary paranoia’ geared against immigrants (an increasingly believable scenario), fought against a Britain who refused to join the rest of the continent (which gels with Brexit, even if it doesn’t take into account Brexit’s own links to the rise of the far-right).
Like with Ant Wars, however, scrutinizing Bloody Mary’s politics and futurology too deeply risks missing the point. They’re just the framework for a gory action yarn done by a Garth Ennis who was still figuring out how to write war stories and a Carlos Ezquerra who had already made a healthy career out of drawing them. While there is plenty of grit and pathos along the way, the creators clearly didn’t take anything very seriously as they indulged in cartoony stereotypes like the brazenly jingoistic (and xenophobic) Major or a wine-obsessed French assassin whose final dying gesture is to pour the nearest bottle. And even though the comic, echoing previous conflicts, pits the UK and the US against European authoritarianism, it makes a point of clarifying that their main motivation is to regain control of the trade that Europe dominates.
The sequel, Lady Liberty, published the following year, is even more tongue-in-cheek, as New York City gets taken over by a horny cult leader:
It’s a 1990s’ Garth Ennis comic, which means it’s still a bit rough around the edges, but also stirringly full of piss and vinegar (and occasional jokes about Kurt Cobain). Ennis and Carlos Ezquerra make quite a team (no wonder they collaborated on so many comics…), especially as Ezquerra can pull off an appealing sort of ugliness that suits both the despicable characters (all of them bastards, to some degree) and the ensuing carnage. Ezquerra also expressively brings to life several lengthy conversations, helped by Ennis’ amusing way with words and by Annie Parkhouse’s vivid letters.
The fact that Mary keeps dressing up like a nun and shooting people brings to mind the ‘nuns with guns’ subgenre, which matches the overall grindhouse tone of the comic. Yet the main influences are indisputably the pulse-pounding movies of James Cameron and John Carpenter, with their badass leads and cyberpunk attitude.
ROBOCOP VERSUS THE TERMINATOR
Speaking of James Cameron: merging the RoboCop and Terminator franchises may seem like a no-brainer. The two film series share a flair for hypercharged violence as well as human-versus-technology themes. The premise that Alex Murphy’s RoboCop prototype kickstarted the chain that led to the Skynet machine rebellion creates a logical link that doesn’t require much retconning. Still, you could’ve ended up with little more than serviceable fanfic were it not for the fact that the team behind this crossover was made up of two giants of the medium near the peak of their careers. As a result, 1992’s mini-series RoboCop Versus the Terminator turned out to be worthy of both properties!
Just as Terminator fans will get a kick out of the relentless momentum and time-travelling paradoxes, the RoboCop crowd should appreciate Murphy’s characterization and the series’ signature black comedy (stay away if you can’t stand the sight of violence against children or dogs!), even if the tone comes across as more earnest than in Paul Verhoeven’s over-the-top satire. As fond as I am of those vicious Alan Grant comics in which RoboCop goes to war in Algeria, this is probably the greatest take on the material outside of the first couple of movies.
As for the title of greatest Terminator comic, it’s arguably a tie between this one and The Terminator: One Shot by James Robinson and Matt Wagner. Not that we really needed more than what we got with the first film sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. By undoing the apocalyptic fatalism of its Reagan-era predecessor (‘There’s a storm coming.’) and – through the story of a woman who stops dreaming about nuclear holocaust – replacing it with a post-Cold War sense of open future (‘no fate but what we make’), T2 provided perfect closure to the saga, so anything after it just feels like gluttony.
Sure, the original Planet of the Apes also had a perfect ending, but at least there the sequels were genuinely weird and original… whereas with the Terminator franchise – from the campy Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (which brought back paranoid pessimism in line with the War on Terror zeitgeist) to the most recent installment, the woke Dark Fate – we mostly got rehashed plotlines and a remix of the earlier movies’ greatest moments and lines (yes, this even goes for Terminator Salvation, which at least tried out a relatively different approach). In turn, RoboCop Versus the Terminator boldly expands the scope of both series while taking the narrative in unexpected directions.
More than the RoboCop/Terminator crossover, though, the comic is worth it for the Frank Miller/Walter Simonson team-up.
Frank Miller penned RoboCop Versus the Terminator with the kind of unbridled excess he brought to other Dark Horse comics at the time, like Give Me Liberty, Hard Boiled, and The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot. He also nailed the various voices, clearly having a blast writing from the machines’ perspective. In particular, having already worked on the botched RoboCop 2 screenplay, Miller had a knack for the humorous potential of Alex Murphy’s no-frills approach to problem-solving (I love the gag with the suicide bomber).
Meanwhile, Walt Simonson took the chance to go wild as he piled up panels upon panels of robots mercilessly fighting each other, with the ensuing shrapnel and John Workman’s sound effects getting all over the place. Although Steve Oliff’s bright, clean computer coloring in 2014’s collected edition (as opposed to Rachelle Menashe’s more subdued colors in the original) doesn’t do justice to Simonson’s gritty artwork, the result is still a fever dream of sci-fi action. Recommended for anyone in the mood for some pure, unabashed schlock.
When I wrote about Chuck Dixon’s grounded, no-frills approach to storytelling a while back, I briefly mentioned his productive collaborations with a couple of artists whose style also fits this description: Tom Lyle (who died shortly after that post) and Graham Nolan. Rereading material for that write-up, however, it struck me how Nolan – for all his deceptively simple, naturalistic pencils – repeatedly resorted to a decidedly unrealistic effect. Every once in a while, he would fill the background with non-diegetic symbols that illustrated what was on a character’s mind…
It’s not exactly a groundbreaking, experimental trick. Scott McCloud, who devotes a couple of pages of Understanding Comics to the tradition of using expressionistic backgrounds as a tool for indicating ‘invisible ideas’ and emotions (allowing us to read characters’ ‘inner states’), points out that this technique is fairly common, for example, in Japanese romance comics. Yet it’s interesting to see Nolan kept returning to this quasi-Brechtian effect, since it seems so much at odds with his typically straightforward, figurative choices. (I always figured him for a crafstman who shared Howard Hawks’ belief that in the best storytelling you don’t notice the storyteller.)
To be fair, he did it very sporadically and without calling too much attention to himself. Indeed, despite the contrast with the rest of his comics, these panels never take me out of the narrative, as Graham Nolan works them in with a minimum amount of fuss, keeping the symbols to an efficient minimalism. For example, here is Arthur Brown (aka Cluemaster) running around while scared out of his mind about the possibility that the Riddler will blow him up:
The panel comes from the very cool three-parter ‘Badd Girls/Lethal Pursuits/Riddled’ (Detective Comics #705-707, cover-dated January-March 1997), in which the Riddler goes after Arthur Brown, whom he accuses of having degraded his gimmick. The Riddler then puts his own spin on Die Hard with a Vengeance, except that instead of Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis, you get Batman and Cluemaster!
The whole thing is super fun, especially this moment when a pissed off Arthur Brown faces a bunch of gangsters while Graham Nolan’s background assures us that he means business:
Detective Comics #707Lowering the level again, here is another monthly reminder that comics can be awesome…
