One thing I’ve long enjoyed about Frank Miller’s work is how he draws a body in flight. Not in motion, though he’s good at that too, but in flight. Leaping, falling, swinging, jumping, or flying. He has this way of suggesting bodies flashing past at high speeds and spinning through the air that’s… elegant, is the closest word I can think of for it. Especially mid- to late-era Miller. The big splash in Dark Knight Returns — you know the one, if not, guess and you’ll probably be right — is obviously cool, but it’s not as raw and frantic as his Sin City and 300 work. I actually have a selfish wish that he’d gotten to do a real Spider-Man job at some point over the years, just because he’s so good at this and he’s fond of lean, scrawny heroes. Would’ve been the best leap forward in Spider-stylings since Todd McFarlane.

I like this page from the end of 300, color by Lynn Varley:

I love the claustrophobic stillness on that first page. Everything is on hold, like a pregnant pause. Every panel is one still moment, fraught with tension. I actually love the little zoom from “You there, Ephialtes.” to “May you live forever.” And then, at the peak of the stillness, “Stelios.” And then:

Stelios coming out of formation and into the air. This is Stelios on the way down, long after his leap. He’s all muscle, whether leg or arm, and his cape is all the way Batmanned out. There’s such a shift between these two pages, from claustrophobia to freedom, maybe. Anyway.

I can’t decide which page of Holy Terror is my favorite. Here’s one of them, though.

Miller does some of his best work yet in the service of a story that doesn’t even deserve it. He also does some of his worst work, so I guess it evens out. But this page of Fixer chasing Natalie Stack is like a shot across the bow of cape comics, most particularly the ones that sit in Miller’s lane: Spider-Man, Daredevil, Punisher, all those books that feature dudes running across rooftops and through alleys in New York.

There isn’t even a lot to this page. The building is a raggedy amalgamation of every building ever. Look how thin it is, how many pipes and antennas sit on top of it, and that useless pipe going down the side. The night sky is just a splash of white with a smudge of black clouds providing flavor. But look at Natalie Stack flipping up and over that pipe. Feet together, arms in the process of flexing, and body nearly horizontal. There’s a sense of momentum in her body language. She looks like people do when they jump over fences at high speeds. She’s not just climbing or running. She’s moving.

And then there’s that fist. The staging here is great. You’ll occasionally get a story where Batman lurks in the shadows for part of an issue (most recently in David Lapham & Ramon Bachs’s City of Crime, I think), but by and large, if there’s a hero on the page, he takes precedence over everything. Not here. Here you just have a fist and a taut rope. You don’t even have to see the Fixer to know that he’s moving fast. All you have to do is let the image sink in a little. Think about that taut rope, the angle of his arm and where his body is likely positioned.

I also love the punctuation-less word balloon, something that too few comics creators utilize these days. “Oof.” has a different impact on your brain than “oof” does. Exclamation points are excitement. Periods are flat. A lack of punctuation has a sound and import all its own. It should be a tool in the toolbox, rather than an exception.

Another favorite:

The rope, the loops, the soles of the Fixer and Natalie’s feet… I just love how this looks. People talk a lot about flying representing freedom. The freedom to go anywhere and do anything at will. Freedom in its purest form. Nobody can tell you “No” or hold you back. But nobody ever talks about swinging. You don’t remember being a kid and that vicious thrill you got when you could swing on a rope or slap your way down the monkey bars at recess? Of sitting in a swing, getting up as high as you can, kicking your shoes off even higher, and then launching yourself into the air to risk either death or glory?

I don’t want to over-sell the feeling, but I grew up in and around areas where monkey bars were everywhere and chain link and wooden fences were even easier to find. But there’s definitely a thrill, every single time, when you don’t climb a fence so much as leap over it, pushing yourself up and over. It’s different from flying and falling, but equally dangerous. It’s like the bastard child of both of them. You could screw around and catch your hand on the sharp part of the fence instead of the round pole, or misjudge your jump and land on the fence or worse. But if you hit it just right, that combination of momentum and weightlessness kicks in and you feel real good. It’s a thrill.

That’s what that page feels like.

Coriolanus (directed by Ralph Fiennes, script by John Logan based on a story by William Shakespeare, 2011): I think I came into this one with the wrong expectations. I’ve never read the play, and the trailer made it seem much more exciting than it actually is. Gerard Butler, Ralph Fiennes, a blood feud that leads to a man being outcast, more than a little homoeroticism… Fiennes gave this interview, I forget where, and he explained that the rivalry between the two plays out like a love story. The trailer makes it sound like a good time at the movies. Instead, we get all of that, but with added interminable monologues, slipshod analogues between Rome and Now, and nothing ever resolving satisfactorily.

There are bits I liked, of course. I thought the modernized Rome was a really cool setting, and Fiennes’s son was very interesting. This was my first real exposure to Jessica Chastain (she has a really familiar face), and she was pretty okay. Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Cox were great, though, definitely the highlights of the film.

But past that? Past the actors I liked, I had a hard time staying awake for this one at 1315 on a Saturday. The accents weren’t a big deal, but the monologues were a well-delivered huge bore. It needed more of the midnight parties involving head shaving and barbershop chairs or ugly fistfights in dusty, blasted apartment buildings and less of people walking around a room, looking everyone in that room in the eye, and talking about their motivations.

The people I saw it with loved it, though. Maybe the trailer just tricked me.

---

I Saw The Devil, directed by Jee-woon Kim, written by Hoon-jung Park, 2010 (Netflix): I watch a lot of these revenge movies. I had this one in my queue for months, though, before a pal talked me into watching it. Two weeks later, I finally watched it, and it was pretty okay. It stars this dude Byung-hun Lee, who I liked a whole lot in GI Joe and The Good, the Bad, the Weird. This one was pretty okay, but frustrating at the same time.

I Saw The Devil is a revenge movie with a point, which tends to be exponentially less successful than revenge movies that don’t have one. Luckily, though, the point is “Don’t go too far with your passion or everything will fall apart,” or something like that, so you get a lot of exploitative violence to go along with the cheap, unearned, and unlikely ending. In fact, while the ending is imploding in slow motion, you’re treated to shots of a new height for revenge in these revenge pictures.

But from back to front, this is a movie about a secret agent (of some sort, you only ever see him do one secret agent-y thing, other than all the revenging) hunting down the dude that killed his lady. There’s no subtlety here, near as I can tell. Lee tracks Choi Min-sik, breaks his bones, cuts his tendons, and generally goes in as far as torturing a man goes. The guy runs, then figures out who Lee is, and then goes on a rampage. Lee’s boss wants his badge and gun. Blah blah blah.

Director Jee-woon Kim takes an uncomfortable, rather than gleeful, approach to the violence. Ears get cut off, there’s gallons of blood and guts, someone’s Achilles tendon gets cut at one point… it’s cringeworthy violence, rather than “Oh MAN!” violence. But at the same time, it gets that cringe not through some type of moral point of view or anything like that. The camera leers over the stabbings and crackings. You see skin break and hear bone’s crunch. The direction is pretty effective, actually, and I’d like to see more from this guy, maybe in other genres.

The ending doesn’t work for me because so much of the movie is concerned with slow pans over trauma. The movie says one thing (“Mmm, here’s a little shocking violence!”) and the ending says another (“Mm, violence… bad idea, bros.”) and doesn’t do a good enough job to bridge the gap between the two. There’s a leap that never gets made between the spectacle and the moral. It’s aight watching, but nothing exceptional. The style of violence sets it apart from a lot of other movies in this genre, but the script isn’t good enough to keep it from feeling bland in the end.

Before I moved out to San Francisco a few years ago, I was going through my stuff at my grandparents’ house. I found this diary/photo album for kids. Actually, it may have been for parents, now that I’m thinking about it. It’s a little fuzzy, but each spread was a school year, I think, with spots for a photo, a list of accomplishments, goals, and all of that. The book was mostly empty. I think everything past the second grade was blank, but I’d scribbled on a few pages. On kindergarten or first grade, I forget which, I’d written that I wanted to be a comedian/astronaut, or astronaut/comedian. Some combination of the two, or maybe I thought a slash meant “and/or” instead of just “and.”

I used to get a big kick out of reading about black holes and astronomy. I never really cared about the speed of light or whether or not a phaser could conceivably be a real thing, even in fiction. But pictures of stars? Talking about how stars could orbit each other in a never-ending death spiral, feeding off each other until their balance is upset? Supernovas, dark matter, and that face on Mars? That really got me going. I’d be a fool to try to figure out why it hit me so hard — it was forever ago at this point, and I remember only a little of that time — but space definitely held a huge amount of appeal to me. It’s alien and scary and beautiful.

I’m not sure when that changed. My mom got divorced, we started moving around, and I guess it just fell by the wayside. I read some SF in middle school, once I got a library card and could bike around on my own, but it didn’t take, generally. I could never stand hard sci-fi, and to be perfectly honest, space-based sci-fi without pictures was and is a hard sell for me. Killer robots? Cool. Descriptions of alien vistas, like those in Larry Niven’s Ringworld? Ehhh…

In the back of Twin Spica 12, Kou Yaginuma has a post-script. A couple, actually, but the one that struck me the most was about time travel. Yaginuma speaks on wanting to go back in time and apologize to a girl he made cry, confess his love to another, and fix all the little errors we all make. He says:

If I had a time machine — I’m sure everyone has thought about it at least once — but in my case, it’s more than once. Late at night at my desk, I’m always thinking about such things.

I want to go back to the place I’m nostalgic for. I want to apologize to the girl I made cry. I want to let that horrible teacher have it.

I know I’d be turned down, but I want to tell that girl how I felt. I want to change all of my regrets into happy memories. I want to erase the no-good me.

If my destinations are the past and not the future, I guess that means I’m an adult now. But perhaps… having a past I long to return to means that I’ve lived a pretty good life.

People say time machines are the stuff of fantasy. But in fact the starlight we see is actually hundreds of years old — phantom light reflecting a past world, something of a time machine. I don’t understand the theory of relativity or wormholes or any of that hard stuff but time travel to the past through reminiscence is within my capability.

Picking up a favorite manga from my childhood can make me feel wistful. If the manga I draw can be someone’s time machine one day, I really couldn’t be happier.

I never had a telescope, not that I remember. I think I went to an observatory with school once or twice, and maybe some an IMAX film on space, back when those were strictly for educational purposes. My interaction with space was limited to stargazing (a possibility in the countrified town I grew up in, not so much in San Francisco, I realized in horror a couple years ago while out with friends) and reading.

Yaginuma’s Twin Spica made me remember that. I’d put space and my prior infatuation with it entirely out of my mind at some point. I’d forgotten how interested I was in stars and all of that. But Twin Spica stars Asumi Kamogawa, a young girl who is positively in love with space and dreams of being a rocket driver. Her dream is to go to space. She’s motivated from childhood, young childhood, to fulfill that dream. The series is the story of her trials and travails in astronaut school, and the friendships she enjoys along the way.

All of the characters have slightly different goals, but space is the common denominator in all of them. Space isn’t… I said that space is Asumi’s goal, but that isn’t right. It’s going to space that’s her goal, and that’s something else entirely. Space isn’t so much a goal as a… signpost, or a symbol of her achievement. But even that isn’t right. It’s not a trophy or a prize. It’s a thing that exists for her to aim at, and in the course of aiming at it, experience new things. Getting up there above the Earth is a motivator, not a goal.

The depth of Asumi’s love, and the way Yaginuma goes about portraying it, is incredible. It really brought back those feelings of idly wondering what the Oort Cloud is like, or what color Proxima Centauri is now. Twin Spica is like falling down a wikipedia hole, only instead of dry information, you’re diving into someone else’s emotions. You can feel the love when you read these books, and that’s an incredibly good feeling.

Twin Spica is at times melancholy, funny, serious, and goofy. Yaginuma covers a lot of ground over the course of the series, from heartbreak to grief to fruit-themed jokes, but more than anything else, Twin Spica feels comfortable. It’s a strange word for what’s sometimes a stressful or sad tale, but it’s true. You’re essentially watching a group of children grow up and learn who they want to become, just like you did. You can see mistakes they’re about to make, or spot areas where they were smarter than you. It’s a funny feeling, but a welcome one.

It’s nostalgia, but it isn’t like the nostalgia that led me to pick up Spider-Man comics at the grocery store after I quit comics. That’s a nostalgia for an object, for Stan and Steve’s baby. It comes from a desire to look and see how something I used to like is doing. The time travel nostalgia of Twin Spica is more like nostalgia for a specific time period. A when, rather than a what, that’s gone all fuzzy now, but still feels warm and inviting. I guess that is exactly what nostalgia is about: a yearning for yesterday. Twin Spica gets me caught up in a feeling I don’t have any more, though it sometimes returns in spikes, like when I find things like this scaled chart of the cosmos and then spend an hour on wikipedia googling up concepts I’d forgotten about.

There’s this bit later in the series where a character from the book is shown to have become a role model to complete strangers, little children in particular. It’s not pitched as yet another glory for that character, at least not primarily. It’s more like something that’s almost incidental, a side effect of that character’s dream. Infectious optimism or motivation, in a way. It’s a nice reminder of the fact that people can and will watch your path as you go about your life and chase your dream, whether you realize it or not. When your nose is to the grindstone and you’re wondering what it’s all worth, there’s somebody out there thinking “That’s the life.” The process of chasing your dream may enable, or encourage, others into doing the same. This isn’t really related to the nostalgia point much at all, but I wanted to be sure to mention it. It’s my favorite part of volume twelve. It’s probably the kindest moment in a series full of them. And I think it speaks well of Yaginuma’s skill with a pen, as well.

I remain impressed at the story Yaginuma told, and how he chose to tell it, but it’s the time traveling that got me most of all. The fact that he was able to evoke that feeling so well, well enough to reawaken that feeling in me personally, is a genuine achievement. It’s not that his artistic accomplishments revolve around me, either, so much as he’s so good at his job that he brought something out of me that I didn’t expect when I first picked up the series.

Originally, I wanted to write a rebuttal to a couple of reviews of Geoff Johns & Jim Lee’s Justice League that David Uzumeri and Chris Sims wrote. I disagree Justice League is in any way emblematic of everything wrong with comics, or even most things wrong with comics. Somehow, I also disagree with Uzumeri’s point that it shines with strong characters. I think there are good character moments in it (each character gets a chance to shine, which I greatly enjoyed), but the characterization is light. I made a joke about going at Sims and Uzumeri on Twitter, Laura Hudson called my bluff, and I started work on the post in earnest for ComicsAlliance.

To make a long story short, I burned out on modern cape comics in a major way partway through this essay. More specifically, I burned out before I got a chance to talk about Justice League at all. I’d had this grand (not really) structure planned–I’d point out why Jim Lee and Geoff Johns were the only people at DC who could do the Justice League relaunch justice, then I’d talk about how the series is structured like a posse cut (this didn’t appear out of thin air, it was going to be integral before I realized I wanted to write about posse cuts more than comical books), and then break down exactly why it didn’t need to be a heartbreaking work of incredible characterization to succeed as a Justice League comic. (“Don’t let me do it to ya, dunny, ’cause I’ll overdo it” is basically how I approach writing, I guess.)

But to make a short story longer, I lost the thirst for it partway through. I liked Justice League 1-6. If I had to give it a letter grade, I’d say “I spent four bucks on each issue and didn’t feel bad about it” and then condescendingly explain to you why I hate grades. (They try to quantify the unquantifiable.)

So to make a long story even longer than it should have been, below the bar is my nearly unedited draft. It’s a little over a thousand words about Geoff Johns and Jim Lee, and who they are and how they came to be. It’s a little cleaner than how I usually work — I usually throw in a lot of placeholder sentences and stuff to get back to later, as well as admonishments and “What is the point of this paragraph, stupid?” — but all that stuff at the top is notes for stuff I’d intended to get to or wanted to structure the essay around. Hopefully you like reading it.

(Keeping with my uncontrollable habit of biting rap songs for titles, “Allow me to reintroduce myself” has its direct origins in Jay-Z’s “Public Service Announcement” and “Back For The First Time” is a ref to Ludacris’s first [major label] album.)

---

allow me to reintroduce myself: justice league 1-6
back for the first time

geoff johns is the superhero guy. bendis is his only competition.
jim lee is the superhero guy. hitch took a stab, but lee is that guy who has shifted cape comics twice–with x-men #1 and batman: hush

it’s about big moments, it’s a blockbuster
it’s The Expendables, it’s Fast Five

The Posse Cut
Point: This isn’t an introduction. It’s a reintroduction.
Point: This is a blockbuster.
Point: Every character gets a moment to shine.
Point: This sets the foundation for relationships in broad strokes, leaving plenty of room for growth.
Point: It ain’t perfect. (lee’s art, johns’s dialogue)
Point: This Is Fast Five

Jim Lee and Geoff Johns are an interesting choice to relaunch Justice League for a wide variety of reasons. The number reason is probably that Lee and Johns are among DC’s biggest moneymakers, and combining the two is pretty similar to printing money. It makes sense financially, but I think it also makes sense from a creative point of view, too.

Jim Lee, love him or hate him, has had a tremendous effect on modern comics. He’s had indirect effects, like publishing Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics or selling Wildstorm to DC and enabling the creative renaissance of that line, but in terms of direct effects… he’s hard to beat. His X-Men #1, written by Chris Claremont, sold over 8.1 million copies. It was the height of the X-Men boom, I think, and the X-Office spent some time chasing that dragon. Later, he co-founded Image and co-created the late, lamented Wildstorm Universe. Ten years after that, he teamed up with Jeph Loeb to create Batman: Hush, a twelve-issue story that was a shot in the arm for the character and returned Lee to the top of the sales charts.

Lee’s spent a lot of time doing work in other media over the past few years, but he’s an undeniable superstar, and possibly the artist in cape comics. His style helped redefine the X-Men, and through the X-Men, superheroes in general. Lee and Rob Liefeld get dinged a lot for pouches, but the people who trot out that tired old joke don’t realize that their styles were a shift forward. It was a move toward real-world utility, a way to increase the realism of comics without sacrificing the technicolor fever dreams that make cape comics so much fun.

Lee’s style incorporates the advances that John Byrne, Frank Miller, Art Adams, and Neal Adams brought to cape comics and pushes them a little further. The X-Men wore gear that was more like uniforms than costumes. Physiques became more chiseled under his pen. He sought out that sublime space between realism and fantasy and sold eight million comics off the back of his style. That’s impressive, and I think it’s turned Lee into one of those quintessential superhero artists. Kirby defined capes for our fathers and grandfathers. Jim Lee redefined them for us.

Geoff Johns has had a different (and shorter) route to the top, but he’s still a very significant player in the cape comics field. He’s the guy who spins straw into gold. With a diverse array of artists, Johns has revitalized, or been largely responsible for the revitalization of, Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, the Justice Society of America, Barry Allen, Aquaman, the Teen Titans, and several other characters besides.

Johns is the king of cape comics right now. His only real competitors in impact and quality are Grant Morrison, whose work has been limited largely to Batman for the past few years and the ongoing reboot of Action Comics for the past few years, and Brian Michael Bendis, who is currently in the process of wrapping up his almost eight-year stewardship of Marvel’s Avengers titles. Morrison is telling a sprawling, messy story about Batman that has lasted almost six years, and Bendis has never been able to match Johns for sheer bombast and scope.

Johns has found a formula for cape comics that works, and probably owes more than a little to Stan Lee’s approach in the ’60s. Rather than being a victim of Silver Age blinders that a lot of people think he is, Johns is actually firmly enmeshed in the Bronze Age. The level of violence in his comics tends toward the gory, which is definitely a hallmark of the modern era of DC Comics, but he has consistently managed to find an angle to approach a character from that resonates with readers. There’s no greater proof of that than the fact that Aquaman, his reboot of the Paul Norris character with artist Ivan Reis, is a top ten seller in the Direct Market.

“Aquaman sucks” is a long-running joke, and Johns turned it into the engine that makes that series go. These type of nerd in-jokes are generally grating — see also any “Glasses are a stupid disguise!” joke in comics — but for some reason, the series works. And I’m not even close to the target audience for that series, but I bought it, month-in, month-out. It’s not a particularly deep work, but it works on a basic superheroic level. You get Aquaman, he behaves like a hero should, but it doesn’t come off hokey or fawningly Silver Age. It’s a modern Aquaman, and I don’t mean modern in the sense of gritty. I mean modern as in suited for today’s day and age, post-Die Hard, post-Matrix, and post-The Fast and the Furious. It’s appropriate for 2012.

Modernizing characters is a tough row to hoe, but Johns has pulled it off time and time again. I got heavy into his first run on Flash when I was getting back into comics, and the Johns/Kolins run remains one of my favorite runs in comics. Sinestro Corps War was a great tale, and I’ve never been a Green Lantern fan, really. There’s something about his approach, the way he marries personal stakes (a thing that reminds me of Marvel-style heroes, actually) with superheroic stakes (Sinestro is gonna do _______) and gleeful violence (almost always on the part of his villains, his heroes remain almost squeaky clean, even after being given permission to use deadly force) that really strikes a chord.

long story short DC chose the best two people to work on the relaunch and the result was a book I enjoyed a lot, despite being sometimes clunky (“you’re the world’s greatest superheroes!”) and the army of inkers they brought in toward the end

Fright Night, screenplay by Marti Noxon, directed by Craig Gillepsie, 2011 (Amazon VOD): I never saw the original, but 2/3 of this movie basically sucks. There’s a stupid subplot about the lead guy having deserted his nerd friend (who gets killed) so that he could hang with the Kool Kids Klub, and it’s just as dumb as he sounds. Apparently his skin cleared up and he… actually they don’t ever say how he made the transition from unforgivable nerd to horrible jock, just that he started dating the cutest girl in school. Oh and also, she doesn’t even like the dudes she hangs around with, and she’s dating the main guy because he’s different, and also she liked him when he was a nerd anyway, so… cheer up, nerds! Because… uh… those girls who hang out with guys you hate are just waiting for your skin to clear up, and then it’s on? There’s a Dr. Who in here, too, and he’s wearing leather pants for some reason.

The 1/3 that doesn’t suck is any time colin Farrell is on the screen. You can tell when an actor has hit a point where he or she just doesn’t care about their original career trajectory and is content to just screw around and have fun. James Franco did it, and to great effect. Johnny Depp did it and immediately fell off. You could make a case for Walken, I bet, post-King of New York. Samuel L Jackson. These dudes show up in marginal or awful movies, deliver the best role of the film, and then move on. Now it’s Colin Farrell’s turn, and it’s great.

Fright Night is basically “Colin Farrell is a dick.” He’s every nerd’s worst nightmare. He’s hyper-masculine, ruggedly attractive, competent, walks around in tight shirts, and would probably have sex with your girlfriend and mother at the same time. He doesn’t even really have a plan beyond “Mock the dork faking the funk next door, hook up with his mom, suck blood.” He’s Alpha Male Plus. He’s a walking, talking, source of constant emasculation.

All of the light, all of the interesting bits in this movie, are Farrell’s. He slings a broken motorcycle well over a mile through the back window of somebody’s car. He smarms it up with the main guy’s mom. Everything he says to the main dude is great, full of really charming menace. At one point, someone threatens him with silver bullets and he just says “Werewolves” and grins. It’s too good. There’s a bit in the trailer where he digs a hole in someone’s lawn, grabs the gas line, and yanks. It’s even better in the movie, because he goes and gets a shovel, aaaaaa! I can’t even tell you how much I enjoyed that or why, beyond a hard injection of the mundane and awkward into the fantastic being something I greatly enjoy. Man, actually, that’s exactly why I liked it. Same thing for the bit at the end of Collateral where Tom Cruise tries to run after Jamie Foxx and trips over a chair. It’s such a nice thing to see in a movie, like a dash of imperfection in what is otherwise a well-oiled machine.

There’s this weird consistently fresh feel to most of the action scenes that makes it quite a movie to watch. A few of them wrap up in a cliche way, but the depiction is always good. It sorta reminds me of Max Payne that way, because that was another movie that was incredibly flawed, but had such a filthy approach to effects and action scenes that I watched it a couple times. The demon hallucinations and awkward first-person were great, but the money shot is that bit at the end where the snow falls on the gun. It’s not a new idea (I think it’s even been done with swords), but dang, they really sold it in Max Payne. Fright Night takes a few of classic vampire movie gimmicks and turns them on their head in the same way.

---

The FP, directed and written by Brandon Trost & Jason Trost: I thought this movie was skin-crawlingly terrible. I saw it at SF Indiefest in a theater full of people who seemed like they loved it, though, which made it even worse, in a way. I sorta realized I wasn’t gonna like it when they started in on nigga this and nigga that really early on in the movie. (I don’t remember seeing any black people with speaking roles in the flick.) There’s a conversation to be had about that sort of… ironic re-appropriation of the word nigger by white people, and obviously anything can be done well, but the wooden delivery and awful writing kept this movie from being anything I’d call “done well.” I mean… son is wearing Confederacy gear and he’s called Sugga Nigga. Really though?

It satirizes a bunch of different movies, subcultures, and character types, but it does it in the most asinine possible way. It’s just… thoughtless. I assume that all of the actors are so wooden as a style thing, but that really only works to make the movie a slog to get through. It disintegrates whatever emotional content the lines had, which was not much to begin with, and bad acting plus cliché writing generally results in a bad movie.

I liked a couple things. Dude that plays L Dubba E, Lee Valmassy, and Art Hsu, who plays KCDC, swagger their way through their roles and are funny sometimes. I wouldn’t mind seeing them in better movies. Past that, though… nah. No thanks.

edit: I saw this with three other friends, so we had the middle of a row on lock. That’s always nice, going to movies with a posse. BUT! The guy sitting directly behind me kept repeating fractions of the jokes of names of characters on the screen and laughing, like he was on some type of tape-delay laugh track that also read all the jokes aloud two seconds after they said them. He ain’t help my mood any.

I had some thoughts about how we talk about Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen after that last interview made the rounds. I think it’s about as good as everyone says it is, but I don’t agree that everything else is as awful in comparison. It’s a nebulous, annoying conversation to have, because there are so many variables to take into account–who’s saying it’s the best, what publishers allow creators to do, and on and on. Anyway, I wrote something up and emailed it to a few friends. Sean Witzke, supervillain, hit me with a response that I thought was really valuable. So, here: point/counterpoint, with David and Sean.

---

David: Alan Moore gave another interview, and that means that we’ve got another chance to think about how DC screwed him and how all modern comics suck and are just suckling at his literary teat even to this day. He’s upped the ante this time to saying that Watchmen, his masterwork with Dave Gibbons, is not only the best superhero comic ever and constantly ripped off, but single-handedly saved the comics industry, too, because the industry was in shambles in the early ’80s and then turned around after Watchmen came out. Which is demonstrably untrue, but whatever. More interesting is his idea that Watchmen is still the best cape comic ever.

You can’t really blame him for holding that position. Watchmen is a crystal of a comic book, self-reflective and reflective of our culture (at a certain point anyway) simultaneously. The writing is on point, the art is on point, and it’s a really good comic in general, no matter how I feel about the plot or whatever. It’s the real deal, and everyone’s said it over and over. So it’s no wonder that Moore looks at that book, and at what people have said about it, and at the current comics industry, and says what he says. Watchmen is the one comic, above all others, that gets the praise it does.

Watchmen is generally treated as Best Comic by the comics industry and its fans. It’s credited with moving cape comics past their genre roots, being a high watermark for cape comics, and the source of the brutality, ennui, and trauma that we think of whenever someone says the phrase “’90s comics.”

I don’t think any of these are strawmen that I’m setting up just to knock them down, either. Watchmen is consistently the one book that everyone (the generic, anecdotal everyone, so maybe this is a strawman, but I sure hope not) recommends to new readers or readers who want a bit of maturity. Watchmen was the only comic on Time’s Top 100 Novels list a few years back. When we look at the ’90s, you often hear that people “learned the wrong lessons from” or “missed the point of” Watchmen. Watchmen is a big deal, deservedly so, but I can’t help but feel like it is a bigger deal than it should be, if only due to received wisdom and a lack of a strong resource for comics history.

The Best Comic thing sticks in my craw the most, I think, because it’s such a fake idea. I can’t think of a Best Movie or Best Song, or even Best Western or Best Rap Song. It’s such a broad brush to paint a work, and therefore a genre, with that it doesn’t even make sense. No one out there is saying that anyone who watches movies absolutely has to watch Carol Reed’s The Third Man or Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. They might recommend those to you, but always as a part of a spectrum of must-watch films. “Oh yeah, watch this, that, this Kurosawa over here, and this De Palma once you finish that.” I like this wikipedia list of films considered the best, because it’s so diverse. The IMDB list is varied, too. I disagree with a lot of them (The Dark Knight is in the top ten?), but it’s still interesting to look at. I think it’s notable that no one film on this list has the same status amongst a broad subsection of movie fans (movie watchers? “people?”) as Watchmen does amongst comics fans. Ask ten people the best movie and you’ll get a variety of answers. Ask ten comics fans and probably at least half of them will say Watchmen. Why does Watchmen get the Best Comic treatment, other than being good?

Part of it is that Watchmen is the result of a conscious effort to make a literary comic. It’s not just about entertainment or ongoing adventures. It’s about competing with Moby Dick, or making a work intended to operate on that same level. Which is admirable, to be sure. The vast majority of cape comics are bent toward direct entertainment, which I think is also pretty admirable. But it has the effect of making Watchmen a stranger in a strange land. It’s got capes, but it’s exotic, too, because of that literary influence.

Conventional wisdom holds that Watchmen represents a watershed moment in comics, is partially at fault for the excesses of the ’90s, and is the peak of cape comics. You won’t find none better. I used to agree with that, more or less, but I don’t think I do any more. Watchmen wasn’t a quantum leap forward into a new context so much as it was another step in a road comics had already begun. It was step six, rather than an all-new step one. The idea of cape comics for adults, or cape comics that deal with heavy themes, had already been broached, most especially by Steve Gerber and several other cats working at Marvel in the ’70s. I feel like there’s this idea that Watchmen is the point when cape comics went from goo-goo ga-ga baby stuff to actual books adults could read — comic books blossomed into *~Graphic Novels~*, essentially. And that isn’t true, either.

You can track what led to Watchmen in cape comics, in pretty concrete terms, too, I’d argue. I’m far from an expert (an understatement), but you can find prior examples of the flawed in Lee & Ditko’s Peter Parker and Lee & Kirby’s Ben Grimm. You could look at several characters in Watchmen as examples of what happens when that flawed hero stops trying to be a hero. Rorshach is the opposite, even–he’s a hero who has no business being a hero, but keeps at it out of sheer hard-headedness.

The bleak miasma that gives Watchmen its tone, the sense of unrest and doom infests the book, feels very ’70s to me. That’s when Marvel was going hard with the idea of uncertainty and unrest, whether it was Luke Cage appropriating superhero iconography in order to escape a return to prison and make a buck or Spider-Man losing when it counts and not being able to do a single solitary thing about it. The Heroes for Hire area of ’70s Marvel, the Luke Cages and Shang Chis and Misty Knights, feels particularly relevant here, as their stories often dealt in moral ambiguity or a distrust of the establishment. Many of Marvel’s heroes were outlaws first, too, at least in the eyes of the public.

What I’m trying to say is that Watchmen is definitely a watershed moment, due mainly to the level of craft and approach that it brought to cape-based material, but it isn’t an unprecedented one, and I think that’s an important factor that we often leave out when we discuss Watchmen and its influence. If Watchmen never happened, I’d bet cash money that the ’90s, the ideal of the ’90s that most of us hold, would’ve still happened more or less as they did. The hallmarks of the ’90s, whether you’re talking pouches or grittiness or realism or whatever, were set in motion long before Watchmen happened.

The moral ambiguity, the physical and emotional trauma, the poison that hammered comics in the ’90s, all of that has its roots in the very beginning of the Marvel universe, when Stan and Jack and Steve and them were revolutionizing comics and making them cool again. They set comics down a road that inevitably leads to clones and crossovers and whatever else. There’s a logical progression from “Spider-Man screwed up, but now he tries harder” to “Spider-Man fails the love of his life and gets her killed” to “Spider-Man is a clone/crazy” to “Spider-Man is hardcore now.” It’s upping the ante on the flawed hero, bit by bit. The fallen hero and anti-hero are just another take on that same basic idea, which is itself another take on an even older idea.

Watchmen is very good, sure. It’s a high watermark for comics, but I don’t buy that it’s Best Comic. It deserves its place in the canon, it earned its place, but the highly elevated status we’ve given it is at least partially in error. It’s warped the conversation about the content of comics, the skill level, and comics history. It’s actually really frustrating to me, because I’m making an effort to go back and learn this stuff so I don’t put my foot in my mouth constantly, and Watchmen has twice the gravity of anything else. It’s hard to get around, and more than that, it’s hard to unlearn. Watchmen‘s GOAT status is a self-fulfilling prophecy, it feels like at this point.

Now that I’m done with this, I sorta feel like I’m saying “Watchmen is overrated.” That’s both not my point (in the sense of snarky dismissals) and my actual point at the same time (in the sense of taking a realistic look at comics history). Strange place to be.

---

Sean: Well, here’s the thing, though –there is a movie — Citizen Kane. And Watchmen totally is Citizen Kane, it’s the one work of art you have to reckon with, reconcile. Either disregard and burn down despite it’s legendary status (because its so boring, and so processed and its old and everyone who took from it took the wrong thing just like Watchmen) or realize that, yes, it is a masterpiece despite all those things.

I don’t know, you could also say that Pulp Fiction has a lot more similarities to Watchmen, because it spawned a million horrible tics and a million 70s references. So many bad tone deaf movies, but it also helped change the way movies were made and released. I mean, I just saw an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson where he said that Tarantino wasn’t an influence on Boogie Nights, but the reason he got to make it at all is because he was coming after Pulp Fiction.

I always think all the bad 90s grim and gritty hallmarks are so much like that. Because the ninjas and assassins and pouches and teeth, all of those things come from guys honestly making things they were interested in. They all became received wisdom, the way that Neal Adams and Gil Kane did for the previous generation. The 00s are a lot like the 80s, especially in comics, because there was such a rejection of the previous set of what is cool that it’s just knee-jerk “oh god 90s”. Which is kind of right, because there’s so much to be rightfully rejected, but in comics, everything was thrown out. Now the weirdest, worst things are all slipping back in from the 90s because we’ve got a good gap of time. There’s a reason that Dave Gibbons was playing with flat/exaggerated facial expressions, there’s a reason that Frank Miller was writing ninjas, because he wanted to write about honor, there’s a reason Moore wanted to discuss fascism with Steve Ditko’s iconography, there’s a reason Art Adams exaggerated gesture. I don’t think you can blame those guys for anything. All the people that came after them, yeah they fucked up. That’s not their fault. Anymore than it’s Moebius’ fault for Tron Legacy.

And beyond just Watchmen, there’s big works in all sorts of genre and media. There’s Moby Dick, there’s 7 Samurai, there’s Akira, and Pinnocchio, and Metropolis and the Twilight Zone, and The Godfather II, and Die Hard, and David Copperfield, and Illmatic, and Goodfellas, and the Searchers, and Star Wars, and I Robot – there’s all sorts of THE GRAND WORK in all sorts of media/genre, that you have to at least give your time, where if you’re going to take the genre seriously you have to give it your time because even if it isn’t the greatest thing you’ve ever been exposed to. Hopefully it isn’t, because if you have a certain level of tastes you’re going to have more personal preferences/ tastes — but you’ve got to reckon with that shit. If you like comics, you have to have really given Watchmen your time because of where it is in the medium, even if you fucking hate it. I hated Citizen Kane the first 3 times I watched it but I knew that I should keep giving it a chance. I’m not a Metallica guy, but I know that Master of Puppets is the “best” metal album.

Here’s the real thing that Watchmen did though, and I didn’t realize it until Abhay pointed it out for me. Watchmen said that you could take this material (superheroes, alternate reality stories) and tell a finite, complete story with it. There could be intertextuality and generational narratives and have legitimate minor characters, and actual consequences and politics. Stories, stories that matter, they have ends. And Watchmen is the first story that was taken to the real world (whether or not it was the first really doesn’t matter, the revolution starts when people notice fires in the street not when the plans are drafted) and said “oh yeah this stuff can actually work as a novel, it’s not just endless soap opera/pulp/sitcom that you can walk in and out of at any time because its an endless middle”. Making more Watchmen comics, as Abhay said, actually say that people were always right its just a garbage dump of endless dudes punching dudes, there’s no finite quality to anything. (I actually think the way trilogies are now par for the course in mainstream hollywood, and 6 season tv shows are doing the same thing to how people watch film and television). You’re right about Gerber and Stan And Jack – and shit, Miller and Moore both said that American Flagg was the reason they manned up and did Watchmen/Ronin, because it introduced real sophistication in a way that Marvel comics never ever ever did. Of course they’d both done Marvelman and Daredevil at that point, and it becomes all a gray morass of what happened first.

It doesn’t matter, no one outside of comics saw it. Watchmen they saw, and it was undeniable.

We’ve got to keep tearing it down so it can be replaced, because its still too big an icon, which actually paradoxically says a ton about how good the comic is. Comics as a whole needs to be able to say “fuck Watchmen” in a way beyond Grant Morrison’s shitty sniping in JLA: Earth 2, and I don’t know if we’re really at that point yet as a medium. I think the way that people are talking about/reacting to Moore isn’t the same thing, and Watchmen 2 really isn’t the same thing either, it’s wallowing in it rather than surpassing it.

Of course we know that Winter Men is the same story but better. But no one but us weirdos read it, it didn’t penetrate the culture. That’s important. Like, really important even though I could give a shit about ever getting anyone to read comics and actively try to avoid ever getting anyone “into” comics because i find evangelism disgusting. Great works, that shit matters, and no one with a brain is ever going to go “oh you liked Watchmen here read (whatever shitty comic people then recommend to people normally. Scalped, yeah Scalped is absolute shit that people like to read)”. No one goes “hey you liked Citizen Kane, you should see Dune“. Because no one starts with Citizen Kane, they have to watch it because it’s a monolith. If they like it or not is irrelevant. You shouldn’t start the film course with Eisenstein, you should have to work up to it. But you still have to cover it in the course, right?

It’s hard to come up with a solid working definition of event comics. Is Blackest Night an event or a crossover? Is there a difference? What about Civil War? House of M? Kree-Skrull War? Some people look at event comics, whatever definition of event comics they subscribe to, as a cheap cash-in, a waste of time, or everything that’s wrong with comics. My personal definition is a little nebulous, but it boils down to event comics being those comics where big action goes to get bigger. It’s where you go to see people you’re familiar with come out of their comfort zone (or ongoing series) and do big things. When properly executed, event comics are great. When done poorly, they suck. That’s true of anything, though.

When trying to define my idea of event comics, I came up with a pretty apt comparison. Event comics are the posse cuts of comic books. Posse cuts are an integral part of rap these days. You gather up three or more emcees and tell them to get to work. DJ Khaled has made a career out of creating innumerable posse cuts, and classics like A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario,” Noreaga’s “Banned From TV,” and Cool Breeze’s “Watch for the Hook” still go hard years or decades after they came out.

Noreaga’s “Banned From TV” is a classic example of a posse cut. He enlisted Big Pun, Cam’Ron, Nature, and The LOX for the first full song on his NORE tape. The only thing all of them have in common is that they’re all New York rappers who were buzzing hard at the time or known for being reliable spitters. “Banned From TV” is the rap equivalent of the NBA All-Star Game. You might not want to see Derrick Rose play with Carmelo, Dwight Howard, LeBron, and Dwyane Wade all the time, but once a year? It’s a treat. It’s usually a hot mess — but it’s a treat.

This is true of “Banned From TV” as well. Big Pun is undeniably the nicest rapper on the track, but everyone who showed up is more than capable of acquitting themselves well. And yet, it’s unassuming and underrated Nature that steals the show with the very first verse. Even if you were a Nature stan back in the day, this probably came as a huge and pleasant surprise.

There’s always someone who blacks out on a posse cut and steals the show. Nicki Minaj absolutely won Kanye West’s “Monster,” out-rapping three of the hottest rappers in the game with a lopsided flow. Busta Rhymes did it on A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario.” TI’s smash hit “Swagger Like Us” showed us that he could out-perform Lil Wayne at the height of his Best Rapper Alive period. Posse cuts are guaranteed to be full of surprises, and that’s what makes them so delightful.

Divorced of any intent beyond just making a cool song, posse cuts are essentially artist showcases. You listen to posse cuts because you want to see how these people work together and so you can pick sides once the track’s done. Who has the best verse of Wu-Tang’s “Triumph?” (It goes Ghost, then GZA, and then Meth.) What about Cool Breeze’s “Watch For The Hook?” (Gipp Goodie.) Or Khaled’s “Holla At Me” (Paul Wall, or maybe Rick Ross.) and “We Takin Over” (It’s TI, and then Weezy a close second.)?

I wouldn’t buy an album of just posse cuts (sorry Khaled), but they serve a valuable purpose, and a lot of their appeal is shared in event comics. On the most basic level, they’re cash-ins. People will check on an event if someone they like is in it, just like you’d listen to a posse cut if your pet rapper is featured. It increases your potential audience. Events and posse cuts also tend to be light in content. You’ll rarely hear a posse cut about pain or love. It’s always just a chance to have someone really go in.

It’s true in comics, too. You’re not going to find a heart-breaking work of outstanding emotional resonance in an event comic. At best, some character you have an irrational affection for might die and you get a little weepy like a cry-cry. But really, you’re buying those comics because you want to see Spider-Man punch Doctor Doom or Superman light up whatever forgettable arch-villains Wonder Woman has.

When I think of the relatively few event comics that I’ve enjoyed, they’ve been high on action and maybe a solid medium on melodrama. X-Cutioner’s Song was a fun ride because you ended up with the three baddest X-Men at the time — Cable, Bishop, and Wolverine — fighting, teaming up, and then battling bad guys. The stakes were high, every character got a chance to talk about the focused totality of her psychic powers or smoke cigarettes in the dark, and I finished the book pleased that I saw a sufficient number of cool scenes for my money.

–For my money, the best superhero was invented back in 1962 by Stan Lee & Steve Ditko. Peter Parker, Spider-Man, is as close to perfect a concept as you’ll find for a superhero. On a most basic, “who is this guy?” level, Superman is defined by his innate God-like goodness. He’s Moses writ even larger, sketched out on a cosmic level. Captain America, too, has that same innate goodness. Batman is defined by his anger at one very bad day. Hal Jordan as Green Lantern is a man in an occupation. Wonder Woman is heir to a lineage of, if not outright heroism or adventuring, then at least mythological significance.

Spider-Man, though, is defined by his imperfect humanity. He got powers, went for the quick thrill, and his own arrogance led to him paying an agonizing price. His heroism since then is due to guilt and finally recognizing what it is that he was meant to do. “With great power comes great responsibility” isn’t just a pithy saying. It’s the Golden Rule and a positive way to live your life. If you have the ability to do something, then you should. It’s that easy. It’s that hard.

As a character, I feel like Spidey is one of the precious few genuinely inspirational superheroes out there. Too many of them are perfectly formed and flawless. Superman preaches being good and Batman preaches being good by doing the hard thing. Spider-Man tells you to be good, but also allows for the fact that you can, and will, screw up. Those screw-ups may be catastrophic, but you will recover and life goes on. Spider-Man would not exist without Peter Parker being a selfish human being.

–Kaare Andrews wrote and drew Spider-Man: Reign, a four-chapter comic book about the end of Spider-Man. José Villarubia colored it. The art hasn’t aged as well as I hoped over the past few years — the 3D CG work looks a little too obvious, mainly — but it’s still as good as I remembered. It’s one of my favorite Spider-Man stories, and to be perfectly real, the last two chapters hit me about as hard as Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3 or Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura’s I Kill Giants. It’s not for reading on public transportation, if you’re at all attached to these characters.

–Reign is an explicit homage to Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. There are newscasters named Miller Janson and Varr Magnuson (or Jones–it changes), for one thing, and there are several other parallels that hammer the homage home.

DKR is interesting, because I think it’s a story that has near-universal appeal. It’s a story about one last job, for one thing. It’s about a man coming out of retirement to do something only he can do. It’s about coping with old age. It’s about respect and revolution and paranoia and Ronald Reagan. There’s a lot to like about it, and what I like the most is probably that it’s about the fact that everyone has something they are good at, something only they can do or are led to do. When you aren’t doing that thing, when you’re avoiding it, you are less than you should be. There’s this line about how the rain on Bruce Wayne’s bat-emblazoned chest is a baptism. Being the Batman is a religious experience for him. It’s not just about fighting crime. It’s about being who he is.

–Spider-Man: Reign is about who Peter Parker really is. When the book opens, he’s old, bearded, and getting fired from a florist. He’s pathetic, and going nowhere. He’s not Spider-Man any more. He’s just an old and tired man. He sees his dead wife when he goes home and sleeps alone. He has no friends. He has no life.

What Reign gets right is that Spider-Man is a role that Peter Parker plays. Peter (and it’s funny that I think of him in my head as “Peter” instead of “Parker,” like he’s an old friend, so please bear with me and my attachment) is an orphan who was raised by his aunt and uncle. He’s meek, awkward, and dorky. He’s not uncool, exactly, so much as not traditionally cool. He’s the kind of person who would grow up to be a regular guy, once he escapes the toxic and fake classifications of high school.

When he’s Spider-Man, though… that’s when he puts on a personality. Spider-Man is funny, exciting, and daring. He’s all the things that Peter Parker believes a hero should be. There are points when Peter is clearly visible beneath the mask, times when his put-on confidence and expertise crumbles under the weight of a cosmic threat, but that only serves to highlight just how human Spider-Man really is under his mask.

Spider-Man is the suit that Peter Parker wears to be a hero. The jokes, the confidence, all of that derives from who Peter is, but it isn’t who Peter is, if you follow. Spider-Man is Peter Parker Plus, a purer, stronger version of his day-to-day life.

–Early on in Reign, at the cusp of Spider-Man’s return, J Jonah Jameson visits Peter Parker. Jonah is excited to see him. He’s a believer now. He knows Peter was Spider-Man. He mentions that Peter seemed immortal to him, that he “thought you’d be twenty forever.” He gives Peter a package. Inside the package is a camera, one of Peter’s old ones from back in the day. Peter’s spider-sense wiggles.

Jonah goes outside and runs afoul of the fascists who police New York City. Peter picks up the camera and drops it, realizing what the fabric the camera is wrapped in really is. Jonah’s become a victim of police brutality. Peter realizes that the fabric has eyes. Reflective eyes. Eyes that show him as old, weak, and beaten. Jonah has been beaten bloody, but begins apologizing. “I’m sorry. So sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry for all of it, my boy. We have so much to talk about.” Page turn. Full spread of an old man wearing a black Spider-Man mask falling out of the sky.

Peter’s captions: “I’m not even there. I’m watching from far away. And all I know is that the mask… the mask thinks it’s funny. It’s laughing. Laughing.”

Meanwhile, Spider-Man dives into battle and cracks wise the whole way down. He mocks the thugs even as he effortlessly takes them apart.

Peter can’t take it. He can’t take the laughter. He turns off the volume and thinks about his past. He thinks about Uncle Ben’s murderer, “a yolk-filled body broken on the ground.” He thinks about the pressures his family put on him. He thinks about Aunt May telling him that he’s her life. (“But I don’t want to be your life.”) He thinks about Mary Jane telling him they’re connected forever, and that he’ll always protect her. (“What if I can’t?”) He thinks about Uncle Ben, the hole in his head still smoking as blood runs down his face like tears.

There’s a tangible difference between Peter Parker and Spider-Man. That difference is what makes Spider-Man so golden. With the mask off, Peter is just a man. With the mask, he’s bigger than anything else.

–Andrews uses masks as motifs throughout the story. Spider-Man is restored to his former glory after Jonah delivers the mask. Masked heroes and villains are dubbed super-terrorists because they go against the order of things. The thugs who police New York look identical, thanks to their masks. The black mask has a different meaning than the red mask. When Kraven kills Spider-Man and takes his trophy, he removes Spider-Man’s mask, not his head. It goes back and forth — order and chaos, chaos and order — but it’s always about freedom.

A child is murdered in chapter two. His name was Kasey, and he was fighting on Jameson’s side. Kasey’s death spurs another, unnamed character into action. She holds up his beanie and realizes that it’s a ski-mask. When the alien invasion hits and everything’s gone south, the girl’s first move is to run to where she knows a lot of people are. She knows that she can’t outrun the aliens… but she can outrun the other people. She didn’t even realize what she was doing as she did it, but she looks back and something changes. She grabs a pipe. She rings a bell. The aliens leave.

“I just needed to do something,” she says. “Anything. Besides running. My shoes — they don’t quite fit anymore. We can’t rely on them any more. The old men. They can’t show us how to live. They took our city and made it a cage. They only hurt us. Stop running. Stop hiding. It’s time we became something more than what we are.” Another kid says that if they at out, then the authorities will hurt them and their families both. The girl looks at the mask and says, “Only if they know who we are. We’ll use masks.”

The old men turned NYC into a cage in the name of protecting everyone. The youth understand that this is completely unacceptable. If they don’t do right by you, you take it, by any means necessary.

–Spider-Man, as a story, is universal. We can all relate to him, one way or another. A side effect of being universal is that it’s also open to reinterpretation. Kyle Rayner, Green Lantern, is very much in the Spider-Man mold. So are Richard “Nova” Rider, Virgil “Static” Hawkins, Miles Morales, and plenty more heroes. Each reinvention, assuming the quality is there, reveals another aspect of Spider-Man and shows just how far that concept can be stretched before it breaks. At the root of Spider-Man is us, and us includes 7 billion people. There’s a lot of wiggle room there.

The girl is the Carrie Kelly of Reign. She provides a hard dose of morality to the story, despite doing nothing more than witnessing Spider-Man in action. She stands up against men twice her age or more, armed with just a bell and her voice. When she runs into Sandman, agent of the Reign and the man in her way, it turns out she’s got a lot to say.

Let me tell you a thing about hope! Hope has three daughters: Anger at the state things have fallen into. Courage to fight to make things right. And the third daughter is truth. And she won’t hide her true face any longer.

Sandman watches her preach. His throat goes dry, “even for sand.” The girl has his eyes. She turns to stone right before his eyes and says “Nice to meet you.” She’s stronger than he is. Sandman says that she’s “more like cement than sand.” When the soldiers open fire, she stands there and takes it.

This is Spider-Man. Anger, at his failure to protect his uncle. Courage, to go out and make sure it never happens to anyone else. And truth — the idea that heroism is something that you must do, if you are able to do it. Standing tall against tremendous, insurmountable odds, and refusing to move. An unstoppable force breaking against an immovable object. Right versus wrong.

The girl, like Carrie, is carrying on in the name and spirit of the star of the book. Spider-Man as inspiration, both inside the text and out of it.

–Spider-Man is about family. The never-ending battle for Peter Parker is how much time he can spend being a superhero instead of tending to his aunt or girlfriend. How much does Peter have to sacrifice to do this thing he must do?

In Reign, Peter struggles with family. He feels like he let them down. Peter knows what they expect of him, and he knows that he’ll fail them. Everyone died. The radioactivity in his body poisoned his wife. He failed his uncle. His aunt still died. His family wanted him to be one thing, but he couldn’t do it. He failed. Time took its toll.

On Mary Jane’s deathbed, he spends some time reminiscing about their time together. “I remember the day we met,” he says to her silent form. “The electricity tingled down my neck. You already knew it and you told me. I hit the jackpot.” He goes on and on. “My chest was too small for what you did to my heart.” “I wanted to tell you so much, but words didn’t have enough… so I tried to show you.” Bu his radioactivity is killing her, and the last thing he hears her say is “Go.” He leaves the room, off to stop another crime, and she dies while he’s out. He comes back to an empty room.

He’s in the middle of a horrific encounter with MJ’s corpse as this goes on. He spills his regrets and tears. “I once said that I’d sooner rip out my still-beating heart from my own chest before I ever hurt you. I’m a liar.”

MJ’s corpse, being pulled along by Doc Ock’s tentacles, says “Stop being silly. That last day… you never let me finish. I tried to tell you, ‘Go… go get ’em, Tiger.'”

(This is the part that murders me every time.)

This is why Spider-Man is about family. You think you’re a failure. You think you can’t live up to the expectations of others. You think that you should have been able to protect them, even when things beyond your control prove otherwise. You internalize all of this guilt and horror and self-loathing… and forget that your family is there for you, no matter what. Love is way deeper than that. On her deathbed, Mary Jane wanted Peter Parker to go do what he does. She wanted him to be Spider-Man, and all he felt was guilt over being Spider-Man. He didn’t understand that she loved all of him, Peter and Spidey both, and that he didn’t fail her at all. He became exactly what she wanted him to be. He was the man she loved, up until her dying moment.

–Peter Parker buried his red & blues in Mary Jane’s coffin. It’s blatantly symbolic. His love died and so did his drive, blah blah blah. More than that, though, is the fact that that action equates Spider-Man and Mary Jane. The two are irrevocably linked. Now, he’s Spider-Man because of her, rather than Ben. She saw the best of him. It actually reminds me of something from El-P’s “TOJ”:

Everything you said, I took it all to heart
And you spurred a change in me
Before I could become a new sun, I had to fall apart
And I can see that now, and I wish you well
‘Cause you saw what was good in me
And I’ll be God damned if I didn’t see that myself

If you want to summarize Peter and MJ’s relationship, that’s it right there. Mary Jane is a rider. She makes him better simply by believing in him, and in making him better, she makes the world a better place. Everything has a point. Everything happens for a reason.

Spider-Man lost sight of the truth, and was lost for decades.

Even as a hallucination, Mary Jane knows the truth. I love the sequence where Mary Jane smiles shortly before something forces Spider-Man into action. She’s driving the car when Spidey hallucinates, too. You can see her fabulous red hair behind the wheel. She knows the truth. He never remembers putting on the mask, but the outcome is always the same. “Woo-hoo!”

–Spider-Man is such a perfect hero because his relationship with his villains is so personal. Spidey’s best villain is undoubtedly Harry Osborn as the Green Goblin, a best friend turned enemy. But for some reason, he has intensely complicated relationships with all his major villains.

I don’t mean Batman/Catwoman complicated, either. That’s the kind of complication that derives from cheap wish fulfillment and lazy writing. Plus, Spider-Man and Black Cat’s relationship is infinitely more interesting. I’m talking Norman Osborn complicated, where one of his worst villains is also a corrupted father figure. Doctor Octopus complicated, where the older man is bent on proving himself to the younger man or obsessed with their status as children of the atomic age. Lizard complicated, where a beast erupts from a kind man who wants the best for his family. Sandman complicated, where the villain becomes a hero after being shown a better way. Morbius, Prowler, Vulture, Chameleon, Kraven, Electro, Rhino, and more — Spider-Man has been fighting these dudes since he was fifteen years old, and they have actual relationships beyond the punching and kicking. They can sit and talk as easily as they can throw a punch, and often have.

This is true in Reign, too. The Sinner Six — Kraven, Sandman, Electro, Hydro-Man, Mysterio, and Scorpion — are released from prison and sent after Spider-Man. They all have grudges to settle with Spidey. Jonah comes to Spidey because of their history. Venom is the prime mover behind the alien invasion, and it’s doing it in part because of their past together. Recognizing the truth of his relationship with MJ made him put the tights back on.

With Spider-Man, it always comes back to relationships, healthy or otherwise.

–Andrews makes a big deal out of people watching what’s going on. There’s a newscast that runs throughout the series. Jonah hacks everything with a screen and livestreams Spider-Man’s fight. Families gather around TVs and mothers cover their children’s eyes and everyone watches. In watching, they learn. In learning, they realize that they have no choice: they must act. They fight back against the Reign. They protect each other. They save each other. They lift each other up. Spider-Man is a role model. The girl sees Spider-Man and realizes that he’s just an old man. “Weak. Like the rest of us.”

But if an old man is willing to fight for what he believes in, what excuse do you have?

Spider-Man watches, too. He loses a fight when he realizes that Kasey has been killed. He watches what people do around him. And then he acts. The things he sees require him to act. He has the power, so he has the responsibility.

–Spider-Man’s got jokes. This is one of the most important parts of the character. He isn’t a stand-up comedian, or even particularly good at telling jokes. He’s just got a quick wit and a mouth that runs faster than he can think. He’s talky, he’s jokey, and he just won’t shut up. Andrews nails this aspect of the character.

Even when an aged Peter is old and morose, Spidey comes out of the gate with jokes, stunts, and flips. He’s a showman. It doesn’t really matter whether the jokes are a cover for fear or whatever. What matters is that they exist. They put him and the people he’s rescuing at ease. They break down the walls of aggression between him and his enemies, replacing it instead with mocking humor or genuine emotion. Peter remarks again and again that the mask is laughing, and that’s true. You can’t have a deadly serious Spider-Man but once or twice.

I wrote about a ’90s Spider-Man story where just that happened in 2006. I called it “No Laughing Matters,” a better title than I usually come up with. Spider-Man not laughing in that story mattered because it was a sign that Spider-Man was wrong. Spider-Man isn’t Batman. You can’t graft the most unpleasant parts of Batman onto Spider-Man and still expect to have Spidey.

I like how many aspects of that story are reflected in Andrews’s Reign. I hadn’t considered them in relation to each other before now, but they fit together like puzzle pieces. Shrieking is the type of story that benefits from the contrast between the Spidey we know and love and a darker, meaner version. “I am the Spider!” works once, and just once, because we all know that the Spider is actually the guy with a joke and a wry smile on his lips. That’s where these stories fall short.

Andrews doesn’t overdo it with the jokes. He uses them to great effect. Spidey tells Mysterio to never dress like a man’s dead wife… unless he pays you to. Spidey sings The Ramones once he puts the red and blues back on. He tells a knock-knock joke before he storms the tower with the end boss in it. He handles the big Electro and Hydro-Man team-up with ease. Scorpion tells Spidey that he can do anything with his new duds. Spider-Man says, “Can you fly?” as he kicks him out of a window. He tells a joke as he’s being beaten to death by aliens. And it all feels so right, so Spider-Man. Put him in dire straits and he’ll go to hell with a grin on his lips and a joke in the air.

–Amazing Spider-Man 316 was my first comic. I can’t believe I don’t have it memorized. I think I still have it kicking around my apartment somewhere. It was a David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane joint, and they hooked me. I loved, and still love, how McFarlane drew Spidey’s webs and the creepy positions McFarlane put him in. I liked Michelinie’s soap opera script. I got lucky and managed to talk somebody into giving me that first Amazing Spider-Man Masterworks as a gift as a kid, and that let me go back to the Lee/Ditko source. I was a regular reader of the Spider-Man newspaper strip during the ’90s, when Alex Saviuk was drawing it. Later, when I got older, I got to experience the Romita/Conway/Andru years and JMS and JRjr’s run was waiting for me when I came back to comics. The first 130 or 140 issues of Amazing Spider-Man are some of my favorite comics ever, even over and above the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four that everyone else thinks are the best. How could you not love those stories? Peter Parker grew up, met girls, went to college, and got on with his life. They’re beautiful.

Spider-Man is that one guy who made comics for me, above and beyond any other character. The guys who shepherded him over the past fifty years have had a huge effect on my taste in comics art and writing. The character they’ve created is one I’ve fallen in love with slowly. I didn’t even know it happened until it did, really. I probably thought to myself “Spider-Man is the best hero” and then realized it was true. A couple of his spinoffs and variations, most notably Static, are super important to me. I’m not a characters over creators guy at all, but he’s still a character I’ll check in on, just to see what’s new in his life.

I’m glad that Andrews and Villarubia did Spider-Man: Reign. It’s a book aimed directly at the heart of a Spider-fan like me, a guy who grew up with this schmuck who rocks red and blue and tells bad jokes. It feels like it was written for me, because it hits so many of the things I love about Spider-Man.

You can buy it on Comixology for eight bucks, total or on Amazon for twelve. I think it’s worth reading, if you like this guy like I like this guy. It’s a nice farewell to an old friend.

I had a bike accident on the way to work this morning, so posting may be light for a few days, unless I get really bored and get back to work. Sorry.

(Yes, it has been a long week.)

Just so this isn’t a depressing post of nothing, do me a favor. What are you reading that I need to be reading? Watching that I need to be watching? Listening to that I need to be listening to? What are you consuming that I need to consume? Why?

Let me know.

I screwed up with the Stephen Wacker thing. I take this stuff seriously, and I shoulda been better than I was.

I took his insults personally. I think he was being a jerk, but that him being a jerk gave me a chance to choose to either be a jerk in kind or bail out. I chose to engage, then I bailed out, then I engaged again. He got me, and he got me good. I helped turn my site into the exact type of comics site I hate. That’s on me, no question.

I shouldn’t have engaged him. I think that I was correct in what I said to him, but I should’ve picked my battles better, rather than stepping in with both feet. My comments should’ve been a expanded into a fully-reasoned post, or something. I don’t know. But I screwed up, and I failed myself and my readers. So I’m sorry for that. I’ll do better in the future.

I’d be lying if I said I was happy with how anything or everything went down, but it is what it is. Wacker’s actions were definitely reason to stop holding out and take a break from Marvel for a while. The company’s a bit sour now, so other than two posts I’ve got in progress, I’m done for a bit. No boycott, no big statement, none of that. I just can’t do it. I’ll reassess later.

Tomorrow, look for a brief post on Marjorie Liu & Phil Noto. It was going to be the third and final part of my look at creative teams, but it feels limp now. Thursday or Friday, look for a 4 Elements on Kaare Andrews Spider-Man: Reign. Whichever day doesn’t have Reign should have an exploration of clothes & colors and why I’ve been consciously branching out past black and dark blue.

Don’t let the comments be a Wacker hate-fest or whatever, please. I’m over it! I would much rather do drugs and play NBA 2k12 than deal with more of that.