The Rockets' Red Glare

I wholeheartedly recommend  Grant Morrison's Supergods to anyone who cares about superheroes or Pop Culture. Reading it, however, made me question whether I should bother writing this blog at all. Part -history of the superhero comic and part -autobiography, I found it observant, witty and compelling. But it expressed so many of my conflicting opinions about the genre so well, that I felt my little efforts were ill-conceived and futile. Especially since I'm only appreciating the New 52 relaunch second-hand through reviews on the Net, without the correct devices to consume Digital DC. It's frustrating too, because I had been advocating the adoption of  Marvel's Urban Noir style for Superman and the JLA here on "Place" for some months. The authorial voice of Brian Bendis has turned the Avengers into a wildly successful franchise and it's that kind of knowing, acerbic tone- blended with a love of the more "exploitational" characters of the Bronze Age- that The World's Greatest Heroes need, I think.

Bendis, of course, first rose to prominence as Marvel's most popular writer on Ultimate Spider-Man. The Ultinate line was launched as an aggressive attempt to simplify the history Marvel's flagship characters and make them contemporary. John Byrne's unloved "Spider-Man Chapter One" limited series had been a failed mutation, an evolutionary dead-end. X-Men, Spidey, Iron Man, the Dark Knight, Green Lantern, Smallville..it seems the smart response to the ubiquity of superheroes would be to retool them to make them recognisable and accessible to potential new markets. And over a decade ago, that's what the Ultimate line did. It's what DC appears to be doing now.

Morrison writes beautifully and wickedly about American youth in the 90s: privileged but disillusioned, suicidal and immersed in narratives of ultraviolence and the supernatural (but apparently without making the connection between those very ideas and the current superhero movie, right down to their hackneyed, gutteral grunge soundtracks). Looking at a fairly recent recent collection of Ultimate X-Men (2008's Vol. 18, "Apocalypse") from Elgin Library, maybe we have a cautionary glimpse of the future of the New 52.

I've found Robert Kirkman's work largely to be a cynical and violent rehash of Bronze Age tropes. In "Apocalypse", he seems to be trying to simplify and clarify the witless 90s action figure plots of Mr. Sinister, Stryfe, Cable and, er, Apocalypse. But it results in a soulless book, utterly devoid of humour and fun. Unless Ultimate Onslaught is meant to be funny. Worst of all, it uses Phoenix to press a great, big reset button, so none of it ever happened, like The Master's reign in Last of the Time Lords. This is such a narrative cheat and I discourage my pupils from using "It had all been a dream" because it's lazy.
But DC have taken their core audience's nostalgia for 90s comics a step further by spearheading the relaunch with Image superstar Jim Lee and derided wonder boy Rob Liefeld is bringing up the rear. It seems so wrong-headed when trying to appeal to new readers. No wonder Bronze Age books look daring, illicit and iconoclastic by comparison.

 I was never a huge fan of Captain America as a kid. Like young people now, the media informed me that the USA was corrupt, hubristic and dangerous; but its heroes still represented ideals. So it wasn't the symbolism that bugged me with Cap. Like Iron Man or Daredevil, it was the dullness. I stared with Kirby, which was fine. This Album Issue made Steve Rogers' adventures look like a wild tapestry of  machines and monsters. But then he became a bore, a plodding authoritarian when compared to his passionate, funky sidekick- mirroring Green Lantern and Green Arrow. The drug courier turned super-villain Solarr seems more suited to the sleek and muscular Falcon than to the Star-Spangler Avenger.
Thanks to Thorpe and Porter,  I missed Cap's finest hour at the time- although I read most of it later: the disillusionment of Watergate, the Coming of the Nomad and the Brand Corporation. I came back to the King and the whacky grotesquerie of Arnim Zola and The Night People of Zero Street.

 Just talkin' 'bout Falc. And we can dig it. How great does he look under Kirby?

I can understand how outraged and indignant the hip fans were, when Kirby took over Cap and T'Challa. The literate but verbose outpourings of Englehart and McGregor had blended soap opera and social comment; Jack's gods and monsters would have seemed juvenile and whimsical by comparison. Even as a Fourth World fan, I feel now that The Eternals lacked sympathetic characters while 2001 is repetitive and its timing is bizarre (imagine releasing a comic book adaptation of  "Attack of the Clones" in 2011).
If Jack had come back on Thor, which was inoffensive and bland under Wein and Buscema or used his Machine Man concepts for a launch of the Vision, a popular B-lister in 1976...if only, if only...

Cap's mid-70s stint in the pages of Captain Britain gave the Lion of London some credibility. Recently I found this mock-up cover by Cliff Robinson (lower right) and also an image of  IPC's original abortive Captain Britain from Seventy-Four, who resembles Marvelman:

 Tom Kerr also drew the time-travelling Adam Eterno from the wonderful "Thunder" comic (1970)

and later "Lion" and "Valiant"

In the Bronze Age, it was the love triangle in The Invaders that loaned some humanity to the Sentinel of Liberty- even though I disliked the luxuriant Seventies hairstyles Robbins gave the Torch and Toro- while Thomas and Robbins' What If was a quietly moving tribute to the fallen Kennedys.
I read a few of the issues in Mark Gruenwald's late-80s run, as Steve Rogers became the Captain and the Red Skull returned in a cloned body, but only as preamble for Simonson's ill-fated Avengers 300. They never grabbed me.
 In the summer, I imagined I'd be blogging about the Captain America movie. But if it was ever screened at the Elgin Playhouse, I must not have noticed, which seems highly unlikely. Anyway, I'm going to look briefly at a second selection from the library: Brubaker and Epting's Death of Captain America/ The Death of The Dream.

I came to this collection sort-of fresh, in that I'd followed Bendis's Avengers off and on; read a Civil War collection; and I also knew from Newsarama posts that Cap and Bucky had gone through the same cycle of death and rebirth as Batman and Jason Todd.
I was pleasantly surprised by this TPB. The tone of paranoid conspiracy thriller was effective and I completely accepted that this was the same Cap, Sharon and Falc from the Englehart Years. I didn't really felt I had a clear handle on the personality of Bucky, the Winter Soldier but Brubaker sucessfully retooled Kirby's corpulent Dr. Faustus into a frighteningly convincing manipulator. I would like to read more of. this series.

 On the topic of cinema again, The Green Hornet was a hero I knew only from that pre-school World Distributors annual and the Corgi model of his car, the sleek Black Beauty. The crime-busting newspaper publisher and his martial artist-chauffeur originally starred in a radio series but if you've ever read 1986's DC Secret Origin of the Crimson Avenger (and Wing) by Gene Colan, you'll grasp the whole set-up.  The Sixties tv show starred the handsome Van Williams and, of course, launched the career of Bruce Lee as Kato. It was, to my knowledge, never screened in the STV region; I've only seen one episode ( as part of a Bruce Lee tribute night) but, despite the frenetic theme tune which reprises The Flight of the Bumblebee, it was a lot less campy than Batman.
The dvd of the Michel Gondry/ Seth Rogen movie was a waste of my time, however. I wasn't quite as irritated by it as I was by Guy Ritchie's drab Sherlock Holmes but, still, it was lousy. The self-congratulatory tone, with Rogen playing a sloppy, emotionally-retarded, irresponsible manboy, corroborates Morrison's assessment of the depressing self-image of young Americans. I was confused by the marketing of the movie since a young male audience is unlikely to have heard of the tv show, I'd have thought, although the level of sometimes very graphic violence seemed designed for the 18-24 demographic. The wilfully dumb tone of this spoof was also depressing, since mocking masked heroes isn't exactly difficult or new. Jay Chou's martial arts scenes were among my least-disliked moments but the character was still embarassingly patronised, as was Cameron Diaz's "hot older woman". A crass and unfunny film.


Coming up:  Green Anchor or Red Waterfall?
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