Cla$$war

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

Cla$$war

In which a bunch of cynical, burnt-out, and horny superheroes, created by an ex-Nazi scientist with a thing for human experimentation, dress up in stars-and-stripes costumes and fight America’s wars. But when one of the members of the team (he’s just called “American”) develops a conscience the world’s mightiest heroes are soon fighting among themselves.

With a synopsis like that I was expecting something very much along the lines of The Boys, and that’s what Cla$$war is. But Cla$$war actually came first, running from 2002 to 2004 while The Boys was 2006-2012. And Marvel’s Civil War storyline, which also shares some similarities to what we get here, kicked off in 2006 as well. Actually, at the time Cla$$war was thought to have been influenced by DC’s The Authority, but Rob Williams says he didn’t know The Authority before he started writing and that his inspiration was more drawn from the Noam Chomsky he’d been reading.

The title, complete with dollar signs, is a bit misleading. In fact, I’m not sure why it was chosen. Nothing in the comic addresses class war in the sense of economic exploitation and the effects of entrenched social inequality. Instead, its target is American imperialism. The Enola Gay team (that’s what they’re called) are more supersoldiers than superheroes, fighting alongside the troops in foreign countries while the political rot deepens at home.

I wasn’t thrilled by the story here, not because of any political leanings (I like Chomsky too) but because the political message wasn’t new. The references here are up to date, with the president that American begins by attacking (he publicly brands the word “LIAR” on his forehead) being a stand-in for George W. Bush, and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq being referenced as earlier forays by Enola Gay. But it also felt a lot like the 1970s, with the Vietnam War and the political conspiracy thrillers of the time. And the invasion of Glenada is clearly a reference to the 1983 invasion of Grenada.

That said, I came away thinking this is a comic that should be better known. Perhaps being published by Com.x, a smaller British comic publisher, meant it didn’t get as much exposure. I thought the art by Trevor Hairsine and Travel Foreman was first-rate, and while the story was pedestrian I liked the way the different characters sparked off one another. American is a bit of a stick, but the other members of Enola Gay, while jerks, have distinct and complicated personalities. And the new superfreak the Nazi doctor whips up in his lab had real potential. I wanted to read more about all of these guys, but for whatever reason the series didn’t continue. It was initially planned to run for 12 issues but they only did six. As things stand the story breaks off, with only the character of Heavyweight now removed from the picture. Twenty years later I doubt we’ll see the series continued, at least in the way Williams might have intended. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a sequel.

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Ripper Legacy

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

I didn’t much care for this. David Stuart Davies is a decent writer and a renowned Holmesian, but something just felt off.

As one of the Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series it’s a pastiche, but the narrow meaning of the word “pastiche” is that it’s an imitation of the style of previous works, and that might be a place to start. While part of the book is presented in the canonical manner of being the written recollections of Dr. Watson, the excerpts from his journal are interlaced with chapters from a third-person omniscient point of view describing actions and events occurring elsewhere. Holmes’s thoughts are even described, which I found jarring.

Also, if not quite jarring but disconcerting, was the character of Holmes. He’s quite unpleasant here, especially in the early going. Not just brusque but rude and insulting, even to the husband and wife who have lost their 8-year-old child. He’s also not very impressive as a detective. He knows that the lost child had been adopted because . . . his picture doesn’t look like either of his parents. Later, he will be embarrassed when he pays a pair of prostitutes to tell him where he can find someone when he’s standing right below a tavern sign with the person’s name on it. So much for his powers of observation. Another big clue will be provided by pictures of the same country house hanging on the walls of a man’s office and home. Even Watson should have noticed that. But then a pattern is held to where Holmes is always one step ahead and Watson a couple of steps behind (which leads to his being captured by the bad guys not once but twice).

Another point that I thought out of place was some of the action. Here’s a taste:

Inside the chamber, Henshaw had taken advantage of the distraction caused by Gaunt’s exit and had scrabbled across the floor to retrieve the gun. With a cry of satisfaction he grabbed it and, clambering to his feet, aimed it at Holmes. Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger. The detective feinted to the left, the bullet just clipping the shoulder of his overcoat. Henshaw roared his dismay and was about to shoot again, but Holmes fired first. Henshaw was hit in the chest and the force of the blow flung his body backwards. With an animal-like bellow he crashed against the far wall of the room, and then slowly slithered down to the floor, leaving a thin trail of blood in his wake.

Watson describes this scene as being “like some violent mummer’s play,” but what it sounds like to me is hard-boiled detective fiction of the American school. And this isn’t the first man Holmes kills in the book.

A pastiche is fan service, and certain popular elements tend to show up in a lot of them. Characters like Mycroft Holmes and Professor Moriarty weren’t seen very often in the canon, nor do the Baker Street Irregulars appear more than a couple of times, but they’re here again, as they are in most Holmes pastiches. But the problem with recurring characters like these is that they become stock figures. Here is Moriarty finally coming face-to-face with Holmes:

“Call me sentimental, Sherlock Holmes, but I have a whim to take a final drink with you. We have gazed at each other for some time across the great divide that separates us and yet we share some strange kind of bond. We are both masters of our profession, you and I; meticulous, brilliant and resourceful. It is these qualities that almost make us brothers.”

You can see what I mean by calling this stuff fan service. But while fans may eat it up I thought it just seemed tired.

The plot itself, finally, mines the Stephen Knight thesis that the Ripper slayings were meant to cover-up the affairs of Prince Albert Victor, then second-in-line to the throne. I don’t think this is very likely, but it has been a popular source for subsequent fictions, like the film Murder by Decree and Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell. I thought it unnecessary here though, and couldn’t figure out why the government considered it to be such a big deal that the prince had a love child. Wasn’t that common to most royals? And how would anyone prove it anyway? The eye test?

So to me it felt like going through the motions, giving Holmes fans a bit of everything except maybe a cameo from Irene Adler (another minor figure from the canon who has enjoyed a long deuterocanonical afterlife). But the mystery wasn’t that interesting and there was an air of glumness and nastiness about it too. Not my thing, but if you wanted to be generous you could see it as an attempt to grow the brand.

Holmes index

Shaft: Imitation of Life

/ Alex Good / 23 Comments

Shaft: Imitation of Life

No, this comic doesn’t t have anything to do with the 1959 Douglas Sirk melodrama of the same name. Instead, it takes its title from a long interior monologue our hero Shaft has over the question of whether art imitates life (mimesis) or life imitates art (Oscar Wilde). Doesn’t that seem a little heady for Shaft? Well, in my review of the 1971 film Shaft I did remark upon the well-stocked bookshelves in his apartment. He’s not just a complicated man but a  guy who reads!

That monologue has a point here because Shaft is looking for a missing person and his investigation takes him (as per usual) into the seedy underbelly of a rotten Big Apple, specifically a mob-run porn operation. But at the same time some indie filmmakers, financed by the same mob outfit, are making a movie about Shaft’s adventures (called The Black Dick, if you can dig it) for which Shaft has been hired as a consultant. So before long it feels like the line is being blurred between what’s real and what’s movie moonshine.

It’s a simple story, of the kind that was popular at the time (that time being the 1970s). Think of movies like Hardcore. The bit of a twist they give it is that the missing person is a young gay man rescued by another gay man who teams up with Shaft. But to be honest, I didn’t find this part that interesting. It does benefit though from keeping things simple, and Dietrich Smith’s clean artwork is an incongruous but oddly effective fit with the sleazy proceedings. With his skin-tight turtlenecks showing off an overdeveloped chest that casts a pronounced shadow in any light, Shaft himself seems more than a bit like a plastic action figure, but that works too. They could have gone with a generic look, which is what I was expecting, but I like how they went with a more cartoonish change-up. Yeah, I could dig it.

Graphicalex

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil Volume 2

/ Alex Good / 31 Comments

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil Volume 2

This volume is a direct continuation of Daredevil’s beginnings as collected in the first Mighty Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil. As such, a lot of what I said about the character there still applies. To take just a few of the points I raised in my review of that book:

(1) “Effectively, Daredevil isn’t blind at all. Anything he needs to be able to do, he can do.”

To take some examples from the issues collected here: In the boat to Ka-Zar’s home of Skull Island (not that original, is it?) Daredevil can “sense vegetation . . . such as Earth has never known for millions of years! As though I’ve been transported to the dawn of time!” Now how would he know what vegetation smelled like (I assume he’s smelling it) millions of years ago? Also, he can identify people at a distance not just from their smell (as in previous issues) but from reading their emotions. How does that work? Just reading heartbeats?  And what are we to make of his “indescribably accurate hearing” that allows him to “tune in” to police short-wave radio broadcasts as he vaults above the city? There seem to be no limits to his (dis)abilities.

(2) “For the most part Daredevil is taking on B-list baddies who are nonetheless a lot of fun.”

So in this volume the “omnivorous”(?) and “omnipresent”(?) Owl is back. The Masked Marauder shows up, is defeated, and then teams up with the Gladiator, and is defeated again. Not the Strontian Gladiator, by the way, but Melvin Potter, a big guy with a chip on his shoulder who runs a superhero costume shop. So they’re a pair of B-listers. Then there’s the Ox, who is a big dumb guy (I’ll bet you never would have guessed) who gets a genius-level intelligence upgrade when a mad scientist switches bodies with him. The Plunderer (or Lord Parnival Plunder, to give him his full title) is a modern-day pirate who would have more of a Marvel afterlife because of his family connections (he’s actually the brother of Ka-Zar). Because I wasn’t as familiar with these guys I actually enjoyed them a lot more. They don’t have god-like super powers but are mostly just either really strong or really smart. And they’re all driven by a sense of bitterness at the world for not respecting them enough. I think this might have had been one of Stan Lee’s hang-ups.

(3) “On the downside, and as I’ve mentioned before, there’s his hopeless portrayal of women. The love triangle going on between Matt, his law partner Foggy Nelson, and their secretary Karen Page is just an annoyance.”

The office-romance stuff with Foggy always lusting after Karen who in turn has a secret crush on Matt plays out again here. And at least Lee seems to have recognized how painful it all was. After one cutaway to the land of thought-bubbles revealing hidden desires we get this editorial comment: “See how we try to please everybody? We even presented the preceding page for the benefit of soap-opera lovers!” And in a later issue, after another such romantic interlude, we get this apology: “Many thanks, Marvelite, for staying with us during the hearts and flowers portion of our yarn!”

This self-awareness, however, only goes so far. This part of the Daredevil story is painful. It does play a bit of a role when Foggy dresses up as Daredevil in an attempt to gain Karen’s affection, but otherwise it’s pointless. Pointless and annoying. At one point “Sensation-monger Stan” even gives his “batty bullpen” a “no-prize award” for presenting seven thought balloons in one panel. Which is as awkward as it sounds.

Speaking of Foggy putting on a Daredevil costume, it’s interesting how this is a motif in several of the comics here. When the Ox goes on a rampage he dresses an unconscious Daredevil in his clothes so that the police will mistake him for the troublemaker and lock him up. And then later the Masked Marauder has his entire gang wear Daredevil costumes as a way of diverting DD from the heist that the Marauder is planning. By sheer coincidence I read this volume at the same time as I was reading Chip Zdarsky’s Daredevil comics and the idea of people dressing up as Daredevil was a significant plot point there too. I also remembered that this was something that turned up in Frank Miller’s Born Again story arc, when Kingpin got a psycho killer to wear a DD costume to kill Foggy and Karen. Were imposters something Daredevil had a special problem with?

On a final note, when a gang of thugs break into Matt Murdock’s office he tells them that he has “business with Murdock too – and I hate to take sloppy seconds!” Today the expression “sloppy seconds” basically has only one meaning, and it’s one that goes back quite a ways. Though I’m not sure what it would have meant to readers in September 1966, the date of the issue Daredevil uses it in here. Good for a laugh anyway.

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Apparently there are no blue carbuncles, a carbuncle being a red gemstone cut a particular way (with a polished convex face and not faceted). So I guess that’s why this particular carbuncle, which is found in the crop of a goose, is worth so much. Given liberties like these I always wonder why people get so worked up over confusions in dates and geography and other consistency errors within the Holmes canon. Doyle was just making things up.

How did the carbuncle get into the crop of a goose? That’s the mystery Holmes is out to solve, and it’s one which leads him on a wild goose chase through London. It’s all a lot of fun and I don’t think it’s meant to be taken that seriously. Holmes, for example, is fine with letting the thief go at the end (while also, presumably, pocketing the reward for finding the carbuncle). There’s also not a lot of deduction going on but more the wearing out of shoe leather as Holmes, in bloodhound mode, drags Watson back through the reverse supply chain of dinner table to barnyard. The one tour de force of drawing inference from the observation of the slightest cues comes at the beginning when Holmes tells us everything we need to know about Henry Baker just from looking at his hat, and I’m not sure how seriously we’re supposed to take that either. We can give him a mulligan on determining that Baker was an intellectual based on hat size alone since at the time the big head=big brain connection was currently the fashion. The other conclusions he draws, however, are so far-fetched as to be what we’d expect in a parody of his method. Though of course they all turn out to be correct. “My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.” Indeed it is.

Noted in passing: at one point Holmes is described as laughing “in the hearty, noiseless fashion which was peculiar to him.” This made me wonder what a hearty, noiseless fashion of laughter would look like. I guess it wouldn’t sound like anything, as it’s noiseless. Did Holmes throw his head back and shake quietly?

Holmes index

DNF files: End Times

/ Alex Good / 17 Comments

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

By Peter Turchin

Page I bailed on: 52

Verdict: Peter Turchin is a professor of historical social science whose baby is a field he calls cliodynamics. What this basically refers to is the mapping of historical processes by the use of mathematical models, in short a science-based grand theory of history of a kind that has long been popular both among historians and writers of fiction.

Normally I would have eaten a book like this up, as I’m quite fond of theories of historical cycles and evolution, from the Greek kyklos to today’s Big History. Turchin acknowledges this long tradition, but sees cliodynamics as something new mainly in its use of large data sets. It’s Big History meets Big Data, with the latter taking the form of something called Seshat or the Global History Databank.

I’d be on board with this approach if cliodynamics had come up with something really new, but I came away disappointed with its findings. All human societies “experience recurrent waves of political instability,” or alternating integrative and disintegrative phases that usually last around a hundred years. There are various factors that lead to a disintegrative phase or period of crisis and social collapse, including popular immiseration, weakened political legitimacy, high levels of social inequality, and exogenous shocks like climate change. The “most important driver of social and political instability” Turchin identifies though, and the one that has led to his making his mark in this field, is “elite overproduction.” Which means too many people holding an elite rank in society without enough positions of elite power to satisfy them. It’s like a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs stays the same but the number of people keeps growing.

This is a new idea, and one that has taken hold in the broader public discourse, but I think perhaps the main reason for this is that it reflects a contemporary concern. And specifically it feels like the concern of an academic, who no doubt sees a great deal of this sort of thing every day. That is, qualified Ph.D.’s who are unable to find good jobs. Then there’s the way the argument is geared toward explaining our current political climate and the Trump phenomenon in terms of a disintegrative phase. In a term historians like to use, this feels a lot like “presentism.”

I was both unconvinced and not very excited by any of the findings of cliodynamics. I don’t think integrative “golden ages” of internal order are typified by “cultural brilliance” while times of troubles experience “declining high culture.” As Harry Lime famously put it in The Third Man: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Lime’s speech is celebrated because it gets at a historical truth. To take another example, one of Turchin’s periods of extreme crisis is the lead-up to the American Civil War, but this was also America’s literary Renaissance. Countless other instances could be cited. Revolutionary times tend to be cultural volcanoes.

So cliodynamics paints with a broad brush. But in other ways a brush that isn’t broad enough. Just in the early chapters it seems like Turchin, in his list of factors contributing to social disintegration, was missing a more obvious and more foundational causal explanation: overpopulation. In the historical examples he gives of disintegrative phases the immiseration of the masses is mainly driven by the fact that the masses were growing at a pace that outstripped the economy’s ability to provide for them. And the overproduction of elites could be seen as a function of overpopulation as well. But once you focus on something as basic as this then cliodynamics itself doesn’t seem to be saying anything new.

Maybe in the rest of the book Turchin took all this in some truly groundbreaking directions, but by the time I quit I was pretty sure he was just filling out the old story of things falling apart with some new terminology and lots of numbers, while turning history into a database that wasn’t informed by any depth of understanding about what really happened in the past.

The DNF files

Old Man Logan 2: Bordertown

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

Old Man Logan 2: Bordertown

Let’s start off talking about place. I don’t like visiting the Marvel multiverse because I’m never sure what timeline or alternate Earth we’re in or on, but at least I was getting adjusted to the set-up in this series after the Berserker volume. In that book Wolvie was sent back from a dystopic (post-supervillain takeover) Wild West to what I guess is our current reality. But things kick off here at X-Haven: “Refuge for mutantkind and headquarters of the X-Men. Located in the Limbo Dimension.” Damn it, we’re in another dimension now? I had to look X-Haven up online and found out that it was created in 2015. Who can keep up with all this except the most determined fanboys and –girls?

Anyway, after a bit of talking between Wolverine and Storm at X-Haven, Logan is back (via teleportation) to the present day and driving his motorbike north. “Really north. Through Canada and beyond . . .” Wait, north of Canada? What does he mean? Russia? Because to get there he’d have to drive over the North Pole and technically be heading south. But then we’re told he arrives at Killhorn Falls in the Northwest Territory: “Nothing but a few rows of trailers and shacks along the Alaskan border. Whole community is built around a gravel quarry sitting on a small port in the Gulf of Alaska.”

Now wait just a minute. The Northwest Territories (it’s a plural) does not share a border with Alaska. That would be Yukon Territory. And the shoreline of the Gulf of Alaska is all part of Alaska (the panhandle), and notably not northern Alaska but the south-east part.

And this was all written by Jeff Lemire, who is Canadian. I don’t get it. Are we in another weird dimension or is Lemire just lost when it comes to geography?

Putting this to one side, I liked this instalment of the Old Man Logan series, but in terms of the larger story I felt like there wasn’t much there. Basically Logan heads off to this remote mining town when Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers show up, so he destroys them while defending a little girl who in one timeline he is going to eventually marry. At least I think I have that right, but don’t hold me to it.

The fighting is good and Sorrentino’s art is aces again in evoking the dark world of aging butchery that Wolverine inhabits. That double-page spread of skeleton Wolverine laughing with skulls dropping from his mouth is quite something. Then in issue #8 we get a vision of the depressing Gotterdammerung that was the supervillain uprising and it’s pretty bleak. But as Logan knows, getting old is itself pretty bleak. That’s just the kind of series this is. I was going to say that’s the kind of world this is, but since it’s many worlds I can’t.

The bonus comic is Uncanny X-Men #205 from 1981, a Chris Claremont story that has Wolverine fighting Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers again. Or not really again, but before. Or maybe not before because time is as loose a construct as geography in the multiverse. It’s a good comic though.

So lots of Wolverine’s claws coming out with a Snikt! sound and lots of limbs being detached. Plus Wolverine learning to accept his identity as agent of chaos, madness, and death, which is a familiar character arc for him. You do get the sense that he’s growing tired of all this though, and that now the game is playing him.

Graphicalex