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Tag: comics

The Watchmen Bestiary 1: The Black And White Panther

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On October 11, 2012

In Uncategorized

[NOTE: This post contains spoilers for the Watchmen graphic novel, and I’m assuming readers are familiar with its plot and characters.]

Remember a few years ago, when I said that I wanted to reread Watchmen, but this time with the Annotated Watchmen alongside? Well, the time has come at last. As expected, it’s producing a much more satisfying reading experience — even just rereading the graphic novel with an eye towards structure and symbolism is deeply rewarding, as opposed to the first time, when I was just reading for the plot. Now the project is spawning a few sub-projects of its own.

I thought it would be fun to pursue the references embedded in the annotations, so as to get a richer understanding of Watchmen‘s various layers of allusion. Here was the first one I saw, in reference to The Comedian’s secret(ish) identity as Edward Blake:

“Edward Blake is obviously a reference to Blake Edwards, the director of the Pink Panther comedies. And, no one’s spotted this, Rorschach’s methods of terrorism are all taken from Pink Panther movies.”

Are they, now? Are they really? Very well, I believe I’ll watch the Pink Panther movies. (That means the Sellers/Edwards Pink Panther movies, mind you. I’m sure Alan Moore wouldn’t want me to have to plow through Alan Arkin, Ted Wass, Roberto Benigni, Steve Martin [who I love, but come on — those are paycheck movies for him], or the truly execrable Trail of The Pink Panther, about which more later.)

Verdict: There’s something valid in the comment, but it’s quite overstated. I’ll buy that Edward Blake refers to Blake Edwards. And there are definitely some parallels between Rorschach’s behavior and one of the movies, The Return Of The Pink Panther. For instance, in the film, retired jewel thief Sir Charles Litton, aka “The Phantom” (played here by Christopher Plummer, taking over the David Niven role from the first movie) investigates a crime for which he’s being framed. In doing so, he pushes around a stoolie, abusing the man’s fingers just as Rorschach does to a low-level underworld type in chapter 1 of Watchmen. Well, not exactly “just as” — Litton’s victim is played for laughs as his hands are squeezed, whereas Rorschach’s target is clearly in agony as his bones snap. But still, the finger torture analogue is there.

There’s an even more blatant connection, though. In Return Of The Pink Panther, Edwards revists the running gag from the previous Inspector Clouseau movie (A Shot In The Dark), in which Clouseau has instructed his manservant Cato to attack him by surprise at any time, so as to keep the Inspector’s battle skills sharp. In Shot, Cato attacks Clouseau in the bedroom and in the bathtub, but in Return he steps up his game by leaping at Clouseau out of the freezer:

Cato leaping at Clouseau out of the freezer in Return Of The Pink Panther

In chapter 3 of Watchmen, Moloch encounters a similarly unpleasant surprise:

Watchmen Chapter 2, page 20, panel 7: Rorschach leaps out of Moloch's fridge, slamming into Moloch.

So yeah, there are definitely parallels, and the “Edward Blake” thing seems like a clear enough reference that the parallels are unlikely to be coincidental. However, that’s about as far as it goes. You don’t see Cato following up on his freezer trick by leaving a “Behind you” note next time around. The Phantom doesn’t shoot anybody in the chest with a grappling hook gun. And Clouseau sure as hell never burns somebody with cooking fat or kills dogs with a cleaver, even if they bite.

Isn’t it odd, too, that while Edward Blake is supposedly The Comedian, it’s Rorschach who gets all the best gags? I mentioned in my last writeup that The Comedian is never funny, but what I didn’t notice is that Rorschach often is. And by “often”, I mean “seldom”, but a lot more often than most of the other characters. It’s Rorschach who actually tells a joke (albeit in his diary — the Pagliacci joke at the end of chapter 2.) He delivers many of his lines with bone-dry irony and sometimes even biting wit. (“Tall order.”) And he provides the biggest laugh in the book — indirectly, admittedly — by dropping Captain Carnage down an elevator shaft, a rather Clouseauesque fate for a villain to meet. His moral simplicity, along with his talent for verbal understatement and physical overstatement, make him the funniest character in Watchmen.

As for the Pink Panther movies themselves, well. One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, to this day, is The Trail Of The Pink Panther. I didn’t actually walk out of the theater, but considering I was twelve years old when I saw it, I think it was the first movie I’d seen in my life that was bad enough to make me think, “This is a terrible movie,” as it unspooled. It was the first time I can recall thinking critically about a movie while watching it.

Trail is basically the movie equivalent of one of those clip shows that long-running television programs sometimes resort to when deadlines are plentiful but inspiration is not — a loose frame story provides excuses to show lots of highlight reels from previous episodes. Peter Sellers died fully 18 months before production began on the movie, and Edwards strings together a Sellers “performance” by using a bunch of deleted scenes from the fifth and last Pink Panther film, along with the funniest bits from the first four. They haul out the carcasses of Sellers’ major co-stars from the previous films to give talking-head interviews about Clouseau. David Niven was so weak that they actually chose to have his lines dubbed in by Rich Little in post-production.

The movie is so bad that Sellers’ widow in fact sued its producers, claiming that it had diminished her late husband’s reputation. The courts agreed, and awarded her over a million dollars. Still, watching all five Pink Panther movies in a row, I could see why the clip show approach must have appealed to Edwards. Every one of these movies is essentially a bunch of middling-to-great set pieces and jokes dangling from a plot that’s more or less beside the point. I saw these movies first in bits and pieces myself, watching over my parents’ shoulders growing up, and re-watching them now, it’s clear how much they were just vehicles for Peter Sellers to be funny. To watch them in sequence is to witness an actor and director zeroing in on a character’s comedic voice.

In the first, eponymous Pink Panther movie, Sellers isn’t even the lead. He’s a supporting character to David Niven’s roguish jewel thief, but Sellers steals the show so wonderfully as Clouseau that Edwards immediately sought another showcase for the character. He found it with A Shot In The Dark, originally a stage play with no connection to the Pink Panther universe whatsoever. Edwards rewrote the screenplay (along with a pre-Exorcist William Peter Blatty) around the Clouseau character, and Sellers hit another home run.

Lots of people cite Shot as the best Pink Panther movie, but I’d have to disagree. In my opinion, the one where the pieces all came together is the one to which Moore tips his hat: Return of The Pink Panther. That movie reprises the compelling characters and setting from the first movie, layers in the funniest elements of Shot (Cato, Dreyfus), and strips away some of the previous distractions — Clouseau as cuckold, Clouseau starry-eyed in love — to focus on the detective pursuing a case through one spectacular failure after another. They crib some costuming from the intervening Arkin movie, and Sellers perfects his outrageous ultra-French accent, complete with befuddled reactions from other characters. After the formula jells in Return, the subsequent films have the easy rhythm (and sometimes the tiredness) of recurring SNL sketches.

Sellers certainly nails all the physical comedy — I laughed out loud the first time he spun a globe and then tried to lean on it — but I found that my favorite parts were the more subtle verbal interchanges. The conversations where Clouseau, in his certainty, completely bewilders another character while not even realizing he’s doing so, are pure genius to me. And I adore him getting worked up and confronting a suspect with, “I submit, Inspector Ballon, that you arrived home, found Miguel with Maria Gambrelli, and killed him in a rit of fealous jage!” Once the films had fully codified the character, even his wardrobe was funny. Come to think of it, that trenchcoat-and-hat combination looks awfully familiar. Haven’t I seen it in something I read recently…?

Next Entry: There’s A Ship…

The Avengers

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On May 31, 2012

In Uncategorized

[We interrupt our regularly scheduled IF reviews for this topical superhero discussion. That review of Mentula Macanus is coming soon– er, on its way.]

I’ve been reading a lot of 1960s Marvel comics lately, letter columns and all. I did this once before, with just Spider-Man comics, which was a lot of fun. This time I’m skipping around more from title to title, getting a feel for the way the universe gelled, and how the constant stream of feedback from readers contributed to that process. It’s really given me a sense for what Marvel did differently back in those early days. For a while there, they could almost do no wrong — “what they did differently” was more or less synonymous with “what they did right.”

Know what else I’ve been doing a lot lately? Seeing Joss Whedon’s Avengers movie. Well, okay, just twice, but that counts as “a lot” in my movie-watching book. The movie is everything I wanted it to be. It was even more satisfying the second time around. Like those early Marvels, it makes the right call pretty much every time. Really: just like those early Marvels.

Continued stories

In 1961, when the Marvel Universe as we know it began, comic books were disposable, not collectible. There was no expectation that whoever bought issue #41 would necessarily have bought issue #40 or have any intention to buy issue #42. Consequently, each one was required to be self-contained, with one story, or even multiple stories, that began and ended within its covers. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but the general expectation was that a comic book contained at least one complete story. Sure, there were motifs that continued from one issue to the next, but they were more or less in the form of an established status quo. Clark Kent always works at the Daily Planet. Lois Lane never gets any closer to figuring out his secret identity. Jimmy Olsen is always just as young and eager and boneheaded as he ever was or ever will be. Stories that deviated from this status quo always made sure to return to it before the issue was over.

Many early Marvels followed this pattern too, though their internal status quo was a fair bit more interesting. However, it quickly became apparent that the stories they wanted to tell were too complex to be contained within a single book. Not only that, they seemed to be attracting older, more sophisticated readers, who might be more reasonably expected to buy a title consistently. So, in many books, “continued stories” became the rule, and whoever read issue #41 might in fact need the previous one or the next one, or several iterations thereof, to get the full tale.

Oh, the complaints that readers sent in about this! The company was accused of greed, insensitivity, poor storytelling, and more. In fact, the hue and cry was so great that at one point Marvel actually abandoned continued stories and tried to keep all issues self-contained. The (predictable) result? Duller, more superficial stories. In fact, it may have almost been a calculated move on their part — by the time they did it, the Marvel Universe had already been established as an enormous tapestry of characters whose lives regularly interwove, collided, and separated again. To write the very kind of stories they had made obsolete may have been their way of saying, “Oh, this? Is this really what you want?” Needless to say, continued stories returned soon afterwards.

In 2012, the majority of movies are self-contained, but there are plenty of franchises in which each sequel moves the characters along a larger arc. However, what we hadn’t seen yet is a movie that ties together multiple franchises in the way that The Avengers does. There are four different lines of movies, each with its own sequel trajectory, that come together in this one. Four sets of stories feed in, and this story will resonate along at least three lines in the future. (I’m not sure if there are going to be any more Hulk movies, though no doubt the success of Avengers makes that outcome more likely. Heck, maybe even Black Widow and Hawkeye will get their own franchises.)

This is an immensely powerful position for a movie to occupy. In the comics, a shared universe gets you several great things:

  • If you’re following multiple lines that come together, you get to feel like an insider when the collisions happen. The more lines you follow, the more satisfying this can be.
  • The coherency of each strand is enhanced by its participation in a greater coherent whole. When Spider-Man bursts into Stark Industries, he may wonder why Iron Man isn’t showing up. Those of us reading Iron Man know that he’s trapped by a villain in another part of the factory, and knowing this lets us feel that both Spidey and Stark are a legitimate part of a larger, grander story.
  • When personalities do come together, especially if they clash, the drama of the encounter is greatly enhanced when each character is fully fleshed out with a detailed background and a story of his own.The Avengers movie inherits each of these advantages, along with the sheer pleasure of seeing a bunch of great actors thrown into an ensemble cast, and an enormous sense of payoff from the most elaborate setup ever.

These people do not get along

As I said, Marvel set up a fictional universe in which its superheroes were constantly running into each other. And when that would happen, inevitably, they would fight at least once. Fans loved seeing the good guys square off against each other, if only from the geeky desire to take the measure of each hero. And so Stan Lee would contrive some sort of misunderstanding or unusual circumstance that would force the heroes into conflict. Letter columns were always full of people eager to know who would win in a fight: Hulk vs. Thor? Thing vs. Iron Man? Spidey vs. Black Widow? Hero vs. hero conflict gave those fans a little satisfaction, though not always as much as they wanted, given that the story often took a left turn before either hero suffered a full defeat.

The Avengers takes this cue and runs with it. And, uh, now it’s probably time for the SPOILERS ASSEMBLE! warning.

The movie gives us so many awesome hero vs. hero matchups:

  • Black Widow vs. Hulk, twice. She dominates him strategically as Banner, he dominates her physically (of course) as Hulk
  • Thor vs. Iron Man vs. Captain America
  • Hawkeye vs. everybody, which was a great way of establishing Hawkeye’s badass credentials. (Casting Jeremy Renner didn’t hurt either.)
  • Stark, Banner, and Cap piercing Fury’s subterfuge, leading to a great 6-way argument and a lovely Whedonesque camera move, inverting the heroes and placing the Staff Of Bad Influence in the foreground
  • Thor vs. Hulk
  • Black Widow vs. Hawkeye

And that’s all before they team up to fight the Big Bad! No wonder this movie had to be 143 minutes long. These matchups do several things for the movie, besides their obvious Big Action Thrill value. I mentioned how turning Hawkeye against everyone, and having him nearly take down the whole shebang, was a great way of establishing him as a powerhouse to be reckoned with, despite his lack of superpowers. Really, that’s true for all the inter-hero fights. In order for us to believe in the enormous victory the Avengers pull off in the movie’s climax, we have to believe in their powers and abilities. Having them establish these against each other is both efficient and effective. This way, we see more heroes in action more of the time, and our belief in one reinforces our belief in the others.

Moreover, the physical conflicts help the movie express the characters’ underlying philosophical conflicts. Superhero stories, at least when they’re done well, are metaphors writ large. So when Thor fights Iron Man, it isn’t just Thor fighting Iron Man — it’s the Mythical/Ancient/Pastoral at war with the Modern/Scientific/Technological, and it’s not accidental that the image of Idealized Patriotism and Selfless Heroism is defeated by neither and brings both together.

Finally, the conflicts move the plot along, which is far from a given in modern action movies. Heroes fighting each other does everything from achieving key turning points (such as when the Widow administers a “cognitive recalibration” to Hawkeye, switching him back to the side of the angels) to subtly filling in explanatory details (such as when Banner finds himself holding the Stick of Psychic Malevolence as he’s getting angry.)

How do you solve a problem like The Hulk?

In fact, this last one helped me understand something about the movie that puzzled me the first time around. I’ve mentioned before that although the Hulk exists in a world of superheroes, he’s not a superhero himself — he’s a monster. Unlike everybody else on the team, he’s not necessarily here to help. This is a hard problem to solve for any story that includes him as a protagonist, and the first time I saw The Avengers, I thought the film hadn’t quite solved it. Why is he all “SMASH BLACK WIDOW!” the first time he appears and then all “SMASH ONLY BAD GUYS AND CATCH IRON MAN AND GENERALLY HELP OUT!” the second time?

Then my friend Tashi suggested this interpretation to me: Banner’s revelation during the climactic battle (“I’m always angry”) indicates that he has figured out that suppressing his anger is the wrong way to go. So instead, he lives with it all the time so that it doesn’t blossom into rage, and tries to atone for his past damage by helping the helpless. (Boy, sounds Whedonishly familiar, doesn’t it?) He believes that he might be able to control “the other guy” now that he’s learned to live with his anger, but he’d rather not take the chance if he doesn’t have to.

Then he gets tangled up with the whole SHIELD thing. He finds himself aboard a massive airship — as he comments when it takes off, that’s a worse place for him to be than even a submarine. Loki’s whole plan is to get the Hulk to wreck everything once he’s aboard the Helicarrier. Well, that and also get Hawkeye to wreck everything from outside the Helicarrier. So, using the remote magic of the Nasty Pointy Spear Of Malefic Intent, he manipulates Banner’s mind (as indicated by the “put down the scepter” scene), weakening his mental control so that when Hawkeye strikes, the Hulk is in rampage mode rather than “I’m at peace with my anger” mode. Then, later, when Banner motors up for the final battle, he’s himself again, and can drive the beast enough to be a hero.

I love this explanation, and I think it’s supported by the film. It’s certainly better than anything Stan Lee figured out in the 60’s. His Hulk was constantly hunted, and his Banner was far from reconciled with his anger. (That is, once it was established that anger is what triggers the change. At first it was actually nightfall that did it, like a werewolf. The anger/stress thing set in pretty early, though.) He tried pills, and he tried locking himself away. He tried staying out of stressful situations. You can imagine how well all that worked out. The comics Hulk was often well-intentioned, but always misunderstood.

There wasn’t a trace in this movie of Thunderbolt Ross-esque anti-Hulkism — on the contrary, the government is looking for Banner to enlist his help, despite knowing he could potentially Hulk out. You don’t get much of that in the early comics, though they repeatedly attempted to cast the monster as a hero. In fact, he was even a charter member of the original Avengers… but he was out of there by the third issue. He’s really not much of a team player.

Homage and better

Having the Hulk be present for the founding of the movie Avengers is just one of the many lovely ways this film pays respect to its source material. Just as in the comics, Loki is intimately involved with the Avengers’ formation. Just as in the comics, the early Hawkeye and Black Widow are a couple, albeit one frequently beset by misfortune. Just as in the comics, the Avengers bicker and argue and crack wise, although the players and personalities are a bit different in the film from how they work in the original stories.

The movie is far from a literal recreation of those early Avengers issues. Instead, like the first Iron Man movie, it faithfully absorbs the spirit of the comics, but compresses, abridges, and enhances to make a coherent story that fits together like an exquisite puzzle. Thank you Joss, for mining the gold from an enormous vein, then shaping and polishing it so beautifully for us. And by the way, that really long sequence shot that went from hero to hero during the third act was JUST AWESOME. Mmmm, I think it’s time to see this movie again.

Good Questions, part 4

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On May 12, 2011

In Uncategorized

Sad to say, I just found out I’ll miss the next Basement Bowl, due to vacation. Drat! On the plus side, I’m scheming to attend the Trivia Championships of North America, a weekend-long trivia explosion scheduled for Las Vegas in July. In any case, it’s time for one more installment of this series. Previous posts have focused more on the philosophical aspects of question construction, but in this one, I’ll get a little more technical — more about the craft than the art, as it were. I think I’m about out of gas after this, so let’s call it the season finale and get rolling.

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Trivial Matters With a Vengeance

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On January 27, 2011

In Uncategorized

Okay, so some of this is covered in my review of Wordplay, but here it is from a slightly different angle. But before we go there, answers to the last entry’s questions:

Following in the footsteps of Anthony Michael Hall and Jason Lively, he played Rusty Griswold in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. More famously, he appeared as David Healey, Darlene’s boyfriend and eventual husband, in 92 episodes of Roseanne. Name this actor who currently stars as Dr. Leonard Hofstader on The Big Bang Theory.
Answer: Johnny Galecki

In the 1960s, Marvel Comics loved to liven up its titles by throwing in an extra adjective. I’ll give you a comic book title, you fill in the missing adjective, for five points each.
1. The Incredible Hulk
2. The Amazing Spider-Man
3. The Invincible Iron Man
4. The Uncanny X-Men
5. The Mighty Thor
6. The Astonishing Ant-Man

During CU‘s 2001 revival of the Trivia Bowl, I heard rumors of this thing called a “Basement Bowl.” I gathered it was some kind of trivia-oriented deal held in somebody’s basement. As you may recall, I had the epiphany in 2001 in which I realized that these are my people, so I wanted in on this Basement Bowl thingy. Sadly for me, it’s not easy to invite yourself to somebody else’s event, at least not for me it isn’t. So I asked around about it, discreetly, and got vague answers that sure, the Bowl’s always looking for new blood, and I’ll pass your name on.

I never heard back.

The next year (the final year of the revival), the same scenario played out. This time, I was more direct, asked more people, and was once again assured that my name would be given to Leonard, which I learned was the name of the guy in charge of the Bowl. I even went so far as to send email to Jason Katzman, who I knew as the film critic from CU’s unofficial newspaper, the Colorado Daily, during my student tenure. He’s part of the trivia crowd, and has a day job at the CU Bookstore, meaning that we sort-of-kind-of share an employer. I had briefly talked with him at the Bowl, and sent a follow-up email saying how much I love the trivia thing and how I’d love to be a part of any other trivia events he knows about.

I never heard back.

A couple of years later, the much much smaller-scale bowl began. That year, I once again participated, and made a connection with a guy named Dave Gatch. Dave is a wonderful guy, extremely bright and very funny, like a lot of trivia people. He’s also interested in reaching out to relative outsiders such as myself, and so that year he started taking me under his wing. In the summer of 2006, he invited me to attend the Basement Bowl at last.

And now, a bit of background. Leonard Fahrni is one of the true characters of the trivia world. Like Gatch (like all of them, really), he’s quite intelligent — he has four undergraduate degrees [3 of these simultaneously, from a triple-major] and three master’s degrees. I dunno, maybe four by now. Going to school is kind of his hobby. He teaches math at Metro State College. Plays trumpet in the National Guard’s 101st Army Band. (Actually, I know he retired from the military recently, so this may no longer be true.) He can be acid-tongued and caustic, but he can also be amazingly hospitable and generous. Oh, and he lives in his parents’ basement.

This basement is the home of the Basement Bowl. Leonard is a longtime fan of the trivia bowl, and during its heyday he watched for several years before forming his own team. When he did, they got blown out. He decided that practice was needed, and inaugurated a habit of getting some like-minded people together to write trivia questions for each other as practice for the yearly Bowl. He even got some mad scientist friend to build a buzzer set, just like the real thing.

In time, the habit morphed from practice into just a friendly event, a chance for friends to get together and do something they love. Basically, a bunch of trivia geeks descend (literally) on the place, bringing packets of toss-ups and bonuses with which to quiz others. If someone is moved to create one, there can also be multimedia quizzes, with sound clips and video clips and so forth. It’s not required that you create a game to come to the party — it’s just that most of the time at the party is spent playing these games, so the more games, the more fun.

Leonard sets up the buzzer system, but there are no set teams — everybody just sits down kind of free-form at the beginning of each new game, and a general social etiquette makes sure that everybody gets a chance to play some. Whoever wrote the game moderates it, and people just sit themselves down on sides, 4 to a team. It is very casual and non-competitive. It starts around 1:00, and goes until the questions run out. Leonard serves lasagna and salad around dinnertime, and guests generally bring drinks and snacky stuff for everybody to munch.

And OH MY GOD IT IS SO MUCH FUN.

My first time there I felt a bit overawed by the whole thing. These were people who had known each other, many of them, for upwards of 30 years. They are very tight and very bright. Some of them have actually won life-changing amounts of money on game shows. I brought a game to my first Basement Bowl and acquitted myself reasonably well, but boy was I blown away at the speed and knowledge of the people in that room. It was amazing.

Well, I must have done something right, because I got invited back. And last Saturday, I attended my 10th one. Laura is always awesome about these, taking on Dante for the day. I try to pay her back in various ways, like when she wants to climb a 14er or attend a meditation seminar or something, but I definitely appreciate how supportive she is of my fun.

For my part, I’ve tried to keep improving in the material I create for the Bowl. I’ve created at least one regular game each time, as well as some other stuff — a music game and a geek game (covering stuff like D&D, Buffy, Internet memes, etc.) I print out sheets with visual clues for bonuses, like TV screengrabs, film stills, album covers, etc. I’ve done all-audio games, like a disc of 55 song clips from one-hit-wonders. Games like that are played as an all toss-up round, often with the top scorers getting some sort of prize. I’ve also branched into video, thanks to the wonderful DownloadHelper, and integrated quite a bit of multimedia into my regular games.

And that, three blog entries later, is what “Basement Bowl” means. Now to start writing the entry I intended to write in the first place. But first: The Geek Bowl!

Trivial Matters 2: Electric Boogaloo

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On January 25, 2011

In Uncategorized

In my last entry, I explained the structure of the trivia bowl, and talked about its history at CU. Before I continue, let me provide some answers to the questions I posed there:

Q: James Rado, Gerome Ragni, and Galt MacDermot were the writers behind what song medley, which won Record Of The Year, topped the charts for six weeks in 1969, and was the biggest hit in the 5th Dimension’s career?
Answer: “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In”

I’ll name a fictional computer from a movie, you name the movie, for ten points each.
1. MU-TH-R 182 model 2, the ship-board computer on the space ship Nostromo, known by the crew as ‘mother.’
Answer: Alien
2. Deep Thought, a computer created by a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings who look to us exactly like white mice.
Answer: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
3. EMERAC, a room-sized computer recently acquired by the Federal Broadcasting Network, whose worth is advocated by inventor Richard Sumner and doubted by reference librarian Bunny Watson.
Answer: Desk Set
4. WOPR, or War Operations Plan Response, a military simulator housed at NORAD.
Answer: Wargames

Now for my trivia autobiography (a redundant phrase, perhaps.) I grew up loving music, movies, and to a lesser extent, TV, as well as comics, theater, and the other sorts of topics that show up in the trivia bowl… except for sports. I was always a casual Bronco fan, but never somebody who could quote statistics or even name all the players. I enjoy seeing the games, but I never mind missing them either. I had a fling with baseball fandom for a couple of years, but then they went on strike and I got thoroughly disgusted with the whole thing.

As for basketball, hockey, NASCAR, golf, etc… don’t care. Never cared. I don’t mind watching tennis, and a bit of Olympics, but I only know the most surface facts about any of this stuff, if that. I do know a little about the WNBA and women’s soccer, thanks to Laura, but now that we have the Dante Distraction, soccer has left the limelight, and many of the WNBA games have moved over to some silly premium cable channel, so even that knowledge is pretty patchy.

Anyway, when I came to CU, I was only dimly aware of the trivia bowl, pretty much as “that thing that sounds kind of interesting but that I’m way too busy to do.” Finally, in 1993 my friend Robby told me that he knew a couple of teachers from our high school who wanted to field a team for the bowl, and asked me if I’d be interested. Robby was/is a total sports guy, as well as music and movies. Our mutual friend James covered TV, as well as some knowledge in all the other areas, and one of the teachers, Ron Hoover, was an absolute monster on old movies. So I said sure, and when we played our first game, wow. I still remember a visceral thrill from buzzing in on toss-ups before the question was finished, because I had such a strong feeling about the answer:

HOST: “Enya has had multiplatinum success with albums like Watermark, but before she–”
ME: BUZZ! “Clannad.”
HOST: “Clannad is correct.”

Whoo! Man, it was exciting. The other thing I remember is the fun of guessing on answers after the question had been read, if nobody else was buzzing in. Sometimes it even worked out:

HOST: “Who has the record for most guest appearances on The Love Boat?”
ME: [After a long pause in which it becomes clear that nobody is going to attempt this.] BUZZ. “Uh… Charo?”
HOST: “Yes, it is Charo!”

Our team actually won a game or two, but got blown out in the later rounds by more experienced and knowledgeable teams. There was a ceremony after the final game, and I was named Rookie Of The Year! Sadly, I had to work, so wasn’t able to accept in person. Even more sadly, 1993 was the final year of the trivia bowl. It is really a bummer to be Rookie Of The Year in the final year of something.

The whole event was dormant for a number of years, but when the CU Program Council brought it back in 2001, I knew I wanted to play. I got together a team of me, Robby, our mutual friend May from high school, and my friend Trish from work. Again, we did well in the early rounds and got stomped later, but that year I had an epiphany: these are my people. I attended every game I could (which was a lot — the tournament went all week, starting with 64 teams and narrowing down to two) and soaked the whole thing in. That was the year I officially fell in love with the trivia bowl.

Unfortunately, I was in the minority. The revival lasted one more year, in which our loss came to the team who went on to win the whole thing… a team led by Ed Toutant, the second biggest winner in the history of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. But attendance was anemic, and while the whole thing was super DUPER fun for me, it was a losing proposition for the Program Council, who pulled the plug in 2002.

After that, the event was held for a number of years in a much, much more scaled down form every fall. It was little conference rooms rather than the Glenn Miller Ballroom, with maybe 6-10 teams competing, no audio/video questions, and a more regimented quiz-bowly format which values strategy over entertainment. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — I made sure to play every year, and it was one of my favorite things, but it was a far cry from the heyday of it all. Now even that is gone, or at least it hasn’t been held for the last couple of years.

That smaller scale, though, enabled me to forge some relationships with trivia bowl “royalty” — the various Hall Of Famers who now moderate games and form a coterie whose history stretches back 30 or 40 years. One of these people, David Gatch, sort of took me under his wing a few years ago and got me invited to a very kooky event called the “Basement Bowl.”

…and that’s where part 3 will begin. But just to keep the trivia power flowing, here’s another toss-up and bonus.

Following in the footsteps of Anthony Michael Hall and Jason Lively, he played Rusty Griswold in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. More famously, he appeared as David Healey, Darlene’s boyfriend and eventual husband, in 92 episodes of Roseanne. Name this actor who currently stars as Dr. Leonard Hofstader on The Big Bang Theory.

In the 1960s, Marvel Comics loved to liven up its titles by throwing in an extra adjective. I’ll give you a comic book title, you fill in the missing adjective, for five points each.
1. The _____ Hulk
2. The _____ Spider-Man
3. The _____ Iron Man
4. The _____ X-Men
5. The _____ Thor
6. The _____ Ant-Man

Sword Of My Mouth

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On April 24, 2010

In Uncategorized

One of the people I met at PAX was Jim Munroe, an interactive fiction author who’s also a novelist, filmmaker, and comic book writer. (Other reviewers might switch the order of those accomplishments.) Jim’s IF works include Punk Points, which I’ve played, and Everybody Dies and Roofed, which I haven’t, since they came out while I was frozen.

Turns out that one of Jim’s current projects is Sword Of My Mouth, a graphic novel about life in Detroit after The Rapture, written by Munroe and illustrated by Shannon Gerard. The book is itself apparently a spinoff from Munroe’s earlier post-Rapture story with Salgood Sam, Therefore Repent!. Now, the first thing I think of when I hear “Post-Rapture story” is Left Behind, a series of 167 or so novels, products, and novel-like products. Although I have not read or viewed any of them them, I get the impression that they want me to get on board with being some specific kind of Christian, and think that if I don’t, I’m in for a scary time sometime soon here.

This does not seem to be Sword Of My Mouth‘s agenda. Instead, it treats the Rapture as a straight-up fantasy premise. In fact, several of the characters suspect that what’s happened to the world has nothing to do with God, and is instead a pretext for some kind of extradimensional invasion. Given that angels are slaughtering people in Chicago and have put New York under martial law, not to mention the fact that suddenly magic works, causing all kinds of unpredictable mutations and freaky phenomena, I think it’s a pretty convincing theory.

The book centers on Ella, a newly-single mother of a baby born after the Rapture, a completely normal infant except for his full set of adult teeth. She’s newly single because her ex, Andre, went to Chicago to join the anti-angel resistance movement. She’s adrift in a Detroit even more abandoned than it is now, and after some unfortunate events she finds herself part of a post-apocalyptic urban farmstead commune. It’s as idyllic a setting as there is to be had in this world, but it’s surrounded by roiling trouble: not just the angels and volatile magic, but cultists known as The Risen, and the unsettling appearance of Famine, a physical incarnation of one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The story’s world is imaginative and engrossing, with plenty of embedded bits that feel like they could launch books of their own. The supporting characters felt convincing and real to me, even the ones with fish scales, missing eyes, or big scary fangs. In fact, part of the way the book effectively leverages its format is by setting prosaic dialogue in the mouths of otherworldly-looking characters. The dialogue doesn’t have to make a big deal of the character’s appearance — the art does that — and consequently the people feel more down-to-earth and knowable than they would if they used more elevated diction.

The art itself eschews the typical comic panel format — there’s not a gutter to be seen. Instead, Gerard conveys action by drawing the same figure in several poses on the page, poses which usually read left-to-right and top-to-bottom to depict sequential events. The style takes a little getting used to, but I was surprised at how natural it soon felt. Drawings overlapping and flowing into each other evocatively echo the erosion of boundaries in the story’s milieu — now that magic works, you never know when something you say or think will have a physical effect in the world.

The lettering, on the other hand, was a distraction and a detraction from the story. I think it’s Gerard’s own lettering, having seen some of her other work, but it kept reminding me of Delirium from Sandman. The story would have been better served by using either digital fonts or just a less trippy handwritten style. As it was, all the characters sounded half-drunk in my head. Really, though, a comic is pretty good when my main complaint is about the lettering.

Well, actually I do have one more complaint: I thought the ending was too abrupt. That may have been a product of the fragmented way I ended up reading the story, but what it comes down to is that I thought the book ended too soon. The fact that I wanted to spend more time in Munroe and Gerard’s world tells you what you need to know about my response to this book.

(Full disclosure: Jim sent me an advance digital copy of the book when I expressed interest in writing about it.)

Young Liars

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On September 28, 2009

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Kristen Wiig plays a recurring character on Saturday Night Live named Judy Grimes, whose schtick is that she’s a travel expert, but gets much too nervous on air to give any travel tips. Instead, she just keeps negating herself, making a statement and then saying, “just kidding.” As the sketch winds up, she eventually dives into some rapid-fire, bravura, all-in-one-breath monologue along these lines:

I’m fine. Besides, I… can’t come back another time because I’m too busy — just kidding, I’m not busy — just kidding, I am but I don’t have any time for you — just kidding, I don’t know how to make time — just kidding, but I know how to make pies — just kidding, I don’t — just kidding, I do, and I’ll make one right now — just kidding, I can’t, because I don’t have a pan — just kidding, I do, but I gotta buy sugar — just kidding, I have what I need, but I don’t have a stove — just kidding, there’s a stove under here, it’s hot — ouch! — just kidding, there’s no stove under here, there’s one at my house, let’s go there right now — just kidding, we can’t all go together, it’s hard to travel in a group — just kidding, we can’t do it because my car’s not big enough — just kidding, we’re in right now, this whole studio’s my car — just kidding, it isn’t — just kidding, it is — beep, beep! Get out of my way! — just kidding, we’re not in my car — just kidding, I wrecked my car — just kidding, I ran into a tree — just kidding, it was a bush — just kidding, it was a man, he was very upset — just kidding, he laughed — just kidding, he died — just kidding, it was a dream — just kidding, it wasn’t a dream, it was a movie I rented — just kidding, I bought it, and now I regret it, it wasn’t very good — just kidding, it was okay — just kidding!

This is exactly the narrative structure of David Lapham’s Young Liars. Oh, it starts out coherent enough. There’s a great premise — a guy in love with a girl who has a bullet in her brain, which makes her utterly fearless, obedient but unpredictable, and constantly in danger of death. There’s a bevy of fun supporting characters. There’s a breathless, rock & roll aesthetic, which veers from extremes of violence to heartbreaking tenderness. There’s a bunch of compelling, plotty twists and turns, intriguing flashbacks, and dark foreshadowing, with a killer climax at the end of issue #6.

Unfortunately, it then goes on for 12 more issues.

In those issues, Lapham breaks down everything he’s built up over the first six to replace it with something else. And then he does it again. And again. And again. Oh, the next part of the story is Sadie’s coma dream. Just kidding, it’s real and she’s an alien from Mars. Just kidding, a different character is the alien. Just kidding, the narrator is a schizophrenic. Just kidding, he’s sane but he’s being manipulated by a conspiracy. Just kidding, the conspiracy is the aliens. Just kidding, the aliens are taking over the conspiracy. Just kidding, the aliens are just a metaphor for corporate takeover. Just kidding, the narrator is a liar. Just kidding, everybody’s a liar. Just kidding, this is all stories told by a psychotic washed-up rock star. Just kidding. Just kidding. Just kidding. The first time one of these shifts happens, it’s intriguing. Then it’s shocking and enthralling. Then it’s confusing. Then irritating. Then maddening. Then really, really boring.

I read all 18 issues of Young Liars in one day. Stray Bullets made me a fan of Lapham, so I decided to subscribe to YL, but my time is highly circumscribed, so the series started and ended before I began reading it. What this experience crystallized for me is that I deeply dislike this narrative structure. Don’t get me wrong — I dig some reality-bending in a story. It’s a great spice. What I do not dig is when the story’s basic reality gets fractured so often or so severely that I no longer know what the story’s basic reality even is anymore. If I go long enough with no idea what is real, it turns out I really no longer care what is real, and the whole thing gets much less interesting. Plus, I completely lose faith that interesting plot danglers from early on are going to be paid off in any coherent way.

I read a great dissection of Heroes, which very accurately described it as a narrative Ponzi scheme, constantly borrowing from the future to disguise the fact that it’s actually based on nothing. This is Young Liars‘ problem as well. Between this, the disappointing run on Detective Comics, and the indefinite cessation of Stray Bullets (along with my vanished faith that that series will ever draw its strands together), I think I’m done with David Lapham now. He’s a fantastic stylist, but it turns out I’m only impressed by that when it’s paired with good storytelling.

Watchmen

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On March 21, 2009

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I’ve just seen Watchmen again, this time in IMAX, and now I think I’m ready to write about it. There are a number of people (say, for example, Adam) who found the Watchmen graphic novel to be one of the best things ever. I do not fall into this group. Don’t get me wrong — I love Alan Moore, and I liked the book very much, but I didn’t find it overwhelmingly compelling and revelatory in the way that some people do. To me it felt like a good, well-written story that resisted superhero clichés in some interesting ways. A solid B or B+.

Now, I think there were a couple of things working against me at the time I read it. One was the fact that I read it in the mid-90s rather than the mid-80s. By that time, various aspects of it had been frequently imitated in various ways, and what was revolutionary and groundbreaking about it no longer seemed so.

Laura has a story about being assigned Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in a college class, and complaining to the professor, “These guys write in such a clichéd style, it’s driving me crazy!” To which her professor of course replied, “No, no, see, these guys invented this style. It was their thousands of imitators who turned it into a cliché.” Well, I had a bit of the Hammett/Chandler effect going when I read Watchmen, even though intellectually I understood that Moore was the originator. His ideas just couldn’t have the same impact on me that they would have had if I’d read them first.

My other disadvantage is the fact that the book is so highly and universally praised. Reading something after hearing bunches of people call it The Most Awesome Thing Ever I Mean Ever can hardly help but be a slightly disappointing experience. It’s the expectation theory.

Well, having read quite a bit of the press around the movie and how it compares to the book, I think it’s safe to say that I missed entire layers of that book in my first reading. I’d really love to reread the graphic novel, perhaps with some kind of Annotated Watchmen alongside it. (Okay Watchmen book, go stand over there in the line marked “to read.” Yes, I know there are 112 books in the line. Hey, I pick randomly from the group, so maybe you’ll get lucky.) Like the book, I think the movie benefits from repeated viewings. I know I was catching things this time around that completely passed me by on the first viewing. However, my overall opinion remains the same, which is that it is a very enjoyable superhero movie, with a great story, some excellent writing, magnificent visuals, and a couple of sublime performances, but it is also significantly flawed in certain ways.

*** Spoilers after this point ***

The first of these is that it is far too much in love with violence, which leads it to undermine one of its story’s main points. From almost the first moment of the movie, characters are punching through solid walls and withstanding beatings that would stagger a rhino, not to mention performing phenomenal feats of strength and speed. Watching these fights, it is impossible to believe that these people are not somehow enhanced, and the fact that the so-called superheroes are not enhanced (with the notable exception of Dr. Manhattan) is supposed to be crucial to the story. In addition, some of those fights are gratuitously gory — I was really tired of seeing people’s bones broken by the end of this film. Another flaw, though one far less in director Zack Snyder’s control, is that the main source of tension in the narrative is the idea of impending nuclear war between the US and the USSR, an idea which has lost most of its emotional resonance today. Viewed as a period piece (despite the fact that it’s set in an alternate universe, it still operates as a period piece), it’s fine. Then again, as huskyscotsman points out, the Doomsday Clock is at five minutes to midnight now, so maybe I’m just far too complacent.

Some people have faulted Snyder for hewing too closely to the source material, but that’s actually one of the things I enjoyed the most about Watchmen. The movie lifts entire scenes, dialogue intact, from the comic, which means that much of its dialogue is quite a bit better than that of the average superhero movie. In addition, it was quite wonderful to see these characters and this world brought to life so faithfully. I don’t know whether somebody who hadn’t read the book would react adversely, but for me it was the thrill of seeing static images come to life. The entire visual atmosphere of the movie is outstanding. The color palette is exactly what it should be, Rorschach’s mask looks perfect, Dr. Manhattan’s glow is just right.

Oh, and I think the opening credits sequence is one of the best I’ve seen in any movie, ever. It manages to pack in an enormous amount of exposition about the characters and their world, all without any dialogue. It does this via a series of striking images which are both reference-heavy (Silk Spectre I’s retirement dinner as Last Supper; Silhouette taking the sailor’s place in the famous V-J day kiss) and highly interconnected (flashbulbs, historical recreations), something that captures the Alan Moore spirit exquisitely. It mixes humor and horror, often within moments of each other, and manages to tell a poignant story of forty-five years in just five minutes. Masterful.

Speaking of masterful, and of Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan, those two characters get the best performances of the film. Billy Crudup’s voice work captures his character’s not-quite-detachment completely, and Jackie Earle Haley is freaking phenomenal every moment he’s on screen as Rorschach. In some moments, he manages to convey enormous emotions from behind a mask, just using his body, his voice, and the shape of his face beneath the fabric. Once the mask is off, he’s even more powerful.

Then there’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He certainly nails the character of The Comedian, but that character has always puzzled me. Watchmaniacs, please be patient while I plod through my thought process, and keep in mind it’s been like 15 years since I read the book. So here you have a milieu of heightened, explicit symbolism. Doctor Manhattan is both a genius and a living nuclear weapon. Nite Owl has big goggles, and a bunch of owl-themed gadgets. Rorschach sees the world in black and white, and his “face” is made up of moving black blobs on a white field. And so on. In this world, you have a character called The Comedian, who is never funny, and never makes a joke. Sure, he laughs a lot, but it’s a bitter, cynical kind of laugh. In fact, he’d be more appropriately called The Cynic. It’s not because the story lacks for humor, either. I mean, yeah, it’s a dark story, but there are certainly plenty of comedic moments. Heck, even Rorschach gets off a bunch of good one-liners in the prison scenes. So the character whose theme is comedy is in fact the least funny, and the most horrifying, at least on a personal level.

Nobody seems to comment on this, except for Rorschach, who claims that The Comedian “saw the true face of the 20th century and chose to become a reflection of it, a parody of it.” Except, as I said, he’s not funny. Now, I know that comedy and horror are not strangers, and I understand that exaggeration is a comical tool, so is The Comedian’s over-the-top repulsiveness a comic exaggeration of human savagery? I would argue that it is not. Comedy, even brutal satire, works because it has a moral center, an oppositional point of view. It may shock, it may exaggerate, and it may distort, but it does not simply personify or repeat. It works toward healing, or at least toward tearing down the things it opposes, not amplifying them. The Comedian is more like a parody of a parody — where a parody would exaggerate in order to show ridiculousness, he exaggerates but without questioning. Where a parody would personify human savagery in order to decry it, he personifies human savagery because, well, he kinda digs it. In fact, it’s completely unclear why he’s even a superhero at all. The closest hint we get is when Hooded Justice is attacking him for his attempted rape of Silk Spectre I. “Is this what gets you off?” he asks, while receiving a beating. Maybe it takes one to know one.

That smiley face icon is strangely appropriate for him, if we take it as the ultimate symbol of empty cheer. If the smiley in culture is an attempt to pretend that the darkness doesn’t exist, it’s sledgehammer irony to put it on the darkest character in the book. In Watchmen, that illusion can’t sustain itself. It’s bloodstained. Just as it repudiates the emptiness of cheerful Golden Age superheroes, just as it takes an extremely dim view of human nature, arguing that the only cure for warfare is a common enemy, so must it mutilate the icon of simpleminded sunniness. In itself, I don’t know that this subversion of cheery fantasy is a bad thing, but I’m not sure I agree with the so-called reality that replaces it. In my real world, humor can be a healing force. In Watchmen, there aren’t many of those kind of laughs around, whether or not The Comedian is dead.

Words I Learned From Comics

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On November 6, 2008

In Uncategorized

Today’s installment focuses on some of the vocabulary I’ve gained from my lifelong enthusiasm for comics. I’ve been a Marvel comics reader since I was six years old, as well as an aficionado of newspaper strips, Mad magazine (in my tweens/teens, anyway), graphic novels, and these days, webcomics.

  • corsair: A pirate.
    [The X-Man Cyclops was originally written as an orphan, but in the 70s, Chris Claremont decided to reintroduce Cyclops’s father as Corsair, the leader of a band of space pirates. Space pirates! Cosmic freebooters! (I may have learned freebooter from this source as well.)]
  • defenestrate: To throw something or someone out of a window.
    [Early in Peter David’s hilarious and satisfying run on X-Factor (issue #71 to be exact), the musclebound mutant known as Strong Guy says this: “I’m watcha call ‘sensitive.’ ‘Course, some blork got a problem with that… then I’ll defenestrate him.” When I looked this up, I was delighted to discover that English has a special word just for throwing somebody out a window. What a great language.]
  • effendi: A Middle Eastern term for a respected man.
    [Stan Lee has an abiding love for unusual, colorful words. When he developed the editorial personality of Marvel, he was known to run wild with the alliteration, producing news column headings along the lines of “A Cacophonous Collection Of Captivating Capsule Comments Calculated To Corral Your Consciousness!” He also instilled certain linguistic tics, one of which was the frequent use of “effendi”, as in, “Don’t worry, effendi, we’ll catch you up on the plot as we go!”]
  • excelsior: Ever upward.
    [And then there’s the most iconic Lee-ism of all. Stan used to write a column in the comics called “Stan’s Soapbox,” in which he expounded about whatever was on his mind or, more often, whatever new product the company was about to offer. He ended each column with an enthusiastic “Excelsior!” (I had to consciously work not to put exclamation points on the word and definition above.) Apparently, this is also the Latin motto of New York state.]
  • hoary: Extremely old.
    [Another place where Lee’s logophilia was allowed to run wild was in the arcane incantations of Dr. Strange. There were plenty of words to learn from these, so I chose one arbitrarily, from the frequently-invoked “Hoary Hosts Of Hoggoth.”]
  • invincible: Impossible to defeat.
    [To punch up his titles, Stan would throw an adjective before the hero’s name on the cover: “The Amazing Spider-Man” or “The Mighty Thor”. In the case of “The Incredible Hulk,” the adjective has practically become part of the character’s name. With “The Invincible Iron Man,” the adjective was new to my 7-year-old self. There’s another one of those coming later.]
  • katzenjammer: Loud, chaotic noise.
    [It wasn’t just Marvel comics that taught me new words. My interest in them led me to scour the library for whatever I could find about comics history, and in the process I ran across The Katzenjammer Kids, a comic strip from the early 20th century. I figured out later that Katzenjammer was not only the name of the strip’s central characters, it was a descriptor of them as well.]
  • martinet: A strict, pitiless disciplinarian.
    [I was a huge fan of Chris Claremont’s New Mutants series in the early 80s, and read those issues over and over. That must be why whole phrases from them still stick in my mind, 25 years after my first reading. For instance, in New Mutants #7, when the team thinks one of its teammates has died in an explosion, Professor X sends them on vacation rather than having them search for her. A couple of X-Men question his decision, and he explains that the entity who caused the explosion is too dangerous for the young team: “For the moment, it is best they think Shan dead — and me a heartless martinet. They may hate me, but at least they’ll be alive.”]
  • mutant: An organism whose genetic makeup is unique due to a spontaneous change in DNA.
    [The word “mutant” itself was new to me when I first started reading about the X-Men in Son Of Origins Of Marvel Comics. According to Lee, he wanted to call the book The Mutants, but was shot down by his publisher Martin Goodman, who insisted that younger readers (what Lee calls “the bubble-gum brigade”) wouldn’t understand the word and would avoid the book. Given that I was a member of that very brigade at the time I was reading, I’m pretty sure Goodman was wrong.]
  • picayune: Trivial; petty.
    [Here’s another one from a newspaper strip, this time Bloom County, whose in-universe newspaper was the Bloom Picayune. One of the strip’s paperback collections even included a sample copy.]
  • prehensile: Able to grasp or hold things.
    [Lee isn’t the only one with tics. Chris Claremont would use the same phrases over and over, such as calling the X-Men “occasionally outlaw superheroes.” One of his favorites was to constantly remind us that Nightcrawler‘s tail is prehensile, allowing him to grab things with it.]
  • ragnarok: The apocalypse, or “Doom of the gods”, in Norse mythology, in which deities clash and destroy the universe.
    [Stan explicitly embraced mythology, going so far as to make a superhero out of Thor, the Norse god of thunder. (That Thor spoke mainly in Elizabethan English is a mystery I will not attempt to unravel here.) In adopting Thor, he brought in not only a huge supporting cast from the Norse myths, but many of their plot points as well. Thor and his fellow gods have been through many a Marvel ragnarok over the last 40 years.]
  • rapport: Sympathetic connection between people, marked by the sharing of perspectives.
    [Claremont liked to lean on this word to describe close relationships with one or more telepaths involved, whether it be Cyclops and Jean Grey or Dani Moonstar and Rahne Sinclair.]
  • revanche: Revenge; retaliation.
    [During the 1990s, X-Men continuity got so baffling that I pretty much disengaged from most of it. At some point during that period, Fabian Nicieza created a character called Revanche, whose most interesting quality was her vocabulary-enriching name.]
  • sobriquet: A descriptive nickname.
    [This one was another Lee-ism, as in, “He calls himself Mr. Fantastic, a swingin’ sobriquet if there ever was one!”]
  • tatterdemalion: A person wearing ragged, tattered clothing.
    [A minor supervillain in the Marvel Universe, Tatterdemalion lived up to his name with a ragged, tattered costume.]
  • telepathy: The ability to read minds and/or project one’s thoughts.
    [Keep in mind, I was quite young when I started reading comics. It was my first encounter with the idea of psychic powers — when Charles Xavier was described as “telepathic,” I had to look it up. Along this line, I also learned telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and other such words for mentally derived superpowers.]
  • uncanny: Eerie, unsettling, bizarre; seemingly supernatural in origin.
    [Like “The Invincible Iron Man”, “The Uncanny X-Men” introduced me to a brand new and very spiffy adjective.]
  • whimsy: Fanciful, illogical, quaint.
    [My memory of this one is fuzzy — it was in some humor magazine, probably a Mad knockoff like Cracked or Crazy. In its table of contents, it contained an expressive row of faces demonstrating various moods of humor, such as satire, drollery, and whimsy. I don’t remember anything else about the magazine, but I do remember that captivating word.]

Sometimes you get not just one brand new word but a whole string of them thrown at you. For those, I am awarding a COMBO SCORE, and I am pleased to give the first one to Avengers #93:

  • Poltroon! Craven recreant!: Coward! Cowardly coward!
    [See, the Super-Skrull is fighting the Vision, and the Vision decides to flee rather than continue the fight. Because the Vision can pass through walls, the Super-Skrull can’t give chase, and so he shouts this in frustration at the fleeing android. It’s the kind of moment that makes me love those early Marvels.]

Also, I should give extra credit to Chris Claremont for teaching me a variety of foreign words. One of Claremont’s enduring mannerisms was to make sure we were constantly reminded of each character’s nationality by either transliterating that character’s speech (e.g. “I dinna ken what ye mean, Dani!”) or peppering it with foreign phrases, or, most often, both. Consequently, Japanese characters were always hissing that Wolverine was “gaijin” (foreigner), Colossus was constantly exclaiming “boizhe moi!” (my God!) and so on.

500 issues of Spider-Man

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On October 13, 2005

In Uncategorized

Last year, Marvel released a set of CD-ROMs containing the first 500 issues of Amazing Spider-Man digitized into PDF format, along with the character’s debut in Amazing Fantasy #15. This set differs from previous reprints in that the entire issues were scanned — letter columns, Bullpen Bulletins (I’ll explain in a second), ad pages, and all. I received the set as an Easter gift, and geek that I am, I proceeded to read them all. I finished in September. Here’s some of what I learned from reading 40 years’ worth of comics in the space of a few months:

The Bullpen Bulletins tell a story of their own. For those of you uninitiated into the Marvel mystique, Bullpen Bulletins are a page that appears (or, rather, used to appear) in most every Marvel comic. They’re kind of a combination of company newsletter, editorial page, and shameless hype machine. Part of the charm of Marvel’s approach, at least for the first part of its existence, is the way that it tried to humanize both its creators and itself as a company. This is evident in things like the innovation of displaying credits at the beginning of each comic (as opposed to the anonymity creators suffered in earlier eras), but it shines most clearly in the Bulletins. At least once a year, sometimes much more, the page would detail some editorial reshuffling that had occurred at the company, explaining in painstaking detail who’d changed offices, who’d moved on to freelancing, who’d been promoted, and so on. Why should we care about such internal company activities? Because we’re part of the Marvel family, that’s why! For a long stretch in the ’80s, each bulletin boasted a “Pro File”, wherein a Marvel staffer would answer a questionnaire along the lines of “My greatest ambition in the comics industry is:” and “People who knew me in High School thought I was:”. Frequently, the page would contain a “Stan’s Soapbox” section, where Stan Lee would dispense some of his thoughts about life, answer questions from readers, or (far more often) shill for the company’s latest product.

To read the Bulletins page through the years is to watch the waves of hype swell and recede. In the beginning, the page consisted of rather naive, personal communiques, to be replaced by the hard sell in the ’70s. The ’80s reign of Editor In Chief Jim Shooter meant that the hype got contained to a small section called (appropriately) “The Hype Box”, while the rest of the page contained lame gags, softball scores, and grainy pictures from the company Christmas party. Bullpen Bulletins in the ’90s were mainly slick advertisements for upcoming art and (to a far lesser extent) storylines, reflecting the dominance of the artist during that era. In fact, it wasn’t just one page anymore — Marvel comics suddenly featured huge spreads hawking the latest Big Thing. Finally, in the last few years, the page has disappeared altogether, due in part to the sudden prominence of the Internet as the primary channel for company communications.

Today’s pro is yesterday’s letterhack. Along with the Bullpen Bulletins, these scans offered the pleasure of The Spider’s Web, Amazing‘s longtime letter column. Marvel’s evolution is on display here too. In the early days, they gushingly offer free subscriptions to servicemen, non-Americans, and people who say really nice things. They also give out plenty of “no-prizes”, a clever non-award to acknowledge fan contributions and corrections without actually spending any money. When they admit a mistake, it’s with great self-deprecation, expressing amazement that they only made a dozen errors rather than a thousand. As the years went on, the free subscriptions dried up and the no-prize policy got much stricter, demanding that fans only point out substantive mistakes, and that those who find a mistake also find a way to explain it away. Of course, the tighter policy is understandable in the face of thousands of letters saying things like, “In issue #167, on page 2, panel 4, the I in Spidey’s dialogue balloon really looks more like a T. Please send me a no-prize.” Then again, Marvel rather haplessly encouraged this kind of behavior when it introduced a “credentials” system that allowed no-prize winners to list spiffy-looking initials after their names when they write in.

Probably the most fun aspect of reading the old lettercols was the regular appearance of people who made big names for themselves in comics well after their letters were published. From Steve Gerber to Evan Dorkin, dozens of future comics professionals first poked their heads into view by writing a letter to Spider-Man. You can sometimes even see a hint of what’s to come, as when Gerber shows an early flair for boundary-testing by suggesting that Spidey team up with Millie The Model, from Marvel’s “girly” line. Probably the least fun aspect of the letters are the boneheaded and/or bloodthirsty suggestions people make in them. There’s usually at least one letter demanding that somebody be killed off, and at least one opining that the story should go in some ridiculous direction like Peter joining the Army or Norman Osborn getting resurrected. (Oh, whoops. That last one actually happened. Maybe the bonehead who wrote that letter went on to become a comics pro.)

There’s a coming-of-age story between the lines. The Bulletins and letters pages both tell stories of growth and change, but that story is most apparent when reading these extra materials in conjunction with the stories themselves. The explosion of early creativity at Marvel is legendary — in the space of a few years Lee, Kirby, and Ditko created the Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, the Avengers, the X-Men, Iron Man, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, and many more heroes, not to mention all the villains and groundbreaking storylines. During this time, Marvel seems constantly amazed at its own success. When a radio DJ somewhere in the country would mention Marvel comics on the air, a Bullpen Bulletins page would proudly announce the fact, marveling at how their sleepy little company was garnering the attention of the “mass media.” When the first t-shirts and merchandise appeared, emblazoned with Spider-Man and the other Marvel heroes, the ad copy almost boggles at the fact, much as I might if people were suddenly buying t-shirts with my picture on them. All in all, it feels innocent and childlike, all wild imagination and gee-whiz enthusiasm. Then, as its prosperity continued, the company settled into a long fertile period of superhero creativity, even as it continually tried (with limited success) to expand its comics into romance, horror, science fiction, and one movie adaptation after another. The first real seeds of trouble in the superhero realms appeared in the ’80s, with a massive crossover event called “Secret Wars.” The story removed every major Marvel hero from their regular storylines, transporting them to a “battle planet” where they fought all the big-time supervillains. It was a one-dimensional action figure fantasy. It lobotomized every character, squashing them into caricatures of themselves. It sold like gangbusters. (I’m as guilty as anybody — I own a complete set of not only Secret Wars but its abysmal sequel.)

From that time, Marvel began an accelerating decline into the sordid life of the gimmick junkie. In just a few years, comic-store shelves overflowed with holograms, inserted trading cards, die-cut covers, endless crossovers, multi-part stories requiring the purchase of separate titles, and on and on. The lovable kid company was suddenly a troubled adolescent who’d fallen in with the wrong crowd. What’s worse, the ascendancy of the marketing department had disastrous effects on the actual stories being told, which I’ll discuss a little more in the next item. Meanwhile, Marvel itself was spiraling into bankruptcy, driven by the collapse of a collector’s speculative “bubble” and by the greed and misjudgment of then-owner Ron Perelman. Reading these comics felt like watching a steadily increasing corruption of innocence. There’s a happy ending to this story, though, or at least I think there is. When Joe Quesada became Editor-In-Chief of Marvel, he presided over an increase in quality and a decrease in gimmicky crap. That is not to say that Marvel’s quality is now uniformly high, nor that gimmickry is entirely gone, but things are much, much better than they were ten years ago. The company is now like a college student, its stupid days fewer and farther between as it finds its adult identity.

My dream job has just as much dysfunctional office crap as my real job. Probably more. In my opinion (and there’s a fair amount of consensus on this), the creative nadir of Amazing Spider-Man was the horrendously complicated and unbelievably bloated “Clone Saga.” This story stretched, astonishingly, over two years (1994-1996) and dozens of issues. It was a sequel of sorts to a plotline from 20 years earlier, in which a supervillain called The Jackal clones both Peter Parker and his dead first love, Gwen Stacy, resulting in a number of reader fakeouts before a big “Spidey vs. himself” battle. The clone dies at the end of this battle, and Spider-Man incinerates its remains in an industrial furnace. Or so it would appear. This first story was kind of stupid, but at least it only lasted a few issues. The Clone Saga brought back the Peter Parker clone, revealing that it had never really died after all, but instead had hit the road and established a separate identity as “Ben Reilly,” only returning to New York upon somehow finding out that Aunt May was ailing (as if that were somehow a new state of affairs.) That was the beginning. From there, surprising endings, bizarre revelations, and freak twists piled upon each other in ascending order of absurdity. By the time the whole thing had wrapped up there were at least three different Peter Parker clones and two different Spider-Men; Peter and Mary Jane’s fetal daughter had suffered either a stillbirth, an infanticide, or a kidnapping (it’s never made definitively clear); Aunt May was dead (killed off in an emotional issue whose story was later to be totally overturned); and Norman Osborn was alive (Norman was the original Green Goblin, whose death had occurred in a classic, landmark 1972 issue, an issue whose power was respected for 23 years before being trampled upon by an army of clones.) Most egregious of all, Reilly was revealed to have been the real Peter Parker all along, which meant that the guy we’d been reading about, rooting for, and empathizing with for the last twenty years was suddenly drained of legitimacy. My friend Trish aptly compared this revelation to those TV shows where we suddenly discover that the last three seasons have all been a dream or a drug trip or something.

Reading these issues is an exercise in frustration, not least because so many of them are just story fragments. See, Marvel was publishing four different Spider-Man titles at the time, and marketing figured out that if you published a four-part story with one part in each title, everybody’s sales would go up. Nevermind the fact that scattering a story across multiple writers and artists made for a less-than-satisfying reading experience, or that people who just subscribed to one title could never possibly follow what the heck was going on. Succor came for me in the form of a 35-part series of articles about the Clone Saga, published on the web by Andrew Goletz and Glenn Greenberg. This series, titled “The Life of Reilly”, does an invaluable service by summarizing the action in the many clone issues I don’t own, but the behind-the-scenes information it provides is even better. Goletz is a fan writer, but Greenberg actually worked at Marvel during the clone era, editing and writing several of the involved books. His comments illuminate a wretched tale of editorial turnover, meddling, and mismanagement, paired with increasing corporate greed and rudderlessness. The story was originally intended to span only a few issues, but as those initial issues were published, Marvel’s owners restructured all of its editorial departments, eliminating the position of Editor-In-Chief and replacing it with five different “group editors.” The clone story (not yet a saga) got stretched a bit, the plot treading water during this transition. However, marketing noticed that those first issues had sold like crazy, and issued marching orders to the editorial side: “More clones!” From there, things spiraled horribly out of control as writers, editors, and marketeers all struggled against each other and their predecessors, creating an unfixable, irredeemable garbage heap of a story.

When the whole thing finally petered out (uh, no pun intended), the Reilly revelation was overturned and the original Peter Parker restored in a book emphatically retitled “Peter Parker: Spider-Man.” But the damage was done. New Editor-In-Chief (yeah, the position was reinstated) Bob Harras, who comes off as quite the jackass in “Life Of Reilly”, had finally shoved through a series of catastrophically bad decisions that ended the Clone Saga to the satisfaction of virtually no one. Reading these comics in conjunction with Greenberg’s insider comments was very instructive for me. See, it’s easy to fall into a mental trap about work, the belief that a job that holds particular appeal will also lack everything that’s unappealing about other jobs. Not true. It might be my dream job to write Spider-Man, but at least if I were doing it during the ’90s, it would still be terribly frustrating, rife with just as much bureaucratic chaos and boneheaded management as any other corporate job.

This comicbook is recyclable. When Peter Parker decided to give up being Spider-Man in issue #50, it was a great story and a landmark moment in the comic, one that still gets respect 35 years later (as evidenced by its reverential treatment in the second Spider-Man movie.) Every subsequent time he decides to discard his superheroic identity is progressively sillier and less powerful. The thing is, at this point, we know he’s coming back. Even in the Clone Saga, when the writers really did intend to banish Peter Parker for good, it didn’t happen. It will never happen, at least not as long as Spider-Man is being published. There is really no benefit to pursuing that plotline, and yet it crops up over and over again. Reading 500 issues of Spider-Man all in a row really demonstrates how much idea recycling some writers do. I’m not talking about the simple reappearance of certain villains, or even about thematic elements like the Daily Bugle persecuting an innocent Spidey. That kind of repetition can actually be welcome, since the reappearance of certain characters over a decades-long story can be powerful, as long as there’s some feeling of difference between this appearance and the last one. Similarly, repetition is what makes a theme a theme, though variations on a theme are even more satisfying. Less satisfying are literal plot repetitions. Mary Jane has a stalker at least twice. Aunt May is dead, then alive, multiple times. I’ve lost track of how many Spider-Women there have been. Is it just that there are no new ideas left after all these years? Certainly not — current writer J. Michael Straczynski keeps pushing the series into new and interesting areas. Which brings me to my last point…

For me, it’s all about the writer. Reading comics from the ’80s and ’90s reminds me what a big deal artists are to some people. I’m not wired that way. Sure, the art has an effect on me — sometimes positive, sometimes negative. I can recognize and appreciate the creative contributions of certain artists, like Steve Ditko’s wild designs, John Romita’s polished romanticism, or Todd McFarlane’s very spidery take on Spider-Man’s action poses. On the flip side, bad art can certainly ruin a story for me — if I never see another comicbook woman with breasts the size of her head, it’ll be too soon. Even so, I’m a word person. I come to music for the lyrics. I come to interactive fiction for the writing. And I come to comics for the stories. That means that no matter who the artist is, when I read something by a really good Spidey writer, I’ll probably enjoy it. Conversely, no amount of great art can save a terrible story, which is bad news for people like Howard Mackie. So, in that spirit, here are my top five favorite writers and their major contributions to Amazing, in case you’d like to seek out the best stuff rather than read every single freaking issue:

  • Stan Lee: Of course. #1-#118
  • Gerry Conway: Death of Gwen Stacy and the Green Goblin, as well as some other seminal stuff. #111-#149
  • Roger Stern: The Hobgoblin and some very solid ’80s stories. #206-#252
  • J.M. DeMatteis: Kraven’s Last Hunt and some of the only good characterization done during a rather dire era. #293, #294, #389-#406
  • J. Michael Straczynski: At last, Spidey is funny and thrilling again. #471-#524, and still going. Note that #471-#499 are numbered as volume 2, #30-#58 for reasons too annoying to explain.

Those are just writers who’ve contributed to Amazing — others deserving honorable mention are Brian Michael Bendis (Ultimate Spider- Man), Chris Claremont (some great mid-period Marvel Team-Ups and others), and Kurt Busiek (Untold Tales of Spider-Man).

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