It's funny how these entries have built on one another. Monday we took a look at Golgo 13, who is about as basic badass as you can get--everything he does is awesome if not superhuman and he has absolutely no character . . .and that's all purely intentional. Yesterday it was Diabolik's turn, and he's got much the same sort of storytelling engine as Golgo 13.
Today we look at a character who's explicitly referencing Diabolik: Grendel.
The first one, specifically. Hunter Rose.
Like Diabolik and Golgo 13, Hunter is an assassin, and a great one. Like Diabolik, he's also superhumanly brilliant, physically gifted, and cunning, although in Hunter's case it has more to do with that old standby of pseudo-science "increased brain capacity" and all that. But it's certainly an evolution of the concept, as we'll hopefully see.
On the surface, Hunter screams "Mary Sue" from every mountaintop. Mind, he also screams "This was a character the author made when he was nineteen." Let's see--gifted but shunned by society, rises to brilliance, unbeatable yet not superhuman, can get away with a mullet as an adult, banged an older woman . . .yeah, you wouldn't think this would work necessarily.
But at the beginning, it's style as substance--the story gains its power and the reader's interest through how it's presented. Ignoring the first four black and white issues and looking at Devil By The Deed, it handles an essentially problematic character by inserting a distancing mechanism in the storytelling--Matt Wagner doesn't have to worry about Hunter being interesting or relatable, because he's built a self-contained storyline, told as a recounting of his infamous life. In addition to making the storytelling engine function smoothly, it also lays the track for the longevity of the concept: "anyone can be Grendel."
But that's a topic for later. Hunter is the odd man out when it comes to the Grendel lineage, as he's so rooted to conventions of the past (whatever else you may say about it, when Grendel returned as a new series, it never long returned to the somewhat more conventional tone of the early Hunter stuff) which don't really carry forward with the later Grendels. Meanwhile, here Hunter is, straddling the middle ground between noirish crime story and Batman villain (indeed, in Batman/Grendel he rather explicitly walks a line between master manipulator and costumed menace. And not badly either, I should say.) Hunter stays on the shelf for the most part as Grendel develops as a title and a concept. Where's the need for him to be there--the conception has changed into something quite different.
When Wagner returns to Hunter later on, his conception of the character's changed. The last of the superhero-esque trappings and all are gone. They're more noirish crime stories, by and large, and they have a far more brutal edge than before. Our distancing mechanism is still in place, of course, but the purpose for it has changed, mostly because the author's attitude towards Hunter has changed.
Hunter is less the extraordinary golden boy, motivated by extraordinary gifts and boredom to a life of crime into something inhuman, evil, and merciless--a bit Hannibal Lector-ish, actually. Held up to his previous portrayal, it's as if Wagner had much more misgivings about what he was doing 25 years later--so often what we think is cool when we're 19 is a bit puerile and adolescent later on. So Hunter is a horrible person that we are expected to have no sympathy with at all--Wagner's actually said as much in interviews.
Unfortunately, this new approach doesn't make for terribly compelling reading. For two reasons.
One, we know how the story ends, if we've read Devil by the Deed. This means nothing substantial is going to happen without being negated by the end of the story or revealed as filigree for the larger plot, and therefore meaningless--if we'd needed to know it, we would have heard about it by now.
Being that these new stories are obvious filigree, they're also pretty repetitive--Grendel ruins someone's life, or kills someone, or Stacy fumes and gets a little bit crazier, setting up the important stuff we've read elsewhere.
There's a lesson here in going to the well once too often I'd imagine. It's probably the nature of the beast--Grendel works best as an ever-evolving concept that continually moves forward at a fever pitch--revisiting any chapter of it carries the risk of bogging the momentum down, which fundamentally damages the storytelling engine.
Next Time: I . . .have no idea. I'll think of something.
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79 comments:
You're absolutely right re: the distant point of view in "Devil by the Deed" - but I think that aspect was lost altogether when Wagner went back to the character. Because from that point on we started seeing events from Hunter's own point of view, and that - coupled with Wagner's determination to make him thoroughly, utterly unlikeable - pretty much stripped the character of his appeal.
Also, I'm not entirely comfortable about designating Hunter Rose as a Mary Sue: Wagner does, after all, kill him in a fairly undignified way (outschemed and blind-sided by a child, and a girl at that). I think that's part of the joke of "Devil by the Deed": as Grendel, Hunter projects an air of omniscience and omnipotence, but in the end he dies as easily as any of his victims.
I'm also reasonably certain that Hunter and Christine are the only genuine anti-heroes in the Grendel saga... Brian and Eppy were insane, which tends to move them outside that particular category, and I think Wagner means for us to see Orion and Prime as benevolent (if "hardcore") heroes.
Well, as to him being a Mary Sue, I'd kinda say he is, if only because he's utterly infallible until that moment and I always wondered if it was just a desperate swerve on Wagner's part that Stacy was responsible for his downfall. It's just a theory, anyways.
Because other than that, man he gets off scot free awful lot, yes?
Agreed about Christine being the other great anti-hero of the story, though I'd still lean toward giving Eppy anti-hero status because he was opposing something even worse despite being mad as a balloon.
If he is a Mary Sue, he's rather unique in that his author eventually rejected him: given the way Hunter Rose is currently written, I seriously doubt Wagner sees him as any kind of extension/projection of himself.
Isn't that a narrative constraint, though? Another reason all these Hunter stories haven't done much good: we already know he never gets caught. So each successive tale of bloodshed and mayhem just stretches credibility further. "Devil by the Deed" dealt with Grendel's ascension in a page or two, and segued right into Barry Palumbo's party (which is where we start to see Hunter's plans unraveling) - the best way to do it, honestly, because you don't really get to see Grendel as this all-knowing, almost-prescient force.
I guess it depends on your definition: the Church is clearly an evil and corrupt institution, so Eppy's war against it is justified, but his motivations are somewhat less coherent than Christine's (especially given that at this point, we start to get hints of the "Grendel-Force" possibility).
Well, yeah, but he only rejected him later. Think about it--Devil By The Deed presents him as "oh, he could have done so much if he hadn't been bored and turned to evil out of idle meanness" compared with Behold the Devil, where it's "well, he's an inhuman, immoral bastard." I'd say the comparison pretty much proves the later rejection.
Well, I think I mentioned somewhere else that the only progressing storyline involving your intensely brilliant master criminal is the one wherein he gets caught (Lupin III rather punches holes in this, but it's a special case. And also, a comedy.)And really, I think Devil By The Deed is pretty much that, isn't it?
True, but as we said in another comment thread, it's one of those dynamics in which the nominal hero is such only because he's slightly less morally questionable than the opposition.
And Wagner really drove that point home ad nauseum in the later stories - that Hunter was utterly, irredeemably evil, that his greatest moment of humanity (adopting Stacy) is instead attributed to some sick belief in a reincarnated Jocasta... ugh.
And it does the job so well that there's really no need for more, is there?
I actually tend to find those characters more interesting, simply because in those situations more attention is paid to why the "hero" does what he does (as opposed to the "You can't do that, it's wrong!" mentality of yore).
Yeah. Again, that's another thing that doesn't work--Hunter was creepy and malevolent enough without needing it underlined and highlighted, especially with the rather cheap "potential child molester" angle the "Stacy as Jocasta" theory implies.
I didn't think so. For one thing, it was the proper, earned ending to his story. For another, it allowed the concept to evolve into something more.
Very true. There was also, in Eppy's case, the underlying subtext of insanity being the only sane response to an insane world.
It comes down to balance, as I said before: Christine doesn't whitewash Grendel's behavior in "Devil by the Deed", but she also makes sure we know that he risked being exposed just to save Stacy from the pedophile. And I don't know if the current interpretation of Hunter would have that moment of humanity.
Which is perhaps my single greatest frustration with the post-Jupiter stories - after spending forty-odd issues developing this epic cycle, Wagner has basically rewound the whole thing and now he's just staying there.
From Eppy's perspective, that's probably true, but don't forget we also have Orion taking very a different course of action at the same time. More of that delightful complexity we've long since left behind. :(
I doubt he would, sadly, and its a shame, because that element of vulnerability, in addition to offering intriguing questions of motivation, also make Hunter less one-note invincible, and thus his ultimate undoing isn't so foregone a conclusion.
Well, what could he do, really? Once you've journeyed from the exceptional, through the personal, the societal, Grendel as an agent of chaos, then a unifying force, then the suffocating mediocrity that Hunter rebelled against in the first place . . .it's rather neatly completed, isn't it? Maybe Wagner should leave it lie or let people do more Grendel Tales, because really the saga's as complete as it's likely to get.
Yep--and that's part of the final turn wherein a reaction against society has become the societal norm itself. It's a completed circle, innit?
Which is precisely the problem I have with post-RWB Hunter: his death was the result of meeting Argent's challenge, and he only did that because he thought Argent was going after Stacy. But Wagner's turned him into the kind of over-the-top mastermind who just wouldn't have fallen for Stacy's trap in the first place.
Well... I guess I would've liked more closure regarding the collapse of the Khanate - "Devil's Quest" seemed like more of an afterthought than a legitimate coda. And that
An extremely well-constructed circle, at that. :)
That was one of the problems I have with the current Hunter era--the other is that he's much less interesting as a result, having sailed well beyond being a Chessmaster and all that.
True, and it would have been interesting to suddenly see Grendel on the defensive for once (because really, once you've conquered the world, what's left?) it certainly would have been an interesting permutation of the saga.
Part of the Chessmaster's appeal is that he's occasionally wrong - it's as much fun, if not moreso, seeing him cope with shifting parameters on the fly (see: the last few phases of the Battle for Gobwin Knob over at "Erfworld"). That hasn't happened with post-RWB Hunter, as far as I can recall.
Theoretically? If you conquer the world, and then lose it, the next stage is either trying to survive or having to face whatever power has usurped yours. The problem with "Devil's Quest" is that the empire's fall is completely internal: the various Grendel clans want autonomy, they go to war, and that's about it. Well, great, but they're still Grendels, right? I guess what I would've liked to see as a last act is the gradual disappearance of Grendel from the world, maybe even going backwards: from clan icon to religious icon to gang symbol to legend until it's just one man again (probably Prime). Granted, it probably would've taken Wagner another twenty years to do all that, but... ah, well.
It hasn't, and really, a little of that give-and-take is sorely missed in these stories, as there's plenty of juice in it and it plays well to Hunter's strength as a character, in addition to giving him some much-needed vulnerabilities.
That's a pretty logical extrapolation and completes the cycle rather neatly. It's intimated that eventually Prime may be the last Grendel here and there, but it isn't exactly spelled out in any great detail.
Of course, that takes us back to the question we've always dealt with regarding Grendel: at this point, do we really need more Hunter stories of any kind? Even if Wagner took some corrective steps, it's still the same character boxed in by the same canonical problems.
Largely because Wagner never covered the period of time between "War Child" and "Devil's Quest": we know a few tidbits, that Jupiter was assassinated and Susan hung out with Prime for a while, and then there's an eighty-year gap until Jupiter III. So much could be done with those gaps if only Wagner would put his former avatar aside and move on.
I frankly don't think we do, really. If all we can do with Grendel now is to pick over the bones of stuff that's already a settled case, then maybe it's time to put it on the shelf and . . .I dunno, do more Mage? :)
And that extends to in-between Warchild and Devil's Quest, really. I think things end, more or less properly, with Grendel-Prime being the last exemplar of Grendel and, as the old Grendel alphabet poster said, "reaching the zenith all alone." It comes to rest at a natural point that it feels like you're over-egging the pudding, just in a different place now.
You know, I never warmed up to "Mage". Got through the first book, shrugged and moved on to something else. Which is odd given that it seems to be more popular than Grendel in terms of series Wagner is primarily associated with...
I've never been quite as on board with Mage either, if I'm honest. Maybe it's my somewhat darker worldview, but Grendel always appealed the most to me. As to Mage, it has a better critical reputation than Grendel, and I've always wondered if it wasn't because Grendel was just savaged when it first came out as amateurish drivel.
In fairness, I never thought much of the pre-"Devil by the Deed" stuff either. I think the problem with "Mage" is that it doesn't seem to say anything beyond making comments on the proto-typical Epic Fantasy... whereas "Grendel" raises some real questions about morality, authority and so on.
It always seemed to me that "Mage" was the other side of the coin to "Grendel," really.
It's not that unusual, really--my two long-term projects ended up as polar opposites to each other as well. I think it's a matter of leaving yourself equal options for when you feel like a nut and when you don't, so to speak.
One thing common to both projects seems to be the ways in which Wagner gets stuck - either not producing anything at all (Mage) or constantly regurgitating the same story in different flavors (Grendel).
And... you know what? You want to do a proper Hunter Rose story? Fine. Get me Larry Stohler's diary (Grendel's lieutenant and the only other person who knew his identity) and have it tell a completely different story from Hunter's logs. Then let the readers try to piece together the truth.
Apparently Mage is a hard thing for him to get to, somehow--not exactly sure why, but look at how quickly he gets Grendel stuff out vs. how quickly new Mage stuff hits.
That would be kinda interesting, actually, not just for the different take on things, but to actually run them simultaneously, Devil Inside-style. There's a lot of hay to be made, I think out of the comparison and contrast between myth and endeavour, yeah?
Then again, his new Grendel material is basically a series of fading photocopies, so...
Exactly. Very thematically relevant to the later stages of the cycle, and there's no reason not to do that sort of thing at this point. I can't imagine Hunter Rose stories would sell that much more than Other Grendel stories.
True. I think we're long past Wagner having anything new to say with Grendel now, really. There's no way forward and you can't really go too far back past Hunter, can you? And Hunter's story's pretty well told--whatever you slip in, he ends up on the roof with Argent at the end, doesn't he?
Pretty much... "Behold The Devil" was proof enough of that. To the extent that Wagner's adding anything to Hunter at all, it's just more opportunities for what the kids call "douchebaggery". :)
Yeah, I had deep misgivings about Behold the Devil the minute the cussing red demon showed up, because as awesome as it was for Hunter to be completely freaked out having the whole of Grendel history shoved into his brain, the other shoe was going to drop and knock all that off the table. :) Now that that gag's been done, is anything left?
The only thing that comes to mind is retconning in Grendels before Hunter, which would be tricky at best, and certainly not something I'd trust Wagner with given his recent output.
But doesn't that upset the cycle a bit? I mean we start with the original Grendel ("The Hunter arose," and all that) continue to the point where it's conquered the world, and returns (more or less) to the single exemplar (Grendel-Prime) To then suggest that there's more we didn't know about before hand kinda disrupts the symmetry of it.
Maybe it's time for more Grendel Tales again. Let loose some fresh blood on some Grendel stories.
Not necessarily: all you'd have to do is end the pre-Hunter cycle with a single exemplar. Hell, you could end it by revealing that Jocasta Rose was the equivalent of Grendel-Prime, and her death started the cycle all over again with Hunter. At least that'd finally give her something to do besides die all the time.
That kind upsets the symmetry of it as it stands now, doesn't it? That kind of bending over backwards to fill in story points that never needed explication, it feels a bit Prequel-y to me. :)
Not necessarily - as it stands, the Grendel saga is a closed loop that starts with Hunter and ends with Prime, but if the point of the story is that history repeats itself (especially where Grendel is concerned), why not depict the loop itself as a perpetual occurence? Think about the stories you could do with the historical context: was there a Grendel in World War 2? Or the Spanish Inquisition? And it wouldn't be a foregone conclusion like the Prequels because all you know is that the cycle ends with Hunter Rose - that wouldn't tell you anything about what came before.
The problem is, the hook the becomes "Grendel's parade of history" instead of using Grendel as a lens to view a certain character (or group of characters) which would be 1) a shame and 2) feels far too much like a gimmick. I'm feeling more and more that's best if Grendel just remain this (mostly--damn the lack of Incubation Years reprints!) complete cycle of work that left the party before it was over. Mostly.
That depends on where you draw the end point, though: if it's "War Child" you can make a case for a relatively closed and complete narrative, but throw in "Devil's Quest" and it just leaves too many loose ends.
Well, "Devil's Quest" works more as a coda/lead-in to Grendel/Batman but I'm not sure how essential it really is to the main narrative--it's really just to get Prime where he needs to be for the Batman story and to embellish upon how dissolute things are getting in the post-Warchild state.
I wonder if it's not vital on a thematic level, though - even Jupiter's reign doesn't last, the Grendel Empire joins its predecessors in the dust. Everything breaks down sooner or later.
Of course, the problem with that particular concept is that there's no inherent end-point: even "Devil's Quest" seems to imply that some kind of new order emerges once the Grendels fragment into various factions. It could just keep going indefinitely.
That's the rationale I give it in considering it--because Jupter's reign is in decline and the days of Grendel controlling the world are closing fast, Prime (the apex Grendel) is trying to contact the first Grendel by some means and running the whole wheel around again.
There is a recurring theme that Grendel is power, but it's transitory and never lasts very long, whether because it burns out its avatar or leaps to a new one or some such. It's a perpetual cycle, and there's always a risk, I feel, about upsetting that balance with anything save the odd Grendel Tale here and there.
I think the problem has to do with the function of "Devil Quest" as a lead-in to a Batman crossover; Prime's success or failure doesn't really matter because he's interacting with a completely static superhero icon - it's not as if he could've left a mark on Gotham, despite coming from a narrative where individuals effecting lasting change is a dominant theme.
Most of the Grendel Tales haven't been very good, though. And almost all of them are set in the post-Orion timeline, which... is fine, I guess, but that world's been explored enough. I'd like to see more of what came after, or that centuries-long gap between Brian and Eppy.
It does feel a little half-baked when taken on its own (Doesn't help Batman/Grendel II is, uh, not very good) and while "Quest" gives us a larger picture of the world, it doesn't amount to much in the end.
I think I remember exactly two Grendel Tales books that ended up as OK stories, but by and large they were merely roman a clefs on what had been before. I don't know if there's much else to be done with it or the entirety of the Grendel franchise, now.
To be honest, however competent the first one may have been, I still think "Grendel" suffers if you're meant to think Batman (and, by extension, the DCU) and Hunter Rose co-exist. It just opens up a whole can of particularly icky worms.
The only one I remember was the Stacy Palumbo two-parter... chilling and dreadful in all the right ways, and it filled in a lot of gaps that DbtD couldn't have covered.
Well, relatively speaking "Behold The Devil" wasn't that long ago, so it's possible Wagner's still got some stories left in him. Unfortunately, it's practically a sure bet that they're all Hunter Rose stories again some more.
Well, it was probably one of those things that could of stood just being done once as it was. Two times made for some poor choices, both in ambition and presentation. But you're right in that Grendel's world and Batman's world just don't play nice together--once's a permanent status quo and the other is a world wherein consequence drives everything.
I'm afraid you're right, honestly. Given that the "Incubation Years" stuff can't be reprinted, it's a shame some effort at re-presenting that material hasn't been mooted. I'd be up for that for sure, 'cos I'm damn burnt out on Hunter, I'm afraid.
It's more than that, IMO: protestations of complexity aside, Batman's world operates on a very simple moral code. As readers, we're never asked to side against Batman or Superman or any of the core superheroes: it's just assumed that they're the moral guardians of the DCU and they'll always make the right choices. That's such a basic tenet of the DCU that any attempt to subvert it - as Brad Meltzer can attest to - inevitably fails. And Grendel's so much more complicated than that: you can sympathize with Christine, or Eppy, or even Orion, but that doesn't make it easier to accept their more dubious actions. They're not "heroic" figures, far from it.
They can't? I was under the impression that Dark Horse just didn't prioritize TPBing Grendel: is there some legal issue surrounding the Incubation Years?
Well, Meltzer probably wouldn't admit failure, although it's as plain as day to all of us how upsetting the hero/villain moral code past a certain point destroys the whole point of superhero stories. Funnily enough--they're probably stories that would work better as Grendel stories, as they grapple easier with moral ambiguity and justifications of means vs. ends.
Actually, it's more a matter of the physical assets--the film for those issue is unusable now, much like Silverback was. Mind you, maybe technology will advance enough to reprint them another way, but for now, the original issues are the only way to read them.
I don't know if I'd go that far with the generalization - it's certainly possible to push the moral code beyond its conventional breaking point and get some interesting stories as a result, "Miracleman" perhaps being the archetypal example. What can't be done, IMO, is take the more traditional, iconic figures that far, if only because the typical comic book writer/editor is too shortsighted to really plan that sort of thing out. It ends up being a case of one polar extreme or another: paragon of virtue or cackling madman a la Hal Jordan's pre-retcon Parallax.
Mind you, that's referring to DC specifically - I've found that Marvel, for all its faults, tends to give heroes a touch of moral fallibility: they may want to do the right thing, but they sometimes fall short of the goal. And I don't think there's some inherently negative judgment placed on them when they slip up.
I wasn't aware of that - I'd just attributed the lack of a Silverback reprint to the story being... well, not that great, honestly. Much like Hunter Rose himself, I think Argent becomes more and more diminished the closer we examine him.
That's an interesting anecdote to attach to the whole issue of digital piracy and comics: I know for a fact that the Incubation Years have been scanned, which means there's material currently available to readers that doesn't physically exist anymore, at least in the hands of the publisher.
Exactly--you can't really push a character in constant publication past a certain point in the status quo without irrevocably damaging the character. Without being able to move past a constant "middle" in the name of building to an "end," any attempt to a story in this fashion has any potential "punch" taken out of it before you've even begun.
True, but there's an underlying sense of moral authority for ost Marvel heroes, even the deeply compromised ones. That said, now you've got me wondering which Marvel characters could support an intriguing Grendel crossover, for some reason.
Apparently, Silverback's film has just completely deteriorated, and according to Wiki (let's take it with a grain of salt) the original art for the Incubation Years stories has deteriorated equally. Of course #23 was reprinted as a prologue to the God and the Devil trade so while the complete package isn't presentable, apparently some issues survive in printable form.
Sadly, scans are a long way from presentable material for remastering and trading. For all the talk of how these things take money away from comics publishers, it would behoove comics publishers to realise that in some cases, this may be the only surviving archival material.
Well, technically you can, it just won't stick. Case in point.
The situation actually puts me in mind of the soap opera apocalypse currently raging across America; apparently series that've been on the air for over fifty years are finally being cancelled due to low ratings, suggesting the death of the genre in general. And I'm wondering whether that'll happen to mainstream comics, whether it's already happening: granted that soaps and comics don't have the same demographic, but they certainly have the same kind of demographic, and if one can finally lose enough of its core audience to implode...
Very few, I'd imagine, given that even the most morally ambiguous Marvel characters have an over-the-top theatricality to them that wouldn't suit Wagner's more subtle (well, relatively speaking) approach to Grendel.
That's unfortunate, especially given how crucial the Incubation Years are for understanding subsequent arcs.
Are they, though? Some of the scans I've seen are of considerably high quality - granted, those were probably a touch more recent than an original copy of the first few issues of Grendel...
That kinda proves the point though, doesn't it? No one really bought he was dead in the first place, because the gimmick of "character x is dead, here's his replacement, but all you folks who fear change don't worry, he's just keeping the seat warm!" is so damn played out it's become a cliche despite being designed to thwart other cliches.
I've been noticing that myself. Like comics, I suspect this is just the natural cycling down of their audience--eventually there's going to become an event horizon where it's more expensive to continue to cater to a dying fanbase rather than to try something else. The same thing happened with Saturday morning cartoons--when TV stations figured out they could make more money putting infomercials in the same slot, they did that.
That, plus the few heroes that would work . . .well, let's just say Grendel/Punisher is a short damn comic in my mind. ;)
Very true. Alas, this is the kind of thing that happens to work that falls out of print, ends up in the middle of a legal tussle that takes a few years--without proper preservation . . .you can't reproduce it.
So far as I understand printing techology, scans are good, but aren't gonna be as sharp as shooting from film of the original art. Mind you, if the technology exists to pull colour data off an old black and white Dr. Who episode, anything's possible.
Exactly. And the really frustrating bit is that in the rare case a writer actually can keep telling the story sans its main character? They go and bring the dead guy back anyway. I don't know, I thought Brubaker was doing just fine with Bucky-as-Cap, and people might've finally started believing that it was for real, that Brubaker had done this huge thing and made it stick... and then we get "Reborn".
The problem, as far as I can tell, is that their existing fanbase is diminishing and they're utterly failing to attract new viewers. From what I can tell, part of that failure is due to the fact that they can't quite let go of the pseudo-Puritan value system that was appropriate for the wholesome TV family ideals of the '70s-'80s that just doesn't work these days, and attempts to be "hip" just come off as utterly wrongheaded.
Unless they're both after the same target. Now that might be interesting...
Yet another reason Marvel's acquisition of Marvelman fills me with fear and dread...
I imagine a bit of computer enhancement might help that problem - it's certainly preferable to just accepting a gap in their library.
. . .which proceeded to bring Cap back in the silliest possible way. I mean, time bullets, for fuck's sake. I still can't get over that.
Well, there comes a time when either you break the format that sustained yourself for decades or so but doesn't seem to work now and try to reach across for something that might, or you commit yourself to just watching things cycle on downward. I get the feeling comics has settled on the latter option most days . . .
They are both very driven and possibly crazy individuals . . .it's not like there isn't some story potential there, you'd just have to keep the principals apart long enough to let the story breath, lest things get over quickly.
Yeah . . .I find myself wondering what condition the Eclipse assets are in, frankly. How long have they been defunct as a company with no one to do anything but take ownership of them with no maintenance?
Anything's possible, and a hell of a lot of technology seems to be geared to restoring things in danger of being lost (silent films, old Tv shows, etc.) so it's not like it's a field of innovation that's standing still.
Well, I can just about accept "time bullets" as the climax of that long-running Arnim Zola/Doom/MODOK Super-Secret Technology subplot that had been running since before Steve Rogers died, but knowing that doesn't change how ludicrous the concept sounds...
The problem is that both Marvel and DC tend to shoot themselves in the feet when they try some new, "risky" project: they market it based on how "different" it is, to a readership that - statistically speaking - seems to prefer the same old formula over and over again. (Mind you, how this squares with the continuing decay of the market is utterly beyond me.)
I guess you'd also have to factor in the nature of the fictional world: would it be the Punisher guest-starring in Grendel's universe or Grendel in the MU? Because they're ontologically different too - I can't quite see Frank Castle operating in Grendel's world without completely falling apart sooner or later.
Long enough that no one seems at all motivated to retrieve them anymore, at least not with regards to any property aside from Miracleman...
Of course, they'd have to contend with piracy, but on the bright side, they'd finally be joining the rest of the entertainment industry. :)
The problem with the phrase "time bullets" for me is I can;t stop thinking of Tenacious D's song "Wonderboy" where they talk about killing a yak at 40 yards with "mind bullets," so . . .yeah. Bit of a strange association.
Very true, which is how SWORD ended up on the rubbish heap. If you;re going to advertise a different kind of comic, I wonder has it ever occurred to them that they may need to advertise to different people? All too often it seems there's some kind of agoraphobia loose in comics that makes them constitutionally incapable of leaving the comic store and trying to reach people outside. Of course, there's precedent for it (I remember the full animated ads for the G.I. Joe comics back in the 80's) but there's no real will and to add injury to insult, the people in charge then have the nerve to act surprised . . .
Hmm . . .you're actually selling me on this. :) A Punisher/Grendel crossover where the principals violently mentally disintegrate culminating in an incandescent flame-out . . .damn, that could work.
It's hard to say. Of course, a few companies have been revisiting stuff from First Comics' archives, so it's not impossible, but really it's a question of will and how fast you can race against time.
Well, they kinda are already, they just are willing to "own" the problem as yet . . .
So last week I decide to read "Reborn" through, start to finish, in one sitting. And... well, it's not very good, especially given Brubaker's usual performance. Part of the problem stems from the utter lack of actual emotion on the part of the characters - okay, Sharon cries a lot, as usual, but you think Bucky would react a bit more strongly to seeing Steve alive again. And while I was still okay with "time bullets" as such, I couldn't believe the whole endgame Brubaker had been working towards all these years was just another Demonic Possession. I'm almost sure that exact scenario has played out before with the same characters. Way to make me look stupid for keeping the faith, Ed.
I was sorry to hear that - I thought the first issue had been a real breath of fresh air, epsecially given where the rest of the line has gone. I suspect the problem with advertising to different people is that, for all intents and purposes, there isn't that much variety among people who are actually reading comics. I'm not talking about the intelligentsia, of course, but the people who actually are affecting direct market sales. They're exactly the kind of people who'll get caught up on Beast "looking like a donkey" as opposed to, you know, the damned comic.
It could indeed. A lost tale from the time of Brian Li Sung, perhaps? :)
And, I suppose, how much money you expect to get out of it. I'm quite curious about how Marvelman - in whatever form it'll take - sells on the direct market. It should be an illuminating lesson on whether the "urban legends" of the comic book reader have any impact on contemporary audiences...
True; I suppose the only way to avoid that would be to go completely digital and try to "protect" the material online... but then, as technology advances the technology to fool it advances too, so I don't suppose that would really work in the long run.
Of course, that leaves out the fact that the whole thing has already been shunted aside and Marvel's moved onto the next thing, and really, that only makes it seem more inconsequential, dunnit?
Well, you just have to get out of the damn comic store. The problem wasn't that no one in the comic store seemed to be the target audience, the problem was that the target audience wasn't the type to go into a comic store to get it. But since we're boxed hopelessly into these strictures, it never occurs to anyone to venture out and find the audience that's out there.
Maybe so! They managed to squeeze a story out of that time period anyhow. :) What's one more?
Well, that's the real question, isn't it? Marvelman's been out of print for so long that most comic fans probably only know it's a big deal because they've been told it's a big deal. How much of that somewhat nebulous interest translates to sales, though?
Well, that type of thing is inevitable, and there's no getting the digital genie back in the bottle. You can turn piracy to your advantage . . .many game companies have adapted emulation software developed by fans and used them for retro collections, so . . .
To be honest, that part's of less concern to me - it's not like I'm reading so many other Marvel books that I care about consequences in the greater MU - but even if you just look at it as a story within Brubaker's Cap run, it's just... Steve Rogers comes back and cedes his identity to Bucky, except Bucky's been Captain America for the past two years, so nothing's actually changed. It's such a meaningless resolution that Marvel put out at least three comics that gave away the ending months before the last issue of "Reborn" was published.
I imagine there's a cultural block there too: we're living in an age where narrative pleasure's available in just about any medium, and printed comics just don't have enough benefits to eclipse the often-outrageous down sides (ie: 22 pages a month, if you're lucky; perhaps the most complicated continuity outside of soap operas and even then soaps usually don't go around unearthing 20-year-old storylines just for the hell of it).
Now all we have to do is find someone who's both willing and capable of handling Grendel without yet another tired Hunter Rose appearance...
You can take that a step further: those fans who know it's a big deal also know it's one of Alan Moore's "lost epics", and ten years ago that would've been enough to generate interest - but Moore's reputation isn't what it used to be. In the here and now of 2010, he just might have reached the point where his star's in danger of fading simply because it's been too long since he's written anything capable of drawing in substantial popularity.
Of course, that approach requires strategic thinking that goes beyond putting your head between your legs and wishing for the best, which seems to be the mode preferred by Big Two executives. :)
I suppose that in those circumstances that it's not that much of a big deal, but all the same, it seems like it blunts what should be a culminating moment, somehow. But that's crossovers for you--a big wet blanket thrown over the really important stuff.
True, but the problem is when you say "comics can't compete with video games" or whatever the obvious answer is, well, no they can't, if the competition is drawn in favour of the video game. You don't sell apples as oranges, for god's sake. If they're willing to push what comics can do that other media can't . . .well, we'd be on our way more than we are now.
Y'know, you're mentioning this and really there might be something to be said for these "in-between" arc stories. Devil Child was pretty good (if utterly harrowing stuff) and The A1 story with Wiggins (which I can't remember the damn name of) was pretty good also.
Very true. Couple that with the fact that probably more than a few neophytes looked at Watchmen and wondered what the big deal was, the promise of another Alan Moore classic may not be enough to hang any meaningful sales on.
And look how well that's worked for us so far!
You know, I can't think of a single inter-franchise crossover that improved the ongoing stories of its participants? If we're lucky, we get a story that mostly holds together on its own merits (ie: Age of Apocalypse, Messiah Complex to a lesser extent), but that's about all that comes to mind.
That's part of the problem, though, isn't it? We seem to be entering a period where adaptations of comics can tell the same story better than the original. Take the "Iron Man" film as an example: it got across everything that's great about the character, minus Teen Tony and Extremis and the SHRA. Same goes for Nolan's "Batman" movies: no Jason Todd, no Orca, no Hush. Now, you can certainly point to "Watchmen" or even something like "Alias", which just wouldn't work without the shared universe connection, as examples of comics that couldn't be properly translated into different media... but those are, I think, fewer and further between than the Big Two might hope.
I really need to track that A1 story down. :) But yes, that's what frustrates me most about Wagner's recent "Grendel" output: the fact that he keeps going back to Hunter Rose suggests he doesn't see any point in further exploration of the Grendel timeline. And that's just a colossal waste of potential.
I'm just waiting for idiots like this to start accusing Moore of plagiarizing Mark Waid's "Irredeemable". :)
Whatever do you mean? It's worked perfectly! We've never been better! Those aren't sharks circling us, they're dolphins with overbites! :)
I can't either. None of them really seem to send on a note that makes you feel like this Brave New Future they're heading towards is really "worth it" in the end, which is kind of a shame as so many of them seem to be geared towards making the reader like the new status quo (see Brand New Day)
I wonder sometimes if the solution is for comics themselves to start adapting themselves. Not in terms of regurgitating continuity and pretending it's some Great New Wrinkle In Things, but just doing self-contained stories wherein they pick the bits they want and ignore the rest. It would mean the death of line-wide continuity as we know it, but . . .
Well, the problem is there is a way you could go with Hunter, but that would require violating his stated "style" and getting more into Hunter's mind and motivations, which doesn't work because according to Wagner we're supposed to be slightly distant from him. So in lieu of that we get pretty stock Hunter stories, don't we?
Or Warren Ellis' Supergod. ;)
Denial: Not just a river in Egypt to comics. :)
The question is, do these stories fail because they're editorially mandated (ie: not organically developed from the ongoing storylines) or because said editors are incompetent? Would crossovers work if someone marginally more talented than Joe Quesada was running things?
Technically, they're already doing that with lines like Marvel Adventures... but the core readership seems to equate lack of continuity as such with lack of significance. I suppose that's just how the medium's trained them to read comics, but it's still a dead-end.
You know, at this point I don't think I'd even be open to alternate interpretations of Hunter Rose anymore - I'm beyond tired of the character.
I don't think we have to worry about that - they didn't have cellphones in 1982, after all. ;)
Or if it is, the dam's got more cracks than New York pavement. :)
They fail because they're bad ideas, shakily and inconsistently implemented and, really, there's plenty of blame to go around up and down the chain of command.
Yes, they do. And people love them and they sell well. So obviously they're not allowed to play in the big boy sandbox and are segregated out while meanwhile, in the main continuity, we have to have a line-wide event about making comics "Heroic" again, even though the idea that this is even needed is retarded.
I think I would read a story with Hunter is he wore a tutu and was a pre-op transsexual. And it was just a normal Grendel story, except Hunter is a big hot tranny mess and in the corner of every single page, a midget clown on a moped is staring out at the viewer and crying. On every page.
That hasn't been done before. :)
They did, but they were the size of (and easily mistaken for) babies. :)
Very true. Very Very true.
Maybe part of the problem is that the concepts of Crossover and Event have become rather conflated these days: it seems like all the big multi-book storylines go south because their priority is Being Significant rather than just telling a good tale.
I like to think of it as an implicit admission that, on some level, it's finally registered that they just went too far. In the wrong direction, that is. Of course, being that we're stuck with the same writers who brought the whole thing down in the first place, it'll be morbidly interesting to see just how much things actually change post-mandate.
Given Wagner's last outing with the South Park Imp, you might not have long to wait on that front. ;)
And now I'm picturing Warren Ellis drunkenly singing "Cellphone babies, we make our dreams come truuuue!" :)
Sometimes. The big problem lately has been that they don't really bother to build to a satisfyingly cathartic event as much as a slight shift in the status quo that lasts a few months. That's one thing Blackest Night managed to actually deliver on--there are enough seismic shifts and "holy crap!" moments that it doesn't feel artificial. And yes, I'm just and shocked and dismayed by this as you are. :)
I would probably guy that, knowing me. :)
I see a lot of trenchoat wearing chain-smoking babies in my future . . . ;)
It's gotten to the point where the events are practically overlapping: "Blackest Night" leads to "Brightest Day", "Necrosha" leads to "Second Coming"... they're not even giving the new status quo a chance before upending it yet again. I think we've already reached the point Paul O'Brien's mentioned in the past, where apathy sets in simply because we're getting used to the notion that these plot developments don't matter - it'll all be forgotten next month anyway.
Glutton for Buyer's Remorse? ;)
Grow a ponytail and get drunk, and you too can write for Marvel! :)
Well, at least you can see the progression of Blackest Night to Brightest Day, seeing as how stuff actually happens in the story. All too often most of the time these major shifts in status quo seem to basically just happen without any great cathartic blowoff moment and what does it really matter? There's gonna be a new status quo in a couple months anyways.
More than likely. :)
I cut the ponytail off ten years ago, so that's me out, unless I can step up the drinking to compensate.
That's the downside of authors' fiat, I suppose: all Bendis had to do was type "No more mutants" and that was that, regardless of whether it made sense or could serve as a long-term premise. Abracadabra.
I really doubt it's possible to outdrink Warren Ellis. There isn't enough booze. Anywhere. :)
And, of course, that is seen as an end in itself instead of just the beginning of a ripple in the status quo. Oh, if only someone understood that stories need a beginning and middle and end . . .
I have higher ambitions than that, and good thing too. :)
I wonder if that's just the necessary evil of extremely-long-running serial fiction: you read comics for twenty or thirty years, you get used to the idea that the story never actually ends - or, for that matter, that there's no real beginning either. Sure, you can have gateways, but even something like the Dark Phoenix Saga doesn't really stand on its own: the first issue included in the TPB was 129, but the Mastermind/Black Queen subplot had been going on for a while before that. And the end of the book isn't much of a jumping-off point because the issue after tha was Jean's funeral and all the emotional payoff to her suicide. I think the whole "ascended fanboy" generation of writers just internalized it to the point where they don't even try to decisively end their own stories anymore. There'll always be another crossover in six months anyway.
I should think so. Mind you, aspiring to early Ellis probably isn't such a bad thing, though he became so repetitive in his later years that I couldn't guess where to draw that line between intelligent Ellis and phoning-it-in Ellis...
And lord don't that just murder the need for resolution and catharsis that the reader/viewer has, dunnit? I mean the soap opera paradigm made sense when soap operas worked, but even soap operas are fading out so . . .maybe audiences have now moved on to a time when they demand some sort of resolution, or everything that happened previous never amounts to anything in the end, does it?
The sad thing is, given Ellis generally hypocritical attitude and his nauseating self-importance and relentless self-mythologising make those days when he was good seem like a three-day weekend fifteen years ago you can barely remember.
It's a bit of a Catch-22 for the format, I suppose: on the one hand, enforcing a status quo over a prolonged period of time wears down your audience, but if you took the more "realistic" approach of changing the characters, the storylines and the setting to reflect some approximation of real time, you'd end up with a completely different cast and narrative. And then you'd have two choices: repeat the storylines of the previous generation, in which case everything becomes a faded copy of what's come before, or take a different approach a la Grant Morrison's New X-Men and risk fanbase revolt. It's almost impossible to conceive of a balance between those two extremes because they seem mutually exclusive.
Granted, he's not as bad as Mark Millar when it comes to self-congratulatory wanking, but yes, Ellis hasn't justified his own hype in a good long while...
Well, the idea used to be that the permanent status quo wouldn't wear down the audience because people would age out of comics and new people would come in. However, as comics have quit marketing to outsiders altogether, that paradigm no longer exists. The sensible thing might be to just let people do their own approach (the "opera" thing from before) but as long as you're mining the same dwindling audience, the path of least resistance is to keep buggering on. Until the means of distributing them to a new audience are seriously considered, no meaningful change is going to happen.
It's been at least 15 years, honestly. And the more he bloviates about whatever's on his mind, the more hypocritical he comes off as, e.g. "I'm not gonna do any more pervert-suited superheroes! Now buy Astonishing X-Men, now with 90% more bondage wear!"
Well, they're clearly trying to pull in other demographics, they just have absolutely no idea how to appeal to them. In fairness, I still think the monthly 22-page comic is a tough sale, and given the diminishing returns on superhero movies, the genre seems to be wearing out its welcome outside the direct market anyway...
I think his self-proclaimed "Year of Whoredom" has now reached 5 or 6 consecutive years... with not much of anything to show for it, now that I think about it. People aren't even talking about Astonishing X-Men anymore.
Well, they want to pull in other demographics, but they want to do it comic book stores which is OK, I guess, apart from the little problem that the only people who go to comic stores anymore are the same damn demographic they already have.
Yyyyeah, and now we have two, two, two Astonishing X-Books that can ship later than their street dates! Man, sure am glad he takes these principled stands--it's like watching Sideshow Bob make his way through all those rakes . . .
Precisely. There's a disconnect somewhere in the standard lines of communication - they go and recruit someone like Eric Jerome Dickey for a Storm miniseries, counting on his considerable mainstream fanbase to follow him... and they don't. Clearly, something's getting lost in translation.
That probably accounts for his diminished online presence these days - even his devotees are embarrassed for him. Now if we can just get every ISP in the world to simultaneously ban Mark Millar, we might actually get some peace and quiet around here. :)
Well, the way things end up going there is, you have fans of his going "who, now?" and people in comics going "wait, who, now? Which guarantees bewilderment from two quarters and guarantees only the last twenty Storm fans out there are gonna buy the damn thing.
. . .you wouldn't happen to know a djinn who could hook us up, would you?
Which is pretty much what happened. Of course, I resent that particular gimmick more than most because when it backfired - as everyone knew it would - it dragged Storm, one of my favorite characters, into obscurity.
Just one, but he talks like Robin Williams. Ten minutes with him and you'll be ready for Millar again. :)
Now that you mention it, she has kinda dropped off the face of the Earth, hasn't she? I mean, except for in Astonishing, and no one really counts that anymore.
I dunno. I might risk it.
Its probably just as well - when they retconned her first meeting with T'Challa so that he saved her from the hunters (it was originally the other way around) I pretty much decided she was dead to me until more sensible writers got her. Still waiting for that to happen.
I'll have the Thorazine ready when you get back. :)
Amazing! You know, the one time legendary sexist asshole James Bond gets married is when a woman saves him from being killed. This means, of course, that Marvel Comics made a story even more sexist than a James Bond story, which is a lot like being more racist than the film Birth of a Nation. Think about that. :)
If anyone can do it while being completely clueless in the process, you know it's Marvel, the company whose EIC draws their most recognized character as himself. Forget Ann Nocenti, we have a new champion of self-insertion! (There's a dirty joke there about how that's exactly what Quesada should do with his comics, but you can take that one.) :)
Hot Nocenti on Quesada action. That's what the comic community wants . . .
. . .to have scoured out of their minds with a Brillo pad. ;)
In true Chris Sims fashion, let it be a Brillo pad MADE OF FIRE and imbued with the POWER COSMIC. :)
In the words of the late, great, George Carlin, "Yes-in-goddamn-deed." :)
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