I hadn't thought about the influence of Watchmen specifically on this book. Unless there are some very specific allusions, I never consider Watchmen specifically. I just assume it's an influence and move on. That's a terrible habit and I need to break it.
I don't know why, but they never seem to consider the limitations they'll face before undertaking projects like these, do they? Shawn and I both said some similar things (him better than I) and the main thrust is that Identity Crisis tried to tell a story that require the superheroes not to be DC superheroes. They needed to exist outside of concerns over next week's comics, because the story demanded that they not be limited in such a way.
I have never understood Batman's outrage at mindwiping Dr. Light. That always seemed inconsitent with his character, which seems to have only one line: he doesn't kill. Everything else is fair game. Except there needs to be a reason for them to mindwipe him, too. Because they need a dark secret. The story came first, the characters second... in a world where the characters always come first, even over real people. ("Of course," says Grant Morrison, "Because they're more real than us! They'll outlive us all!") How does this slip through the cracks? To call it the beginning of the era of "DON'T SAY NO TO PEOPLE WITH NAMES THAT SOMEONE ON THE STREET MIGHT RECOGNISE" isn't right, because that had begun years prior with Kevin Smith and J. Michael Straczynski.
Books like this make people like me wonder what an editor's job is. And if they're proud of having it. You can just picture a group of nervous people muttering about all of the flaws while Dan DiDio stomps around, froth at the mouth, eyes everywhere, shouting "I SMELL MONEY!" over and over again until the muttering dies down and he's free to take a giant shit on each of their desks in peace.
In a comic of dumb moments, the dumbest always seemed to be the part where Green Arrow stabs Deathstroke in his eyepatch eye. Why wouldn't you blind the asshole? Why even introduce the idea that Green Arrow would do such a thing and not follow through on the logical path? It's stuff like that that confounds me. (So much about this comic does!) What does one think when they decide to have Green Arrow stab a guy in his eye that doesn't work instead of blinding him? Are we to assume that Green Arrow is a moron? That he think it too cruel to blind the assassin? What is the fucking point?
I shouldn't have picked this topic. It brings up bad memories.
One last question: what's worse, Identity Crisis or Infinite Crisis?
In 30 minutes, we move onto a good comic: Spaceman with Adam Langton!
We have hit ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS raised. Actually, it's $1010 officially. I keep running out of ways to express my shock at how much money has been raised, but it's still there. Over one thousand dollars. Amazing.
[Don't forget to donate what you can to the Hero Initiative (Details in this post)! After you do, let me know via comment or e-mail (found at the righthand side) so I can keep track of donations -- and who to thank.]
Showing posts with label shawn starr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shawn starr. Show all posts
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Blogathon 36: Identity Crisis (Shawn Starr Guest Post)
The failure of Identity Crisis is that it’s goals outweighs it’s author’s abilities by such a large margin that it collapses in on itself and reveals the fatal flaw of realism in comics, that it is impossible.
Meltzer attempts, with Identity Crisis, to recreate Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen within the confines of the DCU, but Meltzer (no matter how many New York Times Best Selling titles are in his bibliography) is not Alan Moore, and even Alan Moore knew better than to be saddled with the DCU (or Rags Morales for that matter) while writing his magnum opus. What we end up with then is a surface level mimicry of Moore’s masterpiece, Identity Crisis touches on many of the themes of Moore and Gibbon’s Watchmen (generations, maturity, violence, sexism, political commentary, and the psychosis of a “hero”), but it never strains to go deeper than to push those buttons while misinterpreting why they were there in the first place.
Watchmen redefined what superheroes could be; Identity Crisis shows us what they cannot be.
----------------
The biggest failure of Identity Crisis, and the one which doomed the entire series from the start, is the DCU itself. Even though much of the continuity and characterizations in the DCU were relatively new compared to Marvel (following 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths), Meltzer still had to deal with nearly twenty years of history. Where Watchmen used analogues (characters with the perception of history, but devoid of any experience Moore himself did not craft explicitly), Meltzer had to contend with the lived in originals (A.K.A. “The Big Boy Toys”). This forced him into the dilemma of retconning in major moments (the rape of Sue Dibny) in order to make his mystery have any legs. The problem with this is all the stray threads it produces. Joss Whedon called Identity Crisis an epiphany in his introduction in that he changed the very concept of DC history, I’d call it lazy writing.
Once the League chose to alter Dr Light’s mind following several threats to rape their wives (for about 14 pages) in the early days of the League, why didn’t the idea of neutering every villain in the DCU become commonplace? Dr Light was a dufus following his “realignment”, a straight up joke. The plan had worked! So why not just “R.P. McMurphy” the Joker and be done with him? He kills people, I mean a lot of people, and so why is the Flash’s wife more important than the lives of every citizen of Gotham? Huh, Flash? Huh?
(They even mind wiped Batman for Christ sake!!!)
Where Anthony Burgess could deal with the idea of reprogramming the mind, and its moral implications in A Clockwork Orange, Meltzer simply opens a Pandora’s Box of implications and tries to ignore he ever opened it. He needed that rape to happen, so that we knew it wasn’t like the old days. The difference is Burgess controlled his universe, both future and past like Moore, Meltzer though could not by definition as the old days still existed.
--------------------
Another odd trait of Meltzer’s writing is its political aspect; Meltzer grafts onto the superhero community a definitive post-9/11 “American Vigilantism” reminiscent of the Bush Administration and also found in Neoconservative wet dreams.
Green Arrow’s vow of revenge against those involved in the killing of Sue Dibny "And whoever did this-he better pray the cops get him before we do." reads more like a Clint Eastwood line from Dirty Harry than something the DCU's permanent liberal would say (Unless he experienced an overnight epiphany like Christopher Hitchens). That vow though is, inevitably, expanded upon to mean anyone that could be connected with the perpetrators (fire was used, you use fire, you’re on the list) which resulted in goon squads of super heroes busting down anything that even resembles a hideout.
Wonder Woman goes so far as to choke and physically abuse an inmate because he used a specific type of knot while committing his crimes (a knot so common its Scout 101, as Superman comments), even when the perp had been incarcerated during the assault.
The political aspects of Meltzer’s scripts may be the most successful thing about the series; the only problem is that they cast the heroes in the role of the villain, and the villains as the oppressed to a large extent. A league of Rorschach’s defiling the Geneva Convention and habeas corpus to solve a crime one of them committed only to create a greater monster in the now-unwiped Dr Light.
---------------
This political message also ties into Meltzer’s attempt at “serious comics about serious stuff”. While many argue (and to some extent are correct) that the 90’s Image era was based on a misreading of Alan Moore and Frank Miller works (along with a dozen other creators I’m omitting because I don’t have all day), most of those comics (at least the popular ones) are the definition of anti-seriousness. Rob Liefeld never dropped his V for Vendetta for a reason, and the latter half of Miller’s career only goes to show where his allegiances lied.
Meltzer and the generation that followed him, the Post-Image, are the ones guiltiest of a wild and unsophisticated appropriation of Moore/Miller motifs. They make a mockery of it, with the intent of honoring it. Meltzer along with the Geoff Johns and now Scott Snyder’s, pile on these moments of seriousness, rapes, murders, miscarriages, etc., until they collapse on themselves and become a Johnny Ryan parody.
The final page of Identity Crisis #1 depicts Elastic Man holding the charred corpse of his wife (which as a scene is rather well done on its own), it’s not that exploitative, but then Meltzer just has to add onto it with just one more panel, to really nail the scene. That panel is of course of a pregnancy test lying on the floor with a note attached “Daddy, Two lines = POSITIVE!” and then that scene just becomes the funniest thing I’ve read since the opening story of The Furry Trap.
This isn’t the only instance, following the rape of Sue Dibny by Dr Light; Light spends 10 pages hunched on the ground foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog screaming about how he’s going to rape everyone’s families. Everyone from The Flash’s wife, Batman’s wife, Superman’s Wife, Green Lanterns alien lover, Whatever Hawkman does stuff with. I figured he would start threatening people’s dogs next if the page count allowed for it.
He just can’t stop himself from going that extra step, and it ruins everything he was trying for.
----------------------
Then there's the ending of Meltzer’s mystery which is a last minute twist no one saw coming, just like EC comics, and just like Watchmen. The problem though is Ozymandias's plan was foreshadowed the entire time, it just that no one saw it coming. It was a perfect reveal because it made complete sense, but you couldn't see it coming (His confession at the end and the “I did it 35 minutes ago” meme it spawned is also a brilliant deconstruction of the villain plot reveal).
But Identity Crisis, I still don’t get it.
It doesn't make any sense. It’s like Armageddon 2001 where they just changed it at the last minute, but at least in the case of that book it was because people guessed the ending, but in Identity Crisis no one ever could because there is nothing in the prior text to predict it.
It certainly is Jean who killed Sue, that's undeniable, or it’s undeniable in the face of 10 pages of exposition as confession which says just that. A “fair play mystery” this is not.
The problem is that as Batman (A.K.A. the voice of reason) keeps repeating, who Benefits? I still don’t know the answer to that query. For example, how did Jean think she would benefit from this? The Atom in the beginning seems to still be in love with her, she seems past him (she was the one who left him), moving onto new experiences (signing back all his patients so she wasn’t indebted to him). So how did it go from that, to grabbing one of his suits and killing an unrelated person (which she brought additional weapons for, even though I guess it was an accident?) only so that she could get The Atom to come back to her and fall in love all over again. And how did that plan work?
Just to give an alternative scenario, a “cape killer” in Watchmen did not make Silk Spectre fall in love with Dr. Manhattan MORE after they began to disconnect, all it did was accelerate her leaving him and having awkward couch sex with Nite Owl. Jeans plan to have had the exact opposite effect and pushed him towards getting freaky with Tigra.
-------------------------
So my point is Identity Crisis isn’t as good as Watchmen.
Or something.
“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted." -Arthur Miller (from Identity Crisis)
P.S: Chad picked the joke book off my list.
[Don't forget to donate what you can to the Hero Initiative (Details in this post)! After you do, let me know via comment or e-mail (found at the righthand side) so I can keep track of donations -- and who to thank.]
Meltzer attempts, with Identity Crisis, to recreate Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen within the confines of the DCU, but Meltzer (no matter how many New York Times Best Selling titles are in his bibliography) is not Alan Moore, and even Alan Moore knew better than to be saddled with the DCU (or Rags Morales for that matter) while writing his magnum opus. What we end up with then is a surface level mimicry of Moore’s masterpiece, Identity Crisis touches on many of the themes of Moore and Gibbon’s Watchmen (generations, maturity, violence, sexism, political commentary, and the psychosis of a “hero”), but it never strains to go deeper than to push those buttons while misinterpreting why they were there in the first place.
Watchmen redefined what superheroes could be; Identity Crisis shows us what they cannot be.
----------------
The biggest failure of Identity Crisis, and the one which doomed the entire series from the start, is the DCU itself. Even though much of the continuity and characterizations in the DCU were relatively new compared to Marvel (following 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths), Meltzer still had to deal with nearly twenty years of history. Where Watchmen used analogues (characters with the perception of history, but devoid of any experience Moore himself did not craft explicitly), Meltzer had to contend with the lived in originals (A.K.A. “The Big Boy Toys”). This forced him into the dilemma of retconning in major moments (the rape of Sue Dibny) in order to make his mystery have any legs. The problem with this is all the stray threads it produces. Joss Whedon called Identity Crisis an epiphany in his introduction in that he changed the very concept of DC history, I’d call it lazy writing.
Once the League chose to alter Dr Light’s mind following several threats to rape their wives (for about 14 pages) in the early days of the League, why didn’t the idea of neutering every villain in the DCU become commonplace? Dr Light was a dufus following his “realignment”, a straight up joke. The plan had worked! So why not just “R.P. McMurphy” the Joker and be done with him? He kills people, I mean a lot of people, and so why is the Flash’s wife more important than the lives of every citizen of Gotham? Huh, Flash? Huh?
(They even mind wiped Batman for Christ sake!!!)
Where Anthony Burgess could deal with the idea of reprogramming the mind, and its moral implications in A Clockwork Orange, Meltzer simply opens a Pandora’s Box of implications and tries to ignore he ever opened it. He needed that rape to happen, so that we knew it wasn’t like the old days. The difference is Burgess controlled his universe, both future and past like Moore, Meltzer though could not by definition as the old days still existed.
--------------------
Another odd trait of Meltzer’s writing is its political aspect; Meltzer grafts onto the superhero community a definitive post-9/11 “American Vigilantism” reminiscent of the Bush Administration and also found in Neoconservative wet dreams.
Green Arrow’s vow of revenge against those involved in the killing of Sue Dibny "And whoever did this-he better pray the cops get him before we do." reads more like a Clint Eastwood line from Dirty Harry than something the DCU's permanent liberal would say (Unless he experienced an overnight epiphany like Christopher Hitchens). That vow though is, inevitably, expanded upon to mean anyone that could be connected with the perpetrators (fire was used, you use fire, you’re on the list) which resulted in goon squads of super heroes busting down anything that even resembles a hideout.
Wonder Woman goes so far as to choke and physically abuse an inmate because he used a specific type of knot while committing his crimes (a knot so common its Scout 101, as Superman comments), even when the perp had been incarcerated during the assault.
The political aspects of Meltzer’s scripts may be the most successful thing about the series; the only problem is that they cast the heroes in the role of the villain, and the villains as the oppressed to a large extent. A league of Rorschach’s defiling the Geneva Convention and habeas corpus to solve a crime one of them committed only to create a greater monster in the now-unwiped Dr Light.
---------------
This political message also ties into Meltzer’s attempt at “serious comics about serious stuff”. While many argue (and to some extent are correct) that the 90’s Image era was based on a misreading of Alan Moore and Frank Miller works (along with a dozen other creators I’m omitting because I don’t have all day), most of those comics (at least the popular ones) are the definition of anti-seriousness. Rob Liefeld never dropped his V for Vendetta for a reason, and the latter half of Miller’s career only goes to show where his allegiances lied.
Meltzer and the generation that followed him, the Post-Image, are the ones guiltiest of a wild and unsophisticated appropriation of Moore/Miller motifs. They make a mockery of it, with the intent of honoring it. Meltzer along with the Geoff Johns and now Scott Snyder’s, pile on these moments of seriousness, rapes, murders, miscarriages, etc., until they collapse on themselves and become a Johnny Ryan parody.
The final page of Identity Crisis #1 depicts Elastic Man holding the charred corpse of his wife (which as a scene is rather well done on its own), it’s not that exploitative, but then Meltzer just has to add onto it with just one more panel, to really nail the scene. That panel is of course of a pregnancy test lying on the floor with a note attached “Daddy, Two lines = POSITIVE!” and then that scene just becomes the funniest thing I’ve read since the opening story of The Furry Trap.
This isn’t the only instance, following the rape of Sue Dibny by Dr Light; Light spends 10 pages hunched on the ground foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog screaming about how he’s going to rape everyone’s families. Everyone from The Flash’s wife, Batman’s wife, Superman’s Wife, Green Lanterns alien lover, Whatever Hawkman does stuff with. I figured he would start threatening people’s dogs next if the page count allowed for it.
He just can’t stop himself from going that extra step, and it ruins everything he was trying for.
----------------------
Then there's the ending of Meltzer’s mystery which is a last minute twist no one saw coming, just like EC comics, and just like Watchmen. The problem though is Ozymandias's plan was foreshadowed the entire time, it just that no one saw it coming. It was a perfect reveal because it made complete sense, but you couldn't see it coming (His confession at the end and the “I did it 35 minutes ago” meme it spawned is also a brilliant deconstruction of the villain plot reveal).
But Identity Crisis, I still don’t get it.
It doesn't make any sense. It’s like Armageddon 2001 where they just changed it at the last minute, but at least in the case of that book it was because people guessed the ending, but in Identity Crisis no one ever could because there is nothing in the prior text to predict it.
It certainly is Jean who killed Sue, that's undeniable, or it’s undeniable in the face of 10 pages of exposition as confession which says just that. A “fair play mystery” this is not.
The problem is that as Batman (A.K.A. the voice of reason) keeps repeating, who Benefits? I still don’t know the answer to that query. For example, how did Jean think she would benefit from this? The Atom in the beginning seems to still be in love with her, she seems past him (she was the one who left him), moving onto new experiences (signing back all his patients so she wasn’t indebted to him). So how did it go from that, to grabbing one of his suits and killing an unrelated person (which she brought additional weapons for, even though I guess it was an accident?) only so that she could get The Atom to come back to her and fall in love all over again. And how did that plan work?
Just to give an alternative scenario, a “cape killer” in Watchmen did not make Silk Spectre fall in love with Dr. Manhattan MORE after they began to disconnect, all it did was accelerate her leaving him and having awkward couch sex with Nite Owl. Jeans plan to have had the exact opposite effect and pushed him towards getting freaky with Tigra.
-------------------------
So my point is Identity Crisis isn’t as good as Watchmen.
Or something.
“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted." -Arthur Miller (from Identity Crisis)
P.S: Chad picked the joke book off my list.
[Don't forget to donate what you can to the Hero Initiative (Details in this post)! After you do, let me know via comment or e-mail (found at the righthand side) so I can keep track of donations -- and who to thank.]
Blogathon 35: Identity Crisis (Part 1)
I'll be honest: I picked this book, because it seemed like a funny thing to make Shawn Starr write about. Hey, it was on his list...
I don't own this comic anymore. I had the trade and have since gotten rid of it. I don't miss it. This was a bad comic series. It had some nice small moments of emotion and an interesting core idea, but the execution was usually so poor -- and the mystery handled with such retched abandon that it's embarrassing -- that it just made me feel sad to look at it. A work that convinced so many people that it's worthwhile somehow...
I'll never understand how mediocrity thrives so much. What did people like about Identity Crisis so much? I'll grant them the initial stuff with Ralph, but... after...? Was it the convoluted storytelling? The mystery that didn't really add up? The big eyes and mishapen faces? The endless parade of narrators that were used when convenient?
I'm struggling here to see it. It almost seems like it was a popular comic because it was a popular comic. Does that make any sense? The way that some people are famous for being famous? Can that happen with stuff like comics? Can it simply be that this comic was going to be popular and so it was popular? Fuck quality or reasons -- this is just what it is and nothing I or you or anyone says will change a damn thing. That makes sense to me. If God came down and said that, yeah, that's what happened, I would accept that explanation and move on with my life. But, that people genuinely like this comic... how do you stomach that?
What's weird is that I'm not sure that I know anyone who likes it. Those people exist, but I don't... know... any of them...? It seems like I would. Will Shawn be one of them? How will I look him in the eye after...
The part where the book really lost the plot was when it suddenly became about Captain Boomerang being all concerned about his kid. Like heroes and villains have anything in common in this story. A story where heroes know the secret identities of most of the villains those villains families live their lives, while there's a concern that, should the villains learn the heroes' secret identities, all of the heroes' families would be slaughtered. In what world would you tell that story and then try to create a parallel between the two groups? It makes no sense. When Batman is licking his lips at the possibility of dressing your son up in tights and having his way before slitting his throat with a Batarang, then we'll pretend like we give a fuck about lame tubby villain wanting to reconnect with his kid before he goes off and kills Robin's dad.
There's also the fact that we're confronting an issue where typical superhero morality fails. Batman's outrage is laughable in how pathetic it is. Their fear should have been that the villains would learn their secret identities and that would force them to kill every villain. Because they would have to. Or fuck them and their cowardly morality that only got their loved ones killed. In many ways, this is a series that shines a light on how superheroes are awful, irresponsible people who preach a limited morality that doesn't work when things go bad.
It doesn't help that you turn the typical supervillains into stone cold murderous rapists. The worse the bad guys get, the dumber the heroes look. Do they not realise that? Every time the ante is upped, the heroes look that much worse for not doing anything about it. Every Joker story lessens Batman. Sorry, but it's true.
Awful comic... I think Shawn will agree... let's see...
We're up to $970 raised!
[Don't forget to donate what you can to the Hero Initiative (Details in this post)! After you do, let me know via comment or e-mail (found at the righthand side) so I can keep track of donations -- and who to thank.]
I don't own this comic anymore. I had the trade and have since gotten rid of it. I don't miss it. This was a bad comic series. It had some nice small moments of emotion and an interesting core idea, but the execution was usually so poor -- and the mystery handled with such retched abandon that it's embarrassing -- that it just made me feel sad to look at it. A work that convinced so many people that it's worthwhile somehow...
I'll never understand how mediocrity thrives so much. What did people like about Identity Crisis so much? I'll grant them the initial stuff with Ralph, but... after...? Was it the convoluted storytelling? The mystery that didn't really add up? The big eyes and mishapen faces? The endless parade of narrators that were used when convenient?
I'm struggling here to see it. It almost seems like it was a popular comic because it was a popular comic. Does that make any sense? The way that some people are famous for being famous? Can that happen with stuff like comics? Can it simply be that this comic was going to be popular and so it was popular? Fuck quality or reasons -- this is just what it is and nothing I or you or anyone says will change a damn thing. That makes sense to me. If God came down and said that, yeah, that's what happened, I would accept that explanation and move on with my life. But, that people genuinely like this comic... how do you stomach that?
What's weird is that I'm not sure that I know anyone who likes it. Those people exist, but I don't... know... any of them...? It seems like I would. Will Shawn be one of them? How will I look him in the eye after...
The part where the book really lost the plot was when it suddenly became about Captain Boomerang being all concerned about his kid. Like heroes and villains have anything in common in this story. A story where heroes know the secret identities of most of the villains those villains families live their lives, while there's a concern that, should the villains learn the heroes' secret identities, all of the heroes' families would be slaughtered. In what world would you tell that story and then try to create a parallel between the two groups? It makes no sense. When Batman is licking his lips at the possibility of dressing your son up in tights and having his way before slitting his throat with a Batarang, then we'll pretend like we give a fuck about lame tubby villain wanting to reconnect with his kid before he goes off and kills Robin's dad.
There's also the fact that we're confronting an issue where typical superhero morality fails. Batman's outrage is laughable in how pathetic it is. Their fear should have been that the villains would learn their secret identities and that would force them to kill every villain. Because they would have to. Or fuck them and their cowardly morality that only got their loved ones killed. In many ways, this is a series that shines a light on how superheroes are awful, irresponsible people who preach a limited morality that doesn't work when things go bad.
It doesn't help that you turn the typical supervillains into stone cold murderous rapists. The worse the bad guys get, the dumber the heroes look. Do they not realise that? Every time the ante is upped, the heroes look that much worse for not doing anything about it. Every Joker story lessens Batman. Sorry, but it's true.
Awful comic... I think Shawn will agree... let's see...
We're up to $970 raised!
[Don't forget to donate what you can to the Hero Initiative (Details in this post)! After you do, let me know via comment or e-mail (found at the righthand side) so I can keep track of donations -- and who to thank.]
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Direct Message 06: Cable & X-Force #1
This one came together quickly. It's really just Alec and I punching Cable & X-Force #1 again and again in the hopes that it will die. Alec does most of the work, while I just sort of hang back all proud and grinning. Also, Shawn Starr makes a guest art appearance.
You can read Direct Message 06 HERE!
You can read Direct Message 06 HERE!
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