Dream's Lost Years

If you don't want to watch the above video, which you should, but if you don't have four and a half minutes and haven't already heard I'll cut to the chase: Neil Gaiman has written an as yet untitled, J.H. Williams III drawn, Sandman mini-series, out in November.

Williams drew a preview image:

There's a lot of reasons to be excited about this. For one, Gaiman has spent his time since Sandman ended doing all sorts of things, and that added variety to his experience that has almost certainly turned an already wide, almost limitless, imagination into a kind of force. American Gods, although already ten years old, took some ideas Gaiman had been working on since the very beginning of Sandman and transformed them, and I have nothing but the utmost confidence that the writer, returning to the particular character that embodied all of that, will produce something of good quality, that he will tell a story worth telling. For another, J.H. Williams III is doing the art. If there's a more perfect artist for the things that Gaiman can dream up, I have no idea who it is. Williams's work on Batwoman sort of subtly revolutionized what was possible in terms of layout and design in comic books, and we now have consistently more interesting, that is, better, panel layouts and general design.

Of course, there are a lot of reasons to be wary of this, too. I have some of the same concerns that I have with Before Watchmen. Obviously, there's no moral issue here, since Dream is Gaiman's character, and he's doing the writing. Instead, I'm worried about the impulse to tell a new story in an old universe. I get that Gaiman is filling a hole, giving us something he had only hinted at before, even if maybe it was fully or partially conceived back in the Eighties. That's good-- it means he had to keep the old stuff in mind as he was putting together this new bit. But if it he feels he had to tell, why didn't he tell it in the eighties? If it was important to Sandman, important to what Gaiman was building twenty-five years ago, why didn't he tell the story then? Why does he feel the need to go put that piece, never really missing, back into the puzzle?

I'm sure there's a good reason. Maybe he wasn't ready to tell that bit then and he is now. Maybe he was constrained by editorial. Maybe this, maybe that. Unless Gaiman comes out and says why he's writing Dream again, after so long, we'll never know. And, doubtlessly, this new mini will be good, even great. I certainly hope that its as good as Sandman ever be. But it does concern me when someone, anyone, a writer, an editor, feels the need to explain everything, or when a fan wants everything explained. I'm sure I'm going to read it when it comes out, and I'm sure I'm not going to be the only one. But, as a reader, I'm going to lose a little bit of the wonder of those first issues of Sandman. I'm going to stop imagining the why, because I know it.

And I just wonder if I want that or not.

Update: It comes out November 2013, which Gaiman pretty clearly says. My bad.

Nick Fury, Agent of Silly Brand Synergy

So I was looking at that MARVELNOW! preview image when it came out last week, and I was all "who is that guy in the Super Soldier outfit with an eyepatch who looks like Movie Nick Fury/Ultimate Nick Fury, because isn't the adjectiveless Nick Fury a white guy with an eye patch, as opposed to Sam Jackson with an eyepatch?"

Nope. Via Wikipedia:

Ok, so Nick Fury had a secret son whose name is also Nick Fury but is called Marcus Johnson by everyone who knows him. Ok, I'll buy that. I've seen James Bond. International Men of Mystery have illicit affairs on a pretty regular basis. The law of averages says sooner or later there are going to be babies sired via such International Men of Mystery. Sometimes people have their names changed, or their children's names changed, so I guess that makes some kind of sense.

Nick Fury's (secret) son is African-American? Cool! Diversity is good! There aren't enough black characters in comics!* Oh, he's been described as looking like Sam Jackson? Eh. I dunno. How many times has Marvel rebooted the Ultimate universe, in which a Sam Jackson looking Nick Fury existed well before Sam Jackson played Nick Fury in the movies which, admittedly, works? How many times have they asked for a mulligan on that one? Three? Four?

Wait! In the course of Battle Scars (which, full disclosure, I can't comment on as text because I haven't read it), the Sam Jackson looking secret son of Nick Fury loses an eye, so now not only does he vaguely resemble his father, or, at least, he has the same iconography as his father, since icons are the only way that people resemble other people in comics, but he more specifically resembles not only the most well-known Nick Fury, but also the Nick Fury in the other comics?


Sigh.

Look, I get that Marvel is trying to use its wildly successful and popular movies to boost sales of its less than wildly successful and popular comic books. I also understand that, if Marvel stopped publishing comics tomorrow, it would remain a profitable brand for Disney for however long that company continued to make movies based on Marvel properties, and probably even for a few decades after that. Does the company really think, though, that it's going to sell more comics by retiring one of their best characters? Keep in mind that best and most popular are not the same. Remember that the nineties happened. 

Now, it's also true that Nick Fury hasn't had an even moderately successful ongoing series in decades (you know who would be perfect for that book? Ed Brubaker and David Aja.) He's barely appeared at all since that last Secret Wars series. So maybe the time is right for a new Nick Fury (it's not, but bear with me). If that's the case, where is he, this new guy? I read a lot of comics, not all of them, but a lot, where is he? 


The last issue of Battle Scars, and one issue of a Scarlet Spider comic that I didn't even know existed.

I think this strategy could have worked. I really do. I really think that, if Marvel had wanted to, they could have published a new volume of Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D in the wake of the Avengers movie, and, you know what, I bet it could have been good. Hear me out. Guy discovers who his father is, and then inherits the family international spy business, but makes a whole lot of mistakes doing it because he hasn't been a spy since the mid-forties like his father. Seriously, a little bit of humor, a little bit of espionage. It could have been great! Get Brubaker to write it and Aja to draw it. Marvel would sell fifty-thousand copies, easy. Hell, want to sell another twenty-five thousand? Replace Aja with, say, Olivier Coipel, and it's done. The book wouldn't look quite as good, but it would still be fantastic and would probably appeal to a broader audience, particularly an audience of people who saw the Avengers movie and walked into their friendly neighborhood comics shop because wasn't that movie awesome and do I really have to wait three years for more stories like that?

That helicarrier, though, has sailed. It would have worked, maybe, if they had done it in May. The movie's already been out for a couple of months. Everyone who was going to walk into a comic shop on its strength probably already has. Maybe a few of them discovered the magic of comics, and stuck around, and maybe a few of those will discover Jason or Jordan Crane and realize that comics are art, dammit, and not just white men in tights. The people who wanted the Nick Fury from the movie, they've picked up an old Ultimates collection or something because there were no accessible regular universe Marvel comics with a one-eyed guy resembling Sam Jackson in them, and they probably read it and kind of liked it and then they saw Prometheus or remembered that they were playing fantasy baseball and that was that.

They aren't going to pick up whatever books has the new Nick Fury in October, when Marvel is NOW! (it's not NOW! now, but it will be) because they're gone and they're not coming back, at least not until the next Iron Man movie comes out, when we'll repeat the process and maybe those poor saps will buy another copy of the trade paperback they've forgotten is under the bed. And Nick Fury, a character with a history and with fans, a character who will sell some comics, although probably not very many, has been replaced by a Nick Fury who's not going to sell any at all, because no one cares.

I've argued before that comics are stagnant because comics fans (and the people who make comics are also fans, don't ever doubt that) are resistant to change, and celebrate a return to an old status quo whenever it happens. I still think that that is true, and I still think that fresher, newer stories with fresher, newer characters will sell more comics. But new characters (or the return of an old one) has to have a better reason than "there's a movie coming out." There has to be a new story to tell, and the new Nick Fury is not a new story, not really, just an old one that's been repackaged.

I'm setting the over/under at Nick Fury Sr.'s unretirement at 12 months. Unless, of course, that's him, in that picture up there, in the middle of the very left hand side, but it could also be Cable, it's hard to tell.  If it is the old Nick Fury, though, what was the point of the new one, exactly?

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*Unless Nick Fury's secret son is secret because he's black. That's the opposite of cool.

Welcome Back, Drums.

The Drummer's back!

Or, at least, the man who modeled the Drummer on himself is back, for the Rick Remender written Uncanny Avengers, one of the new series from Marvel to follow the conclusion of AvX.  Of the various announcements about the relaunch the company is calling, sort of insipidly, MARVEL NOW!, this is by far the most exciting. Cassaday, who has been absent from regular comics interior work since he and Warren Ellis finished up Planetary nearly three years ago, is one the Modern Age's great talents, an artist who has managed to meld almost photorealistic figures with an energy and movement usually lacking in a style that is mostly attended by an unfortunate stiffness. It'll be good to see his work on a monthly, or at least semi-monthly, or anyway regular, basis again. 

Above and Beyond Watchmen

Of all the questions that need to be asked about Before Watchmen, perhaps the most important one is the one that no one really wants to talk about. More important than whether or not DC has the right to publish such a thing (they do), more important than whether or not they should (that's a stickier issue, we'll get there in a second) is the mere fact that, despite everything else, DC Comics has begun to publish the meta-series, which begs the most important question in all of criticism:

Is it any good?

The answer, or at least the answer for the Darwyn Cooke written and drawn Minutemen mini is yes, it's very good. Of course it's good-- I'm not sure Darwyn Cooke even knows how to do wrong. Its is as if he picks up his inkpen and magic comes spilling out. Everything you've ever loved about his full color comics-- the compositional perfection, the visual puns, the soft edge, the cartoony style that manages to express grittiness, even revel in it, while ultimately rejecting it-- all those things are here. In the whole book, there's just one page that doesn't work, and that's because it doesn't take full advantage of the framework that Cooke has set-up for himself, a framework that he inherited from Alan Moore.

That is, of course, the two-hundred-and-fifty pound cigar smoking Comedian in the room; this story, this classic, if slightly cynical, coming together story, hasn't sprung from the mind of Darwyn Cooke. No, no. Not at all. It all comes from the mad genius of Alan Moore, the creator of Watchmen, over whose wishes this project was commenced. There's been a lot of hand-wringing about this; whether or not DC should have put these books together is one question, but there is absolutely no question that DC has the right to, since they hold the rights to the characters from probably the most popular and certainly the most significant superhero comic in the last forty years. They stand to make a lot of money from exploiting those rights, and they made a product that I wanted to buy, that I bought despite my reservations, so good on them.

No, there's no question about whether or not they could have and, obviously, they did. The bigger question is whether or not they should have and, if we're speaking in purely ethical terms, the answer is no. The fact that there are creators other than Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons associated with this project is absolutely insane; Moore and Gibbons obviously don't own the characters, not in the legal sense, but the characters certainly are theirs. No one else could have made the book that they made, and no one should be doing it now.

But, again, they did. And it's good.

But, still, we're left with another should they question, namely, should DC Comics have felt the need to tell these stories? We certainly don't need them; Watchmen is as close to perfect as superhero comics get, in part because it builds a world, mostly from scratch, gets its audience to care about that world and its concerns, and then it wraps itself up. There is, at the end of Watchmen, nothing more that needs to be said about Watchmen. But here I am, reading Darwyn Cooke's Minutemen series, adding to a story that is full and complete.

To be completely honest, because it is a problem of stories, a problem of complete ideas and finished thoughts, this addition, this fleshing out, is the most problematic thing for me about Before Watchmen. The existence of the meta-series means that DC has completely bought into the engine that drives mainstream superhero comics, that is, never ending storytelling. Batman's story, or Superman's, has been told at regular intervals for the greater part of the last century and comics, more than any other medium, support stories that can go on forever. We can follow Dick Grayson, for example, from Robin to Nightwing to Batman and back to Nightwing, because we've come to care about Dick Grayson, and because we want to know what happens to Dick Grayson next. This is often thrilling, and its part of the reason that comics have a rabid, and often unreasonable and uncritical, readership. Its why fandoms are built up around comics.

Of course, the fact that something comes next, the fact that Dick Grayson's story will never end, means that each story is necessarily incomplete. That something must follow in order for what comes before to have been meaningful. Because Watchmen, complete as it is, is already meaningful, because it is already important, the Before Watchmen comics, no matter how good they might be, are always going to be unimportant, barely meaningful, because they don't really add to Watchmen. They aren't going to make me care anymore about what comes next, and, more importantly, they aren't going to change the way I understand Watchmen because they can't, because Watchmen already is. The only stories that need prequels are stories that aren't fully formed. The only stories that need to be told forever are stories that are meaningful in part because they are told forever. Watchmen only really needed to be told once, only could be told once. And what we're going to get out of Before Watchmen are comics that are stilted, more concerned with moving the right pieces into the right place, like the assembly of chess game, than they are with playing the game that needs playing.

Rightly, no one is interested in how the grandmaster's king got onto the board. And we shouldn't be interested in Before Watchmen, because no matter how good it is, it can't ever really be any good.

Maurice Sendak

There have been a couple of fascinating comics tributes to Maurice Sendak bouncing around the internet today. Over at his blog, and reproduced below, Craig Thompson has a nice little tribute to Maurice Sendak, which I think speaks volumes more than words ever could:

I wish I could say that I had seen Sendak's influence in Thompson's work before now, but thinking about it, its there, clear as day. I would like to know specifically what Sendak told Thompson about his art, and I would have liked to know what Thompson took from Sendak, but, given that the two had a personal relationship, this seems a much more honest kind of tribute, in the voice that comes most naturally to Thompson.

There's also this old Art Spiegelman interview that's been banging about, which I think brings into focus why, exactly, Sendak's work is so important. We, culturally, like to believe that childhood is privileged, protected from the big-bad-wolf of the outside world and, in some ways, it is, but it's also got its own terrors, even for those of us who were lucky enough to grow up in safe and healthy environments. The crux of Sendak's work is to  admit that those big-bads exist, and then to do to celebrate their existence as part of what makes us us, and as what provokes the better angels of our nature.

Basically, Maurice Sendak was more honest about childhood than any other theorist (accidental or not) of the subject ever was; that honesty, that caustic, challenging voice, is going to be sorely missed.