Moloch Whose Comics Are Judgement!

I have to say that, of all these silly Before Watchmen books, the surprise solicited J. Michael Straczynski and Eduardo Risso Moloch is the second most tempting, after that one that I already bought an issue of.

Moral issues and problems with the premise aside, its always good to see Eduardo Risso's name on a comic book, particularly since Spaceman, which had some high quality issues, seems to have fallen off of my pull list for one reason or another. His drawing, when he takes his pen to characters that are not his own, has a revealing, almost transgressive, quality, one that I think is perfect for the Before Watchmen project. And to apply it, of all the Alan Moore creations that have been so far violated in this manner, to Moloch? Moloch, who was more of a cancer-ridden plot device than a real character? Moloch, who, even under Dave Gibbons's steady hand, already looks like something from Risso's sketchbook? This new mini is suddenly the most interesting of the lot of them.

Of course, that doesn't make the Moloch book interesting or in any real way necessary, and it certainly doesn't make the project any less toxic. Although it's hard to look at the preview art and not be tempted to deal with the demon, Alan Ginsberg seems apropos:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
      their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
      nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
       tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
       stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
       weeping in the parks!

Review: Fatale #1

For years, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips have been making, on and off, what may be the best straight crime stories in post-Code comics. Criminal, at the very least, runs neck and neck with Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s work on 100 Bullets and, although the two series were good at very different things and had very different styles, publishing schedules, and kinds of serial narrative, they shared the same sort of mentality, a quality that I’m just going to go ahead and call “high pulp.” Now, pulp has come to mean a lot of things and, although I’m sure this will be maddening for some you, I’m not going to fight through an attempt to actually define it, only to come up with an overdetermined clunker or a meaning so broad as to be functionally useless. Instead, I’m going to hope that some of you have read Criminal and 100 Bullets or both and know what I mean, that is, that the two share a general luridness and violence which is definitively in the grand tradition of the lowbrow dime-store novel but done so well, with such care and of such obviously quality, that they force a reader, even a reader disinclined towards comics, to remember that sex and murder are two of the great themes of Western literature. Thus, high pulp. 

Of course, the fact that 100 Bullets and Criminal are pulpy doesn’t say very much about their genre, but you don’t have to think very hard to realize that both are, over and above their general pulp qualities, ultimately crime stories (that is, as opposed to detective stories or procedurals). Similarly, although clearly influenced by pulp super heroes like Doc Savage and the Shadow rather than their perhaps better known comic book counterparts, Incognito, the second creator-owned universe to spring from the imaginations of Brubaker and Phillips, is unquestionably a superhero story which strives towards (and achieves) a specific kind of aesthetic, a certain recognizable quality.

All of this is basically a long way of saying that pulp, although you sometimes see it used this way and despite the fact that it has some relationship to genre (or at least a certain number of genres which, at the beginning of the twentieth century through to today, tended to be published in anthology magazines or inexpensive paperbacks on low quality paper), is definitively not a genre in itself, not a word that can be used to describe the type or essence of a thing, but one that can be used to describe the way something looks and feels. Or, at least all of this is typically true: with the publication of their new series, Fatale, Brubaker and Phillips have brought their considerable collaborative talents to Image, and have turned those talents away from legitimizing pulp (something I would argue that they were successful at, although, if I’m being completely honest, its pretty obvious that filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino have a lot more to do with this cultural shift than any writer or artist of comic books, although I would also argue that Brubaker and Phillips and Azzarello and Risso and also people like Warren Ellis were at the vanguard of a movement to repulpify comics after the more overtly grim ‘n gritty realism of the eighties and the stylistic excesses of the nineties) towards attempting to transcend pulp’s almost century old status as a style, as a mere lowbrow window dressing, and to reframe it as a genre in itself. 

I know this is a pretty bold claim, and I am also going to admit upfront that what I’m going to talk about has pretty obvious precedents (Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy being examples that I can think of without having to strain myself). But, with that said, bear with me for a second. Fatale is a pretty clear coming together of many of the stock elements that make up pulp stories: there’s the accidental protagonist, there’s a mysterious and beautiful woman (presumably the Fatale of the book’s title), and that woman may or may not be the same as another woman who’s a damsel in distress, there’s a reporter who is nosing around in business that he shouldn’t be, there are crooked cops working a gorey and occult multiple homicide, and an oblique reference to World War II and Occult Nazism and very mysterious strangers and magic and so on. Even more than that, though, I think Sean Phillips has expanded his style a little bit, so that it has the not only the stilted action and comics classicism that is essential to the “high pulp” of Criminal and Incognito but also what looks to me like influences from romance comics, so that not only is the story (that is, the literal story, the plot) a chop shop coupe, but its not trying to hide it, either, and, in fact, it takes a certain pride in emphasizing what it is. Now, the kinds of stories that are labeled “pulp” tend to share elements; this is why I think sometimes the description ends up being totalizing (well, that and the fact that some people just dismiss stories that carry such a label out of hand), but what is going in Fatale is different because it doesn’t appear to have any recognizable genre, or, maybe, because it has bits and pieces of so many recognizable genres and because none of those dominate it, that calling it a horror-romance-procedural-noir seems absurd and that calling it pulp is so much more reasonable and satisfying. 

Here, another comparison with Azzarello and Risso seems enlightening: their new series, Spaceman, is also a nine issue mini (or does nine issues a maxi make?) that features the two creators operating inside the language of dystopian science fiction, that is, outside their typical location at the intersection of sprawling crime epic and allegorical (and, initially, startlingly real) ethical dilemma. Now, if you’ve read 100 Bullets or some of their other work, together and apart, you might be able to see why the two of them might be attracted to this new genre: the application of allegory (a technique, I might that add, that is complicated and almost by its very nature highbrow) was something of an innovation in crime stories, but is a basic part of what makes sci-fi tick. It makes sense, too, that the two creators have added some crime and procedural elements to Spaceman as well. Despite this, however, the story is definitively science fiction, although I suppose the argument could also be made that its a crime story merely set in the future, but it does beg to be labeled as one or the other. Fatale, on the contrary, seems perfectly happy to just be a pulp and, more importantly, pulp seems to be a perfectly satisfying way to describe it.

The two books have other things in common as well, namely a problem with pacing: the second issue of Spaceman followed through on a couple of elements which were introduced in the first, but some of the others were left by the wayside for the third issue. Azzarello and Risso handled it pretty well, though, and it wasn’t as disastrous as it might have been, and that gives me hope for the next few installments of Fatale; still, I would like to have seen some more definitive horror elements. Presumably, they are coming, but after seeing everything else fall into place so nicely, there is a sort of interesting, if expected, small reveal at the end, in the place of what I had hoped would be a much more shocking, much more clarifying, ending. One of the joys of serial storytelling, however, is that pacing is important in the long run as well as in the short and, since one of the other joys of serial storytelling is the consistently awesome team-up of Brubaker and Phillips, I have little doubt that they’ll recover with no problem and in good time.

Dig?

First in a series of posts celebrating the collaboration of Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, on the occasion of the upcoming publication of their new work SPACEMAN and a show highlighting Risso's work at The Rogues Gallery in Chicago.

Fourteen years ago, Argentine cartoonist Eduardo Risso came to the United States. An artist with almost a decade of experience, he had already drawn albums released in Argentina and in Europe, most of which have since been translated from the original Spanish and released in this country. His work was first published in Heavy Metal and by Dark Horse and then, at DC, he was matched with Brian Azzarello, an up and coming writer with a few short stories for the publisher under his belt. The project was Johnny Double, a former cop and private eye based in San Francisco created by Marv Wolfman and Len Wein in the late Sixties.

How they were brought together, and, for that matter, why they were on this particular, rarely used, property, are things I do not know. I may, however, be privy to their method of collaboration: a employee of one of the two comic shops I frequent in Chicago's north suburbs told me once that, when the two creators do talk directly, they do so by way of the Spanish that Azzarello learned working in the backs of restaurants, as Risso speaks only a little English. If writing is a conversation with oneself, than comics, as fundamentally collaborative, are conversations with yourself and with the selves of, at least one but usually a few, others. Azzarello and Risso must, then, mostly communicate through the crime and noir genres, genres with languages all their own, spoken not with words but instead with darkness and light. This is a miraculous thing; the two speak this language so fluently, even in their first collaboration they communicate so well, that their work together is nearly flawless. This first mini would lead to the second longest unbroken creative run of the last two decades, the brilliantly plotted and vaguely philosophical 100 Bullets, a title which is surely either the premier crime comic of that span or a very close runner-up.

With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect that their coming together must have been an accident. Nothing this perfect is ever planned.

Last week, through their Vertigo Resurrected series of 100 page collections, DC Comics rereleased that previously out-of-print first collaboration, Johnny Double: Two Finger Discount. This comic is without a doubt the progenitor of what would come barely a year later: even on the first page, the elements we would now know as the hallmarks of the Azzarello/Risso style are on display. The narrator starts with a story, talking at us like he talks at everybody else. The ink lines are thin, but definitive. The characters are well defined, there isn't a line out of place, but they remain cartoony. The panel design is dynamic, almost interactive, but legible. Few things are approached directly, either in the storytelling or in the pictures. Most importantly, though, there's a sort of subdued glee, as if the two are just barely controlling their excitement at the prospect of unleashing deliciously horrible thing upon deliciously horrible thing.

And the whole thing is as sweet as a first big score.

But there's a seedy core to the sweetness: this isn't a straight up crime story, but none of the good ones ever are. Johnny Double is downright prophetic; the titular character is a beatnik asswipe at the end of the twentieth century, a street wise old man too smart not to get played, a child of love and dope who never really found the first or gave up the second. He's been slinking through life since the sixties, and his world is about to change: the dead bum on the story's first page is the first horseman of the Apocalypse, come to bring the end of days to Johnny Double.

Not far behind are a group of youngsters, street wise in their own way, but not hip like Double; not ready for what comes, not that Double is, either. Nihilists, they see that the world is ending, and they steal for their share and they fuck who they can, knowing that their time is not infinite. And then there's the puppetmaster, a ghost playing the worried father, and his daughter (his lover?), looking for that last big score, that gold wristwatch, so that they can get out of the game.

And then, there's Risso's grubby, sticky San Francisco, all garish lights and overwhelming shadows, with the dead bum under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge (recognizable, but always in shadows, black rather than the iconic red) and the underground parties and the bodies in the bay. Risso's city is made all the more real because it's populated by Azzarello's bums, beatniks and con-men, because its the character that really does, in the end, seem capable of seeing the whole thing through; Johnny Double can't possibly take place anywhere else. It belongs in San Francisco, at the end of the twentieth century, just like the story, tightly wound and perfectly placed, belongs to crime fiction, not just to noir or to the con but to crime (and the only motives that the criminal understands) on the whole.

Johnny Double's a hipster, a beatnik asswipe, a private dick with nothing except the memory of the way that things were once, and at least he's got that. The other characters, the ones with shorter memories? They've got nothing. Azzarello's Johnny Double is an anti-hero for the ages, one turned into an icon by happenstance of being played and the happenstance of the medium into which he was born; Azzarello and Risso know their medium and their genre, know that they're dealing with icons, and so that's what this Johnny Double is; a figure deified not for taking a stand, but instead for being the lesser of all evils, the one who stands firm in the face of the Apocalypse not because he is brave but because he can't see that far past his shades.

If he could see beyond them, though, he'd find a world that's hyper real, one that's just the other side of our existence, one that's plausible despite its contrivances and yet, because Risso works in cartoons rather than in photorealism, one that speaks to a world where contrivance is plausible, where some one is always pulling the strings. Johnny Double isn't perfect, although it comes pretty close, and it is a good indicator of what's to come: with this book Azzarello and Risso came together. This is a marvel: what comes next is history.