Closing the distance

Let it be known that I have far more in common with my gay friends than not.

Like them, I enjoy the pleasures of a good night's sleep, keeping warm during the winter, a nice meal, the presence of loved ones, and the new "Luke Cage" series on Netflix. And let's not forget that I'm also a snazzy dresser. There is much that we share in common; that's why we're friends.

One thing I do not share with them, and never will: I'm not gay. I'm not attracted to other men, and never have been. When I've fallen in love, whether in my teens or in my twenties, my overriding concern has been a fear of rejection, not a fear of discovery. I've never needed to fear for my safety if strangers see me with my partner. No one has ever told me that I'm going to hell for wanting to be with the one I love.

And while adolescence was rough, people generally assumed that I was straight and eventually would find a nice girlfriend, and I did. I never experienced the disorientation that comes from realizing that such fundamental expectations are all wrong. I'm not gay, so all those things are outside my experience.

Thank God for literature. It has the power to close the distance.

A bad book can treat me to an adventure in feudal Japan where all the people talk, behave and interact like 21st-century Americans, right down to their moral sensibilities. An adequate book will at least try to explain feudal Japan and its customs, while a good book will present me with fully realized characters and a setting so that I gain a better understanding of life in feudal Japan.

A truly amazing book is one that not only will help me to understand feudal Japan and the people who lived there, it will give me a personal connection to the era. By the time I'm done reading, I'll have a hunger to know more, and I'll know whether I would be a samurai, a peasant, a ronin or a monk burning incense to the Buddha. Literature can make all these things real and accessible to me.

I can't overstate how important this is. If a book, a movie, a musical, a poem or a song deepens your appreciation of the humanity you share with someone else and it fires a new connection where none had existed, then the creator of that work has accomplished the work of God.

That was my experience with “Fun Home,” a coming-of-age autobiography by artist Alison Bechdel. Originally written in 2006, “Fun Home” depicts Bechdel's childhood growing up in the living quarters of a funeral home, her teen years, and her early adulthood at college and afterward. The book is an odyssey of discovery. Through her experiences, Bechdel comes to understand not only own identity but also that of her father, a distant and inscrutable figure throughout her childhood.

A little over a year-and-a-half ago, my daughter left a copy of “Fun Home” on the kitchen table. It's like she was trying to tell me something. Dad, look! A comic book without a single costumed hero or ridiculous supervillain in sight. You should check this out.

Not only did it avoid superheroes and their melodrama, "Fun Home" was a comic book with a complex plot and complicated characters. In only nine pages, I fell in love with the writing and kept reading until I had finished. As I recall, I didn't leave the bathroom for about two hours.

Not surprisingly, “Fun Home” was adapted for the stage. The show, which won both Tony and Obie awards, opened off-Broadway in 2013 with a script that weaves its way back and forth among the different periods of Bechdel's life, with a few surprises along the way.

Toward the end of the play, when Adult Alison is starting to truly understand her late father, she hears him ask her younger self to join him on a car ride and spend some time together. And then to her wonder, she realizes that Small Alison is no longer on stage; her late father is talking to her. I'm told that the ensuing song, “Telephone Wire,” is considered one of the most moving of the show.

That may be. I haven't listened to the entire cast album, and so I don't know the music particularly well. Still, the one song I do know well is one that affects me powerfully. It's “Ring of Keys.”

In this song the Bechdel character, Small Alison, is in a cafeteria with her father when she sees a masculine-looking woman enter. This stranger is wearing jeans and lace-up boots, instead of properly feminine clothes; and moves with confidence. Small Alison is enraptured with what she sees, and wonders why no one else in the cafeteria responds as she does to this unconventional woman.

“Ring of Keys” isn't a love song. It's a song of recognition. In seeing her, Small Alison for the first time sees something in herself that she had never been able to notice before, because it never occurred to her that it could be there. For the first time in her life, it hits her that she is not the prototypical girl of tea parties and fancy dresses. She's different. She's like this woman.

For all that I have in common with my gay friends, associates and colleagues, I'm not gay. A physical or romantic attraction to another man is something I've never known, which means that there are sizeable pieces of the gay experience that I'll never share.

I make what bridges I can. At times I've had a front-row seat to the misery they've endured when they've come out of the closet and been rejected, and I've invited them to come to my home and join my family. I've witnessed their hurt when lawmakers and Christians have proclaimed a moral right and obligation to deny them a place at the marriage table, and I've screamed like hell to fight for them.

But I've never understood how liberating it must be to have that moment of self-discovery when they discover the missing piece and unlock the secret of how they are different. That essential piece of the gay experience in America has always been foreign to me. It never even occurred to me.

“Ring of Keys” changes that. The song helps me to get it. I listen, and I'm able to perceive and to understand that aha! moment, and through that discovery, I enjoy our common humanity anew, through an experience I can't relate to. It's a wonderfully moving and deeply humbling encounter.

Just think how much of our conflict and division we could resolve, if only we made the effort to listen to one another, especially when we can't relate.



Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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'daredevil'

Just watched the first episode of Daredevil, and it was good.

"Daredevil" is a Netflix show based on the comic book published by Marvel Comics. Matt Murdock is a criminal defense attorney blinded in an accident as a boy when he saved a pedestrian from being hit by a truck carrying toxic waste. Normally when this happens, the person hit with the waste becomes very sick and may even die. But because this was a comic book, Murdock found himself with heightened senses that more than compensate for the lost sight.

And, like any other Irish Catholic criminal defense attorney would do, now that he's an adult, he goes out at night and beats up criminals.

I've only seen one episode, but the show looks promising so far. It draws heavily on the writing of Frank Miller and Brian Michael Bendis, the two writers who left the strongest marks on the comic. Miller set Daredevil in the Hells Kitchen neighborhood and played up his Catholic faith; and Bendis gave the comic a gritty film noir feel. They both also set Daredevil as the superhero who tangles more with organized crime than with flashy supervillains in outlandish costumes.

The show has a few subdued references to the first Avengers movie and the Chitauri invasion. They're there to remind you that it's part of the same shared universe, but made obliquely enough that that the story doesn't suffer if you haven't seen the movie.

Very nicely, the comic book elements are understated. Daredevil's outfit so far isn't the red leather worn throughout most of the comic's history; nor is it the black-and-yellow outfit that the series started with in the 1960s. So far he hasn't even got the Daredevil name yet. When Murdock goes out as a vigilante, he's dressed in the simple black cloth outfit of Frank Miller's "Man Without Fear" miniseries, and he's called by those who meet him "the man in black."

The bad guys are understated too. No outlandish costumes or melodramatic plots to rule the world. Daredevil in this series appears to be poised to fight organized crime. The show starts out with him interrupting a mob human trafficking action, fighting ordinary thugs with guns.

The first episode also introduced us to Karen Paige, Foggy Nelson, Turk and Wesley. (Wesley is the kingpin's right hand man, at least in Miller's "Born Again" story.)

So, good series. Definitely not for the young kids, though.

swamp thing, volume 6

The final collection of Alan Moore's award-winning work on "Swamp Thing" finds everyone's favorite plant elemental trying to make it back home.

Volume 6 is less memorable than the previous volumes collected under writer Alan Moore's name. The first four volumes in particular focused pronouncedly were horror, environmental horror in particular. This anthology instead explores the genre of episodic science fiction as the Swamp Thing's spirit jumps from one planet to the next. As he goes Moore explores and offers up commentary on science fiction characters such as Adam Strange, Metron and a member of the Green Lantern corps.

Unlike the issues collected "American Gothic" storyline, these are essentially standalone stories and fairly straightforward fare. Loosely connected by his desire to return to the earth, the individual issues are not building up to any great conclusion, and in fact contain stories by other writers as well. Among these is Rick Veitch's issue with Metron and Darkseid, which in a few throwaway panel serves to foreshadow one of the storylines Veitch had planned for his own run on the comic.

This is not to say that the stories aren't good; Moore has always been one of the brightest lights in comic books, and in the 1980s, he was at the top of his game. It's clear from these stories that he was having fun, imagining unusual settings to place the Swamp Thing in, and along the way experimenting with the storytelling medium he was using. (There is one story told from the perspective of a sentient planet-size ship that encounters the Swamp Thing and traps him in her core for a brief time.)

But it's only after the Swamp Thing gets back to Earth that things begin engaging again, as Moore returns to his familiar environmental themes, and winds up his defining run on the series. And like every good writer does, he leaves the reader with something to consider on those themes.

While in space, the Swamp Thing discovered he could save a world from complete environmental collapse and ruin, and now on earth he is considering the possibility of doing the same here, until he realizes that humanity would simply squander the new Eden he gives them, and continue to blight it over and over again. It's better, he decides, to sit it out, and hope that humanity will wake up to its responsibilities on its own.

And on that, despite the horror we have seen over the last six volumes, Moore leaves us with the hope that we are willing to contribute, and the effort we are willing to make that hope real.


Copyright © 2014 by David Learn. Used with permission.

swamp thing, volume 5

I had never read much Swamp Thing until recently, when I finally got around to reading Alan Moore's classic take on the character.

As superheroes go, Swamp Thing really doesn't bring much new to the table. A brilliant scientist named Alec Holland, he was turned into a monster by a horrible accident in his lab in the Louisiana bayou that turned him into an intelligent mass of swamp life. It was a fairly ho-hum origin story until Alan Moore took over the title and started to explore the horror story potential around a being so literally plugged into the environment.

This, the fifth volume of Moore's seminal run on "Swamp Thing," marks a shift in the storytelling from the four previous volumes. Until now, "Swamp Thing" has been a comic showcasing environmental and social horror, covering topics like deforestation and overconsumption, nuclear and toxic waste, misogyny and domestic violence, and America's gun culture. Volume 5 is where it becomes a love story.

Comic books almost always have contained their romantic subplots, as the hero has a love interest that can't be fully realized for one reason or another. Superman loves Lois Lane, but she has a low opinion of Clark Kent. Ben Grimm loves Alicia Masters, but can't see her being with someone as misshapen and as monstrous as him. And not only is Abigail Cable married, the Swamp Thing is a superorganism of plants.

Here Moore offers a subtextual commentary on superhero relations as the authorities charge Abby with crimes against nature, prompting her to jump bail and flee to Gotham City. When the Swamp Thing discovers, he follows her to Gotham and ultimately brings the city to a halt and (naturally) comes into conflict with Batman until his lover is released.

This collection continues many of the environmental themes of Moore's earlier "Swamp Thing" stories, but it also delves into the psyche of an urban jungle and its powerlessness before the might of nature. Even as he tells the story of the love between the Swamp Thing and Abby, Moore shines his light into the emptiness of America's cities and the longing at the heart of humanity for a return to the Green and walking in step with nature once more.

As Batman later remarks, "I think all of us were awed by a love that could stop a city."

If you're looking for a superhero comic for your children, "Swamp Thing" isn't it. But if you want an intelligent story that gives you something to think about after you finish, you should read this, and the previous four volumes.



Copyright © 2014 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Art Spiegelman: 'Maus'

It moght sound odd to say that a graphic novel about the Holocaust is inspiring, but in the case of "Maus" that seems an apt descriptor.

"Maus" is a Pulitzer-winning account of Vladek Spiegelman in the years leading up to World War II and the Holocaust. Interwoven with the story is the tale of the hero's twilight years, where he has become a bitter and difficult old man, and his son, the comic book writer and artist Art Spiegelman, tries to bridge the gap between the two of them by trying to understand his father's experiences.

Vladek Spiegelman makes no claims that he and his wife survived the Holocaust because of any special merit on their part, but his story shows a man who seized opportunity when he could. He used those opportunities not only to keep himself alive, but also to give hope and assistance to other Jews during the darkest period of the 20th century.

And while Vladek's story conveys much misery and loss, it ends on the happy note of reunification, as he finds his wife after the war has ended, and the two are able to start a new family.

The younger Spiegelman at times uses the narrative to offer commentary on the medium he's telling it in, and even expresses doubts as to whether the book adds anything of value to Holocaust literature. To that, I'd have to add my own unequivocal "yes." Although "Maus" chronicles the same horror found in books like "Night" and movies like "Night and Holocaust," it also expresses something about the resilience of the human spirit.

For all the horror and nightmare of the Holocaust and other periods where we give way to hatred and fear, and the other woes released from Pandora's box, "Maus" reminds us that hope also is at loose in the world, and cannot be extinguised even by the likes of Hitler and those who support them.



Copyright © 2014 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Alan Moore: 'From Hell'

Well, I finished "From Hell" last night, around four in the morning after getting it in the mail that afternoon, so I think I have to give it a thumbs-up.

The book is a graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Eddie Campbell about Jack the Ripper. Detailing events leading up to the infamous Whitechapel murders and an ensuing coverup, "From Hell" is a tightly scripted piece of historical fiction.

As an on/off fan of Moore's work -- I loved his run on "Saga of the Swamp Thing," was blown away by"his V for Vendetta," and found "Watchmen^*" to be amazing, but was unimpressed with "Tom Strong" and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" -- I've been looking forward to reading this one.

The book did not disappoint. It was a tightly written graphic novel, as meticulously plotted as I've come to expect from Alan Moore, and thoroughly researched. The book is structured around a widely dismissed conspiracy theory that Jack the Ripper's actions were a plot orchestrated by the Freemasons to protect the British Crown during the reign of Queen Victoria from a scandal involving her grandson Albert.

The action is gruesome -- this is a story about Jack the Ripper, after all -- but Moore's ability to tap into the power of symbolism and to further imbue those symbols with the semblance of deeper order and power, drives some of the most absorbing sections of the book, such as Sir William Gull's taxi ride back and forth across London as he completes an arcane circuit of the city's churches and landmarks.

On the downside, the artwork did make it difficult at times to differentiate among the characters, particularly given the size of the cast; and as an American reader unfamiliar with 19th-century London slang, customs or culture, I had to consult Wikipedia at times to make sure I was following the story correctly. (I also had to re-read the first two chapters, since I found I didn't understand properly what was happening in the fourth chapter, when the story started to progress.)

The artwork also was explicit, not just in terms of the violence, but also regarding human sexuality. Jack the Ripper, after all, wasn't just a serial killer; he was driven by psychosexual demons that led him to prey upon prostitutes in the Whitechapel district with a particularly vicious sexual violence. As a result, I doubt I'll be letting my daughter read this anytime soon. Maybe around the time I let her read my "Swamp Thing" collections, which I've summed up previously as "When you're older, and I'm dead."

I do recommend it, although if you've decided you're not an Alan Moore fan, I concede that you probably won't like it.

^* I think I finally enjoyed "Watchmen" on the fifth or sixth time through. To be fair, on first reading I think I initially was expecting a superhero comic, and wasn't ready for the superhero deconstructed. By the time I was in my early 30s, though, I was finally able to see myself a little in Nite Owl, and could appreciate better what Moore had done with the other nonheroic "superheroes" like Dr. Manhattan and Rorshach.


Copyright © 2013 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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ultimate spider-man

I can't help it. I love the new Spider-man, and I can't stop defending him out in public.

Last year, Marvel Comics announced it was introducing a new character to fill the shoes Spider-man. This new web-swinger is named Miles Morales, and unlike Peter Parker, he's not white. He's half-black and half-Hispanic, and represents part of Marvel's overall shift at Ultimate Comics to increase the racial and ethnic diversity of their superheroes.

Predictably, people were upset about the change when it was announced. People complained that Marvel was getting rid of the traditional Spider-man, and accused the company of kotowing to political correctness.

A few things surprised me about this. First is that Miles is not replacing the Spider-man who Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created in 1962. He's replacing the Spider-man whom Brian Michael Bendis created in 2000 for Marvel's Ultimate Comics line.

Second is that even if he were, so what? It's not like there is a dearth of white superheroes, and death in comic books is about as permanent as a haircut. If Marvel can create a superhero who speaks to the experience of its readers of color, I'm all for it.

Spider-man as a character has grown stale because of his pop culture success. He's not allowed to age, to marry and have children or otherwise significantly change, because the editorial powers at Marvel would rather milk their cash cow until it goes dry than risk killing it. Reinterpreting the character as an inner-city person of color rather than as a white teen from Queens is bold and opens up new avenues of storytelling.

What amazes me is that people still are upset about it, more than a year later. Two people at the comics shop the other day criticized Miles when they saw I was buying my daughter a collection of Ultimate Spider-man that included Peter. A friend of mine complained about him last night. Hel-lo, people! Miles rocks.

Miles has a lot of the traits that have always made Spider-man a hero, aside from the obvious spider powers like strength, spider-sense and sticking to walls. In many ways he's every bit as reluctant and outcast a hero as Peter is.

Peter first tried to make money with his powers, and only realized how he was wasting his gifts when a burglar he had failed to stop earlier, later killed his Uncle Ben. Miles used his powers to save some children from a fire, but was so unsettled by the experience that he didn't use them again until after Peter had died.

But the defining characteristic, the one thing that makes Miles stand out from Peter and makes him worth reading is this: He's not Peter. The Ultimate Peter Parker is dead, killed in a battle with the Green Goblin, and remembered by the entire city as a hero.

Miles is trying to honor Spider-Man's memory, but it's going to be ages before he's able to step out from under the shadow of his predecessor and gains legitimacy in the eyes of the New York. (And from some comic book fans, obviously.)

And just as importantly, Miles knows that he can die. One Spider-man already has, and unlike in the mainstream Marvel Universe, the Ultimate Universe doesn't seem to have a revolving door on heaven.

If Miles were simply a case of brown-washing -- if he were from Queens and had the exact same origin story and personality as Peter -- I'd probably agree with my friend who dissed Miles before I explained his story to her. But he's not a black Hispanic superhero for the sake of having one, and when Marvel debuted him, they didn't just create a black Peter Parker. They created a new character, one worth reading for his own sake, and one worth starring in his own movie some time.

He's also a racial minority, a bright kid from a neighborhood a lot worse than the one Peter Parker grew up in. As far as I'm concerned, that's just icing on the cake.

Miles isn't just a black Spider-man. As far as I'm concerned, he is Spider-man, hands-down: fresher and more fun to read about than Peter Parker has been in years.



Copyright © 2012 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Struck by the thunderous magic of Thor

About twenty-five years ago, I discovered a fantastic comic book called "The Mighty Thor."

I'd read the odd issue or two of Thor before, but it never caught my interest like it did this time. Written and drawn by Walt Simonson, the comic was well into a story that had suddenly spilled across nearly every comic book published by Marvel Comics. The Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and even Rom Spaceknight were dealing with unseasonable snow storms. Something called the Casket of Ancient Winters had been broken, and the end of the world was quite possibly approaching.

Simonson, I would discover, was quite a fan of Norse mythology. In less than two years' time on the title, he had transformed Thor from another superhero in a cape into a being of literally mythic stature. He wasn't fighting some random bad guy who wanted to take over the world; he was smack in the middle of Ragnarok, the Norse Doomsday in which Surtur would stride forth from Muspelheim to destroy the Nine Worlds in a fiery holocaust.

I was a late arrival to the story, but I was hooked. Simonson's writing and his art possessed a raw energy that I'd never seen in a comic before; his characters were unique and engaging; and I loved mythology. After one issue actually ended with Surtur lowering his sword into the eternal flame to set it ablaze, I nearly went berserk having to wait an entire month for the next issue to come out.

Thor and his allies won, of course, but the changes even that victory brought to the title and to the character of Thor were stunning. More story arcs followed, some sillier than others, until Simonson finally concluded his run by matching Thor against his mythological foe, Jormangandur, the world serpent. For those who don't know the myth, at Ragnarok, Thor slays Jormangandur, takes nine steps, and dies. Simonson pretty much followed the script on that one too.

Years later, I've come to appreciate what an amazing job Simonson did on "The Mighty Thor." Many comic book writers will tell one story after another; he told one long story consisting of several smaller, self-contained story arcs. It began with the destruction of a distant galactic core on Page One of his first issue, and didn't end until he brought everything to a satisfying conclusion in the issue following the battle with the world serpent.

Along the way, Simonson gave us Beta Ray Bill, brought us through Ragnarok, took Odin out of the picture, gave Thor a beard and Viking armor, and took some very deep and fascinating forays into Norse myth. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced Thor to Marvel Comics, but Walt Simonson is the one who truly made him Thor.

I have a few friends who used to read comic books and who now tell me when the subject comes up that they stopped reading them years ago. Fair enough; I can get just as tired of capes and costumes as anyone else. You know that Peter Parker's spider-sense will warn him before the bad guy gets the drop on him; you know that Lex Luthor will fail once again to stop Superman. It's one of the hazards of an industry where the heroes have to stay in the same essential cycle, lest their identity shift too much and they lose their appeal.

Still, when they're done right, superheroes have the same mythic appeal that the original Thor did, to the people who huddled in Heorot while winter lashed the doorposts and timbers and Grendel roamed the marsh. A good writer brings that out, by exploring the superhero metaphor in a different way, as Frank Miller did with "The Dark Knight Returns"; by making us look at them in a new light, as Mark Waid did with Superman in "Birthright"; or just by going back to the source material, like Simonson did with Thor.

When they're merely done competently, superhero comics are as ho-hum as any other popular novel. When they're done this well, they're worth reading again and again. They're also worth passing on.

Several years ago, Marvel began reprinting comics from its Jim Shooter years under its "Marvel Visionaries" imprint. Not surprisingly, Simonson's run on "The Mighty Thor" was included in those reprints. And not surprisingly, since I missed about half his run, what with one thing and another, I've made the effort to add these to my collection of trade paperbacks.

About six weeks ago, I handed the first volume to Evangeline to read, if she was interested. It took her a little while to get interested, but by the time the Casket of Ancient Winters came into play, it wasn't my enthusiasm that was driving her any more.

Twenty-five years after it first found its way into my life, the magic of Thor's enchanted hammer had caught her too.


Copyright © 2010 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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lightsabers and adamantium

What the world needs is a discussion of whether lightsabers can cut through adamantium. And thank goodness, Fark is there to provide us with that discussion.

As every Star Wars fan knows, lightsabers can cut through everything. And as every comics fanboy knows, adamantium is the nearly indestructible metal used in Marvel Comics. Ultron the genocidal robot has been made of it since the alloy was first discovered. Wolverine's skeleton is laced with it, which makes him even tougher. Just about anyone whom the writers and editors at Marvel want to make more dangerous, has access to it.

Still, while adamantium is nearly indestructible, the key word is "nearly." The metallurgist who created it did so in an attempt to recreate the unique alloy in Captain America's shield. He failed. In the Marvel Universe, the shield remains the strongest alloy in existence.

The shield has been broken only once that I'm aware of. At the conclusion of the 11th issue of the Secret Wars miniseries back in the 1984, Doctor Doom killed Spider-man, the Hulk, and those members of the Fantastic Four, X-men and Avengers who were present with a single bolt from the blue. When they were all restored to life in issue 12, Captain America's shield had a long shard missing.

Doom succeeded in breaking the shield only because he had stolen the power of the Beyonder, a being so powerful that Marvel editors at the time equated him with God himself. Captain America was able to restore it at the conclusion of the issue, owing to residual omnipotence in the air following Doom's defeat.

So the real question isn't whether a lightsaber can cut through adamantium. It's whether it can cut through a metal so tough that only God can break a piece off.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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comic books as literary cycles

If you've read comic books for any length of time, then you know how awful they are for much of the time.

There's a never-ending parade of bad guys who want to rule the world, rob banks, and even nettle specific heroes. They're faced with, and invariably defeated by, a smaller but also never-ending parade of good guys dressed just as atrociously who got their powers in the same improbable ways (chemicals, radiation, genetic flukes or alterations, and aliens).

The stories fall into predictable routines. Maximus has retaken the throne of the Inhumans from his brother, Black Bolt, the rightful monarch, and sent the royal family into exile. Galactus is going to eat the Earth unless his cosmic hunger can be averted. A psychotic madman is terrorizing Gotham City, and Batman has to find him.

By the time you turn 16 or 17, you start to realize that even the comic books about interesting heroes usually aren't worth buying, and so you start to look for specific authors, who you realize can make a comic book about tomato soup interesting, authors like Mark Waid, Neil Gaiman, J. Michael Straczynski and Brian Michael Bendis. Sometimes you even hear about legendary and definitive runs from years past, like Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns," "Batman: Year One" and "Daredevil: Born Again"; Walt Simonson's run on "The Mighty Thor," Tom DeFalco's stint on "Amazing Spider-man," or Alan Moore's legendary "The Saga of the Swamp Thing."

But if you keep reading the same title long enough, you're going to notice some recurring problems. For one thing, no one gets older. Franklin Richards has been 5 years old for more than 30 years, even though the Fantastic Four surely have celebrated his birthday a few times in there.

For a second thing, some storylines seem to keep repeating. How many times has Galactus threatened to eat the Earth after the immortal Lee-Kirby story where he was thwarted and pledged never to try again? How many times is Congress going to consider a superhero registry, or will mutants face the biggest threat to their existence ever?

And for another thing, the long-term storyline is about as clear as a pile of mud three feet deep.

Peter Parker first became Spider-man in August 1962, when he was 15 years old. In the more than 40 years since then, he's aged only to his late 20s, with his story being told in as many as four separate titles at a time. It's just too much storytelling to pack into thirteen years of chronology.

But the lion's share of the blame for the confusion comes from something else: the change in creative teams, which usually comes every five years or so. Attempts to keep the chronology clear usually just make things more confusing. Take Thor for example.

When Thor debuted back in 1962 in "Journey into Mystery," he was pretty much just another guy in a cape with superpowers. He could control the weather, throw a hammer that returned to him like a boomerang, he was superhumanly strong, and he could fly.

Thor moped around for Jane Foster, a nurse who worked for his alter-ego, Donald Blake. Rather like Clark Kent's relationship with Lois Lane, Blake loved Foster, but she had no time for him, and instead preferred his alter-ego. As the comic continued, there were occasional nods to Thor's roots in Norse mythology, but it wasn't anything big, and it got mixed up in a big potpourri of other myth that included the Greek pantheon too.

Walt Simonson came onto the scene in the 1983 and gave the book a massive overhaul. On the first page of his first issue on the title, he began by having some unknown being destroy a star and begin forging a weapon from the core of the star. By the end of the issue, he also had introduced a new character, Beta Ray Bill, whose claim to the power of Thor was as strong as Thor's own.

As the story unfolded over the next several issues, Simonson drilled deep into the rich tapestry of Norse myth, firmly establishing Thor as a member of the Norse Aesir, giving his readers a crash course in that mythology and the stories the Vikings used to tell. As he did this, he gradually racheted up the tension until you realized that the weapon being forged from the core of that exploded star was the flaming sword that Surtur would use to set in motion Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, and destroy the Nine Worlds.

By the time he had finished his story, some five years later, Simonson had revoked Thor's identity as Donald Blake and given him a new alter ego as a construction worker named Sigurd Jarlson. He got rid of Odin as head of the Norse gods and replaced him with Balder, destroyed the rainbow bridge Bifrost, and established a truly stunning cast of supporting characters.

It was tremendous, it was inspiring, and for me at least, it launched an abiding love for Norse myth. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby gave us a superhero named Thor. Walt Simonson reminded us that Thor was a Norse god, and gave us the definitive run on the title in the process. If the comic had ended there, it would have been enough.

It did not end there.

Tom DeFalco, who had done an excellent job on Spider-man in the 1980s, took Simonson's place, and turned it into ... I don't know what. In the few issues that I bought and read, Thor accidentally wandered into deep space, where he squared off against the Celestials. He started fighting with Irish and Egyptian deities, and became less interesting and distinctive a character.

Changes Simonson had made to the character -- having him grow a beard and wear armor, making him look more like the mythological Thor -- were dropped immediately. Odin came back not long after. Last I heard, Thor was back to being Donald Blake, too.

In other words, in terms of continuity, Simonson's run on Thor might as well not have happened. In fact, a later writer revisted the whole Ragnarok storyline, although he apparently wrapped it up by having Thor change history at the end of the story arc, so that it had never happened.

That sort of thing happens a lot in comic books, and if you're a serious fan of a character or even a particuarly well written story,  it can be frustrating to see it reduced to just another episode in the life of the character, with no lasting effects. If Norman Osborne impaled himself on his goblin glider in the 1970s, why is he bedeviling Spider-man again 25 years later?

If Mysterio died at the conclusion of Kevin Smith's Daredevil story, why is he tangling with Spider-man six months later? If the Outsiders knew Batman's secret identity five years ago , why are they so shocked when he reveals it to them now? And how many times does Peter Parker's Aunt May have to die? (Or Captain America, for that matter. Steve Rogers blew up at the end of WWII, he died when his body rejected the Super Soldier serum in the 1990s, he was killed by Onslaught in 1997, and most recently, a sniper shot and killed him.)

A lot of it's because these characters are so old, and so loved by such a number of people. Each time a new writer comes in, she has a choice: keep her predecessor's supporting cast in place, leave the hero in the same general situation as for the last 30 issues or so, or return a more familiar starting place.

Most writers prefer the second choice. So you get some really convoluted stuff, like "That wasn't Aunt May who died; it was a genetically altered actress impersonating her!" Or "The Iron Man you've known has always been in the service of Kang. Now we'll bring in another one from a different timeline!" Not surprisingly, fans do get sick of it and stop reading.

In the past several years, straightforward storytelling has taken a beating at both DC and Marvel as heroes long dead have returned to life. The new Captain America is none other than James "Bucky" Buchanan, Rogers' partner in WWII. Oliver Queen, the original Green Arrow, came back from the dead, as did Hal Jordan and the entire Green Lantern Corps. DC Comics even restored its entire multiverse in "Infinite Crisis," ending nearly 20 years of a single, straightforward continuity with one DCU.

This sort of thing aggravates me, because I liked it better the way it had been. DC's continuity, prior to "Crisis on Infinite Earths" was a bewildering mess, with storylines taking place on parallel earths, and even crossing over annually as the company lurched from one crisis to another.

The new continuity under Jeanette Kahn eliminated that confusion and gave the impression of history, with one generation of heroes making way for the next generation, so that by the present time, Wally West was the third hero to bear the name Flash, Kyle Rainer was the third to be Green Lantern, and so on. The history made the DCU more realistic, and more entertaing to visit.

But of course, other people liked it the other way. And because opinions run so strong on these things, it's not surprising that the policy should change as one group gains dominance and the other loses it. Is Lex Luthor a mad scientist, or a corrupt businessman? Did he know Clark Kent as a boy in Smallville, or did they meet for the first time in Metropolis? It depends who owns the story.

The same is true of Marvel's treatment of with Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. The two of them were married about 20 years ago, and ever since then, fandom has been evenly split on whether it's a good idea or not. In the time that they've been married, Mary Jane was killed in a terrorist attack (it turned out she was kidnapped before the attack), and she's left Peter. (They reconciled.) Most recently, their marriage was retconned out of existence via a deal with Mephisto to save Aunt May.

I'm firmly on the side of the marriage, and I'm not alone. It keeps boiling down to a question of whose vision of Spider-man prevails at any given time.

There is a simple way to deal with this mess. View it as a cycle of literature, handed down from one storyteller to another. Never mind questions of continuity, and how the stories hang together. Consider each storyteller's take on the character as a separate contribution and interpretation of the character.

Most of them suck, but some are incredible -- Mark Waid's "Birthright," for instance, in which he depicts Superman as an outsider who must earn the trust of Metropolis, or JMS' first several issues on "Amazing Spider-man," where he reinterprets the hero around totemistic lines and makes Peter a teacher instead of a photographer, or Bendis' stellar run on "Daredevil."

It doesn't even matter if they conflict with one another. "Birthright" differs widely from John Byrne's "Man of Steel," but they're both excellent reinterpretations of Superman's origin. They're part of a cycle of literature, not a continuing story. That's much easier to stomach, and sometimes, the storytellers even surpass themselves.

And that's what makes them worth reading.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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ultimate iron man

So after a blitz of reading heavyweight books like "Who Wrote the Bible?" and poems like "The Song of Hiawatha," I turned my attention this weekend to the first "Ultimate Iron Man" trade paperback, written by Orson Scott Card.

Despite his multiple Hugos and Nebulas, I haven't really been able to get into Card's work. Because it was so highly rated, I gave "Ender's Game" a try, and then read "Speaker for the Dead" and "Xenocide," but it never really clicked for me. Still, when I saw that he had tackled Iron Man for Marvel's Ultimates line, I was intrigued enough to give it a try, once I could find a copy that I could read for free.
 
Most of the actual origin was the standard throwaway stuff you find in superhero comics: A prenatal Tony Stark inadvertantly was genetically altered so that every neuron in his body functions as brain tissue, making him unnaturally intelligent and regenerating his body  from any injury. He also has a subcutaneous bioarmor that makes him impervious to blunt force trauma. The downside is that he suffers chronic pain because the armor eats his body tissues, which are constantly regrowing. Yada yada yada.

The comic depicts the initial meeting between Stark and James Rhodes, and shows their relationship growing from mildly adversarial to actual friendship as equals. It also provides a reasonable explanation for Stark's alcoholism. Because he's always in some moderate pain from that bioarmor, alcohol when he discovers it at a cocktail party provides him with the first meaningful release from that pain in his life.

I really enjoyed Obadiah Stane.

If you're a comics geek like me, you will remember Obadiah Stane from what is probably the greatest Iron Man story arc ever told, back in the early to mid-1980s. Stane was a ruthless businessman determined to complete a hostile takeover of Stark Industries, which he accomplished by driving Tony Stark, a recovering alcoholic, to the bottle through a series of orchestrated personal disasters.

As the story arc unfolded, Stark gave the Iron Man identity to James Rhodes and ended up drinking himself from being the millionaire CEO and principal owner of a major industrial firm to a wino out on the street who nearly froze to death in a blizzard.

Card brought Stane into the story right from the start, even before Tony was born. In his treatment, Stane's parents are Zebediah Stane and the first wife of Howard Stark, Tony's father. Obadiah Stane and Tony Stark are born around the same time, to parents who had been married, and make natural dramatic foils for one another while they are still young. I've no idea how this has played out since in the Ultimate universe, but the storytelling potential is tremendous.

The Iron Man comic went back to the library today. But if I see some time that they have a second volume, I wouldn't be surprised if I were to pick it up for a light read too.

I need something to do between the heavier tomes I've been reading.


Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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'the last temptation'

I never cared much for Alice Cooper, not even when he appeared on "The Muppet Show."

My younger brother liked him enough that he actually went out and bought the album "Alice Cooper Goes to Hell" after seeing the episode -- to this day I'm amazed that our mother consented to let him buy it, let alone listen to it -- but I never really "got" him. Over the years, I've read a few articles and interviews with Cooper that have piqued my interest a little, but never enough actually to listen to anything he's recorded.

Neil Gaiman, on the other hand, I can't get enough of.

So it was Saturday afternoon that I got my first exposure to Alice Cooper in more than 25 years when I saw a Dark Horse Comics trade paperback at the library. The title was "The Last Temptation," and as it turns out, the comic is based on a concept album that Alice Cooper did several years ago with Neil Gaiman. (I kid you not.)

The plot's pretty straightforward, really. A young boy named Steven is at that most awkward age, when he is neither a boy nor even properly speaking a teen. He's too old for childhood activities like trick-or-treating; and he's just at that age where he's starting to notice a je-nais-c'est-quoi about girls that he finds enticing, almost titillating.

Steven feels trapped and unsure of what comes next, when a mysterious showman appears. Amid a theater of horrors the showman offers him the opportunity to become a rock star in exchange for his future.

Standard Faustian stuff, really. The chief difference is that the Steven's good angel is watching out for him, and Steven discovers the dark truth about the showman and his history. He not only escapes the theater of the damned, he also destroys all that the showman has accomplished over the years.

Not a great comic, to be honest. It was worth borrowing from the library and reading once, I suppose, but I returned it Tuesday afternoon with a ton of other books. The best part was Gaiman's foreword. It was creepy and crack-up-out-loud funny at turns, but that alone isn't worth the price of buying a graphic novel.

Maybe I should get a copy for my younger brother. He always did seem to like that Alice Cooper album when we were little.

Mark Millar's 'Red Son'

How differently might things have gone had Superman landed in the Soviet Union instead of Kansas?

That's the question explored in Mark Millar's "Red Son," a comic that reimagines Superman as a Soviet superhero rather than an American icon. Elseworlds comics like this one take place outside regular DC continuity and reimagine the characters in a new setting. Precisely because of this changed background, Elseworlds comics can be a lot of fun.

"Red Son" is an interesting take on Superman because he's still an essentially good guy who doesn't want anyone to be hurt, and has unimpeachable moral character. He's still Superman. But because he grew up in communist Russia, he's not the Superman we remember. He still defends truth and justice, but it's no longer the American way he upholds. And in the DC Universe, that's quite a game changer.

In the comic, the adult Superman emerges into the public consciousness during the presidencies of Stalin and Eisenhower. The fear and paranoia of the Red Scare are further inflamed by this superhuman champion of communism and Soviet values. In a compelling section on the reaction in America, the comic shows people in the street terrified at the thought that a superpowered Soviet can him to watch their every move from orbit.

Superman's chief nemesis has always been Lex Luthor, and Millar sticks with the classic characterization of Luthor as a scientist, but not as a mad scientist. This Luthor is in the employ of the U.S. government, giving as a rare scenario where Luthor comes off at least as sympathetically as Superman.

The conflict between the two men continues over the next 40 years or so moves along standard Superman lines, however abridged, as Luthor gets Braniac to put Stalingrad in a bottle, and creates one superpowered patriot after another, like Bizarro and the Parasite, in attempts to destroy his foe.

Other D.C. heroes and world history get reimagined along the way. Wonder Woman arrives on the scene, and declares her support for the Soviet Union rather than for capitalist America, With Superan on the scene, nation after nation joins the Warsaw Pact, and America's fortunes ebb lower and lower. Soon states start to secede, and the U.S. government is unable to stop them.

The most interesing aspect of the story, thematically, is when Superman succeeds Stalin as president of the Soviet Union, and makes the nation run like clockwork. Everyone has absolute security, and everything they need. There is no crime, no hunger, and no freedom. Dissidents are rounded up and given brain surgery to make them compliant with Superman's regime. (There are shades of Doc Savage here, but it also reminds me of Mark Gruenwald's "Squadrom Supreme," a comic where a pastiche of the Justice League assumed total control of society to build a utopia.)

The story breaks down for me in the final act. Batman in this world was left an orphan when the KGB shot his parents for publishing subversive anti-Superman material. When we finally see him as an adult, Batman's absolute obsession is to bring down Superman and his Soviet system. As it continues, the comic fails to maintain the energy it had in its opening pages.

In a rare twist, Luthor does win in the end, and outsmarts not only Braniac but Superman as well. Except Superan survives as well, and manages to live long enough to see the earth's sun grow red, and hear reports from one Lex Luthor's descendants that the Earth is going to blow up because of pressure building beneath the planet's crust.

The comic was all right, but none what I would want to buy. But that's why I didn't buy it. Gotta love library cards.

Mark Millar's 'Wanted' (spoilers)

Imagine a world with supervillains but no superheroes, and you might have an idea of what Mark Millar's "Wanted" collection is like.

No, scratch that. Millar's comic, published in a single volume in 2005 by Top Cow Comics, is something it takes a twisted genius to come up with. While most of the rest of us would imagine a world where supervillains run roughshod over everyone else and decent people struggle to eke out an existence, let alone a resistance, Millar instead has generated a world order run in secret by an Illuminati of supervillains.

Our guide to this hidden world is Wesley Gibson, a cube farm worker trapped in a miserable life until one day he discovers that his lost father has died and made him heir to a piece of that secret world.

This strange order of things arose about 20 years ago when the supervillains in the world united with a plan: Why not team up and get rid of all the world's superheroes once and for all, and proceeded to do so.

It makes sense, once you think about it, since every superhero has a score or more of regular supervillains on their roster, many of whom (for dramatic and storytelling reasons) are more powerful than the hero himself. Batman alone has the Joker, Two-Face, Mr. Freeze, the Riddler, Bane, Poison Ivy, the Penguin, Ra's al Ghul and the entire League of Assassins, Amygdala, the Scarecrow, Mr. Zzazz, the Calendar Man ... and on and on and on. Put them all together, and he wouldn't have a chance. Same goes for Superman and any other hero you can think of.

So that's what the supervillains did, back in 1986. They either killed the superheroes, or altered the timeline so that they weren't superheroes anymore -- they were actors who had played superheroes on TV shows or in the movies, and so on. It would be as though Christopher Reeve actually were from another planet, or Adam West really were the world's greatest detective -- and yet both men were unaware of this.

The supervillains, with their foes out of the way, now ran the world, from the behind the scenes. Any time they committed a crime, they covered it up through their vast network of controls.

Once Wesley Gibson has been fully inducted into this new world, and the readers with him, the action begins. Not every supervillain is content to rule the world if no one knows about it. What's the point in ruling the world if you don't get to frighten people? So a rift emerges between the "good" supervillains and the "bad" ones, as the more psychotic ones step out of the shadows, neutralize their colleagues who have been holding them back, and everything starts to go crazy again.

Best of all is the ending, which I won't ruin for anyone who hasn't read the comic, but it's got a brutal in-your-face message to people who hate their jobs, feel their lives suck, and spend $20 picking up a trade paperback.

It's a great idea for a comic, and there are some genuinely brilliant scenes in the comic, but this isn't one I'll be reading again. It was just too crude: the sexually denigrating remarks, the runaway potty mouth, and the struggle between amoral characters and their nihilistic foes drained the book of a lot of its pleasure.

Even the pleasure and wit that do survive are tainted by the foul language. Naming characters "Fuckwit" and "Shithead" is the sort of locker room humor that schoolyard bullies enjoy; it's not the sort of thing you hope to find in your reading material, either casual or serious. And by the time the comic was over, Millar had dropped so many F-bombs, it was amazing there was anything more than a smoking crater left of the comic.

Perhaps this was meant to show how tough the characters were, or how uncouth; but without some sort of counterweight, all it left me with was a feeling of emptiness -- the story was clever enough that better writing would have made it more memorable and worth reading again.



Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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'half a life'

I have found a hero in Gotham City, but it's not Batman. It's Renee Montoya.

Montoya has been a detective in the Gotham City Police Department since 1992. The daughter of Dominican immigrants, she works in the department's major crimes unit, where she helps to investigate crimes by Gotham's costumed criminals like the Joker and Mr. Freeze. And she's the central character to "Half a Life," a collection I just read twice after borrowing it from the local library.

I love my library.

"Gotham Central" is part of that relatively new genre of comic books set in the world of superheroes, but with superheroes and their colorful sparring partners used as backdrops rather than as the star attraction. The main story is the human drama of the people who inhabit the same world as the capes.

The art is incredible. For the bulk of "Half a Life," which incorporates relevant single issues from other Batman titles, the art makes good use of light and shadow, smooth lines, rugged lines, and color. It's got a gritty feel to it, which is appropriate, since it's about Gotham City, the seedy underside of DC's urban world.

But good as the art is, it's the story itself is what makes the collection a must-have. It starts out with an issue printed just after "Cataclysm," the Batman-event earthquake that rocked Gotham City in 1999. Montoya is out working with emergency crews trying to locate and rescue quake survivors trapped beneath rubble, and finds herself working with Two-Face.

Two-Face is former District Attorney Harvey Dent, horribly scarred on half his face and given to a pathology that leads him to cede major decisions to the flip of a coin, one side of which is defaced. If the coin comes up heads, he's your friend; if the defaced side comes up, he probably will kill you. Whatever he does do, it won't be pleasant.

Every time someone asks for help, Two-Face flips the coin. To Batman, the risk of the coin landing wrong would be too high, and he would take Two-Face down rather than face that risk. But Montaya is not Batman. She is a cop who finds needs Two-Face to help with the rescue effort. She has one bullet in her gun, and she is prepared to use it, but every time Two-Face flips the coin, it comes up heads and he helps. It's impossible but it keeps happening.

Montoya realizes that she understands the coin, and when Batman appears and tries to stop Two Face, she uses that understanding to keep Two-Face focused on the rescue effort and to keep Batman from interfering. That understanding reaches Two-Face in a way I don't think I've ever seen him reached before, and he wants to reach back.

Unfortunately, the only way he knows how to do that is through his coin, and the law of averages dictates that it has to come up tails the same number of times it comes up heads.

As "Half a Life" progresses, the story becomes about Montoya's own personal duality, an identity that she keeps secret, and the way that Two Face's reliance on the coin forces the two halves of her life out in the open and utterly destroys them both. It's a brutal process, and you can see the toll it exacts on Montoya's family, her friends, and her partners at the department, but especially on her. It hurt to read this comic, it was that well written.

I'm not going to reveal the nature of Montoya's secret, except to say that it's handled well. The only complaints I have are that the secret is a little stereotypical, given her career; and that I think Batman, while he makes a great part of the background, makes a lousy deux ex machina. But the story is handled extremely well and honestly.

It's no wonder this received the 2004 Eisner Award for Best Story. It is fantastic.

My library has saved us a small fortune in books and videos over the past year, and trips like this one have let me read about $60 worth of graphic novels and determine that I'd really like to own only $15 worth of them. The comic shop isn't nearly that understanding.

The other comics I borrowed from the library this trip include a collection from Mark Waid's run on "Fantastic Four" where they visit God, best skipped; and his series "JLA: Year One." That one at least is a decent, fast-paced comic with some real character development of the classic Silver Age characters and team, but it's worth reading only once, and will go back to the library today.

"Half a Life" stays until its due date, and then it goes on my list of must-haves.



Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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alan moore's "swamp thing"

I don't know if you've ever read Alan Moore's run on "Swamp Thing," but if you haven't, I recommend it. In fact, even if it's available at the library, I'd go out and buy a copy. It's that good.

The only other Moore work I know from the 1980s is his "Watchmen," which I've never been able to submerge myself in completely, even though I recognize its importance to the medium and even though I can enjoy the artistry in some ways. (I'm guessing I don't have enough angst and despair to enjoy the darkening tone of the pirate comic, especially when it's buoyed up by Dreyburg's depression, the Comedian's nihilism, Rorshach's endless hostility and Dr. Manhattan's disinterest.)

"Swamp Thing" is just incredible. As the D.C. Universe goes, he's probably a C-string character, slightly more interesting than the Elongated Man, but not as engaging as Green Arrow or Etrigan. I know him mostly from the movie, where Alec Holland was working on some sort of growth formula to enhance plant growth, got covered in the stuff and became the anthropomorphic embodiment of swamp plants. Plus he had a guest shot in "Aquaman" while Peter David was writing it, and Neil Gaiman wrote a couple Swamp Thing-related stories that appeared in "Midnight Days."

In his first issue on "Swamp Thing" -- and it always feels funny to write about a personally new discovery that's actual twenty years old -- Moore reinterpreted the Swamp Thing's origin, much in the way that JMS later reinterpreted Spider-Man. I don't want to say much about it if you haven't read the volume in question, but it's fascinating. It completely redefines the character without really violating anything you've understood about him, and in some ways it even explains some of the impossibilities of his origins -- although as I noted to Natasha, you can't really do that without creating more absurdities, since you're trying to make the impossible seem believable.

Still, he redefines the character, and then follows that through brilliantly, creating a four-part horror story that works precisely because it deals with real horrors like the environmental devastation we've perpetrated in the last several decades. After that comes another three-part horror story that is also good, partly because of the thematic elements, but mostly because of those freaking twists and turns Moore puts his stories through in terms of expectation and plot. His stories can get so complex, it's fun to go back and re-read them just to see all the pieces lining up ahead of time.

I wish I could write that well. (Come to think of it, I wish Moore still wrote that well, but the "Tom Strong" books I've read have been a disappointment, and even "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" wasn't as good as this.)

And of course, as a "Sandman" fan, I got a kick out of realizing that Matthew Cable is none other than the pre-deceased Matthew, who became Dream's Raven in "The Doll's House." I had read that somewhere else, I think on an annotated Sandman web site I visited a couple years ago, but it was still neat to make the connection, and also to recognize a quote that Gaiman borrowed for "The Wake": "The night can make a man more brave, but not more sober." Ironic, I thought, that a comic book character was quoting to Matthew a line from a comic book where Matthew nearly killed himself while driving drunk.

Anyway, "Swamp Thing" is good stuff. I must remember to use my Barnes & Noble card to snag a copy at 20 percent off if the opportunity presents itself. (And for another good horror comic, check out "30 Days of Night," one of the all-time chillingest horror comics I've read, although it didn't give me nightmares.)

getting feedback, and other events

I was talking to a friend last night who's on my "A Messy Faith" mailing list, and he told me had found my story about Daedalos to be haunting.

I was intrigued, since I haven't been getting much in the way of feedback on the list lately, and its membership hasn't swelled considerably yet. Not completely surprisingly, Brian didn't quite get the idea behind the story. He saw it as being about a man who had been courageous, lost his courage when he realized that he wasn't as in control of his life as he had thought, and then finally committed suicide.

That wasn't quite what I was aiming at. The ending was meant to be at least a little jarring, since you really don't know what's going to happen next, whether the wind carries Daedalos away from where he's been languishing, or if he's going to plunge to his death. I can see where he could get that interpretation, though I had thought the wind was a rather obvious symbol for what I had in mind.

Ah well.

Things continue as they have been, otherwise. We just got back from a weekend trip to visit family in Atlantic City, and are taking a slightly longer trip to D.C. this Friday afternoon, where we will visit my brother and take in the sights of the capital. We won't be going to visit the White House, alas, but we will see some of the other monuments, and let the girls see their first-ever protests outside the White House, I'm sure.

Just checked out a bunch of graphic novels from the library. As predicted, most of the Batman graphic novels were a disappointment. They've replaced Jim Gordon with a new police commissioner (Gordon retired), which makes for an interesting tension between Batman and the Gotham police; and for a few issues at least Batman had a female Robin sidekick, since Timothy Drake was grounded from superheroics once his father found out. A couple of interesting developments and changes, but the comics still lack any vision or drive that made Miller's Batman stand out. Heck, they're not even as well developed as Jeph Loeb's Batman, and I never thought he was that interesting.

On the other hand, I also checked out Alan Moore's "Saga of the Swamp Thing." First time I've ever read a Swamp Thing story (aside from a short story or two by Neil Gaiman), and it's by Moore, too. Does it get any better than this? It's an interesting read, and from what I can tell, it completely reinvented the Swamp Thing story, with a whole new interpretation of its origin. I'm still processing it, and will undoubtedly reread it a few more times before I return it. It's not due until the end of the month, like the others, but they're going back tomorrow.

Been re-reading Straczynski's "Rising Stars," too. More on that later.

hitting the (comic) books

I took the girls to Barnes & Nible today to pick up the "Strangers in Paradise" collection "Molly and Poo" for Niki's birthday. (I tried getting it from Amazon, and they kept pushing back the shipping date, and then from Overstock, and they canceled it, and well ...) Naturally, since we there anyway, I checked their graphic novels section, and splurged on a Daredevil Visionaries collection by Frank Miller that includes the entire Elektra saga. I had never read it before.

Wow.

I was really impressed by it. Miller wrote and drew this when he was in his early 20s, and it holds up pretty well. There's a tremendous intimation of passion between the two, but he never really does more than suggest it. There are occasional exchanges -- a kiss or two -- but mostly it's suggested in the way Elektra tails Matt to protect him from one person or another, or the way she bandages him after he's been hurt -- and of course when she spares Foggy just because he recognizes her.

The story also has the sagas of Bullseye and the Kingpin interwoven through it. When he first appears, Bullseye is suffering from a brain tumor that is causing him to suffer a paranoid delusion that everyone is Daredevil. I don't know much of the backstory there -- I never cared much for Daredevil, aside from when Miller wrote it -- but apparently Daredevil had saved Bullseye's life in a previous story. Bullseye's growing obsession with killing Daredevil, plus his determination to "prove" himself to the Kingpin and the rest of the underworld, make him a much more compelling criminal than I had imagined from the little I knew before.

Kingpin was pretty interesting too. I think of him mostly as a Daredevil nemesis because of Miller's "Born Again" story arc, but I think I was mostly familiar with him from the Spider-Man comics. (Miller apparently made a pointed effort of borrowing or stealing as many Spider-Man foes as he could while he was on Daredevil, Kingpin being one of the most successfully stolen.) At the start of the volume, the Kingpin had left behind the criminal underworld but was being pushed back into it, unwillingly, by one of his assistants. By the end of the volume, he was back into it with a vengeance, making him a tragic figure. I can't think of him as a sympathetic character, but perhaps I should -- as noted, he had left that world behind for the sake of his wife, and was drawn back into it against his will. Interesting stuff.

I probably could say things that are more coherent, and I probably will once I've had time to digest it some more, and probably read it a second and third time. I always do that when I get a new comic, because I want to absorb it completely, and you can never do that in the first reading.

This also means I have a redundant Daredevil volume. The Visionaries collection includes the entire trade paperback "Gang War" or whatever it was called, which skipped over the Elektra saga, skimped on Bullseye and focused mainly on the Kingpin's return, even though some of the missing issues were essential to understanding a subplot involving Ben Urich and his investigation into a corrupt mayoral candidate.

At least I think it's redundant. It's possible that "Gang War" includes a few earlier issues, like the one where Daredevil gets his hide beaten by the Hulk and Urich figures out Daredevil's secret identity. (In a nice touch, Bullseye also figures it out and tells the Kingpin, but it ends up neither man considers a blind superhero to be a believable scenario. Later, in "Born Again," the Kingpin decides that Murdock is pretending to be blind after Karen Paige sells Matt's identity.)

Anyway ...

I also bought "Trinity," a graphic novel about the first meeting of Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman, just because it was written and illustrated by Matt Wagner. An utterly incredible comic. I love Wagner's writing. He gets the characters so exactly right. Batman's reaction to the invisible jet: "I want one." Superman's reaction to Batman's gadgets and subterfuge: "Bruce loves his surprises." And the initial meeting between Batman and Wonder Woman, where they nearly come to blows -- excellent. Completely believable.

Wagner also makes good use of Ra's al Ghul and Bizarro -- two villains I've never found that interesting. Ra's al Ghul seems to exist mostly to show how tough and clever Batman is, and Bizarro is, well, usually just a retarded anti-Superman. While I can't say I'm eager to see either one in another comic, I thought the interaction of them here was pretty good. Ra's al Ghul actually comes across as clever and resourceful, rather than merely thinking himself to be so, and Bizarro is a little comical, particularly the way he gets duped into thinking of Ra's al Ghul as his friend, and calls him "Racer Cool."

Aside from that, I bought myself a new Bible, since the old one is falling apart, and a copy of Philip Yancey's "Disappointment with God." I'm still reading the latter, but I have to say that he's given me plenty to think about, ranging from his description of the divine romance from God's side, down to "Disappointment with life should not mean disappointment with God."

my daughter, the fangirl

Well, I'm proud to say that Evangeline is well on her way to becoming a full-blooded fangirl. That she enjoys being told tales from "Lord of the Rings" is no surprise. What is taking me by surprise is how far she's taking these things.

She made the connection between Mulan and her namesake last fall, which racheted up her interest in the Disney movie quite a bit. Last week, we were finishing our homeschool study on the American Revolution by reading a true story about a soldier named Robert Shurtliff. About halfway through the story, we discovered that Robert's real name was Deborah Samson. Evangeline's interest in the story leaped, and when I asked her why she thought Deborah Samson had disguised herself as a man and gone off to fight in the Revolution, she had an answer right away: "Because she knew that no man could hinder the British."

For our anniversary and for Father's Day, I received three different Spider-Man trade paperbacks written by J. Michael Straczynski of "Babylon 5" fame. Natasha has been reading these almost as fast as I have, and the past two days, she has been reading them to Evangeline including tonight, as a bedtime story. After we said our prayers, Evangeline confided in me that she's into Spider-Man even more than "The Incredibles" and would like to have a Spider-Man dress to wear.

What's a dad to do? Much of Straczynski's writing is either too mature or too advanced for her, so I'm going through my collection of trade paperbacks and figuring out which ones are safe for her to read. ("Sandman" is right out, as are "Kraven's Last Hunt" and "Maus.") Tomorrow I'm going to introduce her to Superman, via John Byrne's "Man of Steel" from the mid-1980s; and see if I can find some Spider-Man cartoons we can watch together over the weekend.

When I was a teen in high school, or even a college student, I never would have dreamed that I would marry someone who could enjoy intelligent, well-written comic books as much as I do. And now I have a daughter who enjoys them too.

must-read graphic novels

It goes without saying that anyone who is interested in reading graphic novels should read Neil Gaiman's groundbreaking and seminal work, "The Sandman."

They also should read the related works, also published by DC Comics on its Vertigo imprint, including two trade paperbacks about Death, one about Destiny, and a collection called "Endless Nights," all by Neil Gaiman, save for "Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold." I can't recall who wrote that one, but it had a haunting, funereal beauty about the lives of those who become entangled with a man marked out by Destiny for horror.

Other graphic novels worth reading, in no particular order:

1. "Strangers in Paradise," by Terry Moore. (This is a series of about 17 collections so far). The series follows the lives of two women, Katchoo and Francine, and one man, David Qin. It gets melodramatic and soap operaish at times, and there are other times Moore has lost track of continuity and what he's doing, but the writing is nonetheless excellent.

2. "Batman: Year One," by Frank Miller. On no account should you read "Batman: DK2." It *really* sucked.

3. "Daredevil: Born Again," by Frank Miller. The Kingpin discovers Daredevil's secret identity and proceeds to destroy him.

4. "V for Vendetta," by Alan Moore. Set in an England under fascist rule, this graphic novel shows the rise of the human spirit and longing for freedom, embodied in the anarchist V.

5. "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," by Alan Moore (two volumes, barely related to the movie). The British government begins assembling a team of people known to us from 19th-century Victorian literature, including Mina Murray, Allan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Edward Hyde and the Invisible Man. The series is worth reading just for the sly references Moore sneaks in to other literary works. Volume one establishes the team; volume two takes place during H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds."

6. "1602," by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman transplants the classic Kirby-Lee characters for Marvel Comics from 20th-century America to Elizabethan England. Despite the large ensemble cast, this is a story not to be missed if you're familiar with the Marvel icons.

7. Marvel Legends Thor 1 & 2, by Walt Simonson. the start of a fantastic and defining run on Thor back in the 1980s, this actually includes the start of Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods. Absolutely incredible stuff.

8. "Amazing Spider Man: Coming Home," "Revelations" and "Until the Stars Turn COld," by J, Michael Straczynski, of "Babylon 5" fame. Unbelievable. The guy reinvented Spider-man in the first set, and set Webhead's entire world on its head in the second one.

9. "Rising Stars," by Joe Straczynski. A realistic look at the superheroes, used as a metaphor for lots of stuff, including limited natural resources.

10. "Kingdom Come," by Mark Waid and Alex Ross. Set in Superman's post-retirement days, this comic brings Superman and the rest of the Justice League out of retirement to battle a phalanx of brutal antiheroes who have taken their place in the years since they left. It closely follows the book of Revelation.

11. "Marvels," by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross. The history of the Marvel Universe, from WWII up through the death of Gwen Stacey, told from the point of view of a news photographer who is not Peter Parker.

12. "Astro City," by Kurt Busiek. This is at least three volumes long. It deals with a superhero universe built with elements of DC and Marvel so that Busiek can explore those heroes by proxy. It deals with things like what would a superhero do if his time were his own, how a superhero has to balance his family responsibilities with his obligations as a hero, what makes someone a hero, and so on. Also good stuff.

13. "Midnight Nation," by Joe Straczynski. An L.A. cop loses his soul and has one year to get it back. A great parable about our nation's coldness to those in need.

14. "Black Orchid," by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Gaiman picked a relatively unknown superheroine -- heck, I never even heard of her before I read that volume -- and did some interesting stuff with her. It's definitely not a superhero story, which is always nice in comic books, and it starts to lay some foundations for Gaiman's theology of the plant kingdom, which he was going to develop more in "Swamp Thing" if he ever wrote that comic, which he didn't.

15. "Ronin," also by Frank Miller. That's the story about a reincarnated Ronin (a samurai, who by failing his master, allowed him to die) going toe-to-toe with a demon in a futuristic New York. Sort of. But not exactly. Not at all, really, but I can't say why not without giving away important parts of the plot.

And if anyone is overfamiliar with the superhero genre and wants to read a brilliant sendup, I recommend the "Quantum and Woody" series published by the now-defunct Acclaim Comics.

I skimmed a collection of Frank Miller's "Sin City" a while ago, and found it unengaging, but that's me personally. I don't care for film noir and gangster movies, which is what Miller was imitating, although I do enjoy Miller's older material immensely.

Also, I forgot to mention Jeff Smith's "Bone" series. It starts out as a kid-friendly humor comic, and although it retains its kid-friendliness and a strong humor vein, "Bone" definitely attains the air of high fantasy. Highly recommended.

And then there's "Cerebus." I bought the first volume of that on a recommendation, but found it so unimpressive that I've never bothered to pick up any of the later volumes.