So let me just say that if your heart doesn’t swell at the sight of a dude in a gold helmet, carrying a shield and a night-stick, with a 60-year-old baby strapped to his back, well, maybe you shouldn’t waste any more of your money on superheroes.
My devotion to Grant Morrison’s ambitious Seven Soldiers project has faltered a bit over the past few months. I’ve enjoyed it, sure, but I haven’t really felt like there was much at stake for the characters, for the DCU, for anybody. But that all changed with Manhattan Guardian #4, by far the best single issue of any of the 7S books yet—so good it inspired me to re-read all the other 7S books that have come out so far, and now I’m convinced the whole enterprise is about the greatest thing ever—and the issue in which the real genius of Morrison’s project becomes most apparent.
In this issue, Ed Stargard, the Kirby-noggined owner of the Manhattan Guardian tabloid, stands (well, sits. He can’t stand or walk. He’s a baby.) revealed as the Golden Age hero Baby Brain, who has aged (but without physically maturing) into a tough-talking, string-pulling tyke. The fingers want to add “cigar-chomping,” but I suppose the bottle from which he still eats takes care of his oral fixation—no need to replace the nipple with nicotine.
In order to prepare the Guardian for what’s to come, he spins a tale of innocence lost involving the original Newsboy Army, a group of seven child adventurers (well, six kids and their multi-millionaire dog). In anyone else’s hands—I’m looking at you, Geoff Johns—this story would have been a Golden Age nostalgia wank. But Morrison’s great achievement is that he’s able to fuse smart meta-commentary on the evolution of comics with the giddy joy of superhero conventions without falling prey to the excesses of either approach. Meta stuff can too often seem cold, tedious, academic, and insular, and straight-up superhero genre stuff can seem too, well, conventional—Geoff Johns, my gaze has not wavered. I’ll stop looking when you stop sucking. Or when you get a court order. But it’s not just a matter of saying, “Oh, you can read it as a superhero story, or you can read it as a critique,” because those ostensibly disparate strands are so beautifully, intricately, and inextricably imbricated into the fabric of the story, so thoroughly mixed up in each other at so basic a level that you can’t isolate one without destroying the other in the process. And there’s a lot more going on than just meta-plus-superhero, too—I don’t mean to sound reductive.
(Seriously, can someone explain to me why Geoff Johns is popular? I picked up a cheap used copy of JSA: The Return of Hawkman a while back, and boy, was it ever lame. Admittedly, David S. Goyer co-wrote the stories therein, but the collection demonstrates the typical Johns approach to storytelling that plagued his Avengers run a few years back and that drove me away from The Flash after never missing an issue for almost a decade: his stories always read as though they’re about action-figures interacting in a vacuum. For Johns, working in a shared universe as rich as DC’s is all about which random character you can introduce, without context or introduction, into the story at an allegedly dramatic moment. Seriously, it’s like he got all his toys out, spread them around on the living room floor (“OK, this carpet is Egypt. And the toy chest is Mars. Kitty, you can be Darkseid”), and just made them go at it, tying the apparently random conflict together with the thinnest of narrative threads. Reading the Hawkman tpb, I would not have been at all surprised to see Snake-Eyes or Optimus Prime swoop in and start dishing out some lumps.)
New Avengers #10. Well, okay. Bendis has spent a few issues now taking the Sentry from meta-fictional gimmick to full-fledged mainstream MU hero and Avenger. It was plenty fun to read, and I loved Steve McNiven’s art. Now the question is, what’s Bendis going to do with the Sentry to justify the time and space taken to make him usable? My worry is that he’s just going to be a generic blond powerhouse, a stand-in for Thor until he gets resurrected at some point down the line, but maybe not.
The Pulse #11. So, after a five-issue opening arc that read like a Spider-Man story, a Secret War crossover and a House of M crossover, The Pulse finally gets around to doing what everyone who buys this title thought it was supposed to be doing all along: telling stories about Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Ben Urich and the rest of the staff of The Pulse—a New York tabloid dedicated to the doings and transpirings of super-people. In this ish, we get some nice character moments with soon-to-be parents Luke and Jessica, and Ben Urich goes on the trail of a mysterious Daredevil-meets-Wolverine figure who foiled a jewelry store robbery, only to do some robbing of his own. I was pleased to see Bendis doing something with this character—you remember Demolition Man (more commonly, D-Man), a former Captain America supporting cast member during the Gruenwald years who eventually got shoved not just to the sidelines but, literally, into the sewers.
During the DeMatteis era and early in the Gruenwald era, Cap was one of the most socially conscious mainstream books around, tackling issues of race, class, and free speech, and if having super-Nazi the Red Skull go around in a cloned Captain America body, become a billionaire CEO, and infiltrate the highest levels of the government seemed heavy-handed and far-fetched at the time, well, now it seems like a gentle, Alan Colmes-ian quibble. But at some point, Gru turned his attention more to straight-up superhero fare. To his credit, he demonstrated that he was aware he was taking the book in a different direction, but his solution created more problems than it solved. In “To Have and To Have Not,” Captain American #418, D-Man awakes (after the events of Infinity Crusade, and, hey Jim Starlin! I haven’t received my apology or my refund yet!) to find himself the prisoner of the denizens of Zero Town, underground tunnel-dwellers driven out of the condemned buildings they used to inhabit when the tenements were razed to make way for swank condos. Says their leader, Brother Have-Not: “They call it gentrification. I call it dispossession.” Of course, Brother H-N turns out to be a corrupt leader, a power leech who sucks the strength from those around him. He and D-Man duke it out, and, with a timely assist from Cap, D-Man puts Brother H-N down and decides that he will join the subterranean residents of Zero Town and help them make a better life for themselves.
And that was the last we saw of D-Man, or of social issues in Captain America, for a long, long while. When D-Man did eventually appear again, in the first issue of the post-Heroes-Reborn Avengers series, Kurt Busiek—in one of the only missteps of his otherwise stellar run on the title—made D-Man an object of mild derision; after years of living underground with the Zero Towners, he had apparently acquried a pretty strong odor, and no one but Cap would go near him. (Cap, always a class act, shakes his hand, greets him, asks him how things are going. We don’t see him offering D-Man food, money, and fresh water on-panel, but he must have done it between the scenes, because otherwise he’d be a colossal jerk, right? Having a meeting in Tony Stark’s mansion, inviting a guy who lives underground and has to forage for food, and then not even letting him take home the leftover pigs-in-a-blanket?)
Anyway, the implications of Cap #418 are clear: someone’s taking care of the poor and homeless, America, so you don’t have to! Go off! Team up with Silver Sable—va-va-va-voom!—fight Terminus, or what have you, and rest assured that things are okay! The people who are having to live in a cave under Central Park now have a slow-witted former pro wrestler as their champion! If that’s not the American Dream in action, then what is? A slow-witted former pro wrestler in every pot by 2012! So, although I’m sure the current storyline in The Pulse was written long before Katrina, now is the perfect time to bring D-Man back, as America rubs its eyes and realizes that, hey, Jesus was right, we will always have the poor with us! We thought sure that not caring would make them rich, or at least make them disappear! As any number of commentors have pointed out, we’re finally being forced to acknowledge, as a national community, the bare and brutal fact of poverty’s existence in the U.S. In this context, D-Man’s “looting” of the jewelry store takes on new meaning, and it’s going to be interesting to see how the rest of this storyline plays out.
Come on, people. Old baby with a gun. What, are you made of stone? Do you need a ride to the comics shop?
Coming Soon: Why Oprah Winfrey’s Broadway musical production of The Color Purple will not be the travesty you suppose!
Waitaminnit—you’re the cat who convinced me to buy all those damn mediocre JSA trade paperbacks!! I mean, I bought them ALL, like at one time! And they sucked! Peter Snejberg has a great feel for Golden Age characters (honed on his better-than-Harris run on Starman—oh yeah, I said it), but the stories . . . blah.
I think I read too much Grant Morrison by obsessively reading & re-reading the Doom Patrol in my teen years. I mean, the guy is a Universe of Big + Weird ideas. It often leaves me cold, but your enthusiasm is making me want to pick this up (despite the burning sensation I still feel after the first issue of Shining Knight).
I remember D-Man! And, good point on the ‘liberal’ Cap: I liked him a whole lot, and the “Captain” identity, too (“the black star on his chest represents the way America has lost its way, man!”).
Gosh, I heart comixx.
What? Me? I convinced you to buy mediocre JSA tpbs? I don’t remember this. Was this when you were in town? If so, sorry. I do generally try to convince people to buy whatever comics they have in their hands when we’re in the comics shop. Comics shops need money! I didn’t realize how bad new JSA was myself until I bought the Hawkman thing recently. The early new JSA stuff had James Robinson, right? And he’s okay. Starman ruled.
I’m not a “wait-for-the-trade” kind of guy, but it might actually be a good idea with Seven Soldiers, although that means it’ll be, like, next Christmas before you could read the whole thing. My advice is to read as much of it at once as you can, perhaps multiple times.
I think I gotta wait. While it’s not “widescreen” in the wait-on-it Ellis or Bendis way, it’s . . . dense, and I’ll forget about what’s going on too easily.
Maybe jp!’s to blame for the JSA probs.
OK. Don’t know a rip about comics, but “I’ll stop looking when you stop sucking. Or when you get a court order.” is classic. Wish I had used that line first.
Carry on, gentlemen.
no WAY! I only by JSA stories that take place in the 40s if i can help it. I like the Spectre, Dr. Fate and Dr. Midnite. if i can’t get the regular versions of those guys, i try to steer clear. (though, i have to admit i’ll buy stuff off of a good cover now and then and JSA can have some good ones)...oh, and DAVE’S LONGBOX is making me wanna read those recent Power Girl stories.
Finally Read Blankets on the night before the election. i never EVER read 500 pages of anything in one sitting. it was shockingly good.
I actually bought the most recent issue of JSA Classified this week (despite my Johns-bashing ways today) and thought it was pretty alright. Not great, but pretty good—I’m genuinely interested to see how this whole origin thing plays out, but mostly just because I’m attached to Power Girl from her JLE days.
I’m torn on this whole Infinite Crisis thing (and I’m skipping all the lead-in minis). I want to hate it, and the preview pages looked about like I expected—pretty Phil Jiminez Perez-lite art, clunky expository dialogue, the sacrifice of B-list characters for cheap drama—but the fact that Morrison, the anti-Johns, has signed on to re-create the DCU in the wake of whatever is going to happen makes me want to be there for the big event. (And this guy has an interesting theory on who the big bad is behind the whole thing, which sort of geeks me out a little bit).