2007: We like short shorts

“Best of the year” lists have been mushrooming, but, understandably, most of them tend to emphasise longer, more substantial works: graphic novels, collected editions and ongoing series. Here, by contrast, are some of the shorter pieces of comics I have enjoyed through the year, none of them long enough to fill a single issue. (But you can, at least, click the pictures below to make them bigger.)

”You’re A Good Man, John Stuart Mill” by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey. Not all of van Lente and Dunlavey’s Action Philosophers (Evil Twin Comics) worked for me, either as entertaining comics or as potted accounts of the thought of major philosophers. But this spot-on Charles Schulz pastiche hit both targets perfectly.


Mark Waid’s super-hero origin stories from 52. As superhero comics sank into a congealed mass of stodgy continuity, Waid performed small miracles every week by boiling down the essence of each of DC’s main cast and presenting it in just two pages. It didn’t hurt that the series attracted artists like Brian Bolland and Adam Hughes, long lost to the more lucrative field of cover illustration, back to telling stories instead. Here are Waid and Hughes on Wonder Woman, from 52 issue 12.


My Own Genie by Jamie Smart. British children’s humour comics have long been refreshingly free of moral didacticism. If My Own Genie was a TV series, Lula, after wishing for something selfish and irresponsible, would have to put it right, while learning a Valuable Life Lesson. In The Dandy, she can just compound the mayhem, while having a good time. It helped that the once-staid publisher D C Thompson is willing to publish artwork as wild as that provided by Smart. This example is from The Dandy Summer Special 2007, as the strip was sadly missing from the regular title for most of the year.


”Maggie La Loca” by Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets Vol 2 Issue 20, Fantagraphics). If brother Gilbert is the Gene Kelly of comics, all flash and effort, Jaime is the Fred Astaire: he makes it all look so simple that it’s easy to underestimate the amount of talent, skill and craft he employs. Plus, I’ve got a soft spot for long-running fictions that age their characters in real time.


Tom Gauld’s letter column illustrations from The Guardian. Weird little flights of fancy that brighten my Saturdays. This one is from 1 December.


Eleanor Davis’s pieces in Mome (Fantagraphics) are often the highlights of this consistently interesting and well-produced anthology. Their unsettling charm makes me wonder if this is how the first generation of comfortable burghers felt when reading the earliest, unbowdlerised Grimm folk tales. These panels are from “Stick and String” in Mome issue 8.


Bryan Talbot’s 3-page History of British Comics, using his Alice in Sunderland style and published by The Guardian to accompany the BBC’s Comics Britannia TV series. I missed this when it came out. For the next few days, my every conversation began, “You didn’t happen to buy The Guardian on Saturday, did you?”


The Mini Marvels, by Chris Giarrusso, appear seemingly at random and often unheralded in various Marvel comics. Really, they should get the cover every time, because Giarrusso’s kiddy versions of the Marvel superheroes are a charming delight, matched only by Jeff Parker’s occasional short X-Men strips with Colleen Coover. This panel comes from “Hulk Date”, which appeared in Spider-Man Family issue 3.


Jack Black from Viz comic. Of all Viz’s parade of grotesques, nothing quite captures the true, vindictive, self-righteous, Daily Mail-reading face of modern Britain quite like Jack Black.


And a Merry Christmas to you, too

DC's First Lesbian Wedding

Here's the cover for the upcoming JLA Wedding Special.


How sweet to see Black Canary marrying Wonder Woman. I haven't been paying much attention to their books lately. How long has this romance been going on?

What's that? Canary's marrying Green Arrow? No, no. Black Canary and Wonder Woman are clearly separated from the other figures, foregrounded while everyone else looks at them. If anything, the cover's focus seems to be Wonder Woman's butt. Green Arrow isn't there at all.

No, it can't be Black Canary's hen night. It's got to be the reception: there's a large wedding cake in the background.

You think Superman's supposed to be bursting out of the cake, like a stripper? No, the artist would have made it look more like he was rising dramatically, rather than hovering. He wouldn't have been so silly as to fill the picture with other flying figures who would confuse the point. And he wouldn't have been foolish enough to obscure the bits of flying cake by putting confetti all over the background. Anyway, who throws confetti on a hen night?

What's that? You think DC should institute remedial art classes for its artists and editors, and tell the latter to pay more attention to supporting and enforcing minimum standards of craft, rather than concocting bad crossover stories? Well, we can agree on that, at least.

Picture
Cover to JLA Wedding Special Issue 1, art by Ed Benes. Due to go on sale in September 2007. Taken from the list of new DC solicitations at Comic Book Resources

Review: Amazons Attack!

Amazons Attack! issue 1: “Chapter 1: The Last Full Measure of Devotion” by Will Pfeifer (writer), Pete Woods (artist), Brad Anderson (colourist), Travis Lanham (letterer) and Matt Idelson (editor), DC Comics, June 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

Yes, it’s a swizz. The cover says “first issue of six”. It’s only when you get inside that you find that it is a continuation of a story already begun in Wonder Woman and that the next issue is not Amazons Attack! 2 but Wonder Woman 9.

Having said that, the story is not as incomprehensible as some have made out. The Amazons seize Washington DC in reaction to the capture, torture and interrogation of Wonder Woman by the Americans. They are being goaded on by Circe the Enchantress, who has a confederate impersonating Sarge Steel, Director of the Department of Metahuman Affairs. It seems reasonable to infer that it was this false Sarge Steel who captured Wonder Woman, but this is not spelled out. Nor is it clear how it comes to be, given that her captivity was the trigger of the invasion, that Wonder Woman is walking around freely on the last page. Had this been a self-contained mini-series, I wouldn’t have been too worried by these omissions, but now I can't assume that they will be dealt with in issue 2, which is annoying.

Will Pfeifer keeps events bowling along at a fair old clip, and lays hints about the motivations of various characters adeptly enough. If this were the 1950s, we might expect the continued emphasis on how much the Amazons hate men to lead to a resolution in which they discover the joys of heterosexual love; but surely not in the 21st century?

Pete Woods is the star here, handling, as deftly as he manages character interaction, the spectacle of vast Amazon armies, huge Cyclopes (clearly influenced by the trolls in the Lord of the Rings films), the destruction of Washington landmarks and flights of both winged horses and USAF jets.



Overall, an entertaining enough issue, but part of an irritating publishing strategy.


Amazon Atrocities
The Amazons’ behaviour in this issue has been controversial – particularly the callous killing of a small boy and his father at the beginning. Ragtime, for one, thinks they are acting completely out of character. And they are certainly different from the society that William Moulton Marston dreamed up all those years ago. Compare and contrast:




On the other hand, this is the first appearance by the Amazons since Infinite Crisis rewired the DC Universe, so past continuity is presumably not binding.

Ragnell, on the other hand, thinks that Amazons are primarily warriors and would behave this way, and Steven Padnick agrees, reminding us that the Amazons “learned their combat strategy and tactics three thousand years before the Geneva Conventions”.

True enough, but even if they didn’t think they needed international treaties to enforce them, all societies have had rules about what conduct is acceptable in war. The DC Universe Amazons have generally been characterised as Greek in civilisation, and worship Greek gods. The Hellenistic writer Polybius, idealising his ancestors somewhat, wrote that they thought “that there was nothing glorious or even secure in military successes unless one side killed the enemy drawn up in open battle … For that reason, they made public announcements to each other about wars and battles in advance …”

When the Athenian army sacked the city of Melos in the Peloponesian war and slaughtered the civilian population, it caused uproar back in Athens. Thucydides believed that the generals were justified, because the city had refused to surrender before the Athenians began their siege, and it was necessary to punish that defiance. But the demand to surrender had to be made first.

It seems fair to say that, if an Ancient Greek heard that an army had appeared in a city and killed unarmed non-combatants, including children, with no declaration of war and no chance for the city to submit, he would have regarded that as an act both immoral and impious – that is, likely to incur the retribution of the gods. But if he was then told that it was an Amazon army that had committed this atrocity, he would have been less surprised – the Ancient Greeks were dreadful misogynists and had, after all, dreamed up the Amazons in part to (literally) embody non-Greek behaviour.

So my carefully considered conclusion about whether Amazon brutality is appropriate to this comic is: I dunno, guv. Let’s see if it makes sense in the context of the story


Random thought
When Black Lightning first appeared, he wore a false afro as part of his super-hero disguise, presumably also intending to look more “street.”

So is it too much to hope that this …


… is a bald wig?


Panels
From the comic under review plus
Wonder Woman “Villainy Incorporated” by William Moulton Marston (writer) and Harry G Peter (artist), Wonder Woman issue 28, March/April 1948, reprinted in Wonder Woman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, DC Comics, 2007

Review: Wonder Woman – The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Wonder Woman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, 187 pages of strip, DC Comics, 2007, US$19.99
Features: “The Origin of Wonder Woman” by Paul Dini (writer) and Alex Ross (artist)
“Wonder Woman Comes to America” by William Moulton Marston (writer) and Harry G Peter (artist)
“Villainy Incorporated” by William Moulton Marston (writer) and Harry G Peter (artist)
“Top Secret” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Ross Andru (penciller) and Mike Esposito (inker)
“Wanted – Wonder Woman” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Ross Andru (penciller) and Mike Esposito (inker)
“Giganta the Gorilla Girl” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Ross Andru (penciller) and Mike Esposito (inker)
“Wonder Woman’s Rival” by Denny O’Neil (writer), Mike Sekowsky (penciller) and Dick Giordano (inker)
“Wish Upon a Star” by Elliot Maggin (writer), Curt Swan (penciller) and Phil Zupa (inker)
“Be Wonder Woman … and Die!” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Jose Delbo (penciller) and Dave Hunt (inker)
“Who Killed Myndi Mayer?” by George Pérez (writer and penciller) and Bob McLeod (inker)
“She’s a Wonder!” by Phil Jimenez (writer and penciller) and Andy Lanning (inker)
Cover by Alex Ross


DC’s post-Infinite Crisis relaunch of Wonder Woman has been faltering badly. In such circumstances, creators often try to reconnect with some earlier, definitive version of the character in question. Want to get the Fantastic Four right? Go and read some Stan and Jack. For Batman, the basic vision created by Bob Kane, Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson can be filtered through lenses provided by O’Neil and Adams, Englehart and Rogers or Miller and Mazzuchelli, but it remains consistent. For Superman, the version of choice at present is the one overseen by Mort Weisinger, rather than Siegel and Shuster’s original, but the principle is much the same.

So what do past versions of Wonder Woman have to offer the present? The latest volume in DC’s presumptuously titled Greatest Stories Ever Told series might hold some clues.

Under the deeply boring cover by Alex Ross (a particular disappointment after two decades of fine and often iconic covers by the likes of Brian Bolland and Adam Hughes) lies a rather erratic selection of stories. We get almost 50 pages by the character’s creators, William Moulton Marston and Harry G Peter, but there is way too much Robert Kanigher. True, he was a very long-serving writer, but the inclusion of four of his stories means that there is no room for anything by, for example, Roy Thomas and Gene Colan, who provided the last remotely successful version of Wonder Woman before the 1980s reboot. The O’Neil/Sekowsky story features a conventionally super-powered version of the character, rather than the depowered Emmapeeled Diana Prince who followed shortly after. There are only two stories from the last twenty years, with nothing by Greg Rucka, who seems to be the best-regarded writer the series has had in recent times.

The eccentricity goes beyond the choice of creators to the choice of specific stories. For example, we get two versions of how Wonder Woman came to adopt her Diana Prince identity, but the rest of her origin is treated only in a few panels by Dini and Ross culled from a much longer story.



The earliest stories, by Marston and Peter, are, of course, quite batty, with a fairy tale logic and Marston’s strange belief in improving society through bondage and “loving submission” to authority. It is hard to see how they could be used as the basis of a mainstream DC superhero comic book nowadays. But they are more purely entertaining than anything else in this book, and, stripped of their BDSM elements, might form the basis of an all-ages read of similar tone to Jeff Smith’s Shazam!, or alternatively something akin to “magical princess” manga.

Kanigher and Andru’s stories are at the dull end of typical silver age superhero fodder. They are also marked by an increased sexism. Marston had written Wonder Woman in the days when Katherine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell were playing witty independent women on screen and Rosie the Riveter was heading to the factories. Kanigher was working in the age of Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe and happy homemakers. Little wonder that he assumes that, if Diana were to marry Steve Trevor, she’d have to give up her super-hero career. After all, she’d be too busy cooking his meals and ironing his shirts.



Mind you, it is almost tempting to envisage Wonder Woman in a comics version of Bewitched, trying to keep Steve and the neighbours from learning that she has been using her powers surreptitiously to defeat those pesky super-villains. With Agnes Moorhead as Queen Hippolyta.

The O’Neil/Sekowsky story is worse. Steve Trevor is tried for murder. Here’s what happens in court.



From here on, Steve’s conviction for the crime is blamed on Wonder Woman: it’s her fault because she’s so emasculating and had the presumption to tell the truth under oath. This isn’t just the view of the prosecutor, it’s the view given throughout by Steve Trevor and even by Wonder Woman herself, so it was presumably Denny O’Neil’s opinion at the time too. Wonder Woman makes no criticism of Steve’s neanderthal behaviour, or even of the reason his alibi is so flimsy – at the time of the killing, with Wonder Woman off fighting criminals, he was busy chatting up the first available blonde, whose name he didn’t bother to get. Perhaps O’Neil thought that was Wonder Woman’s fault, too, for not being on 24-hour call for sex. Vile stuff, and definitely an approach to be avoided by modern creators.

The Maggin/Swan story is so forgettable that, even though I looked it up before starting this sentence, I can remember nothing about it now that I reach the end.

Wonder Woman was completely restarted after Crisis on Infinite Earths. The two post-reboot stories here are decent enough, and “Who Killed Myndi Mayer?” is quite a good little single-issue mystery story. But both Pérez and Jimenez make the mistake of trying to convince us that Wonder Woman is a paragon by having their narrators – Detective Indelicato and Lois Lane respectively – tell us so. The result is that their lead character is remote and uninvolving. Virtue need not be boring, but we need to understand and internalise the difficult decisions and choices that a virtuous character has to take. That is missing here. But, to be fair, with modern soap-operatic superhero comics it is hard to find stand-alone stories, so these two might not be representative.



All in all, this book suggests the rather bleak conclusion that there are no prior versions of Wonder Woman that could provide a solid grounding for a new one. Alternatively, before Gail Simone takes over Wonder Woman and Adam Hughes launches All-Star Wonder Woman, they might need to take inspiration from a completely different set of stories from those presented here.


Panels
Wonder Woman “Villainy Incorporated” by William Moulton Marston (writer) and Harry G Peter (artist), Wonder Woman issue 28, March/April 1948
Wonder Woman “Top Secret” by Robert Kanigher (writer), Ross Andru (penciller) and Mike Esposito (inker), Wonder Woman issue 99, July 1958
Wonder Woman “Wonder Woman’s Rival” by Denny O’Neil (writer), Mike Sekowsky (penciller) and Dick Giordano (inker), Wonder Woman issue 178, September/October 1968
Wonder Woman “She’s a Wonder!” by Phil Jimenez (writer and penciller) and Andy Lanning (inker), Wonder Woman (second series) issue 170, July 2001


All reprinted in the volume under review