Take, for instance, a recent interview he did with Ales Kot and Zoetica Ebb in issue #4 of the amazing publication Coilhouse:

Once the nineties came along, I changed my life and started doing The Invisibles. I thought, I’ll do a comic that actually is a magic spell, a narrative sigil. I had made that little comic book avatar of myself for Animal Man and decided to make a better on, a “fiction suit” I could use to live an alternate life in print.  . . . I was looking at what Neil Gaiman was doing with Sandman, because he looked like his character and it was getting attention. Girls loved him because he looked like Morpheus! I thought, What a wicked idea. Fuse yourself with the character, so if fans love the character then they actually get to meet him when they meet you. How weird is that? I thought, I’m going to turn myself into a comic book character and I’m going to write about my adventures every month. I’m also going to see how it reflects in my own life, as a magical, transformative act.

First off, if you love the aforementioned quote, you’ll end up stalking the entire interview. Go buy your copy of Coilhouse now.

Anyway, maybe it’s my inner nerd taking over, but it’s stuff like this that excites and inspires me. Fiction suit is one of the many terms I’ve appropriated into every day speak and I’ve begun to litter my PhD work with.

Now, I’m not going to get into Animal Man or The Invisibles (not today, at least). Instead, I want to take a quick look at by Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris’ Ex Machina, specifically #40 of the series that used an entire issue to make a metafictional diversion.

Such as this:

What I like about this particular metafictional encounter – the meeting of creator and creation – is how selfish it is. I’m not saying this negatively. Postmodern metafictional encounters, in particular, have been committed more for the benefit of the writer rather than the reader. The writer putting on a fiction suit is a selfish act.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions is a good example of a writer working through some seriously heavy issues as he turns 50. The book is clearly written for Vonnegut first, and luckily, it manages to be entertaining for us as well. Morrison’s metafictional encounter in Animal Man works the same way, but it’s a testament to his talent as a writer that he manages to make it work within the themes he had been building for the previous 25 issues of the run. And when Stephen King puts on his fiction suit for The Dark Tower series, we’re reading King work out some of the remaining issues he had with his horrifying 1999 accident when a truck hit him, leaving him “laying in a heap . . . all tangled . . . [with] his leg was broken“.

Vaughan, wearing his fiction suit, is out to do the same thing; an attempt to work through some emotional issues within the confines of his own work. The issue is full of in-jokes and playing around with the collaborative relationship between Vaughan and Harris, but once you move past that, what you’re seeing is Vaughan at the threshold of a major life changing decision about leaving New York for LA. Like Vonnegut searching for answers from Kilgore Trout, Morrison from Animal Man, King from the Gunslinger, Vaughan is finding answers by interacting with Mitchell Hundred. And thus continuing the postmodern inversion of the creator seeking answers from the creation.

This is a device that turns a lot of people off, but when it’s done right, like in all of the aforementioned examples, it’s a real delight – with implications that are even more delightful.

]]> http://www.puffchrissy.com/comics/long-box-tuesday-metafiction-and-ex-machina-40/feed/ 4 http://www.puffchrissy.com/comics/daredevil-and-elektra-in-common-people/ http://www.puffchrissy.com/comics/daredevil-and-elektra-in-common-people/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:50:28 +0000 Christian A. Dumais http://www.emptyroomslonelycountries.com/?p=1671

]]> http://www.puffchrissy.com/comics/daredevil-and-elektra-in-common-people/feed/ 3 http://www.puffchrissy.com/comics/long-box-tuesday-punisher-10-vol-3-page-13/ http://www.puffchrissy.com/comics/long-box-tuesday-punisher-10-vol-3-page-13/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:38:11 +0000 Christian A. Dumais http://www.puffchrissy.com/?p=3705 Garth Ennis’ run, particularly his MAX run, is probably one of the most perfect interpretations of Frank Castle. It hit all the right notes without becoming ridiculous and maintained an emotional integrity never seen before with the character. This is saying a lot, because the Punisher is one of the most one-note characters in modern comic books.

When Matt Fraction took a stab at the Punisher and returned him to the Marvel universe with Punisher War Journal, despite his best efforts, I thought the series emphasized Castle’s limitations more than anything (this is something I’m finding again and again in Fraction’s Marvel work, a distinct coldness that doesn’t show in his creator owned work). So I’d be lying if I said I was thrilled to see Rick Remender take a shot at the character in yet another new Punisher monthly.

Remender, however, appears to be embracing the ridiculousness of Frank Castle in a world full of superheroes while finding new ways to remind readers of the fundamental horror of his haunted origins. And it…works. The first issue’s confrontation between the Punisher and the Sentry amounts to one long chase scene that does an excellent job in showing readers how he can hold his own, especially against a Superman-like hero.

By putting Punisher right in the middle of the Marvel universe’s current status quo with Norman Osborn running the show, it keeps the Punisher’s adventures relevant and exciting, and by making the stakes personal with the Hood, Remender can really flex his writing muscles.

By issue ten of the current series, the stakes couldn’t be any higher. The Hood brings the Punisher’s family back to life before his very eyes. And the Punisher, being the Punisher, acts quickly…

There’s a lot going on here, and Tan Eng Huat’s art sells it, especially Frank’s look of horror as the caskets open. The question of why the Punisher does it is what makes this page – and the horrifying pages that follow – so much fun. As a military tactician, his lack of hesitation in killing his family to stop the Hood from using them against him makes a lot of sense. But once you get past that, it probably comes down to Frank not wanting his family to see the monster that he had become because of their deaths. And that’s where the real emotion comes in, and I suspect, what Remender wants to play around with in the current Frankencastle storyline he’s doing.

Backed by writers Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, Greg Rucka and Mark Waid contributing with numerous artists, 52 was a year look at the DC universe absent of the trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.

Over the course of the year, the book would end up being a lot of things, from a space epic to a time travel story to a murder mystery to a journey story to a metafictional commentary and more, but most importantly, it was fun and gave something for readers to really sink their teeth into every Wednesday.

Since the writers collaborated, it’s difficult to discern each writer’s contribution to the overall narrative, but there are enough elements at play to give readers some clues to who wrote what. It’s clear the Question’s story was written by Rucka and Morrison’s fingerprints appear to be on certain parts of Animal Man’s story. That said, as much fun as it is to figure out who wrote what, it’s not important in the end.

The art, as a whole, is serviceable. Considering the schedule and the behind the scenes stuff we know now but didn’t know then, it’s amazing the project maintained its schedule to the end. I’d argue that, when it comes to the art, Keith Giffen probably deserves most of the credit for keeping things moving and establishing an artistic consistency for the book.

While I usually single out a page from the book I’m looking at for the week, I want to point out a specific panel instead. The panel on the right comes from issue #10 of the series.

I know a lot of people don’t like the idea of a married Superman - and I’ve seen some comic book writers make arguments about the limitations it imposes on the character – but I’d argue that the inability for the marriage to work more often then not stems from the inability of the writer, not the concept itself. Sure, the love “triangle” between Superman, Clark Kent and Lois Lane has a lot of possibilities, but so does the marriage, and I think that almost 20 years later, we still haven’t come close to what can be done with the idea.

That said, what I love about the aforementioned panel is how it establishes a certain level of honesty and history that’s usually missing from the characters being together. Here, Clark, who has been without his powers for a couple of months, has to be reminded by Lois that he’s about to pick up a hot pot. It’s such a throwaway panel, but it says more and does more for their relationship than entire stories devoted to their marriage. It makes them real and reveals a certain level of compatibility that is usually not expressed in their stories together. Most importantly, it shows us that their marriage exists between the panels.

This is showing us how they’re right for one another, instead of the usual telling.

And it does wonders.

* I say re-started, because I’m counting DC’s previous weekly experiment with Action Comics.

I’m not one of those people who immediately gets interested in the story at the mention of pirates, monkeys and vikings. So when Brian Wood, writer of Local and DMZ, announced he was doing a monthly about vikings, I was naturally disappointed.

I’ve read somewhere online that Northlanders is a crime saga that happens to be set in the viking age, and is a great way of selling the story. And if that doesn’t work for you, consider picking up issue 17, “The Viking Art of Single Combat”, an extraordinary example of comic book storytelling. The entire issue is a single fight between two men, which by itself could be enormously entertaining with the right creative team (and paired with Vasilis Lolos on art, it is), but it’s Wood’s narration and point of view that really sells this one.

Page 18 hits all the right notes:

Artwise, I love Lolos ability to convey movement. The thickness of the lines and the clarity of the fight’s choreography makes the action feel real in a surprising way. You can really feel the energy of the fight and the eventual fatigue the longer it goes.

It’s the writing here that makes this page so successful for me. The language Wood uses is rich, and it does a superb job at making a viking as common and likable as a modern man, something I feel a lot of writers aren’t necessarily good at when tackling characters from the past. And I especially love the placement of those last two captions with the dark image of man getting ready to bring the ax down. It’s so effective.

Most importantly, removed from the rest of the book, I think the page works as a stunning piece of nanofiction that has a burst cultural quality with a solid emotional center.

That said, Brubaker’s work was excellent on Daredevil, especially considering that Brubaker spent a lot of his run returning Daredevil to the unpredictable street-level hero we know and love after not only having his identity revealed to the public, but being incarcerated (a storyline I wish was longer). Not only does he pull this off without completely undermining what came before his run (Milla fans will argue this, but really, if you’ve been reading Daredevil for any length of time, you have to know by now that she couldn’t possibly have stayed in the book), he even throws the book back to the Mike Murdock swashbuckler days for some extra nostalgic fun.

The issue that I keep returning to with Brubaker’s run on Daredevil is issue #116, the first issue of the “Return of the King” storyline. Not only is it a great beginning, it’s a fantastic stand alone piece that should be required reading for any comic book writer looking to establish an emotionally resonant story within 22 pages.

He didn’t do it alone though. David Aja’s artwork in this issue is simply gorgeous. It’s clear Aja put a lot of thought into the construction of the panels and it really shows with page 13:

The artistic depth here is breathtaking, and it’s easy to miss at first glance. You have a profile silhouette of Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin, and within this image you’ll find Spider-Man (I love how the webbing reflect’s the Kingpin’s devious mind), Daredevil, and Bullseye. Bullseye’s presence within the darkness of Daredevil makes sense, how he’s always lurking in the background, whether we are talking about Daredevil’s life or Matt Murdock’s guilt.

And then the narration pushing your eyes downward until you come to the stark image of his wife Vanessa.

Speaking of narration,  it’s one of the elements of this issue that I really love. It reminds me of the second-person narration from the 1961 film Blast of Silence, a device that elevated the movie, such as:

You’re alone. But you don’t mind that. You’re a loner. That’s the way it should be. You’ve always been alone. By now it’s your trademark. You like it that way.

I covered my appreciation and love of Blast of Silence over at Where the Long Tail Ends before, so I won’t wander in that direction. But Brubaker’s decision to use this kind of narration for a comic book villain like the Kingpin was an extraordinary way of allowing readers to look at the character with fresh eyes – something I didn’t think was any longer possible with the character. And on top of that, despite knowing all the bad things the Kingpin has done over the years, you still find yourself hoping that he’ll take the opportunity presented in the story and turn a new leaf.

And if you know how these stories go, like in Blast of Silence, it’s when these guys reach out for something good when bad things happen.

I know I already covered this particular issue of All-Star Superman, but as the new year approaches, I couldn’t pass up sharing this beautiful and optimistic page written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely.

This is as good a place as any to call it a year with comics.

See you back here in 2010.

Morrison’s 26 issue run on Animal Man is crazy brilliant, a sprawling story that winds back on itself with amazing precision, and when it’s over, you want to read the issues again to see how it all came together. And page 24 in Animal Man #25 is the moment when it all comes to a head. After two years of Animal Man going through hell and back, we finally learn what the point of it all was when he is confronted by the man who has been making his life miserable. Here is where our hero meets the writer of his own book, Morrison himself:

I consider this scene to be one of the most important encounters in comic book history, not only as the culmination of Morrison’s storytelling on Animal Man, but in context of postmodern literature.

The more I understand what Morrison is doing in his writing, the more I believe that he is one of the most important comic book writers working today. And Animal Man was a delicious appetizer of what Morrison would end up doing in the next 20 years of his career.

This was originally meant to be for an anthology to be published next year. I had written other pieces for the anthology that explored horror movie and police drama cliches, and I thought it would be fun to apply the same thing to comic books. The word limit for the stories were 1000 words, and once I decided to do this story visually, the trick was trying to do this in less than 100 words, for the challenge of it.

If you read comic books, I think you’ll notice the little details (Kirby dots!) and recognize the story, one that’s been told a million times before.

This was originally meant to be for an anthology to be published next year. I had written other pieces for the anthology that explored horror movie and police drama cliches, and I thought it would be fun to apply the same thing to comic books. The word limit for the stories were 1000 words, and once I decided to do this story visually, the trick was trying to do this in less than 100 words, for the challenge of it.

If you read comic books, I think you’ll notice the little details (Kirby dots!) and recognize the story, one that’s been told a million times before.