Words in Pictures

[Words in Pictures]

Seconds - Bryan Lee O'Malley (SelfMadeHero)

Forever destined to be introduced as a ‘much-anticipated follow up’, Seconds jettisons a lot of Scott Pilgrim's tics, including some of the playful ways it meddled with the comics form and gleeful breaking of the fourth wall.

But this is one of the places where those tendencies seep back in. Seconds is narrated in third-person, by captions which hang in the air above Katie’s head. And throughout, Katie directly addresses - and, in this case, contradics - the way her story is being narrated.

As the captions use free indirect speech - staying just outside of Katie’s head, but heavily dosed with her perspective - they read like a live commentary playing out in Katie’s head.

When she contradicts these monologues, then, Seconds softly establishes and then reminds you how indecisive she is as a character, which (without spoiling anything) turns out to be sort of the point of the book. But on the surface, it’s just a great running joke.

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Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn (Phoenix Fiction)

This is just some great, tight thriller writing.

Those last two sentences invite you to play detective, pick back through the scene for the other four lies. They set expectations which Flynn spends the next few hundred pages alternately reinforcing and confounding. But…

As a rule, I tend to pick out passages that are representative of the book as a whole. That isn’t the case here. To me, Gone Girl isn’t a great, tight thriller, though it may be presented as one. At its most effective, Gone Girl a horror story.

That horror is rooted in very mundane, universal fears. Fears about working in a collapsing industry, which in Gone Girl appears to be just about all of them. About being a bad person, deep down, and having to lie to ourselves and others. About how we appear when those lies fail or are overwhelmed by someone else’s.

Most of all, it’s a horror about the fragile unpredictability of love. The book sells Nick and Amy’s relationship without ever really lingering on its happy origins. Instead, the focus is on the couple a decade down the line, as each of those fears is methodically applied to show how they can cause love to dissipate, or to warp into something ugly and harmful.

[Words in Pictures]

Batman #680, #677 - Grant Morrison, Tony S. Daniel (DC Comics)

(I’ve broken my usual rules slightly and pulled these two snippets from two different issues of Batman RIP – they’re not even in the right order! – because they seem like two sides of the same conversation, the one I’ve been having on this blog over the last few posts.)

The idea of pattern recognition crops up in Morrison’s Batman over and over again. And each time, it’s reframed: as a necessary human skill, a talent that can make us super-human, an unhealthy way of forcing order onto an meaningless world.

As the world’s greatest detective, Bruce Wayne sees things as a rigid, predictable grid (like the one he’s facing down the Joker on in the top panel here). Wayne might be the hero, but it’s never quite as simple as order = good, chaos = evil.

Once again, Morrison makes a good argument for both sides. It's pretty hard to argue with the Joker’s brilliant one-liner: “No, Batman, that’s just Wikipedia”, especially when the story adopts that Batman ‘66 tendency to pluck out facets of reality seemingly at random and force them into an ill-fitting jigsaw of 'clues’. (Y'know: 'C… the sea… Deep Blue… Gotham Chess Park!’)

It was reading Morrison’s Batman (or possibly reading about it) that introduced me to the term 'apophenia’: “the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”, to use Wikipedia’s definition. It is, in its most extreme form, a mental disorder. 

As someone who was just completing an English Literature degree when I first read these comics, it’s probably not too hard to see why the concept might resonate with me.

But, as Batman retorts to Jezebel Jet in our second panel, dozens of pages earlier: the world needs him to be that person. It’s his greatest super power, the thing which allows him to overcome the Joker and escape from elaborate death traps.

Even more than that, the same pattern recognition is at the heart of the story Morrison is telling. In particular, it’s present in the one element that I suspect his run will be remembered for: the way it brings together disparate parts of the Batman mythos, from weird '50s sci-fi through the camp of '66 to modern grit.

My concern is that this will be remembered as an exercise in continuity-wrangling, or a meta-fictional parlour game. And yeah, it is those things, but modern comics are hardly short of stories which play games with older stories.

But by linking to the themes being expressed through dialogue and story beats and art, Morrison turns this into something not just about Batman but about the reader. Not just about the way we read comics (and blog about them) but the way we understand the world.

Then again, perhaps I’m just seeing patterns in random data again. Did I mention I’m an English Literature graduate?

[Words in Pictures]

Batman #681 - Grant Morrison, Tony S. Daniel (DC Comics)

Batman #681 was my first example of Grant Morrison’s inability to stick the landing when it comes to finishing stories. And not just because, in a story titled Batman RIP, Batman entirely fails to die. 

No, my greatest disappointment was this reveal. After a dozen issues building up a mystery – what is the Black Glove? – which evolved into who is Doctor Hurt?, this was the resolution. Doctor Hurt is … Mangrove Pierce! Maybe. Doctor Hurt is … Bruce Wayne’s father! Possibly. Doctor Hurt is … the Devil himself? Um?

I’ve since changed my mind about this climax, or lack of one. Partly because I’ve now read the run in its entirety (the mystery does get a solid answer, sort of, twenty issues or so down the line) and partly because I’ve somehow managed to get more pretentious in my old age, and can chin-strokingly appreciate its thematic value.

Morrison’s Batman is built on a set of contradictory but equally valid ideas, all co-existing. In its pages, Batman is, simultaneously, a bullying aristocrat taking his problems out on the poor; a miraculous saviour who has time for everyone; the inevitable product of a city as broken as Gotham; a camp crimefighter; a grizzled detective; the folly of a damaged child; an immortal concept…

It’s this superposition which defines Morrison's Batman (and Morrison’s Batman) for me, so it’s only natural that the story’s great mystery would present a series of plausible but incompatible solutions (the butler did it! it was all in his head all along! his whole history is a lie!) and then refuse to actually give the real solution.

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Batman #677 - Grant Morrison, Tony S. Daniel (DC Comics)

It’s hard to argue with Jezebel Jet here. Her reading of Batman – that ‘Batman’ is a defence mechanism created by the young Bruce Wayne to avoid dealing with his parents’ deaths directly, and possibly even growing up – is a good one.

She’s certainly backed up by large chunks of the text, not least the Batcave trophies which litter the corners of the page. 

There’s even a tasty vein of meta-fictional message running through it. After all, if we’re talking about superheroes as a way of clinging onto childhood as adults, the finger probably isn’t only being pointed at Bruce Wayne. It’s the kind of reading that’s been pretty commonplace in superhero comics since Watchmen, and I’m sure certain writers would leave it there, pleased with their observation.

But not Morrison.

The rest of RIP makes it clear that Jezebel's argument, to borrow a catchphrase from Catchphrase’s Roy Walker, is good but it’s not right.

Batman makes his counter-argument on the following page, actually somewhat unconvincingly, but the narrative has his back. A few issues later, Jezebel is revealed as an agent of the evil Black Glove, and Batman emerges from RIP not only victorious (beating even the story’s title, at least for a little while) but having pretty comprehensively proved himself a necessary force for good.

(I’m going to get a bit super-connected over the next few posts, btw, in an attempt to get down everything I want to say about the first act of Grant Morrison's Batman (…& Son/The Black Glove/RIP). It’s just too big for a single post, which is actually kind of appropriate.)

[Words in Pictures]

Edge of Spider-Verse #2 – Jason Latour, Robbi Rodriguez (Marvel Comics)

Originally, I was going to just take a picture of the words ‘Previously in Spider-Woman’ and leave it at that. Because they’re potent words, more potent than they should have to be.

I love the way 'Previously in…’ implies not only an alternate universe where Gwen Stacy is Spider-Woman – and where, based on the Times Square billboards just visible in the bottom left, superheroines like The Wasp and Dazzler are the A-list – but also one where Gwen Stacy: Spider-Woman has been a best-selling comic for decades.

It’s great that with one isolate issue to tell Gwen’s story, Latour doesn’t default to an origin – beyond this almost-All-Star-Superman-level compressed spread, at least – but delivers just another installment in her ongoing narrative, with a costume design from Rodriguez that only loosely quotes the 'original’ Spider-Man’s duds.

And I was going to leave it at that, but then there’s the Peter thing. Naturally, the gender swap puts him in the role of hero-motivating fridge stuffing instead of Gwen, but also… let’s borrow from Tom Ewing here, who made a really smart point back in April that leapt to mind the moment I saw these pages:

“We are now in a position where we also know what bright, nerdy, badly socialised young men who feel they haven’t had any lucky breaks in life can think and act like, because vast chunks of web culture is a monument to that. Especially now, with so many dudes using the comfort blanket of 'nice guy’/'beta male’ or whatever status as an excuse and cover story for all sorts of inhuman and revolting bullshit. Spider-Man is the perfect, iconic, character to critique that, but I can hardly think of any examples of it.”

Raise your longboxes to the sky, because here at last we have a prime example.

Humiliated by bullying – and at least partly, the story seems to suggest, by having to be protected by Gwen – he injects himself with a batch of what turns out to be Lizard serum, muttering “I’ll show them who’s pathetic”, and effectively stuffing himself in the fridge in the process.

On a textual level, it’s a tragedy. On a meta one, it’s a perfectly enactment of the nerd entitlement that the internet is rife with at the moment: Discovering that he’s not the hero of the book, Peter’s only choice as the single white male cast member of an audience-relatable age is to make himself the villain.

I don’t like to lean on authorial intent too much but, um, there might be a subtext there?

[Words in Pictures]

WEIRD FOREIGN DRINKS PARTY – Grant Howitt (Look Robot)

Grant Howitt’s Look Robot is nominally about games, I think, but it’s one of those blogs that I will happily follow on pretty much any digression. 

This particular post takes a stroll into a kind of mutant Lifestyle section, outlining – without really recommending – the titular parties, where everyone brings untested beverages (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) and puts them to the test.

I’ve never been one for dressing up, or doing prep or, y'know, activity of any kind. So as theme parties go, this is pretty much exactly my speed.

Howitt elevates it beyond that with prose which is honourable enough to pretend, with an entirely straight face, that this really could be a Lifestyle section and that people in Sunday-afternoon living rooms across the country could right now be nodding sagely into their broadsheets at the idea of a soy/vodka shot.

Which is just a very funny idea, even before you get to phrases like ‘like having the sea come in your mouth’.

[Words in Pictures]

Gentlemen of the Road – Michael Chabon (Sceptre)

…And, of course, sometimes there’s just a giddying joy to be had watching a strange world being constructed. Especially if it’s done with this light a touch.

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Gentlemen of the Road – Michael Chabon (Sceptre)

I followed Chabon blindly into Gentlemen of the Road, fairly disinterested in the genre but in love with the way he knots words and punctuation into an impossible tangle and then – ta-da! – pulls the whole thing out clean before your very eyes.

There’s plenty of that in Gentlemen of the Road, unsurprisingly, but what really struck me was how much Chabon’s style is actually a perfect fit for this kind of historical-bordering-on-fantasy adventure story.

His overrunning sentences can’t help but fill every character, event, setting, and even object with its own history and internal life. In fantasy, you’d call that ‘world-building’ or 'lore’ – a tendency I’ve often identified as tedious – but it’s just Chabon’s natural mode of writing, part of the way he brings the buzz of genre writing to even his most traditionally 'literary’ work.

[Words in Pictures]

Hyperbole and a Half – Allie Brosh (Square Peg)

There are many things Brosh absolutely nails in the short chunks of text and MS Paint cartooning that make up Hyperbole and a Half: 

• Depression and why it doesn’t make sense to people without the disorder.
• The strange relationship between parents and children.
• The unfathomable irrationality of people in general.

But possibly the thing she captures most beautifully is:

• Dogs.

Y'know the way that they’re ever so nearly like people, right until they suddenly react in a way that makes no sense at all, and how that’s infuriating and charming in equal measures? Around half of the stories in Hyperbole and a Half are given over to exploring this spectrum, in the same detail that Jane Austen dedicated to the peculiarities of Georgian high society. I know which I’d rather read.