Joshua Malbin

Usually I try to write about new comics, but Brian Wood’s latest trade paperback volume of DMZ is remarkable enough to warrant comment. Long series can flag in their later volumes—see Preacher, for example, or the last couple flaccid books of Ex Machina. But in Volume 8 of DMZ Wood has put together his finest story of the series, one that’s all the more remarkable because to do it, he completes a slow transformation that’s been underway since Volume 1.

Our hero Matty Roth is an accidental war journalist reporting from the area that used to be called Manhattan but is now known only as the DMZ, a contested zone between Free States militia–controlled New Jersey and USA-controlled Brooklyn. He’s risked his life to broadcast important exposes on the mercenaries of Treadwell (a Blackwater/Halliburton hybrid), and given voice to the beleaguered remaining inhabitants of a ruined city. A couple of volumes ago he decided he wanted to step off the sidelines and try to change things for the better, and threw in with first the candidate, then the newly elected mayor Parco Delgado. Many of his friends in the city have been suspicious of this new path, and especially suspicious of the new mayor, but as Matty has come to feel like a resident of the DMZ, he’s come to believe he needs to take action on its behalf—and we readers have sympathized.

But in Volume 8 Matty’s new path causes him to finally, decisively lose his soul.

The volume opens with an overture, the story of another man losing his soul. A cop wracked with grief over the death of his family in the civil war joins a cult that turns him into a bandit, then a murderer, and finally a suicide bomber.

It’s a miniature of Matty’s tale: mistakes made in reaction to strong emotions build each on the one before, until it becomes almost unthinkable for the man to admit how wrong he’s become. In Matty’s case, those bad decisions have been piling up for several volumes, and now that he’s taken to going out with armed men, fighting the U.S. government’s violence with violence, he’s in a position to give an order that gets innocent people killed. That he does it in haste and accidentally is clearly no excuse.

This progression is all the more effective in that I, at least, never saw it coming. I was on Matty’s side all along, believing in his rationalizations for his actions. And then all of a sudden we see how wrong he’s been, and for how long.

For all its postapocalyptic, sci-fi overtones, DMZ has been praised by many as a comic that does more than almost any other to bring the reality of war to its readers. This latest change in Matty is perhaps the most audacious effort in that vein to date.

It’s one thing to show us soldiers and tell us that war has changed them, as, for example, Garth Ennis does in his many War Stories books. Or even to present us with a nominally innocent character and then immediately show him being changed, a kind of origin story that is fated to happen so that we can get to the character in the state we’re going to know him for most of his story.

It’s quite another to introduce an innocent character into a war zone, invite the reader to identify with him, and then slowly, over the course of years of serialization, show him evolving into a kind of monster.

I wonder to what extent Wood had this in mind from the beginning. I certainly want to see where he plans to take it from here.

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I’m not entirely sure what to say about Patton Oswalt’s Serenity one-shot Float Out. It reads like what it is: fairly decent fanfic from a guy famous enough to draw people to signings, but still sincere enough in his appreciation of comics and Firefly to put some effort into the thing. Surely the money he’s getting for this can’t mean that much to Oswalt.

Here’s the comic: three former friends prepare to dedicate a new ship to the memory of Hoban “Wash” Washburne, the pilot who lost his life with shocking abruptness in the Serenity movie. By way of ceremony they trade Wash stories, two illustrating how good a pilot he was, the third giving an example of what a good guy he was. None substantially adds to what we knew about Wash from the TV show, movie, or previous two comics, but then I wouldn’t like it if this Wash had been very different from the one I already felt I knew.

If this had been a more popular character—like River Tam or Jayne—this structure might have been more successful. But no one ever cared too much about Wash. Oswalt would have better off telling us a story about an important moment to Wash, rather than seemingly random, emblematic episodes.

Oh well. I guess we’ll see if the Shepherd Book book due out this fall is any better.

Preview here.

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I read The Bulletproof Coffin twice and then had to Google its creators—David Hine and Shaky Kane—to make sure they were real people and not just fictions. (It turns out Shaky Kane is a pseudonym, but one used by a real person.)

See, in its postscript The Bulletproof Coffin claims to be the collaboration of a David Hine and Shaky Kane who wrote horror and “twisted hero” comics for an independent publisher in the early 1950s, which would put them in their 80s today. When their independent was bought out by “Big 2 Publishing,” fictional Hine went to work on “blatantly commercial superhero stories including the mediocre but high-selling Z-Men: Final Meltdown.” Kane went underground, calling Hine a sellout. Later they reunited to produce many more comics that were never distributed. The Bulletproof Coffin supposedly tells the story of what they’ve been doing all these years.

Yet neither Hine nor Kane appears in issue #1. Instead we follow Steve Newman, who has the job of cleaning out dead people’s homes for the city. On the assignment that opens the story he finds a trove of Hine & Kane collectibles and comics, including many his buying guide tells him shouldn’t exist. He brings them home and reads one—and so do we, as its pages are interpolated into ours. He also brings home a coin-operated TV, and when he feeds it a quarter, he sees the house’s owner murdered right after hiding something under the floorboards. He returns to the house, pries up the floor, and finds the costume of one of Hine & Kane’s superheroes, Coffin Fly.

Also some sinister men follow him around, and at the end we see an unexplained, menacing pair of monster toddlers brandishing weapons.

These mysteries in the story itself pale in comparison, though, with the bigger one of why the real Hine and Kane have chose to dislocate their comic’s authorship and make its narrative status so uncertain. A character inside this story by “Hine” and “Kane” is going to discover something about “Hine” and “Kane.” But why come at it from that angle? Why are the fictional writers named after the real ones? I’m intrigued enough to stick through the six-issue run to find out.

The art and overall feel of the book remind me of Daniel Clowes’s first multi-issue story in Eightball, “Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron.” There’s a sequence I particularly like where Newman comes home to what is presented like a dystopic future family life. It’s only when you look at the details of the scene that you realize none of this dystopia is extrapolation, it’s all made of real elements of 21st-century daily experience.

Preview below the fold.

(continue reading…)

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You Are Not So Smart is a new blog in my Google Reader that offers a kind of Psych 101 along the title’s theme. The entry Fanboyism and Brand Loyalty discusses the misconception that we “prefer the things we own over the things we don’t because we made rational choices when we bought them.”

It’s an entertaining discussion; I’ll only add a conversation I had sometime in the late nineties in which someone said, “I use a Mac, I drive a Volkswagen, so yeah, I voted for Nader.”

(The truly horrible thing is that I’m pretty sure that’s how it went, but I may have the order of priority wrong.)

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This was what set off your Holy Land Outrage-o-Meter, this week?

[posted here because I am too smart/cowardly to get into it with you directly]

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Comics have come too far for a title like Mystery Society to be creatively viable, even in the limited run it’s slated for. A new superhero group comic—and despite its mild protestations, that’s exactly what Mystery Society is—needs to take a fresh angle on a subgenre that’s been around at least since the launch of Justice League and The Fantastic Four in the early 1960s.

Take The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for example: a superhero group in the 19th century. Or Warren Ellis’s recent forays into the group concept: Freak Angels tells us from the outset that the group has already destroyed the world, though we are not told why. We see them in the aftermath, trying to nurture a society in the ruins of London. In Planetary, one member of the group recruits another in a quiet scene in a diner, and then before the end of the first issue, the two of them encounter the lone surviving member of another supergroup, who’s been trapped under a mountain for fifty-plus years, since he and his compatriots saved the planet in a battle no one ever heard of. In Gerard Way’s Umbrella Academy, we learn in the first issue that our group fought to save humanity back when they were all kids, but now they’re grown up and gathering for a funeral after years of estrangement.

Mystery Society offers nothing that original. Writer Steve Niles (of 30 Days of Night) does try: the leader of the group is telling us the story of the comic at a press conference, having just turned himself in for incarceration. We’re supposed to wonder how he got there and listen as he recounts the origin story he claims isn’t one.

But this is a weak hook for an issue that mostly shows us a hero we don’t yet care about breaking into a government facility to free two more superpowered girls we also don’t yet care about, all the while bantering over a hands-free radio with his wife, which seems to be a way to lard background exposition into unrelated action. By the end of issue #1 we still have no idea what these people are after or what stands in the way of their getting it. So why buy issue #2?

Compare that to the first installment of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. We start on a single, normal boy dong things the reader can readily identify with: hotwiring a car, vandalizing his school. Only after that identification is built, toward the end of the issue, does Morrison introduce King Mob and the rest of the superhero team, there to rescue the boy from a threat we can instantly understand metaphorically (forced conformity), even if we don’t get its particulars yet.

There are stakes for the reader to care about, in other words, rather than a bunch of pages of a guy beating up bigger and bigger robots when we don’t yet give a crap about him or whatever’s past the robots.

Preview below the fold.

(continue reading…)

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