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In an attempt to beat Dan to the manga-reviewing punch, I recently read the first volume of Path of the Assassin, another ninjas-and-samurai epic from Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, the writer/artist team most famous for the legendary Lone Wolf & Cub series. I read the first four or so volumes of the Lone Wolf series a while back, but eventually got bogged down by the endless sword fights.

It was impressive enough, though, that I decided to give them another chance, especially since this Path of the Assassin series is 1) much shorter, and 2) more directly concerned with ninjas, which I’ve never seen handled in any kind of intelligent way before. (I’m sure Cold Heat will be an exception.)

Maybe ninja stories usually fail because assassins are basically repellent people; I don’t know.

In any case, I liked the first volume of this, though I have to admit much of the feudal politics and gender roles are a little off-putting. I don’t know what Japanese audiences make of this material, but 16th century Japan is almost totally alien to me, which is actually one of the things about it I found most appealing.

In fact, comics seem almost ideally suited as a medium for historical fiction (or non-fiction, for that matter). Unlike in straight prose, the comics artist can immerse the reader directly into the world visually, with unfamiliar clothing, vehicles, and tools depicted accessibly and immediately.

Movies can do this, too, but they aren’t able to easily impart a lot of the factual and contextual information needed without resorting to often clumsy exposition. (“Ever since Custer fell, Butch, the Sioux have been restless.”) Comics, on the other hand, can seamlessly include textual notes, glossaries, maps, et cetera, directly into the story.

Of course there have been many great historical comics. The late, lamented Jack Jackson specialized and excelled in them; and he could always be relied on not to cut out the good parts. Harvey Kurtzman’s period pieces from Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat are still considered by many people (including me) to be a high-water mark for the medium.

This obviously isn’t a comprehensive list, but I’m somewhat surprised that more cartoonists haven’t attempted historical work. Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde are at least partly in this vein, but I can’t think of too many other contemporary artists that apply. (Probably the comic book I am most looking forward to is R. Crumb’s adaptation of Genesis, especially after I learned that he was using Robert Alter’s astounding translation and annotation of the Five Books of Moses as a source.) Oh, and I almost forgot Maus! And Tezuka. And Jacques Tardi…

Anyway, time to end the rambling. I imagine that the biggest single reason that historical comics aren’t more prevalent is economic: research takes time, and readers aren’t particularly interested. (Jackson didn’t get rich off Comanche Moon, and Kurtzman’s war comics had to be subsidized by more popular EC series like Tales from the Crypt.)

And I guess, like a lot of things that I wish were better about the world of comics, that’s just the way it goes.

UPDATE: The more I think about it, the more period comics occur to me, from Enemy Ace to the World’s Fair sections of Jimmy Corrigan. I don’t know if that supports my post, or hurts it, or both.

UPDATE II: And Louis Riel! Maybe I’m just stupid…

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An excerpt from Tom McCarthy’s Tintin and the Secret of Literature was published in the Guardian this weekend, and now I’m even less certain that it’s supposed to be satirical. At least in what’s printed here, it all seems to be on the up and up, though maybe a touch hyperbolic. Maybe the Economist reviewer was being sarcastic?

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Due to some perversion of my taste (and too much exposure to English literature grad students in college), I’m kind of partial to satires of tortured academic theory, like Frederick Crews’s The Pooh Perplex and its sequel Postmodern Pooh. (It’s an acquired taste, and I certainly don’t recommend it.)

Yesterday, on the Literary Saloon, I came across mention of a book that seems to be of the same kind, only tackling comics criticism instead of literary theory, at least if this review in The Economist is accurate. (It’s hard to tell for sure, since the publisher’s page doesn’t appear to indicate any satirical intent, and I’m not familiar with the author’s previous work.)

From the Economist review:

[T]he Castafiore Emerald, the author argues with sweeping confidence, is not just the oft-misplaced bauble belonging to a forceful but absent-minded opera singer: it is her clitoris. Switch on the “sexual sub-filter”, he explains, and the jewel’s real nature is clear. … Poor Captain Haddock’s plaster-covered leg, meanwhile, is “a sign of both castration and an erection”.

…

The book is sprinkled with enough pretentious jargon, factual error and illogicality to infuriate and baffle the unwary. But the result is a satire of which Hergé, himself the creator of a cast of immortal parodies, would indeed have been proud.

In any case, this book seems right up my alley, and whether genuine or parody, it’s probably a harbinger of things to come for comics. As graphic novels continue to garner attention in high-brow journals and universities institute more comics programs and departments, it’s only a matter of time before the medium gets the full Roland Barthes treatment on a regular basis.

This will inevitably lead to a lot of grumbling and hostility from longtime comics fans, who are unlikely to cut some English professor (whose familiarity with the medium begins and ends with the Fantagraphics catalog circa 2006 Spiegelman and Satrapi) any more slack than they give Scott McCloud. (This is not meant to imply that McCloud and the professors don’t deserve to be criticized.)

I, for one, though, welcome the wrong-headed, jargon-ridden, and pretentious comics scholarship of the near future with welcome arms. No matter how popular a particular work or artist may be, cultural oblivion is unavoidable without a legion of eggheads scrambling for tenure and over-examining an artwork’s every nuance in search of “subversive” intent and hidden signifiers.

Mistakes will inevitably be made, and dumb judgments will abound, but it also may keep Harvey Kurtzman in print for posterity. Comics fans won’t be able to do it alone, no matter how many variant covers they buy.

UPDATE: It’s probably worth mentioning that as far as I can tell, Tom McCarthy’s book has not been published in the United States, and I have no idea if it ever will be. FYI, for all five of you who may be interested.

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Sorry we missed a day blogging. I ate too many burgers this weekend, and kind of needed a break. (Green-chile cheeseburgers are amazing things, but should be eaten in moderation.

Anyway, I still haven’t come up with the energy for a really well-considered post, so here are a few random things I thought worth noting.

1. The week before last in the New York Times, John Hodgman wrote a really nice review of recent comics, including MOME, Ganges, et cetera. (Most of you probably saw it.) I don’t agree with everything he has to say, but it’s thoughtful, informed, and it isn’t patronizing. This isn’t the first smart comics review Hodgman’s written in the Times, and with any luck, it won’t be the last. Maybe other writers for big-time newspapers and magazines will even follow his example.

2. Last week, on his invaluable Comics Reporter blog, Tom Spurgeon advanced an argument about superhero comics addressing hot-button political issues that happens to more or less, kinda-sorta parallel one of my own recent posts, albeit in a much more focused and coherent manner. Marvel Comics’ own Aubrey Sitterson wrote in to disagree, mostly using straw-man tactics.

I was going to write more about all of this, but ultimately decided against it, as I don’t want to bore readers by talking about superheroes too much. But suffice it to say that Sitterson is only able to think of one modern superhero comic that actually supports his argument, and it’s Watchmen. As usual.

I forgot to mention it earlier, but maybe the fact that none of the characters in that book are used to sell Pez dispensers has something to do with Watchmen‘s artistic success.

3. Many of you may already be aware of Big Fun magazine, but if you’re not, and you’re a fan of classic adventure strips, I highly recommend that you seek it out. The included strips are fairly hard-to-find elsewhere, and they’ve been extremely well-reproduced. Leslie Turner’s Captain Easy, Noel Sickles‘ Scorchy Smith, and Warren Tufts’ Lance are all currently being serialized, and the artwork is simply fantastic.

More, and better, entries later in the week.

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All messy, unsatisfying theory aside, sometimes a superhero comic really delivers the goods, even without providing ten pages of burly men wrestling and making wisecracks.

Like, for example, one of my favorite superhero stories ever, “Captain Marvel and the Atomic War!” It was originally published in Captain Marvel Adventures #66 in 1946, and recently reprinted in DC’s Greatest Imaginary Stories, an anthology that’s recommended for those who enjoy wondering how the world might be different if Bruce Wayne’s parents had never been murdered. (Not to give it away, but it turns out Bruce still would have dressed up as Batman and fought crime — so take that, defenders of psychological “realism” in superhero comics!)

Written by Otto Binder and drawn by C. C. Beck, it’s a simple, fable-like story, and also just about the grimmest depiction of atomic war I’ve ever seen in comics (certainly in those meant for children). It’s a lot more realistic about the consequences of such a war than 1983’s lauded television movie The Day After.

Beck and Binder’s Captain Marvel, for those who aren’t familiar with him, is actually a pleasant, wholesome young boy named Billy Batson who, by speaking aloud the magic word “Shazam!”, is transformed into a nearly omnipotent Superman-like hero who looks a lot like the actor Fred MacMurray. As Jules Feiffer memorably put it: “A friendly fullback of a fellow with apple cheeks and dimples, [Captain Marvel] could be imagined being a buddy rather than a hero, an overgrown boy who chased villains as if they were squirrels. A perfect fantasy figure for, say, Charlie Brown.”

The character’s usual white-bread innocuousness makes this particular story all the more effective and shocking. It begins when Billy Batson, working as a newsreader at local radio station WHIZ, is given a flash report that the city of Chicago has just been destroyed by an atomic bomb. Billy quickly says the magic word, and flies off to help. But it’s already too late.

In one burning home, he finds a woman and her child. Captain Marvel swoops in to the rescue, but radiation poisoning has already done them in. Shaken, Captain Marvel laments, “It’ll be the same all over! Not one soul is alive in Chicago! Four million people—wiped out like flies! It’s horrible–horrible—HORRIBLE!”

Not long after, a whole slew of atomic “rocket-bombs” are headed towards the U.S. Captain Marvel stops a few, but others get by, destroying Washington, D.C., Denver, San Francisco, and Detroit. The American military finally gets things together and starts shooting off atomic bombs of its own, at an unnamed “enemy” country. Captain Marvel escorts the rockets, and finds that the enemy country is sending out atomic bombs, willy-nilly, all around the world.

Pretty soon, with mass confuson reigning everywhere, each attacked country blindly sends out more atomic bombs, without knowing for sure who the enemy is, until every nation in the world finds itself under attack. Captain Marvel does what he can to help stop the damage, but it’s beyond even his powers.

It doesn’t take long for the war to end, and Captain Marvel realizes the awful truth: all of humanity has been destroyed, and he is “the only man left alive on earth!”

At a time when government officials were assuring Americans that bomb shelters would allow citizens to ride out a nuclear war in safety, and children were being given “duck-and-cover” drills, this story is remarkably honest about a pretty terrifying situation. And Beck’s simple drawings give the horrific imagery a startling power, somewhat similar to the effect Art Spiegelman achieved with his simple art in Maus. (And no, I’m not saying this story rises to the same level, so don’t get on my case, please.)

This is one way for a superhero story to deal with a political or social issue successfully, by straightforwardly and honestly depicting the effects, not souping it up with a lot of hystrionic theatrics and claiming to be “grown-up.” This story doesn’t even bother trying to justify itself, it simply depicts the problem dramatically. In the end, it may not be high art, but it doesn’t degrade itself and the reader by pandering, either.

—

So far on this blog, I’ve been writing a lot more about old, mainstream children’s comics than I would’ve expected, especially since that’s not my usual reading material. Not that it really matters much, I guess, but next week, I’ll try to write about something that came out less than thirty years ago.

Goodbye, now!

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Because we got a little off-schedule this week, I’m not going to make the big Shazam reveal until tomorrow (sorry, I know). But since my last post may have come off as a little more strident than I intended, a little brief clarification may be in order.

First, I wrote that only one superheroes-grown-up story has ever worked, but to be fair, I might well have missed something or other. (I’ve never read Rick Veitch‘s Bratpack or its sequels, for example, and for all I know, they’re brilliant. And Alan Moore’s early Miracleman comics worked to at least some extent.) And once you’ve got more than one “exception that proves the rule”, maybe the exceptions don’t actually prove the rule so much as they disprove it. So there’s that.

Second, I also kind of gave the game away when I brought in Ursula K. Le Guin. Once you take away the capes and underwear, there’s really no reason that a story with super-powers can’t be successful (and “adult”). Books ranging from Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination to the New Testament have proved that a super-powered protagonist isn’t necessarily a liability. It’s the costumes that cause most of the problems. (But they’re big problems. Green Arrow yelling, “My ward is a junkie!” is bad all enough on its own, but when he’s dressed like Robin Hood while he’s doing it, it’s all over. Wearing that outfit, reading the 9/11 Commission Report would seem ridiculous.)

That’s all, I think, since I don’t want to get too deep into the nerd weeds. I still think my general point was valid, but consider adding these grains of salt, please.

Unrelated bonus: Since Dan brought up Jerry Lewis comics, here’s a memorable comic book moment that’s been making the internet rounds lately, for those who haven’t already seen it: When Jerry Met Kal-El.

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Superheroes and social issues usually don’t mix well. Whether it’s Superman crying because he’s unable to prevent famine in Africa (which actually seems like the kind of problem he could solve if he really wanted to), or the Justice League coming face to face with the fact that being raped by a supervillain can turn a woman into a psychopathic killer (for those who don’t follow superhero comics, that story was actually published, just last year, as DC’s flagship title), their engagement with complicated “adult” problems is generally puerile, hystrionic, and more likely to belittle the issues involved than to clarify them.

This kind of superficial treatment of complicated ideas in superhero comics saw its apotheosis in the 1970s, when writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams (who currently moonlights as a plate tectonics skeptic) teamed up for a series of Green Arrow/Green Lantern adventures, with the heroes joining forces to confront such social ills as racism and drug addiction.

These stories are still celebrated in some circles today as somehow breaking important ground, though they are basically the embarrasingly dated equivalents to the “very special episodes” of bad sitcoms.

Basically, the quest to depict superheroes as “all grown up” is just a bad idea at the outset—so far, to my knowledge, this artistic strategy has worked exactly once. (And no, I don’t consider The Dark Knight Returns to be “grown-up”; that book works best when the reader is fifteen years old. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that.) Superheroes are the vehicle for adolescent power fantasies, more or less by definition.

Which is not to say that the superhero story is a bankrupt genre or that its tropes are incapable of being used to great effect; it’s just that like any other genre, superhero stories have built-in limitations. Steve Ditko and Stan Lee’s early Spider-Man stories do a remarkable job within those limits, as do Frank Miller’s later Daredevil comics, at a slightly more sophisticated level.

(More obliquely, Chris Ware has shown that the iconic value of Superman can be used quite effectively to very different purposes in his early Jimmy Corrigan stories, and more obliquely still, Ursula K. Le Guin has shown the very complicated and profound ramifications of power fantasy in her original Earthsea trilogy, despite the fact that it features wizards instead of super-powered aliens. (Anyone interested in the potential triumphs and pitfalls inherent to fantasy for young adults should pick up a copy of her essay collection The Language of the Night posthaste.))

I’ve rambled on far too long already, so I’m going to end this here for now. So far I’ve just been leading up to what I really want to talk about, a sixty-year-old superhero comic that deals extremely successfully with a grave political problem. On Wednesday, I’ll reveal the masterpiece in question. If you can’t wait (and I’m sure most of you can’t, this is so exciting), I’ll leave you with a one-word hint: Shazam.

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In this week’s issue of the trade newspaper Advertising Age, “Media Guy” Simon Dumenco has astutely chosen this publication as his current “Pop Pick”.

‘Comics Comics’ ($5 by Internet order) is a new mini-mag that “aims to document contemporary and past comics, from a pluralistic, affectionate, but critical standpoint.” If that sounds a little heady, well, it is–and things get equally quasi-scholarly at comicscomicsmag.blogspot.com, where you can find loving meditations on the artistry of greats such as Scrooge McDuck father Carl Banks [sic]. But you don’t have to be a comics nerd to get inspired by the beautiful art. … Comics Comics shares creators and contributors with The Ganzfeld, an art annual … that shares a similar passion for thinky illustration. Check out theganzfeld.com and roll your mouse over the letters of the logo to view a supercool animation by Flash genius Patrick Smith. And then amuse yourself further by visiting his web site, vectorpark.com

Now we just sit back and wait for the flood of advertising requests from Courvoisier and Aston Martin, anxious to get in on this whole “graphic novel” craze everyone’s talking about. (Actually, come to think of it, if we were really that smart and marketing-savvy, we should have called the magazine Graphic Novels Graphic Novels.)

Also, sometime soon we will begin presenting actual, not just self-promoting material again. We felt like we needed to give you a chance to catch your breath and rest your mind a little first. We’ll start learning you again but soon.

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Dan hit the big time this weekend, finally recognized for his “comic book guru” status by that noted cartooning periodical, The Washington Post.