Comic book suggestions bleg

First, a confession: I don't buy comics. I know, there goes my street cred. By 'comics,' though, I mean regular monthly issues of ongoing series. I prefer stand-alone graphic novels, limited series, or trade paperbacks (the comics industry term for volumes collecting a single story arc, usually of 4 to 8 issues, from an ongoing series).

That started to change around this time last year. For the first time. I decided I really wanted to pick up a series as it comes out rather than waiting for the collected volume: Hellboy in Hell #1!

Hellboy is such a great character. As Anung Un Rama, he was born to be the harbinger of the world's destruction and leader of the armies of hell, a monstrous Dark Age villain. Instead, Hellboy prefers to be more like a Golden Age hero, simple and chaste and uncomplicated... if he can get away with it. It's a great dynamic.

I also love Mike Mignola's art. It's difficult for me to explain why; aesthetic preferences aren't something I understand very well, even in myself. But something about the sharp angles, the extremes of light and dark, and the moody scenery really draw me in.

I bought the first four issues, and am excited to pick up #5 tomorrow!

At first, I thought this was the only comic that could convince me to pick up the regular issues. Then I heard about Sandman: Overture. For those of you that don't know, The Sandman was a series written by Neil Gaiman from 1989 to 1996, and is one of the best ongoing comic series ever made. I read the entire collected volumes through the public library last year, and it blew me away. When I heard that Gaiman and artist J.H. Williams III were writing a new 6-issue bimonthly series starting in October, there was no way I wasn't going to pick it up.

I've picked up a few other stray issues here and there trying to find more regular comics to follow, but so far nothing I've wanted to spend $3 or $4 on every month. A tight budget and specific tastes will do that, I suppose. Aquaman has a new writer at the end of the month, and I already know I like the artists, so I'll be trying that out, but beyond that I'm not sure where to look next.

Most of my current collection of trade paperbacks are from the 1980s--Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Mike Grell--and a few others with deep writers like Mark Waid. I like Paul Dini and Bruce Timm's Batman animation (but who doesn't?). I like Darwyn Cooke. I'm more of a DC guy than Marvel, although I really liked Chris Claremont's and Joss Whedon's X-Men and J. Michael Straczynski's Thor. The Walking Dead is fantastic, at least in collected form.

The point of all this, my friends, is that I'm looking for another monthly to pick up in December. I'd like to hear from any of you who have tried out recent titles. What are your favorites, and why? Know of anything that sounds like it would be my style? I'd like to try it out. Help me catch up to the new century in comics!

All our Heroes are Pyrrhus

That crunching sound is the new meta-narrative
crushing your nostalgia.

A while back I blogged about the summer blockbuster, Man of Steel. Jessie asked for a follow-up:

I want a post about people's oddly consistent reaction to how many extras died in this movie.

To really address this topic, I think we need to look more broadly at action and adventure movies. [I should mention at this will be a spoiler-filled post for any movies that come up, and that I will be talking about some movies I haven't seen.] Two movies this past summer have been particularly  criticized for their portrayal of successful attacks of mass destruction: Man of Steel and Star Trek Into Darkness. Tor.com has a recent post discussing the new perspective on warfare portrayed in these films:

The most disturbing thing to me about both Star Trek: Into Darkness and Man of Steel was the collateral damage in both films and the rather blasé treatment that it received. [...]

We’re not reminded often enough that thousands have died in drone strikes in Pakistan over the past 9 years. It’s not stressed that over a hundred of those deaths were children. They are not important to the narrative.

That narrative tells us that these things happen, that sometimes mistakes are made. That in order to protect our security and get the bad guys, sometimes innocent lives are lost. They’re unfortunate accidents. Incidental. It’s the cost of our freedom.

The whole post is worth reading, and I agree that these films highlight a major difference in the way we tell action stories now compared to previous decades. But I think it misses a critical detail of the destruction in these movies, and therefore a critical part of the narrative they create.

The incredible levels of destruction don't happen to civilians in the enemies country / planet. They happen here. When San Francisco and Metropolis are decimated, the movies are not making a reference to deaths overseas. Not to be completely cliché, but it really is all about 9/11.

Now, action movies have always required a certain degree of collateral damage, both to prove the situation is serious and to motivate the heroes to fight back. Often a close friend of the hero has to die in order to justify the heroes being callous about slaughtering the enemy; as Mark Millar would say, "It’s just a horrible act to show that somebody’s a bad guy."

What, a fiendish mustache isn't enough?

But mass destruction was typically been restricted to disaster movies or has taken place before the heroes get a chance to fight back. In both cases, a fair amount of attention was paid to the fallout, and the heartache of massive losses of life and property were kind of the point.

I think that changed after 9/11. Consider the first X-Men movie, which came out in 2000 and featured the villains almost killing all of the world's leaders. In the end we had one dead senator and a broken torch on the Statue of Liberty. In contrast, the third X-Men movie came out in 2006, and resulted in dozens or hundreds of death, and the complete destruction of an equally iconic national landmark, the Golden Gate Bridge. Some of this is a matter of sequels escalating, but I think there's something different here than what we see going from Die Hard in 1988 to Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995. The process has continued over time, with city-wide destruction the heroes are powerless to prevent in 2012 in The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises.

What people have been commenting on the most, though, is not just the level of destruction, but the fact that the heroes don't even make it a priority to try. These days, movie action heroes have accepted their inability to save large numbers of people, and the filmmakers want the audience to play along. We almost don't notice until we are looking at long-standing franchises like Star Trek and Superman, where we've seen the heroes fight and overcome these sorts of world-destroying dangers before with far less collateral damage.

So what does this say about us? Again, I don't think it's about our drones killing civilians. It's about the fact that our real-life heroes--the soldiers, political leaders, police officers, firefighters, etc--couldn't do much except get out of the way while the iconic monument of the World Trade Center towers collapsed. They helped after the fact, but they were powerless to prevent the tragedy. That's the new narrative I see: not just that heroes don't always prevent collateral damage, but that heroes can't prevent it, and we shouldn't expect them to.

Gone are the days where Superman can conveniently discover the power to turn back time if the villain succeeds in sinking the West Coast and killing Lois Lane. This time, the best we can hope is that Superman uses whatever is at his disposal to stop Zod from making it worse, even if it requires him to kill. Even the most powerful on-screen hero must accept that they are sometimes powerless, because the audience needs to accept that our off-screen heroes are sometimes powerless.

this is what victory looks like in the 21st century

The backlash this year might mean this is changing. As the narrative has escalated what our heroes can't do, we've also gotten further removed from 9/11. We might finally be reaching the stage where it's not enough to see the side of good win only by sacrificing much of what the hero protects (Man of Steel & Star Trek Into Darkness). Or it could be that the new narrative has run against our nostalgia for these franchises and the narrative won. Only time will tell.