Graphic Reagan

Apologies to all for the inexcusable lapse in posting.




The above is from Ten Nights of the Beast, a perestroika era Batman story in which the KGBeast goes rogue and attempts to shut SDI research down forever - a dastardly scheme which will ruin the USA and involves the murder of its chief visionary, Ronald Reagan. It is not Reagan's first appearance in a Gotham City tale. In Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns we see his colourful caricature bumble and ramble and reassure Americans as disaster approaches, from the safety of a TV screen and later, a radiation suit. No doubt he pops up elsewhere in the world of graphic literature. I seem to remember his distorted, ghastly visage appear in Alan Moore's ghostly and paranoid Brought to Light - any other examples will be gratefully received.

All this is preamble to the news that Reagan has finally got his own comic book. Ronald Reagan: The Graphic Biography was published last month and has been serialised here at Slate. As some of you may imagine, news of this (which first reached me via the Good Liberal) had me giggling and twirling with gleeful anticipation. It would be a wonderful merging of my interests, something that I had imagined myself on occasion. I had even more than once promised a strangely unenthusiastic Little Red Bull a script for him to draw, encountering Reagan at various stages of his life (this never got off the ground).

It is perhaps unsurprising then that when the book finally made it through the striking postmen and into my hands, I was a bit disappointed. First off, it is too small. It need not be a 300 style monument, but the tiny A5 pages make for a cramped and jerky narrative, and the story definitely deserves some panoramic images. The other problems indicate the difficulty not of incorporating Reagan's life into a visual narrative, but of making that narrative a "serious" biography (the publishing branch behind this is embarrassingly called "serious comics"). It becomes far to text heavy, driven by the captions rather than the panels. We are presented with a necessarily undetailed text, accompanied by illustrations in which the dialogue is almost only taken from actual quotes. This is done out of the understandable desire to keep the book factual, but it means that its medium loses its strengths. There is no fluidity, no action, no drama. The panels often represent scenes days or months apart, only linked by chronology and the explanations in the captions. Occasionally the authors are reduced to the crude iconography of editorial cartoons to represent an event, or a point, which reduces the weight and the innovation of the idea.

The problem is clear - to fully exploit the medium the narrative would be dramatised, and thus fictionalised, or it would have to become a lot more abstract. I'd be happy with either direction, but the purpose here is to write biography, not theatre or art. Kudos anyway to Helfer, Buccaletto and Staton - all experienced comics writers - for the idea and the attempt. Opening up new avenues for the medium to explore is always worth the effort, especially if they are historical, and even more especially if they are Reagan-themed. The next "Serious Comic" to be published will be about J. Edgar Hoover, apparently - hopefully they will have found some solutions to the problems they met with Reagan.

The blogroll unfurls an inch.

Just to draw everyone's attention to the fact that I'm about make my first link to a blog that is not written by a friend of mine (facebook friend, anyway!). Jack Brougham has drawn my attention to The Fate of the Artist, the blog of Eddie Campbell, who drew Alan Moore's From Hell. Congratulations Mr. Campbell! Jack was motivated by this post (scroll down a bit) about George Herriman, the creator of the marvellous Krazy Kat. Eventually I'll write about Herriman, the Kat and Ignatz, but I realise that this site has been getting a bit comics heavy recently, so I'll leave it for a bit.

I'll also link to Stripper's Guide, by Alan Holtz, which looks pretty interesting, and, what the hey, Harry Hutton's funny stuff. Congratulations Mr. Holtz and Mr. Hutton!

One day I will categorise everything nice and neatly.

The History of the Universe goes on.

When I was about twelve, I picked up The Cartoon History of the Universe: From the Big Bang to Alexander the Great while on holiday in the states. I read it, loved it and reread it until about three years later, when on another stateside trip I stumbled across The Cartoon History of the Universe II: From the Springtime of China to the Fall of Rome. I was equally enamoured, and painstakingly painted copies of the panels detailing Jesus' teachings onto my schoolbag. After a painfully long wait, in 2003 I found The Cartoon History of the Universe III: From the Rise of Arabia to the Renaissance in a St. Louis bookstore (possibly the same in which I had found Vol. 1? I'm not sure) and happily devoured its depictions of Islam's ascendancy and the Crusades while the allies settled in in Iraq. Since then I have mastered internet shopping, and have been twitching with excitement since last week when I realised that Larry Gonick had published the fourth collection earlier this year: The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part I: From Columbus to the U.S. Constitution. It arrived this morning, and I have been reading it with a strange sadness of understanding that in a few years I will happen upon Part II, and the history of the universe will be over.

They are a truly marvellous series of books, written and drawn with flair, insight and wit by Larry Gonick, interviewed here. He has a great feel for the interconnectedness of history, drawing links between geographically and chronologically disparate events. It's an angle which suits the form. A fifty page comic (one chapter) is necessarily selective and fast paced, and Gonick manages to use the structure to create a broad continuity, while also cramming in as much curious and hilarious detail as he can. As a result, Cortez does not seem that far from Caesar, whether in action or in caricature. Amusing despots rise and fall; ideas and diseases race each other across the world; and the narrator despairs at having to draw massacre after massacre (I can't think of a comic which contains more corpses), while exclaiming with glee whenever an elephant pops up in the story. The narration is knowing, always on the lookout for irony, and aware of the medium's deficiencies: Gonick's wild-haired alter ego lets us know early on that Herodotus is his favourite historian, because he makes up all the dialogue. I really can't think of a better thing to do with one's life.

Unfortunately, Larry Gonick does not really look like this.

More on Superheroes

Since writing the previous post, my housemate serendipitously bought and lent me the first issue of Warren Ellis' new title, Black Summer. The front cover should give an impression of what happens:


Yes, a white-garbed super-powered fellow named John Horus decides to brutally murder the President, the Vice President, and much of their staff. "I also had to kill or injure some secret service agents," he tells the White House press room, "which I regret." This isn't a President who is secretly in thrall to baby-eating aliens, or who is bent on a plot to turn the world's population into zombie-slaves, but one who very much resembles our own dear George W. Bush - less through the features of the blood spattered corpse above, but more through the record described by Horus as he explains his actions (illegal war, torture, election fraud etc.). Nor is Horus a typical supervillain determined to take power for himself, we understand, but a hero who has in previous years protected and served in the name of what is good and just, and now wishes to restore America. Ellis discusses his idea:

If we invite or condone masked adventurers to fight crime outside the law, do we get to draw a line where they stop?

What happens when a superhero's pursuit of justice leads him to the inexorable conclusion that he must kill his President to save his country?

This is the freedom of doing a piece of superhero fiction outside the auspices of company ownership or the weight of continuity: the big questions can be asked in a very direct and brutal manner.

Ellis is a good writer who has some excellent titles under his belt. He often deals with themes of conspiracy and the defiance of all-encompassing power; sometimes with an ingenious panache, as in Planetary, sometimes with hilarity, as in Nextwave, and sometimes with a certain smug heavy-handedness, as in Transmetropolitan. This new story clearly is in danger of falling into the latter category, but is almost certain to develop into something interesting.

Heroes

Aside from playing too much scrabble through facebook, in recent days I have been watching the first few episodes of Heroes. Of heroes, Reagan said:

You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond. You meet heroes across a counter, and they're on both sides of that counter. There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity. They're individuals and families whose taxes support the government and whose voluntary gifts support church, charity, culture, art, and education. Their patriotism is quiet, but deep. Their values sustain our national life.

Unfortunately, he was wrong. Heroes are people who can fly, or shoot fire from their fingertips, or grow several extra pairs of arms, or whatever - and who will do so always with a mediocre quip on hand, and always in the service of good. The series seems promising. Based on a failsafe cool idea, it offers some innovation amidst a classy handling of traditional ideas - time travel, flight and saving New York from nuclear destruction. It's perhaps an unnecessarily complex plot, I'm finding the shadowy government (?) organisation hunting down our afflicted heroes a bit tiresome, and the suspense is less an "ooh wow! I can't wait to see what happens next!" than a Lost-esque "why won't they tell me what the hell is going on?!" It's also similar to Lost in that the characters, however enigmatic, are frustratingly obtuse when it comes to figuring stuff out. The concept stems from the tradition that has sustained and confined comic book culture for the past seventy years. It is a strange phenomenon, perhaps, that such a limiting (if hugely pliable) theme could come to define an entire medium, but it has created a massively rich and intertextual genre, of which Heroes is only a recent example.

The show pays homage to its forbears, to its concept's original birth-form; indeed, it is accompanied by the publication of a concurrent comic book. I read a few of these a while ago, and, oddly, felt that perhaps the story didn't quite suit the graphic form and would be better suited to a television series - someone should tell the writers. In its basic idea of "ordinary" people (such as a candidate for congress, or a heroin addicted painter) discovering "talents" within themselves brought on by over-explained genetic evolution it is a clear tribute to Marvel's X-Men. In it's content, though, there are overt references, and not only in the occasional ironic remarks about Super- or Spiderman. A comic book is in fact nicely included as a driving plot device: Japanese teleporter/time-jumper Hiro (do you see what they did there?) is guided on his mission by a comic book from the future about himself, and drawn by the aforementioned precognitive junkie painter.

There is some attempt at cerebral contemplation of the consequences and meaning of the emergence of superhumans, provided in the snippets of narration by geneticist Mohinder, who has no power unless it is the ability to accidentally stumble upon things hidden by his dead father, or by the suitably creepy supervillain Syler. It all seems a bit trite, however, and I wonder whether they will truly delve into the questions of how people might be changed by their powers, and how their existence may change the world around them. These have been questions explored relentlessly by recent generations of comics writers, whether in the teen angst and social conflict of X-Men, the celebrity heroes of Brian Bendis' Powers, or in the recent expansive, civil rights themed Marvel story Civil War, in which poor Captain America is assassinated after leading a resistance against governmental measures to restrict, regulate and segregate the power-blessed. Probably the best author to tackle these ideas has been Alan Moore, in his seminal Watchmen (soon, stupidly, to be made into a film - why can't they just leave well alone?), and even more so in his fantastic Miracleman, which due to copyright issues remains unfinished and uncollected (but can be found on the web in scanned form for all those scummy enough to fileshare). Miracleman takes the idea of the superman to its full Nietzschian limits, displaying the brilliance and wonder of power, and its horrific controlling potential. In its shadow is Mark Millar's Red Son, which imagines a Ukrainian, rather than Kansan, Superman, ruling the world through super-ability and Soviet ideology. Heroes is unlikely to become so drastic, but it really needn't, as long as gets the plot rolling and throws in a good fight scene or two.

Hiro gets all intertextual.