STEVE DITKO: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

I've had the sad pleasure of writing Steve Ditko's obituary for the Guardian; it's online now here and should be in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, but there is so much else to say about Ditko that I could not get into the word limit, and that would probably be considered too esoteric for the Guardian readership.

Ditko's work in those 50s Atlas/Marvel comics and elsewhere was a great honing ground for his later super-hero work.  See the illustration left; he would have made a fine illustrator for Edgar Allen Poe or HP Lovecraft. The expressiveness of his faces, no matter how stylised, was the key to his success with the early Spider Man, as I wrote, but it was not just Peter Parker's hesitant teen--it was Aunt May's worry and Jonah Jameson's bullying bluster. His villains registered enjoyment of their evil--it's how one as absurd as the Green Goblin could work (see also The Creeper).

Ditko also drew other Marvel heroes: his Bruce Banner emphasizes the Peter Parkerish nature of his wimp personality--this was not Superman combing back his spit curl and putting on a pair of smart-guy glasses. I would have liked to discuss the difference in Spider Man after Ditko left and John Romita took over: Romita's faces are more perfect; his women actually beautiful. His Peter Parker was more of a heroic figure before he becomes Spider Man. Romita, who came to Spidey from Daredevil, was adept enough with action, but something more primal was lost. Of course the books immediately increased in popularity. It reminded me of when the underrated Don Heck took over from Jack Kirby on The Avengers; Heck's work reminded me of John Prentice on Rip Kirby, in the Alex Raymond school: his faces were cleaner, and his action more subdued.

And of course there was nothing like Dr Strange, which quickly became my favourite Marvel. I made the point that youngsters thought Ditko must be tripping when he drew the comic, and nothing was further from the truth. By the way, the Guardian using 'hippy' for 'hippie' is one of their bizarre 'style guide' decisions: the guide appears to have been written by someone who spent the Sixtys (sic) locked in a teletype room trying desperately to save received English from American encroachments. Correcting a neologism? What next, yuppy as the singular of yuppies? 

Charlton Comics ran out of Derby, Connecticut, not far from where I grew up. They were one of the town's big industries in the dying Housatonic Valley (Wham-O, makers of Frisbees and Whiffle Balls, were another, in Shelton) and they were in the comics business mostly to keep their printing presses busy. But they were a great proving ground for talent--the story is that Ditko introduced Dick Giordano to DC, where he eventually became the editor. Some was local talent, like the great Batman artist Jim Aparo, who came from nearby Hartford, and the amazing Joe Gill, who wrote twice as much as Stan lee twice as fast. Charlton was also the place where my college buddy Wayne Howard, who had been an assistant to Wally Wood, worked and became the first artist to get a name credit in the title.

The Question remains one of my favourite comics characters, especially before he went over the top: he predated the Pauline Kael/Dirty Harry 'fascist' controversy. I remember Mr. A from Wood's Witzend, to which I subscribed, and I found it funny in a strange way--thinking perhaps Ditko had gone off the rails. This was before I realised there were actually people who took Ayn Rand seriously, which was just before those people starting trying to control the world.  The Question has appeared in DC's animated Justice League TV series; a movie is frequently rumoured. Dennis O'Neil did a nice job with an update of Ditko's series; I think it's time I wrote a Question novel.

The Jonathan Ross BBC4 documentary is a good one, even if Ross' smugness at not revealing anything Ditko said to him irritated me at the time and still does. You can find it on You Tube here. Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman's contributions make it work, but there's also nice stuff from Jerry Robinson and Stan Lee, as well as a couple of later Marvel staffers.

Trying to divide the kudos for Marvel's success is pointless, though we might have wished the financial rewards to fall to Kirby and Ditko as they deserved. John Romita, in the Ross doc, makes the point that Ditko wasn't really interested in money; like a ranch hand he wanted an honest day's pay for his work.

For all that Kirby and Ditko and others may have shouldered the lion's share of the creative burden at Marvel, it was Lee's ability to sense out the market that drove the company forward, that attracted and kept casual fans as well as those entranced by the remarkable work of great artists. Ditko in many ways is the greatest of them, certainly the most mysterious, and most enigmatic. RIP

TOMMY TAYLOR AND THE SHIP THAT SANK TWICE: CAREY & GROSS AND POST-MODERN COMICS

This graphic novel is an origin story of sorts for the Unwritten series, built around Tommy Taylor, a children's book character, and Tom Taylor, son of Wilson Tucker, the writer of the Tommy Taylor books, who has disappeared. Taking off on the Harry Potter series, they have referenced Potters' borrowed fantasy archetypes, and here, with Wilson Taylor placed in the fore, they go even further into the idea factory from which these tales are generated. Yet in its mixture of the writer's life and neuroses, and the parallel father/son relationships in 'life' and in the Tommy Taylor world of magic, this comic plays with the darker areas in which the protection of fantasy shields a child's own life. It's full of stories within stories, and the shadowy way in which the fantasy tale reflects the writer's own life, and the two Toms come together, is a shifting metaphor for the whole creative process.

In the previous post I discussed Sidekick, which plays with super-hero tropes, and referenced Alan Moore as a starting point for such explorations. In a sense, the Unwritten is part of a second strand which does similar things, but in a vein of fantasy which can be traced back to Neil Gaiman and The Sandman. Writer Mike Carey worked on a number of Sandman projects, which makes the link obvious; we can see it also in Mike Willingham and Mark Buckingham's Fables, in which fairy-tale characters take on 'life'; not surprisingly Vertigo has published an Unwritten/Fables crossover, which I reviewed last year here (follow this link).

The Ship That Sank Twice draws you in from the start, with Wilson Taylor's efforts to find a story blending into the original tale of the ship, and a lost baby delivered by Leviathan to the wizard Tulkinghorn, who runs a school for young wizards. But the sunken ship holds a secret which is desperate to escape...

What makes this work so well is the deftness in switching between the Potteresque school, the horror-movie type evil, and the story of Wilson Taylor and his son, which has its own aspects of horror about it. Peter Gross's art (he's credited with layouts, and the collaborators on both art and finishes use line, tone and colour to reflect and indeed set mood) moves just as deftly as Carey's script. In fantasy, emotional realism is essential, and they bring that home well. It's a wonderful dark story well told.

The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor And The Ship That Sank Twice
by Mike Carey & Peter Gross
Vertigo/DC $14.99 ISBN 9781401229771

STRACZYNSKI & MANDRAKE'S SIDEKICK

'After all, they're just sidekicks.' Life changes for Flyboy when the Red Cowl is killed during a victory parade. Once the sidekick to a super-hero, Barry Chase now finds himself unable to transition to hero himself, and his life descends into a pattern of loss he can't overcome with 'dreamstarter', or with a change of identity and city. Sidekick is an audacious twist in the kind of meta-comics we've seen since Watchmen, in which writers untangle and examine the conventions of the superhero comic and use their innate contradictions as the basis for their stories.

The point of sidekicks was always pretty obvious in comic books: to attract the even younger audience and provide a fantasy outlet for them. Over the decades we saw some revision taking place, most notably first in 1971 when in Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' famous story, 'Snowbirds Don't Fly' the Green Arrow discovers his sidekick Speedy is a junkie. Then we saw iterations of the Batman/Robin relationship. In real life, millionaires and wards are not all that common, and in real life youngsters grow up. And in this sense, J. Michael Straczynski's script translates second-banana stories from movies or comedy or music into the super-hero world, and does it with panache.

Flyboy's decline is almost shocking. His attempts at reinvention are first pathetic (robbing a jewellery store in order to solve the crime) and then almost doomed to hubristic failure. And finally, in the shock revelation that turns the story around, his final growth into a full-fledged 'adult' super-hero takes the twisted shape that's been molded through the story. It's a neat piece of writing, not least for the fact that it ends on a 'to be continued' which makes perfect sense.

It's complemented well by Tom Mandrake's art, which tries to combine some of the 'innocence' of golden age styles with the steroid dynamism of the modern era. Mandrake is best on expressing bursts of emotion, often in extreme close up, Chase/Flyboy's despair, self-pity, anger, grief, in essence a full run of adolescent reactions to life, jump off the page, and finally become something more. It's as dynamic internally as in the external action, and that's rare.

Sidekick, written by J. Michael Straczynski art by Tom Mandrake
Image Comics $12.99 ISBN 9781607068617

MIGNOLA AND GOLDEN'S BALTIMORE

Baltimore: The Plague Ships is a vampire tale based on a conceit richer than most: a resurgence of vampires, and a plague fungus that seems to create more of them, have been the result of World War I. It is as if the metaphor of vampirism from Stoker's original Dracula (which of course began upon a plague ship of sorts), for the pent-up repressions of the Victorian era, with whose end seemed to begin the inevitable spiralling Malaise culminating in the Great War, has been released on a grand scale. Henry, Lord Baltimore's post-battlefield encounter with a king-Vampire named Haigus sparks the destruction of all he loves, and begins a revenge quest, but it is not the quest itself that makes this story interesting, but the world in which it takes place.

In fact, a series of scenes in which Baltimore, heavily armed, triumphs over huge numbers of zombies, vampires, or whatever, becomes repetitive relatively quickly. But what is fascinating is the milieu itself—the world of the Great War and its newly-minted killing machines, the effects of the plague on so-called civilisation. There are obvious metaphors here, and parallels with our modern world—war as plague, plague as threat—which are far more challenging than the current fascination with vampires as a way to work out adolescent fears/fantasies about sexuality in an overly-sexed civilisation.

This comic is a sequel of sorts to an illustrated novel published a year before by Mike Mignola (Hellboy) and Christopher Golden, who have combined to write this.The comic art is by Ben Stenbeck, some of whose preliminary sketches are appended. It's a combination of very basic horror motifs with a sort of early-sf view of the Great War; in his introduction Joe (King) Hill mentions Alan Moore's League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and that is apt, because a good way to look at Baltimore might be as the fantasy of Victorian war meeting the fantasy of Victorian horror. I've talked about Dracula, but Mignola himself dedicates the book to William Hope Hodgson who, as he says, had a lot to say about wrecked ships and fungus (you'll see the connection). In a modern world. While in itself it's not the most satisfying story, The Plague Ships is good enough to make me want to seek out the novel, Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Solider and the Vampire.

Baltimore: The Plague Ships by Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, Ben Stenbeck

Dark Horse, 2011,  $18.99, ISBN 9781595826770

WATCHING THE WATCHMEN

Watchmen created an interesting phenomenon; its reviews, particularly in the US, were as bad as any film's I can recall, including some every bit as gratuitously violent as they accused the film of being. At the same time, it was the top grossing movie in its opening weekend, despite, at two hours 40 minutes, being too long for the allegedly limited attention span of today's teenaged cinema audience. I heard one cinema manager explain that parents were arriving with six-year olds expecting something like Spider Man 23, given that the film suffered a two-thirds drop in the second week, word of mouth may have caught up with the fact that this isn't the film almost anyone thinks it is. At the most basic level,the bad reviews are very much a part of this inability to place, indeed, to understand what the film actually is, and this is a problem which has hung over Watchmen ever since the novel came out; first its writer, Alan Moore, and then potential director Terry Gilliam, both declared it unfilmable.

Watchmen is set in the 1980s. Nixon is in his fifth term as president, and costumed heroes have been outlawed, except for Doctor Manhattan, his body transformed in a nuclear accident, whose presence on the American side has thus far kept the world out of nuclear war. The Soviets are threatening war and Nixon is convinced the US could win nuclear armageddon, and someone has just murdered The Comedian, a member of the 1940s crime-fighting group The Minutemen, who stayed active with the Watchmen, and who, we learn in the credits sequence, has worked for the government doing any number of dirty jobs including assassinating JFK from the Grassy Knoll. Rorschach, who apparently has kept working as a costumed crime fighter, despite the ban, tries to reform the Watchmen to avenge the Comedian's killing.

Normally, it's not a good idea to review the reviews of a movie, but in this case, because I think the critics' reactions reflect the core difficulty the film presents, I will refer to two in particular: by AO Scott and Anthony Lane. Scott is the Bosley Crowther of this millennium for the New York Times, vainly fighting a rearguard action for literary values, mainstream entertainment, and artistic decorum. Scott finds it remarkable that the 'interminable' film 'freezes its frame of reference in the 1980s', saying it would appeal best to someone who was a college sophomore at that time, who had 'a smattering of Nietzsche and an extensive record collection'. While he's perceptive enough, which isn't saying much, to note themes of 'apocalypse and decay' (but not to realise the 80s was where these themes came together after being explored separately throughout the 70s) he also accuses the film of 'shallow nihilism', seeing its major conflict as the moral choice between killing masses and killing individuals; 'the only action that makes sense in this world is killing.'

At least he's willing to concede some sort of meaning. Lane, Oxford's man at the New Yorker, might be expected to treat it more gently, as Moore is English, and in this country critical reaction to Watchmen has been tempered by patriotism and the opportunity to show moral disapproval for rapacious Hollywood. But Lane is, in fact, even more dismissive than Scott, advising audiences to walk out after the credits sequence. He compares Watchmen unfavourably to Persepolis or Maus, the 'acceptable' face of graphic novels, saying Watchmen is stuck in 'cod mythology and rainy dystopias'. He too is bothered by the setting, though he's too mathematically challenged to understand Nixon is on his fifth term, not his third. He's also seemingly incensed by the fact that the movie's Nite Owl rips off Batman. His idea of the demeaning audience at which the film is aimed is 'leering 19 year olds' who believe 'America is ruled by the military industrial complex and whose deepest fear (even deeper than meeting an intelligent woman, he says) is that the Warren Commission might have been right all along.'

It's easy to see behind their dislike of Watchman's political perspective. Moore, of course, has dealt before in rainy dystopia; V for Vendetta is set very much in the British version of Watchmen's America, a cross of Thatcher and Orwell which five terms of Nixon approximates fairly well. Superman, remember, fought for 'truth, justice, and the American way', and this world view is one the novel and film present with irony. Remember too, war requires a suspension of super-hero disbelief: if in the 1940s, the Allies really had Superman and Wonder Woman on their side, why didn't they win the war overnight? The experience of Doc Manhattan (and the Comedian) in Vietnam shows us what this would have meant in 'real' life, and makes the bigger point. The superhero impulse does not solve problems, and its appeal is always, at heart, fascist. This, presumably, is what drew the sneering Nietzsche references from AO. But living in an era where a president sought virtually absolute powers to wage virtually perpetual war, it's quite a feat to ignore any metaphoric linking to the present, especially from the paper of Judith Miller. I mean, they even make fun of big business, can you believe it (!?!), as if prosperity weren't just around the corner.

The film is, if anything, more heavy-handed than Moore in ladling out the irony of the superheroes at the beck and call of a corrupt imperialists. The Comedian, who works willingly doing the government's dirty tricks, is also the only crime-fighter who understands, and accepts,his existence as the theatre of the absurd Moore sees it being. He answers Nite Owl's anguished cry 'what happened to the American Dream' by laughing 'this IS the American Dream', and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's playing of the character like Robert Downey playing Nick Fury (one of the models for him) makes that work. I think at least part of the vituperative critical response in the US (and the critical pleasure in the UK) comes from that raw expression of American failure. In this sense, the closest filmic equivalent I can think of is Godard's Made In USA, in which a Richard Stark 'Parker' novel is transformed into a little essay about how the US is in Vietnam because of the same impulse that caused Richard Widmark to throw the lady in the wheelchair down the stairs. Substitute comics for film noir, add a little entertainment value, and you've got Watchmen.

But the crux of understanding the film, and both these reviews, is Lane's harumphing at 'cod mythology', because Watchmen the novel is all about mythology. No less than Godard, Moore is aware of how the pulp fictions of a society reflect, if not shape, that society's behaviour. But he's reflecting comic books from the 'golden' and 'silver' ages, not film noir from the 40s and 50s. This mythology was always going to be the hardest part to convert to film. In fact, the most self-referential part of the novel, a comic within the comic, was eliminated (though it was filmed for a DVD bonus). This is why the setting, in the 1980s, is so important: the real target audience for Watchmen was born in the baby boom, and grew up reading Marvel comics, attracted to them by their adding of real-life angst to the daily lives of Superheroes. That's why the music of the film is so anchored in Sixties cliché (and here I have to agree with Lane that we should ban 'Hallelujah' from any further soundtrack use, ever. Ironic intent or not.) When Frank Miller revitalised Batman with the Dark Knight Returns, the films drew on that nihilism only slightly; though the iconography got adapted in many other parts of mainstream film making.

Remember too that, apart from Doctor Manhattan, none of the Watchmen is actually a super hero. They are costumed crime-fighters, but they posses no super powers (though Ozymandias seems to come very close in some ways). Nite Owl's being out of shape is only hinted at by one shot of his gut, then he seems back instantly to full villain-routing prowess, but these are very much people. Of course he's a copy of Batman, AO, that's what Moore was doing, playing with the tropes of the heroes, at the same time he was inventing so many more. And if the Comedian is his most perfect invention in terms of the role of the hero him (or her) self, it is Rorschach who, as his name implies, is the litmus test for the audience. With his constantly-shifting mask, but otherwise dressed like Mike Hammer, his Spillane-like voice-over frames the film, and it is his diary which will, at film's end, overturn the great good deed which the Watchmen have done. He is the spirit of pure vengeance, and as played brilliant by Jackie Earle Haley, with a Clint Eastwood rasp made all the more effective by the coincident release of Gran Torino, he is both the most violent and most sympathetic of the characters. This suggests another comparison, because what Moore and now Snyder are doing with comic heroes is very similar to what Sergio Leone did with westerns: The Man With No Name reflected, in some ways, an adult approach to the super-hero elements of the genre, a look at what things might really be like if you accepted the conventions of the genre and tried to make them work in reality.

Moore drew on existing comic characters besides Batman. Rorschach is his version of Steve Ditko's Question and Mr A, particularly the latter, with his uncompromising views of right and wrong. That so many of the other characters recall previous comics' heroes is intentional, but too esoteric for the mainstream movie audience; even modern comic nuts are unlikely to have seen Charlton comics, the Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, and many more. So the backstory gets jammed into that entertaining credits sequence which Lane loved. We learn the fates of some of The Minutemen, heroes of the 40s, of whom the Comedian is the only one still active. Mothman went crazy; Dollar Bill was shot when his cape was caught in a revolving door. Lesbian heroine Silhouette was forced to 'retire' then murdered with her lover by an old enemy turned into a crazed sex killer by her 'perversion'. The similar fading to the background of gay Hooded Justice is passed over. But the depth of Moore's comic book universe is thus established right at the start, and to some extent, it's a question of how much the audience can accept it, and what follows, as history which underscores their appreciation of the film.

It has its flaws, though few of them are as serious as those that rendered Zach Snyder's previous film, 300, also a comic book adaptation, so one-dimensional. It is at times gratuitously violent: even if it is understandable that the basic fighting should been enhanced, to emphasize that, although lacking super powers, these are still heroes. Rorschach's prison scenes go on for too long, are too graphic, and don't need to be there; there's a similar indulgence in his explanatory stories. There is an adolescent and voyeuristic lingering over the attempted rape of the original Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino), and when the somewhat wooden Malin Ackerman (who has the unfortunate task of trying to play a scene while being loved by two blue Doctor Manhattans while a third works in the next room) finally dons her costume and steps on screen I laughed out loud, because the costume was simply latex and high heels and she looked almost exactly like a blow up sex doll. The guys, except Rorschach, get costumes obviously engineered to assist them; while Silk Spectre gets fetish. This too reflects the adolescent male sexual world of comics and their audience, including AO Scott, who, oddly, found both Gugino and Ackerman's performances 'solid'. So latex has its artistic uses after all.

And on its own terms, the film is at its weakest as it tries to resolve its over-arching mystery, the bigger question of sacrifice and survival. Part of this is because the ethical dilemma is presented in exactly the kind of philosophy-lite that the critics complain about. Part of it (spoiler alert here) is down to Ozymandias really not being involved enough in the story to the point where he is revealed to be its linch-pin; this was a flaw in the novel too, though to a much lesser extent. And the destruction of Manhattan with nuclear devices is puzzling as well: it seems to have been specific enough to have left most of the island (including both Nite Owl's subway tunnel and Silk Spectre I's flat) unscathed (not to mention free of radiation).

Watchmen fails as a juvenile entertainment; it's too complex. It probably fails as a complex entertainment, in that its assumptions, and its biggest dilemma, are both too simple. The many-layered subtleties of the novel are, after all, based on readings of comic books, and although Michael Chabon has won awards for doing just that sort of deconstruction, not many others doing it will be praised by the New York Times. Time magazine, however, picked Watchmen as one of the 100 greatest novels in English, so go figure. The movie has the power to keep a sensitive, non-comic book reading, anti-violence, prefers-subtitles kind of movie watcher like my wife attentive throughout. It's a fine effort at adaptation, probably about as good as we could expect. I'd put it somewhere between Leone's Fistful of Dollars, a not-quite-perfect first effort, and The Good The Bad and The Ugly, a pulp epic (For A Few Dollars More is more of a self-contained and perfectly formed film) but it should be considered in the same way as we looked at Leone's westerns. Something different from the super hero movies you've seen before. That may well be more weight than the genre can stand, especially in the eyes of Mr Scott and Mr Lane.