Demo - "Emmy"

   "Emmy" is really quite depressing. Reading it, I feel like Wood & Cloonan set themselves the challenge of taking an alluring super-power and stripping it of any glamour, excitement, and appeal. Emmy is a young teenager who has the ability to make anyone do what she tells them to (we don't actually know that Emmy is her name, because no one ever says it, but it's the title and one can assume). At some point, she lashed out and shut her mother's brain off. Emmy takes care of her mother (who can't even take herself to the bathroom), pumps gas to pay the bills, and tries not to speak for fear of what might happen. She loses control when a customer sexually harasses her - though there is no clear indication, the text leads us to believe that her boss has been casually harassing for a while but that this incident is the last straw - and tells him to drop dead. He dies, her boss calls the police, and Emmy decides to run away. She whispers something to her mother before leaving and the horrified reaction of the police suggests that it was euthanasia. "Emmy" sits comfortably beside "NYC" as another angsty teenage story about how it feels, sometimes, that the only power we have is to screw up our lives.

   Mind control is a pretty common super-power, most often presented as a part of a telepath's repertoire (think the X-Men's Professor X or Emma Frost). When mind control lacks the other dimensions of telepathy, it's often in the command of a villain (Mentallo, Mastermind and his daughters also called Mastermind, the Controller, Gorilla Grodd, and the Purple Man, to name a few). In the cases of the villains, mind control is often associated with an elitist attitude, and it represents the power of rhetoric - I'm thinking particularly of Glorious Godfrey and the Hatemonger here. The villains who can trick your senses, or distort your emotions, seem sleazier. In part, it's because they can't be defeated by repeated punching. They stir up the base emotions, the dark fantasies and desires that are already present in those they control or direct. In many ways, the super-hero is the anti-elitist response to those scary men (yes, they are almost always men) who can trick you with their words. What makes the Purple Man, in particular, so scary in Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos's Alias is not just the violation of having your will controlled by another. It's the lingering fear that you were really letting him control you, that some part of you really wanted to do those things. 

   What Bendis & Gaydos do with the Purple Man is probably the closest mainstream super-hero equivalent to what Wood & Cloonan are doing with "Emmy." Bendis & Gaydos, however, explore the ways in which language and art create reality - the Purple Man is aware that he's in a comic and sees himself as the author. With "Emmy," Wood & Cloonan engage with the power of words in a very different way. The effects of language in "Emmy" are multiple. Most obviously, they subvert a typical super-power. Emmy's power manifests through language, like the magic words of several other super-heroes (Shazam/Captain Marvel, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Johnny Thunder). However, Emmy's words are less stable than Billy Batson's. She does not have a single phrase that grants her power (Shazam!); rather, she makes her desires manifest through words. When she tells the stranger to drop dead, he does. The conceptual object of her thoughts is made real. Emmy has the power of creation: she speaks, therefore it is.

   "Emmy" contains text that represents spoken and written language - that is to say, both dialogue and an interpolated document. The first words, and the majority of the story's text, are from some sort of journal, presumably Emmy's, which states that "I'm writing all this down, for you to read." The story, however, is almost told entirely through Cloonan's art. The journal itself simply comments on the action, providing context and limited background on the illustrated events. The text also does not read consistently like a journal or a letter. The "you" to which everything is addressed seems to be a reader who knows nothing of Emmy because it provides expository information, and yet the text reacts to her immediate actions. When the police come, Emmy looks scared in one panel and then determined in the next. In that latter panel, the text reads "No. No more accidents. No more pain," as if in response to her decision to euthanize her mother.

   For a story about the power of words, "Emmy" is almost purely visual and the language that does appear is often contradicted by the images. At one point, Emmy explains that "most people leave me alone now. They're afraid." The text overlays images of Emmy walking home from the gas station and encountering three boys building a bike ramp. Contrary to what we are told, they do not look afraid of Emmy. Their expressions are actually quite blank - confused and a little curious. Earlier, when Emmy says that her boss leaves her alone "mostly," it seems to dismiss his request for a blow job. Though language organizes her world, it often conceals its conceptual objects. The world that Cloonan illustrates for Emmy is barren and claustrophobic at once, a reflection of the limited options Emmy sees for herself. It's not a world of objects, or one densely populated with symbolic tapestries. It's slight, and it's grimy, and it doesn't always act as described. 

   Cloonan's work realizing this is quite fantastic. The opening panel is of a desolate road - the road down which those passersby who frequent Emmy's gas station enter and exit her life. It's the only access to a better world, and it looks like it isn't going anywhere. Emmy lives with her mother in a trailer park and any signs of the small town Emmy says she lives in are invisible. When she slips out of her trailer to escape the police, the final image evokes the opening panel of "NYC." There is no glorious splash of New York, like the one that closed "NYC." Emmy is not on the road out of town that we saw earlier, the road down which she was staring at the story's opening. Instead, she's running across a narrow vertical panel bordered by the white of the page and the words "the end" printed to the left of the image. The spatial positioning of the words, based on the way we read comics, puts them before the illustration of Emmy's escape - she is coming from nowhere with nowhere to go. If any two words impart meaning that shapes reality, it's "the end." 

   Language, ultimately, is only how Emmy conceives her world, just like any of us - almost all the words are hers. The story Wood & Cloonan are telling is a pretty slight one about how a teenager says something so horrible that it destroys her relationship with her mother. She has a more direct manifestation of a power that, Wood & Cloonan's story suggests, we all have. We can all make our desires real if we choose to act on them. We can all burn our bridges and hurt people we care about if we let ourselves. Emmy kills the stranger with her words after he propositions her, but she might as well have sprayed him with gas and set him on fire. It would have been easy for her because, in that moment, she snaps. She is aware of what she can do, but for the smallest fraction of time she no longer cares. Though Emmy has the power of language, she is unable to significantly alter her circumstances - if only because she doesn't the world she creates in language is such a terrible one. She has so completely internalized her own self-conception that she cannot see that she has foreclosed her ability to change her world. Language is how we organize our self-images and by denying herself language, Emmy allows herself to disappear.

Next week: "Bad Blood"

Demo - "NYC"

   The cover to Demo #1, without much subtlety, tells you what this particular issue - and the series as a whole to some extent - is about. The two teenagers on the cover stand out, both in garb and color, in an expanse of nearly identical figures. This isn't just an iconic representation of how teenagers feel, or want to feel, but the mission statement for Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan's whole series. They want to tell stories of super-powered teenagers that aren't super-heroes, that aren't just the same Marvel/DC tights & fights. They want theirs to be a book about kids with strange abilities that stands out from all the rest.

   "NYC" lays that out pretty clearly on the first page. Marie - a good super-hero name, shared with the power-draining X-Woman Rogue - asks her boyfriend if he feels different. "You know, like that you have something special, an ability or physical trait of some kind that sets you apart from everyone else? But, like, you don't wanna tell anyone, in case your family and the rest of society gets freaked out and treats you weird, all prejudiced and shit? You know what I'm talking about? You know that feeling?" Her boyfriend, Mike, armed with the kind of spiky punk-rock hair that requires a near toxic combination of glue and eggs, tells her that he does. "Isn't it fucking great?" he adds, smiling like the cat that ate the bird.

   Wood and Cloonan open Demo with this reclamation of the potent metaphor of super-powers as the physical manifestation of an adolescent's emotional state. The scene doesn't make sense given the series of events that the story then tells us in flashback, but its primary function here isn't to provide an ending to a particular story but to prime the reader for what Demo will be about. These aren't teenagers who dress up in spandex and punch the similarly garbed embodiment of their anxieties or obstacles. Oh no. These are teenagers whose powers as often as not are the problem, but are also the thing that define them in opposition to the society against which they wish to stand. It's more like Wood and Cloonan are trying to continue what Marvel's creators did in the early sixties rather than write the next Image super-hero book with a twist on the Marvel formula (hero with a power that is also a curse, misunderstood by the world he/she has sworn to protect).

   The biggest problem I have with "NYC" is that is feels a bit too much like a project. Marie has powers that her bitchy, one-note mother forces her to suppress. Her powers are representative of how she feels: "I'm a freak," she tells Mike, and that's all we're really given. But, for the purpose of this story, we don't really need to know more. She's an everygirl, the likeness of anyone who has ever felt as if she's been forced to deny herself. Marie and Mike run away from home (we are not given an indication if Mike has a home to run away from, but one can assume), from metaphorical wasteland known as "The Suburbs," to New York. Marie's powers are dangerous and, when she stops taking the drugs that inhibit them and finally lets them out, she demolishes their car and puts a crater in a parking lot. Teenagers, clearly, will explode if they are forced to live in the suburbs and not be themselves.

   The whole issue is dripping with the kind of self-righteous individuality that teenagers feel, and as such it works. But Marie's powers are far too vague a metaphor and she has no personality beyond them. The "self" that she suppress amounts exclusively to the exploding brain waves her mother fears. The script leans heavily on the art to really convey that this is more than just a whiny teen: when she unleashes herself, Cloonan illustrates the scene as if it were a mirror shattered by a punch. It' s violent and scary and it more than justifies the various expressions that Cloonon draws passing across Mike's face as Marie sleeps beside him, spent by her outburst. However, Marie, and Mike to a greater extent, remain types - typical teenagers who feel suffocated by their parents and their suburban world, who feel dangerous because they have no desire to fit in to that world. They represent feelings but take on no feelings of their own. It's too big a metaphor with too little to support it. The issue boils down to "teenagers feel like they don't fit in." 

   Though difficult to differentiate between Wood and Cloonan's contributions to the script, Cloonan's artwork gives the story the ambiguity necessary to undercut the sometimes reductive metaphors. The establishing shot of the first page, before Marie asks Mike if he's ever felt different (why would she ask him this when he already knows she ran away because her parents' didn't like that she can blow up a car with her brain?), is of the pair, huddled together in a cramped panel heading toward the subway. Their heads are down, Marie's arm is across her chest as if she's clutching her stomach, in hunger or in pain, with their features barely sketched in. These two teenagers are having a rough time of it. They might have found themselves in the big city - Marie can blow things up with her brain waves to her heart's content, and Mike can finally grow his hair like Polar Boy from the Legion of Superheroes - but life didn't get easier. They sacrificed something to find themselves. The final panel, by contrast, is a full page splash of New York City. The city skyline rests at the bottom of the page while the clouds rise into an empty sky. The juxtaposition between this and the cramped opening panel only heightens the impact. Sure, this might be freedom, but the opportunities possible will quickly be foreclosed and all that Marie and Mike will be left with is their sense of identity, their rebellious posture, and each other.

   Throughout the series, Cloonan changes up her style, sometimes drawing in thick lines, sometimes delicately thin, but she leaves fingerprints floating in panels every once in a while. The tactility of her work is quite remarkable and, in the case of "NYC" manages to add layers to an otherwise unremarkable story. As the series progresses, Wood's scripts seem to rise to the challenge of her art, her use of empty space and her ability to capture haunting vulnerability. And the lack of color only pulls the best out of her. Whereas a subsequent book like American Virgin featured a lot of her fabulous figure work and expressivity, Demo really gives her the chance to make the art the showcase feature of the comics.

   Next week: "Emmy."

Demo

   I have a conflicted relationship with Brian Wood and Becky Cloonon's Demo. Though I find almost all of Wood's projects to be of interest, I admit that I don't really enjoy them. This isn't intended as an insult to Wood's writing because there are plenty of very talented writers whose work doesn't strike a chord with me. 

   The first Brian Wood project I ever read was his Generation X work for Warren Ellis's Counter-X project. I was an X-Men completist at the time, and I wasn't enjoying ... well, any of the X-Books around that time so whatever Wood was trying to do was lost on me. But like many writers before him, company-owned super-heroes was not to Wood's taste. In his author's note to the AIT*PlanetLar collection of Demo, Wood, very politely, explains that he conceived the series after "I had spent some time a few years before writing teen superheroes for Marvel Comics, and I wanted to take a stab at something similar, but something I would have more control over, to interpret the concept of 'young people with power' the way I wanted to." The series progresses quickly through various permutations of powers and approaches to adolescence, power, and identity. Pretty long-standing and persuasive super-hero themes. But Wood eschews the narrative trajectory of the super-hero: the origin, the villain(s), the costumes, the serial story-telling. Each issue is a different character with no connection to the ones that preceded it.

   As a project, the first volume of Demo (Wood and Cloonan are planning more) is scattershot. It feels less like a collection of short stories than like a series of improvisations on a theme. Over the next few weeks, I'm hoping to write a series of posts about these stories - one per issue, at least, is the plan. Some of the issues resonate with me, while others leave me cold. I'm hoping that by putting together a more sustained reflection on Demo, I'll be able to appreciate even those issues of which I am less than fond.

   Next week: Demo #1: "NYC"

Death and Rebirth of the Author

   Roland Barthes published an influential essay in 1967 called "Death of the Author." Barthes argued against using a critical framework that relies on aspects of the author's identity - gender, race, sexual orientation, age, historical context, and so on - because it creates places an interpretive tyranny on any text. Barthes compares text to textile, remarking that a text is made up of a fabric of quotations drawn from varied and indeterminate centers of culture rather than from the singular experiences of an individual. Every reading and re-reading is a new act of creation and Barthes is more happy to consider the figure of the author as a scriptor who produces but does not command the meanings of the work.

   I don't often come back to Barthes, because I have so deeply accepted his ideas. But there are moments when I cringe a little at the dismissal of legitimate criticism or questions because the issues at stake were not "intended" by the author of the text (let's not even get into the fact that, with comics, you have enough cooks in the kitchen - writer, penciller, inker, colorist(s), editor(s), publishers, and so on - that any pure unanimity would be nearly impossible). I'm reminded of Brian Michael Bendis dismissing complaints about the assault of Tigra in New Avengers #35 because he didn't intend to make a comment about gender and violence in super-hero comics. Once the story is published, it's not really up to Joe Quesada, I'm afraid to say, just as it wasn't up to Bendis, what the story is about. It's up to readers what, if anything, the Death (and now Rebirth) of Captain America means as an allegory. From CBR's interview with Joey Q: 

Jonah Weiland: When Steve Rogers died, was there one mainstream question that you kept getting where you had to hold back from rolling your eyes?

Joe Quesada: Yes. The one question was, "What are you trying to say about America and or American politics?" [laughs] I was like, "I don't know. We're just trying to tell a great story. There's nothing more to it than that!" But they were trying to get deeper, trying to find that controversial nugget where there really wasn’t any, and at the end of the day, if we were trying to say something about American politics, we'd never be able to time it anyway because the amount of time it takes to create a comic book, etc. etc. Things happen the way they happen. But that’s the tricky thing about writing stories with a character that wears the American flag as his costume, people are going to read stuff into his stories that sometimes isn’t there.

 

   Let's ignore that Quesada didn't actually write or draw any of the issues that make up that storyline. Let's ignore the "we're just trying to tell a great story" because that's not true (it would be more accurately to say that he's trying to sell a great story). Any weird, unforeseen themes that appear, regardless of what the creators of Captain America intended, are fair game.

   Joe Quesada is the Editor in Chief, and therefore bears the responsibility for any significant stories in the Marvel U. I can sympathize with his feeling that certain reporters were just digging for a sensational sound-byte or hoping to stir up controversy. And it isn't the place of reporters to make literary interpretations (they have other important things to do). But Quesada is quite mistaken to deny that someone could see an allegory (even a poorly constructed or thematically weak allegory) where one was not intended. It's ridiculous of Quesada to say that "people are going to read stuff into his [Captain America's] stories that sometimes isn't there [sic]." If they read it, then it's there. As readers, they have created that meaning in the text. Just because this long "Death of Captain America" story was not intended to be a comment on the transition from Bush to Obama, doesn't mean that it can't be read as such. It could even be read as a layered allegory for the relative merits of the metric system, if one were so inclined. It's then up to the person who sees the subtext to argue convincingly that it is, in fact, present and persuasive. This is how we reject the bad interpretations (the metric system one, for instance) and find the good ones. Joe Quesada might disagree, but I think that one could easily make a really compelling argument about the present political moment through the lens of Captain America's death and resurrection.

 

Sigh of Relief

   Not that I really believed it, but this week's Uncanny X-Men #511 threatened to bring back Jean "Phoenix" Grey. Again. Being one of those comics fans who actually got addicted to the X-Men in the 90s (particularly the Age of Apocalypse, in all its resplendent narrative glory), I only really knew Scott and Jean together. I was really surprised when Grant Morrison killed her off over in New X-Men #150. I had been collecting X-Men comics for long enough  that they all seemed pretty rote by then. Even Morrison's stuff seemed filled with only refurbished takes on Chris Claremont's stories. When Jean actually died, even with the requisite back door left open for her eventual return, I was floored. Though Marvel didn't know what to do with most of Morrison's contributions to the X-Men, I am very glad that they didn't abandon Scott's relationship with Emma Frost. If Jean had come back, well, then we would get a love triangle instead of the less straightforward - and far more emotionally wrenching - betrayals that Scott and Emma have been inflicting on each other. I'm really looking forward to seeing how that plays out. Jean Grey will be back eventually, but her return at this time would circumvent too many interesting stories to be worth it.

Remember the Last Time?

   So, Flash: Rebirth #3 is out today (or tomorrow in Canada) and that got me wanting to re-read Mark Waid's run. Waid's Flash was one of my gateway drugs into comics (partly because a good friend of mine traded me almost the entire run up to that point, around from #62 - 100, for the #13s of the Heroes Reborn stuff. I don't know if I've ever been so close to theft in my entire life.)

   By the time it's finished, Geoff Johns's miniseries will be the same length as Waid's story (discounting the cliffhanger at the end of #73, "The Return of Barry Allen" ran from #74 - 79). By the end of #75, a reader is pretty sure that this isn't Barry Allen after all. The thematic purpose of the story was to establish Wally as a worthy successor for Barry precisely because he is a different character. Zoom, the crazed Flash fan and a clear precursor to Johns's Ur-Fanboy Superboy Prime, idolizes Barry and wants to be exactly like him. His attempts are futile, and in a bit of time-travelly confusion, they actually create the psychotic Zoom that would/had menace(d) Barry in stories already told. To stop Zoom, Wally has to move on from his own idolization of Barry and accept his role as the Flash. It's all very pop-psychology, with just enough Freud to make things the tidy motivations a little messier. Far from being a love-letter to the Silver Age, Waid's story is a pretty stirring embrace of a new character.

   What Johns's seems to be doing is a little different. For one thing, he's actually bringing Barry Allen back. If he follows his road-map from Green Lantern: Rebirth, as he has admitted in interviews, then he's planning to keep all the Flashes around but put the Silver Age version back in the title role. Johns has made the doubts about bringing Barry back into the plot of the series, as characters express a variety of opinions about what his return means. It's all very meta. He wants to, like Waid did with his story, focus on why the man in the red tights should be wearing them ... he's just arguing the opposite point that Waid did. At the same time, he's trying to preserve Wally as someone special. He wants to re-establish Barry Allen as the Flash, but keep Wally West around as something other than a junior side-kick. What Waid did was prove that the new guy deserved the job. What Johns's is doing is trying to show that the new guy didn't do anything wrong, but that he's going to be replaced anyway. It's not him ... it's us.

   It's not that I anticipate Johns is going to do a narrative disservice to Wally West. Far from it, I would guess. But, unlike the Green Lanterns, there doesn't seem to be any real publishing desire, or mythological infrastructure, to support so many Flashes. Jay gets a pass because he mostly keeps to himself over in the Justice Society. But look at Roy Harper and his Red Arrow persona. Granted, the JLA book has been a supreme mess lately, but having what amounts to two versions of the same character (in slightly different costumes) doesn't work. Sure, Wally can hang out with the Titans, but that book has too many insurmountable problems, and will just get canceled again. He'll pop up here and there in the main Flash comic, and might even be a regular supporting character, but he'll be pushed to the background.

   This stuff happens in publishing. Eventually, if a character is published for long enough, something has to be done to keep him or her fresh. It's OK to put Wally on the shelf for a while, and give Barry some air again. But I'm still convinced Ted Kord's coming back, so maybe I'm just a silly optimist.

   

Reading Bone

   Jeff Smith is pretty great. So far RASL has been energetic and inventive. Shazam and the Monster Society of Evil, though Smith's weakest work, displays a fine balance of restrained ebullience and genuine affection for its characters. But, come on, with Jeff Smith it's all about Bone. 

   Briefly, though Smith's work deserves much more, Bone is fun to look at through the lens of reading. The relationship between reader and text is one of the big themes of the entire series. The three titular Bones - Fone Bone, Smiley Bone, and Phoney Bone - resemble the hobbits of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (Smith himself has described Bone as "Bugs Bunny meets Lord of the Rings"). They are the human avatars, the characters allowing a point of entry into a medieval world. The Bones' world, encapsulated in their hometown of Boneville which is never so much as glimpsed, is described as our world would be. It seems to be an industrialized, modern society - a great contrast to the feudal, primarily agrarian world they encounter. The Bones are put in the position of readers right away: they enter the world through reading a map (a map drawn by Thorn, as it turns out, when she was a child ... the story calls out to the reader).

                                                                                                                

   By reading the map, the Bones are led into an adventure. There is a sense that Smith's world is like that of Baum's Oz books: though the adventure is real, it takes place on an imaginary plane, adjacent to the more mundane "reality." Fone Bone loses his companions in a plague of locusts, survives a long fall into a ravine, and emerges in a world that is not at all like the one he knows. Tracing Fone Bone's adventures is a copy of his favourite book, Moby Dick. Fone Bone is a reader, and is willing to launch into an impromptu lecture on Melville's novel if given even the slightest chance. Scenes from Moby Dick barge into Fone Bone's dreaming life and begin to take on a prophetic quality. The book begins to become shape the reality of the reader.

   As exemplified by Fone Bone's involvement with Moby Dick, reading becomes more than a passive act. The Bones are important in the narrative, and its actions could not take place without them but they enter a world that precedes them and will continue after they are gone. They must learn the pre-existing relationships and rich back-stories. They are often swept along by events and characters over whom they have no control. In this way, they are like readers of Smith's series, who become involved in the action and are engaged in its production (and what's a comic without a reader?).

  

   The last scene of Bone left me quite dissatisfied the first time I read the series. There seems to be no story logic for why the Bones leave. Why would they want to go back to Boneville? We hear almost nothing about families or close acquaintances back home and they don't seem to miss much about it. As with the Narnia or Oz books, I wondered why the characters would want to leave their friends and adventures behind for the mundane life they had before their life-changing adventures. But that's how reading works. You can tumble into the world for a while, but you always have to leave. When the Bones leave Thorn and Granma Ben behind, it's a sad parting because, like the Bones, you have developed affection for these characters through reading. Like the Bones, you leave them because, eventually, you have to put the book down.