This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up talking about what we picked up. This week, Douglas Wolk, Evan Narcisse, Mike Williams, Graeme McMillan and Lev Grossman discuss the second issue of X-Men: Second Coming, Superman #701 and Darwyn Cooke’s one-shot The Man with the Getaway Face.
DOUGLAS: I came to Second Coming after a long time away from the X-Men–every year or so I pick up an issue of something, hoping it’ll be something I can get into, which it usually isn’t. (The only periods of X-Men I’m totally conversant with are #94 to around #200, and the New X-Men era at the start of the last decade.) I bought the “Utopia” collection a few months ago, but it didn’t do a lot for me.
And I have to say: having read #2 (and acknowledging that it’s the final episode of a 14-parter that I haven’t read the rest of)… I can tell that there’s a lot of wrapping-up and setting-up going on, but I do not understand what X-Men is about at this point. Not just the subtext (mutants as “the other” seems to have gone out the window, ditto the “what does it mean to be post-human” idea of New X-Men), but the premise of the franchise itself: why these characters associate with one another, who they fight and why, who wants to harm them and why, what their collective and individual goals are, why they have code-names and costumes. Can one of you who’s more X-Men-literate please explain it to me? Break it down for me like I’m six?
MIKE: I think it comes back to genocide. When the world recognized that the mutant population had gone from millions (they even had an island nation, Genosha) down to just a couple hundred, it saw its chance, more or less. The world and its more militant groups like the Purifiers glimpsed a solution to the mutant problem. Cyclops and the gang have gone from protecting a world that hates and fears them to building an army whose sole purpose is survival. That is what drives Cyclops’ decisions. That is why these mutants both old and new take orders. And it appears he was right all along. With Hope wielding the Phoenix Force now, new mutants are popping up all over the globe for the first time since M-Day.
The question is: now that genocide has been averted, will Cyke’s burned bridges cost him too much?
GRAEME: The problem I have with the X-Men franchise these days is that it’s become so insular. One event kills off the mutant race, another reignites it, and so on. I understand the metaphors at play here, but it still just seems depressingly small-minded for a concept that’s as much about the future as anything else.
(More on Techland: The Comic Book Club: “Batwoman: Elegy” and “Werewolves of Montpellier”)
MIKE: Honestly, “Second Coming” hasn’t been spectacular. They killed Nightcrawler, and Cyclops is a dick. That’s pretty much it.
GRAEME: Hasn’t Cyclops been a dick for awhile now? It feels as if that’s the direction everyone wanted to take the character to show that he wasn’t a wuss.
MIKE: Well, yes,he is a dick, but now the rest of the team knows it. They know that he has green lit the X-Force murder squad and no one is very happy about it.
GRAEME: I’m not the world’s biggest X-Fan – I catch up in trades periodically – but the whole X-Force kill squad thing struck me as impossibly out of character for Cyclops. I remember the creators at the time saying things like “He’s doing it because he’s pushed to the limit and has to protect his race,” but that seemed to ring false… Was there ever any more to it than that?
MIKE: No, not really. After M-Day there were, what, 198 mutants left on Earth? He took it upon himself to protect them all. I guess he felt that Xavier wasn’t getting the job done, etc., etc.
GRAEME: Oh, Cyclops.
I keep wishing the X-Books were better; there are some nice ideas in them, these days – I like the X-Club, I like the idea that “X-Men” is less a team and more a generic term for the characters in the book, all that kind of thing, but the execution is always kind of… ehh.
MIKE: Yeah, I was a trade reader as well, until “Second Coming” rolled along with its wonderful tagline “Many will be injured, several will die!” How could I NOT read it issue by issue.
GRAEME: Have “several” died? I know that Nightcrawler and Cable have both disappeared (with poor Kurt going because no one seemed to know what to do with him for years, more than anything else).
MIKE: Rasputin’s sister Magik was sent to Hell. I think Ariel was blowed up at some point. Vanisher got shot up but I don’t know if he’s dead. Hellion, that little punk, got his hands disintegrated.
GRAEME: Magik was sent to hell? But I thought she was already a demon?
MIKE: There was a three- or four-part series about going to rescue her. I skipped it.
GRAEME: HOLY CRAP HAVE YOU PEOPLE READ SUPERMAN #701? It’s like JMS took a masterclass in how to annoy me.
LEV: You can sign up for that at the Learning Annex now.
DOUGLAS: I don’t think anyone gets to do the “Superman talks the jumper down” story again unless they can do it better than All-Star Superman #10. Which they can’t.
GRAEME: It’s not just that, it’s the “Yeah, those drug dealers can go and sell drugs elsewhere. As long as MY backyard is safe” bit that really irritates me. THAT’S NOT SUPERMAN. It’s that simple. Superman doesn’t deal with problems by making them someone else’s problem, especially when it’s something like drug dealers. It’s such an insanely off-base idea of who Superman is that it completely stuns me that editorial – or, for that matter, Geoff Johns, who as DC CCO must have seen this early and who gets the character in a way that many execs probably don’t (He’s the one who wrote the great “I’m for everyone” line from that “Superman and The Legion of Super-Heroes” story) – let it go through unchanged. Also, poor Lois: Did Superman really tell her he was leaving her to walk across America with no idea of when he’d be back by phone? It honestly reads as if JMS looked at all those SuperDickery covers and thought, hey, THAT’s the Superman I want to see again.
MIKE: And how did Lois show up in Philly? I forget, where is Metropolis in the United States again? I always considered it NYC and Gotham was Baltimore.
GRAEME: Metropolis is wherever you want it to be. Same as Gotham… I think both are on the East Coast in the comics; I know that Smallville (the TV series) firmly puts Metropolis in Kansas.
DOUGLAS: I believe it’s been established that the DCU’s New York is the “Cinderella City,” the smaller city sandwiched between the bigger and more glamorous Metropolis and Gotham.
MIKE: Are we supposed to believe that Supes wasn’t going to catch the jumper? That was offensive-ish. I felt like I was reading fan fiction. Stick to fixing cars.
GRAEME: That’s another of my problems with the issue: for it to work, Superman has to be… not Superman. The Superman we know and love – or, in many cases, know and don’t have any strong feeling for at all – would catch the jumper no matter what. He wouldn’t give riddles about being a hero to someone who razzes him about walking across America. He wouldn’t tell Lois that he’s leaving for god-knows-how-long in a phone call. Etc., etc…. I think there are some interesting things in this story, but it’s not a Superman story. It has nothing to do with me wanting Superman to be “safe” or “comfortable” or anything like that… I simply don’t want him to be a self-righteous asshole.
EVAN: You know, I thought I was being a little harsh when we talked about JMS’ story in Supes #700. But, now, I don’t think so. It’s like I said last month. He’s clearly too in love with Superman as a symbol. That beat when he’s talking to the jumper and he’s name-checking JFK, Gandhi and John Lennon? C’mon, is that really what that girl needed to hear then? That bit of dialogue doesn’t tell me anything about Kal-El. I It doesn’t tell me anything about how JMS sees Superman. It speaks volumes about how he THINKS we should see him but it doesn’t communicate an understanding from the inside out. All it does is tell me that he’s spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of things Superman should say. But it doesn’t feel natural.
(More on Techland: The Comic Book Club: Superman #700)
DOUGLAS: On reading this issue again–and believe me, it’s like driving the spike in a little deeper every time I do–there are two possibilities for the “jumper” sequence: either 1) it means that JMS has never read All-Star Superman or 2) he’s using it to make his Superman go head-to-head with All-Star Superman and one of its most fondly remembered moments. In which case, he is, as they say, tugging on Superman’s cape. I went back and read the All-Star scene with Regan the would-be jumper, and you know how long that thing is? ONE page. Five panels. (Plus a little bit of context before that.) In contrast, this thing just dithers and dithers and dithers.
One major difference, among many: the All-Star Superman doesn’t just do good, he redeems people, from Regan all the way up to Lex. (Geoff Johns’ Superman doesn’t quite do that as much, but at least he talks about it.) Superman’s not the guy who shrugs his shoulders about Charlie the ’70s Stereotype Drug Dealer and his pals setting up somewhere else (after he’s smoked up the neighborhood by setting the stashes on fire), he’s the guy who’d convince Charlie and company to turn over a new leaf and start an effective neighborhood-watch association, you know?
EVAN: That bit with the drug dealers was so bad. It kinda just showed how ineffectual Superman would be on The Wire.
DOUGLAS: “Got to. This is America, man.”
Also, j’accuse Eddy Barrows of rampant widescreen-effect abuse. Only two pages in this issue have any panels that aren’t the full width of the page. Unfortunately, the story is all about multiple-character talking-heads interaction rather than horizontal movement, so Barrows ends up relying on lots of extreme closeups and extreme long-shots, “dramatically” tilting the angle of view, etc., and it feels like there’s no room to breathe.
GRAEME: From the ridiculous to the sublime: The Man With The Getaway Face is just one of those almost perfect comics, isn’t it? From Darwyn Cooke’s beautiful visuals, as lush and, yes, retro as ever, but also looser (The cover is AMAZING) and bolder, to the sparse, fast-moving writing (Again, so confident! That silent heist? Man, that’s good stuff) to the packaging and presentation, it’s just so good.
DOUGLAS: It’s even more remarkable considering that Cooke basically notes on the inside front cover that this was a hold-his-nose-and-get-through-it gig–one of his least favorite Parker books, but one he felt like he had to tackle because its premise sets up subsequent books. The Saul Bass-style “opening credits” business on the first page, followed by the second page’s reflection in an old-fashioned shaving mirror (in parallel to the mirror-revelation shot of Parker in the first volume)… really, after that the rest is a victory lap. (I also love that he sticks with Stark’s construction of the first line. Actually, all the first lines of Parker books are kind of amazing–I like #20.)
Another thing I love about this comic: it’s hyper-compressed–an entire prose novel, telescoped into 24 pages–and a hell of a lot happens, but it feels relaxed and loose. The panels are airy and spacious, even when there are four tiers and eight or nine images on a page. Cooke knows how to pick a detail that implies everything else he needs–the panel of the car’s hood ornament, when Parker’s saying “buckle up”? That’s straight-up visual synecdoche.
MIKE: Can we just quickly mention the materials and dimensions of this book? It’s huge. And it’s printed on this thick card stock. And it’s two dollars! I like just holding it.
The silent heist was beautiful. Although it wasn’t really silent, was it? They talk us through the plan in previous pages, so I wonder if I would have understood it all if I didn’t know exactly what they were going to do.
Outside of the mirror page (which I had no choice but to make my Panel of the Week) I loved the scene where they walk away from the wrecked car and the now-dead double-crossing woman. It was an overhead shot. Just great.
(More on Techland: Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Book Club: Volume 3)
GRAEME: I think that the fact that it’s not one of Cooke’s favorite Parker books actually helps, in a weird way. It allows him to take more liberties with the construction and pare the story down to its basics, in a way that I’m not sure he did in The Hunter. This feels like a more accomplished, riskier book, something that’s more alive. (and I say that as someone who loved The Hunter).
You’re right, Mike: the physicality of the book, the size and weight, really help the experience in reading it. It feels special, like an event.
EVAN: I, for one, just hope that comic-book nerd Jon Hamm has read this thing. We can dream, can’t we?
You know, it’s amazing how Cooke unabashedly mines the retro-cool vein in most of his work but it continues to feel fresh. I think it’s because underneath all the skinny ties and old-school autos, there’s still great mechanics to his storytelling. The characters are always distinguishable with faces that emote, the world feels grounded, even if the backgrounds are occasionally spare, and the camera angles never feel sensationalistic.
The page where Parker’s holding the letter is a great example. So much story gets told in that one shot yet there’s enough artistic detail that you don’t just feel like you’re reading exposition.
I have to confess that I didn’t get The Hunter when I could’ve, and then it was never in stock when I went for it. I’ll be getting it on iPad later today.
DOUGLAS: Evan, I don’t know if you’re trying to avoid adding more physical objects to your life right now (and that “new for ’62” ad at the back is almost gorgeous enough for me to want to read The Hunter on my iPhone, although wouldn’t a 1962 iPhone take up, like, an entire building?), but the book is a really lovely physical artifact. Paper stock, binding, everything.