Might as well post some Superman material: SYFY's oral history of the Death of Superman

Syfy's oral history. It's pretty long.

I read shortened versions of this in a variety of books about Superman as I did my research. I was also reading comics at this time (1992-1993). I wasn't reading Superman books, though, and I sort of missed the whole thing. I was aware of it, because it was hard not to be. But it didn't have much impact.

Here's editor Mike Carlin, at the end of the oral history:

We personally felt bad that characters like LOBO and The Punisher were being hailed as role models of some sort — and maybe it was our fault that Superman felt old-fashioned still. We were in a position to do something about it, or at least to TRY to do something about it, so we took that awkward opportunity of a postponed wedding and really made our point: Don't take Superman for granted — or he might not be there when you need him.

The Death of Superman was a product of its time.

Some interesting links

Here's an essay on the old Death of Superman storyline from '92 by Stephen Sonneveld of Sequart. Sonneveld places the story in the context of the decade that produced it and the contemporary comic trends. Here's a bit worth quoting:

Superman would meet his end not by an egotistical genius or an intergalactic despot, but by an unfeeling force of nature that lived solely to rampage. For all of Superman’s compassion, he could not reason with this beast. For all of his ingenuity, he could not outsmart this gray behemoth. Winds change and tornadoes destroy. Plates shift and the earth quakes. Doomsday runs free and great heroes die.
His craggy appearance notwithstanding, there was élan to this idea. It is difficult to say if the public response would have been so strong had the fatal blow been delivered by a recurring villain. To most outsiders, it probably would have seemed like comic book business as usual. But the fact that this “devil ex machina” was created for the singular purpose of killing Superman again invoked the sense that this character, above all others in the medium, was on par with the myths of old – with the Greek pantheon whose threads were cut by the sisters Fate; the damned Norsemen facing Ragnarok.
In popular terms, for this brief moment, Doomsday was Superman’s greatest villain.


And an examination of one of my favorite movies over at the AV Club: Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation. It's a movie whose whole plot and character development hinge on the pronunciation of a single word. The essay's part of that publication's running feature about winners at the Cannes Film Festival. I spent a couple of nights in Cannes back in 2006, unrelated to the film festival. My wife and I were taking trains all around Europe, and that's where we decided to stay. It was during the World Cup. We'd been in Germany a week before when Germany won a big game. then we'd gone to Italy when Italy won in the semi-finals. We were sure France was going to win the final because it fit the pattern, but Italy won.

Speaking of France:  I just finished Vincent Mahe's 750 Years in Paris, which chronicles the development, destruction, redevelopment, etc. of a single building in that city, through a bunch of major historical events, beginning with the Knights Templar marching through town in 1265. If you're into Here by MacGuire, this is a nice way to follow up on it.

Here, by Richard McGuire

I have a new favorite book: Richard McGuire's comic Here.* I saw it recommended by Book Riot's Hattie Kennedy among 100 Must-Read Comics. The Bloomington library had a copy, but I think I might get my own  because I like it so much. I wish I'd come up with the idea behind it. Actually, I wish I'd come up with it and had the visual sensibility, eye for design, and artistic skill necessary to create it.

The image above is a two-page spread showing, simultaneously, the events that occurred in a single space in the years 1624, 1995, and 2126. Every page is like that, a spread with up to a dozen different images.They range from 3,000,500,000 BCE to 22,175 CE (I think that's the farthest in the future it goes). Multiple stories take center stage; some are only ever a few small panels, some occupy the entire spread. Some are sequential, some are shown only every so often. While the future scenes are some of my favorite, they're wisely used sparingly. The single image of water flooding through the window in the year 2111 speaks volumes--I'll leave you to discover the images from various years (18 in all) that accompany that flood. There's a lot going on, and it rewards second and third readings.

Some of the events include contact between European and Americans, Ben Franklin visiting his son (much more contentious than you might think, since it occurs in 1775), the building of the house visible in the background of the above image (which took place in 1907), and lots of everyday activities. In one sequence I like a lot, a woman sets up a movie screen--one of those old tripods that, believe it or not, I had to set up for an event at IU just yesterday--to watch some old Super 8 movies with her family.

One thing that appeals to me is that McGuire only hints at most of the events. They feel random, but there are thematic resonances that make for some profound and fascinating pages. Here's one:

 
Slightly cut off in that scan is the time stamp of 500,000 BCE. Each panel refers to some sort of loss. In 1932 (far left) "I lost my wallet." 1923 (middle) I must have left the umbrella somewhere. 2008 (right) "I think I'm losing my mind," spoken into a phone

Figurative and literal loss laid over the watery, soupy mess of half a million years ago. A loss that can be very frustrating (wallet), but yet it's not even possible without all the gains that have created the scenes taking place in the house itself. Half a million years provides a dry area, wood and mud to build with, and the house in which the three people experience their lives.

There's something whiggish about descriptions of Here, which tend to focus on the "corner of a room" aspect of the book. That makes it easy to describe, but the book itself doesn't force that description. There's a T-rex, after all. If I had the time, I'd count how many of the spreads have as their background focal point the room and how many show the landscape (which includes Franklin's house: the book doesn't give away the location with any precision, but the Franklin house across the street can locate it for us [William Franklin, illegitimate son of Benjamin, that is], as does the reference in this interview with McGuire, which tells us that the artist used his parents' house in New Jersey; we cannot locate it astrally because, strange as it seems to notice, there are no stars, not even in nighttime scenes).

The theme of the book as a whole, then, is impermanence. A worthy subject. Putting stars in wouldn't fit the theme; they're the closest thing we have to permanence. Mountains crumble, lakes dry up, nations come and go. The stars might shift a little here and there, but they'll outlast us all.

Here is a truly nonlinear book; there's an electronic version that amplifies and sometimes alters the juxtaposition of the different frames. You can see a sample in the videos that accompany the write-up of the book in The New Yorker.

In the interview linked to above, McGuire notes that the electronic and print versions have different strengths:

The book form works perfectly for telling this story, but I also wanted to push the nonlinear aspects of the storytelling. I imagined an interactive version that could randomize all the panels and backgrounds and reshuffle them, and with the new combinations come new connections within the story. I spoke about this possibility at a lecture I gave, and by luck there was a developer in the audience, Stephen Betts, who knew how it could be done. We collaborated on that for two years, right alongside of the making of the paper version. Stephen wrote a lot of programing for what became the e-book. It’s unlike any other I’ve ever seen. It also incorporates animated GIFs and, for me, those little looped movements feel the closest to single memories.

 I think I prefer the print. I could stare at these pages for hours.


*Previous favorite book: Alessandro Falassi's  Folklore by the Fireside.

Comics out Loud

-->  It’s hard to read a comic out loud. Storybooks are easy. One picture per page, and the words match. Strangely, with a storybook the hardest parts to read are the pages without words, when the narrator and the characters are silent. What do you do then? I make sound effects. 

When I was a kid, the comic I read the most was The Mighty Thor—in particular, numbers 337-382, the Walter Simonson run. It’s still my favorite comic story. I had to buy the omnibus edition when it came out in 2011, and his new Ragnarok series draws me to the comic shop the day each new issue goes on sale.

Despite owning the omnibus, I’ve never done more than flip through it until recently. I know the story well enough that I don’t need to read it straight through. I flip through it, looking at specific moments and battles. It’s a fantasy comic, much moreso than it is a superhero comic, and it rewards this kind of revisitation. But a few weeks ago, I go lucky when my five-year-old son asked me to read the whole thing to him. I’m not sure what prompted this request, but I wasn’t about to refuse.

Now, understand that my kids ask me to read comics to them quite a bit. After the first time, I’ve said no about seventy-five percent of the time. We’ve read a few Super Dinosaur, Transformers, and Uncle Scrooge, but not many of them. But they’re all a bit of an ordeal. You’ve got to point to the panel you’re reading, often back and forth between multiple speaking characters in the same panel. And characters frequently speak off-panel just to complicate things further. The sound effects often sound altogether wrong when uttered. Then, in some comics, you’ve got to differentiate between thought bubbles and word balloons. And if you do voices…

Storybooks lack that complicated structure—even though many of them are almost exactly like comics, lacking only word balloons.There's usually just one or two pictures per page spread, and often I can read through the words quickly enough. With a comic, there are so many pictures per page that it's hard to keep his attention on a single panel at a time. He often asks about what's going on in a panel on the bottom of the recto whilst I'm still reading narration for the first panel on the verso. Sorry for the obscure diction. That just happens sometimes.

So, yeah, I do voices. My Odin is a lot like John Houston. Thor is an octave lower than my own. Balder is soft and light. And the warriors three are probably what you'd expect: Volstag bellows everything. Fandral is my attempt at Errol Flynn. Hogun is Charles Bronson (I don't remember where I came across the information, but I'm fairly certain that Kirby had these men in mind when he designed the characters). I do my best fox impression for Loki, even though it makes no sense. And for reasons I don't understand, I make Beta Ray Bill sound like John Hurt. Nobody has an English accent. I don't even want to describe what it sounds like when I read the women's dialogue.

Then there are sound effects. What I have found is that, strangely, these almost never work for me when I read them out loud, so I end up just making a noise like what I think the thing would sound like.

So far, we've read nearly 500 pages of the omnibus. Lots more to go, but it's a fascinating, challenging experience.

Something Fell

Anybody out there read Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith's comic Fell? Image published it, not quite a decade ago. It got into it because it was cheap, and I'd heard good things about Ellis' writing. Fell is Richard Fell, introduces himself as Rich, who's transferred to a place called Snowtown. He's a detective. Lots of the cases he works on in the 9 issues that were ever published of this comic come from real life cases that Ellis got a hold of in newspapers. In the first issue, Fell meets a barkeep called Mayko, and even though nothing they do constitutes flirting, you get that sort of vibe. Toward the end of the story, she brands his neck with a hot iron, giving him the symbol of Snowtown (you know, so he'll be safe).

I liked the approach to this comic right away. Sixteen pages of story, a few pages of backmatter (here actually titled Back Matter) in which the author goes on about the creative process, includes some fan letters, some pictures and whatnot. It's interesting, even when Ellis has no choice but to include pretty much only letters cause his allergies have transformed him into "Snot Tsunami Man" (issue 3).

Ellis has his critics, of course. Some say he's often just weird for weird's sake, other that he pushes the boundaries of taste for no good reason. Sometimes I see that. In Fell #2, for example, he puts in a coroner who's of course eating a sandwich when Fell enters the morgue. Cliche. But then the coroner drops a tomato onto the corpse, and eats it anyway.

Templesmith's art is heavily stylized, which means it either works for you or doesn't. He got big when he did 30 Days of Night. I like his work here. It's moody. And he draws the single most disturbing image of a nun in a Richard Nixon mask that anyone will ever come across. The nun's a recurring character.

Chris Eliopoulis letters the comic, and it's done in a subtle way that makes you forget there's a letterer. There are lots of signs and the like posted throughout the panels, so the lettering is actually a subtle part of the whole of Snowtown, which I like. 

The mysteries/crimes Fell has to solve are almost perfunctory. They exist just to hang the city and the characters on something, so why not have them be some of the more depraved acts of humanity, like smoke babies (issue 2) or the fact that bodies dumped in water get all horridly gross. Nonetheless, Fell gives us some great panels, such as this one, which begins issue 6:

It's funny how things seem to change over time, but don't. Cause I'm the one that's different. The only difference to these comics is that I left them sitting on my desk once, and I had cats back then. So one of the cats knocked over a cup of water, walked through it and then jumped onto the desk and walked all over the fell comics. So issues 6-9 have these dried cat footprint water damage to them. It's tempting to say that Fell isn't quite as good as I remember it, but that's not true. Ellis and Templesmith cram a lot into 16 pages, even issue 8, in which the 9-panel grid gives way to three panels per page for most of the issue. That issue, which concludes the single collected edition, has a great ending.

Ellis wanted to write fell to have something relatively cheap on the stands, for guys like me who can't justify the price of a monthly comic back then. The average comic was between $2.25 and $3 at that time. We need it even more now, as the average is now tipping towards four bucks.

So I'm rereading Fell in part because I wish there were more comics like it. It goes out of its way to be readable, to tell single-issue stories while developing a community through its back matter (an  idea for a series of blog posts: great single-issue stories of recent comics). It only lasted 9 issues (which I think had more to do with the creators not keeping up with it; it won a couple of Eisners, but Ellis' most recent word on it was in 2011). Because life's about to change in a pretty big way, I'm going to drop all of the comics on my pull list. I might've been inclined to keep one if it worked like Fell worked.