Wait 'Til I Wake Up

Yeah, I'm a bit behind...

I was helping SiL clear out her attic 'til about 9pm yesterday, and spent a couple of hours after a belated dinner going through the lastest delivery of comics before losing contact with the waking world. I'll be catching up over the next half-day, and this entry will probably get a couple of updates before the day is through.

Stay tuned!

Update - 14:51 - In Today's Episode: Mane-of-Night learns to appreciate her allies, even though one of them is hardly to her taste as "Lockdown" continues in The Darkhawk Diaries.

There, that's a start...

October's Comics - From A Different Angle

Perusing this month's not-inconsiderable stack of comics, something pretty fundamental becomes clear. Big Comic Events work best not when they "go large", but more when they go more along the "only human" line. Right now, Marvel have two such projects going - the cosmic-level "Annihilation" and the "on your front door-step" "Civil War". Annihilation should totally grab me, as it focusses on Marvel's cast of space-faring characters, several of which I grew up with, so to speak, and to a certain degree it does that, but Civil War transcends that by being thoroughly captivating. Is it something to do with the art? CW certainly wins in that respect, but that's not quite it...

I realised that those "events" that show superheroes as essentially human just... well, work so much better. Last month, I got the trade paperback of DC's "Identity Crisis", the core story of which is the murder of one character's wife, and how it leads to several skeletons escaping from the various closets, and the trust between heroes being severely eroded. These sorts of things happen to ordinary people, and if Adam West and Burt Ward form the basis for your view of superheroics, those things just don't happen to Batman and Robin, do they?

Identity Crisis was just one piece of a jigsaw that led into "Infinite Crisis", an event of the more cosmic, universe-threatening variety, and it managed to deliver - but even then, it didn't quite satisfy. Me "growing out of comics"? Naaaah - it's nothing that simple. Comics have outgrown their supposed audience - the schoolkids with the latest Spiderman rolled up in their back pocket.

Of course, today's Batman did come about by way of the Sixties... the Fifties... the Forties... but not by a natural progression. The next writer down the line will always dispense with something set in stone by their predecessor. Even major events can be "fixed" by "retroactive continuity", and the real test of time for Civil War will be just how much of the story "sticks". This time next year, I may just be ranting about how Marvel reneged on the promise offered up by CW - we shall just have to see...

I shall, of course, be continuing to cover this subject in depth. Stay tuned!