Saturday, February 2, 2008

The Month In Review


Veronica Mars... Duh...

As you might guess, I've been watching a lot of Veronica Mars recently. I've also left Saint Paul to, once again, attend Oberlin College. It feels good to prepare to do some more serious work, but I do want to say a few words about this month's reading list before I am enshrined in my ivory tower.

-Warren Ellis (Cassaday, illust.), Planetary, issues one through eighteen, twenty through twenty-one, and twenty-four through twenty-six.
-Warren Ellis (Immonen, illust.), Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., issues one through twelve.
-Warren Ellis (Larroca, illust.), Newuniversal, issues one through six.
-Warren Ellis (Robertson, illust.), Transmetropolitan, issues one through sixty.
-Warren Ellis (various illust.), Global Frequency, issues one through twelve.

-Grant Morrison (various illust.), The Invisibles, volume one: issues one through twenty-five and volume two: issues one through twenty-two.
-Grant Morrison (Weston, illust.), The Filth, issues one through thirteen.
-Grant Morrison (various illust.), Doom Patrol, issues nineteen through twenty-two.
-Haruki Murakami, After Dark.

-Brian Wood (burchielli, illust.), DMZ, issues one through twenty-seven.
-Brian Wood (Gianfelice, illust.), Northlander, issues one and two.
-Brian Wood (Kelly, illust.), Local, issues one, two, and four.

I've already written about a number of these comics (look around here), but I want to talk a little more broadly about some of the more common themes that seem to run through them. Ellis and Morrison's work, even the more straightforward of it--like Ellis's Fell or Global Frequency is riddled with plots plucked from the latest fad pseudo-science, it's as if that SciFi genre work element never left. The amazing thing is that despite these very genre-specific plotlines, the literary range and virtuosity displayed by Ellis and Morrison is on par the best novelists of the day.


Ellis's work seems less serious on the surface, but he's able to transition seamlessly between comic-world-in-joke farces like Nextwave, serious social commentary like Global Frequency or Transmet, and very much SciFi standard fare like Planetary.


Morrison's stuff is almost too dense to understand at first pass; I'm pretty sure I'll finish--and understand--The Invisibles at roughly the same time I get Gravity's Rainbow. Morrison's work in Doom Patrol, while complicated and difficult, is also able to be read on so many levels. Most accessably, it's a turnabout of the classic superhero archetype. There are no happy, ripped Supermen here, just the crazy, miserable, and disconnected. Instead of idealizing his characters, I find myself identifying with them. Furthermore the primary plot in Doom Patrol's first trade is a fictional world encroaching on the real world. This is the kind of theme I'd expect in Berthelme or McSweeney's, not a superhero book.


My point with all of this is to highlight the versatility of the genre, to defend my choice to read only one actual novel this month (It wasAfter Dark, by the by, and it was excellent, a bite size Murikami masterpiece or some such rot... just read it).


I'd like to close by strongly recommending two of these books in particular: Brian Wood's DMZ and Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan. Relevent, smart, dark, and funny, they capture perfectly the plight of writing--and journalistic writing in particular--in today's world. Up against corporate shortsightedness and greed, government incompetence and graft, and our own apathy, ignorance, these comics are both an elegy and a rallying cry.


Damn, the cadence in the last sentence there, I could write for The West Wing. Too much? Ah. Fuck it.