Gone in a flash...!

The biggest news for me personally in recent weeks was that Borders, the company I’ve worked for over the past five years, has gone into liquidation. In a matter of months, it’ll have passed into history. There’re any number of things I could say about this, but for the purposes of this particular column, I’ll limit myself to comics experience I was able to enjoy during that time. Perhaps most notably, I found myself increasingly in charge of a small corner of the comics retail experience, quite by accident.

I began working for the company in the fall of 2006, opening a new store in Burlington, MA. At first, I as just another employee, and since this was the first time I had ever worked in a bookstore, it took time for me to establish a role for myself, to become comfortable. Some of my earliest contact with the comics in the store were the regular supply of new issues we received in our magazine shipments. I took care to manage these as best I could, but I also enjoyed reading them on breaks, which was a marvelously unique experience (I can’t imagine the wicked temptation working in an actual comics shop might kindle).

At some point, when it became necessary to reorganize certain areas that had gotten wildly out of order, I realized I could take control of the graphic novel collection, too. I became quite interested in this. I started reading a lot of those, too, some like DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and WATCHMEN that I was naturally aware of but had never actually experienced before.

Within about a year, I transferred to a different Borders after moving to Colorado Springs. Things were different here. The graphic novels hadn’t been maintained in any serious manner for some time, and I didn’t feel qualified to correct this right away. In time, however, I had enough support, the right moves were made, and I was finally able to bring them back under control. It was a greater revelation. The new order was perhaps a greater order than I’d accomplished in my other store, and I began to take greater pains to keep it so. I became, essentially, a guardian to the graphic novel collection, sometimes zealously so. The comics kept coming in with magazines, and at some point, I became sole guardian, as it were, of the magazines (somewhat more officially, it should be noted), and so was able to maintain the available issues at my leisure.

Retail can be a funny beast, sometimes completely unaware of the difference between supply and demand. Space was a constant issue, with the graphic novels. I had to innovate in order to find space for all of them. I began appropriating more and more display areas, all around the general area where comics were ordinarily be found. I became a fanatic. I didn’t exactly foster readers, but I at least made it easy for anyone to know what I thought might be worth checking out. It was fun. The displays continued to grow, and it became somewhat ridiculous (within reason). I had virtually turned a whole section of the bookstore into a comics shop. (If only I had real power! Or loyal customers!)

Anyway, then Borders went into bankruptcy, and for some reason or another couldn’t avoid liquidation. So there ends that.

Earlier this year, I had a fortuitously-timed employee appreciation discount when THE FLASH OMNIBUS BY GEOFF JOHNS VOLUME ONE was released. You may know this particular ditty comes at a fairly hefty price, oversized hardcover that it is, collecting more than a dozen comics. The period of 2000-2001, as readers of this blog may remember, was notable in my comics experience in that I was not, as such, reading comics, so Geoff’s run came at a time when I couldn’t really appreciate it. I was still high on all the work Mark Waid had done (even though his last story, involving Cobalt Blue in “Chain Lightning,” seemed to fall on deaf ears), and couldn’t imagine anyone else capturing the world of the Scarlet Speedster quite so vividly. I kept track of comics during my time away, though, and heard all these amazing things about what Johns was doing, and in 2004, when I was segueing back in, his FLASH comics were among the first things I read, even though I didn’t make an effort to be very expansive about it. Even by 2005, when I was officially back, I didn’t seem all that interested in following his efforts too closely.

Let me just step aside for a moment and note for the record that Geoff worked on THE FLASH for five years. This is incredibly unusual. Waid had about six years of interrupted time (by Mark Millar and Grant Morrison) on the title, and worked in conjunction with Brian Augustyn for some of that. Unlike his work on JSA, which he spent shared some of the work with James Robinson, Johns wrote THE FLASH on his own. It was his first big assignment after STARS AND S.T.R.I.P.E., the book that ushered Geoff’s comics career.

He’s been writing Green Lantern since 2005, and has so thoroughly revolutionized that character and the franchise around him that Hollywood finally took the gamble that a wide audience might actually be out there for a property even comics fans have only moderately cared about (for the most part). Geoff’s work in this regard is exactly comparable to what Mark Waid did with The Flash.

So what exactly did Johns did with the same character? THE FLASH OMNIBUS is a clear indication that he had no intention of replicating Waid’s work. He de-emphasized the mythology of the Speed Force and Wally West’s considerable family of speedsters (though in Geoff’s own TEEN TITANS reboot Bart Allen receives a remarkable upgrade that no other writer has been able to capitalize on, with the possible exception of Marc Guggenheim), and instead found a way to represent the reality of life for someone whose main attribute is the ability to run really fast. In effect, now that Waid had matured Wally, Geoff was able to push him into his own confident adventures.

In another departure from Waid’s impulses, Johns chose to bring villains squarely back into the fold, new ones, figures who were familiar from stories that predated Waid in the same series, but most notably the Rogues, characters who had been famous foes of Barry Allen, the second Flash, but who had basically remained dormant for decades. Geoff infused Captain Cold, Weather Wizard, Mirror Master, and others with a considerable of amount of depth that exploded their possibilities, something clear from the very beginning, though he himself wouldn’t fully realize the potential of all this for a few years. For an outsider, it seemed like he was losing himself in everything but his main character. In reality, Geoff understood better than anyone the potential of what he was writing.

A lot of commentators like to say that he prefers to resurrect old ideas at the expense of newer ones, that he’s guilty of submerging the future of comics in a fanboy’s fantasy that forever chains it to the past, limiting the potential for new readers. He brings back Barry Allen after a few decades, reversing one of comics’ seemingly permanent and perfect deaths, and forgets completely about Wally. Where’s the sense in that? The fact is (the Flash Fact), Geoff understands Barry as a character, and has done more with a few stories than most writers working for years will ever accomplish with other characters, realizing the heart of their potential. He found a narrative, a singular voice, for Barry, that had been overlooked before, wasn’t even possible given the style of storytelling when Barry was last in action. If you’ve got that, why worry about anything else?

As I attempted to do, prematurely, a few months back, I bought some comics from Borders, from the last rounds that will ever be delivered, and so will round out this week with my thoughts on those:

THE FLASH #12 (DC)
Cover date July 2011.

Somewhat appropriately enough, the final issue of the current FLASH series, with Johns at the helm, leading directly into FLASHPOINT, the first time the franchise has carried a major crossover event. With details having emerged about the “New 52,” we now know that Geoff has technically ended his run with The Flash, once again, at least for now, which is something of a disappointment, but it can’t be said that he hasn’t devoted a significant amount of his career with one Scarlet Speedster or another. I spent five years working for Borders, and Geoff spent five years writing Wally West. I know how that time passed for me. I can only imagine what it’s like to write a single series for that length of time.

GREEN LANTERN #66 (DC)
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #60 (DC)
Cover date July 2011.

I made a conscious effort to refrain from reading or collecting any of the “War of the Green Lanterns” comics in recent months, knowing that if I read any of them, I will probably want to read all of them, and since I’m “not” reading comics these days, I wanted to wait until the eventual collection to read this latest epic. Well, this was a good enough excuse to break that rule. As far as I can tell, it’s a more than appropriate arc to finish on (at least to the “New 52” fresh start), and works extremely well with GREEN LANTERN AND PHILOSOPHY, a book that was released in conjunction with the new movie, and which deals at some length with the work Geoff has been doing in developing the core concepts of the franchise.

BATMAN #711 (DC)
Cover date August 2011.

I’ve heard some people refer to Tony Daniel as a hack writer. Those who have been following this blog know that I think otherwise. I’m extremely glad that he’ll have the chance to continuing creating Batman stories in DETECTIVE COMICS come September. He has all the potential to succeed Grant Morrison as the next architect of the Dark Knight.

TEEN TITANS #91 (DC)
Cover date March 2011.

Okay, so I didn’t always notice when a series stopped shipping. Toward the end, we received fewer and fewer new comics. I liked to maintain as full a rack as possible, and so that’s why this book stuck around for so long. Which is just as well, because it becomes my only real experience with J.T. Krul’s Titans, which famously integrated Damian as a member. A fairly decent experience, overall, but not really on par with Geoff’s, or Marv Wolfman’s. There is, however, a nice moment where Bart Allen remembers the death Marc Guggenheim was editorially directed to end his run with, which is a nice touch, given what I’ve written earlier.

SPIDER-GIRL #4 (Marvel)
From April 2011.

Along with “One Moment in Time,” “Grim Hunt” was an excellent representation of a mature Spider-Man, so I kept this particular comic around since it was basically a follow-up I kept hoping customers would snatch up. They never did, obviously, but that just allowed me to, finally.

FANTASTIC FOUR: THE LAST STAND (Marvel)

This one was only shipped a few weeks back, and is a repackaging of #s 574 and 587-588 of the series recently replaced by FF, including the famous conclusion to “Three,” and therefore the infamous death of Johnny Storm. I wrote about that particular issue a few months back, and my opinion of its individual worth remains basically the same (the lack of emphasis on Johnny is baffling, except to say that his death was somehow a completely natural outcome of the story, at least in Jonathan Hickman’s eyes). The difference is that this special edition puts the whole thing into a far better context. The Fantastic Four were always something of a Marvel indulgence, a willingness to believe that it somehow made sense that these four characters really did make sense as superheroes, and not just as a makeshift family. Reed Richards, even in the movies, is portrayed as a little too singularly motivated by his pursuit of science for this to completely jive, so the forging of the Future Foundation and a complete break with its origins is actually something of a genius move on the part of Hickman. If other writers actually maintain and expand on the idea, it might even make sense! So I was glad to have had the opportunity to buy this one, certainly.

The fate of Borders, in the end, simply adds a new wrinkle into the continuing evolution of my comics experience. But things are always changing…