Reading Comics 163 "More Comics from 5/27/15"

Divinity #4 (Valiant)

The conclusion to the first Divinity mini-series (this issue announces the next one) is a worthy ending to an outstanding story that not only explores the potential of a character with infinite abilities in ways that you normally don't see, but explores Valiant's superheroes in general (grouped together as Unity) to a remarkable degree, all of which previous issues suggested, and so it's nice to see everything come together so nicely.  And we see Divinity himself, in a move that if it's ever happened I'm not particularly aware of it, actually inspire a religion.  (Seriously, I have no idea why DC's New Gods have never been presented this way.)  Another feather in the cap of Matt Kindt.

Mister X: Razed #4 (Dark Horse)

Dean Motter's latest Mister X concludes a little more intimately than usual, as usual referencing the setup of the whole concept, but also presenting Mister X himself as a character with more than just an obsessive quest (for redemption, among other things) going for him.  I haven't read all of Motter's Mister X, although at some point I'd certainly like to.  I like its cerebral approach, how it evokes a previous era while at the same time presenting something new.  What I've always wanted is for the narrative to move forward a bit.  I think this issues represents exactly that, so I'm glad to have read my first-ever Mister X in original serialized form.  Anyone curious about Motter's work might actually start with this issue, because it sums up the whole thing nicely.

The Sandman: Overture #5 (Vertigo)

The first issue published this year???  Indeed.  And the mini-series launched at the end of 2013, so...five issues across three calendar years.  Obviously not a very fast pace...I've had my issues enjoying this effort from Neil Gaiman and J.H. Williams III, but at this point I think I've put them behind me.  This was never supposed to be the Sandman of the original series, but rather an expansive view of the whole thing, Dream himself.  The next issue (whenever that happens) is actually the conclusion, so I'll wait until then to come up with a more comprehensive reaction to Overture.  But as with Mister X, I'm just glad to have an opportunity to correct something I hadn't done previously, which is read the serialized version of something I previously knew from collected editions...

Mister X: Razed #3 (Dark Horse)

writer/artist: Dean Motter

Motter's eponymous and most famous creation continues the same story he's always ensconced in to lead this issue, trying once again to disentangle his beloved city from the strange architectural conspiracies that have been plaguing it.

As back-up, Menlo Park, the robotic P.I. from one of Motter's other playgrounds, introduced in Electropolis, concludes his latest mystery, and it's clever, a zombie-themed story that turns out to be more clever than that (any good zombie story isn't really about zombies at all, and the best ones don't even feature real zombies at all).

What Motter adds, almost as an afterthought, is a link between Park and Mister X's adventures.  At first they seem somewhat incompatible, however similar in structure, given that Menlo Park is distinctly an element of Dean Motter's prescious retrofuturism whereas Mister X is in many ways merely retro.  How the twain shall meet?  Motter doesn't really sweat it.  It's the girl observing Park's adventure that makes the link.  She even thinks she discovers Mister X's secret identity.

Would that be a first?  I've been trying to catch up with Motter's work for a decade.  I've still got more to read (and therefore I'm happy when I can catch new material first-run), so maybe it isn't a new wrinkle at all.  But it certainly helps keep things interesting.  Besides (without spoiling things in case you want to read Razed for yourself) Motter's idea about how to make your own zombies...

Mister X: Razed #2 (Dark Horse)

writer/artist: Dean Motter

Thanks in large part to Dark Horse's extraordinary commitment in recent years, Mister X is finally starting to get some recognition.  Yeah, it only took three decades...

But Dean Motter is approaching the character exactly the same as he always has: that same mysterious insomniac obsessed with navigating a city he helped create, one corrupt to the very core, having apparently been designed to wreak havoc on the psyche.

Motter's vision has turned out to be a criticism of the modern urban landscape.  At times he's focused on what we used to think the future would look like (what he calls retrofuturism), but in truth Motter has a distinctly pulp perspective, one he's shared with Frank Miller all along.

Where Miller has tended toward a more primal approach, Motter prefers an oblique one.  Where they distinctly merge is in storytelling like the page I included, which you can also find in Miller's Dark Knight Returns.  This is a portrait of the whole city.  Mister X is most often a bogeyman, how Tim Burton envisioned the Dark Knight in Batman, which was much more like Miller's vision than anything that had been seen in comics or television to that date.  Miller's creative vision is best-known from his Sin City comics and the resulting films co-directed by Robert Rodriguez, who's good friends with Quentin Tarantino, who of course made Pulp Fiction.  Motter's storytelling is kind of like what happens in a Tarantino film when there isn't blood involved.  Everyone's very self-absorbed, and they don't notice what's happening around them.  Which is exactly what Motter's villains are always counting on.  When they aren't pulling off a sensational act like making a building disappear.

But more on that next issue!

Terminal Motter

Dean Motter is one of those comic book creators that you will never know exists until you stumble across him yourself.  He doesn't fit into the mainstream or indy scene, and isn't a name like Howard Chaykin or Frank Miller who somehow combines them.  He's his own brand.  Brand X, as it were.

He originally gained notice creating Mister X in the '80s, and to a certain extent that's exactly what Motter is still known for today.  Dark Horse has in recent years actively joined the effort to spread Mister X awareness, the second company to reissue the original stories and actually allow him to publish new ones.

Motter also worked on Terminal City for DC's Vertigo imprint.  His more recent Electropolis was originally meant to be a third volume of these stories, but he ended up working on that project at Image (though it was subsequently reprinted through Dark Horse).  Like all his stories, Terminal City is about retrofuturism, or in other words the shared vision of tomorrow as conceived in the early 20th century, whose footprints can be found in The Jetsons and Futurama, among notable popular interpretations.

In The Compleat Terminal City, both the original nine issues and the five issue followup Aerial Graffiti explore a population existing in the remains of the Brave New World's Fair (we're several generations removed from the relevance of World's Fairs, but they used to be the Olympics of culture).  Motter chooses to put the narrative thrust on daredevils whose relevance fell apart as the boldness of the vision for the future started to fade.  As the vision lingers, so do these daredevils, notably Cosmo Quinn, the so-called Human Fly who once scaled terrific heights merely for the thrill and spectacle of it but now to clean the windows of skyscrapers.

His notable compatriot and greater exile is Monty Vickers, who's the last great anthropologist, who locates living specimens of humanity's evolutionary past, and exploits them like P.T. Barnum getting his hands on King Kong.

There's a host of supporting characters and subplots, though few of them receive satisfactory arcs, and perhaps that's the point, that there will always be a hole in this story.  It's all an illusion, something Motter conjured from the broken pieces of someone else's dreams.

Is it worth visiting Terminal City?  Absolutely.  It's arguably Motter's most complete vision.  Yes, he's playing with the toys of other people, but in such a whimsical fashion (with Mister X he's always grim; in Electropolis traditionally hardboiled) that you can't help but be sucked in.

Perhaps all his nostalgia limits Motter's audience, but it also helps locate one.  Once you discover Dean Motter, it's hard not to love him.

Dean Motter, Psychearchitect

There’s a hidden genius in comics, and his name is Dean Motter.  My first experience with him was UNIQUE, a parallel worlds mini-series he did in 2007.  I’d heard of him earlier, when he’d worked on TERMINAL CITY for Vertigo, but it was when I stumbled across MISTER X that I discovered his essential worth in the medium as a pioneer of what I’d like to call noir psychology.  MISTER X is all about the building of a city of the future along deliberate designs that cause its citizens to slowly lose their minds.  The outcast lead architect is the eponymous Mister X, the boogeyman who is at once at the peripheral and center of the story.  It’s an abstract storytelling technique that’s unlike what just about anyone else was doing at the time or later.  There’s a lot of Golden Age influence to his methods, notably Will Eisner’s Spirit (which also inspired Frank Miller’s SIN CITY), which become all the more apparent with Motter’s more recent ELECTROPOLIS, which features a cameo appearance from Mister X that ties all of his projects together, like a Grant Morrison so far out of the mainstream all the kookiness has been replaced by genre tropes (but then, isn’t that what Morrison has been doing these days?).

Like hardboiled fiction exemplified by Dashiell Hammett and recently echoed in more mainstream works by Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker, ELECTROPOLIS: THE INFERNAL MACHINE is at its heart a near-parody of standard gumshoe storytelling, featuring a steampunk robot who’s stumbled into the career of his late owner, and just so happens to be solving his murder sixteen years after the fact.  Nearly every name in the plot is a pun, and helps make the book perhaps Motter’s most accessible effort, if you want to take it as a lightweight adventure down a corridor you find comfortably numb.  But there are layers to this onion, and you eventually discover that Motter has a lot of ideas up his sleeve, and Mister X’s appearance is the red herring, so to speak, that exposes his true motives.

There’s a temptation to dismiss Motter as just another peddler of someone else’s dreams, junk sci-fi the way SKY CAPTAIN & THE WORLD OF TOMORROW became instant nostalgia, or JOHN CARTER fell victim to his own descendents.  If there was a movie made of his ideas, it would go the same way.  That’s probably what happens to all of his comics, why readers haven’t toasted him as essential each time he comes out with something new.  But then, bold ideas told in fashions that seem tired are usually overlooked, except by cult audiences.  Just look at FRINGE.  Morrison has escaped this fate by sheer sensationalism.  That’s not what Motter does, however.  He doesn’t even go for surreal escapism, like ATOMIC ROBO, or insulated journey, like RASL.  He’s overt, but he’s also complicated.  He tries to let the reader do some of the work, to figure out what he’s trying to say.  Often Motter is described as exploring yesterday’s future today, but it’s a very particular vision, one that seeks to penetrate the heart of where our impulses are taking us.  Today we decry the polluting effects of the Industrial Revolution as a time-delayed bomb of sorts.  Tomorrow, Motter postulates, we’ll be sabotaging ourselves in real-time, and the only way to cope will be to seek comfort in the structures we already know.

Menlo Park, the robot P.I. at the heart of ELECTROPOLIS, has the ability to bounce back from injury by replacing damaged parts with whatever’s on hand, and seems none the worse for these improvised patch jobs.  Motter has been bouncing for years around the comic book industry, and his current patrons at Dark Horse have been reprinting his greatest hits for a few years now.  Here’s hoping they like him for a few years more.

Quarter Bin #23 "Icons - This could be your moment"

DC 1ST – SUPERMAN/THE FLASH (DC)
From July 2002:

One of the things DC has periodically done is release a series of one-shots around a common theme (most recently with RETROACTIVE), perhaps most famously during “skip” week in the 1990s, and that’s the kind of thing that was most likely to escape my attention during the first time I retired from actively reading new comics, roughly 1999-2004. Ruffling through the back issues at Escape Velocity in Colorado Springs last year, I had occasion, then, to find a lot of things I had not previously known about, including the DC 1ST initiative from 2002. This particular issue caught my eye since it’s written by Geoff Johns. At the time, I had little experience with Geoff’s early work at DC (even though by that point, he’d been writing there for three years), having only really gotten a chance at the end of “Blitz” from THE FLASH in 2004, well after I’d read a lot about him secondhand. The Flash featured in this comic isn’t Wally West (or Barry Allen) but Jay Garrick, the franchise forerunner from the Golden Age, perhaps the character with the most sustained significance from the Justice Society era, mostly thanks to Mark Waid’s efforts, and as I was just beginning to realize, Geoff Johns as well (when I read the first volume of the Omnibus series that’s collecting all of Geoff’s Flash work, second one coming soon, I got to appreciate his attention to the whole family, not just Wally or Bart, in TEEN TITANS, as it may have seemed from an outsider’s perspective). Geoff’s Jay Garrick is concerned with his advancing age, and the effect on his relationship with wife Joan (something that he echoed in INFINITE CRISIS as he wrote Superman from Earth-2 and his aging Lois Lane), but he remains a vital figure, since he is only just racing Superman for the first time, in the present day. I’m not sure what other creators did in the rest of the one-shots, but it might have been natural to interpret the “first” as an actual first encounter, which would have been seen as Superman and Barry Allen’s Flash, whose races began the tradition, but instead Geoff, who was not quite in the middle of his Wally West tenure, chose to go with Jay, perhaps an indication for any current readers who may believe DC’s creators don’t have an appreciation for the past, thanks to the latest reboot. Geoff has, in fact, often been accused of adhering too closely to Silver Age sensibilities, but it’s rather his ability to blend those of every era, the distant, recent and present times that has allowed him to remain a relevant and vital creator.

JUDGMENT DAY AFTERMATH (Awesome)
From March 1998:

Alan Moore, Alan Moore…I’ll be writing a lot about him in the coming months, so I shouldn’t spend too much time here. What specifically he has to do with this book is that he became a key writer in Rob Liefeld’s Awesome comics line, a version of his Maximum and Extreme Studios, outbranched from Image for a couple of years, before Liefeld had to once again (as he has repeatedly done, more than any other Image founder) appease critics by crawling back to someone else’s house. Moore is best known for his work on SUPREME (and that’ll be a subject for another Quarter Bin), but he also pulled together a rare event book for an indy publisher, JUDGMENT DAY. This aftermath, however, really concerns the relaunch of the entire line, including a new Youngblood (a keystone of Liefeld’s efforts), Glory (basically Wonder Woman), New Men (basically the Challengers of the Unknown crossed with the X-Men), Maximage (basically Dr. Strange), the Allies (Justice League/Avengers), and Spacehunter. The effectiveness of introducing all these concepts is somewhat dubious now, since Moore only concentrated on Supreme, with some additional consideration given to Youngblood and the Allies, and Awesome otherwise pursued other projects (including KABOOM, which I will write about later), and so the thrust of this particular comic really boils down to Moore indulging some of his looser flights of fancy, reaching a somewhat common vein with Grant Morrison as concerns the uniting narrative about the Imagineer linking ancestral creators like Jack Kirby and Gil Kane, who provides the art throughout the special. As with many of Moore’s works, there is a heavy nostalgic feel, a resistance to current trends, though he clearly adopts their sensibilities…

PROMETHEA #27 (ABC)
From November 2003:

Alan Moore, this column, Part 2. The America’s Best Comics line was something he agreed to do for WildStorm, before it became an imprint at DC, and was basically his way of doing perfectly traditional comics outside the DC/Marvel system. Promethea herself was another Wonder Woman substitute, and is famously an early source for J.H. Williams III artwork, perhaps his most famous pre-Batwoman. In this particular issue, Promethea is reaching a climactic event in her career, a prophesied apocalypse, and as such has drawn other elements of the ABC line into her story, including Tom Strong (the Superman substitute). Moore’s writing is strikingly cinematic in this instance, would fit into any modern TV show or movie, yet there’s again the nostalgic bent that he clings to, always trending his themes (and characters) on things he loved as a child (with a few exceptions, like his Swamp Thing work, V FOR VENDETTA, and, one would hope, FROM HELL), updating them from a slightly more mature perspective. This being the only Promethea I’ve read to date, it’s extremely difficult to judge the series as a whole, and I have no idea how many more issues it survived, though I can’t imagine that there were much. The thing that really strikes the outsider perspective is that, contrary to the interior, the cover artwork recalls Superman meeting Spider-Man in the 1970s, both in the poses by our eponymous heroine and the visiting Tom Strong, as well as the modified logos for each character.

THE SPECTRE #21 (DC)
From November 2002:

Astute observers will note the host in this particular series for the Spirit of Vengeance would be Hal Jordan, post-DAY OF JUDGMENT, the lost Geoff Johns event from 1999, whose existing memory now rests in GREEN LANTERN:REBIRTH and GREEN ARROW: QUIVER, and virtually nonexistent otherwise. It’s weird to think now that Hal spent so much time outside of his role as GL, that he went from villainous Parallax (“Emerald Twilight, ZERO HOUR) to penitent villain (masterful FINAL NIGHT) to a soul looking for redemption and finally right back to where he started and for most readers, all it will boil down to at this point is that Parallax was the Fear manifestation planted inside the Central Power Battery by Sinestro, who infected him and ruined his reputation for a while. That DC kept the character in print for the entire time he wasn’t a Green Lantern never seemed to be enough for his fans, even though it was a truly remarkable decision on the company’s part, completely unparalleled in the medium. That he was once the Spectre ought to remain a part of his legacy. Clearly his creators in this series believed they were continuing the narrative of his life: J.M. DeMatteis resurrects Sinestro (so this issue is actually pretty historic) for the first time, a painful process that speaks to the heart of both Sinestro and Hal, their rivalry, something that did not actually remain dormant from the Silver Age to REBIRTH, as it might sometimes seem. If anyone other than Geoff Johns ever wanted to explore that relationship in depth (including the mortal struggle in GREEN LANTERN #50, second series), DeMatteis would get my vote.

THE PRISONER: BOOK A (DC)
From 1988:

Dean Motter is one of those visionary creators who only periodically seems to receive the respect he’s due, sometimes known for MISTER X, for instance, when critics and companies are in the mood. If anyone could have produced a sequel to the classic 1960s surreal, metaphysical, existential TV series THE PRISONER, it’s Motter, and so of course he did that, too, even though it’s been allowed to be forgotten. (Then again, when THE SIMPSONS did a parody of the show, no one seemed to understand that, either.) THE PRISONER was recently brought back to mind by a TV remake and comparisons to LOST, which would make now a perfect time to reprint this sequel. Until such time, however, I will have to content myself with its introduction, and hope I’ll be able to read the rest of it at some undefined point in the future…

ACTION PHILOSOPHERS! #7 (Evil Twin)
From October 2006:

Fred Van Lente is better known for his superhero work, but his fans know him best as the writer for this series, which revisits historic philosophers in clever summaries of relevant thoughts and experiences. This particular issue revisits early Greek thinkers including Aristotle and the Pre-Socratics. Some readers have taken to criticizing the series by saying it trivializes and distorts its subject matter (something Van Lente gets to handle a bit of in this issue’s letters column), but seriously, if you expect any one interpretation of someone else’s thoughts or experiences to be authoritative, then that’s your bigger problem, and so I say, ACTION PHILOSOPHERS is easily one of my favorite comic book discoveries. This wasn’t my first issue (I’d love to read ’em all, since Van Lente presents a lively and concise perspective), and I am more familiar with his COMIC BOOK COMICS (covering comics history) efforts, not to mention dynamite Hercules stories with Greg Pak, but it’s a fine indication that I have more than sufficient material to claim Fred as one of my favorite creators.