Ultimate Spider-Man (2000-2009)

I’ve bashed Bendis in the past for various misgivings concerning his very loose interpretation of other writers creations, like Marvel Boy or Ares, but that doesn’t mean he can’t do good. At least, writing 133 consecutive issues of any series is an astounding feat in the comic industry these days, considering that a 24-issue run is already seen as long tenure on any character. More astounding is, although this is just my subjective opinion, how good Ultimate Spider-Man has been and still is. Sure, it’s not perfect. I can’t stand some of the high-school melodrama or the usual whining of Spider-Man, but overall, it’s one good issue after another, with many great ones squeezed in-between.

I really like how Bendis uses the baseline of the Spider-Man history to spin out stories that feel both familiar and yet fresh and new. Like, whereupon Carnage is a simple and boring Venom-clone in the typical Marvel-universe, its incarnation in the Ultimate is much more interesting. Also, for the first time in history someone managed to make Aunt May relevant, a compelling and interesting character in herself. I can’t thank Bendis enough for that.

Legion of Three Worlds (2008-2009)

I’ve always liked the Legion of Superheroes more in concept than in reality. As much as the idea of a group of superheroes from different worlds working together appeals to me, the decidedly retro-style future that the legion members populate make it hard for me to take it seriously on the world-building level. I know, it’s superheroes, so I shouldn’t think too much about realism, but the Legion-future is just so pulpy, so backwards even compared to our present, that it’s hard not to notice the little details that make it all look wrong. And then there are the costumes. Even compared to most superhero costumes, they all look really, really ridiculous.

Legion of the three worlds was sort of a tie-in to Final Crisis, although the connection is thin and it’s pretty much a stand-alone story. Superboy-Prime is the main threat, send by a mysterious guy at the end of all time to destroy the Legion once and for all. To counter his actions the Legion locates two more Legions from alternate timelines. As far as stories and execution goes, this is pretty good. Despite the ridiculous nature of the setting, I managed to overlook most of the more annoying aspects and actually enjoyed it for what it was.

Also, Superboy-Prime is quite interesting as a villain: A driven creature who is still, despite all the evil he has done, easy to sympathize with. We all have days when we feel like we’re coming short of the things we hoped we would be, but directly being confronted with the negligibility of your whole life is something that can break even the best of us. And Superboy-Prime isn’t among the most sane people.

All in all, even if you don’t know much about the Legion or care about them, Legion of three Worlds is a fun superhero adventure that manages to weave different parts of Legion continuity into a coherent and yet enjoyable story. Geoff Johns, the continuity doctor, strikes again.

Dark Sky Legion (1992)

Dystopias often come in a few, easily recognized flavors: there’s the surveillance state, the moral society taken to its insane conclusion, the slowly decaying future that poaches in post apocalyptic territory. These stories rarely reach beyond Earth or into the far future and technological progress has often stopped or actively turned back. While they are collective horrors of all humanity, most technophiles can easily lean back and shift the blame on all those repressive, technophobic people that want to hinder us from realizing our true future, our true potential.

Dark Sky Legion is quite a bit different in that regard. It takes the golden age dreams of space empires, of colonizing other worlds, of meeting aliens and twists them until they have becomes the bleakest, most depressive mirror image of all these hopes. It’s the far future, mankind has gone to the stars and realized its true potential. Just not the way you might have hoped.

The Metastable Order is the higher echelon of the galactic human meta-civilization. Its task is to control the development of individual human worlds, to protect humanity in its aggregate against the ravages of entropy and decay. The Metastable Order are big picture guys, who will kill millions if it brings entire worlds back into the fold. Aliens, thought, are not part of the picture at all. The Metastable Order is tasked to realize humanity’s fate, there’s no place for someone’s else.

This fear of change and their readiness to use weapons of mass destruction at the slightest chance of dangerous cultural divergence is born from two elements: space travel is restricted to sub-light speed (act now or there will be no later) and an early conflict in this future history, which nearly destroyed humanity. The reader learns all this not through the eyes of a victim, but one member of the Metastable Order, Maaron Denthurion. When I say victim, I mean only in the most obvious way. Everyone is part of the system, no one can flee to some outside refugee. You can either chose death or being part of it.

The main story is presented two-fold, a recounting of the life of Maaron Denthurion over the eons (he’s immortal and copies of him endlessly travel the galactic empire to uphold the Metastable Order) and his present mission. Maaron comes upon a human world that might or might not have strayed too far from allowed restrictions, and his decision can save or cost countless lives.

If you’ve never read a William Barton novel before, be warned. He’s unflinchingly honest in his portrayal of humans. He doesn’t shy away from showing the less savory side of human nature and his fiction is not uplifting. It can be tough to read page after page with stuff that goes from bad to worse, with no real light at the end of the tunnel. If you can manage that, thought, you get an entirely original take on the space empire concept with brilliant world building and excellent characterization. Just don’t expect a happy ending. That should be obvious by now.

Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985-1986)

Let me just say two words: utter crap.

Okay, before the lynching starts, let’s go a few steps back. Crisis is the mother of all crossovers, the biggest DC Universe story ever told. The whole DC multiverse was simplified to just one timeline, that had merged aspects of all the timelines that existed before. As a concept, it sounds not so bad. But as a story, it’s barely readable. Even someone like me, who likes to read superhero comics and has an average understanding of the DC Universe, had trouble even finishing it (out of boredom).

This comic is an extreme example of how culture can be embedded in its own timeframe. Crisis is a gift to those readers who followed the DC universe for years until the middle of the 80ties. It’s an epic climax to decades of world-building. Universes and heroes die, good and evil unite to fight something worse, and so on. It looks cool in concept, but nothing more. If you weren’t a reader at that time, if you don’t know half of the characters, than this will be an exercise in patience. I needed two months to force myself through this behemoth, without ever feeling like it was worth it.

The characterization is extremely thin. They tried to cram so many characters into it, that none of them felt like real ones. After a while I really didn’t care who of the heroes or villains got offed, they all seemed so interchangeable (although it was quite disturbing how much the series reveled in death and destruction). The plot jumped from scene to scene, barely managing to tell a coherent narrative. All so often scenes got interrupted and followed by a reference for another DC series that would tell what happened with this specific plot-line. In general there was no flow to the scenes, it felt too mechanically, too much like working through a checklist of events instead of telling a real story.

And then there’s the Anti-Monitor. He’s one of the most generic villains to ever helm such a big event (okay, Marvel had Onslaught). Guy wants to recreate the anti-matter universe in his image and to do that he has to wipe out the matter-multiverse. Neither does this explanation nor his motivation ever really makes sense. He’s just a powerful being for the good guys to take out. He’s boring and unconvincing, just like the rest of the crossover.

Overall, I can understand why this comic appealed in its day, but I think it’s something that should be revered in remembrance, not by actually reading it today. I especially like the afterword of the Absolute edition by Dick Giordano, that puts down most crossovers for being constructs, not stories that needed telling. Because, that was exactly how I felt after reading Crisis, a story put together like an engineering exercise. I can even believe that the people who worked on it saw Crisis as a calling (also in the afterword by Giordano), but there’s a good reason that fanboys shouldn’t be allowed to write what they see as their best ideas. The end-product is nearly always shit.

Okay, one good thing I have to mention about Crisis. The covers of the single issues were simply phenomenal. Sadly, the issues never managed to fulfill the expectations raised by these covers.

The Ultron Initiative (2007-2008)

Words fail me to describe just how full of fail this collection is. The first story arc of Mighty Avengers, while not per se bad on the concept level, is one of the worst comics I’ve read for some time. I can understand the need for different approaches with two Avengers series running in parallel, but this one really didn’t work out so well. Bendis used a combination of old-school thought bubbles and typical speech balloons to contrast what the characters were thinking and what they were saying. Nifty idea, but when all characters look like complete jerks, both in thought and speech, it doesn’t really matter. And the added context layer of thought doesn’t really add more info, since it was used mainly for vapid humor on Bendis part.

I appreciate that Bendis tried something different, but the finished product just didn’t cut it. What might have looked like a cartoony and humoristic take on the Avengers in its initial concept stage, came out looking merely stupid and primitive.

Stumbling on Happiness (2006)

This is not a self-help book, at least not in the conventional sense. As the author himself mentions in the introduction, this is the kind of book you seek after countless self-help books to achieve personal happiness just haven’t born out. During the course of watching the 2010 movie Inception I became interested in reading about self-deception, and this is one of the books I turned to.

SuH should be compulsory reading material for any self-proclaimed futurist and any science fiction author who is interested in imagining believable futures, not just shallow reflections of the present. The human mind is an ingenious creation of nature, using countless hacks and heuristics to remember the past, perceive the present and imagine the future. Albeit, it’s exactly how our mind achieves these feats that errors creep in, errors we aren’t aware of and who limit our ability to correctly do either of these things.

We don’t really remember the past, we safe a few details and then weave around them a convincing but fictional narrative that could have been, but wasn’t (at least not in that exact configuration). Once checked with other less error-prone recordings than the human mind, these differences come out. And the fun is, we change your own remembrance every time we activate the memory. Similarly problematic is present perception or how we imagine the future.

This is a book about failure modes, not about how to solve any of the problems that arise from our mind machinery. Sure, the author mentions a few ways we could try, but these are rarely practical (imagine all the things that didn’t happen) or we just won’t do them, because we are who we are (or believe to be: a completely unique being).

This may sound like a horrible book, belaboring the point of just how far our self-deception goes again and again, but personally I find more enjoyment in understanding how we humans don’t work all that well than in wrongly assuming we’re are perfectly capable of seeing past, present and future (my powers of rationalization are strong).

Absolution (2009)

Absolution by Christos Gage doesn’t add much to the trope of superheroes taking vigilantism just a little bit further than is acceptable for most superheroes in comics. His character is a more human version of the Punisher, whose rationalization for killing appeals to the same base emotion (some people just need killing) and by avoiding most of the pitfalls inherent in these approaches. Criminals that need killing are easily identified by the vigilante, there is never any doubt in the comic that these guys are really guilty. Sadly, reality lacks this easy distinction for black and white.

What is okay in a more mainstream superhero comic, because we all know they are power-fantasies and not to be taken at face value, feels ridiculous when someone tries to inject more fake realism (hence my problem with the perception of Watchmen as a classic, which I find equally ridiculous). That isn’t to say that Absolution is a bad read, far from it. The pacing is good, the superhero gone Punisher convincing as a character, as are most of the others. But while I surely can enjoy it as a story, the whole realism aspect completely falls flat for me, because it’s fake.

Superheroes are power-fantasies, Absolution and it’s ilk are just a modification that shroud themselves in perceived real-world issues. Both are fiction and only bear a passing resemblance to our world. We don’t have complex justice systems just for dilly-dally, but because the problem they solve are complex. We discuss questions of free will when it comes to criminal behavior, how to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and what kind of penalty is justified or useful not for fun, but because we live in an inherently uncertain world.

Vigilantism takes away our ability as a society to find workable solutions. It reduces complexity to the point, that in the end more injustice will be done in its name than any kind of justice. That is, in the real world, which is messy and not easily reducible. In comics, it works. But that’s my point, however enjoyable this series is, it’s not actually much different from Superman fighting against intelligent monkeys on the moon trying to take over the world. Yes, I enjoyed Gage series, but it’s not a realistic nor even unconventional take on superheroes (Batman did it a long time ago too). It’s just another power-fantasy and the whole “Shit got real”-meme that comes with this kind of comic just isn’t convincing.

I did like the ending thought. Most comics similar to Absolution, when they are short-form, kill their main character to get absolved for arguing something dumbfuck like “Some people just need killing”. At least Gage’s comic is consequent. I might not agree with the philosophy (neither do I say that it’s Gage philosophy, for the idiots among you, I do understand the difference between characters and their writers), but I dislike it even more if a story doesn’t have some backbone.

All-Star Superman (2011)

All-Star Superman, the comic, not the movie, is one of the best comics done in recent years. Not just superhero comics, but comics in general. Okay, sure, that’s an entirely subjective opinion, but we aren’t here for the facts. Part of the equation is surely Grant Morrison, but equally important is Frank Quitely’s art, which always has his unique touch, something that looks mainstreamy, but is still a little bit off. Not everyone loves it, but I do.

So, how went the translation from a 12-issues series to a short movie with a running time of a little over an hour?

Not bad, although I was worried for the first half hour. The aspect that has survived the least is Quitely’s art. Sure, they really tried and most of the panel design is easily recognizable, but it just doesn’t look like Quitely’s art in motion. It’s halfway there, but not completely. Apart from that, whole chunks of the comic series are missing, but that was to be expected. What remains is the most thoughtful, non-violent superhero movies I’ve seen in years. Sure, there’s a big fight at the end, but even that one feels restrained.

The brilliance of Morrison’s comic, which survived the translation to the movie format mostly intact, is that he told a comic about superheroes, a genre as far removed from reality as possible, and managed to make it feel relevant even here in baseline reality. All-Star Superman is as much a character study of Superman as of Lex Luthor, and Morrison captures them perfectly. I think my favorite scene is when Lex Luthor deplores Superman to give him the serum once more, to save humanity, to which Superman has the best reply ever uttered in such a context. Enlightenment followed by even more enlightenment. Whatever Morrison drinks, it’s powerful stuff.

I do wonder how people who haven’t read the original series will react. All-Star Superman is something of an outlier, a superhero movie low on action and high on contemplation. I don’t think this will go over well with a general audience, because it’s just not what you expect when you go to see this kind of movie. Also, despite being a more than an adequate translation of the source material, I wished there had been a unique touch. The best translations from one medium to another aren’t those that try to adhere too much to the source material, but those that manage to take its essence and transform it into its own thing. It’s a good movie, but not a great one.

Supergod (2009-2010)

In fiction there’s the adage: Show don’t tell. But when a writer of Warren Ellis caliber choses to wield the telling format, you can be sure as hell that it’s a deliberate choice. Over his long career he has used all the narrative tricks, from extremely compact tales like Supergod to long form stuff like Transmetropolitan. So why then did he chose it this way? I can think of two reasons: first, not wanting to tell another superhero story that went on far too long and second, not getting into all the emotions that come with the end of the world and all that when shown in detail.

Since that’s what Supergod is, an apocalyptic tale of what happens when humans really create the man of tomorrow. It’s the end of the world, where a dozen governments decide to build their own human-sized weapons of mass destruction, without understanding all of the implications that go with it. Like someone with the impetus to really safe the world, but with no human morality holding him back. It’s post-humanity realized, and then all goes to hell.

This could have been quite a depressive read, but due to the format the story seem less horrible. The fictional narrator is emotional distanced from everything that happens and only at the end you’ll realize just why that is. It feels like a piece of history, with interesting stuff happening, but where you can easily keep your distance. It’s the perfect format to communicate ideas succinctly. But if you’re the kind of reader who enjoys conventional stories with characters doing stuff, not with them telling you what happened, this probably won’t be to your liking.

As far as the superhero genre goes, I think it’s a smart jab, even if its overall relevancy is limited (because it’s not what most readers of superhero comics actually want to read). But if you read it as an exploration of post-humanity, then it’s an effective counterpart to all those who imagine humans and post-humans merrily working together to bring a new golden age. As the story shows (what a pun), that is not a given at all. Like with all science fiction stories, this isn’t the last word on the topic, but it’s a good antidote for those infused with too much optimism.

Off on a Starship (2003)

This story was my introduction to William Barton, which in hindsight was a bit of luck. His other work is just as brilliant, but not the most inviting. Off On a Starship is playful and optimistic, yet still exhibits the usual elements of Barton’s fiction. An overall obsession with sexuality, a deep probing of the main character’s mind and some neat golden age tropes (the vanished space empire) combined with updated physics.

In many ways, it’s a science fiction geek’s wish-fulfillment. A young science fiction reader who’s socially isolated enters a unmanned space probe and is whisked away to the remnants of a depopulated space empire. There he forms a sort of bond to a robot, who, trough various updates, becomes more than just a friendly companion. Together they try to find out what happened to the space empire and how to reach Earth.

The story excels both in its character-driven moments as well as the plot-driven parts. On the character level, it’s a sort of coming-of-age story, thought not with any obvious life lesson beside screwing someone can be fun. But despite or because of its lack of obvious lessons, Barton manages a realistic impression of a young boy growing up. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything, but neither does he judge his behavior. And for those who prefer a little bit of plot, there’s the intriguing mystery of the lost empire (aptly titled so by the main character).

It’s not too hard to find good stories, even among all the stuff that gets published. But great stories, those that stay with you and who you remember even years later; they are rare. They manage to capture an ephemeral moment, like in this case the dreams of your youth (if you’ve read a massive dose of science fiction). Go one a starship, live among the stars, have adventures. All those dreams, not yet tainted by the experience that age brings. It’s wonderful when, for at least a while, you can still feel it.