The Entropy Pump

Eat-Man is 19-volume manga series about a lone adventurer who wanders frontier worlds, helps out the little people against all kinds of oppressors and whose main characteristic is that he can eat nearly everything: machines, chemicals, data and mostly bolts (hence the name). Once he has eaten something, guns or cars or whatever, he can spew it out again, in working condition, even if it was broken-down before (he has to have enough parts to repair it internally).

I mentioned frontier worlds, because he seems to wander a world that is mostly one big desert with some high-tech cities here and there. There’s a very high percentage of humanoid robots and the architecture of most cities is pretty much the same wherever he goes, which (not intentionally, but it can be read that way) implies to me colonization ships that unpacked or grew most of the cities from the same mold. The high amount of robots also makes sense. If you have a low population number, robots can bridge the time until the population has reached the level to be self-sustaining for any civilization.

Despite the cool setting and the fascinating capability of Eat-Man himself, the series is far from perfect. It has a very episodic nature and most of the adventures of Eat-Man follow a very similar template (evil guy has to be dethroned or help some good guys finding their hearts desire). Eat-Man himself is pretty much a story device instead of a real character: he’s nearly omniscient and never fails in doing the job. Often the stories see him doing things that look at first like he’s working for the bad guys, only to reveal that nothing is as it seems and Eat-Man knew all along who is the real good or the real bad guy.

Still, despite its shortcomings, if you read the series not all at once but one episode at a time, it manages to provide some good fun. I wished that toward the end of the series we could have get some definite answers concerning Eat-Man’s nature and the nature of the colonized worlds, instead of a descent into a very weird fantasy-like creation myth, but nonetheless the series was kind of cool.

Ruins is a two issue-mini series by Warren Ellis, that shows a disturbing alternative of the Marvel comic universe, where every superhero origin or major plot arcs in the Marvel universe lead to decay, death and destruction in the ruined universe. Sounds like an interesting concept, but the series doesn’t manage to be anything more than just a gimmick. Ellis crams both issue full with ruined superhero origins, which after a while become tiring to read. There’s no bigger concept than a dying reporter chronicling all those missed moments of history, origin after origin until you’ll be bored out of your mind and can’t wait until the whole thing comes to an end.

Now this volume was an interesting experience. A good explanation why this disaster ever happened can be found here. If you read it without knowing more, you see the Authority displaced by a government/big power brokers/big money players sponsored team. Both the evil power players and the replacement Authority and the evil Seth are as one-dimensional and evil-for-evils sake as possible (and completely boring). Compared to them the renegade doctor from the last issue seems like a complex character. If you know the background and read it as a meta-commentary on the fact that DC (and implicitly Marvel) provide streamlined and pussyfied superhero comics for the masses (ironic, considering how big the audience of superhero comics really is) and started censoring Millar’s run at every corner, then yes, it’s brilliant in its own way. But it’s not a very good story.

Some people manage to write something that is both highly critical of those in power (even those deciding whether it gets published or not) and that manages to tell a good story. I’ve read enough science fiction from the former Eastern Block to know. That’s something this story arc is lacking, the fusion of good storytelling with the satirical elements. If Millar had managed to give his villains at least some complexity, some depth, instead of what he provided, this might have worked much better.

Another thing that really annoyed me was that Arthur Adams’s brilliant art was wasted on fill-in issues.

When talking about the second Authority TPB I said that Millar’s usual antics didn’t faze me much when it concerned the Authority. While this was true then, I realized rereading this third Authority TPB, that collects the Earth Inferno story arc where a renegade doctor uses Earth to kill and murder as much as he can, that even here, in his version of the Authority, Millar’s antic began to annoy me. Apart from the shock tactics it’s the fact that Millar’s big villain is just a more modern variant of the big, bad evil guy who does evil because he’s evil and likes it. It’s Dr. Evil or any other stupid comic book villain, only on steroids and with a higher death count. Apart from that, I couldn’t suspend my disbelief when the Authority managed to evacuate the whole Earth in a matter of days. Getting all humans from all around the world to evacuate to parallel worlds in that timeframe is preposterous. That wouldn’t work and I’m not talking logistics or anything. Human nature would work against that. Another point against the Earth Inferno story was that the first two issues had art by Chris Weston, which in comparison with Quitely’s art was disappointing.

What I liked about this TPB were the other collected stories: one from a Wildstorm crossover that sees dead superheroes coming back as zombies and attacking the Authority and another two shorts that show a more mundane side of the engineer and what Jack Hawksmoor does for fun.

The second Authority TPB collects the final story by the Ellis/Hitch team and the first story of their successor team Millar/Quitely. The story by Ellis is everything you expect it to be. In its typical larger than life style it depicts the biggest enemy the Authority has faced yet, an alien entity that once created Earth itself and has returned to wipe out humanity. While humongous, world-sized aliens aren’t very original in superhero comics, the way Ellis sets the story up and slowly amps up the tension really makes you feel the scope of the enemy. The story also features one of the best departure scenes I’ve seen for a superhero character. They way Jenny Sparks goes out is really fitting.

One can’t imagine Millar having an easy task set before him, after Ellis’s tenure featured such a near perfect run. I’m not a big fan of Millar’s stuff, but his Authority stories are the exception. He brought back the political vibe that was part of Ellis’s Stormwatch run but wasn’t present in Ellis’s Authority work. As much as I liked the Ellis run, Millar’s approach really gave meaning to the mission statement of making a better world. The typical shock tactics by Millar are also present here, but unlike in his many other comics it didn’t faze me much. Maybe because I really liked his character work on the Authority. Millar really got the characters and wrote them as good as Ellis did.

If I wasn’t all to happy about the way Ellis kicked out the old Stormwatch team and established his own, new team, at least he managed to create something brilliant. Sure, the Authority completely lacked the political vibe that was prevalent in Stormwatch, but never before and since has a superhero team looked as cool as the Authority. In a way it’s still the same old: a supervillain who likes to destroy stuff for the fun of it and human-alien hybrids from an alternate Earth. That wasn’t all too different from other superhero conflicts. But what differentiated the Authority from similar groups was their attitude to getting the job done. They were in it for saving as many lives as possible, not to berate some manic about his morals. When they had a chance, they killed the enemy without hesitation. They were dangerous and effective, everything that Stormwatch in its final days lacked.

Another high point was the art done by Bryan Hitch, which was both consistent from issue to issue and of a high calibre, something that was sorely lacking in Stormwatch. Some of the outside views of the carrier were breathtakingly beautiful. And while the overall concept wasn’t too far removed from other, more conventional superhero teams, the way how the team members behaved and spoke felt far more realistic in comparison. They made stupid jokes, they had sex, the spoke their mind and were allowed to say incredibly stupid things, which made it easy to emphasize with them, despite their powers and appearances.

Final Orbit, ala operation mob up, sees the final stand of Stormwatch in a crossover with the famous aliens from Alien(s). My biggest problem with this one is that I’ve always thought that the outcome of this confrontation was incredibly ridiculous and completely rigged so that Ellis could have a reason for establishing the Authority. It reminds me of a fight between Lobo and Wolverine, which the latter one won. Everyone who knows anything about those two knows how preposterous that is.

As dangerous as the aliens are, they should be no match against the superhumans of the Wildstorm universe. As the parallel Earth Jack Hawksmoor mentioned in the last collection, a few superhumans working together could easily destroy a whole city in under a hour, the whole world given some more time. The aliens should have been like papier mâché to the superhumans, easily beaten and destroyed. I’ve no problem with letting some characters die, but then do it convincingly. This was a farce.

One good thing, we see Jenny Sparks do good on her promise to Henry Bendix. This was later retconned (it was only a double from a parallel universe, which also was the reason for him going mad), but these things happens all so often that I can’t get worked up about the stupidity of that explanation. For me, the real Henry Bendix died here.

A Finer World, the second to last Stormwatch collection of Ellis run on the title has two big stories. One is the introduction of The Midnighter and Apollo, which in hindsight makes this one feel like Ellis had the Authority in his mind all along and was setting it up. The other is a parallel Earth story where a much bigger Stormwatch (bigger in terms of manpower) has to face a Kheran invasion force. Both stories are quite good, and yet both made me feel as if Ellis had run out of things to do with Stormwatch.

This third collection of Ellis’s Stormwatch run is the highpoint of the whole run. In here we have a superman-analogue starting to change the world for real, not by beating up some villains, but by giving humans the mental and physical tools to break free of any kind of authority. Trying to counter this is an ever more unbalanced Henry Bendix, who also wants to change the world, but not by absolute freedom but by absolute control. Obviously, another reason that Bendix is dead set on killing the High (the superman-analogue) and his followers is that if they succeed, the world doesn’t need someone like Bendix anymore.

The goals of the High are admirable, but he fails because he’s far too idealistic and doesn’t account for human nature: that people can only cope with change in small portions, that however positive the change is, if it’s forced people will reject it and furthermore, some people will always be assholes (which is especially bad if those people work for you). A perfect story that balances on the edge between the demands of the conservative superhero genre and the more open genre of science fiction. Since it’s a superhero comic, the first wins out in the end, which means the High gets a tragic ending.

At least, Jenny Sparks sends Henry Bendix packing.

The second collection of Ellis Stormwatch run is more of the same: superhero action with a political vibe. The first three issues concentrate on one character each, first Jack Hawksmoor, then Jenny Sparks and finally Jackson King. Of these three Jenny Sparks story is the most interesting, as she tells her long history that is reminiscent in style and content of the evolution of superhero comics in the 20th century. In just one issue Ellis manages to cover a whole century of art styles and approaches to story telling and yet he also manages to make a coherent story out of it that convincingly explains Sparks attitude and motivation.

In this collection it also becomes quite clear that Weatherman Henry Bendix has gone off the rails. Ellis already depicted him as cold-hearted bastard and control freak, but here it becomes clear that he’s crossed the line to full-grown villain. Yes, Bendix wants to make a better world, but only on his conditions, with every method available. He’s like the dark mirror image of many of Ellis more idealistic characters. He’s not one for mindless destruction or self-enrichment, but as the old saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.