Fables

Don't read Fables. Seriously. Don't even try.

The central idea is wonderful, if not wholly original: characters from fairy tales, folklore and children's stories are all real and have been living in New York for decades. A simple idea that someone even mildly creative could do spectacular things with. Sadly, someone even mildly creative didn't pitch the idea to Vertigo. Bill Willingham did.

The first few issues follow an uninspiring murder mystery setup. Fable policeman Bigby (a human Big Bad Wolf) is roped in as lead investigator. While it's not exceptional the story does a good job of introducing the lead characters and the premise of the book. You're left to assume things will pick up in the next batch of issues.

They don't. The murder mystery is followed by a listless rehash of Animal Farm, an unengaging Civil War tale, and the story of a journalist discovering the true nature of the Fables. Along the way hints are dropped as to the history of all the characters and the hows, whys and wherefores of them being in NYC. Sadly it all feels cackhanded, forced in because Willingham's more interested in the backstory that what he's actually writing.

In one sense this isn't too bad. Hints of what's gone before can often be interesting, fleshing out characters and the world they inhabit. But Willingham goes too far and leaves you wondering why he just didn't start the book with his cast escaping from the Homeland. The answer to that is obvious of course: because it’s not an interesting enough story. It's the contemporary setting that gives Fables its appeal. That the escape pitch wouldn't have been enough to sustain the comic in its own right should have told Willingham to leave it at enigmatic hints.

The biggest failing of the book is Willingham not knowing what to do with his ideas. He's unsure whether he wants to try writing a contemporary anthology series starring well known characters with their more interesting tropes emphasised or a sprawling meta-mythology that encompasses every story ever told, like a fairy tale League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. That both ideas can't coexist in one title and he can't choose between the two means he ends up writing neither satisfyingly.

Artist Mark Buckingham’s artwork is best described as reliable. It’s not bad but it’s not going to wow anyone who’s ever read a comic before. It feels workmanlike. Some of the less identifiable characters can often become muddled with each other. It’s not the book’s biggest problem but it still makes it tough to enjoy.

I read the first eleven volumes of Fables as well as a number of its ludicrously abundant spin-off media. It was frustrating. Good ideas constantly cropped up but went underdeveloped or veered off in ill-conceived directions. Even though I generally rate good ideas over anything else in a comic I couldn't stand the approach here. There was nothing to latch onto but an endless cycle of disappointment.

Please avoid this series. You'll regret reading it.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

I’ve tried to like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. But I can’t. There’s something about it that stops me from doing so. It could be that it’s grim near-future setting had become played out by the time I came to read it. Which is a little unfair because when DKR was written the theme wasn’t as overplayed as it is now. It’s one of the titles that helped to make it popular.

Another problem could be the artwork. Frank Miller (who wrote the script and drew the book) is a talented artist but the panels here are too cramped and tightly packed. At times it’s hard to decipher what’s supposed to be going on and in what order you’re supposed to track the panels across the page. While that does add (deliberately I would hope) to the book’s sense of claustrophobia it makes enjoyment difficult to come by.

It’s that sense of claustrophobia that the book is often praised for. This near-future setting is a dystopia in which superheroics have been outlawed, replaced on the streets by brutal regiments of riot gear-swaddled police. The last cape standing is, predictably, Superman. He now works for the government (or “the man”, if you prefer) while a bitter (and aged) Bruce ‘Batman’ Wayne has retired.

Bruce’s decision to return to fighting the good fight is the story of Dark Knight Returns. You probably could have guessed that from the title. As the tale begins The Batman hasn’t been seen in Gotham City for a decade, crime levels are rising and Wayne is finding inaction increasingly difficult. Deciding to ignore the injury that caused him to retire in the first place he returns to the streets as ‘The Caped Crusader’ and quickly finds himself in a conflict with Harvey ‘Two-Face’ Dent.

Surprisingly few DC regulars crop up during the lengthy story. Superman and Green Arrow are the only heroes besides Batman with a presence, the latter feeling an odd choice because, nowadays at least, he’s a pretty low profile player. Joker appears as a patient-slash-prisoner at Arkham Asylum, and Catwoman crops up as the owner of an escort business. It’s that sort of a book.

That minimalistic approach is actually one of the book’s best attributes. Were it written today it would likely be a summer crossover event designed to find a place for even the most minor of characters. That Miller was given the freedom to use as many or as few characters as he deemed necessary is pleasing. It also ensures the book has enough time to develop what characters it does use, allowing us insight into what they’re feeling and why they’re doing what they’re doing. There’s little of that in the crossover approach.

Miller is at his best when creating dystopic nightmares. That’s what he’s given us with The Dark Knight Returns. It’s a world without hope and at least one of the points of the story appears to be that the world will always need Batman, which I think readers are supposed to take as the standard “fight for what you believe in” jazz.

It’s no wonder it was cited as a big inspiration the Nolan Bat trilogy: all three films, though particularly the final entry, owe a large debt to the depressing world Miller gives us here.

And yet I still can’t enjoy it, because of that artwork and Miller’s refusal to enliven the pace. The book drags for much of its page count. When it does get going it’s an enjoyable read and one of the best interpretations of Batman there’s ever been. Sadly those points don’t come frequently enough and there isn’t enough else in the book to help carry things when the plot lags.

V for Vendetta

I like the V for Vendetta film. I like the fact that it encourages you to believe, just for a moment, that it's cast the chubbier half of Fry and Laurie as a crusader intent on bringing down the government. I like the fact it's cast Mr Blocker as the Prime Minister. Most of all I like the fact that its relatively slender running time means that things actually happen fairly early on.

None of this is a knock on the original text. I like the comic book original version of V. It's just that, well, Alan Moore is pretty self-indulgent and takes forever to get moving with his plot or any sort of coherent revelations regarding his masked protagonist.

This is a fairly common problem with Moore. He’s going to do things at his own pace and nobody’s going to stop him. The issue is particularly prevalent with V for Vendetta. I suspect this is because Moore started writing the strip for British indy anthology comic Warrior towards the beginning of his career. Bigger publishers tend to have more of an idea of how many issues they want written and Moore has become less self-indulgent, or perhaps just better at getting his ideas across more quickly, as his career has gone on.

 

V for Vendetta is an alternate future dystopia story (set in 1997 it could now be considered an alternate history tale). British society has fallen apart in the wake of a devastating and unseen war, with totalitarian regime Norsefire having swept into Westminster to restore order. We follow the story of eponymous freedom fighter and culture vulture V as he trains young Evey Hammond to join him in his fight to restore freedom to Britain.

 

Given that it was written during the 80s it’s safe to say that it was at least partly inspired by Moore’s feelings on Thatcher’s government. Seems that Thatch inspired quite a few highly regarded comics of the decade. She wasn’t all bad.

 

Some plot elements don’t quite sit right. V’s origin for example. It’s revealed in flashbacks in the latter half of the collected volume but feels lacking in drama. It’s not something that needed revealing. That it is and there’s nothing of any particular interest behind it detracts from the momentum of the story.

 

Better is Moore’s world building. I’ve singled this out as a strength of his before and this book is a solid example. While the plot meanders and becomes bloated with extraneous information Moore drops in hints as to the country and world at large. He gives a solid idea of how the new British government is structured without going into endless details on the subject or revealing it all in reams of text. He tantalises with hints rather than trying to force you to care about his world, which is a good approach.

 

The book’s lasting legacy is probably the Guy Fawkes mask. It’s worn throughout by V as a symbol of his anarchist ways (and also to disguise his features). Along with the cloak and 17^th century style hat it creates quite the iconic image. His face being obscured throughout the story means the mask becomes his real face, instantly recognisable to anyone who’s read the book as a symbol of V’s morals and beliefs.

 

Never ones to miss a trick DC (the owners to the publishing rights of the title) released V masks when the film came out in 2006. They caught on in a big way. Naturally they’re a hit at fancy dress parties but they’ve also become a regular piece of kit for anti-establishment protestors. It’s a nice touch, but you have to wonder if the irony of paying DC, a pretty big corporation, to take a stand against big corporations has struck them. Probably not.

 

For the record Alan Moore approves of this development (of course he does). He's less approving of the film adaption. That's the case with any of his work that makes it to cinemas but in this instance he's not alone (in fact he rarely is).  Most people think V is a shoddy film that works better as a book. I think both have their merits, although the comic has more (and Moore) to offer.

 

V for Vendetta is a very good example of Moore's early work. Reading it you can certainly see that he was already beginning to develop into a leading voice for the comics industry, a man with his own ideas and a vision for how to use the medium to send a message. It was equally as clear that he was interested in heroes, just not necessarily the conventional caped kind. The disjointed, lackadaisical narrative stops it from being an easy read but not from being an enjoyable one.

 

Superior

It's easy to pigeonhole Mark Millar as a guy who just does action comics. Because, well, he does just do action comics. But he does them very well and there's more variety than you'd expect from someone who sticks so firmly to one genre. There's always action but he takes some pretty wild routes to get to it.

Superior is the perfect example of this. Not content with the premise of a young boy being transformed into his favourite superhero, looking like the actor that plays him in films (literally movie star good looks), Millar also chucks in demonic deals and astronaut monkeys. There's a closing action sequence that wouldn't feel out if place on the big screen.

It would be unfair and untrue to say there's no emotion in Superior. At times it feels a little forced and out of place but it's there. The protagonist Simon Pooni starts the book with multiple sclerosis and later on in the story he meets several other children with similar afflictions. It's written and handled well, and integral to the plot.

Elsewhere Millar is more ham-fisted. Mid-way through the book Simon reveals his ordeal to a Lois Lane-alike reporter, who listens to his entire tale before suddenly remembering she suffered from leukaemia as a child, prompting her to form a bond with him. I appreciate the need for dramatic reveals and plot developments but it's written as though she'd forgotten her experience until Simon mentioned his multiple sclerosis. Which, y'know, isn't terribly realistic.

On a similar note Simon's parents seem fairly unphased when he returns home having been missing for a week. They also seem a little too accepting of his story about magically turning into a superhero. Simon does at least get believable relationships with schoolchum Chris and bully Sharpie. Millar writes adolescent boys well his. That seems apt.

The action is where the book shines. Whether it's the second issue's scenes of Simon (now Superior) testing his powers by pulling trains and accidentally setting forests on fire or the final battle pitting Superior against not one but two of his adversaries from the silver screen the book's at its best when people aren't talking much. Leinil Francis Yu is particularly good at these sorts of scenes, his art style being dynamic and pacey. He's not bad at slower moments though. I like his art but I always think it's probably an acquired taste.

As a standalone series Superior is very hard to fault. It tells its story well, neither rushing it nor dragging it out too long and wrapping up in an entertaining (if maybe slightly predictable) manner. It revolves around a neat little premise and features some memorable visual moments. If you like the movie offerings of Marvel and DC there's plenty to enjoy and not much to dislike.

 

The Ten Doctors

Let me set the scene. The Ten Doctors is a Doctor Who fan fiction comic written and drawn by Rich Morris. He posted the pages on his website between March 2007 and May 2009. As the name suggests it’s a story featuring the first ten Doctors from Doctor Who and, as with all multi-Doctor entries in the show’s history, it’s very heavy on continuity references. It’s even worse the the heady heights of the JNT Era.

If none of the above made any sense to you this isn’t something you’re going to enjoy. It’s well written with some pretty decent artwork but it’s definitely aimed at fans. If you don’t know your War Chief from your Metebelis III you’re not going to be able to make heads or tails of anything that happens in The Ten Doctors.

The plot is a tricky one to summarise. The general gist is that something has gone wrong with the Doctor’s time stream so all of his incarnations barring the Eighth get together with a selection of companions to investigate the problem. Doctors and companions are then split off into numerous teams, each following their own little plots that contribute to the larger one. Eventually members of the rogues gallery start showing up, as do the races you’d expect to see. The Master, the Rani, the Ice Warriors, the Moxx, the Celestial Toymaker… they’re all here.

Some teams work better than others. The pairing of the Second and Seventh Doctors works particularly well while the lumping of Doctors Four, Six and Nine together feels odd. Given his standing within the show, as well as Tom Baker’s eternal disinterest in sharing the spotlight, it feels odd to see the Fourth Doctor teamed up as part of a group. It feels equally strange for the First Doctor to be off by himself, considering the show was had a fairly large cast during his televised era.

It can be pretty tough to keep track of what’s going on but the approach works for the most part. Morris is just as focused as making sure the plot progresses on every page as he is on dropping in fan-pleasing references. It takes a meandering route but the story’s always got something going on.

Morris also deserves praise for his artwork. There are dozens of characters on display and the important ones (the Doctors and the enemy races) are always instantly recognisable. Some likenesses are stronger than others, but that’s to be expected. Morris does a very good job with Pertwee, Troughton, McCoy and Davison but both Bakers and Eccleston leave a little to be desired. But even when he doesn’t get the faces quite right the guy still does a good job on the outfits: we’re never in any doubt as to which Doctor is meant to be which.

The book’s only real area of weakness is its dialogue. For the most part it’s fine. Morris does a good job of slipping exposition in naturally, not something you’d expect from fan fiction. It’s his use of British idioms and writing of certain characters that lets him down. Ace and Rose’s council estate twangs come off worst. Ace is not a well-written character at the best of times, what with her love of playground level insults and all, but hearing her refer to Rose as Barbie and princess just feels wrong.

This is likely a result of the author being Canadian. His exposure to this sort of slang is likely to be shows like Doctor Who and Eastenders. He’s far more adept at the RP leanings of Pertwee and the old school gang.

What will immediately strike most Doctor Who fans about this comic is how well Morris knows his subject matter. He manages to weave in references to practically every major race, planet and strange piece of Time Lord lore that’s ever appeared in the show and its spin-off media. At one point he even manages a coherent summary of the plot of Trial of a Time Lord. If anything shows an understanding of Doctor Who it’s got to be that.

The Ten Doctors is obviously going to be more accessible to some people than others but if you like the show it’s definitely worth a look. This will make a nice alternative to the inevitably underwhelming fiftieth anniversary episode Steven Moffat has planned for November.

You can read The Ten Doctors at this link.  

Nemesis the Warlock

In the grim darkness of the far future one man wages a war on the oppressive Termite Empire (humanity). That man is Nemesis the Warlock, and he's not actually a man. He's an alien. That's actually the reason he's waging his war. Humanity, you see, is going to become a rather xenophobic bunch once we start encountering alien species. They're going to be outlawed and humans are going to have a rather bad reputation.

Well that's the story here at any rate, as told in the grim darkness of the pages of 2000 AD. The premise may suggest a serious tone that looks at the nature of segregation and oppression. To an extent that's true. This is one of the more political characters from the anthology magazines back catalogue, and those themes are explored.

It's not the sole focus of Nemesis though. That would have made for a dull, one note read with little chance of anything particularly interesting happening. There's a sense of grotesque humour present throughout Nemesis the Warlock and while the focus of it and the way it manifests shifts over the course of the books it never goes away. Whether it's backwater yokels being fearful of alien scum without comprehending how far they've drifted from the human gene pool or the stream of failures suffered by Torquemada, the head of the Inquisition, there's always something to stop things getting too serious.

This isn’t to imply that Nemesis is pure comedy. It has a sense of humour but it was written in part to give author Pat Mills a vehicle to express his displeasure and concern at the choices Margaret Thatcher was making as Prime Minister. The majority of storylines are influenced in some way by her premiership and Mills’ opposition to it.

The plot is simple enough. The idea started out as a handful of one-shots scripted by Mills and drawn by Kevin O'Neil (with later artistic contributions coming from a variety of other names, including a young Bryan Talbot). In these we didn't see Nemesis and only got a glimpse of his mission (the aforementioned war of attrition with the oppressive portion of humanity). They had a much smaller scale, with Nemesis seemingly only concerned with transport systems on Earth. When those proved popular lengthier storylines were planned, Nemesis had his backstory fleshed out, and we were introduced to the galaxy at large. It grew quickly into a book that allowed its creators to target religious zealots, dictatorships, Thatcherism, and the previously mentioned segregation and opression.

That's where Torquemada came in. In many ways Torquemada is a far more interesting character than Nemesis. I often find that to be the case with bad guys, although it’s usually due to the hero being poorly written and having no clear reason for being good beyond it being necessary for the plot. That's not true with Nemesis, we're shown that he has a family that he's fighting for and beyond that his motivations are kept blurred and vague. Which helps his appeal and believability a great deal. He clearly has something he believes in but it can’t be encapsulated in a handful of speech bubbles.

Torquemada is the driving force of the comic, the personification of what's wrong with the society we're presented with (and the one in which Nemesis was written by Mills and O’Neill). His manipulation of an entire race is an important tool in letting us know what the horrors of the world are, and he becomes more powerful once he's a ghost. Sounds a spoiler? It is, but not a huge one: Torquemada doesn’t stay alive for long.

Like much of the 2000 AD of its time Nemesis the Warlock can be hard to get into. It can help to take a break after the completion of a storyline. It's a pretty dense series to try ploughing through in a day but it can be done. As long as you read it at your own pace I think you'll enjoy it. It's well written and has something to say. Not enough comics (or books, TV shows or films for that matter) can make that boast.

Supreme Power

Supreme Power is an eighteen issue series that tells a confined story. That doesn’t necessarily set the book apart as anything special. There are plenty of series that have a self-contained story across a similar number of issues. The story that’s told is not a particularly memorable one. It has its moments and benefits from some thoroughly inoffensive art courtesy of Gary Frank but there’s nothing in the plot that makes this anything noteworthy.

Yet it is noteworthy. This is Marvel giving us an origin story for DC’s top characters, albeit disguised a bit to keep everyone’s legal departments happy. The original DC creations cropped up gradually over the course of several years, all from the minds of different creative teams. That’s always put them at odds with Marvel’s top names, a large portion of whom were created or reinvented by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby.

The stories of who should be credited for creating what are well known, but no matter where the truth lies it’s generally acknowledged that those three men all contributed to sixties Marvel’s popularity surge to a greater or lesser extent. The small team at ‘The House of Ideas’ meant there was a familiar feel to all of the books. The titles didn’t all immediately begin referencing one another but the fact that the same artists were used helped to create a feeling of a single coherent fictional universe, as did the general approach taken: normal people with super powers. That so many new creations debuted around the same time helped too.

Marvel has always felt like it’s designed to be a shared universe. DC often comes across as a collection of characters with nothing in common beyond their names being owned by the same company. The DC Universe often feels like it’s been retrofitted to function as the setting for shared stories. It all stems from those different creative teams.

Obviously the benefit of hindsight plays an important role in Supreme Power. Marvel can jettison what they know won’t work and introduce new elements to the characters. Most of the changes make the familiar cast darker and edgier. It’s the old Marvel trick of making superheroes real people with relatable, or at least understandable, problems. Superman and the gang traditionally have very little to worry about beyond the latest supervillain threat while Marvel has usually gone out of its way to give its heroes things to worry about in their day-to-day lives.

Supreme Power sees Superman become Hyperion, a man raised by government agents posing as a loving married couple. Batman is recast as a night-prowling psychopath who has no problems with killing. Wonder Woman is Zarda the Power Princess, a far less benevolent figure that Double W. Doctor Spectrum replaces Green Lantern and is immediately set up as someone who can rival Hyperion’s power, and as someone who proves far more loyal to the United States to boot.

The only character who isn’t obviously burdened by an overabundance of problems is Blur, the Flash analogue. He’s a rarity in the book, someone who’s mostly happy to have the powers he does.

The idea of Marvel creating their own DC universe is not an original one. Supreme Power has its roots in 70s adversaries to the Avengers, the Squadron Supreme. They were a group of villains based on DC’s Justice League. Marvel had originally wanted to produce a crossover but legal complications meant they had to resort to blatant analogues instead. Later on a second gang using the same name crossed over from an alternate universe, battling the Avengers before they realised they were all good guys and made friends. So Marvel aren’t just borrowing from DC with this book, they’re borrowing from themselves too.

Various mentions of these former teams crop up throughout the Supreme Power series. The various names of the characters, for example. SP also features several touches that had proven popular on Marvel’s Ultimate line. George Bush appears as the President of the United States, and the world we’re shown is presented as contemporary and adult. Childish fripperies are a no-no in Supreme Power.

As I say, the story that unfolds is not the best. It’s engaging enough but it’s not the most interesting thing the series has to offer. That is very much Marvel’s take on DC’s characters, a bizarre updating of analogues they first introduced three decades earlier. Anyone interested in comic book alternate universes or seeing a more coherent and contemporary origin for DC’s prime players will find plenty to enjoy here.