Reviews

DC Comics, 2016, 192 pages, C$22.00 tp, ISBN 978-1401262631

I’ve made a commitment to get back into reading in 2021, and part of easing myself into it was to go through my superheroes comic book backlog. Considering that most of them take at most 30 minutes to get through, it seemed like an ideal way to get into a bedtime routine. Plus, is there anything less fun than a stack of unread comic books?

The problem was that I had quite a stack. Over the past six months, the local dollar store somehow got its hands on boxes and boxes of trade paperbacks superhero comics, selling them at fractions of their original prices. I usually grabbed a few every time I was in the store, and by the time Quebec went into its third lockdown (with “non-essentials” such as books being forbidden for sale), I had nowhere to go and a nice three-foot pile of trade paperbacks with a smattering of hardcovers to go through. Most of the stack was published from 2013 to 2017, and most of it from DC — in other words, reprints of the four-year era that followed the 2011 “New 52” reboot but was itself replaced by the 2016 “Rebirth” reboot. (Which, if you’re keeping track at home, was itself replaced by the 2018 New Justice event — comics are not a sane industry.)

While this review is titled Superman: Truth, I’m not going to specifically comment at length on that specific book. I selected it as a title because it represents a good yardstick through which to approach the modern comic book trade paperback era: It’s not too bad and not too good, showing both the strengths and weaknesses of the very specific way that superhero comic books approach their material. It’s also incredibly interconnected to other books in the stack, making it a good access point through which to approach the rest. Consider this as a brain-dump of sorts of what I thought about while going through the stack of books, being alternately entertained and frustrated by what I was reading.

Let’s be clear from the onset: While I’m generally aware of superheroes, I’ve never been a big fan. Sure, I like Batman (or, more specifically, the universe of characters around Batman) and I have accumulated a smattering of the subgenre’s most noteworthy trade paperbacks over the year. But I was never a regular fixture at the comic book store. Even today, the “comics” section of my library is dominated by graphic novels rather than superhero books. I’ve always found the Marvel/DC universes to be intensely self-referential, with hundreds of supporting characters that only fans with long memories and deep pockets could hope to place in their proper context. This backlog of accumulated history is never consistent, and the various continuity reboots should be recognized as promotional events rather than honest attempts to straighten out a continuity that was never rigorous in the first place. (When subsequent reboots reboot the reboots, well, they’re not doing it out of creative purity.)

Trying to read Superman: Truth, for instance, means loading up on Wikipedia (oh, thank goodness for its ludicrously detailed articles!) to figure out where it fits in the continuity, what happened to Superman right before and who are those characters. In my stack of trade paperbacks, for instance, I had not only Superman: Truth, but Superman: Before Truth and Superman/Wonder Woman: Truth Hurts, all of which had to be read in order to get a sense of the continuity. These days, you can consider yourself lucky if a self-contained dramatic arc is concluded in a single book, as the trade paper collections span multiple arcs and sometimes bring together stories published in separate sub-lines of books. (Alas, it’s those books bringing back everything together that often end up being more confusing, due to writers approaching overall events from different perspectives. I’m still trying to figure out Justice League United, for instance, despite or because it brings together stories from three different lines.)  At other times, you get lucky in reading a title from early in the continuity reboot — it’s fun and accessible to see the individual stories of the characters populating Justice League of America: Road to Rebirth being rebuilt from scratch, for instance, even though the book ends just as they get together.

This is why, over time, I’ve learned to consider superheroes as metastable archetypes. You apply your knowledge of them from other sources onto the specific story being told. They may have core characteristics that carry over time, but various writers and artists are free to shape them into slightly different things over time. Some of those interpretations stick — others are forgotten or actively corrected. Writers may try new things to shock the audiences, or address modern concerns, or feel free to align the archetypes over topical matters. That’s the fun of constant reboots, alternate continuities, “elseworld” creative digressions and successive “runs” by different writers. Over time, for instance, I fully expect to see mainline continuities in which Bruce Wayne shot his parents, Superman is homosexual and Wonder Woman is a trans woman. (Note: All of this has already been featured in fanfiction.)  What usually doesn’t change is the core of the character — sullen vigilante Batman, righteous alien Superman, idealistic amazon Wonder Woman. Everything else is up for grabs.

Sometimes, you even further define your characters by taking away what defines them. One of the reasons why I picked Truth for review, for instance, is that it’s part of an overall arc stripping Superman of what appears to define him: Not more superpowers, no more secret identity (Lois Lane tells the world he’s Clark Kent, and the world does not react favourably), the Fortress of Solitude locked away, friends killed or otherwise put out of action. It’s not necessarily a fun arc, but the Superman that ends up powering through this accumulation of misery is a far more interesting guy. Wearing a T-shirt and jeans, riding a motorcycle and still fighting against injustice, he feels significantly more approachable than the god-among-mortals typical approach. Not that we’d tolerate this deviation longer than strictly necessary: there’s always this expectation that things will go back to “normal” even if this normal often ends up slightly different from what came before.

This metastability is an aspect of superhero mythology that non-regular readers may fail to appreciate. Every so often, some of the weird stuff being tried by the writers for the comic-book fan core makes it to the mainstream press: Superman dead! Captain America assassinated! Batman marries Catwoman! Spider-Man a widower! Of course, the headlines fail to mention that this is standard operating procedure for comics. Superman has died or been killed many times (sometimes brutally, as when Wonder Woman punches through his chest with a fistful of kryptonite in the grim dystopian Wonder Woman: Dead Earth, sometimes gently from a natural affliction in The Last Days of Superman), Captain America’s mantle will go to someone else before being rebooted at some point; Batman did not end up marrying Catwoman; and Spider-Man will eventually get back in a long-term relationship. From time to time, you can see the status quo vacillate: While Lois Lane has typically been Superman’s girlfriend/wife, some recent interpretations had him paired up with Wonder Woman — which I don’t like that for various reasons (much like the whole “Iron Man is adopted” dramatic arc is moronic), but time will tell whether this change will stick.

The end point of this is that readers read superhero comics for characters rather than stories. While narrative is important, it doesn’t mean as much as consistency in a commercially-driven area where readers expect a known quality. Batman fans don’t want a Bruce Wayne that grows old, falls in love, gets married, spends time with his family and turns his philanthropy to preventative social programs. No: they want a sullen, emotionally-stunted, attachment-free Batman who wears Bruce Wayne as a disguise and punches villains all night long. Deviations are allowed only in how they play with the basic character while ensuring that the archetype remains commercially viable.

Anyone with a reasonably objective perspective on superhero comic books (such as anyone weaned on prose fiction or non-franchise movies) will recognize that the Marvel/DC field is stuck in less-than-creative traps. People expect to read about their favourite characters, and that’s that. Even I can’t deny the appeal. One of the reasons why I’m more familiar with the Batman mythos is that I like a lot of the characters that revolve around him: Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Oracle, Poison Ivy (hmm, I sense a pattern…) are often more interesting than Batman. Elsewhere in superhero continuity, I’ll pretty much read anything with Lex Luthor, Iron Man or Captain America, but there are characters that I don’t like. Green Lantern is stupid from top to bottom (which makes reading things like the Lights Out event book useless), the Joker is overrated, and I rarely see the point of Aquaman. (Hilariously enough, his team-up book is called Aquaman and the Others and it’s deathly dull despite a promising espionage thriller focus.)

If immersing myself in DC continuity for a few dozen trade paperbacks has done anything, it’s making me more marginally more sympathetic to the DC universe. While, on ideological grounds, I’m still marginally more sympathetic to the Marvel approach of conferring greatness to ordinary people rather than the godlike mythology of DC, familiarity does breed comfort. I’ve learned to like Wonder Woman a bit more, and Superman can be a really interesting character when placed in the right hands, dealing with thorny problems that don’t require physical strength. I still don’t like Batwoman very much (although this has more to do with the experimental art and writing on the series’ first arcs) and some of the cosmic narratives are as useless as they are obnoxious. For instance, the first two books of Justice League United are an unmitigated collection of nonsense: despite the promising “Canadian” focus, the series then flies off into space for a succession of meaningless fights among godlike beings that are never interesting. I would very much rather see narratives grounded in the real world, such as Superman: Truth making an effort to set Superman is a recognizable version of reality.

This being said, comic books are rarely consistent in their approach. One intensely frustrating aspect of modern superhero comics is their tendency to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. In Truth, for instance, the opening moments of the book are narratively grounded, generally believable, and then, oops, we go to a narrative tangent that dives deep into the more fantastical areas of the Superman universe, forgetting the promising plot threads set up in earlier instalments. I’m not sure if this is an artifact of the writing process very much centred on short issues only later collected in trade paperbacks, but it’s so consistent as to become a characteristic, and not an endearing one. When I say that Truth (and its most closely associated prequel and sequel) are inconsistent, this is what I mean: You can end up somewhere completely different, without any care for narrative consistency, tone or storytelling unity. No wonder I like one-shots or strongly planned arcs better!

It also goes without saying that not all corners of the superheroic multiverse are worth exploring. For every intriguing deviation (such as the surprisingly uplifting street-level vision of an extinction event in the concluding volume of Captain America and the Mighty Avengers: Last Days), there’s garbage nonsense such as Batman Beyond 2.0 (taking the Batman mythology to a futuristic post-apocalypse), or the meaningless Earth 2: Society books (copies-of-copies of superheroes fighting in a pocket universe). It’s trash like this, featuring an endless procession of ludicrous characters spending pages fist-fighting or throwing mental energy beams and Kirby dots to each other that gives the genre a bad name. I would rather have an intriguing story than pages of meaningless fights.

Tone is also important: While the superhero comic book field is not as relentlessly grim as it once was, the current zeitgeist is not exactly all fun and roses. Accordingly, one of my favourite titles in my stack was a reprint of Superman Action Comics that took a classical but incredibly light-hearted approach to Superman — it was a welcome change from the so-serious New 52. Batman is particularly prone to excesses of overly grim and dramatic material — although this paradoxically had me more appreciative than ever for Batman’s famous unwillingness to kill: if he did, his universe could be unbearable. (Also see: The Batman who Laughs.)

Inevitably, reading such a mass of superhero trade paperbacks got me interested once again in the highlights of the genre over the past decade or two. My stack was not exactly the best of what the genre had to offer, and in today’s digital distribution environment, I didn’t have to leave my house to start looking at closing some arcs left untied by the books I had on-hand, or start poking once again at the best one-shots published in recent years. I could, for instance, be quite eloquent about the homerun that is the Harleen miniseries thoroughly and finely exploring how Dr. Harleen Quinzel became Harley Quinn. I could be just as enthusiastic talking about the wonderfully comforting All-Star Superman, the amusing Batman/Dickens crossover Noel, or the inspired take on Luthor. But that may have to wait another time, as those as not your usual superhero books and I had to wade through a lot of uninspired material before getting to those. Sometimes, you have to take a look at the honest average to figure things out.

Unfortunately, this is not building up to any big revelations about the state of the art in superhero comics. It’s pretty much the same as it’s even been, albeit with better-than-ever colouring. The weaknesses and strengths of the form have remained for decades, and I don’t see any reason for them to change (although the move toward trade paperback has been a net plus, even with the often-odd stitching of dramatic arcs across books). It’s still very much a crowd speaking to each other, a fiction genre even more hermetic than most others. The recent invasion of movies by comic book tropes is not always a good thing for movies, but it may have been a shot in the arm for comic book fans, as their characters have been reimagined as more cohesive and more audience-friendly, without the baggage that often weighs down the comics themselves.

Still, coming as I do from the prose fiction world, I can’t quite shake a sentiment of narrative emptiness after finally going through my metre-deep stack of accumulated trade paperbacks. In looking over the stack, I could remember the best ones, but many of the blander books all felt generic and interchangeable with very few clear individual narrative hooks, other than “this is about Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman,” further blurred by stories beginning in one book and ending in another. I hunger for something more, something more substantial and (most of all) something with a self-contained beginning and an end. I’ll read more standalone novels, taking risks in perhaps not liking new characters but ultimately not having to constantly look up the history of every new minor character that pops up.

I’m probably not yet finished — I suspect that the local dollar store still has a few boxes of trade paperback to put on shelves and I’ll probably bring a few more of them home, even if I’m going to be more selective about my picks (this is the last time I’ve purchased a Green Lantern book, I swear). You know, just for the characters.