nixsight

Last week I started up what I intend to be a regular feature on nixsight, wherein I discuss the movies that I have watched in that week.

It turns out that I also sometimes read stuff. Not as much stuff as I watch, but probably enough to post a little about each Monday. Which is what I’m going to do.

So here we have the first Seven Days/Reading Matters. Hopefully I’ll remember to do this every week, and it’ll become a… you know… a thing.

These last seven days I’ve only read one novel, but quite a few comics.

All Quiet On The Orient Express by Magnus Mills

This is the third Mills book that I have read in the last few months, and like his Restraint Of Beasts, it concerns itself with examining the life of the manual labourer, as well as the cultural peculiarities of British rural or small town life, and the aimlessness of the piece-worker.

Our narrator here is a factory worker who is on holiday. As the book opens, he is about to finish his stint at the Lake District caravan site, and head for warmer climes, but a brief conversation with the owner of the site finds him agreeing to do a bit of minor painting around the place.

One thing leads to another, though, and the lad, who is generally a quite agreeable and inoffensive guy, finds himself embroiled in a steadily growing web of social obligation, local history, and a growing amount of menial responsibilities.

Hapless like the duo in Withnail And I, our hero instead finds himself on retainer by mistake.

Like all three of the Magnus Mills books I’ve read so far, the writing is crisp, economical, and matter of fact in a way that must be a lot of work to nail down. Mysteries rear their heads and grow throughout the novel, and it is testament to the likeability and authenticity of the voice that Mills uses here that you don’t find yourself infuriated by how dense and affable the narrator is – a less capable hand might have created a situation where I’d lose my temper with his inability to ask follow-up questions, or otherwise satisfy his curiosity.

But then, that’s one of the points I think Mills tries to make in his work – that our lives become these soporiphic and dull, throbbing and monotonous structures of routine over imagination because of our inability to question the situations we find ourselves in – either because we lack that imagination, or we want to keep our heads down and have an easy life.

For all my seriousness, though, the book is genuinely funny, albeit in a dark and brooding way – and like The Restraint Of Beasts, there is a thread of quiet, very English horror sliding throughout.

The only problem with the book, though, is that this existential horror never quite comes to the surface, and neither do any of the many mysteries or plot threads that weave throughout. Which may be part of Mills’ intended message, here, but unfortunately he has done too good a job of creating an intriguing world, so cutting us off with less of a solid picture then we had to begin with is a little too frustrating. It may well be a stylistic thing, and a matter of different priorities – the themes that Mills examines are dispensed with in satisfying ways, so maybe the plot twists and turns and small moments of character creation and development just weren’t actually part of his bigger picture.

But I find it a little irritating, even if it is deliberate, and it may be a little while before I pick up another one of his books. Not because they aren’t a great read, because they are. And an ambiguous and perplexing conclusion isn’t quite such a problem in a novel just over 200 words – that barely counts as a novella with some authors, and the whole thing slide by so nicely that one might be able to forgive it’s ambiguity as the stylistic flourish at the end of a particularly long short story.

I’m going to take a break because I’ve read three of his books in the last few months, and this has been roughly how each of them has ended. And I’m starting to wonder if maybe Mills just isn’t quite sure how to finish a novel. If I come to the next book fresh, I’ll probably like it a lot more.

Fantastic Four #554 – #557

I’ve been a big fan of Bryan Hitch’s artwork since a long time back – I think it may have been an X-Men/Brood mini-series, but I could be wrong – and Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass is one of the few books that I’m keeping an eye out for at the moment, so I was quite interested to hear that the two of them were working together on the ongoing FF book.

Working with Hitch brought out something quite special in Millar on that first Ultimates book – a bit less of that annoying overworked poppy dialogue, and a little more flow to the action.

Sadly, any restraint Millar is showing in Kick-Ass, and in his previous work with Hitch, is out the window here – scene cuts suddenly into scene, there seems to be no natural progression to what is going on – and Hitch’s art suffers badly. I’m not about to do a panel-by-panel crit on the book, but I’m fairly sure, especially in the first couple of issues, that there are moments when Hitch’s normally excellent anatomy and page breakdowns go completely out of the window – and not just in Reed Richard’s scenes.

What seems to be happening here is that Millar has decided, quite rightly, that the Fantastic Four are considered in the Marvel Universe to be like royalty – much loved, and coddled by the celebrity magazines – the series redesigned cover style reflects this. He has decided that this is the direction that he is going to take his exploration of the characters – that of the high-flying over the angst-ridden.

And fair-play to him for making this observation. It sounds like the sort of thing that Grant Morrison might come up with, when in an astute, not quite so nuts, phase. In fact, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that it is something Morrison said once, but I can’t remember when.

What Millar has failed to do here, though, is fold that observation properly into any sort of narrative, or any actual exploration of themes. On books like The Ultimates, he has managed to do a pretty good job of drawing a compelling picture of the super-team as para-military police – and the soap-opera elements he infused there have been absorbed into the high-powered blockbuster action of the series, to the extent that it isn’t as glaring if those soap elements are cliche, badly delivered or in fact just reworkings of classic plots that were actually brave when first played out decades ago.

The Fantastic Four, by dint of their team structure, have always been a more reflective or calculating team – having a scientist as team-leader forces that approach – and it feels like Millar is already bored with the idea of acknowledging any actual complexity caused by that situation, or by the fact that they are a team that is also a family.

Even by Marvel standards, what Millar writes here is a particularly dumb book. Which, in itself, isn’t an awful thing, but it’s a dumb book that still manages to come across as confused and sketchy, even as it is being simplistic. The clumsy attempts to create “other woman” tension and suggest an actual adult (as in grown-up, not sexual) relationship between Sue and Reed is embarassing and just kind of chucked in there at the last minute. The threat in this first story arc, as well, is totally lacking in any narrative restraint, and the conclusion not only establishes that this is going to be a book in which every other character is going to take a back seat to Reed Richards, but also that the science under Millar is going to be Russel T Davies science.

Actually, the RTD comparison is a good one, because Millar has a similar tendency to create ridiculous situations just because of the WOW factor that having them up there is going to create. And that does tend to sell comics, the same way it sells tv. But I don’t think there’s anything in the WOW on display here that Millar hasn’t already done elsewhere, with Hitch even, or that other people – Warren Ellis, and Brian Michael Bendis, I’m thinking specifically – haven’t already done, either on Ultimate Fantastic Four or elsewhere.

I have to wonder what it’s like working at Marvel with Millar in residence, because he manages to pull every hero in the MU into the final act of this first story, and does them all a major disservice in the process. Including pissing all over his own Civil War work into the bargain.

All that said, the art was starting to get a little bit more like Hitch’s normally solid work by the final few scenes, there was a genuinely cute, if difficult to justify outside of a summer blockbuster, Reed and Sue moment, and a few interesting threads being raised. So we’ll see how it goes.

House Of M

I’ll admit, a big part of comic reading for me has always been about an obsessive-compulsive need to know the ins and outs of what is going on in a comic universe. Working in a comic shop for such a long time damped down that neurosis, but every now and then I’ll be reading an issue of something, and I’ll realise that I no longer have any idea what is going on – and despite my firm belief that mainstream superhero comics work best when they are self-contained narratives, I find that it drives me to distraction.

The Marvel House Of M event of a few years back is pretty much the perfect example of the sort of thing that can trigger off this particular character foible I have – suddenly I found that the whole of the Marvel Mutant landscape was completely different – not in an insignificant way as one might expect, but actually just completely changed. And I had no idea why.

So when I had the chance last week to read through the House Of M stuff, I jumped at it.

And it turns out the reason why suddenly there are very few mutants left is – well, is that someone, or someones, at either an editorial or corporate level, decided it might be a laugh.

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about this story unless someone asks – the fact is, either you’ve read it already, or you’ll have no interest whatsoever in it – that’s how event-driven comics work. Suffice to say, as epic crossover comics go, this isn’t the worst, but it also all feels a little redundant and arbitrary, too.

While the central quest of the few heroes who are trying to fix things is told in too little space, the supplementary books don’t read differently enough from the Age Of Apocalypse crossovers of a few years back for them to really be worth bothering with. If anything, the world of the House Of M isn’t even as different from the normal MU as Apocalypse was, so most of the books read like not much more then a “What If?” or Alterniverse diversion.

The art on the main book, by Oliver Coipel, is pretty and tries really hard, but there are too many times where the information that needs to be given is too much for the pages allowed. Brian Michael Bendis writing, too, is perfectly passable, but often circumstances render events a little difficult to grock.

There’s a problem I’ve been finding with Marvel over the last few years, actually – and it’s in evidence here, the same way that it is in evidence in the more recent Civil War event – and that is that the company has gone from the situation not that many years ago, where most of the decisions were made by businessman and the old firm seemed almost totally creatively bankrupt, to what we’ve got now, which is a company that seems to be having too many ideas, and not enough restraint to actually get them done right.

I still believe that Bendis is a great writer, and I think that he probably still feels like every project is still a dream project – but I found myself wanting events to stop unfolding quite so fast a few times over this story – and I’ve noticed that this has been happening a lot with the Bendis MU books I’ve read in the last few years.

(Not Daredevil. I’ve not had any problems with DD in years…)

The only one of the House Of M supplemental books that I found worth a read past the first chapter was the House Of M: Spider-Man series. This was because it was one of the few that presented a version of events that was completely different from any we had seen before, and also because it gave Mark Waid and Tom Peyer a chance to explore some interesting ideas about the psyche of Peter Parker, in a non-sensationalist that they wouldn’t have been able to do outside of an event like this.

Well worth a read, it suggests intrigue and ideas rather than forcing them down your throat, and has some nice, serviceable art, and some pretty good character writing.

Unfortunately, the whole thing kind of falls apart in the final act, and in fact, I think there is a big discrepancy between how this book leaves Spider-Man and his family, and what happens to the character in the final stages of the House Of M main book, and I have to wonder if this wasn’t supposed to go differently, somehow.

Still, if you’re putting yourself through the nightmare that is trying to keep up with Marvel continuity, you could do worse then picking up this trade at the library – and ignore all of the other House Of M books except the main one.

So there you go. That’s how I’ve been occupying my reading eyes this week. As always, any comments are welcome!