nixsight

A busy week for everything else meant not much of a week for reading, but I’m in the middle of Warren Ellis’ “Crooked Little Vein”, and should have that finished by next week.

So that leaves these three comics:

Astonishing X-Men #26 by Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi

It may be that I’ve got diminished expectations after the awkward #25, but I quite enjoyed the second episode of Ellis’ run on this book.

Part of it might be that we’re fully in the story, now – Ellis writes for trade paperback, and as such, he clearly felt the need to provide an introduction to the characters, concepts and current continuity in that issue, that made for a terribly clunky start.

Now we’re pretty much all action, and Ellis knows what he’s doing here – inventive uses of established powers, a little experimentation with the relatively new Armor character’s power-set, and his trademark, Big Ideas.

Sadly, while Bianchi’s art is still drop-dead pretty in some places, in others it is just ugly, and worse, it suffers from flat, muddy colours, odd composition choices that have us looking up character’s noses while they overact, and the confused direction that made the relatively straight-forward first issue so difficult to read. I have to assume that it’s the artist and not the writer, because I’ve read Ellis superheroes before, and staging and visual cohesion are things that he can nail in his sleep.

Often, you get the feeling that there’s stuff in the script that just isn’t making it onto the page. A battle between the new fiery bad guy and Wolverine suggests loads of great visuals, that the dialogue ends up having to almost conjure from scratch for the reader. More depressingly, the team’s escape from - and the subsequent crashing of - the ship around the middle of the book was clearly written as a massive blockbuster set-piece, but fails in delivery, as the artist chooses to depict the moments where things aren’t happening, and leaving out the moments when they are.

This is such a shame, because Ellis seems to be getting a great handle on characters that you wouldn’t have expected him to have much empathy with – Cyclops, in particular, is well characterised in this issue – and I’d like to pick up the rest of the arc without feeling like I’m enabling bad comic making.

Kick-Ass #3 by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr

I read issue #3 of this series a couple of weeks back, actually, and rather stupidly failed to comment on it here.

It’s not a bad issue, really. Just as promising, for most of the issue, as the previous two had been.

But then, as I wrote to Lee at Quit Your Day Job at the time:

It was a pretty cool issue, actually, although….

The final sequence, while clearly designed to shock, has left me a little nonplussed.

For a start, it’s nothing new… Garth Ennis has been using the bad swears and the ultra violence for a while now, and The Walking Dead took the whole sword violence thing to a horrid new level a few months back.

But the thing that I’m not sure about, and I think, given time, I’m not going to like about it, is that:

a) It seems a little too early – three issues into a story that has unfolded at quite a moody and relaxed pace – to be introducing another “hero”, or “anti-hero”.
b) Although it’s kind of tied into a – those last two pages change the whole dynamic, and in some ways the whole point, of the series. The point is that this is supposed to be a story whose sole gimmick is that it’s a proper, real-world look at what happens when you try to be a super-hero.
Introducing a hyper-violent ninja style character, while on the one hand not really giving the series anywhere higher to go, concept-wise, also doesn’t sit well with the theme. The theme is, in real life, people don’t get knocked out, they get bruised and beaten. When you get shivved, it’s messy. And fighting isn’t something that looks like a high-wire ballet, it’s untidy and chaotic.
Those two pages are the quintessential Millarism – “Wow, won’t it be cool if…?”, but as often happens when he does this, I’m a little worried that it’s going to fuck things up in the mid-to-long term. The guy has no narrative restraint!

As it happens, my concerns were spot-on. In issue three, in case you didn’t read it, and didn’t get a sense of it from that passage, Millar basically continues on with the series as before, writing pretty good characters and a quite interesting plot, featuring as it does a suggestion of how a real-world super-hero might find criminal activities to bust up.

But then, on the final two pages, as Kick-Ass himself once again bites off more than he can chew, a new vigilante bursts onto the scene – a mini-me redux Deadly Little Miho – and suddenly we’re neck deep in ninja ultraviolence and a particularly redundant use of a word that Girl One doesn’t like me saying around the house.

And then, as if expecting Millar to do something new and refreshing was always a naive idea, we lead directly into issue 4…

Kick-Ass #4 by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr

… Wherein Millar proves that the intriguing concept and great characterisation of the first three issues was a fluke, and that it isn’t only British writers that he’s willing to lift from.

The climax of issue 3 continues into issue 4, and we’re treated to five pages of Miller channelled by Millar, as the young girl ninja takes apart a room full of mobsters. The fact that it’s JR JR drawing only helps the feeling that you saw this all before somewhere – it’s like a car-crash of Frank Miller influenced comics – with The Man Without Fear conflated with some of the excesses of Sin City. This extends to the inclusion in this issue of Big Daddy, the large partner of Hit Girl, creating a pairing that could be straight out of one of Miller’s more satirical books.

Don’t get me wrong, it looks beautiful, and it’s all very interesting, still. But this sudden shift in tone and focus, along with the relative unlikeliness of the two new characters and their abilities, fucks badly with the internal logic and apparent intentions of the series so far – as I said before, the unique selling point that this book had was that it was looking at what might happen if a real person in a real world decided to try his hand at superheroics. Millar has already established that a punched face turns into hamburger, and now he’s trying to convince us that in the same world, a ten year old girl can sever flesh like butter.

It sounds like I’m being petty, I know. The best way I can put it is probably this: When Tarantino made “Kill Bill”, he was creating a world that was absolutely incompatible with “Reservoir Dogs”. In the earlier film, people catch a stray shot somewhere other than their head, and yet we still know that they will bleed out and die. A cop is tortured, and every wound inflicted on him is vital and real and painful. And people don’t leap around or run, they walk and stagger and fall. None of the characters from “Kill Bill” could exist in that world, but Tarantino is sharp enough, or controlled enough, to keep the worlds seperate – to maintain the rules of each fictional reality.

In this issue, Millar hasn’t got that level of control, and I feel a little foolish for expecting any different. I can’t help but feel like I told me so as I was reading that first great issue, and I feel a little sad that this book is probably still going to be good fun, but has lost that cool thing that gave it a unique, or at least unusual, point of view.

Mark Millar is like that rowdy friend who convinces you, against your better judgement and on a night when you really just wanted to stay in and have a wank, to go out to a trashy club, wherein he leaves you cornered by rough bastards and dodgy birds while he cuddles up with some crowing make-up slathered lass who keeps laughing at you, until he eventually slinks off with your keys and your wallet, leaving you to a bad altercation with some grotesque, her “boyfriend” and the bouncers.

When you wake up in an alley or on a park bench, and stumble your way home, you already kind of know that it’s your own fault for repeatedly falling for it. And you already know you’ll probably make the same mistake all over again.