Thank you and good afternoon

I am saddened at the death of Dick Giordano, aged 77. When I was falling in love with comics in the 1980s, he seemed to pop up all over, inking a Batman here, a Wonder Woman there; the epic Crisis on Infinite Earths. Before Batman had fully supplanted Superman in my affections (a pivotal moment in my life…), he inked John Byrne’s Superman re-launch The Man of Steel. It was only later that I discovered his famous earlier work – his inks on Denny O’ Neil and Neal Adams’s groundbreaking Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Batman.

As I understand it, by the 1980s the art was just a sideline for Giordano – in his day job he was DC’s Executive Editor, leading its creative output, and helping to drive some of the most important comics of the past 30 years including Crisis On Infinite Earths and Watchmen.

As part of this role, Giordano used to write a column appearing in each DC comic, called Meanwhile, and I will probably remember this even more than his beautiful inks. He’d write about the comics DC was publishing, about their future plans, about the creators, about whatever tickled his fancy, really. He used to sign it off “Thank you and good afternoon”.

Whatever your hobby, interest or passion, it thrives if you are in a community of likeminded enthusiasts. I had few friends who collected comics, especially after I moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg in 1983 (I had to convert some friends into comic collectors!) Meanwhile made me feel as though I was part of something. I would not have used the word then, but I was in a sub-culture; a secret club of collectors, enthusiasts, intellectuals, aesthetes, imaginauts.

Thank you, Dick Giordano, and good afternoon.

Peanuts Watchmen

Two of my favourite things. I particularly love Snoopy Rorschach. Thanks to Sonantics.

Fantastic

The Origin of the Fantastic Four
By Norm MacDonald. Hilarious.

Daniel Handler “Adverbs” 9/10

Loved Adverbs when I saw its Daniel Clowes cover and read the reviews on the inner cover and was not at all disappointed when I read it.

Handler has an original post-modernist voice, is funny and clever. 

The structure of the novel is unlike anything I have read before: Seventeen short stories about love, set in San Francisco (with adverb titles), with seemingly recurrent characters, which taken together form a sort of novel.

Try this, from the first page, which shows his kooky style:

“Andrea was tall and angry. I was shorter. She smoked cigarettes. I worked in a store that sold things”

Or better yet, in the second story, adolescent ‘Joe’ gives this (possibly imaginary) speech:

“It’s obvious she’s a person to love and obviously I love her. Love is this clear thing of revering her, lending your chivalry to her pretty pants and the way she tosses her hair up behind her on rare sunny days and those gray eyes, the luscious gray of them like when the clouds are beautiful even if you’re not buzzed, so how fucking dare you, Keith.”

Liked this review, from Dave Eggers, the most:

“With Adverbs, Daniel Handler, who’s always been a great stylist, goes ten steps further, to become something like an American Nabakov. He and the Russian man share a rapturous love of words, a quick and delicate wit, and a lyrical elegance that makes every single sentence silly with pleasure. On a broader level, Adverbs describes adolescence, friendship, and love with such freshness and power that you feel drunk and beaten up but still wanting to leave your own world, and enter the one Handler’s created. Anyone who lives to read gorgeous writing will want to lick this book and sleep with it between their legs.”

Who Watches the Watchmen?

Well… me, obviously. I adore the graphic novel and its writer Alan Moore is my hero, so I went to see the film last night. 

I enjoyed it very much. It is remarkably consistent with the graphic novel, and I revelled in the familiar joy of each scene (each camera angle really, so true is the film to the graphic novel), while at the same time anticipating the pleasure of the next highlight, which was sure to follow in sequence. But, it’s really not a well-made film.  Spoilers follow.

For starters, the graphic novel was a product of the Cold War, set in a 1985 infused with the palpable fear of imminent nuclear Armageddon. The machinations of its plot derive entirely from this threat, which in the film is vague and never quite credible. In part, this is because by 2009 the danger of the USA and USSR blowing up the world is very distant, but more importantly it is a failure of the director, Zack Snyder, to convince us of the danger (his other option would have been to replace it entirely, with a threat more relevant to 2009). Snyder refers to the nuclear threat, but it feels ‘bolted on’; it does not pervade the film or its characters. In the graphic novel there is a real sense of impending doom, a clock is ticking in the background, and this drives the plot forward, but the film doesn’t seem to offer an underlying reason for its events.

But the film’s problems are even more fundamental. Snyder has a great eye for detail, but in the manner of a magpie. He extracts each shiny bauble from the graphic novel and glues them together, but in so doing he seems to have missed the essence of the novel and his film lacks a clear narrative. The graphic novel has a complex structure, weaving together multiple characters, timelines, storylines, sub-plots, allegorical stories-within-a-story, background material. At the end, when the secret plot is revealed, we are blown away; the clues were all there in the multiple strands of the story, each working in concert. With Snyder, we just get a couple of cool set pieces cobbled together – the opening montage during the credits, in particular, is weak – and a standard whodunit ending.

The film has much more violence, and it is more graphic than the novel. Moore is a master at leaving things to our imagination. The best example of this is one of my favourite scenes in the graphic novel, when Rorschach throws cooking fat over a jail inmate. In the film, Rorschach tells his fellow inmates: “None of you understand. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked up in here with me.” In the graphic novel we hear this statement second-hand, from the prison psychologist, and this has always struck me as a more effective way of evoking the horror.

The film’s fight scenes are often overdone, unoriginal and unnecessary.  In particular, the scenes where Laurie/Silk Spectre II and Daniel/ Nite Owl II beat the living daylights out a firstly a gang of muggers, and later a horde of prisoners, don’t exist in the graphic novel, and serve no purpose in the film. In the graphic novel all of the characters seem so much more rounded. Dan has a paunch. Silk Spectre I and the Comedian have a disturbing but believable relationship. The Comedian is a monster, but a credible one. Also, the graphic novel seems to me to be self-aware about its more extreme characters. We are invited to recognise Rorschach’s cartoon insanity, and we suffer his dramatically-worded journal entries, and Dr. Manhattan’s near-omnipotence, because they serve the story and because they exist in a world which is populated with more realistic characters. 

But Snyder seems to take it all too seriously. It seems that he does not major in character-development (Exhibit A: the film ‘300’).

The soundtrack is absurd, a concoction of stock 60s, 70s and 80s classics, apropos of nothing. 99 Red Balloons is particularly jarring.

Movie adaptations always disappoint fans of the source material and we usually attribute this to the omission or bastardisation of elements of the original, but I’m coming to the view that even relentlessly faithful renditions of comic books can be bad films. They are different mediums, and to the extent that both evoke our imaginations, they do so in different ways.