Some thoughts on Stan Lee’s Characters With Depth

Introduction

It is a truism among those who talk about comics that Stan Lee revolutionised and revitalised an ailing genre by moving beyond the simple action and silliness of the Golden and Silver Ages of comics to give us characters who had depth, with real personalities and who had normal human interactions with one another.  As such he is established in the popular consciousness as the creator of Marvel’s hugely successful gallery of superheroes.

Now, I find this troubling for a number of reasons.  First, we know pretty well that in fact much of the creation of these Marvel superheroes was down to Jack Kirby, and we know from Kirby’s solo work (The Fourth World, OMAC, the Demon, etc) that he had no truck at all with the Stan Lee method: if his characters talk at all, it is to utter the largest of large talk; personal issues are entirely absent, unless directly connected with the plot, and even then, Kirby clearly finds the interpersonal relations bits dull and gets straight on to the big, big ideas.  Second, we  know that the Marvel method for creating comics was for the artist and writer to agree a basic plot outline, then for the artist to draw the comic, and then for the writer to attach words to the images.  This is not a text-led approach, which is surely what we would expect if the supposed Lee-led revolution in fact took place.  Third, to say that comics previous to Lee had no depth is simply nonsensical.  Superman and Batman had complex personal lives from the very outset.  Fourth, as I said above, Jack Kirby’s solo work is resolutely not inspired by the Lee approach, and yet his characters have enormous depth.  As Alan Moore has observed, Lee’s characters are strictly two dimensional: Spiderman is basically a standard issue superhero who’s schtick is that he is a whiny teenager; Darkseid is a tremendously complex and sophisticated tragic hero who defies description.

So, in this piece I want to have a look at the Stan Lee revolution to see how it might really have arisen, and what this means for the popular narrative about the history of comics.

Discussion

So as to avoid being invidious, rather than pick any one of Lee’s works, I will base my analysis on The Great Darkness Saga, a story from the ongoing soap-opera that was the Legion of Superheroes.  This is clearly written in the Lee manner, with characters who chatter about their personal lives and bewilderingly complex relationships, but in this case I happen to have access not only to the finished comics, but also the original scripts from which they were derived.  This makes it possible to see how the Lee style ‘character depth’ arose, at what stage of the creative process it appeared, and even that it came about not as a result of an artistic decision, but as a simple necessity, given the mode of composition.

The Great Darkness Saga (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Great Darkness Saga is a series from 1982 featuring the Legion of Superheroes.  Typically, it contains a vast array of characters who never seem to let the fact that they’re in deadly peril impede their desire to break off whatever they’re doing to have long conversations about their personal lives, especially their love-lives and their bizarrely obscure rivalries.  In one particularly egregious example, at the height of a battle against a massively powerful evil that eventually turns out to be directed by none other than Darkseid, one character, who is meant to be handling the team’s communications , actually refuses to pass on orders from the leader, because he is annoyed that she beat him in a recent leadership election that the team inexplicably took time out from fighting off massively powerful evil and all that for the sake of.  Clearly universes under threat are as nothing compared to campaigning to be the boss, and indulging in tediously long-winded outbreaks of  jealousy and accusations of adultery.   And, even more egregiously, nobody bats an eyelid at this grossly irresponsible behaviour.  Sure, this person nearly lost the battle against massively powerful evil, but that’s not important: what’s important is that bad losers should be allowed to be as petulant as they want.  At a lower level, individual legionnaires take every opportunity to stop doing what they’re doing, stuff that actually matters, and start discussing their relationship issues, to such an extent that sometimes one would think the enemy they were confronting was insensitivity to one another’s feelings rather than Darkseid.  And all this is done in the style of an eighties soap opera, so the relationship talk is deadly, deadly serious.

So, let’s look at the script.  Keith Giffen, who scripted and drew the piece, provided a script which essentially sets out, for each page or panel, who’s there, and what happens, pretty much at the level of ‘page 17, the Legionnaires talk while we wait for Darkseid’s minions to arrive on Earth’.  Then he proceeded to draw page 17, and it was left up to the unfortunate Paul Levitz to produce sufficient words to sustain some kind of interest until Keith got back to folks biffing one another again.

Ambush Bug (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now, this method worked brilliantly for Giffen in his  surrealist Ambush Bug epics, because there the whole point is that the visuals are fractured and change constantly and that the text should be incomprehensible.  The fact that the two don’t fit is, if anything, an advantage.  And, most important, the sheer speed of movement, from one lunacy to the next, means that the reader never gets time to settle down and become properly oriented, and to discover that actually what they’re reading is basically meaningless nonsense (and very good meaningless nonsense too).  But The Great Darkness Saga is no Ambush Bug, and moves at the stately pace of epic, with plenty of long stretches where nothing much happens and words are needed to keep the reader engaged.  So Levitz had to write lots of words about, basically, nothing, and, as a consequence we got lots of inconsequential filler about relationships and the like because, well, he couldn’t write anything  relevant to the plot, because that could cause problems when he next had to synchronise with the pictures, so ‘What were you doing talking to my wife?’ or ‘I don’t care if you won the election and I lost my deposit, I still think I should be leader’ and the like ended up filling up an awful lot of space.  Because, you see, all this Stan Lee method interpersonal stuff has the great advantage that it’s unimportant, forgettable, and can be stretched to fill as much space as is required.

Conclusion

After all that, the conclusion is obvious.  Stan Lee’s supposed great revolution was nothing of the sort, and is simply the natural consequence of an over-stretched and not very imaginative writer who found himself pulled every which way by highly imaginative artists, and a production ethic that cared more for spectacle, and the look of the comic, than for whether it told a good story.  It’s not a revolution; it’s simple expediency.

More from Power Girl

Oh no, not again

Yes, I’m afraid it is.  Having written somewhat exhaustively on the subject of Power Girl, everyone’s favourite over-endowed superheroine here and here, I have gone one stage further in contributing to her degradation.  I have committed fanfic upon her person.

That’s right, fanfic.  That is to say, 12,000 (ish) words of cheerfully doom-laden prose purporting to be the first-person narrative of a young woman who finds herself in a hospital and not entirely certain as to who she is.  She may be Kara Zor-L, or Karen Starr or Power Girl or one of a number of other individuals who appear to share her head with her.  And then, her cousin, a Mr Kent, turns up and discharges her and takes her home for some unclear reason.  And then, in a complex journey, she finally works out who she is.

The key thing about this is that it’s the narrative of someone with a rather childlike view on the world who just doesn’t comprehend her own powers, or how people work.  She starts out probably psychotic, and by the end she’s developed into a raging psychopath and possibly worse.  And yet she is still an innocent.  So it’s a study in morbid psychology and, though I say so myself, rather subtle.

What I’m trying to say is, I think this is the best thing I’ve ever written, and it’s a big breakthrough for me in maturity as a writer.  So I’d like to share it with you:

• Lost Girl of Krypton by Julian Porter

Cutting heroines down to size

Introduction

It’s time for another of my bemused visits to the DC Universe and, more specifically, the curious attitudes of some of its fans.  I have already written (at some length) about two characters: Power Girl and Harley Quinn.  When I wrote about them I noted that in both cases there was something anomalous, for Power Girl it was the weird objectification to which she is subjected, in spite of the fact that it does not fit at all well with her character, and for Harley Quinn it was the somewhat strange way that her numerous fans seem to prefer her to suffer a hopeless and pointless love rather than get on with her life.

Thinking about things a bit more, I realised that there is, in fact, a common theme underlying both cases, that is to say that the heroine needs to be cut down to size before her fans can identify with her.  And this, then, leads on to fascinating parallels with the progress (if that is the word) of the modern romantic comedy.

So here’s what I’m going to do.  I’ll start off with a quick summary of the relevant points regarding Power Girl and Harley Quinn – if you want to know more, read my essays about them.  Then I’ll put forward my theory as to why they are both inconvenienced by their fans.  And finally I’ll cast the net a bit wider, seeing just how prevalent the cutting-down-to-size phenomenon is.

Meet the ladies

Power Girl

Carefully ignoring a certain amount of confusion, it is safe to say that Power Girl is Kara Zor-L, Superman’s cousin from another universe.  She’s at least as strong and powerful as him (possibly more so), is immune to Kryptonium, and has a very strong character and powerful intelligence.  Not having spent her childhood among humans, she has little of Superman’s love of humanity, and it shows: she’s tough, stroppy and a natural leader.  She also has very large breasts and wears a costume that leaves no doubt about it.

That last bit looks rather out of place doesn’t it?  Yes.  Exactly.  That’s the problem.  The thing is, here we have a character who is a natural feminist icon – she’s immensely powerful and intelligent and doesn’t take crap from anyone – and yet she is regularly depicted in a way that makes it clear that what matters is not her intelligence or her leadership qualities, but her breasts.  She is objectified horribly, making it very hard to take her seriously as a character.  During the worst period of objectification (interestingly, when the artist drawing her was a woman) she was given silly plot lines, like what to do when a kid has found your secret identity and uses it to blackmail you to go to the comics store with him, so his friends will think he’s cool?  Fortunately, shortly before her recent unfortunate downgrade from superhero to trophy girlfriend, she did recover some of her dignity, but the image of her as a Playboy bunny who hits people lingers.

Harley Quinn

Harley Quinn is generally described as the Joker’s girlfriend, but things are a bit more complex than that.  She originated on Batman The Animated Series, but was so popular that she transitioned to the DC Universe proper, where she eventually acquired her own title.  As a result, she has two origin stories, one set out in TV-spinoff comic Mad Love, the other in the eponymous Harley Quinn comic.  We need to compare them.

Mad Love version

In this version, Harleen Quinzel  was a student who wanted a job as a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum, so she could write a tell-all memoir and retire on the proceeds.  Not actually having the smarts to do this, she got what she wanted by sleeping with her tutors.  Having arrived at Arkham, she starts out as the Joker’s therapist, thinking he will tell her juicy secrets, but actually he seduces her, destroys her mind, and turns her into Harley Quinn, his crazed side-kick.

Harley now suffers from unending adoration of the Joker, while he is only really interested in her in so far as he can use her for his own ends.  Therefore she is subjected to endless humiliation, rejection and violence, but always, always comes back when he calls.  And there you have it: a woman with no future, with no special talents or abilities, who has got where she has by the good graces of men, whom she rewards with her body or her devotion.  Scarcely a good role model.

Comics version

Both versions agree that Harleen Quinzel was a psychiatrist, but they differ somewhat on the details.  Here, Harleen had no need for help: she is described as having a formidable intellect, and picked up the posting at Arkham by virtue of being brilliant.  When at Arkham she becomes the Joker’s therapist, but now she seduces him.  She tells him about the Harleen Quinzel = Harley Quinn pun, whereas in the Mad Love version, that is his idea, and she clearly makes the move on him.  She has already decided that she is Harley Quinn before she has even met him.

Why she does this is rather interesting.  When at university, she carried out a rather cruel psychological experiment, using her boyfriend as guinea-pig.  Unfortunately, he became so distraught that he committed suicide.  The affair was kept quiet, but Harleen concluded that life was, in fact, a cruel joke, and having done so, looked about for people with whom she could share this world-view.  The choice was obvious, so she set about doing what was needed to catch her prey.

So here we have a decisive, powerful woman who directs her own life.  She just happens to be somewhat deranged.  When the Joker becomes too much, she dumps him (with considerable violence) and sets out on her own, or (more usually) in partnership with Poison Ivy, with whom she starts to develop a proper relationship.  She eventually manages to rehabilitate herself and actually play a more or less positive role.  And she is also one of the few people who has more or less worked out who Batman is.  This Harley Quinn is no joke.

What’s with these people?

Harley Quinn

So, we have something a bit strange going on here.  The comics version of Harley Quinn is, modulo the whole psychopath thing, equally quite a good role model, in that, as I’ve said, she’s pretty formidable herself.  And yet of her legions of fans, the majority think that the comic book version is a travesty and prefer the dim bulb of Mad Love.  You only have to compare the smiles on the pictures of the two Harleys to see the difference.  Mad Love Harley wears a lovesick simper, gazing adoringly at her man.  Comic book Harley’s is the smile of a woman who is in charge, knows what she’s doing and is enjoying it.   To make what that means totally clear, then: the fans disdain a genius who chose her criminal life, and would rather be a woman whose only asset is that men will do her favours in return for sex, and who ends up controlled by an insane love.

This is a strange kind of role model for women, and that is the thing.  Once could understand men finding an easy lay who adores her man more attractive than a capable woman, but the fans we’re talking about are women.  Why would they prefer an easy lay over a genius?  What it seems to be all about is low expectations.  Being a dependent trophy girlfriend is easy: all you need is surgery and sufficiently elastic morals.  Rising to the top of your profession by sheer hard work is much harder.  So Mad Love Harley is more easily achievable.  But what are the rewards of being her?  Harley doesn’t seem to get any reward: her life is bleak in the extreme, used by the Joker when he needs her and thrown away (sometimes literally) when he doesn’t.  The only thing she gets out of it is the knowledge that she is in love, and her (dubious) belief that one day she and her love will be together.

When you look at it, that isn’t much of a goal, to be honest.  It seems strange to be prepared to live a life of self-abnegation and hurt just so you can have a man of your own.  And yet, this seems to be what it’s all about in contemporary woman-oriented romantic fiction.  For example, the horrendous Twilight saga preaches deeply regressive sexual politics on the grounds that the heroine may end up as  cipher, but she has a love that will ring down through the ages, and is joined with her love in ecstasy at last.  And somehow the fact that she has two attractive pseudo-men wanting her at the same time is meant to be sufficient achievement for any young woman.  And the same is true, as I have said elsewhere, of modern romantic comedies.  We repeatedly see the basic plot of successful single woman pretends she is happy, meets man, realises she hates her life and ends up choosing to become his plaything.  And again, as with Twilight, as with Mad Love Harley, it’s women who consume this regressive tosh, and so we must conclude that they seriously do think that romantic love is fulfillment in itself. Me, I’d rather be a top psychiatrist.

Power Girl

So, we can see that the strange preference for the dim Harley over the bright one is a matter of preferring to aim low, belonging to a culture that tells you to aim low, to not try to stretch yourself.  Before we consider that further, let’s look at Power Girl and her vast tracts of male fans (though she has her fair share of female followers too).  Power Girl should be a formidable figure and a feminist role model.  Instead she’s a bit of a joke, butt of endless bad breast jokes.  Well, this seems to be the opposite side of the phenomenon we’ve just discussed.  Women want to be airheaded bimbos because that’s what men like, and men like airheaded bimbos because they’re frightened that a real woman would threaten their quaintly antiquated notions of masculinity.  And, of course, the fact that the women they interact with behave like airheaded bimbos reinforces those notions of masulinity, so we have a rather nasty feedback loop going on.

Now, a woman like Power Girl is a terrible threat to a man who thinks that the act of possessing testicles is somehow in and of itself a major achievement.  She’s smarter than him, tougher than him, stronger than him and can wither him with a stare without even having to resort to her laser beam eyes.  Clearly that is an affront to the dignity of men everywhere, so the only way a woman like that can be allowed to continue is if she is cut down in size, reduced from something frightening to something a man can relate to in a way that makes his superiority absolute.  And, well, sex is how you do that, isn’t it, for no woman can resist any real man, of course.  And so Kara’s increasingly grotesque hypertrophy is a way of indicating that she may be frighteningly capable, and more or less a goddess, but basically she’s sexually available, and hence conquerable really.  And this reaches its insane conclusion in her latest transformation, from Power Girl to trophy girlfriend of Mr Terrific, being cast as the nasty blonde whom the nice girl puts right in a speech of staggering ineptitude: ‘I am a black woman, made to be able to do things you can’t even imagine…’ Presumably Kara is too polite to reply ‘Fancy; I’m a Kryptonian,’ or else, as would be more characteristic, just throw the silly girl through the wall.

The bigger picture

In a series of pieces starting with The Tyranny of Realism, I attempted to understand why it was that, despite vastly greater capability and resources being available to their makers, modern films are almost uniformly less interesting than those made in the past.  In fact, there almost seems to be an inverse relationship between the capability of visual effects and the imagination with which they are put to use.  The conclusion was essentially that audiences are less willing to work than they used to be.  They don’t want to have to use their imaginations or think or be challenged; they just want a simple adrenaline surge.  So modern films are about simple stuff like explosions and things hitting other things and more explosions and sex and even more explosions.  Looking at the wider culture, this seems to apply elsewhere: effort is out, spoon-feeding is in.  Homer Simpson started out as a satirical figure; now he is a role model.

And, unfortunately, the same applies here.  As I said above, any woman can aspire to be Mad Love Harley if she diets enough and knows how to fake an orgasm.  The life of comic book Harley may be much more interesting an rewarding, but she has to do hard stuff like work and lead a gang and so on and so forth, while Mad Love Harley just does what her man tells her.  And, for the men, though Power Girl would be a great woman to aspire to be the partner of, she wouldn’t be entirely likely to tolerate her partner being a slacker who spends all his free time in a bar or in front of the TV.  So, naturally she is reduced from a woman to a pair of breasts, turned into something safe and easy to relate to, because relating to breasts doesn’t require any effort, and have no annoying personality.  And now she isn’t even Power Girl, she’s Karen Starr, and is just some man’s toy.  She has been utterly neutralised.  And what has happened to Harley Quinn is unspeakable.

So, in conclusion, I think we have to say that though it is now possible to understand why these two women of power are so misrepresented, and how that fits in with the culture they inhabit.  But, while that culture would say that we should just accept it and not strive for anything better, I think we should.  Write fanfic where Power Girl is elected as President of the United States.  Create websites celebrating the real Harley Quinn.  Stand up for women, even if they don’t want to be stood up for.

The Strange Case of Harley Quinn

Introduction

Yes!

Harley Quinn, a relatively minor figure in the pantheon of DC Comics’ universe, provokes enthusiasm, no, adoration, hugely out of proportion to her apparent importance. I suspect part of this is that though she may not have the oomph factor of some bad girls, she has an enormous, larger than life, vivacity. She clearly enjoys her life immensely (well, most of the time) and that joy communicates itself to the reader. So though Poison Ivy may be your fantasy figure of choice, Harley would have to be the number one candidate for a girl friend to have fun times with.

No!

All of which makes it perfectly incomprehensible that DC Comics, in their wisdom, chose to ‘reboot’ her in a deeply regressive way. So instead of a gorgeous, funny, sad, wildly unpredictable and larger than life goddess, she becomes the modern-day cliche of the barely clad babe with attitude, heroine of more bad action movies than one cares to think of. Unsurprisingly, this has somewhat annoyed her fans, but it also begs an interesting question, that is: why would DC Comics think that a generic nearly naked skank was more likely to shift comics than a well-rounded character with an adoring fan-base? So that’s one of my questions.

My next question is related. It would appear that fans have been discontented for a while over the kind of story Harley has been involved in. Though she started out as the Joker’s side-kick, of late she has moved away from him, shifting to a complex will-they, won’t-they relationship with Poison Ivy, which only seemed to resolve itself just before the ‘reboot’. Now, given that Harley’s relationship with the Joker was that of an abused woman, with him humiliating, abusing and occasionally trying to kill her and her escaping briefly only to return, because she was sure he loved her really, why would anyone want to reunite them? Surely her fans should be glad that she has found a stable, loving relationship at last? So that is my second question: given how bad the Joker was for Harley, why would a ‘fan’ want to see her return to him?

She started it

But before answering those questions, I want to look at another. This has been bothering me for some while. It is usually stated that Dr Harleen Quinzel was the Joker’s therapist, that he subverted her therapy to seduce her and then drove her insane, Harley Quinn being the result. This is the ‘orthodox’ view, though it hasn’t gained total acceptance and, indeed, is not followed in Harley’s self-titled series. So we are meant to believe that Harleen Quinzel, the brilliant, near-genius psychiatrist, was blasted away by the Joker’s seduction, and what was left behind was a volatile mad-woman almost as dangerous as the Joker himself. For any number of reasons, I don’t think this is very plausible, so I shall start, in the next section, by attempting to analyse Harley, to see what might really be going on.

About Harley

Some facts

Let’s start the analysis of Harley’s psychopathology by examining some of the facts about her. What one might call the two most obvious can be expressed by saying that she acts like a lovable moron who has a propensity to extreme violence. This is true in as far as it goes; the mistake lies in thinking that because she acts like a moron therefore she is a moron. Because the interesting thing about Harley is that she is a creature of layers. On the surface there is the lovable moron, who is always cheerful, spends her days watching cartoons and has a distinctly childish world-view. Every now and then the mask slips and we see a desperately sad woman underneath. And below her there lurks a woman with a powerful logical mind who surfaces occasionally, makes a few observations and then retreats. So any attempt at understanding Harley has to deal with this almost hidden structure which gives her considerable psychological depth.

Moving on to the second point, Harley does have a distinct propensity for violence, indeed considerably volatility of mood. She more or less specialises in not using the minimal force required to get the job done, but in massive overkill, the goal seemingly being not so much an effective operation as the maximum of theatrical effect. In other words, the violence, which is often comical, and carried out with a knowing, cheeky eye on her audience, is part of the general tendency of all Harley’s actions to be much larger than life. She doesn’t just want to get the job done; she wants to get it done with style and in a way that will not so much impress as give pleasure to those who happen to be watching. So, when she needs to leave her gang to do something private, she doesn’t go through the door: she drops straight down the front of a skyscraper. There is a look of pure pleasure on her face when the Riddler threatens to fight her with a sword. And she always, always delivers the appropriate snappy one-liner before thumping her adversary. She knows the role she’s playing and she loves playing it.

As for Harley’s relationships, her record is not good. Her relationship with the Joker is classically abusive. She loves him, he gives her encouragement, then humiliates her, hurts her and even tries to kill her. She leaves, but can’t stay away, returning convinced that he’s reformed this time, and so on. And so we get into the cycle that can only end in intervention or disaster. What does not help is that, on the whole, her friends tend to perpetuate the abusive pattern. Poison Ivy and Catwoman both treat her as if she is a moron, and so incapable of making decisions or saying anything remotely helpful, often resulting in their own discomfiture because they wouldn’t listen to her. And so, once again, we get a cycle of negative reinforcement: treating Harley as if she is a small child leads to her withdrawing further into childish, dependent behaviour, which reinforces their impression that she is a child, and so on and so forth. It is not a happy state to be in.

Some thoughts

Let’s start with the standard view. This can be basically summed up as being that Harley actually is (and not merely seems to be) a lovable moron who is a psychopath, is utterly dependent on the Joker and behaves like a child because that is what she is. So, as I said above, Harleen Quinzel and any adult aspects of her personality have been entirely erased, leaving nothing behind but an emotionally dependent lunatic. This does not stand up to careful thought. If Harley is actually little more than a psychopathic child, what are the deeper layers of personality that peep out from time to time? Given that the deepest layer is clearly extremely intelligent and has formidable psychological acumen, I would suggest that far from having been erased, Harleen Quinzel is still there, hidden under layers of childishness and dependency, and is perfectly capable of being her old self when she wants to. So the obvious question is, then, why did she choose to retreat from the world?

All the emotional support she needs

I am going to argue that in fact, far from having retreated, Harleen is quietly orchestrating much of Harley’s behaviour from behind the scenes. It is just that the way she chooses to arrange things creates the impression that she has been replaced by a childish, needy psychotic. The real change in her is that she has chosen not to engage with the world on its terms any more, but only on her own. Remember that Harleen Quinzel was of exceptional intelligence, and she was also a first rate gymnast (something Harley clearly has inherited from her). Now exceptional intelligence and ability are all very well, but they have a well-known and very debilitating negative aspect: that is to say, if nothing you do is particularly challenging then it’s easy to get bored and frustrated and drift into depression, destructiveness or worse. Especially if, as we know is the case with Harleen, you have little in the way of emotional support from friends and family.

Now, to a mind that was already in the process of this retreat from reality having discovered that no matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t find worthy peers or anything that was remotely challenging, the Joker would have been a wonderful discovery. His psychoses would be a challenge worthy of her, and sufficient to spur her interest in him. So, I think it’s fair to say not so much that he seduced her away from the straight and narrow as that she was only too willing to leave it, and he merely showed her the way. Especially as it would be very natural for her to question whether, as the world of the legitimate psychiatrist left her parched and dying, it might not be worth seeing if she could finally find what she wanted by turning to crime. So Harleen did not lose her mind and in the process become Harley; rather Harley is a persona deliberately adopted by Harleen for her new role as mistress of crime.

The ticket to her dreams

Of course, it didn’t turn out as she expected; the Joker was even more psychotic than she had thought and so she ended up not as a partner in crime but as a despised hanger-on. Admittedly, even in that role she does her best, being supremely effective at what she does. Indeed, the very larger than life quality that characterises Harley’s every action can be seen as just another example of the over-achiever’s curse: she can’t just do the job, she has do do it in a way that’s deliberately difficult and extremely showy, just to prove to herself how good she really is. This also explains her often rather bizarre choice of target for her crimes: often it obeys a very strict inner logic, known only to Harleen, but it makes no sense in terms of the world that Harley inhabits. She doesn’t see that as a problem, as this is all about seeking stimulation and reward, but her colleagues in crime see it as further evidence that she is nuts. Which helps ensure that she remains at best a minor player. It turns out that the only thing she has that can guarantee a challenge is her relationship with the Joker, so she depends on him for stimulation and easily falls into the cycle of abuse. She does not love the Joker at all; she is dependent on him, or has grown to believe she is, and therefore behaves in like a needy woman in love, but there is no genuine feeling for him. Their relationship is one of mutual exploitation.

Her knight in greenish armour

Things don’t get much better when she does manage to tear herself away from the Joker. Her relationship with Poison Ivy could be her saviour. Unfortunately, though it is fairly clear that Ivy does love Harley, she is too far set in her own conceit of hating all humans to actually be able to admit it until almost the last possible moment. Also, she seems to take the rather ditzy exterior at face value and doesn’t realise that it’s the consequence of an extremely intelligent woman finding herself caught, like a rat in a trap, with no way out save irresponsibility. Thus Harley is treated as a hanger-on. Is it not a surprise that she sinks further into childishness, as her mind begins to close itself off from the world, or that she makes one last, desperate attempt to rekindle her connection with the Joker, the one source of stimulation she thought she knew.

Unfortunately, we will now never know what happens next with Harley and Ivy, whether they do sort things out and develop a proper loving relationship, and Harley begins to get the emotional support required to emerge from her inner exile, or whether things just carry on as before. The outlook, it has to be said, is not good.

About Harley’s fans

Why would anyone want her to go back to the Joker?

Wile E Coyote speaks out

As I said in the introduction, prior to DC’s big ‘reboot’ many of Harley’s fans were agitating for her to return to the Joker, apparently viewing her striking out on her own followed by her partnership with Poison Ivy as being something of an aberration. I find this mysterious. Or rather, I can understand this attitude only if one views Harley purely as an intellectual construct, a piece of fictive property, to be put through hoops for one’s amusement. In this case, it doesn’t matter that Harley is apparently hurt and humiliated, because she isn’t real, and she exists only to amuse by her pratfalls in pursuit of her puddin’. Like Wile E Coyote , she will always spring back into shape.

Fail!

There is an interesting story written by an Italian Communist leader who was invited to attend one of Stalin’s private cinema screenings. He commented that Stalin got very involved in the film and talked to the characters as if they were real people. He then made the sniffy comment that this proved that Stalin was of lesser intellect, because only a clod would actually treat fictional characters as though they were real. This view became very modish in modern fiction and literary criticism, the fad being to discuss the author’s writerly constructs rather than what it was they had written about. And yet, as the plethora of ironic, writerly and completely unreadable novels of this school shows, a purely artificial work of fiction does not live for its reader. Criticism also became obsessed with form as opposed to content, as witness Umberto Eco’s famous essay on Superman, in which he appears to argue that Superman is defective as mythic archetype because the stories unfold in the present tense. Admittedly, it is hard to see how a picture-based medium could do anything but unfold in the present, but apparently that observation is too simplistic, and so Eco builds a massive edifice on this entirely meta-textual observation. He then goes on to bolster his credibility by asserting that there is no need for him to discuss any other comic-book characters, because they are all the same.

Contrary to these ‘intellectuals’, Stalin’s empathy with the movie’s characters was the proper form of reaction to fiction. If, say, Harley were a purely intellectual construct, intended, like Wile E Coyote, to amuse, but no more, what is there that makes her any more memorable than any other such construct? Moreover, can she be said to have any individuality at all? Surely the constructs named ‘Harley Quinn’ in different stories are independent because they exist in independent narratives, and so the concept of ‘Harley Quinn’ becomes meaningless. Thus fiction would be reduced to pure formal games, with no actual meaning. To deny, as do Eco and his ilk, meaning in fiction, in the face of authors’ indignant rejection of that denial, is the height of arrogance and evidence of academics forgetting that their job is to study and not dictate. Now, Harley Quinn exists as an identifiable character, not just in her appearance, but in her personality and behaviour. Though different writers inevitably give a different slant on her, there is an identifiable commonalty that can only exist if there is actually some meaning, some concept of ‘Harley Quinn’ distinct from the marks on paper. And that is why I can discuss her psychology, and so many people can love her and want to emulate her. To view her as purely a fictional thing to make one laugh is a possible interpretation, but it is fundamentally misguided and contrary to the very nature of fiction itself.

Not good

However, if one views Harley as a person (albeit a fictional one) it is hard to see how one can think it better that she return to a highly abusive relationship with someone who is very likely to kill her in preference to a relationship with someone who actually appears to love her. With the exception of one rather gruesome possibility. To a certain mindset, Harley’s ‘mad love’ for the Joker might be seen as being terribly romantic in a way that her more sane feelings for Ivy are not. That is to say, simply by virtue of being unreciprocated and hopeless, it acquires a patina of desperate wish-fulfilment common in bad literature from Jane Eyre to Twilight. In other words, fans who themselves have thwarted romantic longings (and who does not in the full flush of youth?) want her to suffer with them, on their behalf, so they have, as it were, a role-model or proxy. Harley happy with Ivy is of no use to them, as though she may be what they aspire to be, they cannot see any way of actually achieving that state, and her having achieved it is, in fact, a threat (even regardless of the fact that US culture is still regrettably homophobic, and so a loving relationship between two women is likely to be seen as transgressive), because Harley with Ivy is telling them that they could be like her, and not full of thwarted desire, and hence creates feelings of inadequacy. Much better, therefore, to stick with unrealistic romanticism and demand that Harley do likewise.

Why the new look?

WTF?

It is understandable that when one is updating all one’s product lines one wants to make changes. What is not understandable is why, when one has a product, like Harley, that is incredibly successful as it is, one would decide to change it almost beyond recognition. And yet that is precisely what DC Comics have done with the new Harley Quinn, featured in Suicide Squad. So is this an outbreak of corporate insanity, along the lines of ‘new Coke’ (remember that?), or is there actually any form of logic to this change?

There are any number of things that have been lost in this change: the beauty, the charm, the humour, the quality of being lovable. What has been gained seems to boil down to two things, both regrettable, but both terribly popular right now: she looks ‘edgy’, and she is wearing considerably fewer clothes than she used to. Now, ‘edgy’ is one of those qualities that are terribly popular, apparently extremely desirable, and yet strangely hard to define. It seems almost to fill the same space that ‘grunge’ did about a decade ago, as the ultimate in socially approved counter-culture (think about it). In as far as it means anything, it seems to involve deliberately not doing a proper job of whatever you’re at and then claiming that the defects make your work somehow more authentic. So the fact that New Harley’s costume is grotesquely ill-suited to a fighting woman is not important and to think about such things is to miss the point: what matters is the look. In other words, what we have here is the old-fashioned cult of amateurism beloved of bad artists the world over. There are quite enough bad comics as it is; why do DC feel the need to give us more?

What hath they wrought?

The second point is even less forgivable. We supposedly live in a post-feminist age. Apparently, or so we are told, all the battles for equality have been won, and there is no need for feminism any more. Women can be comfortable with femininity again. And yet women in movies are relegated to being scantily clad onlookers or neoprene clad babes, one major studio has announced that its policy is to make no movie with a female principal character, and Power Girl has been downgraded from one of the mightiest of superheroes to a trophy girlfriend. And as a part of DC’s ‘reboot’ Harley, whose costume was eminently practical for an athletic criminal, and exposed precisely nothing (while leaving no doubt as to just how shapely she was) has been replaced by New Harley, who simultaneously is less attractive, but shows off a lot more. And this, remember, is part of a move on DC’s part to try to attract younger readers. In other words, they believe that younger readers prefer their women objectified. Which may be true, but succumbing to such a demand is a dreadful state of affairs for a company like DC with a proud history of campaigning for liberal political issues.

Envoi

I had hoped to end this piece with an interview with its subject. Unfortunately, Dr Quinzel’s busy schedule made it impossible for us to catch more than a few moments to speak to one another. She did, however, recommend this extract from the diaries of Dr Arkham, which she said she hoped would be amusing and instructive. Attempts to contact Dr Quinzel’s partner, Dr Pamela Isley, failed. However, I did receive an unmarked package containing a plant which, when watered, proceeded to eat my dog, the postman and seventeen pigeons, and staunchly repelled my attempts to expel it from the house. I took this as a gentle hint and ceased my efforts.

Review: Animal Man, Book 3: Deus Ex Machina

Animal Man, Book 3: Deus Ex Machina by Grant Morrison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my second review of Animal Man. My first was written in the white heat of extreme irritation caused by the rather tedious animal rights rhetoric of Animal Man, Book 1, and this blinded me to the manifold excellence of this third volume of the sage and also Animal Man, Book 2: Origin of the Species. Hence this new review: on calm consideration, my view has changed and I can now see what a remarkable story Grant Morrison has told.

So, let me start with a word of advice. Most of volume 1 is material of lower quality, so I recommend the cautious reader to skip all of that book except for the story called The Coyote Gospel, which sets the scene for all that is to come. If you then proceed to books 2 and 3 you will have read not a piece about animal rights, but a profound, often hilarious and moving study of the nature of reality, the nature of fiction and the many convolutions in the history of the DC Universe.

Animal Man is a very minor, or so we think, superhero, who can take on the power of a nearby animal, so if he sees a bird he can fly, etc. Okay, fine. But then he meets an animal who gives him a manuscript written in an alien tongue. Then he encounters aliens in Africa who seem to know more about him than he does. And then reality starts to shift and he begins to meet slightly different copies of himself, almost as if they were earlier drafts. All this while his family live in an atmosphere of menace and eventually tragedy strikes, leading to our hero entering a state of deepest despair. And that is precisely when the Psycho-Pirate, who had been incarcerated in Arkham Asylum, decides that he doesn’t like the way the DC Universe is nowadays, and tries to bring back all of the old characters who had been written out of the story. Reality fractures. Animal Man (sort of) saves the day, and then goes on a quest as pointless as the one in Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail only at the end he meets, well, God. Of a sort.

So, that’s a top-level view. The thing is that Morrison virtuosically plays with multiple levels of reality and multiple layers of reality, so there aren’t just multiple version of Animal Man floating about, there are universes embedded within one another: the stories of one universe are real to the inhabitants of another. The Psycho-Pirate seems to be aware that Crisis on Infinite Earths was a comic book and that he is a character in a comic book. And in one of the most amazing moments in the story the character turns and looks out of the page and sees – us. So we are pulled into the DC Universe just as it is pulled out into our world, the bounds of reality dissolve, and there is always the inevitable question: if Grant Morrison is writing the adventures of Animal Man, does that mean that someone else is writing the adventures of Grant Morrison? Morrison leaves that question unanswered, but it is left tantalising us right to the end. If we turned round, who would we see?

Now let’s get to the obligatory pretentious bit. One of the key difficulties in epistemology is the precise status of counter-factuals. That is to say, if I ask ‘what if?’ and so question what the world might have looked like had something been different from the way it actually was, how do I tell what the answer to my question is? I can scarcely appeal to facts on the ground, as they relate to reality, and I am talking about something different from reality. Many words have been wasted on this, with some writers proposing that in fact counter-factuals never make any sense. But this is too sweeping: asking what the world have been like now had President Kennedy not been shot is clearly untenable, but asking what the temperature in a saucepan of water would have been had I lit a fire under it is easy to answer in some way that is hard to explain. And so in On the Plurality of Worlds, David Lewis proposed that in fact all possible worlds have equal ontological status and so counterfactuals merely consist of statements about worlds other than the one we currently inhabit.

This is rather startling, but in the context of what I’ve said about Animal Man, you can probably see where I’m going. If Lewis is right (and his thesis is the most persuasive I have seen on the subject) then the fictive world conjured by Morrison is just as real or fictional as the one we and Morrison inhabit, and so is the world of the characters in the comic books that Animal Man’s children read. So we have both an infinite regress of universes and a family of equally possible worlds, and Grant Morrison, by taking a minor DC character and utterly subverting his world, has shown us just how strange reality might be. If there were such a thing, that is.

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Being fair to Grant Morrison

Introduction

As you may have noticed, I recently wrote an extremely angry review of Grant Morrison’s break-through series Animal Man, in which I pointed out a number of (genuine) flaws in his writing.  However, having thought about things for a while I have come to the conclusion that I was unfair, for it is true that though his writing is often infuriating, it is never dull, and I look forward to reading more of it.  So, this is my attempt to make amends by taking a more balanced look at Morrison and his work.

What I shall do is draw in the pieces of Morrison’s that I know best, that it to say We3, Arkham Asylum, The Filth, The Invisibles, Animal Man and the Doom Patrol.  Of these, We3, Arkham Asylum and The Filth are masterpieces, The Invisibles is a deeply flawed piece of work that could have been a masterpiece, Animal Man is simply flawed and the Doom Patrol is a glorious example of Dadaist nonsense.  I will look at these pieces in an attempt to find what is good about Morrison’s writing (lots) and what is bad (not very much, but it’s very bad, and rather pervasive).

What’s good, what’s bad

BAD STUFF

The Devil rides out

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way.  Now, I’m not going to complain, as you might have expected, about Morrison’s tendency to wildly incoherent narratives.  As I’ll describe below, I actually see that as something of a strength.  What is a problem, though, is that sometimes he just lets things get a bit out of control, and the huge proliferation of ideas that emerge from his ever-fertile mind become so disjointed that they end up not generating an emergent masterpiece arising from the chaos, but just chaos.  This does, I have to say, happen at the end of The Invisibles, where he has any number of fascinating ideas, but he clearly has no idea how to make them tie together to form the apocalyptic climax that he’s been promising us now for several hundred pages, and he gives the impression of having become rather flustered.  This also happens very noticeably at the end of the Counting to None arc, where after a terrific build-up, with masses of tension  and apparent disaster facing our heroes, with one of them about to slaughter King Mob, Morrison suddenly pulls an ‘and with one bound he was free’ so blatant as to be almost unbelievable.

The next, and I think most important, problem is a tendency to be a bit lazy, to take the easy option.  So villains are often easy targets.  E.g. in The Invisibles the enemies of humanity are – of course – the English aristocracy.  Who else?  I think this is part of a wider issue, which is a tendency to think in overly black-and-white terms.  Now, I’m not saying he always does this: in Doom Patrol the Devil is positively charming, and Mr Nobody is a creation of genius, in The Filth nobody really comes out very well, except, perhaps, for the cat, and Arkham Asylum is immensely nuanced.  But the villains of The Invisibles are bad, bad, bad.  And as for Animal Man, well let’s just say, the eponymous hero is so good as to be faintly boring, or would be were he not so infuriating, while his enemies are cast in shades of darkest black, without one redeeming feature, or even being given the chance to put their point of view, as opposed to the points of view that the hero puts in their mouths.

Oh, and finally, he really isn’t quite as clever as he thinks he is.  For example, the final ‘character meets author’ scene in Animal Man had already been far surpassed by some of the wilder imaginings of mainstream fiction, not to mention the utterly weird worlds of Philip K Dick (whose novel Valis contains a character called ‘Philip K Dick’, who is ostensibly the narrator, as well as another character who, we later discover, is another ‘Philip K Dick’ who may, or may not, be the same person as the first).  Stanislaw Lem’s fake review The Robinsonads deals with the whole issue far more rigorously (and is much funnier).  For example, instead of Grant turning up and being God-like at the hero, why not have fictive Grant discover that now he’s in the text he’s no longer authorial Grant, and so he is as much circumscribed as his characters?

GOOD STUFF

Mr Nobody likes his haddock

Well, there’s lots of this.  Let me start off by stating the absolutely obvious and saying that Morrison has a wild imagination.  Who else has come up with the idea of an evil genius using a model as his spokesperson – no, that’s not the original bit – then surgically replacing bits of her (e.g one eye) with electronics, installing WiFi, and sending her forth into the world, a sexpot remote-controlled cyborg, guaranteed to stay on-message and able, at the press of a switch, should negotiations become tricky, to deliver a pre-programmed blow-job?  That bit of madness occurs in The Filth, in case you hadn’t noticed.

And then there’s the mad world of the Doom Patrol.  This is where Morrison’s tendency to fire out a new idea every couple of pages comes into its own, because in the gaily absurdist world he creates it doesn’t matter if a woman goes into a rest-room a rather nondescript brunette and emerges as a bombshell blonde.  And so a wild imagination that leads to near incoherence works just fine, because that’s what the world’s strangest superheroes expect.  And they get it.  The Devil is a charming man, rather like Noel Coward, who has a periscope sticking out of the top of his head.  We discover just what a paraplegic man can do when faced with a muscle-bound and heavily armed lunatic who appears, in so far as we can tell, to be a barbosexual (think about it).  Not to mention the intriguing question of what exactly does it mean to lose the use of one’s beard?  And then, of course, there is Mr Nobody, leader of the (New New New) Brotherhood of Dada.  He is a creation so gloriously mad that he really deserved a spin-off series of his own.  Where else will you find a character solemnly asserting ‘I know a way of destroying the fifth horseman of the apocalypse and making him feel really stupid at the same time, and it’s so embarrassing that it must work’ or ‘I’m warning you, I have a boiled egg and I know how to use it’?  And then proceeding to wipe the floor with the Doom Patrol, the only superheroes who dared even try to take him on.

Themes

Narrative Style

The Scarlet Harlot wants it now!

There is a possible criticism of Morrison, in that his wild imagination leads him to narrative incoherence.  His books are famously, even infamously, non-linear, with jagged, fragmented narratives that, on the surface at least, make no sense.  And, as I said above, sometimes things go too far and he does collapse under the sheer weight of ideas.  This clearly happens near the end of The Invisibles, where the strain of pulling all the plot strands is too much, but in The Filth it works to very different effect.

At first sight, The Filth is utterly incoherent, a collection of narrative fragments that more or less involve the same characters, but don’t seem to actually hold together to produce a single narrative.  But that is, in fact the point.  Morrison does not provide complete, fully worked out stories, he doesn’t hand us a world on a plate, telling us what happened and what we should think about it.  Instead he is elliptical, presenting isolated shards of narrative that may (or may not) fit together to form a whole, and leaving it up to us to fill in the gaps.  He turns us into literary detectives whose job it is to derive from the tantalising clues he gives us some idea of the greater truth.  And in The Filth he succeeds: vast ideas (like the giant pen, for example) are merely hinted at, without any attempt at explanation; we have to piece them together.  In other words Morrison pays us the compliment of wanting to make us think, and giving us the raw material with which to frame our own narratives by doing so.  He doesn’t dictate, he suggests.  And, by working in this lapidary way, he is genuinely clever, using advanced literary techniques to turn his work into an act of co-creation.

Similarly, in Arhkam Asylum, he uses the fragmentation approach, but what fragments is not the narrative, but Batman’s personality.  Batman is never seen clearly, he is usually a shadowy hint of an outline, and psychologically he is a tabula rasa.  In his script Morrison describes him as so tightly wound up he would be incapable of a sexual (or any other kind of?) relationship, and it’s clear that the reason is that he so fears the emptiness within that it’s the only way to hold himself together.  And this terrible void is filled with the madness that the Joker, acting as ring-master, as per de Sade in Weiss’ Marat / Sade, chooses to insert into it, and then sent forth into the world to see if he can become a person.  Morrison doesn’t provide an explanation of what the Joker was trying to do, or a conclusion; Batman doesn’t conquer, or overcome: he flees.  There is no resolution, just the Joker’s question as to where does sanity lie?  We have to provide the answers, because Morrison isn’t going to do it for us.

In fact, looking at Morrison’s work, it’s clear that where he fails is where he eschews this carefully non-judgemental and non-completist attitude and tries to tell us what the message is, whether it be in The Invisibles or the frankly preachy Animal Man.  On the other hand, in Doom Patrol, often the villains are more appealing than the heroes, not to mention the fact that on the occasions where the heroes do prevail, they generally do so by accident, and the only real message seems to be ‘strange is good’, which I, for one, can whole-heartedly support.  We3, though it is an unusually straightforward narrative, is scrupulous in avoiding judgement, and leaves enormous scope for thought and discussion relating to what I take to be its theme, that is the way that non-combatant war buffs prefer to dehumanise the actual combatants, because when they become human then there is the danger of people feeling empathy for them, and so losing their enthusiasm for war.  And I have discussed The Filth and Arkham Asylum above.

This characteristic of giving the reader the tools to create a narrative and then leaving them free to do what they want with them is, I think, key to understanding Morrison’s creativity, and it is part of what makes him such a great writer.  It is just a shame that every now and then either he simply cannot control the sheer weight of material, or else he allows himself to be tempted away from this extremely austere approach to writing, and gives in to making easy and unthinking judgements.  Hence the sometimes rather bargain-basement monsters he can produce.  But when he is at his best, and most disciplined, he can produce marvellous work, whether it be neo-Dadaist farce or a profound mystery.

The Ideas Themselves

Lakshmi does the Charleston

As for the nature of the ideas that shoot out at us in such profusion, it is safe to say that their range is as diverse as it is possible to be.  The range of reference is not so immense as Alan Moore’s (but then, what could be?) but then Morrison doesn’t suffer from Moore’s blind-spot when it comes to non-Mediterranean cultures.  And what Morrison is also really good at is creating not just references to things we know and love, like fairy-tales, but fake references.  He can authoritatively create from nothing a supposed piece of folklore that seems to real that it almost convinces one that it is genuine, and it is only afterwards that one realises that, no, he made it out of broadcloth.  This ability to make even the most lunatic idea (changing the shape of the Pentagon by flexing your muscles?) seem not just plausible but inevitable is a great talent.

Going further, Morrison’s worlds are fragmentary, incoherent, and generally just plain weird or even incomprehensible, but they are never, not even in his lesser or flawed works, unbelievable.  The thing in the mirror in The Invisibles is genuine, and is horrifying, even though all we ever see of it is a few tentacles.  Mr Quimper, terribly underused though he is, is genuinely a source of great fear – one feels how monstrous he is radiating from the page.  One feels madness closing in when reading the narrative of Amadeus Arkham.  And, somehow or other, and this achievement alone is enough to make Morrison great, the total lunacy of, well, more or less every page of Doom Patrol does not at any point make one want to fling the volume away and shout ‘stuff’.  Morrison makes the idea of a woman with at least sixty-four personalities, who inhabit a spectral New York Subway, seem not just plausible, but entirely everyday and normal.  And that is part of his genius.

Conclusion

As a parting thought, I’d like to compare Morrison to his great rival Alan Moore.  When reading Moore, one gets the feeling that one is being taken on a guided tour of a vast Gothic cathedral.  Everything is worked out and structured perfectly.  Even in his most bizarre creations, there is a sense of a complete world, and of control.

Reading Morrison, on the other hand, is rather like being an archaeologist, digging up fragments in order to build a picture of an alien culture.  Much of the time the fragments help you, with a lot of mental effort and work on your part to fill in the gaps, to form an overall picture.  Sometimes they make no sense whatever.  And every now and then you turn up a Coke can in the middle of what you had thought was a Neolithic enclosure.  Just like life, really.

Review: Batman: Arkham Asylum

Batman: Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Though Grant Morrison may not entirely agree, this book is almost entirely about the visuals; what his text did was create a suitably claustrophobic world where madness was not just near the surface, but in the sky-scrapers. He created a Batman who, far from being the straight arrow of the normative version is so shadowy a figure psychologically that he is scarcely there at all and a Joker who is a kind of psychic monster, expanding into whatever mental space one had thought safe from madness and poisoning it, until there is nowhere left to retreat and one has to either join him in the Asylum or be mad on the outside. Set against this, we see Amadeus Arkham discovering for himself that the truth is that madness reigns triumphant, and there is no meaning or order. All that, together with a little help from Marat Sade, and then it is over to Dave McKean, who turned Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth from being simply provoking into something quite devastating.

The visuals are simply amazing. The two principle characters, Batman and the Joker, are scarcely rendered even as people. Much of the time Batman is no more than a hint, a shadow, his presence indicated only by the characteristic ear-spikes or, more creepily, the bat-claws on his shoulders. Occasionally we see a suggestion of teeth, of a grimace, but never a face. Batman’s existence here is so liminal that one has to wonder if he is, in fact, a creation of the imagination, the Joker’s puppet in nature as well as in what he is made to enact. The Joker, on the other hand, is beyond human. He has become an all-encompassing presence, everywhere, all-seeing and all-knowing, creating much of the claustrophobia of the book by his sheer overwhelming presence. Whereas Batman is hardly there at all, the Joker is inescapable, a malign God whose intention, it seems, is to show shadowy humanity, just how unreal their precious world of order and logic is.

The rest of the art-work is superb, clearly influenced by the early surrealists, such as Max Ernst, in its use of collage, overlaying photograph, drawing and painting to create a gestalt which only serves to ram home the supernatural nature of the two principal characters by showing how, in comparison with the maniacal baroque reality, one is so insubstantial, the other so enormous.

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Review: Batman: The Killing Joke

Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Let me start this review by saying right up front that what Alan Moore does to poor Barbara is totally out of proportion. Sure he wants to show us that the Joker is monstrous and capable of doing extreme evil as easily as he could steal candy from a baby (to radically revise Nietzsche’s characterisation of the Superman), but as the act is symbolic, and is simply a reminder, it’s not clear that it is necessary that it involve such astonishing cruelty to a warm and positive character. For once, it seems, Moore forgot that his character was human, and did just treat her as pasteboard, her meaning lying in what she symbolised rather than who she was. If it’s any consolation, Moore now regrets this, and has even gone to the extent of satirising himself in Tomorrow Stories 2, where poor American Angel suffers a fate even worse than Barbara’s.

So, that out of the way, let’s look at what Moore’s grand scheme is. The conception of Batman and the Joker presented here is quite fascinating. Right from the outset, Batman has realised that he and the Joker are essentially symbiotic, and that their only alternatives are coexistence or mutual destruction. This is a profoundly troubled Batman who is aware that he cannot really live up to his own goal. And though rage briefly spurs him to violence, it is clear that he wants to talk to the Joker, to connect with him, to be at peace with him, rather than to kill him. The Joker is a vividly three-dimensional character, he knows that something forces him to do bad things, but he admits he doesn’t know why or what, and his glee in his badness is clearly forced, covering the bleakness that emerges in the final sad colloquy with Batman.

And this is where we see the key. Batman and the Joker are both forced to play out roles, though neither is entirely sure why, and those roles are the two sides of human nature. Batman is the questing seeker after perfection that is the human spirit, the light half of our minds. The Joker is the shadow, the animal that lurk in each of us, ready to take over should our inner Batman ever release his vigilance. So their symbiosis represents very exactly the fact that they are both within each of us, and to be fully human is not to be one or the other but to be both and to harness them in such a way that we can move forward as integrated individuals. And at the end of The Killing Joke Moore shows us his two halves of a fractured psyche sadly discussing whether it is even possible for them to move forward together. The answer, though it is left unresolved, appears to be ‘no’, a fatalism that I and Moore as of today would reject, but it provides a fitting end for a sombre tale.

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Review: 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom

25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom by Alan Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is rather a curate’s egg of a book, so I’ll review it under several headings because, fine work though it is, when viewed from different perspectives it scores very differently.

First the use of facts. Moore doesn’t footnote anything. There are no references. Apart from one hilarious case where even he says that something is pretty implausible and quotes his source, there’s really no way of telling where he got some of his facts from. In some cases he is simply wrong. In other cases he allows a somewhat rose-tinted view of the distant past overtake reality. For example, he rightly excoriates the Victorian habit of men indulging in sexual debauch while freezing out their women (though he, strangely, seems to think this a uniquely Anglo-Saxon phenomenon) but holds the view that, say, Roman society was massively permissive. Which it wasn’t: Roman women of quality were just as tightly bound as Victorian; we hear so much about the ravers because they were exceptions and notorious. And the Greek society that he idolises (by which I think he means classical Athens) was immensely hypocritical, with men doing things with boys and prostitutes they would never dream of doing in the home, and would kill their wives (over whom they had power a Taleban leader might only wish for) if they found them doing it. The pernicious sexual schizophrenia of Western society, the split between the man’s world and the family world, was born in the Athens of Pericles.

Moving on, Moore takes the usual ahistorical view of Christianity and the later Rome Empire (his chronology seems to break down at this point as well), has a touchingly quaint faith in the notion that there was something called the ‘Dark Ages’ and generally makes it sound as if all were swingers before the puritans came along. And that pornography has become more and more dehumanised over time. Well, for one thing, this is a very Whiggish view of history, and for a second, one only has to look at, say, some of the precursors to Tijuana Bibles issued in France before and after the Revolution (in which poor Marie Antoinette figured somewhat overmuch) to see that crassly stupid crudity is not a phenomenon of modernity, it’s just that we usually only see the good stuff from the past, whereas now we see all of it because time has not yet winnowed out the chaff.

And finally, for this part, I was simply stunned at the massively Eurocentric view of history. What about the influence of Islamic culture? Is Anglo-Saxon Europe really the only place where the double-standard reigned? Oh yes and, even more finally, I do find Moore’s enthusiasm for the anything goes culture a little lacking in thought. As well as the effect of time, one of the reasons why past erotica tends to be interesting, while modern porn isn’t is simply that the constraints under which artists in the past worked forced them to be more indirect and to work to a higher quality than is now the case; pornographers were more inventive. To see this, look at this piece of mine and compare and contrast modern ‘glamour’ shots with past. No constraint is as bad for art as too much constraint.

So, why four stars. For a simple reason. Though it does flag at the end, this is a wonderfully well written polemic, and it really doesn’t matter if it wouldn’t hold water as an academic study. It is a rant, and hugely enjoyable as such, and that is all it is intended to be. And as such, it succeeds admirably.

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Review: Lost Girls

Lost Girls by Alan Moore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

First things first, this is definitely proof that comics, or graphic novels, are not for children. Put simply, Alice (in Wonderland), Dorothy (of Oz) and Wendy (as in Peter Pan) meet in a hotel in southern Austria in 1913 / 14. Alice is an unrepentant sapphist, stints in asylums having done nothing to change her mind in that regard, Dorothy is healthily pansexual, in Europe for unspecified reasons but eager to experience all it has to offer, and Wendy is stuck in a loveless (in every sense) marriage with a man who hides himself behind his respect for convention. And what follows is a long draw out series of sexual experiments of all kinds, in which three women love one another in evert conceivable way, while not forgetting to take the opportunity to take pleasure with anyone else who happens to be willing. And while this goes on, they recount their stories, not as we know them, but the true stories of which the books we know are merely coded versions, the story of the sexual lives.

The first thing that has to be said about this book is that it is simply beautiful. From the sumptuous binding to the amazing art-work, merely looking at it is an act of pleasure in itself. And I don’t mean because of the naughty bits. The art work is superb, varying page layout and style, drawing on all the usual suspects as far as artistic style goes, and a few very unusual ones: the pseudo Randolph Caldecott soft-core Queen of Spades is a hoot, and the lesbian frolics a la Kate Greenaway is absolutely priceless. So style changes with mood, layout too, and colour and shape forms an absolutely integral part of the story.

As for the story, well I am fast coming to the conclusion that Alan Moore simply knows everything. He draws on his three source-texts (and a few others as well) and creates a massive revisionist take on them, turning them into stories of sexual misadventure, involving the amazingly unbuttoned lesbians of mid-Victorian England, high jinks on a farm in Kansas and a version of Peter Pan that just makes so much more sense than the original. And woven into all this is the ongoing world crisis that culminates in the juxtaposition of an orgy that I might call Sadeian, if it were not for the fact that all find pleasure in it, with the outbreak of war, the madness and dislocation of sexual order of the one acting as a natural mirror to the madness and destruction of all order of the other. Out of this only a new world and a new people can be born.

So we have a book of great subtlety, full of textual and artistic allusion, that makes a powerful case for a sexual version of Nietzsche’s re-evaluation of morals. We see more or less every possible sexual act and, with a few very specific exceptions, all of which are coercive, we see not the depravity, filth, degradation and inhumanity that even today puritans (who, depressingly, seem to occur at both ends of the political spectrum, from the body-denying, God-ridden demagogues of the right to the ‘all sex is rape’ ideologues of the left) claim follows in their wake. Instead we see joy, pleasure and an awakening of true humanity and caritas for one another. If only more people could not read Moore and Gebbie’s gospel.

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