An Open Letter To Mark Millar Re: Superior

Dear Mark Millar,

In the unlikely event that you have been reading this blog, you probably know my increasing dissatisfaction with your output in the past few years. This comes from a place where I once loved your work, back on the Authority and the Ultimate titles. There were innovative titles that were very entertaining and felt like genuinely modern takes on the superhero genre. Even in more recent years you've delivered some very good comics like Wolverine: Enemy of the State and the Marvel Knights Spider-Man. The frustration I feel with more recent works (particularly your ICON output and your Ultimate Avengers revamp) comes from the feeling that you are working well below your potential. Some part of me still held out hope that you'd do thoughtful works again, but after I read Superior #4, I realized that wouldn't be the case.

My experience with Superior was at first conflicted; on the one hand, I thought that the not-Superman Superman analogue was the worst cliche of creator-owned superhero writers, filing serial numbers off and calling it 'meta' rather than creating unique characters. One the other hand, I was impressed with how Simon's Multiple Sclerosis was handled. You made the character's suffering realistic and sympathetic, and you treated him as a major character rather than a pet to showcase others' greatness. And even while I'd lost interest in your other books, I still wanted to see this story progress, and see how Simon would live his life with super-powers.

But that's not what this story is about, is it? The backstory of Simon is scarcely mentioned in issues 3 and 4, and instead the story starts focusing on the Superman analogue. All the old tropes are trotted out, with Simon doing all the heroic Superman things with his Superior powers, and the world acting like he's a savior. The narrator even goes out to talk about Superman-- I mean Superior's origins, and how he inspired kids people during the 30's. This is a unique insight that everyone who's even heard of The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay already knows.

Admittedly, it's optimistic, which is a far cry from your previous Icon stories (which are about, respectively, a wannabe teen hero who pretends to be gay to get chicks, and an evil Batman analogue who impregnates his enemy's daughter with the sperm of his son and booby-traps her womb. But just because it's unique for you, doesn't mean it's unique for others. I've already seen stories that try to reintroduce wonder and hope to superhero comics. I've read Marvels, the "Heroes Return" Marvel books, Grant Morrison's JLA and All-Star Superman, Mark Waid's Fantastic Four, and other comics that believed that being traditional was revolutionary. Most of them weren't so self-conscious about it, though-- they also had inherently interesting stories to go with the nostalgia.

This would merely make it forgettable had I not read your afterword for the first issue, where you talk about the importance of creating new heroic characters for each generation, like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko did in the 60's. But a technicality doesn't make something new. Superior is Prime from Malibu's Ultraverse, who was Captain Marvel from Fawcett. If it was a story about a kid dying of multiple sclerosis, as in the actually GOOD opening parts of the comic, I would have loved it. But you couldn't divorce yourself from the superhero genre, and had to make MS the Culturally Noteworthy Tragic Backstory to inspire Simon when he becomes Superior. Which, in its own way, is again reducing the disabled character to a prop off which others look better.

The cliffhanger with the seemingly compassionate but actually evil Space Monkey giving Simon's bully powers did nothing to convince me that this story will be going anywhere. I'm just not going to bother, because if you've stopped caring about trying anything different, why should I care about what you do?

Hoping you'll write something interesting again,
-Neil Kapit

Nemesis #2, Crowning Moment in Narrative Laziness!

For the pages in question, go here

Nemesis, the new creator-owned series by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven, is about a Batman-type vigilante who uses his unequaled skills and resources to cause crimes, rather than fight them. In the second issue, we find out the origin of Nemesis; when young Matthew Anderson's parents were arrested for hunting transients as sport, he trained himself to be the greatest criminal ever. And I quote...

" Bored shitless with his [Matt's uncle and legal guardian] endless choir practice and impeccable manners, I ran away and travelled the world, learning at the feet of its magnificent bastards. By twelve I was a gang lord. At fifteen I was Asia's largest drugs exporter. At twenty-three I headed a Zoroastrian death-cult and was finally ready to honor my mother's dying wish. "

Note how all of this is caption narration over a panel where we see a young man in a hooded sweater in a dark alley. Obviously, this is a take-off on how Bruce Wayne travelled the world to learn the ninja skills he would use as Batman. However, there are some questions raised by this, such as

1.) Why would all these " magnificent bastards " train Matt in their criminal trades? Do they take time off of stealing and murdering to mentor at-risk youth in super-villainy?

2.) How did a teenaged boy, even a precociously evil one, run a criminal empire successfully without ever getting caught?

3.) Why would he run a death cult with its name attached to an ancient religion practiced today only by hundreds of thousands ( most of whom, I'll wager, are NOT mass-murderers ).

4.) Are we going to see any of this on panel?

The answers are; not explained, not explained, not explained, and probably not. Many stories have been done about Bruce Wayne's pre-Batman life and his training in martial arts; they devoted a whole movie to it ( Batman Begins ), and it was a very good movie. Millar's logic seems to be that because we get the joke that Nemesis is Batman with the serial numbers filed off and his morals ( and color scheme ) flipped 180 degrees, we can get the joke that Nemesis would just have the same background, except trained by the wicked instead of the virtuous.

See, 70 years of Batman writers already did all the work, so Millar can just piggyback on our familiarity with Batman!

Of course, that's the way the entirety of Nemesis works. It is a story that relies on better stories to do its heavy lifting. We know that Officer Blake Morrow is supposed to be Comissioner Gordon, so we don't need to hear too much about who he is as a character, what makes him tick, how he gets along with his family ( a brief comment to his partner about Morrow's arguments with his wife is dropped in a mechanical fashion ). We know that Batman has a bunch of wonderful toys, so we don't need to see what makes Nemesis' tech any more special. We know that the Joker is the homicidal artist that Nemesis is aping, so we don't need to see any particularly unique crimes. After all, the late Heath Ledger's epic performance set the groundwork for the entire media-friendly world appreciating the Joker, so all that Nemesis needs is for us to " hear " Ledger's voice when we read the guy's word balloons!

The truth is, all I can hear from Nemesis is Christian Bale's Batman voice, trying for intimidating and ending up with ridiculous growling.

The galling part is that this comic is under Marvel's creator-owned Icon imprint, but there's very little actually CREATED here*. This is a lame joke about an iconic superhero character, stretched out in an attempt at a story. It's not entertainingly over-the-top, because it sticks so close to the source material. It's not deep, because it doesn't expand far beyond what we already know about the characters and tropes. And while there's a plot that will be going on for two more issues, thus far all we've seen is the most rudimentary duel of wits we can imagine; " I planned for you to fail like that! " " No, I planned YOU to fail like that! ". There aren't characters, there aren't conflicting ideologies, and there are barely thrills.

If you want a great story about a superhero gone bad, read Mark Waid and Peter Kruse's Irredeemable-- it's a Superman gone bad and not a Batman, but it's got much more depth and suspense. If you want a great story about a Batman analogue raised towards evil, read the Prometheus story in Grant Morrison's second JLA Deluxe hardcover. I suppose if you want a story that's an exact replica of " What if Batman was bad ", without ties to any character outside the Batman mythos, Nemesis is your book. But you should probably wait for the inevitable movie made from Millar's Nemesis script, because the cast and crew there are much less likely to phone it in.

* At least not by Millar; Dave McCaig offers excellent colors, and Steve McNiven draws in a rougher style that looks much more appealing than his hyper-rendered work on previous Millar titles. It's a shame that Millar has kept us from seeing McNiven's artwork on a decent story on three consecutive occasions.

Kick-Ass Graphic Novel Review: Itching and Scratching

The Jist:Dave Lizewski is your typical American teenaged boy, from a very pessimistic perspective. His hobbies include reading comic books, playing video games, furtively masturbating, and pretending to be gay to attract girls. In order to give his life some meaning, he decides to take a page from his favorite comics and become a costumed vigilante in his New York City neighborhood. Since he has no super-powers, this doesn't go well for him-- but once footage of him goes online, it starts a trend...

The Crew:Mark Millar ( writer ), John Romita Jr. ( penciller ), Tom Palmer ( inker ), Dean White ( colorist )

The Details:Since Mark Millar's name is on the credits, it's very much a Mark Millar story. Fortunately, it's one of the best ones he's done.

Part of the reason I like Kick-Ass so much is because it's much more humanized than other Mark Millar stories. The fact that it's set in the real world instead of a superhero universe helps this, thought that isn't to say it's realistic-- this is a universe where a ten-year-old girl has the physical strength to slice through a grown man's skull with a katana with one swing, after all. It's about as realistic as an Itchy and Scratchy short on the Simpsons, but without the science-fiction genre tropes offering convenient deus ex machinas, the focus is more on the characters-- and they're well-realized, if thoroughly unlikable.

People have compared the original Peter Parker to J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, but Dave ( Kick-Ass ) is much more of a Holden Caulfield than Spidey-- which is to say that he's a whiny, selfish prick who comes across as pathetic to anyone over the age of 17. He's not a costumed vigilante because he wants to help people and stop crime; he never even had any contact with crime prior to putting on his costume. Kick-Ass is him taking his adolescent power fantasy way too far, putting himself at risk and worrying his widowed father needlessly. And it doesn't make him reform from the little weasel he is in his " civilian " identity, who will claim that he's slightly autistic to avoid getting a richly-deserved punch in the face*. At the same time, he does show rare displays of genuine courage and selflessness when caught up in the moment, running into a burning building to save a woman's " child "**. One thing that's common in Millar's comic is the notion that even good people can do horrible things; it's nice to see the reverse here.

The other characters, as a pleasant surprise, are equally interesting. Shortly after becoming Kick-Ass, Dave is joined by other costumed vigilantes-- and they're all as messed-up as him. They come across as messed-up in different ways, though, and offer a pretty diverse cast based on the notion of the adolescent power fantasy gone awry. Hit-Girl, the ten year old swordsmaster ( and the most surreal character in the comic ), doesn't know anything other than a power fantasy. Big Daddy, her costumed partner/father, enforces his power fantasies upon his daughter, and tries to convince himself that he's doing her a favor. And the villain is a perfect " dark reflection " of Dave-- and since Dave's not a nice guy to begin with, he's entertainingly pathetic in his deviance.

It's still very much a Mark Millar story, with profanity and violence and cynicism everywhere, but it's a very good one. John Romita Jr. deserves a lot of credit for that; his cartoony, sketchy style suits the story perfectly, and goes to exaggerate the violence and the humiliation instead of try to humanize it. Millar's more recent collaborators have tended to be hyper-detailed realists like Bryan Hitch and Steve McNiven, and the results for those stories haven't worked for me because they've just illuminated the ridiculousness. But Romita Jr. makes the teenagers look awkward and goofy, the costumes look ridiculous and home-made, and the violence look like-- well, Itchy and Scratchy. The result is a collaboration that won't change anyone's mind about Mark Millar, but it's one of his best, and strongly recommended for fans of dark humor.

* ( I had a real problem with this scene, because even though it was meant to show that Dave is a coward, it's going to be taken out of context. To too many people, Asperger's is a self-diagnosis people use to excuse their failings. In reality, the people who would actually diagnose themselves with it would either have the condition, or have enough mental problems that a label is appropriate, even if not one on the autism spectrum. Autism is NOT a label that makes life easy; often, it makes life even harder for the stigma. And lines like this make the problem worse, with the comedic tone obscuring the problem. )

** ( He saves the woman's cat, and is frustrated that he's risking his life for a cat. I'd personally be happier with saving a cat than a baby... )