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Column Negative Two: Warm-Up Exercises for the Dead - Part Two 1. Selling England by the Pound Everyone has wished for a comic that would hearken back to the days of the extraordinary evil of the Spider, thrill at the escapes made by Janus Stark, and be amazed by the dynamo of Robot Archie. They were England's greatest comic heroes in their day and if you don't have a bloody clue who they are, you're not alone. On the surface, the idea of a book revealing that a world's favourite comic stories actually existed is a very good one. Particularly, it was done extremely well in James Sturm's take on the Fantastic Four as being based on a real family in Unstable Molecules. Yet, where that told a story of "real" people, this instead is based around the idea that the superheroes were really "real". Here in Albion, it feels as though Alan Moore wanted to bring a little more magic to superheroes, but that magic dissipated when handed down through his daughter and her writing partner. 
The main problem I have with the story is that it's disjointed. In an attempt at world-building, Leah Moore and John Reppion fail to give us anything substantial to actually hook our teeth into. It's almost as though we're automatically supposed to know who these characters are, even though before now they've never existed. Instead of a deep through line of mystery following the two who appear to be our main characters, Penny and Danny, we're given snippets of attacks on what appear to be fellow schoolgirls, what might be a prison for old comics characters (or might just be a prison for supervillains for all we know), and well, a whole load of hints and innuendo from the main characters that successfully only get us nowhere.There is an attempt at giving us an appropriate amount of back story through the use of flashback, these flashbacks being told using alternate comics styles to mesh with the idea that these people were those who the comics were based on, but it feels like too little. It's a great idea, but there's too much disconnect going on already through the broken nature of the narrative. From the first two issues, you get the impression that something dark and insidious is going on, perhaps just the government's apparent cover-up of the existence of the comics characters in the first place, but it isn't capitalised upon to give us a real hook into actually wanting to read further. In a kind of way, it feels like a very hollow, heartless rehash of the themes in Watchmen. Reading through Albion makes me kind of leery of the other titles that formerly constituted the America's Best Comics line. How do titles like Tom Strong and Top 10 read without Alan Moore at the helm? It now feels kind of like the Tekno Comics company from the early to mid 90's that built their comics around ideas from Neil Gaiman, Leonard Nimoy, and Isaac Asimov among others. The concepts themselves were usually sound, but the execution was often a bit dodgy. 2. Out of the Machine 
Aside from the fact that it is apparently the story of the mayor of New York, who happens to be a former superhero, I know nothing about Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris' Ex Machina. It was one of those titles that popped up and gained notoriety during my absence, but in theory I like Vaughan's writing (Y - The Last Man was always an enjoyable read while I was reading it) and love Harris' artwork (or, at least, I did when he was paired with Wade Von Grawbadger on Starman). I thought that it would be one of the titles I'd give a try as I attempt to get back into this.Now, normally these days I'd pick up a trade collection or two, and then continue on with the series wherever it happened to leave off. When I looked, Ex Machina currently has one trade, The First Hundred Days, and another solicited, Tag, for September. Instead of instantly picking them up, I decided to preorder the second trade along with the first one as a backlist item, the then solicited issues for August and September, and then pick up the back issues that were currently out (at first issues 11 and 12, then issue 13 a couple of weeks ago). All of this, I based on the solicitation copy for issue 11, which reads as follows:
You'd think that would be a pretty good indicator that this would be a good place to start reading. It isn't. This is a bridging issue, a breather between story-arcs and such, and unfortunately it appears as though the introductory single issue story has become lost somewhere along the way. I won't say that Ex Machina #11, "Fortune Favors" is impenetrable, just that it doesn't exactly serve as any reason as to why I should continue to read the book. For one, the main thrust of the story is that Mitchell Hundred, mayor of New York and former superhero The Great Machine, is starting to enforce some by-laws on the books in order to "crack down" on crime; the one in particular being fortune-tellers. This, of course, leads to one of his staff telling him about a woman who "saved" her from dying in the collapse of the World Trade Center (although this is partially unclear as to what exactly happened in this universe. It's evident that here at least the second tower was saved, but the fate of the first tower is in question) and then Hundred speaking to said fortune-teller. We learn of Hundred's guilt over the people he couldn't save on 9/11, as well as his seemingly hypocritical stance on the predictions of the fortune-teller, especially in light of his own powers. It's an incongruity also brought up by the characters themselves, but summarily dismissed. The only thing that this book seems to do successfully is convince me that the main character is a complete asshole. I don't know if that's supposed to be intentional, but it doesn't make me want to go out and read anything more. To flip something Warren Ellis reported a fan stating in his Bad Signal mailing-list, "why would I read comics about a superhero mayor when I can buy Joe Sacco?" Maybe the series actually is something different and something worth reading, but I'm not sold on it through this issue. The artwork from Tony Harris and Tom Feister is nice, but I still prefer the days when Harris' artwork was a wee bit rougher and more in line with what JH Williams III's style is today. 3. Cape fetishes, necrophilia, and other sexual hang-ups 
Internet fan response to the first issue of All-Star Batman & Robin has been somewhat funny in its universal hatred of the issue. It's not all that surprising on the negative reaction to Frank Miller's previous run at Batman in The Dark Knight Strikes Again, a series so-wretched that even the colours of Day-Glo pink and neon green warn you away from the contents, but it is given that this is supposed to be DC's first salvo into the realm of a self-contained, relatively continuity-free, "pure" representation of their iconic characters. What is especially funny, though, is one of the key points people have in detracting away from the book; Vicki Vale lounging around in her underwear.It's evident in any review that the reviewer themselves are going to come into it with their own biases. Unless you're writing a straight down the line synopsis of the book, you're going to colour your review with bits and pieces of your personality. It's just that the hang-up on pink frilly undergarments is just, well, silly. There are much better reasons to hate the book. You see, there's this general consensus that the comics fan is an undersexed, emotionally repressed, parents'-basement-living troll and harping on underwear is only successfully feeding into that idea. Through the tub-thumping and general brow-beating over something really as inherently innocent as seeing a drawing of a woman in underwear, it feeds the idea that these people are repressed. They are repressed, perhaps even to the point where they're possibly disgusted with the idea that they themselves are somewhat titillated by the pictures and so lash out at something that they perceive to be "wrong". or perhaps the lashing out is in due course something inculcated in the fanboy's mind as a perpetuation of what they think should be the group response to the imagery. There has been so much oversexualisation of women in comic books, especially during the nineties with all the "bad girl" comic books, that anything even remotely resembling sexuality in a superhero book must therefore be looked down upon. I mean, if you're going to hate the comic book, hate it on the grounds that it's one of the worst-written pieces of trash from one of comics' legendary creators. It seems as though Frank Miller has bought into the Jeph Loeb school of dialogue and narration of "state the obvious and have them think incredibly simple things". The book reads as though it were written by a freaking eight-year old. The internal monologue of each of the characters, despite being grating and making them each sound incredibly vapid and vacant, is also incredibly repetitive. I can understand the use of repetition for the point of clarification or for driving a point particularly home, the use of repetition to reinforce an idea, but this is just silly. I mean, "They're always there for me. They always catch me. Mom and Dad. They always catch me. They're always there for me. They're always there for me. I fly." It's just downright amateurish and honestly makes the characters seem as though they all have OCD or something. Next: A read through a book of the dead.
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