Comics: Clinging to Art!

Both the big superhero comic book companies, Marvel and DC, are currently in continuity turmoil that would be shocking if it weren’t so crucially boring. And it makes the weekly trip to my beloved Comicopia here in Boston a bit of a trial. Gone beyond reclamation – almost beyond recall – are the days when superhero storylines had a comforting sameness, when Thor was fighting Ulik the Troll and the Justice League was teaming up with the Justice Society. Gone, indeed, are the days when the basic givens of Thor – good guy, hell, even male – or the Justice League were, in fact, givens. Instead, what with Marvel’s Secret Wars and its upshot and DC’s Convergence, every given of previous decades seems to be up for grabs, and the ongoing monthly titles that will arise from both these events very likely won’t resemble anything old or be anything stable themselves. The Fantastic Four? Gone. The X-Men? Split. The Avengers? A quantum astrophysicist couldn’t figure out their current eighteen teams.

It’s lead to bizarre shocks for a stuffy old comics reader such as myself. I had such a shock a few weeks ago when I stumbled into a Superman story that I initially took to be a dark, weird, alternate-reality take on the character: not just possessing, as near as I could tell, his original 1938 power set, but also having had his secret identity as Clark Kent exposed to the world. It turns out this isn’t an alternate-reality isolated story at all – the confusing thing is only that DC is unfolding the story in an odd (perhaps incompetent? I can’t imagine them wanting to roll it out ass-backwards like this) way, giving us the aftermath in Action Comics before giving us the big events themselves in Superman. In Action Comics, we see a bitter, buzz-cut Superman, secret identity already exposed, living an embattled fugitive existence. In Superman, we see the more ‘traditional’ Superman, still fighting to save his secret identity from an anonymous blackmailer, still abundantly superpowered, etc. Reading these issues week-to-week is an oddly disjointed experience.

But one thing struck me today as I browsed the shelves at Comicopia: comic book artists have to eat. The best of them go where the money is, and their work is every bit as enjoyable as whether or not the stories they serve make much sense. And for a nice stretch of issues now, Superman has been drawn by one of the best comic book artists in the business: John Romita Jr. And reading his latest issue – in which it’s Lois Lane herself who reveals Superman’s secret identity to the world, in order to free him from the grip of his blackmailers – was like listening to a comic book symphony … just fantastic work on every page. Fantastic enough, I was happy to discover, to allow me to ignore the nonsense of the story itself.

Of course, it’s nicer not to need to do that, and today’s comics gave me another art-driven opportunity: the great artist/writer Mike Mignola, who’s currently producing (veeery slowly, but still) a series starring his signature character, Hellboy, called Hellboy in Hell. It’s a protracted and tangled story in which our demonic hero dies and goes to Hell for his latest series of adventures (once I’ve scrutinized the inevitable graphic novel, I’ll report back on the plot itself), and it features the best artwork Mignola has ever done.

Paging through Hellboy in Hell was in some ways a very different experience from paging through Superman – Mignola has mastered the now-outdated art of making his character consistently interesting while also keeping him consistently the same – but the two comics had that one big thing in common: giants doing the art. And in these chaotic latter days, that’ll have to be good enough.