Mark Waid and Peter Krause, Irredeemable Volume 1. BOOM! Studios, July 2009, $9.95. Mark Waid and Peter Krause, Irredeemable Volume 2. BOOM! Studios, December 2009, $16.99.
I was a judge for the 2010 Eisner Awards. Every year, awards administrator Jackie Estrada asks five people to serve as judges, and my colleagues this year were librarian and scholar Francisca Goldsmith, critic John Hogan, writer James Hudnall and retailer Wayne Winsett. (More about all of us here.) We had two tasks. First, we had to choose names for the Eisner Hall of Fame; we automatically inducted two creators (Burne Hogarth and Bob Montana) and assembled a slate of 13 others (Carl Burgos, Steve Gerber, Dick Giordano, Mike Kaluta, Jack Kamen, Frans Masereel, George McManus, Sheldon Moldoff, Marty Nodell, Bob Oksner, Bob Powell, Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Mort Weisinger) that industry voters will winnow down to four winners, to be announced at the San Diego Comic-Con. We cobbled together our Hall of Fame list through e-mail and message board discussion.
A much harder job was picking the five to six nominees in each of the Eisner's traditional categories: "Best Short Story," "Best Continuing Series," "Best Graphic Novel" and the others. For each judge, this basically entailed reading everything--or at least as much as possible--published in 2009, and then figuring out what was, in our individual opinion, the best. We kept cyber-chatting about our favorite (and least favorite) comics, and Jackie kept the process bouncing along by sending us packages of books to read and evaluate. I wrote mini-reviews on index cards of all the books I read, and kept the index cards in one of those little lidded boxes where moms store their recipes. Verbatim, here's the text from one of my cards, about a book that all the judges loved:
Eleanor Davis (Bloomsbury, 2009)
Charming story about three kids who build inventions together, and what happens when their ideas are stolen by a dishonest scientist / Drawn and written extremely well by Davis, and inked by Drew Weing / Davis tells much of the story through complicated diagrams--and given that Secret's central protagonist is a red-haired nerd, the whole book can be read as a riff on (or a parody of) Chris Ware's Rusty Brown serial / Fairly unattractive cover, alas.
Evaluation: An excellent all-ages book. Lobby for a nomination.
On Wednesday, March 24, I brought my recipe box with me when I flew to California. First stop was Burbank, where I hung out with three members of the Hatfield clan (Charles, Michelle, Nick) for a day. (Charles and I hadn't seen each other in person since 2007--in other words, since before we started this blog--and that's too long.) On Thursday afternoon, Charles drove me to San Diego, where I spent the weekend with the other Eisner judges hashing out the final ballot of nominees. I was going to write a torturously-detailed description of what the actual judging process was like, but no need: Jim Hudnall has his own straight-forward account of the experience here and here, and my experience is very much in sync with what James writes. My only problem with Eisner judging is that it shattered one of my childhood dreams. As a kid, I fantasized about being locked for a week in a comic book store, with hours and hours to read hundreds of comics that I'd never seen before, and our Eisner suite was like that store, packed with graphic novels, floppies and books that I was eager to read and re-read. After three days, though, even I had reached my saturation point: horror of horrors, I wanted to stop reading comics for a little while. Being a judge is an intense, immersive experience.
If you're curious and you haven't seen it yet, our final list of nominees is here. I admit that I've taken pleasure, perverse and otherwise, from the blogosphere's response to the list. Some of my favorite comments are courtesy of Matt D. (scroll down for his killer one-liner "How do the judges sleep at night knowing they nominated James Robinson for Best Writer?"), Tom Spurgeon (with a long, thoughtful take), and the tag-team pile-up of Alan David Doane and Christopher Allen. (Poor, poor Geoff Johns.) And when Sean T. Collins wrote that we picked the nominees "out of a hat," he couldn't have been more wrong: I'll have you know that we used a goddamn shoebox, Collins! (Also read Sean's longer follow-up.) I don't feel particularly wounded by the criticisms, partially because I agree with some of them. There are several books and comics that I wish had made the ballot, and other nominees that I can't stand. But comics is a big tent, and when my fellow judges didn't share one of my choices, I'd read my recipe-card review out loud to try to convince them that X just had to be nominated. Lively debate typically followed. Sometimes I got my way, and sometimes not, a state of affairs that was true for all the other judges as well. Jackie Estrada appoints judges from various aesthetic constituencies within the comics community, and as a result the Eisner ballot reflects an unwieldy, provocative variety of tastes.
One perk of the Eisner process was discovering worthy comics previously unknown to me. I'm not much of a superhero reader these days (see Charles' Blackest Night review for reasons why), but before I went to San Diego, I still tried to read as many mainstream comics as I could, particularly critically praised titles like Captain America and Detective Comics. Somehow, though, I missed Mark Waid and Peter Krause's Irredeemable, so I was lucky that Jackie had a stack of Irredeemable floppies available in our judging suite. Two of my fellow judges talked Irredeemable up ("It's awesome, you've gotta read it!"), so I took the stack with me--along with other comics and books I needed to catch up on--to my hotel room, to read before I fell asleep.
Sure enough, Irredeemable was awesome enough to keep me awake and reading, even as the "artier" books in the pile made me doze. (I'm going to discuss the series in detail, so insert the obligatory spoiler alert here.) Irredeemable takes place in a world where, two weeks ago, Superman--called "The Plutonian" in the Irredeemaverse--went really, really bad. His reason? Many scenes throughout the series indicate that he's tired of mankind's constant neediness and lack of gratitude. His super-hearing provides him with a never-ending, unsettling channel of cries for help and bitchy gossip, and back in his hero days, he had to sort through this din and make hard choices about who to save and who to abandon. A clear antecedent to the Plutonian is Astro City's Samaritan, who was introduced in a 1995 tale as a similarly-burdened, but considerably nobler, Superman avatar.
The Plutonian's first act of criminal madness was tearing down Metropolis-doppelganger Sky City and murdering millions of Sky City's inhabitants, a story twist which reminded me not a little of Kid Miracleman's decimation of London. Since then, The Plutonian has continued to terrorize the world on a macro scale--"Wow, population is really down...on the upside, however, this is a boom time for mapmakers"--and the only resistance is the Paradigm, a Justice League-like group of heroes that counted the Plutonian among its members. Irredeemable #1 plunges us into the action with full-bore in media res panache: in the first six pages, the Plutonian uses his heat vision to incinerate the Hornet (a Paradigm teammate) and most of the Hornet's immediate family.
In the first eight issues of the series (collected in the first two trade paperbacks), Irredeemable's creative team extend and develop the hysteria of this opening scene through suspenseful cross-cutting: we're constantly jumping back-and-forth between the Plutonian (who spends most of his time acting like a shit, with his threat-by-surveillance in issue #5 particularly unsettling) and the Paradigm, whose members scramble to discover ways to defeat their teammate-gone-wrong. I found the results a quick, ferocious read: not profound art, but an entertaining rollercoaster ride.
Much of the credit belongs to artist Peter Krause. I don't think he's quite the clone of Brent Anderson that Alex Boney claims, though both artists produce streamlined versions of Neal Adams' semi-realistic visuals. More importantly, Krause's art is always clear, direct, and "legible," essential qualities in these days of decompressed storytelling, where omniscient captions and thought balloons are rare, character dialogue is taciturn, and pictures carry the narrative. One of the first comics I ever read was Fantastic Four #62 (May 1967), and when I reread Lee/Kirby now, I'm flabbergasted at how many words Lee was able to squeeze into Kirby's detailed panels:
Word count for the above panel: 144. Average word count per page of Irredeemable #1: 38.2. Less verbiage means more emphasis on the pictures to represent events all by themselves, as clearly as possible, and Krause's drawings pull this off, especially in scenes where he stages in depth to reveal passions and hint at secrets among members of the Paradigm. In issue eight, Gilgamos, a winged member of the Paradigm, discovers that the Plutonian has kidnapped a minor supervillain, Encanta, and dressed her up to look exactly like Bette Noir, another member of the Paradigm and Gilgamos' wife. As Gilgamos asks Encanta kinky questions, Bette herself stands in the background, loading her gun and preparing to shoot Encanta in the head before any embarrassing secrets are revealed:
Bette's deliberate, cold-blooded loading of her gun (with a silver bullet, probably the only kind that can kill a witchy character like Encanta) plays out without words, like many of the scenes in Irredeemable, and it's to Krause's credit that the pictures are easy to follow even when they're unsupported by captions.
I'm also a fan of Mark Waid's scripting here, even though I usually hate dark, "realistic" superhero stories: most cynical and serious treatments of flamboyant men-in-tights send me screaming back to Beck Captain Marvel reprints. But I admire Waid's sheer ruthlessness and bombast, his willingness to kill off his characters (poor, poor Hornet), and display the members of the Paradigm in profoundly unflattering lights; as the series progresses, it becomes clear that the Plutonian isn't the only one who's irredeemable. I've been lukewarm about Waid's work before--I've never been able to make it through Kingdom Come (maybe because of Alex Ross' art, which I've always found less compelling than old-fashioned, well executed pen-and-ink cartooning)--but I gleefully sped-read through Irredeemable.
I also like the way Waid manipulates plot and story in Irredeemable, and one of the clearest explanations of the distinction between plot and story is in Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell's Film Art textbook. Thompson and Bordwell define a film's plot as everything a spectator sees and hears while watching a movie from start to finish. Plot includes, then, the opening and closing credits as well as more stereotypically "plotty" stuff like action scenes and conversations among characters. In contrast, the story is the plot, plus those narrative elements that are inferred (but not directly perceived) by our hypothetical spectator. Let's say that you're watching a shot of a protagonist going to bed, followed by an immediate cut to the next scene, where our hero(ine) is sitting at a table eating a bowl of cereal. The cut between these two shots implies the passage of a not-insignificant amount of time: the plot consists of the two shots that appear on the screen (going to bed, then eating the cereal), while the story is those two shots plus the time we infer to have passed between them (seven hours' worth of sleep, say). In Film Art, Thompson and Bordwell discuss North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) in detail, pointing out that that the movie's plot lasts 131 minutes--the film's complete running time--while the story, through direct representation and implication, covers two-and-a-half days in Roger Thornhill's life as he travels from New York to Chicago to Rapid City, South Dakota.
Further, plots can also present their selective events out of chronology (flashbacks, and more rarely flashforwards), and active viewers must then re-shape the plot in their heads to build a story that follows chronological order. Mysteries typically withhold the "whodunit" revelation until the end of a narrative, even though the crime itself happens at the beginning, and the reader or spectator must mentally take the climactic "whodunit" and move it, like a chess piece, to the beginning of the chronology constructed in his/her memory. There's a subset of contemporary Hollywood films--Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), The Hangover (Todd Phillips, 2009)--where the plot is presented in scrambled order, and half the fun for audiences is in figuring out how the plot pieces fit together into a coherent timeline.
Applying these notions of plot and story to Irredeemable helped me better understand (and appreciate) how Waid has built his narrative to deviate from traditional, advance-from-the-present chronology. In the first issue, Qubit, the super-scientist member of the Paradigm, charges his teammates to remember, and research, as much as they can about the Plutonian's background:
This is also a job for Irredeemable's readers: throughout the series, we're expected to both (a.) cobble together the history of the Irredeemaverse based on the bits of information that the Paradigm unearth (mostly through interviews with the Plutonian's friends and foes), and (b.) thrill to the action-packed plot, as the war between the Plutonian and his ex-teammates escalates. Like the TV show Lost (2004-2010), Irredeemable simultaneously reveals surprises about characters' pasts and chronicles how those surprises influence a present-day situation, and this two-part narrative structure prompts readers to make guesses about the myriad way that past and present connect. One minor possible connection begins to unfold in issue #3, as the Plutonian meets with villains in his Rogue's Gallery and complains about how unsatisfying he found his previous life of selfless heroism:
"Volcano"? Ah, a clue to the location of the Plutonian's "Fortress of Solitude"--a clue Waid references in the very next issue, when a flashback conversation between the Plutonian and Qubit is interrupted by an erupting volcano in Japan. (As the Plutonian flies off, Qubit says, "Of course, of course, that volcano won't cap itself, will it?") Will this be the same volcano where the Plutonian decides to build his lair? By choosing to include Qubit's line in the plot, Waid makes us wonder, and I find being kept in the dark pretty fun.
Maybe, though, I've bonded with Irredeemable for personal reasons beyond Waid and Krause's collaborative craft. Specifically, there's a scene in issue #4 that reminded me of the Eisner judging process. After he's angered by Singapore's delegate to the United Nations, the Plutonian begins to push the island nation into the waters of the Strait of Singapore, murdering the nation's four-million-plus inhabitants. Several members of the Paradigm--Bette Noir, Gilgamos, Qubit--use their "quantum jumpers" (bracelets that instantly transport them from one place to another, keeping them one step ahead of the Plutonian) to go to Singapore and whisk as many people off the island as they can before it sinks. Bette and Gil are wounded by the Plutonian, however, and as Qubit pushes his fallen teammates through the quantum gateway, the following scene unfolds:
Sitting in the Eisner judging suite, I felt a little like Qubit, forced to make a succession of Sophie's choices about which books to include on the ballot, and which to reject. (Choose. Five.) It was difficult being an Eisner judge during the true Golden Age of the comics medium, and I can't guarantee that our choices will survive the proverbial and canonical test of time. Heck, I can't even guarantee that Irredeemable will sustain its momentum as a series; Alex Boney, for one, feels like later issues are considerably weaker than the ones collected in the first two Irredeemable trade paperbacks. (I bought these later issues directly from Waid and Krause at Heroes Con in June, but I haven't read them yet...should I? Should I read Incorruptible?) A recent trip to the comics shop netted me The Playwright, Werewolves of Montpellier, the second issue of The Bulletproof Coffin, Mome #19 and The Man with the Getaway Face...and I suspect next year's judges will have it as tough as we did in 2009.
Great observations, Craig!
And how wonderful that Kirby panel is! Your remark about taciturn character dialogue is certainly pertinent. In today's US mainstream comics there's too much of characters barking three-word sentences at each other while gritting their teeth.
One doesn't even need to go as far back as FF #62 for a different aesthetic. Recently I browsed through Grant Morrison's Justice League run from the mid-90s and was struck how information- and word-dense it is.
I want more eloquence in US mainstream comics :-)
Posted by: FrF | July 24, 2010 at 03:03 PM
I agree completely.
The overabundance of words has been a nagging problem for quite a while. I remember reading one of the archived editions of Legion of Superheroes and being amazed at how overabundant the words were. I think one of the major problems deals with the scripting process and juxtaposing that to the artwork, but I still feel that this does not excuse many situations; like a character saying five different things about an obstacle, "Oh no! This large purple alien elephant is about to fall on us and smash us to pieces"! Stuff like that is inexcusable.
I very much like Irredeemable, the sense of dissimilarity and parallels between the idealistic Superman and the insane Plutonian really struck a cord with me. I got a sense of what Lex Luthor feels about "The man of tomorrow", a similar feeling that I found in Lex Luthor: Man of Steel by by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo.
Posted by: James Medina | August 02, 2010 at 03:03 PM