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Column: Special Feature   Extended Flashback: 2007 in Review By Adam McGovern

(Continued from Page 3)

Best Use of Text in a Comic: “The Clown at Midnight” by Grant Morrison (words) and John Van Fleet (images), Batman #663 [DC]

From Batman #663 (click to view full-size)

In awards programs, nostalgia mags, and retro graphic lit, few corners of comics — from pirates to funny animals, fetish-art to sea monkeys — haven’t come under consideration for their place in history and potential value. So why not the comics text page — that accessory artform which began its long life as a string of short adventure tales, mysteries, O. Henry-esque shockers, true-crime and absurd-science stories stuck on back pages from comics’ earliest days?

One reason of course is that this marooned stepchild of the prose fiction that comics were always thought inferior to and pallid ghost of the pulp mags whose popularity they eclipsed is the one part of the medium which got no respect even from fans in its heyday let alone from revisionist scholars now — thrown in to justify comics’ postal status as “magazines” and tossed off by gratefully nameless wage-slaves, there pages are what nobody collects or studies comics for.

And yet the rehabilitation of pure-print’s presence in comics has been underway since at least the ’70s, when Steve Gerber would embed student diaries in Man-Thing’s high-school gothic morality plays, press-conference transcripts in Howard the Duck’s presidential-campaign burlesque, etc. Fake ads and simulated archives have been a fixture of everyone from mainstream master Alan Moore to indie icon Chris Ware for years, either to leave an immersive paper trail for fictional worlds (Moore), spoof the archaic lifestyles and fringe perspectives missed by not paying attention to the fine print (Ware), or broaden genre fluency and vary narrative voice (both). The device has only proliferated, and the last few years have seen some of its more interesting examples, from the Caesar’s Journal scraps in Mr. Comics’ surprisingly brilliant Revolution on the Planet of the Apes tie-in to the academic ephemera that makes shattered sense of The Umbrella Academy’s superfreaks in fragments framing each issue.

The days when comics-prose could be considered marginal to the “real” content are past; these appendices or interludes depend as much on sight as do the more conventional paneled pages: the design of a faux encyclopedia entry to give it verisimilitude; the layout of some autobiographical or audience-addressing manuscript to hold readers’ interest and give some feeling for the flavor of its speaker’s personality.

Grant Morrison’s all-text issue of Batman might seem a cheat since the word was essentially dominant for the entire length, though it did clash and echo effectively with the creepy illustrations sutured in by John Van Fleet, and stood as a rare and risky counterpoint to the series’ overall visual rhythm. Morrison’s prose was great for sheer pulpy description and scene-setting but also served as a kind of ambient caption of the characters’ interior motivations and self-conception, and their place in the mythic order — a commentary and companion-piece to the Batman & Joker saga that feels utterly indispensable to its central canon. We spend a lot of time affirming that comics are literature, so we shouldn’t forget that, sometimes, literature is comics.

Best Graphic Novel (collected): Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine [Drawn & Quarterly]

In both his rising stature and observers’ sour grapes, Adrian Tomine is assuming the role of comics’ John Updike; a creator whose neutral aesthetic is taken for a bland blankness but whose lucid, laconic eye reveals some of the most richly weird of human idiosyncrasies. This latest tale of drifting twentysomethings’ emotional dishonesties and rough-draft selves further secures Tomine’s reputation as a generational portraitist and confirms the lasting substance in his reflections on passing lives.

Best Graphic Novel (original): The Goon: Chinatown and the Mystery of Mr. Wicker by Eric Powell [Dark Horse]

Eric Powell’s ageless interstitial universe of old-movie dialogue, sepia-photograph squalor, bygone lives and eternal, biblical bitterness suggests a lateral-time collaboration between Scorsese and E.C. Segar but looks, feels, laughs and moves the heart like nothing else the real world has actually produced. The Goon’s pamphlet-to-feature breakout was as momentous as some characters’ movie debut. Grand at any scale.

Best Franchise (corporate): Fantastic Four by Dwayne McDuffie (writer) & Paul Pelletier (artist) [Marvel]

There are a lot of rich side-narratives of superheroes these days, “off-continuity” series in which the motivations and meanings of established properties can be dissected and redirected in ways that the main product can’t risk. But I simply refer anyone to McDuffie & Pelletier’s year-long run on Fantastic Four for proof that the “official” version of a superhero franchise can be done in a way that draws on the established tropes and crowd-pleasing pillars of a longrunning series while commenting on its accumulated lore and questioning its current meaning. In McDuffie’s hands the characters were subtly self-aware of their place in history and significance as symbols (never more than in the concluding three-parter in which they have to define their virtue in the face of Civil War’s expedient grit and an apparently reformed Doctor Doom), and Pelletier’s art incorporated all the compositional dynamics of Kirby while achieving a “photorealism” of convincing expression and genuine feelings, not just obsessive texture. This was meant by Marvel as a caretaker run to let the marquee team of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch ramp up, but to top what we’ve just seen, even those colossal talents are really gonna have to save the universe.

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