Today I'm going to talk about comics. Specifically, Hellblazer #157 and
The Authority #22. And the theme is "What the hell?" By the time you
read this, these will be last month's comics; my issues with these issues
will probably be rendered moot, and I'll just look silly, having complained
about what I expect will be revealed as masterworks. You writes yer
articles, you takes yer chances.
Let's start with Hellblazer. What was the point of the issue? Did I miss
something? Twenty-four pages of "I'm more of a badass than you are"
conversation, something about someone who is supposed to be dead but
who we don't know, and for what? Is this the lead-in to a new storyline? If
so, why not make it a bit more obvious? This isn't challenging, it's
obtuse. And this coming after the last storyline, which elicited a big
"Huh?" from me. The plot was slow, and when it finally built up to a
climax I really didn't care about the characters involved. Maybe the plot
only seemed slower than it was, but for all its slowness the characters
were never fleshed out. Again, they were a bunch of tough guys with ill-
defined motivations. Both #157 and the previous storyline were written by
Brian Azzarello, who seems more inclined to write novels. Which is a
problem when you're reading the novel one chapter a month. I buy my comics
issue by issue, with one exception: 100 Bullets. Which is also written
by Azzarello and which would annoy the hell out of me if I tried to read
it one issue at a time. Leaving the audience wanting more is certainly
the goal, but there's a difference between "Hey, that was good, write
more!" and "That's it?" With the latter response, something was missing,
such as a convincing plot or plausible character motivations. I'll probably
read that last storyline again just to see if it makes sense when read as a
whole, but even if it does, it still doesn't excuse the pacing which made
it confusing in its original one-issue-per-month format.
Now on to The Authority #22. First, let me say that after however many
issues that he's drawn, I still don't like Frank Quitely's art. And it's
not that he's a bad artist: his machines, backgrounds, buildings, even
bodies are all very good. But he just can't draw faces without them looking
like they're made of bubblegum (to quote Sun Ra). Right, so the issue
itself: again, "Huh?" Out of nowhere comes a villain who completely
destroys our superhero team. Hey, who doesn't love a bit of deus
ex machina? All we get for an explanation is something about powerful
people threatened by the Authority, genetic modification, and we get this
uber-villain. Right. So it turns out that the Authority are actually a
bunch of second-rate heroes. So where the hell were these super-powerful
entities when, say, the Earth was attacked by a planetoid-sized alien? Or
invaded by forces from another dimension? Or when the renegade ex-
superbeing forced the evacuation of the entire planet? I mean weren't any
of those events bigger threats to the powers that be? I'll point out that
the destruction of the entire planet is a bigger threat to their
influence than the Authority running around knocking out a few despots. But
then, what do I know about running the world?
Granted, the Authority took care of all of these, but they were all, of
course, close calls, barely pulled off, resulting in huge losses of life
and landmass, etc. And now it turns out that the protagonists were,
basically, pointless. Others could have done what they did, and probably
could have done it better. Sure, it's true that the Authority pursued a
social policy that's arguably better than the people controlling the uber-
powers, but if they can be knocked out by one genetically engineered
hillbilly...well, why should I care about them?
Not that I'll stop reading either of these comics because of these single
issues. Hellblazer has been teetering on the edge of my purchase list for a
while, though. It just hasn't really had much of a point. Character
development has been glacially slow, and characteristics change with new
writers. Constantine is interesting when he's an active character, but in
this issue he's just a spectator; heck, he's just a guy in a bar spouting
dialog, little more than a talking piece of furniture. And sometimes that's
ok, but something else should be happening, and it didn't. The
Authority has been good, and issue #22 was the first part of a new series,
but that villain, pulled wholly out of the writer's buttocks, really
annoyed me. And if Azzarello is, in fact, going to take over writing duties
on The Authority, I might just have to stop buying it monthly and start
buying it in those novel-like collections.