Jean Grey Syndrome

The Dark Phoenix Saga
Chris Claremont

Spoilers ahead, maybe

I am no fan of Jean Grey.

I mean, it's a character with potential, I suppose. Jean Grey and Phoenix both. A telekine and weak telepath, with vast reserves of power which, when tapped, slowly take her over. There are things you can do with that. Cool things. Megalomania is an entertaining plot device when handled properly.

However, over the years, the writers who have taken on the story of Jean Grey and Phoenix have gone far past proper handling and into the realm of death, shark-jumping and general headachey terror. The original Dark Phoenix Saga is a fantastic story with a lot of impact. It's a story about someone learning self-control, and ultimately also about a superhero committing suicide. And that's intense, and the sort of thing that people sometimes have difficulty dealing with.

But really. I wish she'd stayed dead.

...I know. Comic Book Death. Nobody stays dead except Barry Allen, and even that might be in doubt. But there's a difference between dying and coming back once, and dying and coming back every few years. Like I said, it's a character with potential. It's a compelling idea. But it's overdone. Hey, Grant Morrison did some cool Dark Phoenix stuff in New X-Men, which I love like crazy, and I still found it tiring.

Also, I don't like characters whose primary purpose seems to be rescuing writers who have written themselves into corners. Wolverine's dead? Whoo! Phoenix saves the day! World ending as you ride a meteor into the sun? Phoenix! Sublime is destroying all of civilization in a horrifying alternate future? Phoenix!

Godsdamn, people. Phoenix is not the answer to all your problems. In fact, at this point, she's not really the answer to any of them.

Please stop. For the Professor's sake.

Gutter Brain

Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud

So I rather enjoyed reading Understand Comics, once I got past the smirking face and the cluttered pages. There were a lot of interesting ideas in it--particularly the idea of action taking place in the gutter between panels. I didn't find the concept terribly surprising, but it was cool to think about, and to see demonstrated.

That makes me curious about something. How far can one go with this implied action? Which is not to say that the gutters should be huge, but how far can you go between moments? I'd like to see a comic that lets minutes pass between panels, preferably without dialogue. I'm sure this has been done before, but I'd like to see it anyway.

I suppose there are other ways to do it too. A story where all the crucial events take place off-panel, maybe. Which would be really interesting, from a story-telling perspective. It'd be a useful exercise in perspective. Maybe the story's being told by that one person who always shows up just too late to see whatever interesting thing just happened. Although I don't think a plot device would be necessary. I'd just like to see a comic that's always aftermath and never event. It'd be different.

Or maybe a comedy thing. Characters that, strictly, only exist within panels, and cease to exist between them, thus creating memory gaps. It'd be fun to construct the story, and terribly confusing for the characters, which I always enjoy. Fucking with my own characters is sort of my hobby. Sort of a way to vent my secret foul temper while maintaining my outwardly sunny peace-and-love demeanor.

...I seem to be wearing this topic a little thin. It's a cool idea, but my brain is shorting out. I'll post more later, probably on another aspect of McCloud.

What Got Me Into This In The First Place

This week in class one of the things we're discussing is Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. And I've got some stuff I want to say about it, but I think that can wait a little bit, or at least until tomorrow. For now, here's something else.

So I've already put up one big long post about why I like comics, but I never really got into how it came up in the first place. I'm sure that if anyone's reading this who's not actually in the class, there are still a few skeptics out there, and I'm sure you're saying to yourselves, "How in the world could this girl--from all appearances reasonably intelligent and possessed of a sharp wit--get interested in something as childish as comic books?"

Well, here's how it goes. This is my comics-reading timeline.

When I was little, I read lots of Calvin & Hobbes, with occasionally wordless flips-through in...um, I think they were Howard the Duck singles, actually. Not really sure. So that got me interested in comics in a general way, because they were fun. Mostly newspaper strips. Then there was Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, a book belonging to my parents. It's a collection of Winsor McCay strips about people having freaky dreams which they then blame on having eaten too much before bed. It was both interesting and, if you'll excuse the phrasing, fucking terrifying. I was seven! (Or maybe eight.) I was not prepared for that shit! So that sort of put me off non-newspaper-strip comics for a while.

Then for a while there was my whole terrifyingly huge manga obsession, which we will skip over in the interests of everyone's time and sanity. I think Japanese comics are very important, but they're also a whole different ballpark, with their own set of symbols and archetypes and cultural assumptions. Although I do still maintain that Petshop of Horrors may be one of the most awesome series on the planet. When I was big into manga, I didn't like American comics at all. I thought they were childish and had bad art. And they're all really basic superhero-saves-the-day stories, right? What besides Batman is cool about that?

The thing that got me off my manga-only kick and back into reading comics in general was Preludes and Nocturnes, the first volume of Neil Gaiman's comic Sandman. I was a fan of Neil Gaiman, which is why I was interested at all, and had already read Sandman: The Dream Hunters, which is cool, but not a comic--it's an illustrated novella.

I read Preludes and Nocturnes and it was really well-written, and strange, and intense and scary and involving in a way I hadn't encountered before. People who have read it may be able to guess why; "24 Hours" in particular is an extraordinary use of the comics form, and particularly an extraordinary use of the standard 24-page single-issue size. It took what would have been a creepy story anyway and made it into something terrifying and riveting, with a forced pace that made my chest hurt, I was so tense. So, bang, pow, and there it is: Miss Becca loves comics, because her favorite author wrote one that made her head explode, and now she wants to see if other people can do the same thing.

Then, of course, there was Watchmen. My dad got me a copy of Watchmen--actually, the same one I've got here at school with me now to use as one of my textbooks. And that also did things to my brain. But it deserves its own post. Several, actually. Which won't be until the end of the semester.