Welcome to Welcome to the Working Week

I was perhaps a little hard on comedian/comics fan Patton Oswalt last week in discussing his not particularly accurate or well-written introduction to Brad Meltzer and company's Justice League of America: The Lightning Saga hardcover. Not that I agree with him that it was a good group of comics, or that Meltzer is a very good comic book writer, or that writing-for-the-trade is a good a thing, or any of the other questionable statements Oswalt made there.

But when I questioned why DC was making a big deal out of Oswalt’s intro on the cover of the book (he got a credit for the intro, but none of the artists involved got cover credits), wondering aloud why he’s someone who’s opinion on comics is worth paying attention to (aside, of course, from the obvious “He’s famous, and not comics-famous, but famous-famous argument), I spoke a little too soon.

It wasn’t until a reader asked just who this Oswalt character is in the comments section that I realized he actually has written some comics before, including a Justice League comic that I liked a lot.


That would be JLA: Welcome to the Working Week, a prestige format one-shot that dropped in 2003, during the first year of Joe Kelly’s run on the parent title.

It may just have been the last good JLA spin-off. After the Morrison relaunch, one-shot specials like this were coming out like clockwork, but as Kelly’s run neared its end, they all but stopped, perhaps in part because the confusion that set in over the whole franchise.

They’ve since re-named and relaunched the monthly JLA comic, and yet it still hasn’t had a stable creative team since Kelly and company left (Meltzer was technically a “regular” writer, but he only stuck around a dozen issues; Dwayne McDuffie is currently the “regular” writer, but he doesn’t even write half an issue’s worth of pages).

Oswalt’s story is set firmly between the “death” of Aquaman during “Our Worlds at War” and the League rejiggering in “The Obsidian Age.”

The team consists of Morrison’s Big Seven line-up, only with Plas in for Aquaman. The real star of the piece is Marlus Randone, a young man from Portland, Oregon who writes and self-publishes a fanzine dealing with superheroes called Save Us!.

When Marlus’ neighborhood is attacked by aliens, he and every civilian there find themselves mass-teleported onto the League’s lunar Watchtower, while the League swoops in to deal with the aliens.

The Leaguers somehow miss Marlus when returning the civilians, and he’s left behind. He spends a whole week as a stowaway on the Watchtower, watching the League from the shadows as they go about their day-to-day work. (Revisiting this after having just read The Lightning Saga collection, I realize that Meltzer’s twelfth issue story “Monitor Duty” was somewhat similar in that it was a day in the life of the League, but Oswalt’s story is obviously much richer in detail, given its size. And the outsider narrator gives the reader a somewhat reliable narrator to listen to, whereas Meltzer’s story had each of the Leaguers take turns thinking out loud for a few panels).

There is an overarching story, involving that horde of aliens, Marlus’ dreams, his past and an alien being named Feast, but mostly the plot seems to serve as an axis on which Oswalt’s observations can revolve around.

He’s quite ably aided and abetted by the art team of Patrick Gleason and Christian Alamy, artists whose style are similar enough to the monthly’s art team of the time, Doug Mahnke and Tom Nguyen, that one could almost mistake them for one another (Oh, and Gleason and Mahnke are two more names that can be added to the Should Be Drawing JLoA Instead Of Ed Benes list).

Gleason’s style is quite adaptable, being perfect for straightforward superheroics and comedy, and he’s able to pull both off in the same panel. He also provides some pretty complex layouts, many of which are jam-packed with crowds and cameos and background details.

Oswalt’s vision of the League is one I like a lot. It’s seemingly heavily influenced by Morrison’s run, based on not only the characters he uses, but the ways he uses them, and the other stories referenced. His League is a super-professional, well-oiled machine of a team, in which the characters finish each other’s sentences, and they all bark half-orders, status reports and jargon to one another in snatches of dialogue as they go about saving the world.

Because of the nature of the story, we get to see a lot more of their down time than we normally do (Essentially, this is a book about the League’s downtime), and yet its clear that the team is the hub of DC’s superhero universe; they’re who all the other heroes check in with, and they’re expected to be the world’s first line of defense.

And his takes on the individual heroes are all great. I think he nails what’s special about all of them to some degree.

When Marlus first comes across J’onn J’onnz, we see the Martian Manhunter seated in the lotus position, hovering while meditating.

Here’s how Oswalt-through-Marlus describes him: “If Superman is Elvis, than this is Dylan. When you’re a kid, you’re all for the spitcurl. But by the time you hit college, you’re forehead all the way. That thinker’s skull, on top of a linebacker’s bod… Like if Socrates played for the Steelers… For every time the world’s been saved in the sunshine by Superman… …it’s been saved in the shadows by this guy.”

Perfect.

His views on Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman all hew pretty close to the modern day standard, although he notably sums up Batman’s position in the League and superhero community perfectly with this one sentence: “Everyone’s always pissed at Batman.”

The Flash and Green Lantern (still Kyle Rayner at this point) are the playful rivals that Morrison set them up as during his run; the two “normal” guys on the team that readers can relate to. Theirs was one of the few relationships in the millennial Justice League that seemed like a real one, and it was too bad when Kyle was switched out for John Stewart (Not because I dislike Stewart, but no one seems to have done anything interesting with him that they couldn’t have done with Kyle).

Plastic Man is similarly played the way Morrison reintroduced him—as the “wacky” superhero. Oswalt seems to be reaching for something to say about the character, as Marlus says, “What’s Plastic Man’s deal, anyway? Does he fight crime, or just react to it?”

But the scene spotlighting Plas is fantastic.

I mean, look at this:

Keith Giffen’s Ambush Bug and Heckler, throwing a kegger with Plas? Of course they’re all pals! Man, that sure does fire the imagination. That’s the kind of story I wanted to see in the wasted, now-cancelled JLA: Classified.

In fact, this isn't the only time Plas an Ambush Bug shared a panel. A.B. was on Plas' "Justice League of Anarchy," which appeared in just one panel of 2001's Justice Leagues: Justice League of Amazons #1:


Anyway, Plas and pals are throwing a big party. The guest-list for which is somewhat…off. Like, I have a hard time believing Ganthet, Animal Man or Batgirl would be interested in attending, but Gleason’s double-page spread is a fun one to pore over to look for cameos.

Let’s see, you’ve got some JLI era Leaguers…


The Inferior Five and someone who looks an awful lot like Bueno Excelente from Hitman…


and Hitman’s Baytor…

(Gleason was apparently a fan of the series. Earlier in the issue, Batman’s shown getting in someone’s face in front of Noonan’s….)

While the party’s going on, Superman, Batman, J’onn, Flash and GL huddle in the locker room, with Superman saying “It’s not my scene,” Batman responding “Not mine, either,” and GL pointing out that the fact neither of them party is the one thing they have in common. (“And the under-wear-on-the-outside-thing,” Flash adds).

Our hero Marlus passes out in Aquaman’s pool room, and flashes back to an Aquaman scene. He recalls the time he saw Aquaman bust some scuba gear-wearing, jet ski-riding kidnappers who had captured a mermaid.

This is the Peter David/Morrison Aquaman, by the way: Hook-handed, bearded and bad-ass. We watch him bust the bad guys siccing a horde of crabs on their leader while passively staring down her harpoon gun.


And Marlus narrates:“Rivers must be to Aquaman what dark alleys are to the Batman… getaway routes for the bad guys from the surface world, secret traveling networks for whatever evil lurks and plots in the deep… A king is a king in every corner of his kingdom… And when he’s not in his kingdom? He’s still a king.”

And when the League ultimately triumphs over Feast, the villain says, “I’m saddened your sea king isn’t here, giving Marlus the opportunity to declare in the last panel of this sequence:

Pretty cool.

Re-reading this for, like, the fifth time, I realized I think I would have preferred to have read a hardcover collection of Oswalt’s run on JLoA with a short prose introduction by Brad Meltzer.

I’m not sure if Oswalt could have turned out a solid 12- or more issue run, or if this one-shot amounted to everything he had to say about the Justice League, but he’s certainly written more good League stories than Meltzer has at this point, with far fewer tries.

And, because it was Sally’s comment that ultimately reminded me that the Patton Oswalt who wrote that intro and hyped up Secret Invasion recently is the same one who wrote Welcome to the Working Week, here’s an image of one of her favorite things, as drawn by Gleason and Alamy in the book:

“Comic books suck these days, and this book is a shining example why…”

Well, I haven’t talked about what a bad comic book writer Brad Meltzer is for four whole days now, so I suppose I’m due for another post on the subject, huh?

Actually, I had an image-heavy post planned for today, but I couldn’t get at a scanner for long enough to get the whole thing in. (Hopefully tomorrow.) I did, however, get my hands on Justice League of America: The Lightning Saga.

The cover for this volume is an oddly cropped version of the Alex Ross image that was used as the cover for the second printing of JLoA #12 (For the first printing, one half of the image was run on the cover; if you wanted the full image, you had to buy two issues). To make room for a bar of text on the back cover, 1/4th of it runs on the back cover, half of it is on the cover of the book, and the final 1/4th of the image on the front cover flap. This leaves Batman off the cover. In Ross’ original layout, the Trinity function as the pillars of the pose, with Black Lightning and Hal Jordan behind each of Wonder Woman’s shoulders. With this cropping, Jordan and Lightning seeming quite prominent. It’s not often you see someone trying to sell a Justice League comic book by putting Black Lighting or Black Canary on the cover instead of Batman.


(Behold my photographic skills! Do not adjust your monitor and/or eyes, the writing has been reversed! I could learn how to fix it, as a few have you have pointed out in the past but, well, I'm lazy.)

(And speaking of Ross’ painting, it’s a good thing he doesn’t read Batman and the Outsiders. I’m sure painting some of the characters on this cover, particularly Vixen and Geo-Force, who didn’t debut in any form until after the cut-off point in DCU costume history that he likes—the appearance of Firestorm signaling where things-he-likes-to-paint stops—must have killed him. And now Geo-Force isn’t even on the Justice League? DC made him paint Geo-Force on the cover of JLoA and he was only even on the team for, like, two stories?*)

Image aside, the cover of this volume varies remarkably from the one containing the first half of writer Brad Meltzer’s run. That one was mostly just cover credits and white space, with the Michael Turner image shrunk down about as small as possible. This one is pretty much all image.

On the first volume, Meltzer’s name was huge, and Ed Benes’ was smaller. On this one, Benes’ isn’t even included. Writers Meltzer and Geoff Johns (who only writes of two of the eight issues within) have their names on the cover in nice big yellow font (much, much bigger than the words “Justice League of America”), and no artists are credited, probably because so many were involved (Benes pencils three of the eight issues; Shane Davis, Fernando Pasarin, Gene Ha and Dale Eaglesham pencil one a piece; the final is a jam issue). In fact, looking at the cover or the spine, you’d be forgiven for thinking an artist named Johns drew the whole thing.

Oddly, while no artists are named on the cover, there is a little credit under Johns’ saying, “Introduction by Patton Oswalt.” Is that a strong selling point? Stronger than any of the artists involved? I mean, “Patton Oswalt” isn’t exactly the first, fifteenth or four-hundredth name that comes to mind when I think of “people who know a lot about comics, and who I’d look to for a recommendation on one.”

The only other text on the cover is a blurb from IGN (The videogame site?), which says, simply, “Spectacular.”

Oswalt’s introduction was pretty funny, and I agreed with large parts of it. For example, he writes, “Comic books suck these days, and this book is a shining example why…”

And, “Brad Meltzer threw a flaming monkey wrench into the machinery when he wrote the IDENTITY CRISIS for DC Comics…this, ‘THE LIGHTNING SAGA,’ is a perfect example of why comics suck.”

Why, he even says at one point that Meltzer’s vision of his stories can “make for frustrating, confusing single issues.”

I couldn’t agree more with any of those out-of-context sentiments; in fact, if I had to choose two words to describe these stories, they would probably be “frustrating” and “confusing.”

Now, Oswalt means all of this in a good way. Basically he’s saying that the overall story that Meltzer—and Geoff Johns, and other of the more popular comics writers of the day that get name-dropped—don’t write single issues anymore, but all write for the trade instead. He means it in a good way.

He even compares the books to those of the old days, when you could buy a single issue of “THE FLASH or X-Men or even Richie Rich and be told a zippy story with a beginning, middle and end.” And that, that’s a bad thing.

I think the exact opposite; the best comics can both tell a single-issue story with a beginning, middle and end and still be a chapter in a bigger story. It’s not an either or proposition. And I don’t see any way in which a single issue being frustrating and confusing can be seen as a virtue, particularly if you read comics as single-issues. Basically, Oswalt is articulating an argument against buying comics like JLoA and JSoA, and instead wait for the trades.

(He also compares single issues of “The Lighting Saga” to single episodes of The Wire, Deadwood and Friday Night Lights, as if being like a TV show, and the trade of it like watching those shows on DVD; I don’t know, there’s something kind of depressing about complimenting a comic book story by saying it’s like a TV show. That’s pretty much my definition of “not a great comic book”).

As for the specifics of what Oswalt has to say, well, after having read his intro, I now suspect that Secret Invasion is gonna suck.

“Oh man,” he writes of JLoA #11, “There’s a moment of revelation that will, literally, make you flip…something.” If you’ve read it already, you know that revelation is that Vixen has lost her animal powers and been leeching her fellow Leaguers’ super-powers. I think. You probably won’t flip anything, but think, “Oh, so it wasn’t just one more dumb-ass mistake when she was using cheetah speed to keep pace with The Flash.”

Or wait, he said “literally.” I guess you will flip the book literally, because a few panels are printed upside down. God, I hope that’s not what he’s talking about…

He also singles out the playing capture the flag scene and the non sequitir involving a trio of supervillains that have absolutely nothing to do with anything at all in this story (rather, it was a tease for a plot currently unfolding in Geoff Johns’ Booster Gold) as examples of “wasn’t it cool” scenes.

I don’t really have anything else to say about “The Lightning Saga” that I haven’t said as it was unfolding. It’s just terrible, terrible, terrible stuff. Since it originally ran, we’ve seen that trio of villains reappear in Booster Gold, we’ve seen Johns play around with The Legion some more in Action Comics, and we’ve seen what’s become of Karate Kid and the shadowy figure from the future in Coundown, and even knowing that, these things still seem off as they occur in the trade, just unconnected, random happenings seemingly beyond the writers’ control.

I was also curious to see if DC changed anything that seemed like a mistake—the coloring of Jai’s hair, the fact that Karate Kid said he “ducked” a lightning bolt that clearly strikes him a few pages earlier—but no dice.

I dropped the monthly after “Lightning Saga,” figuring eventually a nearby library would carry the eventual trade (I’m not above reading bad super-comics, but man, I hate to have to pay for the privilege). So this was the first time I read #11 and #12, Meltzer’s second-to-last and last issue of his short 13-issue run.

The second-to-last issue is easily distinguishable from the rest of the series—it’s the nice-looking one. It’s illustrated by Gene Ha, and it’s impossible to read without thinking how much better Meltzer’s run would have been had Ha drawn it instead of Benes, as he does what Benes can’t by drawing figures that look remotely human, distinct from each other, and capable of expressing emotions.

The story itself is a somewhat pretentiously clever one. It reads a lot like a Brian Michael Bendis story, in which BMB experiments with something seemingly just not to get too bored while cranking out forty super-comics a month.

After they’re caught in a collapsing building and terribly wounded, Red Arrow and Vixen are badly injured, buried alive, facing death, and unable to be rescued by “doors” or Superman. (No mention of why Geo-Force, whose whole deal is lifting rocks and shit, can’t come through). They have to fight through their pain and shock and pep talk each other into getting out (think Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, but with Red Arrow and Vixen instead of fireman). And Vixen doesn’t have any superpowers! And she’s been lying about it this whole time! And now she and her teammate could totally die because she lied! I’d say this makes her seem less than heroic, but considering the actions of the “Power Pact” in Identity Crisis, I suppose this is nothing.

Anyway, it’s a dialogue-heavy issue with too-cute presentation of how they came to be in their predicament, and a kinda neat gimmick near the climax.

And that brings us to the twelfth and final issue of Meltzer’s run on the title, which forms a sort of bookend to JLoA #0, which kicked the series off, but is reprinted as if it were #13, following #12 in this trade (So, if this were a book shelf, both bookends are on the same side of the books, which doesn’t really make much sense).

It starts with nice Eric Wight pencil art, and Wight, like Ha, would have been a far better choice to collaborate with Meltzer for the entire series. He’s seemingly been chosen because his style here looks old and simple, but it’s much more complex than Benes’ (or most of the other pencillers here, excepting only Eaglesham). It only looks simple in that it has less lines, but the lines that are there all do something, whereas too many of Benes’ lines are just there to make the drawing look slightly more complex than a generic figure posing infront of a generic background or, more often than not, empty space.

This story is entitled “Monitor Duty,” and the idea is a day in the life type story exploring the characters and relationships of the various Leaguers. It’something of an empty gesture, given that this is the end of Meltzer’s run; he’s taken 13 issues to get this team together, but leaves before he can say anything about any of them beyond, “Here’s a new status quo; have fun making sense of it, successors!”

In the Wight drawn flashback, we see “Year One” era Aquaman and Martian Manhunter chatting about starting the Justice League, while Hal Jordan and Barry Allen do the same, and then we jump to the present. Two shadowy figures talk about the current League line-up from their hidden base in Rhode Island, spying on them using hologram spy-ware of some sort. Near the end we learn that these spies are actually Aquaman and Martian Manhunter.

This presents some problems. Firstly, Aquaman is dead. The Aquaman who was on the Justice League, the one shown in the flashbacks, the one who knows all the players and experienced all the memories he’s talking about, is dead. During the missing year chronicled in 52, he lost his memory and mutated into “The Dweller of the Deep.” He hung out with Aquaman II for a while, but then he died in the pages of his own book.

So the only Aquaman in the DCU at the moment is Aquaman II, also named Arthur Curry, who absorbed some of Aquaman I’s magic and essence during the missing year, but he’s a totally different person.

The dialogue and story construction indicates Aquaman I is the person talking to J’onn J’onnz throughout the story. The art indicates that it’s Aquaman II, who, in addition to not knowing J’onn, obviously doesn’t know the whole history of the Justice League as experienced by Aquaman I.

That’s a pretty big mistake right there, much bigger than having Felix Faust be the off-panel antagonist of this issue (He’s still stuck in Fate’s Tower with Neron at the time this story is occurring). Flipping through this issue in the shop, I thought it was kind of amusing that not only was Meltzer not reading Aquaman, but neither were his editors on JLoA, and I wondered if they’d be able to correct it in the trade. Maybe if they just had Benes redraw Aquaman, the story would work (so long as you don’t read Aquaman, and, at the time, about 70,000 JLoA readers weren’t reading Aquaman, so it’s probably safe to assume most of those who pick up this trade won’t be tracking down back issues of the now-cancelled Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis). Or if they changed some dialogue to make it look like J’onn was talking to Aquaman II for, um, some reason, it would maybe kind of work. A little.

But this, this just doesn’t work.

It doesn’t deserve a “Continuity is for nerds, it’s the story itself that matters!” pass either, since Meltzer is so goddam concerned with continuity that his readers are supposed to have read and internalized early ‘80s New Teen Titans to the point that when Roy says Vixen’s shaking “like Gar after we lost Terra,” they’ll know what the hell he’s talking about.

To say nothing of referring to the Legionnaires by their first names throughout “Lightning Saga.” When characters call Superman and Batman “Clark” and “Bruce,” it’s annoying and unnatural, but at least any reader who picks this book up is going to be reasonably aware of who Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne are. But Jeckie? Luornu? Val? The hell?

This book is nothing but continuity (and continuity errors) so, like Identity Crisis it doesn’t get that pass; you can’t base a story in DC trivia, expecting your readers to know it at least as well as you, and then beg their indulgence when you screw it up.

The trade ends with JLoA #0, which is the first chapter of the first story arc, trade-collected at the end of the run for some reason. Reading it here seems…off, particularly after the exclamation point ending of Meltzer’s final issue, with Martian Manhunter saying things never change over a two-page spread of the whole line-up running straight at the reader.

All of a sudden, we’re back in the Batcave, watching the Trinity sit down and get ready to look at photos for a few months. I kind of liked the way Meltzer redefined the Trinity as a clique within the League in this story, but the story itself is extremely random.

There are a few pages in the present, but most of them flashback to a new version of DCU history (the post-Intinite Crisis/52 version of pre- and post-Crisis (on Infinite Earths version, in which Wonder Woman was being reinserted into League history after having been removed from it for over 20 years). Or flash-forward to events of the future labeled “tomorrow.” Looking at these now, well over a year since the #0 issue first came out, none of the six “tomorrows” have come to pass yet, and most probably never will (the death of Batman and the marriage of Wonder Woman, for example; the marriage of Hal Jordan and the death of Pa Kent are more possible, I suppose, and the Trinity vs. Luthor over Superboy the most likely to occur).

The main virtue of this issue is the art, with Wight again handling the “Year One” stuff, Benes the present day stuff, and a slew of guest-artists each getting a page or so. We get to see Kevin Maguire and Howard Porter drawing pages set in the eras they defined, plus Dick Giordano, Tony Harris, George Perez, J.H. Williams III, Gene Ha, Rags Morales, Ethan Van Sciver, Jim Lee and others.

And I imagine that’s the last post I’ll have complaining about Meltzer for a good long time, as I’ve now read every comic he’s written. All 26 of ‘em. Stop back tomorrow for “Judd Winick: Threat or Menace?” Kidding! Something light and image-heavy for sure tomorrow.



*I’m guessing, here. Was he officially on the team for “Lightning Saga,” or still just kinda hanging around? In #7, he says he’s not on the team. Well, if he is on the League, that means he’s around for “Lighting Saga,” “Monitor Duty” and McDuffie’s fist arc, “Unlimited.” So, two to three stories altogether, right?

The games Winick and Meltzer played (plus advice on where to get advice on women)

According to the paragraph-long bio on the back flap of The Games We Played: A Celebration of Childhood and Imagination (Simon & Schuster; 2001), editor Steven A. Cohen worked for President Bill Clinton as a press aide starting in 1993 and later for then-First Lady Hilary Clinton as her deputy director of communications. That no doubt explains how he got both Clintons to submit short essays about the games they used to play growing up to run as part of his short compilation of such memories.

While the Clintons are probably the biggest “gets” he got—interestingly, Mrs. says she spent a lot time playing with the boys and claims to have been very good at all of the games she played in a way that seems boastful, while Mr. engaged in the roguish behavior of throwing acorns at passing cars’ hubcaps—there are a lot of famous folks in the table of contents. You’ve got Esther Williams, Al Roker, Gwen Ifill, George Stephanopoulos, Rob Reiner, David Baldacci, and many others whose childhood play I’ve never been the least bit interested in.

So why I am I talking about this book at all, let alone here, on a site devoted to the discussion of comics? Well, the book happened to pass through my hands while at my local library, and two of the names on the back jumped out at me—Judd Winick and Brad Meltzer, two of my least favorite comics writers!

Suddenly I was curious.

I flipped right to the table of contents to look for Winick’s entry, and saw it was entitled “The Cape.” Aw, he’s always been into superheroes! That’s darling.

I was pleasantly surprised to turn to page 71 and be faced with a few panels of Judd Winick’s art. Of late it’s been particularly easy to just think of Winick as a human bad comics script factory, but it was a nice reminder that no matter what stupid shit he’s writing in Green Arrow/Black Canary (Like, "You are going to have to push back that ocean of rage—that monsoon of emotion that kicks around in your body like a rabid bear on steroids," for example, or perhaps, “butt monkeys,” both from the last issue), he actually is (or at least was at one time) a pretty good cartoonist who can actually draw quite well.

I’m not horribly fond of the particulars of his style, as his big-headed human figures with their warts-and-all bodies give off a sort of college newspaper cartoonist/caricaturist vibe that’s not exactly to my own personal aesthetic tastes, but his drawings are full of life and energy and, while it’s been forever since I’ve read anything he’s drawn, I recall him being a pretty solid storyteller when it came to the mechanics of comics.

Like all of the contributions to this book, Winick’s is only a couple pages long, and seems shorter, since four pages of comics can’t fit in quite as much as four pages of prose. His piece is about the Superman cape he used to play with every day, including when he and his family would go on winter vacations to their grandparents’ condo in Miami. There were plenty of things for him to do, including swimming, playing on the beach and drawing, but his favorite activity was to play with the cape.

Here are two of the cape-specific pages, which I realize accounts for almost half the story. Feel free to not read the words or just skip ahead if you intend to check out the book and don’t want to spoil it:



I like the kid’s-eye-view of Winick’s story here, with his dad just being a torso and set of arms, and the chaotic energy of his cape-play on the second page, with little bathing-suit-wearing Winick literally running off in six different directions.

But what really got me was the fact that not only did his father have to regulate the amount of time his son spent wearing a cape, but that he chose 2:45 p.m. as the start time. Not two o’ clock or three o’clock or 2:30, but 2:45. It seems so specific a time and so unnatural a time, that, I don’t know, I find it hilarious. Particularly the thought of the little Winick asking his dad if it was time yet.

(I don’t know when exactly I began to be able to tell time on my own, but I remember the period where I knew about the hours but didn’t understand what “quarter till” or “quarter after” meant, and the adults in my extended family always used the term; I knew a quarter was twenty-five cents and the cost of a videogame or half a candy bar, but I didn’t understand that it was also 15 minutes. In my mind, I knew it meant “almost,” but I didn’t know how to mark it out on a clock. Until I did, anyway).

This is just a short little story, telling a tiny slice of Winick’s childhood, but it’s a good one, and an interesting one, and I was reading the one-sentence bio about him at the end—“ Judd Winick is the author of the graphic novel Pedro and Me, creator of the comic The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius and the writer of DC Comics’ Green Lantern”—it struck me how odd it is that Winick is still churning out awful DC scripts.

Perhaps there’s just a lot more money in selling thirty-some thousand issues of Green Arrow every month, and certainly hammering out scripts like those I’ve read of his Green Arrow or Outsiders is a few thousand times easier than drawing a story (seriously, if he spends more than an hour on any issue of Green Arrow, he’s working way too hard to come up with so little), but I can’t understand why he’s still plugging away at DC, ruining franchises like the Marvel Family and now the Wolfman/Perez era Titans instead of working on his next Pedro and Me.

The comics medium and publishing industry in general has been in a full-on autobio/memoir graphic novel boom of lat e(no surprise in retrospect, given that both memoirs and graphic novels are, on their own, popular categories in the publishing industry), and Winick was out in front of the wave. Why isn’t he now surfing on it, instead of fiddling around with capes and masks? Maybe he’s still just playing with that superhero cape, and his DC scripting is what he wants to do most because it’s the most fun but, man, I kinda wish someone was there to enforce a schedule on him; to say he could only write so much Titans and Green Arrow, and then he had to sit down and work on drawing his memoirs or Barry Ween for a while.

Back to the table of contents, I saw that Meltzer’s chapter was entitled “The Craziest Kid in the World.” Now, I’ve never read any of Meltzer’s fiction, but I understand he’s pretty damn popular (they sell his paperbacks in grocery stores, so he’s reached that level of popularity), and I’ve heard he’s pretty good, but only in a second-hand way; I don’t think I’ve ever read a critic discussing his work. For all I know, he could be a great novelist.

He’s a goddam terrible graphic novelist though. He can hide how bad he is pretty well when he has a strong editor and he’s working with a great artist (You have to read The Archer’s Quest a lot to find its problems, beyond the obvious ones of the continuity glitch or four in each scene, and Morales helped Identity Crisis from completely falling apart until the nonsensical end which, since it was a murder mystery, retroactively ruined the rest of it).

But when he’s working with a terrible comics artist like Ed Benes, his weaknesses are glaring (Although, to be fair to Benes, what strengths he does have as an artist are quite ill-suited to the story Meltzer wanted to tell in JLoA—and I’m being generous by using the word “story”—and the pairing of them at all was just bad judgment on the part of the editors. So, terrible writing, terrible art, terrible editing—JLoA just wasn’t much of a comic).

I’ve probably spent as much verbiage as anyone else with an Internet connection pointing to problems in Meltzer’s writing, so I don’t think there’s a great need to go into too much detail here. But in addition to not knowing/understanding/caring about DCU continuity (which becomes important when telling stories specifically grounded in that continuity), Meltzer over-writes every scene, with his narration—often from most of the characters in the books—repeating verbally information that is already easily discernible in the visuals and/or dialogue (Kinda like super-comics from the ‘40s through ‘60s or so, actually), applying real-world logic selectively (gritty violence and other adult subject matter, but no logic applied to, say, the criminal justice system or the behavior of his characters) and, most pertinent to today’s post, never really finishing a story.

He regards the serial nature of the medium as a sort of a combination between a relay race and a dare, cooking up some crazyass scenarios to hand off to others to resolve and make some sort of sense out of after he’s gone (DC spent about a year untangling the nonsense of Identity Crisis, for example, and Dwanye McDuffie, Geoff Johns and others are still working on explaining the changes Meltzer made to the cast of JLoA during his short, 13-issue stint).

I’ve only read his prose once, in Give Our Regards to the Atomsmahsers!: Writers on Comics (Pantheon; 2004), a pretty interesting collection of essays that I know I’ve mentioned at least once before on this blog (I believe in reference to Jonathan Lethem’s Omega the Unknown project, as the book contains an essay in which Lethem mentions Gerber and company’s original).

The piece by Meltzer in that was actually similar to the piece by Meltzer’s in this, in that it was him writing about an element of his youth. In Atomsmashers!, it was about his reading of Wolfman and Perez’s Titans run, particularly the Terra storyline. In The Games We Played, it was about the game he and his friends played in grade school, called “Craziest Kid in the World.”

His piece is just six pages long, and it opens with an exciting scene. Ten-year-old John Chiarmonte is about to attempt to execute an impossible sounding jump. He’s going to jump down the entire flight of basement stairs to land on the mattress laid out at the bottom for him, despite not being able to get a running start and in spite of the low ceiling preventing him from jumping too high.

Apparently, Meltzer and his friends had each dared higher and higher jumps from the stairs, leading to this moment.

From there, he lays out the vague rules of the game—basically, one of them would do something, and they’d keep upping the ante until someone took it to an extreme no one else would surpass, thus earning the title, and segues into an incident at school involving a huge puddle and, ultimately, an open sewer.

Meltzer’s prose writing style isn’t anywhere nearly as purple as his superhero writing style can be. His sentences are short but well constructed, making his few pages propulsive and easy to read, flowing well into one another. As much as I may loathe his comics writing, he can write. I still haven’t worked up enough interest to try a whole novel of his, but, once again, I’m impressed by his abilities from this brief exposure.

However, I was quite chagrined by the ending. See, remember how I said he opens with the scene of his one friend about to jump down the stairs? There’s actually quite a bit of build-up to that scene; it’s honestly dramatic, a bit suspenseful even. Pains are taken to tell us how dangerous it is. How unlikely it is that he’ll land on that mattress. How likely it is that he’ll get hurt.

Well, the scene shifts to the puddle/sewer incident, the tale just ends abruptly. Did John make the jump? Did he chicken out? Did he land halfway down the stairs on his ankle funny, necessitating a trip to the emergency room?

I don’t know. Meltzer doesn’t say. He never returns to the scene. He brings us up to the point where young John is about to jump, and then moves on.

I even read the bio, which, like the end of some movies, tells us where the kids end up. John is a DJ at a strip club, so at least we can gather he didn’t die in the fall. But that’s all we can do, gather from the bio, since, like at least two-thirds of his comics work, Meltzer doesn’t give us an ending or resolution, but merely stops writing.

Perhaps Geoff Johns or Dwayne McDuffie is meant to tell us about Meltzer’s childhood friends dramatic basement stairs jump in a future volume of this book?



Related: On the subject of comics creators appearing in mostly-prose anthologies, I’d highly recommend Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me (Grand Central Publishing; 2008). It’s a slim, 200-page volume edited by Ben Karlin, who’s worked for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report and The Onion.

The book is divided into 46 “lessons” the writers have learned from being dumped by women. Karlin writes one himself, and his mother writes the foreword (her son, she says, is a catch).

The are more comics (meaning people who work in comedy) in here than comics (meaning the stuff we normally talk about on EDILW) included. The contributors list includes several Onion writers, one politician (Bob Kerrey), two rockstars (OK Go’s Damian Kulash Jr. and Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger) and one sex columnist/author/altweekly editor (Dan Savage), plus Stephen Colbert, Andy Richter, Bob Odenkirk, Will Forte, Larry Wilmore, Stella/The State alum David Wain, Brian Michael Bendis hype man Patton Oswalt and some other rather humorous writers you’re less likely to have heard of.

Representing the other kind of comics is David Rees of Get Your War On fame, illustrator Marcellus Hall (who provides a nicely drawn but not particularly amusing two-page comics sequence) and New Yorker cartoonist Alex Gregory (who provides two not all-that-funny-at-all one-panel gag cartoons).

Rees provides a prose piece entitled “Get Dumped Before It Matters,” and I think anyone who’s read very many of his GYWO strips is quite aware that Rees’ gifts as a cartoonist has more to do with his verbal humor than his drawing ability. For further proof of how funny Rees can be even when clip art of office workers or karate guys isn’t involved, I’d encourage you to check out his new-ish political blog at mnftiu.com. It began as a kind of sarcastic blog making fun of blogging, but is now focused on attacking politics, politicians and the people who talk about them with the same vitriol as GYWO, only on a much more frequent basis.