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Friday, July 19, 2024

Weekly Book Recommendations (July 19)

This Week's Reads

Astro City Volume 3, Volume 4, Volume 5, Volume 8: These are like potato chips; you can't read just one. Busiek and Anderson have such a singular voice on this series that if you like it you generally adore it. There's a stretch in some of these were the stories are downers (a couple "I'm willing to do good but super heroics/intersecting with superhumans is too damn dangerous") that are weakened by being right on top of each other, but otherwise this is all really good stuff. 

Another in my occasional "Not Recommendations But I Need To Talk About It":

Miracleman: The Silver Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham: I, like so many people, was looking forward to the completion of this story, halted in 1993 by Eclipse comics implosion. When the shenanigans settled and the creators could finish the book with Marvel in 2023 I was interested, but didn't track it down until this week. I was ultimately disappointed. I'm sure the time lapse - even if Gaiman had the scripts completed back then they were doubtless edited some, and Buckingham's art style has changed over time (of course it has!) - which gives the book a bit of a disjointed feel. 

Spoilers ahead

More importantly, the central premise is... facile. But it's the problem that most writers have with the Shazam Captain Marvel and his literary offspring. Captain Marvel is smarter than you - he has the Wisdom of Solomon right up there with the Strength of Atlas. Miracleman is smarter than you; it's commented on several times during the Moore run that he's smarter than Mike Moran and getting smarter all the time, so that answers are there before he even finishes forming the question. They are more empathetic than you. They just are. And at the end of Moore's run they have created a "utopia" where no one is hungry, no one is unhoused, no one lives under coercion, no one has to hide their true selves, and if you wish you can become superhuman. The world was free, and the stars were opening to us. 

In The Golden Age and Apocrypha the creative teams explored that: what it would mean for individual people - who at the end of the day were still people and having a safe, sheltering, nurturing world didn't stop people from being fuckups about their personal lives - for those who completely refused the world and were sheltered to accept that choice, and what it meant for art. It was interesting stuff

And then the Silver Age presents Miracleman as a gormless fool, the process of humanity's uplifting has stalled out, and we are re-introduced to the world through the eyes of a 15(?) year old white boy from Britain who ultimately decides in his 15 year old white boy way that the problem with the world is there isn't enough sticking it to the man, and he clearly knows what's wrong, and he's going to make it his job to try to break things once he gets his head on straight. And since Miracleman is not the sort of person who forces anyone to do anything other than not hurt other people, he lets Dickie go, while Dickie - and from the looks of it the author - things that it's because he's delivered a scathing indictment of MM's worldview. When in fact it is an adult letting a teenager be an idiot for a while - or should be if Gaiman's view of MM were not that he's an incurious oaf and MiracleWoman comes across as a manipulative schemer. 

"What fun is perfection?" Dickie asks. Better to break the world and introduce some suffering so people can really feel, man. The whole of this story is framed that this attitude, that' Dickie's child's understanding of the world, is a needed counterbalance to everyone being free from misery and able to chose their own paths, forms, lives. Humanity is shown as having nothing to struggle against when the whole of the universe is out there to explore, just as Winter and the other Miraclebabies are starting to do. Humans could be forming colonies on other planets in our solar system, exploring the heart of the sun, diving deep into the oceans; I'm sure people are already writing and performing amazing works of art because the idea that suffering is necessary for creativity is one fostered by those who like causing suffering. 

The great joys of the original Mircaleman run to me was that it ended with optimism: we're going to take a "realistic" look at superheroes and it doesn't end in dystopia; it ends in an improved world where the supers are giving everyone else a choice to be their best selves - superhumanly smart and empathetic and caring. But in Gaiman's hands it turns out it's just on a time delay. Eventually we have to destroy ourselves so suffering can build character. I can't help but contrast this with the end of The Good Place, which shows a positive view of what happens when humans become their best selves.

It's just so disappointing.  

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