MONDAY
Robin (v4) #9TUESDAY
Detective Comics #649WEDNESDAY
Batman versus Predator #2THURSDAY
Detective Comics #707FRIDAY
Legends of the Dark Knight #110SATURDAY
Batman ’66 meets Steed and Mrs. Peel #3SUNDAY
Batman #614I’ve highlighted the fantastic cover work of Carmine Infantino in the past, namely his beautiful covers for Silver Age Batman and Flash comics.
Yet these heroes weren’t the only ones to benefit from Infantino’s extraordinary talent for cover composition… Along with his elegant body designs, Infantino seemed to always carefully pick the perfect angle to lend a sense of excitement to different types of stories, as seen in this week’s reminder that comics can be awesome:
Another post about science fiction, but this one looking beyond comic books…
Reading old novels set in the future can be fun in different ways. On the one hand, it’s fascinating to see how other eras imagined (accurately or not) what was to come, based on contemporary technology and culture, or how authors commented on their own times through the guise of sci-fi allegories. On the other hand, there is a groovy coolness about all the outdated stuff, which turns these tales into a strange counterfactual history, as if they were set on alternate realities where things somehow evolved differently.
As I pointed out when looking at futuristic comics, though, sometimes that’s just the icing on the cake. Many of these are exciting yarns or touching reads, with evocative prose and absorbing stories… They’re genuinely satisfying books, on top of being interesting and bizarre.
Here are a couple of them that fit this description:
FOUNDATION
(Isaac Asimov, 1951)
“His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before. That is, not in real life. He had seen it many times on the hyper-video, and occasionally in tremendous three-dimensional newscasts covering an Imperial Coronation or the opening of a Galactic Council. Even though he had lived all his life on the world of Synnax, which circled a star at the edges of the Blue Drift, he was not cut off from civilization, you see. At that time, no place in the Galaxy was.
There were nearly twenty-five million inhabited planets in the Galaxy then, and not one but owed allegiance to the Empire whose seat was on Trantor. It was the last half-century in which that could be said.”
It took me a while to get around to checking out this seminal masterwork of science fiction, but once I finally picked it up I was completely hooked. I will get into the plot and themes in a bit, but first I want you to consider the passage above (which kickstarts the narrative after an excerpt from the fictional Encyclopedia Galactica). See how practically every sentence introduces a new concept, from intriguing places and incredible technology to the sense of overwhelming scale (such a far-off future, such an impossibly vast empire…)? That’s pretty much the pace of the whole book, which is made up of very short chapters, each one establishing at least one mind-blowing notion after another, gradually building an epic so sprawling that every fantastic premise and character sooner or later get subsumed into a much, much larger picture. And this is just the first novel in the classic Foundation series, which somehow managed to continue to expand this saga in surprising directions (in a future post, I may end up discussing the first sequel, Foundation and Empire, which is also quite neat).
I only knew Isaac Asimov from Nightfall and from his robot tales, where he tended to explore a few ideas to their logical limit, playing with paradoxes and speculating about all their possible ramifications. In Foundation, however, he keeps throwing more stuff at the reader while pushing ahead with momentum and determination. Early on, we learn about methods of hyper-space travel, about a planet whose whole land surface (75,000,000 square miles) amounts to a single city that operates mostly underground, and about psychohistory, a branch of mathematics that uses ultra-complex statistics and socio-economic formulas to foresee the future. And just as we settle into all of this through the eyes of a young psychohistorian who unwittingly finds himself entangled in a political thriller, the narrative takes a leap forward… and then another… and before you know it you’re in a whole other corner of the galaxy reading discussions about geopolitics between scientists, diplomats, and, even later, a type of priests that are a bit of both.
Asimov’s talent isn’t just in the way he ties it all together and makes the story flow engrossingly, but also in the way he juggles all the multiple scales, shifting from micro to macro and back again. Yes, this is definitely an ideas-driven book with just enough characterization to ground the plot, but even among all these wide frameworks we get to care about petty personal whims and intimate doubts. That said, much of the interior action does involve characters contemplating their own miniscule role or limited perspective in the grand scheme of things:
“He sighed noisily, and realized finally that he was on Trantor at last; on the planet which was the centre of all the Galaxy and the kernel of the human race. He saw none of its weaknesses. He saw no ships of food landing. He was not aware of a jugular vein delicately connecting the forty billion of Trantor with the rest of the Galaxy. He was conscious only of the mightiest deed of man; the complete and almost contemptuously final conquest of a world.”
At the core of the story is psychohistorian Hari Seldon’s prediction that the galactic empire will collapse and that the only way to minimize the ensuing period of chaos is to put together a massive encyclopedia compiling the whole of human knowledge, thus securing the basis of a future civilization. As the decades pass, however, the Foundation in charge of this enterprise gets itself embroiled in local and interplanetary politics, its mission reshaped by coups, espionage, and looming war. I won’t spoil the many, many twists, but suffice to say that power keeps shifting from one group to another, reflecting tensions between scientific research and other tools of imperialism (atomic weapons, trade, religion) that are typical of early Cold War fiction (even though much of Foundation was originally published in the form of short stories in the early 1940s).
Even leaving aside the fact that Foundation’s breathtaking imagination isn’t enough to anticipate a future with women in positions of power, from a purely scientific perspective the notion of psychohistory flies in the face of chaos theory. Asimov does make a point of explaining that such predictions could only apply to overall trends – rather than to an individual’s specific behavior – and he shows awareness that the very act of predicting can change the turn of events, but at the heart of the book is still a general understanding of history as essentially determined by large structural processes without much room for contingency. In fairness, this is a vision shared by many current historians and theorists (from Marxists to neorealist IR scholars) and its evolution in our own future would actually match the ongoing development of big data and machine-learning algorithms. Yet, Asimov himself came to complicate the challenges of psychohistory in the sequels…
That said, I’m less interested in Foundation as a historiographical or a futuristic proposition than in the existentialist implications of eroding our self-importance and putting our trust in what we don’t fully understand. By framing our sense of individuality, free will, and impactful agency against the backdrop of invisible, unstoppable forces, the book gradually blurs the line between equations and prophecies, between logic and faith, or between social dynamics and divine destiny.
“Verisof nodded, a trifle doubtfully. ‘Everyone knows that’s the way things are supposed to go. But can we afford to take chances? Can we risk the present for the sake of a nebulous future?’
´We must – because the future isn’t nebulous. It’s been calculated by Seldon and charted. Each successive crisis in our history is mapped and each depends in a measure on the successful conclusion of the previous. This is only the second crisis and Space knows what effect even a trifling deviation would have in the end.’
‘That’s rather empty speculation.’
‘No! Hari Seldon said in the Time Vault, that at each crisis our freedom of action would become circumscribed to the point where only one course of action was possible.’
‘So as to keep us on the straight and narrow?’
‘So as to keep us from deviating, yes. But, conversely, as long as more than one course of action is possible, the crisis has not been reached. We must let things drift so long as we possibly can, and by Space, that’s what I intend doing.’”
NEUROMANCER
(William Gibson, 1984)
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
‘It’s not like I’m using,’ Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. ‘It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.’ It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.”
Set in a gritty, neon dystopia drenched in Blade Runner-ish aesthetics, Neuromancer follows Henry Case, a down-on-his-luck hacker-turned-hustler who used to be able to jack into a virtual reality matrix that allowed him to communicate with computer programs, inhabiting a vast datascape (picture a more immersive form of internet browsing) before his central nervous system got all fucked up. When Case gets hired for a high-tech heist with an eccentric crew, he finds himself involved in an intricate plot where he can’t trust anyone, especially as people may turn out to be simulated holograms or hallucinations or brainwashed by machines run by the viruses of artificial intelligences working for (or secretly controlling?) shadowy corporations hiding behind shell companies with headquarters in space and a cryogenically frozen board of directors… or something approximately like this.
Along with a noirish narrative, we get plenty of noirish writing, as there is an acerbic wit running through the whole thing that would make Raymond Chandler proud (‘His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.’). Bombarding readers with slangy neologisms and turning descriptions of weird technology into something quasi-poetic, William Gibson effectively bends the English language to accommodate the novel’s vibrant world.
The result is as cyberpunk as it gets. The ‘cyber’ bit was particularly groundbreaking, popularizing the very expression ‘cyberspace’ (which Gibson had coined in an earlier short story… and which helps him keep the action visually grounded even when Case is online, translating his interactions with software into chases and violence and actual dialogue). The ‘punk’ is in the attitude and in the look that Neuromancer vividly evokes (albeit with more mechanic prosthetics than piercings or tattoos). The latter also applies to the close relationship with drugs, including plenty of junky-sounding prose as well as plenty of actual junkies…
“He walked till morning.
The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn’t think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener stripped diagonally with black and yellow.”
This is one of those texts whose place in the canon is visible in almost every line, on the one hand taking Philip K. Dick’s trippy thrillers to the next level, on the other hand directly setting up the stage for Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix, not to mention at least half of Warren Ellis’ comics (particularly the early stuff, like Lazarus Churchyard, City of Silence, Transmetropolitan, and Mek, although Gibson’s spirit has really haunted most of Ellis’ career in one form or another).
At the same time, it’s hard to fully confine the book to a bygone era. In 2022, revisiting this paranoid nightmare about the fusion of globalized capitalism and out-of-control AIs, I can’t help but fear we may currently be living through a bootleg prequel of Neuromancer.
“Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory.”
A two-fisted reminder that comic book covers can be awesome:
Movie blockbusters have been moving into an ouroboros-like postmodern entropy for a while, from Ready Player One and the LEGO franchise to Space Jam: A New Legacy and Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, not to mention the whole MCU meta-series (whose Spider-Man: No Way Home even retroactively sucked non-MCU films into its canon). By now, the novelty is wearing thin and it’s hard not to see in these IP crossover extravaganzas a cynical, fan-pandering corporate strategy that rewards recognition over innovation.
Still, at its best the multiverse can nevertheless be a fun storytelling device, as proven earlier this year by Everything Everywhere All At Once (whose eclectic intertextuality – from Ang Lee to Wong Kar-wai, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ratatouille – is only one of its many gloriously bizarre choices) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (whose loudest laughs come precisely from the liberating joy of conjuring alternate versions of Marvel characters and then exploiting the freedom to do anything to them).
Besides the obvious brand cross-promotion by mega media conglomerates, I like to think this movement is also a side effect of the growing symbiosis between cinema and comic books (problematic as it is)… and not just because unlikely, overcrowded crossovers have been the latter medium’s bread & butter for ages (taken to a delirious extreme in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), but also because alternate realities are one of comics’ most beloved tropes.
To be sure, science fiction has been mining alternate realities for ages, including in classics like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which uses the what-if-the-Axis-had-won-WWII premise to do a complex, thought-provoking meditation on colonialism and racism in America. Yet I would argue the multiverse has a very specific tradition in comics… At least ever since Gardner Fox wrote the first team-up between the Flashes from Earth-1 and Earth-2, this has become a staple device for fixing – or linking up – continuities.
And not just that: imagining offbeat variations of a familiar world can serve to denaturalize what we take for granted (making the normal strange again) and to highlight what’s special about specific heroes and their contexts. As a result, tons of creators have had a blast with the infinite possibilities of a multiverse, whether in The Many Worlds of Tesla Strong (where at one point the protagonist surfs into a dimension where everything looks pretty much the same except that everybody is nude) or in Ivar, Timewalker (where a background gag suggests a world where Native Americans have a lacrosse team called ‘Whiteys’ whose mascot is a silly-looking pilgrim).
This is not just a subgenre of large superhero universes, either. In fact, today I want to spotlight a trio of nifty comics that did wonders with this concept without the need to tie into existing franchises…
THE INFINITE VACATION
In 2011’s The Infinite Vacation, travel between alternate realities has become a massive commercial enterprise (a market dominated by the titular company), with 97% of people in the western world regularly displacing themselves into parallel universes where their life turned out differently. In this mind-bending scenario, we follow the vacation-obsessed Mark as he tries to figure out why all the other Marks suddenly seem to be dying… while also trying to romance Claire, a girl who rejects the escapism provided by The Infinite Vacation. The comic thus explores the paradox at the heart of the concept of a multiverse made up of the infinite ramifications of every decision and contingency in your life, demonstrating how this notion can be both liberating (tapping into endless possibilities) and limiting (obsessing about alternative paths rather than dealing with the consequences of your own reality).
Because the whole thing is written by Nick Spencer, there’s much humor along the way (‘Everyone has themselves for a therapist now. No one knows you like you, right?’). Yet what makes The Infinite Vacation stand out is Christian Ward’s art, which combines highly experimental layouts, weird collages, innovative uses of digital coloring, and even photo-novel techniques, working with the amazing Jeff Powell (the letterer of Atomic Robo). The result is a sci-fi indie love story that, sadly, appears to have gotten buried among all the other genre stuff on the shelves, too idiosyncratic for the adventure crowd (despite featuring plenty of action and violence) yet too conventional for the more demanding critics (in contrast to, say, all the praise showered a few years later onto Daniel Clowes’ Patience, which isn’t nearly as entertaining).
MOTHERLANDS
Instead of using the multiverse to explore notions of consequence and escapism, Motherland uses it as an open-ended gateway into bonkers science fiction by positing that contact between billions of parallel earths (called ‘strings’) and the subsequent mashing of their technologies (called ‘The Pollination Revolution’) led to a cyberpunk future where dimension-hopping bounty hunters (‘retrievers’) chase after mad-science bandits. Against this colorful backdrop, reality TV shows covering the retrievers’ exploits used to be a major source of popular entertainment (aka ‘huntertainment’), but those glory days are over and the job has become bloodier and less inventive… This is why Tabitha Tubach, when going after the multiverse’s most wanted research terrorist, has to team up with a former superstar/psychopath whose old implants may give them an edge in the hunt – and who also happens to be her mom!
The genius of Motherlands lies in its ability to satisfy on multiple fronts: not only does it spin a hilariously twist-filled chase yarn drenched in sci-fi strangeness (you haven’t seen anything yet until you’ve seen the interior of a ‘neuroboosted placentamorph’), but it also delivers an oddly compelling – if nasty as hell – family drama about abuse and neglect. Simon Spurrier is one of those writers who is bound to be rediscovered somewhere down the line by people who have no idea of the sort of intelligent, provocative stuff he’s been sneaking into niche projects (such as the film blanc-like Numbercruncher) as well as into more mainstream comics (including a remarkable run on Hellblazer). Among Motherland’s chaos, plentiful sex, and creative profanity, Spurrier somehow manages to make readers truly care about this dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, culminating in a perfect punchline.
I’m sure it’s not easy for artists to keep up with such a barrage of moods and ideas, but Rachel Stott – inked by Felipe Sobreiro and occasionally backed up by Stephen Byrne and Pete Woods – pulls it off. On the surface, the whole thing may seem like your average action fest, especially if compared with the more aesthetically daring The Infinite Vacation, but some of the designs are quite original (starting with the plus-size Tabitha), the ‘acting’ is expressive enough to sell the drama, and the visuals ingeniously display this world’s madcap technology at work, as shown in the scan above (where you can also see letterer Simon Bowland joining the fun).
CASANOVA
Merge The Infinite Vacation’s whimsical alternative-versions-of-you narrative labyrinth with Motherland’s screwed up family dynamics, ramp up the gonzo science and add some super-espionage and the occasional metafictional gag into the mix… and you get Casanova, a trippy thriller with a frenzied pace and a hip attitude oozing from every line of dialogue. The titular psychic spy is the ultimate double agent – not only does he keep switching sides, he also switches dimensions, as his adventures become increasingly (and wonderfully) convoluted. I’ve recommended this comic before, but I think it’s appropriate to bring it up again as one of the finest examples of how to play with the multiverse, using the parallel timelines as part of an overall leitmotif of fluid, unstable identity, also reflected in the intricate web of secret organizations with mysterious acronyms as well as in the various subplots about automatons with artificial minds (and, more often than not, voluptuous bodies).
Since its debut in 2006, Casanova has taken the form of an irregularly published series of mini-series, with each storyline named after a deadly sin while evoking different music and drugs… Luxuria and Gula were cartoony spy-fi romps, weaving an ongoing saga around specific missions bursting with wild concepts and groovy visuals, from the Recreational Supermechanix Helicasino (‘a black helicopter with delusions of Monte Carlo’) to something called ‘zen crime’ (‘It’s like crime, only there’re no victims, and really, no crimes. It really just spreads a general sense of unrest.’). Spacetime travel took center stage and was pushed to head-scratching limits in Avaritia, which felt like the ambitious culmination of an epic, seemingly bringing closure to various character arcs yet also leaving enough dangling threads to make us thirsty for more. Acedia, then, provided a sort of interlude or detour, as it was mostly set in a Los Angeles where we met alternate versions of several cast members in an occult mystery tale clearly inspired by Thomas Pynchon (who had already been name-dropped in an earlier volume). It ended on an unresolved note, so I can’t wait to see what lies ahead!
You can tell this is a labor of love for everyone involved, from Matt Fraction’s surreal creations and puzzle box-like plotting (which rewards multiple rereads) all the way to Dustin Harvin’s hand-lettered captions, not to mention the alternating artwork by the wonder twins Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon (whose styles are as extravagantly sexy and cheerful as Fraction’s scripts). The original comics had a minimalistic palette (first black & white & green, followed by black & white & blue), but Cris Peter recolored the later editions and has since then become a regular member of the team – and while I still prefer the monotone versions, I admit her unnaturalistic choices are a perfect fit, powerfully bringing out Casanova’s dreamlike mood. Again, as you can see in the excerpt above, it all comes together beautifully.
Another reminder that comic book covers can be awesome… and another tribute to the art of cool headshots:
Today is Gotham Calling’s eighth anniversary!
Since I celebrated the blog’s previous anniversary with a list of my top 50 film noirs, this time around I was going to do a list of my top spy films, but I ended up in a different place… Instead, I’m ranking my favorite episodes of the original Mission: Impossible TV series (1966-1973), about the elite black ops team Impossible Missions Force (IMF), which the US government uses to secretly do their dirty work abroad as well at home. After all, many episodes do feel like mini-movies, as if an impatient producer has taken an Alfred Hitchcock thriller and trimmed down any unnecessary characterization, dialogue, and real-world locations, tightly paring down the plot to the bare essentials.
M:I is a show that can benefit from being watched out of order, jumping back and forth between its seven seasons. You certainly have little to lose, since most episodes are standalone tales: there are only a few multi-parters and no running subplots or larger character arcs. Much of the first season is awesome, but the charismatic team leader Jim Phelps (Peter Graves, giving the kind of understated performance he would later hilariously parody in Airplane!) only makes his debut in season 2 and there is no reason you can’t anticipate the magic he brings in-between checking out the fresh energy of those earlier episodes. Likewise, although the final couple of seasons generally feel less inspired, they do have a handful of gems and you shouldn’t have to wait around forever to dig them out. Plus, season 5 works particularly well if interspaced with the rest the show, as most of its episodes run against the grain, jazzing things up by embroiling more outsiders in the team’s affairs and engaging with countercultural movements in fascinating – if somewhat awkward – ways.
Alternating between different casts also helps with the illusion that each team leader – Dan Briggs and Jim Phelps – is carefully recruiting the most suited agents available for each particular assignment, as opposed to having a regular group where some members eventually give way to others (in other words, it’s closer to the spirit suggested by those opening sequences in the first seasons where Briggs and Phelps flip through folders selecting their team).
If binged chronologically, later M:I suffers more evidently from the loss of the chameleonic Rollin Hand, played by Martin Landau (a genuinely great actor, certainly more versatile than Leonard Nimoy, who then came in to do a similar role), and the classy Cinnamon Carter, played by Barbara Bain. The latter was replaced by several other female operatives, starting with Lee Meriwether’s Tracey (needless to say, in my head-canon Meriwether is still the Catwoman from 1966’s Batman: The Movie, who made some kind of Suicide Squad arrangement with the government following the events in that film). Lesley Ann Warren’s Dana Lambert and Lynda Day George’s Casey had their moments, but they lacked Bain’s knowing look, which sold Cinnamon as a more convincing operative. As for Barney Collier, the team’s gadget wizard – and unstereotyped black man – is the true backbone of the series, playing a key role in almost every episode right until the finale.
So, what makes a Mission: Impossible episode cool? It varies, actually. If most episodes tend to draw on heist and con narratives, there are those that manage to cleverly fuse the two subgenres despite their diametrically opposed ideological gratification, one materialist and the other idealist (as argued by Jason Read, in the former you see an ideal plan clash against material reality, in the latter you find out that schemers were secretly able to anticipate everybody’s thoughts and reactions… and we were as effectivelly manipulated by the storytelling as the marks were by the IMF agents). Moreover, some episodes stand out because of the team’s entertainingly outrageous plans, using special effects and fake sets to trick their adversaries. In other cases, the main appeal are the deliriously complicated, twist-filled plots (especially when scripted by Paul Playdon), often involving meticulous frame-ups and elaborate mind games. Above all, I’d say the best episodes are the ones that deliver these ingredients with a certain rhythm, keeping up the breathless tempo of the opening credits. With that in mind, the list below combines the most perfect renditions of the M:I formula with the most successful deviations.
1. Operation Rogosh
More than the pilot, this is the episode that truly invented Mission: Impossible, establishing the insane lengths the IMF team was willing to go to in order to achieve their goals (in this case, an over-the-top ruse that involves convincing the titular super-terrorist he’s suffering from ‘delayed amnesia’). By itself, this would be enough to make ‘Operation Rogosh’ worthy of note, but what elevates it to number 1 are all the brilliant touches, from the taut direction to the witty dialogue, from the amusing performances to the multiple narrative threads running against the clock. Plus, there’s that unforgettable sequence early on when we first see Rogosh’s new reality from his distorted point of view… Definitely a high point in the history of television.
2. The Carriers
Yes, it’s another mission dealing with a bacteriological threat, but this time with a unique premise, as whimsical as it is engaging: the IMF infiltrates a fake all-American town that’s actually a training facility where enemy agents learn how to pretend to be American (proving that in M:I’s world the villains can be as inventive as the heroes). On top of the setting’s eerie atmosphere and of the episode’s playful undercurrent (toying with the East’s supposed view of the decadent West), ‘The Carriers’ is a prodigy of storytelling, adding new sources of suspense until the very end.
3. The Legend
What can I say… M:I’s first season was so amazing that it deserves all the top spots! Over the years, the IMF went after Nazis – old and neo – a handful of times, often using their own ideology against them. Yet no episode made these villains look more despicable and pathetic than ‘The Legend,’ in which the team find themselves in a bizarre South American chateau where Martin Bormann is preparing to take back Germany. A tale full of surprises where every agent is in top form – especially Cinnamon Carter, who chillingly reinvents herself as a cold-hearted Fräulein.
4. Trial by Fury
Arguably the show’s grittiest episode. The IMF infiltrates a brutal Third World prison in order to both protect a resistance network and expose an informer. The acting, the score, the tilted angles, and the pressure on the agents’ improvisational skills make ‘Trial by Fury’ a particularly intense hour, with a constant, palpable sense of danger. That said, perhaps my fondness for this one also has to do with getting to see Graves play the almost opposite character he played in Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17!
5. The Exchange
‘The Exchange’ opens in medias res (with a superb quasi-silent sequence) and never lets up, as Cinnamon gets captured in divided Europe and the IMF team pull off a rogue operation (conning their own allies!) in order exchange her for a prisoner of the western side. Cue in some remarkable torture scenes and a terrific climax at a proto-Checkpoint Charlie.
6. The Mind of Stefan Miklos
It’s the ultimate double (triple?) bluff, as the IMF is tasked with convincing a genius enemy investigator that false information is correct, so they set up scattered clues – some subtle, some less so – for him to put together. The plot is a veritable maze and, while the action is more static than in the episodes above (a lot of it consists of tense indoor conversations and quiet gestures), the dialogue is sprinkled with clever details. It all comes together beautifully in the end. Another small masterpiece.
7. Submarine
An homage to WWII submarine movies. The team has to get a former SS officer to disclose the location of Nazi funds, even though he has never cracked throughout decades of communist torture. Plus, they have to do it underneath the beards of GDR-ish socialists, whose authorities are about to close in on the IMF operation. Easily one of the greatest endings in the whole series.
8. The Town
In this highly satisfying format-breaker, Jim Phelps gets captured by mysterious foes in a creepy small town. It’s wonderful to see the way Rollin Hand deals with the situation, reminding us that these are seasoned pros, experts at both attentive detection and on-the-fly improvisation.
9. The Killer
The IMF tries to prevent an assassination, even though they don’t know the target or when or where or how the murder is meant to take place… The thing is that the titular hitman makes every decision at random, posing a real challenge to the team’s usually meticulous planning. The result is not only a suspenseful game of cat and mouse, but also a rare showcase for the wider IMF organization working behind the scenes, including a multitude of prop makers and set dressers.
10. Hunted
Rivalling ‘The Killer’ for my favorite season 5 episode, ‘Hunted’ is a gripping chase thriller set in M:I’s version of apartheid South Africa. The revelation in the cold open is a real stunner and the human interest subplot is quite touching as well, no doubt due to Ta Tanisha’s subtle guest performance. While the plotting isn’t as deliciously convoluted (for the show’s standards), there is an asphyxiating sense of urgency to the proceedings. Plus, I love the ironic way racial politics keep working both for and against the IMF’s mission.
11. The Cardinal
The IMF tries to prevent a dictator from replacing a local religious leader with an evil impostor. There isn’t anything deep or extraordinarily groundbreaking about ‘The Cardinal’ – it’s just pure rip-roaring pulp, complete with secret tunnels, pitch-perfect disguises, well-timed switcheroos, a two-way mirror, an ancient deathtrap, a gun-toting nun, and weaponized mosquitoes!
12. The Short Tail Spy
A classy venture into straight-up espionage, as Cinnamon is tasked with seducing an enemy agent but Dan Briggs suspects she may be getting seduced herself. Although ‘The Short Tail Spy’ doesn’t have M:I’s traditionally bombastic set pieces, the episode’s low-key tradecraft, spy games, and moral dilemmas should appeal to true genre fans. Bain’s acting, in particular, helps nail the atypically emotional punch of this lighthearted drama.
13. The Mercenaries
A mean fucker. The IMF pull off one of their most daring heists – along with a couple of ingenious con tricks – amidst a hellish enclave in equatorial Africa bursting with violent mercenaries.
14. The Amateur
Another season 5 narrative experiment, ‘The Amateur’ departs from the M:I formula not just by opening already with a mission-in-progress (which means that the exposition emerges retroactively rather than through an initial tape scene), but also by having a sleazy bar owner, Erik Schilling (an unforgettable guest spot by Anthony Zerbe), stumble into the IMF’s operation and try to make a buck out of it. Schilling’s involvement screws up everybody’s plans (i.e. the plans from both the good guys and the baddies), creating a chaotic encounter between the worlds of professional intelligence services and amateur grifting.
15. A Spool There Was
The IMF is tasked with tracking down a missing recording wire a fallen agent left behind, somewhere in a lake resort. The plan is to put Rollin Hand in a similarly perilous situation, hoping inspiration will strike about the hiding place. Probably the most linear and low-tech operation in the whole series, but the result is damn charming thanks to Rollin’s and Cinnamon’s lovely chemistry. More than any other episode, ‘A Spool There Was’ brings to mind the light entertainment you get from Hitchcock’s spy movies.
16. Nicole
Although cold professionalism was the norm, every once in a while IMF agents did get emotionally involved during their missions. And while not every director could sell such a dramatic change of pace, Stuart Hagmann memorably delivered the goods with ‘Nicole,’ a twisty cloak-and-dagger yarn that starts with a standard heist (of a list of double agents) but soon goes so far outside the show’s trappings that it becomes engrossingly unpredictable.
17. Phantoms
The mission is to bring down an Eastern Bloc dictator before he launches a purge of his country’s pro-western young artists. This dictator, Premier Leo Vorka, is one of the most fleshed out marks in the series, thanks to both a sharp screenplay and a compelling performance. On top of that, the IMF’s plan is as twisted as they come, haunting Vorka with old memories and squeezing his mental health until he breaks.
18. The Innocent
By itself, ‘The Innocent’ is exciting stuff, steadily delivering a solid Middle Eastern adventure. What makes it stand out so much, though, is that this time around the team tries to recruit a conscientious objector (and of course they manipulate the hell out of him, so the episode both validates the show’s conservative politics and perversely undermines them at the same time!). The result is an interesting self-reflexive gesture, as the series addresses a critique of its own premise.
19. The Martyr
Like ‘The Innocent,’ ‘The Martyr’ is a blatant attempt to appeal to the youth movement, as the IMF takes the side of student protesters (abroad, of course), culminating in a revolution to the sound of a Bob Dylan cover! Some may find the team’s efforts to look and sound hip sort of embarrassing, but I get a kick out of it in the same way that I love all the funky dialogue and visuals in superhero comics from the time… All this puts a droll, colorful shine on an already stellar M:I plot packed with fantastic gadgets and circular deception.
20. Bag Woman
IMF’s missions occasionally hit snags, but this is the one where practically everything that could go wrong does so. Things start out bad enough with Casey transporting a suitcase (in order to identify a politician bought by the Mob) unaware that it is set to explode, but soon all the other team members find themselves in their own predicaments… ‘Bag Woman’ is a diabolical contraption with an increasingly manic pace and the stylish feel of early ‘70s crime thrillers.
21. The Reluctant Dragon
The production values are perhaps lower than in ‘The Innocent’ and ‘The Martyr,’ but ‘The Reluctant Dragon’ is even more aggressively political, if not without nuance. A couple of IMF agents go behind the Iron Curtain to facilitate a defection, but things are not all what they seem… At one point, the mission changes into actually persuading a scientist to defect, i.e. showing him how rotten his authoritarian system is! The result has wit and grit to spare: while this is one of the few episodes to explicitly argue the IMF’s ideological justification, it’s also one where the people of Eastern Europe come off as truly diverse and often conflicted individuals.
22. The Question
A pretty original mission, as the IMF is assigned with figuring out if an assassin defecting to the West is the real deal or not. The result feels much closer to traditional spy fiction, but ‘The Question’ pulls this off with aplomb. Above all, it’s quite refreshing to see Jim Phelps’ team be at a loss for so long.
23. The Execution
A hardboiled entry, ‘The Execution’ pits the IMF against an extortion racket, who are of course completely baffled by the team’s outside-the-box methods and callous approach to psychological torture. The whole death row sequence must’ve been one of the most disturbing depictions of capital punishment to hit the small screen at the time… and it continues to strike a nerve! (Again, there is some ambiguity here: on the one hand, the discernible harshness of the process can serve as an indictment of the death penalty; on the other hand, I guess it also illustrates that threatening criminals with death can be productive, which was one of the many problematic subtexts of M:I as a whole…)
24. Memory
The IMF train an alcoholic memory expert to pass off as a back-from-the dead double agent… and that’s just the beginning of this vicious, extremely well-written entry. The earlier M:I episodes had a lot of personality to them, but ‘Memory’ is even more flavorful thanks to Albert Paulsen’s outstanding guest role (the first of many he would do, playing different characters).
25. The Play
Arguably M:I’s most (deliberately) comedic episode has the IMF trying to trick a propaganda minister into approving a theatre play that insults his country’s leader. Seeing the square IMF agents posing as pretentious artists and hammy egomaniacs is a riot, but there are also surprisingly tender moments involving a defector struggling with the prospect of leaving all his awards behind…
26. The Confession
A domestic Cold War story, for once, as the IMF team set out to expose a conspiracy between a hawkish senator and a Soviet assassin in order to prevent the collapse of détente. Lots of fun moments, with Rollin Hand posing as a hotheaded, fast-talking jailbird (Landau has a field day!).
27. Trek
A tough, western-flavored outing where Jim Phelps breaks out a ruthless criminal from a South American prison in the hopes that he will lead the team to a cache of stolen Inca gold stashed somewhere in the nearby desert mountains. A stunning-looking episode that established Phelps (unlike Briggs before him) wasn’t just a cerebral chess player, but also a badass action hero.
28. The Train
All the great spy adventures have at least one incredible sequence on a train, from the British oldie The Lady Vanishes to the Korean throwback The Age of Shadows, not to mention the classic fight in From Russia With Love (which Spectre desperately tried to top)… M:I put its own unmistakable spin on this trope by engineering a false train journey through optical illusions and sound effects (they even recruit an Oscar-winning art director to help out!) as part of an idiosyncratic scheme to prevent a dying democratic prime minister from handing over power to an authoritarian successor.
29. Action!
In a sense, M:I has always been about the techniques of audiovisual fiction: the IMF strategies often involve coming up with narratives, rehearsals, extensive make-up, convincing performances, set design, and practical effects. The faceless Secretary is like a powerful producer and Dan Briggs and Jim Phelps are eccentric writer-directors, just as Barney Collier is the resourceful F/X guy, Willy Armitage is the all-purpose stuntman, and the rest of the troupe are, essentially, a bunch of talented method actors. The parallel runs even farther in ‘Action!,’ where the team infiltrate an enemy studio to sabotage a propaganda movie… and their very weapons are filmmaking tools. Politically, this is one of the dodgiest episodes (it implies American atrocities in Vietnam were ‘fake news’), but it’s nevertheless a joy to watch the way the operation unfolds in such a peculiar, mirror-like milieu.
30. The Condemned
This time it’s personal. Jim Phelps gets his guys to help him clear out a childhood friend who has been convicted of murder in a foreign country. Further shaking up the formula, the team now has a mystery to solve, making the intrigue particularly tortuous. Plus, there is a neat car chase!
31. The Bunker
A double-rescue operation where obstacles keep piling up, including a third-party killer who is also a master of disguise. Yes, these are technically two episodes, but they form a single story, so they only take up one place on the list… In fact, they’re like a slick, deliberately paced spin-off movie. Other than a Big Store scam, ‘The Bunker’ showcases all of M:I’s signature elements, only pushed to the next level: there are masks on top of masks, the action is somehow even more cliffhanger-laden than usual, and the spy-fi gadgets feel even pulpier.
32. Pilot
A sweaty, two-fisted affair in which a still relatively insecure IMF sets out to disarm a couple of warheads in a Caribbean dictatorship. I’m not going to lie: M:I’s pilot is a chunky slice of escapism, but the best thing about it is watching such a rough-edged blueprint for what the show will become, with hints of other directions it could’ve taken… It’s certainly more humorous than most of the following episodes and the characters feel more alive (they joke, they flirt, they screw things up), but you also get loads of soon-to-be-familiar beats (including the first face mask!). Given the prospect of watching something like this every week, I’m sure the studio execs – and the audiences – were immediately blown away.
33. The Survivors
The IMF’s mission in ‘The Survivors’ is to rescue a couple of scientists and their spouses, but that’s just a pretext for a nice remix of the show’s usual bag of tricks, from small cons (including a funny subplot about a femme fatale) to larger stunts (they simulate a freaking earthquake in the middle of San Francisco!). A well-oiled machine doing what it does best.
34. The Traitor
This time the IMF’s mission/caper involves breaking into an embassy in order to steal a secret document before the enemy can decipher it… and, along the way, discredit a defector. Lots of nifty gimmicks in this one, but of course the best thing about ‘The Traitor’ is the presence of a new agent played by the athletic Eartha Kitt (that’s right, another Catwoman actress – and this one actually does some cat-burglaring!).
35. The Ransom
Once again, things get personal. This time around, mobsters abduct the daughter of a close friend of Dan Briggs and propose exchanging her for a key trial witness who is under such strict protection that it takes a rogue IMF operation to get to him. A smooth change of pace, not just because of the different sort of stakes, but also because of the neo-noirish mood, complete with the occasional saxophone and piano…
36. The Glass Cage
The IMF team infiltrate an inescapable, high-tech maximum security prison in order to free a resistance leader. Besides the labyrinthine plot and the claustrophobic settings, Cinnamon’s and Rollins’ acting (played by the real-life couple of Bain and Landau) is a particular delight to watch in this one, effectively exploiting the warden’s psychology.
37. The Rebel
‘The Rebel’ opens near where most M:I episodes end, with the team about to complete their mission. Things go (very) wrong at the last moment, though, to the point where it takes them a whole episode to work their way out of the mess, facing a number of simultaneous challenges. In true Cold War fashion, the solution involves pitting the people’s religious urges against their oppressors!
38. Recovery
When a US bomber crashes behind the Iron Curtain, the IMF is sent to recover its fail-safe device, thus preventing the technology from falling into enemy hands. Another well-crafted thriller, mixing nail-biting tension and geopolitics, with an American scientist defector as a key adversary.
39. Operation ‘Heart’
A rescue mission somewhere in Northern Africa *and* an attempt to prevent a red-backed coup. Thrillingly packed with the team’s trademark sleights of hand and double bluffs, this is the type of cool-as-hell episode that originally set my standard for Mission: Impossible when I first watched it as a kid.
40. Decoy
In order to get their hands on a valuable list, the IMF arrange the defection of the daughter of a dead communist leader somewhere in the Eastern Bloc, even though they’re perfectly aware the whole thing is a trap. The usual, reliable stew of character-based intrigue and gadget-based set pieces gets spiced up by a romantic subplot and an awesome chase scene.
41. The Photographer
Much of the joy of Mission: Impossible is seeing what imaginative plans the team will come up with next, no matter how contrived their execution. In that sense, ‘The Photographer’ has got to be a minor classic. It starts out simple enough, with Cinnamon using her model background to approach a fashion photographer who also happens to be a spy for a foreign nuclear power (not the Russians or the Chinese though), but in the final minutes the IMF’s illusions reach epic proportions. The episode also benefits from quite an original villain, once again brought to life by Anthony Zerbe.
42. The Field
The IMF is tasked with destroying a nuclear satellite about to be used for global blackmail whose controls are surrounded by a minefield in an impregnable island. Besides the fact that the stakes are a bit more James Bondian in this one, ‘The Field’ is one of the most committed mission-gone-wrong episodes, with things drastically spiraling out of control and forcing the team to come up with a whole new plan-within-the-plan, including a great bit of on-the-spot, quick-on-their-feet improv.)
43. Orpheus
Classic Cold War intrigue as Jim Phelps pretends to defect to the East as part of a cunning ploy to identify an enemy assassin. ‘Orpheus’ is another great example of the series’ strand of Playdon-scripted, mind-bendingly intricate, tradecraft-heavy episodes, further helped by a literal ticking time bomb device.
44. Live Bait
Like ‘Orpheus,’ ‘Live Bait’ is a masterful showcase for how fun M:I can be when it pushes the conventions of the spy genre to a dizzying extreme. This operation to free a prisoner who can expose an American mole – and at the same time draw any suspicions away from said mole – results in one of the most complex webs of betrayal, misdirection, and counter-counter-intelligence in the entire series, deviously confusing and edited to perfection.
45. Two Thousand
Take ‘Operation Rogosh’ and ‘The Photographer’ and push their premises to a gloriously ludicrous extreme – and you get ‘Two Thousand,’ where at one point the IMF trick a treasonous nuclear physicist into believing he has woken up in a dystopic, post-apocalyptic future! We’ve seen several variations of this before, but ‘Two Thousand’ approaches the material with plenty of panache, reveling in its own schlocky excess, including a vivid direction, some impressive visuals, and a number of plates frantically spinning at the same time…
46. Kidnap
Most M:I episodes were heists at heart, their structure and MacGuffins covered with the guise of international relations. Even the few off-duty episodes – where accidental and/or personal matters provided a different context and motivation – were all about watching the IMF agents execute complicated retrievals (of objects, people, or information) while displaying stupendous timing and presence of mind. ‘Kidnap’ belongs to the latter strand, as gangsters hold Jim Phelps hostage and force his teammates to steal an important document, creating a lengthy chain of tasks they have to pull off until reaching the ultimate goal of freeing Jim. (Peter Graves directed this one himself and did a fine job at it.)
47. The Diplomat
In an effort to discredit accurate intelligence (about the US second-strike defense system) obtained by a rival power, the IMF recruit an actual diplomat’s wife to attract – and misdirect – an enemy agent (a creep who tends to kill women with sleeping pills). A smart and efficient two-pronged operation with a risky climax.
48. Echo of Yesterday
A quieter, more sensitive episode, in which the IMF push an ageing German fascist to confront suppressed memories. Well-acted and handsomely shot, exploiting the unsettling impact of Nazi iconography. A haunting final scene.
49. The Controllers
When the IMF are sent to stop – and discredit – the development of a mind-controlling drug, a couple of unexpected complications (including a major fuck-up) throw a wrench into the original plan, justifying the story’s extended duration (it’s another two-parter!). The MacGuffin is cartoonier than usual and one of the villains is particularly despicable (and horny), but the tone nevertheless fits in neatly with M:I’s fantastic reality.
50. Zubrovnik’s Ghost
A scientist is convinced the ghost of her dead husband wants her to work for the commies and it’s up to the IMF to prove her wrong (with the help of a medium). From what I gather, fans of M:I tend to despise ‘Zubrovnik’s Ghost’ for being too kooky… Needless to say, that’s exactly what draws me to this episode, as the amusingly offbeat premise and genuine horror vibe raise it above many of the more formulaic entries.
Another week, another reminder that comic book covers can be freaking awesome…
Ed Brubaker is one of the most critically acclaimed comic book writers of the 21st century. Heavily influenced by crime fiction and by the superhero revisionist turn of the 1980s, he has continually sought to imbue American comics with a greater degree of realism, psychological depth, decompressed pace, and adult content like sex and drugs (played not for outrageous shock value, but with a generally tasteful sensibility that treats them as important elements in many people’s lives). You can see a quest for maturity and respectability all over his fan-favorite runs on Daredevil and Captain America, not to mention in his collaborations with Sean Phillips for Icon and Image Comics (most notably the neo-noir series Criminal), whose backmatter often includes additional articles on cinema and literature. While other popular creators from the last couple of decades – like Brian K. Vaughan and Rick Remender – tend to target smart, iconoclastic teens, Brubaker seems to be going for a slightly more pretentious crowd for whom comics should be taken as seriously as the kind of films and novels discussed on the back of his books.
I love much of Ed Brubaker’s work, especially the period pieces The Fade Out and Pulp, along with the spy series Velvet and Sleeper. However, while I certainly share several of his references (from film noir and mystery yarns to heist thrillers and espionage), I don’t think his style always does justice to the material at hand. This definitely applies to his uneven stint on Batman comics in the early 2000s.
Detective Comics #784Having proven his potential with a handful of indie crime comics and Vertigo projects, in 2000 Ed Brubaker, then in his early thirties, was brought in to write Batman, starting with issue #582 and sticking around – with a brief interlude – until #607 (he then carried on for another couple of years, until 2004, writing various other books for the Batman line). I know I’m going against the grain on this one, but I think this initial run displays many of Brubaker’s most frustrating tics as a writer without the redeeming features of his later works.
He started off on the wrong foot with the very first arc (‘Fearless’), which revolves around a new character who is supposed to be both a very close friend of Bruce Wayne (even though we never heard of him) and a brilliant criminal mastermind (with an ultra-clichéd and superficial origin). We learn all this from the explicit narration, but neither of those things is convincingly conveyed within the story, so that when we eventually learn this guy has figured out Batman’s secret ID and when we see Bruce willing to go over the edge for him, it doesn’t feel earned at all… It’s not as if you can’t compellingly establish high emotional stakes about new characters in a brief tale (see, for example, The Batman Adventures #27) or even quickly create a memorable, larger-than-life villain (see Gotham Adventures #49 or the debut of most of Batman’s classic rogues, really), but as far as I’m concerned these issues fail to sell the drama among all the rush. And as if that weren’t enough, they also introduced the super-assassin Philo Zeiss, who turned out to be one of the most uninteresting rogues to ever cross the Dark Knight’s path!
It doesn’t help that the whole run was illustrated by Scott McDaniel, whose dynamic, cartoony pencils hardly match Ed Brubaker’s introspective, relatively down-to-earth tone. Such awkward marriages can occasionally produce something special, but in this case the mismatch simultaneously undermined Brubaker’s literary quality and restrained McDaniel’s visual virtuosity…
Batman #601(Brubaker’s final issues on Catwoman suffered from a similar problem, with Paul Gulacy’s sleazy, highly sexualized drawings annihilating any sense of subtlety or sophistication from the script…)
When I see panels like the one above, I’m struck by the lack of fun and imagination, getting very little in return. Perhaps you could get away with something this witless if it was specifically designed to highlight Batman’s desperation and sense of urgency, but this excerpt is not a from a deeply personal mission… The scene isn’t in contrast to the Dark Knight’s usual attitude or to the series’ standard storytelling approach – rather, it is representative of a peculiar era, immediately after Denny O’Neil retired as editor, when Batman comics mostly did away with playfulness and instead pushed bleakness as far as it could go.
And yet, these were still mainstream DC products, so you had this constant sense of dissonance… For instance, on the one hand, the stories were full of rape and prostitution; on the other hand, the swear words continued to be %#&@ing censored.
I wonder if Ed Brubaker himself eventually had the same realization, at some point.
Catwoman (v3) #5Looking at his 2004 two-parter ‘The Terrible True Life of Tom Strong’ (Tom Strong #29-30), it reads like a meta-epilogue – if not necessarily an outright mea culpa – of Brubaker’s downbeat work on Batman.
In a variation of a familiar story (whose formula harkens at least as far back as Batman’s own ‘Mask’), the square-jawed hero Tom Strong wakes up in a world where it turns out he is actually a delusional loser who has been fantasizing about his alter ego all along. His new reality, then, is akin to ‘our’ reality, i.e. one where costumed crimefighters are pathetic rather than heroic (and where the laws of physics and complex sociopolitics render their exploits impractical and ultimately unethical), or, better yet, akin to the reality simulated in grim-and-gritty revisionist superhero narratives. Brubaker’s script presents such revisionism as not only unpleasant and evil (it’s part of a villain’s masterplan), but also as at odds with the very essence of this type of stories… to the point where Tom Strong is able to see through the hallucination by realizing he just doesn’t fit in such a damned harsh world:
Tom Strong #30Whether the ‘mind of a madman’ comment above referred to Tom Strong’s creator, Alan Moore (whose quintessential revisionist text, Marvelman, is also riffed on in this comic), or whether it was meant as a self-referential allusion, it perfectly encapsulated the attitude presiding over Ed Brubaker’s then-recent Batman work.
In his defense, that attitude matched the zeitgeist, both in the actual United States of the W. Bush era (especially the post-9/11 obsession with terrorism, torture, and surveillance) and across the DC Universe. After all, there was a kind of audition in 2000, with Ed Brubaker and Brian K. Vaughan penning brief Batman arcs and the editors then picking the former over the latter for the role of regular writer. Vaughan (who also went on to do a pretty nifty Tom Strong fill-in issue, by the way) delivered ‘Close Before Striking,’ ‘Mimsy Were The Borogoves,’ and the short story ‘Skullduggery,’ all of them very cool tales that openly embraced the quirkiness of the Caped Crusader’s world (they’ve been collected in the book False Faces). Yet DC was clearly looking for something less whimsical at the time… They chose Brubaker, who, besides showing little interest in colorful rogues with offbeat motivations (except, I grant it, for Santa Klaus), kept coming up with villains whose defining feature was their *lack* of feelings, particularly pain and fear (he later returned to this motif in Daredevil).
It’s not that Brubaker can’t write superhero stories that take full advantage of the genre’s more unabashedly fantastic elements (he did so, quite neatly, in WildStorm’s Sleeper and The Authority: Revolution); it’s more like he set out to prove these could be vehicles for straight-up crime drama… His contemporary character-defining run on Catwoman, for example, is full of references to – and depictions of – drug abuse and underage sex work that are not exploitative so much as genuinely committed takes on these matters. At its best, the result can be touching and even heartbreaking, as it sincerely engages with topics such as substance addiction in a way that feels at least partially autobiographical.
At its worst, though, we ended up with this:
Catwoman (v3) #16Perhaps Ed Brubaker thought this was going to be his only chance to write the sort of hardboiled fiction he cared for, so he just ran with it. Fortunately, since then his commercial success and the evolution of the editorial field have allowed him to move on to projects where he got to explore his interests through his own creations rather than impose them on franchises about spandex-wearing heroes with goofy names (even if he did use some of that freedom to do an R-rated riff on Archie).
Or perhaps it was a familiar, lingering adolescent will to prove once and for all that comics aren’t ‘just for kids.’ You could still feel this in later works – in Criminal: The Deluxe Edition, Brubaker wrote: ‘I often get asked why we haven’t collected these articles [from the issues’ backmatter] in the trade paperbacks, and my usual answer is that you don’t get to the end of a crime novel and find a bunch of articles by the author’s friends about 70s crime movies or Noir films from the 40s and 50s.’ It’s sad that the desire to emulate the ideal of a (presumably more grown-up and respected) prose novel actually means limiting what a graphic novel can provide, so I was glad to see Criminal‘s hardcovers eventually ended up collecting Brubaker’s articles as extras (although not those by his friends, as he explains, in order not to profit further from personal favors).
To be fair, Batman comics do have an umbilical connection to violent crime and, in any case, they have historically been eclectic enough to accommodate wide-ranging genre hybridity, so Brubaker’s approach did not always feel off-the-mark. His reboot of the Joker’s origin, the one-shot The Man Who Laughs, is a gripping thriller. His two arcs on Detective Comics – ‘Dead Reckoning’ and ‘Made of Wood’ – are right up my alley in terms of building mysteries around the specific cast and different elements of the DCU (this is also the kind of thing Jeph Loeb had recently gone for in the shockingly successful arc ‘Hush,’ but Brubaker’s approach is much, much more elegant). The Elseworlds yarn Gotham Noir, which reimagined the Dark Knight’s world through the lens of a film noir set in 1949 – starring James Gordon as an alcoholic private eye – tells a satisfying, character-driven whodunit that works by itself (although, naturally, it’s even more fun if you spot the intertextual winks to the Batman mythos).
Gotham Noir’s seedy atmosphere, in particular, seems perfectly suited to the specific pulp traditions being evoked…
Gotham NoirThat said, I do have other problems with Ed Brubaker’s writing. The main one has to do with his tendency to tell rather than show… Now, I don’t buy into the notion that there is only one correct way to craft a narrative: as much as comics are a visual medium, words are certainly a part of it, so text can be a perfectly acceptable (even powerful) way to convey information or stimulate emotion. However, Brubaker tends to talk down to readers, spelling out every story beat, every inner conflict, even every major symbol, as if wanting to make absolutely sure we all understand how clever the story is. I suppose he could be going for complicity: perhaps his fans do feel cleverer themselves as they get the sense nothing is escaping their grasp (after all, Alison Bechdel does the same in her acclaimed autobiographical comics, so this is clearly a respected approach). Regardless, while Brubaker’s most enjoyable books have toned down this tic, it was all over his Batman and Catwoman runs, especially in contrast to the scripts of other creators in the contemporary Bat-Family series, like Kelley Puckett and Greg Rucka.
Even an incredibly wordy writer like Brian Michael Bendis manages to leave something for the readers to interpret. When he introduced a new love interest for Matt Murdoch in his Daredevil run, for instance, Bendis did it in a way that resonated with the character’s origin… It was hardly subtle, but at least he trusted fans to work out the symbolism and engage with its implications. In turn, when Brubaker followed him, the subtext became text:
Daredevil (v2) #64(In Brubaker’s defense, this whole issue is framed like a tribute to old-school romance comics, so this could be a parody of corny writing…)
As you can no doubt tell by now, I have a very hit-or-miss relationship with Ed Brubaker’s output. I get the sensation I’ve grown up loving the same crime films and novels that inspired him, but his writing doesn’t always transcend the memory of those works. Hell, sometimes I feel more stimulated by the essays on the back of Brubaker’s books about his genre influences – like his piece on Out of the Past in Criminal #2 – than by the actual stories he writes!
Catwoman (v3) #37More often than not, however, Ed Brubaker can truly deliver, so let’s finish by focusing on that side of his work.
At the end of the day, Brubaker did contribute with at least two entries for the pantheon of greatest Gotham-set comics. One of them is the aforementioned run on Catwoman (at least before going downhill in its final year). For all its flaws and missteps, that seriers did reach an outstanding emotional intensity, fleshing out an extensive – largely female – cast that it’s hard not to care about. I am particularly fond of the romance between Selina Kyle and the aging private detective Slam Bradley, as well as the one between Holly Robinson and her lover Karon, full as they were with the uncertainties, ambiguities, and contradictory feelings of so many real-word relationships between broken adults who’ve been around the block.
It showed how effectively Brubaker could reframe the expectations for this kind of comic when given the right creative partners, namely artists like Cameron Stewart and Javier Pulido:
Catwoman (v3) #17(On a meta level, the devastating thing is that what doomed this relationship were invisible editorial forces way beyond the protagonists’ control…)
Like I said, over time Ed Brubaker’s writing appeared to have grown less ashamed of the fact that these were mainstream superhero comics and more willing to bask in the lighter side of the source material. This culminated in the wonderful Catwoman arc ‘Wild Ride,’ where Selina and Holly take a road trip through the DCU’s America. A love letter to this shared universe, ‘Wild Ride’ saw Brubaker briefly interrupt his depressing chronicles of Gotham’s drug trade to play with continuity, with series’ interconnections, and with other creators’ fun ideas, as the duo hit places such as Keystone City (home of the Flash, where Catwoman gets involved in a high-tech heist), St. Roch (DC’s version of New Orleans), and Opal City (the setting of James Robinson’s Starman, whose hip tone had probably inspired Brubaker’s own run on Catwoman in the first place).
Catwoman (v3) #23His other major contribution was Gotham Central, a police procedural set in the titular city that achieved the best of both worlds. On the one hand, it was an intelligent crime series about cops trying to operate in a corruption-riddled department – a classic set-up that isn’t exactly unrealistic (it’s not a big leap from Gotham to the Baltimore of We Own This City). On the other hand, every storyline had a couple of jarring reminders that they were also operating in a place with costumed criminals and vigilantes (whose strangeness was eerily reinforced by the deadpan artwork). GC dug into the everyday lives of regular people inhabiting the periphery of the Dark Knight’s adventures while figuring out the practicalities of policing in Gotham… For example, a civilian organization had to temp out an employee to the Major Crimes Unit so that they could have an outsider switch on the Batsignal (thus asking for Batman’s aid without officially endorsing his actions).
Ed Brubaker penned the stories about the day shift, Greg Rucka the did the ones about the night shift, and every few arcs they worked together on a joint investigation. Their styles merged surprisingly well, so that it isn’t always clear who wrote what. Crucially, Brubaker reined in his most annoying tendencies, like the (over)explanatory ‘voice-overs’ (except for issue #11), going for Rucka’s more cinematic dialogue & action storytelling approach, which resulted in some of the best work in his career. Seriously, his arc ‘Motive’ is up there with Scene of the Crime and The Fade Out as a near-perfect mystery comic… Likewise, the first issue of ‘Life is Full of Disappointments’ is a prodigy of narration-free characterization and understatement.
Plus, it was here that Brubaker wrote some of my all-time favorite Gotham moments, seamlessly incorporating the city’s idiosyncrasies into low-key conversations about good and evil:
Gotham Central #3In last week’s reminder that comics can be awesome, we celebrated goofy romance covers. This week, let’s pay tribute to goofy horror:
