Criminal: The Last Of The Innocents - A Piece I Wrote For Flashmob Fridays, A Blog I have Apparently Been Dumped From.
So, about a month ago, I was invited to take part in Alan David Doane’s latest project, Flashmob Fridays. I gladly accepted, partly because I’ve long been a fan of Alan’s writing, and consider him to be one of the best critics of comics there is, and partly because I’ve wanted an excuse to write more stuff on the internet for a while. I recommend heading over there- it’s flashmobfridays.blogspot.com - because Alan has assembled quite an impressive crew of very talented people to write about a different comic every week. Honestly, it’s well worth your time, if you like reading good comics criticism.
Sadly, it appears I am no longer welcome to write there myself. I say “appears”, as I’ve had no direct confirmation of that. All I know is that Alan has blocked me on twitter, taken me off the list of contributors, and is no longer answering my emails. This is apparently due to my not agreeing with his hardline position on the rumoured Watchmen prequels, which he considers to be deeply unethical and something that must be stopped. I think they’re a bad idea, but I don’t share his fervour on the issue- I could go in to my reasons, but that’s a blog post all it’s own (one I’m about half way through writing, and will hopefully post soon). In the past, I had come to believe that Alan was capable of maintaining friendships in spite of such disagreements (you know, like an adult), and so I felt free to tell my friend that I thought he was wrong about this particular (quite trivial) thing.
Apparently I was wrong. Which is very saddening to me, but there you go. I’ve long considered Alan a good friend, and to lose that over something as stupid as our opinions on a piece of entertainment (that may not even exist!) is extremely galling.
One frustrating aspect of all this (though admittedly much less frustrating than losing a friend) is that this was the first week that I’d actually managed to find time to write something for the blog, a review of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s excellent Criminal: The Last Of The Innocent. It seems a shame to let 1000 words about a fantastic comic book go to waste, so I’ve decided to post it here instead.
Before we get into it, a bit of context for you: This piece was written to be one of a few pieces by various contributors to run as a follow up to last week’s proper entry on the book- as such, it concentrates a little more than necessary on the negative aspects of the subject- there’s already four and a half thousand words of effusive praise for the book in that entry, so it seemed unnecessary to add much to that, deserved as it may be. So, I want to be very, very clear: I loved this comic. This isn’t meant to be a negative review, just an honest account of my reaction to the book.
So, anyway, with all that out of the way, here it is…
#################
I suppose it’s inevitable, in a medium that has, ever since it’s commoditisation, traded primarily in licensed franchises, that the most talented practitioners will find themselves drawn to working with other people’s concepts long after any need to do so has gone away. Whether it’s Alan Moore building entire precarious realities from the fiction of others, or Mike Mignola taking Robert E Howard and H P Lovecraft and using them to create his own cosmology, or even Frank Miller changing Batman and Catwoman’s names to utilise them in his own paranoid delusional polemic, it seems that wherever you look the great (or sometimes, arguably, formerly great) and the good of comics seem to be unable to stop themselves overtly mining past fictions to fuel their own.
That said, if you’d told me a few years ago that Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips would make a thinly disguised Archie comic, I’d have assumed you were taking the piss.
I can’t fault them for doing it; Brubaker clearly has a deep affection for the source material, and hey, everyone’s doing it. Heck, I do it myself in my own comics. But I have to confess to finding this endless referentialism tiresome and distracting at this point. I can’t deny it raised a smile in me now and then — particularly when Encyclopedia Brown showed up, largely because he’s the only character in the piece I have any real firsthand experience of. That, of course, is the big problem with post modernism: it relies absolutely on an assumption of common cultural experience that doesn’t necessarily hold true — Archie may be a staple of American culture, but to me he’s only marginally more familiar than Dan Dare probably is to most Americans. I’ve heard plenty about Archie, enough to know the basic dynamics of the series and cast, I’ve seen plenty of covers and so forth; but I’ve never read an actual Archie comic, and as such it has no resonance for me. Whatever interesting point Brubaker was trying to make about the world of Archie and his friends is lost on me — I get the joke, but that’s all.
It’s particularly frustrating in this case, because the story itself is by far and away the best of the Criminal series so far. If Criminal has a formula, it is this: take a good (or at least ordinary) man, and have him consumed by the darkness of a corrupt world. Last Of The Innocents neatly reverses this; the world presented is, if not necessarily good, at least ordinary; the darkness and corruption all comes from within our protagonist, eventually spilling out to taint the world around him, consuming or destroying all who live there. It is a genuinely fascinating exploration of the mind of a truly evil man, exposing him for the banal and selfish child he is. This is executed with all the skill we have come to expect from the Criminal team, having watched them develop over the last 5 volumes (not to mention various other projects).
Phillips in particular gets to show off — there’s something exciting about an artist using multiple styles in the one story, and his use of the Archie house style for the flashback sequences isn’t just an effective storytelling device, it’s a visual treat, a stunt that wows the reader, the comics equivalent of a blazing guitar solo. Of course we all know he has the ability to do something like this, but sometimes it’s nice to see him prove it. I’ve been a fan of Phillips’ work from his days as a painter in 2000AD and the Megazine, one of the huge wave of guys working in a similar style in the wake of Simon Bisley’s explosive debut and ascension to superstardom. Even then, he stood out, but in the years that have followed he’s proved himself to be one of the best and most versatile cartoonists in the business. There’s nothing new to be seen from him here; the scenes in the “present” are drawn in his signature style for this series, that wonderful combination of heavily shadowed, precisely “messy” inking over carefully composed, well photo referenced drawing, in a page layout that deliberately evokes traditional newspaper comic strips; while pastiche of another artist’s style, as used for the flashbacks, is something we’ve become used to from him in Criminal thanks to the Dick Tracy inspired Frank Kafka. It’s just that this time we get to see him really push both these sides and show us just how well he can do them. It’s not innovative or ground breaking on any level, but it is a breathtaking display of absolute mastery of his craft.
While Phillips is letting off fireworks on a superficial level, Brubaker is quietly doing the really groundbreaking things, at least as far as this series is concerned. By taking the tried and true plot structure that he’s been using for so long now and essentially turning it inside out, he finally, fully codifies the themes and message of the series so far, and manages to make it seem new and fresh at the same time. Every expectation we’ve been trained to have of a Criminal story is overturned; where we expect our hero to fail, he succeeds; where we expect him to seek redemption, he runs into the dark with wild abandon. Where we expect him to lose the girl to some horrible fate or other, it turns out he himself is the dark fate that awaits her.
We wait for the hammer to fall, only to see it inexorably rise, and eventually disappear altogether. Ultimately, it ends just like every other Criminal story: the bad guy wins, and everybody who wants to be good either dies, is doomed, or is exploited and compromised beyond redemption. Darkness always wins. Still, it feels fresh, and surprising, because we’ve never seen it from this side before. It’s simple, but the execution is brilliant, Brubaker bringing the exact lightness of touch required to never tip us off to the trick he’s playing on us.
And yet, my discomfort remains. I guess, ultimately, I just don’t see the point of using the Archie characters in this way, and I don’t see that it brings anything to the story. This isn’t Watchmen. There is no insightful commentary on the genre of teen romantic comedy to be found here, at least so far as I can tell. It’s closer, in fact, to The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (a work that I find myself questioning more with each successive volume), in that the references are only really there to give the reader that momentary thrill of recognition, and give annotators the satisfaction of showing off. It could, I suppose, be justified as a misdirection; as I said, the truly amazing thing about this book is the way Brubaker manages to take us down a by now familiar path without us realising it; perhaps moving that path in Riverdale is part of the trick. For me, though, as much as I adore this piece, it just seems a little too distracting, and I can’t deny I’d prefer the book without it.
Except Encyclopedia Brown. He can stay.
