Monday 14 March 2011

Simply Irredeemable

Capes and cowls had lost their luster, and I was thinking it was me. Apart from Bendis’s run on Daredevil and Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, I haven’t been reading superhero books regularly for years. Oh, okay, there was Ed Brubaker’s Sleeper – good hard-boiled fun, but I’d trade all of those for one issue of Criminal.

My must-have titles these days: B.P.R.D., Hellboy, Buffy, Hellblazer, Criminal… Some have their roots in superherodom, but they’ve mostly looped the loop to the days when Kirby argued for heroes to wear utilitarian uniforms. Look at the way the Batman’s togged out in Joker – it’s not really a costume at all, a detail that tacitly acknowledged how tights and underwear would have blunted the hard edge of Azzarello’s and Bermejo’s story.

So I was down on superheroes, and I don’t seem to be the only one. My local comic store (Avalon Comics on Lavender Hill – hi, Bruce and Mark!) is sadly closing its doors after two decades. The kids aren’t coming in any more, and the increasingly long-in-the-tooth fanboys are getting distracted by wife and family.

Is narrowcasting reaching its logical conclusion, the collapse of the market to a singularity? The reasons for the decline in popular comic book readership, and what might be done to address that, is a big topic to chew. It would be the height of arrogance for me to lecture Marvel on ways to turn it around, so I’ll save that for next week. What I want to share today is my eureka moment, the comic that showed me superheroes can still enthrall and excite. That comic is Irredeemable.

You know how long it can take for a new thing to permeate through all the background noise? I must have been gazing blankly at ads for Irredeemable for almost two years, but it took a review on Guys Can Read to make me actually buy a few issues to see what all the fuss was about.

All the fuss? There hasn’t been nearly enough fuss. You want pace, inventiveness, rich characterization and sheer bravura storytelling? There's very little in either comics or prose fiction that can hold a candle to Mark Waid's Superman-goes-bad saga. I'm finding it hard to remember the last time I came across such a must-read story. After two issues, I bought the whole run to date. Sleep and eating were out of the question; each plot twist was more compelling than the last. There hasn't been a story this gripping since the second season of Fringe.
In a nutshell: what if Superman wasn’t brought up by Jonathan and Martha Kent? Without a stable, happy home life, he isn’t equipped emotionally to cope with the strain of being the Earth’s mightiest hero. And when he snaps it’s not at all pretty. Batman (his stand-in, that is, in Waid’s universe) dies after seeing his wife and kid vaporized by heat vision. The surrogates of Hawkman and Jimmy Olsen suffer much worse fates.

“I will do such things,” said Lear. “What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth!” So wait till you see what someone like Superman might do if he turns evil. It gets grisly. It will make your blood run cold.

What I particularly like: Waid’s story is completely driven by character. As a writer, I know the temptation to just block out a plot and make your characters run it. But when it's done properly, the plot is just something that arises from the character's lies, decisions, revelations, secrets, aspirations and actions. The characters live their lives and a story arises. This is how Waid does it in Irredeemable - and on an ongoing title it's incredibly brave, because you could be painting yourself into a corner. And you need to keep tossing another couple of plates up to be ready to replace earlier ones when they finally stop spinning. It could all go so horribly wrong, and there’s no going back to fix it.

To corral such a breathtaking narrative and still be able to keep the surprises coming, that’s the sign of a master at work. And the surprises Waid throws at us are rarely coming out of the blue. The most effective ones are blindingly obvious – after they’ve happened. “Surprising yet inevitable” is every writer’s goal, yet not easy to pull off. And Mark Waid keeps on doing it. Hmm, I can see how admiration can start to turn into hatred.

So, if you are rash enough to think that superhero comics have no power to impress you, and if you don’t mind starting on a story that will have you ignoring family emergencies, urgent calls and house fires for the next few hours, get the whole set of Irredeemable (twenty-three issues so far) and plunge right in. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

BOOM! Studios comics app
Graphic.ly comics app
Irredeemable Vol 1 on Amazon.com
Irredeemable Vol 1 on Amazon.co.uk

7 comments:

  1. 'The most effective story surprises are blindingly obvious - after you've seen them'. Yes, yes yes, thumping the desk here (thought you might wonder what the noise was, pounding through the wall...)

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  2. I'm late to this party, I know. Finally listened to the voices telling me to check out Irredeemable, and I'm glad I did. But when everybody is running in one direction, I always have the urge to go in the other :)

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  3. I thought you didn't read much DC, Dave, or was I mistaken about that?

    And are the Buffy comics any good? I hated the show.

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  4. Hi Hamza - well, back in the day I was a Marvel fan. We're talking about the Silver Age when kids tended to align with one or the other big publisher. DC was sober, reliable, respectable, a bit ho-hum. Marvel was chaotic, the punk pretender with bags of energy and attitude. I read both, but only the Marvel titles were must-haves that I carefully stacked up in their place on my bookshelves each month.

    Nowadays I don't think anybody could sensibly restrict themselves to one publishing label. DC have some great stuff; I liked the Minx books and got into the Vertigo habit in the '90s, though that imprint doesn't have much to interest me these days. Dark Horse are very smart in having a number of high-quality universes that are small enough for a reader to buy into the whole package (BPRD, Sir Edward Grey, Hellboy, for example). Marvel are looking tired and creatively a bit desperate these days, a bit like the DC of old, but in such a big list they're bound to have a few gems like Criminal.

    And that's just the big boys. With guys like BOOM and Image producing such inventive material, I recommend not taking any notice of the publisher label, just look for the writers and artists you like.

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  5. PS: If you hated the Buffy TV show then you are not going to like the comics!

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  6. Hi Dave, I've read some of the Buffy graphic novels and have really enjoyed them. Can I get these and Irredeemable on my iPad? If so what's the best app(s) to do so? There are so many comic apps out there I don't know where to start (well Mirabilis obviously, but apart from that!).

    Dermot

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  7. Hi Derm, I'm going to recommend Graphic.ly because Mirabilis is on their platform(s) and they have all 23 issues of Irredeemable. (We're on Comics+ too, or will be very shortly, but they don't seem to list it.) I like the Graphic.ly app a lot. It has even converted me to guided view, which I never thought would happen. So that'd be my recommendation. But Graphic.ly are still not *quite* as good as the Mirabilis app I reckon - especially not after we post the update in a few weeks' time!

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