Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I don't want the blog to turn into serial excoriations of the latest bit of entertainment to waste my time. Honestly, I'd far rather read and watch good things (The Shadow Hero, Dirty Snow or Elementary, if you want recent examples) but, having sat through the whole of Agents of SHIELD season one, I feel I owe it to the world to say something.

The great thing about The Winter Soldier is that when you get Fury or other SHIELD agents spouting their ends-justify-the-means doctrine, Cap is there to reground it all with a real moral code - the point of that whole narrative of the movie being, not that a lot of Hydra agents have been pretending to be SHIELD agents, but that SHIELD is Hydra. In the war on terror they have virtually become the same thing.

The TV show, on the other hand, depicts the breakdown of any line between the good and bad guys without apparent irony. On the surface it's about a few stern-parent characters left in charge of a lot of flirty, high-schooly young folks who ought to be partying the night away at the Bronze but instead have been given a plane and as much rope as they like. Agents on both sides are willing, indeed eager, to use or condone torture and killing in cold blood, but Coulson can't provide any counterbalance because he isn't driven by Cap's unalloyed morality. He's your typical self-righteous maverick-with-a-badge who is happy to (ab)use his position of power as he sees fit. It's the kind of show the infantry in Starship Troopers probably watch between battles.

The writing is a curate's egg of the usual Whedonisms (in this case Jed, not Joss). The early episodes have some great unexpected twists such as Coulson's use of the truth serum, but those are quickly forgotten as the story gets bogged down in talk, plans and McGuffins. As the plot spirals in ever-decreasing circles, there's a sense that the writers are barely an episode ahead of their desperate reveals and reversals. By the time we get to the betrayals, which are all easily seen coming, it's starting to feel like Dollhouse season 2 (*Sideshow Bob shudder*)

The plot has become such a mechanical tyrant by the last few episodes that a told relationship like Coulson's and May's is privileged over a shown relationship like Garrett's and Ward's - as if by now the writers had lost any ability to respond organically but were simply sticking to whatever story outline they came up with months earlier. And there is the usual Whedon inability to see a bad guy as anything other than a parrot squawking crazy plans. It's as if, when any character reveals themselves as a Hydra plant, they grow a metaphorical moustache to twirl while gloating. Maybe in a very different show this might have turned into an interesting conflict of ideologies. But no, this is a story in which you are just supposed to root for the people you're told are friends and boo the ones you're told it's okay to despise. The finale is a particularly damp squib, very reminiscent of the Dollhouse finale in fact, and it's not improved for having saved up enough budget to pay for Samuel L Jackson and his gag writer.

Ah yes, gags. In Buffy they served the story. Here, if a funny line occurs to the writers, they use it. Whether it's something that character would actually say, or if it breaks the tension of the story, makes no difference. If only they'd gone the whole hog and remade Get Smart with Maxwell as a SHIELD agent. That might have actually been funnier and more engaging.

When you consider the quality of other shows in the Feds-tackle-weird-shit genre - Fringe and The X-Files especially - Agents of SHIELD looks particularly lame. Its only excuse for existence is to keep the Marvel torch burning between the movies, and great as those movies have been for the most part, so far DC are winning the TV battle by a mile.

Why we need comics we can care about

Tom Brevoort, who is Marvel’s Senior VP of Publishing, recently spoke about the fundamental difference between the DC universe and the Marvel universe. As he sees it, the former takes an optimistic view of the world, the latter a pessimistic one. “Even something like Dark Knight Returns, which is gritty as hell, is at its heart about a heroic ideal, a larger-than-life figure who rises up to champion the city in its time of need.”

I’m not sure about this assertion – though, to be fair to Mr Brevoort, he’s a very smart guy and he did open with the caveat that it was too big a subject to talk about in one short post. As a kid, I turned to Marvel, not for pessimism, but for a more believable idea of what a hero was. I could see that Peter Parker’s heroism cost him more than Clark Kent’s ever did. He was a bigger hero. I didn’t need Aunt May to die to prove that, I just needed to believe that Peter was afraid she would.

In the Lee-Kirby-Ditko era, Marvel stood out because the stories took a deeper, more nuanced view of what it meant to be a hero. The regular guy behind the mask had problems like the rest of us. Courage had a cost. The Marvel universe was a dramatic canvas of love, secrets, misunderstandings, shame, emotional dilemmas. I’m not sure I’d call that universe pessimistic, just indifferent to human affairs. Marvel heroes didn’t get any helping hands from the storytellers.

Are today’s comics (and I’m not specifically thinking of Marvel) rooted in pessimism? Maybe. I don’t really follow superhero comics much, but I see that where once the most extreme stakes for the heroes were life and death, now they’re more often things like disfigurement and brain damage. Action has often been replaced with brutality, personal problems with politics, characterization with a stance on thinly disguised current issues.

Dilemmas in many of today’s comic books are no longer emotional but intellectual. Mutants, that’s like racism, right? And superhero registration, that’s the war on terror. Yeah, we all get it. My blank look is boredom, not confusion.

As I said, I’m not talking about just Marvel here. Comics are a shrinking market and yet the superheroes of the Silver Age are entertaining bigger audiences than ever before. The movies are watched by seventy million people while the comic books’ readership has dwindled to a diehard band of collectors and fanboys. Why is that?

Bambos Georgiou talks on his blog about some of the things that may have gone wrong with the comics market. You would think, after all, that comics as a medium should appeal to both book readers and moviegoers. That’s a pretty wide demographic. The problem is not in the medium but in the content. And we need to qualify that by adding that it’s specifically the US and UK that is facing this problem.

It isn’t a question of whether today’s comics are darker – look how dark Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are. Comics are strangling themselves to death because most people don’t care a jot about the impersonal and somewhat abstract themes in these stories. Fanboys love that stuff but, thing is, fanboys are not really typical. And in a desperate attempt to inject the missing emotion, writers too often turn to sadism and plot complexity, delivering story punchlines that, if they arouse any emotion, deliver disgust and dismay rather than thrills.

Remember, I'm not saying all comic books are doing this. We still have some great ones that are about the people at the heart of the story. But overall it's a trend that has bedevilled the creators who grew up in the long shadow of Moore and Miller, who ape their style without getting even a hint of their substance. It's like a tyro novelist trying to be Hemingway without earning it. And it's a trend that's putting off new readers.

The majority of us connect with stories about characters whose concerns are personal, immediate, emotional, simple and relatable. Explore themes, sure – but personalize them. Blade Runner is not an issue-based examination of human identity; Roy Batty wants more life, fucker. And he ups and shows us what it is to be human.

I was in France recently. There you’ll see kids, teens and adults reading comics. The genres are as broad as in cinema or TV drama. The stories are gripping, and wildly popular like Harry Potter books or Sherlock Holmes movies. A ten-year-old picked up the first Mirabilis book. I thought it might be too old for her, but she read it through twice (the second time on her eleventh birthday, actually) and then demanded more. Teens and adults can enjoy that same story, perhaps seeing a little more in it than younger readers but without demanding characters’ eyes to be plucked out to make it “mature”.

I’ll give you a good analogy that shows how comic books could turn themselves around. A few years before J J Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, one of the show’s TV producers was talking about how maybe the ST franchise was just dying. And indeed it was dying – of worthiness, of sterility. Dying because it had made its issues bigger than its characters. To paraphrase The Onion, it was dying because of the heavy-handed messages about tolerance and the scenes set at long tables in which interstellar diplomacy is debated in endless detail.

The reboot made Star Trek once more about characters on a journey. We were with people we cared about as they faced huge challenges, They had to reach inside and discover the part of themselves that could meet such challenges. We saw them grow and change.

You tell a story like that, in any medium you like, and they will come.

Bernie Wrightson's first gig

It was always Marvel for me, never DC. Well, I say that, but a Gil Kane Green Lantern or Infantino Flash could always tempt me. Oh, and Kane illustrated The Atom so that got added to the monthly stack too. And when Neal Adams started doing Batman and The Spectre, I was in line for those, of course. Let’s say, then, that Marvel had my heart but DC still got a good share of my pocket money. And never more gladly than when, in the summer of ’69, I strolled into my local post office at the back of Mayford village green and there staring back at me from behind the copies of Valiant and TV21 was a pristine copy of Bernie Wrightson’s Nightmaster.

Nightmaster wasn’t a new book. It was a three-issue run of DC’s Showcase title, which was occasionally worth a look as the writers and artists could try out some interesting experimental stuff they never would have got away with in the pages of Superman. Maybe DC rushed this out because they heard Marvel were working on Conan. Certainly it was the first time I’d ever seen the two great loves of my young life get together like that. I’m talking about comics and swords-&-sorcery.

It was to have been Wrightson’s first professional assignment. Al Williamson took him into the DC offices to meet Carmine Infantino (of whom, more here on the encyclopaedically informative Cloud 109 blog) who by Wrightson’s own admission terrified him. He thought that Infantino looked like “a really big Edward G Robinson”, spoke like a fast-talking cigar-chewing Godfather, and when the older man got him in a friendly headlock, 18-year-old Wrightson thought he'd soon be sleeping with the fishes.

Actually Infantino was a much more understanding and supportive fellow than his appearance and lofty career eminence would lead anyone to believe. When, after weeks of working in mounting unhappiness, Wrightson came back with a badly over-thought and lifeless interpretation of the first few pages of the script, Infantino reassured him that it happened to everybody. He put him in the hands of the equally legendary and gentlemanly Joe Orlando so that he could get started on short stories for House of Mystery and build his confidence there. (Did I mention that House of Mystery was one of my must-buys? Phantom Stranger, too. Yet, y’know, I wasn’t a DC reader as such. You couldn’t be a mod and a rocker…)

Anyway, after a few months of the short stuff, young Bernie was flying. In the meantime, the first issue of Nightmaster that had defeated him had been completed by Jerry Grandenetti and Dick Giordano (you see where he got those notions about the Mafia running the NY comics scene) but now Infantino deemed him ready to handle it. Wrightson took the assignment and, with copious behind-the-credits help from his mates Mike Kaluta, Steve Hickman and Steve Harper, he turned in 46 glorious pages of swinging sixties swords-&-sorcery. Denny O’Neil’s script is nothing to shout about, and gives every sign of being knocked off in a few days to fill a gap in a genre that O’Neil probably had no interest in, but there are still some fun touches. The ship that flies with moonbeams in its sails – well, I swiped that for Down Among the Dead Men a quarter century later. And vivid in the memory, even after so long a time, are the flying vegetables and the Oirish Conan wannabe, and the pretty rock-chick barmaids and poisonous green warlocks. Ten years older and I would’ve taken it with a spliff and, man, I'd have instantly got where O’Neil was coming from.

Swords-&-sorcery is not a part of the Mirabilis fantasy tradition. We consciously steered clear of it because the genre barely existed in 1901, apart from the dark Ico-like tales of swordplay from earlier Gothic writers or the more romantic Arthurian vogue stimulated by the Pre-Raphaelites. Heroic fantasy was still a long way from evolving in the hands of writers like Burroughs and Howard into the genre we think of today. There are some Arabian Nights sequences planned for Mirabilis season two, but I’m not sure if I’d call that swords-&-sorcery, and in any case I digress. Connoisseurs of that style of fantasy will find plenty over on the Fabled Lands blog, which this month is running a wealth of Kull- and John Carter-inspired science fantasy in the form of my and Jamie Thomson's Abraxas project.

As a Showcase title, I suppose we have to regard Nightmaster as a failure. The character made a few cameo appearances in other DC titles over the years, but he was clearly never destined for star status. Bernie Wrightson, on the other hand, has gone from strength to strength, and if he ever decides to take up the art duties on a Kull or Grey Mouser book, I’ll be right there with my pocket money waiting for the post office to open.