Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Remembering Wildstorm: Stormwatch, "Jenny Sparks"

"Stormwatch" isn't what I'd call a great comic. It's a good comic--it's got well-developed characters, fun dialogue, lovely artwork, and it's stood the test of time pretty well--but it's still just your standard capes-and-tights rag. It was never nominated for any Eisner Awards. No one wears Stormwatch costumes to conventions. You rarely hear it mentioned in comic book discourse today except in relationship its successor, "The Authority." For the most part, "Stormwatch" was a merely adequate 90s superhero title with occasional flashes of brilliance.

"Jenny Sparks" is one of those flashes.

Writing superheroes is a lot like writing a sonnet. In a sonnet, to paraphrase Madeleine L'Engle in "A Wrinkle In Time," the writer must follow very strict rules regarding rhyme and meter, or else the poem can no longer be called a sonnet. But within those strict rules, the writer can say anything they wish. Similarly, with superheroes, a writer must stay within the parameters of the hero's personality, origin story, and universe. A Batman comic where Batman can fly and shoot laser beams from his eyes isn't really a Batman comic. Superman without the destruction of the planet Krypton isn't Superman. Wonder Woman without superpowers is Wonder Woman in the 60s, but that's a whole other problem. The point is, this is not 'Nam; there are rules. But within the parameters of those rules, the writer may say whatever they choose.

Here are the parameters of Jenny Sparks of Stormwatch as of Issue 44: she's 96 years old; she lives off booze and cigarettes; she's made of electricity; and she's the Spirit of the 20th Century. From these simple elements, in a single issue unconnected to any larger Stormwatch story lines, Warren Ellis and Tom Raney choose to deconstruct the superhero and the entire history of comic books. If anyone ever asks you, "What's this art form all about?" (I don't know exactly how this situation would arise, but let's assume it involves light projectile weaponry and a set of cat ears), you can just hand them "Jenny Sparks."

As with Jack Hawksmoor, the God of Cities, Ellis christened his beloved Jenny Sparks with a title she didn't immediately live up to. "The Spirit of the 20th Century" spent the better part of "Force of Nature" being hungover, cranky, and impatient, a reluctant leader with such little regard for her boss that she won't even call him by his superhero name. But in "Lightning Strikes," we see her earn her title. "Jenny Sparks" is a frame story, with Jenny telling her fellow Stormwatch officer Battalion the story of her life, which just happens to be the story of comic books and superheroes from the 1920s to the present day. It is, as I've mentioned, brilliant on many levels, because as it turns out, Jenny isn't just any hero; she's ALL heroes, from the Depression-era dynamo to the Watchman-esque anti-hero.

For a change, I'm going to focus on Raney's contribution to this issue, because while Ellis's writing is, as usual, top-notch, it's the artwork that really makes this story work. Raney draws each era of Jenny's life in the style of the comic books famous and influential in that time, so her 1940s adventures look like Will Eisner's "The Spirit" and her 60s adventures recall Jack Kirby's early Marvel work.

Jenny's story begins in 1930s in America where she is Superman. Literally. Compare this page with the cover of Action Comics 1, Superman's debut, and you'll see how accurately Raney captured the energy and madness of this new art form called the comic book. Jenny "sprang over those imprisoned Depression streets, me and mine, like our lives were being written by teenage kids, and all their guts and lunacy and hope were encoded into every piece of us." This, of course, exactly describes creators like Batman's Bob Kane and Superman's Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. Plus, check out Jenny's sweet crotchkick!

The 1940s belonged to Will Eisner, who's artwork was so influential that the top industry award bears his name. Jenny is drawn as Eisner's The Spirit, a former detective turned masked vigilante on the streets of New York. Modern audiences might have a problem with reading the original Spirit comics, because The Spirit had a black sidekick named Ebony White who embodied a lot of negative stereotypes about African-Americans. To acknowledge this disparity between Eisner's brilliance and his (admittedly of-the-times) racism, Jenny's 40s adventure brings her up against a plot to gas the inhabitants of the city orphanage because "it's full of black kids." Disgusted, Jenny takes her fight for a finer world back to England, her homeland, because "I don't think American really wanted to be better, back then."
Confession time: I don't know what art style Raney was honoring in his 1950s panels. It looks to me almost like Roy Lichtenstein pop-art, but I know that Lichtenstein himself was influenced by comics of the 1950s and didn't produce his most famous works until the 60s. So if you know what Raney was up to, put it in the comments section. I'm always happy to be schooled in my favorite topics.

Jenny's 1950s story is a bitter pill to swallow. When she first returned to England, she got involved with the inhabitants of a more technologically-advanced parallel Earth and dreamed of the better world she could help build with their extra-dimensional science. But that other Earth went to war and shut the doors between our Earth and theirs. "What we lost, that shot at Utopia, that still kills me when I think about it." The 1950s brought the human race forward by leaps and bounds--space launches, vaccines, the Green Revolution--but was also marred by hostility and paranoia, by the Cold War and nuclear terror. There was the promise of Utopia, like Jenny said, but we couldn't overcome the fear and cruelty within ourselves long enough to make it actually happen. A bitter pill, indeed.

And then came the 1960s, comics Silver Age. Raney offers one panel in the style of
R. Crumb's underground hippie title, "Head Comix," but the rest of the story is pure Jack Kirby. Kirby co-created Marvel Comics best and most iconic heroes: Captain America, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and the Hulk, among others. You can't talk about comic books without talking about Kirby; he's had more influence on the artwork of the genre than anyone else. But like Eisner, he was a man of his times, and Jenny can't help taking the piss out of her Silver Age superhero friends, "dressing as weirdly as possible to make sure the neighbors didn't recognize them... I'm sure they had no idea what they looked like." The 60s was the height of Jenny's superhero career. She operated in public as a champion of the countercultural movement, riding the crest of the wave that was supposed to drown out the old, rotten society she'd left behind in the 40s. This was her second chance at the Utopia she'd lost in the 50s, and now, for the first time, she had a team--she had a culture--whose ideals were in line with her own. The world was ready for her message. It was ready to be changed.

And then it all went tits-up. A member of her team overdosed on drugs at a concert and went on a murderous rampage, killing dozens of civilians. Jenny was forced to electrocute him for the sake of the ordinary people caught in his path. The rest of the team couldn't survive grief (or the bad publicity) and had to disband. All of Jenny's 60s idealism crashed down around her, and without their champions, the children of the counterculture disbanded as well.

Jenny goes to bed in the 1970s and wakes up in Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's 1980s "
Watchmen," itself the quintessential superhero deconstruction that regularly competes with print novels for the most important book of the 20th century. Though almost every comic after "Watchmen" owed something to that dark, bitter morality tale, it's rare to see such a direct homage, partially because Moore has gone batshit insane in his later years and might sacrifice those who displease him to his snake god; and partially because Moore and Gibbons made something so perfect and whole that there wasn't anything any other creators could add to it. And yet somehow, Ellis and Raney find something to add to "Watchmen."
Raney captures Gibbon's style fairly well, but his lines are cleaner, almost more Art Deco, and the coloring is even more lurid and sickly than it is in "Watchmen." But this is a sick, lurid tale of missing children and twisted desires, of want and need. There's no way Ellis can top Moore for crazy, but damnit, he's going to try. In Jenny's 1980s adventure, she's again leading a group of superheroes who are trying to make the world a better place, but these masks had "grown up weird and hungry," lacking the moral compass of her 60s team. Her new friends were selfish, trendy, and spoiled, desiring fame and power but giving little back to the people they've sworn to protect. They're supposed to be investigating a string of murders, single mothers killed in their flats, their babies kidnapped. Jenny discovers that her teammates have been killing the mothers and giving the babies to the hero Firesign, who kills them and sews their parts together to make a "perfect" corpse-baby for his barren wife. Jenny tells Battalion, "All the things we talked about, and it all came down to what they wanted."

So that's what "Watchmen" lacked: Frankenbabies. Thanks, Ellis!

Even for Jenny, who's seen everything, this is too much. She goes to ground again, drinking away the better part of a decade in London's Wolfshead Pub, alone and deeply scarred by a century's worth of friends and lovers who could never measure up to her standards.

It's significant that Jenny was never defeated by in battle or outwitted by supervillains. Super-villains don't even appear in her stories. No, each time she failed to bring about a finer world, her downfall was her fellow heroes: the reporter who gases the city orphanage; the parallel Earth humans who descend into civil war; the macho Silver Age superhero overdosing on drugs; the mad, selfish yuppies killing children in Watchmen London. Jenny believes that the world can and should be saved, but all of the saviors she enlists collapse under the weight of their own human flaws. That is ultimately the reason that comic books still matter to us after all these years, not because they show us mighty superheroes, but because they show us how weak superheroes really are. Done correctly, a superhero comic reminds us just how far we still have to go to produce a finer world. Humans have such power, we've moved mountains and rivers and changed the face of the Earth itself. We are the mightiest species the planet has ever produced, and yet we wander around like we can't tell our collective asses from a hole in the ground, able to master space travel but unable to get clean water to half of our fellow humans. We consistently fall short of our own ideals, not because we lack the power to realize them, but because we are human and therefore flawed.

In some ways, Jenny's story is bleak as hell because it teaches that superheroes--and by extension, everyone else--fail in the end. But maybe that failure isn't as big a tragedy as Jenny thinks. As Battalion reminds her, despite how much and how often she and her friends messed up, "You can still see the stars, Jenny." Life goes on. We can always try again.

Next time, Stormwatch goes to Alabama and battles the Tea Party! Too bad that statement is more accurate than it has any right to be.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Remembering Wildstorm: Stormwatch, "Jack Hawksmoor"


"Lightning Strikes" is the second trade paperback collection of Warren Ellis's run on Stormwatch (1996 to 1997, issues 43 to 47). This is when all of the different themes and elements of Ellis's United Nations-sponsored superheroes come together and explode awesome all over the place like a well-calibrated awesomebomb. The political messages ring truer to the ear than the clunky "Force of Nature" story lines. The stories themselves are more ambitious and experimental. And best of all, the characters get drunk together. Nobody can write drunk superheroes like Ellis.

Tom Raney and Randy Elliot are on board again for pencils and colors, respectively, and speaking of drinking, their barroom scenes are a treasure trove of comic homages and meta-commentary. I could do an entire post on the characters boozing it up in the background. But the noteworthy artist in "Lightning Strikes" is Jim Lee, who drops in to illustrate issue 47. It's a nice you-have-my-blessing gesture from Stormwatch's creator, and Lee is so talented that I have to wonder how he ended up in DC's upper management.

Each of five issues in "Lightning Strikes" deserves its own post, so I'm going to kick us off with issue 43, "Jack Hawksmoor."

Before he got his very own issue, every story featuring Jack Hawksmoor provided a cheat sheet explaining his abilities, some variation of, "a creature designed by aliens to live specifically in cities." We find out that Jack "eats" urban pollution, that he can surf the air currents above tall buildings, and that he can communicate with the cities themselves. Take him outside of an urban environment, like up to the Skywatch satellite for a Stormwatch briefing, and he goes into convulsions and vomits up black sludge. And finally, as Ellis is inordinately fond of bringing up, Jack's transformation from regular guy to superhuman urban entity began when he was only five and was basically a years-long series of abuses and torture--by aliens!

In Jack, it seemed like Ellis had created a character so unique and interesting that he didn't know what to do with him. In the "Force of Nature" collection, Jack is basically just a detective who gets his clues directly from the city. His first lengthy character description in issue 38 reads as alien-modified Batman. "The city feeds him, and lets him dance in her hair, and that's all Jack Hawksmoor ever needs. In return, he attempted to clean the parasites from her concrete skin; the criminals and the people who made them. Until yesterday [when] he became an officer of Stormwatch. From today, he will try and bring justice to all cities." While he's also superstrong and never needs to sleep, it's easy to see why Jack never considered himself part of the superhero community before Stormwatch approached him. He doesn't see what good an emotionally scarred detective can be on a superhuman task force. (*cough*Justice League.)

Anyone who claims to know what Warren Ellis is thinking is clearly in need of an exorcist. But while I wait for my mail-order holy water to arrive, I'd like to speculate that Jack's growing awareness of himself as a valuable member of Stormwatch mirrors Ellis's own growing understanding of what this strange and wonderful character can do. So here we are at Stormwatch 43, when Jack finally comes into his own.

On the surface, this issue is a classic crime noir. Jack, our hard-boiled detective, is hot on the heels of a serial hatchet-murderer who likes to leave American flags at the scenes of his crimes. But while most crime noirs have a beautiful woman tearfully imploring the detective to take her case and solve the crime, Jack has the city herself screaming out for justice in a voice only he can hear. The urban setting is as much a character in standard crime noir as any of the humans, so Ellis takes the next logical step and makes the city a living entity with an emotional stake in the outcome of the case. Jack, then, isn't just a detective who can talk to cities; he's an extension of the urban landscape, more of a city himself than a human being. Though the specifics of his powers are fun and interesting--seeing the past reflected in window glass, divining the future in changes in air currents and floor pressure--what makes this issue great is the exploration of Jack's intimacy with something that's both achingly familiar and wholly alien to ordinary human perception.

But this is all going on in the background. The main action isn't between the city-man and his city: it's between Jack and the United States Secret Service, and here, finally, Ellis's political commentary stops being an embarrassment to us all. While it stills feels like he cobbled together a picture of the American psyche from old movies and supermarket tabloids, what he comes up with is so bizarre it barrels right past bad taste into just-crazy-enough-to-work territory. Ellis doesn't name names, but he pretty obviously implies that the hatchet-man is the illegitimate son of President Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. The (literal) bastard has been killing people since he was seven on account of the incurable congenital syphilis eating away at his brain. And even though it sounds kinda stupid in summary, the fact that Ellis doesn't come right out and say "Kennedy" or "Monroe" makes it all work. Politicians cover up sexual trysts and illegitimate children all the time, and while I don't agree with Ellis's assertion that public knowledge of JFK's serial killer son will "destroy America's innocence," I think that he tapped into some very basic truths about the American political culture. This is exactly the sort of thing the Secret Service would cover up; and yes, America would hate Stormwatch all the more for unmasking the conspiracy. Not because we deify our politicians--just the opposite, actually--but rather, because the idea of a governmental cover-up goes against everything Americans value in our system of government. Scandals are fine, but lies going up to the highest seat in the nation, that shit's for the developing world, for corrupt Middle Eastern and African nations. Americans have a fetish relationship with truth: it's weird and kinky and not always healthy, but we believe it's our collective commitment to the truth that separates us from the other kids in the sandbox.

The crime noir is the perfect vehicle for this message. Things are never as simple as they seem in crime noir, and the truth is always buried deeper than the detective expects. Jack arrives at the scene of a murder and secretly observes the NYPD deciding to sweep the case under the rug. Soon Jack is being chased by shadowy government officials and has to make a series of quick getaways using fun found objects like a microwave and an unopened can of soda, which is all kinds of crazyawesome. Hot on the trail of the killer, he's waylaid by a Secret Service agent who's had plastic surgery to look exactly like Marilyn Monroe because the only face the killer obeys. There's a great moment when the Marilyn Monroe agent tells Jack to strip naked so she can shoot him, and then becomes violently ill when she sees his genitals. It reminds us how far from human Jack really is, and gives him a chance to get the upper hand and force her to reveal the killer's location.

So finally, it's just Jack and the killer, facing off on the scaffolding in the evening news studio. Jack has to make an awful choice: he can bring the man to justice himself as a Stormwatch officer, destroying any goodwill America might still have for the United Nations taskforce; he can let him go, leaving him free to continue killing and getting away with it thanks to the Secret Service; or he can just kill the bastard. He doesn't like to do it--at this point in Jack's character arc, he isn't a killer, and if he was, there would be little to thematically separate himself from the villain of this story; all that moral messiness comes later in Jack's Authority days. But for now, Jack makes his choice, though it tears him up inside. He throws the killer off the scaffolding and hangs him from a noose of electrical cables in front of the television cameras, a public unmasking of the monster live on the evening news. Stormwatch teleports Jack out of the studio before anyone can find him. And the city goes quiet.Some stray thoughts:

Jack kills the villain on live television in a television studio. There's some kind of commentary on the intersection between real life and media in that panel, but this post is long enough already, so I'll let you fill in the blanks.

Raney didn't deign to draw Jack Hawksmoor's penis on panel, and unfortunately, it's hideousness is never mentioned again. Maybe Wildstorm would have stayed in business longer if they'd ever published "Jack Hawksmoor's Alien Penis." You know Ellis would have written the shit out of that comic.

Next time: Jenny Sparks' romp through comic book history.