Ovid
Jan 12, 2008, 10:02 am
<a href="http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/previews/dc/0207/BM_Cv663.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/previews/dc/0207/BM_Cv663t.jpg" hspace=10 align=left alt="Batman #663"></a>Reviewer: T. Martin, khpa3665@yahoo.co.uk
Story Title: The Clown at Midnight
“Where would the act be without my straight man?”
Writer: Grant Morrison
Art: John van Fleet
Type Design: Todd Klein
Assistant Editor: Elisabeth V. Gehrlein.
Editor: Peter Tomasi
Batman created by: Bob Kane
Published by: DC Comics (http://www.dccomics.com/)
N.B.: This is a re-post of an old thread that was lost in the server move.
I’ve dropped this book. Don’t get me wrong – I like Grant Morrison’s work (http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/forums/showthread.php?t=37308). Seven Soldiers (http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/forums/showthread.php?t=43209) was, by and large, exceptional. All-Star Superman (http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/forums/showthread.php?t=36660) is the definitive take on the character for our times and ought to be up there, in my opinion, with the Reeves/Donner interpretation of the previous generation. But while Morrison’s Batman started intriguingly, with fun concepts like ninja Man-Bats, it fizzled out in overwrought soap opera. So while most will buy this for Grant Morrison, I came back for one, last issue because of John van Fleet.
Van Fleet is no stranger to the Dark Knight, having worked on Batman: The Chalice, Batman: the Ankh (for which he picked up an Eisner nomination) and, most recently, Batman/Poison Ivy: Cast Shadows. It was this last book, with Ann Nocenti, that brought him to my attention. His combination of paints and photographs perfectly expressed a story about beauty and kindness in a distorted, toxic, insane world. The media may have been different on that book, but it was laid out like a fairly standard comic. This latest effort is not – in fact it’s not a comic at all, but an illustrated short story in pamphlet form. As such, van Fleet’s art is less integrated into Morrison’s text and, to be honest, less of a draw. Without the narrative pull of sequential art, the illustrations seem (and often literally are) peripheral. However well composed, they carry less weight. Only occasionally is the layout used to combine text and image; normally appreciating the art means taking time out from the story and looking at it on its own. Unfortunately, while many of the pictures, especially the painted ones, hold up magnificently to such scrutiny, others don’t. Van Fleet has made use of computer illustration here as well as paints and photos and some figures have the artificial sheen and tubular construction characteristic of much CGI. In addition, while most pictures are redundant depictions of what we are told in the text, towards the end of the issue some do seem to show extra, untold moments and the change is confusing. All-in-all, this isn’t the best showcase for a normally wonderful artist.
I’d never read any straight prose by Morrison before and I was intrigued to see how someone skilled at story, ideas and dialogue would fare with the fuller demands of descriptive writing. At first I was impressed, as Morrison piles adjective upon adjective, simile upon simile, to conjure the dread, mad atmosphere a Joker story demands. Repeated reads changed my opinion, however. The adjectives became wearing and the metaphors revealed themselves to be redundant or nonsensical. Now, I’m well aware that good fiction writing isn’t like writing an elegant book report for school. Redundancy and repetition can add layers and nuances beyond the mere conveying of information, but this wasn’t the kind of gothic intricacy favoured by an author like H.P. Lovecraft, whose style is so bad it’s good. This was just bad.
It would help to look at an example to see what Morrison is doing with his prose and where it goes wrong. This is from very early on in the book – it’s the second sentence – so there are no spoilers and it hasn’t been chosen as an especially extreme example, just the first that exhibits the traits found throughout:
Rain goes clickety-clack-tack through the sticks and branches of bare, bony graveyard elms, the kind that stand as if ashamed, like strippers past their best – danced out to a standstill in the naked lights, all down to nothing but fretwork and scaffolding, jutting hips, nicotine-stained fingers, and summer gone south for the winter.
Now ask yourself a question: how often are we told the trees are bare? Answer: at least five times in one sentence. The reference to sticks implies it (no reference to leaves), as does the redundant mention of branches. Then we hear the elms are bare, but also, unnecessarily, that they’re bony. Finally, they’re compared to strippers. So that’s five times in a sentence which otherwise just tells us it’s raining. Initially the comparison to aged strippers works, evoking a sense of shame appropriate to the twisted funeral scene the sentence introduces. But Morrison doesn’t stop there. There’s a slew of adjectives and metaphors that either bear hardly any relevance to the original point of the comparison – the elms – or just repeat what the direct description had previously said (as the ‘jutting hips’ repeat the idea of boniness). Morrison’s orgy of adjectives and metaphors adds little meaningful to what we already know.
Occasionally, the mass of allusion seems to be too much for even Morrison to follow and a sentence dissolves into nonsense. At one point, Harley Quinn’s eyes are described as ‘fractured semi-precious stones set like charms in a frightened little Halloween-cake face’. Note that ‘stones’ gets two adjectives, ‘face’ three and the metaphor doesn’t make sense: when are either stones or charms set in either faces or cakes? Morrison seems to have forgotten what ‘set’ refers to. In a description of Gotham at night he makes a similar mistake, writing about how the colours from the advertising hoardings are ‘braiding’ the rain, ‘scything across the docks…’, ‘then crowding into… the canyons… to rinse the lowlifes… off the bustling streets’. The subjects of this sentence are the colours, but the verbs better fit the object, ‘rain’. It seems Morrison can’t decide if he’s describing the light or the weather, and the combination of the two in the final comparison, to ‘an ocean of printer’s ink’, encapsulates the confusion rather than clears it up.
So all too often there is little reason in Morrison’s choices. This might be said to fit a Joker story perfectly, if there were rhyme to the prose. But there isn’t – the style is almost never modulated or dropped. It applies to every scene and every character equally. They are all drowned in simile. Batman’s voice is ‘like steel striking rock’. Gordon’s explanations are ‘brief, like text messages’. The Joker dreams like ‘a grub growing all wrong…, like a caterpillar liquefying… or a fetus dissolving…’ A morgue is ‘like a fetish club’. An asylum guard ‘mumbles like a geisha, fumbling a fan of electronic keys’. In this last example, Morrison has tried for poetry (‘mumbles… fumbling’, ‘fumbling a fan’) but falls short because not only is the simile confused (what is reminiscent of a geisha – the mumbling or the fan?) but it’s arbitrarily attached to a background character. Everyone is treated in the same baroque manner irrespective of their importance to the plot or characterisation. (Compare later in the story, where one of these guards is at the centre of the action and is described, in a moment of high horror, as ‘Lou Perroni (37, a bodybuilder and collector of Ramones memorabilia, GSOH)’. Here, the ordinary, staccato language of a personals ad magnifies the horror by bridging our world and that of Batman and the Joker, but this context-sensitive tonal shift is very much the exception.) Just as in some of his worst comics work, like the Seven Soldiers: Mr Miracle (http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/forums/showthread.php?t=36949) mini, where Morrison loses himself in pseudo-intellectual philosophising, so here he seems to lose himself in words for words’ sake. It’s as if Morrison has been told by some second-rate creative writing teacher always to vary his word choice, not realising that applying that principle willy-nilly flattens prose and dissipates drama.
Morrison’s not known for his prose skills, though. He’s known for his fertile imagination and it’s the promise of letting this imagination loose on the Joker that will draw a lot of readers. It’s been a while since the Joker has done something genuinely weird. Instead writers have turned him into little more than a psychopath with a circus twist, most influentially in Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke. Where he used to want to copyright Jokerfish, more recently he’s been just a sniper with a smile. It’s fair to say, therefore, that he’s in need of a Morrisonian makeover and he gets one here. The Joker as Artist has been done before, but Morrison hits upon the really quite brilliant idea that the Joker embodies the art industry. Like the art world, he too goes through fashions – the Satire Years, Camp, the Ringmaster From Hell and New Homicidal – shedding a personality with each new fad. The beauty in this is that it simultaneously justifies different writers’ takes on the character, fits the Joker’s concept perfectly and provides a strong real-world referent. My main criticism would be that Morrison has given us a mechanism for character change, but his characterisation of the Joker appears in practice barely different than what was done before. Indeed, Moore’s classic addressed exactly the central conceit of the Joker’s motivation in this story: that, “He simply wants the goddamn Batman to finally get the goddamn joke”. While Morrison points to a way of changing the Joker, he in fact doesn’t move him on from the murderous status quo established by Moore all those years ago.
The treatment of the Joker can stand for the issue as a whole. It’s a pyrotechnic display of words and ideas that at first dazzles then fades to emptiness. Like all Morrison projects, this is a book full of possibilities. Like too many, it fails in the execution.
OVERALL:
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dchalf.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcnone.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcnone.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcnone.jpg
Buy Batman online now from X-World Comics and save! (http://x-worldcomics.com/yourvirtualstore/shopdisplayproducts.asp?id=109&cat=BATMAN+)
Story Title: The Clown at Midnight
“Where would the act be without my straight man?”
Writer: Grant Morrison
Art: John van Fleet
Type Design: Todd Klein
Assistant Editor: Elisabeth V. Gehrlein.
Editor: Peter Tomasi
Batman created by: Bob Kane
Published by: DC Comics (http://www.dccomics.com/)
N.B.: This is a re-post of an old thread that was lost in the server move.
I’ve dropped this book. Don’t get me wrong – I like Grant Morrison’s work (http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/forums/showthread.php?t=37308). Seven Soldiers (http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/forums/showthread.php?t=43209) was, by and large, exceptional. All-Star Superman (http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/forums/showthread.php?t=36660) is the definitive take on the character for our times and ought to be up there, in my opinion, with the Reeves/Donner interpretation of the previous generation. But while Morrison’s Batman started intriguingly, with fun concepts like ninja Man-Bats, it fizzled out in overwrought soap opera. So while most will buy this for Grant Morrison, I came back for one, last issue because of John van Fleet.
Van Fleet is no stranger to the Dark Knight, having worked on Batman: The Chalice, Batman: the Ankh (for which he picked up an Eisner nomination) and, most recently, Batman/Poison Ivy: Cast Shadows. It was this last book, with Ann Nocenti, that brought him to my attention. His combination of paints and photographs perfectly expressed a story about beauty and kindness in a distorted, toxic, insane world. The media may have been different on that book, but it was laid out like a fairly standard comic. This latest effort is not – in fact it’s not a comic at all, but an illustrated short story in pamphlet form. As such, van Fleet’s art is less integrated into Morrison’s text and, to be honest, less of a draw. Without the narrative pull of sequential art, the illustrations seem (and often literally are) peripheral. However well composed, they carry less weight. Only occasionally is the layout used to combine text and image; normally appreciating the art means taking time out from the story and looking at it on its own. Unfortunately, while many of the pictures, especially the painted ones, hold up magnificently to such scrutiny, others don’t. Van Fleet has made use of computer illustration here as well as paints and photos and some figures have the artificial sheen and tubular construction characteristic of much CGI. In addition, while most pictures are redundant depictions of what we are told in the text, towards the end of the issue some do seem to show extra, untold moments and the change is confusing. All-in-all, this isn’t the best showcase for a normally wonderful artist.
I’d never read any straight prose by Morrison before and I was intrigued to see how someone skilled at story, ideas and dialogue would fare with the fuller demands of descriptive writing. At first I was impressed, as Morrison piles adjective upon adjective, simile upon simile, to conjure the dread, mad atmosphere a Joker story demands. Repeated reads changed my opinion, however. The adjectives became wearing and the metaphors revealed themselves to be redundant or nonsensical. Now, I’m well aware that good fiction writing isn’t like writing an elegant book report for school. Redundancy and repetition can add layers and nuances beyond the mere conveying of information, but this wasn’t the kind of gothic intricacy favoured by an author like H.P. Lovecraft, whose style is so bad it’s good. This was just bad.
It would help to look at an example to see what Morrison is doing with his prose and where it goes wrong. This is from very early on in the book – it’s the second sentence – so there are no spoilers and it hasn’t been chosen as an especially extreme example, just the first that exhibits the traits found throughout:
Rain goes clickety-clack-tack through the sticks and branches of bare, bony graveyard elms, the kind that stand as if ashamed, like strippers past their best – danced out to a standstill in the naked lights, all down to nothing but fretwork and scaffolding, jutting hips, nicotine-stained fingers, and summer gone south for the winter.
Now ask yourself a question: how often are we told the trees are bare? Answer: at least five times in one sentence. The reference to sticks implies it (no reference to leaves), as does the redundant mention of branches. Then we hear the elms are bare, but also, unnecessarily, that they’re bony. Finally, they’re compared to strippers. So that’s five times in a sentence which otherwise just tells us it’s raining. Initially the comparison to aged strippers works, evoking a sense of shame appropriate to the twisted funeral scene the sentence introduces. But Morrison doesn’t stop there. There’s a slew of adjectives and metaphors that either bear hardly any relevance to the original point of the comparison – the elms – or just repeat what the direct description had previously said (as the ‘jutting hips’ repeat the idea of boniness). Morrison’s orgy of adjectives and metaphors adds little meaningful to what we already know.
Occasionally, the mass of allusion seems to be too much for even Morrison to follow and a sentence dissolves into nonsense. At one point, Harley Quinn’s eyes are described as ‘fractured semi-precious stones set like charms in a frightened little Halloween-cake face’. Note that ‘stones’ gets two adjectives, ‘face’ three and the metaphor doesn’t make sense: when are either stones or charms set in either faces or cakes? Morrison seems to have forgotten what ‘set’ refers to. In a description of Gotham at night he makes a similar mistake, writing about how the colours from the advertising hoardings are ‘braiding’ the rain, ‘scything across the docks…’, ‘then crowding into… the canyons… to rinse the lowlifes… off the bustling streets’. The subjects of this sentence are the colours, but the verbs better fit the object, ‘rain’. It seems Morrison can’t decide if he’s describing the light or the weather, and the combination of the two in the final comparison, to ‘an ocean of printer’s ink’, encapsulates the confusion rather than clears it up.
So all too often there is little reason in Morrison’s choices. This might be said to fit a Joker story perfectly, if there were rhyme to the prose. But there isn’t – the style is almost never modulated or dropped. It applies to every scene and every character equally. They are all drowned in simile. Batman’s voice is ‘like steel striking rock’. Gordon’s explanations are ‘brief, like text messages’. The Joker dreams like ‘a grub growing all wrong…, like a caterpillar liquefying… or a fetus dissolving…’ A morgue is ‘like a fetish club’. An asylum guard ‘mumbles like a geisha, fumbling a fan of electronic keys’. In this last example, Morrison has tried for poetry (‘mumbles… fumbling’, ‘fumbling a fan’) but falls short because not only is the simile confused (what is reminiscent of a geisha – the mumbling or the fan?) but it’s arbitrarily attached to a background character. Everyone is treated in the same baroque manner irrespective of their importance to the plot or characterisation. (Compare later in the story, where one of these guards is at the centre of the action and is described, in a moment of high horror, as ‘Lou Perroni (37, a bodybuilder and collector of Ramones memorabilia, GSOH)’. Here, the ordinary, staccato language of a personals ad magnifies the horror by bridging our world and that of Batman and the Joker, but this context-sensitive tonal shift is very much the exception.) Just as in some of his worst comics work, like the Seven Soldiers: Mr Miracle (http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/forums/showthread.php?t=36949) mini, where Morrison loses himself in pseudo-intellectual philosophising, so here he seems to lose himself in words for words’ sake. It’s as if Morrison has been told by some second-rate creative writing teacher always to vary his word choice, not realising that applying that principle willy-nilly flattens prose and dissipates drama.
Morrison’s not known for his prose skills, though. He’s known for his fertile imagination and it’s the promise of letting this imagination loose on the Joker that will draw a lot of readers. It’s been a while since the Joker has done something genuinely weird. Instead writers have turned him into little more than a psychopath with a circus twist, most influentially in Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke. Where he used to want to copyright Jokerfish, more recently he’s been just a sniper with a smile. It’s fair to say, therefore, that he’s in need of a Morrisonian makeover and he gets one here. The Joker as Artist has been done before, but Morrison hits upon the really quite brilliant idea that the Joker embodies the art industry. Like the art world, he too goes through fashions – the Satire Years, Camp, the Ringmaster From Hell and New Homicidal – shedding a personality with each new fad. The beauty in this is that it simultaneously justifies different writers’ takes on the character, fits the Joker’s concept perfectly and provides a strong real-world referent. My main criticism would be that Morrison has given us a mechanism for character change, but his characterisation of the Joker appears in practice barely different than what was done before. Indeed, Moore’s classic addressed exactly the central conceit of the Joker’s motivation in this story: that, “He simply wants the goddamn Batman to finally get the goddamn joke”. While Morrison points to a way of changing the Joker, he in fact doesn’t move him on from the murderous status quo established by Moore all those years ago.
The treatment of the Joker can stand for the issue as a whole. It’s a pyrotechnic display of words and ideas that at first dazzles then fades to emptiness. Like all Morrison projects, this is a book full of possibilities. Like too many, it fails in the execution.
OVERALL:
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcfull.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dchalf.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcnone.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcnone.jpg http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/dcnone.jpg
Buy Batman online now from X-World Comics and save! (http://x-worldcomics.com/yourvirtualstore/shopdisplayproducts.asp?id=109&cat=BATMAN+)