INDY REVIEWS
Score: 7 / 10 
An Interview With Geoff Klock
Geoff Klock (www.geoffklock.com) knows more about the evolution of superhero comic books than anyone else in the room. This is true regardless of whether the room contains just one other person or more comic book geeks than you can poke a cosmic power rod at.
For his book, How To Read Superhero Comics And Why, Geoff broke into my house, examined every comic in my collection (notable exception: my complete run of Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew!) and explained why each one played a significant part in the evolution of the superhero comic book genre/medium.
Before the police came to take him away, I asked him a few questions. He answered them in a discussion that covered the relationships between text and subtext, hair and baldness and J'onn (Martian Manhunter) J'onzz and David (Angel) Boreanaz.
What was the first comic book you treasured? Not just read and enjoyed, but took delirious delight in?
Sam Kieth's The Maxx. MTV animated the issues -- probably the most faithful adaptation from one medium to another I have ever seen, including the Sin City movie -- and I got momentarily sucked away from my developing interest in the X-Men franchise, and bought all the issues. They didn't look like anything I had ever read, they were fantastic and realistic at the same time, they had a big purple superhero and very cute girls, but also "issues" -- feminism, rape, child molestation, Jungian symbolism. Sam Kieth highlighted both levels of the story and balanced them, I thought at the time, very well. Looking back this was a formative experience for me, as I would spend the next ten years exploring comic books and the "subtext" of comic books, the surface story and the hidden meaning underneath, before I understood the real relation between text and subtext (discussed below). It was The Maxx that first suggested to me that superhero comics were more than mere escapism, or I should say a more rewarding and long-lasting kind of escapism.
Have your years studying comics stirred in you any interest in writing them?
Well for starters I really like what I do. I like the academic world, I am zealous about teaching comics, TV and poetry, I think learning to study these things is important -- not just to me but to everybody. I don't like these academics who try to separate themselves off from the pack by thinking "well being an academic is just a day job, really I am a novelist" -- "oh yeah, what have you published" -- "well I haven't actually published anything..." That drives me nuts. If you went to school for ten years to do something that's your job unless you have become wildly successful in some other field.
It's an unpopular opinion -- and don't get me wrong I get why -- but for me a day spent reading is a better day than one spent doing something else (even writing). Jorge Luis Borges said "I have done little but read much. Or, rather I have done a lot but very little of it has been more memorable than the things I have read." I know why people think that is pathetic, but I can't help but agree with him. I know secretly a lot of people would agree with that, but bad TV sitcoms have wrongly insisted a difference between "living" and "reading" (as if reading isn't as much a part of living as talking to friends is), and lots of people take their cues from The King of Queens (or whatever), unfortunately.
On the other hand my closest friend is Brad Winderbaum, director of the superhero movie The Futurist (www.thefuturistmovie.com). I spend a lot of time talking to him about upcoming projects, trying to use what I know about comics, television and literature to be useful to him in some way. He keeps telling me we should write something together so you never know. But it likely wouldn't be comics. My go-to medium this week is television.
That's interesting. Most ongoing television shows, like comic books, are a serialized medium, with an indeterminate end point (that is, with rare exceptions, they'll go as long as sales/ratings permit them to do so). Is that commonality part of the attraction to both media? Or am I just a rambling fool?
What I like about television and comics is that the long running serial format -- not quite indeterminate because I will leave if the writer or show runner is replaced by someone less good, which is very common -- gets under your skin, insinuates itself into your day to day life more than a movie can. Joss Whedon's Serenity was two great hours, but Buffy and Angel lasted for 254 hours and took us through not only seven years in the characters' lives, but seven years in the lives of the actors; that means my relationship with the characters on that show has outlasted most of the relationships in my day to day life, and was, in fact, a more rewarding experience in many cases. But television, unlike comics, gets to more people, and for some reason that matters to me this week. Poetry and comics are for a coterie fan base -- and because of that have a lot to teach us, because a coterie readership makes for smart readers who can understand dense material -- but television gets everyone (well, almost).
Will there be a sequel to your book?
There will be an expanded second edition at some point, which will revise the whole thing -- and there is a lot that I would revise; I wrote that book when I was twenty -- and add in some discussions of the new stuff I think has really taken over, notably Grant Morrison who as far as I am concerned has emerged from the field as a conquering God, leaving Bendis, Ellis, Moore and everybody else (with the possible exception of Millar on Wanted and Ultimates) in the dust. The new edition will have a massive section on the genius that is Seven Soldiers. Morrison hasn't even gotten started on 52, Batman, Superman, Wildcats and the Authority so I expect to have a lot to say if he can manage to keep all those books above the water level (five books a month sunk Bendis, whose Fortune and Glory I thought suggested a great career).
On this site, I've been reviewing Morrison's run on the JLA. Your book talks about (along with many other things) the struggle for comic book creators to deal with the ramifications of Moore's Watchmen and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. The first version of the JLA to follow Watchmen and Dark Knight was Giffen and DeMatteis's sitcom version of the league. Do you think this was a reaction to those other two books, a kind of 'yep, superheroes are silly and unrealistic, so let's just have a jolly good laugh at them' approach?
This always happens to me. It's all very embarrassing. I haven't actually read Giffen and DeMatteis's JLA. I only have so many hours in the day and have been watching 254 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel while completing an 110,000 word doctorial thesis at Oxford on poetry from the last 200 years. I've been busy, and I've had to triage. Sue me. If I lived in New York I would have gone out to get them before responding to this question but since I live in Oxford (for the next couple of months at least) that's not going to be possible. But like Babe Ruth I will call it before I've done it: I am sure those works are a response to Miller and Moore, because EVERYTHING at that time was.
Fair enough. You didn't miss an awful lot. While it was kinda fun and different for a while, I think the whole 'superhero as sitcom' style proved difficult to sustain. Ultimately, such an approach falls apart and Maxwell Lord eventually has no choice but to shoot Blue Beetle in the head. That's a pretty obvious logical progression.
With a very few exceptions, I wish Maxwell Lord would shoot many other sitcom characters in the head (Two and a Half Men, anyone?). That's an obvious logical progression, or at least an emotionally satisfying one.
In your book, you talk about Morrison's JLA and how much of what he writes is nonsense. Poetic and glorious, sure, but ultimately still nonsense. Is it fair to say Morrison's JLA is just as silly as Giffen and DeMatteis's, but rises above the silliness by the iconic power of the heroes he uses and the grand scale of the crises he throws at them? Is there any deeper level to Morrison's run on JLA that a superficial observer (eg me) might have missed amid all the crazy, mindblowing fun of it all?
This is a good question and allows me to talk about something that has been implicit in what I say about comics but seems to confuse everyone. Everyone who reads superhero comics gets how they are fun. This is, we can all agree, generally a light surface pleasure, not deep philosophy. When I point out some larger significance -- lets say, how Morrison continues rather than ignores Miller and Moore's emphasis on realism in Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen by presenting reality itself as as crazy as Morrison's comics (e.g. discussing his capture to the fifth dimension in non-fiction interviews) -- this kind of thing is subtext, some kind of hidden philosophical import, which a lot of people disagree is there at all, and those that do are clear about it being a hidden secret meaning. When I discuss comics and the more complex things going on in comics people often assume I am making some distinction between these two levels -- ignoring the surface to focus on the serious philosophical hidden message; even those that agree with me about these readings feel the need -- as you do in your question -- to slight the surface level ("ultimately still nonsense," as you said, "rises above the silliness"), and ask about the "deeper level" (your words). This idea about the split between surface and hidden meaning is common, and understandable, but wrong.
The "crazy, mindblowing fun of it all" the "silliness," the "nonsense" seen by a "superficial" reader IS THE POINT. Crazy is good, silly is good, nonsense is actually good -- what the hell is "sense," but the boring, cold, rational, sober face of the world as it is, our world's utter lack of time travel and jet powered apes (as Morrison says in JLA Classified)? As Paul Valery says, the world cannot stand for a moment to be merely what it is; that state is death itself because it is deadly to the imagination. The idea says Valery, introduces life into death, introduces into what is the leaven of what is not. Morrison does the same. Superficial is good, because superficial is the surface enjoyment that you will remember at the end of the day. We don't go to works of art to discover the true hidden meaning -- if we did a summary of the deep meaning could replace the work of art -- but to see how artists respond to cold sober reality (many respond by giving in to it), and to enjoy watching that.
I am not interested in a "deeper level," -- I am not interested in comics to extract some hidden message and then throw the envelope away. I want a better appreciation of the surface, a better understanding of why something is fun, how it is fun, and if I didn't like it, of how I might understand it better and get it, which is to say enjoy it. And if other people don't get Morrison, or whatever, I want to give them the context that will allow them to see how much fun it is. JLA doesn't make sense? It's too crazy? Crazy is the point, lady, embrace it, embrace what crazy allows Morrison to get away with (shaving the Shaggy man for example). When I explain how The Planetary investigates comics history -- how it sets comic book history against itself in order to achieve something great -- this is not a hidden meaning. It's the best way to appreciate the crazy, mindblowing superficial fun of it all. It's not a deeper level, it's not the comic's "truth," its "meaning." It's an investigation of the purely superficial and why the superficial is so great. Why we -- well me at any rate -- remember these "superficial" things more than so many other things that happen to me.
As somebody who attempts to make a living by writing silly stuff (and I use the term 'silly' in a completely non-pejorative sense - something I sometimes forget other people don't do), I like this interpretation. Is it fair, then, to say that my reviews are the single most insightful and developed study of Morrison's JLA run available?
Let's say that I think your reviews are closer to the essence of what makes comics matter than someone studying comics in terms of semiotics, philosophy, history, gender theory, race, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, class, or culture. But then I think mean high school girls with good fashion sense are closer to the essence of poetry than most graduate students because at least the mean high school girls understand aesthetics as a primary dimension, even if they don't know what the word means. So perhaps I am just crazy.
Any analogy that aligns me to mean high school girls with good fashion sense strikes me as being startlingly apt. Disturbing beyond measure, but apt.
First time I read Rock of Ages, I didn't get it. I liked it, but I had no idea what was happening each issue. I simply couldn't keep the events of previous issues in my head over the months it took to tell the story. When read as a whole, the story is perfectly understandable. Is that a flaw in the story or a flaw in the medium of the single issue 'floppy' comic book? Or, Rao forbid, a flaw in me?
Its not you, and its not the format, its Morrison. Morrison, as far as I can tell, travels ten years into the future, writes his comics, then brings them back for us. He is so far ahead of everybody in terms of storytelling and ideas that we all have to struggle to keep up with the guy. If we are thrown at first, or still thrown after a while, it is because we don't know what we are looking at and it will take our eyes some time to adjust to these weird new objects. Morrison takes time to get used to. Between the issues and the trade -- and I bet you read other Morrison comics in that gap -- he taught you to see what he was going for, sped you up to meet with your future self.
And, thoughtfully, he's also prepared me for my future self's rapidly receding hairline. What about Morrison's use of the iconic characters? Any significance to his adherence to each character's individual continuities (eg Supes turning into a blue electric thing, or Wonder Woman being replaced by her mother)?
Well obviously that just DC's editorial policy. Morrison believes these characters are living breathing entities and that there are limits to how far we can remake them -- if this is what is happening in their lives as he writes them into his JLA than he is going to respect that. One of my favorite things about Morrison's JLA run is that the electric Superman caught him by surprise -- he was informed about the change after he wrote the JLA versus Angels script and had to go back and change it; but, being a genius, managed to come up with a better use of electric superman's power -- giving electromagnetic poles to the moon -- than the Superman staff ever came up with.
Your book suggests the possibility of a new age of comic books, such as Warren Ellis's Planetary, where the writer uses the book as a kind of reflection and commentary on various media. Do you think it's possible for a writer to use the icons of the DC (or Marvel) Universe in this way? Or are the commercial constraints too strong to overcome?
At the time I wrote the book I thought Wildstorm was more free than DC and Marvel and could become the third wave, the successor to the Golden Age at DC in the forties and the Silver Age at Marvel in the sixties. With Morrison on Wildstorm's two flagship books I may still be right. But with Seven Soldiers and All Star Superman and The Ultimates -- even Dark Knight Strikes Again -- I have to say my confidence is with DC and Marvel again. The big test will be to see how the DC Universe thrives under Morrison's control.
If you were a fish, would you pay any attention to Aquaman's telepathic commands?
Not if he still had a hook for a hand, or if I had anything to do or if I was tired or something, or didn't feel like it.
Heh. The Aquaman hook hand is a weird one, yes. "I am the lord of all marine life. Please ignore the fact I have a harpoon for a hand." I wish his other hand had been replaced by a fishing rod. If only so we could have had a panel of him trying to tie his shoelaces.
Is there any superhero story that can't be improved by a talking ape?
Not only is there no superhero story that can't be improved by a talking ape -- and Morrison's three issue JLA: Classified run with Gorilla Grodd are my favorite comics of all time -- there is no television story, film, classroom, wedding reception, funeral or mortality and morbidity conference that could not be improved by the addition of a talking ape.
This is what I tried to tell my wife. But no - we had to get one of those tedious human wedding celebrants.
Philistine.
Yeah, but she's cute, so I cut her slack.
Is a hairless Shaggy Man brilliance or madness? Or both?
Both absolutely. Morrison has a thing about hair in his work -- check out Captain All Beard versus Captain No Beard in Manhattan Guardian. At an interview he mentioned that that fight was about Alan Moore -- Moore is famously hairy and Morrison has shaved his head (compare any photographs of the two men). Shaving the Shaggy man is a swipe at the influence of hairy Alan Moore. -- No no of course it's not, but wouldn't that be funny?
Why do Martian invading teams still trust J'onn?
He is a very nice guy, and has a forehead not unlike David Boreanaz. I trust David Boreanaz. (well I did until Bones came out).
I, for one, can now not wait for the Angel v Martian Manhunter mini-series. With a special fold-out double forehead cover.
How cool was DC One Million?
Some of the best comics ever. And one of my favorite things about All Star Superman -- like Marvel's Ultimate line a creation of a "canonical" story review, a retelling of the greatest stories (the fight with Magneto, Return to Weapon X, the Phoenix) -- Morrison canonizes HIS OWN JLA RUN: Superman meets with Kal Kent, the 853rd Century superman from DC: One Million and mentions Solaris, who has a replica in the hideout; the cube of stars from JLA: Classified is even in his headquarters, as is a replica of Brainiac from his JLA: Earth Two (the design is the same). Long Live Grant Morrison, Grant Morrison tells us. The man is an audacious genius.
You can read more of Geoff's thoughts at www.geoffklock.com or his blog (geoffklock.blogspot.com). Or, indeed, in the book we've been discussing here (How To Read Superhero Comics And Why. Pay attention, people).
Begone,
-- Back to all comics
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