Act One: The Electoral Math of the World’s Most Expensive Telegraph
Just a few hours from now (or just a few hours ago, depending on when you read this), we silently sail by the 150th anniversary of a moment that pushed the world as it was to its technological limit. In order to make the November 8th deadline of the Presidential Election of 1864 (an Election that would ultimately see Republican President Abraham Lincoln return to office) Nevada legislature in Carson City rushed to telegraph its entire Constitution to Congress in Washington, DC.
At the time, and to this day, it remains the costliest telegraph ever sent. It allowed Nevada to join the Union, and ensured the newly-minted “Battle Born” (born during the Civil War) State three votes in the Electoral College. And it speaks to one of those rare magical moments in history. As I’m writing this, I’m unaware if the Chicago World’s Fair (just 29 years down the line in 1893) would actually mark this moment of Nevada’s statehood as the technological leap it was. But noted or not so, the telegraphing of the Nevadan Constitution marks a high frequency taxing of the system of technology of the day, never to be repeated, for a technology that’s already on the brink of waning away.
Perhaps more so than any other State in the Union, Nevada’s story of statehood feels like exactly that great American mythic experience; like John Henry beating that steam-powered hammer only to die immediately after. There’s a mythic largeness and largess that ushers us into a sense of wonder. But more than that, it’s Nevada’s connection with the pantomime of Halloween and where the State heads over the next 150 years (well, really over the next 135 years until 1989 and Steve Wynn) that provides a kind of comment on the current state of comics, and suggests a role for popculture.
It’s really these Nevada and its history, its origin story if you will, that in some senses frames expectations when looking at the new, new Marvel NOW! promo poster, a poster that casts Iron Man as a (tentative) villain, Thor as no longer the Odinson and Captain America as no longer Steve Rogers. That has no Spider-Man, no Hulk, and no Daredevil. And that promotes Ant-Man and Doctor Strange to central roles in the Avengers. (Does it though? Who can really say?)
Act Two: Towards a More Permanent Halloween
Dial back to the summer of 2011, and the DC and Marvel megaevent crossovers, Flashpoint and Fear Itself feel like legacy statements. Not legacy statements in the sense of, “this is exactly how far we’ve come,” but legacy statements in the sense that when looked back upon from the vantage point of history, both Flashpoint and Fear itself feel very much like the kind of thing that an entire phase of history was building towards.
Think back to those “crossovers” from the earliest of days—DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths and Marvel’s Secret War. It honestly feels like all those points between, all those crossovers like DC’s Millennium or Invasion or Blackest Night or Marvel’s Evolutionary War or Infinity Crusade or Secret Invasion, really were fully realized in either Flashpoint or Fear Itself.
Both Flashpoint and Fear Itself and with Marvel, one year on’s Avengers vs. X-Men, tell big, bombastic tales about their various universes. And in doing so, emphasize the role of comics as being there to tell trans-generational stories about a core of dynamic heroes, at odds with, and at the same time helping build their respective worlds. But this ideation of comicbook superheroes is at odds with, and ultimately displaces other older ideations of comicbook superheroes.
Primarily the ideation of the ‘70s, stretching as far back as the early ‘60s with the birth of the “Silver Age.” What Stan Lee and Jack Kirby reignited was the sense of magic abundant in those early comics of the ‘30s and ‘40s that came directly out of the original pulp comicbooks. The idea that these superheroes and their comicbooks are an immediate response to the world, and in being an immediate response, are more temporary.
The idea that this isn’t the Great American Mythology that will form a permanent fixture in the popculture of the future, but that somehow, the time of relevance for these intellectual properties will expire. The idea that, in essence, comicbooks and comicbook superheroes could be a kind of Halloween, of popculture. A pantomime of and response to the world, that can be folded up and put away until this time next year.
It’s with this older ideation of comics, the temporariness, the Pantomime Theory, the Halloween Theory of comics, that the rejuvenation of Las Vegas in the early 1990s (well earlier, in 1989, with Steve Wynn’s opening of the Mirage on November 22) finds a deep connection. Wynn’s idea to enlist Wall Street financiers and to reinvent the Vegas Strip not as a high-end tourist destination of utter luxury, but as a finely crafted spectacle that will ensure tourists stay and overspend their money, is a response to a deep crisis in the idea (capital eye) of Las Vegas. It’s easy to see as early as 1989, how the Boyd family’s dream of small-town, family-owned business economics in running casinos was already drawing dead, and how a rejuvenation of sorts was called for.
In 2011 for DC, with Flashpoint kicking off the New 52 that would reset the story-clock of every DC-owned IP to zero, and in 2012 after the events of AvX that would usher Marvel into post-partisan storytelling where Avengers and X-Men could collectively as a whole drive Marvel storytelling, both Marvel and DC faced a similar crisis. But rather than tend towards the pre-universe style storytelling, rather than allow for the Halloween Theory by reducing the output and scope of their perennial characters to allow for short-term aberrant characters like Howard the Duck or titles like Spanner’s Galaxy or Haywire, DC and Marvel fully threw their weight behind universe-based storytelling.
The move means different things for the different companies. It means DC’s strategy with the New 52—to do limited run series like OMAC and Justice League International, only to have them discontinue after telling a well-defined piece of the broader DC New 52 story, seems a little more successful when stacked against Marvel’s. As for Marvel, the current AXIS storyline, which in some ways resurrects the politics of the older, ‘90s-era Onslaught Saga, and in other ways functions as a kind of successor storyline to AvX which instigated the first wave of Marvel NOW!, feels very much like beating a hasty retreat from AvX. Or worse, an admission that AvX wasn’t quite the impact Editorial had hoped to effect.
The schismatic response to how to sustain attention in the comics economy (an economy built to critical mass in the ‘90s), only deepens when transmedia properties are considered. With Warner Bros. shows like the CW-aired Arrow and The Flash or Cartoon Network-aired Batman: Brave & the Bold or Fear the Batman or NBC’s Constantine, DC seems committed to the idea of their TV heroes being simply “one creative vision” of their heroes among possibly countless other creative visions.
Take Oliver Queen’s Green Arrow for example. Arrow shows all the crucial elements of the character—his flair (and arguably its a character failing) for showmanship, his overriding drive towards social justice, his resistance to “trick” arrows and subsequent embrace thereof. And yet, Andrew Kreisberg, Greg Berlanti and Geoff Johns’s vision of Oliver Queen from the show is far darker, far grittier than any other version of the character, save maybe for Mike Grell’s from the ‘80s.
With this kind of treatment of its transmedia properties, DC makes a profound editorial statement. That the transmedia tales are the experiment, but you can always “return” to the “normalcy of continuity” by returning to the comicbooks. Except of course, the comicbooks are altered reality versions of themselves. That Superman isn’t quite the Superman from the late ‘30s on, nor Batman, nor anyone really.
Marvel for its part has entirely reversed that dynamic—allowing the movies to be the perfected, idealized version of its characters, while like DC its comicbooks present an altered version of its “reality.”
Act Three: 30 Bullets of Silver
It’s no secret that I’ll be spending the final hours of this Halloween as I spend the final hours of every Halloween (well technically it’ll be tomorrow)—watching pantomime of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. I really hope I’ll hit the 4AM long, dark teatime of the soul (as Douglas Adams puts it) at somewhere poignant in the play, like Hamlet in the Chapel, or killing Polonius, or back in Denmark for the first time, but in the cemetery. Truth be told, this’ll probably be a hypermediated viewing of Hamlet, in that I can’t seem to put down my iPad since downloading Trials Frontier.
But building up to that, I’ll be rereading, from the start, Greg Rucka and Michael Lark’s Lazarus, because, honestly, their Monsanto-takes-control scifi feels like the best kind of Halloween pantomime we can hope for post-financial crisis.
And because of the other thing. Because of the long drag of history, and because of that inherent promise of Halloween, Nevada’s origin story (a little), and of comics—that some things can last, even after being born in the fires. That the correct response to intimate betrayals might not be 30 pieces of silver, but 30 bullets of silver.
It’s that long drag of history that will most likely take me back to two iconic, but incredibly subtle moments of 2011 and 2012 respectively. Cast in the light of retrospect, these moments now seem overwhelmingly prescient.
The first from DC’s long-running and hugely successful Jonah Hex. In fact the longest running series for the character to date or since, tracing its roots back to early 2005. The series was helmed (really helmed, more than penned) by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, and came to an end in issue #70, entitled “Weird Western.” In its closing pages, we discover that it isn’t Hex’s mythic death at all, and in fact it isn’t even 1904 and Hex isn’t the seasoned age of 66. The entire issue’s actually been a visionquest he experiences while healing from a near-fatal wound delivered by one of the Barrow brothers. (Really, all a dream.)
It’s in those closing pages that we dial back from the fictional history of Hex we know must play out, and focus of the immediate, unending-ness of the character’s present. It’s still many years before 1904 (or it’s many years since 1904, again, depending on how you choose to read “Weird Western”), many years before meeting Jeb Turnbull again, and for now anything can happen.
Then there’s the moment. After Hex heals up, he parts ways with Bat Lash (erstwhile partner) and Tallulah Black (erstwhile paramour) who brought him to this nameless cave to this nameless Apache shaman to be healed. There’s no handshake, no warm hug. Just an unspoken promise to see you out there on the open road. Maybe.
Then eight months later, in June of the following year, longtime Wolverine writer Jason Aaron (longtime for nearly a decade, and for 70+ issues) bows out from writing the character’s eponymous book. “One More Round” is a story about Wolverine’s return to fighting form, after taking it on the chin for far too long. It’s a story about how Wolverine, primarily because of his long history, leaves all these threats on the table, these things that will sometimes come back to hurt him or hunt him. And the closing pages again are the most poignant.
After showing up at Sabretooth’s “coronation” and physically beating him down, as well all other supervillains gathered for the event, Logan enjoys a cool beer at one of the nameless dives he likes to frequent. Artist Steve Dillon, in top form, delivers the “acting” (as longtime collaborator Garth Ennis termed the facial-expression storytelling that’s become a hallmark of Dillon’s art) he so loves. Aaron writes Logan’s monolog in caption boxes: “Cold beer in my gullet. Football on the TV, Sabretooth’s blood on my hands. Loud drunk guys playing pool, probably gonna start a fight later.” Panel break, and the bartender asks, “Anything else I can get you, Pal?” Another panel break. Logan replies, “What else is there?”