Best Comics of 2012, No. 9: Daredevil by Mark Waid

As much great work as they've produced over the decades, I've not been a huge Marvel fan for the last couple decades.
A couple recent titles have bought me around a bit on this.
The first of these is Mark Waid's current run on Daredevil.

Everybody knows Daredevil by now: blinded by a radioactive isotope while saving a blind man about to be hit by a truck, young Matt Murdock assumes the mantle of Derdevil to avenge the death of his boxer father at the hands of The Fixer.
Sort of Batman meets Kid Galahad with a dollop of Shakespearean tragedy,  later supplemented by Miller with noir and manga pastiches.
I've been a fan of Old Hornhead since the early issues. I recall reading the Wally Wood stories, and the Romita and Colan followups, when they first came out.
I stuck with the character. I was captivated by the Miller run and some of the followups, but lost interest.
I returned sporadically. The Marvel Knights runs by Joe Qeusada and David Mack were particularly successful, and the Bendis/Alex Maleev run was spellbinding, if derivative of Bendis' noir themed independent comics.
Heck, I even liked it when DD was interviewed for Rolling Stone in no. 100.
So I know my Daredevil.
But I've not read it for a few years.
I think creators got carried away with the maudlin/tragic aspects of the character. While these were always present, there was more of a soap opera aspect to them in the 60s and 70s. I blame and credit Frank Miller for bringing out Matt's Catholicism as a focus of the character.
At any rate, I'd walked away and didn't pay attention when Waid began writing Daredevil in July 2011.
More fool me. I should have known better.

I love Waid's Astro City, and his "Unthinkable" storyline in Fantastic Four is some of the best superhero stuff ever. I'd like to see him revitalize his Potter's Field, but I'm pretty sure he's done with it.
In the current Daredevil run, Waid and artists Chris Samnee and Marc Checetto successfully meld recent events in the Marvel Universe with the tone of the original stories, without being condescending or overly impressed by their own cleverness. There's no wry "this is a comic" wink to the reader here, only well-crafted adventure.

The stories incoproate contemporary versions of staple characters, including Dr. Doom, Spidey, the Punisher- heck, the whole crowd, pretty much. The central storyline involves a flash drive made of unstable molecules from a stolen shred of a Fantastic Four uniform. This drive contains information that could take down any or all of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world, collectively called Megacrime.
Daredevil has it and everyone wants it.
The art is highly reminiscent of the Wood/Layton run, from issues 5  to 11, still one of the highlights of the character's run, especially issue 7, the battle with Namor.
I see that quality in the current Daredevil run.
No Earth shattering, cataclysmic "the Marvel Universe will never be the same!" bombast here. Just a solid, intelligent adventure.
I read a review of Star Trek: Insurrection in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. It warmly talked of the film as a clever chance to spend a couple hours with old friends.
That's kind of the way I feel about the current Daredevil run. Since I'm reading it in trades, I'm a bit behind the floppies storyline. I've read through Book 3, which culminates with issue 15. The current issue is no. 22.
But I don't expect the issues I've yet to read will disappoint.
Tomorrow: No. 8 in the Best Comics of 2012, a book which will never leave its house.

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: MN Field Report on Free Speech

The spiffy "new: CBLDF logo, a couple years old now!

I've been procrastinating this post for a while, but with San Diego ComicCon right around the corner and the 4th of July fading into the past as I prepare for the second wave of summer classes, I don't want it to be too long overdue. And in light of the CBLDF auction scheduled for that huge event, this seems the ideal time to correct the oversight.
Back in May, I volunteered to run the booth so the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, of which I've been a supporting member for the past decade plus (skipping one year when I was too broke), would have a presence at the MN Comic Book Party, AKA SpringCon.
I'd like to offer a summary of the event.
The first day I was aided by longtime friend and fellow comic book geek Jesse Haller.  Jesse and I have countless discussions on the nature of comics, and endless fun dishing comic book gossip. Jesse was great about creating an effective setup, putting his retail and merchandising experience to work to make the booth shine. He also covered the booth for a couple hours while I had lunch with our mutual friend Frenchy Lunning!

As to the booth itself, it took a while for some of the patrons to figure out what the deal was. But very soon, after the initial burst of people mad to get to the comics (our booth was right by the door!), things settled down and people stopped to talk about the work of CBLDF, and to contribute to the cause.
The degree to which some patrons didn't get it at first was made clear by some folks asking for deals on our books!
Since I wasn't sure of the demographic, I just told the CBLDF people to send stuff they thought apropos. I quickly saw my mistakes. Here's how the event went down:

• This is a family-friendly Con. The items for kids and the small ticket items sold out. 
• Lots of folks buy art at this Con! Some of the limited edition prints would have gone over well.
• Neil Gaiman remains very popular here. The signed 1st printings of The Graveyard Book sold out. IN light of that, if we run the table again, including some of the limited edition prints might be a good idea.
• While we had ample stories of the big cases that CBLDF has helped with, there are many smaller instances that get overlooked. The owner of B & B Comics in Bemidji told us of the organization's help in quieting a "concerned parent" irate over a Frank Miller poster. I also knew from past conversations that Tyler Page, whose strip Nothing Better is linked to screen left, had assistance from them with a rather odd legal threat he received over the content of his strip.

Camille, Lady Liberty and Diana!

Day Two saw me aided by Manga fan and aspiring veterinarian Camille McAloney. Her enthusiasm and ability to engage people really helped our sales and communication efforts!
Both days were made for me on a personal level by encountering so many old friends, quite unexpectedly, including one of my favorite former students and the gent who first hired me to teach! Seemed like every time I looked up, there was someone else I knew! That was so positive, just what I needed coming off a rough year.
But it wasn't about me, it was about the cause.
We raised right around $600, give or take, at the table. And SpringCon gives a significant portion of its art auction proceeds to CBDLF as well, so the organization made a decent piece of change for The Cause.
CBLDF has been in existence since the Friendly Frank's bust in the early 1980s led to Greg Ketter and Dreamhaven throwing The Irish Wake for the First Amendment, an event which I was privileged to attend. This was a direct precursor to the CBLDF. Among hundreds of subsequent cases, they defended a comic book store owner who was arrested for selling  an adults only comic book to an adult.
The mind boggles.
While the problem has diminished a bit, there remains a huge need to protect the rights of comic book creators, publishers and retailers from people who engage in censorship, which is, in the words of Mark Twain, "telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
And just for fun, here's a SpringCon attendee in the role of a Wally Wood EC Comics spaceman!

That's The Spirit!

As I prepare to teach comics history again, I am mindful that today is the 70th Anniversary of the first public appearance of Will Eisner's The Spirit!
So much has already been said about this work. The years of study, the experimentation, the discovery of the work and the young minds that discovery opened. For me, it was the Harvey Spirit #1, which I bought coverless for a nickel at the used furniture store in my small hometown. This is what I saw that fateful day!

More than a decade later, while I was in film school at UW-Madison, I was shopping at the Book Co-op (A book co-op! What a great time to live in a great town!) and I saw the Kitchen Sink Spirit # 1 and 2 on their underground comic rack.

Then the Warren magazines started coming out, and I started to get it. There was a vast array of comics history and art about which I knew nothing!

Over the decades, other publishers reprinted the work. Denis Kitchen worked with Eisner to get new work in print, including A Contract With God, which allowed so many new possibilities for comics creation and marketing.
Of course, we endured the awful Frank Miller film. The less said about it the better.
And the whole Eisner run  is now available in hardcovers- 26 of them at $50 - 60 a pop. But they're out there!
DC is currently revamping the character yet again. I have mixed feelings about this one. The Spirit shouldn't swear. All that deeply anguished noir stuff just isn't Denny Colt. But there was a black and white Spirit story by Harlan Ellison in the last issue that was well worth the price of admission!

I don't know which is worse, anguish or sass. Both are just a bit, well, off for this character, and more than a bit annoying.
Flawed as it was, I rather like the 80s Spirit TV movie. It's kind of like Rockford Files with a mask, but Eisner did have a hand in its production, and aside from the wooden acting of Sam Jones, who also played Flash Gordon in the 80s film, it has a good look and at least a measure of respect for its source material.

Frank Miller owes me two hours

I just finished watching The Spirit courtesy of Netflix.
I'm trying to work up the vitriol to be disappointed.
Oh, I was told what to expect. But this was so much worse. A mish-mash of styles, dialogue that suits none of the characters, a plot so full of holes you could fill Wildwood Cemetery with them, and visuals that lack energy.
Oh, people have commented at length about how visually striking this film is, but it doesn't work for me. It's just a sorry pastiche of Kill Bill and Sin City.
Miller was once capable of great innovation. Now he's a parody of himself, creating implausible cities in which all the women are gorgeous in a sleazy way, all the men are gruff and nobody seems to actually like each other very much. The whole thing was a bizarre nightmare vision of Sin City recast as a camp 60s TV show.
Lest you think me an uninformed grouch, unaware of the nuances of Noir, I would point you to this article.
Eisner deserves better, especially from a freind, and he and Miller were friends.
The Spirit is a pragmatic man involved in Capra-esque morality plays. while these times may seem at odds with such an outlook and such a hero (decades ago, James Garner seemed to me to be an ideal choice to play the Spirit), I suspect that the moral compass of the country is swinging to a sort of pragmatic optimism. The Spirit would fit right in, given the chance.
This page from a Paul Chadwick Spirit story shows that it's possible to be realistic and still maintain a character's inherent humanity and decency, traits that seem to have eluded Miller in this outing.
It's just a darn shame that Frank Miller let his ego interfere with his reverence for the character.
Miller's failure to create a substantial work out of an iconic comic character will in no way help public perception of comics as worthy.