Justice League: A New Beginning

Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, Kevin Maguire & others
Justice League: A New Beginning (1989)
I've always been interested in the mechanics of humour, what works, what doesn't, and why. I've found it particularly interesting since moving to America because it often seems as though our respective chortles are drawn from quite different places. On close inspection, this isn't actually true but is rather a very much generalised reading of variant forms of humour in mainstream entertainment. One might propose a model wherein English humour tends to be at its most characteristic in a broader context and is thus presented without ceremony as part of the general narrative so that, for example, there's more to your average episode of Steptoe & Son than just the funnies and it is the environmental details which support the humour and give it power. By comparison, the American equivalent enters the room with a smirk, announces that you should be ready for laughter, and then tells a joke which isn't particularly funny whilst winking and digging you in the ribs with an elbow. Unfortunately, should we compare - off the top of my head - Miranda with Parks & Recreation, my stupid theory is revealed as simply differentiating that which is funny from that which isn't whilst having bugger all to say about the difference between English and American humour.

The Justice League of America was, as I'm sure we all know, DC comics banding together all of its most financially lucrative superheroes into a single gang and having them fight crime by means of teamwork. I tend to regard the strength of superhero comics as reliant on elements other than the superheroics, and barring one or two exceptions, DC never scored highly in this respect, being a stable of clean-cut role models who go outside the law to foil bank robberies or deliver the stolen wallet back to its millionaire owner like the Nietzschean boy scouts they are; and no matter how hard you might try to get Superman hooked on crack, the wholesome never quite washes out; but on the other hand, no-one really wants dark Superman, at least not over and over again. So when the Justice League was revived in 1987 they decided to go for laughs, presumably given that Watchmen already existed.

Although I can't really speak for anything more recent than September 1991 - the point at which I lost interest - the humour in American superhero comics has tended towards the heavy-handed, cornball and cutesy with nothing to alarm a concerned parent. We'll be able to see the gag, such as it is, coming from at least four pages away, and it will in any case have already been foreshadowed by a cover featuring all of the major characters pulling wacky faces.

Mercifully, Giffen's Justice League tried something different. It was the usual mix of slapstick, comedy turns to camera, double takes, eyes rolled and foreheads slapped in exasperation except for being played more or less straight against a backdrop of fairly typical superheroics and rendered in Kevin Maguire's beautifully understated, almost photorealist style. So here, in these first seven collected issues we have terrorists threatening the UN, a conspiracy, supervillains from another dimension, a team of bad guys based on playing cards, and another chapter in DC's war between the forces of chaos and order. It's mostly what you would expect to find in an eighties comic book named Justice League, except for the peculiarly dry focus on the epic and improbable as background to an otherwise realist narrative which is more or less soap opera, with the humour arising naturally from the contrast. Happily, this also allows the comic to do the usual superhero stuff without it seeming necessarily absurd.

I know. Sounds hilarious innit. Well, it was at the time. Thirty plus years later, I find I'm not laughing quite so hard although it still raises a chuckle here and there. I think this may be me rather than the comic book. Returning to Batman, the Green Lantern and others after time spent away, it takes me a few issues to see past how ridiculous these characters are, for the most part - which I don't really get with Marvel comics of equivalent vintage for some reason. Skipping ahead to a couple of later issues once I was done here, it also seems that the story was still finding its feet in this collection. Nevertheless, regardless of possibly subjective imperfections, this was a mostly great book, streets ahead of anything taking the Jerry Lewis approach to humour in comics, and of what became of this book once Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire handed in their cards.

Space Tug

Murray Leinster Space Tug (1953)
As hard science-fiction, this one is harder than usual for Leinster. He spares us the sums and the lectures about protons, but it's otherwise an aspirationally realist prediction of our first forays beyond the Earth's atmosphere. He didn't get absolutely everything right, but he was close and it remains characteristically absorbing and entertaining despite the somewhat dry subject matter. That said, a slightly uncomfortable note is struck by Leinster's otherwise commendable drive for inclusivity which recruits both a Native American and a dwarf to the crew of our space tug.

He was a tiny man, but he had longings and the ambitions of half a dozen full-sized men in his small body. And he'd known frustration. He could prove by mathematics that space exploration could be carried on by midgets at a fraction of the risk and cost of the same job done by normal-sized men. He was, of course, quite right. The cabins and air and food for a space-ship's crew of midgets would cost and weigh only a fraction of what similar equipment for six-footers would require.

Later, when the crew return to Earth they are besieged by admirers and well-wishers, and so our little guy gets amorous fan mail, but it's okay because the lady in question is of similar height. It's well-intentioned, even quite progressive, but comes over as a bit Ricky Gervais now that we've hit the twenty-first century.

Nevertheless, Leinster nearly always scores high in terms of basic readability, and Space Tug is no exception.

Swamp Thing

 Len Wein & Berni Wrightson Swamp Thing (1972)
...or specifically the first ten issues, reprinted as Roots of the Swamp Thing in 1986. Wein held out for another three issues, but Berni Wrightson had already defected to various Warren titles. Swamp Thing, as you may know, was essentially a horror title, albeit one inhabiting the periphery of a world dominated by Batman and his caped pals, seemingly a rewrite of Marvel's marginally earlier Man-Thing, although Wein also had a hand in that one so it's probably not worth getting upset over.

Anyway, while this version of Swamp Thing predates the comic book having supposedly grown up, as with others of equivalent vintage, it's not exactly a kids' book either. The whole man transformed deal isn't quite Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - although there are thematic parallels - much less Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, drawing more directly from the horror comics which got Wertham so hot under the collar back in the fifties, and particularly from cinematic sources - the Universal version of Frankenstein and the adjective caligarian in issue two could refer to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as much as it represents Latin deployed for the sake of mood. It won't split your brain in two - unless you're unusually stupid - but it's thoughtful, intelligent, powerfully atmospheric, and beautifully drawn; and it works so well on its own terms that having Batman turn up in issue seven feels dramatically like a step in the wrong direction, although thankfully their meeting is brief.

Beyond such details, it's difficult to know what to say about these early issues of Swamp Thing except that it was a near perfect book and effortlessly wonderful. I'm reluctant to embrace twatty maxims about how everything used to be so much better in the old days, but sometimes it actually was.

Mr. Noon

D.H. Lawrence Mr. Noon (1922)
Reading The Lost Girl back in October, I half formed a theory about the extent to which Dave had rewritten the first draft. The Lost Girl is peppered, albeit unevenly, with humorous asides to the reader which seem a little uncharacteristic, so I guessed, given that The Lost Girl revised material written a number of years earlier, that its unusually chatty style perhaps represented a throwback to the earlier rendering, something attempted before Lawrence had found his voice. Anyway, Mr. Noon was written immediately following the publication of The Lost Girl and is full of winks, nods, and comedy turns to the notional camera so I guess I was way out, and this slightly frivolous breaking of the fourth wall was something with which the author dabbled in the very early twenties. Mr. Noon may even have been Lawrence seeing how far he could push it, which is perhaps why the novel was abandoned, only to be posthumously published in its unfinished form.

It may also be significant that Mr. Noon was his most directly autobiographical novel at the time of writing, novelising his move to Europe with Frieda, meeting her family, and associated attempts to rationalise her rampaging polygamy without jeopardising the marriage - given that she clearly had no intention of reigning it in. So perhaps it was all just a little too close to the surface in terms of the subject.

In any case, whilst Lawrence's testimony is massively entertaining as he takes the piss out of himself, his characters, dramatic conventions, readers, and even takes a few swipes at his critics, the currents of chatty wisecracks alternating with the mostly autobiographical observations of life in Germany then Italy, and pseudo-spiritual material foreshadowing The Plumed Serpent's exploration of pre-Christian theology and nature worship, make for uneven reading. Indeed, the narrative switches are so pronounced as to reduce the more direct addresses to near incoherent jabbering. It could have worked but it didn't. It could have worked after a couple of rewrites, but Lawrence decided to direct the energy into what came after, presumably abandoning Mr. Noon as a failed experiment.

That said, it's still worth reading; and the first part - set in what is obviously Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, crackles with more than enough energy to justify its having been rescued from limbo. The second part finally comes together once the Lawrences take their leave of Frieda's family and struggle to get by in northern Italy, but after the main flabby and distinctly uneven whole of the second part, it somehow isn't quite enough.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
I seem to have had a somewhat intermittent relationship with television over the years, at least compared to most people. I'm sure I spent the average daily hourage glued to the box when growing up, then left home in 1984 to take a fine art degree. Excepting a few months of temporary residence at my dad's house, I didn't have a telly until about 1993 because I couldn't afford one and didn't really miss it. The irony here is that my fine art degree was one specialising in time based media, specifically film, video, and television.

We were trying to make video art. One of the pieces which had the most lasting effect on me was by Brendan Mooney, a fellow student who ended up playing rhythm guitar for Dave Vanian's Phantom Chords. I don't recall what it was called, but the video was shot in an empty studio with a stationary camera pointed at the wall. Every few minutes, Brendan would appear, peering at us cautiously from one side of the screen or another as though hoping we wouldn't see him, and each time he appeared, an uproarious laugh track filled the room despite that nothing funny was happening. After a few minutes of this, it became difficult to watch without laughing at the absurdity of it, and after another minute or so the obvious means by which the viewer was being manipulated left us feeling quite uncomfortable; and while it's not true that I've been entirely unable to watch sitcoms ever since, they have to be funny. Some guy pulling a face and saying now that's what I'm talkin' 'bout no longer cuts it for me, regardless of canned laughter.

Not all television is a waste of time, but the great majority of it is, and I no longer have the patience to sit in front of the box for an entire evening. Amusing Ourselves to Death is one of those books which sort of explains why everything is terrible, and has therefore come as a massive revelation because now I understand exactly why I've had this difficult relationship with the goggle box, and also because it's nice to know that I'm not crazy and that it isn't just me.

Postman expands on McLuhan to some degree, although he draws a more ominous conclusion. The central thesis of his argument is simple, namely that we have gone from being a text based culture to a visual one, and that because different media tend to dictate what can be said, this has profoundly influenced our way of thinking; and because visual media tend to reduce complex narratives to easily digested aesthetics, we are now living in a post-truth world where people who think they're vampires can actually be vampires and a game show host can occupy the White House; and should you happen to mention any of this on social media, someone will inevitably bleat about how there are some really good documentaries on television these days, which more or less proves the point.

We've spent a lot of time congratulating ourselves at having avoided the totalitarian future described by George Orwell's 1984. Postman argues that we've actually ended up with something much closer to Huxley's Brave New World wherein the problem is not that books are banned or routinely burned, but that we've ceased to care about books and, by association, truth, because we're too busy being entertained. Of course, as with any argument on this sort of scale, there's a lot of wiggle room - although it seems telling that everything stated back in 1985 applies equally well to the internet and other more recently developed media, and so much so as to require no great extension of the argument - and this is what those few Goodreads reviewers to take issue with this book have picked up on, usually in terms which may as well be how there are some really good documentaries on television these days.

Everybody needs to read this book, and if you believe those who tell you that they don't watch television do so in order to appear superior, then you're almost certainly a massive fucking tool and you really, really, really, really need to read this book.

Without Absolution

Amy Sterling Casil Without Absolution (2000)
This came into my possession because I'd added it to an Amazon wishlist and somebody felt like buying me a birthday present, which was initially puzzling as I couldn't remember who Amy Sterling Casil might be or why I'd been drawn to the book. Eventually I recalled having read Casil's Mad for Mints in a back issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which only presented further confusion because while I remember thinking it was sort of entertaining…

Well, whatever the case - I'm glad to have read this, not least when considering the alternate realities in which I might not have bothered. Casil's introduction mentions her having been influenced by Ray Bradbury, which I'm definitely feeling, although I think maybe I prefer her writing in an admittedly general sense. It's been a while since I read Bradbury, and I remember a few crackers, but Casil's people seem less at the mercy of the sort of borderline cloying sentiment to which Bradbury occasionally succumbed. That said, Casil's emphasis on evocative image rich detail seems very Bradbury, and she treads a fine line in supporting the narrative on a flow of sensations without formally spelling everything out. In a few cases, it doesn't quite work, and I found An Officer of the Faith a little too abstract for its own good, but mostly it's powerfully effective once you've cottoned on to what's happening.

Without Absolution is mostly science-fiction, or speculative, or whatever you want to call it - that ambiguous literary hinterland inhabited by the aforementioned Ray Bradbury, Ursula LeGuin and others - a non-genre of girth sufficient to encompass both the future of plastic surgery and a sequel to Beowulf - which must have taken some balls to write, never mind pull off, as us rootin' tootin' folk say. There's also some poetry, and I'm afraid I still don't really get poetry, although it's clear that it's very closely related to Casil's gorgeous, if occasionally slightly disturbing prose; and The Renascence of Memory is a masterpiece.

The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

Charles Bukowski The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way (2018)
At the risk of becoming repetitive, today's bewildering Goodreads dunce is an individual who regards this book as representing the point at which Bukowski turned himself into a stereotype - as he puts it - seemingly referring to Chuck's emphasis on drinking, shagging, and manual labour - although the latter is referred to only in passing in The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Naturally, I had to ask, because the review in question read a lot like Charles Bukowski keeps talking about women's tits and how he's definitely not gay because he was a bricklayer which is really, really boring actually. Thankfully this wasn't quite what the reviewer meant, so far as I could tell, but his suggestion of Bukowski playing up to a certain image seemed kind of redundant given that the author actually states this in several places; while Chuck's purportedly macho pose is, I would suggest, somewhat undermined by the fact of his spending most of the book writing poetry while listening to classical music, activities which do nothing to suggest we're dealing with a sort of Los Angeles Gary Bushell here.

Never mind. I'm sure the man himself often had to contend with much worse.

The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way collects a series of columns written for various magazines and newspapers, some fiction, prefaces to other people's books, and a couple of interviews. Bukowski is mostly on form.

Oh, by the way, if you want to get one angle on a minor writer, it is one who throws a party or gets one thrown for him when his book comes out.

Even Hell Yes, the Hydrogen Bomb - seemingly an experiment in non-linear pseudo Burroughsian narrative - yields the occasional gem.

Political fervour is the blight of the young. History is too long—the tail swings the dog.

Nevertheless, taken as a whole the collection is a bit of a slog. Much of the word count is taken up with musing upon the act of writing and the life of a writer, with unfortunate emphasis on poetry; which is interesting up to a point, or may have been when broken up into weekly or monthly instalments, but assembled between just two covers becomes a mammoth helping of what is essentially the same thing.

Excepting Bukowski, Billy Childish, Bill Lewis and no-one else I can think of off the top of my head right now - although I'm sure there must be someone I've overlooked - I really find it hard to care about poetry. Oddly, Bukowski feels the same way.

Probably the greatest thing here is the theme song, an essay amounting to writing advice for aspiring authors, and that advice is to go and spend an afternoon at the race track betting on the geegees. Almost all writing advice will be bullshit by definition, but this is pretty solid. To be fair, most of The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way is pretty solid, but possibly not all of it works served on the same plate.