It's funny because it's sad.
Привет, ребятки разных полов и гендеров!
Ну да, конечно, вроде как мне надо делать очередной (снова опаздывающий!) линкспам. И ещё два запланированных узкотематических ссылкопоста. И дописать статью по Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, после которой фанаты Джонена Васкеза захотят моей крови. Что-то плохо она у меня идёт: уже почти тысяча слов, а к сути я пока так и не приступила.
Но!
Но я, читая один из самых лично мне интересных сайтов и-про-комиксы-тоже, наткнулась на разгромную статью, посвящённую "Зелёному Фонарю" Джеффа Джонса. В комментариях там завязалась дискуссия, появились ссылки на прочие мнения... и я подумала: эй, народу может быть интересно! И раз уж со своими словами у меня затык, поделюсь-ка я с вами чужими.
Ссылки, цитаты, слова и даже картинки. Картинок мало.Итак:
Speaking Power to Stupid: The Ever-Dumb Green Lantern Comics of Geoff Johns
Ну вперёд, угадайте, про что это! Правда, глядя на название, это сделать довольно сложно?
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This style has its proponents, even among people who should really know better, due to its constant hammering on nostalgia buttons, emphasis on “awesome” moments, and constantly-expanding stakes that reassure readers a long-term plan is in place, no matter how idiotic it is. What’s more, regular injections of gruesome violence and attempts at making everyone a badass make Johns’ comics perfect for those developmentally-stunted members of the audience who want to pretend that the kiddie entertainment of their childhood is all grown up now that it’s full of rape and dismemberment.
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Why Hal needs to fly planes to get his adrenaline kicks should be the main question here, since he has a ring that lets him create anything imaginable and zoom around the universe at presumably faster-than-light speeds (since he’s always traveling to other star systems) anyway, but it’s mostly the nostalgia factor at work; that’s what he did back in the 60s (when planes were futuristic and glamorous), so that’s what he does now, dammit.
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There’s also Hector Hammond, a gross, giant-headed scientist who Johns attempts to turn into a creepy, telepathic riff on Hannibal Lector, sitting in a prison cell and making cryptic comments to Hal, while commenting that Hal is so cool and he’s Hal’s biggest fan in an apparent attempt to replicate the creepiness of Frank Miller’s take on the Joker in The Dark Knight Returns, but without all that icky homoeroticism.
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That’s how most of these plots work themselves out, by taking leaps that really don’t make any sense. In a later story, Hal and a couple of his fellow pilots get shot down over Chechnya and spend a few months in a prison camp, all because he likes to court danger by not wearing his ring when he flies. That’s a dumb way to start a plot, even if it’s already been established that Hal is a thrill-seeker and a doofus, but there are a hell of a lot of super-people who should have rescued them at some point. The Justice League shows up and apologizes, saying that they thought he was off in space, but none of his fellow Green Lanterns (three of whom are also from Earth) thought to check up on him when he went missing? It’s all meant to give him something to angst about (since he could have saved them all in minutes if he was wearing his ring), and maybe to plug some real-world threats into the book, but it takes some serious mental contortions to even attempt to accept.
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The relatively straightforward nature of the story doesn’t stop it from including all sorts of idiocy and tastelessness though. For one, Sinestro manages to get Parallax to possess Kyle Rayner by revealing that his (Kyle’s) mother was killed by a member of the Sinestro Corps who is a sentient virus. Why that makes him scared rather than angry is unknown. Dumber still is a scene in which we learn Hal’s greatest fear, which is that he’ll never know what his father’s last words were. Does that even make sense? What a weird thing to be scared of. That’s pretty typical of Johns though; he tries to work in dramatic moments that fit the themes he tries to write about (in this case, “fear”), while constantly mashing on the buttons labeled “Hal is awesome and everyone loves him” and “Hal wanted to fly just like his father”.
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And so begins the simplification of all emotion down into a small number of possibilities (what about happiness, despair, betrayal, regret, or, I dunno, nostalgia?), creating fodder for innumerable stories in which different colors can fight each other with a “my hope shall overcome your rage!” simplicity to their actions. As dumb as this idea is, it’s a concept that could work well enough for kiddie entertainment, like something out of Care Bears or My Little Pony, but wedding it to regular maimings, the constant spilling of blood, ridiculously-proportioned women thrusting their secondary sexual characteristics at the reader, and teeth-gritted angsting about law and justice turns it all into a loud, garish mess.
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These guys power Hal’s ring up to 200% capacity and tag along with him to rescue Sinestro, but they get to demonstrate how great they are along the way by cooling down a star about to go supernova, saving all the inhabitants of the planet revolving around it. Interestingly, this is one of the only times in the entire series that any of the Lanterns perform their (or at least the Green shade of the spectrum’s) stated mission to patrol space, fight crime, and help people out. The rest of the series is all about people attacking Hal because they are obsessed with him, or engaging in power struggles between different colors. By including a simple moment like this, the entire premise and conflict of the series is thrown into relief, seeming like petty infighting between the powerful, who ignore the plights of those not worthy of their attention. This wouldn’t be a bad metaphor for modern society, if it was at all intended as such.
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As with most of Johns’ comics (and superhero comics in general, really), this is action figure storytelling, grown men playing with toys and trying to think of cool playsets to build and different childish conflicts for them to get into, but while that sort of thing can have its charms (most Hollywood action movies aren’t much different), Johns turns it into a distasteful exercise in arrested development, trying desperately to make it serious and dark and violent and “adult”. Hence the nasty stuff with the zombies, the constant sexualization of any female characters (even the weird alien ones), or the more ridiculous stuff he comes up with later, like a scene in which zombie Aquaman presents Mera with a reanimated version of their dead baby, and she vomits red blood-acid all over it.
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As much as Johns seems to want to use these emotion-colors to tell stories, he’s got nothing interesting to say about them, or any depth to any of his characters. The killer is unrepentant and evil, ready for death, but he still cracks and starts begging for his life when the various scary monster characters attack him. The father is sad and angry, and I guess we’re supposed to feel sorry for him as he cries and screams and turns into a killer himself. But there’s no attempt to address the morality of capital punishment or the effect that violent revenge might have on those who carry it out; it’s all just window dressing for aliens and costumed creatures to fight over who gets to wield power.
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That sort of massive-scale ambition is kind of commendable, and, sure, it could be a good basis for a kiddie cartoon of some sort, but Johns takes it all so damn seriously. He tries to retell the origin of life and address the nature of death and the afterlife. He has characters confront the horrors of genocide and debate the morality of capital punishment. He attempts to delve into the nature of “pure” emotions themselves and see how they can be manipulated, twisted, or channeled by people. This seems like it’s more than just a big spandex space opera to him; it’s a way of life.
That’s what ultimately sours me on the entire enterprise: the need to turn what could be dumb-but-enjoyable action-adventure stories into some sort of statement, even if that statement is just “look how mature and adult this is!” That’s the nature of superhero comics these days, adding sex (or hints in that direction, mostly consisting of skimpy costumes and cleavage/upskirt viewing angles for female characters) and violence (which is not nearly as coy, usually being front-and-center on the page and as gory as possible) to the children’s entertainment which the creators and the audience have such nostalgia for. Johns’ ambition in revamping and “maturing” the characters and milieus that he loved so much as a kid is obvious, but while he may have stumbled upon some halfway decent ideas and managed to put together some pretty good action sequences, the execution is so blunt and dumb, full of ridiculous nonsense and crammed with tawdry attempts to make the stories “dark”, that anyone in their right mind should just laugh, rather than celebrate him as some sort of master storyteller.
Окей. Океееей.
Тут вот какая штука: ну да, лично мне с супергероикой уже некоторое время как не по пути. Ну да, я не то чтобы хорошо отношусь к Джонсу и нет, всего этого я не читала.
Но с точки зрения чистого, если и предвзятого, то не в ту сторону: автор, ты не убедил меня.
И не то чтобы задача была совсем уж невыполнимой: владеющий словом (а лучше - ещё и обладающий комедийным талантом) человек может в принципе расчленить едва ли не что угодно. а тут с материалом и вправду есть проблемы. Но тут редкие внятные аргументы и хорошие оброты (почти все они - в цитатах выше) разбавляют собой слегка (но недостаточно!) злобный перессказ с постоянной подспудной отсылкой на "очевидность" тех или иных выносимых оценок. Но автору повезло с публикой: аудитория сайта к супергероике испытывает в лучшем случае сдержанную нелюбовь, а потому многие из понятных вопросов заданы не были. Впрочем, не уверена, что они в принципе могли бы быть заданы: увы, люди, люди, которые могут вести спор на определённом уровне, и люди, которым интересно заводить такой спор о Зелёном Фонаре - группы, пересекающиеся не так уж и часто.
Дискуссия, впрочем, в комментариях всё-таки развернулась, и там были сказаны вещи.сказаны вещи:
One of the problems with this writeup is that, in trying to paint this comic as the dumbest thing in existence, you’ve actually made it sound INCREDIBLY ENTERTAINING.
But the main issue is that it doesn’t seem to be intended primarily as a critique of the work itself so much as an attack on its readership. Per the article, the summary of all this is that the writing of Geoff Johns “begs to be ignored and forgotten by anyone with half a brain.” The audience for Johns’ work is described as “man-children like himself who can’t manage to expand the boundaries of their sphere of knowledge beyond stories of muscular behemoths in colorful, skin-tight costumes beating each other into oblivion.” That same audience is then implored to take the author’s advice by reading something better. But what is “better”?
At points in this critique, I was reminded of the question of why the Jedi would use light sabers rather than laser guns. Is ‘Sinestro’ a less silly name than ‘Atrocitus’?
I’d say there’s a difference between, say, the seriousness of Cooke’s New Frontier and that of Johns’ Green Lantern. The former really doesn’t recognize the inherent silliness of its means in attempting to say something significant about the American spirit through nostalgic superheroes, whereas the latter just sort of goes with the silliness, accepts that the story has few implications for our world and then amps the silliness up. I read the series up though the Blackest Night and found it thoroughly entertaining in the best lowbrow way (got bored with the revenants, though).
Johns isn’t a character writer but he goes after the high concepts and the splashy images without ever building the structure to support them. They’re cool because Johns thinks they’re cool without him having the skill to ever really convey that to the reader.
That Blackest Night prologue issue is one that I’ve seen cited here and there as good horror writing, but it’s just a guy obsessed with death who murders his family, kills himself, then gets resurrected when an evil Guardian shows up and vomits up a black ring. It also pauses to spend two double-page spreads recounting every death and resurrection in DC comics, to the point of numbness. Yawn.
And when it comes to “basic human emotional concerns”, I don’t see anything worth trumpeting either. His version of hope is a vaguely religious recitation of the phrase “all will be well”, which is nearly meaningless. His idea of love is all warped, seemingly informed by bitterness toward a controlling, overprotective partner, or a feeling of being grossed out by obsessive voyeurism. Compassion seems kind of threatening, a primitive, literally tribal impulse that mind-controls villains into doing heroic acts against their will. This isn’t really relatable stuff that everyone understands, but terms that everybody knows stamped onto space creatures shooting different colored beams at each other.
I would say that Johns’ comics are written by and for people who do not instinctively understand that “Sinestro” is a good character name and “Atrocitus” is a stupid one.
The “superhero comics fans are more than stunted man-boys” argument misses the point. Sure, you can be an unwashed social retard and eloquently speak of Handel.
But, the thing is, there is that part of themselves — their “inner (sometimes not so hidden) fanboy” — which goes nuts for grim n’ gritty violence posing as maturity, oversexualized fan service femme fantasy figures, adolescent power-tripping rendered in anally tight, gradient-packed art. They could rightly say, “Comic Book Guy, c’est moi!”
Заодно там поговорили про фанатов и поп-музыку, но мы тут не для этого.
Автор сослался на своё "вдохновление", вот это: The Geoff Johns Literalism Method: A Primer
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What is it that Geoff Johns does so well when it comes to revitalizing characters? It's very simple: reduce the character or team into a single core idea and rebuild every aspect of the mythology around that idea. I've termed this "Johnsian Literalism," and it's an approach that's becoming more widely used.
A character's location, family, friends and villains should all reflect or refract an aspect of that core idea -- a crystalline, fractal concept that extends itself into every narrative tendril of every story.
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Johns's run on Green Lantern centers around a single, overwhelming concept: manifestations of willpower. For years previous, the Green Lanterns had been known for not having fear, but Johns's run reframed the concept around very specific theme of overcoming fear.
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Johns mastered this approach and made it very popular in superhero comics. Variations from other writers include Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction's Immortal Iron Fist and Jason Aaron on Ghost Rider. They utilized aspects of the Johnsian approach to extend the legacies of their characters into millennia-spanning epics and create entire worlds around the main characters and their themes, like vengeance in the case of Ghost Rider or accepting responsibility in the case of Iron Fist.
Интересно, что это замечание о том, как именно Джонс представляет своих героев читателям, перекликается со статьёй Мэтта Сенеки, о которой мы поговорим сразу же после того, как я пролцитирую один из комментариев Мэтта в первоначальной дискуссии:
i think i have an even higher opinion of johns since then, mostly informed by chill seshes with andy khouri, who knows him on real life. none of the stuff about bravery and hope is contrived, those are real messages he is sincerely trying to impart. how many comics, super or not, want to inspire their readers to be better people? johns is speaking a language more people understand than what pretty much anyone else in comics is speaking, and he’s working out some heavy cosmological shit with it – creating a fictional universe with no relation to ours whatsoever but using it to address the most basic (or hell, base, i’ll say it, who cares) human emotional concerns. motherfucker is a g. also: doug mahnke consistently amazes me with the level of high focus horrorcore drafting he is able to produce on a monthly basis.
С Сенекой вот какая штука: хотя из процитированного этого и не видно, но, чёрт, этот парень умеет писать. С ним часто одновременно невозможно соглашаться (потому что юноша он странный), и невозможно не согласиться, потому что когда Мэтт удосуживается раскачаться, то, что он пишет, читается как песня, и нельзя не восторгаться чистому умению обращаться с языком. Для примера: раз и два. А ещё он очень похож на моего двоюродного брата. Брр.
Разуммется, на то, что он написал про "Зелёного Фонаря" Джонса посмотреть стоит. Раз: Geoff Johns: The Best On Offer (1)
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Like pretty much everything else about Johns’ work, this quality carries no inherent positive or negative value -- in fact, it’s quite tricky to even assign a value to. It simply is: if you buy a Johns comic, attention to continuity is one of the parameters the story will operate within.
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The second of Johns’ identifying mannerisms is his interest in the iconic. That’s a word that got bantered about a lot during the middle of last decade as the ideal mode for superhero comics (since this country’s economic collapse, it’s been replaced in that capacity by fresh). Iconic is basically an attempt at alchemy, the distillation of year upon year of backstory into compact form, characters presented as a kind of telegraphing symbol for their own long history. The easiest cross-medium comparison is to music: making a character iconic is a bit like making a dance remix of a song, pruning away the ornamental and the expositional and rendering a single, steady hook that retains the identity of the whole while ceasing to hint at the complexity it might have held in its original form.
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Every truly great writer of superhero comics does more than just exploit the “shared universe” concept: they put their own spin on it, creating stories that change the fabric of the story environment itself, forcing future writers to work within the parameters of their stories. There’s nothing wrong with this.
In Johns, however, that desire was mingled with an equally strong attachment to what he saw as the purest forms of the character concepts he was using, the iconic readings of them that first emerged in the continuity-heavy comics of the high Silver Age and were perpetuated by the on-model renderings of the Super Friends TV show in its various incarnations. Johns’ stock in trade became something between reversion to type and retooling for the future. The “Johns relaunch” was typically composed of a return to something approximating the original idea that birthed the character in the middle years of the 20th century, a dangerous and sexy face-lift for the villains that had played the biggest part in the hero’s early career, and the introduction of darker concepts to the range of story possibilities.
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There was a troubling aspect to some of these relaunches, which erased decades of conceptual growth and saddled versions of the characters that were fully and completely intended for children when they were created with uncomfortably adult story material (and occasionally carried an even more vexing hint of racial whitewashing). Though superhero comics have “not been for kids anymore” for a fair few decades at this point, Johns’ reinterpretations made a cottage industry out of ignoring the stories that had passed during those years, moving the characters back to the conceptual ground they operated on during the years when even a thrown punch was an uncommonly savage thing to see in a DC comic. What Johns seems to be doing is going back to the versions of these characters and worlds that were made for children, and seeing how they fare when they have spilled entrails and blown brain matter to contend with.
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To please an ever more passionately divided audience, Johns has made DC’s superhero universe into a venue for unprecedented exercises in exploitation storytelling and conceptual darkness. Under his guidance, the “DCU” has traveled far indeed from the whimsical, consequence-free place it was when the stories whose concepts and frameworks he so regularly borrows from were written. But then, the people who dip their imaginations into it with the greatest frequency and intensity have traveled far themselves. Johns’ writing is writing for children that grew up long ago, a gospel of violence and degradation pitched to an audience whose passion for the material would seem to testify to the deep level it speaks to them on.
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There’s an unanswered question raised by Johns’ resurrection of these works, one that won’t go away: why does he feel it’s necessary to add the violence in?
Хммм, "иконический по Джонсу" - в этом точно что-то есть. Ну да ладно, два: Geoff Johns: The Best On Offer (2)
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As far as Dargeresque superhero comics are concerned, it’s Johns and Johns alone. The overriding sense in both men’s work is one of complete dislocation from reality as we know it: human forms still converse and conflict and move through space, but that’s about it. The rules of the game, the governing principles of reality, are completely alien, the province of an entirely imagined logic. In Johns’ Green Lantern universe it often seems that nothing is random, that the laws of inertia and physics have been replaced by the ministrations of various cosmic deities representing the spectrum of human emotion. It’s a vastly compelling idea: though he has never been one to flinch away from showing the most degrading, disturbing things allowed in mainstream comics (and at times actively expanded the parameters of how far into the meat grinder things can go), in Johns the very presence of death and evil is firmly explicable, the fault of “bad” entities who merely require defeat at the hands of the “good” ones.
Johns’ cosmology occasionally approaches the grand terms morality play operates on, but there’s no actual morality involved in these stories. All the blood explosions and breaking skeletons and planed-open bodies and the forces that govern them are conceived as pure entertainment, with no greater message whatsoever to communicate. Though the presence of “good” and “evil” imply some higher relevance, there is no reflection on right and wrong action, no lessons to be learned or messages to take away. The actions that drive the plot of a Johns comic are literally impossible for humans to take in the real world, and all that is shown of their effects is the influence they have on other, similarly abstract entities. Good and evil cease to matter when it’s impossible to practice either one. For all their near-divine grandeur, these comics are literally meaningless when considered as anything but the actuality of what their panels depict.
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It’s also one of the most unremittingly bleak and violent issues of a superhero comic ever published without the caveat of a mature readers label or an out-of-continuity disclaimer. As far as the “DCU” is concerned, this is all real, and the lack of any excuses is one of the most striking things about it. This is nothing but a mainstream superhero comic, pitched to the most general of audiences the medium commands, and it is absolutely horrifying.
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There’s a linear story beneath the chilling string of imagery Green Lantern #43 presents, but it simply doesn’t feel as important as the sense of utter hopelessness that Johns and Mahnke create: if any Johns comic goes beyond its own complexity and into the realm of successful exploitation work, it’s this one. The point of the comic feels utterly abstract, the creation of something monstrous more urgent for a moment than the epic saga it’s supposed to be leading into.
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When superheroes win we see them as amplifications of the human spirit, elaborately drawn symbols for the idea that though the world may often seem an evil place and humanity all too assailable, day by day we remain alive, and sometimes that alone is a victory. When hero comics give way to this thick a darkness, though, the sense is one of total hopelessness. That downbeat sense doesn’t invalidate the art propelling it -- the list of great works ending on a note of defeat is vast and includes plenty of comics -- but it begs the question of why superheroes are a part of the story at all. They exist to triumph, and when they don’t the poignancy of hopelessness itself is lost, set adrift by a failure to highlight the fragility of the human condition. Johns’ darkness is real darkness, the dark of malice but also of vacancy: comics as pure, vapid spectacle, the aesthetic potential of the ideas being worked with left behind.
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What that says about the medium’s audience is open to interpretation, but I’m afraid I can’t see a way that it says anything good. And what it says about the superhero comics themselves, these stories of inhuman beings fighting for a simpler, lighter world, seems all too obvious. Though they win the battles like they always do, when it’s happening in Johns' comics they’ve already lost the war.
Хорошо, да? Да.
Об этом даже стоит подумать.
И ещё две ссылки всё из тех же комментариев:
Poodle: “I’ve seen superman having sex and it wasn’t very nice” - помните, что я выше говорила про автора с комедийным талантом? Вот вам отличная демонстрация. Разгромная рецензия как перформанс злословием - очень отдельный жанр, и это - прелестный его образчик.
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By resurrecting fucking EVERYONE in the DCU he gets to work all his favourite hangups into the equation: his overdeveloped reverence for DC history and continuity, erecting bloody statues, monuments and super-tombs on every other page, his desire to mine even the most inconsequential characters and cul-de-sacs of the universe for story potential, to enliven – what was it that other blogging bloke called it? – all of those ‘blobs of colour in the corner of the crowd scene’, and, most importantly, have everyone hang out with each other.
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Seriously, if you think Blackest NICE is about anything other than the continuity fucking itself then just read the comic again. Everything, all the ‘dramatic’ stuff, centres around some bullshit that happened in a comic (I hope) you didn’t read: Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s relationship, the return of Martian Manhunter, Ralph and Sue Dibny… It ends on bloody Ralph and Sue Dibny because that’s, you know, definitely the most dramatic thing ever. Only it’s not. Not unless you give a shit. And I don’t. The Flash cries about it or something, but I didn’t.
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Look, Geoff, if you care so much about the demise of these inconsequential characters, if the Flash cares enough to ‘sit down for the first time since he got back’, it has to be because of what Ralph and Sue represented – fun, silliness, childishness, goodness – everything that makes comics good for kids and puppies – so then why oh why do you not understand the irony of turning them into rotting zombie people who like nothing better than to impale their mates with big spears [Editor's note: ah, but that's the point, Poodle: it's about the tragedy of innocence lost!]?
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And another thing. I’ve noticed this trend for you to patronise scientists by having them waffle on about the really, real supernatural side of life and the transcendent power of emotions (which we have you on record as saying you believe are somehow super-physical, just like the lantern’s spectrum) and the ability of these things, and only these things, to invest life with meaning, and you know what: bollocks.
Late on Tues, it’s our reviews: Green Lantern #52 - про неясность видения Джонса.
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Fair enough Final Crisis had the Earth as the gods’ battleground, as a kind of notional universal center, but Morrison had so much other stuff going on that it would be silly to accuse him of geocentrism. His Earth was the center of the universe because it’s the center of the fictional construct (the DCU) that was the meta-textual concern of his very meta-textual story, and he went to great pains to get us to understand that that was where he was coming from. If Final Crisis is a story about DCU stories, which it undeniably is, then of course Earth is the most important place in the universe.
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Johns on the other hand, he’s not saying anything that isn’t written on the tin and what’s written on the tin is genuinely weird*. The Green Lantern concept allows Johns to quite literally reify just about anything he likes and so he has: Life? Check. Death? Check. Avarice? Check. Rage? Yup. Everything is reduced to spandex and glowing energy. In that way he’s not entirely unlike Kirby or indeed any number of other writers, but unlike some of those writers Johns has none of Kirby’s wild creative energy, add that to the very particular world view that comes through in his comics (love=the Predator remember) and the overall deficit of broader, non-DCU, non Green Lantern orientated concerns gives Johns’ mythology a parochial and bizarrely concrete feel.
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hns is an original: there’s no-one out there doing what he does, no-one else who would feel it important to explain the historical significance of Ion, and that’s probably a big part of why he’s so successful. But where others see awesomeness, I see comics that are fixated on comics and nothing but comics – Green Lantern comics in particular.
Вот как-то так.
Ну да, конечно, вроде как мне надо делать очередной (снова опаздывающий!) линкспам. И ещё два запланированных узкотематических ссылкопоста. И дописать статью по Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, после которой фанаты Джонена Васкеза захотят моей крови. Что-то плохо она у меня идёт: уже почти тысяча слов, а к сути я пока так и не приступила.
Но!
Но я, читая один из самых лично мне интересных сайтов и-про-комиксы-тоже, наткнулась на разгромную статью, посвящённую "Зелёному Фонарю" Джеффа Джонса. В комментариях там завязалась дискуссия, появились ссылки на прочие мнения... и я подумала: эй, народу может быть интересно! И раз уж со своими словами у меня затык, поделюсь-ка я с вами чужими.
Ссылки, цитаты, слова и даже картинки. Картинок мало.Итак:
Speaking Power to Stupid: The Ever-Dumb Green Lantern Comics of Geoff Johns
Ну вперёд, угадайте, про что это! Правда, глядя на название, это сделать довольно сложно?
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This style has its proponents, even among people who should really know better, due to its constant hammering on nostalgia buttons, emphasis on “awesome” moments, and constantly-expanding stakes that reassure readers a long-term plan is in place, no matter how idiotic it is. What’s more, regular injections of gruesome violence and attempts at making everyone a badass make Johns’ comics perfect for those developmentally-stunted members of the audience who want to pretend that the kiddie entertainment of their childhood is all grown up now that it’s full of rape and dismemberment.
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Why Hal needs to fly planes to get his adrenaline kicks should be the main question here, since he has a ring that lets him create anything imaginable and zoom around the universe at presumably faster-than-light speeds (since he’s always traveling to other star systems) anyway, but it’s mostly the nostalgia factor at work; that’s what he did back in the 60s (when planes were futuristic and glamorous), so that’s what he does now, dammit.
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There’s also Hector Hammond, a gross, giant-headed scientist who Johns attempts to turn into a creepy, telepathic riff on Hannibal Lector, sitting in a prison cell and making cryptic comments to Hal, while commenting that Hal is so cool and he’s Hal’s biggest fan in an apparent attempt to replicate the creepiness of Frank Miller’s take on the Joker in The Dark Knight Returns, but without all that icky homoeroticism.
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That’s how most of these plots work themselves out, by taking leaps that really don’t make any sense. In a later story, Hal and a couple of his fellow pilots get shot down over Chechnya and spend a few months in a prison camp, all because he likes to court danger by not wearing his ring when he flies. That’s a dumb way to start a plot, even if it’s already been established that Hal is a thrill-seeker and a doofus, but there are a hell of a lot of super-people who should have rescued them at some point. The Justice League shows up and apologizes, saying that they thought he was off in space, but none of his fellow Green Lanterns (three of whom are also from Earth) thought to check up on him when he went missing? It’s all meant to give him something to angst about (since he could have saved them all in minutes if he was wearing his ring), and maybe to plug some real-world threats into the book, but it takes some serious mental contortions to even attempt to accept.
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The relatively straightforward nature of the story doesn’t stop it from including all sorts of idiocy and tastelessness though. For one, Sinestro manages to get Parallax to possess Kyle Rayner by revealing that his (Kyle’s) mother was killed by a member of the Sinestro Corps who is a sentient virus. Why that makes him scared rather than angry is unknown. Dumber still is a scene in which we learn Hal’s greatest fear, which is that he’ll never know what his father’s last words were. Does that even make sense? What a weird thing to be scared of. That’s pretty typical of Johns though; he tries to work in dramatic moments that fit the themes he tries to write about (in this case, “fear”), while constantly mashing on the buttons labeled “Hal is awesome and everyone loves him” and “Hal wanted to fly just like his father”.
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And so begins the simplification of all emotion down into a small number of possibilities (what about happiness, despair, betrayal, regret, or, I dunno, nostalgia?), creating fodder for innumerable stories in which different colors can fight each other with a “my hope shall overcome your rage!” simplicity to their actions. As dumb as this idea is, it’s a concept that could work well enough for kiddie entertainment, like something out of Care Bears or My Little Pony, but wedding it to regular maimings, the constant spilling of blood, ridiculously-proportioned women thrusting their secondary sexual characteristics at the reader, and teeth-gritted angsting about law and justice turns it all into a loud, garish mess.
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These guys power Hal’s ring up to 200% capacity and tag along with him to rescue Sinestro, but they get to demonstrate how great they are along the way by cooling down a star about to go supernova, saving all the inhabitants of the planet revolving around it. Interestingly, this is one of the only times in the entire series that any of the Lanterns perform their (or at least the Green shade of the spectrum’s) stated mission to patrol space, fight crime, and help people out. The rest of the series is all about people attacking Hal because they are obsessed with him, or engaging in power struggles between different colors. By including a simple moment like this, the entire premise and conflict of the series is thrown into relief, seeming like petty infighting between the powerful, who ignore the plights of those not worthy of their attention. This wouldn’t be a bad metaphor for modern society, if it was at all intended as such.
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As with most of Johns’ comics (and superhero comics in general, really), this is action figure storytelling, grown men playing with toys and trying to think of cool playsets to build and different childish conflicts for them to get into, but while that sort of thing can have its charms (most Hollywood action movies aren’t much different), Johns turns it into a distasteful exercise in arrested development, trying desperately to make it serious and dark and violent and “adult”. Hence the nasty stuff with the zombies, the constant sexualization of any female characters (even the weird alien ones), or the more ridiculous stuff he comes up with later, like a scene in which zombie Aquaman presents Mera with a reanimated version of their dead baby, and she vomits red blood-acid all over it.
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As much as Johns seems to want to use these emotion-colors to tell stories, he’s got nothing interesting to say about them, or any depth to any of his characters. The killer is unrepentant and evil, ready for death, but he still cracks and starts begging for his life when the various scary monster characters attack him. The father is sad and angry, and I guess we’re supposed to feel sorry for him as he cries and screams and turns into a killer himself. But there’s no attempt to address the morality of capital punishment or the effect that violent revenge might have on those who carry it out; it’s all just window dressing for aliens and costumed creatures to fight over who gets to wield power.
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That sort of massive-scale ambition is kind of commendable, and, sure, it could be a good basis for a kiddie cartoon of some sort, but Johns takes it all so damn seriously. He tries to retell the origin of life and address the nature of death and the afterlife. He has characters confront the horrors of genocide and debate the morality of capital punishment. He attempts to delve into the nature of “pure” emotions themselves and see how they can be manipulated, twisted, or channeled by people. This seems like it’s more than just a big spandex space opera to him; it’s a way of life.
That’s what ultimately sours me on the entire enterprise: the need to turn what could be dumb-but-enjoyable action-adventure stories into some sort of statement, even if that statement is just “look how mature and adult this is!” That’s the nature of superhero comics these days, adding sex (or hints in that direction, mostly consisting of skimpy costumes and cleavage/upskirt viewing angles for female characters) and violence (which is not nearly as coy, usually being front-and-center on the page and as gory as possible) to the children’s entertainment which the creators and the audience have such nostalgia for. Johns’ ambition in revamping and “maturing” the characters and milieus that he loved so much as a kid is obvious, but while he may have stumbled upon some halfway decent ideas and managed to put together some pretty good action sequences, the execution is so blunt and dumb, full of ridiculous nonsense and crammed with tawdry attempts to make the stories “dark”, that anyone in their right mind should just laugh, rather than celebrate him as some sort of master storyteller.
Окей. Океееей.
Тут вот какая штука: ну да, лично мне с супергероикой уже некоторое время как не по пути. Ну да, я не то чтобы хорошо отношусь к Джонсу и нет, всего этого я не читала.
Но с точки зрения чистого, если и предвзятого, то не в ту сторону: автор, ты не убедил меня.
И не то чтобы задача была совсем уж невыполнимой: владеющий словом (а лучше - ещё и обладающий комедийным талантом) человек может в принципе расчленить едва ли не что угодно. а тут с материалом и вправду есть проблемы. Но тут редкие внятные аргументы и хорошие оброты (почти все они - в цитатах выше) разбавляют собой слегка (но недостаточно!) злобный перессказ с постоянной подспудной отсылкой на "очевидность" тех или иных выносимых оценок. Но автору повезло с публикой: аудитория сайта к супергероике испытывает в лучшем случае сдержанную нелюбовь, а потому многие из понятных вопросов заданы не были. Впрочем, не уверена, что они в принципе могли бы быть заданы: увы, люди, люди, которые могут вести спор на определённом уровне, и люди, которым интересно заводить такой спор о Зелёном Фонаре - группы, пересекающиеся не так уж и часто.
Дискуссия, впрочем, в комментариях всё-таки развернулась, и там были сказаны вещи.сказаны вещи:
One of the problems with this writeup is that, in trying to paint this comic as the dumbest thing in existence, you’ve actually made it sound INCREDIBLY ENTERTAINING.
But the main issue is that it doesn’t seem to be intended primarily as a critique of the work itself so much as an attack on its readership. Per the article, the summary of all this is that the writing of Geoff Johns “begs to be ignored and forgotten by anyone with half a brain.” The audience for Johns’ work is described as “man-children like himself who can’t manage to expand the boundaries of their sphere of knowledge beyond stories of muscular behemoths in colorful, skin-tight costumes beating each other into oblivion.” That same audience is then implored to take the author’s advice by reading something better. But what is “better”?
At points in this critique, I was reminded of the question of why the Jedi would use light sabers rather than laser guns. Is ‘Sinestro’ a less silly name than ‘Atrocitus’?
I’d say there’s a difference between, say, the seriousness of Cooke’s New Frontier and that of Johns’ Green Lantern. The former really doesn’t recognize the inherent silliness of its means in attempting to say something significant about the American spirit through nostalgic superheroes, whereas the latter just sort of goes with the silliness, accepts that the story has few implications for our world and then amps the silliness up. I read the series up though the Blackest Night and found it thoroughly entertaining in the best lowbrow way (got bored with the revenants, though).
Johns isn’t a character writer but he goes after the high concepts and the splashy images without ever building the structure to support them. They’re cool because Johns thinks they’re cool without him having the skill to ever really convey that to the reader.
That Blackest Night prologue issue is one that I’ve seen cited here and there as good horror writing, but it’s just a guy obsessed with death who murders his family, kills himself, then gets resurrected when an evil Guardian shows up and vomits up a black ring. It also pauses to spend two double-page spreads recounting every death and resurrection in DC comics, to the point of numbness. Yawn.
And when it comes to “basic human emotional concerns”, I don’t see anything worth trumpeting either. His version of hope is a vaguely religious recitation of the phrase “all will be well”, which is nearly meaningless. His idea of love is all warped, seemingly informed by bitterness toward a controlling, overprotective partner, or a feeling of being grossed out by obsessive voyeurism. Compassion seems kind of threatening, a primitive, literally tribal impulse that mind-controls villains into doing heroic acts against their will. This isn’t really relatable stuff that everyone understands, but terms that everybody knows stamped onto space creatures shooting different colored beams at each other.
I would say that Johns’ comics are written by and for people who do not instinctively understand that “Sinestro” is a good character name and “Atrocitus” is a stupid one.
The “superhero comics fans are more than stunted man-boys” argument misses the point. Sure, you can be an unwashed social retard and eloquently speak of Handel.
But, the thing is, there is that part of themselves — their “inner (sometimes not so hidden) fanboy” — which goes nuts for grim n’ gritty violence posing as maturity, oversexualized fan service femme fantasy figures, adolescent power-tripping rendered in anally tight, gradient-packed art. They could rightly say, “Comic Book Guy, c’est moi!”
Заодно там поговорили про фанатов и поп-музыку, но мы тут не для этого.
Автор сослался на своё "вдохновление", вот это: The Geoff Johns Literalism Method: A Primer
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What is it that Geoff Johns does so well when it comes to revitalizing characters? It's very simple: reduce the character or team into a single core idea and rebuild every aspect of the mythology around that idea. I've termed this "Johnsian Literalism," and it's an approach that's becoming more widely used.
A character's location, family, friends and villains should all reflect or refract an aspect of that core idea -- a crystalline, fractal concept that extends itself into every narrative tendril of every story.
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Johns's run on Green Lantern centers around a single, overwhelming concept: manifestations of willpower. For years previous, the Green Lanterns had been known for not having fear, but Johns's run reframed the concept around very specific theme of overcoming fear.
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Johns mastered this approach and made it very popular in superhero comics. Variations from other writers include Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction's Immortal Iron Fist and Jason Aaron on Ghost Rider. They utilized aspects of the Johnsian approach to extend the legacies of their characters into millennia-spanning epics and create entire worlds around the main characters and their themes, like vengeance in the case of Ghost Rider or accepting responsibility in the case of Iron Fist.
Интересно, что это замечание о том, как именно Джонс представляет своих героев читателям, перекликается со статьёй Мэтта Сенеки, о которой мы поговорим сразу же после того, как я пролцитирую один из комментариев Мэтта в первоначальной дискуссии:
i think i have an even higher opinion of johns since then, mostly informed by chill seshes with andy khouri, who knows him on real life. none of the stuff about bravery and hope is contrived, those are real messages he is sincerely trying to impart. how many comics, super or not, want to inspire their readers to be better people? johns is speaking a language more people understand than what pretty much anyone else in comics is speaking, and he’s working out some heavy cosmological shit with it – creating a fictional universe with no relation to ours whatsoever but using it to address the most basic (or hell, base, i’ll say it, who cares) human emotional concerns. motherfucker is a g. also: doug mahnke consistently amazes me with the level of high focus horrorcore drafting he is able to produce on a monthly basis.
С Сенекой вот какая штука: хотя из процитированного этого и не видно, но, чёрт, этот парень умеет писать. С ним часто одновременно невозможно соглашаться (потому что юноша он странный), и невозможно не согласиться, потому что когда Мэтт удосуживается раскачаться, то, что он пишет, читается как песня, и нельзя не восторгаться чистому умению обращаться с языком. Для примера: раз и два. А ещё он очень похож на моего двоюродного брата. Брр.
Разуммется, на то, что он написал про "Зелёного Фонаря" Джонса посмотреть стоит. Раз: Geoff Johns: The Best On Offer (1)
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Like pretty much everything else about Johns’ work, this quality carries no inherent positive or negative value -- in fact, it’s quite tricky to even assign a value to. It simply is: if you buy a Johns comic, attention to continuity is one of the parameters the story will operate within.
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The second of Johns’ identifying mannerisms is his interest in the iconic. That’s a word that got bantered about a lot during the middle of last decade as the ideal mode for superhero comics (since this country’s economic collapse, it’s been replaced in that capacity by fresh). Iconic is basically an attempt at alchemy, the distillation of year upon year of backstory into compact form, characters presented as a kind of telegraphing symbol for their own long history. The easiest cross-medium comparison is to music: making a character iconic is a bit like making a dance remix of a song, pruning away the ornamental and the expositional and rendering a single, steady hook that retains the identity of the whole while ceasing to hint at the complexity it might have held in its original form.
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Every truly great writer of superhero comics does more than just exploit the “shared universe” concept: they put their own spin on it, creating stories that change the fabric of the story environment itself, forcing future writers to work within the parameters of their stories. There’s nothing wrong with this.
In Johns, however, that desire was mingled with an equally strong attachment to what he saw as the purest forms of the character concepts he was using, the iconic readings of them that first emerged in the continuity-heavy comics of the high Silver Age and were perpetuated by the on-model renderings of the Super Friends TV show in its various incarnations. Johns’ stock in trade became something between reversion to type and retooling for the future. The “Johns relaunch” was typically composed of a return to something approximating the original idea that birthed the character in the middle years of the 20th century, a dangerous and sexy face-lift for the villains that had played the biggest part in the hero’s early career, and the introduction of darker concepts to the range of story possibilities.
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There was a troubling aspect to some of these relaunches, which erased decades of conceptual growth and saddled versions of the characters that were fully and completely intended for children when they were created with uncomfortably adult story material (and occasionally carried an even more vexing hint of racial whitewashing). Though superhero comics have “not been for kids anymore” for a fair few decades at this point, Johns’ reinterpretations made a cottage industry out of ignoring the stories that had passed during those years, moving the characters back to the conceptual ground they operated on during the years when even a thrown punch was an uncommonly savage thing to see in a DC comic. What Johns seems to be doing is going back to the versions of these characters and worlds that were made for children, and seeing how they fare when they have spilled entrails and blown brain matter to contend with.
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To please an ever more passionately divided audience, Johns has made DC’s superhero universe into a venue for unprecedented exercises in exploitation storytelling and conceptual darkness. Under his guidance, the “DCU” has traveled far indeed from the whimsical, consequence-free place it was when the stories whose concepts and frameworks he so regularly borrows from were written. But then, the people who dip their imaginations into it with the greatest frequency and intensity have traveled far themselves. Johns’ writing is writing for children that grew up long ago, a gospel of violence and degradation pitched to an audience whose passion for the material would seem to testify to the deep level it speaks to them on.
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There’s an unanswered question raised by Johns’ resurrection of these works, one that won’t go away: why does he feel it’s necessary to add the violence in?
Хммм, "иконический по Джонсу" - в этом точно что-то есть. Ну да ладно, два: Geoff Johns: The Best On Offer (2)
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As far as Dargeresque superhero comics are concerned, it’s Johns and Johns alone. The overriding sense in both men’s work is one of complete dislocation from reality as we know it: human forms still converse and conflict and move through space, but that’s about it. The rules of the game, the governing principles of reality, are completely alien, the province of an entirely imagined logic. In Johns’ Green Lantern universe it often seems that nothing is random, that the laws of inertia and physics have been replaced by the ministrations of various cosmic deities representing the spectrum of human emotion. It’s a vastly compelling idea: though he has never been one to flinch away from showing the most degrading, disturbing things allowed in mainstream comics (and at times actively expanded the parameters of how far into the meat grinder things can go), in Johns the very presence of death and evil is firmly explicable, the fault of “bad” entities who merely require defeat at the hands of the “good” ones.
Johns’ cosmology occasionally approaches the grand terms morality play operates on, but there’s no actual morality involved in these stories. All the blood explosions and breaking skeletons and planed-open bodies and the forces that govern them are conceived as pure entertainment, with no greater message whatsoever to communicate. Though the presence of “good” and “evil” imply some higher relevance, there is no reflection on right and wrong action, no lessons to be learned or messages to take away. The actions that drive the plot of a Johns comic are literally impossible for humans to take in the real world, and all that is shown of their effects is the influence they have on other, similarly abstract entities. Good and evil cease to matter when it’s impossible to practice either one. For all their near-divine grandeur, these comics are literally meaningless when considered as anything but the actuality of what their panels depict.
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It’s also one of the most unremittingly bleak and violent issues of a superhero comic ever published without the caveat of a mature readers label or an out-of-continuity disclaimer. As far as the “DCU” is concerned, this is all real, and the lack of any excuses is one of the most striking things about it. This is nothing but a mainstream superhero comic, pitched to the most general of audiences the medium commands, and it is absolutely horrifying.
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There’s a linear story beneath the chilling string of imagery Green Lantern #43 presents, but it simply doesn’t feel as important as the sense of utter hopelessness that Johns and Mahnke create: if any Johns comic goes beyond its own complexity and into the realm of successful exploitation work, it’s this one. The point of the comic feels utterly abstract, the creation of something monstrous more urgent for a moment than the epic saga it’s supposed to be leading into.
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When superheroes win we see them as amplifications of the human spirit, elaborately drawn symbols for the idea that though the world may often seem an evil place and humanity all too assailable, day by day we remain alive, and sometimes that alone is a victory. When hero comics give way to this thick a darkness, though, the sense is one of total hopelessness. That downbeat sense doesn’t invalidate the art propelling it -- the list of great works ending on a note of defeat is vast and includes plenty of comics -- but it begs the question of why superheroes are a part of the story at all. They exist to triumph, and when they don’t the poignancy of hopelessness itself is lost, set adrift by a failure to highlight the fragility of the human condition. Johns’ darkness is real darkness, the dark of malice but also of vacancy: comics as pure, vapid spectacle, the aesthetic potential of the ideas being worked with left behind.
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What that says about the medium’s audience is open to interpretation, but I’m afraid I can’t see a way that it says anything good. And what it says about the superhero comics themselves, these stories of inhuman beings fighting for a simpler, lighter world, seems all too obvious. Though they win the battles like they always do, when it’s happening in Johns' comics they’ve already lost the war.
Хорошо, да? Да.
Об этом даже стоит подумать.
И ещё две ссылки всё из тех же комментариев:
Poodle: “I’ve seen superman having sex and it wasn’t very nice” - помните, что я выше говорила про автора с комедийным талантом? Вот вам отличная демонстрация. Разгромная рецензия как перформанс злословием - очень отдельный жанр, и это - прелестный его образчик.
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By resurrecting fucking EVERYONE in the DCU he gets to work all his favourite hangups into the equation: his overdeveloped reverence for DC history and continuity, erecting bloody statues, monuments and super-tombs on every other page, his desire to mine even the most inconsequential characters and cul-de-sacs of the universe for story potential, to enliven – what was it that other blogging bloke called it? – all of those ‘blobs of colour in the corner of the crowd scene’, and, most importantly, have everyone hang out with each other.
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Seriously, if you think Blackest NICE is about anything other than the continuity fucking itself then just read the comic again. Everything, all the ‘dramatic’ stuff, centres around some bullshit that happened in a comic (I hope) you didn’t read: Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s relationship, the return of Martian Manhunter, Ralph and Sue Dibny… It ends on bloody Ralph and Sue Dibny because that’s, you know, definitely the most dramatic thing ever. Only it’s not. Not unless you give a shit. And I don’t. The Flash cries about it or something, but I didn’t.
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Look, Geoff, if you care so much about the demise of these inconsequential characters, if the Flash cares enough to ‘sit down for the first time since he got back’, it has to be because of what Ralph and Sue represented – fun, silliness, childishness, goodness – everything that makes comics good for kids and puppies – so then why oh why do you not understand the irony of turning them into rotting zombie people who like nothing better than to impale their mates with big spears [Editor's note: ah, but that's the point, Poodle: it's about the tragedy of innocence lost!]?
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And another thing. I’ve noticed this trend for you to patronise scientists by having them waffle on about the really, real supernatural side of life and the transcendent power of emotions (which we have you on record as saying you believe are somehow super-physical, just like the lantern’s spectrum) and the ability of these things, and only these things, to invest life with meaning, and you know what: bollocks.
Late on Tues, it’s our reviews: Green Lantern #52 - про неясность видения Джонса.
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Fair enough Final Crisis had the Earth as the gods’ battleground, as a kind of notional universal center, but Morrison had so much other stuff going on that it would be silly to accuse him of geocentrism. His Earth was the center of the universe because it’s the center of the fictional construct (the DCU) that was the meta-textual concern of his very meta-textual story, and he went to great pains to get us to understand that that was where he was coming from. If Final Crisis is a story about DCU stories, which it undeniably is, then of course Earth is the most important place in the universe.
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Johns on the other hand, he’s not saying anything that isn’t written on the tin and what’s written on the tin is genuinely weird*. The Green Lantern concept allows Johns to quite literally reify just about anything he likes and so he has: Life? Check. Death? Check. Avarice? Check. Rage? Yup. Everything is reduced to spandex and glowing energy. In that way he’s not entirely unlike Kirby or indeed any number of other writers, but unlike some of those writers Johns has none of Kirby’s wild creative energy, add that to the very particular world view that comes through in his comics (love=the Predator remember) and the overall deficit of broader, non-DCU, non Green Lantern orientated concerns gives Johns’ mythology a parochial and bizarrely concrete feel.
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hns is an original: there’s no-one out there doing what he does, no-one else who would feel it important to explain the historical significance of Ion, and that’s probably a big part of why he’s so successful. But where others see awesomeness, I see comics that are fixated on comics and nothing but comics – Green Lantern comics in particular.
Вот как-то так.
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09.09.2012 в 00:06Впрочем, возможно, для автора разбора это было бы слишком ики-гомоэротично.
P.S. А арка про плен в Чечне действительно нереально мутная. Я два раза читала и так и не осознала, что это было.
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09.09.2012 в 00:10Я не то что бы согласна с этим подходом, но я его местами понимаю, по крайней мере на эмоциональном уровне.
Насчёт автора не скажу, но сайт квир-позитиен, думаю, если бы тот же Берлатски (владелец сайта) читал сабж, он бы высказался по вопросу.