An Empowered Post about Empowered

So it’s been a couple of weeks since the last post. I have a good excuse, though—kind of. I was sick for one week, and spent the next week getting back to normal. Now, finally, I get to get back to the work of dreaming up cool topics to talk about. I know the whole “book-of-the-month” spiel is kind of overdone right now, but it’s still a good excuse to bring up comics that I like or talk about a comic I really think could use some more publicity. Me talking about these sadly underpublicized titles admittedly has a yelling at the whirlwind type of futility, but so be it. Sometimes, you gotta yell.

This particular BOTM is kind of dangerous to talk about, because it has to do with sex. Lots of sex. Most of it has to do with bondage, but there’s definitely no shortage of people getting it on in the panel, as well as nubile bodies strutting across every page. Usually, when you say a comic is all about sex, it’s pretty much a given that it’s going to have women in cheesecake shots at least every other page, and that it’s going to have all the depth of, say, a pudding cup. Also a comic about sex can’t be about anything other than helping people to get off. Alan Moore writing Lost Girls? Trying to make a literary pornography title? Fuhgeddaboudit! Everyone knows that a comic about sex can’t have a good plot or good pencils! 

To the people who think that, I say you obviously haven’t read Adam Warren’s “Empowered.” I don’t know what inspired Adam to try his hand at this, but I’m glad he has, and while I’m not happy that his pitches to Marvel and DC have yet to be accepted, at least it means we get to see Adam Warren unleashed, working with his own creations and telling a story he’s obviously enjoying as much as his audience.

For those who have yet to pick up the books, “Empowered” features the adventure of a bondage-prone superheroine named Empowered, who is more or less gifted with a super-suit that allows her to go out and fight crime. The only problem is, when the suit gets torn, it becomes less powerful. Almost exponentially less powerful, actually, and the suit is so fragile that it gets torn with the slightest effort. Which means that Empowered gets defeated a lot, and since the “unwritten rules”  between the superheroes (colloquially known as “capes”) and supervillains (colloquially known as “bad guys”) rule out cape-killing, this means poor ol’ Emp is oftentimes trussed up while her outfit clings to her in tatters.

What separates this book from every other type of sexy superheroine book is that Adam Warren isn’t just telling stories about a bondage-prone superheroine. He’s deconstructing her world as he tells these stories, trying to figure out what sort of people the bad guys are, what sort of people Emp’s teammates are, and most importantly who Emp is. Already, Empowered has become a very Spider-Man like hero, one who is easily more heroic than most of the other “capes.”

This brings me to my next point—character depth. It’s kind of sad that in this half parody half sex comic the characters have more depth than a lot of mainstream characters produced by the Big Two, but there you go. Over the volumes, you learn a lot about Empowered and the other superheroes by what they do and, perhaps more importantly, what they don’t do. You can laugh at Captain Havoc’s fratboy mentality and raging egotism, whether he’s putting the smackdown on the bad guys or trying to bolster his reputation in slash fiction by writing stories about himself. As a side note, even the smallest gags are consistent with the characters. Jeph Loeb could learn a lot from Adam Warren. It’s clever, too—in Volume Six, the big bad is revealed to have a hobby that is almost guaranteed to make you laugh, but given the villain’s power set, it makes perfect sense. That the villain’s hobby is another brilliant bit of superhero deconstructionism is just the icing on the cake.

Finally, Empowered is one of the smartest comics out on the market. Yes, Grant Morrison is still the king of the “out-there” ideas, and yes, when Neil Gaiman deigns to write a comic it almost always has some big idea that resonates on a personal level, such as his two-part Batman story. Adam Warren, however, laces “Empowered” with several polysyllabic seldom-seen words that very rarely feel out of place, regularly brings up cutting-edge scientific ideas and blends them together in ways that just make a lot of sense. The best example of this is an old Gen-13 story Adam Warren wrote concerning the intersection of bubblegum pop songs and memes, but Empowered has its fair share of intelligentsia-only humor as well. Honestly, the only flaw of “Empowered” is that Emp and her friends are written as just a little too aware of their statuses, even when they’re not breaking the fourth wall.

Oh, and one more teensy fact. Almost insignificant, really—“Empowered” is fun. It’s easily one of the most fun comics I’ve ever read. Want an example? Here’s a three-page strip Adam Warren on Emp’s reaction to the pilot of the now-canceled “Wonder Woman” TV show. Here’s Page 1, http://adamwarren.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d3cjrmh , Page 2,  http://adamwarren.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d3cjreo   and Page 3, http://adamwarren.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d3cjqyc  Enjoy. If you don’t wind up laughing, there’s something wrong with you.

So get out there and start reading Empowered. It’s published by Dark Horse, a Deluxe volume is coming out, and it’s really good.

A Love Song to Continuity

So, the new 52 is coming from DC comics, now home to the DCnU. Pretty much everything has been wiped off the table, and DC fans old and new have the chance to see a bunch of heroes without the baggage of years of continuity, with the exception of whatever the writers think is worth preserving. In a lot of ways, it’s like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis—wipe out the outdated and camp, keep the cool and wondrous.

I can understand this. After all, when you’re dealing with characters like Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and Hawkman, you’re looking at about seventy years worth of continuity, based on characters that were essentially pulp heroes in a different medium. Longevity wasn’t exactly built into the character, and it’s a testament to many of the writers and artists who have worked on these properties that they’ve been in print for as long as they have. When a character has been around for a while, though, you do build up a lot of continuity and some of it is pretty cheesy. Try to imagine the 21^st Century Batman taking on a Joker who has his own gag utility belt, for example, or Superman spending an issue trying to make a blind girl believe he’s real.  That’s what the initial Crisis on Inifinite Earths was all about—trying to pare down the decades of continuity and “reset” DC comics for the next generation. Superman’s origin was thoroughly updated. So was Hawkman’s, Wonder Woman’s, the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America.

Personally, I loved the new Superman. Part of me was horrified that the godlike boy scout who could do no wrong was erased, but the new Superman was…well, more human. Lex Luthor was transformed from a criminal mastermind into something worse—a wealthy businessman who Superman could defeat, but never get rid of completely, since the new Luthor was smart enough to cover his tracks. Lois Lane was less of a damsel in distress, and even Clark Kent was a more developed character than the eternal wimp. It all made sense, and I loved it all.

The problem was, there were a lot of good Superman stories that got tossed by the wayside. The one I think of the most is the Alan Moore story, “For the Man Who Has Everything,” a great story that only works with the Silver Age Superman. You need the Fortress of Solitude for that, because the story can’t really take place anywhere else. You need a Superman who more or less is without flaw, because it makes his decisions that much more painful, and it also provides a great twist at the end of the story.

This is the risk of rewriting continuity. Companies that do so throw out years of stories, and you never really know which ones are the ones that defined a character. There are comics fans out there who grew up on the Scott Lobdell/Fabian Nicieza run of X-Men, and there are comics fans whose first exposure to Spider-Man was the Clone Saga. For that matter, the 1960s Batman TV show is how a lot of people still remember the character!

Also, with respect to noted comic book writers like Peter David, rewriting continuity may not mean the retconned stories were never written, but it does invalidate them. In the instance of Spider-Man’s never-happened marriage to Mary Jane, for instance, there were a lot of good stories, a number of them in the “Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” title that chronicled the fallout of Peter Parker unmasking himself. Those never happened. The stories where Clark Kent has those quiet moments with his family? Never happened. We as readers may like them and we might think they’re part of the character, but now with Superman’s foster parents both being dead, that’s a piece of his character that is gone, at least until the next continuity change.

It’s a lot like seeing a remake of a television show. It may be as good as the original, and it may even be better. But inevitably, some parts of the old will be left out, and the fans have to accept that loss or risk being left behind by the crowd and the characters themselves.

So fly on Superman, and prowl away Batman. I’ll be reading, and I’ll be interested in what happens next, but part of what made those characters special for me is gone. Again.

Stepping Out From The Gutters

Wow…a second blog. I’m thinking a lot about why I want to create a second blog, and the best answer I can give is that I must be crazy. Why subject yourself to a lot of extra work, just on the off chance someone might see it?

For me, the answer is simple—I love comic books. And manga. And RPGs. And almost everything else in the geek spectrum. I love talking about them, and I love talking with other people about them. Really, it’s that simple.

So what are you going to find here? That’s a good question, and honestly I’m not entirely sure yet. Comics will be the main thing, but I reserve the right to branch out and talk about anything else in geekdom that interests me.

That’s why this blog is called “Comics a go go,” by the way. It means “In abundance, galore,” There’s a lot going on right now in comics, movies, and it’s a great time to have a taste for sci-fi, fantasy, comics and pretty much everything in the spectrum. Also, I just like the phrase “A go-go.” I think it has that 1920s art-deco cool.

So, that’s it. Stay tuned, over the next few weeks, I’ll be talking about Unwritten, the new 52, and why Knights of the Old Republic was so cool. Enjoy!