Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 9, 1993 TAG: 9305090243
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by R.H.W. DILLARD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
And among the items he mentions which will make him irresistible to his girlfriend are his DC comics, which are not, he implores us, just for kids any more. No more convincing than the average beer commercial, but, as it turns out, a great deal more accurate.
I don't mean that the young man's technological expenditures are going to make him any more appealing to women. But he is right about DC comics. They are different these days.
DC is, for the uninitiated or those who simply have forgotten, the comic book publisher who brought you Superman and Batman (to say nothing of the Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Aquaman and all their cohorts in purple and gold). Over the last decade they and their major rival, Marvel Comics, have been going through major revisions, creating, merging, destroying and transforming whole universes with an encyclopedist's mad rage for order. They also went through an 80s' rage for slaughter, killing off characters with the bloody delight of the Terminator.
What better way to seem adult than to murder Batman's sidekick Robin? Yeah, really.
But over the last few years something much better and more exciting has been happening.
In part because of the older demographics of comic readers and in part just as a cultural byproduct of the postmodernist dissolving of the distinctions between "high" and "low" art, DC has produced new comic books - both graphic novels and series - which are distinctly adult in content, in imaginative intensity, and in artistic and literary style. Oh, to be sure, they did just kill off Superman himself and now are in the process of resurrecting him, but they are also producing the books in their new Vertigo line.
Among these are several new books and six or so established titles (from $1.75 to $2.50 per issue) which have been marked for some time by their intelligence, their appropriation of major icons of modernist culture, their complex art, their breaking of monocultural taboos, and their imaginative verve.
Series like "Swamp Thing" (forget the dreadful movies), "Animal Man" and "Doom Patrol," once a standard adventure series, which now exists in a visual and literary realm somewhere between the metafictions of Jorge Luis Borges and the expressionist/dadaist/surrealist visions of Jean Arp.
Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" is a stunning account of the further adventures of Morpheus in our collective dreams. His new limited series, "Death: The High Cost of Living," tells the story of Dream's very hip and very attractive sister, Death. And just in case that title reminds you of the DC Death Trip in the superhero comics, let me assure you that the connection is tenuous; there may be a great deal of violence and death in Vertigo comics, but it is always the real thing, frightening, jarring, awesome, mysterious, upsetting in the fullest sense - and not a single POW or WHAM!
J.M. DeMatteis and Paul Johnson's "Mercy" ($5.95) is a graphic novel, also concerning death, based on the teachings of Meher Baba, a vividly written and drawn rendering of Sherwood Anderson's contention that "life not death is the great adventure."
At a time when so much of "serious" American fiction concerns nothing more imaginatively engaging than Billie Jo's wry and bitter musings (in her mobile home) on her betrayal by her husband, Billy Joe, or minimalist tales of the emptiness and pointlessness of American suburban life, it is certainly life-giving rather than -threatening to find fiction - even in a comic book - in which the larger issues of madness and violence and death, and, yes, compassion and love and life are addressed directly with imaginative and artistic conviction.
But don't take my word for it.
Go to your local comic book store (mine is B&D Comics in Roanoke), and ask them for a few copies of DC's Vertigo line. Or pick up "Vertigo Preview" for 75 cents.
Join the postmodernist revolution. Read some of the book-length collections of "Sandman" or buy some back issues of "Doom Patrol" and see why life on Danny the Street reveals more about your life than a year's subscription to the New Yorker.
Or maybe "Shade, the Changing Man," which will tell you more about American madness than a dozen chart-talks by Ross Perot. It might not make you more appealing to your girlfriend or boyfriend, but it might just save you from a slow death by aesthetic boredom.
R.H.W. Dillard's new collection of stories, "Omniphobia," and his new collection of poems, "Just Here, Just Now," will be published by the Louisiana State University Press.
by CNB