In How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, its author Geoff Klock presents “a study of the Third Movement (the Golden and Silver ages being the first two movements) of superhero comic books. He avoids, at all costs, the temptation to refer to this movement as ‘Postmodern,’ ‘Deconstructionist,’ or something equally tedious. Analyzing the works of Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, and Grant Morrison among others, and taking his cue from Harold Bloom, Klock unearths the birth of self-consciousness in the superhero narrative and guides us through an intricate world of traditions, influences, nostalgia and innovations - a world where comic books do indeed become literature.” Klock received his Masters in English literature from New York University (where he also studied English literature and philosophy as an undergraduate). As it says on the back of his book, he now studies literature as a night watchman in downtown Manhattan.
Tim O’Shea: First off, any interest in writing comics yourself?
Geoff Klock: God, no. I would be responsible for some piece of crap like Matrix: Reloaded and make my audience sit though an undergraduate class on Kant and causality because, you know, I think school is fun. I mean how can you screw up a film with the two greatest action sequences EVER by making me listen to some kind of Dr. Freud/Colonel Sanders amalgam bullshit philosophy by overusing the words ergo and anomaly? I have that disease of academics where I think in ideas and concepts rather than in terms of human beings interacting, a perspective deadly to fiction, where the story and characters need to come first.
TO: What kind of reactions have you heard from the creators about the works that you analyzed? In particular, I was wondering if Busiek reacted to your assessment: "Astro City is a fantasy, crying to be free of influence, pretending and wishing The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen never happened." (page 94)
GK: People get so pissed that I said that (see chapter 2 for all the evidence). I think it’s because everybody thinks Alex Ross, the C.S. Lewis of comics, some kind of superhero god because it is easy to recognize that photo-realistic art is very advanced - you show Alex Ross to your mom who thinks comics are for kids and its easy to recognize he is extremely talented, whereas the charms of something like Hellboy, or even Batman Animated are subtler (and I think more rewarding). Also, Astro City was such a breath of fresh air, such a feel good charmer, after a long period of darkness and dismay everyone thinks of it as the light at the end of the tunnel. But just because something makes you feel good doesn't mean you turn your brain off. Otherwise you might miss Alan Moore's brilliant Starship Troopers style parody of the superhero-as-fascist that is Tom Strong (see my book, chapter 3).
As for Busiek, I never got a reaction, nor did I solicit one, nor did I expect one. English lit motto: "trust the tale, not the teller." This is another one of those, perhaps academic, things that pisses people off, because its anti-intuitive: when the guy that wrote the comic tells you what its about, isn't that what its about? Shouldn't I want confirmation of my opinion on the writer from the writer? No, is the short answer.
The writer is not necessarily the best judge of his own work, and in fact is often a very poor judge - that's the job of the reader, especially readers who go on to write comics or criticism or whatever. If this seems like a strange idea think of the love lives of your closest and oldest friends: are they really the best judges of their own lives, or do you in fact know them better than they know themselves - when they say they have met their One True Love, and are sure this time, doesn't your prediction turn out to be right when, for the fifteenth boyfriend in a row, they become jealous over nothing and drive the person away? Its not that I would be uninterested to hear what Busiek has to say, but it's what Astro City actually says, because or in spite of the author's intentions, is what that section of my book is about.
And this is why, for the record, Alan Moore never goes to comic cons and Warren Ellis always acts like such a fucking jackass on that website he had, and in interviews and other writings: they are trying to get you to think for yourselves. Comics fans need to stop treating writers (and comics for that matter) like gods to be worshiped. The best thing a comic can do for you is to get you off your ass to write something brilliant and new, something that will leave Watchmen or whatever in the dust. You're the reader, they're your comics, you figure out what's important about them, and for god's sake, be original about it.
TO: How frustrating/ironic is it to you that two works you single out, Planetary and The Authority, as the next step in the superhero genre have been plagued by world events (in the case of the latter book) and scheduling delays (with the former)?
GK: Fuck that. Kafka is one of the three indispensable writers of the twentieth century and all three of his novels are incomplete, abandoned. Spenser only half finished the Faerie Queen, and that's one of the founding poems of Romanticism, going on 400 years later. Do I even need to mention Miracleman? The point is: the thing doesn't have to be consistently published or even finished to be vital to the future of a genre. The nonsense surrounding these books has nothing to do with what I said about them.
On the subject of the Authority, the Ultimates is the Authority.
And on the subject of the delays on the Planetary: I know about Ellis's illness and scheduling, but I have a hunch about the delay's on that book: I think its got something to do with how HUGE that book became. The Planetary is a quite a few notches above his other work (for a while I jokingly wondered if he didn't break into Alan Moore's house and steal the script off his desk - I bet Cassaday's contribution is the real factor): I think he got terrified of his own very powerful skills as a writer: The Planetary is a major advance in superhero storytelling. But I bet for Ellis, at the start, it was just another story (when they made Casablanca they just thought they were making one more movie - no one thought it was a classic: superhero stuff can become a classic before you are halfway done, and that's a lot of pressure). I love issue 12 for example, but he didn't earn it, I don't buy that Ellis was thinking of that reveal when he wrote issue 1. If he was, it doesn't show, or at least I don't buy the evidence. By issue 6, he has something big however and the pressure from exacting and merciless fans, and eventually people like me calling this one of the first major innovations since Watchmen. I bet whatever direction, whatever ending he had planed for that series wasn't enough for what he discovered he was capable of doing, and what folks began to expect. So he fell back and regrouped: I look forward to his return.
TO: For folks who may be interested in where your perspective is on comics, how does Harold Bloom impact your view of the medium?
GK: Harold Bloom is a vastly unpopular poetry professor with a theory (that he dropped around 1990) that says the meaning of a poem is to be found in its relationship with an earlier "precursor" poem: if you want to know what Dark Knight Strikes Again is about you need to understand how Miller is fucking with Batman's earlier history, his own Dark Knight Returns, and the guys that came after his groundbreaking 1986 work (the last line of DKSA completely justifies what I said in my book). For understanding this relationship, Bloom has a wild freewheeling system - based on an idiosyncratic mix of Freud, Emerson, Kabbalah, and Gnosticism -- that would make Grant Morrison proud. Superhero comics are tightly tied up with the history of their genre and comics writers and artists and fans are hugely knowledgeable - something like Planetary can only exist in this kind of environment where you don't have to spell out every detail because you can count on your audience knowing, by even the slightest detail, or dropped name, what you are referencing (note how, when League of Extraordinary Gentlemen gets made into a movie, all of a sudden Mina has to be a bloodsucking beast, who narrates her history in a goofy exposition scene, because in film Harker isn't enough to invoke the whole Dracula mythos). In this environment Bloom's theory is very useful because it is the most advanced way of understanding dense literary history where one poet is dealing with others; poetry has the Milton-Wordsworth relationship; comics get the Fantastic Four murdering the golden age heroes from which they emerged in Planetary 10.
TO: Comic book scholarship is in its relative infancy, do you consider yourself a trailblazer in this new academic territory?
GK: As I said above, the author is not the best judge of his own work, that's for future writers to decide: lets have some more work done and we will see how I look in retrospect. Go write something. Now.
TO: Is it true what it says on the back of your book: that you are a night watchman in downtown Manhattan?
GK: Yes, I get nine bucks and hour and no health insurance to read 40 hours a week. I should note, to anyone interested, that this leaves me with a lot of spare time to blurb the backs of graphic novels, write intros to collections, do DVD commentary tracks and bonus interviews to pad 2-disk releases of superhero movies. I mean I am a shockingly well-educated media whore - some comics company should be getting me to do something fun, or someone should be paying me for freelance writing or something. I could use the money. nyuloki@aol.com.
You know what I think I would be really good at, though: advising comics writers and film people, being a sort of advice guy for hire, whose suggestions could be taken or ignored. I talk to my writer/director friend Brad, and when he gets a good idea I summarize stuff I've read that sounds related, useful and interesting, and then I send it to him, and we brainstorm (we even have a script in a drawer somewhere for a fun pulp novel kind of thing called The Astonishing Adventures of Young Sigmund Freud. We give him guns.) Anyway I think this consultant thing should be some kind of professional position, on movie sets or something.
TO: Where can people get your book?
GK: Anywhere books are sold: hell, go to Amazon right now.
