Who Is Charles Webb?
A frequent contributor to Comics Bulletin, Twitchfilm, and his own blog, Monster In Your Veins, I do more than write about comics, movies, and games – I make my own. I was the lead writer on the horror-mystery mobile game “Exile,” and contributing writer to several other titles for both classic mobile and home platforms. Most recently I’ve taken on the Lead Game Designer position for the North American arm of Advanced Mobile Applications where I hope to have some interesting projects to tell you all about soon.
Greatest (Mundane) Hits
By Xavier Lopez
It is interesting that the first series I choose to spotlight was one that my predecessor didn't like all that much. To be fair, I haven't read his review, it was written after only the first issue, and sometimes it takes more than one outing for a title to find its wings. Also to be fair, David Tischman and Glen Fabry's Greatest Hits is an odd little affair that grows on you only slowly, ultimately building to a kind of anti-climax that might not be everyone's cup of Earl Grey.
We live in an era of really big, over-the-top, special-effects extravaganzas, full of, as Shakespeare would say, "sound and fury, signifying nothing." Take for instance the latest DC multi-versal, multi-crossover, mini-series Final Crisis, which is so full of explosions, deaths and bathetic pain that it ceases to have any meaning and so, in the end, no longer has any impact on the audience. Greatest Hits--also by DC--is exactly the opposite. 
Ostensibly the story of the fictional sixties superhero team the Mates, it is instead a kind of Velvet Goldmine documentary/mystery which recounts the journey of a young man attempting to come to grips with his hatred of the father who abandoned both him and his mother. Yes, there are men in tights, women in tights, wizards, lizards and space aliens, death and explosions galore; but here, they all amount to less. This is not your run-of-the-mill story of superheroes battling evil villains and saving the world—though they might end up doing that and all the earmarks of a normal super-hero extravaganza are in play, however, what we get looks like one thing but is, in fact, something quite different: a very small, personal story in the guise of a super-hero rock opera.
Greatest Hits introduces us to a superhero team (a rarity in the Vertigo world) that is, for all intents and purposes, the Beatles with superpowers. It is replete with variations on each member of the Fab Four; there is even a Pete Best figure, in the tragic form of the Golem, who is forced out of the band due to circumstances and a jealous wife just as they are about to come to America. In fact, every beat of the history of the Beatles has its corollary in this book. Luckily, here, though the Mate's Yoko is far more benign.
In some ways, this is the comic book equivalent of The Ruttles—a rock comedy that takes real history and twists it into something fun and new; but at its better moments, it is more serious and personal more akin to Norman Mailer or Truman Capote. Sure, there is comedy and self-effacing commentary, but it weighs more heavily on the more serious end of things. Reading like a documentary, Greatest Hits flashes backward and forward through the lives of the characters, which might be somewhat confusing to some readers (and some critics), but which tends to give the series a sense of gravitas that it might not otherwise have had.
However, that said, this title is not at all perfect, and that may actually be one of its charms. For example, most of the characters, and in fact all of the Mates, are mere chimeras; they exist only as references to other pre-existing celebrities and have little to add to the tale, with the exception of the son, (a struggling documentary filmmaker who is following in his father's footsteps despite himself) and hopefully, by the end of the mini-series, the father. Tischman forces us to follow these characters rather than the heroes, and the story is built up as a kind of mystery: as the son learns more and more about the father, both characters become more complex and engaging. In a kind of carnivalesque overturning, all the characters, who in any other story would have been central, instead become stereotypes with only brief moments of characterization. The Mates, who would have been the protagonists if this had been any other comic--or indeed most tales--are placed in the background, moving like pawns on a chessboard, while the focus is elsewhere. This story is not at all about the heroes, it is not about the sound and the fury—it is about the nothing.
No, not really, it is not about nothing, per se. This is not Seinfeld, but rather it is about the nothings that prop up a regular narrative's heroes, those characters that are always left behind when the main narrative is told. This is about those characters that I call "soft characters" or "soft heroes" because they are generally the ones whose only reason for being is to move the plot along. These types of characters generally appear in the background, in flashbacks, and crowd scenes; they are the watchers and have very low hit-points. However, as Tischman shows us, every character has his or her own story, no matter how small or pathetic, no matter whether the writer chooses to tell it or not.
And here, Tischman makes just such a decision. He brings these soft men and women to the fore, making them heroes in their own right. He very clearly chose to makes these two protagonists documentarians. That is, those who spend their days watching, recording, making notes; it is not their place to take part in the action. However, when they do, it is actually far more meaningful than Superman memorizing an omega-machine or containing the "bleed" within his glorious super-body as he does in Final Crisis. Ultimately, however, this story is not about normal beings becoming heroes, as one might expect but rather about the mundane in life becoming heroic.
At the same time Glen Fabry's interior and exterior artwork is perfect for this series. Fabry has been working on this saga for two years, and it shows. Each figure is given unique characteristics and personality that really make up for Tischman's lack of individuation.
In fact, if there is one way to describe Fabry's handling of this story, I'd have to say that he brings a very strong sense of the human to it—that and a really nice British sensibility. You really do get the feeling that you are reading about England or Newark or even California in the sixties, eighties and nineties. My only complaint is that I wish that Tanya and Richard Horie-—who did the coloring--had found better and more distinct ways of marking each period and place. The lighting in California is very different than it is in dear old Blighty or even Paris, and our internal memories of the past also look very different to us. I truly hope that these colorists and others actually read and take heed of this, because it is these subtle tricks of the light that can take a comic from just okay to something truly spectacular—from four colors to fine art.
I highly recommend this series, and there is still one issue left! If you are lucky, you might just be able to find the last five issues at normal cover prices. My local shop had just re-supplied itself with the first four, and I was very happy to gobble them up. So put on some mad mod gear, slip in the White Album and do some light reading—especially if you need something to counter the effects of the latest mega-threat to the multi-verse or whatever it is that's causing Superman grief this week.
Until next time, this is Xavier, signing off.
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