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Neil Gaiman and Sandman Season 2 was the most-read story on Bleeding Cool yesterday. Lying In The Gutters is the daily runaround.
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Mark Millar Critical Exposé To Debut Next Year
A few days ago Bleeding Cool featured a blog that dissected Mark Millar's characters through the influence of their parents. We rather liked it.
As did, it seems, the book publisher Seq Art, who came across Smith based on rcommendation from Gail Simone.
Colin Smith has written a chronology of how everything happened and a Facebook link for the new book, a series of essays on the work of Mark Millar entitled Shameless? The Superhero Fiction Of Mark Millar. Expect publication next year.
You can see more examples of what we may be about to expect with blog posts such as Mark Millar & Bryan Hitch's "Fantastic Four" # 554: The Quietest Child Of A Rowdy Bunch Fails To Make Friends With All Of The Neighbours
All of which leaves me wondering whether the script for that first chapter wasn't written untypically swiftly, and whether it might not have been drawn in a less-than-ideal time-span too. For it's not that either the words or the pictures lack detail or skill, but the business of planning, whether as regards a third draft or an extra day sketching out roughs, could explain a great deal. Whatever. The truth is that the first Millar and Hitch "Fantastic Four" tripped over some structural problems of both script and composition, and the result was a comic book so obviously the product of its creative team, and yet so strangely not as well.
And his take on Batman as an instrument of torture is worth checking out as well. Could we have the new Chris Sims on our hands?
But the problem here isn't that the torture has been presented in a humorous context, though it certainly complicates matters. No, the problem is that the torture has been presented in a humorous context while the torturer has been represented to us in an unambiguously heroic light. For as soon as a hero is identified as heroic by their very willingness to torture others, which the legitimate powers-that-be will not, then torture becomes more than just an acceptable method for the super-folk on the side of the angels. It actually becomes a signifier of heroism, of the burden accepted by the noble superhero to undertake those ugly tasks which the state and its servants don't have the backbone or initiative to undertake.
Yeah, I think we've got a keeper here.
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