THOUGHTS ON PETER DAVID

 I wasn't sure I'd write anything about Peter David following his passing on May 25 of this year. Though I once saw a fan fulsomely compare David's comics work to that of Steve Gerber, I'd probably see more comparison to Len Wein. With both writers, I read a fair amount of work that I liked, but probably more than I wasn't crazy about. But then, Steve Gerber himself said (and I paraphrase from his JOURNAL interview) that everyone who makes writing his career inevitably turns out some dreck in addition to some good stuff. Every invested reader makes his own estimation as to whether the good stuff outweighs the dreck or vice versa.

This principle inheres even with specialized criticism like mine. A writer who follows certain formulas in order to keep the checks coming may or may not be able to keep up an interesting flow of either correlations, cogitations, or both together. Said writer is more likely to concentrate on the lateral virtues, since those are the factors that draw in committed buyers. From what I know of David's comics-work, he almost always devoted his efforts to what I called "the basic serial," defined thusly here:

The basic serial in most iterations is not meant to possess an overriding structure. Rather only its constituent parts, be they short stories, long arcs, or other forms, usually display the sort of patterns that can be judged in terms of concrescence.     

Yet I must admit that I probably didn't have as thorough a knowledge of David's work as with others who worked on long-term serials. During the 1980s, when David rose to comic-book prominence, I bought none of his long-term serials-- HULK, AQUAMAN or SUPERGIRL-- as they appeared for purchase. I only picked up odd issues from quarter-boxes and later re-read them in correct sequence. So this week I decided to read through the first twenty-something issues of David's famous 12-year run on INCREDIBLE HULK, to gather a better sense of what he'd accomplished and how it differed from what others had been doing, that had resulted in HULK being a low-selling Marvel title.

Before David became the regular scripter, he was preceded by Al Milgrom, who set up two ongoing plot-threads which would also dominate David's first creative phase on the title. One was that Bruce Banner became associated with a SHIELD-sponsored project, The Hulkbusters, as  did his girlfriend Betty Ross and his perpetual foe General Ross-- all devoted to finding ways to counteract the Hulk's outbursts of violence. Another was that during one experiment to cancel the Hulk's power over Banner, a new "Gray Hulk" was born in HULK #324 (1986), somewhat smaller and less strong than Green Hulk. Milgrom clearly meant this Hulk as a callback to the very first issues of the character's debut, where the heroic monster had some brief moments of potential villainy and seemed more werewolf-like, transforming only at night. David collaborated with artist Dwayne Turner on one issue, HULK #327, but Milgrom remained the main writer until issue #330, which concluded with the death of General Ross. That issue debuted the work of the artist who would remain teamed with David during the aforementioned "first phase:" Todd MacFarlane, who had yet to become a top Marvel artist via his tenure on SPIDER-MAN, much less becoming even more generally famous for Image Comics and his feature SPAWN. 

I've never seen either David or MacFarlane go into detail about their pivotal collaboration. Given how the two of them feuded when David started negatively reviewing MacFarlane's Image works in the fan press around 1993, I doubt either of them would have yielded a balanced account of that interaction. But my critical impression is that both of them, though thrown together by circumstance, shared a desire to use Milgrom's Gray Hulk concept to give Banner's alter ego a meaner, more visceral edge. Milgrom may have intended to do something similar himself, but together David and MacFarlane managed to give the HULK title a more unpredictable, horror-movie mood, lasting from #331 to #346, with only one issue drawn by another artist. 

Throughout the first phase, Gray Hulk continued to contend against the Hulkbusters and grisly villains like Half-Life. But in this sequence of stories the dominant evildoer was a new incarnation of The Leader-- who, in keeping with the increased use of violence in 1980s commercial comics, was also no longer playing with kid gloves. Indeed, the first phase culminates with The Leader putting his old enemy through an emotional wringer by threatening to blow up a small town-- which he does, killing five thousand inhabitants just to produce a few gamma-mutants. This end sequence showed some decent myth-content-- not least the way the Leader's private endeavors mirror those of the government's plan to stockpile gamma bombs-- but it didn't meet my criteria for a mythcomic. 

I did find one mythcomic within the David-MacFarlane run, which I'll analyze in a separate essay. All of the Hulkbusters storylines were wrapped up in #346, except for the little matter of Betty Ross's revelation that she was pregnant with Banner's child. Yet, instead of following that plot-thread, David launched a new chapter in Gray Hulk's life. The character walked away from his old rampaging existence and took on the identity of "Mister Fixit," a bodyguard for a Las Vegas casino-owner. This was arguably the most famous development in David's long HULK run, and though I don't remember getting much out of this new phase, I'd have to give the series a re-read for further consideration.  I'm not sure what David had in mind for Betty's pregnancy, but as Wikipedia notes, David's editor dictated that Bruce and Betty would not have a child, and so she lost the infant by miscarriage. Ironically, David had Betty consider abortion of her child, who might or might not have carried gamma-genes, though the "A" word was never directly spoken. I mention David's original notion to spotlight it as one of many attempts to aim a commercial comic not at the vanishing audience of children but at older hardcore fans.

For whatever it might be worth, though I'm not David's biggest fan, I did assign to him one other mythcomic, discussed here. But that was something of a one-off. I appreciate that David vastly improved the reputation of the Incredible Hulk, albeit in what I'm curently calling "ontocosmic" rather than "epicosmic" terms, so I'm glad he did at one good Hulk-myth that ranks with the Lee-and-Kirby origin.                                  

BETTER THE DEVIL YOU KNOW

After taking a second look at the Noah Berlatsky remarks cited in DUCK SHOOT PT. 2--

If you make it simply about visual stimulation, it’s simply about visual stimulation, and doesn’t have to have anything to do (or at least, not much to do) with real women. Once you start pretending that you’re talking about a smart, motivated, principled adventurer, on the other hand, you end up implying that said smart, motivated, principled, adventurer has an uncontrollable compulsion to dress like a space-tart on crack. Which is, it seems to me, insulting.

-- I find that Berlatsky's intent here is to show a deep-rooted conflict between two aspects of current superhero comics.  One aspect is that of the sensationalism in which the earliest versions of the genre (as with most if not all genres) are rooted.  Sensationalism includes, but is not limited to, blatant appeals to the kinetic entertainment values of violence and sexiness (though not literal sex in the case of early superheroes).  The other aspect doesn't appear in superhero comics to any significant extent until Marvel Comics changes the paradigm for the genre, injecting the expectation of verisimilitude into stories about bat-cloaked avengers and giant green monsters.  Given that Berlatsky is chiding current comics for expecting him to believe that a motivated heroine (or villainess, a la Star Sapphire) would "dress like a space-tart on crack," he's privileging the aspect of verisimilitude within the context of superhero stories, though he doesn't oppose pure sensationalism in the cheesecake cartoons of Jack Cole, since these are only "about visual stimulation."

In my essay-series RULES OF ESTRANGEMENT (beginning here),I critiqued a statement from Grant Morrison on the supposed immunity of fantastic fiction from verisimilitude, and found that "Morrison.... may be too cavalier about the need for some types of verisimilitude in even the most fantastic fiction."  At the same time I disagreed with Tim O'Neil in his view that "fiction is a set of rules." For comparable but not identical reasons, I also reject Berlatsky's idea that verisimilitude takes priority, whether in the superhero genre or elsewhere.

The interactions of those narrative aspects that I've called "sensationalism" and "verisimilitude" in this essay (purely for convenience, not as terms for general use) are far from simple; therefore I won't explore them here. I will note that Berlatsky is far from alone in perceiving a conflict between the verisimilitudinous depiction of fantasy-figures and the use (or overuse) of sensational elements.

On a 4-23-12 post to a Comic Book Resources thread I started, entitled "Black Widow-- unzipped, sometimes heels?", a poster named Hrist (identified as female) made this comment:

There's a difference between elements of titillation and a sequence whose purpose is solely to titillate. It's heroic fantasy first, everything else second, really, with superheroes; the sexual elements are mostly leftovers from a power fantasy, not there to say anything much on their own.

I won't rehash my response to Hrist's assertion here. Yet I find it interesting in that it shows the poster's conviction-- similar in my opinion to Berlatsky's theme-- that there is a type of "heroic fantasy" that may possess "elements of titillation" but which is not defined by them.  Certainly one could find any number of other posts or essays by comics-readers that express diffidence toward the "power fantasies" of the superhero genre becoming infused with explicit sexual sensationalism, as against the various levels of violent sensationalism with which they're dominantly associated.

There's a particular irony in seeing Berlatsky emphasize the importance of verisimilitude within the superhero genre, while championing cheesecake art for being about nothing more than"visual stimulation."  Can't one find superhero characters who function on the same non-verisimilitudinal level of narrative as the cheesecake cartoons?  Here's one:

 And here's another:

Now, in DUCK SHOOT PART 2 I agreed with Berlatsky that the DC Star Sapphire is a contradiction, being a powerful villainess who dresses like a slag.  But the contradiction only exists in respect given that other versions of Star Sapphire have not been so focused on "visual stimulation."  Titles like RIPTIDE and WYNONNA EARP have no such history, so can one not fairly give them the same free pass that the girly-cartoons are given?

The objection may be raised that RIPTIDE et al are intended to function in roughly the same way as any DC serial superhero character: that they have serial continuities that suggest that the characters have a consistent life outside the boundaries of the panels.  But this would be a fallacious defense, for in practice there's no more grounding of the internality of the "Image bad girls" than there is of the "Jack Cole hotties." So the logical extension of Berlatsky's position is that "Image bad girls" too should be exempt from any expectations of verisimilitude, because "visual stimulation" is their raison d'etre, not building up a coherent sense of their characters as heroic, principled adventurers.

Such a defense I would find even more problematic than the admitted discontinuities between a given creator's treatment of a well-traveled character like that of Star Sapphire.  While I may agree with Berlatsky about the unattractiveness of a particular sexualized representation of a particular character, that's merely a statement of personal taste.  From a critical stance I find it illogical to disregard the role of "the sensational" in the superhero genre, or, for that matter, the role of "verisimilitude" in even so humble a form as the cheesecake cartoon.

I'll return to some of the more complex aspects of how these two aspects intersect when I return to the somewhat neglected topic of "adult pulp."