Posts Tagged ‘Comics’

Eviction Night in the Pit: Ian Rankin’s Dark Entries: A John Constantine Novel

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

John Constantine has been around. A former punk rocker turned street magician, Constantine has faced down every ruler of hell, defeated the thing that lives behind the world, survived time in an insane asylum and a Maximum Security prison and become involved time and again with the London underworld.

John Constantine has been around. Created by Alan Moore during his acclaimed run on Saga of the Swamp Thing, Constantine was originally modelled on Sting; a cocky, slightly alien occult wide boy with an eye for the main chance and a ruthless streak a mile long. As the lead character in Hellblazer, he’s become one of the great anti-heroes of the last twenty years and very nearly every major comic writer working today has worked on the title at one time or another. Constantine is, literally, a constant, a Chandler-esque figure with none of the romance and a lot more cynicism, a man who endures in both senses of the word.

John Constantine has been around. Over the years he’s travelled the length and breadth of England, has spent time in the US, done time in the US and lived in Australia. One of the very places he’s never been is out in the spotlight, in the glare of publicity that only reality TV can provide.

Until now. Ian Rankin, one of the greatest crime writers of his generation has produced the first in a new series of Vertigo Crime graphic novels. Dark Entries is the story of what happens when John Constantine and reality TV collide. It’s also a fascinating examination of the difference between compressed and decompressed storytelling.

Rankin is the master of the quiet character touch and his Rebus novels are full of the sort of unconscious character tics that make people unique. With that in mind, it’s interesting to see not only how he moves across to comic work but what he leaves behind to get there. Rankin’s eye for description is still there but he’s been able to move that aspect of the work across to the art, giving both elements equal weight. Produced with quiet authority by Weather Delle’dera the black and white art manages to be tense without being scratchy and Delle’dera manages to give each character unique mannerisms. Jude the football hooligan slouches his way around the house just as Ishmael, the cautious, quiet, oldest housemate is always looking around the room, always making sure everyone else is there. Alice, her arms covered with scars almost never makes eye contact whilst Tom the amiable American geek makes far too much despite his eyes being concealed behind the blank white discs of his glasses. Akiko, the Japanese girl is quiet, reserved and desperate whilst Steph is aware, upright, awake. Each one is unique, each one is well rounded and each one is doomed.

Rankin shares a certain wilful contrariness with his most famous creation and for the first one hundred and seventeen pages, Dark Entries is a slow burn, a murder mystery without a murder. We follow Constantine as he’s approached by Mr Keene, the producer of a reality TV show called Haunted Mansion whose mansion is a little too haunted, we see Keene feed him information, see Constantine enter the house and see what’s begun to terrify the contestants. We also see a lot of the traditional elements of reality TV, from circular conversations to complaints about the lack of alcohol, diary room confessions and the constant struggle for dominance in the pecking order that has been the cornerstone of Big Brother in particular for years. Its typically impressive work from Rankin, putting six people together in an odd environment, and putting the perennial outsider, the detective, in the middle of them. It’s a murder mystery without a murder, And Then There Were None where everyone’s still upright and the result is a low key but constant rise in tension.

Then, on page one hundred and eighteen, Rankin shows us the truth and everything changes. The true nature of the house and the contestants is revealed as it’s placed in a much larger, much more unsettling concept. The story is no longer John Constantine in the world of reality TV but reality TV in the world of John Constantine, a change so dramatic the page colour even shifts from black to white.

This is where Rankin may lose some readers. What began as a relatively straight haunted house story becomes outright supernatural horror with the turn of a page and Delle’edera’s rendition of hell and its denizens must surely rank with John Ridgway and Steve Dillon’s versions as definitive. Like his predecessors, Delle’dera’s hell is spacious, open and one step to the left of normal and, just like his predecessors, Delle’dera uses that to lull us into a false sense of security. Hell really is other people here, as Haunted Mansion is revealed to be a long term ratings hit amongst the damned. Every aspect of reality TV culture is transposed across, from the endless discussion of the housemate’s actions to Eviction Night and the constant scrabble to keep the viewers happy. At first it’s a jarring change, but as the novel goes on it becomes clear that this really is the only way the story could go, running the supernatural world of John Constantine together with the barely natural world of reality television.

Even here, Rankin cheerfully refuses to increase the pace. The tension continues to build, the crowds continue to get raucous but they also keep watching.
Because that’s what you do. Reality TV is, like any entertainment, an investment of time for the viewer, albeit with an added social element. You keep watching through the bad bits so you’ll see the good bits when they happen but you also keep watching because that’s what everyone else does. The contestants are alienated so you don’t have to be.
This is the true genius of the book as Rankin, the novelist who excels at long form storytelling, uses reality TV as a bridge into comics, a medium traditionally associated with short form stories. Rankin keeps every element of his style and marries them to the standard tropes of a Hellblazer story: a very English inferno, suburban horror and personal sacrifice. He even willingly sacrifices his favoured location, with the only reference to Edinburgh seeing Constantine confront Brian McArthur, a former friend who became obsessed with Sawney Bean. Brian’s descent into insanity, cannibalism, murder and death plays like what it is, the big finish of a smaller story. In that story, Brian and the question of whether he was possessed by or obsessed with Bean would be the centre of attention but here, it and Brian, are pushed to the sidelines. He becomes a rejected housemate, a demented fan, someone who knows they’re important and takes desperate measures to get near the star of the show. Which is, as ever, Constantine.

The end result is a novel that feels expansive but not padded, something that wears the clothes of a reality TV show but takes it to some unimaginably dark places. It marries the human touch and deliberate pace of Rankin’s novels with the immediacy of comics, creating a graphic novel in the most literal sense of the phrase. The final quarter, where everything comes to head, has that sickening tension that comes after the fall but before the impact, a sense that no one, not the housemates, not Constantine, not even Mr Keene is safe. It’s the moment after the crowd turns but before the crowd riots, and it’s a credit to Rankin that this is the most unsettling aspect of the story. It’s also a pitch-perfect examination of why John Constantine remains such a successful character; he’s a dark, metaphysical lens that we can view the world through and be horrified and fascinated before we turn away. He has no such luxury but at least, with Rankin, he’s in very safe hands.

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Sherlock Holmes-Eliminating the Impossible

Friday, June 19th, 2009

This is Sherlock Holmes’ year, we’re just living in it. No less than three new versions of Conan Doyle’s classic detective are launching this year across three different media and three very different approaches. The obvious question of course is why? The less obvious question is which, if any, will succeed?

It seems oddly fitting to start with the version of which we know least. Sherlock filmed in January, a sixty minute pilot designed to update the character to modern London. Superficially it’s the least interesting of the three until, that is, you examine the cast and crew.
Created by Stephen Moffat, about to take over the reins of Doctor Who and co-created by Moffat and Mark Gatiss, Sherlock appears to have taken great pains to maintain the basic tenets of the characters and stories. Holmes is still brilliant but socially inept, Watson is still compassionate, slightly dogged and his closest friend. They even live at the same address.
But Moffat and Gatiss both have a reputation for surprising decisions and the fact that Moriarty is mentioned in the press release is I suspect, very deliberate. This has the potential to be one of the most interesting takes on the character in decades and with Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Watson, the central cast are certainly about as strong as it’s possible for them to be. Sherlock looks set to air later this year and it’ll be interesting to see how it fares.

Stepping across to comics for a moment, Leah Moore and John Reppion are currently writing a Sherlock Holmes series for Dynamite Entertainment. Moore and Reppion have been quietly carving a name for themselves in the industry for some time now and their Albion series was simultaneously a celebration and a particularly nasty subversion of some classic English comic characters. They get the peculiar combination of courtesy and violence, tea and blood-soaked shirts that lie at the heart of this sort of English fiction and it’s this sensibility that they bring to Sherlock Holmes. The idea behind the series is simple; these are the stories Conan Doyle didn’t get to tell, stories set in the Victorian London we know so well, starring Holmes, Watson, Lestrade and the rest but in comic form.
The end result is impressive. The debate about whether comics are better telling decompressed serials or compressed stand alones is rendered moot here as the script, along with Aaron Campbell’s art imitates the erudite language of Conan Doyle’s work through pacing rather than dialogue. The first story, ‘The Trial of Sherlock Holmes’ is currently two issues in and in that time we’ve seen Holmes arrested for a murder he seemingly cannot be innocent of, Watson and Lestrade united against a curiously unhelpful Chief of Police, Holmes remarkably relaxed to be in prison and something terrible moving in the shadows of London High Society. These two issues are packed with incident and information, filled with exactly the sort of dense, informative plotting Conan Doyle excelled at but unfold at a unique, deliberate pace. This is prose storytelling in comic form, done not just right but exceptionally. The principles of the character have rarely been more honoured without it once seeming like slavish adherence to the text.

At the other end of the spectrum, the trailer for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes film arrived a couple of weeks ago and caused a minor stir in fan circles. The film casts Robert Downey Junior as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson and judging by the trailer sets them against the beginnings of the occultist and spiritualist movement that Conan Doyle himself would become so infamously drawn to.
The trailer is just over two and a half minutes long, gives both Downey Jr and Law a chance to shine and drives home one point over and over again; this is not your father’s Sherlock Holmes. It shows Holmes engaged in a bare knuckle boxing match, a singularly inept fight with a villain in a shipyard, diving out of the House of Commons into the Thames, failing to pick a lock and being knocked out by Irene Adler. There’s gunplay, explosions and the sort of rapid fire deadpan humour that Downey Jr excels at.
It looks, in short, marvellous. This is the other road to take with Sherlock Holmes, eschewing purism for a format where the characters are rendered down to their barest essentials (Brilliant, eccentric detective, compassionate, long suffering friend, charming, wily female criminal) and then something entirely new is built on top of them. It will, and has I’m sure, enrage purists as the character appears to be rendered down to nothing more than Indiana Jones in period London, the Doctor without his TARDIS.
But that’s not the point. The point is, Holmes CAN be rendered down in this fashion, can be altered, changed as the author requires. He’s very nearly a perfect character, unique but mutable, an ideal that stands a little outside the norm and able to reflect whatever an author brings to it. Holmes is a mirror held up not just to the crimes he investigates and the society within which they occur but also the authors who stand behind him.

This is the central point of Paul Cornell’s magnificent ‘The Deer Stalker’. Available for free on the BBC website it’s a dizzying story that begins with Watson in hiding as mysterious soldiers stalk London and culminates in a moment of post-modern surrealism that not only explains every different incarnation of the character but puts each on an equal footing. He’s an elemental, pure figure and as a result is oddly mutable, a figure adept at disguise be it textual or meta-textual.

Which brings us to the definitive Holmes variation; Gregory House. He’s an irascible, bitter, sarcastic junkie with a dogged, overly compassionate best friend, an establishment figure who is as irritated by him as they are awed and a group of young, eager hopefuls who want to prove themselves. He even lives at 221B.
The medical detective show is in its fifth season and, for all the changes made to cast and plotting, for all the focussing in on the lives of individual characters and the quietly dark hearts of the Princeton Plainsboro staff, the stories remain basically the same; a patient with impossible symptoms is admitted, House tries something and it works a little then fails, tries something else that fails and makes it worse then tries something else and nine times out of ten, cures the patient. Not everyone goes home whole but by and large, everyone goes home. More often than not, House wins and more often than not, he takes no satisfaction from that at all, constantly turning to the next puzzle, the next case. He’s a constant, both in the hospital and the series and that has itself become a plot point. Recent episodes have begun to explore the concept that House is terrified of change, that his constant bullying and cajoling of patients and staff is to hold them in line, to keep them from breaking ranks, breaking the pattern.
This is the genius of the show, taking the format of the original stories and hanging a lantern on them, using that repetition as a character beat in and of itself. House is a constant and he’s trapped by that constant, his genius a fragile structure based on a single friendship and the total control he exerts over his staff.
House is Holmes taken to the nth degree, a snarling, sarcastic figure with a horrific childhood that tortures as much as it enables him. The last half season alone has seen him attempt suicide in the name of clinical information, risk permenant brain damage in a desperate attempt to save the love of his best friend’s life and hire a private detective to keep tracks on his friend and his staff. He’s a disaster, a barely functional human being who uses his constant humour to hide the very intellect, the very concern he’s desperate to prove he doesn’t have. House is a far darker, far more driven figure than Holmes and when the time comes for his Reichenbach Falls it’s very difficult to imagine him returning.

But for all the vicodin and motorcycles, the prostitutes and the lewd comments, at his core, Gregory House is Sherlock Holmes. He’s the same driven, brilliant, slightly doomed figure updated to the present day and placed in an entirely unique context that not only allows him to stand out but also throws a blinding light on Sherlock Holmes and the lives the two men all but share.

When it comes down to it, Holmes is Holmes, regardless of whether his name is Sherlock or Greg, whether he’s in print or on the screen, in 19th Century London or 21st Century America. He’s both unique and uniquely mutable and that means he can be whatever is required of him, however impossible, or improbable, it may seem.

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The Meanest Streets of All

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

Raymond Chandler once wrote ‘Down these mean streets a lonely man must walk, who s not himself mean.’ It’s a concept that a lot of crime fiction, whether focussed on the policemen or the criminals still revolves around, the idea that a wrong will be righted whether by an arrest or desperate, last minute and blood soaked retribution. It’s a starting point, a catalyst and also an immense constraint. Because the sum must be balanced, there must be men in white hats and black hats, something must be done, everything must be paid for.

In Snowtown, the maths works differently

Fell, written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Ben Templesmith is a series where the architecture, both of the stories and the city, is as much a character as Richard Fell himself. Told in one-off, sixteen page issues each dealing with a single case, it throws away the traditional serialised storytelling of comics to embrace something a lot closer to television. Crime fiction has flourished on TV with the CSI universe now incorporating five TV shows and series like Criminal Minds and Dexter exploring the perspectives of the victims and killers in equal detail. It’s a smart move, giving the series a familiar structure which not only appeals to comic readers but shares common ground with some of the most successful TV shows on the planet. As a result, there’s at least some closure every issue, as Richard either finds the person he’s looking for or finds someone who has done something else as bad and who deserves to be punished. You get what closure you can in Snowtown and that’s a lesson that Fell and the reader both learn very quickly.

Richard Fell himself, at least initially, is Chandler’s hero, a man who volunteers to walk down these mean streets and make them a little better. He’s a quiet, almost studious figure, contained and articulate and just a little distant. It’s not the distance of the intellectual, of Holmes or more recently House but rather the distance of a man who knows the power of information, can read people like a book and lives in perpetual terror of others reading him. He’s smart, competent and all too aware of how much danger that can put him in as well as the power it gives him in a place like Snowtown.
The more time he spends in the city though, the more that begins to change. Snowtown is so relentlessly violent, so cheerfully nihilistic that buildings are tagged with the Snowtown mark, a sigil that’s supposed to protect those inside from harm. Richard himself is branded with it by Mayko, the bar owner he begins a gentle, tentative romance with and it’s this marking and Fell’s acceptance of the urban tribal magic it represents that signals the beginning of his evolution. The man who solves his first couple of cases simply by noticing what others don’t is framing a violent mugger for an unsolvable crime and breaking and entering by the end of the first collection. He’s still a good man but he’s a good man being changed, literally wearing Snowtown’s clothes following an encounter with a suicide bomber and a nice old lady who gives weapons to the increasingly terrified pensioners of the city
The moment where Richard receives his new suit is particularly interesting, as it not only evokes the traditional ’suiting up’ moment of superhero comics but is also a very deliberate harking back to older heroes, older archetypes. Richard is a nice, polite boy who wants the best for the good people around him and frequently violent but always fair justice for the bad. He owes as much to Black Mask, one of his childhood heroes as he does to Homicide’s Tim Baylis or The Wire’s Jimmy Macnulty. He’s a man out of time and place and fully prepared to use that to get what he wants.
Richard is, fundamentally, a genius and his natural deductive ability are where the creative team really shine. An early issue sees him tracking the final steps of a woman whose foetus was cut from her, her after image tracing it’s final steps across the page and across Fell’s mind. It’s a quietly impressive, moving sequence, made all the more so by the fact Richard is smart enough to go this far and no further. He’s good just not quite good enough and it’s only after talking to Mayko and learning about the repulsive practice of ’smoke babies’ that he’s able to return to the street, discharge his weapon and note the windows that don’t light up, the people that feel protected by a different type of magic that’s repulsive even in Snowtown. The panels, showing Richard firing, the windows lighting up and him making notes are a perfect marriage of art and script and mark out a style unique to the series. It’s further developed by both the pictures Richard takes and post it notes, used by both the character and the creative team to tremendous effect. One, in the second issue, is attached to the belongings of a murder victim and reads simply ‘All she had left’.

For all his intelligence, decency and compassion though Richard Fell may not be as good a man as he’s perceived to be. Several flashbacks in the series show him visiting his partner, who cheerfully admits to having no memory of who he is and reveal that far from volunteering for Snowtown, he was banished there for two years following an undisclosed incident in the city. That incident has yet to be revealed but the implication seems to be that Richard is more at home in Snowtown than even he would like to admit.
Fell’s supporting cast, oddly, owe more to contemporary crime fiction than he does. Lt. Beard, Ri chard’s shift commander, is superficially the standard tough lieutenant of crime fiction whilst his colleagues include Bromwich, a young, inexperienced detective and Owlsley, an experienced veteran. Even Mayko, at first, is a tough but compassionate bartender, a woman who has seen it all happen before more than once.
But Lt. Beard can barely make it through the day, Owlsley has come back to service despite losing his legs and Mayko, just dumped by her fiance, needs anti-depressants to work in a bar her father won in a card game. The only people in control in Snowtown are the criminals, ranging from the polite old lady who gives guns to her friends to the ‘Nixon Nun’, a ghastly figure dressed in a nun’s habit and a Nixon mask whose actions become progressively more intimidating and seems to embody Snowtown itself, a tangible force that Richard can push against, can see but never quite touch.
None of them are simple, none of them have it easy and all of them are more than they appear, complex characters let loose in a city where the meat trucks are regularly stopped by snipers and packs of domestic dogs have gone feral. Each one struggles to hang on as Snowtown bucks and shifts beneath them, in most cases wanting nothing but to get to the end of the day alive. These may be mean streets but they’re mean streets that must be lived on and everyone but Richard Fell knows this. He’s Chandler’s man wandering Snowtown’s streets and not only changing them, but being changed by them, becoming a feral policeman in a feral city.

Fell, like Snowtown itself, takes the standard sum of crime fiction and comes up with a different result. This is a city where the best detective on the force has been exiled there, where criminals are so all pervasive if you can’t find the right one then anyone will do. It’s a city choking on it’s own violence and it’s own waste, Chandler’s mean streets collapsing in on themselves as the cycle of violence and depravity accelerates.
But for all this, Fell is a series about people not at their best but doing their best. Lt. Beard may be border line insane and Owlsley may not have legs but they both show up for work. Mayko’s life has collapsed and she works in the wreckage of her father’s past but she’s still there and at the heart of it all, so is Richard Fell. A quiet genius with a violent streak and a dark past, a man who cares for the people everyone else doesn’t and who finds himself on the line between corruption and evolution. He may not be a good man, but he’s good enough.

Fell:Feral City collects the first eight issues of the series and is available now.

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