- Coronations are dull things
- You read enough Vertigo comics in your youth (or, last week) and you have had sufficient for the next decade of ingénue audience identification figures having a world of wonder shown to them by an unreliable trickster.
- You’re no longer in your late teens, and you’re a little irked at another piece of culture that insists that the secrets of life and the universe are locked in hearts that, looking back, you remember as a little underdone.
- You are in your late teens, and have plenty of faith in your heart, thanks, but aren’t certain you want it explained to you by someone fading from view of 30.
- You liked the first line best the first time you read it.
- You’ve consumed enough media based on Artists and their troubling troubles, and have come to associate it with fundaments and the disappearing up thereof.
- Related to the above, not looking forward to the issue on the tax system as it applies to the Gods’ earnings.
- You don’t do social media, and dislike the implication that you’ve bought the DVD when you could’ve had the Bluray.
- You can come up with your own objections, and don’t see a lot of value in a strident, and soon to be foolish, character raising them for you.
- You’re only reading comics where a significant character has a BMI over 25.
Did you get the comic’s name wrong to make a point Andrew or should I go in and change it?
As for the more general points, I think a lot of it is a classic example of what I was talking about in my write-up: trope culture, training ourselves critically to hunt down similarities. Which are undoubtedly there, but if you end up just ticking them off and going “OK, seen it”…. well, it’s your money. But if we give Gillen enough credit to realise he’s using the Invisibles quote as a reference (and a critique – “once again, we return” is NOT the same as “we return and begin again”: cyclicality is not being presented as any kind of comfort) then we can get that he’s playing with the idea of the initiate/trickster relationship as featured in that comic by building to the cliffhanger where it’s the trickster who gets completely undermined and left on their own. You COULD do a post where W+D is read entirely in relation to Invisibles #1, the way Three relates to 300.
But I also think that’s partly a trap to catch you and me out. Like, my first reaction to Icona Pop was to think “Wahey, Shampoo!” but catching that similarity could just mean I shouldn’t bother listening to Icona Pop. I’m pretty sure the intended audience for this comic are people who WEREN’T buying “Dead Beatles” in 1994.
(FWIW I don’t especially agree with Kieron Gillen about pop, any more than I agree with Alan Moore about divinity or Grant Morrison about life as a 4-dimensional time slug. All of those things work demonstrably well as a motor for storytelling, though, so their deficiencies as a philosophy don’t matter quite as much…)
#1 Ah, it’s always the last thing – if you would that would be very kind, I tried but it didn’t seem to take…
“You don’t do social media, and dislike the implication that you’ve bought the DVD when you could’ve had the Bluray.”
Andrew, what the fuck does that even mean, if we’re nitpicking writerly flourish?
There’s been a trend over the last year or two for DVDs to be released with just the theatrical release of the film, with all of the special features on the Bluray.
I don’t see how TWATD is doing this though? Because it has a style blog?
There’s quite a lot of “Come join the fun!” on the last not-a-letter-page page. And fun is fun! But I wouldn’t judge someone for being turned off by it.
Oh, you mean Kieron’s writer notes and playlist and things? They’re freely available on his blog, it’s not like you have to sign up to an additional content experience or pay for something on an exclusive format. If you google the comic, you get it- same as CBR previews or something.
Basically: if you’ve got the internet you can gain access to information about a thing- I don’t resent trees for the fact they have Wikipedia articles that enlighten me more about their specifics than if I just look at them, even though just looking at them has its own and valid function.
#2: I had planned a lunchtime reveal that I’d put a typo in the title, that this is _The_ 10 reasons it’s okay not to like it, but ‘shockingly’ my incompetence has put paid to that.
But yeah I think it’s okay to be Vertigoed out, I think it’s okay to say “I’ve seen The Invisibles and this isn’t it” (alright, arguably if you say that, you have missed the point of The Invisibles).
I would say the quotes are doing similar work, there is a cycle as well as progress, but the reason we’re looking at this cycle is because things might change – but I agree it’s commentary.
I didn’t mean to get hung up on the comparison BUT (is the title of my autobiography) this first issue did not make me as excited about seeing the next issue as Invisibles #1 did, but nothing has, and this is closer than anything in the last 7 years.
There’s a post I meant to write (there’s a lot) about being a Lady Gaga fan in 2010, that feeling that there was another album coming, and the tingle that it might crack the world open – it probably wouldn’t (and it didn’t), but that electrical feel in the air* was amazing.
*distinguishing between “this suffuses the atmosphere, each and every breath” and “this is a forcefield one inch thick around me” is rarely of much interest at those times.
Wait, you LIKED it?
Meanwhile, I appreciate asking your readers to go and look at a tumblr lacks the pizzazz of asking your readers to wank over your comic to get its sales up.
They were simpler times.
And yeah, I loved it, I am apart from anything else an old-skool Vertigo mark – you’ve hit a lot of the reasons I liked it in your runthrough, I imagine Hazel will hit a lot more in her piece, I’ll chip in any spare in the comments then.
Apart from anything else, now would be a funny time for me to get picky about my favourite comics being written by middle-aged middle-class white dudes*! I am happy to say “Well this is what we have so this is what we work with”, partly because I have the privilege that ‘what we have’ is a lot of people with the same culture fit as me, but I’m also okay with people rolling their eyes at that.
I’m also aware of the irony of the manifesto of resistance being written by a middle-aged middle-class white dude!
But, I was between two encomiums, and as they say, my state flower is the Fuckin’ Orchid….
*I realised over the weekend that a bunch of my feminism comes from, well, Halo Jones at an early age.
Tom: At least give a chance to see what we do when our sales to tank before you do 1:1 comparison to the sigil wank.