The Disappointing Lexcorp Bailout

Lex Luthor's bailout application, here!

It starts off strong; regrettably, it doesn't stay that way. I wonder why not?

Hmm. The initial joke is the idea that Luthor is a standard corporate CEO. In that context his various anti-Superman plots are pretty funny to listen to, since they're so convoluted and, well, comic-bookish. The humor lies in Luthor's own deadpan lack of awareness; he doesn't seem to realize how absurd it all sounds.

But then the skit suddenly turns metatextual: "I'm Lex Luthor, that's what I do," which doesn't work at all. The shift of tone loses the thread of humor, especially since there doesn't seem to be any real joke involved.

It's a shame, as it starts out pretty strongly. But the ending joke is good!

The Red Prophet Picture Book

Orson Scott Card is best known for his novel Ender's Game, which is fair enough. I like it a lot myself.

But my favorite Card novel is Red Prophet, the second novel in his "Alvin Maker" series about a fantasy frontier America where folk magic works.

Alvin is the seventh son of a seventh son, and this mystical conjugation makes him a Merlin-like figure of magical destiny. The first novel dealt with all this; and it was certainly interesting. But Red Prophet goes into the broader world, where ambitious White men plot among and against each other, and Red Indians are slowly dying of rampant alcohol addiction.

Two brothers seek to change this: Tenskwa-Tawa, the Red Prophet of the title, who wants to segregate Red men from White men and pursue his vision of a great Crystal City; and Ta-Kumsaw, the great military leader, who simply wants to drive the White men from North America entirely.


If Ender's Game is a story about how institutions (especially the military) use and exploit people for their own purposes, Red Prophet is about religion and social reform. That is probably part of why I like it better; it's a theme that's closer to my heart.

So I was quite taken to find that there's a graphic novel version of Red Prophet. I bought the first volume and eagerly consumed it.

In retrospect, I could have guessed that there would be problems.

Card has a very strong narrative voice in this book. It's not just happening, as many novels try to suggest, with you as an observer; someone is telling you this story. (If I remember correctly, the series actually confirms this at some point; the narrator is Taleswapper.)

This doesn't translate at all well into comics format, where the ideal is to show things visually. Visually presenting the events of the book loses almost all of the appealing style.

And so they don't. Instead, they cram as much text as they possibly can into text boxes. Virtually every panel in every page is loaded with a few sentences from the novel. The effect is to make it a sort of Red Prophet Picture Book- an unhappy compromise that loses the advantages of both novel and graphic novel formats.

Some novels don't make good comic books. That isn't a sign that anything is wrong with them; it just means that the novel format has its own specific advantages, which other media don't share. Foremost among these advantages is the ability to get inside someone's head- to share their thoughts and feelings.

Card is good at this. Comics aren't. It's a sad way to realize the fact; but at least I've learned something from the Red Prophet graphic novel, after all.

The Garfield Sampler

This is probably a lot more fun than it should be. It takes panels from the comic strip "Garfield" and posts three of them at random, as if they were a regular strip.

Most of them almost make sense, and some of them are actually funny. (At least, funny in the Far Side sense of "What does that mean?") And this is perhaps what makes it semi-compulsive: they make sense just often enough to tempt you to try again.

The Space Gods, (Not) Revisited

As I mentioned a little while back, I haven't had much reading time lately. But I had to make time for a recent Amazon arrival, Neil Gaiman's Eternals.

Gaiman is one of my favorite comics writers; he reintroduced me to comics with his landmark work on Sandman. And I have a love of Kirby's Eternals from way back. So I delved into this with great eagerness.

I can't say that I really liked it.


I'm trying to figure out the nature of my dissatisfaction. I now notice something that I never picked up on before: Kirby's Eternals may have been the title characters, but the comic wasn't thematically about them. It was about the Space Gods, the Celestials, and the mysterious Space God things they were doing on Earth. All the really interesting and awesome moments were about them; which is why it doesn't surprise me to read that Kirby got the idea from Erich Von Daniken's fantasy-archeology bestseller Chariots of the Gods.

The Eternals and Deviants were just a sort of clunky interface with the conventions of superhero comics- good handsome superpeople vs. bad ugly superpeople. They were necessary in the practical sense that all comics were superhero comics, but I can't recall either race being that important to the plot. The Space Gods had come back, and were going to do whatever they were going to do; this was the real thrust of the series.

I suspect that if Kirby had done the series a few decades earlier, when there were still other options for comics, the Eternals and Deviants might not have appeared at all.

So- to work my way very roundabout to the point- my problem with Gaiman's work is that it's all about the Eternals. And they were actually the least interesting part of the book. It's not especially Gaiman's fault, I guess: the whole Celestial thing was wrapped up in Thor, around issue #300, which didn't leave that much more to do.

But if you're going to give up the appeal of Kirby's title- the images of awesome unstoppable giants, the mystery, the sense of impending cosmic judgement- you need something really good to put in their place. And while the writing is decent, there's... just not that much here.