This Week’s Stash
More writing about comics.
I bought the first issue of Identity Crisis out of a general interest, the second because the clerk persuaded me to do so. This week, I bought the third with a mix of shame and fascination and schadenfreude.
I could go on for pages about it, but I’ll try to be brief. It’s the effort of a popular mystery-thriller writer, Brad Meltzer, to make sense of the DC Universe through the mystery-thriller genre. The story he’s constructed would be just fine if it were in one of his novels, a closed system where he controls the physics and milieu, and where the variant of realism that characterizes the mystery genre can be presented and read in ecological safety, like a terrarium.
However, it occurs instead in the DC Universe, a large-scale persistent fiction based on that least realistic of genres, superheroes. This fiction has, in its 60+ years (to debase Bakhtin with the vernacular) eaten and partially digested every genre from science fiction to fantasy to westerns to teen coming-of-age narratives. It ate mystery-thriller realism in the seventies, ate modernism in the eighties and began generating in-world parodies of both not long after. In an open ecology like this, mystery realism is immediately put in relief with offbeat pseudoscience, spooky magic and metafictional play, and tends to look a little silly in the crowd if it doesn’t have a healthy sense of self-deprecation.
But the story would, I think, still get by if it were just an everyday serialized story that could play nicely in the overwrought playground of genres the DC Universe has going. Gotham Central, after all, is a realist crime drama set in the DC Universe, and it’s one of the best comics they put out. But Identity Crisis is an universe-wide event, a “crisis” that is meant to dramatically revise “continuity,” the collective understanding of what the DC Universe means as a structure. In its attempt to re-read the large-scale persistent serial of the DC Universe through its own lens, it is trying to not only situate these unreal characters — who exceed the speed of time and dance through worlds of quantum indeterminacy — within mystery realism, but also explain them using mystery realism as a dominant mode. Among other things, it’s trying to use something like forensic psychology to explain the character inconsistencies of supervillains across appearances between the seventies and now. Actually, it’s forensic psychology involving magic spells. Does that give you a sense of what I’m getting at?
The mystery genre relies on patterns of resolution; when a detective solves a crime, it’s an implicit argument that reality is a legible structure, which can be deciphered if you just assemble the right template. That’s very much a construct — see Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell for an eloquent critique of it — but that’s fine, it’s worked for mysteries for a long time now. But attempting to read this proprietary, persistent, large-scale fiction system, in all its heterogeneous, inconsistent, overdetermined, fantastic glory, as something that can be explained with some poker-faced, in-diegesis interventionary sleuthing? Can one really generate a logical causal argument explaining the psychology of Doctor Light as it has been interpreted by dozens of writers, artists, and editors since the 1960′s? How about explaining why he doesn’t age normally, instead?
The DC Universe is fundamentally illogical. It is subject to many forces that work against it being unitary or literally coherent. That doesn’t mean it defies explanation, but it does mean that the meta-story of it, continuity, is a contingent social construct, held together with lots of time travel and duct tape, and understood by its readers and producers as exigent. But Identity Crisis, on many levels, fails to get that, and its attempt to say No, all of this really does make sense on a human level, you just need a good detective to decipher it is earnest, and as professionally executed as it can be, and feels really, really off.
The series isn’t even half-finished, so it might surprise me. And it’s not poorly done — Meltzer’s work shows a lot of attention to detail and understanding of what makes for dramatic tension in other media. It’s just, I think, operating on some misguided assumptions that make it feel more Quixotic than dramatic.
On a less critical and snarky note, I also bought Paul Grist’s Jack Staff: Everything Used to Be Black and White, which is really good.