Comics shops are weird places. Cool, but weird. There’s a culture there, a community that senses whether or not you’re a member. I felt like just another ex-comics fan who had come to the shop to belatedly check out that big “event” everyone was talking about six months ago. In many ways, I felt embarassed.

But I bought the book, anyway.

Flash back: I first began my obsession with comics when I was 11 years old back in 1986. My parents had taken me camping with my grandmother on Chincoteague Island in Virginia, and I was bored. There was a little mom and pop store on the island filled with comics — and my grandmother kindly bought several for me. These included Uncanny X-Men, Iron Man and West Coast Avengers. I remember reading them on a picnic bench, surrounded by trees and buzzing flies. I read them again and again. When I got back home, I had to seek more out — and thus began a nearly lifelong fandom.

Of all the books I read, Iron Man was my favorite. This was the David Micheline/Mark Bright era, and I was blown away by the high-tech coolness of the character. Tony Stark took on illegal arms dealers, evil corporations and his own alcoholism. I liked that he was a flawed guy, that he wasn’t perfect. And I especially liked that he could blow things up spectacularly with his powered armor.

It’s from this angle that I approached CIVIL WAR, which I found to be a shallow exploitation of characters I’d cherished as a kid. Mark Millar, who so spectacularly re-invented the super hero comic with his run on the Authority clearly has no respect for these characters. This was clear when he was working on ULTIMATE X-MEN and THE ULTIMATES, where he repeatedly humiliated them. However, since these were alternate takes on classic characters, Millar had the freedom to do what he wanted — you could accept Captain America as a right-wing fascist, since he wasn’t the real Captain America, anyway. But CIVIL WAR takes place in the real Marvel Universe (TM), with fifty years of continuity. What happens there, for all intents and purposes, happens for real.

In a nutshell, the story centers around an incident where the town of Stamford, Connecticut is destroyed as the result of a group of reality-show superheroes taking on villains far outside their league. In response, the country demands the government do something about reigning in super heroes — licensing them, making them both “official” and “accountable.” Captain America disagrees with this, and takes a wide assortment of characters “underground.” Tony Stark agrees with it, and takes a wider assortment of characters on a hunting expedition to apprehend the “rogue heroes.” Eventually a minor hero gets killed and things escalate from there.

In many ways CIVIL WAR is an allegory for George W. Bush’s America and the post-9/11 era, but to achieve that allegory it takes classic beloved characters like Iron Man and Reed Richards and turns them into complete wankers, and others like the X-Men and Spiderman, and makes them out to be pathetic losers. In many ways it reads like bad fan-fiction — there’s a sense that Millar doesn’t care about the history of these characters, and everything that happens is to fuel the books sensational themes of “hero vs. hero,” and not to service the story, itself. Thus, Spiderman agrees to give his identity away on television, Reed Richards develops a superhuman prison in the Negative Zone, and Tony Stark decides to become a complete fascist. And the fact that Stark’s victory over Captain America is depicted as a happy ending, makes me wonder if I live on the same planet as Mark Millar. How authoritarianism can be depicted as a victory is beyond my comprehension.

Look, I understand that franchises can only go on too long before they repeat themselves so many times that their original greatness is lost — STAR TREK is a case in point, as is both the MARVEL and DC comic book universes. I gave up on super hero comics largely because of how sick I was of them and their conventions. But re-inventing them shouldn’t involve disrespecting what’s come before — and it certainly shouldn’t be this ugly.

One, we were overly ambitious — a 36 issue series produced on a micro indie budget just isn’t feasible. Jake and I put together 72 pages of “The Alberic Heresies” (including the preview mini-comic, “The Lock,” and the finished, but never released second issue), and although I’m proud of the work, I realize it was far too much of a long-term commitment and incapable of attracting any sort of audience.

That sort of comic, as much as I love it, is dead. In a dying comic book industry, one more pseudo-fantasy comic with super hero elements just isn’t going to cut it.

I’ve known this for quite awhile, even tried to deny it back when we did SPX last year, but the truth of it is that no one but us cares. And for a project like Alberic, you can’t just do it for fun. And honestly, Alberic has been percolating in the back of my mind since the 1990′s. I’m not there anymore — as a writer, as a reader. I’ve grown up and moved on.

Depression overtook me after SPX, and I curled up inside myself and stopped thinking about Alberic, writing in general, or anything that had to do with the humiliation of that show. Although I consider my fiction work to be very modern, a part of me knew that I was chasing nostalgia with Alberic, and that I wasn’t being true to who I am now.

But that dark period is, I think, well behind me. After half a year of locking that part of my life away, I’m ready to move forward, again. “The Purple Girl” needs to be polished re-written, as does my “Zombie” play. And Jake and I have a new idea for a graphic novel, one that’s a lot more realistic for us to succeed in doing. Expectations are low this time, and excitement is high. Grand ideas for anthologies have been put on hold in favor of more doable projects.

I’ve walked through that initial humiliation of a first attempt at presenting my work to the people, and for awhile I nearly set aside what I cared about most because of it. But I’m finding my creative instincts are returning, my synapses flash ideas back and forth inside the wet muck of my gray matter with curious regularity. And that is an exciting thing. Alberic is dead, but our next project will be much, much better. I suppose that’s the greatest lesson of all of this.

I have to say, I was a lot happier when I was alone in my apartment, banging out scripts with no thought of audience, or business, or marketing, or any of that. I just wanted to tell a good story — my day job pays the bills. This is why I’m beginning to drift more towards prose, as prose gives me that same alone in a room feeling. If I want to publish, I can self publish — I don’t have to worry about jumping through all the terrible hoops you must traverse before you get the golden ticket: publisher support. Which will lead, of course, to some kind of deal with Hollywood.

Mark Millar, author of such books as The Ultimates and The Authority, has written an editorial on a forthcoming bust in comics. The language he uses to describe the industry is not unlike the language I hear many would-be pro’s I know use. There’s a heady preoccupation with money, and a “our generation of writers is the best ever” arrogance that I’m not sure I agree with. You can read it here.

You can read about his life here.

But a bigger factor, I think, is the fact that comic book creators just aren’t on par with their television counterparts. Not to bash Greg Pak who I am sure is a great writer on the Hulk, but his previewed work on Battlestar Galactica is a bit underwhelming. Not only is his adaptation set before the big event that closed the second season of the show and completely changed the series status quo, but there’s just something off about the writing. The charcters just don’t ring true to me — the voices are wrong. The art doesn’t do them any favors, either.

You can have a look for yourself here.

Not unsurprisingly, the comic book version of Galactica looks to be on the verge of very high sales. But I’m afraid I’m not going to be adding it to the pull list.

http://www.albericheresies.com

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