Thursday, January 18, 2018

Review: Black Hammer, Vol. 1: Secret Origins

Black Hammer, Vol. 1: Secret Origins Black Hammer, Vol. 1: Secret Origins by Jeff Lemire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don’t do superhero comics. I guess I just feel the genre is bled dry, that the thirtieth reboot of Spiderman or Wonder Woman isn’t likely to tell me much. For the major characters, there’s simply too much at stake for the publishers to let a creative author/artist do any long-term damage. (The great exception being the famous Frank Miller Dark Knight Returns reimagining of Batman, and that’s more than 25 years ago.) And for the small publishers trying to break a big new character, the template is too clear: create a tortured hero who’s somehow drawn to do good. Maybe I’m missing some interesting work, but I’m convinced I’d be digging through a lot of lame stuff to find something I only modestly enjoy.

Anyway, I wouldn’t have picked this one up if my local store people hadn’t insisted. I ignored them the first time. I tried to ignore them the second, but they had it on sale and prominently displayed in their “employee recommendations.” So, I gave it a shot.

And I’m glad I did.

At least at the beginning, this is to an ordinary superhero comic the way The Watchmen was. It’s using the form for a purpose beyond itself. We know all along that we’re reading a comic – and reading it is part of the fun – but we also know we’re being asked to confront the limits of what it means to get lost in a fantasy. This is as much a meta-comic as it is a weirdly original and twisted story. It’s really a comic book about what it means to read comics.

We learn almost right away that a superhero group is trapped on a small farm. They remember defeating an apocalyptic enemy named the anti-god, and then, without any other information, they find themselves confined to the farm and its environs. A decade later, and they are separately trying to grapple with what the unexplained change means for all of them.

Each character addresses the challenge differently. Golden Gail is a character in the mold of D.C.’s old Captain Marvel; when she says a magic word she’s restored to the shape of the little girl she was when she first chanced upon an ancient priest, and she has secret powers. She’s actually a woman in her middle 50s but, on the farm, she’s trapped inside her child body. To keep up the pretext that they’re just an ordinary farm family, she has to go to school every day, and she cannot smoke or drink as she would like.

I read her as a fairly straightforward metaphor for the way the larger comics world remains, for most non-readers, a child’s experience. The best graphics novel writers and artists are after some serious matters, but they can never escape appearing like children’s entertainers.

In a different fashion, we see Colonel Weird, a one-time space adventurer who, having entered something called the Anti-Zone, now exists in multiple places and at multiple times. If Gail represents an acknowledgement of the necessary child-like appearance to comics, I see Colonel Weird representing some of the peculiar suspension of disbelief that taking comics seriously demands. He’s capable of occasional bouts of rationalism but, for the most part, he’s doddering and unfocused.

And our most frequent point of view character is Abraham Slam, a Batman type (without the brooding) who decides to make the best of it all. He serves as the grandfather patriarch of the clan, and he sees to the real work of tending the farm. He enjoys the sunsets of the open fields, he’s in love with a waitress in town, and he wants the others to be as happy as possible. He is, in other words, an insistent invitation to enjoy the strangeness in front of us without asking too many questions.

Each of those perspectives on the comics experience floats around the story, giving Black Hammer an unusual multi-dimensional quality. There’s a lot going in, not just in back story and inter-character tension, but as a narrative, too. We don’t get all our information in the same way; some comes through the perspective of one character and some from others’. It gets dizzying in a way I really appreciate.

I loved the first couple issues because I’d never seen anything like it. The next few seemed to me a notch less good, though. Instead of diving much deeper into what seemed the central conflict, the book explores laterally, giving us a more sustained sense of each character: we also get a closeted gay Martian warlord, a cranky robot, and a witch who’d just found her long-promised true love before the strange events of a decade before.

The result of all those additions isn’t all bad; it feels something like the TV series Lost with a group of survivors getting only rare clues to the central mystery of their experience. It’s possible that, over time, that mystery will prove as interesting in its solution as it is in the way Jeff Lemire poses it to begin with.

But still, for me at least, the central joy of this is its self-awareness, it’s simultaneous acknowledgement that we’ve seen all this in other superhero comics and that, if we can sustain our belief against the “adult” mockery of the genre, there’s something new and inspiring within it. I’m hoping Lemire will be able to hold onto that aspect of this as he moves forward, and I’d like to move forward with him – at least for another volume.


View all my reviews

No comments:

Post a Comment