Comic Adaptation Week: The Maximortal by Ethan and Joel Coen

I suppose in the interest of full disclosure I should admit that unlike many of my contemporaries, I am not an unreserved admirer of the movies of Ethan and Joel Coen. Be that as it may, the Coens represent perhaps the most widely recognizable body of work within a certain creative instinct unique to what one might call postmodernity. That is to say that the Coens partake in a revisionist assessment of American culture that is rooted in the stories that have helped to define us for generations and whose method involves a modified recapitulation of that storytelling tradition.

The same creative instinct behind the peculiar marriage of Homeric myth and a notion originating in a Preston Sturges screwball comedy provides the underpinning to Rick Veitch's The Maximortal. Veitch's superhero deconstruction performs the seemingly paradoxical task of celebrating the origins and tradition of the comics that perhaps more than any other popular art form symbolized the American century while shining a light on the dark human forces that are behind our fetishization of superhuman heroes.

But what really makes the Coens the perfect creative team to bring The Maximortal to the cinema is the pair's sharp eye for character. Just about any Coen brothers' film is a veritable menagerie of human grotesquerie, from No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh to The Big Lebowski's, well, Big Lebowski, to just about anyone and everyone in Fargo. Not only do the Coens have a knack for creating these lovable monstrosities on the page, but they've also been blessed with the abitity to find the perfect talent to embody them. Casting the Coens' adaptation of The Maximortal would be as simple as calling up the names from their stable of regulars (and one not-so-regular): Frances Mcdormand and Steve Buscemi as George and Meryl Winston; John Turturro as Jerry Spiegel; and who else but Javier Bardem as El Guano.

It is actually somewhat surprising that the Coens have yet to try their hand at a comic book movie. The hard-boiled crime novels that have provided the basis for so many of their screenplays are part of the same pulp tradition. A filmmaking team with the Coens' singular eye for visual detail, coupled with their peculiar mix of lowbrow convention and high concept theoretical nuance would be the perfect fit for bringing Veitch's perverse American epic to a wider audience. Now if only they can contract Eminem for the lead . . .

Powerful Panels: Halloween Edition

It's Halloween and Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader? has decided to celebrate with some fear-filled, powerful panels. Horror is a genre with a lot of comics' history behind it (duh) and it's fascinating to see how that root, horror-influence and the grammar it developed bleeds into nearly every kind of comic. Sometimes there's still just plain old, awesome horror comics, others up the gore or the details, and some graft the signs and signifiers of horror into comics that from the outside, have little to do with the genre. No matter what, you see the powerful horror style in nearly every type of comic.

The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu

This is a classic Horror manga from the 70s, and the above panel depicts one of the big revelations in the book. This is the first time the main character, Sho, has confronted the current situation of the school. The premise is that after an earthquake an elementary school is transported to some alien wasteland. The fear comes in watching a school full of children essentially riot and the way their teachers have to deal with it. There's no monsters or ghosts so a lot of the fear is psychological and rooted in human survival instincts. It's a bit like a zombie movie.

Umezu does an excellent job of making the landscape look horrific and it acts essentially, as a monster. This double page spread actually isn't the first time the reader has seen the landscape. There is a double page spread directly before this when the teachers first notice the landscape. Sho's double page is more significant because he's the main character but also because he's the first child to see the situation. It's just the landscape and his face really hammering in the effect of this event on Sho. Although he freaks out at first, he's one of the first truly able to come to terms with these catastrophic circumstances. Sho is deeply distressed but seeing the situation actually helps him come to terms with it.

Swamp Thing by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson

This could have been any number of panels from this classic run on Swamp Thing. Wein and Wrightson build a tense and psychologically taxing atmosphere. This is a classic Horror comic through and through, but the twist is, the hero's the monster. This set of panels really shows how the horror of the narrative works. There's no shocking surprises; just a meandering inevitability to the events.

It's a subtle technique that is demonstrated in these panels. Swamp Thing is obscured at first and through each panel takes up more room even forcing out the shooter's speech bubbles. The final, and most powerful panel, puts the reader in the shooters' position. We're forced to stare at a face that isn't particularly scary to us, just kind of weird, but we're coaxed into the same reaction as the shooter because of his position in the panel. He's not scared of Swamp Thing, but he's horrified by the realization that there's absolutely nothing he can do to stop death.

The Maximortal by Rick Veitch

This isn't a typical horror comic, but so much in it is just plain gruesome. Veitch re-imagines the Superman myth with a big twist: this super-being has all the same flaws as a regular human. So, as in the panel above, if he throws a temper tantrum he's able to pulverize you in the process. The real-life idea Vietch addresses here is a unbalanced relationship between parent and child. It's the sort of situation that you come across in maybe the mall or toy store. You'll see a clearly spoiled kid acting like an idiot and getting whatever they want.

Veitch's panel has the same gut-wrenching effects by contrasting the boys perfection against the father's mutilation, highlighting the imbalance. Part of the point Veitch makes is that many of the ideas we hold up as "perfect" grow problematic when analyzed or executed. Even though Superman works mostly as a symbol, Veitch shows that at his worst, Superman is closer to a violent, childish fantasy.

Green Lantern #43 by Geoff Jones and Doug Mahnke

There's been a lot of good recent Horror-ish super hero comics lately. It probably all started with Marvel Zombies, and includes Final Crisis #4, Blackest Night #0, #1, and this issue of Green Lantern. Probably one of the most explicit suicide scenes I've ever seen in any media. Jones actually builds to it throughout the story with a depressing tale of this C-list supervillian.

The real reason this is so chilling is Mahnke's combination of pain and a sheer blank expression on his face. It's exactly what I'd imagine a picture of this to look like. The crisp art really works by showing details like tear ducts on the sides of his eyes (for emotion) and green splattered brains (for a cringe). Of course, it's not really a suicide--the Black Hand is resurrected as a zombie Black Lantern later--but just staring at this full page spread is enough to send chills down your spine.

(Stay tuned for David's Part II. Happy Halloween!)

Rick Veitch's The Maximortal

In his typically dismissive, if no less hilarious review of the Watchmen movie, New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane says of comics fans, "[they] are masonically loyal, prickling with a defensiveness and an ardor that not even Wagnerians can match." Lane's particular genius is that it is usually in those moments when he is being most petty and cruel that he is also most accurate, as a perusal of comics bloggers' responses to the negative criticism of the film that has surfaced in recent days will attest. The typical response to a bad review of the movie essentially mirrors the typical response to a negative opinion of the comic, which is to say that fans will claim that detractors just don't get it, as though it were somehow impossible to both get and dislike Moore's opus. The secret is that Watchmen is like Proust only in the sense that it isn't actually that hard to get, it just takes a fair amount of effort to get from the first page to the last.

For the record, I get it. Watchmen is a grittily realistic deconstruction of the superhero comic as a genre and the superhero as an idea as it relates to notions of American exceptionalism and bourgeois culture. I don't like the book and presumably will not like the movie because in my estimation it fails as a comic, fails as entertainment and fails as an intellectual exercise. The best way to demonstrate this is by holding Watchmen up to a deconstructive superhero comic that succeeds: Rick Veitch's The Maximortal.

It is interesting to have this review of The Maximortal follow Brandon's write-up of Milligan & Fegredo's Enigma in that Veitch's approach to the phenomenon of the superhero is problematic in many of the same ways as Milligan's. As Veitch's afterword in the King Hell Press trade paperback edition points out, his whole approach to the history of the American superhero in the 20th century is based upon a fundamental misreading of Nietzsche and his impact on world culture.

Popular notions of Nietzsche's philosophy to the contrary, the philosopher's greatest legacy was not the ill-defined notion of the uber-mensch, but was rather his demonstration of the fallacy of the idea of objective truth. Moreover, Veitch's attribution of the rise of the phenomenon of the superhero to the influence of Nietzsche's uber-mensch ignores the entire history of mythology and his equation of superheros with Nazi eugenic theories is just plain intellectual irresponsibility.


I take pains to point out these problematic aspects of Veitch's book in order to demonstrate, as Brandon did in the context of Enigma, that a writer can base his reading of the superhero phenomenon on a set of questionable assumptions and still turn these into a successful book. The Maximortal works, in my view, because Veitch's approach to the subject provides a broad formal framework in which to explore the issues in question. Veitch has written a broad revisionist narrative of the phenomenon of superheros in all its aspects: as displaced extra-terrestrial being raised by a kindly American couple; as comic-book-character-cum-multimedia-marketing-and-cultural juggernaut; as government weapon and propaganda tool; and finally as symbol for the tarnished values of a civilization. What this shows is that while Veitch can have some fundamental suspicions regarding the implications of superhero veneration, he stills loves his subject and respects the creators who have contributed to its history.


Veitch further demonstrates his respect for his subject in the subtle ways in which he uses and alters his art style throughout the book. The Maximortal is clearly rooted in the comics of the golden age and his representations and particularly his painstaking inking reflects this heritage. Moreover, Veitch employs a variety of inking styles in order to reflect shifts in tone and narrative, from the fine, clearly delineated lines of Sidney Wallace's studio and offices, to the impressionistic brushwork of the book's occasional fiery infernos. Like all great artists, Veitch borrows tropes and techniques from his predecessors and recombines them in order to create new meaning.



Perhaps the book's most valuable tribute to the history of the superhero in America comes in the form of Veitch's revisionist retelling of the story of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, a story that was little known outside of comics insider circles in 1992. Veitch of course took liberties in his portraits of Jerry Spiegal and Joe Schumacher, but as he says in the afterword, "it is all exaggerated fiction, but yes, it's all true too." What these characters demonstrate is that whatever your view of the impact of superheros on our culture, behind these beloved characters are creators willing to work for very little in order to share their vision with the world. Moreover, in an era before artists were more clearly protected by copyright law, there were just as often unscrupulous business persons who enriched themselves at the expense of those creators.

All of these aspects of Veitch's book are instrumental in making the successful deconstruction that it is, but the fundamental reason for the success of The Maximortal is that it is one hell of a read. Veitch's sensibility, both in terms of narrative as well as his illustrations, is exceptionally bizarre. From the peyote-eating, neo-Golem creating alchemist of shit, El Guano, to the bizarre and wildly anachronistic Doctor Blasphemy, Veitch's book is filled with some of the strangest, most unsettling characters and set pieces in modern comics. Moreover, Veitch's skill as an artist coupled with his remarkable sense of visual narrative allow the images to be the centerpiece of the book, with text playing a supporting role. The Maximortal is by turns laugh-aloud funny, profoundly disturbing and intellectually engaging to a degree that few comics are. Comics are fundamentally an entertainment medium and creators who are cognizant of this and keep their readers foremost in their minds will always be those who write the best comics.