Friday 8 April 2011

ATLAS (SHRUGS) part four: By The Time I Get To...


Concluding a series of reviews of the revived Atlas Comics line...

The question that has to be faced is this: is it possible to give these new Atlas books a fair trial? Maybe it is, for a far younger person than myself, one who has no memory of the originals and who therefore has no expectations. For me, and for anybody else with any experience of the originals, I think it’s near impossible to be objective.

Having said that, the time that’s passed since the first Atlas run has afforded a distancing effect. Reading these first issues has been, for the most part, like picking up a genuinely new range of books, with neither baggage nor anticipation. Or, put another way: it’s not been like picking up the first post-Morrison Doom Patrol or the first post-Moore Miracleman.

It pains me, then, that I’m heading into another less-than-glowing review, this time of Phoenix. But from an objective standpoint, a less-than-glowing review is what the book deserves: it’s another less-than-satisfactory comicbook in a field of millions. There’s substandard crap all over the place now, not just in comics but as an everyday part of life, seemingly to be expected and accepted with a resigned shrug and no hope of seeing anything becoming better.

Maybe the problem is that the originals just got on with it, the way that 70s comics had to do. The first issue of a new series had to encompass an origin, a fight scene, a cliff-hanger to drag you back for the next part. Now, what with decompression and ‘writing for the trade’, a typical comicbook is just one small slice of a longer story and as such has licence to drag on for as long as the book makes money. Sometimes this is a good thing: a story that needs room to breathe and explore its theme or its characters should be allowed to do so. However, the other side of that coin is that far too many comics tend to take that freedom and turn it into a reason to expand what ought to be an eight-page story into a six-issue epic during which a great deal of not-a-lot goes on.

But anyway.

Phoenix is a workmanlike comicbook. It’s written by Jim Kruger and it’s co-written by Brenden Deneen who is one of Atlas’ co-publishers. So if anything, Phoenix should be the book that most reflects the publisher’s ambition for the line.

Well, if that’s the case, I’m bailing right now. All I can see in this book is a story that goes nowhere, tin-ear dialogue, and art, by Dean Zachary, which goes with the word ‘amateurish’ better than William goes with Kate. There are panels in this book where the protagonist seems to have one leg a good ten inches shorter than the other. Characters spout exposition like bad soap opera. Heads and limbs join torsos at anatomically impossible junctions. As mentioned before, the Editor-in-Chief of the Atlas books is Mike Grell. Imagine, then, some of Grell’s work – let’s say The Longbow Hunters – lightboxed or badly copied, then equally badly shaded and painted. That’s what Phoenix looks like.

It's actually Interlac for 'Golf Sale'
And the design, my good lord the design; the original Phoenix get-up wasn’t exactly Tom Ford, but this new… thing…takes what would have been a perfectly serviceable bodysuit which could easily handle a little detailing, and smothers it in half-arsed alien symbols which must be an absolute bastard to draw. it’s straight out of the George Perez School of Over-Designed Costumes (there’s a reason why Perez’s Nightwing design was soon simplified down – all that excessive detailing would drive any other artist batshit in seconds).

I’ll tell you what Phoenix puts me in mind of: it’s the comicbook equivalent of an uninterested shop assistant. It doesn’t say “Good Morning” when you walk in, it doesn’t ask if it can help you (or maintain a discreet distance until you’re ready to be helped).  It doesn’t recommend anything to you. It stands there, it has no interest in you as a consumer, you as a person, you as somebody who ultimately pays its wages. It has no purpose except to get to the end of the working day and pick up its money.

And that’s how the Atlas books feel. They just want to get through their 22 or so pages, with little or no imperative to do anything other fulfil than their most basic job description. They’re just enough material to fill a void. You? You expect entertainment? You expect some form of commitment to you as a reader? No. You’re just in its way. You’re just stopping it from doing what it wants to do, which is to become a multi-media intellectual property.

Good luck with Phoenix in that regard; of all the Atlas books, the Phoenix concept – man gets stuck in alien bodysuit, gains amazing abilities, fights aliens (or crime, injustice, uppity socialists, whatever) – is the one that could most easily be transferred to another medium. Whether Phoenix makes that transfer depends, I suppose, on how successful Green Lantern turns out to be as a movie.

In the meantime, Phoenix just sits there, lacking any interest or anything of interest. Well, I expect more. I demand more.  And until I can see that something more, I’ll be leaving Phoenix – and the rest of the Atlas line - well alone. 

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