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[felis_ultharus]

Legend has it that when the eldest son of the Medici family of Florence, Piero the Unfortunate, took over for his father, Lorenzo the Magnificent, he really didn't know what to do with the family's famous protegé, the 17-year-old Michelangelo. Michelangelo had already proven himself a great artist, but Piero didn't know a thing about art and didn't care for it. He just let Michelangelo sit around, doing nothing, while Michelangelo kept requesting work.

Finally Piero said, "Well why don't you go out and build a snowman?" According to legend, Michelangelo built the most beautiful snowman that Florence had ever seen and would ever see, then packed his things and left.

Reading Neil Gaiman's Black Orchid, my birthday gift from foi_nefaste, is a little like gazing on Michelangelo's snowman.


Black Orchid was Gaiman's first work for DC Comics, before he began The Sandman. It came at a time when DC -- inventors and guardians of the superhero comic genre -- finally responding to the challenge of Marvel and the underground comics, had started to take a turn for the darker, shifting gears to a psychologically realistic film noir approach.

It started with a series of Batman graphic novels, culminating in The Dark Knight Returns. Then Alan "Swamp Thing" Moore produced The Watchmen, a frightening examination of fascist overtones of masked übermensch vigilantes beating up undesirables in dark allies.

Then came Black Orchid, where Gaiman and his brilliant artist, Dave McKean step into the superhero genre and do it better than it's ever been done before with an almost supernatural ease. With McKean's haunting artwork (the only person I can compare him to is Yoshitake Amano), and Gaiman's words, the genre is finally done right.

Poison Ivy is an oracle deep in a cave-like room underneath Arkham Asylum, refusing to revweal her secrets and feeding live rats to her the pet plant-creatures she makes out of moss. Lex Luthor is a powerful embodiment of 1980s Yuppie greed, done so realistically that the comic almost tricks you into believing that this is somehow the "real" Luthor, of which the one in the comics and movies is a bad made-for-TV special that's barely-based-on-a-true-story. The Swamp Thing is a primal nature god, the Green Man of Celtic legends.

But best of all is Batman. I grew up reading Justice League and watching that awful campy Batman TV show. I've seen the reinterpreted, gritty modern Batman, and the many movie Batmans. We are always told -- over and over again -- that Batman is supposed to be scary -- that he's supposed to strike a primal cord. We have to be told this, because it's never actually true.

Thanks to Gaiman and McKean, it's true. Batman is portrayed as a frightening black shadow, darker than darkness, featureless except for an outline and an occasional glimpse of grey flesh. He plays a role half like that of Charon on the River Styx -- ferryman to the underworld -- and half like Aeneus' ghostly father in the Aeneid. And there is something about McKean's portraits of him, especially, that chill to the bone.

This is all especially interesting to me because my project is on Batman and his reinterpretation in the late 1980s. So turned out that in addition to being a marvellous read, it's also going to help with my schoolwork. Thanks foi_nefaste :)


In other news, Canada continues to have a government, thanks to Chuck Cadman taking a break off cancer treatments to fly in and vote in favour of the budget bill. This means that Newfoundland gets its Atlantic Accord, the environment gets another $900 million, another $1.5 billion goes to making university more accessible to people less likely to be able to afford it, and extra $1.6 for cheap housing, especially for First Nations people, and an extra half a billion for foreign aid.

It also means that the gay marriage bill may indeed finally pass, and we here in the Jeanne-Le Ber riding association actually have some breathing space to prepare for the next election.

Comments

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Ack! It's not a competition! With the gift certificate you got me, I got writer's market reference books, allowing me to get all the addresses I need of literary journals across the country. I've sent in two pieces for publication in two weeks because of those. So once again, you're helping my writing.

And on the second night of partying, you fed the multitude with a repast of pizza. That's two gifts in two days :)

(D&D tomorrow, by the way, is beginning to look like a mini-adventure. I'm pretty sure only you and Matt will be able to make it, since the NDP thing is now definitely Sunday. I hope you don't mind.)

[em-fish.livejournal.com]

It's all good. Mini-adventure ahoy!

P.S. I make out with Ros on a regular basis. A little light-hearted ribbing can't go amiss.