Quick Rating: I Remember It Well
Title: various
And where is Luna Moth?
Writer: Michael Chabon, Jim Starlin, Kevin McCarthy, Howard Chaykin
Artist: Eric Wight, Jim Starlin, Kyle Baker, Howard Chaykin, Kevin McCarthy, Steve Lieber
Colors: Michelle Madsen, Christie Scheele, Dan Jackson, Jeff Parker, Dave Stewart
Letters: Virtual Calligraphy, Jim Starlin, Dan Jackson, Steve Lieber
Editor: Dave Land, Diana Schutz
Michael Chabon has been cropping up all over the place these days: comic books, popular movies, New York Review of Books, McSweeney’s, etc. If you’re unfamiliar with his name, then you need to glance around at popular culture a little more widely than American Idol and People Magazine. He wrote a book a couple years ago called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It describes the adventures of two golden age comic book creators. Among their creations was the Escapist. Now, he leaps from the realm of fiction to the… realm of… graphic fiction. This comic contains 80 pages selected from the Escapist archives, presented as a loving retrospective on the character.
Pseudo-nostalgia (the longing for a past which you did not experience) is apparently an already established concept. This should not surprise anyone who has been influenced by their parents’ taste in music or has shopped at any clothing chain store. Yet, it is always an odd experience seeing someone in bellbottoms flashing a peace sign or a leather jacket and green hair. Do those people truly long for a lost life? Do they just want to live in a world apart? Do they honestly think they look good when so many others did not?
Pseudo-nostalgia is a weird and treacherous thing. Where one person sees harmless fun, another is insulted. Is it artistic creativity or game play? If you’re unaware that the entire thing is false, then can you still enjoy the experience? If the creation has no basis in reality, what exactly is the point? The point is that pseudo-nostalgia is safe. And I think that is what pseudo-nostalgia is truly about. It turns on the pleasures of lost youth. It provides all the comfort of real nostalgia without the nasty aftertaste and bloated sensation that accompanies the discovery that you’re nostalgic for something that was horrible in reality.
Much of Alan Moore’s current output turns on pseudo-nostalgia. The same could be said of the Ultimate line put out by Marvel. Superman is practically the embodiment of the concept. In some sense, the entire comics industry turns on actual nostalgia as it relies on adults to buy comics written for adolescents.
He is a comic book dilettante which is not a problem. Any adult who still reads comic books probably has a few other fish to fry. Hopefully they’re shuffling in a newspaper or a non-comic-book-based movie every now and then. Only pre-adolescence provided anyone the blinders necessary to be a comic book obsessive.
And yet I really liked this comic book. The stories were entertaining. The hero felt different enough that I remained interested. I worried at the right times. And I enjoyed the prose sections which elaborated the history of the character. And I hope it’s okay. I did not come out of it with that gnawing sense that Chabon is hiding the ball and going to turn on me as a reader. I did not feel insulted for being entertained. I liked the art a great deal- consistently enough that I don’t feel any need to single out a particular artist for kudos. My only hope is that Chabon’s quarterly concern does not devolve into a series of in-jokes and poor pacing. But that’s for another review on another day.
It’s worth noting that the price on this book is steep, but it works out to the same per page price as every other pamphlet sold in this expensive hobby.
March, 2004