… This brings us, at last, to Topic B: the SPOILERY realm of New Avengers (not New Avengers/Transformers, I’m afraid). There’s one big logical flaw in this issue, which is that the team concludes on the basis of Elektra’s corpse being a Skrull that there’s a full-scale Skrull invasion on. And we know from all the "extratextual" stuff going on – on Newsarama and Wizard Universe and so forth – that there actually is a Skrull "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" scenario happening. (That also makes the "thought balloon" trick in Mighty Avengers make a lot of sense; the only way we can know particular characters aren’t Skrulls is if we can read their minds, which through the magic of comics we can!) Still, it would’ve been just as reasonable for the team to conclude that a Skrull had replaced the dead Elektra half an hour before. That would invalidate this whole story’s premise, of course…

For that matter, the "we can’t go public about the alien invasion because everyone would think it was just a hoax" business doesn’t hold water in the Marvel universe, where everybody knows about the Skrulls already and there’s an alien ship shaped like a big rock hovering over Manhattan in half the comics published this month. But what Bendis is particularly good at is character work, and there’s a lot of it this time. I love Luke and Danny not talking to each other, Peter dealing with his terror by wisecracking and acting on his usual responsibility trip ("I did what I could!" – why having a few pounds of something sticky on the front of the plane would be helpful isn’t clear, but hey), Wolverine pointing the finger at himself along with everyone else.

My biggest reservation about this storyline is that it depends on a deep, deep knowledge of Marvel continuity to make sense, despite all the expository dialogue in the first half of this issue.
(I am fairly sure that the chatter about Jessica not breastfeeding the Nameless Skrull-Baby is somehow related to the Skrulls/milk calculus in this miniseries a mere twelve years ago.) Here’s a question for you, though: should it be a baseline assumption that a New Avengers reader should be willing to do some research on the Internet to make sense of the plot of #32 – not the subtext, but literally what the characters are talking about? If not, does that make her a "bad reader"?

Maybe the Wikipedia entry on Skrulls will help – up to and including a picture of the dead Skrullektra. (As I understand it, the Skrull/milk thing has to do with Reed Richards tricking Skrulls into turning themselves into cows; which, down the road, results in Mad Skrull Disease. Shouldn’t eat ground-up shape-changers.)

Onwards:

Like you, I have significant problems interpreting the conclusion of the story, but, as if we’re reading a fragment of Hamlet, Act II (why is that kid so bitchy?!?), we’re dealing with incomplete information. I presume Spider-Woman’s motivation will become clear in a future issue, but for now, we’re left with the information on the page, and here’s what makes interpretation so difficult …

The truth is … let’s roll tape. If you study 19th Century representations of Shakespearean players you encounter for example, Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of J.P. Kemble, as Hamlet. (Click for larger.)

What is less well-known is that, seconds earlier, another portrait painter snapped a strikingly different image of the famous actor:

I have been doing a great deal of research: into the emergence of Elizabethan drama out of much more recent four-color comic forms; into costume styles for super-powered performers. Suffice it to say that most Shakespearean actors, as recently as the 19th Century, were Skrulls. As players, they were valued for the versatile ease with which they could inhabit and also double roles. In cases of so-called Super-Skrulls, quadrupling of roles was possible, not just serially but simultaneously: one performer as Macbeth (one arm), Hamlet (the other), Othello and Lear (the legs). George Bernard Shaw says something witty and cutting about this once popular practice, but I’ve forgotten the joke.

The question, really, is whether Shakespeare’s characters are Skrulls. To be sure, there is Yorick – the following illustration from the first folio testifies eloquently (click for larger):

The severe, anatomic naturalism – of Hamlet, of course; but also the tell-tale quadricleft jawbone – leaves little room for doubt. But what of Hamlet?  (He looks and dresses normally, but so did Elektra. So does Spider-Woman.)

It would be another generation, after Shakespeare, before Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Skrull brought the aliens ‘out of the closet’, albeit not into full cultural acceptance. Yet recent scholarly work suggest audiences in Shakespeare’s day would have recognized, in Gertrude’s lament concerning "my too much changed son," a clear reference to the protagonist’s shape-changing abilities. In the 19th Century, in The Skrullhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, Mary Cowden Clarke expanded the range of possibilities: was Ophelia a skrull? (Tom Stoppard’s Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Skrulls is but the most recent, admittedly speculative entry in this line.) Possibly Dryden bears the responsibility for amnesia that sets in during the Restoration period and after, from which we have not recovered today. In the famous preface to his Troilus and Cressida we read: "The chief persons, who give name to the tragedy, are left alive: Cressida is a Skrull, and is not punished. Yet, after all, because the play was Shakespear’s, and that there appear in some places of it the admirable genius of the author. I undertook to remove the heap of rubbish under which many excellent thoughts lay wholly buried."

What of other authors? Now that the New Historicism is waning in prestige, the New Skrullicism is making impressive advances. (I think it would be difficult to be hired out of an English department today without some familiarity.) The French have Proust. Americanists seem to have settled on the figure of Twain. In Was Huck A Skrull?: Mark Twain and Skrull-American Voices [amazon], Shelley Fisher Fishkin argues that Twain may have been drawing on his childhood friendship with a ‘signifying’ Skrull named Jerry. Of course in a sense this is not new: in 1948, Leslie Fiedler published "Come Back to the Rift Agin’, Huck Honey," in Partisan Review. If Huck and Jim aren’t Skrulls, how did they build that Cosmic Cube? Fielder is, of course a polarizing figure – one of the first to touch on sexual and extraterrestrial issues in American letters, in the 20th Century. (See his, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Skrull; also, The Last Skrull in America.) Skrulls are, the New Skrullicists argue, ‘resonant figments’, and so they would seem to be.

What is the take-away moral? In a recent Brainiac blog entry, Josh Glenn twits Anthony Lane for his SF illiteracy. I know Glenn would agree with me this is just the tip of a huge iceberg of cultural illiteracy, on which a Titanic of ‘the best that has been thought and said’ is bearing down, with critics arranging the deckchairs and just a few prescient fanboys so much as noticing what looms up out of the fog. Turning back to our starting point, New Avengers #32:

In many ways, to be an ideal reader of a Marvel comic book is to be totally aware of every comic book story ever, while simultaneously being able to forget about any individual issue that doesn’t correspond to the current direction of the Grand Marvel Narrative. What a weird way to tell a story!

Yet all stories work that way. Very little literature (great or otherwise) is intelligible, outside the framework provided by the Marvel Universe. Most great literature is based on, drawn from – inhabited by, if not written by – inhabitants of that universe.

If you are interested in doing research on this sort of thing, Bendis’ best work is on Powers, which I have recommended before. But his run on Daredevil is likewise top-notch stuff. For some strange reason, Bendis seems to write better when he isn’t cranking out, like, four books a month. If you are just looking to improve yourself without spending a lot of money, sadly that Simpsons sale is over. But Amazon is having another, a ‘Ginormous Animation Sale’. Plus superheroes. Bunch of stuff 50% off – Cowboy Bebop; all the X-Men films; Ghost in the Shell; Adult Swim. There’s also a 60% off sale with a couple things – unrated version Orgazmo; Eternal Sunshine (surely we own it already); the first season of Kojak. Eh. Hey! Animal House (double secret probation edition). Plus the Ingmar Bergman Collection – six films! – marked down to only 50 bucks! That’s value, even if it doesn’t include Wild Skrullberries.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

But, in honor of this panel from Tales of Woodsman Pete, with full particulars [highly recommended!] …

… I thought I would recommend a few good comics about people with powers.

OK, first things first: clearly, the worst superhero comic – worst hero ever – is Stardust (thanks, Kip). You really want to click that Stardust link. You really do. I only own one issue of Stardust, handsomely reprinted in coffee table-worthy format: Art Out of Time: unknown comic visionaries, 1900-1969 [amazon]. (Because sometimes the best argument for insider art is outsider art. Whew.)

But it is fairly awesome that, in response to Fifth Column, anti-American activity, Stardust forms … a Sixth Column:

Now that the worst is over: if you are the sort who even might like the whole capes-and-tights thing, you should check out Runaways, vol. 1 (and 2 & 3) [amazon].

I know, I know, vol. 1 is sold out right now. Well, let that be a lesson. Just a couple months ago I was going to recommend the Alias Omnibus, a real bargain. Now it’s out of print. (But still take my advice and buy the individual slices 1 & 2 and so forth.)

Second, you should check out Invincible, vol. 1 [amazon].

Without going into details, what Runaways and Invincible have in common is basically that Joss Whedon fantastic fiction crammed into teenage-shaped problems thing, if you like that kind of thing. Cosmic catastrophe in high school. The Runaways are a bunch of kids who realize their parents are supervillains and … runaway. The story arc collected in volume 1 proves to have a most wickedly clever conclusion. (Whedon, by the by, is doing a run of issues.)

Invincible is a kid who’s invincible … but, like the Runaways: family issues.

(I see young Matt Y. is recommending Powers. This is the correct course of action, just the sort of thing I’m talking about. I was on that months ago. I am rather proud of myself for having blogged at CT about both Brian Michael Bendis (comic author) and Bendis, the Thracean huntress-goddess. Perhaps it is no coincidence: I also have nice cartoons of Bendis – the goddess – that I use in my lectures. I’ll show you those another day.)

And let me take this opportunity to continue my occasional series of comics recommendations. In this thread, everyone piped up with faves, but no one mentioned Powers, by Bendis and Oeming. It’s more or less a cop procedural, with the protagonists as ordinary human officers responsible for investigating ‘Powers’-related crimes. You can imagine how that might get amusing. The hard-boiled dialogue is just great. And, in fact, you can read the entire first story arc – Who Killed Retro Girl? – here. (The navigation is a bit confusing. Most of the apparent links are just for jokey decoration. Click on the little ‘click here’ button in the Retro Girl box at the top. That takes you here. Then click the small, ochre ‘full daily page archive’ button on the left. Then pull down the little pull-down thingy to start at the beginning, rather than with today’s offering – which is p. 110. Whew! Now you just keep clicking ‘next’ through all 110 pages. You probably would have figured that out yourself.) Some of the pages are more full-featured, with links to pages of the original script, sketches and such. For fanboys.

The first year of the series – a whopping 450 pages worth – is available very cheaply: Powers, vol. 1 [amazon]. Good deal.

Can any intrepid classicists get me a source for the Cephalus-as-arms-manufacturer fact?

And another thing. The dialogue opens with Socrates and co. attending the festival of Bendis. Here the wikipedia entry is quite nice – indeed, a model of how this sort of thing can go nicely. Because someone has kindly released into the public domain a high-quality photo of a Bendis statue. Very neat. Go wikicommons! (Since part of Plato’s complaint about the goddess is probably that this peculiarly Athenian, syncretic mash-up of Artemis/Bendis is incoherent – irrational, a democratic ‘coat of many colors’ folly – I think maybe I’ll photoshop a little message on her garment: ‘My followers went to Athens and all I got was this lousy tunic.’)

But I’d like to know more, and – weirdly – there doesn’t seem to be a lot about it. (You’d think there would be a ton of stuff about a goddess, and her festival, which Plato saw fit to use as a symbol at the beginning of only the most-read frickin’ philosophy book in, like the history of the world. Except for Confucius’ Analects, yeah.)

Specifically, I’d like to know more about this. The link goes to the long abstract for a conference paper which has, apparently, never been published. (I’ve emailed the author. Haven’t heard back.) His thesis seems to be that Athenian civic recognition of the Bendis cult created an odd public policy problem – namely, you could sneak yourself citizenship by joining the cult, then use cult membership as evidence that you had phratry membership, then use phratry membership as citizenship evidence. But citizenship is supposed to be a strict lineal descent thing, not open to just any Thracean-come-lately dock-worker. So A = B and B = C, but A is not supposed to = C. Another way, then, of illustrating the point that Plato was probably bothered by the incoherent, half-rationalized nature of Athenian politics. A truly traditional society wouldn’t be legalistic enough to allow this sort of thing to happen. And a properly-written legal code would prevent it. Instead we get: stupid ol’ democratic Athens. (Anxiety about illegal immigration springs eternal in the souls of grumpy conservatives?) I would very much like to know more. But I’m not getting a lot of love. Any classicists out there have citations to offer?

In other Cult of Bendis news, I recently finished House of M, vol. 1. I find all these syncretic messings about with Marvel theology to be a bit disorienting. But this is funny (but it contains poop jokes about the origins of ideas, if that offends you.) “You are now entering Marvel Continuity. Population: wtf.” See also (via Farber.)