This is not a manifesto, but rather an attempt to write the kind of comics criticism that I want to read. I’m modeling these posts on the AVClub’s television reviews, specifically on Noel Murray’s writing about LOST, which approaches the show from the perspective that everyone reading the review has seen the episode in question, and that no one is going to base their decision to watch that particular episode on the critic’s opinion. It’s a style of criticism that fits comics well, because most readers have pull lists or subscriptions and are going to buy the new issue of their favorite series regardless of whether a reviewer liked it or not.
So, I’ll host comics cotillions for a few of my favorite titles. I’m going to start small, with just two titles: House of Mystery and Young Liars. If it goes well – i.e. if I like what I have to say – I’ll add Air and Northlanders. Oh, and you know how the AVClub’s television commentary goes live almost immediately after the show airs? I will never post a Comics Cotillion on Wednesday. Probably.
And there will be spoilers. Onward to House of Mystery #11!
Wow, that was certainly a game changing issue! We learn a lot about HoM’s universe in a very short space. Apparently, the shadowy figures who took Rina way back in issue #1 are “a lofty pair” in a rather sinister organization called the Conception, a name whose possibilities excite me endlessly. The Conception wants Rina, I assume, because she’s a pathfinder, someone who can travel between worlds. Just why they want her remains mysterious at this point.
The other big reveal excites me even more. Harry, our redoubtable barkeep and hunky hero, is evidently the force that’s keeping everyone stuck in the House of Mystery. And, of course, we learn this fact just moments before he and Fig – who doesn’t know this important detail – finally sate their desire for each other. The last two panels provide a hell of a cliffhanger: “Fig, I’m in love with you,” Harry says, “I’ve been in love with you for years.”
Years? Fig has only known him for a few days, right?
Whatever Harry’s doing that’s keeping everyone in the House of Mystery can’t be passive. Is he somehow responsible for bringing Fig there? If so, did he bring the others? How does he fit into the fact that the House of Mystery belongs to Fig, that she somehow designed it? I imagine we’ll get the answers to these questions soon, but for now I just want to offer some appreciation for how well crafted this scene is. Fig’s thoughts in these panels draw a powerful connection between architecture and sex: she wants Harry to know her in the way a blind man would have to know a house she designed, “every wall, every arch, every corner by touch.” Harry’s been in this house that Fig designed the longest: he knows it and her so fully. And that’s when the horror of the scene becomes apparent: Fig has let a stranger know her house and herself completely, but she doesn’t know the sinister detail about Harry that we readers know. How will Fig react when she discovers that he's the one trapping her in the House of Mystery?
The short story in this issue is a real winner, too, and more directly tied to the main plot than many of the tales have been. It's a great example of one of the things I love most about the imbeded stories in House of Mystery: "The City in the Space Between" hints that, during the telling, the story takes on a life of it’s own. Fig’s father Peter tells "City" like a history lesson: we learn how the city in the space between came to be, how its social system developed, and why its disenfranchised rose up and overthrew the nobility. But the art tells a more intimate and personal story: we see a young baker fall in love with a noble woman, see him woo her, and ultimately watch as she betrays him to the gendarmes during the revolution which Peter is describing. And yet neither Peter nor his audience give us any sign that they’re aware that the lecture is also a love story. It's an absolutely wonderful use of comics as medium.
I’m not ready to commit to an interpretation of the differences between the story told and the story shown, but I think that one of the ideas that Sturges and his artists are playing with in HoM is the idea that stories, in the telling and in the hearing or reading, become something different, something not entirely in control of the narrator. The last arc featured Miranda, a woman who narrated everything that happened to her, and most of what happened was awful: her life had become a story that she, even as its narrator couldn’t control. Now in this new arc, we’re confronted by this shadowy organization called the Conception, who, for a price, offer to steer your story for you: “And [the Conception] can…change things to make it more to your liking. You want to be rich? Want to be a famous singer? Want to bring your prize pet parrot back from the dead? They can do that, and more,” the administrator Ceorel tells Rina. Why do they have the control that our heroes lack? As I said above, the name ‘Conception’ intrigues me: it points towards the creative moment, the instant in which a story is first conceived, and imply that they are something old, perhaps as old as stories themselves. But – and I don’t think it’s just Watchmen mania making me say this – it also implies something even more sinister lurks behind this group: after all, who conceived the Conception?
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