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THEY DON’T MAKE THEM ANYMORE

Chris Buse (RIP)

When Fatale taught me, you can take the long way home”¦ or you can get to escape.

There is this wonderful line in Watchmen by Alan Moore: “American Love; like coke in green bottles”¦ they don“t make it anymore.”“ What is expressed through the character of Rorschach is a wistful longing for something that was made once, but which simply is not longer made. Yet it is worth remembering. It implies that since you remember this so clearly, it must have been great, much better than the versions made today. What is sold to you is simply not the genuine article anymore, but a variation. There is even a word for this longing. It is called nostalgia. And contrary to what Don Draper tells you in his Kodak sales pitch, no, nostalgia does not mean “a pain from an old wound”“. It is more what another ad executive experiences, Martin Sloan in the now classic The Twilight Zone episode Walking Distance. Nostalgia is the desire to go home again combined with the question “But should you really want to go home?”“. Still ever so often, we will compare the thing we know (or think we know) to something new. And for the latter the former ultimately becomes the yardstick it can never measure up to. Even more so, every comic fan possesses the time machine Don Draper is talking about in his sales pitch. We have our old books, and these are safely bagged and boarded waiting for us to be re-read and re-experienced again. These will always be the classics, sealed almost airtight against the passing of time.

Yes, we can go home! I have been home many times like Martin Sloan, to the magical world in my youth when all comic books were great. And even though I am relatively new to Twitter, you can go back and find many tweets of mine in which I will proclaim, whenever the topic is old comic books, you know the ones by Stan, Jack and Roy from those Halcyon Days of the near mystical Bullpen: “I remember reading those as a child. Man, they are still great!”“ Or the somewhat tempered: “They still hold up pretty well.”“ I have also been to many concerts where I have been shouting with the audience: “Play one of your old hits, those were great!”“ Yes, those old hits were great, and nothing can touch those old comic books not even time itself. Like Rorschach and many other fans at my age I am very vocal in saying: “They simply don“t make them anymore like these old books (fill in a certain period of time dependent on your age or your personal preference. For some it is the 1960s, for others the 1970s or the 1980s).”“ And for us fans this is not limited to the quality of the books (which is subjective anyway), but the type of stories we want to read. Stories that were bright and optimistic and which presented us with a hero we could root for.

Ironically, when in the late 70s and early 80s comic books once again embraced a more optimistic tone, I slowly began losing interest in them. Except for a few titles, there was a sameness to them, a uniformity in the way they looked and in the scenarios that played out between their covers. Even though it seemed that Crisis on Infinite Earths, the DC Reboot that followed it, the early Vertigo books and Watchmen did change the landscape of comic books forever, I clearly had grown out of comics. It was time to grow up like my heroes hadn“t or couldn“t, and to go to college. I sold my collection. Like generations of readers before me, I never looked back. Like Peter Parker on the iconic cover for Amazing Spider-Man #50.

I missed out on revolution that was Image Comics. Whenever I saw comics from Image, they felt strange to me, very different from the comic books I had grown up with. They were clearly targeting a different generation of readers, the generation of loud 90s kids. Rightfully so! Of course, these new readers had no idea how great comic books used to be when we were growing up. Nor did the new readers seem to care. To somebody who is not invested in comic books this seems very normal. You grow out of things you like when you are younger and the medium changes to embrace the tastes of a new audience. This is not different from television. Shows, that appeal to us when we are kids, are not the ones we embrace as we grow older. Except you keep on watching television, especially today when there are many types of shows to choose from. But back in the 90s, this was not how the story went. These new books were in large number bought by speculators who were duped into believing that these would be as valuable as the old classics were down the road. Moms bought them assuming they would pay the college tuition for their kids a few years later. Well, of course they would not. The comic book market nearly collapsed.

Most of these new readers left with the speculators. Who remained, those who would save the industry from itself, were the older readers and lapsed readers who slowly came back into comic books as I did. And of course, we would compare the new books to those from our childhood. And whenever we came across new readers we would educate them. “You like these? Have you looked at THOSE? They don“t make them like this anymore. Sure, the new books are ok, but there is so much wrong with them!”“

So, in the mid-2000s I was back into comics. It just happened. Like that one time I had found a cigarette after a party and I was back into smoking. It did take some adjusting and catching up however. Some characters I had encountered decades earlier had drastically changed and their backstory still got even more convoluted. I managed. I also discovered that my tastes had not changed from when I had stopped reading comics in the late 80s. Identity Crisis by novelist Brad Meltzer, more than any other book, had brought me back to the four-colored world and while I still held the old classics in high regard, I was also looking for something that challenged the status quo in a way that books like Watchmen did in the 80s.

Cut to 2012 when to celebrate their 20th anniversary, Image Comics released three new series, one of which was Fatale. I checked out the books from Image once I had returned to comics of course. Their books had evolved from the books I had on occasion spotted in the wild in the 90s, yet these new ones did not feel like must reads still. I was back reading the superhero comic books I knew and did not stray away from what you would call the mainstream. I decided to give these three books a shot. I was mainly interested in Fatale. The premise sounded interesting and even though at that time I was unfamiliar with the artist of this series, Sean Phillips, I very much loved the writer, Ed Brubaker whose work on Daredevil and Captain America was fantastic I thought. Fatale would change my outlook on comics once again.

Fatale starts with a funeral. The first issue of Watchmen I ever read (#2 with the quote by Rorschach), also starts with a funeral in the rain. Both issues are about demons from the past haunting characters in present day. While in Moore“s work the rain never stops, in Fatale, the rain stops on the second page, the moment our two lead characters met. While Watchmen is about legacy, Fatale is about continuation. On its opening page Watchmen # 2 features a daughter who followed into her mother“s footsteps. Fatale introduces us to its female protagonist as she refers to the past and the story of her grandmother. What Josephine, our heroine in Fatale, refers to however, is not her grandmother“s life, but her own. Josephine is an immortal. She does not live vicariously through past lives or tries to differentiate herself from those who came before her, like Laurie Jupiter does in Watchmen. The lead of Fatale does not carry a Roman numerical to denote her heritage while devaluating her own uniqueness at the same time. Laurie Jupiter can never be the green coke bottle that her mother was. She can never be as good as the original.

Josephine is unique, which however is a burden in a world that values the past. A world in which all that once was seems so much brighter, so much more genuine, and in which all that is, seems like a cheap recreation. Everything is designed to be like something that came before. The past however ages, even though like Sally Jupiter, Laurie“s mother, we are trying to hide the wrinkles that come with getting older. Clearly, we want to do that.

There can never be something as great as in the past, this cherished place we want to go back to. This place in our childhood we want to protect and to live in again. This seems to be true for our comic book heroes and heroines created many decades earlier. Like Sally was shaping her daughter in her own ideal, we want these characters to remain unchanged. As saviors of the comics industry and longtime readers, we feel that the characters belong to us. Don“t they? We have a history with these characters. But these days, with every new creative team coming in, bend on changing things up, we don“t recognize them any longer. And they keep on dying constantly. What is up with that anyway other than this being another cash grab from the Big Two. With our attachment to these characters come certain expectations. And why not? We are the fans, the customers. And should you need further proof that it makes no sense to mess with characters, look no further than Before Watchmen, published in the same year when Fatale started, DC“s ill-advised attempt to continue the world laid out perfectly by Moore and Dave Gibbons. How dare they? We want these characters treated with respect. Maybe rightfully so.

Nostalgia is not only longing for a past that seemed better, but for a past that seemed less complicated. It is easy to deconstruct the first issue of Fatale and the series overall with a view to what is going on in the world right now. There is an apparent sociological message on display, and aren“t the gender politics too obvious to ignore? Our heroine who never ages can manipulate men easily, and thus leaves them but wrecked in her wake. Our hero Nicolas Lash is wounded in the very first issue, becoming less of a man like Jake Barnes in Hemingway“s The Sun Also Rises. Were our old comic books ever this political and this complicated? But Nicolas is not made impotent. He is told to expect phantom pains from the limb he has just lost, the ghost of what once was calling out to him, this lingering pain from an old wound. With the past calling out to him, he examines what completeness means, and like the other men Jo has met in her many years of seemingly eternal youth, Nick Lash is now obsessed with her. He is now the hero with a thousand faces and his quest for Jo becomes his hero“s journey. He searches for her in the past by rummaging through old books and manuscripts, thus he also becomes obsessed with the past.

At the end of the series, both Josephine and Nick find closure. No longer an immortal and having aged for the first time in many years, Jo welcomes the future and the changes it brings. Nick however cannot leave the past behind. A past Nick is reminded of by the phantom pains he was told to expect. While Jo is embracing the future, a future she has been travelling towards throughout the whole series, Nicolas remains forever trapped in the past, his mind being completely shut off to any change or experience. All this is possible, because this is a limited series. In this format, characters are allowed to transform. By their own nature as characters that constantly need to continue their adventures, superheroes cannot complete their journey. They simply cannot age (not really) or even transcend their mission statement.

They are forever locked in amber it seems. And don“t we want them to be just that? Forever staging the same fights, we enjoyed seeing them in during our childhood. We appreciate writers that subscribe very clearly to our sense of nostalgia and are annoyed, whenever we see these characters get written away from the way they were. But in doing so, whatever comes after the magical point in time when our heroes were at their best, in our mind, can never be as great as what has come before. They can never grow beyond their past glory. Like Nick, they are shut off from any real change, forever trapped in the past.

In Walking Distance, Martin Sloan is allowed to go home once again as an adult. Home to the magical world that once was during his childhood. When he does so, in this world of the past he encounters the younger version of himself on whom, by accident, he inflicts a wound. An injury to the leg not unlike the wound Nicolas experiences in Fatale. The wound is now part of Martin“s history, also as an adult, and it becomes a constant reminder, that yes, you can remember a better past, but you cannot live there. And there you have the lesson, in Rod Serling“s words, that Martin Sloan learns when going home:

“Martin Sloan […] Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives ”“ trying to go home again. And also like all men perhaps there’ll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he’ll look up from what he’s doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there’ll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he’ll smile then too because he’ll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man’s mind […]”“

No, they don“t make them anymore. Things like coke in green bottles or the comic books that once were great. But these are available to us, bagged and boarded. Why not let our heroes and heroines escape for once and we with them, and embark on a journey? Perhaps we will find a new generation of readers to whom this newer incarnation of the green coke bottle will become the genuine article, the new classic.

There is a choice in this. For the medium and for the reader. At the end of Fatale, Josephine reflects on what has happened: “And she thinks she“s the lucky one, not Nick. Because she got to escape.”“

October 2018

Chris Buse

Follow me on Twitter: @buse_chris

Author Profile

Chris Buse (RIP)
A comic book reader since 1972. When he is not reading or writing about the books he loves or is listening to The Twilight Sad, you can find Chris at his consulting company in Germany... drinking damn good coffee. Also a proud member of the ICC (International Comics Collective) Podcast with Al Mega and Dave Elliott.
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