Ramblings on libraries and life upon the wicked stage

What do a drunken ex-cop, a social crusader with no face, the ruler of a Middle Eastern nation, a grieving detective, a man from the future and a moral scientist have in common?  52, that’s what.  Read on… 

I am a comic geek.  I try to appear terribly literary and cultured, trotting off to Shakespeare plays and reading eclectic European novels from time to time, but I also have a fondness for the adventures of people with fantastical powers and costumes.  Greek gods are the acceptable face of this joy, super-heroes not so acceptable to the world at large.  And do you know what?  I don’t care!  They’re often silly, often soapy, often stretch the suspension of disbelief to breaking point and beyond, but I like comics (both super-heroic and otherwise) and I don’t need to justify it.

Instead, I shall witter briefly about 52, one of my current most-anticipated reads.  I’ve mentioned it before, as it is the comic where the ludicrously controversial Batwoman is to make her debut.  52 is a real-time comic, or as real-time as it can get (like 24).  An issue comes out each week, and each covers a week of time, so by the end, a year will have gone by in the ‘DC Universe’.  The comic features oodles of characters, but focuses on the 6 second-string folk I listed in the first paragraph, with sidebars on others such as a depressed roboticist and a lost space-farer seeking his way home.  Their stories are mostly separate, but occasionally overlap (like Lost).  It really is quite unlike anything else attempted in comics before.  It’s a grand experiment and a big risk that could have been either wonderful or terrible.

Thus far, eight weeks in, it’s wonderful, in my view.  It’s written by committee, but you’d never know it, and the main characters are better developed than most denizens of the fists and spandex world.  Few of them are admirable, but they are all intriguing.  How far will Black Adam, ruler of Kahndaq, go to keep his country safe?  Has someone really found a way to bring Ralph Dibny’s beloved wife back from the dead?  How low can Booster Gold or Renee Montoya sink?  And as Dr Irons gains super-powers, how does this affect his relationship with his niece?  There are hints of big super-heroic splashy things to come, and there have been some ‘whoa’ moments, but it’s mostly about the characters, giving us a perspective on the world of superheroes that I’d like to see more of. 

What I particularly like is the glimpses of what it’s like to live alongside the larger-than-life heroes and villains of the world.  Montoya is a refugee from one of my favourite comics, Gotham Central, a recently-cancelled series about the Gotham City police force, where Batman was at best a supporting character.  This sort of thing is great.  I like real people looking in on the world of near-gods, which is probably why I enjoyed the recent Doctor Who episode, ‘Love and Monsters’ with Marc Warren, so much.  Real people, with real drama, with the extraordinary people as catalyst.

52 is a great experiment, and at the moment I’m loving it.  A great high-concept, thus far executed really well.  It won’t be collected into bookshelf-sized volumes until it finishes next May, but it’s a great read.  It probably wont turn you on to comics if you don’t like the things (Strangers in Paradise, Fables or Sandman are much more likely bets for that), but in its own way, it’s something a bit different, and things being a bit different tends to make me happy.  I assume I’m not the only one.