Mindless Ones

I Am Not a Comics Critic #5: Everywhere I Look It’s A Darkness

December 29th, 2018

Dark Knights Rising: The Wild Hunt #1

Written by Scott Snyder, Grant Morrison, James Tynion IV and Joshua Williamson, drawn by Howard Porter, Jorge Jimenez and Doug Mahnke with Jamie Mendoza

This is a story about a creature – no let’s call it what it is, or at least what it might once of conceived of itself as, a god – trapped in its own creation.

From The Invisibles volume two #4, by Grant Morrison and Phil Jimenenz

Echoes of its own previous compositions haunt the piece like half-forgotten memories of childhood. How else could the story go? The fallen demiurge may no longer be in charge of the story but it’s still a part of it, still conscious, still able to discern its own hand in proceedings.

From Dark Knights: Metal #6, by Scott Snyder, Jonathan Glapion and Greg Capullo

It’s not just the question of who’s in control of the dreaming that’s confusing here though. There’s also the matter of structure. How can a creator – once functionally a god, at least – be expected to handle the notion that they aren’t even part of the main story, that no matter how much of this story is built on their own labour they’re at best a diversion now, a side story, a spin-off?

Everything looks as it should on the surface, mind. The basic template is still in effect, the shape of things recognisable from when the creature-god was last aware of using it, but in this semi-self-contained effort these familiar names – Porter, Jimenez, Mahnke – lack certain counterpoints, their work suffering from the absence of contrasting art styles, clashing moods, different levels of information. Despite the long list of writers and artists involved in the book’s creation the final product is if anything too coherent, to the extent that you find yourself looking for meaning in the differences between this iteration of the story and those that precede it.

The essential narrative techniques are familiar, with the move from the unexpected character showcase to protagonist-free, Grand-Guignol superhero drama echoing the structure of Final Crisis #7 as much as anything. The bank of imagery will be similarly familiar to anyone who has read Final Crisis or Multiversity, post-Beatles psychedelia that has been allowed to curdle in the heat of DC’s perpetual Crisis.

What’s new, then, is the story’s inability to end on its own terms. Having sounded the usual cry of despair, provided what seemed like a hopeful countermelody, then revealed that to by part of a larger symphony of despondence, the creature is unable to turn this into its antithesis.

The heroes appear to escape their untimely end, but their actions are revealed to have been part of the villain’s plan all along:

Of course, the concluding pages tease the reversal but if one seeks it out within the pages of Dark Knights: Metal then one will be confronted with anti-story, anti-information, idea-death:

From Dark Knights: Metal #6, by Scott Snyder, Jonathan Glapion and Greg Capullo

The creator-god’s own stories have hardly been free of such implosions, of course – not even the ever-more-expanded editions of Final Crisis have helped Super-Young Team’s story to complete itself - but here all of the creature’s efforts meet the same fate. Before, even when the connection between what was happening and what might be felt could be somewhat baroque, the process always had a certain shape, an emergent functionality. Not here.

This is what makes Dark Knights Rising: The Wild Hunt #1 a truly hopeless comic in the end: the limits of the creator-god’s poetic gifts are exposed, its capacity to suggest, to communicate, finally overwhelmed by the sheer illogical volume of its combined efforts:

This is a story about a creature – no, let’s call it what it is, or at least what it might once have been, a god – trapped in its own creation.

We live in the future so we can see that there’s a way past this sense of futility, but The Wild Hunt stands as a record of one particular demiurge’s ability to find despair in the heart of seeming triumph, in the moment when its most personal of languages became a recognised regional dialect in comics and had even – finally! – started to be heard in the living rooms of millions.

The Wild Hunt isn’t good comics as such, but it remains a strange and vivid footnote to the ongoing tale of capitalism’s ability to find new worlds of alienation every day.

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