Faster than a DC Bullet: Jessica Jones, Part III: The Pulse: Thin Air

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2004 (contents: 2004)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2012

The Pulse: Thin Air

Writer: Brian Michael Bendis

Penciler: Mark Bagley

Inker: Scott Hanna
Colorists: Peter Pantazis with Brian Reber
Letterer: Cory Petit

The end of Alias wasn't the end of Jessica Jones; she soon became one of the central characters of another Brian Michael Bendis series, The Pulse, about the writers at the Daily Bugle, especially those in a special section focusing on superheroes.  (Jessica is there to investigate, though not write.)  This volume sees the Daily Bugle staff investigating the death of one of their own.

It's not very interesting.  I don't quite know why, but nothing the characters did ever grabbed me.  The mystery is pathetic.  There's no resonance to this.  Whereas Alias used the question "What would the Marvel Universe look like to a private investigator?" to say something very interesting about powerlessness, The Pulse asks "What would the Marvel Universe look like to newspaper reporters?" and discovers that the answer is "Exactly the same."  The subversion of the genre tells us nothing of interest.

And the reason I picked up the book, Jessica Jones herself, is weirdly off.  I don't think it's the dialogue, as the same guy wrote both Alias and The Pulse, but it might be, as The Pulse is paced much more like a conventional superhero comic; there's no awkward six-page halting conversations here.  It probably doesn't help that, now that she's pregnant, all Jessica does is worry about her unborn child.  I don't doubt that being pregnant would change her, but it's basically her only personality attribute here.  Worse, Michael Gaydos has been replaced by Mark Bagley, who has what is probably a decent style for a superhero comic, but is a complete mismatch for one about Jessica Jones.  As when Takeshi Miyazawa left Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, her body language is just wrong, and it makes all the dialogue seem off; she doesn't move the way Jessica moves or make the faces that Jessica makes.  Given time I might get used to it, but with only five issues collected in this thin volume, it's time I don't have.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Jessica Jones, Part II: Alias: Ultimate Collection, Book 2

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2010 (contents: 2003)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2012

Alias: Ultimate Collection, Book 2

Writer: Brian Michael Bendis

Art: Michael Gaydos (with Mark Bagley, Al Vey & Art Thibert and Rick Mays)

Colors: Matt Hollingsworth (with Dean White)
Letters: Cory Petit (with Richard Starkings & Wes Abbott and Jason Levine)

The second volume of Alias continues the excellence of the first. It continues Jessica Jones's investigations of the dark underbelly of the Marvel Universe, as she looks into the disappearance of one of the many superheroes known as Spider-Woman... who just happens to be the adopted daughter of J. Jonah Jameson. Jameson is always a great character, and he's even greater when he's legitimately worried about something. I would say that this story is my favorite of Alias's "cases," except that it's tied with the Rick Jones and runaway mutant cases in the first volume. (I do love those moments where we see Jessica's very awkward way of flying.)

As good as the first half of the book is, the second is even better. Intending to read just one chapter before I went to bed, I read all of them-- and when she read the book, my wife did the same thing! Here, we finally learn the "secret origin" of Jessica Jones. She went to Midtown High with Peter Parker, which maybe stretched credulity a bit, but as always I like the way that Bendis and Gaydos juxtapose Jessica's miserable life against superheroics. Part of the story is drawn in the style of Steve Ditko, and Bendis's naturalistic dialogue is put right alongside all-caps Stan Lee proclamatory stuff. Jessica says things like "I can't believe how badly I screwed that up" at the same time that a Midtown student says, "SAY, GANG! WE NEED ONE MORE GUY FOR THE DANCE! HOW ABOUT PETER PARKER OVER THERE?" I especially like it when Jessica calls Flash Thompson "a fucking repressed dickhead retard" and Peter replies, "I wouldn't put it in those words exactly."

As always, putting Jessica's life next to these other ones shows how terrible her life is. The secret origin starts with her getting a car crash, and things only get worse from there, as we explore Jessica's past and see how what's happened then relates to her present. It's great, terrifying stuff. Poor, poor Jessica.

As good as it is, though, there are three things I don't like about the ending. (YES, THIS PARAGRAPH HAS SPOILERS IN IT.) The first is that Jessica's "archnemesis," the Purple Man, thinks that he's a character in a comic book. It's too knowing, and I don't think it adds anything to the story. We already get when Bendis and Gaydos are doing if we're paying attention. The second is that when Jessica defeats the Purple Man because Jean Grey installed a psychic trigger in her all those years ago. That's it? Lame. Too easy. The third is Jessica's sudden decision that she loves Luke Cage, who we've seen on a total of three previous occasions this entire series. Really? Why? I just don't see what exists between them.

Aside from that stuff, though, Alias's second book is just as good, if not better, than the first. Good dialogue from Bendis and great art from Gaydos give us a gripping examination of what it means to be powerless-- and the lengths to which people will go to overcome that feeling.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Jessica Jones, Part I: Alias: Ultimate Collection, Book 1

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2009 (contents: 2001-02)
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2012

Alias: Ultimate Collection, Book 1

Writer: Brian Michael Bendis

Art: Michael Gaydos (with Bill Sienkiewicz, David Mack and Mark Bagley & Rodney Ramos)

Colors: Matt Hollingsworth
Letters: Richard Starkings & Wes Abbott, Oscar Gongora & Jason Levine

Not only have I read a lot of superhero stories by this point, I've read a lot of "deconstructions" of superhero stories, stories where the tropes of superhero stories are turned on their head in some way. Sometimes this is done to make a clever point (i.e., Watchmen), but sometimes you wonder why the writer bothered. "Oh, you've proved that it would suck to be a cop in a world full of superheroes. Congratulations, so has everyone else who's written this story."

What differentiates a good deconstruction from a bad one, I think, is doing more than simply subverting a genre convention, but understanding what a genre means. Alias is, thankfully, one such book. It stars Jessica Jones, a former superhero, now a private investigator, and her cases take her into the dark underbelly of the Marvel Universe, as she crosses paths with Daredevil, Captain America, Ms. Marvel, and J. Jonah Jameson. But why bother showing what the Marvel Universe would look like from this perspective?

What writer Brian Michael Bendis understands is that the superhero story is a power fantasy-- and Alias is a story about powerlessness. It tells the tales of people who were superheroes, or can't be superheroes, or have had brushes with superheroes, and contrasts the superheroes against their sheer inability to do anything whatsoever. Jessica Jones is a woman with low self-confidence who very rarely gets what she wants. Nothing can exacerbate the feeling that you can't control your own life like putting you next to people whose lives are magnificent. There are a few sequences in this book where Jessica tries to get in contact with the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, and she can't even get past the phone menu or the receptionists. She's completely powerless.

In her cases, she encounters a number of others trying to find power of various sorts: politicians, an ex-sidekick, a teenage runaway who might be a mutant. They're decent mysteries, but they're even better explorations of what it's like to amount to nothing, and what you might do to amount to something, anything. I particularly enjoyed the story where Jessica was trying to track down Rick Jones, who has been a sidekick to Captain Marvel, the Hulk, and Captain America at various times, which presented a very funny flip-side to the superhero archetype:

"This fucking guy doesn't shut up about the -- about the fucking -- what is it?"

"Kree..."

"Kree-Skull War. And I have no idea what the fuck a Kree-Skull War is! Some big space war and he saved the planet and shit."

And of course, we're all powerless, right? At least that's what Bendis convinces me of by the time that the first volume of Alias is over. He's used the superhero genre to say something interesting and with thematic depth, and though I like a story where Superman-2 fights the Anti-Monitor just as much as the next guy, I like this a whole lot, too.

Bendis is aided in his "deconstruction" by the excellent artwork of Michael Gaydos. I mean, serious excellent. Gaydos as a very realistic style, suited to a grounded story like this, but what's best of all is Gaydos's masterful command of facial expressions. You always know exactly how Jessica (and all the other characters) are thinking and feeling. The art and dialogue move slow at times; there are two-page spreads that include 34 panels, continuously flipping back and forth between two characters. You really feel immersed in a scene and a conversation.

There's a lot of nice, little touches too, and big ones. I like Jessica's not-quite-trusting relationship with Ms. Marvel, and her own "sidekick," and her brewing relationship with nt Man, and every line of dialogue spouted by J. Jonah Jameson (seriously, give that man his own series).

Not to mention that it is the only superhero comic I have ever read where someone sits on the toilet.