Matt Seneca returned from his French vacation with a stack of comics. I know they call them something different over there, but i’m not over there, am I? Let’s see what he thought!
Great cartoonists get weirder as they get older; as a general rule they stop expanding the scope of their work and drill down into old obsessions, attempting to answer the few fundamental questions that hindsight makes obvious they’ve been asking all along. Like Herriman or Ditko or Alan Moore, Moebius became more idiosyncratic and introspective with age, often seemingly in search only of himself.
Weapon X isn’t the only superhero comic to tear down its protagonist’s heroic facade or even to indict its readers for believing in that image – though it is one whose force and quality surpasses all but the top rank of stories to do so.
What can you learn from the comics found at a going-out-of-business sale? If you’re Matt Seneca, the answer is a whole hell of a lot.
Matt Seneca’s new column for the Journal documents what he’s read so far this year–the good, the great, the bad & The Authority.
