Over at the bloghttp://toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.ca/ they've been discussing Mark Millar as of late. The arguments have been more than convincing that the man is a decent topic for academic investigation, and so I hopped over to the library website to get some books to look at. Well, the first stuff in are the titular Nemesis and Jenny Sparks.
Jenny Sparks, the older book, serves as an after the fact introduction to the members of the Authority. So, it's a prequel episode about how everyone met. It's whatever. The British-y drunkard rebel character ala Constantine doesn't generally have any of my interest. Seeing as that's the protagonist in a nutshell, well there you go. As a personal bit of interest, the artist is John McCrea, and the book came out around 2000-2001, the same time McCrea was pencilling the last story arc of my beloved Superboy series. And I haven't seen him on anything else since. Though he may also have been the "Hitman" guy, so that's a feather in his cap. Not that I'm really a fan of the guys pencils, but where'd he go? Maybe I'm not the only one not a fan, ouch.
The second book is far more interesting, Nemesis. The premise is that of a mostly real world, but bored billionaires are paying for the excitement of being supervillains. Whether or not "Nemesis" is actually planning his own explosive capers or, and given the ending of the book, they're all planned out ahead of time by a shadowy... dude... is not explained. Probably the latter, and I'm just being thick in the head about it.
Tying in to the ideas over at toobusythinking about the thread of Millar's work, and learning about his book "Saviour", a what-if-Superman-was-the-antichrist story, I can't help but wonder about the significance of the shadowy dude at the end. Given the "realism" of the rest of the story, we could take it for granted that this is someone with ridiculous prediction skills, a Xanatos Gambit-er extraordinaire. However, in his final letter sent to the hero-antagonist of the book (as opposed to a villain protagonist, which this book also has) he makes an off the cuff comment about also being a religious man. As with everything in that letter, this line sounded both congenial and menacing. It's an odd thing to add... in fiction, rarely is it the case that someone will talk about being religious just because. I generally find such characters are in a setting where the divine is a central theme and an unquestioned truth, like say it was an angel in a story talking to someone who didn't know he was an angel. He'd give a little wink to the camera as he tells someone that he's "pretty religious".
It's for that reason that I wonder whether or not the shadowy dude is supposed to be a/the devil/antichrist. And then what is THAT trying to say?
Dunno. I'll have to send my queries over to toobusythinking.
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