Matt's Blog

In reading the first Showcase volume of Phantom Stranger stories, I quickly fell in love with the character of Dr. 13. The guy’s a skeptic, which is fine and good, except that he’s a skeptic who on a daily basis finds his face rubbed in extreme incidents of the supernatural. If EVERY SINGLE DAY you found yourself hanging out with this creepy dude in a fedora and a cape, encountering witches and ghosts and goblins at every turn, wouldn’t you reconsider your skeptical view of such things?

All this is the long way of saying that I was superexcited to finally read Doctor Thirteen: Architecture & Morality yesterday, Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang’s own Dr. 13 story, and a well-publicized satire of the state of the DC universe and of comics storytelling in the modern age.

My impressions? It was good, but not great; that may change someday when I re-read it. It’s so short and dense that I’m tempted to re-read it this weekend, in fact. Overall, it seemed as though Azzarello was trying harder to give meaning to this goofy story than the story itself deserved; there’s some really striking moments of layered depth & commentary, but then there’s whole passages where you can tell he’s saying SOMETHING beyond the plot, but you have no real idea what it is, and not many clues to point you in the right direction. Also, as for that plot, it’s basically a series of disjointed fight scenes that find 13, his daughter Traci, and a random cast of nth-stringer DC characters fighting amongst themselves before chasing down the Architects, Azzarello’s smart-ass imagining of Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, and Grant Morrison.

Which ends up being a copout, really; he doesn’t come out and name these four, nor does Chiang really caricature them vividly in the artwork. It’s sorta too sly for anyone but the fan who’s done the research prior to reading, and that shuts out a whole level of meaning to the story to anyone but the most die-hard fanboy readers.

And that’s probably the point, at the end of the day. This is a book by comic fans, for comic fans, offering direct and pointed commentary on the state of mainstream superhero comics. In that sense, it holds up a little better as a piece of commentary than it does as a story with dimensional characters, although like I said, it has moments.

Art-wise, Cliff Chiang is just an absolute drop-dead genius and I love him in a way that is unhealthy.