I hate airports.
I’m off for a day trip for an Important Business Meeting in Burbank, and there’s all of this time to kill. SuperShuttle wanted to pick me up at 4:30 for a 7 AM flight. I told them 5 AM would be more than fine, even allowing for, say, an earthquake. I still got here more than an hour before I really needed to.
Anyway, time to kill, so I type to you, my friends, and I write some reviews (though I’m not certain I’ll POST this until later tonight….) [Which of course you now know I didn’t]– but because I’m in an airport, I don’t have actual access to the comics, so this is from memory.
AVENGERS: CHILDREN’S CRUSADE #1: Here’s what I don’t get: they had a perfectly working franchise going on here a bunch of years ago when this was called “Young Avengers”. There were a bunch of fans for that, and this is the actual continuation of that series, by the same creative team – this is, in effect YA #13. So where’s the sense in ditching the name? Meh, well doesn’t matter – if you liked that, you’ll like this. Drawn well, competently written, and a set of reasonably compelling characters new characters (well, new then, not so much new now, but you know what I mean) – if I didn’t read another issue ever, I wouldn’t die, but I’d rather read this then, say, get a poke in the eye, so that’s like competently GOOD.
BATMAN & ROBIN #13: Words fail me of just how awesome this issue was. But I’m with Gotham’s cops – I like Dick better as Batman, too. EXCELLENT
BATMAN ODYSSEY #1: Uhm… What? Over-rendered finishes, hard to decipher page layouts, oddly out-of-character pieces, and clunky, chunky, crunky exposition. Yeah, didn’t care for this even one tiny bit. AWFUL.
BRIGHTEST DAY THE ATOM SPECIAL: Writing super-hero comics is its own special little trick. Not everyone can do it, and I think that, with a couple of pretty rare examples, that most people who excel at doing “Alternative” comics just don’t have the right muscles or tone to do it. I wish I could tell you this was one of those exceptions, but it really isn’t – too much time and space is devoted to things that don’t matter in a superhero comic, the threat was flaccid, and it doesn’t resolve in anything even slightly approaching an exciting To Be Continued manner that would want me to read the upcoming backups in ADVENTURE. In fact, after reading this, I felt pretty ripped off for my time – I didn’t read to read a retconned origin, there wasn’t a moment’s sympathy for Ryan Choi, and the comic didn’t end, it stopped. Sadly: AWFUL
SCARLET #1: No, no, not THIS one
(though, really, with all the vampire shit going on these days, that might have a chance at selling…)
The way I’d describe the 2010 version is Seattle G20 Protest: The Comic, and while that’s not strictly right, it’s pretty close in tone and spirit. It looks dead-fabulous, and while I’m not really sure I care for the protagonist, there’s definitely a huh-what-happens-next? Thing going on here. I thought it was very nearly VERY GOOD, though #2 will probably more tell the actual tale.
SHADOWLAND #1: There’s a pretty cool Reversal in this, though I’m not really all that sure that the ground had been properly set for THAT in the regular DD issues leading into this. I also wonder how the heck Frank Castle is in this comic, given the events in his own book. Still, it is nice to have a “street level” event, after all of the Everything Changes Forever! comics that event books tend to be…. GOOD.
THOR MIGHTY AVENGER #1: I sold out before I had a chance to read this (more copies on their way this week), but I do have to say that on the flip test it looked GREAT. I strongly don’t think, however, movie or not, that the market can support all of the Thor comics (or Iron Man, for that matter) that Marvel keeps trying to cram out. INCOMPLETE
VENGEANCE OF MOON KNIGHT #10: WTF? Ryp? Drawing Marvel comics? Wow, that’s a big poach from Avatar…! This isn’t much what I want to see him drawing (it is kind of the opposite of subversive), but MK hasn’t looked THIS distinct since the Sienkiewicz days. VERY GOOD for the art; EH for the story… average it out to a high OK?
X-MEN #1: Oh, vampires! How we love you! Well, no, not really, and I really don’t think the market needs Yet Another Ongoing x-title, especially one launching into Yet Another Event (when the previous one hasn’t even quite ended yet); my customers have sort of rejected this – I only had 4 preorders for this new title (even lowly X-Force has like 17), and the rack sales weren’t even close to what I wanted them to be for week #1. Thank god for FOC! I thought this was no more than OK, and that not what the market needs right now…
X-WOMEN #1: I love how every woman that Milo Manara draws looks constantly like they’re orgasming, all the time. No, I actually do. But, honestly, he’s wasted on softcore like this – everytime I turned the page I wanted to see Kitty jam her tongue down Storm’s throat while Psylocke stuffed something up her own ass. What? Stop looking at me like that! It’s not that I want to see that, but when it’s Manara, what else can you expect? This is probably going to fuck up a whole lot of kids who stumble across it… and maybe even a few adults. EXCELLENT art, AWFUL story… but it looks so good, I have to call it GOOD.
Well, that’s what I thought at least; what did YOU think?
An essay based upon MARIO ACEVEDO'S KILLING THE COBRA: CHINATOWN TROLLOP #2 after the jump.
Anatomy of an impulse buy:
1) The cover features a dude straight-up getting his fuck on, which is certainly a persuasive sales campaign for a comic book. And next to the Buddha, even, which I don’t think a lot of guys could manage. You know: I already think God’s laughing at me when I take my clothes off, just generally, so having a giant Buddha statue in the room towering over me in that moment would generate the opposite of enlightenment. By enlightenment, I’m of course referring to boners.
2) The sub-title of the comic was “CHINATOWN TROLLOP.” Trollop is such a delicate and dainty euphemism—it’s got so much more panache than “entry-level sluts” or whatever degraded euphemism rings through your local junior high school today. Standards have deteriorated. Trollop is like when you watch MAD MEN—earlier generations may have been racist, sexist alcoholic liars, but they at least knew how to dress themselves.
3) Apparently there was a book called the NYMPHOS OF ROCKY FLATS, and that book was even a best-seller, among literate people, people who don’t need to see pictures when they read. So: this comic about a guy fucking a Chinatown trollop had a very strong probability of having solid literary influences.
Excerpt from my screenplay STANDING DANGEROUS. Log-line: "A rookie English teacher is going to turn the hood… upside-down, through the Power of Learning… and Hip-Hop-- SAY WHAT?"
FADE IN.
Inner city gang members sit in rapt attention.
MR. CARTER
(earnestly) Do you know who the original Chinatown Trollop was?
(beat)
Moll Flanders.
Entire class explodes in applause and high-fives. Lil Tray throws his crutches into the garbage—he can walk! Wall explodes open, showering the room with debris—Buddha rushes in through the hole.
BUDDHA
Hey everybody—we’re all gonna get laid!
FIN.
But, oh well, comics, so:
1) A more astute observer would have noticed the squiggle near the main character’s lips. That squiggle nears the lips is a fang. It’s a vampire comic.
2) It’s about a Hispanic vampire named Felix Gomez and his Chinese “lover” fighting Yellow Peril villains—Jiang Chow and the Han Cobras, Asian heroin-dealers who kill their underlings using cobras. Sample dialogue: “By this time next year, I’ll have every drug cartel—Colombians, Mexicans, Thais, Afghanis, Russians—lapping like dogs out of my rice bowl.” My fortune cookie says you die now, Mr. Bond-- you know, not my kind of thing. By now you can probably guess that I’m a little too much of a delicate flower for that kind of thing. Here's my impression of me: "My vagina's sore. Waah."
3) The only discernible literary influence was Hemmingway’s THE SUN ALSO RISES, in that KILLING THE COBRA is similarly about an expatriate war veteran whose obsession with his war-wound (i.e. a nasty case of vampirism that he caught in the Iraq War) leads him into an ultimately tragic relationship with a woman (i.e. the Chinatown Trollop) and aimless wanderings in the shadow of meaningless and decayed social institutions (i.e. the remote institution of the vampire “Araneum”). However, I think that CHINATOWN TROLLOP loses too much in ignoring THE SUN ALSO RISES’s themes of sexual insecurity—after all, the cover features the Chinatown Trollop having sexual congress near the Buddha, plainly expressing that in the Felix Gomez universe, sexual success is a route to spiritual fulfillment. This is a far cry and a far less believable theme than those raised by Lady Brett Ashley’s inability to consummate a sexual relationship with the narrator of THE SUN ALSO RISES, Jake Barnes, due to his hideous genital wound.
On the other hand, THE SUN ALSO RISES didn’t feature heroin-dealing Chinese gangsters, so who’s laughing now? Not Hemmingway—he killed himself.
So, that happened. A comic you may never have heard of…? Turns out there may be good reasons you’ve never heard of it. But that's not a reason to write about anything, right? "News flash! Comics: not very good sometimes." But when I think about why I didn't enjoy KILLING THE COBRA: CHINATOWN TROLLOP #2-- when I really consider it, the things I've suggested to you so far-- the lack of craft, the discomforting politics, the cliche qualities...? Well, those those don't sound very meaningful at all, do they? I mean, if I really cared all that much about lack of craft, retrograde politics, or cliches, would I really still be reading comics, at all?
No, I found the comic silly for reasons deeper than what can be attributed to any alleged lack of craft. And in thinking about it, what I think it is, and why I think the comic may be worth a thought, is this: the main character. Main character, vampire-of-action Felix Gomez-- he seemed silly to me.
But: why? He's almost identical to a hero of a 1970's Marvel comic, just with fewer thought balloons and more of a willingness to have sex with trollops of a Chinatown variety. He could be Son of Satan; he could be Ghost Rider; he could be Werewolf at Night.
And yet those characters seem tolerable in a way that Mr. Gomez does not. The very idea of him seemed silly to me, regardless of execution. Why? What changed from 1970-whatever to today? Mr. Gomez seemed silly, but he's just a generic R-rated action hero of the pulp variety. And I think that's the key fact here-- that in fact, Felix Gomez: Vampire seemed silly BECAUSE he's a R-rated male action hero of the pulp variety. Those sort of doesn't exist anymore other than in obscure IDW books, hidden away in dark corners of your local comic shop. Not in any way that's hip.
What happened to R-rated male action heroes? What happened to bad-asses? Hemmingway killed himself-- what's everyone else's excuse?
One of the big summer movies this year is the EXPENDABLES, which features or stars every single, important action hero I grew up with (with glaring exceptions like, Fred Ward from REMO WILLIAMS: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS, Taimak from THE LAST DRAGON, or Kurt Russel from a hell of a lot of awesome movies). Most of the stars are roughly 80 years old now. It's a funeral for creatine. What's striking about the movie is how they were never really replaced by a new batch of action heroes. Who are the big action stars of this summer?
NO!
NOOO!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! All the time, it was... We finally really did it. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
THE A-TEAM underperformed at the box office-- THE LAST AIRBENDER exceeded expectations. Bad-ass action has been replaced by dull, computer-generated, bloodless fight scenes in children's superhero movies. "You have to see X-Men 2-- Broadway star Alan Cumming sparkles aroud the White House punching people, until he sparkles away without having hurt anyone. Weeeee!" Uhm: what?! What happened to guns, knives, bows, arrows, blood, gore, viscera? What happened to American audiences lining up to see roided-up freaks violently murdering South American drug-lords for our collective bemusement? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE US OF FUCKING A?
Who were the last round of legitimate contenders for action heroes? What happened to them?
Granted, Schwarzenegger made KINDERGARTEN COP; Stallone made STOP OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT. But they made those after they had made THE TERMINATOR, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, COMMANDO, RAW DEAL, PREDATOR, THE RUNNING MAN-- I repeat THE RUNNING MAN, TOTAL RECALL, ROCKY I-V, FIRST BLOOD, RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II, RAMBO III, COBRA, OVER THE TOP, TANGO AND CASH, and THE PARTY AT KITTY AND STUD'S AKA THE ITALIAN STALLION.
That really only leaves Jason Statham...? Jason Statham has not made a movie for kids, yet. Well, I like to think children can learn a lot of lessons from the CRANK movies, but those aren't explicitly for children. So: one guy. And not to be xenephobic, but: one of them foreigners. You couldn't put James Brown's LIVING IN AMERICA in a Jason Statham movie, the way you could put it in ROCKY IV. And I feel that fact is crucial to any evaluation we undertake here. And by evaluation, I'm referring of course to boners.
What happened to men? What happened to American men? Consider the words of Guy Garcia, author of the DECLINE OF MEN: "We do know that men are losing traction in high schools. The same is true in colleges, where 59% of all students are female. Harvard professors tell me male students have lost their drive and ambition, women tell me they can't find a guy who's not a dummy, slacker, cheater or loser. Men of every stripe and part of the country are telling me they feel confused, besieged and worried that they have lost their place in society, that they have lost their bearings as men."
Science? Science blames chemicals:
"[A] host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people. [...] It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals.
"This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat," says Gwynne Lyons, a former government adviser on the health effects of chemicals, who wrote the report.
[...] Half the male fish in British lowland rivers have been found to be developing eggs in their testes."
British fish have ovaries in their testes; the message is clear: even Jason Statham's days are fucking numbered. Look: I don't know about you, because I know you're probably down with some freaky shit, you're probably 9 kinds of DTF, but I really don't want to have to carry a baby in my testes. I need them for other things (amirightladies?) (ohI'mnot) (ohokaywellenjoyyourevening) (canijusthavesomeofyourhair).
American men are watching soccer. Soccer! For the geeks reading this, I'm pretty sure that's the American jock equivalent of the TARDIS bells sounding on DOCTOR WHO. And without jocks to act as counter-examples-- geeks, nerds, dweebs, dipwads: we are all just regular old assholes and jag-offs. Consider this excerpt from Tom Spurgeon's review of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies:
"Thirty years ago ramming your z-grade peanut butter into their capital l literary chocolate felt like an act of subversion. The boring stuff far outnumbered the junk. [...] These days shoving some aspect of all the junk that's out there into some poor piece of unsuspecting literature feels like something between an act of bullying and an expression of commerce on a sliding scale of self-regard."
"If the Hollywood studio assembly line is high school in a John Hughes movie, superhero films are the jocks — benighted beneficiaries of grade inflation and reflexive fan boosterism."
Geek bullies. Four-eyed fucking menaces.
What became of the pulp action hero? For the 80's action hero, the fantasy seemed to have been one of physical over-competence. Is that somehow no longer a relevant fantasy for today's audience? I'm not sure why not. I don't know about you, but I've gained some weight these last couple of years-- a spare tire around my mid-section, some in the jowl-area. I've got a very upsetting situation going on in my jowl-area, people. I've joined a gym, but discipline is ... Discipline is an issue. It causes no small amount of anxiety, being out of shape, even though I don't think I'm quite a lost cause physically just yet. I believe the statistics suggest that I'm hardly alone in this particular anxiety-- we hear now regularly of rampant obesity, declines in physical activity, and a surge in related disorders. So: shouldn't the fantasy of physical over-competence still hold some appeal for those like me, wanting to correct some years now of physical neglect? Or is the decline in that sort of hero, the fact that I look at Mr. Felix Gomez as being a silly figure instead of an aspirational figure-- is that a kind of surrender, a kind of giving up? Am I part of a culture of defeat?
Heroic sexual excellence got replaced by a scene in AVATAR where a guy shoves his ponytail into a lady's hot, wet ponytail. Great, any question I ever had as to what goes through Ben & Jerry's head when they masturbate has now been answered through the wonder of movie magic. Plus, I don't know if you've heard, but apparently the one guy from LETHAL WEAPON is kind of a fucked up, in real life.
Does MARIO ACEVEDO'S KILLING THE COBRA: CHINATOWN TROLLOP offer any answers to our questions? Does it at least-- at the very least-- give us someone we can point at and blame? Does it offer us a convenient scapegoat, who we can arbitrarily pick out of the ether and cast aspersions on? Consider!
CLUE #1: What is the most prominent feature of vampire pulp hero Felix Gomez in KILLING THE COBRA? It is his sexual relationship with the racially-insensitive stereotype of a "sexually compliant Asian female", the aforementioned Chinatown Trollop.
CLUE #2: Felix Gomez says ridiculous things about himself that made my eyes roll into the back of my head. As one example: "I'm about ready to serve. True, I'm not much of a tennis player, but I am a champion at kicking ass." ... huh?
CLUE #3: As established in the first issue, Felix Gomez has heavy-duty emotional baggage. Consider the following dialogue excerpts from issue #1:
"The agent probably had a wife and kid's waiting ... He's the real hero. Compared to him, I'm a poser.
"They say shit like that stays with you a lifetime. I'm immortal. That means I'm stuck with these memories forever.
"Luckily, I have Qian Ning. My guide. My interpreter. My lover. [...] But I can't fang her. I won't. More of that baggage from Iraq.
"Every time I get the thirst, I hear the screams of that little girl."
Thus, Felix Gomez presents us with three clues: emotional baggage, a tendency to make ridiculous proclamations that he's a "champion at kicking ass", and a disturbing Asian fetish. What do these three things add up to?
Answer: Rivers Cuomo.
Lead singer of the band WEEZER, whose album PINKERTON is widely considered to have first introduced emo-rock to mainstream audiences. Fact: Weezer signed with Geffen Records, on June 25, 1993. The same day, Kim Campbell became the first female Prime Minister of Canada. Historical fact! Connect the dots!
Look, I'm not saying that Weezer's music is a proximate cause of the increase in British fish with eggs in their testes because, well, we probably lack the genetic data necessary to separate cause from correlation. But if we need someone to blame, then the page I'm on, and the page that I think MARIO ACEVEDO'S KILLING THE COBRA: CHINATOWN TROLLOP is on, and the page maybe you should consider being on, is that the GREEN ALBUM is more likely than not a harbinger of testicular disfgurements.
They called off development of a James Bond movie the other day. And even that-- they had hired the director of AMERICAN BEAUTY and AWAY WE GO, real festivals of machismo. The world can not even muster the financial resources to create pussified James Bond movies-- meanwhile, work proceeds to have TWILIGHT 5, 6, and 7 shot simultaneously.
What is MARIO ACEVEDO'S KILLING THE COBRA: CHINATOWN TROLLOP #2, but further evidence, on what is fast becoming a mountain of evidence, that we are the damned, and we have been condemned to hell?
But I have to believe there's still hope. Somewhere in America, there's a young boy doing steroids for the first time because he wants to beat up the weaker children in his class. Somewhere in America, a teenager is dropping out of high school, to spend his days at a gym, where he will smoke dope and lift weights and dream of Hollywood stardom. Somewhere, in schools across this great land, at least once schools are back in session, maybe not this second, nobody's perfect-- but somewhere, young men are imagining that they or their sons or their son's sons will travel into space, to distant lands, to conquer alien species, rob them of their mineral resources, and copulate with voluptuous three-breasted alien women.
Ultimately, I place my faith in the simple truth, that we are a people waging two wars we can't afford, that we are at heart a bloodthirsy and savage race of butchers, and that the arc of history is long, but it bends towards us someday again making rad movies and bitchin' comics glorifying our unquenchable lust for raining violence down onto the innocent people around us. God bless you, and God bless America.
I haven't read WONDER WOMAN #600 yet, but thanks to the free preview on the DC App - Look out, honey, 'cause I'm using technology - I've read the JMS/Don Kramer story and have to say, I think Hibbs is spot on with his thoughts; rewriting Wonder Woman's history so comprehensively screws up DCU history in so many places that it can't be unaddressed for too long, and feels completely temporary as a result. The story itself is... Eh, I guess? I can see the logic on a corporate level for the do-over - and it certainly seems to have worked, at least in terms of getting people to pay attention to the character - but I couldn't say that I was particularly wowed, or bothered, with the execution. It was just there. Luckily, there was another, much better relaunch of a DC book this week.
ACTION COMICS #890: Sure, there's no Superman, but god damn if Paul Cornell and Pete Woods didn't make this issue sing nonetheless. Maybe it's just me, but Cornell's script - and, in particular, the reveal about why Lois was there all along - felt oddly... Marvel-esque to me, in a way that DC superhero books don't normally manage, and in a good way; there was a kind of weird, mad invention and comedy to it that just worked both as a surprise and on a completely logical (and revealing about Luthor) level. Luthor himself got rebooted, as well, with his admitting how he was changed by his Blackest Night experiences - something that didn't seem to be the case from his recent appearances in the last few Robinson/Gates Superman books, but continuity is for losers, apparently - but the "needy, greedy" Luthor feels nostalgic in a good way, and sets up a quest that gives his run as Action lead a reason to exist. Artwise, Pete Woods continues to be the Superbooks' secret weapon; his stuff is clear, attractive and just really enjoyable to read, and I am both happy and surprised that he's not been stolen away by Marvel for some X-Men-related book that I have no desire to read already. Overall, though, this was a Very Good surprise, and a nice antidote to JMS' overly earnest Superman. Looks like I won't be abandoning the Superman titles entirely over the next year, after all.
OK, so I lied a little -- I meant to write the Dark Tower post yesterday, but then I found I didn't want to after Paul McEnery came in an distracted me for an hour. So, let's move forward onto comics, and I'll come back to DT at some point in the future (probably)
WIZARD #228: Wait, what? Well, yeah, Wizard. One of my jobs is to read pretty much everything that flows through the store, and that includes mags like Wizard. Normally that takes, dunno, 5 minutes or less? But this issue is "Guest Edited" by Mark Millar, and there was a fairly interesting roundtable discussion with film-makers about how and what works when making super-hero movies, and while it wasn't great journalism, or anything, it took me nearly TWENTY minutes to read this month's Wizard, which is, anyway you look at it, a great improvement. There were a couple of other, at least, readable pieces. There's no chance that this bump in readability will last more than an issue, and Wizard doesn't seem to understand that people-who-read-Wizard actually want a price guide (sigh), and I fairly despise the company in general, and wish they'd just go on and go out of business already, but I thought this individual issue was actually fairly GOOD.
CHRONICLES OF WORMWOOD: THE LAST BATTLE #4: I don't think I actually mentioned this during the first three issues: while Oscar Jimenez is a very fine artist, his art is a pretty severe tonal shift from the first series drawn by Jacen Burrows. Given that the series is (sort of) "So, Jesus and the antichrist walk into a bar", I find I want that kind of semi-bigfootish cartooning on it, rather than highly rendered, tiny-fine lines. Still, liking this a lot. GOOD.
JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #40: I really think the JSA has been a mess since Willingham took over; I know I've personally broken my multi-year buying of the series. And this issue really isn't much better: jumping around in time awkwardly, quickly resolving the non-threat of a modern nazi-driven supervillain group, and so on. Art is nice, however. But I'm bringing this book up for another reason: someone in DC Editorial or Marketing branded the cover of this issue with "A NEW ERA returns for the [JSA]" and "NEW beginning! NEW Triumphs!", when what the comic ACTUALLY is is the CONCLUSION of the current storyline, and doesn't contain a single thing that might make a new reader either jump on, or stay on. This is even weirder considering that NEXT issue will be the "jumping on" point, featuring a JLA/JSA crossover. I guess I just don't get the thinking of trying to make the cover super-attractive to a new reader, but not following through with that editorially? I thought it was fairly AWFUL.
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #46: This is not great epic comics. We will not be comparing this to WATCHMEN any time in the near future. This will not be winning an Eisner Award. Hell, it's part one of a JSA/JLA crossover, so clearly it isn't literature. What it IS, however, is pretty decent, fun, superhero comical books. There's a certain amount of zest and zing going on here, and, maybe most importantly, it feels like it is taking place in a coherent universe. If all super-hero comics had at least this level of craft, then maybe we wouldn't be seeing such weak sales on so many books? Just sayin'. I thought this was mildly GOOD.
WONDER WOMAN #600: Let's leave the problems for last. As an anniversary issue, I was taken by this in a way that I wasn't with BATMAN #700 or SUPERMAN #700; maybe because I thought the "look back" stories worked well? I super-double especially liked the Simone/Perez story that led off the book, as being essentially "correct" in tone and craft. The Amanda Connor story was also pretty lovely and awesome. The Lousie Simonson story was pretty straight-ahead genericism, but it didn't suck. The Geoff Johns bit was... adequate, mostly leading into the JMS bit, but other than that, it didn't really have a lot of place in the book. There's also a big mass of loverly pinups. So, yeah, this is a nice anniversary issue, and one I can recommend.
But lets talk about the JMS bits, now.
Actually, as a starting point, it wasn't horrible or anything -- and I particularly thought the art was very strong -- this seems like it could be a somewhat interesting direction for a short time (though I am wondering where her lasso is?)
The problem is that we have to discuss the "meta" implications of this. First off, there's a timeline problem here, as I see it. Diana is told it has been "18 years" since whatever happened, happened, and there's a strong implication she was a child when that happened.. making her... 20? 21? certainly less than 25. I'm not a fan of this, as it then makes her younger than Superman or Batman. I've always thought that Diana was older than that, however -- Amazons are "ageless", and while we've seen her "childhood", I've always kind of assumed that she was a "kid" for decades on the perfect, timeless Amazon island. You may disagree.
The goal seems to be to make Diana as important and significant as any other character, but the way they've appeared to try and make that happen is to essentially remove her from DC continuity. This is partly because two things in opposition can't be true at the same time -- if Diana was "never" star-spangled WW, then what happens to the JLA? To Donna Troy, or to Wonder Girl? If she never was, then she never killed Max Lord, in which case he couldn't have "come back" in BRIGHTEST DAY, could he? WAR OF THE GODS and AMAZONS ATTACK then never happened (well, that last one is not SO bad, is it?) Hippolyta would never been in the JSA. I can go on, but what's the point? There are characters and situations that can be retconned, but Star-spangled WW really isn't one of them, because there are too many other things happening to and around her -- pull a thread like this, and the whole tapestry collapses -- she is, or at least should be, central to the underpinnings of the DCU. It's NOT like "Well, Peter never married MJ", because that still left Spidey in play as effectively the same character. Even the whole "Spider-Totem" thing didn't invalidate previous stories (and OTHER CHARACTERS) stories -- but this really would appear to do so.
So, there's that.
There's also the dissonance of renumbering the series (that previous #1 really never should have happened...especially because Picault didn't stay on the character) back to "classic" numbering, then delivering a story that really kind of DEMANDS a new #1 (not that I like "fake" #1s, but this is a pretty different version of the character, both figuratively and literally) -- it's like "we're celebrating 600 issues of this by getting rid of anything that happened in those 600 issues!" Weird weird choice.
The costume? I don't hate it. I mean, personally, I'm more for the sandals-and-skirt version myself, but I'm OK with mixing it up a bit. Ugh, that jacket, though -- it just screams "90s!", and it flashes me back to the bicycle-pants-and-bra Mike Deodato redesign (which didn't much last) (There's a pretty great article on Comics Alliance about her costumes over the years) -- it just feels very "last decade" to me, rather than "21st century cool!"
thought I really do have to question the wisdom of getting rid of the Star-Spangled look DIRECTLY BEFORE FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND. Ooops.
Also on the "meta" scale, JMS needs to... well, he needs to think before he speaks. Apart from the factual notions he gets wrong (ie, she's never changed her costume over the years, Superman and Batman look radically different than they did at launch, and so on), he just sounds remarkably and amazingly dismissive towards anyone else who has worked on the character recently. It rubbed me the wrong way.
At the end of the day, I don't really think this will stick -- there's too much product in the Star-spangled mode, there's too much history that this unwraps -- and, unless there is a WW movie greenlit using exactly this model in the next six months, I can't imagine this will still be here in two years from today. Maybe I'll be wrong, I've sure been so before, but I can't see it.
Despite all of that, I still thought WONDER WOMAN #600 was pretty GOOD.
Well, that'll teach me to make any kind of comment like "We'll try to do these podcasts more often" in the future. In Jeff's defense, these four - yes, four - new episodes of Wait, What? were recorded in a couple of sessions last month, and if I had been better at putting them up in any kind of timely order, then they might have been more timely to listen to. But, sadly, various things - including work, a laptop death and just plain forgetfulness - have conspired to make sure that didn't happen, and that's why you're getting four hours of Jeff and I talking nonsense in one sitting right now, before even more time gets away from us. And so, without any further ado: The Missing Wait, What?Episode 1
Hey, I'm into single issues of things that come out on a weekly basis in a paper format that I can purchase with American currency. Here's a few of them.
Amazing Spider-Man # 633
I’ve enjoyed quite a few of these short story arcs that Amazing has been doing since “The Gauntlet” started, but Shed was the first one where I felt like what I was reading was living up to what I was seeing. The Marcos Martin issues, that Javier Pulido Rhino short, Paul Azaceta’s Electro, cosmic Lee Weeks--all of those were really beautifully drawn comics. But behind the art, I could tell they were supposed to be building towards a broken down Spidey (ala Knightfall), and it never seemed to get there. (Here's some advice: steal Jim Aparo's old "draw some stubble" trick. That's how we knew Batman wasn't at his best.) That might be more tied into the way the comics constructed (the ever-changing writer) than any specific creative failure. Being the last chunk of pain before the big finale, Shed was able to push the point further than the rest, but it’s probably selling Zeb Wells short to imply that his spot in the rotation is responsible for the stories quality.
More than any of the rest of the stories leading up to Grim Hunt, Shed was sad, a dark story that concluded with Spider-Man rejecting self-preservation when it demanded that he hurt innocent people. (He survived, blah blah blah, the drama of that moment had nothing to do with “how’s he going to get out of this”, it was a showcase for determination, a flipped version of the standard Spidey “whatever it takes” moment.) Visually, 633 suffers from the same Bachalo-didn’t-draw-it-all problems that hampered 632, and the only real arguments that can be made in defense of that is that 1) the work that is here is incredible, and 2) it’s not as hard to stomach as that Sinister Spider-Man mini-series where he only drew the fight scenes. (Did anybody else read those comics? Not-Bachalo draws Venom jumping off of a building, and Bachalo draws the landing? Not-Bachalo draws Venom walk through a door, Bachalo draws what’s inside? That didn’t work.)
The most memorable moments in Amazing in the last few months have all been visual--Azaceta’s catching-the-ceiling moment, Marcos Martin’s Family Circus casino fight and his inset square of a Ghost World style Carlie, Javier Pulido’s repetition of the seated Rhino while a jailbreak goes down--and Shed had at least two more, the first being when Curt Connors “died” in 631 and the second being when Spidey got buried at the bottom of a pile of crazies in this issue and chose not to fight his way out. Problems? Yeah, 633 has some. VERY GOOD nonetheless.
Ultimate Comics X # 3
I don’t think anybody was expecting Jeph Loeb to come riding in on a white horse with a new African-American super-hero right when Heidi Macdonald needed one most, but hey, here he went, and look what he brung. Art’s art is EXCELLENT.
Hellblazer # 268
This is the second part of “Sectioned”, which is probably the scariest Hellblazer story since that Warren Ellis issue about a room that made people commit suicide. It’s got a similarity of tone to one of the earlier Milligan stories, the one that achieved all of its drama by behaving exactly like one of those “i’m going to save the girl” soap operas right up until the point where it ended by saying that no, you dummy, the girl is dead and will always be dead and you’re as dumb as John for thinking that dead doesn’t mean dead forever. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that most of the tension right now in Sectioned is wrapped up in wondering whether or not John Constantine actually did beat a woman so badly that he chipped her teeth, split her lips and broke her nose. I’ll admit, it’s pretty fucked up to have the primary importance in a story that involves a woman being beaten to be about ensuring that the male hero of the story isn’t responsible for doing it, but I'm hoping that’s an accidental casualty of the serialization of the story more than it is a reflection of what “Sectioned” is really about. I hope it is. This guy wrote Enigma, you know? I can’t see him busting up ladyfaces as window dressing.
What’s unsettling about "Sectioned" is how its taken John and turned him into one of those crazy/doomed side-characters in a Shade The Changing Man storyline, and now Milligan’s bringing the actual Shade on board as fellow protagonist. It’s scary because the story--like all of Milligan’s so far, except for the India arc--is about breaking John down, about attacking every aspect of the character’s historical behavior. What’s John done since Milligan took over? Failed, consistently. He hasn't saved most of the people he was trying to save, he very nearly raped a girl who didn’t want to date him anymore--get somebody else to explain that--and now Milligan’s bringing the story closer to Delano’s old threat (mental collapse) than any writer has since Ennis.
Not to encroach on Brian’s territory, but most Hellblazer readers have to be aware that the comic has a shitty trade program and low single issue sales, that its continued existence stands in stark opposition to the business model that every other Vertigo comic follows. Hellblazer is the one nostalgia hold-out that Vertigo publishes, and Vertigo’s gotten pretty merciless in the last few years. (Regardless of their quality, Air was a comic that they wrote about in Elle fucking magazine, and Unknown Soldier got a sales-jump write-up in the New York Times, and those comics still got shut down.) So when somebody like Peter Milligan comes along and starts writing Hellblazer stories that keep slamming against what-Hellblazer-is-usually-like, and then he starts doing thematic callbacks to the way the series began (with John’s fearing a return to straitjackets and suicide attempts), and when all of that is coming after two failed Hellblazer graphic novels (Dark Entries and Pandemonium), there’s an added measure of “this could be for real” attached. I’m not trying to imply that “Sectioned” is scary because “oh shit they might cancel Hellblazer”, but the fact that they very well might cancel Hellblazer gives Peter Milligan--one of the original writers that helped establish Vertigo in the first place--a gravity of consequence that the series hasn’t had since Azzarello figured out how freaked out he could make readers by making John into the factual bisexual Delano probably always intended him to be.
Anyway. “Sectioned”. It’s a GOOD story right now, Camuncoli’s still draws some of the most fluid bodies-in-motion panels of anybody right now, Vertigo’s gotten over their early decade fear of non-rust coloring, and Simon Bisley’s covers are goofy perfect. Blah blah blah, I like this one.
20th Century Boys Volume 9, VERY GOOD
This relates, but it's still tangential and you have to guess why.
I had to go to this mega-life-important meeting at this out-of-my-income-bracket hotel recently, one of those kind of meetings that you show up an hour early for because being late for it is a non-option. Being early fucks me up though, because that means I spend an hour milling around in the nearby vicinity getting myself more worked up until I’m as nervous as I get, which is a decent amount, although not as much as some. I was listening to “Chase Scene”, which is the only song on the new Broken Social Scene album that I’ve fallen in love with as much as I fell in love with that song “Atlas”, which was what I used to listen to when I’m nervous and needed to pump myself up a bit. Anyway, I walk towards the hotel, take a deep breath, walk inside the hotel, hit the marble staircase, and right then, at the height of my anxiety, I look up and see this totally-out-of-place guy standing at the top of the marble staircase: he’s wearing a brown t-shirt, one in that bleach-washed style that Old Navy probably has a patent on, and it says something about “always being in a Florida Keys state of mind”, and its tucked into his jeans, which are stone-washed, lycra-tight with hand-rolled cuffs (!), and yes, because he’s a real person who lives like a cartoon character, he’s wearing a gigantic fuck-you-heroes fannypack right over his junk. Rocking some glasses like they came from mail order. He’s looking past me as I hit the marble stairs, and there’s somebody behind me that he knows, because he straightens up, claps his hands and goes Bang Bang with his finger guns, and then he--i’m not making any of this up--he spins on his the ball of his right foot and starts walking toward the front desk.
He immediately tripped, hit the ground.
He hopped up real quick, didn’t need help from the bellhop or his friend, both of whom came running. I silently thanked him over and over again while I was waiting for the elevator to take me to the 18th floor. That guy saved my life.
It is weird, after reading ARSENAL a couple of weeks ago, I feel like a straw broke somewhere for me -- I don't want to READ bad comics any more, let alone say snarky things about them...
Aw, let me put a jump in here, this might be long?
I *think* it is just a temporary aberration, because comics (even awful ones) are in my blood, like printer's ink, but twice I've sat down to write something here and twice I thought "why am I wasting my time talking about things I don't actually care about?"
We can also lay a little blame at Joe Keatinge's feet, as he's leaving SF for Portland (man, a lot of people do that!), and he doesn't want to move everything he owns. We got to talking about prose, and Stephen King, and I mentioned that "The Dark Tower" was the only bit of King's output that I've never devoured -- I had read book one a decade or more back and pretty much hated it (a rare response for me with King), and never read the rest of the cycle.
Joe is, as I said, moving and doesn't want to carry stuff, so he said, "Here, let me just give you my collection of DT books, they're great"
That was a week and some 1600 pages ago, and I'm THOROUGHLY absorbed in Dark Tower right now.
Book one? Still not-so-good, though better than I remembered it to be -- I *think* I read the "original" version of DT v1, and what Joe gave me was the "revised and expanded" version, which reads better. Not great, but better.
But with book 2...? Whoa, now I liked that shit, yes I did!
I've got about 10% of book 5 left yet, and I'm really looking forward to devouring 6 & 7, and then maybe my mind will really be ready for comics again.
You know what's weird? DARK TOWER reminds me, in a lot of ways, of everything I liked about LOST -- there's a TON of (surface) similarities: people torn from their lives to deal with crazy weird stuff, there are flashbacks that tie back into current insanity, there are strange occurrences of numbers, there are mysteries which will be revealed, but "a little later", there's strange things going on with pregnancies, and heroin junkies, and raids from Others, and even a character in a wheelchair... and a sense of, in many ways, of things being made up as they go along, but I have a better sense that King will have it all actually make a certain amount of sense at the end of the day.
So, yeah, digging that, and not digging comics all that much the last two weeks.
I started to read some more comics last night, from this week's stash, and I find that I don't really want to talk about BATMAN #700 or whatever -- I only want to talk about things that make me feel like "Wow, comics are wicked awesome!", and of the 12 or so things I read last night before giving up and going back to Roland and his Ka-tet, almost none of them touched me.
In fact, the only thing I liked, really even a little, was YOUNG ALLIES #1...
It wasn't even that I even loved it all that much, but it made me think of, dunno, NEW WARRIORS or something -- a new title that no one really has any faith in, featuring characters that no one would really say "that's my favorite!", but that delivered a solid base-hit of entertainment regardless. the difference between YA and NW is probably more that I have no faith (none), that YA will still be published in a year -- the market is all wrong for a comic like this right now, buried in Brightest Days and Heroic Ages and Avengers relaunches... in fact, the single worst week they could have possibly released a book like YA was this week where Marvel is also launching AVENGERS ACADEMY #1, which has a number of (surface!) similarities, but ties into the Avengers franchise.
Given a choice, THIS reader would rather see YOUNG ALLIES make issue #24, than AVENGERS ACADEMY, though I kind of don't think either of them is going to make it that far, naturally.
YA #1 had *zero* preorders at my store, and that's a REALLY bad sign because, right now, virtually no one is looking to add new titles to their pulls, and if you don't catch them right out of the box, the chances of them coming along a few issues later is extraordinarily small.
I *could* push and promote and really talk up YA (though, actually, it isn't really THAT good to warrant the full-court-press -- like I said, solid base-hit here), but mathematically, there's not a great return that is going to pay off into -- as a comic book retailer, who reads the market pretty well, thankee-sai, I'd be shocked if it made it to issue #13. It is a condundrum.
I thought YOUNG ALLIES was a fairly GOOD comic, and you might like it as well, but if it is unlikely to last out a full year, I'm not sure there's much point into telling you that? I don't know, flip through it at your local store -- it isn't sexy, but it's more solid than a lot of other launches lately.
Hopefully, something a bit later in the stack will light me on fire, but I think Roland's world is where my loyalty will stay for the rest of the week.
Still, I am, I think, genetically predisposed to a certain amount of snark, so this was the one that hit me when I was unpacking the box yesterday...
I wish I had the mad photoshop skills, because all I could think was....
"Pencilneck G!"? HAHAHAHAHA, man the mind just fucking boggles, doesn't it?
That's still not The Sensational Character Find of (June) 2010 -- that one might go to "Freight Train" in this week's issue of OUTSIDERS, who proclaims:
The Bulletproof Coffin #1 (of 6): This is, on one level, a comic about comics. As our own Abhay Khosla recently said: "I don’t know– do you think that’s interesting, comics about comics? Me, not so often." But me? A little more so.
What sets The Bulletproof Coffin apart from the rest of the pop comics-on-pop comics pack is that it positions itself as genuinely radical in embracing some rather vintage, potentially anathematic ideas about self-expression, and thereby carries the potential to upset. It doesn't particularly play fair either, nor does it seem to even want to - there's a lip-smacking, facetious undercurrent to much of the commentary in this first issue, nonetheless presented with such eccentricity it registers instantly as forthright. And this tone is so odd and delicate its potential shortcomings act as their own thrill for this introductory chapter, juicing up an old fashioned funnybook critique so that it somehow feels like it can go anywhere.
The plot is very simple. Steve Newman is a voids contractor and avid collector of pop culture ephemera: he hauls garbage out of the homes of the recently-deceased, but keeps the good garbage for himself, provided there is no verifiable auction value. No speculator our Steve - he's in it for the love, or even the life, posing heroically in his colorful work jumpsuit ("G-Men" brand prominent) before exploring a clip art-perfect spooky old house, only to return home to a listless, vacuuming wife, fast food ketchup-stained twin boys and a family dog with spiky red hair and no genitals. Temporary solace comes in issue #198 of "The Avenging Eye," a vintage Golden Nugget horror comic the price guide insists ended with issue #127. The mystery deepens when a coin-operated television broadcast maybe reveals the murder of the comic's prior owner, an old man with a Golden Nugget superhero's costume stashed under the floorboards. Can these weird events have something to do with the publisher's legendary 1950s/60s writer-artist team, Shaky Kane & David Hine?!
Of course, Kane & Hine are the British creators of The Bulletproof Coffin itself -- Kane handling the art, Hine writing the script, but both credited with "story" -- neither of them quite old enough to recall the salad days of American Code-era chillers, nor even from the correct country. The start of it, then -- the first layer of commentary -- is that distinctly American strands of comics have been imbued with a near-mystical, life-changing force, propagating a complete alternate reality for the devout - it's like alien technology, and Kane & Hine imagine themselves as cosmic commanders, masters of the universe.
That alone isn't so unique, but the creators complicate matters by also acknowledging their own real-life works and personae: Kane the elusive, art-focused contributor to Escape, Deadline & Revolver (with later, intermittent forays into 2000 AD), and Hine, writer and/or artist of assorted fantastical British works and author of the expansive horror comic Strange Embrace turned script man for various front-of-Previews superhero franchises. As hero Steve enters the spooky house, rooms are lined with items from prior Kane or Hine projects, like totems warding off danger.
This quality is made explicit in the 'historical' essay in the back of the book, even as the creators' histories erupt into burlesque. As eager Hine arrives at Kane's door in 1956 full of ideas, the already-veteran artist growls that comics are bought for pictures, not what's in the word balloons. Nothing in particular happens to rebut that idea, even when the malevolent Big 2 Publishing buys out Golden Nugget's line to gut the place of Kane/Hine's vibrant horror, fantasy and bugfuck costumed hero work: Kane becomes a legendary comics mega-recluse combining Steve Ditko and Jack T. Chick elements with Russian porno produced under the name "Destroyovski," while Hine produces Big 2 superhero scripts for the "Z-Men" (setting up an amusing alphabetical continuum of quality with the G-Men farther up and Kane's own A-Men up front), including a desperately mediocre event crossover titled (oh dear) "Final Meltdown."
Eventually, the pair (allegedly) reunite as old men and (allegedly) set about reviving all their old properties in defiance of Big 2 copyrights. Indeed, eight pages of The Bulletproof Coffin #1 are devoted to one of these new stories, a perfectly blunt horror short about the dead exacting revenge on a weak man who murdered them in stealth, keenly blending Kane's real-life early 21st century horror endeavors from Black Star Fiction Library with in-story Hine's bottomless shame over having surrendered his principles to crank out superhero scripts, actually scripted by the man who wrote last week's Detective Comics.
It's perfectly bananas, delivering strident satirical messages -- snorting at the very idea of interesting or personal or relevant work even conceivably existing at Marvel or DC and then doubling down to lampoon the very idea of comic book writers -- in a style rife with insane self-deprecation or aggrandizement (Kane is at one point compared to Michelangelo) and industry criticisms that appear self-evidently contrived to fix wild old superhero and horror comics as the true state of vibrant comic art, vs. those multimedia-scrubbed corporate bozos who apparently haven't accrued a clattering enough mechanism of generic expectations to produce Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal.
Yet there is a richness to this seemingly on-the-nose-if-maybe-sarcastically-so lampoon, tucked away in Shaky Kane's art. More so than anyone working in Deadline, Kane was concerned with graphical qualities, and visual tropes as personal symbolism; look at his A-Men from that magazine, and you'll see a properly (John) Wagnerian costumed ass-kicker as faux-heroic icon of oppressive law transform rapidly into series of cutting, personal images, mixing comic book signals and Kirby gestures into readable mystery collage. It's precisely the opposite of Big 2's Z-Men, presumably writer-run, editor-managed and continuity-bound, enough so that in-story Kane's hyperbolic distaste for writers makes sense; what worked in A-Men, it's very center of being, was something writing couldn't dictate. There a revealing bit of Frank Santoro's Shaky Kane cover feature in Comics Comics #4, where Kane mentions that outside scripts would ask him for Kirby tribute-style art, and "it fell to pieces" almost all the time - he wasn't trying to become the King on a moment-to-moment level, but absorbing and reflecting the stuff that resonated, personally.
Kane's art is more direct in The Bulletproof Coffin -- as it was in Black Star eight years ago -- full of bright popping colors and clean panel arrangements, but still possessing a lumpy, rather boldly posed character to the figure work (a few pieces even seem to be cut 'n pasted from panel to panel) that gently reinforce their status as graphic elements in tilted perspectives and too-close zooms. It really is a whole world of artifice here, but meaningfully and mysteriously so, because odd foreign comics can be meaningful and mysterious for impressionable minds. Can't you see it in manga? Here we see it in the Silver Age, shone back at us.
All of this is naturally only a reaction to issue #1 - things can change quickly, especially as far as satire goes, especially with one this mannered and conflicted. Certainly the suggestion is made that artist Kane isn't much the same without writer Hine -- hint #1 is in the credits box -- and interviews suggest the series' looming threat isn't nearly as simple as a hard-scrubbing corporate superhero monstrosity wiping out The Best Comics Ever, Which Are the Genre Comics We Loved From Back Then. As I said up top, this is delicate work, almost private, enough so that it could be a total banal disaster or something inscrutable, or just wonderfully unexpected. I have no idea where this superhero-tinged commentary comic is headed, and damn it all I value that.
Hello. For your long weekend, here's another boring "capsule" post where I drone on about things I've found interesting in the last couple months, while I'm too exhausted by work to write anything halfway decent or worthwhile.
GARRISON #1 by Jeff Mariotte, Francesco Francavilla, Jeremy Shepherd, Johnny Lowe, Kristy Quinn and Shannon Eric Denton:
This is a new Wildstorm comic about people who sit in dark rooms. Well, I guess the official pitch is that it's about a serial killer in a cowboy-hat, and the federal agent chasing him, or something. I don't know-- nothing about the story caught with me; I bought it to look at Francesco Francavilla's art. If you don't know his work, he's part of a pretty great group art blog; he has an old-school pulp webcomic he also does that's worth a look; LEFT ON MISSION.
I like how he draws, but the way this book is colored-- almost every scene in this comic was people in a dark room with no lamps: characters watching TV screens in the dark, having meetings in the dark, surfing the internet in the dark. The characters are federal agents, not depressive teenage poets-- somebody turn on the fucking lights!
Maybe it's just me-- if I'm at home at night, I have every single light on in my apartment, at all times. Because I'm afraid of shadows? Yes. But shadows are where the Boogeyman lives, so I think I'm being enormously reasonable.
DC's PULP UNIVERSE:
Oh, I made a terrible mistake with these.
I was excited by the idea for this DC pulp sub-imprint, and so I decided to buy all of the comics that they offered for sale. That might not be a mistake for everybody, but it was a huge mistake for me personally. Being feeble of mind and faculties, I always struggle to remember what happened the month before with anything I read, but now what's happened is that when I read FIRST WAVE #2 I became confused by vague memories of the plots of DOC SAVAGE or THE SPIRIT. I kept waiting for there to be a lightning strike in FIRST WAVE-- before realizing, oh, that's the plot of an entirely separate comic.
"Comics punish my enthusiasm for them, episode one billion and nine."
One of my favorite things about Brian Azzarello as a creator is the ways he very intentionally forces his readers to pay attention, to work to keep up with him instead of the other way around. And I think that maybe might have worked for me here, too, if I hadn't picked up the two spin-offs (both of which launched before the second issue of his FIRST WAVE series was released!). But all of the stories have now jumbled together in my head, basically ruining each other. I'm cutting back to FIRST WAVE: mistake made, lesson learned.
I would say "I don't understand why this is how they're reintroducing these characters," but none of the books really seem to be "reintroducing" anything especially. All of these comics seem to assume that I remember who Doc Savage's 20 companions are, or care about them. I don't, particularly. At all. I could, in theory. I care about Doctor Who's new companion, and all it took was a short skirt and some hormones on my part. But Doctor Who also started the news series with a "why you should care about who Doctor Who is and who the companions are" story. Maybe I'm dead-wrong, but I feel like these characters needed an Ultimates-style reintroduction and instead these series have started with a 200 mph mega-crossover.
Howard Porter seems badly miscast on DOC SAVAGE, though I thought Paul Malmont's effort was noticeable in a pleasant way in that first issue. I wouldn't call it altogether successful, but you could at least tell that guy was trying...? That's something. THE SPIRIT has been the only must-buy of the lot, thus far, on account of its back-up features, black and white comics by Denny O'Neil, Bill Sienkiewicz, Harlan Ellison, and Kyle Baker.
That is an all-star run of creators. It's a strange feeling to see creators of that caliber brought together for back-up features for barely-launched new imprints, though. Shouldn't creators of that level of fame, infamy, talent, whatever, shouldn't they be assembled for projects that feel a little disposable? Well, that sounds extreme, but... What a strange world, where the occasion of Harlan Ellison and Kyle Baker working together doesn't conclude with a ticker-tape parade.
More importantly, however, Doctor Who's new companion truly deserves some kind of humanitarian award. From the UN Commission on Boners. Who do I write to, for that to happen?
MYSTERY TEAM:
Oh my god, you guys.
The reason I'm writing these capsule reviews is so I can tell you about this movie. It's some kind of fucking achievement, is what it is because... If you're a sketch comedy fan, it's extremely difficult to get excited by a sketch troupe putting out a feature length movie. You're used to being a little disappointed. Python pulled it off, yes, but past that, in recent memory-- it just hasn't happened. Mr. Show, Kids in the Hall, Whitest Kids You Know, League of Gentlemen, the vast majority of Saturday Night Live features-- I'm not saying there aren't parts. There are parts of Brain Candy that I quite like. I'm still partial to Wayne's World. But mostly, they don't transition to features.
Derrick for the fucking win.
I'd loved their sketches, most of all Girls are Not to Be Trusted, or their new one Thomas Jefferson, but hadn't expected much more than uneven sketches from their feature. They kind of fucking kicked my ass instead. What struck me as so great about it is they didn't fall in the trap other sketch troupe's have so repeatedly fallen into. They didn't make a sketch movie, where none of the scenes add up to anything-- they actually told a story, instead. There's an aspect of it which is really dark and sad, while it's simultaneously hilarious and innocent...? There's a varied emotional tone to it; it's not just trying to be silly-funny ha-ha good times for the entire length. And it's filled with a fine cast of comedy world people (most in a "before they hit it big" capacity but... Matt Walsh: so underutilized by Hollywood, you guys). The credits are the same names over and over-- it feels like this tiny labor of love, but it looks as good as a Hollywood movie.
It's a story I've actually always wanted to see. The premise of the movie is basically "what would Encyclopedia Brown's teen years have been like" and-- I can't explain why, but I've always wanted someone to make that movie. I just didn't expect anyone to do it this well, or to actually find an emotional theme in that idea that worked as well as the one in MYSTERY TEAM.
This is probably the best comedy I'll see this year-- I'll probably see better movies, but it's hard to imagine loving one quite as much, especially now with movies having been ruined by fanboys. (I love you all, but you've ruined movies). I had the great fortune of seeing this in a crowded theatre (it's playing again at the New Beverly tonight, if you're nearby), with an audience that very audibly loved it. If that's not an option for you, it's available now on DVD, On Demand, what have you.
It's a hard-R rated Goonies! Why would you possibly not want to see that?? This really kicked my ass-- I was really shocked how much I enjoyed this. Highly, highly recommended.
TEEN WEREWOLVES:
I hadn't heard of the whole teen werewolf thing until I saw this video the other day. I'm not hip, not a hip guy, so the teen-werewolves got by me.
We've all thought the same things, I'm sure. We all have probably thought, "How I envy the modern teenager, with their easy access to vast swaths of internet pornography, their adorable ignorance of the days of squinting at scrambled porn, lazy teen days spent watching Lexi Belle perform as Batgirl, et cetera." We're all addicted to pornography in a way that's interfering with our ability to achieve true intimacy, right? That's probably true.
And we've all thought, in turn, well at least, having grown up pathetic losers, that at least in our day, there were no video cameras around, documenting our most embarassing moments for youtube audiences.
But watching this, what I realized, is someday, when I'm old, I'll be taken care of by a generation that sees documenting and publicly sharing shameful moments as being some kind of god given right. And that's terrifying because... I think there are bound to be shameful moments in old age that I'd rather not be on youtube. If I'm in a senior citizen home, crapping into an adult diaper-- I don't want for middle-age werewolves to put that on youtube. Especially if youtube is being beamed directly into people's brains, by that point. Especially now that there's advertising, which is extra annoying-- I don't want me, with a bunch of catheters shoved all in me being the new face of Pepsi, man.
On the other hand, maybe our robot overloads will annihilate the teenage werewolves before that happens. God, I hope so.
SPARTA by David Lapham, Johnny Timmons, Gabe Eltaeb, Wes Abbott, Kristy Quinn and Ben Abernathy #2-3:
I was annoyed by Colin Farrell starring in this book, in the first issue, but stuck with this series, regardless. It's only 6 issues, and I was feeling like I needed to start taking more chances. I'm trying to do that more-- I call it Get Excited About Comics Plan 2010. Try to be more "accepting." Try to be more "enthusiastic." Try to "suck it up." Try to "man it out." Try to "do other things with my time than watch Lexi Belle perform as Batgirl."
This book? I don't know; what do you think? Lapham certainly goes for broke-- I like it more than what I'd read of YOUNG LIARS, at least. There are moments that really are quite creative: a little girl bragging about winning a Junior Mata Hari Award, say, I quite liked. I'm just not sure what exactly I think overall. All of the component parts are the stuff of great comics: football, bigfoots, swordfights, oracular lady assassins, armies of ex-mistresses. It's very much a COMIC BOOK, in capital letters, kind-of in the old Kirby sense of the term. Creativity sometimes feels in short supply right now, so the book is certainly to be applauded in that respect.
But it's ... sometimes it feels like too much of a good thing, I guess. The details are fun, but I'm still not really sure what this book is about, exactly: what anyone is trying to say about anything is kind of eluding me. Since the book is a "mystery" comic, and the mystery of the book is why the world of the book is so crazy and weird-- there's no way of knowing if the details are organic to some organizing principle or just wholly arbitrary. Granted, that same problem didn't stop me from watching LOST for six seasons, but LOST had characters, themes and a terrific visual style. What am I supposed to want SPARTA for? What need is it supposed to fill for me? But ... just the moment to moment pleasure of an idea like the Junior Mata Hari Award may be enough actually.
So, I don't know. It feels like it's at least worth thinking about, this book, maybe, which may be as good a compliment as I'm capable of anymore. Get Excited about Comics Plan 2010 still has a lot of miles left to travel.
JUSTICE LEAGUE: RISE OF ARSENAL #3 by J.T. Krul, Geraldo Borges, Kevin Sharpe, Sergio Arina, Mario Alquiza, John Dell, Rob Clark Jr., Hi-Fi, Greg Horn, Mike Mayhew, Sean Ryan and Brian Cunningham:
So: Brian wasn't exaggerating in his plot synopsis, in the slightest. It's really 100% that.
I didn't really have a very interesting reaction to it, though, other than it really made me feel for Alan Moore. He must think books like this are his "legacy"... They're not but he probably feels that way-- I think I would feel that way if I were him. I stopped halfway through this book, and just thought, "that poor man." People get angry when Alan Moore complains about the state of comics-- "But: has he ever heard of Hellen Jo?!?" But put yourself in his place-- how much would you like comics if you felt responsible for things like this? The shame would be overwhelming.
As for the comic itself, I don't know-- it's a success. I "enjoyed" it quite a bit, even if only in quotation marks. Obviously, if I bought it, it "succeeded" -- it created an accident on the side of the road so horrific that I craned my neck to look at it. And you know: well done. I will now remember JT Krul's name, and if you believe that obscurity is an author's true enemy, well done to him, too. I mean, the low opinion in which I hold numerous other writers in comics certainly hasn't hurt their careers, so well done to him. Well done.
I guess it kind of reminded me of the Wedding DJ video-- I'm sure you've seen it; it's "viral"...
I don't know if that video's "real" or not, but it kind of doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's crass or not-- I was entertained by it anyways: "that's entertainment." I mean, the interesting thing about the video to me is that... you know, does the internet make us all "worse" by entertaining us with bad behavior, or does it make us "better" by exposing bad behavior? Does the rising of the Arsenal make things "worse" by hitting what you might feel like is a "new low," or are we "better" for seeing how close that "new low" is to a "regular" run-of-the-mill superhero comic? I don't know-- no idea. Tucker & Marra covered this better than I'm capable of, so go read that if you haven't already instead, I guess.
IRON MAN 2:
I had really enjoyed the first movie, but didn't have much use for the second one. I haven't seen many reviews address my problem with this movie though which is that... I actually don't think African-American men are interchangeable...?
I had a much, much harder time with the fact they changed Rhodey's between IRON MAN 1 and IRON MAN 2 than I thought I would. I'd read the announcements ahead of time, heard the explanations why they were replacing Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle, and all that stuff. I certainly love Don Cheadle. But, when those scenes actually happened-- I just couldn't get past that they switched dudes on us. Don Cheadle just shows up and says "It's me; get over it; suck on it." But, yeah: sorry, no. Here's the thing: they weren't playing two different characters; they were playing the same guy. They COULD have played two different characters-- he could have been Rhodey's brother, or something. But, no: same guy.
I felt like at some level, the filmmakers were maybe inadvertently saying, "We don't believe you can tell them apart anyways." Which: I can. I mean, I'm not going to win the word-jumble on Soul Train anytime soon, I'm not the hippest guy, but I can at least tell Don Cheadle from Terrence Howard. I can tell all of the original Kings of Comedy apart, too. You know: I listened to a Jay-Z album once, and I didn't understand every word he said, but I wanted to...?
So: I couldn't get past that. Also: the story stank, there were too many villains, the demo for the video-game sequel gave me a massive headache which bummed me out because I totally wanted to play it to see Fraction's contributions, and the commercials for other Marvel movies wedged in the middle of this one were super-boring. But also, the race thing.
NEW AVENGERS: FINALE by Brian Michael Bendis, Stuart Immonen, Butch Guice, Andrew Currie, Karl Story, Paul Mounts, Justin Ponsor, Rain Beredo, Chris Eliopoulos, Lauren Sankovitch, Tom Brevoort, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley, Alan Fine (with apperances by David Finch, Danny Miki, Frank D'armata, Steve McNiven, Dexter VInes, Morry Hollowell, Olivier Coipiel, John Dell, Mike Deodata Jr., Joe Pimental, Dave Stewart, Leinil Yu, Mark Morales, Laura Martin, Billy Tan, and Matt Banning):
Manners compel me not to talk about SIEGE, but this ... this tangential spin-off finale one-shot (?) was an interesting experience. It was like looking at vacation photos of a family of strangers. I'd picked up all three SIEGE finale comics to have the "total Siege experience". I'd picked up the odd issue of NEW AVENGERS in the past-- once in a while. So, I had some familiarity with going-on's of the book, but not a very complete one.
But then, this comic is a celebration for the entire run, for an entire era of Marvel comics, but one I didn't pay much attention to, or didn't have any emotion connection to when I did pay attention. So, that was fun for me, in a way that felt kind of peculiar.
There's this feeling of triumph to the comic, but it's-- it's a triumphant double-page splash of the time New Avengers fought ninjas, triumph over comics I never read. I've never watched the season finales of a show I don't regularly follow, but I imagine that my experience was close to what it must have been like to watch the LOST finale if you'd only seen two or three episodes prior. It was interesting for me not to able to comprehend the glops of emotion on display, but just instead have to shrug and go "well, this is probably meaningful to someone out there somewhere." I don't think I've ever quite had that experience before.
I guess what was striking was how much it felt like a "finale", with none of it being at all, even remotely final. The new AVENGERS book launched, what, a week or two later, with a near-identical creative team...? It's like they threw their own surprise birthday party.
I was interested in it as symbol of this era of Marvel comics, too. Years from now, people can look back on this comic and say "Aah, that era of comics-- they were very taken with storyboards colored red." The red thing-- how did red become to this era of Marvel comics what teal-orange is for movies? Was that a decision that was made? Do you like the color red? I'm more of a blue guy myself-- I personally like that teal-orange look in blockbuster movies. Instead, with blockbuster comics, all that red.
THE SIGNIFIERS #1 by Michael Neno:
I sent away for this comic over the internet-- by the time it arrived, I'd forgotten how I heard about it or that I'd ordered it. I like having strange comics arrive in the mail, I guess. It's an anthology of three stories, two of which end on "cliffhangers": the Signifiers lead story (a strange Kirby pastiche, with animal-hybrids, science-fiction villains, rockets falling to hip-hop lyrics, etc.), Nellie of Cosmic Brook Farm or Cosmic House on the Prarie (a nonsensical 10-panel grid Rocketman comic), and Landlark the Heat Seeking Dwarf (a Silver-Age Marvel-- but not quite Kirby-ish-- comic about a deranged dwarf who escapes bad guys and falls in with a hippie band).
I don't really know what this comic is-- none of the stories "make sense" strictly-speaking, at least to me, so I'm not really sure what to say about them, how to even describe them. The first story is about ... Yeah, can't do it; it seems to all fit together, at least, though, to its credit.
So, I don't know if I can "recommend it"-- but ... This is just the kind of thing I'm happy exists, I guess. It's one of those things that just looks cool, and it's so far gone that you can just forget about paying attention to what's going on and and enjoy watching one panel turn into the next. That's a very specific kind of fun that may not be for everybody though. That's sort of the level I enjoy POWR MASTERS on (although POWR MASTERS is much better than this, I think). The second story's weak sauce, any which way, though-- that 10 panel grid looks unforgiving and I think it brings Neno down to it instead of the other way around. More of the first story and third story might be better if there are any future issues-- those two fit together more than the second one, despite the super-rad title of that second story. It just doesn't live up to that title, but what could...?
SLEIGH BELLS - "TREATS":
I don't remember the last time I've looked forward to an album as much as this one. I probably have pretty bad taste in music-- I certainly know much less about music than ... oh gosh, an awful lot of people that I know, so take this with that warning.
But, man, every track I've heard on this thing has been exciting for me. I haven't felt this excited for a band since ... I don't know, first time I heard Broken Social Scene...? Maybe that'll sound ridiculous to people who have cool taste in music. I really don't know.
I've heard it referred to as "Jock Jams for Hipsters" (I think it was meant in a bad way, but... I'm not sure that's how I'm taking it). Music criticism, though-- there are people whose work I've enjoyed reading over the years, obviously, but... It seems like with any band now has to deal with a really poisonous environment-- the build-up / tear-down cycle seems severe. This band seemed to simultaneously get such a very overheated build/tear reaction.
I wonder if comics will be like that someday.
RED DEAD REDEMPTION:
(I try not to spoiler this, but if you're hyper-spoiler inclined, you might want to skip this one).
Middle-aged man, pretending to be a cowboy in his free time. That's healthy, right? I'm pretty sure that's normal.
On the other hand, this video game, you guys? I'm not a game expert, but I've never quite played a game with an ending like this one. The writing in the last hour of this game seemed kind of remarkable to me. The last hour builds on themes present through the rest of the game to actually elicit a real feeling of story-motivated dread. Not shitty horror-game dread, with violins, but "where is this story taking me" dread. I don't know of another game I've played where I've experienced that feeling before, and that last hour alone makes it Rockstar Games's finest hour for me. The Grand Theft Auto games are more "gorgeous" to look at, more stuffed with entertainment, more overflowing with content-- music, comedy, dialogue, characters.
I was just more impressed by this game, though. I was struck how they succeeded not only with the action elements but the role-playing elements, as well. I played my version of the main character as a decent man, who always did the right thing, and never committed any crimes, except those he was forced into by circumstance. Someone else could have played their main character in some completely different manner-- and I just think that was more truly the case here than with the Grand Theft Auto games.
Between this and the superbly thought-out mission structure on MASS EFFECT 2 (which Kieron Gillen writes about better, here), maybe this is crazy, or not a well-informed opinion, but I feel like the blockbuster-end of gaming took a giant step forward this year, in terms of writing, finally. Finally.
DAVID CHOE AT THE LAZARIDES GALLERY:
Did anybody make it to this? Choe went fucking balls-out on this gallery show. There was a massive inflatable sea-monster that filled the space (new gallery, used to be the Anthropologie store in Beverly Hills-- tremendous high ceilings), huge paintings, small drawings of naked bat-women tucked away in the back area of the gallery (which resembled a church confessional); the entire foyer was festooned with children's blankets.
Here's a bad iPhone photo of the sea-monster-- you can't see the entirety of the gallery, but there was a back area filled with his work, smaller work that expressed more of a sense of humor than the more dramatic pieces out front:
Hell of a fucking show, just a hell of a fucking show-- he really knocked this one down. I think this closed just recently, unfortunately-- I hope you didn't miss it.
CONAN O'BRIEN AT THE GIBSON AMPHITHEATRE, NIGHT TWO:
I'm so glad I made it to this. If you got overly-worked up by the Leno-Conan incident earlier this year, this show was such a joy. Such a joy-- just 2-3 hours of pure happiness for me, at least. Songs, jokes, funny videos, guest stars. Jim Carrey sang a duet dressed as Kick-Ass, with Conan dressed as Superman. Jonah Hill made a rape joke about Inspector Gadget. Andy Richter-- he's performed pretty constantly in small venues in Los Angeles since he left the old show, so it was great to see him this entire amphteatre laughing along with him.
The craziest thing for me was Reggie Watts-- I used to see Reggie Watts perform in the basement of the Ramada Inn on Vermont, in the haunted W.C. Fields room. The last time I saw him perform, it was 10-20 people in a Ramada basement, every single last one of us thinking "Why isn't this guy on TV or something? How am I getting to see this for free?" Seeing him in an amphitheatre, surrounded by people hanging on his every word, watching an audience of that size trying to figure him out-- that was amazing. Amazing.
And, of course, Mr. Conan O'Brien. All of the years I'd seen him-- there's an aspect of him which you don't appreciate on television that makes him funnier in person: motherfucker is shaped like Abraham Lincoln. He is a weirdly shaped guy-- he looks like he could throw a punch, but ... He's shaped like he should be building a log cabin somewhere. There's just something funny to him physically that even after watching him for years and years, I'd never really seen before.
It felt like getting to see and be a tiny, tiny part, however small, of a happy ending.
...which is saying a lot; I've been reading comics with at least some tiniest sense of critical thought for 25-ish years. I've read some howlers in my day; and it is always going to be hard to top, say, TAROT and the Haunted Vagina. For a really really bad comic, I have to end with my mouth wide open, and the thought racing through my head of "....the FUCK did I just read?" as I sit there poleaxed.
Well, I think last night I have read the poleaxest of all poleaxes -- I felt incredibly dirty and gross after I put it down.
JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE RISE OF ARSENAL #3
"Arsenal", of course, is the new nom de guerre (or at least it will be by the end of this series) of Roy Harper, the sidekick formerly known as Speedy.
Speedy, perhaps you know, has recently been known as "Red Arrow", and is/was a member of the Justice League of America. He's had a weird and tortured past: his name used to be "Speedy", after all. He was famously addicted to heroin. He slept with Chesire (who he calls "Jade") -- a genocidal mass murderer in the DC Universe who once blew up the country of "Qurac" with nuclear weapons. They had a daughter, named Lian, who was recently killed (along with tens of thousands of other people in "Star City") by Prometheus. Prometheus also ripped off Roy's arm, leading us to this series, where he's meant to "rise" to become Arsenal.
That's the backstory, here is what happens in issue #3:
Page 1: Chesire shows up to (theoretically) kill Roy, blaming him for Lian's death. They fight, and Roy's thought captions on this page are about how hot she was in bed. No shit: " Next to Kendra (Hawkgirl), Jade was the best in bed." Chesire has poisonous fingernails that will kill you fairly instantly. She is shown scratching him with those fingernails, though he isn't poisoned (?), and the scratch marks completely disappear on page 2 (??).
Page 2 -7: they fight, to such scintillating dialogue as "Bite me, Jade." and "You're a skilled assassin, but as a mother -- YOU SUCKED!". Roy uses various things sitting around (a tennis racket, a stapler, an extension cord) to battle Chesire -- this is apparently Roy's new superpower, fighting with whatever junk is sitting around, which is excitingly McGyver-esque! Using the extension cord like a whip (which is OK, "She likes it ROUGH anyway"), he ties Chesire up, porn-submission-style. Then they make out, and start to fuck....
Page 8: .. except it turns out that he's impotent!
Chesire then disappears from the comic without another word or mention of her.
Page 9: Since he can't fuck, he decides to go beat up guys. "I need a release." and "For me, they serve their purpose" he thinks, as he sticks knives in faceless people's arms.
Page 10: full-page splash of Roy standing over a bunch of unconscious guys. "Much better" says the caption as Roy makes an O-face.
Page 11: his dead junkie friend appears, and talks about the time they double-teamed a "couple of real skanks" in Nashville.
Pages 12 & 13: His daughter dead, and his dead friend prodding him, Roy decides to jump down off the rooftop in full costume and buy some heroin from a street dealer.
Page 14 & 15: he smokes heroin and nods out, in a two page spread.
Page 16 & 17: his dead daughter appears to him in his drugged out state.
Page 18 & 19: ...but is interrupted by five Prometheus' in an alley, and he beats and stabs them...
Page 20 & 21 (also a double page spread)... but it turns out that he's actually just beaten up his junkie alleymates, apparently with a dead cat (!), while Batman shows up and declares Roy needs to stop.
Now I've done a number of drugs over the years, but never heroin. I have, however, known a few junkies, and I can assure you that when/after they got high they weren't capable of fighting ANYthing, or really doing much other than sit there and drool.
Pages 22-25: Roy and Batman fight to the tune of "Roy, I'm your friend" and "I am here to help you". Yay, Dick!
Pages 26 & 27: Roy wakes up with Black Canary standing over him. He's strapped to gurney (all four straps!), and Dinah is kind of moralizing without actually sitting with him, and she walks out, rather than stay with him to help him through getting clean. This is apparently in a hospital, though we oddly don't get a caption explaining this until...
Page 28: Batman and BC talk about how this is a special hospital specializing "in convicted villains with substance abuse problems"
Page 29: Roy apparantly babbles to his dead friend some more, but then we turn to...
page 30: and his daughter is there again, this time covered in wounds and gore. "Next Issue... Death of a Hero", the end.
This is followed by five pages of dialogue-free, black and white images of Batman shooting guns at people (!), apparently killing several of them (!)
This comic book costs $3.99.
This comic book is branded as a "Justice League" title, did I mention that?
Now sure, I get the idea that "If we show him hitting rock bottom, then his eventual return to heroism is that much more powerful" as a concept, but the execution here is maybe about as good as, say, REEFER MADNESS.
And I really don't want to see, in a "Justice League" comic, this level of sexual frustration and violence. There's no "mature readers" notice on the book, yet Vertigo comics with 1/100th of the degradation get labeled...
Is this what we've come to? This was billed by DC as one of their "big" stories of the year. And we wonder why people aren't buying comics like they used to?
I really wonder if we had time machines, what might happen if we traveled back to 1979, or 1969 and showed DC people this comic. What might they think about the corruption of our culture, of the degradation that we've devolved into?
This comic was gross. Everyone involved in its production, especially the editor, Brian Cunningham, and publishers Dan Didio and Jim Lee should be deeply ashamed of what they've done here. It actually has me sitting here, stunned, thinking "Wait, why am I in this business again?"
Let's start with TV!
Hm, I think I'm going to go on and on and on, so let's hide it behind a jump to keep the "front page" cleanish...
LOST: "The End":
So, yeah, I was pretty unhappy with the end of LOST.
It's not that every metaphysical question didn't get answered -- I no more needed to know what the island "was" that I needed to know what was in Marcus' briefcase in PULP FICTION. A McGuffin can certainly be a McGuffin. I'm cool with, say, not telling us how the OtherMother got on the island or shit like that, because that's sort of beyond the point.
But there were a few mysteries that needed to be revealed in a lot clearer than they were -- mysteries central to previous seasons like "what was up with Fertility on the Island?" or "Why was Walt 'special' and what did that mean anyhow?" and "Yeah, while I get that Dharma was 'exploring the island' or whatever, why did they build the things they did in the manner in which they did?" -- I'm thinking of shit like the 108 minute timer flipping over to hieroglyphics at the end. WHY did that kind of shit happen? because those aren't Mysteries of God, they are Mysteries of Men.
I'm also OK with some relatively ambiguous things that can spawn further questions -- like given that Jack was sprawled out like (the unnamed bother) after encountering The Light, are we meant to infer that he becomes the new "smokey"?, that kind of thing. I like things that can make us ask questions about what it meant.
But I don't like having my time wasted; and I don't like sloppiness.
I commented several times this season to Matt in our weekly deconstructions at the store that I thought LOST was having a lot of problems this year with Needing a Second Draft. Individual scenes of dialogue, or conceptual underpinnings that were *almost* "there", but were off for one reason or another. One example might be Sun and Jin's final scene -- where neither of them even mention their child! A Second Draft would have helped immeasurably in fixing those kinds of glaring gaffes.
Ultimately this season was pretty half-baked -- close to half the run time of the season was devoted to the flashes to what we now know was (presumably far "future") Limbo, and it seemed like the first third of the year was devoted to such not-importants as The Temple and a bunch of characters who didn't actually have anything to do with the conclusion (including Widmore's people -- did Jacob have any point in getting them to the island, except to be slaughtered?)!
Ugh, and all of the slow-motion flashbacks in the finale -- by the second or third one I was horribly, horrifically sick of them, and they kept coming and coming between it seemed like every character, ugh!
When I watch a "mystery based" show, I want the "mystery" to be "fair" -- no, I'm probably not wired to solve it myself, but when there's an explanation, I want it to make sense, for me to go "Hah, yeah, right, that's perfect!"
But now I no longer think that TV can actually do that kind of novelistic twisty storytelling. I've been burned twice now in the conclusion -- and that's not counting the various shows along the way that started off, but never actually made it to the "conclusion" due to cancellation -- between this and BATTLESTAR: GALACTICA, and I'll be damned if I'll sit for it a third time.
Some people have said "Well, it's really about the characters!", which makes this ending even more kind of weak and maudlin -- like how is there any sacrifice or loss from Sun & Jin if they all go off happily ever after with everyone else?
Emotionally, the ending "worked", but not in the context of the shape of the season -- frankly, I think 2.5 hours of Nothing-But-Limbo *could* very well have worked as the Finale, and probably would have blown people's minds incredibly, but the long-slow build-up to Limbo all season long wasn't "playing fair" with the concepts of the show.
Here's the thing: The show wasn't suddenly canceled. They knew TWO YEARS (or was it three?) in advance that the ending was coming, and exactly when, so to take that kind of a weird non-sequitur swerve in the last season is not only cheap, but it's a frickin' cop-out.
I wanted explanation -- take "the rules" that Jacob and Smokey were operating under. How did that work? By this I mean: how was it that Jacob could, seemingly, freely leave the island, but Smokey couldn't? How could Jacob seemingly deflect the destinies of scores of people with a simple touch? When Jack becomes "just like me", there doesn't seem to be any kind of a importation of knowledge or power -- Jack is meandering around the island without any real clue, just guesses, about what is going on.
Why isn't there any conversation about what a horrific douche bag Jacob was? I mean, as I read it, he's brought at least one plane full of people (and, it is implied many many more) to the island, mostly to die in horrible and unhelpful ways. He's clearly lied to his most faithful lieutenants -- Richard and that Ilana chick, not to mention Locke. If Smokey had been forced to "stay in Christian's Body" how would have the ended parsed any differently? And, really, wouldn't it have been kind of thematically better with Jack's Daddy issues that would have happened? Jacob was pretty much wrong about everything -- in fact, Smokey HAD to manipulate the Losties to "turn off" the "Vending Machine" so that he COULD be defeated. That's pretty much the opposite of what Jacob was saying all along, isn't it?
I didn't actually think that they'd "get it right" in the end, but at least they could have tried a LITTLE harder -- and it really wouldn't have taken much. 15-20 minutes of exposition, maybe? Though, apparently there's going to be an "extra" 15-20 minutes on the DVD, which, sort of, pisses me off more than almost anything else -- that's a real "double dip" "FUCK YOU" to people who have already invested their time into this series.
But, like I said, I didn't really think they'd resolve it all in the end -- it was clear from the first couple of years that they were making shit up as they went along, and it is human nature to try to impose order on an irrational world. At least it wasn't QUITE as bad as BATTLESTAR where EVERY EPISODE said "they had a plan", and that "plan" turned out to be "A Wizard Did It". At least LOST never *promised* us some sort of rational resolution; we just inferred it.
I resent that 120-ish hours of my life were "wasted" with this show. While I "enjoyed" the ride, that enjoyment as predicated on it meaning something, anything, and in the end, it didn't.
LOST was, as the Bard would put it, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
And that makes it CRAP, sorry.
Because A Wizard Did It.
*************
What about comics, then?
Some quick and nasty thoughts on recent stuff (because I seem to have shot most of my wad above)
From last week:
AGE OF HEROES #1 and ENTER THE HEROIC AGE #1: Mostly these seem to me to be Blatant Cash Grabs trading off to whatever Good Will you might possibly have to SIEGE or the AVENGERS relaunches (do you have any?) -- AGE OF HEROES is sort of 2/3rds CANCELLED COMICS CAVALCADE, focusing on DOCTOR VOODOO and CAPTAIN BRITAIN AND MI13, if you were desperate for some sort of Coda to those two series, with a one-page filler Spidey story and what I thought was a really misguided misfire of a JJJ tale -- JJJ isn't a power-mad opportunist, is he? I always thought he'd do ANYthing to sell papers, but not because he wanted to exploit tragedy. ENTER THE HEROIC AGE is a semi "issue #0" intro to the new Status Quos of ATLAS, THUNDERBOLTS, AVENGERS ACADEMY and so on.
Neither one was bad, per se, but at $4 a throw, I need more than "not bad" -- and these were pretty EH
ATLAS #1: I really kind of don't get Marvel. In the last 16 months this will make the FOURTH try with a new #1 to get people to buy into ATLAS. What's funny is that issue of WHAT IF? with the "50s Avengers", and being one of the very few "What If?" stories that actually happened, is one of my favorites, but trying to fit these characters into the modern age has been a very awkward fit. But, it seems clear to me that the audience really isn't that interested in these characters, and I wouldn't say that it seems logical that they have any real spin-off potential (ie, movies, rides, whatever). So why keep trying? And MORE IMPORTANTLY, why keep trying four times in 16 months? Why keep launching books that are almost certainly going to get canceled before issue #12? All they're doing is to make people more skittish about trying new books... This was OK, at best.
AVENGERS #1: It suffers from the usual Bendis-isms, and I don't think JRJR is the best suited artist for "big brightly colored action", but I'm a little tickled with the "old school" nature of this book -- it's refreshing after the last 5-7 years to actually read an Avengers comic where they're heroes being heroic above board. Solidly OK, I guess.
LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #1: I dunno. I was a massive Levitz Legion fan, but it's almost like too much has passed for me to re-engage with these characters as they were back then. I'm more than willing to give it a couple of issues, however (though I'm utterly underwhelmed by the idea of TWO LSH books running side-by-side -- it would have been smarter to have put ADVENTURE on hiatus for a while to confirm this redo is "working", but what do us retailers know?). I also think DC was dunderheadly stupid to have not to attached a LSH ring to this comic.
Really my biggest problem with this book is the art -- it's pretty "DC House Style", and I think LSH either needs to look super-clean and super-sleek (Give me Chris Sprouse, and I probably would have loved this), or super-hyper detailed (Can you imagine Ryp drawing LSH? That would be keen...), and, instead, it is just kind of... there. I don't know, I'm going to go with a very low GOOD, but that my be my nostalgia talking more than anything else...
ZATANNA #1: Hey, nice, pretty, and reasonably fun. Z is maybe a touch too insanely powerful and in control, but I can totally see following this book to see where it might lead. My biggest complaint? Petty, but it feels like "movie" San Francisco, rather than the real one. That's just cuz I live here. Anyway, i thought it was pretty GOOD.
From two weeks ago:
HULK #22: just under 2 years worth of issues to get to the reveal, sigh. But riddle me this: where does the mustache go when he's hulked-out? EH.
TITANS VILLAINS FOR HIRE SPECIAL #1: Jesus, fuck, what a horrible comic book. I expect my TITANS sales to drop to subs-only within 3 months now. Who wants to read about these characters? And who wants the kind of bullshit hacked out death that appears here? Completely CRAP.
I'm hoping I'm back up to speed tomorrow, and I'll start in on THIS week's books...
If Ambush Bug was a nostalgic disappointment, STAGGER LEE and THE FOUNTAIN were the two happy surprises from my "Name things I should read/review from the Multnomah Library System" idea (Feel free to suggest more books in the comments, by the way. Go here for details on how it works, but use these comments for suggestions so I don't lose track. I find it easy to lose track). In both cases, I had what could politely be called lowered expectations, and ended up happily surprised.
The Fountain, I was kind of biased against; yes, there's that lovely, beautiful Kent Williams artwork (Seriously, why isn't this man worshipped as an artistic god yet? Even if his line wasn't as assured and just damn right all the time - even his "sloppier" looking work just looks perfect, as if he's somehow translating essential truths about the way things look onto paper - his color sense is just amazingly wonderful; when he does full paintings, as opposed to ink and wash, my breath is taken away with the way in which he sees the world), but I'd heard countless bad things about the movie this accompanied, and the book itself suffers from a terribly overwritten opening, sinking hopes even further. But then, surprisingly, the book opens up to become something both more allegorical and more relatable at the same time, a story of magical realism and kindness that, oddly enough, feels as if it anticipates this year's Lost episodes in many ways. Don't get me wrong; Williams is clearly, unfailingly, the draw here (No pun, etc. etc.) but Darren Aronofksy's script ends up coming a close second; light in many ways - this isn't the wordiest book you'll ever read, and the plot is barely a whisper, apparently trailing behind ideas on Aronofsky's list of things to do - but with a weight that stays with you awhile afterwards. A genuinely surprising Very Good.
Meanwhile, Stagger Lee is one of those books that's easy to admire but also, frustratingly, difficult to love. In terms of scope and intent, Derek McCulloch's writing is impressive as hell, with the book acting as part-essay and part-historical recreation about the facts and fiction surrounding the song "Stagger Lee" and the events contained therein, and Shepherd Hendrix's art is clear and subtle, with a nice P. Craig Russell finish sneaking in at times. But both art and writing are uneven, with sections of the book feeling cramped and rushed when compared with other parts, and consistency sacrificed for clarity and comedy more than once. But even with that, I enjoyed it a lot; it reminded me of things like Sarah Vowell's writing, or (to continue a theme, apparently), This American Life in the way it mixes entertainment and education. I'd like to see more of this kind of thing, especially from these two men - I saw McCulloch had a story in last week's Image FCBD book, but have either gone on to do anything else of note? Good, anyway.
So, yes: What else do you people want me to be reading from the library? Lead me in good directions, people.
Maybe it's just me, but there's something kind of depressing about SHOWCASE PRESENTS AMBUSH BUG. I remember, when the original series (serieses?) were coming out, thinking that there was something hilarious and subversive about what Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming were up to, even though I didn't get half the jokes (Hey, I was ten years old or something like that; give me a break), but re-reading the stories now - and especially in one large chunk like this collection - I came away feeling as if I was watching the creators fall out of love with comics, or at least the comics industry; what starts as affectionate parody gradually becomes more and more bitter (and repetitive, as if Giffen and Fleming are getting less and less interested in actually trying to entertain) and, because of that, less enjoyable to read.
(If I had to pinpoint where it all started to go wrong? The Son Of Ambush Bug mini-series, where it was already feeling as if the joke had worn out its welcome, and Giffen and Fleming were getting more insular and straw-mannish with their targets; if the character had pretty much disappeared after the first series, or the Stocking Stuffer special, it might've been better for all involved. By the time the book's last issue, the Nothing Special rolls around, there's almost some kind of contempt - for the audience, for the comic industry, for themselves - sneaking in, some kind of "You think we can get away with this? Why not?", disguised as irreverence.)
Maybe I'm projecting - It wouldn't be the first time - but this is an interesting book for the wrong reasons; somewhere around the midway point, the stories stop being very entertaining, but I started to get fascinated watching the series, and the character, become smaller and more embittered, raging against the way his medium was going. The Showcase collection is interesting for all the wrong reasons; it's interesting because of what was happening behind the scenes, all the things left unsaid and watching as the satirists lose their sense of fun and just get angry instead. Like I said, maybe I'm projecting, and maybe I just don't get the joke. But, even though this is only an Okay book for me, I can't help but feel like there's more here than I initially expected going in.
Pardon me one moment, while I rant about one small thing concerning BRIGHTEST DAY #1. Namely, it's not the first issue. I know, I know; it's numbered "1", and the cover says "First Issue," but... it's really not. Not just in the sense of "There was an issue prior to this" (Although, you know, that should be a clue right there), but in the sense of, "There are no real introductions or beginnings in this 'first' issue, if someone picked it up cold and didn't know that there'd been an #0." Each of the story threads is already in progress, and the characters barely introduced. The first scene, in fact, picks up from the cliffhanger of the previous issue, which itself picks up from the end of Blackest Night #8. Beyond the number on the cover, there is nothing "first issue"-ish about this issue. Bad form, DC.
(Don't get me wrong; I've got nothing against the idea of an #0, and DC have shown they can do it right: Blackest Night #0, and even this week's Superman: War Of The Supermen #0 - Whatever happened to that JG Jones cover, by the way? - did it "right," or close enough for me to be happy... Spend the #0 setting the scene and bringing new readers up to speed, but then open #1 with an introduction in and of itself. Speaking of SUPERMAN: WAR OF THE SUPERMEN #1 - Well, I didn't see that coming; guess I know why that last mini-series was called Last Stand of New Krypton, even though they won. It also signposts a way to end this whole storyline, but despite it being a low-Good, high-Okay read, I remain weirdly uncomfortable and unhappy with the brutality it has, and the casual treatment it gives what's a breathtakingly genocidal act - It's literally "Lots of people dead for cheap motivation! Let's get on with the ass-kicking!" so far, and I hope there's something more to this in future issues.)
With all of that out the way, Brightest Day #1 is... Okay, I guess? It's too early to make any real decisions or declarations about the series as a whole, but from the first two issues, it already feels scattered and out-of-control (due to scale, perhaps) in a way that its closest relative, 52, never did, perhaps because I'm already expecting the crossovers and stories tumbling in and out of this series the way that they did in Countdown. I'm also already worried that we'll see some kind of "They're all still Black Lanterns really!" reveal coming down the line, considering the Aquaman and Martian Manhunter scenes, which is pretty much 100% what I don't want from this series - I understand the value of the core narrative to keep fans engaged, but I'm already wearily wishing that the characters had been reborn without this mystery hanging over their heads, and that Brightest Day was a series really merely looking at how they dealt with returning to life. But that may explain why I don't work in comics.
There are three things that I really liked about last weekend's FREE COMIC BOOK DAY 2010: IRON MAN/THOR oneshot from Marvel, and that's not even counting the John Romita Jr./Klaus Janson artwork, which I believe is now legally required to be noted by anyone talking about any comic that the two of them work on together (For what it's worth, I normally really like both artists, but there was something off about the art in this, for me; a thinness of line in places, an inconsistency in characters (Weird but true: Thor's nose kept annoying me throughout the book. I have no idea why. I became obsessed with how thin and pointy it seemed at times) and a laziness in panel layout. I know, I know; it's like complaining that your hearty, tasty, homecooked meal wasn't up to Michelin standards, but still. Anyway, like I said. There are three things that I really liked about the book, nonetheless.
#1: It felt like an issue of Marvel Team-Up. I mean that as a compliment, honestly. In an era of events and cross-continuity and trade-writing and all those things, there was something oddly enjoyable - if only from a novelty standpoint - about a story that begins and ends in the same issue and sees two bigname heroes team up to deal with what was, let's face it, a fairly generic problem (Not to mention, deal with it by, pretty much, blowing shit up). It felt weirdly nostalgic, and made me wish that a series like this existed on a regular basis.
#2: It made Tony Stark look like a dick, but an interesting dick. Am I the only person who thought that Tony's offhand "Yeah, I created this weapon but I'm trying to be better now" came over as very insincere? Or, more to the point, am I the only person who thought that it was awesome if it was insincere, and that Tony Stark, these days - post-Disassembled and Resilient - was someone who doesn't really care about the morality of superheroing versus weapons-manufacturing, but wants to appear as if he does, and offers up these lazy, unconvincing justifications for his past actions by saying "Yeah, but I'm a superhero now?" I'm probably really reading into what was meant, no doubt, as a sincere, throwaway quip (I have little doubt that Matt Fraction believes that Tony is trying to be better, if nothing else), but I love that there was space for that interpretation. I don't care about Tony-Stark-as-fascist from Civil War, but Tony-Stark-as-sociopath-who-just-finds-being-a-superhero-more-fun-but-pretends-it-has-a-higher-moral-purpose-to-everyone-including-himself? Yeah, gimme more of that guy.
#3: That coloring. Oh, man, that coloring.Just look at the top of that first page, the way that Dean White has done the cape and the sky and the way they meet, and man, that's really, really amazing stuff. It made me think about Marvel and DC colorists, and the fact that - superhero lines only - Marvel's coloring is miles better than DC's; Marvel has artists like White, Laura Martin, Christina Strain and Frank D'Armata, whereas DC's superhero line has... Alex Sinclair? Whose style works well for him (I think he did a great job on Blackest Night, for example), but is also more... I don't know how to put it: Synthetic? Computerized? Less human, somehow, less idiosyncratic than the best Marvel colorists, and that's the problem I have with most of DC's superhero colorists, to make a grand, sweeping statement. It's not that DC doesn't use great colorists, but folk like Dave Stewart (currently working wonders over at Vertigo) and Trish Mulvihill and Laura Allred rarely work on the monthly superhero books, and it's there, those books, that I feel the lack of great coloring. I'm guessing it's a stylistic choice, but I wish that DC could poach some of these guys nonetheless. I'd love to see what White could do with a Frank Quitely page, for example...
All of that said, I'm not sure that this book made me want to go out and pick up an issue of Thor (Invincible Iron Man, maybe; I liked this Tony more than the one Fraction's been writing over there so far, but I'm reading that in collections and so left him comatose, mindwiped and about to be rebooted); the weightlessness that I enjoyed also left me entirely unstirred of any desire to read further adventures of a Thunder God who, let's face it, comes across as fairly bland and personality-less for the entire book (And that nose...!). So... Is that a success or a fail for this explicitly-intended taster? I'm unsure. But taken on its own merits, it still comes out as a Good book, considering I paid nothing for it.
FCBD last weekend, editing an interview that Spurgeon conducted with myself, participating in the first Savage Critic roundtable, getting a first draft nailed down for the next TILTING, and this morning I taught a comics class to Ben's 1st grade class (yay to using words like "juxtaposition" and "onomatopoeia" with 6 year olds!), how do I even have time to breath any more?
Regardless, best bang out some reviews on the quickstyle before I start in on this week's FOC...
I'm not but halfway done with this week's books, but here's some quickie thoughts:
ASTRO CITY THE DARK AGE BOOK FOUR #4 (OF 4): 16 issues and 5 years later, thank god this is over. I can't say that I've liked more than a scene here or there of any of this, really -- I'm VERY ready for the book to go back to Done-In-Ones forever and ever after. I did like the "epilogue" though, and the redacted original pitch is sort of entertaining if you play mad-libs with it. Overall, though? EH
BATMAN AND ROBIN #12: Damn, now that's a sexy issue of Batman, and I suddenly lurve Damien to pieces. I really really want Dick to stay as Batman. Does anyone (other than licensees) actually want Bruce Wayne back? The only sour notes for me are Talia -- I don't get her motivations at all any more, especially with Ra's running around too. But, hell, who cares, this was the strongest issue since #1, and I thought it was fundamentally EXCELLENT!
BRIGHTEST DAY #1: Kind of more of the same as "#0", just with fewer characters. I have a lot of hope this will end up being 52-ish (52 took like a dozen issues to really get good), but I ain't really feeling it yet. On the up-side: we didn't get allocated on the rings, so that should sell a few funny books... This is solidly OK.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #35 TWILIGHT PT 4 (OF 4): I can't say as though I really understand all that's going on with Buffy and Angel and what it all "means", but this has been a rocking arc, and this was a rocking end to that rocking arc. That alternate cover is also 31 flavors of awesome -- not even for the main image, but because they bothered to replicate the TRU banner ad that was on the original. I have warm fuzzies for this book right now, much like I did in the first few arcs. VERY GOOD.
iZOMBIE #1: I don't understand the "i" like Apple's trademark, I didn't really like any of the characters at all, but it's only a buck so that's good. My real ire is that this book was "previewed" in many Vertigo comics the last month, but what the previewed was the LAST pages of the book, so when I got to that point I was all "WTF, I've read all this before!" Dumb dumb move. Mildly OK.
PILOT SEASON STEALTH #1: This is the first of these "Pilot Season" comics I've read yet (after... 8? of them?) where I was actually interested in what happens next, and where, when I got to the last page I thought, "Well, give me the next issue already!" The premise here (superhero with Alzheimers) almost certainly can't be sustained for more than 3-4 issues, but I was intrigued by the set up. Solidly GOOD.
SUPERMAN WAR OF THE SUPERMEN #1 (OF 4): Interesting choice to wipe the slate in the middle of the issue rather than at the climax, but given that there's only 1 or 2 ways the entire series can resolve, I'm not finding a ton of suspense in here. Still, it was strongly OK action comics.
ULTIMATE COMICS NEW ULTIMATES #2: My suggestion is just don't read any of the Captain America captions, because they don't seem to fit the Ultimate Cap at all, and they're very clunky anyway. Without all of that narration, this was actually pretty GOOD, but with them it was fairly AWFUL. I'm weird like that.
That's all I have time for today... hopefully more before the end of the weekend?
Here's a fun fact I learned at Wondercon 2010: Darwyn Cooke is probably the closest thing comics has to a Frank Sinatra.
I was with Matt Maxwell on the last day of the Con, we were both getting ready to leave, both of us feeling beat up in different ways and for different reasons, and Matt swung by to say a quick goodbye to Cooke who was over in artist's alley.
I was aware Matt and Cooke knew each other, although I wasn't sure how well—it seemed like a casual friendship, nothing super-tight or anything (although if you know Matt Maxwell, you know the man has his own code of what he'll talk about and what he won't and things have to move in the teeth-pulling direction before he even considers talking about the latter). So what kind of impressed me is that, as Matt waved at Cooke over the throng of people at Cooke's table, Cooke looked over, smiled, exchanged a few words with Matt, seemed very touched Matt had taken a few minutes to stop and then thanked him...and, in doing so, blew Matt a small kiss.
It takes style for one hetero guy to put his fingers to his lips and blow a kiss at another guy and not have it seem, you know, kind of fey. In fact, this came off as pretty much the opposite: it was the ne plus ultra of het masculinity, affectionate but also jokey and even self-mockingly benedictory. When guys in gangster movies grip one another with a meaty hand below the ear and kiss each other on the cheek? It was kind of like that.
In fact it was exactly like that, and it made me think, suddenly, of Frank Sinatra, a guy who'd deliberately battled his way up to the top of the tough guy heap exactly so he could dish out such acts of gentleness and sentiment without getting any grief for it. (Indeed, it's not easy to remember but Sinatra did a ton of work to get himself positioned exactly so: between being the crooner adored by swooning bobby soxers and having a 4-F rating that kept him from military service during WWII, Sinatra in the '40s had been considered one of the great candyasses of the western world.)
I'll be honest with you here—this is the point where I'm supposed to break out my deep, deep knowledge of Sinatra's music and his personal history, do a little bit of the ol' presto-changeo!, and show you exactly how The Chairman of the Board and Darwyn Cooke (The Chairman of the Bristol Board! Start the meme now!) are intriguing mirror images of one another, images made strange by working in such dissimilar media and to such different ends.
Instead, I'm forced to confess my familiarity with Sinatra is, at best, slight and the closest I can come to tying the two men together is exactly the thing that kept Ol' Blue-Eyes at such a distance for mesomething I'll call The Nelson Riddle Factor.
Nelson Riddle was Sinatra's arranger at Capitol in the '50s, precisely the time when Sinatra pulled off his spectacular career resurrection and went from being a facile 4-Fer to tormented tough guy, and I must be the only guy on the planet who finds Riddle's arrangements the epitome of treacle. I can make it through a song of his if I'm at a bar and I've got a beer under me—in fact, I can even make it through two—but anything more than that and I feel like someone is emptying a cement mixer full of honey over me. It is too too—every imperfection is smoothed out, every nuance underscored with a flourish, every string section put to work even if the job could've been done with a solo violin. It's sonic bathos.
It's a testament to Cooke's talent I don't feel the same about his work, frankly. Being familiar with the source material, I enjoyed Cooke's adaptation of The Hunter but I also understood Dan Nadel's stinging critique over at Comics Comics: What Nadel objects to is precisely the Nelson Riddle factor in Cooke's work, the tendency toward excess (or as Nadel memorably puts it, "every room Parker walks into has an Eames chair and a Noguchi table. Every clock is by George Nelson. All the women are outfitted like cheesecake 'dames.'") in adapting a work known for its spareness. It's not the sort of excess those of us who read a ton of superhero comics easily recognize because we're used to bombastic excess, but it's there. Only the mix of Cooke's storytelling chops--the rhythm of the panels on the page--and the original story's killer narrative hook kept The Hunter from becoming torpid.
So I'm relieved—giddy, in fact—that The Man With The Getaway Face flips the script so successfully: Cooke cuts material from the second Parker book and strips it down to a twenty-four page comic book. Sure, it's oversized and mustard-colored, stylized and clearly in love with the milieu, but it's a comic book about Parker getting a new face and scaring up some money by way of an iffy heist he's not in a position to turn down.
Cooke has to make some hard choices here, but the work is all the better for it and it makes the bravura touches really hit home. The first four pages, for example, feature a credit page sequence that dares you not to think of Saul Bass, and two full page-splashes, one of which is an annotated letter. I have no doubt Cooke could come up with an entire graphic novel full of stunners like this but they're quickly swept aside as the book, and Parker, gets down to business in a series of eight and nine-panel pages which use the oversized format to keep things from feeling utterly claustrophobic.
Like the heist presented inside, Cooke's The Man With A Getaway Face is all about planning and timing. Lovely bits that could've been meaty set-pieces get cut to the thinnest slices possible (I'm thinking here of the panel showing just the ten items needed to pull the heist, presented with no explanation whatsoever) and the art moves from stylization into honest god-damned cartooning: Parker has a face that doesn't come together from panel to panel—in one panel, the tip of his left cheek bone escapes his face altogether, and in long shots his head looks like the puzzle piece Curious George swallowed—but that suits the character perfectly (he has just had reconstructive surgery, after all, and it's easy to imagine how raw-boned and unsettlingly malleable his face must now feel) as well as gives the eyes something to linger on. As Graeme pointed out in our recent podcast installment, even the cover is loose, not-right, with the pencil under-sketching on the right hand visible.
We'll have to see if Cooke is going to keep working like this, or if he decided this was just the way The Man With The Getaway Face had to be—loose, speedy, and purposeful—and The Outfit will shift gears once again. Although this story will be included as a prologue to that book, I prefer The Man With The Getaway Face the way you can get it now: oversized, gaudy, and cheap. It's the Sinatra single I never got to hear—experience and talent and impeccable phrasing, all those fucking binding strings finally snipped away—and it's Excellent work, well worth your time and coin.
This is a bit too long and overly friendly, so it's buried under the cut where Chris and Sean won't have to read it. It's about this X-Men Second Coming shindig. And me. It's too long. Also spoilers.
"Second Coming" is the overall title for the current X-Men cross-over mini-event story arc. It's operating on a weekly basis, delivering one chapter a week. (Last week saw the release of the first unnecessary and terrible tie-in issue, called "X-Factor: Second Coming: Revelations.) It has another nine chapters left to go. The basic plot of the story is that "Hope", the only new mutant to have been born since "M-Day" has returned to the current X-Men timeline, and she is being targeted for execution by a hybrid group of mutant-haters, who are apparently led by a cyborg character named Bastion. That's not a very easy sentence to swallow, but it contains the minimum amount of pertinent information required to keep up with the story. (Whether or not that is enough to enjoy the story is, of course, your personal call.)
Each of the chapters has, so far, depicted a very short amount of time--the fourth installment is the only one that may stretch beyond an hour--and each issue has consisted primarily of fighting between the soldiers of the two groups. As of the most recent installment, Nightcrawler is dead, and a lesser-known character named Ariel died last week. The bad guys have seen a much higher rate of loss, but it's difficult to tell how high their body count actually is--they have a lot of cannon fodder, and lots of them die each issue.
I don't read X-Men comics on a regular basis, and I never have for a consistent period of time. (I did read the Grant Morrison stories in collections, but they've always struck me as Grant Morrison comics more than they were X-Men comics, and according to the Internet, Marvel felt exactly the same way.) But for the past five years or so, I've been taking a chance whenever the X-Men comics do their big X-Men crossover events. It wasn't until I thought about writing about Second Coming for this site that I realized something, which is I have no idea why I've been doing that. I've picked up and read the first issues of Messiah Complex, Messiah War, Utopia, House of M, that Brubaker thing about space, those Whedon things where he put Buffy on the team, that Chuck Austen thing that I guess caused swine flu?, and whatever that one was where Cyclops didn't trust his judgment and Nightcrawler kept yammering about somebody named "Gott"-and yet, I couldn't tell you what the impulse was. There were a couple of times where it was the creator's involved that pulled me in, but otherwise, this was just blindly buying something out of an undefined desire for...what? It wasn't because I was writing blog posts about them, because I didn't have a blog for most of them. It wasn't because I wanted to be able to talk to X-Men superfans, because the only one I know is this guy, and we have more fun talking about horrible things that people say.
And yet, here I am again, and I've found myself looking forward to the new chapters of this thing, this beastly, 14 part weekly story. There's yet to be an issue featuring an artist I care for, I harbor no nostalgic memory for any of the characters or their relationships with one another, and while four out of the five issues have been written by different people, all of the issues have featured the exact same re-arranged story beats. (Fighting, military style orders, short Jack Bauer one-liners followed by murder, some measure of tragedy). For whatever reason, this--the most simplistic example of an X-Men story as I could imagine--works for me in a way that absolutely none of their comics ever have before.
Part of my interest certainly began when I discovered the last two years of Cable comic books. If you didn't read it, Cable was the sort of horrible writing assignment one would expect dictated from someone like Dan Didio, a comic where a writer was hired to keep two characters occupied until the time was reached when rest of the X-Men books were prepared for these two characters to return. The book wasn't particularly interesting on an individual issue basis, but taken as a whole, it's weirdly fascinating stuff. Within its 24 issues, Duane Swierczynski was seemingly allowed to do whatever he wanted, as long as what he wanted involved Cable, the aforementioned Hope, and Bishop. The setting for the book changed throughout, but the basic plot never did--like some kind of long-form Krazy Kat story, Bishop ran after Cable and Hope while trying to kill them, and Hope and Cable tried not to die. (There was a brief X-cross-over break early on, but all of the visiting characters were incorporated into Duane's "run after Cable and Hope" format.) My interest in the book was born solely out of the desire to see Paul Gulacy draw Cable, but the constant repetition of the same plot device drew me to seek out as many of the issues as I could find without a lot of work. (Which was most of them.) Secretly, I hoped to find an issue that consisted of actual scenes where Hope and Cable looked over their shoulder while running away from Bishop, and in issue #22, I found that exact thing.
It would be giving Swierczynski too much credit to claim that this was the best possible creative choice for his Cable assignment, but compared to the way so many recent editorial fiat types of stories turned out, he achieved a weird bit of wizardry with this task. Hope aged (but never became that interesting of a character), Bishop killed millions of people (but his bloodthirsty psychopathy never made a lot of sense), and all the while, the rest of the comic just incorporated a boatload of random window dressing while never notably changing its format. Cable and Hope ran. Bishop ran after them. An artist put different backdrops up behind them. Repeat, 24 times.
In a way, Second Coming hasn't added a whole lot to that general idea. It's added the marquee characters into the mix, sure, and the primary villain has changed, but it's still a book about one thing: people want to kill this girl. The good guys don't want that to happen.
Just past the horizon of the evening, I can hear various extrapolations of overly-considered essays about these comics bubbling up. Maybe something about race, and how it's kind of fucked up that Marvel published a story for two years about how a strong, virile black man wasn't able to catch a sick old white dude and a little girl despite being--you know, not old, sick, or a little girl. Maybe you could even take some of Matt Fraction's past remarks about Utopia--the island/survivalist compound the X-Men now live on--seriously, and you could pretend that M-Day has a parallel to the Holocaust, and that the X-Force team is a vaguely considered stand-in for the Mossad.
Somebody could totally do that. Hell, it's tasteless enough that it might even be me. Considering that today's chapter of Second Coming ended with Hope's arrival at the X-Men's private compound, the story might now slow down and become another insufferable attempt to incorporate lots of talking into an action story while the main characters keep their knife hands pensively closed.
For now though, I'm not that guy. I'm just going to call these fuckers GOOD, and leave it at that.
Oh, wait, one last thing.
I guess Nightcrawler died because he didn't have one what it takes?
Not a review per se, but I'm curious - Does anyone else who's read THE FLASH #1 think that Francis Manapul's art - which I genuinely adore, even as I remain convinced that he's the wrong artist for this particular book* - is oddly reminiscent of Fabio Moon's at times in this issue? I mean that as a compliment, because I'm a fan of Moon's also, but... it strikes me as a really interesting direction for a superhero artist, particularly one who's quickly becoming one of DC's more high profile ones. It's the quality of the line as much as anything, but there's also a slight sense of exaggeration to the figures that reminds me of Ba's work, as well. Am I insane?
For illustration purposes (and sorry for the crappy quality of the scans; if nothing else, I'm outing myself as someone who'd be a terrible comic scanner for torrent purposes), here's some Manapul from The Flash:
And here's some Ba, from a recent Daytripper (which you are all reading, right?):
Ehhh, maybe it's just me. But what do you think?
(* And as to why I think Manapul's art is wrong for the Flash - I'm from the Carmine Infantino school of Flash iconography, which was much cleaner, harder-edged and modern than the - very pleasurable - watercolor effect and softness that makes Manapul's work so interesting these days. But Manapul doesn't seem hard or fast enough, if that makes any sense.)
A quick comic:
THE UNWRITTEN #12: This has been a great series all along, but this self-contained single-ass was a serious line-drive home-run. Thunderingly gorgeous, incredibly smart, I thought it was EXCELLENT.
...and a couple of books...:
MARKET DAY HC: I really think the world of James Sturm as a creator -- GOLEM'S MIGHTY SWING was one of the best books of the year that it came out -- and I think this was a solid read as well. It's a really beautiful meditation on art versus commerce, and faith (and maybe those are even the same thing, in some ways), all through the lens of a turn-of-the-(last)-century European Jew. It is strong, powerful, moving, and drop dead gorgeous, relying more on mood and tone than, necessarily, incident. It is also really elegantly designed, and (thankfully) eschews the D&Q "belly band" (I hate those easily-ripped paper things hanging off book's front covers!) in favor of a thicker print for the middle design element of the cover. (Touch it, you'll see)
I have lots of terrific praise for this, and plenty of glowing adjectives, as a work of creation, but when we get to the "letter grade", I can only barely muster a GOOD. Why? The price. $21.95. For what I counted to be 88 story pages.
(Digression: WHY THE FUCK can no one put page numbers on fucking GNs? I can't say I've EVER seen a prose book that wasn't paginated, and it makes a huge difference in citing and discussing a work -- I can't say "check out the technique on page x" or whatever. Man, does that ever piss me off... /digression)
Some of those story pages have 2-3 panels on them, and there's a number of double-page spreads that, while they add immeasurably to the mood of the work (without being manga, there's examples of manga-esque "a tree sheds a leaf" environmental timing here), it makes this not-a-work-of-density. Well, it has tons of EMOTIONAL density, but what I mean is it really is a quick read; if I spent 15 minutes with it that's probably a lot.
Now, to be certain, I'd rather spend 15 minutes with this than 95% of the output of Marvel comics -- and there's no doubt in my mind that this will stick with me far longer than virtually anything else I've read this month, but "value" is an important concept in retail sales, and unless you're a trust-fund comics patron, this was a pretty mediocre value based on cover price.
Great, nay, superlative content; terrible price. If D&Q actually had any kind of a real HC/SC program I'd say "wait for the SC", but that's not usually how D&Q operates, so it's pretty much this or nothing. this is, to be certain, the kind of work that should be nominated for an Eisner, and it also handsome and has decent "hand", but, man, on a cost-per-minute basis this fails almost any test I could come up. So, yeah, the overall grade is GOOD, solely based on price, even though the content is EXCELLENT.
OTHER LIVES HC: This is, I think, the longest single piece of work that Peter Bagge has ever turned out -- 130 solid pages of cartooning (see, page numbers, not so hard!), and it has all of the exaggerated wonderfulness you expect from Bagge's cartooning. Bagge is clearly a master of his craft, but the work suffers from some of the flaws much (all?) of his post-HATE work has -- he's clearly older than his material, and while the thematic underpinnings of the work (what is "identity" in the internet age?) are very strong, you don't get any real sense that Bagge has any real personal connection/experience/connection to the internet-settings like his thin "Second Life"-esque world.
I'm a MMORPGer (I was even a "Seer" in the venerable Ultima Online, leading a team of a half-dozen in creating/supporting player-made fiction for nearly two years), and I've had more than one period in my life where the fantasy worlds seemed perhaps more solid than the "real" one. I think the world is well ready for compelling fiction set between the digital and "meat" worlds, showing how and why humanity changes their behavior when it isn't tied to physical reality and conventions -- but this really isn't it.
Oh don't get me wrong, this IS solid work from a vet creator, but the actual realities of virtual worlds don't seem to have a lot of bearing here -- to a certain extent this same tale could have been set 40 years in the past and been about, dunno, pen pals, and worked just as well.
The characters are well-drawn (and well illustrated for that matter!) and reasonably compelling, but the notional issues of the internet and the changes it can wreak are oddly tangential to the "normal Bagge-ish lovable losers" in general. It is solid work, but it is a base hit by a comfortable creator, rather than a home run by a burning passion, and I sorta think that Bagge might be better in a writer's room at a sitcom than trying to do comics about characters 10-20 years younger than himself. The work, itself, is probably a low "GOOD"; something to read if you come across it, but not something you need to chase and track down.
But, very much like MARKET DAY, this seems pretty drastically overpriced to this reader. $24.95 is pretty egregious for a B&W book, especially one that isn't a major homerun. Had it been in color I might not be moaning as much, but, brother, I think this is is at least $5 more than the general market is interested in supp0rting, and that's going to knock down my "Final grade" to no more than an OK. That puts it into "Wait for the SC" territory (and even that will, likely, be $19.95, again, $5 too much)
The thing I kind of want to underline here is that if this had been serialized first, the creatives could have been paid for in that format, and maybe we'd even be looking at an eventual $12.95 SC. You say you don't want to buy periodicals any more? 'sfine, you're the customer, but the hard cold fiscal reality of that stance is that you should expect to spend these kind of egregious prices for your comics, then. Especially stuff that is "literary" (I almost typed "high-brow" which would describe Sturm's work nicely, but seems oddly wrong when talking about Bagge)
At $12.95, I'd be giving this a Thumb's Up; at $25, I have a hard time recommending this to anyone who is not a Bagge completest -- I liked this, I didn't love it, and for $25, I kind of have to love a work...
CROSSED TP: It is really weird reading the press releases trying to sell the film version of this comic as a "comedy", because there's nothing even slightly funny in here, on any page. On the other hand, the tone of the work as a collected edition is entirely different than it was as a periodical. As a periodical, I thought mostly of the gore, and there's a lot of it -- but as a collection, I was struck, once again, about how Garth Ennis is, without a single doubt, the single-most moral creator working in comics today. Morality infuses every single page of this (and nearly everything that Ennis writes) with humanity, and morality. Even when, or, really, especially when, those damn humans are making the wrong decision.
If comics could only support one single writer, then Garth would be my vote, especially if you're capable of getting past the surface shocks. There's a ton more going on below that surface, and that's where his real talent lay. I thought the collected edition of CROSSED was VERY GOOD.
