Phantasmic Blog

Fourth World Fridays: Mister Miracle #4--"The Closing Jaws of Death!"

2012-02-17T14:49:00.000-08:00

Let’s talk about female characters in comics. If you’ve been reading superhero comics for any length of time, you’re familiar with the Women in Refrigerators syndrome...and if you’re not, a quick click on the link will fill you in. Short version: there’s an unfortunate tradition of sexism or outright misogyny in superhero stories, with female characters frequently being reduced to cheesecake, depowered, or, worst of all, killed off in a hackneyed attempt to motivate a male character. Obviously, this is an ongoing debate that’s not going to be resolved anytime soon, and the fact that we’re dealing with an entire genre, or even an entire medium, makes it hard to speak in generalities, but it certainly seems hard to argue that superheroes are dominated by the mindset of male geeks, and as such, frequently present a somewhat…skewed…vision of femininity.

What’s interesting about this whole trend, to me at least, is that in many ways this comics misogyny seems to increase as you get closer to the present. Some of the most powerful and interesting female comics characters, including the ur-superheroine, Wonder Woman, are products of the 30s and 40s. Sure, there’s always that streak of sexism native to the era—the infamous cover with Batgirl adjusting her makeup while Batman and Robin fight for their lives being somewhat typical—but back then, comics were actually written about girls and for girls, which necessitated a healthier viewpoint almost by default.

Which is not to say there weren’t issues. Most of the female characters Kirby himself created at Marvel were really, really bland—Susan Storm and Jean Grey were virtually made of cardboard in the early 60s—when they weren’t slightly offensive (Janet Van Dyne, like most early Marvel characters, had a single character trait, and hers was “boy-crazy”). By the time of the Fourth World, however, Kirby had a better handle on his female characters. Corny jokes about “Women’s libbers” aside (and believe me, there are plenty of them in the pages to come), the essentials of women’s empowerment seem to have penetrated Kirby’s worldview along with all that other counterculture stuff.

Which brings us to Big Barda, who makes her abrupt debut on the opening splash page, standing right behind Oberon as he frets about Scott. A rebellious member of Darkseid’s “female task force”, the Female Furies, Barda’s a gigantic lady even by Kirby’s standards, and her costume is one of the most bizarre he ever designed, being basically a cross between an Egyptian sarcophagus and a medieval crusader’s chainmail.

She’s also ungifted in social niceties, demolishing Oberon’s table just to get his attention, before resentfully declaring herself to be Scott’s friend and ally. Oberon takes an instant dislike to her, but nevertheless makes her a sandwich and milk. Geez, I guess the guy’s just stuck in permanent “servant mode”.

As you may remember, last time we saw Mr. Free he was being locked in a trunk and thrown off a balcony by the residents of an office building driven to homicidal madness by Doctor Bedlam’s Paranoid Pill. As soon as Oberon mentions this, Barda leaps up and teleports herself away to Chandler towers to help Scott, who we now cut to in media res, still tumbling through the air, as the crazed mob shoots at him. Barda beams in (the mob instantly declares her a witch) and sees the falling trunk: “Knowing Scott Free and his talent for trapping himself in strange places—I have the feeling that I’d better break the fall of this trunk!” Of course, after falling fifty stories, being “caught” isn’t really going to break his fall, but as it turns out, it’s a moot point. When Barda tears the box in half, it turns out to be empty—Scott is standing many floors above, having escaped under his own power. Obviously this makes sense—Scott gave his word that he’d escape without help, and besides, he wouldn’t be much of an escape artist if he couldn’t get out of traps himself—but it still kinda feels like Kirby wrote Barda in to come and save him and then suddenly realized it wouldn’t fit the story. Oh well. You can’t go wrong with having Big Barda show up in your comic for any reason.

Scott now reiterates that the wager is his alone to win or lose, as the mob grabs hold of him. They’ve now decided that he’s a vampire...apparently for the sole reason that he wears a cape. I guess he could be some kind of Ethiopian vampire… Anyway, they grab a wooden stake and a pipe to use as a hammer, but Scott’s too fast for them—in fact, he appears to literally vanish and reappear a few feet away. But as far as I can tell, he didn’t use any gadgets to escape. So…um…he got out of his ropes SO FAST that the mob didn’t even notice he was gone until the stake came down? “It takes a master to play it that close and cool!” Scott proclaims, humbly, and then he’s off again.

For the next two pages or so, he’s dodging the spray from fire hoses and sliding down banisters, and then something wonderful happens: he’s accosted by a guy in a medieval torturer’s costume, who lays him out by hitting his chest and producing a “BOK!” Here, see:

Yeah, I bet you were wondering what that cover was about, weren’t you? “Klieg lights!” gasps Scott. “Cameras! Good gravy! This is a movie studio! Of course! Galaxy broadcasting films its TV specials on this floor!” Yes, Scott has been captured by the cast and crew of one of those Spanish Inquisition TV dramas that were all the rage in 1971. You know, like Roots. Except with torturing. And Spanish people instead of African-Americans. This whole sequence is just a wonderful example of what makes Kirby Kirby. He’s got a killer premise, more than enough to keep him busy for another 12 pages, but he just can’t help going off on a completely random tangent. Come to that, the director and actors are behaving totally different than the rest of the mob: instead of just calling him a vampire or whatever, they’re determined to make him the real-life victim of their drama so they can win an Emmy (seriously, they say this). “A paranoid director and actors!” Thinks Scott. “How bad can things get?” Clearly, Scott has not spent much time in Hollywood. Come to think of it, maybe this has nothing to do with the paranoid pill at all, and these are just your usual early-70s filmmakers, doing a dry run for Apocalypse Now. I heard they killed, like, five superheroes on that set.

The hooded torturers drag Scott into their dungeon, spouting “thee”s and “thou”s and “varlet”s all the while. “The dialogue is terrible!” Thinks Scott. “But they mean every word of it!” Hey, that’s pretty much what I say whenever I read a Fourth World comic: the dialogue is terrible, but Kirby means every word of it. Mr. Miracle escapes from the fourth wall!

Scott is overwhelmed by the torturers, who shove him into a nearby iron maiden, bristling with spikes. Uh oh, it looks bad for our hero! Meanwhile, Barda is now finding herself confronted with more mob members, who didn’t get Bedlam’s memo about how this is just supposed to be about Scott. “I’ve no time to coddle your neuroses!” proclaims the Amazonian warrior, ripping a pillar from the wall and using it to beat back the hordes. Man, do I love Big Barda. She’s even more awesome than Big Bear. Basically, if anyone in the Fourth World has “big” in their name, they’re awesome. Though it was kinda cold to just flatten all those mob members like that. But then, there are probably dozens of casualties being caused by all this rampaging anyway, what with guns being discharged and railroad workers running amok and whatnot.

Anyway, Barda finds she can’t sit back and watch any longer—“I try not to worry about that wizard, Scott! But I can’t help myself!” This might be a good time to point out that Barda was, apparently, based on Kirby’s wife Roz, who made it her business to protect her husband from shysters and keep people from bothering him while he worked.

Barda uses her “Mega-Rod”, which is basically her own variation on a Mother Box, to blast her way up into the studio and subdue the crazed torturers. Again, though, Scott has managed to escape the trap set up for him. Now, for the first time, they have a chance to really talk—or rather, this being a Kirby comic, to exposition at each other—and they both remark on what a long, strange trip it’s been. As you may have guessed by now, both of them are former pupils of Granny Goodness, and Barda apparently helped Scott escape way back when, but she herself chose to remain. It’s not yet clear when she decided to switch teams, but it’s pretty obvious why she did it, judging from how she’s reduced to stuttering breathlessness every time Scott reveals that he’s still alive.

The hallways have suddenly gone quiet, and the reason becomes clear a moment later, as the pair are confronted by the disembodied spirit of Bedlam. He accuses Scott of cheating, given that Barda is helping him, and in retaliation he unleashes “every monster that has haunted every nightmare since time began” to rile up the rampaging mob. Um…wait…weren’t they already pretty riled up? I’m not sure how a few hallucinations are going to make people who had mistaken Scott for Bela Lugosi a few moments ago act MORE insane.

And apparently we’re not really going to find out, because we now cut to Oberon, sitting at home, fretting about Scott, wondering what he can do to help. Suddenly, he’s struck by a brilliant notion: call the police! Of course! It’s so obvious! I mean, it literally is the most obvious thing anyone would think of! And it kind of makes Oberon look stupid that he didn’t think of it before this! But never mind, because Mr. Miracle and Barda suddenly appear in a crackle of energy, and tell Obie that the cops are already at the scene. Again, nice job, Obie.

The rest of the comic is given over to Oberon’s continued bickering with Barda—one might say he seems a little jealous of her—and to a flashback recap of how Scott made all his wondrous escapes. We started this recap with one of my favourite things about the Mister Miracle comic—Big Barda—so it seems appropriate we should end it with a discussion of one of my least favourite things. That would be the way we tend to cut away from a dramatic escape to see the aftermath, and then get Scott’s summary of how he did it. Actually, this wouldn’t be so bad, except that the answer, without fail, is always, “I used a convenient gadget that I had on me and that you may or may not ever have seen before.” In this particular case, Scott plays coy about revealing his secrets (to his own assistant?) but says it’s OK to “do some supposing”:

SCOTT: Now, you take that trunk in which Mister Miracle was bound—falling to certain death—fifty floors below! It was indeed a time to panic! But was Mister Miracle that type? Suppose he wasn’t!

Whoa, whoa, hold on there, Scott! You’re totally blowing my mind!!!

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that he has a miraculous device called a “multi-cube”—not to be confused with Mother Box or that “cocoon spinner” he used in the first issue—that fired a laser to get him out of the trunk and fired a cable that he used to haul himself up. Then later he used it to squirt a corrosive spray to destroy the rear of the iron maiden, and finally, it produced an “electro-sonic signal which blanketed the brain of every paranoid in the building” thereby rendering them all unconscious.

…WHAT?!?

Scott had a device that could have rendered everyone in the building unconscious…and he didn’t think to use it until he was almost out?!? GIVE ME A BREAK. Hopefully it’s clear why I don’t like this “deus ex machina” approach to Scott’s escapes anyway, but this takes it to a whole new level of sloppiness. Gah. Let’s not dwell on it, and hope Kirby improves in later issues.

Fortunately, that’s not where the issue ends. As Oberon is voicing his concerns about Barda to Scott, and Scott’s dismissing her as “A child, you know! A powerful, deadly child—playing soldier!” Barda enters in the outfit she wears when she’s not in uniform—basically, a jazzy red bikini kinda thing and a headband. She announces that she’s starving, Scott and Oberon do a double take and make some “That’s our Barda!” cracks as the audience applauds and the closing credits roll.

What was I saying about sexism, again?

Fourth World Fridays: Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #141--"Will the Real Don Rickles Panic?!?"

2012-02-03T15:13:00.000-08:00

(Note: Jimmy Olsen #140 isn't included in the omnibus, as for some reason it was a reprint issue, not drawn by Kirby, and with nothing to do with the Fourth World. Hence the skipped issue.)

I’ve been defending Kirby’s writing on this series since the very beginning, but it wasn’t that I thought he was unreservedly talented as a prose stylist so much as I thought he was about on par with a lot of the hacks writing comics at the time. If I’m totally honest, I find what few early-70s Roy Thomas and Steve Engelhart comics I’ve read to be really verbose, and they tended towards fanboy pedantry rather than the demented imagination Kirby brought to his work. If I have to read an awkwardly-written, pretentious comic, I know which of the two I’d choose.

Still, though…after two issues of Superman vs. Don Rickles, I’m prepared to throw in my lot with the conventional wisdom. Kirby really did seem to have trouble with the English language this early in his career as a writer. Here’s a few samples from the first three pages of Jimmy Olsen #141:

“…A strange galaxy never before seen by man! – That is, until Superman, in his guise as Clark Kent, has been hurled into the unknown—trapped in a bizarre space craft!!”

“…Clark Kent gazes helplessly as he drifts past awesome wonders that stagger all imagination!”

“But the unknown says nothing! It glides by—a silent, shimmering animal – tense – and waiting for the kill!”

That last one’s my favourite. Only Kirby would describe the void of space as a shimmering animal, tensing up to pounce on the “helpless” Clark Kent. Who, just in case you’ve forgotten, is Superman. He can fly through space and move planets. But apparently he’s helpless in the face of mixed metaphors.

The situation, in case you’ve forgotten, or deliberately repressed it, is this: in the previous issue, Jimmy and Clark put two and two together and realized that their new boss, Morgan Edge, had made an attempt on their life. They marched up to his office to confront him, but gave up when Edge’s secretary Miss Conway told him Edge wasn’t in, and gave them a new assignment. Which they went on. And which turned out to be another attempt on their life. Wotta couple of schlemiels.

Clark Kent was trapped in a spacecraft that instantly transported him to Shimmering Animal Space. Meanwhile, Jimmy, the Golden Guardian, and a (sigh) Don Rickles impersonator in a superhero suit named Goody Rickels were kidnapped by Intergang, forced to eat food laced with an explosive chemical that would cause them to combust within 24 hours, and thrown out on the curb.

Makes sense to me!

Superman drifts through deep, uncharted space, as represented by another one of Kirby’s patented, and patently weird, photographic montages (to which he’s added some colour this time!) It quickly becomes clear exactly where Clark’s been extradited to when he spots “two giant planets!—One, brightly green and beautiful – the other, in its shadow…” and then spots a human comet coming his way, one immediately recognizable as our friend Lightray. Clark’s inner monologue describes him as “hardly the kind you’d meet at the office!” Well, I dunno, Clark, depends on where you work. If you were a gymnast or a ballet dancer, maybe…

But enough of this “interesting” stuff, let’s get back to Jimmy! And the Guardian! And fucking Goody Rickels! They’re busy expositing away about how doomed they are, despite how unbelievably unthreatening and pointlessly complex the method of their destruction has turned out to me. I mean, if I were in that situation, the first thing I’d be wondering is, “Why did Intergang just go to such lengths not to kill me?” I don’t think I’d even believe there was such a thing as “pyro-granulate”, but even if I did, the hospital is probably nearby, and I’ve got 24 frickin’ hours. But then, I’m not a crack cub reporter or a superhero, because *their* first idea is to go after the RV from which they were ejected in search of a cure…while Jimmy and Goody go to Morgan Edge for help.

…

…Wait, what? No, I must have misread that. Carrying on…

The Guardian gets into his new role as a rooftop-jumpin’ protector of the innocent pretty quickly, using his implanted knowledge of the city in which his predecessor was born and raised (which, again, is now Metropolis, not Manhattan). “Life at the D.N.A. Experimental Project never gave me this sense of freedom!” he monologues. Yeah, you’d think so, Jim, seeing as how the Project kept you in a giant glass jar.

Back at the Galaxy Broadcasting System, Miss Conway is freaking out over the impending arrival of the real Don Rickles, and so, in short order, is everyone else. Simply walking through the office, Rickles is assaulted from all corners by rabid fans begging for autographs, and amourous secretaries who demand to be insulted. Was Rickles really *that* big at the time? I mean, I know he was popular, but Kirby’s treating him like it’s 1963 and he’s all four Beatles rolled into one.

I mean, not that I’m denying he’s a sexy, sexy man and all.

There follows several pages of what can be charitably described as corny schtick. I’ll confess, right here and now, that I’ve never heard Rickles’ act, except in movies like X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes and, um, Toy Story. Sure, he’s pure Borscht Belt, but he always seemed relatively funny to me. I’d like to think that, at his peak, his material was at least a little bit stronger than the stuff Kirby has him spouting, much of which isn’t really “funny” in any sense…just kind of sarcastic and shticky. He meets the wave of adulation with “Relax, you cockamamies! You’re liberated! The Nazis are gone!” Then, after they tear his clothing and are scared off by Edge: “Savages! I’ll send you thirty pounds of raw meat tomorrow morning! And may the Gods rain on your memos!” Then he exhorts a delighted Miss Conway to “get yourself a bikini and start a chain of heart attacks at a garden party!” and refers to Edge as “Mister Smoothie on the outside—‘Mac the Knife’ on the inside!”

I dunno, maybe it loses something on the page.

Meanwhile, we’re getting the historic meeting between Superman and Lightray, out in space. “I was in this sector – and curious to see what sort of specimen was on its way to Apokolips!” declares our merry funster. Lightray, I mean. “You speak my language!” Exclaims Superman. “Are you able to communicate by probing one’s mind?” Wow, a more astute observation than I was expecting. Not that Lightray evinces the ability to read minds anywhere else. And…hmm, he actually kinda brushes Superman off, saying, “You haven’t time for small talk!” Wait, does that mean Kirby was trying to conceal some kind of secret about the New Gods’ language? Is it to do with my hair-brained theories that the New Gods are the descendants of a parallel universe, specifically Marvel’s, and thus have a store of human knowledge? I’m going to pretend it is!

Anyway, the thing Lightray’s concerned about is the fact that they’re looming closer and closer to Apokolips, which Superman remembers hearing about from the Forever People. “They also mentioned a name--Darkseid!!!” Yes, Superman, they mentioned that name right before you met and fought him. I guess it’s possible that Superman is trying to cover his secret identity here…though why he would bother with a cosmic being on the other side of the universe from Earth, I don’t know. And besides, he’s pretty blasé about mentioning that he knows the Forever People. Lightray generously offers to save him from the Parademons rising to intercept the craft, and Clark accepts. Again, I’m gonna hope that was a secret identity thing. I mean, Superman has a tendency to forget his powers, but I don’t think he’s ever gone so far as to forget that he’s Superman and doesn’t really need other superheroes to help him, unless Kryptonite or red suns are involved.

Nevertheless, this B-plot is infinitely more involving than the main story, to which we’re now forced to return. Oh look, Jimmy and Goody are riding the subway. Goody is complaining. Ha ha. Actually, I have to say I appreciate everyone on the subway yelling at Goody to shut up. Also, Goody starts steaming and is about to die. Ha ha!

Seriously, let’s just move on to the Guardian, who’s caught up with the mobile home and comes crashing down through the top hatch, only to be met by Ugly Mannheim and his goon squad. “The pastry’s all gone! – But we’re servin’ plenty of ammo!” You mean, the ammo you could have used to kill Jimmy and the Guardian back when you had the chance? That ammo? Oh, don’t mind me, I’m living in a non-Comics-Code-approved reality. The long and the short of it is, we get this issue’s de rigeur Kirby stompfest as the Guardian beats the antidote out of them.

Meanwhile, the moment none of you have been waiting for, as Jimmy and Goody come face to face with the real Don Rickles. Can you stand the excitement? Bursting into Edge’s office, where he and Rickles are still thrashing out some kind of deal that Kirby never sees fit to explain properly, Goody proclaims, “I’m back, Mister Edge! And, now that I’m dying, I can find the nerve to really tell you what I think of--” and then, for no reason except that it makes for a funny…I mean cool…I mean intensely predictable panel, the real Rickles then repeats his dialogue exactly. Which makes no sense, in the context of the conversation they were just having. I mean, the real Rickles just said he was dying. Despite the fact that he’s still alive and well almost 40 years later. Then we get have a page of “HUH? B-but…you’re me!!!” type reactions, Edge starts blustering, Goody begins to smoke, and Jimmy…begs him for help.

OK, WHAT??!? Jimmy, you idiot, you know Edge was trying to kill you! You got into this mess because of an assignment he sent you on! He’s obviously the one trying to have you killed, even if it is in the most Rube Goldbergian way possible! I mean, we’ve long known that you, Lois, and Clark are all terrible, terrible reporters, but you’d think you’d be able to put the extremely obvious pieces together in order to save your own life!

The story just gets dumber from there, with Jimmy and Goody beginning to glow and then catch on fire--the art making them look like they’re virtually going supernova, as Jimmy remarks, “Strange! I don’t feel any heat!” Edge shoves Rickles out the door—literally shoves him out like an uninvited guest—and tells him to read a magazine. Then he calls the bomb disposal squad. Then the Guardian comes crashing through the window (sure, why not?) and Rickles comes back into the office. Then something explodes—no, not Jimmy or Goody, because next time we see them they’re safe and sound, sipping the antidote Guardian was able to procure. (“It’s not unlike cheap wine!” announces Goody, approvingly.) There’s literally nothing about this sequence that makes any sense at all in terms of internal or external logic, and the obnoxiously lame shtick from the two Rickles—seriously, they’re pretty much equally unfunny at this point—just makes it all the more painful.

Rickles yammers weakly while Edge fumes via thought balloons, wondering how this brilliant, completely foolproof scheme could possibly have failed. Then a Boom Tube materializes in the office, depositing Clark and unceremoniously blasting Rickles out of his chair. The look on his face in this panel is the one mildly amusing moment in this comic:

There, I saved you ten minutes. Except…I guess it probably took you that long to read this recap. But not as long as it took me to write it! Seriously, this is time we all could have spent curing cancer or something, and now it’s gone. Thanks a lot, Kirby.

But wait! There’s a page left! Surely there must be some hacky komedy cliché that hasn’t been milked yet!

Of course! Comical insanity! The bomb disposal squad arrives, Edge proclaims that the bomb threat has been neutralized, and the now-insane Rickles contradicts him: “I’m the bomb! And I’m primed to blow! Get me outta here! Stop me from killing! Tick-tick-tick-tick--”

“Poor guy!” Mutters one of the disposal guys, “With your routine—this had to happen!”

Seriously, is it just me, or do like 50% of all dumb humour comics end this way? With a character who’s experienced some mild weirdness being dragged away to the insane asylum “hilariously”? Yeah, I think it’s safe to say, as we bid a blessed adieu to both Rickles, that comedy is something Kirby ought to have steered clear of. Forever.

Rickles wasn’t the bomb. The bomb was this comic. Handle it with care.

So: the Watchmen Thing.

2012-02-01T23:01:00.000-08:00

I think it’s important to note that there are several different issues at play here. Let me break them down for you so I can explain why DC making up a series of Watchmen prequels makes me so angry. So very very angry.

First off, there’s the actual quality, context aside, of the books. I notice people, no matter how critical they are of this, are already saying “well, I’m sure some of the books will be quite good, with those creative teams,” but even this seems a little generous. I mean, the artists involved range from good to great, but look at the writing lineup: You’ve got Len Wein, whose presence is at least explainable as a guy who was involved in the original book, and who was a decent writer back in the day, but what little I’ve seen of his recent work hasn’t exactly been earth-shattering. I don’t want to sound dismissive of the guy who co-created Wolverine, but I think of Wein as one of those old school journeymen of the Bronze Age, a reliable writer who could pump out fun comics but never really aspired to anything more; a “company man”, as it were. Please, correct me if I’m wrong.

Then you’ve got Darwyn Cooke, who’s obviously a spectacular talent as an artist and as a storyteller, but who I’m not convinced of as a writer, per se. He works in a certain mode that suits him but doesn’t really fit well with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ dense, idea-packed storytelling. I mean, the last time the guy tried to put his own spin on a classic comic, the result was The Spirit, which was a solid comic but really didn’t live up to expectations, and certainly didn’t do justice to Will Eisner’s vision. I doubt he’ll be able to do better with Watchmen.

And then there’s Azzarello, whose work I’m only passingly familiar with, but what I have read strikes me as solid but unremarkable; and J. Michael Straczynski, who, I’m sorry, is just a flat-out hack.

Maybe being called upon to write a Watchmen story will make these guys step up to the plate and really push themselves to deliver something spectacular, but colour me skeptical. Watchmen isn’t just a great comic, it’s a remarkable, multilayered achievement, dense, intelligent, and packed with ideas. Even at their best, these writers strike me more as the kind who can deliver solidly on one level, delivering stories that you read once and enjoy but don’t return to over and over again. I’d love it if they proved me wrong, but as it is the impression you get is that DC editorial literally just randomly pulled names out of a hat to “keep the franchise going”.

Which is another issue, and it’s where I start to get really steamed. Before Watchmen is clearly, unequivocably, being driven by profit. Well, you might say, of course it is, DC isn’t a charity. But working in a creative field, being a company that produces art in any form, there’s a way to balance profit and achievement in an honest way. The ideal way is that a writer, artist, or other creator approaches editorial with a story they want to tell, the publisher decides to go for it, and the result is a success, a genuine artistic accomplishment that provides entertainment and makes stacks of cash. Even if one or two of these elements doesn’t come to pass, the point is that creativity is driving the product. What isn’t a good sign is when a company decides that it needs to milk more money out of one of its properties and assigns a bunch of journeymen to churn out product…which is obviously what’s happening here.

In a weird way, if this had come from a creator marching into DC HQ and announcing, “I wanna do a bunch of Watchmen sequels!”, even if said creator was possessed of Mark Millar-level arrogance, and even if the result blew chunks all over the industry, I would have less of a problem with it on this level. Because at least the motivating factor would have been someone with a story that they wanted to tell, an actual spark of creativity. Not just a soulless money-generating machine.

Now, I’ve already heard people shrugging this off, or, God help them, defending this nonsense, by pointing out all the times existing characters have been tackled by other creators, or needlessly sequelized. Moore himself, of course, invites criticism by virtue of the fact that he’s been writing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics for over a decade now, starring hordes of classic characters. And while Moore’s own statements about this project are problematic for this reason, I think my comments in the above two paragraphs are still valid: there’s a world of difference between a creator deciding to use, say, Dracula in a story, and a corporation that owns a property and has the ability to give it the mark of validity deciding to “extend the brand.”

And this is what truly pisses me off about this: for over 25 years, Watchmen has occupied a place of reverence in the comic book world; now that’s being cast aside for a quick buck. All sacred cows eventually get slaughtered, of course; that’s the nature of culture, and it’s both healthy and necessary for people to puncture any air of self-importance that starts to build up around a work, no matter how well-earned. But this isn’t being done by some punk-rock rabble-rouser who wants to cause trouble, and thereby enrich comics; it’s being done by a soulless corporation that views this great work merely as grist for the mill. It’s one thing for someone to paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa, as Marcel Duchamp did; it’s another thing to use the Mona Lisa as toilet paper because there wasn’t anything else handy. The former is challenging. The latter points towards a world where art has no value, except in a purely utilitarian sense.

By doing this the way they’re doing it, DC is announcing to the world that Watchmen has no value to them except as a source of money. Yes, the original work is in no danger of being damaged, and will survive long after these misbegotten prequels (I want to remain open-minded, but come on, how likely is it that these will be any better than “OK?”) are forgotten. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the comics industry is in a place where its willing to sacrifice the standard bearer for the idea that comics can be more than cheap time-killers and content farms on the altar of commerce. I don’t care about what this bodes for Watchmen; I care about what it bodes for the industry that would do such a thing.

Further reading: David Brothers has some intelligent thoughts on the subject, and the hordes of annoying fans who are already coming to this project's defense.

TheFourth World Fridays: New Gods #4--"The O'Ryan Mob and the Deep Six"

2012-01-27T13:19:00.000-08:00

The most common theme associated with Kirby’s work is “cosmic” (well, and “weird”), but of course he had other idioms he came back to over and over again too. One of these was the hard-boiled world of gangsters and crime-busters, talkin’ tough, wearin’ fedoras, ventilatin’ each other, and embeddin’ their nicknames in a forest of quotation marks. You can definitely see how this would appeal to Kirby, especially the quotation marks. He’d already sprinkled a liberal helping of gangsters into the Fourth World in the form of Intergang; now, in this issue, he gives us, essentially, a crime comic, with a lot of Fourth World stuff lingering around the margins.

Well, OK, it starts on a distinctly Cosmic note, with Metron and his young…I’m going to say, “apprentice”, Esak, who we’ve never seen before, hovering above a primitive planet in the Mobius chair. You know, before we continue, I’m just going to point out that I’m not going to make any dumb NAMBLA-referencing jokes about the fact that Metron is chairing his chair with a young boy in short shorts. I mean, enough with that kind of thing already. I’m not saying comics are innuendo-free or anything, but there was a time when people didn’t automatically assume two characters who hung out together were having sex. And when an adult spent a lot of time with a kid, even one to which he was unrelated, that was called being a father figure. Not HA HA HA THEY’RE TOTALLY GAY. I mean, sheesh, folks. The real irony here is that this is exactly the kind of thing the much-despised Frederick Wertham was so obsessed with, and comic book fans consider him to be a few rungs below Osama Bin Laden on the ladder of hate, yet everyone on the internet is constantly making pedophilia jokes about Batman and Robin. Yes, it’s easy to do. Yes, they wear tight outfits and live together alone. Yes, they fought a guy who spent an entire issue obsessing about “his boner”. But the horse has not only been beaten to death, he has been crushed into glue at this point. MOVE ON ALREADY.

…You know, I just realized that this entry is going to be the first Google hit for anyone searching for “Osama Bin Laden pedophilia gangsters boner NAMBLA”. I’m going to try not to think too hard about that.

Aaaaaaaaanyway. Metron and Esak are casually hovering mere feet ahead of a pair of alien monsters that just so happen to resemble T-Rexes. Esak is afraid, but Metron assures him that they can never match the chair’s speed. Of course, considering that they’re about six inches off the ground and neither of them are looking where they’re going, I’m not sure speed is the only factor involved here.

Metron quickly wises up and, in a breathtaking two-page splash, we see the pair moving up into the air, past a smoldering volcano, with two packs of aliens clashing in primitive battle below. One group looks distinctly caveman-ish, the other like some kind of green goblin-men. “Those creatures below bear the image of man!” marvels Esak, presumably referring to the first group. I wonder if he means “man” in the sense of “humans”, or if he’s including the New Gods in that as well. Either way, note the old-school SF assumption that the evolution of alien life will more or less exactly parallel our own.

Metron mentions that they will return in what “will be a millennium to them!”

METRON: Time to them is not as time to us—is it?
ESAK: Tell me, Metron! Are we truly beyond time? – Are we beyond death?
METRON: My sensors indicate there is an answer in New Genesis!

...Well, that’s one way to avoid answering the question. He could also have tried “My sensors indicate that you should shut the hell up.”

Actually, what Metron’s referring to, obliquely, is the announcement High-Father makes on their arrival back at New Genesis: one of the New Gods has fallen. And of course, he’s also referring to the very end of the series itself, but that’s still a long ways off…

The fallen one, as we learn in abrupt cut to Earth, was a New Genesisean frogman named Seagrin, who the police are currently fishing out of Metropolis harbour. P.I. Dave Lincoln and Orion, in his secret identity of…O’Ryan, have just arrived, and the latter does all but throw himself across Seagrin’s lifeless chest and break out sobbing. Describing him as “a gentle warrior” (riiiiiight), Orion immediately intuits that he’s met his death at the hands of Apokoliptish agents deep beneath the ocean. This being a cosmic being inhabiting a Kirby comic, he needs a proper sendoff, so Orion somehow summons a storm to demolish the pier and give Seagrin a Viking funeral. (Which is appropriate, since this whole sequence would make a hell of a lot more sense if it was in Marvel’s “Thor”.) Invisible through the leaping flames, the Black Racer swoops in and spirits away the soul of the departed (see, that’s how death is supposed to act) before heading back to his apartment for a boring rehash of last issue. (Seriously, how was Kirby planning to build a whole comic around this guy? It’s the most static premise ever—he doesn’t even do anything heroic, really. Was it going to be like an “EC” type comic where he comments wryly on the events of the issue?)

Fortunately, this only lasts two pages, and the next one is one of the most famous splashes in the entire run of the series: it’s a close-up of Darkseid at his creepiest, peering around a corner and delivering an elaborate internal monologue, the most famous line of which is “Yet they know better than most that war is but the cold game of the butcher!” Which, mixed metaphors aside, is a truly iconic line.

Again, either Kirby was improving as a writer, or the influence of Evanier was starting to make itself felt. Remember, Evanier was originally going to write the series, with Kirby being more of a project manager, shooting off the basic ideas. Honestly…that probably would have lead to a more polished series, and perhaps a better one. Kirby could have played to his strengths as an idea man and composition/breakdown artist, and left the prose and specific plot points to Evanier, who’s a more conventionally talented writer (at least nowadays). Evanier tends to downplay his own role in the Fourth World, but I think he definitely had at least a holistic influence.

By the way, this seems a good time to note that Comics Should Be Good just devoted an article to the New Gods (and another to Mister Miracle…will tomorrow’s be The Forever People?) and in it, they make a point that’s so obvious I hadn’t even thought to mention it yet. The Fourth World saga was coming out as America—not just the counterculture--was getting really, truly sick of the Vietnam war, and reflections on the futility of combat were becoming hardwired into the mindset of a generation. Of course, Kirby was a WWII veteran, as well, and he seems to have had a conflicted attitude about the honour of soldiering, but Darkseid’s little musing here seems to sum up the basic ideas about war.

Meanwhile, we’re back with “the O’Ryan mob”, and a lame mob it is. Honestly, I really do like the idea of a bunch of normal people having an experience with a cosmic power greater than themselves and being forced to become adherents of a War God, but these guys can get pretty annoying. And it’s ironic that, facing one of the famously best pages of the series, we also get one of the most infamously awful. This is the bit where Orion’s followers reintroduce themselves via the most hilariously clunky dialogue ever:

LANZA: But I’m Victor Lanza! An insurance executive! A family man! My wife makes me carry an umbrella in case it rains! And now, this! New Genesis! Apokolips! And things that would scare John Wayne!
SHANE: What about it, Lincoln? I’m Claudia Shane, simple but worried secretary! What am I involved in this time?—
LOCKMAN: And me, young but cool, Harvey Lockman!

Admittedly, I think Harv was going for a “hiply ironic” thing there, but man oh man. That is some hilariously bad dialogue.

Orion enters and lays out the plan: basically, they’re going to pose as a rival gang, muscling in on Intergang’s turf. This is, um, ballsy, in that exactly one of them (not including Orion himself) could pass as thug, and the other three are pretty obviously hapless bystanders. I do like that Orion’s first major mission for his followers is to rope them into a life of crime, though.

Asking that they place their hands on Mother Box so they can “see what Mother Box sees in her effort to penetrate Intergang,” Orion sends the four Earthlings a vision of a hatchet-faced goon and a glimpse of his thoughts. They catch that his name is “Snaky Doyle”, that he works for Intergang, and that he’s thinking of something called the “Jammer”, which is what’s allowing Apokoliptians to pass undetected among Earth society. OK, I’ll just say it: Mother Box is really getting to be an annoying Deus Ex Machina. She can do whatever the plot requires at any given time, and is virtually omnipotent when people are paying attention. But rarely do Orion or Mister Miracle or The Forever People think to use her to read minds, which she can apparently do. Nor do they use her to activate remote machinery very often, the way she did in the last issue of New Gods. Mostly she’s used to create illusions—which is ironic, since at least one of the Forever People can apparently do that by herself—and later she plays a key role in computing the Anti-Life Equation. And she summons Infinity Man, of course. With all these powers at her beck and call, the characters forgetting about her to further the plot reaches the same level of annoyance as Superman constantly forgetting his powers.

Anyway, rather than simply grabbing Snaky and beating the information out of him, Orion has a plan to pull a con on Snaky. You know, it’s funny—in virtually every non-Kirby appearance he’s made, including the current “Death of the New Gods”, Orion is portrayed as something akin to a late-90s character, all hypermuscled torso and teeth-baring grimace, and his first thought is always violence, violence, violence. In Grant Morrison’s JLA run it was suggested that Mother Box’s soothing beeping was the only thing that kept him from being a total psychopath. But of course, the character was never like that when Kirby drew and wrote him—sure, he has a tendency to lose it in the heat of battle (as we’ll see next issue) but when he’s not actually fighting, he’s as calm and calculating as any other New God, if a little on the grim side. The relatively elaborate trap he’s about to set for Intergang demonstrates this.

As Snaky leaves the pool hall later that night, he’s grabbed and held at gunpoint by Dave Lincoln, spouting amusing “tough guy” dialogue like “If yuh unzip yer lip, I’ll plug ya!” He frisks him and finds a tiny radio transmitter, which conveniently enough is just at that moment transmitting a message to Snaky to come and “baby-sit” the Jammer. Lincoln cuts him loose, telling him to let Intergang know that the O’Ryan mob has taken over the territory (what, the whole city of Metropolis?). Orion, of course, will follow Snaky from above.

Phase two begins once they’ve tracked Snaky to an old mansion on “a little-used sea-coast road,” where Claudia pulls up in a car and does the “stranded motorist” act. While the Intergang thugs patrolling the area try to help her get her car started so she can clear off, Claudia rolls up the window and presses a trigger that releases knockout gas that “Orion whipped up for this occasion.” The thugs are knocked out, allowing Lincoln, Lockman and Lanza (did Kirby come up with their names by pulling a random page from the phone book?) to emerge from the bushes.

Phase three involves Lanza impersonating a representative of the O’Ryan mob in order to make Intergang tip their hand, something he doesn’t seem to be up to. “You don’t have to play Little Caesar,” reassures Lincoln, “just his smart business manager!” But Lanza is still drenched in flop-sweat.

His entry into the inner sanctum is met with little surprise by Inter-gang’s representative “Country Boy”, who mistakes Lanza for O’Ryan: “We’ve been expectin’ ya! Seein’ that our boy Snaky practically gave yuh a road map!” Glad to see I’m not the only one who thought Snaky acted kinda dumb in heading straight to his headquarters after being accosted by a rival gang. Snaky’s tied to a chair in the office, about to become a cautionary example for Lanza, as “Country Boy” shows off his devastating…fly-fishing ability.

Yes, this is how “Country Boy” intimidates Lanza: by hooking the trigger of a nearby gun with his fishing rod and using it to shoot Snaky. Well, I guess Snaky’s still dead, after all, and—

COUNTRY BOY: Aaaaa—Snaky ain’t dead! – But he is stiff! Paralyzed! And our guns can get spookier than that!

Thank you, Comics Code.

Lanza, needless to say, is immediately reassured that he’s dealing with a bunch of complete tools, and grows more confident. “We know about Intergang,” he says nonchalantly, puffing on a cigar, “But not enough! Frankly, what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t spend a penny on!” Country Boy, being the easily provoked moron that he is, proceeds to immediately show Lanza the Jammer, which he accesses by pulling a secret lever and causing a wall to roll back. “The party we deal with can take this thing apart and set it up again in minutes! That’s organization and power, man!”

…Does it feel to anyone else like Country Boy is overcompensating for something? And doing a lousy job of it?

Anyway, that concludes the crime comic portion of the evening, as Orion immediately blasts through the front door and incinerates the Jammer with a quick burst of Astro-Force. At the same moment, Lanza lays a roundhouse blow to the nearby thug, who was in the process of pulling his gun. Well, what do you know…Lanza AND Claudia both turned out to be competent! Now if only Harvey had done something, anything, to contribute…

But anyway, we’re now leaving the Normals behind and following Orion as he streaks into the wreckage of the Jammer and into a secret passageway beyond. (Hilariously, the Jammer appears to be about as thick as a piece of drywall in this panel.)

Orion shoots down the passageway, while expositioning that Mother Box has now detected the culprit behind Seagrin’s murder: Darkseid’s underwater shock troops, The Deep Six. He shoots out an airlock into the open ocean, Mother Box providing an air bubble for him to breathe (seriously, is there anything Mother Box can’t do if it’s convenient to the plot?) and immediately comes face to face with Slig, leader of the Deep Six.

We’ll be getting to know Slig and the Deep Six better in the next issue, but for now, we quickly (a little too quickly) learn of his ability to mutate creatures simply by touching them, which he proceeds to do to a clump of seaweed. The tendrils reach out and overwhelm Orion, but he blasts free using the Astro-Force, only to be stopped dead in his tracks by a glimpse of…something off-panel.

“What does Orion face? It has destroyed a God—and threatens the entire Earth! Don’t miss—SPAWN!!!”

What, really? That was a pretty terrible comic and all, but I don’t think it threatens the entire—

Oh, OK. Different Spawn.

So, we now have all three of the “real” Fourth World books embroiled in a multi-part storyline, which, perhaps not coincidentally, seems to have elevated the level of the storytelling and the intensity. However, whereas this was a sudden improvement for Mister Miracle and the Forever People, I can’t help but notice that (with the arguable exception of the last issue, which featured the last-minute inclusion of the Black Racer), The New Gods flows extremely smoothly from the first issue to this one and beyond. Each issue is discrete, but the stories evolve logically out of the end of the prior issue, and there’s even ground being laid for future story developments right from the start. That Comics Should Be Good article I linked to above calls The New Gods the best comic Kirby ever did, and I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks so.

But then, I’m just Adam Prosser, simple but snarky cartoonist and blogger. What do I know?

End Of The Year, End of the World

2012-01-25T08:58:00.000-08:00

Hi! Miss me?

It's been a crazy few months here at Phortress Phantasmic, mostly due to an overload of illustration work (which is a very good thing, of course, for my ability to not starve to death and those who enjoy watching me not starve to death). Things are calming down a little now, so it's time to take inventory of...stuff.

Firstly! Lemuria is back, obviously, and if you haven't been following it, it's recently featured the return of Hordo of Atlantis from the second-ever story. Plus lots of pirates. I do have every intention of colouring these strips as soon as I can find a moment to do so...

I also want to finally return to Freak U. and yes, even Night Shift; I'm going to say Freak U. will return sometime in February. Night Shift, I'm not sure about. Even Amazon Space Rangers, which is effectively dead as a comic, is sort of back in the form of a series of prints I'm working on...here's the first.

More on that later. Um, what else? I guess I'll bang out some reviews for the end of 2011 and early 2012:

Sherlock Holmes 2: A Game of Shadows and Sherlock, Season 2: It's kind of weird how pop culture is suddenly Sherlock-happy, isn't it? And now apparently there's an "American Sherlock" TV show in development, which will probably just be "House meets CSI" crap. Anyway, it must hurt Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey Jr. right down in their spleen to know that their big-budget theatrical steampunk version of Sherlock Holmes is being so consistently upstaged by a BBC production starring a previously-unknown and the guy from The Office. I mean, the Downey Sherlock Holmes movies seem to make decent bank, and I actually liked the first one somewhat--putting aside the stupid action movie setpieces, the script actually captured the tone and characterizations of the stories, and avoided some of the pitfalls modern Holmes adaptations sometimes fall into (Watson isn't an idiot, the supernatural is revealed to be fraudulent). But Game of Shadows was just awful--loud, bloated, bombastic, without a trace of wit or refinement. Yes, refinement. Sherlock Holmes should be REFINED, dammit. He should also spend at least a little of his time, y'know, solving mysteries, something Ritchie apparently has no interest in whatsoever. Even worse, the movie's version of Moriarty is staggeringly bland, which seems like it's the last thing Ritchie would get wrong.

This, more than anything, is something that looks completely embarrassing when stacked up against the Stephen Moffat show, because this was the season they got to play with Moriarty, and they absolutely nailed it. The accepted wisdom on Moriarty is that there's something "everymannish" about him, as if he had no personality of his own and could blend in perfectly with the background, the better to manipulate his criminal network. The movie interprets this, as I said, as "let's make Moriarty really, really boring". The show has a very clever take, as we saw last season: first by having Moriarty "speak" using other people's voices, and then revealing him as an unsettling creature whose speech patterns seem to vibrate at random across the entire spectrum of human speech, while never once sounding natural--an obvious advantage when your archnemesis is a guy who can tell everything about you from a glance and a few words. Some people seem to have found this a little annoying, and actor Andrew Scott has toned it down a lot this season, but it's still present. Scott is creepy every second he's on screen--he knows exactly when to go over the top and when to tamp it down a little (but only a little). His over-the-topness is employed in a highly restrained manner, if that makes any sense. But then, it may be necessary to go a little over-the-top when you're sharing the screen with Benedict Cumberbatch. On the flip side, Lara Pulver plays it perfectly cool as Irene Adler, in "A Scandal in Belgravia", somehow managing to be impassive and expressive at the same time, and she too strikes sparks with Cumberbatch--if this season has an overriding flaw, it's that Martin Freeman as Watson gets pushed a little too far to the side by all the larger-than-life personalities.

In general, though, this season is better than the mostly-great first, which was weighed down by the inferior (and racist) "The Blind Banker" and a somewhat chaotic plot in "The Great Game". This seasons' weakest entry is "The Hounds of Baskerville", which is a little padded, but which still manages to get some real mileage out of pitting Sherlock against the supernatural, and develops the theme of Sherlock's increasing humanity in a smart way, by having him deal with crippling terror, something he never thought he'd have to do. "Belgravia" is probably the best single episode of the show so far (for the record--SPOILERS--my opinion is that Adler faked the whole scenario at the end for the sake of faking her death, but also to see if she could draw Sherlock out; so did in fact "win" their game in a sense, by revealing him to have feelings. That's just my interpretation, though, and if Moffat meant for it to be a straightforward "Sherlock saves the day" moment, I do think that's a misstep). And Moriarty's plan in "The Reichenbach Fall" is extremely clever, a brilliant way of upping the stakes and showing why he's a real threat to Holmes, as opposed to just a guy with a really epic scheme to take over the world.

I *am* a little skeptical that Moffat can pull off the reveal of how Holmes pulled off his triumph at the end there--Moffat's shown he's not immune to illogical deus ex machinas in Doctor Who, as the last season showed--but I'll definitely be watching. Oh hell yes.

Hmmm, that ended up taking a lot more space than I expected. OK, I guess I now have the material for a whole series of posts!

Fourth World Fridays: The Forever People #4--"The Kingdom of the Damned!"

2012-01-20T12:35:00.000-08:00

So to pick up where we left off last time I reviewed The Forever People…Kirby wasn’t the first to try to say something a little deeper with comics than “good will always triumph over evil!” He was, however, the first (with Stan Lee and Steve Ditko) to really try and push “bigger” ideas into the superhero genre in the form of subtext, and in the context of the Fourth World, Kirby grabbed that ball and sprinted with it. As we’ve seen, of course, the weirdness and action which were by that point ingrained in Kirby’s work, combined with the natural dictates of the superhero form, meant that this commentary often wasn’t particularly profound. Despite Kirby’s pretentions (in every sense of the word), the primary motive of the Fourth World is still to tell an entertaining story about dudes in tights beating each other up, and in that context reflections on the meaning of life tend to be reduced to laughably simplistic forms. Or else they seem awkwardly shoehorned in, especially when delivered in the form of wordy monologues. The demands of a visual medium and an action-oriented genre tend to overwhelm subtler commentary.

But not always. A talented comic book maker can still hit that sweet spot in which a simple idea turns out to have endless ramifications, both as a source of entertainment and a reflection of life or human society. The key is usually to find some new way of delivering an old archetype, one that hasn’t been used much before but, when tweaked the right way, seems instantly logical and resonant. And in this issue, I think, Kirby comes up with a very good one.

As you’ll recall, I thought that Kirby took an issue or two to really figure out what this series was going to be about, but with issue three it came into focus: it’s basically a bizarre cosmic superhero version of Easy Rider, with a gang of biker hippies trekking across a warped alternate America. What’s more—and this is a touch I simply love—most of their encounters seem to be inspired by roadside attractions. It’s a cross-sampling of the various sights and experiences you might have while motoring across the country during the summer of love on a quest to find yourself…or, possibly, while crammed into a wood-paneled station wagon with 2.5 kids squabbling in the back. You know, whatever.

Anyway, the last issue saw our erstwhile god-hippies visiting a revival show…of evil!!!…and getting captured by their nemesis and ours, Darkseid of Apokalips. They awaken to find themselves in another roadside attraction*, the sprawling theme park…of evil!!…named Happyland.

Here’s where that whole subtext thing I mentioned at the beginning comes into play. Plotwise, the story is that hoary old comic book chestnut where the archvillain has captured the heroes and turned them over to his sadistic henchman to be tortured or otherwise forced to undergo a test of endurance. In this case, the henchman is Desaad, and his torture palace takes the form of an amusement park. Again, an “evil amusement park” was nothing new to comics at this point—the Joker had been turning them into deathtraps for decades already—but it’s what Kirby does with it that makes it a gas.

See, Happyland may house a battalion of prisoners, subject to torments of all kinds at Desaad’s cruel whims, but they’re concealed by illusion. In the opening splash, we see a group of wretched souls pound on the glass of their prison, pleading for help, only to see on the next page that their screams and visages are concealed by illusion from the milling throngs of parents and children attending the park. For all they know, Happyland is just a fun place to visit on the weekend, and they’re oblivious to its true, nefarious purpose.

It doesn’t matter how bluntly Kirby drives the point home later on; this twisted setup is too solid a concept for storytelling, and too great a metaphor for the world as a whole, to be messed up even by ruining it as subtext. It makes for the best issue of “The Forever People” to date.

Elsewhere, unseen by the masses, Darkseid himself is paying a visit to the park, while the Forev Peeps brood on their fate in Desaad’s dungeon. (Since both the FPs and Darkseid were in the same place last issue, you’d think they would have arrived together, but never mind.) Our erstwhile Scooby Gang catches us up on the events of the last issue via some heavy-duty exposition, also informing us that, as you’d expect, Mother Box has been taken from us. But they don’t know where they are, until a medieval-looking type enters and informs them that Desaad is now the master of their destinies. “Desaad! We’re in the hands of Desaad! Darkseid has given us to that demon!” moans Vykin. “He worships torment!--Refines it to an art!” Agrees Moonrider. It’s Serifan, of all people, who’s actually trying to do something useful, by surreptitiously pulling a stun capsule from his hat, but the minions are too fast for him. They hit him with a “Nerve Beam” that causes him to…bend backwards…and make a bored, pouty face? Well, I guess the Comics Code Authority was still going strong at this point, and there was only so much “torment” they could show. As if to drive the point home, the minions deploy a no doubt effective but curiously painless weapon to subdue the FPs: “Vertigo Grenades” that cause them to lose their sense of balance and fall down, to be dragged away to their doooooooooom.

Meanwhile, Darkseid is paying witness to Desaad’s attempted “murder of a Mother Box!” It seems that this is the first of the group to suffer his depredations, in the form of an electronic green warthog shoving glowing spikes into it. Mother Box “screams” and then disappears with a “ZZOSSH!” “They always do that!” sniffs Darkseid, to which the clearly unhinged Desaad responds, “No! It disintegrated! That’s it! I’ve made it commit suicide! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” Um, yeah, good one, master of torment. I have a couple of balloons you can make commit suicide, too, if you want to keep going. Darkseid is rightfully unimpressed. “Does the Mother Box vanish—or disintegrate? You don’t really know! Nor do I!”

Desaad tries to get back in the bosses’ good graces by inviting him to watch the Forever People “thrashing around in his net”, but Darkseid has no interest in petty cruelty. Again, it’s obvious the guy has no interest in other thinking beings in any capacity, not even as something he can destroy for fun. Other people are just an annoying obstacle to him, to be transformed into mindless slaves to his will. Darkseid doesn’t crush you because he enjoys it. He does it because that’s just how things ought to be.

As if to emphasize his callousness towards humanity, he brushes off the vehicle he came in and casually walks out amongst the masses attending Happyland. “Grandpa!” whines a small child, “That man is scary! Make him go away!” Grandpa tries to reassure the kid that The Master of Evil is just a costumed character, but Darkseid is having none of it. “No, Grandpa! I’m the real thing!” Then, as the old man leads his sobbing child away, D.S. continues, “All young humans recognize the real thing when they see it! Young humans see me—even in “Happyland!” But you elders hide me with “cock and bull” stories to keep the premises smelling sweet!” Oddly, the old man’s reply is to yell “Fool!” at Darkseid. Um…fool? Wouldn’t “jerk” or “douchebag” be more appropriate? I mean, isn’t that the kind of thing that a quasi-medieval character like Darkseid should be calling other people, not being called himself? Especially not by confused grandparents?

Anyway, Kirby’s really intent on running this whole “people are distracted by the suffering of others by a theme park” theme into the ground, so we now get a series of vignettes showing the Forever People in peril while attendees remain oblivious. To sum up quickly: Mark Moonrider is trapped in a glass box in the tunnel of terror, but people think he’s just a fake-looking skeleton prop! Big Bear is enclosed in the shooting gallery, where the pellet guns produce intense vibrations that cause him pain! Beautiful Dreamer is immobilized and kept in another glass box, surrounded by visions of monsters, but the onlookers think she’s that “Sleeping Beauty” exhibit a lot of old carnivals used to have! And Serifan is hooked up to a monitor showing Vykin strapped to the roller coaster, his head protruding through the boards, where he’ll be decapitated if Serifan doesn’t press the pedal to lower him out of harm’s way every time the coaster runs overhead! Which is probably, like, once every two minutes or so!

…Uh…OK, these are fairly lame torments. Damn you, Comics Code!

Still, it’s clear that this is going to be pretty rough on the FPs if someone doesn’t come to their aid soon! But have no fear—Mother Box isn’t dead after all. As it turns out, she did in fact teleport herself out of danger, and towards the most likely candidate for help.

Who could it be? I bet it’s Orion! He’s on the ball when it comes to Darkseid’s schemes. Or Mister Miracle! He’s the master of escape, right? Sure! Or any one of hundreds of New Gods. Or how about Superman? I’m sure he’ll save them!

Well, no. Turns out…the FP’s potential saviour is…this guy:

…The ancient winds of trouble blow…inside the box?

This does not look good.

*© The Tragically Hip.

Fourth World Fridays: Mister Miracle #3--"The Paranoid Pill"

2011-12-09T20:37:00.000-08:00

Wrapping up the final issue of the first omnibus on a high note, “The Paranoid Pill” sees Kirby getting more comfortable with Mister Miracle just as he was with The Forever People. The pacing here is better, the characters’ behaviour is more logical, and the idea of Mister M. undergoing a series of trials at the hands of his former classmates is better handled here than it will be even in the next volume.

Which is not to say it isn’t mockable by a shallow and juvenile yutz like myself! Here’s the awesome opening caption to this issue:

Sometimes, there are things that take place in empty rooms that defy belief, and so go unnoticed!!

No, seriously: sometimes things that happen in empty rooms go unnoticed. I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true.

What’s happening in this particular empty room is that a Boom Tube from Apokalips is coming through, and a horde of faceless silver androids are pouring out. Kirby explains via caption that these are “‘Animates’ manipulated by the power of a single mind!” So you’d think they’d have no need to spout expository dialogue to each other, wouldn’t you? You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. Not to harp on it, but this really takes away from the eeriness of the scene. Again, it’s kind of surprising that an artist like Kirby took so long into the Fourth World to figure out the value of just shutting up and letting the pictures tell the story, but I guess he was still working his way out from under Stan Lee’s influence. That aside, though, it's really an incredibly awesome little scene, both as a weird set-piece and as a metaphor for the character we're about to meet: his entire existence is a series of redecorations of vacant suites.

Having furnished the room and placed a single, central “Animate” in a chair in the center of the room, we watch as the “mind-force” takes possession of this body and molds it into the distinctively bizarre form of…Doctor Bedlam.

And all the while, the exposition is flying fast and furious, explaining that the Doctor is pure mind, able to inhabit bodies at will, that he serves Darkseid, and that he’s here to subjugate Scott Free.

I know it hardly needs to be said that Kirby characters talk a LOT when they don’t need to, and much of what they say doesn’t make a whole lot of sense anyway, but in this case, Bedlam is literally talking to himself—the only other people in the room are the Animates, who only have a semblance of life because he animates them. But what’s really hilarious is the kind of stuff he feels the need to explain to the audience. “Here on Earth, by the simple act of lifting this primitive instrument men call a telephone, I shall begin the little charade I have planned!” Then later: “Nothing can be hidden from one such as I, Scott Free! Your telephone number is known to me!!!” Doctor Bedlam has use of a demonic Apokaliptian device known as the “Telephone-book!”

Man, I want a whole comic just of Doctor Bedlam’s daily routine. “By activating the ‘tooth-brushing’ device, I can render my teeth, which I use to masticate food, to a spotless white, as though I had not eaten an entire bag of ‘potato-chips’ this evening! And soon, I shall evacuate my bowels into the toilet! It shall be as though the chips had never existed!”

Splash page time! We cut to Scott, shackled into a particularly elaborate set of restraints that sort of look like an upright set of medieval stocks. Hanging above him is a gigantic granite block, which Oberon opines will fall in mere seconds…but Scott is barking at Oberon to answer the phone.

Who else feels bad for Oberon? I mean, he’s been in show business a lot longer than Scott, yet Scott pretty much instantly assumed the mantle of overbearing master and started ordering him to do menial tasks for, as far as I can see, no money. I mean, as we’ve seen, performing in front of an audience is the last thing on Scott’s mind. He just whips up these spectacular devices from common household items, escapes from them once, and then leaves Oberon to clean up the mess. Or else he’s running off to challenge some weirdo and leaving Oberon to worry about him. Dude, seriously, even if it’s your goal in life to be an escapist’s assistant, you have better options. I hear David Blaine is hiring. I’m sure he’s only 9/10ths the asshole Scott is.

Anyway, despite the ringing phone (and you’d think that a distraction like that could really screw up a split-second escape, but no, Scott Free is just that good) Scott escapes. Oberon takes the call for him. “That’s odd!” mutters Scott. “I know no one in this area, Oberon!” Wow, that is odd. It couldn’t be that the caller is somehow…transmitting his voice an extended distance, using some kind of…tele-phonic…technology? No, that’s too crazy.

Scott takes the call and agrees to Doctor Bedlam’s terms of battle. By the way, Bedlam refers to his plan as “a charade”, and yet the villainous sorts who hail from Apokalips seem to adhere to a ridiculously formal and honourable code of conduct, as we’ll see clearly in this book. At least, they do when confronting Mister Miracle. Others have no qualms with sending genetically altered super-strong Jimmy Olsens to do their fighting for them.

There follows an extended four-page sequence in which Scott explains that Doctor Bedlam is a creature of pure mind, who would crush them were they not protected by Mother Box. They then proceed to hold a weird little séance in which they feel themselves assaulted by unknown terrors—Doctor Bedlam’s mental attack, which Scott provoked for some reason. Really, there’s nothing wrong with this sequence—actually, it’s kind of creepy—but it’s a little jarring to see Kirby spending so much time building up the situation. After all, in some of the earlier issues, major plot points were dispensed with via one-panel blocks of exposition. Here Kirby’s actually taking the time to set up the characters, and my knee-jerk response is, “Hurry up! Get to it already!” even though this comic is still way more compressed than your average Brian Michael Bendis story.

Mister Miracle confronts the Doctor in his ersatz office, which we now learn is on the top floor of an office building called “Chandler Towers.” Just be thankful it’s not “Joey Towers.”

When Mister Miracle refuses to submit to Bedlam’s citizen’s arrest, he displays the lynchpin of his plan: a tiny, nondescript pill. Mister Miracle protests that the code of combat disallows Bedlam from tranquilizing an adversary, but Bedlam replies that his is not what he has in mind. Instead, he’s going to drop the pill into the building’s ventilator system, whereupon it changes into vapour and infects the “literally thousands of Earth folk” in the building with raving, homicidal madness. (I’m not sure that even a huge office tower is likely to hold thousands of people, but never mind.) Mister Miracle’s mission, should he choose to accept it—and he already has—is simply to walk out the front door of the building…which will entail getting past thousands of extras from 28 Days Later without, presumably, doing them any serious harm.

“No metal, no gimmickry, no medieval chain or link for you, my boy! My world is of the mind!--And all the twists and turns that lead it to the pit! ”

I don’t know about you, but I find this to be seriously cool. Much better than that stupid “X-Pit” which you can get out of by pushing buttons, or even some of the heavy-duty traps he escapes from later. It’s a genuine “escape”, but one that requires him to use his wits and resourcefulness instead of just his manual dexterity (or whatever handy Apokaliptian technology he happens to have up his sleeve that month). And it’s certainly an escape that’s actually going to be substantial enough to fill an entire issue, for a change. Or even two.

Mister Miracle, overcome with rage, gives Bedlam a serious booting, but he’s already vacated the robot body in question. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the tower have gone crazy…COMIC BOOK STYLE!

BIG-MOUTHED MAN: Someone here wants to kill me!
CRAZY LADY: It’s the UFO’s! They’ve landed!
BESPECTACLED GUY: I don’t have to work here! I’m needed in the president’s cabinet!
SECRETARY: You ruined my typing!
OTHER SECRETARY: You lie!

I especially like the delusions of grandeur mixed in there. Nice touch, Bedlam.

A guy who thinks he’s being held prisoner smashes down doors. A security guard starts blasting away at “robbers”. “From every doorway—in every corridor—madness, in all its horror, spins into wild frenzy…” No, worse than madness…DARKNESS! KRUG!

“Bedlam’s Paranoid Pill seems to be working!” muses Scott.

Being a logical sort, Scott’s first thought is to simply fly out the window on his aero-discs, but it seems that Doc Bedlam’s sealed the building with “COSMI-CURRENT!” Meanwhile, a gang of freaked-out citizens, including a railroad worker for some reason,

have beaten down the door and are after Scott with drainpipes and whatnot. Scott manages to fly past them with the aero-discs, dodging thrown items and worrying that “one of them is bound to get lucky and…” Well, uh, not that I’d particularly want a vase upside my head either, but aren’t you, like, a New God, Scott? I mean, in “The Forever People” and “New Gods/Orion” they make a pretty big deal about how only Apokaliptish weapons can hurt them. You’d hardly think he has much to be afraid of from a couple of thrown bits of debris.

Nevertheless, it’s probably prudent of him to avoid this stuff, which he does by slipping into an elevator…somehow failing to notice it’s occupied. By a dude with a gun, no less.

With bullets ricocheting around the elevator, Scott hits the emergency stop and gets out on the 45th floor—only to be met with another howling mob. They’re convinced he’s a demon, because “only a demon would look like that—and dress like that!” Well, a demon or a Mardi Gras dancer. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

The mob subdues him, Scott, of course, being restrained by his unwillingness to hurt anyone. They manhandle him into a trunk and chain it shut, the whole way shrieking that he’s a demon, that he’s dangerous to them, that they have to destroy him…and then someone insists that they can’t let him suffocate in there. So they punch air holes.

Um…why even bother? One way or another, it’s not like Scott is about to spend a lot of time in the trunk. And needless to say, this sudden care for his well-being is pretty nonsensical, coming from a ravenous mob. Kirby really should have just had them try to frantically stab him through the trunk, with the air holes being a minor benefit.

Anyway, proclaiming themselves to be heroes for ridding the world of this demon, the howling residents of Chandler Towers manhandle the trunk to the central stairwell of the building and drop him down, 45 flights of stairs, to the bottom. “I waited too long!” Thinks Scott. “The chances of my escaping from this-- are ten past zero!!!”

Oh, OK, then. End of the book, I guess. No need to—oh wait, it’s to be continued. But I’m sure he can’t escape, right? I mean, who wastes time thinking, “Gee, I can’t escape from this,” and then immediately escapes?

Mister Miracle, that’s who!

Fourth World Fridays: Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #139--"The Guardian Fights Again"

2011-12-02T11:34:00.000-08:00

I didn't even want ONE Rickle...

Even Kirby’s #1 fan and bestest friend ever, Mark Evanier, has admitted that Kirby could be a bit on the flaky side. This tendency is illustrated nicely by the two-issue Jimmy Olsen storyline we’re about to endure; the fact that it got so out of control wasn’t entirely Kirby’s fault, but it certainly didn’t help that the guy was so easily distracted. Evanier claims that he and Kirby’s other assistant, Steve Sherman, were mostly used as a sounding board for Kirby’s ideas during the creation of the Fourth World, but occasionally one of their own ideas would slip through, and one of these was to have the then-immensely-popular Don Rickles show up in a brief cameo and insult Superman. Somehow—apparently it had a lot to do with a DC publicist thinking they could reap some major publicity from it—this tiny idea was inflated into a two-issue extravaganza, which was bad enough—but by the time Kirby was done with it, the original idea had been lost, and the whole storyline had gone way off the rails. Most excruciatingly, Kirby had for some reason decided that what the story really needed was to give Rickles an evil twin who was intentionally unfunny. Hence, Goody Rickels (sic) was born, and the moment I’ve been dreading since I started these reviews is upon us.

It starts innocuously enough, back at the Project, where Tommy Sr.—who, you’ve no doubt forgotten at this point, is one of the Project’s doctors—is on the verge of giving the Guardian a clean bill of health and sending him out into the world, the first of the Project’s creations to be thus cleared. The Newsboys arrive to cheer him on and berate Superman in a flurry of clichéd dialogue along the lines of “Make wit’ a little “koitsy” , will ya. Muscles?” (Scrapper) and “Coudja lower the flippa for Dippa, soul brother?” (Flippa Dippa. Because he’s black, you see. Oh well, at least he’s not spazzing out over something water-related.)

Jimmy tells off Scrapper, who responds with “AAAAAA, Pish and Tush, Olsen!” Pish and tush? I thought these were 30s style New York street urchins, not 19th century schoolmarms.

The Guardian is given “clearance” (In quote marks. Slow down with the technical talk, Kirby!) by Tommy’s dad, who nevertheless makes cryptic reference to something weird in the Guardians’ brain, something that they don’t understand fully, and which is apparently common to all the Project’s creations. Nevertheless, the Guardian is eager to high-tail it out of there and get back to Metropolis…even though he’s technically never been there.

“I was grown with the memories of the original Guardian intact in my mind,” he explains. Ah, the old Xerox-clone standby. By now, of course, everyone knows you don’t produce exact, fully-grown copies of people by cloning them, and really, most reasonably well-informed people knew it in 1971, too, but hey, it’s a comic book contrivance. I’m sure that the scientists at the Project, who are constantly creating beings that they don’t understand and either sending them off into the world or enslaving them know what they’re doing.

By the way, the Guardian’s claim that he knows Metropolis introduces a fairly major continuity issue. The Guardian’s original name was The Manhattan Guardian, but here he’s portrayed as a resident of Metropolis, not Manhattan (as are the Newsboy Legion). It reminds me of Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers, which included a new Manhattan Guardian, and explicitly acknowledged that Metropolis and Gotham City were fantasy versions of New York. I guess we can explain this away with the usual “Earth A/Earth B” nonsense (the Golden Age DC characters inhabited Earth B), but that seems to suggest that there is no Metropolis in Earth B. I guess.

Does it seem like I’m stalling? Oh, I am. I dread what’s coming, reader, dread it deep in my soul.

Moments later, Superman is zooming down the Zoomway, with Jimmy and the Guardian in tow in the Whiz Wagon…but without the Newsboy Legion. While musing about how people will someday learn of the wonders of the Project, Jimmy and the Guardian explain their absence:

JIMMY: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! They won’t learn about it from the Newsboy Legion! HA HA HA HA!
GUARDIAN: (Stone-faced) Poor kids! I’m sure they’d find that joke no laughing matter!
JIMMY: Awww…I can’t help laughing, Guardian! Soon after the Doctor approved your leaving he turned “thumbs down” on them!
GUARDIAN: (Still stone-faced, still staring straight ahead) Too bad! One of the boys came down with a cold! Too bad!

Man, is that the flimsiest excuse possible to ditch the Newsboys, or what? I mean, I’d seize on every opportunity to do the same, too, but it’s like they weren’t even trying. You can tell the Guardian feels kinda bad about it. That’s not going to stop him from getting wasted tonight, of course. I hear Metropolis strip clubs are the best. Let’s hear it for no underage accompaniment!

As they emerge into the world above, Superman suddenly puts on a burst of “faster-than-lightspeed” (!) and unsuspiciously races ahead. It’s so that he can adopt his guise of Clark Kent and play dumb about where they’ve been when Jimmy and the Guardian burst into his apartment. (You know, as much as people make fun of Silver Age stuff like Superman having a bunch of robot doubles to cover for him, at least it did allow for this kind of extended absence.)

“Another human original!” exclaims the Guardian, shaking Kent’s hand. “It’s always an experience to meet one!” Uh, yes, and it’s an experience you’re likely to have many, many times in the next few days, so if you could just keep yourself from saying that every single time, that would really go a long way towards not creeping everyone out. Thanks, Guardian.

Anyway, Jimmy’s gung-ho to get Morgan Edge based on what happened in the Wild Area. Clark insists that they should have “facts”, which Jimmy seems to implicitly acknowledge…even though they don’t really have any facts. I mean, other than their general dislike of Morgan Edge, how do they *know* he was the one that planted the bomb? Of course, if Superman is listening in with his super-hearing a little later, he’ll hear one doozy of casual confession…but more on that in a minute.

Meanwhile, the Newsboys are stuck back at the Project thanks to Gabby’s apparent illness. (I’m not sure why the Project workers insisted on quarantining the Newsboys but not Jimmy, but again, I’m not complaining.) Being bad sports, the Newsboys are about to reenact the soap-beating scene from Full Metal Jacket on Gabby before Tommy’s dad breaks them up.

“Kids like the old Newsboy Legion get kinda careful when they grow up!” Explains Tommy. You mean, the way they blasted headfirst into a potential nuclear meltdown last issue?

Meanwhile, Morgan Edge has arrived back in his offices at the Galaxy Broadcasting System as if nothing had happened. When his secretary, Miss Conway, expresses consternation over his abrupt departure last issue, this is his reply:

“Well, you see, I learned that Metropolis would suffer an atomic explosion!”

Miss Conway’s reaction to this—I swear—is, “Oh, er--Clark Kent called! He said that Jimmy Olsen is back—and they both want to see you!”

“I’d have favored the atomic explosion!” thinks Edge.

…

…Seriously, WHAT?!? He just casually admits to this?!? I’ve been defending Kirby’s writing to a degree, but I have absolutely no idea what he was thinking here. Where is the secretary supposed to think he got this bit of info? A gypsy fortune teller?

…And didn’t he fire her last issue?

Anyway, I’m going to assume Miss Conway has gone into a dead-eyed panic and is keeping up the pretense of normal conversation for the rest of the scene, until she can sneak out on this obvious sociopath. She quickly changes the subject to Don Rickles, with whom Galaxy is on the verge of signing some kind of contract, and reminds Edge that “we’ll have two of them now”. When Edge expresses puzzlement at this, she tells him about…Goody Rickels, on their research staff.

Edge gets a glazed look in his eye. “I remember him now! I’m chilled to the bone!” Clearly, Edge is a man after my own heart. He also thinks, “Demons of Darkseid!” which is the kind of thing I make it a habit to say a couple of times a day. But Darkeid cannot save him now. In walks Goody.

So, I think the point is supposed to be that Goody is Rickel’s exact opposite, and thus, well-meaning, idiotic, and unfunny. Having us spend more time with the “unfunny” Rickles may not have been the best plan, but then, the dialogue Kirby (and, I guess, Evanier and Sherman) come up with for the “real” Rickles when he makes his appearance isn’t noticeably funnier, so…

Why is he wearing a superhero costume? Because some guys in the office told him he was up for a TV series. Even though Goody apparently realized this was a gag pretty quickly, he continues to wear the costume for the rest of his appearance. But then, nothing else about Goody makes any sense, why should this?

Edge decides to make use of Goody for a scheme of his to bump off Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen, and after some grating hijinx on Goody’s part, Edge, with teeth-gritted, tells him he’s being promoted to reporter and sent on an assignment.

Meanwhile, Clark and Jimmy are on their way to confront Edge. They know the score now (apparently), and are determined to bring him down. They demand to see him! Nothing will distract them from this mission! Except Miss Conway telling them he’s not in and leaving another assignment for them!

So they go and cover the assignment.

Yes, I’m sure the fact that their boss is a homicidal maniac who’s in with an international crime organization run by a supremely evil being planning to enslave everyone in the Universe is a story that can wait until they’ve checked out this…

…UFO landing?!? Are you $^%*&ing me?!?

So, even though they know Edge is out to get them, even though this whole assignment smells incredibly fishy, even though he’s freakin’ Superman and could probably find Edge in about two seconds, Superman decides the best course of action is to go and check out this mysterious object to which Edge has directed them.

Good one, Supes.

The park is bizarrely abandoned if this is supposed to be a real UFO landing—there’s not even police tape or anything, But hey, Goody is there! He’s already been inside the UFO and indicates that it’s empty, prompting Superman to step inside. At which point Goody presses a button, the door slams closed, and the whole UFO disapparates.

I really don’t get Goody. He’s supposed to be harmless comic relief, but this whole scene plays out like he was willingly doing Edge’s bidding in knocking off Clark. Except that once the UFO is gone, Goody sits around, shell-shocked at what he’s done. Tossing out stupid one-liners the whole time. Argh, what an exasperating character.

Suddenly, Jimmy, the Guardian, and Goody are attacked by…dudes. Like, random dudes. OK, they’re goons sent by Intergang, but why are they dressed like football players?

A three-page scuffle ensues, with Goody sitting around moaning and bumbling, accidentally knocking out one of the thugs by sitting up too quickly. Finally, the battle comes to a halt when a grim-faced goon grabs Jimmy and puts a gun to his head. This is the appropriately named “Ugly” Mannheim, who’s about to engage in desperate measures against our heroes. He’s about to FEED THEM DINNER.

Yes, really.

“Meanwhile, in a space-time continuum--far from Earth, the UFO, with Clark Kent inside, drifts in alien space!!!” “Goody was right!” mutters Clark. “There are plenty of buttons!” I have nothing to add to that.

Back on Earth—or under it—we get a quick scene of the Newsboys. They’ve managed to procure one of the miniature “Scrapper troopers” from a few issues back—basically, living versions of the little green army men—and have used him to crawl into the lock on their door and let them out. They head downwards through rocky tunnels until they encounter an underground river, conveniently furnished with a boat, which naturally causes Flippa Dippa to comment on how great water is. Man, that was close! We almost went an entire issue without being reminded of Flippa Dippa’s monomania for aquatic activities!

Did you think I was kidding about Mannheim feeding Jimmy dinner? Because I wasn’t. He’s forcing Jimmy, Goody, and the Guardian to eat a feast, at gunpoint, in what is probably the lamest and most needlessly complicated villainous plot in history. See, the food has been treated with “pyro-granulate” which bursts into flames at the slightest spark. In 24 hours, our heroes are going to go up like Roman candles. Man, that makes so much more sense than just shooting them. At this point, the Adam West Batman villains are rolling their eyes.

And as if that wasn’t enough, they then proceed to let them go. This is the cliffhanger to the next issue, but come on. There are about five million ways this evil plan could be thwarted, many of them involving just getting to a doctor. Or inducing vomiting. It’s like Intergang isn’t even trying anymore.

I’m tempted to say that this issue is a perfect example of all Kirby’s faults and weaknesses, compounded into one: his capitulation to corporate thinking, his nonsensical, half-assed plotting, and his inability to focus. Sorry to say, we’ve got a whole ‘nother issue of this nonsense coming up, folks. But at least we finish off the first omnibus volume with a cracking Mister Miracle yarn…

Ceci N'est Pas Une Filme

2011-11-30T14:21:00.000-08:00

The last time I reviewed a movie here on my blog, I was dealing with a sweet and well-realized love story with a very human, charismatic core, but wrapped around it was a half-baked SF/fantasy premise that the filmmakers hadn’t thought through properly. In Time is practically the exact opposite of that: the premise is clever, hooky, and well-developed, resulting in a well-constructed and clever world that comments effectively on ours. But the movie built around this premise barely exists, and certainly isn’t engaging.

Justin Timberlake (who I generally like as an actor but who is badly miscast here) plays Will Salas, an industrial worker in an indeterminate future where everyone’s effectively immortal due to genetic engineering. The only thing is that you’ve got a clock branded into your arm that’s perpetually counting down to zero, and you need to keep replenishing it by working. Yes, the whole movie is built around the double entendre of “time is money”. Essentially, you can choose between the security of knowing you have a substantial amount on the clock, or paying your bills. Down at the lower end of the spectrum, in the de facto ghetto (people are segregated in “time zones” based on their wealth—I did mention that this movie likes groan-worthy double-meanings, right?) people are often forced to live “day to day”, barely keeping ahead of the clock, working non stop just to make sure they have enough not to die in their sleep. A mistake in their calculations, a poorly-thought-out indulgence, or even just a failure to get where they need to go fast enough can be fatal.

One night, Will comes across a man (Matt Bomer) in a bar behaving erratically, almost suicidally. Will saves his life from a local gang of thugs, or “Minutemen”, at which point the man reveals that he’s fantastically rich—over a hundred years old, with another century on his clock—gives him an inkling of just how corrupt and rigged the system in which they live is. The next morning, Will wakes to find that he’s been gifted with the man’s time, right as he lets himself die (rather stupidly, if he was trying to help Will, as the immediate appearance is that he’s murdered him and stolen his time). Will goes on the lam to the logical place, buying himself into the highest-income time zone, to get a look at how the other half lives. Soon he’s hobnobbing with the ultra-powerful Philip Weiss (the ever-reptilian Vincent Kartheiser, playing an old man in a young man’s body) and falling in love with his daughter Michelle (Amanda Seyfried, another miscast actor who I normally like). But of course, the heat, in the form of “Timekeepers”, led by Cillian Murphy, catch up to him, and soon Will is in even more desperate straits than he started, on the run with Michelle and trying desperately to find enough time to stay alive.

Reading a synopsis of In Time, it sounds like a really smart, exciting action/SF film. The trouble is that writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) seems to have been so satisfied with the synopsis that he didn’t really take the next step and make it into a movie. I’m barely exaggerating—whole scenes are built around characters telling each other what the scene is about instead of, y’know, showing us. Likewise, whenever an “action” scene starts up, it’s so perfunctory you can almost see text popping up on the screen reading “insert exciting car chase here”. The most emblematic moment of this, as the Onion A. V. Club pointed out, is a moment where Will has to “arm wrestle” a Minuteman (time is exchanged by pressing forearms together, so this is literally a competition to drain the other guy’s life force). It would be exciting…if we had any idea what the rules were, or how it is you can drain time from your opponent without letting him drain you. The perfunctory explanation we’ve received from Will earlier about his secret method of winning arm wrestling competitions makes no real sense, so we’re left with a scene that’s just “Will gets in an arm wrestling competition. Will wins. Next scene.” We in the audience are forced to use our imaginations to fill in what would normally be the crucially entertaining moments of the film.

There’s one exception, a moment early in the film where Will’s mother (Olivia Wilde, who IS well-cast as an older woman in a young woman’s body) has to race through the streets to replenish her clock after overspending, which is legitimately exciting, but otherwise, this is practically a stage play.

I feel kinda bad ragging on the movie for this stuff; lord knows we get far too many supposed science fiction movies where the action and dazzling visuals are literally the whole game, and there’s nothing resembling an idea in sight. But Niccol’s seemingly overcompensated by making a movie that’s literally nothing BUT ideas, with no execution. While he has overcome some of the issues that dogged his earlier work (the sledgehammer-subtle symbolism, for instance, or the look-how-clever-I-am narration of something like Lord of War, his last movie) he seems less grounded than ever in the needs of cinematic storytelling. Niccol’s a good writer who could even be great if the right director would keep him in line (as almost happened with The Truman Show) but as a filmmaker he’s shooting first drafts.

Fourth World Fridays: (Orion of) The New Gods #3--"Death is the Black Racer!"

2011-11-25T10:39:00.000-08:00

I’ve never been sure exactly how well the Fourth World books did in terms of sales when they first came out, and it seems I’m not the only one. The series was, of course, cancelled before its time, supposedly due to low sales, but there sure seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence to indicate that they were both popular and much-discussed at the time. For example, in the afterword to the first omnibus volume, Mark Evanier writes how the publishers reported to Jack that the readers “loved all the new characters in each issue”, which certainly doesn’t sound like a description of a struggling book. This same conversation apparently also led to Kirby inserting a new character into Orion of the New Gods #3, a character he had planned for a separate project. That character was…Death, the Black Racer.

There are so many things wrong with Death, the Black Racer (whom I will hereafter refer to as DTBR) that it’s not even funny. Actually, it is funny. That’s why all those things wrong with the character are actually things right with the character.

That's him on the cover above. First of all, the “Black” in his name doesn’t refer to his costume, obviously, but rather his skin colour. Like much of comics (which tended to follow Kirby’s lead anyway), Kirby was belatedly realizing that he had been unfairly ignoring black people for decades, and attempting to make up for it by awkwardly inserting a bunch of black characters in his work, many of them unfortunately stereotypical or featuring “black” in their names for no real reason.

Secondly…a suit of armour could be a good look for an embodiment of The End of Life, but a garish red, yellow and blue one? And…and…

Skis?!?

OK, so Kirby had hit the bullseye a few years before with a cosmic surfer of the starways, and that must have seemed just as unlikely…but…but…

Skis?!?

Let’s just get started.

“OBLIVION!!! I face oblivion!!! I am the quarry of a power that challenges all power!!” bellows Lightray in this issue’s opening splash page. Not wasting any time, Kirby’s introduced us to DTBR right off the bat, and he’s chasing Lightray for…no reason that I can see. I mean, OK, he’s the embodiment of Death, and he claims all things, and (in a nice bit of metaphor) even the supremely fast Lightray can’t actually outrun him, just outmaneuver him for a while. But…I mean, why is he chasing Lightray at this particular moment? Was Lightray playing with matches or running with scissors moments before? Because I don’t think it’s fair if Death gets to actually cause your death. I thought his job was just to take you away afterwards. Apparently the New God of Death is a more proactive sort.

Anyway, it’s time to check in on Orion, back on Earth. As you may have noticed, this particular comic is falling into a neat little formula: we start with cosmic goings-on back on New Genesis and environs, then cut back to Earth as the story starts. It builds a nice rhythm, with a sense of growing tension, as we wait for these cosmic characters to arrive on Earth and join or hinder Orion.

Orion’s still hanging back at the pad with his disciples. For the record, these are Dave Lincoln, P.I.; Claudia Shane, token female; Harvey Lockman, annoying teenager; and Victor Lanza, perpetually nervous insurance salesman. Quite a posse you’ve got going there, Orion. But at least they’ve been able to procure clothes for him! In only two issues!

Orion goes into the back room to change…in more ways than one. While indulging in a typically Kirbian soliloquy about how he has to hide his true nature and blah blah blah, Orion reveals to us that he’s not actually the good-lookin’ stud that Claudia’s been drooling over; his true face is one that’s just as grim and ugly as a scion of Apokalips. If you haven’t figured out what the deal is with Orion yet, based on all these clues Kirby keeps dropping, you may want to find some new reading material more your intellectual speed, like “Dick and Jane”. Or Spidey Super Stories.

Meanwhile, back in space, Lightray’s prospects are looking dire as he slams into an asteroid—but just as the Black Racer is almost upon him (“It is the end, Lightray! It could only end this way!” It could only end on a planetoid in deep space, via a homicidal renfest reject on skis? Yeah, how could he have not seen that coming?) a Boom Tube opens up and draws the Black Racer off to another plane of existence. Lightray’s rescuer is Metron, natch, who tells Lightray off for not thinking to do this himself. It seems that, in traditional mythological fashion, the only New God who has any brains is the one with “intelligence” as his special purview. Also in traditional mythological fashion, Metron’s kind of a pompous dick about it.

“The Black Racer--where is he now? Where has the Boom Tube taken him?” asks Lightray, a question answered by the splash on the following page, where DTBR proclaims, “So, destiny has changed my course and takes me here—to Earth!!! Uh, dude, that wasn’t destiny, that was Metron. What was I saying about this guy being proactive? So first he chases Lightray around space for no reason, then as soon as he’s diverted, he just gives up and starts harassing the locals? DTBR apparently has ADD.

“There, below—a place of black men!” he narrates, referring to a ghetto. Yikes. “Those who fight to live—others who risk my presence!” He watches as we meet to participants in a gun battle: Screamer, dressed in a natty gangster suit, and Sugar-man, who’s straight out of Sweet Sweetback’s Badassssss Song. Screamer is apparently a stool pigeon, and Sugar-man is, you guessed it, working for Inter-Gang. He ices Screamer (“Your last scream won’t be to the law!”) and then notices the presence of an onlooker. This is one Sergeant Willie Walker, Vietnam hero, wounded in the line of duty, who now lies in a bed, unable to move or speak. So Sugar-man decides he can’t leave him alive as a witness. He decides that the guy who can’t move or talk is going to rat him out somehow. Sugar-man is not a genius.

OK, that’s not fair. It also sort of plays out as Sugar-man being a jerk who can’t resist taking out an easy target, or maybe even thinking he’s doing Willie a favour by putting him out of his misery. Nevertheless, he’s prevented from pulling the trigger by the Black Racer, who causes the gun to explode in his hand and sends Sugar-man running away, clasping his burned face. Um…so why is the Black Racer, who was so happy to arbitrarily kill a perfectly healthy New God a few pages ago, now preventing the death of someone who, we learn in a second, is pretty much crying out for euthanasia?

Well, it turns out, ol’ DTBR is about to give Willie a special gift—by inhabiting his body. First Willie finds his hand moving, stretching out towards the stranger—then he gets up, finding himself able to speak—then he tears away the brace from his neck and, as you’d expect, gets pretty excited. “It’s happened! I’m whole! I’m strong! I’m no longer half-alive!” At which point the Black Racer collapses to the ground and…dissolves? Leaving his armour behind. Willie, after a moment of befuddlement, realizes that he is changing, and…well, it happens between panels, so it’s not clear if he puts on the armour himself or it somehow materializes around him. Either way, Willie now realizes he is now the Black Racer, and passes through the wall to jump on his skis and head out to hunt the doomed.

Got all that? Because the first thing I thought of when I read this was Hermes on Futurama bellowing, “That just raises further questions!!!”

I mean…why does the Black Racer need a body to possess? None of the other New Gods needed to do this to come to Earth (though it might have been cool if they did, and in fact some later writers like Grant Morrison have had the New Gods inhabiting human bodies). The new, Willie-ified DTBR seems to be just as invisible and intangible as his cosmic counterpart, and the old Black Racer was clearly capable of touching and affecting things, based on what he did to Sugar-man’s gun. And on top of everything, in spite of his claims to the contrary, he didn’t actually kill Willie! Or maybe the idea is that he…took Willie’s place…or something…but again, why does Death need a secret identity? I mean, things are dying all the time. This brings a whole new level to the traditional image of the superhero deciding he’s needed and changing into a new form in order to swoop off and do his duty. Instead of zooming to the rescue, death changes into his cowl in a phone booth and races to a scene of disaster to sweep away human souls.

I guess you could argue that DTBR is simply the Death of New Genesis and Apokalips, and that’s why he doesn’t bother with non-New God related phenomena. Although that would suggest that no one can die on either of those two planets as long as he’s kicking back on Earth. What a slacker, that Death!

Meanwhile, Orion (or “O’Ryan”, as his minions suggest he should call himself while on Earth) has donned the guise of Dave Lincoln’s new partner and set out to find the people who kidnapped the foursome in the first place. “It is best we do this alone, Lincoln! The others need not risk their lives in this venture!” “They lack the experience, at any rate, Orion!” agrees Dave. “Also, they’re a bunch of obnoxious boobs with no useful skills whatsoever, and I’m happy to get away from them for as long as possible!” OK, so he doesn’t actually say that last part, but you can tell he’s thinking it.

Orion and Dave use Mother Box to find the hideout of yet another branch of Intergang, this one overseen by a human gargoyle named “Badger”, who looks astoundingly like a cross between Telly Savalas and Fin Fang Foom.

He’s sort of mockingly consoling Sugar-man on his horrific facial injuries, then telling him to shut up as they go over the details of their nefarious plot. They’ve been paid to set off an Apokoliptish bomb in the heart of the city—I’m going to assume this is Darkseid’s fallback plan now that Superman stopped the Project from going nuclear, and man, that guy really wants to destroy Metropolis—but of course, Orion and Dave know an opening when they see one. Orion “literally smashes through concrete and metal walls” (as opposed to metaphorically smashing through them) and trashes the goons, despite their Apokaliptish weaponry. Actually, Mother Box just short-circuits them as soon as he enters the room, but they hold them off long enough to let Sugar-man get away with the bomb. He leaps in the van and drives away…but is pursued by DTBR, who’s swifter than any early-70s model truck. Sugar-man sees the Black Racer in his rearview mirror, but can’t get away from him as he passes his ski-pole through the truck to the bomb and triggers its, um, anti-gravity circuits. Of course. Because what city-destroying bomb is complete without an anti-gravity device capable of sending a truck flying into outer space? It’s just common sense, really.

Despite the fact that we just saw DTBR do this himself, Orion takes credit on the next page for levitating the truck with Mother Box, then blows it (and Sugar-man) to smithereens at a safe altitude. Hmmm…so I guess either DTBR is a glory hog, taking credit for other people’s work, or Orion is amazingly lackadaisical about letting people get away with city-destroying bombs. “Say, Orion, didn’t we just let the bad guy get away?” “Not to worry, Dave Lincoln, I’ll use my…um…magic box…to levitate the truck into the air…c’mon, Black Racer, you owe me one!” “Say, that’s neat. Any particular reason we didn’t use that same technology to beat up these goons from a distance instead of risking our lives?” “Dave Lincoln, I find the warrior’s fury growing in my breast!” “Forget I asked.”

A job well d…OK, a job done, the Black Racer returns to Willie’s apartment and changes back to the paralyzed, helpless Willie Walker, just in time for his primary caregivers, his sister and her husband, to come barging through the door, castigating themselves for leaving him alone. Which, yeah, I have to kind of agree, even if Willie’s brother in law mentions that they arranged for the neighbours to check in on him, in a truly awkward bit of retroactive plot spackling. The neighbours didn’t show up because they were busy with “all that trouble tonight!”, which sounds an awful lot like they got drunk and passed out, but let’s let it slide. The issue ends with a creepy closeup of Willie’s eyes—“He now knows his next quarry! Who is it? Him? Her? YOU?!? ”

I don’t know if the Black Racer reappears anywhere in the Fourth World saga—you’d think he’d show up every time someone died, kinda like the other DC Universe version of Death, the Sandman’s sister. He does seem a bit shoehorned in, which isn’t that surprising given that the comic was apparently planned without him and editorial suggested adding him in at the last minute.

And…y’know.

Skis?!?

Coming up next: the moment we’ve all been dreading, as Goody Rickels makes his terrifying first appearance…

Fourth World Fridays: Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #138--"The Big Boom!"

2011-11-18T13:54:00.000-08:00

Wow, Superman meets Doomsday? We’re about 20 years early on that particular encounter!

I think it says something about the Fourth World epic that I could manage to grow bored with a storyline that features a secret civilization of hippies living below the Earth’s surface, clones of the Newsboy Legion, a Hulk-Jimmy and a Four-Armed Thing, but bored I have become. The fact of the matter is that, in about half the time it’s taken for this storyline in SPJO, Orion has infiltrated Apokalips and come to Earth, Mr. Miracle has begun his act and escaped his archnemesis, and the Forever People have arrived, moved in, had their apartment blown up, and been captured by religious fundamentalists. Compared to that, even as wild a storyline as this business with “The Project” is going to seem to drag on.

Of course, considering what’s coming in the next issue…

But let’s repress that for a while and pick up where we left off. As you may recall, Darkseid’s minions Simyan and Mokkari had accidentally, but conveniently, managed to breed exactly the kind of life form they needed: a four-armed yellow rock monster who feeds voraciously on nuclear energy. Said four-armed terror had smashed his way into the Project and was on the verge of causing a massive hull breach in the Project’s power plant, thus exploding the entire Wild Area—and the city of Metropolis, above. Superman had zoomed to head it off, and Jimmy Olsen and the Newsboys had followed him for God only knows what reason, given that Superman didn’t want them and they only got in the way. They all ended up trapped in a bizarre molecular pink rubber egg. Obviously.

Meanwhile, on the first of several splash pages, the Newsboy Legion’s dads are demonstrating from whence the Newsboys Mk II get their recklessness and stupidity by piling in after Superman, taking the Golden Guardian and several transport carriers full of troops with them. “The Evil Factory has jammed all communications with our atomic power plant! We can’t warn them!” Proclaims one of the military types as they streak down the zoomway through the underground chasms. OK, but, uh, warn them of what? I mean, it would be nice, I guess, but again, these guys are headed towards ground zero of a massive nuclear detonation (in fact, last issue there were already a bunch of explosions going off, but Kirby seems to have forgotten about those). Superman is there already, and either he’s going to stop the monster himself, in which case their efforts will be unnecessary, or else he’s not, in which case it seems unlikely that a truckload of ineffectual army men are going to make a difference and are fairly likely to just get fried. But hey, this is a Kirby comic, and heroism and reckless endangerment go hand in hand!

Kirby begins a countdown—apparently the events of this issue span a mere fifteen minutes, and you could cut the tension with a knife. Superman is finding that the “big, stupid alien egg”, as Scrapper dubs it, is too flexible and yielding for him to work up the necessary leverage to burst their way out, which is actually a clever way of taking him out of action. The Newsboy’s efforts to break free result in their bouncing back and knocking each other around like pinballs.

TOMMY: Well, that does it! Whad’da we do now-- just wait till we’re hatched?
SCRAPPER: Yeah! Dis is some yolk!
SUPERMAN: Cool it, men! Let’s think--not panic!
JIMMY: I’d rather panic than listen to those jokes!

I mention this exchange because it’s virtually the only memorable thing Jimmy says or does in this issue of his own comic. Not that I’m particularly complaining about a shortage of Olsen.

Meanwhile, on the sixth splash page of what is so far an 8-page story—ah, Kirby—the yellow rock-monster is gouging his way towards a typically ornate power plant. Apparently the monster is smart enough to know to dig up and under the feet of the guards, but the guards aren’t smart enough to be able to tell that the tremblors the monster is causing are coming from directly below them.

Back at the egg, Superman (with, OK, some help from Jimmy) has figured out that the egg’s surface will respond to energy, and generates a blast of static electricity by rubbing his hands together at top speed. That actually almost makes sense, sort of—it even ties into what we saw last issue. Gasp! We’re now seven minutes “to fiery end!” so Supes has to hustle. And we have to—

Check in with Perry White! Wow, hey, another Superman cast member. As you may recall, one of the elements of the current Superman storyline is that the Daily Planet has been bought up by Galaxy Broadcasting, which is apparently a front for Intergang, and its head honcho, Morgan Edge, has been openly conspiring with Darkseid and trying to kill Superman. I’d kind of assumed he’d given ol’ Perry the boot, but, great Caesar’s Ghost! Here he is, still doing the hard-boiled editor bit! And sexually harassing interns!

No, just kidding. He’s having a perfectly normal conversation with Terry Dean, a character apparently left over from the pre-Kirby storyline. She does play a part in the story much, much later on, but I’m not sure what the point is of bringing her in now, when having Lois Lane would have made a lot more sense. But, since all the traditional Superman characters were being redrawn against Kirby’s wishes, I guess he wanted to avoid that when possible, so no Lois. The only point here is to establish that Perry’s suspicious of Morgan Edge, so let’s move on.

The old Newsboys, the Guardian, and the troops burst out into the wild area and locate the Legion’s Whiz Wagon. Watching via one of those omniscient viewscreens that seem to come standard with every villainous characters’ evil headquarters, Simyan and Mokkari apparently believe that these guys pose a threat to their plans, despite the fact that they’re already facing Superman, so they teleport the rest of their four-armed brood over to the Project to wreak exponentially more havoc. Man, these guys can see most of what the heroes do, and can send monsters over to harass them at will? That just makes it all the more pathetic when Superman beats them.

But what of the villainous Morgan Edge? I’m sure you’re dying to know. After a perfunctory demonstration of his eeeeeeevilness--he fires his secretary--Edge gets a call via the secret monitor in his desk, telling him to split for a copter on the roof, because Metropolis is about to go up in a gigantic mushroom cloud. Taking this in stride, Edge heads to the door and then, amusingly, has to act casual while walking past his employees to the elevator.

What? Oh yeah, there’s a life-or-death struggle going on back at the Wild Area. I forgot. “Three minutes to violent eruption!” Proclaims Kirby in his narrative caption. Superman bursts in and tussles with the maddened rock monster, only to be thrown across the room and hit with the power plant’s damper rods, with the monster throws at him. They shatter on Superman’s chest, natch, but the reactor is about to go critical! “It is one minute to blow-up!” Kirby reminds us. I get the sense he was struggling with his vocabulary while writing this issue, because the next box reads, “As if to nail down this fact to Superman, the glistening threshold appears—and from it pours an army of D.N.Aliens!!!!”

And they’re met by the army troops!

Again, Kirby was a WWII vet, and it’s pretty obvious he believed that the army was capable of meeting any crisis, but come on. ONE of these things bested Superman—now they’re facing a whole army of them? Kirby tactfully leaves the “bullets bouncing off them as they charge in and create total carnage” offscreen, but it’s pretty obvious that’s what’s happening.

The Guardian, rather unbelievably, manages to put down a rock monster with his fists—that’s his big contribution to the issue—as Superman kills two birds with one stone. Picking up the overloading reactor (“ thirty seconds to Eternity!”) Superman carried it down the corridor to a series of tunnels that were being built to tap into the core’s geothermal energy, and throws it into a very large, deep pit. Not only does the blast take place a safe distance underground, but the rock monsters, blindly seeking the atomic energy that is their nourishment, hurl themselves down the pit after it “Like maddened lemmings!” Good thinking, Superman!

Returning back up the corridor from this apocalyptic scrape, Superman finds Jimmy sulking over the fact that he’s been sidelined in his own comic. Some sub-He-Man level humour wraps up the issue…

And the Project storyline! Whoo-hoo! Alright! Not only is Supes about to get back to fighting crime on the surface (where, you’d think, Lex Luthor would have pretty much conquered the world by now) but we’re about to leave the Newsboy Legion behind for a long, blessed stretch of time! And begin one of the stupidest, most ridiculous low points in the entire Fourth World saga!

Uh…wait…Simyan? Mokkrari? Got any more monsters to throw at us? Please?

Comics Quickies: American Vampire

2011-11-12T13:14:00.000-08:00

Just read the first collection of American Vampire, a series co-created and co-written by Stephen King, though the other writer, Scott Snyder, seems to be a true partner (according to his afterward, he created the central character of Skinner Sweet). It's a clever "mosaic" story with two threads in each issue; the first, set in 1925 and written by Snyder, stars wannabe starlet named Pearl who falls afoul of an evil, bloodsucking Hollywood producer. And also he's a vampire. BA-RUM-PUM! The second is written by King, set in the wild west, and tells the story of the aforementioned Skinner Sweet, a particularly nasty outlaw who ends up antagonizing the same ancient vampire, at this point a railroad baron, and is seemingly brought to justice by a hard-eyed but good-hearted sheriff. The two stories interweave in all kinds of clever ways, slowly revealing more and more about the various characters and suggesting an epic story that will probably move forward across the 20th Century in later issues. In the meantime, King's really on his game here--I haven't read much of his stuff since the mid-90s, and nothing since the Dark Tower ended, so I don't know how his batting average is these days--but this has all the best qualities of his work with none of the flaws that used to rankle me (it actually has a tight ending! Which doesn't rely on the characters suddenly developing magical abilities!). His dialogue and characterization are strong as ever, with Sweet being an instantly memorable character, and the conflict between two evils, with a good man caught in the middle, being an interesting one. Meanwhile, Snyder matches him beat for beat in the Pearl storyline; I'd argue his dialogue is sometimes a bit too contemporary for 1925 (though I suppose Hollywood was the cutting edge of culture) but like King, his characterizations are sharp and the use of vampires as a metaphor for Hollywood is just cute enough without being overplayed. Then there's Rafael Albuquerque, who draws both stories. His art is kind of amazing, expressionistic and even "cartoony" without losing a realistic, gritty feeling, and his characters are just as instantly distinctive art-wise as they are in terms of the writing. Sweet in particular, who looks like Kid Rock's great-grandpappy, is always instantly recognizable no matter what timeline he pops up in, which is of course crucial to a story that jumps between decades and viewpoints.

For those of you who, like me, were rather disappointed by the Dark Tower comics, this is proof of how good a Stephen King comic can be.

Fourth World Fridays: The Forever People #3--"Life Vs. Anti-Life"

2011-11-11T20:58:00.000-08:00

You probably don't need me to describe the many and various ways in which comics' growth were stunted over the decades. The long and the short of it is that being confined to disposable kid's entertainment for so long meant that the innovators often weren't quite able to shake off the status quo when attempting to do something "important" and "meaningful" within the comics medium. This was probably most evident in the early 70s, when comics started to enter a true adolescent phase--meaning that they started yearning for "adulthood" (being treated as a respectable medium) but, for the most part, weren't sophisticated enough to know how to go about it. The results were often strange, to say the least. This is the era in which Spidey bucked the comics code by having a friend fall to heroin addiction, Steve Ditko created a string of Objectivist superheroes, and Green Lantern and Green Arrow teamed up for a really heavy-handed commentary on America and everything that was wrong with it. The results fluctuated between "interesting" and "painfully self-important", but the fact of the matter is, trying to shoehorn "serious issues" into what had until very recently been a defiantly juvenile genre was a very ill fit. It would take a lot of tinkering before we started to get superheroes who could mesh comfortably with the "real world" and all its messiness, and some would argue that we never really got there.

Kirby, ambitious scamp that he was, was not immune to this impulse--in fact, he and Stan Lee had essentially opened the floodgates with their original Marvel line-up (which, let's not forget, included a weapons manufacturer who was a POW in Vietnam and a gang of mutants constantly on the run from prejudice). The main difference there, though, was that the politics were just part of the backdrop, spice to stories that were otherwise focused on the important business of long underwear types beating each other up. When superhero comic writers moved political commentary to the fore, they were generally unable to deal with it except in the straightforward, black-and-white, over-the-top manner in which they'd handled alien invasions and world-shattering conflicts.

Kirby was no exception to this; it's just that his world view was so vast, and so bizarre, that the Deep Important Meanings frequently went past self-importance and awkwardness and became just another ingredient in the surreal landscape of Kirby's world.

Frequently, but not always.

In The Forever People #3, Kirby tackles an issue that's proved just a tad divisive over the years: organized religion. Given the countercultural bent I've noted so often in these essays, I don't think you'll be surprised by Kirby's take on the subject. The story starts with a quote by Adolf Hitler, an army of blank-eyed citizens spouting hatred of those who are different, and a freakishly magnetic red-haired cult leader who has them in his thrall.

What? No, it's not Jimmy Olsen! It's Glorious Godfrey, who makes no secret of his Apokaliptish affiliation, his reverence for Darkseid, and his worship of the Anti-Life equation. The only thing remotely subtle about this four-page sequence is that Kirby doesn't outright refer to Godfrey as a religious leader. But come on: the guy's followers meet in a giant tent containing a huge organ, and Godfrey wears white, billowing robes while standing at a pulpit. And his name is God-Free. I'm kind of surprised there wasn't more of an uproar over this comic, but then, this wasn't the 50s, with Wertham and whatnot. This was the 70s, and America had a lot more to worry about than some subversive comics.

"Life has pitfalls! Anti-life is protection!" Proclaim the unsubtle banners toted by Godfrey's followers. "Life will make you doubt! Anti-life will make you right!" And, most crucially, "You can justify anything with anti-life!" More on this in a moment, but for now, you can see how this relates to what I was talking about, above. No real wannabe totalitarian would advertise himself as promoting "anti-life" or honk on about how he was giving you the right to kill and inflict pain. Real-world villains always make it about something else, something that nobody could disagree with, while sneaking in their more pernicious and mean-spirited views in a roundabout way. But because this is a comic, we have to have it spelled out in broad strokes.

But while he may have been unsubtle, Kirby was canny. Godfrey's creating an army of "Justifiers" who do his bidding mindlessly--the name coming from their ability to justify doing anything in the name of Godfrey, Darkseid, and Anti-Life. It's still cartoonish, but that is pretty bang-on. Kirby's point is that a lot of religious fanatics are concerned less about doing whatever's necessary to save their souls than about using their religion to justify their own violent or hate-filled impulses. I'm having a hard time arguing with that viewpoint, personally...

On literally the next page, we see Godfrey's methods bear bitter fruit for our heroes. With no explanation, a Justifier stands in the middle of our hairy, unwashed heroes' new home base, shaking down lil' Donnie--that's the Tiny Tim lookalike from the last issue, remember him?--and demanding to know where the Forever People are, despite the fact that they're standing right behind him. "Motherbox has bent the light around us--scattered the sound vibrations!" Explains Vykin hurriedly. Oh, OK...that explains one aspect of this scene. But how did this guy get in? How did he know the Forever People lived there in the first place? And if his bosses knew, why did they send a single guy, instead of an onslaught of Justifiers?

Well, we get a partial explanation for that last one, as the Forev Peeps rescue Donnie and bail out of the apartment (Big Bear literally goes through the wall.) See, the Justifier is carrying an Apokoliptish bomb, and he's capable of, as Beautiful Dreamer reminds us, justifying his own death. Yes, that's right: the Justifier is a suicide bomber. Ouch. That's almost painfully prescient.

The FPs just barely escape by diving into a convenient bulldozer-dug hole, and pause to reconnoiter. Realizing that the Apokolips war/invasion has begun in earnest, and that there'll be no more zany hippie monkeyshines for them, the gang decides to abandon the apartment they spent much of last issue furnishing, and hit the road. Well, the apartment is pretty much a smoking crater by now anyway, but even if it wasn't it would still be the right decision. Having these guys hang around the poor neighbourhood of Genericburg isn't nearly as interesting as having them pull an Easy Rider and take a trek across that weird old America. Which is especially weird when Kirby's drawing it.

This, of course, means they have to abandon Donnie. HOORAY!!!!

Sorry to be so blunt about it, but it doesn't seem like a particularly emotional parting for the FPs, either:

BIG BEAR: On board! On board!
BEAUTIFUL DREAMER: Goodbye, Donnie! We leave you what cannot die--love! Friendship!
SERAFIN: It is so in New Genesis! It can be here!
DONNIE: You must come back! You must!
BIG BEAR: Preparing for phase-out!

And then, in a flurry of really dumb technobabble and paying no further heed to Donnie whatsoever, the FPs blast off into the sky.

Good thing, too, because the Justifiers are about to launch their attack on the city. Declaring that "the people we've chosen as targets live here," the Justies pour out of their flying box in a wave of dickishness:

JUSTIFIER #1: Don't bother to discrminate! The women and children are as hated as the men!
JUSTIFIER #2: Waste no time on mercy! Drag them out! Treat them rough!
JUSTIFIER #3: Listen to their cries! I've been waiting to do this for years!
JUSTIFIER #4: Get going! We'll show what we do with your kind!

Man, dig that naturalistic dialogue. I know I've been wasting entirely too much time on mercy these days. Many's the morning where I'll just sit in my breakfast nook, unable to get going on the day's work, because I'm just feeling too darn merciful.

Seriously though, what "kind" are we talking about here? Nothing's specified, and for once I think that has less to do with Kirby's awkward writing style than the fact that he wanted to tiptoe around editorial and the comics code. The obvious suggestion is that the Justifiers are Nazi-ish, which would make the people they're rounding up Jews (of which, I need hardly remind you, Kirby was one). But like I said above, everything else in the book points to the Justifiers being religious cultists, and the comparisons to totalitarianism aren't helped by the fact that the Justifiers mention repeatedly that they want to avoid the police. Oh, and the quasi-medieval clothing seems more Spanish Inquisition than Fourth Reich, too. Though I guess those guys weren't fond of the Jews either.

There's also a brief nod to Fahrenheit 451, as a Justifier enters a library and torches it with a flamethrower, to prevent the spread of dangerous ideas. That would be somewhat more effective if there weren't thousands of other libraries throughout the country, but OK. Godfrey watches through his dressing room mirror-slash-omniscient viewing device as another one defaces a store:

Well, it's still more logical than "S" for Shakespeare. (Scroll down.)

Godfrey uses the power of technobabble to determine that the Forever People are still alive, and prepares for an invasion of tonight's ceremonies by...well, not doing anything, really. By the way, does it seem like Godfrey's assistants in the panel above are modeled after someone in the real world? I'm guessing some kind of early 70s evangelists or religious leaders. Anyone know?

The FPs land just out of view of Godfrey's revival tent and do what they always do: call on Deus Ex Machina Man, I mean Infinity Man, to solve everything. This month, Infy can pass through solid rock at will, and bend lasers--or rather, "Omega beams"--fired at him by the Justifiers, turning them back on his enemies.

"You fool!" Cries Godfrey to Infy's back. "Do you think your spectacular gimmickry can stop this operation?" Huh, apparently Godfrey likes to compliment people as he's insulting them.

GODFREY: The forces of Apokolips are many! --And mighty!
INFINITY MAN: Your secret is wind, Godfrey! An evil wind that rushes from your throat--

Lord, I hope it's from your throat...

INFINITY MAN: --And this Demon's organ! Which must be destroyed!

Ooooooh, I get it. It was the organ all along!

Actually, that's kind of interesting--the Apokoliptians are seeking the Anti-Life Equation, which will make everyone do their bidding, but it seems like Godfrey's organ got them pretty close already. Granted, properly deployed, the Equation can control everyone in the Universe, but still, it seems to me, just follow the Borg model of assimilating everyone into Justifiers, and you've got a pretty good head start. Except Infinity Man just smashed the organ, so back to square one, I guess.

SUDDENLY! An ominous gloved hand lands on Infy's shoulder! "Turn about! Look at me!" Instead of spinning and punching him in the face, Infy looks vaguely up and to the left and soliloquizes. "That voice! It chills the spirit--like the coming doom of all living things!" It's Darkseid, natch...he just happened to be in the neighbourhood, apparently. Or, OK, I guess this is what Godfrey did to prepare for Infinity Man's incursion: called the boss to help him. Fine, fine, whatever.

Anyway, Darkseid shoots cheesy beams into Infy's eyes--through his goggles, yet--and disburses him back into the various Forever People. Apparently the power of cosmic love from beyond infinity is still no match for Darkseid. Or else the plot required him to take a dive.

No sooner have the Forev Peeps reappeared than Desaad pops up and neutralizes them all with a "nerve beam" which, we're told, causes them to yelp loudly before they collapse. We're told this because Kirby apparently couldn't be bothered to draw it, which is weird given that he proceeds to devote the remaining three pages to Darkseid describing the plan he's been implementing for ten issues now, Godfrey jealously vying with DeSaad for Darkseid's favour, and Desaad cacklingly describing the horror that awaits the FPs in his "Camp".

So, at the end of the day, I'd say Kirby pulls off tackling deeper subjects pretty well, without forgetting to give us a neat comic book. Furthermore, with the FPs leaving their pad behind and hitting the road, the book finds its groove. And on top of that, it's a neat cliffhanger in which Infinity Man, for once, doesn't provide a magic solution to the gang's woes. You can definitely sense Kirby finding his feet and gaining in confidence.

The next couple of issues of The Forever People continue the trend of satire and social commentary. Will Kirby lose his way, or gather steam? Stay tuned, true believers...

TV Thursdays: Life on Mars

2011-11-10T10:27:00.000-08:00

As always, SPOILERS follow.

It’s taken as read that endings are crucial to fiction, but is it possible that, in the medium of television, they might not be as important? I can see arguments both ways. I believe the ending of “Lost” is a genuine disappointment, one that completely fumbles the balls the series had been keeping in the air up until that point, but large swathes of the show are still well worth watching, and aren’t significantly diminished by where the story ended up. I think the ending of Battlestar Galactica is good—not great, but good—but it doesn’t change the fact that the show went off the rails in its final season. The finales of Star Trek: The Next Generation (good), The X-Files (bad), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (mediocre) don’t change the respective quality of the series as a whole.

But then, I have to admit, one of the reasons I can blow off The X-Files and Lost in particular is that I became convinced pretty early on that they weren’t going to stick the landing, that the “big reveals” they’d been implicitly promising throughout the show weren’t going to come together dramatically, even if we technically learned everything by the end. X-Files tripped over its own continuity and narrative coherence one too many times by around the third season to convince me the writers had a plan, and if there’s a more obvious example of TV writers stringing their audience along ad nauseum than Lost’s first two seasons, I can’t think of it. Again, I like both these shows, but I decided not to put my trust in a logical meta-narrative and just enjoy it on an episode-by-episode basis early on.

Conversely, when Life on Mars set up an intriguing meta-story in its pilot, I figured it was going somewhere cool. Not an unreasonable assumption—the show was smartly written from the start, it was well-reviewed, and given that it was British, there was a comparatively short run of episodes, so it wasn’t unreasonable to think that they might have told a tight, 16-part story with a satisfying payoff. So the fact that said payoff completely failed to arrive may have coloured my outlook on the whole series more harshly than it otherwise might have.

The show concerns Sam Tyler (John Simm), a cop in Machester, 2006, who’s in pursuit of a serial killer. When his girlfriend and partner (which…I don’t know much about how the police operate in Britain, but that seems like a bit of a stretch, that you would be allowed to have an open romantic relationship with your partner) pursues a hunch and apparently gets snagged by the killer, Sam races frantically to catch her and is hit by a car. To his befuddlement, he wakes up in what seems to be Manchester, 1973, an exaggerated Starsky-and-Hutch-style TV cop show reality where everyone is a slightly (or heavily) corrupt chain-smoker and heavy drinker, women are only there to be harassed, and police methods involve slapping suspects around until they talk. This brave new world is embodied by Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt, played by the magnetic Philip Glenister as a perpetually pissed-off man’s man’s man who takes a blunt-force approach to police work. While questioning the reality around him, Sam also finds himself bringing his modern, logical, and liberal sensibilities to bear on reforming the system, confiding in WPC Annie Cartwright about his former life and providing the voice of conscience for Hunt and his fellow officers.

As with Mad Men, the show focuses on the culture clash between the past and present, more literally in this case, with episodes about the racist and sexist atmosphere of the police station and England in general, the more sexually freewheeling era (masking a heavy level of male privilege), and the corrupt and slapdash nature of police work, compared with Sam’s more meticulous, logical, and by-the-book methods. 1973 tends to come off rather badly in these comparisons, though there is one heartfelt episode decrying the state of soccer/football, and how it’s become a haven for thuggery and pointless tribalism when it’s supposed to just be a fun game.

The real “hook” of the show, though, is discovering exactly what’s going on with Sam and his altered reality. The show suggests very strongly that Sam’s in a coma and imagining everything—he occasionally hears voices from the present on the radio and television discussing his medical condition, and there’s also a series of dreams and hallucinations, including a creepy little girl who occasionally crawls out of his TV set to further muddy the water—but early on Annie points out that the world he’s inhabiting seems far too tactile and detailed to be a hallucination. This sets up just enough doubt that I spent the series expecting Sam’s coma to be an elaborate fakeout…leading to some serious disappointment when the show does, indeed, seem to confirm that Sam was in a coma the entire time and that 1973 was all a hallucination.

This isn’t the only way in which the show seemed like it was leading me on, only to drop the ball at the end. Remember the serial killer business I mentioned above? While the pilot episode focuses on Sam trying to catch, apparently, the same killer back in the 70s, the actual killer—you know, the one who abducted his girlfriend, who he was racing to catch, sending him back in time in the first place?—is apparently apprehended and his girlfriend saved offscreen, while Sam’s in his coma. While I expected this to simply be a temporary resolution that would lead to a more elaborate storyline down the road, it turns out that, no, that’s all the writers cared to do with the concept; the serial killer stuff is completely abandoned after the first episode, lending everything an aura of perfunctoriness. Likewise, the girlfriend that he was so desperate to save is basically abandoned in the second series—while it’s understandable on her part (Sam’s been in a coma for something like a year at this point, and she feels the need to move on with her life), it undermines the earlier relationship more than a little.

Individually, these kinds of issues are nitpicks, but the show is built, at least at first, around Sam’s struggle to escape the world of 1973 and get home, yet the show slowly removes all of Sam’s reasons to want to do so. Thematically, this makes sense; the show ends (somewhat predictably) with Sam abandoning his grey and dreary world of 2006 by jumping off a building and returning to 1973 to save his friends in the middle of a shootout, which wouldn’t make sense unless 1973 had become his real home. But dramatically speaking, undermining the things that drove the plot forward in the early going makes the show more than a little disappointing, in much the same way that Lost’s half-assed focus on weird metaphysics while basically ignoring or only halfheartedly tying up the central mysteries that grabbed us in the first place felt like a copout on the writer’s part. I’m not adverse to a show attempting this kind of sleight of hand, but not at the expense of the drama, and the ending’s ambiguity, again like Lost’s, feels more like the show simply couldn’t commit.

Of course, all the above comes with a caveat: I haven’t watched the “sequel show”, Ashes to Ashes, which I’m told does develop the time travel/coma/afterlife mystery somewhat further (though whether it resolves things in any satisfactory fashion, I couldn’t tell you). I guess this is the problem with British TV: I expect it to be self-contained in a way that North American TV isn’t. Maybe that’s not fair of me? I suppose I’ll have to come back and do a follow-up review if I ever get around to watching Ashes to Ashes…though I have to admit the ending of this show didn’t really compel me to do so. I'm being kind of harsh here, as this can be a very entertaining series on an episode-by-episode basis, but I think it's unfair of this show to dangle an interesting long-form plot and then yank it away by the end.

Fourth World Fridays: Mister Miracle #2--"X-Pit"

2011-10-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

Mister Miracle #2 begins with a rather startling composition--another Kirby innovation that's left its mark on the comics medium. Instead of "gutters" dividing the panels, the images are mounted in and seperated by a bizarre latticework of Kirbian machinery, some of which has a creepily organic shape that's vaguely reminiscent of H. R. Giger. The images within the panels are those of Scott Free and his new assistant, Oberon, setting up for a new display of death-defiance, but the panels, and an overlying series of captions that suggest a ticker-tape readout, do a nice job of suggesting the looming presence of something called "Overlord". "I-AM-OVERLORD--I-CREATE-I-DESTROY--NOW-I-DESTROY--!--SCOTT-FREE-DIES!"

Of course, he can't literally be watching Scott with the same omniscient POV as we, the readers, are, because if he was he'd see that his imminent attack is about to face a slight hitch. Scott has assembled a series of parts using Apokaloptish know-how (and, presumably, the help of Motherbox) into an android duplicate that he calls a "follower". The idea is that it will ape his moves exactly, allowing him to place it in dangerous situations so that he can time and practice his routines without putting himself in jeopardy. That's actually pretty clever, even though we never see him using followers ever again. Anyway, with he and his double strapped into identical straitjackets and balancing precariously on two seperate platforms, Oberon places some kind of volatile explosive (apparently nitroglycerin) on the follower's platform.

Unfortunately, Overlord chooses that exact moment to strike, with a brain bolt from his oversized mechanical forehead. (This is one of only three panels in which we actually see Overlord, and I have to say, he's one of Kirby's creepiest character designs:)

The Nitro goes kerblooey, catching both Scott and his follower in the blast. Fortunately, since only the follower was dressed as Mr. Miracle, it caught the worst of Overlord's assault. Oberon quickly straps on a fire extinguisher and douses the flames, all the while giving Scott an "I told you so" speech.

Scott, however, managed to get out of his straitjacket just fine; it's the Motherbox strapped to his arm that he's concerned about. "She is dear to me--and I must help her!" "Y-you mean that thing--is alive?" stammers Oberon. "In a way, she is!" replies Scott. "But now, she's hurt--weak--I must pour out my love--my belief--to make her respond!" Jeez, Scott, just call tech support like a normal person.

Motherbox turns out OK, though "the follower seems beyond hope." Mistaking the attempted assassination for human error, Scott immediately goes back to planning another escape. But of course, Overlord sends another blast at him, frying him to a cinder.

...Wait, no. That doesn't happen. Because Overlord was apparently programmed by Wile E. Coyote, and thus is unable to repeat the same attempt twice once it has failed, no matter how unlikely the circumstances that led to said failure.

Meanwhile, things are about to get very goofy as we meet Overlord's master...Granny Goodness. Granny's another of the more memorable villains of the Fourth World series, and in a sense she's Scott's real archnemesis. She's also a very, very weird creation. She's so weird, in fact, that she sort of goes past being dopey and back around into sort of creepy. Mostly you just have to wonder at the demented imagination that would fuse Dickens and DeSade into this evil old battle-axe who's both the head of an orphanage and Darkseid's main military disciplinarian. If you can get past the goofiness, it's thematically logical, but man...

...the goofiness is pretty hard to get past. Adding to it are her dorky, pointed-helmet shock troops, who take great pride in said pointed helmets. No, seriously. They act jealous of Overlord, who they see as competing for Granny's affections, and encourage Granny to punish him, but Granny instead turns her wrath on her men, beating them with a billy-club, all the while berating them in a weird mash-up of supervillainese and the kind of condescending baby-talk mothers use on their young children. This is just SO psychologically messed up I don't know where to begin. And yet the insane part is that it fits neatly with Kirby's themes of power and domination; it's just the kind of bizarre scenario you'd never expect to see outside a comic book.

Anyhow, back at the ranch, Mr. M has apparently abandoned his nitro-balancing act and has moved on to the stunt featured on the cover. Despite Oberon's speech bubble there, Scott does indeed escape just in time to duck out of the way of the flying spears. MISLEADING COVER ALERT!!!

Oberon does his typical, "Oh, my heart! Scott, you'll be the death of me!" act while all this is happening. A word about Oberon: his main job in this comic is to express horror and panic at the various feats Mr. Miracle is going to attempt, the idea being that this will make it seem all the more "miraculous" when he does escape. The real effect is to make Oberon extremely obnoxious, not to mention just a little hard to believe: I mean, he's been an escape artist's assistant his whole life, and he's still gasping in disbelief that someone can pull this kind of stuff off?

Oberon does manage to segue artfully into quizzing Scott about his origins. Along with some other dialogue scattered throughout the issue, what becomes clear is that Scott escaped from Granny's orphanage/training facility on Apokalips via the Boom Tube, and Granny is determined to humble him, get him back, or kill him--preferably all three. While this might seem like a waste of Apokaliptish resources in the middle of what is, after all, a pretty far-reaching attempt at world domination (if not an all-out war), we will eventually learn there are some good reasons to focus on Scott specifically. For now, though, the main idea is that, by escaping Granny, Scott has become a living symbol of freedom and rebellion against authority. Can't have that in the new world order!

Oberon is momentarily satisfied, even if he only understands less than half of what Scott is talking about. Turning to clean up Scott's mess (gee, that's awfully nice of him) Obey is startled by Scott's follower, which despite being "beyond hope" a few panels ago is still apparently possessed of enough life to get up and take some halting steps...JUST in time to coincidentally save Scott's bacon yet again. Granny's "Soldier Boys" are watching outside the window, and apparently see nothing suspicious in the fact that Mr. Miracle is lurching around like Lindsay Lohan on a bender (if that's not redundant). They smash their way inside and make off with Oberon and the android, but Scott himself sees them depart and follows them on his flying "Aero-discs".

Back at the ranch, there's a moment of consternation when Granny discovers the fraud, but luckily for her hapless minions Scott himself bursts in a moment later. Well, I'm assuming they didn't want to be punished, but you never know.

Granny hits a couple of buttons, and voila, Scott's aero-discs suddenly malfunction, sending him down a pit that opens in the floor. Good going, Scott. Seriously, why even bother having the follower start working again? They could have kidnapped the real Scott, for all the good it did him to remain free. Oh, wait, I get it--it's like a symbolic thing, man. Scott Free cannot be caged!

Scott and Obey plummet to the bottom of a very deep pit--that would be the X-Pit--but, fortunately, there's a gravitational reversal at the bottom that stops them from smashing all his bones. Apparently just sending Scott flying down a pit wasn't enough of a triumph for Granny; she has to devise another escape at the bottom. Scott and Obey quickly find themselves trapped within what looks an awful lot like Willy Wonka's Great Glass Elevator, except this one leads to...DEATH! The original Great Glass Elevator just led to pain, humiliation, and dismemberment.

Scott frantically starts racking his brain, trying to get inside Granny's head in order to affect an escape. Not a bad idea, in theory. Unfortunately, this is what they come up with:

MR. MIRACLE: Beneath her iron facade lies a hidden fear! I've seen it!
OBERON: She's no youngster! Perhaps it's just the simple fear of old age--and its insecurities!
MR. MIRACLE: Yes! She'll sacrifice anyone and anything--for gifts--rewards! On that premise--and with these studs--we must stake our lives!

And based on that logic, he proceeeds to start hitting buttons at random.

I guess I don't have what it takes to be a master escape artist and inspiration to humanity, because to me that made no goddamn sense whatsoever.

Anyway, it turns out he's activated a "torment circuit" which sends a gout of flame up beneath the glass cage to roast the pair alive--but a pressing the next button switches it to "the electro-shock cycle". "I feel like I've swallowed a thousand hot needles!" moans Oberon. "I must continue the cycle! I must press another of the studs!" moans Scott. So do it already, jackass! In fact, just press all the buttons as fast as you can! This isn't rocket science!

Alas, the next button unleashes a gout of quickly-rising mud, and in the time it takes him to lift Oberon over his head so he doesn't drown, Scott becomes trapped in the hardening mud.

Granny, in classic comic-book fashion, can't even be bothered to watch Scott suffer, which OF COURSE means that she's about to get a rude surprise when he and Obey come smashing into her living room and destroy a box on the table in front of her. Long and nonsensical story short, Scott did manage to struggle through the mud to press the next button, which unleashed radiation, which restored power to Motherbox, which enabled her to interface with Overlord and explode him, which let Scott and Oberon escape. And now here comes the twist: Overlord was a tiny little guy, only an inch tall, and he was in that box that got smashed! That is kind of cool! And also pointless!

GRANNY: You--you'll pay dearly for this!
MR. MIRACLE: And that brings me to my parting words! Dry up and blow away, Granny Goodness!

His parting words? Is Mr. Miracle Jerry Springer?

The two hop aboard the aero-discs and take off. "Fly faster, Scott!" whines Oberon. "I've got an eerie feeling that she's warming up for the second round!"

Well, gee, Oberon, I don't know. I mean, that was a pretty devastating riposte Scott delivered at the end there. I don't think she'll have the heart to try anything against you directly for several months after that, no sir!

Since JUNE?!? Yikes.

2011-10-26T14:29:00.000-07:00

And then there was the time I stopped blogging for four months.

I have to admit that my heart isn't in blogging and tweeting and all the online social stuff the way it is with producing my webcomics. (Not that I've been updating those particularly consistently either...) I often feel like I'm generating a lot of content that's sort of pointless and redundant and nothing to do with my real strengths. There are so many good, intelligent bloggers out there that it can get a little intimidating.

But by the same token, I've realized that I do spend a lot of time commenting on message board threads and whatnot, so why not just organize my thoughts elsewhere into coherent blog posts? Voila, free content.

Combine that with actually freeing up some time after a month and a half of being incredibly busy with illustration projects, and having some big projects on the boils, and I think I'm ready to do this again.

OK, so, where is we?

--I broke down and got a DeviantArt page. I still have some problems with DA, not the least of which is the name (which far too many contributors seem to take literally...part of the reason I resisted this for a long time is not wanting to get linked in any way to, say, people who draw anime furry panty shots), but it IS a good way to network and promote yourself as an artist, so what the hell. And immediately on the heels of sneering at people's sexy drawings, here's a bunch of sexy drawings I did for a local band (the somewhat less sexy cover of the album is here.) (Wait, I apologize to the band members of Disphraxia for suggesting they aren't sexy.)

--I'm on twitter, too, @prankster36 . I've always felt Twitter to be a bit of a waste of time, but again, promotional tool. Plus, I was reading an article with...I think it was Patton Oswalt, and he opened my eyes a bit, pointing out that Twitter can be a valid medium for expression, encouraging conciseness and discipline.

--I'm still cranking out reviews for Thor's Comic Column on Chud.com; over the past two months, of course, I've weighed in a bit on The New 52 (short version: it could have revolutionized comics, and instead DC decided to offer up a heapin' helping of the same-old, same-old, served with a generous dollop of sexism and a truly laughable nostalgia for the early 90s, which aren't ever coming back comics people.) In terms of comics that are actually good? G. Willow Wilson and Pablo Rivera's Mystic has been a wonderful surprise, an intelligent fantasy comic that actually manages to achieve a clever political subtext (as in, tied up with political concerns with our world, even though it's set in a fantastical universe) in an elegant and non-preachy way that you can totally ignore if you just want to read a comic that is basically Harry Potter meets Mean Girls, which is what this is. And Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba's (and Fabio Moon's, though he's not drawing this arc) awesomely mind-melting Casanova has returned with a new miniseries, Avaritia, that tops the already-exemplary work these guys were doing. I just read the first of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels, and it's obvious that Fraction is basically attempting to do one of those, except on acid (and they were pretty trippy to begin with). READ THIS COMIC, people.

--I'm planning to participate in NaNoWriMo, though not in the conventional way. For me it'll be NaNoReNoWriMo (National Not Really a Novel Writing Month). More to come.

--Also probably of interest to no one but a certain blonde Dutch lady: you are the best girlfriend ever. Love you, sweetheart. And I promise I won't grow a mustache for next month.

Here endeth the lesson. Go forth and multiply.

Fourth World Fridays: Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #137--"The Four-Armed Terror!"

2011-06-17T17:30:00.000-07:00

So maybe you've noticed Kirby has a slight thing for exaggeration. The events contained within this issue do not take place on "The Last Day of the World", and would not, in fact, do so, even if the threatened catastrophe had happened. Yes, you'll be amazed to discover that Superman saves the day.

But never mind! Here's that thing that was teased in the last issue: a big, yellow, four-armed rock monster.

Hoo boy. Last time out, Superman fought a dopey version of The Hulk. This time, it looks like he's going to battle a nasty version of The Thing. Kirby was working out some leftover energy from his Marvel days, it looks like.

The Terror, just warming up to its rampage through the vast cavern that holds the Project, comes across our boneheaded goofballs Yango and his friend, who we now discover is named Gandy. "Jimmy Olsen and his pal Superman must have fallen off the map, Gandy!" says Yango. "Put your wheels together and let's split, Yango!" replies Gandy. "They must have run into the Mountain of Judgment! And any cat who's ever done that-- has never been seen or heard of again!"

OK, yeah, that's what these guys were saying a couple issues ago, but now we, the audience, know that the Mountain of Judgment is a gigantic missile carrier filled with friendly genetically engineered hippies under the control of the US Military. I guess I could figure on the Outsiders being too superstitious to have the full picture, but still...what happened to all those people who met the Mountain? Did they get killed? That doesn't seem like the kind of thing the Hairies would do. Are the Outsiders the descendants of Hairies who ran off and have been living wild in the Wild Area? But the Project can't have been at this whole "genetic manipulation" thing for very long. Do the Outsiders get jobs at the Project and just fail to ever go back to inform the Outsiders what happened? That's certainly what's happened to Jimmy, who's apparently too much of a jerk to even call back to his gang--they have radios, for crying out loud--and tell them that he's safe. Sheesh!

Yango and Gandy are basically getting ready to write Olsen off (smart move, boys) when they're attacked by the Four-Armed Terror. The following baffling exchange takes place:

GANDY: Hey! My transistor radio has just switched from country western to "spook" rock! Get that spider sound!

(The Terror rears up behind them.)

YANGO: Man! You hit the bull's-eye without even lookin'! Gandy! Go for your blaster! It's "horror time!"

Indeed it is, Yango. Indeed it is.

The "feature creature", as Yango dubs it a panel later, absorbs the bullets "like a self-sealing tire!" and our two pharmaceutically-altered motorcycling enthusiasts speed off to warn the denizens of Habitat, leaving the Terror to continue its rampage towards the Project.

But Jimmy Olsen has not forgotten the friends that let him get this far! Oh, no! While Yango and Gandy have been searching high and low for their beloved leader, Olsen and Superman have been participating in the Project's research by attaching themselves to the "Solar-Phone", a goofy-looking device invented by the Hairies that enables them to gather radio-signals from the stars "and convert them into mental musical images"! And the Hairies have been using this device to have a great big mental communion...

Oh...uh...OK, I guess Jimmy HAS forgotten about his friends. But who cares? They were the violent, angry kind of hippie. The Hairies are the peaceful, cosmic, all-knowing kind of hippie. And they have a really primo stash.

(By the way, I love how Flippa Dippa feels the need to constantly remind everyone that, yes, he's still there. At least he's not spouting off about scuba diving right now. I guess I'd have low self-esteem, too, if that was the only useful skill-set I brought to the group.)

This series started with Superman barging in on the world of early 70s youth culture like a big, blue, square symbol of authority, and his running battle with Jimmy Olsen played itself out as the very embodiment of the generation gap. It seems things are now groovy, with Superman and Jimmy participating in a great big cosmic love-in. They float heedlessly through a mental landscape of Kirby's by-now-familiar paste-up montages, until they're brought back to Earth by a series of explosions. Yep, turns out the Project is under siege again. Good thing Superman doesn't have a city of his own to protect, and can just hang out here until something happens, huh?

Superman tells Jimmy and the Newsboys to wait in the safety of the Project, instead of heading towards the devastating destruction. Apparently this reasonable suggestion, coupled with the fact that he offhandedly calls them "kids", is enough to rekindle the old animosity and have the Newsboys plotting against Superman again. (Jimmy, offended, insists that he's over 21. Really? I guess time wasn't frozen for all those Silver Age adventures.) After a Newsboy huddle that seems to last all of two minutes, they appoint Jimmy as their leader, the rationale being that if he's good enough to be declared the warrior-god of a bunch of superstitious biker-hippie-savages, he's good enough for the Newsboy Legion. Hard to argue with that.

Meanwhile, the Four-Armed Terror has found its way to the massive nuclear piles that power the project, and is somehow causing a series of devastating explosions that rip through the entire Wild Area. Umm...that's not good. Somehow these explosions are non-nuclear, or so I conclude by the fact that the characters don't all lose their hair and die of radiation poisoning in subsequent issues, but they still wreak havoc on the tree-town of Habitat, causing Yango, of all people, to step up to the plate and assume a leadership role in helping people evacuate.

Here, again, we have Kirby saying something interesting, in an offhand manner. You had a gang of anarchists who suddenly find themselves in a position where they need to be led, and a guy who up until now has seemed utterly useless and self-absorbed turning out to be the right man for the job. Again, I think this reflects Kirby's experience in WWII, wherein a bunch of average joes who might otherwise have ended up as a bunch of slackers managed to rise to the occasion in the face of disaster. Kirby is transposing that onto the counterculture kids of the then-present day, which again reflects a generosity of spirit that not everyone of his generation possessed.

I kinda wish this plot thread had gotten a little more space, but we do have a giant atomic monster for Superman to smash, after all. But first he's got to ditch the Newsboys, who in their Whiz Wagon have reverted to their old, suicidal habits of trying to tag along behind Superman. Not to belabour the point, but Supes is headed into a nuclear zone, yet Jimmy and co. don't pause for even a second in their pursuit. Seriously, what the hell do they think they're going to do? Even if they're interested in "the scoop", what's the point of getting THAT close to unfettered nuclear power? To get some really killer pics before their eyeballs melt?

Superman does manage to outpace them, mentally grumbling over their idiocy, and engages the Terror in a typical Kirby-style smashup. The Newsboys do crest the hill, however, and manage to distract Superman just long enough that the Terror gets the drop on them all, encasing them in a giant pink egg. Gee, thanks, Jimmy, your help is always so valuable!

...Wait...a giant pink egg?

Yes, the terror shoots "some strange form of energy particles" at the heroes, which contract and harden into a shell. He tosses the enclosed Metropolans (Metropolitans? Metropolites?) aside and smashes his way through to the central core of the reactor, to feed on the nuclear energy therein...and watching on a monitor that makes the event look amusingly like a close-up of a sperm about to fertilize an egg, are our villains Mokkari and Simyan. They congratulate themselves loudly on sending the monster to unleash this destruction, which will not only destroy the Wild Area, it will annihilate the city of Metropolis, above.

And, it turns out, all this is just the beginning. You'll remember that these guys had a whole tank full of eggs in the last issue--and now they're hatching into an entire race of Terrors, which they cacklingly proclaim to be the new lords of earth, bred to survive a nuclear holocaust--HOMO USURPUS.

That ain't good.

Next time: arcane computers, evil grannies, and POINTED HELMETS! POINTED HELMETS GALORE!

Fourth World Fridays: (Orion of) The New Gods #2--"O' Deadly Darkseid"

2011-05-27T20:31:00.000-07:00

I remain continually impressed by how much better The New Gods (or, as it's rechristened here, Orion Of The New Gods) is than the other books in the saga. Don't get me wrong, the others are frequently very good, but Orion sees Kirby playing to all his strengths, and synthesizing everything he'd learned in (at that point) 30 years of making comics into something waaaay ahead of its time. It's cinematic at a time when even cinema wasn't anywhere near as bold and Wagnerian as Kirby dares to be here.

I mean, the first three pages of this comic are a splash page and a double-page spread! Kirby, by the way, didn't actually invent the plash page as he's often credited, but he standardized it, and he used it so effectively that it became inextricably bound up with his work. Kirby also does something I haven't seen done before: he spends the first five pages on a "prologue" of sorts, before the title and credits page (which is another splash). With all these prologues and sweeping epic vistas, zooming down into the action from outer space, is it any wonder this comic is often cited as a huge influence on George Lucas?

Come to think of it, that first splash shows Apokalips in the foreground, flame belching ominously in the foreground, as we see it seemingly loom over the green world of New Genesis. Like some kind of planetary...no...astronomical body...a star. A star of death. A death star?

In the double-page spread, children are merrily romping in New Genesis, on some kind of bizarre whirlygig that looks like it was spawned by Salvador Dali. Inside the city, though, things are more grim. Highfather is once again confronting the Source Wall for advice: "WAR--FOLLOW ORION". That tears it, I guess. Earth is to become the battleground between New Genesis and Apokalips, and judging from the names, I'm doubting it's going to end well.

"I am one among those assembled, High-Father!" proclaims Lightray unnecessarily. "I am eager to join Orion!" But High-Father's decided Lightray's too young to jump into the fray, so he's going to have to wait another couple of issues.

Back on Earth, Orion has somehow ended up in the spartan pad in which Darkseid has been chilling, and furthermore, he's brought his new gang of followers with him. Darkseid, in typically ultra-cool fashion, lounges casually in a chair as his sworn enemy bursts in and accuses him of kidnapping Earthlings and violating the treaty. "I dare anything! I am Darkseid!" replies the bored-looking ruler of Apokalips, not even bothering to turn his head and look at Orion! Damn, that's cold.

"King of the damned! I can finish you now!" cries Orion. "Finish me--and you finish yourself!" replies Darkseid. "You hesitate, Orion! You can sense why--but you don't know--do you--? But Darkseid is free of mysteries! He can act!" And refer to himself in the third person! By the way, there's some heavy-handed foreshadowing in both this issue and the last one, but this exchange is rather well-done; clearly Kirby had SOME aspects of the overall story, at least, worked out in advance.

Anyway, Darkseid still doesn't bother to so much as turn his head while saying this, and a second later his minion Brola attacks. It's not that much of a surprise, since we did see him lurking behind the door on the previous page. Brola has a supercharged cattleprod in one hand, and a...brick...in the other. Yes, a brick, referred to as his "hand of stone", which he uses to pummel Orion. But Orion fights through the shocks and the beating and throws Brola through the wall, only to see him vanish in midair along with Darkseid, "snatched away by tele-ray" to "one of the secret bases established beneath the city." (Incidentally, we're never told exactly which city this is. I guess it's the same place The Tick hangs out.)

While Darkseid puts the boot to his useless minion and sends him scuttling out of the comic forever, another, rather more competent minion is working on the latest wild Apokaliptian scheme. It's Desaad, making what I believe was meant to be his debut appearance, despite the fact that he popped up in The Forever People #2, which hit newsstands first. Anyway, in typical New Gods fashion, Desaad's name tells you pretty much everything you'd need to know about the character--namely, that he's an insane weirdo who gets off on inflicting pain. However, because this is a Kirby comic, he's less interested in penning controversial novels and being played by Geoffrey Rush than he is building gigantic, convoluted devices with weird functions. The latest of these is "The Fear Machine" which will, in some unexplained way, flush out the mind Darkseid is looking for--the mind that holds the secret of the Anti-Life Equation.

Incidentally, Darkseid also explains, in a throwaway line, what the Equation is. He'd earlier referred to it as having the ability to destroy all life, but in fact, what the Equation does is take away free will...since, as explained earlier, someone without free will is not truly alive.

This is interesting, and I think gets to the point Kirby was trying to make with these comics. Darkseid doesn't want destruction for its own sake, nor does he want raw power. He wants to rule the world--and, I guess, the universe--but on far more terrifying terms than Doctor Doom did. In his quest to eradicate free will, Darkseid is possibly the purest personification of tyranny we've ever seen in comics: a character who literally wants to be the only thinking being left in the universe, or rather, wants every other mind to be an appendage of his own. I think that when you look at the long, sad, history of real-world dictators and tyrants, you'll find there's a lot of truth to that. What made people like Hitler and Stalin so monstrous wasn't simply the sheer number of people they killed and the warped shape into which they twisted their societies; it's that they wanted to impose their will on the world, a will which, no matter what their original intentions, left no room for other people except as mindless drones. I think that's why Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany ended up in much the same place, despite the seeming differences in their basic philosophies. They were solipsists--Hitler didn't want to share the word with anyone but Hitler, Stalin wanted to be alone with Stalin. They wanted pure freedom for themselves, which meant denying it to others.

Meanwhile, Orion has decided to fill his new friends in on what exactly is going on, and to that end, he produces Mother Box and gets them to touch it, in order to receive a literal infodump of exposition. "A movie without film! That's wild! Roll, man, roll!" enthuses Harvey, the stereotypical representative of today's youth. In 1971.

We then get a three-page montage--two of them splash pages--detailing what's been going on in Jimmy Olsen and The Forever People to date. Earth invaded by the forces of Apokalips, Boom Tube, Mantis, Dropout society, yadda yadda yadda. We do get an interesting bit of foreshadowing with a glimpse at the aquatic menaces known as the Deep Six, who Orion will confront in a couple of issues' time.

The powerpoint presentation...OF THE FUTURE!...is cut short by Mother Box, who "detects an invisible beam sweeping this very city!" Suddenly, the group of Earthlings are cowering in fear. Orion, conveniently, is "trained to resist all degrees of fear," and thus immune. Strapping on his flight harness, he zips out into the night in search of the source of the beam, which turns out to be this:

So advertising never hurt anyone, eh, you Madison Avenue fat cats?

One brief and anticlimactic battle later, Orion has smashed the billboard o' death and is on his way back to his buddies. Desaad and Darkseid watch him go, bickering in typical supervillain fashion--though, oddly, Darkseid won't hear Desaad's smack talk about Orion.

DARKSEID: We could never take one such as Orion captive! His kind dies in battle! And in death would look greater than a vermin like you!
DESAAD: So! The great Darkseid rises quickly to the defense of an enemy!
DARKSEID: Orion is an enemy to be respected!
DESAAD: Yes, it is strange how very like us he is--in his fierceness and--
DARKSEID: Silence, Desaad! Were Orion my own son--he would mean nothing to the purpose of our mission!

Hmm. HMMMMMM. Think that means anything?

The issue ends back in Dave Lincoln's pad, where Orion has apparently decided to crash for his time on Earth. The Earthlings swear fealty to Orion, and the whole thing wraps up with the traditional monologue.

All in all, that issue was kind of a filler, but it was elevated by Kirby's excellently worked-out vision for this series; the stately pace of the narrative feels epic, instead of belaboured, and the story flows naturally, one event logically following another, rather than the sometimes chaotic stories in the other books. You end the comic with the premise fixed in your mind, and eager to see where the story's going. What are all these hints leading up to? What's being foreshadowed so heavily? What will happen next?

If I had to guess, I'd say it involves splash pages.

Fourth World Fridays: The Forever People #2--"Super War!"

2011-05-13T13:58:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that I don't "get" The Forever People the way I do the other books in the Fourth World saga. Jimmy Olsen was Kirby's window into the DC Universe, the contractual obligation that he used to smuggle in his concepts. The New Gods/Orion was the central book from a plot perspective, detailing the mythology behind the clash of these fantastical beings on Earth. Mr. Miracle was the thematic heart of the series, revolving around a symbolic Christ-like figure who fought for an ideal. But the Forever People? Other than the fact that it was about a bunch of super-hippies, Kirby didn't seem to have the greatest handle on the concept at first. Like The Fantastic Four, it seemed, in some ways, to be his "tryout book" for random ideas before working them into the other, more thematically coherent comics, and the fact that it was the first of the Fourth World books to be drawn seems to reinforce this.

I say this because the groundwork we see being laid in this issue sort of contradicts the later issues. Nevertheless, if you're going to have Kirby doing your comics, you've got to have an occasional book where superpowered beings in zany costumes beat the living hell out of each other, with no particular agenda or deeper meaning. Kirby was constantly trying to be, and occasionally succeeding in being, "profound" with these books. However, TFP #2 is mostly just a mental breather, an excuse to trot out a concept Kirby had dreamed up and set it loose. The concept: MANTIS.

The issue starts with some Komedy as the Forever People park their Super-Cycle smack-dab in the middle of traffic. The Forev Peeps, you see, are eternal innocents, speaking in their own cosmic idiom and living in a Utopia, and thus unable to understand our mundane, Earthbound ways such as our need to get from one place to another without some gigantic, hairy jackass parking his eye-scorchingly psychedelic dune buggy/RV in the middle of the road, thereby creating the mother of all traffic jams RIGHT AT RUSH HOUR, and I was only FIVE MINUTES AWAY FROM GETTING HOME for &*$^#%'s sake, and the season premiere of "Dancing With the Stars" is on and I'M GOING TO MISS IT--

Well, there's some understandable hostility being expressed. One guy cracks wise about "Hippies", causing Big Bear to jump in jovially:

BIG BEAR: The dialect is primitive, brother! But the humor cries out for a straight man! Tell me, Mister Corn! What's a hippie?
LOUDMOUTH GUY: Ha, ha--dat's easy! All ya gotta do is show him a bathtub--an' if he runs--he's a hippie!
BIG BEAR: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! It's like direct involvement with ancient vaudeville! Thank you, for the experience, brother!

Then he crushes the guy's upper body with a bear hug and leaves him dying on the concrete! Ha ha!

OK, we see the cop picking him up a panel later, and I think he's supposed to be alive. I think. The point is that, once again, we have proof that Big Bear is AWESOME.

Anyway, it eventually seeps through the skulls of our pack of heroic stoners that they're not really wanted in this particular location, and they move on via the Super-cycle's "Phasing" ability.

Meanwhile! Darkseid is preparing one of his big guns: the monumentally powerful Mantis, who is a dude in an insect suit. Um. Well, he's really strong and fast, anyway, and has the rather cool ability to regulate kinetic energy--he can either "charge" an object with immense power (rather like Gambit, I guess), shoot beams of pure heat, or drain the energy from anything he touches. All of which are abilities he will put to use in this issue.

His weakness, however, is that he goes through energy pretty fast, and when depowered he has to rest up in his "Power-pod". Darkseid rouses him out of this before his charging cycle is complete, apparently to give him a stern talking-to. As usual with Kirby, the exact chain of events is a little vague, but it seems as though Mantis had snuck down to Earth significantly before any of the other New Gods and was planning on subjugating Earth for himself. Since Mantis possesses all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop, Darkseid is almost amused by his apparent betrayal and bids him continue, as long as he doesn't challenge his power.

"DONE!" yells Mantis.

"Then return to your wretched pod!" commands Darkseid.

"DONE!" yells Mantis.

"Unleash the terrors of the night! Make Man cringe! Make him tremble--make him FEAR!!"

Mantis is already asleep.

The Forever Peeps have meanwhile made tracks to the bad part of town, where they hope to set themselves up in some new digs. Mother Box starts pinging away like mad, but the FPs ignore her, in a snit. They tend to do that a lot, don't they? Makes you wonder why they even brought her along. Vykin's the only one that listens to her, and as a result he tends to be a bit of a drag. But they really ought to listen, because lurking in the shadows lies--

--A crippled child?

OK, so the actual danger source turns out to be the boy's Uncle Willie, supposed security guard, despite the fact that he's casually dressed in a loud orange jacket and purple fedora. He threatens the crew with his old-fashioned revolver, but Beautiful Dreamer manages to cool his jets by invoking her ability to project mental images--in this case, they all take the form of old-fashioned, innocent kids in 30s clothing. Trustworthy kids! Kids from a time when young folks respected their elders, by cracky! These are kids Uncle Willie has no cause to be scared by! (Shouldn't the black guy be invisible, then? Ba-Dum!)

Seriously though, this, along with the hippie wisecracks and Big Bear's reaction on the opening pages, is another interesting look at Kirby's mindset towards the hippies. He definitely seems to be siding with them against the establishment, but at the same time, he doesn't seem to be taking them so seriously that he can't give them a tweak. Here, once again, after an initial mistrust, the older generation--of which Kirby was undeniably a part--comes to trust and respect the young'uns, with their wild clothing and the rock and the roll and whatnot. It's the same subtext as the rather half-baked Jimmy vs. Superman subplot of his first three Jimmy Olsen issues, done in two pages. It's agreed that the Forev Peeps can move in--though I hope they're not planning on getting too comfortable.

Later that night, a clock tower silhouetted against the moon strikes midnight...the wind ghosts through the trees...and Mantis rises from a graveyard!! Seriously, an actual graveyard. A master of comics he may have been, but a master of understatement was something you couldn't accuse Kirby of being.

Despite the late hour, the FPs are apparently up and about, furnishing their new apartment with old junk that Big Bear, with typical joviality, calls "pure camp". Mark Moonrider refers to the old, broken TV as "A pure representation of early, post atomic, middle class home visuals!"

OK, hold up. This is really interesting. Again, going back to Big Bear's comments about "Ancient Vaudeville"...are we supposed to infer from this that the FPs are from the future?!? They're not talking about their alien world, they're referring to stuff from our world as if it was their own distant past. Unless Kirby wants us to swallow the idea that the development of civilization on New Genesis *exactly* paralleled our own, complete with cultural tics, and that they're merely a futuristic version of our own society--which is pretty much directly contradicted everywhere else in the saga--than the suggestion seems to be that the two worlds of the New Gods exist in our future, possibly unimaginably distant. Does this resonate with Kirby's idea that we've seen the death and rebirth of the Marvel Universe? Because if I'm following this, it means that the New Gods are visitors from both a parallel reality (the Marvel U.) AND from the distant future. The Marvel Universe will eventually go down in flames and reform itself as part of he DC Universe.

Trippy.

Tiny Tim, I mean Donnie the crippled boy, expresses amazement that Serafin got the TV to work, but Serafin, in a pointless and bizarre digression, explains to Donnie that he's using a bit of New Genesis technology called a Cosmic Cartridge, which are the things on his hat. They resonate with the universe, you see, and put one in touch with the great cosmic harmony. Serafin gives Donnie one to hold, and away he goes on an acid trip, Kirby style.

For one panel.

Then he snaps out of it and continues to pester Serafin about the Supertowner's mysterious origins. Unfortunately for him, the TV suddenly breaks in with a report on Mantis's destructive rampage. Recognizing the Grasshopper of Grimness (OK, sorry), our heroes do what they always do: call on Infinity Man to help them.

Regular reader "Supersonic Man" over at the BMMB was under the impression that the FPs were "non-violent superheroes"; I started to correct him before realizing that they didn't, in fact, do much fighting--they just conjure up Infinity Man every time things get hairy. So in that sense, I guess they are non-violent, but you can see why they don't brag about it. On the other hand, if Infinity Man is a composite of all the Forever People merged into one being, then...well, that's confusing. So let's drop it.

Even though the comic's only half over, there's not much more to tell, because as I mentioned above this is a good old-fashioned Kirby fight comic. Nobody ever did this kind of thing better than the King, and this particular battle runs on for about 8 pages, with occasional interjections from Darkseid and Desaad. (Desaad, for those of you who don't know, is Darkseid's #1 henchman, and makes his first chronological appearance here, but given how perfunctory it is I suspect that once again we're dealing with a comic that was drawn in a different order than how it was published, and that Desaad's proper introduction is in the next issue. So more about him next week.)

Aaaaanyway, the long and the short of it is, Mantis leaps and rampages through the city, cops shoot at him to no effect, Infinity Man gives him a drubbing, Mantis uses his energy-sucking touch to encase Infy in an implausibly cubical block of ice, Mantis rampages some more, Infy uses his ability to bend the laws of time and space--which is looking more and more like a deus ex machina--to break loose of the ice block, he hilariously grabs hold of those impractical ribbons of fabric dangling from Mantis's back to his feet, drains Mantis's power, and Mantis goes crawling back to his Power Pod. The FPs reappear to give a little soliloquy, and the issue abruptly ends.

Next time: Orion lays it out for us, New Genesis goes to war, and more on that Desaad guy.

A Lot of Important Stuff Just Happened in the World. Here's a Post About Doctor Who.

2011-05-04T19:15:00.000-07:00

So a common line I've been hearing about "Day of the Moon" from hardcore Who-Heads (yes, I know that's not their nickname) is that the Doctor committed genocide by implanting the subliminal suggestion in humanity's head to kill the Silence.

I honestly and truly do not get these complaints.

Absolutely no one has to die because of what the Doctor did here--I think his goal was as simple as making sure the Silence get out of the human race's way. Or, at worst, a leveling of the playing field.

We have a race that's been manipulating human civilization since it came into existence, for as-yet unknown ends--but whatever they are, the Silence seems to agree that they're not at all beneficial to the human race. Not only can you not fight or resist them, you can't even look at them without possibly getting subliminal messages implanted in your head. It's one of the most horrific oppressions imaginable.

And the human race is incapable of fighting against them or even knowing they're being enslaved. That takes the whole situation to yet another level. Given the incredibly narrow options here, the Doctor's solution strikes me as downright elegant.

My understanding is that a lot of Who fans are very big on the idea that the Doctor never uses brute force, and that the old show had some memorable episodes about how Ugly Creepy Things Are People Too. So I can't speak to the continuity of the show or the ideals that it maintains. But you can't possibly tell me that the Doctor has never used the threat of force to dissuade his enemies? Because that seems like the crucial business here: the Doctor gave someone (the human race) who had been bullied, oppressed, and had the deck stacked against them for thousands of years and gave them the tools to fight back, something that was remarkably difficult to do given the parameters of the situation.

What the Doctor's done is use their own methods, and their own *words,* to transmit information to everyone who needed to hear it. OK, there's an element of compulsion, but there's an element of compulsion about everything the Silence do, and since they're literally being hoist by their own petard here, I can't see how this is unfair or cruel. All the Silence need to do to avoid getting shot is to back off--it's not like the human race is going to form hunting parties to track them down. And that's, of course, notwithstanding the many other means the Silence presumably have at their disposal to fight back, beginning with another subliminal broadcast to counteract the first. (There may be plenty of ways this wouldn't work, but my point is the Silence did not suddenly become helpless victims after the broadcast.) Indeed, since the Silence are almost certainly returning, you could make the argument that the Doctor's solution is far too temporary a fix.

Now, the argument here seems to hinge on exactly how much the Doctor is allowed to let bloodshed occur, and yes, it surely seemed likely that some Silents were going to be killed right after the initial broadcast. I guess, based on what I know of the Doctor, it could be considered out of character for him...not to be upset that he couldn't have found a better way? That seems reasonable. I do think it might have spoken to everyone's concerns a little better if he'd simply taped the Silent saying "We are your enemy" or "we are your secret oppressors" or something--I'm sure violence would have resulted from that as well, but the Doctor wouldn't have had as much moral culpability. I say this, though, as a guy who doesn't really have a problem with the idea of the Doctor subverting a bunch of interstellar Svengalis by urging their subjects to kill, when the tools available are so flimsy and the situation is so tricky, and again, given the many, many ways that the Silence could undo this within a relatively short time.

At any rate, we can argue at the level of violence, or approval of violence, or compulsion to violence, committed by the Doctor, but calling it "genocide" seems to me, again, to be rather absurd.

Just a Reminder...

2011-04-30T11:31:00.000-07:00

Vote Early. Vote Often.

Vote Not For This Guy.

Fourth World Fridays: Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #136--"The Saga of the D.N.Aliens!!"

2011-04-29T22:59:00.000-07:00

I...greatly apologize, I'm actually posting this early Saturday. Fourth World Fridays nearly slipped by me! This is unforgivable—how could I *possibly* forget…
THE SAGA OF THE D.N.ALIENS?!?

Uh…fairly easily, as it turns out. After a sharp upward curve in quality, the resolution to the Big Green Jimmy fight and the Golden Guardians’ first mission turns out to be pretty boring. Boring by Kirby standards, that is. Which means “still completely nuts, just not that surprising from a plot perspective.” Unless the fact that—

SPOILER ALERT!!!

--there’s actually just one D.N.Alien in the saga—

END SPOILER!!!!

--is supposed to be the big twist.

We begin exactly where we last left our heroes, with Superman K.O.’d by the Kryptonite Jimmy-Hulk and the all-new, all-weird Golden Guardian, a clone of the original Manhattan Guardian who had looked after the Golden Age Newsboy Legion, leaping into the fray to save the Project. The Newsboys (version 2.0) fill us in on this with some expository dialogue, also ruminating over who could have stolen the cell samples to clone Jimmy, what with the Project’s security being so tight and all, as the Guardian battles Greenie over a few pages.

Now, look, I know Jimmy-Hulk was mostly counting on his coating of “synthetic Kryptonite” to put down Supes, but still, you got to figure he’s pretty darn strong, going toe-to-toe with the Man of Steel and all. So the fact that the Guardian gets taken out pretty handily by the Jimmy-Hulk is not really much of a shock. Real Jimmy rushes into swatting range to revive Superman and gets plucked up by the beast, saved only by the monster’s momentary confusion on discovering that his victim looks exactly like him. This gives Superman the time to tilt the entire floor with his foot, throwing the Jimmy-Hulk across the room and causing him to let go of Real Jimmy. Then, just as he’s getting to his feet to continue his rampage, a pink puff of smoke explodes out of the Jimmy-Hulk’s hair and puts him to sleep.

It turns out—are you sitting down?—while everyone was distracted by the fight, a miniature Scrapper clone parachuted onto Jimmy-Hulk and put him to sleep with a gas grenade. Recalling the Little Green Army Men of Toy Story several decades later, an entire army of micro-Scrappers swoop in and, briskly and efficiently, put the Jimmy-Hulk on ice, or rather liquid nitrogen, for further study.

Despite the fact that a bunch of tiny clones just did everything for them, Superman, Jimmy and the Guardian proceed to congratulate themselves on another impressive victory. Jerks. “Thanks for saving my skin, Superman!” declares Jimmy. “You’ve just closed the generation gap!” Oh, really? Just like that, eh? Nice of you to speak for everyone in your entire generation, Jimmy. I’m sure all those college kids who might have had slight reservations about the near-omnipotent vigilante working for the American government—in the Nixon era, remember—are happy to take the word of a bow-tie-wearing redheaded dork and establishment man that Superman’s A-OK! (Man, Watchmen really has ruined me for stories where superheroes work hand-in-hand with the government, hasn’t it?)

Anyway, while our supposed heroes pat themselves on the back that their DNA made such suitable fodder for growing a race of microscopic workers who live only to serve them, the supposedly evil Mokkari and Simyan, back at the Evil Factory, are getting a tongue-lashing from Darkseid. With Jimmy-Hulk out of the picture, the two henchmen have nothing left but “mere beasts of burden!” Yes, that’s right, they’ve been growing human clones to use as slaves! Dastardly and diabolical! Thank goodness our heroes at The Project are here to defend us against such menaces!

The next few pages are mostly boring exposition, recapping what we pretty much already new: that the original Guardian died, but not before passing on his secret identity to the grown-up Newsboys, who then cloned him back to life as the Golden Guardian. Now, obviously, all this cloning (and, cough, “fathering”) of new characters is happening to bring Kirby’s older characters into the present in new, sleek, shiny models; they’re pretty much acknowledging that the old, offscreen Guardian would have been too old to resume his old role. If Jim Harper (the Guardian’s secret identity) was around 30 at the time of the original comics, and if we go by “comic time” rather than actual real-world time, and assuming the original Newsboys were about 10 circa the Golden Age and are now about 30 themselves, that would have made Manhattan Guardian 50 years old at an absolute bare minimum. We’re told that the Guardian vanished when Jim Harper got a promotion to Detective, but clearly he was still pretty active as a cop, since he apparently died in a shootout “just recently”. That guy was eating his vitamins.

Anyway, we’re reminded how creepy the Project is as Superman shows him more clones-Gabbys, this time, to oversee the communications division—and we see a batch of “Normals” being raised in a nursery. “They belong here, Jimmy!” Explains Superman. “The Project grows its own!” Oh, that’s good to hear. For a moment I was thinking that you guys were genetically engineering human beings to act as forced labour and routinely denying them basic human rights, but it turns out they don’t want them. They’re happy just to do their jobs! Yay genetic engineering!

Superman goes into a lot of elaborate detail about the various types of people they’re growing—still not creepy, Kal-El!—which is all explained by this simple chart:

Oooooh, NOW I get it.

It seems there’s one other offshoot of The Project we haven’t seen yet, the titular D.N.Aliens. In fact, they’re just people, genetically engineered to look weird so that slack-jawed yokels like Jimmy can gawk at them. Or at least, that’s what I infer from Jimmy’s reaction when Superman introduces him to “Dubbilex”, a purple, bulb-headed guy with horns. “Dubbilex is resigned to being The Projects’ ‘conversation piece!’ He’s seen by every visiting V.I.P.!” laughs Superman, as the weary-looking Dubbilex looks on. This sequence is hilarious, because it’s obvious that Dubbilex had important work to do, and Superman boorishly yanked him away so that Jimmy could do his Cletus bit. Still a dick!

Mokkari and Simyan, meanwhile, are preparing their newest threat: a group of human cells exposed to “Beta Rays”, which have been gestating beneath a fog that prevented them from seeing in. Wow, does Darkseid know what you guys are doing with his funding down here? I couldn’t help thinking of This recent Onion article while reading this. Anyway, the yellow Darth Maul and his hairy chum have lucked out, in that this apparently neglected experiment actually produced something: a clutch of eggs, conveniently ready to hatch. The shell of the first one cracks, revealing…something with four arms!

OOOOOOH!!!! Four arms!!!! I’m sure that’ll do a lot of damage to the guy who just subdued a rampaging, super-strong monster covered in kryptonite!

By Kirby standards, this ish is a total snoozer. I mean, there’s only one five-page fight scene and just a handful of bizarre, genetically engineered freaks. He couldn’t even get a gorilla in there, apparently. Of course, I wouldn’t blame Kirbs for losing interest in this book, given what he’d been doing with the other Fourth World comics; this, as I’ve mentioned, seemed to be his “contractual obligation” that he made the best of. All joking aside, it’s still Kirby goodness, but he does seem to be dragging it out a bit too much; I’m sorry to say we’ve got two more issues before we get out of the Project and rejoin the goings-on on the outside world. Man, good thing there’s a flock of New Gods on Earth right now, cleaning up the place while Superman hangs out in a vast underground slave-growing complex, isn’t it?

Fourth World Fridays: Mister Miracle #1--"The Murder Missile Trap"

2011-04-22T15:11:00.000-07:00

"HE CHEATS DEATH! HE DEFIES MAN!"

As I mentioned in the last installment, by the mid-60s, Kirby was primarily drawing three books at Marvel: Fantastic Four (about a group of bickering explorers), The Mighty Thor (about a god and his companions fighting evil on Earth), and Captain America (about a pure-hearted hero who's a symbol of hope and freedom to others). I've already theorized that the apocalyptic destruction of the "Old Gods" at the beginning of New Gods #1 was essentially just a continuation of his "Ragnarok" storyline in Thor, taken to its extreme, intended to mark a symbolic ending to the characters he created at Marvel.

But the King must not quite have been ready to let go just yet, because in launching the Fourth World saga, he gave birth to three books: The Forever People (about a group of bickering travellers), The New Gods (about a god and his companions fighting evil on Earth) and Mister Miracle (about...well, you get the idea).

Mister Miracle seems to have been the most popular of Kirby's Fourth World books, given that it lasted longer than the others. Certainly, while I personally prefer the New Gods, there's no denying that Mister M. seems to come from a more personal place for the King. The story of a guy who's obsessed with his work, shunning social contact in an effort to keep outdoing himself, and hoping thereby to inspire people to "escape" from their lives, seems an obvious parallel with Kirby's own life. Kirby also had a faithful assistant and a bombastic wife who kept him safe from people who wanted to prevent him from doing his work...but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The theme of escape artists is strangely common in comics. Batman was, of course, an escape artist, and I believe the Spirit had some facility in that regard, too. There's also the fictional comics character who's the creation of the title characters in Michael Chabon's already-classic novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, and who is used as a remarkably malleable symbol of the various comics characters who made up the Golden Age. In the real world, Jim Steranko, the flamboyant artist who turned Nick Fury into a pop-art masterpiece in the late 60s, had also studied as an escapist, and it was he who reportedly inspired Kirby to create a superhero escapist--but, Kirby being Kirby, it had to be something more. Mr. M. didn't just get out of tough scrapes while fighting criminals; his escapes were symbolic, meant to inspire the world and create a legend. In fact, he focused so much on this that he might actually have, um, let the whole "fighting criminals" business slide a bit too much.

Mister Miracle #1 opens with the title character up and ready to go, practicing an escape in a field with his "little person" assistant, Oberon. "We must give a flawless performance for that young onlooker!" exhorts the escapist, as Oberon straps him into his elaborate shackles. Gee, good thing there is a young onlooker, huh? I mean, I don't know if you've heard, Mr. M., but there are people who will pay to watch this kind of stuff. But I guess Mr. Miracle thinks not of base affairs like payment, which will become clearer and clearer as we go through the various issues.

Oberon's unhappy with Mr. M.'s attempt to recapture his youth; he's worried that too much time has passed since the "Maestro", as he calls him, did this professionally, and that his life is at stake. The trick involves boarding him up, shackled from head to toe, in a wooden cabinet, which Oberon promptly sets on fire. This prompts the onlooker to rush in, horrified, and try and douse the flames...but of course, no flimsy wooden shack can hold Mister Miracle! He bursts loose, to the rather overstated shock of the young man, and introduces himself as Thaddeus Brown, longtime escapist and showman. The kid, meanwhile, goes by the unlikely moniker of Scott Free. "I was raised in an orphanage, and many of the foundlings were given such names to sort of--well--make them feel as individuals." I sense the clammy hand of foreshadowing at work...

No sooner have the two of them begun to hit it off than a sinister-looking car pulls up, and out pour a bunch of thugs right out of a Jimmy Cagney movie. Yep, it's our old friends Intergang again, and they're here to...well...harrass old men and dwarves in fields? Fortunately, not only are Mr. M. and Oberon quick on their feet, Scott turns out to be capable of taking on a whole bunch of goons. Thad thanks him profusely and offers him a place to stay for the night, which would seem to be a good deal for the rootless orphan--based on later events, I've got to assume he's essentially homeless at this point--but his only thought is to keep Thad safe.

Meanwhile, we meet the latest in Intergang's endless parade of weirdos, East Coast division chief Steel Hand. Steel Hand is known as such due to his--stay with me now--hand made of steel, which is capable of judo-chopping a titanium girder to smithereens. He apparently got it as an experimental transplant after his real hand was blasted by a tommy-gun, and then "with radiation treatments, it gained power--power!" You know it's got power, cause he said it twice. But wait, back up--we're all used to people in comics gaining superpowers through radiation, but this is an artificial hand. How the hell does exposing it to radiation do anything but weaken the joints? And why am I bothering to even ask when the explanation is clearly "Because Jack Kirby. That's why.*"

Anyway, Steel Hand has it in for Mister Miracle, obviously, thanks to a wager they made years ago while both were in the hospital. It eventually comes out that S.H. bet Thad $10,000 that he could come up with a trap from which no one could escape. The two haven't seen each other since then, but S.H. has since become a big shot in Intergang, and Thad was inspired to take him on after seeing his picture in the paper. It's never stated outright, but Thad seems to be somewhat in debt, and the money could no doubt help--but Kirby never explicitly states this. If I had to guess, I'd say that Kirby might have felt that escaping for money wasn't the kind of thing his supposedly hip, counterculture readers wanted to hear about. Or, given Kirby's tendency to blaze his own trail, maybe it was something he personally didn't take to--lord knows the guy never got rich off of his creations the way he should have, even though it reportedly burned him up in later years. Maybe this is Kirb's way of making that seem noble, which in a way it was--Kirby fits right into the tradition of the "starving artist" whose work will live on for generations even if he never became a big shot in his lifetime.

Anyway, back at Thad's Pad, Scott is about to demonstrate some talents of his own. After being wrapped up in chains, Scott uses some mysterious "gadget" to smash the chains into a million pieces. "This is an age of gadgets," Scott informs us. Oh, right, of course. Mr. Miracle is still curious, but when Oberon suggests these gadgets could help him in his attempt to win the wager, Thad replies, "Every professional must live or die by his own methods!"

The next day, Mr Miracle attempts another escape. Once again, it's a death-defying stunt performed in the middle of nowhere for some reason, and once again, Intergang is somehow able to find him. As Thad is trying to work himself loose from his bonds before a gigantic steel sphere can crush him, Steel Hand has a sniper take him out. Seeing that Mr. M.'s not going to make it, Scott jumps in with a blast of energy from his fist and diverts the ball's fatal passage. Too late, though: the bullet's done enough damage. "No more miracles for me--" he croaks, as Scott takes out a strange device he keeps on a brace under his sleeve...a small box, that makes familiar pinging sounds. Steel Hand's "big trap"--the one from which no man can escape--was death itself, but with his motherbox, Scott eases Thad's passing.

Steel Hand's obsession, it turns out, comes from a desire not to lose face with his gang. That's right--a bet he made a decade or more ago, which nobody knew about except he and Thad, was going to make him look weak, so he had to take the guy out. Man, that is some kind of mania. Scott, of course, can't let things end that way, so--as if you couldn't see this coming--he suits up as Mr. Miracle and bursts in on Steel Hand's operation. This prompts the usual "B-but...YOU'RE DEAD!" reaction from Steel Hand, who's apparently too dim to realize that Mr. Miracle suddenly has a different voice and is several decades younger behind his mask. The mask that conceals his face. Maybe you should focus more on your gullibility than on your gambling problem, S.H.

Scott is quickly downed by Steel Hand's goons, and now, of course, we get the inevitable "villain puts hero in death trap" sequence. At least this time it's been well established, since the whole comic's been building up to it, and it actually kinda makes sense that the villain wouldn't just shoot him...if you disregard the fact that he didn't want to give Thad the opportunity that he's now giving Scott, of course. Anyway, the deathtrap involves the "secret Intergang missile site". I guess it makes sense that they would own something like that, since their leader is from space and all, but yeesh. A criminal syndicate with their own space program? ...Other than the U.S. Government? (Barrump-pump-pum! Thanks, I'm here all week! Tip your waiter!)

The new Mr M. is strapped to the missile and launched into space--but only to around the upper ionosphere, where the missile explodes. Points to Steel Hand for not leaving the room while this happened, although a method by which he could have watched Mister Miracle die might have been a little more intelligent. Because as soon as he gets back to his office, who should be waiting there but Scott, prompting a homicidal freakout from S.H. We've only got two pages left, so we get two things at once: S.H. goes after Scott with his unstoppable Steel Hand, and all the while Scott explains how he escaped, while using those same devices to subdue S.H. Turns out he used "Hyper-sound intensifiers" in his gloves to break the metal chains, just as he now uses them to mess up Steel Hand's hand; he used retro-jets to blast free of the missile, and to pummel S.H.; and a little thingie that spins out yards of fabric within seconds to weave a chute, and to wrap up Steel Hand for the police, who come bursting through the door at that moment, summoned by Oberon.

Lord knows I'll have plenty of opportunities to discuss Mr. M.'s escape methods in later installments, but for right now I'll just say that using advanced Apokaliptian technology kinda sorta feels like...cheating.

The book ends with Scott vowing to take up Thad's mantle as Mr. Miracle and becoming a superpowered smasher of villainy as well as an inspiration to the masses...the masses who he seems determined to keep from witnessing his spectacular escapes. Or from making any money. Well, um...that's showbiz.

*Apologies to Chris Sims.

Hell Hath No Fury Like A Nerd Woman Scorned

2011-04-17T13:01:00.000-07:00

So, as I may have mentioned before, I'm exceedingly psyched for Game of Thrones, the HBO series premiering tonight, based on George R. R. Martin's fantasy books known collectively as A Song of Ice and Fire. (Yeah, I'm glad they changed the name.) But with its imminent arrival, a recurring phenomenon has returned to the web: the cultural equivalent of the nerds vs. jocks conflict that seems to erupt whenever a somewhat esoteric geek property threatens to get some mainstream attention.

TV/Culture blogger Myles McNutt summarizes a lot of the debate here--he's concerned primarily with the gender aspects, but there's the larger issue of the fact that when critics give a negative review to an adaptation of a book or a comic with a passionate, geeky fanbase, they almost always find themselves under attack by the more hardcore members of said fanbase, even though the critics have seen the show or movie and the fans haven't. Sometimes the criticism of the criticism is valid, sometimes it degenerates into "but in the original..." (which tends to be beside the point--the critic is reviewing the adaptation, not the original work), and sometimes it gets a bit ugly, with the fans attempting armchair psychology on the critics, grasping around for reasons to dismiss their opinions, or just flat-out resorting to personal attacks.

When I read McNutt's essay, I agreed with him in theory, though I had to admit I thought Martin's fanbase had actually been pretty well-behaved, and that the criticism of the show had, in fact, been pretty shallow and poorly written, apart from being negative. (To be fair, McNutt points to io9's article as a rather noxious example of fanboy hype that's every bit as superficial.)

Turns out that was nothing. A few days after McNutt's article, this already infamous review by Ginia Bellafonte appeared in the New York Times, and the controversy re-erupted both on the gendered and "nerds vs. mainstream" front. If you were looking for a better example of how geeks feel bullied by mainstream culture, you couldn't have invented a more perfect one. That article is essentially a more eloquent version of the kind of contempt a nerd might have received from one of the popular girls in seventh grade. What's sort of perfect, though, is the way Bellafonte hung herself with her own petard by devoting so much of her "review" (far more than was spent on trivialities like analyzing the acting, production values, or story) to flatly stating that women were going to flee screaming from this show (and stopping just short of claiming that the exclusively male people who might enjoy this show will never know a woman's touch). The people who respond furiously to articles like this are often...not the kind of folks you want springing to your defense, and indeed might have proved some of her points about the social ineptitude of the show's fans, but by framing it the way she did, Bellafonte of course attracted an array of female nerds who were more than happy to inform her just how deeply up her own ass her head was located. There are too many responses to link to, really, though Annalee Newitz's clever comeback is particularly worth a read, and Matt Zoller Seitz's deconstruction is probably the most effective.

So, basically, while I'm often a little embarrassed by how brittle some of the fandoms to which I belong can be (Hi, Browncoats!), this is one example in which I can unhesitatingly side with the nerds. You done good, folks.

Fourth World Fridays: New Gods #1--"Orion Fights For Earth!"

2011-04-15T20:47:00.000-07:00

One of the interesting things about serialized fiction is that it can have several separate beginnings (and, for that matter, endings). A good comic book storyteller will take advantage of the break between issues to shift the scene, to jump forward past events that are irrelevant or uninteresting, and to concoct something distinctive that unites each separate story, rather than simply having each issue be a new chapter in an ongoing narrative. Though, of course, there's nothing actually wrong with telling one big story in several issues either, it adds a great deal to a comic if each issue is somehow made discrete in terms of tone or structure. Think of Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, for instance; most of the stories were part of the ongoing narrative, but each was a separate self-contained story as well, often with its own narrative "hook", theme, characters, and so on.

Kirby got this. At Marvel he had often woven events between his three major books, Fantastic Four, Thor and Captain America, but with the Fourth World he took it to the next level by telling four separate stories (or three and a half, since Jimmy Olsen was sort of a child of necessity that only vaguely hooks up with the main narrative), each with their own style and thematic concerns, that nevertheless each portray an aspect of the epic saga. It must be acknowledged that this kind of thing was later done more elegantly elsewhere, but for even conceiving of the idea (and for being capable of drawing four monthly books in order to promulgate it!) one must stand in awe of Kirby.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the opening pages of The New Gods, the third book in the Fourth World saga, seems to contain the most appropriate Prologue for the series as a whole:

There came a time when the Old Gods died! The brave died with the cunning! The noble perished, locked in battle with unleashed evil! It was the last day for them! An ancient era was passing in fiery holocaust! The final moment came with the fatal release of indescribable power--which tore the home of the Old Gods asunder--split it in great halves--and filled the universe with the blinding death-flash of its destruction!

Yeah, bee-yatch! That's a motherflickin' opening scrawl for you! Suck on that, George Lucas!

OK, I confess: my feeling that this is where the Fourth World truly starts may arise from the fact that this is the first Fourth World comic I ever read, in a reprint edition which I still own. But you gotta admit, that's the way you announce the beginning of a true epic! (Kirby actually labels it the Epilogue, what with it being the end of the previous story and all.)

Out of the depths of cold space left behind by the fiery conflagration, a lone figure emerges, first in long shot, and then--

Here is where Kirby finally seems ready to do something new, to throw aside the preconceptions of what superhero comics had been and tell the story he truly wanted to tell, with power, grace, and confidence. These first few pages manage to portray destruction and creation on a cosmic scale, and to set the stage for everything to come, without a trace of the awkwardness or rushed feeling that dogs some of the earlier books. Here, for the first time in the saga (and maybe in his career) Kirby is happy to let atmosphere and mood take center stage, to draw us in slowly instead of hurling us headlong into the action the way he usually did.

As I mentioned before, Kirby was a huge believer in change and growth, and his work at Marvel had been starting to stifle him somewhat; his "big idea" in the late 60s had been to have Thor experience Ragnarok, the mythical Norse end of the world. Kirby had intended this to literally alter the Marvel Universe forever, killing some characters, introducing new ones, and just generally setting the stage for a whole new world that he could play around in. In other words, Kirby was proposing one of those Earth-shattering, "Nothing will ever be the same"-type events that the big two comic companies now regularly try to pawn off on us. But back then, the idea of messing around with what was by then an extremely profitable status quo was not particularly appealing to the publishers, and Kirby's Ragnarok ended with things much the same as they had been, other than a growing sense of disenchantment.

So this opening sequence is, metaphorically, the apocalyptic destruction of the Marvel universe, even if only in Kirby's head; he never went back to the FF or Thor, even when he returned to Marvel years later. (He did do some work on Captain America.)

The stately, epic tone continues as our hero, Orion, descends into the capital city of New Genesis--the "Supertown" we glimpsed in the last installment. This whole issue is framed, rather brilliantly, as a travelogue, with Orion acting as our guide through the weird worlds that form the backdrop of the Fourth World saga. Do I detect a hint of Dante's Divine Comedy, a passage through heaven and hell and back to Earth, with a new understanding of exactly what's at stake here?

...Sorry, I'm getting a bit pompous here. Reading the New Gods will do that to you.

Anyway, here in Supertown we meet some of our main characters, who unsurprisingly also happen to be the New Gods of the title. There's the obnoxiously cheerful Lightray, so named for his speed and his ability to manipulate light; Metron, the Spock-like detached intellectual who rides through space and time on a floating barcalounger called the Mobius chair; and High-father, leader of the New Gods and stand-in for Thor's Odin, an old-school prophet of love, peace, and freedom. Orion, a grim sort who lives only for battle, seems uncomfortable amongst this love-in of a civilization, grumbling at Lightray's exhortations to "Live, Orion! LIVE!!!" and bickering with Metron, that "icy mask" whose cold intellectualism he doesn't trust.

(It's actually interesting that there's some merit to his unease. Metron is, in most post-Kirby New Gods stories that I've seen, portrayed as a fairly unambiguous good guy, but here he's a slightly shiftier figure who's later shown to have worked with Darkseid and seems rather umsympathetic to suffering. As Orion puts it, "For a scrap of knowledge you would sell the universe into slavery!"...and Metron doesn't actually disagree!)

Anyway, the Allfather's gathered them here for a purpose that must be seen to. In case his beard, "Wonder-Staff", spiritual leadership, and general attitude didn't tip you off to his inspiration, Kirby now hammers the point home by introducing us to the source of New Genesis's power, which happens to be known as...The Source. It's literally a wall in which a fiery hand appears to write messages from the great beyond, and on this particular occasion it's tasking Orion with a quest: "ORION TO APOKALIPS--THEN TO EARTH--THEN TO WAR!!!!"

Apokalips is the other world of the New Gods, and as you could probably suss out for yourself, it's every bit as hellish as New Genesis is paradisiacal. Darkseid happens to be the ruler of Apokalips, and Orion's been wanting to lay the beatdown on him for ages (maybe literally), so he leaps at the chance to head there and go mano a mano with Stoneface.

Incidentally, we learn later that there's actually a treaty between the two planets, and this technically constitutes a violation of that treaty; Apokalips has been violating the treaty by raiding New Genesis and, of course, mucking about with the affairs of Earth, but they've been keeping that under wraps. By invading Apokalips, Orion is dropping the pretense and declaring war. Kirby doesn't fill us in on this, which is too bad, as it would have made the events of this issue seem even more portentous.

Meanwhile, Metron and High-father are musing on Orion's un-New-Genesis-like passion for battle, with High-father confirming Metron's suspicions that he was actually born of the world which he now plans to invade--Apokalips. "If the other side of good is evil, then surely Apokalips is the other side!" muses Orion redundantly as he descends to the surface of the hellish world (nicely rendered as a place with fast, belching furnaces taking up much of its surface). The next six pages feature Orion's relentless battle towards Darkseid's palace, taking on flying "Para-demons", a swarm of generic underlings, Darkseid's "Dog cavalry", and finally the "Mass-director unit" that's been ruling Apokalips in Darkseid's absence. But the palace is occupied, by none other than Darkseid's son Kalibak the Cruel, who is, not to put too fine a point on it, a caveman.

Before the battle can be joined, Kalibak suddenly finds himself restrained by green bands of energy projected by Metron, who has teleported himself into the fray in an attempt to make Orion feel stupid. At least, I assume that was the point. "Hey, Orion. So, you fought your way through the hordes of Apokalips to get here? Yeah, I teleported. Took me like five seconds. A lot of people find that easier." Metron then takes the opportunity to fill Orion in on Darkseid's plan, most of which we've already gleaned from the last few issues (short version: he's secretly set up an operation on Earth called Intergang, and he's working to find "The Anti-Life Equation" that will give him power over all life in the universe, which is apparently concealed in the mind of someone on Earth.) I'd say he ought to have explained this before Orion came all this way, but Orion probably would have charged ahead anyway.

Of course, that's because there's a deeper meaning to all this, if not a particularly complicated one; these are Gods, after all, even if Kirby just made them all up, so they tend to act along metaphorical lines. Where Orion is action, Metron is pure knowledge; he does nothing except tell Orion stuff and temporarily restrain Kalibak, and that only long enough to give his little speech. He ends by directing Orion to the next room, where Darkseid proves to have taken captive a group of Earthlings in order to probe their minds, then teleports in the "power rods" that Orion uses to fly around (OK, that's another thing he does) before skedaddling. Orion just has time to set the humans free before Kalibak comes storming in; unwilling to risk an encounter with civilians present, Orion summons a Boom Tube and the group makes a hasty getaway.

The comic ends on Earth, with Orion grimly informing his new charges that they are the first to be caught up in an epic struggle that is about to play itself out here on Earth, and making a speech while lightning crashes. Darkseid, in all his Easter Island glory, appears on the last page, labeled "Prologue" (see, because it's the beginning of...never mind) to declare, "I hear you, Orion! The battle begins!"

You know, I think this is my favourite single issue of the Fourth World saga, at least of what I've read. It's Kirby doing what he does best, and could draw better than anyone else--retro-futuristic mythological beings, vast cityscapes, cosmic explosions. Accompanied, of course, by Wagnerian angst and lots and LOTS of speechifying, but done in such an over-the-top manner that you can't help but enjoy it.

Fourth World Fridays: The Forever People #1--"In Search of a Dream"

2011-04-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

And here the saga truly begins, in more ways than one, since according to Mark Evanier this was the first Fourth World comic Kirby actually produced. It sounds as though Kirby drew the first few pages--maybe even the whole thing--and was told by the top brass at DC that he had to tackle an existing character first, hence the move to Jimmy Olsen...but Kirby kept the door open by inserting Superman in this issue, which is a little confusing, since it sort of sets the scene for the previous three issues. Sort of.

We start with a bit of impromptu poetry (VERY impromptu) on the King's part as the Boom Tube, another classic Fourth World concept, makes its first appearance. "Hold your ears--it must be coming through--from there to here--on a trip with a infinite [sic] view..."

Well, I did mention Kirby was a little uncertain in his writing at this point, right?

From out of the tube rockets a wild, and distinctively Kirbian, sight: a gang of wild cosmic hippies on a gigantic monstrosity that's part dirt buggy, part clutch of motorcycles all fused together (and with a garish magenta-and-orange paint job, to boot). As someone looking back from 2011, it sure seems like vehicular fetishism was on a cultural uptick in the 70s, from stunt bikers to supervans to trucker movies, and this seems to have worked its way into Kirby’s comics in the form of the Whiz Wagon and this monstrosity, the “Super-Cycle”.

The pilots are, sure enough, the Forever People, consisting of Mark Moonrider (the little guy down front on the cover above), Big Bear (the huge hairy guy steering), Vykin the Black (the...black guy) and Serifan (the cowboy-hatted blonde wuss on the far right. And I call him a wuss with good reason). They've come from the mysterious "Super-Town" on a mission to rescue one of their number, a foxy babe name of Beautiful Dreamer. To assist, they've got some snazzy Kirbian gadgetry, most notably the aforementioned Super-Cycle and the "Mother Box" that Vykin is toting around.

Materializing in the middle of the road thanks to Big Bear's psychotic driving, the quartet nearly sideswipes a car, but Big Bear (grumbling, "I know what buttons to push!" Gee, that's conforting) activates a doohickey that lets them phase their atoms through the oncoming vehicle. Nevertheless, the understandably rattled driver of the other car drives off the road, but is levitated back to safety by the Mother Box, toted by Vykin. Mark tries to explain away Mother Box to the astonished victims as a type of computer, but Vykin unhelpfully interrupts, "WRONG! Mother Box lives! She talks to us--protects us!" Vykin is apparently unclear on the concept of a “cover story”.

The Forev's now introduce themselves properly. Mark Moonrider is, nominally, the leader. Sort of. Kirby had a tendency, when creating super-teams, to make the leader a really, really bland guy; Moonrider's even worse than folks like Cyclops or Tommy of the Newsboy Legion, barely even registering as a character, let alone the guy in charge. His only real attributes at this point are his dorky outfit (complete with bright yellow loincloth), his dorky name, and his tendency to chew out Big Bear (who rightfully ignores most of his blustering). "Where did you park the Super-cycle?" asks Mark. "On a fat, white cloud!" replies Bear. "Does that make you nervous?" Big Bear is a) extremely weird, and b) awesome.

Vykin the Black continues the ignoble tradition of black superheroes with "black" in their names; he's the keeper of Mother Box and, as mentioned, doesn't seem to care much for assimilating into the local culture. And Serifan? He's the most touchy-feely of the lot, which I guess is natural, as he's telepathic. He tries to calm the driver's female passenger by giving her a bouquet, and astonishingly, it seems to work. "Dear God, we just drove over a cliff after phasing through a vehicle out of Salvador Dali's nightmares, and were levitated to safety by a magic box toted by people who look weird, even for hippies! Jesus, mom warned me about doing drugs! From now on I'm going to straighten up and fly--ooh! Posies! I'm all better now!"

Bobby, the driver, snaps a photo of the gang--turns out he's a friend of a certain red-headed weenie who takes pictures for the Daily Planet. Sigh. Here I was looking forward to an Olsen-free installment of Fourth World Fridays. Anyway, moments after leaving, Serifan swoons from mental contact with Beautiful Dreamer. Yes, using his ability in the most benign way to mentally contact their friend causes him to swoon. Are you seeing what I mean about Serifan being a wuss?

Meanwhil, watching from the bushes is a distinctly ratlike and thuggish individual, with an army of faceless gunmen. It's our mysterious friends at Intergang again, and sure enough, they're working for Darkseid. Their leader makes contact with ol' Stoney Lonesome via a portable monitor, and he directs them to...do nothing except follow them. Ooooo...kay then.

Meanwhile, it's back to the Man of Steel, who, in his Clark Kent guise, is interviewing a boxer named Rocky. Turns out that despite his championship title, the love of Adrian, and his triumphant defeat of Ivan Drago, Rocky is unhappy. Why? Because he's well aware that for all his achievements in the ring, Superman could lick a hundred of him with one hand tied behind his back. Hey, Rocky, Mohammed Ali beat Superman! Quit whining!

Seriously, though, Rocky raises a good point, and one that Clark mulls as he leaves the building. "Poor Super Man!" he thinks (hey, that would make a good name for an avant garde play). "Despite his powers, he is a minority of one in a teeming world of billions!...Do they secretly resent him? Fear him? Hate him? For the first time in many years--I feel that I'm alone--alone!"

This is interesting stuff. Bear in mind that up until this point, angst was as alien to Superman as papercuts. DC's heroes were starting to get a little grittier--Batman had entered the Denny O'Neill era at this point--but Superman had been the symbol of everything noble, pure, and uncomplicated in the world, a beacon in an increasingly confusing and troubled America. Now, thanks to this Kirby guy, even Supes was having an angst attack! Kirby, in these two pages, certainly nailed the crucial dramatic potential of Superman that had gone mostly untapped up to this point. Despite everything he's done, he's still an alien amongst us, and he can never go home and be "normal". Combine that with the average American's growing mistrust of authority figures and people with immense power, touched on in the prior Jimmy Olsen issues, and you've got the basis of good drama even for a character envisioned as goodness and wholesomeness incarnate. It would probably be going too far to say that Kirby laid the groundwork to lead Superman out of the Silver Age...but he does seem to have glimpsed his potential before anyone else, just as Supes glimpses Supertown in the photos of the Boom Tube Jimmy shows him.

What a segue! So, anyway, Supes glimpses Supertown in the photos of the Boom Tube Jimmy shows him. Somehow, he realizes that this might be a place where he could fit in, and makes it his mission to track down the Forever People.

On the way, he zooms past the Intergang helicopter. Despite showing no particular interest in their doings, Darkseid orders them to take Superman out because "I don't want him meddling!" This despite the fact that they're all well aware their "Sigma guns" aren't up to the job of killing Superman. Man, that Darkseid...he's just in the supervillain game to yank his own henchmen around, isn't he?

Sure enough, the Man of Steel shrugs off the ray blasts and takes down the helicopter in full view of the Forev's, leading them to assume that he's a fellow "Supertowner". When he pleads ignorance, they inexplicably turn on him, even after he uses his X-ray vision to uncover a metal plate in the ground. Rushing in mindlessly, the boys spring a series of traps--first a deadly gas that Superman disperses, then a bunch of hot pink goons called "Gravi-Guards" who "transmit gravity waves from heavy mass galaxies" and are thus capable of wrestling Superman to the ground.

It's at this point that things get weird in that special Kirby way. Seeing they're in deep doo-doo, the Forev's levitate Mother Box into the air, raise their arms, and begin "The ritual":

VYKIN: Rise, Mother Box, unite us as one--
MARK: Send him your signal, Mother Box! Make us the door for him to enter--
BEAR: Prepare for the word, Mother Box! Let your circuits carry the word--let it grow loud--until it reaches the winds of infinity!
ALL: TAARU!!!

Well, actually they say "Tarru", but it's "Taaru" everywhere else, so I guess that's just a misprint.

I *think* this is Kirby riffing on the kinds of transcendental meditation and other ritualistic stuff hippies tended to do to "draw people together". The result of this ritual? Infinity Man!!!

It's really not clear whether Infinity Man is some kind of proto-Voltron made up of the Forever People all merged together, or whether he swaps places with them, though the latter seems to be the more likely option. Infinity Man is a very strange character, talking mostly in riddles and avoiding Superman's questions as to his origin. It's also been noted that this is a borderline hallucinogenic re-interpretation of the Newsboy Legion, with Infinity Man as the Guardian, i.e. the adult authority figure who shows up to save the kids whenever they get into trouble. One thing's for sure, though: you'd have to be a being of near-infinite power to get away with that outfit.

Infy...let's call him Infy...makes short work of the Gravi-Guards and starts bellowing out challenges to Darkseid, who rather hilariously makes his appearance grumping, "Don't shout, I am here!" He's wearing a different costume than the even sillier one he adopts later on, and tells them that Beautiful Dreamer is no longer needed. He had been hoping to wrest from her the secret of "The Anti-Life Equation", a big macguffin for the series, but it turns out her brainwaves weren't compatable, so instead he's basically just handing him over to the heroes.

Well...that was a lot of trouble for nothing.

Not really, though, because of COURSE he left her on a booby-trapped table. I have to admit, the fact that Darkseid doesn't even really care that they're here and that he gives back Dreamer of his own volition does make him seem pretty badass. It's like, "Hey, I don't even care enough to try and deprive you of the object of your quest. Here she is, I'm going. Oh, and if you touch her, you die. Yawn."

Superman, of course, is able to grab her off the table and carry both himself and Infy to safety, streaking "at near light speed" away from the explosion that takes out Darkseid's underground complex (which we, oddly, never got around to seeing. Come on, Kirby, this isn't a low-budget movie, you can draw these things for us!) With everything hunky-dorey, Infy disapparates and the Forever People return in his place, vowing to help Superman for his part in their rescue.

Superman asks to go to Supertown, which is easily done, but the Forev's lay a heavy guilt trip on him by mentioning how Darkseid's war is about to get serious, and Superman's help is needed. Despite his assurances he'll be back, the Forev's seem vaguely disgusted with Superman's decision to leave Earth and find suitable companionship for ten fricking seconds. Sheesh. Superman enters the boom tube and gets halfway down it, then succumbs to guilt and zips back down to our end.

Geez, this is supposed to be all poignant and stuff, and it kind of is, but two things:

1) Surely Superman can go visit Supertown for a DAY and not have the Earth be totally conquered by Darkseid--I mean, even putting aside the various New Gods who are already here, and the others who are about to arrive, there's, like, an entire Justice League out there;

and 2) The stuff Superman does back on Earth--if, as I say, we assume this comic takes place before the events of the Jimmy Olsen issues--is hardly so urgent that they couldn't spare him. I mean, he basically babysits Jimmy, the Newsboy Legion, and Don Rickles' evil twin.

...

Yes, I said Don Rickles' evil twin. That's not a joke. Oh, how I wish it was. It's coming. FEAR IT.

Fourth World Fridays: Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #135--"The Evil Factory"

2011-04-01T10:11:00.000-07:00

In an event perhaps unprecedented in the history of the Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen comic, we've now had two covers in a row that fairly accurately depict the story inside. You know that can't last long, though, and sure enough, the cover of #135, above, bears little or no resemblance to the story that begins when you turn the page.

That story is even weirder.

Seriously, as strange as the story up to this point has been, it's been clearly satirical and obviously the work of an expansive imagination that's fully embraced the unbounded storytelling potential of the comics medium. However, with SP,JO #135 things get unmistakeably...psychedelic. I mean, I realize that comics of the 60s were undeniably being written and drawn by a bunch of buttoned-down middle-aged Jewish guys, and it's a little hard to believe that any of them, Kirby included, were chemically altering their consciousness on any kind of regular basis. Even if Kirby did seem to have problems with his memory later on.

No, I'm pretty sure Kirby was high...ON COMICS.

The trippiness begins right on the opening splash page, with a gloved hand clutching a handful of tiny Superman, Jimmy Olsen and Newsboy Legion figures. But wait, these aren't the traditional figurines waiting to be symbolically crushed by the villain; these are actual, tiny clones of Superman and co. that have been bred in...dum DUM DUM...THE EVIL FACTORY. The caretakers of this factory are two guys who appear to have flunked out of Imperial Stormtrooper School. This is hardly the last time the Fourth World epic will remind us of Star Wars...

Awkward expository dialogue ahoy! "We have done well thus far!" Self-congratulates the shorter one. "As representatives of our forces on Earth, we must be ever precise with our responsibilities!" Yes, that string of words certainly sounds like it might mean something, if you don't read it too closely! Mmm-hmm!

This, for the record, is called "Maid-and-butler dialogue": when two characters talk at length about stuff they already know just so that the audience can be brought up to speed. It's especially annoying when it's something that the characters have no reason to be discussing at that particular moment, and when it goes on for PAGES, as it does here. I mentioned in the last installment that Kirby still seemed to be weaning himself from Stan Lee's influence, which is something I think he accomplishes later on; but at this point, he seems to be actively embracing all of Stan's worst tendencies, with none of his strengths. This whole conversation is just absolutely painful, and takes away from the jaw-dropping imagery being presented: besides the tiny Superman gang, we see gigantic machinery as only Kirby could draw it, supporting gigantic test tubes full of distorted humanoid shapes, and culminating in a hooded giant surrounded by Kirby's trademark energy crackle. Matter of fact, that whole array of images pretty much tells the story by itself, with only a few well-chosen words being necessary, so how disappointing that Kirby chooses to weigh them down with such utterly artless text. It's a good thing that, even in his late 40s, the King was a really fast study, and later issues of the Fourth World pared back the dialogue to much greater impact.

The two Invaders from the Planet of Exposition end their little rant by snatching off their helmets to reveal their true faces. (Characters who wear masks for no reason, just so they can dramatically snatch them off when appropriate, are another obnoxious storytelling quirk, but at least here you can make the case that they needed them to protect themselves from...radiation...or something...) The short guy, it turns out, is named Simyan and is a hairy, Neanderthaline fellow, while the other looks remarkably like a yellow Darth Maul and is named Mokkari. (And if you think those names are ridiculously on-the-nose, brother, you ain't seen nothing yet.)

In the meantime, Superman, Jimmy, and the Newsboys are still hangin' at the Mountain of Judgment. And hey! MORE Maid-and-butler dialogue, in the form of an internal monologue from Supes, explaining the events of the last two issues! Comics do this all the time, so I'm not sure why this is annoying me so much right now, but there you go. I guess I'm fed up with Jimmy and eager to get to the Forever People.

"You are needed at The Project!" proclaims the Hairy leader, Jude, and like that, they're off. The Project, we quickly learn, is a heavily guarded military base where genetic experiments are conducted--in fact, the Hairies are the product of military genetic engineering.

So, wait, wait. The army created hippies?!?

Yes, in a bizarre scenario that could only have come from the mind of an FDR Democrat WWII veteran with a fascination for the youth culture of the 60s (but no predilection for drugs whatsoever!), the wild, mystical Hairies and the uptight death merchants of Uncle Sam are not only in cahoots, but seem to be working almost interchangeably on a project that Superman describes as "very similar" to the Manhattan Project (?!?). For the next three issues, we'll be confronted with the confusing spectacle of grim-faced, gun-toting soldiers working alongside flower children for the betterment of mankind, through wild cosmic technology and genetic engineering.

Its, like, beautiful, man!

Remember how, a while back, I proposed that the Newsboy Legion might actually be clones of the originals? It's suddenly looking a lot more likely, isn't it? Especially since we now see that the grown-up versions of the Legion are here at the Project, ready to claim their wayward sons (with their mothers nowhere to be seen). It's looking more and more like a really large, and strangely incompetent conspiracy is what brought the Legion here.

Superman fills Jimmy in on the Project and the fact that they have cracked "the genetic code", allowing them to duplicate and manipulate "any living man". When Jimmy expresses doubt, Superman proves the truth of his words in the creepiest way possible. A nearby soldier removes his helmet and reveals himself to be--Jimmy Olsen! Jimmy #43, to be precise--that's his "life number".

So you see, Jimmy? The military has stolen your DNA and used it to create an army of slave-clones! But don't worry, nothing can possibly go wrong!

Any real-world "Hairies" reading this on acid were about to find their trip going even further south as Superman directs Jimmy to a microscope...and looking down the viewpiece, Jimmy sees a slide filled with microscopic copies of himself. I'm telling you, people, Kirby was absolutely not on drugs.

Back at the Project's evil opposite, Simyan and Mokkari are putting the finishing touches on their "organic murder machine", the hooded giant mentioned earlier: they're spraying him with synthetic Kryptonite in order to make him an unstoppable anti-Superman weapon. They report their success to the boss, who, unsurprisingly, turns out to be the same man...or creature...pulling Morgan Edge's strings: the mighty DARKSEID.

As I'm sure most of you know, Darkseid (That's "Dark-Side", not "Dark-Seed") is the archvillain of Kirby's Fourth World series, and probably the most well-known character to come out of this saga. He's a huge guy with a burly frame and a face apparently made out of stone (and a rather silly costume, but I'll get to that at a later date). He's also a highly memorable character--like most of the New Gods, he's prone to purple prose, but somehow, coming out of that stone kisser, Kirby's cosmic nonsense becomes a curious sort of faux-Shakespearean poetry. Darkseid is Kirby's second greatest villain, second only to a certain Latverian doctor/dictator, and if anything he outstrips Doc Doom in the evil department. There's an aspect of Darkseid's philosophy that Kirby really got exactly right, which lends the series a lot of its greater resonance--but since D.S. is only putting in a cameo appearance here, we'll hold off on that for now.

Simyan and Mokkari impress Darkseid (in the sense that he doesn't have them instantly killed, not in the sense that he betrays any pleasure whatsoever) with their creation, and by not pretending to be doing this for any reason other than pure profit. "Had you wanted mere praise, I'd have deemed you--fools!" But lest you think these are the first non-incompetent henchmen in comic history, their plan goes immediately awry when the giant smashes his way out of the containment area and goes on a rampage. "Kill to live!" he bellows! "Kill! Kill!" S. and M. (heh) are forced to activate their "penetrator beam" (oh come on now) and teleport the giant to the Project prematurely (seriously, cut it out!)

And like that, Superman suddenly finds himself locked in combat with what is revealed to be...

A GIANT GREEN JIMMY OLSEN!!!!

(Hmph) (Snicker) (Grrt)

OK, people? Freaks? You can clone ANYONE to turn into a monster and send against Superman. You choose...Jimmy Olsen?!? The weeniest kid in Metropolis?!?

As with Kirby's subversion of the whole "Jimmy vs. Superman" dynamic of the last two issues, this seems to be Kirby's take on the Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen, plus it seems like a chance to pit Superman against, for all intense and purposes, the Incredible Hulk. So, that's cool and all, but still--come ON!

Anyway, due to Jimmy's Kryptonite skin cream, Supes is quickly down for the count. But wait! The Project's been anticipating a situation like this! Well, I hope to God they haven't anticipated this exact scenario, because that would make them all deeply insane, but they do have an ace up their sleeve! You see, back in the day when the Newsboy Legion had their own comic, superheroes were going through their first wave of intense popularity, and with the comic industry never wanting to miss out on a bandwagon, it was decided that the Newsboys would gain a superhero protector--The Manhattan Guardian. (Interestingly, he appears to be the first superhero character ever to simply be a supporting character rather than the star of his own series. You can read more about this odd footnote in superhero history here.) He would basically show up any time the Legion got into trouble, save their butts, give them a stern talking-to or something, and then vamoose.

Well, guess who the Project's been growing in a tank? That's right! It's the all-new, renamed Golden Guardian! Who has no superpowers whatsoever, and is about to try and tackle a Kryptonite-enhanced monster who just licked Superman in a fight!

Again, is the Project really that short on raw genetic material? You clone Jimmy Olsen--without his consent, no less--a bunch of stereotypical 40s brats, and a forgotten superhero from the same era with no special abilities at all? I realize a Superman clone wouldn't be that useful in this situation, what with the Kryptonite and all, but how about Wonder Woman? You know, the superhero everyone always forgets is almost as powerful as Superman, just because she's a woman? Or any one of dozens of powerful superheroes?

But no, Kirby's calling the shots, and thus the Newsboy Legion, and if they want to clone their dead benefactor back to life and send him out to tackle this (Pfff) unstoppable menace, that's their choice!

TO BE CONTINUED!!!

Detecting Phantasmic Activity in proximity to the Web

2011-03-30T13:51:00.000-07:00

OK, I surrender. I'm twittering now. I'm sure it's the kind of thing everyone will find utterly fascinating.

Perhaps less insipid content can be found at Chud, where Thor's Comic Column lives on. (Even though that particular page doesn't list me among the contributors for some reason....) New columns go up every Friday.

I'm working on a couple of big projects, one for an ongoing client, another for a potential client (which will be really cool if it gets off the ground), and a third which is entirely personal, a gift for my sister and her new husband, who just got hitched over the weekend. In case you were wondering what's been occupying my time. It's a pair of nifty-looking Art Nouveau-ish posters, and I'll post 'em as soon as they're finished.

As for strips, as you may have noticed, a new Freak U. went up today, and I'm hopefully back on track from this point on. New Lemuria on April 4th. I'm still trying to get the backlog of strips coloured in, don't know how long that'll be, but I'm trying to get it done soonish. Possibly by the end of April, at which point I plan to unleash a marketing blitz on the web. Stay tuned.

Fourth World Fridays: Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #134--"The Mountain of Judgment"

2011-03-25T18:35:00.000-07:00

Kirby's departure from Marvel was somewhat acrimonious. According to Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones in their comprehensive The Comic Book Heroes, the inevitable "creative differences" between Stan Lee and himself played a part, with Jack feeling that Stan was hogging the credit. After all, Kirby was putting at least as much into the story as Lee, and Lee's major contribution--the dialogue--often seemed to be fighting with the story Kirby was trying to tell. The Fourth World books give us the first real glimpse of Kirby as writer, fully in charge of his own story, and based on this I feel that the guy's been given something of a bum wrap. I don't think Kirby was lacking in any of the basic fundamentals of writing, or at least, he wasn't any more than your average superhero writer of the time; let's face it, superhero comics of the gold, silver and early bronze age have to be judged on their own weird standards in writing, as with so many other things. I'm not saying that they were inherently bad, but they did speak their own rather bizarre language that can't reasonably be compared with, say, Ernest Hemingway, or Jack Kerouac. It wasn't until the Brits invaded in the late 70s and early 80s that comic writing really started to work as prose in the mainstream sense.

So by those standards, I think Kirby was an...OK writer. He certainly had a knack for a turn of phrase, his characters have reasonably distinct voices, and he usually knew enough not to overwhelm a panel with text. His dialogue is often problematic; Kirby just had no sense for the rhythm of natural speech, like, at all, but his voice is undeniably distinctive, and never less than readable.

One thing Kirby was not, however...was Stan Lee.

It's probably inevitable that Kirby would make an attempt to write like the man who'd worked with him on his greatest successes. And Kirby could pull it off to an extent; with writing, as with everything else, he had a terrific understanding of the cosmic and surreal. Stan's Thor and Silver Surfer-style faux Shakespearean dialogue lingers in much of the Fourth World, and it's a fine fit; I'd argue Kirby does it quite a bit better than Stan, partly thanks to his growing comfort with pacing. But man...when Kirby tries to do the beatnik-style wiseass thing, or adopt the manner of a bombastic carnival barker, the results aren't pretty. Here's the opening caption to this issue:

BEWARE! Prepare for events NEW to ALL your past experiences! This is the STRANGE assignment upon which Jimmy Olsen and his young friends of the Newsboy Legion have embarked!"

..."New to all your past experiences?" Yeesh.

The text in this issue also falls prey to a common tendency of Marvel work of Stan & Jack's era: the desperate attempt to explain something away with exposition in a slapped-on speech bubble. The classic example is in Iron Man's first appearance, where the yellow peril-type villain takes down Tony Stark's formidable new ultra-strong battle suit with a filing cabinet tipped down a flight of stairs; Stan, clearly sensing this rendered their hero just a TAD less impressive, added the thought bubble, "UGH! He weighted each of these drawers with rocks!" (Because communist warlords always have filing cabinets full of rocks handy for when they're chased by superheroes.)

This issue of Jimmy Olsen is unfortunately rife with this kind of thing, which is bizarre since Kirby was handling the text AND the pictures. I guess he was still finding his footing, or else he had gathered so much momentum that he could hardly slow down to clear plot holes out of his way.

And there surely is a lot of momentum to this issue. The whole thing is basically one extended car chase, starting with the Outsiders from last issue having a gigantic bike rally on the vast stump that makes up the public square of Habitat. Jimmy, in his mad pursuit of the scoop, is preparing to goad his new squad of Hell's Angels groupies down the "Zoomway" in search of the legendary Mountain of Judgment, apparently the home of the "Hairies" that he's been sent to find. The Outsiders seem excited and strangely philosophical (by which I mean "clearly stoned") about meeting up with this dread apparition, despite it having been described in the last issue as "...a THING! Like Moby Dick! You go out to meet it--and DIE!" "It can turn you chicken...or man!" opines one weirdo, but our freckle-headed protagonist has them under the spell of his vast charisma. Frankly, he's seeming more and more like Charles Manson Jr. by the minute.

A full-blown hippie love-in is on the verge of breaking out, until Superman shows up in his capacity as Official Buzzkill. He gets a few panels into a speech before one of the mental giants of Jimmy's gang decides he's heard enough, and tries to run him over with a motorcycle.

Let me reiterate: he tries to run Superman over with a motorcycle.

This has exactly the result you'd expect. Of course, it does accomplish something, I guess: once Superman realizes the kind of intellect he's dealing with here, he lets his guard down, conducting a casual, exposition-filled chat with a dude who tries to shoot him with a bazooka. Of course he catches and crushes the shell in his hand like it was nothing--but oh noes! The shell was filled with Kryptonite gas! Superman has been downed by a bunch of extremely dumb biker hippies! The Ignominy!

The clash between words and pictures is at its absolute fiercest here--the Outsiders are literally explaining stuff to Superman as they shoot him and try to run him over, and then--hilariously--as Superman passes out, one of the Outsiders pipes up, "Tell him some more about the Hairies, Yango!" And he keeps talking even as the clearly unconscious Superman is carried off!!!

Fortunately, that bit of unpleasantness behind us, we're about to embark on a much cooler portion of our journey--essentially, the rest of the issue (we're on page 6) is one long, frantic race down the Zoomway. The gist of Yango's little powerpoint presentation is that--shock of shocks--the Outsiders didn't actually build the bikes, weaponry or gigantic tree-mansions they've been using all this time. That was the work of the Hairies, who vanished an indeterminate length of time ago, but are still said to be holed up in the Mountain of Judgment. So, to the Mountain we go! As fast as possible! For no particular reason!

This next passage features our heroes indulging in extreme recklessness, to the point of idiocy, starting with Jimmy Olsen ordering the Whiz Wagon straight at a sheer rockface. Apparently he just "has a feeling" that it's a trick. And sure enough, it is! The Newsboy Legion and its various hangers-on go tearing through the fake promontory like Wile E. Coyote, only to encounter a long highway tunnel with a huge gap. Jimmy loses seemingly half his gang in the jump, but hey, they were just Outsiders! Given the level of intelligence they'd displayed earlier, Jimmy's pretty much doing the world a favour by removing them from the gene pool. (Actually, as Superman awkwardly informs us in another of those pasted-in bits of exposition later on, everyone's OK, it's only the bikes that were trashed. Yep, that's right. Only the bikes. Mmm-hmm. Keep moving.) Next thing you know, the tunnel's filling with water, which means it's time for Flippa Dippa to--

--Oh. Flippa Dippa. OK, I didn't really introduce the Newsboy Legion last time, did I? Well, they're mostly self-explanatory, and honestly pretty bland. There's "Scrapper", who picks fights, "Big Words", who's a genius because he uses words of more than one syllable, "Gabby", who...um...talks, and "Tommy", who has the amazing ability to completely fade into the background. These guys are, as I mentioned before, the supposed sons of the original Newsboy Legion...though that doesn't really explain why they use 40s slang. When I suggested they were clones, I wasn't totally joking...given what we see in future issues, it's actually a pretty reasonable assumption. But anyway, since in 1970 comics were, like the culture at large, struggling to get on the right side of history by paying more sympathetic attention to black people, Kirby's included a new member named "Flippa Dippa". He's African-American, and he's absolutely, dementedly obsessed with scuba diving. How obsessed? Anytime someone mentions fish, or water, Flippa Dippa feels the need to throw in a "Right on!" or "That's my bag!" To remind us that he likes scuba diving. Because the fact that he wears a scuba diving outfit everywhere he goes wasn't enough of a clue. So of course, he's been given an excuse to use his sole useful life skill in both issues so far. It's like how the Justice League was always conveniently encountering water-based threats so that Aquaman had something to do--except that scuba diving is at least a genuinely useful skill in some situations, whereas Tommy and Gabby don't seem to bring anything to the table. Come to think of it, "Big Words" doesn't do much either. And even Scrapper doesn't seem to be any better in a fight than the others. Jimmy's proving very adept at attracting followers with very little in the way of actual talent.

Anyway, Flippa heads out underwater to clear the way with a "shock grenade", which he promptly sets off too soon, "and too heavy", sending himself, the Whiz Wagon and the bikers blindly down the tunnel, ricocheting off the walls. We give you ONE JOB, Flippa...

Finally they touch bottom again...and with scarcely a moment's pause, they keep going. Tenacious, these kids. But they're about to face the worst obstacle of all: DRUGS.

Yes, they've triggered some kind of weird mental defense that makes it impossible to see the road, and sends them "careening madly through a nightmare of Kaleidoscopic form and color!" Kirby gets experimental once again and portrays this via an elaborate collage of photographic images (which are unfortunately in black and white, thus negating the "color" bit). It's a pretty jarring shock to turn the page and see this...I can only imagine a hippie reading this comic in 1970 and FREAKING OUT.

Jimmy's forced to switch to radar in order to keep the Wagon on track. "If we blow it here," pronounces someone from inside the car, "We blow the whole assignment!" Um, that's one way of putting it. I would have gone more with "We're endangering our lives for no particularly good reason", but you've got to admire Jimmy and the Newsboys for their work ethic, if nothing else.

Meanwhile, Superman, having been inadequately secured by the brain-addled citizens of Habitat, wakes up and, naturally, catches up with Jimmy and company in about five seconds. But something huge looms out of the tunnels behind...

Excuse me, I need a second.

It's the Mountain of Judgment, and here I must doff my hat to the master. In spite of its flaws, this whole section of the book has been a brilliant build towards the big reveal, and when it comes it's genuinely jaw-dropping. Turns out the Mountain is a gigantic missile carrier--essentially a really, really, REALLY big RV, carved to resemble a gigantic Chinese lion statue made of jade, and at least as big as a good-sized apartment building. We see this thing in a double-page splash, bearing down on the Whiz Wagon as Superman swoops down to catch up with them, and man is it breathtaking. It so terrific you almost forget to wonder, in the intervening issues, WHY the Hairies have bothered to make their headquarters mobile, given that they have a perfectly good and apparently well-protected stationary home base elsewhere, as we'll soon see. But who cares? This is Kirby-land! GO! GO! GO!

Superman picks up the Whiz Wagon from out of the Mountain's path, but is quickly sucked into the "mouth", whereupon the Hairies burst forth to go over the Whiz Wagon with "sensitive indicators". Here's where Kirby's attitudes towards the counterculture seem to do a sudden 180--the Hairies are, as their name implies, a bunch of hippies, albeit high-tech hippies with a bunch of crazy inventions and an oddly casual attitude to working alongside the U.S. Military.

I can't help but wonder what happened here. Kirby claimed that the Fourth World came about because of his desire to tell a personal story "with no bullshit", so what's the significance of this shift in perspective? Was the tweaking of the counterculture in the story so far something he did out of habit (comics, especially DC comics, hadn't been portraying hippies and their ilk in a very positive light up until that point), then decided that he liked these crazy kids after all and shifted the story to match? Or was this all planned from the start? Was the Dropout Society meant to provide balance against the more flattering depictions of the counterculture presented later? Was Kirby trying to say something about the promise of the free love era, going from confusion and anarchy to a Utopian ideal?

Kirby doesn't give us any time to ponder this in this issue, as the Hairies have identified a bomb on board the Whiz Wagon! Yes, it turns out this was all a plot on the part of Morgan Edge, working at the behest of the mysterious Intergang. Jimmy and the Legion were to provide the instruments of their destruction, thus ridding Edge and his masters of a bunch of meddling kids as well as their chosen target, which is why Superman's been putting so much effort into stopping them. See, he's not such a dick after all! Except, um, actually he is, since there was no particular reason he couldn't have warned Jimmy that the Wagon was carrying a bomb before now. Why, it's almost like this plot twist was suddenly inserted in order to make the preceding 40 pages make sense!

You see why I sometimes get a little skeptical about Kirby's grand vision for this series. While going from the anarchy of the Wild Area to the peaceful, Utopian Hairies may carry a major symbolic charge, we're also talking about a story whose plot seems to be made up on the fly at times. Yet, later in the saga, we see stuff that was pretty obviously planned out well in advance...starting with the second-last panel of this issue, as perhaps the Fourth World's most well-known character makes his first appearance ever.

I haven't spoken much about Morgan Edge, the new owner of Galaxy Broadcasting and the Daily Planet, because he hasn't done all that much in the story so far. It's pretty clear that the guy's evil, since he tries to have Clark Kent bumped off early on in issue #133, and he mentions "Intergang" as his bosses. For the past two issues, he's mostly been sitting in his office, thinking evil thoughts, as his plan moves towards fruition. Now that Supes has thwarted it, he's called on the carpet by his boss...and who is this mastermind? No mere gangster, it seems. Not even an agent of some hostile foreign government. No, Morgan Edge is the flunky of a force that transcends the human, or even the alien. He answers to no less than a god! And not just any god, but the embodiment of pure evil, a force that aims to eradicate love, peace, and liberty entirely from the cosmos, simply to serve his own unrelenting drive to power. A being so monstrous that he wishes to transform all life into mere appendages to his dark will.

Behold: DARKSEID.

Look, in a few issues time you're going to be really impressed by this, OK? Just roll with it.

The Cassidy Conundrum

2011-03-22T15:06:00.000-07:00

This is Proinsias Cassidy:

Cassidy (he doesn’t like the given name much) is the Irish vampire sidekick of Jesse Custer, hero of the comic series Preacher, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. (Cassidy’s presence is a bit odd, actually, since all the other supernatural aspects of Preacher derive directly from God or the angels. It kinda seems like Ennis wanted to write a vampire character but didn’t have a story for him, so he stuck him in Preacher. But anyway.)

Cassidy’s a good guy. More or less. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to call him simply “a lead character”, and he comes into conflict with Jesse later in the book, but he’s a character who we’re at least initially supposed to like and relate to.

This despite the fact that he drinks human blood. Which he kills to attain.

I bring this up because Cassidy is a good example of an aspect that shows up throughout popular fiction, and comics in particular, which has been bugging me lately. I call this archetype The Righteous Asshole.

As an audience, we have certain expectations from a hero. We expect them to have a moral code, to do things for reasons that aren’t motivated by pure selfishness or stupidity, to avoid taking pleasure in killing or raping or doing other horrible things. There are, of course, no hard and fast rules here. Some protagonists behave in an unheroic manner—perhaps they’re cowardly, or foolish, or have some inner conflict. Sometimes you even have outright evil protagonists, a la Patrick Bateman, but of course these are antiheroes, not heroes. Heroes are a distinct breed of main character. We expect to find them in genre fiction, in stories that involve action and life-or-death stakes. On the rare occasions where we encounter them outside of this context, they’re still quickly recognizable: the hero is “the good guy”. There are grey areas here, of course: a hero who is flawlessly competent and morally impeccable can be pretty boring…though not always; Superman, when written well, can be quite compelling, for instance. I’m reminded of G. K. Chesterton’s comment about his creation Father Brown, who was also created to be a walking exemplar of virtue: “white is also a colour”.

But the idea is that the hero is distinguished by his or her desire to “do right” in the face of an extreme physical or moral challenge. If we get to the climax of a story and we’re uncertain whether the lead is really going to let someone else die to save his or her own skin, it seems fairly safe to say they’re not a hero. That’s not to say a protagonist might not do the right and noble thing, but with a non-heroic protagonist you would have some honest doubt. With a Hero, you know going in that they’re going to do the morally laudable thing (whatever the author thinks that is) in a given situation.

An awful lot of heroes kill people.

This really ought to be a bigger deal than it is usually treated as, to me. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m by no means declaring that Killing is Always Wrong and that Any Protagonist Who Kills Is Evil And A Bad Influence and THINK OF THE CHILDREN. In real life, people kill each other, and sometimes that killing can be said to be justified or even heroic. If some dude comes at you with a knife because you looked at him wrong, and you end up reflexively turning it around on him so he stabs himself…that seems like a pretty clear-cut case of self-defense. Likewise, if the hero is being hunted by a Shady Organization that’s Out To Get Him for reasons beyond his control, and they’re firing 2,000,000 rounds per minute in his direction (never hitting him, of course), I think you could excuse him picking up his own gun and returning fire in order to get them to stop. Witty quip optional.

And of course, if it’s 1943 and the Shady Organization has a swastika on their shoulder…well, nuff said.

Speaking of which, part of the brilliance of Inglourious Basterds was the way Tarantino went out of his way to make the Nazis, apart from Landa, as sympathetic as possible—even Hitler was mostly portrayed as a human being—while painting the Basterds as sadistic douchebags at every turn. This makes us confront our feelings about the rightness or wrongness of killing, specifically killing on screen. The Nazis were about as close to pure evil as the real world ever got; does that make it OK to root for the violent slaughtering of specific, human individuals?

I don’t know. But the far more puzzling thing is the way certain authors seem to go beyond the idea of a hero who’s required to get his hands dirty, and turn heroism into an excuse to do awful stuff.

I started writing this blog post a while back, and I’ve been chewing it over on and off for a few weeks now. What inspired me to come back to it was a post on Andrew Breitbart’s infamous Big Hollywood site by a fellow named Leo Grin, posted about a month ago. Grin is apparently involved with a Robert E. Howard fan club in an official capacity, and the post was about how far downhill “secondary world” fantasy has fallen in the years since Howard and Tolkien. Specifically, he was bemoaning the supposed lack of virtuous true heroes, and the fact that fantasy had apparently given way to subversive narratives in which the protagonists weren’t all that heroic.

Again: the guy was using Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, as an exemplar of virtuous, heroic fiction.

I really, really don’t want to link to Big Hollywood—it’s a site devoted to cultural conservative breast-beating and cherry-picking all the supposed ways that the values of “secular humanism”, transmitted via Hollywood and the eeeeeeevil liberal media, are destroying society just for the hell of it, or something—so I’ll instead link to a couple of people who take Grin’s argument apart pretty effectively. If you really must, the link to the original article is included in both those pieces, but really, if you’ve read one Big Hollywood essay, you’ve read them all.

What interests me is that I’m saying things that seem to overlap with what Grin is saying, and yet, even taking things out of the political context, we clearly see the world very differently. Because to me, Conan is a perfect example of a character whose status as a “hero”—something that even his own author had trouble proclaiming—is simply not backed up by his behaviour.

Conan drinks, whores around, steals, and, you may perhaps have heard, has been known to kill people on occasion. Also beasts. And monsters. And Elder Gods from the dark backwards and abysm of time. Generally speaking I’m not going to complain much about the killing elder demons thing, so, y’know, yay Conan, but the context for the stories isn’t what I would call “heroic”. Conan’s status as a hero is predicated entirely on the fact that his author tends to remove moral obstacles from his path.

What I mean is, Conan will kill an elder god because it’s threatening his life; he’ll destroy an evil sorcerer because he’s hoarding a precious gem that Conan wants to sell on the black market; he’ll rescue a princess because he wants to fuck her. Occasionally he’s compelled to go on a heroic mission via money or threats, but the point is that he doesn’t do heroic things for the sake of being heroic; he occasionally saves the life of someone he likes (or wants to fuck) but he doesn’t act to save lives in the abstract. He acts to serve his own interests first and foremost. (Well, that’s not quite true—later, King Conan acts a number of times to save his own kingdom. But even there, you get the sense that he’s doing it not because he actually cares about his people’s welfare, but because fighting off threats is the kind of thing a king does if he wants to keep his kingdom. And even then, we’re pretty clearly shown how kingship has beaten Conan down and interfered with his life as a “natural man” and free spirit.) Conan does what he wants, and the universe—the one crafted by Howard and Farnsworth Wright and, later, divers other hands—obliges by making sure his interests coincide with the greater good.

I haven’t read any of the later, non-Howard Conan stories, but I’d be really interested to know if there are any examples of, for instance, Conan robbing and killing a good sorcerer, or letting an elder demon run amok because he’s not personally affected by it, or in any other way confronted with a moral choice that pits his self-interest against other people’s welfare. But somehow I doubt it. Conan is the archetypal Righteous Asshole. He’s righteous because his author wants him to be.

That brings us back to Cassidy. (Some minor SPOILERS for Preacher follow.) I chose to focus on Cassidy as opposed to his friend and protagonist, Jesse Custer, because Jesse is essentially Conan—he’s always in the right, always awesome and admirable, and he always wins, because that’s how Garth Ennis wants it to be. And while that’s what we expect from an action hero, he falls once more into the Conan trap of having the universe provide a constant string of moral excuses—those guys in the bar whose faces he mutilated, they picked a fight with him! That cop he beat up, he was an asshole to his horse! Those cars he stole—well, actually, there’s no real excuse given for Jesse’s life as a car thief aside from “car theft is awesome”. (And even the mere fact that Jesse’s up against some truly vile villains who want to wreck the world could be seen as a moral out for him to do whatever he wants—the Inglourious Basterds effect again, but without the moral reflection.) But this is par for the course.

What’s interesting about Cassidy is that he’s not, ultimately, given the same moral free pass that Jesse is, even as he seems to make use of it more in the short term. The people whose blood he drinks tend to be (sometimes rather hastily) established as douchebags. If Cassidy’s in desperate need of a blood fix, you can always count on some cartoonish jerk staggering along in the next few pages, probably picking a fight with Cassidy, to provide a convenient excuse.

But Ennis does acknowledge some of the problems with Cassidy within the narrative. As soon as Jesse discovers that Cassidy is “a fuckin’ abomination” In the first book, the two part ways, reunited via the typical Han Solo-style last-minute reunion that saves everyone’s hide. At which point…Jesse and Cassidy become fast friends. Wait, what?

Jesse, dude, you’re hanging around with an undead, blood-drinking monster. I mean, it’d be one thing if it was Angel, and he was raiding blood banks or butcher’s shops for his fix, but the guy murders people to drink their blood, numerous times, in Jesse’s presence. Again, they’re usually the same people who are busily trying to kill Jesse and Tulip (Jesse’s girlfriend), but come on—wouldn’t that raise a few flags? The suggestion is that Jesse had a knee-jerk, negative reaction to Jesse being one of the undead, but got over it. And while I applaud the idea of getting over false preconceptions about people, when you’re presented with evidence that your best friend kills people and drinks their blood, I think we’re on somewhat firmer moral ground here.

Later in the story, Jesse stumbles across evidence of some of the scummier things Cassidy’s done over his unnaturally extended life, and even before that, Tulip ends up being exploited by him during a vulnerable time—and all I could think of was, “Dude. Blood. Drinking. Monster.” Not only did I see Cassidy’s eventual heel turn coming, it made Jesse seem kind of hapless, even as Ennis paints him as an ultracompetent manly hero. It seems like Ennis honestly, truly didn’t see anything wrong with the idea that one of his protagonists kills people to suck their blood—or rather, that he anticipated Jesse thinking the blood-drinking thing was gross and wrong, but the “kills people” aspect doesn’t seem to have bothered him at all.

I guess the point of all this is that here we have a story that’s quite blatantly undermined by its author’s failure to consider the morality of the universe they’ve created. I don’t mean this to sound hectoring—people may have different ideas of what constitutes morality, and what’s “realistic” in this context—but simply to note that this is a matter of practicality. When you make friends with a bloodsucking murderer, you don’t have much of a right to act surprised and hurt when he stabs you in the back.

Fourth World Fridays: Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #133--"Kirby's Here!"

2011-03-18T10:03:00.000-07:00

JIMMY'S EVIL? MUST BE THURSDAY.

So it was, in August 1970, after months of hype and buildup, that Jack Kirby finally made his debut at DC, beginning the epic saga of the Fourth World and the New Gods that would forever leave its mark on the comics industry; the auspicious debut of Kirby's most heartfelt work, and one of the greatest stories ever attempted in comics.

In Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #133.

That's comics for you. The sublime and the ridiculous don't just rub up against each other, they're frequently indistinguishable.

The famous (untrue) story is that Kirby had bragged that he could turn DC's lowest-selling book into its highest-selling one. Mark Evanier, in the afterword, says that it was actually a case of Kirby not wanting to boot any existing artist off a book they'd been attached to, and Jimmy Olsen was one that had no permanent creative team. So it was here that Kirby started to plant the seeds for the Fourth World epic.

This is pretty ironic, since Kirby was well known for rarely wanting to tackle other people's characters, or even return to his own once he was through with them. The story gets even weirder when you learn that the DC editors, unhappy with his version of Superman in an age when they were still desperately trying to stay "on model" with their characters, had some of the more traditional artists redraw his Superman and Jimmy Olsen drawings!

...Did I say this was an "auspicious" debut?

Still, when you understand what Kirby had to work with, the results grow a lot more impressive. Kirby immediately made two smart moves that revitalized Jimmy Olsen's book. One was to bring in his own Golden Age characters, the Newsboy Legion, and have them team up with Jimmy, which of course makes a certain amount of sense, being kid reporters and all. For the first time in this issue, but not the last, Olsen suddenly becomes the de facto leader of a group of misfits.

The second move was to reinterpret Olsen, and the book as a whole, as a stand-in for the countercultural youth movement that even the squarest of Americans were beginning to accept. Now, desperate attempts to make a character "hip" by dressing him differently and having him use modern slang is a long, ignoble tradition in comics, and in some ways, SPJO #133 is no different. But Kirby had a strange and sincere affection for the counterculture of his time--possibly due to the fact that they embraced his comics so warmly--and, interestingly enough, he seemed to understand them on more than a superficial level. What makes this issue immediately interesting is the way Kirby zips back and forth between celebrating the free love era and parodizing it.

Jimmy and the Newsboy Legion (who are actually the children...or possibly clones...of the original WWII-era Legion) hop into their Whiz Wagon at the behest of the shifty Morgan Edge, the new owner of the Daily Planet, to seek out the mysterious "Wild Area", home of "weird motorcycle gangs" and a "dropout society". This inexplicable (even by comic standards) lost land is apparently located...somewhere on the other side of an ocean, yet, as we later see, part of it is under Metropolis. Given the bizarre adventures Jimmy's had over the last three decades, I suppose being saddled with an amphibious, flying car and a gang of 40s-era street urchins and being told to find a lost civilization of biker gangs shouldn't be *that* disorienting, but it's still pretty obvious we're deep in Kirby-land.

Edge's reasoning for sending this gang of minors is that the inhabitants of the Wild Area, to coin a phrase, don't trust anyone over 30. Superman, of course, follows along to look after Jimmy--at least that hasn't changed with Kirby's taking the reins. (I have a theory that Silver Age Superman and his Justice League cohorts were so powerful, and so good at their jobs, that virtually all regular crime vanished from the face of the Earth in the DC Universe of the 50s and 60s, leaving only the crazy supervillains, aliens and mad scientists to cause trouble. The relative scarcity of these types explains why Superman had so much free time to play pranks on people, save Jimmy's butt every time he went charging off into danger, and try to kill Lois Lane. But anyway.)

On arriving in the Wild Area, Jimmy and co. immediately run afoul of a couple of low-rent Doctor Doom lookalikes on motorbikes, named Iron Mask and Vudu. "GO! GO! GO! Vudu! Death is fast! Death is loud! Death is Final!" screams Iron Mask as they charge into battle; the phrase "GO! GO! GO!" makes for perhaps the most succinct encapsulation of Kirby's philosophy one could ask for. Despite apparently being seriously outmatched, Jimmy and his charges make short work of the bikers, and are promptly proclaimed to be the new leaders of their gang, in accordance with the Stereotypical Savages Act of 1932. (Seriously, I love how nakedly Kirby transposes the "lost civilization" tropes onto a story about biker hippies. And the hilarious thing is that it works so perfectly.)

So when Superman arrives, he finds himself facing one hell of a generation gap. The "dropout society" of the Wild Area is one modelled on true anarchy, and here comes Supes, the very symbol of order and patrician authority. "The Establishment", if you will. There's no WAY this is unintentional, even though Kirby, admirably, doesn't belabour the point. Even more interestingly, considering what comes later, Kirby takes Superman's side in this sequence, pitting him against a bloodthirsty gang of militia-types who, believably enough, have used the Wild Area's lawlessness as an excuse to pull a Most Dangerous Game on whoever they can track. ("We dig only our own vigilante group! So--it's like you're doomed!") Superman, of course, makes short work of them, deadpanning, "Sorry, but I CAN'T play your scene!...[That's] something you should dig--but FAST!" Apparently his powers also include super-sarcasm.

Eventually Supes meets up with Jimmy, and here Kirby does something fairly brilliant. We all know that Jimmy attempting to kill Superman, or vice versa, is de rigeur in these things, and indeed, the cover features yet another depiction of Supe and Jimmy's unhealthily abusive relationship. But would it shock you to know that the events depicted on the cover--Jimmy, gleefully commanding his gang to take down Superman--actually happen in the book? And it's not the usual, convoluted explanation of Jimmy being mind-controlled or having amnesia or it being a shapeshifting witch from the future taking his form (that happened, what, every other thursday?) No, while Jimmy apologizes for this particular bit of the ol' ultraviolence a few pages later, the attack was motivated by Jimmy himself, in sound mind and with no real extenuating circumstances--and in fact, Jimmy's latent hostility towards Superman erupts several times throughout the rest of Kirby's run! The King isn't just following the standard tropes of the comic here: he's recasting the antagonism between Superman and Jimmy as the generation gap, the struggle between the counterculture and the establishment, writ large.

Heavy, man.

Superman is knocked out thanks to a convenient Kryptonite gun and wakes up in "Habitat", a jaw-dropping tree-city as only Kirby could render it, whereupon it becomes clear that there's more going on here than a few random biker savages and crazy hippies. No, some advanced force built this place, and Jimmy is determined to get to the bottom of it. But that's for next time...

BEHOLD! The Return of...FOURTH WORLD FRIDAYS!!!

2011-03-11T10:29:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, I began a little project called Fourth World Fridays, on an earlier (and, to my eternal shame, Livejournal) version of this blog. I wanted to review and analyze the entirety of Jack Kirby's Fourth World books, issue by issue, one a week. Why the Fourth World? Well, up until that point, I had been rather dubious about the supposed talents of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. It's not that I didn't think they were talented, and I wasn't denying their massive influence on superhero comics, but as a guy who's always felt that superheroes sometimes get too much of the spotlight in analyses of comics history, I always thought that the monument to Lee and Kirby had been erected overtop of Eisner, Barks, and any number of deserving foreign comics artists and newspaper strip creators. It seemed like the main think L&K get credited with is bringing a new sophistication to superheroes, which they undeniably did, but considering that the other creators I just listed were all so much more sophisticated anyway (in my view), this wasn't the massive achievement that people made it out to be. It seemed like their elevation to godhood had come about due to their domination of a single genre, one which had been unfairly elevated above the others.

Wasn't I such an awesomely rebellious contrarian?

In all seriousness, I do still have some of these reservations about the superhero genre, but I realize I had a pretty superficial understanding of Kirby's work. (I'm still a little skeptical of Stan Lee, who never really produced anything of merit apart from Kirby or the other Marvel artists, but I wouldn't deny he had some good ideas, and was an extremely talented editor and promoter. Anyway, more on Stan in the entries to come.) The work that changed my mind about Kirby was, naturally, The Fourth World, which was indeed one of the most ambitious and visionary works produced in the medium of comics. At a time when superhero comics were beginning to struggle with being "serious" and "deep", and mostly doing a hilariously bad job of it, Kirby launched the first superhero series that had a real thematic depth to it. The characters, in particular, were refreshingly complex, while still being big, bombastic, larger-than-life types (as suited a series about literal gods), and the series had some surprisingly sophisticated things to say about power and authority, self-actualization, the creative process, and the then-current generation (of which Kirby was, obviously, not a part).

Also, it was completely bugfuck insane, in the most delightful way imaginable.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's far from flawless. Very, very far. The plotting is often haphazard, the dialogue is famously clunky--sometimes it seems to go out of its way to be as hilariously awkward as possible--and the whole enterprise is often utterly, majestically silly, from the ridiculous costumes to the general sense of unhipness that was inevitable in a work produced by a middle-aged comics artist attempting to pay tribute to the youth culture of the late 60s and early 70s. But the thing is, the things that often make it silly are the same things that make it great--the sense of complete earnestness, open-heartedness, and commitment to every premise, no matter how bizarre or ridiculous, coupled with the willingness to let imagination lead the way. The result is a series that's an acquired taste, to say the least, and requires a bit of work to really appreciate--but it's also instantly compelling. Even if your first impulse is to make fun of it (I have to admit, mine certainly was) you'll never be bored reading it.

Or, hopefully, reading about it.

I admit right up front, this is a pretty blatant attempt to recycle content for this blog. Fourth World Fridays originally had their own blog, which you can read right here if you're so inclined. I'm doing this again partly because I don't really see the point of having a separate blog and want to amalgamate everything, and partly because I'm quite proud of this series, but I think with a little editing it could be really, really good. Plus, my attitudes have changed--I feel I might have been a little too snarky in the original series, and I want to rewrite them to reflect my renewed respect for Kirby. Sure, you could just click on over there and read the whole thing in rough draft form, but...that...would be...uh...mean?

Anyhow. From now on, Fridays are FOURTH WORLD FRIDAYS here on Phantasmic Blog. GO! GO! GO!!!

Some Adjustment Required

2011-03-09T14:14:00.001-08:00

MILD SPOILERS.

The Adjustment Bureau is a pretty darn good film that could have been a great one. It is, unapologetically, a romance, which is interesting in and of itself; a lot of genre movies have love stories, but they’re usually of the “Here’s where Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese fall in love to move the plot forward” style, a subplot used to provide motivation. Actually, even in The Terminator, the love story is both crucial and affecting, but it’s not what the story is about. The Adjustment Bureau is a love story first and foremost, and the supernatural trappings are secondary to that. It’s still an intelligent movie that addresses existential and religious issues, but it doesn’t do this in the context of an action-thriller, which is how we’ve been conditioned to expect all of our more thoughtful genre movies these days (and a lot of less thoughtful ones, as well).

Which seems to be bothering some critics, who complain about “lowered stakes” (despite the fact that the protagonist faces complete mental erasure) and the lack of a slam-bang action climax. But the movie chooses the structure and story beats of a romantic drama, and I don’t see any particular reason why this is a less valid way of addressing these ideas. In fact, I think that being able to frame Big Ideas in the context of a romance is one of the very best ways of grappling with them, cinematically, and even if the movie pulled this off intellectually it would be laudable. But it also manages to be a genuinely charming romance, thanks due to the terrific performances of Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. Again, this is the kind of story where more idea-focused screenwriters and directors might touch on “romance” as an abstract idea only inasmuch as it serves the story (the Wachowski brothers spring to mind) so kudos to writer-director George Nolfi for giving us a screen couple who are a joy to watch, thereby letting us believe that a real love affair is at stake.

So why does it fall short? Simply put, Nolfi bobbles the themes a bit, and he does it in a way that’s endemic to a lot of Hollywood movies right now. When Damon’s character finally gets the full purpose and M.O. of the Bureau spelled out for him, by Terrence Stamp as the very creepy Senior Adjuster “Thompson”, it turns out to revolve around changing not just random events but people’s minds as well. The Adjusters “can’t alter people’s personality or their emotions”, but they can “change the way you make decisions.” This is their primary tool in keeping human history in order and making sure events unfold in a way that will be broadly beneficial to the human race.

This is problematic for a couple of reasons, the most obvious being: aren’t people’s emotions exactly the kind of thing that would be easiest to meddle with? Understand that the Adjusters don’t *just* tweak fate and probability, they actually get right inside people’s heads when they need to (in a creepy scene that, in retrospect, doesn’t really make sense). You’re telling me that these folks can physically alter people’s decision-making neurons, but can’t make them a little grouchier or more euphoric? There are humans who can do that with relative ease, for Pete’s sake, just by using the right phrasing or exposing people to certain imagery or smells. Also, pharmaceuticals.

Furthermore, we’re told that the Adjusters have been messing with Damon’s personality his whole life, by exposing him to traumas like the death of his family. And then there’s the central event that kicks off the story, Damon’s meeting with Blunt, which inspires him to give an off-the-cuff speech which in turn reignites his political career. We’re later told that Damon’s impulsiveness has been a continuing problem for the Adjuster’s Plan, but here we them using that impulsiveness to get him exactly where they want him.

The real issue, of course, is that Damon’s only meant to encounter Blunt once, then never see her again, but his love for her—combined with a screw-up on the part of the Adjuster assigned specifically to him (Anthony Mackie)—throws the Plan into disarray and puts Damon into conflict with the Bureau. So this is a Love Triumphs Over All story, and given the framework here, Nolfi clearly thought it was most logical to have the Adjusters represent the triumph of cold rationality and intellect, and for Damon’s struggle to represent the counteracting force of emotion.

But that doesn’t really work, thematically. Because Damon’s love for Blunt is just as clearly shown to be the product of chance, and to have been manipulated by the Adjusters. They even say, later on, that the reason the two of them feel so strongly about each other is that an earlier version of the Plan DID mean for the two of them to be together. So their love is just as inspired by the machinations of the Adjustors as anything else.

More than that, though, I don’t think Nolfi has defined “love” properly. I’m of the firm belief—in case it wasn’t obvious—that intellect runs deeper than emotion, and that, forced to choose, it would be better to make a decision based on rational judgment than on emotion. But I also think that’s kind of a false dichotomy, because emotion is a complex thing. Your moods and whims are ephemeral, transient, but there are other emotions, emotions that form the core of your being, and which arise out of your rational judgment (as well as other thought processes that are mysterious to most of us…which is probably a good thing). I may be in a bad mood today because it’s gloomy out or because I have a headache, but listening to some music or taking Aspirin will probably help with that. But when I think about, for instance, the Tea Party, I’m always going to get depressed and angry. When I think about the moon landing, I feel a sense of pride and inspiration. When I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I feel a sense of comfort and familiarity. These “emotions” are consistent, and go to the core of my being. As such, I don’t think you can describe them separately from my rational thought processes. And I like to think that the love I feel for the woman I saw this movie with is fundamental in exactly the same way.

I’m a little leery here, in that I come close to agreeing with a number of borderline sociopaths on this point (most notable the horrible, horrible Objectivists). My larger point is that you need this kind of “emotion” in your life, and it’s foolish to deny that they make up a core part of your being. If the Adjusters can meddle with your rational thought processes, they have the potential to violate your ability to love someone—it’s not about reason vs. emotion, it’s about how the external vagaries of chance affect your fundamental being—your soul, if you like. What would remain of you if everything in your life was different? If the people you’d learned from, the environment you’d grown up in, the events that had happened to you, were different? It’s a fascinating question, and one the movie doesn’t really address satisfactorily, opting ultimately to go for the comforting bromides we’re used to from Hollywood.

But it is sweet, and romantic, and it does raise these issues in the first place. So that’s something.

Winter Isn't Coming Fast Enough For Some People

2011-03-05T16:39:00.001-08:00

I’ve been planning a big—you might even say epic—series of posts about fantasy books (rejected title: Suck on This, J. R. R.) and the “Song of Ice and Fire”/”Game of Thrones” books were and are going to be a central part of it, since that’s the one that rekindled my interest in the genre. But I’m realizing now I had some minor points relating to the ASoIaF fandom and the upcoming TV series that didn’t really fit. Fortunately, the news this week that George R. R. Martin (um, what’s with all the RR’s in fantasy authors’ names? I just noticed that) has finally finished the next book, A Dance With Dragons, provides an excellent pretense to make them apart from those.

If you’re not familiar with the flap around these books: basically, the series is a tremendously fun, compelling fantasy series, one that refreshingly relies on character over world-building, and features a plot that’s a lot more satisfying and twisty than “heroes walk from point a to point b to retrieve object”. In fact, this is one of the only “high fantasy” series I can think of that I would classify as a genuine page-turner, with a lot of wicked cliffhangers that guarantee you’ll be wanting to snatch up subsequent volumes once you’ve started. The last book, A Feast For Crows, ended that way, and here’s where the controversy begins. Each book is structured around a number of viewpoint characters, and this last book ended up running so long that Martin eventually declared that he was chopping it in two, putting off a lot of the most popular characters to the next book, the aforementioned “A Dance With Dragons”. Martin announced that ADwD was basically done and would be arriving shortly. That was over five years ago.

In that time, frustration has built up among the series’ fans, to the point where it’s curdled into…well…this kind of thing.

I don’t blame the readers for being frustrated. It was absolutely silly of Martin to claim that the book was done when there was so much work left—although any creative person, myself included, can vouch for exactly how hard it can be to judge exactly how long it’ll take to revise something. Martin HAS strung his fans along to an extent, though, announcing repeated release dates and then forfeiting on them. But I’m certainly not in a position to criticize there.

What I don’t get, and what bothers me, is the slavering hatred this has engendered in “fans” of the book. You can’t read that blog I linked to above without thinking, “Wait, if you love the books enough that you feel the delay is worth devoting an entire blog to, why are you spending every post putting down the books, their author, the upcoming show, and everyone Martin’s ever met?” (Especially ironic: they failed to blog for almost two months, during which they missed a lot of important news, causing their readers to turn on them. Reap what you sow, dude.) It’s more than a little reminiscent of Homer Simpson’s lament in the episode where he runs for sanitation commissioner: "My campaign is a disaster! I hate the voting public so much! Why won't they vote for me? I'd make 'em pay!"

The guy took six years to finish a 1000+ page book. That's neither unreasonable nor unheard of. Yes, Martin handled it badly, but the people obsessing about this seem to believe that he’d done all this specifically to hurt them somehow, because he feeds on the tears of fanboys, or something. The common lament is that Martin had made so much money that he no longer cared about the series and was simply rolling in hundred dollar bills when he should be writing. Now that this has pretty much been definitively proved wrong, the conspiracy theories are coming out (“he finished it years ago and waited for the show to come out to cash in”—seriously, that’s the argument some people are making) and the muttering has shifted to “Well, I’m sure it’ll suck.” (A Feast For Crows has some problems compared to the first three, so this of course makes it TEH WORST BOOK EVAR and PROOF THAT MARTIN HAS LOST IT)

Of course, the people screaming the loudest seem to care the least about getting, y’know, a good book. Neil Gaiman wrote this and John Scalzi wrote that, which both hit the nail on the head, but there’s another issue here that bugs me beyond defending Martin. I mean, I like the books, but they’re not classics of western literature that are beyond criticism, and as I hope I’ve made clear, Martin certainly isn’t for his handling of the situation. But the arguments employed by some of these faux-fans make it sound like they have no taste, no discrimination, no sense of how literature is supposed to work. It’s not a factory, churning out product to keep you fed or clothed. I thought most people understood that it’s worth waiting for a good story—all of which are different.

One of the constant complaints compares Martin to Steven Erickson, who writes about one of his “Malazan” books a year. “If Erickson, who’s a GILLION SPILLION TIMES BETTER THAN MARTIN, can do it, why can’t he?” I wasn’t hugely impressed with the one-and-a-half books in Erickson’s series I read, but even if it was the greatest fantasy series of all time, and Martin wasn’t in his 60s compared to the relatively young Erickson, it’s still apples and oranges. Different writers work differently. I’m a lifelong fan of Douglas Adams, who famously said, “I love deadlines. I love the whizzing sound they make as they fly past.” Some people work more slowly. And again—“Dance” is apparently longer than the entirety of Lord of the Rings. Which took Tolkien at least a decade to write. Objectively speaking, Martin’s still working at a pretty brisk pace here. I wonder how these people would handle being fans of Thomas Pynchon or Stanley Kubrick.

But, you protest, “Dance” is part of a series! It’s continuing an ongoing narrative! Martin’s entered into an unwritten contract with the reader by starting it! No, you, the reader, have entered into the same unwritten contract you enter into whenever you engage with an unfinished piece of serial fiction. If you’d picked up the first book as soon as it hit shelves, you’d have been taking a number of risks. The book could have been such a bomb that the publisher decided not to continue the series, just as a TV show or a comic book can be cancelled before it reaches a conclusion. Martin could have been in a plane crash. The common fear that Martin might have simply lost interest in the series isn’t entirely invalid—that would indeed have been shabby—but what’s dismaying about that assumption is the way people grabbed onto it as the obvious conclusion, when “writer’s block” seems like a more obvious, and charitable conclusion.

Speaking of Martin dying, this is a particularly noxious example of how self-absorbed and entitled these people are. As mentioned, Martin’s in his 60s, and not precisely a specimen of health. So the refrain has been, “Martin has to finish the series before he dies!” (And that’s the more mature phrasing. A common variation is “Hurry up and finish the book so you can die already, you fat fuck!”) The basis for comparison here is Robert Jordan, whose “Wheel of Time” books hadn’t concluded when he died. Putting aside the fact that I found the one Wheel of Time book I read to be insufferable, I’m fairly certain that Jordan didn’t die to personally inconvenience anyone, and that whining about a man’s death depriving you of entertainment is borderline-sociopathic behaviour. If I were George R. R. Martin, I don’t think I’d be particularly motivated to service a fanbase that’s ghoulishly speculating about my death, let alone one that seemed to wish it on me.

The long and the short of it is, this is an ideal example of just how obnoxiously entitled the world of genre fanboyism has become. It’d be nice if, now that the book has come into being, they had a moment of self-reflectiveness and realized how silly they look in retrospect. But somehow I doubt that’ll happen.

Everybody's Got a Right To Be Happy

2011-02-26T12:14:00.000-08:00

I can understand why some people say they don’t like musicals. Honestly I can. Some of the earliest films I watched were classic musicals--West Side Story, My Fair Lady and Oliver! all spring to mind, plus of course the Disney animated flicks—but even back then, I remember having a bit of ambivalence towards the genre. When they worked, they were amazing, but there were lots of pitfalls into which they could fall for me, too. I never cared for the gee-golly-let’s-put-on-a-show style of musical, with people bursting into joyous song over nothing in particular, and it still makes me cringe when a number begins with a big, overdramatic flourish that brings the action to a halt. (Similar to this, it bothers me when a musical number is cranked up to a massive crescendo at the end, regardless of whether the music can support it or not. Prime offender: Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.) The musical is perhaps the purest realization of fantasy in storytelling, far beyond asking us to believe in dragons or talking animals. The world of a musical is enough like ours that we expect it to play by our rules, but of course it requires people to act in a purely unrealistic, expressionistic way, one that relates to an emotional state. If we’re not on the same wavelength as the characters, we’re going to react similarly as we do to commercials in which the actors are professing undying admiration for floor wax, or whatever. We suspect we’re being sold a bill of goods, that we’re dragged along instead of swept up in the current. It’s a tough tightrope to walk.

And yet the end result can be so much more than entertaining fluff or mindless spectacle. Whenever people say they “don’t like musicals”, I can’t quite overcome the suspicion that they simply haven’t seen the right ones. It’s a situation similar to horror movies or comic books, actually. To someone who’s had only a superficial, mainstream exposure to the genre, it’s tempting to dismiss it as being a certain way, when the more intriguing, less heightened works that might appeal more directly to an open-minded audience are often perversely more obscure. Horror movies, at a glance, can seem like brain-dead shriekfests that revel in sleaze and base exploitation. Comics can seem like juvenile, impenetrable hackwork with a restrictive focus on the subgenre of superheroes. And musicals can seem like hollow, campy throwbacks. Yet, when done with wit and a modicum of ambition and imagination, all three of these can be among the smartest, most challenging, most resonant forms of storytelling pop culture has to offer.

Exhibit A in the argument for musicals as an intellectual artform: Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins.

I’ve now seen this show twice, and I’m pretty sure it’s up there with my very favourite musicals, precisely because of just how far it deviates from what we normally think of as a standard musical. It’s highly conceptual, plotless, avant-garde even. And yet I find it to be highly accessible, to the point where I’d heartily recommend it to people who think they hate musicals.

The show is done in a revue style, with a couple of linking ideas, most notably that of a shooting gallery on a midway; the show opens with “The Proprietor”, a carnival barker, exhorting the passers-by to try their luck at shooting the President of the United States. And sure enough, the people who take him up on his challenge are all people who attempted, successfully or otherwise, to assassinate various Presidents, all of whom co-exist, for the purposes of the show, in some impossible dreamspace outside of time. For the record, the full list of assassins for most of the show consists of John Wilkes Booth (who shot Lincoln, of course), Charles Guiteau (Garfield), Leon Czolgosz (McKinley), Guiseppe Zangara (FDR, attempted), Samuel Byck (Nixon, attempted), Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme (Ford, attempted), Sara Jane Moore (Ford, attempted, again), and John Hinckley (Reagan, attempted). They’re joined by various civilians and a figure called The Balladeer, who, by the end of the show, has transformed into Lee Harvey Oswald. (It’s certainly interesting that you don’t notice, at first, that Oswald isn’t among the group, despite being the most famous.)

What’s cool about this is that, even with no real plot, each character comes pre-packaged with a story arc, one that has an impact whether you know all the historical details or not. Every character gets their scene where they take a shot at the President, except Byck, who tried to hijack an airplane and crash it into the white house; his scenes consist of apparently real tape-recorded monologues that he mailed off to various celebrities, one of whom was Sondheim’s mentor Leonard Bernstein. (I have a suspicion that this is where Sondheim got the inspiration for the show in the first place.) Every character is fleshed out via a scene or two illustrating their various neuroses and obsessions, either one based on real history or one in which they interact with the other assassins. Guiteau has a showstopping number after he’s been caught and is on his way to the gallows; Fromme (a former member of the Manson family) and Hinckley (who, famously, claimed his love for Jody Foster as his motive) share a love song to their respective objects of obsession; Booth is seen trying to make his confession in the barn where he was cornered before being gunned down. Even with all these scattered glimpses, we learn everything we need to know about the characters and the historical context, while still being compelled to hit Wikipedia as soon as we get home to learn more. Simply based on the premise of the show, the omnipresent threat of death, chaos, and insanity hangs over everything, charging every scene with tension and dread, and like a lot of the darker musicals, the seemingly upbeat and sentimental numbers serve as a counterpoint to the rather horrific themes. The show is a triumph of what these guys call “the off-screen movie” (or in this case, the off-stage play).

My favourite number in the show is “The Ballad of Czolgolz” (which is pronounced “SHOW-gosh,” by the way), the crucial number that, I believe, serves as the Act One finale when the show is performed with an intermission (there wasn’t one this time). Czolgosz, a follower of anarchist Emma Goldman who toiled in a horrific bottle-making plant in the pre-Union days, shot McKinley at the World’s Fair in Buffalo after waiting patiently in line to “shake hands with the president”. His was probably the most overtly political assassination attempt (even Booth was acting more out of revenge and wounded pride) and he’s arguably the most sympathetic of the assassins. His killing of McKinley unifies the show in a number of ways—the fact that it took place at a literal fairground brings back the shooting gallery motif, and it’s a perfect metaphor for the promise of America from which Czolgosz feels he’s been exempted. When the balladeer sings “in the USA/you can make your way/to the head of the line” the show’s theme becomes explicit: killing the president is, in its own twisted way, a realization of democracy, egalitarianism, and the American dream.

TV Thursday: Dollhouse

2011-02-24T06:29:00.000-08:00

(Hey, when I called this feature “TV Thursdays”, I never said it would run EVERY Thursday, now did I?)

Is it too soon to start banging the drum for a series that ended last year as one of the greatest genre shows of the decade?

It’s hard not to feel that SF television has fallen somewhat from glorious heights. In my rant last time, I called the last decade of TV probably the best in the history of the medium, in America at least, and while I still feel that to be true, things look substantially shabbier if we turn our eyes specifically to genre TV. Things started strong, but Firefly and Carnivale only produced a relative handful of episodes, and BSG and Lost took a depressing downward turn in quality as they went on. Other than some animated series, most of which were either superhero-based or comedic in nature (like The Venture Brothers and Futurama), SF TV proceeded to take a rapid downhill slide in the last five years. Only Doctor Who really carried the standard, and as I said before, I had some pretty big problems with that show for much of its run.

Let’s not even talk about Heroes.

I’m not sure what’s caused television SF to dry up the way it has. Maybe people feel that the future has already arrived in a supremely disappointing fashion, and no longer feel the promise of tomorrow? That would certainly explain the distinctively dystopian tone adopted by more recent SF series. Firefly had a somewhat grim backstory, BSG was exponentially more apocalyptic, and Dollhouse actually manages to top it in the “humanity is doomed, DOOMED I say” sweepstakes.

You may have looked at that last statement and blinked, if you’ve only watched a little bit of Dollhouse. Certainly, based on the initial handful of episodes—which is what the casual viewer is likely to have seen—that statement probably seems pretty bizarre. Dollhouse, at its inception, seemed like the most superficial, conventional, network TV-ish thing Joss Whedon had ever done to that point. The show revolves around the adventures of Echo (Eliza Dushku), an “active” working for the secret and ominous Dollhouse, operating somewhere beneath LA. This is a privately operated facility that possesses the technology to implant people with new memories and personalities, as required by their clients; essentially, it’s a build-a-person service. The Dollhouse makes a point of performing public services by letting out its actives to do social work, help out at hospitals, and the like, but there’s no getting around the fact that the two most obvious uses for a person who can be programmed to order and then wiped clean of memory afterwards are “love slave” and “assassin”, with various other forms of criminal behaviour filling up the slate. And indeed, these are precisely the kinds of jobs for which various spectacularly wealthy clients tend to engage Echo. But Echo is beginning to show signs of glitching, not just remembering the personalities she’s been implanted with after they’ve supposedly been wiped, but actually incorporating aspects of these personalities into the supposedly blank, unthinking “doll-state” in which she’s held between engagements. She seems to be quite literally developing a mind of her own…which wouldn’t be a problem, except that the last time that happened, to an active named Alpha, the result was a supergenius serial killer who, by the way, is still at large.

Dollhouse had two big issues which are frequently cited, even by the show’s fans, as crippling flaws…but I tend to see them as features, rather than bugs. Admittedly they presented a pretty major challenge to the audience, which seemed to clash with the rather dopey, superficial, Charlie’s Angels tone that the show adopted early in its run, such that the show gave the impression that it really didn’t know what it was doing. With the benefit of hindsight, though, these two supposed “problems” were actually fundamental to the ideas the show was exploring.

One of them was the moral ambiguity of the Dollhouse. If you hadn’t seen the show, reading the above description probably makes you picture a series in which Echo slowly attempted to use the tools at her disposal to fight back against the villainous Dollhouse, possibly with the covert aid of someone outside the organization, or a sympathetic type on the inside. The show does feature both of these in the form of Agent Paul Ballard, played by BSG’s Tahmoh Pennikett, a federal agent who’s been obsessively searching for the Dollhouse with the goal of rescuing Echo in particular, and Boyd Langdon, Echo’s handler, played by the amusingly stone-faced Harry Lennix. But, rather disorientingly, the other Dollhouse operatives are all relatively sympathetic as well, even the seemingly amoral mad-scientist programmer Topher Brink (Fran Kranz) and the steely-eyed manager Adele DeWitt (Olivia Williams), who’s not coincidentally written and performed as a cold-hearted brothel madam but claims repeatedly to see the dolls as innocents under her protection. The initial impression one gets is of a show that was desperately trying to excuse or ignore the fundamental loathsomeness of the characters, who are, after all, high-tech slavers. Actually there are a number of mitigating factors here, though they bafflingly aren’t made clear until a little further down the line. The main one is that the dolls are all, at least in theory, volunteers, though we know from the start that Echo, in her original personality of Caroline, was seemingly pressured or duped into service; it is later revealed that the other main dolls on the show are all suffering from some degree of psychological ailment. Sierra (Dichen Lachman) was supposedly a paranoid schizophrenic, Victor (the astounding Enver Gjokaj) is a solider suffering from severe PSTD, and November (Miracle Laurie) is recovering from the loss of a child. Apparently, serving a five-year term as a doll functions as a highly effective form of therapy; we never get the details, but the basic idea is that taking a vacation from your own brain can have a highly beneficial effect. And once you come out on the other side, you’re paid enough money to set you up for life. The problem is that this is immediately made to ring hollow, not just because of the dubious legality of the operation, but the fact that the abuse of dolls quickly becomes a recurring theme on the show.

And the writers are clearly aware of this. By the end of the first season, it’s made pretty clear that the real theme being explored is the degree to which otherwise well-meaning people will excuse and then even make use of harmful technology and a system that exploits others. Characters who react with revulsion to the idea of the Dollhouse are gradually seduced by it, and time after time, when the pressure is applied, no one seems able to avoid taking advantage of the Dollhouse tech. The show makes the case that the inevitability of technological progress is powered by a fundamental weakness in humanity, the same one that leads us to turn every new invention into a weapon, and that people would rather adapt to horrifying perversions of humanity in the name of progress than give up the benefits that come with it. As Echo says in the final episode: “I don’t think it’s good or bad. It’s just…what’s next.” This is pretty bleak stuff even before the show raises the specter of the complete collapse of human civilization—but more on that in a minute.

The show’s other big area of controversy is the fact that the lead character is, at least at first, a complete and literal nonentity. Or, depending on how you look at it, she’s a different person every week. This admittedly makes it a little difficult to relate to the character, but her core persona isn’t drastically far removed from, say, Data in Star Trek, and the basic idea of a “trapped woman” inherently makes you sympathize with her. I think a much larger issue is the fundamental strain put on the lead actress, someone who has to balance, for all intense and purposes, playing multiple roles that are somehow united by an overarching, collective intelligence. It’s a role that requires a masterful actress. It was a role played by Eliza Dushku.

So…yeah. But the show was actually able to work around Dushku’s limited talents (even putting aside the fact that her acting improved quite a bit as the show continued) in a number of ways. It actually helps that she spends a lot of her screentime as the blank, childlike Echo, a role that’s almost impossible to screw up from an acting perspective. Too, like most of Whedon’s shows, it makes great use of its ensemble, particularly in putting the onus on Ballard to be the pro-active hero for the first season, and then later having the cast form a cohesive team with a clear goal of preventing the apocalypse.

Oh yeah, that. When Dollhouse finished out its first season with crummy ratings, it was naturally assumed they wouldn’t be returning (and indeed, if “Omega”, technically the first season finale, had been the last episode, I doubt I’d be writing about it in such depth right now). However, due to a convoluted issue with the network, the writers owed them another episode for the DVD, and they used this excuse to craft an “epilogue” for the show, “Epitaph One”. In this episode, the action moves to ten years in the future, when the Dollhouse technology has evolved into a horrific weapon that can transform whole populations into 28 Days Later-style mindless killing machines via a remote broadcast—and that’s just the start of the ways in which it’s been abused. A band of scavengers, rummaging through the wreckage of Los Angeles, stumble across the abandoned Dollhouse, and find a message of hope.

“Epitaph One” is kind of fascinating because of its ephemeral nature. Because a lot of people hadn’t seen it, it wasn’t clear—when the show did, in fact, return for a second season—whether it was supposed to be a firmly established point to which the show was heading, or rather a “what-if” worst-case scenario. The second season rather masterfully exploits that uncertainty, hinting at inevitable dark things to come one moment and then introducing ideas that undermine it the next. I’d personally recommend watching “Epitaph One” a little further along in Season Two—after the episode “The Left Hand” would be my personal choice—but you’ll get a different experience out of S2 depending on when you watch it.

One way or another, though, this is a dark, dark show with a bitterly cynical take on both human nature and technological progress. It’s also one of the few SF shows in recent years that’s actually tried to be about ideas. It’s kind of amazing that it lasted as long as it did, but it left behind a surprisingly satisfying, if wildly uneven, serialized story with a beginning, middle, and end. The cult for this show will likely remain tiny compared to those for Whedon’s other work, but I predict it’ll last for a long time. Barring the end of the world.

Dwayne MacDuffie--RIP

2011-02-23T09:49:00.000-08:00

TV Thursday: Carnivale

2011-01-12T21:46:00.000-08:00

Cultural snobs are usually known for decrying the degree to which arts and entertainment have deteriorated in the modern era, with varying degrees of fairness; as usual, one has to look back at past triumphs with the understanding that most of the crap has been filtered out over the years, leaving us with the best of film, novels, or what have you, whereas the present remains mired in Sturgeon’s Law. But seemingly everyone agrees that television is one medium that’s shown an undeniable improvement in the last 20 years. With a very small handful of exceptions, much of what was broadcast before 1990 was pretty much disposable crap, or at best, ephemerally entertaining. Even the “great” sitcoms of the era are now marred by laugh tracks, the “great” dramas by staginess and the limitations of network television, the “great” genre shows by repetitive plots and a lack of narrative development. At least, that’s my take on it—some people can get past this stuff more easily. But I love old movies, and I’m usually able to get past their staginess or cheapness without much difficulty; I feel like much of what limits old TV has to do with the need to talk down to the audience, or at the very least, the persistent fear that following an ongoing narrative will require more brainpower than the average couch potato was believed to possess.

(I guess I should qualify this by pointing out that the British were way ahead of us North Americans in the TV department; when I think back on TV shows from before 1990 that I genuinely like, the top slots are immediately occupied by Monty Python and The Prisoner, and of course there are dozens of other great British televisual achievements like I, Claudius, dating from the era in which Charlie’s Angels was ruling the airwaves. As for other country’s TV, I obviously don’t know enough to weigh in. And as for Canadian TV from before I was born, well, I don’t know much about that either. This above rant applies pretty specifically to American television.)

But then came 1990, the year in which Twin Peaks hit, and suddenly it became clear that TV could handle the weird, the obtuse, and the narratively complex—and that something this wild could go beyond barely surviving and become genuine water cooler television. Round about the same time, the Simpsons began to hit its stride, and Seinfeld made its quiet debut, two shows that would finally, mercifully raise the bar for TV comedy. The floodgates opened, and the next few years saw a staggering improvement in the quality of television that continues to this day. Most cultural critics would point to the last decade as perhaps the best ten years for quality programming in television history, and I tend to agree.

Which makes it weird that I’ve watched so little TV in the last ten years. A lot of it has to do with the rise of DVD collections and streaming TV online (and being pretty hard up for cash, thereby putting cable as a low priority), but still, I’ve completely skipped a lot of the most buzzed-about shows of the last few years and before. I have to admit, I usually have a bad track record with getting in on the ground floor of a show; either they end up disappointing or get abruptly cancelled, so I like to wait until something’s established itself a little before catching up.

So…this is that. A series of posts on TV shows. There’ll be two categories here: shows that I only discovered in the last year or so despite passionate fanbases, and shows that I enjoyed in the past but want to revisit to see how my opinions have changed. Despite my rant at the beginning, I *will* be going back to shows that aired before 1990, but as I’m unlikely to want to delve into old episodes of Mary Tyler Moore while I still have so many great modern shows awaiting perusal, the focus is more likely to be on shows from the past few years. (Consider my Doctor Who post to be kind of a warm up. Though I’m likely to post about that show when it returns, too.)

So, to start: the rather warped, lavish Twin Peaks-inspired HBO series CARNIVALE.

Set in the midst of the Great Depression, the story concerns an Okalahoma rube and runaway from a chain gang, Ben Hawkins (Nick Stahl), falling in with the titular traveling carnival. Ben’s farmboy façade conceals a secret; he has the Christ-like ability to heal with his hands, but at the cost of taking some other creature’s life, be it an acre of wheat, a pond full of fish, or another human being, depending on the seriousness of the healing being performed. (Yes, it’s essentially the same ability possessed by Ned, the lead character of Pushing Daisies, though needless to say this is a very different show.)

Ben’s understandably rattled by the implications that his power carries with it, and the responsibility of choosing who lives and who dies, leading him to conceal his powers whenever possible. But the Carnivale may be a more suitable venue for him than he might have expected, as several of the other carny folk display hints of supernatural knowledge as well. Then there’s the mysterious owner of the Carnivale, referred to only as Management, who never comes out of his caravan, but who may be manipulating Ben’s destiny from afar. Everything seems to be heading for a collision with a parallel subplot involving a priest in California, Justin Crowe (geek favourite Clancy Brown), who’s beginning to manifest supernatural powers of his own.

While Carnivale remains a favourite of mine, there’s no denying that the show has some serious flaws, and chief among them is the dramatic structure. Aside from the glacial pacing of the first season (things pick up substantially in S2), there’s the problem that the whole season is built around characters going through the traditional Joseph Campbellian “refusal of the call to adventure”, particularly Ben; after setting up a character with superpowers and an epic destiny, it seems pretty askew to spend 12 episodes having the character refusing to have anything to do with them. Even into the second season, Ben remains one of the most passive, dim, whiny protagonists this side of Anakin Skywalker; it says something about Nick Stahl’s acting ability that the character is likeable at all.

Until shit finally gets real partway into the second season, much of the narrative heavy lifting is left to be carried by the various mysteries and intrigues of life at the Carnivale; even here, though, there’s a problem, as the show’s writers spend an inordinate level of time on the Dreyfuss family, considering of barker Stumpy (Toby Huss) and his wife (Cynthia Ettinger) and daughter (Carla Gallo), “coochy girls” (which basically translates to 30s-era strippers and prostitutes). Stumpy’s role essentially requires him to pimp them out, which provides an initial kick but quickly devolves into annoying melodrama that only tangentally relates to the main storyline. Again, the actors do their jobs and keep us from getting completely frustrated with these characters, but this is still a subplot shoehorned in for the sake of adding sex appeal to a story that’s supposed to be about slightly more important concerns.

Still, for all that, it’s impossible not to be taken in by everything else going on. Using a traveling carnival as a setting for a genre show is, really, a bit of a masterstroke; it’s an interesting, delightfully weird setting in and of itself, and its wanderings from place to place bring it into contact with all kinds of potentally interesting stories. The show also reveals a clear love and understanding of horror and fantasy on the part of the creators; Ray Bradbury is an undeniable influence (Stumpy actually gives a speech at one point that steals directly from Something Wicked This Way Comes, another story about a supernatural traveling carnival), and in its contrast between down-home Americana and the weird, dark corners of the world, it captures the tone of Stephen King’s best writing in a way I don’t think anyone else has ever done on film. And of course there’s the Twin Peaks influence; casting Michael Anderson as Sampson, the carnival’s general manager, is one obvious nod, but the show provides a deeper homage to that earlier show in Management, a mostly-unseen force who hides behind a red curtain and has a voice like something out of your worst nightmares. No matter how thoroughly and pedantically Management’s backstory is eventually explained in the second season, the essential creepiness remains.

Which is good, because it’s remarkable to me, looking back on it, how little flat-out horror there is in this horror series. Atmosphere isn’t nothing, of course, but as I mentioned above, the show set up a terrific premise that would allow for a great number of standalone horror story episodes, and yet in the first season it rarely took advantage of this. When it did, the results were pretty great; the one truly “standalone” story in S1, the two part “Babylon”/“Pick a Number”, ends on a satisfyingly terrifying note, and there are some excellently skin-crawling bits in S2 (the best involving a porcelain baby’s mask…you’ll know it when you see it, believe me). But strangely, the show’s writers were pretty reticent to go all-out with fully-formed horror plots. I’d make less of this if there weren’t several episodes in S1 where almost nothing seems to be happening, with “Insomnia” being a particular offender. A good dose of flat-out horror—not mystery and Lynchian atmosphere, actual horror--would have improved S1 immensely.

Speaking Joseph Campbell, the show also suffers more than somewhat from its reliance on now-familiar genre tropes. Here, the problem doesn’t really manifest itself until a second viewing; on the first go round, you’re so consumed with the mysteries and atmosphere of the show, and there are more than a few red herrings that suggest a far more interesting moral conflict. After watching the first season, I was utterly convinced that the twist the show was heading towards was the revelation was that Ben was the one “born into evil” and Brother Justin was the scion of good. After all, Ben’s initially benign-seeming power actually comes with a cost, and it’s one that could very easily lead one into temptation; meanwhile, Justin’s initially creepy-seeming power (he can bring to life people’s sins in tangible form, forcing them to confront them) is, when you think about it, a pretty useful power for a priest who’s angling to put people on a righteous path! This is confused even further by Ben’s less-than-heroic nature and Brother Justin’s attempts to do good in S1, and more crucially, the fact that the two characters’ parents—gradually revealed over the course of the first season—more or less line up with this interpretation; Justin’s the son of an avatar of light, and Ben’s dad is slowly revealed to be one bad dude.

And as it turns out, I was far from the only one coming to this conclusion. As I quickly discovered in poking around the internet, this was pretty much the default interpretation of the show going into S2. Which must have made it all the more surprising when the truth turns out to be far simpler than it appears; Ben really IS the good guy, Justin really is a demon in human form, and both slot quickly into their allotted two-dimensional roles in S2. At the same time, even as the show gains narrative momentum, much of the mystery, ambiguity and potential moral conflict of the first season falls quickly by the wayside, reverting to a fairly bog-standard hero’s journey, good-vs-evil, fate-of-the-world-at-stake conflict. Similar to Lost, the show concealed its ultimate predictability behind technical proficiency and alluring, original trappings.

Fans of the show predictably bemoan its abrupt cancellation at the end of S2, when the creators supposedly had 4 more years of storylines waiting to unfold. But honestly, for all the dangling plot threads left after the final episode, the show does come to an indisputable climax, resolving much of the tension that had been building, and feels “finished” the way that, say, the first Star Wars movie does—there’s the promise of more, but at least the main story is complete.

Of course, if the show had handled things a little more intelligently, either moving the story along at a faster pace or favoring horror over melodramatics, maybe it wouldn’t have had to worry about getting renewed anyway. All in all, Carnivale is a weird, uneasy collision of ideas, many of them very well-done, but failing to cohere properly. It’s maybe better to see this show less as a narrative journey and more as a destination in and of itself—a wonderfully bizarre sideshow set up off the main trail, a tactile and atmospheric world that packs up its tent under the cover of night and is gone before you know it.

Plans for 2011

2011-01-06T12:06:00.000-08:00

I know, I know...bad blogger.

There's two reasons I update this thing so rarely. One is that, when I get spare time between illustration commissions and whatever "real" job I happen to be working at the time, the priority is always going to be my comics. (That's Lemuria and Freak U. for those of you just now sneaking into the theater. The latter of which just came back, a day late, and the former of which will be returning this coming Monday, for the record. Hey, I might as well kick off the new year with some shilling!) The other is that I always feel like, if I'm going to blog, I want to do transcend links and "Hey, last night's Doctor Who sure was the ROXXOR"-type posts and do a real essay-type thing with pictures and gewgaws, like my epic Tintin post. And those take time and effort that I not only can't really spare, but a level of concentration that I don't have.

But I am going to make an attempt to do some more posts this year; I've got a couple of ideas for thematically linked series of posts, one on fantasy, and one on TV shows, which will hopefully help to generate new content. I'm also hoping to do more Bollblogging, and I'll be going back to reviewing comics for a certain major movie/pop culture site after the tragic failure of out column at JoBlo.com. (More about that next week.) Looking back--and this post sort of inadvertantly turned into a retrospective on this blog, didn't it?--I'm actually pretty proud of some of the writing I've done here over the past couple of years, so I say, it's time to get a little more serious about it...

Oh, and happy 2011!

Honest Question

2010-12-06T14:46:00.001-08:00

If someone could explain to me how a serialized show about a zombie apocalypse in the Romero mold--a premise that's been begging to be put on television--based on a solid comic book, airing on AMC (current home of some of the best TV available), and overseen and mostly written by Frank Motherfucking Darabont could end up sucking so badly, I would really appreciate it.

Base Metals

2010-10-08T14:39:00.000-07:00

Because geeks like lists and categorizations, it was inevitable that comics would inevitably become grouped into pseudo-scholarly categories. The exact origins of the “Gold”, “Silver” and “Bronze” ages are something I’ve been trying to discover for a while now, but it’s surprisingly hard to track down who came up with this in the first place. The Overstreet Price Guide seems to be the culprit, but I’m not certain that that’s the case. For the most part, comic nerds seem far more interested in arguing about the demarcation lines between the different period, with no particular authority being cited. Anyone (like, say, myself) who enjoys having a running, nitpicky, good-natured debate about stuff can while away many a happy hour debating the exact definitions of these terms.

For the record—and to prove my nerdy bona fides—the Golden Age begins in 1938 with Action Comics #1, which introduced Superman (this being the one point everyone can seemingly agree on). This continues until 1956, when we switch over to the Silver Age with Showcase #4, which introduced the new version of The Flash.

Then the arguments begin.

Since the “Bronze Age” had only just begun when this style of categorization came into fashion, no one seems able to agree on exactly where it begins. The most commonly cited reference points are Conan #1 (1970), The Neal Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow (also 1970), the death of Gwen Stacey in The Amazing Spider-Man #121 (1973) and the introduction of the “new” X-Men in Giant Size X-Men #1 (1975). (A reference point I’ve never heard suggested is the publication of the Overstreet Guide itself…) Tentatively, people apply either Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns (both 1986) as a demarcation for the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the “Iron Age”, though that’s still a alittle shaky. Everything after the Iron Age hasn’t really been defined, despite much talk of the “Chromium Age” and “Diamond Age”.

This stuff is fun to hash over, and it can be useful in casual discussion, but I think it’s important to remember that this is a very loose system at best. For starters, the Gold/Silver/Bronze terminology applies to superhero comics only. It's borderline useless in describing any other genre of comics--do we talk about "Silver Age Carl Barks"? "Golden Age EC"? "Bronze Age Will Eisner"? And what about the many, many comics published before Superman ever made his appearance? Getting too hung up on Gold/Silver/Bronze ages may have helped relegate a lot of significant comics to the dustbin of history.

Furthermore, I'm not sure that you can accurately lay out an "era" of comics while you're still in it. I'm pretty sure the "Gold/Silver" delineation came about in the early 70s, which happens to be the point that marked the end of those eras...and as pivotal as Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns are, it took quite a while for people to start declaring them markers of the end of the Bronze Age. You need the context of distance to be able to call this stuff. That's why I get a little annoyed by the "Chromium Age" or "Diamond Age" talk for recent comics; in particular, I think trying to hold up the collapse of the speculator's market, or the publication of "Kingdom Come", as a demarcation line is a mistake. KC isn't that significant a comic--it only felt that way at the time because people were getting sick of all the grim 'n' gritty nonsense of the last decade. And as undeniably significant as the speculator's boom and bust were, they don't really fit the spirit of the "rules", which use single, epochal issues to mark the beginnings of new trends.

Of course, even there we run into a problem, because the system seems to have been developed primarily for the sake of pricing old issues, which means it wasn’t really looking at comics for their artistic value; it’s simply geared towards the initial superhero boom post-Superman, and the resurgence of the genre post-comics code. While you can see the logic, it means that Showcase #4 is considered pivotal, while Fantastic Four #1 isn't.

I think we need to work on a new system of categorization, one that engages more with creative trends and milestones, and takes into account ALL kinds of comics. My suggestions for pivotal comics under this imaginary new system:

1894--Hogan's Alley debut (eventually became "The Yellow Kid", arguably the first newspaper comic strip)
1929—Tarzan newspaper strip begins.
1934--Famous Funnies #1 (First modern comic book with original material)
1936--Wow! What a Magazine #3 (first comics work of Will Eisner)
1938--Action Comics #1 (Introduction of Superman)
1942--Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold (Carl Barks' first Disney Duck comic)
1947--Young Romance #1 (Beginning of the Romance Comic in its modern form)
1950--Crypt of Terror #1 (Later renamed Tales From the Crypt, marking the new era for EC.)
1950--It Rhymes With Lust (Arguably the first modern graphic novel)
1956--Showcase #4 (introduction of the new Flash)
1961--Fantastic Four #1 (Duh)
1973--Giant-Size X-Men #1 (Launch of new team and Chris Claremont)
1978--A Contract With God (Popularization of the Graphic Novel)
1981--Love & Rockets #1 (Beginning of the black and white indie boom of the 80s)
1985--Watchmen/The Dark Knight Returns/Crisis on infinite Earths
1992--Youngblood #1 (The first published Image comic, I think)

A little more research will turn up tons of others, no doubt. Anyone out there have any further suggestions?

As Promised....

2010-09-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

...you can now buy Freak U. Volume 2 in a handsome 192-page trade paperback format. By clicking on that link. Right there. Or this picture:

Go do. Need money.

Whineblogging

2010-08-31T16:30:00.000-07:00

FFWHOOOOOOFFFF. (That was me blowing the dust off this blog.)

Well. The Toronto FanExpo has been and gone--being the thing that, together with a trip to Nepal and a new girlfriend, has been occupying my summer. So yes--I do apologize for the lack of updates, both here and at Phantasmic Tales, and I do promise to be more regular with this stuff from here on out.

How was the show? It was...a little disappointing, to be honest. For one thing, there were some serious organizational issues, which Chris Bird has already touched on, but perhaps not emphatically enough. On Saturday, one of the people at my table was unable to get back into the convention despite being an exhibitor. That had to do with the fact that they packed us into the tiny North Hall, as Bird says, and then oversold--but it was also partly due to the pointlessly strict security. Exhibitors weren't simply allowed to show their passes to get in. Oh no. They had to get their passes punched for that day, and then get their hands stamped. Like what happens when you go to a club or a theme park. And they did it with the weakest, most water- (and sweat-) soluble ink I've ever seen. My co-exhibitor Justin was particularly pissed because he'd been planning to help set up, go home and shower, and then come back.

Regular patrons who bought three-day passes had it even worse: they were forced to wear a bracelet that they couldn't take off for three days. Seriously.

All of this was simply to prevent people trading passes, which is immensely stupid, particularly in the case of exhibitors. As my other co-exhibitor Nick pointed out, ticket sales are pretty marginal compared to the amount of money they make from exhibitors. By inconveniencing and insulting everyone to stop a relatively small number of people who'd be willing to go through all the rigamarole of trading passes back and forth, they probably lost more ticket sales than they saved. Again, this is particularly moronic when it comes to exhibitors, who have to sit at the table for hours--if I can find a friend who's willing to trade off my pass, is it really an immense loss to the con if we split our time there? Exhibitors are where you make your money, FanExpo. You gain so much more by accomodating them than you do by playing Scrooge.

The annoying part is that these shenanigans cast a pall over everyone, resulting in no one being in a purchasing mood. Our sales were way, way down from last year as a result.

So yeah. Not really worth spending all summer preparing for in that respect.

There were some bright spots, though. Fellow Durham Comics Guild members Dylan, Kris and Nathan sold out of their 16-page book, Larz, which I'd printed on our newly-purchased communal printer. Which seems to work OK, and may enable us to print our own stuff from now on. I also personally sold several copies of Freak U. Volume 2 (which I'll post a link to as soon as IndyPlanet approves it, promise). What was most important and exciting, though, were the many people I met and made a real connection with, many of which might lead to possibilities or new talent for the guild. I actually met not one but two very talented sets of creators making a comic called "SpyGuy"--one of whom, Mike Kitchen, has been a mainstay of the Toronto area conventions for a while now, along with his brother Blair. There was also the amazing Steve Mannion, who is NOT a Toronto mainstay, but has a great action-hero name. What's exciting is that he came up from the same sort of situation that I and most of the Guild are coming from, and he was full of tips 'n' tricks. In addition, a LOT of other people contacted us about appearing at other shows.

So a mixed bag this year, but in the long run it may end up paying off. But the important thing is...it's over.

The Worst Of All Possible Worlds

2010-06-22T16:26:00.001-07:00

In the early sound era, there was a mania for sequelizing and remaking movies; the Wizard of Oz that we know best is something like the fifth or sixth film version, and there was a sequel to King Kong made the same year the first one came out.

In the 50s, movies were often talky and stagey, stuffed with needless filler to pad out the runtime on business that wasn't at all important to the story, and with exposition often delivered in spectacularly clumsy fashion.

In the 60s, movies got incredibly bloated, with studios lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars (adjusted) to fill up the screen with empty spectacle to distract from how boring or stupid the story was.

In the late 60s and 70s, smaller and more independent movies went through a renaissance, but a lot of these were slapdash and amateurish, sacrificing narrative coherency for the director's "vision" (or just a plain ol' inability to tell a story).

In the 90s, movies were aimed increasingly at kids or rather stupid teenagers, sticking rigidly to formulas and keeping everything as stupid and unimaginative as possible.

...

Is it just me, or does a lot of what Hollywood makes these days combine all of these aspects?

I guess the silver lining is that all of these trends eventually reversed themselves.

Who's Next

2010-06-15T20:40:00.000-07:00

Heeeeeey. Long time. Sorry about that.

I’m not a big TV watcher, really. Not nowadays. I don’t have anything against TV; just the opposite, in fact. I believe it can be a very powerful and intelligent medium with boundaries that still haven’t been defined yet, and even now I think the best TV shows are probably better than most of what hits the multiplex these days. But it’s been a long time since I spent more than a couple of hours a week watching TV, and even when I did I wasn’t really a channel-flipper. For me it’s appointment TV only, and the rise of TV-on-DVD has made that increasingly irrelevant. Mostly, for me, it’s The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, and even those are available online.

And yet, as I only just recently realized, throughout my entire life, I don’t think I’ve ever been without at least one TV show that I had to watch, day-and-date—and it always had to be a genre show. When I was really young, it was Transformers, mostly. Then Star Trek: The Next Generation. Then X-Files. Then Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Fortunately, each of these overlapped the others by a year or two, so I was never without some show to obsess over, and there was a strong upward trend in quality, too. Just as I was moving into adolescence and getting completely sick of TNG’s stagey, pedantic universe, The X-Files came along with its dark, moody, and often witty idea-based stories. Then, as I was truly getting fed up with X-Files’ static characters and go-nowhere mythology, Buffy showed me what can really be done with long-form TV storytelling and characters in a genre context. Then when Buffy started to disappear up its own ass…

Well, there really wasn’t anything. (For the record, Buffy is still, on the whole, my favourite TV show.) But there were still shows to delve into; two of them, in fact, if you don’t count the tragically shortlived Firefly. Those two shows would be Lost and Battlestar Galactica.

I don’t really want to get into a huge discussion of these two shows. In fact, I find it interesting how quickly my interest in Lost evaporated after the finale had aired. (And yeah, I thought it was pretty crummy, aside from the awesome Locke vs. Jack fight on the rocks.) BSG had a better ending, but the season leading up to it was clearly wrecked by the writer’s strike, with inconsistent characterizations and stupid plot holes.

Neverthless, without those two shows, I suddenly felt a striking absence. Suddenly there wasn’t anything I felt compelled to watch. I’m looking forward to the upcoming A Game of Thrones, based on one of the few genuinely good fantasy novel series out there (and about which I plan to have more to say in a little while), but that won’t be hitting until next year. What’s a geek to do?

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

My relationship with Doctor Who is pretty simple. Caught it now and again on TV when I was a kid. Thought it was creepy and weird. Didn’t make a point to watch it—don’t know if it was too scary for my liking or if it just came on before I got home from school. (Probably the latter.) At any rate, I mostly missed the window to allow a show like that to get its hooks in me…

…Except that, when the new show launched, a lot of very smart bloggers, most of them British, turned their attention to talking about the old show, and they did it in such a way that I was intrigued. I’ve since caught a couple of episodes of the classic show and found it to be somewhat interesting, though I’d be lying if I said I felt compelled to really delve into it. I can understand and respect its status as an iconic institution, and I do plan to check it out every once in a while, but as with a lot of old comic books, I’m almost more happy to read ABOUT it than to actually experience. (And yes, I hold with the idea that Dr. Who is about as close to comic books as TV has ever come.)

The new show, though. Well. That seemed like a good jumping-on point. I was actually pretty excited when the show returned in 2005—I always like the theory of revamping old TV SF shows and movies for the modern era, even if the execution is so often lacking, and since I didn’t have any emotional connection to the old show, I wasn’t likely to get caught up in the endless fanboy debates that I knew, even then, were on their way. For me, the show could just be something fun and new with a history behind it, but one that I wouldn’t be beholden to—it could be an entry point into the old show, and nothing more. Plus, I liked the idea of a TV show starring Christopher Eccleston.

The problem, of course, was that the show sucked.

I seem to be in the minority here, but I honestly still think, looking back, that the first season was by far the worst. It had nothing to do with whether or not you enjoyed the original show (though it seems like most hardcore Who fans pretty much hate the new show), or whether you could get past the dodgy FX (I knew going in that that was part of the Dr. Who package); it was just flat-out crap, period. Plots didn’t go anywhere. The ideas were unimaginative and repetitive. There was an inexplicable focus on the boring life of Rose Tyler, on a show that had all of time and space to play in. The satire was both heavy-handed and nonsensical (they’re still going to be watching “The Weakest Link” 5,000 years in the future? They’re not even watching it NOW). And Russell T. Davies, the show’s new executive producer, was committed to some truly awful ideas, first and foremost being the race of farting alien infiltrators.

It wasn’t a complete wash; there were a handful of decent episodes, most notably “Dalek”, which reintroduced the Doctor’s classic foes, and “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances”, an actually creepy and satisfying story set in WWII. It was enough to keep me watching, hoping that all this “Bad Wolf” business was going somewhere (it wasn’t), that the melodramatics would subside (they didn’t), that the show would find its footing (it didn’t). At the end of season 2, I was out of there.

And yet, here we are. Partly because of my aforementioned lack of a genre show, and partly because it seems to have pervaded the geekosphere, to the point where it seemed like everyone had developed this weird blindspot as to just how lame the show is. It’s the classic case of “if you’re told something often enough you start to think it’s true, even when it actively contradicts reality.” What finally tipped me over were two factors: I learned that Steven Moffat, generally considered to be the show’s best writer (he wrote the aforementioned “Doctor Dances” two-parter, so the evidence seemed to support that) was going to be taking over as showrunner; and I found myself housesitting for a friend who had the entire modern series on DVD, and nothing to do otherwise. So I decided to catch up and start watching the new series.

I’m sorry to report my take on the Davies era hasn’t changed much, but I will say this: generally speaking, the show improved slightly with every season it was on the air. Season Two continued with a lot of the stuff I’d disliked about the earlier show (and the Christmas special that introduced David Tennant as the new Doctor was truly lousy, which sadly started a precedent of awful Christmas specials), but there were a few signs of improvement. The farting aliens were gone. The show’s budget had improved, which is a cosmetic change at best, but it leant everything a sheen of professionalism that made it go down more easily; at the very least, they could do more episodes set in the past or the far-flung future, meaning we spent less time hanging around Cardiff, Wales, disguised as London. More importantly, I started to get just a teensy glimpse of why people were so engaged with this ridiculous show. There’s a certain…spark to the proceedings, an energy, a chemistry between the leads that keeps everything highly watchable no matter how cruddy everything around them gets.

And things did get pretty cruddy. The big problem is that Davies-era Who seems to rely on certain tropes over and over again: unrequited love (including between the Doctor and his companion). Humans being possessed by or turned into aliens. The hamfisted “satire” mentioned above (i.e. diet pills that are turning people’s fat into little alien creatures, reality television run amok, a planet where people are stuck in a perpetual traffic jam). And, most annoyingly of all, a plot that sort of flails around wildly until it’s solved by a deus ex machina of increasingly ridiculous proportions. (“The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit”, the most revered two-parter from season two, begins with the Doctor looking on, amazed, at a planet suspended above a black hole without falling in, and proclaiming it to be impossible; by the end, he’s blasting out of the black hole in his TARDIS like it’s nothing. Consistency!) Oh, and the Daleks returned over and over again, despite the fact that every episode ended with them supposedly being destroyed forever.

Nevertheless, I was addicted at this point; it was a bit like cramming your face with nacho-cheese-laden turkey-flavoured double-fried potato chips. You know it’s really, really bad for you, and sort of makes you gag even as you’re consuming it, but you can’t stop.

The third season, again, showed a slight improvement, partly because the utterly obnoxious non-love affair between the Doctor and Rose Tyler was over. This, unfortunately, gave Tennant’s Doctor something to mope about, something that he’d continue to do at great length throughout the series. Tennant himself is an appealing actor, but his version of the Doctor was a whiny emo trust fund kid, which was a thoroughly unappealing characterization. On a moment-to-moment basis, they did keep to the “wacky mad scientist characterization, but you’d get to some point in each episode where the Doctor’s eyes would well up, and the score would start to blast, and he’d say “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and you’d know you were in for a rough time.

And may I just take a moment to deride the music on this show? It's the most heavy-handed tripe I've ever heard. I'm no expert on the old show, but I know it's often praised for its inventive music and sound design, and from what I've seen I agree. With the new show, it's boilerplate emotional manipulation all the way, and when the composer and Davies REALLY go both barrels it's like Spielberg and Williams with about 1/8th the talent and 1/25th the subtlety. "This is WHIMSICAL, dammit!!"

Fortunately, counterbalancing that was the lovable (and yes, very beautiful) Freema Agyeman as the new companion, and a strong run of episodes leading up to the end, leading up to “Blink”. “Blink” really threw me for a loop, because it’s possibly the best single TV genre script I’ve seen in the last few years. And here it is in the middle of this show that, at its best, still wasn’t THAT great. However, it had been preceded by a really strong two-parter, “Human Nature”/”The Family of Blood”, so I allowed myself to think that maybe the show was tipping over into being legitimately good.

And then Derek Jacobi turned into John Simm and the Doctor turned into Tinkerbell. And I don’t really want to talk about that.

Anyhow. Season Four saw the return of Donna Noble, the character who’d already popped up in a previous Christmas special and been very, very annoying, so my hopes weren’t high. Imagine my surprise when Donna (played by Catharine Tate) turned out to be the best of the Davies-era Companions. Her grating nature actually turned into a huge advantage for the show, as at that point the Doctor had been saddled with two Companions in a row who thought the sun shone out of his ass, and he desperately needed a voice of dissent. Considering that the Doctor had been growing increasingly self-absorbed and immoral—a character arc that I don’t believe was intentional at first but was clearly being developed by the writers at this point—having someone act as the needling voice of the Doctor’s conscience was a smart move, helping to steer the show away from melodrama and back towards the saving-the-world business it was supposed to be about. This is also the season that introduced the interesting River Song, a character who’s story arc actually made use of the time travel that the show is supposed to be about; essentially, the Doctor and River are experiencing their relationship backwards, so that his first meeting with her was her last, chronologically.

The Season 4 finale was as stupid as ever, and the string of TV movies that followed (making a de facto Four and a Halfth Season) were plenty mediocre, but there was a definite sense that the show was on rails. It wasn’t good, but it had the ingredients to be great, with just a nudge or two in the right direction.

Enter Matt Smith.

At the end of “The End of Time”, Tennant’s Doctor (they’re usually referred to by number, so call him Ten) died the way he lived: whining about his lot and life and acting like a drama queen. (I love that his last act is to trash the TARDIS for the next guy. Prick.) Fortunately, the nature of Dr. Who is such that once you’ve got a new lead actor and a behind-the-scenes change, you have a bit of a clean slate, so it’s not surprising how quickly the new series has gone over into something compulsively watchable, occasionally even great. That X Factor—which basically seems to boil down to “coherent scripting”—has been added to the show, while keeping the spark of weirdness and fun from Davies’ run.

When Smith was cast, there was a lot of grumbling that he was too young and glamorous, but in fact, when you see him in action, Smith seems less like a Boy Band member than Tennant did. The guy’s just odd-looking—handsome enough, sure, but not in any conventional way. But what’s amusing is the way he plays the Doctor as a very old man, which of course, he is at this point. (By the way—is it just me, or is the Doctor getting younger with each regeneration something that’s been going on since the beginning? I know the respective Doctor’s ages don’t make a perfect downwards line, but the oldest Doctor, William Hartnell, is also the first, and in general each new Doctor seems younger, with a few exceptions. Casting a Doctor as young as Smith makes a certain amount of sense to me at this point—I think he’s got one regeneration left, right? If that one’s a teenager, it would be pretty funny.)

Meanwhile, Karen Gillen as Amy Pond is…um…just a little bit sexy. Just a smidge. More to the point, her character is actively sexual in a complex, interesting way. She’s introduced, as an adult, as a “Kiss-o-gram”, which is pretty clearly meant to be kid’s show code for “Stripper”, and this more or less makes sense given her backstory. The newly regenerated Doctor crashed in her backyard when she was a child, already developing some odd quirks due to dead parents and a frequently absent aunt who raised her, and he seemed like Santa had answered her prayers (she was literally praying to Santa Claus when this happened) by sending down a real-life imaginary friend. But then he abandoned her, intending only to pop out for a minute and instead returning 12 years later. The adult Amy is clearly dealing with some issues, and some of them may be sexual, but refreshingly, she hasn’t let them ruin her life; she’s mostly a stable, functioning adult with a few neuroses. (Some people actually find her a little annoying for this reason, but Gillen’s pouty face is something I could look at all day, personally…) The show’s subtext has been about Amy’s choice between childhood and adulthood, as represented by her upcoming wedding; to that end, Moffat’s version of the show has more of a fairy tale feel to it.

Anyway, this kind of careful scripting, as opposed to Davies’ sledgehammer, is what’s made the new show so much more enjoyable when it goes into sitcom/soap opera territory. Which it does fairly often. I suppose I understand; the show’s become a massive hit based on Davies’ version, and Davies’ version was a soap opera, so they don’t want to change things up too much. Actually it’s interesting how much the Moffat show has hit many of the same beats as the Davies run, but then taken them in different directions. The Doctor-Companion sexual tension is there, but it’s dealt with fairly quickly and effectively, and with the obvious implication that they won’t be getting into a relationship (which I approve of; personally I wish they hadn’t brought it up at all as a possibility, but at least it’s veered quite firmly away from Rose Tyler territory.) Likewise, we’ve had the schlubby boyfriend who has to compete with the Doctor for the girls’ affections; Amy’s encounters with the Doctor over the course of her life echo “The Girl in the Fireplace”; and the most recent episode pulled a hat trick of callbacks, with an crashed spaceship doing harm while trying to repair itself (like “Fireplace” again), the Doctor trying to blend in as an “average bloke” (like “Human Nature”) and a couple of Young Nerds In Love who are too awkward to tell each other how they feel, and whose lives are impacted by the Doctor (like “Love and Monsters”, a.k.a. THE WORST THING TO EVER AIR ON TELEVISION EVER). We’ve even had a “runaway bride”. It’s like Moffat wants to show off how much better he is at running the show, and really, he’s right. Under Moffat, the show has been tighter, more imaginative, and more idea-based.

The big difference seems to be that Davies isn’t interested in SF; Moffat is. In other words, we’ve now got a guy who likes SF running this SF show. Gosh, who would have predicted that would have made a difference?

But it has, and now I’ve got my appointment TV back—

--for a couple more weeks.

Damn.

Miss Me?

2010-05-18T16:54:00.000-07:00

Been super-busy. Aside from trying to keep my head above water with Lemuria and Freak U (both of which will hopefully have new printed material by this summer) I've been tackling some major illustration work which will be keeping me busy for a few weeks yet. But I am going to make an effort to blog more; I've got two big ideas for ongoing posts which I'm hoping to launch within the week.

In the meantime, I'm still contributing to and now editing the new comics review column at JoBlo.com, so if you want to read more of my golden thoughts, there's the place! We're now weekly, with a new column every Tuesday.

This Is Not An April Fool's Joke

2010-04-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

I am now officially part of the comics reviewin' team at JoBlo.com. Which, to be clear, is only just now coming into existence. The comics review column, not JoBlo itself.

Title TBD.

Epic Epicness Indeed

2010-03-25T22:39:00.000-07:00

And then this happened and I had to spend the whole evening watching it over and over again while walking in smaller and smaller circles and pretending to fly across the room while punching things in slo-mo.

I'm excited, is what I'm saying.

Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles!

2010-03-05T16:02:00.000-08:00

So, I’m kicking around the library a week or two ago, and just out of curiosity I head over to the kid’s graphic novel section. While it’s expanded significantly in 20 years, there was nevertheless a pretty substantial assortment of graphic novels here back when I was a kid. Most of them were album collections of European comics, three titles in particular: The Smurfs, Asterix, and Tintin.

It was the Tintin books that I was most obsessed with as a kid for some reason, which in retrospect doesn’t make a lot of sense. The other two titles featured more appealing, expressive art (I thought so then and I think so now) as well as nifty fantasy elements in the case of the Smurfs, and epic historical adventure in the case of Asterix. They’re both also a LOT funnier and more well-characterized than Tintin.

…And looking at them now, I’m only just realizing what a huge subconscious influence they were on Lemuria--good grief. How did I not catch that? I guess it just shows how thoroughly I’ve internalized these comics.

I guess it’s not hard to see why a kid would read the Tintin books—the ligne claire style is still breathtakingly elegant, simple yet with lots of appealing detail. The various locales are captured in impressive detail; it’s no surprise that this comic was a huge influence on Stephen Spielberg (who, as you’ve no doubt heard, has a Tintin movie in production. And there’s no denying that Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus and Thompson and Thomson are entertaining sidekicks. Of course, Tintin himself remains a boring cipher whose few shreds of personality disappear whenever he’s around one of his sidekicks.

Anyway, it turned out there were several new Herge books on the shelves I hadn’t seen before, such as:

Yes, it’s the very first Tintin book ever. Along with Tintin In The Congo, it’s one of two not listed on the back of the Tintin collections. “Congo” is legendarily racist, being essentially a bit of blind boosterism for colonialism (Congo having been a Belgian colony at the time) and featuring some pretty over-the-top slaughter of animals, so it’s not hard to see why this story isn’t promoted much these days. But “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets” is pretty uncontroversial and is obviously historically significant. Its obscurity seems to boil down to the fact that it’s really not very well drawn.

Georges “Herge” Remi drew these strips for Le Petit Vingtieme, a children’s supplement for the Catholic newspaper Le Vingtieme Siecle (“The 20th Century”). What I didn’t know what how blatantly the strip was intended as a work of propaganda at first. The strip was apparently commissioned by the editors as a full-frontal attack on Stalinist Russia, though, it must be said, it was an attack that turned out to be surprisingly accurate about some of the abuses that were going on in that country, particularly the widespread famine and poverty being covered up by the Soviet leaders. Though having Tintin randomly stumble across the supervillain-esque secret lair of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, protected by a haunted house of all things, might have been just a tad over-the-top.

Right from the start, a lot of the Herge tropes are in place: Snowy/Milou the “talking” dog (who no one seems to be able to hear, not even Tintin):

…an essentially realistic world that occasionally, and jarringly, reminds us that it is a cartoon:

…and Tintin repeatedly triumphing, not by skill or smarts, but by repeated dumb luck and the idiocy of his enemies:

Of course, now that I know Tintin was explicitly intended to be Catholic, I suppose you could argue that it was God who kept saving his bacon in all those improbable ways.

Side note: this is also the first and only Tintin story in which Tintin, ace reporter, does any actual reporting.

As for the story, it’s a pretty repetitive and dull affair, filled with vaudeville humour (the series always traded in slapstick, especially once Captain Haddock joined the cast, but this was literally produced during the age of vaudeville). Basically, everywhere Tintin goes, the bad guys try to kill him, he escapes through pure luck and manages to single-handedly put a huge monkey wrench in the evil regime. It’s a wonder the Soviet Union hadn’t packed up and gone capitalist by the time Tintin leaves. What’s kind of hilarious, though, is that this story has exactly the same plot as Tintin in America, the third book, except there it’s gangsters who are constantly trying to kill him via elaborate deathtraps and failing due to idiocy and really, really bad luck (or good luck, from Tintin’s point of view). Herge was apparently an equal-opportunity critic when it came to capitalism and communism. It’s just too bad we never got to see Herge work his magic on the Nazis.

Oh, wait…there’s a reason for that...

Anyway, Tintin was an instant hit, and Herge became a sensation in Belgium and, a little later, Europe in general. This success enabled him to spend a lot more time working on the artwork of the strip, which very quickly went from the simple doodles of “Soviets” to incredibly lush, full-colour strips loaded with an almost insane amount of detail. Herge even went back and redrew some of the earliest books in order to unify their look (and remove some of the more unfortunate stuff from “Congo”, which Herge quickly realized had been insensitive and/or wrongheaded). European comics have always been filled with a lot more detail and background art than American or even Japanese comics; I suspect Herge is one of the forefathers of this tendency.

Herge cranked out a 62-page (or thereabouts) volume of Tintin every year or so from the 30s to the mid-50s. What’s astonishing is that this wasn’t all he was doing; he also launched a number of other comic strips, one a year for the first half of the 30s, though none of them lasted more than a single album. The exception was Quick and Flupke, a more gag-oriented strip about a couple of moppets that ran for a decade starting in 1930. As if all this wasn’t enough, Herge created yet another strip in 1936 that lasted for two decades: The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko.

This strip seems to have been born out of the fact that Tintin, supposedly a teenager, didn’t much act like one; Jo and Zette LeGrand are much more believably rendered as kids, often in danger but never single-handedly defeating villains. Most of the actual action and competence is left to their engineer father.

And yet again, this was a work of propaganda, even though it was apolitical; it was commissioned by another Catholic newspaper to promote “family values”, i.e. a paradigm in which mom and kids are useless appendages and the dad does everything.

But hey, there’s a monkey! (That’s Jocko.) (And like Snowy, he talks, but none of the humans ever seem to hear him.)

This is the only JZ&J book I’ve read, but once again the troubling (but complicated) racial and cultural undertones of so much of Herge’s work are present. This is embodied in The Maharajah of Gopal, the focus of much of the plot, and, really, the main character. He doesn’t get to kick ass like Mr. LeGrand, but he’s so much more compelling than anyone else in the story, even when for the first third he’s portrayed as a relentless jerk:

He’s basically a grown-up version of Abdullah, the spoiled brat son of an oil baron, who pops up in Tintin’s adventures. The Maharajah complains whenever someone shows him up, even accidentally; he relentlessly abuses his privilege, demanding canings and imprisonment for anyone who sets him off; he demands that everything conform to his worldview (to the extent that, when some jewels go missing and a detective is called in, he forces the detective to change into a Sherlock Holmes outfit before he’ll let him do his work); and he values objects over people. The plot is set in motion by the Maharajah’s desire to build a bridge in his homeland, which it’s eventually revealed is because he wants the money that will come with bridge fees.

His obnoxious puling eventually culminates in…oh dear…

Yes, that’s a civilian white dude spanking non-white royalty. Go ahead and guess if there are any consequences for this. No, seriously, guess.

To be fair, Herge seems to have had it in for the wealthy and privileged in general, rather than foreigners in particular. The Maharajah talks in immaculate English, and his faults aren’t associated with his race (his put-upon personal assistant seems like a perfectly decent and competent dude). And the Maharajah does redeem himself somewhat by the halfway point, revealing a more modest and friendly side…after he’s been spanked. Of course, when we get to Gopal, it’s full of scheming Indian stereotypes, including a treacherous Prime Minister and an evil Fakir.

So really, not much there to be happy about.

What’s frustrating about all this is that Herge was a cosmopolitan guy who doesn’t seem to have had a trace of malice for anyone. This was all the result of ignorance and/or the genial insensitivity of a privileged white guy ensconced miles from the countries he was writing about. And of course, in some ways Herge was actually quite enlightened…his famous friendship with Chinese sculptor Chang Chong-jen led to a relatively sensitive and accurate portrayal of China in “The Blue Lotus”, and in the later books he clearly put a lot of effort into researching the various cultures he was portraying. It just shows how multifaceted and pernicious racism can be.

Oh well. Let’s move on to a later date, and the second-last Tintin book:

I grabbed this one because I remembered it being one of the few Tintin books with a SF element (“The Shooting Star” is the other one, unless you count the appearance of the Yeti in “Tintin in Tibet”). The last three Tintin books were produced at a very slow pace—understandable, since Herge had apparently become seriously burnt-out by the mid-50s, and anyway he’d become so successful that he didn’t really need to continue the series. Flight 714 came out in 1968, and it had clearly absorbed some of the then-trendy ideas of the time. Specifically: ancient astronauts.

The story has the Tintin crew (no Thompson twins this time out) being hijacked and forced to land on a remote island somewhere in Indonesia. The mastermind turns out to be Tintin’s archnemesis, film director-turned-drug-dealer-turned-Blofeld-esque supervillain, Rastapopoulos.

Despite what you might expect, it’s not an elaborate plan for revenge; Tintin’s presence is just another one of the many fantastical coincidences that populate Herge’s world. Rasta’s actually after the bank account of one Mr. Laszlo Carreidas, a miserable Ebenezer Scrooge-esque millionaire who’s nevertheless taken a shine to them, particularly Captain Haddock. Carreidas’s behaviour isn’t much better than the Maharajah’s, hence my comments about Herge having it in for rich folks.

At any rate, for the first half, this story is the usual sort of thriller, with the gang escaping Rastapopoulos and engaging in a series of action sequences, but then something weird happens: Tintin starts to hear voices…

Which lead him to an underground space filled with mysterious artifacts of a bygone time…

…Wait a minute. Mysterious island, strange voices, SF goings-on, a black rock, underground temples…there wouldn’t happen to be any incongruous polar bears on this island, would there, Tintin? Any sign of this symbol?

Well, I guess he doesn’t have much time to look around, being chased by terrorists and all. But if this IS the island from Lost, I can spoil the ending of the series for you: it’s aliens.

Somewhat jarringly, a mysterious Russian man, Mik Kanrokitoff, shows up to meet them and begins filling them in on a lot of X-Files-ish mumbo-jumbo about the island being a meeting place between aliens and a secret cabal of humans. Don’t worry, they’re perfectly benign—in fact, the only real purpose they serve in this story is to save the gang as the active volcano beneath the island erupts.

The aliens themselves never appear on-panel, and the heroes have a telepathic whammy put on them before they board the spacecraft, which leaves their memories completely erased afterwards. The story is clearly meant to emulate the various popular accounts of alien abduction, but it’s hard not to be a little frustrated by how much is left dangling at the end of this story—it feels like all buildup, no payoff. It certainly blows my mind that there were ever comics made that would AVOID showing aliens and spacecraft by any means necessary.

I set out to write something fond about Tintin, and of course I did feel a warm, fuzzy, nostalgic glow as I leafed through these books. But rereading them, I’m sort of disappointed by how dry and soulless they are, and how much objectionable content is present. The art remains magnificent, but there’s so little humanity in them, even aside from the regressive politics and the tiresome humour. It’s clear that Herge continued to learn and improve all his life, and the geniality of his creations still makes the books readable…barely. But I think I’m ready to throw these on the pile of “books I loved as a kid that don’t hold up.”

Excuses, Excuses...

2010-02-24T13:54:00.000-08:00

So Sunday afternoon I get home from a baby shower* with the coming week largely clear of obligations, professional and personal. "All right!" I think. "I can use this week to catch up and get get ahead on my webcomics!" So I sit down and pencil this week's Freak U. and Lemuria, going great guns, all fired up to keep the pace going for the next few days...and by the time evening falls, I'm feeling an ominous tickle in my throat...

Monday morning I awaken to find myself buried under a pile of bricks. On closer inspection, the bricks turn out to be mucus, and Monday turns out to be Wednesday. Possibly time travel was involved. As far as I can remember.

At any rate, the biohazard seems to have receded to the point today where I can actually accomplish something beyond turning over frequently enough not to get bedsores. (OK, I exaggerate--I was briefly online, but I wasn't up to doing much of anything that didn't involve pressing a button or two.)

I mention all this because, despite the inauspicious start, I still have a fair amount of free time this week, and I'm hoping to use it so that you guys don't have to see anymore non-updated strips. Famous last words, I know...

Just so as not to leave this post as a bunch of whinging, here's a bit of linkblogging. The website Comics Alliance has made the wise move of employing comics blogger extraordinaire Chris Sims, and he, along with main editor Laura Hudson and...other guy Caleb Goellner, have been providing the vital public service of mocking some of the more idiotic and poorly-researched coverage of comics that have been popping up in the mainstream media of late. First they took on this eye-gougingly smarmy and cliche-packed CNN article, and now they've tackled a less absurd but still fairly dumb article about Mark Millar.

Oh, and speaking of ambitious plans of my own and entertaining comics blogging, I have a rather epic post about Tintin that should be going up in the next day or two. Yeah, Tintin. Can you stand the excitement?

*It's now pretty much normal for men to go to baby showers, right? I mean, I'm aware that's not how it was done, traditionally, but that tradition seems to have existed primarily because society wanted to keep baby-rearing squarely the responsibility of the ladies, which makes it pointless and outdated. And I've been to several amongst my baby-having friends. I'm not part of some cutting-edge progressive commune (contrary to what Americans seem to think of Canada) so I have to assume this is basically normal amongst my generation now.

Oh, Right, Valentine's Day.

2010-02-14T18:37:00.000-08:00

About all that means for me right now is that I get to post joke Valentines from around the web.

(Click on the images to see more from each site)

Happy corporate-sponsored commercial exploitation of people's emotions, everyone!

The Olympic Opening Ceremonies Definitely Summed Up Canada

2010-02-13T21:42:00.000-08:00

Badly organized, filled with technical glitches, everyone having fun regardless.