The Hurting

2008-08-28T15:42:00.000-04:00

Out of Town, Out to Lunch

On vacation in an undisclosed location. In the interim, I'll throw out a question for my readers, something I've been meaning to write about for some time but have yet to actually do so.

The Donald Duck we read about in comics is an entirely different character than the Donald Duck we see in cartoons. There are many reasons for this. The difference is similar to something you might expect from an Earth 1 / Earth 2 division.

Discuss.

2008-08-19T17:37:00.000-04:00

My Life With the Skrull Kill Krew

Let's talk, briefly, about the 90s.

Dick asked whether or not there were any good superhero comics in the 1990s. He gave a thorough drubbing to a few of the usual suspects here. Tom answered with a partial list of his own.

Looking back through my archives, I've addressed this topic more than once, so I thought I'd pluck out a couple interesting pieces that might be of note if you've never seen them before.

First, about a year and a half ago when I was hard up for something to write about I banged out a brief list of my Top Five Mainstream Superhero Books of the 90s. It was off the top of my head and I can see maybe tinkering with it if I ever decided this were a topic that really mattered a lot to me, but essentially it's a good list I'll still stand by today:

5. Weapon X - Barry Windsor-Smith
4. Starman - James Robinson & Various (notwithstanding the bad parts)
3. "Unity", in various Valiant titles - Jim Shooter & Various
2. "The Rock of Ages", in JLA - Grant Morrison & Howard Porter
1. Marvels - Kurt Busiek & Alex Ross

Honorable Mention - Lobo & Lobo's Back by Keith Giffen & Steven Grant & Bisley

Keep in mind I had just recently reread "Unity" at the time and if I had to do it over again perhaps the book would not have placed so high - perhaps the Ellis / Hitch Authority would find its way on to the list. My main motivation behind putting it on the list, I guess, is the fact that - like a lot of comics fans - I've got a deep-seated affection for huge reality-bending crossovers which feature every character ever, but am fully aware that even the best of them usually suck. I mean, yeah, Infinity Gauntlet still holds up as a ripping yarn, but given that the original artist quit halfway through because the story was too repetitive*, it hardly holds up as great comics art. "Unity" actually felt like the kind of story that had to involve all these different disparate characters, and it also had real, legitimate repercussions that would play out throughout the remainder of Valiant's lifespan. Now, we didn't actually get to see most of the events promised in Rai #0 come to pass because the company changed hands and went out of business (in that order), but the tight continuity and fairly unusual adherence to more-or-less well-defined sci-fi strictures made for a uniquely engaging set of stories. The bit where Magnus gets to meet his parents and doesn't even know it is simply great.

Lobo - the original Lobo, that is - is a great book that I suspect most people who came of age after the character's prime have never given a second thought, and there's a good reason for that, considering how poorly the character has fared in the ensuing years. I mean, seriously, if your only exposure to the character was the watered-down Main Man of 52 or the JLU cartoon or even - shudder - his surprisingly long-running, execrable solo title, you'd probably be disinclined to ever want to see him again in any capacity. But it was great black comedy, sort of like Marshal Law if that book had been created with the sole purpose of mocking its own audience. Gleefully hateful.

Dick hates Howard Porter with a passion that seems slightly out-of-proportion, at least from where I'm sitting - I bought the run off the stands as it came out and I must say that Porter's art seemed perfect for the material at the time. Even the dated elements don't really seem to grate that much. Sure, Electric Blue Superman and Crab Mask Green Lantern are goofy as fuck, but rather than date the stories (as I've seen many people suggest) they rather add to the tacky, overheated stew. Hell, there's even a "Genesis" tie-in right in the middle of "Rock of Ages" - and yet it works, because Morrison's JLA was a book composed of hyperventilating day-glo neon bullshit, and the more extraneous junk that could possibly be thrown into the pile, the better. Of course, Morrison would later take that philosophy and overdo it to the point of exhaustion, but on a book like JLA it felt right.

(I have to disagree that the hook-handed Aquaman was a bad idea. Maybe it's one of those things that you just had to be there for, and I'm not making any claims for Peter David's interpretation of the character, which I found rather boring, but at the time it made perfect sense.)

Weapon X is a great book that, again, is probably less read today than it once was. Probably the best Wolverine story there ever could be, even if it's only tangentially about Wolverine, and even if everything good about this story was subsequently trampled and gang-raped by the people who made the actual Wolverine comic book.

Maybe I need to reread Starman. I've seen more than one person recently make the claim that it doesn't hold up nearly as well as we all remember it. Maybe my memories of the early issues are distorted, and my evaluation of the later, dire, space opera storyline not quite as even-handed as it should be.

As for Marvels, I've never made a secret of my affection for that series. I wrote a couple long-ish evaluations here and here which hold up fairly well, even if they fall prey to some of my worse tendencies as a writer - namely, stating my case a bit too strongly, and rather skirting around the point when a more concise, direct approach would be more appropriate. To wit: the reason Marvels holds up for me is that it's about nostalgia, and the way nostalgia can distort people's lives. It's not about how great it is to read superhero comic books, it's about how affection can turn into blind devotion, and how the object of that devotion can't really love you back. Marvels is essentially a long-form version of Tom Spurgeon's "Comics Made Me Fat".

If you're of a certain age and have never had the kind of "break" in comic reading that a lot of people usually do - you know, the old, "I discovered girls / college / pot and comics went by the wayside" - in other words, if you're a lifer, your relationship with comics is probably pretty complicated. Comics can be like a drug. They say addicts get stuck at the level of emotional maturity they were when they first began to use. That is definitely true for comics fans, and learning to outgrow what can be a pretty crippling, albeit comforting "crutch" can be really, really traumatic.

That's what Marvels is about. Sure, there's that rush of first, sweet love when you find yourself drawn into the world of brightly-colored superheroes. But then you grow and mature, or at least, you do so haltingly, held back by your unhealthy devotion to the minutiae of Spider-Man and Wolverine. Instead of a sideline it becomes a shield against an unthinking, uncaring world. Reading comics as a young adult makes you, in other words, a socially retarded, sexually frustrated, out-of-shape and ethically confused shithead.

Marvels doesn't end with Phil Sheldon looking up into the sky, seeing Thor fly by and saying to himself, "gee, these super-heroes sure are wonderful". It ends with Sheldon throwing a coffee cup into a television and washing his hands of super-heroes, forever, because he's sick of that shit. Then he goes out and has his picture taken with a kid who will one day grow up to be Ghost Rider, which proves that these things will go on whether you're a part of it or not. The world keeps on turning, and it'll keep on turning whether or not you're at the comic shop every Wednesday to buy Amazing Spider-Man.

* Yeah, I know - there was the small matter of his being over-committed, due to penciling that summer's other big x-over, DC's War of the Gods - which was obviously a bigger priority considering it was built on the chassis of his Wonder Woman run - but if George Perez thinks your story is redundant, well, maybe you should pay attention.

2008-08-18T17:55:00.000-04:00

Stuff I Have Read

The Last Defenders #6

The Defenders is a difficult concept, both in terms of how the book can be approached by a writer and what the readers expect. Bluntly, it doesn't work. It worked for a brief period in the 70s when all the main characters' status quos happened to place them in similar enough mindsets that they could conceivably be expected to be in the same room at the same time for longer than five minutes. I guess that's the appeal, but it's also the inevitable problem. The Hulk, Dr. Strange, the Sub-Mariner and the Silver Surfer just don't need to be on a team together. They all have their own lives and adventures, and the only possible way to put them together for more than a single storyline is essentially to contrive a silly motivation or an even sillier plot device. Back in the 70s, they managed to make it go for a surprisingly long run before it fell apart, but in the end there was little that could be done to commercially redeem a book whose main draw is seeing four disparate characters bitch at each other for 22 pages at a time, especially when three of those characters are only intermittently popular enough to support solo books.

One of my favorite Defenders stories is a reunion crossover penned by Peter David somewhere during the first half of his Hulk run. There's a nice scene in there where Dr. Strange, Namor and Bruce Banner are sitting around having a cup of coffee or something, reminiscing about old times and discussing the threat of the moment. It's a great bit because the characters are relaxed, not at each others' throats, positively friendly - it underscores the fact that the characters don't necessarily hate each other, and in fact, if they just met periodically for social visits they'd be fast friends, considering how much they have in common. But because circumstances dictate that they must be individualists, the moment they "have" to work together for a "common cause" - and especially the moment the Hulk starts making fun of Fish-Man's pointed ears, or Dr. Strange starts telling people what they should be doing because it's clearly obvious to him - they start acting like a pile of bickering junior-high kids. It's fun to watch but the forced conflict grates a bit thin, especially considering that we're long past the point where folks like Dr. Strange and the Surfer can reasonably be written as domineering assholes without also being massively out of line with 40+ years of character development. (Although they seemed to have found a loophole for that on the Surfer's part by returning him to his original status quo, but said status quo also effectively cuts him out of having any logical or even passably illogical reason for being seen in the company of any of these other guys.)

But that's just geek talk: the real reason why they never found a convincing reason for the Defenders - the core team of Defenders, that is - to stick together for any amount of time past the original 70s run, is that the Defenders don't sell. If they did sell, you best believe that someone would have figured out a damn good reason to bring the team together. As a brand, it rates somewhere below the Outsiders or the New Warriors - borderline concepts that nonetheless manage to stay in print periodically - and above Checkmate and Cloak & Dagger, perpetual losers in the revamp game. There will always be brief Defenders revivals, but barring a miracle they will be just that - brief.

The conventional logic behind team books - that putting less-popular characters together in one book makes for a book that is more popular than the sum of the composite characters - works in reverse for The Defenders. It is possible to make a successful team out of second-and-third stringers with a good enough creative team and a strong hook - they did it with the post-Crisis Justice League, they did it with the original New Warriors - hell, the "All-New, All-Different" X-Men were pretty much the definition of B-listers. But the same formula works in reverse for the Defenders - on their own, each character can at least make an attempt at feasible, marquee-level solo success: they each have their own distinctive mythos, supporting characters, and rich history. But put them together and watch sales shrivel faster than the Sub-Mariner in Death Valley. It's not just that they are, in the context of their own stories, an "anti-team" - the book itself is an anti-comic. It has every reason in the world to sell, but it doesn't.

So while no one was looking, Joe Casey wrote a comic book about just that fact. The Defenders is a concept that has no reason to exist, and on its own it just doesn't make sense. There's no motivation. The concept of The Last Defenders is that there is no motivation for this team to exist, and really, no reason for this book to be printed. There's just an idea, a random, abstract notion on the part of both Kyle Richmond and Joe Casey that there should be a Defenders. Nighthawk wants there to be a Defenders for the same reason that David Lovering will never say no to a Pixies reunion. Part of me is sad that Joe Casey put so much obvious thought, effort and subtle attention to a comic that will be read by maybe 20,000 people and almost instantly forgotten. But another part of me is happy that he did because despite how futile it is that he created such a wonderfully awkward story, it was nevertheless very fun to read.

I think, to a degree, Casey is underrated because he goes out of his way to minimize the kind of flashy, attention-getting impulses that make Morrison beloved among the comics blognognoscenti. This is not to say he doesn't have his fans, but they tend to be far more reserved than not - when was the last time you heard someone talking about how absolutely fucking fantastic Automatic Kafka was, but how many words have you seen devoted to that boring-ass Aztek thing in just the last month since they put out the trade? You'll never see Kafka collected, not unless someone at DC wakes up one morning and decides to put it on the production schedule as their last act before flipping off Paul Levitz and jumping out a 10th story window.

Casey is an extremely understated writer when it suits his purposes. This series, for instance? It's essentially five-and-a-half issues of feints and misdirection, a seemingly pointless series of events that only coheres in the final pages of the final issue - but then, when Casey finally delivers the punchline, well, the whole thing makes a whole lot more sense. What had been random, disassociated bits of plot come together and there's something interesting there, an amalgamation of ideas that - while none of them terribly original on their own - come together for a unique, spicy flavor. It's not like he could have just started out on page 1 with this new, "final" line-up of Defenders, he had to prove a point, which was that this wasn't just another team of Defenders, this was the best team of Defenders there could ever possibly be. And there's an open question in the book's final pages as to how necessary even that is. It's a tricky move, considering that in any event he wasn't likely to maintain an audience through five issues of shadowboxing to get to the pay-off. That's how Morrison has been operating for the past few years, but Morrison's name ships a lot more copies than Casey's. The Last Defenders was structured very much like "Batman RIP", with a whole bunch of misdirection and false preamble leading up to eventual coalescence. The difference is that even if it were the most abstruse, unreadable piece of crap (and I was convinced up until this last issue that that is exactly what "Batman RIP" was), Batman has to work hard to dip below 70 or 80,000 copies, whereas any book selling itself on the strength of The Defenders as a brand-name better hope that one of the creators on the cover is named "Alan Moore" or "Alex Ross". Just the way the world works.

It means we might be waiting in vain for another adventure of Joe Casey's Defenders. It's OK, all things considered, because the concept has been constructed with planned obsolescence in mind. A lot of work for the superhero equivalent of a shaggy dog story!

2008-08-14T11:52:00.000-04:00

With the Usual Apologies to Dorian for Stealing His Schtick

Although, honestly, context really doesn't help for this one.

2008-08-13T16:01:00.001-04:00

Who Watches the Wazzzzzzxxxxzzzzz

I sort of implied I'd be writing something about that Watchmen trailer, didn't I? I'm not really that upset about it. It doesn't offend me on a profound level in the same manner as that Spirit trailer. I just don't care. I'll probably see the movie, it might be fun, most likely not really for anyone who read the book. But I do care about the book.

If 1/20th of the however-the-fuck-many copies of the book have been printed actually get purchased and get read, the movie will have been a rousing success for that purpose. It's obviously not as if Watchmen has ever been short of plaudits or attention - most of it well-earned - but seeing a legitimately great book being exposed to a even larger audience than would normally seek it out, well, that's pretty good. To his credit, and even as much as I dislike the man's work, Zack Snyder has said pretty much the same thing. Despite the fact that simply making the movie is dodgy from an ethical and aesthetic point of view, the director has at least an iota of class. A small iota, but an iota nonetheless.

Still, it must be said: the book was great for many reasons, but one of the most important reasons has to be the way in which it methodically deconstructed all the beloved genre trappings of its parent, the superhero comic. "Deconstruction" has become a cliche of almost unimaginable proportions, but it's still true - more than mere deconstruction, the book took a fucking scalpel to the entire notion of the super-hero. There were good books to follow which treaded the same ground - Marshal Law turned the mysanthropy up to the proverbial 11, Marvels made the poison-pill bittersweet by inverting and poisoning the process of nostalgia itself - but this is the book that made all that possible. Again, as with the Spirit, I ask, how much of the book will be lost by even the most faithful adaption, simply by dint of the fact that the movie can't come with any kind of contextual referents for the uninitiated?

Reading the book, it's fairly obvious to any moderately intelligent reader* that Rorschach is - far from an absolutely bad-ass combination of the best qualities of Batman, Daredevil and Wolverine - a mess, scary not so much because he's dangerous (although he is) but because he's fucking crazy. He's a violent psychopath with sociopathic tendencies, a racist, a reactionary, obsessed with Reagan-era** eschatology and fueled by delusions of unimpeachable moral righteousness. In short, he's the logical extension of every vigilante power fantasy ever brought to life on paper. But I suspect any filmmaker, even an extremely skilled filmmaker, would have to work pretty hard to keep Rorschach from coming off well in a film adaptation, for much the same reason that all but the most inhuman, unwatchably brutal war films can be accused of ultimately glorifying war simply by portraying it.*** If the film can pull it off, great, but I remain skeptical. The proper reaction to Rorschach is revulsion, straight-up - maybe not in the first chapter but certainly by the time the reader reaches the sequence of the psychiatric examination. If they keep the flashback sequence with the rottweilers, I'll be extremely surprised, because if they did it in the same manner as the book they'd have people walking out of theaters all across the country at about the 90 minute mark. Hell, I don't even think I would care to see that onscreen. Killing a midget in a prison toilet, on the other hand - there's one for the Rambo reel. THIS . . . IS . . . SPARTA!!!

But the worst thing to come of the movie has to be the overhype surrounding the book itself. Just as you can damn something by faint praise, it is also possible to damn something through effusion. Watchmen is a damn good book, probably even a great book. But, as I'm exactly the ten-thousandth person to point out, it's not the greatest comic book of all time. As Tom Spurgeon recently pointed out, it's probably not even the greatest comic book of 1986 - certainly not measurably greater than the then-current first series of Love & Rockets, peak-era Calvin & Hobbes, or freakin' Maus (and that's just in the English speaking world). It's not even Alan Moore's best book. Critical consensus is chimerical and all that, but I'd wager a plurality comics-literate people would put From Hell above Watchmen. There are also many people who would argue the merits of V For Vendetta, and good arguments could conceivably be made for Swamp Thing or Promethea.****

Pitching the book to the general public as "The Best" can only end badly, especially given as it's the final, poisonous flowering of the same old mindset that inevitably equates comics with superheroes. I would argue that this isn't even a good attitude for the people who publish superhero comics to promote at this late date, as it creates marketplace distortions which can only rebound badly on those who promulgate the misconceptions. If the people who ran MLB decided to start pretending that Baseball was the only "real" sport, and that football, basketball, hockey, golf, track & field, horse racing and mixed martial arts were all weird outliers whose business models could only be grappled on the most theoretical basis, I think most sports fans would probably regard this as a questionable move which would probably hurt baseball's standing with fans, broadcasters and merchandisers. Why would any young manga fan be attracted to a product promoted - in an unthinking, unconscious, subliminal fashion - in such an insular, obviously fake fantasy-land manner? Let alone any living person with a pulse who may have read Ghost World in college . . .

So, essentially, it's great that people are buying the book. It's a good book, one that anyone who loves comics should read, and because of its subject matter, one that also might conceivably be of substantial interest to non-aficionados. But it's dense, ethically murky and stylistically rococo, in such a way that despite the fact that it has descriptive comic-book pictures, it might just be this generation's Ulysses: a great book that everyone acknowledges as great and which many people may even own, but one which the general public finds a bit too dense to easily read, let alone enjoy.

A movie adaptation is a dumb idea, but the book itself is good enough to survive the inevitable misconceptions and mischaractizations that will follow, although it could certainly do without such effusive phrase. Lesser-known books like From Hell or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen will probably take a while to crawl out of the shadow of their crappy adaptations. But at this point, I think there's a chance that Watchmen might be well-enough regarded by those who pay attention to such things that an inferior adaptation might just rebound on the filmmakers themselves, with little or no impact on the book itself. You don't see crappy adaptations of Emma punching holes in Jane Austen's sales, after all.

* Of course, a large percentage of comics fan do miss this very point. Go fuckin' figure.

** Of course, Nixon is president in the book, but you know what I mean. Reagan was the nuclear cowboy.

*** Insert your favorite boilerplate film-crit rant about this subject.

**** If just occurred to me that the "best" Alan Moore book might well be one that hasn't been published - a compilation of his short work, stuff like "Pictopia", "The Bowing Machine", "The Hasty Smear of My Smile", "Hungry Is The Heart", maybe the Bill Sienkiewicz CIA thing. There are enough shorter, lesser-known masterpieces scattered throughout his corpus that a compilation of the best would be an event in and of itself.

2008-08-05T18:26:00.003-04:00

Son Of At The Movies

In reference to difficult source material, folks often say that something is "unfilmable" -- be they massively dense tomes like The Sound and the Fury or Ulysses, transgressive and controversial texts like American Psycho or Lolita, or books which are simply too recondite in their execution, so rooted in the medium of prose, to make for an easy adaptation, a la Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief or The Lord of the Rings. But all of the books I just mentioned have one thing in common: they were all the subject of motion picture adaptations at various points.

Nothing is unfilmable. If the last 100 years of film history have proven anything, it's that there is no text so slippery that a clever filmmaker can't figure out how to hammer it into a two-hour-long cinematic framework. Clever in this context can be pejorative or complimentary -- if you're discussing Mary Harron's underrated, subtle adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' shocking tour de force, it's definitely a compliment. If you're talking about Peter Jackson's thunderingly obvious adaptation of Tolkien's fantasy series, well, clever is not necessarily a good thing.

(The best Lord of the Rings movie will always be the one that plays in my head when I actually read the book. Also, movies rarely replicate the kind of ambiguity that can be found primarily in the source text: this is one area were Harmon's film excelled, in terms of making an honest attempt to import some of the stranger effects of Ellis' combative prose onscreen. In adapting Tolkien, however, Jackson never made a single creative decision that rose above the glaringly obvious, with the end result of pasteurizing a prickly and at times frankly unpleasant reading experience in the service of making a movie that could sell a lot of toys. Which was by no means a surprise, but it doesn't mean I have to care about the finished product.)

So it's not like The Spirit is unfilmable, not by any means. But the prospect of The Spirit film fills me with not a little disgust, far more than that raised by the looming specter of seeing Dr. Manhattan blow up Vietnam real good on a screen near me very soon. A Watchmen movie was inevitable, really. It was only a matter of time. But The Spirit wasn't inevitable, and I find myself sad that it has been made. Because The Spirit is important. It's far more important than Watchmen. It's one of the great works of English language comics, with all that that implies -- it's a foundational work.

If Will Eisner had had a time machine, I bet he would have
gone back in time to slap his younger self for this shit.

But it's also incredibly problematic in all the ways that "classic" texts have always been problematic. The issue of race is never far from the reader's view, not until Ebony White is gradually phased out of the proceedings. A great deal of the strip is poor-to-mediocre. Much of the strip was actually done by other people (which isn't an aesthetic judgment, but it makes talking about the work as Eisner's creation problematic). There's just so much of the damn thing: at last count, 26 giant DC Archive editions. That's more Spirit than most people, even comics aficionados, probably even most comics historians, will ever feel the need to read. And at it's best, the strip defied categorization, mixing what could only be called virtuosic, playfully metatextual storytelling with a sincere, unvarnished humanism. It was more than the sum of its plot points or characters. In fact, I don't think it's very controversial at this late date to say that the Spirit really worked in spite of its ingredients. As a crimefigther, the character's only real claim to fame was getting the living shit beat out of him on a regular basis. He had no powers, his motivation seemed to be little more than that fighting crime might be a worthwhile way to pass the time. (Oh, he did have an origin, obviously, but his origin was always perfunctory, much like Superman and Batman's origins were in the beginning, just an excuse to get the super-hero on stage with some rudimentary motivation to push him in the direction of the plots.)

The point being, the Spirit is a complicated strip, the reasons why it was so important might not be readily apparent to anyone not already familiar with the form, and the chances of a Spirit film totally missing the mark are pretty high. Especially if you give the film to someone who, while certainly one of Eisner's most vocal admirers, is also almost equally famous for not really "getting" Eisner at all, or rather, understanding the most superficial qualities of the man's work while consciously eschewing, well, everything else. Eisner himself made no bones about this fact, despite his apparent friendship with Frank Miller. (This, while unfortunately, only an excerpt of a longer piece, is a nice snapshot of the tension between the two men, and the slightly facetious mindset that seems to orient the two creators so closely despite their obvious differences.) Gary Groth sums up the difference in attitudes succinctly:

Aesthetically, they share virtually nothing in common. Miller has expressed himself mostly through the trappings of genre — crime, superheroes, occasional forays into sci-fi — whereas Eisner very purposefully eschewed genre after he ended The Spirit in 1952, and even did his best to skirt genre within the Spirit stories. Miller loves to juggle the outsized pop-cult trappings of sex and violence, the more outrageous and in-your-face the better; Eisner's forte had become domestic melodrama and generational sagas where physical violence is conspicuously absent. Miller enjoys pushing boundaries and causing offense (if that's still possible); Eisner has striven for legitimacy among a rarefied cultural elite and frowns upon vulgarity. Miller considers himself more of a popular entertainer; Eisner considers himself a serious artist. Eisner is by temperament or calculation utterly genteel; Miller sees himself as a controversialist and a rebel with all the license that goes with that.

Among Eisner's shortcomings, an inerrant amiability is foremost: the same restraint that keeps many of his later works grounded by an extremely sincere brand of sentiment - that some would call mawkishness - is evident throughout the Spirit. There's nothing "extreme" about the strip at all, and in fact, the protagonist's occasionally bumbling, definitively middle class approach to adventuring was as close to humble in conception and execution as you can imagine a costumed adventurer ever getting. Moreso considering the adventurer's costume is nothing more than a blue suit and domino mask.

I am fairly confident that my fears will be fulfilled when the film is released. Frank Miller has done nothing in his career that indicates he has either the ability or temperament to eschew his own aesthetic prerogatives, even for the sake of hewing closer to the (literal and figurative) spirit of someone else's work. The movie will, of course, have no impact on the strip itself. There are no Spirit collections rocketing up the charts in response to the movie trailer, no 300,000 print runs being drop-shipped to retailers across the nation. The Spirit had already faded from the national consciousness a long time ago, along with Captain Marvel and Plastic Man and Pogo, once ubiquitous cultural brands now essentially the province of hobbyists and academics. So, while for that reason it's hard to imagine very many people coming to the strip as a result of the movie, it doesn't help that the tone put forward in those trailers is so diametrically opposed to the actual tone of the strip.

I could be wrong. I'd love to be wrong. But Frank Miller has spent the last twenty years trying his damndest to turn himself into a living caricature, and an avatar of the way comics' worst and most excessive impulses have been gradually repackaged as a new paradigm in pop culture. It's really just shiny, exploitative shit being shoveled with enough energy to convince the audience that there might actually be real calories, when in fact it has the nutritional content of Cool Whip. The man is a hack, and the only reason he's being allowed to direct The Spirit is because his ideas - deformed, malnourished and derivative as they are - have been proven to make serious money. Given the chance to take the plunge into directing a movie of his own, he chooses instead to tarnish a dead man's family jewels.

2008-08-04T19:48:00.000-04:00

Stuff I Have Read

The Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day Extra

All you need to know about this comic is that the majority of pages are devoted to giving Hammerhead a grim & gritty revamp.

What, you want to hear more?

OK, there's a couple other innocuous bits of padding, including a legal interlude with Matt Murdock that actually roused a chuckle out of me, and had some art by the guy who did that nice Dr. Strange mini a couple years back. But overall, it all still reeks of flop-sweat, the kind you might expect if you put half-a-dozen middle-aged guys into a room and ordered them to replicate the intangible mood of forty-year-old comics, the actual shape and dimensions of which are consistently distorted by nostalgia.

Plus, the story features a sequence where a good pile of super-people impersonate Spider-Man. One of them is Hawkeye, who is still pretending to be some guy named Ronin. And of course when Hawkeye put on his Spider-Man costume he made sure to put his bulky Ronin ninja armor on underneath Spider-Man's tight-fitting costume. If you can figure that one out, you deserve this comic.

Green Lantern #33

The left-field success of the whole Sinestro Corps storyline surprised the hell out of me, considering that it was pretty mediocre, aside from a few nice moments. The fact that the entire Green Lantern franchise has basically been rebuilt on a chassis built by Alan Moore in the space of a handful of weird off-model Green Lantern Corps back-ups (which were so weird they got buried in an annual, for Chrissakes) is just bizarre. And the fact that Geoff Johns decided to follow up the Sinestro Corps thing - which succeeded primarily because it was big, loud, fast and unexpected - with one of the slowest bits of decompressed flash-back origin retelling filler tales I've ever seen is just straight-up baffling. The real meat here are the hints being dropped for the forthcoming "Blackest Night" story, but these hints could have been covered in a much more economical - not to mention interesting - fashion, i.e., just about any other fashion than a half-year-long retelling of Hal Jordan's origin.(But then, I also suspect that the real reason for this storyline is so that Geoff Johns can erase some unpleasant episodes relating to Emerald Dawn II from New Earth continuity. Which, again, makes me want to die.)

I've been pleasantly surprised by the quality of a lot of Johns' writing lately, but this can't help but seem like a fumble - a story that was obviously planned and outlined months before they saw the sales figures for the Sinestro Corps, because it is so at-odds with the tone, pacing and scope of that storyline. If something succeeds, you do more of it, you don't take a six-month detour into the modern-day equivalent of a fill-in. Hal Jordan just is not that fascinating a character, certainly not as fascinating as these kinds of "in-depth" character studies would have us believe.

(And on that note, neither was Barry Allen, but I'm betting we're going to be hearing a lot about how fascinating he is in the coming months.)

Justice Society of America Annual #1

You know how I said a while ago I was enjoying Johns' JSA? That verdict will change overnight if this twenty-years-stale fan-wank pollutes the main title. Anyone who has ever read this blog will know that I have an inordinate amount of fondness for many backwaters of mainstream superhero continuity, but the whole Earth 2 / Infinity Inc. phenomena is one whose appeal has remained steadfastly opaque. Boo-urns, as the kids say.

Reign In Hell #1

Quite possibly the most blasphemous comic I've read all month, and considering this month also saw the release of a Ghost Rider comic wherein the title character beat a psychotic emissary of rogue angels to death with a Holy Bible, that is saying something indeed. Don't these companies have stockholders anymore?

Skaar Son of Hulk #2

I used to really like Ron Garney's art. I loved World War Hulk without reservation. This, however, is unbelievably bad, the kind of weird anomaly you have to at least give them credit for trying. But it's still not very good. This is a spin-off not of World War Hulk but Planet Hulk, and despite Greg Pak's insistence, the strange alien world of Planet Hulk just wasn't that interesting or original to begin with, and it certainly isn't interesting in the least without the Hulk in it. Imagine if someone had read the collected works of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs and decided to regurgitate them in as unironic and unimaginative a way as possible, reproducing all the weaknesses of the source material while also managing to import a fair number of cliches from other sources as well. Does the Marvel Universe really need a rampaging space barbarian Hulk-lite? The only conceivable direction this can go is basically a redux of World War Hulk, albeit with a far less compelling protagonist / antagonist / anti-hero coming to earth to kick ass over some perceived slight, only to find his lost father and oh isn't that wonderful everything was just a misunderstanding.

Whatever. I guess if you write a huge crossover tent-pole you get to polish your own turds in public.

Superman / Batman #50

So what are the chances of a space-probe sent by Jor-El finding Thomas Wayne on Earth? About the same as this comic not being so bad it makes kittens cry blood.

Sadly, my cat is weeping blood.

2008-07-31T17:46:00.002-04:00

At The Movies

The most important thing you need to understand about the success of The Dark Knight can be summed up very simply by my girlfriend's reaction to the film. Coming in, her total combined lifetime interest in Batman could probably not have been measured with an electron microscope. But she had heard a lot of good things about it, and was prepared to like it. But she didn't like it, she loved it, and in fact, she raved about it for hours afterwards. She was the first to admit the movie had some problems, but she loved the performances, loved the characters, and even didn't mind the plot. (It's probably the best compliment that can be imagined for these types of movies if it can be said simply that the plot doesn't spoil the action.)

The action, in this instance, was the Joker. It's his movie, and even though he's not onscreen for very long -- not in the context of a very long film -- he's a presence throughout, the presence. I don't know whether or not you could accurately parse how much of that stemmed from Heath Ledger's actual performance and how much from the ghoulish aroma of the actor's real-life fate. Ask us again in a decade. But the fact remains, as ghoulish as it may be, the spooky X-factor represented by Ledger's ghost certainly didn't hurt the Joker's effectiveness.

There's nothing quite so creepy as death threats from a dead man.

But with that said, it's still a problematic film for a number of reasons, most of which stem from a weak script. For everyone who will tell you that this is simply an amazing movie that defies all comic book conventions and blah blah blah, you have to ask, why the hell wasn't the movie about 45 minutes shorter? I'm a patient man, but I started to get squirrely at about the 90 minute mark. These movies always make the mistake of trying to shoehorn way too much plot into too small a vehicle -- the proverbial 20 lbs of shit in a 10 lb bag. The Dark Knight never met a plot twist that it couldn't turn into a Rube Goldberg device, even when a simpler, more elegant solution would have been far more satisfying.

(Some spoilers ahead, but if you haven't seen it yet I'd be willing to bet you don't care.)

And a lot of these problems boil down to one very simple distortion of Batman's character: the Batman in The Dark Knight just isn't that smart. Sure, he's clever, and he's able. But the most interesting thing about Batman -- if anything can said to be truly interesting about an almost-70 year old character who has been exhausted in almost every way possible -- is that he's smart. Isn't that the whole point of Batman? Sure, he's been the Dark Knight for twenty years, thanks to Frank Miller, but he's also the Dark Knight Detective. Of all of Batman's multitude of tricks, this one is perhaps hardest to translate to the medium of film. After all, being a real honest-to-goodness detective is quiet business, in that it requires thinking. Thinking is a hard thing to do in the context of a summer action film. So Bruce Wayne outsources his thinking, to the likes of Lucius Fox and Alfred. The one bit of actual "detective" work he does in the movie is some phony-baloney CSI shit with bullet fragments that the movie, thankfully, doesn't dwell on because it doesn't make sense even in the context of a film with an evil circus clown fighting a man in a leather bat costume.

But no, the Dark Knight in this film is a grunting, monosyllabic thug, with barely a hint of the smooth, commanding authority conveyed by the likes of Michael Keaton, Kevin Conroy, Rino Romano and even Adam West. I have to confess my interest in all things Batman is so low that I still haven't bothered to see Batman Begins, so the first time I heard Christian Bale open his mouth in costume on screen I almost laughed out loud. It doesn't sound threatening, it sounds like Batman's got a three-pack-a-day habit.

In order to get past the fact that Batman wasn't that smart -- for whatever reason they chose to stress this questionable decision -- they introduced a MacGuffin in the form of some magic supercomputer radar imaging system to track down the Joker. This plot point exists solely to introduce a ham-fisted "Statement" about privacy rights in the War on Terror, and has the added benefit of giving Morgan Freeman something to do. But besides that, it's just confusing. I swear, when they introduced the whole magic super radar thing one of these magic MacGuffins? If they had just written Batman as a real detective they could have figured out a much easier way to get Batman into position for the climactic three-way battle with the Joker and the police. As it was, the constant jump-cutting between the onscreen action and the weird glowing radar vision made that same scene just about unintelligible. And the confusion even allowed the Joker to get the one-up on Batman.

Also, while I didn't necessarily mind the addition of Two-Face as the film's second villain (third if you count the brief Scarecrow appearance), I think the final confrontation was spoiled somewhat. Would it have been that bad simply to leave Two-Face for the next film? As it is, the last few scenes left Harvey Dent's status naggingly ambiguous -- is he dead, as is implied by the final funereal speeches, or just shuffled secretly to a room in Arkham? To say nothing of the fact that the cover-up Batman concocts with Gordon in the film's final moments is about as flimsy as tissue paper -- if Harvey Dent killed seven people on a psychotic rampage, including a handful of cops, are you telling me no-one in Gotham would actually investigate beyond taking Gordon's word for it? Things like cop cover-ups usually get a lot of unwanted attention when they happen in the real world. Hopefully this is setting up a plot point for the next film, because otherwise that's just a stupid way to end an otherwise decent film.

So yeah, a pretty good film, hobbled by a weak third act and the insertion of wholly gratuitous and extraneous plotting. Eliminate Lucius Fox's character and the magic radar MacGuffin and you'd have shaved 30 minutes off the film, in addition to strengthening Batman's presence and cutting a totally 100% superfluous detour into privacy rights. I know people like Morgan Freeman, but c'mon, how is it OK that the movie Batman depends on this support staff to tell him what to do? Batman should know what a fucking skyhook is if anyone on this planet does.

It's become something of a cliche in the comics, but it remains a cornerstone of the character: with just his skills and intelligence, Batman can defeat just about anybody, and solve just about any kind of problem. That's what makes him so dangerous: you get the idea that even if he broke his back and were confined to a wheelchair (as he was very briefly back in the 90s), he'd still be the most dangerous man in the room. But Christian Bale's Batman would probably need Lucius Fox to remind him to use kryptonite against Superman.

Tomorrow (or thereabouts): I saw two trailers in front of The Dark Knight that gave me indigestion. Guess which ones.

2008-07-23T15:57:00.000-04:00

Tonoharu
by Lars Martinson

I quite liked Lars Martinson's Tonoharu. It's about Japan, but not necessarily the Japan we're accustomed to seeing in western comics, or as seen in Japanese comics through western eyes. There's no romance or exoticized eroticism or anything that even comes close to approaching that kind of staged cultural rapprochement -- just one American guy adrift in a land of strangers and strange customs, with nary a ninja otaku or hyperactive moe girl to be seen.

Perhaps the most appealing thing is that despite the fact that it isn't a memoir or even directly autobiographical (although probably, from what I gather, maybe a little bit of a roman a clef), it feels honest. The voice is disenchanted and maybe just a little bit xenophobic at times, and as unattractive as that seems the clear-eyed illustration of an extremely dysfunctional travel experience is more than a little fascinating, in much the same way as a car wreck. The story begins with his reflections, looking back at his own nascent hopefulness from the beginning of his trip, and contrasting that with the banal reality of having to live in a country where you can barely understand a word anyone else is saying. I read somewhere I long time ago -- long enough that I can't even begin to remember where -- that whenever you move to a foreign country, there are always stages of acclimation: first, enthusiasm over the novelty of an exotic land, then homesickness, followed closely by disillusionment at the fact that whatever alien land the traveler has found himself in hasn't gotten any less alien, and in fact, has become moreso with every halting attempt on the traveler's part to actually understand the culture. Eventually, or so the theory goes, the traveler comes to a final, lasting acclimation that accompanies a greater rapprochement.

I don't think the protagonist of Tonoharu is ever going to reach that last stage. He's pretty much a loser, as presented in the book, either unable or unwilling to really extend himself into the surrounding cultural landscape. It doesn't help that he can't learn the language, and it also doesn't help that the customary Japanese reticence makes all social interaction seem compulsively alienating. There's something to be said for cultural conciliation, but for the vast majority of the world that kind of intricate appreciation for otherness is probably not so easy. Take anyone and pluck them from their daily lives and into an unfamiliar country on the other side of the world where even the toilets work differently, and chances are unless they had the equanimity of a saint, the transplantation would fail, or at least cause a great deal of necessary friction.

The protagonist, Daniel Wells, doesn't come off particularly well in the book, but it's about more than just him. Admittedly, if the book was solely about his misanthropic adventures, it might get repetitive. But it's not: there's a bigger plot at work here. There's a disconnect between what Daniel tells the reader in the prologue and what we actually see unfold in the story: Daniel is not merely a pretty pathetic traveler, but an extremely unreliable narrator as well. There's enough dissonance there to qualify as actual suspense, if it weren't for the fact that the story unfolds in such a leisurely manner as to preclude suspense. Rather -- and I didn't mean that as a complaint -- Martinson's narrative sense keeps the book rolling at such an amiable, even clip, despite the rather abrasive subject manner, that you barely notice being sucked along page by page. Or at least I didn't, and consequently I found that I had read the book in one quick sitting. Pretty neat trick.

But that's also something of a problem. Although I really did like Tonoharu, and I don't want to seem like I'm qualifying that statement, I do have to add a qualifier by way of saying that the book's format does it few favors. A smallish hardcover, 116 pages for $20, and this is only the first part of a story that will last four volumes? I understand it's an unusual time in the comics industry, and the transition from a serialized model to a primarily graphic-novel publishing model is still causing growing pains across the boards -- but a book like this definitely suffers. If it had been serialized in comic-form beforehand, that would have probably been better. As it is, for $20 the reader gets what is essentially the first chapter of a much longer story - and it's not a particularly thick chapter, either. $2 less will get you the new Acme Novelty Library, and that'll probably keep you occupied for a lot longer than the present volume. And it's not even about comparing the book's quality, really: it's about finding the right format for the right story, and this is a very good story by a talented cartoonist that is almost certain to wither on the vine in the present. It's not ideal to be forced into a discussion of monetary value when discussing such an aesthetically appealing book, but that's the world in which we live.

2008-07-21T20:11:00.001-04:00

Final Thoughts On Star Trek

Before I conclude, a couple interesting thoughts from the comments. Commenter Plok had this to say:

TNG has an awful lot of clunkers, in my opinion -- most of the episodes that I think shine flirt with a sort of SF-horror vibe (on one occasion, a very successful SF-horror-action vibe, wow!) that may actually be kind of unique to TNG (!), but for some reason that tone seemed quite difficult for the makers of the show to keep a reliable grip on. Which is a pity, because when those elements are treated just right, you can see the show that might have been. Ultimately I think TNG suffered from being a Star Trek show, as odd as that sounds -- if it had been less concerned with its great big ethos, and more willing to discard its fan-fic chumminess -- if it had only pandered a bit less to the faithful, and challenged them a bit more instead -- it might have expressed that unsettling horror vibe I enjoyed a bit more consistently. Up above, someone mentioned the odd time or two that Riker looks like a bit of a dangerous guy to piss off. Sometimes Picard seems cold to his subordinates or antagonists. I think these character bits do get played on by the actors quite consistently, but all too often the scripts seem unwilling to support that kind of performance.

There's a lot of good stuff there, just about all of which I agree with, and most of which relating back to what I was trying to see to begin with. Plok expanded on these thoughts here, and I'll be damned if he didn't come close to obviating everything I was trying to say from the beginning. If you care one iota about Star Trek, you should read his post now: if you want to understand why the show, despite having one of the best set-ups in the history of live action sci-fi, ultimately fell into a frustrated, self-involved wet fart, he does a good job of getting at just why that was. Best bit:

The return to an absurdly sterile status quo, regular like clockwork every episode: it’s almost physically painful, but perhaps that’s because it conceals a point. Maybe, just possibly, it’s a choice…

Although not a choice I agree with in the slightest, because I am not a show-maker but a show-watcher, and I want what I like — feel that the same points could be made very adequately in the context of hammering, rather than tapping, tapping, always bloody tapping. But maybe that’s just me.

If you think about it, the whole premise of Star Trek is really absurd: every episode, or just about, the crew of a space ship hundreds of light years from anything else find themselves face to face not merely with villains and menaces, but weird science-fiction threats so terrifying in nature as to be downright existential. I mean, seriously, how much is human nature suppose to have changed in three hundred years that we should supposedly be able to come face-to-face with something like Q -- basically God -- and just shake it off with equanimity, meet for drinks in Ten-Forward after your shift is over? How the hell is it that the entire crew of the NCC 1701-D hasn't been Section 8'ed? Let's see, one episode you're facing an omnipotent God, the next one you get transformed into a fish monster by a devolving ray, the next you see your captain turned into a robot monster bent on destroying the Earth -- and next week we're supposed to give a crap that Data wants to learn how to tap dance? That is serious Blue Velvet territory right there.

The real shame is that when the show was good, it could be really good. I think if I had to pick a really strong selection I could pick maybe a full dozen TNG episodes that came pretty close to shaking off the cobwebs of the premise's "dynamic stasis". Not surprisingly, the episodes that focused on action and thrills were really strong. The first Borg episode ("Q Who?") is one of the best, and the second Borg episode (the "Best of Both Worlds" two-parter) is quite possibly the best of the series, and not just because of that (justly) famous cliffhanger. (I mean, seriously, cliffhangers are a dime a dozen these days, but that last scene where Riker told Worf to open fire on the Borg cube and then the screen went black to "To Be Continued . . ." -- well, that was a damn long summer, is all I'm saying.) The Borg were a great enemy precisely because they stood against everything which, conceptually, TNG had been founded on: diplomacy, reasoned assurances that problems can be solved through negotiation, a gentle commitment to mutual cooperation even among rivals. The Borg were implacable, invincible and deadly, and for a brief shining moment they were the scariest thing on TV.

And then? Well, after the boffo success of "Best of Both Worlds", the Borg were subsequently ignored and trivialized. The first is understandable, sort-of, considering that the Borg were obviously the single most expensive special effect the show had. But the second -- well, that was unforgivable. Giving us sympathetic Borg? Worse, demoting the Borg to a race of candy-asses in thrall to Data's paint-huffing twin brother? I think if you look up "jumping the shark" in the dictionary, you'll see a picture of Geordie's lovable Borg pal Hugh.

"Best of Both Worlds" has only one real rival for the title of "best TNG episode": "All Good Things". It's one of the best -- if not, hell, the best series finale I've ever seen. It summed up, in two hours, everything that was good about the show, as well as putting much of the preceding seven years to shame in terms of showcasing interesting, well-written, dynamic and downright awesome sci-fi writing. It deals with alternate realities -- TNG was always good when it dealt with alternate realities, probably because they could get away with the illusion of consequence in alternate realities where things could actually "happen", at least sort-of. Most importantly, watching "All Good Things", the viewer can fool themselves into thinking that there really was an alternate-universe TNG where all that cool character development and sharp writing came together every week, and not just a handful of times over the course of 178 freakin' episodes. But of course, since it was the last episode, they probably thought they could get away with actually changing things up a bit. A shame, that.

I liked "Parralels" and "The Inner Light", two more alternate-reality episodes that actually seemed to cut to the heart of the respective spotlight characters -- Worf, in a rare non-Klingon-centric starring role, and Picard himself. Again, though, in order to find something interesting to say about the characters, the writers had to go out of their way to concoct Rube Goldberg plot machines that would allow for emotional arcs without messing with the precious status quo. If you start looking, you can find a lot of episodes that go to the same well: there's always something to trigger or mitigate unusual behavior, something to excuse the characters from acting like real people as soon as they put on those damn Starfleet unitards.

And this isn't an attack on the notion of Star Trek's future being a practicing utopia: that's a great, optimistic idea that really sets Trek apart from just about everything else in the sci-fi universe. The problem is that the idea on its own is a setting, not a plot point. This goes back to the heart of why TNG just didn't work over the long haul. It was built on the bones of fan-fiction. What is fan-fiction, really? I'm sure there's fan-fiction out there that's just as good as the real thing, but when we say fan-fiction, I think we all know what we mean: stories in the framework of a preexisting fictional universe that emphasize certain isolated interests of the fan in question to the detriment of the property as a whole. Like, say, what if Kirk and Spock acted on the hetero-normative frisson in their working relationship in a homo-sexual manner? What if Spider-Man had stayed married and had kids? That kind of thing.

In this case, however, it's more like, "what if Star Trek really was just the most perfect, all-inclusive, wonderfully balanced society in all of history, with room for every misfit, including me . . . ?"

TNG failed because accepting the show's premise implied a tacit rejection of the original series' writ. The fun of Star Trek, to the creators of TNG, wasn't the fabulous adventure, action, and colorful character acting -- no, it was the future-oriented optimism implied by a color-sex-and-creed-blind utopia world. All of which was great, but never, never actually the focus of TOS, only ever incidentally. The fact that it was so offhanded was what made it work: of course there's a Russian on board, the Cold War was 300 years ago; of course Kirk is kissing Uhura, prejudice is so 20th century. But on TNG, they practically made a cottage industry out of bringing old TOS cast members out of mothballs to fawn over the crew of the NCC 1701-D, saying just how much better the new Enterprise was and how slick and smooth everything was in this perfect little future world of the Federation. Bones, Scotty, Spock, Sarek -- am I forgetting anyone? Even Kirk, in the end, had to get down on his knees to ritually fellate the insecurity of the amassed nerds who not only wanted their sci-fi as bland as possible, but needed to be told that it wasn't "just" a fun show, it was a way of life. And that if they worked hard there would be a place for them aboard the Enterprise, right alongside Picard, Riker, and Counseler Troi in her space-bunny leotard.

2008-07-17T19:26:00.001-04:00

Comics I Have Read

Justice Society of America #17

As much as I want to dislike Geoff Johns - and Lord knows he more than deserves the lion's share of the criticism he's got over the years - reading some of his later work I can't help but feel as if he's turned some sort of corner. There's not so much of the left-field ultraviolence that worked against the supposedly mellower tone of his nostalgic work. The tendency to wallow in continuity seems less annoying now. Sure, all of his main DCU titles are pretty much "inside baseball", but I liked his recent Legion of Super-Heroes a story much more than I thought I would, and I guess my delight at seeing the "old school" Legion once again influenced my generosity towards the rest of his work. And sure enough, his JSA has actually become interesting. I'm surprised it's even readable - it's in the middle of an ongoing patch-job dedicated to finally integrating Kingdom Come with the mainline continuity. I don't think Kingdom Come holds up well at all so I am surprised they were able to find a clever angle on the material, but the idea behind the storyline is actually quite strong. The idea of a godlike being coming to earth and upending the apple-cart for genuinely benign purposes is, amazingly, not one that's been played before in a lot of superhero books. The dialogue about faith and religion is being tackled pretty honestly, all things considered, especially in light of how corny it could have been. I just have two reservations: One, the sinking feeling that Gog will turn out to be less than advertised. The idea of an outer-space god willing to change the whole of humanity for the better is a rich enough idea that it would be a shame if Johns took the easy way out and gave him an ulterior motive. Second - Mr. Terrific is one of the only openly atheistic characters in super-dooper comics - as stupid as it may seem, I guess I'm attached to him for the same reason Jews are attached to Kitty Pryde, Catholics like Nightcrawler* and Scientologists dig Triathlon (hah!). Hopefully his crisis of un-faith will not result in him having a bogus spiritual conversion. (It may not make much sense to be an atheist in a fictional universe where on every other Tuesday you are given some form of concrete proof in the existence of the Judeo-Christian God, but hey. There shouldn't be any global warming on Earth-DC after Final Night, but I bet they have that, too.)

Secret Invasion #4

Considering all the buildup, I don't think this is what people were expecting. I think people were probably expecting something a bit more substantive, like a taut thriller that hinged on escalating tension and surprise reveals, sort of a Marvel Universe version of one of those John LeCarre novels. But this - well, we're halfway through and the story has taken up all of, what, eight hours so far? Where's the intrigue? There's no intrigue, it's all smashing and shooting, and most of that is pretty nonsensical at that. (Like, who are Nick Fury's new stooges and what are they doing, exactly? If I hadn't read the tie-in where they were introduced I'd have no idea whatsoever why they were even in this comic.) The only attempt at intrigue is the "is Tony Stark a Skrull?" plot, but since everyone in the world pretty much knows they're not going to pull that trigger, it's a useless red herring. Unless, of course, they do, in which case I take back everything I said. But they won't. So, yeah: it's on time and it'll probably continue to ship on time, but what price punctuality? It isn't reading well in serial format, it'll be nonsensical in a trade unless it's a huge omnibus with all the pertinent tie-ins, and it's just not very good to begin with. Oh well.

Mighty Avengers #16

And then there's this. Before Secret Invasion, I would have bet money that one of Marvel's primary - if obviously unstated - goals was to ultimately reveal that the resurrected Elektra that's been running around the Marvel Universe for the past decade or so had in fact been a deep-cover Skrull all along. None of the post-Frank Miller Elektra titles have amounted to anything much, and I doubt the creators involved would really begrudge the move at such a late date. I mean, Miller has never made any secret of the fact that he thought the resurrected Elektra was stupid. And Joe Quesada even made a half-hearted attempt to placate Alan Moore, for God's sake, so it seemed like a pretty obvious proposition: even if it was unlikely that Miller would really want to come back to Marvel in the first place - since it would probably distract him from counting all the money he's got stuffed in Will Eisner's taxidermied corpse - undoing all the bad Elektra stories that postdate Elektra Lives Again would have been a pretty solid way to re-ingratiate themselves with a topper-than-top-shelf talent nonetheless, just on the off-chance he would ever want to do an All-Star Daredevil The Man Without Fear. But no, they didn't, and more's the pity. At least they did have the faux-Elektra get beaten to death by a Super-Skrull, but it's a missed opportunity.

Doesn't make up for those stories when she was hanging out with Wolverine, after he lost his nose. (I'm not making that last part up, if you're too young to remember.)

Batman #678

I'm not stupid, this just isn't very good. It reads incredibly choppy, the art obviously makes a bad situation worse, and is Batman on crytal meth now? Seriously, if I didn't read blogs I wouldn't understand what was going on. I don't know how anyone else figured it out, because frankly this is a mess, and it's just not worth the trouble to sit around a decipher crap in the hope there are nuggets of gold secreted inside the feces.

Jokers Asylum: The Penguin

Wait a minute, Jason Pearson is doing interiors again? Does anyone remember when he was a big deal? And wait, this story is actually pretty good? Wow. The Penguin, of all things.

* Do Catholics still care about Nightcrawler, or did the whole demon-pope thing from Chuck Austen's run pretty much salt that proverbial earth?

2008-07-08T19:15:00.000-04:00

Why Star Trek - The Next Generation Failed

(So yeah, it took a few days longer. Erm.)

Like many folks of roughly similar backgrounds, I enjoyed the heck out of Star Trek - The Next Generation when it first premiered, followed the show avidly through its seven seasons, and mourned its eventual passing. Although it sounds like the kvetching of the aged to say so, the fact is that kids today don't know how good they have it: was a time when the idea of having a moderately intelligent weekly sci-fi television program that didn't have asinine budgetary restrictions was simply inconceivable. TNG came out, was incredibly successful, and essentially recreated the entire genre of television sci-fi in its own image. That's hardly an understatement, as every significant sci-fi program to appear in the ensuing years has been strongly defined, either thematically, tonally or structurally (or all the above) by its relationship to TNG. Whether it's been established in stated opposition to the Trek "house style" (Babylon 5, Battlestar: Galactica, X-Files) or in slavish imitation (the various Stargate series, SeaQuest, any number of crap shows you can catch on late-night local syndication), the fact is that TNG changed the ballgame entirely. If you don't believe me, go back and look at how crappy something like V looked just a couple years before TNG. (And if you want to defend V in the comments, go right ahead, but that doesn't make it not crap.)

So yeah, you can't really say that TNG failed on any significant level except . . . well, have you watched it recently? Sure, everyone remembers the good episodes, "The Best of Both Worlds" and "All Good Things . . .", a couple of the Q episodes (because John de Lancie was one of the best character actors on TV for the duration of the show), maybe, if you're kind, a Klingon-heavy episode or two. And then, ummm, well. I had a DVR a couple years back and I decided to start recording the episodes of TNG that were being shown on Spike at the time. I rewatched the entire run of the show from beginning to end, and was dismayed by how badly the whole thing held up. And by dismayed, I mean horrified, because there had been a time when I had dearly loved the show. That time has passed.

Back when Trek was the only game in town, it was easy to overlook the problems. Those who loved the original series saw enough in the new show to remind them of why they loved the franchise, and enough new fans came aboard that the show became an honest-to-Goodness phenomenon, at least for a short time, until Paramount killed the franchise through overexposure in the late 90s. But it's not as if the problems are only valid in hindsight, with the benefit of a decade-and-a-half of better, post TNG television and film sci-fi to cull from. The show's problems were endemic from the very first episode, in fact, they were perhaps most obvious in the earlier seasons, before Gene Roddenberry died and some of the restrictions placed on the franchise began to loosen. As sad as his death was, the fact is that by 1991 his vision of the future was going nowhere fast.

Comparing Trek to Star Wars is a pastime as old as time itself, or at least as old as 1977, when the thunderbolt popularity of the first Star Wars films established the franchise as the second pole in sci-fi fandom's big tent. When Roddenberry returned Trek to TV in the 80s, he made many of the same mistakes George Lucas made when he returned Star Wars to film at the turn of the century. Primarily, he disregarded a great deal of what had made the original property so popular in exchange for accentuating background details which were, at best, incidental, and at worst superfluous to the property's appeal. For the purposes of this discussion, I'll label this phenomenon the "Han Solo Effect".

What do people like most about the original Star Wars trilogy? Lots of things, sure. But what made those first three movies really sing? Han Solo. Sure, you had a cosmic mythology and a classic story of good versus evil and all that Joseph Campbell bullshit*, but really, who do you root for? Who has the charisma? Who was a good enough actor that you forgave him the occasional churlishness of the material in exchange to see him shoot a blaster from the hip on occasion? That's right, Han Solo. Along with the really-more-frightening-than-intended Chewbacca and his dilapidated spaceship, he was the glue that held the entire movie - all three movies, really - together. Go back and watch A New Hope: the most convincing character arc is not Luke. Luke doesn't even have a character arc besides the gradual realization that he's some sort of Aryan Jedi superman. The real crux of the movie is Han Solo deciding to not be such a prick. He's the one who saves Luke at the end of the movie, after all. A lot of people forget that.

The problem was that Han Solo's success was partially due to elements completely out of Lucas' control: i.e., the fact that Harrison Ford was about to become one of the most popular movie stars of all time, and was therefore carrying around more charisma and sex-appeal in his back pocket than everyone else in all the movies put together, with the possible exception of Billy Dee Williams**. Considering that Lando Calrission was essentially the same character as Han Solo didn't really matter: everyone loves a rogue, and watching a rogue turn against his baser interests in order to find redemption is one of the most enduring stories in the history of the world. Screw the "Hero With a Thousand Faces" - everybody knows how that story ends. Give me Casablanca - or better yet, give me Casablanca with spaceships and call it The Empire Strikes Back.

I have never made any secret of my affection for the prequel trilogy - it's better than most give it credit for. The underpinning thematics aren't bog-stupid and downright reactionary in their leanings, and the political analogy set up in the second and third films actually - maybe - veers towards actual insight. But there's still something undeniably missing, some vital element keeping the later films from approaching the very simple believability that the earlier films accomplished so effortlessly. What's missing? Han Solo. Obviously, there could be no Han Solo, but there needed to be something to fill that roll, because without that kind of a charismatic lynchpin, sci-fi pageantry can easily turn into self-important drivel.

It's the same reason, really, why the Hobbits are placed at the center of The Lord of the Rings: sure, they're not rogues, but they're still the characters you're paying attention to when the camera is supposed to be focused on Gandalf or Aragorn pontificating about something or other. In order to pull off that kind of high-epic storytelling, you need something slightly off-grain to focus on, or the texture and emphasis can seem all wrong. You pay attention to Han Solo in Star Wars because he's mirroring your own reactions of slight disbelief at the crap he's hearing from those self-important Jedis. Similarly (and although the characters couldn't be more dissimilar in other ways), Frodo and Sam and Merry and Pippin are just agog at everything, and their reactions - both general awe and a little tiny bit of disbelief at the absurdity of the proceedings - focus the narrative. Doctor Who has made it so long because this function of the narrative is built into the very premise: the Doctor flies around time and space with a companion. There's a reason why there has only ever been one full Who adventure without a companion, because without that dynamic the series breaks down.***

So, given this, who was the lynchpin of the Prequel trlogy? Who was supposed to be the charismatic outsider who served as the narrative's focal point, or, barring that, the viewpoint character who defined the story through his interaction with unfamiliar elements? There's only one character that fits the definition: Jar Jar Binks.

Unless you' haven't been paying attention, I'll bet you can see where I'm going with this. James T. Kirk was another once-in-a-lifetime confluence of character and actor, and Roddenberry was smart not to try to attempt to remake Kirk when designing TNG. The problem was that they decided to eliminate all tension from the show's premise. Instead of a fairly rag-tag group of disciplined but very human astronauts cruising around a pretty frightening galaxy of unknown terrors, TNG presented the Federation of some fifty years later as essentially a utopia, with perfectly balanced space diplomats cruising around a fairly well understood and mostly domesticated post-Glasnost galaxy. A roguish asshole like Kirk, the kind who lied and bluffed and punched his way through adversaries many times more powerful than he was, just wouldn't fit as the captain of the NCC-1701-D. In fact, no one with any kind of personality defect more unfortunate than, say, an inordinate love of Dixieland jazz would ever be cleared for the Federation's flagship. No Han Solos or James T. Kirks to be found, but boy, was there plenty of time spent exploring the underpinnings of Federation ethics and philosophy. Hot dog! And we were even given, in lieu of any kind of charismatic rogue figure, two new POV characters who could react to the world of the 24th century not with disbelief, amusement or bemusement, but awe, wonder, genuflection and hope: Wesley Crusher and Commander Data.

The implications of this emphasis on utopian world-building were immediately felt in the show's writing. Without being able to show any kind of interpersonal strife or conflict - not even of the friendly rival variety, as with Bones & Spock - the writers were forced into a dizzying variety of compromise positions. They could introduce mind control, utilize or overutilize secondary characters who were granted temporary license to be imperfect, or use the metaphorical toolbox of hard sci-fi to externalize conflict. (This last one has always been Trek's defining engine of conflict, going back to the original series, with the Klingons, Vulcans, Farengi, Romulans, Cardassians and even the Borg all standing in for various facets of unpleasant human behavior which could never be openly explored in the context of the Federation itself, not within the strictures Roddenberry had painstakingly established.) All of these were used to excess throughout the seven-year run, and every overplayed strategy was an ultimately futile attempt to distract from the fact that by definition the show was unable to utilize the most basic of tools required for any narrative: conflict between primary characters. In the 24th century, interpersonal conflict was eliminated, but that had the unpleasant side effect of rendered everyone rather boring.

It is telling that for all the time spent on each primary character over the course of so many years, each characters' singular defining traits could only ever be touched obliquely. There was apparently supposed to be a romance between Riker and Troi, but if you never read a fan magazine you might never have picked up on it, because the two actors had all the chemistry of a 2x4. Riker himself had a lot of possibility that was never fully explored: he actually seemed to have the closest thing to a "dark side" or any of the crew, even Worf, but it could only be touched on very obliquely. There was a pretty decent episode late in the run that featured a transporter clone of Riker, who meets his alternate self after seven years' stranded on a distant asteroid or something. His first reaction when he meets himself is, what the fuck? I should have been a captain by now, not someone who routinely sabotaged his own career to play water-carrier for some bald Daddy figure. But of course, the show could never really do anything with that other than externalize the tension in such a way as to keep the main characters unharmed and unchanged.

In a similar fashion, there was a surprising amount of time devoted to Geordi's singular haplessness with ladies. Sure enough, there was a funny sequence where he fell in love with a holodeck simulation of an engineer who helped design the Enterprise - a surprisingly prescient plot development. But really, the fact that Geordi was a creepy internet stalker was never developed at all, and when he eventually met the engineer whose virtual personality he had fallen in love with, you'd be absolutely mistaken if you thought the sparks would fly. Any kind of sparks at all, besides the spark that hits the couch after you fall asleep with a cigarette in your hand because it's so fucking boring.

In fact, let's see if I can write the outline of a sample TNG episode right here:

Stardate XXXX

While on route to investigate a previously unreported subspace anomaly near the Glifhfksnene quadrant, the Enterprise received a distress call from the planet Denregdnew. We've been dispatched to help with an emerging refugee crisis, while also ferrying a group of diplomats from the Pdhrgeneiwkw gaseous cloud to help with negotiations. Meanwhile, Commander Data has decided to enlist the aid of the crew while he learns how to yodel.

More to come.

* I'm not just being dismissive, I really do think that stuff is grade-A bullshit, and the pernicious influence of Joseph Campbell's pop-mythology on pop culture, via Star Wars, simply cannot be overstated.

** Yeah, even Alec Guiness. Look, Guiness was many things in his day, but a Harrison Ford-level matinee idol was not one of them.

*** "The Deadly Assassin", in case you were wondering.

2008-06-30T19:43:00.000-04:00

Does anyone really care about Star Trek anymore?

I realize it was most likely a rhetorical question, but my answer is still a qualified "yes". Those qualifications are: I used to love Star Trek and still have an inordinate fondness for the franchise, and would dearly love to see a new, well-done and cool iteration of the series. Stranger things have happened. If you went back in time ten years and told me that a revamped and recharged Dr. Who would be not merely popular, but extraordinarily successful, I would have thought you were nuts. But, importantly, the Powers That Be at the BBC let Who lay fallow for fifteen years - a steady trickle of fans-only ancillary product and one regrettable American TV movie notwithstanding. By the time Who came back a few years ago, there was enough water under the bridge that the general public could come to it fresh, but not enough time had passed that the hardcore fans had begun to, well, die off.

Contrariwise, there was a new Trek series on the air every year from 1987 to 2005, and half-a-dozen movies in theaters as well. In the years 1994-95 alone, Next Generation ended, Deep Space Nine continued, Voyager began and Generations saw theatrical release. That's an incredible amount of material in a relatively short amount of time: say what you will about George Lucas, but there is something to be said for keeping a tight control on the reins of your fictional universe. The general malaise which met the release of Enterprise signified more than merely dissatisfaction with the show itself (although that was a part of it), but a marked decline in the franchise's general appeal. The fanbase had dwindled, the writing and production had grown stale to a general audience, the well had gone dry. I watched consistently for most of the 90s but my attention wandered after Deep Space Nine ended: Voyager just wasn't anywhere near as good, a few standout episodes aside. I stopped watching at some point. I didn't bother with the last couple Next Generation films, and I don't think I ever saw a whole episode of Enterprise. (Although I have heard a few good things about the series in the ensuing years, by people who said that towards the end they gave up on trying to follow the Next Generation formula and just went crazy.)

So if you're working on Star Trek, your challenge is two-pronged: one, you have to win back old-school fans like me who may have strayed from the franchise, and are at the very least skeptical about any new material. But two, and more importantly, you have to be able to wipe the slate clean for the casual viewer. If you're going to sink $75-100 million on a Star Trek film you have to make it palatable to the general public who will decide whether or not the movie opens with a triumphant $50-60 million weekend or a Fanboy-FUBU $20 million.

My first bit of advice? Well, it's a bit moot now, but it bears repeating: whatever you do, don't reboot. It's one thing to reboot Batman. People are used to seeing different actors as Batman - just as they're used to seeing different people as Superman, James Bond and - presumably one day - Spider-Man. These characters all originated in other media besides film, so there is no one actor who carries a monopoly on how Bruce Wayne could or should act or look. But Captain Kirk? One of the most iconic characters in television history, and - for better or for worse - absolutely, inextricably identified with the performance of William Shatner. Shatner doesn't get a lot of credit for being a good actor - he's not, really - but in Captain Kirk he found a character that matched his temperament and performance instincts so well that the idea of Shatner playing another character besides Kirk - to say nothing of another actor ever trying to play Kirk - seems like simple folly. Leonard Nimoy was a much better actor than Shatner, and therefore it's probably a more significant shame that he became as typecasted as he did, but the same concept applies.

The original Trek remains eternally popular, and even managed to emerge from the Trek-overload of the 1990s relatively unscathed. (To that end Paramount's decision, whether intentional or incidental, to keep the "Next Gen" and "Classic" brands separate and distinct probably saved the long-term viability of the franchise. Conversely, Lucas' insistence on marketing all of Star Wars under a singular banner might have precipitated significant fandom erosion, considering the toxic reaction to the prequel trilogy in fan circles and the common belief that the later films negatively impacted perception of the earlier films.) Kirk and Spock still retain significant cultural cache. Even people who know nothing about science fiction have seen the original Star Trek. Going back to Kirk and Spock seems problematic at best. It's not like Battlestar: Galactica, where few know and fewer care whoever the fuck played Starbuck back in 1979. People still remember the original Star Trek.

But at root, the problem is even simpler than that: going back to the beginning just seems half-assed. It doesn't even look like a total stem-to-stern revamp, like the aforementioned Galactica: based on what little we've seen and heard, its Kirk and Spock on the Enterprise. How much future does a franchise legitimately have if it spends all of its time retelling old stories? Admittedly, I may be entirely mistaken: maybe the world desperately needs a new interpretation of Kirk and Spock, and the movie will make a hojillion dollars. (It'll probably make a lot of money anyway, if advance buzz is any indication.) But speaking from the privileged position of a fan, I can honestly say I'm not really interested in seeing it done again when it was done well the first time. Show me something new. That's exactly what they did with Next Generation back in 1987, and - at least for a while - it worked like gangbusters. The success of the original-cast films throughout the 80s prompted the invention of a new series going off in new directions, and those new directions were interesting enough to propel almost twenty years worth of material. Hopefully that kind of a leap forward is a possibility in addition to the film's soft reboot, because I think there's still a lot of potential in the world of Star Trek . . . but I'm skeptical about how much of that potential can be fulfilled by rehashing old ideas.

Tomorrow (or the day after): why Next Generation failed.

2008-06-26T20:49:00.000-04:00

Stop the Motherf***ing Presses

Ladies and gentlemen, is there even any need for blogs, or even the Internet, anymore? Isn't this pretty much it? I mean, all we need now is for someone to do a YTMND animation of Spock drawing a pentagram and saying "You're the man now, dog." And then, if that happened, we could say the human race had finally fulfilled its potential.

2008-06-24T18:22:00.000-04:00

Root For The Home Team

Logic dictates that rooting for a losing sports team is the height of inefficiency, and yet people do it all the time. By nature, most sports teams are losers at one point or another, no one wins all the time unless they're the Boston Celtics in the 1960s. The most sensible thing to do would be to follow the team with the best record, and to switch allegiances at will as the teams' performance varied. Hence, if the Diamondbacks were doing well this year, you'd root for them, but if they fell into a slump you'd follow whichever team was having a better year. You could limit it to regional affiliation if you insisted: but still, at the end of the day, if you lived in California you could decide whether to root for the Angels, the Dodgers, the Padres, the A's or the Giants, maybe even the Diamondbacks or the Mariners. Perhaps there could be a simple rubric for deciding which team had the potential for the most profitable fan-relationship.

But the dictates of logic have nothing to do with fandom. Cubs fans have had a tough time of it, with the longest championship drought of any team in professional sports history. So, why does anyone support the Cubs? Why do people feel such illogically strong proprietary feelings towards a team that has disappointed so often? In real life, if your spouse of significant other let you down 99 times in a row, you'd probably seriously reconsider whether or not to continue to be with them. And if you bought 99 bad issues of Superman in a row, you'd probably stop buying Superman for good, right?

Right?

Brand loyalty gets people into trouble, and it's even worse in the realm of entertainment, where brand loyalty becomes conflated with identity. No one outside of the realm of stationary retail or Wall Street gives a crap whether or not Xerox outsells Canon. Maybe an extremely small percentage of the population, office managers or whatnot, have an opinion about photocopiers, but most of the rest of us could not care less as long as the damn thing works when you go to the library or Kinkos. Maybe a few more people care about Coke versus Pepsi - most people who drink soda probably have a general preference* whether, if offered the choice between the two, they will choose Pepsi or Coca-Cola, but the majority of people probably don't spend too much time thinking about brand loyalty, they just buy what they like**. If Coke stopped making Coke, they'd switch to Pepsi or RC or Shasta (where applicable). Maybe a few more people care about cars - a few people have terrific brand loyalty, especially regarding American cars. You don't see as many "I'd Rather Push A Chevy Than Drive A Ford" bumper stickers as you used to, but they're still out there. Likewise, Honda drivers like Hondas for their longevity and easy maintenance; Subaru drivers like Subarus because of their progressive corporate practices and similar ease of maintenance.

But except for an infinitesimal minority, most people don't really identify with these kinds of economic decisions in the same we they do the decisions they make regarding their entertainment intake, be it sports or TV or comics. People identify with their favorite sports teams, they identify with their favorite TV shows, and they identify with Batman. There is no more wrenching decision for any sports fan than to see their team uprooted to a new city: what do you do? Continue following "your" team when they're halfway across the country or switch allegiances? How long? Do you continue to be a Dodgers fan, and teach your children and their children to be Dodgers fans in the heart of New York long after anyone who ever played for the team's Brooklyn incarnation is long dead?

And what if Batman sucks? If you're a fan, your allegiance to the Batman franchise sidesteps reason. If you want Batman, you have to buy the Batman comics supplied by DC. Maybe you also buy the Iron Man comics, and perhaps Spawn too, but if you like Batman you probably don't acknowledge any of these as appropriate substitutes for Batman - you'd probably be just as pissed if Iron Man sucked, and just as unlikely to buy more Batman in substitution if the situation were reversed.

Given this, it takes a lot to shake this kind of brand loyalty. Look how hard Paramount had to work to erode fan loyalty to the Star Trek brand, one of the most notoriously strong brands in all of entertainment. It isn't even really brand loyalty: if you really, really like Batman - or Star Trek, or Iron Man, or the Cubs - it's not a question of identifying with the Batman brand, it goes deeper than that. It goes to the heart of your identity in small but subtle ways. If you have loyalty to Batman you've probably been loyal to Batman since you were very young, and can't imagine a world where Batman comics didn't exist, and where you didn't buy them at least occasionally.

And by that same token, the fierce loyalty to Batman translates to a strong feeling of entitlement: if you've given a large portion of your life to the character, you have a right to dictate terms, right? You get a say, I mean, other than simply choosing whether or not to by the books? That's a given, right? I mean, if you're already going to spend $3.00+ on Batman every month, you should get some say in what happens between those pages, right? Once you've committed to the purchase, and are presumably committed to the purchase for the foreseeable future, the creators and editors have an obligation to pay attention to you, right? You get a say, right?

Right?

* To this effect, I should point out that I am the only person I know who is completely agnostic about cola - I will happily drink either Pepsi or Coke (but not the diet version of either, thank you), and will usually drink Pepsi Max or Coke Zero interchangeably. That is less of a preference than most people have, I'd wager, but most peoples' loyalty to their brand of choice is probably not very deep.

** Diet Coke drinkers are the exception: those people are fanatics.

2008-06-23T18:02:00.001-04:00

Such A Great Idea, Someone Already Had It In 1987

In case you don't remember, I put this up a couple months back.

Then just today I was skimming through this:

When I came across this:

Specifically, this:

So now we have proof: there has been a groundswell
of support for Morrissey for over two decades.

It can happen.

It should happen.

(Incidentally, when I concocted the strip above I had no idea that Davros was going to be the big baddie for Season 4, it was really just wishful thinking, and reasonable deduction considering he was the last really big name missing from the old series - Daleks, Cybermen, the Master, the Sontarans - after Davros it's slim pickings, and even the Sontarans were kind of goofy to begin with. I mean, everyone was hoping that the Rani would be in Season 4 but, seriously, do you see the Rani coming back? Ever? About as much chance of that as the Mad Friggin' Monk.)

The Hurting

If Will Eisner had had a time machine, I bet he would have gone back in time to slap his younger self for this shit.

If Will Eisner had had a time machine, I bet he would have
gone back in time to slap his younger self for this shit.