Gotham's Reckoning



Courtesy of Violet

San Diego Comicon News Wrap-Up 2012

Drawn & Quarterly Announce New "Building Stories" Deluxe Edition

Drawn & Quarterly publisher Chris Oliveros announced today that the company would be releasing a deluxe edition of Chris Ware's newest graphic novel, Building Stories. While the collection's first edition, slated to hit stores this October from Pantheon, is still months from release, Oliveros is confident that the announcement of the new super-deluxe edition will not effect sales. "We've seen this model for years in the movie business: new movies are first released on DVD in bare-bones format, with no commentary tracks or extra footage. Then six months down the road, the studio releases the two-disc deluxe set that has all the bonus goodies that fans wanted all along. People have no problem double-dipping on the newest Batman movie, so it doesn't seem unusual to expect that people are going to be willing to pay a similar premium to get the complete Building Stories experience."

The first edition of Building Stories is already a marvel of interactive packaging and state-of-the-art book design. When pressed for specifics as to how the updated Building Stories would surpass the original, Oliveros said that the deluxe edition would "dwarf" the original. "The version of Building Stories that goes on sale in October is the best version of Building Stories that Pantheon could produce. It's a little box with a bunch of posters and fold-outs in it. It's a perfectly reasonable approximation of the Building Stories experience, good for the types of people who are going to read the New Yorker's inevitable laudatory review and buy a copy of the book to put under the holiday tree. Dilettantes, basically. But the real Building Stories is something much larger and more ambitious. Pantheon balked at the idea of creating a 3' x 6' x 6" wooden plank hand-carved and lacquered to look like a scale model of a real building. The book is basically going to be a kind of advent calendar. The reader will open up the thirty "windows" on the face of the building and pull out thirty tiny mini-books with the story content. But - here's the best part - each succeeding window can only be opened once the reader answers a riddle and inputs the answer into the digital master-lock controlled by the book's security system, the answer to which has been cleverly hidden in the previous book. These are hard riddles, too - I don't want to give anything away, but there's a lot in the book on the life of Robert Moses, and it might help to have a copy of The Power Broker on hand, as well as - obviously - Boethius."

When asked about the content of the books themselves, Oliveros said that the finished, deluxe Building Stories would be substantially larger than the Pantheon edition. "Our version has at least 75% percent more material than the Pantheon edition, maybe more. The first book in the sequence is what we in the trade call 'normal size' - the customary 6 ⅝" × 10 ¼" comic book size that you might recall from the most recent, nostalgia issue of Optic Nerve. As the narrative continues, the books get smaller and smaller, reflecting the crushing spiritual ennui and claustrophobic depression these characters experience. The final book in the sequence is only 1" x 2" inches and printed in tiny micrographic detail - with the naked eye the pages look almost completely black, covered with tiny lines. We're including one of those magnifying glasses you get with the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, and even then you might be unable to read the conclusion without pulling the pages out of the book and reading them under a microfiche reader, the type you probably have to go to a major university library to find because most public libraries threw out their microfilm years ago."     

When asked how much the deluxe edition would cost, Oliveros was unwilling to speculate what the final retail price would be. "We aren't sure yet - we're still talking to contractors and lumber yards. I'm pretty sure that no one in this room is going to be able to afford this one, though - we've already accepted an order for 5,000 copies for the gift shop at the Met. It's going to be a great conversation starter for anyone who can get it up through the freight elevator to their SoHo loft." Although Ware himself was not present in San Diego, he made an appearance by phone during the D&Q showcase panel. After Oliveros placed the telephone speaker against the microphone, the crowd heard a muffled, wet sound that Oliveros assured the audience was weeping. "That's usually what Chris is like, there's a lot of uncontrollable weeping and gnashing of teeth. I know it sounds like he's laughing hysterically, but he's not, I promise."


DC Announces New "Kid-Friendly" Batman Book

Responding to longstanding fan and retailer complaints that the mainline Batman titles offered by DC Comics are far too explicit to be sold or given to children, the company announced during their spotlight panel earlier today that they would be publishing a new all-ages Batman book specifically aimed at winning over lapsed kid readers and the parents who buy them comics.

DC Co-Publisher Dan Didio introduced the book with a tacit apology. "I recognize that we've painted ourselves into something of a corner in the last few years, with increasingly explicit content in both our books and some of the ancillary product, like [the popular video game] Arkham City. But we've taken a look back at some of our publishing decisions and realized that we need to reaffirm our commitment to once again making Batman friendly for kids and families."

The new book will start, Didio said, with sanitized retellings of some of the more controversial highlights of the last few years of Batman stories. "The first issue of the new Detective Comics started with the Joker getting his face ripped off - we realized after the issue hit stands we may have crossed a line. In our new version, the Joker draws on his face with permanent marker - I think any parents in the audience should recognize which is more horrifying! In Night of the Owls, Batman and his friends faced the undead corpses of Gotham city's most powerful citizens - in our new version, the Court of Owls' foot-soldiers will have really bad ice-cream headaches."

Didio alluded to the imminent arrival of the latest Batman film as the impetus for this new initiative. "In just over a week, people are going to be lining up across the world to see The Dark Knight Rises. And that movie is going to be promoting a vision of Batman that we need to be able to follow-through with on the publishing level. The cinematic Batman lives in a gaudy fictional city filled with colorful villains and pulse-pounding adventure. Christopher Nolan's films have done a great job exposing Batman to a new generation of kids and parents alike. Families walk out of the theater with huge smiles after watching Nolan's films. They're used to seeing a Batman who isn't afraid to crack jokes with Robin, fighting villains with colorful costumes and dastardly yet absurdly elaborate robbery and extortion schemes. They want the basics: death-defying acrobatics and sharp detective skills, Batman overcoming impossible odds to escape preposterous death-traps and sock the villains on the jaw, that kind of thing. That's the 'new' old Batman we need to be promoting in our books."

The first issue of the new all-ages Batman book is being solicited for a November release. The creative team will be Tony Daniel and Philip Tan.


Marvel Studios Pleased to Announce New Slate of Creator-Screwing

Fresh off the success of Marvel's Avengers, Marvel Studios President of Production Kevin Feige appeared in front of a packed standing-room-only crowd to discuss Marvel's upcoming slate of big-budget creator-screwings.

"So, who here saw Marvel's Avengers?" Feige began by asking the crowd. The question elicited a thunderous reply from the assembled fanboys, many of whom had waited in line for two days for the opportunity to maybe see a test reel from Ant-Man. "We couldn't be more pleased by the reception Marvel's Avengers has received not just from you guys, but from the whole world. But I'm here to say that we're not going to be happy with just the third-biggest movie of all time, our creator-screwings are only going to be getting bigger from here on out."

During the panel, Feige announced the titles for the next Avengers-family sequels - Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. "We're thrilled to embark on the next round of creator-screwing. One of the problems with our creator-screwing so far is that - although there have been some exceptions - our most potent screwings have been going to creators who are either dead or on death's door. It's just not as much fun to screw estates as it is to screw the old guys themselves - you can really see the hate in their eyes when you tell them you just bought a third house in Florida with the proceeds you got from signing off on last-minute script revisions for a property they unambiguously created but over which they have no legal control. Or rather, scratch that, you can't see it in their eyes, because who would want to go near old people?"

Fans met this announcement with surprising enthusiasm, marked by an occasional, confused yell of "pull the plug!" Feige continued: "in hindsight, the real model for us going forward is going to be Elektra. That film may have underperformed at the box office, but we learned some valuable lessons about screwing over living creators with that one. Sure, Marv Wolfman sued us over Blade, but the circumstances surrounding that lawsuit were regrettable - Wolfman actually had half a case, and we had to go to court, and it just got drawn out. Where's the fun in going to court and listening to some boring judge take half a day to say what you already know, which is that old people stink? But with Elektra, we actually had a living, breathing creator - the incomparable Frank Miller - who was not merely alive to see his creation turned into a big-budget bomb that even in failure still made the Second Unit Best Boy more money than Miller has probably ever seen in royalties - but also had the common decency not to sue since we were so unambiguously within our legal rights to attach his good name as a creator to any half-assed piece of shit we felt like crapping out."

At this point, Feige pointed to a slide on the screen behind him featuring concept art for the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy film. "We're all really excited about this one, because we can finally start sticking it to some younger creators here. Half of these characters were created by Jim Starlin, the others by Steve Englehart and Bill Mantlo. The name 'Guardians of the Galaxy' was, of course, created by Arnold Drake and Gene Colan,  both of whom are dead and who are therefore no fun to taunt. But Starlin and Englehart are both alive and kicking, and all signs point to them being extremely displeased with the liberties we're taking with 'their' creations. But we're especially pleased to be able to finally screw over Bill Mantlo, co-creator of Rocket Raccoon: not only is Mantlo a destitute older creator, but he's also been confined to institutions for twenty years following a tragic accident that left him permanently mentally impaired. This is pretty much a dream come true in regards to being able to screw over the most helpless and pitiful creators possible."

As for the future of Marvel Studios past the next wave of Marvel's Avengers spin-offs, Feige was optimistic. "Basically, the sky is the limit in terms of our ability to piss off creators of every generation. We're just now getting around to screwing over creators in their fifties and sixties, so just imagine the kinds of opportunities that are still available for even younger creators. We've got a Deadpool video game coming out that you'll be pleased to hear Rob Liefeld has no input in whatsoever. We're still working on a Runaways movie - Brian K. Vaughan isn't even forty yet, so he could potentially enjoy another forty or fifty years of prime quality screwing if we turn his property into a massive hit. And one of these days you know we're going to make a fucking Sleepwalker movie, because I ran into Bob Budiansky once and he stole my soft pretzel. It was a fucking bomb-ass pretzel, too."

In conclusion, Feige alluded to the more complicated status of characters created since the institution of participation contracts in the mid-80s. "Since the 1980s, creators are entitled to participation in any profits from their creations. What this amounts to, in practice, is that they get to sit in on a conference call while we count the money. You know how modern business is, we don't actually need to physically count money, but for the benefit of our creators - for whom no effort is too great in terms of giving them the screwing they so richly deserve - we actually go to the bank and get these big sacks of dollar coins, and crisp bank notes, and take turns stacking and restacking and folding them as loudly as possible so they can hear over the phone, the actual sound of money. The best part is that after a while you can hear this soft moaning over the line, like the sound of an old, bruised heart finally breaking after a lifetime of undeserved mistreatment, like the end of Homer's Odyssey when Argus raises his head off the garbage heap and sees his old master Odysseus one more time before dying, only instead of his old, kind master all he sees is the Devil himself rising up out of the ground to drag his soul down to Hell as just rewards for being such a God-damned sucker. I tell you, at the end of the day, that's what makes it all worthwhile."

Free the demon / Hear this ceaseless screaming.



John Henry

It would be an extreme overstatement to say that John Henry was a "grunge" album. And yet at the same time it would be incorrect to say that the album didn't feel and sound quite differently from its predecessors, and that a great deal of this change in tone was a direct result of the band's decision to actually become a rock band. If you're not that familiar with They Might Be Giants, this might seem like a fine distinction: after all, TMBG had always been a "rock band," in that they had always played rock & roll music. But it wasn't until they toured for 1992's Apollo 18 that they had actually put together a band - drummer, bassist, extra guitar. And it wasn't until 1994's John Henry that they bought a fuzz box.

To say that the album met a mixed response would, again, be something of an understatement. This was back in the earliest says of the World Wide Web - I wasn't around on Usenet, although I'm certain there were plenty of TMBG fans who were incensed that the Johns were using a real drummer. With almost twenty years (!) in the rear-view, such fine distinctions seem comical - after all, by now the Johns have been a "rock band" for almost twice as long as they were a duo. But people hate change. I remember specifically that I didn't like the album at first, either. It took me a while to come around to it. I don't know why, in hindsight - it certainly sounded different from their previous albums, but not enough so that you'd be hard pressed to recognize one of the most distinctive-sounding bands of the last thirty years. Perhaps it was less a matter of the album sounding different from its predecessor than of it sounding uncomfortably similar to the then-current gold-standard of post-Nirvana high-gloss rock and roll jamming the radio waves in the year of Kurt Cobain's death.

Again, this is a tricky proposition, because John Henry is still far closer to being a They Might Be Giants album than, say, a Smashing Pumpkins album. But the more I listen to the album now the more I also see it as something that remains an artifact of its time. That's not necessarily a bad thing. My mind has always twinned John Henry with R.E.M.'s Monster - two albums released two weeks apart in September of 1994, which I purchased on the same day on a trip to the Tower Records on Watt Ave. in Sacramento. Both albums seem to me to be an expression of the same kind of desire to emulate the trademark heaviness of early nineties grunge without subscribing to the prevalent self-seriousness that was already recognized as Cobain's dubious legacy. Monster was essentially a peak-era glam album released 20 years too late - playful, sardonic, and intense in equal measure. John Henry was - well, it was still a They Might Be Giants album. But if the album began with the band's trademark accordion (the first few seconds of "Subliminal") that accordion is soon joined by heavy drums and deep growling fuzz guitar. The Johns weren't just playing around with the denser sound afforded by the post-grunge heavy rock palette, they were fully committed.  

It should always be remembered - despite their unique career trajectory - that They Might Be Giants are a historically important band in terms of the evolution of quote-unquote "alternative" music. Depending on your perspective they were either one of the last significant "college rock" bands or one of the very first "alternative" bands - do you remember college rock? Do you remember how when college rock actually started selling albums it morphed into the vague category of "alternative," because in order to be considered legitimate in the nineties, you had to come positioned as either an implicit or explicit "alternative" to something else? "Dirt Bike" is a song explicitly about the salad says of college rock radio, telling the story of a fictional touring band - called Dirt Bike, of course - touring the country and slowly taking over:

Here comes the dirt bike,
Beware of the dirt bike,
Because I hear they're coming to our town.
They've got plans for everyone.
And now I hear they're over their sophomore jinx, so you had better check it out.

Mind control is a frequent topic in TMBG songs, and the metaphor is useful here as a means of describing the intense bond between college bands and their fanbases - exchange "Dirt Bike" for any mid-to-late 80s hard-touring regional rock band. Michael Azerrad named his book on American "underground" rock of the 1980s Our Band Could Be Your Life, and in the post-Internet, post-Napster, post-Pitchfork world, it's becoming harder and harder to understand how the small scale of post-hardcore pre-grunge American indie-rock bred such fervent and long-lived loyalty from its fans - how to imagine a world where good music was hidden like a secret, in which uncovering a new favorite band could feel tantamount to becoming a different person? RIght now you have at your fingertips a machine that can give you access to the sum total of all written and recorded music throughout history with a few key strokes. Remember when we had to pore over back issues of SPIN to catch brief mentions of promising ultra-obscure bands? When people actually circulated zines ,and college radio stations were cultural institutions? I'm barely old enough to remember that heyday myself but it already feels like a far-distant age of Pharaohs.

If you were feeling unkind you could say - perhaps not without some justification - that TMBG's switch to a more conventional full-band rock sound in the mid-nineties reflected a broader pasteurization of the college format to reflect the realities of alternative rock's brief commercial heyday. Despite having significantly exceeded expectations with the improbable success of 1990's Flood, TMBG were soon lost in the shuffle of A&R shakeups at Elektra. Apollo 18 was a fine album that met a muted sales response, and the chances of John Henry being lost in a similar fashion were high. By 1994 it was probably hard to ignore the probability that Flood would remain the group's commercial high-water mark. Was the adoption of the full rock sound an attempt to appeal to more conventional radio audiences by jettisoning many of the band's more prickly and unpalatable eccentricities?

The evidence doesn't seem to back up this pessimistic narrative. Although the harder rock sound of John Henry would be mostly abjured on Factory Showroom, the band would never return to the more stripped-down sound of their earlier releases. Every album and tour since the Apollo 18 tour has been performed by the band as a full band. Although they would never again release an album as consistently "hard" as John Henry, the hard rock sound would remain in their repertoire, popping up most notably on 2007's downbeat The Else. John Henry didn't mark a permanent change in the band's sound, but indicated the means by which the group would continue to expand and enhance its stylistic variety. Put simply, as the band has grown and changed they have remained resolutely chameleonic, and if John Henry means anything with almost twenty years' hindsight, it marks the point where the group was first able realize the full range of their wide ambition.




The album's stylistic ambition is nowhere more clear than "Sleeping in the Flowers." The song begins as a heavy, borderline sludge-y rock track before veering to the left to become an up-tempo vaguely ska-core ditty, before veering back towards the heavy sound of the song's introduction, and back again. In the space of four-and-a-half minutes (itself a previously-unimaginable running time for the band), TMBG runs the gamut between sincerely facetious appropriation of Alice In Chains-y shredding and Operation Ivy skronking, complete with horn section. It's a bravura performance, showcasing not merely the kind of facile wit for which the band was already well known but a level of compositional acumen that was simply head and shoulders above anything they had produced up to that date. And of course, being who they are, the band follow up "Sleeping in the Flowers" with a bonafied country song, "Unrelated Thing."

Perhaps the single most important factor in the album's success is Brian Doherty's extraordinary drumming. For their first album sans drum machine, the Johns were clever enough to find a percussionist who could appropriate the precision and forcefulness of a programmed drum track while also offering the kind of energy and spontaneity that is very difficult to produce with a machine. From the very beginning of the album and the primitive stomp of "Subliminal," up through the frenetic workout of "Meet James Ensor" (seriously, listen to the drums on that song), Doherty is precisely the kind of drummer TMBG needed in order to be able to be able to convincingly "sell" their rock pose. They still had the pop ditties and the strange genre experiments (coutnry on "Unrelated Thing," barbershop quartet on "O Do Not Forsake Me"), but the backbone of John Henry is a real rock & roll rhythm section.

If "grunge" is the first word we need to keep in mind in relation to John Henry, then "maturity" is the second. This is something of a canard, I realize, and it's become something of a shadow narrative throughout these articles: have They Might Be Giants somehow "failed" to mature? Did their so-called "arrested development" hurt their output, particular into the late nineties and early aughts? As I've discussed in past articles, I've struggled to frame my own disappointment with the band's post-Elektra output not in terms of their failure to live up to some kind of implicit "potential" - as if there was an alternate universe somewhere with a demure, adult contemporary They Might Be Giants playing soulful dad rock to Pitchfork crowds - but as a product of my own understandable alienation from their deserved and long-overdue sustained success, a success that just happens to have come about as a consequence of their transformation into children's musicians. I don't resent them their success but much of their output for the last decade, until last year's Join Us, just hasn't grabbed me. I used to think the correct model for comparison for TMBG was the Flaming Lips: another veteran of the mid-80s college rock scene who made the transition to major label success and "alternative" status with indie cred left (relatively) intact. And, of course, this comparison is deeply unfair because the same year the Lips released The Soft Bulletin, the Johns were reeling from their major label exodus and releasing unsatisfying experiments  like Long Tall Weekend.




John Henry is a great album - a truly great album - because it confronts the question of "maturity" that had always been lingering in the background of any discussion about the band and places it defiantly in the foreground. It's not a mature album with all the loaded, dad-rock qualifications that brings to mind - it's something far more rare and infinitely more rewarding, it's an album about maturity, about the act of growing up without actually being grown-up. They Might Be Giants built a loyal constituency out of precocious adolescents and disgruntled teens - the kind of kids who were far more clever than their surroundings but nowhere near yet wise enough to look past the limitations of "clever" as an overriding worldview. John Henry represents a confrontation with the profoundly, triumphantly juvenile worldview of their earlier recordings.

The album is filled with stories of unhappy, paranoid, delusional characters, confronting a world that refuses to conform to their deeply unrealistic expectations. Nowhere is this more clear than on the aforementioned "Sleeping in the Flowers," about the painful discrepancies between the fantasy and reality of unrequited crushes. "I Should Be Allowed to Think" quotes Allen Ginsberg to make a point about the growing pains of young intellectuals. "Why Must I Be Sad?" is a song about youthful misanthropy filtered through the lens of Alice Cooper. "Extra Savoir-Faire" and "No One Knows My Plan" are both about suffering delusional levels of self-regard.
"A Self Called Nowhere" is unambiguously about depression. "Meet James Ensor," ostensibly about the painter, is also about misanthropy masked as asceticism and self-denial, a theme echoed again on the brief sketch "Window."

The album climaxes with "Stomp Box" and "The End of the Tour." Although on first blush these tracks could not be more dissimilar, they fit together as the culmination of the album's themes. "Stomp Box" is a violent pseudo-metal stomper, led by a distorted, demonic vocal that spews a barrage of sarcastic bile, echoing and lampooning the endless destructive if of early 90s hard rock:

Kill Kill Kill Kill
Kill me now
Free the demon
Hear the ceaseless screaming
Little Stomp Box
Tear it from my heart.

For all their reputation as perpetual adolescents, They Might Be Giants nevertheless see right through the supposed "maturity" of the early nineties. Just a few months after Cobain's death, it was hard not to see the limitations of using rock music as catharsis. Genuine emotion easily congeals into self-parody with just a few turns of the notch. 1994 also saw the release of The Downward Spiral and while it's not hard now to see that Trent Reznor always had a sense of humor (most early industrial acts, it must be remembered, were also quite funny), few who followed his footsteps, or Cobain's, saw the inherent absurdity in the pose.

"Stomp Box" fades into "The End of the Tour." This track is pretty much universally acknowledged as one of the band's best. It    comes after almost an hour of songs and stories about delusion and self-parody, unhappiness and sadness masked in uptempo drumbeats and chipper melodies. What is the song about? I've heard some theories that the action in this track - a car crash on the interstate - is a kind of capper for a number of the people involved in previous songs - "AKA Driver," "Subliminal," "Sleeping in the Flowers," very much like the end of Short Cuts or something similar where all the previous threads are drawn together in a single massive accident. I've seen ideas that the song is a tribute to fans who died in a car crash on the way to a show, that the song was a tribute to the Grateful Dead ("the engagements are booked through the end of the world"), or that the song was specifically about the death of Kurt Cobain. (The "girl with the crown and the scepter" is supposedly a reference to the cover of Live Through This.) In any event, the song is about endings - about something drawing to a close, about admitting that " the scene isn't what it's been," and that it might be time to go home. It could be about death or dying, or hearing about the death of a close friend, or simply the literal act of being a touring band, and the point when driving around the country in a van starts to lose its appeal.

It's a song about what it means to be a rock & roll band in the mid nineties, after the underground scene you were a part of crested and became an aboveground phenomenon, after the community spirit of eighties indie rock became a marketing slogan for nineties alt rock, after Pavement recorded "Range Life" and Cobain wrote "Serve the Servants" and R.E.M. wrote Automatic for the People and all those other bands like Hüsker Dü and the Replacements and the Minutemen broke up and scattered to the winds. It's a song about growing up whether you want to or not, and it comes as the climax to nineteen other songs about the negative consequences of not growing up, not learning to acknowledge other people, not being able to look past your own self-obsession. It's sobering, but it's also hopeful - maturation doesn't have to mean death, but it does mean change. Sometimes it might even mean change for the better, once you've got over yourself.

And it's old and it's over, it's over now
And it's over, it's over, it's over now
I can see myself.

Next: Industrial Revolution



(out of five)

SIR

AvX

Fuck that shit, let's talk comics.

The problem with AvX is not that it's terrible - really, do we expect better than terrible? why would we do this? - but that it's terrible in a really repulsive way. As in, I feel dirty reading the thing because I think the "ideas" on display are really, really (can I say "really" anymore? I really mean it this time) ill-thought. It's not that the story presents a legitimate difference of opinion between rival squads of superheroes. That's what Marvel would have you believe the story was about (at least at the outset), in much the same way as was Civil War. I was about to type something relatively complimentary about Civil War here by way of using that faint praise as a club with which to bash AvX soundly across the head and shoulders, but that's not really helpful. Civil War was bad for a myriad of reasons but at its core was the germ of a good idea, and some semblance of thought was given to charting how individual characters would react to a line being drawn in the sand on a matter of deep principle. I may not have believed every minute of it, and any number of characters acted "out of character" according to the experiences of people who have been reading about superheroes for longer than the five minutes it takes to read the back of a DVD box (I'm assuming that is how long it takes you to read the back of the DVD box for Iron Man 2 if you believe that the political commentary in Civil War was "trenchant") - but you know what, Civil War still took the time to attempt to justify most of the main characters' opinions throughout the narrative.

If you think I'm trying to compliment Civil War here, I'm really not. Civil War provided the bare minimum of narrative meat necessary to string together a series of "awesome" story beats. Seriously - pick up the collected edition and skim through it. It's one of the great examples of "momentism" in comics storytelling - the story isn't paced so much as defibrillated. Every time characters are talking to each other, the story sort of murmurs along and then BLAM they shout "CLEAR!" like we're watching E.R. reruns and, whoops, Spider-Man is ripping his mask off, whoops, here's the Punisher.

One problem with AvX is that it actually makes Civil War seem better in hindsight. If Civil War was a series of "kewl" moments strung together with bad exposition, AvX is nothing but bad exposition - with the actual meat of the series - you know, the part where the Avengers fight the God-damned X-Men - farmed out to spin-offs. Think for a minute about just how seriously fucked-up it is that a superhero comic event series actually has to have a spin-off specifically dedicated to fight scenes, because there's no room for these fights in the actual series itself.

I'll let that sink in for a minute.

People don't talk a lot about decompression anymore, but I think it's fair to say that the war has officially been lost. They at least make an attempt now to make the comic take longer than five minutes to read - at last six, six-and-a-half if Bendis is writing a scene with Luke and Jessica talking about their relationship - but they don't pace these things right anymore. They don't know how to write fight scenes. You know how it used to be that writers would have to spend time thinking about how characters would use their powers and teamwork to defeat enemies, and we'd see the give-and-take of individual fights and different characters ding different things and the plot would actually be pushed forward by actions characters committed during pitched battles? You know? No, of course you don't, because if you started reading superhero comics anytime in the last ten years all you know is the artist drawing a bunch of characters ramming into each other for a big two-page spread and then some random characters have ironic asides and the plot grinds to a halt, then they stop fighting and the plot moves forward again. Some are better than others, true, but the vast majority of these things are written so unimaginatively that the superheroes are just cogs in some paramilitary law-enforcement fantasy, with endless ranks of colored action figures being pushed up against each other at random. But the point is that the fights aren't important anymore - the fights themselves are so perfunctory in the series itself that you almost get the feeling that the people writing this book are ashamed that they have to put them in there. So much easier to write characters talking to each other about their feelings - or talking to the President, there's a lot of talking to the President.

(And the worst part is that most of the fights in the AvX: VS spin-off haven't been that bad - fairly imaginative character pieces with decent-to-good art. But man, how weird is it that the book devoted to showcasing two groups of superheroes fighting has to outsource the actual fighting itself. I just can't get over this.)

The major problem at the heart of AvX, if we're being honest with ourselves, is that the central conflict is completely stupid. As in: one side of characters is so obviously right and the other so obviously wrong that it sort of demeans them all to come to blows. If we didn't know that the X-Men were actually supposed to be superheroes - a perhaps erroneous assumption predicated on fifty years of previous X-Men comics - then we would have no idea that they were supposed to be in any way sympathetic. To put it as plainly as possible: the X-Men take actions that endanger the safety of the almost seven billion people on Earth because they think the gamble might pay off. The Avengers point out that this isn't really a reasonable thing to do, regardless of the possible positive consequences, because the potential negatives are just too high. The X-Men, instead of realizing that they are in fact endangering the lives of every man, woman, and child on the planet for something that could charitably be characterized as a craps-shoot, get all defensive and start calling the Avengers bigots. You know, the same Avengers being led by Captain America.

The problem with someone calling you a bigot is that, regardless of the merits of the particularly claim, it's just not something anyone wants to see deal with first thing in the morning. It's a bit like the old, "when did you stop beating your wife?" question. And it doesn't make sense because, as I say, we've got a good fifty years of (mostly) peaceful coexistence and cooperation between Marvel's mutant heroes and the Avengers. So it just doesn't make sense - and is quite off-putting - to see the mutants now turning on the Avengers and accusing them of being bigots trying to keep the mutant man down. It feels sordid. Especially since, you know, this is Captain America we're talking about, and we as readers know for a fact that anyone who calls Cap a bigot is just not playing with a full deck of cards.   

Now, based on the surprise twist at the end of issue #5 (I assume you've all either read it or don't plan to at this late date), it's become somewhat clear that the X-Men are being played as the villains here. The five X-Men who just happened to be possessed by the Phoenix force were the five most morally compromised X-Men - imperious and arbitrary Namor, ex-villain White Queen, unpredictable and occasionally evil Magik, Juggernaut-compromised Colossus, and bat-shit extremist Cyclops. (I do call shenanigans, however: the Magik vs. Black Widow story mistakenly asserted that Magik had no soul, when in fact they spent the better part of a year in New Mutants telling the story of how Illyana got her soul back - do these people not even bother to read the Wikipedia pages? Because folks, that's free.) It's fairly obvious that they're setting the X-Men up for a fall here, and that's fine, I guess. This last week has established that the X-Men have built a prison for the Avengers out of a chunk of Limbo placed in an active volcano - as in, an actual piece of Hell torn from the inferno and designed to torment Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

You can't even say that any of this is coming out of leftfield. One of the problems (one among many!) with Fear Itself is that the storyline emerged seemingly out of nowhere. It was actually a pretty good evocation of a truly "old-school" crossover, in that it presented a new threat that appeared fresh in the first issue and ran roughshod over everyone else's plotlines. It did so in such a haphazard, off-putting way that it came off as kind of desperate, a little bit of "old school" flop-sweat channeled through the market wisdom of the "dead cat bounce." But you can't say that AvX is in any way arbitrary or unplanned: they've fairly clearly been planting the seeds for this story since somewhere around 2004. I believe them completely that this story has been brewing for almost a decade. The same people in charge of Marvel then are the same people in charge now; the same people writing AvX are the people who wrote all the other stories that fed into this one; and - at least on paper - this does actually appear to be the culmination of almost a decades' worth of event storytelling. But in actuality - well, yeah, this does read like the kind of story that they've been building to since 2004, in that it is so clearly a set of bullet points put together to clear out eight years' worth of dead-wood continuity problems.

AvX makes a great argument as to why the X-Men franchise is currently broken beyond recognition. Everyone knows that the X-Men are based on a series of simple metaphors relating to prejudice and tolerance. The problem is that while this is a great thematic starting point from which you can tell any number of stories - and there have been many good X-Men stories over the years, let's not kid ourselves, there's a reason why the books were so popular for so long - there are also natural limitations to the kinds of stories the franchise can tell. Because you can only push the civil-rights metaphor so long before it starts to break down in the face of the fact that mutants are a substantially different kind of creature than black people or gay people, who are still always, you know, people. You can say, yes, irrational prejudice and hatred is completely wrong, but then you've got a story wherein the most vocal proponents of "mutant rights" are unilaterally making decisions with such far-reaching consequences that the death of the human race might be considered acceptable collateral damage - you've blown any sympathy for mutants as an avatar of real-world minorities out of the water.

Let's put it another way. Say for a minute that the United States government found out that the ghost of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was heading towards the planet Earth for unknown reasons. The only thing they know is that Dr. King's ghost has recently destroyed a number of planets with billions of people on them, and we have no reason to believe that Dr. King's ghost will behave any differently when it reaches earth. So the world unanimously decides to try and prevent Dr. King's ghost from reaching Earth, except for a small group of African-American activists who accuse the rest of the world of being racists for not wanting to risk getting the planet destroyed by the pissed-off revenant spirit of America's greatest civil-rights leader.

The preceding paragraph, in case you hadn't noticed, doesn't make any sense at all. The reason it doesn't make any sense is that the X-Men have gone so far off the reservation in terms of a clear adherence to their thematic core that trying to make sense of the state of the mutant race in terms of being an allegory for real-world prejudice is completely absurd. We're supposed to be sympathetic with the X-Men because they represent a repressed minority fighting for their rights, fighting for tolerance, cooperation, and acceptance. Now again: it has become patently clear that Marvel is specifically playing up the fact that Cyclops's faction of X-Men have essentially become Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil mutants in all but name. They're not fighting for acceptance and toleration: they were fighting for survival and now they're fighting for dominance because now that they have the power they have the right. A while back people figured out that the proper "new" valid metaphor for mutant rights in the X-books was actually early-to-mid-twentieth century Zionism. The problem is that this isn't really a productive long-term metaphor, because sure it's great when you get to retell Mila 18 and Exodus with superheroes, not so good when you try to figure out how to explain who the Palestinians are in this scenario, especially when your characters are owned by the Walt Disney Corporation and boy howdy do you not want to wade into that firestorm. All of which is to say: telling these stories in this way was a terrible mistake and it has already done great harm to the X-Men franchise. The X-Men don't make sense anymore. They are unambiguously villains, and it makes me feel all kinds of weird to say that.

So yeah, I see where they're going: in trying to save the mutant race, Cyclops and his coterie have in fact brought about the exact circumstances that will lead to even worse prejudice and oppression against mutants. Classic hubris, etc etc. Kind of like how they did the same thing with Iron Man a few years ago - only, you know, it took years to make Tony Stark an even vaguely sympathetic character after Civil War, and it only required giving him a partial lobotomy and erasing his mind in the process. But that's just one character, and one who always had a reputation as an asshole to begin with. It was at least slightly in Iron Man's character to act unilaterally on the belief that he's right.

What are we supposed to take away from AvX - it's OK to hate and fear minorities because if they had the chance and the power they'd destroy all us normal folk?

The slipshod nature of the crossover is such as to betray a reflexive contempt for their audience. The basic, bare minimum that should be required of any crossover is that the main series and the tie-ins fit together - this is one of those simple concepts that didn't used to be a problem. Go back and read Inferno or Acts of Vengeance  - not particularly well-regarded today, but I'll be damned if they don't stand up as marvels of crossover engineering. Everything fit, there was a definite reading order, characters weren't in two places at the same time indiscriminately. I remember I used to have a definitive reading order for Acts of Vengeance worked out in my head: it was so well-designed that you could fit the Captain America issues in between two pages of the Fantastic Four sequence. The key was figuring out that the two most crucial series for keeping track of the chronology were Solo Avengers and Damage Control - you could plot out the rest of the story with those two books as your spine. It was great fun, although I was sorry to see that the recent Omnibus did not go to such lengths to replicate the correct reading order. The point is, that type of consistency used to be the norm. It was fun to follow these things and see how they all fit together. That they fit together wasn't ever in doubt. These were fun stories and if you enjoyed them you wanted to read the crossovers to get more of it.

Now, though, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of care put into constructing a strong through-line. Characters show up in places where they can't be according to the chronology of the main series. The Avengers crossovers are stuck months behind the main series on a tangent with almost no relevance to the main series. Don't even try figuring out how the AvX: VS series fits into AvX - no care at all has been taken to fit these fights into the actual story. They are more . . . variations on a theme. There's no consistency at all. They may as well be taking place in another universe for all the impact they have on the main storyline. Even Civil War - again, I know I keep beating AvX with the Civil War stick, but damned if the former doesn't make the latter seem like Proust in hindsight - even Civil War exercised a fair degree of consistency with its tie-ins. Plot threads dropped in the main series were picked up in the tie-ins with a surprising degree of fidelity. Characters who were supposed to be on the other side of the planet didn't just appear in Manhattan for no reason. And there were no God-damned polar bears in Antarctica.

Am I belaboring the point? For a story that has been eight years in the making, there is a surprising amount of fucks not given in the production thereof. Are we just not supposed to notice these inconsistencies? Are we just supposed to not care? Isn't the whole point to get us to care, to get us to want to drop $3.99 American on these flimsy pamphlets, to be carried away on the wings of our child-like imaginations to a world of larger-than-life heroes and villains? Have the people involved in the making of these comics simply become so cynical in the making thereof they they literally cannot see how cynical these books look, how sloppy they read, how carelessly they are throwing out the most important facets of these beloved characters? I am going to extend the benefit of the doubt to the people involved in the making of this story that they're trying their best to create a good story. But this is so far away from actually being a good story that I simply cannot fathom the thought processes that led these intelligent people to make these creative decisions.

I've been reading Marvel comics since I was a little kid and I still feel a great attachment to these characters and their stories - but more and more the emotion I am filled with when I read these books is not affection or even nostalgia but contempt. It's certainly possible to write fairly intelligent superhero comics that can amuse and entertain intelligent adult readers. Marvel even publishes a few of these. But this is the jewel of their line, the big climax of a decades' worth of storytelling and promotion. This just feels exhausted, the product of lazy and incestuous ideas brought past fruition and into decay and fermentation, turned rotten and sour. How could they possibly have ever signed off on an idea that turned the X-Men from a metaphor for tolerance into an argument in favor of racism and xenophobia? If they didn't see that, how could they not have thought through the consequences of ideas that they've been building for eight years?

Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit. Shit.

The Last Picture Show



I saw Prometheus again earlier this week. I was again impressed and came out of the screening with an even deeper appreciation for the movie and the ideas on display. And again, I was also profoundly disappointed by the tepid reaction to the film. Having seen the film twice now, having spent a great deal of time thinking about and defending the movie for two weeks, I have to say that the vociferous negative reactions I have seen across the internet are simply beyond my comprehension. But it's more than just the fact that I like something that a large percentage of the audience seems to dislike - it's that they are extremely vocal about their dislike. Something about the movie just rubs people - many people - the wrong way, and I don't just mean a little bit, I mean a lot. Furthermore, the antipathy towards the film has even spilled out into strange political dimensions that I can't even begin to fathom.

It's like the film is sounding out dog-whistle noises that only a certain percentage of the audience can hear. Anyone whose ears can pick up the noise are driven barking mad, while those who can't are left scratching their heads as to just how the film could possibly elicit such a strong negative reaction.

I'm not about to say that the film is perfect. There are a number of problems with the film, but to my mind they're small problems, hardly deal-breakers. But for the most part the criticisms I see leveled at the films aren't really reasonable criticisms - they're criticisms that require a fairly strong act of bad faith in order to muster. Most of these nerdish critiques seem predicated on a willful inability to suspend disbelief, and require either a shockingly literal ability to ignore subtext and implication, or an even more shocking ability to ignore / discard explicitly stated plot points. As in, many common critiques are based not on problems with the movie itself but the fact that some viewers don't believe the movie, or choose to ignore the movie when it says something that explains whatever lapse in narrative they think they've spotted. (For instance: the reason why the geologist and the biologist can become lost in the pyramid is that the storm is messing with their instruments, the same reason why they can't stay in contact with the ship. This is explicitly stated in the film and yet consistently ignored.)

This is one of the more egregious examples of nerd-herd mentality I've seen in quite some time. The problem is that nerds - and I use this term in a very literal sense, the people who have been consuming these stories for their whole lives and have become de facto experts in genre fiction - have literally seen it all. Chances are that they've not just seen all the Alien films but they've seen every other science-fiction film made in the last four or five decades, read the books, played the video games - have all the ins-and-outs of the genre committed to heart. So they go into a movie like Prometheus with expectations, and therefore will base their enjoyment on the movie less on the actual quality of the movie, but its ability to simultaneously meet and fail to meet the expectations of its genre, in addition to the expectations leveled upon specific creators. When you're dealing with an audience of fans who are hyper-literate in your genre - perhaps even better versed in these stories than yourself -  the expectation that every new story will completely remake the wheel can be crippling.

For instance: there's been a lot of flack thrown in the direction of Damon Lindelof over perceived problems with the script and story. A lot of this appears to be a hangover from the generally poisonous reaction to the last season of Lost. I've never seen Lost - it never interested me during its run, and the negative reaction to the finale cemented my general disinterest - so I'm as close to being completely agnostic towards the man as possible. But what appears to have happened here is that a number of people who still resent Lindelof for Lost went into Prometheus with a huge chip on their shoulder already, willing and able to read their prejudices against the man against the film even when the text doesn't really support their reading. The moment they saw a character holding a cross on screen - well, shit, there we go again, Lindelof is putting his religious agenda into our sci-fi, game over. (The whole "space Jesus" thing didn't help - but it's worth pointing out again that that particular plotline did not make it into the film, and even if it did, it wasn't nearly as dire an idea as these film's detractors would have you believed - again, you need to remember that the quote-unquote "space Jesus " would have been an evil alien, and therefore hardly a message to be welcomed with open arms by the devoutly religious.)

Yes, Prometheus was a film about the nature of faith and belief. But contrary to much of the criticism I've seen - and certainly contrary to that absurd "Tea Party in Space" article I linked to above - Prometheus does not talk about faith in glowing, uncritical terms. First of all - and this is a huge detail that seems to have passed over the heads of many people - every character who proclaims any kind of "faith" or "belief" is let-down. At every turn throughout the movie, faith is rewarded with death and disillusionment. Shaw and Holloway both believe that their discoveries will have profound positive consequences, and will change human history for the better. Holloway in particular believes he'll be able to speak to the aliens and learn directly from them. Vickers believes against all conceivable evidence that her fealty to her father's scheme will somehow give her the approval she desperately craves. Weyland himself believes that the aliens are going to be able to help him live forever, a belief he is willing to follow to its most absurd ends, even when it means burning through his company's resources on an ill-fated whim and ensuring his heir inherits nothing, a decision which seems to have been motivated almost purely out of spite. (There is a reason, I suspect, why the company we see in Alien is Weyland-Utani.) In every case, these characters make decisions and devote their lives to following faith over facts. In every case, their "faith" is answered in the most perverse and unpleasant fashion possible. I don't know how that can in any way be interpreted as an argument in favor of faith - when in every case blind faith is the wrong decision.

Also, in the specific case of Elizabeth Shaw - the movie never explicitly states that she is a Christian. She never says "I believe in the literal truth of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ." She carries a cross as a symbol of faith, yes, but faith in what? She carries that cross as a reminder of losing both of her parents as a young child. I know many non-Christian people for whom the cross is nevertheless an important symbol. There's a lot of subtlety associated with that kind of religious symbolism - and the large cross-section of types and varieties of human faith - that is simply effaced by a knee-jerk conflation of faith and religion. Because - and here's the clincher - faith is not synonymous with religion. It just isn't, and pretending that it is, is simple ignorance, and betrays a distinct lack of imagination. (I'd say that people need to read more Hume, but let's not get carried away here.)

Another thing that really bugs me is how many of the plot critiques seem to focus incessantly on the fact that the expedition in the movie is a terrible science expedition - bad scientists acting stupidly. This despite the fact that numerous characters say repeatedly throughout the film that it's not a scientific expedition. Obviously, the scientists themselves believe it's a scientific expedition - right up until the point when Vickers says clearly and without any ambiguity whatsoever that it's not a scientific expedition, which is a scene it appears many, many people slept through. At that point, of course, our expectations take over and we just assume that the movie is really a story about an evil corporation trying to exploit things it doesn't understand. And, certainly, there's a little bit of that, but the movie veers to the left by refusing to give us anything as simple as a reiteration of the central conflict from the earlier Alien films. Any "science" in the film is simply a byproduct of the fact that the whole thing is a giant ego-trip for the world's richest man - you definitely get the feeling that everything else on the periphery of the mission is just Vickers' attempt to salvage some value out of what became the most expense archaeological dig in history. This is hardly a pro-business film, despite the fact that the anti-corporate message comes in a different flavor than Paul Reiser twirling his dastardly mustache throughout Aliens.The fact that one man can throw away a trillion dollars on a massive craps-shoot for the sole purpose of finding personal immortality is a pretty damning critique of a system that would allow one selfish man use his significant personal resources - and the historical opportunity to make first-contact with an alien civilization - for the express purpose of making himself feel important. Again, this is hardly a "conservative" message.

Is the movie, at its most basic level, an anti-science film? Does it devalue curiosity in the name of a conservative reluctance to explore the fundamental mysteries of human existence? I really don't think so: again, if we want to pluck out concrete themes, the theme of blind faith as a destructive force is prominent, as is the idea that capitalism allows strong-willed individuals to exercise monstrously disproportionate control over societal resources and values, as is the idea that children always resent their parents, and the corollary that parents always somehow manage to fuck up their children. I don't think telling a story about the negative consequences of curiosity is necessarily conservative unless you're already hardwired to see any suggestion of reasonable diligence and caution in the face of potential danger as "conservative." A lot of the old myths are, unsurprisingly, quite conservative in design - the Garden of Eden, Pandora's box, even Prometheus himself - but they stay hardwired into the culture for a reason, and it's because the idea of exploring the negative consequences of curiosity is a basic story that never seems to lose its ability to scare us. Like any good story, it also opens itself up to prolific revision and reinterpretation - and I think, the unique combination of sci-fi and horror in Prometheus's DNA makes the film an especially effective meditation on this theme. It's an explicit attempt to rewrite 2001 from the position that the universe is filled with scary monsters instead of benevolent higher intelligences. That's an intriguing idea.

On that note, one thing that almost no one has discussed is just how deep a debt this film owes to H.P. Lovecraft - except Guillermo del Toro, oddly enough. In any event: if you've read At the Mountains of Madness, there is a pretty strong resemblance. Specifically, the idea of the black ooze is a good evocation of Lovecraft's shuggoths: physically amorphous, powerful, created by unknowable beings for sinister purposes, and prone to revolt against their dark masters. Structurally, the film also owes a lot to Lovecraft's novella, right down to the mysterious murals detailing a half-understood secret history and the fixation on strange religious objects. If you've read Lovecraft it adds a lot to the film. The idea that the universe is filled with great and terrible creatures to whom we are essentially unimportant and who even actively plot our demise is quite powerful, and inasmuch as Lovecraft has a terrible track record of filmic adaptations, Prometheus may very well be the best cinematic exploration of his themes and ideas. 

Also, can I just throw one more random observation out here? Something I didn't realize the first time I watched the film but was really obvious on the second viewing: the reason David puts the goo in Holloway's drink is that he's got a crush on Shaw. Weyland told him to "try harder," he sets out to prove himself to his parent the only way he can think of, and it just so happens that there's someone in particular he has reason to dislike. Pay attention to the fact that of all the people on the ship - including, most prominently, Mr. Weyland himself - the only person to speak kindly to David is Shaw. Holloway is especially a dick. Add that to the fact that, for all his acumen, David has the emotional wherewithal of a child. He has to deal with the passive-aggressive abuse of his "father," as well as the constant rejection from the one person who could be his "sister," and his only actual role model is a character in a 140-year-old movie. Of course he falls for Shaw. He risks his life to save Shaw in the storm. He sees Holloway treating her like shit and he does what any child would do in those circumstances - something really mean and spiteful, the consequences of which haven't been completely thought through. And when it comes out that Shaw has been hurt and impregnated with something weird, well, he tries to protect her the best way he knows how - keeping the knowledge from her and putting her into suspended animation as fast as possible. Because he's a robot, he just doesn't know how these things are supposed to work. I believe, rewatching the scene in the infirmary, that there is every chance he is trying to comfort and reassure Shaw, and not freak her out, but because he's essentially a powerful computer with the lived experience of a small child, he can't really do that very well. (Also also, another cool thing: did you notice that in the scene where David cracks open the jar and looks at the goo, you see a close-up of his fingertip, and his fingerprint has a big "W" logo stamped on it? This is a man who, every time he looks at his hands, has to be reminded of the fact that he hates his father.)

Perhaps the most notable problem with the film is the fact that a good many characters are pretty blatantly "red shirts." This is a fine complaint except for the fact that I've seen more than one critic use Aliens as a stick with which to beat Prometheus in this regard - because, you know, all those Colonial Marines in Aliens had such marvelous personalities. Like Hicks and Vasquez, and, uh, the drill instructor Sergeant guy, and um, lady pilot with sunglasses? Those characters felt real not because they were all so well defined, but because Cameron really created a fantastically vivid military milieu aboard the Sulaco. The attention to setting and lived detail is one reason the first two Alien films pop so well, and Fincher's attention to the detail of the prison milieu is perhaps the single best thing about Alien 3. Prometheus, for a number of reasons, lacks that kind of distinction: partly because the ship itself is new and shiny, partly because the characters themselves lack any kind of unifying bond other than having been hired to work on an ambiguous science-ish mission. The first Alien is about coworkers in a cramped and contentious workplace. Aliens is about soldiers in high-stress combat situations. Alien 3 is about prisoners locked away and forgotten by the rest of the universe. Prometheus lacks this kind of unifying milieu - and while you can certainly make an argument that this is an intentional affect, predicated on the fact that the audience is supposed to be able to figure out that this mission is strangely vague and ill-defined on purpose - it nonetheless subtracts some from the dramatic tension that so many of the characters are utterly disposable. 

But that's hardly a deal-breaker. I still love the film, enough to sit through it twice and feel satisfied both times. Let's be frank: I love the Alien films, all of them. I'm inordinately invested in the mythos. Prometheus was a movie I had waited decades to see, and therefore I felt a not inconsiderable degree of dread in anticipation. It would have been so easy to fuck it up. My enjoyment of the film was doubled by the relief I felt that they hadn't screwed it up, that they had - against whatever odds you want to calculate - succeeded in making a big-ideas cosmic sci-fi film of the kind that I just did not believe they made anymore. And of course, the reaction has been muted - after the fans came out on the first day, the movie has slumped along at the box office. Respectable, not great business, far from ensuring a sequel in today's marketplace despite having made back twice its budget in international ticket sales. I'd give anything to see another movie like this set in this wonderful universe - but if Prometheus isn't deemed sufficiently successful, I'm sure the message they'll take away is that they need to produce more cheap spin-off material like the two quite profitable and quite mediocre Alien vs. Predator films, and less in the way of ambitious, ambiguous think pieces.