Justice League #4

Oh, sweet untouched Mary on assback, the testosterone! Still! Four issues in and just glancing at the cover gets me hard with visions of high school locker room posturing and towel snapping! I suppose there is something to be said about having reprehensible characters lead a story – it is what drove Married with Children to be so popular, to say nothing of 16 and Pregnant or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or Seinfeld. Or Glee, for that matter. But the characters should at least be intriguing, draw us in, and maybe pause for a moment to let us in on the adventure. But so far, this maiden arc of Justice League is the comic book equivalent of Rush Hour: lots of noise but not one inward glace or moment of calm, rational discussion.

Superman has become anti-establishment, but is he still a hero of the people? Morrison has Army General Lane coming to the realization that not only has he been manipulated into hating Superman by Lex Luthor, but also that superman is the only one who can save his daughter from being collected by Brainiac. Jump ahead to JL times and Superman still distrusts the government. It will be interesting to see how these stories are bridged.

Wonder Woman doesn’t know ice cream, but can tell when someone’s flesh has been fused to cybernetic armor.

Flash is the adult child of an alcoholic, and so far can sing one note.

Batman wants to be in charge. And while he’s always kept the Batman Family in line under his benevolent hegemony, I can’t see him wanting to wrangle strangers into working for him, especially when, as a Loner of the Night, he could just as easily walk away. Unless he’s just pissing up a rope to not lose face in front of the other males of the JL which is also not his style. He knows he’s better.

Aquaman is King of Atlantis and wants to be King of Total Strangers Whom He Just Met and also wears flashy jewelry. And still is just some guy who talks to fish. The trident is nice, though. Phallic. Like his glans-shaped belt buckle.

Green Lantern is still playing “What are Your Powers?” though we find out in an unguarded moment -of truth, misogyny, and paranoia- that his bravado is as blustery as March in Chicago. And, for me, GL is the new JL writ small. Geoff Johns has given us Ryan Reynolds’ version of GL, but without the self-confidence and understanding of what a hero is that Reynolds managed to tweak out of his character by the end of the movie. I’ve never found (classic) Hal Jordan’s GL to be all that interesting (outside of Darwyn Cooke’s The New Frontier) because he’s always been so noble and good. And boring. My knowledge is sketchy after that. I know he was Parallax for a while and then dead and then back again for Blackest Night. And as much as I liked BN, Hal’s story didn’t intrigue me as much as, for example, Mogo’s did. Needless to say, the prospect of a GL movie didn’t tantalize me at all. When I finally did see it (it was the nephew’s idea), I was surprised that the most important element of Hal’s being chosen as a Green Lantern -his innate courage- was dismissed in favor of him being a man-child womanizer. But then he evolved. And while it wasn’t perfect, I went along with it and found some enjoyment in that iteration.

And perhaps this evolution will come to the JL membership in future issues. This is, after all, a glimpse into the past when there was no JL and anti-hero sentiment was at an all-time high (which really makes one wonder what motivates Batman and Superman to don costumes and fight crime). Perhaps there will be time for character development later. Perhaps I’ll revisit around issue 12 when, no doubt, someone else will be writing this series.

Good help is so hard to find.

Grade: D

Justice League Dark #4

I really can’t believe Madame Xanadu was cancelled and an alternate John Constantine was created to get this title out on the market. Matt Wagner’s MX was an excellent tour-of-the-ages that connected the dots between a hero from a lost kingdom to the early Golden Age of superheroes, charming, creative and had an all too brief life. And while I’m not a die-hard Hellblazer reader, I know who Constantine is and the dew stories I’ve read were all top-notch. I just don’t see him as being part of a team for a long period of time, but that’s just me. But Justice League Dark… What perplexes me is that the title has all the elements I love in fiction writing – good characters (though I know very little about Shade, the Changing Man), magic (magic is always wonderful), underdogs trying to beat impossible odds (like The Mighty Ducks), groovy, psychedelic art with a rotoscope realism, a dense story that requires some thought to put it all together, but it all totals out to bad hash. I wish I knew why.

Grade: C+

Wonder Woman #4

I disagree with Azzarello and Chiang’s announcement that their run on Wonder Woman will be a horror story. There are no elements of horror that I recognize in the story beyond (stretching here) encounters with the supernatural, but I would call this “mythology” and not “horror”. Maybe I’m wrong. Feel free to say so. Which is not to say that I’m not enjoying the series because I am. It’s just not horror.

What I do read in the title is a pagan Wonder Woman. And there could be a fearful element in that. There is something terrifying about ancient religions (to be fair, there’s something terrifying about modern religions) and how far removed they are from the clean (read “sanitized”) places of worship people flock to these days. The last time I attended Mass, there was no awe in the pews. No reverence for Transubstantiation. No resigned dismay to ingesting the Body and Blood. No fear that God was present and maybe a little miffed about the horrible things done in Its name. Really, Church is for pussies, or at least people who would prefer to not think of the Infinite as something that would make them void their bowels when confronted by it. Pagans knew how to worship, and that was through fear-inspired servitude. Like the Amazons do. Azzarello and Chiang have stripped the marble and ruffle-y robes and Escher-esque architecture away from the Greek Gods and made them dirty, blood-covered brutes, which is horror of a sort, I suppose. It works. The Gods are to be feared. Ask Hippolyta. Oh, wait. You can’t.

While Diana is now a demi-goddess by heritage (and I have my own misgivings about what this does for Diana’s uniqueness since Zeus was the Johnny Appleseed of his day -except that instead of appleseeds he spread it was his godly sperm and instead of fertile land it was any woman within squirting distance), she doesn’t have a familial connection to the Gods, though she is obviously friends with Hermes. She could have been friends with Strife as well -Lord knows Strife was trying to get in Diana’s Good Books even after causing the deaths of who knows how many Amazons- but only ended up making another enemy. However, spending time with her new family brings Diana to the conclusion some people never learn: family is the people you go home to. Which brings us to the most frightful page of the issue.

Finally, while Chiang’s art is growing on me, his rendition of women in armor is still a visual stile. Diana in street clothes is lithe and powerful-looking almost like a dancer; Diana in costume is blocky and has Dot Marie Jones shoulders. She almost looks like Futura from “Metropolis”.

Even has the same fussy lines. Ah, well. A minor concern.

Grade: B+

Avengers: The Children’s Crusade #8

Yeah, yeah. Late again.

Yeah, yeah. Great writing.

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic art.

Now that all that is out of the way, let’s talk about absolution. A terribly Catholic notion, absolution is granted when a person is truly sorry for his or her sins and asks the Divine to wipe the slate clean and return one to a state of grace. It’s a step above the passive-aggressive bumper sticker theology of “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven,” because one has to be sorry for being an asshole and not just assume that belief in Jesus’ warm, loving forgiveness is enough.

Part of The Children’s Crusade is about the Scarlet Witch’s search for absolution, as an Avenger, as a mother, as a person. But not everyone is willing to give her that so easily; the X-Men and the Avengers are on the scene to … do … something (even Scott Summers isn’t sure (or is unwilling to explain himself) how Wanda should be punished for purging mutantkind from the human race), but they are all in agreement that punishment is required.

And then Wiccan -who has the greatest sense of family and love than any other character in the Marvel Universe outside of Jean Grey- rises to his mother’s defense (as she will not defend herself) and points out that The X-Men now keep company with Magneto and Emma Frost -murderers themselves- and that The Avengers themselves have ex-criminals in their ranks. It’s a beautiful scene because all the elements are there – the guilty whose conscience demands she atone for her sins, her accusers who are blind to their hypocrisy, and her defender who sees the world as a place where fairness and justice are attainable.

And then God -a Life Force imbued Victor von Doom- arrives to make everything OK.

Not really.

What he does, in fact, is destroy the Scarlet Witch’s need for absolution by saying that it was he who excised the X-factor from the human genome, not Wanda. And right out the window with the baby went the entire passion play that has been building from issue one. The Scarlet Witch is no longer a tragic figure who knows that her hamartia is due her, but merely a weak woman, used (in ways yet to be explained) by Doom (for reason yet to be explained). And the choice grates. Wanda was poised to be a great hero, and is now instead just as damaged and thoughtlessly reactionary as she was back in House of M.

And to distract readers from this terrible revelation, there are two almost-deaths.

Not my favorite chapter in this otherwise great (though needlessly protracted) mini-series.

Grade: C

Invincible #86

“[Humans]‘re assholes.” AAAH, Mr. Kirkman! What a talent for understatement you have! Let me correct that for you: “Everyone is an asshole.” Some people are just better at rationalizing it. (I’m looking at you, Allen and Roger.)

Grade: B

While I may be a comic book nerd, my brother Scott is in no way one. Sure, he listens to my rants about terrible storylines and my praises for excellent, novel writing and art, but shown a picture of Catman he would probably laugh wonder why someone hasn’t been sued for the obvious Batman knock-off. OK, OK, that’s not a great metric because I laughed the first time I saw Catman, thinking he was some kind of out-of-US-copyright-jurisdiction Mexican (maybe Taiwanese) money maker for a drug cartel to finance new stealth motorboats. But you know what I mean: he’s DCnU’s target audience for their relaunch. What then did he think of their flagship title, Justice League #1?

* * * * *

The theme of this article is “point of reference.” From what I am told, I’m not necessarily meant to have one and do not necessarily need one in order to appreciate DC’s new re-lauch–or reboot or whatever you want to call it–of their DC universe. This is a lie. Or a misconception. Or both.

It would not be fair to say that I grew up with comic books, but I do know my share of the comics universe. Like many of my childhood peers, I watched the “Batman” television show and saw Christopher Reeve fly in the first Superman movie. Like a good number of my male childhood peers, I experienced my first surge of hormone carbonation somewhere between the costumes Batgirl and Wonder Woman were curvily poured into every week. (Seeing Batgirl’s motorcycle cross the Batman title sequence was enough to instantly snap my attention to right quick.) However, I do not know or even care about the intricacies of the multiple universes occupied by the post-modern clusters of anti-heroes, doubles, duplicates and dopplegangers that have driven the comics world for the past several years. So, I am a cultural comic geek. I am told that people like me are the target demographic for the new DC. That’s what I’m told. What I got from reading Justice League #1 was not quite what I was expecting and, perhaps, not quite what DC intended.

It has always seemed to me that among the best comic books are those which tell a dynamic story that doesn’t get lost between panels. That is, comics are not films where many squares of information happen by really quickly and make scenes and people seamlessly move to create a story. Comic panels are static; what happens between panels–call them ghost panels, if you will–ought to be readily intuited by the reader bsed on the preceeding and following panels. JL #1 falls quite short of the mark, here. In the first panel, the reader in thrown into a storyline in media res where a rifle-weilding SWAT member tells his superiors that he has Batman in his sights. Behind the sniper are other SWAT members holds a bathed in red light. There is tension. A disembodied typist–the font and balloon style look like an all-caps text message circa 2004–tells us in the caption “There was a time when the world didn’t call them it’s greatest superheroes.” The next panel–the very second panel in the comic book–tells us that we are five years in the past. Already, the comic has timed itself and told the reader that everything he or she is reading will work out and that heroes will be heroes, even superheroes. The intelligent reader might be asking “Well, why were–or is it ‘are’?–the heroes hunted? And how did they get to be heroes to begin with? And if the world didn’t want them, how and why did they stay heroes?”

All of these go unanswered. The reader is thrust into the middle of a simultaneous firefight and chase scene worthy of the best of Michael Bey’s filmmaking. (“Wait, how did we get here? And where did that important bit from a couple of minutes ago wander off to?”)

The rooftop chase scene proceeds apace. Batman is chasing some kind of robotic, dog-like creature. Do we know why? No. Are we meant to know? To tell you the thruth, I’m not sure. This creature will later plant a bomb and detonate it in the name of “Darkseid,” whom neither of this book’s heroes will be able to identify, either.

[Sean's aside - When I read Green Lantern's suggestion that he and Batman go to Metropolois to ask Superman if he's connected to this "Darkseid" person because he's an alien, the implication being all aliens obviously know each other and are in cahoots to bring down this great nation of ours. Like Asians. Or Bank of America. Green Lantern's xenophobia is showing, which makes me wonder why he was chosen to be a Universal cop if he is so distrustful of alien races. I also found it hard to believe that the Guardian database -compiled by near-immortal beings who live on a planet located in the center of the Universe, and who have divided said Universe up into patrolable sectors routinely guarded by corps of ever-on-the-go Green Lanterns- somehow lacks information on Darkseid.]

So, it is held that a point of reference is not necessary for a reader to enjoy these comic books. However, this comic is nevertheless clearly desinged with the diehard fan in mind. It’s as if DC wants its new readers to shake loose of something they themselves are unable–or unwilling–to do. The most telling examples of this 50/50 thinking on DC’s part are the adverts in the comic and the jokes in the story. Not three pages into the comic, the reader is shown an ad for Converse hightops emblazoned with a classically-posed Batman. (He’s swooping down, a shadow from above ready to kick wholesale ass. Beware evildoers!) Above the sneaker are clips of Batman in the same dynamic pose taken from comics throughout the years with the attendant, different iterations of the famous costume. The tagline? “Classic heroes. Classic shoes.” Appealing to the longevity of the character and the geeky fascination with the changes that the costume has undergone through time harldy seems like the tack to take with teh n00bs, does it? Rather, it is a clear pandering to those who know: DC’s old, established audience.

After Green Lantern and Batman meet for the first time–and I can’t imagine a less dramatic scene than these two sizing each other up and forcing exposition out like the last bit of toothpaste in the tube–Green Lantern angrily realizes that Batman is “just some guy in a bat costume” and asks him “Are you freaking kidding me?!” The scene was stolen almost line for line from two animated College Humor videos that made their way around the interwebz in 2008, the tagline for one of which was “Batman faces his toughest adversary yet: Real super powers.”

And lest DC forget the moviegoers, Green Lantern asks Batman whether he intends to simply talk to bad guys in a deep voice upon encountering them, a clear nod to one of the most prevalent criticisms of Christian Bale’s gravel-voiced portrayal of Batman in The Dark Knight in 2009.

The rest of the ads showcase the new DC universe but are bookended by the Got Milk? ad on the back of the comic book featuring Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern from this past summer’s theatrical release. Again, if DC intended its audience to be comic neophytes, they are being rather odd about making them feel welcome.

Scott can be reached via his website, Daedalusrose.

I just saw “Thor” with my brother and nephew, and was struck by how dead-on ordinary it was. In short, this would be a good rental on a Friday night if you’re staying in to drink. In long…

DARK, DARK, DARK

Having heard that “Thor” wasn’t filmed in 3-D natively, we opted to see the regular 2-D version, and the first twenty minutes or so were just annoyingly difficult to see what was going on because the screen was so dark. Even in golden (and so ostentatious) Asgard, my eyes couldn’t adjust to the muddy contrasts between “light” and dark. I’m not sure who needs to fall on their sword for this because according to the end credits, most of Los Angeles was involved in one way or another. My advice to people who haven’t seen the movie yet is to bring a flashlight.

Ratiocination

Loki’s motivation for doing anything he does is a complete mystery to me, and, watching his constant, almost guileless switching-of-sides, makes me think Loki had no idea either. At the beginning of the movie, we see a young Loki and a young Thor being instructed by Odin about the war with the Frost Giants and how the Asgardians came to possess the dangerous Frost Box, certainly the most powerful and boxy of all mystical weapons outside of the Ark of the Covenant. Odin waffles about which of his sons will be king one day (even though Thor is his first-born), but it’s clear from Loki’s face that’s he’s gearing up to be disappointed. From the comics’ history, this is half of Loki’s problem with Thor: jealousy (the other half is that Loki is just an evil son of a bitch).

After that things get a bit… murky. Loki for most of the movie is portrayed as a neglected, but loyal, son. A bit of a prankster, but gods will be gods. He has no insidiousness about him. He has no plots within plots. He has no.. frankly, he’s got no game. But after Thor is banished and Odin falls into the Odinsleep, Loki is made king and ham-handed lies just pop out of his mouth, like “Sorry, Thor. Dad’s dead and it’s your fault. You can’t come back to Asgard because it’s part of our peace treaty with the Frost Giants. Also, Mom said so.” Granted, Thor had no way of verifying this story, and since he seems to trust his brother (God of Lies and Mischief, remember?), the fibs are taken as truth. However, later, Loki does three things that make no sense:

1.) He encases Heimdall in ice and leaves him standing on Bifrost for anyone to find. Yeah, Heimdall attacked him, but Loki had admitted he earlier let a raiding party of Frost Giants into Asgard, so the attack was warranted. What happens when someone finds Heimdall and thaws him out and Loki’s betrayal is discovered?

2.) After freezing Heimdall, Loki allows frost Giant King Laufey and a larger raiding party into Asgard to kill Odin, who is vulnerably napping away. At the last moment, Loki kills Laufey (his biological father) and says he did it for Odin to recognize his worth.

3.) Loki tries to destroy Jotunheim, the realm of the Frost Giants because, again, he wants recognition from Odin. However, the whole movie is based on the idea that Thor was punished by Odin for starting a war that would lead to death and horror on both sides. And Loki was a first-hand witness to this. How this is supposed to be “worthy” is unclear. Also, that is some righteously misplaced anger on Loki’s part. Only a few scenes before, Loki found out that he was taken from Jotunheim by Odin and that he was actually a Frost Giant by birth. He accused Odin of manipulating him for selfish purposes, then he kills his biological Dad instead. And I think my family has issues.

For being an experienced Trickster and the villain of the piece, Loki was just amateurishly written, though well-acted by Tom Hiddleston.

Telescoping Humility

It took Thor all of two, maybe three, days to discover how to be worthy of Mjolnir. That is quite an accomplishment for anyone, though not a god, it seems. Apparently, therapists just have to get people in life-threatening situations in order to get them to emote better. Dying seems to be the left hand lane of spiritual healing.

Conventional Conventionists

WHYYYYYYYYYYYY????!?!?!?!??!, shouted to the storm-battered sky. Why aren’t we over this yet?

Slow-motion smiling faces on the verge of cracking in half, and turning heads to show great joy. The climax of the movie was lifted right out of the last scene in “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone“, and I was critical of it ten years ago. Imagine how I feel about the same technique now.

Beyond the alarmingly ordinary cinematography, characters like Thor’s companions – Sif, Hogun, Volstagg, and Fandral – are paper dolls compared to even (dare I say it?) the well-developed roundness of Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster, Astrophysicist. They move as one; they think as one. They are never out of each other’s company, and they are all blandly on the same page at the same time. Branagh was somehow unable to tease the least bit of character development out of any of these gods when they are nothing if not bold and well-defined: Volstagg is boastful and somewhat cowardly; Hogun is grim; Fnadral is vain and a flirt, and Sif is…. Sif is supposed to be a warrior, but she’s acted like Pippi Longstocking – smiling and laughing while carrying a horse around on her back, making her seem vaguely autistic.

Gang of Five (Plus One)

“Thor” apparently had five writers involved in the script, including Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, Don Payne (none of whose names I recognize), and J. Michael Straczynsk (whose run on the comic book Thor I loved) and Mark Protosevich (known for the JLo vehicle “The Cell“). And maybe because there were so many hands involved in writing the script that it became the middle-ground blahfest it was. Never having worked with a team (and not really wanting to for this exact reason), I have to assume that things get lost or over-written or deleted while being passed from hand to hand. Of course, if I’m wrong someone correct me. just know that I’m going to throw “Titan A.E.” back at you. Kenneth Branagh also has to take some spankings for this. Here is a man who did a four-hour Hamlet for movie-going audiences and made it accessible. Why couldn’t there have been more Shakespeare in “Thor”? It would have highlighted his alienness while on Earth, but it also would have given the character some more dignity than the teeth-clicking, eye-winking celebutante from another dimension he was. More than that Thor has been talking with “thees” and “thous” since Journey into Mystery #83. Why change now? Branagh could have made it work if anyone could have.

FINALE

In the end, “Thor” had moments that were watchable and funny, but there was no drama, no cohesiveness to the story. And the lackluster characters couldn’t rise above the aimless script.

GRADE: C

Let’s the basics out of the way first: Jon Macy’s art in “Fearful Hunter” is superlative. His “Teleny & Camille” was great, but he has (as he should) gotten stronger, more Macyesque imagery on the page. Boffo. And basic number two: the erotic charge of the story is part of the story and not the only story or, worse, filler to bring the book to an even number of pages. I read comics for the stories; I read nifty.org to get off. Macy has kindly brought two of my hobbies together. Again, well done.

But here’s what I really love: Macy has created intriguing characters in the couple of Oisin and Byron, two men who in the real world I would probably start a betting pool over how long and in what way their relationship would implode. Yes, I know this makes me a horrible person. Still, I found myself pulling for these two to come and stay together.

Oisin is a druid apprentice, taught by the older Tavius, who is full of plots and snares like Old Nick himself. Oisin wants to be a druid, but is distracted by what he is told he cannot have: a life involving other people. Magic requires that he be dedicated only to his work of safeguarding the Natural World. Still, he is fascinated by the wolfboy Byron, and is in earnest to heal Byron’s “sad heart”. Because that always ends well.

Byron, the wolf-boy, is magickal, hot, and as sensitive as a ficus. If I knew someone like this, I would definitely call him on a lonely Friday night after a contempt-filled watching of “Smallville”, but then shuffle him out the door after the deed was done and before I could hear how painful and difficult his week had been (which, yes, I know makes me a horrible person). Byron’s sensitivity, however, isn’t from the oh-so-common “my man done me wrong” syndrome that I’m certain anyone reading this article can relate to. Since he mates for life, there’s never been an emotionally stunted, abusive ex that swims in his subconscious, telling him that he’s worthless. He is simply fearful. And emo. So. So. SO emo. Which makes me wonder what it is that Oisin sees in him, or, more importantly, what Macy sees in him (he is, after all, the eponymous character). Of course, not every love story (and this is a love story) has to be peopled with noble characters of deep-set virtue who are not only self-aware and pithy at an early age, but who have a love like no man or woman has ever know handed to them for no better reason than Destiny has declared they be the Luke and Laura of their age. Flaws like Byron’s (and Oisin’s for that matter) make their story far more worthy a read, mostly because there is no guarantee here that love will conquer all, despite what Shea, the werefox, promises.

What I enjoyed most about “Fearful Hunter” is the world Macy created to house his people and their stories. Like Charles de Lint’s urban fantasies, our and the sidhe world aren’t countless dimensions apart, but literally right next door to each other. Neighbors, classmates, acquaintances could be fey and one would never know. Tavius and Oisin’s keep is a cavish affair, deep in the forest and underground, where they practice magic that should light them up like a Fukushima crab to even non-magical folk. Yet they are practically unknown to the nearby townies. There is a sidhe bar that is in plain sight of every slack-jeaned punk within a hundred miles (have I mentioned the care with which Macy draws men’s asses?) hangs out in with the Cousins that is just part of the fabric of this world. No walls or wardrobes separate Humans from the Others. In fact, it seems that only one’s unwillingness to see what is right there in plain sight is what keeps these peoples apart.

Jon Macy’s “Fearful Hunter” series comes highly recommended.

In short, the movie is called “Sucker Punch” because you simply don’t see the stupid coming. I am deeply DEEPLY worried about the Superman franchise because of this.

In long, I’m going to ruin the movie for you. There will be no coy references to possible plot points, or oblique descriptions of the action in order to avoid possible spoilers because I want to spoil the movie for you. I want you to read this review, and say to yourself, “Well, thanks a lot, Sean! Now I know what’s going to happen!” Exactly. I want you to save your money for something important, like paying parking tickets or… neutering your pets.

If you’ve seen any of the trailers, you have an idea of what the movie is about: a girl is taken to an insane asylum and left there by some sweaty older dude for what can only be nefarious purposes. There is a voice-over saying something about “using the weapons that are in side of you”, “be strong”, and “find the way out.” From this, I inferred that this girl was involved in some kind of experimental therapy that would not only heal her mind, but give her the power to go full-on Hamlet on the aforementioned sweaty, old dude. Sadly, that was not Zach Snyder’s “Sucker Punch”, and, frankly, the movie in my head was a gagillion times better than what I saw in the theatre last night. Sweaty old dude is actually Babydoll’s (we assume this is her name, though I’m sure that was not the one given at the baptismal font) step-father, widower of her recently deceased mother, who left all of her considerable estate to her two daughters, Babydoll and Soon-to-Be-Dead-at-Babydoll’s-Inexpert-Handling-of-a-Gun, much to the chagrin of Step-dad. Whether out of revenge or creepy plot to impregnate and marry one of the girls, Step-dad makes a move for Babydoll, gets scratched across the face for his efforts, locks Babydoll in her room, then goes for the younger sister. Babydoll escapes out an window and returns holding a gun, fires at Step-dad, but kills her sister instead (in the most magical of bullets since the one that took out JFK). The cops come and Babydoll is taken to an asylum for “the mentally insane”. In the asylum, we see the major therapeutic vehicle for the inmates recovery: “The Theatre”, where girls work out there problems by re-living them for an audience. Step-dad makes a deal with an orderly named Blue to have Babydoll lobotomized before the cops can ask more questions about that night’s events. In three days, the doctor will arrive to perform the “surgery”. So, we have the set-up: dead mother and sister, guilt-wracked innocent (you can tell by her pink pajamas), salacious and covetous step-dad, corrupt institution, method of redemption, possible allies, and a deadline to escape. All this is done in a tableau/montage to a re-mix of “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This”, and is a pretty effective prologue (mostly because it matched what was going on in my head), so I thought I could settle in for two hours of me and Zach Snyder quibbling over the details of how “our” movie would unfold.

Nope. The very next scene is the doctor arriving and lobotomizing Babydoll with a leucotome, but before the hammer can hit the nail on the head, the action becomes a slow motion freeze, and Babydoll is replaced by Sweet Pea in a blonde wig asking Dr. Vera Gorski how or why this scene should even happen. We are no longer in the insane asylum; we are in a brothel/theatre in which the young ladies of the music of the night are taught one dance with which they can seduce/entertain clients. Babydoll has been watching the performance from the audience, as her priestly caregiver from the orphanage sells her to Director/Producer/Pimp Blue.

There are three layers of reality to this movie: Real Life, “The Theatre”, and “Hyperlife”. Real Life is the one we saw at the very beginning with the institutionalized Heiress Babydoll. “The Theatre” is the metaphor Babydoll uses to cope with her circumstances in Real Life.
“Hyperlife” is the sword-and-skirts kung fu fantasia that, let’s face it, is what everyone going to the movie thinks they want to see. “The Theatre” is a completely unnecessary conceit in this film, and, in fact, is the major source of confusion for most viewers, but without it, the movie would have nothing to hold it together (unless, of course, MY script were being used) and would probably top off at around 45 minutes. What’s confusing is that it is entirely a flashback to the three days starting with Babydoll’s arrival at the asylum right up to her lobotomy, but is told in the moment before the lobotomy cuts her brain in two. So, what we see in the movie is Arrival at the Asylum-Lobotomy(I)-The Theatre-Hyperlife-The Theatre-Hyperlife-The Theatre-Hyperlife-The Theatre-Lobotomy (II). In actuality, the order is Arrival at the Asylum-The Theatre-Hyperlife-The Theatre-Hyperlife-The Theatre-Hyperlife-The Theatre-Lobotomy. Why this had to be told in flashback is anyone’s guess. We find out at the end of the movie that everything Babydoll accomplished in Hyperlife as a metaphor for what she accomplished in The Theatre was all a metaphor for what she accomplished in Real Life. In essence, there was a narrative middleman who upped the charges for selling us these goods when really, we should have gotten them directly from the buyer. So to speak. I’ve read that people are comparing “Sucker Punch” to “Inception” for showing layers of alternate reality, and while this is true on the surface, “Sucker Punch” has none of the depth or novelty that “Inception” did. We don’t wonder about how far down the rabbit hole we’ve gone because we know. We see the sign posts that say “This way out”. We see how this is a daydream and not a soul lost in the crushing grandeur of the multiverse. There is no awe in “Sucker Punch”.

In The Theatre, Babydoll befriends four other inmates – Rocket and her sister Sweet Pea, Amber, and Blondie. Together they plot their escape by obtaining four objects – a map, fire,a knife, and key. Babydoll knows they have to find these items because they came to her in a vision she has while she dances for the first time. According to all witnesses, Babydoll has a raw power about her dance that leaves men and women breathless. However, the only move we ever see her perform is a shoulder roll, then she escapes to Hyperlife and walks that I’ve-been-across-the-world-yet-even-the-peaks-of-Tibet-bore-me, weary-yet-powerful slo-mo walk that “The Hangover II” made fun of 20 minutes earlier in the previews. Don’t tell me there’s going to be cake if there’s not going to be cake. It makes me think you don’t know how to bake. But here’s the thing, Mr. Snyder, even if you don’t know how to bake, I’ll bet there’s a pastry shop somewhere in your town. Hire them to bake a cake. Of course, the cake you’re serving up might actually be pie, so if you don’t let us see the cake, maybe we’ll never guess that it’s pie. If that’s what happened here, I have to wonder why you didn’t hire cake in the first place. There is also a fifth item that is necessary for escape, but, as Babydoll is told, it is something that only she can find and will require a great sacrifice. Then she has to fight three giant samurai with a sword she picked up only moments before. Can you guess the end? Yeah, she wins after leaping a tall learning curve in a slow-motion-freeze single bound. Three more fights like this one to gain their quest objects – against zombie Nazis, wyvern, and a runaway train – are mind-numbingly dull. There is never a sense that these girls aren’t going to win, so the Snyderized fights become these impenetrably dull and lifeless pantomimes. And so ponderous. They’re the visual equivalent of a Calculus textbook.

With two of the items – a map and fire – won, the knife and Rocket are lost when… something goes awry. I’m not sure what or how. Rocket tries to get the knife away from the cook while Babydoll dances for him, but when he discovers her wandering hands, he stabs her. Babydoll is shaken out of Hyperlife for a moment, then retreats back to watch her friend die, which doesn’t make sense because she stood up to the cook in Rocket’s defense only 30 minutes beforehand. What causes her to distance herself now is never explained nor does it make Rocket’s death tragic, heroic or anything-ic. She just dies in Hyperlife and in The Theatre. Then Blue discovers their plan and condemns Sweet Pea to the closet, and executes Amber and Blondie (who never did much of anything to begin with except have ironic names).

Now, here’s what I guess the sucker punch of the movie is supposed to be: the climax. Babydoll stabs Blue and steals his master key. She absconds with Sweet Pea, but finds that the main gate of The Theatre is guarded by heavies. Babydoll then deciphers the message of her first Hyperlife experience: this is not her story; it’s Sweet Pea‘s story. I beg to differ with you, Babydoll, but an hour and forty-five minutes of following your POV tells me this is, indeed, your story. Babydoll has to sacrifice herself so Rocket can escape. it’s this kind of “Oh, look how profound I am!” self-satisfied moment that led my brother to declare that this movie was made for “13 year-old horny, emo cutters.” I have to agree. This is just bad poetry. Bad like… oh, Lord. An ex of mine, whom I hope doesn’t read my blog, once read me a poem of his that said something like “I’m as old as the mountains and as young as the sea.” And my first thought was, I’d really like to get laid tonight, and if I’m honest with him that’s not going to happen. So, I dissembled a bit and got lucky, but not even all that deep down I knew that the poem was bad because it was so greenly self-conscious. Much like this twist in “Sucker Punch”. Babydoll distracts the guards by kicking one of them in the balls. As Sweet Pea exits the gate, the guard punches Babydoll in the face, and…

POP! In goes the leucotome. We’re back in the Real World, and Babydoll is a vegetable. No revenge on Step-dad. No regaining her position in society. No becoming a stronger person by tapping into her fantasies of power. Just… leafy greens and $6 gone.

“Sucker Punch” is full of allusions – I’m being charitable when I call them “allusions” – to other media. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”, “Akira”, and “I, Robot” to name a few, but I think visuals may help a bit:

This falls hard after reading about the weekend of Megacon drama. Not to say that Zack Snyder is a plagiarist or anything like that, but how far can “homage” go?

And, finally, not to put too fine a point on my disdain for this movie, but while I can see a “steam- and cog-driven” mecha suit – steampunk is making the rounds these days (have you see the “The Three Musketeers” trailer?), and nothing seems too old-fashioned that it can’t be retro-fitted into being more modern – why are there floating computer screens inside the mecha? Can steam really make light-based UIs? Why even explain it at all if girls in SCA coswear are fighting zombie Nazis? If I can accept one, I can accept the other without explanation. It’s like Julie Taymor’s Arachne explaining her love for all things cobbled with, “I descended from the astral plane with the help of human shoes!” Silence would have been a better answer.

I wrote this review from the hip, so I’m sure there are errors here and there, some unfinished thoughts, and perhaps a bit of libel, but I wanted to get it out as soon as possible and keep others from making the same mistake I did. Stay home. Masturbate. I insist.

Brian Cronin, who is the voice of Comics Should Be Good over at Comic Book Resources is reviewing one LGBTQ comic book a day for the entire month of March. On March 13, Brian reviewed Frater Mine and he completely made my week with his praise for the book, especially recognizing the (in my opinion) superlativeness of Scott, Dan, Juan, Andres, and Ed. So, please take a look at what Brian had to say about the comic and the team.

Because I’ve been involved in the LGBTQ comics community for a while now, I sometimes think that I know all the players, but thanks to Brian’s reviews, I am now aware of comics and artists I had no idea existed. I definitely am going to check out Dar: A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary, Wandering Son, and Tough (so far as his list has gone). See Brian’s full archive for anything that might interest you.

I was writing my review for Justin Hall’s Gamazonia trade, recently published by Northwest Press, when I was… interrupted.

Avengers: The Children’s Crusade #3

I want to be mad at Allan Heinberg for the bi-monthly publication schedule of The Children’s Crusade, but I’m afraid that his control of dialogue and character development have pushed me to his total… well, near-total forgiveness; eighteen months is still a long time to be strung along by a single story. And that is the last time I will complain about this particular topic, though I reserve the right to revisit it if the final payoff isn’t commensurate with the investment of my patience.

Let’s start with the reason why I really love The Young Avengers: Billy and Teddy. Of all the gay superheroes out there, these two have got to be my favorites. Part of it is because they’re young and still pretty innocent about their love for each other, and I need that level of cute in my life, being the jaded old man that I am. It’s kind of like how when I listen to Bare and I think it’s alright that Jason killed himself at the end rather than go to college and end up betraying Peter even worse than he already had by breaking up with him then impregnating the school slut. For some reason, I see Peter walking into their dorm room at Notre Dame one afternoon unexpectedly only to find Jason with a pillow under his butt taking it hard from the linebacker, high as a kite, and when he sees the hurt on Peter’s face, Jason looks at him with half-closed eyes and says, “Heeeeeeeey, Peter. Wanna join ussss?” And then there are the months of Peter having to see Jason in the cafeteria every day, pretending that what happened (again) doesn’t hurt, but inside he’s nursing an ulcer the size of Rhode Island.

So…. yeah, take note Marvel: keep these two together; I’d like to not see Billy get hurt. That’s right, Hulkling. I got yer number.

Still not liking Wolverine. I’m not sure I’ve liked him since he got his own spin-off title back in, what, 1987? But in the last year or so, I’ve grown completely unable to stand him. I know he’s “doing what needs to be done” to protect the mutant race, but I’ve always thought of Wolverine as a character with a firm grasp on what it meant to be a man of Honor, and not just a wetworks soldier. His picking a fight with the Primary Avengers is just one more moment added to the pile of objections I have to him of late. Well, at least Heinberg is standing firmly behind the party line.

In the end, this story is about families: the ones people are born into, the ones people create, and the ones people find. Billy and Teddy have found each other in the larger Young Avengers family (they’re even sharing a bed now!), and they have found a highly suspect connection to Magneto and Quicksilver through their absent mother, The Scarlet Witch. Wolverine is quickly running out of friends (Storm even broke off her familial bond with him a few months ago over a “last drink”), mostly because he doesn’t trust anyone around him. Teddy rightly calls the Maximoff family “toxic”, and Billy tries to be a hero for his mom (despite the song telling him to not do that). Heinberg is a master of creating scenes that define characters by making them react to each other in ways I would expect my friends and family to react to similar situations. I mean, as similar as they can get to this reality. This is a very human story, and while the action may seem MIA, I’m enjoying the moments that are defining these characters and their relationships.

Grade: A-

Let’s say you like comics. Let’s also say you’re gay. Let’s go even further and say that you’ve spent some time in front of Xtube participating in your own personal Tubesock Holocaust the likes of which would make Onan himself stop and go, “Wow.” Pushing the “what if’s” past the bounds of good taste, let’s finally say you enjoy the Underworld series. Sean-Z’s MYTH #2, then, is probably for you. However, if you are a savvy politico who keeps abreast of current gay events, MYTH #2 is definitely for you.

Ostensibly a story about the often-naked Zithyran V’riel and his quest to locate and reawaken his world’s gods, MYTH also reflects an important part of the gay cultural dialogue that has long gone unaddressed: namely, the equal and opposite reaction of gay opponents to Marriage Equality. As important as Marriage Equality is as a civil rights issue, there is a faction within the gay community that does not embrace it as step forward, but rather as a white flag to the heterosexual hegemony (say that three times fast!). In essence, gay culture will die under the trappings of “normalcy” – spouses, children, split-level houses, and dogs that do no fit into a shoulder bag – finally losing our sense of “special otherness”. I’m not saying I agree with this, nor do I presume to know Sean-Z’s political leanings; nevertheless, he gives us an alluring, profound, and often exciting look at the Marriage Equality counter-argument.

Sex will always be a part of the gay identity, mostly because we are both self- and other-identified through our sexual behavior. In terms of the heterosexual (i.e., “other”) identification, I would even argue towards “over-identified and bordering on unhealthy obsession” (I’m looking at you, Matt Barber and Peter LaBarbera). One only need glance at any number of postings by anti-gay groups to see that their fevered imaginings are far more pornographic and detailed than anything the average gay male has experienced. Why then is it important to have the discussion of “marriage” at this time? Wouldn’t Marriage Equality kill the gay sexual drive, as any number of late night TV wags have said it does to straight marriage? What would become of gay culture as we know it? Obviously with so profound a question mark directly in our path, it makes sense that some people would try to apply the brakes or jump out of the vehicle altogether.

In MYTH, inhabitants of the world Zithyra and their gods are comfortable with their bodies enough to go au naturel (and with their bodies, who wouldn’t be?) and are obviously queer. In choosing to arrange his universe this way, Sean-Z opens up two interesting points: one, that somehow the race propagates, and two, that there is no stigma attached to being queer, so we are left to judge “good” and “evil” by their respective behaviors. The “evil” side, the one that represents Marriage Equality proponents, is populated by vampires, draining the life of others to make it their own. I’ll admit the characterization is on the harsh side, but one can feel the sense of betrayal that V’riel has towards the head vampire, Donjovan Faust. I hope in future issues to see the past of their relationship. The “good” side is seen in V’riel and his mecha servant Koz (which brings to mind the colloquial “cuz”, so I’m left wondering about the implications of man-on-machine sex), who rescue a god (called a “Maker”), Julian, and his friends from a fire at a bar called “The Raunch”. The good guys are sexually liberated and for most of the book are naked and/or on teh cock like a GOP Congressman at an out-of-town convention without his wife. It’s a canny metaphor, and one without clear answers. While we root for the good guys, we can’t help but notice that the bad guys are just as hot and just as motivated to prevail.

Whether you are pro-Marriage Equality or feel that it will be the ruination of “gay”, Sean-Z’s compelling MYTH #2 will force you to take a long hard look at the future as it lays bare before you.

I can tell already that Robert Kirby’s new series, THREE, is going to get a lot of mileage out of its title. So many good things come in threes – like wishes and bears and the hot soccer triplets down the street whom I fervently know are 18 years old – or multiples of three – like a six pack (a three pack would look weird with a partnerless odd-ab-out) and… no, a six pack is the pinnacle of all things “six”, I’d say. And to begin his latest anthology venture (the sublime Boy Trouble book preceding), Robert and two other cartoonists – Eric Orner and Joey Alison Sayers – each offer up a story of a moment. Filed under “s[tuff] you can’t make up”, I’m tempted to say there is a semi-autobiographical revelation that comes from these moments. Whether by accident or design, there is a theme of “one” in each cartoonist’s work (yeah yeah yeah, it’s also issue number one) that has the ring of verisimilitude which I say can only come from personal experience. Like so:

Weekends Abroad by Eric Orner sets the bar high for every story in every issue including and following this one. Ostensibly a tale of what an American Jew working in Israel does on the weekends (cruise guys on the Internet, go to clubs, get laid), Weekends is a sad story. Not suicide levels of sadness by any means, but I feel for the nameless protagonist. And that is my point in a nutshell: can it get any lonelier for this cartoon stranger in a strange land who doesn’t speak Hebrew and who can’t find a decent guy to schtup than we readers not even knowing his name? I doubt it. There are moments of comfort, but the anonymous hero isn’t part of them – Markot games, Vox, finding the mysterious graffiti poet; he’s an observer. But, as with most things, there is grace in the end.

Joey Alison Sayers’ Number One is an odd piece, but it made me laugh. My six-year old nephew is going through his “bodily noises and functions are funny” stage, and, yes, my brother and I are encouraging it, not only because burps that scare birds out of trees are funny, but also because they’re natural and everyone does them (we’re trying to avoid any kind of shaming issues). Recently, the three of us were at Sara’s, a local beach-front hamburger “stand” which has my favorite ice cream in the world: soft-serve orange sherbet, when my brother belched unexpectedly, like, “Kronos eating his children too fast” belched. We all started laughing then realized a woman and her daughter sitting next to us were chuckling along. Scott was immediately embarrassed and apologized for interrupting their meal, though I have to give him credit for not stopping laughing. The mother said she looked over because she thought her son was nearby as he also doesn’t cover his burps in public. My nephew and I were amused by this, like, groundling amused. This is the charm of Number One: we’ve all been there.

Robert Kirby’s Freedom Flight rounds out the issue with another story about loneliness in the middle of a crowd. Drew has always wondered what it would be like to disappear, so when his boyfriend blows him off to work one afternoon, Drew leaves their apartment to meander around NYC. Kirby’s “one” could be seen as a companion piece to Orner’s, but much darker. In both stories, the protagonists are lost in the Big City, mostly because they’ve never been connected to it. But unlike Orner’s leading man, whose interior monologue connects his past to his present and to his future, Kirby’s Drew cycles around and around in a never-ending present, an existential “Groundhog’s Day”. And finally, there is no grace to save his Drew in the end: “one” simply becomes “none” (worse, “no one”). It’s a sucker punch in the gut, to be sure. It’s also honest and real.

Robert Kirby promises this is the first issue of an on-going series (a promise backed by the art samples for #2 on the final page) with contributions from old and new names in queer comics. It’d be a shame to not get on-board for this sure-to-be spectacular ride now. Order a copy of THREE here as soon as you reach the period at the end of this sentence.

In brief: See it, but pretend that someone else is playing Scott Pilgrim.

Too gay to be straight?

Several weeks ago, there was a minor rhubarb in the gay blogosphere when Ramin Setoodeh of Newsweek suggested that Sean Hayes, co-starring opposite Kristen Chenoweth in Promises, Promises, ruined the play because his gay was sparkling through what was supposed to be a straight character. I’m going to suggest the exact same thing about Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Dude acts like a lady. I’ve seen him in similar movies about disaffected and intensely understated teen love – Juno springs immediately to mind – which end in emotional waterfalls of caring and empathy, but I’ve never actually bought it from him. I’m now convinced it’s because is ways too subtle for the conscious mind to perceive, he was actually projecting his love for J. K. Simmons. (And who wouldn’t?) Never having read the manga-books, I wondered for the first thirty minutes if Cera’s lispy and breathless performance was foreshadowing Scott’s coming out later the film. Even his roommate, uber-slutty manbanger Wallace, in a metafictional moment says of him, “And you think I gay up the place too much?”

Is Cera really gay? Is he really straight? Who knows? Who cares? All I can say is, he needs to butch it up there a little and step out of his “less is more” schtick or he’s going to be typecast in the way of D J Qualls who is mostly famous for being Holocaust-thin. That or, ya know, he can start up a production company with Chad Allen. “Cerallen” or something mish-mashy like that.

Too hip to be square?

And speaking of disaffected. Is the… I dunno, are they still called “hipsters”? What is the generation of Xbox addicts and lonely souls in skinny jeans and pork pie hats called? Someone let me know, but until then I have to ask, is the Hipster Revolution over yet? I’m kinda tired of them. Yeah yeah yeah, my generation had the spotlight held up to our disappointments in The Breakfast Club, but kids these days remind me vaguely of kids from my college days who didn’t have jobs or any visible means of financial support but who still managed to be dropped out of helicopters to snowboard down mountains.

Holy crap. I’m my father…

Scott Pilgrim and his friends are like that (not my father; the previous thing): they don’t do much, but their days are full of activity – playing video games, wearing ironic t-shirts, faking suicides, trying to get signed with a music label, making much ado about trivia, and muddying the waters with their unexpressed emotions in a self-conscious way. Of all the gang, only Kim (Allison Pill) has the facial chops to pull off the seething cauldron of rage and resentment that threatens to bubble over at any moment. Scott himself is dating a high schooler – 17-year old Knives Chau – because he wouldn’t get any play otherwise. Though he wants to hang out with her, and they have a simpatico ninja-ass kicking video game technique, it’s awkwardly apparent that the power dynamic between them is WAY off. In one moment, Scott literally freezes his affections towards Knives until she obsequiously puts more quarters into their arcade game then he continues as if she had done nothing wrong. Yeah, right away, I didn’t like Scott (the character, not Michael Cera), but I’m certain I wasn’t supposed to like him, otherwise how could he grow into a better person by the end? Thinking of it, the ladies of the film were actually far superior to the boys in every way, not only as characters, but also as actresses. Knives (Ellen Wong), Kim, Stacey (Anna Kendrick), and Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) are part of what I’m calling “Hit Girl Syndrome”: “when a secondary female character upstages the male lead in every scene.” (I’ve already submitted it to Urban Dictionary, bitches.)

I think the only current cultural obsession missing from the movie was zombies (seriously, it even had a bacon moment! I don’t think even Twilight had a bacon moment.), but it did have winged Japanese succubi in sailor outfits. Is that almost the same thing? Is Scott Pilgrim too, almost cynically, relevant?

What’s a meta for?

None of this movie is meant to be taken literally, postmodern bitches.

+8 Balls

It may not seem like it, but I enjoyed this film a lot. I could relate to the story and the difficulty of forming relationships in what is now the 128-bit digital age (yeah, the NES graphics are part of the metaphor, too.), and though I wasn’t moved by the characters, I was certainly touched by their woes. Had it been directed by anyone other than Edgar Wright, it would have been forgettable, maybe even terrible. But Wright brought all the charm of the comic book medium to the screen as literally as was possible, and in doing so kept the usual translation problems to a minimum. Perhaps Neil Gaiman should have a sit down with Wright before Anasi Boys goes into pre-production.

A-

Jon Macy’s adaptation of the early gay pornographic work Teleny into the graphic tome (seriously, I could kill a cat with its heft) Teleny and Camille seethes. It churns. It tugs. It traps all things beautifully gay and all things terribly gay then challenges the reader to not look away. I’m sure many will see this novel only for the love story, but what Jon has given us is a vision of how much and how little we gay folk have changed in the 100-plus years since Oscar Wilde (allegedly) and his band of lavender men wrote the original novel in round-robin. It’s a FAR superior execution of the idea behind Francis Ford Copolla’s Dracula: Victorian context, modern subtext. (I have to thank my brother for this succinct metaphor.)

The story is a simple one: boy (Camille) meets boy (Teleny), and they begin a secret yet intense love affair that knocks Camille out of his perennially heterosexual life and into the clandestine London homosexual world. But there’s so much more than that. Even in 2010, the gay world is somewhat invisible, almost like a Wonderland that isn’t seen until someone falls down the rabbit hole. Yeah, people are aware of Teh Gays, but they have no idea how subversively ubiquitous we are until it’s pointed out to them. A dear, dear friend of mine knew me for years before I mentioned the local bathhouse in Austin, TX to her, and when I did, I thought she was going to have a stroke. What she couldn’t get over was that it’s located right next to a major shopping mall on a major street. She’d seen it a million times, but never knew what it was for. So it goes with Camille. After becoming involved with Teleny, the scales fall from his eyes and he stumbles upon homosexuality everywhere. But when you look into the gay, the gay looks into you. Camille is no longer able to hide his nature (though he does try at times).

I won’t be the only person to say this (though I hope I’m the first): Jon’s art is the sensual motifs of Aubrey Beardsley with the grotesqueness of P. Craig Russell (though it lacks PCR’s cool detachment from said grotesqueness). I’m sure by now that everyone knows NOM’s Tour of Hate is crossing the nation, preaching the sanctity and sturdiness of a “one man, one woman” marriage and the horror that is Marriage Equality. But if one looks back over just this past year, there have been shocking abuses in these “sanctified” marriages ranging from mundane adultery to selling children in Wal-Mart parking lots. The hypocrisy rankles me, but it seems to be “OK” with Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown because straight people are perpetuating the abuse.

Stay with me. I have a point.

Teleny and Camille calls this hypocrisy out, or at least recognizes that straight people don’t get a free pass by virtue of where they insert their genitals. In his youth, Camille visited a brothel with friends before they all left for college. The night ended… let’s say, “poorly” for one sad prostitute. Yet there is no condemnation between Camille and his friends for being in the brothel in the first place (to say nothing of the dead whore). As an adult, Camille accidentally wanders into a cruisy section of a park, calling it a “modern Sodom and Gomorrah”. Yet, what is the difference in these locales and the behaviors except the attitudes which accept or reject them? Wilde and company were making a point then that we’re still trying to make today. Consciously or unconsciously, Jon does some editorializing in these scenes. Most of his pages are not made of composed art inside panels in a certain disposition, but rather the pages themselves are full compositions, whole art. However, in these scenes (and one or two others), the pages break apart in a sense. Panel dominate the landscape, and Jon’s lines change from fluid and expressive to harsh and… like barbed wire in 3-D. Grotesque. They fit the scenes perfectly, but they jar the eye.

And don’t even get me started on how much I think Jon hates poodles.

Where the story and the art meet is in the sex. The sex in Teleny and Camille is more than just hardcore porn. Yeah yeah yeah there are engorged penes and money shots that could blind a treeful of squirrels, but it’s not gratuitous and definitely not there for a cheap thrill or (even worse) page filler. The sex has meaning and purpose and emotion behind it. Some of the emotions are lovely and expansive; others are more bothersome, but still need to be there.

One thing I must thank Jon personally for is his ending. THANK YOU, JON!! Your indictment against the trend in gay literature that “even the one’s written by the gays” require a tragic ending because “it’s like we’re too damaged to even dare imagine being happy” is difficult to refute. So many stories dwell on death for obvious reasons, but even pre-AIDS gay media fall to either Boys Beware or Cruising-type idioms. It’s refreshing to have a gay love story with a happy… well, at least an ending without murder, death, or disfigurement (I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if your ending is a happy one). E. M. Forster is no doubt completely behind your modern addition to the text.

So. Yeah. Buy it!

Xposted at Prism Comics

This was an early draft of a review I wrote of Android Karenina for Instinct Magazine:

I can say without reservation that I would rather have an anal fissure treated by a leper armed only with lemon juice and a nail gun than get involved in any literature from Russia, let alone Anna Karenina. Thank goodness Quirk Classics has taken out all the proletarian angst and replaced it with ROBOTS, which studies have shown to be 2 bajillion percent more interesting than the travails of bored upper-class housewives. In this alt.Russia, robots are inseparable companions and confidantes of the wealthy; faithful and obedient, save for Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin’s FACE implant, which threatens to destroy the peaceful monotony of everyone’s lives. Thankfully. The original novel makes the “Little House on the Prairie” series looks like a grindhouse bloodbath, so a touch of mayhem helps the boredom disappear like android exhaust in a stiff breeze. Guaranteed you will not throw yourself under a train by the end. Thank you, Quirk!

This was my final draft:

I would rather have a broken bone set by a dog armed only with a nail gun than read any piece of Russian literature, let alone Anna Karenina, the 19th century’s “Real Housewives…”, except instead of vapid whores who have everything, there is one bored betty who jumps in front of a train instead of divorcing her husband to be with her lover. Happily, Quirk Classics has taken out all the proletarian angst and replaced it with ROBOTS, which studies have shown to be 2 bajillion percent awesomer than bustles and adultery put together. Anna’s doomed affair with Count Vronsky takes a backseat to the treacherous plan by Russia’s cybernetic citizenry to usurp their fleshy creators and become Mechanical Overlords of the World! More Robotech than Tolstoy, and thank goodness for that!

They’re both WAY over my word limit (Sorry, Jeff!), but I’m curious to know which one has more “oomph!”. Thoughts? Comments? Opinions?

New X-Men #114
New Mutants #14

The Once and Future Master Mold. No wonder New X-Men #114 was re-issued this week.

“Second Coming” continues with Part 11 this week. It’s still mass destruction on all sides (though I seem to care less about which characters are dying than I did way back in “Mutant Massacre”), and all the B-list mutants (like Colossus) are taking the heavy knocks. Of all my impressions of this book, the strongest one I come away with is that I don’t like Doug very much. Actually, I don’t like any of the Muties very much. They’re all grouchy and smarmy and way too cocky for their own good. At least when they were teens, there was a reason for their cockiness (i.e., they were teenagers who thought they knew better than everyone around them); now it just reads as snark. And transparent snark at that. And what happens after “Second Coming” ends? What is the next genocidal plan Marvel will put into motion? I know that The X-Men will join “The Heroic Age” next month, but I probably won’t be along for the ride. “Mutant Massacre” was back in 1986, and it’s been one long assassination attempt since then. And “The Heroic Age” pits the X-Men against Dracula. Wow. Didn’t that happen back in 1983? Well, it will free up a few bucks every month to start my Bird of Prey, volume one collection. Speaking of which…

DC Legacies #2
Birds of Prey #2
Brightest Day #4

Apparently, “Brightest Day” is not going to be the solution to the endless deaths and editorial-driven disasters that I have assumed it to be. In an interview for the DCU Blog, Alex Segura has Geoff Johns as saying

“Brightest Day” is about second chances. I think it’s been obvious from day one that there are major plans for the heroes and villains from Aquaman to take center stage in the DC Universe, among many others, post-”Blackest Night”. “Brightest Day” is not a banner or a vague catch-all direction for the DC Universe, it is a story. Nor is “Brightest Day”a sign that the DC Universe is going to be all about ‘light and brighty’ superheroes. Some second chances work out…some don’t.

Yet, for being “just a story”, it’s leaking all across the DCU, even into the restart of Birds of Prey (granted Hawk and Dove are now part of the team), so it seems to be more of a paradigm than a story. After reading my DC titles this week, I’ve come to the conclusion that this could be a great opportunity to shake things up in DCU. Yeah, yeah, “again”, but everyone loves a crisis,right? Looking at DC Legacies, the heroes of the Silver Age disappeared rather than reveal who they were to the government and thereby lose their effectiveness to fight crime. But look at this week’s Birds of Prey: Oracle’s Braves know who the Penguin is, know his real name and know that he’s a bad guy. I’ve never really thought about it before, but, really, everyone in the DCU knows who the villains are. They don’t have secret identities per se, though they do have criminal personae and $$$ and guns and guards and compounds and Machines of Doom. Yet for some reason, they persist like untreated athlete’s foot even after year of head-butting with any number of heroes. But how much more fragile is a hero’s secret identity. The whole plot of BoP is the ruination that would follow revealing a hero’s alter ego. Witness what happened to Black Canary, and she’s apparently just the first. Does this make her more vulnerable (as we’ve always thought), or does this free her to be more of a hero? If “Brightest Day” is about second chances and not about being “light and brighty”, then maybe the way the heroes can get the upper-hand and not make porridge out of this second chance would be to adopt the villains’ “lifestyle” – live openly and without apology.

At least, that’s how I’m making sense of “Brightest Day”: that there really is a plan to drastically cut back on the snuff porn and get back to good stories. Of course, I thought that keeping New Krypton around for more than a minute was a good idea, too. Oh oh oh! and leaving Paradise Island intact.

Acts of Violence

I often say that Noir is dead though my saying so doesn’t stop people from trying to put the corpse on stage and make it dance. Noir was a time and a place that doesn’t exist anymore, and woe betide anyone who thinks its resurrection is imminent. This being said, it’s so much better just to write a 1920′s gangster story or a rural justice anecdote in one’s own voice the way that Martin Scorsese did in Gangs of New York or The Departed… well, maybe The Departed is a bad example of “better”. The team behind Acts of Violence took the better path, and in doing so put out a collection of four outstanding stories. I’m not one for gratuitous, over-the-top violence, but I am one for good stories, and the four tales here – “The Three Princes”, “Six O’clock Noose”, “Reggie-Town” and “The Orchard” – are excellent reads. I was especially intrigued by “Reggie-Town” with its deluded protagonist and the unexplained fate of the baby he kidnapped. Without histrionics nor finger-wagging, these stories stare at a black spot in the human psyche then take a picture.
Grade: A+

Batman/Superman Annual #4

Lex Luthor is one of those characters who can be admired for his ability for do impossibly heinous acts in the name of some twisted moral code and yet slip away form punishment like Louisiana shrimp from the hands of a shrimper… too soon? For this same reason he is also a source of frustration for me. Yeah, he’s Superman’s greatest enemy, but I’m rather tired of him (especially in the movies), so it’s nice to see that he will eventually (at some far-flung future time which should reach the newsstands in about 3130) get what’s coming to him. And while I at first thought he was a commercial ploy, I’ve grown to like Batman Beyond, and wouldn’t mind seeing him in an on-going series of his own, especially if Renato Guedes continues to draw him (his transitions are somewhat awkward, but his coloring and linework are peerless).
Grade: A-

Brightest Day #3

Wow. This is a total downer. And not all that bright at all. Seriously, Blackest Night had more hope than this. The story is intriguing and well-paced, but it’s not living up to its title. Yet. I’m standing by my man and saying that things will get better as the series goes on.
Grade: B

Wonder Woman #44

As cool as it might be to dream of being an Amazon, after this issue I am convinced it’s just a protracted death sentence being related to Diana. Last issue, Astarte revealed that she was Diana’s long-gone aunt, taken by The Citizenry and become mother of their greatest monster, Theana, Diana’s never-known cousin. By the end, Theana, by all rights an interesting and powerful character, is dead, and Astarte is Paradise Island-bound to be re-educated (which is the same fate Diana has planner for her, but with an upstanding moral twist to it, I’m sure). Another branch of the Amazon family tree is pruned for no really good reason other than to make Diana fightin’ mad and win the day. Yeah, it’s a long drink of hemlock being Diana’s kin.

But why? Why did Gail Simone end her excellent run on Wonder Woman with a rather macabre tale of mayhem and familicide, and then blunt the point of the tale with a happy ending that makes that of the first “Harry Potter” film seem maudlin? I’ll give her props for handing off the book to JMS in a package cleaner than that handed to her by Picoult, but there’s a difference between having a mess to clean up, and being handed a story that’s been cauterized. Which is not to say that this was a bad story; I’m just uncertain what its meaning is for future Diana stories. Usually, an author will take a moment to show what lurks around the corner or for terrible realization to dawn on a hero’s face, but here, Diana’s ignorance of what she’s just done is more worrisome than anything. I’m not saying there’s any deliberate malice on Diana’s part, but there were some troubling juxtapositions between her and Astarte’s behavior. And maybe Diana was supposed to come off looking better, more moral, than Astatre, but I’m not convinced she did. Here’s what I saw:

* Diana used the lasso to compel Zusen to betray her people. It was said in the previous issue that the members of The Citizenry were taken from various cultures and trained to forget their past lives. Having Diana subvert someone’s free will to do her bidding looked bad.
* The Reformation Island reference was a bit too close to the re-education proposed by Astatre.
* Diana took over a violent culture that has centuries of severe administration issues then let it go without supervision.
* She omitted telling her mother about her stolen sister. Yeah, Diana said she would te

ll her later, but it’s such a Catholic thing to do, putting off bad news until someone is happy enough to receive it without falling apart. It’s pretty co-dependent.
* She let Gail Simone kill her cousin (ok, that’s probably just Gail’s evil showing through ).

i dunno. could there be an evil Diana in the future, regardless of the “Brightest Day” mandate?
Grade: B

Madame Xanadu #23

“Broken House of Cards” finally ends, and while the end is just as subversive as most of Matt Wagner’s other endings (where instead of a full-pitched battle for world supremacy, protagonist and antagonist sort of slip away from each other to wage war another day; really, Wagner is the Anti-Millar), I found it to be a satisfying one. Of course, anyone who’s read Jack Kirby’s The Demon knows that Morgana comes back around 1973, but however frustrating that might be for Madame X, it’s also another story for another time.

Two things I would like to see happen with this book: one, that we linger in the early days of the DC Legends for another story or two. With DC entering the “Brightest Day” (which is still pretty dark, all things considered) and looking back on the early days of the DCU and its heroes, seeing Madame X move alongside more of them would be years worth of fascinating reading, especially under Wagner. Two, Madame X needs to grow in power. What kept her from being more powerful than Morgana who has basically been catatonic for centuries? Is it her moral restraint, as though the power to appropriately defend her ideals would end up eroding them, or is it some kind of… let’s call it “naivete” instead of “character flaw”. It’s fitting to be reviewing Wonder Woman this week while bringing up this issue. Diana has grown up in her comic from a wide-eyed princess to a warrior-philosopher. However, she’s done this in (relatively) little time. Madame X needs more depth without her having to go to the Dark Side and back again (“depth” does not have to mean “be laid waste to”), and I think then that we’ll see her grow in power and in character.

Grade: B+

Birds of Prey #1

Collectors are by nature an obsessive people. Nothing is so upsetting to us as missing pieces of a set. While I had been aware of Birds of Prey, I was so turned off by the TV show of the same name that the comic book didn’t seem like a “must get”. Then Gail Simone took over the writing duties for Wonder Woman, and I immediately loved her take on the Amazon Princess. I still had zero interest in BoP, but when I heard that it was starting over with Gail at the helm (sadly no longer on WW), I had to pick it up. I mean, I needed my monthly Gail fix. All I can say is, “Well. Crap. It looks like I need to get the full run of the original BoP series.” Damn you, Gail Simone, for loving your characters and making them so fun and appealing to read!
Grade: A

New Mutants #13

There not being even one mutie on the cover gave me pause. I know that with the “Second Coming” storyline taking over all things X, I shouldn’t have been surprised that Sam’s team took a backseat to Hope and Cable’s return (though Moonstar beating up the Messiah was an awesome tribute to the on-going struggle between polytheism and monotheism). I like and dislike that Marvel would declare martial law on the X books and commandeer their regular storylines. I like it because it means there are no core event books to buy with my regular reads being tie-ins. Instead, there’s a chapter book-like continuity to “Second Coming”. I dislike it because everyone is all jumbled up and I’m missing important information that core event books would probably provide.

Zeb Wells continues to grow as a writer and continues to grow on me. He hasn’t hit any remarkable strides yet, but I’m aboard. For now.
Grade: C+

Seige #4

Marvel is the Naproxen of event comics. Yeah yeah, they get the job done, and the result is almost indistinguishable from the real stuff, but ultimately there is something off-brand about their stories – a whiff of clone, a hint of prête à porter – that makes them seem tawdry in comparison to the Aleve of DC. Stan Lee rather cynically and shamelessly exposed the Silver Age trend of Marvel’s copying DC’s lead during a feature on the Justice League: New Frontier DVD (why he was doing an interview for a DC project is anyone’s guess), but why they still do this is beyond my imagination. Seige (along with “Necrosha” and Civil War and… some other event I have blocked out) is Marvel’s Darkest Night, though less aptly handled. Is it any surprise then that later this month they’ll be releasing their Brightest Day, The Heroic Age? (Though to be fair, I’m skipping The Return of Bruce Wayne because GMo’s Bruce-Wayne-as-Dawn-of-Time-eugenicist is already tripping me out.)

Beyond the ethics of the story, Seige ends, and ends well. Good. I’m uncertain how the combined forces of Marvel’s heroes can’t hurt The Void, but the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier can. And if the combined forces of Marvel’s heroes can’t hurt The Void, how is it Thor manages to drive The Void back and disintegrate Bob? I think it’s time to revisit the Marvel power scales flowchart. Oh! Ares gets a splatter porn death, but Loki just disappears? Not a power comment, just wondering why the bad taste couldn’t have continued all they way through to the end. In the end, there is a promise of renewal and hope which I do indeed hope Marvel follows through on. I’m kinda worn out with the body count and all.
Grade: C

In short, the action sequences are doled out like handfuls of rice in the Congo but without the accompanying satisfaction; however, the characters with the exception of Rhodey, are all hot. Don Cheadle is a bit too serious in his role, Chekovian levels of serious. He makes “The Three Sisters” look like vaudeville.

Look, anyone who wants to go see “Iron Man 2″ is going to go see it no matter what I say. Hell, I warned all my friends about “Clash of the Titans”, and yet some of them still went (and regretted it). I’m not saying “Don’t see it”. Definitely not! Go see it in an auditorium full of people because this is probably the Cotillion of summer films, the social event of the season. It’s all downhill from here. I’m just saying I didn’t like it as much as the first one, despite the snappy dialogue (reminiscent of Mandy Patinkin’s overlapping arguing with just about everyone during his stint on “Chicago Hope”) and the inclusion of the Black Widow. OH OH OH! andthe 40-by-his-face Mickey Rourke, who has the uncanny ability to do a consistent Russian accent. Yeah. Go see it.

Like its protagonist, “Kick-Ass” suffers from an identity crisis.

When Kick-Ass the comic was first released, I was impressed by how far the writer, Mark Millar, was willing to take his characters. However, as the story moved on, the body count grew higher and higher, and the scenes bloodier and bloodier to no good end except that Millar could do it that way. His property. His choices. No problem with that, except it didn’t make for good reading after an issue or two. However, sitting in a theatre watching an 11-year-old girl, supposedly living in the real world, pull off these amazingly choreographed kills was nothing but fun. And pretty much weightless. The concern I felt for all the heroes in Kick-Ass the comic, wasn’t present in Kick-Ass the movie at all. While I fretted over Dave’s choices and Hit Girl’s salty vocabulary and sociopathic upbringing in the reading, I never felt that there was any damage being done to their psyche’s in the film.

And this is the schizophrenia of Kick-Ass: it’s a terrible read with gem-like commentary and a featherweight movie that doesn’t even stand up to Titus Andronchus for character violence. Or for more modern watchers, it doesn’t even stand up to Die Hard 4 for general mayhem.

I will give Kick-Ass and Mark Millar this: I appreciate the wanton escalation and huge payoff at the end because there’s no expectation of continuance. Unlike most comic books which want to preserve a core cast of characters because the buying public identifies with them and wants to buy products in which they appear, and, therefore, must keep these characters alive ad infinitum, Kick-Ass has no upper limit that keeps characters “in play,” as it were, because the characters are not what drive the story, so they are expendable in the face of a rising action that has to keep rising. And I’m torn on liking this or not. On the plus side, it hurries the story along and stakes seems that much more risky. This was a lesson that Jericho learned after being canceled less than a season into the story. I tried to watch when it was on, but after four or so episodes of the town facing one more post-apocalyptic crisis yet settling down to a cold brewski at the end, I gave up. I never felt like these characters were at risk because they weren’t. Keeping a story going for as long as possible, usually past the point of usefulness or interest, is the TV way of telling a story. However, after “Jericho” was canceled, the writers took the story into some radical and life-threatening directions (I caught a clip here and there). Too bad they didn’t do so earlier. I hope that “V” learns the same lesson. Soon. (Related kvetch: the pacing on that show is glacial. And a resistance movement of four people?!? Riiiight.) On the con side, it hurries the story along and characters are sacrificed along the way. Aaron Johnson as Dave Lizewski/Kick-Ass was apt: kinda bland and not much of an emotional range, but there wasn’t a lot of call for emotion in “Kick-Ass”. Alone, Johnson couldn’t carry the movie, but he luckily had Chloe Moretz (Hit Girl) to do all the heavy lifting. More than anyone else, she had a story that was worth telling. and Nic Cage… good Lord. He’s almost like Shelly Winters, the butt of his own joke. More than once, I thought he was Nic Cage playing a man who was mocking Nic Cage.

And for comic that was so audacious, I was shocked that Millar signed off on (I assume he signed off on) a Hollywood ending: boy gets girl, boy lays girl, boy uses personal bazooka to dispatch antagonist and usher in the dénouement (not as cool as it sounds). The ending to Kick-Ass the comic was much more coherent, or at least much more in line with the rest of the story. The movie’s seams show so badly that I again found myself wondering if there was an element of parody involved.

While the movie didn’t live up to Mark Millar’s own hype, it’s an adventure worth catching. If it were 3D, I’d tell you to see it now, but it’s 2D, so wait till it’s on DVD.

I did not have a very productive morning in terms of getting my grades done before noon like I normally do. I was a bit distracted by… a pressing matter that will come to a head tomorrow. So, at noon, I packed up my laptop and student essays, hid them, and made my way to see How to Train Your Dragon, which I’d wanted to see for a while. So worth the interruption to my day. If you haven’t seen it, get to your local theatre before it’s gone.

That being said, don’t read any further if you haven’t seen the film. Spoilers ahead.

“You’re not my son.”

Hiccup, the protagonist, is the skinniest of all the Viking in his village (except for Astrid, so you know they’re going to get together by the end) and the least physically able to participate in his tribe’s all-consuming pastime: dragon slaying (further evidence Hiccup will get together with Astrid by the end because, as Paula Abdul knows, opposites attract). Even though he has a million inventions to do the heavy lifting involved in dragon slaying, his father, the village chief, isn’t interested in progress. He’d rather rely on old-fashioned ways of dispatching the winged terrors. During a dragon raid, Hiccup traps a never seen, but rumored to be the worst dragon of all, a Night Fury. However, no one believes him when he announces his triumph. Hiccup sneaks away from the village and finds the Night Fury, whom he befriends over time and names Toothless. I’m going to have to admit that there were parts of this movie that made me tear up a bit. Maybe it’s the fact that I was really caffeinated at the time which always makes me emotional. Maybe it’s the fact that I have several pets, little souls in my care, whom I love more than I’ve loved most of my exes (not in an Erick Rivera kind of way, but in an appropriate human/animal kind of way). Maybe it’s because I have daddy issues out the wazoo (I can barely sit through The Lion King). Pick your trauma, but I found the plot of How to Train Your Dragon to be one with more depth and interest than most movies I’ve seen of late (including the last-in-a-line-of-godforsaken-French-films-that-unfathomably-win-awards opus, A Prophet).

“You just gestured to all of me!”

There’s something about a running gag that I love, and HtTYD is full of them, mostly directed at Hiccup. I want to call this “The Muppet Movie Syndrome”. Thankfully, the jokes never have the chance to grow predictable, and by the end, they’ve evolved into expressions of affection, again, directed at Hiccup. There’s also one transgressively bawdy joke at the expense of Hiccup’s dead mother. Stoick gives Hiccup his first gift: a horned helmet made from Mom’s breastplate. He explains, pointing to his own, that they’re a matched set; they keep her close. Hiccup tries to be appreciative, but, ya know, “Ew!”

The language is a little bit “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and a little bit “Glee”. Nothing wrong with that since that’s the demographic the movie points itself at (I was there! What more proof do you need?), and I didn’t even notice. At all. I hope this doesn’t mean I’m losing my linguistic edge.

“Well, most of him.”

I didn’t see the crippling at the end coming, though given all the other motifs, I should have. Still, I gasped when Hiccup got out of bed for the first time since being wounded fighting the Tyranodragon and his metal prosthetic touched the ground. It grounded the movie. Without it, the movie would have been good, but this irreversible maiming of a character made it, dare I say, profound.

“The food is tough and tasteless; the people even more so.”

I’m glad that How the Train Your Dragon was as fun as it was. Dreamworks is sometimes hit or miss with its animated features. Madagascar and Shrek had great early movies, but the shine dimmed quickly with all the sequels. Monsters vs. Aliens never got off the ground due to its glacial pacing and comic mistiming. However, Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Kung-Fu Panda and Chicken Run were all well done full stop.

One thing I found odd was the darkness of the 3D. At the end of the movie when I took my glasses ff, I couldn’t believe how much color had been filtered through the dark lenses. It obviously didn’t interfere with my enjoying the movie, and I obviously wasn’t even aware of it, but now I’m going to peek over my glasses during every 3D movie I go to to see if I’m missing something.

“That’s for everything else.”

When all is said and done, dragons will probably make a comeback at Christmas this year. I know I left the theatre wanting a dragon, but I had to settle for zipping through Friday afternoon traffic at speeds in excess of 15 MPH over the posted limit (I know: “Do you dare?”). I shouldn’t say that. My friends already think I’m a hazard on the road. Still, would I be less of a hazard riding a dragon? Well, maybe for airplanes.

Hie now!

Brightest Day #0

Geoff Johns needs to be cloned so he can write every current mainstream DC book, with maybe the exceptions of Wonder Woman and Batman and Robin and the upcoming return of Birds of Prey. His Blackest Night was the one event in years that was 1.) readable, and 2.) important. As one of DC’s new creative admins, he’s in the perfect position to make sure that his work isn’t changed at the whim of some editor **cough*dandidio*cough** because there’s more money to be had by putting out a new, contradictory event. With Brightest Day, Johns (with Peter Tomasi) brings continuity to his vision for the DCU by exploring the aftermath of the defeat of Nekron and the resurrection of several characters. There’s no story to report on so far, just tantalizing hints of what’s to come as seen by White Lantern Boston Brand, the hero formerly known as Deadman. Great stuff for the man I intend to father my children. Seriously, I’d grow a uterus for him. A+

Kill Shakespeare #1

I’m not a fanatical Shakespeare purist. You know, the kind who doesn’t have a sense of humor about adaptations or who can’t seen the plays done in alternative form (like “Ten Things I Hate about You” or “O” or “Forbidden Planet”). I am, however, one of those people who is going to give a salty opinion when some theatre group manages to mangle the text into something unrecognizable on stage. Which brings me to Kill Shakespeare. The stumbling blocks I had with this comic were exactly the elements that are crucial to a good comic book: the art, the language, and value of the story. Of course, the art sets the tone for the story because it’s the first apparent element when browsing a comic book title. Had Kagen McLeod, the cover artist for the edition I bought, done the entire story rather than Andy Belanger, I would have been more interested in the story. Belanger’s Mignola-like style pulls away from the story instead of supporting it. As far as the language goes, I wasn’t expecting iambic-pentameter (the only people who actually spoke in iambic-pentameter were pirates because in attempting to look educated, they were too dumb not to know that regular people didn’t speak that way), but I also wasn’t expecting contemporary language patterns. Lord knows there are enough 16th century resources and texts (or even amateur scholars) out there for people to emulate. And finally, Richard III is manipulating Hamlet into killing Shakespeare, and given the title, it seems a done deal that he’ll try to do so. Why show us your hand like that? It certainly doesn’t leave much in terms of plot twists or surprising moments. Then again, Rosencrantz here is shown to be a faithful friend to Hamlet and not Claudius’ crony, so who knows how Shakespeare himself will be characterized. Ultimately, there’s not enough here for me to consider buying issue #2. D

I saw Clash of the Titans tonight. For those who don’t have time to read a whole review, I’ll summarize for you: “Don’t bother.” But if you have a few minutes, let me tell you why.

The Tyranny of Slavish Devotion vs. Just Call it the Fuck Something Else

No one loves deconstructed stories more than I do. Being able to take a familiar story and inject it with new and surprising elements is a skill that few people have, but more people should practice. Greek myths are, what, closing in on being two thousand five hundred years old now? Can we count how many times the stories have been told, re-told, embellished and spun? Doubtful. To tell the story of Perseus as one might find it in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology to a modern movie audience would invite sudden critical box-office death, which no one in the studio wants. Even to re-shoot the 1981 Clash of the Titans might cause audiences to wonder why a script with more 21st century sensibilities wasn’t used. In and of themselves, there is nothing wrong with these approaches to updating movies (whether one should update movies in the first place is another issue altogether), but every once in a while, something like 1995’s The Scarlet Letter rises from the brew.

Clash of the Titans is 2010’s The Scarlet Letter.

Again, one does not have to be tied down to the source material – Lord knows the original CotT wasn’t – but why mess with the relationships between the characters? Hades is out to rule Olympus? Danae is not Acrisius’ daughter, visited by Zeus in the form of a golden shower (ahem…), but his wife, visited by Zeus in Acrisius’ form a la Uther meets Igraine? Djinn? Perseus loves Io? Wasn’t she a cow? Should someone tell Perseus or will he discover her udders for herself (speaking of which, what an odd costume choice that was for Cassiopeia)? If that much re-arranging is going to be done, why even bother with the CotT name-recognition? Make up some mythical land with its own pantheon and released it under a different title altogether. Maybe Dungeon Siege is in need of a sequel.

“Getting to Know Nothing about You”

How is it possible that in the scope of a two-hour movie, almost nothing exciting happened? Wait. Let me qualify that: there was lots of destruction and things exploded and monsters were around every corner. But I could have cared less. I didn’t have the slightest interest in the problems of these characters because I didn’t know who they were. Thinking back, I can’t recall most of the names of the characters who I watched for most of the film. Frankly, I’m not even sure their names were said. I searched vainly on IMDB for a picture of the youngest member of Perseus’ party, first, cuz “woof!”, and second, because that was the only was I could hope to locate him: by his looks. I don’t have the slightest clue what his name was, though I’m guessing it ends with “-us”. Not that it matters because every character died in the Underworld anyway. Talk about Princess Parking.

The Schizophrenia of God

To look around these days, religion is getting kicked in the nads. Hard. Mostly through the fault of church leaders who, from all available reports, are in it for either a.) the tax-free donations, b.) the love of power, or c.) child-raping with impunity. The situation is exacerbated by the screaming devoted who on one had are a little too quick and a little to proud to make sure everyone knows they’re Christian, yet on the other are some of the biggest assholes around. Jesus loves you, but God will punish you. Do as I say, not as I do. Obama is a dark-skinned socialist, not at all like who Jesus was. God obviously needs a better PR machine than the one he has now because one doesn’t have to look any further than them to see why His stock is swirling the drain.

The Olympians are much like that. Zeus wants the love of the humans he created, but isn’t above terrorizing them to get it. He has a bastard son whom he’s willing to sacrifice because he’s not showing Dad any love, but then goes out of his way to help this son whose goal is to topple Olympus, yet somehow doesn’t see that or doesn’t care. Because family is just that important. All of which makes it easy to believe than an entire country has gone anti-god, and that a rabid pro-god cult has sprung up to fill the vacuum. Maybe it’s me and how I view religion, but the underlying message of “religion bad” was more pointed than an honor student’s pencil collection the morning of the SAT.

I’m torn between to possibilities: this was just part-in-parcel with the rest of the sloppy writing and editing in the film, or this was an on-the-nose condemnation of organized religion. I lean towards the latter because I’m a devoted anti-theist: I believe in a God of one nature or another, and I believe God’s true believers need to go find their own planet to live on. My proof, if one can call it that, is V for Vendetta. As soon as it was (relatively) safe to release an on-the-nose metaphor for the Bush Administration, they did. Better late than never, I suppose. Is CotT taking aim at the religious bedlam that has placed itself on the largest, yet most beleaguered (they say) soapbox in the public forum? No doubt Bill Donohue would be all over this cinematic lion, sending out poison e-missives to whomever still listens to him if he weren’t so busy making excuses for all the child-raping.

“Bitch” is the New Black

There is exactly one adult word in Clash of the Titans: “bitch”, as in speaking of Medusa, “Now let’s go kill this bitch!” After Perseus said this, I had a moment of déjà bolus. I had choked on this word before. Then I remembered from where: X3 with its now iconic “I’m the Juggernaut, BITCH!”

It was just as distasteful now as it was then.

Moments. Mere Moments.

Despite what I’ve said, not everything was terrible. Of course, there were Sam Worthington’s calves (sadly, he never took off his shirt. Not. Once. What the hell kind of sword-and-sandals movie is this?), but there was also a glimmer of a larger story. When Perseus and company arrived at the lair of the Stygian Witches, Io explained the ruins were the site of the battle between the Kraken and the Titans. Just like that, I wondered where the temples and personalities and nymphs and fauns and gods were. The one thing missing from this movie about Greek mythology was the mythology.

Another treat was the Bubo-shaped Easter egg that was in the movie for 15 seconds, though sadly as the butt of a derisive joke. It was cool to see him, but like the rest of the movie, this scene mocked its better.

“Re-make” ≠ “Better”

I saw Clash of the Titans at the Alamo Drafthouse South, where they showed classic “Dynarama” trailers spotlighting Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion effects work on The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and Jason and the Argonauts, and the original Clash of the Titans. Even with the clunky monsters and their sometimes awkward interactions with real people, I just added the gift set to my Amazon.com wish list (hint hint). I can say with no uncertainty that will not happen with 2010’s CotT.

The And

Of course, this is just me. I’m a firm believer in “Go and see”. Once you do, let me know and we’ll talk. I’m eager to hear what others think. A final dire thought: as everything else goes these days, is it impossible that a sequel is in the works already?

Uncanny X-Men #522 - No one could have been more supportive of the return of Miss Pryde than me, but the overall story to get her back home ASAP seems rushed. I don’t doubt that in the Marvel U, Magneto can reach across the vastness of space, turn a moon-sized bullet around and draw it to Earth at near the speed of light. But I’m calling shenanigans on the “he disintegrated the bullet as it entered the atmosphere thereby not destroying the world.” That’s just too much to take in in a single issue. And why the hurry to get her back, anyway? The story could have been drawn out for a few months and had a way better plot, but it seems she had to be back now. What is Marvel planning for Shadowcat?

Of course, there is a twist to Kitty’s return: she’s stuck in her phasing state. I suppose that the X-Men could ask Reed Richards to unstuck her like he did in The X-Men vs. The Fanstastic Four back in.. what, 1987? C

Nemesis #1 - I am going to hold off on doing a review of Nemesis, except to say that I got it, and it does indeed, make Kick-Ass pale in comparison. Good or bad? You decide.

The HULK! #23

I didn’t buy Crossed this week like I had planned because my LCS didn’t have back issues extending to #1. Being a completist, I would have been driven mad by half a set. HOWEVER, there was a copy of the infamous The HULK #23 in which Bruce Banner is almost shower-raped at a Y by two sour-faced gay guys. As noted in Mistakes of a Past History #2, writer Jim Shooter was apparently going for “verisimilitude” with this story, but the result is a menudo of melodrama, a veritable potpourri of painful plights so grotesquely portrayed that I can’t believe it got green lit in the first place. Of course, I was interested in buying the issue because of the gay angle (it being of personal interest), but trust me, gay people were not the only one’s maligned by Jim Shooter. Junkies in particular should be taking some umbrage with him, to say nothing of baby mommas. “Verisimilitude” to Jim Shooter apparently means, “everyone dies unmourned: the good, the bad, the innocent” or something equally as nihilistic… well, in a Sartre-for-Dummies-I-read-about-this-once-while-waiting-on-line-at-the-grocery-store kind of way. Shooter didn’t have the chops to write this effectively, and that’s the real crime.

No reviews this week, but I found something truly wonderful at Austin Books and Comics: Dynamite #4 with the dreamy Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson on the cover! Squeeeeeal! On a less gay note, Dynamite was one of those magazine’s for kids that we got through Scholastic Book Services in school. It was a step above Highlights for Children in terms of content and reading level, but less erudite than CBS’s “In the News”. The cool thing about this find is that it still has the subscription form and club patch inside. And, yeah, the Hardy Boys.

Green Lantern #51

There’s a reason that Geoff Johns was just promoted to the post of DC’ Chief Creative Officer, and it’s in this issue. I don’t normally read any of the GL titles, but Johns’ “Blackest night” has me buying all his supplementary stories. The guy is carrying on a serious love affair with all things DC, and his affection is contagious. Under his direction, I can see the DCU becoming a much more interesting place.
Grade: A

Uncanny X-Men #521

If it weren’t for the last page of this issue, I would consider dropping the title altogether. The X-Men just created a nation for themselves, and instead of getting into the meat and potatoes of setting up a government, mutant political factions, “savior complexes”, and host of other issues that are pretty relevant to current topics, Matt Faction serves up a very tepid Legacy Flu. It’s sort of like having Hamburger Helper every Friday night: it’s safe and traditional, but no one is every going to moan in delight with each meaty, saucy spoonful.
Grade: C-

Siege #2

I haven’t been an “event” person in years (even though I have every issue of the much-maligned “Final Crisis”) mostly because I find them to be more con than content. While hyped to be huge and meaningful, events aren’t usually that impacting, and, worse, they’re horribly written and poorly plotted.

Having said that, I loved Siege #2!

While the content is on the light side (the majority of the issue focuses on Ares and his ill-fated battle with Sentry), the more mundane scenes – particularly between Nick Fury and Alex, the Avengers in the S.H.I.E.L.D. transport, and the last page of the issue – are well-written and give more weight to the story than “superpower-on-superpower action” and “the Saint Crispin’s Day speech”. But, I’m a moments guy.

Coipel, Morales and Martin are a cyclonic artistic force. While Bendis’ words may have been handled well enough by another team, this one breathes life into each panel with its dynamic compositions and expressive faces. Even the capes are expressive and full of movement. The best example of this is page three – Ares’ realization that he’s been manipulated into attacking Asgard juxtaposed with the battle below is brilliant. Without words, without mummery, the reader knows exactly what is going on under the god’s helmet. Great stuff! However, the rending of Ares on a later page, while arranged beautifully, is odd in that his intestines seem to have been previously resting on his back, protecting his spine. Gory, yes, but inaccurate overkill at best.

My one complaint is the half-truth of the “death of an Avenger” solicit. It was sophomoric hype at best. You can do better, Marvel.
Grade: A-

Kick Ass #8

The final issue of Kick Ass is just about what everyone expected it to be: loud, hyper-violent, and calculated to offend as many people as possible with… well, pick your issue. It’s bound to be there. and I say “calculated” in the most cynical way possible. Even going back to the solicit, which asks “Who will be morally outraged?” (when there’s not a single character in the book that knows what morality looks like let alone if outrage is an option), it’s obvious this finale was designed to provoke a reaction from the audience. Mark Millar went where “Heroes” couldn’t/wouldn’t/was unable to go with the “superheroes in real life” theme, and how messed up it really would be. Overall, however, Kick Ass is like watching porn: lots of button-mashing and screaming and penetrations climaxing with everyone screaming as the money shot splooshes out, covering everything. It is a comic fanboy’s wet-dream brought to the page. I have to applaud Millar for doing what no one has really done before: delving into angsty-teen-comic-fan-fic comic stories and making at living at it (then again there is the inexplicable popularity of “Twilight” and “Wicked Lovely”). If “nuance” is what you’re looking for, well, that’s why there are movies like “When in Rome” (I jest, of course. “When in Rome” is as subtle as a skinhead at a Seder.). I just help but wonder that I read this series the whole way through. Maybe because it betokens the future of comics writing.
Grade: C

Madame Xanadu #19

Madame Xanadu is one book I look forward to every month. Oddly, this month’s issue was supposed to be the conclusion of a story, but instead there was an overwrought “aside” about Nimue and Morgana’s childhood together (an extremely long childhood, at that). I know that Matt Wagner is often overwrought, but usually that can be forgiven because of the art that accompanies the story. This is one of those titles where the art means so much to the words. Amy Reed Hadley, who normally illustrates, is off this month, replaced by Joelle Jones, and the story is just kind of “OK”. Amy brings some real magic to Matt Wagner’s words, and without her, this chapter seems both unnecessary and ugly.
Grade: C+

Green Lantern Corps #44

Normally, i hate deus ex machina because it’s a cheap escape from a dramatic problem: the universe steps in and says, “No more. It’s done.” which leaves characters (and viewers) unsatisfied because it shows that we’re at the mercy of powers greater than ourselves, and free will is a slogan like “life should be fair.” That being said, I LOVED GLC’s method of disposing of the Black Lanterns: Mogo. It seems fair in some way, especially because Xanshi in its entirety came back, to say nothing of the rest of the universe’s re-animated dead. God doesn’t come down and declare that “Enough is enough. Go home.” No, no. God comes down with some righteous smiting, and it looks great ion a page. Is there a counterpoint to deux ex machina? If so, that’s what Peter Tomasi has created in this issue.
Grade: A

Uncanny X-Men #520

When sitting down to write this review, I had to pick the issue back up again because I had no recollection of what had happened. Then I saw the cover and remembered that Wolverine and Psylocke were out and about looking for someone for some reason. Then it occurred to me that I had liked Magneto because he was being misunderstood (Scott, of course, was a controlling bitch to him) and noble (poor guy couldn’t catch a break even when being helpful). In general, the issue was half-forgettable and half-sorta interesting.
Grade: C-

The Power of SHAZAM! #48

I’m sure the undead have their own particular stench, but in this case, it smells like… poo? Jeez, someone light a match for this Blackest Night stinker! First of all, this one-shot is even more proof that no one knows how to write the Marvel Family well. Except for their abbreviated stint in JSA last year, there’s really nothing marvelous about them of late. Second of all, I’m uncertain if this a “triumph of the human spirit” story or a “here’s another clue as to how Nekron will be defeated” story. If it’s the former, why is Osiris of all people able to resist the Black Rings? “Black Adam’s magic” is a throwaway explanation since lots of magical beings have not resisted un-life in the main BN title. If it’s the latter, well, it’s a clue no one in the DCU is going to have access to.

The Marvel Families have so many stories that still need to be told, and with just one issue to do one story, they (and we) were we given this. Osiris himself says that “we were all just family,” and that would have made an excellent theme for an excellent story, but, unfortunately, we got jack shit.