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Mon Oct 5, 2009 — by Robert Greenberger
Review: 'Snow White' on Blu-ray
Truth be told, I was never a big fan of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
The basic children’s fairy tale was simplified for the 1937 film, starting with the excising of Snow’s mother in favor of just presenting the wicked stepmother. When the Queen tries to do away with Snow White, it took her three attempts which Walt cut down to just the poisoned apple. On the other hand, Walt’s idea of having the Prince’s kiss wake her up is superior to a piece of apple being dislodged from her throat. It would have been nice if the Queen was forced to watch her step-daughter happily marry the Prince, wearing red-hot iron shoes as her punishment.
Wisely, Walt simplified the story to fit it in the constraints of then-current film-making. Additionally, he played up the part of the Seven Dwarfs, giving each a distinctive personality that have become memorable. In the story, after she sought shelter in their home, they agreed to let her stay with them in exchange for her services as cook, maid, and, laundress. Instead, Snow here takes it upon herself to do the cleaning first, ingratiating herself to the dwarfs before meeting them. Of course, that allows for the animators to let the forest creatures come to her aid set to song.
Still, it’s a charming story, simply told; an experiment that paid off handsomely, catapulting Walt’s studio ahead of all other animators.
Now, the studios’ crown jewel is coming to Blu-ray, going on sale tomorrow. The Blu-ray edition has two discs, one for the film and one for the copious extras. Also included is a standard DVD version so this combo pack is the one to buy for now and the future. While the standard disc contains extras, the supplemental Blu-ray disc has them and much more.
The original film has been meticulously restored and the lush color and design has never looked better. The sound is crisp and the imagery a wonder. Clearly, this is the best the film has ever looked.
Blu-ray owners will enjoy having the Magic Mirror act as the Disney Smart Navigation interface. The mirror guides you through both discs and has enough intelligence ot know if you’ve played this before and whether to resume where you left off. BD Live adds to his functionality and practical use such as time and weather information. If you don’t like the letterbox bars, you can switch to Disney View which features new art extensions prepared by Toby Bluth, complete with some new information about their creation.
Extras include Backstage Disney: Hyperion Studios, an exhaustive look at the original home for Disney and his animation team complete with virtual tour of the first house that Walt built. A ton of archival material has been unearthed for presentation to diehard fans with every department well represented. Along the way you will watch two Silly Symphony cartoons from the early days and be treated to commentary and tours from current animators including Pixar’s Andrew Stanton. You learn much about how it all began through a series of short features but it requires effort to poke and prod through every doorway and department within the virtual studio.
Snow White gets its due in “The One That Started It All” that offers up some new information and insights.
One of the more interesting featurettes is Snow White Returns. Recently uncovered archival material indicates Walt may have been toying with a sequel and we spent nearly 9 minutes reviewing the data. Deleted scenes include the “Soup Eating Sequence” and the “Bed Building Sequence”.
Resurrected from previous editions are “Dopey’s Wild Mine Ride” game, “Heigh-Ho”, a karaoke sing-along and “Disney Through the Decades”, “Animation Voice Talent” (featuring Caselotti). Unfortunately, some of the 2001 edition features are absent.
This belongs in every videophile’s library and under the Christmas tree of children from coast to coast. The charm and whimsy endures as witnessed in this beautiful collection.
Fri Oct 2, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Supernatural Teens
Reviewing Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales: Sanctuary, Yokai Doctor, and Amefurashi
Where would comics be without the stories of young people with amazing powers? Oh, sure, you could cobble together a world canon of stories with no supernatural stuff at all, but it would have to be a masterpiece of the gerrymanderer’s art. And why would you want to – when you can have all of the moody, or conflicted, or ridiculously innocent teenagers with amazing abilities you ever thought of? Like the main characters of these three books, for example…
Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales, Volume 1: Sanctuary
Written by Melissa Marr; Art by
Xian Nu Studio
Tokyopop/HarperCollins, May 2009,
$12.99
Wicked Lovely is the name of a novel by Marr, and it also seems to be the umbrella title for her novels about teens and faeries (and teen faeries, and faerie teens) in the modern world. The novels seem to be about a girl named Aislinn – no self-respecting teen-novel heroine ever has a name like Doris or Mabel – and her travails in high school and the Faerie Courts. But this manga volume – it says on its back cover that it’s “manga,” if you don’t believe me, and never mind that it reads left-to-right and was written by an American – is set somewhere in the western desert, where once-mortal Rika lives quietly, trying to avoid both humans and the local faeries.
Rika was discovered and turned – not exactly “seduced and abandoned,” since she wasn’t able to give him what he wanted – many years ago by the Summer King, Keenan, who turns up early in this book to give an excuse for some backstory and to fail to get her to swear fealty to him. She refuses, of course – she’s solitary now, and happy that way. What does it matter if most of the solitary fay are nasty enough to make “mischievous” a very weak term to describe them?
But they’re just there for spice; this is a series for teenage girls, which means Rika has to see a cute boy – Jace, who paints, like she does – and save him from those nasty fay, who try to kill him for no good reason. He’s sweet and innocent enough to stare wide-eyed at her abilities – those nasty wild fay don’t give up, or there wouldn’t be a plot here other than “elf girl and artist boy meet cute and gaze into each other’s eyes,” – and the book is low-key enough that they’re just mildly kissing by the end. (Which seems awfully tame for a fairie who’s hundreds of years old.)
Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales: Sanctuary has too many colons in its title and a thin plot, but I have to expect that it’s just the kind of thing teen girls will want: a bit of angst, a wish to be alone that doesn’t actually lead to loneliness, and a cute boy that the girl gets to protect and pursue. I’m just twenty years too old and the wrong gender to appreciate it properly.Thu Oct 1, 2009 — by Robert Greenberger
Review: 'High Moon' Volume One
High MoonDave Gallaher & Steve Ellis
DC Comics, 192 pages, $14.99
DC’s online imprint, Zuda Comics, has certainly been a hit or miss affair but when it hits, there’s a pleasure in discovering new talent or new concepts. While Bayou was a breakout hit, the most consistent entry remains High Moon, written by former ComicMix contributor Dave Gallaher, illustrated by Steve Ellis and lettered by Scott O. Brown.
Gallaher had this notion for years but managed to earn one of the inaugural slots when Zuda went live in late 2007 and the strip won the first reader contest. It has since received plaudits from around the field and now DC is releasing the first three stories in a trade paperback.
The three stories comprising the first volume mix the western and horror genres with a dash of steampunk and overly, it’s a breezy, entertaining read. The focal point surrounds the Macgregor family, a line of detectives, currently working as a branch of the famed Pinkertons. Matthew Macgregor takes center stage in the first story while brother Tristan arrives for the second tale and then Tristan and Fergus deal with demons in the final tale. Linking all three, though, is Eddie Conroy a werewolf with a haunted past.
Each tale takes place in a different locale, starting with the drought-stricken Blest, Texas, then moving on to Ragged Rock, OK before concluding in South Dakota.
Across these stories are vampires, werewolves, demons, sexy Indians and a lot of atmosphere. We are given details in drips so reading the three stories in one sitting helps build the world of High Moon and it’s a nice place to visit. Gallaher’s dialogue is spare and distinct while Ellis works wonders with the static format of the Zuda reader, playing with page design when the action demands it. His use of color goes a long way towards giving the strip a nice atmosphere.
We could use a little more grounding in the time and place when these stories take place and what the ground rules are for the occult aspects but these are minor quibbles for what is a strong series which returns to the web with a fourth installment this fall.
Wed Sep 30, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Fathers and Sons: reviews of Danica Novgorodoff's 'Refresh, Refresh' and 'The Big Kahn' by Neil Kleid and Nicolas Cinquegrani
I should start by quoting something weighty – the most obvious would be that old Tolstoy saw about happy and unhappy families – but let’s take that as written, shall we? Comics have given short shrift to families for the past seventy years – at least, the American comic-book industry has, though strip comics grew fat and bloated on the hijinks of aggressively “relatable” families for that long and longer.
Even the undergrounds – typically about countercultural types, who occasionally complain about their parents but try to avoid them as much as possible – and the modern alt-comics movement (Alienated Loners R us!) avoided family dynamics. Sure, there are exceptions, from Will Eisner to art spiegelman, but the average American comics protagonist is an orphan – or wishes he was.
Maybe that’s starting to change, or maybe I just have a couple of anomalies on my hand. Either way, today, I have two books where that isn’t the case – not to say that these dads might not be dead, absent, or problematic, but they’re definitely part of the story. And their sons care who, and what – and where – their fathers are.
Refresh, Refresh
A graphic novel by Danica
Novgorodoff, adapted from a screenplay by James Ponsoldt based on the story by
Benjamin Percy
First Second, October 2009,
$17.99
What do men do? For many in the comics reviewing world, that’s an easy question: men punch each other in the face. But they don’t have Refresh, Refresh in mind when they say that. This graphic novel is set in a small Oregon town, just a couple of years ago, where most of the adult men are off fighting with the Marines in Iraq. And their sons – mostly Cody and Josh and Gordon, three highschool-aged boys who are at the core of this particular story – talk about joining up when they’re old enough, or working in the local factory, or maybe even getting out.
But Refresh, Refresh is based on a literary short story, and if there’s one thing we all know, it’s that there’s no getting out of a story like that – it’s all doom and gloom until the moment-of-clarity ending. So this town is stifling and without any options, the boys drifting – from backyard boxing to underage drinking in bars to racing around on motorbikes and sleds – as they rebel without any fathers to drag them into line. (The narration – presumably taken from the original Percy story; I don’t want to blame Novgorodoff for any of it – is particularly heavy-handed in that area, such as this sequence from p.83: “We didn’t fully understand the reason our fathers were fighting. We only understood that they had to fight. ‘It’s all part of the game,’ my grandfather said. ‘It’s just the way it is.’ We could only cross our fingers and wish on stars and hit refresh, refresh, hoping they would return to us.”)
What they hit “refresh, refresh” on is their e-mail in-boxes; that scene recurs several times in the story. Oddly, though, it’s the only incursion of modern technology into a story that could otherwise be Vietnam-era. They don’t follow their fathers’ platoon on CNN.com or an Armed Forces website; don’t call each other on cellphones; don’t think about or track or seem to notice the war on TV or the Internet; even their laptops seem to be screwed down to tables, for all the moving they do.
Refresh, Refresh is a very traditional story about young men in small towns; I could probably quote half-a-dozen Bruce Springsteen songs on roughly the same topic, and with pretty much the same moral and tone. (And that’s without diving into the world of the realist short story, where kitchen-sink dramas almost require young men with promise to be squandered.) Novgorodoff tells this version with a bit too much self-conscious artistry – too many deer looking up at airplanes, too many of those explaining-the-theme narration boxes – but she keeps the focus tight and specific, on these three boys and their world, their choices and possibilities. A story like this is nearly always about badchoices, though, so it would be best to come to Refresh, Refresh with a MFA-teacher’s fatalism, and not expect anything so comic-booky as a happy ending for the boys who punch each other in the face.
Mon Sep 28, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Two Bleak Futures: David Ratte's 'Toxic Planet' and 'Ball Peen Hammer' by Adam Rapp and George O'Connor
Everything is going to hell. Everything is always going to hell, and always has been, of course, but it’s going to hell even more now than it ever has been, and quicker, too. And so we get ever more stories about those hells – like these two very different books that I have to talk about today. They even both have people with gas masks on the cover!
David Ratte
Yen Press, August 2009, $12.99
Sometime in the future, the world is so crowded and polluted that everyone wears gas masks all of the time, and the natural world is essentially forgotten. Toxic Planet is a satire – and a broad, obvious one at that – so there’s no point to asking what kind of food these people eat; it’s not designed to show how this world actually works, but to make obvious points about our own world.
Our hero is a factory worker named Sam; his blonde wife and aged grandmother are never named, but that’s OK; they’re all such broad characters that real names are superfluous anyway. Other characters include an unnamed owner of the plant and his young son, the President of the United Global States, who is an odd combination of Bush and Sarkozy, and the union rep Tran, who gets to be the voice of reason (reason here being very much a relative concept). Later on, Sam’s long-lost parents – they’re ecologists, which is about as popular and mainstream in this society as a combination of Muslim, Communist, and child molester would be in darkest Alabama – return from the countryside (yes, the world is completely polluted everywhere, and yet there’s still an unspoiled “countryside,” but don’t ask), with his younger sister Orchidea, and they get to be the even more obvious voices of reason.
Toxic Planet is funny here and there, and dull and axe-grinding equally as often. And it’s really much, much too long for the message – yes, we all agree that polluting the entire planet, declaring war on defenseless countries, and similar things are Really Bad, but we don’t need to keep seeing heavy-handed double-reverse sermons on the subject over and over for more than a hundred pages. Ratte’s world isn’t clever or interesting; he just wants to make it dirty and unpleasant, and he succeeds. The one interesting part of watching the axes grind are the times when Ratte’s French ideas of what’s obvious and true – so much so that he doesn’t have to say them, just have his characters parroting whatever he considers the opposite – aren’t at all clear to a North American audience, and so the reader can’t quite tell what he’s so worked up about.
Ratte’s art almost makes up for that, even laboring under the constraints his writing has given it – no faces, only gas masks, and characters who have to be differentiated mostly by hairstyle and typical clothing – with an appealing lightness and energy. But Toxic Planet is the kind of book that can make a reader want to drive a SUV to McDonald’s for lunch and then go prospect for oil in a wilderness, just out of spite.
Wed Sep 23, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Asterios Polyp' by David Mazzucchelli
Yes, the same book everyone else has already reviewed
Asterios Polyp
David Mazzucchelli
Pantheon, July 2009, $29.95
Comics are an essentially mongrel art, bred out of the scraps of two prior art-forms in the great kennel of popular culture. That’s no bad thing, despite what the mandarins might say – mongrels typically have the strengths of both parents, without the fussiness and decadent weakness characteristic of arts that only breed incestuously. Of course comics then are called bastards, which is both a slander and absolute truth. The slander only stings if one thinks being a bastard is a bad thing.
Asterios Polyp, for example, is a bastard, and the graphic novel that bears his name is – and this is only one of the things it is, but we’ll start there – the story of how he finally, much too late in his life, learns how not to be quite so much of a bastard as he was before. We see Asterios in appropriately classical form: both before and after his downfall, as if he’s both at once. More importantly, though, Asterios Polyp is the story of comics themselves, as it dramatizes the interplay of the elements that come together to make up comics. Asterios is a renowned teaching architect: serious, linear, dogmatic, didactic, Apollonian, a maker of dichotomies. And he comes up against the Dionysian side of the world again and again, symbolically ramming his axe-shaped head into the places where the world doesn’t fit his categories, willing it into the forms he’s decided are right for it.
Continue reading Review: 'Asterios Polyp' by David Mazzucchelli ›
Sun Sep 13, 2009 — by Robert Greenberger
Review: 'The Next Doctor' on DVD
The Doctor Who Christmas Specials have normally been delightful affairs, bridging the events of one season with teases for the forthcoming season. This time, though, The Next Doctor
When the special aired last December, there was intense speculation whether David Morrissey was actually being introduced early as the replacement. It certainly felt that way as we learned the villains would be the Cybermen and that Velile Tshabalala had been added as Morrissey’s companion, a woman named Rosita, which more than echoes the now gone Rose Tyler.
Clearly, that was not the case and was an interesting premise with so-so execution. In short, while visiting London on Christmas Eve, 1851, the Doctor comes up against a new threat but also a man acting, sounding and even looking like he might be, well, the Doctor. He spoke of the TARDIS and proclaimed to possess a sonic screwdriver but as the men began investigating together, the real Doctor figured out how a poor, mentally stressed man was led to believe he was a Gallifreyan Time Lord.Along the way, the two have to learn the secrets of the Cybermen’s scheme and then foil it, clearly doing so before St. Nick arrives to dole out gifts to one and all.
The first half of Russell T. Davies’ script is nicely paced by director Andy Goddard and sets things up well but the second half is lots of running, chasing, fighting and noise-making without making an awful lot of sense. The escapade is being released on DVD this Tuesday from BBC Video, oddly timed considering the following special is already available and it’s a wee bit early for the holiday season. Regardless, the story reveals to us that the poor man was accidentally imprinted with details about the Doctor that had been prepared for the Cybermen. As a result, its weeks before he realizes that his family is dead save his young son who must be found and rescued.
Morrissey does a good job as Jackson Lake, adding some nice pathos to the part. He and Tennant also play nicely off one another but Tshabalala has precious little to do and Dervla Kirwan as the villainous Miss Hartigan is a one-dimensional serial villain.
There’s a lot of stuff and nonsense and in the end, the character arcs are truncated in favor of the shouting and jumping around as if everyone discovered they were short on time to properly finish the story. As a result, it’s a good but far from spectacular effort. Being one of the final Tennant episodes, it’s a wasted opportunity.
The delight of the disc, though, is the special feature, the Prom 13: Doctor Who Prom concert that was performed in England on July 27 of last year but aired only in January. The hour-long concert, specifically designed to entice children to the orchestral experience, shone a nice spotlight on Murray Gold, the composer of Doctor Who music since the series’ revival in 2005. Hosted by Freema Agyeman with a cameo from Catherine Tate, the performance included many of the aliens and menaces from the series, walking through the audience and interacting with them. There was also a seven minute “Music of the Spheres” video presentation featuring Tennant aboard the TARDIS which discussed the importance of music. The storyline involved interaction with the orchestra such as the Doctor tossing his sheet music into the air and having it land in the hands of the performers.
Definitely not the way to introduce newcomers to the Doctor but certainly worth having by the diehard fans.
Fri Sep 11, 2009 — by Alexandra Honigsberg
Review: 'Logicomix', the Sorrows of Young Bertie, and the Great Quest
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou
Bloomsbury, September 2009, $22.95
Despite the modern framing at the end of this book arguing about whether or not this was a tragedy or a happy ending by bringing computers into the whole thing to support the side of happy, which puts a pimple onto something that is quite near-perfection otherwise, I will say that this is, in the imperfect vernacular, freakin’ awesome.
Being an Aristotelian and Thomist (Thomas Aquinas, 13th C.), mainly an Ethicist and Metaphysician, though I am acquainted with modern philosophies, they are not my favourite dance floor. I am neither adept at nor a fan of analytical philosophy – where they turn premises and sentences into symbols like mathematical equations. So I am absolutely gobsmacked that three Greek guys and one Italian-French chick got a hold of Bertrand Russell (19th-20th C. Logician, Mathematician), and not only made this titled noble Welshman from Cambridge comprehensible, but a sympathetic human character.
How did these wacky geniuses – Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie DiDonna – manage this great feat in all their fabulous geekitude? Very simply. They went straight to the heart of what makes Philosophy philosophical. It is the human quest. Every Philosopher is on it and always has been for nearly 3000 years.
Philosophers are, as a general lot, idealists. They are insane enough to dare to view the best and then to try to find a way to get there, through the Labyrinth, past the Minotaur, and give us mere mortals a map by which to follow along (maps being symbols of reality). The story is framed by our authors as they try to write this book and get it published and, just like their philosophical hero, they got turned down in their initial efforts, but persevered ‘til you have what is now before you.
The artwork is sweet, gentle, old-fashioned, nostalgic, very well-suited to this story starting in Victorian times and running through both World Wars, in Britain and across Germany, Austria, and Belgium. It’s approachable and easy on the eyes, but never talks down to the reader or the material – this is not Russell for Dummies. This is Russell for honest seekers who really want to understand him and his related colleagues but just aren’t wired for 360+ pages of symbols to indisputably prove that 1+1 = 2.
Continue reading Review: 'Logicomix', the Sorrows of Young Bertie, and the Great Quest ›
Fri Sep 4, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Young and Special -- 'X-Men: Misfits', 'Cat Paradise', 'Ninja Girls'
All young comics protagonists are special, even if they don’t know it yet. In manga in particular, they’re likely to protest loudly that they’re just “a normal kid” and to squirm at the thought of being separable from the vast thundering herd of undifferentiated humanity in the slightest way. But it doesn’t matter what they say; we see that they’re all uniquely wonderful -- maybe special snowflakes, maybe purple children. Maybe wizards! Maybe mutants! Maybe the feudal lord! Maybe the rightful ruler of the entire world, and the dashing fated love of that gorgeous other character, and, and, and EVERYTHING!
This week, I have three books like that, with young people who are deeply, utterly special.
X-Men: Misfits, Vol. 1
Story by Raina Telgemeier and
Dave Roman; art by Anzu
Del Rey Manga, August 2009,
$12.99
Telgemeier and Roman take the standard X-Men set-up – which is already, in its full Claremontian flowering, completely full of adolescent longing, fear, and obsession – and twist it about 90 degrees into the world of shojo. The characters come from all over the X-men universe, with a plot germ from mid-Claremont Era: Kitty Pryde, young and conflicted about her powers, is given a scholarship to Professor Xavier’s Academy for Gifted Youngsters in Westchester.
And she finds herself the only female student there. (Even the female professors are absent for most of this volume, to intensify the reverse-harem feeling.) The other X-Men characters are all familiar names, though they’re arbitrarily divided into teachers (Colossus, Magneto, Storm, Marvel Girl, Beast) and oh-so-pretty boys (Iceman, Angel, Forge, Havok, Cyclops, and so on). There’s the usual clique of privileged kids, who are allowed to do what they want and essentially run the school, and of course they are the prettiest boys and of course they are called The Hellfire Club. (And of course Magneto is their mentor; Telgemeier and Roman are hitting all of the X-Men/shojo parallels they can as hard as they can.)
Kitty is torn between the fast heartless boys and the outcasts – in particular between Pyro (who becomes her boyfriend) and Iceman (who is unfailingly cold to her, natch). Does she make a big choice at the end of this book? Does she learn what really matters in life? Is the Pope Catholic?
X-Men: Misfits is a solid reverse-harem shojo story, but I can’t help but believe that it’s true audience is men and women of around my age – comics readers of long-standing who know enough of the X-Men mythology (and I barely do) to appreciate the changes that are being made to it. Anzu’s art is exactly what you’d expect for this kind of story, though she does differentiate a large cast (of mainly pretty, pretty boys – all the same kind of prettiness, too) clearly and easily, which is not simple.
Mon Aug 31, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Syncopated' edited by Brendan Burford
It calls itself "An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays"
Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays
Edited by Brendan Burford
Villard, May 2009, $16.95
For most of the past fifty years, American comics had been running through an ever-tightening spiral of acceptable topics – somewhat mitigated by occasional art-comics eruptions – as superheroes and (ever less and less) other areas thought acceptable for children dominated ever more and more each year. And one little-remarked side effect of that spiral was that nonfiction comics, stories that actually were true, became so marginalized that they practically didn’t exist. Everything was fiction – even the memoirish comics of the undergrounds were transmuted into fiction – and the truth was nowhere to be found on the comics page.
That’s changed in the past decade or so, as a generation of new or newly energized creators have grappled with their own lives and histories, bringing forth a host of primarily memoir-based comics, from Perseopolis to Fun Home to Cancer Vixen. And that flood has brought attention to cartoonists who write about true stories that aren’t their own, like Joe Sacco. Slowly, nonfiction is creeping onto the comics shelf – it may be mostly memoirs now, but I hope that we’ll see ever more biographies (like Rick Geary’s J. Edgar Hoover) and histories (like Larry Gonick’s work) and even diet books (like Carol Lay’s The Big Skinny) and less likely things. Maybe, if I can be optimistic for once, in twenty years there will be comics (or graphic novels, or whatever you want to call a couple of hundred of drawn pages in a coherent narrative) in every bookstore category, filling the shelves with real stories as well as made-up ones.
If that does happen – and I hope that it is possible – Brendan Burford’s Syncopated will become a signpost on the way to that new world. Syncopated has sixteen original stories by sixteen distinctive voices (Burford among them), on various nonfiction topics. It splits fairly neatly in half between memoirs and personal reminiscences on one side (seven pieces, by my count) and works of history and current events outside of the artist (also seven pieces), with two portfolios of drawings, by Tricia Van de Burgh and Victor Marchand Kerlow, to finish up.
Continue reading Review: 'Syncopated' edited by Brendan Burford ›
Fri Aug 28, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter' by Darwyn Cooke
Hard-boiled noir from 1962 via 2009
Richard Stark's Parker, Book One: The Hunter
Darwyn Cooke
IDW, July 2009, $24.99
Richard Stark’s Parker novels come out of a particular period in literary history: the heyday of the disposable paperback for men. Paperbacks had appeared in their modern form just before WWII, and servicemen got used to carrying small paperbound books in whatever pockets they could jam a book into. The boom continued through the postwar years, with a flood of short thrillers, detective stories, and soft-core porn – all to stave off boredom for a man waiting for dinner time on a business trip in some hick town, or hanging out at the PX on his army base, or riding the streetcar home at night.
The Hunter was published in 1962, at the height of that boom – a good decade before the ‘70s taught publishers that women were even more dependable consumers of paperbacks, and the long shift to romances and their ilk began. At first glance, Stark’s hero is right out of the mold of the great hardboiled Mikes (Hammer & Shayne) – tough, violent, single-minded, implacable. But Parker was less emotional than the usual hardboiled hero – cold where they were hot, calculating where they were impetuous. Parker could kill when he had to – and he did it quite a bit – but he never killed for fun, or just because he could. As the Parker novels went on he avoided killing as much as he could, simply because deaths attract more attention than he wanted.
Hardboiled heroes came from both sides of the law – Mike Shayne and Mike Hammer were detectives, but there were plenty of law-breakers before Parker, from writers like David Goodis and Jim Thompson. They usually weren’t series characters, though: Parker’s amoralism went beyond his own actions to his world, and his stories told how a master criminal could get away with it – if he was smart and tough enough.
Continue reading Review: 'Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter' by Darwyn Cooke ›
Mon Aug 24, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: B.P.R.D., Vol. 10: The Warning by Mignola, Arcudi, and Davis
Armageddon looms
B.P.R.D. Vol. 10: The Warning
Written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi; Art by Guy
Davis
Dark Horse Comics, May 2009, $17.95
The Warning is the tenth volume collecting the adventures of the Hellboy-less Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, and the first in what the creators are calling the “Scorched Earth Trilogy.” The afterword by co-writer John Arcudi claims that events will get bigger and more dangerous from here – though he does note that this volume includes, among other thing, “[name withheld] gets kidnapped, … entire fleet of helicopters gets wiped out, and gigantic robots trample [name withheld] into rubble.” And previous volumes of this series (and, of course, of the related Hellboy) have been no slouch in the near-Armageddon sweepstakes – particularly The Black Flame. That’s a lot of promise, but Mignola’s fictional world does always teeter on the verge of utter supernatural chaos, in his very Lovecraftian way. It would be wise to take Arcudi at his word.
The Warning begins with the team going in two directions at once, urgently following up recent events – Abe Sapien leads an assault squad out into the snowy mountains to try to find and retrieve the Wendigo-possessed former leader of their team, and the others have a séance to contact the mysterious ‘30s costumed hero Lobster Johnson, whom they think will have information about the robed man taunting and manipulating firestarter Liz Sherman in her mind. But neither one of those leads works out as the B.P.R.D. hopes, and, before long, they’re face-to-face with another high-powered menace and seeing another city being assaulted by giant robots.
And yet, remember that note from Arcudi. The plot of The Warning turns out to be just a warm-up; the antagonists here are not the true enemies of the B.P.R.D. Near the end, that mysterious man claims that he isn’t their real antagonist, either. The B.P.R.D. is fumbling in the dark in The Warning, unsure of what the real menace is, let alone how to stop it. But they go on, because that’s what they do.
The Warning is a great installment of a top-rank adventure series, filled with wonder and terror, eyeball kicks and quiet character moments. It’s a magnificent brick in a more magnificent wall, but it’s no place to start. If you haven’t read B.P.R.D. before, go back to the beginning with Hollow Earth – or, even better, go back to the beginning of Hellboy with Seed of Destruction. But, if you enjoy adventure stories with characters who don’t wear skin-tight outfits, you should have discovered Mignola’s world by now.
Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He¹s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.
Publishers who would like to submit books for review should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.Sun Aug 23, 2009 — by Robert Greenberger
Review: 'Sunshine Cleaning' on DVD
Most times, we read our comics and watch our movies and television programs and come in at the beginning or during an act of gruesome violence. Often, we then see the crime scene investigators do their thing and then leave. But what becomes of the crime scene afterwards?Answering that question is the moving Sunshine Cleaning
, an independent film starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt. The well-received film comes out on DVD this Tuesday from Anchor Bay Entertainment.Adams plays Rose Lorkowski, a single parent stuck in a dead end job, trying to raise her young son. Raised by her failed salesman father (Alan Arkin), it fell to Rose to raise her younger sister Norah. Rose was once on top of the world, captain of the cheerleading team, but there she is, a decade-plus later and she’s still sleeping with the quarterback (Steve Zahn), despite his being married to someone else. She aspires to more, maybe real estate, but life keeps dragging her down.
The quarterback turned police detective suggests try her hand at the lucrative crime scene clean up business. Rose convinces the hapless Norah to join her in this new venture and Sunshine Cleaning is born. We watch them figure out what the business is all about, stumbling on their own, until they meet up with Winston (Clifton Collins, Jr.), proprietor of a cleaning supply company who provides advice.
For a 91 minute film, there are many themes touched on in Megan Holley’s debut script. Love and loss, taking responsibility, struggling to raise a child and sister and father, missing a dead mother and more. Everything is intertwined as the story progresses but it’s not all neatly tied up by the end. Life’s a messy business, the tag line tells us, and director Christine Jeffs does a nice job showing us exactly that. While Rose is serious and trying to do right by her family, she does so at the cost of her own freedom and happiness. Norah is directionless and gains her first taste of adulthood by working with Rose and by trying to befriend the daughter of a victim. Meantime, we’re left uncertain as to what is wrong with young Oscar (Jason Spevack) – is it ADD, a closet genius or something else. He’s also just trying to get by while being looked after by his grandfather and aunt.
The performances are somber and dead on. Adams, normally gorgeous and perky, allows herself to look dowdy and sad while Blunt, more of a chameleon actress, fully inhabits Norah. Arkin plays Arkin, a man past his prime, terrified of disappointing his family yet doing it again and again as his schemes to make a buck fail. The core cast is ably supported, notably by Collins in an understated part.
The movie comes in both widescreen and full screen, which is a somewhat unnecessary option. The sole unique extra is a wonderful 11 minute featurette interviewing two older women who really do this sort of work. They show where the film was dead on and where it took some liberties, plus showed how they did some of their work.
Wed Aug 19, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: Famous Players by Rick Geary
The second book in the Treasury of XXth Century Murder
Famous Players: The Mysterious Death of William Desmond Taylor
By Rick Geary
NBM, August 2009, $15.95
No one does murder like Rick Geary. For more than a decade he’s been regularly creating slim books in this loose series, each depicting a separate, horribly violent crime of passion in his inimitable crisp and detailed style, each with enough Geary detachment and subdued whimsy to keep the blood from being too much. This is the tenth – not including an earlier, larger-format Treasury of Victorian Murder, Vol. 1, which had shorter stories and served as a dry run for the later books – and Geary is still at it. As usual, he’s digging into once-scandalous events from about a century ago; the series was explicitly “Victorian” until last year’s Lindbergh Child, and this book examines a murder case in the early days of Hollywood.
After a few pages of scene-setting – and no one does scene-setting better than Geary, one of the very few cartoonists who routinely incorporates maps and schematics into his comics pages, and makes them fit perfectly – Geary focuses his story on 1922, when the star director of the highbrow but very successful Famous Players studio was William Desmond Taylor, a man of middle years who – as it turned out – was not really named William Desmond Taylor, and who had a complicated hidden past. That all came out after the morning of February 2nd, when his cook/valet found him dead on the floor of his apartment. Police science was not advanced at that point, and the power of the studios was, so the crime scene was tampered with by various people – both random sightseers, hangers-on, and reporters as well as possibly culpable parties such as Famous Players’ “troubleshooter” and two of Taylor’s colleagues, whom Geary shows moving, concealing, and removing evidence. (What that evidence was – and whether it had anything to do with Taylor’s death – is of course impossible to know now.)
Mon Aug 17, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Stuffed!' By Glenn Eichler & Nick Bertozzi
A strained comedy of inheritances - personal and social
Stuffed!
By Glenn Eichler & Nick Bertozzi
First Second, September 2009, $17.99
Eichler writes for Stephen Colbert’s show, which is why Stuffed! has a prominent Colbert quote on the cover – and, perhaps, why it was published at all. It’s a graphic novel that wants to be satirical, particularly about the modern touchiness surrounding race, but it bogs itself down in bland talk without ever quite pushing its satire to become really funny or really dangerous.
Tim Johnston is a mid-level bureaucrat at an HMO, one of the faceless thousands responsible for denying healthcare whenever possible. But one day he gets a call he doesn’t expect: his estranged father is dying. Soon, Tim has to deal with his father’s death – and his inheritance from the old man. Johnston senior had a small storefront – The Museum of the Rare and Curious – in which he displayed various odd items to the very few people who ever bothered to come look at it. Most of that “museum” is easily disposed of, since it’s nearly all junk. But then there’s “The Savage,” which Tim refers to as a “statue” of an African tribesman – about a hundred years old and dressed in a leopard-print loincloth in best Republic serial fashion.
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