Category: Reviews

Early Review: ‘Fringe’

FringeLong gone is the time when great science fiction programming came in two categories; Star Trek spinoff and everything else. Today, those categories have been split into dozens more, including things like superheroes, time travel, or even the occasional futuristic evil robot plot. Fringe seems to take just about all of the elements that fans have loved over the years of watching X-Files, Heroes, and Lost and purées them into an hour long drama that will inevitably go over the heads of millions of viewers.

From creator J.J. Abrams (Lost, Alias), Fringe follows the structure of too-curious-for-her-own-good government agent (Anna Torv) and the estranged son who must suffer from his father’s evil schemes (Joshua Jackson) solving mysteries surrounding a string of DNA that could “change humanity as we know it”. While the structure may not sound that boring, the actors make sure to help that point.

Anna Torv’s Olivia Dunham leaves enough room for a tractor to fit in her enthusiasm factor. She, along with everyone in the series, seems to be playing this out like it will be the next Lost, trying not to emote too much, because who knows where their character may lead in a season or two. This is a nice return to primetime TV for Joshua Jackson, seeing as how the last time we saw him, he was hanging around a creek. He plays the cunning-yet-brash son of the evil Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble). There is room for plenty of father-son and even lover-dead lover drama, which eats up about half of the pilot.

The story loses steam when they introduce the stereotypical “evil corporation with a secret that controls the government” subplot. This will more than likely become the center of the entire series, if it even gets the chance to unravel that plot. Throw in a few cameos from Abrams’ other shows, and you’ve got a nice little vehicle to keep naive Lost fans happy until mid January.

The concept of DNA manipulation and secret government cover-ups is no longer flashy and original to an audience of modern primetime television. Add that in with more Lost-esque ambiguity and a very weak leading role, this show doesn’t look to be going too far. Fox has already ordered 13 episodes of the series, but those who know Fox’s M.O. when it comes to new series know that it will take a miracle if Fringe even makes it past three episodes. The network is infamous for dumping shows at the first sign of a bad review or bored expression, and this show is just asking for one-if not both of those conclusions. RATING: 6/10

Fringe premiers on Fox Tuesday, September 9 at 8pm Eastern.
 

Early Review: True Blood

True BloodFor too long, paranormal dramas have been restricted to basic cable where they become weighed down with melodrama and morals that everyday teens can take away from each episode. I’d like to say that [[[True Blood]]] breaks that trend, but, sadly, it does not and with the exception of a few expletives and some exposed body parts, this show could certainly be made for ABC or the oh-so-hip CW.

From the Alan Ball, the creator of the acclaimed HBO series [[[Six Feet Under]]] comes the TV series based on [[[The Southern Vampire Mysteries]]] book series by Charlaine Harris about a southern telepathic waitress named Sookie Stackhouse who solves mysteries involving vampires, werewolves, and other such creatures. Keep in mind, this series was written four years before the nation’s newfound interest in vampires was peaked with Stephanie Meyer’s [[[Twilight]]] series. That said, this still isn’t safe from being called a watered down version of [[[Buffy The Vampire Slayer]]].

There were only a few scenes that were of interest to any fan of the vampire mythos, the rest establishing the faux racism storyline that seems to be the backbone of the show. In a world where vampires have “come out of the coffin” (not my turn of phrase) and are now publicly known, they become the new racial scapegoat for the scared and angry citizens of Southern America to abuse. This storyline borders didacticism by using “vampire” as a replacement for words like “black” or “gay” or even “cylon”. In a world where these immortal creatures walk the earth, why should they care what the clerk at the Quik-N-Stop has to say to them? Unanswered questions like these makes one realize why this series needs to be looked at like a Vampire Romance novel, instead of a replacement for something like Buffy or [[[Angel]]], much like watching [[[The New Adventures of Lois & Clark]]].

Outside of plot holes like that, the other two issues with the pilot were the pacing and acting. The pacing seems to be almost at a torturous level, leaving entire chunks of time where nothing more than a lot of pensive staring goes on. We understand that there is a lot of animosity between the vampires and the “mortals”, but they can rip your throats out, so stop looking like a pissed off toddler. The acting  (I won’t go into how bad the southern accents are) and motivation of characters just came across as inconsistent, as many of them were either set as “angry girl” or “delusional grandmother”. There was hardly any reasoning behind these emotions, and they felt unnecessary and distracting.

The ending left for a good cliffhanger and a want to pursue the next episode, which I encourage. This series will hopefully improve and become slightly more watchable, but this doesn’t seem like another Buffy the Vampire Slayer or even a Twilight, instead just a watered down amalgam of the two.  Rating 6/10

True Blood debuts on HBO Sunday evening at 9 p.m. and has a twelve episode season.

Review: Learn Spanish With Batman

Review: Learn Spanish With Batman

So there I was at the supermarket maintaining a half-century long tradition: hanging out by the magazine racks looking for treasure. Or at least something interesting to read. Nada. As usual.

But there was a dump next to the racks with a trade paperback titled [[[Learn Spanish With Batman]]]. Well, that seemed interesting. I picked one up, flipped though it and found that the stories were reprints from DC’s sundry Batman cartoon tie-ins. Top-rank stuff by top-tier people: Terry Beatty, Rick Burchett, Tim Levins, Scott Peterson, Dan Slott, and Ty Templeton. What the hell; I picked it up.

Truth be told, I took a couple years of high school Spanish. My first teacher would have done better as a guard at Guantanamo Bay. My second, Ron Manger, was vastly superior but it was probably too late. I picked up a lot more Spanish on the Chicago streets. So I approached Learn Spanish With Batman with my typical cynicism.

They reprinted the stories but certain key words in Spanish, lettered in a red color hold. The translation was off to the side in the appreciable borders. The whole thing was done by Berlitz, who have quite a track record when it comes to the foreign language racket.

Reading the 110 pages, I felt a few ancient memory cells being brought out of a coma. I don’t know how effective this process would be for someone without my slight Spanish language background but – to be fair – the book is obviously targeted to kids and pre-adolescents. I only fall into that category for a living.

It was a pleasurable experience; the stories were great fun and some actual knowledge got hammered into my leaden brainpan. There’s two volumes of Superman and another of Batman in the series thus far, and I’ll probably pick up the latter.

If you’re only interested in the stories, DC’s many trade paperback reprints are a better deal. But if you’d like to try a little experiment, or you’ve got kids or young siblings, I’d give this a try.

Review: ‘American Widow’ by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi

Review: ‘American Widow’ by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi

American Widow
By Alissa Torres; Illustrated by Sungyoon Choi
Villard, September 2008, $22.00

Luis Eduardo (“Eddie”) Torres started a new job as a foreign exchange trader at Cantor Fitzgerald on September 10th, 2001. He was thrilled to get it – he’d been out of work for a few months, his wife, Alissa, was then seven months pregnant, and he was a Columbian national, so his immigration status could have been compromised by staying out of work too long.

Seven years later, we all remember what happened on September 11th, but perhaps only New Yorkers remember Cantor Fitzgerald as clearly. Their headquarters was at the very top of One World Trade Center: floors 101 to 105. That was directly above the impact site of the first plane; no one in Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices survived. Of the dead at the World Trade Center, nearly a quarter were Cantor Fitzgerald. Eddie Torres was one of them.

Alissa Torres quickly found herself a widow: one of the smallest of mercies was that her husband jumped, and so was identified quickly. And then she found herself a “9/11 widow” – alternately helped and hindered by charities, sought by the media, torn completely from her previous life. The fact that her husband had just started work – at a site whose records were utterly destroyed – only made things more difficult.

[[[American Widow]]] is Alissa Torres’s story, in her own words and presumably her own comics-panel layouts. The art is by Sungyoon Choi, a very young graduate of the School of Visual Arts; this appears to be her first major work. It’s also Torres’s first work in comics; before 9/11 she was an instructional designer for the New York City Department for the Aging and afterward she seems to have only written about herself and her late husband, with several essays on [[[Salon]]] and one in [[[Redbook]]]. (A search at Salon didn’t bring up those essays; nor does the Redbook essay seem to be online.)

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Review: Invincible the Series

Review: Invincible the Series

During the 2008 San Diego Comic Con, MTV New Media debuted their new animated series based on Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker’s Invincible comic. Published by Image Comics, [[[Invincible]]] tells the story of Mark Grayson, a young man who inherits his father’s superpowers. It’s been released through various outlets: iTunes, Xbox, Amazon, MTV2, MTV.com, and MTV Mobile.

Instead of creating brand new animation, the series has decided to use the latest editing techniques to “animate” Cory Walker’s actual comic book art. Just use existing comic art and let the camera to give the illusion of movement. To younger viewers this may seem innovative, but it’s been done as far back as the Marvel Comics based cartoons from the 1960’s. It was used again, very artistically by MTV, when they brought [[[The Maxx]]] to television. Even more recently [[[The Watchmen]]] has been done in this style.

While the story and art deserve all the critical praise that the Invincible comic has received over the years, [[[Invincible the Series]]]’ biggest stumbling block is its editing. The MTV produced show has the same pacing as MTV’s promo spots, wildly kinetic with lots of flashing graphics and texts. Never let the eye settle for minute. This is fine for 15-second ad, but watching a full show like that is taxing.

In a one step forward, two steps back move, the show decided to include the actual word balloons from the comic. But instead of letting people read it, the text has a subtle shake to it. To emphasize energy, I guess. While nothing sits still on the screen, you would expect the parts you want people to read to be motionless.

A good way to judge an animated show’s sound is to close your eyes and listen. Does the soundtrack still create images of the action? In Invincible’s case, the answer is yes, but barely. The voice acting and sound effects are serviceable. They don’t do anything cringe worthy, but neither do they stand out. No Kevin Conroy or John Di Maggio here.

If the production calmed down, this could’ve been a great show that brought quality comic books to video formats. But as it is, I couldn’t stand watching this for more than a few episodes. And like I said, I’m a fan. Imagine the effect to someone who’s browsing MTV2 late at night.

Watch the first episode for yourself below. Let me know if you think I’m right or wrong in the comments section.

 

Review: ‘Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!’

 

Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!
By Howard Chaykin
Dynamic Forces, July 2008, $49.99

Science Fiction has never been quite as successful in comics form as it seemed it should have been. Oh, sure, there have been plenty of vaguely SFnal ideas and premises – from [[[Superman]]] to [[[Kamandi]]] to the [[[X-Men]]] to the [[[Ex-Mutants]]] – but they were rarely anything deeper than an end to the sentence “There’s this guy, see? and he’s….” One of the few counterexamples was Howard Chaykin’s [[[American Flagg!]]], starting in 1983 – that series had many of the usual flaws and unlikelihoods of near-future dystopias, but it also had a depth and texture to its world that was rare in comics SF (and never to be expected in even purely prose works, either).

American Flagg! suffered from Chaykin’s waning attention for a while, and then crashed and burned almost immediately after he finally left the series, with a cringe-making overly “sexy” storyline utterly overwritten by Alan Moore. American Flagg! limped from muddled storyline to confused characterization for a couple of years afterward – but the beginning, when Chaykin was fully energized by his new creation and the stories he was telling, is one of the best SF stories in American comics.

The series has never been collected well, though a few slim album-sized reprints were once available, and may be findable through used-book channels. This Dynamic Forces edition, reprinting the first fourteen issues of the series, is quite pricey. (Especially for a book with no page numbers, and one in which the pages are precisely the size of the original comics – not oversized, as those previous album reprints had been.) This book has a strong, thoughtful introduction by Michael Chabon – which has already appeared in his [[[Maps and Legends]]] collection, presumably due to the delay in the American Flagg! book – a gushing afterword by Jim Lee, and a new short story written and drawn by Chaykin.

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Review: ‘Zot! 1987-1991’ by Scott McCloud

Review: ‘Zot! 1987-1991’ by Scott McCloud

Zot! The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991
By Scott McCloud
HarperCollins, July 2008, $24.95

There are those of us – only a few now, I bet – who keep hoping that Scott McCloud will finally get the comics-about-comics thing out of his system and go back to fictional comics. (1998’s [[[The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln]]] is generally skipped over in these laments, as it is in all other discussions of McCloud’s career, including the one in this book.) Oh, sure, [[[Understanding Comics]]] was one of the great graphic novels of the early ‘90s, and a major roadmark towards the modern comics field, and [[[Reinventing Comics]]] and [[[Making Comics]]] have their strong points as well, but, we keep wondering, what about [[[Zot!]]]?

We were heartened when Kitchen Sink Press reprinted three-quarters of McCloud’s Zot! run in three nice trade paperbacks in 1997-98, and then disheartened again when KSP went under before finishing up with the fourth volume to collect “Earth Stories,” generally considered McCloud’s best stories. And since then, we’ve mostly just been waiting and hoping, living on crumbs like “Hearts and Minds” and McCloud’s other webcomics.

But now Zot! is back, in something like a definitive form, from one of those real big-time bookstore publishers that the comics field is so in awe of. HarperCollins has been McCloud’s trade publisher as far back as Understanding Comics, so their imprint on this book implies a lot about their commitment to comics, and to McCloud.

But maybe I need to back up a bit, for those of you who weren’t around for the days of Eclipse in the late ‘80s. Zot! was McCloud’s comics debut, starting with a ten-issue storyline in full color in 1984-85 and continuing with twenty-six more issues in black and white starting in 1987. Those color comics are now only available in the first, long-out-of-print, Kitchen Sink trade paperback collection of Zot! from ten years ago, though this book hints that they may be reprinted if Zot! 1987-1991 is successful enough. (And maybe then we’ll get Chuck Austen’s art from two “fill-in” issues from the time of McCloud’s wedding, plus all of Matt Feazell’s “Dimension 10½ “ back-up strips.)

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Review: ‘Gentleman Jim’ by Raymond Briggs

Like so many of the great cartoonists, Raymond Briggs operates almost in disguise, using his innocuous-appearing drawings and simpleton characters as a front while he delivers thoughtful commentary and a piercing wit.

The British pioneer of the graphic novel field (he was, at the very least, a contemporary of Will Eisner’s, though Briggs is too generally labeled a children’s book creator) offers up this sneaky blend of the adult and childish in the reprinting of [[[Gentleman Jim]]] (Drawn & Quarterly, $14.95).

The eponymous Jim is a bathroom cleaner with fantastic ambitions — in his mind. For years he’s been content to only dream of trying on a new career, and one day he finally decides to make those dreams real.

What follows is a seemingly childish series of adventures, as Jim attempts to enter unrealistic careers (a cowboy, a painter, a soldier) but is stymied at every stop.

Eventually he becomes dedicated on being a highwayman, stealing from the rich to benefit the poor. He buys fake weapons, creates a preposterous costume and brings home a pathetic donkey, then embarks on his misadventures.

Of course, this enterprise fails as well, which makes a simple enough little story. But what makes it so appreciable to a more mature audience — beyond Briggs’ delicate and beautifully composed art — is how he uses Jim as a foil to poke at the bureaucracies, laws and stuffiness of modern society that tamp down anyone daring to be odd.

Much as Charles Schulz and Richard Thompson instill children with adult sensibilities to great effect, Briggs does the reverse, making Jim both adult and childish, even giving him a baby’s broad face.

Like so many of Briggs’ characters, this allows Jim to be foolish and stupid but still endearing, a loveable bumbler who is deeply wise in his simplicity.

Review: ‘Wonder Woman: Love and Murder’ by Jodi Picoult and others

Review: ‘Wonder Woman: Love and Murder’ by Jodi Picoult and others

DC Comics got a lot of press last year when they signed up bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult to write their monthly [[[Wonder Woman]]] series – gallons of ink about her being the first female “regular writer” on the series, and about how this would finally catapult WW into the position DC keeps insisting she already has: a central, iconic figure whose comics people actually buy and read.

Well, more than a year has passed year later, and Picoult’s run turned out to be only five issues long – so much for “regular,” huh? – and also served primarily as set-up for one of the log-jammed line-wide crossovers, [[[Amazons Attack!]]] Picoult’s five issues were gathered into a classy hardcover, suitable for libraries (where I found it, actually) and real bookstores, with her name given huge prominence.

Assuming that the point of making Picoult’s name so large is to draw in the many readers of her novels, or other casual bookstore browsers, it’s fair to ask whether [[[Love and Murder]]] makes sense as a book in its own right, and provides anything like a satisfying experience to those new readers.

I haven’t read any of Picoult’s novels, unfortunately, but I also haven’t ever read Wonder Woman, and I haven’t read a mainstream DC book regularly in a few years – so, with my ignorance wrapped around me like a cloak, I dove in…

Wonder Woman: Love and Murder
Written by  Jodi Picoult
Art by Drew Johnson & Ray Snider with Rodney Ramos, Terry Dodson & Rachel Dodson, and Paco Diaz
DC Comics, November 2007, $19.99

Well, the first thing a seasoned comics reader notices is that the art team changes entirely twice during five issues, which is usually a bad, bad sign. Readers coming from the world of prose probably won’t notice that – the three art styles are all minor variations on today’s version of superhero-standard, and the transitions aren’t particularly jarring – but it is a danger sign, implying that something was going on behind the scenes.

And then, before the story actually starts, we get a one-page “Previously in Wonder Woman,” explaining how she killed Maxwell Lord in some other cross-over that we didn’t read and don’t care about, and now she’s pretending to be “Diana Prince” again, working at the Department of Metahuman Affairs with her face-changing partner Tom “Nemesis” Tresser under the literally iron-fisted Sarge Steel. (I’m not sure if we believe that, since Diana has some much trouble with ordinary life later that we doubt she could convincingly fake a history or paper trail to get such an impressive job.) OK, fine, that’s backstory, and we’ll get into a brand new adventure now, right?
 

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Review: ‘The Dead Boy Detectives’ by Bryan Talbot and Ed Brubaker

By my count, there are four good reasons to buy [[[The Sandman Presents: The Dead Boy Detectives]]], now out from Vertigo.

First, it’s cheap, at a slight $12.99 for some 100 pages of comics.

Second, it’s a heckuva good mystery yarn with plenty of occult elements.

Third, it’s part of The Sandman world, and there are plenty of readers who snap up anything associated with Neil Gaiman’s creation.

But the last — and, for me, best — reason to pick up the book is that it further illustrates Ed Brubaker’s dexterity as a writer. I’ve long said that the thing that makes him so talented is that if his name wasn’t on the cover of his comics, you wouldn’t be able to recognize him as the author (also, his books are all quite good).

Unlike a Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis or Brian Michael Bendis, Brubaker writes comics without stamping his voice all over them. And, in [[[The Dead Boy Detectives]]], he shows off a wholly new voice, slipping seamlessly into the world of the ghostly boy sleuths and their London setting.

Like all great P.I. stories, this one begins with a girl, then gets all weird with shriveled dead bodies, witches and immortal creeps. It’s not quite unpredictable yet manages to be surprising.

But, mostly, the great characterization of ghosts Charles and Edwin and their childish interplay is what makes this one a winner. Well, that and the other reasons listed above.

Van Jensen is a former crime reporter turned comic book journalist. Every Wednesday, he braves Atlanta traffic to visit Oxford Comics, where he reads a whole mess of books for his weekly Reviews. Van’s blog can be found at graphicfiction.wordpress.com.

Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Van Jensen directly at van (dot) jensen (at) comicmix (dot) com.

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