Category: Reviews

Mickey Mouse: Zombie Coffee by Régis Loisel

Mickey Mouse: Zombie Coffee by Régis Loisel

Formats come with expectations and assumptions – not always warranted, but they’re along for the ride already.

For example: Mickey Mouse: Zombie Coffee , a bande desinée by Régis Loisel, originally published by Éditions Glénat in France in 2016 in (waves hands) some format, possibly within Le Journal du Mickey , is laid out like a newspaper comic. Four panels across, most of the time, about four times wider than tall, two strips to a page, 137 strips total.

As an American comics reader, on first glance I assumed this was a little less than half a year of dailies in some newspaper, and my thought was “who knew there was a regular Mickey Mouse strip in French newspapers?”

But I think that’s wrong. I think these appeared in that magazine, weekly – maybe one at a time, maybe two or three on a page each issue – and that the strip format is either an artistic choice or a very specific slot in that magazine that might look like an American daily, but is a different thing.

So I’m left wondering about the rhythm of this story: was it just one strip a week? That’s pretty slow for an adventure strip – though a lot of webcomics are on a similar pace, these days. It might explain why a lot of these are pretty wordy – you need to remind the reader of what’s going on. Or, to be positive, perhaps this ran in a really large space, and these strips are shrunken a bit for this book publication.

In any case: it’s a Mickey Mouse story, of the old school. The time is during the Great Depression, the place is Mouseton (presumably USA, but unspecified), and our hero and his friends are the downtrodden, pushed-around little guys of the early days rather than the fancy suburbanite or corporate icon of more recent years.

Mickey and Horace Horsecollar are looking for work, with no luck. Mr. Ruff, “the foreman” (seemingly the only way to get hired in Mouseton) keeps finding excuses not to hire them. So the two decide to run off with their girlfriends (Minnie and Clarabelle Cow) to go camping and fishing for a while, bunking with Donald Duck on a lake somewhere, because “camping is free.”

That takes up about the first quarter of the story – they return to Mouseton to find things have changed. A rich developer, Rock Fueler, is turning their neighborhood into a golf course. The potential good news is that means jobs, plus money for the houses he’s buying. But of course the capitalist is the villain, so his plans are much more nefarious than simply building something.

Fueler has employed two chemists to create massively addictive “Zomba” coffee, which he then distributed free to all of the citizens of Mouseton. The men, zombified by coffee, work almost for free, and the women and children get packed off to a new housing project on the outskirts of town. And the chemists are working on further foodstuffs, to squeeze the last few cents out of the Mousetonians.

Even Goofy, left behind, is now a coffee zombie, though Horace and Mickey do save and reform him.

And then our heroes fight back, against the nearly overwhelming forces arrayed against them. Pegleg Pete is one of Fueler’s top henchmen, as of course he must be, so he does a lot of the immediate attacking, sneaking, and other evil deeds. There are chases and fights and confrontations, and various bits of comedy along the way – for example, the chemist’s food is so seductive that noseplugs are required to resist its tantalizing aroma, so the big end scene is played out almost entirely with people speaking with those stuffed-nose voices.

I read this digitally, and I think that means I saw it somewhat smaller than the printed book – I hope so, since it’s full of detail and life and energy, and a larger format would make it a lot better. I haven’t seen Loisel’s work before, but he’s clearly great at this style, and has had a long and respected career making things that mostly haven’t been translated into English.

It’s a classic Mickey story told well for a modern audience – my understanding is that the French audience is mostly middle-graders, but there’s no reason it needs to be limited to that age.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency: The Interconnectedness of All Kings by Ryall, Akins, Kyriazis, & Livesay

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency: The Interconnectedness of All Kings by Ryall, Akins, Kyriazis, & Livesay

I suppose the Hitchhikers‘ ground has been thoroughly salted at this point – I’ve seen the movie; you don’t need to tell me – which is why we’ve gotten two Dirk Gently TV series and these comics over the past decade. But even leaving aside how much Douglas Adams was a writer of voice to begin with, the Dirk books were fun because of the way they were told rather than the vague shaggy-dog stories they told. So doing the same sort of thing in a different medium feels like the wrong next step: the Adams estate would have been better off commissioning someone to write more Dirk novels, I think: assuming anyone could convincingly do that, which is the rub.

Anyway, there is a comics series continuing the Dirk Gently books. This first miniseries, from 2016 – probably not coincidentally the same year as the second, more successful TV show – promises there will be more, but a quick Google here in 2023 did not actually discover more. So I think this slots in just like the original novels: fun, faintly disappointing, not quite going anywhere despite apparent velocity and direction.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency: The Interconnectedness of All Kings  was written by Chris Ryall, long-time comics scripter and (probably much more importantly) then the head of IDW, publisher of this series. Art is by Tony Akins (pencils on the first two of five issues), Ilias Kyriazis (rest of the pencils), and John Livesay (inks). Colors are by Leonard O’Grady. There is also an introduction by Arvind Ethan David, who produced the second TV series and says here he will be writing the second – so far nonexistent – comics series.

As the book opens, Dirk is moving – carrying basically nothing – from his native UK to San Diego, for no obvious reason. (This isn’t a problem: “for no obvious reason” is the way Dirk does everything.) Your Cynical Reviewer assumed San Diego was chosen because Ryall and IDW are headquartered there, but I’m willing to entertain alternate explanations. None are provided, let me be clear. But I’d entertain them if they were.

He soon gets caught up in multiple quirky plots: he grabs a random suitcase, which belongs to a yuppie couple who are engaging in serial-killer touristry: I mean, both being serial killers and doing it in ways that are inspired by classics of the field. There’s also a couple of ancient Egyptian men, King Ahktenhamen-adjacent, who are now in the modern world after half-explained magical shenanigans and have the traditional life-stealing curse. Someone is also giving nifty gold cellphones to the homeless of San Diego, but this is much less important to begin with. And Dirk is also casting about for a new base of operations, which of course he does by walking into a random business and claiming it.

There’s a lot of complication and goofiness, and the tone strikes me as authentic to the Dirk novels – but I have to admit it’s been decades since I read them, so my memory could be off. It’s less jokey than Hitchhiker, as I recall – light adventure rather than near-parody.

The whole thing was pleasant but didn’t feel Adams-esque, if you know what I mean. Douglas Adams had a tone and a way of constructing sentences, so I’m not sure (as I said up top) that any other medium  or writer could replicate that to begin with. And Dirk is a quirkier, more fragile thing than Hitchhiker to begin with. So this is a nice light adventure comic about a guy called “Dirk Gently” that was pleasant to read but left me a bit flat. Given no sequel has appeared in nearly a decade, I have to assume that reaction was common.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Macanudo: Optimism Is for the Brave by Liniers

Macanudo: Optimism Is for the Brave by Liniers

Some comic strips have ongoing stories – adventure strips are rarer these days, but long continuities still exist, here and there. Some have recurring gags, done slightly differently each time – Lucy and the football, the possibly imaginary Ernesto Lacuna, a sergeant viciously beating a private.

Those are things to grab onto, when you are, as I am now, trying to write about a new book collecting that comic strip.

Liniers’ Macanudo is a wispier, quirkier, more variable thing – it does have recurring characters (five or six sets of them, in fact), but their interactions are oddly both more and less templated. The elves always talk about the same kinds of things, ditto the penguins. Olga and Martin have imaginative adventures, usually outside. Henrietta reads books, and does other little-girl things. But what they each do is more intellectual, more about the life of the mind, and less “little Billy draws a dotted line through the neighborhood again” – it’s more patter, and less business, to put it in comedy terms.

It’s not really patter, either – I think Liniers means it. His characters are serious about their thoughts in a way that’s mostly alien to the least-common-denominator dullards of North American zombie strips, who enact the same few actions over and over again because those actions once won their original creators hundreds of syndicated papers and minor fortune.

That’s what’s interesting about Macanudo, and distinct and exciting. But it does make it difficult to find things to say about a collection of two hundred or so strips. Especially when you (well, me, in this case) said it all once already.

Macanudo: Optimism Is for the Brave  is the second collection of the strip in English [1]; the first was Welcome to Elsewhere , last year. I had a long post then, talking about the style and feeling of the strip, and cataloging all of the recurring situations I saw in that first book. There are more, I understand – the Wikipedia entry lists two dozen, so some of them may appear much less often, or were only in the earlier Spanish-language days, or have been left out of these books for other reasons.

So what I said then is still true: it’s still the same kind of strip, as you’d expect for something that has been running (counting the Spanish-language-only years, which of course you have to) since 2002.

The title of this one is appropriate: it is a strip with an optimistic tone, most of the time, a strip about the casual bravery of everyday life – the bravery of being positive and open and welcoming to the world instead of closed and hateful and destructive. All of those situations – even the witches, who tend to be more put-upon by people unhappy with their lifestyle – are in a positive, optimistic mode, about being happy and learning new things and exploring both physically and intellectually.

It’s not exactly a gag-a-day strip – each strip is a thought or a moment, and they do tend to be separate moments. But they’re not “gags,” most of the time. They are amusing, or thoughtful, rather than the “hey laugh at this!” post-vaudeville rhythms more common in the standard comic strip. That makes Macanudo a quieter, different  thing, and I wonder how well it fits on the page with the usual comics rabble.

(I only read it in book form, myself – it’s not in my local paper. I have no idea how many English-language papers it is in. Given the contractions of the industry, I’d bet fewer than it even was in a year ago.)

You probably know already if Macanudo sounds appealing to you. If it does, you will enjoy it. If it sounds fussy or overly precious to your ear…you might still like it; it’s simpler and more grounded than I might be making it sound. But it is different, it is a strip about thinking rather than bonking people on the head. I like that; I hope you will, too.

[1] There’s an asterisk if you both read Spanish and have access to the book markets of Argentina, where a dozen previous collections were published.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast

I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast

Don’t tell anyone, but I think this is a stealth reprint collection. If it were in prose, I might even go so far as to call it a fix-up.

Roz Chast is one of the giants of contemporary cartooning, a New Yorker mainstay since the late ’70s and the author of the major memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?  about a decade ago, plus a number of other books, both reprints and original. All of her work is fun and quirky and specific, coming out of a relatable New York sensibility – so I’m purely talking categorization here, not making a value judgement.

I Must Be Dreaming  was her new book for 2023, billed as a “new graphic narrative, exploring the surreal nighttime world insider her mind.” Which is true, as far as it goes: the narrative is clearly new. But I think a lot of the pages here, probably a majority of them, already existed. I think this is a themed reprint collection lightly cosplaying as an original graphic novel.

The alternative, though, is that all of the things that look like individual cartoons here – mostly retelling specific dreams – were all new work, that Chast dug through her dream notebook and did all of this work in one rush as a book. That’s possible, but it feels like a compendium of several decades of dreams – that she pulled published cartoons and sketches and ideas from the body of her work, maybe with a tropism for things that hadn’t been in a book yet, to cover this material.

Because creators don’t just suddenly have a completely different idea that they’ve been working on for years, and Chast has been thinking and cartooning about her dreams for a long time now.

Either way, Dreaming starts out with what is clearly new material, in Chast’s GN-esque style – hand-drawn type in paragraphs around individual illustrations – as she explains what she finds interesting about dreams, and how she’s captured hers – then dives into compendia of different types of dreams, mostly drawn as single-page cartoons – and then has a somewhat historical/overview section, again in that more discursive GN style, to close.

Everyone’s dreams are weird and random, I think – some in an interesting way, and some in a tedious way. Chast is clear that she’s curating dreams here: illustrating the most distinctive or visual or bizarre ones, and avoiding the dull ones. (Anyone else had the “trying to walk somewhere in the rain, and your legs don’t work right?” Unpleasant to experience, boring to explain.)

It’s a Roz Chast book, so it’s full of her sensibility and viewpoint – though maybe more so, because of dream logic. I liked it a lot, again because it’s Roz Chast. In sum, unless you are one of those weirdoes who can’t stand Chast, this book will make you laugh and enjoy life just a bit more during the time you read it.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television by Koren Shadmi

The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television by Koren Shadmi

When I was a lad, the standard bio-for-young-people format was a small hardcover, heavily illustrated but written in prose, in short, punchy chapters and topping out at maybe a hundred and fifty pages. There were a lot of them: I recall shelves in classrooms and school libraries full of the things, some of them in specific series from particular publishers.

At some point since that dim misty past, the format seems to have shifted – or maybe a new format has been added, but I think the old style is at least declining if not dead – into a graphic novel that covers roughly the same territory but in a more visually exciting (and reluctant-reader-appealing) way.

Now, let’s be clear: the new style is not just for middle-schoolers who need to do a report on Random Famous Dead Person a couple of times a semester. But that is a large and powerful audience, with vast collective library and school budgets seeking books to buy all the time, so it’s not surprising that things tend to be published that will fit that model, even if they were conceived for different purposes and audiences.

The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television , a 2019 book by Israeli-American cartoonist Koren Shadmi, fits pretty comfortably into that category: it covers Sterling’s whole life, with a Twilight Zone-ish frame story where most readers will guess the payoff very early (which is very Twilight Zone, and so deeply appropriate), tending to play up the drama and struggle to give a clear arc of a life.

It’s crisp and clear and sweeping, covering Serling’s fifty years with a central focus on what every reader really wants to know: how he got to create Twilight Zone, what those years were like, and how it affected him afterward. To be reductive: he was an award-winning writing superstar for the then-popular TV anthology-show format; super-busy and stressful, with increasing network trouble over the five-year run; he didn’t live long enough to get a real third act, and his second act was all reaction and scrambling for any, usually tawdry, work as the anthology-show format entirely disappeared.

Shadmi has been doing this sort of historical non-fiction book fairly regularly the past few years – I’d previously read his Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Dracula , which came out two years after Twilight Man. He’s good at it: it takes a lot of research and synthesizing to present wads of historical context and full conversations (or large chunks of TV-show dialogue) in an engaging way, and Shadmi does that consistently here.

He tells this story in Serling’s voice, which is appropriate for the man who so intensely narrated his most famous production but presents certain potential pitfalls. As far as I could see, Shadmi avoids them all: Serling comes across as understandable but clearly a man of his time, with the right cadence and style in his speech. Shadmi also keeps his trademark cigarette in hand consistently – I wonder if that was less of an issue in this book because it came out from Humanoids, a dedicated GN publisher, rather than the young-readers division of a major house? I would not be surprised if some school districts avoided buying it because it has a cigarette on the cover.

Twilight Man aims to tell the story of this one guy, and somewhat show what writing for TV was like in his heyday of the ’50s and ’60s – it does the former well, and gives at least a Serling flavor of the latter. The second half of the subtitle is more expansive than the book itself; it really is just about Serling. I see Shadmi has a couple of other similar books I haven’t found yet; I’ll be looking out for them.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Dumb Money

REVIEW: Dumb Money

“I like the stock.”

If only the world of high finance could accept things as simply as that.

As we learned in 2021, the so-called masters of the universe had written off GameStop, the venerable supply of used video games and assorted tech gear. The only one, it seemed, who still believed in them was Keith Gill, who live-blogged as Roaring Kitty. With incredible transparency, he shared his spreadsheets and showed his faith by buying up shares, which encouraged others to follow suit.

The run-up of the stock, fueled by the disruptor app Robinhood, spooked Wall Street and led to at least one capitol group crumbling with hubris.

Finance can make you want to shut down and read a book, such as The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich, which inspired the film, but like the superb The Big Short, the 2023 film Dumb Money walks you through this Byzantine world. Director Craig Gillespie shows you how Gill (Paul Dano)’s faith and followers managed to propel a nearly 3000% increase in GameStop’s stock values from $17 to $500 per share.

Out now on disc from Sony Home Entertainment, we see Gill’s story, but also his influence on other “regular” folk who would never dream of buying stock, but thanks to the easy no-fee Robinhood app, they can take a gamble on Gill. Here we follow the everyday lives of financially struggling nurse Jenny (America Ferrera), GameStop retail employee Marcos (Anthony Ramos), and lesbian college couple Riri (Myha’la Herrold ) and Harmony (Talia Ryder), among others.

Not everyone is a fan with Gill’s own brother Kevin (Peter Davison), thinking him a loser. Still, Gill soldiers on, largely because of the unswerving love of his wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley), an underappreciated factor.

The film is compared with the superior Big Short, but it works very well on its own merits. Gill is not a financial genius, but watch his testimony to Congress, and you can see that the arcane ways of Wall Street have prevented the average American from understanding what happens to their companies. It’s a strong message that undercuts the smarm and greed of the high-rollers who just don’t get it. It’s quite satisfying to learn that Melvin Capital Management and its founder Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) lost billions as a result.

The film looks just fine in 1080p high definition, although it had been shot with the most contemporary 4K equipment, so having only a Blu-ray available is a disappointment and shows a lack of faith from Sony. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is up to the task given how much tech is employed, considering this all occurred during the pandemic lockdown.

The Blu-ray disc comes with a Digital HD code and has a handful of special features. These include the Audio Commentary by screenwriters Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum; Fat Cats Vs. The Roaring Kitty (8:00); Diamond Hand Ensemble (6:00), which is about the casting; and Deleted Scenes (3:00).

REVIEW: Babylon 5: The Complete Series

REVIEW: Babylon 5: The Complete Series

At a time when syndicated science fiction was just Star Trek series, it took some guts on Warner Bros’ part to try something darker and more experimental with J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5, designed to tell a sprawling epic that was more political than it was space opera. The show arrived thirty years ago and was successful enough to spawn spin-off five telefilms and a short-lived spinoff, spanning 1993-2007.

The core of it, the 110 episodes from the original five-season series, have been remastered and collected on a nice Blu-ray box set from Warner Home Entertainment. Also included is the original pilot film.

Set in the 23rd century, the Earth Alliance has found its place among star-faring races, notably the Minbari and the Centauri. Some of these races are fine with humans; others wish them gone. Then there are the Vorlons, and no one knows what they want.

Babylon 5 is a gigantic, 5-mile-long space station built by humans but designed to house the various known major species from the stars. B 1-3 were destroyed during construction, and B4 mysteriously vanished. The sprawling station is where the bulk of the stories are told, with humans dealing with the ambassadors, aides, merchants, and others from the other known races. A Shadow War is brewing along the way and will ensnare most of the main players.

Straczynski wanted the show to have sweep and scale, something SF TV has lacked, and was determined B5 would do for television SF as Hill Street Blues had done for police dramas. With that in mind, he wrote the bulk of the series, each season taking up a year, and was designed as a finite five year arc, an ambitious goal given the vagaries of syndicated fare. He wrote 92 of the episodes and was supported on the rest by Peter David, Neil Gaiman, Kathryn M. Drennan, Lawrence G. DiTillio, D. C. Fontana, and David Gerrold, with Harlan Ellison listed as a creative consultant.

We begin with Season One – Signs and Portents, which takes its time introducing the various species and interrelationships. From there, change is the theme for Season Two – The Coming of Shadows, as Delenn transforms and Michael O’Hare steps back, replaced by Bruce Boxleitner, who seamlessly fit in. As with many series, Season Three – Point of No Return is where the show hits its stride as things are taken up a notch, and the simmering mystery of B4 is revealed. Unfortunately, that couldn’t be sustained during Season Four – No Surrender, No Retreat because JMS was under the impression there would not be a Season Five, and he hurried to tidy things up, reducing the long-promised Shadow War to a mere six episodes. Things felt rushed and uneven, though it was not his fault. This left Season Five – The Wheel of Fire as 22 episodes without an engine to drive it, leaving us with some interesting character bits, some filler, and lots of spinning plates as he valiantly tried to keep things moving forward.

It paid off, celebrated for its mature themes, complex characterizations, and thought-provoking moral dilemmas. Its large cast evolved over the years but was anchored by a stellar assortment of talent, including Bruce Boxleitner, Michael O’Hare, Claudia Christian, Jerry Doyle, Mira Furlan, Andreas Katsulas, Peter Jurasik, Richard Biggs, Andrea Thompson, Stephen Furst, Bill Mumy, Tracy Scoggins, Jason Carter, Robert Rusler, Jeff Conaway, Patricia Tallman, and Mary Kay Adams.

While Boxleitner and O’Hare were your stereotypical square-jawed heroes, the aliens had far more fun, starting with Centauri Ambassador Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik), whose rivalry with G’Kar (Andreas Katsulas), the Narn ambassador, provided the series with some of its best moments. The other pivotal player was Delenn (Mira Furlan), the Minbari ambassador, who willingly altered herself into half-Minbari/half-human, which had dramatic repercussions among her people.

The show was never a critics’ darling or top-rated show compared with its Star Trek competition as it arrived while TNG, DS9, and even Voyager filled the screens. While those explored strong themes, few did so with the same level of maturity and depth that JMS did with B5, which is why it endures in fan memory. Issues of faith, morality, and sexuality are openly discussed and addressed through the actions and reactions of its characters. Psionics are real in this world and various Psi-Corps officers play key parts in the serial, notably Trek-veteran Walter Koenig as Alfred Bester (named after the Golden Age SF author).

“There are things in the Universe billions of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless, and if they are aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants, and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us,” G’Kar observes at one point and reminds us of how much tapestry is left to be woven.

Visually, the series was the first to experiment with all-CGI SFX, and in high definition, it may appear rudimentary, but you have to give Warner credit for getting on the cutting edge of, ahem, the future. Sitting with the box set, you have to admire the structure of the series, enjoy the enhanced visuals at 1080p, and enjoy its well-matched audio track.

There are no bonus special features other than the pilot film.

REVIEW: A Disturbance in the Force

REVIEW: A Disturbance in the Force

20th Century Fox wasn’t sure what it had in Star Wars, and apparently, neither did George Lucas. The director was building up his company, Lucasfilm, and unleashed his secret weapon: Charley Lippincott. He whipped people into a previously unknown frenzy by working the fans at science fiction and comics conventions. He saw to it DelRey had the novelization out months before the film, as well as three of the six-issue comics adaptation from Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin at Marvel. These people were lined up for day one, and the word of the month spread so fast that it endured throughout the summer of 1977.

Before the Special came the finale from The Donny and Marie Show, which Donny discusses on the documentary.

As we learn in the wonderfully entertaining A Disturbance in the Force, a 90-minute documentary from directors Jeremy Coon and Steve Kozak, despite all his statements saying he had everything planned out, Lucas was still figuring things out. So, 20th and Lucas were concerned in 1978 that interest might wane despite the sales success of the toys, Splinter in a Mind’s Eye novel, and comics.

As a result, they thought marketing the property through television appearances would be fine. Here, we’re reminded that late 1970s prime time television was littered with poor product. Sure, there were a handful of prestige series (thank you, MTM Productions) but we were given lots and lots of crap (thankfully, I missed most of it by being in college). So, there were dancing stormtroopers on Donny & Marie and Mark Hamill dancing alongside Bob Hope, and so on.

When CBS wanted a special, Lucas agreed, and enthusiasm got the best of everyone. Hence, it grew to a two-hour extravaganza known as the Star Wars Holiday Special, which the creators thought would be an evergreen special but aired just once on November 17, 1978. Without reruns and before the advent of home video, it became the stuff of legend.

It has also proven to be an embarrassment to the film’s stars who were contractually committed (according to Harrison Ford) or were enticed with perks (Carrie Fisher getting to sing). They have spoken of it in interviews and convention appearances with dread, shame, or a laugh.

Writer Bruce Vilanch

Coon and Kozak tracked down as many of the original people involved in the making of the show as were still alive and got them to talk about it with forty years perspective. We come to understand that CBS hired people who knew variety specials but not science fiction and Lucasfilm assigned people unfamiliar with television production.

Writers Bruce Vilanch and Lenny Ripps recount the chaos in shaping the show, based on one intense day with Lucas, who then turned his attention to crafting The Empire Strikes Back. His input placed the focus on Chewbacca’s homeworld and family, with the concept of a Life Day celebration. He also wanted Boba Fett introduced through an animated section, which was nicely done by Nelvana, evoking Moebius’ style.

With Lucas’ UCLA buddy David Acomba signed ot direct things proceeded at light speed until they were four days into production, overbudget and in serious trouble, Acomba was removed in favor of Steve Binder who righted the ship as best he could.

The documentary uses copious clips from the special so you can see for yourself the then-state-of-the-art special effects, the creepy Wookie VR-porn (guest starring Diahann Carrol!), the Jefferson Starship rock video, and more.

Seth Green, actor/cocreator of Robot Chicken

Pop culture giants including Weird Al Yankovic and Seth Green are on hand to provide perspective alongside Lucasfilm alum Mick Garris and Craig Miller. Most lay the blame for the show’s quality on veteran musical variety veterans Ken Welch and Mitzie Welch, who were out of their depth from science fiction to being left to edit the pieces together (a first for them).

I found it incredibly entertaining and applauded the directors for tackling this subject and doing so with affection. I have a 9th grader who is a major Star Wars fan and I asked her to watch this and provide her perspective. Among her comments are, “…there’s a constant reminder that they didn’t let George do it AND HE HATED IT SO MUCH that he went to Robot Chicken and voiced himself hating the Holiday Special. I understood why he hated it so much because I hated it. It really sucked, besides the Boba Fett cartoon. Apparently, another reason why it was acceptable was because crazy holiday specials were popular and things that are made without context are automatically funny. Lastly, I belive the most terrifying thing I saw on the Holiday Special was the ugh the… the… TEDDY BEARS!”

The documentary is available for purchase on Blu-ray and for rental on various streaming services and should not be missed.

Reset by Peter Bagge

Reset by Peter Bagge

I’m running close to a decade behind reading Peter Bagge’s books – but, the weird thing is, I seem to still be reading all of his books, just with that big time-delay. I have no explanation, and may catch up one of these days: cartooning is time-intensive work, and even someone as prolific as Bagge doesn’t pile up books the way a prose writer like Stephen King or Nora Roberts does.

That’s as close to a reason why I read his 2012 miniseries/2013 graphic novel Reset  here at the end of 2023. As usual, I find bits of the worldbuilding to be weird, especially in retrospect: maybe because of the things Bagge needed to create this story, maybe because I fundamentally don’t agree with his assumptions about life and society in general.

Bagge’s worlds are full of mildly updated ’50s gender-essentialism: men are hot-headed and often physically violent, because They Are Men and the World Is Frustrating. Sometimes they are divided into the smart ones (effete, tentative, too weak for this world, typically wearing glasses) and the strong ones (stupid as a post, addicted to incredibly counterproductive ideas, full of zeal and energy for all the wrong things, typically wearing mullets). Women are sneaky, vindictive shrews who you (the reader, who is of course a man) can never trust and who drive you (ditto) crazy all the time, and usually won’t even let you fuck them! (Not that you want to: damn harpies! But a man has needs!)

This time out, the man is Guy Krause, right in the middle of that Bagge male stereotype: we meet him in a mandated traffic-safety class, where he was forced after a road-rage incident. Krause is a minor celebrity, a former stand-up comedian turned movie actor, maybe B or C-list at best but recently hitting a stretch of bad luck and bad breaks.

The woman is Dr. Angie Minor, who meets him in that class – with ulterior motives, we soon learn – and recruits him for a research project.

That project is not what it seems to be, of course. And Bagge seems to be interested in yet a third aspect of the project, which makes the book a bit lumpy and thematically jumbled. But let me start with what it seems to be.

Angie is working for an unnamed company, developing a fancy new VR headset and associated software program. They claim not to know what they’ll use it for yet, but they can create a Choose-Your-Adventure version of a subject’s life, after some serious, presumably expensive research, to build the world-model. (Anyone who understands capitalism will have warning bells ringing in their heads at this point: there’s no plausible product here aside from maybe masturbatory fantasies for billionaires.)

So Guy will be put in a chair with this headset and some fancy electrodes and relive important moments of his life, while Angie and her tech, Ted, monitor him to find out…something they’re unclear about. The title comes from the fact that Guy has one control, a button that pops him out of the simulation and resets it back to the base state: the beginning of this particular scenario.

It is also the big honking metaphor at the center of the book, of course: what would you do if you could live the important moments in your life over? If you could Reset, what would you do? Bagge runs away from this idea almost immediately; it doesn’t fit his plot and his tech is too crude to really be believable to the user.

Ray is both a bad subject – headstrong and unwilling to be led and obnoxious (did I say he’s a Bagge main character yet? I may be repeating myself) – and the only possible subject for this custom bespoke simulation based entirely on his life, which seems really weird and becomes the obvious Chekhov Gun looming over the whole book. And, yes, the real explanation of Angie’s research comes into it – though Bagge never gives any adequate explanation of why Guy was chosen, aside from the very weak initial “you’re famous enough that it was easy to research you” one, which is only plausible if they sign up the subject before doing the research.

The plot is more about what’s really going on and less about Ray’s re-living his life, though I think Bagge wants the core of this story to be what Ray learns. (He does re-connect with a girl he had a crush on in high school, for example.)

Again, in a Bagge world, everyone is selfish and horrible and unpleasant – occasionally not all that bad to specific other people that they like, at that moment, but you can never count on that. So people yell at each other, act out, ramp up the experiments, maliciously comply with instructions, and much more. We do find out the secret reason for the project in the end, and it’s dumb and vague and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that that would lead to this.

So it’s a Bagge book: full of talky, angry people with rubber-hose limbs gesticulating at each other, spitting fire, yelling, and so on. I don’t have an overly sunny view of humanity, I think, but even I think he can be a bit much. This one is amusing and doesn’t have any unpleasant background assumptions (unlike Apocalypse Nerd , for example); it’s somewhat lumpy but generally moves well and is full of amusing Bagge stuff. Maybe not top-tier Bagge, but pretty close: good, almost current work from a creator who is like no one else. If Bagge seems interesting, this is a decent one to dive into, though Hate is still the core.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Pixels of You by Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Ota, and J.R. Doyle

Pixels of You by Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Ota, and J.R. Doyle

It’s not usual for a creative team to accrete members over time. OK, sure, you can think of bands that got bigger as they got successful enough to add, for instance, a horn section, but those accretions tend to be semi-separate: The Fantastic Desperadoes with the Horns of Doom! People get replaced, of course. But it’s not common for new people to come in, set up, and just be added.

So I’m wondering what will be next for the team behind Pixels of You , a 2021 graphic novel from Amulet, Abrams’ teen-comics imprint. Co-writers (and partners in life, too, I think) Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Oda did the book Lucky Penny together before this – there, Hirsh was billed as the writer and Oda as the artist, but we all know artists in comics do at least half the storytelling (which means “writing”) anyway.

This time out, they have a new artist – maybe to have a particular look, maybe for other artistic reasons – J.R. Doyle, who also does a webcomic called Knights Errant and seems to do storyboard work as well.

Pixels looks nothing like Penny, and the tone is completely different, so that’s my assumption: Hirsh and Oda knew they wanted this new project to go in a different direction  If so, it worked: I had to look them up to remember what it was I read by them, and didn’t bring any expectations to Pixels.

Pixels of You is a personal drama, enemies-to-friends division (maybe more than friends, as is often the case), set in a near-future SF world. AI is ubiquitous and well-integrated – the SFnal kind of AI that quite likely will never actually exist, humaniform persons who are just part of human society. They don’t seem to be an underclass, though there are hints of prejudice and most AI persons may be vaguely considered lesser than meat-people. There are also hints that AI personhood, or possibly citizenship, are contingent in some way, with regular tests AI persons need to pass to stay in their current status.

Indira is a young woman working as an intern in an art gallery: she’s a wannabe photographer, and her boss is influential in that world. The internship is a strong way into the world she wants to be part of, and she’s trying to make the most of it. She also has a cybernetic eye – totally realistic-looking; no one knows unless she tells them – from a tragic accident in her past, and either that accident or the eye or both are the source of health issues, pain and bad dreams and sometimes worse.

Fawn is the next intern in line at the gallery: she’s on her way in as Indira is finishing her time. Fawn is a human-presenting AI, the “daughter” of two traditional-looking AI persons who seem to be quite successful – maybe managerial-class jobs, something like that.

They meet at a show, and immediately get on each other’s worst sides: Fawn insults Indira’s work, without know it’s hers. Indira is prickly and standoffish to begin with, so gives as well as she gets.

But the gallery owner needs them to work together, and forces them to do so: the next show, which was originally planned to be a combined look at their separate work, now will be of work they make together.

Both Indira and Fawn are well-meaning, mostly nice people, so they don’t stay enemies all that long. (Coming from Penny, I might have expected a longer, funnier sequence of squabbling, physical or verbal, but Pixels is a quieter, much more serious book.) They do learn to work together, they do learn each other’s secrets, they do become friends.

That sounds trite, I suppose, but any story is trite when stripped to the barest plot. The team here tells this one well – there’s a lot of single-panel pages to show what Fawn and Indira’s work looks like, and a lot of semi-wordless sequences, since photography is more about seeing than talking. It’s a sweet story, even if I do have some quibbles with the SFnal background.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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