Category: Reviews

Book-A-Day 2018 #240: Labor Days 2: Just Another Damn Day by Phillip Gelatt and Rick Lacy

Once again, I’ve gotten to a book several years too late, and that’s confusing me. I read the first Labor Days book (written by Phillip Gelatt and drawn by Rick Lacy, neither of whom I know from anything else) back in 2009 and reviewed it for ComicMix then. And then I got a spiffy digital copy of the sequel later that same year…

…and it sat quietly on my device for nearly a decade.

Lesson: I am not dependable in reading anything, but I’m particularly prone to forgetting things that I have in purely-electrons form. If it’s not on a shelf where I can see it, I’m afraid it drops out of mind very swiftly.

Anyway, I had a week where I was specifically reading digital things on that device, because I was traveling, and so I finally realized I had Labor Days 2: Just Another Damn Day  and actually read it.

And it’s been long enough that I don’t trust my memories of the first book. I don’t think it read like a weird mash-up of a Mark Millar story and a parody of a Mark Millar story, but this one definitely does. (At least to me, this many years later.) The main character is still an Everyman, subcategory Dull Ordinary Bloke, and there’s still a big conspiracy that runs the world or something, but this time it all seems to be more specific and moving forward. (My memory of the first book was that it threw that hero, one Benton “Bags” Bagswell right into the deep end and just had complications run around him for about two hundred pages until the book hit something like an ending.)

So there’s a guy called “the Face of History” — literal, actual guy, also the personification of history — and Bags is having prophetic dreams in which he’s told to find and kill that guy to take his place, driven by some female supernatural entity that I don’t think is ever named here but whose job seems to be lining up losers to kill the Face of History about every sixty years or so.

The Face has massive secret societies devoted to him around the world — well, secretly devoted to him, since most of the devotees don’t actually know that. And there are what seems to be an equally large group of equally crazy, equally secret societies headed by people who know the Face exists and want to depose and/or kill and/or replace and/or subvert him.

So Bags and his hot redheaded bespectacled super-competent girlfriend Victoria have been wandering around, trying to join looney groups in hopes that will get them close to The Face. It hasn’t been working particularly well, but Bags has gotten to drink a lot of beer, so it’s not all lost. But the sequence of events that starts at the beginning of this book sends them through some new organizations, and finally to The Face. Also, Bags’s secret dream-fairy finally realizes how stupid he is and tells him explicitly what she wants him to do.

Again, this all seems like either a rejected Mark Millar story, circa 2007, or someone’s idea of a parody of a Mark Millar story, only it would need to be, y’know, actually parodic at some point. Instead, it’s adventurous in a manner that’s serious about half the time and absolutely unable to be taken seriously the rest of the time.

Look, this clearly isn’t a deathless classic of comics: I knew that going in. But I didn’t expect to be this confused at the end….

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

REVIEW: The Flash: The Complete Fourth Season

After a particularly dour third season, fans were promised that the fourth season of The Flash would lighten things up, which was most welcome. On the other hand, the pacing and plotting of the major character and story arcs was uneven and dissatisfying, with lots of highs but too many lows.

The Flash: The Complete Fourth Season is out on Blu-ray and Digital HD combo pack today and across its four discs offers up not only all 23 episodes but the compete “Crisis on Earth-X” crossover event. No doubt, this was necessary considering that Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) and Iris West (Candace Patton) finally tie in the knot in the crossover’s Legends of the Tomorrow installment.

While he is taking a moment to appreciate his happiness, his season-long antagonist has determined Barry needs to be taught humility and sets about to beat that into him episode after episode.

We start the season six months after Flash sacrificed himself to remain within the Speed Force to maintain its stability. Iris has gone from fledgling reporter to the brains behind Team Flash, more fully integrating her into the stories but defying logic. At best, she is the team’s heart and soul; at worst, it’s a pale imitation of Felicity on Arrow.

Once they free Barry, we learn this and everything that follows has been carefully orchestrated by Clifford DeVoe (Neil Sandilands), a man in search of knowledge (wisdom not so much) who winds up mutated by the same forces that turned Barry into the Fastest Man Alive. Aided by his devoted wife and partner Marlize (Kim Engelbrecht), the Thinker is racing against time, attempting to acquire massive powers before his body fails. These powers are to be derived from the dozen passengers aboard the same bus that also gave Ralph Dibny (Hartley Sawyer) his stretchable powers.

Along the way, the large supporting cast needs to be serviced, so we watch Caitlin Snow (Danielle Panabaker) accept her Killer Frost alter ego, lose it, and work to regain it; Cisco (Carlos Valdes) pine for Gypsy (Jessica Camacho) while helping her father, Breacher (Danny Trejo) cope with losing his powers; Wally (Keiynan Lonsdale) feel like a fifth wheel and head off to be a Legend; and Joe West (Jesse L. Martin) prepare to become a father all over again with his new wife Cecile (Danielle Nicolet). Then there’s the flipside to DeVoe, Harrison Wells of Earth-2 (Tom Cavanaugh), who amps up his brain in an effort to match wits with their foe, only to find the price was his intelligence (but also giving us the godawful Council of Wells).

Thankfully, we also have a new foe in Blacksmith (a scenery-chewing Katee Sackhoff) and other distractions. The most wasteful and illogical thread has to be the trumped up charges against Barry, getting him convicted of killing DeVoe and letting his stew in Iron Heights while the Thinker’s plans progress. The Enlightenment, Thinker’s big scheme to ruin mankind’s intelligence so he can reteach them, is too easily dealt with and the conclusion feels rushed and unsatisfying.

Don’t get me wrong, there are strong episodes and terrific moments throughout the series, but too many times I watched and cringed at bad plotting and overly prolonged threads. Even the addition of Sterling Gates to the writing staff couldn’t stop the badly conceived stories. It was gratifying to watch the Elongated Man become a hero, working to save the other bus metas and become fully integrated into the team.

Sprinkled throughout, we see a pretty, young woman (Jessica Parker Kennedy) working at Jitters and encountering various members of the cast until she arrives for the season ending cliffhanger: her revelation as Barry and Iris’ daughter from the future and in need of their help.

The four discs come in a clean high definition transfer at 16×9 1:78:1 with a good DTS-HD 5.1 Dolby Digital audio track.

In addition to a handful of deleted scenes, there are bonuses scattered throughout beginning with a Gag Reel (8:58) on disc one. Disc two brings us the four show runners responsible for the “Crisis” crossover (41:30) which was too self-congratulatory and not revealing enough. Elongated Man (9:44), on disc three, has the producers gush about the fun of bringing the stretchable sleuth to the screen and what the actor brought the cast. Also on the disc is Flash Time on Amunet Black with Katee, Eric, and Sterling (12:52), the most enjoyable as the star chats with Executive Producer Eric Wallace and writer Sterling Gates, looking at her fourth season appearances. Disc four offers up The Fastest Mind Alive: The Thinker (15:20), a look at the comic book origins and adaptation of the villain. Here, the producers talk a good game making me wish more of this was found in the episodes themselves. Finally, there’s The Best of DC TV’s Comic-Con Panels San Diego 2017.

REVIEW: Freedom Fighters: The Ray

The CW Seed has been the ancillary stomping grounds for animated versions of DC Comics’ Arrowverse characters, a chance to extend the brand with lesser-known heroes. For their third outing (after Vixen and Constantine), they smartly offered up Freedom Fighters: The Ray for two six-episode seasons, which have been edited together into a feature, on disc today from Warner Home Entertainment.

Although the two seasons arrived in December and July, they act as a prequel story to last fall’s “Crisis on Earth-X” crossover extravaganza. Here, we have the birth of the Freedom Fighters with appearances by not only the Ray but also Black Condor (Jason Mitchell), Phantom Lady (Dilshad Vadsaria), Dollman (Matthew Mercer) and Red Tornado (Iddo Goldberg). According to some behind the scenes shenanigans, the animated story was written first and when the four-parter was written for live-action, things weren’t lining up right, so the keen viewer will notice there are inconsistencies between the two.

The biggest headscratcher may be the Ray fighting alongside Green Arrow (Matthew Mercer), the Flash (Scott Whyte) if they didn’t meet until the crossover.

That said, this is a very entertaining short film with pleasant limited animation aided by strong vocal talent. It’s interesting to note that this version of The Ray, originally created by Will Eisner for quality Comics back in the Golden Age, was a 1990s revival from Jack C. Harris, Christopher Priest, and Joe Quesada. As voiced by Russell Torey (a veteran BBC genre star), he is a likeable kid, coming to grips with his powers at a time when things look fairly dark for Earth-X’s population.

Interestingly, Ray Terrill being gay wasn’t overt in the comics but became a main selling point for the transition to mass media. The third episode focuses on Ray as a closeted adult, living with his conservative parents. Seeing him struggle is good, since it establishes his personality and gives people in similar situations a role model. Things go wibbly-wobbly when we realize this has been Earth-1 and the Earth-X Ray, a hero, arrives mortally wounded and passes on his powers to his doppelganger, sending him to a world where the Nazis won World War II and people like him are sent to the camps.

When the Ray fully comes into his powers and responsibilities as a hero, we can thrill to his battle with the New Reichsmen’s Overgirl (Melissa Benoist). She’s aided by Black Arrow and Black Flash so there are a lot of costumes and duplicates in this event. He gets plenty of support from Arrow and Flash in addition to Cisco (Carlos Valdes) and Mr. Terrific (Echo Kellum)

I have no idea why it took Emilio Ortega Aldrich, Lauren Certo, Marc Guggenheim, Sarah Hernandez, Elizabeth Kim, and Sarah Tarkoff to write this, but it also may explain the slightly shifting tone from episode to episode, which is less obvious when spliced together. What IU can’t figure out is why the various uniforms worn by the heroes come from differing seasons of the Arrowverse so you can’t quite tell how far ahead of the crossover was this set.

The edited feature looks terrific on Blu-ray and sounds just fine, letting you appreciate Blake Neely’s score. The movie has been released as a combo pack so you can have Blu-ray, DVD, and a Digital HD code. The sole special feature is a way too short interview with Tovey.

 

Book-A-Day 2018 #239: Esperanza by Jaime Hernandez

Everyone gets older, in any world that tries to be real. Most comic-book worlds don’t try — how old is Peter Parker now? And how old was he in 1966?

Jaime Hernandez’s comics world is real — or as real as it wants to be, with only minor occasional eruptions of superheroes and prosolar mechanics. And that world tends to move in forward in time in fits and starts: there will be a clump of stories with his characters at one point in their life, coming out over two or five or six years but covering maybe a month or two of their lives, and then the next clump will begin after that, with another few years passed almost without noticing.

That’s how we live in our own lives — at least how I do. Everything seems to be basically the same for a while, with years that are all pretty much the same rhythms, and then you look up and everything is suddenly different.

Esperanza  collects comics from the second Love and Rockets series, from roughly 2000 through 2007. I could say that this book sees the focus snap back to Maggie and Hopey — which is semi-true, since there’s a long story sequence for each of them here — after the stories in Penny Century, which spread further out into the cast. But Ray D. is just as prominent here as he was in Penny Century: there, he was mooning over Penny; here’s he’s in a complicated relationship with “the Frogmouth,” a stripped named Vivian who also seems to have an unrealized crush on Maggie. Penny herself doesn’t show up as often this time out, true: she drops in and out of the Locas world regularly over the years, as if only visiting it from her own, more glamorous and exciting universe.

And there’s two major new characters here, both younger than the aging Locas: Vivian “the Frogmouth” and Angel Rivera, whose name we’re not actually told directly at any point. So Maggie is still the center of this world — Vivian has something like a crush on her; Ray D. is still semi-obsessed with her; Angel lives in the apartment complex she manages; and we all know about Hopey — but it’s a large world, full of people with cross-connections.

Esperanza starts off with the ten-part story “Maggie,” only briefly interrupted by a Ray D. appearance. That’s more reductive than the book really is, though: all of the stories in Esperanza are telling the same overall story. Some are Maggie stories, some are Hopey stories, some are Ray D. stories, and some even more exotic, but these are all people in the same circle and the stories are all placed in time. It’s all one piece in the end: it all comes together.

Maggie is still managing that broken-down apartment complex in LA, blonde and chubby in what’s probably her early forties. She’s still sabotaging herself, still helping Izzy manage with her minor-author fame, still circling Hopey, who is tending bar nearby and working in some kind of office. (If there was ever any explanation of what Hopey did for close to ten years in that office with Guy Goforth, I missed it.)

Vivian — a bombshell of a woman of twenty-five or so who generates trouble just by being in the vicinity — is the motivating force for most of what happens in Esperanza. She dates Ray D.; she almost has an affair with Maggie; she’s caught up in various low-life gangsters and ex-boyfriends who don’t realize they’re ex. And she can spark a fight just by standing there.

The rest of the plot is set in motion by Hopey’s old enemy Julie Wree, whose mean-girl circle is still intact, still more successful than our heroines, and running a popular public-access TV show, where Izzy appears once and Vivian is the “ring girl,” coming through boxing-style in a bathing suit holding large cards.

Well, there’s a lot of incidents here that aren’t set in motion by anything in particular. Hernandez’s characters are restless and unsatisfied and rarely happy with themselves — and that drives them to do a lot of what they do, in this book and in all of his other work.

The back half of Esperanza semi-alternates stories about Vivian and Ray D.’s messy relationship with the “Day By Day With Hopey” series. Hopey is studying to be a teacher’s assistant — we don’t see her do much studying, but we see her leave the old office job and start the new job — and it looks like she’s finally growing up, finally leaving behind the reflexive shit-stirring that was so central to her early punk personality. (You can see Vivian as the same kind of person, only more so: Hopey fomented chaos deliberately, Vivian is an endless source of chaos in herself.) But she’s also having a slow break-up with her live-in girlfriend Rosie while flirting with saying “I love you” to Maggie, chasing the cute girl fitting her for glasses and having a friends-with-benefits thing going on with yet another woman, Grace.

This is a world: these people all know each other. Some of them like each other, some of them love each other, some of them want to fuck each other, some of them want to kill each other. Actually, “some” in the previous sentence might be understating it: the thing about Hernandez’s cast is that they all feel like that to all of the rest of them, more or less, at different times. (Except Julie Wree: everyone hates that bitch.) Epseranza has stories from the time when some of them are starting to think that they might be getting a little to old to be this crazy all the time.

Maybe they’re right. But I also notice that Hernandez has been bringing in newer, younger women all of the time — Gina and Danita previously, Vivian and Angel most prominently here — so that, if his old cast ever does grow up too much, he has more Locas to keep it all going.

I wouldn’t worry about that: nobody ever really grows up. We just get old, faster than we expected. And we’re all still crazy: that’s why we read Jaime Hernandez, to show us the ways we are, so we can laugh and recognize our own craziness.

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

REVIEW: Lucifer the Complete Third Season

Nothing is as it seems on Fox’s Lucifer. The charming police procedural series is also a horror story and maybe even an allegory for human existence. Loosely based on Vertigo’s Lucifer Morningstar (from Sandman), the show has underperformed on the network despite a strong lead performance from Tom Ellis. As a result, fans never know if the show will be around or not.

With season three’s pickup iffy, Fox held back four episodes — “Mr. And Mrs. Mazikeen Smith,” “City Of Angels,” “Off the Record,” and “Vegas with Some Radish.”– running them as part of the 2017-18 season. Then, when things looked dire for a fourth outing, they decided to hold back on two more. And finally, once the show was officially canceled, they burned off the final two episodes – “Boo Normal” and “Once Upon a Time” — as a block on May 28,

Thankfully, you can have all 26 of them on four discs in the just-released Lucifer the Complete Third Season from Warner Home Entertainment.

We open with the mystery of where Lucifer was and how he got his wings back. That propels things, especially his consternation at the fact no one noticed his two-day absence. There are, though, bigger issues including a new killer in town, dubbed Sinnerman along with a brand new commander at police headquarters: Lieutenant Marcus Pierce (Tom Welling). You can almost being to suspect there’s some connection between the two and it is revealed across the run of the season.

Each week there’s a crime to solve and character arcs to advance, but really, this season is all about the characters coming to grips with their true natures. Lucifer won’t tell Chloe (Lauren German) who he is, something he’s tried to do since the beginning, usually with his fussy brother Amenadiel (D.B. Woodside) stopping him. This time, it’s Pierce who gets in the way, romancing her, bringing her along for his own reasons that make for a nice reveal in the post-hiatus “All about Her”. He’s Cain, the first murderer, and was cursed with immortality and like so many immortals in fiction, is weary of it and wants to die. His plans are all about bringing him death and peace in Heaven.

LUCIFER: L-R: Tom Ellis and Kevin Alejandro in”All Hands on Decker”

But first, others must die, which brings out fine work from Tricia Helfer, as Charlotte, and Woodside. Welling’s Pierce was a wonderful addition, and his work has been quite effective, coming a long way from Smallville.

Lucifer has other ideas as seen in the rather effective finale, “A Devil of my Word”, with terrific visuals and a nicely choreographed fight. Finally, he stands revealed as the devil and Chloe is left to process the news. And as things wrap up, we’re left with a final meditation on free will vs God’s plan.

The series has, fortunately, been picked up by Netflix so we can see what happens next.

The five DVD discs are fine to watch and come with a handful of deleted scenes for 11 of the episodes. Additionally, disc 2 offers up Off Script with Tom & Tom, Part 1 as Ellis and Welling chat in Lucifer’s penthouse. You can find the entertaining part 2 on disc 3 and part 3 on disc 4. On the final disc, you have the cast and crew chat about moving the production to California in Lucifer Returns! Bringing the Hit Show to LA and the obligatory Lucifer: 2017 Comic-Con Panel, and finally a short Gag Reel.

Book-A-Day 2018 #238: Girlfiend by The Pander Brothers

I have never been so tempted to take Jacob and Arnold Pander’s surname so literally.

Perhaps it’s because Girlfiend  started off as a screenplay, but this thin (but stylish) story of a runaway vampire girl and the boy she meets in the big city (Seattle) feels like a collection of second-hand attitudes and moments in search of a coherent plot or reason for being.

Don’t get me wrong: it looks great, as always with the Panders, full of speed lines and slashing shadows and evocative eyes. They get into some complex page layouts, too, with negative effects overlaid on shard-like panels on big double-page spreads, to give comics the eyeball kicks of a big-screen movie. And this would be a lot of fun as a movie, though it feels like something you’d see in the second-run theater in about 1988. (The Panders have always felt like a window into a superstylish ’80s; that’s what they do.)

So a young woman gets off a bus in downtown Seattle, sometime that could be now but doesn’t really feel like it. She’s distracted and maybe a bit overwhelmed — and she’s killed, messily, in a car crash.

Cut to the local morgue, where tech Nick is working on her body. And she comes back to life after he removes a nasty piece of rebar from the middle of her chest. Her name is Karina, and, inevitably, she moves in with him within another scene or two.

She tries to hide her secrets, but it all comes out quickly: she’s a vampire, one of the special “next-generation” kind who can go out by day, but otherwise has the usual vamp details — fangs, needs to drink blood, young and beautiful forever, strong and agile and powerful.

Meanwhile, in the B plots, there’s both a crew of criminals who have heisted something very valuable and dangerous (and keep getting themselves killed in various ways trying to open a safe and maneuver for control of it), and two detectives who spend a lot of time talking about justice and showing up after those criminals and others die in bloody ways.

Nick gets Karina to go after criminals for the blood she needs to drink — which means, mostly, the gang I just mentioned. The two cops are more familiar with vampires than you’d expect. And a team from Karina’s “family” is heading to town to return or eliminate her: no one is allowed to escape.

They all collide in the end, as they must. Since this is a comic, we don’t get a Kenny Loggins song under the big fight, but we can imagine it. There’s a happy ending for the heroes, since that’s how ’80s movies have to end. And, again, it all looks great, even if the story is nothing but B-movie cliches as far as the eye can see.

But if you’re looking for the great lost Seattle vampire movie of the late ’80s, you just might have found it in this comic.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #237: Ares & Aphrodite: Love Wars by Jamie S. Rich and Megan Levens

It can be hard to praise things for being small without sounding condescending.

Oh, what a quaint house!

Aren’t you a darling little man!

What an adorable book!

I’m going to try to avoid that pitfall today. But what I like best about this graphic novel by writer Jamie S. Rich and artist Megan Levens is that it’s not trying to do too much. Ares & Aphrodite  tells the story of one couple — well, one potential couple — and how they got together, if, eventually, they do get together enough for that to be a story.

In a world of comics that seem to want to be widescreen media-spanning epics, Ares & Aphrodite aspires to be a really good small movie, the kind made for a TV channel that churlish men avoid or that plays in that one theater two towns over. It’s about two people, their professional connection, and a low-stakes bet they make with each other.

Will Ares is the top divorce lawyer in town. Gigi Averelle runs Aphrodite’s, the most exclusive wedding-planning service in town. “Town,” in this case, is Los Angeles, which would normally mean both of these two are massively important, with egos to match — but they’re both awfully normal and down-to-earth. Both seem to be somewhere in their thirties: old enough to have succeeded, old enough to want something better, young enough to still have time ahead of them.

Evans Beatty is Ares’s current big client — and has been several times in the past. He’s a big Hollywood producer, currently disentangling himself from a writer to marry Carrie Cartwright, the currently hot teen-queen actress. (Evans looks to have a good three decades on Carrie, but Ares & Aphrodite does its best to ignore that and focus on their individual personal issues. I thought that was fine; others may find it harder to ignore.)

Evans is Will’s client; Carrie is Gigi’s. So they’re currently running into each other a lot. Will asked Gigi to go on a date with him — she shot him down. So he proposed a bet: if Evans and Carrie do get married, she’ll go out with him. And Gigi accepts.

That’s the central thread of the plot — one lawyer, one wedding planner, one too impetuous aging producer, one not-as-sweet-as-she-seems ingenue, and a few friends and hangers-on. It ends at the big wedding, at a mansion by the sea. And their bet is decided there.

They don’t battle ninjas; they don’t even save a movie from ruin. They’re people living their lives and doing their jobs — and those jobs are mostly giving honest, professional advice, to help their clients achieve what they want in the best way possible.

It’s a sweet story, no bigger than it has to be, courtesy of Rich. Levens makes the art equally clean and transparent, like we’re looking through a window into these people’s lives, and this is how they must look at any moment.

Ares & Aphrodite is small — but, as the old saying goes, it’s also perfectly formed. We can always use more stories like that.

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

REVIEW: Deadpool 2

As I made clear with Deadpool, while I love the creators, I have always been lukewarm towards the Merc with a Mouth. I was pleasantly surprised by how entertaining the film adaptation was and that Ryan Reynolds was right to stick with the plan to make the character work on film.

Now we have Deadpool 2, out this week on disc from 20th Century Home Entertainment and it cleaned up at the box office, making in excess of $770 million worldwide. I think there’s a place for the character and the cheeky sendup of the oh-so-serious superhero fare. Frankly, better skewer yourself than let someone else do the honors. It’s certainly a proven success for Marvel the last decade.

The super-thin plot basically has a despondent Deadpool, in the wake of his sweet Vanessa’s (Morena Baccarin) death come to the aid of a young mutant, Russell Collins (Julian Dennison), hounded by an orphanage and its nasty headmaster (Eddie Marsan), that has been abusing mutants. This could have been subtitled How Deadpool got his Mojo Back.

Along the way, he gets a wakeup call from Colossus (voice by Stefan Kapicic), forms X-Force, and fights against or with Cable (Josh Brolin) as the prey becomes the prowler as the kid, pushed to the limit, fights back. Cable’s back from the future to kill the kid to protect his own family, creating the usual temporal headaches. X-Force features many familiar mutants including Domino (Zazie Beets), and you either love or hate how they’re used (abused?) in this film.

That’s pretty much it. Along the way, we get the overstuffed meta jokes and Easter Eggs, some of which are utterly brilliant and others are just so much filler. Brolin and Beets sell their new characters well although her Domino looks better in comics, here she looks generic.

Director David Leitch keeps things moving at a fine clip and makes certain the fun supporting players from the first outing, including Blind Al (Leslie Uggams) and Weasel (J.T. Miller) are there for good bits. Less useful was the superfluous use of Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), who is now playing kissy face with newcomer Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna), who smiles and waves a lot.

Really, it’s amusing but not the thrill a minute freshness the first film was. The action set pieces are prolonged, notably the X-Force chase/battle sequence. The climactic battle between everyone at Juggernaut (a CGI amalgam of multiple performers, voiced by Reynolds) was just so much destruction without humor. Better are the post-credits sequences that offer up some of the best meta humor in the entire film and well worth sticking around for.

The film most clearly sets the film and character in the Fox corner of the Marvel universe thanks to a brilliant blink-and-you-miss-it cameo. The question becomes, where do you go from here? The answer may reside more with Kevin Feige than anyone else and it’s still too early to tell.

The Blu-ray comes with two discs, one with the theatrical release and special features while the second disc has the fifteen minute longer Super Duper Cut. The best that can be said of the new cut is that it provides a fascinating study in editing considering line reads and sequences are edited differently as are the musical cues. Basically, the fifteen minutes is merely more. The 4K Ultra HD comes with the theatrical release as both 4K and Blu-ray plus the bonus Blu-ray disc. All versions come with a Digital HD code.

The AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1 is just fine, with good color and detail (pointing out how cheap some of the CGI looks in comparison with other moments). The DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 mix is excellent.

There are plenty of special features, some fun, some interesting, some utterly superfluous. We start with the Deleted/Extended Scenes (2:36) and Gag Reel (3:11) before we get to the film’s theme explored in Deadpool Family Values: Cast of Characters (15:09). Then we have David Leitch Not Lynch: Directing DP2 (11:39); Deadpool’s Lips Are Sealed: Secrets and Easter Eggs (12:52); Until Your Face Hurts: Alt Takes (9:25); Roll With the Punches: Action and Stunts (6:57); The Deadpool Prison Experiment (11:28); The Most Important X-Force Member (12:21);  Chess With Omega Red (1:16); Swole and Sexy (2:12), which focuses on the red necks (Matt Damon and Alan Tudyck); and, “3 Minute Monologue” (2:14), Brolin riffs during makeup.

There’s an Audio Commentary by Ryan Reynolds, David Leitch, Rhett Reese and Paul Warnick that is occasionally interesting and revealing.

Deadpool’s Fun Sack 2: Videos (35:22) has an amalgam of bits filmed for the film including the hilarious first teaser and Stills (2:23).

Book-A-Day 2018 #235: Star Wars: A Long Time Ago…: Dark Encounters by a whole bunch of people

Today’s story is about reading procrastination, or about good intentions, or maybe just how there’s more things we want to do in the world than there are things we have the time to do.

Fifteen years or so ago, Dark Horse was humming along with its Star Wars comics program — a few things tied to the prequel trilogy, which was about to wrap up, but mostly in the “Extended Universe,” in-continuity stories that stretched across comics and videogames and the novels Bantam and others published. Someone remembered that there was also an old series of Star Wars comics — the ones from Marvel that ran from 1977 through 1986 and were solidly out of continuity by that point — and decided to reprint them.

I guess they were pitched to the Science Fiction Book Club, where I worked at the time. I was the resident Star Wars guy then, reading and acquiring all of the novels and getting to go to a licensor showing of Phantom Menace a few years earlier. [1] I don’t think we did them, but I ended up with copies of the first two collections, Doomworld and Dark Encounters .

At the time, I thought I’d be doing a lot of reading on the nice comfortable couch in our dining room/kitchen/maybe a great room if you squint. So the two Star Wars books, along with some other stuff, migrated to an end table next to that couch, and sat there. Somewhere in the middle, before this blog started, I did read Doomworld.

But Dark Encounters lingered, and wandered around the house, in search of a reading spot where I actually would read it. Eventually, it ended up on a shelf, which would have been the sensible place to begin, and I finally got to it — forty years after the comics themselves and over fifteen since the book was published — as part of this Book-A-Day push.

These stories are not part of any continuity anymore. They only vaguely qualified when they came out, since it was only the dawn of the Era Of Continuity, and it’s clear whoever held the license issued occasional diktats to Marvel, asking them to tack over in this direction because the new movie was coming up, or to slim down the new additions and have the next big plotline be set on Tatooine again.

But even that vague, OK-maybe-it’s-sorta-canon sense of the original comics was firmly jettisoned first by the Extended Universe (which, as far as I can tell, is mostly called that in retrospect — at the time it was just a bunch of other Star Wars stories in different media) and then by whatever we’re calling the spiffed-up Nu Wars continuity where Han and Leia only had one mopey son rather than three odd kids. So these stories are doubly out of continuity — they’re not even part of the old one, that various sectors of the Internet are loudly proclaiming is obviously better than this new version with way too many icky girls and not enough boys playing with their lightsabers.

And, frankly, these are odd stories: very comic-booky, obviously done quickly to deadlines and trying to spin out what was a fairly thin thread from the first Star Wars movie. (At this point, it was still called Star Wars. Please remember that.) If none of the ideas from these comics — the giant gambling space station The Wheel, ray shields, the villainous and aristocratic Tagge family, cyborg bounty hunters, Imperial industrial planets, the idea of the Empire as a long-running thing with a family one could marry into, the winged Sky’tri people of Marat V, the Sacred Circle religious organization — turned out to have anything to do with George Lucas’s actual future Star Wars stories, well, how could any of us have known? (George didn’t know himself, despite all of the many “I meant to do that” retcons since then.)

Dark Encounters collects issues 21 to 38, and the first Annual, of that Marvel series. Those comics originally appeared from March 1979 through August 1980 — Empire was in production for most or all of that time, but how much of the details flowed out to the comics team is harder to say. These were the days before tight licensing integration, in a world where communications were slower and less ubiquitous than now. Stuff just happened.

The comics here are mostly written by Archie Goodwin, with Chris Claremont tackling the Annual. Carmine Infantino draws nearly all of the issues, inked by Bob Wiacek most of the time and Gene Day the rest. (Mike Vosburg and Steve Leialoha did the Annual with Claremont.) The very last issue here much have some kind of interesting story behind it: issue 37 proclaims that the next issue will start the Empire adaptation, but the actual issue 38 has a shorter story “written” by Goodwin but “plotted” by penciller Michael Golden, which smells like a last-minute rush job to me. The issue (inked by Terry Austin) is also very much a one-off fill-in, of the “hey! did we tell you this story? it happened a little while ago, in between other stories…” style. And then it, too, says the next issue will begin the Empire adaptation, which actually did happen.

Characters often look off-model here, particularly Chewbacca, who has a flesh-colored face for a lot of the book. Whether they act off-model is a more complicated question: you have to consider only the original Star Wars movie, and that doesn’t giver us a lot of guidance. But they’re all pretty recognizable as the people they kept being in the later movies — depth of characterization is not really a George Lucas core concern.

So these are weird, funky ’70s Star Wars stories, set in a universe that’s vaguely like the later Star Wars universes, but not all that much. Sadly, the giant green bunny Jaxom doesn’t show up in this book — I think he was in the first collection — but we do have a planet of blue-skinned flying people to compensate. (Frankly, a lot of this Star Wars feels more like the 1980 Flash Gordon than like what Star Wars turned into.) The core audience, obviously, is people who were there at the time, but there’s appeal to anyone who likes the oddball corners of space-operatic universes.

[1] True fact: I only got to go to two movie screenings because of the SFBC. One was Phantom Menace and the other was Batman and Robin. So, yeah, the glamor was real.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #234: Ocean/Orbiter by Warren Ellis and various artists

The romance of monkeys in tin cans continues to elude me. It was one of my pet peeves back when I was working at the SFBC — an endless stream of stories, all by men (it was always men) who imprinted on an Apollo launch early, with another piece of special pleading about how Man was Destined to Go To The Stars because it was His Destiny Goshdarnit and We Can’t Put All Our Eggs In One Basket and The Frontier Breeds Real Men and Man Must Go Ever Onward and similar piffle.

I thought I’d left that all behind a decade ago when I was cast out of paradise lost my SF job, and that was one of the few bright spots of the transition. [1]

But I still read SF, some of the time. And those same guys — mostly my generation, more’s the pity, so I can’t gratuitously insult their entire cohort — keep writing stories about how, this time, sending warm bodies into space is both really, really important and justified by some new piece of handwaving they’ve just discovered or invented.

It’s almost enough to make a man swear off near-future SF, I tell you.

And it somewhat infects the book I have to tell you about today. Ocean/Orbiter: The Deluxe Edition  collects two entirely separate SFnal graphic novels from the mid-aughts. Both are written by Warren Ellis; Ocean is drawn by Chris Sprouse and inked by Karl Story while Orbiter has art by Colleen Doran. There is also an afterword by Ellis, specifically about Orbiter, which is the full monkeys-in-cans hoo-hah with a side order of Columbia sadness. [2]

(I have another rah-rah monkeys-in-space book that I’m still reading; it will come up here eventually. Do not expect me to have my mind changed.)

Anyway, the two stories are completely separate: both near-future SF, yes, but one about a hundred years on and one a now-alternate day-before-yesterday. Not set at all in the same SFnal universe, and with entirely different artists. The one that’s not about the importance of monkeys in tin cans, unsurprisingly, is more successful.

Ocean originally appeared as a six-issue miniseries in 2004-2005. It’s the one a hundred years on, and is set mostly around Europa, where a UN research station has just discovered the usual impossible, dangerous alien artifact.

In this case, it’s a huge array of what seem to be cryopods, with billion-year-old humanoid sentients (99% human, of course) in them, floating deep in Europa’s ice-covered ocean. Sent to investigate is Nathan Kane, a special weapons inspector for the UN, since the alien humanoids have quite impressive and very deadly technology.

Also close by is a “Doors Corporation” (wink wink nudge nudge) station, because of course a computer company has a lot of research that can only be done in Jovian orbit. (I would have preferred a slightly more plausible evil corporation.) And they, being computer whizzes with better, newer tech than the government folks, have tapped into the official telemetry, figured out what’s going on, and (accidentally?) started the wake-up sequence for this billion-year-old alien army.

This is a mildly cyberpunky future, so Doors replaces the free will of its employees with its own software for the duration of their contracts, which makes their local manager (far from home and far overdue on his required software updates) less amenable or available for negotiation than he might be.

So it does not come down to negotation, as one would expect in a near-future SFnal comic about a weapons inspector. One must have weapons to inspect, right?

Sprouse and Story make this a crisp-looking tale, in a solid Big Two look. Ellis hits the expected story beats, but does it well, and doesn’t throw in the titillation that you might expect. I didn’t find Ocean particularly surprising, but it’s a solid, and mostly “hard,” SFnal story in comics form, and there are damn few of those.

Orbiter, on the other hand, has a softer, more people-centric visual look, driven by artist Colleen Doran. And it is very much the story of how we are Destined to go into space, and how an enigmatic event — yes, another one of those — pushes that to happen.

Ten years before the book begins, and a few years in the future from 2001 when it was written, the space shuttle Venture disappeared just after achieving orbit. Now, suddenly, it returns to land at a Kennedy Space Center overrun by what seem to be shanty-town refugees for no reason the story deigns to give us. (Well, obviously, everything in a society goes to shit when they turn their backs on manned spaceflight! Everyone knows that!)

Only one man, the commander, is on board, and he’s insane. The outside is covered with something that looks like the original covering, but is actually skin. And there’s all kinds of weird stuff inside.

A colorful group of ex-astronauts and other science-y types is quickly assembled to investigate, and they act colorful and throw out crazy theories for fifty pages or so. And then they all realize they they really really want to go to space, because that’s where monkeys belong, and the nice aliens have set everything up so they can.

(I may be exaggerating, but I’m not really joking.)

Of all the kinds of special pleading for monkeys in cans, the “super-powerful benevolent aliens will totally do all of the hard stuff for us!” is by far the most special.

I have a hard time taking anything in Orbiter seriously, though I have liked Doran’s work in the past. The story is too fond of itself, and too sure of its own righteousness, to need me or anyone to take it seriously, though. So I’ll just let it sit over there, in its smug self-satisfaction, dreaming of kids watching Apollo moonshots and growing up to have jobs in space themselves.

[1] Well, that and money. There’s hardly any jobs adjacent to print book editorial that don’t pay substantially better than it does.

[2] Yes, the Space Shuttle was a horrible design, as seen by the fact that two of them blew up in barely over a hundred missions. One of the main reasons it was horrible was because it had to take monkeys into space.

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

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