Category: Reviews

Book-A-Day 2018 #12: Satania by Vehlmann and Kerascoet

“There’s a world going on underground,” a great man once growl-sang, and Satania just is the book to explore that hidden underground world.

One might think the naked redhead at the center of the cover is Satania, but no — she’s Charlie (short for Charlotte), the teenage force behind an underground expedition to find her missing brother. Also in the group is the requisite old, crusty guide, Father Monsore, who was on the ill-fated prior expedition where Charlie’s brother Christopher disappeared. There are several others — the party starts out with about six people– but those are the ones to be concerned with.

Christopher had a crackpot theory that Neanderthals moved underground and therefore mutated into demon-looking humanoids who are the source of all worldwide stories of hell and its inhabitants. But these evolved Neanderthals are actually highly civilized, sexually free, and possessed of uniquely high technology that he will discover and share with the world. Now, Christopher deduced all of this — he has no evidence of any kind — and it seems that his book expounding his stupid theory was roundly panned out in the world. So, in a huff, he planned the expedition to prove his theories, heading into this cave somewhere in Europe to film the people he already knows everything about.

I think the reader is supposed to take Christopher’s theories seriously. But this, frankly, is impossible for anyone with a lick of sense and scientific knowledge — if he was right about anything, it could only be by pure happenstance. Luckily, it’s not necessary to believe in those nutty theories to enjoy Satania; he does not turn out to be entirely correct, though he did correctly guess that there’s much more going on in this massive subterranean cave system than surface-dwellers suspect.

So: Charlie, and Chistopher’s collaborator, and some other people somehow related to the crazy theory, are looking for him, in the cave system where a flash flood separated Christopher from the rest of his party months ago. And do they encounter their own flash flood practically as soon as the book begins?

Reader, of course they do.

They do not die in the flood, but their scrambles and running and propulsion by water leaves them somewhere they’ve never been before, with no way back. They set out to explore, in hopes of getting back to the surface. They have limited supplies and light, but, as with any self-respecting tale of underground worlds, they soon find edible and luminescent growing things to keep them going. (From that point on, everything is illuminated, and finding food not a serious issue.)

They find a lot more than that, of course: dangers aplenty, strange landscapes both made by sentients and shaped by nature, strange and dangerous creatures, allies and enemies, deadly heat and chilling cold. Satania turns out to be huge, and full of horror and wonders.

It does not, though, correspond closely to anyone’s image of Hell, even though several members of this party really really want it to, and this leads to certain unpleasant disagreements within the party. This is a story of hardships and stunning vistas, of a series of strange revelations, each stranger and more revelatory than the last. (But, to be clear: this is not a fantasy. They are not in Hell and everything they see should be roughly acceptable to physics, biology, and chemistry as we know them.)

Satania is a gorgeous book, as you might expect from the wife-and-husband art team credited as Kerascoet. The colors are exquisite, giving color to emotions and places, and the book contains a succession of amazing images, culminating in a fantastic double-page spread near the end. Even if this book hadn’t been translated from the French, I think it still would be worth “reading,” just for their work.

But it was translated (by Joe Johnson) from a script by Fabien Vehlmann, here just credited by his last name. He previously worked with Kerascoet on the stunning Beautiful Darkness , and I also really liked his script for the chilly SF graphic novel Last Days of an Immortal . So Satania is just a little disappointing: Christopher is a crank, and his crankishness sets in motion the whole plot, and there’s no way around that. The story is also more episodic — bad things happen, they flee, and have a moment of peace until the next episode starts — than the stronger Vehlmann books I’ve seen.

Not being as good as something amazing wonderful is not that much of a criticism, though: Vehlman has excellent dialogue here, making his very different people all come alive, and he particularly has a way with mania…perhaps he does realize what a crank Christopher is. Satania is an interesting, gorgeous, twisty journey through a vividly imagined world, by a set of world-class talents.

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

REVIEW: Scooby-Doo! and Batman: The Brave and the Bold

REVIEW: Scooby-Doo! and Batman: The Brave and the Bold

I wish I had a grandchild to enjoy Scooby-Doo! and Batman: The Brave and the Bold with since I am far from the target audience. I was outgrowing Saturday morning TV when Scooby and the gang debuted and never warmed up to them. Over time, the troublesome teens have encountered countless pop culture celebrities in their storied career but this, their fourth meeting with the Caped Crusader, is a record.

It makes perfect sense that the 1960s homage version of Batman (Diedrich Bader) is used here since it is stylistically appropriate for this sort of crossover. Paul Giacoppo acquits himself well with a breezy script that uses touchstone elements from both series so fans are satisfied. Comics aficionados will appreciate the use of the New Look era Mystery Analysts of Gotham, even though the novelists have been replaced by the more colorful Martian Manhunter (Nicholas Guest), Detective Chimp (Kevin Michael Richardson), the Black Canary (Grey Griffin), the Question (Jeffrey Coombs), and Plastic Man (Tom Kenny). It’s funny to see Aquaman (John DiMaggio) trying to be a member while the Scooby (Frank Welker) and the gang are tested for admittance.

Since these sorts of mashups require a major threat, it seemed right that Batman’s rogues cause the trouble so of course we get to see Catwoman (Nika Futterman), Riddler (John Michael Higgins), Penguin (Tom Kenny), Clayface (Kevin Michael Richardson), Harley Quinn, and Poison Ivy (both by Tara Strong).

There’s action, humorous hijinks, Scooby snacks, familiar catch phrases, and more all nicely handled by director Jake Castorena, who graduates from numerous art director assignments (Batman: The Killing Joke, Justice League: Gods & Monsters, etc.) to his third directorial job, following directing episodes of Justice League Action and Batman Unlimited.

The 75 minutes definitely feels padded but that’s to be expected given the limited range of the Scooby half of the match. Thankfully, the disc is rounded out with two classic episode from the New Scooby-Doo Movies:  “The Dynamic Scooby-Doo Affair” and “The Caped Crusader Caper”.

Box Office Democracy: Bottom 6 Movies of 2017

6. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

If this was just about wasted potential, Valerian would easily be on the top of this list.  There are five worse movies this year but none of them have a fraction of the visual artistry displayed here by Luc Besson.  Valerian has some of the best design I’ve seen in a movie all year and two of the most inventive chase sequences maybe ever.  It also features a terrible script that meanders forever over trivial nothing and merrily skips past dense plot without a moment for inspection.  I loved watching the action but I never really understood why any of it was going on.  Toss on top some of the worst chemistry I’ve ever seen between an on-screen couple (and honestly maybe Dane DeHaan isn’t ready to be a leading man) and this is an unpleasant movie to watch at any volume above mute.

5. American Assassin

I sincerely thought that we were past making movies like American Assassin now that we’re on year 16 of the obviously never ending War on Terror.  I assumed we were past movies that seemingly exist solely to demonize and dehumanize brown people on the other side of the world.  This is a movie with no nuance or subtext or anything.  It’s predictable, dreary, and the worst kind of weighty.  It depicts a world in which people are nothing but weapons for the nation as one we should want to be in.  It also runs for 15 minutes past any events of consequence happening and expects us to sit and care about literally nothing happening.

4. xXx: The Return of Xander Cage

If you’ve ever seen those posts where someone feeds a computer a bunch of data about one topic or another and then the computer spits back an attempt at making original things of the same set, you could understand how they probably wrote the script for xXx: The Return of Xander Cage.  It’s trying to be every successful action movie of the last ten years all at once.  It has a multi-cultural cast, numerous exotic locations that all happen to be filled with parties full of white people, and a bunch of supporting and cameo roles given to people intended to draw in audience in foreign markets.  There’s nothing holding the movie together so it’s easily the most boring movie I’ve ever seen that also features trying to use an airplane to hit falling satellites.  Movies are more than the sum of their parts and XXx: The Return of Xander Cage is a great lesson in that.

3. The Mummy

I long for the days when studios would just make movies with the idea that they could make an obscene amount of money from them.  Now it seems like they don’t want hundreds of millions of dollars unless they know it directly leads them to the next 100 million.  There were fine ideas in The Mummy about a woman who would not be cast aside and wanted to seize absolute power to punish her family.  That character doesn’t get to exist on screen because we need develop Tom Cruise to be the hero of the Dark Universe and we need time for Dr Jekyll and for the people who hunt monsters.  It is needless and exhausting.  The Mummy might not be an objectively terrible movie but it is so impossibly frustrating it needs to be recognized here.

2. Ghost in the Shell

Just to get it out of the way: this movie would make it on to this list just because it’s racist and tone deaf.  Deciding, in 2017, that it’s a good idea to make a movie based on an iconic Japanese manga/film/media empire and cast almost exclusively white people is astonishing.  It’s an irredeemable failure solely from looking at the poster.  Then it’s not even a good movie.  They threw out all the stories they presumably licensed the material for and instead gave us a milquetoast cyberpunk paint-by-number.  When the studio found out the Blade Runner sequel would be released in the same calendar year they should have shelved the project until we all forgot what could be done.

1. Transformers: The Last Knight

I suppose I should have some respect for Michael Bay as an auteur at this point.  He can’t possibly be hurting for money.  Nothing would stop him from getting lazy and putting out shorter films to try and goose his grosses by squeezing in another showing.  Bay is going to make these monstrous, incomprehensible, films and they’re going to be exactly as he wants them to be and as long as he pleases.  It would be charitable at this point to call these movies pointless.  There’s definitely a point: People who know things are idiots and people who shoot things are awesome.  They’re never going to stop with these; we should all just adjust our lives to accommodate them.

Book-A-Day 2018 #9: The Someday Funnies edited by Michel Choquette

We all love a good story. And a behind-the-scenes story can be even better than the story told in the book itself. “Heroic editor spends years of his life trying to assemble a massive, global collection with contributions by the best in the field, but the book never sees the light of day” is a great story. That’s the story Bob Levin told in a 2009 issue of The Comics Journal, about Michel Choquette and his massive book The Someday Funnies, which was almost published in the 1970s, and how all of the pages of completed art were still in storage, never seen but ready to go at a moment’s notice.

That was a wonderful story, and it led to the actual publication of The Someday Funnies in 2011, with those hundred-and-fifty pages of 1970s comics displayed on oversized pages and introduced with commentary by comics historian and critics Robert Greenfield and Jeet Heer plus Choquette’s own account of the path to creating Someday, and closed out with the usual author bios and behind-the-scenes details and an index.

Unfortunately, the actual comics don’t live up to the hype. They’re often jokes, almost all time-bound — because the stated theme of the anthology was to be a look back at the just-ended ’60s — and only a page or two apiece. Yes, the list of contributors is impressive — from Russ Heath and Jack Kirby to art spiegelman and Vaughn Bode, from Frank Zappa and William S. Burroughs to Rene Goscinny and Jean-Claude Forest, from R.O. Blechman and Ed Subitzky to Harlan Ellison and Federico Fellini — but what they contributed is much less impressive. There’s nothing here that I’d expect to see again outside of this context, other than spiegelman’s strip “Day at the Circuits,” which he reworked from the ’72 Someday original into a ’75 version for his comic anthology Arcade. Some of it is OK, some of it is incomprehensible without notes or specialized knowledge (I remembered who Vaughn Meader was, but how many people will?), and some of it rises to the level of pretty good. And some just looks like self-indulgence, of the kind that the ’60s has been inspiring at the time and ever since.

Now, it’s true that thirty-nine years is a long time for expectations to build up, and Someday Funnies grew out of a planned comics supplement for Rolling Stone magazine in 1972. But it kept growing, until the Rolling Stone piece would be just a teaser for the upcoming book, and then RS pulled out, and then a series of actual or potential book-publishing deals also fell through, leaving Choquette with a Montreal self-storage unit full of comics and correspondence and no use for them in 1979. It’s not Choquette’s fault that it didn’t happen…well, maybe it was. He could have delivered that original RS supplement and then moved on to a larger project. He could have closed out the book at some point, and kept the scope limited and specific. Frankly, at this distance, it looks like the usual story of a deal-maker high on his own deal-making, wanting to keep going with the fun part of the job (signing up artists, finding new talent, flying around the world) and avoid the vital anthology work of making choices and finalizing the package. (I think he did do the latter, eventually — but probably too late, and maybe not strongly enough to make a publication date in the 1970s.)

Someday Funnies is an interesting artifact, a comics time-capsule of both comics-makers in the early ’70s and the cultural impact of the ’60s when it was still fresh; as far as I can tell, all of these strips were done between 1970 and 1974. (For all of the details of Choquette’s travels and work here, there’s no explanation of which strips were delivered and finalized when; no timeline of the actual work assembled here.) One of Choquette’s less inspired requirements of the original project, that every piece include a blank space that would be used for some unifying element to be decided on later, was eventually filled by new 2011 art by Michael Fog, depicting Choquete’s travels in the ’70s. Again, the background story is the more interesting, vital one — the way this book came to be is more exciting than the actual thirty-five-year-old strips it contains.

One last consumer note: Someday Funnies is a physically big book, the size of a tabloid newspaper. So it can be cumbersome to hold and read as well, and some people may find it difficult to store. (I don’t intend to keep my copy permanently, so I don’t have that problem.)

I’m glad Someday Funnies was eventually published, and all of the contributors — well, those who hadn’t died in between — got to finally get paid and see their work in print. That also was the perfect end to the real story of interest here, of Choquette and his travails. But you don’t need to read or care about the book to know and appreciate that story, and it may be easier to care if you haven’t read it.

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

Book-A-Day 2016 #6: Baking With Kafka by Tom Gauld

Is Tom Gauld our most erudite cartoonist? From the evidence of his work, he well could be — there’s a parade of authors both classic (Shakespeare, Austen) and genre (Ballard, Gaiman) and modern literary (Franzen, Mantel), and a dazzling awareness of tropes and ideas and genre furniture in his work, and it’s hard to think of any other cartoonist who has worked so much with this material.

Naysayers might point out that all of this material originally appeared in the book section of the British newspaper The Guardian, and so one could thus expect that bookishness would be baked into the premise. That’s true, but, still Teh Grauniad asked Gauld to be their cartoonist in the first place for a reason, and it’s not because of his amazing facility at drawing likenesses of famous writers.

(Just in case: Gauld does not have an amazing facility for drawing likenesses of famous writers. At least, I’ve never seen such from him, and his minimalist style would tend to go in the opposite direction. But there I go explaining the jokes again.)

Baking With Kafka is a collection of Guardian cartoons. Some of them may have appeared elsewhere, before or instead of or also, because this book, like so many others, doesn’t explain where it’s contents appeared previously. (Cue my standard if-I-ruled-the-world complaint.) They are all about books, in some way or another, or, at least, about the kinds of things that bookish people care about.

It contains such awesome works as “The Four Undramatic Plot Structures” and “My Library” (with books color-coded as to whether or not they have or will be read), “The Nine Archetypal Heroines” and “How to Submit Your Spy Novel for Publication,” “Jonathan Franzen Says No” and “Niccolo Machiavelli’s Plans for the Summer.” All of those are a single page in size; no one must keep a thing in memory from page to page — except, perhaps, a sense of object permanence and the ability to read the English language.

Some people will hate this book. Perhaps they hate it because they hate literature, or books in general. Perhaps they hate it because Gauld’s style is too simple and illustrative for them. Perhaps they hate it because they are hateful people full of hate who live only to hate. There are many reasons, none of them, I insist, good ones.

All of the smart readers will love it. And you consider yourself a smart reader, don’t you? There you go.

(For those unsure as to how smart they are: the cartoons here are much like those in You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack . You might also want to consider Gauld’s recent full-length graphic novel Mooncop .)

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

Box Office Democracy: Star Wars: The Last Jedi

I think The Last Jedi is my favorite Star Wars film.  It’s hard to say, these movies need so much time and will be seen over and over again.  I’m unwittingly comparing it in my head to my more recent viewings of the original trilogy and not the dazzling first ones but I have to trust it will hold up.  The Last Jedi is ambitious, and thought-provoking and fun in a way that none of the “core” Star Wars films ever have been.  This is the kind of movie someone would make if they spent their childhood loving the material but realized as an adult that it depicted a world that would never function.  Rian Johnson makes a more functional galaxy with more authentic characters and he’s made the best big-budget science fiction movie in some time.

It’s tough to write this review after having seen the battle lines being drawn across the Internet over the movie.  People are polarized and it’s pushing opinions to the far reaches.  I believe Kylo Ren is the most interesting character in all eight Star Wars movies but that might be an overreaction.  I know that his internal struggle and strife is the only time the dark side has seemed like a real thing people would be interested in.  This is a movie that took the laughably bad Anakin Skywalker arc from the prequel trilogy and made those feeling feel real.  Here I can find the nuance and conflict that we had to paste on to the prequels with speculation and supplemental material but all here in one go.  I would say that this is probably how people thought about Darth Vader after watching Empire Strikes Back but I’ve seen that movie, there are only a handful of meaningful head tilts signaling anything at all.  For the first time I feel like I’m not being asked to fill in big gaps of narrative or run to read some tangential novel released years later.

I’ve heard people say that none of the characters changed or grew in this movie and I simply can’t agree with that at all.  If after the events of this movie Poe isn’t doing some big time soul searching, this whole trilogy is a massive failure.  Granted we don’t see him become less of a reckless hotshot but it’s certainly what I expect to happen.  You can grow and change and not have it be immediately visible.  Finn, the person who lived to be a soldier, starts to see the galaxy that isn’t in a state of constant war and starts to see the context.  His relationship with Rose is engaging and exciting.  I enjoy the look at military heroism and idealism as Rose moves from idolizing Finn for his supposed deeds in the first film and then seeing that he’s a flawed person and kind of lapping him by the end of the film.  I need more of those characters pushing and pulling on each other.  Maybe even smooching but I do not want to wade in to the intricacy of Star Wars shipping politics.

If we want to accept the premise that the entire Star Wars series is the story of the Skywalker family (and I’m not sure I do want that, but here we are) this was another smashing success for me.  Mark Hamill has spent most of his career at this point as a voice actor, and it was so apparent in his performance here.  There are lines and readings where you can still here the kid annoyed at his uncle because he wanted to go get power converters. But there’s also the person who has had to live the last thirty years in a galaxy that he didn’t change nearly as much as he thought he would.  I wish we got a little more Leia but they didn’t know they weren’t going to get another chance with her.  It’s a sad thing but it is what it is.

The Last Jedi has the inside track to become my favorite Star Wars movie because it is challenging.  It takes a universe that, for all the turmoil depicted around the margins, has been a place of very safe storytelling and shakes it all the way up.  It shows us not just the corrupt slug gangsters but the people in glittering casinos making money off of selling fighter ships.  It’s willing to show us heroes getting old and instead of being cagey or clever like Obi-Wan or Yoda, becoming kind of hopeless and despondent.  It gives us villains that are complicated and conflicted at moments before their sudden but inevitable betrayal.  I’ve never felt this excited, this alive, after walking out of a Star Wars film in my lifetime as I did after The Last Jedi.

REVIEW: Dunkirk

REVIEW: Dunkirk

Regardless of the subject matter, director Christopher Nolan remains an interesting, inventive director. It’s no surprise, then, that this summer’s Dunkirk was a sober look at war through the eyes of the participants. That it lacked a traditional story and characters was just par for the course.

The film, out ow on disc from Warner Home Entertainment, is 106 minutes looking at the first day of the British withdrawal from the shore while dodging German gunfire from the ground and the air. The film offers up a 360-degree view of the carnage and heroism from the point of view of enlisted men, officers, pilots, and civilians.

Beyond the slightly unorthodox storytelling, the film is a visual masterpiece, with Nolan relying on traditional special effects, eschewing CGI, which gives the story a gritty, raw feel. He shot it with director of photography Hoyte Van Hoytema, using IMAX 65 and Panavision 65 cameras, releasing the film in differing formats depending on the house. The commercial video push is for the 4K Ultra HD edition but the film looks pretty spectacular on Blu-ray although it is said to pale next to the 4K version.

The events of Dunkirk, rescuing more than 300,000 men over eight days, largely though civilian vessels, is a small item in the history of World War II and is often overlooked here, especially since we hadn’t entered the war yet. As a result, the story unfolds like something brand new in all its tension-filled glory. We are made to feel as if we were also on the beach, tired, hungry, soaked, and certain death was seconds away.

While the cast is filled with familiar faces – Kenneth Branagh and Tom Hardy among them – every performance is unstated, the dialogue kept to a bare minimum. The role with the mot lines is like that of the civilian fisherman, Mark Rylance, an actor known for his subtle, quiet work. Most of his work is with his character’s son, Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney), and their friend, George (Barry Keoghan), both reacting differently to getting this close to the war. The first man they rescue is a shell-shocked soldier (Cillian Murphy), a stark reminder of wounds that go deep.

You have to pay attention while getting caught up in the story since there are three main storylines and each unfolds at different speeds.

The Blu-ray was overseen by Nolan, color correcting and pushing the 1080p, AVC-encoded transfer to its limits. Similarly, Nolan eschewed Dolby Atmos for a lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 audio track. It is a perfect complement so no one should feel there was loss.

Nolan also insisted the Special Features be packed on a separate Blu-ray disc. The strong Behind the Scenes material is organized into five chapters with a “play all” function. There are sub-chapters as well.

Recreating the look and feel of the 1940 setting takes up much of the material in these diverting featurettes:

  • Creation (22:19)
    • Revisiting the Miracle
    • Dunkurque
    • Expanding the Frame
    • The In Camera Approach
  • Land (16:39)
    • Rebuilding the Mole
    • The Army on the Beach
    • Uniform Approach
  • Air (18:30)
    • Taking to the Air
    • Inside the Cockpit
  • Sea (36:57)
    • Assembling the Naval Fleet
    • Launching the Moonstone
    • Taking to the Sea
    • Sinking the Ships
    • The Little Ships
  • Conclusion (1519)
    • Turning Up the Tension
    • The Dunkirk Spirit

Additionally, there is a featurette about the U.S. Coast Guard (2:02).

REVIEW: Home Again

REVIEW: Home Again

With the comic book-based movie ascendant, other genres have worn out their welcome with audiences, largely given to them being played out mines of creativity. One such casualty of staleness was the romcom; I would argue we haven’t had a good one of those in at least a decade. It makes sense, therefore, that the next generation of filmmaker tries the genre. You can’t have a better pedigree for this than Writer/Director Hallie Meyers-Shyer, who with parents Nancy Meyers (The Holiday) and Charles Shyer, were the last interesting purveyors in this field.

The trailers for Universal’s Home Again certainly looked promising with a look at 40-year old single mom Alice Kinney (Reese Witherspoon) raising her two daughters Isabel (Lola Flanery) and Rose (Eden Grace Redfield) in the house her now deceased father owned. He was a legendary director who married his last major star, Lillian (Candice Bergen), who remains a cheerful nudge. Alice is separated from her husband, music producer Austen (Michael Sheen) who can’t seem to make time for his family.

While out getting hammered in celebration of turning 40, Alice and her pals encounter fledgling filmmakers Harry (Pico Alexander), Teddy (Nat Wolff), and George (Jon Rudnitsky), in town to work on turning their short film into a feature. For some reason, none of them have money, but Harry has plenty of chemist with Alice, resulting in the three crashing at her house. Lillian invites them to stay in the guest house our back and so begins the romcom.

The three keep telling us how in awe they are with how well Alice is handling the single mom thing but Meyers-Shyer keeps forgetting to show evidence of this. Instead, these three are like elves who cook, shop, and chauffeur while also working on their careers, collectively and increasingly individually.

All the elements are here for a fun exploration of romance and parenthood in the 21st century but instead, everything is under-baked. The age difference between 20-something Harry and Alice is never an issue, the men’s fraying relationship is more contrivance than character-based dilemma, and the ultimate arrival of Austen in the mix goes along predictable lines. In fact, the further into the film we go, the more predictable the plot points get, robbing the film of being truly engaging.

The film is out now on a Combo Pack from Universal Home Entertainment so you get a fine high definition transfer, a DVD, and Digital HD code. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack is equally competent.

Despite middling to positive reviews, the movie underwhelmed at the box office, which may explain why the sole special feature is an audio commentary with Meyers-Shyer and mama Meyers.

 

REVIEW: Games of Thrones: The Complete Seventh Season

With the news this week that the eighth and final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones won’t air until 2019 comes just as Games of Thrones: The Complete Seventh Season arrives on disc tomorrow. The digital editions have been out for some time and if any season bears repeat watching it is this one.

One advantage to the bloodshed and character demises over the last few seasons has meant that the survivors all get larger roles, meatier scenes, and characters we’ve longed to see together actually share the screen. The episodes are longer, but there are fewer of them to enjoy. Perhaps the biggest downside to this is that events have had to be telescoped, stretching and then breaking the show’s internal logic.

No matter how the producers spin it, there was really no way for episode six to work once the White Walkers surrounded our hardy band of warriors. Of course we knew what was coming, we knew that Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) would arrive on her dragon to rescue them in the greatest arrival of the cavalry moment in years.

The shorter season also cost some characters a chance to breathe before they shuffled off stage, notably the sand snakes (Indira Varma and her daughters). Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) and his visions also gets short-shrift but that is more than made up for by the arc involving his sisters, Sansa (Sophie Turner) and Arya (Maisie Williams), especially as they are manipulated by Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish (Aidan Gillen). Some of their exchanges caused much chuckling.

Everyone has been moved around Westeros as the true threat has finally been exposed. And yet, there remain schemes within schemes, wheels turning as we see Cersei (Lena Headey) cutting deals with the Iron Bank and overseas alliances in anticipation of life after the White Walkers’ defeat. While it makes sense to be prepared, she may also be underestimating the size of the threat coming from the North.

As secrets have been revealed to the audience, but not yet the characters themselves, we also see the inevitable consummation of lust between Danerys and Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) leading some in the audience to go, “ick”.

After the men have brooded, slashed, and hacked their way into this mess, the tide has turned and it has pretty much fallen to the women to clean up their mess. The fun of the final season should be the culmination of the moves made during this rather satisfying seventh with Cersei, Danerys, and Sansa all in positions of power with vastly different objectives and alliances. It’s a shame Lady Olenna Tyrell (Diana Rigg) won’t be around to see it after her incredibly dignified death in episode two.

We’re in uncharted here since the television series is far past where the events of the source material, George R.R. Martin’s stalled Song of Fire and Ice novel series, left readers. As a result, we have no way of determining how much of this is Martin’s original scheme and how much a product of the producers. They have certainly maintained the flawed characters and expansive world but as they are left to their own devices, there are far fewer surprises than earlier seasons.

The episodes come in a variety of packages with our reviewing the four-disc DVD edition. The transfer for audio and video is superb and will reward viewers.

The most welcome extra is the separate disc packaged apart from the season set (for a limited time): Conquest & Rebellion: An Animated History of the Seven Kingdoms. This is an animated history of the Seven Kingdoms with voices provided by Pilou Asbæk (Euron Greyjoy), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister),Aidan Gillen (Littlefinger), Conleth Hill (Varys), Harry Lloyd (Viserys Targaryen) and Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark). The focus is on Aegon Targaryen’s attempts to conquer the Seven Kingdoms and was written by show writer Dave Hill. Essentially, this is a 45-minute expanded version of the Histories and Lore shorts, found in the box set.

The extras contained within the box set include: From Imagination to Reality: Inside the Art Department, a two-part featurette (46:25) that concentrates its attention the new sets, including Dragonstone, Casterly Rock, Highgarden, and the Dragonpit.

Fire & Steel: Creating the Invasion of Westeros (30:02) has the cast and crew talking about creating this sequence.

There are Audio Commentaries for every episode with cast and crew including producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Jacob Anderson, Gwendoline Christie, Liam Cunningham, Kit Harington, Lena Headey, and others.

Histories and Lore are seven animated shorts that provide the history and background for storylines including The Dragonpit, Highgarden, Prophecies of the Known World, the Rains of Castamere and more all narrated by cast members.

In-Episode Guides-In-feature resource that provides background information about on-screen characters and locations.

For those who buy the series digitally, available through iTunes and UltraViolet, there’s one more bonus: “Creating the North and Beyond” looking at Jon Snow’s trek north.

Herbie Archives, Volume One by Shane O’Shea and Ogden Whitney

Yeah, it did take me until now to finally read Herbie. It is so much exactly the kind of thing that I would like that the delay seems weird, but it’s a big world, and you can only do one thing at a time. I finally got to this particular thing, and can finally talk about it.

But wait! You say. Did I come in the middle of something? What on earth are you going on about?

All right, all right. Herbie Popnecker was the “hero” of a series of stories from the American Comics Group, for about a decade from 1958 through 1967 — first as one-off stories in anthologies, then as the star of twenty-three issues of his own comic in 64-67. He’s a short, fat, torpid, laconic kid with heavy-lidded eyes, a bowl haircut, and a lollipop always in his mouth, whose father is constantly complaining about him and calling him a “little fat nothing.” He doesn’t like sports or schoolwork or playing with other kids; at home he tends to sit in a straightback chair and doze, and we don’t see him at school or interacting with his peers.

So far, so promising for a humor title, right? Sounds just like the thing in the ’50s-’60s burst of teen-interest comics, with Archie and Binky and Scooter!

Well, Herbie was more than just a little fat nothing, luckily. He was also world-famous, almost omnipotent, and oddly resourceful. His lollipops gave him superpowers — this is slightly inconsistent, since sometimes he seems to have power merely because he is Herbie — and his aid is regularly sought by US Presidents and UN Secretary-Generals. Gorgeous women swoon at his approach. Vicious animals flee when they realize who he is. He travels in time, via lollipop and a flying boat-like grandfather clock, and can walk under the oceans and across empty space to reach distant planets.

And, if threatened, all he needs to do is ask “You want I should bop you with this here lollipop?” Herbie’s bop is a force that can frighten the greatest forces in the universe — in just this book, we see suns, dragons, and Satan himself cowed by it.

That is one weird mix of elements, and it doesn’t seem like it should work. But ACG editor Richard E. Hughes (writing as “Shane O’Shea”) kept a deadpan tone around Herbie, making it all strangely plausible. And Ogden Whitney drew all of the stories in a solid, straightforward style — both of them as if to drain any possible insinuation of imagination out of the stories, as if to prove Herbie’s adventures must be plausible if they are this normal-seeming.

It worked. It still works, now: some elements are a little outdated (the supernatural creatures are somewhat comic-booky and of their time), but most of Herbie is unique and sui generis. And many individual panels are still laugh-out-loud funny after fifty-plus years.

The first third of the Herbie stories were collected in 2008 as Herbie Archives, Volume One , which is what I finally read. There are two more volumes, collecting the rest of the Herbie stories, which I now need to dig up and read. If you like weird comics, you probably already know about Herbie. If you’ve never read him, you’ll probably want to move him up in the queue — this is still really good stuff, nutty and crazy in all the best midcentury ways.

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

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