Category: Reviews

REVIEW: Buffy the Vampire Slayer 25th Anniversary

Once upon a time, a young screenwriter managed to sell a vampire film script with the absurd title of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What no one realized at the time was that this amusing romp would evolve into a cult television series that would make stars out of the cast and turn the screenwriter into an acclaimed writer/director of television, feature films, and comic books.

But what was there in that little summer film from a, gasp, quarter-century ago? No surprise here, this month 20th Century Home Entertainment wasn’t going to let its anniversary slide and now have the Buffy the Vampire Slayer 25th Anniversary edition for consideration.

While the Joss Whedon script shows flashes of the wunderkind he was to become soon after, here, his subtle touches are mashed by director Fran Rubel Kuzui, who didn’t seem to share his sensibilities. Instead, she seems more accustomed to the Japanese style of film where she has largely toiled ever since. The necessary mix of geek humor and outright horror seemed beyond her skills to pull off effectively.

The film featured Kristy Swanson as Buffy Summers and was supported by Donald Sutherland, Paul Reubens, Hilary Swank, David Arquette, and Luke Perry in their attempt to save California from Rutger Hauer and his demon horde. If you come to this fresh, knowing only the show, there’s a lot that changed. Buffy on film is a senior and Giles is a mysterious stranger named Merrick Jamison-Smythe. What may seem familiar is Buffy was your stereotypical airhead/cheerleader who has to grow up in a hurry to accept her destiny as the Slayer. While Joyce on the show was a loving, supportive mother, here, Mom (Candy Clark) is a distant, neglectful influence.

If you pay attention will see uncredited turns from Ben Affleck, Ricki Lake, and later Buffy regular, Seth Green.

The 1992 release came and went without much of a ripple in the zeitgeist so this is an interesting misfire of a cultural artifact. A better interpretation of Whedon’s intention would be his Dark Horse graphic novel, Buffy: The Origin, which he considers more faithful and canonical.

It’s a fairly tepid celebration with no new extras, just a nice high definition transfer and a digital HD code.

REVIEW: Justice League: The New Frontier – Commemorative Edition

REVIEW: Justice League: The New Frontier – Commemorative Edition

While Warner Animation and Warner Home Entertainment celebrate ten years of DC Comics adaptations with next month’s 30-disc set, they are also spotlighting one of their best efforts with the current release of Justice League: The New Frontier – Commemorative Edition in a steelbook.

Based on Darwyn Cooke’s 2004 acclaimed miniseries, the 2008 animated adaptation received an 8/10 here at ComicMix. The 75-minute story deserves a fresh look and it’s a loving tribute to Cooke, who died in 2016, leaving behind a fine legacy. Directed by Dave Bullock from a script by Cooke and Stan Berkowitz, the largely faithful story is a loving tribute to an earlier era when heroes needed courage first, powers were secondary.

While the characters hail from the first days of comics’ Silver Age, the story is a fresh take, involving an alien entity known as The Centre, threatening all life of earth. With each feint and direct attack, men and women rise to the challenge, some demonstrating powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. J’Onn J’Onzz (Miguel Ferrer) reveals himself a Martian while Wonder Woman (Lucy Lawless) comes from Paradise Island to participate in the world’s defense. Bit by bit, the heroes band together so you have the birth of the Justice League, but we also have the Challengers of the Unknown, the original Suicide Squad, Dinosaur Island, the Losers, and others making an appearance.

You have to watch this to absorb all the Easter Eggs and marvel at Cooke’s deft ability to make each character recognizable and distinct. This is action-packed and perhaps one of the best adaptations over the last decade. No doubt, Cooke’s involvement guarantees that. The vocal cast, anchored by Jeremy Sisto, David Boreanez, Neil Patrick Harris, Kyle MacLachlan, Phil Morris, and John Heard is one of the stronger assemblages of talent.

The Blu-ray remains visually striking but no different than the original edition. The original special features — Audio Commentary: Bruce Timm, Michael Goguen, David Bullock, Stan Berkowitz, Andrea Romano and Gregory Noveck; Audio Commentary: Writer/Artist Darwyn Cooke; Super Heroes United! The Complete Justice League History; The Legion of Doom: The Pathology of the DC Super Villain; Comic Book Commentary: Homage to the New Frontier – are retained here.

What is new, though, is Retro Action Cool: The Story of Darwyn Cooke where friends and colleagues talk about Cooke the creator and his legacy. Many get emotional talking about their departed friend, especially Art Director Mark Chiarello, who found his work in an editor’s slush pile, and offered to get him published. It’s nice that Cooke’s work for IDW’s Parker adaptations is featured in addition to his DC material. And in a welcome touch, you actually get some interview outtakes that humanize the earnest talking heads, especially DC co-publisher Dan DiDio.

If you missed this then, get it now.

REVIEW: Batman vs. Two-Face

REVIEW: Batman vs. Two-Face

You can’t help but watch the just-released Batman vs. Two-Face with a tear in your eye and weight in your heart. Adam West’s final performance was thankfully completed well before his untimely death in June. He goes out with some fine tributes but it’s a shame the concluding chapter of his Batman career is such a mess of a story.

For whatever reason, ABC and 20th Century-Fox chose not to use Two-Face, perhaps fearing he was too gruesome for 7:30 p.m. viewing. That’s a shame since the Harlan Ellison treatment for a two-parter, had some promise. The tortured psyche of District Attorney Harvey Dent makes for a wonderful examination of mankind’s duality and the obsession with the number two fits in with the rest of the rogues’ gallery. For whatever reason, the screenwriters eschewed the comic origins in favor of something hewing closer to Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde (appropriately name-checked here).

There are storytelling lapses in logic that one could argue is in keeping with the rushed pace of producing the original story but for a sustained, feature-length story, you need a far stronger premise. We have Prof. Hugo Strange (Jim Ward) making his debut, demonstrating he has figured out how to extract “evil” from Batman’s foes. To test it, some genius has allowed him to experiment on five of the most dangerous foes rather than one, so yes it works, but so much evil has been extracted that the machine predictably explodes. And so Two-Face is born.

The rest of the story presents an opportunity to showcase large numbers of familiar felons in a wrong-headed bit of fan service (we got them last time so this feels repetitive) while creating an oddly dissatisfying subplot of Dick Grayson (Burt Ward) actually feeling jealous of Bruce Wayne (West) having an adult male friendship with Dent (William Shatner); something to feed the homosexual theories that have existed between the duo since Fredric Wertham first raised the issue in the 1950s. Thankfully, we have the welcome dalliance between Batman and Catwoman (Julie Newmar) early in the story to cement the notion that Bruce is straight. His opening scene of reciting poetry to her from outside her prison cell is one of the most romantic elements in the series.

Given the pedigree shared by writers James Tucker and Michael Jelenic, I expected a tighter story. There’s a lot of fighting, wheel-spinning, and effort to wink at the fans to prolong the story of Two-Face’s efforts to rule Gotham, especially after he unmasks Batman, and Dent’s struggle to retain his humanity. We get a nice focus on King Tut (Wally Wingert) and his own duality issues while little used villain Bookworm (Jeff Bergman) makes for a nice red herring. There is also the introduction of Dr. Quinzel (Sirena Irwin) which is tonally wrong and out of place.

Director Rick Morales does a serviceable job but may have allowed too many inside jokes, marring the actual pathos of the story. That said, of the various puns and jokes, the best may be that Dent is treated after the initial explosion at the Sisters of Perpetual Irony Hospital.

While West, Ward, and Newmar are welcome familiar voices, Shatner surprises with a nuanced performance as Dent/Two-Face. What could have been over-the-top, even for this series, actually helps ground the character’s torment. They are all well-supported by an able vocal cast.

Visually, the designs for Batman/Wayne and Robin/Grayson are less effective than the previous feature. In some angles, Robin actually looks aged and too often, neither look like their live-action counterparts. Thankfully, the animators literally copied Filmation’s Captain Kirk poses so Shatner is recognizable as his 1966 self and his Two-Face is appropriately creepy.

The Blu-ray combo pack comes with the Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD code. The Special Features open with “The Wonderful World of Burt Ward” (14:30), a look at the actor’s career and half-century relationship with West. The actor is remember during the Adam West Tribute Panel from Comic-Con International 2017 (39:30), where radio personality Ralph Garman, director Kevin Smith, producer James Tucker, actress Lee Meriwether, and moderator Gary Miereanu talk about the man’s influence over generations; “Burt Ward on Being Starstruck” (2:00); “Burt Ward on Ambition” (1:00); and “Julie Newmar on Inspiration” (2:00). Look for a 30-second Easter Egg which is fun, but obvious.: bAT

Box Office Democracy: The Snowman

There’s a degree to which I have to respect any film that can take a thoroughly innocuous thing and make it terrifying.  Movies like Child’s Play or Nightmare on Elm Street have done this and become iconic classics partially on that basis.  If you can make something spooky that people didn’t find spooky before like a kid’s toy or going to sleep you are going to get substantial mindshare out of it.  The Snowman gets to that place with snowmen.  I walked in to the theater convinced it would be a silly device but by the end of the movie I got a bit of a charge seeing them get that little bugger in to new places.  It doesn’t save the movie— it’s unfortunately a terrible bore— but it gives it a bit of a lasting legacy as opposed to just being completely forgettable.

I don’t like when I feel I’ve been lied to by the marketing materials for a movie.  The first poster I saw for The Snowman (and most of the marketing material overall) was focused on this letter that read “Mister Police You Could Have Saved Her I Gave You All The Clues” and that’s a galling claim for a movie that has basically no clues in it.  The investigation follows one thread for the whole time for basically no reason than one person has a hunch/grudge and the suspects are creepy.  Then when this part of the investigation dead ends (because it was nothing to begin with) the movie is basically out of time and has to just tell you who did it so they have time for any kind of climax.  There’s no mystery presented to the audience at all.  To be fair the letter on the poster is not in the film at all but it still feels like I was sold a mystery and then delivered a more straightforward thriller.

It’s such a bummer that The Snowman is as bland as it is.  There’s a decent cast in here but they have nothing to work with and there’s no spark coming from behind the camera.  Michael Fassbender is an actor that I like but there’s nothing compelling about being a drunk detective that doesn’t have his life together.  That isn’t an interesting character because it’s been done hundreds and hundreds of times before.  He floats through the movie seeming barely interested (it leads to an amazingly unintentionally funny sex scene but that probably wasn’t the point) and that’s not acceptable in a movie about people being killed.  People have to care about that.  The whole movie is full of people who don’t care enough that a serial killer is plaguing their lives or that their son keeps running away, or that a dead person is suddenly in front of them.  Val Kilmer apparently was battling cancer during filming of The Snowman and they had to have someone else come in and rerecord all of his dialogue and it’s jarring and the sync is not as good as it could be.  I don’t know why you would cast someone who couldn’t deliver their lines.  I love Val Kilmer but he’s not such a transcendent physical actor that he’s good enough when his ever scene is a spaghetti western.

It would be hard for a transcendent movie full of spectacular performances and excellent directing to overcome the dreadful story work in The Snowman and with lifeless entries in all other categories this movie sinks into the frozen lake the provides so much of the plot development.  This is a movie with two compelling scenes in the first third of the film and then just a slog of bland nothing for an hour as the gloomy array of characters struggle to make me believe they care.  There are reports out that they didn’t get to shoot 10-15% of the script due to timing and budget issues.  Maybe somewhere in those gunshot pages there are magic scenes that turn this in to the compelling mystery thriller the marketing promised.  It’s just as likely there’s nothing that was going to save this film, that the adaptation was doomed from the start and it was a studio deciding not to send good money after bad.  We’ll never know and I don’t intend to lose any sleep over it.

Sweatshop by Peter Bagge and others

This is not a limited series. I know: I was surprised, too. But Peter Bagge’s afterword, which explains the history of Sweatshop , makes it clear that it was intended to be ongoing, and that he would have been happy to keep it running for a much longer time.

That didn’t happen: Sweatshop got a six-issue run from DC in 2003, when that company was in one its periodic throes of trying to broaden its range, which was followed by the inevitable and equally periodic pullback to its core competency of grimacing people in spandex punching each other repeatedly.

Sweatshop is not about spandex, or punching. It does have its share of grimacing, and other extreme facial expressions, because we are talking about Peter Bagge here. But, otherwise, it doesn’t look much like a good fit for DC. Our central character is Mel Bowling, a comics creator on the far side of middle age. He’s the credited creator of the syndicated strip Freddy Ferret — though it’s really put together by his oddball crew of young, underpaid assistants — and a lazy, narcissistic golf-playing blowhard.

(The set-up is not unlike some manga about manga-making — Bagge doesn’t mention any inspirations, or Japanese comics at all, in his afterword, but it’s at the very least a striking case of parallel development.)

Reading the first issue, I thought it would feature Bagge’s art on stories about the whole team and his fellow artists (Stephen Destefano, Bill Wray, Stephanie Gladden, Jim Blanchard, and Johnny Ryan also contribute art to these stories) each picking up from the POV of one of the assistants. That would have been neat, and more formally interesting, but it’s not the way the series ended up going: the feint in that direction was apparently a scene-setting one-off for that first issue. Instead, there’s mostly a lead story for each issue drawn by Bagge, and then additional stories drawn by one or more of the others, in the style of old humor comics.

The stories are all about that crew in Bowling’s studio — worrying about the “Hammie” awards, planning and going to the big Comic-Con, dealing with a new writer joining the team, and various career and personal issues for all of them. It’s not quite as zany and slapstick as Bagge got in the ’80s and ’90s, but these are broad characters who do crazy things: it’s a lot like a sitcom on the page.

Sweatshop is funny, and probably even funnier the more you know about strip comics: I suspect Bagge buried jokes and references I didn’t get among the ones I did see and laugh at. Some readers may find the changing art styles distracting, though they all are in the same tradition — Bagge’s rubber-hose arms and googly eyes are probably the most extreme, cartoony style here, with the others giving a (sometimes only very slightly) more restrained version of the same look. What can I say? It’s a funny collection of stories about comics and comics people, and a decade has only dated it slightly. (A contemporary version would definitely have at least one issue full of webcomic jokes.)

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

Box Office Democracy: Happy Death Day

It would be overly cynical to say that I’m never surprised, or pleasantly surprised by movies anymore.  It happens fairly often that a movie I think is going to be mediocre or bad ends up being good.  It’s much more rare that a movie that I’m actively rolling my eyes at while the trailer is rolling becomes a complete delight.  Happy Death Day looked like a poorly conceived attempt at rehashing old ideas.  Instead it’s a fun, playful, horror movie that hits all the right notes and does a mostly good job exploring their concept.

Happy Death Day is exactly the movie you think it is.  It’s Groundhog Day but a slasher movie instead of a Bill Murray comedy.  A college student (Jessica Routhe) is murdered on her birthday and keeps reliving the day until she can get through it without dying.  There’s a bit of mystery, a bit of comedy, a bunch of becoming a better person and we’re all back in the lobby before the 100 minute mark.  The mystery isn’t particularly difficult (I had identified the culprit in less than 15 minutes) and nothing in the movie is particularly unique or groundbreaking, but everything chugs along nicely.  There are plenty of scares (jump and non) and there’s a persistent sense of tension once the general aura of menace is established.

It’s strange to have a slasher movie where only one person ever gets killed.  On one hand you can always be on the edge of your seat because you always know who is going to be attacked next and that character is always on screen.  On the other hand, you know that if the killer succeeds the movie resets and there are no lasting consequences.  They try to introduce some lasting stakes about an hour in with Theresa getting weaker each time she resets but that never feels like a real threat or a particularly persistent one as in one reset she is confined to a bed and a few resets later she’s enacting an action movie plan for revenge.

The problems with the movie are ones of over-plotting and low budget.  The movie feels the need to chase down so many red herrings that not only go nowhere but aren’t that amusing.  There’s a fun montage of failed suspects but anything that takes longer than a couple minutes ends up feeling a touch long.  The supporting cast is perilously thin and all of the suspected motives are kind of ridiculous so it drags a bunch.  There’s a particular theory of the crime that takes up a huge chunk of the second act that, had it been the true solution, would have been so far out of left field it’s impossible for it to be right just on the basis of not passing dozens of angry patrons on my way in to the building.  This is a Blumhouse film so it was made on a shoestring budget, and it’s only obvious with the fight choreography when nothing looks like it actually hurts.  It’s a little thing but what if, when they knew one of their movies was going to get a big weekend theatrical release, they juiced the budget a little bit so the climax didn’t look like a student film?

There are a lot of bad things to be said about the Blumhouse model of movie making.  That it creates a race to the bottom, that a successful formula can be driven in to the ground at an amazing pace, that things can feel more like a product than a work of art.  This year has shown the way that model can work very well.  Happy Death Day is a movie that wouldn’t get made without this scattershot model.  It’s not that strong of a concept, it isn’t a good pitch or a poster but it turned out to be a good movie.  The lower bar let them jump that much higher.  It’s honestly the same way Get Out wouldn’t have gotten made because a more traditional studio wouldn’t have trusted a new director nor would they have wanted to make a movie like that about race.  Happy Death Day is a half-clever idea executed all the way perfectly and it makes for a great movie, the early favorite for best horror movie of the fall season.  Don’t make a sequel though, the sequel will be a horrible train wreck; this is the money you get from this idea.

Box Office Democracy: Blade Runner 2049

I often cite the original Blade Runner as my favorite movie.  I also think having one favorite anything is kind of silly so it’s always been less of a true answer as it’s been an indication of what I like.  I like cyberpunk, I like hard-boiled detective stories, I like being asked to think about things, and I like a movie that can spawn a conversation 30-some years after it came out.  I don’t know that Blade Runner 2049 has the legs for that last part but it hits all those other bits and so I have to say I liked watching it a great deal.  It’s a challenging movie and it makes some colossal missteps along the way— but it’s been fun to think about and talk about so far.

Denis Villeneuve is quickly becoming my favorite director.  I’ve spent a lot of time both here and in my personal life gushing about Arrival and this is such a big departure from this.  Arrival felt like a quiet movie and is practically art house next to the unending spectacle at play here.  This is a stunningly beautiful and well-composed movie.  You can see all the money they spent on this movie on the screen and you can see that someone with an actual eye for cinema was composing the shots.  The urban landscapes evoke the original film while borrowing from all the cyberpunk things that movie itself inspired in a ouroboros style self-inspiration.  The baseline test they subject Joe to are an incredibly harrowing cinematic experience and that’s incredible when you think that it’s really just a white room and a skewed perspective shot.  I could talk about different things I loved about the movie all day from the images of a blasted out Las Vegas to the flyover of a Los Angeles that is so overbuilt it almost looks like farmland but the thing that most consistently got me while watching it was the view from outside Joe’s apartment window.  It’s hard to explain but between the color and the proximity of his neighbors and the way it looks like my childhood window and also most definitely the far future proved this was good science fiction.

I don’t think it’s worth getting too far in to the plot because it’s a twisty winding kind of plot and it’s best experienced in person.  Also I feel like it would take forever to recap, and I would read it back and think I was a crazy person.  It feels overly complicated and subplots start and stop seemingly at random and some of the more interesting ones are just discarded never to come back.  There are countless screenwriting books that advocating putting your story beats on index cards to get a better map and it sort of feels like Blade Runner 2049 had seven cards they knew they wanted to hit and the rest of them didn’t matter and were just made as quickly as possible.  I want more from the plot, but a lot of the individual scenes work so well.

I don’t know what Ryan Gosling does differently than other actors when playing quiet roles but he’s on a whole other level.  He doesn’t have a ton of dialogue in this but he makes every word count and the work he does with expressions and movement is superb.  It’s like he took the quiet menace from Drive and turned it in to something that works all across the emotional spectrum.  Gosling is perfect for this role, for this movie.  I’m honestly not sure any other actor could have made this movie work but he does it.  He’s better than Harrison Ford in this.  He’s better than Ford was in the original.  It’s an amazing performance that will never get the attention of a movie like La La Land but shows so much more technique.

The gender politics in Blade Runner 2049 leave an awful lot to be desired.  Every woman in the movie seems to be trying to speak to some thesis about the commodification of women and their sexuality.  This is a fine point to make a movie about but it’s not what this movie is about, so it’s an observation with no critique which ends up looking an awful lot like just doing the thing you imagine they’re against.

I don’t know that Blade Runner needed a second chapter.  I don’t know that this movie needs to be so stuck in the past; it would probably be a better film if Deckard never showed up.  I wish so much that they had done more interesting things with basically every character.  This is a beautiful movie filled with missed opportunities, but for an almost three hour movie I was almost never bored.  There’s a lot to think about, there’s a lot to look at.  I appreciate that this is an attempt to make a deeper movie instead of a quick cash-in.  I look forward to watching this movie grow in time (and seeing the inevitable director’s cut) and seeing how I think about it in a few years.  If we had to revisit this world I’m glad we got as complex a take as this and one that pushes so many visual boundaries.

Conan: Book of Thoth by Busiek, Wein & Jones

We really don’t need any more origin stories. OK, maybe if it’s integrated — a quick flashback during something else — it’s not so bad. But, please, not a whole story just to show us how the guy we already know got to the place we’ve seen him. Boooo-ring.

Writers Kurt Busiek and Len Wein (along with artist Kelley Jones) work hard to keep Conan: Book of Thoth out of the Boring Zone, but I’m afraid it’s a losing battle.

A) this is an origin story, and (even worse) one of a villain, so it’s all cackling laughter and evil triumphing.

Two) this is a Conan story in which Conan can’t appear at all, so we just get a couple hundred pages of neo-Howardian pre-historical squalor and woe.

Thoth-Amon is a major Conan villain — one of the few who doesn’t show up and get his head chopped off in the space of a short story, I mean, which is what “major Conan villain” means. And so, round about 2005, he got a comic-book series to explain Who He Is and How He Got That Way. And, well, it turns out he was a nasty street kid — battered by his father, to make it even more tedious and psychological — in some random Hyperborian Age city, who did various nasty things for four long issues to end up as High Priest of Set and secret ruler of an entire nation.

MUA-HA-HA-HA!!!!!

Book of Thoth is pretty much all one tone — slightly detached tsk-tsking at how horrible this guy named variously Thoth, Amon, and Thoth-Amon is, while still being excited at each new bit of nastiness. It’s really only for huge Conan fans, and I have no clear idea why it was on my shelf. (My best theory is that it came in one of the care packages of comics I got after my flood in 2011.) And it is one more signpost to show that we really don’t need more origin stories.

(By the way, I don’t know if Mssrs. Busiek, Wein and Jones knew this at the time, but if you google “Book of Thoth,” you get a whole lot of what are technically called “woo-woo” books about Atlanteans and energy beings and a tiny little bit of Egyptiana. Sometimes the obvious title makes your project hard to find.) 

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

REVIEW: iZombie the Complete Third Season

REVIEW: iZombie the Complete Third Season

There has been a certain joyfulness to the CW’s iZombie which was missing in the original Vertigo series. Producer Rob Thomas has also been wise in making each season feel slightly different than the preceding one to keep things fresh. It certainly helps to have shorter seasons for a more potent viewing experience. Warner Home Entertainment has released iZombie the Complete Third Season on DVD while Warner Archive offers up a Blu-ray version.

Much of the credit beyond Thomas’ light touch goes to Rose McIver who plays Liv, the zombie who must consume a deceased’s brains once a month otherwise be turned into your stereotypical monster. Once she devours the brains, she briefly takes on the person’s aspect giving her a chance to go from vamp to klutz, a performance second only to Tatiana Maslany’s many-faceted clone over at Orphan Black.

She’s surrounded by a strong supporting cast led by Liv’s ex-fiancé Major (Robert Buckley), also a zombie. We open the third season to deal with ramifications of Chase Graves’ (Jason Dohring) company Filmore Graves having taken over energy drink producer Max Rager for reasons that get spelled out throughout the season. The idea of a home in Seattle for the growing population of zombies is an interesting one but things are never simple.

The inter-relationships have deepened this year as police detective Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin) learns the truth about Liv, making him more of an ally. Being a CW show, there are plenty of romantic complications, notably Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli) learning that Peyton (Aly Michalka) has slept with former zombie, once more human Blaine (David Anders).

Everything, gets shoved aside as D-Day approaches, with Carey Gold (Anjali Jay) releasing the Aleutian Fly as part of the master plan. When Aleutian Flu vaccines containing zombie virus are beginning to spread among the populace. The final episodes packs a little too much exposition into the beginning, which may show some earlier plotting missteps. To warn America about the plot, Liv agrees to let Johnny Frost (Daran Norris) broadcast that is not only warning about the tainted vaccine but that zombies already walk among them. This sets up an intriguing new status quo for the forthcoming season four.

The DVD set has fine transfers so audio and video are good for rewatching. There are a handful of deleted scenes throughout, including a thread about the Major seeking zombie turned called girl Natalie (Brooke Lyons). Beyond that we have the obligatory 2016 iZombie panel from San Diego Comic-Con.

John Ostrander: “A Legacy Of Spies”

A Legacy Of Spies by John LeCarréI’m a huge (or as our president would say, YUGE) fan of John le Carré, the English writer specializing in espionage stories. le Carre’ is the pen name for David John Moore Cornwell, who was a member of the Secret Intelligence System or MI6 so he brings a great deal of first hand knowledge to his work.

le Carré’s agents are far more realistically drawn than James Bond or Jason Bourne. Don’t get me wrong; I loves me some Bond and Bourne but, honestly, I’m far more drawn to the very morally murky world that le Carré depicts. You can see that influence in GrimJack but especially with the Suicide Squad. This is particularly true with the first multi issue Squad arc, “Mission to Moscow”. Bureaucratic screw-ups result in the mission’s failure with one dead and a member of the team captured while the rest barely escape. The feeling is meant to be realistic and the morality dubious. Very le Carré and that was by design.

le Carré’s most famous book, I think, has to be The Spy Who Came In From the Cold which was his third book, first published in 1963. Like much of le Carre’s work, it’s rather bleak but its success enabled le Carré to devote himself full time to writing.

le Carré’s latest book, A Legacy of Spies, revisits the events around of that earlier tome, giving us new background and insights to its characters and events. The legacy deals with the consequences of those acts as the offspring of two of the main characters, Alec Leamas and Liz Gold, bring a lawsuit against MI6 and some of the people involved, especially our narrator, Peter Guilliam, and George Smiley, Peter’s superior and le Carré’s spymaster and protagonist through a series of books.

As always, the book is suffused with feelings of regret and betrayal and not just in the matters of espionage. Smiley’s wayward wife, Ann, regularly betrayed him with affairs, one in particular having terrible consequences. Loyalty is important but more on an individual basis; the Service does not always share that loyalty to those who serve it, usually at such great cost. The story is set long after the events of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and there is serious doubt if the whole thing was worth it. The participants, and the reader, now see things in context. What was achieved, and at what cost, and was the cost worth it?

As I noted, Peter Guillam is the narrator of the story but it is also told through official reports and documents of that earlier era, like extended flashbacks. I’m not sure that always works; flashbacks can take the reader out of the “now” of the narrative. In this book, it can sometimes get a bit dry. However, it can be argued that it also serves the storyline and the themes.

le Carré is an old master and this is the work of an old master; assured, in full command of the material and his own gifts. Does the new reader need to have read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or the other two le Carré’s novels – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or Smiley’s People? Technically, no – all the information you need to understand A Legacy of Spies is in the book itself, which is as it should be.

However, it is filled with “spoilers”. The book reveals things that the reader perhaps really should experience first hand for themselves. If you haven’t read the other books, I recommend doing that first. They’re very worthwhile in their own right and, IMO, makes the full experience in A Legacy of Spies far richer. That said, the book is well worth reading on its own, the work of a master still showing his mastery.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks