Category: Reviews

Saga Volume Seven by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan

Trust is a tricky thing in stories: you have to trust the person telling the story will do a good job to keep rewarding that person with your attention.

Brian K. Vaughan had my trust and hugely lost it, in his Ex Machina  series with artist Tony Harris, and I’ve been giving each of his projects the side-eye since then, watching to see if the same thing would recur. That’s probably not fair, and it might have made my posts on the earlier Saga books — volumes one , two , three , four, five , and six — less useful than they could be.

But there’s an essential tension in a standalone, ongoing comic book: is this one story, or is it a series of stories? Most comics tell several stories in a row: sometimes simply, with a story in each issue, and sometimes complexly, across dozens of issues of dozens of titles for two months to then abruptly stop and pick back up with the next big crossover. But Spider-Man or JLA or Marvel as a whole is not a story — they’re walls made up of separate but interconnected stories.

Saga, though, has always presented itself as a story. A story told by a grown-up Hazel, some time in the future, which presumably explains how she can tell us things that happened in secret far away to other people. A story with a single through-line: how this family got through a galactic war and (we hope) found peace. So we’re expecting more than just twenty-some pages of action each month; it all has to add up to the story of this family.

And the longer a story goes on, the bigger the ending has to be to suit it. (Ask George R.R. Martin.) With the issues collected in this Volume Seven , Saga is now forty-two issues long — that might be half of the whole, or more, or less. We don’t know. The debt of that ending is continuing to grow, and will grow until we get to it.

Is it a good sign or a bad one that this volume collects a complete arc, with a definitive shape? (Does that make it a story, or a chapter?) This is some of the strongest work in Saga since the beginning, as if Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples cracked their knuckles and said “OK, we got the family back together — now it’s time to fuck shit up.” That’s a good sign, whichever way you fall on the story question.

In the end, I think I land on a slightly different set of questions: is Saga still compelling? is it still moving in the same direction? does it seem to have not just a vector but real velocity on its path? are these people still real and true to themselves?

And, from these issues — or this chapter, or this Volume Seven, call it what you will — the answer to all of those questions is still yes. So I’m still on board, though I would like to have a sense of how big the story will be overall. All stories have to end, even the good ones. Even this one. Stories that don’t end aren’t stories, they’re just things that happened.

And I want Saga to be a story. It has the potential to be a great one.

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

Betty Boop by Roger Langridge and Gisele Lagace

I have no idea why someone said, in the year 2016, “Hey, what this world really needs is a Betty Boop comic book!” It seems like an odd and unlikely thing to say, even if one happened to work in licensing for an entity that happened to own the rights to Miss Boop.

But it must have happened, because that comic book did come out, in four issues, and they were duly collected under the simple and obvious title Betty Boop. (Because, even if this isn’t the first Boop comic ever in the history of the world — though it may well be, for all I know — there’s no possibility of confusion in the marketplace with all of the other Boop collections.)

Luckily, whoever the person who had the brain-spasm in re Betty had the good sense to hire Roger Langridge to write the Boop comic. Langridge has previously translated musical comedy into comics both in his own works (The Show Must Go On , for example) and licensed properties like The Muppets . Since I can’t think of anyone else who has even attempted musical comedy in comics form — most people think not being able to hear the music is an insuperable obstacle, which has never stopped Langridge — he was clearly the best and only choice for the job. The fact that he also has a love for old bits of popular culture, particularly cartoons and comics (see his work on Popeye for another example) is only lagniappe.

There may be people out there who can speak learnedly to the Boop milieu — who will know precisely how canonical her job as a waitress at the Oop-a-Doop club is; when her friends/co-workers Bimbo, Sal, and Koko the Clown first appeared; her tangled relationships with boss Mister Finkle and bandleader Scat Skellington and villain Lenny Lizardlips and her Grampy; what tunes the songs in this book are to be sung to and any relationship those songs have with the historical Betty Boop. I am not one of those people. So I’ll point and say that all that stuff is in this book.

(By the way, the cover is actually a variant from issue 1 by Howard Chaykin and doesn’t quite look like the Gisele Lagace art inside. It also implies a relationship between Betty and Koko that in no way appears in the book.)

I know Lagace’s work mostly from her sexy webcomic Menage a 3 , but others may have seen the work she’s done in comics (for Archie properties mostly, I think). Either way, she has a known expertise for drawing attractive girls, but she’s also just fine with the cartoonier aspects of Betty’s world — and, since this is a Depression-Era world, there’s a lot of cartoony elements. She also manages to keep Betty’s ridiculously oversized head look reasonable and consistent, possibly through secret black arts.

Again, I have no idea why anyone thought a Betty Boop comic would be a good idea, or if this one made more than ten cents total. But it’s a lot of fun, in a not-entirely retro style, and it has the feeling of those bouncing, singing old black-and-white cartoons on the page. It’s a massive success at something weird and unlikely and quirky, which is the kind of thing I like to celebrate.

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

Box Office Democracy: Atomic Blonde

It’s hard coming here to review Atomic Blonde after ripping in to Valerian last week.  I said Valerian was a gorgeous movie with well-executed action sequences that didn’t click for me because the script was a genuine chore to think about.  Atomic Blonde has a lot of the same problems, and at times looks like someone’s aesthetic Tumblr came to life on the condition that it had to recite a tired spy story to stay alive.  I’m not sure why, but it works for Atomic Blonde.  Maybe an overdone spy story is just more fun than an underdone science fiction story.  Maybe Charlize Theron and James McAvoy are just that much better than Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne.  It could be as simple as grey and neon and the fall of the Berlin Wall is a better mood than the promise of a fantastic science fiction world if you get beyond the bland corridors.

Atomic Blonde has the kind of story you swear you’ve seen a hundred times but can’t quite place any of them.  It’s kind of Skyfall meets The Usual Suspects if you only pulled the worst bits from the latter and the best bits from the former.  It’s set in 1989 just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a file containing the names of every agent from every country working in Berlin has fallen in to the wrong hands.  The list also contains the identity of a notorious double agent.  MI6 sends in Lorraine Broughton (Theron) to retrieve the list and rendezvous with David Percival (McAvoy) an agent who has been without supervision so long he has “gone native” which in this context seems to mean that he’s playing a Mad Max villain dialed down to 70%. The story has enough twists and turns to keep it interesting, but I never felt like anything made enough sense.  The combination of the unreliable narrator and the endless double crosses makes everything one or two degrees too muddled for me.  Not that this is a movie that wants to be remembered for its plot; it wants to be remembered for its action.

This is a movie directed by someone that started as a stunt coordinator who then hired a top notch crew of stunt and fight choreographers.  The action beats in this movie are completely nuts.  There’s a one-take continuous fight scene that travels through an entire building that is spellbinding.  Because movies have become so enamored with quick-cut action scenes this becomes instantly anti-cinematic and feels even more real.  A rejection of the Bourne model of fight scenes (ironically made by people who did work on fights in those movies) and a statement that this is a movie where fights are longer, more brutal, and have a more lasting effect. The other fights are also superb but they were also universally featured in the trailers, including the climactic fight scene, so it felt like I had seen everything else before I got there.  I know that the people who make the movie don’t cut the trailers but the marketing people did this movie a disservice by putting out so much of the good stuff for free.

I don’t tend to like movies that use grey as their primary color, and Atomic Blonde uses an awful lot of grey, but it works here because they use it exclusively to allow pops of other color.  Berlin is dreary and sedate in this film but none of the characters are.  Everyone has something about them that jumps off the screen be it hair, clothes, some kind of prop.  Lorraine gets all three.  The locations sometimes defy belief (there were neon pink lights in flop house hotels in 1989 Berlin?) but I like beyond belief if it lends itself to a better looking film.  Atomic Blonde is slick without being shiny and that’s worth a lot for a movie that’s supposed to be set in such a pivotal moment.  I would roll my eyes at any movie that wanted to end with the backdrop of fireworks, but if the Berlin Wall is falling and the fireworks look like the kind of thing you see from people in cities where fireworks are illegal it kind of makes it okay.

I would absolutely watch Atomic Blonde if I saw it on HBO, I might even buy the graphic novel to see if it makes the plot any easier to understand.  I appreciate that I seem like a hypocrite for praising this movie after slagging a movie with similar attributes a week ago, but I don’t care.  Cool counts.  Atomic Blonde is cool and catchy and sticks with you.  It pushes itself above mediocrity through grit, charisma, and gumption.

Bad Machinery, Vol. 7: The Case of the Forked Road by John Allison

The Mystery Tweens are solidly becoming Mystery Teens in The Case of the Forked Road , which means the boys have all seemingly lost 50 IQ points and keep punching each other for no reason. [1] So any mystery solving will be left to the girls, this time out.

Since this is a volume seven, before I go any further, there are two notes. First is that you don’t need to know anything going into this book. Well, OK: these are kids in a secondary school in Tackleford, the oddest town in England. You can pick that up from the book, and it’s all you need to know. Also, this is a collection of a webcomic , so you can always read as much of it as you want online.

But, if you do want to know more, let me direct you to my posts about Bad Machinery books one , two , three , four , five , and six . You may also be interested in the pre-Bad Machinery comic Scary Go Round , also set in Tackleford, which led to the comic-book format Giant Days, of which there have been several collections so far: one two three four .

The book version of The Case of the Forked Road, as usual, is slightly expanded from the webcomics version, with some pages redrawn a bit and others added to aid the flow. It also begins with a new page introducing the main characters and ends with several related old Scary Go Round pages — both of those introduced and narrated by Charlotte Grote, Allison’s current troublemaking smart-girl character (following a string of such in the past).

As usual, Allison is great at capturing speech patterns and the half-fascinated, half-oblivious attitude of teens — the girls discover a mystery this time, in the suspicious activities of a elderly lab assistant they call “Grumpaw.” But they have no idea what this guy’s name is, and have to go through convolutions just to get their investigation started.

They do, of course, and eventually find a fantastical explanation to the question of Grumpaw and the mysterious and strangely ignorant schoolboy Calvin. And the dangers they have to deal with this time out are directly related to the stupid violence of some male classmates. (Though the cover shows that it’s not the boy Mystery Teens; they stay offstage most of the time, and are useless when they’re on it.)

Allison writes smart stories that wander interestingly through his story-space and gives his characters very funny, real dialogue to say on every page. And I think his stories are best when he draws them himself: his line is just as puckish and true as his writing. That makes the Bad Machinery cases the very best Allison books coming out now.

One last point: if you’ve complained that previous Bad Machinery volumes — wide oblong shapes to show off the webcomic strips — were physically problematic, then you are in luck. The Case of the Forked Road is laid out like normal comic-book-style pages, just as these strips appeared online. So you no longer have that excuse, and must, by law, buy Forked Road immediately.

[1] If you think this is some kind of sexist nonsense, my currently sixteen-year-old son can tell you a story of some of his fellow students on his recent trip to Germany and Italy. These young men got into trouble because they were throwing some “hot rocks” around — as you do when you discover some rocks that are warmed by the sun, in a nice hotel in a foreign county — until, inevitably, windows got broken. There are boys who avoid the Enstupiding and Masculinizing Ray of Puberty, but they are few and beleaguered, and the general effects of the ray hugely debilitating.

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

The Complete Peanuts, Vol. 26 by Charles M. Schulz

This time, it definitely is the end. The previous volume finished up reprinting the fifty-year [1] run of Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts in twenty-five volumes, two years in each book. (See my posts on nearly all of those books: 1957-1958 , 1959-1960 , 1961-1962 , 1963-1964 , 1965-1966 , 1967-1968, 1969-1970 , 1971-1972 , 1973-1974 , 1975-1976 , 1977-1978 , 1979-1980 , 1981-1982 , 1983-1984 , 1985-1986 , 1987-1988 , 1989-1990 , 1991-1992 , 1993-1994 , the flashback to 1950-1952 , 1995-1996 , 1997-1998 , and finally 1999-2000 .)

Vol. 26 does something slightly different: it collects related works. It has comic book pages and advertising art and gift-sized books (some of which could be called “graphic novels,” with only a tiny bit of squinting) and similar things — all featuring the Peanuts characters, all written and drawn by Schulz. Obviously, this was culled from a far larger mass of related Peanuts stuff — dozens of hours of TV specials, to begin with, plus major ad campaigns for many products over most of those fifty years, among other things — but Schulz managed and supervised and oversaw (or just licensed and approved) the vast majority of those.

This book has just the art and words that can be attributed cleanly to Schulz personally. Not all of it — there’s plenty of other spot illustrations, and a number of other small cash-grab gift books, that Fantagraphics could have included if they wanted to be comprehensive, but they didn’t. Instead, this is a book about the size of the others, that will sit next to them on a shelf and complement them.

Annoyingly, this very miscellaneous book avoids a table of contents — possibly because the previous books didn’t need one? — so you discover things one by one as you read it. It starts off with seventeen gag cartoons that Schulz sold to the Saturday Evening Post in the late ’40s, featuring kid characters much like the ones in L’il Folks and so somewhere in the parentage of Peanuts. Next up is seven comic-book format stories from the late ’50s that Jim Sasseville (from Schulz’s studio at the time) has identified as all-Schulz (among a much, much larger body of comic-book stories that I think were mostly by Sasseville). These are interesting, because they show Schulz with a larger palette (both physically and story-wise) than a four-panel comic strip — he still mostly keeps to a rigid grid, but there’s more energy in his layouts and he has room for better back-and-forth dialogue in multi-page stories.

Then there’s a section of advertising art, which begins with five pages of camera-themed strips that appeared in 1955’s The Brownie Book of Picture-Taking from Kodak but quickly turns into obvious ads for the Ford Falcon and Interstate Bakeries. The latter two groups are intermittently amusing, but mostly show that Peanuts characters were actively shilling for stuff a few decade before most of us realized it.

The book moves back into story-telling with three Christmas stories, which all originally appeared in women’s magazines from 1958 through 1968 (at precisely five-year intervals — what stopped the inevitable 1973 story?). The first one is two Sunday-comics-size pages; the others are a straight series of individual captioned pictures in order. After that comes four of the little gift books — two about Snoopy and the Red Baron, two about Snoopy and his literary career — which adapt and expand on gags and sequences from the main strip. (I recently tracked down and read the one about Snoopy’s magnum opus, which I still have a lot of fondness for.)

Two more little gift books follow, these more obviously cash-grabs: Things I Learned After It Was Too Late and it’s follow-up, from the early ’80s. These were cute-sayings books, with pseudo-profound thoughts each placed carefully on a small page with an appropriate drawing. Schulz’s pseudo-profound thoughts are as good as anyone’s, I suppose.

Last from Sparky are a series of drawings and gags about golf and tennis, the two sports most obviously important to him — we already knew that from the strip itself. The golf stuff is very much for players of the game, and possibly even more so for players of the game in the ’60s and ’70s, but at least some of the gags will hit for non-golfers several decades later. The tennis material is slightly newer, and slightly less insider-y, and so it has dated a little less.

The book is rounded out by a long afterword by Schulz’s widow, Jean Schulz. It provides a personal perspective, but takes up a lot of space and mostly serves to show that Jean loved and respected her husband. That’s entirely a positive thing, but I’m not 100% convinced it required twenty-four pages of type in a book of comics and drawings.

Vol. 26 is a book for those of us who bought the first twenty-five; no one is going to start here. And, for us, it’s a great collection of miscellaneous stuff. Some of us will like some of it better than others, but every Peanuts fan will find some things in here to really enjoy.

[1] OK, a few months shy of actually fifty years — it started in October 1950 and ended in February 2000. But that’s close enough for most purposes.

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

Box Office Democracy: Valerian and the City of Thousand Planets

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a stunning chasm between the quality of the visuals of a movie and the dreadful script tying it together.  Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a gorgeous film with ambitious action sequences that can keep a frenetic pass without looking choppy or rushed.  It’s also got a plodding, boring script completely devoid of narrative or emotional nuance.  At its peak Valerian is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before— and in its valleys is like a Mad Libs version of Avatar and The Matrix.

The big action sequences in Valerian are stunning feats of direction.  There’s an action sequence where many of the characters involved are in multiple dimensions at once affecting what they can and can’t interact with.  There’s a suspense beat, a chase, and then several bits leading to another chase all in this multi-leveled reality bending circumstance.  Some characters integral to the operation don’t ever see or interact with the actual sequence.  It’s dizzying in all the best ways.  There’s also a chase scene that goes through all the different parts of this elaborate space station with dozens of alien races and their unique habitats that would have been the best sequence in every science fiction movie I loved as a child.  Luc Besson does an outstanding job framing these sequences and the effects team really outdoes themselves.  I don’t know how many of these alien races or habitats come from the source material, but it all looks tremendous.

It’s a struggle to praise the directing in Valerian when the acting is so terrible.  Dane DeHaan performs like he’s doing an impression of mid-90s Keanu Reeves and not a terribly flattering one.  He has the same flat delivery no matter what he’s trying to say.  He starts the movie with a declaration of love and it sounds like he’s barely awake trying to figure out what toppings he would like on a pizza.  I’ve never DeHaan impress me in a role and I’m starting to wonder what the casting directors of the world see in him that I don’t.  No one else in the cast is doing good work either.  Clive Owen is wooden, Rihanna was better in Home, and Cara Delevigne is acting like she can never remember the emotional tone of the last thing she said and has to guess for the next line at random.  It’s like everyone involved in the production was so invested in the effects they couldn’t be bothered to care about the people.

The script is also quite bad.  The story takes forever to get going and it always feels like key pieces of information are kept out of the characters hands not because it makes sense in the universe but because otherwise the whole thing would take 30 minutes to resolve.  The love story seems tacked on and only moves forward because they have Valerian and Laureline tell us it does and not because we see them do anything to move closer together.  I suppose I could accept that they’re going through a lot but this is their job, they must be in harrowing situations all the time.  There’s also a healthy dose of the kind of noble savage bullshit that I’m sure was all the rage in France in the 60s when this comic started publication but feels terribly tone deaf in 2017.  Even beside that the dialogue is 80% dry exposition delivered with the cadence of someone bored of being there.  Every time someone talks in Valerian the experience gets worse and worse.

It would be amazing to find out something like Valerian syncs up perfectly with a famous album or something because it would be nice to watch the movie again without having to listen to any of these characters talk.  I want people to see this film, it’s so fun to watch when it’s on top of its game.  Unfortunately it’s just as terrible when it isn’t.  Valerian is a film that should be watched in a theater, on a big screen, but only by people who paid to see another film and have sneaked in with good headphones and a podcast on or something.  This movie is a technical demo for what good effects people and cinematographers should do, and a cautionary tale for writers and actors.  Study hard, film students and drama majors— or else you could end up making a film like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and be trapped forever in pretty nonsense.

Lost and Found: 1969-2003 by Bill Griffith

If you keep going long enough in a creative field, eventually someone will collect your stuff. If you’re reasonably successful, they’ll even collect the oddball stuff — the one-offs and blind alleys and test-beds and experiments that you made as you were working towards (or in between) the works that you were better known for.

Yes, you too can be the proud creator of an odds and sods collection, if you live long enough and work hard enough and get lucky enough. If your name is Bill Griffith, congratulations! That book was published by Fantagraphics in 2011 as Lost and Found: 1969-2003 .

Griffith has spent most of his career aiming his Zippy the Pinhead character, and associated folks, at whatever Griffith’s current obsessions were. It’s a good model for a cartoonist, actually: if you have a malleable character that you own, and a flexible, large cast around him, you can keep producing work that gives your audience continuity while telling the stories and working with the ideas you really want to in that moment. It’s not coincidental that the major outlet for Zippy stories for the last three or four decades has been a syndicated comic strip: that’s been the model for a huge number of successful comics creators for over a century, a way to reach a large audience with work that can, for the right person, be personal and idiosyncratic.

But that’s what’s not in this book. It has one sequence from the Zippy strip, but it’s mostly comic-book-formatted pages, and it’s mostly from anthologies and magazines and other people’s comics — the stuff he was doing when he wasn’t making Zippy strips and purely Zippy comic-books.

Zippy’s in a lot, though. Griffith developed his cast early, and has used them across all of his cartooning formats. But he’s definitely not as central here as he is in most of Griffith’s work. Lost and Found is heavily weighted towards the early part of Griffith’s career — the 1970s is by far the largest section — and so this is a book in large part showing how that cast first appeared and developed.

Mr. Toad was the original central character in Griffith’s stories, starting off as an Everyman type but quickly becoming the raging id (loosely modeled on Griffith’s father, as he acknowledges later in this book) he was meant to be. So he’s the first main character the reader meets, soon accompanied by some one-off folks from Young Lust (the sex-filled parody of romance comics that Griffith co-edited).

Frankly, the early comics are very “underground” — rambling and navel-gazing in turn, clearly drawn by someone who is still learning his craft and doesn’t have any strong models or guidelines for what he’s doing. To be more pointed, they’re not very good. They’re interesting for people who like the mature Zippy stuff — you can trace the development of Claude Funston pretty clearly, and obviously The Toad — but the first hundred pages of Lost and Found is a bit of a slog for anyone not already seeped in ’60s counterculture.

(As they say, if you can remember the ’60s, you weren’t there. I don’t remember them, but I wasn’t there, either.)

The back half of Lost and Found is more impressive, with one-off stories set in the Zippy universe that appeared various places during the ’80s and ’90s, including an extensive color section. This is the part of Lost and Found that most readers will be looking for: I almost recommend that folks start here, and only dip back into the ’70s section randomly  as they have the inclination. (I don’t actually recommend that, because I’m a fiend for doing things in the right order.)

But, again: this is an odds and sods collection. There will always be sods. It’s the nature of the beast. You gotta take them with the odds. And some of this is quite odd.

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

REVIEW: Ghost in the Shell

While fully aware of Japan’s Ghost in the Shell and its impact as a Manga and Anime, I never experienced any version of it. As a result, I watched the recent live-action film version without preconceived notions. I knew all about the casting controversy but until there’s an actress of Japanese descent who can open a movie wide, casting decisions, such as this, will continue. So get over it.

Masamune Shirow created an interesting meditation on where humanity is going as he, like Ray Kurzweil, foresees the day when man and machine blend into a singular being. It won’t be overnight, nor will it be neat and easy. As a result, the question of what does it mean to be human permeates the film as written by Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, and Ehren Kruger and directed by Rupert Sanders.

The story centers on Major (Scarlett Johansson), an accident victim who awakes to find her brain has been wired to an android body. She now serves Section 9, a counter-terrorism operation, currently tasked with hunting down the killer known only as Kuze (Michael Carmen Pitt). Along the way, she is seeing images making her question not only her humanity but her memories. While searching for the killer, she searches for her own identity.

This is a brilliantly designed and realized world so I wish we were more fully immersed in it rather than seeing it as colorful window dressing. The Section 9 agents operate in and around an urban society but we have no real feel for how this world works nor how the general populace feels about these cyborgs and androids living among them. What is real and what is acceptable? We’re given merely hints.

Instead, sadly, we have running, jumping, fighting, and way too much shooting. Additionally, Sanders has everyone underplay their parts, muting the emotions and robbing the characters of range. The movie is drab and dull, perfunctory, wasting the grand themes raised and world built in favor of the same old.

Johansson has certainly proved herself capable of both acting and action thanks to her Marvel work and Lucy so she shines here. While everyone else is robbed of color, she shimmers as she comes to realize she was the first successful ghost placed in a machine, but far from the first. Her confrontations with her designer, Dr. Ouelet should have crackled but are instead downplayed. Juliette Binoche, in a change of role, brings warmth and humanity to the character but doesn’t get to do enough with it.

Similarly, the Section 9 team is made up of an interesting variety of international actors but other than Pilou Asbæk as her partner Batou, none of them are seen enough for the audience to care.

By the time the Major gets answers, Kuze’s predictable rationale is revealed, and things are settled, we’re long passed caring, preferring a nap or the source material.

Ghost in the Shell comes in a variety of formats including the standard Combo Pack of Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD code. The film’s high definition transfer to Blu-ray is stunning, capturing the colors and shadows perfectly for home viewing. The Dolby Atmos soundtrack is a solid match for the visuals.

There are just three interesting Special Features: Hard-Wired Humanity: Making Ghost in the Shell, a multi-part Making Of feature that properly credits the set designers and WETA’s visual effects team for bringing the original to life. We look at the under-utilized Section 9: Cyber Defenders and then you finish with the Man & Machine: The Ghost Philosophy that talks a more interesting game than the film manages to deliver.

Hawkeye, Vol. 3: L.A. Woman by Fraction, Wu, Pulido, and others

Last month, I read a book called Hawkeye, Vol. 1 . This month, I hit one called Vol. 3. In the annoyingly typical way of Big Two comics, the latter follows directly from the former. (One is a hardcover, which in comics-reprinting circles comes typically a year or two after the paperback and combines two paperbacks together. Yes, that’s the opposite of how we old-time book-industry hands are used to seeing things happen, but it seems to work for the Wednesday Crowd.)

Anyway, at the end of Vol. 1, the two Hawkeyes split up, because comics are all about break-ups and changes and new things that can last for six issues or so. (Spider-Man No More! once again.) L.A. Woman follows the younger female Hawkeye, Kate Bishop, who drives a cool car cross country to the city of the title, where she immediately gets caught up in nefarious doings and skulduggery of her own. Presumably there’s a Vol. 4 that features what Hawkguy was doing at the same time back in NYC, and that seems to be about as long as this particular set-up ran.

Kate’s travails form yet another “gritty” and “realistic” superhero comic — no powers, no flying, more-or-less the real world — that descends from the Miller/Mazzuchelli “Born Again” run in Daredevil, the major cliche in this area. Look, comics folks, we all know it’s not hard to put a bullet in someone’s head. And people without superpowers who repeatedly annoy large-scale criminals without actually jailing those criminals find themselves possessors of those bullets-in-the-head sooner rather than later. So talking-killer scenes, and repeated hairsbreadth escapes in noirish colors, just lampshade how artificial your story is. Avoid them. If your villain isn’t going to actually try to kill the hero like an actual criminal would in a real world, don’t go down that road and pretend that the plan is to kill her. We all know that’s not the case.

Speaking of which…Kate runs afoul of a supervillain carefully tailored to her abilities, one who can stymie her and cause her great pain but not blow her away instantly or hire goons to kidnap and murder her family by the snap of her fingers. So she’s in L.A., and she Loses Everything.

That’s OK, comics characters Lose Everything roughly once a year — it’s one of their major shticks. But she’s young and a fairly new character, so this is one of her first Lose Everythings, and it has that element of novelty to it.

By the end of this book, she’s Voluntarily Relinquished Everything — the next step towards Getting Everything Back, And Even Better, Because She’s The Good Guy — and is heading off for the vengeance and catharsis that probably got sidetracked and muted by some stupid crossover or other.

These are good superhero comics, for all that they’re drenched in cliches. It’s not quite as good as the Clint Barton stuff in the earlier issues, maybe because he’s easier to make a sad-sack in the first place. But “good superhero comics” is perilously close to damning with faint praise, along the lines of “a perfectly serviceable category Regency.” I wish readers and creators could aim higher, but that’s life.

If you like stories about superheroes who can’t jump over buildings with a single bound, and like to pretend that such people are “realistic,” you will probably enjoy the stories that Matt Fraction wrote about the various Hawkeyes. This time out, the opening story is drawn by Javier Pulido and the rest by Annie Wu, who are both good at the moderately gritty, real-people thing in their own ways. Go for it: I can’t stop you.

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

Box Office Democracy: War for the Planet of the Apes

I’m honestly not sure why these Planet of the Apes prequels work so well.  On paper they’re a disaster: a trilogy of prequels to a movie that while historically significant is not relevant in the modern era except for having a famous twist ending everyone knows.  Every movie sets itself up as a conflict between humans and apes and the titles reveal that the humans don’t stand much of a chance.  They work because there’s a real heart here, there are great performances from both humans and CGI apes.  Everyone in War for the Planet of the Apes cares about the stakes so much that you can’t help but be completely invested.  These movies are beacons of earnestness in a cynical, sarcastic, landscape.

There’s a lot of plot in War and I’m not sure it’s all necessary.  Head ape Caesar (Andy Serkis) wants to lead his people out of the woods they’ve been living in since the last movie because it’s suddenly untenable.  There is word of some paradise out past the desert and the apes plan to move out.  I don’t want to spoil any of the emotional beats but Caesar ends up not going with the rest of the apes and instead goes with the only two characters I remember from the last movie and a newcomer and try to hunt down the colonel leading the aggressive human military (Woody Harrelson).  The colonel is afraid of a disease that is somehow taking higher brain function away from humans and this has put him at odds with other human factions.  This all ties together with a rescued human girl who has the disease and an awfully depressing ape concentration camp.

That’s a lot of story even for two and a half hours.  War wants to linger in the bigger moments, and it should— those are absolutely the strongest parts of the film— but it ends up throwing away good stuff.  The whole illness plot builds to the predictable end, the colonel contracts the disease and kills himself, but it happens with 20 minutes left in the movie and I don’t think it affected the outcome.  By taking the disease bit out of the climax and making it basically inconsequential all it actually does is give us a cop out for Caesar’s journey of revenge.  He doesn’t have to decide to kill the colonel.  Maybe the disease just exists to explain why the humans in the original Planet of the Apes couldn’t talk but that’s such a long way to go for something that no one really cared about in a movie from 1968.

This is a well-directed movie, a gorgeously shot movie, and the series features some of the best CGI acting I’ve ever seen.  Andy Serkis has been doing this for a decade but he’s amazing at doing performance capture.  I wouldn’t give him an Oscar for this part (it just isn’t nuanced enough) but it shouldn’t be discounted because of the medium.  In an era when it seems like all of the big budget action movies are jockeying to show how little their leads can care about anything, the Planet of the Apes franchise is going the other way.  Everyone in this movie cares a lot all the time.  There’s a family-like relationship here that is exactly like the one Fast & Furious would tell you they have, but here they show it instead.  I want these apes to feel happy and know peace even though in the fiction that means the death of most of the humans.  This movie has me rooting against my own people.

I understand that they have plans to make as many as two more in this series and as much as I enjoyed this one I sort of wish they would stop.  I don’t know how to escalate from here.  The last movie has a well-meaning human who was pushed too far.  This one had an actually evil human pushed too far.  I don’t want to see them try to heighten past ape concentration camps.  It’s either time to get in to the minutia of building an ape society (and maybe don’t try that) or it’s time for Charlton Heston to fall from the sky.  (I suppose it could be time for Mark Wahlberg to fall from the sky but gross.)  I want this series to stop feeling like it’s spinning its wheels and while the end of this one suggests they’re sensitive to that problem I’m ready to just get to it being a planet of apes by now.

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks