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 Thothout 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.)
I didn’t remember Neil Gaiman’s story “Troll Bridge” well. In fact, if you’d asked me about it, I would have assumed some confusion on your part with Terry Pratchett’s short story “Troll Bridge,” and tried to lead you in that direction.
But story titles can’t be copyrighted, and even good friends can use the same ones without stress or strife. I’d forgotten it, but Gaiman did also write a story titled “Troll Bridge,” originally for the Datlow/Windling anthology Snow White, Rose Red in 1993 and collected a number of times since then. And, since Gaiman has a huge audience in comics that might not be as familiar with his just-prose works — or, at least, there are publishers willing to bet that’s the case — a number of his short stories have been turning into short graphic novels from Dark Horse over the past few years.
Last year it was Troll Bridge
‘s turn, adapted and drawn by Colleen Doran.
I’m not sure short stories need to turn into graphic novels, but they’re about the right length — a twenty-page piece of prose can be a forty-eight-page graphic novel and fit comfortably into that size, without the usual Procrustean manipulations to fit the format. So, given that it’s possible, and anything both possible and likely profitable will happen, the only question left is: how well does this story work, translated into this new medium?
It works pretty well, actually. “Troll Bridge” is a story of episodes — a boy meets a troll under a bridge near his home, somewhere in then-rural England, and then other things happen over time — and that translates to comics just as well as it works in prose. The troll itself, as seen on the cover, is traditional, which is fine for this twisted-traditional story. And the boy looks much like Gaiman might have at the same age, which is of course the point, as in so many Gaiman stories. (He works from material based on his own life a lot more than I think he gets credit for.)
So this boy meets a troll, who wants to eat his life. The boy would rather his life not be eaten, so he makes a deal. And this is a fairy tale, so that deal comes out badly in the end — fairy tales only reward the heroes who are strong and true throughout, and have the luck to be born third. (And not even them, all of the time — fairy tales are one of our bloodiest types of story.)
I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten whatever lesson “Troll Bridge” has to impart — unless it’s “keep away from bridges, because trolls lurk there and will eat you” — which may be why I keep forgetting it. Burt this is a good adaptation of that story, keeping the flavor of Gaiman’s narration and adding Doran’s pastorally-colored and carefully seen vision of his world. I’m still not 100% convinced this story needed to be adapted, but, if it was going to be anyway, this is definitely a successful version.
Karen Reyes is ten years old in 1968, and she loves monsters. Monster movies, monster magazines, the idea of monsters — imagining that there are real monsters around her in her normal Chicago life. She’s also seriously bullied and outcast, with no real close friends as the book begins. And she’s telling us her own story, drawing it page-by-page in a series of notebooks, with herself as a kid-werewolf PI in fedora and trenchcoat.
But My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
is not cute. And it’s also not the kind of book where the reader understands the truth of what’s opaque to the narrator, like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Karen is young, and there’s a lot of things she doesn’t know, and she does want to become a movie-monster, but she’s mostly clear-eyed about the world around her, and she’s good at finding things out and piecing things together. (She will make a good detective when she grows up.)
And her upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, did just die — shot in the heart in her living room, though found dead in her bed. Since the apartment was locked at the time, the police have closed the case quickly as a suicide. But Anka has deep secrets from her life in Berlin before and during WW II — and she’s not the only one with secrets in the building, from her musician husband to the minor-gangster landlord and his hot-to-trot-wife, to the ventriloquist in the basement and Karen’s twenty-something amateur-gigolo brother Deez and hillbilly mother.
Karen does meet some other kids who she sees as monsters, or possible monsters. And one of those may not be entirely a real person who actually exists in the world. So there’s some unreliable-narrator elements, or fabulist elements, in the mix as well. But, at her core, Karen is honest and straightforward: she’s trying to find out the truth, and has some good tools for doing so.
The truth — which doesn’t all come out in this book, the first of at least two — looks to be bigger and more dangerous and complicated than one ten-year-old girl can fix. And her family has clearly been trying to keep some big secrets from her, like Deez’s relationship with Anka.
I’ve tagged this book as “Fantasy,” but I don’t think it really is. But it’s a book about the fantasies that we have, and about how fantasy creatures can make real life bearable.
All that is told as if drawn by Karen — don’t think too hard about when she has the time to draw this much, or how she got this good at the age of ten — in colored pens on pages lined in blue, to mimic a notebook. There’s around five hundred of those pages, though none of them are numbered, and there are a lot of words on many of these large pages. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a big book in every way: physically large, full of words, impressive pictorially, challenging in subject matter and storytelling.
This is Emil Ferris’s first book — she’s a woman about the age Karen Reyes would be, grown up, and she seems to have been a kid like Karen back in the late ’60s. I have no idea how many of the elements of Monsters came out of Ferris’s own life, real or transmuted over time, but I can say that Monsters is nothing like a memoir. It is a fully-formed story, about a deeply individual young woman, stuck in a bad situation — several bad situations, overlapping — and trying to cope with it through intellect and rational thought and just a bit of wishing.
It’s a very impressive graphic novel. Several dozen more influential people have said that before me, and they’re all very right. Debuts like this don’t come around very often. This is something very special.
This will be a bad review — not a negative one, since I enjoyed these books, and like the endlessly proliferating world of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe. No, this will be a poorly informed review, quick and slapdash and lazy, written more than two months after reading the books. But I’ve done a lot of them over the years — hey, I’m not getting paid here, so you get what you get — so I think I have a facility for doing quick superficial reviews that only mildly suck.
These three volumes reprint the first year and a half (roughly) of the ongoing Abe Sapien comic, spinning off from B.P.R.D. when Abe himself cut loose from that joint, in the wake of another transformation and driven by a niggling worry that he might be an Apocalypse Beast himself. (For a different apocalypse than Hellboy himself, but this universe is well-stocked with potential and actual apocalypses to choose from.)
And they remind me of nothing so much as ’70s Hulk comics: the mysterious stranger with dangerous powers wanders across the Southwest, encountering both good people and monsters. Admittedly, the landscape Abe encounters is vastly changed: the Frog War might have been “won,” more or less, but there are massive alien monsters scattered around the world, entire cities have been destroyed, and normal life is basically over.
(Parenthetically, I’ll repeat again what I said in my review of the last clutch of B.P.R.D. stories: Mignola and his collaborators here are writing stories set after industrial civilization has collapsed, but they don’t quite seem to realize that. There’s no way any contemporary supply chains are still operating, and I’d estimate several billion people have already died — or been transformed into monsters — by this point. Just getting enough food to eat should be the primary worry of everyone in this world; not getting eaten by a monster is now a luxury.)
Meanwhile — because it wouldn’t be the Hellboy universe without subplots — a mostly dead B.P.R.D. agent has been brought back by a necromancer with a fiendish plot that we don’t entirely understand yet. And the B.P.R.D. is chasing Abe in a way that alternates between friendly and not-so-much.
And along the way a bunch of people die, and so do a bunch of monsters. This is a nastier world than the pre-apocalypse status quo, even if there does seem to be a somewhat functional government and occasional new consumer goods when there really shouldn’t be. Abe is mostly moping through all of this, worried that he is an Apocalypse Beast but pretty sure he isn’t, but still wanting to figure out how he fits into this world and what he should be doing.
It’s an interesting storyline, running somewhere through the territory between horror and superheroes: Abe is strong and knowledgeable, but he and his friends have already failed to stop the end of the world. Even if I do think these series must eventually show the extinction of the last humans on earth, there’s plenty of time and narrative space until that point.
B.P.R.D.: Vampire (written by Mignola, Gabriel Ba, and Fabio Moon; art by Ba and Moon; colors by Stewart)
And this standalone story is a loose sequel to the 1946-1948 stories, focusing on one B.P.R.D. agent who was transformed into something more than human — and no prizes for guessing what.
I don’t think all of the middle has been filled in — this book covers a short time in the late ’40s, and that agent I don’t believe has showed up in any B.P.R.D. stories set any later in time than that — so I suspect this is Mignola throwing a ball up into the air and expecting to catch it much later, in some future B.P.R.D. story. (Or maybe there will be a direct sequel, which will end his story; it could go either way.)
So: moody, expressive art from Ba and Moon. Somewhat less dialogue than usual for a B.P.R.D. story, but still plenty of exposition. A conflicted hero and a mass of nasties. (I seem to be channeling Joe Bob Briggs here. I think there are a few breasts, actually. And plenty of blood.) This is a stylish, smart piece of a much larger story that pretty much stands on its own — if you want to sample Mignola without diving headfirst into the tangled mythology, this would be a very good choice.
We’ve been wondering about the stars since the first intelligent biped stared into the night sky. Personally, I find the possibilities beyond our atmosphere fascinating and wish I had the mind to absorb the hard science. I took Astronomy in college and when I struggled with the math involved I went to the professor who asked if it was part of my major. When told no, he told me to drop the course. A year later, PBS aired Cosmos: A Personal Journey, Carl Sagan’s lauded and beloved miniseries about the stars. Being in college at the time, I missed watching it or reading the gorgeous companion volume but know it had a major impact on society.
Among those influenced by the show was Neil deGrasse Tyson who recently concluded a thirteen episode sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, which is now available ion a handsome four disc Blu-ray set from 20th Century Home Entertainment. It comes at a time when America relies on Russia for engines to reach orbit and a recent analysis declares we don’t have the budget or political wherewithal to reach Mars anytime soon. We still have members of Congress automatically pooh-pooh any sort of scientific warning about our climate or evolution or the value of exploring the universe.
They should all watch this. We’re reminded of the awe-inspiring vistas of stars, solar systems, and galaxies. Credit goes to Renaissance-man Seth MacFarlane for producing this series, using his clout to get this funded and on the air. Among the executive producers is Brannon Braga, known better for mangling science fiction than embracing science but his presence here is a welcome one. Tyson partnered with Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan to write the series and collects images culled from telescopes and satellites representing a true international collective.
While Sagan was a scientist-poet, Tyson is more of an everyman but still inspires us with his wondrous tour of the cosmos. He honors his predecessor, showing what we’ve learned since the original series and builds on what was presented then. With his own version of a starship, we tour the stars and the intent was to bring a cinematic sweep to the smaller screen and it works beautifully.
The Blu-ray transfer is just shy of perfection with photography and stunning CGI recreations. The lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is more than match for the visuals so watching this again and again will be a pleasure.
Each of the four discs comes with Special Features such as:
Disc One:
“Standing Up in the Milky Way” Commentary from Druyan, Mitchell Cannolo, Braga, Jason Clark and Kara Vallow.
Disc Two:
Celebrating Carl Sagan: A Selection from the Library of Congress Dedication (34:37) . Credit goes to MacFarlane for getting Sagan’s papers delivered to the people’s Library.
Disc Three:
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey at Comic-Con 2013 (40:13) shows that much as we love our spaced fantasy, we’re also geeks for the real thing.
Disc Four:
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey – The Voyage Continues (41:20) shows how the first miniseries informed and inspired the second.
Interactive Cosmic Calendar: Druyan hosts a timeline accessible from any given cosmic “month”.
Time was, three-four decades past, that I wrote some fiction with environmental themes. There was a short prose story with no real villains; what the characters were contending with was an ecosphere that was completely decayed. Then there were the comic books. These, being heroic fantasy, sort of, did have villains – a genre requirement – but I don’t remember much about them and I will, thank you, spare myself the discomfort of rereading old work. It’s pretty safe to say, though, that these bad guys did what they had to do, serve the needs of the plot in narratives that focused on what they did, the polluting bastards, and very little on why they did it.
What to you want in a 22-page comic book, War and Peace?
If I were to do those stories today, I might, just might, try to peep into the villains’s motives. Something like this:
Our antagonist is wealthy beyond the needs of a hundred lifetimes, but he is not satisfied. He wants more…no, in a way, he needs more. He has been indoctrinated in the belief that men are judged only by profit. He does not question this, any more than he questions the air he breathes. Nor does he question the kind of society he strives for but, if it happens, it will be a world ruled by a plutocracy: the creators, the movers and shakers, the worthy at the top, and the moochers and lazy and incompetent, the rest, in some grey region doing what the worthy have given them to do – grumbling and grousing, to be sure, but doing their jobs because they must.
His philosophy, his religion, his family – all assure him that his is the correct zeitgeist and those who believe otherwise are pathetic and ignorant.
But he is starting to hear, sometimes from those in his employ, that his world is beginning to crumble. The damage he and his brethren have done to the planet has become manifest. He scoffs: lies! The deterioration continues: his companions tell him that the upheavals have perfectly normal explanations, that the whole thing is not man made and will soon correct itself. Just be patient. Oh, sure, the scientists are busy doom saying, some of them, but at the end of the day, what do the scientists know, really know? And aren’t most of them fuzzy-minded fools who suck at the public teat? No, no need to listen to the scientists.
Eventually, he must admit that, yes, something is wrong. But that science – he doesn’t understand it and so he feels that this lack of understanding means he is exempt from doing anything about the problems. What can he do but what he’s always done, make a profit.
That’s the villain. As for the story itself…I wonder what kind of ending it might have.
Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return is simply irredeemable. I’ve been sitting in front of a blank Word document for over an hour trying to figure out where to start and have experienced new waves of outrage every time I think of another part of the movie. The characters are bad, the story is basically nonsense, it’s ugly, the songs are bad, even the credits are confusing. I don’t know another way to judge this movie to make it look like a success. The 3D stereography didn’t make me want to throw up. That’s the best I can do.
The movie opens by explaining that the filmmakers had no understanding of the story from The Wizard of Oz. Having gotten their gifts from The Wizard in the first film Scarecrow is now a super genius, Lion is ready to fight literally every adversary he meets and Tin Man expresses big emotional responses to even the most trivial events. In this universe The Wizard was not telling these characters that they had these qualities in them all along he literally made them all the best at all of these things by magic. It also means they have none of the character traits they had in any other media you might be familiar with them from. These characters feel like the supporting characters from a bad 90s Saturday morning cartoon.
Properly channeling Japanese culture for American audiences has been a challenge given how different our tastes and expectations are. We find the content of much of their Manga and anime either not to our taste or outright incomprehensible. So, the challenge of adapting their bushido Edo-era and adding in some powerful fantasy into [[[47 Ronin]]] was going to be a challenge. Mix in American performer Keanu Reeves as a half-breed you have an uphill challenge in making the film palatable to enough moviegoers to justify the $170 million budget.
It has some terrific concepts and incredible visuals but it’s a mess of a movie, with a long, sluggish middle that loses the audience. Even amazing CG and a strong Asian cast can’t support a messy script.
The story, in short: Lord Asano Naganori (Min Tanaka) is disgraced after the efforts of Lord Kira (Tadanobu Asano), conspires with a shape-shifting witch (Rinko Kikuchi). He commits seppuku and Kira takes charge of Asano’s family by arranging for him to marry Asano’s daughter, Mika (Ko Shibasaki). She agrees to the marriage but extracts a promise to have a year to mourn her father. Asano’s 47 samurai has acknowledged the deviltry that befell their master and they become ronin, masterless samurai, vowing revenge. Enter Kai (Reeves), who just happens to be in love with Mika, who partners with Oishi (Hiroyuki Sanada), the ronin’s leader.
While the action is swell along with some stuff I have not seen before, the characters are flat, one-dimensional. There are the brooding glances, clichéd dialogue, and predictable character beats that spoil the film’s potential. Much of this is a result of delays in shooting, studio interference and an emphasis on visual wonder and not enough on content. The film was a major bomb in the United States, bringing in under $40 million. As a result, you likely missed this last winter but can make up for it now with the Blu-ray release from Universal Home Entertainment. The video transfer is stunning with equally strong sound.
Clearly, the studio gave up on the film and went with a perfunctory suite of extras including four Deleted Scenes (8:00), which are interesting but easily excised; a brief Re-Forging the Legend (7:00); Keanu & Kai (4:00); Steel Fury (6:00), which looks at the film’s training, swordplay and battles; and Myths, Magic & Monsters (8:00).
The film is a curiosity and there are glimpses of what it could have been.
The Coming of Age book has become fodder for dystopian science fiction and fantasy while some of the toughest Worldbuilding is done right here, on the planet Earth. Things don’t get more dystopian than growing up in Nazi Germany during World War II. As captured by Austrian author Markus Zusak, The Book Thief is a harrowing, sorrowful tale about life during wartime. The 2005 novel is amusingly narrated by Death and tells of his fascination with Liesel Meminger (Sophie Nélisse), who comes to his attention when collecting her brother.
The novel has been justly feted over the years and the inevitable film adaptation arrived in November and is now out on disc from 20th Century Home Entertainment. The film is faithful without fully capturing the novel’s tone, aided by some solid performances, excellent production design and a John Williams score that justly earned an Academy Award nomination without imitating his Schindler’s List, which covered much of the same time.
Liesel winds up handed over to Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and Rosa (Emily Watson) Hubermann for safekeeping and she has to make new friends and form new attachments in an unfamiliar environment. While Hans quickly grows to like Liesel, Rosa is upset that the brother and the money to care for him has vanished and seems to take it out on the ten year old. When it appears she is illiterate, slowly Hans teaches her to read and books become precious to her. She also becomes the object of fascination to the boy next door, Rudy (Nico Liersch).
Life is further upended when Max Vanderburg (Ben Schnetzer) shows up, obligating Hans to pay a debt stretching back to World War I – in this case, honoring Max’s father for saving Hans’ life. The scenes between Max and Liesel are among the book – and film’s – best.
The rest of her life in the small community is a varied bunch and you can’t help but wince to watch the children inducted into the Hitler Youth. This includes the ritual book burning where she rescues The Invisible Man and keeps it, despite the mayor’s wife, Ilsa Hermann (Barbara Auer), knowing her secret. Her bravery is later rewarded when Liesel is tasked by Rosa to bring the Hermann’s laundry to Ilsa, opening a new chapter for her.
The book is nicely condensed and is serviceable for those who haven’t read the book but once more, the richness of voice in print is absent from the film. While Rush and Watson do nicely, they can’t carry the whole film which is at time disjointed and lacking in the Zusak magic.
Overall, the transfer to disc is fine and worth a look. The extras that accompany the Blu-ray include a handful of mostly superfluous Deleted Scenes (6:34) and an assortment of featurettes on the making of the adaptation, A Hidden Truth: Bringing The Book Thief to Life (31:05). I appreciate that Zusak is well represented here but overall this is a perfunctory set of short pieces.
It’s a fairy tale, it’s a fantasy and it’s a romance. WINTER’S TALE covers a lot of territory as it makes the jump from novel to film. Director and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman and star Colin Farrell talk about how the magic strings it all together. Plus Bryan Singer picks up a comic property and you can get set to binge watch STAR WARS CLONE WARS in just a few days.
