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How I came up with the idea behind “Once Upon A Deadpool.” No, really.

How I came up with the idea behind “Once Upon A Deadpool.” No, really.

“I’ll tell you the truth and its up to you to live with it.”
William Goldman, The Princess Bride

This week, I found myself at the center of an internet storm where every entertainment news site and blog I’ve ever heard of has been debating how I predicted the framing device (and selling point)  of the new ‘Once Upon a Deadpool’ recut of Deadpool 2, several months before the writers even wrote it. Little did anybody know at the time that all of my ideas involve kidnapping Fred Savage.

He might want to look into a restraining order.

Hello, I’m ‘Some Guy’, AKA ‘A Guy’, AKA ‘Some Bloke’ AKA ‘A Fan on Twitter’, A.K.A. Michael Vincent Bramley. I’m a comics writer and an artist from Queens and this is the strange story of how I spent my Thanksgiving vacation.


This all started in 2017 when the buzz on the internet was that if Disney successfully acquired Fox, then the beloved R-Rated Deadpool series may have to adapt for the PG market or possibly die. I personally love that Deadpool is R-Rated, but seeing as how I was raised on Deadpool comics and am acquainted with some of the talented people who have written and drawn for them over the years, I also know that a PG Deadpool definitely can work. It always has worked. There had to be a way to make it work for the movie version without betraying the current fan base.

These are just the kinds of thought experiments I occupy myself with when I’m bored.

The first idea that sprang to mind was to replace all of the swearing with absurd TV stand-ins, like the infamous ‘find a stranger in the alps’ line from Big LeBowski. The second (though not mutually exclusive) idea was to have Deadpool directly address the censorship by kidnapping former child star Fred Savage and forcing him to reenact his role in the classic 1987 movie ‘The Princess Bride’. This seemed much funnier, so I tweeted it at Ryan Reynolds.

I’m not sure what exactly possessed me to send that tweet. It’s not something I’ve ever done before. I don’t usually use Twitter. I barely know how. Most of my tweets are things I share from my instagram or my scarcely used blog, with the occasional retweet peppered in.

You know, a surprising number of strangers have been asking me, if I had the idea first,  why didn’t I make it myself? I really hate to say it, but they’re absolutely right. I really should have made a multi-million dollar PG Deadpool movie co-starring Fred Savage instead of sending a tweet to Ryan Reynolds. That one is on me.

My point is that ideas I can’t do anything with myself aren’t worth a whole lot to me. And for the many, many people who have tweeted at me about how you shouldn’t pitch creative ideas on Twitter, yep, I know. The way I saw it, I wasn’t so much pitching a movie as I was making a joke. When I have good ideas that I can actually use, I make them into weird independent comics for weird people who like comics written by even bigger weirdos.

This was just a thing that I thought was funny and because of how little I’ve bothered to learn about using Twitter over the years, I actually thought that by tweeting it at Ryan Reynolds, then maybe one or two of his followers would get a chuckle. Or that maybe he himself might see it and laugh. Maybe there was a Detective Pikachu’s chance in a Ground Themed Gym that it would go viral and that he or someone influential would see how perfect it was… and, of course, on some level that’s still the movie I hoped they would make, but I never really expected them to actually make it.

Then I took a Christmas shopping trip to a Michigan Mall and while I was hunting for Detective Pikachu merch (that I am now certain doesn’t exist yet), my wife (Alice Meichi Li) told me about a trailer on Youtube and my mind was fucking blown.

Watching it the first time was a truly surreal experience and I’d be lying if I said it was a good one. I got a sinking feeling in my gut as I tried to make sense of the matter. Four possibilities sprang to mind.

  1. Maybe Reynolds saw it and knowingly used it without telling me. Something that the law doesn’t acknowledge as plagiarism, but most of civil society would acknowledge as ‘a dick move’.
  2. Maybe Reynolds forgot he saw it and unknowingly copied it. It’s called cryptomnesia and it’s apparently fairly common among creatives (although that one could have applied as much to me as to him until I found from an article that he pitched the idea in May of ‘18).
  3. Coincidence. As unlikely as it seems, synchronicity actually happens. As an Englishman, I grew up knowing that there were two Dennis the Menaces. They both exist because the UK and US versions were released on the same day by two different creators in two different countries. They’d never met or had any way of knowing what the other was working on. It’s rare, but possible.
  4. Something with time travel. Just trying to cover all the bases here.

It might seem counter-intuitive since it’s exactly what started this mess in the first place, but I started tweeting at Ryan Reynolds again.

I started suggesting several different ways Ryan and I could settle things;

Other suggestions I made elsewhere included things like ‘Hugh Jackman’s phone number’, ‘a staring contest with Fred Savage’ or ‘plain old hand stuff’.

I also retweeted my original tweet and accompanying facebook post, then eventually went to bed.

The next day I woke up to a topsy turvy world where my name was in a SYFY article and then Newsarama and then Screen Rant and so on and so forth until a steady stream of strangers were tweeting support, rage and unsolicited legal advice at me. I watched the comments coming in and this formed a weird echo chamber of sorts where the people who thought that I should sue somebody and the people who thought I shouldn’t sue somebody convinced themselves that I was trying to sue somebody.

If I even had a case (I didn’t), I wouldn’t have the will, the energy, or the money to fight a legal battle against Disney, Fox, or Ryan Reynolds. I half-jokingly/half-seriously asked for things, sure, but I literally never even considered suing as a viable possibility.


That first Syfy article posited that this may all be part of a viral marketing hoax and by the time io9 put their article up it had developed into a full on conspiracy theory citing the timing of when I posted my Domino painting on Instagram as suspicious. By this point, none of this felt unsettling to me any more, it was just really fucking funny.

‘Lucky Me’ © 2018, look closely and you’ll find several clues as to the whereabouts of the holy grail.

On Thanksgiving, shortly after internalizing a metric tonne of Chinese food with my wife and her family and after I tweeted a disclaimer about how little interest I had in suing anybody, Ryan Reynolds slid into my DMs.

Deadpool Spider Man GIF - Deadpool SpiderMan Marvel GIFs

I’m not going to share what he sent me here, but I will say that it was a respectful friendly message where he acknowledge that they had come up with the idea independently seven months after I did and that yep, I’d gotten there first, but that no; he hadn’t and wouldn’t ever use an idea without permission.

I don’t know what the odds are, it seems incalculable, its like winning the weird lottery. But I guess that lotteries are won every week. And remember there were two Dennis the Menaces. These things can happen and it makes sense that if it were to happen to me, it’d happen with the film series that seems to have been tailor made for me in the first place.

We had a brief conversation, maybe I’ll have more to say on the subject down the line. I did ask if he would sign a photo of Fred Savage for me and we’ll see where that goes.

Since the last tweet I made on the subject didn’t inspire a dozen follow up articles and only a handful of Twitter users still want me to know that I’m a dickhead, I can only assume that things are getting back to normal now and that for the time being I can close the big Deadpool/Princess Bride book on the subject.

Besides, I don’t know anybody else who can say that the exact movie they asked for got made or that it profited a deserving charity in the process. And I’ll know that whether directly or indirectly, I really did crack the PG Deadpool code.

For movies. I cracked it for movies.

Book-A-Day 2018 #329: Memoirs of a Very Stable Genius by Shannon Wheeler

Disclaimer No. 1: I’m not related to Shannon Wheeler, as far as I know. We both carry an ancient Anglo-Saxon name, and probably have at least one ancestor in common, somewhere in the misty dawn of time, but there are a lot of Wheelers in this world.

Disclaimer No. 2: Wheeler has a recent book about Our Current President, but this is not it. If that’s what you’re looking for, may I direct you to Sh*t My President Says ?

Memoirs of a Very Stable Genius  is a collection of Shannon Wheeler’s cartoons, both comics-format and single-panel. The supposed connection, according to the back cover, is that these are all “personal comics,” but I’m not sure what makes these single panel cartoons any more “personal” than, say, the ones in I Told You So  or I Don’t Get It  or I Thought You Would Be Funnier .

The longer stories all are autobiographical in some way or other, so they’re more obvious. But, if the single-panels all really do come out of Wheeler’s life somehow, it would have been good to have an introduction, or endnotes, or something to make those connections clear. Wheeler does have a fair number of mildly political cartoons, mostly reacting to the frighteningly authoritarian bent of the current US administration — but the majority are just regular single-panel stuff, from desert islands to couples (in bed, or on a couch, or out at a table) to kids to cocktail parties to crime (and superheroes) to death and cupids.

Well, we didn’t get that, so any reader will just say “huh, this cartoon of a guy and his pet fish on a desert island is personal. Wonder what that means?” to herself without getting any answer.

Also quirky and not entirely clear: the book is divided into a number of numbered chapters, without any indication of why or for what purpose. There may be a theme for each chapter, but, if so, I couldn’t detect any of them. Or they may be excuses to run Wheeler illustrations on the chapter-title pages without those having to be jokes.

The longer stories start with the opener, “Camp Micro-Penis,” about a boy with an unfortunately tiny male appendage who Wheeler knew as a boy at summer camp. Also included are the self-evident “My Meeting with Congressman John Lewis” and “How to Pack for a Trip” and “Paris ’89” and “San Diego Comic Con!” and “The Dirty Little Secret Origin of Comic Books” and “How to Sell a Love Doll.” Slightly less obvious are “Cubana” (about a 1996 trip to Cuba) and “Portugal” (ditto, year unspecified) and “The Urine Squirt Gun” (a Chekhovian story about Wheeler and his kid friends and a horrible weapon) and “Dog Bully” (A teachable moment with his kids) and “How to Choke Your Chicken” (in which Wheeler had to kill his ill egg-layer).

All of the long stories are amusing; all of the cartoons are at least amusing, and I laughed at a few of them. Wheeler has a nice cartoony style which works well in both formats, and a lot of this book is in color, too, which surprised me.

Given that he is a Wheeler, I was inclined to like this book anyway. But I can do that without any qualms: there’s a lot of good stuff here. I can’t judge the claims of “very stable” or “genius” from these works, but, what the hell! let’s let him claim that. He’s definitely not the worst person ever to do so.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #328: The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

There was an era in books for younger readers where the standard message was to conform, to become just like everyone else was supposed to be, to follow the prescriptions of life and fit your feet to the path. And we all make fun of those books now, when we see them or think about them.

We’re in the opposite era now: the standard story is that what a person wants must be right, because that person wants it. And putting it that baldly obviously shows up the inherent problems, but we generally don’t worry about them. Tell kids they can do anything, we say. They’ll figure out all of the ways that isn’t true for themselves eventually; we don’t need to crush their dreams directly.

Those stories are also regularly about exceptional, unique people — coddled princesses and lost princes, prophesied heroes and fated liberators. Is that because we all believe we are princesses at heart, or because those are the people whose dreams aren’t crushed in the end?

Don’t get me wrong: it’s good to tell kids they have options, that they can aim for the stars. But I don’t think we’re telling them that 99% of them will fail, that the stars are out of their reach, and that they’ll, at some point, need to trim their sails to catch a wind that actually exists. And so I wonder about the diet of stories we’re giving them.

Jen Wang is telling a “be who you feel you need to be” story in her new graphic novel The Prince and the Dressmaker . And, in that Oscar Wilde sense, it’s fiction, so they can become those things. One of them, of course is a prince at the start, which gives one a certain leg up in the world: it’s easier to find your perfect self when you’re not struggling to put food in your belly and clothes on your back.

It’s also easier when you’re in something like a fairy tale, which this is. It’s set in “Paris, at the dawn of the modern era” — maybe the middle of the long quiet 19th century, maybe later, maybe earlier, but those “maybes” are the point. The Prince is Sebastian, of Belgium, who you will not find on the family tree of the actual Belgian monarchy. He’s in Paris for the summer with his aunt, a French Countess, and will have the usual round of balls and events for his sixteenth birthday.

The underlying reason why he’s in Paris: to choose a wife. His royal parents are fictional/modern enough to let him pick his own match (within reason, and from a carefully curated list of the right young European noblewomen), but they’re traditional/realistic enough to want to get the betrothal settled before much more time goes by. Sebastian isn’t terribly interested in this — is any fictional prince or princess ever happy to engage in the round of who-should-I-marry? — for reasons that will be very obvious very quickly.

Frances is a young woman from outside Paris, driven to become a dress designer. She’s working, at what seems to be a low level, in a high-end shop, and gets her chance with a last-minute design for the Prince’s first ball: the willful Lady Sophie Rohan ruined her dress riding and in a fit of pique asks Frances to make her “the devil’s wench.”

Frances is too green to realize actually doing this would be horrible for her fledgling career, and does it. The dress causes a scandal, and Frances is about to be fired when a mysterious man comes around, looking for the designer of the scandalous dress. He has an equally mysterious client who wants to hire that designer exclusively to design for her, and Frances jumps at the offer.

Of course, despite an initial attempt at anonymity, she soon learns her new client is Sebastian. But she wants to design, and Sebastian wants to wear exactly the kind of flashy, exciting dresses she wants to make. And, at first, it all goes well: Frances gets experience and confidence, and Sebastian gets to go out in public as Lady Crystallia and become a minor celebrity.

But Frances can’t advance professionally as “Lady Crystallia’s” dressmaker, because that would connect Crystallia to Sebastian. And Sebastian’s parents are demanding he spend more time wooing all of those young women, who he has no interest in or time for. (He’s spending his nights as Crystallia, and his days sleeping and recovering.) It all is going to smash, and it does.

Wang finds her way to a happy ending, and one that’s more in keeping with the time and her protagonists’ very different social positions than I expected. The Prince and the Dressmaker is much more successful than I was worried it could be; it is a book that tells the you-can-be-whatever-you-want lesson, but it doesn’t skimp on pointing out the hard work and sacrifices needed along the way. (Plus a fair bit of luck, a sympathetic creator, and no small bit of wealth and position — but that’s what makes it fiction.)

I should have expected that from the author of Koko Be Good , which had a similarly complex central male-female relationship that didn’t resolve in conventional ways and a more nuanced view of success and the pursuit thereof. Wang is also a fine cartoonist, particularly good here with crisp, openly emotional faces drawn with few lines and big expressive eyes. This is a book telling that currently-popular story, and in a way designed to appeal to young readers who want to believe that they’ll get all of their dreams — but it’s a fine book despite that.

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

Laurie Strode Celebrates Halloween at Home January 15

Universal City, California, November 20, 2018 – The infamous killer Michael Myers strikes again in Halloween, arriving on Digital and via the digital movie app MOVIES ANYWHERE on December 28, 2018, as well as on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-rayTM, DVD and On Demand on January 15, 2019. Hailed by critics as “a near perfect blend of craft, character growth and nostalgia” (Perri Nemiroff, Collider), Halloween takes place four decades after Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, Halloween Franchise, “Scream Queens”) narrowly escaped the masked Michael Myers’ brutal killing spree. Packed with bonus features including chilling deleted and extended scenes as well as special featurettes showing behind the scenes looks at creating the film, Halloween delivers spine-chilling, hair-raising intensity and thrills to both new and repeat viewers.

Forty years after the events of 1978’s Halloween, Laurie Strode (Curtis) now lives in a heavily guarded home on the edge of Haddonfield, where she’s spent decades preparing for Michael’s potential return. After being locked up in an institution, Myers manages to escape when a bus transfer goes terribly wrong, leading to chaos in the same town he preyed on decades earlier. Laurie now faces a terrifying showdown when the deranged killer returns for her and her family – but this time, she’s ready for him.

Master of horror John Carpenter (Halloween (1978), The Thing) joins forces with director David Gordon Green (Joe, Pineapple Express) and producers Jason Blum (Blumhouse), Malek Akkad (Trancas International Films) and Bill Block (Miramax) for this follow up to Carpenter’s 1978 classic horror film. Halloween also includes a stellar cast including Judy Greer (Ant-Man and The Wasp, Jurassic World), Andi Matichak (“Underground”), Will Patton (Armageddon, The Punisher), and Virginia Gardner (Project Almanac, “Runaways”).  Proving “classics never die” (Mara Reinstein, US Weekly), Halloween offers a tricky treat for audiences both old and new. Halloween is the perfect slasher film, lauded as “hands down the best Halloween sequel ever” (Katie Walsh, Nerdist) and “immensely entertaining” (Eric Eisenberg, Cinemablend).

BONUS FEATURES on 4K ULTRA HD, BLU-RAYTM, DVD & DIGITAL:

  • Deleted/Extended Scenes
    • Extended Shooting Range
    • Shower Mask Visit
    • Jog to a Hanging Dog
    • Allyson and Friends at School
    • Cameron and Cops Don’t Mix
    • Deluxe Banh Mi Cops
    • Sartain and Hawkins Ride Along
  • Back in Haddonfield: Making Halloween
  • The Original Scream Queen
  • The Sound of Fear
  • Journey of the Mask
  • The Legacy of Halloween

The film will be available on 4K Ultra HD in a combo pack which includes 4K Ultra HD Blu-rayTM, Blu-rayTM and Digital. The 4K Ultra HD disc will include the same bonus features as the Blu-rayTM version, all in stunning 4K resolution.

  • 4K Ultra HD is the ultimate movie watching experience. 4K Ultra HD features the combination of 4K resolution for four times sharper picture than HD, the color brilliance of High Dynamic Range (HDR) with immersive audio delivering a multidimensional sound experience.
  • Blu-rayTM unleashes the power of your HDTV and is the best way to watch movies at home, featuring 6X the picture resolution of DVD, exclusive extras and theater-quality surround sound.
  • Digital lets fans watch movies anywhere on their favorite devices. Users can instantly stream or download.
  • MOVIES ANYWHERE is the digital app that simplifies and enhances the digital movie collection and viewing experience by allowing consumers to access their favorite digital movies in one place when purchased or redeemed through participating digital retailers. Consumers can also redeem digital copy codes found in eligible Blu-rayTM and DVD disc packages from participating studios and stream or download them through Movies Anywhere. MOVIES ANYWHERE is only available in the United States.

Book-A-Day 2018 #326: Lumberjanes, Vol. 5: Band Together by Stevenson, Watters, Leyh, Allen, Nowak & Laiho

There’s a point where, as a reviewer and critic, you either need to engage fully with your material or just walk away from it. Holding it at arm’s length doesn’t do anyone any good.

And I’m very aware that all of my posts about the great female-centric comic Lumberjanes — see my posts on volumes one and two and three  and four  — are about how I really can’t engage that deeply with a comic that is so centrally about being a girl and having friendships with other girls in a very girl-positive environment.

So I think this is the last time I’m going to read a Lumberjanes thing: they are good, and entirely a positive thing to have in the world, but I really don’t have a way into this material, and five books of searching is long enough.

Also, the stories collected in Lumberjanes, Vol. 5: Band Together  see a big shift in the creative team — Noelle Stevenson leaves as co-writer, to be replaced by Kat Leyh, and Brooke Allen hands over illustration duties to Carolyn Nowak. So this a a transitional moment anyway, which makes it better than most moments to transition myself quietly in the other direction.

Band Together starts with a single-issue flashback to the first day of camp, showing all five of our intrepid campers arriving, in the company of their various families, and pretty much immediately becoming best friends. It is fun and nice and sweet and very fluffy.

The rest of the book collects the three-issue story that introduced Leyh and Nowak as creators, in which our five intrepid best friends discover that there’s an entire civilization of mermaids in their local lake. (Lumberjanes has a lot of the qualities of a good animated TV series, primary among which is that the world is big and full of wonders, including ones that really should have been honkingly obvious before the point they appear.) Since Lumberjanes is about all-friendship-all-the-time (for female-identified persons), this story must of course be about our heroines mending a broken friendship among the hard-rocking merwomen.

That longer story is less fluffy, but it’s still very Lumberjanean (Lumberjaneite? Lumberjaneicious? Lumberjane-aroonie?) in its core positivity and sunny disposition. Even when one character becomes obsessed, she can be talked down (and mildly shamed) by her friends by merely mentioning that she wasn’t thinking enough about everyone else’s feelings.

Again, I think I’m going to leave Lumberjanes behind at this point. It is a very good thing with almost no points of congruity with my life or interests, and I’m trying to teach myself that I don’t need to worry about everything. Let’s see if I can learn.

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

SyFy’s Wonky Krypton Season 1 Comes to Disc March 5

BURBANK, CA (November 14, 2018) – Krypton, the all-new series from executive producers David S. Goyer (Man of Steel, The Dark Knight Trilogy) and Cameron Welsh (Constantine) tells the origin story of DC’s iconic Superman in a whole new way! Just in time for the second season on SYFY, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment will release the action-adventure hit series Krypton: The Complete First Season on Blu-ray and DVD on March 5, 2019. Fans can purchase the set which, in addition to all 10 exhilarating episodes from season one, contains over an hour of extra content, including the 2017 Comic-Con panel, featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel. Krypton: The Complete First Season is priced to own at $24.98 SRP for the DVD and $29.98 SRP for the Blu-ray which includes a Digital Copy. Krypton: The Complete First Season is also available to own on Digital via purchase from digital retailers.

What if Superman never existed? Set two generations before the destruction of Superman’s home planet, Krypton follows a young Seg-El, the legendary Man of Steel’s grandfather, who is faced with a life and death conflict – save his home planet or let it be destroyed in order to restore the fate of his future grandson. With Krypton’s leadership in disarray and the House of El ostracized, Seg fights alongside Earthly time-traveler Adam Strange to redeem his family’s honor and protect the ones he loves while saving the future of his legacy from DC Super-Villain Brainiac.

With Blu-ray’s unsurpassed picture and sound, the Blu-ray release of Krypton: The Complete First Season will include 1080p Full HD Video with DTS-HD Master Audio for English 5.1. The 2-disc Blu-ray will feature a high-definition Blu-ray and a Digital Copy of all 10 episodes from season one.

Krypton stars Cameron Cuffe (New Year’s Eve), Georgina Campbell (One Night, Black Mirror), Shaun Sipos (Final Destination 2), Colin Salmon (Arrow), Elliot Cowan (The Golden Compass), Ann Ogbomo (Wonder Woman, Justice League), Aaron Pierre (Britannia, The A Word), Rasmus Hardiker (Your Highness), Wallis Day (Will), with Blake Ritson (Da Vinci’s Demons, Indian Summers) and Ian McElhinney (Game of Thrones). Based on the DC characters created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Krypton is from Phantom Four Films in association with Warner Horizon Scripted Television and is executive produced by David S. Goyer alongside Cameron Welsh.

BLU-RAY & DVD FEATURES

  • Krypton: 2017 Comic-Con Panel
  • Krypton: Bringing the Home World to Life
  • A Lost Kingdom: Life on Krypton
  • Gag reel
  • Deleted Scenes

10 ONE-HOUR EPISODES

  1. Pilot
  2. House of El
  3. The Rankless Initiative
  4. The Word of Rao
  5. House of Zod
  6. Civil Wars
  7. Transformation
  8. Savage Night
  9. Hope
  10. The Phantom Zone

DIGITAL

The first season of Krypton is also currently available to own on Digital. Digital purchase allows consumers to instantly stream and download all episodes to watch anywhere and anytime on their favorite devices. Digital movies and TV shows are available from various digital retailers including Amazon Video, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu and others. A Digital Copy is also included with the purchase of specially marked Blu-ray discs for redemption and cloud storage.

BASICS
Street Date: March 5, 2019
BD and DVD Presented in 16×9 widescreen format
Running Time: Feature: Approx. 600 min
Enhanced Content: Approx. 61 min

DVD
Price: $24.98 SRP
2 DVD-9s
Audio – English (5.1)
Subtitles – ESDH, Latin Spanish, French
UPC# 883929653232
Catalog# 1000728377

BLU-RAY
Price: $29.98 SRP
2 BD-50s
BD Audio –DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 – English
BD Subtitles – ESDH, French, Latin Spanish
UPC# 883929650972
Catalog# 1000727261

Book-A-Day 2018 #325: Promethea, Book 1 by Moore, Williams & Gray

Alan Moore famously has a love-hate relationship with superhero comics. Well, I mean, a lot of people love or hate superhero comics, and plenty do both. The difference is that superhero comics hates and loves Moore back.

In the late ’90s, after he’d cast a magic incantation cursing DC Comics and all of its wares, swearing never to work for them again under any circumstances, Moore started his own line of superhero comics, under the not-at-all-self-aggrandizing label of America’s Best Comics. And then his publisher sold the entire company to DC anyway, pretty much simultaneously with the launch of the ABC line.

(It’s almost enough to make one believe that deep Northamptonian magic doesn’t actually do anything!)

One of those ABC books was Promethea, with art by J.H. Williams II and Mick Gray. I read the first collection sometime in the early Aughts, and didn’t remember a whole lot about it. (I do remember that nothing I saw of America’s Best Comics, then or later, impressed me all that much. But I can be hard to impress when it comes to superhero stuff.) Since I’m reading giant stacks of comics-format books this year to feed the maw of Book-A-Day, I figured I might as well try Promethea, Book 1 again.

(I’m still not that impressed. This is not a surprise.)

Promethea the character is a legacy hero, one of many in Moore’s work — he’s been very fond of having his main character be one of a million versions of the same thing, from the Captain Britain multiverse to the Parliament of Trees. This time, the original of Promethea is a fourth-century girl in Egyptian Alexandria bodily transported to the realm of story by the god Thoth-Hermes, and somehow because of that gets to be the template for a series of mystically-powered superwomen starting at the end of the 19th century in the US. Since Moore always has miles of notes, I’m not going to ask what Promethea was doing for the intervening thirteen centuries, because he’d probably tell me in great detail in some tedious end-of-book text feature.

Our brand-new Promethea is Sophie Bangs — that name sounds much more like a camgirl than a superheroine, but OK — in a mildly science-utopian 1999, a slightly alternate comic-book-universey version of the real world her story was published into. She’s a college student researching the legend of Promethea, providing both the natural opportunity for a lot of infodumping and the reason why she gets saddled with the glowy caduceus staff and form-fitting bronze armor.

There are, of course, equally mystical evil people who want to snuff out this new Promethea before she comes into her full powers, and they try to do so. But most of the story here, from the first six issues of the Promethea comic, is an extended tour of the Immateria, the lands of story and myth, in the company of each of the recent dead Prometheas in turn.

That tour is not over at the end of this book; nothing is actually resolved by the last page here and Sophie/Promethea is heading out into a promised two more sections of the Immateria to learn more lessons from more dead predecessors. Why this is where the vast and cool intelligences of DC chose to end this particular book is beyond me; I suspect they believe that their target audience doesn’t understand the idea of stories “ending” anyway, and so don’t bother wasting time with such things.

But I am a well-known cynic.

Promethea is a perfectly adequate superhero comic, with powers and characters that make more sense than many of its competitors. Williams and Gray draw well, and get some inventive page designs out of it. You could certainly do worse than this.

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

REVIEW: Mile 22

It feels as if Mark Wahlberg is casting about for a franchise to call his own. The actor, who recently bailed on the remake of The Six Million Dollar Man, may have found it in his fourth outing with director Peter Berg, Mile 22.

This action-adventure film, out now from Universal Home Entertainment, introduces us to CIA operative James Silva (Mark Wahlberg). He’s been tasked by Overwatch leader John Malkovich with bringing an asset, police officer Li Noor (Iko Uwais), to the secret Mile 22 facility so they can extract the life-threatening secrets he holds about the whereabouts of several radioactive cesium isotope dirty bombs. With that thin, familiar set-up, he’s off and running and we’re breathless trying to keep up.

We travel to interesting locales (Colombia filling in for Indonesia), have one set piece after another, watching Jason Bourne/Ethan Hunt/James Silva avoid being blown up, shot, stabbed, or beaten to death. The action is decorated with all the latest surveillance tools and cybersecurity wizardry so it looks good.

Lauren Cohan plays Alice Kerr, Noor’s handler who was wounded prior to the film’s main story and is seen dealing with the after effects and repercussions. Her arc is surprisingly good and helps ground the film from floating away at warp speed. Her performance and Uwais’ make the film more enjoyable than it should be.

One has to credit Lea Carpenter, in her debut screenplay (doctored by Graham Roland) for providing us with the template for adrenaline-filled adventure with a likeable lead. If only he weren’t so cardboard – maybe next time.

The movie comes as a Blu-ray DVD, Digital HD multiscreen extravaganza and has a fine high definition resolution and audio track

The picture in its 2.39:1 aspect ratio and DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 sound quality on the Blu-Ray are solid as expected and the special features include interviews from the premiere on the red carpet with the cast, six behind the scenes featurettes along with soundbites and B-Roll.

 

The Blu-ray special features are as lightweight and forgettable as the film they support. These include: Overwatch (1:36), detailing the para-military division in Mile 22; Introducing Iko (1:48): shining the camera on international action star Iko Uwais; Iko Fight (1:47), more or less continues the previous piece focusing on his training and choreography; Bad Ass Women (1:44) has actors Lauren Cohan and Ronda Rousey and writer Lea Carpenter, celebrate female empowerment; BTS Stunts (1:56); Modern Combat (1:56) shows what goes into making one of these films, which requires multiple cameras and carefully planned cinematography to capture the death-defying stunts; and finally, Colombia (3:45), a travelogue of sorts.

REVIEW: Christopher Robin

REVIEW: Christopher Robin

Ever since Loggins and Messina tugged on our heartstrings with the wistful ‘70s ballad “House on Pooh Corner”, the notion of saying goodbye to childhood playmates has tinged A.A. Milne’s delightful Winnie the Pooh stories. It was seemingly inevitable that the song would be turned into a story, which more or less explains this summer’s Christopher Robin. The film, out now from Walt Disney Home Entertainment is incredibly predictable but still charming in its own way.

We have an adult Christopher (Ewan McGregor) who has married Evelyn (Hayley Atwell) and they have a daughter Madeline (Bronte Carmichael). However, the joy of childhood is gone in his life, replaced with drudgery, as he has become the London equivalent of the salaryman, working for a gray luggage company with inept management.

While the audience is shown that the inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood gang – Winnie the Pooh (Jim Cummings), Owl (Toby Jones), Tigger (Jim, Cummings), Eeyore (Brad Garrett), Rabbit (Peter Capaldi), Kanga (Sophie Okonedo), and Roo (Sara Sheen) – are aware Christopher has grown and left them behind, they have no real sense of time.

Circumstances, though, allow Pooh to enter Christopher’s world and they have an awkward reunion, as at first, he’s delighted to see the “silly old bear” but has already given up his much-needed family vacation to find a plan to salvage the company or fire half the staff. Pooh becomes an impediment, as he has to bring the playmate back to the Wood.

Once home, we know he’s going to reconnect with his childhood, resolve the work issues, rekindle his family connections, and all will be well with the world. So, the question comes down to execution. The screenplay by Alex Ross Perry, Tom McCarthy, and Allison Schroeder is serviceable but lacking in whimsy and charm so director Marc Foster does what he can. The CGI is a delight and the interaction of humans and animals works just fine.

Foster makes an interesting choice in having London and the Wood but darker, overgrown, and less than welcome, equating the two is odd when we’re expecting more of a contrast. They certainly stand out in sharp contrast to the visual humor and wide-eyed reactions when people meet the animal gang for the first time.

The film is entertaining enough but you wanted more than the expected. At least the high definition transfer, retaining the original 2:39:1 aspect ratio, nicely captures the tonal differences in location. It comes with a fine 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio mix as well.

The Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD multiscreen pack offers up some nice, not great, special features. We start with “A Movie is Made for Pooh,” (5:28) the standard behind-the-scenes featurette with cast and crew chatting it up; “Pooh and Friends Come to Life,” (3:16) Carmichael narrates this look at the 3-D CGI renderings required for the production; “Pooh Finds his Voice,” (2:43) Cummings gets the well-deserved spotlight and he nicely credits his  predecessor, the late Sterling Holloway;  and then we end with “Pooh and Walt Become Friends,” (2:43) which revisits Walt Disney’s introduction to Pooh via his daughter Diane, and what happened next.

For those who use the Digital HD at Movies Anywhere, you get an exclusive feature: “In Which…We Were Very Young” (3:51), which gives us insight to the real Christopher Robin.

Book-A-Day 2018 #323: Julio’s Day by Gilbert Hernandez

I spend more time than is reasonable worrying if I’m doing things right. Even worse, often what I mean by “right” is “fitting the rules I made up myself, which I haven’t bothered to clearly codify.”

Obviously, a healthy person would not spend time on anything like that, but I am a blogger, and so clearly not that healthy.

So my first question after reading Gilbert Hernandez’s standalone 2013 graphic novel Julio’s Day  was whether it really counts as Love and Rockets. Oh, sure, two excerpts from it appeared first in the New Stories paperback series, but most of this story didn’t, and it has no connections with any of his other L&R work. (On the other side of the argument: a lot of his L&R work has no connection to the rest of his L&R work; he’s been more likely to go off on tangents than his brother Jaime.)

Since I’m writing this here now, you’ve probably already assumed that I decided it counted. And I did. But I had to worry the issue for a while first.

The next big question is whether it’s way too reductive to call Julio’s Day the story of the hundred-year-life of a completely closeted Mexican gay man. And that’s a nice label, but it doesn’t reflect what the book is actually about. Julio himself isn’t really all that central to his own story to begin with: he’s pretty colorless for a Gilbert Hernandez protagonist, overshadowed his entire life by the more vibrant members of his family.

As usual for Hernandez, “vibrant” is not at all the same thing as “positive.” Julio’s uncle Juan is one of the most distinctive characters here, and he’s a deeply damaged person, compelling to sneak away with baby boys and do unspecified things with them. The rest of Julio’s family, and the few others they interact with, are quirky in similar Gilbert Hernandez ways, but Julio himself remains transparent, the void at the center of his own story.

Like Palomar, this town is somewhere in Latin America. Also like Palomar, Hernandez will not be any more specific than that. Julio’s life matches pretty closely to the twentieth century, from small bits of internal evidence, but that’s all background: Julio is not involved in any great issues, and barely any small issues. He just lives here, for a long time, while other things happen around him, mostly far away.

There’s a hundred pages of incidents and no real overall plot: this is a story of episodes, moments over a hundred years when Julio was there to witness them. (Or was somewhere else: the two pieces published in L&R follow other members of his family on journeys, first his father and then his grand-nephew.)

In typical Hernandez fashion, there are bizarre, horrifying diseases and deaths, and many random, mostly unhappy events — a long life in a Gilbert Hernandez story is a sequence of sad and shocking moments, ended only by death.

The title is ironic at best, as well: not only is this the story of a hundred years, not a single day, but Julio never really had a day, either literally or metaphorically. His grand-nephew poses that question to him near the end, and that’s the source for the title — but Julio was never in the right time or place to seize that day, and maybe was never the person who could have seized that day.

Does that make Julio’s Day a cautionary tale? It’s not focused enough for that, and I think Hernandez would deny that impulse — he’s never been one to make a single lesson with a story. Gilbert Hernandez stories aim for the complexity and confusion of real life: too many things happening to too many people to turn it into a single narrative, and all of the lessons possible in there somewhere.

And I suspect Julio’s Day is the kind of book that rewards multiple readings, to trace the connections, personal and visual, over this long century, from the moment Julio opens his mouth to be born until the moment his mouth hangs open in death.

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