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Wakanda Forever as Black Panther Comes to Disc in May

BURBANK, Calif. (April 10, 2018) — Marvel Studios’ Black Panther, the highly celebrated story of T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), a young African prince who takes on the mantle of King and Super Hero, has thrilled and inspired generations of moviegoers around the globe. Now, fans can bring home the phenomenon, packed with light-hearted fun, pulse-pounding action and a powerful message, and watch it over and over again, Digitally in HD and 4K Ultra HD™ and Movies Anywhere on May 8 and on 4K Ultra HD™, Blu-ray™, DVD and On-Demand on May 15.  With both Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos immersive sound, 4K Ultra HD offers consumers a transformative viewing experience.

Through the 4K Cinematic Universe Edition of “Black Panther,” fans will experience the exhilarating adventure in stunning 4K Ultra HD with next-generation high dynamic range (HDR) visuals and Dolby Atmos immersive audio. Never-before-seen extras feature commentary from director Ryan Coogler; deleted scenes; outtakes; and several making-of featurettes, which detail the Black Panther’s evolution, the remarkable women of Wakanda, the history of T’Challa’s proud nation, and the cosmic origin and technological applications of vibranium. Also included are a roundtable discussion with “Black Panther” filmmakers and writers; a featurette tracing the countless connections between heroes, characters and storylines within the Marvel Cinematic Universe; and an exclusive sneak peek at “Ant-Man and the Wasp.”

The global cultural phenomenon of Black Panther has dominated the box office charts emerging as the third biggest movie of all time domestically with over $665 million – the first film in eight years to spend five weeks at No. 1 – and rising to the global top 10 of all time with over $1.3 billion. In the acclaimed film, T’Challa returns home to the hidden high-tech African nation of Wakanda to succeed to the throne and take his rightful place as king, following the death of his father. But when a man named Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) appears, T’Challa’s mettle as king—and Black Panther—is tested when he’s drawn into a formidable conflict that puts the fate of Wakanda and the entire world at risk. Pitted against his own family, the king must rally his allies and release the full power of Black Panther to defeat his foes and embrace his future as an Avenger.

The film features a fierce group of Wakandan women, including Nakia (Academy Award® winner Lupita Nyong’o), a War Dog and Wakandan spy; Shuri (Letitia Wright), T’Challa’s little sister and tech wizard; and the Dora Milaje, the all-female Wakandan Special Forces led by Okoye (Danai Gurira). They team up with reluctant ally CIA agent Everett K. Ross (Martin Freeman) to help T’Challa defend Wakanda against the forces threatening to destroy it. The extraordinary ensemble cast of Black Panther also includes veteran actors such as Academy Award® nominee Angela Bassett as Ramonda, T’Challa and Shuri’s mother; Academy Award® winner Forest Whitaker as Zuri, the spiritual leader of Wakanda; and Andy Serkis as Ulysses Klaue, an illegal arms dealer; and standout performances by Academy Award® nominee Daniel Kaluuya as W’Kabi, Royal Counsel to T’Challa; Winston Duke as M’Baku, the formidable leader of the Jabari tribe; and Emmy® Award-winner Sterling K. Brown as N’Jobu, a Wakandan War Dog.

The action in Black Panther is intensified through a musical score by GRAMMY®-nominated composer Ludwig Göransson and soundtrack curated and produced by GRAMMY® Award-winning global superstar Kendrick Lamar and Billboard Magazine’s Executive of the Year Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith. Black Panther: The Album topped the Billboard 200 chart for five consecutive weeks and the end-credit track, “All The Stars,” featuring Lamar and SZA, spent nine weeks in the top 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.

BONUS MATERIAL (may vary by retailer):

Blu-ray:

  • Director’s Intro
  • From Page to Screen: A Roundtable Discussion – Delve into the film’s making
  • Crowning of a New King – Explore the world of Black Panther in all its color and complexity
  • The Warriors Within – Get to know Wakanda’s women and the actors who portray them
  • The Hidden Kingdom Revealed – Wakanda’s diverse people
  • Wakanda Revealed: Exploring the Technology
  • Deleted Scenes
    • N. Meet and Greet
    • Okoye And W’Kabi Discuss the Future of Wakanda
    • T’Challa Remembers His Father
    • Voices from the Past
  • Gag Reel
  • Exclusive Sneak Peek at Ant-Man and The Wasp
  • Marvel Studios the First Ten Years: Connecting the Universe
  • Director’s Commentary

Digital Exclusives:

  • In World Wakanda Tourism Ads
    • Come to Wakanda “Before”
    • Come to Wakanda “After”

Black Panther is packaged several ways to ensure fans get the most out of their in-home viewing experience. The Multiscreen Edition (formerly the Blu-ray Combo Pack) includes Blu-ray, and a Digital Copy, giving viewers the flexibility to watch the film on different devices. Those with 4K Ultra HD capability may opt for a 4K UHD Collector’s Edition, including 4K Ultra HD disc with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, Blu-ray disc, and a digital copy (where available). Dolby Vision delivers greater brightness and contrast, as well as a fuller palette of rich colors. Dolby Atmos places and moves audio anywhere in the room, including overhead. Together on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray disc, viewers will fully experience the sights and sounds of Wakanda.

DISC SPECIFICATIONS (applies to film content only):

Product SKUs:                           4K Cinematic Universe Edition (4K UHD+Blu-ray+Digital), Multi-Screen Edition (Blu-ray+Digital), Digital UHD, HD, SD, HD Bundle (“Black Panther”+”Captain America: Civil War”), DVD and On-Demand

Feature Run Time:                  Approximately 134 minutes

Rating:                                          PG-13

Aspect Ratio:                             2.39

Audio:UHD BD: English Dolby Atmos, English 7.1 Dolby Digital Plus, Latin Spanish 7.1 Dolby Digital Plus, French and Spanish 5.1 Dolby Digital, English Descriptive Audio 2.0 Dolby Digital
Blu-ray: English 7.1 DTS-HDMA, French and Spanish 5.1 Dolby Digital, English Descriptive Audio 2.0 Dolby Digital
DVD: English, French and Spanish 5.1 Dolby Digital, English Descriptive Audio 2.0 Dolby Digital
UHD Digital: English Dolby Atmos (some platforms), English 7.1 Dolby Digital Plus (some platforms), English 5.1 & 2.0 Dolby Digital, English Descriptive Audio 2.0 Dolby Digital
HD Digital:  English 7.1 Dolby Digital Plus (some platforms), English 5.1 & 2.0 Dolby Digital, Latin Spanish 5.1 & 2.0 Dolby Digital, French 5.1 & 2.0 Dolby Digital, English Descriptive Audio 2.0 Dolby Digital
SD Digital:  English 5.1 & 2.0 Dolby Digital, Latin Spanish 5.1 & 2.0 Dolby Digital, French 5.1 & 2.0 Dolby Digital, English Descriptive Audio 2.0 Dolby Digital
Languages/Subtitles: English SDH, French & Spanish
Captions: English

BLACK PANTHER CAST & CREW:

Black Panther stars Chadwick Boseman (Captain America: Civil War, Get on Up), Michael B. Jordan (Creed, Fruitvale Station), Academy Award® winner Lupita Nyong’o (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, 12 Years a Slave), Danai Gurira (The Walking Dead, All Eyez on Me), Martin Freeman (The Hobbit trilogy, Sherlock), Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Sicario), Letitia Wright (Urban Hymn, Glasgow Girls), Winston Duke (Person of Interest, Modern Family), with Academy Award® nominee Angela Bassett (American Horror Story, London Has Fallen), with  Academy Award® winner Forest Whitaker (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Lee Daniels’ The Butler) and Andy Serkis (Avengers: Age of Ultron, Star Wars: The Force Awakens).

Ryan Coogler (Creed, Fruitvale Station) directs from a screenplay he wrote with Joe Robert Cole (The People v. O.J. Simpson:  American Crime Story). Kevin Feige is producer with Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Nate Moore, Jeffrey Chernov and Stan Lee serving as executive producers.

The Black Panther creative brain trust includes frequent Coogler collaborators: Oscar®-nominated director of photography Rachel Morrison, ASC (Dope, Fruitvale Station), production designer Hannah Beachler (Creed, Fruitvale Station), editor Michael P. Shawver (Creed, Fruitvale Station) and composer Ludwig Göransson (Creed, Fruitvale Station); along with editor Debbie Berman (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Timeless), costume designer Ruth E. Carter (Selma, Lee Daniels’ The Butler), Academy Award®–winning makeup designer Joel Harlow (Star Trek Beyond, Black Mass), visual effects supervisor Geoffrey Baumann (Doctor Strange, Avengers: Age of Ultron) and eight-time Academy Award® nominee/special effects supervisor Dan Sudick (Captain America: Civil War, Marvel’s The Avengers).

Book-A-Day 2018 #103: Syllabus by Lynda Barry

This is not a graphic novel. It’s not even graphic non-fiction in a narrative form. It’s related to Lynda Barry’s last few books, What It Is and Picture This , but it’s less conventional and concerned with telling a story than those two books were.

Luckily, it has a title that tells us what it is: Syllabus .

Barry has taught courses in storytelling and creativity — that sounds vague, because they were inter-departmental courses that were about brain science as much as how to draw and write — for several years, mostly at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This book is something like a blended experience of being in those classes, or perhaps particularly “The Unthinkable Mind” class from spring of 2013. It contains what seem to be Barry’s actual handouts and worksheets from that course, along with exercises from the students that year, organized chronologically to cover that whole semester. There are also some pages, especially near the beginning, that set the scene and explain her process and and overall plan for the class — but, as the book goes on, more and more it is a record of what that class did.

So it’s possible for a devoted student to follow most of the instructions here, and make for herself a one-person version of that course. (She couldn’t do everything, since there are some exercises where work gets handed around the class, with each person adding something new.)

Syllabus is a much denser book than What It Is and Picture This were: those aimed to entertain while touching on profound ideas, while Syllabus aims to document an entire teaching method and program. It’s all related — Barry’s ideas on art and life have been basically the same through the past decade — but Syllabus is the operationalization of those ideas, if you’ll let me descend into bafflegab for a moment.

I frankly was surprised by Syllabus: I wasn’t expecting a book so dense and so school-book-y. (Perhaps I should have read the title a few more times! It was not hidden.) I appreciate a lot of Barry’s work and enthusiasm, while still fervently believing that I would hate every second of being in a class like this…and not just because I’ve never liked or been good at drawing. But be aware: this is deeper and denser than her previous work, and is for a more rarefied and self-selected audience of people really interested in the sources of creativity and how to teach stimulating those sources.

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

Black Lightning The Complete First Season Strikes Home in June

BURBANK, CA (April 11, 2018) – From Warner Bros. Television, DC Entertainment and Berlanti Productions, the producers of the hit series The Flash, Arrow, Supergirl, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, along with Akil Productions, comes the next Super Hero breakout hit as Warner Bros. Home Entertainment releases Black Lightning: The Complete First Season on Blu-ray and DVD on June 26, 2018. Black Lightning delivered the most-watched series premiere in the past two years and remains The CW’s second highest-rated show just behind The Flash. Fans that purchase the set will be able to watch all 13 electrifying episodes from the first season, supercharged with extra content including the 2017 Comic-Con panel, new featurettes, deleted scenes, gag reel and more. Black Lightning: The Complete First Season is priced to own at $29.98 SRP for the DVD and $39.99 SRP for the Blu-ray. Black Lightning: The Complete First Season is also available to own on Digital via purchase from digital retailers.

Black Lightning follows Jefferson Pierce (Cress Williams), a man wrestling with a secret. As the father of two daughters and principal of a charter high school that also serves as a safe haven for young people in a neighborhood overrun by gang violence, he is a hero to his community. Nine years ago, Pierce was a hero of a different sort. Gifted with the superhuman power to harness and control electricity, he used those powers to keep his hometown streets safe as the masked vigilante Black Lightning. Almost a decade later, Pierce’s crime-fighting days are long behind him…or so he thought. But with crime and corruption spreading like wildfire, and those he cares about in the crosshairs of the menacing local gang The One Hundred, Black Lightning returns — to save not only his family, but also the soul of his community.

“In only its first season on the air, Black Lightning has quickly established itself as a hit series with its action-packed episodes and stellar storyline,” said Rosemary Markson, WBHE Senior Vice President, Television Marketing. “We are very excited to release the first season on Blu-ray and DVD so fans and newcomers alike can add the new hit series to their collections along with newly added bonus content.”

With Blu-ray’s unsurpassed picture and sound, Black Lightning: The Complete First Season Blu-ray release 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 13 episodes from season one.

Black Lightning stars Cress Williams (Hart of Dixie, Code Black), China Anne McClain (House of Payne, Descendants 2), Nafessa Williams (Code Black, Twin Peaks), Christine Adams (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Batman Begins), Marvin “Krondon” Jones III, Damon Gupton (Whiplash, Bates Motel, Empire) and James Remar (Dexter, Sex and the City, The Path). Based on the DC character created by Tony Isabella with Trevor Von Eeden, Black Lightning is executive produced by Greg Berlanti (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, Blindspot, Riverdale), Salim and Mara Brock Akil (The Game, Being Mary Jane, Girlfriends), and Sarah Schechter (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow).

BLU-RAY & DVD FEATURES

  • Black Lightning Comic-Con panel
  • A Family of Strength
  • Black Lightning Come Visit Georgia
  • Gag Reel
  • Deleted Scenes

13 ONE-HOUR EPISODES

1.      The Resurrection
2.      LaWanda: The Book of Hope
3.      LaWanda: The Book of Burial
4.      Black Jesus
5.      And Then the Devil Brought the Plague: The Book of Green Light
6.      Three Sevens: The Book of Thunder
7.      Equinox: The Book of Fate
8.      The Book of Revelation
9.      The Book of Little Black Lies
10.  Sins of the Father: The Book of Redemption
11.  Black Jesus: The Book of Crucifixion
12.  The Resurrection and the Light: The Book of Pain
13.  Shadow of Death: The Book of War

DIGITAL

The first season of Black Lightning is also currently available to own on Digital. Digital allows consumers to instantly stream and download all episodes to watch anywhere and anytime on their favorite devices.  Digital is available from various retailers including Amazon Prime Video, iTunes, PlayStation, Vudu, Xbox 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: June 26, 2018
BD and DVD Presented in 16×9 widescreen format
Running Time: Feature: Approx 572 min

DVD
Price: $29.98 SRP
3 DVD-9s
Audio – English (5.1)
Subtitles – ESDH

BLU-RAY
Price: $39.99 SRP
2-Disc Elite BD-50s
BD Audio –DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 – English
BD Subtitles – ESDH

Book-A-Day 2018 #102: Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1954 by Mike Mignola, Chris Roberson and various artists

So the big Hellboy story is over — it’s been over longer than most people think, as I argued when I wrote about the second volume of Hellboy in Hell. But Hellboy is still a valuable piece of intellectual property, with a potential movie reboot still kicking around in the background somewhere. So there has to be some Hellboy product coming out on a regular basis, to help keep the lights on at Dark Horse and to keep Mike Mignola busy.

Well, maybe that’s too cynical a view of things. Hellboy is an interesting, fun character, and his history contains vast swaths of space and time to throw additional stories into. It’s not impossible that Mignola and his collaborators are really, really enthusiastic about all of those possibilities and that Mignola is taking on such a large number of collaborators and doing a whole lot of unrelated one-off stories because that’s precisely what the Hellboy universe needs right at this moment. The world is vast; all things are possible. And it’s clear that Mignola and team are enjoying what they’re doing.

So what we have here is Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1954 , containing four miscellaneous stories all taking place in that year and all written by Mignola with Chris Roberson, his current major writing collaborator (following John Arcudi). Two of the stories were two-issue mini-series, another was a single issue, and the fourth appeared in a giveaway comic for Free Comic Book Day in 2015.

(Similar volumes covering the years 1952 and 1953 came out previously.)

The four stories are all entirely separate, which is nothing new for Hellboy: even now, probably a majority of the books featuring him are made up of miscellaneous tales of investigating (and then, inevitably, punching to death) some mysterious folkloric thing in some odd corner of the world. The best of the short pure-Mignola stories relied on folklore and atmosphere rather than tying everything into the standard Hellboy mythology, and it’s good to see that most of the stories here follow in that vein.

We lead off with a two-parter, “Black Sun,” drawn by Stephen Green in the traditional dark and moody style of other-hands Hellboy-universe stories. I tend to think of that look as being codified by Guy Davis in B.P.R.D., but a lot of people (the Fiumara brothers, Duncan Fegredo, Ben Stenbeck, Tyler Crook, James Harren, and even Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba) have worked in that vein on various Hellboy-related stories over the years and done good work. “Black Sun” features both Nazis and flying saucers, and is the most core-mythology of the stories here.

Moodiest (and probably best) is the single-issue story, “The Unreasoning Beast,” with art by Patric Reynolds. It has a monkey in it; I probably shouldn’t say more than that.

The other two-parter is “Ghost Moon,” set in Hong Kong. Brian Churilla draws this one, and I found the style to be brighter and more open than most Hellboy stuff. Some of that may be Dave Stewart’s colors, but he colors nearly everything in the Hellboy universe, so it must be a deliberate choice here. This is another story using real-world folklore, but I found it a little pat and obvious.

And last is the shortest piece, “The Mirror,” drawn by Richard Corben. Corben’s grotesques work pretty well for Hellboy, though I personally like his work best in small doses. This is more a vignette than a story, but it’s a nice vignette.

We all know that this book exists because a lot of us like Hellboy and want to keep reading stories about Hellboy, even when there’s no compelling in-story reason for those stories to continue. If that describes you, you’ll probably like this book: it does that Hellboy thing, in the extended-universe manner, and does it pretty well. But if you haven’t gotten into the Hellboy thing yet, go back to the pure Mignola stuff and start there.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #100: The Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow

People will tell you that The Ghost in the Shell is a single story, about a cyborg cop in a complex future Japan and her pursuit of a mysterious AI called The Puppeteer. They are lying to you.

Oh, that thread is here, and the very last installment here sees the conclusion of that story. It’s a plausible lie, like all the best ones.

But Ghost in the Shell is three hundred and fifty pages of comics, across eleven long chapters, and most of those chapters are individual episodes of our heroine murdering lots of people because the government tells her to. Puppeteer comes in during one of those murder sprees earlier in the book, and then returns in the aftermath of yet another kill-that-guy mission for something like an ending.

There is a lot of pseudo-philosophical talk about brains and bodies, and a whole lot of skiffy bafflegab — which I think was not translated as crisply and clearly as it should have been — about the cyberpunk details of the technology here. But that’s not nearly as unique as Ghost‘s boosters pretend it is — or as coherent.

Of course, we do have to remember that Ghost started serialization in 1989 and was collected in 1991 — cyberpunk wasn’t new at that point, true (in fact, I think “Vincent Omniveritas” had declared it dead several years before), but Ghost showed that cyberpunk was going global and infiltrating new media. If you think of it as an ’80s cyberpunk comic, Ghost is pretty good — it has a complex, lived-in world, lots of interesting technology turned to criminal and/or destructive purposes, and a deeply jaundiced view of anyone in power. Masamune Shirow might have been working on the other side of the world, in a different language, and a different medium than the first wave of cyberpunks, but he could see what was important in that mode and turn it into the stories he wanted to tell.

The street finds its own use for things, as they say.

In this case, it’s the story of a cyborg mass-murderess, who is our heroine because she kills people the government aims her at, and we still thought that was good enough in the ’80s. (She does get in trouble near the end for her bloody work, but only because she was unfortunate enough to do it where a camera could see it — the killing itself is never questioned for a second, by anyone in the book.)

As you might guess, I found it a lot to swallow. Oh, not that a government would have a secret assassin — that’s traditional enough in this kind of story. Maybe a bit that she’s part of a big squad with a code number ending in nine — explicitly shown to be one of a series of similar teams with mostly non-overlapping opportunities for mass murder  — which implies a level of bloodthirstiness that seems unlikely to be sustained for very long, even in a country as full of targets as Japan. Mostly because Major Motoko Kusanagi never really becomes a person: she’s a collection of standard manga reactions and poses, there to be in the middle of the action and do Cool Stuff. Her entire personality is “dangerous sexy manga chick.”

Again, 1989 was another world — Japan doubly so, manga triply so. But, coming to Ghost in the Shell now, it does not look terribly impressive.

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

REVIEW: Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay

REVIEW: Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay

The trailer for Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay was designed to make it look like a 1970-s grindhouse film, which could have been an interesting take on the team. What we get instead, isn’t exactly that, and while set within the new DC Animated Universe canon is off in a corner, nor is it particularly good or bad. Out this week from Warner Home Entertainment, the 86-minute feature is most certainly not for children.

There’s a gritty realism to the constant violence and betrayal among the villains seen in this movie, written by Alan Burnett, who certainly knows the characters well. He adapts them from the comics, making adjustments for his needs, so it’s not exactly like their four-color counterparts or as we’ve seen them in other animated fare. There’s certainly a high body count, starting early with the quick dispatching of Tobias Whale (Dave Fennoy) Count Vertigo (Jim Pirri), Punch (Trevor Devall), and Jewelee (Julie Nathanson).

The team – Deadshot (Christian Slater), Harley Quinn (Tara Strong), Captain Boomerang (Liam McIntyre), Killer Frost (Kristin Bauer van Straten), Copperhead (Gideon Emery), and Bronze Tiger (Billy Brown) – is assembled by Amanda Waller (Vanessa Williams) to seek out the fabled Get out of Hell Free card, a plot device taken from a run of Secret Six stories. She needs it because of her terminal  diagnosis but once the team hits the road, it seems many other people want it, too, most notably the immortal Vandal Savage (Jim Pirri).

Along the way, the team has to combat Vandal’s daughter Scandal (Dania Ramirez) and Knockout Cissy Jones), deal with various betrayals, and watch the leadership handed around like a hot potato. Zoom (C. Thomas Howell), the most desperate of those wanting the card for gruesome reasons, Blockbuster (Dave Fennoy), and Silver Banshee (Julie Nathanson) have  formed a trio to also obtain the card, starting with the odd kidnapping of Professor Pyg (James Urbaniak) and constantly in the Squad’s way. All roads lead to the card’s possessor: Maximum Steel (Greg Grunberg), a former Doctor Fate for is an airhead despite his resemblance to Kent Nelson.

While the core characters feel pretty accurate, Nelson is played as a fey moron, which is dissatisfying. Far better is the romance between Scandal and Knockout which also gives some near full-frontal nudity (again, not for the kids).

There are some definite themes at work here and producer/director Sam Liu keeps things moving fairly well. The fight scenes remain a few beats too long and the animated look relies too much on Asian influence and shading than I prefer. Robert J. Kral’s music owes nothing to the great grindhouse tracks and is melodramatic, but works here.

In the end, the card winds up being used in a satisfying moment. Underneath the blood and betrayal, there are some nice emotional moments, including the final scene. Overall, the film is entertainment but I was left somewhat uninvolved.

The movie looks terrific in high definition 16×9 1.78:1 ratio, nicely matched with the 5.1 Dolby Digital audio. This has been released in a 4K, Blu-ray, Digital HD combo package.

The bonus features start with a look at this spring’s Death of Superman movie and is followed with two short profiles on Outback Rogue: Captain Boomerang and Nice, Shot Floyd! The Greatest Marksman in the DCU. We don’t learn much from these but I certainly got a kick out of seeing material from the original comic book run used to illustrate them. The longest and most interesting piece is The Power of Plot Devices, MacGuffins, and Red Herrings, which includes how these objects are used in live-action (Casablanca and Maltese Falcon clips included) works with due homage paid to Alfred Hitchcock.

Book-A- Day 2018 #98: Saga, Vol. 8 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

I should probably stop writing about Saga through the lens of my own expectations. I want it to be a single story that started with the birth of one child in this space-fantasy universe, and to have it end well in a way that wraps up that story. But it’s becoming more and more clear that creator Brian K. Vaughan instead sees Saga as a universe to tell stories in, and that those stories will all be somewhat related to that central family.

So I’m looking for a unity that isn’t here, and will never be here: Saga will run as long as people keep buying it (or until artist Fiona Staples decides she wants to do something else; I can’t imagine this continuing without her), and it will be a normal comic-book, full of issues that are separate stories or add up to an “arc” of three or six issues. Eventually, it will stop, for whatever reason, but the whole of Saga is not a single story and there’s no way to make it one at this point.

I’m sad about this, because there are enough serialized adventures in comics already and not enough stories, but no one asked me. I do hope I can draw a line under than thought here, and leave it buried: it’s not a useful framework for looking at Saga going forward from here. (And I see I keep saying a variation of the same thing every time I write about Saga, which must be tedious on your end: see my posts on volumes one , two , three , four, five , six , and especially seven for my repeated cataloging of pointless objections.)

So: here’s Saga, Vol. 8 , collecting another chunk of six issues. The first of these even seems to be an attempt at an introduction for new readers, that old standby of serialized comics. Let me just note that “new-reader friendly” is only important in a medium where going back to the beginning is infeasible or impossible: Netflix has built a big business on letting people binge from Season One Episode One.

Anyway, this volume is the story of an abortion. Well, it’s described as an abortion, repeatedly, but the baby is dead in the womb — in a mystical, woo-woo kind of way that means that child is also a ghost running around nearby — which means the medical procedure is actually quite distinct from an abortion. One suspects Vaughan might be trying to make points, or just be provocative for the sake of being provocative. The big events at the end of the last volume left that child dead in the womb, and apparently it’s not simple to just get him out. (If anything were simple, it wouldn’t be Saga.)

I find it harder and harder to write about the Saga volumes at this point: I’m trying not to give away who needs an abortion, even though that’s blindingly obvious to any semi-serious reader of the series. But I feel like the plot details of part forty-three of an umpty-ump part story shouldn’t be splashed around; I think most readers will want to get here under their own power. And, more seriously, Saga is becoming more and more soap-opera-ish with each issue: I forget precisely which TV-head is the guy running around in this issue (Count something? the Duc of NBC? Crown Prince Cyborg MCMLXXVI?), and I can’t remember where Lying Cat got to (she’s not in here at all), and I’m only vaguely invested in the some-other-horrible-person-has-captured-The-Will-and-has-now-learned-our-heroes-exist-oh-woe plotline.

Look, these are sturdy, well-built characters. They inhabit a big, complicated universe. Staples can draw any damn thing Vaughan can throw at her, and make it look both real and retroactively obvious. Many of the relationships here are ones readers care about and are invested in. But Saga seems to be still proliferating, and the initial burst of energy that was so enticing is slowly expanding into that big universe, like the Big Bang, and is cooling and becoming less excited as it goes.

Hmm. I guess I can’t stop talking about the same issues with Saga every damn time. Oh, well. Saga has gone from being a thunderbolt of energy and passion to a solid, entertaining space adventure comic. It’s still very nice, but it’s not what it was.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #96: Rise of the Black Flame by Mignola, Roberson & Mitten

Another day, another Hellboy spinoff. It’s not quite that frequent in the real world, but it certainly can seem that way. (And I did just talk about The Visitor: How and Why He Stayed yesterday.)

Rise of the Black Flame is another unnecessary book, which fills in backstory that wasn’t required the first time around. Of course, all fiction is unnecessary if you think of things that way — but this is material that explains how one character got the beginning of another story when we already had “he was subsumed by some alien evil power,” and that was good enough.

Again, for me basically every single “mainstream” comic is totally unnecessary — who does Spider-Man fight this month? which character will have a shocking death touted in press releases three months ahead? does any of it track back to anything at all from the original creators? — so this is a very minor complaint. Rise of the Black Flame is more original than any Superman story from the past ten years, for example. But it’s still a sign of the rot at the heart of comics: this is a medium utterly speciated into the narrow niche of delivering exactly the same thing on a weekly basis to a purportedly adult audience.

So, yes: two British cops in Burma in the early 1920s follow the path of some kidnapped girls, learn of a shadowy evil cult next door in Siam, meet up with two female paranormal investigators — one of whom has a link to Sir Edward Grey of Witchfinder fame, to keep the world-building knitted together — and eventually find their way to the sinister temple crouching in the jungle where an aeons-old cult is ready to finally summon The Great Darkness. Do they manage to foil the incarnation of the being who later becomes a major antagonist to Hellboy? Of course they don’t — we already know that.

Christopher Mitten is another solid artist for the Hellboy universe: he’s more towards the realistic side than creator Mike Mignola, with maybe some echoes of long-time B.P.R.D. artist Guy Davis. And Chris Roberson, the current major story collaborator with Mignola, knows this world about as well as anyone not in Mignola’s head can — it’s all smooth and well-told and connected.

But this is, in the end, another villain origin story. Those are never particularly necessary to begin with, and this one even less than usual. It has nice atmosphere and tells a solid adventure story, but it just takes us to the place we always knew it was going.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #94: Lewis & Clark by Nick Bertozzi

I’ve already done my song-and-dance about explorers in my post four years ago about Bertozzi’s book Shackleton, so it’s best to take that as read here. [1] But Shackleton lived in an age when most of the world had been mapped and organized; he was trying to fill in one of the last few open spaces on the map, to be The Guy who got his name on that effort.

By comparison, Lewis and Clark were just military men sent off by their commander, with orders roughly equivalent to “check out what’s over that hill there.” It turned out “that hill there” was the Rocky Mountains, but there were a lot more empty places on maps a hundred years earlier. Lewis and Clark led a team through one of those big empty places, and helped fill it in.

(Well, fill it in for white people on the East coast of North America. The people already in those lands had a decent sense of at least their immediate area.)

But, anyway. Nick Bertozzi told a story about explorers before Shackleton. And this is it: Lewis & Clark , an album-sized graphic novel that I suspect was aimed at least partly at a school audience. If I still worked at a publishing company that sold into the trade — which I didn’t, for a good year or so even before I left Wiley in 2015 — I could have looked up how it sold, and maybe gotten a sense if that strategy was successful. But, instead, I can come to Lewis & Clark as just another reader.

Bertozzi tells this story in episodes, a page or three at a time. He has the whole 1803-1806 expedition to cover (plus a little before and afterward), and only 137 pages to fit thousands of miles of wandering and many many eventful days into, so that’s not surprising. (If there are any Lewis and Clark scholars out there, I can’t guarantee your favorite moment from the expedition is dramatized in this book.) He somewhat alternates between single pages and double-page spreads, which is occasionally confusing — the reader isn’t always sure whether to read straight across the top tier, or continue down the left page. That does make for some impressive vistas, though — Lewis & Clark takes advantage of its larger size, which can make up for the black and white art. [2]

I get the sense Bertozzi’s aim here was to faithfully chronicle the high points of a historically important event, and not provide commentary or his own opinions. If so, he did a great job: Lewis & Clark is the kind of comic that feels like a camera-eye, a view into a world long gone. His art is bold and strongly story-telling, moving the action forward. This is, inevitably, a very episodic book, but it’s an engrossing one, and the personalities of the main characters come through even told in episodes.

[1] Shackleton was a 2014 book I read when it was new; this is a 2011 book it took me seven years to get to. I have no compelling reason for why it happened that way, and must throw myself upon the mercy of the court.

[2] I’m fine with b&w myself — I got into comics in the ’80s, when b&w was hip and trendy — but, for a lot of people, it’s means the work is unfinished.

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

REVIEW: Legion: The Complete Season One

REVIEW: Legion: The Complete Season One

Fox and FX have taken entirely divergent paths in exploring the mutant mythos apart from the X-Men feature films. In Gifted, they make it personal and about family in a paranoid America, that has taken mutant hysteria to new heights. On the far more dramatic and intense FX network, they go for the individual in Legion, focusing on David Haller (Dan Stevens), illegitimate son of Charles Xavier.

Showrunner Noah Hawley has created something edgier and much of the praise heaped on the first season has more to do with hallucinatory imagery than actual clever storytelling. Obviously, Haller is a mutant but is considered insane, heavily drugged, and locked away in the Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital. The series sees the world from David’s point of view giving it a unique look and feel, which fans fell in love with. With season two starting this week, 20 Century Fox Home Entertainment has released the first season on Blu-ray.

While in Clockworks, during brief periods of lucidity, he seems to have forged bonds with Lenny Busker (Aubrey Plaza) and new arrival Syd Barrett (Rachel Keller). The latter agrees to be his girlfriend but since she doesn’t like to be touched, it’s platonic, until she’s released and he kisses her. At that point, they seemingly switch bodies (revealing her mutant ability), also allowing us to switch point of view, which happens a lot.

We’re taken into David’s mind, which allows the mutant metaphor about the human experience to dwell on the nature of mental illness. But it’s also based on a comic book franchise so there is plenty of action and a big bad that must be dealt with, in this case the threat from the Shadow King, even though we never really know what he’s after (that’s coming this season we’re promised).

His confinement is ended when he’s recused by Division III (ooh, a mysterious op) and brought to Summerland, a mutant refuge outfit where he’s cared for by therapist Melanie Bird (Jean Smart). She’s trying to figure out the root causes of his issues and we relive his past traumas with David with much harrowing imagery. In time, we all learn that the entity David dubbed the “Devil with Yellow Eyes” was actually Amahl Farouk, who lost a psychic duel with Xavier and has been lodged in his psyche, feeding like a parasite, biding its time before it can be free.

However, Melanie also wants David to help free her husband Oliver (Jermaine Clement), trapped on some astral plane and when he does, Lenny wants to run off with him. Yeah, it’s complicated.

There series has a lot of style and flash, unreliable narrators, some experimental storytelling but in the end, we have a tortured man seeking sanity in an insane world, paying for the sins of the father.

Legion: The Complete Season One a fine AVC encoded 1080p transfer largely in 1.78:1 (some interstitial sequences in 2.38:1), nicely matched with the effective DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track.

For a lauded series with a fervent fan base, the extras prove disappointing. We get Deleted Scenes (26:50), Fractured Reality: A Different Kind of Hero (10:35), Uncanny Romance (3:09); Production Design (2:38); Powers (2:39); Make Up (Making the Devil with the Yellow Eyes) (3:00); Visual Effects (2:34); Costume Design (2:58); and, Locations (2:24). All perfectly fine background but nowhere near as engaging as the series it supports.

 

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