SENSES-SHATTERING!!!

Spidey Super-Saturdays: Amazing #4

2009-05-09T09:58:00.000-05:00

“Nothing Can Stop… The Sandman!”

The Lurid Cover: A four-panel story all by itself. 1: Spider-Man and the Sandman meet on the street. 2: Spidey tries to embrace the Sandman, who shrinks his waist to make himself more huggable. 3: Sandman surprises Spidey by allowing him to penetrate him right away, and by dripping his sandy man-junk over Spidey’s leg. 4: Sandman takes the initiative, pinning Spidey down and lowering himself onto his middle area. This filth is later passed around prisons as currency.

Opening Splash Hype: Last time, Dr. Octopus was the “strangest foe of all time.” Now the Sandman is “the most fantastic foe of all!” In other news, this is the “record-breaking fourth issue!” I love that claim. Every time a new issue of a comic comes out, it shatters the old record of publication by one!

The Story: In the first page, Spider-Man is defeated by a trio of crooks who point out that they haven’t actually robbed the store they were casing yet. Spider-Man, a masked vigilante with super-strength, webs, and no legal authority to fight crime, is nonetheless stymied by this technicality. Then they chase him off by calling for the police. Spider-Man vows never to jump into a situation “until I know what the score is,” you dig?

It is such a solemn vow that he takes an entire page to forget all about it and leap after some guy the cops are chasing – the Sandman.

The next couple of pages get weird. An innocent kid like Spidey isn’t ready for the raw machismo of the Sandman. He tries to embrace him like on the cover, but the Sandman isn’t so easy to pin down. He slips through Spidey’s fingers, and we learn that he’s in high demand from Maine to Mexico. Since he has the power “to harden any part of me that I want to,” it’s not hard to see why! As Spidey points out, he’s like the dark, dangerous version of Mr. Fantastic. “Ugh! Your jaw is like iron!” That ain’t the only thing, kid. Then Sandman hits him with a hip thrust that makes Patrick Swayze’s Johnny look like a dead pope. Spidey’s mask is broken; he’s exposed, vulnerable, afraid of what people will think if they know the real him. Metaphor, anyone? How did Wertham let this one get by?

On the next page, we learn that Sandman’s finger can re-shape to fit whatever opening he puts it into. Dirty!

Then for a while we have Sandman’s reign of terror, intercut with Peter’s usual personal problems. The agony of repairing his costume – you know, the incredibly intricate web-lined one he designed and sewed in the first place. The angst of breaking off a pity date from Liz. Not getting an advance from Jonah for photos he hasn’t taken; we readers conclude that Jonah is making perfect sense and recoil in horror.

But things pick up again when the Sandman, on the run from the law, ducks into a local high school – which just so happens to be the same New York high school attended by his arch-foe! This is Stan’s way of evoking New York City’s small-town charm, where there are only two high schools – the one the hero attends, and the other one they play football against if the subplot demands it.

What is this “most fantastic foe’s” diabolical master-plan? He wants the school principal to issue him a high school diploma, even though he never passed, let alone obeyed, physics. Winning the Award for Pointless Heroism is Principal Davis, who stands on his principles (homophone alert!) – instead of giving the madman what he wants and getting him away from the students as soon as possible, he defies him.

Fortunately, Spider-Man comes to the rescue. A battle begins, a true contest between titans that rages all over the high school. Sandman seems unbeatable.

Then Spider-Man sucks him up with a vacuum cleaner, defeating him. This actually happens.

We learn a lot in this issue: Umbrellas are for pansies. Sentient sand with shape shifting abilities is rendered powerless once contained within a canvas vacuum bag. And if a photojournalist – say, Peter Parker – fails to take pictures of an event – say, Spider-Man fighting the Sandman – it is ethical for him to re-create the event using trickery – say, Spider-Man tossing around some fire bucket sand – because it’s like shooting another take for a movie. Because a fictional movie is just like news coverage of real life. And it is therefore okay to sell these faked photos to a major newspaper for money, especially if the owner of the paper is some jerk who won’t even pay you for photos you didn’t take.

Oh, and according to the ads, hypnotism is dead easy.

Spidey Super-Saturdays: Amazing # 3

2009-05-02T09:54:00.000-05:00

“Spider-Man Versus Doctor Octopus”

The Lurid Cover: Now that’s how you slip some hot homoerotic tentacle bondage past the Comics Code Authority.

Opening Splash Hype: I just adore the carnival-barker attention to craft here. Not only is Doctor Octopus the “strangest foe of all time” (really?), he’s also “the only enemy to ever defeat Spider-Man.” What, ever? In all four, count them, four issues, this is the only time he’s ever been defeated? I mean, yeah, he beat the Tinkerer, natch, and the Vulture, but it was really the cops that caught the Chameleon. And in one sense, the Burglar defeated Spidey worse than anyone save the Goblin.

The Story: Anyway, the introduction of one of Spider-Man’s greatest villains begins with a classic case of “be careful what you wish for.” In the first page, our hero easily clobbers a gang of thugs ripping off a warehouse. Afterward, he complains to himself that it’s getting too easy, that he wishes he could have a worthy opponent. At this point, anyone who’s ever read a story before knows exactly what’s coming.

Next we meet Doctor Octopus, a Genius – as in, “Wile E. Coyote, suuuperrr-GEN-i-us!” He’s so smart, he can use mechanical arms to conduct a “nuclear experiment.” It’s clear from the artwork that either Lee and Ditko had no idea what one looks like, or science back then was a lot less careful with atoms. Doc is standing behind some kind of leaded glass, while reaching around on either side with his arms. Apparently radiation can’t go around a small barrier the width of a man. He’s doing classic comic book science, dumping stuff from test tubes into a glass beaker, but something goes wrong.

Fortunately, the good doctor has hired a crack staff of level-headed professionals: “LOOK! The radiation-meter has gone whacky!” (That can happen when you don’t spring for the name-brand Geiger counter, I guess.) “Something is wrong! There’s gonna be a blow up!”

There is indeed a “blow-up,” after which Doctor Octopus dies of acute radiation poisoning.

No, wait, sorry, that’s what should have happened. Instead, his arms are fused to his barrel-shaped torso and his brain is damaged. Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of damage that causes him to simply forget his times tables. No, he’s been turned from an arrogant “genius” to an arrogant evil genius.

Pretty soon he’s holding the staff of his hospital hostage, while at the same time sending them out for equipment and supplies. I’m not sure how that works. Maybe they take alternating shifts as hostages and couriers.

Spidey, on his way to get pictures of the injured doctor for the newspaper, decides to rescue the hostages instead. But he gets more than he bargained for with Doc Ock – he’s overwhelmed by the many arms and the fact that the guy can snap his webbing. After a brief, one-sided battle, the doctor shows his utter contempt for Spider-Man by just tossing him out a window.

Now, the Spider-Man of today would just dust himself off and head back inside. But this was still early in Peter’s career, and he was something of a sensitive lad, the kind that runs away crying when cops are mean to him (as we saw in Amazing #1). He is so humiliated, he spends several panels moping and thinking about the end of his superhero career. (Maybe he knows that most new super-heroes don’t catch on, but he never explicitly says so.)

Meanwhile, Doctor Octopus is taking over an atomic research facility for some unspecified megalomaniacal reason.

Everything changes when the Fantastic Four’s Johnny Storm stops by Peter’s school for a presentation. His biggest message is simply not to give up, no matter how many setbacks you have. It’s just what Peter needs to hear, inspiring him to try again. And it’s another part of the complicated Spider-Man/Human Torch relationship.

Spidey’s second battle with Dr. Octopus goes better – he’s ready for him, his spider-sense helps him dodge attacks, and he invents a chemical that fuses two of Doc’s metal arms together. Then he makes his breakthrough discoveries – webbing Doc’s eyes blinds him and makes it harder for him to attack, and despite the strength of the metal arms, the guy they’re attached to is just an out-of-shape scientist with a glass jaw. Now – that isn’t always the case; in other stories it seems as though Doc’s face stands up to spider-strength surprisingly well, when he really should go down every time.

In fact a second glance at this issue reveals that Doctor Octopus believes he does have super-strength, though it’s unclear whether he means through his metal arms, or his actual muscles. My Essential copy of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe claims he has an ordinary, even portly, body with all strength coming from the arms.

But before I start to obsess, perhaps I should move on… with my comprehensive look at every issue of Amazing Spider-Man... Um.

In the end, Spidey goes to thank the Human Torch for his help, and we find Johnny hearing this from his doctor: “Good news, Torch! Your temperature is down…!” That’s right. Apparently his fever was making him feel unwell. Things like that would make me too confused to fight crime.

Spidey Super-Saturdays: Amazing #2

2009-04-25T15:31:00.001-05:00

“Duel to the Death with the Vulture” In which Peter starts taking pictures of himself in action to earn money, and gets a kick out of selling them to J. Jonah Jameson, “publisher of NOW Magazine.”

There’s a good “how-to” scene in here after his first fight with the Vulture. He recalls that he developed his costume and webbing back when he was just going to be an entertainer. But now that he’s committing to being a super-hero, he gets serious. He designs a concealable belt full of extra web cartridges so he won’t run out, and a spot for a miniature camera. In this same scene, we see him using his science acumen to develop a device that will disable the Vulture’s flying power. Of course, Stan isn’t a science genius, so we don’t get even a bare-bones explanation of how it’s supposed to work.

Whatever it is, it works like a charm, and Peter manages to sell more pictures to Jonah. This early Jonah is a little too generous; he gives Peter a big enough bonus that he can pay the rent (? Apparently the Parkers rented their house?), and buy his aunt those kitchen appliances she wanted. That’s too much coin to come from a notorious skinflint, but it was a simpler time, when photos of a man who can stick to walls and spin webs was considered something amazing.

The Vulture is probably one of my least favorite Spider-Man villains. An old guy who can fly just isn’t that menacing, no matter how well they try to sell it. I like the Evil Old Guy/Heroic Young Guy adversarial relationship, but it’s much more satisfying against someone like Dr. Octopus, as we’ll see soon.

The second story in the issue is the first major clunker. “The Uncanny Threat of the Terrible Tinkerer!” Terrible being the operative word. It’s Spider-Man versus aliens, and not even half as interesting as that would seem.

There are exactly two bits of interest for me: One is the panel showing off the technical stuff of Spidey’s web shooter, with little caption boxes and arrows pointing out various parts such as the “Palm release button” and the “adjustable nozzle.” I was always a sucker for those little diagrams when I was a kid. The other point is that we see the spider-sense being used as a way to advance the plot: Peter senses evil, investigates – bingo! You got your story going right there. (It’s a little more subtle than Whedon’s Angel TV series, when convenient psychic visions told the protagonists where to start.) I’m glad this wasn’t overdone in Spider-Man as the series went along – sometimes he just swings around town and stumbles into a crime.

Spidey Super-Saturdays: Amazing #1

2009-04-18T15:05:00.004-05:00

The Amazing Fantasy #15 debut was so successful that Marvel followed it up by giving Spider-Man his own book. And it’s a surprisingly strong follow-up. It sets up so much of what Spider-Man will become known for, and right out of the gate. I’m not going to do a page-by-page breakdown, but there are several highlights.

The opening splash shows Spidey facing a lot of pointing, accusing fingers, including that of future New York Mayor J. Jonah Jameson, while the epithets “Freak!” and “Public Menace!” hover in front of his face. He is going to be the misunderstood hero, the one who not only has to face crooks and super-villains, but he’ll be hated and reviled for it by lots of people. It feeds into Marvel’s “I’m a hero, oh woe is me” attitude, but it’s refreshing compared to someone like the universally beloved Superman. Sure, I admire Supes, who doesn't? But who do I root for? The very inspiring symbol of American heroism itself? Or the guy who is never going to get credit for what he does, who often has the whole world against him -- and who keeps fighting for the little guy against impossible odds anyway? I made my choice as a kid, and never looked back.

The next couple of pages are a good, clean recap of the origin: got bit, uncle murdered, caught burglar. But it also gives us the consequences of that origin. Uncle Ben was apparently the breadwinner of the family, and without him, Peter and Aunt May need money. He considers quitting his job, but May won’t hear of it; he considers stealing money as Spider-Man, but immediately rejects it. He tries performing again, but apparently the producers don’t know how to make a check out to “cash.”

Then Jonah comes out against him, and his future gigs are cancelled. Jonah’s early argument is that Spidey is a vigilante, a bad influence on kids, a monster, and a phony. Oh, and by the way, his own son is a heroic astronaut. Even after Spidey saves his son’s space capsule during a botched re-entry, Jonah claims it was deliberate sabotage by Spider-Man that set back the space program by weeks. By the end of this story, the public is afraid of him, even his own aunt.

And in this installment of Peter Parker, Potential Super-Villain: He finds himself wondering if people won’t accept his attempts to do good, is becoming a menace the only option left to him?

The set-up to actually rescuing the space capsule takes a while, but once we're there, Ditko’s panels of Spidey dangling by a web from a speeding vehicle really capture the excitement.

The second half of the issue, “Spider-Man vs. the Chameleon,” starts with some classic Marvel cross-promotion, as Spidey decides the solution to his financial worries is to join the Fantastic Four. So kids, as you’re out there hunting for a job, try this approach: Break in through the window, smash their security equipment, throw around the staff, and shoot them with webs. I mean, it didn’t work for Spider-Man, but that’s only because the FF are a non-profit group with no salaries or profits who believe that he is a wanted criminal.

All of that has nothing to do with the rest of the story, except that somehow the Chameleon deduces from it that Spider-Man needs money. So he sets him up as the fall guy when he steals some missile defense plans.

In this adventure, we see the first instances of him using spider-webbing as a slingshot to propel himself several blocks through the air, followed by a web parachute. We learn he’s strong enough to rip the door off a helicopter. He has some sort of “spider-sense” that can detect the Chameleon even when he’s disguised as a cop. And he runs out of web fluid at a pivotal moment.

In the end, the cops catch the Chameleon, but Spidey thinks they’re after him, and he runs off crying. *Crying.* Not only does he not defeat the villain, but he loses his dignity. Kind of puts all those Bendis stories where the hero fails in perspective.

Spidey Super-Saturdays: Amazing Fantasy 15, Continued

2009-04-11T22:58:00.002-05:00

Continued from last week...

Part 2 begins with Spidey as a major TV sensation, and it shows something you don’t see much in comics anymore – a sense of awe. People watching him stick to walls, spin a web. Their jaws dangle, they hold their heads. This was still early days in the Marvel Universe; you could still shock the average person on the street. Nowadays there are so many characters flying around that the sheer fact of them fails to impress. “Honey, the TV said Namor’s attacking the city again. Better take your umbrella.”

By the next page (8), Spider-Man has become an egotistical jerk, telling people to talk to his agent, looking out for Number One, which in case you didn’t know, “that means – ME!” But he also blows off a cop’s plea, and allows a thief to get away. This is our example of “power without responsibility.”

He’s still loving to his aunt and uncle. After all, they just bought him what every teenage boy dreams of – a new microscope. Going back to the idea of early Spider-Man as a potential super-villain, I’m reminded that some of the worst villains usually have a deep love for one or two people, while holding Peter’s attitude that “the rest of the world can go hang for all I care.” See Black Adam as written by Geoff Johns, for example.

Page 9 – Uncle Ben has been murdered. Yet another hero finds his motivation as a victim of crime, seeing its consequences first-hand. At first, all he wants is vengeance, and he knows he has the power to get it. But the killer is hiding out “in the old Acme warehouse,” so he’d best watch out for giant magnets and rocket skates and the like.

Page 10 – Spidey goes web-swinging for the first time, to cross town fast. When he confronts the bad guy, the Burglar is astonished by him – apparently he hasn’t been keeping track of Spider-Man’s extensive media coverage from a couple of pages ago.

Page 11 – The final confrontation is just a few panels, but it covers the basics: Web the gun, use spider-strength to punch the guy out. But then, the big ironic twist – the bad guy who killed his uncle is the same guy he allowed to escape! It’s so shocking he suddenly has pupils in his white eye plates! He realizes that his choices do have consequences. He finally gets what Edmund Burke wrote: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

This is also the first time that Spidey dangles a bad guy from a web for the cops to find.

Our final panel shows Peter walking off into a city that looms over him, his head hung with the weight of his failure. The caption overhead introduces the power/responsibility phrase that will become his famous mantra. And there’s a reason it endures. It’s basic civic duty stuff, but as comic book morals go, it’s one of the best.

Modern writers tend to over-emphasize Peter’s basic sense of guilt for everything. In small doses, it can be endearing. But they claim that it's his core character trait. Bendis, for example, likes to have him running on about how it’s all his fault, no matter what. His "great responsibility" is apparently all-encompassing. It makes him annoying, like a cute girl saying "I'm ugly" just so those around her will argue with her and make her feel better. We know it's not Peter's fault, so quit making us think it all the time.

A more balanced view, seen here, is that the tenuous blame he may deserve for allowing Ben's murder to happen teaches him about taking on a wider responsibility, but only proportionate to his powers. He has neither infinite power nor infinite responsibility. Like the rest of us, he can't stand idly by and let the world become worse around him. If you have the ability to make the world a better place, you'd damn well better do it. You have no excuses not to. And that’s why the guy was my hero from the get-go.

Spidey Super-Saturdays: Amazing Fantasy 15

2009-04-04T01:00:00.001-05:00

As a way to keep myself going in this blog, I'm starting an Amazing Spider-Man Project. A look -- sometimes a mere glance -- at every issue of Amazing, from the first issue through the classics to the bad stuff and back again. My partners in this: the back issues of Amazing and Marvel Tales that I own, plus Graphic Imaging Technology, Inc.'s Complete Collection DVD that covers the entire series up through June, 2006. One of my favorite things.

Caveat: I have no scanner, nor any plans to get one. There will be few if any graphics for this, so ready yourself now as I prepare to fill your mind with word-pictures. Also, first time out? Wordy.

Amazing Fantasy #15

Where it all began.

In the opening splash page, we meet Peter Parker for the very first time. It’s a compact and telling intro. A group of high school kids straight out of late 1950s TV shows greets each other: “Say, gang, we need one more guy for the dance! How about Peter Parker, over there?” I am curious about this unnamed opening speaker. What is the minimum number of young gentlemen required for a dance at their school? Is it so everyone has partners? As a guy, wouldn’t you want a higher ratio of women to men, unless… he feels the love that dare not speak its name? Of course. Right out of the gate, Stan Lee flouts the homophobia of the Comics Code and subtly promotes inclusion in the very same panel in which the teens will treat Peter as an outcast. It’s irony at a higher level.

“Are you kiddin? That bookworm wouldn’t know a cha-cha from a waltz.” Flash Thompson, ladies and gentlemen, the archetypal high school foil – big, brawny, popular, and an expert on ballroom dancing. And in one balloon, he gives us Peter’s public image, a nerd.

Blonde bimbo Liz Allen confirms it in the next balloon: “Peter Parker? He’s Midtown High’s only professional wallflower!” It’s not just that he has nerdy tendencies; apparently there are no other nerds in the entire school for him to hang out with. But at least he’s receiving financial compensation from the school. Liz also does us the service of repeating Peter’s name, to help us remember it right away. A trick more screenwriters should learn and use.

Ditko’s art in this panel also reinforces the dialogue. The “gang” is a clot of grinning, squinty-eyed jerks; Flash is waving Peter away dismissively. Peter stands off to one side, slumped, defeated, a sweater vest-wearing four-eyes, a pile of books under his arm. But behind him, his shadow hits the wall as a silhouetted figure standing proudly against a spider-web, our glimpse at his looming destiny.

In page 2, Pete doesn’t fare any better. In fact, it hovers on the line between making him sympathetic and just plain pathetic. He starts off waking up to his loving Uncle Ben, saying, “Gosh, Uncle Ben.” In the next panel, we meet Aunt May, who is already suffering from acute osteoporosis, her back curved like a question mark as she shuffles into the kitchen, bringing “Petey” his wheatcakes. Pete’s uncle, who is 60 if he is a day, tells her not to fatten him up too much, as he can “hardly out-wrestle” the sixteen year-old. Cheers to the loving family; jeers to the acre of corn.

Pete is also a suck-up in chemistry class: “I’ll do my best, sir!” Apparently all the adults like this fine young man. “But alas, other teen-agers can sometimes, unwittingly, be so very cruel to a shy young man…” Peter asks “Sally” if she’s busy tonight, but she’s only got eyes for the dreamboat Flash Thompson: “I admire your taste, doll! Get lost, bookworm!” Then he knocks Peter’s books out of his hand.

Of course, Lee is feeding into the whole adolescent power fantasy thing, along with the myth that girls always go for the jerks over the “nice guy.” If only they’d look beyond the shallow surface to see how great the nice guy is and how awful the popular guy is, then all would be right with the world. But now that I’m older than the intended audience, I’ve moved beyond that perspective. Peter is getting shot down because he brings nothing to the table. He may not be an athlete like Flash, but he also lacks charm and wit, at least initially. (We’ll know better later.) His idea of showing a teenage girl a good time is to take her to the new science exhibit, while Flash wants to take her to dances in his cool convertible. Peter doesn’t know what Sally likes, which shows he hasn’t been doing the right kind of homework, and the fact that she’s had to reject him “umpteen” times shows he can’t take a hint. I feel sorry for him, but he’s got a lot to learn.

Oh, and how does he react to this cruelty? “Some day I’ll show them! (sob) Some day they’ll be sorry! – Sorry that they laughed at me!” …he says as he storms into the “Experiments in Radioactivity” lab. If I didn’t know better, that would sound like the ravings of a future super-villain. Heroes want you on their side; villains want you to suffer for when you wronged them.

On the other hand, it’s 1963. Just six years after Sputnik, and Flash and the gang are not doing their part to promote the advancement of American science.

Page 3. (I’ll pick up the pace in future issues, I promise, but this is the iconic story, and besides, it’s short.) Peter witnesses one of the worst scientific demonstrations in history. As scientists demonstrate “radioactive rays,” a spider slides down its thread, getting bombarded. Then it lands on Peter and bites him, transferring its powers into him. One of the most familiar origins in comic book history, and what gets me is how pure it is. I mean, the word “radioactive” might as well be “magic” for all the sense it makes from a plausibility standpoint. It’s pseudoscience at its most basic, but from a storytelling perspective it’s compact and efficient. The exact mechanics of how it happens aren’t important. We respond to everything that is concentrated in that moment. It’s a tiny event, a few seconds in which a tiny creature makes one feeble act and dies. And yet it is utterly transformative, a moment from which springs a great adventure. A man becomes far more than he was, and how? An accident? Or fate?

It’s important to emphasize that Peter’s powers stem from a scientific environment, no matter how fake. This is going to be the meat of Spider-Man’s milieu: dealing with scientific disasters and characters whose powers come, intentionally or no, from weird experiments and fantastic technology. Yeah, he’ll also fight street criminals, but whenever he drifts too far from this crime/science arena, he’ll be out of his element. That can be good for the occasional story – making him a fish out of water can make him more of an underdog, or just more of a comic foil for whoever he’s helping. Those stories, however, shouldn’t be of any lasting consequence. There’s a universal comics law that characters with their own title don’t experience major changes in a team book. In the same way, you wouldn’t have Batman experience major status quo-altering changes in a cosmic adventure with aliens, or Spider-Man as the result of magic… I think you know where I’m going with that one. (And if you don't, then I welcome you to the exciting world of comics and comics-related bloggery. Beware "One More Day" -- it was written by Sutter Cane.)

Of course, Peter has no idea what’s happening to him at first. He feels weird, and says so. How do the scientists react? “Holy crap, that kid feels sick! Maybe we shouldn’t be firing radioactive rays in an open, unshielded lab with absolutely no safety precautions whatsoever”? Nope, that would make too much sense. Instead, they mock him: “Too bad, he must have a weak stomach!” Yeah, f*ck him, the little pantywaist. “Oh, boo hoo, the nasty radioactivity is making my head hurt! You’re too much of a sissy for science, that’s how much you suck!”

Fortunately for humanity, and the efficiency of the story, Peter is then nearly run down by a speeding car. The unseen drunks behind the wheel identifies him as a daydreaming egghead, because for the third time in two pages, he drops the pile of books he insists on carrying everywhere.

But all that is forgotten as he leaps to safety and clings to a wall. He is astonished, and rightly so. It would be amazing even if his feet weren’t sticking to the wall despite being encased in socks and heavy brown shoes. (You can make all the explanations you want about tiny fibers sticking from his skin and through his costume, or whatever, but the shoe thing doesn’t even make pseudo-sense. We don’t care, of course – the idea is too neat to quibble about such things.)

By the end of page four, Peter has discovered strength, agility, and apparently improved eyesight. (Because you know the old saying, “He’s got eyes like a… spider.”) He decides the easiest way to score some quick cash is in a wrestling contest. But he makes a costume to disguise himself, because he’s still stricken with an acute fear of failure.

On page five, he humiliates Crusher Hogan in the wrestling ring. If you were beaten by a guy wearing Peter’s makeshift costume, you’d die of embarrassment. (Or you’d notice, “Hey, he’s sticking to that tall wrestling ring pole, despite the fact that he’s wearing heavy rubber boots,” and your brain would explode.)

Page six shows Peter creating his new persona. He needs “showmanship” for his wrestling career, so he creates a spider-themed costume. I’m not sure how long he’s meant to take to sew it, but the way he narrates his every move, you get the sense that it doesn’t take more than an evening. Even if it took a week, it’s surprising how much detail he puts into it. I mean, I understand teenage geek obsessive-ness and all, but the costume does have a lot of intricate web detail you’d think he wouldn’t have the time or interest for. Maybe if Ditko and Lee had shown an earlier panel demonstrating how into cosplay Peter was…

(I'm reminded of a Bill Hicks bit, in which he imagines CNN if Ted Turner was getting regular lovin': "It's all gonna work out! Here's sports!" What does the well-laid hero's costume look like? The Spirit? "There ya go, a mask. Done!" "Well, it doesn't really evoke a 'spirit' persona... Maybe something a little scarier, makes you look like a guy came back from the dead?" "Done!" "It doesn't even really hide your secret ident--" "Done! Anybody needs me to make a cameo in a character-based installment of my own strip, I'll be over a P'Gell's. But if you see the mask hanging on the doorknob, come back later.")

Peter also realizes that as a spider, he needs a web. Apparently enough time has passed that he knows he can’t make it the natural way, thank God. So, as if it were the easiest thing in the world, he rigs up a couple of web-shooters, which shoot thread with “strong liquid cement at the end.” The sort of thing your average science major can do.

Check back next time for the second half, with more dramatic irony... with a vengeance!

Doom!

2009-04-03T00:26:00.003-05:00

What he said. Because really, who doesn't love a good Shaft reference?

And the series really is a great celebration of villainy. Dr. Doom and the Masters of Evil is this year's Super-Villain Team-Up: MODOK's 11. Except each issue is, "I just pulled that amazing caper so I could pull this even bigger caper next issue." And nobody knows what's really going on except Doom. As it should be.

The New #1*

2009-04-03T00:05:00.000-05:00

If at first you don't succeed... try again a year later.

I took a year off, mostly due to inertia, i.e. laziness. (Also I'm writing a novel.) But I've also had a growing dissatisfaction with the state of comics -- the stories being told, the ham-fisted editorial decisions, the loss of creative teams, and so on. I've seen a few favorite blogs whither away, sometimes coming back in other forms.

But through it all, I've held on to my love for comics, for great villainous schemes, and thrilling adventures in any format.

So I'm taking another pass at this. In the coming year: Spider-Man - Past and Present! Diabolical villainy, and the best in Master Plans! More Spider-Man! Movies! Books and comics that everybody else read years ago, that I just got around to reading, and that I want to talk about now! Missed Opportunities in storytelling! Mysterio! Extremely rare and poorly thought-out topical content! More exclamation points!! More of anything!

* Not to be confused with the new Number Two (Sir Ian McKellen).

Secret Invasion #1 Review

2008-04-03T14:06:00.002-05:00

In that earlier Secret Invasion post, I mentioned how I like creeping paranoia thrillers. Secret Invasion, it turns out, is not quite like that. A better example is DC's Countdown to Infinite Crisis. Ted Kord was the doomed protagonist of that one, the guy who knows something is up, but no one will believe him or help him. He gets a little false hope from his pal Booster, only to lose him when he needs it. And just as he's got everything figured out, BLAMMO!

Good times.

Anyway, SI #1 was still plenty of fun. And perfect for a feature known around this blog as Rate the Master Plan. Now, of course, I don't KNOW the Skrulls' master plan just yet, but the early stages are all appreciably evil, if sometimes repetitive.

Tony Stark virus: Reminiscent of the recent Ultron attack in Mighty Avengers except less gender-bendy. But they don't linger over it. And because he's jacked in to so many parts of the defense grid, this can have a huge impact.

Helicarrier disabled: What do helicarriers do anymore OTHER than fall from the sky? It's a dramatic visual, but a little over-used. In fact, by now it should probably be illegal for helicarriers to EVER be above a populated area.

SWORD space station blown up: Because that's what always happens to orbiting space stations eventually. Seriously, it's a good move to take out the guards before you break into a planet full-force.

Two prison breaks. I don't know much about the Cube, so that part is lost on me. But this is straight out of the New Avengers #1 playbook. Sure, letting a bunch of super-villains out is a good way to sow chaos, if that's all you're after. But do the Skrulls really think that guys like Dr. Doom are going to take the invasion lying down? If that is, indeed, Dr. Doom in there, of course.

Thunderbolts attacked: I haven't really been following them since the new incarnation started. I've heard good things from some people, but I find it hard to latch onto that group, and even Ellis can be hit-or-miss with me. I find it hard to believe any of the big names on the team are dead, just pissed.

Take that, Richards!: I really enjoyed the attack on the Baxter Building (or Four Freedoms Plaza, or whatever the building is called now), including the Skrull infiltrator morphing from tourist to FF member, and the Negative Zone/black hole dealie was a cool visual. Although it doesn't look as though anybody died in the attack, except maybe some no-name staffers. Reed himself doesn't look so good, but I doubt he's dead. That's part of the fun of that kind of character -- just how much punishment can he physically take? And of course, this reminds us what we always knew: Never Trust Pym, no matter what form he takes.

Since I don't read every Marvel comic, I'm a little surprised that FF HQ is the only building in Manhattan that looks especially damaged. If I had editorial control at Marvel, I'd suggest that artists draw the post-World War Hulk New York to look like London after the Blitz, at least for a while. It'd add to the mood of Secret Invasion: "We just survived that, and now this?"

That Ship in the Savage Land, AKA WTF: From everything I could tell, the Skrull engineered things so that all the Avengers would be gathered when the ship was opened. It's a good mind-job, and if Bendis is to be believed, there's a mix of Skrull and superhuman on each side. What they hope to gain remains to be seen, though it could involve both sides fighting and wiping each other out as much as possible in an isolated area, rather than letting them interfere with the invasion.

If some Skrulls don't know that they're Skrulls, then not only does that negate any vindication the Mighty Avengers thought balloons might have offered, but it would also mean that they would fight just as hard as the non-Skrulls.

Rate the Master Plan: I put it at 80 degrees on the Tomometer. Points off for some repeated ideas - especially so close to their last use by Bendis -- and for the fact that I don't see much that I can't imagine recovering from That is, Baxter Building rebuilt, Reed heals, SHIELD builds more helicarriers, etc. I added a couple points for how creeped out I am by Aunt May dating a damned dirty Skrull.

Why I'm Excited About Secret Invasion, No Foolin'

2008-04-01T16:04:00.008-05:00

Whew - month and a half since my last post. Um, I was temporarily held captive by Skrulls. Sorry about that.

Which brings me to the subject of today's (or possibly this month's) post: Secret Invasion.

Two things that I really like are horror movies in which the threat looks mostly like us – Body Snatchers, vampires, John Carpenter’s The Thing – and 1970s paranoia thrillers. The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, all of that post-Nixon conspiracy stuff where the hero is quite probably doomed by the end. The more recent Arlington Road was a nice throwback in that respect. The best combination of these is 1978’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. To my mind it’s much creepier than the 50s version or any to follow since, and that’s despite Donald Sutherland’s perm. That growing sense of unease, building into dread and then realization that resistance really is futile.

There hasn’t been quite the same level of paranoia in the build-up to SI. Knowing that the enemy is among us and could be anybody is a good start, of course. Knowing that they have incredible combinations of powers and are completely undetectable also works. Nobody’s sure who they can trust. But the difference in Body Snatchers was the realization that no matter who you could still trust, that number was shrinking all the time. As of yet, we haven’t seen the scale of the invasion, because it’s – shhh – a secret. But I hope that will change as the event proper begins. That in the early chapters, there will be a growing sense that even the heroes’ every move is being thwarted as their teammates are falling and being replaced, that the public is being manipulated like sheep, and that what seems like hope is as false as everything else.

Like I said, that’s my hope for the early chapters. Because if my expectations hold true, the later installments will no doubt be devoted to the effort to fight back – how they learn to detect the skrulls and drive them off. And that could be fun, too.

While Bendis seems to be really pushing the Skrulls’ religious and imperial motives, that’s actually less interesting to me than the characters and plot. Not because it isn’t an idea with potential, just that I am not convinced Marvel is particularly capable of executing deep – or even shallow but coherent – philosophical arguments within its events. Civil War had more potential than most to deliver, but they couldn’t sell each side’s arguments coherently, especially not in a way that stayed true to established character. They got too caught up in their mandated plot points and shocking reveals to make it work.

Now, Bendis is not Mark Millar, and he’s obviously been thinking about this for a long time. Maybe, with a minimum of intrusion, he can pull it off.

Possible pitfalls before us:

1. Popular character is revealed to have been a Skrull for long time, making whatever issues they’ve been in up until this point a fake-out.

They did it in Fantastic Four with Alicia Masters. They did it to Spider-Man with a clone. If Bendis reveals that Spider-Man has been a Skrull for any length of time, he will prove that he has one large brass pair on him.

I don’t think this one is likely. My expectation is that Bendis has stuck with mostly secondary characters, like Dum Dum Dugan, or characters he has exclusive control over, such as Spider-Woman or Echo or Hawkeye. Characters without their own book are fair game – Dr. Strange, for example.

In the case of characters with their own separate title, any Skrull replacement will likely have been very recent – since the other writers learned that editorial was ramping up for this event – or the Skrull was running around the same time as the real version. That could explain pointless continuity questions like how is Danny Rand giving the New Avengers an apartment when he’s also starting a revolution in the 7 capital cities of heaven.

2. “Skrulls did it” is used to wipe away unpopular editorial decisions.

I think we’ve got a good shot at seeing this in a couple of instances, but not overall. The vibe I’ve been getting is that it really was us doing most of the screw-ups – the Skrulls were just taking advantage, maybe manipulating things in their favor, but not actually causing Stamford or Peter’s exposure, or most of Tony Stark’s actions. As Shakespeare wrote, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the Skrulls but in ourselves that we are underlings.”

But in another way, as divisive as the infiltration will be, it will also ultimately have the same effect that Watchmen’s grand scheme had – to unite divided parties against a common foe, to realize that there are bigger challenges we all face, beyond our personal disagreements. As mad as characters may be at Nick Fury for earthquaking Latveria or shooting them into deep space or whatever, they’ll decide he’s not such a bad guy after all if he’s got the answers to the Skrull problem.

3. The Matrix Revolutions ending.

We don’t defeat the enemy so much as make peace with them in some long-term ne w status quo, which the writers think is more nuanced and subtle but which is also less emotionally satisfying than a rousing victory. Also, Luke Cage, who was so cool in the first movie, is totally relegated to the sidelines by the end.

4. “The Skrulls can be defeated by a simple computer virus. Also, our water is like acid to them.”

Assuming the Skrulls are fully defeated, I hope it is well-earned. That there is some real thinking going on by the heroic brain trust – stuff that we can sort of follow and not just deus ex Richards. (“I’ve created a theory of everything that totally justifies the Civil War, the Negative Zone prison, and even Clor. Yes, Clor. Oh, and the Mad Thinker checked my work.”) Just as Bendis has promised that you can go back and see clues to the whole invasion throughout his Avengers work, so too I hope he has spent the time setting up the pieces for how it will be stopped – what minor characters will come into their own, how villains might help, etc.

5. Magic.

House of M? Yeah, not so good. If the last or penultimate issues have some kind of “no more mutants” solution, then the promising story will be another disaster.

6. The global alien invasion takes place mostly in New York.

We’ve already seen infiltration of the moon and Japan, both in Bendis-scripted stories, so hopefully he’ll play with the full toybox. As opposed to World War Hulk, which while entertaining, wasn’t even as international as a pancake house.

7. The heroes fail to actually be heroic.

I consider myself a Bendis booster, generally, but my all-time biggest problem with him, far more than his dialogue fetishes, is the frequency of stories in which the heroes fail to achieve anything, try as they might. The New Avengers never solved their inciting incident – the massive prison breakout. Actually, the New Avengers don’t solve much, period. Ultimate Spider-Man is regularly captured, unmasked, and belittled by snotty SHIELD agents; both versions of the Goblin in his continuity just died, but Peter couldn’t really stop them or save them – he was barely involved.

Bendis seems to do it because he does, in fact, think hard about story and character and dialogue and all the rest. I think he’s trying to give us something different, tales in which something other than the predictable happens. As in, it’s so predictable when the heroes have a problem, they figure it out, and then they solve it. Y’know, what heroes DO.

So sometimes he’ll give the costumed heroes a win. But sometimes the government agents will come in and solve the problem, or stop the heroes from solving it for a greater good. Because it’s more realistic that highly-trained elite government agents in form-fitting spandex would solve the problem than if highly experienced super-powered individuals in form-fitting spandex did. Or sometimes the villains will be having an argument amongst themselves and deal with it without allowing the heroes to really affect things. That ambiguity, used judiciously, can make for some rich and complex storytelling.

But the heroes still need visible wins, or they risk losing their status as such. They need to save the lives of real human beings, keep villains from making life worse, and even, on occasion, help make lives better. If there was ever a time for the heroes to step up and actually save billions of real human lives, it’s an alien invasion.

EDIT: I thought of another one after I read Bendis's interview in Entertainment Weekly. He mentions that Nick Fury will return with a bunch of all-new characters.

8. Not only will the costumed superheroes fail to be heroic, but the real heroes will be some all-new characters created by Brian Michael Bendis.

This was what was so "fun" about Secret War - the established heroes didn't really accomplish much, while Earthquake Girl (too unmemorable for me to recall her name) defeated Latveria in a dark, controversial way. I can only hope that all of the super-heroes I've been reading about throughout his run on two Avengers books will be shown up completely by some brand new characters. Weeee.

This Gun for Hire: Chance

2008-02-14T15:41:00.008-06:00

So in Tom Brevoort's Spider-Man Manifesto, he talked about creating new villains, as well as bringing back the classic ones later on. I'm all for both, but I also think they should consider refurbishing some old "new villains" that didn't create much of a splash the first time around.

As I said when discussing Swing Shift, a healthy part of any hero's rogues gallery should be devoted to the colorful henchpersonnel. Overdrive is a good example: he works for a criminal mastermind, he has some flashy gimmicks, and he has an interesting personality tic or two for flavor.

Another one was introduced back in the mid-8o's: Chance. He was an assassin-for-hire with rocket boots, lasers, and acid darts as part of his arsenal. His helmet also allows him to see in every direction so Spidey can't sneak up on him. His character is pretty bare-bones, except that he's willing to place bets with his agreed-to fee, contingent upon success. That's about it.

How could Chance work today? So far, the Brand New Day villains seem to be tied in some way to aspects of Peter or Spider-Man. Mr. Negative references Peter's job as a photographer (guaranteed future story line: "Mr. Negative: Exposed!"). Menace's name uses a term often ascribed to the web-slinger at the Daily Bugle, as does Freak. At some point, they could use some villains to address the "Parker luck" as he sometimes refers to it when he's feeling sorry for himself. A story could involve a string of "bad luck" things happening to Peter and Spidey. Maybe it could be set against a gambling backdrop. Maybe that bookie character from the Bar with No Name could run some kind of gambling competition to see who can kill Spider-Man first. Spidey could be targeted by Chance and others, have dalliances with Jackpot and/or the Black Cat, and so on.

Heartbreak Can Be Fun!

2008-02-14T15:20:00.002-06:00

But New Avengers 38 isn’t.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we get the break-up of Luke Cage and Jessica Jones, who have been married, in comic book time, what? A few months, at most? It feels kind of silly to complain about an all-talk issue from Bendis at this point, so we’ll just skip that. The end of this marriage isn’t a complete travesty, which already makes it a step up from One More Day. But it isn’t any more fun.

If you’re going to devote an entire issue of a serial comic book to an argument, it had better be a corker. It had better build into something larger. In this, the argument runs around in circles, including tired registration talk that bores longtime readers and alienates new ones. A fight is hinted at but never comes to anything; it almost makes me miss the fight-first-and-ask-questions-later days of early Marvel. The whole thing ends with little to no change. Then the New Avengers get an apartment in a development that even they are bored by.

Missing: Suspense, action, the Skrull plotline, the Hood or any other villains, a point.

There are ways to blend heartbreak in with a larger story in an organic, action-filled way. And Marvel has at least one writer working for them that knows how to do this: Joss Whedon. He’s the guy known for “kill all happy couples,” because it added to the drama. The basic formula: Build up the longing, bring them closer together, give them a taste of personal happiness, mixed in with outside conflicts, then create compelling reasons to drive them apart. Maybe give us just a bit of hope for them having a future someday.

The difference between Whedon and Bendis’s approach is that Whedon is a better juggler. Bendis seems capable of doing wild action or dialogue that advances the plot, but rarely both.

They Call It Trinity

2008-02-11T09:51:00.000-06:00

So this new Busiek/Bagley weekly Trinity sounds good. I like the idea of them giving more attention to their "big three," although they still need to do more to bring Wonder Woman up to the level of respect the other two get. I know Bagley's got great output, but still, I hope he's drawing his butt off between now and June to stay ahead of things.

And thank God they learned from Countdown and aren't forcing the continuity tie-ins on this one.

Of course this probably means that Astro City will continue to come out about once per eon.

Weekly Fix: BtVS #11 - A Beautiful Sunset

2008-02-11T08:42:00.000-06:00

Just so's you don't think all I've been reading is Spider-Man, let me talk a little bit about "Season 8" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm enjoying it quite a bit. I was late to the party on the show, just getting into the DVDs as Season 7 was winding down. So I went on Buffy binges, plowing through a season in a week or two instead of a school year. I do that with a lot of shows these days, and while there's something fun about jumping from one episode right into the next, it does take away from the week-to-week experience. That's especially true with 24, where the plot contortions seem more unlikely all running together. I also notice that I tend to forget a lot in between seasons if I wait for the next DVD set, as recently happened with Lost, Season 3. Now I'm caught up with that show and can enjoy it from week to week.

Which is also part of the appeal of BtVS, Season 8. Like everybody else, I get to follow the story in real time, waiting in between installments, spending much more time speculating on what's going to happen.

I've read complaints about the new status quo in this, and also over in the new Angel, Season 6. And honestly, it's not my favorite. After seven years in Sunnydale, we're suddenly tossed into a Scottish castle, where Buffy and Xander lead a paramilitary team of Slayers against demons around the world. Giles is off with Faith, Willow hardly ever comes around, Dawn the giant is depressed, and there's a low likelihood of Angel or Spike stopping by for fights or smooches.

But although they've been at this for nearly a year now, it's really still early days. I don't know how many issues they have planned, but if this were the TV show, we'd really only be a few episodes in. With the multi-issue arcs, each issue feels like a portion of a TV episode, but instead of two minutes of commercials, we have to wait a month for the next segment. Some of the individual issues feel like they could have been expanded to an entire episode.

Anyway, the MO for most seasons has been that at the beginning, things don't feel right. In Season 3, Buffy had left her friends and family and was hiding out in LA under an assumed name. At the start of 6 she was dead, her friends were hurting, and even when she came back it took forever for her to feel alive again. In the beginning of Angel Season 4, Angel was at the bottom of the ocean, Wesley was a traitor, and Cordelia was missing.

Each season has had a different journey for Buffy. In Season 2 she had to sacrifice everyone she loved and cared about to save the world. In Season 4 she and her friends fell apart, only to reunite stronger than ever. In Season 5, she rejected sacrificing anyone else and gave up her own life for the ones she loved. In 6, she learned to live again. And so I have faith that by the end of Season 8, she'll figure out the current problems.

In this issue, she's feeling a terrible disconnect from those around her. She and Willow fell apart some last issue - Willow's afraid that either Buffy or her new love can live, but not both. There's the possibility that Buffy's new war with humanity could mean the end of magic, which Willow doesn't sound thrilled about, and there's the prophecy that Buffy will be betrayed by someone close to her. Now she feels as though everyone who cares about her dies or leaves or has something equally horrible happen. We found out who kissed her back in the first arc, and why it won't work. And Xander, helpful sounding board that he may be, as much as tells B that this disconnect may be the price for helping everyone else.

Which of course, means that finding that connection will be a big part of the resolution of this series. Twilight, the new Big Bad, makes it clear he or she is doing everything possible to tear Buffy and those she loves apart. It goes back to Buffy's original premise -- strong on the outside, vulnerable through her emotions. But this "divide and conquer" approach didn't work so well for Adam in Season 4, so I'm pretty sure things are going to turn out well eventually.

They seem to be strongly hinting that Twilight is a resurrected Caleb from Season 7 - his sexism, his familiarity with the crotch-slicing move, his "My First gift is my last" line, his general way of speaking and annoying calmness as he fights her. Which, of course, makes me distrust my assumptions as too obvious. And I love Joss's "itchy neck" gag toward the end. He does love to play with us. Of course, the whole "secret masked villain" thing wouldn't play as well on TV - it's much harder to do there than in comics because then, of course, we'd hear the villain's voice. And once you heard Jonathon's voice, the game would be up.

Kidding. I think.

Brand New Day: The Brevoort Manifesto

2008-02-07T01:17:00.000-06:00

The Brevoort Manifesto in the Amazing Spider-Man: Swing Shift: Director's Cut had me nodding over and over again. As frustrated as fans have been over recent decisions, it’s easy to assume the editorial staff haven’t been thinking things through. This made it clear that they at least have an idea of the destination, even if the path to get there was muddled.

"Spider Man Is About Peter Parker." It's not Batman. He doesn't live in the costume. His grounding in our reality makes him relatable. So while it's nice to visit Avengers Tower, he can't stay there for long. And I do like the idea of some soap opera, as long as it doesn't feel like it's covering old ground. Which some of Brand New Day surely does.

"Spider-Man 2 Gets It Right." While there were things about the marriage that I liked as well as anyone else, I will say that having Peter kiss his beautiful, understanding, supportive, and witty wife on the way out the window to work is not especially dramatic. Having to hide his identity for fear of endangering the girl he loves, who is dating someone else because Peter can't commit and won't explain why, adds to the overall drama.

"Spider-Man Is the Hard-Luck Hero." I agree. Part of what made his victories so sweet to Young Tom was that the deck was stacked so heavily against him. Stolen costumes, dwindling web supplies, disease and injury, friends in jeopardy, final examinations, loss of powers -- it was never fair, and he fought on anyway. And the best stories were when he seemed completely overmatched by his opponents. But I hope his future cases of hard luck remain fresh rather than nostalgic. The promos for "Spidey does his own laundry!" leave me cold.

"Spidey Makes Mistakes and Bad Choices." This where Breevort reiterates that the public generally mistrusts him. On the one hand, this is very plausible. America tends to look for the flaws in our public figures and celebrities. Even with revered figures, all it takes is one whiff of scandal for us to turn on them. So I can see how it still works. But I've read a couple-two-three issues of Web-Head's adventures. He has saved so many people and captured so many criminals. He was a member of the Freaking Avengers, hand-picked by Captain Freaking America, during which time he saved America from a major Hydra attack. Even if logically I can see where many people would doubt him, emotionally I feel as though most people should cut him some slack. When minor characters lash out at him -- usually when he's in the process of saving their lives -- it feels frustrating and forced.

"Go Forward." By this point I was saying "Yes! You are correct, sir!" in my best Bill-Hicks-as-Ed-McMahon voice. What he's asking for all sounds just right. "The worst thing that can happen is for [it]... to feel like it's 1968 again." Which is what some people are complaining that it feels like. Not me, not yet. Involving Betty as a friend to a degree that she never really reached before. And when he wrote "no girl-falling-from-the-bridge, and no lift-the-big-heavy-thing-off-his-back-to-save-Aunt-May," he got a great big AMEN. I am so over the girl-on-a-bridge homages, and so is everybody else. Make new classic stories. It won't be easy, but it will be worth it.

"Circle of Friends." "There's something creepy about a guy who's still hanging out with the same six guys he went to high school with." But there's NOT something creepy about him still working the same low-paying thankless part-time job he's had for the past decade when he holds graduate-level degrees in science? Wait, Breevort's going to get to that...

"Peter LIves & Behaves Like a Young 25 Year-Old." If we're talking about the appeal of Young Peter, we need to include the potential he represented from the start. This kid was brilliant, and while he might not have had two dimes to rub together, you could see he was going to persevere in school, and then he was going places. You knew that Peter's science acumen was going to eventually lead to something substantial. That's why having him work with Tony Stark, actually using his knowledge and skills, felt like a natural progression, even if I knew it was part of the Civil War set-up. There's no inherent shame in being a photojournalist, but losing the science career feels like wasted potential. It feels like he's stuck as the loser some people already think he is.

"New VIllains." While I agree with the sentiments expressed in this section -- Spidey is best fighting criminals and crimelords -- I find it ironic that Brevoort notes that "Spider-Man should probably not often be dealing with... magical creatures..." Does Mephisto count? But yeah, anything that puts spider-totems and the like in the rearview mirror sounds good to me. The generational conflict he mentions ties in to the humor. The older villains like Ock were full of humorless old guy rage, being driven crazy by his constant mockery.

"Who Will Know Peter's Secret Now?" It feels like a bit of a waste to make it so that nobody knows. I was never a fan of Bendis's psychotic need to unmask all heroes, but... I did like Peter and Matt Murdock being allies, even if there was a slight age difference. I liked him having a few confidants. People who'd earned the right to know the secret, as opposed to those who learned through his cheap Civil War unmasking. On the other hand, if some people remember who he is, then the question is whether they remember that everybody else used to know, and whether they start poking in to why things changed and then the Marvel Universe cracks in half. Eh, maybe the blanket amnesia is better.

About that 2008 Bible:

Wait, MJ left him at the altar? She's on the West Coast? Okay, maybe she isn't Jackpot. Maybe.
Vin Gonzales looks like a new twist on Peter's foil. Instead of Flash, the guy who loves Spidey and hates Peter, we've got the guy who hates Spider-Man... and dislikes Peter, too.
Jackpot's changeable nature -- sometimes a pro, sometimes a fan girl -- seems to fit that "luck" idea I mentioned above. The triple-seven belt buckle she sports is reminiscent of a slot machine. Maybe she's got some kind of randomization involved with her powers and/or personality. Or maybe there are multiple versions of her somehow.
Bill Hollister, the new councilman -- profits from the actions of Menace. Is this Menace's MO? Hollister creates a secret, villainous persona that he can fight against politically? Or Menace takes out his enemies so he can rise in prominence?
Screwball, Overdrive, and Paper Doll all seem tied to the modern media, as does the Hollister story. Seems like a great way to reinforce the subplots involving the DB and Peter's role with it.

Amazing Spider-Man: Swing Shift: Director's Cut

2008-02-06T23:27:00.000-06:00

As this becomes an all Spider-Man, all the time blog... I swear, I'll blog about other things, but the whole Brand New Day thing is holding my attention surprisingly well these days.

I missed this story when it came out on Free Comic Book Day last May, but it's a very tight issue that does a nice job of establishing different elements of the new status quo. Allow me a little space to discuss what works.

Page 1: Now we know where May got her name.

"What? My Spider-Sense is tingling!" In a thought balloon. With the half-Peter, half-Spidey face. If I was writing my first-ever Spider-Man script, that's how I'd want the first page to end, too.

Pages 2-3: New third-tier villain "Overdrive" is a good addition to the stable of utility players. Since chasing robbers in a getaway car is a superhero staple, he can fill that need while providing just enough of an extra twist – he’s a Spidey fanboy with gadgets – to make things interesting.

If you’re building up the web-slinger’s rogue’s gallery again, it’s good to pad this tier. Eventually you hope to create an icon or two at the level of the Doc Ocks and Goblins, around whom entire storylines may be built. But you also want your Shockers and Rhinos, guys who can maybe fill out an issue when they’re first introduced, but then recede to supporting players in future installments, maybe to start an issue with some action.

Peter's leap to safety is a nice homage to Amazing Fantasy #15, plus it establishes that he's protecting a secret identity again.

Pages 4-5: What a gorgeous splash.

Page 6 teases Mr. Negative. Page 7 introduces "Vin," one of the police-perspective characters.

Page 10: The Bar with No Name. "C'mon, a new guy? What's the point? He always beats the new guys." Of course, the bar is loaded with post-Lee "new guys." I recognize Spot, Slyde, Cobra, Boomerang, and the Answer. (And Kraven? I'm not up on Kraven's post-suicide successors.)

Page 13: Jackpot’s got a cute design, but her identity seems at once too obvious to really be estranged girlfriend Mary Jane Watson, and yet so appropriate as MJ that it may be hard to accept anyone else under the mask, unless they’re closely related to her. Is it a long-lost twin sister? Universe B MJ, using the Slott idea from the tail end of his She-Hulk run? Clone? Making MJ a superhero could address how to better involve the love interest into the stories, without just making her a damsel in distress. If it wasn’t for their adamant position that no one knows Peter’s identity – and by now they’ve established enough trust for us to take them at their word, ha ha – I might think that Peter broke up with her because he didn’t want her to keep getting in danger, and becoming a superhero somehow was her way of joining his world.

I'm guessing she's got luck powers, kind of a reverse Black Cat. Maybe Felicia Hardy has gotten a major makeover to be more Spider-Man's type. Though of course she wouldn't know what that is now, would she?

Page 15: Using Spidey's knowledge of New York traffic to stop the bad guy is just brilliant.

Page 20: Who is this "Joe" escorting May? And how will he be tied into a super-villain?

The Weekly Fix from Two Weeks Ago: Amazing 548

2008-02-06T23:03:00.000-06:00

Spoilers below...

So the new owner of the Daily Bugle has "DB" initials. Cute. The bow tie will help him stand out. He's not quite the charmer I was expecting, and his patronizing attitude toward Joe Robertson demonstrates some faults JJJ didn't have.

Jamal the cabbie was a great touch. He doesn't love Spidey, doesn't hate him. He respects him while also feeling that he should be registered. As a very minor character, he serves the plot, adds to the New York feel, and doesn't fall into cliche.

Somehow I always associate circus scenes in comics with Dick Grayson, even though I know Spidey has fought the Ringmaster on at least one occasion.

"The important thing is I'm solving all my problems... with kicks to the face!" Come on! Slott's got to be an ISB fan!

The fact that Spidey points out that he has no living blood relatives to succumb to the poison... makes me think he's going to meet some long-lost somebody or other in a future arc. Then again, Slott's such a Marvel history geek, he probably remembers the time Spidey gave a blood transfusion to somebody or other.

Villain spoiler next! Of course the villain is connected to Aunt May! You can just see the writer’s meeting, talking about how much they loved that she used to work for and then date Doc Ock, and how it would gall Peter. How she once shot Spidey (Amazing #115) to keep him away from her employer. Is the idea that most Brand New Day members won't remember the Doc Ock/Aunt May relationship, or that those who do will get all nostalgic about it?

Many of the most iconic Spider-Man stories involve a personal connection between Peter’s friend and family, and the villains he faces. His best friend’s father. His college biology professor. A rival photographer. It’s a small, small universe in Marvel. However, you keep tapping that well, it strains even comic book credulity, and that's saying something. They talk about how they're expanding Peter's circle of supporting characters. They're going to have to do that in part just so they'll have new friends who turn out to be [related to] super-villains.

Overall, I liked the arc, and it did plenty to get things started. But if feels a little on the small side. Maybe after all the "events" of recent years, they’re going to do smaller stories to build things up.

The Weekly Fix: Amazing 547

2008-01-18T11:32:00.000-06:00

Two issues into "Brand New Day" and I'm having a fine time. (It helps to pretend I have no memory of recent issues myself.) Slott gets what a fun Spider-Man comic should have (although due to decompression, what should appear in one comic will now appear in three; hence the lack of in-costume action in Amazing 546).

The requisite hard-luck portions of Peter's life and the motivation through guilt are there.

The stolen web-shooter is a fresh variation on the occasional "someone has stolen Spider-Man's costume" subplot. And it allows for the wacky multiple spider-tracer complications. While I was able to accept the streamlining that organic shooters provided the films, and even the attempt to make the change in the comics, I confess I'm glad to see the gizmos back. They add to the Murphy's Law outlook of the series -- when they break or run out of fluid or whatever, they can add to the tension in a scene and up the stakes. I just hope the same old complications aren't used too often as a crutch.

And by the way, web shooters are ingenious but relatively simple technology. How come Batman never has to reboot the Bat-Computer or deal with a broken grappling gun or anything? Maybe he just has a better equipment maintenance schedule.

Slott also understands that a good Spidey story is a juggling game. A story about how a superhero career interferes with a private life is standard. So is having to defeat a villain or save some innocent people (relatively speaking in New York). What adds the sauce to the goulash is piling on the complications. So he doesn't just need money for his apartment anymore -- he's got to save the Daily Bugle. And he's got to save it for a guy who has ripped him off because he feels guilty. You can have a Spider-Man story without him blaming himself for something, or someone else blaming him, in theory. You can also order a hot fudge sundae without hot fudge -- if you want to change its very identity. I like the Bugle shakeup because it opens up some possibilities for change, while there's nothing that says Jonah won't be able to take back his media empire later down the line.

The Spider-mugger is a fairly standard trope: somebody sullying Spidey's name in a city prepared to believe the worst about him, no matter how many times he's saved them all. Also just as soon as Peter has his secret identity back, it's already in peril -- which is what Peter's secret identity is for.

And if that's all that was going on, it would be a ho-hum story. But it's just a way to involve Spidey in the middle of a gang war, which is always fun. Mr. Negative is a simple but well-designed villain with a surprisingly positive outlook, and his masked electro-enforcers make great fisticuffs fodder.

Slott shows off his love for Marvel history by referencing a mystical tablet out of classic Stan Lee-era comics -- and Wacker actually lets us know which issues of ASM they're talking about! Yes! In the old days, you'd see, "As in Amazing Spider-Man #3" and think "but I can't afford that!" or "I don't live near a devoted comics shop, as I bought this issue from a drugstore, so I have no idea where to buy that issue or its reprint." But now, even kids can check out comics at their library, or Essentials collections at bookstores. Welcome back, indexing!

Wacker's over-the-top editorial intrusions are -- so far -- a great dose of nostalgia; the last panel had me giggling. I'm wary of it becoming an over-used spice, but this time it was fun. It's a case of they know we know, so they're not trying to pretend we're buying the Bad Cliffhanger.

Predictions:

The poison released by Mr. Negative is genetically-specific and can only kill people who share the blood used to create it.
Spidey will be fine, although Amazing 548 will open with a panel in which someone is either performing rescue breathing on him, or trying to. The first panels of 546 and 547 both show a lip-lock, so Slott will either continue with that a third time, or change it up according to the Rule of Three.
If we're lucky, the remaining members of the Maggia will blame Spider-Man for the hit and issue a contract on him.
The new owners of the Bugle will be much more pleasant in temperment, possibly even in compensation, than Jonah. They may take a less antagonistic approach to Spider-Man. Peter will feel guilty for enjoying the new bosses - until he realizes that he has problems with some of their other business practices.
The change in ownership will allow the story to address the current state of newspapers in America, with declining ad revenue, competition, and alternate formats. For storytelling purposes, a web site headline just doesn't have the same oomph as screaming 80-point ink-on-newsprint.
Jonah will have to work hard to regain his position, and while he may learn tiny lessons in the process, like how to modernize, we'll basically get the old skinflint back in the end-- because Slott and the others are smart enough to know JJJ is a vital part of the Spider-Man entertainment equation.

Thoughts on The Dark Knight Trailer

2007-12-17T21:11:00.000-06:00

Looks like we might have switched from "Wayne Manor" Bruce Wayne to "Penthouse" Bruce Wayne.
Standing atop the Sears Tower doesn't quite have the same Gothic atmosphere as Batman Begins's rooftop pose. And I can't imagine what useful purpose it would serve to go all the way up there.
The high Joker laugh sounds pitch-perfect.
The heavy security around an apparently captured Joker is reminiscent of the precautions taken for Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.
The Joker seems to be heavily into knives, along with guns and explosives. Nary a joy buzzer or exploding cigar in sight. Maybe they're trying to go for a (relatively) realistic approach. I'm not saying I want them to bring back the squirting flowers, but a shtick-free Joker sounds just as off as one doing the Batdance.
Something about Ledger's voice and expressions in this one is familiar, but so far I can't place it. It's unlike anything I've seen him do, but it's reminding me of one or two other performances somewhere. For example, his voice when he says, "A little fight in you -- I like that."
The new concrete bunker with the white ceiling is awfully stark. I hope it's not the new "Batcave."
When Bruce walks into the restaurant with his blonde escort, just before we see Maggie Gyllenhall -- is that Harvey Dent sitting at the table?
The motorcycle wipe toward the end kind of reminds me of when the Joker shoots down the Batplane in the '89 movie.

Overall theme: "Look! We've got explosions! And the Joker! And explosions!"

The Weekly Fix: Booster Gold 5: What a Rip!

2007-12-13T22:57:00.000-06:00

Seriously? "Solidified time?" I'm with Booster on this one: "What the hell?"

In case you haven't read this issue, I'll recap. Spoilers ahead, though.

Booster Gold wants to go back in time and save his friend, the Blue Beetle, who was shot in the head by Maxwell Lord as part of the lead-in for Infinite Crisis. Time traveller Rip Hunter agrees, but says first they have to keep Batgirl from being shot by the Joker in "The Killing Joke."

Booster agrees and tries valiantly, but he keeps getting his ass handed to him by the Joker. He never gives up, no matter what the Joker does to him. Then we learn that the whole experience was an object lesson by Rip Hunter. He claims Barbara Gordon's paralysis and career as Oracle cannot be changed, because they are "solidified time." AND he says that "Anything from the present on back cannot be changed." Then what's the point of any story in which you travel back in time? Why worry about Per Degaton or any of the other time villains? And, huh?

I don't know DC well enough to know whether they've used "solidified time" before, but let's call it what it really is -- an Alan Moore story. It might be one of the worst things that ever happened to a viable, positive heroine. But once it's been written by the God of Comics, apparently in an Old Testament sort of mood, comics fundamentalists aren't going to let you undo it. And anyway, as ugly as the act was, the outcome is that Oracle is one of the strongest, most inspiring heroes in the DC multiverse.

Personally, I think this was a no-win story. Undoing it wipes out all that Oracle has accomplished since. But not undoing it is equally unfair, since male heroes are constantly getting takebacks, from Superman and Green Arrow's resurrections, to Hal Jordan's redemption, to Batman's healed back.

"Solidified time" is a cop-out. The point of this kind of time travel is not that the past can't be changed. It's asking whether changing it to suit our vision of "how things should be" is the right thing to do. Even when we mean well, what are the long-term implications of what we do? Saving Barbara Gordon might be the right thing. A strong, able-bodied Batgirl would be great, especially when she switched her name to Batwoman. Being able to run around wouldn't preclude her from using that brilliant librarian's mind to become a super-information guru, just as knowing every martial art there is doesn't preclude Batman from being a forensics expert.

However, in Booster's case, he's agreeing to help partly so he can get his friend back, a more selfish reason, though one we can easily sympathize with. Giving him a moral dilemma would be more interesting to me than this ham-fisted way of blocking certain avenues of storytelling. And it makes the final reveal more annoying: Batgirl CAN'T be saved, but the Blue Beetle MUST be saved?

The Weekly Fix: Green Lantern 25: Senses-Shattering!

2007-12-13T14:01:00.000-06:00

Sometimes the pretty ones are worth the wait. It's true for my wife, and it's also true for this ridiculously gorgeous book. In the same week that Lenil Yu gave us some unfortunately messy fight scenes over in New Avengers 37, Reis and Van Sciver gave us some pages that are even more jam-packed, but far more worth poring over.

The cast-of-thousands battles. The Anti-Monitor going Kong on New York. The Lanterns over Coast City. All spectacular.

The story, too, was keen. It's a finale overloaded with action, but unlike emptier blockbusters, the beats are filled with meaning. As a common enemy, the Sinestro Corps has served to unite the Green Lanterns, even giving former rivals newfound respect for Hal Jordan. At the same time, Sinestro has achieved his goal, making the conflict between Lantern and evildoer more complex. As John Stewart points out, this intergalactic police force now faces the same kinds of life-and-death decisions regular cops do, and the ethical considerations that come with them.

And Johns does something he's particularly apt at: He expands the world he's playing with. With the Flash, he fleshed out Keystone City and the Rogues. Here he's building a mythology, the dawning of a new era as more colors are added to the emotional spectrum. The red lanterns sound particularly brutal -- I have a feeling we're going to see more rolling heads and other Johns-style gore when they make the scene. I also like the Orange Lanterns - intergalactic thieves sound like fun, though they'd be hard-pressed to top the theft of an actual planet that occurred in that Adam Strange miniseries. Indigo sounds a bit touchy-feely, and it's interesting that they're using the "eye of Rambaldi" from the TV show Alias as their symbol. Orange Lanterns' logo seems reminiscent of the Freemasons.

And I'm dying to find out if the Black Lanterns' symbol has some significance I should recognize. Even the placement of the power battery on the "Birth of the Black Lantern" title page seems very deliberate.

But I'm not sure about the Black Lanterns themselves. On the one hand, it’s a nicely ironic consequence of the first new law of Oa. On the other, zombies have been getting a little played in the last few years. (Even The Goon has switched to a different monster.) I’m not saying you can’t do interesting things with them, but I hope they stay off the stage for a while.

I found the quick return of the defeated villains a little off-putting. I understand that in serialized storytelling, you don’t want to destroy characters that could prove useful in the future. But within a particular storyline, especially one that has been as effective as this one, it should feel as though something significant was accomplished by the heroes. Even if Johns felt he needed to show the Anit-Monitor's fate as a preview for the coming Black Lanterns, Cyborg Superman's return could have been held off until he was needed again. And letting Superman Prime loose in the Multiverse is just asking for trouble.

Hopefully Final Crisis will not impede the long-term plan for Green Lantern.

And now it's time to Rate the Master Plan: Sinestro assembled an awesome team: The Cyborg Superman, who destroyed Coast City; Superman Prime, who would like to destroy the world; an army of aliens who would like to destroy the Green Lantern Corps; Parallax, who destroyed Hal Jordan; and the Anti-Monitor, who would like to destroy the Universe. They ambush Oa and slaughter many members of the Corps; turn Kyle into Parallax; attempt to destroy Mogo, the planet-sized Lantern who is the soul of the Corps; and attempt to destroy Earth as a way of destroying the Multiverse. All supremely evil, and partially successful. Even though Cyborg Superman doesn't die, Superman Prime doesn't destroy the Earth, and the Anti-Monitor doesn't get what he wants, Sinestro claims victory. Way back in the Sinestro Corps Special, he said that the Green Lantern Corps would change, and it has. And from the looks of things, there are about nine more changes to come.

I really, really hope Final Crisis doesn't screw up this book.

Superheroes Can Survive Anything

2007-11-29T23:44:00.000-06:00

It's true. And I'm not just talking about certain doom or actual death. No, I'm talking about fates worse than death. Unnecessarily armored costumes. Bad writing. Editorially mandated crossovers. Late books. Rushed art. Stupid romantic choices. Lame villains. Ridiculous new powers. And, of course, $#!tty reboots.

Remind you of anyone?

As a Spider-Man fan since birth, my affection for the character has never waned, though my interest in reading his books has. I gave up comics for a while, starting in junior high, when I decided that a deep interest in comics was incompatible with a deep interest in ever being touched by a woman.

Then in the 90s, I briefly came back. Word in the popular press was that Spider-Man might not be the real deal. That this other guy was swinging around, and maybe he was really Spider-Man. I was deeply concerned. The guy I had been reading about for years might have been a fake since before I could read. I didn't know from infinity or crises. I wasn't savvy enough to spot stunts for what they were.

And so I read through the whole infamous Clone Saga, which, as you may know, ended with Peter being a clone and Ben Reilly being the real Peter -- or was he? Storyline villain the Jackal kept switching his story every couple of panels, so you could never be sure, but the gist seemed to be that Peter was out and Ben was in, and that the writers, whoever they were, really truly no-foolin' believed it.

I stopped reading comics again for several years.

Around that time I started dating the woman who later became Dr. Wife. Once she was deeply under my spell, out came the comic books again. She came to, only to realize she was married to a comic book nerd. But it was too late! Bwa ha ha ha!

Anyway, even while I was rediscovering comics, I stayed away from my favorite character, except through old issues and collections. Until I learned that they had fixed their stupid mistake through a not-quite-as-stupid-but-pretty-close mistake, in which they brought back the Green Goblin and made him responsible for fooling Peter all along. I mean, I can understand the desire to bring back a classic arch-nemesis. But it hollowed out one of the classic comic book deaths of all time.

There was some other stuff with Aunt May dying but not really, and Mary Jane blowing up but not really, and maybe a baby died in there somewhere too? LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU SHUT UP SHUT UP The main point for me was, Peter was the One True Spider-Man again, and eventually he was in some stories I actually liked.

Oh, not the spider-totem crap. HELL no. I did like JMS's characterization of Peter, though. Making him a science teacher tapped into his decency and science knowledge. I've been surprised to enjoy Spidey's new role as a team member on the Avengers, just as I was not at all surprised to hate him revealing his secret identity for NO GOOD REASON.

What I never really minded was his marriage to Mary Jane. Her love and support felt like a big reward for a hero known for suffering in every aspect of his life. They worked well together.

And so this whole drawn-out Back in Black, One More Day storyline has driven me away from the character again. An Aunt May-in-peril story? Really? That's what you're hyping? We all knew what was coming, and finally, this week, here it is.

Spidey can save Aunt May, if he makes a deal with Mephisto, some Marvel Satan/Joe Quesada stand-in, who wants him to sacrifice his marriage to Mary Jane. Gee, what a cliffhanger. I wonder what he'll choose. I wonder if his loving and supportive wife who also loves Aunt May will agree that the sacrifice is the right thing to do.

My apologies to my local comics shop -- I love you guys, and I think my purchases reflect that -- but I totally skimmed this one in the store. I never do that, honest, but the two issues of nothing before this were a waste of money, time, and paper.

The only choice possible will be made in the next issue. And then...

Those of us who hope to read Spider-Man comics for the foreseeable future are going to have to suck it up. We're going to have to accept the new status quo, whatever it is exactly. Or we can ignore it and read our old Lee/Ditko/Romita reprints.

But I believe superheroes can survive anything. Spider-Man can. The whole clone mess is now one of his favorite punchlines. Someday, he'll find a way to laugh about losing his marriage.

And the only thing I like about this whole sad, twisted mess, is that Dan Slott is coming on board. He's got the skill, he's got the enthusiasm, he's got the great knowledge of comics. I think he can create a new status quo that I'll actually enjoy reading. I think he can create new villains that stand a chance of lasting. I think he can use old ones effectively. I think he can inject the fun back into the title, the way he did with She-Hulk, and the Thing miniseries, and Spider-Man/Human Torch: I'm with Stupid. The way he makes use of the Marvel Universe is often so smack-yourself-on-the-head right, it seems inevitable. Like Spidey figuring out that he could stop the constant unmaskings by keeping his mask stuck on with his sticking powers. Or the identity of the new Scarlet Spiders in the Initiative: Of course they're clones!

I hope he succeeds in a big way. If the book takes off and sells really well, then maybe Quesada can go screw with some other corner of the Marvel Universe for a while.

UPDATE: Gah, I totally overlooked the other three writers, Marc Guggenheim, Bob Gale, and Zeb Wells. Sorry, guys, but you don't have the personal name recognition that Slott does for me. I know Guggenheim from the aborted Bart Allen run on Flash, and Gale from Back to the Future. Hopefully they'll all be great, too, but I'm expecting some uneven flow to the stories.

Recent Avenger Developments...

2007-11-02T19:05:00.000-05:00

So I'm late on this, and many others have commented on the major issue of Tigra's beating by the Hood in New Avengers 35. So I'm just going to throw in some additional thoughts:

I had almost zero awareness of Tigra prior to Civil War. She does not strike me as a character worth much interest. I did have awareness of the Hood thanks to reading the miniseries a while back. His coming role as the new Kingpin for potentially the next few years seemed worth some attention.

A quick comparison of the Hood/Wolverine fight in New Avengers #33/34 and the Hood/Tigra beating in #35 may demonstrate the difference between an A-list hero and a C-list one. Or it may show BM Bendis's contempt for Tigra. Or it may be thoughtlessness on his part. His recent Newsarama interview on the subject suggests he thought he was doing good by not suggesting rape. I dunno, maybe that seems like a selling point to him: "She was just beaten like a chump, not raped. C'mon, guys, at least there were no tentacles involved!"

Wolverine: Smells the Hood while he's invisible. Gets shot and keeps fighting. Gets his genitals shot off and keeps fighting -- AND making with the threats. His cries of pain are varied. He remains such a threat that the Hood must upgrade to demon mode, then flee the scene. Wolverine drinks, heals, and gripes.

Tigra: Smells the Hood while he's invisible. Gets shot and stops being one of "Earth's Mightiest Heroes," devolves to screaming, looking terrified, and begging. Repeatedly screams "AAIIE!" per Bendis's script. Has no comebacks, defiance, or anything resembling a heroic response.

Another difference is that Wolverine is a member of the current team’s roster. His beating feels like part of the building story. Tigra’s isn’t a current member and I have no expectation that she will be. And even if she was, I don’t really want to see her motivation to join the team be a personal physical assault. We’ve already seen rape retconned as other character’s primary motivation, and it didn’t have a place in superhero comics in the first place. Not entertaining.

Calvin Pitt has offered some suggestions for how the scene might have been improved. I would add that there are several ways the scene could have worked just fine. Dirty tricks by the villain -- drugs, poison, deception, betrayal -- are all ways to make a hero's defeat easier to accept. So is allowing the hero to fight back -- at all -- against an overwhelming force. She could have been exhausted from fighting other super-villains, or her mom could have been abducted and in the room with a gun to her head.

Instead, Tigra lost what was basically a fair fight, in a completely lopsided way, sapping the character of any strength it might have had and making it a hollow victory for the villain.

Because really, who's impressed with the Hood by this accomplishment? If you buy the argument that a hero is only as good as the villain they face, then a villain who’s the protagonist of a story is only as tough as the hero they’re trying to defeat.

On a different note, reading the Hood's speech to the assembled villains, telling them "this is how it is now" -- I was strongly reminded of Sammy Silke, the punk who tries to take down the Kingpin in Bendis's run on Daredevil (Underboss). A small man trying to sound like a big shot, projecting confidence as he tries to hustle his way into the big leagues. Silke's reign was extremely short- lived.

If he's going to impress major villains and, more importantly, the readers, he has to accomplish something major. Surviving Wolverine is a baby step. Beating a poorly-characterized Tigra is a step backward. Scoring 12 million dollars is another step. But so far I'm not seeing the criminal mastermind or terrifying monster I was hoping for.

Never Forget...

2007-11-02T18:58:00.000-05:00

Peace with the Russians didn't just happen. It took the deaths of three million New Yorkers 22 years ago to turn us away from World War III.

Take today to remember their sacrifice, and what it bought us.

The Weekly Fix 10-3-07

2007-10-08T22:48:00.001-05:00

Green Lantern Corps #16: “The Battle of Ranx”

By now you’re either on board the Sinestro Corps War, desperately trying to catch up with back issues, or insane. (Or, y’know, a non-comics reading civilian like Dr. Wife.) I struggle in vain to think of another comic being published right now that provides this level of entertainment value for three dollars. (Sorry, Canadians. Hope you achieve price equity soon.)

But my point is, we all get it. I don’t have to belabor the point by going on about an issue that opens with two planets fighting (it looks kind of like two billiard balls doing battle, if one of them had exploding sci-fi laser-plasma-whatever weapons). One that continues on with desperate battles against impossible odds, multi-species trash-talk, a new moral quandary for the Lanterns, prophecies, and the execution of baby suicide bombers.

At first I would have thought that you’d save a planet exploding for the climax of a miniseries. But that was just the halfway point for Star Wars, too. The actual assault on Earth looks like it’s going to sting a bit.

I’d also like to add how enjoyable this is for someone who hasn’t been reading Green Lantern for years and doesn’t have to. My prior exposure to these characters was: Kyle in JLA; John in animated Justice League; Hal as Spectre and in the Rebirth Trade; Sinestro in Superfriends; Guy in various jokey mentions in comics. The rest I’ve all picked up through comics blogs and Wikipedia, but there are still huge gaps. I was befuddled by Mogo’s appearance in Infinite Crisis until I did some reading.

What I love is that the whole event opened with an extra-large special that laid out who’s who, what’s what – all the essentials I needed to get started. The rest has been added along the way, and even if I’m not always sure who certain Lanterns or Sinestros are, the pure kinetic energy of the story is carrying me along just fine.

Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Cyborg Superman: “Death of a Cyborg”

A double shot of GL in one week? Yes, please!

I’ve always been curious about the Cyborg Superman. I was off comics during the whole Death/Return of Superman, but I’ve read enough since to know the role he played in Hal’s downfall. Plus I dig the character design. As I think about it, I’m a sucker for villains with a skull motif. Red Skull, natch. Black Mask, early Terminators, even Mr. Fear. Still no interest in Ghost Rider, though.

So anyway, the background on his character was just what I wanted. Great look, cool motivation, nemesis for two major DC players. And rather than just being a tacked-on, optional addition, this one actually moves the Earth invasion story forward. FINALLY, we understand a big piece of that two-page art spread from way back when.

Detective Comics #837: “Honor Among Thieves”

Didn’t love it. Sure, it’s a Dini one-shot, and it’s got the wacky adventures of Riddler, P.I. But it feels too tied into the whole Countdown/ Amazons Attack/ New Gods bullhockey for me to really enjoy it.

Action Comics #856: “Escape From Bizarro World Part Two”

As cute as the story is, I’m really getting this for Eric Powell’s art. There’s a certain lean purity to his Superman design, harkening back to the old Fleischer cartoons – though it’s odd that his eyes are so squinty. And his years of work on the Goon have given him the perfect skills to represent Bizarro World, equal parts amusing and nightmarish.

Super-Villain™ Team-Up: MODOK’s 11: “Death from Virtue, or, The Getaway”

Van Lente knows from heist stories. In most cases, the job is only part of the story, especially the part of how it goes wrong. MODOK’s plan is going SPECTACULARLY wrong, with the double-crosses and reversals piling on.

But that’s par for the course. What I really want to mention is the bonus treat of another Mini-Marvels comic in the back. Apparently Reed Richards and Beg Grimm are also endowed with super-sarcasm, but their mini-versions are so cute it’s hard to tell. It didn’t detract from the main story, which is already a lightweight romp. It felt like how I’ve always heard the movies used to be, long ago, with a cartoon attached, standard. (Along with the newsreel, musical short, trailers, etc., all for a shiny nickel!) I would love to see short, funny mini-comics included with my regular comics, especially ones that aren’t going to have other used-to-be-standard features like a letters page or a self-contained story.

Astro City: The Dark Age: Book Two #4: “Saturday Night Fever”

The long wait for this issue was made extra long when my Local Comics Shop sold out quickly. I got it this week, and I only sort of remember what led up to this. So I don’t have much to say about the story, except about revelations and surprises.

The Deacon’s betrayal of his boss, the Platypus, comes as a surprise to no one who has been reading Astro City up to now. The Deacon was the terrifying top criminal boss throughout the 90s, and maybe still today. I continue to have qualms about this Dark Age series, because part of what it’s doing is answering questions and filling in the blanks from earlier Astro City stories. But part of the original appeal of the series was that Busiek was implying stories and character histories with an economy of detail. The approach allowed us, the readers, to bring our awareness of superhero stories archetypes to his issues and fill in the gaps ourselves. We recognized things we had never quite seen before.

That said, I was more surprised to see the Silver Agent again than I probably should have been. A dead hero staying dead? What genre of comics did I think I was reading? Still, the references to him in early Astro City issues sure did make it seem like his story ended with tragedy and doom. Maybe it still does. But this latest appearance suggests new untold tales about his adventures through time, and come with a bright feeling of hope.

Does anyone else wonder if that the Samaritan in there? The Silver Agent’s new powers include flight, super-strength, and energy that looks like Samaritan’s Empyrean Web. Did he fill in for Silver Agent? Was he always Silver Agent? The time-travel aspect to his origin would fit this theory. Both men have been inspirations for their era. As much as I just said I didn’t want too many answers, I may have been lying. But since we probably won’t see Book 3 until around 2010, I’ve got time to make up my own stories.

Heroes, Season 1

2007-10-02T13:41:00.000-05:00

Continuing the titular Hero theme from yesterday, Dr. Wife and I recently finished watching the first season of Heroes on DVD. Last year, neither of us were able to watch the show during broadcast – no cable, Tivo, or working VCR at the time – but this year we’ll be able to see it as it’s released. I’d heard one of the issues critics had with the show was the slow pace, but thanks to DVD, we didn’t have that reaction. In fact, this was probably the fastest we’ve ever burned through a DVD set, with the opportunity to follow the second series throughout the year as an incentive.

We dug the show quite a lot. Sometimes I’m very aware of the budgetary restrictions of TV, but I wasn’t this time, except maybe with the Kirby Plaza conflict in the finale. I guess it has to do with the style of the show so far, with the characters discovering their powers and each other. The effects and locations seem to serve the story, and never feels as if they skimped on something they wanted to include. Also, it’s superheroes in an accessible form for Dr. Wife, who puts up with my occasional commentary track explaining who Tim Sale is, or a Kirby reference within the show.

I have a few minor issues with it. I remember thinking in the series premiere that Mohinder speaks almost entirely in exposition, and while he’s moved beyond that some, I still get frustrated by his voice-overs at the beginning and ending of episodes. (But then I have a low tolerance for the narration trend in today’s shows. Dr. Wife occasionally watches Desperate Housewives, which is apparently narrated by a character who committed suicide in the first episode of the show. Or shows like Scrubs, where one character always has to tell us the lesson he or she learned, because audiences are apparently too dumb to figure out a moral from television. About the only one I can stand is Ron Howard on Arrested Development as the omniscient narrator, whose voice-overs are used to further the comedy as much as explain anything.)

I also worry about how many of the main characters end up having powers, and how so many of them meet by mere coincidence. We’ve already seen in the first episode of Season 2 that one of the first students Claire meets at her new school can fly. I just hope the writers don’t burn themselves out with too many powered characters too fast. That may be why I like Claire’s dad, Noah Bennett, a guy who’s smart and capable enough to hold his own in this environment.

Another aspect I enjoy is how the powers are reflections of, or contrasted with, the characters’ personalities. As Dr. Wife put it, Peter is super-empathetic, allowing him to feel what others feel, while Sylar, as a more mechanically-minded guy, must take them apart. Claire’s physical invulnerability is contrasted with her emotional vulnerability, in a way not entirely unlike Buffy, though the two characters are quite different. Isaac’s paintings. And so on.

The show is predictable at times, but I think that’s the result of a superhero series masterminded by a guy who has said he doesn’t read comics. The team may not always realize when it’s heading into familiar territory.

By far my favorite character – Hiro Nakamura. I don’t identify with the woe-is-me heroes we get in most of the series. They remind me of Bruce Willis in Unbreakable. “Poor me! I’m super-strong and invulnerable! I guess I’ll go mope in the corner.” Hiro, on the other hand, was born for this. When he discovers his powers, he knows what to do and what it could mean. He may suffer the occasional moment of self-doubt, but overall he is full of the wonder and potential that draw so many of us to superheroes in the first place.

P.S. D'oh! We missed the second episode last night!

HERO by Perry Moore: Senses-Shattering!

2007-10-01T09:24:00.000-05:00

This year we’re seeing a promising trend in original superhero novels. I liked Soon I Will Be Invincible well enough – as a dual character study, it’s enjoyable. Author Austin Grossman filled his world with great details that showed an obvious appreciation for the superhero genre. But when it came to the characters, I was left cold. Both Dr. Impossible and Fatale were such careful observers of the world around them that I never got a strong sense of what they were feeling. Neither their victories or defeats were especially moving.

Not so with Perry Moore’s coming-of-age adventure, simply titled Hero. This time our narrator is Thom Creed, a gay high school senior struggling with his sexual identity and his emerging power to heal injury and disease. Thom’s father, Hal, is a former superhero, Major Might. As a non-powered Batman type, he was disgraced when a battle with a Galactus-level monster led to a disaster on the scale of the World Trade Center. Thom’s mother has left them both, for reasons unknown. As supportive as they are of each other, Thom’s dad is homophobic, leaving a lot unsaid between them.

But during one fateful summer, all of the Creed family secrets are going to come to light. A super-villain attack on a city bus forces Thom to use his powers, bringing him to the attention of “the League,” which is just what it sounds like. The super-team Moore describes is full of the usual DC analogs: Warrior Woman, King of the Sea, Spectrum, Silver Bullet (Flash) and Golden Boy (Kid Flash). But there are two Superman homages – Justice and Uberman.

Despite his father’s deep prejudice against powered heroes, Thom accepts the League’s invitation to a tryout, along with many other hopefuls, and he wins a spot on a probationary team along with his jerk trainer Golden Boy; fire-controlling hothead Miss Scarlett; Typhoid Larry, a nice guy who can give people any disease at will; and Ruth, a chain-smoking senior who can see the future.

This new adventure is interwoven with Thom’s journey to find love and acceptance, to uncover his family’s secrets and reveal his own. This personal journey is probably the book’s strongest element. He suffers ongoing humiliations throughout the story – an awkward first kiss with a man, embarrassing himself at work and during combat training with the League, nearly getting caught looking at gay web sites by his father.

Despite this strong emotional core, Moore’s Hero is also packed with action. There’s an early scene where some burglars don’t realize they’ve broken into Major Might’s house until it’s too late. There are super-villains and super-fights galore, including that bus attack and a disastrous encounter outside a hospital. It all leads up to a big-budget battle royale involving every hero the League’s ever had.

Perhaps the weakest element, for me, is the mystery plot that emerges about halfway through the story: Someone is killing off League members for reasons unknown. The first official victim is just who you’d expect it to be (which League member gets the least respect?), and the culprit should come as no surprise to anyone who’s read some Bronze Age superhero murder-mysteries such as Top Ten Vol. 2 or Powers: The Sellouts and what feels like a few other stories. When it was revealed, I had an “of course it’s so-and-so.” But it may feel fresher to the book’s young adult audience. Also, the identity of the mysterious “Dark Hero” wasn’t so mysterious.

Still, despite that, the book closes with a kick-ass climax that allows each of the main characters to have their big moments and triumphs. The development of Thom’s powers, his relationships with others, and their connections to each other, all satisfy. The last line is perfect.

I hope we continue to see more original superhero novels on this level. Just as comics fans like to point out that comics are a format and not a genre, superhero fans should be able to enjoy their genre in a variety of formats.

Spidey Super Saturdays: More Mysterio

2007-09-22T14:12:00.000-05:00

My love for the Mysterio character is directly proportional to my hatred for Kevin Smith's Daredevil arc, "Guardian Devil."

It's too damn wordy, but that’s to be expected from Smith. As he will be the first to admit, dialogue is his comfort area, so much so that he will not trust action and the art to help tell the story.

It also suffers from unoriginal ideas, like using Bullseye to kill off another Matt Murdock girlfriend. It's like having Spider-Man rescue a girlfriend from a villain on or near a bridge -- how many times has that element been resurrected?

Worse is the supernatural aspect to most of the story. A street-level hero like DD doesn't really mesh well with demons and evil babies, no matter how much you emphasize Matt Murdock's Catholic/spiritual side. And the fact that he buys into it all so easily is off-putting. He is entirely too credulous, even given the explanation of events later.

That explanation, by the way, is that Mysterio is behind the whole thing. (Spoiler.) I suppose it seemed like an interesting idea at the time -- how does the Master of Illusion put one over on a blind guy? But it just doesn't work. His motivation to fight Daredevil is sorely lacking. He's dying, and he wants to go out with a grand hurrah. But his usual nemesis Spider-Man was mired in the whole clone debacle at the time, and he wanted to fight a legitimate hero.

Smith has a habit of copping to his own weaknesses as a way of heading off critics. But here, it’s lame to have Mysterio acknowledge that he’s ripping off the plan from Miller’s Born Again, and stealing the suicide idea from Kraven.

It's just a terrible way for Mysterio to go out. On the other hand, he's the easiest villain in the world to kill off. You can always bring him back later with, "Yeah, I faked my death." The first time he did it ushered in the second Mysterio, Danny Berkhart.

But Peter David avoided this easy out in the recent Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man story, "I Hate a Mystery." Instead we get three Mysterios for the price of one, including a seemingly resurrected but gruesome Quentin Beck. I like the extra confusion when it comes to old Bubble-Dome, especially as at least one of the Mysterios now has legitimate super-powers.

Long live Mysterio!

Year of the Skrull: Skrulls Did Everything

2007-09-19T20:36:00.000-05:00

Ain't It Cool News Comics has a fun take on the Skrull business in this week's set of reviews.

The Suicide Squad in: How to Get Tom's Money

2007-09-17T22:41:00.001-05:00

For years now I've been reading about the widely accepted awesomeness that is John Ostrander's Suicide Squad of the 1980s. I'd never read it at the time -- but that was true of almost everything that didn't have Spider-Man in it. When I heard a new series was coming out, by the same writer, I was only too happy to check it out. Even better, they were releasing the original series in Showcase form. I could get caught up on the characters.

This is a practice that makes sense to me, a guy who returned to comics a few years ago. I have been hard at work catching up on DC's past, and on non-Spider-Man characters in Marvel, and on Image and Dark Horse and independent characters, to a lesser degree. When you've got some splashy new product about your characters, especially characters the general public may not be as familiar with, you want to put out some trades to satsify their curiosity. I hate reading a comic in which the writer just assumes I know the characters and all their history. I'm willing to do a little research to find out more. But then -- and here's my point -- if I find something I'm interested in, I'm going to want to read the old issues. I want to read the stories in which an important villain was introduced or came into their own; the ones that really did change the hero's life forever. The ones in which a writer was at the top of their game for the title. And because I'm a lazy bastard - hence my recent blog absence - I don't want to have to go searching the bins. I want the stories bound and collected for me, and I will plunk down my cash.

So cancelling (or postponing, really, I'm assuming) the Suicide Squad Showcase is just keeping some of my money out of DC's pocket, and Suicide Squad stories out of my brain. Nobody wins. Releasing the trade, especially at a time when my curiosity is surging, gets DC more money and me more comics enjoyment. Everybody wins!

What comics or storylines are you waiting to see collected?

Year of the Skrull: New Avengers 32-34

2007-09-17T21:36:00.000-05:00

During my extended summer leave, I haven't been talking about events in New Avengers lately, namely the Year of the Skrull. People have been complaining about the last couple of issues, as Bendis has the characters clearly lay out reasons why each of them may be an evil alien shapeshifter, sent after the Kree-Skrull War to infiltrate the ranks of the superheroes in preparation for a takeover of planet Earth. Too talky, people say. I can just imagine Claude Raines from Casablanca: "I am shocked! Shocked to find huge amounts of dialogue in a Brian Michael Bendis comic book!" By now, people deserve whatever they get.

Me, I'm having fun. I like the first half of Shoot to Kill, when you wonder which of the hiking party is really a murderous jewel thief. Or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Conspiracy thrillers from the 1970s. Paranoia. It's awesome.

Plus, Issue 32 had an unexplained plane crash, and Issue 34 brought back the Hood. I just recently read the Hood miniseries after I learned of Bendis's plans to establish the Hood as the new Kingpin. The miniseries was pretty good. Parker Robbins is not a heavyweight, but he's got potential. I like the idea of a less-obvious, less-established guy growing and b.s.-ing his way into the role.

Which brings us up to issue 34, and Dr. Strange's spell. It shows everybody who they are on the inside. Apparently, nobody is a Skrull, except maybe Spider-Woman, who stole the Elektra Skrull in Issue 32. Of course, nobody in the issue points out that if Dr. Strange is a Skrull, then the whole exercise is suspect. Could just be alien technology simulating magic -- something that reads brainwaves and projects them. Maybe there's another loophole I haven't thought of. Maybe the projections show other forms the Skrull has taken before? Maybe their shapeshifting ability is tied to mental projections that fool the spell?

Anyway, if the spell IS bogus, then anybody's still fair game. Well, maybe not everybody. There are practical considerations to Skrulling characters shared by other writers. I still maintain that making Spider-Man a Skrull is more trouble than it's worth. Too many complications with all the work Slott will be working on. Too close to making him a clone. Same deal for Iron Fist -- Brubaker's got too much going on with him. (Unless there are TWO of these guys running around, like a real Spider-Man and a fake one.)

But nobody else is doing much with Cage, Jessica Jones, Maya Lopez, Hawkeye/Ronin, or Dr. Strange. Wolverine? I don't read any X-books these days 'cept Astonishing trades, but I don't care. And if this is going down anything like a Body Snatchers movie, what was true a few issues ago may not be true now. In issue 34, everybody took a day off (at Cage's suggestion), then re-grouped. Somebody who wasn't a Skrull could have been captured and replaced in the meantime.

The symbiote cliffhanger is kind of a "wha...huh?" moment. Sometimes I think Bendis has storyline attention deficit disorder. Remember when they were trying to track down who was behind the jailbreak in the first arc, then got distracted by ninjas and the collective and the Civil War and then more ninjas? Would it be too much to hope that the symbiotes will somehow tie into the Skrull storyline?

Anyway, fun stuff.

Spidey Super Saturdays: I Love Mysterio!

2007-09-15T16:04:00.000-05:00

One of my all-time, hands-down favorite Spidey villains is the inimitable Mysterio. When I see that giant goldfish bowl on a comic book cover, I immediately know I'm in for some fun. The art's going to have visual flights of fancy, and the story's going to throw our hero off-balance, once again trying to figure out what's real and what isn't.

Mysterio doesn't always get respect from the fans -- or some creators -- and it's a damned shame.

Yes, he's an interesting paradox from a design point of view. On the one hand, it's an extremely iconic look -- bizarre and alienating and instantly recognizable. On the other hand, it's ridiculous -- a design so cartoony that it strains all credibility. You'd be hard-pressed to faithfully adapt Mysterio into a movie.

You might get away with a re-design of his look. For example, you could tone down the costume and replace the fishbowl with that headless look he sported once in the 1970s. Or he could have a hood and mirrored face, like one of those guys in The Black Hole. You'd have to tweak it more, but hey, I'm not Blockade Boy.

If I had my way, Mysterio would be far more arch of a nemesis for Spider-Man than even the Green Goblin. He would be, in the words of his first cover, "the greatest villain of all for ol' Spidey." The reason I think he never gets the respect is that Lee and Ditko kind of shot their wad when they introduced him. The first time Spider-Man fought Mysterio, they had Quentin Beck spill his origin and trick technology right away.

But revealing a magician’s secrets ruins the fun. To put it another way: Mysterio has no mystique, and if anybody should, it’s him. He can block spider-sense, make webbing dissolve in thin air, and make Spider-Man question his own sanity. That's something to milk for a while.

Also, I have to say that while Spider-Man stories often overdo the “hero has personal connection to the villain” device, Mysterio is one villain who doesn’t use it but should. Think about it. We’ve seen many villains who learn a hero’s identity and use it to screw with their life. Kingpin vs. Daredevil in Born Again and other tales. Hush vs. Batman in Hush. Dr. Light. The Green Goblin vs. Spider-Man in many, many stories. ("No! All for Norman! All plotlines belong to Norman!") But unlike Hush or Bane, Mysterio wouldn’t have to use intermediaries. Hell, he made him think Aunt May was dead just to be evil, without even knowing who Peter really was. Think what he could do with inside knowledge: Uncle Ben accusing Peter of letting him die, playing into his guilt. Variations on Aunt May or MJ in peril. Turning into a spider again. Or the whole world learning his secret iden—OH WAIT.

Oh, and if I’m Mysterio, and I’ve invented gloves that dissolve Spidey’s webbing with a gesture, I’m going to market that stuff to every one of the wall-crawler’s rogue’s gallery. That alone would keep my smoke machines running for years.

Rate the Master Plan: Die Hard Edition

2007-06-28T11:15:00.000-05:00

It's time again for Rate the Master Plan, a look at villainous schemes - what they plan and how it turns out. This time: the Die Hard films. (Not counting the new one - I hope to check that out this weekend.)

Die Hard

The Culprit: Hans Gruber, former member of the Volksfrei movement in Germany, now leader of a Eurotrash band of mercenaries. He's a snappy dresser, sparkling conversationalist, and ruthless killer. He adapts to contingencies easily and in a variety of accents.

The Plan: One of my all-time favorite schemes. It looks like a hostage situation at a company Christmas Eve party. It’s supposed to. But it’s really using that set-up for a robbery from the Nakatomi corporation’s vault. Mostly, the vault is a cakewalk for the team’s man Theo, who can hack the code and crack the mechanical locks. But the electromagnetic seal can’t be cut locally. It has to be done from downtown. Now, in theory, the team could have a couple of guys break in to the downtown electrical grid and do the job when they need it done. Instead, they have the FBI do their work for them. They know that the FBI will automatically cut the power, breaking the seal and allowing the crooks into the vault when the backup power comes on. They then set up a roof exchange for the hostages, allowing them to blow up the roof and escape in the confusion.

Profit Motive: 640 million dollars in negotiable bearer bonds.

What I like best about this scheme, besides its neatness and manipulation of the enemies, is that it remains viable until almost the end. For all that John McClane gets painted as "a fly in the ointment," the biggest challenge he poses is getting his hands on the detonators. But I'm sure even without them, Hans could have found a way around them -- one of his biggest skills is his quick adaptability. And even though McClane is killing off members of the team, he’s just increasing Gruber’s share of the score. Really, until he actually takes a bullet in the final moments, there’s no reason why Hans couldn’t have gotten away with the whole thing. A blazing 100 degrees on the Tomometer.

Die Hard 2: Die Harder

The Culprit: Colonel Stuart, a rogue Army officer now leading a group of ex-Army mercenaries. He's kind of a little guy, but he's a hard man. His icy blue eyes don't blink as he sends 230 or so passengers on a British flight to their deaths. Has a penchant for practicing Tai Chi in the nude. He's definitely evil, but he lacks some of Gruber's ingenuity and style.

The Plan: Seize control of an airport during a Christmas Eve blizzard. These guys have better electrical skills than Gruber's bunch: they take out the lights on all the runways and take over all communications with the planes circling the airport. They can cause the planes to crash, or just let them run out of fuel if their demands aren't met. They also take out the airport's main police force in a deadly ambush.

Profit Motive: The team is here to rescue a a deposed foreign dictator on his way to trial in America. (Think Noriega, but with better skin.) Apparently they believe he is one of the few men capable of truly standing up to the Communist menace, circa 1990. In other words - it doesn't matter.

This one’s a little looser. The plan depends a lot on a winter storm being in place, which is hard to plan on. Otherwise most of the planes could have re-routed to nearby landing fields. Also, they make their escape attempt in a plane – from an airport everyone is watching. They may control the Dulles tower, but not the radar all over the country. Anyway, their plan is a little more straightforward – their objective is clear to everyone – but they still have a few surprises, such as their control of the “opposition.” I just don’t see why they couldn’t have driven away from the airport in multiple vehicles, then regrouped in the Caymans or someplace. 80 degrees.

Die Hard 3: With a Vengeance

The Culprit: "Simon." For the first hour, he's just a voice on a phone, threatening New York City with a wave of bombs if John McClane doesn't play his little games. Later we learn his true identity, his connection to the Die Hard franchise, and what he's really after. Suffers from migraines strictly as a plot point.

The Plan: One of Simon's games, involving a bomb on a subway train, is designed for failure. It goes off precisely where it’s supposed to – right next to the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Now, while the police are distracted with a bomb somewhere in one of the city’s schools, the villains can pose as a repair crew and rob the bank. The loot is moved to a ship on the coast, where it is supposedly blown up. In an early draft of the script I read, this was the actual plan – to sink billions of dollars, sending the American economy into a tailspin and raising the value of Simon’s own holdings. (Very Goldfinger.) The version we see uses another switch – blowing up scrap metal to cover them moving the loot into Canada.

Profit Motive: Approximately 150 billion dollars in gold bullion.

This one follows the first film in that the outward appearance of the villain’s plan is quite different from its actual intent. But this time, we the audience are left to wonder along with our heroes. The games go on for a while as cover for the ultimate plan. As a Master Plan, it all seems a bit complex, requiring many, many things to go right. Simon is not an adherent to the school of Keep It Simple, Stupid. Still, within an action movie context, they make the gold heist workably plausible.

It just sort of breaks down as a Die Hard movie. To me, once you set up your “Die Hard” location – skyscraper, airport, bus, naval vessel, train, island prison, airplane, airplane, etc. – the entire story should be resolved within that location. In this case, the location is New York City – a bit larger than one would expect, but they make it work. Moving the climactic showdown to some generic warehouse in Canada, though, is boring and completely disconnected from the rest of the movie. (I also have a problem with the subway finale in Speed.) I'll say 80 degrees for this one, too.

The Flash Is Dead. Long Live the Flash. Again.

2007-06-25T22:06:00.000-05:00

The last couple years have been a great big pain for most Flash fans. Geoff Johns ended his run with the Rogue War, having done what he wanted with the series. Great! I liked one of his earlier arcs better, but still a fun way to go out.

Then we got another arc for the series after its cancellation had been announced, some space-filler involving Vandal Savage. Meh.

Then, Infinite Crisis. The last Crisis included the heroic sacrifice of Barry Allen. We were all worried about Wally. We lose Wally and his family, but in a nice way. Typical of the whole series, the scene is rushed and disconnected from those surrounding it - just a plot point so that they can give Bart Allen a try.

Bart's returns as the All-New Flash was a disaster from the starting point. Poorly writing, poor characterization, generally unappealing. When writer Marc Guggenheim came on, he promised to take the series back to what we want out of Flash comics. It wasn't quite Johns-quality yet, but it was, pardon the expression, building momentum. The kid was juggling a relationship, a new career as a cop, getting a handle on being the Flash. It was going somewhere.

It just turns out the destination was an empty death. Guggenheim does the best he can with it, I suppose. Bart goes out heroically, and the reaction of his friends is moving. But the story just reeks of editorial confusion, of a false start. Or maybe he was fated to die all along. As Dido said back during Infinite Crisis, we shouldn't have gotten attached to the first Flash we saw. But as much as I enjoy Wally West stories, I was willing to give Bart Allen a try, maybe seek out some of his older adventures.

Now it just feels like Bart is going to be the new Jason Todd - that uniform in the display case at the Flash Museum, to give Wally West something poignant to remember and honor. Something to up the ante with his fights against the Rogues. This Time It's Personal, etc. etc. Eventually, of course, he'll be resurrected, and maybe he'll go Red Hood against the Rogues. Or maybe they'll figure out something else to do with him.

As for JLA/JSA's "The Lightning Saga," Sweet Christmas. Choppy as hell, with a change of location and characters every couple of panels, and confusing color-coded caption boxes. There's more overlapping dialogue than a Robert Altman film, and not to any useful effect. A lame "conflict" with no apparent villains, and... You know what? I don't have the strength. For a more complete look at the suckiness, Greg Burgas lays it out for you over at Comics Should Be Good.

On the plus side, Wally's back, with the wife and kids, and Mark Waid's going to be writing The Flash again. Yay. But you know what would have been better? To just bring the guy back in his own series. The JLA could have spent their time doing something useful, like fighting a major villain.

Worst of all, I don't think we're done with this Lightning Saga story. There's something off about it that makes me not trust it. Batman was so sure it would be Barry. Is having him fall for the same red herrings many of us did supposed to make the readers feel better? Or is it a suggestion that maybe it was going to be Barry, but the intervention of someone changed who came back?

Is there somebody trapped in that lightning rod at the end of the last panel? Is that Barry Allen? When Braniac 5 refers to this universe, is he making some veiled reference to the story having crossed at least two of the 52 universes? Is this the Legion from New Earth's future, or another of the 52 Earths? Why is Wally West who they wanted, for this universe?

Also, Karate Kid is obviously lying about ducking lightning.

Conclusion? The Legion of Super-Heroes has been replaced by Skrulls.

The Weekly Fix for 6-13-07: The Giganta Justice Post

2007-06-20T19:08:00.000-05:00

Is two years too long to wait for a single comics story? Well, if it's a handful of monthly issues like All-Star Batman and Robin, probably. But if it's a twelve-issue mega-event like Alex Ross doing a Superfriends versus the Legion of Doom story, and it's solicited to come out bimonthly, and it does so on schedule, then no, not at all. They set reasonable expectations for themselves, and they met them. Kudos.

Since I wasn't blogging when it started, I thought I'd take a quick look back at the highlights. Spoilers ahead. Also, for a drinking game, take a drink every time I use variations on the phrase "mind control." You will die.

Justice #1 - Certain Doom and Giant Seahorses

Nuclear apocalypse? That's one way to get our attention. The nukes are flying in hard and fast, and for all their power, the Justice League is unable to save us. Metropolis burns, Martian Manhunter melts, Team Hawk pulls an Icarus, Aquaman's kingdom boils, Star City collapses (again), Batman lures more children into his cave (sorry), and for an encore, Earth goes down like Krypton.

Superman in the void of space: ...(sigh) Man, this is getting old. Maybe I'll look for that "Alderaan" I heard about somewhere.

This is followed by some villains waking up in damp sheets (hopefully sweat). The threat is real to them, hanging like a cloud over the rest of the story. It's the Doom that forms a Legion. They believe they're doing the right thing much of the time, or at least the wrong things for the right reasons. If the whole planet is at stake, then failure is not an option for any of them.

We've just had a pre-title sequence, one of my favorite storytelling devices since the early Bond movies. It's followed by a big two-page splash, a heroic pose of the League before we shift to our first hero: Aquaman.

Unlike some comics bloggers out there, I know next to zilch about the king of the ocean, save for a few blog entries and the old cartoons. The tranquility of the family scene in Atlantis serves as a nice palate cleanser from the earlier horror, but it also sets up some of the other stakes that will be in play later in the story. Plus: "Arthur? There's a shark here for you" is one of the things I love about comics: the offhand comment about something amazing.

Captain Cold creates a glacier in the desert. Are the bad guys out to show up the heroes? To make people wonder why the "good guys" aren't doing more to make the world a better place?

Aquaman finds a big black marble on the ocean floor. The plot thickens... Then - Black Manta attacks! The sound of lasers in water? "BBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!" Also, Aquaman can swim faster than light can travel through water - or maybe there's some prismatic effect? Anyway, underwater lasers appear to be one of the more useless weapons out there. Mind-controlled sharks, on the other hand? Why have Aquaman's buddies turned on him? For all the hatred Manta is spewing, he's not going to give any straight answers. "C'mon, man, it's only the first issue," he says. "We've got eleven more months of this."

Last shot: The Legion of Doom's conference room. Tantalizing for those of us raised in the late 70s/early 80s.

#1 whets the appetite just fine. It's kind of a shame that Aquaman's the first to go down -- with all the cheap comedy bits at his expense, Arthur Curry's doesn't need any more hits to his rep. Kreuger and Ross make up for it later, though.

Justice #2 - What's It All About, Alfred?

This episode starts off with another fun concept: The Riddler is using Wayne Industries computers to hack the Batcomputer - and steal the secrets of the Justice League. The entire issue is almost entirely focused on this adventure, while most of the League remains off-panel. It includes many of the Batman Adventure Ingredients: a Batmobile chase, a fight in his parents' graveyard, a conversation in the Batcave with Alfred, and a quick look at the villains in Arkham.

The villains have a cool, understated look here. The Riddler has eschewed his green tights or even the jacket and slacks look for a topcoat that glows from within -- it's as tantalizing as a good riddle. And when he flashes you - flying green question marks in a blinding light show. His nameless underlings sport sleek black turtlenecks, blazers, and leather gloves. Classy henching.

The Riddler is a great focal point at this stage, because Kreuger and Ross are still concerned with setting up questions that will be answered later. Why are the villains helping humanity so much with these miracles? In some cases, how are they doing it? What is wrong with the Riddler? What do the villains want with Aquaman? And how does Gotham have a club called the Batcave - just a coincidence, or do they somehow know the name, if not the location, of his hideout?

Last shot: A big Superman foe up to gruesome experiments on a fallen hero.

Justice #3 - A Major Case of Brain-Fry

What if J'onn Jones, Martian Manhunter, fought Gorilla Grodd in an alliterative altercation of mind-controlling madness? That's the fan fiction question that concerns us this time. Answer: Grodd uses J'onn's one weakness for some major, if temporary, ownage. Things are starting to look bad for our heroes.

The scope starts to widen in this issue. We see more humanitarian efforts by Legion of Doom members, and the complacent reaction by our heroes. J'onn discovers the empty city. Cheetah suits up for a cat fight. Luthor rescues the Riddler. Braniac explores someone else's brain. Aquaman finds a unique way to send his friends a message. And the Red Tornado does what he does best.

Last shot: The Legion of Doom, now armed with the Superfriends' secret identities, prepares to strike.

Not my favorite issue. But in a hero/villain war, I love it when the bad guys start picking off enemies before the other side realizes what's going on. It makes things so much worse, which in turn makes it so much better when they turn things around. Grodd proves once again that, written and drawn properly, a talking gorilla can be scary as hell.

Justice #4 - The Ambushers

In their first open assault against the League, the Legion broadcasts its intentions around the planet in a public relations attack. "We're improving your lives - what have those Justice League chumps ever done but maintain the status quo?" Fair enough, but the 60-foot holograms of yourself? Still kind of evil.

Speaking of those chumps, what is Superman up to at that moment, with several of his friends missing? He's having a nice TV dinner - probably one of those old-fashioned ones with the chocolate brownie for dessert. Which makes him conveniently available when Bizarro, Solomon Grundy, Parasite, and Metallo show up to beat the SNOT out of him.

This is one of my favorite issues, because it's that part of the "villain team" story I love best: When the villains execute their plan to take down all the heroes. Sinestro sends Green Lantern to the ass-end of space. Scarecrow and Clayface scare and smother Black Canary and Green Lantern. Toyman blows up Hawkman and Hawkgirl's museum with them in it. Some woman with a sniper rifle shoots the Atom while he's full-sized; kind of a "wha- huh?" moment there. Flash is drugged and forced to run until he dies. Manhunter is going insane. Red Tornado: still broken. Aquaman: still dead.

And then there's Wonder Woman. Of DC's Big Three, she easily gets the least respect. It certainly shows here. Who do they send after Superman? A super-strong zombie, a guy with Superman's powers, a guy who can steal Superman's powers, and a guy powered by the one substance that can kill Superman. Who do they send after Wonder Woman? A woman in a cat suit whose main weapon are claws she can use to scratch another woman. And that's, like, one of her archest of nemeses, y'know? (At least as far as I know. I'll cop to not reading Wonder Woman much - at least not until Simone takes over.) Sure, maybe those claws are laced with mythical poisoned centaur's blood - bad stuff if you know your Greek mythology - but the imagery is still pretty weak. I wish much better for Wonder Woman - this kind of stuff doesn't do much for her image.

Last shot: Superman wept.

Justice #5 - That's What Superfriends Are For

Ralph Dibny? What's he doing here? I know he's a sometimes League member, but I thought this was just going to be an "essential" League story. This turns out to be the beginning of an ever-expanding cast, which hurts the series overall. It feels as though Kreuger and Ross just wanted to cram so much in, they included a host of characters that don't necessarily add to the story.

It's true: you can't keep a good Manhunter down. The heart of the team realizes what's happening to them, but he kind of overlooks the Flash, who is running right past him -several times at once - when he surfaces. His mind must have been elsewhere.

Great offhand comment #1: "Do you have the cities?" "Yes." (Better than: "Aw, man, I left them in my other pants. I hope they didn't go through the wash.")

Captain Marvel's cavalry arrival is swift and cheering and almost makes up for Superman's boo-hoo despair shortly before. And the guy can punch Bizarro into the stratosphere. Respect.

Offhand comment #2: Hawkgirl: (crawling out of museum rubble) "Not unlike that night on the fourth moon of Tenrus, was it?" ("I remember every detail. The Glorgans wore green. You wore yellow.")

Great Batcave splash. All the classic elements are there. I love the fact that a freaking dinosaur, a giant penny, and a playing card are our visual shorthand for the Batcave. You don't even have to recognize the old stories they come from. You see them, and you just know where you are.

Followed a couple of pages later by Batman getting his bell rung. Wasn't this right about the time Batman was getting sucker-punched throughout DC's line? No, wait, it's after Infinite Crisis, so maybe not.

Last shot: Superman to Captain Marvel: You're going to have to throw me into the sun. ("Sure. What are Superfriends for?")

Just when it seems like our heroes are escaping certain death a little too easily, we get mind-controlled Batman! And soon, mind-controlled Superman! They're not out of danger by a long shot. Cool.

Justice #6 - "Shut up, Alfred."

The halfway point. Superman gets thrown into the sun. The Atom's mystery sniper turns out to be Giganta. Green Lantern tries to survive by sucking himself into his ring. Newly cured people are flocking to the Legion's floating cities. Wonder Woman fights Poison Ivy and mind-controlled Batman, who uses the Dark Side of the Force on her. The Hawks fight misfit toys. Green Arrow and Black Canary are presumably still arguing.

Last shot: And the Flash is still caught in a loop.

Action-packed. The heroes are still dealing with the villain's attack, but only just starting to come together. And the Joker is Amish, apparently. I can't tell if I have less to say about these issues because I'm running out of steam, or just because they're mostly fights.

Justice #7 - Because Amphibians Can Regenerate Their Brains

J'onn Jones and Zantanna find Aquaman's corpse. The Legion of Doom targets the League's friends and loved ones. The League gathers at the Fortress of Solitude - which also has a dinosaur. It's probably been said before, but the place seems kind of show-offy for a fortress of solitude. It makes the Batcave look like a moonshiner's shack.

Team Hawk smashes Toyman's Braniac factory, and discover some broken mind-control worms. (Seriously, is Toyman ever a threat? His basic appeal seems to be fun imagery - watch the heroes smash his armies of playthings!) Captain Marvel and Superman rescue the Flash and get him some chow. Hal Jordan suffers an existential crisis. The Doom Patrol gets added to the cast, gives a Miracle Max explanation about Aquaman's recovery - from DEATH, and puts him in a bacta tank to speed his recovery.

Last shot: Black Manta steals Aquaman's baby. Evil!

Another fun issue. I continue to worry about the growing cast of heroes - besides setting up some dense, occasionally confusing fight panels later, it also seems to lessen the threat the more help they get. But I love Metamorpho and Captain Marvel's aghast expressions at the size and ostentatiousness of the Fortress.

Justice #8 - The Tedium of the Insight Conversation

Batman and Superman have one of those "insight" conversations writers always seem to like to write for those two - how they're so different, and yet so alike, and how sometimes they're the opposite of what people think. Does this device ever get boring for anyone else?

Then the heroes actually start to track down their enemies. First up, Flash is looking for a reckoning with Captain Cold. Batman threatens an enemy with a gun (freeze or not, it's still got a trigger and lethal force), and you know he's not lying because he's still wearing the Lasso of Truth. Um, really?

Hal disappears into fantasy land. The Atom analyzes Braniac's mind-control worms. Ralph Dibny whines and has an "insight" conversation with Plastic Man. Batman calls bull$#!+ on the Legion's motives. Wonder Woman is getting worse.

Green Lantern gets rescued by a deus ex Phantom Stranger, which does nothing for me. He's another character I know zilch about; he seems more like a device than an actual character. But to help us overlook this lazy plotting, Ross goes for the dazzle with a frameable panel of the Lantern recharging while reciting his Oath all dramatic-like. It's pretty cool. Then he cleans the worms out of Batman's system, also a plus.

Aquaman, now all alive and sporting a Power Girl boob window, rallies the League to stop hiding in the Fortress and go kick some alien ass. With only four issues left, we're gearing up for the showdown.

Last shot: The Doom Patrol wonders if winning will mean dooming the earth. Nice positive attitude, guys.

Justice #9 - Things Get Annoying

This issue starts to send the whole adventure off the rails with the introduction of that most dreaded of comic book power-ups: armor. As Dave Campbell rightly points out, armor is never cool. I mean, I get why Kreuger and Ross are doing it. Plot-wise it actually makes some sense - they need to keep the mind-control worms off themselves, and it allows them to put in some fun switcheroos. They get to put the Metal Men to use. Plus Ross probably wanted to paint superheroes in armor. Plus the toy companies get to sell more action figures.

But still, armor? From a telling-what-the-hell-is-going-on point of view? Still sucky.

How about the rest of the issue? We've got a Marvel family smackdown, with the Big Red Cheese fighting Black Adam and his own mind-controlled friends... in some annoyingly narrow panels. I'm all for packing in the story, but some of the action needs more room to breathe. There's also a fine battle between several League members and Gorilla Grodd, who's sporting an extra yellow power ring. Fun stuff, that, and Metamorpho and Red Tornado have a moment to shine. We learn the origin of the mind-control worms.

And there's a rather brief fight between mind-controlled Captain Marvel and Superman. Is it just me, or does DC find more acceptable reasons for their heroes to fight each other, whereas Marvel heroes just fight because at least one of them is being a tool?

Last shot: Luthor is pleased. Never good.

Justice #10 - Eye-straining Armor Battles

The Legion of Doom is getting dressed up. While space-suited spy the Atom observes, we see Braniac turning Aquaman's son into a droid.

The Legion is toasting to its victory. The basic law of hubris means that is the exact moment the League will burst in to fight them.

And the hurting begins. There are many, many panels, large and small, with tiny characters fighting each other. Some are recognizable villains. Some are armored heroes with few of the visual cues we usually have to identify them on sight. We have to work much harder just to tell who is fighting who. I sort of like being forced to linger over detailed comics art sometimes, but this is just way beyond my annoyance threshhold.

Still, the basic plan in this one is great - distract the villains so that Green Arrow and Canary can start the rescue of their friends and loved ones.

Last shot: John Stewart becomes Green Lantern and assures Supergirl (and us) that the world will be saved. Kickass.

Justice #11 - Yellow + Blue =

Armor gets shed. The hurting dies down. And as the armor comes off, more switcheroos in the plan get revealed. Captain Marvel owns the Parasite and Bizarro - again! Green Lantern fakes out Sinestro. John Stewart saves EVERYBODY. Hal Jordan and Sinsestro fight with yellow rings, then with the fisticuffs. Braniac pulls a great variation on the "basket chase" from Raiders of the Lost Ark. A splash page Braniac battle ensues. Scarecrow sends an army of mind-controlled civilians after the heroes.

Last shot: After a fearless (Remember! He's fearless!) Hal Jordan cleans the worms out of everybody, Scarecrow, in a major case of sour grapes, has the people all freak out and attack each other. As last cliffhangers go, it seems a little weak.

Justice #12 - Something for Everyone

As much as I've complained about how there are too many people on the heroes' team, the writers certainly do manage to ensure that everybody gets at least a moment to shine in the final issue.

The Joker gets more revenge on the villains who snubbed him. Plastic Man makes a Wonder Twins funny. Wonder Woman proves she's more than just a pretty face. ("Cheetahs never prosper" - The Lion King.) Superman channels Hamlet with my preferred version of Braniac - the shiny metal skull. "Alas, poor Braniac. I knew him Zatanna. A fellow of infinite evil..." Supergirl smokes some weed. Martian Manhunter arranges a meeting of the minds to redirect the nukes. Aquaman not only beats Black Manta down - he exposes his hypocrisy. Ouch! Ralph Dibny becomes a Super Happy Fun Slide. Superman, Zatanna, and Red Tornado defeat Luthor AND Braniac. The Green Lantern Corps saves Earth. Superman saves Zatanna - by heating her up on re-entry from space and then remembering not to kill her during CPR. That's why he's the man. Wonder Woman and Hippolyta act out the ending of Star Trek III. The Legion of Super-Heroes? Inspired.

In the end, the crooks are going to jail, and none of our heroes have suffered any permanent damage or consequences of any kind, really. They've also averted the Apocalypse. Cool. On the other hand, all those starving people, everybody who was blind or missing limbs or otherwise suffering before? Back to square one. Maybe you can't have everything. Still, the final panels suggest that maybe this event will somehow inspire the world to change. It reads as a bit of a cop-out to me, but not enough to ruin the overall story. I get how they want to go out on a message of hope.

Last shot: Understated, or underwhelming? Superman becomes Clark Kent and heads into work. I guess it's the "Back to Normal ...Until Next Time!"

Bottom line for me: Take out the armor and a few of the faux insights, and it would have been just what I wanted. But with all its ambition, its often gorgeous Ross work, and its irresistable hero-villain match-ups, Justice is still a work I looked forward to for two solid years, and I'm looking forward to a single-volume collection.

Heist Week! Part Seven: Ocean's Thirteen

2007-06-17T02:23:00.000-05:00

For my final, ridiculously belated entry in Heist Week!, I offer a quick look at the new movie that inspired this feature in the first place. Some spoilers for the movies ensue.

There's a small minority out there that actually enjoys Ocean's Twelve. Dr. Wife and I belong to it. Oh, I can totally understand not liking it. The full team, so carefully established in the first movie, falls apart quickly. Reunited by a common threat, they never seem especially happy to be back together. At least, the minor members of the team don't. Maybe they've read ahead in their scripts, because several of them will be sidelined through much of the movie -- arrested or otherwise rendered ineffectual. Bernie Mac, for example, is treated as an afterthought. There's no single master scheme for us to follow.

But if you like the core trio of Clooney, Pitt, and Damon, I can't see how you wouldn't like the movie a little. They're having plenty of fun together. It's Pitt's turn to have a romantic subplot, and his relationship with Catherine Zeta Jones's character reminds me a lot of the Clooney/Jennifer Lopez thief/cop romance in Out of Sight -- which I also enjoy quite a bit. Both have the effect of taking actors I'm not especially fond of and turning them into appealing characters.

Damon's Linus continues to tickle as a junior member eager to prove himself. As things fall apart around them, he is forced to step up with contingency plans that seem increasingly desperate.

I liked the fact that it didn't conform to the single heist plan formula of the first, that everything seemed to be going off the rails. It heightened the suspense and made the ending more satisfying. The Julia Roberts gag was a risk, and you either went with it or you didn't; I chose to go along with it.

Apparently audiences didn't agree. (FOOLS!) So for their third outing, the team decides to return to what worked, with some variations on the theme.

I don't like Ocean's Thirteen as much as Ocean's Twelve, but it's neck and neck with Ocean's Eleven. By taking on another evil casino owner, the team is challenging itself to return to the flavor of the first movie, while providing enough variations to keep it fresh.

Dr. Wife and I noticed that the first 20 minutes or so was relatively laugh-free at our theater. I think it's because we're all too busy trying to keep up with the plot exposition, as Ocean and company lay out all of their schemes and obstacles to a confused Eddie Izzard. The plan is much more complicated from the outset than the first one, and additional obstacles lie ahead.

From this point on, though, the movie becomes more fun. We get to see the entire team in action again, and the secondary members get more to do than the last time.

Other observations:

Gosh, that casino sure is shiny. It's a bit gaudy at times, but overall very pretty.

They kind of wasted Pacino's potential as an antagonist. He's evil enough in the beginning, and the obstacles he's set up prove difficult all the way through. But he never seems to be close to figuring anything out, turning the tables on the 13, or in any way surprising us. If he had figured out the seismograph's extra function, or seen through Carl Reiner's facade, or anything like that, we would have had a truly worthy villain for the team's final bow.

Likewise, his right hand played by Ellen Barkin is suitably mean to the staff, but she doesn't come close to seeing through anything, not even Damon's fake nose.

That pheremone thing Damon puts on his neck should be guarded like a WMD - it would be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands. It's a little sad, though. Barkin is forced to act like one of the bimbos in those Axe body spray ads, or the women in the old Hai Karate commercials.

The Fox from Ocean's Twelve is a pale imitation of his former formidable self.

While Casey Affleck starting a labor fight at the dice plant is funny because it's a total digression from his mission, it also seems a little insulting that the white guys are the ones who lead the unthinking Mexicans to revolt. Or am I reading too much into it?

I can understand that Tess and Isabel might not want to participate, especially Isabel as a (former?) law enforcement officer, but I would think you'd want some women on a heist team. I like the guys on the team and everything, but the boys' club thing is tired.

Well, that's it for Heist Week! I'm off now to catch up on last week's comics and a few other topics that I'll post on soon.

About the New Batman Costume

2007-06-16T16:00:00.000-05:00

(Regarding the costume Batman will wear in 2008's The Dark Knight, revealed this week.)

The main bodysuit looks like something out of Tron, but without the electricity. I'm all for a tech-savvy hero updating his duds, but it seems like he just decided to put on part of a fake-looking cyborg costume. Batman films as far back as Burton have gone for variations on the fake muscle/armor look, but this is uglier. But then, the new Batmobile was also uglier, and people seemed okay with that because it fit the more realistic approach they were going for. If the movie is as good as Batman Begins, this costume probably won't spoil the experience for me.

I like that they're addressing the head movement issue. Hopefully the silhouette won't be too badly damaged.

The wrist-spikes as darts sounds cool. Hopefully they're not deadly weapons -- I don't think Batman's aversion to guns should allow loopholes. (It'd be like when MacGyver was supposedly against guns, but then he would jury-rig a pipe bomb every other week.) Good thing Schumacher didn't think of this -- we could have had a Batman who shoots his nipples at you!

I never used to think of the cape as anything more than a way to add to his cool sinister vibe. But whenever I'd see him fight, I'd always wonder why his enemies aren't yanking on that sucker to trip him up. The answer, of course, is that he's usually too good to let them. (Suspension of Disbelief has an interesting post along similar lines about how Judomaster's costume would affect his fighting skills.) The movies, at least, have turned the cape into a piece of valuable equipment - converting it into a glider/parachute in Batman Begins, or a fire shield in Batman Forever.

Overall, the hype machine on this movie has been excellent. It just all feels a little early.

The Weekly Fix for 6-13-07: More New Avengers #31

2007-06-15T19:47:00.000-05:00

So I just read this. It's simultaneously exciting and really disturbing.

It's exciting because I can feel Bendis' excitement for the idea, and hope that he's got a plan for a great story. One of my favorite genres of film is the mid-1970s paranoia thriller, like The Manchurian Candidate (the first one) or The Parallax View. And one of my favorite examples is the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. People are being replaced with duplicates, you don't know who to trust, they might be after you next. It scares the hell out of me, and I like being scared.

It's disturbing because, well, one of the things that drove me out of comics last time was the Spider-Man Clone Saga of the 1990s. The biggest insult? The Spider-Man I had been reading all through the 1980s? Not the real Peter Parker! It was a g-ddamned clone! Compare that to this:

NRAMA: Wait – so since shortly after the ending of the Kree-Skrull War…you’re saying…
BB: Yup – that’s what I’m saying.
NRAMA: Bastard. So possibly, for what, thirty+ years, one or some of those characters could have been Skrulls?

One of the problems with making this element so wide-reaching is that it makes it very difficult to be sure when it's over. Yes, I'm sure Bendids can see the positives in that uncertainty. I get that.

But I actually bought Maximum Clonage and many of the issues leading up to it. (Remember the last post when I said my brain is small?) The Jackal kept jerking Peter (and the readers) around so much, it was impossible to know what was real anymore. Who was a clone? Who wasn't? He kept changing his story, and for a while that was diabolical, and then it was just annoying as hell. And then later, long after I'd given up comics, it turned out to be a resurrected Norman Osborne. Hey, maybe he's a Skrull!

Bendis also says, "There's no one you can trust. No one." Nice hype there, Bendis. But if Spider-Man is also a Skrull, my tiny brain will explode and ooze out of my ears. I'm just sayin'.

Gird your loins, comics blog readers. Get ready for a year or more of Skrull conspiracy theories, Skrull-based punchlines, Photoshopped comics images to make them 50% Skrullier, etc. You thought the Loki/Skrull/mind control theories were bad during Civil War, but Bendis and company are about to take it to a whole new level.

Get ready for the Year of the Skrull.

The Weekly Fix for 6-13-07: New Avengers #31

2007-06-15T01:37:00.000-05:00

With Summer Reading dominating my life, the Weekly Fix will occasionally switch from a single mega-post to individual issues I bought for the week.

First up: New Avengers #31. Spoilery!

I'll get this out of the way: My brain is small. When the big Elektra reveal happened, I didn't get it. And I do know what a Skrull is. But I know the Hand members decay when they die, so I just thought she was decaying into some weird green corpse, and that her spirit had somehow transferred into Luke Cage and Jessica Jones' baby, Jenny Sparks-style.

Now that I understand the Skrull part, I don't understand the baby part. Did the baby just get Animal Man/She-Hulk powers of awareness? Can she see me, the reader? Are those supposed to be Skrull eyes or something? Is Luke or Jessica supposed to be a Skrull?

This isn't going to be used to explain away Civil War, is it? They said they weren't going to do that, didn't they? Were they lying to us? I don't mean in the sense that writers are professional liars -- I'm talking about basic honesty in marketing to readers. (HUGE gut-laugh ensues.)

On a separate note: Can anybody remember any depictions of effective ninjas in comics? Ones where maybe two or three ninjas, tops, actually achieve their objective? Ones that do not involve ninja hordes tripping over each other as they are schooled by bored, smack-talking superheroes?

Heist Week! Part Six: Heists in Brief

2007-06-15T00:15:00.000-05:00

It’s Heist Week at Senses Shattering! I’m using the release of Ocean’s 13 as an excuse to look at some of my favorite heist movies and stories, including my obsession with great Master Plans.

Whew! Heist Week filled up quickly, and there are several I still wanted to mention.

Gambit. The ads for this one didn't lie -- the best twist is in the first half of the story. Without spoiling it, it hinges on the difference between expectations and reality. It's been a few years since I've seen this one, but I seem to recall that the mechanics of the actual heist aren't that great. What's more interesting is the triangle between Michael Caine, Shirley Maclaine, and Herbert Lom. I love Lom's penthouse. I always like it when a heist can help characters fall in love.

The Good Thief. I've yet to see the original version of this, Bob le Flambeur, but I enjoyed this take. Nick Nolte stars as a charming American thief, gambler, and heroin addict living in the French Riviera and forced into One Last Score. He assembles a team of old associates, including an untrustworthy protege, a disturbingly underage girl, and a transsexual with a plot-significant fear of spiders. Down to his last francs, he has to go cold turkey, dodge a friendly but determined cop, persuade Lord Voldemort to front him some cash, and plan an elaborate heist of a casino's expensive art collection. Despite my expectations, Nolte actually is pretty charming in this and somehow manages to avoid making his friendship with jailbait girl seem especially creepy. This was the movie where he experimented with heroin to "understand his character," resulting in that mugshot you've probably seen.

How to Steal a Million. Another fun, romantic heist. Suave Peter O'Toole has to help Audrey Hepburn steal a statuette from a Paris museum before they realize that her father is an art forger.

Lassiter. I always remember this 1984 caper as feeling very adult, decadent. One of the first R-rated movies I watched on cable when I was too young for it. Tom Selleck makes another bid for big-screen stardom as a jewel thief in pre-WWII London. He's being forced by Bob Hoskins, playing a super-hard-case copper, to steal some diamonds from a murderous Nazi superfreak played by Lauren Hutton. Jane Seymour is mostly wasted as the girlfriend who doesn't want him to pull this one last score, especially if he has to sleep with the Nazi freak to do it. The final heist features a guy dressed all in black riding a pulley across a cable, which to me is the archetypal image of any heist. See below.

Return of the Pink Panther. I haven't been able to sit through Pink Panther movies since I turned 12, but I always remember the heist at the beginning of the movie. It still feels like the quintessential heist. The black-suited Phantom skulking around a museum, dodging guards and electric eyes, using specially-made devices and a crossbow, escaping on a pulley ride. Fun stuff. But the twist in this movie is incredibly dated -- the thief, shockingly, is a woman! (Actually, looking at most heist stories, they're an almost exclusively male club. What's up with that?)

Selina's Big Score. Darwyn Cooke's take on the heist features a resurrected Selina Kyle just before her return as Catwoman in the new goggles-and-zipper-tab jumpsuit. It feels like a mid-budget heist flick with a early 60s Vegas/noir vibe. Cooke takes us through all the classic steps: 1. An opening heist goes wrong, forcing the hero to pull a big job. 2. She assembles a team, each with their own skills, baggage, and levels of trustworthiness. My favorite is Stark, an ex-lover and partner who's an obvious homage to Richard Stark's Parker character. 3. They put together the equipment as they lay out the plan, in this case, robbing a mafia money train while it's in motion. 4. The opposition prepares to upset the plan. 5. The heist is executed, but... 6. Things don't go according to plan -- meaning double crosses and other complications. 7. The protagonist comes out on top, but not without paying a price.

Task Force X. This episode of Justice League Unlimited introduced the animated world to the Suicide Squad. Since I never read much DC in the 80s, the Squad's something I know of more by reputation than actual experience. But it was fun to see the villains' perspective as they execute a caper inside the Justice League Watchtower, surrounded by all manner of superheroes.

The Thomas Crown Affair. Another remake, and one which I prefer to the original. I'm not knocking Steve McQueen, I just don't think the movie was his best. Brosnan's flick is just slick, slick, slick. The opening heist is actually two heists, one of them a fake to disguise the other. Part of the fun after it's over is watching Rene Russo and Dennis Leary figure it out, and then watching Russo and Brosnan play games. Remember that period when Russo was the love interest in, like, every movie? I can see why -- here her character is smart, tough and vulnerable, spirited, and stylish. The end of the film has a second double-heist -- actually an elaborate anti-heist that also covers up a second, mysterious theft.

The Wrong Trousers. When the future Dr. Wife, my best friend, and I went to go see one of Spike and Mike's Festivals of Animation at the local art house theater, we were surprised to read that one of the shorts went on for half an hour. Since the whole show was something like 90 minutes, it seemed awfully lopsided to include such a long segment. We had no idea what we were in store for. How often does that happen anymore when you go to the movies? I was howling at this thing. I had no idea where the story was going, but I knew that I was loving every minute of it. The heist itself is actually suspenseful, despite the comedic situation, but the show-stopper is the final confrontation on the train. Fact: Wallace & Gromit rule.

What's your favorite heist?

Heist Week! Part Five: Sneakers

2007-06-14T23:23:00.000-05:00

It’s Heist Week at Senses Shattering! I’m using the release of Ocean’s 13 as an excuse to look at some of my favorite heist movies and stories, including my obsession with great Master Plans.

One of the things about being a movie obsessive is that I often associate times in my life with the movies I was watching at the time. In the case of Sneakers, I saw it at a sneak preview on my college campus, in the fall of freshman year. There was nothing quite like the feeling of walking back from the auditorium with a bunch of new friends, talking movies. It was an exciting time of my life, which is one of the reasons I still think of the movie fondly.

Having just watched it again recently, I still think it holds up pretty well. The prologue in 1969 is fast and neat, and they found a great kid to double a young Fort Red Border - I mean, Robert Redford. Then we cut to the Sneaker team's latest job, where each member is introduced efficiently. We don't learn much more about each guy beyond their skill set and one distinguishing characteristic, but that's all we need. Whistler is the communications expert; he's blind. Mother is a tech guy; he's a conspiracy theorist. Crease is the security expert; he's ex-CIA. And so on.

I have a little nagging reluctance about the movie. It's a broad, intentional crowd-pleaser, and as such, some of its choices seem a little obvious, a little hokey. Redford's performance plays the comedy too broadly, with lots of eye-rolling and heavy delivery; for the "message" portion, he comes across as too smug.

But I can overlook that. The script plays smartly in its twists and turns, in its shifts of mood and presentation of information. The score is sometimes jazzy, often effectively ominous. The cast is having fun, and the team seems like they all have known each other for years. They enjoy working together, and they play to their strengths. Mary McDonnell, in the usually thankless role of "the girl," comes out well. She's smarter than Redford's character, her ex; she's a reluctant witness to his team's hi-jinks; later, she's enrolled into the group as their spy.

This 1992 movie falls just after the Cold War, with the U.S. and Russia supposedly friends; but it captures the confusion of the time -- who are our enemies now? Russia? Organized crime? Our own government? Of course, the portions about NSA spying on Americans has only become more plausible.

The first heist is an after-hours bank job, in which the team uses a smoke bomb in a safety deposit box to set off the fire alarms. While the guard is calling it into the fire department -- actually Whistler -- the others are breaking in, disabling the alarms, and using the computers to reroute money into Redford's account. It's more about who these guys normally are than the heist itself, and as such, it works.

The second heist barely qualifies. It's a low-security job in which the hardest challenge is fast-talking the target's Czech mistress. Mostly, the team has to spend its time keeping surveillance on a mathematician (a young Donal Logue), and then figuring out where the McGuffin is.

The third heist, in Sneakers' second half, is the big one. The team has to find and then break into the villain's lair, housed inside an impregnable toy company. (???) They have to bypass laser fencing, armed guards, voice-activated locks, keycard scanners, motion detectors, heat sensors, and Stephen Tobolowsky. They set it all up, and then start knockin' 'em down. This impossible mission force uses disguises, recorded voices, stolen keys, thermostat tampering, and the power of slow motion. Of course, things go wrong, the blind man has to drive (wacky!), and we wrap up with Redford making smug comments to the villain.

The kicker is the final moments. All along the movie has been taking liberal jabs at Republicans, from Nixon to H.W. Bush. After the Sneaker team has extorted a sputtering James Earl Jones in a ridiculous scene, we learn that the heroes are robbing from the rich and giving to the liberal. That might be my favorite heist.

Summer Reading Kicks My Ass

2007-06-14T23:18:00.000-05:00

There have been a few lags in the blog the past couple of weeks. The culprit: Summer Reading. For a children's librarian, summer can actually be an incredibly busy time. This is when we beg and bribe kids to keep reading during their time off. If we're successful, like this year, it is hell on our schedules.

And we'll say no more about that, except: If you have kids, and a local library, why not take them in? You'll make us happy, and your librarians might have a little something going on to remind them that reading is fun if you let it be.

Heist Week! Part Four: The Great Muppet Caper

2007-06-11T20:08:00.001-05:00

What was your first heist movie? Mine was probably The Great Muppet Caper, and as such, it remains one of my favorites.

It has its weak portions - the ballroom dancing and water ballet nearly put Young Tom to sleep - and yet I can't help but love it. Because the parts of it that work just work so well.

Take the Peter Falk cameo. We've just gotten over the big ballroom sequence, and Kermit is mooning over Miss Piggy's glass slipper, and it's kind of dull. And then Peter Falk interrupts the whole movie to tell a story that goes nowhere. Kermit actually has to tell the guy that they're trying to make a movie.

Think of the last bad movie you saw. Would it really be that much worse if Peter Falk showed up and distracted the actors with a story for a few minutes? I argue no.

One of the charms of the Muppet world is that the fourth wall isn't so much a wall as a screen door with giant holes in it. Right off the bat, Kermit tells us this is a movie, tells us what it's about, and then leads the cast in a song called, "Hey! A Movie!" Later, Kermit and Piggy get into an argument about her acting.

Miss Piggy: "Why are you telling me all this?"

Lady Holliday (Diana Rigg): "It's plot exposition. It has to go somewhere."

"Uh, Tom, what about the heist itself?" Glad you asked. The movie actually features a heist you want to see fail, because it's being perpetrated by Charles Grodin, who may have the most basic motivation I've ever seen: "Because I'm a villain. It's pure and simple."

He's leading a team of diabolical runway models to steal the Fabulous Baseball Diamond. Seriously. I'm pretty sure "Fabulous" is part of its official name (it's owned by a fashion designer).

Opposing him: Kermit the Frog. Fozzie the Bear. Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker. Scooter. Janice. Dr. Teeth. Animal. Lew Zealand, the Boomerang Fish Thrower. Animal.

The bad guys have nifty matching black uniforms. Grappling guns. Laser this. Computerized that.

Lew Zealand has some paper towels.

The bad guys don't stand a chance.

Because the Muppets have skills. They can scale sheer walls. Rowlf speaks guard dog. Animal can handle three models at once. Miss Piggy can bend steel bars. Ride a motorcycle like Evil Knievel. And her pig fu is strong.

In thinking about the Muppets skills, I realized that I would love to see the Muppet version of Batman. He learns fighting from Piggy. Gets equipment from Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. Learns to throw batarangs from Lew Zelaand. (I mean, if you can make a tuna fly out and return to you, you can handle a precision-crafted throwing device.) And of course, he would have an instinctual urge to punch out Fozzie.

Heist Week! Part Three: Heist

2007-06-10T15:48:00.000-05:00

It’s Heist Week at Senses Shattering! I’m using the release of Ocean’s 13 as an excuse to look at some of my favorite heist movies and stories, including my obsession with great Master Plans.

Since I just saw Gene Hackman in Night Moves for the first time, I'm in the mood to discuss his foray into the heist film, namely David Mamet's Heist. The film has its critics, but I'm not one of them. When you go into a Mamet film, you tend to expect the constant double crosses, stylized dialogue, and the flat acting style of his wife, Rebecca Pidgeon.

Hackman plays Joe Moore, a professional thief at the top of his game. Unfortunately, in the opening minutes of the movie, a meticulously planned jewelry store robbery goes wrong, and Joe has to get out of the business fast. But his fence Mickey Bergman, a crime boss played by Danny DeVito, forces Joe to do another job he's promised him: a heist of Swiss gold. And there's another wrinkle: Bergman insists Joe use his nephew, Jimmy (played by a particularly oily Sam Rockwell).

Moore is no fool: He's not interested in One Last Score, and he certainly has no desire to fall prey to the Fallacy of the New Guy. But since Bergman won't pay him, he has no getting-away money, and all his other attempts to escape are stymied. The movie becomes as much about his war of double crosses with Bergman as it does the planning and execution of the actual heist.

Also on his team are Delroy Lindo and professional magician (and Mamet regular) Ricky Jay, Hackman's loyal, capable, and quotable partners. With heavyweights and tricksters like them on his side, he just might get out of this job whole. Complicating matters is the role of his wife, played by Pidgeon. She is used to distract Jimmy, but the attempt leads to further complications along the way.

I dig just about all of the cast -- I would watch Hackman steal the phone book, and he and Lindo have strong chemistry. Rockwell, although I like him, seems a little miscast here, given what happens by the end. Although Mamet's dialogue may seem unlikely, to me the actors pull it off within the movie's alternate Mamet universe. I can watch this over and over again.

Rate the Master Plan: The gold heist involves several switcheroos, not only against the rightful owners and the authorities, but against various members of the criminal element as well. I've read complaints that the details of the scheme are implausible, but that's all part of the heist genre. You set up the various seemingly-impossible obstacles and safeguards, then you show the team maneuvering past them. Moore's team employs disguises, concealed weapons, fake containers, appearance-changing vehicles, unwitting accomplices, explosives, sedatives, and fake gold. These guys could fake out the Impossible Mission Force. Points off for the New Guy and Rebecca Pidgeon. 90 degrees on the Tomometer.

P.S. Do not confuse this with Pierce Brosnan's The Heist, a made-for-cable flick in which he attempts to rob former business partner Tom Skerritt's race track - and win back his old girlfriend. It's a barely tolerable movie if there's nothing else on, but it doesn't approach the fun of Hackman-brand Heist.

(Night Moves, by the way, is a great example of that mid-70s pessimistic neo-noir, in the vein of Chinatown. Hackman plays a private eye on a missing persons case who is distracted by his wife's adultery. Almost every element feels natural, and the plot details aren't telegraphed or wrapped up neatly. Worth checking out.)

Heist Week! Part Two: The Hot Rock

2007-06-08T21:06:00.000-05:00

It’s Heist Week at Senses Shattering! I’m using the release of Ocean’s 13 as an excuse to look at some of my favorite heist movies and stories, including my obsession with great Master Plans.

Like all sensible people, I enjoy the works of Donald Westlake, aka Richard Stark. As Stark, he writes the lean, mean Parker novels, about an unrepentant strong arm robber. Westlake's character, John Dortmunder, is also a thief, but he wouldn't go anywhere near Parker. He's more reluctant and pessimistic, and less physical when he can help it. While Parker's a loner who changes crews depending on the job, Dortmunder hangs out with a Usual Gang of Idiots, including an opportunistic thief named Kelp, wheelman Stan Murch, and muscle guy Tiny (natch). Dortmunder is the idea man, who usually comes up with some entertaining schemes to get the goods.

Most Dortmunder books are worthy reads, but my favorite remains the first, The Hot Rock. There's a movie version with Robert Redford that's okay, but it doesn't capture the full lunacy of the book. The title object is a large emerald with great cultural and political significance to two rival African nations. One of the countries hires Dortmunder and company to steal it from an exhibit at the New York Coliseum. They do - sort of.

One of the men gets cornered by the cops, and unfortunately he's the guy holding the emerald at the time. So before they see it, he swallows it. Now in order to get the emerald, Dortmunder and company have to spring him from a police station lock-up in downtown New York City. They do - but then there's another wrinkle. And another. Dortmunder keeps having to figure out new schemes to steal the same emerald from a variety of impregnable locations. It's a hilarious premise that keeps satisfying.

If you'd like a little taste of the book, try searching "Hot Rock" in Google Books.

Heist Week! Part One: Heat

2007-06-08T14:38:00.000-05:00

It’s Heist Week at Senses Shattering! I’m using the release of Ocean’s 13 as an excuse to look at some of my favorite heist movies and stories, including my obsession with great Master Plans.

First up, Heat. You know it, you love it. Powerhouse actors + Michael Mann in top form + 50,000 bullets. It’s not what I’d call a pure heist movie – there’s too much else going on – but I’m going with it because it has three heists in it.

What surprised me when I went back and looked at Heat was that for all of the sophistication of Neil McCauley’s crew, and for as much respect as he engenders in Detective Vincent Hanna, we never see them pull off a fully successful heist.

The first one, you would expect, would be the perfect one, the one that sets you up before others fail. But it’s bad news from the beginning, because the crew has taken on a guy they don’t know. This should be rule number one for movie heist teams – never work with a new guy.

The plan itself is great. The team knows the route of an armored car. They know how to disable it with a stolen semi. They know how to blow its doors off with carefully placed and untraceable explosives bought in another state. They know how to handle the guards with no damage greater than some busted eardrums from the explosion – now that’s a senses-shattering moment. And they know how to focus on one valuable item before making their getaway in a stolen ambulance.

They just don’t know how to hire a guy who won’t go nuts and murder a guard.

This guy has had his senses shattered.

The back end of the deal goes south anyway, though, because they try to sell the merchandise back to its original owner, and he’s too pissed and too dumb to just go along with it. So they end up having to deal with his betrayals without getting much out of it.

The second heist involves stealing some platinum from a warehouse, but it doesn’t matter too much in the scheme of the story. It’s mostly a scene to show how willing McCauley is to walk away from something if there’s a chance it could hurt him. Which, of course, makes his later decisions more interesting.

As much as we get a vicarious thrill from well-executed movie heists, there’s always something that goes wrong. That opens up two avenues of satisfaction: One, the thieves can overcome the wrinkles and get away with it anyway. Or two, it can go really wrong in an entertaining fashion.

The final heist is an example of the latter: the famous bank robbery. For all the crew’s careful planning and ingenuity, it goes SPECTACULARLY wrong. The guy who screwed them in the first heist phones in a tip to the cops, and suddenly it’s war on the street. A running and gunning fight through downtown L.A., and surprisingly, a couple of the guys get away with some cash.

The Master Plan, though, was decent and simple: They drill into the bank’s alarms the night before and disable them, so that when they start to rob the place, there’s no police response. It would have worked perfectly, if not for the Fallacy of the New Guy.

The Weekly Fix for the Week of 6-6-07

2007-06-07T20:23:00.000-05:00

No Countdown this week. If anything significant happens, I’m sure someone in the comics blogosphere will mention it.

Avengers: The Initiative #3

This series continues to engender mixed feelings. I like a lot of Dan Slott’s stuff, but this was not what I was hoping for from the book. If you’re going to set up a 50-state Initiative, I’d rather see an anthology of tales. The South Dakota team practically daring terrorists to attack Mount Rushmore, just so they can get some action. The Nevada team keeping the state safe for gambling and prostitution. The Idaho team’s epic video game tournaments, because let’s face it – they ain’t leaving the rec room. The Maine team fighting vampires, UFOs, zombies, a murderous clown that eats children…

I didn’t want a boot camp saga, but for what it is, it’s not bad. There’s some karate bearfighting, some Thing-wrestling, a scary new piece of Initiative technology, a handful of Spidey villains, and a fun re-use of the red-and-gold Spider-Man costume. It’s just the sort of thing New Tony Stark would do, including calling them “Scarlet Spiders.” Actually, I’m surprised he didn’t work the Stark brand name in somehow, but I’m sure he’ll figure it out.

It’s just hard to fully enjoy a comic peopled by characters I don’t really like. Gauntlet and War Machine come off as arrogant @$$es. Hank Pym is morally questionable as usual, and Justice is well-meaning but ineffectual. The recruits seem either too freaked out or too cocky by far. When a nobody like Komodo dares to lecture Spider-Man – a guy who was just trying to stop some bad guys – she engenders the same rage I felt when I saw Captain America get lectured in Civil War: Frontline because he could give a $%!# about NASCAR.

To answer Calvin Pitt’s question, I think Slott has to be undermining the Registration Act on purpose. Doesn’t he?

Also, Spider-Man seems kind of chipper for a guy who’s supposed to be so dark and moody right now. It’s good that he isn’t letting the current state of Marvel depress him the way it has me.

Buffy: The Vampire Slayer: Season 8 #4

This comic knows its audience. If you haven’t watched all 7 seasons of the show at least once and more likely a few times, you aren’t going to get a lot of what’s going on here. I’ve watched the series through all at least twice and I’m still confused by some of what’s going on here.

Partly I think it has to do with the editing. A one-panel close-up of an eye is in one location, and the very next panel is halfway around the world. And it cuts back and forth, and then Buffy is saying “Satsu,” and before I can remember that that’s the new Asian girl with the Buffy-approved hairdo, the next panel makes it look like Buffy is talking to some kind of Wiccan nature gods or something, before I realize that that must be somewhere else and that they’re talking about Willow, who isn’t fully in her own body, but then where is she? Whew. That kind of quick-cutting might have worked on the show, but because George Janty’s character models don’t make them as distinct and recognizable as I would like, I find it hard to distinguish who’s who just when I need to do so rapidly. Thank god for eye patches and gigantism.

“Mom?” I love that in this world, the best weapons are usually emotional ones. Love and fear and everything in between – these are what both good and evil use against each other. And if Buffy gave Amy the idea, this same weapon could come back to hurt her or Dawn later.

This final chapter of “The Long Way Home” is pretty good. It still just feels like a first episode so far, with plenty of questions and concerns left about the road ahead. The conflict they’re teasing between Buffy’s army and the rest of humanity is potentially interesting, but I don’t think that’s going to be the season in a nutshell. There’s more to come.

My biggest concern: I miss the simple Scooby Gang. Buffy as the leader of an army of girls just feels like more of Season 7, with too many speeches that start out “It’s about power.” I don’t want more boring General Buffy speeches, and I don’t want them constantly surrounded by a gang of anonymous girls. I’m not opposed to girl power or the opportunities for them to do greater good than ever before. But what kept me coming back to this show was the bond between Buffy, Xander, Willow, and Giles. The times they spent hanging out, the times they fought, their romantic ups and downs. And of course, I enjoy a good Big Bad.

Detective Comics #833

If Dini’s Countdown was this jam-packed with story, I would still be buying it.

Also, maybe I’m an idiot, but I never noticed those little black-and-white “Countdown 4_” tags next to the price box on the cover of the comics. So there is a way of knowing which issues tie into Countdown. Not that I have the patience to seek them out, but at least there’s something. I just would have thought it would have been slightly more obvious.

JSA: The Slippery Slope

I realized that my disinterest in Brad Metzler’s JLA (I’m not writing it out; damn DC’s trend of ever-longer series titles!), was making me pass up the enjoyment I get out of Geoff Johns’ work on JSA. And reading other bloggers’ comments about the Lightning Saga series made me curious enough to at least buy JSA 5 and 6 this week. And reading those made me curious enough to maybe buy more Metzler JLA.

Dammit.

Justice League Unlimited 34: “Phantoms”

It’s like a monthly lesson on compression in comics. We start in media res (“in the middle of things”), with Superman in trouble. One character doesn’t understand a premise of the story, allowing others to explain it to him – and thus the reader. In this case, Booster Gold doesn’t know about the Phantom Zone and the Kryptonians in it. In two pages of explanation, we’re back to the opening scene.

On the downside, characters don’t refer to each other by name as much as they have in the past. I think that’s a necessary inclusion for any done-in-one story.

The second villain reveal seems meant to be surprising. Hopefully it is to the young kids out there.

Page 9: Today’s grammar lesson. “The Justice League are approaching.” NO. Come on, editor Rachel Gluckstern! “The Justice League is approaching.” While the Justice League consists of multiple people, it is a collective noun; you refer to a group in the singular.

Page 17: Why does Blue Beetle say, “Beetle, get the Projector offline”? Since I know squat about Ted Kord, I have to ask, does he talk to his blue scarab or something? Because otherwise it looks as though he’s talking to himself, or that Batman’s word balloon got pointed at Blue Beetle.

Pages 4 and 12: Looks like writer James Peaty is a Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country fan.

Dr. Strange: The Oath

2007-05-30T23:56:00.001-05:00

Dr. Strange: The Oath

I just finished this book, and I'm happy to say I enjoyed it thoroughly. I'm not a huge fan of magic users in my comics, and when I do read them, I prefer them in small installments -- say, an arc highlighting Dr. Fate in JSA, or a limited series such as this -- or when they're members of a team, such as Strange's current participation with the New Avengers.

Though I grew up reading Spider-Man almost exclusively, I have a vague understanding of most Marvel characters, because sooner or later Spidey teams up with everybody. I thought I knew almost squat about Dr. Steven Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme, until I read Vaughn's tale, which nicely recaps his origin as an injured surgeon unable to practice his vocation, and turned to a second career as magician.

For a limited series like this, I might have expected a lot of magical fireworks and big guest appearances by the stars of Strange's rogue's gallery. Instead, it's a surprisingly intimate tale, focusing on Strange's life and those it has affected; his relationship with Wong; and an unexpected turn of events with the Night Nurse, a character I only met in Bendis's run on Daredevil. The MacGuffin is intriguing and entirely appropriate for the medical flavor of the story. The dialogue is top-notch, and there is plenty of action to satisfy my baser needs.

One technique which deserves special mention is Vaughn's incorporation of the Marvel re-cap page. Instead of having an impersonal summation by a third-person omniscient narrator, he incorporates it into the story at the beginning of each new issue - once by his Eye of Agamotto artifact. The final summation, done in a memo written by a villain, is actually incorporated later into the story as evidence. Well played.

Bad Cliffhangers: Uncanny X-Men 133 & 134

2007-05-30T02:14:00.000-05:00

The cliffhanger: a classic staple of serial storytelling, be it TV series, comics, movie franchises, or even chapters in a book. Done well, cliffhangers make stories more exciting, build anticipation for the next installment, and even prompt imagination -- how might the hero get out of this one?

Done badly, they're just cheap gimmicks.

For example, let's look at Uncanny X-Men 133 and 134. Now, for X-Men fans, these issues are like books from their bible (maybe the Old Testament). They're part of Chris Claremont and John Byrne's much-loved first run, and more specifically comprise later chapters in the Hellfire Club saga. Overall, it's a strong story, and rates high on the Tomometer of Master Plans - the villains have manipulated the heroes, winnowed them down with traps, and utterly defeated them in battle. (Or so it would SEEM.) There's plenty of awesomeness surrounding this bad cliffhanger, so I can see why many would choose to overlook it. But I never could.

In the final pages of 133, Jason Wyngarde wins a psychic sword fight with Cyclops and runs him through. For the benefit of those at home, Nightcrawler narrates the terrible effect for us:

"He lies so still, Storm, Colossus -- his chest isn't moving! He isn't breathing! Cyclops-- IS DEAD!"

In 134, the very next issue - the very next PANEL - Nightcrawler says: "Storm! Colossus! Look! Cyclops is Alive!"

WHEW! That was a close one! Next time I start to worry about one of the X-Men, I'll just pause, take a breath, and remind myself that Nightcrawler never finished medical school.

The Weekly Fix for 5-23-07

2007-05-28T11:07:00.000-05:00

Here’s what I bought and what I thought for the Week of May 23, 2007. Spoilers abound!

Captain America #26

How can you have a series in which the title character is dead? Well, for one, you cover up part of the title with a villain’s robot head. I hope the full title keeps getting obscured until Steve Rogers returns.

How long will the death last? Marvel doesn’t have nearly the track record that DC does with legacy characters – someone who takes on the mantle of a fallen, missing, or retired hero. I do take comfort in recent interviews with Brubaker, in which he’s related the fact that this story was planned from issue #1, just bumped up because of Civil War. Plus, y’know, it’s Brubaker. He’s earned a lot of credit as far as I’m concerned, and this issue backs that up.

The story nicely juggles the responses of Cap’s old friends and enemies, and it twists the knife in several places to make an already painful loss that much worse. Only pro-registration forces are allowed to attend his wake, while Cap’s allies are forced to remember him from afar. Sharon Carter, the love of his life, can stop forgetting that she was forced to kill him. The Falcon, his partner, gets to see all sides of things, and every one seems to tear him up. And newly resurrected partner Bucky, a super-assassin, has decided on a new target that, if he follows up on it, could make for some exciting issues in the coming months. My only quibble with that is that the target in question has become the new punching bag at Marvel, and while I don’t like what’s been done to the character, I’d like to think it’s capable of redemption along the line.

Plus, just one issue after Cap’s death, the villains are already at work on technology that could be the perfect loophole to bring him back.

Countdown #49

My problems with this series remain the same – some interesting tidbits with no apparent story to tie them together in any meaningful way. 52 was episodic, too, but more coherent.

The Elastic Lad bit was neat. I enjoy the Rogues’ infighting, but I’d rather see them gang up against the Flash. I still don’t care about Mary Marvel as presented, and it feels way too early to see Black Adam again, after he was missing and de-powered a few weeks ago in 52.

Countdown #48 better be a doozy, or I’m done.

Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Annual #1

As a Flash fan, I’m reminded by this Sandman: Year One story of Geoff Johns run on the scarlet speedster. He would devote single issues to various members of the Rogues, showing their troubled pasts and what motivated them to become who they were. It’s a nice idea, but it sometimes comes off as a little forced. It can’t be enough that he just has sand powers. Peter David is doing something we’ve seen in TV shows like Buffy and Smallville, where the villain’s powers are a metaphorical echo of their history and personality.

So now the tale must be jammed with as many sand references as possible. Young Billy makes sand castles and sand sculptures, and when he sleeps, he gets visited by the sandman. He wants something that lasts, “somethin’ that won’t be washed away by the sands of time.’” Uh, mixed metaphors, anyone? When bullies try to grab him, he “slips through their fingers like sand.”

As a storytelling conceit, it’s a nice idea. Sometimes it’s used well. More often, though, it’s a bludgeon in practice, hitting us over the head with the concept.

Also, recycled and expanded origin stories? Kind of boring, after a while. I get what David is going for, and it’s somewhat interesting, but just not enough to sustain an annual-length story, especially when the backup feature is a huge downer, too. In a title like “Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man,” I would have thought they could emphasize the light-hearted a little more.

Marvel Adventures: Iron Man #1

Okay, now this is an origin story done right. It starts up perfectly – with a page one suiting-up sequence that fits the character and provides all sorts of information about the suit and its powers. We get a little Iron Man action, including a mecha bank-robbing device.

I love the way they update Tony Stark’s character as a cross between a Steve Jobs techno-guru and a Richard Branson globe-hopping adventurer. It puts a modern spin on the kind of person he needs to be to be Iron Man. And he’s got a nice arc from self-important jerk to hero, especially with Dr. Yinsen’s final tug on his conscience.

Along the way, the story is loaded with fun, including AIM’s artificial island -- that they can drive around the ocean -- and a formidable female villain, the Scientist Supreme. I’m always in favor of strong female villains.

All in all, this is a perfect antidote to the well-meaning master of betrayal Tony Stark has become in the regular Marvel Universe.

The Spirit #6

Another fun, absorbing story by Darwyn Cooke. I love that cover, and the great use of color by Dave Stewart.

When you look at why comics have become so decompressed in the last decade, several reasons come up. One, of course, is to make more money off of a single story by breaking it up. Partly it’s a symptom of attempting more naturalistic presentation through dialogue, and cinematic storytelling language.

But another key factor is the approach to art. The emphasis now is on larger panels and more splash pages. They want the reader to revel in the attention to detail the artists put in. Of course, that sometimes means ridiculous delays in titles such as Secret Wars and the Ultimates, but when the editor-in-chief is also an artist, I think he’s more likely to be sympathetic to them.

Except that Cooke’s The Spirit is a perfect example of how a comic can be compressed and still beautiful. Pages 2 and 3, for instance, are full of narration, but each image also captures the essence of the story, the telling details. It’s a cartoony art style, but it’s engaging and exciting. The story is dense, involving, and complete in a single issue.

If we’re going to see more done-in-one comics again, there will have to be some negotiations with what kind of art we’re willing to accept. Cooke’s found a way that works, and I think with the cooperation of the writers, other artists can find their own way as well.

Trades

This week I picked up Doctor Strange: The Oath, which I’d heard good things about when it was coming out in single issues. I’ve never been a huge Strange fan – I think he’s a decent guy, but my tastes tend to diverge from magic in comics. Yet I love it when writers can make me interested in characters I’ve never cared about before. So I’m looking forward to this.

I also grabbed The Plain Janes, which has been getting good buzz around the blogosphere. I may have more to say after I read these.

At the Movies with Dr. Wife

2007-05-27T17:38:00.000-05:00

Wow, things get a little busy and suddenly it’s days since my last post. I missed the big Star Wars 30th anniversary retrospective everybody in my generation seems to want to do, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t see it when it first came out anyway. I was two at the time, and my parents were old-fashioned enough not to bring a two year-old to a movie he wouldn’t get. All I know is I’d seen it by the time Empire came out, since that was my big birthday movie that year.

For my own celebration, I’ve settled for playing LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy. Easy to play, funny, and full of that classic space-adventure vibe. If you haven’t played it because it seems like it’s for kids, ignore that feeling and give it a try.

Also, my hard-working bride has finally had some time to relax, and we took in a couple movies.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

Does anybody else still remember when pirate movies were considered box office poison? Cutthroat Island and Waterworld weren’t what we were looking for. Now this new series is a license to print money. There are many reasons why – great production values and special effects; well-staged, sometimes senses-shattering action; attractive leads; and some supernatural flavoring. But they also remembered what Lucas forgot in his prequel trilogy – it helps to have a good scoundrel in your cast.

I’ve been enjoying these movies, but only in spite of the bloated storylines and contrivances. I’m sure Jerry Bruckheimer’s success formula includes rules about pushing everything to the extreme, but some of the excess just makes me tired. In the first movie, it was the fact that well after the villainous pirates were defeated, we had another fifteen or twenty minutes of wrapping up the Jack/Elizabeth/Will/stuffy admiral storyline, and it was just storytelling death. This time --

[SPOILERS]

--we’re subjected to a wedding during a pirate battle – because, y’know, captains can perform ceremonies. It makes no sense in the flow of the story; it’s more a case of Bruckheimer saying, “Weddings are clichéd and boring; but a wedding during a swordfight? That’s edgy and different; I can sell that.”

Swashbuckling stories are a personal favorite of mine – Robin Hood, Zorro, the Three Musketeers, The Scarlet Pimpernel, even Scaramouche. And the Pirates movies give pretty good swashbuckling – loads of sword fights and fancy costumes and the like. I enjoy exotic locations and wretched hives of scum and villainy, and betrayal and monsters and magical objects. I most enjoy them when they’re attached to an internally consistent story.

But I have a harder time with:

A magic song that draws pirates of the world together.

A “pirate’s code” that’s more of a loose set of guidelines in the first movie, and a codified book of laws in the third. For people with such shady ethics who are so prone to betrayal, they sure do have a lot of rules, man.

Ordinary pirates who turn out to be “pirate lords” and goddesses. It’s not enough that Elizabeth be a society woman-turned-pirate, she’s got to be King of the Pirates, through a series of circumstances that strain credibility, especially when all these scurvy dogs accept it so easily. This was one of the mistakes made in The Mummy Returns, too – our adventuring protagonists turned out to have special destinies or powers or whatever, just for the sake of upping the ante.

The neutering of Davy Jones for most of the movie, until his final villainous deed.

Pirate lords who do nothing in the final battle, but then cheer and wave their swords as if they played a vital role in the outcome. I can appreciate the fact that they didn’t make the climax confusing, but I think a pirates-vs.-navy battle could have gone on in the background of the maelstrom sequence.

The fact that Will and Elizabeth are kind of charisma vacuums. They’re pretty to look at, but the poignant ending they’re going for is weakened by how little I care about them.

Other thoughts: Geoffrey Rush looks like he’s having a blast, and so he’s fun to watch.

The bizarre sequence in Davy Jones’ Locker is like my favorite scene in Being John Malkovich, but the rock-crabs look like somebody’s computer animation school project updated by professionals.

These movies have a real comic-book quality to them: No popular character stays dead for long.

Shrek the Third

Much less to say about this one. These movies are just okay, a fun diversion but nothing special. As a children’s librarian, I admit a fondness for spoofing fairy tales, but sometimes their attempts are a little weak.

Dr. Wife and I enjoyed some of the princesses – narcoleptic Sleeping Beauty, and OCD Cinderella. Snow White’s scratchy 1930s singing style made me giggle, as did the follow-up. And I am a sucker for a Six Million Dollar Man gag.

Amazing Spider-Man 163 - "I've Been Expecting You!"

2007-05-22T20:33:00.000-05:00

As much as I appreciate the inherent value of Showcase and Essentials reprints, I just can't bring myself to buy them much. To my unsophisticated eyes, the black-and-white reprints of art that was meant for COLOR! just don't have the same appeal. It's like Ted Turner taking Gone with the Wind or the post-tornado parts of the Wizard of Oz and de-colorizing them. You'd still get the gist of the story, just not the full intended effect.

That's why I enjoy things like Marvel Masterworks and the Nick Fury, Agent of Shield, and Batman Chronicles. But being a librarian, I'm fortunate enough to have first access whenever we get new graphic novels and collections. I may not want to own some of the Essentials, but I sure enjoy giving them a look, especially when it comes to my old pal Spidey.

A short way into Essential Spider-Man Vol. 8, I found Amazing Spider-Man 163. I was unfamiliar with the story -- it's not one that gets referenced a lot or changes Spidey's life forever or anything. But it's a fun, solid story with all the elements I look for in my Spider-Man action.

Inside two pages, Spidey catches a futuristic helicopter stealing a delivery truck! He fights guys with jet packs, then gets caught clinging to the roof of the truck as they drop it - from thousands of feet up in the air!

How Spidey gets out of it isn't really important (hint: it involves webbing). What I like is the mysterious hand bitch-slapping the nameless underling for almost killing Spider-Man when he wasn't s'posed to. Because, it turns out, only fools work for the Kingpin, too. Incompetent fools.

After that economic opening, we follow Peter as he tries to patch things up with Mary Jane -- she's feeling neglected because Peter keeps running off on her for some reason. When he can't find her, he returns to his apartment, where most of his supporting cast is waiting to surprise him! That includes MJ, Flash Thompson, Glory Grant, Harry Osborn, Liz Allen, his landlord, and a couple of others I don't know. Since his friends noticed he had no furniture, they have all brought an item from their own homes. It's a touching moment - these are the kinds of friends you'd want to have - and it's funny, too. Their gifts include a cigar Indian, a giant teddy bear, the standard wooden spool coffee table, a mounted marlin, a chair that Peter sinks a little too far into, and five toasters, two of which actually work.

Just in case things seem to be going too well, MJ is using Flash to make Peter jealous, and it works like a charm. We briefly leave our hero, during which he has an adventure over in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #1, and then he decides to track down the technology stolen from that delivery truck.

Con Edison is nice enough to tell him that an abandoned movie studio is using more electricity than it should. (i.e., any at all - it's abandoned!) Right away, when I hear the words "abandoned movie studio" in a Spider-Man comic, I think "MYSTERIO!" Or I would, if the real villain hadn't been featured on the cover. I tend to think "MYSTERIO!" a lot of the time, but that's another post.

Anyway, he discovers the Kingpin waiting for him. The crime lord even does the classic "I've Been Expecting You!" Chair Swivel. You know the one. He's seated facing away from the door in his high-backed leather chair, until the hero enters. And then he spins around, says something along the lines of "I've been waiting for you, Mr. Bond!"

It turns out that the whole heist had a second motive - to lure Spidey into a trap. What follows is a pulse-pounding, senses-shattering fight to the finish - with only one man left standing! Let's have a listen:

ZZAKK! (Kingpin's cane blaster.)

ZOK! PAK!

KROOM! (Desk to the face.)

POW!

WHOMM!

WRUNCH! (The meal between Wreckfast and lunch. Luke Cage always starts the day with a proper wreckfast.)

BROK!

CHUDD! (Not to be confused with this or this.)

HA HA HA HA!

He who is laughing last is the Kingpin, because he has just gassed Spidey with his trick tie-pin. A side effect of the gas: unnecessary narration. "He's GASSED me... with his trick...TIE-PIN..."

When he comes to, the Kingpin hasn't unmasked him. He couldn't care less who Spider-Man is. All he wants to do is suck the life out of him. Not with a six-issue story arc that goes nowhere, but with a Pseudoscience Device called a Vita-Drain! As in: "Activate the VITA-DRAIN... NOW!"

I don't even care that it ends on a cliff-hanger. Granted, I just have to flip the page to read the next story, but even if I didn't, it's a fun issue, with a lean bit of soap sandwiched between two thick slices of action.

Questions and Comments About Mighty Avengers #3

2007-05-20T22:29:00.000-05:00

Questions:

If you're faced with a hyper-advanced robot that can control the entire world's weather, shouldn't you assume it can hear you whispering battle strategy from thirty yards away? The Avengers need a telepath or something to allow silent communication.

How did Ms. Marvel decide on a swimsuit, opera gloves, and thigh-high boots as her outfit for battling world threats, anyway?

What purpose does the Tigra seduction scene serve in the story? Did Bendis just ask Cho what Marvel vixen he'd like to draw and plug in the scene?

At the very moment that Black Widow takes command of SHIELD, Cho employs a prominent butt shot. Did this seem a little off-message to anyone else?

If you're not going to fly Ultron into the sun because Tony might still be in there, shouldn't you avoid punching it so hard that the back of its head touches its spine?

Comments:

Hey, wow -- there's some actual action in this issue. Fighting. A falling SHIELD helicarrier. The Sentry seeming almost... capable.

But some buildings are smashed. I'm glad Captain America isn't alive to see that.

Seriously, even if the Sentry isn't going to fly the threat into the sun, maybe he should fly it out to rural New York somewhere -- away from the people and stuff.

I still love the brand-logo displays when the heroes first appear. Simple and comic-booky and cool.

Whenever the villain's face takes over all the TVs, you know you're in trouble.

I wish Cho could put his cheesecake fetish in check, because I think he's a great comic book artist otherwise. He can sell dynamic action, varied facial expressions, unique character design, etc. Plus less cheesecake means one less thing to ask Dr. Wife to ignore about my reading choices.

Batwoman Was a Bad Idea: Female Versions of Male Superheroes

2007-05-20T15:07:00.000-05:00

As much as I enjoyed 52, I was often disappointed with its approach to female leads. I know the series has been over for weeks, but it stands out as an example of a major comics pet peeve of mine. The “dynastic centerpiece model” may be a long and successful tradition in DC comics, but the female counterpart is worse for the status of women superheroes than the junior counterpart or kid sidekick – because the central, original figure is almost always male.

I don’t mean to demean the individual accomplishments or strengths of the characters – just to express my disappointment in how many women superheroes are based on a male one.

Who were the female leads of 52?

Renee Montoya, an interesting and complex character from Gotham Central who is turned into one of DC’s legacy characters – she takes over the role of the Question.

There’s Kate Kane, who may be a feisty redheaded Jewish lesbian millionaire, but she’s still dressing up like a bat in Gotham City (and judging from the Christmas issue, carrying inferior batarangs). Now that the crime bible prophecy seems to be over, what will they do with her? In a world where Batman is protecting Gotham again, how is she relevant?

When Natasha Irons’ uncle Steel won’t let her wear her armor, she actually seeks her own identity (“Starlight”) through the Everyman Project. That falls through, so by the end she comes back to him and becomes a female Steel.

Adrianna Tomaz was introduced as a strong woman capable of redeeming Black Adam, and as a result she was granted powers and became his queen, Isis. In a move that surprised no one, she was murdered in a plot device to send Adam over the deep end and set off World War III.

Starfire, who as far as I know is not a female counterpart, helps to defeat the forces of Lady Styx and to bring Animal Man’s jacket back to his wife. But she doesn’t bother me as much, because while she seems irrelevant to the overall 52 storyline, so are her male companions.

No, the one who really bugs me is Isis. I thought she had potential, but I didn’t believe for one minute that she was destined to last. Most readers predicted she was going to die. Mark Waid admits that she was intentionally created to die, just to give Black Adam motivation to “go postal.” Besides my annoyance with creating a woman just to motivate a man, it’s just not that hard or that interesting to make Adam go postal anyway. What’s more interesting is to take characters in surprising directions.

For Isis, I would have liked to see a Michael Corleone arc. She thinks she’s a woman of peace, a model of restraint, and an advocate of the unfortunate. But when the chips are down and you murder someone in her family, she discovers she’s willing to go farther than she ever thought possible to get revenge.

If you’re going to have her change her mind at the end and tell Adam to avenge her and her brother, why not take it further? You could have her be the one who wants to destroy her enemies. Maybe Adam becomes her partner in revenge. Maybe she’s affected him so much that he resists this change in his angel. Or maybe you kill him off instead of her – he’s someone who would ask to be avenged.

I know it sounds like I’m advocating another female legacy character, but it’s merely the by-product of wanting to see a decent character put to some kind of worthwhile use. Black Adam ripping off limbs again: not interesting. A corrupted heroine – with proper, established motivation – a little more interesting.

Better still, let’s see more original female leads, ones who are neither legacies nor counterparts.

(I’m sure this has all been said before, but it was on my mind, and I don’t have an encyclopedic memory of When Fangirls Attack postings. I’d love to hear about other posts on this topic, if anybody out there knows some.)

Rising to the Top

2007-05-20T15:04:00.000-05:00

Today for the first time, my Google search of the phrase "senses-shattering" brought this blog to the top of the results. This brought an inexplicable smile to my face.

Next goal - get 3 whole comments on a post.

That is all.

Recent DVDs at the Bomb Shelter

2007-05-19T10:18:00.000-05:00

Catch and Release. As Alias fans, Dr. Wife and I decided to check this Jennifer Garner vehicle out. It’s a mild pleasure, a romantic drama based on a woman getting over her dead fiancée. Kevin Smith stands out with some warm-hearted comic relief, but the others in the cast acquit themselves nicely. I still can’t quite buy Timothy Olyphant as a romantic lead (I think I’ve seen him play creepy too often), but even he’s not bad. The shared grief makes the humor kind of tepid, but it made for a pleasant rental.

Curse of the Golden Flower. Dr. Wife and I have a two-word review for films like this – “Visually stunning.” In other words, the visuals are damn near senses-shattering, but it moves like a glacier through molasses in January. I don’t know how director Yimou Zhang pulls it off. Like his Hero and House of Flying Daggers before this, it’s got action aplenty, but none of it is especially involving. This movie has multiple pseudo-ninja raids, sword fights, poison, incest, murder, betrayal, Chow Yun Fat, an epic battle royale starring roughly the population of China, and more cleavage than any movie in recent memory. It was enough to hold my attention, but never enough to excite me. And I am a guy who generally likes a good historical costume drama.

Our Man Flint. I’d never seen this mid-60s Bond takeoff until the other day. Now I get a couple more bits from the Austin Powers movies – woo hoo. It’s entertaining enough, but I couldn’t overlook a few points. 1. In trying to top the Bond franchise, the filmmakers spend the first 20 minutes or so establishing just how accomplished Flint is. The world leaders all love him, the computers all prove mathematically that he’s the best man for the job, he’s rich, he teaches ballet in Russia, he can stop his own heart to relax, etc., etc. It’s funny, but it doesn’t necessarily leave me with a sense of his superior cool. For all of his professed reluctance, he actually seems like kind of an eager beaver compared to Bond; while Bond was always a bit of a know-it-all when M asked him questions, Flint has to take it a step further by correcting his boss on whether a poison acts in four seconds or three. He cures people medically, he knows bouillabaisse recipes from around the world, and so on. They’re trying too hard here. 2. The concept of the villains’ hollowed-out volcano is actually cooler than the one in You Only Live Twice; the latter has the advantage of being a giant practical set rather than a combination of visual effects. 3. The villainous GALAXY organization actually seems to want to save the world; when Flint rejects their offer to do so, he comes off as kind of a jerk. On the other hand, their threat to melt the polar caps and raise sea levels has some eerie resonance in the global warming era. 4. Flint has four live-in girlfriends/servants, possibly five by the end. (This movie must have been popular at Hugh Hefner’s house.) GALAXY captures them and brainwashes them so they can sexually service the organization’s goons. I’d always wondered before how villainous organizations get so many goons to help out with insane schemes. But when Flint breaks the brainwashing, to “rescue” them from a life of sexual servitude, he keeps repeating “you are not a pleasure unit.” What he really means is “you are not A pleasure unit – you are MY pleasure unit.”

What If Marvel's Heroes Relocated?

2007-05-18T14:09:00.000-05:00

Steven at the Roar of Comics recently posted about New York City’s role as Marvel’s primary location. As a kid I loved having a city full of heroes. It the old Marvel approach, in that they often just ran into each other, had a misunderstanding leading to a fight, and then teamed up to battle an actual villain. They usually didn’t plan to work together.

However, over the years I’ve decided that DC’s multiple-city approach works better for me, and it’s why I’m actually hopeful that the new 50 State Initiative lasts (never mind its awful genesis). It just makes more sense to spread heroes out so that they can deal with problems all over the country, if not the world. For that to last, though, some of the bigger heroes might have to establish themselves in new cities. You couldn’t do it with some of the characters – Spidey and Daredevil seem to be most tied to New York. But other heroes could very easily relocate, if you could write a plausible enough transition – and if you could match the heroes to the right cities.

My hometown of Chicago, for example, seems like the natural choice for your premiere national response team, since it’s centrally located. Why not make it a home for the Mighty Avengers? I could also see Chicago fitting the Hulk’s personality. It’s the City of Broad Shoulders, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, and it has a history of being almost completely destroyed. For the Punisher, it’s got a long history of organized crime and corruption.

Where would you put your favorite heroes?

Summer Movies - Where'd My Excitement Go?!?

2007-05-18T12:46:00.000-05:00

It’s Friday again, the day I’m usually thinking about what I want to see. For the second week in a row, though, I’m less than excited. I’d like to see the new indie, Once, but so far it’s not playing in Chicagoland. I’ll probably see Shrek 3 at some point, but I’ve never been enthusiastic about the series. It’s odd, because I’m a children’s librarian and a fan of fractured fairy tales. And these movies have their moments – they’re just not as tightly crafted as your average Pixar story.

(After Spider-Man 3 the other week, I popped in The Incredibles again. I still have a little issue with its implied message – heroes are born, not self-made – but otherwise it’s still all that I hoped for and more.)

Anyway, I’m just having a hard time building up my usual excitement over the summer movie season, and I don’t like it. I want to blame what they’re putting out: Is less geared toward guys in their early 30s? I mean, it’s not like I’m especially mature for my age.

Maybe I just have too much experience with disappointment. Too many sequels that not only weren’t as good, they weren’t even close. Promised big events that turned into big disasters. Over-hyped releases that seem to have no idea what might actually entertain an audience.

I LOVE going to the movies. It’s the only thing in my life where I consistently arrive early. I like lobby displays and walls of teaser posters. I’m okay with the concession stand, especially since my local theater still offers free refills on any size drink or popcorn. I usually sit at about the third row, because I like the screen to fill as much of my field of vision as possible. If it’s a sparse audience, I’ll sit in the middle, but otherwise I take the aisle, because I’ve got the bladder of a small kitten, and who wants to shuffle past annoyed aisle-mates multiple times? I like sitting around talking before the movie starts – well, the commercials start first, but I prefer to imagine a world without them.

It used to be, when the previews came on, I would duck out into the lobby. I was so sick of having the actual movie ruined for me by trailers that give away everything. More than a few times, I figured out a movie’s “shocking plot twist” just by watching the preview. These days, I settle for closing my eyes so I won’t have the visuals spoiled, and hope the narrator and clips don’t tell me too much.

I like being surrounded by a couple hundred people who are excited to be there, who know how to behave, who laugh and scream and even applaud when the movie does what it’s supposed to.

I love going to the movies on my birthday, but since it’s in late August, the only offerings are usually crap. The best I can hope for is a holdover from late July, or something the studio didn’t realize was good. My best friend has a May 25 birthday, so he gets stuff like Star Wars and Indiana Jones and pirates, often premiering that day.

I hate my best friend.

Anyway, if I've got any readers yet: What do you like about the movies? What summer movies have you excited?

The Weekly Fix for 5-16-07

2007-05-17T15:47:00.000-05:00

Here’s what I bought and what I thought for the Week of May 16, 2007. Spoilers abound – especially regarding the finale of the Ultimates!

Countdown #50

I still want to like this comic, but the Decompression we’ve been talking about this week is making it extremely hard. They’re getting a little better at introducing characters, and they do a decent job of re-capping events from Issue #51 for those who missed it, but they are still employing the language of cinema that Scipio brought up.

The worst offense is probably the three-page fight between Batman and Karate Kid – it’s nearly silent, has no establishing context before or after, and seems completely disconnected from everything else. The presence of Black Lightning leads me to assume it’s a tie-in to Justice League of America, which I stopped buying after the Hall of Justice Tour Issue. It’s weird, because while I generally dislike tie-ins, they don’t even make the effort to sell to me this time. I thought they promised that we wouldn't have to read other DC titles in order to follow the story.

That said, I did find things to enjoy: Jimmy Olsen on the story and Superman’s long-distance assistance. High-tech ninjas, which make sense – ninjas were innovators who invented new tools to gain advantage over their opponents, so they wouldn’t have necessarily stayed rooted in 16th century technology. Too bad they’re still portrayed as extras, easily defeated by a man with a chair. Madam Xanadu appears to be using the Cosmic Cube; she should expect a visit from the Red Skull soon. I do enjoy ambiguous prophecies as a storytelling device. I’m curious about the “display of loyalty” required of the Trickster and the Piper. I LOVE the list of prohibited items in Arkham.

I also like this week’s Countdown ad, with its new button. If nothing else, the new series has been expertly promoted and teased from the beginning. But I’m going to start needing more rewards, something to involve me in whatever semblance of story there is. I’m giving the book two more issues to hook me before I pull it and follow it in other, more dedicated reader’s blogs.

The Flash #12

I’ve been reading the Flash throughout the Johns run, but after the debacle of the new series’ first issue, I didn’t come back until Marc Guggenheim started writing on Issue #9. So I’m more or less familiar with the characters, especially Flash’s stable of villains, the Rogues. I still didn’t know much about this Inertia cat who’s apparently the Flash’s clone and who seems to be pulling an Alexander Luthor on the Rogues. I got more or less caught up through some Internet research, no thanks to DC’s editorial approach.

(Along the way I also found out more about recent Teen Titans events, which I had not been following, and learned that Duela from last week’s Countdown has been playing a role in the villainous Titans East group. Too bad I couldn’t have gotten that in Countdown itself.)

Anyway, it felt as though it’s been a while since the last issue, so I re-read my back issues for this arc. Inertia has been telling the Rogues that he can build a 30th century machine to stop time, allowing them to move around while everyone else is frozen – a handy thing for thieves. But 64th century magician Abra Kadabra sees through him, and we learn that it’s actually a device to steal Flash’s “speed force,” the power that allows him to move so fast.

I’m enjoying Guggenheim’s run so far. It’s got everything I look for in a Flash comic: fights with the Rogues, varied use of super-powers, a little brain-hurting time travel. There’s some ongoing soapy elements with his girlfriend, and he’s trying to establish a new milieu in LA. Personally, I prefer DC’s fictional cities such as Keystone and Central Cities, especially the way Johns fleshed those out.

Re-reading also reminded me that Bart discovered a piece of Apokolipsian technology in #9, but I’m not sure who ended up with it. Is this part of the Countdown set-up, or just a McGuffin for that issue? After all the Apokolipsian weaponry in 52, I have to wonder if there is a larger story at work here.

Ultimates 2 #13

Okay, let’s get it out of the way: Was it worth the wait? Of course not. A human being might be worth eight or nine months to release. Not so much a comic book, no matter how awesome.

But as a wrap-up to the Grand Theft America story, it’s pretty damn good. Not especially surprising, except with a few strange storytelling choices, but satisfying.

We knew from issue 1 that a Thor/Loki battle was due, and the reality-bending nature of the Trickster God’s powers allow Millar and Hitch to go nuts with giants, trolls, wolves, and dragons. Armies on both sides. There’s something a little empty about Cap’s usual rah-rah “Take ‘em down!” attitude, but it’s fun to look at. I appreciate the gimmicky fold-out, but where’s my 3-D glasses?

More satisfying are some of the character beats. Thor’s complete validation, especially. (But only Hawkeye and the Wasp actually acknowledge it; Cap and Nick both still owe him a big apology as far as I’m concerned.) A change in the Ultimates’ role from national warriors to an independent world-saving organization. Tony’s efficient emotional recovery. Even Hawkeye’s cold-blooded revenge works in the context of the story –he’s “avenging” his family.

A few questions. In the previous issue, Captain America seems to have no compunction about killing Abdul, whose country he helped disarm and humiliate. No “maybe we overreached.” He calls him a punk and he lightsabers his @$$. Now it’s bothering him? And if he doesn’t want to be an agent of America anymore, shouldn’t he logically pick a new name?

Since Loki tells us that hitting him with a hammer isn’t enough to stop him, I have to assume his defeat with the second hammer-strike comes about through the lightning. Maybe it’s holy lightning? Maybe he’s Marvel’s Black Adam.

I realize that in the heat of battle, the team doesn’t always have time to ask the questions it would like to. But there is plenty of time spent on the aftermath in the second half of the book, and the one thing no one seems to be addressing is: HOW THE HOLY &$%# IS THE HULK ALIVE? The dude was tried, convicted, and supposedly executed – by thermonuclear device – for murdering over 800 people in Volume 1. Granted, we readers got the gist that he woke up, Hulked out, and leaped away from the blast just in time, but none of the characters besides Hank would know that. And now that he’s back, no one spends a second thinking about what to do with him. The last time we see him, Betty is putting a blanket around Bruce. Is he back in another cell in the Triskelion? Double jeopardy shouldn’t apply, and I don’t buy him getting an official pardon. Is he hitchhiking across America to a sad piano tune?

I sure could have used a little more Hulk closure than a seemingly unrelated four-page flashback to Steve Rogers’ pre-serum life.

No trades this week. Instead, I picked up a bunch of back issues, including that Incredible Hulk 106 that I skipped earlier, plus several issues of Justice League Unlimited, which are just phenomenal. I have no idea why I haven’t been getting these; it may have been that I just expected to pick up the trade collections, which I have yet to see. These may earn their own posts later on.

Now it’s time to play Rate the Master Plan.

Countdown – still none in sight, other than to get my 3 dollars every week for another year. Effective in the short term, but it seems unlikely to last. 40 degrees on the Tomometer.

Flash – stealing the Speed Force from Bart, and tricking the Rogues into helping. Sounds great in theory, but the unintended consequences suggested on the last page lower the temperature. Then again, the threat posed is big, so I’ll say a breezy 75 degrees.

Ultimates 2 – Here I’m rating the plan throughout the second volume, and it’s a doozy. (Remember, huge spoilers follow!) Loki gets his revenge on Thor and creates mischief by instigating a World War that will bring America to its knees. To do this, he convinces a coalition of nations, including China and Russia, to fight the growing super-powered forces of the West with their own. The Black Widow, having infiltrated the Ultimates, exposes the Hulk cover-up from last year and gets Bruce Banner tried and “executed.” They convince the team that Thor is crazy, rob him of his powers, and put in a cell. Black Widow kills off Hawkeye’s family and captures him to get his security information. Loki frames Captain America for the massacre, getting him arrested. The enemy nations’ super-powered “Liberators” launch their attack on New York and Washington, destroying the Ultimates’ Triskelion headquarters with a fleet of crashing SHIELD heli-carriers, killing thousands, ripping off leader Nick Fury’s right arm, and toppling the Statue of Liberty. The Black Widow seduces Tony and murders Jarvis. The Liberators bring down Air Force One with the President inside.

As Master Plans go, it’s got nearly everything – huge ambition, long-term planning, insidious attrition of the opposition, ruthless manipulation and murder, and overwhelming force in a final blitzkrieg. Best of all, it kept me guessing, and the actual attack surprised with its speed and scope. Putting the heroes on the ropes as badly as they did made their eventual counterattack that much more satisfying. 100 degrees.

That's it for now. I've got more JLU issues to go read!

Fight Decompression in Comics - Exposition

2007-05-16T10:20:00.000-05:00

In decompressed comics, simple explanations of who characters are and what special objects or creatures are either get left out in the assumption of more knowledge than a new reader might have, or characters use up the better part of an issue gabbing about it.

If we’re going to bring a little compression back into comics, the writers have got to handle exposition properly. Steven over at the Roar of Comics addresses the pitfalls of exposition in dialogue, which he points out is the only device left once narrators are removed in the era of decompression.

As he and I have mentioned, Marvel’s choice has been to use an effective “Previously on” page at the beginning of each new issue. But is dialogue the only other option, and does it have to be clunky?

If dialogue is used to explain things, then the goal should be to make it as natural as possible. One option is to introduce a new character. Someone who doesn’t know all this stuff yet. That way, an experienced character can give the rookie the basic facts while also informing the reader. Another way is to separate characters, then reunite them. They can inform each other of what happened to them – not re-hashing entire scenes we’ve already witnessed, but filling in who’s who, what’s what, and any conclusions they may have drawn from those events.

A simple device is to use the media. In Darwyn Cooke’s The Spirit #1, he has reporter Ginger Coffee talk in unnatural exposition, which The Spirit notices (“Will you please stop speaking in that idiotic way?”), but that’s because she’s secretly narrating a news story over the phone. Busiek used news reporters all the time for exposition during his Avengers run. As recently as Spider-Man 3, the news was used not only to set up the climax, but also to inform the hero that his love is yet again in danger. It can be over-used, but it’s still a viable tool.

I also think first-person and third-person narration boxes are perfectly reasonable. For an example of the first-person, I enjoyed Geoff Johns’ method of letting the Flash introduce himself and Keystone City in many of his issues. Or in the first panel of Detective Comics 27, we get: “The home of Commissioner Gordon, who at the moment is entertaining his young socialite friend, Bruce Wayne.” Setting, characters, done. If narration is used, it needs to be consistent and concise. Say what needs to be said, and then shut up. The intrusive, Stan Lee-style of narration should not return, except maybe in comedic homage to that era.

Footnotes, used sparingly, can be helpful. I especially like reminders about acronyms such as S.T.A.R. Labs – Science and Technology Advanced Research, or the fact that MODOK is a Mobile (Mental?) Organism Designed Only for Killing. I’m not as big a fan of footnotes that sell me tie-in issues.

For introducing title characters, my favorite comics tool is probably the summary statement, which usually appears on the first couple of pages and goes something like this:

“Granted strength, speed, and resistance to injury by a mysterious Accident, marketing drone Connor Mackenzie patrols the rainy streets of Evergreen City as THE VELVET MARAUDER. His mission: punish evildoers, protect the brand image, maybe buy some shoes.”

It gives the new reader a baseline understanding to build from, and it saves us from longer re-caps of the origin story. As an old Spider-Man fan, I seem to remember him recalling his origin about once every twelve issues, at least. After a few years, I would just skim those parts and move back to the main story.

Fight Decompression in Comics!

2007-05-15T22:36:00.000-05:00

So I was reading this today, and it reminded me of some wish-list ideas I had for addressing the rampant decompression in today’s stories. After so many years of “widescreen” action, modern readers may not be able to accept new comics coming out fully compressed again. But there should be some middle ground.

I’m going to start by suggesting some basic writer’s rules of thumb:

Treat any Issue #1 like an annual – it should be a done-in-one extravaganza, setting up the main characters and an exciting story involving a big-time villain. If you must do arcs, wait until issue #2 to start. Better yet, make the first five or six stories in a row (the usual length of an arc and trade paperback) complete unto themselves.

If you’ve been a successful decompressed writer, it’s time to challenge yourself. Build a reputation as someone who jam-packs each issue with full, satisfying stories. That way, if you do resort to a multi-issue arc, readers will know they’re getting something special.

Starting in media res (“in the middle of things”) should be the goal. Despite several fun ideas and some pretty art, Metzler’s six-issue relaunch of Justice League of America comes across as a lengthy justification for the characters he wanted on his team. But it’s possible to use a single issue to build a team – Morrison did it in his first issue of JLA, and even then the focus was on the current threat. Still better would be to introduce the team through action. For example: A villainous super-gang is pulling a job, figuring nobody could stop their grand scheme except the now-defunct JLA – when all of a sudden they are surprised by a newly-formed team, the members each taking action, showing their powers/skills in the process, and introducing each other through simple captions and plot-relevant dialogue. If more explanation is necessary, having some less-experienced members of the team on each side allows the senior members to educate them about their opponents and each other. (“Don’t underestimate the Canary just because she wears fishnets in battle – her sonic cry once destroyed an entire battalion of my Death-bots!”) When the dust settles, you could have a page or two of news coverage, common-man reactions, teammates catching up – followed by the triumphant pose shot at the headquarters. Maybe an epilogue teasing the next issue.

Show, don’t tell. Don’t spend an issue giving a tour of the headquarters, as in Justice League of America #7. Instead, reveal them through action, as in JSA #10: “Wild Hunt!” In a single issue, Wildcat fights the Injustice Society throughout the headquarters, showing us its basement garage, the AI security system, big elevators, display halls, research laboratories, secret vaults, an aviary, a hospital, the “dive tube” system, and a gymnasium. Wildcat narrates what these places are, but only in service of the story. Even better, several of the locations reflect different members’ identities, such as Hawkgirl’s aviary or Wildcat’s boxing ring. And it’s free of the self-congratulatory introduction seen in Metzler’s issue.

The Shadow in: Crime, Insured!

2007-05-15T19:13:00.000-05:00

A few months back, I had the pleasure of cracking open Paul Malmont's novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril. It's cousin to Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, only it focuses on the writers of pulp magazine stories instead of comics creators, and it involves more actual adventure than Chabon's tale, without sacrificing its literary credibility. The story involves Doc Savage writer Lester Dent and The Shadow writer Walter Gibson as they get caught up in a mystery that involves the death of H.P. Lovecraft, reanimated corpses, poison nerve gas, and plenty of supporting roles for real-life pulp writers, including future theologian L. Ron Hubbard. If you haven't read it, I think it's worth a shot.

But be warned: It may make you hungry to read some of the actual pulp stories of the era. I know it did for me. But I lack the patience and resources to buy vintage pulps.

...Or so I thought until a recent trip to my local bookstore. There, while browsing the mystery section, I happened upon Nostalgia Ventures' reprint collections of some Shadow and Doc Savage tales. Naturally, I bought a couple on the spot. But since I'm surrounded by books all day at the library, I usually have a stack of stuff in my to-read pile, and other priorities took over. Then, on my vacation over the weekend, I finally lost my The Shadow virginity.

The volume I bought contains two complete novels about the infamous crime fighter: "Crime, Insured," and "The Golden Vulture." The latter story was written by Doc Savage mainstay Dent, and is mentioned several times in The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril. I was anxious to read it, but I decided to start with a tale written by regular writer Gibson.

Just in case you're not familiar with The Shadow (the The was always capitalized in the book), he's a mysterious crime-fighter who dresses in black, generally moves around unseen unless he wants to be, and usually leaves with a parting laugh. He wears a shiny ring and carries huge twin automatic pistols. He's incredibly strong and agile, solves crimes constantly, and is skilled in such arts as lock picking, disguise and concealment, and explosives chemistry. He employs several "agents" who follow his orders unquestioningly; I'm not sure he even comps them for time or expenses. In short, he's Batman with better people management skills.

Having finished "Crime, Insured," in a couple of days, I have to say I can see the attraction. It's no literary masterpiece by any means, and there's little to no character development, but the plot races along. It starts with some misdirection: The Shadow and his agents are foiling the sophisticated heists of a major New York crime boss, but somehow, he's still scoring big money. Eventually we learn that the top criminals in the city have been taking out "crime insurance" from an evil insurance company executive: If a planned job is successful, they're out the premium, but if it fails, they receive the estimated value of the score. It's a ridiculous plot device, but imaginative and perfect for the genre.

After The Shadow foils a jewelry heist and turns the tables on an armored car robbery, he attracts the insurance company's attention. Soon they've tracked down and captured all of his agents, and lured him into a trap in his own hideout, the Sanctum. His building is surrounded by dozens of thugs, they shoot at him and spray him with poison gas, and then blow up his building for good measure. It's a classic case of the hero on the ropes, and his efforts to turn the tables on his enemies are equally satisfying.

Like I said, the writing won't win any literary awards, but given that Gibson was banging a full novel out every two weeks, I can cut it some slack. That said, I have to wonder about the number of agents The Shadow employs. They seem to be a bit of a writer's crutch -- any time he wants, he can think up another agent to assist The Shadow when he needs backup. In this case, though, he doesn't abuse it; The Shadow is forced to fend for himself for several harrowing moments.

Playing Rate the Master Plan, I'm struck by just how many different criminal enterprises are being juggled in the story. Still, the crux of the story -- the villains' careful investigation of The Shadow, and the traps it lays for him and his allies -- is well-conceived and executed, if ultimately doomed to fail. It also loses degrees for the classic "he MUST be dead" fallacy. 85 degrees on the Tomometer.

The Weekly Fix for 5-9-07

2007-05-10T12:19:00.000-05:00

A look at what I bought and what I thought. Spoilers abound!

Countdown #51

Look, I was going to get into this later, but… DC needs some serious work in providing context to its readers, and the first issue of Countdown is a perfect example. I recognize several characters and items from having read DC for a few years now. But I don’t recognize everything, and if I were a new or new-ish reader, I’d be lost.

Compare it to this week’s Immortal Iron Fist. The front page, in pretty standard Marvel style these days, tells me who Danny Rand is, then lays out the previous 4 issues. Even if I’ve never read the others before, this catches me up well enough to follow the story. Sure, it uses up a page in a $3 book, but it’s open to the idea of allowing someone to try it out.

Countdown 51, on the other hand, is a first issue. It starts the story off with action, which is appropriate; I think we’re all sick of event books that spend the first couple of issues with characters sitting around assembling a team or providing a lot of exposition. But what’s the harm in providing context?

Couldn’t Countdown have afforded a 1-page “opening crawl,” giving us the relevant highlights and outcomes of Infinite Crisis and 52? Maybe even Identity Crisis, since Ray Palmer comes up. I have a feeling answers are coming, similar to the way Infinite Crisis laid out the backstory in its second issue. Couldn’t they have done it with a few caption boxes? With Dini’s excellent “done-in-one” run in Detective Comics, I was sure he’d pack the first issue with relevant information.

I look at this and try to imagine it through the eyes of someone new to the DCU. I might have questions, but I don’t know if I’d have the patience to keep buying issues to get the answers.

Page 1 – a guy in a purple robe. I’ve been reading DC for a few years now, but I have no idea who he is. Am I supposed to?

Pages 2 & 3 – Okay, Darkseid I recognize. I’ve read about him in blogs, I’ve seen him in some of the animated shows, and I’ve read a few books he’s appeared in. Should I assume Purple Robe is one of his nameless servants, or something more significant?

Page 4 – Never heard of Duela, but she introduces herself moderately well.

Page 6 – Red Robin Hood? This one would be mystifying to people who haven’t been reading Batman and/or Nightwing for the past couple of years.

Page 7 – Jason Todd. Well, at least we have a name now.

Page 9-10 – Mary Batson. No mention that she’s Mary Marvel – just a hint with the lightning bolt. A new reader probably never heard of Mary Marvel; maybe they’ve heard of Shazam. I didn’t know who Freddy Freeman was until I Googled him.

Page 11-12 – This exchange between Heat Wave and the Trickster, by contrast, seemed easy to follow.

Page 13 – Since the “Piper” was mentioned on the previous spread, and since the Piped Piper of Hamlin is a pretty familiar tale, this doesn’t need anything else.

The last characters introduced without actual introduction are the Monitors. I think I’ve read about them in a blog somewhere, and I assume they’re tied into THE Monitor. Their role seems more or less clear, as long as the reader gets the basic idea of what a “multiverse” is.

I know it’s intended to be a different animal than 52, but… A look at 52’s first issue shows several characters discussing the aftermath of Infinite Crisis, including explaining about the supervillains’ all-out assault, the death of Superboy, and the missing characters. We get strong introductions to who Ralph Dibny, Black Adam, Renee Montoya, and Booster Gold are. It is jam-packed with context and makes Countdown look a little sparse.

That said, I’m keeping an open mind for now. I have followed the DCU from before Identity Crisis through now, so I don’t need as much to catch me up. I’m just hoping that the next couple of issues will have enough in them to keep me interested.

The Immortal Iron Fist #5

After a few exciting issues of set-up, this installment reveals more about what Danny Rand and the other Iron Fist, Orson Randall, are fighting for. It includes a Greatest American Hero-style instruction book and a sense that writer Brubaker is setting up an overarching storyline for the title that could last for years.

The issue is packed with the elements that have sold it as a great new title -- a big opening action sequence, mythology-building, and a heightening sense of tension as the stakes keep getting raised. Danny Rand’s explanation of how he gets around New York was different, though it made me think getting a Fistmobile might be more cost-effective. I’m not sure how Luke Cage’s appearance in this book – as a Hero for Hire, I take it -- jibes with the post-Civil War role he’s playing over in New Avengers. Great last page – looking forward to the next issue.

New Avengers #30

This issue is Part Four of the “Revolution” arc, showing us the New Avengers’ first adventure in the wake of the big Civil War. As much as I despise Civil War and many of its effects, I’m actually enjoying this run quite a bit. I think it has to do with another of my favorite types of stories – the hero as insurgent against an oppressive regime. I know, that’s politically charged today as America fights insurgents in Iraq; sorry. But I’m actually referring more to clear-cut heroic stories such as Robin Hood and Zorro and Star Wars. A lone hero or small band against a stacked deck of oppression, with evil lords and countless armed guards and the threat of betrayal by those you are sworn to protect. I’m a sucker for those kinds of stories.

I’m also a sucker for the way Bendis writes an adult Peter Parker. Hawkeye: “Saw you on TV $%#@ing up your whole life, Peter.” Peter: “I’m thinking about submitting the tape for Emmy consideration.” I may hate that whole debacle, but the line made me laugh.

It’s too bad that most of this issue is characters standing around Dr. Strange’s hideout arguing. It plays into one of Bendis’s biggest problems, the static over-reliance on dialogue. That said, I do enjoy the dialogue, for the most part. Beside Peter’s non-stop quips, we’ve got Brother Voodoo’s rebuke against the Civil War, another of Tony’s attempts to convince the friends that he’s betrayed countless times, and Luke Cage’s excellent re-cap of New Avengers plus a demonstration of why he’s the leader of this group. I have to wonder if Bendis has been planning to return to those early dropped plots all along and got interrupted by House of M and Civil War, or if he just woke up and said, “Oh yeah, I have all these loose ends to get back to!”

Does no one notice Spider-Woman clutching her throat after the “purity” spell?

Even the confrontation with the ninjas takes another couple of pages of dialogue first, and even Cage admits it was basically filler. It was nice to see a horde of ninjas actually being effective for once, though of course I don’t see it as a long-term problem. I’m not even worried about Dr. Strange, since I figure he’s got to be around for the Hulk to smash in this summer’s big Marvel event.

World War Hulk: World Breaker

Speaking of the Hulk, I missed last week’s Incredible Hulk 106 – I was still on the fence about another giant Marvel crossover. Once again, there seem to be too many issues. But this oversized book was just what they needed to get me. I’m still won’t be buying a lot of the tie-ins – I’m especially down on the Frontline concept thanks to their ridiculous put-down of Captain America – but I think I might be picking up the core titles.

“Casus Belli,” the first story, is just excellent. Again, it’s dialogue-heavy, but after all, it’s giving you everything you need to know in case, like me, you gave the “Planet Hulk” series a pass. Everything essential is put into place – Hulk’s motives and overall plan, his opponents and allies, and some hints at the problems that are in store. It perfectly lays out the anti- and pro-Hulk perspectives on each of his chief enemies, and it builds anticipation for throwdowns with Black Bolt, Reed Richards, and Tony Stark. As long as there continues to be something substantial behind all of this, I’ll be along for the ride.

“Round Trip.” A Mini-Marvels recap of the Illuminati decision to shoot Hulk into space. About the only thing I’ve read this week that was funnier was the World War Hulk publishing schedule in the back of the book. I’m sure we’re all convinced it will be finished in September, right?

Anyway, this story is almost worth the cover price. It’s got Hawkeye crashing the party, speculations about the danger of Black Bolt’s voice, rock-paper scissors, the brilliance of Reed Richards, Hulk and the devil game, and the sandwich that changed the Marvel Universe… forever! Plus, Mini-Hulk… cutest monster ever! Where can I find more Mini-Marvel stories? They remind me, in tone, of Sean Whitmore’s Fanboy Productions spoofs, using toys to re-tell some of the recent giant crossovers. I’m still waiting for Civil Crisis, though.

Although I wasn’t familiar with Amadeus Cho before reading “Mastermind Excello,” I feel like I’ve got a decent handle on him and how he might play into the crossover. A solid third story.

I also bought the first Criminal trade - Coward, and the new Y: the Last Man - Motherland. I'll review those later.

Dr. Wife and I are going on vacation for a few days. Will post when I return.