Battlestar Galatcica: Happy Endings

I'm coming to the realization that Battlestar Galactica could very well be my favorite TV series, ever and it's making me wonder why I've been feeling more and more ambivalent as the last few episodes have been unspooling. They've certainly been good, and I'm sure part of it is that while they're giving call-backs to past episodes and kind of reveling in the idea that, "well, we're not going to be in this corridor ever again, we might was well give it a send-off" we all just want to know how it ends. The biggest thing is that we want someone, anyone in this Olympics of Despair to have a happy ending. That's what this show has been about since the first nuke exploded over Caprica, a happy ending for the human race, and short of the ONE TRUE GOD coming down, that's not going to happen for most of the cast we've come to love, let's give a quick run-down:

President Roslin: They might as well be wheeling her around in a coffin for the next three episodes.

Adama: Will not survive. Because letting him live after both* of his true loves are gone is too much for the Old Man to bear. Speaking of his other true love....

Col. Tigh: Is it me or has this whole series been about Tigh? It' like he's the very definition of human fallibility and also of our nobility. Just an amazing character...which kinda sucks because the dude is screwed. There's no way he can have a happy ending, because his two loves are going to be eternally in conflict and other than Adama his other love....

Ellen Tigh: Has been set up as the fall guy lady for the whom all of Man's/Cylon's sins will eventually rest. Ellen will eventually do something noble, but she's fucked (as is most everyone else...keep going).

Boomer: Effectively damned herself with her abduction of Hera, unless she and Tyrol can somehow end up boxed together in the Barbie-dream-house she imagined for them. Speaking of...

Galen Tyrol: Yeah, without Boomer, dudes just a fat, single dad who can fix the hell outta a Viper. That's no happy ending.

Baltar: Let's face it, if this dude gets a happy ending, it's no happy ending for us. I like Baltar, the flashes of brilliance he used to get himself out of tight scrapes are just amazing at times, but eventually, he's going to be made to pay.

Tori: She was once really hot, then she got all Cylon and bitchy. Go away...no happy ending for you.

Hot Dog: Who the fuck cares about Hot Dog?

Anders: Well, it doesn't look good, figuring dude's got a bullet lodged in his brain and he's a Speak n' Spell right now, but, obviously he's going to have a major part to play coming up in the end seeing as how he's married to...

Starbuck: who is obviously the crux who the whole thing is revolving around (though I've never found her that interesting). However, no matter what she is, no matter what happens to her, she's probably not going to be happy, since she love both Anders and....

Lee Adama: Who has shown himself to be both bad-ass and milquetoast throughout the series. Hopefully our man will get a chance to shine in the next two weeks, but I just don't see him settling down with Starbuck and having little cigar-chomping, lawyers with her. He's dooooommmmedddddd.

Helo, Athena & Little Hera: They're it. These three are the only ones with a chance of redemption at the end, the only ones who have not betrayed their friends, whose trespasses are forgivable, who have kept the faith. At the end of the series, humanity/cylonity will rest upon this family and they are all we have.

Well, them and the hopes of a scene featuring Adama and Roslin going to work on Cavill with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch. But that's probably too much to hope for. What do you think?

Batman: Battle for the Cowl

Picked up a bunch of books this week, but I think I'll split the ones I want to talk about into a few posts. Anyhoo, up first is Batman: Battle for the Cowl #1:

So Batman's dead, or stuck int he past, or trapped on an alternate Earth....whatever, dude's not around so the shit is hitting the fan in Gotham City. The criminal element has felt the absence of Batman and is taking full advantage. Nightwing has pulled in all of the reserves to cover the crisis and they're holding, barely. But a new Batman is appearing on the scene, brutally bringing down criminals, leading Robin to believe that someone from the inner circle has to take up the mantle.

I've gotta say, Tony Daniel really does a good job with this book. After reading his workman-like art during Grant Morrison's run on Batman, I was doubtful that his writing would be much batter, but he has seemed to really nail the characters (with one reservation). Robin narrates the whole story, and his voice is very well done. The art is serviceable, not bad, but still a little sketchy in places.

The only real issue I had was Damien's characterization. While Daniel gets the spoiled rich kid thing with him, I always saw him as being much more unflappable. The kids too much of a dick to let his opponents see fear on him, plus the little fucker's lethal. It just seems like the plot required him to behave that way, and thus, he did.

Anyway, it was pretty darn good, and after all of the Final Crisis stuff, astonishingly straight-forward. I'm looking forward to the next two issues, hopefully they'll come out at a reasonable clip.

Fantastic Four: World' Greatest

"It's such a fine line between clever and stupid" - Ian St. Hubbins (Michael McKean)

Mark Millar's been bugging me for a couple of years now. Not really his writing (which has been both good and bad of late), but his public persona, constantly schilling his stuff and explaining to anyone who will listen how rich he is and how much of genius he is. It's pretty much turned me off from picking up any of his latest stuff. However, I had a free trade coming from the shop this week, and with his latest collaboration with Brian Hitch hitting stands, I figured that I'd give it a whirl. Following their collaboration on The Ultimates, a book that I liked a lot though I felt it kind of fell apart towards the end of part two), Millar and Hitch signed on for 16 issues of Fantatic Four and this collects the first eight of them.

Overall, it's a fun little read, playing to their strengths with big action set-pieces and lots of big crazy-science ideas, but, as Sir St. Hubbins says above, in his quest to be really clever with his story, Millar falls onto the stupid side of the thin line. The overall conceit of the book is that the Earth is dying and the only way to save its population is to move them all to the under-construction Nu-Earth (no umlaut?). Of course, the construction is being led by Reed's ex-girlfriend Alyssa Moy (think Reed in Tomb Raider's body), who we're supposed to think is constantly tempting Reed with her feminine wiles, despite acting like a woman I can't see anyone standing for more than ten minutes. That's probably my biggest problem with the book is the characterizations. The only character that I really felt that Millar "nailed" was Reed, with his absent-minded-professor schitck. Ben just kind of stands around and makes wise-cracks, Sue's just there to be the loving wife and stand by Reed, and his Johnny is an irresponsible jackass. That characterization of Johny would have been fine five or six years ago, but during Mark Waid & Mike Wieringo's run* they actually grew him up a bit and it's a shame that no one is contiuing that, it just seems lazy, like he couldn't be bothered to draw any nuance but the broad strokes.

From there we get the patented Millar/Hitch big action scene featuring the entire Marvel U going up against Nu-Earth's out of control security (giant) robot. The arc wraps up with the FF being challenged by a team of refugee superheroes from Earth's apocalyptic future (which adds up to how many apocalyptic futures for the Marvel Universe now? ).

Hitch's art is very good for the most part, but seems in some areas very sketchy. like they colored directly from his pencils in order to save time, which is a shame. If you hire Hitch, you have to deal with the delays and not bother rushing him. He also doesn't seem to get Reed's face/head right. He's pretty spot-on with everyone else, by Reed just always looks rather mis-shapen. Also, he relies upon photo reference for a few too many of the women's facial expressions. I mean, how many do you know who talk while sticking their tongues out? Apparently Bryan Hitch (and Greg Land) know a lot of them. My last issue with the art is that there's a few places where it's obvious they had meant to do a double-page spread of an action scene, but for some reason decided not to. It makes the action in those pages seem rather compressed and loses a lot of its impact (I noticed this towards the end of Ultimates 2 a well).

Overall, I liked the book in it's turn-off-your-brain, action movie kind of way, but it's certainly not something I'll hold up to people as vital work on the FF.

*Probably my favorite run on the title.

Movie Review: Watchmen

"George, you can write this shit, but you can't say it." - Harrison Ford to George Lucas

The quote above pretty much embodies a lot of my feelings towards the movie adaptation of Alan Moore & Dave Gibbon's graphic novel Watchmen. I absolutely love the book,but when comic book dialogue is taken off of the page and put on screen, coming out of the mouths of real people, it just sounds stupid.

But let's back track. I did think the movie as a whole was pretty good, Zack Snyder took what I thought to be an un-filmable book and managed to tame it into a pretty brisk 2 hour 45 minute movie. Some of the performances were excellent, some (one in particular) were not so good. So we'll start with the good. The movie really begins excellently right off with a credits sequence set to Bob Dylan's "The Times, They Are A-Changin'" illustrating the "golden age" of the movie's world to the present with key scenes, including the formation of the Minutemen, the assassination of JFK, and the sad end of the Silhouette. It really sucks you into the world that Moore & Gibbons created and serves as a great Cliff's Notes to the new viewer to understand what 1985 of the Watchmen's world is like. From there we get the first two issues of the series pretty much word-for-word, and done well. Jackie Earl Haley is very good as Rorschach , managing to pull off his voice very well and give his journal readings some heft. Though Jeffrey Dean Morgan gives it a good try, The Comedian's dialogue is the most ridiculous, when not given a brush-up for the screen. This is most obvious during his scene with the Nite Owl while quelling the pre-Keene Act riots. I love how it reads off the page, but when it comes out of his mouth, it just doesn't work. It's in this instance that the filmmakers' slavish devotion to the source material hamstrings them. I'm sure they could have pulled this off much better if they'd rewritten some of it.

The movie proceeds pretty much along the lines of the book, excising some characters (the News Vendor, the boy reading the comic book) and combining some scenes (the psychiatrist now has just one scene with Rorschach). The biggest change is the tweak to the ending, which really didn't bother me, though the idea that Dan & Laurie continued on as superheroes after the end did, as it kind of misses the point. I always thought was one of the ideas of the book was that dressing up in these idiotic costumes was damaging to the individual, for them to continue to be costumed adventurers, to me, shows that they haven't changed despite the events of the story.

Easily the worst part of the film was Malin Ackerman's (Laurie Jupiter/Silk Spectre II) acting. It was as if she was reading cue-cards just out of scene. When I read Michael Phillip's review for the Chicago Tribune and he referred to her as "possibly the worst actress in Hollywood at the moment", I thought he was just being an asshole (because the rest of his review is pretty asshole-ish too), but I do have to agree, she's really bad, distractingly so.

Other issues were Zack Snyders' use of his fast-slooooowww-fast style of action scenes, a style that was old before 300 was over. It's odd, because that's the only way he asserts any directorial style into the picture, other than that it's purely what's on the page, put up on the screen. I would much rather have seen a different director put his own stamp on the material ad take chances with it. While Watchmen is not as bad as 300 or Sin City in my mind, both of those movies to me were so slavishly devoted to their source-material that they ceased to be anything more to me than technical exercises in taking pictured from the page and adapting them exactly for the screen; the equivalent of taking a photo of a girl and photoshopping it so that it looks exactly like the Mona Lisa, that's not art, just good photoshopping.

Anyway, I may sound like I'm coming down on the movie, but I did enjoy myself and may even see it another time (I'll certainly see it on video). At no point was I looking at my watch thinking, "get on with it!" I do wish that I could have come into this movie cold, without the weight of having known this story so well for the past 20 years, I think that's why Roger Ebert's review is so laudatory, he had not read the book, so all of this was new to him, as this was just a re-telling of one of my favorites. Overall, they took a great book and made a pretty good movie out of it.

FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS: OPP!

TONIGHT'S ONE PANEL PUNCH-OUT:
CAPTAIN MARVEL JR. VERSUS CAPTAIN NAZI

YEAH, THAT'S JUST ABOUT HOW I THOUGHT IT WOULD GO DOWN

This awesome panel (along with so, so may others) is brought to you by: Shazam Family Archives Vol. 1.

What I Got - 3.4.09

So I guess I should make an attempt to put up some content on this here blog-thingy, so here's a quick rundown of what I picked up this week, I haven't gotten a chance to read everything, but at least here are some first impressions:

Secret Six#7: The first arc of this book comes to an end and I'm rather enjoying Gail Simone's take on this team of quasi-villains. It just seems like it's missing something, if it weren't for the fact that I have a feeling that the book needs every purchase that it can get, I would probably wait for trade. I suspect that it would read better that way.

Gotham Gazette: Batman Dead?: My sole reason for picking this book up was to see the Gotham MCU back in action and it's OK. It just seems like one of those preview books that DC puts out occasionally, featuring four 6-page previews of new books coming out,this time featuring Vicki Vale, Stephanie Brown, Leslie Thompkins and Harvey Bullock as they deal with the aftermath of Batman's "death". However, I guess that the stories in this book are meant to be wrapped up in another Gotham Gazette book in May? I liked this, but I don't like waiting 2 months for the ends of stories that weren't long enough to be that memorable.

Hellboy: The Wild Hunt #4: It's Hellboy. There's really nothing else to say about that.

Secret Warriors #2: I got the hard sell on this book from a fellow customer at the shop, and, since I've always love Nick Fury I figured I'd give it a shot. Well, I did and I'm out. The whole "everything you know is wrong!" reveal of the last issue just rubbed me the wrong way, and this issue did nothing to make me feel like anything actually interesting is going to happen. Part of the problem is that both issues have featured people sitting around have not-particularly interesting conversations. Plus the art is rather pedestrian. I'll look in on it again when the trade comes out. Kind of disappointed as I was hoping for more from co-writer Jonathan Hickman (as I loved The Nightly News).

Best of the Week

Agents of Atlas #2: Jeff Parker is easily my favorite comics-writer right now and his original Agents of Atlas mini-series is a large reason why. Taking a disparate group of Marvel's golden age characters and fashioning them into team that seeks to save the world while operating as an underground criminal organization, this book is pretty much everything people want in a comic. Smart, fun and full of action, I just love this book so much.

TRADES:

North World Vol. 2: I didn't even know this book was coming out until this morning and I was very happy to see it was coming out. Lars Brown story of Conrad, a heroic adventurer who decided, after the event of volume 1 that he'd rather settle down and be an accountant with his Dad that chase monsters is an enjoyable little story about a man facing the dawning of his adulthood, while fending off giant bears and random street-thugs. I'm only about half-way through this new volume, but it's of the same quality as the first.

Fantastic Four: World's Greatest: I hadn't planned on getting this first volume of Mark Millar and Brian Hitch's run on the title, but I had a free trade coming at the shop, so I figured I'd take a shot. I think I might actually try to review this one in full, once I read it.


So there you go, what did you all pick up this week?

ONE MORE! And Then There Was The Time...

And then there was the time when Power Pack teamed up with The Punisher and Dakota North to bring the Three Stooges to justice...

This fever-dream brought to you by Power Pack #46 by Jo Duffy and Whilce Portacio. And with this one, I promise I'll stop stealing Church's shtick.

And The There Was The Time...

And then there was the time when Luke Skywalker fought
some crazy chick with a laser whip....

This fight originally published in Star Wars Vol. 1 #96, and it is yet another reason why the Expanded Universe can suck it.

Reading the Watchmen: Chapter Five

This was my favorite issue yet of the series. Alternating between the various stories running parallel in the book, the plot is moving quickly towards the moment where everything goes to hell.

Rorschach continues his investigation into the murder of the Comedian and the shaming of Dr. Manhattan. Through this we can again get into his head and see the pure black and white world view that he subscribes to. He sees the evil in the world and he is on a crusade to end it, all of it.

Along with that, we return to the Greek chorus of the book, the nameless news vendor, offering his opinion to any and all about the state of the world, all while the boy reads through the comic-within-a-comic, "The Tales of the Black Freighter". That narration of that book, serving to also narrate our story.

All of this culminates with the framing and capture of Rorschach, revealing him as the bum who we've seen earlier silently carrying a sign reading, "The End is Near". This leads you to wonder, is he really any type of hero at all?

This was just a fantastic issue, and a horrific one. The horrible visuals of the Black Freighter story only serve to heighten the feeling of dread that comes through the entire story. The back-up in this issue, is an excerpt from a book about the pirate comics that ruled the newsstands in the world of Watchmen. The amount of detail that Moore puts into just those three pages is just amazing and I wish that they had managed to put together some of the stories they discuss in there for real, as they all sound pretty amazing.

Reading the Watchmen: Chapter Four

Chapter four of this book is a tough nut to crack, perhaps because it is the most straight-forward so far. It features Dr. Manhattan on Mars, recounting his life story. From boyhood, teaching himself to be a watch-maker (Hey there symbolism! Glad you could drop by!) to becoming a physics researcher for the government, to the accident that turned him into something far more than human.

Essentially, we also get a brief history of the latter 20th century of the world of Watchmen. Manhattan's very existence serves to completely tilt the balance of the Cold War so that it's no longer just a balance between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., instead (as is spelled out in the essay in the back), it's now a ticking time bomb until Russia finally gets fed up and decides to put "America's Superman" to the test by asking him to catch a whole gang of nuclear warheads.

Manhattan has made the whole of humanity obsolete. In a telling scene between the first Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan at Owl's retirement party, he mentions to Manhattan that he's going to fix cars. Manhattan immediately responds that the new electrical cars he has made possible will be even "simpler" than current automobiles. Poor Hollis Mason, the man is effectively pushed out of two lines of business by Manhattan's arrival, and he seems to be the stand in for everyone.

The one thing I question about Dr. Manhattan is that he is most likely the book's biggest tragic figure, since he can see the future and obviously knows both the horrors that are to come, but that he is also powerless to stop fate, but I don't know if he can feel the tragedy in that. It's been shown that he does feel emotion (his outburst of anger when the press turned on him, for one), but while do get overtones of sadness from him, I don't know how he feels about all of this. I'll keep a look out for that as we go along.

Reading the Watchmen: Chapter 3

With the introductions and the world-building of the first two chapters out of the way, chapter 3 kicks the story into high gear. The plot against Dr. Manhattan is put into place, as he is confronted with the information that many of his previous associates have been diagnosed with, or even died from cancer. Manhattan's way of dealing with this information is to freak out on live TV and vanish, first for Arizona and then Mars. His disappearance, literally throws the entire world into havoc. Up until this point, Dr. Manhattan was the ultimate Cold War weapon for the United States, there was no weapon that the U.S.S.R. could produce that could hope to counteract him, so, as we've heard in asides previously in the series, the Russians pretty much had to be happy with saber rattling and accepting whatever America wanted to do. Now, with his disappearance, they immediately invade Afghanistan, with their sights set on quite a bit more. This shows the reader just what the stakes are, for those of us who grew up in the 80's, we all knew that nuclear war was a possibility (hell, a probability depending upon what type of rhetoric Reagan and Thatcher were spouting that particular week), but in the world of Watchmen, it's even far more likely, and closer than ever.

In this issue, we are introduced to the news-vendor, who serves as a bit of a Greek chorus to what is going on in the world. He gives the reader a view into the everyday existence of the book and how the goings on are effecting everyone. Also introduced is the in-book, comic book, The Black Freighter. Picking up with a sailor who stands abandoned on an island with nothing to keep him company, but the rotting corpses of his dead shipmates, his narration of his own story also serves as narration to the over-arching story of the book. I'll be honest, the Black Freighter portions have always been the most impenetrable portions of the book for me. I know what Moore is going for, but this time around I had an easier time seeing the comparisons between the Sailor's thoughts about God abandoning him and Manhattan abandoning humanity.

The back-up is the third (and I believe final) excerpt from Hollis Madison's memoir of being the first Nite Owl, bringing us through the end of their Golden Age and through the beginning of the Silver. The only thing I was left to wonder about was whether DC got the idea about the Justice Society's break-up in the 1950's over being targets of the McCarthy hearings from Watchmen, seeing as how that's essentially what happened to the costumed heroes here, or if it was an independent decision. Just something that occurred to me.

Another great issue of this series, though I really need to pick up the pace if I'm going to get through nine more of these before the 26th. Hope you all had a good weekend!

New Music - The Pains of Being Pure at Heart S/T

It's Saturday morning, and since it looks like it's going to be a pretty nice day here in the Chicago-land area, I figured I'd start it out with a song. Some friends and I were discussing this article at the AV Club regarding what bands you'd like to see one more time, and I started getting nostalgic for my college days and the music that we would listen to over and over again. And fortunately, it just so happens that Thursday night I had downloaded a new album that sounds exactly like the sort of stuff I would have played over and over back in those days. Well, not just in those days, since I've been listening to The Pains of Being Pure at Heart's self-titled album pretty much constantly and enjoying quite a bit. It's just the perfect type of fuzzy pop magic that I loved then, and I love it now. Here's an appropriate song for the day of the week:

Come Saturday - The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

If you'd like to read (and hear) some more, head on over to good friend Ditching Boy's blog.

Ladies & Gentlemen: A Major Metropolitan Newspaper!

I had to post this, simply to confirm that it wasn't some type of fever-dream. Today's Chicago Tribune (Section 1, Page 3) featured a 3/4 page spread comparing Rahm Emmanuel to ROM: Spaceknight, here it is in all its glory:

[Edit! You can now click to embiggen!]

So, have I been (as TwitterPal Robert Clark posited) been somehow transported to the Marvel Universe? I don't know, but watch out for Dire Wraiths!

[Edit: It was actually TwitterPal Matt Springer (of PopGeek and AlertNerd) who made the livin' la vida Marvel comment. Oops.]

Reading the Watchmen: Chapter 2

Chapter 2 is where the plot, as they say, thickens. The main line of the story is the funeral of the Comedian, as each of the main characters remembers a key moment in their life that involved him, leading us to understand just what kind of a miserable bastard that he truly was. From him almost raping Sally Jupiter in the Minutemen's trophy room, to his murdering the Vietnamese woman he got pregnant during the war, all these terrible acts show us the dark side of America that he had come to represent. These flashbacks also tell us a great deal about the characters themselves. Most interesting is the realization of just how disconnected from humanity that Dr. Manhattan is. After murdering the woman in Vietnam, The Comedian chides Manhattan for imploring him to stop, but doing nothing about it, "You coulda turned the gun into steam or the bullets into mercury...but you didn't do nothin' about it!" The Comedian becomes a character that allows the reader to view each of these heroes in extreme circumstances and gives us a true window into the America of this book.

So after seeing how horrible a person The Comedian can be, it makes it all the more amazing the revelation that Rorschach has while investigating Moloch, an old villain. The pages featuring a drunk, sobbing Comedian, seemingly confessing his sins and rambling on to Moloch are a beautiful lesson in foreshadowing. In fact, the whole issue is. Really, the whole mystery of the book is solved right there. From watching Ozymandias stare at the burned map of America after his comments that, "Given the correct handling, none of the world's problems are insurmountable. All it takes is the right intelligence." To The Comedian commenting on what he saw on that island, and that Moloch was on "the list". It's all right there.

The book is capped by another excerpt from the original Nite Owl's memoir, this portion detailing the beginnings of his career and the formation (and downfall) of the Minutemen. Not as revelatory as the portion from the previous issue, but still it helps to fill in some information on the world the book is inhabiting.

Reading this again years after first reading it, the big thing that stood out for me was, during the flashback showing the abortive formation of the Crimebusters, Rorschach is speaking with a normal word balloon, instead of the (I have no idea how to describe it) shakily-drawn one he usually "speaks" in. Just another thing to illustrate that one, even Rorschach was a somewhat sane individual.

Reading the Watchmen: Chapter 1

Since the movie is coming out in a little over a month, my local comics shop's book club decided that Watchmen should be our next book up for discussion. This seemed like a piece of cake to me, since I had read the book first close to 20 years ago and several times since. However, once I thought about it, it's probably been over a decade since I sat down and actually read the whole thing, all the way through. Sure, I'd scanned through it on lazy Saturday afternoons, maybe even read the whole thing, minus the text pieces a few times. But I can't remember the last time I had made a concerted effort to read it all as a solid piece of work.

So that brings us to the purpose of this post, and the series that should (hopefully) follow it. I'm going to read each issue individually and try to type up my thoughts about it here. Though I'm sure it'll be tempting to blow through several of the chapters at a time, I kind of want to give myself the chance to really think on each one individually, and this will also help to serve as my "notes" for the upcoming discussion of the book over pizza and beers at the end of the month.

One last quick note, if you haven't read the book yet, I'll probably be talking about some of the stuff that will happen later in the book, so you may want to skip over this book and go and pick up a copy for yourself. Even though I haven't read it in a while, I still think it's one of the best books residing on my bookshelves.

Anyway, issue #1: We begin with the aftermath of the Comedian's death and the start of Rorschach's investigation into it. IT serves as a clever introduction into the world of the book, the conversation between the investigating Detective's providing us with the broad frame-work of what has happened to the super-heroes of the world and Rorschach's narration giving us a view into his pure black-and-white morality.

After discovering that the murder he was investigating turned out to be a former costumed adventurer, Rorschach then sets out to warn his former comrades: Nightowl, now a fat, middle-aged man who's only happiness lies in the past. Adrian Veidt, the smartest (and possibly richest) man in the world, who sold-out before heroes were made illegal and now makes a pretty penny on his image. Then, finally there is Dr. Manhattan and Sally Jupiter. Manhattan, the only truly "super" hero of this world who seemingly detached from life itself. Sally, his "kept woman", given a life by the government simply because she keeps Manhattan happy and relaxed.

With his warnings ignored, Rorschach sets out to find the killer none-the-less, simply because that is what he does, he realizes that he cannot save the world from what he sees as an inevitable fall into evil, but he does what he can simply because he must, as his morals allow for nothing less.

Following the comic proper, there is an "exerpt" from the first Nighowl's memoir, detailing his childhood during the Great Depression and what pushed him to become a masked adventurer. The most interesting thing about the text piece being is that he mentions that he was inspired by the early pulp heroes and comics, particularly Superman, but he then comments that no one probably remembers them, giving us a clue that, in this world where superheroes are "real", the fictional ones ceased to exist.

Overall, this is just a fantastic first issue, and it's still as fresh today as the day it was printed back in 1985. Re-reading it today the art is the biggest revelation. I've long been a fan of Dave Gibbons, but it's odd when you realize that large portions of this book are wordless, simply streetscapes of New York City with a lone character walking. Working in a fairly rigid nine-panel grid, Gibbons just does beautiful work. One of the biggest things I noticed is his use of facial expressions to convey very precise emotions. Gibbons is probably the single best artist I can think of at doing this, all of his faces just look real. The color pallet is very limited with a lot of deep-browns and greens, making everything look very dingy and decrepit.

Thanks for reading along, I look forward to sinking my teeth into issue 2 tomorrow night, (depending upon whether the Superbowl is interesting or not).

My Fellow Americans:

STOP

Listen, I like him, you like him, we all like him. A lot. But please, stop buying this shit so they stop making it.

Friday Night Fights: The Conclusion

Since tonight is the final round of Space Booger's first go-round of heading up FNF, I figured that I had better find something suitably epic to end it on the proper note:

SKRABLLAAAMM!

So yeah, Earth-2 Superman punching the Anti-Monitor's disembodied spirit to Hell feels suitably epic for me. Anyway, big thanks fo SpaceBooger for heading this up for the last 13 weeks, and though I haven't had been involved as much as I would have liked to, it's been a blast.

Images taken from the "Event Comic" that started them all, Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Zombies Ahead

You know, fun is fun, but if I saw this sign on my commute home:

Let's just say, it's for the best that I do not drive through pedestrian-heavy areas on the way home. I don't like the zombies.

Thanks to Johnny Bacardi for the tip.

A Book I Want Part 2

OK, since I'm bored, this one popped into my head as I was going through some comics in the basement and came upon the one issue I have of this run. Jeez, this is some wierded out shit*, I would love to have it all in one nice package:


2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY BY JACK KIRBY OMNIBUS
Written by JACK KIRBY
Penciled by JACK KIRBY
Cover by JACK KIRBY
The trippiest movie of the 1960's becomes the trippiest comic of the 1970's. On the success of one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, Marvel commissioned Jack Kirby to bring his own cosmic spin to the story, and boy, did he! Featuring the first appearance of X-51 aka Mr. Machine aka Machine Man!
Collects 2001: A Space Odyssey #1-10 and 2001 Marvel Treasury Edition #1
290 PGS / All Ages … $29.99

*Seriously, if you don't believe me just go check out the cover gallery at The Grand Comics Database.

A Book I Want

Kevin Church put out the call for people to submit solicitations for collections that you want to see happen. Here's mine, by all accounts, this is pretty awful stuff, but boy, did I love this book when I was a kid:



THE ESSENTIAL WEST COAST AVENGERS
Written by ROGER STERN & STEVE ENGLEHART
Penciled by BOB HALL,AL MILGROM, JOE SINNOTT AND FRIENDS
Cover by BOB HALL
Dark Avengers, New Avengers, Mighty Avengers! Copy cats! Look here True Believers to see the original Avengers spin-off! Watch as everyone's, fan-favorite couple Hawkeye and Mockingbird assemble the most stunning group of heroes yet! Also featuring Iron Man, Wonderman, Tigra and even more!
Collects West Coast Avengers Mini-Series 1-4 and West Coast Avengers 1-23.
544 PGS / All Ages … $16.99

New Music: A.C. Newman: Get Guilty

So, if you pay attention to the little do-dad I have in the sidebar over to your right, you'll notice that I've been listening to A.C. Newman's new album Get Guilty pretty much non-stop lately. Newman's best known for being the ringleader of the "Supergroup" The New Pornographers, who are probably one of my favorite active bands. Though I've generally enjoyed his song-writing and singing for that band, I was left a tad cold by his first solo effort, it just felt (for lack of a better term) thin. However his new record is a lot more like his work with the 'Pornos, more orchestrated with much more complicated arrangements. However, it's just not as lush as the Pornographers stuff. That's not a criticism, it gives the work a certain, almost lo-fi charm, as if it was all hashed out in his garage (though it's obiously very produced). Essentially it feels like a New Pornographers' record, minus the influence of his collaborators in that band (Dan Bejar, Neko Case, Todd Fancey, etc.) and it comes out very well.

Anway, since I'm kinda crap at talking about music, here's one of my favorite tracks:

A.C. Newman - The Collected Works

This album is available at eMusic, a service that I wholly endorse as a way of downloading very good music for a very low cost.

How to Start a Day, Badly

I made chili last night, and it turned out OK, but not as good as I would have hoped when I figured in the amount of effort I had put into it. Anyway, I had to chop up something like 7 jalapeno peppers for the recipe* and despite washing my hands several thousand times during the cooking process, apparently some of the pepper oils hitched a ride on my fingers, none-the-less.

Anyway, long story short, though feeling a slight burning when I took out my contacts before bed, nothing could prepare me for the horror that I was dealt when I put them back in in the morning. I dropped to my knees and squealed like a little girl seeing a Jonas Brother and it took every bit of will power I had to pull my eye open and get the damn thing out again.

However, needless to say, there was no way my day could go downhill from that point on, so I had that going for me.**

*I used the standard recipe from The Joy of Cooking, with some alterations of my own.

** And yes, after a quick Google search I leaned that I have to use some type of cleaner with citrus or detergent qualities to break up the oils, but shit, next time I'm wearing rubber gloves if I'm chopping peppers.

Friday Night Fights!

America! How do we celebrate a new President!?!?!?

By beating up on Hitler, dammit!

KRONTCH!

Once again, another wholly out-of-context panel from Captain America: Bicentennial Battles by Jack Kirby. Then again, beating up on Hitler needs no context.

For more Friday-Night-Fighting Action, check out SpaceBooger.

JUMPING FIREBALLS!

Seriously folks, I could just post random panels from Captain America: Bicentennial Battles every day for months. What a delightful batch of insanity it is.

Happy Inauguration Day!

It's Inauguration Day, and let's celebrate it the best way I know how: with an out-of-context panel from Captain America: Bicentennial Battles!!!



Find out more about Benjamin Franklin: the shiftiest of the Founding Fathers in Captain America: Bicentennial Battles by Jack Kirby.

New Comics: 1/14/09

Hey, imagine that? Comics are in the news these days, so let's talk about them. Fortunately, the two biggest selling comics for the big two publishers for the month were out yesterday so I figured I'd give my impressions.

First up is Amazing Spider-Man #583, which, according to one person's whose blogging I have high regard for, is bringing out classiness all over America:



Now there are three distinct things wrong with this issue, and they are all on the cover, let me break them down for you.

Problem #1:

Firstly, let me say, I don't have a problem with the fact that they are doing a "Tribute to Dating" issue. It's close to Valentine's Day, and hey, whatever you can do to shift a few more units, you go right ahead Marvel. But, it's the fact that this issue points out what a soulless, awful hell the dating world of the 21st Century is, well, it's just cruel. The whole point of the issue is for Betty Brandt to reflect on her relationship with Peter Parker while she does her best to hook him up via the time tested devices of speed-dating and getting her friends so drunk they'll sleep with anyone (except, of course, Peter Parker). The big problem is that she proves that there is not one, acceptable single woman in all of (make-believe) New York City. That's just sad.

Problem #2:

OK, though Peter's not meeting any women inside the book, outside he's hitting on promiscuous older ladies. This is disturbing to me on many levels. First of all, ever since Peter was made single by selling off his marriage to the love of his life to the devil magic, Marvel's gone to great pains to point out that this was to make him seem younger (especially because once you've got a ball and chain, you're one foot in the grave already), but this is just not the way to do it people!

Problem #3

Spider-Man's gettin' lucky tonight! That's just too much.

Anyway, once you get into the actual content of the issue, it's pretty damn good, and it's odd that this could be an issue that a lot of non-comic readers pick up, since Spider-Man only appears in about three pages.

Oh yeah, and the thing that everyone's talking about, the back-up featuring President Obama. It's OK, certainly a rush-job featuring some workmanlike art by Todd Nauk, but it's not bad and it features a pretty good Joe Biden joke. Obviously I was not one of the lucky few to get the much-vaunted Phil Jimenez Obama cover, but I think I got some good mileage out of this one.

Next up, we've got Final Crisis #6, spoiler goggles on for the rest of this one:


So let's get this out of the way, who woulda thought that the comic that features the death of Batman would be a newscycle also-ran this week? But let's begin at the beginning. I've really been enjoying Final Crisis, and so have a lot of other people, but I have a feeling that this book just isn't going to get its due for a while. Grant Morrison is making you work for it a little more than you do for other big event books. Often the big fights are left off-panel, leaving you to fill in some of the blanks. Also, something that rarely has occurred to me while reading the book is that the "big seven" of the DCU is pretty much been taken off the board ever since issue #2. This is a book, though rewarding in (somewhat) monthly reading is going to be a whole different, better beast once collected.

In this issue, we get the show down between the last remaining remnants of free humanity and Darkseid and his accursed horde. This is really where the series really rewards those of us who have read a lot of old DC books, I mean, there's a scene where Tawky Tawny disembowels Kalibak, who has been reincarnated as a tiger-man from Kamandi. That scene pushes a button that few people have, but if you have that button, like I do, it's a motherfucker.

All of this wraps up in the showdown between Batman and Darkseid, which is just as understated and as well written as anything else in this series. It's just plain good.

Anyway, we have one or maybe two (depending upon how much Superman Beyond #2 ties in) issues of this series left to go, and I can't wait to read the whole thing through sometime soon.

A quick word about the art, up until this issue, the multiple artists that they've been employing have blended pretty seamlessly through out, however this was the first time that I noticed a jarring shift. There were a few, obviously rushed pages in the middle with some sloppy inking, and the last few by Doug Mahnke didn't flow as well from the rest, just because he has such a different style from Pacheo, Jones, etal. But overall, still very nice. Hopefully the inking will be cleaned up in the collection.

So there you go, two very good books this week, I feel blessed!

What Bugs Me About Fringe: Part One

You know, I've started this post two or three times and just never gotten around to finishing it, but seeing the promos for the second half of Fringe's first season really solidified something in my mind. The thing that bugs me the most is that fucking robot arm. In the first episode, when Olivia met with the suit from Massive Dynamics (can't remember her name, but it might as well be Deus Ex Machina), to show the benevolence of the company's owner, she shows off the nifty robot arm he gave her to replace the one she lost to cancer.

See, with The X-Files being one of my favorite TV series ever, it's obvious that I'll make comparisons, seeing as how they're pretty much the same, ie. FBI Agents exploring weird shit. However, The X-Files always went out of their way to make things somewhat plausible. At the end of the day, most of the stories could be explained by delusion or some other, real-world type of explanation, and even the more fantastical stuff was grounded in a some form of reality. Hell, the aliens in the show didn't run around blasting each other with lasers...fuck no! They stabbed each other in the neck with ice picks.

But in Fringe, that robot arm showed that all bets were off, we were no longer grounded in reality and in full on, sci-fi zone. This show does not take place in anything close to the "real" world (unless you listen to a lot of Coast to Coast AM), and it does not have to play by the physical rules as we know them. Once I saw that, I just started to care less. It's not that it resides in that zone, it's that it went out its way to flaunt it in its first episode. Take Fringe's older brother, Lost. A show it is obviously meant to be a companion to (the in-jokes leading me to believe that they even take place in the same "universe"), Lost, though dealing in the fantastical as well, didn't delve into the full-on, anything can happen, sci-fi realm before its third season, when it had earned the audience's trust through a lot of very good story-telling. In my mind, it had earned that leap. Everyone who was watching had seen the clues along the way, the polar bear, the subtle time-shifts, the smoke monster. But at any time, there could have been a "rational" explanation. Then they took the plunge and it worked. It just seemed cheap to me that Fringe took that leap without earning it, like they took the believability of the series for granted.

Ah, what do I know, I'm just some crank on the internet. Plus I keep watching, but really, I can't deny the awesomeness of crazy-Walter. I wish the show was just about him.

Yes, apparently, this is the first in a possible series, as there are some other things that bug me about Fringe and I will continue to keep venting them at you until you go to everyone of my Amazon affiliate links and buy all of the shit that I am pushing on you.

What I'm Reading: RASL: The Drift

Hey there, I still have on more Vacation Reading post to go up, but, I haven't finished to book yet. Hopefully tomorrow night I'll get through it and get a post up. Anyhoo, this week I picked up RASL: The Drift, the first volume of Bone creator Jeff Smith's new book. A ways back I reviewed the first issue of this book, and though I liked it, I had felt that it was simply not paced for single issue reading, especially considering the book is coming out on a quarterly basis, so when I saw the collection was hitting the shelves today, I was excited.

And I was right to be, though this volume only collects the first three issues, it feels like a much more solid chuck of story, though it is obviously only just the very beginning. Our protagonist is Rasl, a man who has discovered how to jump between parallel Earths and uses this knowledge to steal priceless works of art from other Earths to fence on our own. OVer the course of the volume, he learns that other, more sinister interests have discovered how to do this too, and they're out to get him. We also get some back-story as to how Rasl discovered how to traverse universes and what led him to go from straight-edge scientist to hard drinkin' thief.

As a whole, it's very good and I'm definitely interested to see where this is going. I was wondering how Smith's rather cartoonish art style would match up with the more real-world, violent themes of this new creation, but I should not have worried. It all looks good and nothing seems out of place. It's obvious that Smith came from animation, because his art just moves. There are a couple of foot-chase scenes in the book and you can practically see the characters running in your mind as you go.

My only hesitation about the book is that it is so obviously only the beginning and there's probably a lot more to before we really get into the meat of the story. I want the rest now. But, then again, I'm an impatient ass, so YMMV.

Also, a note about the packaging of the book itself. I had assumed that the book would be would be in the "smaller than a comic, but bigger than manga" size that the re-issues of Smith's Bone have been in, however, it was in an oversized (roughly 10''x13'') format and it added some nice heft to the volume. It also allows Smith's art more room to breathe and it helps the story. It made me very happy that I waited for trade.

Marvel Team-Up Featuring: Spider-Man & Barack Obama

I realize that I'm late to the game on this one, but I just had to comment that this is incredibly cool:

Amazing Spider-Man #583

I mean, when was the last time we had a President cool enough to team up with Spidey, much less, share a "terrorist fist-bump"?

Anyway, hopefully I'll have a review of something I picked up this week later today and maybe even finish up my Vacation Reading series (if I ever finish the last book I started).

For more amusing, if not down-right scary, reactions to this issue, check out the latest from Get Off The Internet.

Hey Kids! Art!

Just had to share these, Les McClaine, co-creator of The Middleman and creator of the web-comic Johnny Crossbones put out a call a month or so ago that he was taking commissions, so I had him do these two:

OMAC

The Demon Etrigan

I'm very happy with the way they turned out, and if you like them, keep an eye on his blog for the next time he puts out the call.

Vacation Reading: THE BEST OF THE SPIRIT

The Best of the Spirit is a book I had read several years ago, courtesy of the local library, however it recently came up as a selection of my (Comic)Book Club for this month. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend this month's meeting/drink-up, so I neglected to pick up a copy. Fortunately, the weather on the night in question proved apocalyptic, so I learned on Christmas Eve that it had been pushed back to Jan. 2, so I grabbed a copy and threw it in my suitcase.


This book contains various stories from The Spirit Sunday newspaper supplement from 1941 through 1950 and (I believe) they are all seven pages long. The single fact that they are all so short is shocking considering the amount of information and story they contain. Will Eisner's art is very good and you can see it evolve throughout the book, from the very "puply" style of the first few stories, to a much more cartoonish style towards the end. And some of the title pages are just jaw-dropping, employing techniques that Jim Steranko would use to drop jaws forty years later.

Here are two as examples:




The stories themselves are very good and the wide range of story-telling styles employed (standard comics, text with pictures, story-book-like, etc.) is just incredible when you consider that it was all done by one author. The hardest part about judging the stories is that you have to keep reminding yourself that Eisner is inventing this stuff. It's kind of like when I watched Citizen Kane for the first time a few years ago and I realized that I'd already seen the whole movie in various bits on The Simpsons, it's almost impossible to understand how revolutionary this stuff was, since so many of these things have been woven into the tapestry that is comics today.

One of the best things that Eisner does so well, is that he recognizes that the Spirit himself is one of the least interesting characters in the book, and as you get to the later stories, the Spirit becomes less of a character int he stories and instead is a macguffin or a force of nature that moves the stories forward, sometimes appearing only in a single panel or not at all.

Overall, the box at the top of the title page promises Action, Mystery, Adventure! and this book does deliver. The only mark against this book are the absolutely horrible racial caricatures, particularly of Ebony, the Spirit's cab-driving side-kick. They are indefensible other than to say that they are a product of their time.

As for the recent movie, ever since I saw the first images, I had a feeling that it wasn't for me, coming from "Whores, Whores N' More Whores!" Frank Miller, I had a feeling it would stray from what I've always liked about this character. After reading Doctor K's recent negative review, and Conditional Jeff's thoughtful notes on why he was skipping out on it and I decided that life's too short to waste my time and money on a movie that I know that I'd hate (though I will rent it, since I bizarrely consider Netflix "free"). All I can say, is considering the movie made about $1.25 in it's first weekend, hopefully that means we won't get subjected to Frank Miller's "vision" of Buck Rogers.

Other recommended reading: To see a big-name comics creator do right by the character, definitely check out Darwyn Cooke's first collection of DC's recent re-launch of The Spirit. It contains six, very good done-in-one stories, and Cooke & Jeph Loeb's The Spirit/Batman team-up, which is a hoot.