Short report from the Toronto Comicon

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Blew off all my schoolwork today to go to the Toronto Comicon. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a little thing like my education stand between me and picking up some cheap trade paperbacks.

Cheap trades, unfortunately, were few and far between. I’ve been to plenty of the little Heritage Hall cons in Vancouver, but this was my first “big” con, and I went with hopes of visiting a magical comics utopia.

I knew something was amiss, then, when I walked in and it looked like we were in a loading bay or a parking garage. Cement floors, exposed pipes, steel pillars. Nothing wrong with that, it was just a little more… industrial than I was expecting.

My main mission in going to cons is cheap tpb's, so it was more than a little disappointing that the best anyone was offering was 20% off. The cons back home may be tiny, but there's always a table or two where current trades are 40% off. I'd been expecting to pick up the latest 100 Bullets for cheap today, but nothin' doin'.

Not to say that there weren’t deals. At the Beguiling table they were unloading Blade of the Immortal paperbacks for $5 apiece, and I picked up six for $25. Score! I also picked up the TCAF Free Comic Book Day offering, so that was a nice bonus too.

I also went to see if I could catch the panels for today. However, I missed the Bendis panel due to my complete inability to get anywhere on time. Problems finding free parking and then lack of signs inside the con itself also contributed, but mostly I missed the talk because I’m completely irresponsible. I walked around trying to find Jerry Robinson’s talk, but couldn’t find it, and this time it was entirely due to bad signage.

Rushing to get to see Bendis did make me hours early for Warren Ellis, so I did catch him, and he was plenty entertaining. A few highlights:

- When asked what the worst project that a company ever asked him to do was, he replied that in the nineties, DC had asked come to him with “an old character named Deadman. His special power is that he’s dead. His costume has a “D” on it so you know he’s the one who’s dead.” He was convinced that the character wasn’t real and that someone had created a mock up just to fuck with him.

- Musing on the curious fact that Irish alcohol doesn’t travel, he said that Irish people who drink Guinness in England swear that “English people shit in the kegs.”

- He told a story about going on Garth Ennis’s stag that I can’t do justice to here, except to mention that it involved an “apocalyptic” boat ride in waters north of Ireland, that Ellis likened to the scene out of The Perfect Storm, a pub that only closes once a year, and Glen Fabry’s eating habits, or lack thereof.

- Ellis also does a hilarious imitation of Alan Moore. If you ever see Ellis on a panel, ask him to tell the story about what it’s like to talk to Alan Moore on the phone.

All in all, a fun day where I wound up spending a lot less money than I thought I would, which is both good and bad.

Anyways, back to work.

Not quite back yet

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Two papers finished. 6500 words of grad school essay written and typed (yes, two different steps) in 36 hours. I am a ma-Chine.

(Oh yeah, and there was four days of research and moaning about how screwed I was, beforehand, but that doesn't count).

One more to write from scratch before the end of the week and then I'm done last semester's work, and I can start paying attention to my current classes.

In light of my minor victory today I thought I'd poke my head up and post a couple of quick reviews for the two books I picked up last week, just so I don't fall too far behind.

This panel from Superman #215 captures most of my feelings towards this issue and towards the whole of Azzarello and Lee's run:



I don't know, Superman, I'm as confused as you. Did I really buy twelve issues at four bucks a pop of a series that I didn't even understand? Who were any of these characters? And where did they come from? And where did they go? Why were your parents robots? How did you create the pocket dimension? What does any of it mean?

I've got real trepidation now for the upcoming All-Star Batman. Jim Lee's last couple of projects have been nice looking, but failures from a writing standpoint. "Hush" had one good moment but was otherwise uniformly awful, and "For Tomorrow," I honestly don't know what happened in this story, other than that I liked a line about ten or eleven issues back and used that to justify picking up every issue since. I shouldn't be supporting comics I don't like, and I'm giving Miller/Lee two issues to win me over before I leave.

Runaways #3 - This is a generally entertaining issue, and while it didn't knock me off my feet, I understood the story, and considering the competition this week, that's worth something. Trademark snappy Vaughan dialogue, and though the art seems to be getting even more jaggy, it does the job. I may have said before, but

SPOILER

the loss of Alex has left this book kind of floundering. He was the entry point character, and while that made the shocker at the end of the first series work, it's left this book without anyone to identify with. Good reading regardless.

And that's it, I'm out for a few more days. Be good.

Breaking radio silence

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I decided last Thursday that if I was going to get my papers done I was going to have to turn off my computer, hence my lack of updates for the past few days. I’ve got a buttload of writing to do, and in case you were wondering, the essay writing beard is in full effect. However, I’ve just finished one of my essays (the shortest one >sigh<) and I’m rewarding myself with a little blog time. This is my one phone call and I’m using it to call you.

The first thing to get out of the way is a few quick reviews for the comics I picked up last Wednesday.

Ultimates #5 - I was surprised to see this on the shelves already, has it even been a month? A nice looking issue as always, with plenty to look at during the big fight. I wish that colorists would knock it off with the blur effect (is it colorists that do that? It must be, right?), I can’t think of an instance when I’ve seen it done well, and I wind up just being bothered that it’s obscuring the art. Quicksilver being knocked out repeatedly wound up being comical, but I’m not sure that was the intended effect. The first time he goes down in this issue I can’t even tell what does it.

It occurs to me that issue #5 of the first run was when the team fought the Hulk, so there’s a parallel here. Wasp alludes to as much when she flies into Thor’s head. However, I remember that the Hulk fight was the first time this series really blew me away, and while I enjoyed this issue it really highlights that they haven’t reached the same heights since. The last page was an ominous touch, and I’m interested to see where the story goes, but I have to wonder if I’d still be buying this series if Hitch wasn’t drawing.

Iron Man #3 - Now this on the other hand is something that’s really started clicking. Much of the issue is one big fight scene, and it’s wordless, which I usually hate, but it all works. It’s a more down to earth presentation of the armour, as the weapons are innovative, but plausible. I particularly liked the cluster bombs that fly out when his fist gets grabbed. As well, the armour reacts like metal and takes damage when hit; I can’t imagine him fighting Thor or the Hulk in this rig. It makes the fight more interesting as victory is less certain.

The issue isn’t perfect; Granov’s art is pretty, but the figures look posed and stiff much of the time. As well, the villain, with his militia background, is awfully generic and boring. But overall, there was a lot to like in this issue. I even found the Ellis tech talk at the beginning interesting, which is surprising because I hated it in Ultimate Secret #1. Was it better written here? Or do I like the biological speculation more than the outer space stuff? I don’t know, but he’s doing everything right in this issue and I hope he keeps it up.

Adam Strange #7 - Another solid issue, but the series has definitely lost the momentum it had early on. This issue is loaded up with exposition giving answers to the mystery that has been driving the series. Despite the potential in characters like the Omega Men and Vril Dox, everyone is a little dull. I’ll buy the next issue because it’s the last, but if this was an ongoing I would’ve jumped ship a few issues ago.

Powers #10 - An entertaining issue, and it looks like they’ve upgraded the paper stock, although the colouring is still a little dark in places like it has been over the past few issues. The arc ends well, and there’s some good writing in this issue. I’ve been concerned lately that I’m souring on Bendis, but there’s plenty to like in this issue. This series hasn’t blown me away in a while, like every arc seemed to in the first run, but it’s solid enough that if it keeps up like this I’ll keep buying it.

Gotham Central #30 - Good story, good dialogue, good art. I wish more people were buying this, but I’m glad that enough are for it to have lasted this long. The Doctor Alchemy as Hannibal Lecter stuff in this issue should seem derivative and shouldn’t work, but it does and it’s an edgy read. The Doctor’s excursion goes the way you’d expect it to, but I’m curious about the experiment he keeps talking about. I’m interested in what’s going on in the background with Montoya’s dad too. I’m not a big fan of the stories where Batman comes in and fixes everything, but it’s been a while since that happened, and I’m hoping the next issue will find a way to put a twist on that. Great work overall.

Okay, it’s late and I’m tired. I didn’t get to write as much as I thought I would so maybe I’ll post again later. No promises though, I’ve got ten to twelve thousand words to write before the twenty-eighth, so I expect to be on the down low for a while, as the kids say. (They still say that right?)

And where's me lucky charms?

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A happy birthday to Des, who is currently in Dublin and as I imagine it, is laughing over a beer with Bono, Garth Ennis, and the Lucky Charms leprechaun, like everyone in Ireland does on their birthdays. Top o’ the mornin’ to ye laddie.

A happy birthday also, to Paul, who I’ll bet you is having a drink with Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, and Roch Voisine, like everyone here in Canada gets to on their birthdays.
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Speaking of Paul, he writes the best comments ever. Every time, he sets me laughing out loud. Don’t believe? Check out the one in response to this post, from a while back. If this were a family and you and Paul were siblings, this would be me as your mom saying to you, “Why can’t you be more like Paul?”

And he’s got a blog, I read it and I think he’s crazy. This is my favourite entry so far.
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Got an invitation in the mail today to my friend Blair’s wedding in Sweden in July. I’m going to have to RSVP and say that I can’t make it, seeing as I am broke. If anyone wants to start up a Send Davinder to Sweden in July fund, you have my blessing. I’m not above taking charity.

Blair’s the third of my childhood friends to get married. It’s starting to make me feel old. And alone.

Perfect time to look at the new DC solicitation images for July.
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As per usual, I will mention that this isn’t a previews review, these are just images that caught my eye enough that for one reason or another I saved them. If I had the webspace or the motivation, I’d post up all the images on my computer somewhere. I worked at a software company for a while, and often wound up web-surfing for eight to fourteen hours a day. During that time I managed to collect a lot of interesting comic related (and other) images; I’ve currently got over four thousand on my computer. If I could share I would, I think there’s something there to interest almost anyone.

I’m still not picking up the Seven Soldiers titles, due to my aforementioned broke-ness; my reasoning being that I’ll buy the whole as a bunch at the end. Covers like this one test my resolve. I wish the resolution on this image was higher, because the blurring craps it up (that’s a technical art term, trust me). I might have to concede to Des and admit that Sook does the best Zatanna ever.



There are multiple different political messages you can take out of this image, and that’s why I think I like it. Is this an injection of America (Fuck yeah!) into the Middle East, or is the syringe being used to draw oil out and that’s what makes the U.S. run? Or something else? It’s an eye catching and thought provoking design, that’s what matters, and I’m impressed that DC are running it as a cover.



Guns, wings, Adam Strange and a Hawkperson? What’s there not to like? Dynamic poses, and it lets you know exactly what you’re going to find inside without telling you anything about the story. And like I’ve said before, I’m a sucker for Hawkpeople.



This one was on the borderline, I hemmed and hawed for a while on whether to keep it, but in the end what’s a little more disk space? I like the action going on here, but the lack of backgrounds on all three covers of this series so far is going to make them start looking alike, ala Ultimate Spider-man. On its own, though, it’s a very nice cover.


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I just realized that this stuff will be coming out right around the time that if I had money I’d be in Sweden. Instead I’ll be sitting in the corner sobbing as I read my comics.
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Hey, I just finished reading the first two volumes of Age of Bronze, and holy cow is it good. I’m mean really, really good. I’ve had the first volume sitting on my shelf unread for ages, and I’m kicking myself for not getting to it sooner. I’m going through and reading them again, and when I get a chance I’ll post a full review. But wow, these are good.

Dispatches from Africa

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I got a letter a few days ago from my friend John who is currently doing field research on fish in Zambia. He was there for a few months last year as well, and he came back with all sorts of stories of life in the Zambian countryside. One story involved a friend he made there who gave John a goat on his birthday. I’m not going to tell you the rest of the story because John doesn’t like me telling it, but let’s say that it involves firearms and doesn’t end well for the goat, and leave it at that.

So, in his letter, John tells me that he once again met up with his friend, Phil, who gave him the goat. In their first conversation, Phil told John that he was concerned about a crocodile at a nearby resort that the owners were going to kill. Thinking that this was unnecessarily cruel, Phil asked John if he could help him catch the crocodile and move it to a pond on Phil’s property. Phil’s plan involved using a goat carcass as bait (I’m getting the impression that he hates goats), and John suggested they use a long pole with a loop of rope on the end.

The story ends there because they hadn’t actually gone and tried to catch the crocodile as of John's writing. It takes six weeks for letters to get here from there, so I figure anything could’ve happened in the meantime.

I told mine and John’s mutual friend Carol the crocodile story and she said that nobody ever comes to her and asks her to catch a crocodile or anything like that, and that she imagines that it doesn’t happen to most people. I told her that it was because when someone’s got a plan like that they size people up before asking them to participate, and if it looks like the person will say “no,” they won’t ask them. So most regular people don’t get asked to join in on crocodile games, but when these nutjobs look at John they know they’ve found a kindred spirit. This guy asks for help catching a crocodile and the first thing John thinks is, “Maybe I can rig up a stick with a noose on the end.”

I’ll post updates as they come in. In the meantime, I think I’m going to start a pool where you can bet on which body part John will be missing when he returns. I call the left eye.
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I should’ve posted this way before, but better late than never. If you’re a Canadian, you may know that there’s a vote on The Civil Marriage Act (Bill C-38) in Parliament tomorrow. If you support passage of the bill, go to this link and send your MP an email saying so. They’ve got a form, so it only takes a minute to do.
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And while I’m being socially conscious, here’s a link to a flash animation called The Meatrix. It’s entertaining and informative. Go watch. (thanks to Kristen for the link)
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And last but not least, here’s a link to The Breast Cancer Site, where, just by clicking a button, you can help fund free mammograms. It doesn’t cost you anything, it has something to do with their advertising. Just go there and click the button and you’ve done some good.
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Does this let me off the hook for all that talk yesterday about beating up kids?

Personally, I think I could take about twenty to twenty-five of them

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My good friend, and sick bastard, Marcel sent me this link yesterday to a message board posting, and the subsequent forty-five pages of follow ups. Rather than get into it, I’ll just let you go and take a look for yourself. (Fair warning, it’s in questionable taste-- oh, let’s be honest, it’s in out and out bad taste. If you are turned off by black humour and you like kids, then you’ll probably want to stay away).
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On a related note, I was talking to my friend Erin last night and she said that there’s nothing she’d rather do to let off some steam than plow a kid in the face. True story.

(Look at that Erin, you’re on the internet).
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File this under Things I Learned off of the Internet: When you park in a parking lot, park between four-door cars rather than two-door cars. The doors on two-door cars swing out wider, and they’re more likely to hit your car. I’m just letting you know because I know how upset you get when you come back and find a ding in your car.
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Not satisfied with contributing to the excellent blog, Suspension of Disbelief, Loren Collins also has a page devoted to free comics on the internet. At The Collins Compendium of Free Online Comic Books he’s got links to over two hundred and fifty free comics. As he says, these aren’t just previews, they’re whole stories. Go take a look around you cheap nerd; it’s free for God’s sake!

Oh, and over at Read-Box.com they've got a sixteen page preview of Moebius's latest Blueberry story, Dust.



It's entirely in French, so knowing that language might help your comprehension, but the pictures are nice to look at regardless.
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And finally, this image I found online, while dazzling, shows why that crazy bastard Art Adams will never be able to do a monthly comic.

I think I might be "the typical Gen-X whiner who is completely self-absorbed" that you're talking about

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Today I dealt with the hideous amount of writing I have to do in the way that any sane person would, I spent an hour messing with my blog template in order to update my blogroll on the left there. That's reasonable, right?

I broke the list into categories, and while it's not as pretty as I'd like it to be, it does satisfy my anal retentiveness temporarily. I've added in Peter David and Priest, two creator blogs I enjoy; and BeaucoupKevin, who I could've sworn was on the list before. Also, I'd like to welcome Derek Martinez and his ramblings to the site. Through reading his blog, I’ve discovered that Derek and I share a fondness for Asian cinema and more importantly a fondness for Maggie Cheung. Unfortunately this also means that one day I will have to engage Derek in mortal combat over Ms. Cheung, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, here’s a little something we can both enjoy.



My good friend Romain is currently living in Shanghai, and occasionally sends back pictures such as this from his travels in China. He says that advertisements of this sort appear commonly everywhere. In the words of Yakov Smirnoff, “What a country!”
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Ed Cunard at The Low Road posted some thoughts on reviewing and sacred cows and a bunch of other stuff. It's an interesting read, but what really stood out was this link he posted to the story of a reviewer who negatively reviewed a children's book published by a small Christian press, and was then confronted online by the publisher, and eventually called a Nazi. The best bit is this final spear thrown by the publisher:

Hi, Did it ever occur to you that the other 100 or so positive reviews of Leah's Way are right and that you might be wrong? Or are you the typical Gen-X whiner who is completely self-absorbed and sees herself as always picked on, a perpetual victim? Look at yourself. You pride yourself on being a critical bitch, pampered, on a college scholarship that obviously led to nowheresville, you're a failure in life, you judge books not on their merit but on your own prejudicial beliefs, and like a typical liberal you are only tolerant of people who think like you do. Liberals are the most intolerant people on the planet, all the while "preaching" tolerance. Huh? You picked on Leah's Way solely because your biases predispose you to hate it. That's not a critic, that's a propaganda machine like Goebbels was under Hitler. The only good news is that people like you, and you specifically, don't matter. You're so inconsequential that it is like you simply don't exist. Don't bother responding. I won't bother reading your response, and you'll have your attention hoping nature's worst nightmare come true--you'll be ignored. Enjoy the rest of your miserable life. You should; you're the only one who cares about it or who will notice.

That's the way to sell a book!

I'm somewhat disappointed with myself that I spent more time reading the reviewer/publisher feud than Ed's reasoned argument. It's like staring at a car crash instead of heading in to the library. In my defense, it's a pretty entertaining car crash, go judge for yourself.

Some moaning about school followed by New Comics Reviews

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I had this all ready to post last night, but stupid Blogger wouldn't let me. I'd still be sitting here wondering what to do if Jumbotron 6000 hadn't posted the answer. If you're having similar problems, go delete all your cookies, that should fix it. Big thanks to Jim.
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With classes done for this semester I’ve lost all markers of time in my life. I spent all day today thinking that it was Saturday, and wondering why no one else was home. It’d be fine if I didn’t have work left to finish, but that’s not the case.

I’ve got such a stupid amount of writing to do over the next two weeks that I don’t know where to begin; I’ve responded to the challenge by hiding from it for the past five days. I’ve got to go talk to my professors and tell them that I don't know what topic to write on, but I’m afraid of their unanswerable questions, like, “Why didn’t you come in earlier?” To which I can only reply, "I thought the problem might fix itself while I was sleeping."

I might have mentioned it before, but I constantly have these moments in my life when deadlines are caving in on me and I stop and wonder, “How in the world did things get this to this completely disastrous point?” I think I’ve got one of those coming in about a week.

Perfect time to do comic reviews, then.
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(Plenty of Spoilers, so stop reading if you want to be surprised by any of these).

Maybe it’s my impending academic apocalypse, maybe it’s the dazedness brought on by constant napping, I don’t know, but this week’s comics all seemed really good.

Green Lantern: Rebirth #5 was the first one I read. There’s more stuff right here than there is wrong, which in the end is a compliment, backhanded though it may be. The battle between Hal and Sinestro is well done. We get a sense of the scale that they’re playing on, and I loved all the long shots that just showed streaks of light darting at each other in the distance. Most of the credit here I think has to go to Ethan Van Sciver. I’ve been critical of Van Sciver’s work in the past, and some of the anatomical oddities remain, but overall this is a well drawn comic. The battle scenes are visually interesting and make excellent use of the outer space setting.

Johns does well on his end too. There are some good scenes, like Hal turning back to the fight with a smile, and Sinestro’s exit line, which doesn’t quite work, but I see what he was getting at. John’s shows the hate between the two, but also that they like the challenge of fighting each other. It’s one of those “each one needs the other” things, but it comes off okay. Also nicely done is the little pep talk scene with Hal and Kyle, which, despite the fact that it’s been done in every issue Ron Marz ever wrote of Green Lantern, shows some good interaction between the two.

There are problems with the issue, like Hal’s initially interesting and then tedious comparisons of his ring to a jet, or the dual villains of the piece creating a false ending when Sinestro leaves. Also, we see a hint of Johns’s hysterical Batman at the end, which I loathe. However, overall this issue, and this series, has more good moments than bad. This miniseries could’ve been a car wreck, and it wasn’t.

Lex Luthor #2 goes a long way in restoring my faith in Brian Azzarello’s ability to write anything other than 100 Bullets. Azzarello’s building a complicated picture of who Lex Luthor is and how he fits into the world around him. I was struck after reading this issue how satisfying it was, and yet, how little happened. Nearly the whole comic is taken up by Luthor’s contract disputes with a union, which hardly sounds like it’d be interesting, but somehow it is. The appearance of Bruce Wayne on the final page shows how carefully Azzarello is constructing this story, as everything Luthor says earlier in the issue about Superman could have been said by Batman as well. Azzarello has arranged the pieces to show how similar Luthor and Wayne are, and I imagine later issues will deal with how the two are distinct from one another. It’s a quiet story, and not the sort of thing everyone would be interested, but I definitely am.

Y the Last Man #32 has a fill in penciller, and while they’ve had good luck with fill ins in the past, this one falls a bit below the standard set by series regular, Pia Guerra. I had hoped that if there would be another fill in that it would be done by Goran Parlov, who did the Arizona issues a while back. Parlov’s work was similar to Guerra’s but just a touch better, I thought. This issue’s penciller, another Goran (what are the odds?), Goran Sudzuka, is just a touch below what the series is used to. The storytelling is capable, but not quite as professional as Guerra’s work.

The story itself also seems off this issue. Although significant developments occur, for some reason the book feels like it’s treading water. Yorick’s interaction with the Captain feels like something we’ve seen before, and while I’m glad Vaughan didn’t make her a nut, I almost wish he had in order to add some interest to the scene. Also, the relationship between the doctor and 355 changes, but I can’t see it having significant effects on the dynamic between the three leads. I hope the crew isn’t at sea too long, however, the next issue at least will likely be taken up with this voyage too, unfortunately.

A last note, I liked the cover and I hope this cover artist sticks around for a while.

Take me down to Basin City, where the grass is grey and the girls are pretty

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Finally got around to seeing Sin City yesterday, and although I think I need to see it again to fully appreciate it, I thought the movie was good. As with any adaptation where I’ve read the source material, much of the time I was watching for how certain scenes were staged, whether the various elements worked in a different medium, and for what matched the original and what didn’t. Also, as the group I went with were not “comics people,” and hadn’t read the books, I was overly conscious in trying to anticipate how they and the audience at large were perceiving various bits and pieces. As a result, in our discussions after the movie, I found that I was much more critical of it than the others had been. For example, my criticism that the dialogue felt stilted in places was met with responses that it was simply characteristic of the genre.

What I thought was interesting was that there were certain scenes that I thought were acted badly, or maybe just stiffly, by actors that I know are capable of doing those kinds of bits well; so the movie is frustrating at times in terms of directing. However, there are some surprisingly good performances too. Two of the best performances in the movie come from Mickey Rourke and Powers Booth, who I generally consider to be two of the worst actors around. On the drive home I said that I kept expecting Jon Voight to appear and complete the trifecta. For Powers Booth, maybe it was that the movie required the sort of overacting that comes so naturally to him. Mickey Rourke disappears into the role of Marv and rarely surfaces as himself. Benicio Del Toro is also unrecognizable; between his acting and his makeup, if I hadn’t known beforehand I could’ve watched the whole movie and not known that it was him. My favourite performance in the movie was Rosario Dawson as Gail. She wasn’t Gail, but the character she plays was a hell of a lot of fun.

I was disappointed by the woodenness of Clive Owen’s performance, particularly because I know he can do better. Everything he says in the movie has a ponderous weight to it. As he responds to Gail’s taunts in one scene he tells her twice, “Not now Gail.” However, instead of a lighter, “Not now Gail,” followed by a more serious, “Not. Now. Gail.” He delivers the line both times the second way, with the same heavy emphasis, thus paradoxically robbing it of any emphasis. This heavy delivery might have been okay if it just happened here, but he does this with almost all of his lines. Michael Madsen’s performance is also disappointing. All of Michael Madsen’s scenes with Bruce Willis are acted broadly, as if they were in a play instead of a movie. Thinking about it now, though they don't feel right in the movie, I think those scenes actually would have worked on stage.

Like some other reviewers, I thought the movie got better as it went. The dialogue in the early scenes particularly felt clunky and unnatural. However, it occurs to me that the first time I read any of the books I thought the same of the dialogue there. It’s only over time that I’ve grown accustomed to it and stopped noticing that people don’t really talk like that. Despite my reservations about Clive Owen’s acting, my favourite sequence of the three used in the movie was Dwight’s, which may be because I’m the least familiar with it, as The Big Fat Kill is the only one of the books I don’t own. The Tarantino directed scene therein is a highlight in the movie, and I wish he’d done more. One of the criticisms that the others and I had of the movie was that we thought it would have played better if the different stories had intercut with one another more, instead of just letting the Marv and Dwight segments play out in full.

As with the comic, the greatest innovations come in the visuals. There are some beautiful shots in the movie; I think my favourite is still the one from the trailer of Bruce Willis leaning against the tree in the snowstorm. When I got home I flipped through That Yellow Bastard and was amazed at the number of little details they kept the same, from the mountain road Hartigan drives up when he’s chasing Nancy and Junior, to the table he’s standing on in the motel room. I was bothered by the overhead long shots of cars driving, as they looked unnatural and fake, much like the cgi in video games, but up close all the cars looked great. I particularly liked the bits when the cars would come flying over the crests of hilly streets. The spot colour worked well in most places, but I wish they’d reined it in a little. Miller put out two full minis before he first used colour in The Babe Wore Red, and I wish the effect had similarly been used sparsely in the movie to make it more surprising when it did show up.

As well, I would have liked the music to have been a little more restrained. I was curious about how the music would be integrated into the movie, as that was one aspect that is obviously entirely absent from the comics. Rodriguez applies it with a heavy hand, and I don’t remember there being any scenes that didn’t have music going constantly in them. While I didn’t notice the music much in the beginning, in the last few scenes it really started to get on my nerves.

Again, though, I’m just being hypercritical. Everyone I went with thought the movie was from good to great, and I know for certain that I’ll watch it many more times when it’s out on DVD. I may even see it in the theatres again if someone catches me in a moment of weakness.

Oh, and one last note, Elijah Wood is one creepy bastard. I’ve always thought so, but between this movie and Eternal Sunshine, he seems to be working overtime lately not to get typecast as Frodo.

Multimedia assault

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Geekgasm! Here’s a look at the first poster from the upcoming Superman movie:


(found at MovieWeb)
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At Batman: New Times, the full version of their movie (originally due at Christmas 2004) is finally up. I can excuse their lateness, though, as I have a lot of problems being on time myself.



It’s a computer animated short, done in a Lego style like the Spider-man: Peril of Doc Ock from last year. Like the image above shows, the movie features an all star cast for voice talent, with the standouts being Adam West and Mark Hamill reprising their roles as Batman and the Joker, respectively.

Although the Batman movie is technically well done, I didn’t like it as much as I liked the Spider-man one. New Times decides to play the whole thing straight, which is surprising on two levels. First, they’ve got Adam West playing Batman, and they get him to do it seriously, which seems a bit of a waste. Moreover, I didn’t know Adam West could play anything without camping it up, never mind Batman. Second, the movie is done in Lego for God’s sake. I think a little deprecating self-referentiality should be a given when you’re working in a world of toy building blocks, but maybe that’s just me.



Here’s a link to the excellent Spider-man Lego movie, so you can watch both. I’d think watching the Batman first will prove more enjoyable, as it definitely suffers by comparison the Spider-man movie.
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Over at Des’s site, Megan used her semi-weekly guest stint to link to a transforming Citroen car commercial current airing in the UK. Maybe it’s here too, I just haven’t seen it. If I’m not mistaken, the city in the background is Vancouver, and the song is the saucily titled “Jacques your body,” by Les Rhythmes Digitales, in case you were wondering. It’s a lot of fun, and I’ve been watching it over and over since Des posted it a couple of days ago.

You can see how far transforming car technology has come in just a few short years in this clip of a transforming Beetle from a while back. Of course the second guy didn’t have a whole studio behind him.
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And just to show that you really can find anything on the internet, here’s a link to one of my all time favourite videos, A-Ha’s “Take on Me”. If you haven’t seen it, shut up, you’re reminding me how old I am. The story in the video involves a romance between a woman and a comic book character, which is cooler than it sounds. I think the video was produced in Britain, and it’s interesting to note that just like in British comics, the villains of the piece are not super-powered world destroyers, but police types with truncheons.

Deep breaths, deeep breaths

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What a bunch of assholes.

Yesterday I linked to MovieGuide.org, a Christian media watchdog group. After reading their outrage on Sin City, I took a look around the rest of their site and came across this:

Moviegoers Reject Movies
with Strong Homosexual Content

The Bible strongly condemns homosexual behavior, so it’s not surprising that MOVIEGUIDE®’s annual study of the major movies released by Hollywood show that moviegoers do not spend their money on movies with strong or very strong homosexual content, such as KINSEY, SAVED!, SHE HATE ME, HEAD IN THE CLOUDS, DODGEBALL, BEING JULIA, and TYING THE KNOT.

and

In fact, movies with strong homosexual content averaged $14.1 million and movies with very strong homosexual content averaged less than $1.2 million at the box office, but movies with strong Christian content earned about $98 million per movie!

leading them to conclude

People clearly do not like to see strong public displays of homosexual behavior, now matter what they think of the sinfulness of such behavior in people’s private lives.

Like I said before, what a bunch of assholes. I usually don’t respond to stuff like this, because it’s a bottomless pit, I could keep throwing arguments at it all day and it’ll have no effect. But having run across an article this stupid, I’ve got to say something. First, that’s an interesting selection of movies that they’ve picked out there. Aside from Dodgeball, those are all smaller, art-house type movies, they don’t expect to draw big audiences. Using those to prove your point is deliberately skewing your results. It’s like saying that the poor turnout for Frida and El Mariachi shows that audiences hate Mexicans. The only mainstream movie in the bunch, Dodgeball, did draw audiences, and MovieGuide themselves point out that it was in the top 25 movies in box office returns. (Side note: did Dodgeball have “homosexual behaviour”? I saw the movie, but I don’t remember that. Of course, my definitions and MovieGuide’s definitions on what constitutes homosexual content may vary).

Secondly, in stating that movies with Christian content did better at the box office than movies with homosexual content, it’s interesting that MovieGuide doesn’t offer any examples of the movies they consider to have strong Christian content. Also convenient is the fact that they only give a dollar figure for last year, with The Passion of the Christ padding the figures. Doing so means that their sample size could be six movies, five of which made zero dollars and The Passion, which made six hundred million. Actually, would The Passion be considered as having strong Christian content? You know, considering it was a two hour long beating? Don’t get me wrong, I liked the movie, I’m only half snarky as a I ask the question. What constitutes strong Christian content?

Also, regarding the conclusion that audiences reject media with homosexual content, I know the site’s name is MovieGuide, but it seems an oversight- or willful blindness- to exclude the gay presence on TV, with shows like Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. While both shows are problematic in certain respects- Will and Grace particularly- both are extremely popular, and I don’t think that MovieGuide is concerned with differentiating between positive and negative portrayals of homosexuality, just in stamping all portrayals of homosexuality out altogether.

Crap. Look at how much time I gave these people.

A bunch of stuff I should just leave alone

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One of my housemates just spilled soup on his laptop. I really feel for him because it’s something I can see myself doing and then kicking myself over for years afterwards. So we’re running damage control and I do a search for "soup on laptop" - which turns out to be a surprisingly common problem- and in my results I find this piece of stellar advice at the PC World website: “Never put your laptop (or any PC) in the dishwasher.” Wow, you do learn something new every day; in this case it’s that there really are no limits to the dumb things that people will do.
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Until I see Sin City I have to amuse myself with the reactions to it, like this one from a review that Ian Brill referenced: “Filmmaking virtuosity aside, SIN CITY is despicable.” He's fighting so hard not to like it. You can read the rest here; it looks like it’s a Christian media watchdog group. Like I said yesterday, even (or maybe especially) the negative reviews make you want to see the movie.
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Over at The Savage Critic, which is one of my two or three favourite places online to get comic reviews, Jeff Lester makes a couple of good points, first regarding DC Countdown:

it made me actually kind of sad: I mean if I assembled a list of all the DC titles from the '80s and '90s that deserved to be shit on, the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Justice League would probably be at the very bottom of that list. And yet, this is about as thorough a shitting on as one can imagine (well, L-Ron didn't come out and skullfuck Blue Beetle's exit wound, but maybe they're saving that for the "Director's Cut.")

I didn’t really need to include that last bit, but it made me laugh out loud when I read it. I think this quote encompasses my biggest criticism of DC Countdown in that it colours the previous material. You can’t read JLI now without considering Max Lord’s actions as having a dark undercurrent, or at least the writers of this book don’t want you to be able to. I can imagine that being more acceptable for a book that no one read or liked, but to do it to the Giffen/DeMatteis run, like Jeff says, of all things, seems to be a myopic and mean-spirited move by creators who I don’t think are either of those things. I can’t think of a more symbolic way to signal the end of fun in DC comics than to have Maxwell Lord shoot Blue Beetle in the head--well, unless Max had first spraypainted “fun” on Beetle’s chest and then shot him with a bullet engraved with the word “the end,” that might be a little more symbolic.

I think that’s all I have to say about Countdown.

Jeff also articulates my reaction to the latest issue of Batman, be warned, there’s spoilers:

BATMAN #638: There was that great issue of Hush where it seemed like Jason Todd was back, and I knew, after it turned out to be a red herring, it would only be a matter of time until Jason Todd really did come back. Because that red herring was so much more exciting and unexpected than the rest of the story Loeb had lined up, it was only a matter of time before another writer went for it. Looks like Judd did (although who knows? Could be another red herring, and the Red Hood is really Aunt Harriet…) although the main problem is, really, it's not nearly as exciting the second time around...

He nails my feelings on both the “Hush” arc and this issue; I don’t have anything I can add to this.
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And in my ongoing mission to plumb the depths of poor taste, a side note: The bit about L-Ron skullfucking Beetle’s exit wound reminds me of a story (you know this isn’t going anywhere good). A few of my friends went and saw David Cronenberg’s Crash when it was in the theatres, and they hated it. If you don’t know, the movie is about people who are sexually aroused by car accidents and accident victims. As my friends were walking into the underground parking, mocking the movie, my friend Kirtus almost gets hit by a car heading into the parking lot. He yells his surprise, and my friend Alvin says, “If you’d gotten hit, I would’ve run over and thrown it in you.”

Pure comic genius.
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I can only imagine the sorts of hits I’m going to get after that. I got my first person here yesterday looking for “rimjobs.”

"Misanthropic nihilism"

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Sin City seems to be garnering a favourable response overall, as the reviews collected at Rotten Tomatoes show. Even the negative reviews make the movie seem like it’s worth watching, with quotes like this, “after half an hour spent drooling over its visual splendors, I found the movie every bit as sickening as its creators intended it to be, minus the kicks they so palpably got out of making it” or this, "This big-screen treatment of Miller's graphic novels is a soft- core marathon of stylized mayhem, flesh-pot excess and cinematic pretense." The heading for my post today is another choice phrase referring to the movie.

Roger Ebert’s review of the movie is an interesting read, particularly this quote:

it was a masterstroke for Miller to find a compromise between the cost of full-color reproduction and the economy of two-color pages; red, green and blue also make their way into the frames. Actually, I can't even assume Miller went the two-color route for purposes of economy, because it's an effective artistic decision.

Never mind mainstream acceptance of comics, how about mainstream understanding of comic book aesthetics? You can actually see the light bulb turning on here.

It’s funny, I’m reading the reviews like I normally read movie reviews, skimming and trying to avoid plot details. But then I remember that the movie is a shot by shot remake of graphic novels that I’ve read several times. Even more than usual, I’m not going for the story but for how they tell it. I’m seeing the movie on Tuesday, I think, and I’m going to be waiting impatiently, hopping foot to foot until then. Yes, just like the pee dance.

Among the compliments he has for the movie, Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers says: “Better yet, the creator of the child-friendly Spy Kids trilogy has now made an R-rated movie that no sane person should let a child near.” Which raises something that I hadn’t thought of, there are people that are going to take their kids into this movie. I remember when I saw Kill Bill in the theatre, during the anime sequence I looked over and there was a couple walking out of the movie with their kid in tow. I wanted to go yell at them, “What made you think this was a kids’ movie? It’s called Kill Bill for God’s sake! And like Quentin Tarantino is known for his family movies. Did you not see a commercial before coming?” After I told this story to Janis, she reported back some days later that she too saw a family with a child walk out when she watched Kill Bill. How stupid. And yet, somewhere right now, someone is stalking out of Sin City dragging their kid, indignant at the filmmakers.
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Abhay Khosla, who I think is the funniest person talking about comics, has the best read on DC Countdown I’ve seen so far. I wasn’t as critical as he was, but he raises a lot of the same issues I had with the book.
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And finally, a couple of days ago Mike Sterling had an idea on how he could help promote Free Comic Book Day. I don't know if I keep forgetting to link to his post because I'm absentminded or because I'm desperately trying to rid myself of the image. Either way it's out of my head now and on its way into yours.

Cranky, wine-soaked reviews

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My presentation this morning went well, or at least it seemed so to me. I went in with two hours sleep, no breakfast, and no direction on what I was going to say. I knew the text inside out, I just didn’t know where to start. I wound up just riffing for an hour, and I think it made some sort of sense.

Afterwards I went to the pub, and then to a wine and cheese type thing, and then back to the pub, and then to a long lecture in movie form, and then barely stopped myself from hitting the pub again. Two visits in a day is enough, I think; three would make me Warren Ellis. I’m nursing a bit of a wine headache, so I’m crankier than usual as I start these reviews.
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Speak of the devil.

Ultimate Secret #1 - I’m a bit of a slow learner sometimes. Luckily, though, Warren Ellis has time to teach me. See, despite being bored to the point of abandonment by the slow pacing and empty issues of Ultimate Nightmare, I picked Ultimate Secret up without even flipping through it, reasoning that the Steven McNiven art would be enough to satisfy me. However, this issue is so light on actual stuff happening that there’s nothing for McNiven to draw. I can understand and appreciate this being a chapter in a larger story, but there isn’t even enough happening to merit calling this a chapter. There’s a space shuttle and someone comes to blow it up. That’s it. That’s the whole comic. That’s not a story, that’s about a third of a story. Today, on his mailing list, Bad Signal, Ellis says while talking about Promethea:

You can go anywhere for works that are about nothing but the plot. Hell, pick up a Tom Clancy novel, there's nothing but plot in them. Books that are about nothing but ideas and beauty and connections are few and far between.
Fuck the fanboy obsession with plot content as the only yardstick of value-for-money in fiction.

He’s talking about Promethea, but it also sounds like he’s responding to criticisms that plot movement in his last few series has been lacking. I’d be happy if the ideas in this book, or the dialogue, or something - it doesn’t need to be plot- was strong enough to interest me for the time I was reading it, but there’s nothing here. You can’t give me an empty comic book and then think it unreasonable when I’m nonplussed. If speculations on warp engines are meant to take the place of story, then we’ve been misunderstanding each other on what a comic should be. I won’t be visiting this book again without hearing significantly good word of mouth.

I think I’ve mentioned before that my comic weeks tend to all follow the same pattern, the books will either all be good, or all be middling, or all be bad. I don’t often have weeks with one standout and everything else sucks, or vice versa. Whether that’s because the books are all on the same level, or the experience of the first few colours the rest, I don’t know. But it sucks getting into the first books and having them not be good, and then looking at the rest of the pile knowing where it’s headed. This week I read Countdown first, and I was half-way through Ultimate Secret when I started to get a bad feeling about how the rest of the week was going to go.

Spider-man #12 - Mark Millar’s Spider-man started off strong in the first few issues, but there hasn’t been anything new or exciting since the scene early on when Peter Parker swung through Manhattan in his civvies. I don’t know why that scene resonated with me, but I loved it, and it’s been carrying this series for me since. The climactic fight this issue is so-so, and the webbing trick during Mary Jane’s fall doesn’t really seem plausible. The letter on the final page was a nice touch, and made this an acceptable buy, but we’ve seen a similar device in Alan Moore’s story in the 50th issue of WildC.A.T.s. I’m glad Millar’s run is done so I can stop my inexplicable buying of this title.

A final note, Aunt May adds to my “Can you believe…” count as she utters, “Can you believe it lay empty all those months and nobody wanted to live in it?” I’d be okay with Millar’s abuse of this line if every “Can you believe” was followed by a spit-take by the other character in the conversation. “>Pffffssshhh<>

Astonishing X-Men #9 – Another book that’s slipping into “Why am I buying this?” territory. The next issue (which I hope is the end of this storyline) will tell for sure, but this whole plot seems right out of left field. Minor story details rankled me too; for example, I’m pretty sure the plane flying through the building and then turning around to fire at the team defies several laws of aeronautics. Wolverine’s “He’s back” spoken with wide-eyed wonder was completely inappropriate to the character, and the line would have been more appropriately spoken by anyone else in that scene. As I said, though, it’ll be the rest of the story that tells whether this was good or bad, right now it’s acceptable.

I was going to say that Cassaday’s art looked rushed, but as I look back through the issue I see that it’s only his work on Colossus that I don’t like, everything else is uniformly strong.

Fantastic Four #524 – Waid and Wieringo save an ailing week with a nice close to their run. It’s quieter than I expected, but quiet for the FF does not equal quiet in any real world sense. There’s plenty of action, a couple of funny bits, a surprisingly risqué moment at a strip joint, and it’s all only slightly, if understandably, corny. This isn’t great comics, but it’s good comics. In a perfect world every comic would have this as a minimum standard. I hope that’s not damning with faint praise.

All in all, a fine tie up to a run that’s as good as anything on this title post Lee-Kirby.

I go now to pass out.