Sean T. Collins has written about comics and popular culture professionally since 2001 and on this very blog since 2003. He has written for Maxim, The Comics Journal, Stuff, Wizard, A&F Quarterly, Comic Book Resources, Giant, ToyFare, The Onion, The Comics Reporter and more. His comics have been published by Top Shelf, Partyka, and Family Style. He blogs here and at Robot 6.
(Provided that I deem them suitably fabulous, your name and message will be considered eligible for publication unless you specify otherwise.) Review Copies Welcome
Not to be a vulgarian, but holy fucking shit, this is what Herbie comics are like? I mean, I knew the basic look and set-up, taciturn fat kid with a lollipop is actually a terrifying war machine with godlike powers of destruction, it's from the '60s and it's a funny in a weird art-out-of-time way. But my God! The comedy in this thing is a solid 40, 45 years ahead of its time. You could animate this thing and it'd feel right at home on Adult Swim between Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, or make it a webcomic and stick it in your RSS feed along with The Perry Bible Fellowship,, or buy it from Buenaventura Press in a two-pack with the next issue of Boy's Club. The two-panel tier, six-panel grid pages are really just perfect for a "set-up/punchline" gag structure with zero room for milking the humor out of things by taking too long with them, and for increasing the randomness of the juxtapositions. One panel, Jackie Kennedy is swooning with unrequited ardor for a morbidly obese child as JFK fumes in the background; the next, Herbie is soaring through the air on the back of a giant parrot. You know what I mean? The actual plot-based gags are similarly non sequitur--Herbie defeating an army of ghosts by suddenly being able to call the animals of the jungle to his defense by bellowing like Tarzan is the kind of thing you'd see in one of those two-minute sequences in The Family Guy where Stewie is suddenly reenacting William Shatner's "Rocket Man" performance or Peter performs "Shipoopi" from The Music Man in its entirety. (I like The Family Guy; let's not have that debate here.) Then there's Ogden Whitney's art, which is about 12 times as strong as it needs to be to make this work and 40,000 times more realistic. But it's not just the contrast between the visuals and the subject matter that he has to recommend him; it's also the angles he chooses for the planes of action within his panels, and his choices for the strip's "actors"--the way the proud dads directly address the audience at the beginning just kills me. So does the visual shorthand he uses to depict Herbie planning his vengeance: a series of blackened thought balloons with bright red question marks in the middle. That's exactly how I'm going to picture my own rage from here on out. For me it really all comes together in the final four panels, which silently culminate in a panel so deadpan it anticipates the awkward-pause comedy of everything from Space Ghost Coast to Coast to Curb Your Enthusiasm. Hilarious. I want these books now, badly.
The great thing about cartooning is that sometimes the texture and feel of the way cartoonists approach the form can be as important as the content of the narratives. That's why, to use a famous example, you can look at an end table drawn by Charles Schulz and feel his entire world through its line.
That's a crackerjack insight no matter what, but what makes it even better is that before I read the post I just sat and gawked for a bit at the Wright panel Tom chose to illustrate his piece:
I think different kinds of comic geeks geek out in different ways: Lately I geek out by marveling at things like just how goddamn well-drawn that dude's jeans are. I'll tell you what, you draw jeans like that and your comics have instantly earned a lot of credit with me.
* Here's a bizarrely eloquent post on Wolverine by national-security blogger Spencer Ackerman. I'm impressed by the way he unpacks the character as better understood through a series of small personality-based revelations throughout his publishing history than through a comic or movie that purports to be his "origin." Also, it's funny to look at Barry Windsor-Smith's Weapon X through a topical lens. Thank god we stuck with waterboarding and didn't give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed an adamantium skeleton.
* Now that was an episode! One thing I'd forgotten to mention about last week's installment was that it was the first one I could think of to end on a series of cliffhangers in a long, long time. Because Gossip Girl moves at three times the speed of any other show, usually storylines more or less get wrapped up by the end of the hour, and then some tease-y thing is appended to the end to hook you for next week. But last time out, almost nothing was resolved. It was all gonna play out here. And it sure did!
* I can't exactly remember the details anymore, but I seem to recall some elaborate scheme last season being screwed up by Vanessa's ill-timed intervention. This time around it was down to Dan and Lily to blow up the spot. Which was frustrating insofar as it was repetitive, but also fitting: It took Dan's self-righteousness and Lily's status-fixated meddling and made them real liabilities for the characters.
* As far as the Lily end of that point goes, that was part of what made this such an effectively emotional episode. Kelly Rutherford doesn't get a whole lot to do on this show other than be rich and MILFy, but I really liked the way she slowly revealed the various aspects of the investment-payback and get-Serena-arrested schemes to Rufus, as though with each new sentence she had to redouble her efforts to deny that what she was doing was completely fucked up.
* Lily's go-along-to-get-along mentality also made her a more fulfilling antagonist for Serena's scheme than what I thought was going to happen, which was Lily trying to get the police involved and Serena trying to dodge responsibility by taking Poppy and Gabriel down herself. Instead, the roles were reversed, and Lily was the sketchier of the two. Well done writers.
* Getting back to the emotional bit, Chuck and Blair's exchange at the Russian Tea Room was interesting in that I really had no idea how it was going to go down. It was a good choice on Ed Westwick's part to smile when he lied to her about it all being a big game to him, because for serious, does he ever really smile on this show? Seeing his teeth made it seem like this was a really unique moment, somehow. I'm not sure I buy his reasoning for letting Blair go, however. Doesn't it seem like she'd be totally happy with him at this point, particularly if he was prepared to be honest and tell her he really has feelings for her, which is what he could have done at that very moment? The Missus and I were convinced he did it to spare Nate. I was really, really hoping that when Serena asked him "Chuck, why did you just do that?" his answer would be a gravelly whisper of "Bros before hoes."
* So they played Georgina's Jesus stuff strictly for laffs this time around, which is how I thought they were going to go the whole time. That's fine I guess. A good excuse to paraphrase Pulp Fiction's made-up Ezekiel verse.
* Speaking of pop-culture references, there was much rejoicing in the Collins househould when Jenny distracted Lily by explaining the plot of Twilight. 'Round these parts, you could keep me busy for a solid hour just trying to convince me that vampires in Twilight sparkle in the sunlight instead of burning up. "Wait, they sparkle? You're making that up."
* Another Vanessa-less episode! Woo! Actually, The Missus rightly said tonight "I'm glad Vanessa slept with Chuck. I don't hate her anymore!" It's true! She became more interesting through genital osmosis.
* Meanwhile you've got a lot of other interesting characters floating around who you could work into the mix on a more permanent basis. Well, mostly Eric Van Der Woodsen, whose not-a-main-cast-member status is inexplicable. But Georgina and Gabriel both have potential in a reformed-villain and/or anti-hero kind of way. Like Hawkeye in the early Avengers, or Venom.
* I'll give the '80s flashback/spinoff a try, sure. But god help us was that No Doubt covering "Stand and Deliver"? Fuck that noise. Gwen Stefani isn't fit to do Marco Pirroni's make-up.
* Rob Bricken, the Topless Robot, draws our attention to District 9, an upcoming science fiction film about an alien refugee/internment camp here on Earth, directed by Peter Jackson cohort Neil Blomkamp. This sucker is hanging right over the plate for any lazy film critic to knock their "I only pay attention to genre films insofar as I can read them as political allegories" grand salami right out of the park, but you know what? I'll eat it.
* Heidi MacDonald draws our attention to three comics projects of note. First is The Iraq War Stories Anthology, an Act-i-vate-hosted collection of, well, Iraq War stories by the students in Nick Bertozzi's Comic Book Storytelling Workshop at SVA. Nick is a blazing talent, he was my very first friend in comics, and this is an idea that seems almost necessary, so count me in. It launches on May 10th.
* Next is The Big Feminist But, an anthology of comics about contemporary feminism by the likes of Jeffrey Brown and Julia Wertz. I think feminism is in a weird place right now, where it's almost always treated as something relatively lighthearted. Granted, my main exposure to movement feminism during my adult life has been through hipstery mags like Bust and Bitch, but that really does seem the dominant approach among my age group, and it's weird to imagine, say, black civil-rights activism working primarily in that vein, isn't it? So I'm a little skeptical, but also quite curious.
Granted, I can't say Ryan Reynolds is terrible so much as he's stuck in the hopeless position of playing a fan-favorite character that became a fan-favorite due to his handling by specific writers, yet shows up solely for the purposes of having another fan-favorite character in the movie regardless of how he's actually presented, since hey - he's a fan-favorite, right? So, here we've got a Wade Wilson that cracks jokes for ten or so minutes, and thereafter turns into the Super Skrull by way of Baraka from Mortal Kombat, complete with a showdown on a thin, high ledge, and you sort of wonder how the writers couldn't quite manage the psychological muscle of Rob Liefeld-era New Mutants.
Uncharacteristic, probably ill-informed and ill-advised comics industry post
Let me be the 20th person to encourage you to read Tom Spurgeon's essay on why Diamond's rejection of James Turner's Warlord of IO is a terrible thing. I'm confused by a lot of the reactions I've seen to it. Tom can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe his point is this: Comics' Direct Market as currently constituted is incapable of reliably selling comics, even comics of obvious quality and reliability, unless they're the biggest superhero comics from the biggest publishers; and monopoly DM distributor Diamond's current actions, while nominally in the service of improving the bottom line, are taking for granted a set of assumptions that are unrelated to the genuine financial well-being of either Diamond or the DM and that make it even more difficult to sell the aforementioned comics, perhaps irreversibly so.
HeidiMacDonald can correct me if I'm wrong too, but she seems to be taking that as the end of the discussion rather than the beginning, choosing to focus on touting other options instead of improving the existing one. It's wonderful that there are other, better avenues for comics like Turner's to reach an audience. It's great that there's manga and webcomics and iTunes and bookstores. But celebrating that and pursuing those avenues is by no means mutually exclusive with addressing the problems of the Direct Market, as opposed to writing them off.
Meanwhile, Brian Hibbs, though he eventually goes for the gusto and attacks Diamond's deals with the Big Publishers for tying everyone's hands, then focuses on (for example) publishers needing to do a better job advertising their wares to retailers and customers in the Previews catalog--but even doing a fan-freaking-tastic job in an inherently cockamamie and self-defeating system like Previews is like being the world's tallest dwarf. Moreover, Diamond isn't giving James Turner that option anymore even if he wanted to take it.
Tom's said it before and it's true: The great thing about comic shops, in theory, is that they're shops that sell the comics. If you're interested in one comic, it seems logical that you should be able to go to a comic shop and get it, and once you're there, it seems logical that you should be able to look down the aisle from the comic you're interested in and find other, different comics. Narrowing that selection to the Sure Things will, I think, be about as effective in saving the Direct Market as the chain record stores in the malls with their outrageous pricing for the Billboard Top 100 albums have been in saving the music industry. For years, all you could do about the shitty selection and pricing of record-store chains was bitch about them, but then along came Amazon and iTunes (let alone mp3 blogs, let alone Napster 1.0 and BitTorrent) to eat their lunch, and when the likes of Tower went out of business no one gave a shit, not even hardcore CD buyers like me, because no one felt any goodwill toward those stores regardless of their goodwill toward music. The graveyards of the world are filled with indispensable "in-store experiences."
Pushing the price of the bestselling comics ever upward while preemptively choking off the market access of other kinds of comics at the source is a recipe for disaster. And it really would be a disaster, because no matter how crappy the local Android's Dungeon is, the Direct Market comic shop in its ideal form and even in its less-than-ideal form is the kind of sales mechanism most media would murder dozens of innocent people to have access to. I've read enough on the topic from even artsy-fartsy stalwarts like Fantagraphics' Eric Reynolds to know that even the DM's red-headed stepchildren depend on the DM and would be devastated by a collapse. And it's not necessarily at the top of my list, but the in-store experience at comic shops, good ones at least, really is something of value in and of itself. So yeah, it's a disaster waiting to happen. But it's a disaster that can be staved off, provided people, like Tom, repeatedly point out how disastrous it is, rather than whistling past the graveyard while being really glad for the latest 12 simultaneously bestselling Naruto volumes or the ridonkulous book deal Craig Thompson signed or the fact that Diesel Sweeties can support itself with merch. You can be really glad about all those things--I am!--and still want and work toward a better Direct Market.
The reason that disaster can be staved off is because Diamond's move is not, in any way, the inevitable result of the market having spoken. The Direct Market's inability to sell anything but Avengers titles in quantity is not a result of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand flipping everything else the bird. That notion is belied by the fact that there are viable alternative sales avenues that have been discovered by webcomics, manga, literary comics and the like. If no one wanted to buy them, they wouldn't make money anywhere. Instead they can't make money in, ironically, the one venue dedicated solely to their medium. That is a result of conscious decisions made by major players at various levels of the market--publishers, distributors, retailers, consumers, creators, and commentators all share in the blame. Now, however, the monopoly distributor of comics to the venue dedicated solely to selling comics is officially instituting that venue's unofficial failure as policy. They shouldn't, and we should tell them why, and we should also be able to tell them how not to without having to suggest that they wake up tomorrow as an entirely different sales mechanism. I'm not ready to give up on the DM as is.
* "'Fuck it!' Yes! That's your answer! That's your answer for everything! Tattoo it on your forehead!" When it comes to attempting to reform the Direct Market instead of storming out in a huff, Dirk Deppey is most definitely not a Lebowski Achiever.
* David Lynch has two new, unorthodox projects brewing: providing visuals for Dark Night of the Soul, a musical compilation curated or produced or something by Dangermouse and Sparklehorse (via Pitchfork), and Interview Project, a yearlong series of interviews with ordinary Americans (well, as ordinary as Americans can be when David Lynch gets through with them) conducted during a road trip and posted at Lynch's site (via The House Next Door.)
* The Onion AV Club talks to Scrubs creator and Josh Homme lookalike Bill Lawrence about the series, whose likely to be final episodes air tonight. Lawrence is impressively candid about the creative highs and lows of the show, though he and I differ about what those are. (Count me in as a fan of the increasingly far-out material of the late-middle seasons, which Lawrence thinks went too far.) This interview reminds me that I'll be happy when everything goes into reruns so my TiVo can start taping the show again; we might have been able to shuffle things around on the very busy TV night of Wednesdays in order to keep taping the show, but by the time we realized we were missing it it was weeks too late. (Via Whitney Matheson.)
* Real-world torture porn update: As I've followed the revelations of the Bush Administration's use of torture, I've been really struck by just how much the nature of the news media's basic "he said/he said" template has allowed the torturers to frame the debate. That's the way brutal methods understood around the world as torture since their inception are now referred to straightfacedly as "harsh interrogation techniques that some critics say amount to torture." It's also how the Abu Ghraib photos that most closely resemble the "frathouse antics" that torture proponents dismissed them as became the dominant frame for that scandal, to the point where when Rachel Maddow showed a picture of a man tortured to death during his CIA interrogation at Abu Ghraib on her show last night, I was stunned to realize I'd forgotten that that even happened. That's why releasing and publicizing the nauseating details of our torture program is so important. When you learn that someone was waterboarded 183 times in a single month, it's harder to defend the completely imaginary "one and done" super-awesome terrorist-breaking conception of waterboarding concocted by the torturers and the Internet and think-tank tough-guys who fawn over them. When you learn that we were locking people in boxes with insects, it's harder to depict the torture program as an orderly means of extracting information as opposed to the sordid province of sickos. For that reason, I fully support the release of as many incriminating photos as possible, and I hope they greatly discomfit the torturers, their defenders, and the people who, like me, spent years in blissful, even willful ignorance of the fact that it can happen here, and contemptuously dismissing those who tried to tell us otherwise.
* Before I begin, a plea: We're heading into season finale time, which means I'll be speculating a bit about what will happen. If you know what's going to happen--or at least have some educated guesses--based on in-real-life, behind-the-scenes stuff that you've read in interviews or the press, actors getting cast in other pilots or whatever, I ask that you please do not bring it up in the comment thread. I try as hard as I can to restrict myself to whatever ends up on the television, meaning the episode and the next-week teaser, and really really hate finding out about future developments because so-and-so is in some article from Variety or Jeff Jensen said something a little bird told him, so I'd like to keep the comment section free of that too.
* This episode of Lost got my heart racing like the show hasn't done in a long time, perhaps not since last year's season finale (Keamy and the freighter), or maybe even the previous year's ("NOT PENNY'S BOAT"). I think it's because it's really starting to feel like we're moving toward some major showdowns--Locke confronting Jacob, whatever "The Incident" is, Jack trying to set off the bomb, maybe some revelations about Richard and/or that Annie girl that Li'l Ben was friends with in portentous fashion a few seasons ago who we haven't seen or heard from since--with the end in sight, and suddenly I realize that anyone's probably fair game to go.
This has been a harder trick for the show to pull off now that it's pared down the original cast so much. Boone and Shannon were relatively easy marks, Charlie started as a core character when the show was depending on Lord of the Rings fandom to boost ratings but by the time he was killed he was the definition of a supporting character, the Tailies (even Eko) didn't get to stick around long enough for their deaths to be real hard work for the writers, Michael got the shit end from the start of his heel turn so sending him out like a punk wasn't a huge risk, Walt's aging gives fans agita every time he shows up so people don't seem to mind that he's gone, Vincent seems to have undergone Charlie's basic trajectory from foreground to background, the redshirts are the redshirts (despite the occasional for-fun elevation of the likes of Arzt, Nikki & Paulo, and Frogurt), and I don't hear too many people clamoring for the return of Claire, Rose, and Bernard from parts unknown. (I love me some Rose & Bernard, but I know I'm in the minority.) Heck, even most of the major Others like Tom and Mikhail are dunzo. Obviously the show has kept up the mortality rate by offing freighter characters (and newbies like Cesar), but while the freighter gang is fun, I don't feel as attached to them as I am to Desmond, Penny, Ben, and Juliet, let alone the remaining original castaways.
So along comes this episode, and all of a sudden we're getting tons and tons of foreshadowing that There Will Be Blood between Sawyer and Juliet, while Jack and Locke are involved in high-stakes Island brinksmanship with forces beyond their control and characters with demonstrably few scruples. And since this is the show's penultimate season finale, when it sends the message that anything could happen to characters we've cared about for a long time, I believe it. Which makes for exciting television!
A lot of people have brought up how these characters may not want to change the future, as landing safely to LA (strangely enough) is a worse fate than crashing on the island. Sure, that's true. Kate was on her way to prison, Sawyer had nothing to live for, Locke was paralyzed and working at a dead-end job, Hurley was cursed, Rose had cancer, Jin and Sun were in an emotionally abusive relationship. Things weren't that great. But, then again, think about all the people who have died: Boone, Shannon, Ana Lucia, Libby, Eko, Charlie, Michael, and all those nameless red shirts. Is it acceptable for our heroes to say, "You know what? I didn't really like the apartment I was living in before the crash. It was too small and in a bad neighborhood. I don't want to go back there. To hell with all those good, innocent people who had to die"? I suppose Locke's view of "I wouldn't change the past because those events made me who I am today" is a bit more acceptable, but still.
I've already talked about this sort of thing in terms of the Oceanic Six's disregard for the lives of the other people on the Ajira flight; iirc I was ready to book them for criminally negligent homicide over the death of the plane's pilot. So my response when Ben pointed this out to me was this:
Nutshell reaction: Sadly, I think the morality of the main characters' actions vis a vis the redshirts is something that the show can never address without making Jack into Tony Soprano, so we just have to ignore it, more or less.
Imagine my surprise and delight, then, when saving the lives of all the people who died during their Island experience and its aftermath was one of Jack's first offered rationales for trying to go through with Daniel's plan. I kept waiting for the show to send us a big signal that we're meant to think that Jack is wrong to want to do this and Kate is right, but beyond the preexisting warped calculus of screentime-based emphasis, privileging Kate's actually rather miserable romantic relationships with Sawyer and Jack over the lives of untold dozens, we really didn't get one. In fact I think we're supposed to be irked with Kate for winding up on the sub and potentially fucking things up between Sawyer and Juliet one last time. Yes, the show tried to make Kate seem less like the most selfish person on the planet by couching her objection to the H-bomb plan in "if you're wrong you'll kill everyone on the Island" terms, but that was clearly an afterthought. Now, I suppose you could say the same thing about Jack, i.e. his main rationale for wanting to change the future isn't to save Boone, but so that he doesn't spend those few years of his life constantly fucking up and feeling guilty about it. But so far the show seems to be leaning toward the (correct) point of view that the Main Characters' thrilling adventures taking their stand down in Jungleland aren't worth sacrificing the lives of everyone else on the plane. (Meanwhile I don't think Faraday would be trying to set off the H-bomb if it was going to kill anyone except perhaps the people setting it off--seems to me like the idea is the energies of the bomb and the Island will cancel each other out relatively harmlessly--so that's why I'm not giving much credence to Kate's idea that Jack is risking the lives of the Dharma people or whoever else.)
This show is never going to be about morality the way The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, or Battlestar Galactica were about morality--it's more about the emotional consequences of decisions you make or are prevented from making than the moral ones--but I'm happy to see this addressed even a little bit. It could just end up being a one-line nod in the general direction of the idea before ignoring it entirely, a la Ben saying "who cares" about whatever happens to the other Ajira passengers, but I'll take what we can get.
* I got a good chuckle out of how Ben sheepishly tilted his head down and averted his eyes after Locke mentioned that he did, in fact, die.
* I'm kind of disappointed in the "next week on Lost" teaser for revealing that Sawyer, Juliet, and Kate all end up back on the Island somehow. I feel like the teasers have done a lot of that sort of thing this season--prematurely revealing the temporal/spacial proximity of characters who we didn't know were in the same point in the spacetime continuum, showing that people who were in a bad spot got out of that bad spot, etc.
* Hopes for the season finale: seeing Jacob, seeing the DeGroots or Alvar Hanso or whoever really runs the Dharma Initiative, seeing Annie, a flashback to Statue Time or Black Rock Time, finding out what lies in the shadow of the statue and who the people who are dropping that catchphrase are, a happy ending for Sawyer and Juliet, explosions, The Incident, Richard info...
* Comic Book Resources speaks to Grant Morrison at length about his upcoming miniseries Multiversity. As usual with Morrison interviews lately, it's compelling reading both for the ideas he trots out and, in terms of ideas he says he had to abandon for reasons beyond his control, the implications regarding DC's apparently, oh, let's say "less than optimal internal cohesiveness" over the past few years.
* My pal Ben Morse proudly presents his debut comic as an editor for Marvel.com: War of Kings: Warriors #1, containing the origin of extravagantly Mohawked outer-space superguy Gladiator. Believe it or not, the origin of this Chris Claremont creation and the basics of his race were completely unexplored up until this point. I for one was particularly pleased to see an in-continuity explanation for his ridiculous haircut.
* Of all the responses to Tom Spurgeon's recent essay on Diamond and the Direct Market, I like NeilAlien's summary the best:
The Direct Market comics shop should be the jewel in the crown of multiple comics markets during a peak time of comics craft and mass-media attention; instead it eats its own arms off
* Meet Victor Aleman Jr., recently arrested on drug and weapons charges with a Jeep full of cash and cocaine...and a cellphone sporting pictures of four severed heads lined up on a table. Florida police still have not identified or located the heads. (Hat tip: Matt Maxwell.)
* "Crazy sickness" is spreading in Nicaragua. The unexplained "grisl siknis," which usually strikes young women of the country's indigenous Miskito ethnic group en masse, basically turns people into something out of Shivers or 28 Days Later. Scientists and doctors are unable to determine whether it's physical or mental in nature--perhaps caused by ergotism like various mass-hysteria outbreaks of yore, or perhaps just a societal safety valve blown wide open. (Via Yucky Tuna.)
* I didn't mention this, but it was refreshing to see Hurley's not-so-brightness presented as a liability (in that hilarious "so you served in the Korean War?" exchange with Dr. Cheng) instead of as a method of audience identification for a change. Remember when Hurley was the common-sense character? The one who'd ask the questions the audience argued anyone would have the sense to ask in the castaways' situation? That was back when the writers' attitude vis a vis the character was "You guys in the audience are calling attention to some of the plot holes and dramatic lapses, so we'll have Hurley try to address them." Now that they're doing all this time travel stuff, the attitude appears to have switched to "You guys in the audience aren't quite bright enough to follow The Terminator, so we'll have Hurley force people to spell it out over and over." An audience identification character who used to be a compliment is now a veiled insult!
* Okay, I'm about to break my own rule and talk about some stuff Damon Lindelof recently said about what we can expect from the show in the home stretch. It's nothing along the lines of what I was saying yesterday about not wanting to hear that, like, Matthew Fox is replacing Simon Cowell as a judge on American Idol--it's nothing that's going to spoil the season finale for you. But it does eliminate some options regarding a pair of long-standing mysteries that everyone expected to be tackled in the final season, so in that sense, BEHIND-THE-SCENES-TYPE SPOILER WARNING.
* After watching last night's episode I realized just how much ground the show has to cover in its less-than-20 remaining hours. I listed some of the outstanding mysteries I hope to see addressed in this season's finale, but there are plenty more that will hopefully pop up in the final season. One of the dangling plot threads I've been excited for them to get to is the story behind Libby, the ill-faited Tailie paramour of Hurley who was revealed to have been housed in the same insane asylum, and also gave Desmond the boat he ended up shipwrecking on the Island. My assumption ever since Matthew Abaddon described his gig for Charles Widmore as "I get people where they need to be" was that Libby had the same job. But it seems we may never find out, because at some kind of nerd-media panel last night, Damon Lindelof revealed that actress Cynthia Watros is apparently pointedly uninterested in reprising the role. Lindelof says this means they can't address the question adequately, so they won't do it all. I think that's a bridge too far. For starters, she was okay with showing up for a 10-second cameo in last season's finale to tell Michael it was time to die, but actually getting to act again is something up with which she will not put? Weird. Second of all, it seems easy enough to have the beans about her true motives spilled to Hurley by some relevant character, particularly if my Widmore theory pans out. I mean, I understand Lindelof's point about telling-not-showing being kind of annoying, but leaving this hanging is much more annoying.
* Also frustrating are Lindelof's conflicting statements regarding the Numbers and what, if anything, will be revealed about their provenance. On the one hand he says they'll be revealing perhaps quite a bit more about them. On the other, he says that the origin of the Numbers as revealed in that dopey ARG from a few years back--they are the constants (!) in an equation devised by Dharma scientists to predict the end of the world, and that the Initiative's goal on the Island was to conduct experiments that might help them alter the equation and thus save the world from its inevitable demise from war or ecological catastrophe--won't come up on the show because too much of the audience isn't hardcore enough to care. This is irritating as all get-out to hear, given that the entire first two seasons virtually centered on the Numbers; fans who are interested in hearing what's up with them are not just the fans who cooked up elaborate theories based on the writings of real-world philosopher Jeremy Bentham. I guarantee you that if they close out the show without bringing this up, you'll read sooooooooooo much bitching about it from fans not hardcore enough to have followed the ARG or gone to nerd-media panels featuring Damon Lindelof. In fact it's the NON-hardcore fans who suffer from this decision the most! Now, I understand what Lindelof is saying about how there's no real answer for "what the Numbers mean"--like most numerological phenomena, the Numbers themselves are arbitrary, and their meaning stems from their reoccurrence (be it coincidence or synchronicity). That is, it's not like you'll find out why it's "42" instead of "43." But it would be nice to trace them as far back as you can, and a misreading of the audience to expect them not to care.
* I disagree with Todd Van Der Werff's contention that this episode was too plot-heavy to actually be good--one of the first times this season I've found myself at significant odds with his take--but as always his review/recap is worth your time and attention.
* Back to Libby/Watros for a second, I'm sure I've kvetched about this before, but I hate it when I find out that real-world actor issues forced changes in the plot of any movie or TV show. The most heartbreaking example of this, for me, involves a '70s film classic that I'm not going to mention because I just found out a friend of mine hasn't seen it and I don't want to prematurely disappoint him about it, but in Lost's case I hate that Mr. Eko was written out of the show prematurely because Adewale Unspellablelastname didn't want to live in Hawaii anymore. I don't hold it against the actors or whoever was at fault, mind you--it just bothers me, as a fan, that stories rarely emerge in their platonic form.
* Anyway, it turns out that Watros is going to show up on Gossip Girl soon. Not since my hope that Bart Bass's secret sex society was somehow linked to Charles Widmore has a Gossip Girl/Lost crossover flowered so fully in my mind. "Spotted in the Hatch: Golden Girl, grabbing supplies for a beach-blanket buffet with cute'n'cuddly Lotto Boy. Are these two really crazy...in love? Or will Michael go off half-cocked and shoot down their shot at love? Only time will tell--let's just hope it takes less than 108 minutes. XOXO, Gossip Monster."
* At first it seemed like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the torture of Abu Zubaydah, but it turns out that's not true, at least as far as we know and as far as she and currently available records both say. You'll no doubt be thrilled to the bottom of your heart to learn that torture is still enthusiastically supported by Dick Cheney, until four months ago the Vice President of the United States of America.
* Topless Robot's Rob Bricken seems skeptical about Gamer, the upcoming Gerard Butler action movie whose trailer you see below. I think this is because Rob is unaware that the film is directed by Neveldine and Taylor, the men behind the magisterially ridonkulous Crank and Crank: High Voltage. (The latter of which I still haven't seen, by the way--any NYC-area readers looking for a movie date, my email's to the left.) Rob is therefore forgiven for his lapse in judgment.
* I can't help but feel like giving the '80s flashback episode of Gossip Girl/backdoor pilot of Lily a hard time makes me Kurt Vonnegut's proverbial fully-armored person attacking the metaphorical hot fudge sundae, but: This very much did not work. Not because it was an '80s period piece, but because it was a poorly observed one.
* For example, in regular Gossip Girl you get maybe one big recognizable pop hit on the soundtrack per episode; the rest is comparatively obscure indie pop/rock. By contrast, the flashback material consisted almost entirely of songs that got their own segments on I Love the '80s. I've seen some people complain about the presence of over-obvious '80s props like the Rubik's Cube and Jane Fonda workout video, but none of that bothered me nearly as much as the easy-peasy soundtracking.
* The writing was also much, much weaker--hokier--than normal. It feels churlish to complain that "nobody talks like that" on a show that normally features the wit and wisdom of Chuck Bass, but seriously, nobody does those self-aware "this is the moment where you fall in love with me" things, let alone does them again later on in the evening as a callback. The dialogue and behavior of the villainous Van Der Woodsen character (dun-dun-DUN!) was similarly canned, right down to yelling "Get him!" at a pack of undifferentiated preppy '80s villain types. There was a noticeably forced infodump early on when Lily described her sister to her father and us in the audience. And so on and so forth.
* And at times the weak dialogue went beyond making the characters sound silly right into undermining the whole emotional premise of the story. The whole business about Lily trying to find her own way despite the well-meaning conformist meddling of her parents was presented in as cliched a fashion as possible in that closing "one phone call" scene, but it seemed to me the writers thought they could get away with it because of the irony that Lily will go on to do exactly everything her mother wanted her to. The problem is that that irony is just as obvious and cliched as what it's purporting to subvert. I'm bored with this character and her sister and her bad-boy boyfriend already. (Like Lily's mom, I too would take an army of Dan Humphreys over that pouting greaser.)
* Back in 2009, the prom stuff was all pretty cute. It was fun to see the mean girls fail one last time, and even though it felt like the latest off-again from Nate and Blair kinda happened because it had to, it was still well done and reflective of the fact that that whole relationship really has run its course. If I were Nate I would have responded to her request to "hold me" with a counteroffer to play a game of Hide and Go Fuck Yourself, but hey.
* Inasmuch as the Lily/Lily's Mom business was really just a continuation of the flashback material, it didn't work for me, especially that final conversation--one second Lily's really giving mom the business about having wanted to choose her own destiny, the next second she's demanding a hug?
* However, I walked away from this episode feeling great. Why? Because of the one big exception to the flashback's "Obvious '80s Smash Hits Only" rule: They ended the episode with "Doot Doot" by Freur! (That's Underworld before they were Underworld.) All is forgiven, Gossip Girl, all is forgiven.
Burma, as Delisle encounters it, is not a nakedly Orwellian police state but something perhaps more subdued although still sinister, a suffocating authoritarian regime where the population has resigned itself, uneasily, to the status quo. In trying to distil the unspoken despair he encountered in Burma, Delisle takes a deliberately understated approach, one that is at first glance deceptively casual.
* Have we lost the torture debate to the torturers and torture enthusiasts? On the one hand, leading figures in one of the country's two major political parties are now comfortable arguing in public that America should adopt the standards of the Spanish Inquisition; leading figures in the other major political party failed to exercise any oversight to prevent this from happening; the President and his administration seem opposed to practicing torture themselves but equally opposed to any consequences befalling their predecessors for doing so and bound and determined to prevent that from happening; and the he-said/he-said nature of media coverage has placed "harsh interrogation techniques" as the normative description of torture and reserved the actual word "torture" for the province of "some critics." So that's all in the "lose" column. On the other hand, I like to think that having unpalatable political figures like Dick Cheney out there proudly proclaiming their own brutality will cause people to turn away in revulsion. I don't know. I have a lengthy track record of abject, shameful, willful ignorance on these matters. I'm going to go make an ELI ROTH WAS RIGHT t-shirt.
* When it emerged in the course of Sawyer's conversation with Jack that he was going to detonate a nuclear bomb and change the course of time because Kate broke up with him, I can't be the only person who shook his head in utter dismay. My first recourse was to the old "nobody cares about the love quadrangle anymore" saw, but you know what? I doubt that that's true. Nobody on the Internet may care about it anymore, but I'm sure Lindelof is right and that his mom and people like her are totally tuning in week after week to see who Kate chooses and suchlike. (Granted there are a lot fewer people like Lindelof's mom in the audience for Season Five than there were for Season One, but still.)
* So no, that's not ultimately what bothered me about it. What really irked me is something I've been talking about for weeks now, which is how utterly selfish and irresponsible the main characters' behavior has become with regards to anyone who isn't a main character. It's fine to care about the love quadrangle, but doesn't the whole "some people are more equal than others" aspect of how much more important who Kate chooses is than whether or not the other 30 or so non-main-character castaways live or die kind of creepy? In this episode it was particularly pointed. Even Sawyer, who momentarily looked good when in the midst of beating the bejesus out of Jack he pointed out that Jack was out to steal the best three years of his and Juliet's life from them, is really just looking out for him and his when you give it more than two seconds of mid-fight thought.
* This chronic case of mefirstandthegimmegimme-itis was the case not just in Jack risking the lives of everyone on Island '77 and using the lives of everyone on Island '04 as a maguffin for his real motive, i.e. to hopefully Pound That Pussy once more someday, but also in Jack becoming a relentless killing machine, gunning down countless Dharma guards. These guys aren't cultlike Others or Widmore thugs but salarymen trying to protect the lives of an island full of scientists and janitors and schoolkids and so on. Dudes straight out of Dante and Randall's Death Star debate in Clerks, more or less. Genre pieces occasionally have such lapses--Neo and Trinity's electronica-soundtracked massacre of innocent security guards and police in the first Matrix movie is a good example--and they always bug the shit out of me.
* But ultimately, I think we have to abandon the notion that Lost is about anyone but the main characters. This isn't Battlestar Galactica, where personal needs and the greater good were constantly weighed against one another during life-and-death choices. It's a show about a bunch of people with horribly fucked-up personal lives who come to a place that violently forces them to confront the personal failures that got them where they are, and to attempt to fix them in the future. The personal lives are what matters here.
* So how did things look through that lens? Well, they weren't perfect. My ears are still ringing from the pounding of the plothammer that made Juliet launch "The Great Sub Escape" to stop Jack only to end up leading the sub crew in their Wild Bunch shootout as Jack's backup. It was particularly weird and random given that we were certainly to believe by the end of that climax that Sawyer really did love Juliet and vice versa, and that he was telling the truth when he said "it doesn't matter who I looked at--I'm with you." Kate's turnaround was just as unpersuasive--she was more dead-set against blowing up the bomb than anyone, and I can't even recall what Jack said that made her change her mind.
* Another lapse: The shockingly hamfisted Juliet flashback. The writers raced through it in order to make their pat point, and there wasn't even the mitigating circumstance of Jacob's presence to justify showing it any way other than "we just want to make Juliet's bizarre behavior seem even slightly plausible."
* But!
* The climax was really something! First of all, kudos to a setpiece that references the Sarlaac Pit fight from Return of the Jedi and the climaxes of Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Return of the King, and of course Lost Season Two all at once.
* More importantly to the show, it was really something emotionally. Smart, smart filmmaking to track the reaction to Jack's release of the nuke solely with tight closeups of the four main characters' emotionally wracked faces. And while it seems a shame to jettison the love story with the most believable chemistry the show's seen so far by killing off Juliet, that same chemistry is what gave it all such an impact--that and Josh Holloway and Elizabeth Mitchell's really gutwrenching performances. Once you saw where it was going, it actually became difficult to watch. It's easily the show's most powerful death scene this side of the execution of Alex.
* The point is, Lost is like opera, or superhero comics, or art-house kung-fu movies. In opera, the singing (at least the arias) is a spectacular representation of the emotional states of the characters. In superhero stories and wuxia flicks, that's what the fighting is for. In Lost, that's what the daring, desperate, dangerous, deadly last-ditch plans are for. Whatever its flaws, this episode made that work as well as it ever has on the show.
* And then there's the whole Locke story. Am I a little disappointed that the Locke we saw hilariously lording it over Ben, the Locke who finally gave that compulsive liar his comeuppance, isn't Locke at all? Hell yeah. Is it gonna keep me up at night, given that we're now watching some kind of skin-changer waltz around settling centuries-old grudges? Hell no! That's awesome!
* Also awesome: Casting Titus Welliver as your sinister ur-antagonist. God bless Lost and its Deadwood Cast Relocation Program. Paula Malcomson, Robin Wiegert, and William Sanderson pass the torch to you, sir!
* So that leaves us with the question of Jacob. I take it the cabin housed this other guy back when the creepy rocking-chair silhouette said "help me" to Locke? Are Christian and Claire working for him, or for Jacob? How does he get off the Island? Does Ben and Widmore's battle have any relation to the fight between Jacob and the other guy? Did everyone notice their black and white color schemes during the opening scene? Shouldn't Hurley have tried to throw himself out of the cab when a stranger knew who he was given that he was convinced people were out to get him? Just how many Island factions have shadowy global networks, anyway?
* The statue is nice and creepy. Well done, designers. Also? "It was like that when I got here." LOL!
* I wonder how long Terry O'Quinn knew he wasn't Locke anymore.
* Thinking about it now, whatever or whoever Locke is, he's not omniscient. Otherwise why go through the whole farce of browbeating Richard into showing him where Jacob lives? That makes me feel like New Locke/Titus Welliver Character and the Smoke Monster are two separate things, given the Monster's apparent role as a security and surveillance mechanism--if this guy had transmogrified into Smokey, surely he could have tracked Jacob down?
* A nice reversal: Ben spent the back half of season three trying to convince John to kill someone; Locke pulled the same trick with Ben in the space of one episode.
* It's just occurring to me now how much having the Island be riddled with tunnels and secret passages is 100% pure kids playing around in the basement. Love it.
* The whole "obliviously standing in the middle of the street facing the camera when all of a sudden a vehicle comes out of nowhere and plows into you" shot is getting a little cliched at this point. Sorry, Nadia, you deserved better.
* So that's probably the last we'll see of Rose and Bernard. I'm fine with that. I loved those characters and this is pretty much the ending for them that both they and I wanted. I just hope they end up being the Adam & Eve skeletons.
* I'm less okay with this being the end of Vincent. Which I doubt it is, if only because Lindelof said he's the one character you can count on being safe till the end of the show. Still, "safe" and "on the show" are not necessarily synonymous--just ask Walt!
* Walt better come back, man. He was a HUGE DEAL, you can't pretend he wasn't!
* Man, there are still a lot of unanswered questions, aren't there? I figured we'd get more traction on the Christian & Claire question, just for starters.
* Desmond, Penny, and Widmore also had no role in the finale.
* Meanwhile, Sun dragon-lady'd her way to the forefront earlier in the season only to recede to the background in the back half. Weird.
* I love that Frank Lapidus is a big deal. The way he reacts to everything like "[sigh] Now what?" is so hilarious to me. It reminds me of the headshaking dismay and resignation with which Mike asks Michelle what's goin' on in Utah.
* I always hope that big episodes will bring back dead characters for a cameo, but no joy this time around. Cynthia Watros, call your agent, that Gossip Girl prequel was not hot!
* The fade to white with a black logo instead of cut to black with a white logo was pretty clever. It's the opposite sketches, motherlovers! Anything can happen!
* I got a kick out of seeing the promo for the season finale of Grey's Anatomy, which seems like it will be the second time a character has been written out of the show because the actor playing him or her is an insufferable asshole. It's a different ballgame over there!
* Here's the thing about the cliffhanger: If the bomb's detonation really does change everything, then the whole scene with New Locke and Ben killing Jacob while Richard and Lapidus and Ilyana gape at Dead Locke outside would never have happened. And since I assume that that was meant to be a cliffhanger too, rather than a collection of characters we'll never see in the same place together again, I'm guessing the bomb's detonation didn't change everything.
* Here's a trailer for The Road. They appear to have changed the implied nature of the apocalypse quite a bit, which I'm not super-thrilled about. On the other hand, the cast is nuts, and I'm pretty sure I heard The Gut-Wrenching Scream.
* The latest entry in Scott Tobias's New Cult Canon series for the A.V. Club is a doozy: The Big Lebowski. It's weird: I feel like I've internalized so much of that movie that Tobias's quote-heavy take on it doesn't tell me anything I don't already know. But perhaps you'll get more out of it than I did.
* Finally, I am not a political blogger (thank your lucky stars, believe me and anyone who was around for the comics blogosphere's early years), but I have been blogging a bit about political issues that touch on the pop-cultural areas that are my usual province. I blog about torture because it's horrifying, just like I blog occasionally about real-world serial killers or atrocities or animal cruelty or even fun stuff like giant squids and sea monsters and paranormal stuff and suchlike because they're horror-related, or like I blog occasionally about drug policy because of recreational drugs' connection to making and enjoying art. (And while we're on that subject, the new White House Drug Czar says the "war on drugs" is being abandoned as a term and a rubric, which is just wonderful.) But just like I've never become a true-crime blog despite the activity of any number of gruesome murderers, and just like I've never become an animal-rights blog despite the daily avalanche of pitiless cruelty on both individual and industry levels, and just like I've never become a cryptozoology blog despite the rumored presence of any number of weird critters out there, I don't think it's in the best interest of anyone to turn every carnival of souls into a collection of links to the latest news about America's devolution into a torture state under the Bush Administration and the degree to which this will or will not be reversed under the Obama Administration. I already subject The Missus to nightly minutes-long obscenity-laden diatribes on the topic, for one thing, and her pain is your gain; meanwhile it's impossible for me to separate the issue from my years of cheerleading for the people responsible and my current and overwhelming and perhaps preening self-disgust over that, so I fully trust neither my motives nor my judgment. I also generally don't feel like talking about it with strangers or stranger-esque people. But most of all, there are any number of vastly better informed sources out there doing actual reporting on this vital matter, rather than simply stealing Glenn Greenwald's links and calling it a day like I've been doing. So if you notice a decrease in posts and links about the less sensational aspects of this soul-destroying story, that's why. I expect I'll continue to note theworstparts, though, because that's me all over.
* Bruce Baugh serves up a one-two punch of superhero blogging, reviewing Brian Michael Bendis and Olivier Coipel's House of M and last year's Iron Man and Incredible Hulk films. It's interesting to read such reviews from a guy who's plugged into the genre and its fandom and yet is coming at the specific material in question from a remove of months or years, given how much superhero commentary is aimed at the here and now.
* Tom Spurgeon reviews The Walking Dead Compendium Vol. 1. I really just love reading Tom on The Walking Dead. I don't think very many writers who take the book seriously have ever approached it outside the usual zombie-movie framework, myself included, while I don't think very many of the great writers-on-comics take the book seriously to begin with, making Tom's reviews a double treat.
"That wasn't necessary!" "The entire film wasn't 'necessary.'"
Yesterday evening, in a moviegoing experience that was like the blogger equivalent of the Yalta conference, Jason Adams, Matthew Perpetua, and I saw Crank: High Voltage. I am thisclose to slapping my hands down on the table and saying "Sorry, folks, that's it, that's all I got!" I don't even know where to begin, I honestly don't. I just wrote a long list of all the amazing, at times almost literally unbelievable things that appear on screen in this film, but deleted it when I realized what a tremendous disservice that would be to you, the readers, who really, really, really need to walk into this movie having as little idea what to expect as possible. Shit, Matthew hadn't even seen Crank 1! And I'm sure that just made the experience all the more, literally, amazing. Like an unholy cross between Chuck Norris's Invasion U.S.A., Troma, and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, the movie was wildly and needlessly experimental, and was offensive even to me at times, and had no redeeming social value whatsoever except to punch you in the face repeatedly with a fist made of entertainment. I'd be amazed all over again if I see a movie I enjoy more than this one for the rest of the year. I beg you to track it down if it's still anywhere near you and see for yourself.
I'm almost positive I've written this exact thing in the past, but even if so, it remains true: You can put up with a lot of plot holes if they're holes in something otherwise worth preserving. That's why it almost always feels cheap to kick the crap out of a flick I don't like for its lapses in logic. Certainly many of Terminator Salvation's lapses are built right into the very structure of the Terminator concept, from "Why don't the Terminators just reach out and crush their targets' skulls with their enormously powerful metal hands instead of playing them a little chin music first?" on down. These are things you'd be willing to look past in exchange for other compensatory values.
In the first Terminator film, such values abounded. The genius Stan Winston's unimpeachable T-800 design. Genuinely rich and sad performances from Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton, performances that reward repeat viewings not in that they reveal layer after layer, but in that they offer a sort of warm human comfort each time. Arnold Schwarzenegger's star-makingly brutal "performance" as the Terminator. The almost absurdist violence--fists punching all the way through human torsos, post-apocalyptic automated tank treads crushing a field of human skulls, a shootout in a discotheque, a guy killing L.A. housewives he looked up in the phone book. (I'd imagine that last bit resonated on a Richard Ramirez level, by the way.) Brad Fiedel's wonderful theme music, juxtaposing elegiac synths against clanging percussion just as the Terminator juxtaposes living flesh against a metal skeleton. James Cameron's rapidly peaking talent for blending action and pathos. But most of all, the terrifying simplicity of the basic concept:
Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
Terminator 2 has a lot going for it as well. Don't get me wrong, I saw it a couple years back for the first time in ages, and a lot of it is 100% pure government cheese, the seeds of schmaltz that would eventually blossom into the two hours or so of Titanic that weren't innocent people plunging to their deaths down the deck of a vertically sinking boat or Kate Winslet's nude scene. But T2 (the first tentpole film advertised via acronym?) was a true cultural moment--between the morphing and the Guns n' Roses song it came to define the modern summer blockbuster more than any other film this side of the Tim Burton Batman that kicked off the era--and there's something to say for being a part of that. And while the process of sanding the weird brutality of the first film down into a glossy studio sheen was already in full effect (best encapsulated in turning the Terminator into the good guy and having him shoot people in the knees) there were memorable moments and images galore: That DePalma-esque slow-motion shootout in the shopping-mall corridor, complete with sly G'n'R visual shout-out. The truck chase down the aqueduct. Danny Furlong's Public Enemy t-shirt. Linda Hamilton's survivalist-Ripley transformation, accompanied by guns that put Michelle Obama to shame. (I was also at just the right age for the scene where the orderly licks her seemingly catatonic face to strike all kinds of chords.) The T-1000 itself, dated though it might seem now--the way its head blossomed when Arnold hit it with a shotgun blast, the way it oozed into that helicopter. Robert Patrick's entire creepy gestalt--the way he'd ask passers-by if they'd seen this boy, the fact that the villain of the piece in this post-Rodney King, post-riots action romp was dressed as an LAPD officer, and that relentless full-tilt run, as courage-sappingly unstoppable in its sleekness as Arnold and his Stan Winston skeleton were in their bulk.
[Terminator 3 I skipped. I understand there was a naked lady?]
What you've got in Terminator Salvation, by contrast, is kind of like what you might get if Neil Marshall's Doomsday had been made not by a bunch of Scots gorehounds who spent most of their budget providing Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell with an all-you-can-eat scenery buffet from the craft services truck everyday, but by a committee of life-imitates-Entourage suits and former Sugar Ray video directors who refer to ideas as "properties." There's nothing in here that's outwardly insulting to your intelligence, nothing that feels like it's pandering to the lowest common denominator, nothing that demonstrates obvious contempt for the fanboy audience; in short, it's not a Michael Bay film. It's simply uninspired. It does what it's supposed to do, and nothing more.
Knowing its place as the latest iteration of one of the past 25 years' key works of pop-speculative fiction, the movie hits its genre marks, but mechanically, unsurprisingly. Michael Ironside shows up to make the kinds of people who get really excited about Michael Ironside excited, but that's essentially all he does. The existence of The Road Warrior is duly noted, while Aliens is pillaged for its mute little girl and its into-the-lion's-den denouement, The Matrix for a robot design here, a close-quarters shipful of survivors there. A bunch of cool new robots do what you've seen them do in the trailers and nothing more. The truly unpleasant, real-world evocative aspects of the holocaust wrought upon humanity by the machines are reduced to cattle-car imagery you've seen depicted much more disturbingly by, say, Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Speaking of the Tim Burton Players, Helena Bonham-Carter pops up (I'm not spoiling it, you find out in the opening credits and she's in the first scene) to do exactly what you'd expect Helena Bonham-Carter to do in a movie like this. It has a "humanistic" message in the same way as Disney movies about sports teams who overcome tragedy and win the big game for the Coach. The cornpone quotient of the ending elicited audible snorts and titters of derision from the audience. There's even the full-on Republic Serial Villain speech your Ozymandias warned you about.
Performance-wise, there's nothing remotely as interesting as what Schwarzenegger, Biehn, Hamilton, Patrick, or even Furlong brought to the table. Christian Bale commits with the same level of utterly sincere, borderline-homicidal intensity he's brought to all his recent roles, but you're left feeling that all that distinguishes his John Connor from his Batman is post-apocalyptic stubble; I liked him better in Reign of Fire. Common and Bryce Dallas Howard look and sound Very Serious. Moon Bloodgood has a legitimately awesome name and showed some spark, but in a thankless role constructed to showcase the bland tan good looks that Hollywood still considers exotic, the kind of part that if better written could have given Maria Conchita Alonso or Jenette Goldstein something to run with. Only Sam Worthington as human-machine hybrid Marcus distinguishes himself, as sort of a slightly less reptilian Dean Winters in a matinee idol's body, but he's consistently undercut by undercooked writing that avoids the most interesting aspects of his predicament and leaves his words and actions little more than cliches.
Of course the movie pushes all the franchise-specific buttons you'd expect it to, but in as rote a fashion as it does anything else. The weather-beaten photo of Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor makes an appearance, as do her prophetic cassette-tape messages to her son, but they come across as just another reason for Bale to brood. Terminators are defeated in manners that call back to the previous films' methods of dispatch, only to surmount them this time around because...because it's the fourth film in the series, I guess. Danny Elfman riffs on the original film's score in a manner just as forgettable as everything else Elfman has done in a decade. The much ballyhooed Resistance is reduced from the first film's memorably desperate underground community to an international military committee straight out of the "It's a Small World" U.N. sequences in Spider-Man and X-Men, a redux of the Nebuchednezzar crew from the Matrix movies, and metonymized groups of fighters gathered around their radios a la Independence Day. Some people cheered for the requisite utterings of "come with me if you want to live" and "I'll be back," but I sure wasn't one of them. Admittedly, the movie's hulking, skeletal, soon-to-be outmoded T-600s cut an impressive figure, with the tattered remnants of their human-clothing camouflage attempts lending them a zombified air, and there's one bona fide moment of genuine wish-fulfillment movie magic--though it's been spoiled everywhere, and the film (or more accurately its budget) seemingly couldn't wait for it to end.
But despite all those attempts at fanservice, Terminator Salvation just completely whiffs on the key component of the first two films, their set-up: An implacable killing machine is sent to kill a vulnerable person, and a vastly outmatched protector is sent to stop it. Instead of that relentless chase-movie structure, you have a convoluted morass of constant, bloodless explosions and gunfire, amid which two separate heroic protagonists drive two separate storylines that are artificially grafted together during a completely narratively unnecessary action sequence. (It features the second of the film's two you-are-there helicopter crashes, for crying out loud.) Moreover, no one is yanked from the everyday world into a nightmare war of man vs. machine, giving you something to ground yourself with--it's all nightmare all the time, but an indistinct nightmare, like a twelfth-generation copy of more vivid material strewn with shards of rebar at random. There's no hook, it's just...there.
So yeah, I could regale you all night with the movie's logical pitfalls and dropped balls, its "but why didn't they...?"s and "what was up with...?"s and "shouldn't he have just...?"s. And honestly, in some cases they're so glaring I wouldn't be able to overlook them even in a movie I otherwise loved. (Keep in mind this is no Crank: High Voltage, a film so ludicrous it can begin with its main character plummeting to his death; Terminator Salvation Is Serious Business, and therefore must rise and fall with the Maximum Seriosity of its plot mechanics.) But it's all small beer compared to the generally dull character of the film itself. I actually came close to getting up and leaving, not because I was so outraged or disgusted, but simply because about two-thirds of the way in, I knew the movie had nothing more to show me. I don't doubt that everyone involved wanted to make a really good movie, and again, I never felt insulted. But with no compensatory warmth or weirdness to make it feel less like a product and more like the product of someone's barely controllable imagination, Terminator Salvation does what it's programmed to, and that's it. It thinks it's human, but it had better think again.
* Please note that this means I have seen neither the Gossip Girl season finale nor my entirely unironically beloved Adam Lambert's American Idol finale performances yet. All in good time, my pretties, all in good time.
* Captain Britan and MI 13 has been cancelled. I was enjoying this book more with each subsequent issue, as I got to know better characters with whom I had zero personal history, and as, y'know, Dracula invaded from the Dark Side of the Moon and conquered England. So this is a bummer.
* Like me, my movie buddy Jason Adams tries and fails to review Crank: High Voltage. It's review-proof if you're trying not to ruin it for your readers. All I can do is promise that its opening sequence is more entertaining than Terminator Salvation's entire duration.
* I'm going to link to Jason's post containing some images from and links about Lars Von Trier's new horror movie Anti-Christ just so I can say I've done so. Having seen Dancer in the Dark I believe I've plumbed what passes for Von Trier's depths as much as I need to--I think he's a phony, I think his misanthropy applies to everyone but himself which is incredibly dull (I mean, just contrast the Von Trier quote Jason reprints with the Roger Ebert quote he reprints and see if Von Trier himself doesn't give lie to Ebert's entire point about the film's "despair"), and just like Jackie Treehorn I think he treats objects like women, man. There's not much I've read, pro or con, about Anti-Christ that makes me feel like I need to reevaluate this. Still, I'm a sucker for beautifully composed shots of severe genital mutilation, so who knows.
* There's some fun footage from the upcoming remake of V popping up here and there: here are two clips and here's a longish trailer. I'm catching a Battlestar Galactica vibe here and there, in particular an echo of the Baltar/Six relationship during one of the clips, which is nice; I'm also pretty happy about the casting for reasons that I'm not going to go into here for fear of it coming across as a spoiler for another show, but you'll probably know what I'm talking about when you see it. This is not to say that there's no "network TV does alien invasion" hokum in there, because there's plenty...I dunno, man, it's lizards under human masks, that's rad.
* A Grant Morrison documentary? Sure, I'll eat it. (Also, after seeing what they did with Bai Ling in Crank 2 I couldn't help but chuckle about the subtitles they use to help the viewer decipher Morrison's accent. I wonder who he considers to be his shiny lunchbox?)
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.
If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.
--Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder"
Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth
You pull on your finger, then another finger, then your cigarette
The wall-to-wall is calling, it lingers, then you forget
Oh, oh, oh, oh, you're a rock 'n' roll suicide
You're too old to lose it, too young to choose it
And the clock waits so patiently on your song
You walk past a cafe but you don't eat when you've lived too long
Oh, no, no, no, you're a rock 'n' roll suicide
Chev brakes are snarling as you stumble across the road
But the day breaks instead so you hurry home
Don't let the sun blast your shadow
Don't let the milk float ride your mind
They're so natural - religiously unkind
Oh no love, you're not alone
You're watching yourself but you're too unfair
You got your head all tangled up but if I could only make you care
Oh no love, you're not alone
No matter what or who you've been
No matter when or where you've seen
All the knives seem to lacerate your brain
I've had my share, I'll help you with the pain
You're not alone
Just turn on with me and you're not alone
Let's turn on with me and you're not alone
Let's turn on and be not alone
Gimme your hands 'cause you're wonderful
Gimme your hands 'cause you're wonderful
Oh, gimme your hands
* Tucker Stone compares the superhero-succession stories in Ed Brubaker's Captain America and a cast of thousands' Batman and its related titles. Guess which comes out on top? As a separate issue, it turns out Tucker buys Batman comics like Paul O'Brien buys X-Men comics, apparently. That's interesting to me because if there were a superhero I'd do that sort of thing for, it would be Batman, but I've never been remotely interested in doing so. Batman is my favorite superhero by a country mile, yet I've spent years as an active comics reader (let alone time away from comics altogether) not buying any books with him in it, and I'll probably do so again. (Via Kevin Melrose.)
* Bruce Baugh liked the director's cut of Alex Proyas's Dark City. I remember liking the film well enough when it came out but haven't come back to it. I think I was on some level a bit offended by the at times shot-for-shot lifts from Hellraiser. Of course, these days I really like Doomsday, so this isn't exactly a principled objection.
* This week at Scott Tobias's New Cult Canon: Brick, Rian Johnson's high-school noir. That's the kind of killer idea you see a lot of "new mainstream" comics try to make a go of but never come up with anything remotely as interesting in the execution as the idea itself, so I remember being really delighted that the whole movie was good.
* Thanks to an in-law who hails from Austin, Texas I discovered the joys of Shiner Bohemian Black Lager last summer, but to my dismay the Tri-State area is one of the few remaining regions in the US where you can't purchase Shiner products. Imagine my delight, then, when I saw McSorley's Irish Black Lager on sale at Stop and Shop circa St. Patrick's Day, and ever since. A black lager is a bit like combining the flavor of a porter or stout with the drinkability of a lager--it's like drinking smoke, and I love it. Anyway, turns out Drew Friedman drew the label. You can't escape comics even when you're just trying to get loaded. (Via Eric Reynolds.)
* Finally, I'm desperate to go see Nine Inch Nails when they play nearby Jones Beach on Sunday, June 7th, in part because it's so close by, in part because I really like the tight, heavy four-piece configuration they have right now, in part because it's supposedly NIN's farewell tour for the foreseeable future, but primarily because their setlists have been absolutely bonkers. During the first three nights of their American tour I believe they played over 40 different songs, including some they'd never before played in concert and old favorites of mine you just never hear ("The Becoming," "Last"). They've also been reviving the covers they've done on record (Gary Numan's "Metal," Joy Division's "Dead Souls," Adam & the Ants' "Physical (You're So)"--we can't be far from Soft Cell's "Memorabilia"), not to mention Trent Reznor taking lead vocals on the version of "I'm Afraid of Americans" they did with David Bowie. And apparently they're also doing things like covering the MC5's "Kick Out the Jams" with Boots Riley from the Coup and Street Sweeper. ¡Jesus Marimba!
* Back? Good. Now you know how flattered I must be that Ben claimed my goofy posts as an inspiration and model for that sucker. He wrote it with the episode much fresher in his mind than it currently is in mine--I watched it last night and then quickly switched over to have my heart destroyed by American Idol and I still haven't quite recovered from the trauma--so it's just going to be much, much better than what I'm gonna write. Plus it's just legitimately excellent, and I hope he makes a regular thing of it next season. Fair warning.
* Anyway, can you believe the stuff with Nate and Madchen Amick, and the fake boyfriend out in the Hamptons, happened this season? It feels like it was on another show! Obviously the breakneck pace of this show has been a running theme in these posts, and I think that in this episode it was clearer than ever. To use the finale's central storyline as an example, how many times have Blair and Chuck had heart to hearts just in the past few episodes? Hell, they had two or three in the finale alone, with different results each time! To swipe a term from Grant Morrison, Gossip Girl is supercompressed television.
* As I've said, this pace has some drawbacks. For one thing, the stories can get repetitive, with the same characters doing the same things with diminishing returns. For another, it can grind up supporting players--their stories move so fast that none of them seem to last longer than a three-episode arc. And of course the latter problem is a major contributor to the former.
* That's why I'm glad to see the show potentially setting up Georgina, Carter, The Missing Brother, and Eric (finally!) as main characters next season, even though I'm not wild about Georgina or Carter. The show just needs some new blood! And as Ben points out, having Georgina and Carter around will either help soften the loss of perpetually scheming Chuck and Blair to their romance, or force them out of retirement.
* Speaking of Chuck and Blair, Chuck and Blair! Yay! That said, it was spoiled for me by the damn internet, so it lost a little impact. I will say that I thought Blair's big speech to Chuck when he turned her down was very well written, though--over-the-top and epic in the way that a particularly articulate teenager might actually be, and moving.
* Ben was also right to note that this episode was SEXXXAY, the hottest we've had in quite some time. Loved Blair's striptease, loved the Serena Sideboob Showcase on graduation day and the Serena Cleavage Spectacular on graduation night. Here's the thing though: Aren't the ladies and gays in the audience getting royally gypped on the eye-candy front, just in terms of the flesh on display? Penn Badgely, Ed Westwick, and Chase Crawford are all lovely-looking guys, but how 'bout they take their tops off once in a while, huh? Hey Chuck Bass, put 'em on the glass!
* Back to the pace question, I think it was kind of hilarious what this episode allowed to go down off-screen. Nate getting hit on by the deputy mayor could have been a whole storyline! And I suppose they're saving whatever Georgina did to Poppy for later--perhaps keeping Poppy in reserve as an archenemy, like the role Olivia D'Abo plays for Vincent D'Onofrio on Law & Order: Criminal Intent--but you'd think that might have merited depiction.
* Ben gets at this in his excellent observation about Dan's peripheral role lately, but I do feel like the episode dropped the ball by not keeping Dan and Serena at least within striking distance of its emotional center. I know that Chuck and Blair are really special characters, but Dan and Serena are Our Hero and Our Heroine, and I think the show really has to watch its step in terms of keeping them interesting, involved, and central to the story. Chuck and Blair are a bit like Ben and Locke on Lost: breakout characters who are actually closer to the central appeal of the show than the leads (the mysteries and mythology in Ben and Locke's case, sleazy scheming decadence in Chuck and Blair's case). Gossip Girl will ultimately have to work just as hard to make Dan and Serena matter as Lost does with Jack and Kate.
* NYU: the affordable alternative to Yale! LOL
* In much the same way that Ben wonders if the soft-pedaled, weed-enabled rapprochement between Lily and Rufus (whose music is truly a turtleneck in music form) was done that way because of expectations for the Lily flashback spinoff that's now not happening (thank god), I'm curious as to whether the sudden season-ending interest in Daddy Van Der Woodsen stems from the character's apparent role as a villain in the spinoff. As it stood it was a bit random and kind of threw off the balance of the very end of the episode.
* I loved the Nelly Yuki quasi-reveal. I actually think Dan/Nelly would be kind of hot. Fuck it, I'm shippin' it. Delly is my OTP.
* I really liked that this was a high-school graduation episode, and that so much of it revolved around who would be Queen Bee of the Mean Girls next year. Part of the allure of the show is that it's about kids who can afford to act like grown-ups, but they're not actually grown-ups, and all these storylines about corporate intrigue and marriages in Spain and Junior Varsity Eyes Wide Shut and so on kind of obscure that. Letting them drink in ritzy bars without getting carded is one thing, but it all works much much better when the show reminds us that they're 17 and 18 years old. I mean, that's why Cruel Intentions is such a fucking scream, you know?
* Maybe having Vanessa go to school with these clowns will make her feel a little less like an afterthought. Don't forget she's still a little bit infected with interestingitis courtesy of Chuck's junk, so maybe they'll actually pick up on that instead of just throwing it out there alongside Blair being an unclefucker and how our homework was never quite like Dan's.
* I have to say I had beef with the way the ep handled the Gossip Girl/Serena grudge match. First of all I had The Missus sitting next to me the whole time complaining that what GG did to them during graduation wasn't actually all that bad, and that normal kids would probably be like "Fuck it, I'm graduating, high school's over, I don't have to care about this shit anymore, and I'm never gonna see half these people again anyway." But mainly, I feel like the show should have shat or gotten off the pot. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they'd continue to use the character and the conceit (and Kristen Bell's voice) after outing him or her, but I definitely wanted them to out him or her. But of course they couldn't, so they didn't, and they ended up having to resolve the storyline in a way that didn't really make sense. (Serena threatened to out GG unless GG showed up at the bar. Serena didn't actually know who GG was, but GG didn't know that--that was the whole point. So why was GG confident enough not only not to show up, but to drive every single other person in the class to the bar instead?) I suppose we won't find out who GG is until the final episode, and perhaps not even then, but that's really the only time they could do it--so that should have been the only time they brought it up. This just felt like wasted time.
* That said, I loved how the only people GG mentioned in her graduation-day blast were the main characters. Are we sure Gossip Girl isn't Jacob, and that text wasn't another one of his lists?
SPOILER ALERT - I talk about these early episodes as someone who's seen everything, so if you're not completely caught up with the end of Season Five, read no further
[Watched 1.1 - Pilot Part 1; 1.2 - Pilot Part 2; 1.3 - Tabula Rasa; 1.4 - Walkabout; 1.5 - White Rabbit]
* After Season Five wrapped up, The Missus and I thought it would be neat to re-watch the entire series from the beginning in the months prior to the sixth and final season. Meanwhile The Missus's parents, who are in town for Memorial Day, had decided to watch the show for the very first time, plowing all the way through the series so they too could watch the final season. Call it fate, call it luck, call it karma, but this was a pretty good excuse to start watching the show from the first episode onward this weekend.
* I'm still amazed at just how involving these first few episodes are. I've told the story about how The Missus and I caught the sneak preview of the first episode at San Diego Comic Con 2004 a million times, but seriously, we went in there with less than no expectations and left true believers proselytizing to all and sundry. That whole first sequence with Jack waking up in the middle of the jungle, seeing a labrador retriever, and then running into a horrific plane crash on the beach with shrapnel flying every place and people getting sucked into jet engines--magnificently intense television. The rest of the episode was a balance between further shocks--the giant monster roaring through the jungle, the death of the pilot--and deft little (well, okay, played to the balcony) character moments--Jack asking Kate to stitch him up, the "count to five" story. I half-worried that the show wouldn't be much fun to watch over again since I know the answers to so many early questions, but it's still a ton of fun.
* And oh yeah, there's plenty of death. I remember a big part of my attraction to the show being how it showed people dealing with the plane crash, the dead and the dying. That was actually a big plot driver in these first few episodes, especially by episode four, when the bodies in the fuselage are cremated and Claire leads her memorial service. Yet oddly, it was a much lighter show, too. Action-packed and heavy on carnage, yeah, but not the relentless parade of murder and failure that it's since become. Back when Charlie, Claire, Boone, Shannon were on the show, it was much younger and funner-seeming, even if all Boone and Shannon did at this point was bitch at each other. It was also a much less dense show, both visually and narratively--during the J.J. Abrams-directed pilot you had shots of fields of stars and sunsets, while in lieu of the non-stop mythology-exploration and multiple timeframes of Season Five you had lengthy sequences of people just climbing up stuff. Everything's bright: the white of the beach, the blue of the ocean and the sky, the green of the jungle. For pete's sake, episode three ends with a musical montage in which various pairs of characters do nice things for each other--Sayid tosses Sawyer some fruit, Jin brushes a lock of Sun's hair, Boone finds Shannon's sunglasses, Michael brings Walt his dog, etc. It's bizarre to think that Boone and Shannon won't last till the middle of Season Two, Michael will murder two people in cold blood and die estranged from his son, and Sawyer will fall in love with a woman who dies in an attempt to never have met him.
* Back then it really did seem like much more of a Lord of the Flies set-up than a science fiction one, even though even at this early stage we knew that Locke had seen the monster and been spared by it, we'd seen a polar bear, and we were catching our first glimpses of ghost-Christian. Debates about what to do with the bodies, figuring out how to get food, arguing with Sawyer over the ethical way to divvy up supplies, all of that presented the island as a lowercase-i "man vs. nature"-type antagonist that would give rise to internal power struggles. I dug that! Though I grant you it might have been difficult to sustain for six seasons. Anyway that seemed to be the implication of Jack's big "live together; die alone"
* The show also hadn't quite settled into itself yet. The pilot had a slightly different look to it, The music in the pilot, though composed by Michael Giacchino just like everything else, was much heavier on percussion, from drums to vibraphones; to my ear, the string-heavy sound we're used to didn't fully emerge until episode four, while the first recognizable theme didn't show up until episode five. Ditto the flashback structure: the pilot's flashbacks were limited to shots of the plane in mid-flight, while Kate's flashback (in addition to having unusual slow-mo lead-ins) lacked the big revelatory twist, which was instead presented in the island material (she's a criminal!). Not until that wonderful, wonderful moment in episode four where you learn Locke was in a wheelchair did the Lost flashback come into its own.
* And speaking of Locke, they were rather ambiguous as to whether or not he was a bad guy back then. That musical montage that capped off episode three ended with sinister sounds and a close-up of his scarred face. He was just one of several rather creepy things going on, from the endlessly repeating distress call to the Shining-like apparition of the man in the suit in the distance. It was quite a scary show and still can be from time to time.
* I only caught one Easter Egg: After the Monster's first run through the jungle that first night, the next morning you hear some of the characters discussing in in the background. You hear Rose (love you Rose!) say that something about it sounded familiar, and then she tells another character she's from the Bronx. I guess she recognized the taxicab receipt-printing noise the sound guys built into the Monster's clickings and whirrings. I did, however, dream that Richard Alpert was hanging out among the castaways in the early episodes, but so far that hasn't panned out.
Tom Spurgeon has posted his annual guide to San Diego's Comic Con International. This year it's a shortened version, with a mere one hundred tips and tricks of the trade. To call it a must-read is to woefully understate the case--it's a looked-forward-to annual event for me nearly on par with Comic Con itself. And in years like this when I'm not going to the Con, it takes on an added bittersweet dimension, like the comics blogging equivalent of "Soon" by My Bloody Valentine. Go and enjoy.
Tales Designed to Thrizzle #5
Michael Kupperman, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2009
32 pages
$4.50 Buy it from Fantagraphics
By now I've written about how Kupperman's humor works at some length, so you'd think it would have occurred to me by now that his humor is an entirely different animal from the vast majority of humor comics. Which it is, insofar as it's funny and most humor comics aren't. But it wasn't until this (ironically) prose-heavy issue that I realized he's not doing gag comics at all. The only four-panel punchline-driven strip in this entire book, "Ever-Approaching Grandpa," basically exists to give lie to the notion of the four-panel punchline-driven strip (and is own title). He's not content with using just the words and the visuals. I think what Kupperman's doing--with his long, digressive "stories," with his riffs on old-fashioned comic-book covers, and so on--is using the stuff of comics itself as a locus of the comedy. A grid of panels implies continuity of action, so he uses that to present an increasingly bizarre and disjointed Twain & Einstein adventure with barely any internal cohesion whatsoever. We assume that captions or word balloons will comment on the visuals against which they are juxtaposed, so he creates a how-to arts-and-crafts strip that for no apparent reason is also a brutal noir ("How to Pattern Print with a Potato, Johnny"). We've come to accept certain visual cues as meaning a certain thing, so he literalizes them so that they mean something entirely different--a phone in the extreme foreground actually turns out to be a just-plain gigantic phone; a mother's wagging finger radiates motion lines that turn out to be "super-vibrations." In his way, Kupperman's just as concerned with making comics' formal aspects work for him as Chris Ware. In his way he's every bit as effective. Goddammit this book is funny.
I went to see Crank: High Voltage when we were in Los Angeles. I had just watched that, and I thought everything else just looks like slow motion, really. I wanted to get that effect into the comics as well. To me that was just a great action film, and every action film after is going to have to try and move at that speed. I really wanted to get that into Batman and Robin.
The only way a "Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely on Batman using Crank and Twin Peaks as influences" could be purer Collins Crack is if it came with a collaborative soundtrack by David Bowie and Underworld.
I don't know whether to be furious at the lawyer for pressuring his client into a plea based on an estimate of his own skills to try the case given that he had access to consultants who would throw themselves off a building to stress a case like this can be won, curious as to what the hell Handley was facing that was worse than a 15-year potential jail sentence if the charges had been fought, or just generally dismayed that what should be the fundamental right to spend our private team reading whatever the heck we want that doesn't harm people in its creation might be decided through decisions like this one.
I think it's important to keep in mind that along with whatever hideous precedent this might set for the comics world at large, it's also destroying a specific man's life for the crime of purchasing comic books. Just a horrible, horrible story.
* I find Jeff "Doc" Jensen's Lost ramblings to be like listening to some crazy guy on a street corner scream about the Illuminati, only worse because Jensen doesn't have insanity as an excuse to wonder (as he does in the column I'm about to link to) whether when the show uses the contraction "can't" it's actually a reference to Immanuel Kant. That said, he's assembled a pretty solid list of 10 mysteries the show really ought to solve on-screen in its final season, with a promise of a longer list to follow. The list is derived from reader submissions and is generally the kind of fan-reaction-media thing the show's creators appear to pay attention to, so there's the chance it could do some actual good. He also links to the true origin of a certain notable landscape feature from the show, which was kind of cool to find out. (Via Jason Adams.)
* Maybe They're remaking Alien, more likely they're working on a prequel, either way Terminator Salvation has pretty badly soured me on this sort of thing and demonstrated that remakes/reboots/prequels/sequels aren't worth doing unless you have a crew with vision, which is kind of a "duh" but still.
* Ryan Kirk's Shelf Porn may be the most impressive set so far, but I'm saying that in large part because it appears to have the most overlap with my own.
* Normally political comics don't do a whole lot for me, but I enjoyed this preview of False Witness! The Michele Bachmann Story, an upcoming series about the, shall we say, outspoken conservative Representative from Minnesota. For starters, the sub-Chick-tract look and feel of the thing dovetails neatly with the apocalyptic, conspiratorial rantings of its subject. At the same time, it's by local writers and artists emphasizing a local angle--arguing that the Minnesota press hasn't informed the public about Bachmann's years-long trail of bizarre extremist statements--that I hadn't heard before, giving the project a unique feel compared to your average national-level broadsides. (Via Talking Points Memo.)
* I'm posting this video discussion of Ned's Atomic Dustbin's debut album God Fodder not because it's a great video (it really isn't) nor because I endorse this fellow's dismissal of Ned's subsequent albums (CRAZYTALK--Are You Normal? is one of my five or ten desert island discs), but simply because I just never hear anyone talk about Ned's Atomic Dustbin EVER. Someone should really listen to that lead bass guitar, which is used in a way beyond even what New Order did, and rip that sound off shamelessly. (Via Recidivism.)
* Sean Update: I've got a bunch of stuff floating around in hard copy these days. First up: ToyFare #143, featuring the sensational character find of May 2009--BIZARROBAMA!--in Twisted ToyFare Theater, plus brief plugs for Bat for Lashes' Two Suns, David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp, and SubwayNow.com. (What a gig!) Second, the latest issue of Wizard, which features short articles on Ross Campbell's Wet Moon, Tom Neely & Aaron Turner's The Wolf (check out Tom's site for a peak at the article), and a lengthy profile of Fantagraphics that I'm quite proud of. I think we're just a couple weeks away from a Maxim piece I'm pretty excited about, too.
Invincible Vols. 1-9
Robert Kirkman, writer
Cory Walker, artist, Vols. 1&2
Ryan Ottley, artist, Vols. 2-9
Image, 2003-2008
in the 120-144 page range each
$14.99 each Buy them from Amazon.com
I don't know what it says about me that I viewed my re-read of Robert Kirkman's creator-owned coming-of-age superhero series Invincible largely through the prism of posts by other comics bloggers--probably nothing that isn't deeply sad--but there you have it. First off, I thought of Tom Spurgeon's recent post on Kirkman's other long-running, unlikely-success indie title, the zombie-apocalypse survival-horror opus The Walking Dead, and how reading a massive chunk of it in one go reveals Kirkman's studious, in-it-for-the-long-haul pacing. There's certainly more going on set-piece-wise in Invincible than there is in The Walking Dead, but the principle is the same: For example, the titular superhero, teenager Mark Grayson, doesn't have his series-defining confrontation with a secretly villainous character until the series' third volume. Meanwhile, Kirkman takes Paul Levitz's tried and true A/B/C-plot structure and stretches it out like a slow-motion camera filming a hummingbird--major players can spend a dozen or more issues being introduced in one- or two-page snippets before we even have any idea what they have to do with the book's main character.
Naturally, reading as much of the series as you can in as short a period as possible flatters these aspects of Kirkman's writing. But moreover, they help mitigate against Kirkman's major bad habit: His characters either say exactly what they're thinking/feeling, or they don't say anything, or say "it's nothing" when it clearly isn't. There's no in between, no subtext--they either come right out and say it or lie about it. To me, his inability to write convincing human interaction in that regard is the thing keeping him from being not just a really good, entertaining writer, but a great one. Which is frustrating, because his storylines and ideas are so engaging and frequently unusual that he'd really be a top dawg if he could master emotional expression. Now, I think this is already less of a problem in Invincible than it is in The Walking Dead, because Walking Dead is relentlessly bleak and serious book whereas Invincible is a much lighter one (albeit with plenty of serious moments); Kirkman's inability to handle an emotionally charged conversation the way a great writer can has less impact in an action-adventure romp than it does in a character-driven survival-horror story. But (finally getting around to the point) it has even less of an impact when you're plowing through 47 issues in a row and really letting the slowly unfolding, meticulously planned plotlines drive your reading experience rather than having the one-issue-a-month format dictate that you dwell over every scene. You can see the whole lovely forest without getting stuck on some of the gnarlier trees.
On to another blogospheric touchpoint: In his long series of posts on Kingdom Come and '90s superhero comics, Tim O'Neil argued that Mark Waid and Alex Ross's Kingdom Come marked the rise of the "momentist" school of superhero writing, which is less concerned with soap opera or traditional plots and more driven by attempts to serve up iconic moments for the characters at regular intervals. His best example of this was from a comic that predated the movement but obviously had a lot of influence on it--Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's "For the Man Who Has Everything" and the moment where Superman says "BURN." and uses his heat vision as a weapon against Mongul. I think O'Neil was right in that this has led to an enormous amount of self-indulgent, hero-worshipping crap. It's also led to some good stuff--I think Geoff Johns, at his best, does this stuff really well. (One moment I often think of in this regard was the bit in Green Lantern: Rebirth where Green Arrow used Green Lantern's ring for a second and it totally kicked his ass, giving us new respect for GA and GL all at once.)
Kirkman, by contrast, doesn't do Momentism at all. Maybe it's just because these are creator-owned characters he just made up and they don't have a lengthy history to play off of in constructing iconic moments. But, consciously or no, I think he actually hit upon the fact that iconic moments are a mug's game for non-legendary superheroes, something pretty much every other indie superhero book misses entirely. Instead, he lets the ideas and the storylines drive the book, usually presenting the action in as flat a fashion as possible, so that he doesn't distract from the loooooooong game he's playing. In fact, outside the initial "learning to fly"-type stuff, the book's big "moments" are almost invariably Invincible being stunned or pwned or both. There are plenty of "BURN."-style moments where Invincible Finally Lashes Out Against His Enemy, but they almost invariably end in moral or physical disaster for the poor kid. It's very much not a book about how awesome Invincible is, whereas 90% of corporate superhero comics these days are about how awesome Copyright Man or Team Trademark is. (The problem there is that very few characters actually merit such treatment and very few writers and artists can pull it off.)
Which reminds me: Invincible becomes much more interesting as a character the more he gets his ass kicked. I once wrote, back when the book was young, that the difference between Invincible and other teen superheroes like Spider-Man or the original X-Men or most of the Runaways is that while those kids were all geeks or outcasts, Invincible seemed like the kind of kid who'd pull into the high-school parking lot in his SUV blasting Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good." But that was actually giving the character too much credit--he wasn't a Popular Kid anymore than he was a freak or a geek. He starts out as just sort of Generic Teen: He's good-looking but apparently never seriously considered approaching girls and never seriously approached by them, he's smart but doesn't seem to be considered a geek by anyone, he's got a crappy job but only because his dad insists he take one to gain a work ethic, he has no brothers or sisters, he reads comics but probably only because he's a character in a comic book, he's got one friend who's sort of like a more high-strung duplicate of him, etc. Even when he finally starts developing the powers he's waited most of his young adulthood to have, there's zero angst about it, and nothing illicit either--he knew it was coming, he doesn't hide it from his mom and dad, he instantly starts fighting crime. The wildest he gets with them is taking his buddy for a flight or two.
Then that series-defining confrontation occurs, and suddenly the superhero aspect of his life is the source of immense emotional pain, while at the same time he realizes that his name is far from accurate. The rest of the series, which by and large corresponds with Mark's graduation from high school and entry into college, is basically about how fast he's forced to grow up, the way the stress and danger of superhero life slowly chips away at his attempts to have a normal life, the high stakes of emotional involvement between godlike super-people, and so on. Oddly enough, Invincible is benefited in this regard by an art switch a lot like the one that happened in The Walking Dead. In that book, the clean cartoon line of co-creator Tony Moore gave way after an arc or two to the scratchier, edgier work of Charlie Adlard, just in time for the series to take a definitive turn for the darker. Here, the comparatively minimal. angular look of co-creator Cory Walker's art is swapped out for the fuller, livelier stylings of Ryan Ottley. Ottley's stuff is cartoony in a way you just don't see from the Big Two and their SERIOUS BUSINESS books anymore, outside of books like The Incredible Hercules that manage to dance between the raindrops of the Momentist events and the realists and Image Seven disciples who draw them. But more importantly, it livened the book up in a big way, just as Invincible developed more of an inner life to display.
I think this change really hit home in that aforementioned series-defining confrontation (no, I'm not going to spoil it even though I can't imagine anyone reading this deep into this review who hasn't already read the damn book). What had been the sort of light-hearted "let's make superheroes FUN again!!!" romp you see so many creators attempt, so many bloggers applaud, and so many readers ignore suddenly got ultraviolent. It was a huge tonal shift, one that the series occasionally reproduces, though it does so infrequently enough for the move to retain its ability to shock. (The book even has some meta-style fun with it in one issue, prudely cutting away from multiple sex scenes only to end the ish by depicting a horrendous beating and dismemberment in full, bloody, intestine-ripping detail.)
In these moments Ottley's good-natured art suddenly feels like it's being used as a weapon, while Kirkman demonstrates that he's ready, willing, and able to completely upend the book's status quo. Following his mutually unsatisfactory sojourn at Marvel, Kirkman would be the first to tell you it's his total control over the book and its characters that enables him to pull off stuff like that, that enables him to tell you "anything can happen" and mean it and convince you that it's true. That's probably the greatest pleasure of reading nearly 50 issues of Invincible in a row: You've watched Kirkman grow as a writer, Ottley grow as an artist, and Invincible grow as a character (though you haven't watched Bill Crabtree grow as a colorist, because he started off awesome and stayed that way--pastels! Brilliant!), so by the time you get to one of those anything-can-happen moments, you're so attached to the character and the book he stars in that you just race through the pages hoping that whatever happens isn't so bad.
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