stuff i made

-A quick preview of Adam Warren and Emily Warren’s Empowered: Ten Questions for the Maidman, a one-shot released last week that was pretty dope.

–Graphicly just redesigned their site, and I took a quick look at what works.

-This is the remix: I took this post about X-Men First Class and turned it into this post, inviting dozens of comments from idiots about race. That sorta thing is sorta why I hate writing about race for a mass audience, because sucker ducks always got something to say. Whatever though. I’m gonna go sleep on this pile of money.

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something i like
Four pages from Mike Mignola, Duncan Fegredo, and Dave Stewart’s Hellboy: The Fury, a series that’s going to be positively apocalyptic and more worthy of your attention than pretty much any other ongoing comic:

There’s something incredibly pure about Hellboy these days. Mignola and company have been pumping out quick series or one-shots that do a lot with a little. With The Fury, we’ve got three issues that can go in any direction, save for maybe the death of Hellboy. Then again, we’ve already seen him maimed, so that might not even be off the table.

This intro is enormously effective. It brings to mind a ton of things. I look at it and see a boxer’s long walk to the ring. It’s the stranger riding into town while strangers grip their pistols and spit. It’s Deebo walking up and everyone in the hood going silent. It’s the beginning of the big war conference in any movie ever, where warriors bang shields and monsters roar at the moon. Lightning strikes either as a show of approval or as an omen of disaster.

“Now I am become Death,” the witches say as they look on their handiwork. “The destroyer of worlds.” They’re not as powerful as they thought they were, and now they’re wracked with doubt and guilt. Then they spot a lone figure walking out of nowhere, and begin creating stories about him to suit their purpose.

“It’s Odin out wandering the world.” Wise and all-seeing, Hellboy is the all-father in human form. Wikipedia tells me that Odin is “related to ōðr, meaning ‘fury, excitation,’ besides ‘mind,’ or ‘poetry.'” There you have the title of the series and the tone. The Fury is the epic poem of Hellboy’s life. Hellboy’s stuck in a Homeric tale, and he’s almost at the end of his run.

“He carries a hammer. Thor then.” He’s the thunder and the lightning, destruction and health, a terrifying protector. A hammer is used to build and destroy. Sometimes that’s the same thing. The myth parallels Hellboy’s journey, too. Thor battles Jormungand, the Midgard Serpent.

Hellboy is every god, every hero, every messiah, and not in some stupid Joseph Campbell sort of way, either. He’s fighting something that is the ultimate evil, so it stands to reason that he has to be the ultimate good. The only thing that matters is beating her.

This is the eschaton in progress, where evil breathes in before pulling the trigger and heroes stride down off the mountain, glorious in demeanor and unafraid of death.

It’s Mignola synthesizing all of his interests, from myths to ghost stories to Jack Kirby comics, and creating something fearsome.

More than anything, though, this has what a lot of theoretically exciting cape comics lack. This is exciting. It builds tension. This is how you do the slow walk.

Funny coincidence. Marvel’s Fear Itself, courtesy of Matt Fraction, Stuart Immonen, Wade Von Grawbadger, and Laura Martin, features the Asgardian host battling an ancient evils. I picked up the first issue and found it overwritten by far, though the art was nice. It had a bunch of people telling you why something’s scary or dangerous instead of that thing putting the fear of God in your heart. What little tension there is isn’t earned at all.

Fear Itself didn’t feel effortless like this does. The Fury is a snowball rolling down a steep hill, and the weight of the past few years does it wonders, but the difference is still striking. Maybe that’s unfair. I don’t think so, though.

There’s a gang of Hellboy available digitally. Read ’em in order, or check out The Island and the Third Wish, Makoma, or Buster Oakley Gets His Wish. I like those a lot, especially Makoma and Buster. Corben and Nowlan are beasts. Nobody should be able to draw cows as cool as Nowlan does.

-What’s it take for you to stop reading somebody’s work?
-Do you let a creator’s personal beliefs change how you perceive their work?
-When’s it appropriate to dislike somebody as a person, rather than as an artist?
-We tackle all of these questions and more in a free-wheeling podcast I probably should’ve given a meaner name.
-It’s an interesting question, though.
-I can separate the work from the artist nine times out of ten, but sometimes you learn too much and feel all uncomfortable.
-Feel free to chime in.
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-Here comes a new challenger!
-See you, space cowboy!

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Bare your teeth, put on your pouches and sharpen your spikes because we’re entering the 90’s!

This week I’m joined by David Brothers, Was Taters and Space Jawa. Due to David dropping the Cipher, his Wednesday article which lists just what books I’m reading for the week, Jawa and I have a bit of overlap in the Flashpoint department that I probably should have warned him about before he scanned his images. I read everything but the Aquaman book and he read everything but the Frankenstein book, so a couple of them will have panels from both of us.

In regards to Flashpoint, Deathstroke the Terminator being a pirate is an idea so perfect that I can’t believe it’s never been done before. I wish his post-reboot self would remain a pirate and continue his adventures on the high seas, but that’s not in the cards.

American Vampire: Survival of the Fittest #1
Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy

Annihilators #4
Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Tan Eng Huat

Read the rest of this entry »

I admit that I’ve been putting this one off for quite some time. It’s only natural, since it means having to read Maximum Carnage for the first time in about fifteen years. For a while, I didn’t even intend to review this story since it’s been covered to death across the internet, but then I realized that my take may have its own flavor. After all, I’m a guy who likes Spider-Man, loves Venom and tolerates Carnage. That last one already puts me on a different path from most reviewers.

Carnage falls into the category of, “It’s not the character that’s bad but the writing.” Carnage can be in a great story, I’m sure. We just haven’t seen it yet, though the Carnage miniseries (originally going to be called Astonishing Spider-Man and Iron Man until Marvel realized they could lure more readers in by naming it after the long-dead villain) has certainly had its moments. In preparation, I read through Carnage’s original story arc in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man #361-363, which isn’t at all an offensive story. The Micheline/Bagley joint mostly acts as a way to both remove Venom from his status quo where he peacefully lived on an abandoned island while believing Spider-Man to be dead as well as giving Venom an excuse to fight alongside Spider-Man against a threat greater than both of them.

This idea, which I’m sure sold like gangbusters, was made fun of in the pages of the Ren and Stimpy Show #6 when Spider-Man made a guest appearance to fight a mind-controlled Powdered Toast Man.

This was written by Dan Slott, who would go on to create Anti-Venom and a bunch of gimmicky Spider-Man costumes. Pot and kettle.

So anyway, Carnage was a decent enough villain for his initial story. If they kept their cool about it, he’d probably be more accepted by your average comic fan. Instead, they went nuts over how this was the best idea Marvel’s come up with in years. The covers would literally say that Carnage was so awesome that they had to put his name on the cover twice! It was this thinking that made Marvel brass believe that a lengthy Spider-Man arc spanning all his books should be centered around this supervillain.

After reading Maximum Carnage, I felt that it had a lot of similarities to the Clone Saga. Part of it is the innocent idea of taking a character who’s been taken off the board in a previous story and bringing them back for the sake of telling a bigger, better story. Due to the hype behind the character, many issues are dedicated to telling this story. Too many issues.

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I’ve been working on my next We Care a Lot article, which centers on a certain 14-part Spider-Man/Venom team-up story from the 90’s that we all know so well. It’s going to be one of the longer write-ups and it should be up in just a day or so. Because of the length, I couldn’t find a spot to fit this in. It’s from the editorial column in Web of Spider-Man #102 and it caught my eye.

That’s kind of rough to read in hindsight. For the few of you not in the know, that’s talking about the Roger Corman Fantastic Four movie from the 90’s. A terrible movie created on a shoestring budget for no reason other than allowing the studio to legally hold onto the franchise for a few more years. The entire movie was created and only a handful of people involved knew that the studio had no intention whatsoever to release it. It stands with the Star Wars Holiday Special as one of the most bootlegged videos out there.

I love how excited that article is. All that hype. They just can’t wait to be able to watch THIS.

“REED! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?! WHAT HAVE YOU doooooooooooone?”

The wedding scene mentioned is also the final scene of the movie, so thanks for the spoilers, jerks!

X-Men First Class!

It was pretty much the only comics movie I was really looking forward to this year (unless I forgot about something, but I doubt it), so I caught X-Men First Class while I was on vacation last weekend. Overall? I dug it. It’s not the best-written or best-directed Marvel flick, but it has a strong visual style all its own, and it being set in the non-swingin’ sixties apparently counts for a lot for me. I’d rank it as being better–for whatever better means, I guess “more enjoyable” at this specific point in time–than the other X-Men and Spider-Man flicks. Better than Iron Man, even. It’s less cute, and there’s no Robert Downey charmingly stumbling his way into your heart.

Anyway, I have Opinions:

-Michael Fassbender as Magneto as Simon Wiesenthal was a good look. Magneto in the comics is… I don’t want to say soft, but he’s very comic book. He’s simplified, boiled down into that superhero/supervillain dichotomy. In X-Men First Class, he’s much more human, and even more relatable.

-I hadn’t realized how much I liked the character, the idea, of Magneto before this, but yeah: I like him a lot. There are two key lines that were blown in the trailer that I think are significant. I’m copy/pasting from Wikipedia, since I saw this days ago and already forgot, but:

Professor Charles Xavier: We have it in us to be the better man.
Erik Lehnsherr: We ALREADY are.

and

Professor Charles Xavier: Listen to me very carefully, my friend: Killing will not bring you peace.
Erik Lehnsherr: Peace was never an option.

-My Magneto is probably similar to Morrison’s–he’s a mad old terrorist, but he’s not entirely wrong, either. He’s extremely powerful as a symbol, which I already knew and enjoyed, but X-Men First Class added a human component that I enjoy. The conflict in the comics comes from the fact that Magneto becomes what he despises (a Nazi) out of a desire to protect his race. Goofy comic book plotting.

-What I like about Magneto, what those lines unlocked, is that 1) he’s lost and he knows it and 2) some people deserve to die. It’s part of why crime fiction, and more specifically, Frank Miller’s The Big Fat Kill, are so appealing/interesting to me. Morality through immorality/amorality. Who puts the bullet in the head of him that deserves it?

-Magneto is convinced of his race’s superiority (and he’s technically correct), but he’s also come to accept that he is broken. He’s a martyr in his own mind, and the one person willing to do what must be done in order to protect his kin. His life doesn’t matter, so long as he spends it for his people.

-Peace isn’t an option because his peace was stolen decades ago.

-Fassbender, man. SO manly. I’d watch a sequel that was him terrorizing his way through the ’60s and ’70s. Magneto the Jackal.

-I liked James McAvoy as Xavier, too. He wasn’t as revelatory as Fassbender, but his callous, arrogant Xavier worked. The little touches, like the way he used groovy while hitting on coeds or how he didn’t really get the mutant struggle, were great, too.

-Rose Byrne as Moira, Nicholas Hoult as Beast, Caleb Landry Jones as Banshee, and Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique were all pretty okay. Good enough that I would watch them in sequels, but not standouts.

-January Jones was terrible.

-The major cameo was as great as everyone else has said, and the Cerebro sequence was pretty cool, too.

-Kevin Bacon was great. It’s like he saw Stephen Dorff as Deacon Frost, one of my most favorite roles ever, and was like, “Yo, I can top that. Sebastian Shaw? Son, I got this. Watch.” Fassbender > Bacon > McAvoy > everybody else > January Jones.

-I like Zoe Kravitz. I thought she did a fine enough job with a poisoned chalice. And I mean, her mom is Lisa Bonet and her dad is Lenny Kravitz, and she looks it. Instantly made my top ten dead or alive list.

-The list changes constantly, but right now we’re looking at Rosario Dawson, Anna Karina, Scarlett Johansson, Aubrey Plaza, Rashida Jones, Salma Hayek, Josephine Baker, Aki Hoshino, Lucille Ball, Sade, and Erykah Badu. That’s eleven. Vivica Fox or Lisa Bonet might rotate onto the list soon, too.

-But yeah, let’s talk about what I didn’t like.

-It sucked to be black in the sixties, and that goes double if you’re a mutant, apparently. Edi Gathegi as Darwin died in one of the dumbest scenes in any movie anywhere and Kravitz turned evil because dot dot dot.

-Darwin basically served two purposes in the movie. He was there so that when someone said “slavery” when talking about mutant rights, the camera could focus on his face. He was there to die to give Shaw some cheap heat.

-Here’s a scene, paraphrased fairly faithfully:

Shaw: What’s your power?
Darwin: Evolving to survive anything.
Shaw: Survive this. *puts a fireball in Darwin’s mouth*
*Darwin dies slowly over the next minute while making a sad face*
*white people are sad*
*every black person in the audience leans over to the nearest black person like “niggas always gotta die first”*

:negativeman:

-Get outta here. Really? It wasn’t even a shin hadouken. That was a medium punch joint at best. It looked like a gadouken.

-Darwin was wasted, but that’s symptomatic of the larger problems with X-Men First Class.

-He was an extra character. The movie is too full, and pretty much just Beast, Magneto, Mystique, and Xavier get a chance to shine. Banshee gets something like seven whole lines, doesn’t he?

-So, because the cast is so full, everyone’s motivations are… thin. Angel is okay with being ogled as a stripper, but hates how the humans look at her wings. That makes a kind of sense–she’s in control in one area and not in the other. But apparently she hates the latter so much that she signs up with a genocidal mutant after less than a month of even knowing that other mutants existed, deserting her mutant friends with not a second thought.

-Oh, and right before she does that, an off-screen human is like “Take the mutants, they’re hiding in here! Just don’t kill me!” just in case you don’t get that no one likes them. Racism! (Eyerolls!)

-Nobody beyond the main characters have much of a reason to do anything until Darwin bites it.

-“Hey, do this.” “Sure, okay.”

-“Boy, being a mutant sure is cool.” “Yep, sure is. :)”

-“Man, humans sure do hate us.” “Yeah, they do :(”

-But really, the worst part is that both black mutants die or turn evil in the same scene. What part of the game is that? You make a movie out of a series that borrowed heavily from the civil rights struggle and then cut out all the negroes?

-I’m not saying I want balance, one good and one evil. I think that’s dumb, to be perfectly honest. But at least let me believe that black mutants have actual reasons to do things or have powers that aren’t lame. “I can survive anything. Oh wait, no, I’m dying!” is crap!

-It’s doubly crap because of the pro-mutant slogan that pops up a few times in the movie. Say it loud: “Mutant… and proud.”

-The pregnant pause is part of the slogan.

-It’s like the moral of the movie is “Black, er, blue is beautiful!”

-I can totally buy evil black mutants. It makes sense, it’s feasible, blah blah blah. But I didn’t buy it here because the writing team barely even tried to sell it. They just threw it out there.

-Boring. They got to do better next time.

-The Nazis got what they deserve, though, so that’s okay.

-On the flipside… there’s a bit where a Nazi quarter (did they call them quarters? it’s worth 25 Nazi Cents I assume and has a swastika on it) turns into the X-Men First Class logo. That’s probably not the best message to be sending at the beginning of your big fat civil rights metaphor. I don’t know whether that’s because Nazis barely count as people or because it sets up a really terrible unintentional comparison.

-“Mutants?! More like Nazis, am I right, fellas?”

-Next time: tighter script, better colored mutants (I’d settle for a real gully version of Bishop or uh… actually Frenzy would be kinda dope, as long as they go real raw with her), and more Fassbender. Fewer sad white people, fewer characters with no motivation, fewer scenes with January Jones stinking up the spot.

-“Magneto was right.”

-Oh yeah, better music in the new one, too. This one was forgettable. X-Men’s got to be a sexy franchise, and the ’60s were a great time for music. Throw some period joints on that fire.

Less than a year ago, Alan Moore went on one of his usual tirades. The kind where he goes on about how he doesn’t read a thing by Marvel or DC, but knows they suck just because. You know the kind.

Yeah, like that.

While ranting about the comic business is part of Moore’s Thursday routine, this instance was different. By this point, the comic industry had taken enough of his bitterness. For one, fellow scary bearded writer Jason Aaron wrote up a big essay on how he once idolized the man, but is now completely over him. DC Comics, meanwhile, seemed to take it just as personally. While they have no problem making money off of Moore’s old classics in trade form, he’s otherwise dead to them. In the past couple months, it seems DC’s making it their business to wipe Moore’s presence from DC continuity.

Sure, he gave us that comic with the naked blue guy and the creepy dude who’d always go, “Hurm.” He gave us that cool Superman story where he was all, “MONGUUUUUUL!” But those stand by themselves. When you look at it, in terms of DC continuity, there are three major impacts Moore has made. Four if you count the Blackest Night hoopla, but that was really just a minor aside that Geoff Johns mutated into something else entirely. Five if you count John Constantine, but let’s face it. There’s no damage DC can do to him that the movie didn’t already.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was initially very unimpressed with Flashpoint.  Not the many different worlds; I liked that.  The Azzarello Batman: Knight of Vengeance hit the Miller imagery harder than Miller has in the last twenty years, and that’s okay, because it makes for a fun few issues.  I like sampling the various variations.  The main story isn’t splashing over into the books I regularly read.  For a big summer event, I liked it.

No, the thing that left me initially unimpressed was the idea that the entire DC universe gets rebooted at the end of it.  Yes, when I hit the ground in comics, I hit the ground running.  And yes, I have thirteen boxes full of comics to prove that.  And yes, I just gave away an entire shortbox full of kids comics to my mom to cut it down to thirteen boxes.  But – I haven’t been reading that long in the grand scheme of things.  And in that time, the entire DCU has been rebooted at least twice.  The idea of another reboot just left me feeling tired.

But, true to form, just when I thought I was out, comics pulled me back in.  This re-boot is going to be a little re-bootier than usual.  It seems that DC, conscious of new readers being too intimidated by the mountains of continuity to pick up a single title, is going back to issue one, and trying for an iconic version of DC.

This means one of two things.  Either this one will stick a little more than usual, or it will be gone in a blink, leaving only even more confusing continuity in its wake. 

I hope for the former.  The last few decades of ultra-grim continuity have left me feeling a little poorly towards comics in general.  A clean slate, free of tragedy and its attendant moping, might be nice.  I feel like it would be good to step into a DC universe where not every single character has violently lost a child.  (Batman, Superman, Green Arrow, Aquaman, Arsenal, Wonder Girl . . . I’m sure there are more, but I can’t take thinking about it.)

So here’s what I am scanning the headlines for:

1.  What happens to the Batfamily in general?

Well, of course I am.  I’m still me, aren’t I?  And I like most of the Batfamily the way it is.  I like Jason Todd (shut up) and Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown, and Damian (as a side character), so I’m hoping DC won’t lose them completely.  And yes, I saw that Barbara is Batgirl and written by Gail Simone.  I’ve gone on record with my opinions on Babs returning to Batgirl before – but I’ll do it again.  It’s a terrible idea, a regression for the character, and eliminating one of the most original characters in the DCU.  And I love it.  It’s Babs, and Babs is my favorite character, and I love Batgirl too, and I don’t care about anything else.

2.  What about the Blue Beetle?

It hadn’t occurred to me that anything would happen with either Blue Beetle – neither right now seems like a big enough character to be messed with.  I’d love it if they were both back, but I’m the ‘more is more’ persuasion of fan.  Which is why I have thirteen boxes of comics in my house.

3.  Lian Harper must live!

It was a creepy story and depressingly generic turn for the Arsenal character to kill off his kid and have him turn ‘dark’.  The overall story was so distasteful that it put me off reading comics in general for weeks.  A big re-set for the universe would be a good way to erase that.

stuff i made

–A reprint of an old post about The ‘Nam

–A preview of the Static Shock Special, which I had previously discussed in March. I wasn’t really going to pick up the special until I saw the preview. I’m still a little grossed out, to be honest, but it’s clearly a good faith effort on the part of the creators involved. Comics will make you feel weird about things you like, man.

–I wrote up Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal: Last of the Innocent. It’s good. Buy it.

–Digital ComicsAlliance: this week, I tackle the DC digital pricing scheme with veiled drug references, overt drug references, and references to going on a blackout bender with friends.

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something i like
From Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal: The Last of the Innocent, two non-consecutive pages that I liked a lot:

I read and reviewed this book while sitting in a room I haven’t slept in for four years. I took a trip back home for a week, and it’s been sorta weird. The first thing that happened when I got back into town, like right after I got off the airport shuttle, was that the lady at the desk recognized my last name, asked if I was related to a couple people, and told me about my aunt holding back on a recipe. The rest of the trip has been a whirlwind of sideways nostalgia, where everything is too small or out of place or weird or different from how it was four years ago/when I was a kid. (though small is almost definitely a metaphorical thing, now that I’m looking around my room and mentally comparing it to my apartment)

This latest Criminal is about a man coming home after five years away and being completely seduced by nostalgia for the way things were. The gap between then and now shakes him up early on, but later, when he’s conversating with old friends and having a good time, he starts thinking about how great then feels and how broken and corrupt now is.

This sort of stuff is basic, I think, the sort of universal emotions we all experience at some point. I just happened to read the book at the best/worst possible time to do so. Brubaker and Phillips came through with the execution, and the basic nature of the story (“Life was better then,” whether “better” is true or not) gives it a little extra punch. Widest possible area of effect, right? Even famous people feel that. (“Ain’t kill myself yet, and I already want my life back.”)

This is a good first issue for what will hopefully be the best Criminal yet. It feels very resonant; it’s easy to relate to. Well worth a look.

-This was supposed to go up last week, but WordPress hiccuped or something and I didn’t notice until Friday night.
-No, seriously. I didn’t forget. Shut up. Here’s proof:

-“Missed Schedule?” How does an automated post miss the schedule?
-Anyway.
-Batcast!
-Talking about Grant Morrison and crew’s:
–Batman & Robin Vol. 1: Batman Reborn
–Batman & Robin, Vol. 2: Batman vs. Robin
–Batman & Robin Vol. 3: Batman Must Die!
-I don’t think I actually hate Warren Beatty, but Esther’s memory is way better than mine.
-“Talking about” more like “Talking around”
-You know how we do
–Here’s that Wingman essay
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-Here comes a new challenger!
-See you, space cowboy!

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