Earthquake

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The Sign of the Bat

This entire article contains spoilers about the storylines in various versions of Batman in comic, film television and video game published in the last few years.

Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories were deliberate experiments in deconstructive meta-fiction. One was a scene for scene, line for line reconstruction of an Elric fantasy story re-written as a near future story of byzantine family plotting and murder, others took place in slightly or extremely different worlds, the multiple universe variations of a guy named Jerry. They were reasonably entertaining for metaphysical/existential literary experiments and extended jokes.

Batman seems to have evolved into the same kind of hyper-adaptable mytho-form by accident that Moorecock was creating on purpose with the Cornelius and Eternal Champion cycles. Batman is a meme now, with multiple changes of detail or history permissible in any version but certain highly charged symbolic historical imagery that has to be lurking under even the most innocuous interpretations. A young boy in an alley watches his parents get murdered before his eyes, the same boy swears an oath of vengeance against crime and the fearsome appearance of a bat or swarm of bats giving this traumatized obsessive his method of terrorizing his criminal targets.

It doesn't matter exactly how idealistic District Attorney Harvey Dent gets half his face scarred, goes insane and becomes a duality obsessed super-criminal, just that he does. Neil Gaiman's recent Batman story 'Whatever happened to the Caped Crusader?' explores this theme directly in an elegiac tale of the ghost of Batman attending his own funeral.

In the last couple years the Batman has reached creative peaks in all its interpretations. Batman Begins and of course The Dark Knight were monster hits, saved the movie franchise and rebooted the character in a hyper-realistic take. Fans were ecstatic.

In the comics, Grant Morrison has been writing an extended and stylish heightened reality version that tries to reconcile all of Batman's comic book history into one eventful life. Bathound, Batmite, alien monsters and otherworldly Batman analogues included. Morrison has written Batman before, in JLA Batman was a hyper-competent professional superhero of the first rank. The guy who could take out the insanely powerful menace with ruthless efficiency after the Justice League members with the power to crack planets were taken out easily. In his most recent run Morrison posits a Batman so obsessively super-competent and disciplined that he deliberately creates a back up personality that can take over if an enemy ever attacks him psychologically.

At the moment, the comic book version of Batman is believed dead and Dick Greyson the first Robin later known as Nightwing has taken on the Batman's cowl while Batman's secret son with a super-villain has become the new Robin. Hints have already appeared about the real Batman's impending return.

The third animated interpretation of Batman in just the last few years made the smart decision to do something different from what anybody else was doing but still grounded in the Batman tradition, history and mythos. The Brave and the Bold is in the tradition of the Super Friends Batman, the Adam West Batman, an avuncular Batman who lives in a colorful world crowded with other heroes and villains who spouts note perfect pulpy "You'll never succeed in your diabolical scheme" dialogue with a straight faced growl by the goofy guy from the Drew Carey show.

Its the lightest interpretation in years but just as valid as the gritty realism of the movies and heightened darkness of the comics.

The version that most perfectly encapsulated every characteristic and reference possible into one spectacularly immersive experience is Batman: Arkham Asylum. Taking inspiration from a fifteen year old graphic novel by the same Grant Morrison but expanding on it massively, the game that got some of the most glowing reviews of the year puts you through the longest night of Batman's life. The Joker has taken over Arkham with hundreds of violent thugs and set loose dozens of Batman's most dangerous and insane foes. In every category imagery, detail, voice acting, music and gameplay the game is Batman.

Gameplay is the most impressive way this is so uniquely a Batman experience. It consists of investigation, combat and sneaky combat. You can experience the world in two visual modes, normal which is a dark and lushly beautiful experience of a dank and eerie game world built to increase tension and suspense or the shadowy Detective mode that gives you a heads up display of clues, DNA trails, fingerprints secret passageways and usefully, bad guys through walls and around corners. In a room full of unarmed thugs you can wade into them. The combat system is simple enough for mashing the x key while running at the bad guys to work quite well at first to give you confidence and help you develop a bit more combat subtlety.

Alternatively in a room full of armed guards you can swing about in the rafters or scuttle behind ledges and in and out of grates and sneak up on the bad guys one by one and choke them into unconsciousness from behind. Then you can booby-trap their bodies with explosives and trigger them from a distance when their friends bend over to check on them. This is more fun than it probably should be.

As well as the primary mission of sweeping through the asylum in Jokers wake clearing rooms and slowly discovering the Joker's hidden ultimate scheme, scattered throughout the game are Riddler puzzles punctuated with mocking radio messages from the Riddler himself, as well as hidden Arkham history and scattered therapy interview tapes with the Asylum's inmates. The sense of urgency created by the game's story and always stellar voice acting from most of the voice cast from the 90's animated version, had me finish it and then wander through the empty halls of Arkham for a few more hours completing the job of finding all the hidden trophies, visual reference tricks and audio rewards. I could listen to Mark Hamill's note perfect mix of mirth and menace as the Joker for hours.

Even after completing the story all of the various combat and stealth predation set pieces from the game are available as challenge modes both individually and comparable through online scoreboards with other players all over the world.

You might be able to tell I'm looking forward to the sequel.

Of all the console games I've ever played this one has kept my interest the longest.
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Pele

It is said that the volcano goddess Pele once challenged a brave chief named Kahawali to a toboggan race down mount Kilauea. Not knowing she was a goddess and entranced by her beauty he agreed.

Despite her power the chief won the race due to his superior skill and asked for a kiss as his prize. Enraged Pele pursued him, sliding down rolling rocks which quickly turned to lava as her fury set the whole mountain alight.

Reaching the sea the terrified chief escaped in a boat just ahead of the smoking rocks she threw at him.

When he turned and looked back at the beach Pele had resumed her fiery form...

end.

From a folk tale of Hawaii.



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Rory Hayes: Where Demented Wented

Rory Hayes had one of the most extreme visions among the transgressive artists of the comix underground. The leading lights of the scene in the 70's considered his disturbing and primitive stories to be minor masterpieces of paranoia and terror.

There's a child like dread in his stories, crudely delineated, starkly presented and usually featuring a button-eyed anthropomorphic teddy bear in tales of murder and mutilation. I was introduced to his work in the 80's, in an article about underground horror comix in Marvel's news-stand fantasy magazine Epic - a short lived attempt to compete with Heavy Metal - and have sought it out ever since.

They're like the scrawled nightmares of a traumatized child dosed with heavy psychedelics.

Hayes had serious problems. His nightmarish comix reflected an equally nightmarish inner world. He was an enthusiastic user of drugs and ultimately died of an overdose. Vancouver comix artist Colin Upton, who I briefly knew back in the 80's has flatly said that "Rory Hayes was nuts. I mean, really, truly insane."

Others have argued that positioning Hayes as an 'outsider artist' a primitive stylist pouring his mental illness onto the page is too simple, among them Dan Nadel, co-editor with Glenn Bray of a new Fantagraphics retrospective of Hayes work:

"Where Demented Wented: The Art and Comics of Rory Hayes"

"This idea that he was some kind of outsider artist is overstated. He was an artist pure and simple, and very ambitious. He suffered from personal problems and was self-taught, but then R. Crumb was self-taught and suffered from personal problems. It's not that different from Krazy Kat. But Herriman was canonized and Rory wasn't."

But regardless, the work of Hayes elicits strong reactions from anyone exposed to it ranging from disgust to fascination.For more of Hayes work including several complete strips check out MONSTER BRAINS.


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Santarchy

This one came to me from my buddy professional astrologer Matt Currie. You can find his vaguely disreputable yet rakish column at Astrology.com He's in San Francisco these days, enjoying the outside world looking like the inside of his head for a change.




Related: Santa, No!


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It's Catching Up

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The Sacrifice of the Holy Fool

Edward Woodward died on Monday at the age of 79. He had many movie roles, including two authentic classics in Breaker Morant and The Wicker Man, but will be remembered primarily as one of the most prolific British TV actors ever. Most Americans probably remember him best from the 80's TV hit The Equalizer, as a retired secret agent using his deadly skills and barely repressed righteous fury to defend the weak and downtrodden.

To genre fans though, he will always be remembered as Sergeant Neil Howie of the West Highlands Constabulary, stolid, priggish and utterly dedicated to his Christian duty.

The Wicker Man was made in 1973 (For the love of God avoid the disastrous remake starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Neil LaBute, a misogynist hack and the most over-rated film-maker ever.) it tells the tale of a dedicated police officer who comes to a remote Scottish Isle searching for a missing child and discovers mystery, sensuality and a jovial yet sinister population who all seem to be in on a joke that he is left out of.

The joke, of course, is on him.

Despite the delightfully malevolent presence of Christopher Lee as the mysterious Laird of Summerisle and the pulchritudinous unclothed charms of a young Britt Ekland, the movie depends above all on the performance of Edward Woodward.

He doesn't disappoint. The rigidly self-righteous Sgt. Howie shouldn't be as likable as he is with his dour and disapproving Christianity and his quivering tight lipped fury at the sin and debauchery he encounters at every turn on an island where Christianity has long since been supplanted by a much older faith.

Woodward doesn't play Sgt Howie, he becomes him, and after multiple viewings you can still find yourself hoping against hope that he'll get back in his police seaplane and leave the dark mysteries of Summerisle behind. But events unfold with as they must, bringing him inexorably to a windy seaside cliff and his unavoidable destiny.

The movie is a study in bizarre tonal shifts and and discordant atmosphere. It's a mystery, a comedy, a horror movie and a character study. Sprightly traditional folk songs contrast with a steadily building menace. Audience expectations are toyed with expertly - particularly via a sudden shift to a traditional action movie chase sequence late in the game that suddenly becomes a cruel jest on both protagonist and audience.

I can't recommend The Wicker Man highly enough. Its a great way to remember an actor's actor who brought a commitment to every role he took inhabiting the skin of baffled angry men with just enough self knowledge to make them tragically flawed icons of victimized everyman.

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It's in the Blood

Vampirism is almost as flexible a metaphor as Zombies can be. Vampires have represented teen alienation, addiction, class elitism and of course sex. Most recently legions of enthralled teenage girls have utterly internalized getting bit by a vampire as corresponding exactly with 'losing it' in a series of rather dim novels and now movies.

But the correlation at the heart of the myth and implicit in Dracula, the Ur text of the genre, is vampirism as disease.

In Stoker's Dracula, Vampirism is a blood born taint being fought by science. The supernatural element is of course present, but as others have observed its really a book about Syphilis. In Victorian England before antibiotics drove a stake into it, Syphilis was what AIDS was until recently; an incurable, barely treatable blood disease. Nice people didn't talk about it, it was spread by 'beastly' behavior and the sufferers would die slowly and grotesquely being marred with ugly stigmatizing sores and wasting away and going mad as the disease ate at their brains.

In that context, Bram Stoker's Dracula with its emphasis on blood borne evil and modern (for the time) medical methods like transfusions becomes a very different beast than it is to modern readers.

Nosferatu the first unauthorized adaptation of Stoker's tale made the disease metaphor explicit. The vampire is a horrific deformed creature with rat like teeth bringing plague and swarms of vermin with him as he invades the comfortable reality of modern Hamburg.

And now film-maker Guillermo Del Toro and co-author Chuck Hogan make the disease metaphor explicit again with the first in their new trilogy of novels The Strain.

The hero is a doctor for the Center for Disease Control brought in to investigate a mysterious plague that has wiped out an entire airplane full of passengers - or has it? The medical mystery element is played well, but the underlying monstrous evil of the vampire begins to unfurl as the story goes on. Disease becomes unearthly evil gradually but utterly.

In this age of SARS and H1N1 and the world wide unease that we are due for something makes The Strain as timely and unsettling as any horror novel you've ever read. The fact is that a deadly killer flu strain seems to hit the world every 4 decades or so - and the last one hit us in the 60's. If SARS or H1N1 aren't it that doesn't mean it isn't coming.

The airplane opening in The Strain is a reminder that in our modern globalized world, the next killer virus could be burning in the bloodstreams of the worlds capitals for days or weeks before we even realized what was happening to us. This is a modern unease that The Strain captures very well.

Del Toro, of course, is the film-maker responsible for Pans Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone and the Hellboy movies among others. He's currently in New Zealand working on the Hobbit with Peter Jackson. If you've seen and enjoyed any of these films - and enjoying them pretty much goes hand in hand with seeing them - then you will love The Strain. I'm looking forward avidly to the next book in the series, and after reading it I think you will be too.
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Steal from the best

So I'm watching the new episode of Supernatural. It's not a spectacular show but its entertaining enough and it hooked me when it had an episode with the title 'Criss Angel is a douche-bag'.

That's a great title, man.

Tonight's episode (I believe the children are the future - another great title.), spoilers of course, is about a little boy named Jesse who is extremely powerful without knowing it. Anything he believes comes true in a radius of several miles around him. So if he believes joy-buzzers really do electrocute you they do, if he believes the tooth fairy is a leering biker in a Tutu that's who will show up and yank out all your teeth.

Turns out he's the Antichrist, but is actually a really nice kid with no desire to destroy the world.

This is, of course also the plot of the novel Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

Let's be charitable and call it a tribute.



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I see a Darkness

Cash I See a Darkness (Paperback)
A review of the graphic novel.
by Rheinhard Kleist
224 pages
Self Made Hero



A spare and elegant interpretation of a story anyone likely to read will likely already be familiar with.

The challenge then, for German cartoonist Rheinhard Kleist, is to take the same material from Johnny Cash's autobiography and every other compendium of tributes and oral tradition that the makers of the film dipped into and justify his own versions existence.

But Kleist has produced something wholly unique and beautiful here. His choice of which parts of an iconography almost gospel to Cash adherants and produced a must have for Cash fans and fans of excellent sequential graphic art.




The format is an assured biographic narrative inter-cut with less successful dramatizations of Cash songs with Johnny in the starring roles. Get it for the southern Gothic aesthetic of the depression era segments and the noir prison bar shadows of the mythic concert at Folsom.

Not the dramatic comic strip interpretation of Ghost riders in the Sky.

The art is the real treat here. An evocative mix of intricately delinated and shadowed close ups and almost expressionistic rendering of the backgrounds along with almost cartoonish sequences that mostly manage not to distract from the rest of the book's look.

It's a fine line, but for the most part Kleist walks that line.






Of course there's also this earlier interpretation from Christian Archie publishers Spire:


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'I'm Peter Lorre, bitch."

And you're not.

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Ghost of Stephen Foster

The Squirrel Nut Zippers

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Supervillain Pickup Line #1

"I bet you don't have an evil bone in your body.
Would you like one?"

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Charon

Adapted from the story by Lord Dunsany.

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Weekly Comics - August 15

The Walking Dead
Volume 10, What We Become

I collect The Walking Dead in it's trade paperback collections. I balance the painful wait between volumes with getting more story at a time. Volume 10 collects issues 55 to 60 of the savagely brilliant ongoing series that is one of the most bleak but compulsively readable epics in comics.

The premise, for the uninitiated, is that at the end of the zombie movie the story just keeps going. We follow the hunted survivors of the roaming bands of zombies that have over run the Earth. Different hunted groups merge, characters join the group, form relationships, get eaten, new people arrive, but distressingly, less all the time.

People transform. As the book advertises. 'No government, no grocery stores, no mail delivery, no cable TV. In a world ruled by the dead we are forced to finally start living.' In this volume we learn that can also mean becoming monsters no less terrifying than the hungry dead.

Highest recommendation.



Amazing Spiderman
602

Let's call this the 'Welcome back Mary Jane' cover shall we?

So, a few decades ago in real time, a few years in comics time Peter Parker found out that Mary Jane Watson knew he was Spiderman, had in fact always known since they were both teenagers but had kept that knowledge a secret even from him.

After years of playing the field Peter Parker zeroed in Mary Jane Watson, they were a steady item for a few years and then in a time of event driven comics they got married.

And the writers just couldn't figure out how to do Peter Parker, put upon young everyman if he was married to a super model/actress. They were split up by Mary Jane's move to Hollywood but stayed married. You can't give a heavily licensed trademark comic book character a divorce. Just can't happen.

So after the Marvel Comics Civil War event when Spiderman revealed his identity as Peter Parker to the world and Aunt May got shot by a sniper, the powers that be specifically editor in Chief Joe Quesada, decided that they needed a full continuity reset.

Spiderman couldn't get a divorce, so he sold his marriage to the devil in return for Aunt May's life and the secret of his identity back.

No, really.

After a year away, after everyone on Earth's memory is wiped of the knowledge that he's actually Spiderman Mary Jane returns to establish the current continuity line that almost everything happened the way it originally did except that they didn't get married. They had a longstanding relationship, she seems to still know he's Spiderman, maybe they even lived together, but they didn't get married.

Oh, plus, J. Jonah. Jameson is Mayor of New York and Peter's back to working for him and a creepy serial killer super villain coats Peter's face in plastic and drops him into a pit of acid.

Yes, this review was an excuse to run that cover.


The Chronicles of Wormwood The Last Battle
Preview
Garth Ennis and Oscar Jimenez

Like the novel Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Wormwood is a play on The Omen, the story of a sympathetic Antichrist. Instead of a likable 12 year old boy, Wormwood is a mostly likable grown up TV executive. He has a perverse intelligent rabbit, a forgiving girlfriend and he likes to hang out at the bar with his brain damaged buddy Jesus Christ.

In the first volume Wormwood's girlfriend dumps him after finding out about his steamy afternoons of anal sex with Joan of Arc. She's taken him back now, but he's still keeping the whole Antichrist thing a secret. Volume 2, The Last Enemy was really only memorabe for the line "Suck my cockectomy spawn of the Dark One!"

Now after defeating both his father Satan and God in Volume One to get them to leave humanity alone, somebody even worse has taken over Hell. This is just a brief preview of the coming miniseries Volume 3, The Last Battle, with an affordable $1.99 price tag.

It's a sacrilicious treat!



Dominic Fortune #1 of 4
Howard Chaykin and Edgar Delgado

Chaykin resurrects his 30's era pulp adventurer created in the 70's. He was originally published by Atlas Comics and called the Scorpion and then in Marvel magazines and comics as Dominic Fortune. It was always a stylish and sexy book. Now, in the new miniseries for Marvel Max, Marvel's explicit content line there are a lot more naked people and blowjobs.

A cross between Indiana Jones and Alexander Portnoy, as the story begins Dominic Fortune is demonstrating what an amoral swashbuckling mercenary he is by selling his fighter pilot skills back and forth to both sides of the just ended war between Bolivia and Paraguay, (which would make this June of 1935.) and falling from the sky into a naked starlet's swimming pool.

The war over he drifts to Hollywood and a job babysitting a trio of drunken actors. A racist conspiracy and some rather brutal whore shooting hint at the larger story.

It's got my attention and I'll be coming back for issue #2.

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