Bourbon and Bongwater

Reiterations in Red and Green

2011-12-10T09:50:00.001-08:00

In my last post as the New DC Universe was just launching (Its been a busy couple of months) I suggested that the new Swamp Thing and Animal Man books were calling back to their Alan Moore and Grant Morrison glory days.

In fact after reading the first four issues of both it seems they are instead calling back to just after both of those writers left.

After Grant Morrison left Animal Man the book was given to writer Jaimie Delano who introduced the Red, gave Animal Man a more animalistic appearance and made Buddy and his daughter the avatar/elemental champions of the animal kingdom the way Swamp Thing is for the plant kingdom. This is of course the currently running storyline in the new Animal Man series as well.

After Alan Moore left Swamp Thing Rick Veitch continued with much the same thematic approach as Moore until his Swamp Thing meets Jesus storyline was censored by DC (after originally approving the script.) and Doug Wheeler took over. In a storyline that combined with fan backlash over how Veitch had been treated dropped sales to record lows Wheeler created an archetypal foe for the Green that Swamp Thing served, the Grey - the separate fungal world. The resonance with the Rot of current Swamp Thing and Animal Man stories is obvious.

I have serious doubts about both of these books now. Making an anthropomorphised villain out of the concept of decay seems to fly in the face of the themes of Moore's run that explicitly recognized death and decay as a natural part of both nature and the Green. When the book suggested a conflict between parts of the natural world, the seemingly never ending 'vegetable wars' story was a conceptual, and sales disaster that the book foundered on.

Over in Animal Man, Jaimie Delano left behind the meta fictional conceits of Morrison's later run on the book and used the animal avatar concept to address radical political animal rights and environmental concerns. Echoing an almost despairingly apocalyptic viewpoint from his Hellblazer run Delano's was a challenging read, feverish angry extremes with stretches of bleakness that were almost unreadable. His run was fascinating but ultimately exhausting and disheartening.

The current Animal Man storyline and that of the new Swamp Thing haven't even mentioned environmental or political concerns except in almost purely comic book monster terms.

I wanted to like these books, I really did, but they seem like pale shadows of the characters glory days calling back to old narrative dead ends.

New Comics Sept 2011

2011-09-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

The first wave of DC's rebooted 52 event are out and we begin to see the outlines of the new universe. Everybody's a little younger, costumes are more Hollywood friendly and reassurances are being given that much of the past continuity is intact if slightly different.

Essentially the creators of the 52 books hitting the stands over this month appear to have been given permission to keep the bits they like and ignore the ones they don't. I'm unconvinced but I will be spending more in the short term as I plan to give almost all of them a shot. The exception is Hawk and Dove by Rob Liefeld. I flipped through it in the store and confirmed my confident suspicion that yep, Liefeld still sucks balls so I can save some money at least.

The only new 52 title I could really have been said to be enthusiastic about is Action Comics by Grant Morrison and Rags Morales. Morrison of course, the writer who gave us such mind expanding freak outs as Doom Patrol, The Invisibles and the fourth wall breaking meta-fiction of Animal Man before moving on to bringing his mind expanding 'wide-screen' approach to more traditional super-heroics with JLA and then spent the last few years on Batman with his fascinating approach of embracing all of the characters decades of bizarrely convoluted often contradictory continuity.

Now he takes on Superman again - his Silver age worshiping All Star Superman run can be considered a continuity all its own - and he goes back to the characters earliest roots.

The earliest Superman stories in the 30's by Seigel and Shuster were the adventures of an almost crazy grinning radical with super powers who would break down the Governor's door to stop an execution, kidnap arms dealers and force them to fight on the front lines of the wars they were supplying, force mine owners to work in their own unsafe mines and smack wife beaters through walls. When the earliest strips Seigel and Shuster had completed before selling the character to DC (then National comics) ran out, the publisher firmly mandated bringing the character in line and making him a bland and nonthreatening protector of the status quo.

Morrison presents a Superman at the beginning of his career in a DIY costume abducting corrupt executives, getting shot at by the police and bleeding when he gets hit by cannon shells. For anyone complaining this isn't the Superman they know Morrison has the unassailable defense that he's actually returning the character to his earliest roots.

I'm in for the duration on this one not least because of Morales' lovely art.

Animal Man by Jeff Lemire and Travel Foreman and Swamp Thing by Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette are more problematic but still are on my buy list on a probationary basis. They bring in the concepts that Alan Moore and Grant Morrison explored in innovative runs in the 80's while grounding the characters in DC's mainstream superhero continuity.

Basically the plan seems to be to make Animal Man the avatar/elemental of the animal kingdom while Swamp Thing is the same for the plant world. The art is beautiful and the writing is certainly competent, but ultimately for a long time reader of the characters this seems to be re-warmed versions of narratives I've read before with the added complication of more firmly grounding them in the world of long underwear types.

The real innovations of the Moore and Morrison runs were narrative, dialogue and character pyrotechnics that blew the lid off what readers could expect from the medium. So far these books seem to be trying to adopt some of the story ideas of those classic runs, but in the context of more traditional comic book writing. They have me for a few more issues at least and possibly more, but ultimately my recommendation for these characters is to pick up the trade paperback collections of the classic Moore and Morrison runs they are harking back to instead.

Also worth checking out from the new DC books this week are Batgirl by Gail Simone and Ardian Syaf. Problematic decision to write out Barbara Gordon's paralysis notwithstanding the art and writing are beautiful. I'll be giving a Static Shock, Batwing and Men at War a shot too .

Wow this is a tough one. I'm a big Rick Veitch fan, his dream diary book Rare Bit Fiends is as innovative and fascinating a comic ever produced and his take on Superheroes in books like Maximortal and Brat Pack is darkly fascinating. The Big Lie is well written, beautifully drawn and Gary Erskine a tasty artist on his own provides a lovely gloss to Rick Veitch's pencils with his assured inking job.

But my overwhelming reaction to this book is... disappointment.

Disappointment that a creator I respect has falling down the rat hole of a conspiracy theory I most emphatically do not respect.

The book uses the framing device of a scientist from today going back in time 10 years to September 11th to try to convince her husband to get out of the Twin Towers as a framing device for all the various Truther 'facts' and 'theories'. Lots of niggling little cavils about the inconsistencies and contradictions in the official story culminating in an unabashed statement of belief in the conspiracy theory that the Bush administration killed thousands of Americans to get the excuse they needed to attack Iraq.

I'm not going to get into the many reasons why this is nonsense, this Salon article eviscerates most of the theories in this book quite nicely and this Rushkoff piece expresses how I feel about what a waste of time and energy the Truther movement is.

For a peace loving Timelord...

2011-09-04T13:48:00.001-07:00

...the Doctor sure has busted a lot of caps in a lot of punk ass bitches.

Nymphos!

2011-06-27T23:19:00.000-07:00

From Shock Corridor, 1963

Nightwing Red

2011-06-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

In general I'm running pretty cold on the pending DC comics universe reboot, particularly as it applies to the Batman family of titles. But the release of the cover for Nightwing #1 almost allays my fears.

The cool blue highlights of his old costume have been replaced with blood red explicitely tying the costume to the red vest of Dick Grayson's original Robin costume and even more so to the design esthetic of the cartoon Batman Beyond costume.

It's a much better costume than any of the previous Nightwing designs and creates a nice visual continuity between Bat family characters past and future.

Brave New World

2011-06-02T20:10:00.000-07:00

The DC Universe is rebooting again.

I was a teenager in 1985, probably the perfect time to be a comic book geek as the DC Universe experienced its first major reboot in the groundbreaking maxi-series Crisis on Infinite Earths. Over 12 feverishly cosmic issues Writer Marv Wolfman and artists George Perez and Jerry Ordway detonated decades of intensely intricate comic book continuity full of alternate dimension variations of all the main characters. Whole universes of characters were devoured, crushed or grafted together to make new streamlined versions of older stories.

It was exhilarating. It felt like being on the ground floor of something big, the original DC universe had lasted pretty much unchanged since the early 60's and here I was getting to read how a whole new universe that would surely last for decades began as it happened.

Twenty-six years later and the DC Universe has been picked at, unspooled, re-written and re-booted literally dozens of times since the original Crisis. All the multiple universes destroyed in Crisis on Infinite Earths were brought back. Most of the major characters killed during the Crisis or in its many aftermaths have been resurrected and now a generation later DC, staffed now with writers who grew up in the 80's, have returned the DC Universe to much the same shape it was before that first cataclysmic re-boot.

Now, in the coming aftermath of the Flash miniseries Flashpoint where Flash nemesis The Reverse Flash is using time travel to alter history, all of the DC titles are re-starting with new number 1's, new continuities and new status quos.

The constant wave of re-boots is starting to wear a little thin to this long time reader, but it's probably going to be thrilling to a lot of geeky teenagers. I can't begrudge them it, out of nostalgic solidarity if nothing else.

The picture is from the upcoming Justice League #1 art by Jim Lee. There are some interesting visual changes, Superman has a New S symbol and appears to no longer wear his underoos over his tights, most of the characters sport a similar Star Trek Next Gen uniform collar on their costumes and the way the Flashpoint series is launching Cyborg from the B - List to the A-List seems to be something they're keeping in the new continuity.

I just really hope that Grant Morrison's big fairly recently newish take on Batman isn't one of the pending victims of universal reboot although its rumored that Morrison will be given the Superman rewrite so we'll see.

I'm iffy on the new Hawkman, but with rumours of a possible Hawkman movie I can see why they would want to butch him up:

Batman Brings the Fun!

2011-03-31T22:20:00.000-07:00

Like most comic fans who grew up in the 80's I got my mind blown by the massive upswing in quality led by Alan Moore and Frank Miller. The darkly verite so called 'grim and gritty' style they exemplified has been used hard and put away wet since then, so its hard now to remember how fresh and revelatory it seemed at the time.

Moore went on to rue the way a style that came out of, as he put it in 2001, 'a bad mood I was in 15 years ago' became omnipresent and associated with the lamest of writing and cheapest of reader exploiting tactics. Miller, after pushing the style into realms of absurdity has descended into self parody and almost desperate reiteration.

The style is still dominant in the superhero genre and nowhere has it been more overt than with the character of Batman. Frank Miller's one-two punch of The Dark Knight and Batman: Year One, respectively the last year and the first of Batman's superhero career, combined into such a strong vision of the character that the obsessed and grim avenger of the night became the only version imaginable for literally years. Only now is the character beginning to emerge from its shadow.

Grant Morrison has been in charge of the character for the last few years and has been operating with the exhilarating approach of embracing all of Batman's history and persona from the comics, both the warrior of darkness and the cheerfully heroic comic book superhero he was portrayed as years ago.

The experiment has reached it's most recent artistic peak with issue 4 of Batman Incorporated.

This is, quite simply the best superhero comic I've read all year. A brilliant display of raw technical writing ability with its meta-fictional conceits and narratives nesting within narratives, like exquisite Russian dolls brilliantly merging the Golden/Silver Age Batman, with his modern counterpart. A lot of credit has to go to artist Chris Burnham who expertly and imaginatively matches the art style between the modern darkness and light hearted flashbacks.

This a Batman that embraces multiple, seemingly contradictory conceptions of the character seamlessly, a rare feat.

The other place where the light-hearted Batman is experiencing a resurgence is the animated cartoon Batman: The Brave and the Bold. This is a Batman who is a serious professional superhero but not one with no life outside of combating evil.

In the latest episode he teams up with a giddily wonderful Silver Age Superman to fight crime in Metropolis for a day because it sounds like 'fun'. This is the classic comic book Superman of the Curt Swan/Wayne Boring era, with tons of tributes to old comic covers from the 50's and 60's spoofed in a matter of minutes. The voice acting is particularly fun with Sirena Irwin in particular doing a great Rosalind Russell/Hildy Johnson voice - perfect for Lois Lane - and almost as good as Jennifer Jason Leigh's version in The Hudsucker Proxy.

Animating the Superhero universe

2011-03-05T13:59:00.000-08:00

Superhero cartoons have been riding a serious high since Bruce Timm brought Batman to the small screen. Currently there's a nice mix of action, whimsy and intensity in superhero animation.

The Avengers is a slick production, re-telling the earliest days of the Marvel super-hero team but with an eye to backstopping and reinforcing the big screen interpretations in existence or pending. Young Justice (Don't call them the Teen Titans) brings the more realistic and glossy design and animation of recent superhero straight to video movies like Justice League: Earth 2 and Batman Under the Red Hood to television animation. Batman The Brave and the Bold goes a completely different direction emphasising the campy kid friendly approach that is an equally valid take on Batman as the grittier, darker versions are.

The Avengers is a straightforward superhero action cartoon with great hero/villain battle set-pieces. It's essentially the classic 60's line up but with the enjoyable and interesting narrative decision to ask what if The Hulk, the sullen but not completely stupid version he was at the time, hadn't left the Avengers and had actually stayed on the team. This offers a clue that suggests that Joss Whedon's take on the Hulk in the Avengers movie will be based on a smarter more talkative version as he's been portrayed in the comics lately.

Classic Avengers villains and stories are referenced but with the advantage of being able to take years worth of continuity and incorporate them into a cohesive story arc.

Some great voice acting - Lance Henriksen as the villainous Grim Reaper is a standout - kid friendly designs and kinetic animation make this one of the best of the animated Marvel universe cartoons.

Young Justice adapts the Peter David written comic series with the addition of recent DC Comics interpretations of Aqua Lad and the new character Miss Martian. It's also Peter David who brought back the intelligent but mean version of the Hulk in a big way although others explored it before him. More people see the cartoon version of these characters than read the comic book versions, so Peter David is exerting a lot of influence on the public perception of both the DC and Marvel universes right now.

The Superboy is the cloned version introduced in the death of Superman story-line with lots of young teen clone angsty goodness.

By far the darkest and most superhero realist take on the comic book hero genre, Young Justice features dark conspiracies, complex character beats and grand cinematic scale to lesser seen corners of the DC universe. A high point was the most recent episode with its in depth exploration of the Atlantean society of the DC universe with a beautiful visual interpretation of an underwater city.

Batman The Brave and the Bold goes the exact opposite way with an appropriately boldly cartoony version of Batman and the DC universe.

Some fans of superhero cartoons have been taken aback after the more quasi-realist approach has been so dominant for so long but in fact The Brave and the Bold succeeds and it does so completely precisely because its creators bring the fun.

Most recently, the impish other dimensional fanboy Batmite who perfectly personifies this sunnier Batman cartoon hosted a special episode animating some of the odder interpretations of Batman in comics and cartoons including an early Kurtzman Mad Magazine Batman parody, Bat Manga and another sequence celebrating the long alliance of mighty heroes between Batman and Scooby Doo.

Writer Grant Morrison has suggested that the DC universe can be viewed as a real universe constantly accreting detail and even sentience. Universes are vast, they can contain multitudes.

Honorable mention to a cinematic version of the classic superhero/supervillain diad in Megamind, just out on DVD. This is the hero/villain war paradigm as joyful game and simultaneously unresolved childhood complex. Fun and well worth picking up.

Hustle Up

2011-03-03T22:51:00.001-08:00

Guilty Pleasures TV Edition

2011-02-19T17:46:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you just want your culture in greasy, bad for you, cheese filled quick gratification form. Here's some carnival food stand slices of TV entertainment the dweller has queasily enjoyed lately.

Todd and the Book of Pure Evil

As if 1980's Degrassi High and Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a baby and then let the kid smoke pot and listen to Heavy Metal all day.

Starring headbanging underachiever Todd, his one armed best friend Curtis, The indie chick Jenny that Todd crushes on and the science loving Hannah who crushes on Todd. They battle 'the Book of Pure Evil' a living, flapping malevolent tome that grants wishes to the lost and demented kids in their odd high school, inevitably in gruesomely ironic ways.

But strangely, the real star of the show is Guidence Counseler and closet Satanist Atticus Murphy JR. Whether he's sarcastically cringing before the sinister cult looking for the book or screaming impotently at his phone alone in his office he steals every scene he's in.

The first 13 episode season has aired on Canada's Space Channel. Keep an eye out for a DVD release soon hopefully. Fun cheese.

Doctor Who The Movie Special Edition

In the dark days between when the last episode of the original series aired in 1989 and it's triumphant rebirth in 2005 the one new piece of TV fans got was a Fox movie of the week that transplanted the Doctor to America (as played by Vancouver of course.) starring Paul McGann as the Doctor with Eric Roberts camping it up outrageously as the Master.

It was a bizarre and flawed entry in the series but with its own odd charms. It's canon for one thing, featuring a long intro sequence with seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy before he dies and is resurrected in the most blatant Christ metaphor scene you'll see outside of a Narnia book.

McGann is a perfectly acceptable Doctor and with all the criticism this entry got from fans the consensus was he did a good job and deserved more time as the character. He has done a series of audio dramas continuing his eighth Doctor's adventures.

This 2 disc set features the movie, and several good behind the scenes features and interviews. An oddly fascinating look at the dark times for fans of the Doctor and the abortive movie and series projects that kept the fire burning.

Rake at the Gates of Hell

2011-02-18T19:08:00.000-08:00

New laptop. I'm back bitches!

Newsarama has become an Attack Site

2010-12-27T20:09:00.000-08:00

Popular comics news site Newsarama is giving out free search redirect viruses for Christmas. Very annoying and still after multiple anti-virus and anti-spyware program scans undetectable. On the plus side I found a Firefox Add-On called NoRedirect that seems to get AROUND the problem but doesn't solve it. I'll keep updating my various virus and spyware programs and hoping that eventually an update will solve it.

For now, I'm removing Newsarama from this site's links and heartily advising people to avoid the site. I'm sure it's not intentional, maybe its just their ad server, but you know what? I don't care. A quick search of 'Newsarama, virus' brings up multiple recent hits of people reporting the same thing. I used their contact form to advise their site administrator of the problem hours ago. No response.

They have a responsibility to their readers to be a lot more careful, and if they can't find the problem they should shut down until they can.

Please share this news widely.

UPDATE: Well they managed to kill my computer stone dead and to date have never responded to my email to the site administrator. Thanks a lot Newsarama. Please choke on dick.

If you use Firefox and you haven't already installed the NoScript addon I highly recommend it - its the first thing I'm adding when I'm able to get a new computer.

Psychedelic Movement

2010-12-11T21:59:00.001-08:00

Swipe File

2010-12-03T14:21:00.000-08:00

The infamous 'Nowhere to Run to' DJ from the classic street gang on the run action movie 'The Warriors'

Misty Knight, coordinating superheroes on assignment in 'Heroes for Hire #1' from Marvel Written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning art by Brad Walker and Andrew Hennessy

Not so much a swipe as a tribute, and a nifty one.

The First Horror Movie

2010-11-25T20:20:00.000-08:00

It's short, not quite thirteen minutes. It's stagy and melodramatic. The effects are crude, though surprisingly effective and the film stock is very degraded.

But put yourself in the mind of somebody in 1910. Maybe you've seen a couple of the new short silent film reels, maybe you've never seen moving pictures at all.

You're ushered into a dark room and watch in horror as a grotesque monster is born out of a steaming cauldron. A backwards immolation as the figure forms out of burned meat. And then a shaggy monstrous creature, not even remotely human stalks its appalled creator.

It must have seemed apocalyptic.

Edison Frankenstein - 1910:

Some history.

Ingrid Pitt RIP

2010-11-23T12:26:00.000-08:00

Ingrid Pit died at age 73 in her South London home. The actress, a concentration camp survivor and horror movie scream queen of the 60's was best know for such shockingly sexy Hammer Horror epics as Countess Dracula, The Vampire Lovers, the subversive horror classic The Wicker Man and a couple serials of the classic Doctor Who series, most notably as the Queen of Atlantis in 'The Time Monster'.

Unlike some scream queens who've voiced discomfort with their horror movie infamy, Pitt quite enjoyed her sexy, predatory image and liked playing the baddies.

Pick up and put on The Vampire Lovers some time and raise a glass of the red stuff to one of the premiere scream queens.

Grandville Mon Amour

2010-11-21T13:06:00.000-08:00

Grandville Mon Amour
by Bryan Talbot
Dark Horse Books

This one I picked up because I saw the promotion. I've always liked Bryan Talbot's stuff, going back to a DC deluxe painted miniseries called The Nazz. A fevered story of ancient Hindu meditation techniques and superpowers. Then there's Luther Arkwright, an SF adventure with dirigibles and alternate universes inspired by Moorecock's Eternal Champion cycle and my favorite One Bad Rat, a thoughtful story about child abuse filtered through the imagery of Beatrix Potter. I already mentioned his geographical history Alice in Sunderland yesterday.

Grandville Mon Amour is the second volume in Talbot's Steampunk, anthropomorphic animals, Holmesian mystery adventure series. Yes, walking talking 'funny animals' but in a serious and dramatic adventure story. Eventually you just roll with it and go with the story - and then in one scene there are suddenly two human characters, two petty criminals derisively referred to as dough-boys and then never mentioned again. Its a vertiginous moment that had the effect of making me focus in on the whole different animals playing different characters thing again. The 'dough-faces' were introduced in Grandville, the first book in the series as a rare type of hairless chimp treated as second class citizens by all the other talking animals.

An artist as skilled and experienced as Bryan Talbot doesn't create effects and reactions like that in his readers by accident, which made me think about the anthropomorphic style itself. The most well known examples are the comics we read as little kids. Donal Duck and Mickey Mouse, comics based on animation characters but expanding their lives into houses and histories. Comics that encompassed a range from short simple humour stories to movie serial style high adventure, the best and best known by master story-teller Carl Barks.

Bringing a more adult take to funny animal universes allows an artist to capture the childhood resonance the style brings to then subvert that resonance to more adult aims. Robert Crumb explored our darkest sexual impulses and neuroses through the intercession of cheerfully stylized funny animal strips, In Maus, Art Spiegleman illustrated the Holocaust and his own tortured relationship with his death camp survivor father with the Jews presented as mice and the Nazis as cats.

Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics discussed how a very simple, cartoony design, particularly of faces encourages identification with the reader because its the same way our brains are wired to perceive our own faces. When juxtaposed with a very detailed and hyper-realistic external world a lot of perceptual buttons get pushed whether the reader realizes they are or not.

By suddenly dropping human characters into an anthropomorphic animal story with no fanfare or explanation Talbot subverts a style already designed to subvert our expectations. Always nice when that happens.

But I might have missed this book if I hadn't seen the sneak peek published in British comics magazine Comic Heroes in their regular Sidekicks compilation and the clever promotional trailer created for the book available on Youtube. I suspect we will see more and more of these, as done well they're an excellent way to highlight the tone and feel of a book to the audience its meant for.

Jabberwocky

2010-11-20T18:14:00.000-08:00

From Bryan Talbot, who just released the second chapter of his Steampunk, 'funny animal', Holmesian mystery adventure 'Grandville Mon Amour', which I'll be reviewing soon.

This delightful interpretation of Jabberwocky by Lewis Carrol comes from Alice in Sunderland, a compulsively fascinating work of geographical history merged with fiction much like Alan Moore's experiments in From Hell and Voice of Fire to create a four dimensional architecture to a sense of place. Moore did it in From Hell to London and with his home town of Northampton in Voice of Fire, Talbot does it for his hometown of Sunderland with a special emphasis on Sunderland native son Lewis Carrol.

And here's Terry Gilliam's take, a grittier, more medieval interpretation. It's long, but try to stick with it to the introduction of the Jabberwocky himself, the giant puppetry prototypes of the practical effect monstrosities of Gilliam's dystopian classic Brazil. I know that by every objective standard the flashy CGI Jabberwocky of Tim Burton's Alice is more impressive but this creaky giant puppet made of wood and fabric fills me with joy.

The Wolf with the Red Roses

2010-11-20T00:11:00.000-08:00

Top 100 Horror Movies

2010-11-14T16:18:00.000-08:00

Top 100 Horror Movies
IDW/Fantastic Press
Written by Gary Gerani
Introduction by Roger Corman

I approached this one with caution and skepticism. Invariably these kind of 'best of' books are so subjective as to be one step up from vanity projects, overly weighted to recent movies and suffering from unforgivable exclusions.

But Gerani has created a list that had me nodding my head at almost every page. Almost every pick and its ranking made sense. These aren't necessarily the 100 best horror films, but Gerani makes a good argument for them being the most important ones.

OK, no true genre fan could pick up a book like this without at least a couple fierce nit-picks. The author justifies the absence of John Carpenter's The Thing because it will be in his planned follow up Top 100 Science Fiction Movies. I would quibble that while yes, Romero's original Night of the Living Dead certainly belongs on the list, the original Dawn of the Dead does too. It's the platonic ideal and all time classic of the zombie genre and any list of great horror movies has to include it.

Plus if you're going with a Tim Burton film, I would pick the Hammer Horror worshiping Sleepy Hollow, a more artistically successful and quintessential horror film than the entertainingly gory but overly stylized musical Sweeney Todd.

The production is excellent and while the art selected will be familiar to any fan of Famous Monsters of Film Land or indeed any genre productions its an atmospheric graphic collection nonetheless.

Batman in Turnabout Intruder

2010-11-03T16:04:00.000-07:00

For some reason Batman The Brave and the Bold decided to adapt the last, and what most people consider the weakest episode of classic Star Trek, Turnabout Intruder except they called it The Criss Cross Conspiracy.

Batman's decidedly effeminate, not to put too fine a point on it flaming demeanor makes Batgirl and Nightwing wonder what's up with that?

What's up is that failed thrill seeking super heroine Batwoman, forced out of the crime fighting business by having her identity exposed by the Riddler, seeks revenge on the world by using black magic to swap bodies with Batman. There's a lot of twisted sexual politics in the story as she believes that there is a double standard for male and female crime-fighters and only in Batman's body can she have the freedom of power and male authority. Which brings us to Turnabout Intruder...

Same idea. One of the many embittered former conquests of Captain Kirk possesses his body in order to get the power and freedom of a male star-ship captain. Misogyny is implicit in the script and explicit in Shatner's campy, over the top ranting and prancing performance. All hysteria, all the time.

Ultimately Brave and the Bold makes this story work, sort of, in a way that Trek doesn't. Maybe it says something that this story only works as a half hour cartoon rather than a live action drama.

This is Halloween

2010-10-31T10:53:00.001-07:00

Covered by Marilyn Manson

Rhymin' and Crimin'

2010-10-30T11:56:00.000-07:00

Hip Hop and crime movies have been a match made in hell since the earliest days of old school rap but Masterpieces like Boyz in the Hood and New Jack City have slowly been supplanted by limited vanity projects and barely watchable straight to video dreck.

There have been a few authentic masterpieces that advanced both the crime film genre and the artistic boundaries of Hip Hop as well. Today we'll look at two gems, lesser known except among the cognoscenti.

"I think you know that there's no such thing as an American anymore. No Hispanics, no Japanese, no blacks, no whites, no nothing. It's just rich people and poor people. The three of us are all rich, so we're on the same side"

Deep Cover released in 1992 is an overlooked oddity that never really got the audience it deserved. With a theme of tortured moral ambiguity and the existential terror of ethical compromise it also features a brilliantly appropo old school Dr Dre soundtrack and the introduction of a rapper known then as Snoop Doggy Dogg on the title track

Laurence Fishburne is the hero and poetic narrator, a fiercely straight edge cop compensating for the childhood pain of watching his drug addicted father gunned down on Christmas day with an iron self control. A sleazy DEA agent tells him his 'criminal personality type' makes him perfect for undercover work and reluctantly at first he sets himself up as a drug dealer to bring down a cocaine network that traces back to a South American politician.

The neo-blaxploitation stylized film-making of Bill Duke (A Rage in Harlem) builds and maintains a dark atmosphere of moral dread as Fishburne's character hooks up with a corrupt lawyer played with edgy intensity by Jeff Goldblum, a successful family man with a yearning need for a gangsta lifestyle, who want's his cake and eat it too.

Lines blur, loyalty is tested and Fishburne's narration gets more and more lyrical and intense. Some amazing dramatic set pieces, tight wire over the top performances and thoughtful political and philosophical speculation make this a film you can watch multiple times and find something new every time.

"It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this."

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai from 2001 is a masterpiece of slow burn suspense and dramatic artifice. Director Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, Down by Law) never makes the same movie twice, artistically and musically he always stretches boundaries with his films.

Ghost Dog takes the martial arts movie fantasy world of Wu Tang Clan alum RZA who does the soundtrack and tells a darkly lyrical story about the power to choose the world we inhabit.

The hero played with sleepy eyed intensity by Forest Whitaker is either a crazy assassin who lives on a roof top with pigeons and kills people for the Mafia, or he is a dedicated warrior, committed body and soul to the melancholy death worshiping code of the ancient samurai as laid out in the classic 17th century Japanese text Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai. Quotes by Whitaker from the book are interspersed throughout the film and are offered as a mournful poetic counterpoint to the ambiguity of the main character. He serves an unworthy gangster master who once saved his life, a moment of essential defining purity for Ghost Dog, but a casual throwaway whim on the part of the gangster.

There's a lot of sly humor, Ghost Dog's best friends are a Haitian Ice Cream salesman, and most of their translated conversations consist of good natured misunderstanding; "I'm sorry, I don't speak English" in response to "I'm sorry I don't speak French" and a little girl waiting for the book that will change her life. The elderly fading mobsters offer the most laughs, ancient Italian Mafiosi obsessed with old school rap and cowboys and Indians.

The theme is simple. Your identity, your code, your very reality is what you choose it to be, and just because you live in modern day New York doesn't mean you can't choose to be a Samurai living by an ancient code of honor.

Sleeping Through the End

2010-10-28T22:38:00.000-07:00

The Walking Dead hasn't even officially aired yet and already some commentators are sniffing that the opening seems awfully similar to the opening of 28 Days Later.

This is, of course, true.

In 28 Days Later bike courier Jim, in hospital with a head injury from a car meets bike courier accident wakes up out of a coma to find the hospital and seemingly all of London are completely abandoned. Death and destruction are everywhere, and ultimately it turns out that ravening hordes of horribly transformed normal people are slavering for his blood.

In The Walking Dead (Both comic book and TV series) Rick, a police officer in hospital after being critically injured in a shoot out wakes up out of a coma to find the hospital and seemingly all of his home town are completely abandoned. Death and destruction are everywhere, and ultimately it turns out that ravening hordes of horribly transformed normal people are slavering for his blood.

So yeah, kind of similar.

But what the nitpickers don't realize is that 'sleeping through the apocalypse' is actually a recurring trope that has appeared many times. In fact 28 Days Later was specifically referencing the classic John Wyndham novel turned multiple movie and TV adaptions The Day of the Triffids.

The hero Bill Mason, is in hospital getting treatment for an eye injury that has temporarily blinded him. So his eyes are covered with bandages when almost everyone else raptly watches a bizarre meteor shower that lights up the skies all over the world. The next morning everyone who did is permanently blind while Mason can see as soon as he takes off his bandages. His awakening in hospital surrounded by the terrified newly blind and stalked by horrific monsters is strongly reflected in the first quarter of 28 Days Later.

Ultimately the sleeping through the apocalypse trope is useful to writers because it allows them to plunge directly into the post apocalyptic action without having to explicate the apocalypse itself. Plus the audience is introduced to the new reality at the same time as the hero is, encouraging identification with his baffled terror.

Other examples range from the Twilight Zone classic episode 'Time Enough at Last', the short lived Gene Roddenberry series Genesis II, the zombie move Night of the Comet and too many other examples to count.

Worry about the similarities between 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead if you want - or you could just enjoy a great thrilling zombie series on the small screen every week.

I know which option I'm picking.

UPDATE: Heh. AMC aren't too worried about the comparison. They ran 28 Days Later right after the repeat performance of the premiere episode on Friday Nov 5.

Planet Vancouver

2010-10-13T23:14:00.000-07:00

I love how every fantasy or science fiction show on TV lately is a long game of 'Spot the Vancouver landmark'.

No that isn't the headquarters of alternate dimension Fringe Division, it's the downtown Vancouver Public Library.

It's futuristic, neoclassical coliseum look has naturally, also been glimpsed in Battlestar Galactica and Caprica helping make that Greco-Roman mytho link of the stories part of the visual tone of the shows. Other examples of the glassy modernistic architecture of Vancouver like the UBC Museum of Anthropology also appear regularly.

Lots of back alleys, stretches of lonely highway and beachfront broodiness in Supernatural are familiar to anyone who's ever spent any time on the lower mainland - and just the constant gray sky light and unrelenting rain in recent episodes of Caprica and whole seasons of the X Files are pure British Columbia.

It's enough to get all misty for the town I grew up in.

Pandemia - Voodoo Zombie

2010-10-08T21:58:00.001-07:00

Dead London

2010-10-03T21:57:00.001-07:00

Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions Review

2010-09-27T19:36:00.000-07:00

Just finished my first run-through (X-Box 360 version.) and its entertaining enough that I'll probably play it again.

Its certainly the best Spiderman game yet, but fans of the character and gaming know that isn't saying much. Over all its a solid playing experience and a lot of fun. After the problematic open world approach led to frustrating game-play in the last few Spiderman games, Shattered Dimensions goes for a linear A-B-C style of sequential play that can become repetitive: Chase villain boss, defeat henchmen, rescue civilians and escort them to safety (bleh.), fight Big Boss, fight Big Boss again, rinse and repeat. The thumb controls close up combat system in the level finales works intermittently, sometimes a nice change sometimes frustrating and annoying.

Thankfully the level by level shifting between the four different Spidermen and their unique design and game-play elements help keep the game fresh. There's an over-arcing storyline about Mysterio and a shattered mystical tablet that Madam Web contacts alternate dimension versions of Spiderman to retrieve, battling a villain for every piece. Its basically just a framework for one boss fight after another.

Amazing Spiderman captures the colour and line art style of the comic books, 2099 is flashy and high tech with fun free fall combat sequences but occasionally blurry neon heavy backgrounds. Ultimate just seems like Amazing but with the black symbiote costume and none of the dialogue heavy character elements that make the Ultimate comics unique and Noir has the best ... well, noirish design work.

However the shadow of the bat hangs heavily over the game there's no doubt about it. Like most people I think Batman: Arkham Asylum was the greatest superhero game ever made and clearly so did the designers of Shattered Dimensions. In game mechanics, fighting style and whole levels the influence sometimes crosses over into outright imitation. In Noir Spiderman in particular the hide in the shadows and perform silent take-downs mode is almost embarrassingly similar to what dedicated Arkham inmates are used to. Spiderman's spider sense vision is virtually identical to Arkham's Detective Vision and the final boss battle with Mysterio felt exactly like one of the hallucinatory encounters with Scarecrow scuttling from one shadowy fragment of reality to another until you get close enough to defeat the god like villain with the spotlight and the hallucinogen theme.

But this is quibbling. The game captures the fun Spiderman quip heavy comic book action and the voice acting - particularly Neil Patrick Harris racking up another comic book character for his collection - is uniformly excellent. Just speed-playing and finishing the story would take about nine or ten hours. Actively seeking out all the level challenges and collecting every upgrade takes a few hours longer.

Either way it's worth the price of admission.

Daredevil: Superhero. Lawyer. Asshole.

2010-09-19T22:33:00.000-07:00

Something Wicked This Way Comes

2010-09-14T21:26:00.001-07:00

Comics Reviews Sept 13: 'For the Record...'

2010-09-13T00:38:00.000-07:00

Batman and Robin #14 Grant Morrison writing and Frazier Irving's lushly organic art, produced entirely on computer which I've dribbled over here before. This is THE Batman book right now as far as I'm concerned. Neal Adams berserk Odyssey is Batman to readers of a certain age, David Finch's Dark Knight will doubtless be a contender as will Grant Morrison's upcoming International series.

Right now though Batman and Robin is where the fireworks are going off, both in the heightened hyper-compressed storytelling and archetypal imagery Morrison does when he's doing superheros and Irving's spectacularly beautiful art glowing on the page like fluorescent rot.

If you're a Batman fan and you aren't getting this book, you're missing out.

Comics Reviews - Sept. 4

2010-09-04T10:46:00.000-07:00

Recently a minor fuss hit the comics field as a scathing critique of modern comic book writing by an industry professional made the rounds. The piece expresses disappointment in the current 'sprawling and inconsistent patchwork of murky, angry, shock-value events' So this week we'll look at some of the bright spots in a field slipping back into some very bad habits from the 90's I thought creators had sworn off. It's appropriate that we begin with a book by the writer widely assumed to be the anonymous author of the name withheld note, Kurt Busiek.

Astro City Special
Silver Agent #2 of 2

If you get a sense of Déjà vu from this issue, yes in the last several months both Captain America and Batman also went skipping across time after seeming to be killed, touching lives down through the years until returning to their own time to face their destiny. Considering the lead time a comic needs, its likely all three story-lines were in production simultaneously.

Silver Agent is a character in Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's long running Astro City series. A tribute to the comic book superhero that with it's sprawling observation of a classic comic book universe has as its conceit the goal of putting the 'human' in the superhuman.

Silver Agent is Astro City's Captain America analogue. There are also Superman, Fantastic Four and Batman analogues in the series - not so much imitations of these characters but iconic archetypes who play the same roles in the Astro City Universe as their avatars do in the Marvel or DC universes.

Silver Agent is brave, steadfast and true, and those attributes aren't mocked with a clumsy Dudley Do Right satire as so many hacks would doubtless portray basic goodness. Busiek takes on the far more challenging writer's task of making heroism and self sacrifice in pursuit of an ideal a fully realized and seriously considered display of human choice. Silver Agent chooses his fate with his eyes open and without regrets to protect an ideal he's seen and decided is worth any cost to protect.

Busiek and Anderson explicate the moral essence of self sacrificing love in the context of the comic book superhero as perfectly as you're ever going to see it.

I Am An Avenger
#1 of 5

Surrounded by frankly uninspired filler in one of the 3000 different Avengers related tie in titles published this month, is one of the most emotionally resonant stories published in a superhero comic that I've seen in a long time.

The Books of the Iron Fist written by Duane Swiercynski and beautifully illustrated by Jason Latour, fakes out the casual reader with an obligatory page and half opener with the classic muggers confronting the hero in his civilian wear motif and then a comfortably genre sounding title before becoming a story about a man and woman sitting on the floor after a breakup sadly splitting up their bookshelf.

With delicacy, understatement and real feeling, the end of a relationship is shown with more real quiet drama than a thousand of the shouty, weepy monologues that the comics medium usually presents as its idea of human interaction. It's a fractal snapshot of a story that unfold like a geometric flower from every word, every sad glance. Eight pages that have more human feeling than any other ten comics you'll read this year.

Meanwhile in Brightest Day #9...

Oh, who gives a rat's ass?

Psychobilly Freakout

2010-08-14T17:49:00.001-07:00

Comic Reviews - Aug 8

2010-08-09T14:23:00.000-07:00

Batman Odyssey #2
Neal Adams

For those asking why they don't make comics like they used to - here's proof that they sometimes still do, and economically, its also a demonstration of why they generally don't.

Neal Adams is one of the most respected 'super realist' artists in comics - arguably the wellspring for the whole densely illustrative, heavily detailed style that dominates the super hero genre. The Renaissance of the Batman character as a dark, brooding avenger of the night taken deadly seriously was Neal Adams 1970's run on the book with Denny O'Neil on the scripts. It's no coincidence that Batman Begins, the dark hyper-realist first Batman movie by director Christopher Nolan used Ras Al Ghul, the international terrorist they created in that run as the villain.

But Adams is writing as well as drawing this new series himself and Batman Odyssey combines his super dense, packed to the gutters art with utterly berserk almost stream of consciousness writing that is less a comic book than page after page of smacks to the face. The dialogue is a bizarre mix of non-sequiters, verbatim incoherent stuttering (“Huh? What... I can’t hear you... guy... look? Huh? What? Why?” - I'm not kidding that's a real line of dialogue in this book.) and one vertiginously odd sequence where Batman interrupts a fight scene in order to slam a thug up against a wall and give him an impromptu science lecture on the explosive properties of hydrogen.

Really.

If I'm not being clear enough, I loved this comic with an unreasoning joy even while being completely befuddled by it. As incomprehensible, over packed and just plain nuts as it is, it's also enormous fun and very pretty eye candy. Fashion designers have a term 'Hot Mess' to describe an ensemble that by any reasonable critical standard is a disaster (It's ironic that this issue includes a literal train wreck) but is still too much fun to look at to dismiss.

izombie #4
CHRIS ROBERSON and MICHAEL ALLRED

This super fun go-go boot monster comic continues and just keeps getting better. Starring Gwen Dylan, a morose zombie girl who is able to think and look alive only by chowing down on brains, izombie is just a heck of a lot of fun with ghosts, werewolves, vampires and mummies exuberantly thrown into the mix in every issue.

With issue #4, Roberson and Allred offer a cohesive 'rules for the undead' structure to explain every kind of monster we meet in this book. It's internally consistent and satisfying, but wasn't entirely necessary. I was quite willing to accept that the characters live in a world with zombies, vampires and were-terriers without needing a theological under-pinning for them but for the rules junkies there's a satisfyingly complete set here.

In this issue the monster hunters are circling and avoiding them will doubtless soon become part of Gwen's nights - equally doubtless is the heavily telegraphed love triangle lurking between Gwen, the smooth talking mummy who explains the world of the supernatural to her and the rakish monster hunter character staking vampires in alleys. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking or innovative here, but its an appealing enough production that there doesn't really need to be.

No gum shall escape my sight

2010-08-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

Is it just me or does the upcoming Green Lantern movie have an easy advertising tie-in pick up right out of the gate?

Comics Reviews - Aug 1

2010-08-01T19:10:00.000-07:00

The Artist Himself: A Rand Holmes Retrospective
by Patrick Rosenkranz
Fantagraphics Books

Canada's revered and preeminent artist of the underground comix era, Rand Holmes contrasted a beautiful Wally Wood inspired illustrative style with subject matter lauding outlaws and scofflaws like his hippie hero Harold Hedd and glorying in the humiliation and downfall of authority figures. His beautifully rendered brush stroke could throb with paranoia or add a density and panache to hilariously scatological funny animal epics.

This book serves double duty as a biography and a collected edition of the bulk of Holmes' creative output in comix, covers and later painted work including the complete hippie high adventure epics Wings over Tijuana and Hitler's Cocaine (Think the Freak Bros. epic Mexican Odyssey but with a real world gloss to the druggy antics.) along with a frank appraisal of the unconventional life of a hippie dropout contrasted with a painstaking craftsmanship. Recommended.

Hotwire: Deep Cut
Written and illustrated by Steve Pugh
Radical Comics

Continuing the character and story he co-created with Warren Ellis in Requiem for the Dead, Pugh brings us the continuing adventures of Alice Hotwire a police exorcist in a future where ghosts are a powerful and dangerous electromagnetic phenomenon requiring high technology to fight.

The art is beautiful and the story retains the inventiveness of Ellis with perhaps a little less of the horrible cynical bastard pose that is his trademark.

Still enough of a futuristic Ghostbusters with a hungover bad attitude to make a very entertaining read.

Snowblind

2010-07-24T11:51:00.000-07:00

An under-rated chanteuse does some great crunchy psychedelia.

Tom Waits gets his Mojo on

2010-07-11T20:15:00.000-07:00

Brits make the best music magazines and Mojo is one of the best of the best.

Now, to celebrate their 200th issue they've given big chunks of the magazine to Tom Waits to edit with articles about Harry Belafonte and Ray Charles and an interview by Tom Waits of Hank Williams III and they let him pick the soundtrack of the issue's free CD.

Why are you still sitting there reading this instead of running to your nearest magazine dealer?

Octopus

2010-07-10T11:13:00.001-07:00

Art?

2010-07-05T20:49:00.000-07:00

Roger Ebert recently expressed the view that video games were not - and never could be - 'art'.

He started wishing he'd never brought the subject up in the first place almost immediately. Endless people pointed out to him that devotees of literature and live theater said the exact same thing when film came along and endless people sent him suggestions of games to try that would prove to him games could be art.

Ebert was learning the central lesson of life online: Don't feed the trolls because their hunger is savage and unending. His climbdown came quickly and came down to an admission that he had no right to challenge the artistic legitimacy of video games if he had no intention of playing any.

The problem comes down to a misunderstanding about the word 'art.' It isn't a value judgment word, its a category word. Saying that something is 'art' doesn't mean its good art or high art, just that it falls into the category of creative endeavour.

Of all the definitions and deconstructions of the concept of art that I've seen, Scott McCloud's from his magnum opus Understanding Comics resonates with me the most.

Art is simply any human activity not concerned specifically with survival or reproduction. Anything we do that is extraneous to these pursuits is art.

Of course it can be related to those urges, but it's impulse comes from somewhere else altogether.

There's no doubt in my mind that games like Bioshock are art. With a mix of compelling story-telling, trenchant social commentary and beautiful design, any single component of the game could be considered art on its own - why once it became an interactive experience would it stop being art?

Oh Noes!

2010-07-05T18:58:00.001-07:00

Question

2010-07-05T18:08:00.000-07:00

Flipping through the channels, ah, Law and Order SVU, always good for a human degradation fix. Olivia is being all soft spoken and empathic with a grieving widow. "Can you think of any reason why your husband would have been sodomized with a banana?"

"He was allergic."

"The Deadliest Night of my Life"

2010-07-04T18:09:00.000-07:00

Daredevil #208, 1984.

Written by Harlan Ellison and Drawn by David Mazzucchelli.

Two years later Mazzucchelli partnered with Frank Miller on the highly acclaimed Daredevil: Born Again story-line and then on the Batman: Year One epic with a style at once more impressionistic and more realistic, but he was already producing iconic imagery on the book before then.

You are my Asylum - Alan Moore knows the score

2010-07-03T21:45:00.000-07:00

Alan Moore performs at the launch party of his absurdly wonderful magazine project Dodgem Logic.

Every issue is a stuffed to the margins collection of music, culture and humor. It made the fan headlines recently, when Moore publicly resigned from the New Gorillaz Rock Opera project pointing out that as the band couldn't get their act together to produce a promised 3 page story for his magazine, Moore felt little inclination to make the time to contribute the script and design work for their project. Moore is clearly having more fun with this retro underground newspaper/magazine then he's had in years. It's a loving evocation of a particular era of rebel press in British counter-culture. One almost expects to find a double page spread of unspeakable things being done to Andy Pandy.

Moore is one of those rare and wonderful chimera, a lifelong idol and artistic north star who never disappointed or disillusioned. With a bibliography full of the greatest texts in the medium Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to name just a few. Fiercely, unbendingly ethical and uncompromisable, he refused movie money, refused to be punked by corporate tools and refused to be bullied artistically. My Alan Moore shelf sags under the weight of his output, comics that dragged the artform years forward, reinterpretations of heroes and monsters, elegant pornography, rigorous science fiction, social satire and critical analysis.

He's also a practicing ceremonial magician of an idiosyncratic Golden Dawn style but with an eclectic syncreticism of his own devising. His ultimate exegesis on the subject, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is at the top of my wish list of anxiously awaited future projects.

Every issue Of Dodgem Logic includes extras, a CD in issue one featuring the song at the top of this post among other local alternative musicians in Moore's orbit, issue two had an 'insert' comic Astounding Weird Penises, both written and with a rare art job by Alan Moore himself. The latest, issue three has an old fashioned classic iron on transfer of a plump pin up beauty by Moore's collaborator and lady love Melinda Gebbie.

Moore is able to put this out, in a model perhaps inspired by his early experience with the creative collective the Art Lab, while also producing multimedia extravaganzas and putting on magically transformative spoken word performances in the tunnels under London.

He also knows the score about the ducks. Little bastards.

Comics Review - July 3

2010-07-03T19:14:00.000-07:00

The Death of Dracula
Marvel One Shot

This one-shot is the preview of the big cross-over event of the coming year in the Marvel Universe. Dracula looks completely different from his previously extremely consistent classic model sheet. Evening wear, widows peak and opera cape have been replaced with an albino pony-tale and cheesy fantasy armor.

It's not an improvement, but he isn't in the picture for long. As others have said, its basically a Mafia story. The Godfather gets assassinated and the five families descend into plotting, jockeying for power and open inter vampire clan warfare.

We've never seen this gathering of different clans of vampires before, but its explained it happens once a century, and now that Dracula has been murdered the assembled hosts of the undead have turned their sights on the rest of the Marvel universe. If you were a vampire in a world of unimaginably powerful superheroes, wouldn't you turn them into undead thralls?

The Tomb of Dracula
TPB collecting issues 1-12 of the 70's classic

Doubtless timed to cash in on the big Marvel vampire crossover in the works, a new color reprint delivers the first 12 issues of the Marvel horror classic. It's been reprinted multiple times in the last few years from black and white phone book sized economy editions to deluxe hard cover collections. This is an affordable but attractive middle ground color paperback collection.

Gene Colan has the art duties from the first issue, while the writer changed multiple times until Marv Wolfman stepped in on issue seven beginning a partnership with Colan on the book that lasted seven years. It was the longest running series starring a villain in comics history and deserved it.

The book featured a motley crew of vampire fighters including Frank Drake, one of Dracula's descendants determined to defeat the family curse, Abraham Van Helsing's grand-daughter and in issue ten, a day walking half man half vampire named Blade.

Blade, of course, went on to make Marvel beau-coup movie bucks. Wolfman went to court to try to get a taste of the movie money for creating the character but lost and was largely blackballed in the industry afterward.

It is to be hoped he at least got a share from this latest collected edition of his work.

Captain Swing #2
Avatar

The long awaited second issue of Warren Ellis' Victorian steam punk electric pirate series is out and reveals that Ellis has created an inter-connected world of his Avatar books. Captain Swing is the ancestor of Doktor Sleepless, while his bold policeman prisoner and possible ally is apparently the great-great grandfather of combat magician William Gravel.

He seems to be treating his Avatar cosmology more like a darker echo of Alan Moore's genre mash up the League of Extraordinary Gentleman than the tedious merger of soap opera and pro wrestling that established superhero universes evoke.

The story itself, is about a crazed but charismatic super-genius turning to elaborate science piracy to try to stop those who would keep magic and scientific miracles in the hands of the elites and follows the themes of his other genre fusion series Planetary. Recommended.

"A smile before you go..."

2010-07-01T23:12:00.000-07:00

"A smile before you go..."

by
Cliff Almas

“Lucille, you must see how it is. It can’t be a surprise to you that somebody finally got upset.” Corporal Jeffery Mackinnon of the RCMP shifted uncomfortably, the plastic covering on the hard chair crackled along with his movements.

Lucille Nystrom collected colorful little figurines. They covered every flat surface of the neat sitting room. Mackinnon, a big broad shouldered man going just slightly to pot, felt huge and clumsy. He feared that the smallest movement would slaughter porcelain multitudes.

Perhaps Lucille could sense his nervousness. She casually picked up and moved aside a tiny Shetland pony from next to his elbow as she refilled his cup.

“I honestly don’t understand all the fuss. Peter Carr was a remarkably jovial man, always a smile on his face, and that belly laugh! You could hear it across the room.” Lucille sat down lightly, knees together, back straight and fixed Mackinnon with a piercing stare. “Sending him to his reward with a scowl on his face would have been a shame and a sin.”

“Come on Lucille, you didn’t have to put a scowl on his face, but a big toothy grin wasn’t the way to go either.” Mackinnon sipped his tea, controlling a wince. He was a coffee man and to his palate the tea tasted bitter and metallic.

Lucille leaned forward and moved a tiny Collie with a red ball between its paws back from Mackinnon’s end of the coffee table. He felt more self-conscious than ever. Was his awkwardness over the chore that had brought him here so obvious as to make Lucille fear a figurine massacre?

“Corporal, I took over the Nystrom funeral home, this funeral home, when Gary passed away last April. Susan Carr has been the only one to complain about my work since then.” Lucille’s lips were primly pursed but still held the faint half smile that never entirely left them. The trim pretty fifty-eight year old widow was popular in the township. Undertakers were usually shunned, at least a little. Nothing overt but there just the same. Gary Nystrom now, had been a somber, even dour figure. He’d probably have been avoided no matter what his occupation.

But nobody could shun Lucille; that fiercely friendly personality was simply too forceful to resist.

Mackinnon sighed and slurped up more bitter tea. Like everyone else, (Well, maybe excepting Susan Car and a few other offended bereaved these days.) Mackinnon liked Lucille enormously, and he bitterly resented the position he was being forced into.

“Nobody questions how hard you’ve worked since Gary died, but it’s been a hard year and all those smiles… well Susan Carr isn’t the only one who’s been bothered by them, she’s just the first to complain officially.”

It had been a bad year. One of those statistical spikes that looks so innocuous on paper, but in real life means accidents and heart attacks and plain old deaths from old age have chosen to cluster together perversely.

Latham was a small northern town made up of farmers, oilmen and a few townies who ran the stores and worked for the schools and the hospital. The tiny population had done more than its share of mourning. Mackinnon had headed up the three man Mountie detachment for ten years. Every death was like losing family.

Lucille turned that 100-watt smile on him and Mackinnon blinked. “Corporal, death isn’t something to be feared any more than life is. ‘Going to your reward’ isn’t just an expression. It’s the simple joyous truth.” Lucille reached over with the teapot and topped up Mackinnon’s cup. He eyed it mournfully and took a dutiful sip.

Lucille bustled off to the kitchen with the kettle, but not before picking up a tiny china shepherdess from the mantle piece next to Mackinnon’s head and moving it to a bookshelf across the room. Mackinnon felt a drop of sweat slide out from under his hairline and quickly wiped it away.

Thirteen deaths. Thirteen people ‘sent to their rewards’ in the past year, and starting with Gary Nystrom, thirteen people lovingly laid to rest by Lucille Nystrom with wide happy smiles on frozen white faces.

And the nasty, unspoken fact of this little visit was that Mackinnon was going to have to do something about it. If Lucille couldn’t be convinced to stop molding stiff dead flesh into beaming grins then… well she was going to have to stop, that was all there was to it.

Mackinnon had already made a note of the phone number of the Provincial Mortuary Regulatory Board. He really didn’t want to have to call that number.

But he would if he had to. It might be time for Lucille to retire, whether she agreed or not.

Mackinnon could feel the beginnings of a nasty case of heartburn developing behind his sternum. The tea and his own nervousness was making acid bubble and rise.

“Lucille, if you could just make them look peaceful it would make my job a lot easier.”

Lucille came back in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a tea cloth. “This world doesn’t have enough smiles Jeffery. I’m just trying to bring people a little happiness.”

Mackinnon opened his mouth and a sudden wave of agony rippled through his chest and down his left arm. He gasped and hunched forward around the pain. A sickening spike of nausea uncoiled from his stomach and after three tries Mackinnon managed to swallow down bitter bile through the sudden vice grip that was constricting his chest.

“I am sorry that it hurts Jeffery.” Lucille’s voice was distant and tinny over the throbbing, frantic rush of blood in Mackinnon’s ears. “The Digitalis is the best method I’ve found so far, but there is some pain.”

Mackinnon tried to stand but his legs were made of rubber. “Digi…Digitalis?”

“Just a little something I found on the Internet dear. I grow the Foxglove in my greenhouse for my little projects. Such a pretty cone of little tube flowers! Did you know that when it’s refined it looks exactly like a heart attack and it won’t show up in an autopsy unless the coroner is looking for it? It’s a wonder anyone ever dies of natural causes at all.”

Lucille gently pushed Mackinnon back in the easy chair and briskly lifted each of his eyelids with her thumb. The pupil of the left was noticeably larger than the right. “It won’t be long now, dear.”

Mackinnon was completely numb. Lucille’s smiling face was little more than a pale oval at the end of a dark tunnel. “Wh…wh…why?”

Lucille softly stroked Mackinnon’s cheek, smiling that same constant, gentle smile. “I already told you Jeffery. Twenty years with that sullen, miserable man I married taught me one very important lesson.”

“Lucille’s fingers gently traced Mackinnon’s cold, numb lips. Lightly lifting them at the corners.

“There just aren’t enough smiles in the world.”

end.

copyright (c) Cliff Almas

Doctor in the House

2010-06-28T22:14:00.000-07:00

Orbital close out the Glastonbury festival with an ecstatic version of the Doctor Who theme with the Doctor himself Matt Smith rocking the synthesizer!

Public Policy, Games Theory and the Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

2010-06-24T08:29:00.001-07:00

Oh sure our leaders and administrators are worrying about trivialities like global warming, simmering warfare, global food shortages and economic uncertainty...but who's planning for the ravening hordes of the hungry dead?

The prestigious journal Foreign Policy fills the dangerous zombie gap in large scale public policy planning and puts some serious wonk time into exploring different strategies for dealing with the hungry dead. they explore differing approaches based on ideology, resources and military strategy.

There are many sources of fear in world politics -- terrorist attacks, natural disasters, climate change, financial panic, nuclear proliferation, ethnic conflict, and so forth. Surveying the cultural zeitgeist, however, it is striking how an unnatural problem has become one of the fastest-growing concerns in international relations. I speak, of course, of zombies.
For our purposes, a zombie is defined as a reanimated being occupying a human corpse,
with a strong desire to eat human flesh -- the kind of ghoul that first appeared in George Romero's 1968 classic, Night of the LivingDead, and which has been rapidly proliferating in popular culture in recent
years (far upstaging its more passive cousins, the reanimated corpses of traditional West African and Haitian voodoo rituals). Because they can spread across borders and threaten states and civilizations, these zombies should command the attention of scholars and policymakers.

Followers of cold blooded Realpolitik would call for closing the borders and leaving the rest of the world to be over-run by the shambling hordes. Selfish but effective if you don't mind watching the rest of the world get eaten alive. Liberals would band together and cooperate against the zombie threat, a little hippie-dippy perhaps, but ultimately probably the best long term strategy for cooperating against the undead on a global level - see the book World War Z, an Oral History of the Zombie War for the best description of the UN VS the Zombies model. Finally neo-conservatives would probably go out in the world proactively bombing, shooting and presumably torturing the walking dead in the fight against the undead evil-doers. Effective in the short term but the 'You're either with us or you're with the Axis of the Evil Dead' approach would turn off potential allies.

In the end, what I am suggesting is that with careful planning and a consistent approach, the zombie threat can be managed. The purpose of this essay is not to make a policy recommendation or suggest that one approach is superior to another. It is up to the reader to exercise his or her own judgment in determining what to do with this information. Indeed, interested and intelligent students of world politics should use their own brains -- before the zombies do.

Monster Size Monsters

2010-06-23T20:55:00.001-07:00

That's right baby, Frankie is 7 feet tall. 7 feet...and 11 inches.

Mickey Mouse, Breaking Bad

2010-06-20T12:52:00.001-07:00

For awhile there, amphetamines were legal, and Mickey and goofy picked up a couple bucks on the side as pitchmen for legal crank.
It all ended in tears of course:

Quote of the Day

2010-06-13T13:03:00.000-07:00

If the absence of sensation means a living death, then perhaps zombies are merely creatures thrown up by evolution to live in the urban environment.

-Roger Ebert, from his review of Little Murders, 1971

The Garden

2010-06-12T15:24:00.000-07:00

Sort of Psychobilly meets Sweethearts of the Rodeo.

Oh, that is just WRONG!

2010-06-11T09:55:00.000-07:00

"All I know is, we're in love."

Exposition Fail

2010-06-10T21:36:00.000-07:00

Avengers West Coast #52

Mark Hamill's Last Laugh

2010-06-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

After being associated with the character since the early 90's on the beloved animated version, Mark Hamill announces the upcoming Arkham Asylum 2 will be his final bow as The Joker.

Nothing but respect for Heath Ledger's lacerating, terrifying interpretation of the Joker as a nihilistic urban terrorist, but Hamill owns the role. Both in the Timmverse animated version and the atmospheric Arkham Asylum portrayal his voice IS the Joker for me and a whole generation of fans.

God, I want this game NOW!

Bad Blood

2010-06-06T13:33:00.000-07:00

Beck contributes a swampy, sexy blues rock swagger-stomp to the new season of True Blood and it is the shit:

Comics Review - Effects and Atmosphere edition

2010-06-05T19:34:00.000-07:00

The Hunter
Adapted by Darwyn Cooke from the Novel by
Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark

The term 'Labour of Love' is an overused one, but there's no doubt of it's applicability to this handsome graphic volume by Darwyn Cooke.

Long time fans will remember Cooke from the rocket age Elseworlds Justice League series The New Frontier. He also led DC's recent rebirth of The Spirit (And left it in a mysterious break with DC.) and is the artist responsible for Catwoman's current popular costume model sheet with its Modesty Blaise lines and mod cats-eyes goggles.

His snappy rat pack cool style is perfect for the 60's hard-boiled tough guy motifs of the classic Parker series, this is one to get in the slickly beautiful hardcover edition and I await the next book in Cooke's planned series of Parker adaptions with keen anticipation.

izombie#2
by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred

Stylized and fun, Roberson and Allred continue to document the afterlife of Gwen, just your average punky pretty grave digger, who seems perfectly normal...as long as she chows down on the occasional human brain, otherwise she goes all drippy and shambling like the classic zombie.

Unfortunately eating brains means eating memories and Gwen finds herself compelled to right wrongs and complete the unfinished business of the dead people she devours.

Along with her ghostly plucky friend Ellie who has been rocking the go go boots since she died and a growing cast of monsters and monster hunters, izombie should be a big hit with the black eyeshadow and Nightmare Before Christmas backpacks crowd once they outgrow Emily the Strange and start looking for something with more bite than Twilight.

And you can almost feel the set up for a cable channel original series. Enthusiasm and ambition pour out of every pore of izombie.

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #2
by Grant Morrison and Frazer Irving

At the end of Final Crisis Batman appears to have been killed by the searing eye beams of Darkseid after administering the fatal blow to the evil New God. In fact Darkseid's 'Omega Effect' beams blast Batman into the past and he's been hopping forward ever since, touching down in history at various points over centuries. Issue one was all about cavemen and the origin of Vandal savage. In issue two Bruce Wayne leaps forward thousands of years to 17th century Puritan Gotham.

Its perfect for artist Frazer Irving who's dimly luminescent Klarion the Witchboy was one of the high-points of Morrison's 7 Soldiers of Victory experiment. Irving's art is produced one hundred percent digitally, even the initial sketches directly drawn on tablet by a stylus. The result is a lushly evocative painterly style that is a pleasure to look at.

And the writing is Morrison. So uniformly excellent.

Recommended.

Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal #3
by J.T. Krul and Geraldo Borges...

...on the other hand is one big reeking pile of poo.

Ugly, crude, mean-spirited and with the understanding of the subtleties of human nature, grief, loss and addiction of ham-fisted drooling sadists.

All the worst, most stale and limited approaches to adult drama and characterization of post 80's grim and gritty comics are on display - as demonstrated by torturing, maiming and dragging a character as low as possible as a sign of how 'sophisticated' the creators are.

DC seems to be trying to have their cake and eat it too by proclaiming a new brightest day of lighter more sunny superhero fare but still getting to portray their heroes as grieving amputees whipping the mother of their dead child with an electrical cord while remembering how great the sex with her was.

Piece. Of. Shit.

Walking Dead TV

2010-05-29T15:23:00.000-07:00

Produced by AMC the network responsible for Breaking Bad, Frank Darabont the Director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile and with the full involvment of the books creator Robert Kirkman who will be writing some episodes. The reasons for enthusiasm about this impending TV show just get more and more compelling.

The premise of The Walking Dead, for the uninitiated, is that the zombie movie never ends. The survivors just keep running, struggling to survive in an ongoing battle to live through the zombie apocalypse. It's made for the kind of edgy episodic television that cable TV has been producing so regularly in the last few years.

They Live... to kick ass!

2010-05-21T20:24:00.000-07:00

I'm watching They Live, the John Carpenter political horror movie starring Rowdy Roddy Piper. The movie with the longest, most awesome fight scene in the history of cinema.

There are a lot of 'political' horror movies. Films that find the terror in class conflict and cultural conflict. A lot of zombie movies are thinly disguised metaphors, for commercialism and mindless consumption, authority, mass movements, hidden sins... the list is endless. Some are more overt than others.

Films based on classic dystopian novels like 1984 and Clockwork Orange and those inspired by them like Brazil and Equilibrium that explore the twin and opposite fears of chaos and tyranny can easily be classified as political horror, while existential nightmares like The Matrix co-opt the paranoia of political dread to narratives more vaguely metaphysical.

The perversely playful low budget horror Society offers the same kind of alien overlords metaphor for the power elite of society that They Live embraces, with an added frisson of the sexual panic of effects heavy Cronenberg style body horror. The Torchwood miniseries The Children of Earth comes full circle to the understanding that the real threat are our own human leaders.

Red Lantern on Fringe Finale

2010-05-20T21:19:00.000-07:00

As Peter looks around his apartment given to him by Walternate and talking to Alternate Olivia, on his wall is a framed copy of Red Lantern/Red Arrow no. 76.

Nice touch.

Here it is next to the original.

Update: the rest of the Fringe alternate universe DC comic covers are up at Newsarama.

Nazis:

2010-05-17T20:44:00.000-07:00

Bet you can't punch just one.

Dio, RIP

2010-05-16T21:41:00.001-07:00

Ronnie James Dio - 1942-2010

Too much rock for one hand

Frank Frazetta RIP

2010-05-10T13:24:00.000-07:00

The Godfather of fantasy art. A master of dynamic action rendered with exquisite detail. Nobody could paint a battle-axe shearing though flesh and bone better. Dead at 82.

They should float him out to sea in a burning longboat.

Low Budget Gems

2010-05-06T14:32:00.000-07:00

When it comes to fantasy, SF and horror, low budget more often than not makes you think of the failures. Spectacular failures, unintentionally hilarious failures, monumentally inept failures.

But the other side of the coin is that sometimes big budgets just means movies that are both bloated and bad and sometimes neophytes with microscopic budgets produce gripping, suspenseful minor classics that because of equally low budget promotion and distribution don't get the audiences they deserve.

Today's installments: Parasomnia and Freaky Faron.

Parasomnia is a dark fairy tale. A heightened reality where characters, behavior and setting bring the darker side of the brothers Grimm to the modern world.

It has a beautiful princess locked in a lifelong sleep, a dark sorcerer holding her prisoner and the hero who steals her away.

Or its about a desperately ill patient, the hypnotic serial killer chained up in the hospital room next to her telepathically torturing her in her dreams and the slacker clerk visiting his druggie brother in the hospital and stealing away the comatose patient in one of her rare moments of wakefulness.

It's a film of almost cartoonish, guignol excess and arch stylization. There are gory murders, an arch-villain who could have been auditioning to be the next horror icon, abductions, escapes and daring rescue attempts. A high point is B-movie warhorse Jeffery Coombs as world-weary Detective Garrett. The low point is a lame nod to the Saw movies with a creepy doll in an abandoned warehouse. It almost seems like, 'Hey we've got his neat prop left over from another movie, lets throw it in.' It's a minor plot point though, so I can live with it.

The director William Malone has a track record that includes House on Haunted Hill and Fear.Com. Cheesy, but glossy and visually inventive horror. In some ways this film seems to take his style to its logical extreme.

Freaky Faron from Writer/Director John Ross is a very different film. There are no grandly structured gothic set-pieces here. No inventive camera work or shoe-string visual effects. This is a talky, slow moving character study made up of conversations in offices, in classrooms and playgrounds under streetlamps.

When she was 11 years old, Faron Hallowell shot and nearly killed a local TV weatherman. It subsequently comes out that she had been operating as a highly successful vigilante for months, investigating, revealing and punishing criminals, by breaking into dozens of homes.

She tells the doctors that she was trained by an alien to protect Earth from alien prisoners marooned on Earth in human bodies and she has intense almost Sherlock Holmesian observational and deductive abilities. Five years later she is released from hospital and tries to re-build her life.

But some people won't let her forget and some clues lead to the mysteries of her own childhood.

It's hard not to wonder what Freaky Faron would be like with a bigger budget. Most of the story happens in exposition, in memories related by children and interviews with doctors. As it is, the film has to depend on the performance of Courtney Halverson an intense redhead playing an emotionally guarded girl trying to live a normal life with a history no one will let her forget and abilities that drive her to pursue mystery.

Remember the name, you'll be seeing more of her.

The Crisis Begins

2010-05-04T07:18:00.000-07:00

Hardcore DC comics fans know that the great Crisis that destroyed millions of alternate universes began when Krona of the Guardians of Oa broke their most sacred law and used his super science to peer back in time to the very origin of the universe.

Doing so introduced either evil or entropy into the universe depending which version of the story you read and led to the deadly conflict between the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor.

A dozen pan-dimensional Crisis's later the DC universe is only finally returning to much the same shape it was in 1985.

But now disaster stalks the multi-verse again with the same sign:

"I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there,

please save me, Superman!” - Homer Simpson

Mooooon River

2010-05-02T21:55:00.000-07:00

OK, so if they're letting through Brian tossing Stewie's salad - what exactly is Standards and Practices at Fox stopping?

Seriously, the whole episode seemed like the setup for a scat-fetishist's Family Guy slash fiction.

Stay

2010-05-01T17:59:00.001-07:00

I admit it, I love bombast and narrative melodrama in music, and Shakespear's Sister's 1992 hit 'Stay' provides both in spades. It's a fun goth opera slice of high grade cheese.

Particularly fun is Siobahn Fahey's over the top performance as whacked out angel of death come to steal Marcella Detroit's boyfriend away. Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic was just getting big at the time and Fahey's performance seemed to draw from his goth-girl personification of Death in the plot of the video at least.

The portrayal though, was miles away from Gaiman's perky and kindly Death, drawing more from Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and supposedly, the 50's 'classic' Cat-Women of the Moon.

Fahey was reportedly quite drunk when the video was filmed. Watch it and decide for yourself.

I've got a Giant-Size Man-Thing

2010-04-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

What? What did you think I was talking about?

Now that's a f#%*ing magazine cover!

2010-04-29T13:03:00.000-07:00

Like every decent human, the Dweller hates Fergie, but still that's one hell of a cover!

Calgary Comic And Entertainment Expo - Day Two

2010-04-25T21:09:00.000-07:00

A better camera and many more pictures this time. Met some friends (Hi Hugh, Hi Theo, Hi Sam, Hi Courtney) bought more stuff, got some signatures.

Here's some photo moments from the day:

This was as close as I got to Leonard Nimoy. $60 for a signature and I was a few bucks short by the time I got there.

On the other hand Aaron Douglas was $30 and I always liked Chief Tyrol. I'm a big pro-union guy so I liked his Shop Steward sequences on Battlestar Galactica.

"And that sir, is how we deal with big blue alien fuzzies in Her Majesty's Galactic Empire, by cracky!"

A fateful encounter.

She's a creature of the night.

The Star Trek mini-skirt makes a comeback in a big way. Practical, yet gratuitously sexy. I want to live in this future. Particularly if it includes cheesy carnival fun-houses too.

Red Sonja, a hot Steampunk babe and a teenage anime fan whose life is having an awesomeness peak.

Everybody get's one.

All your miniatures are belong to Cthulhu.

UPDATE: Thanks for dropping by BEAT readers, feel free to check the rest of the site out. Lots of comics and reviews, music and art.

Calgary Comic And Entertainment Expo - Day One

2010-04-24T18:43:00.000-07:00

Oh my God do my feet hurt.

End of Day One, I'm home now watching the new Doctor Who, and staring out the window in awe at the sudden onset polar snow-storm that appeared out of nowhere and is now in the process of burying Calgary under mountains of soggy wet snow.

I met Eric Powell, the creator of The Goon, George Freeman artist of my favorite patriotic hero Captain Canuck and attended a talk by Bruce Timm the creator of the Timm-verse DC animated universe that started with the great 90's animated Batman series.

He was limited about what new direct to DVD animated superhero movies he could announce yet. However in response to a question about animating some of the books from the Vertigo line of DC comics he said the ones that had the kind of public profile to make Warner's agree to take a chance on them like the Sandman series already had their rights tied up. The one possible exception was the Swamp Thing and there was a real possibility of doing something with him. He didn't say if it would lean more to the original Wein and Wrightson version or the Alan Moore reboot.

Lot of people there in a lot of very cool costumes, and like most conventions I spent most of my time in the huckster's hall. Bought lots of toys and comics and probably will again tomorrow.

But tomorrow is signature hunting day, which means many hours in lineups. Oh my feet.

Gone

2010-04-22T20:11:00.000-07:00

Calgary Convention may be last chance to meet Leonard Nimoy

2010-04-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

“We started making Star Trek pilots around 1964, I think,” Nimoy says in an interview from his Los Angeles home. “I’ve been involved with Star Trek for 44, 45 years. It’s been a wonderful ride for me and it’s been great for my family. We got to do some interesting work outside of Star Trek because of Star Trek and I’m very satisfied.”
In fact, Nimoy suspects he is probably done with acting altogether. This year may also be the last that he makes the rounds to various fan conventions. Which means his appearance this weekend at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo could be one of the last times for devotees to get up close and personal.

If you didn't have reason enough to come to it folks.

Getting my nerd on

2010-04-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

Next weekend April 24th and 25th the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo is on and the Dweller will be there and blogging it.

Why should you care about a convention in a Canadian city many of you have never heard of? Well let's look at the lineup of guests:

We've got Malcolm McDowell, Tony Todd, Billy Dee Williams, Brent Spiner, Bruce Timm, Tamoh Penikett, Chris Claremont, Matt Wagner, Eric Powell, Len Wein, Lloyd Kaufman and Mr Spock himself Leonard Nimoy. Plus many other notables from the worlds of comics, TV SF and movies. I imagine some people of the teenage female persuasion are only going because a few of the beefcake homonculi from the Twilight movies will be there.

Factor in an enthusiastic crowd (A much larger venue was selected after the huge swarms last year.), row after row of huckster tables selling shiny nerd-bait and workshops, panels and a costume contest and you're talking about my idea of a hell of a good time.

Comment if you are going and let me know what you are looking forward to the most.

The More You Know

2010-04-14T21:13:00.001-07:00

Sluggo denies your reality and substitutes his own.

2010-04-12T17:54:00.000-07:00

If you love her, buy her a gun

2010-04-12T17:35:00.001-07:00

Hulk sneers at your 'safe word'

2010-04-11T22:58:00.001-07:00

Take it. Take it all.

Comics Review - Look at the colours edition

2010-04-11T20:09:00.000-07:00

SPIDER-MAN: FEVER #1 (of 3)
Written by BRENDAN MCCARTHY
Pencils & Cover by BRENDAN MCCARTHY

This is the book to get if you want to see Spiderman tripping balls on magically contaminated bug-spray in Doctor Strange's bathtub.

McCarthy channels Ditko at his pop-art insanity - rather than his equally prodigious Objectivist, Ayn Rand worshiping insanity - peak. Featuring the non-linear, drug-trip dimensions of Ditko but with some P. Craig Russell gloss and a nod to Frank Brunner on the faces and torsos. It's an artistic tribute to the entire history of Doctor Strange.

Plus it goes well with mushrooms. Holy crap is this ever blatantly a druggy Spiderman and Doctor Strange Comic.

Lots of Burroughsian demonic spiders speaking in cut up poetry while Spiderman has tub seizures and Doctor Strange monologues about ~~Aleister Crowley~~ Albion Crawley.

Trippiness level: Hangin' with the Machine Elves.

Doctor Who
Classics Series 3
Issue #2
Steve Parkhouse & John Ridgeway

Colorizing and reprinting 25 year old black and white stories from the Doctor Who magazine, from the fraught sixth Doctor era no less, traveling with a talking penguin as his companion.

I know it doesn't sound promising but this is a grand mal 70's disco science fiction concept album of a comic book flip out. There's a plot in there about rogue Time Lords and a highly symbolic lighthouse tower that may be a Tardis.

It's part three of a story about mysterious black ships on metaphoric oceans, Cthulian monstrosities from the deep and running about energetically in the classic Doctor Who style. It really doesn't matter though, just roll with it and let the story come up without worrying about anything so prosaic as whats or whys.

Trippiness Level: Altered States, breaking into the monkey cage at the zoo.

Philip K. Dick's Electric Ant
Written by David Mack
Art by Pascal Alixe
Cover by Paul Pope

Philip K. Dick used to throat cheap speed like cheerios and write for twenty hours straight churning out dozens of novels in the course of a few paranoid twitchy years.

The signature Dick style of a glassy speed freak existential paranoia about the nature of consciousness and reality has become standard fare in movies, cyberpunk SF, and video-games post Matrix, it's all the fruit of the Philip K. Dick tree.

Electric Ant successfully captures the jittery amphetamine dread of Dick, but it's not bugs under the skin its nuts and bolts. Garrison Poole wakes up in a hospital to discover his blissful life as a corporate prince is an illusion. He's actually an android programmed not to realize he's an android. Hilarity and existential crisis ensue.

Trippiness Level: The tinfoil protects me from the rays.

E-Sheep Reborn

2010-03-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

Here's your opportunity to directly support some kick ass comics by an enormously talented artist.

Patrick Farley was one of the early innovators of the web-comic scene, producing under the E-Sheep brand intricate fascinating, hilarious and disturbing web-comics. Some were traditional pen and ink scanned and posted, later he produced spectacularly beautiful computer illustrated chiaroscuro like branching stories that took advantage of the virtual space of the web. And then there was the retelling of the Book of Revelation of St John the Divine in the style of Pokemon.

He did it part time for awhile, made a couple abortive attempts to make it pay enough to do full time and is trying again with an innovative audience support scheme utilizing Kickstarter.com and the 'thousand true fans' business model.

Think about supporting this. If you need any convincing I recommend a nice artgasm wallow in his archives page.

Comics Reviews - March 3

2010-03-06T16:39:00.000-08:00

MW
Osamu Tezuka
Vertical

It's difficult to get across to western readers the importance of Manga 'god' Osamu Tezuka. Cross Walt Disney, Jack Kirby and Will Eisner and you begin to understand the extent of his innovation and influence on Japanese comics and animation. Westerners know him best for Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion and its...cough... 'homage' by Disney The Lion King.

But by 1976 his position was being challenged by a new generation of Manga artists working in a more mature and dramatic style called Gekiga (dramatic pictures) Tezuka was rapidly becoming yesterday's man with his cute Disney cartoonish style (The big eyes and little mouth Manga is known for was actually Tezuka imitating Disney) and light approach to story-telling. All of that changed when Tezuka decided to challenge the new bloods at their own game and produced a perverse and swirling melodrama full of themes and scenes that are shocking even today.

There is fairly explicit homosexuality, pedophilia, rape, even hints of bestiality all illustrated in Tezuka's incongruously Disney cute style.

MW tells the story of Michio, an amoral sociopath, a beautiful young man rising high in the ranks of a bank office while at night he engages in a series of savage kidnapping murders and Father Garai, the despairing compromised priest who tries to save Michio's soul while being unable to control his lust for his body. As the story unfolds we learn of their history together and of MW, a deadly nerve gas that killed an entire island full of people and may be responsible for Michio's psychopathy.

The story is elaborate, almost byzantine, and some of the story elements work and some of them don't but the book still remains compulsively readable for it's almost 600 pages.

Warlord #12
DC

With this issue Mike Grell completes a story begun almost 25 years ago in the first run of the series, bringing decades old story elements full circle. There are fierce battles, secret identities revealed, arch villains getting their comeuppance and an elegiac farewell.

The art is beautiful and in the slightly strained story Grell is clearly trying to bring a new maturity to a series that historically was always rather formulaic. In the original series Travis Morgan was an air force pilot who found a lost civilization in the center of the earth - or possibly another dimension.

Every issue Morgan would jump to conclusions, try to save an innocent from a monster - and usually discovers that it's the innocent who's the monster and vice versa.

He was always a flawed hero and in the most recent iteration of the series Grell is trying to reconcile the responsibilities of leadership that the title Warlord implies with the rip-roaring adventure readers expect from a sword and sorcery comic. The jury is still out if the series can sustain such pressures.

Earthquake

2010-01-30T18:45:00.001-08:00

The Sign of the Bat

2010-01-30T14:08:00.000-08:00

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.

Pele

2009-12-25T10:09:00.001-08:00

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.

Rory Hayes: Where Demented Wented

2009-12-15T18:20:00.000-08:00

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.

Santarchy

2009-12-11T13:25:00.000-08:00

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!

It's Catching Up

2009-11-19T19:55:00.000-08:00

The Sacrifice of the Holy Fool

2009-11-18T23:28:00.000-08:00

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 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.

It's in the Blood

2009-11-15T10:38:00.000-08:00

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.

Steal from the best

2009-10-21T19:24:00.000-07:00

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.

I see a Darkness

2009-10-19T20:09:00.000-07:00

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:

'I'm Peter Lorre, bitch."

2009-10-18T22:52:00.000-07:00

And you're not.

Ghost of Stephen Foster

2009-09-13T21:42:00.000-07:00

The Squirrel Nut Zippers

Supervillain Pickup Line #1

2009-08-21T23:33:00.000-07:00

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

Charon

2009-08-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

Adapted from the story by Lord Dunsany.

Weekly Comics - August 15

2009-08-15T12:48:00.000-07:00

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.

Raw Hide

2009-08-15T12:14:00.000-07:00

Dead Kennedys
(All Midget cast)

What's in a name?

2009-08-11T17:58:00.000-07:00

So a rapper named 'C-Murder' was just convicted of murder.

This suggests you should never leave books of matches around Steve Arson, and whatever you do, never go out for dinner with Johnny McDaterape.

Weekly Comics - August 8

2009-08-08T14:51:00.000-07:00

The Saga of Solomon Kane Dark Horse
Dark Horse

Collecting classic stories from Marvel magazines like Savage Sword of Conan and Kull (Even Tomb of Dracula as the two characters meet in these pages.) with script adaptations by Roy Thomas among others and featuring art from such 70's superstars as Bernie Wrightson, Neal Adams Howard Chaykin and even some early Mike Zeck.

Solomon Kane was one of the many pulp creations of Robert A. Howard that were stacked in comic and magazine form under bongs and Black Sabbath albums in bedrooms all over the world. The Dour puritan with the flashing blade and a fierce hatred of evil never became as popular or well known as Conan or even Red Sonja, but he had a long career of backup feature status. Dark Horse has added him to their Robert A. Howard publishing line and this release is a nice affordable collection in the popular black and white 'phone book' format. Over 400 pages of content for under $20.

Justice League Cry For Justice #2
DC

Popular writer James Robinson returns to comics after a long hiatus and is joined by the beautiful painted art of Mauro Cascioli. Classic characters Green Lantern, Green Arrow and The Atom are joined by Super Girl, the new Captain Marvel and minor oddities Congo Bill and the 70's Starman in a story about the heroes deciding to become proactive and start actively hunting super villains. So far its all buildup, albeit with Robinson's sophisticated dialogue and Cascioli's expressive art.

The best scene in this issue is Green Arrow twitting Green Lantern about what a man-whore he is, most of this issue is conversations on rooftops or in warehouses.

Worth picking up but you may want to wait for the inevitable trade or hardcover collection.

The Hangman #1
DC
DC Comics takes another stab at reinventing the Archie Comics Red Circle heroes. Last time it was the Impact Line in the early 90's. Respectable but not spectacular and ultimately short lived. This time they've given the characters to Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Stracynski and he's begun the process of incorporating them into the main DC continuity. There will be one-shots for the major Red Circle titles The Shield, The Inferno and The Web (But not The Fly this time unfortunately.) as Stracynski does much the same for the Archie golden age characters as he did with Timely's lesser know Golden age characters in his Marvel miniseries The Twelve.

The Hangman is a well written tale of supernatural revenge, even though it does follow a rather well worn path most recently trod by DCs updated revival of western vigilante El Diablo. We've seen this all before, but its an entertaining story nonetheless.

Also out his week: North 40 #2, Wednesday Comics #5, Warlord #5 and Astro City the Dark Age Book 3 #4.

There's Horror...

2009-08-06T21:20:00.000-07:00

..and then there's self-indulgent, hateful murder porn.

Rampage is a new film from Uwe Boll. Yeah, that name alone is the hallmark and warning of utter crap. The fair warning that you are considering viewing the product of a sub-literate crap-meister who owes his entire career to a German tax law that seems to have been based on the plot of The Producers. Literally a legal way to make investors money on utter failure both artistic and at the box office.

Rampage is Boll's latest masterpiece. Artistically and morally it is clearly nothing more than repugnant murder porn. Don't believe me? Check out the trailer. Fair warning, you will need a shower afterward.

See? Uwe Boll is about to become the go to film maker to all the dismal little losers who've convinced themselves it's everybody else's fault that they are worthless little turds who can't achieve anything with their lives and all women are evil because every one they meet can smell the crazy loser stink off them from a mile away.

This movie seems designed to create copycat acts of violence. I hope Uwe Boll gets sued to death by the families of every victim of every crazed loser with a gun and a grudge who comes along and has this piece of shit in his DVD collection next to all his tentacle anime and drool covered holocaust documentaries.