Reiterations in Red and Green

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.  

Nymphos!

From Shock Corridor, 1963

Batman in Turnabout Intruder

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.

Daredevil: Superhero. Lawyer. Asshole.

There's Horror...

..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.

First Five Minutes of the Horror Movie

The Penatagon is working on a robot that can fuel itself by eating corpses.

Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot -- that's right, "EATR" -- "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.

That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material -- animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone.

Yeah, nothing could possibly go wrong with that...