The Netflixing of Everything

#drwho #bigfinish #scribd

It kind of amazes me that this is slipping in under the radar, none of the big fan sites or outlets for Doctor Who seem to have noticed that a lot of the Big Finish Audio adventure range is now available on Scribd.  They also seem to have most of the novels and all the new comic lines from Titan, making Scribd one stop shopping for everything Doctor Who except the episodes themselves.

To be fair neither Big Finish Productions nor Scribd seem to have rushed to announce their new partnership either, there seems to be almost a deliberate effort to have this happen on the down low.

In other words Doctor Who fans who have dipped into the full cast radio play style Doctor Who adventures featuring actors from the entire 50 years of the BBC series and those who may have never heard of them can now gorge on many hours of them with an $8.99 a month subscription.  Plus Scribd gives you access to thousands of books, audiobooks, magazines and comic books - all the major comic publishers except DC, Image and Dark Horse in fact.

I have drastically reduced the number of comics I buy while drastically increasing the number I read. I'm saving a hell of a lot of money and storage space and enjoying comics more.

Between my Marvel Unlimited and Scribd subscriptions the comics of virtually every comics publisher except DC, Image and Dark Horse are delivered right to my tablet with a combined cost of under $25 a month for the two subscriptions. Since Scribd also has a large Marvel catalogue you could scrimp and just get the Scribd, but I like the weekly dose of Marvel newish stuff in Marvel Unlimited, even though it is six months behind the comic shops. The Scribd subscription also gives me thousands of books, audio books and magazines.

I still love the medium of paper, I still buy comics and books in physical form and probably always will, but now my slightly OCD completist urge can be satisfied much more cheaply with much less use of storage space.

This is the model I respond to.  Whether its music, movies, tv or books the model that intuitively works best with the existing technology is the subscription streaming service.  DRM is still a concern but for price, ease of access and storage space the Netflix model will conquer all others because its how people want to get their media. 

THIS is the best way to combat illegal downloading.  Give people a simple, economical alternative and they will take it.

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.  

New Comics Sept 2011

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.

Nightwing Red

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

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!

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

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.

Newsarama has become an Attack Site

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.

Swipe File

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.

Grandville Mon Amour

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

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.

Sleeping Through the End

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.

Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions Review

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.

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

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

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?

Comic Reviews - Aug 8

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

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

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.

"The Deadliest Night of my Life"

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.