The Factual Opinion

Romancing The Stone: I'll Take The Dream Curry

I seem to be on a bit of an autobio comic kick. The latest is Johnny Wander.

Now I've picked up some less-than-appealing autobio comics recently, and I'm trying to figure out why exactly they are so unappealing compared to Johnny Wander or to Vanessa Davis' Make Me A Woman. Why is that? What it is that some people get so right, and some so wrong?

Well, let's talk about what's right, which is right here: in Johnny Wander. Every fourth page of this collection had something that made me laugh out loud, or gasp, or smile. Some of the other pages just didn't have as much of an impact on me, and some I didn't really "get". But the ones I got, I really loved.  I think being able to have that kind of impact in one page of storytelling of a snippet of one's life is a real skill. Some of the simplicity of what's here isn't that different (in terms of what's being portrayed) from what I read in other non-fiction diary style comics, but in Johnny Wander, I found it engaging. (Whereas the last one I looked at before Make Me A Woman just repulsed me.)

To my mind, there's an art to boiling down the poignant or funny moments from a day into just a few frames, but there's still work to be done (work I see in many of Wander's pages) to have those few frames really land on the reader. In the educational theater field, and probably in other sociological and psychological fields, at the end of every lesson plan is a reflection exercise. It's a practice that stems from the belief that we learn more if we take some time to reflect on what stood out for us. That reflection can take any of a multitude of forms, from journal writing, drawing, even dramatizing favorite moments in "snap shots". In an organization I'm involved with now, we're using a means of "digestion" that we call "Favorite Frames." (It's a term of convenience.) Reading Johnny Wander, it struck me that autobio comics could be interpreted as a series of "Favorite Frames" of one's life. And yes, in one sense, anyone could do them. But to have some kind of impact beyond a personal diary writ large, there has to be some kind of acknowledgment that these things are for an audience--they're personal expression, but not of a kind that can go to far into inscrutable navel-gazing. In Johnny Wander, the best pages are the ones that are set up like jokes or good short stories in two or three frames: there's a set up, with the action in the first frame, a ramping up of the situation or the insertion of conflict in the second, and a conclusion or punchline in the third. It's the newspaper strip format, and I've spent some time wondering whether that's a format that naturally occurs while doing this work or if it was a considered decision. (It's not a question I'll ever be qualified to answer, but I'm leaning towards it being a considered decision, because "natural" implies that it happens on its own, which seems a bit unfair.)

The other ingredient that is very subtle is point-of-view. The frames don't seem to be narrated from one person's point-of-view, but rather from that of a person who might be observing it from afar. This somehow keeps judgement and negativity and even typical sarcasm out of the picture and just allows for the observance of the inherent humor in human behavior, or cats, or the dynamic of roommates and living situations, etc. Everything is presented benignly, with joy - even when it involves fire and the fire department.  

That's another thing: I loved reading the "Extras" at the end of this book. It's a selection of several of the comics they used while testing the web comic format, and a brief explanation as to what didn't work and what they changed. In the very beginning, they show and explain how the first few comics were too negative. That's when I got to really appreciate how difficult it must be to find one's own voice in a comic. Those first few frames really are in stark contrast to the vibe and feeling of the comic as it is now. Besides being a neat piece of education for me, it got me to fully appreciate what's been accomplished in the final product, and how difficult it must have been to get consistent with the tone they established.

This was a lovely, easy, enjoyable read - complete with perfect instructions for making a homemade heating pad as well as Yuko's Dream Curry. (Both of which I am going to try!) These are the kind of people you want to bump into and spend time with, but if that never happens, the comic is an excellent substitute.

-Nina Stone, 2010

 

No Pictures: Justin Cronin Made A Lot Of Money In Print By Writing Something People Want To Read

The Passage
By Justin Cronin, 2010

If you haven't heard about it yet, here's a refresher course: this book made the writer nearly four million in publisher money, and then it made him nearly two million in Ridley Scott's movie money. That's before the book was published. It isn't Justin Cronin's first book--he has two previous novels and one horribly received novella (which he wrote in his twenties, which is when you're supposed to write those kinds of things)--but it is the first thing he's done that's completely removed from his educational and professional background, which can be summed up by merely listing a bit of them: Iowa Writer's Workshop, Harvard, professor of English. Because: this book? This multimillion dollar book that clocks in just a shade below 800 pages and happens to be the first in a trilogy?

It's about psychic vampires who have rendered North America (and probably the world, although there's no confirmation of that theory to be found in this first volume) a post-apocalyptic death zone.

So, fuck yeah. From beneath the feet of Marilynne Robinson (current faculty member of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and writer of the fantastic Gilead and near-perfect Housekeeping, neither of which of feature vampires or rogue FBI agents) comes something that reads a bit like The Stand would read if somebody had stopped Stephen King from including all those made-up colloquialisms he always spackles his dialog with.

King isn't the last comparison that might cross your mind when you're reading The Passage, but the one that won't make much of an appearance is Twilight or True Blood: this isn't a book about the people who befriend the vampires, that little fantasy is dispensed with early on in the book when the closest thing to "a good one" that the book has rips one of our earliest heroes into multiple pieces after a particularly engaging (albeit stocked with cliches like "i'll be right behind you") chase sequence. The other thing you won't find much of is the word "vampire"--it's made clear early on, by one of the overachieving scientists responsible for the world's condition, that the word is in the verboten category. And for the most part, so are all the stock vampire truisms--sunlight remains a problem, but killing them is more a question of weaponry and speed, neither of which our eventual protagonists have in great abundance. Garlic just turns them on.

For the most part--and yes, this is one of those rare attempts at Spoiler Freedom--the book is set after the world has collapsed, almost a century after mankind's numbers have dwindled to tiny, walled in communes rife with possible incest and a knowledge of history dependent on the memories of the old and senile. Cronin's Crichton-y efforts at the beginning of the story--which focus on the days and actions that preceded the current status quo--are rife with the sorts of things that always populate these kinds of novels, crash-course biographies and chainmail-fisted attempts to inspire a reader's immersion. Maybe it's due to his serious American fiction background, but most of it actually works--a beaten, impoverished white trash wife, an FBI agent trying to stem the moral collapse his infant daughter's death has brought about, the decaying sanity of a "recovered" child molester--even when the book's blurb leaves no question of whether these people will survive past the opening pages, thus rendering this first section a laundry list of "people who aren't going to make it".

Of course, it's when the book opens to its primary setting of a world after that Cronin starts to show off the second part of his so-fetching-it-must-be-public-relations bio takes hold. Supposedly, Cronin came up with a good bit of what he was going to write during a game he and his daughter played during their daily walks to school; a game where they were making up a story. True or false, it's not hard to see what he means--The Passage, like almost all post-apocalyptic fantasy, fits perfectly with what one might refer to as "daydream" fiction, the types of stories we tell ourselves about what we would do if we won the lottery tomorrow, or if we were forced to scavenge for food at the cheap bodega we usually just buy cigarettes at. From here, the book follows some predictable twists and turns, but it's ultimately successful: a smart, compelling thriller that's biggest flaw might be the mercenary techniques that Cronin overuses to give each of the book's "Parts" a cliffhanger to rest upon. (It's wholly possible that some people might be reading this book slowly, but god knows why--if ever there was a genre that suffers from multiple stops and starts, it's thrillers-in-prose.) By the end of the book, when Cronin sandwiches two fake-out gotchas right next to one another, even the most forgiving reader will be irritated by the gears of manipulation left out so plainly. (And they'll feel an even deeper level of irritation when they read the book's last sentence and remember how far away 2012--when the second book will "hopefully" drop--really is.)

The Passage isn't about to change the world, and it isn't Twilight for grown-ups. In time, it may be as dated as the good versus evil portions of The Stand are now, hell, it may be a stupid book already. But it doesn't feel like one. It feels like the sort of book that Red Dragon or the Day of the Jackal still are, the sort of airport-friendly don't-put-that-fucker down experience that books supposedly don't provide that often. It's got some work to do if it's not going to turn into a super-powered magic fight, and the violence could use some greasier descriptions to better marry it to Cronin's blunt surprise delivery, but for what it is--a Stephen King post-apoc thriller with a Michael Crichton meets Andre Dubus opener--it's a hell of a good time.

-Tucker Stone stayed up until 4 two nights in a row to prove to his wife he could read this fucker in less than 30 hours, 2010

Too Many Movies: It's Tamil, Not Bollywood. Learn The Difference.

This week, Martin Brown put his mind inside Woody Allen, Joe McCulloch put his hands inside Enthiran, and Tucker left a part of his soul inside Monsters. 

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
Shoulda Dragged This One Up, 2010
Martin Brown

Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger begins with a Shakespeare quote: “[Life] is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Of course, he’s got the context all wrong. MacBeth, the character responsible for that quote, is suicidal because he killed a guy and his wife just died. Shakespeare never meant that quote to espouse his own world view, but to color MacBeth’s mental state. Woody Allen uses it to explain and excuse everything that comes next in his movie. He’s not revealing anything about his characters, but maybe he’s saying something about himself. And he gets it mostly right, except that You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger doesn’t even bother to muster up any sound or fury.

Anthony Hopkins is Alfie, a man in three-quarter life crisis who wakes in the middle of one night and decides to start working out and eat healthier. He ditches his wife, Helena (Gemma Jones), for bachelorhood. She reacts by overdosing on sleeping pills, surviving, and eventually rejecting her psychiatrist for a psychic. Her daughter, Sally, is in an unhappy marriage with a frustrated writer (Josh Brolin), but she wants a baby anyway. In other words, Allen’s four main characters are not only clichés, but they’re just about the most blatant clichés imaginable. The only ways any of them break from the expected are that Brolin’s character actually finishes his book a half hour in, and Watts plays a British woman with an Australian accent.

Although the film’s title turns out to be a double entendre for romance and death, Allen’s characters aren’t morbidly death-obsessed so much as just kinda bored and selfish. Each of them embarks on an affair. Naturally, Alfie marries a hooker half his age. Sally develops a crush on her boss (Antonio Banderas). But the best is Brolin’s character, Roy. In flashback, Allen shows his initial seduction of Sally. Sitting on a picnic blanket drinking Coronas, he recites “A Red Wheelbarrow” and adds “Sally’s ass” to the end of it, right beside the white chickens. In the present, he lusts after an Indian girl (Freida Pinto) playing guitar in the window across from his bedroom window (who is, yikes, a tall dark stranger). After watching her for weeks, he invites her to lunch and confesses that he enjoys secretly seeing her undress. She, of course, dumps her fiance for him. See! Creepiness works!

For me, the most compelling part of the movie was this: Alfie tells his daughter he’s fallen in love with a woman half his age. He takes Sally and Roy out to dinner to introduce them to her. She shows up late, so that Allen can have her enter and Be Revealed. The actual reveal is that the woman (Lucy Punch) is a tall, stacked bombshell, and obviously a hooker--like Mira Sorvino’s character in Mighty Aphrodite. But I thought the reveal was that Alfie’s mistress was a man. Because Lucy Punch has a serious man face. So, the second she walked on screen, I thought, “Oh, he’s dating a man!” and then I spent the entire movie wondering when he’d find out he was dating a man. The woman wore nothing but skin tight, cleavage revealing clothes, but I thought for sure she’d turn out to be a man. When a younger dude hits on her, I thought that he’d totally get her into bed and find out she’s a man. None of that ever happened, but the wondering was the most fun I had during the film. Turns out that role was supposed to be played by Nicole Kidman. That would have made You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger a whole lot worse.

Enthiran
aka: Endhiran, aka: Robot, 2010
Joe McCulloch

There are moments in this film, most particularly those featuring prolific actress Aishwarya Rai-Bachchan writhing in a futuristic catsuit beneath a bejeweled purple cape and stainless steel headdress as the only human at a fascist dance party in the Flash Gordon lair of a maniacal android promenading electronic lions on fluorescent leashes, his villainy evidenced by an ‘80s X-Men skunk stripe hairdo as cloned footmen serve as backup hoofers, where you begin to think that India’s most expensive and highest grossing movie just totally beats the shit out of America’s. It’s a musical interlude, of course, many of which in this picture seem isolated enough with black leader and closing fades that they might have been conceived as potentially excisable for international markets. Well no fucking way: the robot themed musical scenes (less so the humans-cavorting-in-exotic-settings bits) come off as in direct competition with this film’s expansive action scenes, compressing as much visual flash as the gunplay and chases into tighter spaces. But then, within five minutes of the opening titles, the promised Robot is already both dancing and kicking; at times the project as a whole threatens to obliterate what small distance is left.

Throughout, you struggle not to loll in simple exoticism, because of course these tropes on screen are built in part from long-honed domestic expectations -- to say nothing of the frentic, wire-flying man-on-multitude brawls notable in Southern genre pictures, albeit here choreographed by the august Yuen Woo-ping -- but there’s little denying that Enthiran seems nonetheless prone to hitting every happy button on a certain breed of North American cinema cultist - it’s bright, forthright and giddy in mixing genre movies and comic books and gaming and music into a proudly gaudy contraption of determined, unashamed artifice. I mean, the robot even sings in Auto-Tune! And you know you’re in the presence of stardom of some excellent vintage when the lead actor doesn’t get just a pre-title credit, but his own logo. Like, you know how all the studios and whatnot have their fancy logos play onscreen before the movie starts? That’s what mononymic cash cow Rajinikanth (or: “Rajini”) gets in this one, and he’s not a producer or anything - his logo merely broadcasts the imminent arrival of The Awesome. Unbuckle your seatbelts, we’re almost there.

The saga of a passionate inventor (Rajini) who invents the world’s most sophisticated peacekeeping military robot (Rajini!), only to witness (and sometimes facilitate) his creation’s upgrading into a feeling, emotional entity manipulated into murderous villainy by the avarice of humankind, Enthiran bristles with references to sci-fi epics from Metropolis onward and namedrops Asimov with no less vigor than the Ramayana, but it’s maybe most directly comparable to the manga of Osamu Tezuka, encompassing both the extended theme of a fundamentally peaceable robot driven to tragic violence, and a predilection toward zany, often slapstick humor -- sometimes sped up, Benny Hill-style -- including a gratuitous sequence of comedic fancy set among talking insects. Pop culture gags and in-jokes abound, so that attentive viewers might catch a reference to the 60-year old star’s off-screen baldness (the wig budget on this thing must have exceeded 10 crore on its own) before soaking in a prolonged cop-killing car chase seemingly in homage to Grand Theft Auto. That it’s all fairly contrived in terms of storytelling and almost determinedly adverse to divining any meaning beyond that accumulated from its myriad influences seems nearly beside the point.

But there’s also backwash from so many troubled, outright dystopian ingredients. The film labors under delusions of misanthropy; basically every human character contributes in some way to the madness and ruin of this poor, nice robot, who just wanted to be loved, and while the stain is certainly spread to the romantically troubled inventor Rajini himself and an obligatory malevolent mentor/rival -- the latter with connections to terrorism, as embodied by a German arms merchant, who I guess is there to foreshadow the fascist theme of the Robot’s eventual turn to mecha-authoritarianism -- most of the earthy beatings are directed at singularly aggressive street thugs of a noticeably race/culture-coded sort. Rai-Bachchan is saved from rape twice, once by each incarnation of Rajini, as if to keep the heroics even; the grosser scenario sees a bumbling seaside native taking the Heroine’s teasing too far, only to be bluntly and simply outwitted by our gallant man of science, but the Robot does enjoy a far flashier mass fight scene against a vicious dastard in leopard print attire surrounded by goons prominently clad in hip-hop gear (this after the robot heroically destroys their home theater for playing their damn music too loud). It’s an odd middle ground, where composer A.R. Rahman fuses hip-hop and contemporary R&B sounds into his score, while director/co-writer S. Shankar uses hip-hop attire as unambiguous shorthand for “violent crime.”

Maybe he’s implicating himself in humanity’s fallen state, but the dim-bulb characterization of Rai-Bachchan’s romantic object, a goofy, studying-is-soooo-boring teenage type transposed to medical school, speaks mainly to the ease with which damsels in distress and other easy characterizations fit into the picture’s popular blend. It can still be potent, believe me - to call the last 45 minutes of this film ‘over the top’ doesn’t begin to address the Treasure boss fight delirium of several dozens of CG Rajinis fusing into a rolling metal sphere spiked with jutting arms clutching automatic firearms. Yet mostly the lasting impression is one of agreement with the story’s ultimate moral: no, for all the flash and awe, the future isn’t quite ready to arrive yet.

Monsters
The Failure of Microbudgets Continues, 2010
Tucker Stone

Monsters doesn't open with promise, but with apology: night-vision cams, stock military types, an inexplicable homage to I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, and then, the beast untamed. And while the audience will certainly will have been prepared by the hype the film has gotten to see what a no-budget special effects man can do with off-the-rack technology, it's still a bit of a shock. Not because it's scary--make no mistake, nothing in Monsters comes close to that word--but because it's even worse than the most cynical might have imagined. A corny, digital squid, resting on top of a gas station, noisily hurling shit around. The only thing that makes it different from the clips of those five dollar SyFy channel originals is the lack of Joel McHale's never-ending wit to lessen the sting.

While this is the first moment in the film when a gaping plot hole opens its mouth to puke idiocy upon you--the soldiers have fought these beasts for years, and yet still show up to do battle with useless machine guns?--there's so many of those to come that, by the time we return to this scene (because, of course, this is one of those flicks that begins at its conclusion, only to work its way back) one might even find it quaint. After all, you've already gone through this once. It's the kind of stupidity you're ready for.

Yes, this is one of those: a shit movie, through and through. Aimlessly stocked with an assortment of contextual swipes--there's Babel's cinematography, here's some illegal immigration scenes too didactic for Harrison Ford, let's marathon Before Sunrise for all the romantic bits--Monsters isn't just lazy, it's in your face, poking your chest about being so. Why is the main female character in Mexico? Fuck you, no answer. Why does she have to get back home so urgently? Fuck you, no reason. What kind of desperate, down-on-his luck photographer would aggressively try to bang his boss's soon-to-be-married daughter right after meeting her? Fuck you, this guy.

In the interest in keeping things brief, Monsters isn't just laced with moments of narrative incoherence, it's actually constructed out of them; a film whose first thirty minutes don't make any logical sense whatsoever, with two characters who consistently make choices that serve only to prolong the film's runtime. By the point in which they've put themselves in danger--an alien danger that is depicted mostly through the violent slaughter of some Mexican "coyotes" who, in a previous scene, have just explained that the beasts mainly dislike Americans, because they're not all people-of-the-Earth like us good old fashioned AK-47 toting people smugglers--you can't help holding on a bit longer, desperately yearning for a scene where one of these dime-store Linklaters will get their tongue ripped out and all will feel right with the world. Spoiler alert: don't bother.

There's a hope in this country, probably the world, that the ease of digital production will break the backs of the behemoth movie studios. It's a hope propagated solely because there's a portion of the audience who, like those American Idol contestants who Just Don't Get It, think they've got something to say, and that something is better than those talentless fucks who get all the chances. Sure, you'll find others who say that the rest of the world is clamoring for these things as well, but it isn't true, don't believe it for a second. Audiences are fine with Pixar's fables, they're creaming their jeans for Christopher Nolan's sterility, they're packing stacks of cheddar for big budget sci-fi remakes of Dancing With Wolves. If they want individual works of art, unique, personal films--well, they've got plenty of those. Godard's still around. Haneke's got plenty of life left in him. The Criterion Collection is selling pillowcases. Besides, the dream on the horizon for our hopefuls isn't a sea of Slacker remakes (those are available as well, they just call it "film school" and "the Sundance Institute"), it's shit like Monsters, fan-fiction and a dream of remaking Die Hard, propelled by the belief that all it takes to make great genre is a wholly unwarranted belief in oneself and hilarious self-created "writing" schedules that involve lots of alarm clocks. It's the old LA joke gone viral--you're not a bartender, you're a screenwriter, wait until you see this buddy cop story. And while Monsters isn't responsible for any of that, it's an outgrowth of it, and that's why you're going to be hearing about this one for a couple of hot minutes when it finally hits theaters. Oh, the print critics won't praise it--five will get you ten that Armond White and Roger Ebert will team-up against this nonsense--but the wanna-bes will be out in droves. They don't have a choice. This is the kind of crap that's going to buy them the sandcastles of their dreams.

-Martin Brown, Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2010

Romancing The Stone: Old School Mash Notes

Make Me A Woman
By Vanessa Davis
Published by Drawn & Quarterly 

I just finished “Make Me A Woman” by Vanessa Davis, and I feel like I’ve made a friend who I want to hang out with more. I didn’t want the book to end, and I identified with so many of these comics that I'm starting to think Vanessa and I were either cousins or went to Hebrew School together.

It all started on a trip to the comic book store. I was wandering around, trying to find something to read. To be honest, I haven’t been that smitten with anything in some time now, and it was beginning to feel like a bit of a chore to read and write about a comic each week. I picked up this book at random, unaware that it was "new", and the next thing I knew, I was engrossed in the story of Vanessa’s Bat Mitzvah experience.

I know, right? Has anyone every captured this in a comic book? (That's a rhetorical question. I'm sure somebody has.) But this was the first time I'd read one, and the first time I've read anything about that particular experience in a way that takes me back, personally. I rarely (almost never) reflect on that time in my life, but when I do, I usually just marvel that I found the time to practice and memorize a portion of the Torah.

For me, these are very specific "American Jewish Girl" moments that are usually only talked about and relatable in the short time frame in which they actually happen. That period of time, from about 1st grade through 8th grade, the main thrust of all the religious school training that we young Jews have...it's a very specific experience, but it isn't one that has much to do with my adult life, and it isn't one I reflect upon very often. To open a comic and read about it, to have something so specifically relatable to me, but to also get a feeling that it could be a little more universal than I previously expected was like...coming home? I'm digging around here, but that's the only way I can describe it. I felt this comic, on a gut level, but it came out of nowhere and I'm not confident that I'm going to be able to verbalize it very well.

Much later in this collection of comics, there was a series of frames dealing with being an adult Jew in the world, and Davis wrote “I feel lucky to have been brought up in this broad-minded Judaism, that lets me belong, even when I pull away.” It's such a lovely way to crystalize the experience, and I’ve never heard anyone express gratitude for Judaism in that style. It struck me again: this is something I'm relating to on a basic, barely remembered level. These comics aren't about me, but my relation to them, my response to them--it's something further than mere identification. The last thing I’ll say about the whole Jewish-thing (maybe) is that Davis simply references it is as a part of her upbringing. She’s not constantly trying to crack Jewish jokes or throw in a bunch of oy veys. It felt real, it felt honest. It shook me, but not in a negative, overly melodramatic way. To be honest, the most accurate word I'd use for it is that it felt cool, reading something that wasn't corny or overly sentimental.

The other thing that strikes me so much about this book is what Davis is able to capture. There are moments in my life that seem so full, whether they be full of pain or joy or love, but  moments and memories that overflow with feeling and meaning. In my life, I tend to try to put those moments into a song or poem. (Often unsuccessfully.) I know how hard that can be, and reading Vanessa’s book, I developed a great love and appreciation for comics as a medium of personal expression. Only in a drawn picture with word and thought balloons can some moments really be captured, it seems. Sometimes, she abandon comments or editorializing, just simply relying on the a particular drawing to deal out a moment that makes its significance known and felt. 

Beyond the Judiasm, I related to so much of "Make Me A Woman". Vanessa references places and even a few people in NYC that I’m familiar with. She captures that slightly miserable feeling of dating in New York (and possibly anywhere) by depicting the behavior of single guys and girls and the things they say in a stark yet careful way. 

I also adore the way she frames herself and illustrates her own quirks. Particularly sticking out in my mind at the moment is a series of pencil sketches that start with her narrating, “Lately I’ve been experiencing these desperate pangs for people I know...” That sentence alone is hilarious and I know exactly what she was talking about! But then the sketches that follow make it even more hilarious.

This is a wonderfully dense collection of work and I loved every minute of it. It’s a wonderful journey through a life, and the comic critique of Crumb is in just the right place. At no time did I find Vanessa’s (you like how I’ve just gotten so friendly with this person I don't know at all that I’ve taken to calling her by her first name this whole time? No “Davis seems...”. Just “Vanessa is..”. I think that is a reflection on how this book makes one feel like they know her and feel like a friend of hers after reading it) work seem full of ego. As I read her critique on Crumb where she says “Is this why people think auto-bio cartoonists are really self-indulgent assholes?”, I thought “Oh yeah! That IS what I usually think when I've tried to read auto-bio comics!”  

It’s true, I have to admit. I’m almost always like, “Ugh....why are you illustrating a totally uninteresting story about your life to me?” But I do not feel that way about these comics/cartoons at all. In fact, there’s always some point beyond “sharing” for each of her anecdotes and tangents. Whether it be simply a form of relatable self-deprecation that seems charming through her comics, or capturing complex relationship dynamics in a fair way, every picture is engaging, fun to look at, and full of life. I’m so glad that I had this opportunity to read this. I’m looking forward to keeping up with Vanessa Davis in the future.

-Nina Stone, 2010

 

Comics Of The Weak: Shit, I Wish Your Mother Had Clicked "Close Tab"

Strange Tales II # 1
By Kevin Huizenga, Frank Santoro, Dash Shaw, Kate Beaton, Rafael Grampa
Published by Marvel Comics

It didn't get mentioned that much the first time Marvel went down this road, but the first Strange Tales mini-series was mostly a piece of shit, completely shown up by the Gary Panter contributions to Omega The Unknown (which had proved that Marvel did have a few people still connected to their courage) and the Simpson's Treehouse of Horror (which showed what independent creators could do with companies that actually understood the definition of the word "freedom"). Now, the first attempt at Strange Tales wasn't a piece of shit the way a lot of Big Two comics are in terms of lacking anything interesting to look at, it was a piece of shit the way anything always is when better, more expansive versions of what it offers are available online constantly, for free. This time around, things seem a bit different, like the people involved are involved for more than just generic jack-off reasons, that there's an investment being made in taking a chance. Some of it is still just a rough hewn example of their more interesting non-Marvel work--Kate Beaton, for one, delivers little more than a funny reminder to check her website (which most people are certainly doing already)--but there's very little here that calls back to the first time Marvel tried this, which was when they basically published a longform themed sketchbook of the indie world. There's a lot of praise being heaped on the Grampa thing, and while that's all well-deserved, it's Dash Shaw's passionate mash-up of Spider-Man that seals what Santoro, Huizenga and the aforementioned Grampa all toy with. In a few pages, glaringly unlike anything Marvel publishes, Shaw mixes a variation on his (let's call it what it is, "weird") obsession with kitschy reality television against Stan Lee's classic Peter Parker positive-speak, all of it married in the all-too-telling image of our hero and his adventures being thrown away with the trash. And if the point wasn't clear enough, it's verbalized right on the page: The dumpsters is where this genre fucking thrives.

Return of Bruce Wayne # 5
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Ryan Sook, Pere Perez & Mick Gray
Published by DC Comics

It's kind of hysterical that DC and Grant Morrison had the opportunity to see Marvel fuck up the return of Captain America, by publishing multiple comics where Steve Rogers wore a black spec-ops bodysuit and stood on the tops of buildings watching heroes do shit before the Reborn mini-series concluded, and yet still turn around and manage to fuck up their own Return of Bruce Wayne shindig in the exact same fashion. All the evidence has been there for months of what was going to happen, and they still went ahead and chose to fuck it up anyway. Here's your unfinished, late as hell mini-series by the marquee names (plus a fill-in dude), released alongside a stack of one-shots, all of which feature Bruce Wayne, in a black, spec-ops bodysuit, standing on top of buildings, watching heroes do shit.

Edge of Doom # 1
Written by Steve Niles
Art by Kelley Jones & Jay Fotos
Published by IDW

You've got to admire the balls out courage it takes for IDW to look at the consistent failure of new horror anthology comics to find an audience and still decide "fuck it, we'll do a bunch of them anyway, and we'll make them even longer". Hell, if you look at the way they describe this issue, you might even think that Edge of Doom is actually a mini-series based around one story. (It isn't.) On the other hand, maybe you're just looking into this thing because it's Kelley Jones, and you're one of those people so sick of Tony Daniel/David Finch Batman drawings that you've actually started wetting the bed for the old Moench/Jones Fuck The Government paranoia years. If that's the case, here you go: it's a Tales From The Crypt riff on Gulliver's Travels, with a curious nerd who gets his eyeball yanked out by tiny arrows.

Amazing Spider-Man # 645
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Paul Azaceta, Matthew Southworth & Javier Rodriguez
Published by Marvel Comics

While the previous installations in Mark Waid's performance piece on Spider-Man featured what one assumes is his preferred version of the character (the simpering crybaby with wisecracks aplenty), this chapter cuts to the other Spider-Man, the one that imitates Christian Bale's Batman for some reason involving feelings. So look and behold, as Peter Parker silently terrorizes all of his villains before snapping the Shocker's wrist (or something). Cast your eyes upon the requisite reverse-homage to old Spider-Man comics, this one being the "I must hold up this thing that is heavy", and this time, it's all like, scary and shit. It's a lot of fun, because it's not any fun at all.

Superman # 703
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Art by Eddy Barrows, J.P. Mayer & Rod Reis
Published by DC Comics

The general rule for whenever Superman and Batman get together is that the one who is right is always the one whose name is on the cover. If Superman shows up in a Batman comic, he's going to act like a self-righteous tool, and when the reverse happens, Superman will be thoughtful and human, while Batman will shoot his mouth off like a gloomy Dead Can Dance fan with an inferiority complex. And--well, you can't fault Straczynski too much, he certainly shoots for accuracy in his attempt to make Superman seem thoughtful, he just misses the mark because of his primary failing, which can be summed up by remembering that he's a tedious, boring writer who comes up with concepts that he never bothers to fill out with actual characters or dialog. (Which is why he's best served by television, where he can count on a crew of people to fill in all the gaps that he leaves behind.) In comics--specifically, Big Two comics, a place where any creator with even the vaguest "celebrity" is given free rein to embarrass themselves as much as humanly possible, up to and including taking business advice from beef-addicted morons in jean shorts--a writer has no crew to turn to, as DC and Marvel have spent the post-Image decades feverishly dismantling the idea that the people drawing these things could possibly understand storytelling themselves. Instead, they have this: a writer who believes himself automatic genius, no help required. God forbid anyone reads these things and sees the banality that belief produced.

BPRD Hell On Earth: New World # 3
Written by Mike Mignola & John Arcudi
Art by Guy Davis & Dave Stewart
Published by Dark Horse Comics

While the return of the BPRD's most dangerous unresolved subplot has gone a lot differently than what might have been predicted, the bigger surprise is how committed the Arcudi/Mignola duo is to the whole "Hell on Earth" concept. While the damage foretold in the trilogy that brought the new status quo forth was extensive, the continuing collapse of our home planet hasn't stopped, and everything must go. And yet, after smartly delivering a one page scene of destruction that left thousands dead, this issue dived out of the apocalypse window entirely, choosing to focus on our two heroes (and there aren't many left), as they 36th Chamber their way against one stand-alone monster. It's frequently claimed that serialized comics run out of places to go after they go big and loud, but Arcudi and Mignola prove that to be a song of laziness. All this issue is, when you boil it down, is a stripped to the gears fight scene: two dudes, one bad guy, and a pick-up truck full of weapons. It's been thrown to Guy Davis and Dave Stewart, those guys have continued their streak of doing things perfectly, and when you're finished, you're fat with satisfaction.

The Invincible Iron Man # 31
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Salvador Larroca & Frank D'Armata
Published by Marvel Comics

If you ignore everything that goes into the actual reading of these Iron Man comics, like the horribly inhuman drawings and the obnoxious "people talking to each other, about nothing, forever" structure, what you've got is a comic that's supposedly about one of the top ten smartest people in the Marvel universe, and that's an actual list that someone is paid to keep track of. So what is the smartest man obsessed with doing? What kind of plan for changing the world do we get from a genius who fetishizes his alcoholism when he needs to teach his ex-girlfriend shitty metaphors?

He makes a car that looks like a clunky cross between a Lamborghini and a Toyota Tercel. That's this bozo's vision of the future: an ugly two-door sports car with a fucking blower on top. Here's another word for that: starts with q, and it rhymes, sort of, with "taint".

Green Lantern # 58
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by Doug Mahnke & Christian Alamy
Published by DC Comics

Since "hope" is basically a kid's game, a gamey concept as realistic as Santa Claus or peace in Israel, Geoff Johns had no choice but to pick a fourteen year old girl as its physical agent. (The only thing more hopelessly stupid than a fourteen year old girl being, obviously, a fourteen year old boy.) It's still Johns, so the girl happens to be the latest victim in a string of kidnap/murders at the hands of what looks to be a young, mustached Professor Ivo, and the whole story is really just a sideshow, plot events tied up in finding new ways to define boring old Hal Jordan. (He's into hope, but afraid of it, and the cliffhanger ending is the Flash questioning Hal's choices in running buddies.) Basically, it's another routine Green Lantern comic--scream-y, weird, and dull.

Gantz # 13
By Hiroya Oku
Published by Dark Horse

While the charm of the Gantz crew fighting dinosaurs wore off quite a bit when it become clear that Oku's obsession for detail meant that every single way-too-intricate drawing of dinosaurs was going to clash with his studio's way-too-intricate background drawings of buildings, thus resulting in some of the densest, most unfriendly panels this series had so far (and the action has been plenty confusing before), it's endlessly amusing when a forty-year old nebbish screams lines like "I can feel the lust for life within you! You're strong! You have the strength to survive anything!" Gantz isn't alone in having a complete lack of internal life--that's pretty much every Robert Kirkman comic, honestly--but unlike the this-is-so-serious Walking Dead, the Gantz translators seem to understand that the only way to handle something so egregiously ridiculous as a bunch of idiots in scuba gear ghost-fighting gigantic dinosaurs while E-cup porn girls idly stand on the sidelines (and a panda bear shows up for some friendly wrassling) is for absolutely every single line of dialog to be delivered with a zero tolerance policy towards sarcasm, self-awareness or maturity. If these chapters took any time to read, the high pitch might make one deaf. As it is, it's one of the reasons why Gantz--the most sterile masturbation action fantasy that wasn't made by the Wachowski Brothers--remains so consistently gratifying. Whether it's good or bad, this is what pride actually looks like, and American comics could take a lesson: apologies are for high school kids.

I Am An Avenger # 2
Written by Greg Rucka, Sean McKeever, Paul Tobin & Jacob Chabot
Art by Michael Lark, Stefano Gaudiano, Matt Hollingsworth, Mike Mayhew, Rain Beredo, Nathan Fairbairn, David Lopez, Alvaro Lopez & Jacob Chabot
Published by Marvel Comics

According to this comic, Steve Rogers attends the funerals of American soldiers who die in conflict with Epic Marvel Crossover Events. Lucky for him, only one soldier died in Siege, lucky for you, that only makes one ridiculously maudlin funeral scene involving Captain Fucking America to read. Here's the message it delivers: it really sucks to lose a family member in a pointless secret super-hero war, because it means the funeral is going to be completely overshadowed by the gigantic super-hero creep who wanders around and says "geez, i'm really sorry, America Pledge of Allegiance eagles" while you're trying to say goodbye to somebody killed by Daken (the Dark Wolverine!). Nothing's worse than crying your eyes out while those eyes are looking at something that your brain is totally convinced you should be laughing your ass off at.

Slam Dunk Volume 12
By Takehiko Inoue
Published by Viz

It's probably unfair to call this installment in Inoue's basketball manga "more of the same", since it does include a couple of new plot twists (the coach does something! the bad guys have their own crazy dude!), but that's pretty much what this volume is: more. The feelings are there, stronger than they might have been previously (the team captain reveals he's been dreaming of the coming game, every night, for three years), but Inoue's decision to replicate our leads exactly in this new opposing squad makes the story read more like a meta-comic about practice than the sudsy testosterone melodrama that made the previous game (which was also, like, A Really Big Deal) so deliciously painful to wait on. The one saving grace that remains is found in the final panel, when the team's silent assassin takes to the floor and mutters "you all talk too much". While previous volumes have shown what this enigmatic fucker can do, as well as providing Inoue with his most aggressive opportunities for action drawing outside of Vagabond, the tease is enough to postpone abandonment a little bit longer. 

Daken Dark Wolverine # 2
Written by Daniel Way & Marjorie Liu
Art by Giuseppe Camuncoli, Frank D'Armata & Onofrio Catacchio
Published by Marvel Comics

The best anybody could hope for with a character as ridiculous as Daken (the Dark Wolverine!) was that a comic focusing on his exploits would look nice (because it's Camuncoli, one of those rare artists D'Armata doesn't seem to be able to entirely cripple) and that it would be funny, because...well, fuck dude, it's about Daken, he's the Dark Wolverine. He's bisexual and has pheromone powers with which to tease, tantalize and turn on both sexes. He has a flowy mohawk. Ultimately, he's the end result of a lack of imagination, sure, but that's the rule of the day in all super-hero comics when children are involved (except for Cable, who is the end result of a lack of imagination PLUS gigantic guns and metal, and those can fix lots of things, the same way drawing all your characters with gigantic letter V's bisecting them can fix lots of things). The first issue of this series seemed to be a general step in the right direction--Daken fucked a girl, fed another girl a strawberry, there was a great fight scene, Daken humped a midget, he yelled at buildings--but this issue goes in another direction, one that incorporates weird cringing comedy, bullshit Wolverine tie-in crap nobody cares about, and shows the one thing you don't want to see in a comic about a sleazy cornball with sexxxy powers, which is the part where he acts embarrassed. Bad form, and bad tidings as well.

Warlord of Mars # 1
Written by Arvid Nelson
Art by Stephen Sadowski & Adriano Lucas
Masturbation Fodder Variant Cover by the one-speed master
Published by Dynamite

They should really dole out the licensed comic adaptation deals once a year, in a high school gymnasium. You could invite all of the bloggers who aren't too busy taking pictures of themselves standing next to a oversized model of a X-Wing Fighter, Five Guys could cater it so that nobody fucks up and loses any weight, the whole thing would be a pretty sweet deal for genre freaks. Everybody would get draft picks based off how shitty their taste is, and then things would be a little more fair, and it could possibly result in more exciting comics as result. Like, instead of seeing a bunch of big tier creators doing Dark Tower for Marvel while the scrub list manhandles the Phantom, you'd get Jacen Burrows adding his plastic rape faces to Halo: Bonghits while Brendan McCarthy draws hallucination panels into Tarzan crap.

Thor # 616
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Pasqual Ferry & Matt Hollingsworth
Published by Marvel Comics 

There's a lot of problems with Thor comics right now, and while most of that is tangled up in the fact that there's just too fucking many of them for any one person to possibly care about one of them in great magnitude (except for the one that's for kids and yet happens to be most popular with people who aren't actual kids), but that's more an industrial problem than it is one of content or form or any of those other words that gets thrown around when there's nobody getting fired to blog about. The real problem with Thor comics (besides the Ultimate ones where entire scenes get yanked from Hellboy: Seed of Destruction), is that Thor's primary villain gets all of his primary villainous opportunities directly from Thor, because Thor is really fucking stupid when it comes to the guy. Over and over again, this is the nature and planning of every modern Thor comic: a bunch of people says "Hey, you really shouldn't trust Loki, he's a bad guy", Thor says "nah, he's my bro, shaddup" and then Loki reinstitutes slavery or fingerbangs Margaret Thatcher against her Iron Will, and then Thor has to hit Loki with a hammer or lightning or whatever, and then there's something with Frost Giants while Loki licks himself clean and comes up with another plan. That's the cycle, over and over again. How do you root for that? How is that entertaining? It's not like Thor is being a moron in the way that a guy in a Failblog video is being a moron, he's not slipping on banana peels and falling into custard. He's just an idiot with a hammer that he never uses. What's pop art about that?

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Too Many Movies: Bergman Loved Tarkovsky, Tarkovsky Hated Ponies

This week, Joe McCulloch bet on Secretariat to win, show and place, while Tucker dug up Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage.

Secretariat
Expected reactions, first out of the gate, 2010
Joe McCulloch

 Initially it felt awkward knowing that my brother and I were the youngest people in the theater by a solid twenty years, going by what was on the screen; there aren’t a lot of PG-appropriate trailers to run before a Walt Disney scoop of canned corn like this, so it was mostly CG cartoon after 3D cartoon playing to blank faces (and then Tony Scott threatening to run children over with a train, as if in response). But pretty soon I realized that kids ought to be present for this picture, in that it could serve as an invaluably straightforward early exercise in reading motion picture cues. See the mean horse trainer yelling at the stable’s black groomer? Already junior knows he’s bad to the core. A straight-laced lawyer (and tax expert!) frowning at his daughter’s interest in Vietnam War protesting? Might as well drop in a caption announcing HE’S BEHIND THE TIMES. In contrast, Diane Lane’s gentle countenance and sensible period hairdo assures us early of her aptitude at comforting mighty beasts from a Triple Crown winner to society’s clucking prejudice against female racehorse owners to John Malkovich as the eccentric good guy trainer. “Malkovich,” you whisper into a tiny ear. “Malkovich,” comes the reply.

But really, I tend to envy this sort of super-assured inspirational product, so at ease with its predetermined ending, so relaxed in the arms of triumph-over-adversity formula that it drops in a Biblical quote to precede the opening titles and strikes up a soul classic (I’ll Take You There, Staple Singers) to accompany an obligatory “things going alright” scene in which the multi-gendered, racially mixed cast of heroes actually dances around the title animal in joy. There’s no shame here. Characters speak plainly and at length about the powerful emotions they’re feeling, and eventually about how they’re all the finest horse-related people that ever were. There’s comedy, drama, a sensible amount of crisply-shot racing action, and even some wholesome sex appeal in the form of country-fried Disney-affiliated multimedia personality Amanda Michalka, creeping around the snow-speckled windows of her folks’ ‘60s ranch home in a nightie fit to leave the male audience rarin’ to sire a few themselves. Her succession of outfits -- from loose hippie getups to casual-liberated jean shorts to a proper lady gown in the culminating ballroom scene -- neatly tracks the picture’s celebration of female empowerment as just nominally abrasive, and ultimately bolstering to the enduring rightness of the American upper middle class and further, further!

Yes, Secretariat aces the Bechdel test by many heads, so long as we’re not counting the horse as a guy. But just as it’s a sports movie building up to a major triumph we already know, so is its engagement with powerful women predicated on the acceptance of such into mainstream thought, as opposed to radical-ish politics or counterculture living, all benevolently dismissed as harmless affectations of youth. And nothing is more mainstream than All-American Big Money Victory; it’s not for kicks that much of the drama turns on the dreadful threat of the *gasp* *choke* estate tax, or that ultra-rich James Cromwell is redeemed by his willingness to buy into a crucial franchising scheme, while blustering rival owner Nestor Serrano is characterized only in broad male chauvinist and animal endangering terms. “Leering scumfuck!” screams your child, because what right-thinking person could oppose the risk-taking moxie of Diane Keaton, or the seven hundred shots of Secretariat’s massive eyes, burning with first the love of running and later a godly fervor indicative (the reprised opening verse suggests) of the Lord’s verily boundless presence? Impossible! A miracle! Oh Happy Day erupts on the soundtrack as the mighty creation gallops to victory, his jockey’s uniform clean and glowing white, as if transfigured by triumph. Everyone gathers around the trophy, and we can see for ourselves that God is always there for the rich and winning in this eminently reparable land of ours.

Scenes From A Marriage
Ingmar Bergman doesn't care how short your life is, 1973
Tucker Stone 

Scenes From A Marriage was the Carlos of the 70's, a 295 minutes long film originally released as a six-part television series in Sweden. A 168 version played theatrically and had a small VHS run, but it wasn't until 2004 that the film freak gods and Bergman fans known collectively as the Criterion Collection released a three disc collection of the original cut alongside 1974's theatrical version. If nothing else, Scenes From a Marriage is a superb example of the "Film school in a box" ideal that used to be the manifesto of the Criterion Collection. Similar to their intensively detailed five disc collection of Bergman's Fanny & Alexander, Marriage is the sort of DVD collection that appeals to obsessively curious film fanatics--useful as archaeology, but more valued as masterclass in the power of editing to shape and control the narrative. All that being said, Scenes From A Marriage isn't exactly the cliched "gosh, that didn't feel like five hours" type of experience. It's a subtle, occasionally boring film that focuses almost exclusively on the relationship between two individuals who, by the close of the film, have caused each other enough pain that it will be difficult for even the most forgiving viewer to want to go much further with either of them. (Bergman felt differently, returning to the characters in 2003 with Saraband, a direct sequel filmed for Swedish television.)

The opening of Scenes is one of those sort of Bergman macguffins where he doesn't attempt to hide the utilitarian necessities used to get his characters where he needs them--a woman is interviewing the couple who form the marriage in the title for television, and that's all. Why she chose them isn't important, it's just an excuse to see them on their best behavior. Unlike the majority of the film, these scenes are one of the only times that Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson will play towards the audience, and it's important for Bergman's plans that they be depicted as deeply in marital bliss as possible. This being Bergman, there's a heavy emotional cost to be paid, and it will mean that much more if the height of the fall is set impossibly high. From here, the film moves into a dinner party with a couple that our protagonists will eventually emotionally replace--bitterly, vindictively and cruelly--still hopelessly entangled in each other.

While the first episode also includes a cruel plot development that I won't spoil here, it's merely one of set-up and misdirection. That style, the punishing, final twist, is never repeated, the film never even tries a trick like it again, essentially turning episode one into the fabric that the next four hours will rend. What follows it is a study of two people talking to each other over the passage of decades, pursuing one complicated argument about what their marriage, their relationship, actually means to them as individuals--the question of who the other is, and what remains of that answer when the connection between the two is severed entirely.

Obviously, they split. That isn't a spoiler. Scenes From A Marraige isn't a film about plot, it isn't about being startled or understood. It's a film about experience--the experience of becoming fully invested inside the dynamic of two people and their relationship. It's part of what makes it such a frighteningly uncomfortable, or unusual, film--Bergman chooses to completely subvert and eventually destroy the expectation that the characters in a film are something that the audience should somehow relate to, that it's necessary or useful at all to the viewer to "identify." It won't take long for any audience member to find something that the husband does that's repellent, and it will only take a bit longer to find the wife to be intensely frustrating--any lengthy relationship has these moments, Bergman uses them to say, where people are stripped bare of what makes them tolerable, and one is left only with the commitment, the agreement to "wait it out." An audience member has, in most cases, none of that--the loose committment to finish the film they started, the idea that they "paid" for it--and here, all of that will be thoroughly tested. It's not that either of these characters are completely unlikeable, but that Marriage demands that the audience's patience be given more on faith than reason. Bergman has a study to perform, this is the laboratory he's chosen, and there's little concern given that the response be one that's shared by a large group--this is it, the film says, this is his experiment. Like it or leave. The experience is exaggerrated in a more rigorous fashion then film usually provides--tight, unwavering shots of faces and movement, claustrophobic sets and the bizarre sensation of being a true voyuer (since both actors so convincingly portray a couple who have known each other in the physical sense so long that their human vanity is completely absent) all contribute to make Scenes something that's almost toxic with the concept of art as personal experiment. Besides all that, there's the sheer length of the thing, set at a frenzied, realistic pace that isn't at all what regular man vs. woman stories normally behave like.

Is it good, is probably the question--these are supposed to answer that kind of question, even when the mere asking seems like a tiresome exercise in box-checking. Yes? It's a unique experience, the five hour film, one that's probably going to exist as curiosity and fetish object as time stumbles forward. The reverence quiet movies demand is impossible to replicate at home, and Scenes needs that quiet to work, it requires an audience who will shut the fuck up long enough to hear Bergman's take on relationships out. Without patience, the tedium can be hard to navigate, and its moments can seem like they'd be more rewarding buried in pot-throwing arguments sandwiched between Tony Soprano killing his friends in weekly installments. Scenes is what it is--a throwback, overlong, boiled in pretension. Worst of all, it's sincere.

No surprise then, that it works so well. Honesty has a place of righteousness, even when you have to create a lie to put it on display.

-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2010

Things That Belong On Tumblr: The NYCC Loot of 10/10

The Rundown

Showcase 91-93 (Manhunter 2070): These are the juice, those are the words of the Omega Effect. Trust in metal.

Captain America Dead Men Running 1-3: Danijel Zezelj has turned bad scripts into good comics and turned good scripts into great comics, and these are rumored to be more latter than former. In keeping with Marvel's public pretense towards giving people a chance while privately treating them like unwanted garbage, his name is spelled wrong in the first issue's credits. We'll see!

Blackhawk 1-2: Chaykin.

Sinner 1: Muñoz.

Rocco Vargas A Game of Gods: Torres.

Aces 3-5: Airplane pilots, dudes who smoke, clean line stuff. Tasty!

Drawn and Quarterly 9: Thought this was something else. It isn't.

Batman 233: Some Dick Sprang reprints in the back, but the main story is the real draw here: Bruce Wayne versus Bruce Wayne, for the life of Bruce Wayne, who will be executed at midnight for the murder of Bruce Wayne. Batman is also involved?

Voyages: Faux-Heavy Metal cover, and the credits list Chaykin, Toth, Vess and Rick fuckin' Geary. We call that a squadron.

John Carter of Mars 1-3: Guy almost paid me to get these out of the way. Think the landfill was the next stop. Marsh!

Inside Moebius 6, Intégrale Chaland 3, Intégrale Chaland 4 and Le dernier des Mohicans: These are all from the famed Alca table, which was sequestered in the final row, next to the people selling bedsheets with horny anime girl pictures on them. First time at the convention, and they seemed pretty satisfied with their sales when Sunday rolled around. That's no small feat, as the books are pretty expensive and their credit card machine was a bigger anti-American than Gary Groth. Untranslated? Sure, but that's the way things go sometimes. Consider the likelihood of a future onslaught of Chaland in English (low), factor in the route all previous Moebius releases take in this country (out of print immediately) and you'll end up pulling out those French textbooks from college before you know it. As an alternative, there were things like Le derneir des Mohicans, a violent adaptation that deals more in abstract, wordless panels than it does in text. Solidarité!

Television Of The Weak: I'm Asking You, Sugar

On a quiet week in October, three men watched television. Matthew J. Brady chose Fringe, Tim O'Neil become one with Gray's Anatomy, and Tucker spent his time with the Sons of Anarchy.

Fringe: "Olivia" and "The Box"
Matthew J. Brady

The strange thing about Fringe is that it's enjoyable enough while I'm watching it, but trying to analyze it for a write-up like this just exposes all its glaring flaws and inanities. Maybe those should just be accepted by this point, but it's hard not to focus on the minuses when the pluses are less than satisfactory. However: this season starts out on a pretty compelling note, with Olivia stranded in the other universe, with villainous versions of Walter, Broyles, and Charlie trying to brainwash her into thinking she is the alternate version of herself, and in addition, the alternate Olivia is in "our" universe, spying on the team from within. Not a bad concept, although the machinations that get "good" Olivia to her mind-controlled place in which the writers apparently want her are as silly as usual, something about injections containing her evil alternate's memories taking over her mind (a nice chance for paranoia as she questions what is real, but with a near-instantaneous transformation that kind of ruins the buildup), so she can be placed back on her old team for some reason. If the show is going to bounce back and forth between universes each episode, going on its usual course of weird cases each week, that could be pretty interesting, and might be a good chance to explore the differences between worlds (hopefully beyond the oh-so-clever gags like a taxi advertising the musical "Dogs"). Evil Olivia's adventures on this side of the vibrational barrier seem neat too, although Anna Torv is stretching the limits of her acting abilities with her attempts to seem sinister. But, she does shoot a guy execution-style, then makes out with Peter to distract him from the blood slowly pooling under her bathroom door; that's always fun. The rest of the plot is sillier, regarding the discovery of some mysterious box related to evil Walter's doomsday machine; it emits brain-melting ultrasonics whenever anybody opens it, but some guy survived it, and the team has to find him. Any guesses as to how he did it? If you said because he was deaf, even though that's not the way sound waves work, you've earned the satisfaction of being able to predict the silliness of the show's pseudoscience. Also, you get to enjoy some random guy's head exploding, which is another thing that's always fun.

So, Fringe: still pretty dumb, but enjoyable enough to stick with, at least out of hope that something silly will happen, ridiculous science will be proffered, or the characters will be goofy enough to keep from grating against the walls of unbelievability. Here's hoping for a season that's dumb enough to almost seem smart.

Sons of Anarchy - "Turning and Turning"
Tucker Stone 

While Sons never truly transitioned from being a moderately interesting show featuring some incredible performances by a few minor characters, the rhythym of the show eventually caught me. It's an interesting trick that the show played in its second season--teasing out the satisfactions of justice postponed, and then delivering said justice (in full commitment to FX's extreme taste for onscreen violence) with the gusto the weeks of waiting for it demand. This season may be working the same method out once again--episode after episode, building its way towards the fists and blood conclusion that will see Our Man Jax find His Son Abel in That Country Ireland--but if it isn't, then the show had best come up with an explanation for why it's sidelining every episode into a whiny subplot machine. It's the same problem the show experienced in the previous seasons middling episodes--when there isn't violence to be had, Sons doesn't seem to know what to do with itself. Irritatingly, it seems to think that it has something to say, be it about the economy (it's bad), brotherhood (it's good) and girls (such a headache). The last season's music video conclusion, where Jax collapsed in the gang's arms while watching his kidnapped son disappear in the distance while his mother ran from a Federal murder charge frame-up, was a bravura moment all around, the sort of pulpier-than-thou conclusion that so many of these shows strive for. But now, with the gang running in place in California while a swath of recognizable Irish actors cryptically mumble in second-unit Belfast scenes, those moments are absent of impact, even in memory. To make it worse, the emotional demands of a kidnapped baby have stolen any screentime the non-leads might get, leaving only token head-nods and "we're with you brother" lines to its secondary players, all of whom are more compelling than Kurt Sutter (the show's creator) seems to realize. While Katey Segal's performance remains the sort of praiseworthy adventure that results in Emmy campaigns, she's working in service of killing time.

All that being said, the nice thing about this sort of entertainment--the pulpier, macho porn kind of entertainment--is that it won't have to do much to right the ship. Like season two, the show could easily fix itself with one or two damn fine episodes. If what's being teased by plot comes to bear, that could be the sight of Jax, Chibs and Opie walking the streets of Belfast--the IRA on one end, and untold carnage in wait between them. Here's to hope.

Grey's Anatomy - "With You I'm Born Again"
Tim O'Neil

One of the reasons why doctor shows are perennially popular is that people secretly hate and resent their doctors, and not-so-secretly relish the prospect of seeing them humiliated and humbled. It's not rocket science - or even brain surgery - most people have neither the ability nor the patience to be doctors, even the fake doctors who talk about Hegel to stoned undergraduates. Therefore we loathe the fact that some dudes and dudettes had the wherewithal to flush their twenties down the toilet in exchange for a massive payday beginning sometime in their mid-thirties and proceeding thereafter until the day they die. (Or, at least until Obamacare takes over and all the MDs are driving tractors on the commune like the rest of us.) Which isn't to say that all doctors are Brainiac 5-level mental giants, but even the most mediocre opthamologist in the world was still able to stick it out through the decade-or-so of grueling study and labor necessary to become a board-certified physician. So I guess that entitles them to be dicks and lord it over everyone else around the table at family reunions?

Anyway. The cast of Grey's, as you are probably aware, is almost entirely made up of doctors. Whenever characters from other professions are introduced - even supposedly similain-scope professions such as nursing or lawyering - invariably these characters get swept under the rug in short order. Why? One big reason is that this show usually does a great job of ignoring one big icky bit that often comes up in peoples' relationships with their doctors: class. A lot of people resent their doctors simply because doctors make a lot of money, and if you're a doctor reading this now who wants to leave an angry post in the comments to the effect that you don't make that much money, remember that you still make a lot more money than me, and probably more than I ever will, so shut the fuck up. Grey's likes to persist in the fantasy that doctors - not even just interns or residents, but real full-blown physicians - do things like share apartments and live in trailers in the woods. The best part was when the chief of surgery (not Chief Weber, but Derek when he was chief last season) was sharing a house with a handful of residents. (One of those residents was his fiancee, but still.) If you're the chief of surgery at a major metropolitan hospital you're making a lot of money, and it stretches credibility beyond the breaking point to believe that someone making probably in the high six figures, if not more, is going to be sharing a bathroom stall with surgical residents for any reason. I can stretch my suspension of belief to encompass the idea that a forty-foot tall humanoid in purple pants flies around the universe with a silver herald eating planets, but I'm just too much of a Marxist to ever fully believe that people who make that kind of money would slum for any reason.

So what the hell am I talking about? Last season - you might recall - ended on a really big high point. For those too lazy to click, the last two episodes of the most recent season ended on a complete tonal break, with a psychotic shooter on a rampage in Seattle Grace. Before the episodes were over he had killed or wounding a bunch of people, including a few established cast members. It was absolutely crazy: for the space of two hours, the anodyne prime-time soap opera was transformed into a merciless, Jack Bauer-esque bloodbath. Characters lived, characters died, epiphanies were reached and a number of long-standing plotlines were resolved with brutal suddenness. I give Grey's a lot of crap for being an awful, cliched, predictable and stone-dumb show (that has somehow managed to get its hooks into me nonetheless, which says more about me than it), but I had to give completely unironic props: they flipped the script on the audience and I was riveted to my seat. It was awesome.

But then, what do you do after you blow everything up? How do you wrench a show like Grey's back into it's tried-and-true format after having first wrenched it so violently - and effectively - out of shape?

The answer: not very easily. "With You I'm Born Again" is, obviously, the "aftermath" episode. For the clearest analogy, think "Family," that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation right after "Best of Both Worlds," wherein Picard returns to his family estate in France and tries to come to grips with the fact that he was mind-controlled by a race of evil cyborgs and used as a weapon in an attempt to enslave or annihilate every living being in the Alpha Quadrant. Or, closer to home, how about all those old issues of Uncanny X-Men right after some big crossover event that featured all the main characters moping around and reflecting on What Just Happened, while in the background a few things were unobtrusively done by way of setting up the next year's worth of subplots. Usually they involved Jubilee as a viewpoint character talking about everyone's feelings in some capacity or another.

The difference is, of course, that Grey's Antomy isn't Uncanny X-Men. It's one of the longstanding conventions in superhero comics that people are remarkably resilient and able to deal with even the most devastating Crisis with unmatched equanimity. One issue half the southern hemisphere is eaten by Brainiac, the next issue we're supposed to care that Toyman is sticking hypno-rays into Barbie dolls as part of a plot to sabotage Fashion Week or something. That's life, we try to pick up where we left off. Only, really, that's not quite how that works in quote-unquote "real" life: people who don't wear spandex get caught in tragedy and changed by trauma in ways that cannot easily be swept under the rug. This is actually one of Grey's evergreen themes, with characters struggling hard to overcome past hardships and traumatic events. One of Grey's oldest rules is the idea - not unique to the show but certainly hammered to death over the last few years - that people can't be in successful relationships until they get past their own problems. Which, OK, I'll concede that this is strictly true, but it usually doesn't stand in many peoples' ways in real life. (In my experience people usually get into relationships when they want to, whether they're a good idea or not, and sort it all out later.)

That's one of the reasons - maybe the biggest reason - why the cast of Grey's is so universally insufferable: they all have a constant finger on the pulse of their own feelings, and are able to articulate every vicissitude of their emotional state with pinpoint precision. Usually once or twice an episode. They broadcast their emotional status in laborious detail at every opportunity: they are all the most self-involved little pricks on God's green earth. And as the series progresses, it becomes harder to ignore the fact that these people are no longer perky, likeable young striplings, they are becoming close to actual medical professionals. Meaning they've grown from raw interns to hardened residents without learning a damn thing about keeping their mouths shut and not acting like crybabies. Meaning you want to punch them in the face all the damn time. Is this how doctors are in real life, all running around having cathartic monologues every five minutes because they've discovered Feelings? if so, I'm going to stick to sacrificing goats to Ahura Mazda as my primary means of keeping testicular cancer at bay.

Now, of course, they all have real reason to discuss their Feelings at the drop of a hat. Now everyone on the show has PTSD, not just Kevin McKidd's Dr. Ginger McTavish. Speaking from a purely mechanical standpoint, the short-term gain of the awesome season finale might just not be worth all the long-term trouble, because unless they plan to sweep everything under the rug (and the only thing Grey's ever truly sweeps under the rug is unwanted cast members), the long-term shape of the show becomes the laborious recovery of a close-knit group of PTSD survivors. Which sort of puts a downer on things. This week saw the marriage of Yang and Hunt (pictured above) which, while certainly not unexpected, is still the direct result of having survived a recent near-death experience. The question remains as to whether or not a marriage made under these circumstances can survive past the initial euphoric mood. The writers this week sure went out of their way to foreshadow the fact that the new marriage will be a rocky one, and perhaps a short one as well.

The question lingers, as yet unanswered, as to whether or not the series will ever really be the same again. If it really follows through on the whole massive cast-wide PTSD storyline, then it could be pretty grim for the foreseeable future, and without any kind of lightness the series is going to get pretty damn awful. Because, let's be serious, Grey's isn't really any good if we're actually going to get out our ruler and measure "good" and "bad" according to anything remotely resembling a logical standard - at its best, it can manage 'fun and frivolous." When it manages to get over, it usually does so through charm and momentum. Based on this first episode, the new season looks to be short on charm and momentum. We could be in for a hard slog.

-Matthew J. Brady, Tucker Stone, Tim O'Neil, 2010