The Factual Opinion

My Wife: Reads Big Summer Event Super-Hero Comics For Your Pleasures, Text Edition

What follows is the natural counterpart of the previously posted Audio Editorial.

In this corner, Heavy Weight #1, Marvel's Fear Itself! And in this corner, Heavy Weight #2, DC's Flashpoint! Two publishing giants going up against each other with their big event comics of the summer! Which one will win the heart (heart?) of Nina Stone? Which one will win...her flesh?

Ummmm.....okay.  

So, I read issue one of Fear Itself and wasn't such a fan. Nevertheless, I'd taken the assignment, which was to read the two of these and then "compare & contrast", and I don't screw around when I'm on assignment. It's called discipline, and while I won't say that being a Jewish tigress gives you the backbone of a stonemason, I will say that I'm one tough cookie.

You know what? As weird as the premise is, Fear Itself is somewhat compelling. It isn't necessarily the actual plot (i use the term loosely) of this issue that got to me--for one, I had to read and re-read, and re-view the whole sequence of events surrounding Juggernaut about four times to try and figure out what had just happened. There's an explosion? But no one died? Juggernaut is wearing what looks like a cement suit - and the security guards aren't? But they ALL survive the blast? And then, he touches something all glow-y? Loses his ability to speak? (I do love the blank word balloons) and turns into God-only-knows what...but basically just himself, with laser lines and extra gear? I just couldn't get it. I think it's one of those things you get after reading the whole issue, or one of those things where you just read lots of comics and automatically fill-in gaps and apologize/ignore stuff.

Anyway, all these heroes turn into evil fighters who speak some weird language of Rune symbols. And that's messed up? I guess? But that's not the compelling part to me. (Side note: I totally LOVE the chick who is a Hulk. LOVE HER. More please!)

What really got me, was the level of the Serpent's hatred. How evil evil evil he is! I mean he's saying things like "Punish and terrify every living thing that you can;" and "Fill them with doubt and panic and FEAR;" and "All targets are valid. Women -- children -- property -- ALL of it -- Kill them all. Everything."

That's pretty intense. He reminds me of Gary Oldman in the Professional. And it was there at the end, after enough of that sort of thing was said, that my mind started doing the "what if" game. What if there really was someone or something like this happening in the world. What if there was a villain who had no remorse of feelings of vulnerability or anything. And it's with that line of thinking that I can see that one might capture (ha! no pun intended!) and audience. A person might return to this comic over and over again to live through this possible reality to see what happens.

(I guess the big cliff hanger was supposed to be that The Avengers were missing in action. But...it just wasn't so much for me. My personal cliff hanger is - Whoa! I wonder just how unrelenting and uncompromising in his evilness this Serpent dude will be?!?!)

The answer is that he blew up some buildings!

Which was kind of a letdown, for obvious reasons.

So with that, I move on to Flashpoint. I had a weird experience with this one. I know nothing of this guy. Flash, you say? Barry whatsit, is that it? Nothing. I've got more extensive relationships with toaster waffles, and I haven't eaten one of those things in at least ten years. So I'm on that first page, and it feels like backstory to me. Here's what I got from the first page:

The young boy is Flashpoint as a child. His mom gets abducted/hurt/killed one night when she was trying to fix her broken down car on the side of the highway. The case of her disappearance remains...unsolved.

And his....dad? Is at work? And there's and explosion that kills him - so Flashpoint is orphaned at an early age?

OR - that guy in the lab is our guy, the Flashpoint, at the moment of some weird, flukey accident that turned him into the Flashpoint. I think that's the right version. But I had to come back to this after reading the whole comic book and re-form my idea. Also, I had to be told that his name is the Flash and not Flashpoint, which makes more sense. However, I thought i'd write it like that both because that's what I thought when I was reading it, and also because I don't understand why this comic is called Flashpoint. Why is it called that, please?

Anyway, he's moved on from the past, right? He fell in love, has a whole electric family. (C'mon - look at them! There's static electricity running through them all. It looks painful as hell. But hey, birds of a feather......dress dumb. No, I'm sorry, that's not fair. The red suit people look great. But why is that man wearing that bowl?) Also, and this is really a subject for a later time, but why are super-heroes always so ridiculously angry? Except for the little girl, everybody in this drawing below looks like they hate life in the worst way. Is this a thing? 

Anyway, after all this stuff, then he's waking up suddenly. He fell asleep at work. But apparently it's Opposite Day, or something, because nothing is as it should. I mean, it sort of made me think of Freaky Friday or any of those switch-a-roo movies where suddenly a person wakes up in an other person's body. But that's not entirely the case here. I couldn't ever, though, figure out what the deal was. I mean, he runs into his mom. And I'm thinking, "wait...his mom's dead, right?" Therefore, they did a great job of letting even the newest reader understand that something is off. When the mom showed up, I knew that something was weird. But...that was kind of it.

And so, regardless of the fact that I really couldn't understand what was going on, I'll admit, I was sort of hooked. I was. And then the comic decided to take a detour into weirdo land.

I can't. I can't even. I just like can't even, no. THANKS, but NO THANKS.

Suddenly, there's Batman. I figure he must tie in somehow, right? Wrong. All together wrong. No, Batman is actually being approached by Cyborg. And apparently Wonder Woman and Aquaman are going crazy and are ravaging the earth. (Really? Aquaman???) So Cyborg wants to stop them, and he tries to convince Batman, and in doing so, calls on this random sampling of characters who are willing to join the fight if Batman is. Essentially, we go through this whole weird role call thing with people stating why they won't fight, or will fight, or in some cases now will fight because The Dark Knight is there and they want to hang out with him or be led by him or just...I don't know, they all came to ask him out on a big date. And after that whole drawn out (stupid) thing, Batman says: No. Not interested. And so, everyone else says, "Wait. He's NOT joining us? Well forget it. I'm out too." And then, we're back to our regularly scheduled story.

That's not even a subplot! It's just a huge non-sequitur. And by the way, what's with that weird line/rectangle across the left hand side of the centerfold? Is that just a coloring mistake? Or was that supposed to ....no. No! I just looked at it again. It's just a mistake. I mean, how can you let that go to print? You are comic book publishers. Editors. Etc. This is what you do. You write stories and illustrate them. If there's something wrong with the illustration, you fix it before it goes to print. How hard can that be? This thing doesn't even have that many pages!

Anyhow. After all that nonsense, we are back with our friend, Barry Allen. And he's off to see the Batman. Now once again, it's all wackadoo. The Wayne mansion looks abandoned and in complete disarray. The Batcave is sparse. And suddenly Batman is there, fighting with Barry Allen. And the big cliff hanger? Barry looks at Batman and says, "You're Thomas Wayne."

Let me just say - I understood none of this. It had to be explained to me that this was an alternate universe. Duh! Of COURSE! Of COURSE it's an alternate universe! Why didn't I think of that?!!  

Oh, I know why - because WHY WOULD I? It's such an insiders thing to have happen, to assume that people have regular relationships with things like "Whether or not the Flash's mom is alive" and "Who Cyborg is" and "What's Bruce Wayne's dad's name" and "Can Aquaman do things".

Anyways. I don't know what else to say about any of that, so I guess I'm at my conclusion. The more gripping tale of the two stories, and winner of this round, which I'm kind of hoping is the final round, is Fear Itself. That doesn't mean I'm looking forward to the next issue of Fear Itself though. It just means that I'm never going to read enough super-hero comics for something like Flashpoint to mean anything to me but "that comic I had to ask a lot of questions about just so that I could understand it."

That doesn't make for much of a contest.

-Nina Stone, 2011

Comics Of The Weak: Maybe The World Did End And God Just Didn't Want You

 

Avengers #13
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Chris Bachalo
Published by Marvel Comics

The tagline with Chris Ware is that he's trying to create comics as if the medium was untouched by film, the tagline with the Lone Wolf and Golgo crew is/was that they had/have a hard on/boner for spaghetti westerns, and the gig with Will Eisner is that he sat in the dark watching penny dreadfuls (he was a plantation owner who lived in the 1900's, according to Jeet Heer's "notes"), or so the legends go repeated. Those references and inspirations are cute but fuck all those posers, says Bendis. What would comics look like if they were pure translations of reality show confessional booths? That's what comics calls a high concept, nursery school, so shove that Batman comic in your cupcake sucking mouth. And yeah, so what if that means the majority of this book is 12 panel pages of head shots and bad jokes? We got a streak of wasting the abilities of interesting artists by giving them almost nothing of interest to draw to keep intact, and when the goal is to keep Daddy so worked up in the other room that Mommy can go to sleep and dodge that getting pregnant bullet one more time, you know which exit ya'll bitches can take on expressway future: it's the one that says "screw".

Batman and Robin #23
Written by Judd Winick
Art by Guillem March & Andrei Bresson
Published by DC Comics

Apparently the numbers for Batman & Robin finally crossed some arbitrary bottom that set off the no-shame alarm bells, because there's no other believable reason for Guillem March's cover to go that hard in the "After Quitely" paint: and maybe it'll work, all craven Hail Mary as it is. "Remember when a lot more of you bought this comic" is, as they go, a pretty decent way to get people saying "yes" and Dale Carnegie always said that first yes is where the sale begins. That's all brinkmanship though: how's this Winick comic read, you ask? Eh, like most of them do, they say: not enough happens to fill the pages, and even when some of its blatant rip-off-the-Punisher stuff works, it's rough trade copy of the moment when a frantic Batman drove somewhere while screaming something like "the call is coming from inside the house" is only the most obvious version of this comic's greatest problem, which is that this is ground recently well-covered being covered spuriously here.

Tomb of Dracula Presents Throne of Blood #1
Written by Victor Gischler
Art by Goran Parlov
Published by Marvel Comics

This is a comic that probably only exists just so that Marvel can keep guys like Goran Parlov too busy to take work from the frantically seeking fill-in factory over at DC, but it's still Parlov with Gischler, and those are the two guys responsible for the only good non-Ennis Punisher comic since Romita on War Zone. Being set in the feudal Japanese era, Gischler has to include a nod to Lone Wolf and Cub (that's the one part of the Comics Code you'll only forget at your peril), but he otherwise follows the same formula that showed up in that weird Death of Dracula comic that Giuseppe Camuncoli drew last year: overtalking mixed with good-to-great violence drawings. Totally diggable stuff, but only in so much as you treat it like a sketchbook.

Batman Incorporated #6
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Chris Burnham
Published by DC Comics

While this title has essentially pumped steroids right back into the Only Extreme Positions May Apply war between Morrison's most obsessive fans and Morrison's most obsesssive detractors (still this generation's most boring comics argument, although Why Don't You And Your Fucking Masters Degree Shut The Fuck Up About How To Fix Wonder Woman lurks forever in the rearview despite it not having the "both of you are the same" irony found in Morrison's Cafeteria), none of that silliness is Batman Incorporated #6's fault. Of course, it's also not its fault that it fights against the expectations bred of the dying flower that was Return of Bruce Wayne, which was a strange experiment in trying to create an ongoing story based off of ideas that had already been taken away from its writer once before by a man whose lifelong ambition is, apparently, to write really ugly comics about Geoforce, Katana, and a gigantic racial caricature named Freight Train. Anyway, there's no better case for why Grant Morrison comics would be so much fucking better if they were about whole wheat bread statues and Jewish hobo boxing champions, basically anything other than Big Two super-heroes, because this comic is a smart and dare it be said funny tear through all of what might someday make Bat Inc great, and as that greatness is never ever going to be allowed to happen, it would be awesome to see him hang out around something that didn't so closely resemble the word "debacle" every couple of years.

The New Avengers #12
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Mike Deodato, Howard Chaykin, Rain Beredo & Jose Delgado
Published by Marvel Comics 

This was great, both for bullshit "what a horrible comic, comics are horrible" reason as well as just a straight up "that was perfect" reason, and you don't get a lot of comics like those. The dumb part was the part where a long time NYC detective played by fat Laurence Fishburne--seriously, can somebody loan Deodato a movie that didn't come out in the last two years? thanks!--claims to have never heard of Luke Cage, which is all kinds of confusing for about 75 reasons, 12 of which have to do with the fact that you can guaran-godamned-T-ya that every black cop in the city knows full fucking well who Luke Fucking Cage is, and if you make me go into that I'm going to start crying, and you don't want to know what I mean by that because it is something I'll only explain while spooning. AND. The stand alone good part was when the dude got his head all blown to spaghetti while the Red Skull was saying something about Superior Races, all because of the way Chaykin delivered one of those masterful head spins where it looks like the Red Skull's cranium is a globe on an axis. That's how you draw dumb shit gloriously, and if the world cared, it would show up be cemented forever in the brains of America in one of those "Sequence of the Week" columns that Sean T. Collins delivers over at Newsarama, but he's too busy watching Bethenny Ever After to mess with us proles. Confound you, snobbery!

FF #3
Written by Johnny "Inappropriate" Hickman
Art by Mike "Steve" Epting
Published by Marvel "We'll Only Hire A Black Guy If We Can Immediately Fire A Woman" Comics

The all time best invitation comic ever was that JLI issue where Fire pretty much foreign language fucked El Diablo for the entire page count, so this issue of FF will have to get spot number two. (If only DC had the balls to publish the story where all the super-heroes were given "wear your costume to the Identity Crisis funeral" orders when the stretchy guy's preggo wife got the burnt remainders of her carcass shoveled into one of the many DC landfills!) As with all the Hickman issues, this is arguably a really smart math comic about the thought experiment of whether or not a bunch of Reed Richard's from alternate dimensions are more boring than one regular Reed Richards all by himself. This is, however, arguable, so you should show your work. Spoiler! This comic will put you in a coma.

Captain America #617
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Butch Guice, Chris Samnee, Mike Deodato's Computer
Published by Marvel Comics 

We got a couple of complaints across the desk here at TFO headquarters not too long ago, and while they ended up the same place that all of your letters go to, we did notice the irony that one was from the Mars, and one was from the Sun, and far be it from us to ignore whenever the God of War teams up with the the guy (girl?) from Stargate all for the purposes of pulling out the old namby pamby "you hate everything" card, a card that makes sense when its slapped down by a beanie baby from the breakworld and not so much otherwise. So here's a class action suit fired in preparation of a libel case: this is a great issue of Captain America, in no small part because its able to use a fight scene involving a bear even after webcomics and Robert Kirkman came along and turned all of those late-night-drunk-being-silly kinds of stories into an actual genre that each one of them seems to think they do better than the last, despite the obvious truth that all of them do it more horribly than the ones who came before. So good on you Ed Brubaker, and good on Butch Guice for drawing shitloads of panels on the page, and good on the Breitweiser family for producing so many various people with the last name Breitweiser that you eventually had to end up with one who colored comics better than Frank "The Steamroller" D'Armata, and good on Chris Samnee for still being Chris Samnee, and I guess good on Mike Deodato's Computer for having lots and lots of pretty women's breasts to trace or whatever it is that does that thing with the nipples and the bottoms in the catsuits. Sisterhood!

Ultimate Spider-Man #158
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Mark Bagley
Published by Marvel Comics

He's not dead yet.

Ultimate Avengers Vs. New Ultimates #4
Written by Mark Millar
Ar by Lenil Francis Yu
Published by Marvel Comics

But somebody else is dead!

Booster Gold #44
Name of person who will pretend they wrote this of their own free will: Dan Jurgens
Art by Dan Jurgens
Published by DC Comics

A lot of people keep asking: What's the deal with Flashpoint? Where did it come from? Who makes up these crazy ideas? Of course, as you already know, DC is keeping a pretty exclusive lid on Flashpoint so that all those people staying at the Holiday Inn Express can read about it first in their free copies of USA Today, after which they will spread the story via word-of-mouth in what's come to be known as "viral" marketing (because herpes is a virus, and everybody who reads USA Today probably has herpes because seriously: who fucking reads USA Today? whores and junkies, that's who!) However, your trusty website was able to reach out through the magic of the internet and get some actual answers on the historical backgrounding of Flashpoint, which we now present below via the medium of copying and pasting:

TFO: Yo, fuckface.

Geoff Johns: What is up cockmaster?

TFO: Not a whole lot, actually. I was thinking I needed to book myself a stay at the local bed and continental breakfast to rustle up one of those free copies of USA Today, find out what the deal is with the Flashpoints. Then I remembered: I still had your email address from that time you gave that private online press conference explaining why you kept inserting abandoned or abusive fathers in all of your hero scripts.

Johns: Ah, the "Cub Scout" explanation, I remember that. You know I can't talk about how we're using Flashpoint to reboot all the Grant Morrison Batman stuff after this is all over and done, right?

TFO: Of course dude, this is just a private conversation. Treat it like this: I'm metaphorically nude right now, a moist infant, searching for a teat of Flashpoint historical information that I can suckle upon for my pleasures. I crave understanding the way Judas craved some simple recognition when he said "nah, thirty sounds fine." Let me curl up amongst your hairy bosoms like the wolf cub I so long to be.

Johns: I can't give you much, but how about I share my original moment of inspiration? Will my brain's lightning bolt be enough of a nipple for you to sup some nom-noms?

TFO: I'm puckered up like a 9 year old Catholic lighthouse keeper. Plop that shit into my gullet like you're fly-fishing.

Johns: First, a question: who's the lead character in Flashpoint?

TFO: You are, you fucking shortstop. Why not ask me something that won't cause me stupid cancer?

Johns: Alright smart guy: who's the lead COMIC BOOK character in Flashpoint?

TFO: Well...It's the Flash, right?

Johns: Nope. It's Cyborg.

TFO: What's so special about Cyborg?

Johns: Take a look at this: 

TFO: What the hell is this? And why does Superman want to know my two favorite breakfast foods? Hey! Why can't I have more than two? Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!

Johns: Don't get bogged down in the details, buttercup. That's just the kind of stuff he liked to "rap" about before John Byrne made him a Communist, dig? What I want you to focus in on is Q5. Do you see what i'm looking at?

TFO: Let me see..."how interested are you in reading about..." oh. Oh my!

Johns: Exactly.

TFO: But...I don't understand!

Johns: Allow me to explain, with American words. This survey, found in many DC Comics in 1970, was used by DC Comics as a guideline to the stories that those creators told. Now, my first action following my promotion to DC Story Overlord was to give myself two week's paid vacation so that I could meet the guys who invented Kirsten Dunst, but my second action was to summon all of DC's historical documents to my bedchamber. It was there that I made an astonishing discovery.

TFO: Was it a sexual discovery? Like on that show Survivorman?

Johns: What? No, you gotta focus. No, what I discovered was that the DC reader of 1970--what Levitz used to call "our wet creature"--wasn't just a fan of hot AND cold cereal, he was also an old school hardcore racist. He wasn't very interested in black people. He wasn't fairly interested in black people. Brother, he was straight up NOT INTERESTED.

TFO: People actually ripped these surveys out for the sole purpose of telling DC Comics that they didn't want to read comics about black people? Is that what you're telling me?

Johns: Not only that, they also wanted to let us know what they liked to eat for breakfast along with their passion for comics about astrology. Now, you gotta remember, there was a war on. Lots of kids were doing heroin and stealing bras so they could burn them at heroin parties. It was a different time. It was a racist time.

TFO: So what's this got to do with Flashpoint?

Johns: Well, when I sat down in my bedchamber with those survey results, I cried, I'm not going to lie. I cried like I was watching Marley and Me. I haven't cried that hard since the last time I read that part in New Frontier where Hal Jordan meets his flight jacket for the first time. I wept.

TFO: That's crazy. You think of Hal Jordan's jacket as a sentient thing capable of meeting human beings?

Johns: I'll ignore that, because you obviously haven't turned your life and will over to Stephen Ambrose. When I was looking at those survey results, I realized why so many people think of DC as a stodgy old company that pumps out a never-ending stream of inherently fucked up content in hopes that one of them might have a strong enough grasp on some swath of the American overconsumer that our corporate overlords can make some money off of the merchandising fees. They think that because we're still trying to please some racist kid who eats multiple breakfasts!

TFO: Broseph, I can get behind that kind of reasoning, as it makes perfect sense. Go on.

Johns: So my question became: what would things have been like if it had gone the other way? What would it have been like it our readers had responded to the survey and said that they were VERY interested in reading about black people? And hobbies!

TFO: And your answer was Flashpoint?

Johns: No, Cyborg was my answer. Flashpoint is just the leaves that grew off of the Cyborg tree!

TFO: I feel like you're hiding something.

Johns: Of course I'm hiding something! There's more comics coming, a lot more, and some of them are going to blow your mind. But here's a tasty example: what if the Greatest Generation was only Great because Hal Jordan became a Green Lantern? To be more specific--and this might be hard for you to understand--what if the only reason why we defeated the Nazis in World War Two was because of super-heroes?

TFO: That question doesn't even make sense. And what's that got to do with the survey?

Johns: Son, forget about the survey, I just got the black people thing from that. Now I'm talking about Nazis.

TFO: Yeah, I don't really want to talk about Nazis. I'm just...

Johns: Scared? I'll bet you are! You should be scared. See, in Flashpoint, the Nazis have taken over parts of South America. They never lost! They're still out there, goosestepping, talking in German, ironing their epaulets...

TFO: I'm not scared. I'm bored.

Johns: Wha-

TFO: Like, Nazis? Really? That's what I'm supposed to get a hard on about? I mean, i'm probably into the thing were Wonder Woman kills millions of people, that seems like there's a lot of potential for some hardcore gore. But Nazis? C'mon dude. Didn't you read that Wolverine comic where he ghosts all those Nazi bitches in the concentration camps? That shit was unreal. It was like Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark level shit, like "two dead boys stand up to fight, back to back they faced each other", you know?

Johns: Oh shit, "drew their swords"?!

TFO: "And fucking SHOT each other". Yeah, now that's the kind of Nazi versus super-hero shit I'll get behind.

Johns: God, that sounds so rad. I can't be seen packing that gear though, you know? It's bad for business.

TFO: You seriously can't read badass Mark Millar Wolverine comics? Not even as a "know your enemy" kind of thing?

Johns: Nah, it's...honestly, I think it's that some of those dudes--you know, like Sattler, Berganza, those cats--they just take this shit home too much. I remember Jim used to have some old issues of X-Men in his office, just as a reminder that he'd drawn the best selling super-hero comic like EVER, like, The All Fucking Time shit, and Ian was walking by, and he saw them gangbang mothers laying out...

TFO: All gatefolded out like a Sports Illustrated calendar...

Johns: You know it, with Magneto in the Kathy Ireland spot! .... Shit. But yeah, it was just sitting there, and Ian starts bawling like Jim had broken his Tonka truck. He locked himself up in the toy design rooms, refused to write the DC Nation for a couple of weeks. They had to let him fire some Vertigo people just to get him to stop crying. After that, the unspoken rule became an unspoken law.

TFO: That's so crazy.

Johns: Yeah, why do you think everybody keeps bailing for LA? That place is about as fun as a methodone clinic. Well, listen, I gotta bail. It's fucking l.a.t.e. It's Skinemax late.

TFO: All good. How's that Green Lantern movie looking, before you go?

Johns: Pretty good, I guess. We hired Helen Mirren to redo all of Blake Lively's lines in a Jamaican accent. It was going alright until Blake's agent found out. But that's all legal shit, not my game. I'm just waiting for the checks to roll in. 

TFO: Living the life, sergeant.

Johns: You know it. We done here?

TFO: Audi 5000.

-Tucker Stone, 2011

My Wife: Reads Big Summer Event Super-Hero Comics For Your Pleasures, Audio Edition

The title pretty much covers it, although it should probably be noted that this is one of those times when it's best to have the comic to flip through while listening.

Television Of The Weak: In the Future All Our Creeks Will Be Dawsons

This week, Matthew J. Brady finishes up the latest season of Fringe while Tucker checks in on the Biggest Loser.  

Fringe - "6:02 AM EST", "The Last Sam Weiss", "The Day We Died", and beyond
Matthew J. Brady 

Hey, remember when Fringe was all about weird science, and evil geniuses creating monsters and whatnot? Sure, shows change over time, and this one did kind of have a plot that developed as the episodes have continued to pile up, but what was once a quirky bit of pseudoscientific goofiness has turned into a show about inter-dimensional war and ancient prophecies, as well as a relationship drama in which multiple versions of the same characters fight for each other's affections. It's still (usually) pretty stupidly enjoyable, but it's certainly notable that it's pretty much become a completely different show.

Of course, shaking things up did seem to help inject some energy into the proceedings; the middle of last season was mired in increasingly tiresome nonsense about characters keeping secrets, but a jaunt into a parallel universe led to some neat developments, and the beginning of this season had a cool alternating structure in which one episode would focus on the regular cast (with Olivia replaced by an evil doppelganger) and the next would jump to the alternate universe for the adventures of a brainwashed Olivia and her otherworldly pals. That had to end, of course, with Olivia returning to find that Peter had been fucking her evil alternate, stranding everyone on the island of tears and regrets for a while, but then the next plot kicked in, in which everyone got all worried about a big, ancient machine destined to destroy one universe or the other, with Peter prophesied to be the guy who operates it for some reason. This seems to be the J.J. Abrams effect; didn't he pull something similar on Alias, where fun spy shenanigans devolved into a complicated conspiracy based around some Renaissance-era prophecy or something? This time around, it's all about some technology created by "the first people", an unexplained race of ancients or aliens or whatever, which is pretty silly stuff, but at this point you just have to go with it if you want to survive.

Anyway, there have been plots about the "good" universe starting to come apart at the seams like the other one is, and a tiresome few episodes in which Leonard Nimoy's character came back from the dead through a ridiculous plot device called "soul magnets", with his soul taking over Olivia's body for some questionable acting and a badly-concieved Inception rip-off in which Walter and Peter took a trip into her mind, which was revealed to be the land of bad computer animation. Oh, and the evil Olivia (or Evilivia, as I call her) in the other universe found out she was pregnant with Peter's kid, and then had the baby a couple episodes later, which evil Walter (which the show has nicknamed "Walternate", doing internet commenters' work for them) is now using for nefarious ends. That's the thing with this show; you just have to go with it and enjoy the ridiculousness, although it can certainly become pretty eye-rolling at times, and the occasional lapse into sentiment (Walter doesn't ever want anything to happen to his "son" Peter! Olivia and Peter are in loooooove!) can get really tiresome (don't even get me started on the flashback episode in which Peter and Olivia met as children, destined to fall in love someday, blah blah blah). But when it's just going balls-out with the nonsensical "science", throwing ideas at the wall, and coming up with sublimely dumb plot twists, it's, well, not exactly good, but it does feel like it's rewarding longtime viewers by having all the shit it's been teasing actually happen. That's something, right?

So here we are with the three-part season finale, which appeared to be leading up to a sort of resolution to all the stuff about the ancient machine and a final showdown where one universe lives and one dies, before taking a left turn into uncharted territory. Not that there weren't plenty of ridiculous revelations even before that, as first it turned out that Kevin Corrigan's "bowling therapist" character from a season or so ago is actually a prophet/historian who knows all about the "first people" and all the crap that will happen with their doomsday device (my favorite touch is his fancy version of one of those executive ball clackers that moves by itself to indicate that the universe is falling apart). Ah, but that's not dumb enough, there's more convoluted "everyone is connected to the big plot" nonsense to come. Yes, a heretofore-unknown prophecy indicates that not only is Peter the guy to operate the machine (which really should have been given a nickname along with everything else, shouldn't it? I think I'll call it the Penultimate Nullifier), but Olivia is the "key" to unlocking a forcefield around it, due to her ever-expanding psychic powers, which now include telekinesis, pyrokinesis, multiversal teleportation, and time-delayed technological manipulation. Hey, why not, we're just pulling things out of our ass at this point.

Ah, but then comes the (sort of) big twist(s) of the finale, in which Peter gets thrown 15 years into the future to see the results of his actions, I guess. Which means, time for more wacky changes and "mysteries" about what could possibly have happened in all that time. The answer: not much that you wouldn't expect. Peter and Olivia are married and are bigwig Fringe Division agents, Broyles is a senator, Walter is in jail (with an awesome Ted Kaczyinski beard) because everyone realized that all the deaths from the multiversal collapse were his fault, Olivia's niece is old enough to be a rookie agent now, Astrid has a terrible haircut (just about the only noticeable visual character change; people age well in this world), and, oh yeah, the world is falling apart a little bit worse than it had been before. In the typical non-ambition of this show, most everything is about the same, except every so often somebody pulls out a high-tech cell phone or something. If you think nerds complain about the lack of jetpacks nowadays, just wait until 2026.

So anyway, while Peter seems confused about being in the future at first, he quickly regains his future memories or something, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. So it's like a normal episode of futureFringe, seeing a terrorist group setting off bombs that worsen the fissures in reality, hastening the destruction of the universe. And surprise, surprise, but Walternate turns out to be behind the plot, having been exiled in "our" universe for some reason just as his universe was destroyed by Peter in self-defense while he was in the Penultimate Nullifier. That's interesting enough, and it could have made a hell of a twist for the show, to have it suddenly taking place 15 years in the future, or being a place for occasional flash-forward episodes in the manner of the ones which jump to the other universe, but instead, the show decides to go big and overdramatic (is it any surprise that Akiva Goldsman is one of the writers of this episode?), having Walternate kill Olivia and subjecting viewers to endless scenes of mourning and sadness that doesn't mean anything, since we all know the death will be instantly reversed.

Yep, it's the time travel solution, in more ways than one. Walter comes up with a dual-pronged scheme: first, he'll be the one to create the Penultimate Nullifier and send it back in time a few million years, and then he'll figure out some way to drag Peter's consciousness forward to the future so he can see what horrors will transpire if he succeeds in destroying the other universe. This doesn't really make any sense, but he still attempts to explain it by saying that the past can't be changed since it already happened, so he has to send the machine back, but by influencing Peter, he can make changes within the past. Yeah, I don't get it either. And then he doesn't even have the courtesy to make up a dumb explanation of how he's doing this thing with Peter; we just suddenly jump back to the "present" and see Peter decide not to become death, destroyer of worlds. Instead, he zaps Walternate and Evilivia over from their universe so they can all work together to fix this multiversal silliness, and then disappears in a nonsensical cliffhanger. Yay, next season?

Objectively, this is all pretty terrible, at least from a writing standpoint, with big plot developments happening because they seem like cool twists, without much work being done to make them less head-scratching. Luckily, the rest of the show does attempt to make it all work, with pretty good visuals and sound (there's a moment in which a sci-fi bomb is being set in an opera house that almost manages to be dramatic and exciting, simply through the use of swelling opera music), some good attention to detail (my favorite touch was the title sequence, in which mostly-fictional science terms flash on the screen; in the dystopian future, those include "water" and "hope"), and actors trying their damnedest to make the characters believe this nonsense. If the writing was anywhere near the level of the rest of the production values, this might actually be a sci-fi show for the ages, rather than an entertaining bit of fluff verging on a guilty pleasure. After several seasons, it's easy to just keep watching a show out of momentum, but while I've felt that way about Fringe at times, I'm starting to think that it's one that I'll often roll my eyes at, but one that I'll almost always gain some pleasure from, be it a cute moment between characters, a completely ridiculous use of fake science, or a neat effect of some sort. It's not great TV, and nobody in their right mind should watch it from this point hoping to get any pleasure, but if you let it accumulate over a few seasons, it turns out to be engagingly pleasant and kind of fun. Basically, if you've been watching from the beginning, I recommend it, but otherwise, stay away. How's that for a backhanded compliment? I like you, Fringe, but it's nothing less than what you deserve.

The Biggest Loser Couples: Week 19
Tucker Stone 

There's only five people left on the Biggest Loser. They are as follows:

Jay - He actually got kicked off a while back and returned almost immediately, because of some game-play thing I don't remember. He should've gone home last week, but Tim Gunn saved him in the last act of his "fairy godfather" role on the show, which is as over-the-top as it sounds. It's actually more over-the-top than it sounds, now that I've written that down. They had a carriage that resembles a pumpkin, and they wouldn't give Gunn a break despite what sounded like a pretty nasty illness. Remember Val Kilmer in Tombstone? That kind of sick.

Austin - For some reason, the producers haven't taken to Austin the way they have to Jay and Olivia--they like to show him off, because he's young (21 years old) and has lost a tremendous amount of weight--but he seems to lack the deep emotional scarring that keeps the rest of the contestants in a constant state of almost-crying. That isn't to say that Austin is a monument of stoicism--the dude's losing tears like a busted toilet main of sorrow--but that his weeping often repulses more than it does inspire. I like Austin, and think that he's probably going to suffer the least amount of emotional damage that a show as irresponsibly exploitative as this one will undoubtably cause in all of those it touches, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out he was home schooled.

Irene - Do you know anything about Irene? Of course you don't. Neither does anyone else. Here's the facts about Irene: she's better looking than anyone on the show, is almost never in danger of leaving the show because of her fearsome commitment to weight loss, and almost never cries. That last one is the reason the show doesn't focus on Irene.

Hannah & Olivia - The announcer claims that no one ever thought they would make it this far. This is a made up conflict that has never been mentioned until now. But sure, whatever, nobody ever expected these two to make it this far. No one remembered to mention that they were sisters since the first episode either. If anything, Hannah's most important relationship seems to be the friendship she's built with Irene, but the last few episodes have been dedicated to building Olivia into America's favorite contestant. This may be succeeding somewhere, but in my heart, rooting for Olivia is like rooting for an owl in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

As there aren't enough people left on the show for them to do crazy shit like pull a fucking steam engine while a couple of team members throw gigantic burlap bags of vegetables and grain at train signals in the middle of the night (yes!), the producer's make the contestants take individual tests with each of the four trainers. Those tests:

First up is Bob, who puts them all on exercise bikes and pretends to be a new student. It's as ridiculous as one could imagine, with Bob constantly going "Oh my GOD" and raising his eyebrows in horror whenever the contestants forget that they're supposed to pretend they're talking to someone who has never seen a bicycle before, much less one that is attached to a giant piece of steel and doesn't actually go anywhere. The sequences get funnier the more you're able to not take "spinning" seriously as a sport.

Second up is Brett, who is dressed up like a quirky Brooklyn hipster version of a college professor. He's doing a multiple choice test on nutritional and exercise trivia. He's also acting like a clown, which is part of the reason why nobody bought his exercise videos.

Third up is Cara--as one might expect, it's the most awesomely ridiculous thing ever. See, Cara's obsessed with using the word "fighter" in every sentence her crazy ass New York accent can produce. No question, if you made a drinking game out of Cara's mention of being a "fighter", you'd end up spraying a liquified liver out of your back end before an episode was halfway done, and you wouldn't care, because you'd already be in a fucking coma on your way to brain death. And of course, Cara's test is on whether or not the final contestants are "fighters". The test begins with Cara pressing her forehead against the contestants foreheads, and since Cara is about as tall as Papa Smurf, it's hilarious...which is why Hannah loses points, because real fighters don't laugh at things that are funny, and there's nothing funnier than watching Cara press her forehead up against yours while growling at you. Then they do a little boxing workout and it's over. Everybody wins! Seriously, everybody wins. Cara doesn't seem to have come up with a very good grading scale. You're a fighter just for watching!

The final test isn't a test at all, it's just Jillian sitting there with her new feathered haircut (she's going for an original Charlie's Angels look) while the contestants try to replicate the show's stock non-workout scene, which always consists of contestants opening up with weird descriptions of why they got so fat, why they hate themselves, and how they plan to maintain what they've achieved after they get sent back to their miserable lower-middle class existences. It's as disgusting and offensive as it sounds, but as these people weren't kidnapped and brought here, I'm somehow able not to feel sorry for them. I do like the fact that Jay treats the whole situation like he's some mind-reading Blade Runner that quite nearly blew Jillian's mind, but I don't like it enough not to hate myself for paying attention.

After the final test, there's another test/advertisement, this one for the X-Box 360 Biggest Loser game, which is almost completely the same as the old Nintendo Power Pad fitness routine, but with better graphics. Some of the contestants do well, some don't, Hannah seems sweatiest, so Hannah wins. It's really boring, but at least the producers were nice enough to place host Alison Sweeny's teleprompter off to the left side of the camera. It makes it seem like you're watching a hostage video, the way she keeps glancing off to the side. Allahu Akbar, Alison! All of the contestants win a copy of the Biggest Loser game, which leads me to wonder if they're all getting X-Box 360's as well. NO ANSWER WAS PROVIDED.

In the second of what will ultimately be five or 17 in-show advertisements, Bob shows up in one of his John Varvatos-provided jackets (you can tell its Varvaotos because the seams are exposed on one side) and tells you to go online and join the Biggest Loser community forum, where the Biggest Loser Elders will teach you where to go when the revolution begins. Also, they will tell you that you are fat and why this means you should hate yourself. I think you get a sweet 15% off deal on TV dinners, too. What a conundrum!

After that, it's time for the workout, which focuses mostly on watching videos of Irene when she was fat and Jillian trying to murder Jay with exercise. At one point, you can see how much steam is coming off Jay's body, and it actually looks like he's been lit on fire. He falls off the stairmaster at one point and so Jillian screams at him until he screams back, and he looks like he's going to murder her when he does so. According to Jillian, he's "not switched on", so she keeps pushing him until he cries, and he cries a lot and starts talking in this panicky voice about losing his family. In Jillian's weird, fucked up world, this indicates progress. And yeah, maybe it does. She's a professional, sure. But really--take an old man who's had some pretty major surgery and all kinds of fucked up shit in his medical history, work him until he nearly pukes, push him, scream at him, humiliate him, make him cry--is that really worth whatever bullshit emotional outcome you're going for? I could probably get the cat to stop eating my roses by breaking his legs, but you know, I think I'll just keep the bedroom door closed.

The rest of the workout segment focuses on the girls doing boxing shit with Cara. In the most egregiously forced moment of this episode so far, Olivia runs uphill into a swamp while wearing boxing gloves and screams "I am a champion!", for no reason whatsoever. It would be funnier if it weren't Olivia, but Olivia can't help but be so earnest that it just feels like watching Girl Scouts fold up a flag in slow motion while somebody plays that House of Pain song about Jumping Around.

After the workout routine, it's time for another product placement ad. This one's for milk, and since it isn't a specific company, it just seems like Austin is having a weird conversation with Cara about why he likes cereal, to which she responds in her best impersonation of a synthetic Fran Drescher, "Milk is very important. It makes me happy that you are eating it with cereal." Afterwards, Austin tells us that 19 weeks ago, he didn't even know what it meant to be "Vitamin D deficient". I think that's more a reflection of being poorly educated on the meaning of the word "deficient", if you ask me.

Now that an hour of the show has passed, the show stops to recap the first hour. Is that really necessary? Is the general American audience--the millions of people who watch this show at an exponentially higher number than Breaking Bad, The Shield, and Parks and Recreation combined--so fucking stupid they can't remember what they've been watching for the last sixty minutes? Apparently they are, so the recap continues.

The second challenge--the winner will get a 1 pound advantage at the weigh-in--is an individual challenge, where the contestants have to move some random number of sandbags up a gigantic staircase. I don't know or remember the amounts, so let's just say that all of the fat people have to climb up and down a giant's staircase while carrying 20 pound sandbags, which they use to make little staircase mountains on each one of their steps. And since I'm just filling in gaps here, let's also say that they're all dressed like Starfire from the Teen Titans while doing so.

There's a break for another in-show advertisement, this one for the Pledge Your Pounds Challenge, which is something I don't understand, nor do I want to understand. The commercial is insanely packed, too--first you watch a fitness class with a bunch of tattooed dudes doing lunges in a gymnasium, then the mayor of San Bernandino talks about giving back and does a pretty intense ab workout, and then a woman who is 105 goes "I am 105 years old and I cannot get by without certain things" and then some other old lady holds up the 105 year old woman by her bony left arm inside a factory where a forty year old woman mouths something about boxes and Jillian tells you to "pledge your pounds" in a voiceover. If it wasn't so brightly lit, it would seem like a Burmese snuff film.

We return to the challenge, which is a foregone conclusion, no matter how the producers try to edit it. Austin is handily beating the shit out of everybody. Olivia almost seems like she's going to say "he doesn't need the advantage, and should just let one of us win", but she stops herself and says that she wants to win. And then they cut to her later and she says she doesn't care. She's really hard to root for, this lady. And then Austin wins, so no more of that jibber-jabber. Dude doesn't even seem tired, if we're being honest.

Commercial, again: this one's for Subway. All the contestants go to Subway, with Brett of course, because Brett is always drawing scut work detail. (In part because he's the new guy, and in part because Cara is clearly on loan from some kind of hospital, and thus has limited working hours.) What do you think people talk about at Subway? Go with that thought, it's probably no more or less interesting than what these people talk about. Oh, and when you imagine the conversation, you have to include a goofy Jamaican sounding steel drums soundtrack. Because that's what's playing on this one, son.

Back for the last chance workout, which is always awesome in terms of having kick-ass sound effects whenever weights are thrown around, as well as dope-as-fuck camera moves to make it seem like those push-ups are so intense they are actually making the camera shake. The workouts are cross-cut with shots from the previous weeks, so that you remember the fucking crazy ass amounts of weight that these people have lost. The sound effects build up. The camera shakes. Jay screams, throws the weights on the ground, rips the head of a baby off with his teeth, and then he and Bob go out and drink the skin of their forefathers. Or something.

The girls work out next. For some reason, Jillian and Cara don't work them as hard, but that's probably just some weird editing. Either way, Bob shows up and screams at them and makes them work some weird metal gear style machine, the sort of thing you don't see at normal gyms due to the fact that it's not actually exercise equipment. Hannah maybe starts crying? The best part of watching Bob is how he always storms off and on during the workouts--there's nowhere else he has to go, but the way he runs around, you'd think he's delivering babies in the other room. Also, the dude is single handedly proving that black socks look awesome pulled all the way up past the calves. Seriously, Bob is one fly motherfucker.

The Weigh In:

This segment takes up a good forty five minutes of the show, but it's almost impossible to explain what happens in a way that would make you believe it takes that long. They just weigh people, and then the two people who lost the lowest percentage of weight are voted on to go home by the people who weren't in the bottom two. The only thing that makes the weigh-in interesting is seeing what Bob wears (one time he wore a cape!) and listening to Jillian say "fuck", which can be a whole lot. But even that is a gamble--like this time, Bob's just wearing jeans and the unfinished blazer, and Jillian's just keeps doing her whole "I DON'T GET IT, SHIT IS CRAZY" schtick, which is a lot less entertaining than her "FUCK YOU AND FUCK THIS COUNTRY ALSO FUCK DIABETES, S'MORES" schtick. So who cares? Some people lost weight, Olivia and Hannah continue being groomed to be the show's winning duo (despite the fact that the show can only have one winner) and Austin goes home because he only lost one pound.

-Tucker Stone & Matthew J. Brady, 2011

Comics Of The Weak: Live?

 

Due to Free Comic Book Day and the fact that the entire staff of these Factual offices have spent most of its non-P90X time holed up with Portal 2, Comics Of The Weak was even more neglected than it usually is, which translates to "Not Dealt With At All". Thankfully, almost nothing was released in the past week, to the point where the Factual's purchasing agent returned empty handed, even though he'd been ordered not to open the front door without a copy of Darkie's Mob. In service of the greater comics community, our intrepid super-hero reader and erstwhile David Allen fan braved a beautiful spring day, grabbed a stack of what fictitious American drug dealers like to call "the shit", and set it down next to the computer for a bit of the old live blogging. If you're seeing this post and there's lots of words missing and no picture, well sister, you showed up early. Otherwise, this is later and you missed the whole goddamned thing. (For those with long memories, yes, we did one of these once before--it ended with a book burning and a whole mess o' follow-up bitching. It is unlikely that will happen this time, but mostly because Tucker doesn't smoke anymore and is thereby less willing to go up on the roof, which is where all the rapists like to sleep.*)

Amazing Spider-Man Spidey Sunday Spectacular
Written by Stan Lee
Art by Marcos Martin
Published by Marvel Comics

The draw here is Martin, and some of what he does in here is worth looking at, for sure. It still isn't one of his best times out of the box--the story contained in this comic was delivered in two page installments in the backs of some pretty hideous issues of Amazing Spider-Man, and that gives the whole thing the same herky-jerky up-down quality that Wednesday Comics or Strange Tales had, where one's investment lasts only as long as it takes to turn the page and get let down again. Basically, this isn't Martin at his best, and since Stan Lee's story doesn't even muster up the brain damaged earnestness of that Spider-Man newspaper strip, the ultimate result is a thing that's just sort of there for awhile, and then is just sort of over. Like chlamydia, except you buy it in a store, and that means other people know you have it for a little while, although they'll probably forget an hour after they see you.

If nothing else, this thing actually increases the interest factor of Martin's upcoming stint on Daredevil, even if it's only going to be two issues. Mark Waid's the kind of guy who seems to actually enjoy giving artists comic-book-type-shit to draw, as opposed to these miserable fucks who seem to think that a 25 dollar book about poorly drawn heads arguing in poorly drawn rooms is the pinnacle of achievement, and you just know that he's chomping at the bit with some goofball shit after spending so much time with the poverty page rate crew over at Boom Central. Considering Daredevil's historical record as being extremely good for brief periods of time, with those periods often sandwiched between unholy garbage, this next slide might be the ticket. But even if Waid's run turns into Murdock Fucks 'Em, Then They Die, as so many Daredevil runs have before, Martin's still got the potential to make a neat poster out of the whole thing.

I couldn't really figure out a way out of that last chunk there. Do people still have posters? Teenagers aren't people.**

Uncanny X-Force #9
Written by Rick Remender
Art by Billy Tan & Dean White
Published by Marvel Comics

Somebody--it was Tim Callahan--wrote about how there aren't any conversations with super-hero comic book creators anymore on the same level of honesty that the old Comics Journal articles had***, and here's another one that was missed: somebody getting Dean White to explain why he didn't do all the backflip twists that he used in the eighth issue of Uncanny X-Force to make it look like Billy Tan deserved to be in the same class as Jerome Opena, because holy god did all that classic Billy Tan bullshit come right back into the mix this time around. It's like somebody throw a full diaper into an industrial dryer, there's just nothing in this issue that was left untouched. The story goes like this: Magneto comes to see Wolverine. And he cries a little bit, and then he hands Wolverine a picture of a Nazi and asks him to go kill the Nazi, because the Nazi is still alive? and so Magneto wants him dead, but for some reason he can't do it himself? and so Wolverine goes to kill the Nazi, and he arrives way too late, as in he arrives after the Nazi has lived a really full life that involved him being married to a pretty woman who loved him to pieces, and then she passed away and now he's just waiting for someone to come kill him, and that someone is Wolverine. And then, because Nazi characters are like kryptonite for intelligence over at Marvel Central, he has one last moment of being like "fuck you, I'm a bad ass Wolverine" before Wolverine cuts his head off with a samurai sword. And then the issue is over, and you're left wondering if the whole thing was a joke or something...because, seriously. This comic JUST STARTED. There was no reason to come out with so many issues--this is the third one in four weeks--when you just could have put issues out on a monthly basis and never done either of these Billy Tan issues, or at least just not done this one. 

Mainly, it comes down to this: unless you're doing the Red Skull or Hellboy, relying on Nazi stories makes you a lazy fucking asshole. They should set up a room at Marvel Comics, and that room should be full of all kinds of horrifying Nazi iconography, like buckets of stolen gold teeth and lamps made out of human skin and close up pictures of emaciated concentration camp victims, pictures where you can see what infected bed sores look like, and then everytime somebody wants to write a Nazi story they should make them sit in that room for an hour while listening to an audio recording of iFanboy or Awesomed by Comics or any of those kinds of comic book podcasts, and then after that hour, if they're still convinced that Nazis and super-hero shit goes together, they can do their story. Otherwise, grow a fucking pair and learn how to make a Mister Sinister storyline work.

Superboy #7
Written by Jeff Lemire
Art by Marco Rudy Daniel Kor, Jamie Grant & Dom Regan
Published by DC Comics

It would be an insult to waste time talking about the story in this comic, so let's just say that it seems to be a riff on that Man Who Has Everything story that a bearded wizard wrote back when comics cost a nickel and they kept Dr. Who fans in cages. But fuck the story, if Jeff Lemire wants to do that story, he should have at it, it is not like anyone on Earth gives a shit what Superboy comic book stories are like. He's a super-hero whose costume consists of a t-shirt and jeans, for christsakes. Fuck the story, because boys and girls, this is it, one of the ones that'll slip through the cracks if you're not careful: this is as weird as Big Two comics gets, now that Bill Sienkiewicz inks everything with a bunch of broken sticks he stole from a Boy Scout troop. Take a look at this opening page:

Make no mistake, sarcastic guy: this is the DC equivalent of Brecht Evans right here, in terms of coloring. This is somebody digging around for something in photoshop besides the regular SHINY and SHINIER and SHINY ENOUGH TO SHAME GOD buttons that everybody usually relies on over at DIGIKORE and SLICE and TWO LIVE STEWS as well as all those coloring places that don't use horrible names and yet still suck the life out of comics in a way that the most trans-media Hollywood pitchmeister fuckface writer type can't even begin to imagine, which of course is why they're plying their ten year old high concept idea about bears and knife-fucking in comics in the first place, because they lack an imagination and are probably Catholic. THIS:

These pages aren't really going to do the whole beast justice, but yeah, this is the other guy who draws the comic, and he really digs on these arbitrarily designed layouts (of which what you see above is a mild case), to which I guess one could thank JH Williams, because old Superboy 7 is right up there with those two Batman Annuals about how Batman will only hire Muslims who have no discernible accent to go along with an absence of any political awareness, and all three of these comics prove that DC's editors put "randomly designed panels" on the left side of an equals sign, and on the right side they put a picture of those Batwoman comics that will probably never come out. Because they can't tell the difference oh never mind, look at this:

 

So fucking weird, this comic. I'm really not doing it justice.

Moon Knight #1
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Alex Maleev
Published by Marvel Comics

Has any other character had as many chances in the last few years as Moon Knight? I don't mind if Marvel wants to keep acting like there's a big demand for the character, it doesn't bother me or anything, but this is one of those titles that serves as a head and shoulders example of the same dearth of creative thinking that has resulted in millions of dollars being spent so that Zach Snyder can climb the heights of Mount Brainaic and remake Superman II, only in this case it's a bunch of guys who were actually working at Marvel during the last two attempts to make Moon Knight a palatable choice, and neither of those times was the comic in direct competition with 17 Thor books and 29 Captain America comics, none of which are distinguishable in terms of quality against Moon Knight, which seems to be a comic designed for the people who complain when the New York Post spoils plot developments on 20 year old reruns of Remington Steele.

Fear Itself #2
Written by Matt Fraction
Art by Stuart Immonen
Published by Marvel Comics

Nina Stone will be handling the Factual's "official" take on this later in the week, and I'll be participating in something else somewhere else, but I did think it might be un-Christian of me not to admit that I liked the dialog where Odin and Thor talked back and forth to each other about humans and obligations, etc. It worked, whatever. The rest of this comic felt like the same kind of tired you feel when you're stuck in a conversation with someone about 'zine culture or how much things used to cost. At the end, there's a drawing of some flying versions of those battle suits they had in Avatar destroying the White House, and it was a great reminder of a simple rule that nobody ever mentions because I'm making it up right now, and that rule is the reader should never be able to count how many bad guys there are in a gigantic destruction scene, because it just makes it seem like it's not that big of a deal when there's a specific number of a thing.

The Boys #54
Written by Garth Ennis
Art by John McCrea
Published by Dynamite

I quit reading this comic. Dynamite is the fucking pits. 

Grab Bag

This was going to be where I dumped something on the other comics that came out this week, but I just can't keep going with these things. They're horrible! What a lousy week. Try this instead:

Onward To Our Noble Deaths
By Shigeru Mizuki
Published by D&Q

It's obvious that the marketing money is way behind Chester Brown's crybaby book about why girlfriends are scary instead of Noble Deaths, but that's okay, Mizuki was born in 1922 so it's not like D&Q have to dodge his phone calls that much longer. But this is a good one, a diabolically special book that stands in stark relief against so much World War II fiction that it ultimately makes a huge portion of the History Channel's programming block look shallow. Even if it was just the song lyrics that are being presented here, this book would be a revelation. Great stuff, and a firm (and necessary) return to the Tatsumi level of quality that had made D&Q's manga line so exciting in the first place.

Judge Dredd Complete Case Files 5
Written by John Wagner & Alan Grant
Art by Bolland, Dillon, Ezquerra, Others
Published by Rebellion

This is the Apocalypse War story arc that explodes out of Block Mania, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find something that does exactly what this story does to the extremes that this story does it. It's basically a perfect Judge Dredd arc--you can tell that he's going to win, because he's Dredd, but it takes a while before you really grasp how incredibly far he's going to have to go to get the win, and the skill at which Wagner (and Grant, apparently?) manipulate the basic "fascism works" Dredd shtick is really at its best. It's a crime how rarely Wagner gets mentioned in terms of quality serialized storytellers. I really wish I liked something else he did. Anyways: Apocalypse War. It's unmissable, and so much better than mini-comics.

I think that's it. Phoenix 1 (Tezuka) was really good, and that second Krazy Kat collection (second in terms of chronology, release wise, I think it was the 12th Fantagraphics book) was very good as well, but I don't know that I have the energy to say anything beyond that. The previous Krazy Kat book was a bit of a chore to read--some of the panels just went on and on and on, and I far prefer the ones that maintain the what seems to be Krazy's natural rhythm, which is a quicker, loping pace--and the latest installment had more of what I like. It also had a page where Ignatz explicitly attempts to murder Krazy by drowning him, which added a level of nasty to the relationship that I think only makes it more rewarding. 

*One of the things that I've been told about working at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater is that they're heavily invested in one kind of humor, and that kind of humor is classified as "Lasers 'n Rape", and I totally believe it, because just saying that phrase out loud conjures up a very specific kind of person, and that person really likes improv, and is a total fucking asshole.

**Neither here nor there, but I was looking at the last issue of New York Five and it struck me that making comics, or books, or basically anything that involves reading for teenagers is probably the worst possible idea ever, because aren't teenagers the most unlikely group on earth to sit around and read? And wouldn't the audience of teenagers who sits around and reads be the bottom of the gene pool kind of audience anyway? Teenagers should be out screwing up their lives and banging into each other at concerts, they should be doing all the shit that college and student loans and credit card debt will eventually neuter and make terrible. They can sit around and read and get fat and be superior to each other later, when they don't have a choice and no one wants to kiss them anymore, but they shouldn't be doing it now, it's practically criminal to suggest otherwise. This isn't New York Five's fault, and it seems pretty obvious that New York Five isn't for teenagers anyway--one of the main emotional beats involves a girl dumping a boy's Compact Discs on the street, and if there's one thing that screams 30-somethings, it's punishing a man by messing with a box of *gulp* Compact Discs. It just made me think of teenagers, which is sort of (maybe? who cares?) what the Minx line, which New York Five was spun out of after being apparently one of the only ones people liked, was supposed to serve.

***Tim's half right--comics people don't talk shit in an actual print magazine anymore, but they still talk as much (if not more) shit than they did back in those old Journal interviews. They just do it via email, via twitter, via message boards, via signings and conventions and all the rest. And while that stuff is sort of semi-private at first, it never stays that way...but even if it did, there's shit out there worth looking into on the margins. The question is: why the fuck would you want to? Hickman gave a pretty telling interview of the original ideas behind what became that boring SHIELD comic he does, an interview that pretty much laid bare how the House of Ideas was embracing the House of Make Sure This Idea Won't Result In Us Sharing Movie Profits With Sony, but do you have the time or patience to listen to the 20 other interviews Hickman gave where he didn't mention that kind of stuff and instead stuck to the boilerplate ad copy? And if you do, wouldn't you be happier fucking whores, like Chester Brown did? I saw a picture of the way he drew himself after he paid a woman to fuck her, and he looked like the happiest skeleton that had ever appeared somewhere besides a vinyl sticker attached to a front door in October. All it took was money and the willingness to fuck whores!

Television Of The Weak: I'd Totally Watch A Living Single Remake, But Only For Like Six Years

This week, Tim O'Neil goes two episodes deep into the just-started Game of Thrones while Tucker goes two episodes back into the just-finished Justified.

Game of Thrones: "Winter Is Coming" and "The Kingsroad"
Tim O'Neil

 

(This is part two of a two part discussion of Game of Thrones. The first part can be found at The Hurting, here.)

The pull quote for Game of Thrones - or leastwise the pull quote that HBO very dearly wishes to see adopted by an unwitting media - is that the series is "The Sopranos with swords." That this description is more or less accurate does not necessarily redound to the credit of the series. The Sopranos was a deeply flawed show that used a number of fairly sophisticated storytelling techniques to mask the fact the it was yet another iteration of the same old mob tropes we'd seen reiterated by Hollywood ten thousand times before. It doesn't matter how badly we see the bad guy dragged through the mud, and how "problematic" their life is and how their ethical bankruptcy effects their families - at the end of the day we still feel that rush of adrenaline when he pops some guy in the head because he's out protagonist, and we're hardwired to reward our protagonists with unearned and sycophantic loyalty. Inverting genre tropes, no matter how cleverly done, is still just another excuse to trot out the tropes. We think we're safe because the meta elements and supposed ironic detachment provide some degree of ethical prophylaxis, but really we're still just as complicit with Tony Soprano as we were with Tony Montana.

I can't help but feel a similar sort of sinking dissatisfaction while watching Game of Thrones. This is supposed to be the state-of-the-art in the fantasy genre, and yet it still seems very familiar. What do we have to show for the supposedly mature level of storytelling on display? Political intrigue and sex. We'll discuss the politics first, because that would appear to be the story's primary hook (although the sex is getting quite a bit of attention as well). The seriousness with which the production tackles the material argues in itself for a kind of respectability that reflexively places the material above the level of "mere" fantasy, with wizards and magic and paladins and orcs. But I strongly suspect that for all the intrigue and lust on display, the series will live or die on the alacrity with which it finally delivers on the (implicit) promise of merciless and magical medieval action. Will viewers stick around for a fantasy series that does not - or, because of its obeisance to its source material, cannot - deliver on the promise of a more fantastic spectacle? No matter how nuanced a character (the producers would like us to believe) Tony eventually became, it was still the promise of violence, grimy immorality and gallows humor that put butts in the seats on HBO for the better part of a decade.

The story of Game of Thrones focuses on the machinations of the royal families of a group of interlocking yet competing fiefdoms under the ostensible rule of a strong central king. All the houses jockey for power relative to the throne, with the ultimate goal of any family being (presumably) the usurpation of central authority. This is the kind of story filled with characters for whom the adjective "Machiavellian" was certainly coined. And yet it's hard to feel sympathy for any characters in this undifferentiated mass of political schemers when they're all feudal aristocrats: they're all complicit in a system that normalizes exploitation. Are we supposed to root for the good princes who love dogs and have cute children over the bad princes who have the children of menial's whipped to death for the temerity of speaking to royalty? They are all symptoms of a sick system, and seeing as we're not Aristotle the only way to differentiate between "good" kings and "bad" kings is that the bad kings are still breathing. But given the complete lack of any non-aristocratic (or non military) characters in these first two episodes I seriously doubt we're building towards any kind of proletarian revolution, or even just a moderate expansion of the political franchise.

Everyone knows that Machiavelli wrote The Prince, but how many people have ever read his Discourses on Livy? Machiavelli was a dyed-in-the-wool (small "r") republican who devoted his life to promoting political freedom throughout Italy. The Prince was (depending on which scholars you believe) either pitch-black satire or a bald-facedly cynical attempt to ingratiate himself with the same Medici's who broke both of his arms for (supposedly) conspiring against Florence. There is a whole world of political thought and ethical theory outside the realm of musclebound noblemen jockeying against one and another for the privilege of pissing on the poor.

And the sex . . . yes. There is a lot of sex in this show. All that can be said, I think, is that any filmmaker wishing to convey the seriousness and grotesquery of forced marriage and rape should not film rape scenes like outtakes from a porn film. If you don't want people to second-guess the prurient intent of your rape scenes, you should film them to be as unarousing as possible - you know, actually unpleasant, and not lit by soft candles in a cozy tent or set against a backdrop of waves crashing against the setting sun. I know I go back to this example a lot, but really, if we're talking about rape on film we should be talking about Salo. If you want to make the audience hate rape and detest rapists, there are ways to do this - but the methods necessary to truly convey the monstrousness of sexual violence on film are perhaps too astringent for pay cable. So instead we get this sub-Nancy Friday royal rape fantasy bullshit.

I like fantasy, but I am strangely unmoved by Game of Thrones selective obeisance to the mores of epic fantasy storytelling. Every "mature" element is undercut by another concession made to convention. Sex and politics, yes, but we're still ultimately in a world of royalist power fantasies buttressed by parochial notions of clan ethics. It reminds me more than a little of Geoff Johns' insistence on filling Green Lantern comics with dismemberment and blood - it's Green Lantern, for fuck's sake. The gore doesn't convince anyone that it's all grown up now. At the end of the day people still want to see dudes with green wishing rings fight evil space robots. I can't help but think that Game of Thrones might not be just a bit more interesting if we actually saw some monsters and dragons. I have been promised by people "in the know" that these elements are coming, eventually. In the meantime, we're left to struggle through a fantasy series for people who really, really wanted to know more about the foreign policies of Rohan and Gondor in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Númenor. If you don't know that that means, trust me, it would be as boring as it sounds.

Will I ever pick up the books? Believe it or not, even despite my general lack of enthusiasm for the show, I am seriously considering it. It's not so much that I would specifically like to see if my complaints regarding the show are addressed or mollified by the books (I have a hard time thinking the rape is anywhere near as sensationalistic in the books as on film, for instance). I would like to see if the stories themselves in their original unexpurgated form are strong enough to make me not care about all the little problems that make the TV show such a frustrating viewing experience. That's the strength of a well-told fantasy story, after all: it sucks you in despite yourself, it convinces you to buy into the most fantastical premise despite your better judgment, to surrender your willing suspension of disbelief to the custody of a master storyteller, to sign on to the cause of crown and kingdom and fight to the death against the incarnations of absolute evil. I dearly cherish that experience, when I manage to find it.

Justified "Reckoning" & "Bloody Harlan"
Tucker Stone 

While the first season of Justified had problems finding its preferred format, playing the long form familial conflict arcs interrupted by done-in-one Raylan-gets-his-gun set pieces that varied in quality, the show was one of those rare beasts that arrived as close to perfect as it could be, considering it's hysterical line-up of cliches. (The least of which would be the fact that it's a show about a fast-draw lawman who wears a hat, has a crusty old boss who just can't get him to behave, a couple of woman who just can't help but love him, and the most of which that the show never stopped coming up with reasons why it's demonically attractive lawman never found a room he couldn't take off his shirt in.) The first season, it was a show that knew exactly what it was supposed to do, even if sometimes it didn't exactly know how. By the close of that ragtag collection of episodes, there'd been a couple of solid done-in-ones (Alan Ruck's turn as a doomed dentist was my personal favorite), and one of the most satisfying season finales in what's rapidly become the primary warhorse in the FX garage, the pulp machodrama. Justified isn't the Shield--there's just never going to be enough on the line for it to reach that show's grueling final years, and despite the winning presence of Walt Goggins and the incomparable genius of Nick Searcy, Justified's back bench of acting talent is so slim as to be nonexistent--but Justified was a solid contender to back up Sons of Anarchy, a show so lurid that it's probably best described as the hangover after sleaze decides to go and get black out drunk.

If it seems like this is leading up to a claim that Justified has lost its way a bit, that would be because it seems an inarguable claim to make...and yet?

Few seem to think so. Those who had once given the show only the most wavering support seem to have now fully given over to this weird, Frankenstein narrative it's spent the last three months farting out, and the regularity with which the show gets named as Breaking Bad's only competition for best child of the Holy Trinity (Shield/Wire/Deadwood) is so consistent as to be expected. (While remaining completely inaccurate.) Simply put, the show's been bad--at times, it was bad because it brought on a why's-he-still-working guy like Larenz Tate and then gave him the stupidest lines in the show's history (regarding a cheap stuffed animal, which was covered in blood) and had him deliver these lines to an actor who's only saving grace might be that he's young enough that it's totally possible that he could grow into being a better actor than Larenz Tate, and other times the show was bad because of how little it seemed to care about the characters it had spent the first season building (have any of Eva's choices made sense this season? If you didn't already know that Boyd's character was intended to die back in the series premiere, wouldn't you have guessed it by the way he rockets around in motivation and design?), but most of all, the show was bad because of what it spent an entire season consistently dismantling, which was Raylen Givens, it's heart and soul.

There's a scene in "Bloody Harlan" where Jeremy Davies--who's Miller's Crossing inspired performance in last week's "Reckoning" was one of this season's rare high points--beats on Raylen with a baseball bat. It's an uncomfortable scene to watch, and not because of its reliance on the show's commitment to that odd juxtaposition of graphic violence and rural outdoor settings. It's an uncomfortable scene because Raylen sort of deserves to get knocked around, because he's not that good of a guy.

A quick aside: I'm not someone who personally cares that much if characters on a television show are "likeable" or not, although I do consider that to be a factor in whether I can enjoy a reality show. Fictional though, the only thing I ask is that they be consistent, whatever they are. Consistency is how someone as selfish and self-obsessed as McNulty becomes watchable, how a character as darkly horrifying as Shane Vendrell becomes tragic. Raylen's problem isn't that he's no longer likeable--if anything, Olyphant's ability to give the show's leaden dialog such a charming lilt has become a constant saving grace--it's that he no longer makes sense from the long view, and that means everything he does correlates to where he is in the moment. And where is that, but a bottomless pit of self-created destruction? Would the guy who swore oaths in Miami to clean up cities in the face of annihilation have assisted his fickle ex-wife after discovering the chasms of dishonesty that existed behind her petulant manipulations, only to carry on in hotels with random mining executives a scant few days later? Does his arrogant (and consistently fruitless) disdain for his boss, his partners, his family, even the law itself have any consistent connection to the never compromise hunter who laid it down in the desert so many times when Miami's shooters came calling? The guy that season built--a classically structured archetype, a gunslinging maverick built of honor--was turned into something else this season, a dressed up in tight jeans piece of white trash, only different from the Bennett family he fought in that they never turned on one another, while Raylen couldn't be trusted to even tell his friends the truth. In the end, he betrayed them all.

That deserves a couple of licks, at least.

-Tim O'Neil & Tucker Stone, 2011

 

My Wife: Has Some Choice Words For Brightest Day

Brightest Day #24
Written by Geoff Johns & Peter J. Tomasi
Art by Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Patrick Gleason, Ardian Syaf, Scott Clark, Norm Rapmund, Vicente Cifuentes, Oclair Albert, Tom Nguyen, Mick Gray, Mark Irwin, David Beatty, Aspen MLT's Peter Steigerwald
Published by DC Comics 

And now for something completely different!

Look, I know. Issue 24 is not really the place to start, you might say. Oh yeah?

Well I say it is! The recap of this comic is so good that, not only did I not feel lost - I will never have to waste my time reading issues 1 through 23!! I've never read a recap quite like this one before...not only does it save me the time and energy of reading a bunch of comics, but it makes me feel both sorry for AND superior to everyone who did. Think of all that time they wasted!

I mean, sure, there's a bunch of stuff that I - or any reader who picked this issue up as their only interaction with Brightest Day - could know more about. But we don't really need to. I got all caught up on Alec Holland, The Green, The Swamp Thing, The Elementals - all of it. And then, just as I got a feel for the back story, the wrap up began. It's like this comic is some kind of super-hero soap opera delivery device for busy executives. Love it!

What's hilarious about reading this comic and only this comic in this series is that it is clear that someone wanted a "do over." Like, they wanted to write about Swamp Thing. But for some reason, they wanted a cleaner Swamp Thing. A "Green" Swamp Thing, if you will. (And by Green, I mean that the new Swamp Thing is a sustainable, um, product. I think. I'm operating mostly off of feelings here.)

Remember being a little kid on the playground, in the midst of trading insults with someone and finally feeling like you were "winning" and then the other person suddenly sings, "I am rubber and you are glue.  Whatever you say, bounces of me and sticks on you." And every time that happened, I'd buy it. They would sing that little song, and I would BELIEVE it. It was a game changer, the phrase that turned everything around. And of course, in reality, you and I both know that it was nonsense. It's just some made up words, and a made up idea that can never ever be true. But for some reason, one person stated it, and belief makes it true. I'm not going to go deep into the social contract on this one, but you know what I'm talking about, right?

I feel like someone just did that to Swamp Thing. They took the big etch-a-sketch Swamp Thing was written on and shook it up for a complete do-over. And I'm fine with buying that, with giving this new take on Swamp Thing that kind of power. I'll agree to believe this, if only because I think it's silly to pretend that I'm planning to go back and read old Swamp Thing comics. I'm not going to do that. This is what that character is now? Okay. That's fine.

At the same time....this is super-hero comics. Do these people not know what they make? This is one of those types of entertainment that's chock full of playground logic, of "I am rubber and you are glue" kinds of reasoning?  Couldn't they have just given the back story as quickly as they did in this issue and started a whole new Swamp Thing series? Couldn't it have been a magic wizard? A wishing ring? An invisible jet?

Why are they trying so hard to act like they're something they're not?

Perhaps I'm going off the deep end here, and don't really know what I'm talking about. Okay, wait a second. I KNOW I don't know what I'm talking about. That's what these whole columns are all about.

Here's the thing. This was one of those reading experiences where I really felt that this stuff is not written for me, and I shouldn't be reading it. Or critiquing it. I mean, this - Brightest Day in particular - is not really for adults. I'm not saying that comics aren't for adults. I would never say that. But this series? It definitely isn't. As I read this I just couldn't imagine that any grown person would have any care or concern for these characters or what happens next, if anything ever does. I mean, in the list of important things in our grown up heads - pay bills, grocery shop, date night with the spouse, errands, carpools, i'm not even going to begin on the subject of children, but you know, kids - I just don't believe that at any place on that list is "find out what exactly is happening with The Green." That's not to say that fiction and reading doesn't have a grown up place in our lives. It totally does. A necessary place. But this plot, this subject matter?  To me it has no parallel. No metaphor. No re-framing or reflection of my life, of anyone's life, through the subject matter. This just feels like a silly story that's not for me, or anyone else that's my age.

I had a similar feeling recently while watching Sex and The City. I loved that show. I watched the reruns all the time because it felt like visiting old friends. I loved Carrie. I loved Carrie and Aidan. I loved it all. But recently I was watching it - watching an episode I've seen plenty of times before - and I was suddenly so turned off by Carrie's behavior. What she said, and what she was doing, and her emotional reality...I was suddenly like, "Oh my God. She is totally unlikeable. What is she DOING? Who does that?" And well, the fact of the matter is simply that I have outgrown Sex and the City. (Almost. Okay - I still watch it on E when I happen to catch it on. But I only watch it with one eye.) 

And I really felt like that reading this comic book. I felt like - oh - I cannot do this. This is not for me. There's just no way.

-Nina Stone, 2011