The Factual Opinion

My Wife: Came Not To Bury Spider-Man, But To Coo At Him

Ultimate Spider-Man #160
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Mark Bagley
Published by Marvel Comics 

This one is difficult to review. I shouldn't even pretend that I'm "reviewing" it. To do this issue any justice, I think it would have to be done by someone who has read the whole series leading up to this part. Or most of it, at least. I think I've read a total of three, maybe 5?, Ultimate Spider-man issues since I've been reading comics (which is a whopping 5 years or so. Where did the time go?!). There's no way that's enough to grasp everything this particular chapter is trying to accomplish, much less tell you whether it succeeds or fails. All I can do is relate my experience with this issue, which even I can grasp is an important one. (It does, after all, say "Death of Spider-Man" on the cover.)

I always liked Ultimate Spider-Man when I read it. If I'm recalling correctly, its been relatively cheerful and light...and by light, I mean it was always angsty in a really breathy teenage way. Peter Parker in high school by day and scaling walls as Spider-man at night. From what I remember of those past issues, it always seemed like they were telling the stories in between big events, not that they ever really were big events. And now, here I am reading "Death of Spider-Man". That's pretty intense for an Ultimate Spider-Man title, right? And my first impulse--the one that led to all that explanation and equivocation above--is that I feel like I've sat down and caught the last two minutes of a movie. Like, soooo much is already in the actual midst of happening, and I feel like the girl who comes into the room to see her family engrossed in a show. Do I want to keep saying, "Who's that? Why's he so upset? When did Peter kill everyone the Goblin man loved?" I've got too many unanswered questions to know what's really going on. Do I want to be that girl? The girl who interrupts the current scene to ask about all the stuff I missed? Do I even care?

I didn't ask until later, actually. While I was in the middle of the thing, the thing was totally engaging. Ultimate Spider-Man number one hundred and sixty? It's a page turner, you can quote me on that.

You need more?

Okay, I also loved how Peter/Spidey's humor is still in tact as he's on the brink of death. What's still intact is all of his love. Aaaaaawwwwww, yeah. I love the love. I love MJ sneaking out in the middle of the night against her mom's orders, all so that she can steal a truck and run over the Green Goblin. That was great! I love how much Peter loves his Aunt, how he just wants to save her, no matter what the cost. He loves her, she loves him, he also loves MJ, the blond girl loves dressing like it's still 1998, and.....oh, I guess Ultimate Spider-Man has always been all about the love, huh? There's so many worse things to be about. So many things that aren't as sweet, so many things that aren't as kind.

So, of course, if you don't mind me spoiling the ending that the cover describes, this is also very, very sad. But I haven't been keeping up, you know? Those last pages--where Peter dies in his Aunt's arms--it seemed so unreal to me. And it is unreal, right? I mean, its comic books! Which means that in the next issue, he might suddenly not be dead. I mean, anything happens in comic books. I read one last week where Aquaman killed Rome. They can't have comic books where Aquaman kills Rome and sweet boys like Peter Parker die in Queens. (Trust me, I've been to Queens. God doesn't let people die in Queens. Queens is like an old Sega Genesis games: it just doesn't count.)

I think I'd like to see what happens next in this comic book. I asked if there were more after this one, and I guess there's going to be one where all the women in this comic hold hands in the dark? That was the ad I saw, at least. That seems kind of slow for a comic book though, so maybe there's a bank robbery or something.

-Nina Stone, 2011

No Pictures: Chuck Bronson and Bill Everett Were The Sort Of Men Who Could Punch You With Their Eyes

Death Wish
By Christopher Sorrentino, 2010

The second in Soft Skull's Deep Focus series, Sorrentino's look at Death Wish takes a decidedly different turn from the format Jonathan Lethem used in his book on They Live, and while it's difficult not to have a preference, it's a lot easier when one sits back and realizes that leaving-it-up-to-the-writer bodes far better tidings for future installments in the series than it would if Lethem's version was passed around as a "like-this" rulebook. Choosing to deliver four stand-alone essays on Death Wish--one on its treatment of New York City, one on its confusing politics, one on the specific actors and a final one on what you might call its most "filmic" sequences--Sorrentino manages to illuminate the film in a way that, while not making it seem any better, makes it far more interesting. Not actually caring for Death Wish as a film makes the experience of reading a book about it a bit strange, but Sorrentino is a fine guide, and his unexpected plea for a more even keeled audience (found roaming in a beautiful meander called "Afterthoughts on the Middle Level" that serves as a sort of philosophical conclusion) struck home for this reader in the best way possible. The Lethal Weapon book can't come soon enough.

Fire & Water: Bill Everett, The Sub-Mariner, and the Birth of Marvel Comics
By Blake Bell, 2010

While there's probably some quibbling to be done with the final part of this book's subtitle, as "the birth of Marvel Comics" is mostly a sideshow concern that just happens to coincide with the life this book spends it's page count on, it's hard to get too ornery about a book as pretty as this. Arriving last year during that spat of time when Fantagraphics released a torrent of heavily designed hardcovers focusing on comics creators, Fire & Water doesn't seem to have caught hold outside of the same 15 or so people who usually buy these things, but that shouldn't be taken as a reflection on quality. (If every person who bought that Rand Holmes book was put in the same room at the same time, you could smother most blog fights in the cradle.) Bill Everett's story is an interesting one, and while the standard hero comics mile markers of exploitation and disrespect all make their necessary appearances, alcoholism was the main stumbling block, and Blake Bell performs admirably at covering the ground between the two.

Eventually, the deleterious effects of low pay and an over-saturated market for books like these will be felt, and you're going to see poorly researched books pumped out in hopes of grabbing whatever cash this audience has left. I believe some might argue that has already begun, although it's more likely that you won't see any open criticism of the trend until after some kind of contraction occurs, because the group that makes this stuff and the group that knows which of this stuff is bullshit are the same people. Maybe that will change in the future.

Griftopia
By Matt Taibbi, 2010

Matt Taibbi's greatest strength will always be his humor, but that gives short shrift to his less heralded one, which is his ability to be heavily critical without falling into the trap of hectoring. As his writing moves further away from the pop culture trail that is the electoral grind and more into the study of financial and legal machinations that fill Griftopia's pages, he consistently skirts the lures of that wild-eyed sputtering cynicism that so often cripples this sort of writing: but if you're just mad all the time, the only people who will listen to you are the people who already agree with you, and most of those fuckers are crazy as hell. While Taibbi certainly gets irritated, what sets him apart is that he's able to compartmentalize that contempt in a way that seems to have evaded the left for, if not all time, the last decade at the very least. (It's no surprise to find out that Taibbi and David Rees run in the same circles. The two of them have been calling bullshit for the last decade at the least, and yet they're still coming up with newer, funnier ways to do it.) It's admirable to see Griftopia continuing the upward qualitative trend evident in all of his books so far, and it's a pleasure to see him bucking the sit-around-in-pajamas trend in political punditry. Well-researched shit-talking: this is such a great book.

The Ronin
By William Dale Jennings, 1968

While Jennings' historical importance as an activist (primarily for gay rights, but the man's conscience had a wide net) ultimately make The Ronin a footnote to a career committed elsewhere, it's unlikely that wouldn't have been the case even if novel writing had been his primary concern. Ronin isn't a bad book, but it's a very mean one, and its crime-to-spoil conclusion ultimately limit its audience to the very few. While its been compared (unfavorably) more than once to Clockwork Orange, that comparison seems to rest mostly on the savage rape that both books contain. But whereas Orange depicts rape as something the protagonists enjoy and you really aren't supposed to, Jennings commitment to the character he designed requires a sequence that's difficult to escape from: bluntly, he tasked himself with making assault sexy, and that choice will always limit the size of your audience. While it's understandable why he does it--even as those pages pass, it's pretty obvious where he's going with it--it wouldn't be a surprise to find out people abandoned this book when the sequence begins. "Based on a zen myth" is the tagline the book was hawked underneath, and for those willing to stick it out, the book's final lines are arguably worth the trip. But make no mistake: at times, that trip is a hellish one.

-Tucker Stone, 2011

Too Many Movies: Here's The Movies Not Giving Cars 2 Any Competition

This week, Joe McCulloch has your Green Lantern while Tucker has your Bad Teacher. 

Green Lantern
Bill Finger: unwelcome in opening credits for almost seventy years, 2011
Joe McCulloch



There’s been a lot of complaints about this one -- and, unfortunately, I agree with basically all of them-- but even beyond the stuff lobbed out a hundred times already, I feel the need to articulate a very fundamental sinking feeling I got from so elephantine a summer mega-production: this thing looks shockingly cheap. I mean, like they seriously ran out of money at some point. The first 10 or so minutes in particular are just totally artless, crashing between abbreviated action sequences, pace or build up be damned, looking for all the world like an ugly CG cartoon with only enough resources at hand to put together the high points of set pieces, maybe in the hopes of attracting investors to fund the connecting fiber. That really shouldn’t feel like a problem with Green Lantern, yet the whole movie seems filled with weird cut corners, from the would-be dramatic flashback of Hal Jordan witnessing his father’s death-- populated with a small handful of spectators planted in an open space and lil’ Hal running up towards the fatal explosion completely alone -- straight on through to the grown Space Cop’s final struggle with dread Parallax (presented as a gigantic black snake firework, or maybe a writing mass of burning turds) abandoning its kinda-cool city battle stage after a scandalously brief period to leave poor Ryan Reynolds flailing suspended in chroma key space orbit and reacting alarmedly to animation elements for the rest of the climax.

It looks low-rent, is what I’m saying, and while it could be that a particularly heroic pre-production period racked up costs to the point where the quoted $200 million before-advertising budget wasn’t nearly what was available to work with -- remember the Jack Black comedy iteration of the mid-‘00s? -- I’m wondering if there wasn’t some very fundamental post-production shenanigans going down, possibly locked into the death spiral of simplifying the subject matter to protect against escalating costs, thereby running costs up further. The risk/reward ratio on withholding information for the purposes of suspense or wonder or whatnot in super-big movies gets badly skewed, apparently enough so here that an opening voiceover is presented to detail background information in anticipation of spelling it out again via expository dialogue after approximately one hour.

A really assertive personality at the helm can cure this state, but I can’t imagine Martin Campbell was quite Christopher Nolan, or even Zack Snyder; the result is a film about a man with a wishing ring that can do anything, wherein the vast majority of miraculous feats he performs are flat recaps of stuff he either witnessed earlier or was specifically taught to do, right down to his observation of a slot car racetrack in his nephew’s bedroom improbably moving him to rescue a falling helicopter by transforming it into a giant slot car and sending it zipping around a massive playset he’s willed into the middle of a bustling party with dozens of people standing around - it might not make a lick of sense in terms of logical motivation, given the circumstances of the threat, but at least it squelches the slightest opportunity for even one audience member to go “hey, how’d he do that?” and thereby feel a slight twinge of anxiety or helplessness over having had something potentially inexplicable occur in this story of the limitless potential of human will.

Still, there’s some blessed relief to be had in the form of Peter Sarsgaard, splendidly playing a version of evil researcher Hector Hammond made over in the manner of Dr. Forrester from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Basically, he’s a huge, awkward nerd, and his storyline -- uneasily positioning him as a sort of accidental herald of Parallax, despite his actions having virtually no applicability to the villain’s arrival --affords Sarsgaard all kinds of opportunities for odd twitches and eccentricities and little bursts of anger and that bending over to sip at a really full drink thing you see people do and maybe do yourself - all the itch oflife.

Naturally, this is pitted against movie-smooth, sneering, handsome Reynolds, who in one scene heroically beats the shit out of angry blue-collar workers whose livelihoods he’s ruined (which isn’t a political statement, mind you, it’s just another means of connecting the scene to something, anything from earlier inthe movie, so nary a soul might wonder “but why is Hal Jordan being attacked?” and thus feel uncertainty’s sting in this fable of mighty emotions in a vast cosmos) - needless to say, Sarsgaard stands absolutely no chance, because that’s how this airtight world is built. Yes, yes, Reynolds comes to a nominal realization that being nice is good, and extends the hand of friendship and use of the magic ring to the fear-consumed Sarsgaard, so full of self-loathing over his unattractiveness to lovely Carol Ferris and the political favors his father has done for him - except, it’s a trick! Hector Hammond can’t really use the magic ring, because the concept of Green Lantern as presented here requires Hal Jordan to be at-heart superior, elite - CHOSEN. He’s just better, the very universe knows it!

I ask you - who wouldn’t soak in nihilism given that scenario? Truly it’s Sarsgaard that’s the film’s tragic hero, its true (if accidental) source of light and heat and sound, the lattermost element specifically being the beating of millions of awkward folk’s knuckles against their desks as they lament how irreversibly crap this Earth can be while imagining that everything beyond our atmosphere is much the same, only bigger and gaudier and more dubiously composited. Christ, no wonder this thing hasn’t cleared $150 million!

Bad Teacher
More Fake-raham Lincoln Please, 2011
Tucker Stone 

This isn't getting the best shake of it from our nation's film critics, and that's no surprise: it isn't a very good movie. From the very beginning moments, when an after the fact recording of dialog is slapped atop a scene built out of shots of the back of whomever is supposedly speaking all the way to the very end, when the same lame attempts at punch-up make the concluding moment of expected romance look more like a homemade Vimeo drama than it does a movie, with movie stars, Bad Teacher never lets you pretend that what you're seeing was figured out long before you arrived. Being a mostly school based comedy, there's multiple fill-in shots of the same extras in different clothes, the same shot of one slack-jawed kid confusingly used twice, and the conspicuous lack of dialog amongst all but four of the school's children. (As soon as they talk, you gotta pay them more.) Of course, flaw-picking isn't novel enough to be more than a time-killing game, and while Bad Teacher provides plenty of sport, lambasting it in advance of the unknown IMDb heroes who will eventually fill out its "Goofs" section provides little pleasure.

In a depressing twist, the movie actually didn't necessarily have to be this bad, and there's even some moments of genuine greatness that shine through it's unnerving failures. Jason Segal's impossibly good-natured attempts at shlubby seduction seem to have been dropped in from a far better film, and there's some wonderfully absurdist anti-comedy (the stuff that Adult Swim traffics in) roaming around in the middle of a few scenes. (Cameron's best line--"better get yourself good and hard, cuz I'm gonna suck your dick like I'm mad at it" is unfortunately dumped too early in the film, but her evil replication of teenage peer pressure makes for a close second.) The good of it isn't enough to overplay the bad, and yet it's essentially a harmless film: entertaining, dumb and mean. If only it could have been so in equal measure.

-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2011

Comics Of The Weak: I'm Serious About That Baby Owl Thing, It's Money In The Bank

The Spirit #15
Written by David Hine
Art by Moritat
Published by DC Comics

Man, women love the Spirit, don't they? They want to kiss him and rub their privates all over him. It's funny when you think about it, because he doesn't dress that differently than the Green Hornet, but the Green Hornet never has ladies going so crazy they kill (nor so crazy they die) just to get his attention, unless you count that little Asian slave who kung fu fights for him, but I don't think it's funny to make jokes about slavery. And man, that shit where the ladies go crazy happens to the Spirit all-the-fucking-time! 

Oh! I bet his penis has a bunch of baby owls tattooed on it. Baby owls are the first person shooter of making ladies go crazy.

Superman #712
Written by Kurt Busiek
Art by Rick Leonardi
Published by DC Comics

This one kind of cracks you up, because hey: where's Superman, dude? Dog comics? FUCK DOGS. fuckdawgs?

Straczynski's run on Superman has taught this reader one thing, and that is how to spell his name. It's taught absolutely nothing else though, it's just been a fucking shotgun blast of moron right to the face, and bringing another writer on board to flesh out the bad ideas didn't change a thing. It's been anti women, anti kids, anti black, anti intelligent, decent human beings on a nonstop never quits basis. But in what has to be the biggest DC shocker since the dead cat as weaponry, DC apparently ended up with a hot enough potato (the potato was Muslim flavored) that they couldn't bring themselves to print the fucking thing, and they ended up tossing out some dog comics to kill time. Think about what that comic must be, for DC not to publish it! Now, it's wholly possible that this horrible, horrible story arc had all of a sudden, for reasons that make absolutely no logical sense, turned out a magical comic despite being written and drawn by the same people who, for obvious reasons, had yet to make something that even remotely approached competence before. That is a thing that is possible! They could have gotten all the stupid out of their system in the child abuse issue, as there was lots and lots of stupid in that issue. But maybe--and religion is a sensitive subject, so let's tread carefully--it's more likely that a grown up finally walked into the room and said "I think that's enough." 

(Here's a hint: one of these responses is a bit optimistic. The second one is insanely optimistic.)

Ultimate Avengers Versus New Ultimates #5
Written by Mark Millar
Art by Leinil Francis Yu, Stephen Segovia, Gerry Alanguilan, Jason Paz, Sunny Gho & Jeff Huet
Published by Marvel Comics

Thank god Marvel was kind enough to bring such a massive crew of people on board to finish this issue. Having to wait to read one of those comics that hinges on somebody saying "actually, those bullets won't work...because I did something yesterday to THAT gun with YOUR mom and now EVERYTHING is different" would've really stunk up the trunk. That shit aside though, it does bode well to see North Korean freedom fighters showing up as the Big Bad's final line of attack, because if there's one thing that irritates the penises of internet comic book joykillers, it's when Mark Millar gets into contemporary geopoliticking. Make sure you pour out a forty for Black Hulk, gentlemen! (He got shot in the face.)

Green Arrow #13
Written by James Patrick
Art by Agustin Padilla
Published by DC Comics

While all the goodwill built up by DC's Rise of Arsenal comic was long squandered when the new Green Arrow series turned out to be merely a piece cut from the other side of the same shit pie that the previous Green Arrow series had grown out of, it's always worth flipping through the latest issue if you can find one on the stands, if only to see moments like this:

For those who prefer to have their pictures described to them by somebody who is waiting for a torrent of The Real Housewives of New Jersey to finish downloading, allow me: this is the real Green Arrow Year One, a flashback depicting the moment when, prior to the part where he was patrolling-the-streets, the character borrowed medical cadavers for the express purpose of shooting them with arrows, so that he could see how that shooting-people-with-arrows-shit worked. Drink that in, if you please. So many questions! Why did the medical school agree to let a rich industrialist shoot their medical cadavers? Did the cadavers come limbless, or is that something Oliver did on his own? How did he hang those cadavers up on those target plates? Did Green Arrow become Green Arrow to make use of all those extra back muscles he is depicted as having? I ask again, why the fuck don't they have any arms and legs? Even better: did he learn anything, or did he just yank the arrows out and say "guess my arrows made some fucking holes in you, bitch"?

Captain America #619
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Butch Guice, Chris Samnee & Elizabeth Breitweiser
Published by Marvel Comics

It would be a lot cooler if they would just let Mike Deodato or Kyle Baker use Bruce Villanch as reference for Steve Rogers, or, if not "a lot cooler", semi-intriguing, because this whole thing where Butch Guice does the best work he's done...is this ever? It feels like ever, and this is a guy who drew part of one of the best selling series of comics in the category called All Time...right alongside critical darling Chris Samnee who, while being totally wonderful, seems to have been stuck drawing "Steve Rogers argues with himself about being Captain America in the Captain America home ec classroom" for longer than it's going to take you to figure out where this sentence started, which was the statement that it would be better if Steve was played by an obese joke monger with a beard that looks like a shrimpnet. Because it would!

Flashpoint Lois Lane and the Resistance #1
Written by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning
Art by Eddie Nunez & Don Ho
Published by DC Comics

In the category marked "that doesn't make any sense", there's a manila folder containing the things that shouldn't inspire people but apparently do, and right next to the entry for Hal Jordan you'll find Lois snoozey ass Lane. And while the two characters inspire a general "who fucking cares about those losers" sentiment amongst people who have never even heard of custom made action figure, the ironic difference is that it really doesn't have to be that way for old Lois. No, unlike Hal scumbag fascist bags of shit dogfucking Jordan, Lois is just supposed to be a smart female reporter. Hell, the only thing you usually have to suspend disbelief on with Lois is the part where she works for a newspaper and is also pretty, as in real life those are two of those "twain will never meet" kinds of things. And yet, historically, the only good comics Lois is prominently involved in are the ones where she does something idiotic and Superman has to break his dick in half saving her. It's probably attributable in part to the people who make her stories up, but then again, maybe it's just something in the fabric of her fictional make-up: doomed to a promise she can never deliver. 

Take this comic, for example. That cover-depicting a badass looking chick facing off against a bunch of random DC characters, one of whom (the Demon Etrigan) any normal human has no chance against and should, by rights, be shit-their-pants-terrified of, and yet Lois is packing a nine, all set to fire at their prime time. If anything shows promise--if anything shows an understanding on DC's part that they could actually win some people over to liking their comics and not just buying them in a state of depressed "maybe this time they won't use a weight bench to rape my favorite female character" dejection like some pop culture abuse victim, it's the comic this cover has on advertisement, the comic that's about the take-no-shit scarf wearing lady who plans to shoot some motherfuckers in the face for jacking up her trip to London. And hell, it's by Abnett and Lanning! They wrote all that cosmic Marvel shit that I know at least one person liked, I'll bet this is going to be the pickle I eat, not the pickle I boink the dog with! How could they fuck up this kind of touchdown?

Oh neverfuckingmind

-Tucker Stone, 2011

 

Woodshed: Anatomy Of Arousal

Study Abroad

Over at The Comics Journal, Tucker reviewed Butcher Baker The Righteous Maker, which is a comic totally worth reading even though it always feels a little disappointing after doing so. While you're there, there's an excerpt from Tim Kriedler's upcoming article on Cerberus (which must be a monster in terms of length) which is pretty fucking awesome, as everything else Kriedler's done for the Journal has been.

At The Straddler, Marty Brown delivers what we hope will be the first amongst many articles regarding Rick Ross, Nothing's Been Authenticated. We will accept other subjects, but our preference is, like any real American, a permanent run of Rick Ross related texts.

At comiXology, Tucker finally sat down to write something serious about X-Force, but then he ended up changing his mind and just talked about formatting.

At the Savage Critics, Tucker teamed up with Joe "Jog" McCulloch, Jeff "Dog" Lester, Chris "Rog" Eckert, Brian "Glog" Hibbs, David "My Dick Is A Calculator" Uzumeri and Abhay "Titties" Khosla to talk about Flashpoint and Fear Itself. Graeme was on drool-wiping detail at the Newsarama compound and Wolk refuses to accept that nobody is ever going to read that Techland website, but they did send an email saying that it was tough being scared. Part One! Part Two! Part Three!

Here at TFO, we had Matt Seneca on Marvel Movies, Comics of the Weak with a Gina Gerson reference Nina had to come up with herself, a throw-your-hands-up look at Emperor Aquaman, and another batch of book reviews.

Over at Supervillain, Sean Witzke wrote up BPRD 1946 (which was one of our "best of year" comics in 2008). Hopefully this piece might convince the doubters to lay down their arms and allow Joshua Dysart to enter their hearts, or at least betwixt their loins. He'll cup the balls, it's the American way.

There's a lot of great things in this post from Michel Fiffe, so let's only single out two of them. The first is the badassness of the late 80's Suicide Squad (which also shows up as a "read this one" recommendation in one of Joe Casey's Butcher Baker essays) and the second is Fiffe's claim that Jim Aparo was "the best Batman artist in the history of the entire world". That's a claim that doesn't get made often enough, which is fucked up only until you remember that the only people talking about water being wet are small children. When you grow up, indisputable facts become silent facts, and nobody mentions them anymore because they've just become the fabric of existence. It's worth remembering out loud in these days of change that one thing never will: Jim Aparo was born to change your entire life, and he'll be doing that forever, one perfect Batman drawing at a time.

The Hooded Utilitarian and Robert Stanley Martin asked for TFO's participation in their upcoming Best Of All Time aggregate, and while Nina refused--she thought it would be disrespectful, go figure--Tucker did not. The actual list follows, and the plan (or maybe that should be "hope") is that there will be some more substantive explanations behind these choices going up over the next year. As with any of these lists, any excitement on the part of the audience is going to be where connections (or disagreement) can be found, so keep an eye on the Hooded for the rest to appear.

LONE WOLF AND CUB, Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY, Chris Ware

CALVIN AND HOBBES, Bill Watterson

GASOLINE ALLEY, Frank King

KRAZY KAT, George Herriman

DOMU A CHILD'S DREAM, Katushiro Otomo

BORN AGAIN, Frank Miller & David Mazzuchelli

2001, Jack Kirby

OMAC, Jack Kirby

JIMBO, Gary Panter

*A few things to clarify about this list: Lone Wolf is a comic I'm still reeling from after experiencing the first time (reading doesn't really describe what going through that comic was like), so affection may lessen over the course of time. The Acme Novelty Library mention goes out to the individual issues of that series as an ultimate (and unfinished) work of art, the same way that "Krazy Kat" or "Jimbo" means, you got it, the whole fucking enterprise. Making an ultimate canon of comics strikes me as most interesting (for me) when it's treated as a personal exercise, one that will fluctuate over time. I'm less and less excited by comics-as-literature and more into dealing with them the way one does music, and that means that a large part of how "great" they are to me has to do with where I'm at as an audience member the moment my hand goes out to grab them. I'd still rather read the tenth issue of Acme or the portion of Calvin and Hobbes where their house gets broken into while they're away on vacation than I would decide which one of the two goes with me on an imaginary desert island (I really don't need any comics if I'm living on a desert island, thanks), but I ain't gonna pretend this wasn't fun to think about, and as it's spurred a re-read of all of the titles listed above, that fun will probably continue for a while longer. Looking forward to seeing who else those cantankerous cats pulled together.

No Pictures: Oh I Wish They Could All Be California Books About Movies Starring Rowdy Roddy Piper

They Live
By Jonathan Lethem, 2010

As there will probably never be another in-depth analysis printed on John Carpenter's They Live, this one will have to serve for the ages: thank goodness it's by a writer like Lethem, whose skills in the super-serious-look-at-trash-culture field of writing matches (and often exceeds) his contemporaries, of which there are, if you ask Philip Roth, way too many, and if you ask me, absolutely the right amount. Being the first in Soft Skull's Deep Focus series, the book is also exciting in terms of advertisement, because if this is what they plan to publish, I think I'll just have to buy the whole set. (The next volumes are on The Sting and Death Wish. Also a Bad News Bears sequel? For some reason the Lethal Weapon one has been delayed.)

The trap that Lethem has to watch out for is the same one that threatened, and may have now overtaken the 33 1/3 scribes: this has to be better than one of those great wikipedia articles you read once and then only remember the trivia from, and the writer has to be more than one of those autodidactic memory savants who handle a lot of what's currently considered the in-vogue criticism. (And if you're trying to be really great at it, it has to avoid the personal information dump ground that ruins the rest.) They Live succeeds on both fronts, in part because Lethem restricts the personal stuff to how-it-relates-to-watching-the-film, and in part because he's able to split his focus without lessening the intensity of it. There's a lot of thought given to They Live's famous fight scene, a decent chunk of time studying what our new, obsessively audience-controlled method of film-watching does to a viewer's takeaway experience, and a honest (and necessarily critical) probing into They Live's political wormholes. It's a hard book not to recommend, and one of the most pleasurable print movie critiques I've read since Stephen Mulhall's On Film. So buy it, I guess. Or don't. Whatever you decide, I think we should spoon more often, you and me.

On Literature
J. Hillis Miller, 2002

Although it's not a totally fair or direct comparison, you could call On Literature the academic version of that cult-y essay by Jonathan Franzen on why reading smart books doesn't make you smarter and not be too far off the beam, or at least you won't be far enough off that the judges skip scoring you and start advising you to try a different sport entirely. The comparison does falls apart when you get down to what the different authors were trying to do--as well as the obvious question of whether they succeeded at it or not--but you'd be hard pressed naming one as being noticeably "better" than the other. Miller's descriptions of the two kinds of reading, (critical and slow, immersive and pleasurable) made this one worth the time, at least. The back cover says "passionate", I don't disagree in the slightest.

The Life an Times of R. Crumb
Edited by Monte Beauchamp, 1998

This is one of those gifts of kindness from a family member who doesn't know comics, the sort of thing this reviewer gets in place of the bath soaps and scented candles he often gives to others. I just flat out love books as gifts, even when they turn out to be Reallionaire or a Purpose Driven Life. It's like being handed a stranger's vacation, but not in a gross way. Now, this Crumb thing isn't really a book, per se--like Naomi Klein's Fences and Windows, it's a collection of what would now just be printed on the individual blogs of the more cocksure contributors, or it might pop up amongst the essays that a Tim Hodler or a Noah Berlatsky commission for more general purpose websites. The subject is supposed to be Robert Crumb, and about half the entries are able to stick to that, but the rest are, as these things always are, more about the contributors relationship to the man. And while a lot of the book could (and should) be dismissed for falling apart into self-delusional rationalizations why Crumb has books about him and others are still busting their ass to make rent in roach-encrusted San Fran garrets, there's some metal that comes shining through. (Like Trina Robbins honing her attack on Crumb's attitudes towards women down to its finest, sharpest point in a way that won't allow the reader the standard hours-of-cyclical-argumentation way out that longer versions of her criticism seem to always develop into, and then, there's a genius essay from an underground contemporary describing a late-in-the-movement party where Crumb was the only attendee with a lawyer, and decades later, he was the only one at that party that ever got paid.)

Another shining moment has to be the Reverend Ivan Stang's anecdote describing Crumb's initial reaction to walking into one of his first roomfuls of fans. 

"All these nerdy little guys with glasses!! Are these people the ones who've been buying my stuff all these years??" He was actually surprised. I said, "well, yeah, of course! Haven't you ever been to a comic book convention?" "No," he replied. I was floored. This was in goddamn 1984, for god's sake!! He was appalled to discover the nerdy quality of his fans. "It's really depressing. They're such geeks!"

I did kind of a double take. "Look who's talking, Crumb! You're a nerdy looking guy with glasses!"

A Burnt-Out Case
Graham Greene, 1960

File this one alongside The Pale King in books that nearly broke me, not due to content but to the test of my endurance: this is a book that, until what seemed like an ancilliary character forces a soap-operatic conclusion (it is not a wholly unsatisfying soap-operatic conclusion), prizes your suffering above all else. Page after grueling page, a great craftsman tries to escape the life he's created for himself and the art the world still demands from him, chased the whole time by the insidious conversations of blameless curiosity dwellers, seeking only explanation down where mortality ends. Even when the selfish and greedy butt through the door, demanding first attention and then argument, Greene's pace never accelerates. It's just a march on empty, and a rebuke to those who prize anything but the choice to go on breathing. This one hurts.

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson, 1980

It's not as perfect as Gilead, but that comes as little surprise; after all, Housekeeping is a 1st novel. After cruising through a few of these bad boys about six months ago, Housekeeping lines up and takes it's lumps like all the rest: it's more unwieldy then the author's later work, the ambitiousness and flaws are far more pronounced...it's your classic first book. And yet it's also a lost book--it came out in 1980, and Robinson didn't put anything out in fiction until 25 years later, when she unleashed the male version of Housekeeping, otherwise known as, there's that word again, Gilead.

The only real complaint I had was that there was a predominant gypsy feel to the book, and seriously, I run a zero tolerance program when it comes to gypsies. Dr. Doom's a gypsy, you know? Gypsies are dangerous.

-Tucker Stone, 2011

My Wife: Believes That Aquaman Would Be Happier In Da Club

Flashpoint Emperor Aquaman #1
Written by Tony Bedard
Art by Ardian Syaf & Vicente Cifuentes
Published by DC Comics 

Aquaman looks like he's dancin' on the cover of this comic book. Take that crazy scepter out of his hand, wipe that frown off his face, and bang! He looks like he's breakin' it down! Mmm-tsz-mm-tsz-mmm-tsz-mmm-tsz (go ahead and make those sounds - you'll sound like the thumpin' beat of a cri-za-zy dance club! Paris is BURNING, darlings! Move your hips.)

Anyhow....let's get down to business. There's no way they'd make something as fun as "what if Aquaman only wanted to party party party, party all the time." So what in the alternate world is going on here? I mean, the J.J. Abrams Super 8 mini-comic-in-the-middle-of-the-comic aside - what's the story?

Let me guess: I betcha it's gloomy.

Is it just me, or did this whole issue read like one looooooonnnnnngggggg recap? Like, I feel like I was getting caught up on all that had transpired, yet this is the first of three issues and part of the larger Flashpoint story that only has two issues out. (I asked.) WTF? Look, I'm not going backwards on a longstanding tradition of believing that back story is good. Back story's make for really interesting character development. But when the entire comic book is back story, it feels like I've been left out of something. And, you know, I usually feel that way anyway when I read comic books - but when I'm reading a first issue, and I'll go ahead and say when anyone, not just me, is reading a first issue, said person should probably not feel that way. Especially if it's a mini-series already. I feel like I'm trying to get started on a board game and somebody is saying "no wait, I've got to read to you about what kind of homelife the people who invented this board game had. They had to walk to school!"

And, what's funny is that a good recap - when its actually a recap - is done in such a manner that delivers all the pertinent information so that a new-to-the-story reader feels all caught up without feeling like they've been patronized to or spoon fed anything. But in this case, 21-or-so-pages of a recap, and at the end I'm still going, "Who's Brion's sister?"  

Yeah, I had to ask. And I was told that she's one of the Teen Titans (in the regular universe, where she's sometimes a traitor). Why should I have to ask someone? In all that recapping, they couldn't have ever cleverly slid in something about her? And yeah, okay, there's a blank there because I have no idea what her name is, because it's not mentioned, and it's been made so consistently apparent that these Flashpoint comics really despise people who aren't well versed in their little minutiae...I mean, I just think this is so weird. Especially when these big summer event comics are designed in the hopes of garnering new readers. You gotta tell us newbies what's going on and who's who, folks! You've GOT to. Or it defeats your entire marketing team's reason for existing. These things are just so insulting without any right to be, you know? There's nothing cool about this comic, the story it tells, and when it's confusing, it's only confusing because it's too dumb to explain itself properly. I'd be willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, to believe that's because it wants me to go and buy some other comic book, but if that were the case, why not point to that comic and say "read this one." What a joke. That people worked to make something like this, that people buy it--after reading something like Hellboy last week, the idea that something like this might be where somebody goes next, the way I have...a joke. That's what this is.

Maybe it'll get better in the second issue?

-Nina Stone, 2011

Too Many Movies: Matt Seneca Takes In A Marvel Double Feature

Matt Seneca is a cartoonist responsible for many fine comics (some available here, the currently ongoing Affected available here) who writes for CBR, TCJ, CA as well as his wonderfully intoxicating Death to the Universe who was kind enough with his time to cover the Marvel Movie beat for TFO, thus extending his grip over websites with three letter shorthand names beyond all reason.

Thor, 2011
X-Men First Class, 2011
Matt Seneca 

Marvel Movies -- is there any more recognizable commodity at today’s box office? In comics the time when “universe building” was an achievable task seems to have well and truly left us, with every company that’s placed an emphasis on constructing a shared story space for their properties to interact in either decayed into something else or gone belly-up entirely. There are worse testaments to just how much the average comics reader isn’t-a-child-anymore than that: it was easy to accept that Sal Buscema’s Avengers and Herb Trimpe’s Hulk and Gene Colan’s Dr. Strange all hung out, easy even to keep on accepting it as time went on because hey, you were twelve when you first read that stuff. And you were only five when Kirby first imagined it that way. But these new attempts, the ones undertaken when you were already a grown-up, they were just insults to your intelligence. Tell me why the WildC.A.T.S. and Spawn were allowed to bump up against eachother without explanation. Or why the stars of both Sojourn and Scion both had glowing ying- yangs tattooed on them. But we’re talking about movies here, people. Ahem.

All I’m saying is, the fact that Marvel Films has managed to build a coherent, believable shared universe for their characters the same way the comics built one half a century ago is nothing short of a conceptual/marketing miracle. I’m tempted to call it yet another proof of the power Jack Kirby’s imagination held -- “that stuff can translate to any medium!” -- but the cynic in me wonders how many people would also think Star Trek and Transformers were part of some giant unified crossover scheme if they both bathed everything in the same sterile blue-gray lighting and featured atmospheric cameos by Samuel L. Jackson. Even if the by-now unmistakable Marvel aura is really only a bland sense of uniformity, the fact that it’s been successfully cast over so many actors, bad and good, so many directors, mediocre and slightly more mediocre, and just so many damn movies, is impressive in the abstract.

Is it impressive on the silver screen, though? Does anybody actually get sucked into these flicks, obsessed with them the way the comics have managed to make people obsess from the Kirby days right through to the present, when the conceit of a shared universe still binds a perplexing spell over a hundred thousand acolytes of Brian Michael Bendis? Well, I mean -- speaking for myself here -- hell yeah. I went and bought a ticket to Thor at eleven last night and when it was over I was so pumped that I was positive it was a good idea to sneak into the X-Men First Class showing that didn’t end until well past three. Then again I’m not a movies person, I go to see maybe one or two a year, so if you put something on a giant screen and the big multiplex subwoofers in front of me I am basically guaranteed to get bowled over by it, an easily entertained infant in the face of the sheer novelty and romance that is The Movies. Especially the kind where people fight each other.

I grow ever more certain that I am the perfect audience for these things, an uncritical viewer with an embarrassingly encyclopedic knowledge of the “source material”. (Boy, if that doesn’t sound like a Kirby term!) I mean, we were late to Thor by a couple minutes so I had to describe what the general situation was going to be for the uninitiated -- without having seen a preview even, mind you -- and whoops! I ended up describing the entire movie! Maybe that’s another aspect of these films’ success. They understand that one of the key tenets of the action blockbuster is an aspect of familiarity. The preordained formulas of body count in relation to perceived threat level, the ratios of interrupted kisses to explosions that mysteriously don’t go off, the precise amount of time for which to cut the sound off during an action scene before bringing it back in at full blast.

Marvel Films, though, does familiarity plus. Thor has all the classic big- budget fight movie beats, but it’s also got a backstory that was literally ancient knowledge back when Kirby first put pencil to paper on it. And there are just so many more things we know to expect from these particular blockbusters. The “hidden” Jackson cameos, of course (credits roll and nobody even makes a move to get up because we’ve all seen Iron Man, or maybe Hulk, unless it was Iron Man 2, and we’re excited for that little cherry on top the folks behind the red and while logo love to throw at us), but let’s not forget the way the visage of Stan Lee is ingrained somewhere on the print of every one of these movies like Christ on a Mexican pancake, or the “NEW MEXICO: JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY” tourism-bureau billboard placed in the corner of the screen for those of us who’ll know what that means, or the haphazard mentions of Dr. Hulk Banner, who despite his ostensible status as a recluse hiding somewhere in the Canadian wilderness is apparently road dogz with every member of the American theoretical-science community up to and including Natalie Portman.

Familarity breeds predictability, however, and predictability breeds boredom. (Who’s got the energy for contempt when they’re sitting in a multiplex?) But somehow these movies manage to stay engaging, to keep the eyeballs stuck to the screen even when the face turns to the next seat over and mutters “that Black Swan chick would never kiss a man she believed to be homeless.” With Thor, the secret is one that the less talented harsh-noise bands have been using for years: make it hit hard enough and it’ll be like they’ve never been hit there before, even if they were less than five minutes ago. In the comics the thirty days’ wait between instances of Loki bamboozling the all-knowing Odin with a few tourettic proclamations is always just enough to force you to suspend disbelief, somehow. It doesn’t have that going for it when it’s happening all at once on a screen the height of my apartment building at the volume of a low-level volcanic event, lubed up by the combined efforts of a few hundred tricked out MacBook Pro’s, but polished to such a sheen it’s left the behind all logic for the realm of pure experience now: instantaneous. Immersive. And that fool is pure fucking evil up there with his watery eyes and his leather pants! Look at how much skinnier he is than everybody else! He’s wearing a scarf! The complete and utter bastard.

As with Kirby, when the amplitude of the packaging forces the critical eye to retreat and beats the audience down into passive receptors, the images alone hold more than enough meaning. And Thor as played by what’s his name is a gigantic blonde man with a winning smile and a Gap t-shirt that I have a copy of too. I would follow that guy into battle. I love that guy. I am that guy. And then even when the credits roll, I don’t sit back and say “no I’m not” because I’m waiting for the Jackson cameo. MAKE MINE MARVEL.

As a movie? As art? I mean, do I really have to type the words it was wack? I can barely remember the thing it got me so high! If I had to explain I’d say that there was only one extremely puny fight at the end, that Kenneth Branagh can’t choreograph an action scene to save his life, and that Anthony Hopkins as Odin reminded me a little too strongly of Rory Root. Yes, this was a fiercely unoriginal action movie, the least transcendent film about gods to come out in a good long while. That’s the point, though. Branagh filmed an all-time great autocritique in the scene where the goddess Sif and the immortal Warriors Three (one of whom is played by Tadanobu Asano) show up full-armor in a small Southwestern town crawling with federal agents. “Call it in,” one faceless suit says to another. The walkie goes to the mouth, and the words come out: “Uh, we got Xena Warrior Princess, Jackie Chan, and Robin Hood.” Would that all filmmakers possessed such crystal-clear knowledge of exactly what their product is.

Most of all though, Thor was a Marvel movie where the blue-gray (and alternately, black-gold) lighting was ever so occasionally shot through with full- spectrum sparkles of CGI rainbow, and I just wanted way, way more of those. On, then, just down the scarlet scurf of trampled multiplex carpet, to X-Men First Class. Here is an entirely different visual environment, a Jello bath for eyes scoured to the veins by Thor’s ascetic vigor. Sizzling pinks, waves of yellow, clean grass-green, and shot after shot of a thick, glabrous blue, a hot one far from the typical brushed steel tones, suffusing out over everything. It sounds like a triviality, but the colors are the most immediate part of a movie, the first thing any of our senses perceive -- out in front of our comprehension of spoken words or figurative images. They are the first determiners of what we feel. And the chroma of this new X-Men movie is closest to the kind of stuff you might fail to change the channel over on Cinemax, or maybe the Austin Powers movies. Farcical, sure; gaudy, no doubt… sexy? That too, definitely.

In fact, the most striking thing about First Class is how pervasively the aura of sex hangs over it, by turns the product of typical comic book movie repression (there are far less involved contortionist acts than Matthew Vaughn’s continuing refusal to just show nipples already) and look-what-we-can-get-away- with liberation, which the very presence of the ever-hypnotic sexpot Emma Frost character attests to. X-Men III blew up the idea that these films had to carry a consistent narrative momentum half a decade ago: this one is another collection of loosely strung bits, its overall success dependent on how many of them you can remember after stumbling back into the real world. I can remember like… six? Or maybe seven? Of those, a majority have at least an angle of the erotic to them -- Vaughn isn’t much more of a superpowered-battle choreographer than Kenneth Branagh, but he can make his sexy scenes stand out from the dreck like a Bruce Lee roundhouse. Chris Claremont’s eternal nerdy girlfriend Moira MacTaggart, recast here as one of those compassionate CIA agents that all seem to be stationed in Hollywood, kicks the movie off by stripping down in her surveillance vehicle and wandering over to a swanky burlesque party in lingerie and garters to swipe a few Russian state secrets. There are a few leaden jokes about Professor Xavier and Magneto double-teaming the Grant Morrison female version of Angel when they first meet her in the gogo bar where she works. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos makes a five-second cameo as a sheet-sheathed nude body, a definite aesthetic evolution from her role in the previous films as a paint-and-scale-covered nude body.

The most memorable bit in this one -- or any X-Men movie -- is also the most sexually avant-garde set piece I can remember seeing in a superhero film. Logic, always a tenuous presence in the Marvel mutants’ saga, is completely out the window here, as in I can’t even remember how it got led into, so maybe it’s best to just describe it. Emma Frost, diamond-skinned, blonde and beautiful in a bra and thigh-highs, gets bound to the front of a bed by the metal bars of the frame itself, courtesy of Magneto’s powers. A Russian general reclines on the mattress above her, absorbed in the psychic illusion that he’s having sex with the woman sitting fully restrained a few feet in front of him. Magneto bends a bar around Emma’s throat. We watch from straight on as the breath whooshes from her lungs, her diamond shell subtly flickering between the white of precious stones and the pink of the velvet skin beneath it. The image is one of pure, utterly erotic strangeness, a soft and decadent surrealism on par with anything Bunuel could have dreamed up if they’d handed him the X-Men. Domination and submission in one, the same person directing and receiving malevolent sexual force. Bondage and choke sex thrown in for good measure. This movie is serious, and no amount of asinine plot maneuvering can possibly erase that one picture from memory. It’s one of the more incredible sections of film I’ve ever seen, an exquisite torture that would have done Pasolini proud.

Even the muck they throw on to cover such a shining moment back up again has a strange, uncomfortable edge, though. The other bits that stand out are the Hugh Jackman Wolverine cameo -- an attempt at the same kind of familiarizing Thor pulls off so well that ends up as an utter failure, sticking out like a sore thumb for its most prominent use of the word “fuck” ever in a Marvel movie -- and the death of Darwin, a character whose existence I had no previous knowledge of. He’s the one black guy, so yes he dies first, but more striking still is the sudden cut to a closeup of his face a few moments previous as the nefarious Sebastian Shaw asks the group of young mutants Xavier’s assembled if they really want to be enslaved. Not an undropped jaw in the theater, folks. But then, subtlety was never there to begin with.

First Class is farce -- mistakenly hilarious, campy, overblown farce that manages a kind of majestic sleaze, a transcendence via banal degradation that outshines any feat of godly power on display in Thor. Notably, it’s the first Marvel flick not to feature the reassuring presence of Stan Lee, the semi-estranged godfather of this whole shambolic media empire. Maybe it’s just because he pulled out after he saw the dailies on that Emma Frost asphyxia scene, but this is also the first Marvel film to be co-produced by an outside studio since the company’s merger with Disney. As I understand it, at this point Fox is basically holding the X-Men hostage, pumping out whatever works in order not to lose such a lucrative license. We’ll be seeing a lot more of these a lot quicker is my guess, each more lo- fi and logic-light and riddled with the ridiculous than the last. Mutant movies about mutants: there are worse things. And hey, thank god I don’t have to watch Halle Berry trying to act anymore.

Fascinatingly, this film’s final two big emotional beats are Xavier lying on a Cuban beach whimpering “I can’t feel my legs,” and Magneto finally first getting his Kirby-helmeted badass on for realz: moments that get you jacked as fuck to see more and then drop you right off into a wacky, Pink Pantherish credits sequence with the greatest of ease (no Sam Jackson cameo afterwards, obviously). You want more? As we all know, it’s to be found in the first through fourth installments of the series, and the only real question after that is whether this prequel is the serpent’s head chomping away or the bloodied bits of tail sliding down its gullet. X-Men III is still my favorite superhero movie of them all because with its gaps in rationality, its kid-language bombast, its propulsive sense of self importance, it most closely approximates the actual experience of reading a superhero comic book. This one is every inch a worthy successor. If you don’t like the sound of that then maybe you should think about learning to embrace trash a little more fervently. After all, if you’re watching these things you’ve already got the gist of it.

Thor: Thumbs Up
X-Men First Class: Two Thumbs Up

-Matt Seneca, 2011