New-ish Comics to check out

I've been lazy about posting, mostly due to my natural laziness. But also because I've been on a comics binge. Some old, some new, and a lot of them good.

#4 The Circle by Brian Reed (Ms. Marvel, New Avengers: Illuminati) and Ian Hosfeld, Image: Lots of action, lots of gunplay, solid art, and a nice little plot twist here and there. I don't have a ton to say about this book, because it's only just barely started, and like most spy stories there are more questions than answers at this point. But it's been a fun read so far, and hopefully enough people are buying it to keep it going.




#3 Northlanders by Brian Wood (DMZ) and Davide Gianfelice, Vertigo: I completely love DMZ, so as soon as I saw a new book by Brian Wood (and one from Vertigo, who always seems to pick interesting projects) I was in. The fact that it was about vikings was just icing on the cake. Cause vikings are cool, right? This isn't exactly what I was expecting, though. No horned helmets, no groups of big blonde dudes and their shieldmaidens pillaging and plundering. So far, it's a pretty standard story about a young man returning home after travels abroad, and not liking what he finds. But the characters are interesting, even if they're not exactly likable, Gianfelice's art is really quite something, and we're barely past the introductory part before things start really happening, so I think this is going to be a winner.

#2 Scalped by Jason Aaron and R. M. Guéra, Vertigo: This one's not exactly new. I think it started in 2006, and I've only recently gotten into it, thanks to the folks at Comics Should Be Good. But ignoring it is totally not my fault. Vertigo ran a preview of Scalped in the back of some issue of DMZ a while back, and... really, it was boring. And the whole first arc is not great. But be patient, because it gets very good in a hurry after that. The basic gist of Scalped is a noir-ish tale of corruption and murder and all that good stuff, but on an Indian reservation where a casino is about to open, and with a whole lot of violence. It's got a little bit of an early Quentin Tarantino flavor to it, with the fun with time, lots of obscenity, and brutal violence, but it's not derivative or anything, it's just good.

#1 Pax Romana by Jonathan Hickman: Johnathan Hickman wrote and drew The Nightly News, which is a comic that looks nothing like any other comic. It's also a completely entertaining, media hating, corporate conspiracy theory rant along the lines of Network. It wasn't perfect, but it was exciting and different, and exciting and different is hard to find. I heard about Pax Romana, also by Hickman, and that was enough for me. Only one issue in and I'm hooked. It seems like a lot more of a story than The Nightly News, but it retains the weird comic/infographic hybrid thing. I thought it was tons of fun going in with no idea what it was about, but if you're interested, there's plenty of info at Jonathan Hickman's website.

Continued....

Top 4: Batman Villains

Batman is my favorite superhero, and has my favorite collection of enemies, so how about a list of them?

#4 Ra's al Ghul: A 500 year old criminal mastermind with limitless resources for his mostly evil plans, Ra's is a complicated character. Like a lot of bad guys, he sees a flawed world and is willing to go to crazy lengths to change it. In Ra's case, he thinks humanity is so flawed that the world would be better off with most of us dead. At times, he can be allied with the Dark Knight, and has offered Batman a place at his side, and his daughter Talia's hand in marriage. But most of the time, he and "the Detective" are most certainly at odds.

Ra's was created in the 70's by Denny O'Neil and Neil Adams as part of their effort to ditch the campy Adam West image of Batman, and the character hasn't changed all that much since. Ra's al Ghul also made an appearance in Batman Begins, though the immortality aspect of his character was dropped.


#3 Catwoman: Like Ra's al Ghul, Catwoman has a complex relationship with Batman. Often, they're hot for each other. Often, her alter ego, Selina Kyle, and Bruce Wayne are hot for each other. But mostly, Catwoman's been out breaking the law and Batman's wanted to throw her in jail. Unlike Ra's al Ghul, Catwoman has changed a lot over the years. She's been a cat-themed thief with a thing for whips, a man-hating prostitute with a thing for whips, and eventually a sort of superhero (but still with the whips) defending her own little section of Gotham City.

The latter was a great reimagining (and redesign, above) of the character by Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke in 2001 which really made me a fan of Miss Kyle. She has, of course, been a staple in big and small screen adaptations of Batman, with mixed results. And there was that whole Halle Berry thing, but it looked so awful I never bothered with it. Maybe it was secretly really good. But probably not.

#2 Two-Face: Harvey Dent, district attorney, ally of Batman in the war against crime in Gotham, has his life ruined when a mobster throws acid in his face. In some versions, Batman rushes to save Dent, but is only successful in keeping half Dent's face from the acid. Regardless, not only is his face horribly scarred, the emotional trauma leaves him with a sort of multiple personality disorder, reflected by the two sides of his face, man and monster, and completely obsessed with duality. He flips a two-headed coin, with one side scarred, to decide almost everything. Smooth side up, and he'll aid earthquake victims, or give a speech honoring Commissioner Gordon. Scarred side up, and he does something horrible.

Many people's opinions of Two-Face are influenced by the horrible Tommy Lee Jones character from Batman Forever, but that version has almost nothing to do with the real Two-face. The real Two-Face has a twisted view of the world (Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum book summed it up best with this line: "The moon is so beautiful. It's a big silver dollar, flipped by God. And it landed scarred side up, see? So He made the world."), an obsession with duality and fate, and a history with Batman. Hopefully, the Batman Begins sequel will do him justice.

#1 The Joker: The best Batman villain, and probably the best in all of comics. That giant smile, the green hair, the pale face, and his nonstop cackling make him truly creepy. His sense of humor make him, at times, lovable, or at least darkly hilarious. The Joker doesn't have much of a backstory (in The Killing Joke, the Joker tells his life story, but admits that it comes out different every time he tries to remember it), nobody seems to know his real name, and all he really wants to do is laugh, torment Batman, and kill some people.

As such an attractive character, he has a tenancy to be overused in the comics, and sometimes poorly written. But when he's on, he's on. My favorite moment is from The Last Laugh, when, while in prison for killing Commissioner Gordon's wife Sarah, he learns that he's terminally ill. He writes a list of things to do before he dies, which includes "Ring Gordon. Ask for Sarah... hang up. Repeat."

Honorable mention: The Riddler, Harley Quinn, Mr. Freeze.

Continued....

Top 4: Writers' Strike Silver Linings

It didn't take long for the Writers Guild of America strike to impact the television landscape. With no one to write original material, most every talk show went to reruns. Saturday Night Live will probably have to as well. It sounds like most scripted network series have 5 scripts ready to go, so they should be ok for a while, but if this keeps up, there won't be much to watch beginning in December. So with that in mind, let's look at a few positives of the strike:

#4. Brian K. Vaughan has more time to write comics: Brian K. Vaughan was hired last year as a writer on Lost, and co-wrote the episode "Catch-22." But he made his name writing comics, as evidenced by the argument over whether Superman was faster than the Flash in that episode. Vaughan is the creator of Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, and Runaways, and (perhaps most important to television fans) is scripting the current arc of the Buffy Season Eight comics. BKV recently blogged that he will "take however long the strike lasts (which could be anywhere between a day and forever) to concentrate on making Ex Machina kick as much ass as possible as we start to head into that series' final year, and to continue to develop my next big creator-owned projects," which is nice for a fan to hear.



#3. Comic Books: Speaking of comic books, I've got a pile of them to read. And now with an extra hour a day (which I would have spent watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), I can start tackling them. Among the titles to catch up on: Criminal, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' noir-ish crime book, Invincible, quite possibly the greatest superhero comic in the universe, and Dynamo 5, which I haven't actually read any of yet, but it sounds pretty cool.


#2. Netflix Queue: Should the strike keep up for long, I'll have more than an extra hour on my hands, and I can start going through those Netflix DVDs faster. I usually watch 2 a week, but I might go as far as upping my plan to the 3-at-a-time if we're stuck with only reality and game shows at some point. My queue is almost 300 movies long, and I seem to add things faster than I watch them.


#1. Writers Getting What They Deserve: Apparently, the last time the WGA contract was up, the union was told that the home video market for television would never amount to much, so the writers didn't push the issue. Now, TV on DVD is huge business. According to a recent televisionary post, TV series writers are currently getting four cents per episode for TV on DVD sales. So when you're dropping $40 on a season set, about 90 cents is going to the writers. That hardly seems fair. On top of that, I don't think the writers are seeing a penny for itunes, those amazon unbox things, or ad supported streaming video on network websites.

I love television as much as the next guy, and I have no life, so production shutting down on my favorite tv shows sucks for me. But the writers create the characters we love, dream up the worlds they inhabit, put them in the situations that drive the action, and don't seem to be getting their fair share. Hopefully this can all be resolved quickly, writers will get their due, and maybe the studio suits can handle life with only one butler.

Continued....

Top 4: Animated Series Based on Comic Books

From Spiderman and His Amazing Friends to The Superfriends, my childhood was filled with cartoons based on popular comic book characters, but putting nostalgia aside, most of the series before about 1990 are painful to watch now. The animation is cheap, the voice actors over emote every line, the stories are repetitive, and the dialogue is written to ensure that even the slowest 5 year old doesn't miss a single plot point. But in the late 80s and early 90s, cartoons started to raise the bar by including actually interesting plots, non-campy dialogue, and skilled voice acting.

#4. X-Men: The Animated Series - In 1992, Fox added this faithful adaptation of Marvel's X-Men to their "Fox Kids" Saturday morning lineup, and it was quickly one of my favorites. It featured a mix of classic and newer X-Men team members, with Xavier, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, Wolverine, Beast, Rogue, Gambit, and Jubilee serving as the main team members for the run of the series. It drew not only on heroes and villains (Magneto, Juggernaut, Apocalypse, and Mr. Sinister, to name a few), but on classic X-Men storylines as well. The Phalanx Covenant, Legacy Virus, Days of Future Past, and Dark Phoenix Saga all inspired prominent arcs of the series.

Dark and dramatic, with much more adult themes than traditional Saturday morning cartoons (addressing divorce, religion, and intolerance), it became one of the top rated series in the Fox Kids lineup. After a few spectacular seasons, however, things started to fall apart. The plots started to become more and more far fetched, the Soap Opera Continuity started to become distracting, and, in the fifth and final season, production was moved to a new studio with a dramatic dropoff in the quality of the animation and voice acting. But for a few years, X-Men was as good as anything, introducing a new generation (including me) to the Marvel universe.


#3. The Tick - 17 year old Ben Edlund created the Tick in 1986 for a local comic book shop, and soon it was a hit underground comic book (the original 12 books can often still be found in print from New England Comics and they're very much worth the read). An astonishingly stupid and nigh-invulnerable big blue pile of muscles, leaping from building to building with his moth-suited accountant sidekick Arthur in the pursuit of evil-doers, it was an undeniably funny take on superheroes and the conventions of their world. In 1994, Fox brought the Tick to television, and Edlund oversaw production of the series, which, aside from dropping a few not-for-kids elements (like the Tick being an escaped mental patient), retained the look and feel of the comics, and was hilariously absurd.

Sadly, The Tick lasted only 36 episodes, but partly because of its short run, every episode was a classic. It's only recently starting to show up on DVD, with the second season due out later this summer. In 2001, there was a live action series on Fox starring Patrick Warburton (Putty from Seinfeld), also featuring the writing talents of Ben Edlund and several other of the animated series' writers, but unfortunately the copyright for several of the animated series' characters belonged to the production studio, so many of the live action characters had to be ripoffs of their own characters (Die Fledermaus and American Maid became Batmanuel and Captain Liberty, for example). The live action version lasted only one season (available on DVD), and Edlund would go on to co-write the movie Titan A.E. and work on a number of television series (Angel, Firefly, The Inside, Point Pleasant, (Tick writer Jackson Publick's creation) The Venture Bros., and Supernatural).

#2. Justice League/Justice League Unlimited - After a number of successful series based on DC Comics' properties, the creative team behind the DC Animated Universe (or "Timmverse", named after Bruce Timm, who's had his hands in all the series in this universe) decided to tackle the Justice League for the Cartoon Network, the team of superheroes combining forces to defend the earth from its greatest threats. In the first two seasons, which ran from 2001 to 2004, it featured Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, the Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern, and Hawkgirl. It told a series of ambitious stories in two and three episode installments, but while it was a solid effort, it never really impressed me all that much. Apparently, it had the same affect on audiences, as the third season took the show in a while new direction.

Retitled Justice League Unlimited, the series not only incorporated dozens of other characters from the DC Universe (Green Arrow, the Atom, Captain Marvel, Zatanna, the Question, and Supergirl, among many, many others), but ditched the three parters for mostly self contained single episode stories that contributed to a season long arc (Buffy-style). Most episodes centered around a small group of heroes, sometimes major players (like Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman in the adaptation of my favorite Superman story, For the Man Who Has Everything), sometimes virtual unknowns (Shining Knight, Crimson Avenger, Vigilante, and Speedy in "Patriot Act"). Compared to the "limited" first two seasons, he storytelling was a lot more focused, sometimes darker, and all around a lot better. Justice League (which I don't especially recommend) and Justice League Unlimited (which I strongly endorse) are available on separately titled (and separately numbered) DVD sets.


#1. Batman: The Animated Series - In 1992, partly to capitalize on the then still-successful Batman movie franchise, Fox began Batman: The Animated Series on weekday afternoons. It was immediately apparent that this was something new, different, and special. Many of the backgrounds were painted on black paper, a highly unusual practice that helped make Gotham feel like an appropriate setting for the Dark Knight. The technology and style of everything had an odd retro-futuristic quality. Scientists built robots and the police had a fleet of blimps, but Gotham TV broadcast in black and white, mobsters used tommy guns, and everything had an art deco style to it. And it wasn't just the visuals, the series had an orchestral score (based in part on the Danny Elfman theme to the 1989 Batman movie) and brilliant voice casting (Mark Hamill as The Joker and Richard Moll (Bull from Night Court) as Harvey Dent are two performances I hope the people behind The Dark Knight are aware of).

With decades of comics to draw from, the stories took full advantage of Batman's massive rogue's gallery, including the major players (The Joker, Two-Face, Penguin, Riddler, etc), the minor players (The Clock King, Killer Croc, etc), and a few new ones. The series was so well received, that some of the ideas from the animated series made their way into the comics, from Harley Quinn, the Joker's jester costumed girlfriend, to Mr. Freeze's more sympathetic backstory and abandonment of the campy demeanor that had been with him since his inception. And comic book geeks are normally first in line to trash any adaptation of their precious characters, so when they embrace a tv adaptation, you know it's pretty good.

The series was retitled and restylized several times, but I consider the first 85 episodes (plus the two movies, Mask of the Phantasm and Sub-Zero) to be part of this series, and the New Batman Adventures that ran as part of the The New Batman/Superman Adventures to be separate. But in any case, DVDs of the series are available and definitely worth checking out.

Honorable Mention - Duckman (based on a Dark Horse comic, it's a series that's almost completely forgotten these days despite being pretty funny at times), Spider-Man (the 1994 one, which poorly mixed CGI and traditional animation, but was pretty faithful to the comics otherwise), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (seriously, go back and watch it, it doesn't hold up as well as the top 4, but it has some jokes that still work, the dialogue isn't dreadful like other cartoons of that era).

Continued....

Top 4: Things That Ruin Superheroes

From the pages of comic books to popular television series to the big screen, superheroes are a bigger part of popular culture than ever. And who doesn't love a big mythic story with costumes and superpowers, damsels in distress and big scary explosions? But it's not all great, so here are the top four ways to derail a perfectly good superhero (or supervillain):

#4. Soap Opera Continuity - The angry looking gentleman with the big gun to the left is Cable, son of X-Men Jean Grey and Scott Summers (Cyclops), who was raised hundreds of years in the future by his sister Rachel. Except that Jean and Scott never had any kids, and Jean died. Cable was created with the help of a crazed 19th Century Darwinist and a clone of Jean. Rachel is from an alternate timeline. Rachel and Cable's grandfather died when Cyclops was just a kid, except that it turned out he didn't die, he had been abducted by aliens and joined a group of space pirates, who Cyclops conveniently met one time when tooling around in space with the X-Men. And their family tree is even more complicated than that.

That is all completely ridiculous, but that's not too out of the ordinary in the superhero genre. Comic books that have run for decades try in vain to keep up some degree of continuity while keeping the reader guessing with plot twists. When a new character appears, there's a 90% chance they turn out to be a family member, childhood friend, or former lover of an existing character. It seems exciting when they make a revelation, but if you take a second to look at the big picture, it all starts to feel silly.



#3. Multiverses - Both DC Comics and Marvel have idiotic concepts where they have alternate versions of their characters from alternate worlds, or timelines, or universes, and they occasionally cross over from one universe to another. DC has had several major storylines that have involved around the creation or deletion of alternate universes.

The problem I have with the multiverses is not that they exist, but that they weren't designed to exist. Comic publishers want to put out more than one Superman or Spider-man title per month, so they have separate storylines happening at the same time. They also don't want their characters to age, so they would reboot franchises so that the guy who fought Nazis when he was in his 30s doesn't have to be 60 years old in the '70s. But when inconsistencies start to arise, they invent the idea of all these alternate universes to explain it. True comic book fanboys eat this stuff up, but personally I think it's all bullshit.

#2. Overpowered Heroes and Villains - I grew up watching the X-Men Animated Series, which was generally awesome. And one of the fans' favorite villains, and the subject of amusing internet videos, was the Juggernaut. He was granted invulnerability by a magical ancient Egyptian gem, and has a helmet that makes him invulnerable to psychic attacks. Because he was so powerful, the X-Men couldn't scratch him, so every time he came on the scene, after a number of buildings got smashed, the X-Men would rip off his helmet and Professor X would work his mojo and make the Juggernaut wander off peacefully.

The same thing applies to Superman, especially in it's television adaptations. Either the writers have to keep coming up with reasons for Kryptonite to be as common as granite, or they have to give every new opponent a complicated backstory explaining how they got superpowers allowing them to hang with Superman. There's a reason Batman is the best superhero out there, and it's not just the extra cool costume.

#1. Death is Meaningless - In 1993, the big news was that Superman would be killed off. And he was, at the hands of Doomsday. The media made it sound like the end of an era, except that he ended up coming back to life after less than a year. At some point early in my comic reading days, I was told that nobody stays dead except for former Captain America sidekick Bucky, former Robin Jason Todd, and Spider-man's Uncle Ben, yet recently all three of those have been resurrected in one way or another, so it's safe to say that when someone dies, you'll probably end up seeing them again pretty soon.

Since most every long-running comic book story has at some point included clones, time travel, magic, or supremely advanced alien technology, it's pretty easy for a writer to come up with excuses for dead characters to show back up. And while that is a fun twist from time to time, it ruins the dramatic impact of the rest of the story. When a superhero is in a dangerous fight, it's not as exciting if the ultimate danger, death, is only a temporary problem.

Honorable Mentions: Crossover "events" (which seem to happen constantly, making them not very eventful), borderline pornography in lieu of story and character.

TV fans can just hope that Heroes' season nine doesn't feature Isaac and Candace from an alternate universe fighting an impossibly powered foe whose only weakness is mustard, and just happens to be Isaac's long lost brother.

Continued....