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BEST ALBUM OF 2011

2012-01-05T21:03:00.001Z

People, especially people writing in certain types of magazines, occasionally talk about soundscapes, about how the way in which an album or song is laid out can feel like a sort of immersive environment. Well, says Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, that game is for wimps. In the space of one released-for-free mixtape, The Weeknd established a whole world.

A world where – as pretty much everyone who’s written about, or listened to, the music will tell you – it is constantly the early hours of the morning, where it’s cold and smoky outside, where the party is always just ending. A world with the colours turned down slightly, viewed through a lens smeared with vaseline … or are your eyes just bleary?

With its sort of Noir R’n’B (as in the black-&-white motifs, sure, but also the femme fatales and troubled masculinity of the lyrics, the quivering motel neons in the music) House of Balloons manages to transport all this to the space between your eyes and ears. It’s a weird kind of Tolkeinesque world-building by way of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet.

This was effortlessly sustained by the other two parts of the mixtape trilogy The Weeknd released in 2011, Thursday and Echoes of Silence, which served more or less as expansion packs. The former just adds a slightly different colour palette, the Vice City to House of Balloon’s GTAIII. Accordingly, I was hoping December’s Echoes of Silence might be his San Andreas, in terms of expanding every bit of ambition in the original to obscene proportions.

It’s not, but it does sharpens the aesthetic to a lethal point, then turn it back on pop, to shows how it’s not all that far from, for example, the work of Michael Jackson – it opens with a cover of MJ’s Dirty Diana, which doesn’t sound too dissimilar to the original, just filtered through that unmistakable Weeknd worldview.

The three albums have distinct personalities, but there’s the intertextuality runs deep, and each can be played back to back, flowing almost imperceptibly into one another, to create a two-hour mood piece. It’s testament to Tesfate’s masterful control over the aesthetic parameters of this world– so much so that it’s jarring to hear Superhero and Party, tracks from around 2008, released recently, when he was doing something completely different, closer to trad R’n’B, and frankly much less interesting.

The Weeknd snuck into an incredible number of corners during 2011 – the music I talked about when I was drunk, slipping it into playlists so everyone else could hear it, owning the week I lived in a hostel in Bath and playing at being a games journalist, being the only album on the my mobile’s SD card, so soundtracking a lot of morning tube journeys and late night walks home.

(This piece is a palimpsest, etched over the remains of something I wrote back in June, about the joys of playing House of Balloons back to back, on constant repeat. I ended up back-to-backing the album, with barely an exhale between end and beginning, for pretty much the entire next six months. I still have absolutely no idea of most of the lyrics.)

There’s a sense that perhaps I’m enjoying something beyond the music, something that exists in the images it sets off in my head, in the meeting point between the videos and photographs and what other people said.
That tends to be at least inherent in the criticisms of The Weeknd (of which there have a been a lot, often from writers whose opinions I respect) - that somehow these aren’t songs that Tesfaye is selling. And, okay, compared to, say, Childish Gambino - to pick another artist whose work I enjoyed immensely in 2011 - the pleasure is less immediate, the songs are less likely to grab me by the lapels while I’m listening to them.

Admittedly, a lot of the time, I let The Weeknd slip into the background, using it as a sort of musical wallpaper, while something else goes in the foreground. But if it’s ambient, it’s aggressively ambient. It’s the kind of wallpaper that, suddenly feeling overly sensitive to everything, you rub your fingers over, and appreciate every inch of texture.

It’s music that feels physical, in every possible way - not just how it occasionally taps into your muscles and makes them jump and twitch in the nearest approximation of dancing you can manage on the morning commute, but like its ideas form something three-dimensional, so dense you could almost reach out and touch it. And it is dense - all this information is condensed down into these small aural packages, like Grant Morrison hyperstorytelling or something.

But, yes, perhaps I don’t enjoy House of Balloons in the way I do other music. The lyrics don’t mean a lot to me; to be honest, I can’t participate in the discussion about whether the songs are misogynist or misguided, because the words are just extra sounds to me. Which is fine, because the sounds are the whole point of the thing.

Tesfaye has a delicate voice, which generally sits on top of the song, skimming along the surface, while in depths there are these bassy, creaky thumpings. In the space in between, all sorts of stuff can happen: The Beach House sample Loft Music squashes out of shape, so it feels like an uncovered artefact of ancient pop rather than something from 2008. The bit where a woman’s voice joins in on The Party & The After Party, throbbing just under the song. The statement-of-intent looping squeal that introduces House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls – and from there, the song slides into a fluid underlying push/pull, with just the slightest buzzy echo, before introducing all sorts of other sounds and layering them on top, or underneath.

Every single moment on House of Balloons sounds absolutely gorgeous - whether through headphones, my old beaten-up laptop speakers, or my relatively good sound system. There are entire clubs’ worth of speakers going wasted on not playing The Weeknd constantly. I say we take the Gatecrashers of this world (rubbish club, fantastic sound systems) by force, and turn them into cathedrals of sound.

And then, the next morning, walking the wet streets, trying to scratch the tinnitus echo of the songs from our inner ear with a little finger, we can live in that fantasy world that House of Balloons taught us about. Of course, that would mean we’d just have to start enjoying the songs on their own merits.

Oh well.

2011 – twelve months, twelve songs

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

The pre-New Years blogfest didn’t quite go as planned, thanks to the intrusion of pesky real life, and my own stupidity in underestimating the effort required to read and summarise an entire years’ worth of film reviews. I move into a flat in London tomorrow – an event aligned so neatly with the start of the new year I’m finding it difficult not to self-mythologise, but also meaning I won’t have broadband for a little while, but I’ve got a few end-of-year articles I’m hoping to polish and put up here. Watch this space, but for now enjoy this month-by-month account of the year in music (and double your fun with this YouTube playlist, featuring all 12 songs).

JANUARY
Kanye West – All of the Lights
Or, how I discovered that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy had been my favourite album of 2010 all along, I’d just never listened to it. Running some beautiful strings and piano into big, punch-to-the-face beats, punctuated with those horns, there is always at least one thing going on. All of the Lights also features some of Rihanna’s finest work (and, in the video, the most I’ve ever understood why the entire universe fancies her) alongside a great segment owned by Kid Cudi, and appearances by Fergie, Charlie Wilson, John Legend, Tony Williams, Alicia Keys, La Roux, The-Dream, Ryan Leslie, Alvin Fields and Ken Lewis. It should be a mess but Yeezy, in full 21st-Century-Brian-Wilson mode, stitches it all together perfectly to make an instant classic that would soundtrack the climax of every house party for the rest of the year.
FEBRUARY
Kimya Dawson – Walk Like Thunder
From music that sounds best at 2am coming through a stack of speakers, via a wall of human flesh that’s screaming a rough approximation of the lyrics, to headphone music for those 2ams spent alone. Walk Like Thunder is a 10 minute epic that fully earns its length. The listener is trapped in a confessional booth with Kimya’s voice and sparse atmospheric music, only blooming out at the very end into an Aesop Rock cameo. It’s pretty blunt, lyrically, but I’d venture that’s the point – people do everything they can to avoid talking about death, and maybe that should change.
MARCH
Rebecca Black – Friday
Am I being contrary? Well, maybe a little. (I briefly considered including Swagger Jagger instead, playing the same role). But I’ve genuinely got a lot of joy out of this song over this year – some of those lyrics are genius in their banality, if your mind is pitched just right, and it’s sweet-natured enough, and I think it’s unfairly become a byword for rubbish pop. Rubbish pop is mediocre, and the mind-blowing literality and creepy older rent-a-rapper of Friday is not that, by any yardstick. This goes out to all those 344,303 dislikes on YouTube – grow up, it’s at least pretty good.
APRIL
Childish Gambino – Break
January, redux. All of the Lights was so good it stretched into two of my favourite songs of the year – this is a remix, kind of, but it’s so much more than that. It’s in a relationship with the original, definitely, referring back and twisting its lines, but picks something new out of it – a sort of melancholy sweetness – like a friend telling you the answer to one of those Magic Eye puzzles. And then Mr Glover does his thing, dropping some nicely dense lines thick with reference, wordplay and an almost unhealthy interest in Asian women in a way that reminds you that in his other life, Donald is a well-loved comedian and writer. The meeting of those two simple ideas – cartoony rap and confessional emoting – would spark a love affair that lasted all year.
MAY
The Weeknd – House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls
The most important thing I heard all year. 2011 was the year I really got into hip-hop and R’n’B, and Kanye and The Weeknd (and Miles “Strong Opinions” Bradley’s Tumblr) are probably equally responsible. It’s already pretty obvious that the three mixtapes The Weeknd released this year will be leaving grubby pawprints all over pop for some time to come. (Plus, last night Christopher “Mancrush” Sparrow pointed out to me that it should be pronounced The Weakn’d. That kind of hidden-in-plain-sight wordplay would pretty much guarantees The Weeknd a place on this list.)
I’m not specifically thinking about this track here, mind – anything off of House of Balloons is good with me. Less than than individual songs, it’s the aesthetic choices, and the trail of thick gloomy atmosphere it leaves, that have stuck with me.
JUNE
Emmy the Great – A Woman, A Woman, A Century of Sleep
And Emmy returns from the wilderness semi-unrecognisable, having shed some of the folkiness and acerbic one liners in favour of grander sounds and more obscure lyrics. It’s all a bit rather more grown-up, and you sense that, in another life, this is the year Emma Lee Moss would have moved from short stories to writing novels. That’s rarely something I mean in a good way, but the razor-sharp confidence of Emmy Mk 2 makes for something fully the equal, and opposite, of all the old material.
JULY
Drake – Marvin’s Room
By this point, the year’s ruling aesthetic was official set – moody late-nite R’n’B/hip-hop full of loneliness and isolation and unpleasantly irresponsible drinking. Marvin’s Room is simply a fine example of that. It employs beats that sound the way H.R. Giger’s industrial/organic artwork looks, mixing straightforward rap verses with sung choruses which stretch out Drake’s voice into something quivering and completely separable from the rest of the sounds. Meanwhile, snippets of phone conversation flit in and out, repurposing the skit tradition into something that fits the post-Weeknd aesthetic.
There’s something about its deployment of the n-word that I’m not fully comfortable with, and the slow-motion repeat of the bridge is only just on the right side of being silly, but Marvin’s Room provides a stylish bridge between House of Balloons and the Chris Rock guest appearance on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
AUGUST
Kanye West & Jay-Z – Otis
Another slice of solid, straightforward hip-hop that references an R’n’B legend in its title, it’s hard not to consider Otis the mirror image of Marvin’s Room. It sounds absolutely gorgeous but like the accompanying Spike Jonze video, it’s surprisingly no-frills: just Yeezy and Hova hanging out and shooting the breeze. The entire song just rests on these two big personalities, and they’re more than big enough to carry it. Otis doesn’t bother with any kind of subtle rise-and-fall, it just uses a series of joyous screams to tell you this is the climax. Perfect – they were possibly my single favourite sound in music all year.
SEPTEMBER
Florence & The Machine – Shake It Out [Weeknd Remix]
In which The Weeknd house style gets turned onto a piece of otherwise basic but decent indie pop. It inspired probably the best bit of music writing I did all year, so I’ll just steal and remix that. It’s no one-trick pony, but the outstanding bit is how the remix splits Florence’s vocals into two tracks, one high-register pinging and one slowing so its sounds like the vinyl its pressed onto has melted; even the lyrics get warped into two separate interpretations. The remix manages to take the voice of Florence Welch, reasonably talented human being, and run it through a prism, multiplying into something more transcendental and pluralistic and interesting.
OCTOBER
Kavinsky – Nightcall
The Drive soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal, and has earned the film a strong foothold in my lasting affections. This was the highlight, perfectly pitched for drives along empty roads wearing sunglasses and a brooding expression. There’s that contrast again, between the sweet, earnest Lovefoxx vocals and the terrifying digitised whisper of Kavinsky, which sounds like a serial-killer broadcasting onto the dead space between channels on your car radio. With the loud clarity of cinema speakers behind it, it absolutely knocked me out, and then I went home and listened to it another thirty times. On repeat, living at home with no job or real hope of one, with only the company of my laptop screen, it kept me up past a sensible bedtime for a good chunk of October. It’s time I couldn’t have hoped to waste more beautifully.
NOVEMBER
Los Campesinos! – Baby I Got The Death Rattle
The best of the LC! tracks we got this year, mixing together pretty much everything I love about the band into something that doesn’t sound quite like anything else they’ve released. It opens with a spoken section worthy of its own t-shirt, Gareth doing his brilliant microscopic poetry thing, and picks out a path through a few superimposed versions of the same song, jumping from one slightly different version to another throughout. Single, well-observed lines cut diagonally against choruses. There’s a point where the song declares “and this is the end”, pauses , and immediately starts to build up again with one of those LC! intros where it sounds like they’re playing toy instruments, straight into the final third of the song.
Baby I Got The Death Rattle is a song that fully earns the morbid melodrama of its title – the full-on emo band I wanted LC! to become peeking through once more - but it still has a swing in its hips, and a sense of humour. I love that LC! don’t exclude sex from their song, and as the song takes a turn towards the smutty, an obvious rhyme gets undermined with a dismissive “oh, you get the message”, with the timing of the greatest punchlines, before jumping right back into the final chorus. It takes itself exactly serious enough to know when to crack a smile.
DECEMBER
Azaelia Banks – 212
A lot of the music I’ve mentioned here has been night-time music, tunes for the early hours. There’s something about 212 that feels like it was made for daylight, with Miss Banks a beacon of pure attitude. I just talked about LC! being smutty, but they've got nothing on this. The song delivers a range of filthiness and aggression beyond what the hip-hop boys can manage, delivered with the light touch of the finest pop music. The song is perfectly crafted, curvy in all the right places and just fidgety enough to suggest an entire career for the newcomer – the new Nicki Minaj, Missy Elliot and Santigold, depending on who you listen to – into a three minute single. Most importantly, though, it’s just having enormous fun while it’s at it.

That’s far from everything I’ve loved this year. Rihanna’s S&M held my heart for a good few weeks before she officially ‘lost it’, in my estimation; Heems’ WOMYN is the year’s best bit of feminism-pop; The National provided the only song of theirs I’ve ever truly loved for the Portal 2 soundtrack in Exile/Vilify. And missing off The-Dream/Terius Nash’s Wedding Crasher is an absolute travesty, frankly, and I can only apologise. But it’s everything I could fit in this admittedly rather narrow format.

Self-Reflection on Saturdays: a Spot of FFoF Post-Game Analysis

2011-12-31T17:46:00.000Z

I embarked on this yearlong endeavour hoping to learn something about myself. Rereading all the entries this week, I'm not sure I've had any mindblowing ephiphanies but, presented with a chunk of writing (or indeed picks) this substantial, it'd be hard not to spot a few patterns.

First of all, that I'm not a very good self-proofreader. I've alluded a few times to the number of entries written in a panic, in those final hours before my self-imposed deadline of 23:59 on Friday - a deadline I only missed once, by about 15 minutes - and that meant I didn't get to double-check everything as thoroughly as I might have liked. I can see at least one thing I'd change in every single post - an odd bit of phrasing mostly, a factual error, a couple of typos (or an occasional vestigial "???", my personal notation for write more here).

I won't go back and change them all, though, not even my claim that Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 2003. I'd claim that this about retaining the purity of the thing, but honestly it's just that this list has already driven me mad once, and I don't fancy getting lost in it again.

Perhaps more interesting are the words, phrases, and structures I've repeatedly leant on. Talk of “quotables”, “charisma”, and “cool” need to exorcised from future writing, and recently, a lot of “of course”s and “after all”s have crept in too. (An attempt at keeping a conversational tone, I reckon.)

Thematically and structurally, I reckon I've overused the gap between what I'd remembered and what I found on a rewatch as a springboard. Similarly, a tendency to focus on one element throughout the piece, and then conclude by saying but, wait, there's more to this film! has been too common - a result, probably, of trying to find a variety of ways to gush about a film...

Consider this me burning all my writerly bridges – none of these tricks are ones I'll be able to use again. Good.

The most peculiar bit is how how fond I've been of using permutations of “boy meets girl...” for showing how something sticks to/departs from a standard structure and cinematic traditions, but it's something I think I've only ever used in FFoF posts, so as long as it stays there, that's okay.

Throughout, I've struggled to organically work in a synopsis of the plot – partially because it feels like it ruins the fun of watching it for yourself - but it's something, in all the different permutations I've tried out, I have been working hard to fix. As I've pointed out in some of the posts, I'm less concerned by narrative than other elements of cinema. I'm fascinated by pacing – whether something comes over an hour in, or 20 minutes from the end - and non-traditional (i.e. non-fantasy) world-building. Also, use of music, pure emotional resonance, big Ideas, how a film fits into a director or writer's body of work... all thoughts I've addressed at some point.

Most of all, though, it's been a year of trying to work out how to describe cinema, in terms of what exactly is happening on screen, and whether it's extraneous. Most of the joy of writing about, say, music is just finding words for what's happening; in games journalism, I'm interested in telling stories other people won't necessarily have had. It's much harder in film, treading a line between spoiling a key scene or boring you with something you've already seen. The Apocalypse Now piece's look at the Do Lung Bridge scene is possibly the best example of this – it's a fine piece of visual poetry which I tried to get down in suitably wide-eyed prose. I'm still not sure it's possible.

A chart showing the breakdown of my fifty favourite films, by decade

As someone on the internet once told me, I need to watch some films that were made more than 10 years ago. The years 2000-2009 make up an overwhelming half of the list, with my single favourite year for films, apparently, being 2004. It's the year Shaun of the Dead, Anchorman, The Incredibles, and my #1 favourite film ever, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, came out. It's also the year I was 15 years old.

I observed it a few times throughout, but I really have a obsession with the links between being a teenager and cinema. Cinema burnt brightest for me when I was in my teens - almost every year between 1999 and 2009 produced three films on this list, and most of the other ones I saw in that impressionable time too. A lot of the films were included for the warping effect they had on my young brain, and what was on my mind at the time - male friendship, the relationship between individual and state, the loss of youth and innocence, etc.

It also turns out that, statistically speaking, Quentin Tarantino is my favourite director, having directed four of the films on this top 50, with Brad Bird trailing just behind with three. Tarantino is even more prolific as a screenwriter, having written five films on the list. That said, if we're being purely statistical, he would also be my favourite actor, having had substantial appearances in three films, and that is certainly not the truth.

Looking back, there are films that should be higher, or lower – Airplane!, for example, was clearly cheated, while I'm not wholly sure T2 deserves its place around the halfway mark – and there are a couple of films I'd like to include – Social Network being the first one that comes to mind – though I have absolutely no idea which films I'd kick off the list to make room.

After all, lists like these are completely arbitrary. That's the truth we can admit now it's all over – they're a bit silly, really, and it's something you can see shining through every time I jokily declare a statement to be fact!.

Nevertheless, as a body of work, it's something I'm very proud of. There's enough there - somewhere in the region of 30,000 words, by my estimation - to fill a small book, and most of it is reasonably good. It's certainly quite wide-reaching, in terms of genre, topic, and years of release... well, okay, no, not years of release, given that the entire '60s and '70s are represented by a single film each.

But I managed to cover all sorts: posts contained thoughts on whole genres, or single shots. I reflected on the nature of Top x lists, my relationship with my sister, how films from children differ from films for adults. My big theory about how detective stories are the purest distilled form of narrative dipped its toe in the FFoF waters more than once. And there is, of course, some fantastically hubristic formalism in there - remember that time I wrote entire the Memento post backwards and then carefully reshuffled it so no one would ever notice?

There's a hell of a lot of intertextuality going on, especially in entries that lie next to each other, intentional - the pairing of The Thing and Zodiac, for example - and stuff that just slipped in - the mention of Spencer-inherited personality traits in the Spirited Away and Iron Giant pieces, later transmuting into the comparison of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and 24 Hour Party People as distant cousins with a single family trait in common.

In fact, there's lots of talk about family trees, and relationships between films. There's a big dusty hall of fame taking up a corner of my brain, with each film and article give its own place, with lines and arrows running between each. The project quickly turned into an attempt to document a sort of personal history, and writing it has created a history of its own. I remember where I was when I wrote most of them – the staff room at school, on lunch from work experience and, most often, on a variety of trains.

What was meant to be a way of getting me to write more regularly turned into an autobiography, really. It's something I tried to chase out - the boring writer peering over your shoulder constantly - but, as I pointed out in the Pulp Fiction entry, it's often hard for me to separate the media I love from the conditions I experienced it in.

Favourite Films on Friday - The Full List

2011-12-31T15:35:00.000Z

You, dear readers, met me at a very strange time in my life. I'm heading into 2012 as a more-or-less grownup, with a proper journalism job, a home, and a joint bank-account; but 2011 has been a rather messy year. The one constant has been waking up every Friday and panicking about having not written the week's entry yet. I'm going to miss it, but given the number of nights I've stayed up until the very death in front of a keyboard, I suspect Imogen "Flatmate" Dale won't.

But to see the year out, here is every single one of my favourite films - click the title or image to (hopefully) go straight to the relevant entry. Go chronologically, or just pick the ones you like, whatever. I mean, it's your life.

#50 - The Wrestler

#49 - Airplane!

#48 - Where the Wild Things Are

#47 - The Thing

#46 - Zodiac

#45 - Anchorman

#44 - 24 Hour Party People

#43 - Wristcutters: A Love Story

#42 - Memento

#41 - Spirited Away

#40 - The Iron Giant

#39 - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

#38 - Leon

#37 - Juno

#36 - Battle Royale

#35 - Austin Powers - International Man of Mystery

#34 - Brazil

#33 - Army of Darkness

#32 - Wall.E

#31 - From Dusk Till Dawn

#30 - Star Wars - Return of the Jedi

#29 - Brick

#28 - Ratatouille

#27 - Terminator 2 - Judgment Day

#26 - The Graduate

#25 - Kill Bill

#24 - American Psycho

#23 - Serenity

#22 - Blue Velvet

#21 - Raiders of the Lost Ark

#20 - Reservoir Dogs

#19 - Let The Right One In

#14 - Shaun of the Dead

#13 - Jackie Brown

#12 - Hot Fuzz

#11 - Pulp Fiction

#10 - The Big Lebowski

#09 - Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

#08 - Die Hard

#07 - The Incredibles

#06 - Donnie Darko

#05 - The Matrix

#04 - Ferris Bueller's Day Off

#03 - Up

#02 - Fight Club

#01 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Favourite Films on Friday: #1, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

2011-12-30T23:57:00.001Z

This is my favourite film. It will probably remain my favourite film forever, and now I am etching that onto the stainless steel face of the internet, where it will stay as long as I pay my URL fees. How’s that for commitment?

It’s one of the few films on this list that I’d also argue is in the running for the Best Film of All Time. That’s not something I’d ever say about last week’s #2, Fight Club – its importance is too personal, too tied to my own history. But I have very few memories tied to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which, luckily, stops this from straying anywhere too autobiographical like some entries have tended to.

Eternal Sunshineis a film firing on cylinders, every element hitting every note perfectly at the same time, in a way I’ve never seen since. Actors, director, writer, photography, soundtrack, effects … all objectively perfect. Fact.

It starts out looking like an indie romance film. Joel Barish wakes up bored with his life – as narrated in a gravelly, remorseful whisper – and impulsively ditches work to go somewhere beautiful and desolate. There he meets the quirky Clementine Kruczynski, and they, awkwardly, fall for each other. Nothing particularly special there – this first 20 minutes is an actor’s piece, director and writer waiting for their time to show off, and Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet sell it perfectly. It’s not an easy task, as proved by all the other indie slice-of-life romances I watched afterwards, to make a relationship interesting and convincing so quickly.

Then, with a flourish, we jump back and suddenly Joel is in his car, crying and listening to Beck’s cover of Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime. The film is structured non-linearly; roughly speaking, it rewinds through Joel and Clementine’s relationship to show us first how it went wrong and then later, why it worked.

Unlike the tight formal structure of Memento, though, it’s not that simple – the rewinding takes place inside Joel’s head, as the men he has hired to wipe all his memories of Clementine do just that. It’s all interwoven with segments arranged in order, with a b-plot telling the story of the guys doing the memory wiping. And, it turns out, the start of the film is also actually the end – Joel and Clementine are meeting again, by apparent chance.

The split between internal and external allows Michel ‘le réalisateur’ Gondry, and Charlie ‘the author’ Kaufman chances to shine. Gondry is another director with a background in music videos and adverts, one of my favourite creators in any medium who has never quite found another cinematic vehicle for his tremendous imagination. The fantasy world of Joel’s memory provides Gondry with a chance to play his trompe l’oeil tricks - characters disappear and reappear wearing different clothes, apparently in the same take; streets endlessly mirror themselves; remembered locations blend into one another – and fiddle with cinematic techniques to reflect the process of memory loss.

Meanwhile, Kaufman finds a clever sci-fi concept – of a company who can wipe your powerful memories, Lacuna Inc, who can unremember it for you wholesale. It’s an idea which can dig under your skin, so you find yourself wondering in idle moments what exactly you’d delete from your past. But then, even better, he finds the mundaneity and reality in it. Lacuna’s offices are reminiscent of a trip to the dentist; the memory-wipers enjoy a few beers, a joint, and the contents of Joel’s booze cupboard while he sleeps.

It matches up with the slightly wonky sci-fi tech that Gondry conjures – the upturned-colander that sits on the patient’s head, the slightly retro computers – and gives it all sense and meaning, reigning in his excesses. In return, Kaufman’s writing is lent a rare warmth and humanity. It’s the classic odd couple – sloppy meets clinical – and the contrast makes both stronger.

Notably, neither has another film on this list, and very few of the actors involved appear in any of the other 49 either. The ensemble cast, far beyond Carrey and Winslet – both cast against type, playing the role the other would traditionally fill, and proving they should have been doing this all along – is flawless. Elijah Wood, as ever, benefits from being cast as a character with a bit of a sleazy dark streak; Mark Ruffalo is one of cinema’s most loveable slackers; Kirsten Dunst was always meant to play the confused young girl in love; Tom Wilkinson is never anything less than fantastic.

Each of those parts – clever indie romance, surrealist dream sequences, inventive but grounded sci-fi – would be enough to guarantee a place on this list. But they form a whole more than the simple sum of its parts, creating a world with a whimsical sense of unreality, but exactly as much reality as is needed to sell the emotions.

Oh, the emotions. Joel and Clementine quickly feel like a real couple. As we rewind through their past (at least, in one strand of the film) it becomes clear, through the fog of all the arguments, why they’re together in the first place. In one of the most freeing moments I’ve ever seen in a film, the two accept that, yes, it will all go horribly wrong, but it’s worth it. And then the endless, beautiful futility of it all is played out in a moment repeated over and over, skipping and eventually fading into purest white.

And that’s all enough to catch in my throat, but the stakes are higher than the traditional romantic threat of the two being parted – the permanence of memories and feelings are in jeopardy too. There’s something sacred about memory, a lesson I’ve been bludgeoned over the head with over the last year, and Eternal Sunshine reaches the only logical conclusion - in the end, for all our follies and humiliations, our past - every last awful part of it - is as vital as our future.

So why not spend a year of your life celebrating it, eh?

PERSON OF THE YEAR (feat. Tim Maytom)

2011-12-27T13:40:00.000Z

Aiding me today in my recap of 2011 is Monsieur Timothy Maytom - Agent of B.A.D.A.S.S., blogger extraordinaire and, I learnt this year, all-round top bloke. Last year, he picked Donald 'Childish Gambino' Glover as his Person of the Year, and I spent most of this year catching up and realising he was right at all along. Who will be this year's best human?

Amy Poehler

Last year’s Person of the Year, Donald Glover, was about recognizing a somewhat meteoric rise to fame. Not to reduce what was surely an awful lot of hard work by Glover, but his story is one of making the most of some very good opportunities. This year, we look at someone that has had a longer path full of a lot of hard graft, and no one could deny that she deserves every plaudit that is thrown her way.

Amy Poehler started out at Chicago’s famous improv theatre Second City, going on to be a part of the influential group Upright Citizen’s Brigade. From there, it was onto Saturday Night Live, and a well-known spot co-hosting the Weekend Update segment with Tina Fey. In her book Bossypants, Tina Fey tells of how Amy shot back at Jimmy Fallon after he called a bit she was doing 'not cute': “Amy made it clear that she wasn't there to be cute. She wasn't there to play wives and girlfriends in the boys' scenes. She was there to do what she wanted to do and she did not [especially - clean language ed] care if you like it.” This is the year when Poehler truly did what she wanted, and not only do I like it, I bloody well love it.

Parks and Recreation, which Poehler currently stars in, as well as produces and writes, is probably the best comedy on television at the moment. It does what no other comedy right now does, which is fight back against the 21st Century trend of meanness in humour. It doesn’t truck in cynicism, or wallow in embarrassment, or sit on the sidelines, snarkily commenting in a superior tone. Instead, it embraces and celebrates friendship, hard work and idealism, all while staying side-achingly hilarious. It manages to sneak (and sometimes trumpet) a feminist message onto US network TV without anyone pitching a hissy fit, and has assembled one of the best ensemble casts around.

Poehler’s Leslie Knope is a fantastic comedy creation, balancing competence and intelligence with naïveté and well-intentioned over-ambition. Her slow-burn romance with Adam Scott’s Ben Wyatt has been sweet and relatable, and her relationship with Rashida Jones’ Ann Perkins is one of the best-realised friendships on television. The episode that Poehler wrote this year, The Fight, delved into that friendship as the two had a very drunken falling out, and resulted in a truly hilarious half-hour of television.

Poehler was honoured this year with Variety’s Power of Comedy Award, where she gave a fantastic speech, that also saw Will Ferrell and Nick Kroll make out in the background. On a slightly more sober day, she delivered a speech to the graduating year at Harvard’s Class Day, where, between jokes and Bostonian accents, she spoke of the importance of humility, collaboration and how improvisations rules apply to real life. She’s also one of the minds behind the website Smart Girls At The Party, a brilliant community for young girls championing feminism.

Poehler’s talent, hard work and wisdom make her my Person of the Year. In every stage and aspect of her career, she has demonstrated the power of collaboration; that two people can make a change that one can’t, that asking for help can sometimes produce results one couldn’t dream of. In the year that saw the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, in the age that champions crowdsourcing and kickstarting, it’s a timely lesson, and we’re lucky to have someone out there leading by example.

BEST COMIC OF 2011

2011-12-26T20:18:00.000Z

Okay, we've got roughly a week of 2011 left, and a little less than that until finally get to my #1 Favourite Friday Film, so let's try and quickly recap all the culture that mattered, starting with my favourite comic series of the year...

Journey into Mystery
(Written by Kieron Gillen
Art by Dougie Braithwaite, Richard Elson, and Whilce Portacio)

“Ink is how words are chained to paper. Words are ideas, cast down from the Platonic firmament to this Earthly Hell. But even so, no matter how far they’ve fallen, words and what we can make of them are eternal,” says the Devil, as he feeds some poor innocent into a meat grinder to make ink. “You will live forever. You’re becoming part of a story far bigger than you could possibly imagine.”

As statements of intent go, it’s hardly the most subtle.

Yet coming from the mouth of Mephisto, resuscitated by writer Kieron Gillen as a wonderfully theatrical, mutton-chopped vessel of hot bubbling charisma, it is entirely charming. And he’s not even the main character. Not in the top ten, probably.

The main character of Journey Into Mystery (probably) is Loki Laufeyson, God of Mischief, half-brother of Thor, as recently played by the handsome Tom Hiddleston... Oh, and in the Marvel Universe he’s currently a child in his young teen, but don’t worry about that too much.

The point is, the comic bends pleasingly to his character. It’s the extension of Gillen’s work on Thor, but where his brother is a hulking great hero of the most ancient type (that is, the type that hit people with hammers), Loki is a much more interesting proposition. This is a tale which, as Loki himself puts it, “involves a little reading and even proper punctuation”.

Comics are so singularly ruled by superhero stories. Naturally, the focus is on action scenes - which, oddly, is something I’ve never thought think the medium handles particularly well. With time in the hands of the reader (for those of you haven’t read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, a clumsy recap: each panel represents a single moment, and by moving your eyes between panels, you push time along, at your own pace) there’s no room for the fluidity of movement of, say, a Bruce Lee film. Only two moments truly exist: the one before a punch lands, and the one after. Action scenes work on such a primal response that the effort of stitching these together yourself into a single action – so often the magic of comics – often strips away the effect.

So it’s nice to see Journey Into Mystery is a superhero book dedicated to solving its problems – the same, world-threatening problems – with violence of a more wordy sort. The first arc, spanning a suitably epic 10 issues, ended with Loki besting The Serpent, Fear Itself’s Big Bad, by merely changing the story. introducing a detail to the Serpent’s legend that gave his character a weakness. He did this, of course, using a magic pen.

As I say, it’s never been particularly subtle about its themes: the end of the first issue (#622, this being comics) dove into that black hole at the bottom of a question mark. The most fearsome monsters in the story are summoned by speaking their name. The Devil, to recap, turned some unfortunate bloke into ink. It’s a book about magic which reminds you that spells are just a series of words.

Compared to Gaiman’s Sandman, say, which it occasionally feels similar to (its love of meandering mini-plots), and often feels like a reaction to (see Nightmare, a clear parody of Sandman’s protagonist Dream), the focus is less on the power of stories and more specifically on the power of words. Perhaps unsurprising, given that Gillen spend the last decade working as a journalist. But it's an interesting choice, in a medium that sits at the crossroads between text and image, and it could mean the former overwhelms the latter - after all, there are rather a lot of caption boxes.

But the art is always given the space to tell the story. It’s not the reason to buy the comic – given my preference for clean cartooning, Braithwaite, Elson and Portacio all lean a little too much on the side of scratchy pencils for my tastes – but Braithwaite and Elson in particular are a perfect fit.

Still, you come to Journey into Mystery for the words. And on that front, it’s bloody good value - those gloriously florid captions and sharp, slightly-too-witty-to-be-thought-up-on-the-spot speech balloons fill the pages. At its best, this is a comic which feels like the finest pub conversation, insightful and incisive, with a friend who has drunk two or three of their chosen tipple. And only rarely does it have that ill-advised next drink, and allow things to spill over into dreadful, boring fisticuffs.

This isn’t about that Thor chappie, after all – it’s a story about Loki. And when he's such good company, Journey into Mystery is enough to make you wonder why he wasn’t the star all along.

Favourite Films on Fridays: #02, Fight Club

2011-12-23T22:24:00.000Z

The first thing about Fight Club is, it’s not subtle. This is a film which uses every opportunity to beat you senseless, which fills your ears and eyes, loud and brash and unapologetic. Look, here’s a Simpsons-esque cutaway to a fantasy sequence. Now we’re zooming in extreme extreme close-up through the interior landscape of a bin, or a brain. Here are cigarette burns – have you ever heard of cigarette burns? – and slipping frames. Subliminal images. A man being beat to bloody hamburger. It’s absolute sensory overload.

Fight Club can never quite stay still. It starts out as a film about the boredom of being a modern middle-class male, with touches of black humour. Then it’s about the pleasures of male company. The joys of two men hitting each other really hard. It’s the story of how one becomes a terrorist, that becomes a psychological thriller. (And all the while, hidden underneath is a love story, or maybe two.)

The second thing about Fight Club is, it’s very, very far from subtle. And there are a few good reasons for this:

One, for the sheer joy of the thing. I often talk about how much I love Ideas in film. To anyone who’s been following this list closely, you’ll probably notice that this ranks about concerns like Narrative for me. I’m talking about those big pop Moments where you’re presented with something you’ve never met before – the way a song intersects with a scene, or the way a camera moves, or observing something about life you’d never considered before, or the casting of Meatloaf in a supporting role. Director David Fincher had come to films from adverts and music videos, and Fight Club feels almost like a patchwork of three-minute experiments in style, stitched loosely together.

Which – two – is more or less exactly how the novel it’s based on was written, with Chuck Palahniuk collecting together all the stories he’d heard or lived and finding a framework. In this sense, it’s a perfect adaptation, changing and cutting where necessary but keeping the spirit. It’s the same in the dialogue, which is not quite real, and full of loose slogans and Did You Know?s, but is enchanting for it.

Three: Tyler Durden. Cinema is brilliant at crafting characters like Tyler Durden. It’s a medium where charisma rules and, looking back over the list - Ferris Bueller, John McClane, Jeff ‘The Dude’ Lebowski, Samuel L. Jackson, Ash Williams – it’s clearly something I’m susceptible to. Brad Pitt makes Durden the absolute bottled essence of cool. He’s fidgety, angry, attractive – even when he’s delegated to the back of the frame, swinging nunchuks or flicking away a cigarette, he’s the centre of the attention. He’s the hot centre the film crowds around, and like an impressionable youth, Fight Club copies its hero.

And also, four, his philosophy. Fight Club is about nihilism and anti-consumerism and anarchism, always the coolest standpoints, in that sixth form-y kind of way – screw buying stuff, eff the man! Those slogans the characters talk in really are slogans. The film itself is a manifesto, a doctrine, propaganda, and like any piece of propaganda, you can’t give the audience a moment to think about what they’re being fed.

But it's (five) not necessarily the film’s philosophy. Really, Fight Club is a satire on all that, and satire is by necessity always an exaggeration. It pushes all the arguments of the above to their logical extreme, to show us how ludicrous they become. The slogans echo and, coming from the mouths of Durden’s mindless followers, become uglier, climaxing in the horror of a houseful of idiots chanting “His name is Robert Paulsen” like it’s scripture.

All those big issues it deals with – whichever side of the fence you’re on – never really touched me, though. I liked the swagger of Durden, and some of the lines struck a place in my young lyrics-quoting heart, but the core of Fight Club for me is the friendship. (It’s actually not that different from Fincher’s Social Network in that regard, but that’s a discussion for another time.) The love between two men that, like the Romans believed, could be the greatest and purest love of all, and whether it’s compatible with a heterosexual relationship with a woman. For all its messiness, the story can be thinned down to: boy meets girl, refuses to admit he likes her, boy meets boy, tries to navigate relationship with both, chooses girl.

And that choice is celebrated with literal fireworks, as some triumphant Pixies plays us out. It can’t resist a last big wink, though, a big fat screenful of penis for one moment. This is still Fight Club, after all.

It’s that lack of subtlety that has often made me fearful to revisit Fight Club. It was the single piece of culture that had most impact on me as a teenager, and probably has the most responsibility for the person I am now – pushing me towards certain films and especially (via the original novel) books, and subsequently towards writing, and it made me think about cool, and the roles I’ve played in friendships, and I probably still cop some of Tyler’s swagger occasionally, especially when I’m drunk. To borrow the bit of Phonogram I always borrow, it was the fuel I burnt to become me.

And, as he’s mellowed out over the last decade into one of the greatest filmmakers we’ve got, I’d suggest maybe the same is true for David Fincher too. Perhaps Fight Club is meant to be grown out of. Those youthful relationships, forged in the early hours. Thinking you could change the world. Being able to laugh off losing a tooth. Being angry with the world in a way you don’t think anyone has thought about before…
It’s embarrassing to look back at those moments, isn’t it? But that never makes them more worth regretting than celebrating. Why shouldn’t it be the same for the films you loved?

A Quick Word about This Is My Jam

2011-12-21T14:13:00.000Z

Ah, the footprintless snow of a new social media platform. This Is My Jam. Like Twitter but for music, is the elevator pitch you can imagine its creators giving. Choose a song, pick a YouTube video or HypeMachine mp3, and show off your brilliant taste to whatever people you can convince to join up.
It's simple, and it's good-looking (as long as your chosen YouTube video has a nicely-sized preview image, or you can be bothered to upload a picture which, let's be honest, you can't) and, for me personally, it arrived at exactly the right moment.
With Spotify having reduced its listening limit to an amount I can apparently burn through in one working day, I needed a way of listening to new music, without doing anything illegal, before I commit to buying it. Neatly, the site runs all your friends' current Jams into a smooth playlist, so as long as people keep updating, I have an hour or two of cutely personalised radio station every day.
That curation streamlines the all-important discovery process. Frankly, I've never fully clicked with a single music publication, certainly not since Plan B closed down, and this means I can put everything whose taste I consider worthwhile in one place and force them to feed me new songs.
So that's Spotify ticked off, and Pitchfork... I wish it came a little closer to dethroning Last.fm, but at present there's not much in the way of an archive. As the end of 2011 approaches, and all the music I've loved this year slips through cracks in my brain, I'd appreciate a way to go back and check out everything I deemed worthy of a Jam.
The biggest flaw, though, is in what it shares with Twitter. You're given the chance to say a little something alongside your chosen track, but it really is a little something - 110 characters, by my count.
I appreciate discipline, and brevity - it's not a blog, after all - but it's too little for anything more than a jokey aside. The way I use it, listening to everything on offer before picking the day's finest, that's okay, but I want to tell anyone who doesn't use it like that why they should listen to my Jam.
Although... 'Because I have the greatest taste in music EVER, obv!' - that's less than 110 characters, isn't it?

Favourite Films on Fridays: #03, Up

2011-12-16T15:08:00.002Z

Disney has a grand tradition of death, and this isn’t the first time I’ve written about it, but what makes Up more special than Bambi, or even The Lion King, is how carefully it follows the grieving process. Everyone focuses on the silent montage at the start, which compresses a couple’s entire life together into four wordless minutes. It’s as fine a piece of cinema as you’ll ever see, and it’s reputation is well earned. But as in life, it’s not the death itself that’s really important – it’s what comes after.

And after, Up picks up with Carl, an old man, living alone. The brilliance of that montage is in the way it echoes throughout, and as Carl navigates his house, you begin to notice the hooks that have been set in your heart – the mailbox, the bottle-lid badge, the chairs – and that will be tugged mercilessly throughout. In my experience that’s more or less how it happens in life, just a little messier. You encounter innocuous little cues with rough edges that catch in your chest.

I admire the ruthless efficiency with which Up can bring me to my knees: a single shot of an inanimate object, a couple of notes of Giacchino’s score. But from what I’ve said so far, it doesn’t sound very fun, does it? What makes me love Up is the contrast.

After all, there aren’t many in-depth examinations of the grieving process that can also shift thousands of stuffed toys, are there? The film only wallows in this loneliness for a short time, before Carl escapes, into the sky, and towards Paradise Falls. Introducing the rest of Carl’s party – Russell the persistent ‘Wilderness Explorer’ boy scout, Kevin the giant bird, Dug the talking dog – Up turns into something as simple and likeable as any Pixar film.

But it doesn’t abandon that emotional core. All the conflicts are caught up in one another – Carl’s craving for adventure, as a younger man, resurfaces after he can’t have children; Russell’s largely absent father isn’t there to do his Wilderness Explorer activities with him; Kevin, the only character to have a full family, is separated from them. (Incidentally, I think you could make an argument for the characters representing Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, particularly the midlife crisis of generativity vs stagnation.) And, like all the best baddies, Charles Muntz is presents Carl from a different perspective – his airship is a much more literal museum, full of the bones of mythical creatures he hunted, as Carl’s floating house, but both are just as preoccupied with the past and with death. And of course, the film never shies away from lingering, for just one moment, on one of those mementoes.

Ultimately, though, life goes on, and all the grief sits just underneath the surface, the engine which drives all the thrilling adventure stuff. The world doesn’t suddenly turn black, beauty and humour still exist, and that allows Dug to exist – thank God – and Dug, in turn, allows Up to work. There aren’t many visual metaphors stronger than that house rising into Sega-blue skies, tugged upwards by a multi-coloured cloud of balloons. There are few more crushing than the half-burned house, heavier than the remains of balloons can carry, scraping along the rough earth as Carl drags it, alone, before grinding to a halt.

Up follows the same emotional waveform as most Pixar films, with the hero starting low, rising steadily to a high, then being brought down by the consequences of that rise, only to get over what brought them low in the first place and rise triumphantly.

Of course, that also describes most human experience, including grieving for a loved one.

I’ve made a big deal in the past about how the shape of Up could be emotionally educational, the implication being, for children. I’m going to come up front and say what I really mean is, for me. A while back, I lost my Nan; she was a wonderful and vital woman, and… frankly I lack the vocabulary to talk about this kind of stuff; I haven’t had to deal with death, really, since I was young. I suspect I’m not good at it.

Catharsis is one of art’s greatest virtues; Up provides a safe way to experience, and re-experience, difficult emotions in a controlled environment. It gave me a framework for understanding, and a context to place it in. Essentially, Up takes everything that’s bundled up in grief, and turns it into a story. I’m used to stories.

Swan Song: Hello Sadness, Goodbye Dirty Mistress

2011-12-15T13:58:00.006Z

Los Campesinos! released an album just over a month ago. It was inevitable I was going to write about it, and the odds were good it would be something long and overly theatrical. And boy did I deliver on those two promises.

"They were a teenage crush, the last of my actual teen years. We were into all the same stuff. I was quiet and awkward, they were noisy and joyful the way . Theirs was the name I scribbled into the margins of notebooks. When I scribbled in margins, it read AS 4 LC!, encircled in a clumsy red-pen heart.

Now, we’re both a little older, both like to think we’re a little wiser. In the interim, there have been drunken passes, the occasional disagreement, and the discovery that one of us really likes football and one of us doesn’t. (“I’m not sure if it’s love anymore…” croons Gareth in my ear. Steady on, now.) Today the more refined LC! fan snorts at the mention of You! Me! Dancing!.

We’ve changed. And that’s healthy."

It's possibly the finest use of The Dirty Mistress as a discrete entity I've managed. Messy, long, indulgent, heart-on-emo-sleeve, playing with form and dipping into personalities I've written in since that first Hold On Now, Youngster review. I'm really proud of it - almost as much as I am embarrassed - and I'd like to think it might hold interest for non-LC! fans because it's about the album discovery process in general, and about a few other things, I think.

This site, at least in my head, is meant to be the respectable face of things, and if I do write about Hello Sadness for it, it will be distilled into a more digestible review. So, it's a piece I would only have done on Tumblr.

Which is why I'm slightly sad to be curtailing this particular experiment. Feeling less like I had to write vaguely publishable stuff freed me up over the summer, to play with everything from recipes . And lots and lots of pictures of cute animals.

But doing anything for it - at least, anything beyond reblogging other people's stuff - slowed down a lot recently. Given that the original idea was to have content be more regular, to encourage people to stick it in their bookmarks, having a Tumblr has become kind of pointless.

So consider this a rebranding, a refocusing, and all that PR rubbish.

Favourite Films on Friday: #04, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

2011-12-09T20:21:00.004Z

I say John Hughes Movie, you think: teenagers, the 1980s, hot pink, awesome cheesy pop music that kicks in at just the right moment, the dull ache of nostalgia for an imagined childhood. Right? Doesn’t matter if you’ve actually seen a John Hughes movie or not – I mean, I’ve seen three – if you’re relatively conversant in pop culture, it has a meaning. For me, they’re magic words – John Hughes comparisons were what convinced me I needed to see Drive. (Sidenote: I really did, but that’s a story for another time).

Ferris Bueller is the reason for that.

(Don’t get me wrong, I love The Breakfast Club, but there’s a reason it didn’t make this list – primarily, that the clichés Hughes created stick out a little more in that film. The Allison de-gothing transformation scene is a bit painful to watch now. And that’s ignoring my instinctual feminist reading of it. But nevertheless, imagine The Breakfast Club holding a position somewhere below the waterline, around #56.)

Like all John Hughes Movies, like all good teen movies, it’s about innocence, and the loss of it. All of the characters are placed on that vital cusp, and it gets touched on more than once. Ferris might want to avoid high school – and get his friends out of it, at least for one day – but the fact that this is his last year, that it’s all coming to an end, is a major source of pathos in the film.

After all, in this world, Ferris is the uncontested king of all he surveys. The whole city, from freshmen to police department, are pulling for him to get through the imaginary illness he’s using to bunk off. Ferris is a walking magnet, both animal - he’s the kind of guy that will stop running for his life to introduce himself to two sunbathing girls in bikinis – and for pure good luck - there’s a moment at the grand all-action finale where he throws a baseball to turn off a radio; it hits the ‘off’ button perfectly and rolls neatly into a waiting glove. Ferris is irresistible by nature, and that pulls everything into place around him. But that can’t last.

There’s little doubt that this is Ferris’ last hurrah, that he’s peaking and rest of his life will roll slowly downhill. This isn’t even subtext, it’s directly text. "I'm going to ... put a dent in his future, so years from now, when he looks back on the ruin his life has become..." monologues school principal and nemesis Ed Rooney. Even his best friend Cameron predicts a sparkling career as a “frycook”.

The film isn’t afraid to question whether Ferris’ motives are selfish, or show the mechanics behind the curtain of Ferris’ charm, even – we see him turn it on, how manipulative he is, from the very start with his parents. Not that it makes him any less charismatic, mind.

It’s a legacy that would carry forward into all the post-Hughes teen films. Look at American Pie, or Superbad. Both are films with absolutely filthy minds, but innocence isn’t all about sex, or the lack thereof. In Ferris Bueller, these kids are getting laid, or at least talking about it, and there’s a reasonable amount of salty language, but they’re still figures as innocent as Blake’s young rosy-cheeked boys.

The film’s worldview is simple: teachers and sisters are the villains, girls and friends and cars and simple pleasure are the treasure. All that provides just enough grit to make it feel real; it’s still a entirely good-natured film. Even as it shows us that childlike quality fading into twilight, the world of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off remains untouched by what lies beyond, in the dark.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is an elegy to that period of our lives, and it’s sadfaced about how temporary it all is, how fast it goes by, to paraphase Bueller himself – but it’s still a complete fantasy. This, after all, is a film which repeatedly uses Yello’s Oh Yeah (aka the Duffman theme tune). It’s John Hughes doing what he did best: creating a fantasy world, a vision of the teen years that almost none of us had and, in equal parts, wish we had and romanticise we did. Or is that just me?

Favourite Films on Friday: #05, The Matrix

2011-12-02T21:32:00.005Z

What is the Matrix? I remember seeing that question everywhere when I was 10. It was at the forefront of the marketing, efficiently creating mystery in a mere four words. What? is? the? Matrix?

(If that’s a question you don’t know the answer to, I believe I am required to say two things. First, to make the traditional asinine comment about your head being buried in a shoebox under the crust of the Earth for the last decade. Second, to warn you: do not read this. Do not. You are a very lucky person. Go and find The Matrix on DVD, now. Your mind is purest white snow, before the first muddy footprint. Don’t read the back of the box, don’t do anything, just watch.)

What was the Matrix? I had no idea. Working off the snippets I’d seen on TV, I did exactly what you’d expect a 10 year old boy’s mind to do, I extrapolated. Somewhere in the recesses of my young mind are elaborate answers, whole imagined films. None of which, I am sure, bore any resemble to The Matrix.

I don’t remember first seeing it, or how much of the answer I’d picked up by then, but it was a couple of years later, on a fuzzy VHS, and it immediately became my favourite film.

Released in 1999, it hit the zeitgeist perfectly enough that it still felt brand new when I saw it then, so much it still seems convincing now. The Matrix is set in a future extrapolated from the end of the 20th Century, and all the stuff that seemed important and futuristic then: the internet, the idea of avatars and the fluid identity they brought, AI... And, for most of the film, that is the setting: a slightly tweaked version of 1999, and the technology available then, in all its clunky analogue glory. Modem-punk, if you will.

(I love the way that the Matrix-specific technology they sneak in – the bug the Agents put in Neo’s stomach, and the big vacuum cleaner Trinity uses to get it out – don’t quite fit with the smooth modern aesthetic. Like they can’t quite be constructed from the simulated-1999 vocabulary of the Matrix, and have to be cobbled together from odd bits and pieces.)

Everything manages to look more-or-less plausibly real. It helps how recognisable the inside of the Matrix is: the freedom fighters are just guys in trenchcoats and shades, exits are landline telephones, world-changing glitches are just moments of déjà vu. Its props belong to our world, just slightly twisted.

All of which allows it to go on flights of fancy. Primarily, in those action scenes full of impossible spectacle. I would’ve expected time – all the copies and parodies and rewatches – to dilute the balletic grace of the fights. But no, they’re still awe-inspiring. The way they move is how I imagine I’m moving when I’m really, perfectly drunk and dancing to my favourite song. Then suddenly gravity is being bent and the fight is in the air, on the walls…

But again it’s grounded: in how clearly it’s really the actors, not stunt men, and they are really doing really beautiful kung-fu. In the perfect intimate body-horror connection of… well, those connections. Things are always penetrating: the bug’s journey into, and out of, Neo’s belly button. The umbilical -giving that are pulled out when Neo wakes up. Syringes into bare flesh. Most of all, that big spiky ethernet cable sliding into the place where skull meets spine. The most horrifying deaths aren’t by machine gun, or helicopter explosion, or kung fu. It’s Apoch and Switch, comatose, having their connectors pulled out and tumbling down dead inside the Matrix.

But… oh, those fight scenes.

This film is the reason now, as a sort-of grown-up, I don’t accept the oh, it’s just a dumb action film argument. This is not a matter of meeting quotas.

The Matrix has action scenes that go beyond watchability, beyond the mathematics of x bodycount, y explosions and z headshots. They are beautiful and grounded in a real and present threat – and when that’s not enough, the Wachowskis are clever enough to pile on a threat in the other world, too, one that’s been neatly set up an hour before.

But then on top of that it piles other stuff: symbolism and references and and callbacks structure and all of that – this is after all, a film that reaches its climax in the same motel room it opened in. And a sense of humour and a plot and human characters and most of all, constant cool ideas. It’s sci-fi as it should be- just about plausible enough to have you questioning the stuff that matters, but more importantly never letting up, never catching its breath. As full of ideas as it is full of action.

I saw this film when I was 12 years old. I’ve been metabolising it, on and off, ever since. And then, we’re a decade on, and you give me Transformers 2? You feed me that and you expect me to be satisfied?

Favourite Films on Friday: #06, Donnie Darko

2011-11-25T17:19:00.002Z

Donnie Darko, for a sci-fi teen comedy about a boy and his imaginary friend saving/ending the world via the means of time travel and revealing paedophile's sex lairs to the world, is actually quite a small film. Perhaps the best way of explaining why it’s so good is to compare it against Richard Kelly’s next, Southland Tales, a film which is generally agreed to be a complete car-wreck.

Southland Tales touches on those same tropes, all the end-of-the-world stuff, purple prose and extreme drama mixed with comedy, but it’s swollen. There are dozens of characters vying for lead role, setpieces piling upon setpieces, musical segments… And it’s not just a (rather long) film, either- there are comic books and a fictional script, trying to fully explain all the complexities of the plot.

Donnie Darko, by contrast, is tight. It knows – and this is one of those films where the ‘it’ rather than the ‘he’ seems worth considering – exactly what it can achieve in its hour and three-quarters. The sci-fi plot is equally twisty and borderline nonsensical, but that’s just a backdrop, really, to the story of Donnie. A teenager growing up in a small town with emotional problems and fearsome intelligence, who meets a girl, grows up a little, and makes a decision. The story of one boy.

And, okay, to some extent one small community (most of whom we get to know fairly intimately at some point) too. The end of the world is bandied around, but it’s never a true threat. Not beyond the small contained world of Middlesex, at least. It’s a world populated by absolutely fantastic actors - Patrick Swayze, Holmes Osborne, Seth Rogen – and one which is laid out effortlessly, mostly by a couple of wordless sequences, some of the finest moments in the film. The camera sweeps through the suburban streets, the corridors of a school, to music plucked perfectly from the ‘80s.

One month. The film regularly turns back to a countdown, white text on black announcing how many days are left. At the very longest, it’s 28 days and all that time travel stuff I mentioned is really only over the space of a few days. At one point, Frank, the terrifying bunny thing, removes his gnarled mask to reveal idiosyncratically long hair and one destroyed eye, speaking in riddles. Why is he called Frank? “It was the name of my father and his father before me”. The film teases that maybe Frank is from the far-flung future, but in the end he’s simply not.

This is not to say, not to even momentarily suggest, that Donnie Darko is not ambitious.

(A stray paragraph here about the Gyllenhaals. I’m not really the kind of person who is a fan of particular actors; it’s not a skill I can necessarily spot – in the same way that, say, great technical guitar playing means little to me - but this film set up my love of Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal for life. They deliver every line absolutely perfectly. A quick example: when his girlfriend confides her father has emotional problems, Donnie cheerily responds “Oh, I have those too! What kind of emotional problems does your dad have?”. It helps that they’re both stunningly attractive, of course.)

Within those self-established confines, it does everything. Trippy sci-fi visuals - Frank’s bunny suit, the wobbly translucent ‘spears’ that grow out of people’s chests – rub effortlessly against straight-up comedy. “Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.” “How did you feel, being denied these Hungry, Hungry Hippos?” I could quote funny lines from this film as long as any comedy film on this list, and they’re deployed with precision.

A precision that leaks into all corners; Kelly has the mind of a great music video director. Not just in those montage-y soundtrack sequences, that collage of image and sound, but in simple camerawork like the first time we and Donnie meet Frank. He’s standing on a mound in a golf course in a long shot which fades into a close-up of Donnie, placing the nightmarish rabbit firmly within the outline of his head. Or how the whole screen tilts 90°, turning the letterbox on its side, to show brain-twisting moments. Donnie Darko is at its best when it’s understated, using the power of suggestion. Like how the wormhole portal – the symbol of escape – opens up in the middle of a cinema screen. Of course it does.

Again, this is all in the interests of keeping it tight. When it tries to explain its ideas directly – like in the much-maligned Director’s Commentary, or the moments of full-on cod philosophy. Some of the lines in this film, make no mistake, are of prose of deepest purple.

And make no mistake, it totally is a traditional teen film; in at least some ways. The complex web of high school relations; the stock characters- the hard-case bully and his tagalong, the inspirational teachers… There’s a Mom and Dad’re Out Of Town House Party! But they’re not cliché, quite.

People talk about how The Inbetweeners is just sooo accurate of their teenage years. And maybe it is. Donnie Darko mixes that John Hughes quality, of the youth you wish you’d had, with something that feels like exaggerated reality. (And, personal sidenote, those teachers, young and rebellious but caring, who get sacked, for me has a pretty direct correlation to two teachers I had at an impressionable point in my youth.)

I love art about the teenaged condition, more than is possibly healthy for someone of my age; Black Hole, Sleigh Bells, Buffy… They all amp those emotions up to match how how it felt, that mingling of great pop songs and girls and HIGHEST DRAMA. Everything turned up as high as it’ll go, all the comedy and love and terrifying rabbits from the future. Just like real life.

Favourite Films on Friday: #07, The Incredibles

2011-11-18T18:47:00.005Z

Here were are again: 'Alex loves Pixar films'. It's well-trodden ground at this point, yes, I'm predictable, I know, I'm sorry. But the beauty of the studio's best – Ratatouille, Wall.E, Monsters Inc – is that they're very different films, and The Incredibles is possibly the best example of that.

Being obvious: it was the first Pixar film to thrust human characters into the spotlight, rather than featuring animals/toys/monsters/beautifully-animated-inanimate-objects. Which is probably as much to do with technology as anything else – look at Andy and Sid in the first Toy Story, and compare them with the Parrs here. But that's not important, because the legacy The Incredibles is best examined alongside isn't that of Pixar; it's superhero films, And this is, by a very long way (by at least 43 spots, I guess) my favourite superhero film. There's just so much it gets right about 'supers', as the film calls them, on screen.

First of all, those powers. It cherry-picks the very best – using, more or less, the Fantastic Four template of stretchy one, invisible one, strong punchy one, but switching out fiery one for speedy one. If you ignore flying, it's pretty much the Platonic template for iconic super-powers. And then it shows them in such brilliant ways: with an opening action scene that shows Mr Incredible and Elasti-Girl in the field, establishing what kind of feats they're capable of quickly and easily. But then we cut forward 15 years, and see Mr and Mrs Incredible – Bob and Helen – in a more domestic setting, where powers are implemented casually: a crushed door handle, splitting up a fight between the kids, a car lifted over the head (possibly the strongest single image of superherodom in existence, stretching all the way back to the cover of Action Comics #1) in frustration.

The kids: Dash (speedster) and Violet (invisi-force-fielder). Their powers are teased in this setting, and only unleashed in the final third of the film. It's a family film in all senses. The super-powered setting just exaggerate a more mundane reality. Bob's secret crime-fighting trips are a mid-life crisis played out on a bigger scale; something that's never more obvious than in Helen's quiet fears that he's having an affair.
But it's designed to play to the whole family too. So it's bright and it goes pow! in all the right places. Action is pretty much constant, woven seamlessly in amongst jokes playing to both ends of the familial spectrum.

Most importantly, it's got that indefinable Disney quality, of pure sweetness. No film makes me smile more, so consistently brings a big goofy smile to my face. The ridiculous design of the throwaway characters – Bob's boss Mr. Huph; Edna Mode, fashion designer to the super-able. The beauty of the volcano lair setting. Just the way the superheroes move: take the setpiece where Mrs Incredible gets her extended limbs stuck in a series of automatic doors as she tries to take out a load of henchmen; it's a silly, funny extrapolation of her Elasti-powers, but it's genuinely thrilling too, and when she takes the bad guys down, it's easily as cool as the greatest feat of strength Mr Incredible is able to summon. Most of all, though, it's the relationships between the family members. It's touching is what it is.

This is a film, though, that understands that to have that Disney sweetness, to have it ring true without turning to cloying saccharine, you need danger, threat; grown up things. And so that mid-life crisis writ large is a threat to the marriage, to the stabilising centre of the family. It's a truism that cartoonier characters are easier to relate to, more universal, and that would explain how easily it attaches you to these characters.

And this is where we come back to the Pixar legacy. That moment that catches in your throat, a bittersweet trademark. Here, for me, it's the scene where Mr Incredible thinks he's lost his family, that the supervillain has killed them. It's not even a fake-out; the viewer knows they're fine, but still... It gets me choked up every time.

(For me, as I suspect for many people, family and Disney/Pixar films are inseparable. That Christmas of drunkenly tearing up on the sofa to Finding Nemo; cinema trips... my sister even reads the odd thing I write if it's about animation.)

And then it builds on top of that, finds every permutation of cinematic cake it can think and simultaenously both has and eats it. The James Bond set design and smooth cool of Mr Incredible's secret life, against the comedy of his out-of-shape chubbiness as he gets stuck in a pod launcher. He can be the butt of a joke without detracting from his iconic hero moments. Big action setpieces with the kind of spectacle that wouldn't be possible in live action without being plastered in ugly CG, but with the intimacy and investment I celebrated in Die Hard. It's as prismatic as any modern superhero comic.

This means it gets a bit muddled if you look too deeply at what it's saying. Is it wrong for Bob to shirk responsibility for cheap thrills and temptations (he's punished, his family are put in danger) or is he realising his true potential (it brings the family together, as a team)? Which brings us sort of neatly to the elephant in the room. What Christian “Solario” Otholm refers to as “an appalling moral to put in a children's film”. The idea that no-one should try to go beyond the limits they were born with. The villains (Bomb Voyage, Syndrome, Underminer) are all powered by technology. There's a moment where Mrs Incredible tells Violet that heroism is “in her blood”, and looked at through this filter it's wince-inducing. I spent much of my planning time for this article trying to work out a counter-argument. And I can't. It's a completely fair reading of the film.

Such are the dangers of being such an all-inclusive film in terms of material. But that message doesn't push through (or seem intentional, as if that ever mattered). The film is far too excitably scattershot for that; its only centre is family. The other stuff – like Frozone's role in the plot, for example – all kind of gets forgotten in the rush. “If the time comes, you'll know what to do. It's in your blood.” That reads very differently with a focus, optimistically blinkered as it might be, on the bonding of family than the binding of caste.

Favourite Films on Friday: #08, Die Hard

2011-11-11T23:48:00.002Z

What elevates Die Hard above every other cheesy action flick of the ‘80s?

Because make no mistake, this is precisely what it is. The sub-genre Alpha, the cheesy ‘80s action non plus ultra. What exactly differentiates it from, say, Above The Law, Steven Seagal’s debut released the same year?

It’s a scale thing. Most action films push to be bigger, more impressive. Die Hard keeps it small, confined. Look at John McClane, as we’re introduced step-by-step. It starts with a vulnerability: John McClane doesn’t like flying.

A stranger gives the invaluable advice to take his shoes off, make a fist with his toes. We’ll return to this later, but for now it’s time for the next step in our introduction: John McClane carries a gun. An action hero, maybe. Bruce Willis passes this off with easy charm. Don’t worry, I'm a cop.

Quickly, the pendulum swings back again: John McClane pulls a huge teddy bear from the overhead locker. It’s not a joke the way it would be if it was Arnie holding that teddy; not a sneer from an hard-man acting against type. It’s a warm little smile. This isn’t Arnie; it’s Bruce Willis. It’s different now, but at the time Willis was only known for his role in as the romantic lead of TV show Moonlighting.

Bruce Willis is a good everyman actor. An everyman with plenty of cool and a slight hard edge, but just a bloke like us all the same.

Lest we forget about that cool, though, we’re representing with a long shot of McClane and the bear, as he lights a cigarette and takes a single weary drag. In a series of quick signifiers – vulnerability, gun, teddy bear, cigarette – the character is laid out.

Of course, soon enough a bunch of Eurotrash terrorists take over Nakatomi Plaza and the running and gunning begins, but it’s vital that Die Hard took that time. The rest of the film cashes in what has been set up, hammering home McClane’s vulnerability over and over. He’s wearing a vest, showing all that soft squishy flesh, for a reason.

After all, most of the protagonists in action films are beyond relating to, either in what they can do or how they can act. Or, in many cases, both. To take a quick example from lower down the list, look at Arnie as the Terminator. He’s physically hardy– we see him take explosions to the face –but his behaviour is similarly inhuman, strong, invulnerable. (Which is kind of the point, as the whole film is him overcoming this and learning to be a person, but nevertheless...) It’s an interesting comparison with the other action films I love; take next week’s film, which emphasises the humanity of its heroes even more, but gives us people capable of incredible feats. John McClane is a bloke with a gun.

Die Hard goes to great lengths to set up its hero’s vulnerability, how supple and soft the flesh is, before it takes out the first nail and starts to hammer it in, as the gates and shutters come down and lock us inside Nakatomi Plaza. Looking at other action films, it’s remarkably small. John McClane isn’t saving the world, he’s fighting for the dignity of a single building. Relatively speaking, the stakes are pretty low, but they’re well established.

It’s claustrophobic, full of air vents; closed where most action films are open. The enemy are finite, laid out precisely: one guy versus twenty. Knowing the exact odds, there’s a simple mathematical pleasure to seeing them slowly climb in McClane’s favour with every baddie he takes down.

At the end of the day, Die Hard isn’t transcendent of its genre. It is precisely a cheesy ‘80s action film. But in its execution it is a masterclass, taking every opportunity to set up a credible threat. More importantly, taking every opportunity to create a fully human action hero, one who can be hurt. Most importantly, making us care that he might be.

Favourite Films on Friday: #09, The Empire Strikes Back

2011-11-04T23:59:00.000Z

The Empire Strikes Back's place here is almost token. No list would be complete without it, but it's standing in as a representative of quite how important Star Wars has been for me. After all, more than perhaps any other film ever, Star Wars has leaked out into all corners of our pop culture. Books and comics and games, sure, but far far beyond that. Lightsabers, dark sides and Wookiees, these things leaked out in the consciousness of a generation. Over the last 30 years, all this stuff bled out beyond the confines of three films so thoroughly that barely a minute of Empire's running time goes by without something you've seen riffed on elsewhere, whether on a screen or in real life. This would probably true even for someone who had never seen the films.

That kind of shared vocabulary means that Star Wars is an easy - and fun - topic to theorise and joke about. Every lazy stand-up comedian has got at least one joke referencing Star Wars in their repertoire. So what is there left to say? I already got my Kevin Smith on to talk about Return of the Jedi, positing that the films are just a huge playset, full of toys.

(I'll add a quick observation: have you ever noticed how little characters in the film seem to respect Darth Vader? Outside of the film, in our world, he's one of the most revered baddies of all time, an example to be carted out when discussing how design or mystery or costume can build a character's appeal. But most of the Imperial officers are open with their disdain for the Force, and treat him with all the hushed reverence of a Pizza Hut employee arguing with their manager.)

There's no point in telling you the story, laying out the characters or describing how things look. This is Star Wars, and that was all magically inserted into your brain when you were about seven years old. It's the middle child of the trilogy, which means it actually steps further away from traditional blockbuster structure than its siblings, and has the reputation as being the 'dark' one. It ends on an absolutely sublime cliffhanger, all moody and foreboding, but it's the film is still exceedingly warm and friendly overall. It is, however, more mature in a few other ways; there's something in the way it's shot which looks more cleanly professional than the others, and the characters crystallise best into almost-real people in this one. And it's got the bit where Han Solo says "I know", a.k.a. the coolest moment in cinema history.

(Another little point: I don't think most people realise how minimal George Lucas' influence over this film was. Lucas and Star Wars are two names married together in a way few other franchises and directors are, so it's odd to realise that not only did he not direct, but that his only writing credit is for providing the story.)

But it's all the same Star-Warsy nonsense that I love, really, with made-up words, silly voices and gigantic worms that live inside comets. Of this, too, it's possibly the best example: we're introduced to Boba Fett and Yoda, two of the series' best characters and purest action-figure fodder. It also brings in Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian, Space Pimp; a ridiculous character of another type and one of whom I'm increasingly fond.

It's a Star Wars film, is what I'm saying. A brilliant Star Wars film. You know what that means, don't you?

Favourite Films on Friday: #10, The Big Lebowski

2011-10-28T13:58:00.001+01:00

As a film, The Big Lebowski is a lot like its protagonist, Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski. It's lacking a little in forward moment, preferring to luxuriate in individual moments than get caught up in any big sweeping plot. They're both hugely influenced by what's around them: The Dude speaks largely in borrowed phrases from other character's dialogue, while the film steals from noir, slacker comedies and westerns. The main thing that Lebowski and Lebowski have in common, however, is that they exude purest undiluted charm.

The film is a pastiche of the hard-boiled-detective-pulp-noir tradition, in particular Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and the 1946 film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and, personality notwithstanding, The Dude finds himself placed in the role of detective. The film's humour and personality comes from how ill-fitting he is for the role; not so much hard-boiled as baked.

A case of mistaken identity leads to a urinated-upon rug leads to a meeting with the other, far richer Jeffrey Lebowski and his trophy wife Bunny. Who promptly disappears, as is the way of these things. It's something I've touched on here and there, but I staunchly believe that the detective story is the purest form of fiction, a single driving force driving reader and protagonist forward. Here it's used to stitch together a loose series of locations and setpieces, from a bacchanalian party at the pad of "known pornographer" Jackie Treehorn to the sweary smashing up of a stranger's car.

It gives the Coens an excuse to show off. There are shots of a naked woman against a sheer black background being thrown up beyond the top of the frame and falling out of sight before trampolining back up; dream sequences which mix opera, bowling, and porn. It's absolutely luscious cinema of a type that's rare in comedies.

The places we're led through are individually fascinating, brilliant proof that it's not just fantasy films that do great world-building, but it's The Dude's charm that ties the piece together as, for example, a fine rug might tie together a room. He's a force of personality, a common theme that will emerge a lot in the films to come (particularly numbers 5, 4 and 2). The kind of guy who goes shopping in his pyjamas, and buys a single carton of milk with a cheque. Without seeming to try, his appearance is totally iconic; dressing gown, shades, and permanent lowball of White Russian adding up to a slacker Jesus.

The film is full of quotable lines, and for the most part The Dude merely echoes them, but the fact that they're being delivered by Jeff Bridges. Every line is delivered perfectly, given the slightest spin, and he makes even the slightest movement almost quotable. It seems like an easy, comfortable performance but in truth Bridges is an high-precision surgeon of an actor in this film. He effortlessly makes The Dude someone in whose presence you want to spend all of your time. And The Big Lebowski, in two-hour chunks, gives you the opportunity to do just that.

Look, Ma, I Writ Somethin'!

2011-10-24T22:10:00.003+01:00

I realised today I've been a little quiet of late, so I'm currently assembling a few posts behind the scenes. However, there are a few recent things from the mouth of my Dirty Mistress that I've been really pleased with, though, so it's time for a little cross-promotion.

On Frozen Synapse, and its Similarities to Squares

"Like chess. That’s the old chestnut, isn’t it? The holy grail of strategy game design? And yes, Frozen Synapse is a bit like chess: a turn-based game of combat between two opposing sides, different classes - knight, castle, rocket launcher guy, shotgun guy, bishop, etc - each with their own ways of moving and attacking. Most importantly, it shares those mind-expanding moments when you can predict exactly what your opponent will do next, and the agonising slap to the brain when they do something totally different."

On Minigolf Flash Game Wonderputt

"Deep in Wonderputt’s DNA are those Grow games, where you click wildly to watch a monitor-sized world bloom into something ludicrous and beautiful. Like those games, the actual ‘game’ part isn’t so important; the visuals are the appeal here. It’s like watching the sketchbook of an accomplished doodler come to life, with enough interactivity to keep you involved."

On Florence & The Machine, as Remixed by The Weeknd

"It does all the stuff I imagine people who like Florence think her music does in the first place. It takes Florence Welch, human being with a rather nice voice, which let’s imagine as a single beam of white light, and then runs it through a prism, splitting it into the voices of many, rattling around inside your head. It transcends, into something that can only be supernatural."

On Cooking A Steak to Perfection

"Leave the steak. Seriously, leave it alone. No pokin’, no turnin’, no nothin’. You only want to have to turn the meat once, when the bottom is fully cooked. This should take two to three minutes, give or take depending on whether you want it more well-done or rare."

Favourite Films on Friday: #11, Pulp Fiction

2011-10-21T22:37:00.001+01:00

Inevitably, approaching the very heights of a list like this, as we now are, something changes. There's a move from films you love for one or two reasons, that you've seen two or three times to two-hour chunks of pure cinema you've seen enough times, talked about and fawned over enough that, over time, they've become woven directly into your personality. The relationship is just different: from now on, this list becomes pretty much The Films That Made Me. I'll try not to get too indulgent, try and keep the pesky author out of it as much as possible, but you're just going to have to allow me this one.

Watching Pulp Fiction now feels like nothing more snuggling into an old favourite pair of pyjamas. Baggy in places, sure, maybe with holes you've picked over the years, but familiar, and comfortable. There was much laughing at jokes the moment before they happened and - in the case of Urge Overkill's Girl You'll Be A Woman soon - singing along. For all the violence, drugs and naughty naughty swears, it was an experience best described as 'nice'.

So while it played: I reminisced about the first time I watched it - in the living room on a Friday night, while the parents were out - and doodling sharp-suited assassins in GCSE art. I spot moves I stole for awkward school discos before I could dance. Occasionally, I rolled over and watched the colours twinkle on the laminated poster of Jules & Vincent I bought on a school trip to France. I mentally placed tracks on the soundtrack (which I bought on the same trip, and which pretends to follow the film's chronology but doesn't, really) and finally worked out why Strawberry Letter 23 is on there, except for the fact that it's one of the best songs ever...

It was an intensely personal experience, is what I'm saying. I'm indulging myself a little, but that's what it felt like: the pyjamas I was wearing as I watched it, or the hot chocolate I'm sipping as I write this. Warm, fuzzy nostalgia of the kind I don't often have for my actual real-life memories of school.

Not that I had a bad childhood or anything, don't worry your pretty little self, but rather that I'm one of those people for whom memories don't come too easily. Retrieving them most often means a sharp wince of embarassment, or else fuzzy, like someone smeared Vaseline on the lens. As you're reading this, it's quite likely that you too define yourself by the culture you consume, at least occasionally. It's not an attempt to look more intelligent or interesting or, God forbid, cool (I certainly wouldn't be writing these if that was my aim). I'm not even sure it was something I chose. I just know that, on holiday in the small Spanish town I went to every summer for nearly a decade, when my mom points out a place and says 'remember when...?' I struggle, but that if I stand in one place for long enough I can give a rough idea of what page of which Discworld book I was on.

Which, if Pulp Fiction doesn't play the same role in your life, doesn't tell you much about the film - the casual non-linearity, the structure of interlocking short stories, the interplay of dialogue and soundtrack, actor after big name actor turning in some of their finest work and Quentin Tarantino doing a particularly poor imitation of Quentin Tarantino, etc. I'm sorry about that, but it's all widely available online or by talking to anyone who has ever heard of Pulp Fiction. All you really need to know is that for all my nostalgia, I was actually surprised by how vital it still felt.

The thing is, though, I'm pretty sure something does play that role in your life. Or a few things, most likely. It's a response I'm fascinated by, the way we can build identity out of pop-cultural detritus, that has fed directly back into the type of culture I enjoy. Like Pulp Fiction, for example. Like most of Tarantino's work, it's a just-about-digested mix of all the films that fascinate him. It's telling that one of the main criticisms levelled at his work is that it's self-indulgent. Which is a criticism I'd lay firmly at the feet of this entry, too. But to that I say: so what? And hope someone's still reading.

Favourite Films on Friday: #12, Hot Fuzz

2011-10-14T08:57:00.002+01:00

"This relationship between men is one of the key tenets on which all of Pegg, Frost, and Wright’s work is built, along with the oft-cited pop-cultural obsession and the symmetrical structures of callbacks and foreshadowing which we’ll be looking at in a future post."

Ah yeah I did. Consider that foreshadowing, and this the callback. If we want to reach back even further, my review of Chris Nolan's Inception might be useful: I compared it to a Rubik's cube-style puzzle, or a clockwork-tight machine of interlocking pieces of plot/idea/dialogue. Hot Fuzz does all that - it's got a whole lot of guns on a whole mess of mantlepieces, the dialogue is full of repetitions and variations - but at the middle of that ticking machine of gears and pistons, it manages to stuff in a human heart.

(The heart being the relationship between Nicholas Angel and Danny Butterman. That'd be the romantic relationship between two straight men, then. Tick!)

I know it's generally considered second to Shaun of the Dead, and please understand that, as a film with The Fratellis on the soundtrack, my love comes hard-earned. But Hot Fuzz is an astoundingly well put-together piece of work. It feels crafted, like every decision was carefully thought through: the confident second album.

And it uses its structure for so many different purposes: first, most obviously, comedy. Take the swan, which evolves from the reversal of a classic Simpsons prank call (Mr P.I. Staker, it turns out, doesn't think his name is particularly funny) to a running sight gag. But, and here's the thing: it's also key to the action of the film. The swan turns out to be a vital element in winning the film's final 'boss fight', which feels natural - this is no cygnus ex machina - and funny. It's an effortless juggling of the film's two halves, the mundaneity of small-town boredom vs big Michael-Bayesque action.

It's also a good way to put the viewer inside Angel's much-discussed brain - which is tightly focused and trained, like a bureaucratic British Batman - as he tries to solve the mystery. First of all, everything is rigidly ordered, as it should be when your protagonist demands paperwork after a firefight. But it also gives the impression that clues are being laid, that we can solve this mystery. It is all there from the very start, and it's actually probably easier as a comedy to lay down each piece of the puzzle without them being noticed, because it's indistinguishable from the bits of set-up that will be played for laughs. (The solution to the mystery, incidentally, is probably the film's weakest element, because it feels so arbitrary; thinking about the film's political stance, though, it is rather more thematically satisfying.)

Meanwhile, it sets up a sense of place: the repeated references, a sign first, then a joke, to the model village which, of course, ends up as the setting for the big finale. Meanwhile, it's helping make the plot fit together and not collapse into total farce. Meanwhile, it's keeping a certain part of your brain occupied and entertained, the part of you that might have occasionally watched Spaced with the reference-explaining subtitles turned on... Tying it to last week's idea of films as music might be a callback too far, I suppose?

There are hundreds of other things to like. Timothy Dalton as the very obvious baddie, chewing so much scenery that of course he ends up ... well, chewing scenery. The way it takes a certain strain of very British, "you're not even from round here!" conservatism* as its villain, and places the 'hoodies' alongside the heroes. Nick Frost using his natural sweetness to completely sell the central romance. Count Buckules having his head exploded by a piece of masonry. The dozens of great British comedians and actors. The Iain Banks/Iain M Banks joke, which also makes me feel clever. The continued use of the smash-cut montages of the mundane: filling in paperwork, photocopying...

But the thing I always come back to is how well structured it all is. Like Inception, like Watchmen (not Zack Snyder's), Hot Fuzz is a film that rewards careful watching and rewatching by tickling that little part of your forebrain that tells you 'oh, I'm well clever!' for noticing. But it weaves this careful structure into something with as much heart as brains

*DISCLAIMER: Note the small 'c'. Not in the political sense, friends who I've argued about the world of difference that capital letter means. I mean a genuine wish for things to remain in stasis.

Spelunky: An Oral History

2011-10-13T10:47:00.006+01:00

A sample piece written for a job application. Me being me, I decided doing something experimentally foolish was a brilliant idea: an oral history of possibly-favourite-game-ever and definitely-most-written-about platformer Spelunky that would try and explain, through fictional interviews with the characters, everything you needed to know about the game. Hmm. You can guess how that went.

Spelunker #1 (professional adventurer): Putting the faded photo in my pocket, I squeezed the whip at my side, and thought of her one last time. That's all it took to get me down here, beneath the surface of the world. Of course, it's different for everyone. Now, shh. That statue's a trap. You've got to time this just perfect--erkkk

Spelunker #23: I've never seen another spelunker. No bodies, even. Not a soul. It's almost as if – nah, that'd be impossible – as if there're an infinite number of caverns down here. But damn me if those caverns ain't full of good-lookin' dames.

Marion (damsel in distress): Just because this dress shows off my curves, doesn't mean I'm not up on my feminism. And frankly, the gender politics are appalling. These fellas'll use you as a shield as soon as rescue you. And then they expect a kiss? Don't even get me started on the Parlours.

Rudy (proprietor, Rudy's Kissing Parlour): Look; I provide a service. A man like that, big adventures on his mind, sometimes he just needs a kiss, eh?

Pancho (proprietor, Pancho's Speciality Shop): It's a dangerous business. But a man like me, knows how to specialise – capes, jetpacks, teleporters – there's big money in it.

Spelunker #72 (ex-adventurer, spending his retirement fused irrevocably into the scenery): ...the time I got a teleporter? Ah, I remember it fondly. Course, I probably should've looked where I was going a little better.

Ivan the Shopkeeper (proprietor, Ivan's Armoury): One of the buggers shot me! It's just not cricket; a man stocks a handy range of shotguns, down in the dark places, he shouldn't have to expect this yobbery.

Spelunker #99: By means we needn't go into, I acquired a shotgun. Deep in the belly of the beast with a handful of boomstick. I was invincible. Those blasted spiders melted into red mist before me. Then some old bearded bloke with a grudge – and worse, a shotgun of his own - was waiting for me by the exit. The rest was bloody history.

Jethro (professional tunnel man): Do you know what it's like, being the only black guy under the Earth's crust? Whitey's off having adventures with a girl over his shoulder, and here I am, no-one to talk to, shovelling dirt. They're all addicts, if you ask me. Get what's coming to 'em.

Spelunker #118: They'll tell you it's all about greed. Don't listen. The gold, jewels, that little number that ticks up somewhere in your head, that's just window dressing. Why do so many of us do it? It's about seeing new places. And they're always new. People talk about travelling, broadening your horizons. Finding yourself? Try finding a bloody huge mutant psychic brain.

Spelunker #199: This was it: just a giant stone head between me and the big time. I dispatched it quick enough, right into the lava. A door opened. Glory! Except... I forgot to leave a way out. Sigh. I'll jump into the lava meself, then.

Olmac (giant stone head): Ummmg.

Spelunker #199: The afterlife turned out to be a lot of numbers carved into a rockface. And I wasn't even the highest score.

Project 52: The Aftermath

2011-10-12T17:46:00.003+01:00

It's been two weeks since we wrapped up Project 52's coverage of the DC Comics relaunch. It didn't take long for us to start jonesing for more, and so we all got together in a dark corner of the internet, and laid out our thoughts on the relaunch, the comics, and the process of reading and reviewing a hell of a lot of comics. The results, heavily cut down to make them faintly readable, are produced below.

How many of your titles will you be picking up next month, now you’re not reviewing them?
Michael: Batman and Wonder Woman. Snyder has a good take on Batman and I really want to see how he writes Bruce Wayne some more. I'm a Greek Mythology nut so I like that they're playing that up in Wonder Woman.
Alex: In my case.... Action Comics, because Grant Morrison is Grant Morrison and I want to know where he's going with it all. Swamp Thing, because it was brilliant and the art was sumptuous.
Oh, and probably Wonder Woman and Batman, though I might wait for the digital copies to drop in price after a month. With the exception of Swamp Thing, though, they're all just out of curiosity of what they'll do with it.
Bret: Animal Man and the Green Lantern one that I’ve already forgotten the name of. The one with Kyle Rayner [New Guardians]. I would also like to pick up Action Comics #1 as I never actually read it.
Tim: I think the only thing I'm going back to in singles will be Frankenstein, but I'll definitely pick up some in trades. Probably Aquaman, Wonder Woman (I'm a myth nut too) and Birds of Prey.
Oh - I might do singles for Stormwatch too, but that's more for affection for the characters than on the strength of the first issue, which looking back was probably weaker than I originally thought. And I'll steal Bret's Animal Man and New Guardians.

Will you be buying anything when it comes out in collected trades?
Alex: I'll probably pick up the trade of Batwoman, and maybe Justice League Dark if it gets good reviews.
Bret: To be honest, now that I think about it I'm probably going to wait till they're all out in trades. I've just never been a fan of singles really. I wanna read the whole story at once, not in parts.
Tim: Writing for the trade is a real problem that this relaunch highlighted. It feels like few people know how to write a compelling single issue anymore.
Alex: My non-comics-reading friend Geoff was asking about that from reading the reviews, actually. He's looking for comics recommendations at the moment, but we totally put him off the idea of reading single issues.
Michael: I really think this relaunch would have been stronger if the first issues felt complete and managed to hook people.

Relatively speaking, we’re all non-DC readers: what preconceptions did you have about what makes DC comics different, and did this impact on your enjoyment?
Michael: I think DC is better known for their cosmic stuff now than some of the other companies. Marvel has the street-level characters and DC has the Gods, and those who live amongst the stars
Bret: DC for me is now summed up by the idea of great powers and some flimsy characters behind them, like we got back in the four-colour days.
Alex: My opinion of DC has always been tied up with the idea of convoluted continuity we mentioned in a lot of the reviews. For example, I’ve also been rereading Final Crisis, and while I enjoyed it, I still have no real idea what's going on or who half the characters are.
Tim: It varied from title to title. The two Legion titles were almost completely incomprehensible to a newbie, but I thought something like Aquaman did well by relying on general public perception of the character, rather than lots of continuity nods.
Michael: I actually think my very vague perception of Deadman hindered my reading of it in a different way. I was slightly aware of the character from his appearances in the animated DC Universe and yet I was still put off by the amount of time the book spent telling me the new status quo.
Tim: It was a tricky balancing act as far as status quo and continuity goes - trying to make things accessible to new readers without alienating old ones, and explaining how things sit in the new relaunch without turning issue one into a flood of exposition. That ties back into the whole 'done in one' first issue thing - if you give yourself one issue to hook people in, they're more likely to stay if Issue #2 is explaining the character's place in the new universe for all the continuity nerds out there.
[Ten minutes are spent grumbling about continuity, the minutiae of how everything fits together DC's new 'Five Years' timeline, and suggesting DC might already be writing themselves into another Crisis.]
Bret: ...Ultimately though (and I feel this is something DC just doesn't understand) story is more important in a comic than continuity. If you can tell a good tale, it shouldn't matter if it lines up with something that happened 30 years ago. That said, there is that weird woman in red. I take it you all spotted her? It looks like she appears in every issue.
Tim: Yeah. Maybe a year down the line, she'll have a miniseries just explaining how all the continuity lines up. I'm sure it will be riveting reading.
Michael: Seems like she might be there for DC to take this all back if they need to. An escape strategy.

What were your first impressions, and what do you think will be the lasting legacy of this relaunch?
Bret: When I heard about the New 52, I wasn't excited. I just rolled my eyes.
Michael: I honestly thought it could be a good idea in theory. If they stick to it. I think it's one of the best chances comics have ever had to bring in new readers, but after the first month it feels like business as usual.
Tim: We've been talking about a hard reboot, what with the Women in Red and all, but I think it's more likely that once the new sales shine is off, things will slowly slide back to how they've always been. For example, social crusade Superman will slowly turn back into regular old Superman.
Bret: The Superman I read (the non-Action Comics one) just felt like regular old Supes to me
Tim: It's a great example of how they've mussed up to me. You have a great opportunity to create an interesting new spin on the character, but you have to have another title just to keep the fans who don't want change happy.
Alex: I think this is just the nature of comics. It's prismatic. Ultimately, you've got two people simultaneously writing the same character. Maybe working off the same notes, but they can't respond. So a fresh start kind of can't work with two titles.

On a more positive note: What were your favourite things about the relaunch?
Tim: Frankenstein! And Aquaman!
Michael: I can be positive! We have a good Animal Man book. And Swamp Thing! I haven't read Frankenstein but it's great DC are publishing it, and I want to read it. And Demon Knights and Justice League Dark are books that I want to check out.
Alex: I'll say this. It all felt more like an 'event' than anything else I've experienced in comics. Much more than a summer crossover or whatever. (Though, at least partially because I did this with you guys...)
Bret: My favourite thing about the relaunch was doing these reviews. Because if it wasn't for this, I wouldn't have read a lot of the weirder titles that I did, like my man Ommy's for instance, and I probably would have skipped Blue Beetle, Aquaman and Animal Man.
Tim: Basically, the times when they took the opportunity to put a new spin on a character, or shine a light on an interesting corner of the universe. It's great that people like Swamp Thing and OMAC and Animal Man all get books, and that thanks to the relaunch, they have a much better chance of finding an audience. I definitely get the impression they are trying to produce something for everyone, which is admirable.
...Sorry - everyone who isn't a woman
Alex: ZING!
Bret: As funny as that is, I'm not sure it's fair. Batgirl and Supergirl (costume aside) had some very good titles.
Michael: Obviously everyone is different and people like having a character they can relate to and see themselves in. Hence why diversity in comics on all levels would be handy.
Alex: But ... does 'fiction for women' necessarily have to be 'fiction starring/featuring women' What DC had the opportunity to produce here was something like... Lost. Which was largely male-orientated in its cast, let's be honest, but appealed to both genders. My point is, it's not the gender of the character it features, it's the huge fat roadblack that is that horribly leery Red Hood comic Tim reviewed.
Tim: It does feel like the biggest story to come out of the relaunch (besides the fact they were relaunching) was the awfulness of Red Hood and Catwoman.
Michael: What? Aren't people annoyed that they got rid of Deadshot's moustache?
Tim: It doesn't create a good impression for women who are interesting in picking up new titles because of this relaun... THEY GOT RID OF DEADSHOT'S MOUSTACHE!?! SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING!
Bret: ...Deadshot?
Alex: (The story of the entire relaunch there, in four lines.)

Have you been buying the digital comics? Are day-and-date digital comics the future?
Michael: Yeah, on iPad. I've been too busy to get to the store and yet I've been able to buy those digital back issues and the new issue of Schism. I will say one thing about digital comics: they can't cope with a double page spread. Otherwise I am perfectly happy to read comics digitally.
Bret: I don't think I'm ever going to download comics. I just like owning the book. It's the smell, and the experience. It's why I like the cinema and don't just watch movies at home for half the price. You start taking away from that as an experience and you'll lose my custom.
Tim: I haven't really looked into digital comics because I prefer the physical object, be it floppy or trade, and I have access to a reasonable LCS, but I still recognise that it's an important step, and a whole new market to access. It's a lot easier to get people to pick up Batwing #1 when they don't have to venture into a grotty basement that smells of despair to get it.
Michael: I like collecting comics, I like flicking through comics and I love how trades look on my shelf. But I am running out of space. Those five books I downloaded last night are not taking up space.
Tim: I think it somewhat taps into the collector/fetishist aspect of geekdom, just like how some people still prefer vinyl.
Alex: The thing about single issues is, and I think it's what DC especially survives on, it's the soap opera element. Like, there's this world where stuff's constantly going on, and you want to keep up on a weekly basis.
Tim: Yeah - I think that's why I kept up with X-Men far into it getting sucky.
Alex: And digital comics give me a way of doing that without falling back on Wikipedia, or flicking through in a shop, or even more illegal methods...

So: it's 6 months ago. The four of us are put in charge of DC. What do we do differently with this relaunch?
Bret: Actually, can I stop you there? First off: why would we even want a relaunch?
Alex: Okay, going on what we've said earlier:
-it gives us publicity
-it gives us a reason to make a big thing of going digital
-we can launch some more 'out there' titles, genrewise
-some people are stunned when faced with part 543 of a story
-my girlfriend didn't know they still made new superhero comics
Tim: I think a relaunch done well can do all the things Alex mentioned and more. It's a risk worth taking, and a ballsy move on DC's part.
Michael: And, you don't need to undo everything. As we have seen, we'd get to pick and choose. And most importantly, those comics still exist.
Bret: How about this? We do what DC actually did. We have a story staggered through time and tell flash backs but we sit down first and we work out EXACTLY when everything is meant to happen. And then, for the readers who really care about continuity we produce a timeline, or a book only dealing with where everything fits in over all, like a reader's guide to the new universe.
Tim: I think that approach would work, as long as you don't make the new timeline the focus of the first issues. You make the Issue #1s one-offs to hook people in: done-in-one stories that explain who the characters are and why they matter. Then you explore your past as you tell further stories.

Was the relaunch a success? Did the titles feel like the start of a new universe? Did it take advantage of all the opportunities it had?
Michael: They certainly sold those comic books.
Bret: As an opportunity to attract new readers to some titles they maybe previously wouldn't have read, I feel it's been a success. Also, DC really does feel like they've brought out a book for everyone. However, as a relaunch and a chance to retell their main stories it's failed and will fall back on it's old ways sooner rather than later. I just hope it'll be at least 10 years before they feel the need to rewrite this new universe they've created... again. But I don't think that'll be the case as even after the first issues there are already continuity and timeline problems.
Alex: For me personally, I feel like this relaunch has been a qualified success. My DC reading list generally consists of however many titles Grant Morrison is writing at that moment, but with this I've finally picked up some stuff I've been hearing buzz on forever - J.H. Williams on Batwoman, Scott Snyder's work. I even read a Geoff Johns comic.
On top of that, I've been reading a lot of comics journalism on the relaunch and I've been picking up trades of older DC stuff (aforementioned Final Crisis, the original Justice League International). But I think I'm being optimistic because of how much of a pleasure Project 52 has been. Even through bad issues (and there have been a few), I've been fascinated by the shape of the thing as a whole, and the way it feels like a potential game-changer. But ... in six months... who knows?
Tim: DC had a great opportunity here, to tell new interesting stories and make a big inroads into gaining new readers. But the relaunch overall feels rushed and lacking organisation, so the success came down to the individual titles and their creative teams, which is always going to be varied. What we need is CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN.
Michael: Like Harvey Dent?
Tim: Exactly.
Michael: We wanted Harvey Dent but the relaunch we got was more like Two Face. Or something.
Tim: We got the hero we need, not the hero we deserve. Or something. Then again, it's only comics. Why so serious?
Bret: Who wants to see DC do a magic trick? They can make 70 years worth of continuity disappear! TA-DA!
Tim: The Second Law of Comics Thermodynamics: Any critical discussion of the art form will eventually devolve into Batman puns.

Favourite Films on Friday: #13, Jackie Brown

2011-10-07T15:31:00.004+01:00

Jackie Brown: the third Tarantino film of five, the one people tend to forget. Naturally, it’s one I love dearly. How is it different from all the rest? Well, it marks the moment before Tarantino dived into the self-referential genre stuff, and is a bit slower and smoother than the rest of his work, and I think it’s generally considered his most mature work. But I don’t want to talk about that stuff. Just watch it, it’s great, and if you like Tarantino you’re really missing out, okay?

I want to talk about music. That means, I realise, talking about one of the things that doesn’t differentiate it from Tarantino’s 0ther work: after all, he’s always been handy with a soundtrack. It’s easy to rattle off a list: Little Green Bag, Misirlou, Battle Without Honour or Humanity, Cat People... But this is a whole other level.

Because it’s never just been about the music. It’s about how Tarantinos entwines them with the film, to make something bigger. I could talk about the opening, where we track, following Jackie as she walks through an airport to the sound of Across 110th Street, and how it tells us pretty much everything we need to know about the character or how it should be one of the most iconic scenes in recent cinema.

We could reminisce about Strawberry Letter 23, how its opening is one of the most magical minutes in all of music, and how beautifully it complements a scene of Samuel L. Jackson preparing to stone-cold murder one of his friends. How the gliding vocals as he pulls those gloves on develops that Stuck in the Middle/torture juxtaposition into something far more subtle and sinister.

I could go on like that all day. I really could. But I want to tell you my latest theory. We’ve already considered Kill Bill’s novelistic chapters, but I think Jackie Brown is the perfect illustration of how musical Tarantino’s work is. Obviously the use of songs, yes, but: the way the greater plot so often gets sidelined in favour of dipping and peaking tension. The rhythm of dialogue. The non-linear style that returns to certain moments, chorus-like. The focus on Moments.

There’s a way of looking at music that’s well expressed in the work of Tom Ewing, and one I tend towards when thinking/talking/writing about music, that puts the focus on these individual Moments. You know: the thrilling peaks in the middle of those repeating structures, that demand your attention every time a song plays. It might introduce a new idea, or put the emphasis on one instrument, or maybe a production trick that tweaks the way everything sounds.

In Tarantino, this manifests as those quotable moments of dialogue (“Our ass used to be beautiful”, the AK-47 speech, 90% of the things Sam Jackson says in this film) and little stylistic quirks (the ubiquitous ‘trunk’ shoot from inside a car’s boot, the use of white text on black titlecards). There are valleys – and Jackie Brown is a long film, so be prepared for a whole lot of valley – that provide the rhythm, and then layered on top of that, and on top of the push and pull of these characters and the constant threat of them killing each other, are these beautiful moments of style. People criticise Tarantino for being style over substance. I say, style is the substance. Have you never listened to a pop song?

The Complete Project 52 Reviews

2011-10-04T11:12:00.000+01:00

Here we are, then. All of the New 52 #1s from DC, reviewed by myself, Bret "OMAC" Canny, Tim "Mr Terrific" Maytom, and occasionally Michael "Wonder Woman" Eckett. There's some great stuff in there, especially the reviews of OMAC #1, Frankenstein #1, Batwoman #1, Deathstroke #1, Legion of Superheroes #1, DC Universe Presents Deadman #1, Batman #1, Aquaman #1, Flash #1...and many more. Also: Tim's continuing explorations of the New DCU's less superhero-y side; Bret's beautiful habit of nickname-giving, and a whole lot of ranting (largely from me). Nerds? Us?

Anyway, if a particular cover grabs you by the eyeballs, just click on it to be taken to the relevant post.

Project 52, Week Five: Comparing notes on Justice League Dark

2011-10-01T14:30:00.000+01:00

And so we find ourselves at the end of our little adventure at last. Five weeks, four gentlemen of the blogosphere, 52 comics. Somehow, we reviewed 'em all. So, to celebrate, let's finish off with a double review: Alex vs Bret on...

Justice League Dark #1

Written by Peter Milligan
Art by Mikel Janin

Bret's Review:

You know that feeling you get? When you’re surrounded by cool people talking about cool things and you don’t have any idea what’s being said but you know you’d better keep damn quiet and pray you don’t get asked a question, because you know full well if you open your mouth you’ll sound like a fool? [deep breath after long sentence] ...That’s the feeling I got from Justice League Dark.

I feel like this comic was better than good but I honestly don’t know why. I’ll start with the bits I fully understood. The Justice League, after having investigated some kooky goings on, have narrowed down their suspects to the Enchantress who then swiftly defeats them with magic. Against Batman’s will, Zatanna decides magic is her thing and so steps up to deal with the threat. That’s all we see of that side of the story and it’s only 6 pages worth. The rest of the time is spent introducing this new other team who I should imagine will join forces to defeat the foe which the Justice League could not.

HOWEVER! I don’t know who most of these new guys are. DC have taken a stance of “our characters are so bad ass they don’t need introducing” and normally I’d have a problem with that but here I get the feeling that it’s my fault I don’t know who anyone is! As I know characters such as Deadman, Shade the Changing Man and John Constantine have all had their own solo titles I feel like DC have essentially put all these guys together in one book. And the nerd part of me that was obsessed with collecting all 150 Pokemon LOVES the fact that they’re doing that. It’s what I loved about the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics. But here I don’t know who anyone is (except for John Constantine who I now know is a 100% English stereotype, complete with use of the words “geezer”, “bloody” and “bollocks”)

Did any of this make the book less fun for me? No. I actually really liked it. The scene with the June Moons on the motorway really made me sit up and pay attention. The characters first appearances were handled nicely as well. Even though they didn’t give a full explanation as to who everyone was or what they could do, I got the sense that it was deliberate which I’m okay with as long as it suits the story. It’s got some great art work to boot and every scene has some stunning backgrounds.

Overall, it was a very good book, let down only by the fact that it had so much content that it couldn’t fit an entire story into its first issue. There have been worse comic crimes by far.

Rating: B-

Alex's Review:

I guess it’s probably a sign of just how many comics I’ve read of this New 52, but everything is beginning to meld into one. It happened with The Dark Knight, and now it’s happening with this. Odd bits and pieces of it reminded me of other issues, but I couldn’t tell which ones, exactly.

Justice League Dark is basically equal parts Demon Knights and Swamp Thing. Bad global things are afoot, outside of the standard Justice League jurisdiction. Bad magical things.

And so a collection of weird, magicky characters - drawn largely from the Vertigo stable - have to team up and sort it all out. Most of whom get the spotlight for a page or two, which establishes them nicely. And… that’s about it really. All the pieces are set (more than Justice League #1, but less than Animal Man #1, for anyone playing along at home). There are a few nice ideas, especially in how the magic threats manifest themselves, that feel more neatly integrated than Demon Knights’ ever did. The proper Justice League (the one we haven’t seen come together yet, back in the actual Justice League title) fail to fight off a swarm of rotting teeth in a series of panels that heavily recall Swamp Thing’s horror scenes…

This is the last comic I’m reviewing for Project 52, and it’s late at night and I’m tired. All of these might explain why everything feels so amorphous, so melted into one. But it’s started to happen, and while Justice League Dark is a good comic, it’s unmistakably a victim of this. There’s nothing - except Janin’s Irving-esque digital art - that makes it stand clearly out from the rest of the fantasy/horror-tinted titles I’ve read. It doesn’t help that two of its characters are shared with other titles - DC Universe Presents’ Deadman, Demon Knights’ Madame Xanadu…

Already, to gather material for this review, I’m flicking repeatedly back through it. Already I can feel the onset of: Now, which one was it? With all the creepy stuff… The one with the green dude? Maybe? No? I’m absolutely sure it had Superman in it…

Rating: B-

This has been Project 52. Thank you, and good night.

Project 52, Week Five (Teen Titans/Hawkman/Dark Knight/Firestorm/Superman)

2011-10-01T12:00:00.000+01:00

And so we near the final curtain. Reviews #47-51 of Project 52 include the new rather garish-looking Teen Titans, Tim taking a look at the relaunch's two most ridiculously named titles, and close on the title that Imogen "Smallville-fancier" Dale said was the only one she'd be interested in reading about - Superman #1.

Teen Titans #1
Written by Scott Lobdell
Art by Brett Booth
Reviewed by Bret

The first word in the comic summed it up for me. “Meh”. It was okay, Teen Titans didn’t do anything wrong, it was just very average. I think Teen Titans is probably feeling the wrath I’ve been building up whilst reading a lot of DC’s new 52 because SO MANY of them commit the same crime. And it’s not a big crime, but when you add all those little crimes from all the separate stories it starts to become like Kid Flash’s middle name. A problem.

See, on the cover of Teen Titans #1 there are quite clearly seven characters. How many do we meet in issue 1? Four. One of whom is only on the last page as what I feel is a desperate attempt to say “look! We do have more coming next issue! Spend money here again!”. But I’m sorry, that attitude isn’t good enough if you’re going to relaunch all your major titles purely because someone like me, who is reading A LOT OF THEM, is going to pick and choose the best of the bunch and go back and buy those and ONLY those. That means you can’t hint that the good stuff in your comic is coming later, you need to show the good stuff NOW because you are in competition with all the other new comics and I can’t afford to continue to read them all.

SO! That’s what let Teen Titans down. We get a good explanation as to who Red Robin is, a bit of an explanation as to who Kid Flash is and less again for Wonder Girl, who made it quite clear that her name isn’t actually Wonder Girl… but never told us what it really was. So like it or lump it sister, you’re now getting called “Wonder Girl” from here on out.

The art was nice and really did of good job of the action sequences which in turn helped to avoid large blocks of text when introducing characters. But again, quite frankly it’s not enough to make up for the lack of plot. Don’t get me wrong a lot happens but I feel like I just watched the first half hour of Mission: Impossible and then had Tom Cruise turn to me and ask what I thought. As Ramona said to Scott, it’ll sound great when it’s finished.

Overall, as what feels to me like a work in progress I honestly don’t feel I can rate this comic. I’m sure it’ll be much better once it gets underway BUT they chose not to do that so I’m stuck giving Teen Titans a C. It’s a shame, because I’m sure there’s a great story that could have been told in 20 pages, but as I won’t be coming back I guess I’ll never get to read it.

Rating: C

The Savage Hawkman #1
Written by Tony S. Daniel
Art by Philip Tan
Reviewed by Tim

Hawkman, like Aquaman, is one of the B-list DC heroes who stood to benefit greatly from the relaunch. While semi-recognisable to the vaguely-comics-aware public, he suffered from slightly goofy powers, a horrendously complicated origin and backstory, and a terrible costume. While Aquaman addressed the preconceptions that people may have had about the character and simplified the origin to the essential core, The Savage Hawkman instead adds a new layer onto the character and complicates his mythology even further. And while Aquaman’s costume remains about as bad as it always was, Hawkman’s has got even worse.

The issue starts engagingly, with Carter Hall dragging the Hawkman armour out to the woods to bury it, and once and for all say goodbye to life as a hero. Needless to say, it doesn’t go as planned, and he finds himself with new armour that appears from underneath his skin (how very Iron Man) and fighting an ancient alien symbiote thing (how very Venom). It’s a decent enough gimmick to make the character feel a bit more relevant and able to compete with the other heavy-hitters of the DC universe, but a relaunch should be about stripping a character back to their core and finding what works, not piling new information on. To writer Tony S. Daniel’s credit, we’re not made to feel like we have to know much of Hawkman’s background, but by making his “Nth Metal” armour such a key component of the story, you’re already saddling us with assumed knowledge.

The art by Philip Tan is gorgeous, with a painterly style that matches the tone of the comic very well, lending it an old-school adventure feel that works with the idea of Carter Hall as a heroic, Indiana Jones-style archaeologist, and Tan even manages to make Hawkman’s armour seem threatening and aesthetically pleasing. However, the costume, like the comic itself, has taken something that more or less functioned and rather than explore what actually worked, has decided to instead just add a load of extra stuff on top (A shield that’s a claw! And his axe should also be a mace! More spikes! More explosions!)

And Morphicius is a terrible name for a villain. He sounds like a subspecies of climbing shrub.

Rating: B-

Batman - The Dark Knight#1
Written by David Finch & Paul Jenkins
Art by David Finch
Reviewed by Alex
Did you read last week’s Batman #1, as reviewed by the eternally handsome Michael Eckett?

If so, I can save you $2.99, right here and now. Loosen the staples holding that issue together, switch the pages around a bit and you’ve pretty much got Batman: Dark Knight #1.

That’s not exactly a criticism, but… Look, both comics open with captions of Batman narrating a little speech at us which turn out to be an actual speech being given by Bruce Wayne at a fundraiser where he’s then stopped by a character who could be a new ally or foe. There’s also a fight in Arkham Asylum against a multitude of escaped supervillains.

Like I said, it’s not a criticism. It’s just (I presume) a stunning coincidence. And, like Detective Comics #1, show the boxes that Batman stories feel they need to tick off. However, it does serve to highlight how Dark Knight compares to Snyder’s Batman. Those events I’ve mentioned make up almost the whole of this issue, but in Batman, they were only half of the story: we also got to see Batman’s relationship with the police and the assorted Robins, some detective work, some new gadgets and the Batcave.

So, it ticks off significantly less of those boxes. Which is a ridiculous comparison by which to judge a comic, I realise, and I actually didn’t enjoy Batman as much as the rest of the internet seems to have (C+, probs). But it shows up Dark Knight as a little sloppy. There, Batman’s speechy captions provided an interesting device; here, they’re borderline incomprehensible. (Fear is a cannibal that eats from both ends? Seriously?) There, the last page reveal provided a tug to buy the next issue; here it’s … well, borderline incomprehensible again.

Honestly, I went into this issue with a ready-cooked bias. David Finch, whose art I don’t really enjoy, also writing? I expected to hate it. And I didn’t. Finch’s art still isn’t my bag, but everything works just fine… I’ve just read a few too many Batman comics this month that have tried to hit the exact same series of notes, and it’s starting to get a little fatiguing.

Rating: C-

The Fury of Firestorm #1
Written by Gail Simone & Ethan Van Sciver
Art by Yildiray Cinar
Reviewed by Tim

And the award for the clumsiest title in the New 52 goes to…Firestorm. Or to give it the full title, The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men. The title is sort of indicative of the comic itself – a little unwieldy, and with a few too many levels to it. There’s the vaguely religious mercenaries, the corporate conspiracy, a slightly gratuitous level of torture, the ham-fisted attempts at addressing racial politics, plus a superhero origin story with two narrators. The issue feels like such a jumble of plot, set-up and thematic elements that the central core concept – two contrasting characters with similar powers who can combine into a third form – gets lost beneath all the other elements fighting for your attention. Whether the central concept actually works is difficult to tell – at the moment it feels a little Captain Planet-esque, and the third form, introduced on the final page, doesn’t strike me as particularly interesting. The two clashing protagonists, Ronnie Raymond and Jason Rusch, come across as more worthy of note.

The book’s attempts to delve into race are brave but feel clumsy, and need more space to breath than they are given here. Rusch, who tries to illustrate to Ronnie the racial inequalities that surround him in the most aggressive, unhelpful way possible, strikes me as a bit of a blowhard. This may be intentional (he later boasts about how clever he is, and how Ronnie couldn’t possibly understand what’s going on) and it’s perfectly valid characterisation for the smarter character to be egotistical, blunt and have poor people skills (for example, Hugh Laurie as House) but when you then have that character as the voice of some reasonable points about white privilege in modern America, you muddle the message somewhat. While a debate between a sheltered but well-meaning Ronnie and Jason, who has legitimate arguments but is abrasive and rude, could make for a fascinating comic given the room to establish the characters more fully and let the discussion play out, jamming it into such a tangle of plotting does a disservice to the ideas under debate.

It’s a shame, because the book feels at its best during these discussions. When the mercenaries appear at the school, and Ronnie and Jason are transformed into Firestorm/s, both the art and the writing seem to lose something and devolve into lots of shouting and the comic equivalent of CGI explosions. Having read Aquaman, it has hammered home how important characterisation and tone are in these first issues, towering over plot in terms of what matters and what makes a good book. Firestorm gets it completely wrong in this regard, piling more and more plot elements on what could have been a solid spine for the title until it buckles under the weight.

Rating: C-

Superman #1
Written by George Perez
Art by George Perez & Jesus Merino
Reviewed by Bret

Well well well. Just as I’m done bitching that so many of DC’s new 52 have only told us half a story, along comes Superman to save the day. (Spoilers ahead.)

You know what, I’ve never really liked Superman comics. It’s not the character himself; I really liked Smallville for instance. No, it’s more the setting. It doesn’t matter how many references to modern day they make, it stills feels like it’s set in the 1950s to me. And even though this issue still has a twinge of the past about it, I’m glad to say they seem to be dealing with modernising their universe. First up, the Daily Planet building gets ripped down and rebuilt into something looking more like Stark Tower. Secondly there’s a lot more talk about how a newspaper can’t cut it in today's world and so instead we see reporters racing to be the first to get their article online. But most importantly, it’s the way people behave. Superman in his first issue is a bit of a whiny bitch. He’s not happy that the Daily Planet is being bought out by a bigger news company and starts an argument with Lois about it. But really there’s subtext because what ol’ Clarky boy is actually upset about is that the Man of Steel doesn’t have the balls to tell the girl he likes how he feels about her to her face. Something that stings all the more when his super-hearing lets him know what’s going on between her and another man behind closed doors. Brilliant stuff, that I can actually relate to!

The story itself has a definite beginning, middle and end which is SOOO refreshing to read in a first issue. And even though at times the plot felt so fantastical that is was starting to leave us normal humans behind, it would manage to somehow keep it grounded to a human perspective. Even if it was just by putting normal people in the firing line and dealing with the cost to human life when a couple of aliens battle high above the city. And I know that not everything has to be about human understanding and that Superman should absolutely be about the fantastic but at the same time, if I can’t measure the danger he’s facing to a scale I understand then the threat loses its tension, like an ant worrying about the global economy. Superman finds a balance, though, to show both the fantastical and make it relatable. The action sequences for instance are narrated by tomorrow's news headlines looking back at what happened at the time. A little confusing to start with but actually a very clever way of making you feel more involved.

Overall I liked it. It’s true to say that I prefer Clark Kent as a character to Superman but I also appreciate that sometimes you just need to punch a giant fire monster in the face.

Rating: A

Favourite Films on Friday: #14, Shaun of The Dead

2011-09-30T17:58:00.004+01:00

I can remember when the concept of ‘bromance’ was a revelation to me. It’s warped into something ugly now, a word I can only bring myself to use contained safely between quotation marks. But I was young, and full of foolish innocence, and the word was a lightning rod. The relationship between two (mostly) straight men, it said, could be as beautiful and important as the love affairs most films dedicated themselves to. I wasn’t thinking of Ryan Reynolds and The Hangover and MTV. I was thinking of Nick Frost and Simon Pegg.

Shaun of the Dead, for all its high-concept romzomcom premise and delicate construction, is just about two blokes in love. Shaun and Ed. The kind of mates who’ve known each other since primary school, have intertwined lives and shared jokes that have being running since forever.

Of course, there are women, and family, and all the types of love that come along with that too. But Shaun of the Dead presents nothing on a higher pedestal than what I’m sure Plato himself would have termed the bromantic love between the two. In the finest Twilight tradition, however, the path of their love does not run smooth. The painful truth, as various characters continually point out to Shaun, is that he’s just no good for him. Ed’s lazy and abrasive and selfish. But since when has that got in the way of a good romance?

It’s the central conflict of the film. Sure, it looks like a romantic comedy (with zombies!, as the tagline so cheerily informs us) about a guy trying to win back his girl, but really the threat that drives the plot along – from the very first scene, long before the zombies arrive – is deciding whether his relationship with Ed is destructive. It’s all tangled up with Shaun’s need to sort his life out, but the relationship with Ed – and whether Shaun should dump him, and whether anyone will stand between these starcross’d mates – is where that conflict crystallises most clearly into actual narrative.

This relationship between men is one of the key tenets on which all of Pegg, Frost, and Wright’s work is built, along with the oft-cited pop-cultural obsession and the symmetrical structures of callbacks and foreshadowing which we’ll be looking at in a future post. All three are fascinations of mine, and Shaun came along at so perfect a moment that I can’t separate the two, establish which came first.

When I actually watched Shaun of the Dead, on my bedroom floor with my own BFF, did this all stand out? Did I know that I would ever try and mark pre- and post-? Of course not. I was too busy being entertained by a funny, thrilling, gory romp. Everything else came later: when you're watching it for the seventeenth time; when you take selfsame friend to see Hot Fuzz for Valentine's Day; when you're trying to write about it...

Project 52, Week Five (Voodoo/Aquaman/i, Vampire/All-Star Western/Blackhawks/Flash)

2011-09-30T09:32:00.001+01:00

Part two of this, the final week of Project 52's reviews of every single #1 in the DC's New 52 initiative, brings our most surprisingly positive review yet, an angry inner dialogue on sexual politics, and what Bret has been teasing on Twitter as a "430 word bitch slap" straight to the face of the Fastest Man Alive.

Voodoo #1
Written by Ron Marz
Art by Sami Basri
Reviewed by Alex

Immediately before reading this comic, I did something potentially rather silly. After last week’s apparently rather pervy selection of comics, I read Laura Hudson’s piece on Catwoman and Starfire’s apparent ‘liberated sexuality’. It was a well considered, satisfying read which filled me with exactly the right type of righteous indignation. Then I did something much, much sillier: I read the comments.

To quote one choice example:

“Sorry PC Police!!! - The Perverts & Fan Boys are taking Back comics!! - just like in Video Games & Japanese Anime - You’re sorry ass Gender blurring B.S. doesn’t sell. NO One wants your Close-Minded “world view” and twisted social gender role restructuring. DC wants to get NEW readers and by New they mean one’s that are “Normal” and don’t hate Sex”

So when I opened Voodoo, and was greeted by the sight of our heroine on all fours, displaying her cleavage to the reader, surrounded by dollar bills, I … it didn’t make me feel good about humanity.

It turns out this ‘Voodoo’ (apparently DC’s first black female to get her own ongoing series) is a stripper with a mysterious past. And so it is that we’re treated to a page of her dancing and posing in her pants, before cutting away to the comic’s actual characters: two government agents - one woman, one man - watching the show. It is at this exact point that my mind splits in two.

Alex #1 [reading page three]: Ah, okay. I see what they’re doing here: the guy’s not being played sympathetically. He’s got big reflective shades on. I’ve done enough Film Studies to know my audience metaphors: the shades hide his eyes, the way a screen or page removes us from the reality of pornography. He’s the Male Gaze, and he is not an attractive prospect.

Alex #2: But what exactly is it that’s being reflected in those shades? A woman stripping, in comics’ classic far-as-we-can-go-without-being-softcore cheesecake fashion. And [page four] here’s a waitress encouraging him, also with a big rack and a top we can conveniently see down in every single panel.

Alex #1 [page six]: Ah. Um… Hang on! Here’s the ballsy female agent. The one that straight up told the pervy audience metaphor he was a jackass and stormed out. And look! Her non-stripper presence has irked some underage gentlemen trying to get eyes-on with their first pair of titties. These men are definitely not sympathetic. They called her ‘lady’…

Alex #2: …and then immediately accuse her of either “looking to party” or being a lesbian.

Alex #1: Exactly! Unsympathetic! They’re That Guy from the comments thread. And [page eight] she just knocked them all out. Damn satisfying.

Alex #2: I’ll concede that. Look I was about to make an argument about the problems with the Female Hardass archetype, but [page nine] we’ve cut to the strip joint’s dressing room. Where all the woman are conveniently in the process pulling their tops off.

Alex #1: It certainly is all very Showgirls… with the standard ‘oh, we’re all doing it to pay for college/our kids’ clichés and bitching about the “balding fatty” clients. Um, is Showgirls feminist or misogynist? I forget.

Alex #2 [page twelve]: Shhh, it’s time for another action scene. By which I of course mean stripping. Which goes on for … [page fifteen] four pages!

Alex #1: (During which, to be fair, the sunglasses fall to the ground with a noise that, if you listen closely enough, sounds distinctly like ‘METAPHOR!’) [page sixteen] But that’s all okay because Hardass Lady Agent’s back and…

Alex #2: …and she’s having sex with the male agent and wants him back so she won’t be alone tonight. [page seventeen] Before jumping back to more stripping!

Alex #1: Yes. But stripping intercut with a one-panel moment of horrible surgical violence and [page eighteen] Voodoo’s transformation into a big scaly monster.

Alex #2: A monster which is still wearing lacy pants and has its breasts covered by a few demure strands of hair.

Alex #1: Thus turning both of those cheesecakey signifiers inside out, surely? Who’s turned on by the breasts of the Creature From The Black Lagoon?

Alex #2: C’mon, Alex, you’ve been on Deviantart.

Alex #1: Ick. But… [page nineteen] the violence! The blood! The return of the shades and the dead open eyes of the pervy audience-representative. This can’t be meant to turn anyone on, can it?

Alex #2: Can it?

And I can’t decide. This is either a clever satire which plays with your expectations by titillating, titillating, and then dropping a big boner-killing landmine in your lap, or a prime example of comics’ dodgy politics, which remembers on the last few pages it’s supposed to be a thrilling sci-fi story. Either way, it’s all told very competently, setting up three characters, killing one off and ending with a compelling thrust to the next issue. And, when it’s not focusing on improbable breasts, Sami Basri’s art is beautiful and complemented well by Jessica Kholinne’s colours. But at the end of the day how much I like this comic boils down to which Alex is right and so…

Alex #1's Rating: A-
Alex #2's Rating: E

Aquaman #1

Written by Geoff Johns
Art by Ivan Reis
Reviewed by Tim

Poor Aquaman can’t get no respect. He’s the ruler of 70% of the Earth’s surface, but to most people, he’s a cheap punchline, the guy who talks to fish, who rides a dolphin to emergencies and can’t help out unless the fight is taking place next to a convenient inlet, or possibly a fjord.

Geoff Johns takes on all of these issues and more in this comic. It’s the most “mission statement-y” of all the first issues I’ve read, and as such is a very strong opening comic. Unlike so many of the other DC relaunches, it spends only five pages on setting up the plot mechanics of the first arc (which it does with sparse elegance), and instead spends the time with Aquaman on a semi-typical day, building a voice for the character and addressing the preconceptions we have built up around the King of the Seas.

In a great first scene with the hero, we see Aquaman take out some bank robbers in an armoured van, and get disrespected by both the robbers and the police on the scene, who can’t fathom why he’s at a crime that doesn’t involve fish. Johns and Ivan Reis keep the action tight, with Aquaman notably taciturn. Between Reis’ art and John’s writing, we quickly build up a portrait of a hero who may well have a bit of a chip on his shoulder about being seen as a perennial joke, and who doesn’t have the time or inclination to play up to people’s expectations, or try to win them over.

Shifting the action to a nearby seafood restaurant, we have Aquaman dropping by for a fish and chip lunch, to the dismay of several other diners. Johns gets the necessary exposition out through the device of a blogger who wants an interview (perhaps a sly dig at Internet culture’s tendency to view Aquaman as a relic of the Silver Age) and isn’t afraid to bring up the tough question that everyone is thinking: how’s it feel to be nobody’s favourite super-hero?

Aquaman only really gets articulate at the end of the issue, when he meets up with Mera, his wife, and expresses his desire to leave Atlantis behind to fare for itself, and live a simpler life with her. Here, we find that as uncomfortable as he is among the land dwellers that reject him and snigger at him as he’s saving their lives, he’s just as much of an outsider in Atlantis. In a flashback, his father tells him “someone has to watch the shores”, and that feels like a summation of what this series will grow to be about: a hero of both worlds, belonging to neither, but standing on the shore between the two, protecting them from each other and the darker elements within the both of them. It’s a strong central theme, and gives Aquaman a place in the universe and an idea to hang stories on.

By focusing on the character, the issue avoids the problem of feeling like Part 1, as opposed to Issue 1, and gives itself space to establish Aquaman without feeling rushed or laden down with exposition. The issue shows a self-awareness that is rare in comics, and by having the character acknowledge his own lack of popularity, it feels like Aquaman is dusting off his shoulders, saying “Haters gonna hate” and going ahead to star in the most accomplished first issue I’ve read of the DC relaunch.

Rating: A+

I, Vampire #1
Written by Joshua Hale Fialkov
Art by Andrea Sorrentino
Reviewed by Bret

Or, as it sounds more like a bemused question to me, I Vampire? On a scale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Twilight, the new iVampire definitely falls into the category of Twilight. How do I know this? Yes, I know those types of women and yes, I’ve been dragged to see these films. Team Jacob! Sarcastic Woo!

If you’re a fan of Vampire Romances (of which there seems to be a lot now days) then maybe this comic is for you. Really, I feel the need to judge it from 2 perspectives. Firstly as a comic, and secondly as it’s about vampires. Now this may seem like I’m being overly critical. I mean, I never judged Green Lantern for the ridiculousness of an intergalactic police force that uses special rings, why would I focus on the supernatural elements in Eye Vampire, the Vampire With Too Many Eyes? The reason being is that most of DC’s title characters are very original, where as Ilene Vampire is clearly a punt at the teen girl market and if you’re going to be almost exactly the same as something else that’s already on the market then I need to compare you to give an informed review… like I did with Deathstroke and Punisher.

So! As a comic? It’s okay. The art work was nice but failed in its primary job. Yes it was very nice to look at, but it wasn’t till I reached the last page that I realised the two girls who appear in the book weren’t in fact the same person. I get it, shadowy, non-detailed faces adds to the noir element but if it stops me from understanding the story then it’s too much. Apart from that, the story is about a good vampire killing bad vampires. But not in a cool Blade style because he’s constantly whining about how evil his evil vampire girlfriend is. It’s pretty much what you’d except from a modern vampire tale. Lots of statements about how wrong it is to be immortally young, all powerful and sexy or how difficult love is when you’re all dark and mysterious and broody. Interestingly, it is set in the standard DC universe. So it’d be interesting to see when happens when the JLA find out vampires exist. Wipe them out in one blow I should imagine!

As a story about vampires… well… it left me with one or two questions. The Munsters were popular, as was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That, however, doesn’t mean that every time we see a tale about vampires that every other supernatural has to be represented somewhere as well. Vampire Diaries and True Blood I’m looking at you. In Iron Vampire starring Robert Downey Jr, the vampires seem to also be werewolves. There’s quite a bit of shapechanging going on which I know is a Dracula thing but still. Also, when grouped together, vampires seem to move and behave exactly like zombies. On their own, quick and nimble, put them in a group and they're slow and clumsy. Like Stormtroopers! And when a vamp is in their true form… what the hell is that coming out the back of them? Is that a fish tail? Are they mermaids as well? I just don’t get it.

I dunno. I, Vampire gets a D from me. It wasn’t a bad read, it’s just nothing new and I understand that I’m not the target market but that’s no excuse for just copy and pasting what you know is popular. People making vampire fiction could maybe try and vary up what their pumping out because if this wasn’t just the same old stuff it would have got a better score. I think Gandhi said it best when he said “An I, Vampire for an I, Vampire makes the whole world lame.”

Rating: D

All-Star Western#1
Written by Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray
Art by Moritat
Reviewed by Alex

There’s been quite a lot of talk about DC’s New 52 branching out a little, genrewise, from pure superhero stories. Horror and fantasy have crept in a little more, over the boundaries marked ‘Vertigo-land’, along with the war tales and cosmic sci-fi Tim’s been exploring for us.

Well, All-Star Western is, surprisingly enough, a Western. I’m not especially fond of the genre, in any medium. It’s also a detective story, of which I am much fonder. But, like all of those other titles, it’s also recognisable as existing in a universe built for tales about superheroes.

Where those three genres meet is what makes All-Star Western interesting. The engine that drives the plot is a mysterious killer, who has been murdering prostitutes. With the period setting, and Moritat’s scratchy art, it’s a little reminiscient of Alan Moore’s Jack the Ripper tome, From Hell.

But instead of Victorian London, this is Gotham City, circa 1880. The Batman connections are all there - one of the main characters is Amadeus Arkham, founder of the famously ineffective asylum; the Waynes are namedropped; there’s even one character drawn into the foreground with a very Joker-esque appearance, recalling Grant Morrison’s suggestion in The Return of Bruce Wayne (which, on its travels through time, also touched on this particular soil) that these archetypes repeat throughout history.

Joining Arkham is Jonah Hex, he of the hugely unnsuccessful movie with Megan Fox in. He’s basically a cowboy superhero, with six-shooters instead of heat-vision. The genres fold into each other organically, and satisfying to read in the same way as listening to a good mashup, seeing what fits where. I’m flicking back through now, noting Mayor ‘Grandaddy of The Penguin’ Cobblepot and enjoying the way Arkham drinks green absinthe, prepared with the proper equipment, while Hex knocks back ‘Deadman’ brand whisky. If the devil is in the details, then this comic’s fuller of Satan than a ceiling-bound Linda Blair.

However: it doesn’t hang together all that well. A murder mystery is the most compelling force in all of narrative, if you ask me, and yet here it struggles to grip. The story elements are bit scattershot, the narration occasionally a little clumsy, Moritat’s art never quite consistent. The final page reveal is quite lovely, told through the most stunning series of panels the comic has to offer. But it’s not quite enough to elevate the comic beyond a pleasing novelty, beyond being merely ‘quite good’.

Rating: C

Blackhawks #1
Written by Mike Costa
Art by Ken Lashley
Reviewed by Tim

I’ve still got a couple of reviews to finish, plus whatever post-match analysis Alex is cooking up for us, but with Blackhawks, it feels like I’ve come full circle, back to Men Of War, the first issue I reviewed solo for Project 52. While Men Of War was grounded in realistic warfare, but acknowledged that it existed within a universe where superheroes existed, Blackhawks never really brings up any links to the DC Universe, but plays out like a Jerry Bruckheimer film. I’ve never read any of the GI Joe comics (although I’ve heard great things about Larry Hama’s run) but I imagine that this is what they’re like. The over-the-top action (the issue more-or-less opens with a character wrestling with a jet pilot in an open cockpit while hanging onto another man strapped into a bomb vest) is complimented by an array of near-future tech with a particular focus on nanotechnology. The characters exist largely as nicknames, and all tend towards a standard gruff military type personality, all on various positions along the Boy Scout-Renegade spectrum. In some ways it feels a lot like a sub-par Warren Ellis comic (something in the Global Frequency mode), which makes sense considering he recently wrote a new GI Joe miniseries.

The art by Graham Nolan and Ken Lashley is competent but feels a little loose for this sort of comic, which would benefit from a more polished, dare I say plastic feeling, aesthetic. The sketchy lines imply to me a grittier sort of tale than you find here – we’re definitely in Saturday morning cartoon territory as far as plotting and character development goes. As far as the plot goes, there’s little to comment on. At least one long-running plot thread is established, plus one of the main characters seems to be developing some sort of superpowers (possibly the proportional strength of a Kazakh fighter pilot, based on the comic) which could take the comic into interesting new places, but given the lack of inspiration on display in this issue, I doubt will be treated in a particularly unique or affecting way.

The disconnect from the larger DC universe feels like the biggest missed opportunity in this issue. The idea of a black-ops UN team in a world where superheroes operate has some legs to it, but by focusing on a generic terrorist threat, the unit feels a little bit too Team America: World Police, and the idea of the super-tech, kung fu squad descending from their mountaintop base to blow the crap out of the third world carries some unfortunate connotations. Without the greater threat of superhumans (particularly in the new DC universe, where they are a much more recent phenomena and therefore the world would still be reacting to them as a new danger) there is nothing to connect this book to the relaunch. It feels entirely generic and by the numbers, and as I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, that just isn’t enough in the kind of mass relaunch exercise DC is trying.

Rating: C-

The Flash #1
Written by Francis Manapul & Brian Buccalletto
Art by Francis Manapul
Reviewed by Bret

Okay. First of all, before I even get started on anything else... What the hell? The Flash killed that guy. Like stone cold just to save his own skin. I don’t care that later on in the plot it turns out the guy was already dead beforehand because that’s just convenient and the Flash didn‘t know that. Anyway, if that guy wasn’t already dead he would have been after what the Flash did. And you can’t say “Oh, well the Flash knew the guy was already dead, that’s why he did what he did to save himself” because No. Read page 11. The Flash’s first words when he sees the corpse of the guy he iced are “Killed on impact?”. It’s a damn question. HE DIDN’T KNOW SQUAT! Flash is just lucky that the bloke was already dead.

Which leads me to another thing. What the hell? The police are like “Somebody please tell me I don’t have a homicide with Flash’s finger-prints on it!” and then later “No leaks on this one… anyone talks and they’re done in my department”. So what are we saying here? That if any of the police go to the media and tell them that the Flash might have killed a guy they’ll lose their job? That’s perverting the course of justice! Exactly who are they trying to serve and protect here?

Okay, rant over. Even without from the cold blooded murder, the book wasn’t that great. I loved the style of it, especially the way Flash first changes into his costume and the little two-page intro we get, but apart from that the story is lacking. It felt to me like it was Part 1 of maybe 8, and quite honestly nothing happened that would make me want to go back and buy more. I felt little to no emotional connection with any of characters and even though it’s well established in the book how Flash feels about these people, that’s not enough to make me care as well. Mostly because for me to care about who the Flash cares about… I need to care about the Flash. And that dude's a killer in my eyes now so he can go f*** himself. Especially as the only reason that guy was falling to his death in the first place was because of the Flash put him in that situation. GOD DAMN!

You know what Flash, if you can’t do the job without putting peoples lives in danger AND THEN SACRIFICING THEM TO SAVE YOURSELF MAYBE YOU SHOULDN’T DO THE JOB!!!

Oh, and the art was passable.

Rating: F

Project 52, Week Five: Comparing Notes on... Green Lantern New Guardians

2011-09-29T23:12:00.005+01:00

It's the final week of DC's New 52 wave of #1 issues, and the final week of Project 52. So in celebration/memorium, let's play with the format a bit. Starting with Tim and Bret having the kind of verbal intercourse I can only have in my head.

Green Lantern: New Guardians #1 – A Discussion, between Mssrs Timothy Maytom and Brettania Canny

(Written by Tony Bedard
Art by Tyler Kirkham)

Tim: What did you feel about this one?

Bret: I…liked it. As I’ve said, I’m still new to the DC universe, but Green Lantern’s always been someone whose interested me. I like the idea of the power, but at the same time, I didn’t realise you could have more than one at the same time until I started reading these. Having now read Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps and been introduced to three of the four Lanterns, now there’s this new guy. And from the single issues that I’ve read, this guy’s actually my favourite.

T: Kyle Rayner, from when I’ve read pre-reboot stuff, was always my favourite. The way that he replaced Hal Jordan, and then Hal came back, always reminded me of a story from the '60s, when Stan Lee was writing Spider-Man. No matter what they did when writing Gwen Stacy, they couldn’t make her as interesting as Mary Jane, even though Gwen was meant to be Spidey’s true love. So in the end, they just gave up, and made Mary Jane the love of his life, and it feels like the opposite of that with Green Lanterns. Kyle Rayner is always the more interesting one, and yet they make Hal Jordan the main hero.

B: He was there first, and it goes with DC’s love of their history and origin stories, which ties into the whole reboot thing. The beginnings are seen as more important than the journey the characters have been through.

But having read New Guardians, I’m confused. In Justice League, we see Hal Jordan five years ago as an established hero. In Green Lantern Corps, we see John Stewart and Guy Gardner, look at me with the knowledge, head off to the Green Lantern planet and it’s all hunky dory. But in this issue, we go there, and everyone’s dead, and we have to assume it’s at the same time.

T: There’s a bit later in the book that says “Present Day” but does that mean anything before it was in the past, or what?

B: Yeah, page one, and everyone on Green Lantern Planet is dead, and the blue guy is saying “I’ll use the remains of my power to make this last ring” and unless you’ve killed off three Green Lanterns off-panel, it’s not really the last ring. And does Kyle Rayner live under a rock? Because when he gets his powers, the blue guy says, “Welcome to the Green Lantern Corps” and Kyle says, “Welcome to the what?” like he’s never heard of them.

T: We establish in the issue that people know who they are; you have people saying, “I like the one with the brown hair” and stuff.

B: They do seem to be tying it into other titles, like this Red Lantern with the bat wings appears in Red Lanterns, but she seemed like she was being set up as a major character there, and if she’s now being ported over to here, it makes me wonder if they’ve mucked [-keepin' it clean ed] up their timeline already.

T: Having not read any of the other Green Lantern titles, I quite liked this issue. I thought it did a good job of establishing Kyle Rayner; it introduced some of these other Lanterns, as this is the multi-Lantern title. It didn’t really explain why they were being brought together, but there’s the sense of a mystery beneath it all, what with the whole “everyone on GL Planet is dead”.

B: This scratches that itch I have for collection, what with the “one of every colour” concept, and if I were going to read a Green Lantern title, it would probably be this one.

T: Is that on the merits of this issue, or more to do with the concept behind it?

B: Well, there are three factors. One: I liked Kyle Rayner. Two: I like the “there’s a different ring for each emotion” idea, and if I was going to write something in this universe, that’s the kind of book I’d write, that threw these characters together. And Three: I always appreciate a book that’s willing to say “I have a story to tell, rest of the universe be damned”, much like X-Factor does for Marvel, and I feel like this could have a similar attitude.

T: It’s very much a set-up issue; not a lot happens. There’s a really nice splash of him saving a crane from falling down, which shows off why I like Kyle Rayner, as he really puts the whole “your ring can do anything” to use. In Justice League, we had Hal Jordan making jets, ‘cos he’s a pilot, and here you have giant '40s workmen saving stuff, which I find cool. I’m not so sure it’s going to be one of these books where the writer has a story to tell and is just using the toys from the universe, but I get that it could be that. We have all these different characters forced together…

B: And it’s not just that they’re different, they’re representing a lot of directly opposing concepts, which I think is cool. As a story on it’s own, it’s okay. The art is fine.

T: Yeah, there were a couple of nice pages like that splash, but it’s mostly passable without being special.

B: I’ve sort of accepted that most of DC’s first issues aren’t telling a complete story, which is a shame, because you could have done that here with some tweaking, but I also can’t think of many other actual origin stories, with a character gaining their powers in the reboot. Most of them assume you know that character, and throw you right in.

T: It does it quickly, without a lot of fuss. You don’t feel like anything’s been skimmed over, but you also don’t feel like it’s being dwelled on too long. It’s a case of, “you have a magic ring, it does whatever you think, and now go!”

B: And you avoid that thing of having the character announce how their powers work, because you have someone explaining it to them.

T: “With my magic ring, I can create whatever I imagine!”

B: Final verdict?

T: There were a lot of introductions, often for concepts, rather than characters, but I like the central idea, and Kyle Rayner is an interesting, appealing hero, so I think it’s definitely got potential.

B: Considering the lack of content, because it is mostly introductions, and setting up who you need to know, which leaves the story a bit empty, I can’t give it an A. It’s a bit “here’s everyone you’ll need to know, and then, the end”. But I did really like what I read.

Bret’s Rating: B+
Tim’s Rating: B

Favourite Films on Friday: #15, Monsters Inc

2011-09-23T14:08:00.001+01:00

As someone who has long taken issue with the way certain childrens' books (hint: rhymes with Larry Frotter) are not just acceptable but celebrated reading material for grownups, my love of kids' films is maybe worth a little examination. They have to dumb down to the same common-denominator level, surely, to be understood by even the littlest of the littl'uns?

And, if you'd put this question to me in person, I'd likely spend a lot of time humming and aahing, looking at my shuffling feet, before making a hurried mumble of apology (something about explosive diarrhea?) and fleeing from the room. But here we are on the internet, where I am master, and have infinite time to consider my answer.

Which is (now) this: as a passive medium, cinema doesn't have a prerequisite 'you must be this tall to enjoy' barrier to enjoyment. In a children's book, even one aimed at an audience older than Monsters Inc, the level of vocabulary and technique available to the author is limited by the reader's understanding. The same logic applies to game for children, which have to be reasonably simple to interact with.

Pixar are able to bring all sorts to complex cinematic technique to bear. Just look at the comedy outtakes that run over the credits: try something like that in a book, and the extra layer of fictional reality introduced could be alienating. But in Monsters Inc, that just slips over you without being an issue, even when it slips back into the original reality with Mike & Sully's 'Put That Thing Back Or So Help Me' musical.

Or... well, it could be that I just don't really dig on Harry Potter (I've tactfully avoided making any reference to Pullman's Dark Materials stuff or my lack of interest in the HP films, both of which would totally sink my argument) whereas Monsters Inc is an undeniably brilliant film, equally capable of making me laugh, cry, go awhhhh, marvel at its prettiness, get caught in the action, cry again, and totally not care about any kinds of adult/child divides. But, shhh. That would totally invalidate this post, wouldn't it?

Project 52: Week Four

2011-09-22T10:45:00.008+01:00

This is the disembodied voice of Alex, being broadcast atcha from the Lagoa region of Portugal. Yup, I'm on holiday. Which means lots of food, lots of drink, but no comics or blogging for me. So, it's my pleasure to introduce renowned playwright, occasional blogger and all round good guy Mr Michael "Meckett" Eckett. With a bit of luck, he won't show me up too badly. So kick back and enjoy the reviews.

Batman #1
Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Greg Capullo
Reviewed by Michael

I love a good writing device. Particularly in a single issue comic it allows an easy structure to present itself, juxtapose images and explore different world views without it feeling forced. Scott Snyder's decision to base the narrative of Batman around completing the sentence of "Gotham is..." using three words or less introduces us to the world inhabited by Batman and also brings Gotham to the forefront as a character in its own right.

Gotham is a city so tainted that it corrupts and destroys everything and everyone within it; even one of Gotham's better police officers can be worn down by the vices the city perpetuates. So in a city this bad, the good men, like Bruce Wayne and Jim Gordon are extraordinary.

Batman #1 plays with all the toys that make Batman great; detective work, big ideas in the form of Wayne tech and badass fighting. It opens with Batman against a breakout at Arkham; villains old and new are deftly handled by the caped crusader in a frenetic yet clear fight scene. If you recognise all the villains, you understand the stakes whilst new readers get a fun introduction.

Capullo's Batman in the opening is all gritted teeth and cloaked in shadow framed by a jagged Gotham, covered in grafitti and detailed decay before we see his Batcave, something expansive and reassuring. The iconic trophies are all there alongside Batmobiles of the ages alongside a brooding Bruce Wayne. Out of the mask Bruce heads to a party with Dick, Damien and Drake; and we see the other side of Capullo's Gotham, a bright warm area for the rich, lacking in detail, ignoring the harshness outside. Instead we focus on the facial expressions and postures of Gotham's elite, Damien's sneers, easy going Dick Grayson's slouches and playboy Bruce Wayne charming a room. Capullo's cartoony style makes these moments even more charming.

I really like Snyder pushing Bruce Wayne as a force of positivity as a philanthropist and not only a crimefighter; Bruce has realised he needs to fix Gotham itself and that he can't rely on Batman, Gordon and his Robins who have thus far survived being tarnished by Gotham. But the cliffhanger suggests at least one of them might not have escaped the city's clutches.

Batman #1 is a really fun, well crafted comic and as an introduction it's fantastic. If the run lives up to the promise shown here we could be in for a real treat because it really is everything I want out of a Batman comic.

Rating: A

Birds of Prey #1
Written by Duane Swierczynski
Art by Jesus Saiz
Reviewed by Tim

Fighting! Spying! Car chases! Explosions! Birds Of Prey has it all, and doesn’t really put a foot wrong. It’s a great example of a first issue done really well. Like Justice League, we’re only introduced to a portion of the cast in this issue, but unlike Justice League, there’s a definite sense of intentional team-building going on, with Black Canary out to put together a team, trying to recruit Batgirl (in a nice nod to the old Birds Of Prey series) and dealing with a snooping reporter and some stealth-suited assassins.

Swierczynski gives Black Canary, Starling and Charlie Keen, the reporter, individual voices and enough characterisation to make them pop off the page, and the plot, while simple, has enough promise. As a new season of American television starts up and some promising pilot episodes start to appear, it’s reminded me of what I look for in a first issue – the plot doesn’t matter as much as the character dynamics do, and Birds Of Prey makes enough of an impression to make me feel confident in where it’s headed. The art by Jesus Saiz is great, atmospheric and polished, with really smooth action sequences full of movement. The only thing I’m not so keen on is the cover, which makes the character designs look a little clumsy, whereas in the book they feel appropriate and stylish. It’s also gratifying, after yesterday’s comics, to see a comic book full of women drawn with realistic bodies who aren’t sexualised so much I feel like I’ve opened an issue of Nuts.

Birds Of Prey doesn't do anything extraordinary – it doesn’t rewrite the rulebook or mess around with format, aside from some well deployed flashbacks, but it gives us a super-polished first issue that makes none of the mistakes that have plagued a few of DC’s other titles. Instead, it creates a promising foundation for a superhero action-thriller that doesn’t feel rushed or cluttered with exposition. It has the kind of simplicity of purpose and drive that all of DC’s first issues should have had.

Rating: A

Blue Beetle #1
Written by Tony Bedard
Art by Ig Guara
Reviewed by Bret

After having just read the end of Blue Beetle #1 I can sum it up in one word, one noise and then a lengthy complainy sentence. So here goes… the word is “disappointment”, the noise is “AAARRRRGHGGHG” and the complainy sentence begins “WHAT THE HELL?! YOU CAN’T LEAVE IT LIKE THAT!!! I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS!!! YOU BUILD UP THAT SORT OF AN INTRO AND YOU DON’T EVEN LET ME SEE THOSE DICKS GET PUNCHED IN THE FACE?!!?!!”

Blue Beetle was very good and ticks a lot of boxes for me, and as always, SPOILERS AHEAD. The back story is explained in a short prologue so you don’t feel like you’ve skipped a beat when you start reading. The characters are introduced naturally and I like the fact that we’re getting a Puerto Rican hero who doesn’t come off as stereotype. The art is very nice, and compliments the story greatly. There are a couple of characters who aren’t named or explained and I’ve criticised that in other books from the New 52 but here the art work is so refreshingly clear that you can tell who’s who and what’s going on without a running commentary from the cast. Also, (and this may not be new to the Blue Beetle at all but it’s new to me) I LOVED the fact the source of the Blue Beetle’s power is an intergalactic scarab that’s only about as big as your palm and looked upon by the Green Lanterns as vermin.

This is a clear origin story, and to be fair, more like the sort of thing I expected from DC’s relaunch. I understand that with titles like Green Lantern and the JLA you don’t need to introduce characters as much because people will already know who they are… but at the same time if you’re taking everything back to the beginning… aren’t origin stories what you would expect? Anyway, the point is that Blue Beetle was definitely an origin and as such I (as a new reader to DC) feel like I am more inclined to now go back and buy issue 2. Having been there from what feels like the start, I feel more involved in the character.

Overall, it's an engaging story which left me in enough suspense that I want to go back and buy more just to find out what happens, with really nice character and art work. Lets hope enough people read it for DC to take note of what’s been done right here.

Rating: A

Captain Atom #1
Written by J.T. Krul
Art by Freddie Williams II
Reviewed by Michael

Captain Atom received nuclear based powers in an accident of some description which isn't elaborated on because it's not necessary, he's also probably a Captain. He can shoot energy beams, absorb energy, is super strong and can fly and he uses these abilities for old fashioned super heroics, fighting dangerous people piloting robotic atrocities and saving people from natural disasters all because he's a good man. Dedicated to helping Captain Atom in a different way are the scientists at Continuum exploring his powers, including the workaholic, jovial Ranita Carter and the to-the-point, unsocial Dr. Megala.

In the opening action scene Captain Atom realises he can manipulate molecules other than his own, transforming metal into dust; but at the same time his hand begins to disintegrate as he loses control of his body. It's a fun little metaphor for him losing his humanity as his powers become more god-like. Of course Captain Atom doesn't see it as fun, as using his powers could kill him, so when he flies off to absorb the energy of a nuclear reactor meltdown and stop a volcanic eruption in New York you feel a genuine threat to his existence.

It's the small touches in this comic that I particularly enjoy; we never learn Captain Atom's real name thus distancing and dehumanising him, and he is never inked, but coloured straight onto pencils which gives a nice effect and makes the bright blue Captain Atom stand out from the rest of the art.

Conversely the things that detract from the comic are also small things. Most new scenes also have a clock counting up from a point in time (possibly the accident that gave Atom his powers) but towards the end of the book the clock goes back in time rather than forward. And whilst the dialogue and narration flits between peppy and introspective sometimes J.T. Krull comes out with a rather odd phrase. Freddie Williams II inks over his pencils but they are sometimes a bit heavy for my liking and more often than not ordinary people can end up looking quite creepy.

Whilst issue one balances out to be quite average there are a lot of nice things to be found in Captain Atom and if a few of the kinks are worked out it could be a very decent book in the future.

Rating: C+

Catwoman #1
Written by Judd Winick
Art by Guillem March
Reviewed by Tim
Man, I finished Red Hood and the Outlaws feeling like I needed a wash from all the cheesecakey art on display, and then I read Catwoman, and realised it could have been so much worse. I was hoping that the awful, awful cover wasn’t an indicator of the content of the comic, with it’s soft porn inspired pose and Catwoman spilling diamonds suggestively over her breasts, but no, you open up to the first page, and you’re greeted with four panels of Catwoman’s bra, with her face cut off in each panel, because who really cares about that?

Part of the controversy surrounding the DC relaunch was centred on the shift away from female creators, in an industry where women are already severely under-represented, and accusations of sexism can fairly be levelled at the representation of many female characters. You’d think that DC would make an effort to counteract this by portraying its second biggest female character a strong, positive light. Instead, we have a title where, out of the 20 pages, over a third feature the main character in her bra, where most of the action panels would rather focus on Catwoman’s ass than what’s going on, where the only other female characters are a former show girl and prostitutes, and where, instead of the typical cliff-hanger on a moment of tension or a dramatic reveal, we are left with Catwoman and Batman having extremely awkward looking sex, because her most important function is as a hero’s girlfriend, right?

It’s not all bad news, I’ll admit. It passes the Bechdel Test, and when Guillem March’s art isn’t pushing in on Catwoman’s butt, its simple, good-looking, with clear storytelling and some creative flair when it comes to composition and panel structure. The plot is engaging enough, with plenty of hooks for future stories, and we’re given enough of Catwoman’s inner thoughts for her to have a voice and a personality. But like Red Hood I keep coming back to the sexism. This kind of regressive misogyny doesn’t belong in comics any more, and you would think that DC’s attempts to reach new readers might include making their titles friendlier towards women, especially the ones where female characters are front and centre.

I keep coming back to a scene in the middle of the book, where Catwoman, in disguise, seduces and then attacks (possibly killing) a mobster who appears to have killed her mother (the flashback is a little unclear). She follows him into the toilets, where he’s alone, pops open her shirt and moves in seductively before beating him up. She’s a stealthy character and he’s alone and not expecting an attack – there’s absolutely no reason for her to seduce this character that she detests, beyond the reader’s titillation. It rings so false and exploitative, and I can’t begin to understand what Judd Winick was thinking when he wrote the scene, beyond “sexy sexy danger”. Catwoman deserves better than that.

Rating: D-

DC Universe Presents: Deadman #1
Written by Paul Jenkins
Art by Bernard Chang
Reviewed by Michael

There's a man named Boston Brand who was a trapeze artist. A trapeze artist called Boston Brand who went by the name Deadman. Boston Brand who went by the name Deadman was not a very nice Deadman when he was alive and then Deadman died. If you want to read a comic about a dead man called Boston Brand but who was known as Deadman, there is a comic book called Deadman about Boston Brand. When Deadman dies he is not dead. "Not dead?" you ask, no not dead. But if he is not dead what is he? He is in-between. "In-between? In-between what?" might be the question you reciprocate with in relation to my revelation about Boston Brand. "In between a life poorly lived and the agony of death is where Deadman currently lies", is how I would answer you. If the current stilted and annoying exposition is bothering you, I would suggest not picking up Deadman #1 the comic about Bost---you get the idea.

The most frustrating thing is that there are quite a few positives that are completely overshadowed by the negatives. After having the same things repeated to us over a montage of static images lacking any flow or storytelling, we then get a bit more into the new Deadman status quo. Deadman's reasoning and drive for possessing individuals and solving their problems is no longer to figure out who murdered him but to atone for his life as a bit of a dick. It adds elements of reincarnation and karma to the mix, definitely allowing for more emotive storytelling but it's all squandered because we don't see Deadman living any of these lives; we're just told that he has. The comic actually lets us know that we could be reading a story about a Chinese-American Spy, a covert operative or a genius scientist but instead get to listen to how each of their lives are rubbish and that Deadman feels he's failed them. It's not at all engaging and so dour that the big emotional cliffhanger doesn't land.

The art from Bernard Chang is a bit of a mixed bag too; his gaunt figures and clean pencils lend themselves well to the tone of the book with Deadman himself looking particularly good. However his figures are sometimes too oddly contorted with weird facial expressions and in moments where a visually interesting image could lift an information dump, there are instead just a lot of people standing around with a glowing red outline.

I've been keeping up with Tim's reviews for the other weeks of the new 52 and he's had a couple of complaints of books "telling" and not "showing" and this seems to be another disappointing example of that trend. Deadman introduces some interesting concepts but doesn't feel the need to explore them beyond concepts or indeed make any other part of the book interesting. It feels like a waste of potential of something that could have been one of the more fun titles of the DC relaunch.

Rating, the score I'm suggesting this book deserves, a final grade for the book: D+

Green Lantern Corps #1
Written by Peter J. Tomasi
Art by Fernando Pasarin
Reviewed by Bret

Guy Gardner and John Stewart. 2 of Earth’s Green Lanterns (or as they’re constantly called in this book “GL’s”) are feeling like they don’t have a place on their home planet any more and set out to investigate a rash of GL deaths that have occurred in Space Sector 3599. Sounds like it might be a bit much to a reader who’s unfamiliar with the DC Universe? Well actually no. The first issue of Green Lantern Corps makes the smart move and spends a couple of pages fully introducing both its main heroes and its villain. Not only that BUT it even manages to avoid introducing characters by having them just stand there and recite their life history. No no, here we’re treated to little side stories that sum up who it is that’s being introduced while still being entertaining.

I’ve never read any of Guy Gardner’s stuff and have always judged him by the fact that he insists on wearing his stupid collar up on his stupid waistcoat like some 80’s throw back. IT DIDN’T LOOK GOOD THEN GARDNER AND IT LOOKS EVEN WORSE NOW! However, I found myself liking Guy. I also found the so far nameless villain to be genuinely threatening. The art work doesn’t shy away from demonstrating violent murder in what is clearly going to a story in need of adult supervision. After killing some people in a way that reminded me of the laser beam scene in the Resident Evil movie (you know the one) I think the only way to make it any clearer exactly how bad that bad guy is, is to have him kick a puppy… maybe with laser beams…

Seriously though, this is clearly a very well thought out, character driven story that puts weight into making a highly sci-fi tale about aliens and outer space feel realistic and believable. It would have been an even better rating, but I just can’t forgive that waistcoat.

Rating: A-

Legion of Super-Heroes #1
Written by Paul Levitz
Art by Francis Portela
Reviewed by Tim

What can you say about superhero names? They’re a tricky art – a lot of the good ones are gone, you need to strike an appropriate balance of iconic and character-driven, and when you sit down and actually think about it, even some of the established names are pretty ridiculous. Shadowcat? Green Lantern? Wonder Woman? We accept these names because we’ve grown up with them and because there’s a suspension of belief that you have to buy into. But I have to admit, the names in Legion kept pulling me out of the story. As awesome as a lot of the Silver Age was, names were often not the strong suit – there’s a reason “Speedy” became “Arsenal”. The Legion, which as far as I can tell began as a kind of galaxy spanning Teen Titans, and the names show this – they’re full of adolescent identifiers, which is fine if you’re playing up to that tone or dealing with young heroes, but when you have a character called Colossal Boy lamenting the loss of his wife, it breaks the flow. It doesn’t help that most of the characters are drawn as teens or young adults – apart from Star Boy WHO HAS A FULL GROWN BEARD.

Anyway, on with the actual review. Legion suffers from a lot of the same issues as Legion Lost. There’s little sense of a relaunch or continuity reboot here – past problems are mentioned with no guidance for new readers, the Flashpoint storyline is referenced, and characters come ready equipped with tons of baggage and issues with each other. The huge, sprawling cast doesn’t help – we deal with 16 named characters in the issue, plus enemies, and it’s a little bit of an information overload. It improves on Legion Lost’s exposition dump by using character detail box-outs that give us names, codenames and powers without forcing it in as un-natural sounding dialogue, and the characters are all fairly distinct looking.

The main thrust of the plot, with a group of Legionnaires investigating a gone-quiet base on a border planet, is simple enough for a first issue that’s also packed with subplot and flits around four different locations, and the artwork by Francis Portela is crisp and clean, with a good handle on the action and great detail work, especially in the lush alien backgrounds. The issue falls down, at least in terms of being a relaunch, by trying to cram in too much information. The signal to noise ratio is all off – Paul Levitz does a good job cramming in characterization where he can, but the issue could do with a lot more room to breathe.
Rating: C

Nightwing #1
Written by Kyle Higgins
Art by Eddy Barrows
Reviewed by Bret
And here it is. Seems I’ve been waiting for you Mr Grayson, without ever even knowing who you are. You see at some point when writing reviews you’ll be asked to give your opinion on something, and even though it’s good, doesn’t make any of the mistakes you normally look for and you know full well that all the fans will hold it high and say “This. This is what comics should be about” you know in your heart of hearts that you just didn’t like it. And pointing that out will ALWAYS upset someone.

Again I feel the need to state that Nightwing wasn’t a bad comic. It was very stylised and well drawn. The plot took it's time to explain who Nightwing was and what he’s done in his life to get to where he is now. There were a couple of very nice fight scenes and it even showed us Nightwing's home life as Dick Grayson to give us something to associate with as normal people. It all sounds great right? Well maybe.

I get the feeling that fans of Nightwing, Batman and DC in general will get a real kick out of it. The tone definitely nailed Gotham’s nitty-gritty hotbed of crime and sin, but it's nothing that I haven’t seen before. Dick Grayson was likeable but, you know, nothing special. And the story? It was okay.

This is just going to be one of those things. If you disagree with my opinion you’re probably right. Read what I’ve written? What am I complaining about? Nothing really. It’s just… I didn’t care about the book. Any of it. Nothing grabbed my attention and everything felt like stories I’ve read a hundred times before. Well told yes, but still nothing that would want to make me go back and buy again.

Overall most people will love Nightwing, but there will be a small number of people out there who, like me, just don't care enough to rate it higher. And it should feel grateful because I really wanted to give it a D.
Rating: C

Red Hood & The Outlaws #1
Written by Scott Lobdell
Art by Kenneth Rocafort
Reviewed by Tim

As I mentioned in my introduction way back in Week One of this venture, I grew up with the British reprints of '90s X-Men titles. In the wake of the X-Men cartoon’s debut in the UK, a biweekly title was launched featuring the (then new-ish) X-Men title plus back-up adaptations of the cartoon stories. Over the years, this changed format and expanded to Uncanny X-Men and other titles, but the foundations of my comics-reading life were laid by Jim Lee and Scott Lobdell, and story arcs like “Fatal Attractions” and “X-cutioner’s Song”. Red Hood and the Outlaws feels like a flashback to those times, not simply because Lobdell is once again in the writer’s chair.

The story, which sees Jason Todd and Starfire rescuing Arsenal from a Middle Eastern prison, and then planning their next move on a tropical island, could be an old X-Men arc compressed into one issue, with some reasonably well-executed action sequences and cryptic warnings about future broken up by the main characters lounging about in swimsuits, dealing with their personal lives. Kenneth Rocafort’s art is reminiscent of Jim Lee’s, if a little looser, but with a similar tendency towards cheesecake when it comes to female characters.

Admittedly, Starfire has always been a character built for the 13 year-old boy market, but the way she is portrayed emerging from the water like a Bond girl and offering no strings attached sex to Arsenal is more than a little skeevy, and there isn’t a single panel featuring her that doesn’t reek of sexualisation and male gaze. It’s off-putting in an otherwise acceptable first issue. There are a couple of witty one-liners in here (and a couple of stinkers) and I enjoy the way that Arsenal’s black eyes form a domino mask not unlike his costume (although I’m not sure if that’s intentional).

As for plot set up, the cryptic warnings from Essence (not a character I’m familiar with) fall a little flat without any context for them, but it feels like there’s some mythology at work behind the scenes here, and plans are being made for future plot developments. The characterisation falls a little short, with no real motivations for any of the characters presented, and little to distinguish them from each other beyond Starfire’s apparent emotional detachment/amnesia.

The further we get into this project, the more I am seeing three distinct strands in these first issues: the good, the bad and the depressingly mediocre. I’ve mentioned before the opportunity for reinvention and boundary pushing that this relaunch offers, and the more I read issues like this, that take no risks and offer nothing new, the more pointless the whole exercise seems.

C’mon, DC, you can do better than this!

Rating: C-

Supergirl #1
Written by Michael Green & Mike Johnson
Art by Mahmud Asrar
Reviewed by Bret

Supergirl to me has always been more interesting as a character than Superman. Firstly because I’m a little shallow and she’s a gorgeous blond, but mostly because she wasn’t raised on Earth and so doesn’t always see things from a human perspective… and I like that. She’s not from around here and hasn’t been raised to be as caring towards her fellow man as good ol’ Clarkey boy was. That’s a good foundation to have DC tell some interesting stories which I can happily say they’ve nailed with their first issue of Supergirl’s new title.

To be honest, not a lot actually happens in the book. SPOILERS HERE! She crash lands on Earth like a meteorite, gets spotted by some military types who dispatch some men in battle-mechs to capture her. Then they fight. And that’s it. But, during what would seem like a very simple and possibly boring plot we really see the essence of what Supergirl is all about. She is a lost teenage girl who has no idea where she is, why she’s there or what’s going on. She’s panicked and frightened and under attack by strange robot looking things who don’t speak her language and you can’t help but feel sorry for her. Imagine how you would feel if you woke up in a strange place and laser beams suddenly started blasting uncontrollably out of your eyes. Freaked out, I would wager.

The art work does a stunning job of underlining the confusion. There’s a single panel where she stops fighting for a second to look in horror at the blood on her hands which just captures the moment perfectly. My only criticism with the art was her costume. I don’t know if she’s either wearing skin coloured trousers or a Superthong but either way, I found the amount of crotch and bum shown to be a little distracting… especially as she’s only a young girl.

Overall, this isn’t going to be to everyone’s liking as not much actually happens. However, the content that is there avoids all of my normal complaints whilst managing to be heartfelt. But if you’re going to live in my house then you’re going to follow my rules and I will not have you leave the house looking like that young lady.

Rating: B+

Wonder Woman #1
Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Cliff Chiang
Reviewed by Michael

Before yesterday I don't think I've read a Wonder Woman comic. I've obviously been exposed to Diana through various crossovers, the Justice League cartoon and my girlfriends pyjamas. I think I have a pretty decent idea of the concepts, the origin and some of the stuff fans are sensitive about but Wonder Woman, like a lot of the DC titles with long histories, always felt like it might be hard to get into. I know Wonder Woman exists in the same way that I know the pope exists but have never felt the need to read a comic book about him.

Armed with only a vague idea of the character and some background reading on the relaunch, which consisted of people arguing about what will cover Wonder Woman's lower half and writer Brian Azzarello saying this will be more of a horror book, I really wasn't sure what to expect. What Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiang present to us is a book with the Greek Gods at the centre. It is a world where the debauchery and murderous nature of the Gods is still around in the modern day and Wonder Woman is placed in the middle of it all, defending humanity from the horrors they face from the Gods' meddlings. It's an interesting take on the character and bringing the mythological side of the character to the forefront is something I personally enjoyed.

The book opens with one such God (I think it's Apollo as there's a 'sun' pun and he changes appearance upon sun rise but it's a different depiction of Apollo than I've seen before and it is never made explicit) who leads three mortal women to a penthouse before turning them into his fates and sacrificing them by the end of the book. From there we segue to another God in a hooded peacock cloak (thus suggesting it's Hera) who promptly hacks off two horses heads in order to birth centaurs. It's an entirely silent scene carried by Chiang's artwork who balances the feminine grace of Hera with the grotesque creature creation. These centaurs are sent to kill a young lady named Zola all because she's been impregnated by Zeus. With Hermes (actually named) failing to protect her, he sends her via magic key to a slumbering Wonder Woman. Because Zola is both frightened and headstrong she uses the key to transport both her and Wonder Woman to Hermes and the heavily armed centaurs. Wonder Woman is a little more suited to fighting and she takes down the centaurs whilst the captions relay Apollo's conversation with his Fates and this leads to the final revelations of the issue in both strands of the plot.

Coupled with earthy, vibrant colours from Mathew Wilson, Cliff Chiang's art is a wonderful thing to behold; his storytelling is fluid and exciting and his facial expressions tell us everything we need to know. Even though there's no dialogue in the fight scene, we see all the emotions and reactions Diana and Zola go through whilst throwing in some cool fight moves. Coupled with Azzarello's dialogue the comic is able to simultaneously show and tell and better connect us to the characters.

It's hard to say what a new reader might want or expect from the comic but I feel like we didn't learn too much about Diana, about her motivations or origins; all I really felt I learned was that she likes to sleep naked and head-butt horse-people. And perhaps the parts with the Gods could have used a bit more clarity, some names might help the uninitiated. However I think the things left unsaid make the comic more intriguing rather than vague or confusing.

Rating: B

The Trip, Part Two/Dva/Két/Dvě

2011-09-19T14:56:00.006+01:00

LAST TIME ON THE TRIP:
Alex "Dash" Spencer and Dominic "Party Pants" Parsons began their sweep across South-East Europe, encountering artery-killing food, wrestling Russians, and Western European Guilt. But with three destinations down, there were still eight countries to visit, drain dry of their chocolatiest resources, and write about at length. Their adventures continue in this, the second thrilling installment of The Trip.

Because what more magical time is there than 5am? The walk from the station, as the sun began to happen, took us past what would remain my favourite sight in all of Zagreb: the long wall of graffiti. It was (officially-sanctioned) street art at its finest, blank stretch of urban space and transforming it into something playful. To be honest, it's something Zagreb could have done with more of. It's handsome city, well-kept and just the right size, but it felt a little like a blank slate. In the blistering heat of first day, heavily punctuated by naps, putting our own stamp on it just felt like far too much effort.

It took until the next day, jumping from bar to bar drinking irresponsibly and with veracity, for it all to click. Dom choked down an accidentally ordered 'Amaro'; in a moment of conciliation, I burnt away a few throat cells with some 'Stock'. (The exact nature of both spirits remains a mystery.) Everything just worked, landing us in Kaptolska klet for the largest mixed-grill-to-share ever encountered by humankind.

Train 4: Zagreb –> Budapest
By now, we'd settled into a rhythm. Not full-on ADVENTURE!, not the mind-losing boredom of Train 2. Just a peaceful seven hours spent keeping to ourselves, until the train was invaded by a load of post-festival local tweens with no respect for personal space. Never have I become so quickly acquainted with a young lady's feet! And without socks! I say!

For our shortest stay of the trip (approximately 18 hours, including a lengthy and much-needed sleep), I felt strangely done with Budapest by the time we left. We were masters of time and our own fate... or just lucked out a bit. Picking a route to and from dinner (Trofea Grill, uncontested king of surprisingly classy all-u-can-eat-and-drink meat and wine) through the Városliget park is probably the reason for this. Coming back along its north edge at twilight exposed us to Vajdahunyad Castle, beautifully lit, and along the Andrássy Út boulevard. Delightful!

Train 5: Budapest –> Prague
Two trains in two days. 14 hours out of 48. Travelling shouldn't have been this much of a pleasure. But the novelty of modern, air conditioned trains, plenty of food and drink, and a cabin to ourselves? This was the Interrail experience we'd dreamed of.

The first stop I - in fact, both of us - had visited before, three years earlier, on the holiday that served as a blueprint for this journey. The entire city was overlaid with half-memories - is this where...? didn't we...? - and expectations. And of course we landed, completely by accident, in the same cocktail bar we'd behaved disgracefully in three years prior (Harley's, Dlouhá 18, complete with slightly dodgy Jack Daniels rock theme, graffitied walls and inexplicably ice-filled urinals). One reasonably priced Long Island Iced Tea later, and it wasn't hard to remember why. Many cocktails later, it was hard to remember how we'd even gotten there. In the meantime, the city had hit that weird hour where bars were just getting lively, but all the restaurants were closing. And so we ended up in La Casa Blů (Kozí 857/15), a tapas bar, eating a Czech interpretation of everyone's favourite pick-&-mix Spanish food.

Cue the next morning, more half-memories and a day of wandering the city feeling hazy and homeless. The hangover landed us in some tourist trap restaurant (Hotel Prague Inn, 28. října 378/15), looking to repent for the tapas and get a solid, honest, 'Polish'. On this front it delivered: well-cooked meat, slightly sweet cabbage and dumplings galore (my moravský vrabec) and a touch of the strange in Dom's svíčková na smetaně, beef served with whipped cream. But then the accumulated hidden/semi-hidden charges and apparently compulsory tip kicked in, as is a tourist trap tradition.

The feeling of disparity and being cheated (and homeless) knocked us off balance for a few hours until we found another centre in Petrin Hill. We were chasing an ambiguous road sign promising a possibly non-existent maze, but a steep climb to the top yielded great, if tree-obscured, views and a sense of smug self-satisfaction from watching people get on and off the funicular. Homeless or not, we were empirically better than them, and what greater holiday feeling is there?

(Additional photos over on the Dirty Mistress Tumblr)

Favourite Films on Friday: #16, Apocalypse Now

2011-09-16T14:59:00.003+01:00

You know when you go back to a film you love, especially one considered a classic, after a few years? Your memory tends to get fuzzy, and so you kind of wait for the moments that have settled in your mind. It’s often those ‘classic’ big moments, the bits you see talking heads remembering for you on endless Channel4 Top 100s. Ride of the Valkyries, napalm in the morning, the horror the horror, etc. But I was surprised to find what’d truly stuck from Apocalypse Now was something else entirely; an unusual moment three-quarters into the film.

It comes as the boat carrying Captain Willard reaches Do Lung Bridge. Night has fallen, and the bridge is chaos, smoke and sparks everywhere. Like the rest of the film, it makes beautiful use of light and dark, silhouettes and explosions of blurry colour. Flares fall lazily from the sky, leaving trails that are reflected in the ripples of the water. It’s probably the single biggest bit of spectacle in the film.

As the boat pulls up to the bridge, Lance announces he’s just dropped his final tab of acid. “It’s beautiful … far out”. And it is – the whole scene is a light show – but it’s hellish too. “You’re in the asshole of the world, Captain!” The soundtrack is broken circus music and the incoherence of dying soldiers. The space between flashes of light gets longer, and we’re left in darkness between moments of piercing brightness. Just to underscore all that, into the most dangerous space we’ve been yet, Lance brings his newly-acquired puppy.

The scene signifies a crossing into the out-and-out strangeness of the last half an hour, which is fitting given it’s a gate, a threshold between ‘here’ (Vietnam, warring against Charlie) and ‘there’ (Cambodia, hunting down one of your own). The film is one long stream of insanity, of various stripes and colours, but there’s a coolness to what comes before, that doesn’t have much place in the uneasy remainder. This is the bit where the film starts to turn nasty.

On top of all that, above everything else, it’s presented like another world; more sci-fi than war film. Willard and Lance moving through the trenches in silhouette could be men on the moon. Among the churning soundtrack, I swear I can hear laser fire.

That’s Apocalypse Now: an exploration of a world outside of our laws. It might as well be a fantasy world: it’s certainly far richer than the world of any fantasy film I could name. The Lord of The Rings? Pfft, this comes with its own language too – equal parts acronym (FNGs, ETAs, LZs), French, and insults - one which filled me like asbestos when first I saw it as a teenager, coloured my vision of festival fields, and is still with me today, laughing uncontrollably in the backseat as Dom throws his car round a sharp corner while Ride of the Valkyries blasts in my ears.

Project 52, Week Three (Mr Terrific/Demon Knights/Deathstroke/Suicide Squad/Legion Lost/Superboy/Grifter)

2011-09-15T20:11:00.015+01:00

Grifter #1
Written by Nathan Edmonson
Art by Cafu
Reviewed by Alex

A few years back, there was this TV programme called Lost. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it; apparently DC haven’t, given that the logo for Legion Lost (reviewed below by Tim) looks like this:

And it’s fine that DC have never seen, nor heard of, this moderately successful TV programme. Some would argue, after that ending, that it’s actually for the best for them. But you’d think they’d at least have a researcher with his eye on these popular TV things, in case something like Grifter ever happened.

Okay, so Grifter stars a ever-so-slightly-Southern conman with long blonde hair and swarthy good looks. I’m not great at visual description, so in case you need help, he looks roughly like this:

…oops, sorry, I meant like this…

I’m being unfair, aren’t I? I pulled the oldest trick in the book there, switching the pictures round for a cheap laugh. It was beneath me and I apologise. And I’m led to believe that Grifter is a pre-existing character (and frankly, looking at that costume, he could only be a product of the ’90s).

However, what I’m saying is: if you have a character who is really rather similar to another character so embedded in the collective pop-culture consciousness, it might not be all that wise to open your first issue on an aeroplane.

And as the weird stuff on that aeroplane starts to mount, and you make dark references to mysteries not yet of the reader’s ken, it might not be the best idea to start revealing that by flashing back to the character’s life before things got all weird. And then proceeds onto several shocking reveals, including a ‘messing with your sense of time’ twist.

(Admittedly, there are aliens or some such. Which Lost didn’t have. However, which existing Lost-ripoff The Event did have. On an aeroplane. With someone pulling something out from under their skin, in a slightly gross way, as also happens here.)

I mean no disrespect to Nathan Edmonson here. I’ve heard Who is Jake Ellis? is a fine comic book, but this issue seriously reads like he got the call from DC, found out he’d pulled the short straw labelled ‘Grifter’, and decided to spend his advance getting bombed in his flat in the company of a couple of boxsets.

Which, being fair, is exactly what I’d do too. LAD.

Rating: E

Mister Terrific #1
Written by Eric Wallace
Art by Gianluca Gugliotta
Reviewed by Tim

A character called 'Mister Terrific' is always going to have his work cut out for him. For someone who is presented as the third smartest man in the world, as well as a billionaire businessman, you’d have thought he would have invested in some market research first.

It’s been interesting reading the second- and third-tier titles of this new DC Universe for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that each has been establishing their particular corner of the world. Men of War’s primary strip showed us war in a super-powered world, Stormwatch took us into the renegade black-ops weirdness just under the surface of traditional superhero antics, and Resurrection Man began exploring the cosmology and metaphysical roots of the New 52. As well as establishing a tone for the title, they also stake out a boundary in this new, different world. War is like this, angels work like this; while the big names tell their stories in the centre of the universe, the smaller titles are out at the fringes, marking territory. Mister Terrific seems set to do this for the realm of super-science in the new DCU.

Having finished the comic, I took some time to think about science-based heroes in the DCU, and realised there are remarkably few. In the Marvel world, you can’t move without tripping over a scientist-hero (Iron Man, half of the Fantastic Four, Bruce Banner, whatever Hank Pym’s calling himself nowadays…) whereas in DC comics, there’s Steel, the Atom and Mister Terrific, and that’s about it. Sure, Batman is supposed to be a scientific genius, but that’s not how he’s framed by stories, and that’s not the world he inhabits. Maybe it’s that so many of the characters were devised in the '30s, when there was less of sense of scientific exploration, and a lingering resentment towards the big business figures who’d let the Great Depression happen. Who knows? But it’s clear that there’s a vacancy for a scientific figurehead in the DC universe, and Mister Terrific aims to fill it.

You’ll notice that I haven’t actually said anything about the comic itself yet, and that’s mainly because it left very little impression. It was fine as an opening slice of superhero action. Eric Wallace establishes the character, his supporting cast and his little corner of the world well enough, and Gianluca Gugliotta’s art tells the story with the minimum of fuss and enough spark to keep it moderately interesting; but both as a character and as a first issue, Mister Terrific has very little to make him pop. His origins feel so entirely generic that they give the character no real definition, and the story we’re presented with, while competent, has none of the sense of wonder or exploration that science heroes should inspire, and never truly breaks out any of the weird and impossible technology or concepts that the book could support. There’s nothing especially wrong with the issue, but it feels like superheroes-by-numbers, and the opportunity that these first issues present to reinvigorate characters shouldn’t be squandered on such generic fare.
Rating: C-

Demon Knights #1
Written by Paul Cornell
Art by Diógenes Neves
Reviewed by Alex

I want to like this comic, I do. There’s a lot to like about it (okay, here be spoilers). An exploding possessed baby which, continuing the trend of the DC New 52 embracing the horror genre, is genuinely creepy. The love triangle between Xanadu, the demon fella you see to the right there, Etrigan, and his human host. Most of it is set in a pub. It apparently features him from Assassin’s Creed! Her from Seven Soldiers! A historical Wonder Woman type! Dragons… DINOSAURS! It just doesn’t hang together particularly well.

There’s a criticism of Morrison-esque comics that all the ideas get in the way of actual coherent storytelling. Needless to say it’s one I’ve never quite agreed with.

This comic falls in the middle of that: trying to balance a fairly standard-issue story with its clever ideas. Except, there aren’t actually that many ideas. The stuff I’ve mentioned above is pretty much it. It’s hardly anything to babble to non-comics-reading friends about.

Strangely, when it does shine in those moments, everything does seem to get better. The dialogue’s a little better, or a plot or character is suggested. Even weirder: the art seems to get better. Overall, Neves’ art is good but unremarkable. The panel of the possessed baby is brillliant; the Etrigan/Xanadu flirting beautifully expressive; he draws a mean dinosaur.

Everything else is a bit of a bland beigey mess. It leaves me wanting Cornell to choose one way or the other: push the characters and the story or turn up the volume on the Big Crazy Ideas. Compress all the stuff in that first paragraph down into the kind of space it took me to explain them, and keep firing more, more, more at us. Bigger! Crazier! Now!
Rating: C

Deathstroke #1
Written by Kyle Higgins
Art by Joe Bennett
Reviewed by Bret

I have always been a fan of the Punisher. One of the main reasons I like the Punisher is that he’s a bit rubbish. For as many people as he kills, he suffers that many injuries to himself. When he does crossovers with the likes of Spiderman, Daredevil or the Avengers he’s always looked on as a second stringer, and… you know, a crazy guy but still a not very powerful crazy guy. Deathstroke seems to be right up my alley then. He’s an ageing mercenary who will kill whoever for money, who, as it says in the book “takes impossible jobs… because he can do the impossible.” Unlike the Punisher, Deathstroke seems to actually be pretty good at his job. This is a good thing, as the type of story Deathstroke wants to tell seems to be a cross between your standard dark assassin/spy espionage romp with parts of super-science and the supernatural world. An entertaining mix.

Deathstroke hit the nail on the head with each of the categories that I seem to have been judging these comics with. The art was nice in a sort of urban, gritty, night time at the docks way, and complimented the story nicely. It managed to tell a complete story within the space of a single comic which is EXACTLY what you need in a first issue to explain what style of stories you can expect from Deathstroke in the future. It aced character introduction, avoided large blocks of text, explained who people are and what abilities they have AND made characters feel like real life, genuine people within the space of a couple of panels. And finally, my last criteria, did it lay the seeds to have a fully fleshed-out plot blossom in the future? Yes. Deathstroke seems to be headed down a “out to prove that he’s still got what it takes to be a badass even though he’s old” path, which is the story I enjoy from the Punisher and the reason I go back and buy more.

Has it done enough to make me want to read more? Yes. Will I actually do that? I don’t know, I suppose time will tell on that one but at least I know I’m going to keep an eye out for it. All of this leads me to give Deathstroke a solid B. Not the best book I’ve read, but certainly one I’m going to make ol’ Timosaurus Rex read just so I have someone to talk to about it.
Rating: B

Suicide Squad #1
Written by Adam Glass
Art by Federico Dallocchio, Ransom Getty & Scott Hanna
Reviewed by Alex

Exposition. It’s the necessary evil of storytelling. In a comic introducing a whole squad of characters, launching on the back of a line-wide relaunch, it’s completely unavoidable.

And Suicide Squad comes up with an acceptable structure for delivering all the relevant information. The Suicide Squad (Deadshot, El Diablo, a horribly redesigned Harley Quinn, Black Spider, Voltaic, King ‘actually a genuine shark’ Shark, Savant; supervillains saved from death row to do the government’s dirty work) are in a room being tortured, and they each flash back to how they got there. It’s a bit clumsy, and there’s a lot of “thanks, Johnny Llama”, but it’s a fair cop, guv. Until, that is, it drops my least favourite convention in all of sequential graphic storytelling: the asterisk.

(For those of you not familiar with the workings of yer everyday superhero comic, it goes like this. A completely unassuming bit of dialogue will make passing reference to an event and be asterisked. Follow the asterisk to a caption that cheerily tells you to ‘see issue whatever!’)

They’re just incredibly tacky. It’s like watching a film with that one friend that thinks interrupting with ‘bonus’ information is a brilliant idea (yes, Geoff, I’m talking about you). It breaks the suspension of disbelief, and is a barefaced bit of marketing. If your story is handled right, it’s just completely unnecessary. After all, it’s not like Ulysses came with boxouts that pointed you back to Homer’s Odyssey! #35. In a story like this, an exposition-delivery machine already struggling to tread the line marked ‘too much’, the consequences can be ruinous.*

(*See rating below to find out how ruinous! - Aggravated Al)

Rating: D

Legion Lost #1
Written by Fabian Nicieza
Art by Pete Woods
Reviewed by Tim

Legion Lost’s name is entirely appropriate: it is about the Legion of Superheroes (DC’s future-based teen heroes) and after finishing it, I felt entirely lost. [Zing! -Ed] Perhaps it’s the fact that the Legion seems to be largely annexed off from most of DC’s continuity (much like Marvel’s cosmic heroes) or the fact that, as a time-travelling title, they seem somewhat aware of the rebooted universe (a reference is made to Flashpoint, the event that precipitated DC’s relaunch) but this doesn’t feel like a first issue. Hell, it doesn’t even feel like the beginning of a new story arc – the issue begins in media res, with the Legion already chasing down a villain who seems intent on releasing some kind of infection upon the 21^st century, and mostly deals with their attempts to adjust to crash-landing in our time.

For heroes and protagonists within the story, the Legion (or the subset we deal with here) is massively ineffective in this story. Crippled by failing technology, time-travel sickness and internal turmoil, they barely make it through the issue. The villain they are pursuing is only caught because he has already passed out by the time they catch up with him, and by then he’s already released his pathogen. Upon awakening, he quickly overpowers them and causes them to crash once again, with two of their number dying as it happens, through their own fault. I have no problem with opening a story with the hero already on the back foot, or in putting a protagonist through the wringer, but the Legion feel inept, rather than challenged, making their progress through dumb luck rather than hard-fought victories.

Pete Woods’ art is the one truly solid part of the book, with clear story telling, good costume designs and a pleasantly cartoonish style that suits the tone of the book, but unfortunately Fabian Nicieza, the writer, doesn’t seem confident in Woods’ ability to convey the story, and overloads the issue with characters needlessly announcing what they are clearly already doing. The worst offender is when a police cruiser narrowly avoids being hit by a hurled milk tanker in a panel that takes up a good two-thirds of the page, and is pointlessly accompanied by a speech bubble of one of the cops yelling, “That was a flying truck!” We can see!

I’ve already criticised titles for not taking advantage of the power of the relaunch to tell compelling stories that hook people in, but Legion Lost makes an even more cardinal mistake, and offers up an issue that is downright offputting when it comes to accessibility. I felt so out of the loop reading it that I struggled to judge it as a comic in its own right, a sign of just how badly it has failed.
Rating: D-

Superboy #1
Written by Scott Lobdell
Art by RB Silva
Reviewed by Bret

First off, I liked it. A little on the slow side and maybe even a little boring, but very interesting if your mind works that way. Superboy #1 is a simple story of super-science. It doesn’t rush its character introduction and actually seems to have realised that it’s a first issue. This really works for me personally as I don’t know much about Superboy and it’s nice to not be bogged down with backstory before I’ve even turned a page, like I have been with some other New 52 titles.

(If you don’t want spoilers, I’d skip this paragraph.) So we begin with Superboy being created in a lab where he’s non-responsive to the scientists who are working on him. They get the order to “initiate the termination protocols” but Superboy doesn’t like the sound of that and busts out killing everyone in the room with him. A month on and we see Superboy has been placed in a “Smallville Farm” style foster home. Now I liked what they did here. We’re shown that Superboy is smarter than even he himself knows. But that, more worryingly, when he sees a woman trapped in a burning building he just walks right past her without even so much as a 911 call. Then, shock horror, we find that Superboy isn’t really living a Clark Kent style life but is really trapped in a virtual reality suit designed to test him further by the same scientists as before. (Well, I assume not the exact same ones as they’re dead, but more of the same). He’s also aware that he’s trapped. Is that why he didn’t help the woman before? Does he know it’s not real or does he just not care?

So yes. They do some interesting things and I haven’t even mentioned the sub-plots that have been hinted at, so I should imagine Superboy is going to turn into a very interesting comic. But there’s that word again. “Interesting”, not “entertaining”. I enjoyed it, but that’s because I like a slow plot that takes its time, but at the same time I know I’m not going to buy it again unless maybe they publish the whole story arc in one book. Was this the beginning of a good story? Yes. Was this book on its own enough to wow every new reader? No, it didn’t even wow me and I liked it, so God knows what people who didn’t like it will think. Overall this makes Superboy a solid C. I should imagine Superboy is going to suffer the same fate as Firefly. Yes it’ll be a good story told very well, but will it get enough followers to sustain itself? I doubt it. Maybe Superboy could have taken a leaf from Firefly’s book with an extra long first issue. Maybe then it would pack enough punch to break the universe
Rating: C

(click the logo to see all the Project 52 reviews in one place)

Project 52, Week Three (Green Lantern/Batwoman/Resurrection Man/Frankenstein/Batman & Robin/Red Lanterns)

2011-09-15T17:06:00.011+01:00

Welcome to week three of the new DC Universe, and week three of Project 52. In this edition we're playing with one of my favourite things in the world: symmetry. We're starting out with the star of this summer's most high-profile flop, Mr G. Lantern, before moving over to Batman. The wonderful centrepiece is provided by Tim, with two of the smaller-name titles of the New 52 launch. And then it's back to the Batverse, and out with the naughty Red Lanterns.

Green Lantern #1
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by Doug Mahnke
Reviewed by Bret

This is complicated for me. Having just read Green Lantern #1, I want to write two very different reviews. The first would say that it’s been refreshing to read a book from DC’s New 52 starring one of their main characters that actually turned out to be quite good. From other mainstream stories I’ve read I’ve come under the impression that it’s only DC’s more obscure or wacky line-up that can deliver the goods, whereas their main characters haven’t moved far past simple four-colour stories of amazing powers, with no real depth. However, I’m happy to report that Green Lantern tells an interesting tale of how longtime Green Lantern villain, Sinestro, has been given a green power ring that gives him amazing abilities, whilst long time hero, Hal Jordan, has lost his ring and now has to adjust to a life full of bad dates and eviction notices. It’s an interesting read seeing Jordan fail on every level while, in contrast, Sinestro has been given power and tasked to take down the former members of his Yellow Lanterns. The pacing is good, and they manage to introduce the characters without large chunks of text to wade through. Even the art is nice AND we’re treated to an action sequence or two which actually feel plot relevant.

All good, you might think? Well yes, but then there is that other review sneaking around in the back of my mind. The one that says “Hey, you only know who these guys are from 'cos you’re geekier than your average Joe. And isn’t this a first issue? Aimed at people who haven’t been uber-geeks since before the Spice Girls were famous? Yes everyone knows who the Spice Girls are now, but that’s my point dude! Stop changing subject! Green Lantern TOTALLY assumes that you know who Sinestro is and who the Sinestro Corps are. It even expects you to know where Hal Jordan has been for the past few years, why he hasn’t been on earth AND how he lost his ring. That to me sounds like a lot of assuming to be made. Especially if this book is aimed at first-time readers.”

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing for this comic to have history. It’s clearly left them to tell an interesting tale. But wasn’t the point of “The New 52” to be just that? “New”? And having read Green Lantern #1, I feel a little cheated. Like I now need to go back to the comic shop and say “Hey, are you sure this is issue 1? 'Cos I need to read something to bring me up to speed on exactly what’s happening with these guys. And also, you remember the Spice Girlsm right?” but then I suppose that’s what Wikipedia is for. Filling in the holes left by lazy writers.

A decent story makes Green Lantern a B. The fact that if I didn’t already know what was going on I wouldn’t have enjoyed it makes it an F. So we’ll go half way and say...
Rating: C-

Batwoman #1
Written by W. Haden Blackman & J.H. Williams III
Art by J.H. Williams III
Reviewed by Alex

I hadn’t read Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams’ acclaimed Batwoman run on Detective Comics, nor had I read the #0 issue last year. So please excuse me for saying some things that will be stupidly obvious to anyone who did.

This is an incredibly good-looking book. It’s the girl at the party with everyone’s eyes on her, as J.H. Williams does his usual shtick of mixing painterly wobbly-framed segments with more traditional inked art.

When it comes to comics’ combination of words and pictures, my interest tends to fall firmly on the textual side. But what sticks about my two dips into this issue is how it looked. It’s reminiscing the next morning about talking to that girl, the alcoholic haze not dimming your memory of the way she moved, but not remembering a word she said.

Your friend suggest, uncharitably, that she must be empty-headed. And that’s not fair: Batwoman’s story is interesting enough, it’s just that the memories of how it’s told keep getting in the way. The page that lays out all the exposition around its edges, in a series of images that suggest a dozen artists illustrating Batwoman’s past. The skull-faced baddie wearing a suit, with a pink novelty tie. The panel borders shaped into logos and thunderbolts…

There’s something to be said about how Batwoman isn’t interested in this relaunch. It wasn’t born of the New 52 - that last #0 issue was nearly a full year ago and this issue was scheduled months earlier. It’s a straight continuation of the Detective Comics story. But it still works as a #1, lays out everything you need to know effortlessly. Or, at least, I think it does. I just keep thinking about that art…

Rating: B+

Resurrection Man #1
Written by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning
Art by Fernando Dagnino
Reviewed by Tim

Resurrection Man, one of the lower-tier titles in DC’s relaunch, poses an interesting question. When your hero’s power is coming back from the dead, how do you put him in peril? This series answer seems to be: get metaphysical on his ass, as the issue quickly establishes that Resurrection Man is somehow involved in a struggle between Heaven and Hell (albeit hidden behind references to “Upstairs” and the “Basement Office”). The whole Jesus parallel has yet to be raised, but you can feel it around the corner already, and the Lady Gaga-esque Suriel who attempts to abduct/kill/rescue Mitch (it’s not quite clear what, probably intentionally) is a suitably fresh take on the appearance of angels.

It’s a clever tack to take, and establishes a corner of the DCU for him to explore, and an atmosphere of foreboding and dread that permeates the comic. Resurrection Man is an odd duck – he doesn’t suit the typical pants-on-the-outside version of superheroics, and DC seem to almost be positioning him as a Constantine-type figure (which is funny, given that they’ve only just finished dragging him back into mainstream DC continuity), what with the whole religious angle, and the hobo-chic that Mitch rocks throughout the issue (clothing seeming something of an issue when you spend a large chunk of your time being autopsied and sucked through jet engines). It is no doubt intentional that the only time he is actually referred to as “Resurrection Man”, it is treated as a title, as opposed to his actual name.

Abnett and Lanning, best known for their work revitalising Marvel’s cosmic heroes in Annihilation, write a well-constructed comic, with snappy enough dialogue, and a layering of threats and agendas that is reminiscent of pulp detective fiction (only with more exploding planes and angels being struck by lightning), and Mitch’s internal dialogue gives us plenty of insight into the grim details of his powers. Fernando Dagnino’s art works best when he’s establishing the shady, noir-ish tone, with heavy inks and interesting choices when it comes to panel construction, but he fails a little when it comes to the action sequences, which lose some of the clarity and sense of space that he had earlier in the book.

Without the name recognition of other books to draw on, Resurrection Man does a good enough job of giving readers a reason to be intrigued, and shows that the superhero genre can support a decent amount of variation when it comes to tone.
Rating: B-

Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE #1
Written by Jeff Lemire
Art by Alberto Ponticelli
Reviewed by Tim

Comics, as a medium, can support all sorts of stories. From the kid-friendly antics of The Beano and The Dandy, to the sensitive slice-of-life tales produced by the likes of Adrian Tomine, to journalism and biography and every other type of fiction and non-fiction there is. That said, when I think about comics at their purest, I think of comics like Frankenstein. They have moments that I refer to as COMICS! It’s Iron Man being brought back to life by one of Thor’s lightning bolts channelled through Captain America’s shield. It’s Superman using the miniaturised Kandorians to punch a child’s cancer into remission. It’s Frankenstein being teleported into a three-inch hovering ball that houses the shrunken base of a government agency with a ridiculous acronym that is dedicated to fighting evil, to receive his orders from a Japanese schoolgirl.

If Resurrection Man is being positioned as the DCU’s new Constantine, Frankenstein is quite clearly its Hellboy. The premise of the comic is heavily indebted to Mike Mignola’s iconic hero, down to the squad of supernatural beasties there to support his adventures. Where they differ is tone. Hellboy was a salt-of-the-earth, short-tempered slob in a world of grim mysteries and dark shadows. Frankenstein is a dour, Milton-quoting gentleman in a world of mad science and pulp insanity. His team are mostly well-drawn archetypes at this point, with enough friction between them to generate one-liners and enough story hooks to suggest their backgrounds will be well explored in the future. The issue is very heavy on exposition, but manages to mix up the format in which it is introduced between captions and monologues enough to keep the pace brisk. The art by Alberto Ponticelli is sketchy in style, but feels appropriately visceral, with some nice horror moments and an appealingly chaotic splash of Frankenstein and his Creature Commandos tearing into the monsters. The character designs feel organic and stylish, and the art complements the relentless nature of the comic. As a protagonist, Frankenstein isn’t that well defined yet, but Lemire has at least given him a distinctive voice, and his relationship with his wife looks to be a defining aspect of the character and a way to explore his place in the world.

Mostly, Frankenstein sustains itself on the sense of pulpy fun that infuses every page. It’s a comic that throws everything it has at the wall in the hope that something will stick for every reader, and that’s an approach that I can’t help but admire, especially in a first issue, when capturing interest is crucial.
Rating: A

Batman & Robin #1
Written by Peter Tomasi
Art by Patrick Gleason
Reviewed by Alex

There’s a lot of symmetry between Batman & Robin and Batwoman, if you’re looking for it. (Earlier creative teams picking up pretty much exactly where they left off. Man/woman in a cape & eager-but-arrogant son/cousin sidekick. Opening with a mysterious ghostly figure doing a crime. Parent troubles. Ginger Commissioner Gordon.)

But what’s most important among all that symmetry is what’s different. I’d never read Batwoman before. Batman & Robin, however, is a comic I followed for two years, from its very first issue. Those 16 issues are part of Grant Morrison’s run on Batman, probably my favourite superhero story ever.

So I think it’s fair to say that I had some expectations. That there is a context when I say that this comic isn’t really that good. It opens well, with the aforementioned ghostly mystery-villain offing a Russian member of Batman Inc (Bruce Wayne’s ‘Batmans-around-the-world’ scheme), but everything else I like about it can be summed up as: phew, they’re not retconning all that Morrison Batman stuff out of existence. Dick Grayson still had a go at being Batman, Batman Inc still exists, and Brucey still seems to be the guy that travelled from prehistory to the end of time and had a resulting epiphany.

It’s not fair to judge it by those standards, I know, and especially when we’re bearing the standard for accessible, new-reader-friendly comics. But ignore that, and it’s still not a very good comic. In fact, it’s actually slightly less of a good comic. Batman and Robin both act a little off; the dialogue is very very Basil Exposition, and there’s the clumsiest appearance of a weird hooded dude yet. It isn’t the perfect mirror image of Batwoman, it’s the evil twin.
Rating: C-

Red Lanterns #1
Written by Peter Milligan
Art by Ed Benes
Reviewed by Bret

I can honestly say that Red Lanterns was not what I was expecting. I’m new to the DC universe and some things (like Superman and Batman) I’m familiar with, but some things (Red Lanterns for instance) I don’t really know anything about. I know that Green Lanterns exist and that they have bad guys who are Yellow Lanterns, but that’s about it. Getting an understanding of who all these different Lanterns are, and what their powers might be, was the main reason I wanted to read all of the various Lantern #1s. Sadly Red Lanterns fails to not only explain who the Red Lanterns are or what their powers are, but also fails to entertain or tell any kind of a narrative at all.

The “plot”, and I use the term loosely, consists of 3 parts. Part A is a quick action sequence involving the main character, who is a red alien, and his pet cat, beating up blue space lizards. The lizards seemed to be torturing someone, so let's assume they probably deserved it… but I would like to point out that it’s never made clear as to who they actually are. The fight lasts for all of seven pages before Parts B and C begin. Part B is set on Earth and for some reason is a story about how a granddad gets killed during a mugging and about how his grandchildren deal with it. Part B pops up periodically throughout Part C and isn’t given an ending or explanation as to why it’s there. I assume Part B gets concluded or brought into the main plot in the next issue, but I’ll never know because this comic did nothing to make me want to go back.

So then onto Part C which makes up the brunt of the book, in terms of how many pages are devoted to it. Part C is the main character monologuing. Yep, just one long monologue. It consists of ten whole pages in which he complains about how he’s really angry about things that have happened in his life, but also sad now because he’s not as angry as he used to be. Which is bad because it would seem that the other Red Lanterns who he’s “created” (without so much as an explanation as to what that actually means) are not going to like him any more.

And that’s it. That’s the whole book… hmm… apart from the fact that all the members of the Red Lanterns seem to be vomiting blood. Including the Cat. But I thought I’d skip that part in the main review. So, who are the Red Lanterns? I don’t know, and now I don’t care. Well done issue 1, you’ve earned yourself an...
Rating: F- (see me after class)

Favourite Films on Friday, #17: Aliens

2011-09-09T22:35:00.004+01:00

Perhaps you already know this, but it’s nearly a full hour into Aliens before the first appearance by any, you know, aliens. It’s a pretty ballsy move, and one that helps make the action sequences in the second half really sing.

But there’s an even more important late introduction, at the 45 minute mark. It looks like it’s going to be the aliens. The motion tracker bleeps promisingly, teasingly. Guns are raised. That blip turns into a blur streaking across the foreground. Of course, it’s a fakeout. It was a little girl. Newt.

Newt changes the film. Putting kids and dogs in danger is a cliché; it’s an easy way to up the stakes, but it works. (Alien had a cat, which has nearly the same effect except that cats are rubbish). Part of this is the execution – Newt’s never overplayed, she’s not a cutesy or annoying character, Cameron can build tension like an absolute melonfarmer – but more important is that the Ripley/Newt relationship is the key to the film’s main theme.

If Alien was about the fear of pregnancy, Aliens is about something much more terrifying: what happens next. You survived the body horror of giving birth to something red and fleshy; now you’ve got a small vulnerable creature to care for. When I occasionally wonder about parenthood, I’m paralysed by two terrifying realisations: A) it’s very easy, to paraphrase that filthy-mouthed Philip Larkin, screw your child up; B) you’ve got something extra to be scared of, all the time. You know how much more worried you are about being mugged when you’ve got a couple of hundred quid in your pocket? But, like, times a million.

This is the feeling Aliens works on, and then builds a constant plot-based tension around it. The survivors get narrowed down, and maybe you’ll jump a couple of times, but it’s only when it comes to Ripley and Newt that it really hits bone. People remember the ‘cool’ stuff of Aliens: the firing of plasma rifles and the casually-dropped quotables. But as is usually the case, that’s not very accurate. While the two hours zip past, the film’s light on set-pieces or any extended action.

Instead, it practically rubs the motherhood stuff in your face. It felt weird, watching the Theatrical Release, not having the scene where we – and Ripley – discover her daughter grew old and died while Ripley enjoyed her 57 years of hypersleep. It foregrounds her relationship with Newt even more, but the film still hardly goes light on the theme stuff. After all, Aliens is a film that climaxes with a fight between a queen alien protecting her brood of eggs and the woman whose surrogate child she stole. And afterwards Newt clutches the victorious Ripley tight and calls her “mommy”. Was there really ever any doubt what it was all about?

Project 52, Week Two (Batgirl/Justice League International/OMAC/Hawk & Dove)

2011-09-09T00:54:00.009+01:00

The last lot of this week's reviews. This time it's one of the most interesting/controversial comics to come out of the relaunch, with the de-disabled Batgirl; the second Justice League title; our first proper trashing, and a piece I think we'll all remember as 'My Man Ommy'. If I might be so self-congratulatory, I reckon this is the best set of reviews yet (note that my contributions to this post are minimal). 14 comics down, 38 to go. Bring it.

Batgirl #1
Written by Gail Simone
Art by Ardian Syaf
Reviewed by Tim

There is so much to be gleaned about Batgirl from the wonderful front cover by Adam Hughes. The art is of the high standard one has come to expect from Hughes, detailed without being too busy, painterly but with a pop sensibility. Barbara Gordon aka Batgirl isn’t sexualised, nor is she striking an aggressive pose, but instead is leaping forward, into action. And she’s smiling! She looks like she actually enjoys being a superhero!

Batgirl was always going to be an interesting relaunch, after they announced that Barbara Gordon was once again going to be taking up the mantle, but they weren’t going to retcon away her shooting by the Joker and subsequent paralysis. Given that, in her guise as Oracle, Barbara become such a symbol for disabled comics readers, someone they could identify with who wasn’t defined by her disability, it seemed strange and downright regressive of DC to change the status quo in this regard. Most comic readers never knew Barbara as anyone other than Oracle, so there was no great clamouring for her to be restored. Still, with Gail Simone writing, I trusted that the transition would be at least smooth, if not perfect.

Like with Batwing, the breathing room that dealing with a single hero as opposed to a group is evident here. However, where Batwing used that space to allow Ben Oliver’s stunning art to shine, Batgirl instead crams in twice as much story. No decompression here! It’s a credit to Simone’s mastery of writing that the issue doesn’t feel weighed down or overly stuffed by the various storylines at work here (prologue, action sequence, introducing supporting cast, more action, flashbacks) and instead feels solidly packed with a great mix of plot and characterisation. We are quickly given a firm grasp on Barbara as a character struggling to readjust to the heroic life, but nonetheless determined to put a positive spin on things. Unlike her mentor Batman, Batgirl brings levity and wit to her escapades, which makes her dramatic freezing under pressure all the more shocking. The art by Ardian Syaf is nothing extraordinary, but does a very solid job of storytelling, with enough creativity in the layouts to keep things interesting and the action sequences fast-paced and flowing.

Whether taking Barbara out of the wheelchair and putting her back in the Batgirl costume is the right decision is tough to judge at this point, but as far as the comic goes, it does a fantastic job of introducing a character’s history without feeling like a lecture on them. A good first issue that does everything it needs to with charm to spare.
Rating: B+

Justice League International #1
Written by Dan Jurgens
Art by Aaron Lopresti
Reviewed by Alex

Ah, a multi-national superhero team. Is it time we had The Conversation?

It’s always bugged me how location-specific superheroes are tied down to stereotypes. The identity of characters get completely overwritten by Being Russian or whatever. After all, it’s not like Batman is defined by Being American. This is probably true of most pop culture, I guess, but it’s more obvious in comics where identity is worn on your brightly-coloured sleeve, in the name and costume and powers a hero has.

At best, it shows a limited, America-centric worldview. At worst, it’s … well, it’s kind of racist, isn’t it?

It was getting better, with Batman Inc especially navigating identities for its various Captain Foreigns that were formed equally by place and self. But JLI is a step back. The team is drawn together by the UN from around the world, and the issue is a textbook characters-meet-and-squabble story. (Hint: they will probably all kiss, make up, and forge the necessary team spirit just in the nick of time). That’s fine, although it’s done a little clumsily.

But beyond Green Lantern (no, not the one from the other Justice League comic, one with a much worse haircut, and still not the black one that people actually like) having issues with Booster Gold as team leader, most of the conflict for this squabbling is drawn from the characters being from different countries. These are meant to be people we look up to with awe and wonder, and for some of them, their first response when meeting someone of a different nationality is to say ew, you’re not like me.

I’m being a bit unfair here - the superheroes don’t have costumes and powers defined by their nationality, mostly - but the fact is that nothing else about the issue stood out. It’s reasonable enough comics, and it’s rather nice to look at (Lopresti turning in yet another example of sleek cartoonised art), but there’s nothing special about it, apart from that one character talks in broken English about Russian supremacy and Russian winter and Russian alcohol and another says things like “mate” and “sod it” and “blimey charlie, guv’nor!”.

Rating: C-

O.M.A.C. #1
Written by Dan Didio & Keith Giffen
Art by Keith Giffen
Reviewed by Bret

O.M.A.C in one word is OMAZING! You know when you find something on Youtube that’s so bizarre that you have to show people? O.M.A.C (henceforth referred to as “my man Ommy”) has completely captured that experience. Firstly, this little adventure is titled “OFFICE MANAGEMENT AMIDST CHAOS” which, let's face it, just rocks on every level. Five pages in I found myself wondering “who is this crazy blue man with a fish tail for a Mohawk? Why is he talking to that screensaver of a sunbathing girl? Why the hell is she talking back? Is there a damn plot to this comic?” but then I turned the page, was introduced to the bad guy, and TOTALLY stopped caring.

My man Ommy has taken a leaf from Star Wars when it comes to introducing a character. How do you know Darth Vader is the big bad when you first see him? Dude is dressed all in black with some evil ass theme music playing. Just like my man Ommy’s villain “Lord Mokkari” who is clearly the big dog in this underground super science lab. He knows to be bad you don’t need to say you’re bad, you just ooze confidence. Mokkari coolly orders that my man Ommy be stopped, but Ommy don’t play that way. An incredible fight scene breaks out which interlaces ridiculous body smashing, mutant turkey, face-cannon combat with smooth character introduction using both realistic-sounding text and detailed art work.

Yes it’s over the top. Yes it’s kitsch. Yes it’s so brilliantly awful that I laughed like a idiot at some points and yes it’s not going to be everyone’s liking. But I liked it, maybe enough to go back and buy issue 2. I’d be hard pressed to take this story seriously, but my man Ommy seems to revel in the ridiculous and hey, isn’t that why things like Youtube exist in the first place? My man Ommy gets a solid...
Rating: A-

Hawk & Dove #1
Written by Sterling Gates
Art by Rob Liefeld
Reviewed by Tim

I wanted to give this comic the benefit of the doubt. Hawk & Dove, as concepts go, are no more ridiculous than a whole host of other comic characters, and the idea of a superhero duo is one rarely explored (Power Man & Iron Fist being the most obvious example). Before picking up the book, I was explaining to Bret how you could use the concept for a light-hearted “buddy cop” style-book, or a more serious examination of the ethics of superheroics, how pacifism holds up in extreme situations, and where heroism becomes vigilantism, or even plain thuggery. Never mind that it was written by Sterling Gates, who sounds like a suburban home improvements company, and drawn by Rob Liefeld, who sounds like the 4th seal of the Apocalypse cracking open as all your crops and livestock die. There are no bad characters, just bad executions, right?

Hawk & Dove is not a good comic. In fact, it’s a pretty bad comic. DC’s relaunch, combined with the new push into digital comics, has given them the opportunity to reach a whole new audience who had previously been turned off by convoluted continuity, to challenge people’s preconceptions of what a superhero comic was, to tell new, exciting stories freed from a 70 year history. Hawk & Dove fails on all those counts. The writing is terrible, with long passages of exposition that constantly break the golden rule of storytelling: “Show, don’t tell”. Despite being a relaunch, it immediately bogs the book down in continuity, with a large chunk of the comic given to retelling the story of a character who is no longer in the title. The dialogue is clunky, lacking flow or snap, and the plot is typical superhero fare that we’ve seen a million times before, with no real imagination injected into the telling. There is nothing here to entice new readers, no originality and nothing to excite or stir anyone’s interest.

As for the art, those familiar with Rob Liefeld will not be surprised to learn he has not changed one iota. His faces are indistinguishable (the only way to tell Hawk from his father is the fact that his father has white hair) and he knows two expressions: scowly grimace for the men and open-mouthed blank for the women. His grasp of human anatomy is as famously poor as always – Dove seems to be suffering from an extreme case of hip dysplasia and I’m not sure where her internal organs are meant to fit in her abdomen. The action sequences are pedestrian and the costume design is lodged firmly in the late '80s (as are the hairstyles).

Overall, if you know comics, you know how bad this book will be, and if you don’t know comics, you can probably guess just from the front cover.
Rating: D-

Project 52 Week Two (Action Comics/Batwing/Detective Comics)

2011-09-08T16:59:00.012+01:00

Today's second injection of undiluted Review straight to the base of your spine. This time, it's some of the big boys: Superman, Batman, African Batman and ...er... Static Shock.

Action Comics #1
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Rags Morales
Reviewed by Alex

Lex Luthor: “The brown tree snake, introduced to the U.S. territory of Guam right after World War Two, caused dozens of indigenous birds and reptile species to become extinct. The cane toad, sent to Australia as a pest control agent, decimated local biodiversity.”

And Grant Morrison, put on the first issue of Action Comics after the rebooting of the entire DC universe, gets to overwrite the entire history and metaphor of Superman. The first issue from a writer like Morrison, is pretty much a guaranteed Statement of Intent. Last time he touched the Man of Tomorrow, Morrison wrote him as an omnipotent Sci-Fi Jesus. He came down from the skies and cared for all of humanity, and sacrificed himself to save us.

This isn’t quite that Superman. Apart from being younger and less all-powerful (and wearing jeans! Can you imagine Jesus wearing jeans?), the central metaphor is different. It’s laid out pretty clearly on the first page: “Rats. Rats with money. And rats with guns. I’m your worst nightmare”. This is Superman as the champion of the oppressed, delivering social justice. It’s something Morrison has often discussed being at the heart of the character from his very first appearance: smashing a car on that iconic cover from 1938, the last time Action Comics had a #1. And so Superman’s targets are corrupt businessmen who take advantage of cheap labour, men who hit their wives, and xenophobes.

Being honest, the metaphor and the Brand New Direction are more interesting than the actual plot. It’s thrilling enough, and well-told, but there’s nothing about the story that leaves me craving the next issue. It’s not even that heavy on Morrison’s trademark Big Ideas. What will bring me back is faith in Morrison, and Morale’s gorgeously cartoony art (why couldn’t all the new books look like this? This is what Accessible Comics in the 21st Century should look like). Most of all, I want to see where the book’s going to go with all the underlying stuff, what it has to say about social justice and inequality.

Rating: A-

Batwing #1
Written by Judd Winick
Art by Ben Oliver
Reviewed by

Batwing is the first solo title I’ve reviewed, and the difference it makes to the pacing of the comic is immediately felt. Rather than having to cram in multiple introductions (or, in the case of Justice League, only introduce a few characters and leave the reader feeling short-changed) it has one central figure to build a story around, and while a supporting cast and recurring villains are also introduced, their characterisation isn’t so essential, so can be dealt with at a more leisurely pace. Batwing doesn’t feel nearly as rushed as other titles have, and as such feels more like a story in its own right, rather than a preamble to the real meat of a title.

I haven’t been reading the “Batman Incorporated” arc (I can already feel Alex tutting at me across the Internet) so this is my first encounter with Batwing. I must admit, the concept of “Batman of Africa” struck me as both a little hokey, and lodged in the Silver Age (people do realise Africa isn’t one big country, right? Tell me I’m not in the minority on this…) but Judd Winick makes it work by highlighting the similarities between Gotham and Batwing’s Tinasha (such as a corrupt police force and a brazen criminal culture prone to theatrics) without sacrificing the cultural identity of the Congolese setting, or falling into stereotypes. The universe relaunch works in the title’s favour – with superheroes reinvented as a more recent phenomena, the huge disparity in global distribution is easier to accept, and Winick and Ben Oliver seem to be addressing this ever further by building a superheroic mythology for Africa in the DCU.

More than anything, the art sells me on this book. Ben Oliver’s pencils and inks are gorgeous; astonishingly detailed, with realistic expressions and great costuming without sacrificing dynamic layouts or a sense of weight and movement in the action sequences. It’s a truly beautiful comic, aided by Brian Reber’s painterly colouring, which gives the daytime sequences a kind of heat haze while adding a moonlight glow to the action at night.

Time will tell whether Batwing will generate enough sales to keep it going far beyond its first arc, but if the standard continues to be this high, it deserves a long and healthy life.

Rating: A

Detective Comics #1
Written by Tony S. Daniel
Art by Tony S. Daniel
Reviewed by Alex

Detective Comics #1 is a very competent comic. That’s a virtue, no doubt, but when it’s the main thing that stands out, it’s also a limit. Don’t expect anything transcendant or life-changing, don’t expect to be grabbing your friends by the lapels and saying, look! read this!. It’s a fairly by-the-book Batman story, told well. You know: there’s a criminal on the loose, the cops don’t trust Batman but Gordon does, Bruce Wayne breaks hearts, Batman punches the Joker repeatedly in the face…

It doesn’t use the relaunch to do anything new, and the story would have fitted just as neatly in the status quo six months ago. Everything’s the same, including Tony S. Daniel, who’s been a regular artist and/or writer on Batman for nearly five years now. Except, okay, the police don’t trust Batman, which, as someone commented on the JL review, feels a little like a character being brought more closely in line with his film counterpart.

Nevertheless: I’m pretty hooked on the central whodunnit, which is at it should be in something called Detective Comics, and that last page is seriously ballsy. Daniels’ art is looking better than I’ve ever seen it, and he makes a surprisingly good writer. He manages to fulfill both ends of the job well: putting Batman in positions where he looks cool, and then drawing him to look really damn cool. That’s all you need to do, really, and if I was picking this up as my first ever Batman book, as DC are surely hoping someone will, I’d be back next month.

Rating: B

Static Shock #1
Written by Scott McDaniel & John Rozum
Art by Scott McDaniel & Jonathan Glapion & LeBeau Underwood
Reviewed by Bret

As I come to write this review I find myself worried that I’m going to seem hypocritical. I’ve complained that other comics I’ve read in The New 52 have been long drawn out blocks of text that, in real life, would sound unrealistic if spoken aloud in conversation. Static Shock goes in the opposite direction however and keeps the chatter appropriate… which you would think would be a good thing… yet I’m still not happy. Mostly because the large amounts of text are due to DC, quite rightfully, assuming that not everyone reading is going to know who their characters are and so wanting to fully introduce them. Static Shock does JUST about introduce it’s characters but of the full 18, seemingly important, people with speaking parts only a handful are named or given any explanation as to who they are.

Now, I’m not stupid. Yes I can work out that some are his family, some are his enemies, one guy seems to maybe be his boss. But the point is, did Static get the memo that this is a relaunch? As comics go it’s exactly what your average non-comic reader would expect. There’re brightly coloured costumes, crazy powers, fights with explosions and over-the-top villains, but is it what we should expect from a first issue? I came away feeling like I’d missed some plot already. I actually genuinely think this story carries over from a previous Static title. I’m probably wrong but I’ve been left feeling like I’ve switched the TV over to what seems to be an okay film that’s halfway through. It looks good granted, but if I’ve not seen the beginning I’m not interested.

Overall the comic is okay. Lots of sciencey technobabble was used to explain away the powers, but at least they got an explanation. And I liked the fact that it wasn’t afraid to show how fighting crime might realistically affect you or the people you’re trying to save. So it did okay. Though it didn’t patronise like some other #1s I’ve read, it could have slowed the pace down just a little. Static Shock’s first outing gets an average...
Rating: ...B

Project 52: Week Two (Men of War/Green Arrow/Swamp Thing/Stormwatch/Animal Man)

2011-09-08T13:14:00.009+01:00

You remember how DC are scrapping all their comics and launching 52 new ones, right? You remember how we're reviewing them all? Me, Tim, and Bret? Good. Then enjoy the first dose of this week's Project 52, including reviews of Green Arrow and Swamp Thing.

Men Of War #1
Written by Ivan Brandon
Art by Tom Derenick
Reviewed by Tim

Men of War is one of DC’s attempts to branch out a little beyond straight-up superheroics – in this case, to a military anthology title. That said, it’s still located within the DCU – the main story in this issue (a modern day version of Sergeant Rock) features a US Army operation that goes tits up when a mysterious superhuman attacks the same target as them. The back-up strip, titled “Navy SEALs: Human Shields”, is much more of a standard military tale, located, like the main story, in some unnamed Middle Eastern country, featuring a team of SEALs pinned down by sniper fire.

Both stories are heavy with military jargon (helpfully annotated with translations) and gung-ho spirit. The Sergeant Rock story casts the main character as a scarred enlisted infantryman, still only a Corporal at the beginning of the book, who disobeys his superiors but makes brilliant tactical decisions. His mentor is an equally rebellious badass who is killed in action at the issue’s end, field-promoting our hero. Ivan Brandon creates a compelling tale of what military action in a superpowered world might look like, contrasting the power of one powered individual against the human squad, and Tom Derenick’s art is dynamic and atmospheric, with suitably craggy-faced heroes and explosive action.

The back-up strip didn’t work quite as well for me. Jonathan Vankin’s writing felt overly expository, and Phil Winslade’s art, while agreeably reminiscent of British military titles like Commando, was too sparse and his faces all look the same. In addition, there was a hefty undercurrent of conservative values (know your audience, I suppose) with some unfunny homophobic “jokes” and digs at the Peace Corps, as well as a “oh course I’m not racist, some of my best friends are black!” moment that felt a little preachy.

Overall, as a genre I’m unused to, I enjoyed the first story more than I thought I would, but the second spoilt the experience for me somewhat.

Final Grade: C+

Green Arrow #1
Written by J.T. Krul
Art by Dan Jurgens & George Perez
Reviewed by Bret
Out of the 4 new comics I picked up today, Green Arrow was the one that interested me most. I’ve seen Smallville and liked what they did there with the green leather-wearing archer, Oliver Queen (even if they were trying oh so hard to make him Batman). Sadly the first issue of Green Arrow misses out on the emotional complexity and the “do what it takes to get the job done” attitude we saw from ol’ Ollie in the show. Instead, his new solo comic ends up reading more like a Saturday morning cartoon. And not a very good one at that, with a parent friendly “it’s not good to be a bad guy” moral brought up every other panel and all.

I think it’s the fact that, despite passable foreground artwork, the background of the panels were often a single colour block rather than showing any hint of detail. That and the fact that heavy amounts of text were used to tell the story. This made the characters come off as simple and patronising to me. But then maybe Green Arrow has a younger audience in his line of sights. Having said that though, I did find it odd that our seemingly child friendly hero went from using concussive, blinding and freezing arrows to shooting a guy through both palms and forcing him to accidentally electrocute himself. The sudden burst of blood and violence felt very out of place in this black-and-white world of right and wrong.

Overall lazy colouring, generic characters and text to explain what I should be seeing explained through art make Green Arrow misfire.

Rating: D-

Swamp Thing #1
Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Yanick Paquette
Reviewed by Alex
For a comic about Swamp Thing, this issue sure is a brilliant advertisement for the New DC Universe. It opens with a sleek panoramic view - Clark Kent in Metropolis, Batman under Gotham, Aquaman in an unidentified ocean. And so, in three pages, it manages to establish a credible worldwide threat and introduce the heroes and universe better than last week’s Justice League managed in its full 40 pages.

It helps that Yanick Paquette’s art is so incredibly gorgeous, of course. Superman’s a square-jawed lump of handsome, and the new costume manages to look regal. Even Aquaman looks good in this comic.

And then the Swamp Thing story begins, and it’s an intriguing one. The changes to the Swamp Thing mythos - one with which I must admit only a passing familiarity - don’t feel unnecessary. It feels like a true fresh start, and the changes are woven into a compelling mystery. But that’s not all! Then there’s a brilliant horror sequence that’s probably the creepiest bit of comics I’ve encountered. But wait, there’s more! It alludes fascinatingly to “the events of last year!, just suggesting the slightest edges of a history. And there’s some fun Palahniuk-style facts about botany. And! And! AND!

…There’s a lot squeezed into this comic. Snyder takes full advantage of the situation that’s been presented to him, in every facet. Even the DC universe being born again in media res is used to create a sense of mystery. And so it makes a convincing case for this entire relaunch - mystery isn’t something we’re used to in the familiar world of Superman and Batman, and without mystery, any sense of wonder can dissolve - and for the way this character - who, in the most praised comics written about him, appeared in a separate reality - fits into a world of superheroes. It’s comics at a hundred miles an hour and this review was meant to be way shorter but I’m struggling to keep up and tell you everything that’s great about it.

Grade: A+

Stormwatch #1
Written by Paul Cornell
Art by Miguel Selpuveda
Reviewed by Tim
If you read my little introductory preamble to my review of Justice League last week, you’ll know that The Authority was one of the books that reignited my passion for comics after a couple of years of buying purely out of habit. Despite my tastes having changed and my critical eye improved somewhat, it is a series I still love, despite its flaws. The characters were fresh new spins on classic archetypes, and the realpolitik approach to the realm of superheroes, and how they would impact the world was well realised and flawlessly executed. As such, I have a lot of affection for the characters, and a big part of me is excited to see them A) revived and B) brought into a new universe, with a whole bunch of new characters to clash with. However, there is another part that says, “Can these characters, with their particular brand of heroics, function in the idealistic, four-colour world of the DCU? Won’t such a clash of ideals ring false, with the Wildstorm characters feeling gritty for the sake of shock, and the DC characters feeling like relics of a simpler age?”

Luckily, Paul Cornell is at the helm, a writer I have a lot of respect for, and if this issue is anything to go by, he is more than up to the task of balancing these two tones. Stormwatch is presented as an existing organisation, one that has protected from the shadows long before the dawn of superheroes 5 years ago in the new DCU, and one that is more than willing to make the tough decisions and muddy up their morals. As the Martian Manhunter says in this issue, you can be a hero, or you can be a warrior, and Stormwatch is for warriors. Basically, while Superman is saving your life and Batman is foiling your evil schemes, Stormwatch is in ur base, killing ur doodz.

In some ways, the issue echoes last week's Justice League, with disparate heroes uniting, personalities and powers outlined, and a new character revealed on the final page, having quickly dispatched our heroes. However, Paul Cornell handles the necessary exposition much more gracefully and smoothly, laying more groundwork for future stories without sacrificing momentum, and Miguel Sepulveda’s art is cleaner and clearer, telling the story with the minimum of fuss, and some nice touches in the action. The digital colouring and various overlays used as graphics, or to indicate shape shifting are a little distracting, but otherwise it’s a very pretty looking comic. The only downside on the art is the awful redesigns of Apollo and Midnighter, both of whom have traded in simple, classic costumes for awful over-designed crap. Midnighter looks like he’s playing some kind of futuristic version of American football that involves bondage wear, and who the hell decided that giving Apollo a haircut was a good idea?
Still, these are small criticisms against an otherwise very solid first issue – the first of the DC relaunches that I will be picking up next month to see what happens. Grade: A
Animal Man #1
Written by Jeff Lemire
Art by Travel Foreman & Dan Green
Reviewed by Bret
Animal Man. Wow. Maybe it’s because I just read Green Arrow and that has made Animal Man seem amazing in comparison but let me tell you right now this gets an A. Screw it! A+.

Animal Man is one of those characters I read once long ago, and saw that they did some interesting things with his powers. This left me to think that he was a cool character, if slightly cheesy. Well it would seem that the new run is not only going to continue the trend of being interesting but has somehow replaced cheesiness with grounded, heartfelt characters and plot. The story has a solid foundation in its opening, showing an interview with Animal Man in a magazine. This does a great job of making you feel like the character is a real person with a believable background.

Next we’re introduced to Animal Man’s wife and kids. Here we get a very interesting look at how a casual part-time superhero / movie star acts in his day to day life dealing with the kids and having to make sure he’s home on time for dinner. The scene changes and now we’re at a hospital trying to help the police with a hostage situation. It turns out that the man with the gun has just had a break down after losing his daughter to cancer and doesn’t know what else to do but blame the doctors. Animal Man deals with the situation with genuine compassion and understanding whilst managing to show off his powers to the reader without seeming like he’s showing off in the book.

Simply put, an amazing tale that had as much tension as it did comedy and feel good factor, all in 20 pages. And with gorgeous artwork too! Seeds are sown for a larger plot and with that ending (no spoilers here) I’m guaranteed to go back and buy issue 2.

My exact words when describing this to Tim Tim Biscuit Tin were “Animal Man is a pie that I’m eating and I can’t quite put my finger on that taste but I know that I want more of it.”

Grade: an easy A+