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Saturday, February 01, 2003 ( 2/01/2003 04:21:00 PM ) Bill S. SOME CLOWNS IN CIRCUS COSTUMES – Several weeks ago, I did a piece for this blog & Blogcritics, discussing some of my favorite ongoing genre comics. I received several responses (not to mention, a nice plug in Journalista!), but the most insistent comments came from a reader who thought I should’ve included Marvel’s The Ultimates in my personal survey. I hadn’t read the book at the time and said so. I’d gone through some trade reprints of Ultimate titles featuring Spider-Man & X-Men – and as handsome as they looked, there wasn’t much in ‘em to prod me into digging more deeply into the Ultimate Marvel Universe. I know it’s standard to re-tell and reinvent comic book characters for a new generation – how many reboots has Superman seen, for instance? – but neither parallel universe series seemed sufficiently different to justify a whole line o’ Ultimates. Dude, I was told, after I’d made this point to my interlocutor, the Ultimates are nothing like Marvel’s old Avengers series! So I acquiesced and picked up a copy of the recent trade reprinting the book's first six issues. My reader was right. This is a major revisionist job on Marvel’s longstanding Lee-&-Kirby superhero creation, The Avengers. The book starts out promisingly: in the European Theatre, circa 1945, super soldier hero Captain America is on a mission alongside a group of convincingly tough-talking grunts, including journalist Bucky Barnes. The soldiers are understandably skeptical about Cap, (“Dressing some clown in a circus costume. . .” one of ‘em says. “What age do you think we are?”) But their skepticism vanishes when they all venture into battle. Scripter Mark Millar and artist Bryan Hitch establish a strong tone at the outset: hard-bitten, gritty, w./ lots of obscure rain-drenched battle imagery. Hitch (who’s also worked on The Authority & Justice League of America) has a flair for big group battle scenes, so he’s in his element here. The whole first chapter/issue leads to a moment that long-term Avengers readers know is coming: Cap’s struggle to disarm a launched rocket that’ll wind up in his getting dumped & frozen in the cold Atlantic waters. So far, so good. Unlike Marvel’s original Avengers – which only took one issue back in 1963 to establish its basic team (though Cap America didn’t appear ‘til issue #4) – Millar’s Ultimates are a bit slower getting out of the gate. For one thing, where the original series was built around characters who already had their own established titles (Ant/Giant-Man & Wasp, Hulk, Iron Man plus Thor), the core cast of Ultimates is introduced as the series progresses. Next three chapters in the book are primarily devoted to presenting this crew in presentday surroundings – it isn’t ‘til the series’ fifth issue that we see ‘em fight as a team. This makes the bulk of the book more character-driven, even if the characterization is more than a bit dubious at times. Among the changes in these Ultimate Incarnations:
That somewhat dorky exchange aside, Steve Rogers’ Cap can be an affecting figure. He’s always been one of the more interesting Marvel characters: a man reflecting square-jawed democratic values he knows are out of time (even his contemporary peers don’t always get what he’s going on about), who always is aware of how much he’s lost. In one scene, Steve visits the home of his friend Bucky & former fiancé – the former is dying of lung cancer, and the latter is too aware of how old she looks to let him see her – while later we learn that he’s moved back into his old New York neighborhood, which is now a drug-riddled slum. Though unsaddled w./ the broad doubts & neuroses of his fellow Ultimates, he remains an isolated figure. By the end of Chapter Four, we’re told there’s already public doubt about the need for this new super-group. So Doc Banner does what we’ve all been waiting for him to do: unleash the Hulk to give the gang a real menace to battle. Learning that ex-lover Betty is dining w./ Freddy Prinze Jr. (does Sarah Michelle know?), Banner/Hulk rampages through Manhattan, screaming for the head of the Scooby Doo star. Which finally brings us to Chapter/Issue Five’s climactic battle scene: the monstrously horny (bet we don't get that in the Ang Lee movie!) Hulk screaming for Betty – so he can give her what ol’ puny Banner apparently can't – and brutally killing civilians along the way. (At one point, we’re told, he slays a fat man just so he can steal his pants.) This is no childlike tantruming Hulk, but an ugly brutal monster: smashing into Giant-Man, he bellows that he’s gonna tear off his head and use his skull like a toilet bowl. (Sure don’t imagine TV’s Lou Ferigno delivering that line, but then how many lines could he deliver?) The whole crew comes out in force, and Wasp displays a startling use of her powers by flashing her breasts before the Hulk to distract him. It also rains a lot, thanks to Thor’s hammer. I can see the reason for doing big FX-laden battles in the rain & dark in movies – where you can use both to mask wires, etc. – but after viewing two rain-blurred fights in this book, I really started missing day-lit primary colors. It’s a comic book, guys: you can show us anything you want! Our team prevails by chapter's end, changing the monster back into his weedy Banner self (where he’s promptly straitjacketed), then hushing up the scientist's involvement in the Hulk rampage. But despite – or perhaps because of – this victory, we don’t end Book One on a happy note. In the final chapter, we get a depressing glimpse into the married life of Hank & Janet Pym. Still sulking over the fact that he got his ass kicked in the Big Green Fight, Hank holds up in his lab. When wife Janet attempts to pull him out to a dinner at Tony Stark’s, he snaps back jealously, and things escalate into a full-blown physical fight between the two. The panel where Hank first hauls off and hits his wife is even more dismaying than the scenes where Hulk threatens to rape Betty (if only because we know that the good guys are gonna prevent that appalling act from happening), and are about as far from the original characters as you can get. But does the scene make any sense? As it plays, the moment works. Millar & Hitch do a decent job building their scene (we’re given a hint that this is not the first time the two have come to blows) and even capture such subtleties as the moment where, mid-fight, Janet apologizes for starting a conflict that really is more Hank’s fault than hers. The fight also ends on an ambiguous note: Janet being overwhelmed by ants that have attacked her on Hank’s command (as he tells her in an ominous full-face close-up, “You shouldn’t have made me look small, Jan!”), then a full-page scene of Pym seated in the wreckage of lab, bemoaning what he has done. Very effective. And yet – and yet . . . for the first time since I started this series, I suddenly find myself growing all fanboyish. A bit that I would’ve accepted in a newish superhero title like The Authority can’t help but feel off when it’s built around characters who’ve been around for ages, even if they are supposed to be the new-&-improved Ultimate versions. It’s not like I have any great love for the first Hank Pym. Truth be the told, the original version was a stiff. But I’m even less enamored w./ the idea of making the guy a wife beater. Call me old-fashioned. In the end, the issue ultimately comes down to this: when does revisionism cross over into shock value contrariness? It’s a dividing line that probably varies from reader to reader, but we all recognize when it’s been crossed. It’s that moment when you suddenly feel a sinking sense of betrayal by the actions of a bunch of featherweight figures on glossy paper. Aside from its success as a marketing gimmick (“This ain’t your Daddy’s Ant-Man, that’s for damn sure!”), I remain unconvinced about the viability of the Ultimate books. “Why not simply write good versions of the original characters?” think I. Isn’t that what the company’s been trying with, to name one example, its current Marvel Knights Daredevil series? But what do I know? The past few months have seen more Ultimate titles – Ultimate Adventures & Ultimate War (that last now puts the line in the same league as Troma Films) – along w./ an Ultimate Daredevil/Elektra mini-series, clearly demonstrating their comic shoppe cachet. Me, I’m just a cranky ol' critic who, on finishing this book, felt the need to cleanse my mental palate w./ a simple Lee-&-Kirby komic. Okay, now I've read The Ultimates. # | Friday, January 31, 2003 ( 1/31/2003 10:30:00 AM ) Bill S. “AM I PART OF THE CURE/OR AM I PART OF THE DISEASE?” – Is Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood To The Head the most used thematic background music this television season? Sure seems that way, but maybe I just watch the types of shows that’d think to use it – like last night’s E.R., which got effective play out of “Clocks” in the show's final minutes. You can hear why the group’s songs make for good mainstream TV backing: they’re subdued (if occasionally too subdued), beautifully melodic, while their lead has a kind of choirboy yearning just right for supporting melancholy dramatic moments. # | Thursday, January 30, 2003 ( 1/30/2003 12:49:00 PM ) Bill S. BRING ON THE NEWSBOY LEGION! – More fun news from Mark Evanier’s site: DC is reprinting the short run of Jack Kirby written & illustrated Jimmy Olsen comics from the 70's. Though plenty of fans’ll vociferously disagree, these are some of my favorite Kirbys from the period – a time when the great comics artist had broken away from Marvel Comics to produce his own creations for the Distinguished Competition. He came up w./ plenty of inventive titles (New Gods, Mister Miracle, The Demon, et al), but his take on this long-standing Superman character had a goofy energy that I especially liked. Nice to see it getting resurrected. (Now if only DC would issue color versions of their New Gods series reprints.) # | ( 1/30/2003 09:19:00 AM ) Bill S. SO LONG, SD-6 – Watched the Super Bowl episode of Alias last night: first time we’ve caught the show this season. You could see writer/creator J.J. Abrams trying to grab those of the audience too plowed to switch channels after post-game: the show opened w./ two extended images of series lead Jennifer Garner in provocative lingerie. (Dressed to impress a pudgy computer geek, our heroine Sydney is forced to change out of her first outfit into a second.) This prolonged bad guy/audience tease was capped by a moment when our heroine attacks the villain and spits out a comment about how uncomfortable the whole Victoria’s Secret look is. You could practically hear pomo feminist critics reaching for their pencils w./ that ‘un. Word is that Abrams & co. are trying to unkink the convoluted plotting to make the series more accessible to an incoming viewer. They jettisoned the series’ double-agent plotline by swiftly dispatching SD-6 – the phony arm of the CIA that’d initially recruited our heroine then killed her fiancé – though, hopefully, such appealing characters as Carl Lumbly’s Dixon and Kevin Weisman’s techno-geek Marshall won’t be gone for good. SD-6 baddie Sloan (the man who ordered the death of Sydney’s betrothed) is still on the loose, happily. Sunday’s ep was plenty zippy (there’s a great sequence involving a depressurized airplane that utilized CGI to outdo Goldfinger), and now that WB has moved Angel from its deadly Sunday timeslot onto Wednesday, we’ll probably be watching it again. Just when you think that Abrams has eliminated the “trust no one” spy-line that’s provided so much oomph to the series, he threw a nifty curve in the final minutes. Not bad. Speaking of Sunday Series: ABC also took advantage of Super Bowl to shift another show, David E. Kelley’s The Practice, to a different night. Saw its premiere in the new Monday timeslot, and I’m siding with skippy in his assessment of the show’s current weak state. I’ll watch Alfre Woodard’s plotline (playing a mentally ill prisoner who’s been taken off her medication: a patented ploy for Emmy consideration to these eyes, though it’ll still be fun to watch her decompensate), but I’m suspecting that’s it. Perhaps Kelley is a writer who works best with a time-limited series: this isn’t the first of his to lose its sense of purpose by the third or fourth season. # | Wednesday, January 29, 2003 ( 1/29/2003 04:21:00 PM ) Bill S. WHERE’S ROOT BOY SLIM WHEN YOU NEED HIM? – Just caught up on a strong posting about fat joke characters in Ampersand’s Alas, A Blog, a topic that's come up once or twice in these parts. I especially liked his reference to the Absent Fatso: the sitcom character who we never see – but who remains the object of ongoing fat jokes. So would Niles Crane’s Maris be the Absent Anorexic? # | ( 1/29/2003 09:32:00 AM ) Bill S. THE TRAGEDY OF THE SPITBALL – Though much discussed on comics message boards and other places of higher discourse, I’ve generally ignored the Danny Hellman/Ted Rall legal contretemps. Neither side in the conflict particularly comes off very well, and though literary/artist feuds are as old as time, in the long run they’re pretty trivial. What matters more are the creative works themselves. Everything else is just a gossipy footnote. That noted, I admit I got a laff out of “Maakies” artist Tony Millionaire’s guest artist prank. As explained in Journalista!, the gag went like this: Millionaire periodically has guest artists writing & drawing his weekly strip; he offered Rall a guest slot, which was publicized all over the message boards. But when the time came for the guest strip to appear, in its stead was a strip by rival Hellman parodying the Rall’s lawsuit against him. Hellman’s big “Maakies” strip does a neat job replicating Millionaire’s voice, and its basic premise is broad enough that readers who haven’t been paying attention to comics news aren’t left behind. The bottom tier mini-strip, however, only makes sense if you know that Rall is the artist being referenced. So now Hellman-ites are rubbing their hands w./ glee over the set-up & prank (including – hey, welcome back! – Jim Treacher), while Rall-ists are wondering if they’ll ever get to view the “Maakies” strip he reportedly submitted to Millionaire. I’m curious myself about what Ted can produce when called upon to approximate Millionaire’s more studied, craft-driven style. But I’m not holding my breath, waiting for it to appear . . . UPDATE: August Pollak has a sharp & heart-felt reaction to the whole shmear, written from the perspective of a budding cartoonist. # | Tuesday, January 28, 2003 ( 1/28/2003 04:28:00 PM ) Bill S. “I HOPE YOU FEEL BETTER SOON” – You can tell ABC’s midseason Miracles is gonna be a dark time when the opening voice warning us of “intense subject matter” comes across so whisperingly ominous. Despite its title and homey station break image, the series is not one of those unchallengingly inspirational religio-fests like Touched By An Angel. Nope, Miracles aims to stake out grimmer thematic territory: the solemn “more things in Heaven & Earth” plot-land of movies like The Sixth Sense. Earnest series lead Skeet Ulrich plays Paul Callan, a traveling debunker employed by the Catholic Church to investigate reports of miracles. Callan is like Harry Houdini was w./ mediums: rigorous in exposing fake miracles yet forever yearning to come across the real thing. The series opens showing him at work. Confronted by the 140-year-old intact body of a nun, he demonstrates that her seeming unnatural preservation is the result of apricot seed nutrients in the soil. All this hard-nosed scientific investigation can be tough on a fella’s faith, however. “What’s the point of faith if it’s never been tested?” priest/mentor Father Bellamy (Hector Elizondo) asks in his patented seriously hoarse voice (lots of muttering on this show – glad I have closed captioning). Our hero goes on sabbatical ‘til he seemingly receives a call from the priest asking him to check out a boy in Arizona named Tommy Ferguson (not as cool a name as Cole Sear, but never mind). You can bet Callan'll be coming across something inexplicable this time: otherwise the whole series'd be dead on the tracks. Callan’s case turns out to be a frail boy w./ an incurable disease plus the power to heal others by hugging ‘em and saying that he hopes they feel better. Trouble is: Tommy’s healing powers come at the expense of his own health – every time he uses it, his own disease grows stronger. First sign the kid is doomed as doomed can be: when he enters a dialog w./ our hero by asking, “What happens when you die?” At the same time, Callan is being plagued by portentous dreams & visions: of a water tower w./ the daunting legend “God Is Coming” (this is one of those stories where lots of ordinary stuff is made to look ominous by lingering on it), of a rain-drenched railroad crossing, of young Tommy bleeding from his eyes (okay, that last creeped me out a bit). Confronted by something truly unexplainable for the first time, our hero can't tell whether its source is divine or demonic. Trapped in a car by the fateful crossing, Callan sees a series of words spelled out on the dash in blood, but even here their message is maddeningly ambiguous: “GOD IS NOW HERE” or “GOD IS NOWHERE.”Which is the right message? You don’t expect ‘em to tip that in the pilot, do you? Writer Richard Hatem and producer David (Angel) Greenwalt are counting on this central mystery to keep pulling you back. Scheduled against the secular criminalists of C.S.I.: Miami, the show presents a canny kind of counter-programming. Where the C.S.I. franchise is designed to answer every asked question by the end of each hour, Miracles wants to throw out more & more open-ended puzzles as the series progresses. Is the American viewing public in the mood for such spiritual ambiguity? Probably not. But I’m guessing those viewers who miss Chris Carter’s Millennium will be intrigued. Near the end of the debut ep, Callan is contacted by a mysterious figure: our hero’s investigative predecessor, now working for a parallel organization. All the signs, he tells Callan, indicate “Something Big Is Coming.” Wonder if the show’ll last long enough to tell us what that is? # | Monday, January 27, 2003 ( 1/27/2003 06:13:00 AM ) Bill S. ON THE HIGHWAYS & BYWAYS – I'm on the road for a couple of days, so behave yourselves while I’m gone. And stay away from that reality programming: it's bad for ya. . . # | ( 1/27/2003 06:10:00 AM ) Bill S. LEFT OUT IN THE RAIN – How much do I not care about the Super Bowl? So much that I watched a second John Cusack romantic comedy in as many weeks on a movie channel. This time it was America’s Sweethearts, the Billy Crystal/Peter Tolan written Hollywood farce that also featured Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones plus Crystal as a fast-talking press agent. Movie had some big laffs at the expense of the moviemaking machine (most notably from Stanley Tucci and Christopher Walken as a producer and eccentric director, respectively), but I didn’t believe its central romantic triangle for a second. (Cusack & Zeta-Jones are glamorous movie stars on the rocks; Roberts is the mousy sister who has a major thing for Cusack; Crystal has gotten the two actors together on a press junket to promote their newest movie together – so let’s watch the sparks fly!) The pic wants to be Twentieth Century in the worst way, but Crystal & Tolan sure ain’t Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur. They’ve got the snappy patter thing down, but seem unable to give their characters enough neurotic heft to convincingly relate to each other. And speaking of heft, Sweethearts was one of two recent comedies to place a well-known actress in a fat suit: Roberts’ Kiki, we’re told, has lost sixty pounds over the past year, so her Greg Cannom makeup is less extreme than Gwyneth Paltrow’s was in Shallow Hal. We get to see her as her fat self in a flashback plus some documentary footage shot by Walken’s director; in the latter, she’s shame-facedly stuffing herself w./ chocolate. Now there’s a surprising slice of characterization. Me, I’d rather watch Paltrow’s Rosemary unapologetically grab a big ol' slice of chocolate cake. They got the obligatory Cusack-In-The-Rain scene out of the way early, incidentally. Like Hitchcock’s cameos, it’s probably best to do it quickly these days: otherwise, the audience spends the whole flick watching for it. . . # | Sunday, January 26, 2003 ( 1/26/2003 12:18:00 PM ) Bill S. THE BOOKS OF LUBA – Whenever I pick up one of Gilbert Hernandez’s Luba’s Comics and Stories, part of me wonders whether I’ll be able to keep the characters straight. The comics creator has developed such a rich family history – stretching from Palomar, Mexico, to Los Angeles – that at times it can be a bit daunting. His newest addition to the saga, Ofelia And The Little Ones (Fantagraphics), quickly banishes such reader fears, though: its inner cover is devoted to a quick genogram of the book’s characters. Story two, “Ask Luba,” even provides a Cliff’s Notes history of the series’ ruling matriarch – for those who haven’t been following her adventures since the days she was an Amazonian world-beater in the earliest Love and Rockets. A good introduction to the domestic Beto Universe, in other words. Though both title & cover focus on Ofelia (Luba’s elder cousin and the prime child-rearer in the family) alongside Luba’s four youngest kids, the book keeps returning to its hammer-wielding nucleus. In the opening story, Hernandez takes a typical day w./ Ofelia & the gang – inserting flashbacks that depict her as teen left in charge of kid cousin Luba. Ofelia, it appears, has been watching children all her life (in her eyes, Luba is as much a “little one” as the brood she now babysits) and she harbors much resentment over her role. She works on a book about her life w./ Luba – which resurrects old grudges even as the chances of her actually finishing the tome look extremely dubious. Much of Ofelia And The Little Ones circles around issues of child-rearing and abandonment. Ofelia takes the kids on a trip to hear an unseen crying infant (“I hear the mother left it here and forgot about it and it’s been crying for ever since,” Little One Casimira says). Luba’s mother, we learn, also left her at an early age, while Luba’s own readiness to regularly palm her kids off on Ofelia represents another kind of maternal abdication. We’re not talkin’ Mother of the Year here. Long-suffering Ofelia is no saint, of course. In her role of substitute parent, she’s been niggling away at Luba for years. One of the things that keeps me returning to Beto’s work (even at its more elaborately constructed) is his skill at creating and revealing complicated character. He’s also a master at capturing children’s thoughts & fears – which he does w./ all four of Luba’s kids. Not all comics fans have the desire to delve into the domestic dramas that Hernandez explores in his Luba books. Though he often inserts gothic or surreal elements (that crying infant voice, for example), the end results are usually more everyday than fantastic. Doesn’t mean the material's not entertaining, though. As he currently is showing in DC’s superheroine title, Birds of Prey, Beto is skilled at scripting amusing lightweight superheroine fantasy. But the women & children of Ofelia clearly are the ones who have the strongest grip on his heart. . . # | |
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