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Saturday, April 10, 2004 ( 4/10/2004 10:10:00 AM ) Bill S. SERENE VIEWING – After rationing ourselves by only watching eps when another show was in rerun, we finally got to the end of the Firefly boxed set last week. Viewing the season a second time, I naturally found my perspective on some of the characters changing. Adam Baldwin's opportunistic Jayne Cobb, who I originally found somewhat irritating, grew funnier the second time through – particularly since all his attempts at double-dealing prove fruitless. (If he were successful at being a sleaze, we'd probably loathe him.) The sexual tension between Nathan Fillian's Captain Reynolds and Morena Baccarin's professional companion Inara seemed less awkward the second time through and was significantly expanded upon through one of the set's three unaired episodes, "Heart of Gold." I was particularly impressed by the three previously unseen entries (two of which end with extended eulogy scenes, interestingly). Though not up to the show's peak eps (Joss Whedon's "Objects in Space," for instance, which closes the whole box set on an almost poetic note), they certainly were better than most of what passes for series television. Particular fave: "Trash," which brings back professional scamster Saffron (first seen in "Our Mrs. Reynolds") and extrapolates its plotline from the garbage scene in the first Star Wars. Be great to see what Whedon and company will be able to do with these characters in the movie-budgeted Serenity. As a side note, I found myself pondering – in the face of fannish efforts to get Twentieth Century Fox to release the full season of the imprudently canceled Wonderfalls – how creator payment works for episodes that have never been aired on network television. I know the rate of pay for tape and DVDs was a major bone of contention during the last writer's strike, but did anyone at the time even consider the possibility that fresh series material would find an audience in the DVD market? Are the previously unaired shows treated like Direct-to-Video material or something else entirely? In the case of a series like Wonderfalls – where only four of its thirteen commissioned episodes have been broadcast – this could be a major contractual issue unless some enterprising cable net like Bravo (which successfully did it with the canceled Fox series Keen Eddie) or Trio grabs the full season for itself. (NOTE: That last paragraph is all, of course, half-assed speculation. I'd love to hear from any real-life teevee folk on this because I suspect the situation is more complex than my couch potato self can imagine. (UPDATE: Captain Spaulding responds to my query – and it reads like my idle speculation was off base.) # | Friday, April 09, 2004 ( 4/09/2004 03:13:00 PM ) Bill S.  "DETAILS ARE IRRELEVANT. . .THAT'S HOW I PREFER IT!" – The protagonists of Brian Wood & Rob G's graphic novels The Couriers and The Couriers: Dirtbike Manifesto (AIT/Planet Lar) are two twenty-ish urban mercenaries named Moustafa and Special. The duo work as free-lancers for an unseen job broker named Hot Sauce: when we meet them in New York City ("Right Fucking Now," the caption clarifies), they're in the midst of a shoot-out in Chinatown, taking on a Russian mobster who's tried to stiff 'em big time. Our trigger-happy lad and lady work in a murky legal realm, although Wood establishes early that they have their own code of ethics. When HS pulls them in to do a "biologic," the delivery of a living person, Moustafa initially balks: "It's always child prostitutes or prisoners or some shit that's against their will. It's wrong and we don't do it!" But they wind up taking the assignment, which involves transporting a helpless young Nepalese girl from the airport to an undescribed safety area, anyway. Said girl, who communicates to Special via personal sign language, is being pursued by a former Red Army General for reasons we don't learn until the end of the book. We know the General is a psycho s.o.b., however, since his first act in the story is to grab a cat out of the young girl's arms, then toss the feline out a window to its death. Though the General has been exiled to Nepal by "soft" elements of the Chinese government, he has contacts with a Chinese gang called the Triad and with his former comrades in the Red Army. He utilizes the former to intercept the girl at the airport – which results in a violent gunfight and a car chase – then the army to interrogate and shoot every courier they can find. So far so good, but once the General's army shows up in the middle of NYC with attack helicopters, I could feel my willing credulity snap in twain. (Proof that what you can readily get away with in a movie – Whoa! Look at them bad-ass whirlybirds! – is harder to pull of in a gritty action comic book.) Moustafa rallies his fellow urbanites to strike back against the invading Red Army. And, like Ewoks defending their forest from the Empire, they do so. More ultra-violence ensues, though we never once see a representative of civil authority intervene even though events are occurring "right fucking now" in the aftermath of 9/11. You know how it is: the Man doesn't give a rat's ass for grown-up, punked-out street urchins in the city. The Couriers, then, is set in a hyped-up metropolis that's designed to be the writer & artist's violent playground. It's about as close to the real thing as the title setting of Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx, though both creators of this "Wood/G Joint" keep steady hands on the eccentric pulses of each character. (We learn, for instance, that Moustafa loves chow fun noodle soup with fish balls and that scarred and street-tuff Special decorates her bedroom with unicorn and big-eyed kitten posters.) Rob Goodridge's black-and-white art borrows from all over the place (in one panel, he even turns two characters into cartoon manga kids), which is apt considering the tale's multi-cultural urban jungle setting. I enjoyed The Couriers, even as I recognized its implausibilities in a way I wouldn't even notice with a book featuring super-powered protagonists. At one point, Wood shows Special ramming a gun into one bad guy's mouth, shooting him through the head and nailing a second baddie right through his motorcycle helmet. "I'm not sure sure if you could shoot through two heads like that or not," the artist admits in one of the book's "Production Notes." But it sure looks neat. Wasn't until I got twenty-plus pages into The Couriers that I realized the characters were part of a larger continuity that began with Couscous Express. But I didn't go back to that earlier 2001 outing until I'd read through both Couriers volumes, in part because the first book wasn't as visually welcoming. Express is told through Olive Yassin, daughter to the owners of the book's eponymous restaurant and girlfriend of courier Moustafa. Spoiled (we're told she's that way by the courier, who talks to the reader from a park bench) and resentful of her parents' mild demands on her, 16-year-old Olive gets put to the test when her parents are threatened by a Turkish mobster who was once her mother's lover. Played at a more realistic level than Couriers (even if Olive's sudden facility with firearms is a stretch), Express is a layered and intriguing story. But the art by previously-unknown-to-me Brett Weldele is much less assured than Rob G's. Weldele uses mechanical shading like a sumbitch, but all it does is draw attention to his more dubiously rendered human figures. Olive has a small speaking role in Couriers and a more prominent, though largely silent, one in the second Couriers book, Dirtbike Manifesto. This latest entry takes our two urban mercenaries out of the city in search of the gun source responsible for the death of a fellow courier. There they run into their redneck doppelgangers, a thuggish couple aligned with a local militia. Wood's big idea here is to place these two refugees from the New York melting pot in racist small-town U.S.A. – where Moustafa's Egyptian heritage spurs suspicion and casually bigoted epithets – but he spends more pages focusing on bike chases and showdowns than he does the clash of American subcultures. The results are diverting (Rob G clearly has a great time rendering blurry speed and motion) but slighter than either of the other two volumes. Reportedly, Wood & G have three more books planned featuring Moustafa and Special. On the basis of their three GN appearances, I find these engagingly foul-mouthed mercs appealing enough to follow 'em in subsequent volumes. Hopefully, Wood'll give these scruffy action kids more plot than he doled out in Manifesto. UPDATE: Johnny Bacardi has since posted his take on the three books – and while we're both pretty much in the same place on story, we're totally at odds on the art. . . CORRECTION: When I first posted this piece here and on Blogcritics, I carelessly referred to Rob G's Couriers "Production Notes" as if scripter Wood had written 'em. I've since corrected this in both postings. # | Thursday, April 08, 2004 ( 4/08/2004 11:16:00 AM ) Bill S. WHOA! – Just learned that I've been declared Blogcritic of the Day! Between that and reading on Franklin Harris' blog that I was in the bottom half of Blogarama's "Top 100 Cool Blogs," I feel like I need to check to make sure my zipper's fully up. . . # | ( 4/08/2004 09:14:00 AM ) Bill S. FRESH POLLACKS – Hadn't realized, until I came upon an Atrios ref to the fact he was blog-stepping behind Condoleezza Rice's 9/11 Commission testimony, that Neal Pollack is back bloggin' with The Neal Pollack Invasion. Though he's apparently abandoned the nutcase persona that produced some of his funniest past entries, he's still fun reading. Especially choice: April 1's mock overview of the Left Behind series ("On my way back from a recent trip to Chicago, I had an hour-and-a-half layover in Dallas, and was able to read all 12 novels in the series.") But he's also crisply snarky with Condi. ("She is the most resolute and hard-working woman ever to work in our government, and also the only one who has an oil tanker named after her.") Great to see him back – and to learn that former manservant Roger is doing well. . . # | ( 4/08/2004 08:23:00 AM ) Bill S.  "I'M THE THING THAT YOU LET LOOSE." – Been reading the trio of "urban mercenaries" graphic novels (about which, more later) by Brian Wood over the last few days, so this morning I took a break to devour Garth Ennis & Rich Corben's post-apocalyptic finish to The Punisher. After all this hard, nasty comic fare, I'm gonna want to immerse myself in a pile of Gemstone Comics.Looking at Corben's two-page spread of a bombed-out NYC, I inevitably flashed on the work he did in the underground days for an ecological horror title like Slow Death. This is apt since Ennis's script – which climaxes with an aged Frank Castle cutting a swath through a bunker full of fat cats ("Oilmen and generals. Computer billionaires and senators. Captains of industry," we're told) – reads like something Tom Veitch might've written for Greg Irons in one of the ug updatings of EC back in the 70's (Deviant Slice, say). Or Spain's hard left Trashman series. Nuthin' too original, in other words – but I like the pissed bite-the-hand-that-feeds-me tone of this one-shot, which is doubly effective running alongside more traditional bland movie tie-in ploys like Marvel's two recent Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus mini-series. I'm wagering the upcoming Punisher flick won't be half as much nasty fun. # | Wednesday, April 07, 2004 ( 4/07/2004 09:31:00 AM ) Bill S. LITTLE TRIGGERS – Some mid-week bullet-pointing, which is to say another batch of random political and pop cultural thots that probably couldn't stand up by themselves:
# | Tuesday, April 06, 2004 ( 4/06/2004 12:27:00 PM ) Bill S.  "MOVIE'S OVER, TOUGH GUY!" – Some graphic novels work so hard at being "cinematic" that they run the risk of losing much of what makes 'em graphic novels in the first place. Matt Fraction & Kieron Dwyer's Last of the Independents (AIT/Planet Lar) openly acknowledges its movie roots from the get-go – scripter Fraction dedicates his portion of the book to "Dads that take their kids out of school to catch movies instead of math class." – and it's at its weakest when it lets these roots show too clearly.Independents is a caper yarn: the story of a trio of westerners who rob a bank to reverse their bad luck ("Because we're losers and it's time to be winners," developmentally stunted savant mechanic Billy rotely explains,) only to discover that this particular bank is money laundry for a brutal Vegas mobster named Vincenzo R. Francone. How vicious is this guy? Midpoint in the story, we see he's tortured and crucified the unfortunate bank guard who was unable to halt the robbery. Francone sends a henchman named Pascal Thorpe to retrieve "his" money, and the latter half of the book is devoted to our threesome's battle of wits against an army of black-suited goons. It's a familiar enough yarn (think Don Siegel's Charley Varrick.) But Fraction & Dwyer treat the material simply and, thankfully, sans a lot of self-conscious jabberjawed media riffs. The scripter establishes his threesome – grizzled cowboy Cole Caudle, pilot girlfriend Justine Worrell and (you know he's doomed the instant he tells the other two that they "take care" of him) big kid Billy – without a lot of fuss. (If anything, he underplays their back story.) Cole is a former town drunk who's won an amusement park through some dubious means (he says he won it in a "river boat poker game," but we're not sure we believe him.) He's driven to plan the robbery (which he refuses to call a "caper," though Billy wants him to) after a larger park called Planetworld puts him out of business. Caudle wants "to be a different man. Not a new man, just different," but instead finds himself with eight million dollars that he can't give up even as it guarantees that Thorpe and his gang o' thugs won't give up trying to get it back. Dwyer's art, printed in sepia tones suited to the story's dusty milieu, is at its best showing moments of quiet before the action (there's a two-page wordless sequence between Cole and younger Justine in bed that tells us all we need to know about the pair's relationship) and mano a mano facedowns. It's less successful during the book's action sequences, which occasionally come across more static than they need to. (A panel where a greasy bank manager gets a rock flung at his teeth just plain doesn't work, though I liked how Dwyer made the manager's checked coat blend against a wire fence during a gunfight.) There's a neat car and horse chase sequence, however, which Fraction wisely keeps dialog free and which also got me wondering how Dwyer would do with a full-blown western comic. He has a heavy brush line that makes me think of Jack Davis in places – not a bad look to cultivate in material like this. On the whole, Last of the Independents is a nicely played genre exercise, which works best when its filmic influences aren't too openly aired. A scene where Justine improbably escapes a group of thugs holding her captive, for instance, doesn't fully work because Fraction can't resist giving her a snappish screenplay line before she grabs a handful of steak knives off a nearby kitchen counter. Better if Fraction had followed his own advice from the inevitable showdown between Cole and Pascal Thorpe: "What? No clever line? No witty fucking quip. . ." Thorpe sneers as his nemesis towers over him – and, true to his laconic cowboyness, Caudle sez nothing. Quick and dirty, that's the way to play this kind of GN pulp. # | Monday, April 05, 2004 ( 4/05/2004 02:39:00 PM ) Bill S. GET CRAZY WITH THE CHEEZE WHIZ – Shane Bailey at Near Mint Heroes sent an email today noodging me to mention the Big Losers Contest over at Ringwood Ragefuck. The writer who comes up with the best description for why s/he is the Biggest Loser in the Universe will win a complete run of the swell Andy Diggle & Jock Vertigo comic. Hey, if I didn't already have all these issues, I'd happily humiliate myself for the prize! # | ( 4/05/2004 09:53:00 AM ) Bill S. TALKIN' BASS SILENCED – In a move that'll surprise no one who's been following Fox Network, the flawed but zippily whimsical fantasy series Wonderfalls has been axed after four airings. (Haven't viewed the fourth ep yet myself, but it's been taped.) Per producer Tim Minear, there's little chance of getting the blinkered network types to change their collective mind – too busy seeking out the next Swan to look back, one supposes – but there already is a petition out asking 20th Century Fox to consider releasing the series as a DVD set. . . (Found at Tony Collett's blog.) # | ( 4/05/2004 09:01:00 AM ) Bill S. IN-JOKE DU JOUR – From Sunday's episode of The Sopranos comes a disbelieving conversation among the F.B.I. agents pressuring Adriana La Cerva (Drea de Matteo) to narc on the Soprano family. Learning that Ade and Tony S. have shared a moment of mutual lust, one of the agents scoffs about the knock-out Adriana being attracted to "Barney Rubble." Which echoes an episode of "Adult Swim's" Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law that recast Fred Flintstone as a putative mobster – and later revealed Barney Rubble to be the real power behind the throne. Dabba Do, indeed. . . # | ( 4/05/2004 08:25:00 AM ) Bill S. "WE HAVE MET, RIGHT? IT'S GETTING SO HARD TO TELL. . ." – Don't much disagree with Johnny Bacardi's thoroughly negative assessment of Avengers/JLA – which rates a big huh? what? from this reader – but I will note that I was momentarily caught by a scene between the Silver Age Flash and Green Lantern (who, in the story, have been temporarily revived by the "chronal chaos" symptomatic of all the cosmic goings on.) In the lull between overcrowded fights, the two share a nice moment of comradely reflection: "If only there was one more day, one more cookout with Carol and Iris," the Barry Allen Flash notes. "One more loud night with Ollie and Ralph," the Hal Jordan GL takes up. It may've just been fanboyish pandering on Busiek's part, but for eight brief small panels I connected to the story and these two favored characters from my boyhood. Whether that's worth the cost of four $5.95 prestige comics is another question, of course. # | Sunday, April 04, 2004 ( 4/04/2004 02:34:00 PM ) Bill S. BOTH REACHING FOR THE GUN – So I finally caught a Starz showing of the movie version of Kander-&-Ebb's Chicago last night: a neatly heartless musical, though unlike K&E’s Cabaret it never manages to achieve devastatingly heartless since (aside from John C. Reilly's cellophane hubby Amos) none of the characters manage to rise above cartoonish. The flick moves along at such a clip I'm guessing a lot of character material from the original play was discarded – but perhaps not. (I'll have to catch a theatrical production sometime.) Best musical numbers: Queen Latifah's bawdy reciprocity song and Reilly's soft shoe self-description, which I knew from many Sunday afternoon radio playings of Joel Grey's original cast rendition – wouldn't have thought Reilly could've kept up with Grey, but he does. But, anyway, that's not the real point of this post. This a.m., while perusing blogs I'd managed to skip over the past few days, I came upon Peter David's political parody – which uses another song from Chicago to proactively lampoon the upcoming Bush/Cheney testimony before the 9/11 Commission. If I'd read this before I'd viewed the movie, I probably wouldn't have chuckled so much, but, for me, the timing was right. If you know the musical, check out David's entry – and you'll probably picture Mort Drucker renderings of the principals as you do. . . # | |
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