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Friday, March 28 ( 3/28/2008 08:14:00 AM ) Bill S.  "THE DAYS OF THE IRON CROSS ARE LONG GONE!" Gotta admit I probably would've skipped a comic book entitled Warriors Creed (Guy Thing Press) were it not for its promo release. Sent by a firm in Texas, it trumpeted the new color comic book series as part of a burgeoning Christian-themed boomlet aimed at young male readers: "For boys especially, for whom the King James Version of the Bible might not exactly seem compelling, these comics present a new way to engage youth in their own language."Christian-themed comic books aren't new, of course. Most comic fans are familiar with the notorious evangelical graphic tracts of Jack T. Chick, while the Spire Comics line published series of Christian-focused Archie comics for years. But having recently moved to a small Arizona town where the only bookstore in the area is a religious one, I was feeling curious about this new supposed movement of religio graphic novels. Which is how this largely lazy agnostic wound up writing Guy Thing Press for a review copy of this floppy. The book's creator John King, I've since learned, is an Australian-turned-Texas-evangelical who is also founder of the International Men's Network, a group devoted to building better men through application of Christian principals. In addition to his new comic series, the minister also has a collection entitled Helping Guys Become Better Men, Husbands And Fathers, which the p.r. folks also sent me alongside two copies of Creed #1. Haven't cracked that puppy open yet, though I have read my way through the 24-page Creed premiere several times. The experience hasn't particularly inspired me to dig any further into Dr. King's oeuvre. The comic concerns itself with two brothers, Joe and Paul Lee, whose parents were killed by a nefarious terrorist organization called the Black Hand. As the story opens, Joe is a clandestine operative working under the code name Operation Mongoose, while Paul is a streetwise pastor teaching young boys kickboxing. After the Hand captures Joe, his brother is enlisted to pull his own G.I. Joe-styled outfit out of mothballs. Going by the heavily connotative moniker of the Iron Cross, Paul flies to the Philippine island where his brother is being tortured by a turban-wearing (but of course!) baddie called the Inquisitor. "Shouldn't someone named the Inquisitor be wearing something more Papal? A mitre, perhaps?" the inquisitive reader may wonder, but this is no anti-Roman jeremiad. The Black Hand, we learn, worships the Middle Eastern deity Moloch. In issue one, King largely downplays the religious overtones in favor of his fairly familiar action comic set-up: the better to seduce his young readers, one supposes. The only open reference to Christianity comes when Joe is about to be tortured (suggested on-panel by a series of largely lettered "Whack!"s and "Fwak!"s) and he tells the reader, "The torture starts and the world goes black. I find myself remembering stories of a hero called the Savior. Could it have possibly been like this?" Reading that passage, I suddenly flashed on the image of the school teacher from A Christmas Story, pulling out her red pen to angrily slash "vague pronoun reference!" across the comic book lettering. If anything, Warriors Creed serves to demonstrate that not just anyone can write comics. As a scripter, King proves remarkably tin-eared. Check out this piece of narration from the opening page: "It is said that this island holds many tales of would be conquerors, almost heroes, and forgotten pains. You could say I'm here for a little of all three of these things." I had to reread that rascal several times before it could actually register. Artist Chris Fuentes doesn't particularly help matters either. He has a shaky handle on anatomy - his characters' necks, in particular, have a propensity for elongating in unnatural ways - while his big-draw action panels are frequently characterized by petrified poses. Fuentes' panel compositions don't always clarify the action, and, combined with King's unsure grasp of storytelling niceties, things can get pretty dicey. When King tries something as basic as a simple flashback illuminating his bland characters' background, for example, he doesn't include enough info in the narration to make it immediately clear when we return to the present. In more confident hands (think the current season of Lost), this type of confusion can be calculatedly entertaining. Here, it just comes across as sloppy. At one time, this kind of fumbling, half-formed comics work would've been largely confined to amateur-produced fanzines: where young would-be comics writers and artists could have taken their first fumbling steps into creating in front of a small audience of fellow comics geeks, hopefully learning from their mistakes in the process. These days, the existence of web comics and specialty publishing companies makes it disastrously easy for eager newcomers to foist their work on an unsuspecting public. I'm less concerned about what this means for Pastor King's message of Christian manliness than I am any young boys who are given this book in a misguided attempt at introducing 'em to the King James Bible. Let's hope they have some friends with a decent pile of mainstream comics or a shelf full of manga - lest they get turned off graphic storytelling altogether. # | Wednesday, March 26 ( 3/26/2008 05:46:00 PM ) Bill S. 2ND MID-WEEK MUSIC VIDEO: Cindy J. shames me in comments to the previous post by pointing out that there are indeed Wednesday Week videos available on YouTube. To get to 'em you just have to scroll down past some guy's diet diary and his regular Wednesday weigh-ins! So let's take a look/listen to one of the highlights from their debut album, What We Had, "Missionary": # | ( 3/26/2008 06:42:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VIDEO: I arrived at to this video looking for anything by the eighties power pop girl group, Wednesday Week, who've recently shown up in a new CD reissue of their debut album, What We Had. Was unable to find any vids by the Callan sisters, but, since the group's name is also the title of a sweet pop track by the Undertones, I wound up spending some going through that great pop-punk band's catalog. Here's one of their first singles, the so-simple-it's-genius "Teenage Kicks." # | Tuesday, March 25 ( 3/25/2008 07:09:00 AM ) Bill S. THE CURSE OF DVR: Was watching all four episodes of Bender's Big Score, which we recorded in four increments off Comedy Central last Sunday, when we saw to our dismay that the final chapter cut off just as the entire fabric of reality was about to be demolished. Damn you, teevee networks with your way-too-porous time slots! # | Monday, March 24 ( 3/24/2008 06:19:00 PM ) Bill S. A MY-HOW-WE'VE-AGED MOMENT: Catching a few moments from the Easter-broadcast movie version of Godspell and realizing for the first time that the curly-haired hippie Jesus with the heart on his forehead is the austere patriarch on Eli Stone (not to mention: Sydney Bristow's papa). # | Sunday, March 23 ( 3/23/2008 10:26:00 AM ) Bill S. WICKER WORK: This weekend, our local cable company has been offering preview HBO, so we decided to take advantage of the deal by catching Neil LaBute's remake of the The Wicker Man last night. It was an apt choice for an Easter weekend, we thought. Though admirers of the original have largely panned the remake, watching this born-again version somehow seemed right to our heathen selves. Unfortunately, LaBute's remake turned out to be every bit as wrongheaded as we previously heard. To those unfamiliar with either movie, Man centers on a policeman (Edward Woodward in the original; Nicholas Cage in the remake) who is lured to an isolated island in search of a missing little girl. The isle turns out to be a close-knit rural community whose inhabitants practice a proudly pagan, earth-centered religion. As our representative of modern civilized law investigates further, he becomes convinced that the island residents have sinister plans for the still missing girl Rowan. He's mistaken, however, and this error will prove his own undoing. Original screenwriter Anthony (Sleuth, Frenzy) was a skilled hand at messing with his audience, and in the 1975 version of Wicker Man, he pulled this off big time. Making Woodward's Sgt. Howie a rigidly old-fashioned Christian, he played the character's stiff-upper-lip self-righteousness against the sexier, rowdier denizens of Summerisle led by Christopher Lee's urbane Lord Summerisle. Watching Woodward tromp around judgmentally as he comes up against, for instance, Diane Cilento's schoolteacher after she's explained the phallic symbolism of the maypole to a group of young schoolchildren, you can't help but side with the more open villagers - until you realize what they do to maintain their hedonist traditions. Though it all ends horribly for Sgt. Howie, the movie still affords him a final moment to state his case. And in at least one story matter, we know that he's in the right. In contrast, writer/director LaBute's Summersisle (note the extra "s" in the middle) primarily proves to be a forum for the writer's own long-standing observations of the battle of the sexes (cf. In the Company of Men). Now, there's nothing wrong with a writer slathering his own thematic concerns onto an already established work, provided he adds something new to the mix. But the best that Wicker Man 2.0 offers is retread bits from Harvest Home. LaBute's northwestern island has been transformed into a bee-keeping matriarchy run by Ellen Burstyn's Sister Summersisle (see how much more sibilant and unwieldy that extra "s" makes her name), and, unlike the original agrarian community, it proves anything but inviting. Where the original's villagers were seductive and engaging (none more than Britt Ekland's innkeeper's daughter), the new island community is tight-lipped and unwelcoming. At no point in the movie do we find ourselves thinking, "Hey, it looks like these folks are really tied into something," because the writer/director can't bother to show his villagers actively communing with the forces that they profess to worship. Nature, which is practically a character all itself in the original, is only incidentally noted in the remake. Cage's Edward Malus, meanwhile, proves too indistinct a character to fully engage our sympathies. Meant to stand in for All Men (where Woodward's Howie was a more specific breed of English Christian), he's too unfocused to stand up against Burstyn's queen bee - and can only resort to repeated invocations of the law whenever he comes up against any of the other women of Summersisle. LaBute attempts to impose a personal dimension on the character by, first, providing our hero with a traumatic event in this past and then excessively flashing back to it and, second, by making one of the Summersisle women (Kate Beahan's Sister Willow) an ex-lover. (Which ultimately makes the missing Rowan . . . guess what?) Both choices only serve to further flatten Schaffer's original construction. Could've been intriguing - in an era where religio conflict has had an even more palpable influence on our national discourse - if the current Wicker Man had something to say about our present-day anxieties re: group belief. But, unfortunately, LaBute is too invested in erecting feminazi straw women to do anything so provocative. Next year, it's back to the original on DVD for our spring viewing. UPDATE: In the interest of record-straightening, Abshire notes that producer Nic Cage reportedly had a heavy hand in movie rewrites - and is to blame for an especially ludicrous scene where his cop hero commandeers a bicycle at gunpoint. # | |
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