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Saturday, November 06, 2010 ( 11/06/2010 06:13:00 AM ) Bill S.  “YOU AND THE WHELP WYATT MUST BE READY TO BIND IT AGAIN.” A wild-and-wilder survival horror comic, Aaron Williams and Fiona Staples’ North 40 (Wildstorm) opens on a young small town couple as they gaze upon a restricted volume on loan from the Vidette U. library. Said book has a cyclopean tentacled face on its cover, but naturally our curious twosome think it’s nothing more than some geek’s concoction made up of an old dictionary and epoxy resin. They’re deadly wrong, of course. As a result, “They’ve weakened the bindings of an ancient power.”With this weakening, all manner of nastiness breaks loose: the small town library is decimated, and the entire rural county is blocked from the rest of the world. Many of the town’s residents are transformed -- some into grotesque Lovecraftian creatures, other into beings with preternatural powers -- while the few wholly human remnants struggle to survive in the chaos. As is usual in tales of this ilk, both the area’s upper class and its low-lifes strive to take advantage of their new world, while its grizzled symbol of authority, the town sheriff, is sent scrambling all over the place to put out fires. Also on the side of righteousness: a diner waitress with second sight, a young deputy with the ability to fly and a scythe-wielding girl who is drafted into the fray by an ambiguous witchy hag. The resulting bloody violence proves visually inventive: artist Staples has a sure hand with outlandish human mutations and flying body parts and is up to scripter Williams’ entertainingly monstrous conceits. Horror comic fans, if they haven’t ventured onto this particular trek of country highway yet, should decidedly be pleased. As a writer, Williams can occasionally overdo the rural narrative pone, but he keeps you reading through his large cast’s grisly travails. In North 40, creatures both organic and biomechanical run amuck throughout the imprisoned county to effectively horrific results. “I got told all of kinds o’ stories ‘bout what Heaven would be like,” the series narrator says near the end of this only partially resolved six-ish collection. “No starvin’ folk, no crippled kids, and everybody livin’ in a mansion o’ gold. But then I figger, if there’s all that and more, how come most gods’re all so HUNGRY?” Theological concerns aside, the answer to this ‘un is obvious. It’s so we can get cool panels of emerging Elder Gods snatching poor victims and chopping their bodies in two, right? (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: modern comics # |Tuesday, November 02, 2010 ( 11/02/2010 09:48:00 PM ) Bill S.  NOT AN ACCIDENT . . .AN ASSASSINATION! Yet another retelling of the Superman origin: so many writers have attempted to wrest this character from the hands of the two kids from Cleveland who first came up with him; so many have fumbled it.The first entry in a new series of graphic novel rewrites of classic DC characters, Superman: Earth One focuses on a young Clark Kent’s first days in 21st Century Metropolis. Writer J. Michael Straczynski presents our hero-in-the-making as young and callow, not yet ready to wear the Big S until an alien invader shows up to wreak havoc on planet Earth. Said invader, a mime-faced nasty named Tyrell, is the member of a race responsible for the destruction of Superman’s home planet Krypton: a major story change since it turns what was once a natural event into an act of wartime aggression, changes the Man of Steel from a divinely sent hero into Batman, basically. Whether you accept this conceptual shift is most likely the key to whether the new GN will speak to you. I can already anticipate the reviews discussing how Superman: Earth One takes the character into the Post-9/11 World, but was this trip necessary? To be sure, Stracynzki and artist Shane Davis tell their tale with plenty of slick visual energy and snappy dialog. They don’t mess with the other Metropolis mainstays -- Lois, Jimmy and Perry -- and both the city and its alien attackers look spiffy. But this reader still couldn’t help comparing Earth One to Superman -- The Movie: much good honest dramatic work done in the service of too much dumb material (the movie’s Lex Luthor as would-be land baron, this book’s portrayal of Superman as costumed avenger). Sorry, guys, but two young newcomers with marginal writing and drawing skills still own Superman -- even if they lost the rights to him decades ago. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: modern comics # |Monday, November 01, 2010 ( 11/01/2010 07:22:00 AM ) Bill S.  “THERE’S SOMETHING PECULIAR ABOUT CONJURERS.” That Ingmar Bergman, king of art house cinema in the fifties and sixties, would craft an entertainment blending upstairs/downstairs sexual frolics with classic horror movie imagery is most likely one of the big reasons his The Magician is considered one of the master’s lesser works. Yet even lesser Bergman can be pretty damn amazing, and this longtime admirer found Criterion’s recent DVD release an apt offering for Halloween Day. With a beautifully restored high-def digital transfer and improved subtitles, the moodily lensed (courtesy of elegant cinematographer Gunnar Fischer) movie proves an enjoyable grown-up gothic exercise.Set in 19th Century Stockholm, the film concern a troupe of traveling show folk known as Vogler’s Magnetic Health Theater. Name on the wagon Albert Vogler (played by king of anguish Max von Sydow) is a combination stage magician/patent medicine huckster. Accompanied by his wife (Ingrid Thulin), crone grandmother (Naima Wifstrand), con man m-c Tubal (Ake Fridell) and a young coachman, Vogler is brought to the home of the city Consul where he’s forced to put on a show for the consul and his grieving wife, plus two skeptics who are meant to represent 19th Century reason. Vogler’s primary antagonist is the doctor Vergérus (Gunnar Bjornstand). An avowed enemy of the “inexplicable,” Doctor V.’s mission is to expose the magician as a charlatan. This he thinks he does until the movie’s horrorshow last act. Trapped in an attic with an autopsied body that looks to be much more lively than it should be, the rationalist physician has his secular faith tested big time. The attic sequence is the one that also most tests the patience of many Serious Students of Film. But it’s the moment the movie has been building toward. For The Magician is ultimately about filmic storytelling (part of Vogler’s show, it should be noted, involves a magic lantern) as much as it is about the battle ‘tween scientific reason and magical art. Von Sydow’s Vogler spends two-thirds of the movie pretending to be mute -- and when he breaks his silence the first words to come out of his mouth are a condemnation of his audience. He’s the struggling creator whose conflict with the arrogant doctor spurs him into concocting a convincing gothic work that blends both the surreal (an eyeball in an inkwell) and familiar (hands clutching out of the darkness.) For a first time viewer, the attic sequence is effective, though after Bergman pulls back the curtain and reveals the trickery, it’s difficult to go back to it the same way. The movie’s comic moments, primarily centering on the other members of Vogler’s troupe as they flirt with the household staff, hold up even if they do seem to come from a different movie altogether. As a moviemaker best known for somber treatises on existential despair, Bergman had a knack for believably depicting sexual tease, and the flirty bits in The Magician are indubitably entertaining, They’re not the moments most buffs recall when they think about the movie, however. No, that remains the darker material: the shots of the troupe’s wagon going through a fog-festooned forest, the image of a servant hanging from a downstairs ceiling, the casually sudden appearance of a severed hand. In these days of much more graphic terrors, it all seems a little quaint, but it still remains a treat to view -- a master moviemaker playing with both Bunuel and Val Lewton, tweaking (as Peter Cowie narrates in a bonus mini-doc) his critics and his audience as he goes. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: classic cinema # | |
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