The Infinite Wait and Other Stories

The Infinite Wait and Other Stories (2012) by Julia Wertz: Three pieces make up this comics collection from Julia Wertz. 

The first, entitled "Industry," chronicles the jobs she's had over two decades and two coasts, from a lot of waitressing and bartending jobs to her later days as a professional cartoonist who doesn't have to hold down another job.

The second, the eponymous "The Infinite Wait," covers Wertz's move to San Francisco from Napa in 2002 and her subsequent diagnosis of having the auto-immune disease Lupus. The third, "A Strange and Curious Place," is, in Wertz's own words, "basically just a love letter to my hometown library and everything it taught me."

"Industry" probably has the most laughs per panel, even as Wertz starts to lose jobs because of her incessant drinking. The publishing success of her first two books, Fart Party I and II, moves "Industry" to an often hilarious evaluation of how Hollywood tries to adapt work, and specifically autobiographical work. 

"The Infinite Wait," Wertz informs the reader, was a title chosen for its pretension and "seriousness" as a joke related to the decidedly unpretentious tale of Wertz vs. Lupus. This is certainly one of the funniest comics stories ever created about an incurable auto-immune disease. Well, any disease, any sickness. It may catch at the heart, but the story never stops presenting situations of high wit and low comedy.

Then there's "A Strange and Curious Place," the shortest piece in the book. It is indeed a paean to Wertz's hometown library, and to the joys of reading for a child. The depiction of Julia and her brother's excitement at the annual library book sale is a gem of humourous, pithily observed sentiment. The book, too, is a gem of autobiographical self-evaluation and often raunchy, sometimes obscene brilliance. Highly recommended.

Drinking At the Movies

Drinking At the Movies (2010/ This edition 2015): written and illustrated by Julia Wertz: Julia Wertz is one of a handful or so of the funniest cartoonists currently working, and has been since she began her career on the Internet back in the mid-oughts. Mid-oughts? Whatever.

It's a trick to make autobiography funny without avoiding the horrors of being alive. Wertz has got that trick. Her autobiographical works deal with her alcoholism, her brother's drug problems, and her life with lupus after being diagnosed with same at the age of 20 (in 2002).

This volume was Wertz's first full-length 'graphic novel,' coming in at a dialogue-dense 200 pages or so. Drinking At the Movies covers Wertz's first year in New York City in the late oughts after a move from San Francisco. Her comics career has begun to take off. That doesn't save her from dead-end jobs and squalid apartments. Wertz is a comic commentator on urban life at the edge of poverty, all of it alcohol-soaked in this volume. Sobriety would come later.

Wertz is a deceptively simple cartoonist. She can draw complex representations of the real when she wants to, as her renditions of the various apartments and streets of Brooklyn shows throughout Drinking At the Movies. The characters are much simpler, in the tradition of comic strips, with a simple six panels per page for much of the volume. It all works beautifully. Also, there's something really funny about the way Wertz draws arms when people are sitting at a table with arms bent.

Through four apartments and seven apartments, Wertz drinks a lot, comments a lot, and worries over family problems back on the West Coast (one brother is a drug addict). She gets shingles, manages her Lupus, discovers that being a bike courier sucks, teaches comics to kids at a library in the Bronx... well, many things happen.

Moments of self-evaluation and sorrow burst forth throughout. But Wertz is a fabulous entertainer at heart with the critical eye of the jester. I don't recall when I've laughed so much at a volume of anything, comics or writing or whatever.  Highly recommended.

The Dark Knight III: The Master Race

SUPER BEST FRIENDS AGAIN !!!

The Dark Knight III: The Master Race (2016-2017/ Collected 2017): written by Brian Azzarello and Frank Miller; illustrated by Andy Kubert, Klaus Janson, Frank Miller, Eduardo Risso, John Romita Jr., Brad Anderson, and Alex Sinclair: Rumours are that Frank Miller had very little to do with the writing of this follow-up to The Dark Knight Returns (1986-87) and The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001-2002). His art duties involve the inking of a few covers and drawing inter-chapter 'mini-comics' that contextualize portions of the main story. 

The main story is credited as 'Story by Frank Miller and Brian Azzarello.' Penciller Andy Kubert and inker Klaus Janson (inker of The Dark Knight Returns) do a fair job of maintaining their own styles while also paying homage to Miller's art style circa 1986. Miller's art in the mini-comics is sort of awful at points, reaching a nadir when he hinges the Atom's legs backwards, having apparently forgotten how knees work.

Taking up three years after The Dark Knight Strikes Again and six years after The Dark Knight Returns, DKIII again features aging versions of DC's major superheroes in a near-dystopic future. Events conspire to team up Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and many others to oppose a new global threat. One of the signs that Miller may not be writing much of the book is that Superman comes across pretty well for once, even saving Batman's life at one point. It's a shocker. 

Azzarello, if he scripted most of this, supplies lots of tough-guy and tough-girl introspection alongside all the fist fights and explodey-ness. Kubert and Janson give us suitably over-sized heroes and villains, innocents and grotesques and all that jazz. The whole thing goes down smoothly and way, way faster than the original The Dark Knight Returns and its intermittently densely packed pages of dialogue and exposition set off by full-page spreads. There's still satire here, particularly of both Obama and Trump, but it's pretty boilerplate stuff. 

Azzarello, not really known for writing superhero punch-ups, has written a giant superhero punch-up. It's enjoyable, certainly far more enjoyable than the clumsy and misanthropic Dark Knight Strikes Again, though no touch on the original. Miller's far-right politics seems to manifest in the idea of Kryptonian cultists who look and act a lot like stereotypical Muslim fundamentalists, but the comparison is never pushed too far (and these fundamentalists appear to believe in gender equality). In all, lightly recommended.

The Ultimates Volume 1: Superhuman

The Ultimates Volume 1: Superhuman (2001-2002/ Collected 2002): written by Mark Millar; illustrated by Bryan Hitch and Andrew Currie: Long ago when the millennium was new, Marvel's Ultimates line rejuvenated Marvel's place in the comics marketplace after bankruptcy and creative stagnation. The Ultimate universe was a grittier, darker place than the 'normal' Marvel universe. And it was made with one eye towards movies.

The Ultimates was the new line's version of the Avengers. It was really, really pointed towards movies, with Samuel L. Jackson being paid so that Marvel could use his likeness as Nick Fury. Yep. Seven years before Jackson's first onscreen appearance as Nick Fury, he'd already been pen-and-ink Nick Fury for seven years!

One can see a lot of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in The Ultimates, obviously in Nick Fury and the idea that the Avengers were assembled by the government. Iron Man/Tony Stark is closer in personality to his movie version than the regular Marvel universe version. Hulk and Thor, not so much.

Oh, right. This is rapey, cannibalistic Hulk! Creepy stalker Bruce Banner! Wife-beating Ant Man! Mutant Wasp! Captain America is pretty much Captain America, though steroids now played a part in his creation. Indeed, the Hulk is also the accidental result of Bruce Banner's pursuit of a super-soldier formula.

Bryan Hitch's art is, well, widescreen, though there's also a lot of standing and talking. Writer Mark Millar, fresh off a popular, ultraviolent run writing DC-Wildstorm's The Authority, pretty much does the same thing here -- ultraviolence, snarkiness, and somewhat unlikable heroes. The comics readers of the time loved it! It all seems a bit dark and dreary now, especially all the stuff involving creepy Banner and cannibal rapist Hulk. What fun! Lightly recommended.

The King's Speech (2010)

The King's Speech (2010): written by David Seidler; directed by Tom Hooper; starring Colin Firth (King George VI), Helena Bonham Carter (Queen Elizabeth), Derek Jacobi (Archbishop Lang), Geoffrey Rush (Lionel Logue), Michael Gambon (King George V), and Guy Pearce (King Edward VIII): Colin Firth certainly is good in his Oscar-winning Best Actor performance as King George VI, afflicted with a stammer and stuck with a whole lot of public speaking gigs once he assumes the British throne after his brother's abdication. 

The whole thing is about as rock-solid a BBC sort-of production as one could want -- indeed, it really plays like a Very Special Episode of Masterpiece Theatre. Geoffrey Rush is fine as the eccentric speech therapist who helps Bertie overcome his speaking problems and Guy Pearce is subtly wormy as Edward VIII. 

One can understand the Best Actor Oscar. Oscars for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture testify more to how much Hollywood loves a certain type of Presitgious British Cinema (and movies about real people who have to overcome physical and/or mental problems) than to the movie's quality. Recommended.

The Beach (2000)

The Beach (2000): adapted by John Hodge from the novel by Alex Garland; directed by Danny Boyle; starring Leonardo di Caprio (Richard), Virginie Ledoyen (Francoise), Guillaume Canet (Etienne), Paterson Joseph (Keaty), Tilda Swinton (Sal), and Robert Carlyle (Daffy): Promising riff on Lord of the Flies, if Lord of the Flies were gene-spliced with Club Med, sputters out in the last 30 minutes. 

A bunch of almost universally white pleasure seekers travel to a hidden spot on an isolated island to enjoy the titular beach, located in the interior of the island around a hidden cove or possibly lagoon somewhere near Thailand. Leo di Caprio, a disaffected young America, narrates his search for something interesting, which he finds on the beach, travelling there with two French tourists, one of whom, Francoise, he has a crush on. 

Because this movie is at least somewhat about White People's Problems, the beach colony is led by Tilda Swinton, the whitest woman in the world. Things eventually start to go badly. But not that badly. Timeless' Paterson Joseph plays the only black guy on the island. Spoiler alert: he doesn't get killed! 

The whole thing is very watchable, but seems pretty weak tea given the credentials of director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) and Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), whose novel is adapted here by John Hodge. Lightly recommended.

Solo (2018)

Solo (2018): written by Jonathan and Lawrence Kasdan; directed by Ron Howard; starring Alden Ehrenreich (Han Solo), Woody Harrelson (Old Muley), Donald Glover (Lando Calrissian), British Comic Who Sounds Like Tilda Swinton (Sexy Droid), Emilia Clarke (Space Mafia Princess), Paul Bettany (Annoying English Guy), and Thandie Newton (I'm Not Doing six months of reshoots!):

Solo... A Star Wars Story... hmm. Spoilers ahoy!

1) The movie tells but doesn't show Solo as a young street punk on Corellia, making one wonder if an opening montage establishing this was left on the cutting-room floor some time during the process of scrubbing all of Phil Lord and Chris Miller's influence from the movie and reshooting 70% of the movie.

2) Boy, the first 20 minutes on Corellia are clunky and boring.

3) Hyperfuel/Coaxium. After fuel wasn't mentioned in 40 years of Star Wars movies, suddenly it's a major plot point in The Last Jedi. Now, fuel gets mentioned in the opening "scroll" (OK, it wasn't a scroll) and becomes the driving force of the plot. It sort of feels like the creators were backfilling the role of fuel in the Star Wars universe so that some day, when someone watches these things in chronological narrative order, Solo will have set up The Last Jedi. That's retroactive continuity!

4) Ditto for Han Solo's golden dice. As an original viewer of Star Wars, I don't even remember the dice. I mean, I assume they're hanging from the Millennium Falcon's rear-view mirror, but nope... no memory. Now they get more close-ups than Chewbacca. Feels like more narrative backfilling for Last Jedi. Maybe the dice will now get their own spin-off movie.

5) Thandie Newton dies blowing up a railway track that doesn't need to be blown up unless the objective is to piss off the Empire as much as possible. Maybe Newton didn't want to do reshoots and requested that her character be killed off as quickly as possible because she wasn't doing any more Star Wars acting.

6) Coaxium. Sometimes you need a train car, sometimes you need a garbage bin, sometimes you need a suitcase. Was there just one garbage bin worth of coaxium on the train and the rest was, um, packing material? Snow? If they only needed a suitcase of refined coaxium, why did they need to steal an entire train car worth? Why is refined coaxium less volatile than raw coaxium? More importantly, if Crimson Dawn works for/with the Empire, why do they need to steal coaxium? Wouldn't the Empire just, you know, SELL IT TO THEM??????? Thinking of this last was when my brain broke. The entire plot of Solo is... pointless.

7) I guess the revelation is that Dark Helmet turns out to be a girl. And good rather than evil, but primarily a girl. As a revelation, it falls flat because I was sitting there going, "Am I supposed to recognize her? Was she on Star Wars Rebels too? And do these Rebels travel the galaxy on speeder bikes? Because if so, that's definitely some hardcore star travel!

8) Wow, the set-up for the Kessel Run was laborious, wasn't it? On the bright side. Han accidentally kills Cthulhu. Nice work, boys!

9) Jesus, Chewbacca's Wookie pal on the Klingon Penal Asteroid of Rura Penthe looks a lot like Chaka from Land of the Lost. Distractingly so!

10) Is there a Coaxium refinery on Kessel? I don't think so, given that robbing it would make more sense than stealing unrefined coaxium. But if not, getting coaxium to a refinery must be the most dangerous job in the universe given how quickly it turns explodey.

11) Wait, all the Coaxium in the area is located... under the spice mines? Hunh? Kessel: home to spice and Hyperfuel! You'd think they'd fix the place up a bit!

12) This card game doesn't seem that difficult.

Oddly enough, I enjoyed it. Sort of. Lightly recommended.

Six-Pack and Dogwelder: Hard-Travelin' Heroz

Six-Pack and Dogwelder: Hard-Travelin' Heroz (2016-2017/ Collected 2017): written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Russ Braun with Steve Dillon and John Kalisz: From the pages of Garth Ennis and John McCrea's late and much-lamented HITMAN come... Six-Pack and Dogwelder and the other heroes of Section 8! Well, and from the pages of the earlier SECTION 8 miniseries!

Garth Ennis' hatred for superheroes other than Superman is at its most evident when he chronicles Six-Pack and Section 8, heroes with powers that range from the disgusting to the non-existent. But Six-Pack idolizes Superman and wants to do the right thing. That he may be dreaming all of this while he dies drunk and homeless and freezing in an alley is also a possibility. Or not. For once, in the pages of Hitman, Six-Pack saved the universe from an invasion of demons with his idealistic heroism. No joke!

The title riffs on the unlikely, socially relevant Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics of the early 1970's. The first issue gets Ennis' critique of socially relevant comics out of the way before plunging into the greatest mystery of the DC Universe: who is Dogwelder and why is he compelled to weld dogs to people?

Garth Ennis and sharp, pungent artist Russ Braun take the piss on superheroes past and present, from Starfire to the Flash, from the Justice League to Hellblazer. Ennis wrote a memorable run of John Constantine Hellblazer in the 1990's. Here, he brings John back to piss on DC's attempt to make Constantine more mainstream and conventionally superheroic. It's funny stuff, though really only if you're in on the joke.

DC's supernatural, God's vengeance hero The Spectre makes a memorable appearance to jumpstart the quest to discover the true nature of Dogwelder. John Constantine shows up on a very Silver-Surferesque flying board to help out and complain about what the corporate powers of DC have done to him, now that they've put him in a space helmet and given him a raygun dubbed Hellblazer.

Dogwelder will of course turn out to be from a long line of Dogwelders. Heck, this Dogwelder is the second one we've seen, the first having been blowed up during that hitherto mentioned battle with universe-ending demons. Dogwelder is dead. Long live Dogwelder! 

This is a lot of fun, though you may need some foreknowledge of DC Comics and superheroes in general to truly appreciate all the jokes. As a bittersweet bonus, the reprinted covers for the series are some of the late, great Steve (illustrator of Ennis' Hellblazer, Preacher, and Punisher work, among many other memorable moments) Dillon's work. Recommended.

Pearl Harbor: The Accused (2016)

Pearl Harbor: The Accused (2016) This HBO documentary does an awfully good job of absolving disgraced four-star admiral and Commander in Chief US Pacific Fleet Pearl Husband Edward Kimmel of responsibility for that Day of Infamy. Indeed, it does such a good job of doing so that the only explanation for the actions and inactions of US Naval Chief of Operations from 1939-1942 Harold Rainsford Stark is that Stark was a member of the time-altering lunatics of Rittenhouse on TV's Timeless. 

Kimmel's grand-children continue to fight for his official absolution, but while a Senate Resolution absolving him of responsibility was passed in 1999, Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have refused to sign that Resolution, thus leaving Kimmel's honour in official limbo. It's really an astonishing story. Recommended.

Spider-Man 3 (2007)

Spider-Man 3 (2007): based on characters created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee; written by Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi, and Alvin Sargent; directed by Sam Raimi; starring Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker/ Spider-Man), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), James Franco (Harry Osborne), Thomas Haden Church (Flint Marko/ Sandman), Topher Grace (Eddie Brock/ Venom), Bryce Dallas Howard (Gwen Stacy), James Cromwell (Captain Stacy), Dylan Baker (Dr. Curt Connors), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May), and J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson):

11 more years of superhero movies have made Spider-Man 3 seem a lot more charming now than it did at the time. The studio forced director/co-writer Sam Raimi to shoehorn 1980's Spider-Man villain Venom into a story that already had Sandman and Harry Osborn as antagonists for Peter Parker's spidery alter ego. And oh boy, what a clumsy shoehorn it is!

The result does strongly suggest that Sam Raimi pretty much said 'To hell with you!' at this point, forced to give us a tale of Peter Parker briefly 'going bad' under the influence of the alien symbiote/black costume. While he's bad, Peter Parker looks and acts like a sort of Emo Beatnik. He dances. He snaps his fingers. He plays the piano. Wow!

Sam Raimi's desire to be done with superhero movies also seems to be in full evidence. Spider-Man 3 opens and closes with a musical number. The motivations of villain Sandman are murky. A retcon of the murder of Peter's Uncle Ben has been inserted because everything has to be personal for superheroes. The Sandman himself generally looks and acts a lot like the sandstorms in the first two Brendan Fraser Mummy movies.

Oh, well. Tobey Maguire is still mopey and perky as Peter and Spidey. Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane is now a thankless wet blanket of a role. James Franco just looks stoned all the time as Harry Osborn. As in Spider-Man 2, the action climax ends on a note of forgiveness rather than all-out punchiness. In today's superhero world, that last choice still seems fresh and important, and the makers of Spider-Man: Homecoming seem to have realized that with the ending of their NuSpider-man movie. In all, lightly recommended yet almost incongruously entertaining.

I Am Sam Kinison (2017)

I Am Sam Kinison (2017): written by Adrian Buitenhuis and John Barbisan; directed by Adrian Buitenhuis: Sam Kinison became America's most popular stand-up comic in the late 1980's, eventually selling out stadiums and living like a rock star. This documentary, part of the 'I Am' series that also includes I Am Chris Farley, shares certain problems with the other I Am features -- a tendency towards hagiography, over-statement, and avoidance of certain negative features of the subject. 

Kinison, startling and innovative in his screaming stage presence, looks pretty familiar now: he's the aggrieved heterosexual white man, enraged by women and gays. There's a reason Kinison became so popular for a short time -- much of his act seems like a blueprint for today's Republican Party. Only way more public about the rampant drug and alcohol use. 

He's definitely an important and influential figure. But the various defenses of some of his now nigh-unwatchable rants ("Everything's OK if it's funny!") misses the basic fact that Kinison spent a lot of his vitriol punching down at people and groups who had far less power in the world of 1989 than heterosexual white men. That is to say, gays, women, starving Africans... the list could go on. 

That Kinison died in 1992 clean and sober (so far as we know) crashing into a car driven by a drunk seems almost impossibly ironic. A fascinating but immensely flawed documentary, much like the man and the comic. Lightly recommended.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017): based on the comic strip written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mezieres; written and directed by Luc Besson; starring Dane DeHaan (Major Valerian), Cara Delevinge (Sergeant Laureline), Rihanna (Bubble), and Clive Owen (Commander Arun Filitt):

Last summer's hot mess of a box-office bomb is this summer's... well, it's not a hot mess. It's not exactly good, either.

Valerian (also known as Valerian and Laureline) was an immensely popular French comic strip that began life in the late 1960's. It offered (emulating an earlier French strip, Barbarella) a combination of space opera and spies, a sort of Flash Gordon of Her Majesty's Secret Service. The strip was set hundreds of years in the future, but because of time-travel technology, agents Valerian (a guy) and Laureline (a woman) could operate throughout time and space so as to protect the future Earth alliance's interests.

The strip gradually elevated the spunky Laureline to the level of co-equal with Valerian. Indeed, in the story arc that writer-director Luc Besson based much of this movie upon, Ambassador of Shadows, Laureline is the protagonist while Valerian spends much of the story imprisoned off-panel.

No such luck here. Perversely, Besson's movie is a tone-deaf 'Love Story' in which Laureline and Valerian's relationship must end in the marriage Valerian wants because, you know, whatever. Of course, Valerian is a Major and Laureline is a Sergeant. No problem there! Valerian's courtship of Laureline throughout the movie runs the gamut from sexual harassment to assault to stalking. What larks! Of course Laureline, often incompetent (as is Valerian) falls for him in the end because LURV!

Of the other three major female characters, two are dead by the end of the movie. Whee!

Luc Besson professes to a life-long love of Valerian and Laureline. Boy, I'd hate to see the movie he would have made if he hated the source material!

There are sections of visual grandeur and cleverness. The movie comes out squarely against genocide, which is awesome. Rihanna is good as a shape-changing hooker with a heart of gold and the underwhelming name 'Bubble.' The score by Alexander Desplat is solid. 

The two leads are a bit perplexing. Dane DeHaan is utterly miscast as Valerian unless the point was to satirize the typical male action hero, in which case I guess he's perfectly cast. As Laureline, Cara Delevinge is dismayingly underweight in a bathing suit and dismaying gaunt and hollow-eyed throughout. She spends about two-thirds of the movie in a padded spacesuit. I don't normally worry about the health of an actress based solely on her physical appearance on-screen, but here, yeah -- it's frankly a bit creepy.

There's certainly enough here to be interesting, so long as one doesn't try to watch its 2 1/2 hours in one sitting. It may actually be better than Besson's over-praised The Fifth Element, and it's certainly better than his equally over-praised Lucy, which to me came across as some sort of racist parable, intentional or not. Lightly recommended.