Monday, January 28, 2019
Sunday, January 27, 2019
Saturday, January 26, 2019
The New Teen Titans Omnibus Volume 1 (1980-1982)
The New Teen Titans Omnibus Volume 1 (Collecting material originally published between 1980 and 1982/This edition 2017): written by Marv Wolfman with George Perez; illustrated by George Perez, Romeo Tanghal, Curt Swan, Carmine Infantino, and others:
The original Teen Titans debuted in the 1960's as a group of DC sidekicks. 1960's members included Robin, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, Speedy [the Green Arrow's sidekick], and Aqualad. The roster changed over the years, with an extremely unliked 1970's revival adding long-forgotten characters that included Lilith, Bumblebee, Mal, and the Geico Caveboy.
That latter-day revival made writer Marv Wolfman's pitch to do a New Teen Titans seem doomed to fail before it had even been approved for a series in 1980. Instead, Wolfman and the terrific but then up-and-coming artist/co-plotter George Perez conjured up a comic book that became DC's chief sales rival (and thematic rival) to Marvel's ascending super-team the X-Men. It helped make George Perez's reputation as the go-to artist for superhero action and melodrama, and did something similar for Wolfman's career.
Wolfman took a core group of Titans -- Robin, Wonder Girl, and Kid Flash. To them he added a pre-existing teen hero (Beast Boy, dubbed 'Changeling' for this revival). Then Wolfman and Perez added three new heroes to the mix: the alien princess Starfire; the haunted half-demon Raven; and the cybernetic Cyborg. And unlike Mal, Bumblebee, and the Geico Caveboy, these new characters DIDN'T SUCK!
The rest was history. The New Teen Titans rapidly became DC's best-selling book. As these were the days when Marvel and DC were still on speaking terms, this even led to an inter-company crossover between the X-Men and Teen Titans that pitted them against DC uber-villain Darkseid and the X-Men's Dark Phoenix. Ah, those were the days. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Titans is certainly an 'Art Book' because George Perez was great at both bombastic battle and nuanced character descriptions and even body types. Perez's women and men actually look different from one another. This is rarer than one might think in superhero books.
He's matched by Wolfman's densely written mini-epics. Wolfman was one of the most melodramatic of superhero writers, and I mean that in the best way. It was a time when reading a comic book could actually take more than 5 minutes because there were words in them and no one was ashamed of that fact. Such, such were the joys!
This volume contains the 16-page 'Preview' inserted with another comic book, the first 20 issues of New Teen Titans, a back-up story from one of DC's digests, and the four-issue 'Origins' miniseries that fleshed out the back-stories of the 4 less-familiar characters -- Changeling, Raven, Starfire, and Cyborg. It's all aimed more at teens than children, though Wolfman keeps the more adults problems of the Titans obscure enough to allow children to read the comics.
As all this occurred before the days of 'decompressed storytelling,' these 26 stories cover a lot of ground. The Titans battle Raven's demonic father Trigon on extra-dimensional worlds. They take on super-assassin Deathstroke (here still generally called The Terminator as these issues predate the James Cameron movie), super-villains The H.I.V.E., the Brotherhood of Evil, the original Soviet hero also dubbed Starfire, ancient Hindu gods, and the Greek Titans of myth. All that and several standalone, character-development issues. Whew.
It all still works beautifully as long as one adjusts for a bit of period nonsense (Changeling still comes across like an ad for sexual harassment at times, or an ad against toxic masculinity, or something; Wonder Girl's civilian job as a fashion photographer never seemed like a good idea, nor Starfire's first human job as a buxom model in jeans ads shot by Wonder Girl). So it goes. Highly recommended.
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Friday, January 18, 2019
Thursday, January 17, 2019
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Marvel 2016 Again!
Fast-moving, crowded film pits lots of Marvel super-heroes against lots of other Marvel super-heroes. The movie stays moderately zippy as it leaps from location to location. It also manages to bring Spider-man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in fairly rousing fashion. Well, rousing if you enjoy seeing the increasingly dickish Iron Man practice child endangerment! It's really not a Captain America movie but rather a third (at the time) Avengers movie.
Black Panther gets introduced too, and ends up being one of the few voices of reason. All hail Wakanda!
Things go on about one super-hero battle too long, in part because the best part of the whole movie occurs during that second-to-last battle as the movie goes all-out comic book. Boy, though, the Vision's costume is terrible. If nothing else, the film suggests that Marvel's Damage Control comic, in which super-powered cleaners clean up the aftermaths of super-battles, should be turned into a movie franchise. Stat. Recommended.
A bit of a boiler-plate Marvel Movie (think Iron Man with magic instead of technology and you've pretty much got it) enlivened by some ambitiously loopy visuals, albeit some of them riffing on Inception and not anything in the Dr. Strange comic books themselves.
The changes to Dr. Strange's character make him a twin for Robert Downey Jr.'s snarky Tony Stark. That's faithful to the original comics version of pre-magic Dr. Strange, not so much for post-magical-training Dr. Strange, possibly early Marvel's least quippy hero -- even Reed Richards (or Sue Storm, for that matter) got off more zingers than Dr. Strange in the 1960's.
Created by writer-artist Steve 'Spider-man' Ditko, Dr. Strange's non-quippy gravitas probably makes him the Marvel character who would most benefit from a trade to DC Comics for, say, the Legion of Super-heroes.
Benedict Cumberbatch is fine as Dr. Strange, though his American accent is all kinds of weird. Chiwetel Ejiofor does nice work as a seriously reworked Mordo. Mads Mikkelsen plays the least interesting Marvel Movie villain since Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell in Iron Man 2. Rachel McAdams is stuck playing Natalie Portman in the Thor movies, only moreso.
The movie's visuals fail spectacularly at the end even as they also succeed admirably in translating Ditko's surreal comic-book visuals of the Dark Dimension into the movie world. To say that the visual redesign of Dr. Strange's greatest foe is regrettable is about the most praise I can offer. The poor bugger has been biggie-sized into a giant floating head that looks an awful lot like what would happen if you painted the Tron visuals for the Master Control Program onto an accordion.
As to the white-washing in regards to Asians... yep, one of Marvel's first prominent, 'good' Asian characters is no more. Doc's mentor, the ancient Asian known only as the Ancient One, is now the surprisingly spry Tilda Swinton, a.k.a. The Whitest Actress Ever. And the other tweaks made to the Ancient One's character don't help much either.
In other areas, the magic training Strange endures now has all the length and rigor of selecting icons off a computer screen. Really, it makes the Harry Potterverse seem like a world teeming with educational rigor by comparison. Doctor Strange just has to make funky Kung Fu moves -- no pronouncement of spells required.
And the mystical doodad Strange and friends need to travel through space-time? It's there to be dropped at a crucial moment, as these things always are. And it's called a 'Sling Ring,' thus recalling one of the lowest of low points in adaptations of Marvel comics to other media -- the laughable Thing animated show of the 1980's and the cry "Thing ring, do your thing!" On the bright side, the Wand of Watoomb makes a cameo and the Cloak of Levitation gains the personality of loyal dog. Lightly recommended.
Tuesday, January 8, 2019
Aquaman (2018)
Maybe nothing epitomizes better the odd, endearing, Frankensteinian assemblage that is Aquaman then the use of Julie Andrews to voice a giant sea monster and Dolph Lundgren to play a slightly pink-haired Atlantean King. The people behind Aquaman seemed to decide to throw in a wide variety of genres and tones in an effort to please everyone. As Aquaman approaches $1 billion in world-wide box office, the approach seems to have worked.
It's a weirdly likable movie with sudden shifts in genre and tone that recall DC Comics blockbusters of earlier times, especially Superman: The Movie (1978) and Batman (1989). In one bewildering 15-minute sequence, Aquaman riffs on Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Da Vinci Code, the Jason Bourne movies, and the Roger Moore James Bond movies before doing a quick 'head in a toilet' gag and then jumping to Lovecraftian monsters before emerging in, well, Jurassic Park.
It works because while Jason Momoa is an, ahem, limited actor, he's a likable screen presence whom the movie allows to be likable (contrast this with Henry Cavill's dour Superman in Man of Steel). It also works because director James Wan, known primarily for horror movies that include Saw and The Conjuring, seems comfortable with a superhero movie that is visually more Lord of the Rings meets Avatar than Iron Man or The Dark Knight.
Vast undersea armies, weird creatures, and one really big creature (voiced by Julie Andrews!) don't need to look entirely 'real' for the CGI to work. Instead, they're colourful and strange and drawn in many cases from the comic art of people like Esteban Marato in the 1980 DC miniseries The Atlantis Chronicles. It's overlong and overstuffed and many of the 'comic' bits fall pretty flat, especially when they rely on Momoa's ability to deliver a line.
Aquaman also has prestige actors in supporting roles, recalling Superman (1978) and those Irwin Allen disaster movies of the 1970's. One can imagine a movie poster with little boxes with actor's faces running along the bottom -- Nicole Kidman as "Atlanna", Willem DaFoe as "Vulko", and Julie Andrews as "Karathen." So much CGI work is done to de-age Kidman and DaFoe for flashback sequences that they almost qualify as visual effects.
Nonetheless, it's actually fun and weird and worth looking at -- easily the most 'comic-booky' of all of these attempts to create a DC Cinematic Universe to rival Marvel's, and all the more welcome for that sense of weird superhero mayhem and earnestness. Recommended.
Monday, January 7, 2019
The Knife Slipped (Cool & Lam #2) (1939) by Erle Stanley Gardner
Cool, a Rabelaisian giant of a woman, runs a detective agency in Los Angeles. Donald Lam is one of her newish detectives. A woman and her mother hire Cool's agency to discover what that woman's husband is up to at night. The answer is... plenty! And not all Hanky Panky!
Gardner was certainly no Hammett or Chandler. His prose is workmanlike for the most part, while some of the characters and situations are stereotypical. Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable, pulpy time-waster. Bertha Cool is a memorable comic grotesque. And some of the perils and pitfalls of private detecting are highlighted as Lam makes some (near) rookie mistakes.
And the novel is surprisingly racy. And surprisingly cynical about pretty much everything, with most of that cynicism expressed by Bertha Cool, about as knee-jerk a pragmatist as one could ask for. Gardner's PI's aren't all that interested in the larger ramifications of the case, leading to a conclusion that's pretty much a dramatic fizzle. I won't read another of the Cool & Lam mysteries published between 1938 and 1970, but I am glad I read this one. It's a hoot. Lightly recommended.
Saturday, January 5, 2019
Teen Titans: The Judas Contract (2017)
Enjoyable DC Animated film adapts the 1980's Teen Titans story arc The Judas Contract with a few character additions and subtractions mostly centered around the addition of Bruce Wayne's son Damian as Robin (with the original Robin here too as Nightwing) and the baffling newish Blue Beetle.
Beast Boy's pursuit of new Teen Titan Tara/Terra now plays a lot like sexual harassment and stalking, and really needed to be toned down for a contemporary audience. Kevin Smith (voice) cameos as himself. Lightly recommended.
Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse (2018)
Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse is an animated delight in both senses of the word. Its protagonist is Miles Morales, known to Marvel fans as the second Spider-man of the Ultimate comics universe and not known to pretty much anyone else. He gets a lot of help learning how to use his powers from a bunch of Spider-heroes sucked into his universe from other universes by a cosmic doohickey that nonetheless has a USB port because EVERYTHING HAS A USB PORT.
The Spider-characters are all drawn from different comic-book takes on Spider-man, from the original (Peter B. Parker here) to funny-animal Spider-Ham. Even with two major character deaths, things remain fairly light -- credit Lego Movie's Phil Lord for that. The whole thing is terrific fun and terrifically meta-fictional.
The CGI character animation is clean and somewhat life-like without ever entering the Uncanny Valley, and the movie takes full advantage of the limitless possibilities of animation at many points. It's pretty trippy! And Kingpin's cartoonishly grotesque physique owes more than a little to the 1980's work of artist Bill Sienkiewicz.
All that and a worthwhile post-credits sequence. May Miles Morales get more movies! Highly recommended.
Planes and Proms
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