The Front Runner (2018)

The Front Runner (2018): adapted by Matt Bai, Jay Carson, and Jason Reitman from the book All the Truth Is Out by Matt Bai; directed by Jason Reitman; starring Hugh Jackman (Gary Hart), Vera Farmiga (Lee Hart), J.K. Simmons (Hart Campaign Manager Bill Dixon), Alfred Molina (Ben Bradlee), Mamoudou Athie (AJ Parker), and Sara Paxton (Donna Rice):

Solid, enjoyable tour through The Fall of Gary Hart during the early Presidential campaigning season of 1987. Hugh Jackman is perfectly fine as the charismatic Hart, the Democratic Front Runner when we begin in 1987. His polling numbers suggested that he could beat presumptive Republican candidate George H.W. Bush. Well, we all know how that turned out.

Hart would become the first Presidential candidate whose campaign would be derailed by the sort of tabloid gossip previously, mostly, absent from Presidential campaigns. After him, the deluge! The accusations made against Hart now seem quaint in the Age of Trump. Well, quaint if one is a Republican. Democrats still savage their candidates over these and lesser outrages. The Republicans don't care.

The film-makers streamline the story of Hart somewhat, omitting a later, unsuccessful return to the Democratic race after his initial withdrawal. The story nonetheless still resonates, balancing the seeming puerility of the causes of Hart's political demise with characters who question Hart's decision-making abilities, his truthfulness, his ability to navigate political adversity, and the larger questions of male privilege and the inequality of power in certain 'relationships.'

In all, The Front Runner presents a sea change in how the media would cover politics and politicians. There's no small irony that Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee (played here by Alfred Molina) finally decides to go with the story, given that Bradlee spent the entire JFK Administration alternately covering up for, and partying with, JFK and friends. Recommended.

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991)

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) by David Simon: Once upon a time, a Baltimore crime reporter managed to get a year 'embedded' with Baltimore's Homicide detectives. The year was 1988, the reporter was David Simon, and the result wasn't just this terrific book -- ultimately, the result was David Simon's entry into the entertainment industry, resulting in the TV shows Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner, The Wire, and so much more.

For those like myself coming to the non-fiction book after the assorted TV series about crime in Baltimore, some of the fun is spotting things that would appear in somewhat different form on TV. The murder that inspired the haunting Adena Watson story-line on Homicide: Life on the Street is here, heart-rending and awful. So too a number of other homicides. I'll leave you to play spot the crime. And spot the detectives who inspired Simon and Company's fictional detectives!

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is a terrific, gripping, moving book. It's also a corrective to any number of cop-show cliches and misrepresentations. Simon also lays out the departmental and city politics that provided the background to any number of episodes of Homicide and The Wire, and the foreground too.

But it's probably the characterization of the homicide detectives and their highers-up that makes Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets so memorable. These are men as interesting as any of Simon's fictional creations. We see how different detectives detect differently. We see some of them become obsessed by unsolvable cases. We definitely see the coarse, obscene badinage that marks most homicide detectives. In the face of death, a certain measure of dark levity is often necessary.

Amongst all the horror, there's even a weird sort of comedy in one case involving insurance scams and a lot of dead bodies. The case as it plays out is both grim and so outlandish that it seems impossible to fictionalize -- no one would believe it. In all, this is a truly great piece of non-fiction, as gripping as any novel or any of Simon's fictional work. Highly recommended.

Devil Insider

1988 collected edition

Grendel: Devil's Legacy (1986-87/ Reprinted in Grendel Omnibus 2: The Legacy/ 2013): written by Matt Wagner; illustrated by the Pander Brothers, Rich Rankin, and Jay Geldhof: Approximately 50 years after the death of first Grendel Hunter Rose comes this Grendel story. It chronicles the tragic fall of journalist Christine Spar, dubbed "Grendel's grand-daughter" by the press because while she's not biologically related to Hunter Rose, she is the only daughter of his adopted daughter Stacy Palumbo.

Devil's Legacy occurs some time in the late 2020's or early 2030's -- Hunter Rose died in 1982. Besides her mother's relation to Rose, Spar has also written an acclaimed and popular non-fiction book about Grendel. But now she's about to get sucked into the underworld which Hunter Rose so briefly but completely dominated.

Originally published in 12 issues in the late 1980's, Devil's Legacy saw creator Matt Wagner hand the artistic duties over to the Pander Brothers. They really suit the story (though I also assume Wagner crafted elements of the story to suit them). Stylish, sharp cartooning gives way to a gallery or grotesques and grotesque poses and representations as the story proceeds and Spar assumes the mantle of Grendel. 

She begins by using Hunter Rose's stolen costume and weapon to seek answers about her missing son. 

She ends in conflict with almost everyone.

The art by the Panders really is nice, whether in the cleaner-lined, prettier early sections or in the distorted faces and bodies of the later stretches of the narrative. Matt Wagner's writing is sharp and expressive as well. Spar's tragic descent is narrated by Spar herself at points, an unreliable narrator becoming more unreliable by the moment. Despite the personal nature of the early stages of her assumption of the Grendel identity, Spar rapidly grows to share the obsessions and urges of Hunter Rose. 

There are flaws in the narrative. The most glaring is the representation of the reaction of the New York police to a missing-child case. Their indifference seems entirely artificial, necessary for Spar's descent into Grendel-hood but never made believable. And that's despite the fact that the police have been privatized in this future of flying cars and an immigrant Eskimo problem in the United States. 

72 hours before the police will search for a missing nine-year-old boy? Um, no. Wagner might have been able to sell this idea by spending more time establishing the police as being completely useless and under-staffed, but these things aren't developed enough to make this particular bit of incompetency even remotely plausible. 

And not making the police interested in such a disappearance does make elements of Spar's later vendetta against the police seem far too Straw-Man-ish: the savagery and vindictiveness of Grendel is made to seem like a suitable response, and I don't think that's what Wagner was aiming for in his representation of Spar's late-life bildungsroman.

However, the rest of this future, while a little flying-car happy, is fascinatingly imagined. The characterization of the main characters, from Spar through her friends and lover all the way to the police who come to pursue her and the strange man-wolf Argent, is sharp and quite moving at times. Fine work all around. This part of the Grendel epic works nicely for the most part in the slightly reduced page size of the Dark Horse Grendel Omnibus series, though a few sections of text strain the eyes a bit. Highly recommended.

'Old' Books

The Dark Man and Other Stories by Robert E. Howard, edited by August Derleth (1963): Eclectic collection of non-Conan stories from Robert E. Howard, originally published in hardcover by Arkham House. Magazines of the 1920's and 1930's originally published everything included here, including the wonderfully named Oriental Tales. Boy, those were the days. Was Edward Said the editor?

Basically, one gets some contemporary horror stories, of which "Pigeons from Hell" is the marvelously titled best, and at worst Howard's second-best pure horror story. Howard's ancient Pict leader Bran Mak Morn shows up a few times, even after he's dead. Some Lovecraftian horrors show up, as do a few ghosts and demons and one malevolent magic snake.

Roaming freebooters of the Middle Ages, Turlogh O'Brien and Athelstane, have a couple of adventures involving lost civilizations and massive bloodshed. And a couple of (then) modern-day Americans suddenly flash back to past lives of adventure, as happens a lot in Howard's stories. Viva reincarnation! Recommended.

Cinder and Ashe: written by Gerry Conway; illustrated by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Joe Orlando (1988): Solidly written thriller from Gerry Conway, Cinder and Ashe follows private detectives Jacob Ashe and Cinder DuBois as an enemy from their shared past in Viet Nam long thought dead suddenly turns up in a case they're working in 1988.

This miniseries, from that long-lost era when DC Comics regularly released non-superhero work under the main DC banner (as opposed to under the Vertigo banner) has never been collected into book form so far as I know, so you'll have to check out the back-issue bins.

Conway's writing does the job -- you can see how he would seamlessly transition from writing for comics to working for the Law and Order franchise in the years to come .

And the art, by longtime DC mainstay Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, is fantastic -- beautifully detailed and fluid. Because Garcia-Lopez works here on normal people and not super-heroes, his artistic similarity to the great Milton Caniff and other comic-strip giants really shines through. Not only does the art alone make a case for permanent collection, it makes a case for oversized permanent collection so that the often exquisite linework becomes fully visible. Recommended.

Retro-Titans

The New Teen Titans: Games: written by Marv Wolfman and George Perez; illustrated by George Perez, Mike Perkins and Al Vey (2011): Announced in 1988 as an original graphic novel starring the then-current iteration of DC superhero group the Teen Titans, Games soon became one of mainstream comicdom's most famous 'lost' books. New Teen Titans penciller extraordinaire George Perez completed roughly 70 pages of art before the project got shelved. After a few false starts and subsequent stops, Games in its 120-page entirety finally sees the light of day 23 years after its announcement.

DC wisely lets the story take place in the time-lost continuity of 1988, making this almost a tribute to the superhero group Marv Wolfman and Perez made so popular at DC in the 1980's, when the New Teen Titans comic was DC's biggest challenge to the supremacy of Marvel's X-Men.

Perez's almost-obsessively detailed art is a joy throughout -- all the characters are distinctively different, Perez's attention to facial detail being one of his less-heralded strengths. Wolfman and Perez's story maintained my interest throughout, as the Titans face what appears to be a terrorist with a super-powered team, a terrorist who seems to know their most intimate secrets and how to use those secrets against them. The events come, perhaps, a bit too fast and densely -- there are points at which it almost feels like this should have been a story twice its length -- but I'll take compression over decompression in a superhero comic book pretty much any day of the week.

It's nice to visit with old friends -- with Wolfman and Perez on the book they brought to prominence, and with the late 1980's line-up of Titans. I'd have liked more of (Kid) Flash, Speedy, and Aqualad (there are continuity reasons for why these early 1980's Titans weren't a big part of the late 1980's comic), but Games is so packed with characters and situations that I'm not sure how they'd have played a larger role without a lot more pages. Recommended.