Contusions of a Dragonslayer

Smax: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Zander Cannon, Andrew Currie, and Richard Friend (2003): Moore and Cannon send big, blue, nigh-indestructible Smax and techno-whiz partner Robyn ("Toybox"), two of the super-powered cops of Moore, Gene Ha, and Cannon's Top 10, to Smax's alternate Earth for the funeral of Smax's uncle, after the events of Top 10 issue 12. Well, adopted uncle, as he was a dwarf and Smax is...well, the book explains his origins.

Jeff Smax's Earth is one on which fairy tales, legends, and myths have all happened, sort of. There are dragons, elves, ghosts, and about a zillion other things, many of them appearing in the background. Cannon's art often emulates the crowded panels of Mad magazine -- here a Troll, there Harry Potter, and over in that corner, Stewie Griffin holding a gun to Maggie Simpson's head.

In the midst of the violent yet comic shenanigans comes the dragon Morningbright, unfinished business from Smax's mysterious past as a dragonslayer who failed to earn his last 30% commission for killing Morningbright because he ended up running away right off his own Earth and onto Earth-10, where he eventually got a job as a cop with Precinct 10. While he's not bright, Smax isn't a coward: Morningbright was a debacle he doesn't want to think about.

Somewhat like the dragon of John Gardner's Grendel, Morningbright can see the future, or at least enough of it to be a real problem. That his powers make him nearly omnipotent is another problem. That Smax has to somehow figure out how to kill him to fulfill a prophecy -- which on a magic-driven Earth is somewhat binding -- is another problem. That Smax and Toybox have to assemble a heroic group while meeting affirmative action quotas is also a problem. There are a lot of problems here. But years before Robyn ever came to Smax's Earth, Morningbright gave Smax a message for her, apparently intended to spook her. Why?

Simultaneously zippy and dense, Smax is a lot of fun -- and the dragon is a fascinating creation both in the writing and in Cannon's depiction of it. Morningbright is super-creepy, especially once the specific nature of his hoard of gold finally becomes clear. Recommended.

Three Dooms for Sister Christian

How to Train Your Dragon, written by Adam F. Goldberg, Peter Tolan, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, based on the novel of the same name by Cressida Cowell, directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, starring the voices of Jay Baruchel, America Ferrera, Gerard Butler, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jonah Hill and Craig Ferguson (2010): Why are the vast majority of good fantasy films now animated?

Possibly because the idea guys have far more control there than on live-action films. How to Train Your Dragon, based on a series of children's books, is a fine fantasy, and the best dragon-centric fantasy film since Dragonslayer. Compare this to, say, the inept, idiotic but somewhat similar Reign of Fire, and wonder where so many live-action fantasy films went so horribly, horribly wrong.

The dragons are charming and occasionally scary, the characters nicely fleshed out, the fantasy world itself fairly rationally worked out. Jay Baruchel's voice work is solid as the young man whose theories and study of dragons ultimately change the way the entire embattled Viking island in the movie deals with the regular resource raids of hundreds of dragons (and at least a dozen different species of same). A lot of fun for anyone. One wishes the written fantasy worlds of Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea or Gordon Dickson's Dragon Knight series would be lucky enough to get the animated treatment from filmmakers such as these. Highly recommended.

Sahara, written by Philip MacDonald, James O'Hanlon and John Howard Lawson, directed by Zoltan Korda, starring Humphrey Bogart, Bruce Bennett, Lloyd Bridges, J. Carrol Naish and Dan Duryea (1943): Bogart plays Sgt. Joe Gunn, in charge of an American M3 Lee tank in full retreat from Nazi forces in Libya in 1942. He and his crew collect a ragtag, multinational group of survivors on their way back to rendezvous with Allied ground forces, but soon find themselves forced to engage a much larger Nazi infantry and motor column (though thankfully no other tanks -- the M3 Lee, one of the first tanks mass-produced by the U.S. during the early stages of WWII, was relatively lightly armed and armoured, and would soon be supplanted by other, more capable armed vehicles).

Everyone from an Italian prisoner to a sympathetically portrayed Muslim Sudanese military men has to come together to defeat the Nazi threat, and hopefully find some water while doing so. Solid, fairly realistic war film with a solid cast. Recommended.

The Core, written by Cooper Layne and John Rogers, directed by Jon Amiel, starring Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, DJ Qualls, Richard Jenkins and Stanley Tucci (2003): When it comes to bad science, The Core may be the greatest science-fiction movie ever made. Or one that takes place in an alternate universe with radically different laws of physics. The US military accidentally stops the Earth's core from spinning.

In our world, the energy released by this stoppage would probably blow a significant portion of the Earth's crust and mantle into orbit, creating several new moons orbitting a dead Earth. In the universe of this movie, though, birds get confused and Earth's electromagnetic field starts developing gaping holes over famous landmarks that then get destroyed by solar radiation. I think the exploding Earth idea would have been a lot more interesting.

In any event, some plucky astronauts, academics and scientists get into a magical tunnelling subway train made out of a magical metal called Unobtainum (which begs the question, How did they obtain it?), a substance that can survive the high temperatures and super-pressure of the Earth's underregions. Apparently, nuclear explosions can restart the core's spin.

Hilarity ensues, a lot of people die heroically or at least semi-heroically, and the remaining heroes make it back to the ocean floor through an imaginary tectonic plate juncture near Hawaii, where killer whales sing to them in the voices of humpback whales. I'm not kidding. Hilariously bad, so I'm recommending it -- it makes Armageddon look like a documentary about NASA by comparison.