Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019)

Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019): CAST AND CREDITS: The first post-Avengers: Endgame Marvel movie quickly skates over the ramifications of that movie's ending, which I think will soon be one of those 'Now let us never speak of those five years again!' things in upcoming Marvel joints. 

Tom Holland makes a good Peter Parker. Marvel has wisely emphasized Peter's mechanical and problem-solving genius, a welcome nod to Peter's status as a very clever fellow in the classic Steve Ditko/Stan Lee comics of the 1960's. Hey, that guy beat the Sandman with a goddam vacuum cleaner!!! 

Pretty much all the actors are charming, and Jake Gyllenhaal's Mysterio is a hoot. Even the tweaking of Mysterio's origin is funny yet convincing, though I sort of miss the idea of a character who was a visual and special effects movie guy. Maybe because he could have teamed up with Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Stuntman. 

The whole thing plays like one of those Roger Moore James Bond movies where everything stays pretty light and jokey while Bond travels from country to country destroying priceless artifacts and occasionally landmarks. Recommended.

Venom (2018)

Venom (2018): Venom created by David Michelinie and Todd MacFarlane; written by Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg, and Kelly Marcel; directed by Ruben Fleischer; starring Tom Hardy (Eddie Brock/Venom), Michelle Williams (Anne), and Riz Ahmed (Carlton Drake/Riot):

I guess it's good that the current superhero glut can result in even marginally offbeat projects based on Marvel and DC characters. Venom isn't a good movie, but it's intermittently fun, and the goopy creature effects are a far cry from most normal Marvel and DC movie fare.

In the comics, Venom was what happened when Spider-man's black-and-white alien symbiote costume he acquired in the Secret Wars event in the mid-1980's acquired a new host because it was driving Spidey crazy and he got rid of it. You may remember events like this from Spider-man 3. Yes, Venom has appeared in a movie before, its host Eddie Brock played then by Topher Grace.

Now Eddie Brock is a formerly heroic, now down-on-his-luck journalist in San Francisco who acquires the symbiote (or is acquired by the symbiote) while trying to resurrect his career by blowing the whistle on Riz Ahmed's mad billionaire scientist. Ahmed barely registers as an evil version of Elon Musk. Well, more evil. He torpedoed Brock's career because Brock discovered he was doing some crazy experiments on people who subsequently died.

The symbiote gives Eddie a wide, ill-defined range of superpowers along with a blobby covering that looks a lot like Spider-man because, well, Venom was a Spider-man suit in the comics. The suit likes eating human heads and Tater Tots. What larks, Pip!

Our lumpy, lumpen anti-hero eventually learns the value of human life and saves the world from some stuff. It seems like about 20 minutes of story has been cut that showed Venom's progress from head-eater to Earth-lover. Oh, well.

Tom Hardy is hilarious doing some insanely bad accent that's supposed to be... Brooklynese? I have no idea. Venom sounds like Tom Hardy doing a Keith David impersonation. Michelle Williams looks absolutely lost in a CGI-laden action movie. And Riz Ahmed, as noted, is barely there. 

This is not a good movie, but it's oddly charming and enjoyable enough to waste time with. And as it's technically part of the Spider-verse Sony still has rights to despite their NuX2 Spider-man movies now being part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.... well, that astronaut is the son of J. Jonah Jameson, who in the comics became the werewolf Man-Wolf after visiting the Moon. I hope that happens in a subsequent Venom movie!!! Lightly recommended.

Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse (2018)

Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse (2018): written by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman; directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman; starring the voices of Shemeik Moore (Miles Morales), Jake Johnson (Peter B. Parker), Hailee Steinfeld (Gwen), Mahershala Ali (Uncle Aaron), Brian Tyree Henry (Jefferson Davis - Miles' Dad), Lily Tomlin (Aunt May), Luna Velez (Rio Morales), Zoe Kravitz (Mary Jane), John Mulaney (Spider-Ham), Kimiko Glenn (Peni Parker), Nicolas Cage (Spider-man Noir), Kathryn Hahn (Doctor Octopus), Liev Schreiber (Kingpin), and Chris Pine (Spider-man): Whew!

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.

Avengers: Infinity War (BluRay) (2018)

Avengers: Infinity War (BluRay) (2018): written by everybody; directed by Joe and Anthony Russo; starring everybody: Mostly diverting, overlong superhero slug-fest struggles to balance bombast and quippiness and mostly succeeds. 

The visuals and writing are a step down from zippier recent Marvel movies that include Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok. The logistics of fitting all these characters into this story overwhelm all other considerations. Wit is at a premium.

To wit: six years ago, Thanos managed to lose control of two of the magical plot-device Infinity Gems when he had Loki lead his forces in an invasion of Earth in the first Avengers movie. At that time, a third stone was in the possession of the Ancient One on Earth. So Avengers was basically Operation Stumblebum for Thanos. Three of the six stones in his grasp! Then he fritters away six years and goes on a stone-collecting bender in the week or so leading into and through Infinity War. We all wrote high-school essays on pretty much the same last-minute timeline!

The plot thread starring Iron Man, Spider-man, and Dr. Strange is terrific. Robert Downey Jr., Benedict Cumberbatch, and Chris Pratt are all divertingly pissy while Spider-man looks on in wide-eyed bafflement. That most of the scenes in this thread take place either on a planet right out of a videogame cutscene or on a spaceship shaped like a donut seems weirdly appropriate. Though the designers of that flying donut really should have invested in double-walled bulkheads.

The climactic Wakanda battle scenes make little strategic or tactical sense, and suggest that, among other things, none of the Avengers or Wakandans have ever seen Zulu. Or read about military battles after the invention of projectile weapons. Wait, didn't Captain America FIGHT in World War Two?

Thanos has been much-changed from his tirelessly malevolent comic-book self into a mournful giant who desperately needs a hug that he never receives. Maybe in Part Two! Brolin invests the big purple fella with a certain bruised gravitas even if his master plan for the universe was stolen from the original series Star Trek episode "The Conscience of the King." 

The BluRay is a little thin in terms of interesting features, especially compared to the loaded Thor: Ragnarok BluRay of a few months back. The featurettes play more like long advertisements than anything substantive, there's nothing about the comic-book origins of Thanos, the gag reel is perfunctory, but the deleted scenes are sort of interesting. I'd guess a much more fully loaded BluRay will appear a couple of weeks before Infinity War 2 bows in April 2019. 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.

Spider-man: Homecoming (2017)

Spider-man: Homecoming (2017): based on characters and situations created by Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, and Don Heck; written by Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Erik Sommers, Chris McKenna, Christopher Ford, and Jon Watts; starring Tom Holland (Peter Parker/ Spider-man), Michael Keaton (Adrian Toomes/ Vulture), Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark/ Iron Man), Marisa Tomei (May Parker), Jon Favreau (Happy Hogan), Zendaya (Michelle), Jacob Batalon (Ned), Laura Harrier (Liz), and Chris Evans (Captain America): 

Spider-man: Homecoming because Spider-man: Prom lacked the metaphoric level of Spider-man's 'homecoming' to the Marvel Cinematic Universe after five movies in his own playground at Sony.

The movie is surprisingly funny and light on its feet. Spider-man: Homecoming gets Peter Parker's urgent need to save people just right. It also does the right thing by having Peter be an underclassman in high school. 

Tying Spider-man so thoroughly to Tony Stark/Avengers is a bit of a bummer, though. We're told repeatedly by assorted characters that Peter is "the smartest kid" they know. But the elements that made this true in the comics only remain in Peter's creation of his web-slinging fluid and web-shooters. And Tony Stark even improves on them. Peter doesn't have to create the finished version of the iconic costume, the Spider-Beacon, the Spider-tracer.... oh, well. The whole thing almost acts as metacommentary on Spider-man now being part of a vast, shared, corporate movie universe.

Tom Holland is good, as are most of the actors. As Spidey's newly minted best pal Ned, Jacob Batalon steals the show on several occasions while also demonstrating why maybe superheroes need to preserve their secret identities. He's definitely a plus. 

Peter Parker isn't the socially ostracized misfit of the comics, though, and that was always part of the point of Peter's high-school experiences: Spider-man is willing to help people who treat him badly. Here, socially awkward Peter has trouble asking a Senior girl to go to the Prom... sorry, Homecoming... but it turns out she has a huge crush on him! The angst and awkwardness of Peter Parker has been mostly muffled. It seems like Marvel missed a chance to use Spider-man to address issues of bullying et al. Spider-man's miserable high-school existence has been defanged.

So too his reciprocal, self-sacrificing pas de deux with Aunt May, who is now Marisa Tomei, her hotness much commented upon, her elderly comic-book nature replaced by a sort of hippie Earth Mother. I'm not sure Aunt May should turn out to be Stacy's Mom!

Still, it's a genial movie. Michael Keaton's Vulture is surprisingly low-key -- he's supposed to be a working-class joe who moved into high-tech after being screwed over on a contract he had to clean up some alien debris lying around after the Avengers' battle with the Chitauri invasion of New York that occurred at the end of Avengers (2012). As motivations go, it dovetails with the movie's treatment of Spider-man as a working-class hero who needs to give up his desire to join the Avengers full-time and save "the little people." Oh, those little people. Recommended.

Diction

1. Something "changed the course of history." Look, unless you're a time traveler, you can't possibly know what the "course of history" was SUPPOSED to be. It's just history, even when it's startling or seemingly bonkers.
2. The "foreseeable future." Unless you're clairvoyant, there is no such thing as a "foreseeable future." I don't care how good your models are.
3. The "dark side of the Moon." You can tell where the dark side of the Moon is by looking at its phases. It's not the same thing as "the far side of the Moon." The dark side changes. The far side remains mostly constant, though slight inconsistencies between the Moon's rotation and Earth's mean that we see a little bit of the Moon's far side, on either side, depending on the day and time. The far side is not permanently dark. The dark side is not permanent.
4. It's "vocal cords," not "vocal chords," as weirdly appropriate as the latter may seem.
5. It's Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and Iron Man but it's Spider-man. Yeah, I don't know why Spidey gets a hyphen when most superheroes don't. Maybe because he's so amazing.

What Are 3 Movies I Recently Watched?

Hugo (2011): adapted by John Logan from the novel by Brian Selznick; directed by Martin Scorsese; starring Ben Kingsley (George Melies), Sacha Baron Cohen (Station Inspector), Asa Butterfield (Hugo Cabret), Chloe Grace Moretz (Isabelle), Helen McCrory (Mama Jeanne), Christopher Lee (M. Labisse), Emily Mortimer (Lisette), Michael Stuhlbarg (Rene Tabard), and Jude Law (Mr. Cabret): Hugo pretty much swept the 2011 artistic and technical Academy Awards for sound, art direction, visual effects, and cinematography. It was Martin Scorsese's first foray into 3-D film-making AND Young-Adult-friendly narrative.

On the small, non-3-D screen, Hugo still boasts some impressive set and production design as it depicts a somewhat fanciful Paris c. 1932. Unbeknownst to the authorities as embodied in Station Inspector Sacha Baron Cohen, the orphaned Hugo Cabret keeps the clocks running in the film's central location, the main Paris train station. 

Hugo also works to repair an automaton rescued from museum storage by his late father. And unbeknownst to Hugo, the cranky toy-stall owner at the station is seminal French film director Georges Melies. Is that a spoiler?

Hugo is slow in its initial hour or so, and the supporting characters never seem to be drawn sharply or funnily enough. However, the movie looks great, and Asa Butterfield and Chloe Grace Moretz make a charming pair of investigators. More time devoted to recreations of Melies' fanciful films would have been nice -- there's a little too much lead-foot in the movie's shoes when it comes to film's ability to transport a viewer to new, strange places. Scorsese may simply be too rooted in the quotidian, no matter the goodness of his intentions, and John Logan (Gladiator, Star Trek: Nemesis) is something of a literal-minded plodder when it comes to the fantastic. Nonetheless, recommended.

The Boy (2016): written by Stacey Menear; directed by William Brent Bell; starring Lauren Cohan (Greta), Rupert Evans (Malcolm), and Ben Robson (Cole): Who names their son Brahms? Oh, well. Lauren Cohan plays an American hired as a nanny/au pair by an elderly English couple. She's there to take care of their eight-year-old son while they go on vacation. The son is a life-sized doll. OK!

The Walking Dead's Cohan carries much of the film's best moments, as improbable as they often seem. And the movie plays fair until the epilogue, which one could argue is as much an imagined nightmare as the 'hand shots' that appear near the ends of Carrie and Deliverance. Rupert Evans brings a muted affability to the thankless role of New English Love Interest. The doll is pretty creepy. 

The director whiffs several times on disguising the fact that the movie was shot in and around Victoria, British Columbia rather than England. Either that or The Boy takes place in an alternate universe in which England has redwood trees. Lightly recommended.

Spider-man (2002): created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee; written by David Koepp; directed by Sam Raimi; starring Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker/ Spider-man), Willem Dafoe (Norman Osborn/ Green Goblin), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), James Franco (Harry Osborn), Cliff Robertson (Uncle Ben), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May), and J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson): Still a mostly jolly, romantic romp, this Spider-man. Maybe a bit too romantic, but the doomed love affair of Mary Jane and Spider-man was a key factor in drawing in a better-than-average-female-audience (for superhero and/or action movies, that is). 

Raimi and company dumb Spider-man down, eliminating the comic-book wish-fulfillment genius that allowed him to create mechanical web-shooters and many other awesome Spidey gadgets, which is a shame -- organic web-shooters are gross, and suggest that Peter Parker must spend a lot of time eating high-protein foods after a particularly heavy bout of web-slinging. 

Still, the cast -- even James Franco as Parker pal Harry Osborn -- is a delight. Would that they had come up with a better rendition of the Green Goblin's comic-book costume, though, if only so that many scenes didn't look like Spider-man vs. the Green Mattel Chocobot. Recommended.

Prequel and Sequels

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016): written by J.K. Rowling; directed by David Yates; starring Eddie Redmayne (Newt Scamander), Colin Farrell (Graves), Katherine Waterston (Tina), Alison Sudol (Queenie), Dan Fogler (Jacob), Ezra Miller (Credence), and Johnny Depp (Grindenwald): A Harry Potter prequel (one of at least four, apparently) set in New York in the 1920's. The rare modern movie whose charms lie almost entirely on the CGI end of things. Eddie Redmayne, mumbling and whispering and retiring, was a terrible choice to play the lead: he's perpetually drowned out by pretty much everything else in the movie. 

The film might have been 25% better if David Tennant had played Scamander in full blustery Doctor Who mode. Between this and his performance in Jupiter Ascending, bad in a different way, Redmayne really needs to avoid potential tent-pole blockbusters. He's too finely tuned an actor to look comfortable in front of a green-screen battling for attention with giant birds and immense balls of crackly darkness.

J.K. Rowling's first original screenplay is a mess, vague and unfocused and rambling for the first hour. Characters we don't care about whiz by, leaving only Eddie Fogler's Muggle-out-of-water baker and Alison Sudol's perky telepath to cheer for, and be cheered by. A movie about the two of them and their magical bakery would be a Potter prequel I could get behind. The appearance of Johnny Depp at the end inspires the wrong kind of dread for the future of the series. Lightly recommended.

Spider-Man 2 (2004): based on characters created by Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, John Romita, and others; written by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, Michael Chabon, and Alvin Sargent; starring Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), James Franco (Harry Osborn), Alfred Molina (Dr. Octopus), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May), and J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson): 15 years further into The Superhero-Movie Age, Spider-Man 2 seems smarter and more human than ever. The actors charm, the villain is more of a tragic figure than anything else, and everything hinges not on a final fist-fight but on a final appeal to a doomed character's humanity. 

In terms of choreography and spectacle, the final battle isn't quite as interesting as two earlier set-pieces, though that may explain the sudden left-hand turn the plot takes at its conclusion away from all-out punchiness. Only the decision to have Spider-Man's webs be biological rather than mechanical is a drag: the fun of Spider-Man's encounters with super-villains in the comic books sprang partially from his scientific and engineering prowess deployed in the service of stopping said super-villains, and Spidey could really use some high-test webbing when he battles the homicidal, cybernetic arms of Dr. Octopus! Highly recommended.

The Dark Tower (2017): adapted by Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen, and Nikolaj Arcel from the series by Stephen King; directed by Nikolaj Arcel; starring Idris Elba (Roland), Tom Taylor (Jake), and Matthew McConaughey (Walter): Shortly before its release, The Dark Tower was called a sequel to the 8-novel+ Stephen King series by its creators. And it actually makes sense as one if you've read the series. 

Is it a great movie? No. It's bracingly short and compact, though maybe 20 minutes' more questing and world-building would have been nice. Idris Elba does fine work as a more tortured Roland the Gunslinger than we see in the novels. Tom Taylor does fine work as Jake, the boy on 'our' Earth who dreams of the Gunslinger and his fantastic quest to save the Dark Tower at the centre of reality. And Matthew McConaughey is suitably smarmy and smug as Walter, the Man in Black who's trying to bring down the Dark Tower in service to his own dark god(s). 

There are Stephen King Easter Eggs galore (Hello, Charlie the Choo-Choo! Hello, Room 1408!). There are rat-men and assorted other servants of darkness. Its weakness is occasionally seeming rushed, though that's better than bloat in my book any day. The Dark Tower also understatedly offers a multi-racial cast, something that seems to have gone unremarked upon the curious critical rush to pan the movie. Oh, well. Recommended.

The Sorrows of Young Warlock

Jim Starlin's Warlock: The Complete Collection (1975-77/ Collected here 2014): written by Jim Starlin; illustrated by Jim Starlin, Steve Leialoha, Josef Rubinstein, Alan Weiss, and Al Milgrom: The 1970's were a quirky age of growth for mainstream American comic books, with much of that growth occurring at the margins in a way we just don't see any more. Some of the greatest writers and artists mainstream comics have ever produced worked away on series that were mostly far from the big hitters like Spider-man and Superman. 

Names to conjure with included Bernie Wrightson, Howard Chaykin, Walt Simonson, Don McGregor, Steve Gerber and many others. And the great series of mainstream comics at DC and Marvel were either limited-run back-up strips (Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson's brilliant, beautiful Manhunter at DC) or strange, genre-bending series located safely away from the normal mainstream universe (Don McGregor, P. Craig Russell and company's sprawling, poetic Killraven). 

And then there's Jim Starlin, a writer-artist who staked out his own peculiar corner of cosmic adventure. The only thing all that similar to Starlin's early 1970's Marvel work on Captain Marvel and Warlock was writer-artist Jack Kirby's gigantic, unfinished Fourth World saga over at DC. But where Kirby was ultimately obsessed with life (really, LIFE), Starlin was obsessed with death (DEATH). 

Having cut his cosmic teeth on Marvel's Captain Marvel in the early 1970's, Starlin would return to fringe heroes and outer-space sturm-und-drang in 1975 when he revived the Adam Warlock character. Warlock made his debut as a naive, genetically engineered superman known only as 'Him' in the pages of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's Fantastic Four in 1967. Over the next few years, he'd gain the name Adam Warlock, have adventures on Counter-Earth, and fulfill his superheroic Jesus Christ arc by getting himself crucified and resurrected.

HIM! In his cocoon.

Returned to Marvel publication after a few years off (hey, everyone has to take time to recover from a crucifixion!), Warlock was now being written and penciled by Starlin, who never met a case of cosmic angst he didn't like. And Warlock would soon be the angstiest cosmic hero of all, easily surpassing the Silver Surfer for the number and rate of existential crises suffered during barrages of energy bolts and exploding stars. 

But it's fun. And very heavy metal (though not really Heavy Metal) in its adolescent mixture of self-loathing and super-powered punching. Starlin would bring the cosmically villainous Thanos over from his run on Captain Marvel, first as an unlikely ally for Warlock and then as a more likely antagonist. Nay, nemesis! For while Captain Marvel was a problem for Thanos, Warlock is his full-blown opposite: the Life Equation to Thanos' Anti-Life Equation, in terms of Jack Kirby's Fourth World comics for DC.

People talk a lot in Warlock. Boy, do they talk a lot. Starlin has learned to lighten things up a bit by giving Warlock a comic sidekick -- Pip the Troll -- and a female sounding board -- Gamora, played by Zoe Saldana in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Starlin's fascination with the Church (and specifically the Roman Catholic Church) as an institutional Evil shows up here, to later be expanded upon in his Dreadstar series. And he gives Warlock one of the most fascinatingly twisted enemies to ever appear in an ostensibly mainstream superhero comic: The Magus, about which no more said.

But it's the battle against Thanos that dominates much of this volume, as it should. It's probably good that Warlock got cancelled when it did, thus forcing Starlin to end the Thanos saga in post-cancellation Avengers and Marvel Two-in-One annuals. Otherwise, Warlock's suffering might have gone on forever. Instead, Warlock rallies the Avengers, Spider-man, and the Thing to his crusade against Thanos. It's a smaller scale version of what would happen 15 years later in Marvel's Infinity Gauntlet miniseries: everyone versus Thanos. And Starlin throws in some lovely twists along the way. It's good, clean, angsty cosmic fun in the Mighty Starlin Manner. Highly recommended.

Heroes and Misfires

The Amazing Spider-man 2: based on comics by Stan Lee, Gerry Conway, Gil Kane, Steve Ditko, Ross Andru, and others; written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Jeff Pinkner, and James Vanderbilt; directed by Marc Webb; starring Andrew Garfield (Spider-man/Peter Parker), Emma Stone (Gwen Stacy), Jamie Foxx (Electro/ Max Dillon), Dane DeHaan (Green Goblin/ Harry Osborn), Sally Field (Aunt May) and Chris Cooper (Norman Osborn) (2014): Not a complete misfire in the tradition of Batman and Robin or Ang Lee's Hulk, but also not a particularly good movie. 

Sony's desire to stuff in a whole bunch of crap about the Sinister Six didn't help things. Neither did trying to deal with both Electro and Harry Osborn's transformation into the Green Goblin into the same movie. Nor did all the ridiculous, exposition-heavy crap about Peter Parker's parents, their hidden Laboratory of Solitude, the Osborn family disease, Gwen Stacy's interview with Oxford University, and so on, and so forth. The whole goddamn thing ends up feeling like the second season of a TV series condensed into a sporadically draggy 2 1/2 hours.

You might want to watch it at home over two or three nights. You might also wonder why the film-makers turned C-list Spider-man villain Electro into a combination of Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan and Jim Carrey's version of the Riddler in Batman Forever. That's some nice borrowing, boys! Oh, and Gwen Stacy dies at the end. It was a bad idea in the comics in the early 1970's, and it's a bad idea now. God forbid superheroes just break up. Not really recommended.

X-Men: First Class: based on characters created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and others; written by Brian Singer, Sheldon Turner, Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman, Zack Stentz, and Ashley Miller; directed by Matthew Vaughn; starring James McAvoy (Professor X), Michael Fassbender (Magneto), Kevin Bacon (Sebastian Shaw), Rose Byrne (Moira MacTaggart), Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique), January Jones (Emma Frost), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), and a cast of thousands (2011): Competent, occasionally plodding origin story for the X-Men of the 1960's. That it didn't gross enough money is why we got X-Men: Days of Future Past and not X-Men: Freshman 15 or X-Men: Second Class. 

This isn't really a movie where one suspends one's disbelief to believe in superpowers. It's more of a movie where one suspends one's disbelief so as to believe that Michael Fassbender would age into Ian MacKellan, or James MacAvoy into Patrick Stewart. It's completely ridiculous, but we go with it, along with Rebecca Romjin starting off as Jennifer Lawrence, because one must do as one needs must when the Devil vomits in one's tea kettle.

The whole thing plays out as a counter-historical spy thriller set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, only with more mutants. A lot of the story's events rely on people with super-powers either not using them at all, or not using them against the people they should use them against. They stand around a lot, these mutants, or they move frenetically and with lots of noise. There's really no middle ground. And how the screenwriters, all four hundred of them, managed to turn Moira MacTaggart from a geneticist into a CIA agent must make one hell of a writers' room story. Lightly recommended.

Cuban Fury: written by Jon Brown and Nick Frost; directed by James Griffiths; starring Nick Frost (Bruce Garrett), Chris O'Dowd (Drew), Ian McShane (Ron Parfitt), Rashida Jones (Julia), Alexandra Roach (Helen), and Olivia Colman (Sam Garrett) (2014): Delightful romp from Nick Frost and company. Frost plays a former teen-aged salsa dancing prodigy whose love for the dance was destroyed by bullies. 25 years later, he gets a crush on his new boss (Rashida Jones), who turns out to be a salsa dancer herself. So Frost's character goes back into training.

It's all somewhat familiar in its plot beats, but Cuban Fury's subject matter (salsa dancing? in England? with Nick Frost?) makes the whole thing zing. The writers give the characters decent lines to say. And for all the focus on bullying, the movie views most people as benevolent. Having Ian McShane as the grumpy salsa instructor is some sort of casting genius. And having Chris O'Dowd play against type as a complete jerk also pays dividends. Recommended.

Despicable Me: written by Sergio Pablos, Ken Daurio, and Cinco Paul; directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud; starring the voices of Steve Carell (Gru), Jason Segel (Vector), Russell Brand (Dr. Nefario), Julie Andrews (Gru's Mom), Will Arnett (Mr. Perkins), and Kristen Wiig (Miss Hattie) (2010): Jolly animated foray into the world of super-villains is far better than the vast majority of live-action superhero movies. And it makes about as much sense. Steve Carell's bizarrely accented super-villain Gru is hilarious, the three girls he adopts as part of his nefarious plan to steal the Moon are adorable, and Gru's seemingly infinite supply of yellow-skinned, semi-robotic minions are scene-stealers (which is probably why they'll soon have their own movie). Highly recommended.

Gorgo Loves His Mama

Ditko Monsters: Gorgo: edited by Craig Yoe; written by Joe Gill and others; illustrated by Steve Ditko and others (1961-64; reprinted 2013): This grand, tabloid-sized volume reprints all of comic-book legend Steve (Spider-man, Dr. Strange) Ditko's work on the Charlton Comics adaptation and continuation of the giant-monster movie Gorgo.

Gorgo was a British attempt in the early 1960's to match the success of Toho Studios' Japanese giant-monster movies, especially Godzilla (nee Gojira). Thus was born Gorgo, a giant monster with an even more giant mother. Like King Kong, Gorgo gets captured and exhibited by some remarkably stupid showmen. Unlike King Kong, Gorgo has a mother who seems to be several hundred feet tall. England takes a beating.

After adapting the movie, Charlton continued the adventures of Gorgo and Mama Gorgo. Ditko and his long-time collaborator at Charlton, writer Joe Gill, combined on several issues of the title over a three-year period, with Ditko also providing several covers to issues he didn't otherwise illustrate.

This volume really highlights Ditko's two almost paradoxically opposite skills as a comic-book artist. He's great at drawing really weird things, and he's great at drawing people and settings that look far more normal and believeable than that of any other mainstream American comic-book artist in history. Giant monsters and ordinary people: it's the Robert Redford/Godzilla movie you always wanted!

In between depopulating the ocean for their out-sized caloric requirements (Gorgo's mother can gulp down sperm whales whole), Gorgo and his mother sleep on the ocean floor and occasionally get into adventures. They're not the villains of the series -- far from it. Instead, they end the Cuban Missile Crisis (I'm not joking), save Earth from an alien invasion, rescue an American nuclear submarine from the ocean floor, and inspire men and women to get married wherever they go (again, not kidding). For giant, destructive monsters, they sure are swell.

Throughout, Ditko juxtaposes the mundane and the fantastic with the same sort of skill he exhibited on his far more famous work on Spider-man and Dr. Strange, two characters he was drawing for Marvel pretty much simultaneously with several of the stories in this volume. Ditko enjoyed working for Charlton, pretty much the cheapest of the comic-book publishers to survive through the 1960's and 1970's, because he had pretty much carte blanche. Charlton was too cheap to exert editorial control, which meant Ditko didn't have to tailor his style to the publisher or have his stories micro-managed by an editor.

It's all a lot of over-sized fun on over-sized pages. This is Ditko near the height of his mainstream artistic powers. The scripts by Joe Gill are loopy in that Silver-Age science-fictiony way. The historical material contextualizes both the movie and the comics. Really, a fine piece of work. Gorgo loves his mama! Highly recommended.

Spider-men and 'Spides'

Dicks Volume 1: written by Garth Ennis, illustrated by John McCrea (1989-90, 1997, 2002): One of the earliest collaborations between the dynamic duo of Ennis and McCrea (Hitman) takes us through the hyper-violent, occasionally supernatural adventures of two Belfast screw-ups.

Your degree of enjoyment will depend a lot on how funny you think Ennis and McCrea are when they get all hyper-violent and super-offensive. I think they're funny, and the dense Belfastian slang just adds to the humour. Recommended.


Spider-man: The Original Clone Saga: written by Gerry Conway, Bill Mantlo, Len Wein, and Archie Goodwin; illustrated by Ross Andru, Sal Buscema, Jim Mooney, Frank Miller, and others (1974-75, 1979-80, 1989-91; collected 2011): The 'Original Clone Saga' comes in at about 500 pages, which works out to about two-dozen comic books spread out over nearly 20 years. However, it would also spawn what is probably still the longest Spider-man narrative in history. That would be the redundantly titled 'Clone Saga Epic.'

The 'Clone Saga Epic' was much-hated when it occupied every issue of every Spider-man title for a couple of years in the 1990's. The 'Original Clone Saga' (TOCS?) is really three story arcs that occur with several years separation between each one.

The first gives us the story of the attempts by somebody to drive Spider-man crazy by convincing him that murdered love Gwen Stacy is actually still alive. The second traces the strange story of Spider-villain Carrion. And the third...well, the third is one of those 'Everything you knew was wrong!' scenarios that, in the process of ostensibly making a previous story make more sense, actually causes that story to become completely goofy.

Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable survey of three different times in the publishing career of Spider-man. And the third arc, written by Gerry Conway, who also wrote stretches of the first arc, may actually be a parody of the 'Everything you knew...' trope that super-hero comic books have deployed since almost the beginning of superhero comics. Because if it's a parody, it's a funny one in which a new explanation that's supposed to make more sense than the old one actually requires much more suspension of disbelief.

The art is competent and, in stretches, quite enjoyable (though Frank Springer makes a terrible inker for Frank Miller -- their styles just don't work together). I especially like Ross Andru's Spider-man, though he, like Miller, is not always served well by his inkers. And the writing gives us, for the most part, that angst-ridden but dedicated Spider-man we know and love. Recommended.

Retch-conned

Spider-man: Chapter One: written by John Byrne; illustrated by John Byrne and Al Milgrom (1998-99): Well, it's not as bad as I feared, this attempt at a retcon of Spider-man's origins that fared so poorly in the marketplace and among those who actually read it that Marvel subsequently ignored everything herein. Nonetheless, Byrne is not at the top of his writing or drawing game here. Not even close.

Basically, Byrne decided that Spider-man's first 20 appearances back in the 1960's constitute Year One. However, Marvel can't call this Spider-man: Year One because DC had already cornered that title extension. Hence Chapter One. Things are then updated so that everything occurs about eight years prior to the then-current Spider-titles, setting Spidey's origin around 1991.

Then come the changes. Stan Lee first posited in a never-produced screenplay that the same radiation experiment created Spider-man and Doctor Octopus. Byrne takes that and runs with it. He also has the radiation accident that created that little radioactive spider kill about a dozen other people and put Peter Parker in the hospital for weeks. Wow, what larks!

Then, with the benefit of hindsight that the Green Goblin was really crazy industrialist Norman Osborn, Byrne attributes the origins of many of Spidey's greatest foes to Osborn. And those he doesn't create, he enlists to attack Spider-man.

Furthermore, because Steve Ditko drew the Sandman and Osborn with similar Ditko-stylized hairstyles (hairstyles that would translate literally into the real world as some very out-of-place, out-of-time combination crew cuts and corn rows), Byrne has the Sandman and Osborn turn out to be cousins. I think. Norman thinks of the Sandman as 'cousin' in quotation marks at one point, perhaps suggesting that Osborn is lying, or perhaps suggesting that Osborn just likes making air-quotes.

Along the way, Byrne gives Electro a boring new suit, something the filmmakers of the upcoming Spider-man movie have also chosen to do. He comes up with a rationale for the burglar's murder of Spidey's Uncle Ben that is a marvel (or maybe a Marvel) of obsessive problem-solving of continuity problems that are not actually continuity problems. And he makes Peter Parker's relationship with Daily Bugle secretary Betty Brant somewhat ickier by making it clear that she's a 20-something dating a 17-year-old boy.

There are some nice moments here, especially in some of the action sequences. But throughout the book there's an obsessive tying together of threads best left untied (did every super-villain work for Norman Osborn?) and some uncharacteristically sloppy artwork from Byrne (the low-point comes late, with a panel showing a Daredevil who is apparently either a very peculiar-looking dwarf or possibly a giant, costume-wearing fetus; the Green Goblin is the worst-served throughout, possessed as he is of a gigantic, grinning, orange-on-a-toothpick head).

That Byrne periodically draws Aunt May to look exactly like his version of intermittent Fantastic-Four nanny (and practicing witch) Agatha Harkness actually confused me a couple of times. And why does Flash Thompson's hair change back and forth between blonde and red throughout this compilation? Who's checking the colours for the reprint? Lightly, lightly, lightly recommended for Spider-man completists or those curious to see why this miniseries continues to be hated by comic-book readers 16 years after it debuted.

Charlton Chews

Unexplored Worlds: The Steve Ditko Archives Volume 2: edited and with an introduction by Blake Bell (1956-57; collected 2010): This second volume of the Fantagraphics Steve Ditko Archives takes us through a year in which Ditko recovered from tuberculosis and drew like a fiend, racking up over 400 pages of work, mostly for bargain-basement Charlton Comics. The co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange strove to develop a personal style very early on, as this volume shows. The art is distinctly Ditko from the get-go.

But it's also a Ditko experimenting with what works in terms of storytelling. He plays with detailed rendition and exquisite linework, especially on covers and in opening splash panels. And the broad nature of what Charlton was publishing -- very short stories in a variety of genres, all of them terribly written -- gave Ditko pretty much free rein to work on everything from how to draw a horse's legs (he still doesn't have it at this point, though I'm not sure he ever did; Kirby didn't either) to how to draw fantastic vistas of space and time and other dimensions.

A story about a painting that's a gateway to another dimension shows us the Ditko who will be, less than ten years later, on Marvel's Doctor Strange. On that great character's adventures, Ditko would become one of a handful of the greatest depictors of the weird and uncanny in comic-book history. It's a bit of a paradox.

Ditko was (and is) perhaps the most humanistic and normative of superhero illustrators, his characters not puffed up like steroid-addled beachballs, their faces and clothes lived in and life-like. But he also had a penchant for action conveyed through body language and positioning, and an eye for the weird and unusual conveyed in a few simple lines. He was the comic-book world's version of Magritte with his surreal juxtapositions and commonplace elements arranged in impossible ways.

The writing on almost all of these stories is pretty terrible, as noted -- Charlton was the Yugo assembly line of American comic books of the 1950's and 1960's. But the sheer volume of pages required by Charlton (and the sheer volume required by Ditko to survive at Charlton's miniscule page rates) did give Ditko a chance to develop, experiment, and become the artist he soon would be. Highly recommended.

Strange Spiders

Spider-man/Dr. Strange: Fever: written and illustrated by Brendan McCarthy with an additional story written by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and illustrated by Steve Ditko (2010/1965; collected 2010): Enjoyable, wonky, slight and psychedelic team-up of Marvel's two biggest heroes co-created by the occasionally trippy pen of Steve Ditko.

That Ditko was amazingly good at conjuring up the weird magical vistas of sorcerer Dr. Strange always seemed a bit paradoxical, as Ditko's other strength lay in making his characters look realistically proportioned -- and New York realistically lived-in. Nonetheless, Ditko made magic look somehow effortless and cool and disquietingly surreal, and forty years of other Dr. Strange artists have struggled to approach the surreal-yet-grounded vistas and creatures of Ditko's realms of magic and mystery.

McCarthy has earned a name as a somewhat surreal comic-book artist, often more for his cover painting for books like Shade, The Changing Man (itself a revival of a trippy 1970's Ditko creation for DC Comics). Here, he grounds his magical dimensions in Australian aboriginal art, among other things, in this tale of Dr. Strange and Spider-man fighting spider-demons in another dimension.

McCarthy wisely keeps Strange and Spider-man believably human-proportioned and muscled, and some of the effects he achieves are quite lovely and strange. He's no Ditko, as the bonus reprint of the first Ditko-plotted-and-drawn Spider-man/Dr. Strange team-up shows, but he's definitely not your average 21st-century comic-book artist. Recommended.

Martians and Spiders and Cocoa Puffs, Oh My

Comics:

Killraven by Alan Davis and Mark Farmer (Six-issue miniseries 2003): Marvel Comics' 1970's Killraven, Warrior of the Worlds series (which started off as War of the Worlds) was a sequel to H.G. Wells's late 19th-century Martian invasion novel War of the Worlds. Set in the third decade of the 21st century, Killraven depicted a world overrun by Martians about 20 years earlier, with humanity reduced to slaves, food, entertainment, and the occasional survivor living off the grid.

Though created by others, Killraven quickly became the stand-out work of writer Don McGregor and artist P. Craig Russell. The whole 70's saga is still available in a Marvel Essential edition, and I'd recommend seeking it out -- it's an odd but intoxicating blend of superheroics, post-apocalyptic action and increasingly intricate experiments with art and storytelling, none moreso than the final issue of the initial run, "The Morning After Mourning Prey." McGregor and Russell helped pave the way for the increasingly literate genre comics of the 1980's and 1990's -- in many ways, their Killraven is a more direct ancestor of Alan Moore's 1980's Swamp Thing work than any previous Swamp Thing iterations.

By my count, this miniseries was Marvel's second attempt to reboot Killraven with a new team for a new generation of comics readers. It isn't exactly a failure. Writer/penciller Alan Davis is a solid writer and artist of superhero comics for both Marvel (Excalibur, Fantastic Four: The End) and DC (JLA: The Nail). His Killraven reboot attempts to streamline things, and the plot reaches a point after six issues of this miniseries that the original series never actually reached over its 30+ issues and one graphic novel -- a partial rapprochement with some of the Martians.

Nonetheless, this is pretty boring stuff, though maybe it wouldn't be if one hadn't read the original run. Characters are simplified and streamlined, none moreso than Hawk, a tragic Native-American malcontent in the original run who here becomes simply a whiny blowhard. The introspection and weirdness of the original (a battle with Martians amongst the devastated breweries of Milwaukee would be one of the high points of the original series, which often set its larger battles with the Martians in iconic American locations including, in the graphic novel finale, Cape Canaveral) have been abandoned for a relatively straightforward quest plot. It all looks great, albeit a bit slick, and it's all as boring as hell. Pick up the Essential volume, don't bother with this. Not recommended.


Essential Silver Surfer Volume 2 by Stan Lee, Steve Engelhart, John Buscema, Marshall Rogers, Ron Lim, John Byrne, Joe Staton, Joe Rubenstein and others (1981-1988; coll. 2006): The former herald of Marvel's world-eating Galactus would undergo a 16-year hiatus between the cancellation of his first regular series and the beginning of his second regular series in 1987, with only a couple of solo one-shots and appearances in other characters' titles during the interregnum. Writer Steve Engelhart and penciller Marshall Rogers were finally allowed to get the Surfer back into outer space in 1987, as the Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm figured out how to get around the 'barrier' Galactus had placed around Earth to stop the Surfer from leaving, a punishment for the Surfer turning on Galactus to save the Earth way back in the Surfer's first appearance in the Fantastic Four in the 1960's.

Engelhart and Rogers waste no time going cosmic, placing the Surfer in the middle of an intergalactic war between Marvel alien-race mainstays the Skrulls and Kree, a war which becomes part of a larger battle involving the machinations of a bunch of Marvel's really old, powerful aliens, The Elders, and their attempts to really, really, really screw up the entire universe. Along the way, various cosmic characters and storylines from Marvel's past show up, including the Celestial Madonna, Jim Starlin's In-Betweener, Lord Order, Master Chaos, the High Evolutionary, Galactus himself, Mangog, the Soul Gems, the Super-Skrull, Jack Kirby's Eternals, the Celestials, and Kree super-blowhard Ronan the Accuser. Surprisingly fun. Recommended.


Spider-man: Election Day by Marc Guggenheim, John Romita, Jr., Klaus Janson, Barry Kitson, Zeb Wells, Todd Zauck, Matt Fraction and others (2009): AKA 'the Spider-man collection with Barack Obama on the cover.' Spider-man's megaselling team-up with Barack Obama on Inauguration Day makes up only about 20 pages of this 200-page collection, with most of the rest of the collected issues dealing with New York City's mayoral election on Earth-Marvel. The main story, by writer Guggenheim and artists Romita, Jr., Kitson and Janson, is a sort of standard, competent Spider-man arc, angst alternating with action sequences. Someone's framing Spider-man for 'The Spider-Tracer Murders,' in which murder victims are found with Spidey's electronic bugs on their bodies. Meanwhile, a Green Goblin-like menace called The Menace seems to be trying to affect the outcome of the mayoral race in its last few days. The whole thing plays out like a slightly more self-reflexive Spider-opus from the 1970's.

The Obama issue also evokes the 70's, though in this case the Hostess Fruit Pie one-page ads that used to run in comics and featured licensed DC and Marvel superheroes fighting supervillains who were trying to steal large quantities of fruit pies. The Obama issue, written by Robot Chicken's Zeb Wells and illustrated by Todd Zauck, feels like the longest Hostess Fruit Pie ad ever created. Minor, early Spider-man villain The Chameleon tries to impersonate Obama at his inauguration. Spider-man has to stop him. This would be a bit more interesting if Zauck could draw a convincing Obama. Unfortunately, he can't, though he's a little better with John McCain and Joe Biden. It's all pretty crappy, making DC's 1963 story "Superman's Secret Mission for President Kennedy" look like Watchmen by comparison. Not recommended.


Book:


Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman (Collected 2003): Klosterman's essays on various pop cultural topics managed to combine hilarity with insight at about 120 bpm. Though I remain unconvinced by his attempt to argue for the greatness of Billy Joel, I am convinced by his explanation of how The Empire Strikes Back helped create the angst and failure of Generation X. A piece about the differences between the 1980's Lakers and Celtics and another one about several nights spent 'touring' with a Guns and Roses cover band also stand out. Highly recommended.