The Flash: Born to Run: written by Mark Waid and Tom Peyer; illustrated by Greg LaRocque, Humberto Ramos, Pop Mhan, Jim Aparo, Bill Sienkiewicz, Wayne Faucher, and others (1992, 97; 98/ collected 1999): Long-time Flash writer Mark Waid explores the origins of what was DC Comics' third Flash, Wally West, who started his super-speed career as Kid Flash, protege (and eventual nephew) to Barry Allen's Flash.
This is an enjoyable Year One story-line made somewhat unusual by the age of the hero in question experiencing his Year One as a superhero. Wally West is about 10 when he gains super-speed powers in an accident almost identical to that which created Barry Allen's Flash. That this all seems like too much of a coincidence for a 1990's comic-book reader or writer looking at an origin story from the early 1960's is addressed throughout the story, though the origins of this 'coincidence' will only be explained in another book.
The super-speed action is fun and nicely thought-out, as it pretty much always was during Waid's tenure. Waid fleshes out the early back-story of Wally West with indifferent parents and a desire to flee his small Nebraska hometown. Waid's characterization of Wally, Aunt Iris West (soon to be Iris Allen), and Barry Allen is deft and sympathetic. The art is solid, meat-and-potatoes comic-book storytelling, though a story in which legendary Jim Aparo is inked by legendary Bill Sienkiewicz is a rare artistic treat. Recommended.
The Flash: Dead Heat: written by Mark Waid; illustrated by Oscar Jiminez, Jose Marzan Jr., Humberto Ramos, and Wayne Faucher (1995-96/ Collected 1999): What's really a one-year Flash story-line kicks off here with some major ret-conning introducing a whole new Flash villain who's actually been around for a long time. That's the self-named Savitar, a maniacal speedster who wants access to the Speed Force all to himself and who will kill everyone else with super-speed to secure that access.
Ah, the Speed Force. Introduced by long-time Flash writer Mark Waid, the Speed Force is a quasi-mystical energy/realm existing beyond the speed of light that gives super-speedsters their speed. Run too fast and you become part of it. Savitar and his ninja-like worshipers have to go after Wally West's Flash because he has the most direct connection to the Speed Force in their time period: basically, he's the reigning avatar.
Over the course of six issues, Savitar and his people force Wally to round up all the secondary speedsters of his time to defeat Savitar's plans and stop his killing spree. As noted, ret-conning abounds, but the explanations and exposition go down smoothly. The art by Flash artists Oscar Jiminez and Jose Marzan Jr is straightforward and pleasing, while the manga-influenced, big-heads-and-big-eyes of Impulse penciller Humberto Ramos (two of the six installments appeared in Flash spin-off Impulse, the Kid Flash of the 1990's) is really a matter of taste for the reader. Recommended.
The Flash: Race Against Time: written by Mark Waid and Brian Augustyn; illustrated by Anthony Castrillo, Oscar Jiminez, Jim Cheung, Sergio Cariello, and others (1996/Collected 1999): The story begun in The Flash: Dead Heat concludes here. The climax of that story-line hurled Wally West millennia into the future, unbeknownst to girlfriend Linda Park and the rest of his loved ones in the 20th century. While Wally tries to make his way home, 27th-century speedster John Fox makes the moves on Linda Park after he arrives in the 20th century as a fugitive from his century.
Problems soon develop for both Fox and Wally as they struggle to adapt to their new centuries. With enjoyably straightforward art, we visit several time periods with Wally while Linda and Fox try to solve an on-going mystery back in the 20th century. Two old Flash villains, a mysterious new Flash villain, and the wife of deceased Flash Barry Allen, Iris Allen, figure into the mystery. And unfortunately for the 20th century, John Fox doesn't make a very good Flash regardless of his attempts to woo Linda Park. Recommended.
Mythago Wood (1984) by Robert Holdstock: Transcendent fantasy novel about fantasy, legend, and myth. Englishman Stephen Huxley returns to his ancestral home of Oak Lodge after a year recuperating from wounds suffered in World War Two to discover his father dead and his brother, well, a bit bonkers.
Huxley's brother Christian soon disappears into the encroaching Ryhope Wood, a relatively small stand of old-growth English forest, but only after explaining to Stephen that the woods are haunted by mythagos: avatars of English myths and legends given physical form by the woods and by the occasional interaction of the woods with a human mind.
Got that? The word 'mythago' is a portmanteau derived from 'myth' and 'imago.' Holdstock's concept, expanded upon at great and fascinating length throughout the novel, is intensely Jungian. The mythagos manifest and, in most cases, die after a time, to be reborn again and again. They vary sometimes depending on what version of a myth a human knows: Robin Hood, for instance, can change depending on what myth about him is relevant to the human.
And the woods themselves are a pocket universe, much larger inside than out and well-defended against too much human incursion: most people are simply guided back out of the woods by labyrinthine, shifting pathways should they attempt to walk too far back into the Deep Time held within Ryhope Wood.
Holdstock soon gives Stephen a personal element to fuel his attempts to explore Ryhope Wood and discover the whereabouts of his brother. He'll also gain an ally, disfigured former RAF pilot Harry Keeton, whose plane crashed into a haunted woods in France similar to Ryhope. Together, they'll face the ancient myths and legends of England, and some more modern ones too, as they enter the maze. The deeper one goes, the longer the myths persist -- and the mythagos can be almost anything, from castles to walking corpses.
Mythago Wood is a marvelous meditation on the power and sources of myth, told as an entertaining and engaging work of fiction. Holdstock's greatest prose accomplishment lies in keeping everything clear while still poetically describing the events, creatures, and stories Stephen encounters. It all has the ring of real myth, whether it is or not. It's also a fantasy world that makes clear and reasoned sense. It's a triumph of fantasy. Highly recommended.
The Drowned World (1962) by J.G. Ballard: Deeply modernistic with its ideas of race memory and archetypal Edens hidden within human consciousness; deeply post-modern in its refusal to assert these systems as having any power to unite humanity in some universal whole.
J.G. Ballard's first novel is a John Wyndham global-disaster novel reimagined as a combination of Heart of Darkness and an extraordinarily odd journey into the disintegrating self. Dr. Kerans, a biologist attached to a biological survey team of the world government, is our protagonist. He first appears looking out onto the changed landscape of some European city whose name he's forgotten.
No matter: the city has been drowned by the world-wide flood unleashed by terrible changes to the sun. The tiny remnant of organized humanity now lives at the poles, perhaps 5 million in number.
Kerans and the survey team catalogue the rapidly changing flora and fauna of the drowned metropolis. Species dead for millions of years seem to be returning, per the theory of Kerans and fellow biologist Bodkin that Earth is moving into a second Triassic Age. Giant alligators and iguanas and monitor lizards are everywhere, along with increasingly gigantic and exotic species of bats and insects and fish. All this in the 100 years or so since the seas started rising.
The book stays in the survey team's location, for the most part, bringing new characters and situations into a world in which a half-submerged Ritz hotel looms over the lagoon that drowns the cityscape. Kerans and several other characters suffer from lassitudinous dreams and visions -- of a desire to head south into the super-heated tropics, and of an identity-destabilizing descent into some strange, returning group un-mind.
It's a hothouse book of mythic and psychological speculation, The Drowned World. Ballard's mastery of mood and mythically, psychological complex landscape description aren't much like anything he'd done in his short stories prior to this, which were more generally along the lines of Philip K. Dick as translated by a proper Englishman who's swallowed a thesaurus. Stunning, depressing, weirdly hopeful -- its images and questions stay with one after the novel's over. Highly recommended.
Tarzan of the Apes: adapted by Robert Hodes from the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs; illustrated by Burne Hogarth; introduction by Maurice Horn (1972): Burne Hogarth took over the syndicated Tarzan strip when Canadian-born Hal Foster left in 1937 to create Prince Valiant. For roughly ten years, Hogarth honed his comics skills on the strip before leaving to do other work. This volume, illustrated by Hogarth in the late 1960's, is an unusually early American graphic novel.
It's now available, together with its sequel, from Dark Horse. This volume is the 1972 version. It's an adaptation of roughly the first third of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel that introduced Tarzan to the world. The illustrations are beautiful, the African settings lush, the panel composition charged with energy. Well-worth picking up from Dark Horse for any Tarzan fans, or fans of human anatomy in motion. Highly recommended.
In the Days of the Mob: written and illustrated by Jack Kirby with Mike Royer, Vince Colletta, Frank Giacoia, John Costanza, Steve Sherman, and Mark Evanier; introduction by John Morrow (1971/Collected 2013): Fun collection of stories written and drawn by the great Jack Kirby for an adult-oriented, magazine-sized crime comic entitled In the Days of the Mob that released but one issue in 1971.
The introduction details DC's complete incompetence at creating a B&W comics line. And this Comics Journal review details the production problems that persist in this volume. Nonetheless, it's a fascinating and enjoyable volume of stories that aren't much like any other Kirby stories. Recommended.
The Scar (2002) by China Mieville: China Mieville's second novel about the steampunky, science-fantasy world of Bas-Lag marks a dramatic jump in his strengths as a story-teller. The first Bas-Lag novel was Perdido Street Station. It was a fine, dark, thrilling piece of work. But it also had pacing issues involving an exhausting, seemingly never-ending climax that occupies almost half the book's 500+ pages.
This time around, the pace ebbs and flows in a fairly expert manner. This suits the novel's tricky plot, which often resembles that of a John Le Carre novel more than it does any fantasy novel that comes to mind.
Magic and science co-exist on Bas-Lag. There are humans there, but also an awful lot of fantastic species intelligent and otherwise. We begin in the immediate aftermath of the events of Perdido Street Station, as our co-protagonist Bellis Coldwine flees the sprawling city-state of New Crobuzon by sea. However, she and the other passengers and crew of the ship she's sailing on are captured by pirates from the floating pirate-city of Armada. And it's not just a regular pirate attack: they were after someone on the ship.
Armada, a city of hundreds of thousands of people comprising thousands of ships bound together, is after something. Luckily enough for Coldwine, Armada is also quite liberal with those whom it captures: she soon has a job in the great library of Armada as befits her bibliographic and translation skills.
Things are even better for the prisoners in the hold of the captured ship: 'Remade' with terrible biological or mechanical modifications as punishment for various crimes, they too are now free. Tanner Sack comes from this group of prisoners, and becomes our other co-protagonist (or other prime narrative focalizer, if you prefer).
And then things start to pop. Armada seeks something deep in the sea. But the politics of Armada are complicated. Coldwine's translation skills will soon come into play, as will Sack's Remade underwater abilities. We'll meet a host of other characters with radically different agendas. We'll get a mysterious mercenary swordsman, a pragmatic vampire king, and a horrifying race of human mosquitoes. And that's just in the first half of the novel.
Mieville's characterization is top-notch throughout. The plot is twisty and clever with reversals and mistaken assumptions. The city of Armada is fascinating, as are the goals of its nominal leaders, known only as The Lovers. There's thrilling, horrifying action involving naval battles. There are monsters whose goals are not as obvious as they seem. And there's a left-wing social consciousness at work throughout, an evaluation of the cost that the plans of the mighty have on those below them on the Class Pyramid.
There's also a slight modulation of Mieville's often dazzlingly weird diction at work, a few less moments when one worries that Mieville may choke on that thesaurus. The result is something much more organic in its diction than Perdido Street Station. In all, this is quite a performance by Mieville, a witty work of epic science-fantasy with a moving emotional quality to it. Highly recommended.
20 000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954): adapted from the Jules Verne novel by Earl Felton; directed by Richard Fleischer; starring James Mason (Captain Nemo), Kirk Douglas (Ned Land), Paul Lukas (Professor Aronnax), and Peter Lorre (Conseil) : Jesus Christ but does Kirk Douglas ever get out-acted by a trained seal in this movie. Douglas is both terrible and miscast as harpooner Ned Land, a character one wishes would just die. He's the angry, stupid American. James Mason, Paul Lukas, and Peter Lorre seem to be acting in a different movie.
The biggest-budget, live-action Walt Disney film to hit the screen in the 1950's (and for at least a decade afterwards), 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea remains involving despite its occasionally torpid pace and that godawful performance by Kirk Douglas. The design of Nemo's Victorian-era super-submarine, the Nautilus, is superb and steampunky. James Mason as Nemo, Paul Lukas as Professor Aronax, and Peter Lorre as Conseil are all solid in their roles. And the squid fight still works, with the mechanical effects making the squid seem as unearthly as the tornado in The Wizard of Oz.
Made now, 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea would play Nemo as even more of a hero -- he's attacking the slave trade, after all, having been enslaved himself in some South Seas mining colony. Of course, Nemo was a native of India in the original novel. James Mason, not so much. The often languid pace can get a bit wearing at times, as does Kirk Douglas, but 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea still works for the most part. Recommended.
How To Train Your Dragon 2 (2014): based on the books by Cressida Cowell; written and directed by Dean DeBlois; starring the voices of Jay Baruchel (Hiccup), Cate Blanchett (Valka), Gerard Butler (Stoick), Craig Ferguson (Gobber), America Ferrara (Astrid), Jonah Hill (Notlout), and Djimon Honsou (Drago) : How To Train Your Dragon was a lot of fun. So too this sequel, though its frenetic pace and much longer action sequences make it a far less charming movie than the original. Still worth watching, though, for the animation, voice acting, and story. The designs of the seemingly endless number of different dragon species remain a highlight. Recommended.
Run Fatboy Run (2007): written by Michael Ian Black and Simon Pegg; directed by David Schwimmer; starring Simon Pegg (Dennis), Thandie Newton (Libby), Hank Azaria (Whit), Dylan Moran (Gordon), and Harish Patel (Mr. Goshdashtidar) : Fun, amiable comedy takes full advantage of the good will Simon Pegg generates when playing hapless heroes. Hank Azaria seems like an odd choice as the handsome boyfriend, but he does a good job. Thandie Newton is lovely but stuck with being a straight woman to pretty much everyone else in the movie. Recommended.
Poltergeist (2015): adapted by David Lindsay-Apaire from the 1982 movie written by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, and Mark Victor; directed by Gil Kenan; starring Sam Rockwell (Eric Bowen), Rosemarie DeWitt (Amy Bowen), Saxon Sharbino (Kendra Bowen), Kyle Catlett (Griffin Bowen), Kennedi Clements (Madison Bowen), Jared Harris (Carrigan Burke), and Jane Adams (Dr. Brooke Powell): It's probably a much better-acted film than the original, this Poltergeist remake. Sam Rockwell certainly does everything he can with his role, which actually seems to be modeled on the father in The Amityville Horror rather than Poltergeist (1982): financial woes occupy him.
The kids are much more front and centre here. The scares are pretty light. Perhaps most notably, the Tree and Clown scenes have been completely bungled. It also doesn't help that the gateway to the Underworld looks and acts like a Stargate, or that occult investigator Jared Harris is dressed like a leprechaun. It's a diversion, but just barely. Lightly recommended.
Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (2008) by Michael Chabon, containing the following essays: "Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story"; "Maps and Legends"; "Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes"; "Ragnarok Boy"; "On Daemons & Dust"; "Kids' Stuff"; "The Killer Hook: On Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!"; "Dark Adventure: On Cormac McCarthy's The Road"; "The Other James"; "Landsman of the Lost"; "Thoughts on the Death of Will Eisner"; "My Back Pages"; "Diving into the Wreck"; "The Recipe for Life"; "Imaginary Homelands"; "Golems I Have Known, or, Why my Elder Son's Middle Name is Napoleon"; and "The Single Unitard Theory."
Enjoyable decades-worth of essays from American writer and Pulitzer-Prize-winner Michael Chabon. Throughout and even in the title, Chabon wears his affection for popular culture openly and proudly (the title comes from an R.E.M. song). He also discusses his time in an M.F.A. program, his childhood love of Norse mythology, the genesis of his first and second published novels, the Yiddish language, the history of golems, his family history, and the planned community he grew up in.
Along the way, Chabon will also express his love for Sherlock Holmes, H.P. Lovecraft, Howard Chaykin, M.R. James, Philip Pullman, and a host of other popular characters, writers, artists, and writer-artists.
The history of the American comic book informed much of Chabon's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Chabon has written for comic books. And he discusses them here, their modern faults (a need for entry-level comics for kids) and successes (the work of Howard Chaykin, especially his 1980's science-fiction series American Flagg!).
There's a peculiarly American moment in which Chabon goes on at length of his admiration for comics legend Will Eisner because of Eisner's business savvy as well as his work. It's not something I would think of as a plus or minus except insofar as, you know, good on Eisner for making a better living at comics than a lot of his contemporaries. I suppose it's also a peculiar section because the Eisner section pretty much ignores the studio aspect of Eisner's comics work in the 1940's -- which is to say, the fact that much of it was written and drawn by other people. It feels a lot like congratulating Henry Ford on building all of his cars by hand personally...
For the most part, though, this is a fun and occasionally thought-provoking book. I've generally found Chabon's fiction to be about 5% too glib and/or too arch, a problem that essays can live with better than fiction. There's a weird moment in which Chabon seems to be suggesting that ghost stories aren't written any more (hunh?) which may simply be a result of space considerations in the original publication of the essay: for a space, he seems even dottier than Susan Hill on the topic of the contemporary ghost story. So it goes. Recommended.
Starman (1984): written by Bruce Evans and Raynold Gideon; directed by John Carpenter; starring Jeff Bridges (Starman/Scott Hayden), Karen Allen (Jenny Hayden), and Charles Martin Smith (Mark Shermin): Not normally known as a director of warm dramedies, John Carpenter took on Starman to ensure he could keep getting funding for the horror movies and thrillers (and one never-made supernatural Western, Diablo) he preferred. The result was Starman, a science-fiction movie that nabbed a rare major Oscar nomination for an sf film -- a Best Actor nom for Jeff Bridges.
And Bridges is great as an alien being pretending to be human so he can make his way to a rendezvous in Arizona with his mother-ship. He takes on the appearance (and, thanks to a lock of hair, the DNA) of the dead husband of Karen Allen. Having watched the alien's rapid growth in her living-room, Allen knows he is an alien. Their relationship drives the rest of the film, as they drive to Arizona. Basically, it's ET meets Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
As noted, Bridges does fine work as the alien, managing comedy and pathos when required and doing an awfully good job of suggesting a creature learning to use a body (and language) on the fly. Allen is also solid, as usual -- as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, she makes for a non-cookie-cutter leading woman. The government forces are, as always, bad. However, the lead scientist played by Charles Martin Smith is sympathetic. It's politicians and the military and not the forces of science who are the bad guys. In all, this is very good movie that's aged surprisingly well. Highly recommended.
The Blair Witch Project: written and directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez; starring Heather Donahue (Heather), Joshua Leonard (Josh), and Michael C. Williams (Mike) (1999): Maryland: home of the Terrapins, the Ravens, The Wire, that weird state flag, and a homicidal witch. The Blair Witch Project is the most influential horror movie of the last 40 years, as it made the found-footage film the go-to vehicle for filmed horror pretty much up to the present day. It also suggested that less was more both in terms of putting graphic images on the screen and in terms of budget.
And despite a couple of verisimilitude-harming flubs (yes, it's those guys fishing in two inches of water again near the beginning), it's a fine piece of work. Of course, it's hard to separate the film from the hype surrounding it in 1999. But watching it for the first time in at least 15 years, I'm struck by what a fine piece of mounting suspense it represents.
The three actors we spend most of our time with, those three film-makers lost in the demon-haunted woods of Maryland back in 1994, are utterly credible. They're not all that good at camping or hiking. Their growing panic seems genuine -- The Blair Witch Project is a really fine study of how group harmony can disintegrate disastrously under pressure. There's even a tie-in to the 2016 presidential campaign, as the growing resentment directed towards director/group leader Heather by her male partners-in-film-making seems at least partially a result of sexism towards female leaders. And there's that witch, of course, that deadly metaphor for hidden female power revealed and aimed at the patriarchy.
There are problems, but forgivable ones, especially in a movie that cost about $10 to make. I'd have liked more scenes shot in thicker portions of the woods during the day-time to add some atmosphere and menace to those day-time hiking excursions. That they're traipsing through some very thin growth isn't a plot problem -- it's not like witchcraft is contingent on Old-Growth forests. But there is a dearth of mood in some of those day-time scenes.
The night-time scenes are well-imagined, though. I especially like how the sounds that terrify the campers on the first three nights all seem to involve massive, unseen beings crashing through unseen trees. It gives an almost Lovecraftian feel to those moments, an idea of something much larger and much worse than a witch walking somewhere behind the trees.
And so we leave our campers, forever stranded in woods they can't seem to walk out of, no matter how long and how straight a bee-line they make in any one direction. Oh, sure, it's hard to believe that someone doesn't put down a camera (or pick up a weapon) as things get closer and closer to that much-discussed ending. So it goes. And those little hand-prints on the walls, when they come, are as awful as anything gory one could depict. Highly recommended.
Spy: written and directed by Paul Feig; starring Melissa McCarthy (Susan Cooper), Jessica Chaffin (Sharon), Jude Law (Bradley Fine), Miranda Hart (Nancy), Jason Statham (Rick Ford), Bobby Cannavale (Sergio De Luca), Rose Byrne (Rayna Boyanov), Alison Janney (Elaine Crocker), and 50 Cent (Himself) (2015): Hilarious spy spoof takes full advantage of Melissa McCarthy's outsized comic talents by making her hyper-competent, if occasionally a bit over-matched.
The supporting cast is pretty much uniformly well-served as well, whether it's Jason Statham spoofing Jason Statham or 50 Cent supplying a winning cameo. Paul Feig, who did similar writing/directing duties on previous McCarthy movies The Heat and Bridesmaids, has become a gifted comic voice with a particularly appealing manner with women. If the new Ghostbusters is this good, people will be happy. Highly recommended.
