Clerks III: Batman Returns

Batman: The Widening Gyre, written by Kevin Smith, illustrated by Walter Flanagan and Art Thibert (2009-2010): Kevin Smith (yes, that Kevin Smith) and Batman make a somewhat problematic fit -- The Dark Knight and that patented oopsy-cutesy-risque Smith frank sexual dialogue don't mesh all that well. Would Batman's girlfriend really tell Batman's surrogate father Alfred the sexual details of why she calls Bruce Wayne 'DD'? And it doesn't stand for 'Daredevil', either.

Smith picks up where he left off in his previous Batman miniseries, Cacophony, presenting a Batman drawn heavily from 1970's Batman scribes like Steve Engelhart and Bob Haney (!). This Batman isn't the hypercompetent ubermensch of Grant Morrison or even Denny O'Neil -- instead, he's got a personal life, and he's riddled with enough insecurities about that personal life (and his life as Batman) that he's awfully soft and mushy under that crunchy exterior. It's not psychology, mind you, it's psychobabble.

There are certainly enough enjoyable moments -- one of Smith's advantages when he does comic books is that an artist stages thing, thus saving us from Smith's self-admitted visual crappiness as a director. Flanagan and Thibert do a solid, competent, vaguely 'retro' job on the art -- there's no discernible manga influence or really much cartooniness at all; the book would look perfectly normal to a comic-book reader who time-travelled here from the far-flung past of 1978.

One major caveat? The whole thing ends on a cliffhanger that I assume will be resolved in the next Smith/Flanagan miniseries. The plot? Batman starts working with a new costumed crime-fighter named Baphomet (!) while simultaneously re-connecting with 1970's Steve Engelhart/Marshall Rogers era Batman-girlfriend Silver St. Cloud. Will Batman justifiably let down his guard in both his public and private life? What do you think? Recommended.

My Bloody Hand!!!

My Bloody Valentine, written by Todd Farmer and Zane Smith, based on the screenplay for the 1981 film of the same name written by John Beaird and Stephen A. Miller, directed by Patrick Lussier, starring Jensen Ackles, Jaime King and Kevin Tighe (2009): 11 years ago, Tom Hanniger (Ackles) accidentally caused an explosion at the mine his father owned. One man survived by killing all the other trapped miners so as to conserve oxygen, though when he was found, he was in a coma. Ten years ago, that man awoke from his coma and went on a crazy killing spree, nearly killing Hanniger before being forced to flee into a collapsing mine tunnel.

Now, Tom Hanniger is back to sell the mine. Selling the mine will put everyone in town out of work because I guess in the universe of this movie, mines can be packed up and moved elsewhere, just like factories. This last is not the dumbest thing in this slasher-movie remake.

According to some wag on the Internet, the original My Bloody Valentine (1981) is one of the neglected high-points of the 'Golden Age of Slasher Movies', by which I assume he means the late 1970's and early 1980's, and not the age of 17, which is really the age at which these things seem interesting. Never has a Golden Age of any cinematic sub-genre produced fewer truly good films, though. That said, this is a pretty inept entry in the recent slasher-film boomlet.

Tonal shifts from horror-comedy to apparently serious melodrama jar the viewer right out of any ability to enjoy the movie on either level. Some of the CGI comes across so laughably that the gold old days of on-set special effects look awfully good by comparison -- a shot of a woman's head bisected by a shovel looks like something a talented 12-year-old whipped up in between Pizza Pops, for instance, while the nods to the 3-D this film was screened in are the same old throwing-stuff-at-the-camera crap we've been seeing from 3-D movies since the 1950's. ZZZZZZZZ.

Jensen Ackles, best known for TV's Supernatural, looks embarrassed and out-of-place here -- indeed, he looks like he's stuck in the Supernatural episode "Hollywood Babylon", in which his character hangs out on the set of a slasher movie that looks way more interesting than My Bloody Valentine. Some of the surprising slasher-film tropes expounded upon the the terrific film-criticism text Men, Women and Chainsaws play out here -- ultimately, the true protagonist (and only competent 'good' person in the entire movie) turns out to be a woman; Ackles, though he headlines the picture, is only in about half the movie, and his character is something of an incompetent boob. So it goes. Not recommended.

Ministry of Fear

Ministry of Fear, written by Seton I. Miller, based on the novel by Graham Greene, directed by Fritz Lang, starring Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds and Carl Esmond (1944): The film opens with Stephen Neale (Milland) being released from a mental asylum where he's been incarcerated for two years after being convicted of mercy-killing his terminally ill wife, though his wife actually dosed herself with the poison he'd purchased. Because this is a thriller, there's a Nazi spy ring at work in the carnival opposite the train station Neale goes to after being released. In a case of mistaken identity, he's given a cake intended for a spy within which is hidden what Hitchcock would call the McGuffin -- the thing everyone in the thriller is chasing. Hilarity ensues.

It really seems as if Paramount was trying to make Ray Milland into a poor man's Cary Grant at this time, possibly because of Milland's odd mid-Atlantic accent. Milland's tour-de-force performance as an alcoholic in Lost Weekend was still a couple of years away; here, he's a sort-of dashing Hitchcockian 'Wrong Man' trapped in a thriller plot somewhat resembling that of The 39 Steps.

The whole thing with the cake is handled with right amount of drollness, and there are some really lovely set pieces cooked up by director Fritz Lang, he of German film classics M and Metropolis and a number of classic films noir once he fled Nazi Germany in the mid-1930's.

This is indeed a 'dark film' in terms of photography, though incongruously light-hearted much of the time -- a comic-relief private detective is something of a botch. A gun fight in an English field being bombed by the Nazis looks terrific for something obviously done on a sound stage, and there are a number of other scenes in which the play of light and shadow creates an aura of menace the script can't quite maintain -- the narrative starts and stops a number of times, something quite odd for a film that's less than 90 minutes long. But Lang, strong on visuals, always seemed to be a bit weak on narrative momentum. Recommended.

Best New Horror 15 (2003)

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 15 (2003) edited by Stephen Jones: The Mammoth series of annual 'Best of' horror anthologies has been a godsend for over two decades now, and even more of a godsend ever since the DAW 'Best of Horror' annual series ended with the sad and early death of its long-time editor Karl Edward Wagner. That the Mammoth series has at least twice the page count of the Wagner series, along with lengthy Necrology and 'Year in Horror' sections, makes it even more essential, if that's possible.

Stephen Jones is a voluminous and gifted anthologist, and the yearly Best New Horror has become one of the things I look forward to each year, like the Super Bowl or Fox TV's annual purge of all its best shows.

This anthology of stories from 2003 is the usual solid job, with good stories by perennials that include Ramsey Campbell, Glen Hirshberg, Caitlin Kiernan and Neil Gaiman, along with offerings from lesser-known and new writers. The great Gene Wolfe does one of his reality-bending bits with "Hunter Lake"; Hirshberg offers a melancholy new take on the Golem and the Holocaust in "Dancing Men"; Campbell expertly mines childhood fears in "Fear the Dead"; Toronto's Gemma Files comes up with a really awful innovation in the realm of puppetry with "Kissing Carrion" (also set in T.O.); Simon Clark and Tim Lebbon work wonders with a story about the great fantasist Arthur Machen's WWI story-turned-urban-legend "The Archers of Mons"; Joyce Carol Oates comes up with an atypically typical (for her) bit of nu-Gothic in "The Haunting." There's even a story set on an island in Lake Erie ("Lucy, In Her Splendour" by Charles Coleman Finley) and a creepy, M.R. James by way of H.P. Lovecraft story by Mark Samuels, "The White Hands." One of the pleasures of the Mammoth series is catching up with old friends; another lies in discovering "new" writers whose names you'll have to look out for, such as Samuels.

All in all, this is another fine addition to the Best New Horror series, and a useful reference book for the year in question. Jones is extremely catholic in his horror selection, with stories running the gamut from gruesome but natural horror to mind-bending examinations of the supernatural Sublime. Long may he run. Highly recommended.

Doom!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Showcase Presents Doom Patrol Volume 2, written by Arnold Drake, illustrated by Bruno Premiani and Bob Brown (1966-68; collected 2010): Ah, the Doom Patrol, DC Comics' weirdest and most Marvel-like superhero team of the 1960's. Like the X-Men, they had a leader in a wheelchair. Like the Fantastic Four, there were four of them, including an orange strongman, a super-genius, a person who could stretch, and a flying hero with energy powers. And yet the timeline for the creation of those three books makes plagiarism on anyone's part pretty much impossible -- though it has been suggested that a conversation on a golf course may have somehow influenced the rosters of those two Marvel and one DC super-teams. So it goes.

Commercially, Doom Patrol was either the second-most successful of those titles in the 1960's, behind The Fantastic Four but ahead of The X-Men, which somehow couldn't become popular enough to stay out of reprints even with Neal Adams drawing the book.

Of course, Doom Patrol got cancelled around the same time as X-Men went to reprints and pretty much stayed in reprints for six years until Giant-Size X-Men #1 reinvented the X-Men, who would then gradually become Marvel's most popular book over the course of the late 1970's and early 1980's. DC tried bringing the Doom Patrol back in the mid-1970's, but it wasn't until the late 1980's that yet another relaunch lasted longer than the original run, and gave us writer Grant Morrison at his early, weirdest best.

Like many of Marvel's super-teams and supergroups, the Doom Patrol (Robotman, Negative-man, Elasti-Girl and the Chief) squabbled a lot. Well, they did have a hero named Negative-man on their roster! They fought distinctive, and distinctively weird, super-villains: Monsieur Mallah, a super-intelligent, beret-wearing gorilla; the Brain, a brain in a jar; the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man (A-V-M-Man for short), a guy who could turn into pretty much anything; Garguax, an alien with an army of super-powered plastic robots; and a host of other freaky supernatural and superscientific menaces. The heroes were occasionally self-loathing, seeing themselves as freaks, though ultimately they became like a PSA about embracing one's own difference.

Quirky writer Arnold Drake and underappreciated artist Bruno Premiani wrote and drew pretty much every Doom Patrol adventure from their first appearance in the anthology title My Greatest Adventure (they don't make comic-book titles like that any more!) to the last issue of their own comic, which was actually just My Greatest Adventure with the title changed but the numbering intact.

Along the way, they picked up green, shape-changing teenager Beast Boy (later of the Teen Titans) and grumpy telekinetic millionaire Mento (the fresh-maker!) as auxiliary members. The focus remained pretty much on the four core members, though, in all their freaky and occasionally crabby glory. Grant Morrison pushed them into areas of previously untapped weirdness in the 1980's and early 1990's, but much of that weirdness is at least implicit here, and often explicit. All that and perhaps the most shocking final issue of a superhero comic book of the 1960's. What's not to love? Highly recommended.

Legion

Showcase Presents Legion of Superheroes Volume 4, written by Jim Shooter, E. Nelson Bridwell and Cary Bates; illustrated by Curt Swan, Win Mortimer, Dave Cockrum, George Tuska, Jack Abel and others (1967-1972; collected 2010): The fourth Legion of Superheroes (LSH) Showcase volume takes us through a period of transition for DC's group of super-powered teenagers in the 30th century (and Superboy and Supergirl).

Artistic great Curt Swan leaves for full-time pencilling duties on the Superman books, and World's Youngest Comic-book Writer Jim Shooter follows a year or so thereafter. Legion stories shift from Adventure Comics to Action Comics to Superboy, losing pages every time. But Superboy would become Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes soon after the stories collected here. Dave Cockrum, one of the best artists the Legion ever had (and a pivotal co-creator of Marvel's new X-Men a few years down the road) pencils his first few stories here.

The best story here is the opening two-parter by Shooter, Swan and inker Abel, in which a handful of Legionnaires flee to 20th-century Smallville with the forces of Mordru the Mystic close behind them. Mordru's powerful enough to defeat the entire Legion by himself (Superboy is as vulnerable to magic as anyone else), and the two-parter is a mini-masterpiece of suspense.

One of the things the Legion did for Superboy was regularly place him in situations of real peril that didn't always have to involve Kryptonite. While the Superman books of the 1960's seemed perpetually stuck with a nearly omnipotent Man of Steel, the Legion books gave us a Superboy who could be hurt and even killed by the villains he faced. It made for a lot more drama.

After Shooter left, things got a lot less interesting, though the end of the volume brings young writer Cary Bates and the aforementioned Cockrum onto the stage, hinting at better days to come. One of the icons of early comic-book fandom, the Legion also looked forward to the dizzying array of superheroes that would come to characterize Marvel's 1980's super-hit X-Men: Legion members included such bizarrely gifted heroes as Matter-Eater Lad (who could eat anything), Bouncing Boy (who could bounce really well), and Chemical King (who could speed up chemical reactions).

Unlike later X-heroes and X-villains, the Legion members had helpfully descriptive names: one could actually tell what their powers were just by knowing their names, a far cry from characters with names like Holocaust, Marrow and Apocalypse. So it goes. Long-time artist Win Mortimer's art on the Legion here is better than I expected, partially because Jack Abel's inking gives the whole thing that peculiar weight and darkness that was Abel's trademark. Long live the Legion! Recommended.

The Thunder Hides What the Lightning Sees

Thunderbolt Jaxon, written by Dave Gibbons, illustrated by John Higgins (2006): DC's Wildstorm imprint assayed a number of books in the mid-to-late oughts based on British comics characters of the 1940's, 50's and 60's. This was the so-called 'Albion' universe, which at its inception had some input from Alan Moore (Watchmen). And here we have two other Watchmen creators -- artist Dave Gibbons and colourist John Higgins -- on another Albion book, albeit as writer and artist, respectively. The history of the Thunderbolt Jaxon character is weird enough to warrant the inclusion of a link to it:

http://bearalley.blogspot.com/2009/03/origins-of-thunderbolt-jaxon.html

Wild, hunh? British comic books always seemed to have way loopier publication histories, especially when they dealt with super-heroes, who never gained the sort of strangehold on the comics mainstream that they did in the U.S.. The Albion miniseries of a few years back offered a cornucopia of bizarre British characters. One can see at least some of the occasional, carnivalesque wackiness of British comics writers that inlclude Alan Moore and Grant Morrison being inspired by the peculiar British world of super-heroes, science-heroes and giant crime-fighting eyeballs.

While Wildstorm's Albion miniseries brought a number of the old British characters into the modern world mostly unchanged, Jaxon instead attempts a complete reboot. It's an interesting though perhaps overly familiar at points story (kids find magical artifacts, magical artifacts turn one kid into an adult 'superhero' [in this case, the Norse god Thor]). Higgins's art looks great, and Gibbons keeps things zipping along.

The whole thing feels a bit decompressed (five issues for an origin that only truly gives us 'Thunderbolt Jaxon' at the very end?), and as sales were apparently not enough to justify an on-going series or another miniseries, we're pretty much left in the end with the end of the beginning of Thunderbolt Jaxon. Oh, well. The name itself is still great. Recommended.