Violent Cases

The Boys Volume 1: The Name of the Game: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Darick Robertson (2006-2007): Even though Irish comic-book writer Garth Ennis has done a lot of work for Marvel and DC over the last 20 years, he hates superheroes. Boy, does he hate superheroes. Well, except for Superman.

The Boys is Ennis's superhero hate made manifest, a scabrous series about superpowered beings and the people who hate them and the people who want to be them and the people who try to control them. The Boys bears a thematic resemblance to the great Marshal Law series by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill, another world of superheroes gone terribly wrong. Ennis's superheroes may sometimes superficially appear to be like the beloved characters of pop culture (indeed, they often do in both costume and name, anyway). But for the most part, his superheroes are corrupted by fame and power, nearly as bad as the supervillains they have violent, super-destructive public battles with. Sometimes worse.

And so a mysterious former CIA operative puts together a team to monitor superheroes and, when necessary, destroy either their public image or, if possible, their existence. Collectively, these are the Boys (though one is a woman). They have super-powers because that's pretty much necessary to survive conflicts with super-powered beings. And their leader, Butcher, really hates superpowers. And he's got an agenda of his own.

This first volume introduces the Boys and sets them on their first case, an investigation of a teen superhero group (think Teen Titans or Young Justice). The horrible world just beneath the surface of jaunty, colourful superheroing fairly firmly puts one on the side of the Boys, even if they're no angels. Darick Robertson's clean, straightforward art lays everything out in almost clinical detail -- he's about as normative as a modern-day (mostly) superhero artist can be. That the most sympathetic member of the Boys, Little Hughie, has been drawn to look almost exactly like Simon Pegg adds a whole other layer of sympathy. Well, as does the origin of Little Hughie's antipathy towards superheroes, an event that brings him to the attention of Butcher.

Terrible things happen. So do funny things. Sometimes they're the same thing. Ennis's satiric vision is as sharp as ever, the character names often sadly appropriate (in this world, the Superman stand-in is named The Homelander. And boy, is he a prick). Early throwaways seem to promise later development (the existence of fundamentalist Christian superhero groups seems somehow logical and creepy, though no creepier than the 'Extreme' super-teens the Boys try to take down).

The deforming capability of power (and the will-to-power) seems to be Ennis's main target here, as torture and sexual cruelty come esaily to most super-beings. And they're never punished for their cruelties and murders because, hey, they're part of the Establishment. People like them. They're cool. They've got power. Well, here comes the Butcher. Recommended, but not for the squeamish.

Time Loop

Looper: written and directed by Rian Johnson; starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Joe), Bruce Willis (Old Joe), Emily Blunt (Sara), Paul Dano (Seth), Jeff Daniels (Abe), and Pierce Gagnon (Cid) (2012): Rian Johnson's Brick was an idiosyncratic gem, a high-school drama played like a hard-boiled film noir, complete with 1940's inflected dialogue and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in his first defining dramatic role after years on Third Rock from the Sun. Johnson and Gordon-Levitt re-team here for another genre-buster. Looper is at least nominally science fiction, but it's also a Western. And another crackerjack film noir.

The major influences for Looper seem to be Shane and that terrific modern noir of the early 1990's, After Dark, My Sweet (though that film was based on a Jim Thompson novel from the 1950's). Then throw in time travel and, um, telekinesis -- more specifically, Jerome Bixby's Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life." This is nothing if not a mash-up.

Organized crime in the 2070's sends its targets back to to the 2040's to be killed by a 'Looper.' Why? Something about bodies being difficult to get rid of in the 2070's. Frankly, this is the shakiest part of the premise. Some of the other problems with this use of time travel could be explained by the disintegration of organized government, which would explain why there aren't Time Cops running around the 2040's. But then, who's discovering the bodies in the 2070's?

We'll give them this as a starting point. The rest of the movie is pretty smart, with nice background details that sketch in the decaying America of the 2040's without throwing it in one's face. There's also an automated flying crop-duster that made me smile -- it looks like the country cousin of the Imperial Probe Droid from The Empire Strikes Back.

But having seen Brick before seeing Looper also helps explain certain things, as Looper is equally stylized and non-mimetic, if not anti-mimetic: for one, the stuff with Blunderbusses and Gats seems more like a commentary on movie gunmen than a realistic categorizing of weaponry. Because these guys are all carrying big guns with which they're only intermittently able to hit something other than their own feet.

The movie plays out with some deft twists, turns, and at least one major reset button. Time travel is a tricky thing. Bruce Willis, as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's future self, is tough and ruthless; Joseph Gordon-Levitt pulls off the difficult feat of playing a monster who develops a soul. He's developed into a fine actor. Pierce Gagnon does some fine child acting, and Emily Blunt pulls off an American accent. Time folds in upon itself. The rules the movie sets out for time travel make a sort of sense right up to the climax, at which point...well, you'll see. Recommended.

Return of the Space-Gods



A Celestial gives one thumb up...

The Eternals Volume One: written by Jack Kirby; illustrated by Jack Kirby, Mike Royer, and John Verpooten (1975-76; collected 2007): Jack Kirby's return to Marvel brought this tale of space gods and god-like humans to the company. At first, it may have seemed as if Kirby had simply continued his New Gods storyline in another venue, but The Eternals quickly established itself as a different kind of thing about many of the same things that have always occupied Kirby.

The most interesting of these new things are Kirby's Celestials, 2000-foot-tall space aliens whose powers are god-like and motives mysterious. While mucking about with human genetics millennia ago, they created two spin-off races of humanity: the noble, man-like Eternals and the protean Deviants, who produced offspring in a wide assortment of shapes and powers.

In this Chariots of the Gods scenario, the Eternals have provided humanity with the model for many of its gods while the Deviants have provided the model for many of its demons. The Deviants even managed to enslave humanity for a time in some antediluvian past, before the Celestials destroyed their empire in a massive flood.

The Eternals begins with the return of the Celestials, who will stand in judgement over humanity and its off-shoots for fifty years prior to deciding their fate. Politicking and warfare between the Eternals and the Deviants soon breaks out, with humanity finally discovering its siblings. And things get weird very fast.

Most of the Eternals have names that echo those of human gods and figures of myth -- Ikaris, Thena, Zuras, Makkari, Ajak -- though in all cases, they turn out to be models for many different figures from many different cultures. The Eternals get around when they're not hiding out on mountaintops. And they neither age nor die.

One of the oddities for the time of publication was that The Eternals soon establishes that it's a wide-ranging group book without a clear, single protagonist. The stolid Eternal Ikaris initially seems to be the hero, but he vanishes for lengthy sections of the narrative. This sort of storytelling would be much more commonplace ten to fifteen years down the road; in 1975, it's downright peculiar to shift focus from group to group (or sometimes away from all recurring characters entirely) for entire issues at a time.

Art-wise, the Celestials are the stand-out here, one of Kirby's most bizarre and foreboding bits of design, with elements of Aztec and Mayan art mixed in with Kirby's expressionistic take on computer circuitry and high technology. Also, they neither speak nor have thought balloons. Later writers, when using the Celestials, would introduce both speech and thought balloons to these cosmic giants, rapidly removing all mystery from them. For now, though, they're cool and sublime, as is the book itself. Recommended.

Some are born to endless night...

Batman: The Court of Owls: written by Scott Snyder; illustrated by Greg Capullo and others (2011-2012): DC's line-wide reboot, the New 52, has yielded a number of lengthy storylines right out of last year's gate. A case in point would be the Court of Owls storyline in the regular Batman title. It occupied the first 11 issues of Batman along with an annual and a crossover into all the Bat-titles, and its repercussions are still being felt.

A lengthy 'Everything You Know is Wrong' story, The Court of Owls posits that Gotham City has been run from behind the scenes for centuries by a cabal of the rich and powerful called the Court of Owls. They even have their own nearly unkillable enforcers, the Talons, to wipe out any opposition. Batman has remained unaware of them until the storyline begins. Then, he finds out that they've been behind many of Gotham's woes -- and possibly killed his parents.

Snyder keeps things moving along quite briskly, and Capullo's art is a really pleasing take on the Dark Knight, clean-lined and filled with shadows. The story starts to bog at the end, undone by too much length and a few too many surprises.

The real villain of the piece, an obscure character introduced in the 1970's and then quickly consigned to the Now Let Us Never Speak Of This Again Bin, is a bit underwhelming. Nonetheless, there are a lot of good Batman moments here. If only DC were still capable of producing standalone stories instead of endless event storylines. Lightly recommended.

Aaron Burr in Space

DC Showcase Presents Green Lantern Volume 5: written by Denny O'Neil and Eliot S Maggin; illustrated by Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, Mike Grell, Dick Dillin and others (1970-75; collected 2012): The classic Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories herein, mostly by writer Denny O'Neil and penciller Neal Adams, are available from DC in a variety of formats. I like this one because B&W is a nice way to appreciate Adams' art. Also, Adams doesn't redraw the work in this volume for contemporary publication, making this the real deal as it was when it was published.

By 1970, DC's Green Lantern title was foundering in sales. Along came editor Julius Schwartz, O'Neil, Adams, and a mandate that could really only come in comic books: team Green Lantern up with another character whom he shared a dominant colour with. Thus was born the somewhat oddball pairing of cosmic policeman and non-super-powered bowman.

O'Neil and Schwartz decided to make the series "relevant" by having the characters confront social problems that include racism, over-population, and pollution. These social problems were often rendered melodramatically or even parodically, but they were nonetheless a departure for DC Comics and for Green Lantern, both of which had always been more comfortable in a more complete fantasy world.

The pairing didn't save the title from cancellation (though Green Lantern would be back on his own soon enough, first as a back-up in The Flash and then in his own book again). It certainly made for a historically interesting ride, though. How well do these things stand up now? Well, Adams' hyperrealism still looks terrific 40 years later. O'Neil's scripts creak and groan a lot under the weight of their own hyperrealism (which is not the same as realism) and melodrama, but there remain a number of strong moments of writing.

The social consciousness rapidly vanishes once Green Arrow is gone, while the straight-forward superheroics return. An O'Neil-penned tale about how aliens abducted Aaron Burr after his murder of Alexander Hamilton and made him their leader stands out in the later stories, though perhaps not for the right reasons. It's completely bonkers. All in all, recommended.

Dracula's Quest

Seance for a Vampire by Fred Saberhagen (1994): Saberhagen's revisionist Dracula series began in the late 1970's with the delightful The Dracula Tapes, narrated by the bloody 'Count' himself, and continued through nearly a dozen volumes before Saberhagen's death in 2007. This is the third-last of these novels, and the second to pair Dracula with his cousin (in Saberhagen's world) Sherlock Holmes.

Dracula is something of a droll narrator of events, this drollness counterpointed by sections narrated by Dr. Watson, who doesn't entirely trust his best friend's cousin. But while Dracula is a master of violence, he abides by his own code of honour in Saberhagen's universe -- and part of that code involves stopping vampires from preying on humans against their will. The events of Bram Stoker's Dracula were, after all, narrated by pretty much everyone BUT Dracula.

A seance meant to draw forth the spirit of a mysteriously drowned young woman seems to call forth instead a vampire. Holmes and Watson are on the case, but once vampirism turns up, Dracula must be called in for assistance. Soon, the unlikely trio are jaunting around the early 20th-century countryside on the trail of a vampire seeking lost treasure from more than a century before -- and wreaking vengeance on the descendants of his long-dead nemesis.

Before it's all over, we'll visit pre-Revolutionary Russia and have an encounter with one of the early 20th-century's most notorious mystery men. It's a good thing Watson packed the wooden bullets -- no metals, not even silver, have the slightest effect on a vampire. While lacking the near-epic scope of The Holmes-Dracula File, Seance for a Vampire is a fun read with some poignant moments set off by comparisons between the never-aging Dracula and Holmes and Watson, now in their fifties and beginning to show it. Recommended.

Fast Company

Showcase Presents The Flash Volume 3: written by John Broome, Gardner Fox, and Robert Kanigher; illustrated by Carmine Infantino, Joe Giella, and Murphy Anderson (1963-66; collected 2011): The Flash was always the jauntiest of DC's Silver-Age reimaginings of Golden-Age characters, sleekly drawn by Carmine Infantino and written with a flair for the oddball, mostly by John Broome. As with other DC titles of the 1950's and 1960's, psychology is mostly absent and rapid-fire superheroics are the norm. Also, there are a lot of aliens.

There is some Marvel-Age influence here as the volume moves to the mid-1960's. A cover with the Flash abandoning his uniform and his superheroing seems pretty clearly inspired by a classic Spider-man cover of the same time period. Some personal angst slips into a couple of the stories -- being the Flash does occasionally play havoc with the Flash's relationship with reporter Iris West -- but the overall tone is usually light. One story has the Flash participating in bizarre, tearful conversations with his costume. The mental stability of superheroes often seems pretty precarious.

And then there's the Flash's host of supervillains. Captain Cold, the Trickster, Captain Boomerang, Heatwave, the Top, Abracadabra, the Reverse-Flash, and numerous others may be occasionally homicidal, but for the most part they're either trying to steal things or seemingly obsessed with playing tag with the Flash. And there are a lot of aliens from both space and other dimensions trying to destroy the Earth, or conquer it, or whatever.

The Flash's superspeed, so advanced as to give him complete control over every atom in his body, comes in handy. Occasional 'Flash Facts' explain why our hero can do certain things (like run straight through a brick wall) that one might think would kill him. Thankfully for Earth, relativity doesn't seem to apply to the Flash, as his jogs at the speed of light don't make him so massive as to destroy the Earth. Seminal Flash artist Carmine Infantino draws everything with an angular, lunging quality that highlights the speed of the Flash and the occasional slowness of everything around him. Phew! Recommended.