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| Sunday, September 9, 2007 08:02 PM |
| The Take |
 by Fëanor |
Circumstances (those being a holiday on Monday and a lecture Thursday night) led me to purchase my books at an unfamiliar comic store on an unusual day of the week, but I got everything I really wanted anyway. I even saw a copy of Batman: Gothic, but I didn't buy it, because it appeared to be an older print, and not the new release. I doubt the new release is much better or more exciting, but I figured I might as well find the fresh one I was really looking for rather than purchase an older copy, so I passed it by. Besides, TPBs are easy enough to purchase online if it comes to that.
Buffy Season 8 #6
I had been kind of afraid that Brian K. Vaughan might not be able to keep up the high quality I've seen so far in this series, or be able to handle its characters and dialogue as well as Whedon himself, but this issue - Vaughan's first in a short run as writer on this book - put all my fears to rest. It's fantastic. Faith is brought back into the mix as the Slayer you go to when you want something nasty and dirty done, and Giles shows up to hire her to take out a particularly badly behaved member of the 2,000 new Slayers in the world. It's an obvious - but nonetheless totally fascinating - idea: that one of those newly created superheroes would use her power for evil, and that a Slayer who herself had gone bad in the past would be the best choice for eliminating her. There's also a short scene that further stretches the sexual tension between Buffy and Xander, and some hints at how the over-arching storyline of Buffy's new secret cult of enemies will continue. It's a totally engaging plot, loaded with the horror, tense drama, great characters, and snappy, hilarious dialogue that we've come to love. Vaughan has gotten everything right. He's nailed the characters and their voices perfectly. Hooray!
The Incredible Hulk #110
Yes! Another great Hulk book! Amadeus Cho is in rare form again, hacking computers, people, and physics to get what he wants. We get further insight into the Hulk's true character here - he's tricked even himself into thinking that he's a brutal, evil monster who wants nothing but bloody revenge, but Cho knows that secretly he can't bring himself to kill anyone. It's a story that could have been really corny, but it's told subtly and well here, and with plenty of humor.
Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus #1
I'm not as behind as I thought on the whole Lobster Johnson thing. It turns out he's only ever appeared in the past in short stories and back-up features, and that this is issue #1 of what will be the very first mini-series for his character. And I'll be collecting the rest of it, because Mignola has got himself another interesting character here and another interesting story. Johnson is kind of like Batman, in that he comes out of the shadows - dark, humorless, vaguely terrifying - takes revenge upon evil criminals, and then vanishes as suddenly as he appeared. But he has more of a secret agent vibe than Batman does. The story is set in late 1930s America where the sewers are secretly populated by cannibals, and Johnson and his crew are on the trail of some Nazis who are trying to get their hands on a big weaponized metal suit powered by the mystical forces that ran Atlantis. And if you're not sold already, I don't know what's wrong with you. This opening story isn't absolutely fantastic; it's not as exciting as it could be, and the guy wearing the suit talks a bit too much like Hellboy sometimes for my complete comfort. But it's got great ideas, a good sense of humor, and decent - if slightly cartoony - art by Jason Armstrong. I will definitely be staying on for the ride.
Iron Man: Enter the Mandarin #1
After reading this first issue, I'm pretty sure this series is actually going to have very little to do with the upcoming movie, despite what the preview text on the Marvel website led me to believe. And actually, even if it did, I'd probably be dropping it anyway, because it's just not very good. It's apparently based on an old comic written by Stan Lee, and hints at the backstory of Iron Man's enemy the Mandarin, while also telling us the story of how Iron Man and the Mandarin met and fought for the first time (although oddly the story is set in the present day, instead of back in the '60s or some such). The problem is, the story is pretty boring, the characters are relatively flat, and the dialogue - written by Joe Casey - is just not that great. The Mandarin is a ridiculous, pompous parody of a supervillain and has almost no discernible personality apart from the classic stereotype of a megalomaniacal, mustache-twisting evil bastard. And Iron Man might as well actually be made of iron. The rather poor art by Eric Canete doesn't help; he actually manages to make Iron Man's suit and mask - one of the cooler outfits in comic-dom - look really dumb and clunky. Yeah, I definitely won't be reading any more of these.
Batman and Son
This collection turned out to be not quite what I was expecting. I thought it was going to pull together a lengthy story arc covering the origin of Batman's son and his relationship with his father. But it actually consists of only a couple of issues of Batman that I hadn't read before (although they do indeed introduce Damian to Batman for the first time and deal with their relationship), with a sparsely illustrated short story in the middle set at about the same time, but not talking about Batman's son at all, and then finally a couple of very recent issues of Batman that I already read and own (oops). The couple of issues I hadn't read before were indeed interesting, and definitely helped to make those issues I'd already read make a lot more sense. I got to meet Damian, discover where he came from and what his story was, and see him get into a rather creepy conflict with Robin over Batman's affections. There's also some pretty funny scenes with Alfred, and a great sequence where Batman gets to say: "Not Man-Bat. Man-Bats. Ninja Man-Bats. Alarming twist." That is good stuff, people. And yes, he does indeed get to fight hordes of ninja Man-Bats, and in the middle of a comic book-themed pop art exhibit, no less.
After reading these issues, the issues I had already read were even better than they had been before; the final issue - the one about Damian's brutal future Batman - is particularly spectacular. Seriously, that issue rules. But of course, I already owned these issues. So all I really got out of this collection were a couple of new issues and the short story in the middle. And, as it turns out, the short story in the middle is absolutely horrible. It's still written by Grant Morrison, just like all the rest of the collection, but apparently Morrison works best in the comic book format, where he's restricted to short bursts of dialogue and the occasional small chunk of narrative. His prose is incredibly melodramatic, faux-poetic, overwritten, and overdone. He over-describes everything, heaping metaphor atop of simile until you forget what he's even talking about. The actual story is a weird little thing about the Joker trying to off all of his old henchmen, despite the fact that he's imprisoned in Arkham and still recovering from the surgeries he's had as a result of the serious injuries he received in a fight that occurs at the beginning of the first issue in this collection. Morrison envisions the Joker as a very odd kind of creature psychologically, with no permanent personality of his own. Instead, the Joker, through a strange and painful process, metamorphoses every few years into a new - though always just as murderously insane - personality. Here, in the birth throes of his latest metamorphosis into what seems to be a particularly terrible and dangerous personality, he decides he must divest himself of all of his former servants before moving on. It's a strange idea, but I suspect that the story overall could have perhaps worked anyway if it had been done as a comic book instead. But written in Morrison's twisted, off-putting prose, and accompanied by the occasional hideously ugly computer-generated illustration - all of which are full of characters that live dead in the center of the dreaded uncanny valley - it's pretty much a complete loss.
Of course, re-reading that future Batman story at the end almost made up for it all anyway.
Watchmen
I have, of course, read Alan Moore's gigantic milestone graphic novel Watchmen before, but that was a borrowed copy, and long ago. So recently I finally purchased my own copy and decided to read it again. It was an interesting experience. I thought Watchmen was a truly great piece of work, but now my estimation of it has shrunk somewhat. It has great moments, and as a whole it is indeed very impressive. But it also has some pretty serious flaws. It's overlong and could use some editing. It also just tries a little too hard to be a little too clever. Almost every single transition between scenes in the book is from one image to a similar image - a silhouetted pair of lovers dissolves into a blot of ink that looks like a silhouetted pair of lovers, and so on. Also, almost every single panel has some kind of visual pun in it, or some kind of weird echo or reference between the image in the panel and the words in the panel. And of course there are many echoes and references across the entire book, interconnecting everything. The thing is built like some gigantic clockwork machine - a carefully constructed mechanism whose outcome is painfully, tragically inevitable. Like I said, impressive, neat. But also, really almost too much. After a while, those ridiculous transitions just get to be a little too on the nose, and you just want to track down Moore and artist Dave Gibbons and say, "Okay, I get it! You're clever! Now please, can you just tell the story?!"
But of course, the book is loaded with fascinating, complex, fully-realized characters (yes, even Sally Jupiter, although she's also incredibly irritating, and how she convinces the amazing, omnipotent Dr. Manhattan to do anything is a mystery), a totally engaging story, and it represents the first and most believable attempt at examining what it would actually be like if superheroes really existed in the world.
While I was reading the book this time, I was also thinking about the upcoming film adaptation, and considering how it might come out. I can actually see how a good movie could be made of Watchmen, as it is a very cinematic story, very much focused on imagery (and in fact I often wondered how much input illustrator Gibbons had in the creation of the book - did Moore dictate to him exactly what to draw, or did they work together to create the combination of words and imagery, or did Gibbons have relatively free reign in terms of what to draw?). I even saw a lot of pieces of it that could easily be edited out without losing any of the meaning as a whole (like pretty much all the scenes at the news vendor's, and all the bits about the pirate comic book - both of which really started to annoy me after a while). The problem is the guy directing the movie is Zack Snyder, and his work on 300 didn't lead me to believe that he has the intelligence, the talent, and the subtle, careful touch necessary to do this adaptation well.
Ah, well. We still have the book, right? |
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