Comic News Reflections

I talked about Paul Cornell’s Wisdom mini-series, which means I can say that I’m looking forward to his reward of an ongoing series: Captain Britain and MI-13. Cornell has a nice writing style, good sense of plotting and a very British sense of humour, which should all make for an interesting comic book. And, with Leonard Kirk on art duties, an artist I’ve enjoyed since I first saw his work on Ultragirl (which I think was his first Marvel job), that’s a cracking creative team.

The combination of Captain Britain, Pete Wisdom and the marvellous John the Skrull is enough to convince me to pick up the book, but I really don’t know if it is going to succeed in the current market – it seems a very optimistic launch. The image above (taken from this post by Cornell on his blog) suggests that even he knows it’s going to be a tough sell. I can see that the Skrull Invasion crossover will help – there must be some connection with John the Skrull – but what chance does it have after that? How long is Marvel going to give it? I wish it well, but I do fear for it.

(And, special note to CBR about their article: Northumbria is not a city – it’s a vast area of north east England.)

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Talking of authors with series that had difficulties from the start – Priest is back. Sort of. He had a prose back-up feature in a new comic book. We haven’t seen any comic book work from him since 2005, when Captain America and The Falcon ended. He has found he enjoys the unrestricted freedom of writing novels more than the hassle of writing mainstream superhero comic books, something he did very well – his Black Panther run was the best the character has seen. It’s a shame that Priest isn’t working in the comic book field at the moment; at least we’ll always have his back catalogue to keep us entertained. Here’s hoping that he can be lured back again.

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A writer who doesn’t have to worry about lack of work in the mainstream industry is Brian Michael Bendis, whose work was recently examined by Don MacPherson. He looks at why he thinks that ‘the bloom is off his particular rose’. The strange thing is that he acknowledges the fact that he does different things (such as the Mighty Avengers return to thought balloons); however, it feels more like a fan of an indie band wondering what happened to the good, early stuff when nobody knew him. Nobody can produce consistently brilliant stuff, and Bendis would probably be the first to admit that he isn’t perfect. But he does keep trying and he thinks about what he is doing, which is more than can be said for a lot of writers working at the two big companies. The post led to discussion, which the Blog@Newsarama highlights, where BMB himself replies to the criticism (although he shouldn’t have bothered – let your work speak for itself, Brian). Even though I haven’t bought his work the way I used to (no Secret War or House of M for me), I am interested in the Secret Invasion storyline coming up because of the build up he has created for it in the New Avengers, a book I am enjoying (well, except for the silly Collective storyline, obviously; I’m not that mad). Bendis may have his writing tics, but he is a technically proficient and always interesting writer, and long may he keep producing good work.

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Finally, a quick mention of the fact that the greatest comic book shop in the world, as far as I’m concerned, has its own blog: Gosh! step into the world of blogs, after their weekly How Late?! e-newsletter. Keep up the good work, chaps.

From A Library - Wisdom: Rudiments of Wisdom

Wisdom #1–6 by Paul Cornell and Trevor Hairsine/Manuel Garcia

Paul Cornell is another one of those people who could be accused of stunt writing, if you use the cache of his writing episodes of Doctor Who, Primeval (or even Robin Hood) to pull in the punters. But Cornell has been writing genre fiction for quite some time, his name isn’t sufficiently well known, and he’s a Brit, so nobody is going to care that much.

Which is a shame because it meant that nobody paid much attention to this mini-series when it came out. Having read the trade, I’m amazed it was allowed to come out – not that it is bad, quite the opposite, but rather because it is so unashamedly British. The level of in-jokery going on is quite staggering, and you wonder how he was allowed to get away with it.

In Wisdom, Cornell takes the Peter Wisdom character created by Warren Ellis in Excalibur and puts in charge of a team working for MI-13, the British intelligence agency that deals with weird things. First in-joke: having his boss with the name of Mr Grimsdale (in reference to the boss that English comedian/actor Norman Wisdom would always have to deal with in his films). He is in charge of Tink, a fairy dissident; Captain Midlands, a British super-soldier and complaining old git; John the Skrull, part of the Skrull Beatles; and Maureen, a clairsentinent who joins the team at the start of the series (and is the link for the arc that carries the book through to the end – working on the new Doctor Who and Primeval means that Cornell is used to doing the one-off stories but with a background threat). They even have their own Q, who looks like Charles Hawtrey from the Carry On films, for your next English in-joke.

The first issue deals with fairies being vicious on British soil, which must be dealt with. The second issue has the village of Pantagruel, or rather the sleeping giant buried there millennia ago, waking up and fighting guardians before moving to near Greenland. (The in-joke of the issue being John the Skrull’s dream, which pastiches the Beatles and their films to good effect. There’s also the reference to putting a neighbouring village back in Berkshire, which is going to be lost on anyone outside of England, I would have thought.) Issue three has them dealing with the Welsh dragon (which piles on the Welsh jokes and references thick and fast, as well as including cunnilingus to get its MAX rating because there’s very little else in the series to suggest it required the ‘Explicit content’ tag) and has a guest appearance by Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu.

The last three issues deal with the story connected to Maureen that has been reference in the previous three, when a man seems to draw Jack the Rippers from alternate universes to this one – ‘Will the real Jack the Ripper please stand up?’ (with a special appearance by the Jack the Ripper of Alan Moore’s From Hell). It turns out that it is the Martians (from HG Wells) who are using him and Maureen as a gateway into this world for their invasion. And, as with all things in Wisdom’s life, things don’t end happily.

The book is rather enjoyable if a little rushed in places – the pacing in the first three issues seems helter skelter, barely giving enough information and time to understand what’s going on in the comic before coming to the end. The last three issues take a bit more time, but the way that the character of Maureen is set up for her role in the story seemed a little forced and detracted from the enjoyment.

The art on the book changes after issue two – Hairsine leaves to be replaced by Garcia, and his style doesn't work as well as Hairsine's. He had very nice character designs that worked well, and Garcia's style, while good, doesn't capture the same vibe and energy and doesn't quite suit the stories (except for the action stuff at the end, and even then his Captain Britain looks a little weird).

I know I shouldn’t compare British writers with like, but there are elements of Ellis and Grant Morrison thrown into Cornell’s style – the Wisdom–Ellis connection leads to this (with Ellis-like dialogue for the lead character), as well as an almost Authority-like attitude to plot for the sake of explodo; the Morrison connection is the throwing lots of ideas in the mix, and the John the Skrull character (for me, the star of the book) who reminds me of the Mandala character from Zenith and the Skull Kill Krew. However, for his first comic book work, it’s quite impressive, and bodes well for the new ongoing series Captain Britain and MI-13. And surely John the Skrull must play a part in the upcoming Skrull Invasion?

Book Review: Contract

Contract by Simon Spurrier

By a confluence of events, I discovered that Si Spurrier was writing Gutsville and a new Silver Surfer mini series In Thy Name, and then saw this book – about a hitman whose hits come back from the dead, hinting at a divine conflict, a heavenly war – which, you have to admit, sounds pretty damn cool. Excerpts on a promo site about the protagonist, Michael Point, suggest an interesting prose style: I’m sold.

I would like to tell you now that the book is NOT about a heavenly war. At all. So, if you thought it might be worth reading based on the synopsis, like I did, you should not read the book. The story is not quite what it seems. Point is a hitman; he’s been doing it for a few years when we meet him, and he has a pragmatic approach: It’s All About The Money. No morals and a careful attitude, combined with lots of internet research, and away he goes. The book is told in first person, so Michael can tell you everything you need to know about him and what he does. Herein lies a large measure of the appeal of the book. Spurrier has a strong voice, detailing the extremes of his protagonist. The only trouble is the repetitive emphasis of a man with a limited imagination (the protagonist, not the author): ‘The thing is:’, ‘This place’, ‘Listen’, ‘Bear with me’, ‘The point is’, What I’m thinking is’ punctuate the prose with oppressive regularity, deliberately to highlight the central character’s mindset, but it gets really tiring actually reading this style.

Spurrier captures the voice and thoughts of a man who thinks he is better than he is and the way he goes about life – the details, the anal quality, the sadness, the need to talk to someone – but it grinds you down.

The story weaves between him being interviewed after the fact and relating to us exactly what he is telling the interviewers. Oddly, this is interspersed with diary entries of a woman is Michael’s closest human contact, which throws things off a bit. Michael kills a man (using a gun with bullets laced with heroin) but he comes back and has to kill them again. This keeps happening. He is hired by someone to do ‘special’ jobs, but who seems to know a lot about him. The final job is the difficult job, with lots of people to kill, from which he doesn’t expect to escape. During this, the woman interacts with him a lot, influencing his brain and the way he does his job, especially as he starts to think that religion is involved, what with all these people coming back to life after he kills them.

But it is nothing to do with heaven or hell, and the only thing that didn’t make me throw the book away at the end in disgust was the reveal behind the interview room scenes. Otherwise, I felt slightly cheated by the outcome. My fault for wanting what they said on the tin, I guess. At least some of the journey was interesting.

Oscar 2008 - Reactions

Transformers was robbed!

Ahem.

So, the 2008 Academy Awards have been revealed – and we have had a good yield for a good year. The Coens got the Oscars they deserved, even if they did it to spite my prediction of the Academy splitting the director/best film.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem were the predicted winners, whereas the female awards threw up the surprises. I haven’t seen the films to speculate, but I’m glad for Tilda Swinton (and not in a jingoistic patriotic way) – an interesting actress with an interesting career.

Ratatouille got the best animated film, of course, and the screenwriting awards went to deserving homes, even if all the nominees were worthy (a view for most of the categories, it has to be said). And The Bourne Ultimatum is now a triple Oscar winner in addition to being one of the best films of last year; admittedly, they are technical awards but who cares?

The only disappointment I felt was for Roger Deakins, who I think should finally get his Oscar, but he had the misfortune to split the vote by doing superb work on two worthy films, which must be confusing for voters.

However, I do stick by my fake fanboy opening statement – there is no way in a million years that somebody could say with a straight face and hand on heart that the CGI in The Golden Compass was better than Transformers. I am not a Transformers geek but, dude, robots into cars and back again, beating the shit out of each other and interacting with actors on screen – how the hell didn’t that win? Seriously. Is there some kind of Anti Michael Bay Campaign? ‘No film directed by him will ever win an Oscar, mark my words!’ Completely unbelievable and the only blemish on the night.

Talking of the night, it sounds like it went well (apart from the montages) and that Jon Stewart did a good job with some nice lines (best: ‘Even Norbit got a nomination, which I think is great. Too often the Academy ignores movies that aren’t good.’) and his lovely gesture of getting Marketa Irglova (winner for best original song for Once) to come back out to give her acceptance speech after she was played off the podium. Nice guy.

I know there must be some disappointed bloggers out there with nothing to complain about in the results (like I was back in 2005), but it’s good to feel happy about the Oscars.

Film Review: No Country For Old Men

Apologies for the hiccup in posting – a sick girlfriend will do that to a schedule. To get back into the swing of things, and in advance of the Oscars tonight, here are my thoughts on No Country For Old Men, which I think will win the best directing Oscars for the Coen brothers but not the best film, which will go to There Will Be Blood.


The first adaptation by the Coen brothers, this film grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shakes you until you drop. This happens from the start – Javier Bardem is arrested by the local sheriff, who takes him back to his office. As he phones his boss, we see Bardem slip his cuffed hands under his legs and use them to quietly and calmly throttle the sheriff to death, before washing his hands in the station sink. In the act, his eyes seem to be elsewhere, as if he isn’t there – a great performance of dead-eyed evil but I’m not sure if it’s the stuff of Oscars (but what do I know? As much as I enjoy watching Alan Arkin, I still can’t believe he got an Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine).

We see Josh Brolin out hunting in Texas desert; he shoots a deer but only wounds it. He follows it to kill it, only to discover the remains of a drug deal gone wrong, with nearly everyone dead. He finds the money and takes it; meanwhile, Bardem has been given the job of retrieving the money. Tommy Lee Jones is an older sheriff (who narrates the opening sequence of the film) who is investigating the deaths that seem to follow in Bardem’s wake. He’s see a lot in his life but wishes he hadn’t, including Bardem’s use of a human animal killer to murder people. Meanwhile, Brolin makes a decision to help someone that sets events in motion for the rest of the movie.

The film is a stunning piece of cinema, especially as it originates from a book by Cormac MacCarthy. There are some amazing near-silent set pieces of pure nerve-jangling suspense and thrills, told in such a cinematic style – obviously, the Coen film that never was of the prisoner of war in enemy territory that is told with almost no dialogue stuck with them more than they said. It’s incredibly daring and exceptional storytelling that never loses sense of the narrative or the characters. All the actors pull off excellent work, with Jones’ craggy face showing the heart of the idea behind the title, but the plaudits are all with the Coen brothers and Roger Deakins’ cinematography. I believe they will be worthy winners of Academy Awards tonight, well deserved after excellent bodies of work.

The only aspect that stops this film being completely perfect is the ending – it feels too much like an ending in a book rather than a film. I’m not asking for a neat resolution to the film, with characters having definable arcs – the problem is that we don’t witness a pivotal point in the story (we are shown the aftermath), which the story has been leading up to, and then we finish the film with a character having a chat with somebody we haven’t seen in the rest of the film. It seems rather odd, falling away from the rest of the film. However, even this deliberately ambiguous end doesn’t stop the (extremely violent) movie from being a superb piece of cinema.

Rating: DAVE

I Am Geek, Hear Me Roar

(Click to embiggen)

So, having your girlfriend have an emergency appendectomy when you visit your parents in Ireland really gets in the way of blogging. Not much time for writing content when you're a nurse.

It means that I haven't had the chance to buy the first issue of the new ClanDestine series (so I haven't had an opportunity to rejoice yet, Greg); I've been trying to catch up on my blog reading (nearly 1000 posts on my Google Reader). The one bit of relaxing I did was the Empire How Well Do You Know? the X-Men Trilogy quiz: see my result above. I have never got a perfect score in any quiz on the page, so I guess I have to admit to my X-Men geekery.

Back to normal as soon as my girlfriend's better.

From A Library – The Thing: Idol of Millions

The Thing (latest series) issues #1–8 by Dan Slott and Andrea DiVito and Kieron Dwyer

What is it about the Thing that gets him is own series? I’ve never understood it – sure, he’s got pathos but remains down to earth, and he’s got the catchphrase, but what is it about him that keeps getting him his own book outside of the Fantastic Four, the whole point of which is the family dynamic. He’s rocky, he’s orange, he’s strong, and that’s about it.

This time around, Ben Grimm is written by Dan Slott, a funny man (having Ben say, ‘I’m a regular “Kevin Bacon” of the superhero set.’ is typical of his comic touch) who knows his way around the Marvel Universe. However, despite the Thing’s supposed popularity and the critical acclaim this series got, even he couldn’t keep Ben in an ongoing series.

(Btw, 'Idol of Millions': has Ben really called himself this before? Slott really hammers it home, as if to reassure us, but I've never heard it.)

Part of the problem could be the approach. In an interview, Slott admits to being self-indulgent in the first three issues (having Nighthawk, the Constrictor, Iron Man on Arcade’s island) and describes it himself as ‘was very much a fun, retro, bronze age book’, which I think hurt the book and makes it feel very dated.

The loaded adjective of ‘fun’ can be applied to these tales; they are light and fluffy but seem devoid of any purpose. The first three issues on Arcade’s island seem old-fashioned, when the whole point of the series should be about the fact that the Thing is now immensely wealthy and how this changes him. This comes into effect by issue four, with the introduction of Lockjaw, the teleporting alien bulldog of the Inhumans, and a sense of purpose to Ben’s life (Reed gets Franklin to indirectly teach Ben about the value of money) but it seems an unwise choice to not start with the stronger material in the first issue. The best part of the first three issues was the fun of seeing the Thing fighting different Hulks (Maestro, Mr Fixit, the combined version) in the guise of robots, who then go on to fight different robot versions of the Thing (original, extra-rocky, ‘helmet head’ presumably from the ‘90s).

The later issues see some fun – he teams up with Spider-Man (there are nice jokes about the stupid costume that he was wearing at the time, with the armour and the three limbs) and then takes Alicia into the past to see the original Venus de Milo (where Ben gets into a fight with Hercules as he was then, with some nice jokes about history and Alicia being an oracle) and a final issue which sees Ben having his Bar Mitzvah and having a huge poker game with nearly all the heroes in the Marvel Universe. But, as Spidey so rightly says at the end, ‘Uh … is that it?’

Artwise, Andrea DiVito is a perfect artist for the Thing; his thick, smooth lines compliment the rockiness of the craggy exterior, and he has good, expressive faces and bodies. I’m sure I can detect a hint of George Perez in his artwork, in a good way, and is completely appropriate for the tone of the stories that Slott is telling. There is good attention to detail, such as in the background of a fight scene where you can see the breaks in the concrete where Ben has trod. However, he does suffer from the problem afflicting a lot of modern superhero artists – the sexualisation of the women characters. The picture of Carlotta (a gold-digging film actress who is Ben’s girlfriend for a short time) where she is in a basque and suspenders, her massive breasts larger than her head, is completely unnecessary. Especially in the first issue. Still his sense of fun (some of the famous faces in the party in the first issue, or the Bruce Banner robot on Arcade’s island chewing on the Thing’s leg) covers for this – his covers are a delight, particularly issue 6 with Spidey. It’s a shame to see him leave, but Kieron Dwyer is no slouch when it comes to humour and action, and he is a good replacement, even if is artwork is craggier in contrast to DiVito’s.

I still don’t see why Benjamin Grimm deserves his own series, but that could be my flaw. If Slott had got round to bringing the series into the modern era that the interview suggests, the book could have become more interesting and wouldn’t have been cancelled. I guess we’ll never know. If you like your superheroes old-school, this is the book for you.