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Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Indulge me this one time
This week sees my birthday, which is tomorrow (I'll be 23), and the second anniversary of this here blog. The biggest change from the beginning of this blog to now is that I'm something of a professional in the comics industry. I used this site to get my name out and combined with a bit of hustling I actual got a few places to pay me for my ramblings. It's actually a bit bewildering at times because I've never been too confident in my writing but I can't say I'm not enjoying this. The comics industry can be a pretty crazy place but I've found if you go in with the right mindset it can be worthwhile to explore. It's certainly a lot better than any other job I've had. I'm certainly proud of this article which showcases people in comics way smarter than I'll ever be.
I've been told plenty of times that I should be thankful to get such work early on. I certainly am. In particular I would like to thank Heidi MacDonald, Calvin Reid, Douglas Wolk, Dirk Deppey, Michael Dean, Tom Spurgeon, Tim Leong, Larry Young, James Sime and the Isotope gang, Mike, Dorian, Tom and everyone else in the ACAPCWOVCCAOE, The McMillans, Eric Reynolds, Dean Haspiel and probably a whole bunch more people I feel bad about leaving out. Thank goodness this isn't the Oscars. I'd be thrown off stage by now.
There might be a few changes coming to this site. Hopefully it will look a lot more, well, professional. But even as I find it harder and harder to work in time for this blog be assured I will always make use of a forum that allows me to go off unedited and unrefined.
One more thing: please buy the second issue of Wholphin when you see it, which should be soon. I you can order it right now if you're the impatient type. We worked ever so hard on it and I do think you get a lot of good stuff for $16. Errol Morris interviews Donald Trump about Citizen Kane, Bob Odenkirk's unreleased pilot, Steve Carrell and the nerdy guy from Freaks and Geeks and a monkey-faced eel. Check out all the crazy stuff on our website while you're at it. That "Street Moves" video was short where I used to live, for those of you who want a taste of SoCal suburbia. It's what me made me who I am today.
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Monday, June 26, 2006
Something I've noticed
This past Wednesday I picked up All-Star Superman #4, Casanova #1 and the trade paperback to Fear Agent (read the first issue). The books were all enjoyable, but reading one after another I started noticing something they all have in common. It’s something they share with Godland and perhaps other books I haven’t read yet.
All these books are influenced by past comics or movies but the way the creators use that influence is much more exciting and successful than how other comics have looked to the past. We’ve seen fannish adoration of past comics, usually the superhero stories of the fifties and sixties, and creators try to recreate those types of stories with a few modern touches. The best example of this would be Kurt Busiek’ and Pat Olliffe’s Untold Tales of Spider-Man, which for a long time was the only Spider-Man book worth reading. Other creators have taken the path of deconstruction. To make a story seem powerful you just take a character that’s been around forever and put them in a wannabe Frank Miller story. I always found this type of storytelling to come from an insecure place. In an effort to prove critics, most of which tend to reside in the creators’ minds, that comics are real adult stuff they’ll have Green Arrow avenge Black Canary’s rape. Because after all, this stuff never happened in Gardner Fox’s stories. The “reconstruction” trend that Busiek, Mark Waid and others were a part of was in some ways a reaction this. I prefer the stories from that era but they provide a reading experience that’s less ambitious than the comics I’m writing about in this post.
I’m now noticing comics that go for something more than just recreating the style of certain past stories. Casanova and Fear Agent, perhaps it is telling that these aren’t superhero books, are not just going after a certain aesthetic but also the immediate feeling one gets thinking about ‘60s spy movies or old sci-fi EC comics. Fear Agent doesn’t seem influenced by EC books as it is influenced by the covers of those past books. Reading Rick Remender’s writing you won’t find any of the endless narration in blocky type or twist endings that seem more than a bit hard to swallow. Instead Remender and artist Tony Moore share that same wonder when you look at a Wallace Wood cover and think “what the Hell is that?” From there Remender and Moore fill panel after panel with multi-tentacled creatures and pointy spaceships. The feeling you get seeing that Wood cover is repeated throughout. Our guide isn’t some stiff omniscient narrator but rather the hard drinkin’ Texan Heath Huston (Russ Heath + Hosuton, Texas) who isn’t above the action but very much in it, providing a sense of urgency few EC stories had.
I think this is what the always insightful Jim Roeg meant when he saw what was “hyperreal” about Godland. An audience absorbs an original work. Their reaction to it is mixed in with whatever emotional buttons that have been pushed. Now part of that audience has their own book that combine the most memorable bits of the original work in hopes to create a more refined type of storytelling. To see how a creator sets out to try and recapture these past sensations read Matt Fraction’s essay at the end of Casanova #1.
Usually this quest benefits from a much more modern narrative sense. Compare Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly’s All-Star Superman, the greatest superhero book now being published, to the actual Mort Weisinger books that stand as inspiration. There’s a type of stiffness found in those older stories, just as I suppose American society as a whole was more stifling than it is now. Those books are worse offenders than EC in terms of suffocating their crazy ideas with plodding dialogue and characterizations that rarely get past bewildering immaturity. At least EC’s book had a certain charm to their antiquated style. I enjoy the Weisinger books in small doses, usually the ones with Jerry Siegel writing and Curt Swan on art, but reading page after page in the first Showcase Presents: Superman book I was getting tired of stories that had so little respect for their audience’s intelligence, something you should never do when writing for young people. All-Star delivers on the promise of the Superman-Lois-Clark love triangle, Jimmy Olsen’s many transformations and the whole idea of a superhuman that could move a million suns with his index finger. There’s genuine comedy and drama, stemming from how human Morrison writes all the characters regardless of how human they might actually be, and the stories move briskly with enough set-up and payoff in a single issue. These allow concepts such as Hercules and Samson vying for Lois’s attention or Jimmy becoming Doomsday to shine.
I don’t know if I’ve been totally clear in this post (remember writing from an insecure place?) so let me put it succinctly: Watch a Republic movie serial. Then watch Michael Anderson’s Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Then watch Steven Speilberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Notice the difference? That’s what I’m talking about.
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Friday, June 23, 2006
Quick Watchmen thoughts
You've probably seen the news that Watchmen has a new director attached to it, one Zak Snyder. I enjoyed Snyder's Dawn of the Dead very much. I'm not a big fan of horror movies but that was a film that had plenty of quirkiness and bloodiness to make a serious impression. The opening is to zombie films what the opening of Saving Private Ryan is to war films.
Based on Dawn though I can't imagine Snyder creating a version of Watchmen that's much like the book. You know what? Good. No one is going to make a film version of Watchmen that is equal to the original version. So I say to Mr. Snyder, producers Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin and writer Alex Tse, in the .0000000000000003% chance any of you are reading this: go crazy. It's futile to try and recreate how intricate the plot is and the Cold War dread that it depended won't resonant with today's audience. Instead, bring all your own creative ideas to the table and throw out that of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's that doesn't work. Some central ideas should prevail, such as the disillusionment in authority and the ennui that comes from aging and feeling irrelevant (maybe you should bring that '80s feeling then), but from those templates an original vision should arise. Will people complain? People complain about the weather, doesn't stop the rainfall. Don't let the intimidation of working on Watchmen hold you back, use it as a starting point to create something new. Being reverent will just create something stale and that's hardly paying tribute to Moore and Gibbon's vision. Everyone needs a little literary blasphemy now and then.
I've read Sam Hamm's script for Watchmen. The changes Hamm made to the story only appear in the beginning and the end, most notably in reworking the problematic ending. Everything else is a straight adaptation of key scenes from the book. Those changed scenes wouldn't make a great movie, although they could make a good one, but they were the only parts of the script that felt vital. Heed that boys and make yourselves a real barnburner of a picture!
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Tuesday, June 20, 2006
The Shat Lives
Shatner, People Who Are Not Shanter to be Inducted into TV Hall of Fame. This isn't an honor for The Shat as much as it is an honor for the Academy of Television Art & Sciences Hall of Fame. Only now, with The Shat amongst its rank, can it truly call itself a "Hall of Fame." Now let's see Nimoy, Takei and Charles Nelson Reilly get inducted.
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Recommended Reading
Tomorrow Casanova from Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba arrives. What do you get for $1.99? Usually it will be 16-pages of Pop Art manic adventures but to kick things off you get 32-pages of content. Honestly, this book does more in its first 16 pages than most do with 32 or 40. I have a full a review in this post that name checks some of the previous works this book is inspired by. If it was just a tribute to the swinging '60s it would only be a fun novelty. Instead Fraction and Ba are really creating a living environment for Casanova Quinn, one that's believable as the creators play it with the right balance of smirk and seriousness. This is pretty much my definition of what a fun comic book should be and I hope you enjoy it, too.
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Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Smile, you're saving money!
McSweeney's is having a big sale until the 30th. While it's true that the literary empire is my "day job" I'd still recommend taking advantage of all the goodies here. You can buy Johnathan Lethem's book for five dollars (it's even got a Chester Brown cover). Any available issue of the quarterly is 25% off, including the Chris Ware-edited comics issue. You can subscribe to The Believer for a discount price. Go crazy, folks!
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Monday, June 12, 2006
How to disappear completely
This seems to be the summer where I dive into irrelevancy. I’m actually soaking up more books, TV and movies than before but it’s all stuff from past eras. I’ve been spending enough times in used book and video rental stores to forget the latest “cool new thing” and instead draw from decades of almost forgotten pop culture.
That means this area of my life suffers. To keep coming up with dynamic and interesting blog posts I should stay on top of the latest in comics or movies or what have you (I do really want to see Prairie Home Companion and read the third Scott Pilgrim book sometime soon but who has the time these days?). So in one meaty and probably annoying (and certainly unnecessary!) blog post I present to you what I’ve been wasting my time with.
The second season of Twin Peaks (from 1990/1991)
Not yet on DVD I’m blazing through sixteen year old VHS copies to continue the story of Washington’s craziest little town. Before starting this season I kept hearing how the show loses the plot but all comes back in the end for some real crazy David Lynch stuff. I just finished “The Orchid’s Curse” (it’s the one where Cooper and Sheriff Truman rescue Audrey from One-Eyed Jacks) and still feel interested in the show. The challenge for the show is now that Laura Palmer’s murder investigation is wrapping up can the quirky characters stand on their own with their own stories. For the main players like the Hornes and the law enforcement I would say yes but I’m still not sure about lesser characters, such as Big Ed’s wife reverting back to a teenager. It’s a neat idea since the actual teenager characters and their journey from innocence is a big part of the show, hopefully they’ll tie those two storylines together.
Apparently the problem came from Kyle McLachlan not wanting to do a central storyline where Cooper gets involved with Audrey, the best of the teenage characters. I agree with this decision. The big secrets of Twin Peaks deal with men like Ben Horne and Leland Palmer taking advantage of “the girls behind the perfume counter.” Cooper should be above that. Of course, he’ll still have his own secrets revealed as the show progresses. When his ex-partner Windom Earle shows up will see more (I haven’t seen those episodes, I just researched ahead).
”The City of the Dead” episode of Doctor Who (From 1979 and looks it)
So I decided to try some Doctor Who, a favorite of my Dad’s growing up and other smart people I know. I just never could get into it as a kid but I figured as an older and wiser person I could appreciate the show. I picked this episode because it was co-written by Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide fame.
There are a lot of elements of the show I like. I like Tom Baker’s Doctor. He’s smart and has plenty of good one-liners. The idea of Earth’s savior not being Captain Kirk/Han Solo type but an eccentric and aloof egghead with a love of long scarves is a cool one. No one has pulled off the combination of bug-eyes and prominent teeth better than this man. I like the way The Doctor and Ramona saw Earth as outsiders (although I was baffled by Ramona’s choice in wardrobe, which seemed to be a mix of Japanese schoolgirl and Italian gondolier) and the romantic undertone in their relationship. Julian Glover was a fun villain as The Count and I liked his look under his mask. I enjoyed seeing John Cleese and Eleanor Bron show up for a cameo. The storyline of multiple Mona Lisa’s and the beginning of the human race was pretty interesting, although it felt more like a standard time travel story near the end.
BUT good gosh does that dated BBC look just not do it for me. The parts of Paris that were filmed were okay although I don’t know why they decided to dwell on that for so long other than to make-up for the travel expenditure (see also: Carmela’s recent trip to The City of Lights in The Sopranos). When the show is videotaped on a set, which is most of the show, it just has this limp look that I’ve never warmed up to. I usually enjoy low-budget sci-fi settings like that of the original Star Trek. Here the leisurely pace, spare use of score and cheap sets don’t hold any charm for me. I’m just reminded that the show was being produced in a bygone era. Do the new episodes airing on the Sci-Fi channel remedy this? I want me some good British sci-fi but not feeling like I’m watching a midday American soap opera.
And man oh man does that theme song rule.
Shitty science fiction books I get for cheap (from various years but all from before I was born)
I go to this bookstore on Irving street in San Francisco (I honestly cannot remember the name of it), go to their selection of sci-fi paperbacks and pick out what has the craziest covers. So far I’ve finished W. Watts Biggers’s (the co-creator of Underdog) The Man Inside, which wasn’t really a sci-fi book, and I’m now half-way through Richard Cowper’s (real name John Middleton Murry, Jr ) Clone. Up next is Avram Davidson’s Mutiny in Space, which I got because it promised “a bizarre army of screaming women.”
Biggers book, from 1968, was actually a parody of the stories about young men searching for a purpose in life. A short man with no memory of his past encounters psychologists who encourage the actual realization of the Oedipus complex, gets suckered into a paternity scam and finally becomes the toy of a rich Southern man’s son (this before Richard Pryor and Jackie Gleason’s The Toy). It’s a funny idea although most of the situations are more bizarre than humorous. Biggers has a supremely cynical take on gender relations, leading to a situation with a transgendered person (the nephew of the Southern man…ah, it’s too complicated to explain) that’s in real poor taste. If the bad dialogue between characters is meant to be a part of this parody I couldn’t tell, I just thought Biggers had a tin ear for the way people talk. This was worth reading if you like nutty books from the ‘60s that tried to cash in on the youth movement but that’s about it.
Clone is better on a superficial level. Cowper’s dialogue is witty and so his description of London of 2072 (the book is from 1972). It reminded me of the aforementioned Adams’s work but not as thorough a comedy. Explore the book any deeper, really not that much deeper, and the book falls apart. The story of one of four cloned boys and his quest to find out about his visions is a loose plot to begin with and Cowper doesn’t really seem interest in moving it along. Instead we get plenty of description about intelligent chimps and apes that are now the resident minority in England. The use of human’s evolutionary cousins for social satire was done better in Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes. Here chimps just replace any racial or economic minority in real life, which was an odd choice. It proved to be dull when one when one of Cowper’s main attempts at satire is bringing out the well worn stereotype of ego-driven Marxist revolutionary. Then it proved to be disturbing when Cowper follows up an implied human/simian gang rape (oh the search hits I’ll get!) with a real one. This follows Cowper’s similarly irritating treatment of women in his story. All the good credit the author gets for predicating gay marriage is quickly lost when the lesbian scientist, the one behind the cloning, is written as a woman who is good at fainting a lot and pretty much nothing else. All this and we only really see one of the four clones and never get into the issue of identity, which one would think would be perfect for a story about cloning.
Oh obscure science fiction writers, why does it seem you just use your books to sort out any personal dysfunctions you might have?
The Raconteurs at Amoeba (this past Thursday)
Hey, this is actually relevant. A free show at super-record store Amoeba on Haight (they actually cleared out the store at 8 p.m. and filled it with fans waiting outside) was a pretty fun way to top a nice evening. This was their first show in San Francisco and I think this was their third show anywhere after the Henry Fonda theatre in L.A. and the Amoeba in-store appearance in that city.
Jack White’s new band does the ‘70s-tingned garage rock in a much more traditional way than The White Stripes. The two-guitar and rhythm section line-up is augmented by some new wave keyboards, which gave some songs a cool new dimension. I was only familiar with the single “Steady as She Goes” before this but it turns out a lot of other songs are pretty darn catchy, with plenty of rocking behind the tunes. The only misfire would be an acoustic song that sounded too much like Lionel Richie’s “Easy.” The band closed with “Blue Veins,” the sort of throw back to Led Zeppelin White likes to do now and again. White proved to me that he really is an underrated guitar player. When he solos he’s got this great melodic sense going through that most guitar players forget, more content to just show off a bunch of tricks. Now I just nee to see White’s full-time gig in concert.
The end of this post (now)
There we go, the reason why I haven’t talked about many comics lately. Nothing’s really grabbed my interest lately although I liked Megan Kelso’s new book coming out this month and I think Gilbert Hernandez is doing great work. Maybe I’ll think of something soon though. In the meantime I’ll probably play some 78s on an old record player then go see a five-cent nickelodeon in my furthering quest for the obscure.
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Sunday, June 04, 2006
The Opener: Historic First Use of Snake on a Plane
My thoughts after seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time. I saw it at the glorious Castro Theatre.
1. You can write a textbook on how Spielberg frames so many of these shots. He took what Orson Welles and Gregg Toland did on Citizen Kane and applied to action/adventure serials he probably watched on Saturday-mornings. Some of my favorites were when Indy, his boss and the Army Intelligence men all look at Indy's book about the Arc at once, Karen Allen declaring "I'm your goddamn partner!" where Spielberg makes her look 18-feet-tall and the scene between Indy and Belloq in the Cairo bar where Harrison Ford's face is an arch over Paul Freeman's.
2. I believe that the scene where Indy shoots the enthusiastic swordsman, which got great applause from the audience last night, is the birth of Joss Wheadon's writing career. Every episode of Firefly had at least three instances where some action film cliche was being set-up only to have one of the quip-ready characters deflate it. The Serenity film has the most blatant example: Operative: "...I am unarmed." Mal: "Good." (shoots him)
3. Pauline Kael wrote that this film represents a turning point in films. Whereas older action films would take a while to set-up the action (note all the pomp in the Irwin Allen films like The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure) almost every scene in this film had some action in it. A great example is the action scene with the grounded plane and the German strongman, where all these set-ups, the lighter fluid running and the deadly propellers spinning, were set-up quickly in the scene and then drawn out ever so carefully until they paid off, such as the death of the German strongman. It is episodic filmmaking in the best sense. I wonder if you actually could chop this film up into a serial and play fifteen minute chunks over the period of a few weeks.
4. It's odd seeing a film you've never seen before where so many aspects of have already been absorbed into popular culture. I was already familiar with the line "Again we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away" for some reason and had no idea this is where it originated.
5. How did Marion not die when the truck exploded? Did they switch baskets at one point? How did Indy get through choppy waters so fast that he gets to the German sub? Why in the beginning did he bring along Alfred Molina and the other guy? They both betray him and Molina just seems like a burden in the secret passage with the idol. I suppose they are his guides but Indy seems to know way more than both of them.
6. I saw the film with The Brothers Gorenfeld and John did make sense of the "close your eyes to avoid facemelting" scene. Because Indy and Marion proved they did not have the pride and hubris to witness the opening of the covenant they were spared. I guess that makes sense.
7. Did audiences go crazy when the saw the "facemelted Nazis" ending? They mustn't have expected that in a non-horror film.
8. The film's at The Castro until the 8th. I'm seriously thinking of seeing it again. That is broad, over-the-top and exciting moviemaking that got pretty much everything right. Hell, even the plot holes and cheats can be seen as a tribute to Republic Serials, which were rife with them.
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Stray Lost thoughts
Talking with my friend about the second season closer of Lost and the philosophies of the different characters (a universe with reasons or "destiny" vs. a chaotic universe or "free will") I realized a problem the show has.
The characters on the show can argue all they want about how the world works but we all know how the world of Lost works. This is a show with producers, directors, writers and actors. All the situation are created and players act them out. This is a world where indeed there is a guiding hand, more than one. So how does the show contemplate whether there is a "guiding hand" in real life or not. Perhaps that's why the show can sometimes feel aimless or unreasonable. The creators want to reflect the boredom and mundaneness of real life, a world that often times feels where there is no meaning in what we do. Pushing a button in a hatch may not be the most exciting plot conceit in the world but it recalls the boring office life Locke once led, one many still lead. Maybe that's why Locke and Eko are my favorite characters. I can't relate to their view of the world as compared to Jack's but since Locke and Eko belive in a world with a "plot" (or at least Locke did) they are more of their fictional world.
Even if that is the intent of Lost I'm not so sure that excuses some of the poorer episodes that started the second season (and the creators of the show should be congratulated on taking this season from "blah" to "yowza" by the end). It may just because The Sopranos portrayed boredom so much better. Lost has nothing on Tony and Michael's pathetic recalling of The Vipers hijacking in Tony's basement or Vito's "don't check your watch" voiceover.
Another quick thought: we learn in the second season closer that those in "The Pearl" watch the people in other hatches, record their actions on notebooks, send them though a tube and it goes nowhere. It means nothing. Watch the people in the hatch, go over it but it leads to nothing. Watch the people on Lost, write about or discuss it but it all means nothing. It means nothing...
Do you think that might have been a meta-commentary there?
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Friday, June 02, 2006
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