Jim's Comic Reviews - Week of 9 January

Fantastic Four #3

So, now that we've settled in, what can we glean about the direction Fraction and co. have undertaken with this title? I have to say, it's exactly as expected:  The first family of comics is in another realm entirely, disconnected from the events of Earth-616, partaking in adventure of a very Trek or Lost in Space vibe.   Bagley's art is competent, Mount's colors are all very whiz-bang, as you'd expect on such a title, and the characters are true to their nature...but I'm a little bored with it, to be honest.  The one thing the issue lacks is a complex, motivated nemesis, and the being they encounter instead is very Trek-like and just...well, generic sci-fi. It's all very predictable, and this is one title that's gotta be anything but.  The vibe they're going for is "boundless adventure" and what you get is something that, although executed with competence, you've seen before.  If 50's and 60's sci-fi nostalgia is what trips your trigger, I'd say give it a look-see, but even then, if you're more Whovian than Trekkie in your taste for weird sci-fi plots you'll want to give it a pass.  For myself, I've seen this episode dozens of times, it's just that Shatner was playing his own version of Mr. Fantastic.

Thunderbolts #3

I gotta say, this was a fun read.  Way's giving us a motley of characters that are all very broken, and delights in those moments of interplay within the team that make the book what it is. He's one of those few that can get legitimate, consistent hilarity out of the over-used Deadpool, who's played as the perfect foil to everyone else's weighty concerns. Dillon's art is what it is, though...you never want for clues as to the characters' emotional states, and the storytelling, character blocking and composition is all there...but there's an element of same-face to characters and, well, to put it bluntly there's just something wrong with everyone's mouths and eyes.  The line weights are just too uniform around facial features and they lack any sense of texture. That, and character movements and poses are all very uninspired.  With a character like Red Hulk, for example, I want more "tank-like" and less "slightly taller than Frank Castle, if you check his driver's license" That being said, this title is going on my pull list tomorrow, great art or no.

Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files:  Ghoul Goblin #1

Apparently, there's a set of novels and a tv show about this Dresden guy, and I've never seen any of it...go figure.  I'm judging the work as an introduction to a reader who's starting out cold, so fans should bear that in mind.  Love the art work in this issue: the Cooper/Mohan team gives us images well suited for the story, which concerns the adventures of Harry Dresden, Wizard-For-Hire.  Now, that's a job title that just screams for a unique character and a bizarre plot to go with it.  While the plot here seems original in it's underpinnings, the execution is rather flat. I haven't followed the character in works past, so maybe there's back-story and motivation I'm unaware of that fans will just "get", but I didn't think the book did a convincing job of laying out the basics.  I'm thinking they were going for "hard-boiled" and "noir-ish", but they end up with a sort of faceless guy who deals in the fantastic in a way that's very parochial.  I don't recommend it as an introduction for non-fans of the character, but I'd guess that long-time fans might like it.

Batman Detective Comics #16

While the issue is without the mask cover of the other, sometimes more relevant, pieces of the Death Of The Family crossover event, it does have the crossover billing over the marqis.  I suppose the guts of the story  kinda depend on DotF going on, but it's definitely a side-line arc that could have, with a few tiny tweaks, ended up well outside the bounds of the crossover.  Nevertheless, Layman once again lays out a tight, engaging script that's perfectly suited for the title, and could definitely stand as it's own story. An up-and-coming villain is bent on taking control of the Gotham crime syndicate currently headed by the Penguin, and he's definitely proving himself willing to embrace Gotham's own brand of intricate, violent weirdness to do it. Layman is setting us up for many issues to come, and it's a fun ride.  The art is pretty stellar, too.

Thor God Of Thunder #4

Just go buy it already.  I can't believe Marvel is putting out such consistent quality with this title at such a fast pace.  Probably the best run of Thor since JMS was on the character a few years back, and I daresay it's even better.  The art, imho, is a runaway best of the new Marvel NOW! line, and I'd put it up against any current monthly title by any publisher.

Action Comics #16

Somewhere in here is a good Superman story, I'm convinced of it...but it seems, once again, Mr. Morrison has confounded it with a jumbled aesthetic and an incomprehensible narrative, and it'll probably take another six issues to glean enough pieces to even begin the work of puzzling it all together.  Maybe it is hard to come up with an unfamiliar-sounding Superman story after 75 years, but is the character so far gone that finding such a story involves LSD?

Earth 2 #8

Earth 2 has been on-again, off-again with the quality, but I thought this issue was rather solid.  It gives us a view from the other side of the conflict, and really serves to cement the idea that in this dimension, things can be allowed to spiral out of control, upsetting the status quo on a world scale and examining the consequences in a way that, let's face it, you just can't in the regular DCU, no matter how many times you push the reboot/reset button.  The Steppenwolf of Earth 2, having been trapped on the wrong side of a boom tube, is embracing the new world he's found himself in, and like Caesar in Gaul, he's got his sights set on conquering the scattered barbarians he finds there and bringing them to heel.  Convenient, then, that he's found the perfect fictional nation to home base in.  This title is, the way I see it, so very necessary to DC as a sort of end-game fulfillment of the what they billed the New 52 reboot as being:  Truly new, truly different...and assertively NOT dependent on 75 year-old characters in familiar settings with familiar motivations, to make it tick.  All in all, a very good read, if a tad on the dry side.

Superior Spider-Man #1

I've made no bones on the podcast nor in previous blog entries about the fact I think some of the decades-old characters of comics could use an ending to their stories...in truth, I've found the idea of a new psyche inhabiting the body of Spider-Man immensely intriguing, perhaps even worthy of an indefinite status with one of Marvel's linchpin properties.  But do I end up liking this character?  I don't know yet.  Octavius of the comics has always been written as kinda petty, and while it is an interesting premise to have such a self-centered mind saddled with Parker's everlasting guilt trip, yet stuck in a body capable of the sort of wish fulfillment every villain dreams of, you still get the sense things are in a state of flux, and it's tough, at least in this first issue, to get behind it.  You want the diverse motivational elements to get to detente, so you can take a look at the singular result with new eyes, but you still get the sense this is two characters jumbled into one, ala someone like Firestorm.  Perhaps it's just the stutter of changing gears, and things will all shake out after we've had some time with the character.  Nevertheless, it is FUN, and treated somewhat lightly, and I'm genuinely interested in a Spider-Man title for the first time in years.  Stegman's art is perfect for the cartoony, frenetic tone of OctoParker's endeavors, and it's scripted about as well as can be expected.  Good for Mr. Slott for venturing down this path...we could use a few more such risks with established characters....and a risk, it definitely is.

Anyway, it's been a great week for comics.  Thanks for reading!  

Jim's Comic Reviews:  Justice League #13

Okay, so it's been a while since I picked up a new Justice League comic besides thumbing through one at Captain Blue Hen.  I came off the reboot last year confused and disillusioned with the series, unable to put together a simple sequence that explained the book's overall timeline. This was exacerbated somewhat by Jim Lee's work on the title, where I would look at a given two-page spread and think, "looks great!", but a page or two later, and I'd be wondering what was going on.  It was as if the characters were well-crafted but inarticulate action figures traipsing through backgrounds that were just too full of imposing heroes to convince me the world was greater than the space between the gutters. Superman doesn't fly, he poses in the narrow sky.  Batman doesn't tumble, he's too busy holding up the margins of the page with his shoulders.  Aquaman doesn't swim, he's holding back the tide by standing in front of it, heroically brandishing a trident or something.  Too many flashbacks being the main course, there was not enough meat on offer, story-wise or art-wise, to justify my cash.

This brings us to issue #13, where a pleasant surprise awaited me, in the form of some very solid pencils by Mr. Tony Daniel, and some tight storytelling by Geoff Johns.  This issue explores the recent lips-smacked-round-the-world between Superman and Wonder Woman, re-introduces Cheetah not only as a capable nemesis for Wonder Woman, but a challenge for the entire league assembled, and features a back-up story centered around lovesick Steve Trevor that hints at things to come.  Overall, a competent effort by Johns that, while it's not going to win any awards, was a right-sized chunk of episodic fun and brought enough entertainment for me.

What got me about the issue's art is the cinematic nature of it.  Tony's never been a go-to artist for me, but reading this issue, I'm wondering why.  He seems to have all the good bits of Jim Lee down:  The characters are as heroic and imposing as Lee's own rendering, but he maintains a tight control over the space they take up in the panel, and the timing imparted by the panel size and action therein.  Action-wise, Wonder Woman and Cheetah, the two major combatants, slug it out with the battle moving from panel to gracefully rendered panel fluidly, and there seems to be no snapshot in time Daniel can't convincingly render them frozen in motion. There's an eye for environments at work, and attention to the movement of the chess pieces, and the world seems larger for it.  When things slow down, the facial expressions contain nuances of performance to do any actor proud, particularly the glances shared between Wonder Woman and Superman, and the combination of grudging respect and rivalry between Batman and Aquaman.

The issue comes off as having just the right amount of character development, exposition, and action for this title and flagship-worthy art, and I came away well satisfied with the read.

This is the Justice League I was looking for.  4/5 stars.      

Jim's Movie Reviews: Dredd 3D

Dredd 3D is the second major motion picture concerning the exploits of Judge Dredd (played by Karl Urban), a fictional law enforcement officer in the post-apocalyptic metropolis Mega-City One. The character and his world were created by John Wagner and first rendered by Carlos Ezquerra in sequence art for the UK scifi anthology magazine 2000 AD, and published under various titles for the better part of the last 35 years or so.  Dredd is as old as Star Wars, even if he doesn't enjoy the same level of attention.

Written by Alex Garland (28 Days Later, Sunshine) and directed by Pete Travis (Vantage Point, Endgame), this film pairs Dredd with rookie Cassandra Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) on an investigation into a run-of-the-mill triple homicide in a massive residential skyscraper that turns into all out war as the plot unfolds.  It seems that this structure is home to the undisputed queen of the city's drug cartels (Ma-Ma, played by Lena Headey) and once she puts the building on lock-down, no one's getting in or out until justice is served or the Judges are dead. Fortunately for our heroes, Judges in Mega-City One are equipped with plenty of justice (read: 'bullets') and the authority to try, convict, and sentence miscreants on the spot, up to and including the death penalty.

What follows could be described as a blood-bath, but there are also plenty of bone fragments, shards of glass, teeth, freshly skinned corpses, and various displaced anatomy flying around the screen for most of the film.  Each death is exquisitely rendered in stunning detail, with 3D used to great effect, resulting in a level of violence that makes your average Rambo tussle look like a Saturday afternoon spa treatment.

Through it all, Dredd remains the stoic, unyielding figure we are introduced to at the beginning of the film, with his only character arc being the traversal from floor to floor, Die Hard style, in the great high-rise of death he finds himself in.  What little character growth there is is managed by Cassandra, who lays aside her initial squeamishness to become capable of doing what's necessary to survive, that is, kill a whole bunch of people in varied and spectacular fashion.

I feel I've been flippant enough about the characters and the violence in this film that I should take a moment to say the following:  As a screenplay, this piece does only what's necessary to advance the rather pedestrian and cliched plot from beginning to end.  As it was filmed, however, it succeeds on several aesthetics that not only make it a wonderful film to watch, but one of the most skillfully rendered action movies in recent memory.  The photography in evidence is astoundingly good, and no surer hand with set pieces and backdrop have I seen in a movie of its ilk since Blade Runner.  Yes, I went there:  Mega-City One is so stunningly realized, it invites comparison to some of the best works in the genre.  Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (yeah, the one with the Oscar) puts his best foot forward here.  With flyover shots taken from about thirty thousand feet, the city is established from horizon to endless horizon in orderly rows and columns, where gargantuan project buildings housing seventy thousand people a piece stand as ominous sentinels peppering the land.  The oppression and hopelessness of the citizens is palpable from the opening shot.  And let's not stop there:  The vision of its highways and byways at ground level is richly realized as well, with nary a surface unmarked by dust, blood, crumbling stone, offal or graffiti, and all is awash in punishing sunlight glare.  Interiors are dark, suitably cramped, and packed to the gills with gritty detail.  Never once in the film are you fully removed from the presence of decay, not even during the dream-like sequences depicting the drug-induced ecstasy of some of the city's more fortunate junkies. There are no green trees, no fountains, no garden parks, no glimpse of nature to relieve you from the visage of a world that is simply used up.

The viewer never has to wonder, then, about the role of the addictive substance peddled by the antagonists' goon squad.  Called slo-mo, the drug serves the user by slowing the apparent passage of time to 1/100th that of normal speed, the effect being to render beautiful, for a time, the simplest gesture or happenstance.  The camera uses this to breathtaking effect in several sequences during the film, including some of the more prominent death scenes.  Filmed in ultra-high speed, the sweat, blood, and splintered bone performs a ballet in mid-air, rendered in a crisp 3D effect that, to my knowledge, has never been demonstrated so effectively in this media.  Unless you are one of those people who absolutely detests 3D film-making to the point of nausea, you'll want to see this one with the glasses on.

The film is edited well, ramping into a smooth action pacing early on, and firing on all cylinders to the end.  The actors do a fine job...no standout soliloquies or emotional revelations, but Mr. Urban's Dredd is confidently delivered and maintains the necessary air of menace and finality necessary for the character.  Thirlby's Cassandra convincingly moves from timid to decisive as the situation comes to a rolling boil.  Headey is a sufficiently damaged, ferocious, and utterly remorseless Ma-Ma.  The score is wonderfully integrated and sets an eerie tone in the slo-mo sequences, changing to an arrhythmic artificial heartbeat for much of the fast action.

All in all, where the film fails to deliver a complex story or engaging character arc, it succeeds so fluently in its aesthetic that it's hard to dismiss.  I recommend it to fans of the genre, and to fans of the character wholeheartedly, but the level of violence and lack of literary merit may be valid reasons to stay away for others.  8 out of 10.