Richard Caldwell, 12/25/2008

Last time, I tried to give light to what I see as a major issue that I am just not reading all that much about elsewhere. Comic book successes in Tinsel Town have been spiking on up over the past ten or twenty years, but how much further can this notoriety honestly be maintained before the big shot producers latch on to some other niche market?

Remember, for every Iron Man or Dark Knight there are plenty examples of the David Hasselhoff/Nick Fury and Halle Berry/Catwoman bits of insulting rubbish. Yes, American Splendor, Ghost World, and Crumb were all excellent films in their own right, but they made no money. Just as with the actual comic sources, they are trendy to acknowledge, but sadly, nobody really reads them. When people think of comic books they see in their mind's eye guys in tights beating justice into each other. Likewise, when people think of comic book-based/inspired movies, they expect guys in tights beating justice into each other. To better define the medium in public view, movies need to stem from this more familiar precept and then grow to show the true potential. To accomplish such while raking in the cashflow is the real test, and I am convinced that it now all rides on the current Batman franchise, as all other immediate possibilities have been already shot down by my own skewered sense of logick.

Batman Begins, in my opinion the best and itself rating very high on my list of all time favourite films, was a powerhouse of a well-conceived and even better executed film. It contradicted little from the more credible history in the source materials, and if anything filled gaps in the character's overall cannon. For this it appeased many a fan, and the psychology of the story itself is what opened the eyes of many non-fans, I think. Begins was the perfect origin tale, as it was clustered with symbologies for father-figures and growth, which most of today's population can sadly identify with, seeing as how the real world is today without the boundaries that the generation of our own fathers were forged by. Nerves were struck accordingly.

The Dark Knight, while currently the most successful comic book flick of all time, continued this evolution of socially aware psychology. The character of Bruce Wayne had grown and asserted himself to the point of being surrounded by equals. Moreso, by people whom he himself could easily have become, had his own personal choices evolved differently. I think the solid weak point plotwise was the inability of the writers to keep Harvey Dent in a coma following the warehouse explosion, which would have left the ending of the DK far less claustrophobic while saving the Two-Face character entirely for the next in the series. Regardless, movie-goers were presented with an intelligent and appropriately adult version of an American icon, a concept which until then was widely confined to the hallowed halls of geekdom. Very smart work, that.

Robert J. Sodaro, 12/24/2008

The Day the Earth Stood Still: Rated “PG-13” (110 Minutes)

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, Kathy Bates, John Cleese, Jaden Smith

Directed by: Scott Derrickson

Remember when the future was cool/

I’m sure that I’m going to take static from some quarters over this, but not only was this version of the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still is a solid story, a worthy successor to the original, but Keanu Reeves delivers a commendable performance as Klaatu, the stoic spaceman sent to Earth to deliver a warning and message of tolerance.

The plot of the classic film is essentially unchanged. Klaatu, along with his faithful sidekick, guard, escort GORT (re-imagined as a 25’ android), arrives on Earth bringing with him a message from a consortium of planets about Earth’s place in the greater community of the cosmos. A critical difference between the two films is that in the original, it was a message couched in a thinly-veiled threat, while here it is more of a “shoot first, warn later” variety.

The sequence of events is essentially the same, Klaatu arrives, is shot on sight by the trigger-happy military, winds up in the care of doctors at Walter Reed Hospital, and then escapes delivering his warning to a distinguished professor before activating GORT to do that voodoo that he does so well. One of the main deviations between the two films is this extensive one’s use of CGI/SPFX (which obviously didn’t exist in 1955), and the film’s overriding message.

Kurt Wilcken, 12/21/2008

MECHA MANGA BIBLE HEROES #1
JMG Comics
Script by Tom Hall & Joey Endres
Pencils & Inks by Thom “Kneon Transitt” Pratt

There are many deep and abiding theological questions that man has grappled with over the ages: What is the Nature of God; Why does a Loving God permit Evil to exist in the world; Can God create a rock so big that even He can’t lift it? One question, however, the theologians have avoided:

Can God beat a giant robot?

This question is at last addressed in MECHA MANGA BIBLE HEROES #1 from JMG Comics. The story, by writers Tom Hall and Joey Endres and artist Thom Pratt, takes the story of David and Goliath from the Bible and translates it into a manga setting. King Saul and his army are facing the Philistines, but the enemy has a secret weapon: a giant mech-warrior named Goliath, who challenges the Israelites to face him.

You know how the story goes. The shepherd boy, David, is bold enough to take that challenge. (“He’s not just laughing at you; he’s laughing at God!”). Armed only with the weapon he knows best, a simple sling, and his faith in God, David defies the giant.

Alex Ness, 12/19/2008

Good stuff came out in 2008. Sometimes comics happen quickly, sometimes things follow a slow deliberate course. Sometimes they go to hell and never appear. I had one comic go away. I had one publisher give me a contract and then go down the tubes quickly. I know how difficult it can be to get your book to market.

My favorite title of 2008 is the DEAD@17 Compendium, which features all the stories up to now in one wonderful volume. If you haven’t tried the series here is a chance to pick up everything in one set, for a reasonable price by a great company (Viper) with a fantastic creator, Josh Howard. DEAD@17 is a story that begins like horror, follows a path similar to the X-FILES, and ends with a powerful drama similar to JERICHO. The story telling is great, the characters are interesting, and there is plenty of symbolism to feed upon. I cannot recommend this enough. Now I wish the person I lent my one copy to would not have moved without a forwarding address.

Alex Ness: Reviews, 12/16/2008

Despite the current respect for comic books and characters (due to making successful movies and making money for Hollywood) I would suggest that comic books are still not a mature medium, and still have room to grow. Despite the huge downturn in the economy, I believe people can still make money in comic books, can still be creative there, and readers still have new things to read.

But, they need to overcome some problems, which are:

Eric San Juan, 12/16/2008

We are still reading, folks. Call these reviews. Call them my semi-random musings. Call them whatever you like. This is I Am Reading... This week I am reading DMZ. Garth Ennis’ Hellblazer run. And Ultimate X-men.

Marc N. Kleinhenz, 12/12/2008

Battlestar Galactica’s third season finale, “Crossroads, Parts I and II” (episodes 319 and 320), knocks over a lot of tables, as J. Michael Stracyznski is fond of saying: President Laura Roslin’s caner returns; Major Lee Adama quits the military; Captain Kara Thrace returns from the dead; Dr. Gaius Baltar is exonerated of crimes against humanity and becomes the head of a religious cult; and four of the Final Five Cylons are revealed, both to the audience and to themselves. Razor, BSG’s first telefilm (but certainly not the last – The Plan is already in production for release next year, with two more movies reportedly in the midst of negotiations), complicates the matter by establishing that Starbuck is the “harbinger of death”; rather than leading man and Cylon alike to the much-fabled Earth, she will drag them all to extinction. Needless to say, such a dizzying and expansive array of plot twists creates a plethora of questions. Why are four of the Final Five sleeper agents, thinking and acting and living like humans for some two or three decades? What, exactly, is Starbuck – a modern-day (so to speak) Lazarus or another celestial “angel,” along the lines of Baltar’s Number Six and Caprica Six’s Baltar? Just who is the twelfth Cylon, and why, furthermore, has Cylon society been segregated into two different (and apparently disjointed) components?

Interestingly enough, the first half of the show’s final season – what the Sci-Fi Channel refers to as “Season 4.0” – doesn’t deliver any answers or, even, substantial follow-through to any of these questions. What the opening ten episodes do accomplish, however, besides a significant amount of set-up and foreshadowing for the latter installments, is pay off one not-too-irrelevant throughline: finding Earth. (And it’s oddly appropriate that finding Earth, what Galactica’s entire premise is based upon, didn’t form the events of the series finale, as in other lost-in-space shows, such as [the supremely dysfunctional and outright idiotic] Star Trek: Voyager: the miniseries delved into the inter- and intrapersonal relationships of the characters, and the central Colonial-Cylon relationship that serves as a backdrop to this all, well before it introduced the quest to find the far-flung home of the Thirteenth Tribe.) And now that the show has closed the book on its premise, the path is cleared for the real task at hand: resolution and closure, though not necessarily in that order.

But season 4.0 didn’t completely sidestep the many questions of import introduced last season – Baltar’s quite sudden (and quite singular, it would seem) visitation by angel Gaius is proof positive of that. Indeed, this first part of the final year may just be setting up a bit more than meets the eye.

To wit, some brief observations:

Barry Keller, 11/23/2008

The holidays are quickly approaching and I, for one, am always on the look-out for gift ideas for my friends and family. Here are a couple of ideas from Asgard Press of Wilmington Delaware. Asgard's main line of business seems to be posters, calendars and notecards for university alumni, but they also make a couple of products that are dead on for the pop culture enthusiast on our shopping list.

Rich Chapell, 10/23/2008

The best, and worst thing about going to a comic con is walking through Artists’ Alley. It’s how you find the Next Big Thing when it’s still just Some Guy’s Book. On the other hand, you have to avoid the eyes of all the guys selling hand-stapled Witchblade knock-offs or copyright-infringing pin-up girls. Once I actually start talking to an artist, I start to feel obligated to buy a book from him, so I only have a few seconds to eliminate the blatantly derivative and the pathetically untalented. It can be tricky, too. Lewis Helfand’s Wasted Minute is the worst-drawn book I’ve ever seen, at least in the initial issues, but I love the writing.

Joe Hilliard, 7/24/2008

Since Comicon 2008 is taking place in San Diego even as I type this, I figured what better time to do a column about … hockey. It's been awhile since I've wrote about my one real sports obsession; a few years ago I opined on Cam Neely's election to the Hockey Hall of Fame. Oddly enough, we are going to talk about the Boston Bruins again. I'm not a particular Bruins fan, but there is no denying their place as one of the preeminent franchises in the sport. And one of the enduring legacies of the team is the play of defenseman Bobby Orr.

Barry Keller, 1/3/2009

I listen to Alex Bennett in the mornings on my Sirius radio going to work and am always interested in the weekly movie reviews. A few weeks ago he described Slumdog Millionaire as the best movie of the year and specifically noted how wonderful you felt leaving the theater. I may have misunderstood his meaning.

I think Slumdog Millionaire is a really well-made film, but it is also a film people get up and walk out on (six people did in the showing I watched). Who can blame some of them? Listening to the glowing reviews it is shocking to see scenes of child mutilations on the screen. They are so jolting that long after the film is over they are still with you. And not in a good way.

Am I missing something here?

Barry Keller, 12/31/2008

I'm reading John Lennon The Life by Philip Norman. Well, actually I have been flipping through the exhaustive index and then turning to a topic that interests me and so far the book has exceeded my expectations in that I have learned something new about Lennon or the Beatles on almost every page I have read, like this one from the height of Beatlemania:

John and Paul's extraordinary success rate as songwriters generated insecurities of its own...The pair spent hours trying to analyze just what had made their latest hit a hit...For a while, they believed the crucial ingredient was simply the word me or you, hence not only "Love Me Do," "Please Please Me," "From Me to You," and "She Loves You," but also "P.S. I Love You," "Do You Want to Know a Secret?" "Thank You Girl, "I'll Get You," "Bad To Me," and "Hold Me Tight."

Barry Keller, 12/29/2008

Frank Miller's interpretation of Will Eisner's The Spirit earned just $6.5 million this weekend, putting it in ninth place and barely on the top ten. Is anyone surprised by this?

If you strip out Eisner from the Spirit you aren't left with much.

Barry Keller, 12/27/2008

An interesting obit from the Los Angeles Times earlier this month...

George Morrison, 89, a retired Navy rear admiral Once the youngest admiral in the Navy, Morrison had a long career that included serving as operations officer aboard the aircraft carrier Midway and commanding the fleet during the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to an escalation of American involvement in Vietnam.

The father of three children, Morrison had a falling out with (son) Jim after his son launched his music career with the Doors in the mid-'60s. But in 1970, the year before Jim died in Paris at age 27, Morrison acknowledged viewing Jim's "success with pride."