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WATCHMEN REVIEWS

Some more of the gang opine on the latest DC opus...

Watchmen
By Adam Prosser

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is a fascinating and baffling film that somehow manages to be enthralling and disappointing all at once. It’s enthralling to see a story geeks have cherished for decades brought to life, sometimes spectacularly; it’s disappointing that the result feels soulless and rote, only a step or two removed from that “motion comic” thing (I’d imagine - if you think I’m going to bother watching that thing, you’re crazy.)
 
Somewhat to my surprise, the ham-fisted director of 300 actually gets a lot of the book and brings through some of its complexities. He even adds some interesting twists of his own - which is where my complex series of issues with the film begin. I recognize that Snyder was in a tight spot here - how do you handle an adaptation of a source material that’s just beginning to hit critical mass as part of our shared culture? What changes do you make to a comic that’s just starting to truly get its due as a bona fide classic, and has the fanbase to prove it? Where do you press the knife to a work as densely interwoven as this, whose author considers it unfilmable, and which is very much a product of its medium?
 
But the fact remains that a movie is not a comic, and too often Snyder’s faithfulness comes off as fear and uncertainty as a director. His job isn’t to be a cross-media stenographer; it’s to translate the spirit of Watchmen to a new medium, not the letter.
 
The ironic thing is that some of the best moments of the movie are basically the filmmakers’ own inventions, like an over-the-top but thrilling opening scene, followed by a bravura credits sequence that distills the essence of the world (and probably baffles the hell out of a lot of people who haven’t read the comic). Similarly, screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse settle on a new and simpler plot device for the climax, which, I have to admit, works very well.
 
The movie could have used more of that judicious and inventive paring down of the source material. Much of the rest of the film is a somewhat mechanical plod, as if Snyder was going down a checklist. The flashbacks interwoven amongst the funeral scene? Check. Rorschach’s interview with the psychiatrist? Check. Dr. Manhattan on Mars? Check. It’s not that a lot of these sequences aren’t individually well-done, it’s that they don’t really come together as a cohesive whole, and many of them are patently unnecessary. What’s the point of showing Rorschach’s dog-killin’ flashback when it doesn’t tell us anything new about the character? Why show the Comedian’s murder of a pregnant woman in Vietnam when even the scar he gives him is hardly noticeable?
 
To its credit, the movie never drags; it ticks along like a machine, and with about as much humanity. This becomes more and more apparent as the movie enters its third act, and the seams begin to show in earnest. Much of the movie is saved by the talented cast Snyder’s assembled, particularly the spot-on Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach and Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan (though, tellingly, neither of these two actors is given much of a chance to just be human, being reduced to voices and special effects for much of their screentime). Unfortunately, the story’s finale is anchored by the characters of the Silk Spectre and Ozymandias, and these two are the film’s biggest weak links. Malin Akerman isn’t *quite* as terrible as you might have heard as the Spectre, but her storyline is supposed to provide the movie’s big emotional, human catharsis, and she’s not up to the challenge. Neither is Snyder, taking what was a brilliant, subtly-handled reveal in the comic and hitting us over the head with it.
 
But far worse is Ozymandias, the single factor that brings down the movie for me. No one who has ever seen a movie before could possibly fail to identify Ozy as the villain from the moment he steps on screen, surrounded by ominous black sculptures in his gleaming corporate tower, as “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” plays in the background (seriously.) What’s worse, Snyder seems to have gone out of his way to remove any of the moral ambiguity from the character—gone is almost every moment that humanizes him, anything that gives you cause to reflect on whether his ends truly justify the means. No “I did it”, no conversation with Dr. Manhattan at the end, no sense of sorrow for the tragic state of humanity. The only thing that differentiates the movie Ozymandias from “some comic book villain” is that he gets away with it.
 
I can’t deny that Snyder’s managed an impressive feat of craftsmanship here, but in the end, the movie Watchmen isn’t about the themes or ideas of Moore and Gibbon’s groundbreaking work. It’s about being a movie adaptation of Watchmen, little more. It’s a precision timepiece, not a story.

Supermen! The First wave of Comic Book heroes 1936-41 (Fantagraphics)($24.99)
By Adam Prosser
 
When you think about it, dividing the history of comics into the “Golden Age”, “Silver Age”, and so on doesn’t really make sense. For one thing, it only really applies to superheroes - you wouldn’t describe Carl Barks as a “golden (or silver) age funny animal cartoonist”, or “Creepy” as a “Late silver/early bronze age horror book” - and it has the tendency to minimize the quirks and contributions of individual writers and artists in favour of a supposed “style”. Even in points where comics fans seemingly agree on the lingo, there’s a surprising amount of ambiguity: we all think we know what’s meant by a “silver age superhero book”, but there’s a pretty big difference between silver age DC and silver age Marvel, to use the most obvious example.
 
And the biggest problem with this system of taxonomy is the simple fact that the golden age is usually defined as beginning in 1938, with Action Comics #1…several years after comic books, as we know them, began to exist. AC #1 (which introduced Superman, as I’m sure everyone reading this knows) wasn’t even the first appearance of the superhero, per se; characters can be defined as “superheroes” by any reasonable standard existed all through the thirties, and their obvious ancestors had been cavorting through the newspaper comics for at least a decade before that.
 
As its title makes clear, Fantagraphics’ Supermen!, edited and designed by Greg Sadowski, dates the beginning of the “first wave” of superheroes to 1936, and sure enough the book is filled with variations on the theme: mystery men, costumed crimefighters, pulp heroes with that little extra flamboyance. Whatever your personal definition of a superhero, chances are you can find one in here. But the thrill of these characters, it seems to me, is that no one really knew what the “rules” of a superhero were (assuming they do now), and for that reason there were all kinds of fascinating deviations from what we think of as the norm.
 
For example, one of the most common types of adventure character was the magician-hero, often a stage magician who happened to have real-life magical powers. Given that this kind of character always wore a costume (tuxedo, top hat, cape, turban, or what have you) and was frequently near-omnipotent, there’s no reason not to qualify them as superheroes after the fact. In fact, the first entry in the book is a character along these lines known as “Dr. Occult”, created by none other than Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. There’s also the archetype of the “space hero” like Dick Briefer’s “Rex Dexter of Mars”, or Basil Wolverton’s bizarre “Spacehawk”, with cartoony art that recalls the infamous Fletcher Hanks. And surprise surprise, Hanks is in here too, with his two main creations, Stardust and Fantomah (the latter of whom is a jungle queen along the lines of Sheena, but much weirder).
 
“Weird” is definitely the word for a lot of these comics. Hanks and Wolverton, especially, have a rubbery, heavy-ink style that almost seems to anticipate the much later underground comics work of Gil Shelton and Robert Crumb. Combined with the insane plots, hyper-compressed storylines (villains are frequently done away with in a single panel), bizarre imagery (I love the conga-line of identical gorillas in the Fantomah story) and often casually extreme violence, the overall experience of reading these comics can be deeply unsettling. You almost feel like you’re reading missives from some alien world, or possibly the brain of David Lynch.
 
Even post-Superman, when the more classical characters and artists begin to make their appearance, there’s a heavy dose of “WTF?” Jack Cole, an amazing artist who created Plastic Man a few years later, gives us “the Claw”, a Yellow Peril so nightmarishly surreal that he stops being even remotely human and thus, isn’t particularly offensive. Gardner Fox, the man behind the Silver Age Flash, the very model of a kid-friendly, classical superhero creator, gifts us with “The Face”, a crime fighter who wears a hideous mask with which to terrify criminals and extract forced confessions. (Forced confessions are practically a recurring motif in these comics.) Even Will Eisner manages a moment of oddness with the heavily stylized gouts of “the Flame”.
 
And Jack Kirby, was here too, experimenting with how to inject unnerving intensity and grotesques into superhero comics two decades before Marvel came along. His “Cosmic Carson” has an oddly Futurist/Constructivist feel to it, but by the time he closes out this collection with “Blue Bolt”, the style and structure of superhero comics are clearly starting to become well-defined. Kirby’s innovation elevates the story, but it’s clear that superheroes were entering a decline, even as their popularity skyrocketed in the shadow of WWII. From their weird, wild origins, superheroes had devolved into a bunch of interchangeable, patriotic do-gooders, and from there things got even staler. Kirby remembered, though, and in the 60s he brought a little bit of the pre-war strangeness back to the tights-and-capes genre.
 
But only a little. It really can’t be emphasized enough how limited our attitude towards superheroes has become since the 40s. This book is a great antidote to that, and a reminder that comics really is the medium where anything is possible.


FOUR AND A HALF OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS



Raided: Conan the Cimmerian #8 (Black Colossus” Part 1 of 6)(Dark Horse)($2.99)
by Sean Fahey

I’ve been a Conan fan for many, many moons, and I have to say that one of the most iconic images of the character, on page or screen, appears in this comic. Oddly enough, it’s buried in the issue, a panel that takes up no more than an eighth of a page -- a close-up of Conan’s eyes as he sits under a tree and watches a massive battle between the armies of Corinthia and Koth unfold. It’s an undeniably powerful image that speaks volumes about the character. The focus. The hunger. The longing for battle. The hard, cold eyes of a warrior. It perfectly captures where this character is in his life and, in turn, this series -- ready for battle. Ready to move beyond petty thefts and bar room brawls toward something bigger and more in tune with what he truly is, a warrior. Here, in a small disputed border province, Conan’s career as a mercenary captain begins. If epic tales of sword and sorcery high adventure are your thing, you can do no better than Conan the Cimmerian. You can check out some preview pages HERE.


FOUR AND A HALF OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS


Raided: The Goon #32 (Dark Horse)($3.99)
by Sean Fahey

I can’t believe it’s actually been ten years, but this month marks the tenth anniversary of the first appearance of creator Eric Powell’s The Goon. To celebrate, Dark Horse made the most recent issue of the series a special anniversary edition with Goon pinups from fan favorites like Mike Mignola and Jeff Smith, and a short history of the development of the Goon that is an insightful look at the creative process (let’s put it this way, the character went through some real trial and error before Powell perfected him). You also get thirty-two pages of story featuring our favorite tough-guy knocking the living snot out of an undead Hobbo King, retard jokes, animal rape jokes, breasts, gorillas and gothic pulp monsters. All the usual things that make The Goon such a side-splitting and spooky trip to read. If you have a dark sense of humor and appreciate pulp horror this is your comic book, brother. You can check out preview pages HERE.


FOUR OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

 

Raided: Scalped #26 (DC/Vertigo)($2.99)
by  Sean Fahey

Welcome to “Writing Complex and Compelling Characters 101.” Today’s assigned text is the latest issue of writer Jason Aaron’s Scalped, a noir crime series that takes place on an Indian reservation. Today’s lesson, making arrogant, seemingly morally vacant assholes textured and even sympathetic. Our case study, Diesel (yes, Diesel), a murdering, double-crossing under-cover FBI agent with a real identity crisis. See how through a series of flashbacks to Diesel’s childhood interlaced with the current story, Aaron shows how an innocent kid that only wanted to be accepted as an Indian (he’s 1/16th Kickapoo, not enough to qualify for official recognition) is broken down and turned into an animal that only wants to be feared. It’s a technique that, although not wholly original, is incredibly well executed here. In fact, it’s heartbreaking. Like many of the other “villains” in this book (namely Casino owner and crime boss Red Crow), Aaron gives us a three-dimensional “lost soul,” not a cliche. It makes the read so much more visceral. This series is not just the best crime comic on the market, it is hands down the finest comic book being published. Pick it up if for no other reason than to have a monthly tutorial on how to write complex and compelling characters by a writer who has emerged in record time to be one of the most respected names in the industry. Scalped is absolutely guaranteed to be worth your time and your dime.


FIVE OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS


Raided: Madman Atomic Comics #14 (Image)($3.50)
by  Sean Fahey

To be honest, I find myself more frustrated with this series than actually enjoying it, and feel sometimes that I’m only reading it out of a sense of obligation. See, I’m a big fan of Mike Allred. I think he’s one of the most unique artists working in mainstream comics today and his runs on Madman for Dark Horse and The Atomics for AAA Pop remain some of my all time favorite comics (must reads for any fan of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Silver Age style). But this series, while it’s certainly had its moments (my first experience with four-color existentialism), often feels more like a tripped out, psychedelic romance novel with the emphasis squarely on adventurer Frank Einstein’s (the titular Madman) relationship with his girlfriend Joe than it does a hip sci-fi pulp superhero comic book. This issue is another mixed bag, with more of the same from lover’s lane (not knocking it, in and of itself, but it’s wearing thin), interrupted briefly by a (admittedly) hilarious imaginary battle Frank has with an action figure of himself and a giant robot.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the relationships in this series. But where the Madman and Atomics of old struck a great balance between the relationships and story/plot/action/adventure, this series is often tilted in favor of the former. Of note in this issue though, is an insane Madman backup story by Darwyn Cooke and J. Bone featuring Frank and Joe’s misadventures at a theme park that feels like an episode of Looney Tunes. Fun stuff.  You can check out some preview pages HERE.


THREE OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS



Raided: Ghost Rider #33 (“Trials and Tribulations” Part 1)(Marvel)($2.99)
by Sean Fahey

Ever wonder what a Native American Spirit of Vengeance looks like? How ‘bout a Puritan Spirit of Vengeance in colonial America, or a Spirit of Vengeance fighter ace during World War I? A prohibition era Ghost Rider? A World War II tank crew inhabited by Spirits of Vengeance, flaming skull heads and all? Pretty insane stuff, and it’s all on display courtesy of artist Tony Moore (The Walking Dead, Fear Agent) in the latest issue of Ghost Rider, as the latest Caretaker (a kind of guide and watcher for a Spirit of Vengeance) recounts a brief history of various Spirits of Vengeance and gets readers up to speed on “the story so far” during this run. Of all the comics Marvel publishes, Ghost Rider is the most over-the-top, no-holds-barred, anything goes among them, and this issue is great jumping on point for new readers, as writer Jason Aaron begins a new chapter in the supernatural adventures of Johnny Blaze. Outrageously fun action horror.  I mean, come on. How can you not appreciate a protagonist that is a motorcycle daredevil with a flaming skull for a head? You can check out some preview pages HERE.


FOUR OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

 

Raided: Deadpool #8 (“Magnum Opus” Part 1 of 4)(Marvel)($2.99)
by  Sean Fahey

If you’re picking up this comic expecting to see Deadpool face off against Norman Osborn’s Thunderbolts, save your coin and just grab the next issue of Thunderbolts. Nothing of consequence happens here. The first of a four-part crossover, wherein the “Merc with the Mouth” looks to collect from Osborn (the current head of SHIELD) what was promised him by Nick Fury (the former head of SHIELD) for throwing in against the Skrulls during Secret Invasion, Deadpool #8 is twenty-two pages of introductory fluff that could have easily been covered in three of four pages. Deadpool sneaks into Avengers Tower looking for Osborn.  Instead, he finds the Thunderbolts. Cue the dramatic music. Issue over. I know I’m coming off as a bit of a smart ass here, but this is exactly why I’m giving up on superhero floppies - almost all of them are written for trades, which means fluff. The slow burn works for mysteries, not action stories. I credit  writer Daniel Way for trying to make Deadpool more than a guy in spandex with a lot of guns by focusing on the character’s borderline schizophrenia and over the top sense of humor. But twenty-two pages of a Gollum-esque internal monologue wears thin. Deadpool is supposed to drive his adversaries up the wall, not the readers. And, I’m sorry, but a gun drawn to look like Rob Liefeld’s version of a gun is not a gun, it’s silly.  Granted, his sense of humor is what sets him apart, but Deadpool’s gear should look like that of an assassin, not a clown. You can check out some preview pages HERE.


TWO OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS



Raided: Fantastic Four #564 (Marvel)($2.99)
by Sean Fahey

The fact that Fantastic Four is the only major title published by Marvel that wasn't forced to tie itself to Secret Invasion or Dark Reign is alone reason enough to like this book. Under writer Mark Millar's stewardship, the series has been (relatively) free to chart its own course (relatively) independent of top-down corporate mandated story lines. Now, add to that the fact that the book is actually a good read that is in keeping with the best traditions of the title and the team. In short, this is what a Marvel superhero comic should be - entertaining and accessible. Fantastic Four #564 kicks off the beginning of a new story-arc, and finds the first family of comics on Christmas vacation in a mysterious Scottish hamlet whose inhabitants engage in a sinister annual ritual. Anyone that has read Shirley Jackson's short story, "The Lottery" can see where this story is going, (and to be honest Millar isn't exactly playing hide the ball) but that doesn't make the story any less engaging. Fantastic Four is one of those rare books that works when it's operating on an epic scale (with large, world ending threats) as much as when it's operating on a personal scale. One month it's Galactus, the next its superstitious Scottish villagers. Either way, it works because we can contextualize and relate to family - and that's always been the greatness of this book. A very good issue of a great run.You can check out some preview pages HERE.


FOUR OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS

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Please send any and all questions and suggestions to me at: scfahey@yahoo.com