Joshua Malbin

Dollhouse was the anti-Battlestar Galactica.

Dollhouse couldn’t have been anything good as regular episodic TV, as evidenced by the mostly crappy starts to both of its short seasons, but it turned out pretty great once it began to ignore all of those requirements and focused on building a single, long plot arc culminating in a thoroughly satisfying finale. In fact, looking back from the finale makes me think of the whole show as rather better than it probably was on average. They made me care what happened to Topher. That took some doing.

Battlestar was entirely plotted, a single continuous fabric of narrative that started to unravel as it approached its finale. In fact, its finale was so godawful that it ruined all of what came before it for me.

Part of the difference, I suppose, is that Dollhouse gave up on mystery by its midway point. Epitaph One, the conclusion to season 1, told us exactly what was in store and pretty much what it meant. Season 2 gave us more context and background, but based its climax on its characters. Battlestar, on the other hand, multiplied its mysteries season by season, and then at the end waved them all away with a completely bogus explanation.

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The last issue of the first Kick-Ass story arc just came out, and since the movie release is only three months away, it’s worth looking back over the book’s first two years (yes, only eight issues in almost two years) to try to figure out why this story I loved so much at first went off the rails.

The premise was fantastic: a nerdy kid with no training or special abilities decides to put on a costume and go out and fight crime. In his first real altercation he foils a mugging, taking on three guys at once. He also gets beaten so badly he ends up in the hospital. But someone records the fight on a cell phone, uploads it to YouTube, and Kick-Ass the superhero becomes a national sensation. Of course in his secret-identity life, in which he still goes to high school with his costume on under his clothes, he’s busy pretending to be gay so that girls will deign to talk to him.

I thought this would be a story that took the desire to be special seriously, and let the kid be special in a real way, in a real world. (See, for example, the true story of Master Legend, a guy who lives in Orlando, dresses up in a superhero costume, and goes out to fight crime. He also rustles up donations of supplies for the homeless, launches a campaign to educate them about a staph epidemic, and helps force the state government to relocate endangered gopher tortoises out of the path of a freeway. He is simultaneously ludicrous and, in a deep sense, a hero.)

But instead Mark Millar ended up using his fake superhero as a backdoor into a plot involving real superheroes, a Punisher-type character and his ninja ten-year-old daughter. As soon as they made their entrance the tone shifted and we got several straight issues of slapstick violence, culminating in this issue 8 bloodbath. (There’s an onomatopoetic joke involving shooting a guy’s penis off and then splitting his head with a cleaver, for instance.) Maybe I should have known Millar’s intentions didn’t lie in the direction I wanted from the tag line on the cover of issue 2: “Sickening Violence…Just The Way You Like It!”

From the previews it looks like Kick-Ass the movie follows the comic’s storyline pretty closely. For once I wish the screenwriters who wrote the adaptation had decided to diverge more. I don’t think Mark Millar would have cared—Wanted the movie had only the vaguest of resemblances to Wanted the comic book.

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I’m in the comic-book store today, because Wednesday is new comic day, and this kid of about thirteen or fourteen comes in with his dad. I’ve seen him there a few times before. He has Asperger’s or something: can’t modulate the tone of his voice, is totally obsessed with a specific subject (in this case, comics), seems oblivious to other people’s reactions to him. He strides inside confidently and announces that Batman and Robin is the only good comic out this week, everything else is crap.

He’s carrying a pole about five feet long with some kind of yellow mechanism at the end he’s holding topmost. I see it, assume it’s a piece of merchandising for some movie or comic franchise I don’t know, and don’t remark on it much further than that. The store owner banters with him and his dad a little about comics and whatnot, and finally asks him, “So what’s that you’ve got there?”

“This?” the kid declares, holding his pole aloft. “You might call it a mop handle, but in fact it’s my staff of all cool things that are awesome!”

Top that, Barack.

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Does that work? I have no insight from inside an elected representative’s office, but my impression from watching these campaigns mounted semiregularly by the liberal blogosphere over the past few years is that they don’t accomplish much. There’s one going on now to encourage the House to pass the Senate health care bill, if necessary with amendments passed through budget reconciliation.

Set aside the fact that after you subtract one Republican (Cao) and at least ten anti-choice Stupak amendment fanatics who don’t like Ben Nelson’s still evil compromise language, you’re left considerably short of being able to pass anything. Maybe this is just me getting cynical in my old age, but I can’t think of a single example in the last five years when calls to Congress from Daily Kos readers changed a result.

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Several of the volumes of Rex Mundi now have been careful to point out, on their back covers, that the comic predates The Da Vinci Code. The latest and last, Rex Mundi: Gate of God is no exception. It is true, but they were both beaten hollow by Foucault’s Pendulum a good fifteen years earlier, which made merciless fun of the conspiricizing they both take so seriously.

For those who aren’t familiar with the story so far, it’s far more inventive than Dan Brown’s, which seems to be a pretty straightforward mystery based on other people’s conspiracy theories. (From what I know of it. I haven’t read Dan Brown and don’t plan to.) Rather than setting his conspiracy about the bloodline of Jesus in the modern Catholic Church, Arvid Nelson constructed an entire alternate world in which the Reformation and the French Revolution both failed. The setting is France in the 1930s, still ruled by the monarchy, in a Europe where the Catholic Church (and its Inquisition) are still major political forces. Also, magic works.

It started out highly promising, with political and mystical forces all at work together in a major mystery whose surface the main character, Dr. Julien Sauniere, is only beginning to scratch. I was puzzled by the fact that France devolves into Nazism around book 3 or 4, setting off a war more similar to World War I than II—does Nelson mean to imply that Nazism was historically inevitable, even under vastly different political circumstances? And as the curtain was drawn back further and further on the central mysteries, I found myself disappointed by them.

Perhaps that’s inevitable. It’s always easier to hint at mysteries than reveal them.

Anyway, this last volume is entirely given to a final cataclysmic confrontation between good guy and bad guy, with the help of some pretty silly magic wine and a collapsing castle. It’s satisfying in a formal way. Thematically, it’s supposed to have something to do with Baha’i prophecy, apparently, but I wasn’t really sure what to make of that.

Preview of book 1 here.

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I suppose there are some readers of this blog who haven’t met one or the other Joshes in person. Here’s a little taste of what we look (and of course, sound) like.

I am everyone in this video. (Another reason to choose Yale.) That is, everyone except for the one who is Josh Malbin. He can be seen wearing the Chinese dragon costume in the “8 Cultural Centers” bit.

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I’m hardly the only person to say this today, but Scott Brown would be foolish not to run for president. A state senator who lept to the U.S. Senate. Brown’s opponent did him plenty of favors, but Obama’s opponent was so laughable as to raise reasonable questions about Obama’s ability to survive an actual competitive election. Brown is telegenic, looks good naked, has a national base but can probably (by virtue of living in Massachusetts alone) mitigate fears that he aligns perfectly with that base’s beliefs. The career paths of John Kennedy, Bob Dole, John Kerry, Barack Obama and John McCain all deprecate the value of “experience”, suggesting that candidates quickly grow stale in the Senate. At some level, voters prefer governors with executive records; legislative records pile up for consumption by op researchers; magic and local identity wear off.

Given a wide-open field and two and a half years to the convention, I’ll put up $125 right now that Brown takes the GOP nomination if you’ll give me 4:1 on it. Who wants a piece of that action? Honest Harry holds.

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The Los Angeles Times features waiters who work at Los Angeles’s two notable south-of-Mulholland delis: Langer’s and Canter’s. Canter’s is the Hollywood deli, set in a neighborhood full of young writers and actors, up all night, and host to The Kibitz Room (where Boots recently brought Edmund Welles). Langer’s, The Restaurant Saved By The Red Line, sits in “transitional” MacArthur Park, an easy lunch destination for downtown office workers who can ride the subway or get curbside to-go using their cell phones.

And Langer’s — as the Times notes 20 grafs in — is union.

Eva Francois began serving at Canter’s 17 years ago. The nighttime shift allowed her to spend days with her young son, but once he grew older, she was able to work days. A co-worker who served at both delis suggested lunch shifts at Langer’s, an extra job she has been working the last eight years. Like many dual-deli waiters, Francois takes the health benefits at Langer’s — a union shop.

Good on them for spelling out the difference. What the article neglects to mention–though the story’s in the archives–is that a little less than twenty years ago, Canter’s was union too. As I understand it, the original owners passed management to their children, who overturned a longtime arrangement with labor. A decertification campaign bitterly divided the staff. The former bass player in my band was a union organizer who worked closely with one of the shop stewards who manned that picket line (at a different job, years later). So we were not about to play The Kibitz Room.

Also, Langer’s is widely thought to make the best pastrami in the United States. Any meat-eating New Yorkers wanna come try it?

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Or at least moves too fast for irony. Or something.

Jesus.

UPDATE: This is apparently really a case of life imitating someone else’s art.

The irony mark or irony point (؟) (French: point d’ironie; also called a snark or zing) is a proposed punctuation mark that was suggested to be used to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level (e.g. irony, sarcasm, etc.)….This mark ؟ was proposed by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm (alias Marcel Bernhardt) at the end of the 19th century.

Someone French, no less.

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At first I thought The Unwritten was okay, nothing special. A cute little metafictional story about Tommy Taylor, a guy who may or may not be the incarnation of the main character in his vanished father’s fantasy novels. This failed to grab me in part because those fantasy novels seemed to be a lamer version of Harry Potter crossed with the Hardy Boys, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to notice how dumb they were.

A few issues in, though, it becomes quite clear that Mike Carey and Peter Gross know exactly what they’re doing. A group of writers meets in the house where Frankenstein was conceived, and after a few pages to remind us of the power of Mary Shelley’s work, we meet her literary heirs:

I’m Sonia Taft, creator of vampire detective Medley Silver. Sexy undead chick solves crimes in the big city. It’s noir fusion.

I’m Simon Grove. I write cosmic metaphysical horror. Most of my work comes from the Lovecraft estate. I’m finishing off three novels that he left in note form.

My name is Lauren Sedgwick, but I write as Lauren Snow. I’m just finishing a big magic realist psycho-gothic epic. Umm–not yet commissioned.

‘The name’s Bond, James Bond.’ Nah, I’m Stanley Jardine. I do post-modern, self-referential slasher horror. Lots of blood, but–you know, played for laughs.

I’m James Mortenson, and since you’re thinking it, I’m happy to say it. I write torture porn, which is horror unencumbered by the demands of plot or character. The real deal.

Later, the group is hunted through the house by a scythe-wielding maniac. “It does no good to run,” he declares.

And it does no good to hide. But I know what it’s like, your brain shuts down, and you follow your instincts. Or at least you think you do. But you know what you’re really doing? When you flee through the night, or crawl into your little bolthole? You know what’s really guiding you? Controlling you? Pushing you on? Genre conventions.

That last line is delivered after he cuts in two a woman hiding behind a curtain, which is of course two references in one: horror movies and Hamlet.

And then Tommy Taylor isn’t even in the last issue. It’s all told from the point of view of Rudyard Kipling, who explains how the shadowy conspiracy that sent forth the scythe killer made him a literary success for their own reasons, and how he ultimately rebelled by writing the Just So Stories. For which they destroyed his family.

In other words, The Unwritten appears to be genuinely interested in the power of narratives to shape the real world as well as their fictional one. This could be one of the many cases where authors promise more depth than they can deliver. But at least Carey and Gross have the ambition to make the promise.

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