Archive for August, 2010
Dark Rain
by Joshua Malbin on Aug.30, 2010, under Comics
As former Bush chief of staff Andrew Card educated us all when it came to the Iraq War, ”From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” That’s my excuse for falling silent, anyway: there hasn’t been anything new to review.
But we have hit the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and for that we get Dark Rain, set in New Orleans during the flood. It’s an edifying contrast with Sweets, which I panned not too long ago: it is possible use a caper plot and relatively stock characters to explore an interesting landscape and have the result turn out well. But you need to do the work to make the landscape vivid.
The caper is this: a couple of ex-cons team up to rob a bank in the middle of the flooded Ninth Ward. One is a greedy, weaselly former bank employee, the other an ex-paratrooper who just wants enough to settle his child-support debts. They’re in a race with the mercenaries of Dark Rain (i.e., Blackwater), and as they motorboat through New Orleans’ watery streets they interact with many of the disaster’s iconic scenes: People trapped and dehydrated on rooftops. Dead bodies face down in the floodwaters. The overpass from which some people were lifted by helicopter. The chaos and abandonment of the Superdome. The blockade on the bridge to Gretna.
They don’t just pass these incidents by in the background, either. The main characters, or at least characters who end up in the story, interact with each event. Think of it as the Titanic approach to storytelling: work a conventional plot into a well-known disaster and invite your audience to enter it through your characters.
It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that Mat Johnson is sadly one of the few successful indie comic writers in America who writes about race and racism at all. It’s like him, Adrian Tomine, Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, and that’s about all I can think of. So check this out, and check out his earlier, really fantastic Incognegro.
Brief preview below the fold.
Walter Mitty (1UP)
by Josh K-sky on Aug.16, 2010, under Comics, Movies
Scott Pilgrim vs The World would have been the best video game movie if it was, in fact, based on a video game instead of on a comic book informed by video games. As it is, it’s a brisk and hilarious mishmash of comic book tropes, which work poorly, video game tropes, which work really well, and dreadful gender politics.
The comic book (which I haven’t read — maybe Big Josh will weigh in) introduced a video-game world that the movie faithfully reproduces. Chyrons spring up around characters and props, placing them in context and giving the viewer vital information as if about an opponent. When Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) fights each of his girlfriend Ramona’s evil exes, the fights are riffs on Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter and other arcade games from the period just following Q*bert and the collapse of my own interest (I will whup you at Ms. Pac-Man, but little else).
In addition to the video game stylistics, the movie also employs comic book stylistics, which suffer in comparison to the former. No movie has played with comic book aesthetics better than American Splendor. Ang Lee’s Hulk gave it a try, but Harvey Pekar’s story benefited from having the form address the content — it is the story of a man who tells his own life in comics. In Scott Pilgrim, the form and experience of video games is native to the original story, which (like The Hulk) happened to be told in comic book form. So effects like having visible ‘D-D-D-D-D’s come out of Scott’s bass, or animating the exit wound when drummer Kim pantomimes shooting herself, add nothing but clutter.
The style of the film is exciting in other, more light-handed ways. Director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) hopscotches through the first act, jumping from setting to setting while remaining in one linear conversation. I’ve seen it done before, but never so deftly or without care for suspension of disbelief, and it allows Scott’s world to be introduced visually without any expositional slowing.
Spoilers and gender politics-grumbling below the fold.
Adventures in Ill-Advised Paragraphs
by Josh K-sky on Aug.15, 2010, under Los Angeles, Politics
There’s nothing wrong with anonymity — in its place. For instance, many people engage in discourse and commerce on the Internet anonymously (assuming the websites they’re dealing with have any scruples) for sound personal reasons.
Michael Hiltzik, Trying to shed light on a shadowy figure in Proposition 23 battle, August 15, 2010
The L.A. Times has suspended Pulitzer-winning business columnist Michael Hiltzik without pay, and discontinued both his column and his weblog, in response to the news that Hiltzik used psuedonyms on his blog and elsewhere to comment on Times-related matters, including his own work.
Opinion L.A. (an latimes.com blog), Hiltzick Suspended, April 28, 2006
It’s a very good column. Hiltzick, probably my favorite L.A. Times columnist, is pushing to expose the donors who are hiding behind the “Adam Smith Foundation” in order to overturn California’s landmark greenhouse gas emissions control law, AB 32. Just… dude. Choose better examples.
Morning Glories #1
by Joshua Malbin on Aug.13, 2010, under Comics
I can’t say right now whether the movie based on Morning Glories will be any good. But I can say, just based on the first issue (which sold out on its first day) that there will definitely be a movie. For all I know there may already be a deal in place; the new trend seems to be to make deals for movies and comics simultaneously.
Morning Glory Academy is basically the Bizarro version of Hogwarts or Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. It’s not clear from the pre-credit sequence—erm, opening pages—whether the children there are extraordinarily gifted in paranormal or merely normal ways. What we see is extreme facility with chemistry, gymnastics, and martial arts. But it is clear that the school is eeeeeeeeeviiiillll. A student tries to escape and the teachers let this ghost thing eat his brain. Or maybe his mind, since it just seems to be sticking a hand through his head.
Then the story steps back to focus on a new set of kids as they say goodbye to their families, some more dysfunctionally than others, and prepare to leave for Morning Glory for the first time. The rest of issue #1 deals with them settling in and making certain initial discoveries about the place, one of which is that it’s eeeeeeevil.
It’s totally entertaining and about an inch and a half deep. I’m fine with that.
One preview here. Another below the fold.
Revolver
by Joshua Malbin on Aug.11, 2010, under Comics
Here’s how I imagine what Matt Kindt (author of 3 Story, among other books) did in writing Revolver. At least, when I’ve ended up with results similar, this is how I’ve gotten there.
He had a great concept. A series of terrorist attacks shakes America, with conventional, biological, and radiological bombs exploding in multiple cities at nearly the same time. Fleeing the newspaper offices where he works, Sam ends up in a car with Jan, his boss. He kills a man, the world is in flames.
And then he wakes up to his ordinary life with his girlfriend Maria, who wants to go shopping for a new table set. Jan treats him just as contemptuously as ever. He can’t figure out what’s happened to him until the clock hits 11:11 and he finds himself back in Armageddon.
So there’s the concept: every day, the main character switches back and forth from world to world, on the run with Jan in one, at home with Maria in the other. He begins to prefer the crisis world to the ordinary one, because there he feels like he’s doing something important every day.
I had a few geek-level sci-fi issues with this setup. Like, it established that his body isn’t the same between the two worlds. Injuries sustained in one don’t carry over to the other. So what happens to him in one world while he’s conscious in the other? Does he go limp? No one around comments on it if he does. Does his body keep performing tasks without his being aware of it? He never remarks on things being different from the way he left them so that too seems unlikely, and anyway it would raise more unanswered questions about the consciousness in charge when “he” is absent. Or does he somehow experience simultaneous events in alternating fashion?
Whatever. It’s basically a solid conceit.
Then Kindt had to find a plot to fill out the concept, give it the shape of a story. So he kept writing until he found one that fit well enough, retconned the beginning, and wrapped up the end. At least, as I say, that’s how I imagine it happened, because that’s how I’ve done it myself.
You end up with an antagonist introduced only midway through the book and an explanation for what’s going on that doesn’t fully track. (For example [SPOILER ALERT], the villain confesses to Sam that he’s caused all the chaos in the one world by exploiting knowledge gleaned in the other. That doesn’t make any sense. Wouldn’t the hard part of building a biological or radiological bomb no matter where you got the blueprint? And how is it easier to gain access to deadly secrets in one world rather than the other before the bombs go off?)
Oh well. A solid premise an an 80% satisfying resolution still puts Matt Kindt ahead of nine of ten other comic book authors out there, and makes the book worth buying.
Preview below the fold.
Not Good Enough
by Joshua Malbin on Aug.10, 2010, under New York, Politics
Look, I appreciate it’s his normal desire to have things all ways, but David Paterson is being an even bigger weenie than usual:
Gov. Paterson said Tuesday the developers of the mosque near Ground Zero might consider moving the project – and even floated the idea of offering them state land.
…Paterson said the anxiety felt by mosque opponents was “not without cause” and that New York still suffers from the Sept. 11 attacks.
Paterson stressed however that he has no objections to the proposed center, which houses a mosque, and that there is “no reason” why it should not be built.
Unacceptable. There is no legitimate “cause” for 9/11 victims to be upset here. Any equivocating on that point implies that there is a legitimate connection to be drawn between crazy terrorists and the world’s 1 billion Muslims, even if in the next breath you say the opposite explicitly.
Are the Courts Progressive?
by Josh K-sky on Aug.09, 2010, under Politics
There’s a temptation for liberals, especially when confronted with demagogic initiatives like California’s Prop 187 and Prop 8 and Arizona’s SB1070 to look to the courts and the function of judicial review as the locus of minority protection in U.S. democracy. In its ugliest form, this takes the form of an anti-populist snobbery: “thank god we have the courts to protect us from yahoos.”
An old Scott Lemieux post provides a good summary of why, although this may be the case from time to time, progressive outcomes are rarely due to judicial review. Long excerpt below the fold.
A Change Is Gonna Come
by Josh K-sky on Aug.07, 2010, under Politics
[M]arriage has always been understood, with very few exceptions, as the union of a man and a woman. This is true across time, across cultures, across religious traditions, etc. Does it really seem likely that this remarkable consensus is nothing but a nasty desire of one group to flaunt its privileged position over a minority? Is it really feasible that the world’s cultures all consulted about how to put down gay people and came up with marriage as the solution?
William Duncan, director of the Marriage Law Foundation, in National Review‘s The Corner
It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of “sexual orientation.” The is not a development that would have been foreseen from the viewpoint of the fin de siècle itself[...].
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
42. Same-sex love and intimacy are well-documented in human history. The concept of an identity based on object desire; that is, whether an individual desires a relationship with someone of the opposite sex (heterosexual), same sex (homosexual) or either sex (bisexual), developed in the late nineteenth century.
a. Tr 531:25-533:24 (Chauncey: The categories of heterosexual and homosexual emerged in the late nineteenth century, although there were people at all time periods in American history whose primary erotic and emotional attractions were to people of the same sex.);
Judge Vaughn Walker in Perry vs. Schwarzenegger
This is a court ruling, not an academic seminar at Berkeley.
Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner
One of the most impressive and least discussed aspect of the ruling that has overturned Proposition 8 is its sense of history. The standard right-wing dismissal of gay marriage is that marriage has for millennia been an institution that joins a man and a woman, and that same-sex marriage hasn’t even been on the agenda of gay rights groups for very long. Even sympathetic critics see the place of marriage on the gay agenda as emerging “as if out of nowhere over just the past few years”, and not without reason.
The excerpt I pulled from the ruling is slightly misleading; for all the attention Perry vs. Schwarzenegger gives to the historical contingency of homosexuality, it gives much more to the evolving qualities of marriage. Racial restrictions and divorce laws loosen over time. Historian Nancy Cott testified about the laws of coverture and the ways in which “the wife was covered, in effect, by her husband’s legal and economic identity.”
“Chauncey” cited above refers to George Chauncey, who authored the amicus Historian’s Brief in Lawrence vs. Texas. There’s been much discussion about how the legal framework of Walker’s decision is aimed directly at Justice Kennedy, seen as the swing Supreme Court vote. Less has been made about the importance of the historical grounding to Kennedy; as Rick Perlstein wrote in an article about Chauncey, “the heart of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s new legal doctrine in the 6–3 decision [of Lawrence vs. Texas], ranging over some dozen paragraphs, is a virtual recapitulation of the Historian’s Brief arguments.”
It would be hard for the Supreme Court to allow a radical challenge to an eternal truth, and right-wing rhetoric like the reductio ad absurdum in the William Duncan quote depends on this. But the case has been carefully made that a century-long shift has led to an incontrovertible conclusion. The challenge no longer looks like a radical upset, but as a mostly typical (and slightly queer) American pattern of expansion of justice and liberty.
Happy (Belated) Birthday to Us!
by Josh K-sky on Aug.07, 2010, under Uncategorized
We just marked our First Blogoversary. Big Josh showed up here on August 5th, 2009 with a review of Chew #1; his enthusiasm may have led directly to a TV deal.
Here’s to another year of humbuggery and wet blanketism, love and theft, the occasional great comment thread, and all the vampire dental anatomy the Internet needs. Thanks to our several faithful readers, and thank you Josh for having me aboard.
Four Eyes TPB Vol. 1
by Joshua Malbin on Aug.06, 2010, under Comics
I raved about Joe Kelly’s book I Kill Giants, and while the first trade paperback collecting his series Four Eyes doesn’t quite pack the same emotional punch, it’s still very good.
It’s set in New York during the Great Depression, where the most exciting illicit activity isn’t booze, but dragon fighting (think cockfighting rather than bullfighting). To obtain dragons for the ring, teams of men enter dens to steal dragon eggs. Young Enrico, maybe nine or ten, watches his father die doing this, and as a result he hates dragons. He goes to the fights because he wants to see dragons die, and then for the princely sum of four dollars joins a crew of “beaters” (the disposable workers who distract a dragon while the professionals go for her eggs).
Kelly sets himself a hard task here. He lets us know from the beginning—by setting protesters around the fringes of the action and by letting us peek into newspapers—that dragon fighting is just as cruel and evil a bloodsport as any in our real world. But he puts his protagonist on the wrong side of the moral divide, letting him remain the tough little boy who hates dragons and wants to see them suffer and die, and asks us to sympathize with him anyway. (Amores Perros succeeded, for example, only by shutting its eyes to the immorality of dogfighting. Joe Kelly has denied himself that escape hatch.)
A big part of what makes that sympathy happen is Max Fiumara’s art. Fiumara draws Enrico bottom-heavy, a scrawny upper body atop oversized pants and shoes, his hands often hidden inside giant gauntlets that reach to his elbows, and a scowl on his triangular, big-eyed face. In other words, he uses every visual trick there is to make the boy look like an adorable pixie acting tough and taking on responsibilities too big for him.
At the end of this first volume Enrico rescues a runt dragon, the titular Four Eyes, and bonds with it. But he bonds with it as a survivor, a fighter like him, and it’s not hard to see what’s coming in future issues: Four Eyes will have to enter the arena. Meaning the series will continue to be a tricky pleasure.
Preview below the fold.