Joshua Malbin

X-Men: First Class — Sebastian Shaw is surrounded by armed G-Men on a balcony who shoot round after round into his body on the floor below.

But because his power allows him to absorb and control limitless energy, he easily shoots their firepower back at them.

Time Bandits: Evil is surrounded by the time cavalry: cowboys, hoplites, the odd space cannon. They give him everything they’ve got…

…and back it comes.

I think it’s a deliberate quote.

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Al Gore has a long essay in Rolling Stone that’s 90 percent about the complete failure of print and TV media to tell the public the truth about the dangers of global warming in the face of industry-financed denialists. The opening paragraphs:

The first time I remember hearing the question “is it real?” was when I went as a young boy to see a traveling show put on by “professional wrestlers” one summer evening in the gym of the Forks River Elementary School in Elmwood, Tennessee.

..

But the most unusual and in some ways most interesting character in these dramas was the referee: Whenever the bad guy committed a gross and obvious violation of the “rules” — such as they were — like using a metal folding chair to smack the good guy in the head, the referee always seemed to be preoccupied with one of the cornermen, or looking the other way. Yet whenever the good guy — after absorbing more abuse and unfairness than any reasonable person could tolerate — committed the slightest infraction, the referee was all over him.

…

That is pretty much the role now being played by most of the news media in refereeing the current wrestling match over whether global warming is “real,” and whether it has any connection to the constant dumping of 90 million tons of heat-trapping emissions into the Earth’s thin shell of atmosphere every 24 hours.

The headline in the New York Times? “In Essay, Gore Criticizes Obama on Climate.” CNN? “Gore: Obama has ‘failed.’” Shit, even-the-liberal TalkingPointsMemo: “Al Gore: President Obama Has Failed To Lead On Climate Change.”

Granted, Gore does make that charge, buried after 5,000 other words (approximately) of a 7,000-word essay, and it is true. And I think he foresaw the headlines: “Even writing an article like this one carries risks; opponents of the president will excerpt the criticism and strip it of context,” he writes.

But it must be damned frustrating to be Al Gore,  criticizing institutions to their face and having them deliberately mishear you in real time.

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Patt the Hat interviews Stan the Man in the Los Angeles Times:

Comics have gone from being despised and derided to an art form. How did that happen?

I’d like to think Marvel had a lot to do with that. When I started, I worked for a publisher [who] used to say: “Don’t use words of more than two syllables. Don’t worry about characterization or dialogue. Just give me pages with a lot of action.”

And I did that for years, and then I got really sick of it.

So I started using a college-level vocabulary. I felt the reader would look it up in a dictionary, which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, or get it by osmosis. The publisher really hated that, but it didn’t hurt the sales of the books. I also started playing up the characterization so you differentiated between one and the other.

My big run with Marvel was from 1984-1988, and reading comics increased my word power. Reed Richards was a great vocab instructor — I remember learning the word “amorphous” from him. I picked up “gangrene” from an episode when She-Hulk got her hand stuck inside a bubble of slow-moving time, which came with a complex idea about blood flow.

What did you learn from comic books? The ones for kids, if you’ll pardon the expression. Joe Sacco doesn’t count.

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I’m not sure what spurred me to buy this first Golly trade paperback. Possibly a dim memory associated with author Phil Hester, who I had an idea that I liked. (It turns out I do like him. He wrote The Atheist and The Coffin, both of which I loved though they disappeared from print far too fast.) In any case I bought it and got one of those rare and overwhelmingly welcome surprises that keep me taking chances on unknown comics even though, you know, Sturgeon’s Law.

Because Golly is really fun. It feels as if someone took Garth Ennis’s Preacher and drained out all the meanspiritedness, sadistic jokes, and sexism.

Golly Munhollen is a carnie. He grabs the circus strongwoman’s ass one day, she knocks him out, and he’s visited by an angel who informs him that the Apocalypse has been postponed indefinitely due to lack of interest, and in the meanwhile he’s been appointed the clean-up squad for all those demons left running around the world. When Golly asks the logical question—why me and not someone smarter—the angel tells him that from a heavenly perspective the difference between him and a genius is negligible.

“It would be like asking you to look into a puddle and select the smartest amoeba,” it says. “You will do.”

Now, as a way of bypassing the usual pitfalls of origin stories, this is simply brilliant. It provides an inarguable logic for choosing our hero and gets it out of the way fast. It also sets up a recurring gag in which the angel is much more interested in mundane elements of Earthly existence than it is in Golly.

“I have fulfilled my mission with you, but I have more important tasks at hand,” the angel tells him. “I am currently engaged in a complex and taxing endeavor on another part of your planet… I am bringing an earthworm into existence in Australia.”

The pace is brisk, with two demonic forces vanquished in the five issues collected here. Golly’s carnie friends are an easygoing, entertaining band of demon-hunters and Hester never overindulges in flashy action sequences, preferring to linger in dialogue in the moments before and after them. Think trailer-park Buffy, perhaps.

No long-term arcs have kicked in yet, and presumably if Golly ever manages to put out more issues Hester will have to come up with some eventually. These five issues came out between August 2008 and May 2010, though, which is a) very slow and b) not terribly encouraging for future installments. For now, I’ll just recommend that everybody pick up the trade and maybe Image will pay Hester to write us some more.

Preview here.

PS: It occurs to me that this would be a great candidate for Josh K-Sky’s quest to turn superhero comics into TV shows. Granted, it’s not a commercial success as a comic so I’m not sure who would want to option it, but Josh, get on that.

PPS: It further occurs to me that such a show would be pretty similar to Reaper, with the added benefit of being set in a circus rather than a big-box store. Reaper should have been a better show than it was. Spotty writing is partly to blame, but there was enough good writing that I think it’s fairer to blame much more Bret Harrison’s complete lack of charisma and actually negative chemistry with Missy Peregrym. Ray Wise and Rick Gonzalez made me smile every time they were onscreen. Give me Golly with Rick Gonzalez as Golly Munhollen and Ray Wise as the voice of his sidekick friend’s ashes in the PBR can. Make it happen, Hollywood!

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Back in the very early days of Love and Rockets there was a third Hernandez brother. Mario Hernandez contributed a long sci-fi piece called “Somewhere in California” and also pitched in on the “Errata Stigmata” stories, and then pretty much disappeared for the next twenty years while Jaime and Gilbert reinvented the medium.

He resurfaced in 2008 and 2009 with Citizen Rex, a six-issue miniseries just collected into a new trade hardback by Dark Horse. The byline credits Mario and Gilbert equally for story and art, but since the art looks to me like pure Gilbert I’m inclined to give most of the credit for the story to Mario. From Mario’s notes at the end it looks like he devised the story and did initial character sketches and layouts, and then Gilbert drew the final art, refined the layouts, and helped redraft the story.

Of course it’s impossible to tell for sure. But I’m also inclined to believe the writing is Mario’s work because the story, another sci-fi tale, suffers from the same problems as “Somewhere in California” so many years ago: too many characters, too little time spent developing those characters, and too much information dumped about their world in place of characterization. I suppose it’s also true that Gilbert’s town of Palomar features a big cast of characters, but Gilbert has demonstrated over and over that he knows how to take his time with them, focusing on one and then another until they all become real.

That’s not to say there aren’t lots of good story ideas jumping all over each other in Citizen Rex. The first-ever sentient robot is reactivated by an evil scientist in cahoots with a mob boss. A crusading blogger related to one of the city’s leading families gets mixed up with the daughter of the robot’s socialite girlfriend. A giant block of unidentifiable matter appears in the city center. Advocates of prosthetic limbs and robot rights clash.

Yet too many promising ideas can be just as big of a problem as no original ideas. If we are to care about them characters need room to breathe, to demonstrate who they are specifically, beyond descriptions like “sentient robot hero.” I never found that room and kept getting confused about the various players’ motivations as a result. It’s all very madcap, and maybe some people will like it, but I just kept wishing it would slow down.

Preview here.

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I can’t tell what 50 Girls 50 aspires to be. By the end of the first issue it sure seems like it’s aiming for the cheesiness of Cinemax soft-core porn, but I can’t tell whether that’s ironic, and if so, what exactly the joke is.

The premise of 50 Girls 50 is pretty strong: Earth is running out of resources and must send astronauts traveling faster than light to fetch supplies from distant stars. As it turns out, though, the only people who can survive faster-than-light travel are women with three X chromosomes, who coincidentally enough are all super-hot.

In issue #1 they’re supposed to be heading home but somehow fail to make their important wormhole rendezvous and end up floating near an unknown planet. Two crew members head down to the surface to investigate, for reasons I don’t quite understand, since they really should be worrying about why they’re not home.

Here’s where the issue starts to get ridiculous. The atmosphere of the planet dissolves plastics. I suppose that’s theoretically possible if it were dense with hydrocarbons, though of course then it wouldn’t be breathable. Except writers Frank Cho (author of Chew) and Doug Murray tell us explicitly that it is breathable. Why? Because everything the women are wearing is made of plastic fiber. Their spacesuits, clothes, and underwear rot and fall away over the course of the issue, leaving our two bubble-breasted Amazons naked, but still breathing.

To be clear, what’s ridiculous isn’t the breathability of the air. It’s the silliness of turning most of issue #1 into an extended striptease. It’s absurdly blatant pandering, on the level of That Scene in Game of Thrones a couple of weeks back.

It’s so blatant, in fact, that like That Scene one has to wonder whether it might not be meant ironically. But as I said, what’s the joke in that case? Maybe I’ll buy issue #2 to find out. Or maybe I’ll just buy it for the titties.

Or no, the Internet has porn for that.

Preview here.

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Why do all the Heat players keep spitting out their mouthguards and chewing with them hanging half out of their mouths? It’s gross and they all do it.

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