Posts from — November 2007

Tonight’s face-wrecking brought to you courtesy of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, from Phonogram #1.

Bahlactus is truth!

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Listening to: The English Beat - Mirror In The Bathroom

Only Reader, I’m sorry to divert this blog from its regular content, but I want to talk about something very personal.

I’m sick, you see. I’m still functional, and have been living with my illness for about two decades now, but like all ailments, there are good days and bad days and lately, the bad days have been a lot more frequent.

It’s difficult to talk about, Only Reader, but I…am an X-Men fan.

I started reading in earnest during Claremont’s Brood storyline, and the oldest issue I still managed to hang onto after the Great Comic Purge features Kitty and Peter in Murderworld trying to save Arcade’s life with the help of a legion of robot X-Men. I have a huge amount of love for Claremont in his prime, and a rather large amount of apologism for his work now.*

Because of my comics hiatus through much of the 90s, I missed a good portion of the really drasty bits of X-Men canon, and I think that’s key to my continued love affair with the franchise. I came back to the X-books a month or two before Colossus died, and I thought that the books were dumb four-color fun with a little glimmer of the social conscience and soap opera that Claremont infused into the title during his decades running the show. My favorite issues from that pre-Morrison era are Uncanny #391, which chronicles a ill-conceived attempt at male bonding between Cyclops and his father, and the issue of X-Men - the issue number escapes me - where Kitty scatters Peter’s ashes and then quits (only to show back up in a Claremont-penned mini some time later, then guest in X-treme X-Men, and then rejoin the X-Men proper at the start of Whedon’s Astonishing - which doesn’t seem to me like a very wholehearted retirement).

And then the change came. Claremont and Larocca’s X-treme is largely forgettable except for the Invasion and Prisoner of Fire arcs, and the less said about Joe Casey (and then Chuck Austen) on Uncanny, with its convoluted retcon of Nightcrawler’s entry into the priesthood***, the better we’ll all be.

Morrison’s New X-Men, though, made me feel like I was a little kid again, reading these characters for the first time. He evolved the philosophy of the franchise and put so many absolutely mind-blowing moments into his run. Fun fact: for about five seconds, I was against Morrison and Quitely taking over the book when it was first announced, chiefly because long-time acquaintance Tom Derenick had just been tapped as the penciler on Uncanny before the creative team shuffle. Of course, then I read the first issue of Morrison’s run and the scales fell from my eyes.

There was something missing from the X-Men, though, as good as New X-Men was: the crossovers. The massive crossover is deeply rooted in X-tradition, all the way back to the Uncanny/Avengers/Fantastic Four affair that brought Jean Grey back and launched X-Factor. The books - all under the watchful eye of Claremont and Byrne and Louise Simonson - were so tightly plotted that the crossovers read coherently even without the intervening material, at least up through Inferno. After the creative change that Marvel touted as X-Men: ReLoad (or some such thing), the individual books became more isolated from one another than ever, and that lack of a discernible shared continuity stung.

The X-universe became a morass of retcons and misfires in the wake of Morrison’s departure, however, with the only bright spot being Christina Weir and Nunzio DeFilippis’s New Mutants. As decompressed and talky and all-around mediocre as House of M was, it has to be given some kind of credit for repurposing the X-brand, giving the disparate books a common sense of direction and bringing the family, soap opera element back to the books. It wasn’t until the current crop of writers - Carey, David, Brubaker, Kyle and Yost - that it’s finally gotten good again, though. And of course, we have a big, crazy crossover.

Messiah CompleX, the fifth chapter of which hits shelves today, has been absolutely the best X-Men event I’ve read since Here Comes Tomorrow. It’s a bit worrying that we’re nearing the halfway mark and we still don’t have a lot of plot information, but I’m willing to forgive it because what is there - action, speechifying, and a real sense of the mutants’ desperation - is well-executed and very, very welcome.

Most importantly, though, this story has made me love Scott Summers. Cyclops has always been a flawed character, to be sure - he left his wife and infant son to cavort around New York with his resurrected ex-girlfriend - but I’ve gathered some perspective on his flaws. Scott is a mess of a human being - and that’s very obvious to anyone who reads the character for more than a page or two - but he’s really adept at holding himself together when it’s time for him to step up and be a leader. There were glimmers of it in Morrison’s New X-Men, again in The Day After, and a metric ton of great Cyclops moments in Astonishing X-Men, but Messiah CompleX practically bombards the reader with great reasons why Scott Summers is the leader of the X-Men.

Even with the apparent lack of New X-Men, my favorite of the current roster, in the aftermath of the event, this is still a ride worth taking for anybody with even a passing interest in the characters. If you’re on the fence about whether or not to pick it up, it’s worth it to pick up Brubaker’s one-shot and give it a read. It sets the whole event up nicely without making you do a ton of back reading to figure out what’s going on.

Oh, and my money’s on the mutant baby being a reborn Jean Grey. And on Magneto being the mysterious party who has the baby. And on Beast dying.

*Though his House of M: The Day After one-shot was simply phenomenal.**

**Though World’s End, the Uncanny arc where Marvel Girl turns into a dinosaur and tries to kill the X-Men, is easily the dumbest thing I can even attempt to comprehend.

***He even had a priesty-looking collar on his uniform.

Watch this:

If you didn’t like that, don’t watch Day Watch.

The Mist is the first Stephen King story I ever read. I was eight years old. I was rummaging around my grandparents’ farmhouse on a summer afternoon, looking for something fun to do, and I found a copy of Skeleton Crew. I spent about a week reading through the book in order, so of course, I started with “The Mist,” and I was absolutely floored. The attention to detail, the characters, the sheer horror of the situation - all of them grabbed me, but the thing that’s stayed with me forever has been that ending.

When I heard that this story was making the leap to film, my first thought was finally, and the next one, almost immediately on its coattails was there’s no way they’re going to get the ending right. Even with Frank Darabont behind the wheel of the movie, I was too prepared to accept that the book-to-film translation always suffers some loss of awe.

I was wrong.

Darabont nails the story’s ending. My jaw dropped; I honestly can’t remember feeling that sort of wonder/horror mix during a movie, not since I was a kid. Then, not satisfied with that, Darabont keeps going and continues the story out from King’s bleak cliffhanger to the most horrific, haunting, heartbreaking ending I’ve seen in a horror film. Conceptually, it’s not new, but it’s so well-executed that you may tear up.

The rest of the movie follows suit. It’s absolutely phenomenal in every way. The peaks and valleys of suspense are perfectly plotted out and the few release-valve moments are never just cheap jokes; they’re empowering hero moments that have a bit of humor in them.

The Mist is scary, the creatures look great, the gore is solid, the suspense is better, and the movie has an ending that will hit you like a brick to the stomach. Go watch it. If you’re a Stephen King fan, this is probably something you’ve been waiting for, and it won’t disappoint you.

Two high-quality adaptations of two of my favorite King stories in the same year. I still don’t believe it.

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Listening to: Old 97’s - Indefinitely

Avengers Forever #5, Busiek and Pacheco

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Listening to: The Saturday Knights - 45

Francesco Francavilla drawing Matt Wagner’s Zorro comic.

OMAC

Starman in fancy hardcover format.

Jack Kirby

Turkey

Rock Band

And I guess friends and family, too. I guess.

Happy Thanksgiving, guys.

Item: I’ve started playing City of Heroes again. My main is an energy blaster, an old favorite of mine for the sheer fun of knocking people into walls. But I’m also trying a scrapper, a samurai robot cowboy katana scrapper. He doesn’t look nearly as ridiculous as he should yet, but I have some costume changes coming my way.

Item: I have a plethora of mixed feelings about Marvel’s online comics distribution platform, and I’ve remained quiet about it solely because I’m not sure if it’s good or bad. I will say, though, that I’ve been reading online comics the exact same way as Marvel’s presenting them since 1998 or thereabouts, when Dark Horse did something similar. My gut reaction is that if I’m going to pay, then maybe the interface should be newer. I guess the argument is that I’m paying for the content, not the reader, but it’s still vaguely dissatisfying, raising the spectre of the unassailable ‘paper is better’ argument.

As mixed as I am about this for me, this is a great way to use comics in a technologically-integrated classroom setting. And I’m serious about continuing that experiment. Some people I know - well, one person - has already taught an entire semester out of graphic novels, and to positive result.

Item: I’m not sure how I feel about Beowulf yet, but it’s certainly less stiff and creepy than Polar Express was, not to mention unabashedly lusty (not a surprise considering, you know, Vikings). The audience didn’t dig it at all on Friday night, and plenty of people walked out. It does a lot of revising to the original text that may bug purists, too. But it was fun and funny and pretty, so it was worth the eight bucks.

Item: Rock Band tomorrow. My band name this time around, following the impossible-to-improve-upon Sycophant Prog and Miranda Auto, will be Manic Chalice.

Really, if you’ve not read any of the Marvel Adventures books, go and pick a few up. Especially the Jeff Parker-penned ones, like MA Fantastic Four #4 to your left.

Ever since Colossus and Wolverine perfected the art, I’ve been a sucker for people throwing other people at things. Any right-thinking person would be.