BATMAN R.I.P.

ACHTUNG! SPOILERS & PLOT DETAILS WILL BE DISCUSSED UNREPENTANTLY. Proceed at your own risk, fanboy.

So we’ve finally come to the end of the BATMAN R.I.P. storyline, and a lot of us are still scratching our heads. Well, it’s not really the end– we’ve got what’s being promoted as Batman’s entire history covered by Grant Morrison in two issues. And to do that they’ll have to be the shortest or longest two issues in all comic book history. I mean, it’s either, “Bang. I must become a bat! Yr the devil! BOOM! R.I.P.” Or it’s going to be longer than 52.

Anyhow, I’m a big Grant Morrison fan and was laying off judgment on this arc till it had concluded, but after reading back through it all, I’m not exactly sure what this story was doing and why. While its seeds were planted early into his Morrison’s run on Batman (the “ZUR EN ARRH” graffitti appears in #558, the first issue of his run), and it all seems obvious now– out of all the separate arcs he’s written so far, the R.I.P. storyline itself has been the least satisfying. And while a large part of that may be Morrison drawing on some seriously esoteric aspects of Batman continuity, I think a large part of the blame is on penciller Tony Daniel’s incoherent layouts.

Just about any artist is going to look bad after following the phenomenally talented JH Williams the III (and what may be my favorite Batman story arc of all time on “The Black Glove,”) but Daniels’ storytelling has actually gotten worse over the course of his run on the title. During the altogether crappy crossover, “The Resurrection of Ras Al Ghul,” Daniels’ panels are pretty well-paced and the action is clear, even if I don’t particularly like his character renderings. And in issues #672-674 dealing with Dr. Hurt’s three replacement Batmen, the art remains coherent with some splash pages I daresay I liked! (With the notable exception of the whole fake-arm escape thing in #674, which was real awkward and maybe impossible for anyone to draw, but awkward nonetheless.) In #675, a new inker excentuated the worst parts of Daniel’s pencils and beginning with #676 the official start of the “Batman R.I.P.” storyline, the art literally begins to lose the plot.

Morrison like many writers, sometimes gives pencillers lay-outs to work from and may be responsible for the pace of action in the storyline– but it’s hard for me to believe after seeing what Williams and Andy Kubert did with the scripts given to them that we couldn’t have gotten something a whole lot better and readable out of the whole storyline. Again it’s rough to compare Daniels to veterans like Williams or Kubert, but even if I dislike Daniels art, my criticism isn’t with the way he draws a single face or figure as much as it is with the way he’s laid it all out. To be fair, Kubert isn’t really a favorite of mine in any fashion, but I’ll be damned if the man doesn’t know how to lay out a page.

Also, now that we’ve seen Batman go down with the devil in a helicopter crash, it really seems like Paul Dini’s craptacular “Heart of Hush” storyline really was a “fuck you” to Morrison’s Batman RIP storyline like I thought it might be. Other than being a lot crappier to read (but easier on the eyes thanks to Dustin Nguyen), Dini’s storyline has a lot of parallels to R.I.P., most notably the “mysterious villain from the past utilizes other villains to wear Batman down” aspect, and the ambiguous death in a helicopter crash at the end of both. Of course, by all rights Hush should’ve just died in the crash (largely because he’s a worthless and empty character), but he survives and the mediocre status quo is maintained, nothing meaningful happens. Is this a meta-commentary on what’s going on with BATMAN R.I.P. or just a crappy shadow of another storyline? Probably the latter, but perhaps one can leave Dini some benefit of the doubt, deserved or undeserved being in the eye of the beholder.

One of the problems with the last couple issues of BATMAN R.I.P. was all the exposition and motivations we were given so flatly: Jezebel Jet’s secret origin via the Black Glove(!) and all that. Classic “telling” versus “showing.” Not that we really needed to hear every single individual’s backstory coming into this, but we got so many flashes of different characters, it would’ve been nice if more of them, especially Dr. Hurt himself, made a bigger impression as personalities. But even after all the noise and action has subsided, Morrison still managed to write some of my favorite Batman storylines and moments during his run. The demonic son, the Club of Heroes, and the ninja Man-Bats were all fantastic. Right now I’m just unclear as to why Bruce Wayne is gone, and while I’m not necessarily against a successor– I’m looking for a better storytelling reason for him to have died.

With Morrison’s Final Crisis giving us the true death of the Jack Kirby’s New Gods and Fourth World, there have been rumors of a “Fifth World” pantheon where all the A-list DC heroes are going to ascend to. Having fought the Devil, is Batman going to become a God? Maybe, but with all the mandated rewrites that are apparently effecting the ending of Final Crisis and vis-a-vis the entire DC publishing schedule, all bets are presently off. And it’s not just Bruce Wayne’s future that’s unclear, the coming “Battle for the Cowl” storyline wherein all the Bat-heir-apparents (Nightwing, Robin, Damian, maybe Batgirl and whiny shoulda-stayed-dead-douche Jason Todd?) fight to be the goddamn Batman has been passing through writer’s hands like a potato hot with herpes. This all bodes ill for however it’s all going to shake out for Batman in the DCU at large, and along with the rewrites afflicting the end of Morrison’s magnum opus, it only makes the general prognosis for everything DC seem all the more dismal.

Happy Birthday Sparky

Charles Schulz was born today in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1922. An only child (and like Charlie Brown the son of a barber), Schulz was a timid youth who grew up to be a withdrawn and neurotic adult. He fought at the tail-end of WWII, participating in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. After the end of the war, Schulz worked as an instructor at Art Instructor, Inc. where he found the inspiration for the Little Red-Haired Girl, a secretary whom married someone else before he could propose to her, and a coworker with the name “Charlie Brown.”

Peanuts was the first comic strip that I truly loved, and one that reflects the isolation and quixotic aspirations of being young. Few artists have had the influence that Schulz has had on mainstream culture, especially while cultivating such a deep reverence from artists and creators whose work is far outside that commercial mainstream. To me, the first strip is still my favorite– Schulz’s artistic style is still developing (Charlie Brown doesn’t even have a zig-zag on his shirt), but the core of its wry punchline remains true to the tone and lifetime of the comic strip and its creator.

In Case You Were Wondering…

Mortal Kombat vs. the DC Universe is just as stupid as you thought it would be. The characters models are embarassing in their attempts to be “extreme” and/or sexy, the gameplay and special moves are dull, voice acting is predictably bad, just a general lack of imagination in every conceivable category. And the fatalaties– the only real draw of an MK game are  all pretty lame as a whole. They’re all familiar MK moves with DCU character models swapped in. You’d think that maybe they could’ve come up with some new stuff (especially for the DCU’s “Heroic Brutalities”) but I didn’t see a single thing that didn’t make me yawn when I saw it in 1996.

Since the fatalaties are pretty much the only reason to check out the game, here’s a link to an appropriately poor quality youtube video of all the various fatalities.

Review: The Joker by Brian Azzarello

Drinking game: everytime the story gets predictable, take a shot!

The Joker
Written by Brian Azzarello
Illustrated by Lee Bermejo

While its prestige format and labored art attempt to elevate it beyond a simple cash-in on The Dark Knight, Brian Azzarello’s The Joker is a big disappointment. On the coattails of TDK’s box-office success, we get a Joker story that doesn’t really seem to be about the Joker, even if the slashed smile resembles his cinematic stand-in. The main problem with Azzarello’s story is that he makes the Joker and his criminal aspirations seem so… ordinary. Joker gets released from Arkham (with no explanation as to the how/why) and is obsessed with reestablishing his criminal empire and rebuilding his cash flow by strong-arming the various Gotham gangs headed by familiar super-villains.

And really, that’s it. Joker as hard-boiled crime boss is boh-ring, especially through the first person narrative lens of Jonny Frost, whose rise from Joker’s flunky to number 2, is supposed to engage the reader but fails because Jonny is such a cypher and charicature of criminal desires and background.

I generally like Azzarello’s writing okay, and a previous collaboration with 100 Bullets artist Eduardo Risso on Batman: Broken City worked when it attempted to recontextualized Batman’s rogues gallery into more contemporary criminal types. Killer Croc vainly dressed in pimp suits and rocking an iced-out grill?Awesome.

Riddler's got matching tattoos on his other side...

But in The Joker, similar revisions grate and fall flat. Croc is now just a huge black guy with eczema. Harley Quinn is a voiceless stripper with no agency of her own. And why does the Riddler gangster limp and have shitty tribal-ish tattoos on his exposed navel? No idea, I just know that I don’t like it.

Obviously, artist Lee Bermejo shares in the blame for the poorly executed visual reimaginings– and his art, while often glossily lush, is largely inconsistent. In word and picture, I never felt like the Joker ever got consistently rendered. It’s not like say, Grant Morrison’s Joker, where inconsistency and instability is built into the character and essential to understanding his chaotic nature. With Azzarello, I just got the sense that I was reading a paint-by-numbers crime story with nothing really Joker-y about it. It’s not like every Joker story needs poisonous clown fish or exploding cream pies or anything like that, but aside from a tendancy to pun there’s little to distinguish this character from any other psycho.

Part of what makes his character in The Dark Knight so striking, is that the Joker is less a criminal than a force majeur– an agent of entropy whose actions are inevitable, nearly unstoppable, and lacking reason. As others have pointed out, the Joker is insane, he’s artful at times and corny at others but more than anything he’s more than just a cheap hood or a scary guy with face paint. Overall it’s not a terrible story, but Azzarello’s fundamental mistake is to take what’s alien, provocative, and inventive about the Joker and replace it with something that’s ordinary, edgeless, and all too familiar.

RE: Diving Deep Into the Shallow End, an ADDENDUM

Should’ve also mentioned that comics-related TV show, Heroes was also watched a few times in the past month, largely out of morbid curiosity. Despite being leaden and hugely anti-climactic, season 1 was largely watchable as far as television serials went. Sure, the interconnected storylines never really connected together in a satisfying way, but whatever– they blew shit up with superpowers and right up to the anti-climax, I had some genuine interest in seeing where it was going. At least until season 2, which was in a word: stupid. Some poorly planned stunt-casting (RIP Veronica Mars!) gone awry, a lot of annoying over-exposition in the dialogue, and a buttload of syrupy schmaltz made for a truly craptacular crapfest. The teen romance between the cheerleader and the faux-rebel kid was so wooden that it lessened the show’s carbon footprint. The Mohinder/Parkman “My Two Dads” shtick with the dead-eyed kid (who had all the powers of Google Maps) led me to recall the inhuman monster that is Paul Reiser, and anything that leads to thinking about Paul Reiser’s soul-sucking awfulness is anathema in my book. And Masi Oka is cute, at least as cute as an amalgamation of emasculating Asian-stereotypes can be.

Well, this latest season has been shark-jumping its way into a category of complete unwatchability. Heroes has never been particularly original, but Mohinder’s turn into a villain isn’t so much similar to The Fly, as it is exactly what happens in that movie. EXACTLY. And trying to reform the previous two seasons big bad Sylar (the pathological bed-wetter who killed people to steal their powers,) into a good guy is a head-smackingly horrendous choice. It undercuts everything we knew or understood about the character up till now. It smells like a case of elevating an actor/character over the story, which is a bonehead move for an action serial that previously relied on tight cliffhangers and overarching mysteries. The character 180’s, hyperbolic melodrama, and lame villains (the shrew-faced party clown is a perv? Who’d a thunk?) resemble the antics of  pro wrasslers discussed in the previous post, than the sort of episodic adventure we were originally hooked (if only slightly) to. Where once there were some good character ideas, we now have mostly incomprehensible motivations, a lot of lame new superpowers, and a gaping lack of direction where the plot should be.

Given all that, it comes as no surprise to me that lead writer/executive producer Jeph Loeb has gotten fired. I don’t know if there’s any way to fix the show now, but at this point I don’t think I’d care if they did.

Diving Deep Into The Shallows

So it’s like I never came back, as this here nerd-blog has lacked in regularity and discipline as far as updates go. I have good excuses though! Or maybe just excuses… Well, between my recently purchased Xbox 360 and the advent of a Digital Cable connection– I’ve basically been drowning in my television. Between hacking my way through Fable 2 and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (both are awesome BTW), I think I’ve spent the majority of my free time in the past few weeks either slaying zombies or impersonating them while glued to re-runs of No Reservations and various VH1/MTV reality TV shows. I’m quite convinced that thanks to the combined efforts of the cast of Flavor of Love (and all its antecedents) we will see the incubation and derivation of weaponised STD’s in our lifetime. Truly, this is a great country.

USA! USA!

And speaking of patriotism, genital shrinkage and narcotics abuse, we have the beautiful and bathetic displays of ego and more ego on like Hulk Hogan’s Celebrity Championship Wrestling where you can see “celebrities” like Todd Bridges (Diff’rent Strokes! Felonies!), Dustin Diamond (Screech! and…. Screech!),  Nikki Ziering (she married that asshole from 90210 and has large boobs! Large!) in a competition to see which ex-star slash parole-violater makes the most convicing wrestler. And being a realistic pro wrestler is basically being about mastering a multitude of skills. One must be a shitty stunt-man, soap opera actor, carnival barker and meth addict. With his absurd egocentricism, propensity towards violent outbursts, and long history of substance abuse– I’ll call it early and say that Danny Bonnaduce is your winner.  Sorry Frank Stallone, I don’t see a championship belt in your future. You’ll just have to fall back on that being-the-brother-of-a-famous-but-not-particularly-well-respected-actor thing you got going.

As far as I can tell, the only “project” that Chef Jeff is working towards (on the appropriately named, Chef Jeff Project) is getting his group of troubled teens used to being berated for following guidelines that were never laid out. And I think that by any standard, that is probably the most important and well-learned lesson that anyone who aspires to a career in the restaurant industry can get. The premise of the show is that ex-con Chef Jeff (try saying “Chef Jeff” over and over) teaches some young ex-cons the basic skills they need to succeed in the restaurant industry and become a big-shot TV chef like him. But he never teaches them anything. He lays out what they have to do, leaves and then yells at them for fucking up. It’s clear most of the kids have all the knife-handling skills of maladjusted puppies (who don’t have thumbs and are bad pets) but he’s still somehow shocked that after showing them exactly nothing, the juvenile delinquents didn’t perfectly execute 100 8oz. servings of chicken picatta for the cast of Survivor: New Jersey. Chef Jeff calls it teaching, but you know what yelling at someone for failing to do what they couldn’t have known you expected of them is called? Tough love guys, TUFF L-U-V (at least according to my parents).

Also, I’d like to know who produces all those Sci-Fi original movies– I’ve got an idea that I don’t want to say too much about that I think would be perfect. It’s a monster movie, but with a twist! All I’ll say is that the creatures involved kill their (sexy) teenage victims in a grisly fashion, and that these killer monsters may or may not have thumbs and may or may not be adorable when piled together inside a cardboard box.

Despite TV consuming much of my brain/soul in the past few weeks, I just want it to be said that I have been reading lots of comics. And thinking about comics. Just not blogging about them. Which is kind of like telling you that I meant to do my homework, but didn’t because a thumbless puppy ate it. Which he did right before yelling at me for not writing my homework on salami. More comics and salumi coming up, I promise.