Bleary-eyed 2008 Best-Of, Blurst-Of…

This list has no arbitrary number, and no real parameters other than I’m trying (dimly) to recall all that resonated with me the most, for better or worse, in the bygone year. Plot-related SPOILERS will be discussed, because it’s hard to be specific in praise/critique without acknowledging details. Here’s my not-so-thin-line between love and hate.

LOVED:

• All-Star Superman was perfect in almost every way. Grant Morrison embraced everything Superman inspired, assembling cluttered continuity and archetypical resonances into a heroic ideal distilled to its essence. Frank Quitely continues to be my favorite of Morrison’s recurring collaborators. While there are other artists whom I might prefer in general, Quitely’s unique style and sense of pacing just seems to fit ineffably better.

• The Death of Captain America managed to turn what could’ve been a cheap stunt, into one of the most compelling espionage stories I’ve ever read. As a lefty and contrarian, I’ve never been a fan of the unabashed patriotism and jingoism Captain America’s represented, but Ed Brubaker helped carve out a character I cared about– before shooting him dead and replacing him with his long-lost sidekick. And of course he made me like the resurrected sidekick too, taking the new Captain America into murkier and doubt-ridden places that a stalwart, Hitler-punching Steve Rogers may not have been able to go. Brubaker’s Criminal has consistently been one of the best reads in any given month and his new series Incognito is off to a great start for the best of 2009.
• Fallout 3 destroyed my social life by being 2008’s most absorbing video game experience. GTA IV was good, and even great at times,  and Fable 2 was fun in its own right– but nothing beat the bombed-out post-apocalyptic wastes of Fallout’s immense world. Fallout‘s mix of humor, nostalgia, cold-war paranoia, and engaging game-play has kept me glued to my 360 for the last third of the year.
• The Dark Knight was among the best movies I saw in 2008, regardless of genre and my own geekiness. Heath Ledger’s electric performance, the epic cinematography, overarching themes of dodgy morality, and complex plotting made TDK one of the year’s best (especially in IMAX intensity).  Iron Man was fun too, because hanging out with Robert Downey Jr. would be fun, but it just didn’t put all the pieces together the way TDK did.
• Let The Right One In was my favorite movie of the year, its frosty Swedish setting sealing the tension within its story of nascent desire and adolescent violence. The fact that it was a teen vampire movie of sorts, puts it into immediate comparison with Twilight and Anne Rice’s libidinous stories, but LTROI distinguishes itself by its emotional naturalism and the fact that in many ways it was a purer and more loyal exploration of the vampire myth.

HATED:

• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was dumber than even I expected it to be. Steven Spielberg managed to crowbar in all his pet obsessions (daddy issues, alien life, and the irrepressibility of youth!) into one of the densest disappointments of the year. Even if the story wasn’t totally inane, the performances were uniformly horrible. Harrison Ford may as well have phoned it in from Spielberg’s favorite alien planet, Cate Blanchett’s horrendous Soviet accent and phallus-envy sword play were a constant irritation, and Karen Allen seemed to be reprising a role as a heretofore unknown and unhinged cat-lady. And of course, one can’t ignore that the story itself was inane. Indy 4 suffered from constant credulity-straining suspensions of disbelief (even the jungle monkeys hate Socialists!) to forehead-slapping thematic platitudes (“knowledge was their treasure!!”), resulting in a multi-million dollar turd that only Spielberg could’ve directed.
• Detective Comics: Heart of Hush by Paul Dini was a story I can’t believe I even bothered to read. I’d generally been enjoying Dini’s run on Detective, but this storyline was a pathetic attempt to bring some gravitas to the character of Hush. Riddled with cliche’s and cheap flashbacks that attempted to give Hush some depth, this absolutely airless ugh-fest compared all the more unfavorably to Grant Morrison’s convoluted but inspired BATMAN R.I.P.
• Mark Millar used to be a writer I enjoyed (The Ultimates, Ultimate Fantastic Four, etc.), but thanks to its big-screen adaptation, I finally read Wanted, and I truly wish I could unread the ugly, hateful, and ultimately pathetic power-fantasy in its pages. Everything of Millar’s I’ve read (or re-read) since has been colored by that story’s shallow characterizations, puerile attempts at humor, and general bigotry.
• Guy Fieri‘s frosted douche-itude and ubiquity is quickly making the often unbearable Food Network, completely unwatchable. I can stomach Bobby Flay’s overwhelming smarminess, deal with Iron Chef America‘s tepid imitation of the Japanese original, and Alton Brown’s cornball moments in return for glimpses of culinary inspiration and opinion rendered smartly and pointedly by folks like Brown, Mario Batali, Masahiro Morimoto, and Jeffrey Steingarten. But Fieri and his chicken-fried personality represent what’s wrong with how our culture relates to food. I’m not saying we need to populate the TV with granola-fed back-to-the-landers, but I’d take anything over his constant shilling of fried mediocrity and quarter-pound diabetes burgers available at TGIFridays.
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was yet another example of overblown cinematic stupidity. Probably the worst film I saw all year (even after I saw a stop-motion bat try to rape his college sweetheart). Worse because of its attempts to appear profound, shoe-horning Forrest Gump‘s treacly sentimentality onto a creepy, ultimately hollow love story. For something so incredibly overwrought The Curious Case… is amazingly careless. The film doesn’t even follow its own internal logic relating to Brad Pitt’s de-aging (starts normal sized baby that’s old, so it should end with man-sized geezer that’s a baby?), and Cate Blanchett gives another overwhelmingly obnoxious performance in a high-profile movie. Adding to its insipidness, the film fails to do anything meaningful with Hurricane Katrina in its backdrop, insulting the hurricane’s victims and its audience.

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.

Review Revue

All-Star Superman #12 concludes what’s been one of the most moving, inventive, and just plain fun comic reading experiences of my life. I want to devote a longer post to it later this weekend, but in the meantime here’s some talk about this past month of comics…

• Batman Detective Comics #848
• Guerillas #1
• Criminal #5
• Scalped #21
• The Lone Ranger #13
• Buffy: The Vampire Slayer #18
• Ex Machina #38
• Final Crisis: Revelations #2
• Lucky #2

Reviews after the jump…