Who you calling "raggedy"? (Image via splashpage.mtv.com)
“You know, I love all my raggedy children,” he said. “But if I could be anywhere, I’d be on board Serenity.”
Me too, Joss. Me too. I’ve loved Mal ever since I saw him kick the bad guy’s lackey into the ship’s engine during the pilot (well, technically episode two). That is a man I would drink with. In case you’ve somehow never seen that:
So, how could Firefly get any cooler? Mash it up with The Avengers!
What I am about to write is not going to be objective, because The Comedian from Watchmen is just about my favorite comic character.
How much my favorite? Well, I not only have the movie action figure, but I also have the Comedian badge pin – you know, one of the ones that DC sold for a buck a whack in 1987 or so and which made Alan Moore lose his shit and then tell then-publisher Jeanette Kahn that he thought “DC” stood for “dook corporation.”
But that’s not all…
…I also rock the man’s badge on the front bumper of my car. And I can already hear you: “But Rob,” you’re saying, “The bloodstain is on the wrong side!” To which I can only say: not if you see me in your rearview mirror when I’m rumbling up behind you, motherfucker.
My point is that The Comedian and me? We’re close. We’ve been close since I was sixteen years old. I know The Comedian, Mr. Azzarello. And this?
This is not The Comedian.
Hey, didja hear about the dude in Texas who skated on an indictment for murder after he beat a guy to death when he caught the dude raping his treasured and favorite child?
What does that have to do with comics, you might ask? Well, funny story: The Comedian is my favorite character in Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen… and Brian Azzarello’s and J. G. Jones’s Before Watchmen release of Comedian was released today. And considering Crisis On Infinite Midlives contributor Trebuchet tweeted the following to me this afternoon:
I’m guessing (Rob) hasn’t read today’s Before Watchmen release… I would have heard the screams from here…
…it means that… this…
…means the end of our broadcast day.
Ah well; regardless of yet another potentially sketchy rework of a classic Watchmen character, it’s still looking like an interesting week. We’ve got a new The Walking Dead, a personal favorite in Peter David’s X-Factor, an Avengers Vs. X-Men Round… Still…, and a bunch of other cool stuff!
But before we can be aggrieved by retroactive changes to The Comedian, first we need to read them. So until that time…
…see you tomorrow, suckers!
Let’s get the obvious out of the way right now: Untold Tales of The Punisher Max #1 isn’t about The Punisher. Sure, The Punisher’s in it, but only in nine out of 34 pages, which is a ratio that makes calling this a Punisher comic like calling Fight Club a tale of handling insurance claims, or Deep Throat a medical thriller.
No, this is not a comic book about The Punisher. What it is is a reasonably crackling and profane – if not particularly original – little near-noir crime tale about a degenerate gambler in over his head and trying to solve the problem by loading his pockets with lead ingots. It is about organized crime as seen by way of the wrong side of its customer service department, with an engaging protagonist and a compelling plot… provided you don’t stop and think about it too hard.
This is the story of gambling addict Jimmy Frisco (someday I’ll read a crime story about a degenerate scumbag named Quincy Madison Worthington IV… or at least one who hasn’t run for President of The United States) who is twelve grand into a bookie named Shelly, who has an idea for an interesting and novel way for Jimmy to work off his debt. And despite Shelly’s goon’s early question to Jimmy vis a vis which hand he uses to jerk off, it does not involve Old Fashioneds through a glory hole. No, Shelly wants Jimmy – a regular guy who works in an auto body shop – to kill a jockey for him. Otherwise, Shelly’s taking the twelve large out of Jimmy’s ass… which loops us straight back to the glory hole imagery. But I digress.
Barbara Gordon finds herself questioning her approach to crime fighting as issue #10 of Batgirl opens. While punching out one of a handful of local thugs attempting to boost expensive cars at a fundraiser being held in the low rent Cherry Hill neighborhood, she asks herself, “Am I being a jerk right now?” Rich folks show up with their pricey vehicles in an area of town where the people have nothing, as if purposefully tempting those on the down and out to do wrong, and Babs helps them out with a punch to the face. Is she part of the problem?
Of course, that’s a giant oversimplification of the economic, cultural, and legal forces at work in poverty stricken urban environments, but writer Gail Simone is willing to at least posit the question as to how poor neighborhoods could improve their quality of life and decrease their crime rates. Sure, her question includes the potential of assistance from masked vigilantes, but it also begins to broach the larger issues of community involvement versus gentrification. As someone who moved into a neighborhood that is undergoing a slow process of gentrification, I must admit that Simone has my attention with this topic. As more folks like me move into this neighborhood, I worry that the quirky little things that drew me to it to begin with will begin to vanilla out: the ethnic grocery stores, the mom and pop hair cutting businesses, the porn stores. Yes. In the age of the internet, I somehow live in a neighborhood with two “adult entertainment” stores.
But, with the nifty local amenities, there is still a sketchy element to the area. The first time Rob and I had guests out to out place for New Year’s Eve, they were greeted by the sight of a wino pissing on one of our neighbor’s front steps. I’ve had my car side swiped while its been parked on the street and was unlucky in trying to find witnesses due to language barriers. Oh, and did I mention the porn stores?
As satisfying as it might be to dress up as a giant bat to terrify the local drunks coming out of the Salvation Army across the street in hope that they remember that the nearby stoops are not for pooping, I suspect that I’d eventually run afoul of the law. So, I must wait for gentrification to continues its slow process of squeezing folks out renewal. Since Gotham seems to take a broader view to the whole masked justice thing, what answers to the problem of decay in urban neighborhoods does Gail Simone uncover?
Barbara Gordon does a little soul searching and considers ways to “monetize asskicking”…along with spoilers…after the jump.
Ok, maybe you don’t have to “be the tree” to take it down in one fell swoop, but it doesn’t hurt to be 6’4″ like the late President Abraham Lincoln…or to dredge up and concentrate all the hate and rage that you feel at having your mother taken from you at a young age…by vampires.
As someone who loved the novel, I’m pretty excited about the movie version, which opens this Friday, June 22. A United States President who took care of vampire threats while seeing the country through a turbulent civil war – that’s a guy whose candidacy I could get behind in an election. Oh well, until our nation finds itself in the middle of a vampire apocalypse, we have this movie.
In The Massive, writer Brian Wood is back in the wheelhouse he established in Channel Zero and DMZ: a story about pragmatic survivors in a world at least two degrees more dystopian than our own. It is an interesting book with action, at least a couple of well-thought characters, in a world that has obviously been carefully planned and built by Wood, with high stakes for everyone involved, and loads in a background enigmatic mystery to boot. It’s tinkering with big ideas – such as, what happens if Al Gore is correct, and we’re about to be joylessly fistfucked by global warming – and doing it using a pragmatic, non-sci-fi viewpoint. It appears ambitious.
So why am I sitting here wondering: where the fuck is that second zodiac speedboat from the Goddamned chase scene? But we’ll get to that in a minute.
I say again for the record: this book is Wood back in his element. The man made his bones looking at How Things Are, extrapolating How Things Might Be In Two Years If It All Goes To Shit, and stacking that world with people fighting that system. Channel Zero is a classic of that style – a story from the late 90s based on the simple idea of, “What if, after cleaning up Times Square by throwing all the winos and junkies in Riker’s Island, Mayor Giuliani could do anything he wanted?” And in that world he put Jennie 2.5, a media hacker raging against the machine with guerrilla journalism that foretold blogging and social media revolution by about ten years… although, to be fair, Christian Slater and Pump Up The Volume not only got there first, but had gratuitous Samantha Mathis jugs and Leonard Cohen tunes. But I digress.
Back in July 2005, at the San Diego Comic-Con, Joe Quesada said that, if the classic Marvel Universe ever crossed over with the Ultimate Marvel Universe, it would mean that Marvel was “officially out of ideas.” It is now June 2012, and by Joey Q’s own metrics, Marvel is officially out of ideas. Say hello to Spider-Men #1.
This is the first time that the 616 has mixed with the Ultimate Universe (Think a Resse’s, your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter deal except ram-fed full of anticipated marketing dollars), but it’s not the first time that the Ultimate Universe has crossed over, even at the hands of Spider-Men writer Brian Michael Bendis. Bendis was one of the writers of Ultimate Power, which crossed the Ultimate world with Marvel’s other alternate world of Squadron Supreme, back in late 2006, or about four months after Quesada announced that such a crossover would equal an utter dearth of ideas. That crossover event led to Nick Fury leading Squadron Supreme, that book eventually quietly disappearing, the Ultimate Universe being almost destroyed by Magneto, the reboot of the Ultimate Universe (But, but Marvel doesn’t reboot! And their crossovers are always well-conceived and executed!), and, ultimately (get it?), the death of the original Ultimate Spider-Man.
My point is, when it comes to Ultimate universe crossovers, Spider-Men is facing a bar that is comfortably low. So the big question is: does Spider-Men make it over that bar? Well, considering this is the first issue of a Bendis miniseries, the answer must be: how the fuck should I know? Almost nothing happens in this comic. This issue is all set-up.
Are you just now coming off the awesome high that was seeing The Avengers movie three times straight, possibly in back to back viewings? Do you perhaps find yourself approaching the debut of The Amazing Spider-Man with cautious enthusiasm, nay, excitement? Have you already staked out sidewalk space in front of your local megaplex in anticipation of scoring the first midnight screening tickets to The Dark Knight Rises? Well then, friends, this fan made trailer for Justice League is for you.
This trailer was created by YouTube user SouperboyX, in advance of Warner Brothers finally beginning to make mumble noises of “Oh, perhaps we could make a team movie after all. What’s that super group we have called? Superfriends? Ask Rick’s boy in accounting. He knows that nerd shit.” He describes it:
Here we basically have a ‘Suicide Squad/VRA/Brainiac Invasion’ type thing going on here. Probably what would be the three main acts of a film. Since everything has to be pretty big. I can’t really show you guys how I would mesh together those storylines in a two and a half minute trailer, but you guys can leave that to your imagination I suppose!
Which is about right, if you think about it. The suits at the studio would probably throw in notes to the writers demanding that more villains be shoe horned into the movie, distracting from the plot. Spider-Man 3, I’m looking in your direction.
SouperboyX seems to have sourced his trailer from a variety of footage, including Smallville, the Wonder Woman pilot, Green Lantern, and The Dark Knight Rises. I have to admit I got a kick out of seeing Justin Hartley back as Green Arrow. I’m still bummed he’s not going to be in the new Green Arrow series.
Check out the trailer (and a HELL of a trailer it is, too!), after the jump.
I will say this about Silk Spectre #1, written by Darwyn Cooke with art by Amanda Conner: these are two artists who are bringing their A Game to the very possibly losing proposition of Before Watchmen.
This is a book that, at least generally, looks like Watchmen, reads more like Watchmen than Cooke’s Minutemen (which reads more like a standard DC superhero comic, only with Hooded Justice as Batman and Nite Owl as Batman and Captain Metropolis as Batman), and embraces the character-over-action ethos of Watchmen, and what action is here is visceral and real-feeling, as it generally did in its parent book.
The book features a relatable and believable sixteen year old female protagonist, and a believable character in her mother, provided you believe that any WASPy community middle-1960s suburban community would accept a Polish former softcore porn star and her Jewish husband… but it also portrays that community being intolerant of the “family” in a way that feels realistic… for 1966. If it took place anytime after 1988, Sally Jupiter’s house would be surrounded by teenaged boys with copies of She Devils In Silk whimpering for an autograph and praying she understood that “autograph” was shorthand for “handjob.” But I digress.
My point is that, God help me, Silk Spectre #1 is a good comic book. However, it is a good comic book that takes place in the Watchmen universe, and I’m not sure my prejudices in favor of the original will ever allow me to rank one of these Before Watchmen books as great.
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