If a webcomic is intended all along to become a book — if it’s being created as a book, and put up online as a teaser or buzz-builder along the way — is it somehow less of a webcomic? I’m sure there are webcomics purists who will insist it is: there are purists for everything, and we’re probably all purists for something. But, realistically, what difference does it make?
I discovered Andy Warner’s Brief Histories of Everyday Objects
before the book came out, when he was serializing the individual pieces online
. I read it like a webcomic, was happy when I heard it would be a book, and (eventually) found and read the book. That looks like success, from an ex-publishing hand and still-marketing professional. That looks like the way it’s supposed to work.
Warner’s introduction here doesn’t quite say either way: he developed Brief Histories as “an idea for a comic.” I think I’ve seen elsewhere that he had the book deal in place ahead of time…but maybe I’m making that up. (I like people to have book deals; it makes them happy, pays them for their work, and gets stuff for me to read. Win/win.) However it happened, Brief Histories was on the web, and it is now a book.
Warner gives the history, or a history, of forty-five random common objects, from toothbrushes to bicycles. Each one gets four pages, three and a half of them telling one main narrative, plus a few panels of “briefer histories” at the end for random fun facts that Warner presumably couldn’t fit into the main story. These are not all necessarily the entire history of these objects, or even their original creation — it tends to be a funny story that’s reasonably close to the modern day, meaning a lot of 19th century and early 20th century inventors.
It’s all true, as far as I know, and it’s all pretty funny. Warner is an energetic cartoonist who uses a lot of blacks and tones, giving his pages vibrancy and depth. And, of course, they’re often about obsessed people talking about their creations in semi-anachronistic dialogue from Warner, which adds to the humor. (And will probably annoy purists, again — though purists are not likely to enjoy four-page quick takes on anything.)
To sum up: Brief Histories is funny, enjoyable, and, if you don’t watch out, you just might learn something.
Thor: Ragnarok is funny, bright, colorful and imaginative. Clearly, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s cosmos is a brilliantly lit place and a lot of fun to visit. The 2:10 movie, out on disc now from Walt Disney Home Entertainment is a joy to rewatch because of director Taika Waititi’s imaginative approach to the now-familiar characters.
The blending of the prophesied Norse end times with the beloved Planet Hulk storyline is made to work but only by giving each story short shrift and robbing the former of its power. As much fun as it is to see Thor (Chirrs Hemsworth) shorn of hair, robbed of his enchanted hammer Mjolnir, and subjected to appearing in a remake of Gladiator, the film doesn’t pause long enough to make audiences feel anything for the end of the Norse way of life. Early on, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is revealed to have replaced Odin and allowed his prejudices to reshape life in the fabled kingdom. It has also allowed events to bring back Thor’s heretofore unknown sister Hela (Cate Blanchett), who is determined to force Ragnarok’s early arrival.
Thor and Loki seek the All-Father (Anthony Hopkins) with the aid of Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and once they find him, watch his demise. Once he fades away, Thor and Hela vie for inheriting the throne and once he loses, the movie is kicked into high gear. But Odin’s passing, like that of Asgard itself, is never truly dwelt upon so feels like a rushed plot point. We see refugees board a starship but never know them or understand their plight.
Hela is fascinating, all sensual moves and snarling hatred for being banished from the Nine Realms so is quick to make her mark. However, much of it happens quickly and is then off screen for too long. As a result, the Warriors Three are dispatched so fast you barely register them and no dialogue accounts for the absence of Sif.
Instead, Waititi and screenwriters Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, and Christopher Yost spend more time with Thor and the Hulk on Sakaar, in the clutches of the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum). We feel far more for the Hulk’s two-year exile from Earth thanks to the screen time and Mark Ruffalo’s moving performance.
Neither is not particularly happy of being trapped and help foment rebellion, which had already been brewing thanks to Korg (voiced by Waititi). Along the way they redeem a fallen Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), kick ass, and have a bromance that is a delight to watch. The laughs come at the expense of the gravitas the passing of Asgard and Odin deserve.
The film is out in various additions including a Multi-Screen Format (Blu-ray, DVD, Movies Anywhere Digital HD code). The high definition transfer is superb, capturing every shade in the rainbow and making things pop. The DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 lossless soundtrack is strong, not perfect.
Like the film itself the Special Features are short, fizzy, and avoids depth in favor of light-hearted affection for one another.
Things kick off with the Director Intro (1:44) as Waititi talks taking on the project; Getting In Touch With Your Inner Thor (6:39); Unstoppable Women: Hela & Valkyrie (5:58); Finding Korg (7:34); Sakaar: On the Edge of the Known and Unknown (8:24); Journey Into Mystery (5:47), which gives Jack Kirby his due for creating the original look; Gag Reel (2:18); Team Darryl (6:08), the latest short with Thor’s hapless roommate, now hosting The Grandmaster; Marvel Studios: The First Ten Years – The Evolution of Heroes (5:23); Deleted Scenes (5:43); 8-Bit Sequences, claiming to be pre-film tests for certain sequences but they look like they were done for fun: Sakaar Spaceship Battle (0:58) and Final Bridge Battle (2:17). There’s an entertaining Audio Commentary from Waititi.
Where do I begin? Oh, right, I began two columns ago, because this is column three in my series discussing the “The Trial of The Flash” episode from the The Flash TV show. (And there’s a sentence that’ll drive proofreaders crazy.)
Okay, I’ll actually begin with a SPOILER WARNING. If you’re not caught up on The Flash, I’m about to reveal a couple of episodes worth of endings. Now, with the warning out of the way, like a college professor dressing for his twenty-fifth graduation ceremony, I have to recap.
Barry (The Flash) Allen was on trial for murdering Clifford DeVoe. In reality, DeVoe, a super genius whose hyper brain was literally sapping the vitality from his own body, transferred his consciousness into the body of another man. Then he put his lifeless body in Barry Allen’s apartment and framed Barry Allen for murder.
The trial followed the Constitutional principle of a speedy trial, it barely took up half of the forty-two minutes a one-hour TV episode lasts when you use your DVR to skip the commercials. My writing about the trial has taken a bit longer. Okay, more like a terabit longer. But take heart, the trial’s reached the closing arguments and instructions to the jury stage.
Which I’m not going to write about.
Not because closing arguments and jury instructions are boring – although they are – but because the episode didn’t actually show either to us. About three sentences into defense counsel Cecille Horton‘s one-law-degree-short-of-being-ept closing argument, Barry received a Troubalert that the villain du semaine was wreaking havoc in Central City. Barry told the judge there was an emergency and he was needed. Cecille added that nothing required the defendant to be present during closing arguments and the judge let Barry leave the trial. You might wonder whether the defendant can actually leave a trial while it’s still going on. The answer is yes.
Defendants don’t normally leave their trials, because that tends to make juries think the defendants don’t care about the trial, so why should the juries care about the defendant? But they can leave while trials are going on. And case law says that if a defendant voluntarily absents him or herself from the trial, it can proceed without the defendant.
So Barry left the trial to help Team Flash. Not to mention helping us. As I said earlier, we didn’t have to watch the trial’s boring parts.
It took Flash less than one act to defeat the baddie. It took the same amount of time for the lawyers to finish closing arguments, the judge to deliver the jury instructions, and the jury to reach its verdict. Right before the act break, the jury found Barry guilty.
Some people have complained about the verdict coming in that fast. But it happens. It’s what we call in the legal game a flash verdict— no pun intended, that’s really what they’re called. When juries retire to the deliberating room usually the first thing they do is elect a foreperson. Then lots of juries will take a vote on the verdict just to see where they all stand. If that initial vote comes back with a unanimous guilty verdict, the jury deliberations could be over as quickly as the episode indicated. So I have no problem with how fast the verdict came in. I do have a problem with the jury instructions, however. Those things are never fast.
After the verdict, the prosecutor delivered a speech that he hoped Barry would receive a life sentence given the brutal nature of the crime. Which was grandstanding on his part. Barry had been convicted of murder in the first degree. In Missouri, the mandatory sentence for murder in the first degree is life without the possibility of parole.
Before the judge delivered Barry’s sentence, he delivered a speech about how in all his years on the bench he had never seen a defendant who was more unmoved or had such a lack of regard for human life. You know, the usual shtick.
Also grandstanding, but I can forgive the judge his grandstanding. Judges lay it on thick at sentencing, so they can show the voters they’re tough on crime. It tends to get them reelected. When prosecutors lay it on thick and show that they don’t even know what their state’s mandatory sentence laws are, they tend not to be reelected.
Which brings us to the end of “The Trial of The Flash,” but not our column. See while Barry was serving his sentence in Iron Heights Prison, Warden Wolfe discovered that Barry was The Flash. So three episodes later, in “True Colors,” Warden Wolfe made a deal to sell Barry and some of the other super villains in Iron Heights to Amunet Black, a super villain who trafficked in the super-powered people black market. When Barry and the other super villains learned about Wolfe’s plan, they attempted an escape during the course of which all the super villains and Warden Wolfe died. Team Flash told Barry that he should finish the escape plan so that he could be free and help Team Flash defeat Clifford DeVoe. Barry refused.
He was willing to help the others escape to keep Wolfe from selling them on the black market, but that was no longer a possibility. Barry was going to stay in prison until Team Flash could find a way to get him out of prison legally. That would be the only way he could ever feel truly free.
And later that episode, Team Flash did figure out a way to get Barry out of prison. The Elongated Man used his stretching powers to make himself look like Clifford DeVoe and appeared in court. “DeVoe” told the judge that he hadn’t died, he had been in some weird state of unconsciousness. The judge didn’t think to ask any questions such as how DeVoe survived the autopsy which would certainly have been required on his body before Barry could ever have been brought to trial, and ordered Barry released.
So that was Team Flash’s plan to get Barry out prison legally? Committing a fraud upon the court? If that’s the kind of “legal” method they were willing to use, why didn’t they just bribe the jury during Barry’s trial? It would have saved them a lot of time and us a lot of grief.
As you might be able to tell from the year in the post title, I’ve gotten more than a little lackadaisical about keeping up with this annual series of the best in comics created by North Americans. (I reviewed 2006
at the beginning of 2007, 2007 later in 2007, 2008 in 2008, 2009 in 2009, 2010
in 2011 after the next book was published, 2011
in 2012, 2012
in 2013, 2014
in 2014, and have so far missed 2015, 2016, and 2017. If it were still my job to keep up with things being published, I would probably be deeply ashamed of myself — but it hasn’t been for a decade now, so I’m not.)
But I’m still interested in good comics, as always. So here I finally am with the Jeff Smith-edited The Best American Comics 2013
, only four and a half years after it was published and six-and-a-half to seven-and-a-half years after the work in it originally appeared.
This is the point where one is supposed to say “better late than never,” but I don’t want to tempt anyone. “Best of” volumes always have a problem with age: even in the best of times, the beginning of the year they celebrate is about eighteen months before publication, and sometimes it can be even longer. The Best American Comics has an idiosyncratic September to August “year” to begin with, which makes it more convenient for their publishing schedule but can be confusing to someone trying to keep track of when things were published. (Although there’s no real reason to bother to do that, if you’re not running a media outlet or reprinting books for a living.)
Anyway, in this fine book are full stories and excerpts (more of the latter, as usual) from comics works originally published from September 1, 2011 through August 31, 2012 and made by people either currently resident in North America or “North American” (whatever that means). Translations would be OK as long as you’re French Quebecois or Mexican, I suppose, though I don’t recall seeing any of either in this series so far. (Too bad the old Yiddish publishing industry died out: it would be fun to see that in the modern comics world.)
The usual suspects are represented with the expected work: Alison Bechdel with an excerpt from Are You My Mother?, Craig Thompson with one from Habibi, Leela Corman with a bit from Unterzakhn, Eleanor Davis with “Nita Goes Home,” Derf Backderf with some pages from My Friend Dahmer, and stories from Laura Park, Kate Beaton (who also provides the cover), Gabrielle Bell, Vanessa Davis, and Paul Pope. There’s something of a tropism to cartoonists over teams, which is probably mostly a reflection of what the literary/artistic end of the comics world is like.
More obviously commercial work is represented, too, of various kinds: Faith Erin Hicks is here with an excerpt from Friends With Boys, Tony Puryear with a piece from Concrete Park (before it became a series, I think), and Terry Moore with some of Rachel Rising. All in all, there are 30 comics stories here from 33 creators, with Evan Dorkin showing up twice, as writer of a story with Jill Thompson and cartoonist of a collection of his “Fun” gag strips from Dork!
Some people you might expect are missing: the Hernandez Brothers, Dan Clowes, Peter Bagge, and CharlesBurns are ones I thought of. But, without doing tedious research, I’m not sure what they published in that time period, if anything. And anyone interested in a book like this is going to know who they are to begin with — making room here for Sophie Goldstein and Sammy Harkham and Jeremy Sorese is probably better, if we’re making judgments like that.
As always, it’s a kaleidoscope of very different kinds of comics. I tend to check to see if the guest editor has tastes wide enough that there’s at least one story in the book that I don’t like or get at all — paradoxically, that’s what makes the best editors. Smith doesn’t manage to do that, which means either my tastes keep getting wider or they’re very in tune with his to begin with.
Any book in this series is worth reading, if you like comics and want a sampler of what’s good out there. I found 2013 a little less adventurous than some other years, but it’s always impossible to tell if that was the year or the editor. Libraries have a lot of these books; check ’em out there. It’s what I do, these days.
BURBANK, CA (March 1, 2018) – Warner Archive Collection (WAC) celebrates the 20th anniversary of Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero with a remastered Blu-ray™ release of the award-winning animated film. Now available for preorders, Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero will be available March 27, 2018 via wb.com/warnerarchive and your favorite online retailer.
To hail the arrival of Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero on Blu-ray™, WAC will host an hour-long panel at WonderCon on Friday, March 23 at 1:00pm in Room 300B. Warner Archive Podcast hosts D.W. Ferranti & Matthew Patterson and some surprise guests will show remastered footage and discuss the film and the evolution of Mr. Freeze from a goofy villain into an endearing multi-dimensional character who just wants to find a cure for his dying wife.
Originally released as a direct-to-video film on March 17, 1998, Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero will be released on Blu-ray™ in its original 4×3 Fullframe aspect ratio. The 67-minute film will be accompanied by several special features, including Art of Batman: Music Montage; Get the Picture: How to Draw Batman; the film’s theatrical trailer; and the Batman: The Animated Series/The Bew Batman Adventures/Batman Beyond “Mr. Freeze Saga” in chronological order – four episodes entitled “Heart of Ice,” “Deep Freeze,” “Cold Comfort” and “Meltdown.” The episodes will be presented in standard definition.
In Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero, Batman faces his coolest case ever when Mr. Freeze returns to Gotham City and kidnaps Batgirl. While unraveling the mystery of Batgirl’s disappearance, Batman and Robin discover that she is part of Mr. Freeze’s frigid plan to save his dying wife – no matter what the cost. With time running out, Batman and Robin must find Gotham’s most cold-blooded villain and prevent him from putting Batgirl “on ice” forever.
Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero is directed by Boyd Kirkland, who also helmed 21 episodes of Batman: The Animated Series as well as serving as a sequence director on Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. The script is written by Kirkland and Randy Rogel, who penned nine episodes of BTAS – but is probably best known for his prolific songwriting on Steven Spielberg Presents Animaniacs. Andrea Romano (of course) served as casting and dialogue director.
The film was honored as the Annie Award winner for Best Home Video/Animation.
The voice cast is led by Kevin Conroy, the preeminent voice of Batman, who went head-to-head with Michael Ansara (Guns of the Magnificent Seven, Harum Scarum) as he also reprised his BTAS role of Dr. Victor Fries/Mr. Freeze.
“Watching Michael Ansara portray the anguish and passion in Freeze’s love for Nora was beautiful,” recalls Conroy. “It was an acting lesson.”
Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero also reunites key members of the Batman: The Animated Series cast, including Loren Lester (Robin/Dick Grayson), Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (Alfred), Robert Costanzo (Detective Harvey Bullock), Robert Hastings (Commissioner Gordon), Marilu Henner (Veronica Vreeland), Mari Devon (Summer Gleeson) and Liane Schirmer (Lt. Renee Montoya).
George Dzundza (The Deer Hunter, Law & Order), who voiced several characters in BTAS, joined the Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero cast as Dr. Gregory Belson. The film also features Mary Kay Bergman in her first and only turn as Barbara Gordon/Batgirl, and Dean Jones (The Love Bug) as Dean Arbagast. The cast also includes Rahi Azizi as Koonak, Lauren Tom as Mariko, and veteran voice actors Frank Welker, Tress MacNeille, Townsend Coleman, Neil Ross, Randy Thompson and Ed Gilbert. Notable on-camera actors Brian George (Seinfeld) and Carl Lumbly (Alias, Justice League/Justice League Unlimited) also provide voices for the film.
