Category: Columns

John Ostrander: Political Television Theater

The late great newspaper columnist, Mike Royko, once observed of the Chicago city council (I’m paraphrasing), “I never said it was the most politically corrupt council in the world; I said it was the most theatrically politically corrupt council in the world.” There is an inherent theatricality and drama in politics; more so in an election year and a lot more so this election year.

It can also make for good television. Or not, depending on the show. Let’s look at three that are running this summer.

The first is the six episode Political Animals on USA on Sundays at 10 PM. It stars Sigourney Weaver and has a pretty stellar cast, including Ellen Burstyn, Carla Gugino, Vanessa Redgrave and Ciaran Hinds. Weaver plays a (very) Hillary Clinton-esque character, once married to a philandering Southern president (Hinds), then a failed candidate for her party’s presidential candidate, and then Secretary of State to the guy who beat her. She also has two sons: one a hard working straight arrow who is also her chief aide and the other a gay man with lots of problems including substance abuse.

I was really looking forward to this one and now I don’t know if I’ll finish watching the series. It’s more soap opera than anything else and relies too much on the Clinton comparisons to the point of making it predictable. Ciaran Hinds is a wonderful actor (as seen in the wonderful Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day and many other films) but he’s a caricature in this as Weaver’s Bill Clinton-esque husband. He’s more buffoon than anything else and makes Weaver’s character look stupid by her constant return to him.

There’s also stupid plot twists. Weaver’s character, Elaine Barrish Hammond, has decided to run again for president against her boss, the sitting president. That’s never worked for any candidate and she would know that (in fact, it’s pointed out to her in the show); she would become persona-non-grata within her own party and this character is supposed to be politically astute. And I can’t fathom the reason she would do it.

Also, it’s her gay son who has all the emotional problems and drug abuse and that’s so stereotyped. It would have been a lot more interesting if the gay son was the top aide and the straight son who had the emotional problems but that’s not the choice they made.

If I was Hillary Clinton, I’d sue.

Over on HBO, The Newsroom is on the same day and time and it’s Aaron Sorkin’s latest foray into television and it has all of Sorkin’s strengths and weaknesses. Whether you like it or not may be determined by whether or not you like Sorkin; I do so I’m enjoying myself.

The series is set in the newsroom (fancy that) of a nightly news hour show set on a mythical cable news network. Jeff Daniels (who I have long enjoyed as an actor) plays the starring role of Will McAvoy, the anchor who had been coasting too long until he answers a question honestly on a panel. His boss, Charlie Skinner (played by Sam Waterston who is plainly having a good time with this part) brings in McAvoy’s former girlfriend (and lost love), MacKenzie MacHale (played by Emily Mortimer) as McAvoy’s new producer and she shakes him up to the point where he becomes Keith Olbermann (sorta). I should also mention that the head of the network is played by Jane Fonda, the former Mrs. Ted Turner, who is also having too much fun.

Cannily, the show is set in the recent past (within the past two years approximately) that allows Sorkin to comment with a perspective of time passed. He has described it as a “political fantasy” enabling him to show how he wished things had been reported. Yes, that allows him to preach but, in general, his politics and mine coincide so I enjoy it.

I do have my problems with the show. Too many of the female characters get addled in ways that their male counterparts don’t. The exception appears to be Jane Fonda’s character thus far, but we’ll see. From what I’ve read, Sorkin had a traumatic break-up with a girlfriend and it appears to be factoring into a lot of his work. For me, the plusses far outweigh the minuses on this show. It’s been renewed for a second season and I’ll be there.

In passing, I’ll mention Boss on Starz, featuring Kelsey Grammar as the mayor of Chicago. You would think this would be a natural for me, Chicago boy that I am and raised during the era of the first Mayor Daley. I bailed after a few episodes. Too sudsy.

My last selection is Suits which is in its second season on USA Thursday nights at 10 PM. It stars Gabriel Macht, Patrick J. Adams, Rick Hoffman and the spectacular Gina Torres, who you’ll remember from Firefly. This is less about the world of politics and much more about office politics as practiced in a high-level law firm. I think someone once said ”All politics are personal” and this is very much the case here.

Patrick J. Adams plays Mike Ross, a brilliant college dropout who winds up working for Harvey Specter (Macht) even though he doesn’t have a law degree, a fact that both of them conceal – which is illegal and, if it got out, would do serious damage to the firm. The office, sexual, and romantic politics are all high level and so is the writing and the performances. Of the three series I mentioned here, this is far and away my favorite. The characters, all of them, are a mixture of faults and virtues. This is not a bunch of people I would have thought I would ever identify with but I wouldn’t miss a single episode.

Oh, and there’s also Donna, Harvey’s redheaded secretary, played with élan and brio by Sarah Rafferty. She’s hot, she’s brainy, she’s sharp with a line and it’s worth tuning in just to see her. All the female characters are really strong, especially Gina Torres as Jessica Pearson, the managing partner of the firm who is beautiful, smart, and sometimes utterly ruthless and scary.

So you can vote with your remote and, as we say in Chicago, remember to vote early and often.

MONDAY: Mindy Newell

 

Marc Alan Fishman: Marvel Now and Later

Sorry for my absence last week, loyal readers. It would seem something had to break in my fragile world, and this was the first thing closest to the exit ramp. Luckily for me you all had more important things to do on a Saturday morning than read my rants and raves. Right? You didn’t? You mean to tell me you’ve been sitting there, at your desk, for a whole week… awaiting my article? Jeez. I’m sorry. Let me make it up to you. Let’s start off with something really inflammatory to get back into the thick of it, shall we?

Marvel Now is what I’d wished DC would have done with their New 52.

Marvel comes right out of the gate with the smartest roll-out plan I’ve seen in a while: A sensible one or two new books out every week, over the course of a few months. DC’s “throw everything at the fan, and watch the sales spike and recede” did exactly that. Marvel Now (boy, that’s gonna get annoying) sidesteps the idea that fans are willing to try everything all at once, in lieu of a doing it a few at a time. I’m a marketing man by trade. This screams of “listening to the target audience” and “lowering the barrier to entry” for those less willing to hop aboard. In human-speak? Someone at Marvel realized fans aren’t made of money. They are more willing to start a new series at #1, and toss it into their weekly rotation a little at a time, rather than dump their entire paychecks out for the opportunity to “catch up” to a continuity that wasn’t quite rebooted, wasn’t quite reset, and wasn’t quite defined in the slightest.

Marvel also has taken it upon themselves to shake up some major players on major books, after successful long-term runs had been accomplished. Where DC has been quick to play musical chairs before some writers grew their sea-legs for a particular title, the House of Mouse once again played it cool. Let Bendis play in the Avengers sandbox until he’s run out of awesome things to do. Then let Fraction do the same with Iron Man. Then put Waid (who is still rocket hot after relaunching Daredevil back into our hearts) onto a book, The “Insert-Adjective-Here” Hulk, that frankly I’m sure no one has cared about since Jeph Loeb murdered it in the early aughts.

In the art department, fan favorite John Cassaday gets to give The Avengers a nod, which I hope is as good or better than his work on the Astonishing X-Men. The always tried-and-true Mark Bagely will lend his hand at Fantastic Four, which should loosen the book up from its present look and feel. And over in the Four’s sister (or really… daughter?) book, FF, none other than Mike Alred is slated to put pencil to page. The last time I believe he was around MarvelLand, we got X-Statics, which was X-cellent. Sorry, had to go there.

And how about the overall plan? Axel “Not Danny D” Alonso made it pretty clear that the books that are working well now will have no plan for resets. This means fans of Daredevil, the Punisher, X-Factor and the like won’t have to fear an immediate exit strategy and creative retreat from their favorite books. This is of course (to me, at least) a direct wink and a butt slap to the boys with the new oddly shaped logo.

DC was glad to let its entire line of books stink up the joint for the last three months they were around prior to the New 52 debut. Never in my 20+ years reading comics had I felt more books “phoning it in” then at that time. As a 20+ DC book subscriber? It rubbed me the wrong way. Hard. Here, Marvel seems to realize the old adage holds true; if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Generally we know this is the point where I play devil’s advocate. And I see by the folding chair in your outstretched arms, ready to strike me where I type, I’d better get on with the “Howevers…” or else. Now, Marvel Now is just an on-paper-plan at this point. Even with that said, it’s hard not to notice a few things that reek of desperation. I love Brian Posehn. I do. But does anyone here honestly wish to place a wager on how long his run on Deadpool will last?

And just how many Avengers titles are they releasing? 20? 30? We get it, the movie made a kajillion-billion Disney dollars… but someone somewhere had to wave a white flag. As it stands I still contend that the over saturation of books with the popular characters just clutters up racks with an ultimately less-than-the-best product. All this, and somehow, the X-books still all sound ludicrously horrendous, Bendis or not. The idea that “silver age” X-kids land in the present, and get to play the “Oooh-how-the-world-changed-card” to me is choking hard on the gimmick bone. Be sure to take a shot every time NewOld Jean Grey asks “what’s an iPod?”

See? I’m not just shilling for Marvel, unless they wanna send me a check. In that case, I’ll make myself “AR” compatible in a heartbeat. In the mean time, my opinion stands: Marvel Now appears to be better thought-out, with a smarter release schedule, and an ideology that holds on to the notion that quality beats quantity every single time. Mark my words, kiddos. Marvel Now is gonna pants DC, and in the scramble expect DC to fire back with 17 epic all-title consuming crossovers.

Did you mark that down? Good.

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

Martha Thomases: Fanboys In Congress

Because it is an election year and I’ve given money to candidates in the past (and foolishly included my phone number with the donations, because I’m an idiot and also it’s required by law), I get phone calls from people looking for more money. Most often, these calls are from organizations or PACs, but sometimes the actual candidate picks up the phone to call me.

Mostly I dismiss the calls from organizations because they are annoying and I don’t want to encourage them to keep calling me. However, ever since my pal, Ed Sedarbaum, ran for office and told me how difficult it is to make those calls, and how great it is when someone will listen, I cut the individual candidates some slack. I listen. I engage. And, when I can, I make a pledge.

What does this have to do with comics? I recently got a call from Nate Shinagawa who is running for the U.S. Congressional seat for the 23rd district in New York. I’m sure he got my name from Eric Massa’s list, because Massa is from the same aea and I liked him a lot before his shenanigans got him into trouble.

Anyway, he introduced himself, and then we started to talk about Superman.

It turns out that Nate is a big old fanboy. He started reading comics around the time the Death of Superman story was playing out. He explained this to me in case I didn’t feel old enough.

We chatted for a far longer time than I suspect he allotted for me. We talked about comics, and I explained to him my theory that Superman is, at heart, a New Deal Democrat. To put it in a perspective more appropriate to the 21st century, he’s a superhero, sure, but he also demonstrates that the things that make us different from each other are what make us valuable, and we should use those things to make the world a better place.

So I’m not surprised that people who like superhero comics are occasionally inspired to live a life of public service. Most famously, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy is a Batman fan. I’m sure there are Marvel fans in politics, and conservative candidates who are comic book fans, but its unlikely I would come across them. I hope they found something equally valuable in the stories they love.

My point is that, like all art forms, graphic storytelling can inspire people. And the more commercially successful it is, the more people it reaches, and the more it can inspire.

Sometimes, a candidate will even set himself on a campaign against a super-villain.

Saturday: The Return of Marc Alan Fishman?

 

Dennis O’Neil: Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing?

We’ve been pretty grim, these last couple of weeks, so I thought maybe I should lighten up. What I thought I’d do, last night, was take my place at the computer and spin some wordfluffle suitable for submission to ComixMix and then…what? Continue existing? But before I could get to it, I saw the news window on the screen and learned that some lone gunman – anything familiar in those words? – had killed six Sikhs in a Wisconsin temple before being himself gunned down by police. We don’t yet know why. We probably won’t be too surprised when we do.

The politicians – no surprise here – beat me to the fluffle. The same dreary litanies we hear so often: hearts and prayers going out to and deep sadness and troubled days ahead… Democrat, Republican, independent all saying the same thing and in so doing actually saying nothing.

Look: I get ritual. I don’t much like it and I’m no good at it, but I think I understand it. Somebody dies or gets married or gives birth and you recite some variation of a limited set of sentiments and it’s not the words that have meaning, it’s the act of saying them. We use these formulae to console and rejoice and lament because, really, language isn’t up to these primal needs and so we let the clichés act as signifiers to express what resists expression. And that’s all good.

But when ambitious strangers say the words? When they claim that a tragedy that happened to strangers makes their hearts heavy? Allow us, please, to doubt. Allow us to at least suppose that the ambitious ones are using tragic occasions, at the very least, only because the recitation of the words is expected of them or, even less admirably, to further their own agendas. The word for this is hypocrite.

Let’s agree that hypocrisy stands pretty far down in the catalogue of major transgressions, and I’d have no serious quarrel with it if it were followed by action of some kind. Any kind. We’re not advocating anything draconian here. We’re not even advocating a program of legislation and, to be honest, I doubt that any single law or even set of laws will solve the problems that lay deep in the senseless acts of violence that are happening again and again and again.

But shouldn’t we start? Somewhere? As Jon Stewart pleaded, let’s agree to discuss everything, openly and honestly, with nothing withheld from consideration. Then maybe the hollow words will begin to have meaning.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases and the Fanboy Politicians

 

Mike Gold: Cold Ennui

Here’s a sucky way to spend one’s birthday: voiceless with a serious summer head cold. Bitch, bitch; moan, moan. Okay, I had a great day-before-my-birthday in Manhattan lunching with Danny Fingeroth and dinnering with fellow ComicMixer Martha Thomases. Nine hours of fantastic conversation in the best thing in life with your clothes on.

Sadly, as the overly-breaded but otherwise tasty General Tzu’s was being presented to me at our Greenwich Village dungeon of culinary delight, I was starting to sound like a frog in a blender. By the time I was on the subway back to Grand Central Terminal, I was grateful somebody bothered to invent texting. The gifted Miss Adriane picked me up and dragged me home. That was birthday-eve.

On birthday day, we first had to ransom my car back from the shop – I can’t complain; 100,000 miles on one battery is pretty damn good and I guess you really do need functioning breaks. After a quick stop at Walgreens to clean them out of toxic chemicals and chocolate Twizzlers, we returned home. As Miss Adriane procured the prerequisite chicken soup, I retired to celebrate the anniversary of my mother’s major inconvenience in a time-honored way: I picked up my stack of comic books (e-comics; I’m nothing if not hip and trendy in my dotage) and commenced to read.

As luck would have it, there wasn’t a winner in the bunch. Only one or two sucked; the rest were poignantly mediocre. This is not to say that I hadn’t read some worthy stuff while on the train to Manhattan – I consumed all the good stuff as a matter of fate and ill-planning. But you’d think that out of a dozen or so hand-picked titles, there’d be at least one that reaffirmed my fannish enthusiasm. Let us remember: I was under the weather, and my cockles needed to be warmed.

There were three New 52 titles in the electronic pile. All 12th issues. None motivated me to pick up the 13th, two months hence. There are a number of New 52ers I really enjoy: Batgirl, Batwoman, All-Star Western, and everything with the words “written by James Robinson” on the credits page. These weren’t them. The most enjoyable of the DC books was, oddly, the only Before Watchman mini I’m reading: Night Owl, and that’s because I’d read prescription warning labels if Joe Kubert drew them. Reading Kubert, for me, is a lot like drinking chicken soup. You might have to be Ashkenazi to fully grok that.

The Marvel titles were okay; slightly better in that none chased me away. But, damn, why is it that each and every good Marvel “event” series has four times as many issues as necessary? Okay, we know the answer to that one. Still, the Avengers Vs. X-Men series was established to put Marvel on a somewhat different course for a while and it’s doing its job. It’s not a reboot, it’s just your standard dramatic shuffling of the Marvel deck. But it should have been over by now.

The so-called indies were all over the map as they are supposed to be, so my luck of the draw was simply a bad hand. No, not bad. Just mediocre. Too many unnecessary middle-issues in overly long story arcs. I regret the day publishers decided to put six solid pages of story in each 24-page issue, and I look forward to our next GrimJack series to once again prove you can actually put 28 pages of story into a 24-page issue… without being Stan Freberg, and, yes, that was just to see if Mark Evanier’s paying attention.

Okay, all that sucked. On the other side of the scale, I got more than 200 emails and Facebook shout-outs from friends old and new. That’s great anytime, but after a speechless day of aches and not-breathing and a dozen mediocre comics, all that made be feel on top of the world. And not in the Cody Jarrett sense, either. To one and all, my deepest thanks.

Daughter Adriane and I finished the day watching Paul, a genuinely funny and essentially heartwarming movie written by and starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. I’m a sucker for anything with Jane Lynch that doesn’t involve high schoolers spontaneously combusting into song, and Pegg and Frost have never disappointed me.

Moral of the story: when you’re feeling low, reach for something positive and funny. Tomorrow is… another day.

Thursday: Dennis O’Neil… Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing?

 

Emily S. Whitten: Marvel Movies: Are They Going Too Far?

I suppose we could call this a follow-up or at least sister piece to last week’s column, in which I interviewed the fantastic Cleolinda Jones, author of Movies in Fifteen Minutes, about her experiences with comic book movies. Cleo noted that she tends to be more interested in Marvel characters because “Marvel has been so much more pro-active about getting movies made and characters out there;” which is true. Let’s look at some numbers for live action comic book movies, just for kicks.

Marvel Movies: 37 (33 + 4 from other Marvel imprints)

DC Movies: 33 (23 + 10 from other DC imprints)

Marvel Movies since 1998: 31 (28 + 3 from other Marvel imprints)

DC Movies since 1998: 18 (8 + 10 from other DC imprints)

Forthcoming Marvel Movies: 16 (8 announced – Iron Man 3; The Wolverine; Thor: The Dark World; Captain America: The Winter Soldier; The Amazing Spider-Man 2; X-Men: Days of Future Past; Avengers 2: Guardians of the Galaxy; Ant-man. 8 speculative – The Amazing Spider-man 3; Deadpool; Doctor Strange; Nick Fury; Runaways; The Hands of Shang-Chi; The Inhumans; Fantastic Four)

Forthcoming DC Movies:   9 (1 announced – Man of Steel. 8 speculative – Constantine 2; The Flash; Green Lantern 2; Justice League; Batman reboot (again); Wonder Woman (maybe?); Suicide Squad; Lobo)

Sources: Wikipedia’s Marvel and DC movie pages; IMDB; tooling around the Internets for all the announcement mentions I could find.

As we can see from the numbers, Marvel consistently beats DC overall in live action movies and soundly whups DC’s behind in live action movies (released and upcoming) from 1998 forward, which I think of as the current/modern comic book movie era (it started with Blade and gained momentum thanks to X-Men and Spider-Man in 2000 and 2002). In the upcoming movies department, not only does Marvel have almost twice as many movies as DC, but at least eight of them are pretty definitely moving forward; as opposed to the one DC has in the can and ready to go. Although DC has announced or sort-of announced several more, they have been much less forceful in confirming their future line-up, and most are not yet locked in.

The Dark Knight Rises (and Christopher Nolan’s trilogy in general) was a huge success; but The Avengers is currently ranked third overall  in box office sales, and Marvel is pushing full steam ahead with a long list of upcoming movies to expand on that success. But is their current success making them go too far? With future movies pulling from somewhat second-string characters like Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, and The Runaways, is Marvel stretching itself too thin and being too ambitious? Are they going to burn out moviegoers with a plethora of new movies about characters people might not know?

Actually, I’d say the answer is no; Marvel is doing exactly what it should to continue producing quality comics movies, and to continue beating the pants off of DC. There are two reasons Marvel’s exuberance in greenlighting all kinds of characters is going to pay off. The first is that Marvel’s attempt to interlock its movies and continue to build off of its shared movie universe, as it has built off of its shared comics universe, has been a resounding success; and if the quality of upcoming movies is consistent, there’s no reason why that should change. In fact, if the future movies are quality, things can only get better for Marvel. Everyone loves a good series, and Marvel’s movies promise to be an ongoing and expanding series like nothing we’ve ever seen in mainstream cinema. They will pull in, if they haven’t already (and dollars to donuts they have) those who don’t read comics but love sci-fi and fantasy series’ like Lord of the Rings, or even those who just like stories that keep on giving. As long as the overall weight of the expanding universe doesn’t drag down the individual movies, love for the whole series will increase exponentially.

The second is that making movies about possibly second-string-ish but still fully developed characters gives Marvel more creative freedom. Despite Ant-Man being a member of The Avengers, he doesn’t have the pull and wide recognition of Iron Man or Captain America. And while Brian K. Vaughan’s Runaways was a great series, since it doesn’t often cross paths with a lot of the more enduring characters, even core Marvel readers may not have picked it up before. By greenlighting some less familiar faces, I’d say Marvel has the leeway to be a bit looser with the source material if it will result in a better movie. Similar to what DC has tried to do with the New 52 comics, Marvel can make these characters accessible to the modern audience, but in an easily digested format in which it’s already accepted that stories may be adapted to serve the medium. I see this as a strong benefit, because often being too enmeshed in the sometimes complex source material can drag a movie down. Thanks to the successful movie platform they’ve built, Marvel now has a great opportunity to introduce some less known characters, including to casual or even serious comics readers, for the very first time through the movies, as they continue to build a more and more of a “realistic” and layered movie world that viewers can lose themselves in.

So I predict that Marvel’s method of movie-making (say that three times fast!) is going to keep working for them. And with that in mind, even though Marvel’s got a super-awesome and full line-up in mind already, here are some other (slightly more minor) characters I’d love to see greenlit for movies:

Taskmaster – He’s a villain, he’s a hero, he’s a villain, he’s a…oh, who knows. Probably not him. All I know is that his backstory is already intertwined with S.H.I.E.L.D. (and Deadpool!) so he could be woven into the overall movie universe; and that he’s fun to read about. And that I’d like to see those photographic reflexes at work on the big screen.

BAD Girls, Inc. – A group with ambiguously good/bad members, Diamondback, Asp, and Black Mamba have crossed paths with Captain America, Iron Man, and more. They could eventually be folded into the wider universe, but given that there are three of them with great interplay and distinct personalities, and given their eventual status as reformed criminals, I could first envision a great mostly standalone strong female action/adventure/crime-related movie with solid and engaging character arcs and redemption. Unfortunately, one of the three, Asp, has been revealed to be a mutant, so I’m not sure if there would be rights issues; but then again, Marvel is doing Runaways, and in that group, Molly is a mutant; so maybe FOX only owns the rights to mutants who have been tied to the X-Men.

Hawkeye/Mockingbird/Black Widow – Marvel’s teamed these three S.H.I.E.L.D. agents up in the comics before, and Hawkeye and Black Widow have already been introduced in the movie universe. I definitely want to see a movie featuring those two, but I like the idea of bringing Mockingbird in as well. I’d love to see a movie that casually establishes that she was already a known entity with an established history with Hawkeye in The Avengers but was just not part of that particular fight; it adds to that “layered universe” feel to have characters who have been presumably going about their lives offscreen before being brought in to the event we’re watching. Plus there’d be some great interplay between those three, and I feel like a S.H.I.E.L.D.-focused movie would benefit from a small team of fairly equal major players.

Ms. Marvel – Okay, she’s not actually a minor character. She’s a major character, an Avenger, and a fucking badass powerhouse. Despite the horrifyingly fanservicey costume, she’s a super-strong (literally) female character, and we need to see her on the big screen. Like, yesterday.

Black Panther – He’s got an interesting backstory and eventually does a stint with The Avengers, but is also powerful and important in his own right. There’s a lot to choose from in his history, since he’s been around since 1966. Also, obviously, it’d be great to see a minority character getting first billing.

…And after Marvel does all of these movies, when we’re all eighty-five years old and hobbling to the movies on our walkers…then they can finally wrap it up by thumbing their noses at us with a Nextwave: Agents of HATE movie. And then maybe close out with X-Babies to make us feel better about everything. Because awwwwwwww, X-Babies.

After all this talk of Marvel, one obvious question is: what can DC do to be more successful in the movie arena? One answer is that they can build up an interlocking universe like Marvel; and it looks like that’s what they’re now planning to do. But as they’re developing that, there are a couple of other things I’d recommend for them. One is to put a lot of energy and love into making a Wonder Woman movie a staple part of that interlocking universe, and do it right. There have been several attempts to get a modern Wonder Woman something off the ground, but the proposed TV series never came to pass, and although the modern animated movie was fun, it didn’t reach a wide audience. Wonder Woman is a major and much-loved DC character, and perfect for the current climate of successful strong female character movies. For whatever reason, though, adaptations seem to struggle with what part of her giant backstory to tell. I’d advise DC to simplify things by deciding how Wonder Woman would be living today, and picking up only the threads of her long-running story that will play with modern audiences. Look first at what makes the best contemporary story that embodies who she is, and second at how faithful each individual bit is to the preceding comics.

Another thing DC can do is to stop rebooting Batman. There have been three versions of Batman to date, and now there’s talk that Christopher Nolan will eventually be helming another Batman reboot. Now, it could be that this rumored reboot is actually going to continue the story Nolan left us with at the end of The Dark Knight Rises and connect it to Man of Steel and other DC movies. If so, great. But if it is indeed a fourth iteration of a character that just wrapped a super-successful trilogy…well I don’t even know what to do with that. DC should be focusing on characters it hasn’t featured instead of relying too heavily on continuously reimagining its two staple stars, Batman and Superman. I hope it does.

Whatever happens, I’m looking forward to the movies that are in the works, and continue to cross my fingers and hope that they’ll all be amazing.

Until next week, Servo Lectio!

(And thanks to my friend @wmslawhorn for inspiring this topic while in a WSFAn’s kitchen eating brownies and drinking beer.)

WEDNESDAY: Mike Gold’s Cold Ennui

 

Mindy Newell: Doctor ????

Who’s your favorite Doctor?

I discovered the Time Lord back in the late 1970s (I think), when WNET, the New York PBS station, started running the Tom Baker episodes. Baker’s Doctor, with his floppy-brimmed hat, outback duster, and loonnnng, multi-colored, scarf – did Granny Who knit it for him? – was the itinerant cosmic hobo. Only instead of hopping the rails, he “tripped the light fantastic” across the universe in the TARDIS. Companions Sara Jane Smith (the late Elisabeth Sladen) and Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter) were – seen with the advantage of hindsight –sort of “Mulder/Scully” prototypes, with Sara Jane as the believing Mulder and Harry as the skeptic. I can’t say that the British military operations called UNIT – Unified Intelligence Taskforce – was the FBI, although Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart did sort of act like the Assistant Director Walter Skinner, walking the high-wire tightrope between helping the Doctor and answering to his superiors.

Like every other Whovian, I mourned – and was really pissed off – when the BBC stopped producing the series.

And like every other Whovian with Cablevision, I watched the relaunch of Doctor Who on Sci-Fi, with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor and Billy Piper – the call girl of The Secret Diary Of A Call Girl on Showtime – as his companion, Rose Tyler. I really got into Eccleston as the Doctor, and was incredibly disappointed when he chose to leave the role after only one season…until David Tennant took over the controls of the TARDIS and the wielding of the sonic screwdriver. Like Rose, I fell in love with Tennant’s Doctor.

And I was deeply upset when, after five years, Tennant left. The love story between the Doctor and Rose added new and deep emotional resonance to the series and I didn’t want their tale to end.  So I was stubbornly anti-Matt Smith as the as romanticism and emotional I was not prepared to like Matt Smith as the Doctor’s eleventh reincarnation. I thought his introduction was stupid and boring, not funny, going though young Amy Pond’s refrigerator and kitchen pantry, tasting everything, spitting out everything.

But then….

Bow ties are cool. So are fezzes.

The absolute brilliance – imho – of Smith’s first season as the Time Lord, and the introduction of Amy Pond as, first, a young girl, and then as a grown woman (Karen Gillan), with the addition of Amy’s fiancée-now-husband Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) won me over by the second episode.

Last night I watched The Science Of Doctor Who, which, like its predecessors The Science Of Star Wars and The Science Of Star Trek, explored how the show has influenced the scientists of today in making the science fiction of the Doctor science reality. Today I trolled BBC America’s Doctor Who web pages, watching sneak previews and reading about catching up on all things Whovian. Including the news that Gillan and Darvill will be exiting the show, and that it may have something to do with the Weeping Angels – to my mind the scariest and creepiest aliens to ever appear on Doctor Who. Yes, much more than the Daleks or the Cybermen.

But I do have one question.

Can someone please, please tell me when Season 7 starts?

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

WEDNESDAY MORNING: Mike Gold and Cold Ennui

 

 

John Ostrander: Redshirts

I love to read. I have ever since I was very small. I startled my parents when I started reading the milk cartons and cereal boxes aloud when I was in pre-school. I love it when a book sweeps me up and takes me wherever it is set. The genre doesn’t matter – fiction/nonfiction, history/memoir, sci-fi/fantasy, mystery/western – just tell me a good story and I’m yours. If I don’t have a good book to read somewhere around the house, I get a little hinky.

If the author wastes my time by not telling me a good story, I get a little irate.

Fortunately, John Scalzi tells a very good story with his new novel, Redshirts (Tor books, hardcover). Tells a very funny, engrossing and ultimately thoughtful story in a novel that includes three codas at the end. Tells a story that will strike very close to home for Star Trek fans, especially those of the original series.

SPOILER NOTE: I’ll give some things away about the plot as this review goes forward. Can’t discuss the story without talking about the story but I’ll try to give away as little as I can. This is as much warning as you’ll get.

The story is set in the Universal Union, mostly aboard its flagship, the Intrepid, and Ensign Andrew Dahl is happy to be posted to it – until he notes something odd. There are all these away missions and the command crew, the captain, the chief science officer, and the astrogator are assigned along with some low level member of the crew. Like ensigns. There’s just about always a fatality but not among the command crew although the astrogator can get hurt really bad but recovers within a week. Odd, to say the least.

These moments come and go but, when they come, it’s as if the crewmembers aren’t really in control of their actions. As it turns out, they’re not.

Turns out that, in an alternate universe/timeline, they’re all characters in a cheesy Star Trek knockoff TV show and their lives are being controlled by a bunch of hack writers. Dahl and an intrepid group of fellow Intrepid redshirts have to travel backwards/sideways/whatever in time/space/dimensions/whatever via a means familiar to Star Trek fans to somehow stop these writers (mainly the head writer) from probably killing them for cheesy dramatic reasons, usually just before the commercial break.

The story owes something of its concept to the wonderful movie Stranger Than Fiction (my favorite Will Ferrell movie and maybe my only fave Will Ferrell movie) and acknowledges that but also, to my mind, owes its tone to an equally wonderful movie, Galaxy Quest, which it doesn’t acknowledge. There are flaws: many of the characters are identified only by their last names and are more a collection of characters traits then characters. On the other hand, that may be deliberate since the book satirizes that way of creating support characters on TV and indeed elsewhere. Take a character trait from column A, column B, and column C and provide a name and – bingo! – instant character. To my mind, they also sounded quite a bit alike but what they said was often funny and entertaining. I just had trouble telling them apart sometimes.

The book is clever and light which makes it great for summer reading. It doesn’t get particularly deep until the three codas that follow the end of the story proper. They’re like three short stories using minor characters in the main book. Here Scalzi plays more with the concepts brought up in the main story. I can see why they are separate – the tones wouldn’t work in the primary narrative but they’re very worth reading and add a great deal to the overall book.

Recommended. It also makes me very sure that I never want John Gaunt to find a way to meet me. I’ve done too many nasty things to GrimJack all in the name of compelling narrative and I think he would hurt me bad. So – shhhh! Don’t tell him where I live.

MONDAY: Mindy Newell

 

Marc Alan Fishman: Gone Fishin’

After staying up for the better part of a week, or perhaps the worse part of a week, meeting his Unshaven Comics deadlines Marc has no printable words for us this week. Just some groans, moans, twitches, and a lotta snoring. All this is for the benefit of those attending next week’s Chicago Wizard World or the Baltimore Comic-Con September 8th and 9th, and you can see the results of their labors and actually meet the entire Unshaven Comics crew in person, in the respective Artists Alleys.

Warning: Several other ComicMixers will be at the Baltimore show as well. We will have you surrounded. Surrender Dorothy.

SUNDAY: In the Dark With John Ostrander

 

Martha Thomases: My Green Lantern Problem

If I’m reading their website correctly, DC Entertainment currently publishes three different Green Lantern titles, not counting the animated series tie-in. There is also a Red Lantern comic. The last several company-wide crossovers involved the Green Lantern Corps as major players.

It’s too much.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Green Lantern. I vividly remember when I bought my first copy. I was about eight years old (which would make it 1961, for those of you keeping score), and felt very grown up. I thought Green Lantern, being a science-based character, was much more intellectual than Superman or Batman at the time, with their dog pals and mischievous imps. Hal Jordan wasn’t a millionaire playboy nor an alien. He was a test pilot. He had a job.

A decade later, when Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams took over the title, I was mesmerized. They were using a character (one whom, by this time, I realized didn’t have much to do with science) in a comic book to express a point of view on the world in which I lived. How amazing was that?

By the time my son was reading comics, there were several Green Lanterns. He loved them. He especially liked Green Lantern: Mosaic, which featured John Stewart trying to assist a world that had a variety of intelligent life forms, immigrants from dozens of worlds. It seemed like a metaphor for life in New York, but I don’t know if that’s why he liked it so much.

I guess I’m trying to say that Green Lantern is a concept that different people, at different stages of their lives, can enjoy. A man (or woman) with a strong will, and a ring that can manifest that will, is a wonderful vehicle for imagination. With the introduction of the idea of the Green Lantern Corps, 3600 strong, each patrolling a different sector of the universe, the reader can see how different personalities affect the way the ring works. Some shoot green rays, some make green weapons, some create helpers. The stories are limited only by the imaginations of the creative teams.

Still, the heart of the stories was Hal Jordan. The supporting cast included fellow Lanterns Guy Gardner, Kyle Rayner, and the previously mentioned John Stewart. Sometimes one of them would replace Hal as the main Lantern for sector 2814 (that is, Earth).

Since the introduction of The New 52 last fall, the cast has expanded quite a bit. There are Lanterns of other colors of the rainbow, representing other emotions. Each color has 3600 champions (except orange, which is avarice, and its ring holder took all the other rings because, you know, avarice). The stories involving these characters, and the Guardians of the Universe who created the Corp, span all three books.

Believe me, I understand that this may be the direction that the creative teams want. They may enjoy having the cosmos as a canvas, and they may think that having different species as characters is a wonderful opportunity to comment on the human condition. If this is the case, I don’t think they’re succeeding.

I can’t keep up with everybody. Even worse, I don’t care.

I want some stories to take place on Earth. I want to see Carol Ferris, and not in her Star Sapphire costume. I want to watch John Stewart as an architect. I want to see how artist Kyle Rayner meets his magazine deadlines. I want to see Guy Gardner with Ice. Even better, I’d like to see story ideas that haven’t happened yet, but that engage me with situations with which I can relate.

I want to see humans. More to the point, I want to see human stories.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman, Gone Fishing

SUNDAY: John Ostrander, Friend to the Chickens

 

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