Category: Reviews

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Dogtangle by Max Huffman

Comics do at least half of their storytelling through images – but sometimes I wonder if some creators think their images can communicate deep, complex concepts that are clear and crisp in their own minds, even when they don’t embody those ideas in words.

Max Huffman’s graphic novel Dogtangle  brings up those thoughts: it’s obviously full of ideas, and Huffman is clearly coming from a specific viewpoint and stance, but his words only sketch lightly around the edges of his premises, leaving his energetic, deeply particular art to carry a lot of the weight of his story here.

That art is deeply caricatured, verging into pure design at times; his characters, to my eye, disappearing into his tinted pages as just more elements to shock or delight the viewer. It’s a deeply cartoony, distinctive style – I think I see graffiti influences, especially in his display type, and maybe equally in his defiant love for stark pages and imagery that doesn’t quite come into focus unless you already know what you’re looking at.

Dogtangle has plenty of dialogue, and a few captions to define what we’re look at, but not nearly enough words to explain all of the complexities of Huffman’s weird, satirical world. Concepts are thrown onto the page once for the reader to catch, and I suppose Huffman assumes that reader will assemble the elements in their own minds to match the model he has in his own. But I found Dogtangle, as it went along, more to dissolve in my mind to a sequence of striking images – vignettes, scenes, or moments – that sit like beads next to each other but don’t connect or combine to form a coherent whole.

I’m sure there is a story here, in Huffman’s mind. I’m just not sure it made it onto the page in a format that’s intelligible to most readers.

Here’s what I can tell you. Vernon Smilth is a local gadfly in Business Park, making long speeches during boring civic meetings in the converted Taco Bell, trying to slow down the relentless redevelopment of the town. He’s a failure at this, and there’s no sign that he does anything for an actual living: this is all he does that we see.

At one meeting, he meets Caressa Vignette, head and face of the pharmaceutical company named for her. We later on get the usual corporate hugger-mugger, in vague terms, so she doesn’t outright own the company, but her actual title and role and what Vignette really does is never clear – they make stuff, she’s in charge, that’s as far as Huffman wants to explain.

Smilth and Vignette fall in love, eat soup, get married – in the course of about two pages. They both want to do something big, something impressive. And Smilth has an idea: to create a Hypermutt. (The word is always presented in display type, like a splash page, in that Huffman graffiti-esque style, so it’s deeply difficult to read.)

Like many things in Dogtangle, exactly how this works is vague and doesn’t make much sense. But the Hypermutt is basically a specialized Katamari: once created, it is a big ball of dog that absorbs any other dogs that touch it. This supposedly is the next big product for Vignette, which is supposed to be satirical, but I have a hard time even seeing the space where the joke is supposed to be: this is not a consumer product at all; it can’t be sold to multiple people; and it seems to have nothing to do with the actual business of a pharmaceutical company.

Anyway, they make this thing, which is not as central to the book as you might imagine.

Almost immediately, Smilth and the hypermutt disappear – Vignette gets a ransom note for one or both of them, but we don’t see anyone nab either of them. Smilth is threatened and beaten by one of the Business Park zoning nabobs, apparently because his useless complaints at meetings were slightly less useless than Huffman made them appear. He has angered Powerful Forces, and He Will Pay.

What does that have to do with the Hypermutt? Did this Florida-based zoning overlord also grab the dog for some unspecified reason? Well…maybe? It’s never clear.

Back in Business Park, Vignette goes into business-crisis mode, running the gauntlet of shouted questions from reporters and hiring Ermine Slalom, a high-powered something-or-other (lawyer?) who will help her keep control of the company…but that plot gets derailed quickly by new characters Simon (Slalom’s little four-eyed nephew, who she’s caring for) and Smilth’s formidable mother, who arrives at the same time and is kept in the dark about her son’s disappearance.

From that point, a lot more stuff happens – some of it in what seems to be a completely different alternate universe where all of these characters are living in medieval Europe, for no obvious reason. Oh, and it flashes forward what I think is a few years, to Simone Slalom – who I thought at first was Simon’s mother, but maybe she’s an older sister? – where the Hypermutt now dominates the sky and has ruined the world.

Because what happens when dogs get stuck together in an ever-growing ball is that they fly into the sky and form a layer of cloud…obviously. (Duh!)

Anyway, this is SF and it is satirical, so of course there is an apocalypse, and this one is the Hypermutt apocalypse. At this point, the reader starts to wonder if the build-things-everywhere, knock-down-the-old-city, make-all-the-money folks are actually supposed to be our heroes. They did try to stop the apocalypse and their motivations were clear and reasonable, if venial.

Back to plot: Simone once pet-sat the Hypermutt, and was “the best sitter ever,” so now she has to retrieve Smilth from inside the flying cloud of dog. That sentence makes slightly more sense in context, though not very much. She does, he is freed, the Hypermutt collapses or dies or something, and the world…is maybe slightly less apocalyptic in the end? Huffman ends the book with a deeply enigmatic stretch of mostly-wordless pages that I assume mean something to him but left me flipping back and forth to figure out if he actually explained anything or told us where he left any of these characters.

(As far as I can tell: no.)

So Dogtangle is a deeply weird book, a massively particular book, and one that I suspect you might need to be Max Huffman to understand. Well, maybe Huffman could explain it to you in person, too – that’s possible. But, if you’re just reading it, do not expect it all to come together or make conventional narrative sense. It will look awesome, full of bizarre pages, and you may find yourself asking questions like “All of the pages are tinted, and the colors shift repeatedly throughout the book, from blue to yellow and so on, to end with orange. Does that mean anything?”

I suspect, in Huffman’s head, there’s a lot of meaning here. But it is not particularly clear on the page.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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REVIEW: Olive: Lost in Inner Space

Olive: Lost in Inner Space
By Vero Cazot and Lucy Mazel
256 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$38

Autism is a challenge to depict in comic form; so much depends on the artist’s strength, since it’s all about nuance. Take Olive, for example. In Paris, she arrives at school as a 17-year-old, forced to adapt to a world alien to her. The school has worked to accommodate her needs in exchange for maintaining respectable grades. We meet her when the opposite has happened, and she is now being forced to share her dorm room with Charlie, a fairly normal teenager. The counseling sessions helps provide insights into Olive’s past.

Olive lives in her head, a wonderfully creative space she shares with a large rubber duck, Noel, and the transparent whale Rose. When reality overwhelms her, this is her safe space until the day an astronaut crashes into her realm.

The 2024 French album arrives in glorious color, courtesy of Vero Cazot and Lucy Mazel. Broken into four parts, we trace Olive’s attempts to figure out how the astronaut got into her world, which leads her to mount a rescue mission to locate him. Fantasy bleeds into reality when it becomes clear that astronaut Lenny Popincourt has crash-landed on Earth and is missing.

Over the course of the story, Olive searches in both realms, aided in our reality by Charlie, who accepts Olive’s condition and supports her efforts with good cheer. In exchange, Olive begins to open up and, in a rare act, invites her home for Christmas.

The story in both realities slowly unfolds as Olive can’t understand how this other person has invaded her private realm, even though clues about their connection are presented early on.

It’s a charming coming-of-age story as well as a fine fantasy tale; that is, until the final section, where Olive manages to cross into Siberia on her own (when did she get a passport, considering her aversion to the world?) in search of Lenny. But it’s a minor quibble over a lovely tale of magical realism.

Mazel’s art and color help make both realities distinctive and ground the teens well. This is a fanciful tale that is a fine page-turner.

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Tomorrow the Birds by Osamu Tezuka

Osamu Tezuka made a lot of comics. According to Wikipedia , over 700 works, comprising more than 150,000 pages. I doubt even half of that has been translated into English. So the view any North American reader has of his work – unless that reader both is fluent in Japanese and has access to a library-worth of Tezuka – is going to be limited, tentative, and gatekept by other people.

I come back to Tezuka periodically, though I think I found the period and style I find most compelling first: Tezuka was inspired by the adult-oriented gekiga movement in the mid-60s, and changed up his style and concerns for at least one strand of his work going forward for the next twenty years. (Tezuka died of cancer, at only 60, in 1989.) Vertical published a lot of that Tezuka material, around fifteen years ago, including The Book of Human Insects , Ayako , Ode to Kirihito , Buddha , Dororo , Black Jack , MW , and Apollo’s Song .

There’s probably more in that style – to say it again, Tezuka was ridiculously prolific – but I haven’t seen anything newly-published along those lines in years. So I’ve poked into other Tezuka styles and series – the well-regarded early adventure Princess Knight , for example, and more recently the anthology Shakespeare Manga Theater  and the odd One Hundred Tales . But the seriousness and darkness of those core gekiga works hasn’t come out in anything else I’ve seen.

But I keep looking. So this time I grabbed Tomorrow the Birds , from the time-frame that also saw those gekiga books. It was serialized in S-F Magazine between 1971 and 1975, collected in Japanese not long afterward, and translated into English for this 2024 edition by Iyasu Adair Nagata.

It’s somewhat more serious than the ’50s-era Tezuka books I’ve seen – it comes close to the doomy gekiga, especially early in the book – but still has some goofiness in it. And Tezuka seems to have leaned heavily into the serialized nature of this story to tell very different kinds of stories – to the point that the back half of the book feels a bit like “well, here’s a Western set in this world, and now here’s a fable, and then let’s try a ghost story.”

Tomorrow is basically a future history, spanning what seems to be at least a thousand years, told in nineteen mostly short chapters. In the near future, magpies (maybe corvids in general) have gotten smarter, learned to harness fire, and start attacking humanity. Very quickly, over the course of the first four or five stories, Japan surrenders to the birds and helps them destroy other human nations – I expect this was a political dig – and human civilization ends. The birds turn into anthropomorphic birdmen in a mechanism Tezuka wisely does not explain – though, as you can see from the cover, he does note that their heads get substantially larger to house more complex brains.

There’s also a minor thread of an alien civilization monitoring Earth, and how they have interfered to create the rise of the birds. This is another bit of Tazuka’s SFnal satire, and also gives him his ending – I saw it coming, but it’s well done.

Each of the nineteen stories in Tomorrow is separate. The first few, during the war between humans and birds, take place in a short period of time – maybe one generation at most – but the rest of the book stretches down long centuries, as birdman civilization grows, changes, and is expressed differently in different places on earth. As I said, we get a very traditional Western – with a human in the Noble Savage role – and several other clearly genre exercises, as if Tezuka was working down a checklist of kinds of stories to tell in this milieu.

The stories are mostly in the downbeat, tragic, or SFnal if-this-goes-on mode: things go badly for the main-character humans in all of the stories, and often not much better for main-character birds. This becomes a bit obvious once the reader notices it – and any reader will definitely notice how the first few stories are all “birds attack humans, humans lose” – but each story is strongly told, and all of this material does have a similar tone and sweep and seriousness to his core gekiga works.

It is a goofy premise, but Tezuka sells it well, and gets through the “birds destroy human civilization by setting things on fire” bits quickly enough that most readers won’t argue too much. We take it as allegorical, accept the WWII echoes and the core Japanese-ness of the idea, and see where the story takes us. Tomorrow the Birds is not quite as darkly uncompromising as something like MW or Ode to Kirihito, but it’s from the same strain of Tezuka’s work and has many of the same concerns and ideas.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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REVIEW: Captains Courageous

Where does courage come from? Is it inborn? Can it be taught? These are some of the questions explored in the 1937 film Captains Courageous, based on the Rudyard Kipling novel. You start with Harvey (Freddie Bartholomew), the prototypical spoiled little rich boy who clearly needs to be taught how to behave, and those harsh lessons come from the most unlikely of sources.

We open with a drawn-out section that shows how morally rotten Harvey is, from the way he treats the servants to the way he treats his classmates at a tony school. He bribes and bullies his way until finally, a boy on the school paper wallops him. He goes running to tycoon dad Frank Burton Cheyne (Melvyn Douglas), who initially takes his side until the headmaster and a teacher tell him the truth about the boy.

The single parent is stuck with Harvey for the remainder of the spring term, so decides to bond with him by taking Harvey on an ocean liner, where father and son continue their habits, until the boy falls overboard. Rescued by Manuel (Spencer Tracy), a Portuguese fisherman. Not believing how wealthy Harvey’s father is, Captain Disko Troop (Lionel Barrymore), makes the boy a member of his crew for the next three months, refusing to give up prime fishing season to bring him to shore.

The remainder of the film is Harvey’s transformation from a brat to a hard-working member of the crew who has fallen in love with their hard life. Along the way, Manuel and Harvey form the bond that the boy never had with his dad.

The 1897 novel depicted Harvey at the more realistic age of 15 for this coming-of-age story, but was made younger to accommodate child star Bartholomew, whose English accent keeps sneaking into his dialogue, although the upscale school can be blamed for it. Also, the bond between Harvey and a cabin boy is peer-to-peer, whereas the film shifts the relationship to Manuel, addressing parenting issues.

Tracy was highly reluctant to take the role but was convinced by MGM’s Irving Thalberg to accept the assignment. Thalberg tragically died just before the film, which he optioned three years earlier, started shooting. Tracy sounds more like Chico Marx than a seasoned Portuguese man who was taught by his father. Tracy, who won the Oscar for Best Actor, was also uncomfortable with Manuel’s spirituality, although it proved invaluable in making him a rounded character. So many others aboard the We’re Here were stereotypes of the Gloucester fishermen of the day, notably the captain, fellow fisherman Long Jack (John Carradine), and rival Captain Walt Cushman (Oscar O’Shea). Director Victor Fleming does a strong job handling the cast and the physical elements, with sequences shot on location in Port aux Basques, Newfoundland; Shelburne, Nova Scotia; and Gloucester, Massachusetts.

The film is a joy to watch, seeing the hard lives of these men, and the tragedies that befall so many, and their effect on the families, as seen in the final moments. It’s also fun to see so many fine actors at different points in their careers, including a blink-and-you ’ll-miss Bob Hope. It also nicely integrates the cast with Doc (Sam McDaniel), the cook, treated like one of them and a smattering of black families back on shore.

The film, out today from Warner Archive, is making its Blu-ray debut, and the 4K transfer looks stunning and sharp in 1080p. The theatrical aspect ratio of 1.37:1 is retained grayscale works well for home viewing.  The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono sound mix is strong, preserving the sounds of the ship, the sea, and Franz Waxman’s score.

The film comes with special features that first appeared on the 2006 DVD. There’s the not funny Robert Benchley short “How to Start Your Day”, the radio program “Leon is on the Air” (audio only, of course), and the 1937 animated Happy Harmonies short, “The Wayward Pups”, which I found fine, lacking the distinctive personalities found in competing animated fare of the day. It should be noted that this was the Two Little Pups’ fourth and final appearance.

The movie on its own is well worth watching and this disc a good addition to your library.

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REVIEW: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

An unnamed man walks into a neighborhood diner and asks for volunteers to help him save the world. But, it can’t be just anyone; it has to be a specific combination of people at that moment, 10:10 p.m. Once assembled, they need to go a few blocks over to insist that a nine-year-old boy install safeguards on the AI he’s developing, otherwise the world will end.

Oh, and this is the 117th time he’s tried this since he’s been traveling back from the future.

Matthew Robinson’s script for Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a head-spinning cautionary tale that arrives at a moment when everyone is talking about the dangers of AI and society spending more time scrolling than actually speaking to one another.

The film, directed by Gore Verbinski in a pleasing comeback, is well worth a look. Out now on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray from Universal Home Entertainment, the film demands you put the phone down and pay attention.

And that’s fine, considering the cast assembled to save the world. Our protagonist is Sam Rockwell, who is always worth watching. He recruits Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a teacher couple, Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), Susan (Juno Temple), who lost a son to a school shooting, but a numb world doesn’t offer her comfort, and Scott (Asim Chaudhry), whose story remains untold. Those with backstories wind up offering commentary and representations of today’s preoccupation with the digital world rather than with one another. It’s telling that when the man-from-the-future walks in, no one is actually having a conversation, scrolling instead.

Verbinski’s visual presentation is that of controlled chaos, more akin to his Pirates of the Caribbean films than misfires such as The Lone Ranger and Tonto. With Rockwell, Verbinski has a conductor to organize the mess and strive for the best possible outcome.

The 2160 high-definition transfer is crisp, capturing skin tones and the color palette well. The 2.39:1 aspect ratio looks good on the home screen, as does the Dolby Vision. Similarly, the Dolby Atmos audio track complements the visuals, making for a pleasing experience.

For an ambitious film like this, the Making of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (5:07) is way too short and leaves you wanting to know more.

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Elric: The Dreaming City by Roy Thomas and P. Craig Russell

Most of the Roy Thomas-scripted adaptations of Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels came out as individual comics issues – five or eight or so for each novel – and were eventually collected into book form. But The Dreaming City  was instead a single graphic novel from Marvel in 1982 – maybe because this is the original 1962 novella “Dreaming City” rather than the alternate-title-for-the-first-novel Dreaming City, which has confused several generations at this point.

To be clearer: the novella “Dreaming City,” when I first read the Elric books, was collected in The Weird of the White Wolf, at that time the third “novel” (actually a fix-up, like many of them) in the series, and now I think fourth. There have been remixed editions of the series since, so it also sits in different books with “Elric” in their titles.

I suppose the important thing to note about this adaptation is that it is the third in the recent Titan unified-covers reprinting of all things Moorcockian and Eternally Championing, Elric sub-series – third by internal chronology – but that it was first in the sense that Thomas wrote it first, P. Craig Russell drew it first, and it came out into the world four years before the adaptation of the first novel in the series, Elric of Melniboné.

(Also see my posts for the first two books in this Titan series: Elric of Melniboné  and The Sailor on the Seas of Fate . Though both the original Moorcock stories and the vicissitudes of publishing adaptation series makes the timeline and details too convoluted to easily follow.)

I should also note that the next volume in this Titan series reprints the Thomas-scripted adaptation of The Weird of the White Wolf, which I expect – I haven’t read it since about 1986 – also includes an adaptation of “The Dreaming City,” in the context of that fix-up. So I have that to look forward to.

“Dreaming City” was one of the very earliest Elric stories, and, as many have noted repeatedly since then, Moorcock started out with the most dramatic, central story of his doomed albino hero, and has spent six decades since filling in smaller, lesser stories around them. What that means is: if you only read one Elric adaptation, it should be this one: it’s early enough to be unfussy, it has some of Russell’s most energetic artwork, and it’s early-80s full-of-captions style captures the feel of Moorcock’s prose well.

So this is shorter than the other Elric adaptations, tells a story of tighter scope – originally a novella, not a fix-up of short-fiction like the “novels” – and is one of the major events of this doomy, gloomy albino’s life.

In Dreaming City, for good and sufficient reasons which are not provided here, Elric leads a large force of Sea Lords – pirates, basically – from the Young Kingdoms to plunder his homeland, sack its capital city Imrryr, slaughter basically all of his people, and depose his evil cousin Yyrkoon. He does succeed in those things, though he also intended to save his cousin and lover Cymoril, who does not survive this story.

He also does not succeed in getting more than a tiny fraction of his human forces back from Imrryr alive, in keeping with Elric’s usual results to his actions: pretty much everybody but him dies, usually in horrible ways that make him sad. But that’s the deal with Elric, and this was one of the first stories to codify that. Thomas and Russell turn Moorcock’s often-purple prose into equally grand and exciting pages here; I’ll repeat that, if you’re interested in either Elric in general or the comics adaptations thereof, this is a great place to start.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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REVIEW: Beam Me Up Sulu

It is likely that many Star Trek fans since the 1960s have shot home movies, recreating Gene Roddenberry’s television in their basements and backyards. I know I was part of one in sixth or seventh grade. So, it’s little surprise that film students in California in 1985 wanted to take their turn at making one such film.

Yorktown: A Time to Heal was the brainchild of college student Stan Woo, who worked with friends and fellow students to make this tribute to the series. Funded largely by Woo’s father, the production cost about $10,000 and was shot in and around the area between 1985 and 1987. Surprisingly, he coaxed George Takei to reprise the role of Hikaru Sulu in this fan film while awaiting work on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Perhaps even more surprising, Woo found and convinced veteran character actor James Shigeta (Die Hard) to join the production in the role of “revered” Admiral Nogura.

Star Trek production designer Joe Jennings and special effects artist Andrew Probert even contributed to the production. Both were easily located through the phone book (trust me, these were simpler days).

And then the film disappeared. Woo admitted in the 90-minute documentary Beam Me Up Sulu that the Paramount Pictures canvas bag containing the film reels was misplaced in his family home, where it remained undiscovered for years.

Meantime, John Atkin read about the production in Starlog #119 in 2010 and wanted to watch the film. He found Woo, learned the film was never quite finished, and offered to help. Between 2010 and 2022, Atkin worked sporadically on digital effects while additional scenes were filmed to complete the story.

The 23-minute fan production debuted on April 2, 2022, and is available on YouTube. This documentary, produced by Timour Gregory and Sasha Schneider, recounts how this remarkable production came to be and places it in context within the world of Star Trek.

Eugene Roddenberry recounts his father’s pre-television career, while copious film clips depict the social issues consuming the 1960s, with science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer noting that the series was a beacon of hope amid the chaos. Takei himself discusses his upbringing, including the now well-told story of his time in the Japanese internment camps. There’s a digression on how Asians were depicted in film and television until Takei helped break stereotypes with Sulu. Several other actors from across the sprawling franchise—Garrett Wang, Christina Chong, Alexander Siddig, and Ian Alexander—all chime in about how the original series paved the way for diversity to flourish (perhaps Roddenberry’s greatest legacy).

There’s even a section covering diversity and acceptance within the fan community and at conventions (although the scenes are all from pro events like Creation rather than fan-run shows).

As a result, we get a lot of digressions to pad out the film, each element deserving its own examination. The real joy is watching the young cast and crew in behind-the-scenes footage from the original production, along with recollections from several participants. James Sheigeta’s widow was totally unaware of his participation, and there’s genuine delight on her face as she sees his scenes for the first time. To bridge some of the stories, the producers brought in Gazelle Automations to produce Filmation-style animated bits, which provide a nice touch.

This is a mostly engaging documentary, available on disc from Tribeca Films, and a true Valentine to Star Trek and the generations of fans who were in some way inspired by its promises.

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REVIEW: Soviet Land

Soviet Land
By Pierre-Henry Gomont
320 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$34.99

Those of us of a certain age recall when the Berlin Wall was breached and the USSR, the evil empire that was our Cold War enemy, was shattered. We knew of détente, perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the other big players of the time.

But, as I recall, the Western press didn’t spend a lot of time talking about what this meant to the citizens of the former organization who were now merely Russians. We heard about the rush of capitalism and the arrival of America’s biggest brands, but also about supply shortages and long lines for meager offerings. But the full picture of daily life remained elusive.

French creator Pierre-Henry Gomont invites us along for a glimpse into what that world must have been like for people living there. We open a few years into the new era and follow the efforts of the young, disillusioned artist Slava and the con man Dmitiri Lavrin as they scavenge and sell remnants of the old regime amid the country’s collapse. We watch as they, like so many others, loot abandoned Soviet sites for valuables to sell to collectors and to put food on the table. They’re an odd couple, but their friendship is genuine as they look after one another throughout the story.

At one stop along their nomadic path, they encounter Volodya and his daughter Nina, who are squatters in their latest target. The older man physically is the old Russian bear, menacing to those who threaten him or his daughter, who, of course, has caught Salva’s eye.

We follow their travails as Lavrin breaks away to use his skills to parlay his way out of poverty and become a major wheeler-dealer. Volodya and Nina get involved in an abandoned mining operation, trying to repair its equipment and put people to work, but find themselves embroiled in a new form of corruption, embodied by Morkhov, one of the oligarchs who cares about money rather than Communist ideals.

Gomont, a former sociologist, has been producing acclaimed graphic novels since 2011, and this appeared as a three-album series between 2022 and 2024, making its English-language debut in this collection. His energetic art is expressive, with kinetic, layered pages and loose, flowing linework. It’s an appealing style and makes the complicated interrelations between characters and story arcs easy to follow.

He explores the erosion of ideals, the struggle for survival, profiteering, and the search for purpose in a disorienting new world. Being Russian, it has its share of humorous moments and keen tragedy. 

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REVIEW: Moneyball

Geeks come in all shapes, sizes, and flavors. Among the earliest might be Henry James, who developed the box score for baseball, which evolved under Bill James into the field of Sabermetrics. An entire generation of people scoured box scores and then followed James, who dug deeper and came up with entire categories Major League Baseball had never considered. After all, to them, the Save and the Hold were still newfangled concepts in the 1980s. 

In 2001, though, those stats and their analysis broke through to the professional ranks. After losing the World Series to the Yankees, in a true David and Goliath matchup, the Oakland Athletics were about to lose first baseman Jason Giambi, outfielder Johnny Damon, and pitcher Jason Isringhausen to free agency, and there just weren’t the financial resources to match what other Big Market teams were willing to pay. General Manager Billy Beane, a young but open-minded executive, lost out on a trade with Cleveland but met a Yale economics graduate named Peter Brand, who had theories about player value that ignored the handful of stats MLB typically used. Intrigued, Beane hired Brand, and together, they built a stronger A’s for 2002, and after convincing old-school manager Art Howe to try it, they found success.

Business writer Michael Lewis covered this transformation in the best-selling book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which became the hit film Moneyball in 2011, and has just arrived on 4K disc from Sony Home Entertainment.

Director Bennett Miller (Capote) faced the challenge of presenting statistics in a compelling way to keep audiences riveted in their seats. It helped that he had Steven Zaillian’s help, who wrote the original script for Steven Soderbergh. When he left the project in 2009, Miller was hired, and he had Aaron Sorkin revise the script so that the two had clearly delineated personalities and matching dialogue.  Miller was fortunate to assemble a stellar cast, led by Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as this triumvirate of executives. The tension comes from Brand convincing Beane, then executing the plan until they hit the stone wall of Howe, chipping away at him, until finally the plan is executed to smashing success. They are three very different personalities, each with vastly different experiences, and they find common ground thanks to the singular goal of winning.

Anyone who knows baseball knows this was a turning point in analytics, and suddenly, one team after another hired their version of Peter Brand, including Bill James himself, which lends importance to this story, since it worked outside expectations and delivered, and could be replicated.

The film comes with 4K Digital HD and a Digital Code. The 2160 transfer is very good, though not as sharp as one might hope, given the quality of the 1080 edition from 2013. The video is supported with an excellent DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio mix, ported over from the Blu-ray, so you can enjoy the game without leaving your home.

This 15th anniversary edition eschews major new supplemental features but uses the ones from the original 2013 Blu-ray release:

Deleted Scenes (3 clips, 12:05); Brad Loses It (3:11); Billy Beane: Re-Inventing the Game (16:02); Drafting the Team (20:51); Moneyball: Playing the Game (19:28) Adapting Moneyball (16:33); Theatrical Trailer (new to the collection, 2:33)

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Red Ultramarine by Manuele Fior

What do you get when you tell the story of Daedalus and Icarus, and combine it with a parallel story about a modern architect named Fausto? Does it matter if the architect stays resolutely a secondary character, and makes no deals with any infernal agencies? How about if the whole thing is told in slashing, imagistic hues of black and red? Or if the architect’s girlfriend Silvia is the main character?

Those are some of the elements in Manuele Fior’s graphic novel Red Ultramarine , which I think is his earliest work to be translated into English. The Italian original came out in 2006 – and is the earliest book listed on his website – and this translation, by Jamie Richards, is from 2019.

I don’t think I entirely understood what Fior was trying to do here. Why does King Minos seem to be the same person as the esteemed doctor that Silvia consults about her boyfriend’s obsession? How does that doctor’s assistant, Marta, connect the two worlds – Silvia and Fausto in the modern day, Icarus and the rest in ancient Greece? And why is Marta young and gorgeous – and, notably, naked – in Greece, but older and more settled with the modern doctor?

The story, such as it is, bounces back and forth between the two timelines. Icarus works with his father near the labyrinth, both are eventually thrown into it and have to escape, and do so in the traditional way with the traditional tragic end. Meanwhile, Silvia consults the doctor – who hectors her and rants about Faust for no obvious reason – about her boyfriend’s obsession with perfection and labyrinths, is given a cream by Marta that promises to make the large birthmark on her face “go away,” and uses that cream, which turns her entire body the color of the birthmark and sends her back to the time of Icarus. Silvia consults the doctor – who is somehow also in ancient Greece and has the same face as Minos, but is dressed differently, so maybe they’re not the same person? – and demands that he send her back to her world, and he responds in much the same confusing wordy flood as before, which makes her hysterical.

All of the dialogue in Red Ultramarine talks around things: nothing is stated clearly. No options are laid out cleanly. The connections are symbolic, imagistic, implied. And all of the talk about Faust doesn’t lead anywhere cleanly – it comes across as a red herring.

Speaking of colors, the title is also a bit perplexing. The book is steeped in red – several of the characters, especially in Greece, have dark red skin tones, and red is an element on every page. Ultramarine, though, is entirely absent from the book – that slash of blue on the cover is the only blue in the entire book. The art inside uses black to complement red – black as the base, the core element, red as the embellishment, most of the time.

The art is gorgeous and striking, almost abstract at times in its stark outlines and elegant simplicity. It’s not simple in a cartoony sense, but simple like design, like a mid-century poster. It’s visually stunning throughout, a succession of compelling pages, even as the words confuse and obfuscate.

In the end, I took this as an early work by a creator still figuring out what he wanted to say and how to say it. Possibly also a creator more comfortable with pictures than with the words that partner them – able to make the art say what he wanted but not quite as adept yet with the words.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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