Category: Reviews

Box Office Democracy: Kingsman: The Golden Circle

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Kingsman: The Secret Service was such a breath of fresh air when it came out.  It was an action comedy that didn’t decide it could skip out on the action choreography part.  Matthew Vaughn made a movie that was all the way both things.  It was honestly a bit shocking to experience after so many Austin Powers movies where not giving a damn was basically part of the fabric of the movie.  Obviously there’s no element of surprise with Kingsman: The Golden Circle but the formula is still solidly there.  This is an action comedy that wants to have it both ways and while it’s perhaps a little worse on both ends there’s a solid movie in here anyway.

While Kingsman: The Secret Service was taking the piss out of the cliche British spy tropes, for Kingsman: The Golden Circle Vaughn decides to invent some American ones to lampoon.  Instead of being prim and proper buttoned-up bespoke suit salesman the Statesmen are rough and tumble cowboys who make whiskey (and bicker with their UK counterparts on whether that last e belongs there).  It’s fun and more importantly I think it underlines for the American audience how absurd the characters are in the first movie.  An audience raised on James Bond movies might think that’s actually what England is like so having that mirror held up can make all of the original jokes hit a bit harder.  Is an electrified lasso that cuts through anything it touches completely ridiculous? Yes, but not that much more than the see-through umbrella nonsense from the first movie.

I’ve been sitting here for more than five minutes trying to figure out how I would end the sentence “Kingsman: The Golden Circle is about” without completely failing.  On one hand it seems to be about how drug prohibition is ineffective as public policy but the people involved in the drug trade are universally unlikeable.  It might be about how hypocritically we deal with illegal drugs versus legal ones like alcohol but there’s no actual condemnation of alcohol use and, in fact, even in the closing minutes we are asked to celebrate the liquor industry.  Maybe it’s about the nihilism at the heart of political debate surrounding drugs but they don’t hit that very hard.  I appreciate that I wasn’t beat over the head with a message (especially one about drugs) because I don’t need to be preached to but this movie kind of exists in a nebulous in the middle which feels more like a fear of committing or, perhaps, like a slew of studio notes.

The standout scene in the first Kingsman is the fight scene in the church set to an ever quickening version of “Freebird” and there’s no scene in this movie that’s better than that.  I don’t understand why you would make a sequel if you weren’t prepared to do a heightened version of the signature scene from your first movie.  There are two attempts to top it and they come close with a fight during a car chase in the beginning but the third act melee is obviously their main attempt and it’s flat.  I’ve seen spies effortlessly deal with nameless mooks dozens of times before and it isn’t special like a church full of drug-fueled nobodies did.  The sequences aren’t bad or anything and in a generic movie I would probably be gushing about them, but to be in a movie called Kingsman it needed to be better.

I’m cautiously optimistic on Kingsman as a franchise.  There’s good bones here and as long as every spy movie has to constantly race to be the most serious it can be, having a release valve like this is essential.  Serious action combined with a ludicrous backdrop makes for a winning combination and I can even accept a romcom-esque meeting (the parents scene) dropped in in the middle.  The high body counts mean it’s easy to churn in new talent (and maybe eventually Channing Tatum will have time to actually be in one of these) and their willingness to hand wave any consequences with super-science means that they only have to be as macabre as they want.  The franchise needs to push itself, Vaughn can’t rest on his laurels like he sort of did with the action sequences in this one, but as long as this is willing to be arch and wry while James Bond is stuck trying to out-grim himself every time out, Kingsman is going to continue to feel like a breath of fresh air.

Notes, Vol. 1: Born to Be a Larve by Boulet

Boulet is one of those European Cartoonists who are so cool they only need one name, like Herge. (And several others — I feel like there’s a lot of them, but can’t be bothered to research the question right now.) Or maybe it’s not a coolness thing — perhaps it helps them avoid the social shame of being known publicly as a cartoonist? Or maybe it just fits better on a comics page as a signature?
So many possibilities.

Anyway, his real name is Gilles Roussel, but he works in comics as Boulet. And he started a blog in 2004, which seems to be what really pushed his career forward and gave him some momentum. (2004 was a good year for blogs — most of the years since, not so much.)

The blog has been collected in several volumes in French, under the overall title Notes. (Wikipedia lists four volumes, but that’s only through 2010. Actually, that Wikipedia entry seems to stop listing anything as of about 2010, which leads me to believe it hasn’t been updated this decade.) Last year, Soaring Penguin Press — which I’ve never heard of before, though I immediately like them for their name — had the first volume translated and published it in the UK. And somehow one copy of that edition found its way to an independent bookstore in New Jersey and finally into my hands.

That book is Notes, Vol. 1: Born to Be a Larve . (Not sure why it uses the French spelling “larve” rather than the English “larva,” but that’s just my editor-brain kicking in when no one asked it to.) And it collects roughly the first year of that comics-blog, plus some framing pages of Boulet talking to a woman (his editor? a friend? another comic-blogger? she doesn’t seem to be a girlfriend,  and I can’t find anywhere she’s named) about assembling and organizing this very book you’re reading.

The new material (well, “new” as of 2008 when the book was assembled) comments on and contextualizes the older blog entries — this is a fancy way to say that Boulet and his unnamed female interlocutor talk about the story on the previous pages, and Boulet sometimes gives more details about those stories.

Because this is the kind of blog that’s based on real life. (They all supposedly were, and it can be hard to tell how much any individual blog is “real,” I suppose, but this is mostly day-to-day life-of-a-cartoonist stuff.) There’s some stories about conventions, and some stories about daily life as a cartoonist, and the inevitable here’s-the-dream-I-had-last-night-because-I-can’t-think-of-anything-else-this-week entry. All of the old blog entries are in color — some seem to be watercolored, and some are more traditional spot color (by Boulet, presumably) over pen-lines. The new stuff is mostly black-and-white, except for the orange of Boulet’s hair. (Which is a fun design element, and also shows how much his style loosened up between the initial blog entries and this book.)

Some of the stories are a single page, but they’re generally longer than that — enough to tell a little story, or run through a series of events. The stories themselves are not dates, though Boulet mentions several times how much trouble it was to find all of them and put them in the correct chronological order.

So this is a book of parts — Boulet explicitly worries about that in his framing material up front, and revisits the idea at the end — like a book of short stories. It’s all things that happened to this one French cartoonist (even if some of them, as with many creative folks, were things that happened entirely in his head) over the course of a year more than a decade ago.

(By the way, the blog is still going, and there’s an English version now — the latter is available here .)

If you’re the kind of American whose conception of “comics” is entirely filled by people in bright colors punching each other, this is very much not the book for you. I hope there aren’t actually that many of you, but — since I’m a pessimist — I tend to assume you’re the majority, you thick-knuckled vulgarians you. But, for the rest of us, this is a neat book by an interesting creator, and for other comics-makers, it’s an intriguing look into a life in comics in a somewhat different market and ecosystem.

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

I Told You So by Shannon Wheeler

I can’t claim any connection to the cartoonist Shannon Wheeler, despite the name similarity. Oh, he lives in Portland, as does my brother — but I think that’s as close as it gets. The Wheelers are a vast clan, with our fingers in all of the world’s pies, and Shannon’s branch is very distant from my own.

But, still, he is a Wheeler, and thus one of the best in the world at whatever he chooses to do, by the power of that exceptional name. In his case, first there was the hit comic Too Much Coffee Man (in several formats, for a long time, and not quite done even now). But he’s also been working seriously on New Yorker-style single-panel cartoons for at least a decade now, with some success in that fine magazine.

And, since he’s a guy who publishes the cartoons he makes — a man wants to eat, and his audiences wants to laugh — I’ve seen two books of those cartoons so far: I Thought You Would Be Funnier and I Don’t Get It .

I don’t actually know how many of those books there are, now — I have a vague sense Wheeler has been putting out one a year, since since when or until when is less clear — but I found and read another one last month: I Told You So , published in 2012.

This one is loosely organized by place — San Francisco, New York, Portland, The Suburbs, The Internets, and Unexplored Places — which are, more or less, where the respective cartoons take place. It’s as good an organizing principle as any other, I suppose.

And it’s full of single-panel cartoons, in the arch, somewhat artificial New Yorker style. (All art is artificial, of course — that’s what makes it art. So that is in no way a dig.) Wheeler has a classic cartoony style here, full of tones and soft edges, that primes the reader to look for this kind of humor. (Well, it does for me, at least.)

Again, he is a Wheeler, and therefore excellent at what he does. It’s no surprise he was good at this kind of cartoon. If you like New Yorker-y cartoons, Wheeler has a number of these little books full of them, and so far I can recommend them all.

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

Box Office Democracy: American Assassin

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I don’t really know what it’s like to be an actor and even less what it’s like to be an aging actor, but I have to wonder what made Michael Keaton take this role in American Assassin.  He signed on to play this role after being nominated for an Oscar for Birdman and having wrapped production on The Founder, so he had done two big meaty acting roles in a row and he chose…this.  Maybe the money was too good (and he didn’t know he would sign to be The Vulture a month later), maybe the phone just isn’t ringing off the hook for older actors if you aren’t in the Clooney-tier.  American Assassin is a bad movie and it makes Keaton look like a dime store Liam Neeson.  He should be doing better things than this, everyone in this movie should. Movies should be better than making movies like this.

American Assassin has all the narrative nuance you would expect from a movie based on a book written by a consultant on 24.  Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien) is a man haunted by the murder of his fiancée by terrorists and turns himself in to a one-man terrorist vigilante.  He can speak Arabic, do MMA, and shoot a gun so he’s definitely capable of single-handedly infiltrating big secretive organizations and immediately talking to big-name terrorists.  He’s arrested in the middle of one of his operations and recruited in to a secret CIA terrorist-hunting squad led by Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton) who also does not play things by-the-book but also hates Mitch for not following the rules.  There’s a big hunt for a nuclear weapon that is being sold by a former protege of Hurley’s who also does not like following the rules.

The CIA depicted in this movie is an organization full of people who constantly belittle each other, don’t follow procedure or even direct orders, and play fast and loose with each other’s lives and the lives of millions of people if we take the whole atomic weapon thing seriously.  It’s kind of inconceivable to imagine this organization is capable of stopping any kind of foreign plot.  I understand that they want our protagonists to feel like rugged individualists (why else put “American” in the name honestly) but there’s never any contrast.  I can appreciate the plays-by-his-own-rules characters only if I have a baseline to compare them to.  This works in cop dramas a lot more easily because I know what a standard police officer looks and acts like; I have no such standard for black ops CIA operatives.  If all you ever show me are the iconoclasts they don’t stand out at all.

I honestly thought we were past the point of making movies as overtly racist as American Assassin but it would seem I am just naive.  There is one Middle Eastern person in this movie with lines that is not working with terrorists, and even he is working directly contrary to the interests of the US government but is just honorable about it.  Moreover, while all of the bad guys who get few lines and exist just to be chased and die are Middle Eastern, the grand schemer behind the whole plot is another white guy.  They made a movie about how all these brown people are evil and didn’t even have a meaty villain role to give to an Iranian actor.  It’s insulting, it’s sad, it makes the movie more predictable, and it shouldn’t be ok in this day and age.

Even if the politics weren’t a garbage fire, American Assassin just doesn’t have interesting action beats.  The very best scene in the movie would be the worst action scene in the most recent Bourne movie.  There’s a sequence where an agent gets murdered in the field and it leads directly in to a car chase where nothing happens and there’s no interaction between the two cars.  There’s an MMA-style fight that features someone getting a full mount on their opponent and then that same opponent immediately kicks them in the face.  I’m not a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu expert but that doesn’t seem possible.  Even the big finale featuring a live nuclear warhead doesn’t seem particularly important or impactful and I cared so little about the characters that as soon as the effects shots were over I was ready for them to fade to black.  I could not make myself care about the fates of these characters.

There’s no shortage of spy thrillers out there right now— I can’t imagine what made anyone look at the movie landscape, then look at this script, and think they had something worth making.  The best thing I can say about this movie is that it’s usually boring and only occasionally racist and/or confusing.   American Assassin is a movie with nothing interesting to say, nothing interesting to show you, and only a couple of reasonably interesting ways to point a camera at something.  This is a movie everyone involved with should be embarrassed about and if we’re lucky maybe everyone will just forget it ever happened.

REVIEW: Wonder Woman

wonder-woman-3d-e1502390466111-5884053Having earned over $800 million, Wonder Woman has proven itself on many levels. In a year that started, more or less, with Hidden Figures, and with a summer that had three hits featuring women (the others being Atomic Blonde and Girls Trip) the female half of the movie going audience is finally receiving their due. Director Patty Jenkins has certainly shattered some records and glass ceilings along the way while Gal Gadot has now proven she can open a movie.

With Wonder Woman out today on Blu-ray from Warner Home Video, we have a chance to look back and enjoy it all over again. While it fits neatly in the larger DC Cinematic Universe thanks to the framing sequence, the movie largely works on its own with a vastly superior tone and vision than its predecessors.

There is sumptuous color representing Themyscira, home to the Amazons. All the scenes there are a delight as we see women of age and color living harmoniously with the land and training because they know that man’s world remains a violent one.

When the First World War literally arrives on their shores, the women are ready and the beach fight is a spectacle. It also means it is time to re-engage with the world and Diana insists she be the emissary, bringing Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) back to his people. It’s clear to the Amazons that Ares (David Thewlis) is behind this and Diana brings with her the god-killer sword, convinced men will lay down their arms once Ares is defeated.

The remainder of the movie is Diana’s journey, less a fish out of a water story, more of a series of discoveries. She learns to trust men, marvel at ice cream, and show compassion where others would demonstrate might. With Trevor, she collects a select team of agents, each with their skills, but all in awe of what she can do. The team – Sameer (Said Taghmaoui), Charlie (Ewen Bremner), and Chief Napi (Eugene Brave Rock) – give her someone to talk to along the way and they demonstrate that not all men are square-jawed righteous as Trevor is or as devious as General Erich Ludendorff  (Danny Huston). Similarly, Trevor’s British contact, Etta Candy (Lucy Davis) is contrasted by Doctor Poison (Elena Anaya).

wonder-woman-in-action-e1505660961165-2044316Her arrival in No Man’s Land, changing the months-long stalemate, is perhaps the film’s best sequence as it shows Diana as Wonder Woman for the first time and it’s a joy to behold.

If there are any quibbles it is the one many comics fans made, the final fate of Steve Trevor. Set in World War I, there was not plausible way for Trevor to be a part of her life in the modern world so his story had to end. It just didn’t need to repeat the end of Captain America; The First Avenger.

The film is released in the usual assortment of packages including the popular Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD set. The high definition 2.39:1 transfer is brilliant, letting Themyscira glisten and not losing a detail during the less color-saturated war sequences. The Dolby Atmos sound track is a delight, showcasing Rupert Gregson-Williams’ excellent score.

wonder-woman-steve-trevor-e1505660996285-2743816As it deserves, the film is accompanied with a rich assortment of special features, starting with Epilogue: Etta’s Mission, a brief bit that toasts Trevor’s memory and establishes the team as force, on the hunt for a Mother Box (hinting at Justice League of course).

The behind-the-scenes material begins with Crafting the Wonder which explores the look of the film and how much the lighting was influenced by the paintings of John Singer Sargent. We then get five short A Director’s Vision pieces: Themyscira: The Hidden Island (4:53), Beach Battle (4:54), A Photograph Through Time ((5:01), Diana in the Modern World (4:37), and Wonder Woman at War (4:58).

Warriors of Wonder Woman (9:50) introduces us to the international assortment of women who spent four months physically training to become Amazons.

wonder-woman-godkiller-sword-e1505661047793-8691677The Trinity (15:56) has cast, crew and comics creators Greg Rucka, Phil Jimenez, Liam Sharp, Paul Dini, Cliff Chiawonder ng, Jill Thompson, and Lauren Montgomery who directed the 2008 animated Wonder Woman film, examine DC’s holy trinity of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. They discuss their similarities and differences and how they balance once another in print and on screen.

The Wonder Behind the Camera (15:31) focuses on the many women Jenkins hired to work on the production, as seen through the eyes of aspiring female teen filmmakers who visited for a day.

Finding the Wonder Woman Within (22:40) has award-winning poets and a wide assortment of public figures (including Dee Dee Meyers and Danica Patrick) discuss what female empowerment means to them along with their connection to the Amazon Princess.

There are six Extended Scenes which are worth a look and the usual Blooper Reel.

REVIEW: Arrow: The Complete Fifth Season

arrow-s5-bd1-e1496773124819-8370652All along, showrunners Marc Guggenheim and Wendy Mericle have been telling us Arrow was seen as a five-year odyssey, intended to be the same amount of time post-Lian Yu, to show how he has grown since being stranded there. Other than that noble notion, the execution has been incredibly uneven season to season.

As the series entered its fifth year, they began the season uncertain if this was going to be its final one so they made certain things got tidied up. The tedious flashbacks had to wrap up the five years before the series’ start and move Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) and his friends towards a point where, should it be canceled, viewers were left satisfied.

Somewhere during the production of the final nine episodes, they got a sixth season renewal so shifted the planning to bring things to a climax and a cliffhanger. The messy 23 episodes are now collected by Warner Home Entertainment in Arrow: The Complete Fifth Season.

Oliver Queen’s story was one of redemption and responsibility wrapped around his family. Along the way it has taken interesting twists and turns and this year it was clear the intent was to get back to the street-level threats that propelled the Hood, the Arrow, and Green Arrow to protect Starling, now Star, City. As a result, it was an odd monkey-wrench tossed in when the series had to acknowledge the existence of aliens among us with its participation in the four-part crossover. The planning was haphazard since the episode had to double as a celebration of its 100th episode and therefore focused more on that than the crossover, spoiling the impact it should have had.

Oliver realizes there is so much to do, as both the Arrow and as Mayor, that he needs a team now that Diggle (David Ramsey) is in prison and Speedy (Willa Holland) has had her fill of costumed adventure. Slowly, and reluctantly, he rebuilds with the addition of Wild Dog (Rick Gonzalez), Artemis (Madison McLaughlin), Ragman (Joe Dinicol), and Mister Terrific (Echo Kellum). Later, detective Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy) uses her sonic powers to join the team as the future Black Canary III. These newcomers offer a breath of fresh air to the series’ dynamic, especially as they are trained and then sent out to fight, not entirely agreeing with the hows. Artemis’ betrayal is a surprise but she’s off-stage for so long that when she turns up as Prometheus’ sidekick, we wonder where she’s been. Her arc deserved better since the betrayal is important.

arrow-s5-underneath-e1505576670659-3207597Picking up from the Olicity breakup at the end of season four, the season’s best episode may have been “Underneath”, which focused mainly on Ollie and Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards), allowing them to air out their emotions showing more can be done with less – a lesson I wish all the CW series would learn.

Instead, Prometheus (voiced by Michael Dorn) is the Big Bad, the son of someone Arrow killed way back in season one and has spent the last four years not only training himself to be the hero’s physical equal but to be psychologically ahead of his target. Throughout the season he takes out the people around Ollie until he gets Ollie himself and forces him to look deep inside himself to confront some harsh truths.

The problem with Adrian Chase (Josh Segarra) as Prometheus is that he’s too smart, too sophisticated and accomplishes way more than he should be capable of. He’s too perfect of a villain to be a true threat and I reached my limit when he produced Ollie’s secret son William (Jack Moore).

arrow-s5-team-e1505576699403-4674868Muddying the storyline are threads that never went anywhere such as Ollie’s sort of romance with journalist Susan Williams (Carly Pope), and the periodic appearance of Vigilante, who in the comics is Chase, so makes us wonder who this one is.

And with such a sprawling cast, Quentin Lance (Paul Blackthorne) doesn’t get enough screen time but what he does get, is usually as a foil to Wild Dog – their dynamic is at least a fresh one. Holland’s coming and going from the series was never adequately covered so her character is under-served and deserves far better.

Personally, I felt Ollie never should have left the island and the flashbacks should have ended about three seasons earlier. That said, I am fine the Russian thread got dealt with and we can move forward.

arrow-s5-prometheus-e1505576726227-4535577The climax, set where it all began, on the island, brings everyone to one place then doesn’t do anywhere enough with them, including Talia al Ghul (Lexa Doig) , who felt more tacked on that useful. As it stands, the past has been figuratively and literally destroyed in the final episode so truly, the new season next month can finally move forward.

The 23 episodes come complete with a series of related deleted scenes and the ever-popular Gag Reel. We get the third installment of Allied: The Invasion Complex, this one focusing on using the alien tech to let the Arrow characters see alternate histories, which reset Oliver’s goals for the remainder of the season. There are two other featurettes: The New Team Arrow where the production team talk about how the new team members were selected, designed to be fresh and allow the writers to change-up the character interplays; and Returning to the Roots of Arrow: Prometheus, examining how the series unintentionally set this up and how it got to be paid off (without really discussing the comic book origins of Prometheus or Adrian Chase).

Ed Catto: On Target with Green Arrow and Richard Gray

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moving-target-cover-1225578Moving Target: The History and Evolution of Green Arrow by Richard Gray. Sequart, $17.99 paperback; $6.99 Kindle edition

Way back when, Green Arrow was sort of the “always a bridesmaid, never a bride” of the superhero set. For a long time, fans could enjoy a new Green Arrow adventure just about every month, but he didn’t enjoy the headliner popularity of his hero pals like Batman or even Wonder Woman.

That’s all almost forgotten now. Today, so many fans enjoy this modern-day Robin Hood in comics, on TV and with licensed merchandise.

For some, Green Arrow became “a thing” when he debuted on TV, first as one of Superboy’s pals in Smallville and then in his own series. (He was briefly on Saturday morning cartoons before that too.)

green-arrow-the-longbow-hunters-01-3257119Comics fan, and local dad, Greg Parker started with the TV series and now reads the comics. “In today’s world of income imbalance and overall division, Oliver Queen represents someone willing to do the right thing, whatever that may be,” said Parker.  “Green Arrow has no superpowers. He simply wants to help defend his city from criminals and corruption. This is why we read about superheroes, someone doing the right thing regardless of the consequences to his fortune or popularity.”

For some fans, certain points of Green Arrow’s long comics career was their jumping on point. Many readers started to embrace this character during the groundbreaking Green Lantern/Green Arrow series by Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams. Or it might have been when he finally headlined his own comic in a four-part mini-series by Mike W. Barr and Trevor Von Eeden. Other fans sat up and took notice during the 90s with The Longbow Hunters comic prestige series and the subsequent ongoing comic series by Mike Grell, Mike Gold, Ed Hannigan, Dick Giordano, Dan Jurgens and so many other talented folks. I should note that this iteration was shepherded by ComicMix’s own Mike Gold.

grenarrowwy3-gray-morrow-1218265For me, Green Arrow was a “barbershop hero.” As a young boy, I distinguished the tattered comics I’d read in the barber shop from the new comics my dad would buy for me. For whatever reason, the local barber had a lot of old DC Comics with Green Arrow backup adventures. I never gave Green Arrow a lot of thought outside of getting my hair cut.

But one day I finally gained respect for Green Arrow. There was an adventure when a small child was confronted by a wild moose and Green Arrow saved the day with his “Antler Arrow.” I realized it takes a special kind of superhero to anticipate moose-related dangers, I realized.

I always liked the character after that. In my mind, it was years later, during the 90s Urban Hunter phase shepherded by Gold, Grell, Hannigan and others, when Green Arrow really grew up.

And It was during this Urban Hunter era that Green Arrow became a favorite of Australian writer Richard Gray. Those 90s comics were his starting point. Now he’s made himself something of a Green Arrow expert – searching out all the old stories and keeping up with the new comics, TV appearances and merchandise.

Gray wrote Moving Target: The History and Evolution of Green Arrow, which just debuted and is published by Sequart.

green-arrow-and-speedy-4110255He revealed that as part of his podcast, he had wanted to create one article on Green Arrow. But then he found there was too much to fit into one post. One blog became seven blogs, and that eventually became a book.

Gray’s pal, Ryan K. Lindsay, had written a Daredevil book, referred him to Sequart and Moving Target happened.

As I started my interview with Gray, I first wanted to understand if his Australian POV was similar to that of standard US comic fan. I was familiar with Australian titles like Tip Top (reprinting DC titles in the 60s and 70s), but more recently I had heard about how wonderful the Australian Comic Shops are. And that always seemed to be during the Eisner Awards Spirit of Retailer discussions. Gray explained to me that Australians now get their comics about the same time as stateside fans do. So it’s easy to keep up with Geek Culture and characters like Green Arrow. The direct market made it happen, although he remembers when he started reading comics and every corner had a “card store” that sold comics.

richard-gray-photo-by-amy-allenspach-c-4300082It was really right about the time when Oliver Queen died, and Conner Hawke took over, that Gray became a big Green Arrow fan. His passion for the character was ratcheted up when Kevin Smith started writing the adventures of a “returned from the dead” Oliver Queen.

“I did miss Conner Hawke – he was underused,” recalls Gray. “The story I wanted to see was with the two Green Arrows. I wanted to see what the interaction would look like. I wanted to see two Green Arrows on a page.”

He’s less enamored with the recent changes to character in the New 52 and Rebirth, although he noted that the GA we know has seemed to return with the legacy elements.

But as the guy who wrote the book on Green Arrow, Gray asserts that for this character, all roads lead back to O’Neil and Adams era.

“It was during that period where they established he was a liberal and wasn’t afraid of standing up to the gods of the Justice League,” said Gray. “In the very first issue of that run – he’s holding up them up to task. But also proving, in the process, that he can be wrong too. Green Arrow’s single-mindedness can be a weakness for him.”tip-top-comics-5708136Gray talks about how enjoyed seeing the character struggle as a regular guy. And he mentioned how a favorite Green Arrow story was from that Mike Barr and Trevor von Eeden series. I learned, in my recent research on the cult hit comic Thriller, a bit about this Green Arrow mini-series. Artist Von Eeden was assigned to his mini-series in order to slow him down and keep him from starting work on Thriller.  In retrospect, the Green Arrow series certainly holds up and Von Eeden’s art is spectacular.

There’s so much to Gray’s Moving Target, including:

  • Speedy – Green Arrow’s sidekick was always a favorite of mine. Gray does not disappoint and provides a meaty section focusing on Speedy.
  • Kirby – Likewise, Gray has a long chapter on Jack Kirby’s contribution to the series. Although Kirby’s run on Green Arrow was painfully brief, and how it important it has been in defining the character.
  • Interviews – There’s plenty of in-depth interviews too. Gray chats with long-time creators like Neal Adams, Mike Grell, and Chuck Dixon as well as some of the modern era writers like Jeff Lemire and Brad Meltzer.
  • Foreward – And while not really an interview, Phil Hester kicks it all off with a humble and insightful forward.

Moving Target covers a lot of ground with care and detailed analysis. There’s something here for every Green Arrow fan.

Troll Bridge by Neil Gaiman and Collen Doran

I didn’t remember Neil Gaiman’s story “Troll Bridge” well. In fact, if you’d asked me about it, I would have assumed some confusion on your part with Terry Pratchett’s short story “Troll Bridge,” and tried to lead you in that direction.

But story titles can’t be copyrighted, and even good friends can use the same ones without stress or strife. I’d forgotten it, but Gaiman did also write a story titled “Troll Bridge,” originally for the Datlow/Windling anthology Snow White, Rose Red in 1993 and collected a number of times since then. And, since Gaiman has a huge audience in comics that might not be as familiar with his just-prose works — or, at least, there are publishers willing to bet that’s the case — a number of his short stories have been turning into short graphic novels from Dark Horse over the past few years.

Last year it was Troll Bridge ‘s turn, adapted and drawn by Colleen Doran.

I’m not sure short stories need to turn into graphic novels, but they’re about the right length — a twenty-page piece of prose can be a forty-eight-page graphic novel and fit comfortably into that size, without the usual Procrustean manipulations to fit the format. So, given that it’s possible, and anything both possible and likely profitable will happen, the only question left is: how well does this story work, translated into this new medium?

It works pretty well, actually. “Troll Bridge” is a story of episodes — a boy meets a troll under a bridge near his home, somewhere in then-rural England, and then other things happen over time — and that translates to comics just as well as it works in prose. The troll itself, as seen on the cover, is traditional, which is fine for this twisted-traditional story. And the boy looks much like Gaiman might have at the same age, which is of course the point, as in so many Gaiman stories. (He works from material based on his own life a lot more than I think he gets credit for.)

So this boy meets a troll, who wants to eat his life. The boy would rather his life not be eaten, so he makes a deal. And this is a fairy tale, so that deal comes out badly in the end — fairy tales only reward the heroes who are strong and true throughout, and have the luck to be born third. (And not even them, all of the time — fairy tales are one of our bloodiest types of story.)

I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten whatever lesson “Troll Bridge” has to impart — unless it’s “keep away from bridges, because trolls lurk there and will eat you” — which may be why I keep forgetting it. Burt this is a good adaptation of that story, keeping the flavor of Gaiman’s narration and adding Doran’s pastorally-colored and carefully seen vision of his world. I’m still not 100% convinced this story needed to be adapted, but, if it was going to be anyway, this is definitely a successful version.

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

Black Dahlia by Rick Geary

I’m in danger of turning into a broken record on this subject: Geary has been doing the same thing brilliantly for so long that I’ve run out of different ways to say it.

Black Dahlia is the seventh in his “Treasury of XXth Century Murder,” which followed eight similar books in the “Treasury of Victorian Murder” (and one even earlier book, The Treasury of Victorian Murder, Vol. 1, a miscellaneous collection that was the prototype for the whole sub-career). Each one is a roughly comic-book-sized hardcover, of about eighty pages, telling the story of one famous historical murder. He’s done Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield, Jack the Ripper and H.H. Holmes, Sacco and Vanzetti and several more not as well-known in the 21st century. Each book is carefully researched and filled with maps and diagrams of the towns and murder locations — all drawn by Geary in his precise but puckish style.

The new book for 2016 — he’s had one of these for most years this century — covers the famous LA murder case from 1947, as previously retold by James Ellroy and countless others. As always, Geary isn’t here to fictionalize the case, or make up his own ending — he wants to present the true story, as best it can be determined, in all of its complexity and confusion, and lay out what might have happened, if that’s clear at all. It isn’t, in this case: whoever killed Elizabeth Short got away with it cleanly, and we’ll probably never know who he was.

Some of these books are more about the before, and some are more about the after — some murders have a huge media life, with shocking revelations and new suspects, and some just don’t. The Black Dahlia case basically went nowhere, so Geary doesn’t have a lot of after to work with. But Elizabeth Short did have a complicated life for her twenty-two years, which means Black Dahlia starts with the murder and then moves back to tell Short’s life story, or the pieces of it that seem to be relevant to her death.

Geary seems to be drawn to the unsolved, complicated cases the most — not the ones where we know what happened and who did it, but the ones where we can almost tell what happened, where there are some suspicions but not proof, the ones that are a bit frustrating, the ones where we’re pretty sure a murderer completely got away with it. Black Dahlia is deeply in that mode: whether Short was killed by a gangster or an angry boyfriend, he got away entirely. (And he’s probably dead now, which is as much getting away with anything that anyone can ever do.)

As always, Geary’s eye is focused and distinct. He gives us the people and places of the time — the right hairstyles, the right cars, the right streetscapes — to build the world that Elizabeth Short lived and died in. A series of books about old murders might seem frivolous or macabre, but death is just a lens to look at life. And Geary is excellent at telling us about both life and death.

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

Box Office Democracy: It

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The original It miniseries came out when I was in first grade.  My parents, being reasonable people, didn’t let me watch it, I’m pretty sure I didn’t even know it existed back then.  But an elementary school has kids in it so much older than six and while I wouldn’t want my 10 or 11 year-old watching It they were certainly out there.  The imagery from that miniseries became the urban legends of our school.  The unused fifth floor had an evil clown living there and on an on.  Why did an elementary school in a busy urban area have an entire unused floor? I assume to make urban legends easier to stick.  I saw the miniseries myself in middle school and honestly was still probably too young to deal with all that stuff.  I’ve been scared of It for as long as I can remember.  I don’t think they should make movies based on It, I think all the copies of the book should be put in some giant box and never be touched again.  It scares me to the bone with almost no provocation needed and this new movie is spectacularly terrifying, I believe even to people without all the built-in baggage I brought to it.

It’s basically impossible to adapt an 1100 page book and not have to leave an awful lot out.  Luckily adaptation is an art form and not just a mechanism for translating a movie literally to the page (Peter Jackson I’m still quite angry with you for those Hobbit movies).  It leaves an awful lot out on the way to a 135 minute version of half a giant novel but it certainly gets the gist of it right.  There’s an evil clown trying to kill a bunch of kids and said clown has probably been doing it at this same spot for a good long time.  Bullies are terrible and adults don’t really care about the plights of children.  Oh, and the whole thing is balls-to-the-wall scary the entire time.  The atmosphere of menace only lifts for fleeting moments and it took every ounce of my willpower not to watch those moments though my fingers.

I am a bit of a pushover when it comes to horror movies.  Even bad ones where you 100% know when the jump scare is coming can get me hunched down in my chair and averting my gaze.  It probably isn’t enough to tell you that I was scared during It but so was everyone else in my theater.  From my seat in the third row I could see that the entire theater was cringing and averting their eyes.  Statistically there must have been some horror mavens in that theater and no one was having an easy time.  This is the director of Mama, a movie I’ve often cited as the least comfortable I’ve ever been in a movie theater, finding new and more cunning ways to manipulate feelings of terror.  I never want Andy Muschietti to make another horror movie.  I can’t stand the idea of him getting better at this.  I will be there for It Chapter 2 the day that it opens.

I lived the last month of my life dreading seeing It.  I had to stop watching Nick at Nite when I went to bed because they would run commercials for it and it was too much for my subconscious to bear just before asking it to cook up some new dream ideas.  It ran a brilliant marketing campaign and backed it up with the scariest movie I’ve seen since Crimson Peak.  In a perfect world the story would have had a little more time to breathe but this is already on the long side for a horror movie and I can’t figure out what I would cut.  I’m anxiously awaiting the second part and planning what show I will have to watch on Netflix while I go to sleep because I won’t be able to stand those trailers either.  I’ll never quite be free of It but at least the rest of the world can live in the same mental hell as I do now.  Hooray!

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