Category: Reviews

All Tomorrow’s Parties by Koren Shadmi

The Velvet Underground were famously the band who had only a very small fanbase while they were around – but, the joke went, every single one of those fans started bands of their own. So they were massively influential, which is nice, but not usually what people start rock bands to achieve.

Koren Shadmi’s 2023 graphic novel All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Velvet Underground Story  tells the story of the band in comics format. It follows Shadmi’s previous nonfiction books Lugosi  and The Twilight Man , more traditional pop-culture bios of a single person, as well as a number of Shadmi’s fictional works, like Bionic . He’s been making book-length comics for more than a decade now, through a bunch of variations, and clearly has the chops to do a more complicated book like this one, with multiple main characters and a lot of faces to get right on the page.

Now, I am not one of those fabled Velvets fans – I’ve heard their music, here and there, and obviously heard a lot of people influenced by them, but it’s never been my thing. I’m here partly out of vague interest in the famous story, partly for the mid-60s vibe around Andy Warhol’s Factory, and partly because I’m just keeping up with Shadmi’s career.

So I think Shadmi does this well, but I might not be the one you trust on that. He frames the main story with Andy Warhol’s 1987 funeral, the first time former Velvet creative titans Lou Reed and John Cale had spoken in nearly two decades, and tells the main story conventionally, starting with quick glances at Reed and Cale as tormented teenagers in Long Island and Wales, respectively, before bringing all the threads together in New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1960s.

The core of the book is the early days – say roughly 1963 to 1970 – when Reed and Cale first met and started making music together, then forming the band, connecting with Warhol and his whole weird entourage/machine, and finally recording their first two records. The book doesn’t exactly end when Reed kicks Cale out of the band unilaterally in 1968, but there’s only two short chapters after that point: one a vignette of the band’s life in 1970, their last failing grasp at popularity; and the other returning to the frame story in 1987 to show how Cale and Reed reconciled, made a record together about Warhol, and eventually had a small Velvets reunion in the early ’90s.

That’s probably as much of the story as I’ll bother to explain: the core audience for this book knows all of these details much better than I do.

Shadmi focuses on the band members in a rough scale of importance: primarily Reed, only slightly lesser Cale, and then a big drop down to guitarist Sterling Morrison (who’s part of a lot of scenes, but not as active), and then even more down to drummer Mo Tucker (who seems to have been pretty quiet to begin with). Nico is there but oddly, not really fitting in – just as she was in real life. He’s good at their faces, though at times the book is oddly a series of images of Reed’s craggy face masked by sunglasses – just as it was at the time, of course.

There’s a lot of material here, and Shadmi has good control of it. I did wonder about some threads that never quite get resolved – Reed probably kicked his drug habit somewhere between 1970 and 1987 (or possibly even before 1970), but it doesn’t happen in the book. But this is a big, messy story about a bunch of messy, complex people who fought a lot, did a lot of weird things, and were never that consistent about what they did or how they explained it afterward.

I’m slightly surprised there was a comics biography of the Velvets in the first place. I’m happy to see it’s this serious, comprehensive, and through.

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

Two Dead by Van Jensen and Nate Powell

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I’ll probably be short here – my time is limited this morning and my old instincts in writing about mysteries (from doing reader’s reports for a decade and a half for bookclubs) is to explain everything in order, using every character’s name prominently. And that is, frankly, a lousy model for writing about mystery stories, as anyone can see.

Two Dead  is a mystery, or maybe a thriller, since we know most of the details from the beginning. It was written by Van Jensen and drawn by Nate Powell, telling a story of cops and criminals in 1946 Little Rock – a city they both know well, though maybe not in that era. (They’re both somewhat too young to have been around then – frankly, nearly everyone in the world at this point is too young to have been around eighty years ago.) It’s a graphic novel, in an oversized format, which presents Powell’s characteristic ominous chiaroscuro art well.

Like many stories about crime and criminals, it’s a book of dualities – there are four main characters, in groups of two. Gideon Kemp is a young WWII veteran, who just joined the police force as a detective and is secretly working for the mayor to root out the organized crime that at least partially runs this city. He’s mentored by Abraham Bailey, the haunted middle-aged Chief of Detectives, who is teetering on the edge of some kind of mental breakdown. (He sees visions of his original, long-dead partner all the time, for the most obvious manifestation.)

On the other side of one line in town – the color barrier – are brothers Jacob and Esau Davis. (Jensen may be just a bit too obvious with the names here.) Jacob is another WWII veteran, and head of the unpaid, volunteer Black police force that patrols their neighborhoods: it’s a bit more than a neighborhood watch, since there’s some backing from the government, but they are not cops and they are not equal to the White population and they seem to mostly try to keep things from exploding. Esau works for the criminal gangs that run Little Rock, and, as the book begins, has just attracted the attention of one of the leaders, Big Mike.

The story of Two Dead is what those four characters do – how Gideon and Abe try to stop organized crime, in their own ways (and what they find along the way, how that crime has infiltrated local government), and how Jacob and Esau are caught in the middle of it, pulled to one side or the other. And how Big Mike and his compatriots fight back, in the typically violent ways of organized criminals in an era when they could do nearly anything.

It’s not a happy story: both Gideon and Abe are suffering PTSD for different reasons, the Davis brothers are Black in a deeply racist town a decade before the Civil Rights era could give them any serious hope. And the title is Two Dead. It’s not quite noir, but it’s in the same broad territory – crime fiction set in a world with only shades of grey, where everyone has an agenda and most of them are at least slightly unbalanced.

An afterword explains that it’s all based on a true story – how closely isn’t clear, but it sounds fairly close. So the ending was baked in from the beginning: this all happened, more or less, eighty years ago. Jensen and Powell turn it into fiction – into a story, with structure and weight and solidity, not just a series of things that happen – and do it compellingly.

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

Spy Superb by Matt Kindt

Matt Kindt has been making stories about spies since the beginning of his career – but he’s found a new take this time.

Spy Superb  has a title that echoes his early success Super Spy (and its loose Lost Dossiers  follow-up), and that is definitely intentional – but Kindt is substantially less serious this time out than he was in his previous stories of spycraft.

This, instead, is a take on the James Bond idea: the suave, omnicompetent operative who can go anywhere, do anything, and always wins out for his side. (Which is, as it must be, our side, the side of freedom and democracy and English-speaking peoples.) Like so many other people doing James Bond takes over the past few decades – most obviously Austin Powers – Kindt makes that idea an obvious fake: no human being could actually do that, so what’s the real story?

In Kindt’s version – and this is explained in the first pages; no major spoilers here – the “spy superb” was constructed from the beginning in WWII as the perfect operative, by the fictional Half-Huit organization (co-run by the US OSS and their French equivalent). There was an original Spy Superb, but he died, stupidly, in his first mission, an immediate failure.

No matter: the organization realized they didn’t need a Spy Superb: they needed the idea of a Spy Superb, and a series of patsies to do the actual work – each one handled by career spies, generally given one small task to do, usually not even aware they were doing spycraft, and often liquidated afterward for maximum secrecy. Then all of the successes of Half-Huit would be attributed to their immortal, unstoppable premier agent.

Fast forward several decades. The most recent Spy Superb has been killed by someone unknown. And a disk he had, containing details of all the previous Spies Superb and other damaging details of the program, is on the loose. So all of those other spy agencies could learn the secret: it was all a trick.

To respond, the masters of Half-Huit activate the most delusional patsy possible: Jay, a wannabe novelist who is the guy on the cover. And their adversaries, sensing something big, send their best operatives: a Russian codenamed “Roche Chambeaux” and a Chinese woman who turns out to be a double (triple? quadruple?) agent, to kill what they still assume is a deadly super-agent.

Jay, of course, believes he is the best at whatever he does: he’s the kind of guy who mansplains absolutely anything at the drop of a hat, even though (no: entirely because) he knows nothing about it. He wanders through assassination attempts and globe-hopping adventure, surviving due to luck and his unassailable belief that he’s actually good at all these things.

There’s a good fight scene early where Jay accidentally kills three highly-trained Russian agents in his kitchen, just by trying to talk to them. After that, the random luck quiets down: I would have liked to see more of that, more of the clearly ludicrous silliness. Kindt instead mostly plays the action scenes straight, having Jay accompanied by a competent agent who wants him alive for most of the rest of the book, and so Jay mostly survives because of someone else’s ability rather than his own stupid incompetence.

That’s my overall take on Spy Superb: it’s fun, but doesn’t go quite as big or silly as it could. Jay is an idiot: that’s very clear. But we only see his idiocy save him once or twice – it could have been a lot funnier if it happened more often, more obviously, more blatantly.

There’s no reason there can’t be a sequel, though: even if Kindt doesn’t want to use Jay again, the concept means there will always be more Spies Superb, someone else even dumber and less connected to reality. And what we have here is funny – and having it in the same scratchy, rough art style that Kindt uses for his serious spy stories makes it that much funnier.

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

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 4: The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy by Stan Sakai

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The fourth collection of Stan Sakai’s long-running Usagi Yojimbo series collects a long – some would say “epic” – storyline that started in 1989 and ran through six issues of the comic. It’s largely the “gather all of the popular, previously separate, supporting characters” arc, and it has the same largely historical accurate but softened for tween readers tone as the rest of Usagi. [1]

In the interests of clarity, I should note that “Dragon” is a metaphor and “Conspiracy” is overblown: this is one feudal lord, conspiring with only his own lord and minions, planning in secret to launch a rebellion that could, potentially, maybe, topple the Shogun and would definitely knock off a couple of his local rivals and give him much more power and influence. “Dragon Bellow” is an artsy way of saying he’s going to use guns to do that.

Thus Usagi Yojimbo Book 4: The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy . There are basically two intersecting stories, neither one of which initially involves Usagi, our rabbit-samurai hero.

In the main plot, good-guy (super-literally: he is drawn as a baby panda) Lord Noriyuki thinks his neighbor Lord Tamikuro is up to something mischievous. Tamikuro is a supporter of Lord Hikiji, the big bad of the series, who is continually scheming to depose the shogun. (Everyone seems to know this – perhaps except for the shogun.)

So Noriyuki sends a delegation to visit Tamikuro, led by the female samurai Tomoe Ame, who Usagi met and almost had a romance with in a previous story. And of course Tamikuro is scheming, having gathered a large stockpile of guns, and will be attacking Noriyuki any day now. Tomoe attempts to get back to her lord with the big news, but is captured.

Meanwhile, the ronin Gen (a big, mostly honorable rhino) is chasing the blind swords-pig Ino for the bounty on the latter’s head. Both of them had been occasional allies of Usagi in the past, and they’re heading through this same territory right now.

Usagi gets pulled into the story as he’s also traveling through this region on foot: he sees Tamikuro’s forces riding off with a captured Tomoe and tries to follow. But a rabbit on foot is no match for multiple…cats?…on horseback, so he’s quickly left behind. He did hear her call out something about warning Noriyuki, and is torn between saving the damsel from unknown peril or warning the lord “hey, your samurai damsel is in some kind of peril.” While pondering, he wanders into what had been a secret ninja village – they’re like carpenter ants, there’s one behind every hillside in this region – to find all the inhabitants had been slaughtered.

Quick background note, to explain what readers learned in bwa-ha-ha style gloating dialogue among the villains: this particular group of ninjas is opposed to Hijiki, for whatever reason, and has been spying on Tamikuro, trying to figure out his plans. So Tamikuro had his men slaughter their village.

Anyway, Usagi is an honorable rabbit, so he drags all of the dead bodies into one hut, in hopes some kin will eventually bury them. He is witnessed leaving the village, with not a little blood on him, by Shingen, a leader of those ninja, who has the reasonable misapprehension that Usagi was responsible. So he starts following Usagi to take his vengeance.

After more than a little swordfighting and yelling at each other, the good guys not in Tamikuro’s prison – to sum up: Usagi, Shingen, Gen, and Ino – meet, work out their differences at least temporarily, and band together to assault Tamikuro Fortress with a force of those handy ninja.

There are battles, there are deaths, there is a conspiracy foiled. But, in the middle-grade friendly standard for the series, no recurring characters are harmed in the melee. As usual, I’m finding Usagi Yojimbo to be well-constructed, beautifully drawn, and compellingly told – but inherently a watered-down story for young readers. It definitely has a niche, but I’m finding that niche increasingly restrictive as the story goes on.

[1] See my posts on books one , two , and three for more details on the series, if you’re interested.

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

Fly By Night by Tara O’Connor

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Do you ever find yourself complaining about the genre premises of a work? It’s not helpful, I can tell you. And it can waste a bunch of mental energy while reading until you realize that’s what you’re doing.

For example, in a graphic novel mostly aimed at teen readers, with a mostly teen cast and a thriller/mystery plot, the reader needs to remember that the characters have to solve the dangerous problem themselves. Sure, they might be in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a preserve of ecological interest to at least a national if not international audience. And they might also be right in between two massive media markets full of reporters who would be happy to make a lot of noise about this particular issue. But adults sweeping in – even if the teens strategize and find those adults – is not what this kind of story is about. So I really shouldn’t have spent so much time thinking about the ways these characters could have done any of that.

My foibles aside, Tara O’Connor’s Fly By Night  is a thrill ride with heart, a few good fakeouts, and an ending that goes big when it has to. I grabbed it randomly from the YA GN shelves at my library – it’s set in New Jersey, where I live, and that sealed the deal – but I’ve never read any of O’Connor’s work before.

Dee Ramirez’s twin sister Beth has disappeared mysteriously, in the small Pine Barrens town where they both spent their childhood. After their parents divorced about six years ago – in middle school; the girls are high school seniors now – Dee went with her father to live in a new town, Westbury (and eventually with a new wife) while Beth stayed with their mother. O’Connor is a bit shaky on some details, both here and later – how exactly did Beth go missing? have the girls really not been in touch at all for six years? what actually is the name of this town? – but it works, psychologically. 

(I also initially thought that Dee was the older sister, and her talk about graduating meant she was nearly done with college – the twin thing isn’t mentioned until a number of pages in. Fly By Night trips over its own feet a few times like that.)

Anyway, Dee is back in her childhood home, with her ex-cop (or maybe still currently cop, somewhere else?) dad and something-or-other mom, as they squabble with each other over everything. (They got divorced for a reason. Mom is a bit passive, but Dad comes across as a minor-league asshole a lot of the time.) Dee is going to snoop around at school to find out what happened to Beth, even as a police investigation continues. She meets back up with her old friend Tobi, and spends some time with Beth’s boyfriend Lucas, who has a gigantic “Suspect Me!” sign on him but she still goes out into the Barrens with him alone.

At the same time, there’s a big evil company – Redline Oil, recently taken over by your standard evil businessman, Marshall Monroe – intending to run a big pipeline through the Pine Barrens. It’s not clear where this pipeline is going or why – I gather there is actually a similar pipeline proposal in the real world, so maybe it’s a big natural gas feeder from Philly to Atlantic City or something, but O’Connor just focuses on Big Evil Scary Polluting Horrible Thing – and the local students, led by teacher Mrs. Ruby, are predictably organized against it. Monroe more-or-less admits that he’s buying his way into this project, and we assume it must have some expected profit for him, but it’s mostly “I’m rich and powerful, and I want to do this, so I will buy it, and the rest of you can go pound sand.”

(Frankly, everyone seems to be against it, because it is cartoonishly evil. We have a couple of scenes of board meetings, and even the random adults don’t seem to want any of this.)

The where-is-Beth plot and the stop-the-pipeline plot are never as connected as they feel like they should be. They intersect, sort-of, out in the Barrens, but they diverge in the end. Oh, and I probably should have mentioned this before, but the Jersey Devil is real – this is a supernatural story. There is a big confrontation in the woods at the end, which for dramatic purposes happens right in the middle of the prom – this is the kind of town so far away from anything that they have the prom in the high school gym, which I didn’t think was a thing in NJ anymore – and there are dramatic revelations about the evil CEO and a big fight.

At this point, modern media actually becomes relevant, after I spent three hundred pages having the argument at the top of this post in my head. But there is a moderately happy ending.

Fly By Night looks gorgeous, has strong naturalistic dialogue, interesting and distinctive character designs, a strong sense of place, and a lot of ideas whirling around inside it. I didn’t think it quite pulled all of those elements together as well as it should have, but it does a decent job, and it’s a solid environmental thriller for teens, especially those with any connection to Jersey.

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

REVIEW: Captain Planet: The Complete Franchise

Conceived by Barbara Pyle and media mogul Ted Turner, Captain Planet was an ecological hero way ahead of his time. The animated series ran for years with some nifty design work by Neal Adams and his Continuity Associates. Each episode featured an adventure and a lesson (of course). It endeared itself to a generation of viewers and remained an enduring figure from the 1990s.

Now, Warner Home Entertainment has released Captain Planet the Complete Franchise, with 41 hours and 31 minutes of environmental goodness. For silly legal reasons, the show has two titles evenly split among its six seasons: Captain Planet and the Planeteers (animated by DIC) and The New Adventures of Captain Planet (animated by Hanna-Barbera) for the final three seasons.

Gaia, the spirit of Earth, was voiced by Whoopi Goldberg, who set the tone and standard for the entire series. She was accompanied by a voice cast that included Margot Kidder (who replaced Goldberg in season four), Meg Ryan, Martin Sheen, Jeff Goldblum, LeVar Burton, Ed Asner, and Dean Stockwell.

As Gaia awakens after far too long, she is unhappy with the shape of Earth and sets about to repair things, with the help of teens drawn from the continents, granting each power — earth, fire, wind, water, and heart — to help save the world. United, they summon forth Captain Planet (David Coburn). The excellent captain can be felled by pollution and similar harmful environmental factors. Our teen heroes —Gi (Janice Kawaye), Kwame (LeVar Burton), Linka (Kath Soucie), Ma-Ti (Scott Menville), and Wheeler (Joey Dedio) — respond to Gaia’s alerts via their solar-powered Geo-Cruiser.

Their recurring foes include Hoggish Greedly (Ed Asner), Hoggish Greedly Jr. (Charlie Schlatter), Rigger (John Ratzenberger), Verminous Skumm (Jeff Goldblum/Maurice LaMarche), Duke Nukem (Dean Stockwell/Maurice LaMarche), Leadsuit (voiced by Frank Welker), Dr. Barbara “Babs” Blight (Meg Ryan/Mary Kay Bergman), MAL (David Rappaport/Tim Curry),  Looten Plunder (James Coburn/Ed Gilbert), Argos Bleak (Scott Bullock), the Pinehead Brothers (Dick Gautier and Frank Welker), Sly Sludge (Martin Sheen/Jim Cummings), Ooze (Cam Clarke), Tank Flusher III (Frank Welker), Zarm (Sting/David Warner/Malcolm McDowell), and of course, the good captain’s evil twin, Captain Pollution (David Coburn).

The DIC episodes were very much formula, and when H-B took over, backstories and more depth were added throughout, making for a more enjoyable viewing experience. Still, there were many times the themes were heavy-handed, making them feel like an “eat your spinach” experience.

It did spawn The Captain Planet Foundation in 1991, as Pyle donated a percentage of the show’s merchandising revenue to do some actual real-world good. It ran a decade until new parent company TimeWarner shit it down. After the disastrous AOL merger, the foundation was resurrected in 2007 and continues to do good work.

The series looks fine on DVD, reproduces the original animation well, and offers Dolby Digital audio. Little expense was spent on cleaning and unifying everything, although the entire package is a lavish one. Not a single special feature has been included.

REVIEW: The West Wing: The Complete Series

Okay, I get it. The West Wing is a fantasy. But it’s not just a liberal fantasy television series. It is a series that celebrated patriotic Americans who all thought they were working to create a better country. The staffers in the west wing of the White House and their president strove to bring their best efforts, and as we watch, we see them try and fail, we see them try and succeed, and we see them try and not get everything they wanted. There was no breast-beating or pouting on national television.

The 1999-2006 series celebrated patriotism and intelligence, two things lacking from way too many elected officials today, making us long for the Bartlet Administration. Long overdue, Warner Home Entertainment has chosen the show’s 25th anniversary to finally release The West Wing: The Complete Series on Blu-ray.

Created by Aaron Sorkin, using leftover material from his entertaining The American President, he created a rich, varied cast of characters. With producer/director Thomas Schlamme, they cast one of the finest ensembles you could hope to find on American prime time television. They oversaw the first four seasons before burnout and drug problems led Sorkin to step aside, with Schlamme with him. The fifth season saw Executive Produce John Wells step in, and it was an uneven season, but it found its footing. Seasons six and seven introduced fresh characters as the next election loomed, and it found new energy, ending on a high note.

Even its weakest episodes were stronger than most of its network competition, rivaling the upcoming Golden Age of cable as it competed with series like The Sopranos. We saw the struggles to run a country each week, along with their horrible work/life balance. Their little personal time often involved attempts at romance, which gave rise to many wonderful relationships.

We also learned a lot about how the government works and issues large and small. Sorkin would have people bring him the boring, and he somehow would have it turned into fascinating badinage and debate.

The show has endured, not just through cable and now streaming accessibility. Still, it spawned the first series rewatch podcast, The West Wing Weekly, and has spawned numerous mini-reunions for good causes (most recently, on the Emmy Awards). The show’s enduring nature and its influence over many worthy causes were also celebrated in What’s Next: A Backstage Pass to The West Wing, Its Cast and Crew, and Its Enduring Legacy of Service, written by two of its stars, Melissa Fitzgerlad and Mary McCormack.

The 156 episodes, across 28 discs, carry over the 20+ commentaries, behind-the-scenes featurettes, unaired scenes, gag reels, and more from the DVD editions. The 1080p transfers are sharp and clear, with a fine DTS-HD MA audio track. Alas, only English captions are available, which I think is a missed opportunity, as there was a lack of anything new to celebrate 25 years (the live recreation of an episode done as a Democratic fundraiser would have been welcome). The plastic cases cram the discs in place and can be easily dislodged, which is another shame.

Superman Isn’t Jewish (But I An…Kinda) by Jimmy Bemon and Émilie Boudet

With supposedly-nonfiction books, I’ll focus tightly while reading on how true they are, looking for any crack in the verisimilitude that might imply some fiction has made its way into the mix. I think that’s pretty common: we want to know what kind of stories we’re being told, how constructed they are, to know how to respond.

But it’s not always clear how much the book is claiming to be nonfiction. This graphic novel – or bande dessinée, since it’s originally from France – is in the “Life Drawn” series from Humanoids, which I thought meant it was clearly, well, drawn from life. But I just took a look at their website, and the series is described as “Biographies and slice-of-life tales that show us what it means to be human” – and, more specifically, Wander Antunes’s adaptation of Twain’s short story Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg , which I read recently, is also included in the program. So my assumption that of course anything published as “Life Drawn” would be nonfiction has been proven to be inoperative.

In other words: this is probably close to true, more or less. But only…kinda.

Superman Isn’t Jewish (But I Am…Kinda)  is a coming-of-age story told in the first person by a French boy, Benjamin, and covers mostly his youth in the late eighties and early nineties, in a large extended family with a (now-divorced) Jewish father and Catholic mother. It was written by the film director and screenwriter Jimmy Bemon and drawn by Émilie Boudet, first published in France in 2014 (when Bemon also made a related short film with the same name) and translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2018 English-language edition.

Jimmy is immersed in Jewish culture and history by his father’s side of the family, encouraged to believe himself part of a long, storied cultural tradition stretching back five thousand years, one of the chosen people. And he’s happy with that part.

But being Jewish also meant that he was circumcised at birth – which is vastly less common in France than it is in the US, something Bemon didn’t need to point out to his original audience but might make his histrionics come across weirdly to American readers – and so he is Different From Other Boys.

There are other issues as he grows up – undertones of how much “Jewish” means “Zionist” to a bunch of schoolboys, some of whom are Arabic, things like that – but the chopped willy is the big one. Benjamin is worried that, when he ever gets together with a girl, she will point and laugh, and then tell everyone else.

Superman Isn’t Jewish is relatively short and conversational, like a film driven by a single narrative voice. We don’t see a whole lot of Benjamin’s young life: just what matters to his possibly-Jewish identity. He has classes with a rabbi, and celebrates his bar mitzvah. There’s a moment where he’s pulled in to be the tenth man for a minyan. But he doesn’t quite feel Jewish, and eventually works up the courage to tell his father that. This is a mostly amiable, positive book, so that goes OK in the end.

I do wonder a bit how much of Jimmy is in Benjamin, and what there is of Jimmy that didn’t make it into Benjamin. But that’s the inherent question of semi-autobiographical fiction, isn’t it? In the end, this is a nice story about a good kid who figured out how he wanted to live and found happiness, in bright colored pencils and big faces from Boudet’s art – that’s a fine thing to have.

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

REVIEW: Friends: The Complete Series 4K Blu-ray

In spring 1994, I was reading a series of articles in The New York Times about pilots for the forthcoming TV series, and they profiled a series featuring six twnetysomethings trying to adjust to adulthood. It sounded promising so my wife and I sampled the NBC series the following September.

And Friends has been running somewhere on television ever since. It is now 30 years old and to celebrate, Warner Home Entertainment recently released Friends: The Complete Series, debuting on 4k Ultra HD for the first time. Every episode is included along with a variety of bonus features making this an ideal addition to your video library.

What’s interesting about the series today is how it has endured despite aspects no longer appearing as fresh. The creators, David Crane and Marta Kauffman, cleverly found six types that could bounce off one another with heart and humor. With director James Burrows handling the pilot, all the elements from the first episode were there and remained in place for the next decade.

Largely set in two adjacent apartments in Manhattan, and their favorite coffeeshop, the six worked to live with running gags about their jobs (or not having jobs). They never seemed to worry about paying the rent or utilities, so their struggles were more about relationships—finding them or keeping them. They loved and lost, laughed and cried, and turned to one another for support. Over the course of ten seasons, we saw two couples form, one long-simmering and filled with pathos, while the other unexpected and funny. By the time they turned the lights out in an hour-long finale, they had become part of the national dialogue.

The show endures because the character relationships feel real and their affection for one another is evident from when Monica’s friend Rachel turns up in her wedding dress, having run away from her wedding and is immediately adopted by the others.

Wisley, the showrunners, plotted out the character arcs for each season well before writing and filming began, serving the characters first, then the gags. This may be one of the reasons why it is among the series I continually find my high schoolers watching via streaming.

The series has 23 triple-layered 4K discs and two dual-layered Blu-rays for the special features. They’re tidily packaged in a nice plastic case that fits snugly on the shelf. The 2160p transfers, framed at 1.78:1, look just fine, and as you remember, the series back in the CRT days. That said, the color is oddly saturated throughout and look just a wee bit off, enough to nag at veteran fans.

The 4K discs come complete with a fine DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio, serving the dialogue and music just swell.

The Special Features are mostly taken from previous Blu-ray and DVD editions of the seasons such as the audio commentaries with executive producers Kevin S. Bright, Marta Kauffman and David Crane.

On the first bonus disc, we get a new Friends: Through the Peephole (15:18), hosted by Warner Bros. archivist Matt Truex, examining some of the 2,000 props and costumes. There is also the less interesting trivia contest How Well Do You Know Your Friends? (6:37).

Each season carries over the other Blu-ray extras such as trailers, music videos, shorts spotlighting the series’ international appeal and other topics.

The second disc contains extras imported from seasons 6-10, so we have gag reels, Gunther’s chats about each subsequent season, and various Friends appearances on talk shows plus the Extended Broadcast Episodes – “The One Where Rosita Dies,” “The One Where They All Turn Thirty,” “The One with Joey’s New Brain” and “The One with the Truth About London.”

I suppose the Max reunion special should be here, but it isn’t, which is a shame. Overall, though, it’s nice to have the entire series in one place, so you can watch at your leisure and not worry about the show vanishing from your favorite streaming service or cable channel. As promised in the catchy title song, one of the last to chart on top 40 radio, they’ll be there for you.

Black Is the Color by Julia Gfrörer

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I often find I’m thinking about or focused on the wrong things in the books I’m reading – that I need to specifically tell myself to ignore something so I can move on.

For example in Julia Gfrörer’s short, dark, creepy 2013 graphic novel Black Is the Color , the story opens on a wooden ship, far out in the ocean, several hundred years ago. One of the leaders – not the captain, maybe the first mate or owner – tells two sailors that they are, unfortunately, running lower on provisions than expected. So he’s going to kick the two of them off the ship, into a small open boat, to die in the middle of the sea.

And my first thought was: was that a thing? I’ve heard of crews going on half-rations, or even less – stretching their food farther and farther. And I know that a merchant ship, which this one appears to be, had a small, tight crew to begin with – especially compared to a warship, which would be swarming with gunhands and marines and others. So it didn’t quite make sense that they could or would just kill two of a very limited crew at the first sign of trouble.

But that’s how Gfrörer gets to the story she wants to tell: this is about two men, in that open boat, and what happens to them. So the setup almost doesn’t matter: it’s plausible, it’s quick, it gets them out there, under a baking sun, with no food or water.

And then the mermaids come out to investigate.

Black is the story of one of those two men: Warren. He lasts longer. He’s…befriended? made a pet? visited? by a mermaid, Eulalia. We see him alone in the boat, slowly dying. We see him with her, being comforted or having sex or being a new object of interest. We see her down in the depths, among her people, callous and self-centered and flighty. We see that she and all her people view humans as amusing distractions, as entertainment – interesting in the moment, maybe, but nothing more important or significant than that.

Gfrörer’s art is detailed and organic, her lines dark black and usually thin, her borders in this six-panel grid just slightly irregular, her people with sharp defined faces, her seas a mass of lines rippling and undulating, endlessly. This is a book that’s black in multiple ways: story, theme, characters, often visually. Black is the color here.

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

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