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The Law Is A Ass #410: Captain Marvel and I Indulge in Conspiracy Theories

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I’ve never lied to you.

Last time I said I had no more Civil War II columns and here I am writing about Jessica Jones #6 and things that wouldn’t have happened without Civil War II happening. But writing about things that happened after Civil War II ended is not a Civil War II column. It’s a Civil War II aftermath column. So I didn’t lie. Technically.

And now that I’ve cleared my conscience, let’s get this over with.

Alison Green was one of the people that the Inhuman Ulysses Cain predicted was going to commit crimes. Which made her one of the people Captain Marvel arrested before they committed the crimes and threw into a preventative justice prison so that they couldn’t commit their future crimes. Unfortunately, Alison wasn’t going to commit a crime. Ulysses was as wrong about Allison as that soothsayer was about the Powerball numbers she gave me last week. And Captain Marvel was even more wrong to arrest Alison than she had been in arresting all the other people she was wrong to arrest.

Alison created an anti-super hero organization. Captain Marvel and Jessica Jones tricked Alison into believing Jessica Jones was disgraced so Alison would recruit Jessica into the organization. Which Alison did and got stung worse than Doyle Lonnegan after stepping on a hornet’s nest. Jessica helped Alison capture Captain Marvel, Then, when Alison thought she had the upper hand, she showed she had what it takes to be a comic-book villain; she went into full-blown monologue mode and revealed her master plan. Which was to kill the Champions in a way that would foster a huge anti-hero backlash and end the age of the super hero forever. (End the age of the super hero? I don’t think Disney pictures would like that very much.)

Captain Marvel said Alison’s Champions plan added conspiracy to commit murder to her other crimes. But I don’t know. See, the crime of conspiracy to commit a crime entails more than conspiring to commit a crime. As the details about Alison’s plan were sketchier than an Artist’s Alley commission, I’m not sure there’s enough there for a conspiracy charge.

Conspiracy has three basic elements. First, two or more people have to be involved. Second, they have plan together to commit a crime. Third, at least one of them has to commit some overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Let’s take those one at a time. If only one person is involved, there’s no conspiracy. No one can conspire with him or herself. Even if all three faces of Eve agreed to commit the crime, that’s not a conspiracy because there’s only one Eve. And conspiracy is all about Eve and someone else planning a crime.

Second, the two or more people have to create a plan to commit a crime. They don’t all have to commit the crime. Even if only person commits the actual crime, as long as two or more of people planned the crime, they’d all be guilty of conspiracy. That’s two defendants for the price of one, what a bargain!

Third, at least one of the conspirators has to commit some overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy. If Bonnie and Clyde create a plan to rob the Commerce Bank in Beverly Hills then go to sleep so they can get a fresh start in the morning, they have not committed a conspiracy yet. However as soon as they do something else – drive to the bank, steal the getaway car, kidnap Sonny Drysdale  to use as leverage against the bank president – they’ve completed the crime of conspiracy. It doesn’t even matter that they haven’t actually robbed the bank yet. By making the plan and then doing an overt act in furtherance of the plan they committed conspiracy, even if they never accomplish their ultimate objective.

So did Alison conspire to commit murder? Well, first we’d have to know did Alison make her plan to kill the Champions with one or more people? And, if so, with which people? If the only person Alison made her plans with was Jennifer Jones, then there can be no conspiracy. Jennifer wasn’t really part of the conspiracy, she was an undercover government operative. Traditionally, when the only other party to a conspiracy is a government operative, then two or more people aren’t agreeing to commit a crime. One plans to commit the crime, the other is just pretending as part of the undercover sting and we’re back to the a person can’t conspire with him or herself rule. Recently, some states and the Model Penal Code have started to move away from this position and allow conspiracy convictions when the co-conspirators are government agents, because the criminal thinks he or she has entered a conspiracy.

So if New York allows conspiracies with undercover police of if Alison made her plans with anyone in her organization other than Jessica, then the first element of the conspiracy is met. She probably did, but we weren’t given enough information in the story to know this for sure.

Assuming that Alison and others did plan to kill the Champions, the second element is also met. I trust that I don’t have to convince you that murder is a crime. I think I have to convince some writers of that, based on the way they have their heroes kill. But you, I shouldn’t have to convince. As murder is a crime, making plans with other people to commit a murder would hit conspiracy’s second element.

Third element, did any of the conspirators commit any overt act in furtherance of the plan to kill the Champions? We don’t know. We do know they were supposed to carry out the plan later that same night, so it’s likely that somebody had done something, because time was a wastin’ but the law doesn’t allow us to assume the existence of an element. So I can’t say for sure that anyone did an overt act or that Alison is guilty of conspiracy.

Sure Captain Marvel said Alison committed conspiracy. But let’s face it, Captain Marvel’s grasp of the law is about as firm as if she were noodling for mercury. While wearing a catcher’s mitt on both hands.

Now while I may not be able to tell you whether Alison’s guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, I can tell you this; I just checked my pile of write-about-these-someday comics and there isn’t one of them that’s connected to Civil War II. So I should be done with it. Unless Marvel’s got some new story coming up that connects back to Civil War II. And I don’t think they do. Civil War II is so last year. This year Marvel’s too busy secreting Secret Empire stories.

Martha Thomases: King Arthur, Lois Lane and Gefilte Fish, Oh My!

Diversity is in the news!

Warner Bros. spent an estimated $145 million on a movie about King Arthur, directed by Guy Ritchie, hoping to have a new tentpole hit like his Sherlock Holmes films. Instead, the movie opened in third place, far behind Guardians of the Galaxy 2, which had already been out for two weeks, and Snatched, starring Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn.

In other words, a movie based on a male hero of white culture (albeit one with a random but beautiful black man) flopped behind a movie about a multi-racial multi-species space gang and a movie about two women, one of them old enough to have grown children and one of them not conventionally movie-star beautiful.

I’m not here to say that King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, failed because it is not a good movie, or that the two other movies I mentioned here are of higher quality. I like Guy Ritchie, or I did when he made movies like this. Instead, I want to talk about how the modern American audience, the people who pay for our popular entertainment who buy movie tickets, books, comics, music and television subscriptions, is more accepting of diversity than the people who sell them.

That’s the facet of the discussion about the Marvel story that I think gets neglected. Marvel Vice-President David Gabriel did not say that the inclusion of more non-white, non-male characters was the reason for Marvel’s sales slump. He said that a few retailers told him that was the reason.

By itself, this does not mean that books with diverse characters don’t sell. This means that they don’t sell in those retailers’ stores.

There are all sorts of reasons this could be true. I don’t know where these stores are, or what their surrounding communities are like. I don’t know what the capacities of these retailers might be in regard to advertising, promotion, and outreach. Are they located near colleges or other kinds of schools? Are they rural or urban? Do they see themselves as a community asset for everyone, or a safe haven for their loyal Band of Bros? Any of these factors can have an impact on the kinds of books a store sells best.

It is this very variety in the kinds of markets comic book stores serve that should encourage publishers to produce more diverse kinds of books, not only in terms of the characters but in the genres and packaging of the stories. Saying that books about people of color, or books about women won’t sell is just as stupid as saying the same things about movies.

I can understand that many readers of superhero comics are tired stories where an established character is suddenly replaced by someone of another race, gender or sexual orientation. It was daring and interesting when it first happened 40 years ago, but today it’s neither new nor newsworthy. Anyone who tells stories like these today should have some different insights than we’ve seen before.

It’s much more interesting, to me anyway, to create entirely new characters. That’s what Milestone Media did back in the day, and it’s what Catalyst Prime from Lion Forge Comics seems to be doing now. I haven’t seen them at my local store yet, but I have faith in any comic book company that does this.

My real reason for encouraging diversity is entirely selfish: I want more, and I want different. I want to have the time and resources to sample as many different things as I can in this life. Whether that means strange foods or different kinds of stories, I want the opportunity to try the new and exotic.

By the way, the article in that last link (about the growing Jewish community in Berlin) has one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in The New York Times. I don’t know if the Gray Lady meant to be so snarky, but it’s hilarious. See for yourself:

“Jewish culture here is a bit superficial,” said Elad Jacobowitz, a 39-year-old real estate broker from Tel Aviv who moved to Berlin 13 years ago. “It doesn’t fit,” he said, sipping horseradish-infused vodka while listening to a klezmer band at the gefilte fish party during the Nosh Berlin festival.

Terms and Conditions by R. Sikoryak

Sikoryak has made his comics career out of taking words and pictures from other people and mashing them together — most notably collected in Masterpiece Comics. His thing generally is to redraw famous comics pages — sometimes new pages in the style of someone old and/or dead, but usually the famous art itself — and put different words into the balloons, for amusing, satiric, and or artsy purposes.

A couple of years ago, he decided, for whatever reason, to abandon high literature and take his text from much duller reality — Apple’s iTunes Terms and Conditions, a legal document that millions of us have accepted without actually reading. The book Terms and Conditions explains, in a short postscript, how he went about working on this project, and which iterations of the changing legal document were used for various versions of these pages, but it never actually tells us why he did it.

The book also never mentions that Sikoryak replaced the main characters in all of this redrawn art with what looks like a Steve Jobs figure — the name Jobs is never mentioned, nor the fact that this book has a single main character throughout all of its hundred art styles. But it’s what he did, and you can see many of the styles of Job on the front cover.

Sikoryak’s postscript also notes that he worked on his book in batches of pages, a dozen or so at a time. He would draw those page and then shoehorn some T&C onto them, and then go onto the next batch. So he didn’t pick pages to coincide with the text; he just redrew a bunch of famous comics pages to star Steve Jobs instead, and then tossed what is essentially lorem ipsum text onto those pages.

It’s all very arty. But I don’t really see the purpose or use of it. Terms and Conditions can have no artistic unity in any way — each page in completely independent, and the text is pure legal boilerplate. The enjoyment in reading it is primarily in recognizing each page (if you do so instantly) or in trying to figure out the source if it’s vaguely familiar. It is a cold and pointless thing, of interest primarily to people who like conceptual art.

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

REVIEW: Vixen the Movie

vixen-the-movie-bd-box-art-1-e1487886337288-2885976It’s hard to imagine Vixen as a member of the DC Universe for over 35 years now, an early victim of the DC Implosion before arriving as a guest-star in Action Comics. She’s been a constant presence if not a major one, but was exactly in the range of secondary characters ripe for development for television since her powers were not entirely special effects-laden.

Interestingly, she was brought to The CW through their CW Seed website, a way to expand the Arrowverse with original content. In 2015, there were six short animated episodes that performed well enough that a second season arrived last October. The dozen episodes have now been edited into a 78-minute feature, Vixen the Movie, out now from Warner Home Entertainment.

The series is only kinda sort of close to the source material as we learn of Mari Jiwe McCabe’s (Megalyn Echikunwoke) upbringing in the African land of Zambesi, but raised in Detroit by her foster father Chuck Neil Flynn). The series opens with Mari wanting to learn the truth about her birth parents and the origins of the Tantu Totem necklace she was given by her birth mother. People are now after it and she discovers it imbues her with animal powers, bringing her to the attention of Flash (Grant Gustin) and Green Arrow (Stephen Amell). She rejects their offers of help and instead turns to college professor Macalester (Sean Patrick Thomas) for answers, leading her back to Africa and a confrontation with Kuasa (Anika Noni Rose), the sister she didn’t know she had, and one who wants Mari dead so she can possess the totem.

The second season went way beyond the comics and introduced the notion that there were five powerful totems – air, earth, water, fire, and spirit. The fire jewel has been found and comes into the possession of Benatu Eshu (Hakeem Kae-Kazim), a general who has been seeking any one of the jewels for years. He appears too powerful for Vixen until she digs deep and finds a way to persevere. Along the way, she demonstrates how comfortable she has gotten with her powers by aiding Flash, Firestorm (Franz Drameh/Victor Garber), Atom (Brandon Routh), and Black Canary (Katie Cassidy) during an attack from Weather Wizard.

The animated story suffers from the same weakness of its live-action colleagues, an inability to effectively write team action or proper use of powers. In this case, Eshu uses fire much as Heat Wave does, as some sort of force rather than something that burns. The dialogue has the same snap to it, though, which is welcome.

The animation is adequate if a little stiff and angular in character design while the live-action actors needed far better direction for their animated counterparts. Thankfully, Echikunwoke does a far superior job, which earned her a guest spot on Arrow last year and would be most welcome back for a third season or another live-action appearance.

The movie comes on a Blu-ray with Digital HD code. The lone special feature is “Vixen: Spirit Animal” which has comics historian and ComicMix contributor Alan Kistler, series executive producer Marc Guggenheim, Victor Garber, and Carlos Valdes weigh in on how her magical background fills a gap between the super-hero and the vigilante in the Arrowverse. Not much about her comic book origins are ever discussed, though. Additionally, there are two episodes from Justice League Unlimited included – “Hunter’s Moon” and “Grudge Match”.

Amadeo & Maladeo by R.O. Blechman

Blechman has been making comics and related art for six or seven decades now, going back to 1953’s The Juggler of Our Lady. Most of that stuff was collected a few years back in Talking Lines — but Blechman is still around and still making art.

(If anything below ends up sounding critical — I never know which way my fingers will tend — let me say up front here that it’s really damn impressive that Blechman is still around, still working, and still getting books published. This is a man who was born in 1930 and got into the Art Directors Hall of Fame nearly twenty years ago…and he had a new book out in 2016. I only hope I can be around when I’m 86.)

Amadeo & Maladeo is a historical graphic novel, something of a compare-and-contrast about two musician-composers in the late 18th century, loosely inspired by the life of Mozart. And it looks like it will have a crisp, defined contrast between the two of them, but then…wanders off into specifics on both sides that make that comparison muddied.

I’m torn on whether that makes this book stronger or weaker — on the one hand, the book it seemed to be heading towards could have been dull and obvious, with the rich prodigy brought low in the end and the poor kid finding fame and success in America. On the other hand, their careers aren’t particularly parallel, and there’s a moment where something bad happens to a middle-aged Amadeo — a carriage accident of some kind — that Blechman never quite explains.

But, anyway, Amadeo is a prodigy, performing for the crowned heads of Europe in the 1750s, before the age of ten. Maladeo, born on the other side of the blanket to a servant girl who had a happy night with Amadeo’s violin-teacher father, performs on street-corners and is shanghaied to New York at a young age.

In the end, we are with Maladeo as a happy old man, which I suspect is the big clue — Blechman himself lived to an impressive old age, and he had Amadeo die at an age similar to Mozart’s. Neither man could choose his life, of course, and both had successes and happiness along the way — but Maladeo is still going at the end, and that has to count for something.

So there may not be a moral here, just the story of two contrasting lives. The world has enough morals, though, so the lack here is not a problem. And Blechman’s trademark “shaky line” is as expressive and wonderful here as ever — note that it’s not because of age; he’s always drawn like that on purpose. If you’re not expecting something stark and classical in its construction, you’ll likely enjoy Amadeo & Maladeo a lot.

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

Legends of Tomorrow Season Two Hits Video August 15

BURBANK, CA (May 16, 2017) – Their time is now! Just before their third season premiere on The CW, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment releases DC’s Legends of Tomorrow: The Complete Second Season on Blu-rayTM and DVD on August 15, 2017. Fans can zoom through 17 exhilarating episodes from the second season, plus exciting special features including the show’s 2016 Comic-Con Panel, crossover featurette, gag-reel and deleted scenes. DC’s Legends of Tomorrow is The CW’s #4 show among Total Viewers, with over 3.2 million viewers tuning in weekly.⃰ DC’s Legends of Tomorrow: The Complete Second Season is priced to own at $39.99 SRP for the DVD and $44.98 SRP for the Blu-ray, which includes a Digital Copy.

*Source: Nielsen National TV View L+7 US AA%; excluding repeats, specials, and <3 TCs; Season To-Date = 10/13/16-12/08/16

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow amps up the firepower for Season Two of the Super Hero team-up series by enlisting both a league and a legion of new characters to join the legendary crew of the Waverider.  Charged with protecting the timeline from temporal aberrations – changes to history that spawn potentially catastrophic consequences – the Legends reassemble with the addition of historian Nate Heywood (aka Citizen Steel) and Justice Society of America member Amaya Jiwe (aka Vixen).  And yet, for every force of good, there is an opposing force of darkness.  In Season Two, the Legends of Tomorrow face off against the first ever team of DC Super-Villains: the Legion of Doom, including Malcolm Merlyn, Damien Darhk, Captain Cold and the Reverse Flash.  After saving the world from Vandal Savage and the corrupt Time Masters, the Legends of Tomorrow are now charged with protecting time (past, present and future) itself, taking them across history and up against the power of the Spear of Destiny – a threat unlike any humanity has ever known.

“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow has captivated audiences through its incredible action and impressive special effects,” said Rosemary Markson, WBHEG Senior Vice President, TV Marketing. “We’re thrilled to release the complete second season on Blu-ray™ and DVD to give fans even more of the excitement and adventure that they crave from this series.”

With Blu-ray’s unsurpassed picture and sound, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow: The Complete Second Season Blu-ray release will include 1080p Full HD Video with DTS-HD Master Audio for English 5.1. The 3-disc Blu-ray will feature a high-definition Blu-ray and a Digital Copy of all 17 episodes from season two.

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow stars Victor Garber (The Flash, Titanic), Brandon Routh (Arrow, Superman Returns), Arthur Darvill (Doctor Who), Caity Lotz (Arrow, Mad Men), Franz Drameh (The Flash, Edge of Tomorrow), Maisie Richardson-Sellers (The Originals), Matt Letscher (The Flash), with Nick Zano (The Final Destination) and Dominic Purcell (Prison Break, The Flash). Based on the characters from DC, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow is produced by Berlanti Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television, with executive producers Greg Berlanti (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, Blindspot, Riverdale), Marc Guggenheim (Arrow), Andrew Kreisberg (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl), Phil Klemmer (Chuck, Political Animals), Sarah Schechter (Arrow, The Flash, Blindspot, Supergirl, Riverdale) and Chris Fedak (Chuck, Forever).

BLU-RAY & DVD FEATURES

  • DC’s Legends of Tomorrow: 2016 Comic-Con Panel
  • Allied: The Invasion Complex (DC’s Legends of Tomorrow)
  • Deleted Scenes
  • Gag-Reel

17 ONE-HOUR EPISODES

  1. Out of Time
  2. The Justice Society of America
  3. Shogun
  4. Abominations
  5. Compromised
  6. Outlaw Country
  7. Invasion!
  8. The Chicago Way
  9. Raiders of the Lost Art
  10. The Legion of Doom
  11. Turncoat
  12. Camelot/3000
  13. Land of the Lost
  14. Moonshot
  15. Fellowship of the Spear
  16. Doomworld
  17. Aruba

BASICS

Street Date: August 15, 2017
BD and DVD Presented in 16×9 widescreen format
Running Time: Feature: Approx 714 min
Enhanced Content: Approx 45 min

DVD

Price: $39.99 SRP
4 DVD-9s
Audio – English (5.1)
Subtitles – ESDH, Spanish, French

BLU-RAY

Price: $44.98 SRP
3-Disc Elite 3 BD-50s
BD Audio –DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 – English
BD Subtitles – ESDH, Spanish, French

REVIEW: Wonder Woman – Commemorative Edition

ww-commemorative-2-e1490823554377-9809149Warner Home Entertainment is commemorating Wonder Woman’s 75th Anniversary leading up to the June 2 release of Patty Jenkins’ feature film. Joining in on the fun is this week’s rerelease of 2009’s animated film, directed by Lauren Montgomery.

This new edition, out as a Combo Pack with Bu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD, comes with just one new extra (the old ones remain): What Makes a Wonder Woman with a nice assortment of people chatting about her cultural significance, including Jenkins, Montgomery, Phil Jimenez, William Moulton Marston biographer Jill Lepore, and a few others for good measure.

Here’s our original review, which remains unchanged:

The DC Universe series of animated features got off to a rocky start with the Superman vs. Doomsday offering but has gotten steadily better.  New Frontier was pretty amazing and now they offer up Wonder Woman, which may be the closest we get to a feature about the Amazon Princess for quite some time.

And I’m pretty okay with that, given how good this direct-to-DVD offering is.  It’s not perfect, but it’s entertaining and a great introduction to the character. If you’ve been following the interviews we’ve been posting here at ComicMix, you know that it comes from the usual suspects behind the animated DCU along with a very strong voice cast.

The movie posits that Wonder Woman exists in a world of her own and there are no references to the greater DCU, allowing you to dwell on the mythological background that spawned the character.  Created by William Moulton Marston, his grasp of the Greek mythology he predicated the character on was shaky at best and frankly, it wasn’t until the George Perez-driven version of 1987 before anyone explored the Greek gods and their role in the Amazons’ world.

This is an extended origin story hewing fairly closely to the familiar canonical tale although there are several different interpretations of characters and events to make this another flavor of the origin.

We get to learn of the Amazons and how they arrived on Themyscira and how their queen, Hippolyta, longed for a child, fashioning one from clay and given life by the gods she worshipped.  Life in paradise was fine for some, not for others but the island also served as a prison for Zeus’ son Ares, god of war.  His scheme for freedom coincides with the accidental arrival of Steve Trevor, an Air Force pilot and the decision to hold a contest to allow the winner the right to bring the man back to his world.

The look of the island and its inhabitants is nicely designed and many of the familiar characters are given more personality and wit than their comic book templates.  Steve Trevor, voiced by Nathan Fillion, has more charm and unique characteristics than in any previous interpretation and makes you understand what Wonder Woman eventually sees in him.

Once Diana wins the contest and takes Steve back to “man’s world”, the story begins developing logic problems which are never resolved (or even explored in the accompanying commentary).  She’s given the invisible robot plane with no explanation or training in its use and then they go to America.  The Air Force doesn’t seem remotely interested in his whereabouts so he’s never debriefed but remains free to use their equipment.  He then says that Ares, now freed, is leaving a trail of destruction and a pattern will form and he can be followed, a logical point but never followed through.

Instead, Ares finds an ancient cult that remains active, and uses them to gain access to Tartarus where Hades aids his cause.  Let me say that the look and handling of Hades wildly varies form the comics but works perfectly here and I applaud the design.

Ares, now more powerful, summons an army from…somewhere…and launches his campaign of war against mankind from Washington D.C. which, from his point of view, makes no sense. He makes a pretty speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial which also makes little sense.  But it does kick off the climactic fight which is well handled throughout.  The arrival of the Amazons, though, makes it appear the Potomac River is as large as an ocean and is a little too reminiscent of moments from Troy and Lord of the Rings.

While the story doesn’t hang together as well as one would like, it also is filled with deft little moments and great bits of dialogue so kudos to WW scribe Gail Simone and Michael Jelenic for the overall story and Jelenic’s script.  The voice cast, led by Keri Russell, Alfred Molina, Rosario Dawson, and Fillion, is also strong, letting the animated people feel more than two-dimensional.

The score is a generic animation score and in that regard is like wallpaper but could have done more.

The disc comes with a 10-minute background to their next offering, the just announced Green Lantern feature due in July.  There are other background features to several other DCU animated projects and trailers for related product from Warner Home Video. The commentary from the production team could have been more focused but does provide some interesting insight into what made it to a storyboard and what made it to the final cut.   The two-disc set comes with several Justice League episodes as does the Blu-ray.

Mike Gold: Malled By Wonder Woman!

Last week, we had one of those delightful father/daughter days when Adriane and I went diving for Funko. According to our drivers’ licenses, we are “adults” but, according to our predilections, we are “fans.” Personally, I’m only an adult when I’m on the clock, and then only when I’m in court. Hey, it’s a living.

Whereas we, like most of you out there in comics ethersphere, saw Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 the week before, we weren’t really looking for GOTG stuff. Oh, sure, if they’ve got a Funko Pop with Baby Groot teething on Drax’s arm I’m buying it but, as you probably know better than me, the really good shit is grabbed well before the movie opens. Nope; we were spelunking for Wonder Woman chachkas, coming soon to a theater near you.

The trick is, there are certain Pops that are made exclusively for certain retailers. Target has theirs, Electronics Boutique and Game Stop have theirs, and so on down the drive past the malls and big box stores on the road formally known as “Main Street.” So doing the fanboy supermarket sweeps involves checking out a number of establishments.

Despite Adriane’s adulthood, she’s more familiar with the product than I am. It’s not like I don’t have a small shitload of Funko stuff, but Adriane’s collection could fill a warehouse. That’s fine by me, as long as I don’t have to schlep it the next time she moves. And Adriane doesn’t want to have to move my comic book collection. This is known as “21st-century quid pro quo.” So as we zot down the aisles, Adriane brings to my attention the more unusual stuff.

Which brought us to the Lego aisle. To be specific, it brings us to the Lego Lashina toy. Yes, your favorite Jack Kirby S&M character is now a Lego toy. This is pretty damn cool, unless the Department of Children and Family Services tends to frequent your home.

I realize Lashina is a card-carrying member of the DC Universe in all its forms. She’s been in the Suicide Squad. She’s been on Smallville. She’s been on sundry DC cartoons. And, honestly, I’m not opposed to S&M among consenting… um… Lego toys. Maybe she’ll get her own Lego movie.

But somebody’s gotta tell me what Krypto is doing there.

We didn’t get many Wonder Woman exclusives (remember when they were called “chase cards?”), but I did score a great Peter Capaldi as the guitar-playing Doctor; something to hold on to as they jerk us around with the “who is the new Doctor” bit… even though the BBC already filmed the regeneration scene.

I suspect Adriane will keep an eye on eBay, the best place on Earth to overpay for already overly expensive collectibles. The forthcoming Wonder Woman movie allows us to resurrect and adapt an old joke: Funko Pop! can market an invisible bi-plane in an empty box.

I wonder what that will go for on eBay.

Then Adriane showed me the Funko Pop! Vito Corleone.  Yep, The Godfather. Hey, they had to put something next to their Fredo vinyl. Why not a murdering drug dealer who refuses his Academy Award?

As weird as that seems to me, to be completely honest when (not if) Funko comes out with a line of Pops dedicated to Fritz Lang’s M… I am there!

Box Office Democracy: The Wall

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I’m not sure what it would take for me to get solidly behind a war movie these days.  There’s certainly a fatigue component from the unending wars we seem to be fighting in real life, full of drama and heartbreak in their own kind.  It’s also very hard to get anything new out of the genre right now.  Perhaps because so many fantastic directors have made big important war movies, or maybe just because we seem to get three to five every year.  I would need either a fantastic take on the themes I’ve seen a thousand times (and I think you’re about to fall well short of that with Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan) or some fantastic new way of telling a story in the backdrop.  The Wall is an attempt at doing the latter; this is a horror/thriller movie set in the Iraqi desert, but it isn’t a good enough movie to get over my general distaste for the genre.

The Wall is not a complicated movie.  Two soldiers are in the Iraqi desert to investigate an attack and are ambushed by a sniper.  Staff Sergeant Shane Matthews (John Cena) is hit first and is incapacitated, and Sergeant Allen Isaac is shot in the leg and is trapped behind the eponymous wall.  The rest of the movie is mostly Sergeant Isaac talking to his assailant (Laith Nakli) over short-range radio while he devises numerous plans to stay alive, identify and locate his attacker, and try to escape.  It’s not the strongest plot in the world, but it’s only an 81 minute movie and it’s more than enough to make that time feel full.  It hits the necessary action beats, it has some unsatisfying twists which I’ll come back to, and it does what it can to find catharsis.

What the movie is missing is a coherent thesis statement.  For a short film it does an awful lot of bouncing around.  There’s a fair amount of assuring the audience that war is hell, but there’s not a person alive that hasn’t heard that a thousand times by now.  There’s a lot of dialogue about who is really the terrorist, the insurgent fighter or the invading army, but they undercut it pretty dramatically with the way in which the Iraqi sniper threatens to gouge out Isaac’s eyes or staple his tongue to his chest.  Ideology aside, I’m not looking to even entertain the idea of rooting for someone that wants to do that so there’s no incentive to look at both sides.  There’s a desperate last minute attempt on the part of the movie to perhaps assert that this was a movie about the way people deal with guilt and grief.  I could entertain that idea if it weren’t introduced in the last ten minutes of the film, that’s a little late to be telling me what the movie is actually about and seems more like a last ditch effort to seem important.

This isn’t a story that needed to be set in the Iraq War.  You could have set this in a city with only a couple changes.  It could be in the distant future or an awful lot of the earth’s past.  I kind of want to know why they decided to make it a movie about a modern war.  One of the twists late in the movie (and this is a spoiler and this is your spoiler warning and I hope you’ve stopped reading by now if this bothers you) is that the Iraqi sniper is using the information he gets from talking to Isaac to fake a distress call to command and he plans to ambush the rescue team, and he probably did the same to get Isaac and Matthews out here to begin with.  It turns the sniper from a troubled person who claims to feel forced by the circumstance of the war into a cold blooded serial killer in a snap.  It bucks the trend of the last 40 or so years of war movies, and instead of showing the adversaries as people fighting for country this man is undeniably evil and is killing for sport or pleasure.  If the whole movie were set up like this it would be one thing, but as a last minute reveal it works to dehumanize the enemy in a war we aren’t even fighting anymore.  It left me cold, I didn’t like it.

That said, I don’t think I was supposed to like it.  I’m not entirely confident who The Wall is made for but it isn’t me.  It’s violent and graphic in ways I’m not interested in seeing.  It’s a gritty war movie and I don’t need any more gritty war movies;  it’s not interested in deep or meaningful characters as it is in manipulative drama and shock moments.  It isn’t a movie for me, but it’s probably a movie for some.  There were two teenagers sitting behind me who seemed really into it.  They’ve probably seen a lot fewer war movies than I have.  Ironically, this movie about people who use fantastically precise weapons is a dull, blunt, instrument.

REVIEW: The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship

The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship
By Phillip Pullman and Fred Fordham
Scholastic Graphix, 160 pages, $17.99

There’s little original in Phillip Pullman’s first graphic novel. We have a mystery ship shrouded in fog. Time travel. A rich madman. A plucky heroine. Still, he manages to spice things up then stir them into a tasty concoction that makes this book a cut above many of the more recent releases from Scholastic’s Graphix imprint.

First, it is taller and wider than the other books and artist Fordham takes advantage of this with solid sequential storytelling, barely wasting a panel. Pullman’s characters can be talky but at least here he’s giving them meaningful things to say.

We open with multiple threads all involving the Mary Alice, a sailing vessel that is legendary in its random appearances, always foreshadowed by thick fog, making it hard to discern. There are two different sets of people seeking it, one to understand it, one to destroy it. They work at cross-purposes throughout, which heightens the tension.

Then we have Serena, an Australian teen, who tumbles overboard her family’s sailboat only to be rescued by the boy in the red shirt, John Blake himself, the master of mayhem. As we learn throughout the book, the Mary Alice’s predicament is one of his unfortunate making and he’s trying to set things to rights. To accomplish that, he has to expose Carlos Dahlberg’s perfidy and it turns out, he needs Serena’s help to pull that off.

Dahlberg comes off two-dimensional while everyone else is nicely delineated by Pullman. Some of the best scenes are watching Serena acclimate herself to life aboard the Mary Alice and getting to know her time-lost crewmates. I actually wish there was a little more of that and little less mustache-twirling action.

It’s an ambitious tale with a lot packed into the pages. Fordham designs good characters and layouts but some of his figures are too stiff. The color work is also strong, which helps the overall story.
The best part may be that this is a done-in-one story. If we never see John Blake again, the readers will be satisfied. On the other hand, the title says “Adventures” so expect to see more of him in the future. This recommended for ages eight and up although younger readers may find the time travel paradoxes a little difficult.

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