Category: News

[[[Bad Island]]]By Doug TenNapel224 pages, Scholastic Graphix, $10.99

Author/artist Doug TenNapel impressed me last year with his Ghostopolis, a fresh graphic novel for young adult readers. He’s back this month with Bad Island and I am less impressed. He has an ambitious story to tell, actually two stories that parallel and intertwine at times, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

The biggest problem I have is that this family of four castaways on a mysterious island react unlike real people, constantly taking me out of the story to scratch my head and wonder how that happened. The family set out on an enforced bonding vacation that the eldest child, teenage Reese objects to. What aspires to be a three hour tour finds the tiny ship tossed by a storm that leaves the shipwrecked and the crew left on a deserted island.

Their efforts at survival are given incredible short-shrift with dad, Lyle, proving fairly inept. There’s an unrealistic calmness among the quartet with way too much focus from younger daughter Janie’s obsession over her pet snake.  That dad allows her to carry the snake corpse around is inexcusable.

When there is evidence that alien life exists on the planet, they accept this way too calmly so there’s a lot of running, screaming and activity without a great deal of rational reason.

On the other hand, the other story involves aliens but it’s still a story about a father and son. The tension between them remains the same as Lyle and Reese, but both are not well-developed enough to make you care.  He gives us an unbelievable human family contrasted with an alien reality that is woefully underdeveloped.

As hinted at on the cover, there island itself is a character in the story but I don’t want to give away some of the book’s obvious fun.

While the writing fails to work this time around, TenNapel’s art and storytelling remains engaging. The color, from Katherine Garner and Josh Kenfield and an army of ten, works exceptionally well, making the graphic novel pleasing to the eye. He and the colorists differentiate the island antics and the outer space thread making it clear to readers where we are and what is happening.

I wanted to like this more than I did, but the poor characterizations and leaps from logic robbed the book of its potential power.

There used to be ten comic book stores within a mile of my apartment. Now, there are two.

To be fair, this is two more than most people have. And when I expand the radius to two miles, there are more than a dozen. Which, again, is more than most people have. There used to be a lot more bookstores, too, even before the Borders bankruptcy. Some of this is the ebb and flow of commerce, and some of it is specific to publishing.

Most of the comic book stores near me closed in the early 1990s, when the direct market imploded. Speculators stopped buying, and there simply weren’t enough reading fans to support so many stores. With bookstores, the same kind of competition had an effect. Instead of speculators, bookstores suffered from Internet offering lower prices and free delivery. More recently, the success of Kindles and other e-readers means that fewer readers are buying physical books.

Comic fans have been reading comics online for years. You, yourself, can read comics – for free – on this very site. It’s possible to illegally download comics you’d otherwise have to pay for, through a process I’ve always thought was too complicated to bother with. Also, I don’t mind artists and writers getting paid.

Starting next month, DC Comics will offer readers the chance to buy comics digitally at the same time (and at the same price) they are available in stores. Naturally, comic book stores are less than thrilled about this.

This is a long and winding way to get to my rant.

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Hanna-Barbera was clearly running out of steam in the later 1980s as their style of animation and storytelling was no longer in synch with its young viewers. As a result, they did an awful lot of recycling of concepts including the two season-long Hanna-Barbera Superstars 10 which took Yogi Bear, the Flintstones and the Jetsons and told longer, and not necessarily better, stories in ten stories. The ten telefilms ran during the 1987-1989 seasons and since then have been in rotation on cable’s Boomerang channel with Warner Archive slowly releasing them to eager fans who can’t get enough of these properties. Their last release from this series was The Flintstones Meet the Jetsons.

This week, from Warner Archive, comes the release of Rockin’ with Judy Jetson, a Jetsons’ film that puts the focus squarely on the teen daughter, who is usually overshadowed by the rest of the cast. That alone would make the 92-minute film interesting  but it is another effort that clearly shows its writers didn’t know how to expand from the thirty minute confines to something longer.

Check out the official synopsis:

Despite father George’s disapproval, Judy Jetson is totally into Sky Rocker, the biggest intergalactic rock star around. When the teen icon announces a surprise concert, Judy writes a super awesome song and sends it to him. And – oops – the song is accidentally switched with an evil magic message from music-hating witch Felonia Funk. Bummer for Judy! Then Felonia goes one diabolical step further: she kidnaps Sky Rocker. What a buzz kill – but don’t freak out yet! Judy and her friends – along with brother Elroy, family dog Astro and music-loving aliens named Zoomies – set out to save Sky themselves. Is Judy Jetson the coolest Space Age teenage cartoon star ever?

Mistaken identity, switched songs, intergalactic evil queens, all manner of things so unlike the futuristic sitcom which was based on the family comedies that were so prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. The closest to an evil witch was Endora on Bewitched. Anyway, the story is pretty dumb from beginning to end despite it being a showcase for Janet Waldo, who had been Judy Jetson’s voice since the series debuted in 1962. Writers Charles M. Howell IV and Kevin Hopps could have done better with the characters. Director Paul Sommer at least tried to make it contemporary with rock video montages and some quicker than usual edits.

The song Sky Rocket turned into a hit, credited to Judy but not written by her, is the memorable nonsense known as “Gleep Gorp”. While a bit of a catchy tune, it has become a YouTube hit for those who grew up on the show but was written similar to the bubble gum pop of the 1960s, not the music the intended audience was more familiar with. The feature boasts six songs, most of which are the same two repeated by different singers.

The vocal cast is a welcome, familiar addition as Waldo is joined by the original team of George O’Hanlon, Penny Singleton, Daws Butler, Don Messick, Jean Vander Pyl, and Mel Blanc. New voices include comedian Ruth Buzzi as Felonia with the rest being fairly non-descript.

Another missed opportunity, this one is only for those with a real sense of nostalgia for ‘80s H-B material.

Hey, here’s a real shock. From all the teaser press releases Marvel sent out yesterday alone, it appears November will see the return of Fantastic Four. Amazing! Incredible! Astonishing! And all sorts of other adjectives Marvel has copyrighted as part of title names.

They’re doing this just in time to miss the actual 50^th anniversary of Fantastic Four #1, which happened this past week. Nice timing, guys! It’s sort of like Fleetway launching 2000 AD back in 1977… but calling it 1976AD.

The event was predicted in this very space a couple weeks ago, but I take no credit. It’s sort of like predicting the sun will rise after the rain passes. So they missed a wonderful marketing opportunity that, in all fairness, would have gotten lost in the Captain America movie hysteria anyway. Big deal. They just jerked us around again, proving DC doesn’t have the market cornered in disingenuous redundancy. We’ll live.

The only question is, when will the Human Torch return? Oh, you think he’ll stay dead? Really? No you don’t. You’ve seen Bucky and Phoenix and Aunt May and, oh, damn, everybody else come back from the dead. Maybe they’ll bring back Jim Hammond, the original Human Torch who was an android and, therefore, never really was alive in the first place. But I think he’s committed to the last couple episodes of Torchwood: Miracle Day… and probably Captain America 2: For Whom The Bell Jar Tolls.

(Yeah, it was really cool to see HT in the Cap movie. A genuine fanboy moment that proves I’m not completely jaded. Actually, I’m only jaded for a living.)

Will they go back to some version of the classic costume? Let me answer my own question with another question. Have you bought any action figures lately?

Will Spider-Man stay in the group? I don’t know; lately he’s been bitching about being in too many groups. But unless Johnny Storm returns or Wolverine finds a costume made of unstable molecules with “4X” on the chest, I think he’ll be there for a while. Not a long while. There’ll be a Human Torch there eventually – certainly in time for the next FF movie – and he’ll probably be Johnny.

There are two lessons to be learned here. I’m not addressing this to comics fans, as we learned this lesson a long time ago. I’m addressing this to employees of Marvel and DC Comics.

The first lesson is: no more death stories. They totally lack verisimilitude. And they’re kind of insulting to anyone who has ever lost a loved one. Which is, like, everyone. Second: stop the cancel/replace/revert cycle. We know you’ll revert, usually within two years. It’s just another phony, contrived attempt at attracting sales on the collectibles market. Fight the impulses with another #0 issue complete with nine variant covers, one printed on bubble-gum and shrink-wrapped for your protection.

Ah, well. Even though they could have retitled the book Reed Richards’ Cosmics and Stories, it will be nice to see Fantastic Four back.

Until it’s not.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil