I needed Godzilla to give me more monster fights.  Not monsters destroying cities or people running from monsters but monsters fighting monsters.  They knew that’s what I wanted too because sequences would build to those moments where two kaiju would look at each other, screech, and charge at each other only for the camera to cut away to some human doing some dumb thing or another.  I know that this movie already cost $160 million and that’s with almost no money spent on cast so I have to assume they put all the special effects in that they could but this movie made almost $200 million in its first weekend and I assure you I do not care what the humans are doing in Godzilla, not even a little bit.

The monsters look fantastic.  I tried to parse exactly how they made them through studying the credits and it seems to be some alchemical combination of digital effects and performance capture and I can’t stress enough how perfect and plausible they look.  It probably helps that they are usually in dark smoky environments but it works better than any attempt I’ve seen with the possible exception of Pacific Rim and this is certainly trying for a grittier, more realistic look than Rim was going for.  The climactic fights are over-the-top brutal but all the way through I was impressed at how it looked like these massive creatures had actual weight and interacted with their environment in consistently plausible ways.  A sequel has already been greenlit and I’m beyond excited to see where they go with these monsters.

The humans are another matter entirely.  I mean, I guess they always look like they have weight and they interact with their environment in a plausible manner but I’m not sure they ever really affect the story.  You could take the actions of every human being out of this movie and it would affect the outcome not at all.  Nothing the humans do to stop the rampaging monsters is successful on any level.  In fact, the climactic actions of the main human character, Lieutenant Ford Brody, only serve to save people from a mistake the humans made earlier in the film.  Godzilla is the title character and he solves the problem all by himself.  I never quite got invested in the drama they tried to insert with Brody and his wife or Brody and his son or Brody and some strange other child.  I completely failed to care at all about the faceless, practically nameless, other military operatives.  I only cared a little about Dr. Serizawa because Ken Wantanabe played him and I honestly can’t tell you what happened to that character in the third act.  Everyone just sort of fades away in the backdrop of better monster action.  As much as I want to see them expand on the monster action I want them to throw all the other characters in this movie and start over with every entry.

A common lament about film in the last decade or so is that every film is either a remake or a sequel and no one is willing to try new things.  While there is undeniable truth to this, Godzilla is proof that there are plenty of new ideas and good movies to be made from old properties.  This is as different from the original film as is possible with only passing similarity to what came before.  It would be a huge mistake for anyone to dismiss this as creatively bankrupt when it’s such a fresh take on a property that was honestly run in to the ground by The Toho Company some time ago.  This is a fantastic action movie and one worthy of praise no matter what its origins are.

http://derfcity.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-end-of-city.html

I’m ending my comic strip, The City, after 24 years. Here’s the final strip.

I’m ending the strip So I can concentrate full-time on graphic novels. It’s all good. I’m not slinking away from a failed endeavor as a washed-up has-been. I’m leaving it behind in a blaze of glory, as a newly minted, internationally-best-selling comix creator. The past couple years have been the best of my career. After 30 years of toil as a (at best) cult favorite to suddenly find success? I’m loving every fucking minute of it! I simply no longer have the time, nor, quite frankly, the desire, to devote to The City. Typically, it takes almost two full workdays to write and draw one strip. That’s time better devoted to other projects.

Sigh… it seems to happen earlier every yea– What? How could you forget that the third Monday in May is Miracle Monday? Elliot will be very disappointed in you…

If you have no idea what I’m talking about (Ma nishtana ha-laila ha-zeh mi-kol ha-leilot) [[[Miracle Monday]]] is the third Monday in May. It’s from a Superman novel of the same name written by Elliot S! Maggin and published in 1981. I highly recommend reading it, if you haven’t read it before. Here’s a taste:

On Miracle Monday the spirit of humanity soared free.  This Miracle Monday, like the first Miracle Monday, came in the spring of Metropolis, and for the occasion spring weather was arranged wherever the dominion of humanity extended.

On Uranus’s satellites where the natives held an annual fog-gliding rally through the planetary rings, private contributions even made it possible to position orbiting fields of gravitation for spectators in free space.  On Titan, oxygen bubbles were loosed in complicated patterns to burst into flame with the methane atmosphere and make fireworks that were visible as far as the surface of saturn.  At Nix Olympica, the eight-kilometer-high Martian volcano, underground pressures that the Olympica Resort Corporation had artificially accumulated during the preceding year were unleashed in a spectacular display of molten fury for tourists who walked around the erupting crater wearing pressurized energy shields.  At Armstrong City in the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility there was a holographic reenactment of the founding of the city in the year 2019, when on the fiftieth anniversary of his giant leap for mankind the first man on the Moon returned, aged and venerable, to what was then called Tranquility Base Protectorate, carrying a state charter signed by the President of the United States.  The prices of ski lift tickets on Neptune inflated for the holiday.  Teleport routes to beaches and mountains on Earth crowded up unbelievably.

Interplanetary wilderness preserves became nearly as crowded with people as Earth cities.  Aboard the slow-moving orbital ships that carried ores and fossil materials on slowly decaying loops toward the sun from the asteroids, teamsters partied until they couldn’t see.  On worlds without names scattered throughout this corner of the Galaxy, where Earth’s missionaries, pioneers and speculators carried their own particular quests, it was a day for friends, family, recreation and-if it brought happiness—reflection.

But why did it become Miracle Monday? And what was the first miracle? Go get a copy and read.

We’re sorry to report that Mindy has been at home the past several days, in bed with a bug. And a high temperature. And the irony of knowing she’s a nurse who probably needs a nurse.

These things pass eventually, and we eagerly await her return to the word processor.

Last week in this space I touched on the subject of Amanda Waller and how she acted in the penultimate episode of this season’s Arrow. I mentioned how I found her acting a little out of character. I thought we’d probe that a little more as I explain what my thinking was when I created her in the first place

Before I start, I want to state that I know Amanda Waller is not my character. She belongs to DC Comics and, by extension, the Warners conglomerate. I’m glad to be receiving compensation when she gets used outside of comics and I look forward to the check I’ll eventually receive. What they do with Amanda is up to them and I generally refrain from discussing how others interpret her; I was given a free pass in interpreting existing characters so other creators should have that same freedom without my breathing down their necks.

That said, I think that if you’re using a character you should stay true to who that character is – what they are, who they are, what values they have. When Tom Mandrake and I took on The Spectre, we certainly put our own spin on him but, at the same time, we very much wanted to get down to the core of the character. There was a certain type of visual that we wanted to use. Otherwise, why do The Spectre? (Plug area: you can decide for yourself how effective we were when the TPB of the first 12 issues, The Spectre Vol. 1: Crimes and Judgments, goes on sale May 20. And we thank you for your support.)

I’ll dip now into my leaky cauldron of memory and try to recreate my thinking in the making of Amanda Waller. I was putting together the proposal for my version of Suicide Squad. The high concept of that was Dirty Dozen meets Mission: Impossible meets the Secret Society of Supervillains. The series needed someone in charge of the Squad and there was a list of possible candidates within the DCU such as King Faraday and Sarge Steel. However, I wanted someone original.

Then, as now, I was into diversity in comics. I wanted someone, a type, who hadn’t existed before. I wanted a female and I wanted a person of color. I also wanted her to have a certain size, a certain heft and be of a certain age. Why? She would seem more real and, despite having no superpowers, she needed to be imposing. Her power was her will and, with that, a seriously bad attitude. Her physique was not superhero or supermodel; she seemed more real that way, to my mind. I had met women like her. My father’s mother, although not black, was an imposing woman. Shaped like the Wall. She scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. Not someone I wanted to provoke. Hell, I didn’t want her to glare at me. So a lot of Grammy O went into Amanda.

And, I guess, some of me. There are those who have told me that somewhere deep inside I have an angry, middle-aged black woman trying to get out. Yeah, that scares me, too.

Waller is ruthless but that comes from her background. For many years, she lived in Cabrini Green in Chicago, one of the projects. She lost her husband and a daughter to the violence there. She got the rest of her children out and then went to college herself. Lots of will. She knows first hand about violence and criminals. She knows a lot about getting the job done. She has no compunction of using criminals to achieve ends that would benefit, in her mind, the greater good (which she defines).

I think some people misread her that way as well. They use the badassery at the surface and interpret her mostly as a villain. I don’t see her that way and never have. She does have a conscience and she keeps people around her who prick that conscience. She may not do as they recommend but she does hear them and, deep down, considers those recommendations.

Waller is also not stupid. She is both street smart and book smart. She has college degrees. In short, she’s not one note. There are depths and nuances in her – at least as I conceived and wrote her. I think that’s what made her a compelling figure.

I don’t understand why they felt, both on the TV show and now in the comics, that they had to make her look like a fashion model. To my mind, she loses lots of what made her unique. She looked like no one else in comics; now she looks like most females in comics.

I also don’t understand why, on Arrow, they had her prepared to do a nuclear strike on Oliver Queen’s home town of Starling. Yes, there were super-powered thugs trashing the town and she stated she couldn’t risk their getting out of the city. However, Arrow told her he had a way of neutralizing them and she cut him off. Okay, I understand from a plot point perspective that the writers felt they needed a ticking clock but it’s a stupid move. It’s morally indefensible and not very bright. Nuking an American city? The repercussions from it would expose her and her group. It’s too over the top; it makes her irredeemable when there were other possibilities. Hell, shoot the thugs with exploding bullets. You have to figure that being in pieces might at least slow these thugs down. But no – she went for the nuclear option. That’s not the Amanda I know.

Will I cash the participation checks when they come to me? Oh yeah. And, again, I’m not trying to tell anyone to do the Wall my way. Couldn’t make them do it if I wanted to. I just wanted to go on record as what I was thinking when I created her.

Now you know.