Tagged: fantasy

Book-A-Day 2018 #96: Rise of the Black Flame by Mignola, Roberson & Mitten

Another day, another Hellboy spinoff. It’s not quite that frequent in the real world, but it certainly can seem that way. (And I did just talk about The Visitor: How and Why He Stayed yesterday.)

Rise of the Black Flame is another unnecessary book, which fills in backstory that wasn’t required the first time around. Of course, all fiction is unnecessary if you think of things that way — but this is material that explains how one character got the beginning of another story when we already had “he was subsumed by some alien evil power,” and that was good enough.

Again, for me basically every single “mainstream” comic is totally unnecessary — who does Spider-Man fight this month? which character will have a shocking death touted in press releases three months ahead? does any of it track back to anything at all from the original creators? — so this is a very minor complaint. Rise of the Black Flame is more original than any Superman story from the past ten years, for example. But it’s still a sign of the rot at the heart of comics: this is a medium utterly speciated into the narrow niche of delivering exactly the same thing on a weekly basis to a purportedly adult audience.

So, yes: two British cops in Burma in the early 1920s follow the path of some kidnapped girls, learn of a shadowy evil cult next door in Siam, meet up with two female paranormal investigators — one of whom has a link to Sir Edward Grey of Witchfinder fame, to keep the world-building knitted together — and eventually find their way to the sinister temple crouching in the jungle where an aeons-old cult is ready to finally summon The Great Darkness. Do they manage to foil the incarnation of the being who later becomes a major antagonist to Hellboy? Of course they don’t — we already know that.

Christopher Mitten is another solid artist for the Hellboy universe: he’s more towards the realistic side than creator Mike Mignola, with maybe some echoes of long-time B.P.R.D. artist Guy Davis. And Chris Roberson, the current major story collaborator with Mignola, knows this world about as well as anyone not in Mignola’s head can — it’s all smooth and well-told and connected.

But this is, in the end, another villain origin story. Those are never particularly necessary to begin with, and this one even less than usual. It has nice atmosphere and tells a solid adventure story, but it just takes us to the place we always knew it was going.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #90: The Nemo Trilogy by Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill

One of the core joys of comic books for the past fifty years has been playing with other people’s toys. I’m not hugely in sympathy with that impulse myself, but I can recognize that a lot of people want to do it, either directly (by writing comics) or indirectly (by reading those comics and arguing about how it should have been done).

Alan Moore, I’m coming to think, became a famous and respected comics writer because he has that urge on a level previously unknown to man: he wants to play with everyone’s toys, all at once, together, making some massive Lego set that takes over his living room and forcing his family to quietly leave and go live with relatives. (My metaphor may be breaking down slightly.)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories are clearly the strongest expression of that love: they take as many other people’s fictional characters as possible — those from authors safely dead and their works in the public domain, so their current corporate guardians can’t cause problems — and mash them together in various permutations.

(Lost Girls, on the other hand, is the fictional equivalent of taking the clothes off GI Joe and Barbie and making them kiss, then pretending they’re having sex.)

I finally caught up with a League offshoot recently — the three short graphic novels Moore wrote for League collaborator Kevin O’Neil to draw about “Princess Janni Dakkar,” the daughter of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo. The three Nemo book, like the rest of the League stories, are entirely filled with other people’s characters and settings and ideas: that’s the point of that universe. It’s Moore’s only personal Amalgam universe, with all of the bits that he likes of every fictional world he’s ever enjoyed.

And so these books are stuffed with other people’s characters and ideas — so many of them that you have to be a pop-culture scholar to know who all of them are. Since I’m not Jess Nevins — there’s already one of him! — I’m not going to go that deeply into the specifics. (Though I might be better read than I expected, since I recognized the Thinking Machine from his real name — the benefits of a childhood spent read everything that came to hand.)

The trilogy covers most of Janni’s life — she’s young and energetic in Heart of Ice , set in 1922, middle-aged and concerned about her family in The Roses of Berlin ‘s 1941, and a dying, haunted old woman by 1975 for River of Ghosts . The three books are closely connected by the same antagonist — H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha (aka “She”), the immortal white African queen. I call her the antagonist and not the villain because Janni sets the whole thing in motion by stealing what seems to be the entire wealth of the exiled Ayesha at the beginning of Heart of Ice.

Of course,  Janni is in the old family business — she’s a pirate. And if one sets up as a pirate, one can’t be surprised when other people take offense to their things being stolen. It’s not quite true to say that one unwise attack blighted the rest of Janni’s life, since this is a horrible 20th century full of monsters and villains (not least Janni and her fellow megalomaniacs and criminals, who seem to run roughshod over everyone else and may actually rule the world! bwaa ha ha ha!), but it certainly didn’t help.

So Heart of Ice tells the story of a badly planned expedition to Antarctica, to what Moore does not exactly call the Mountains of Madness. Janni’s rapidly shrinking forces, who I think are all minor British adventure heroes of the 19th century, are harried by a group of American “science heroes” hired by Ayesha’s current benefactors. The group is led by a thinly veiled Tom Swift, here under a veiled name because trademarks are far more durable than copyrights.

Then The Roses of Berlin sees Janni and her husband, Broad Arrow Jack, fighting their way into a Rotwangian nightmare Berlin to save their daughter and her husband (the second generation Robur) from the evil clutches of the worse-than-Nazis, who are inevitably allied to Ayesha. And, again, Robur and “young mistress Hira” were engaged in war on Germany when they were captured — the enemies in these books may be horrible and cruel and entirely wrong for this world, but they’re equally sinned against by our putative heroes.

Finally, an obsessed Jenni chases rumors of a reborn Ayesha up the Amazon to the obligatory den of hidden Nazis and their robot bimbo army in River of Ghosts, bringing an end to the story of Janni and Ayesha, though the Nemo family will live on, for potential sequels.

At the end of it all the world is still, as far as we can see, run by the villains of popular literature, and there’s no sign it’s anything but horrible for anyone who isn’t the star of a story Moore liked as a child. We did have three gorgeously-drawn adventure stories full of wonders and terrors, and a game of spot-the-reference that many of us will have enjoyed a lot. But it all does feel faintly pointless, as if Moore can write these everybody-else’s-characters-fight stories in his sleep, and is now doing so.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #29: Mr. Higgins Comes Home by Mike Mignola and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell

The world might not have expected a homage to The Fearless Vampire Hunters. The world may not have needed a homage to The Fearless Vampire Hunters. The world may not have wanted a homage to The Fearless Vampire Hunters. But the world got one.

Mike Mignola has been making comics about vampires (and similarly ghoulish monsters) and the people who stop them (most usually, with punches from a massively oversized red fist) for close to thirty years now. And I suppose he can’t be serious all the time.

Mr. Higgins Comes Home is not entirely serious. It’s not entirely comic, either, but it falls more on the goofball side of the ledger than the creepy side. Some of that is due to artist Warwick Johnson-Cadwell, whose work is more stylized (in a way that feels European to me, like a Donjon volume) and who uses brighter colors than usual for a Mignola story. And some of that is due to the story itself, which is more matter-of-fact and less ominous than Mignola’s usual. This isn’t quite Mignola parodying himself, but it feels a little like the Wes Anderson version of Mignola: straight-faced but not quite right.

So we have Count Golga and his Countess, in their massive Carpathian castle on the eve of Walpurgis, when all of the vampires who are anyone will arrive for the big annual celebration. And we have the two vampire hunters, who do not look overly dangerous, just arriving in the local village for a bit of staking. Both are wary of the other; both think the other is a worth opponent. We the readers may feel otherwise.

And then there’s Mr. Higgins. He and his wife were previous victims of the Count: Mary became one of the usual blue-faced vampiresses, and her husband is distraught and wants revenge. He has become…something different, which we see as the book goes on. He does not really go home in the conventional sense in the course of this book, but, then again, didn’t a great man once said that we never could go home again? Maybe that explains it.

Mr. Higgins is pleasant and fun, but I can’t help but see it as another pierce of evidence that Mignola needs to do something else for a while. He’s been doing supernatural mystery, almost exclusively in the Hellboy-verse, since the early ’90s. I suggest that he needs to do something substantially different: a space epic, an espionage caper, a noir mystery. This particular well is not drawing like it used to.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #12: Satania by Vehlmann and Kerascoet

“There’s a world going on underground,” a great man once growl-sang, and Satania just is the book to explore that hidden underground world.

One might think the naked redhead at the center of the cover is Satania, but no — she’s Charlie (short for Charlotte), the teenage force behind an underground expedition to find her missing brother. Also in the group is the requisite old, crusty guide, Father Monsore, who was on the ill-fated prior expedition where Charlie’s brother Christopher disappeared. There are several others — the party starts out with about six people– but those are the ones to be concerned with.

Christopher had a crackpot theory that Neanderthals moved underground and therefore mutated into demon-looking humanoids who are the source of all worldwide stories of hell and its inhabitants. But these evolved Neanderthals are actually highly civilized, sexually free, and possessed of uniquely high technology that he will discover and share with the world. Now, Christopher deduced all of this — he has no evidence of any kind — and it seems that his book expounding his stupid theory was roundly panned out in the world. So, in a huff, he planned the expedition to prove his theories, heading into this cave somewhere in Europe to film the people he already knows everything about.

I think the reader is supposed to take Christopher’s theories seriously. But this, frankly, is impossible for anyone with a lick of sense and scientific knowledge — if he was right about anything, it could only be by pure happenstance. Luckily, it’s not necessary to believe in those nutty theories to enjoy Satania; he does not turn out to be entirely correct, though he did correctly guess that there’s much more going on in this massive subterranean cave system than surface-dwellers suspect.

So: Charlie, and Chistopher’s collaborator, and some other people somehow related to the crazy theory, are looking for him, in the cave system where a flash flood separated Christopher from the rest of his party months ago. And do they encounter their own flash flood practically as soon as the book begins?

Reader, of course they do.

They do not die in the flood, but their scrambles and running and propulsion by water leaves them somewhere they’ve never been before, with no way back. They set out to explore, in hopes of getting back to the surface. They have limited supplies and light, but, as with any self-respecting tale of underground worlds, they soon find edible and luminescent growing things to keep them going. (From that point on, everything is illuminated, and finding food not a serious issue.)

They find a lot more than that, of course: dangers aplenty, strange landscapes both made by sentients and shaped by nature, strange and dangerous creatures, allies and enemies, deadly heat and chilling cold. Satania turns out to be huge, and full of horror and wonders.

It does not, though, correspond closely to anyone’s image of Hell, even though several members of this party really really want it to, and this leads to certain unpleasant disagreements within the party. This is a story of hardships and stunning vistas, of a series of strange revelations, each stranger and more revelatory than the last. (But, to be clear: this is not a fantasy. They are not in Hell and everything they see should be roughly acceptable to physics, biology, and chemistry as we know them.)

Satania is a gorgeous book, as you might expect from the wife-and-husband art team credited as Kerascoet. The colors are exquisite, giving color to emotions and places, and the book contains a succession of amazing images, culminating in a fantastic double-page spread near the end. Even if this book hadn’t been translated from the French, I think it still would be worth “reading,” just for their work.

But it was translated (by Joe Johnson) from a script by Fabien Vehlmann, here just credited by his last name. He previously worked with Kerascoet on the stunning Beautiful Darkness , and I also really liked his script for the chilly SF graphic novel Last Days of an Immortal . So Satania is just a little disappointing: Christopher is a crank, and his crankishness sets in motion the whole plot, and there’s no way around that. The story is also more episodic — bad things happen, they flee, and have a moment of peace until the next episode starts — than the stronger Vehlmann books I’ve seen.

Not being as good as something amazing wonderful is not that much of a criticism, though: Vehlman has excellent dialogue here, making his very different people all come alive, and he particularly has a way with mania…perhaps he does realize what a crank Christopher is. Satania is an interesting, gorgeous, twisty journey through a vividly imagined world, by a set of world-class talents.

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

Conan: Book of Thoth by Busiek, Wein & Jones

We really don’t need any more origin stories. OK, maybe if it’s integrated — a quick flashback during something else — it’s not so bad. But, please, not a whole story just to show us how the guy we already know got to the place we’ve seen him. Boooo-ring.

Writers Kurt Busiek and Len Wein (along with artist Kelley Jones) work hard to keep Conan: Book of Thoth out of the Boring Zone, but I’m afraid it’s a losing battle.

A) this is an origin story, and (even worse) one of a villain, so it’s all cackling laughter and evil triumphing.

Two) this is a Conan story in which Conan can’t appear at all, so we just get a couple hundred pages of neo-Howardian pre-historical squalor and woe.

Thoth-Amon is a major Conan villain — one of the few who doesn’t show up and get his head chopped off in the space of a short story, I mean, which is what “major Conan villain” means. And so, round about 2005, he got a comic-book series to explain Who He Is and How He Got That Way. And, well, it turns out he was a nasty street kid — battered by his father, to make it even more tedious and psychological — in some random Hyperborian Age city, who did various nasty things for four long issues to end up as High Priest of Set and secret ruler of an entire nation.

MUA-HA-HA-HA!!!!!

Book of Thoth is pretty much all one tone — slightly detached tsk-tsking at how horrible this guy named variously Thoth, Amon, and Thoth-Amon is, while still being excited at each new bit of nastiness. It’s really only for huge Conan fans, and I have no clear idea why it was on my shelf. (My best theory is that it came in one of the care packages of comics I got after my flood in 2011.) And it is one more signpost to show that we really don’t need more origin stories.

(By the way, I don’t know if Mssrs. Busiek, Wein and Jones knew this at the time, but if you google “Book of Thoth,” you get a whole lot of what are technically called “woo-woo” books about Atlanteans and energy beings and a tiny little bit of Egyptiana. Sometimes the obvious title makes your project hard to find.) 

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

Troll Bridge by Neil Gaiman and Collen Doran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris

Karen Reyes is ten years old in 1968, and she loves monsters. Monster movies, monster magazines, the idea of monsters — imagining that there are real monsters around her in her normal Chicago life. She’s also seriously bullied and outcast, with no real close friends as the book begins. And she’s telling us her own story, drawing it page-by-page in a series of notebooks, with herself as a kid-werewolf PI in fedora and trenchcoat.

But My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is not cute. And it’s also not the kind of book where the reader understands the truth of what’s opaque to the narrator, like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Karen is young, and there’s a lot of things she doesn’t know, and she does want to become a movie-monster, but she’s mostly clear-eyed about the world around her, and she’s good at finding things out and piecing things together. (She will make a good detective when she grows up.)

And her upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, did just die — shot in the heart in her living room, though found dead in her bed. Since the apartment was locked at the time, the police have closed the case quickly as a suicide. But Anka has deep secrets from her life in Berlin before and during WW II — and she’s not the only one with secrets in the building, from her musician husband to the minor-gangster landlord and his hot-to-trot-wife, to the ventriloquist in the basement and Karen’s twenty-something amateur-gigolo brother Deez and hillbilly mother.

Karen does meet some other kids who she sees as monsters, or possible monsters. And one of those may not be entirely a real person who actually exists in the world. So there’s some unreliable-narrator elements, or fabulist elements, in the mix as well. But, at her core, Karen is honest and straightforward: she’s trying to find out the truth, and has some good tools for doing so.

The truth — which doesn’t all come out in this book, the first of at least two — looks to be bigger and more dangerous and complicated than one ten-year-old girl can fix. And her family has clearly been trying to keep some big secrets from her, like Deez’s relationship with Anka.

I’ve tagged this book as “Fantasy,” but I don’t think it really is. But it’s a book about the fantasies that we have, and about how fantasy creatures can make real life bearable.

All that is told as if drawn by Karen — don’t think too hard about when she has the time to draw this much, or how she got this good at the age of ten — in colored pens on pages lined in blue, to mimic a notebook. There’s around five hundred of those pages, though none of them are numbered, and there are a lot of words on many of these large pages. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a big book in every way: physically large, full of words, impressive pictorially, challenging in subject matter and storytelling.

This is Emil Ferris’s first book — she’s a woman about the age Karen Reyes would be, grown up, and she seems to have been a kid like Karen back in the late ’60s. I have no idea how many of the elements of Monsters came out of Ferris’s own life, real or transmuted over time, but I can say that Monsters is nothing like a memoir. It is a fully-formed story, about a deeply individual young woman, stuck in a bad situation — several bad situations, overlapping — and trying to cope with it through intellect and rational thought and just a bit of wishing.

It’s a very impressive graphic novel. Several dozen more influential people have said that before me, and they’re all very right. Debuts like this don’t come around very often. This is something very special.

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

Hellboy’s Buddies: Three volumes of Abe Sapien and one of a B.P.R.D. Vampire

This will be a bad review — not a negative one, since I enjoyed these books, and like the endlessly proliferating world of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe. No, this will be a poorly informed review, quick and slapdash and lazy, written more than two months after reading the books. But I’ve done a lot of them over the years — hey, I’m not getting paid here, so you get what you get — so I think I have a facility for doing quick superficial reviews that only mildly suck.

(And, if you really care what I think about the Hellboy universe, you can check out older posts on Hellboy in Hell , The Storm and the Fury , Being Human , Witchfinder , The Wild Hunt , The Midnight Circus ,  The Devil Does Not Jest , The Crooked Man , Lobster Johnson 3 and 4 , Hell on Earth 1-3 , Hell on Earth 4-10 , The Burning Hand , 1947 , 1948 , War on Frogs , and even further back from those if you follow some internal links.)

Abe Sapien: Dark and Terrible and the New Race of Man
Abe Sapien: The Shape of Things to Come
Abe Sapien: Sacred Places
(written by Mignola and Scott Allie, with one bit co-written by Mignola with John Arcudi; art by one or both of Sebastian Fiumara and Max Fiumara; colors by Dave Stewart)

These three volumes reprint the first year and a half (roughly) of the ongoing Abe Sapien comic, spinning off from B.P.R.D. when Abe himself cut loose from that joint, in the wake of another transformation and driven by a niggling worry that he might be an Apocalypse Beast himself. (For a different apocalypse than Hellboy himself, but this universe is well-stocked with potential and actual apocalypses to choose from.)

And they remind me of nothing so much as ’70s Hulk comics: the mysterious stranger with dangerous powers wanders across the Southwest, encountering both good people and monsters. Admittedly, the landscape Abe encounters is vastly changed: the Frog War might have been “won,” more or less, but there are massive alien monsters scattered around the world, entire cities have been destroyed, and normal life is basically over.

(Parenthetically, I’ll repeat again what I said in my review of the last clutch of B.P.R.D. stories: Mignola and his collaborators here are writing stories set after industrial civilization has collapsed, but they don’t quite seem to realize that. There’s no way any contemporary supply chains are still operating, and I’d estimate several billion people have already died — or been transformed into monsters — by this point. Just getting enough food to eat should be the primary worry of everyone in this world; not getting eaten by a monster is now a luxury.)

Meanwhile — because it wouldn’t be the Hellboy universe without subplots — a mostly dead B.P.R.D. agent has been brought back by a necromancer with a fiendish plot that we don’t entirely understand yet. And the B.P.R.D. is chasing Abe in a way that alternates between friendly and not-so-much.

And along the way a bunch of people die, and so do a bunch of monsters. This is a nastier world than the pre-apocalypse status quo, even if there does seem to be a somewhat functional government and occasional new consumer goods when there really shouldn’t be. Abe is mostly moping through all of this, worried that he is an Apocalypse Beast but pretty sure he isn’t, but still wanting to figure out how he fits into this world and what he should be doing.

It’s an interesting storyline, running somewhere through the territory between horror and superheroes: Abe is strong and knowledgeable, but he and his friends have already failed to stop the end of the world. Even if I do think these series must eventually show the extinction of the last humans on earth, there’s plenty of time and narrative space until that point.

B.P.R.D.: Vampire
(written by Mignola, Gabriel Ba, and Fabio Moon; art by Ba and Moon; colors by Stewart)


And this standalone story is a loose sequel to the 1946-1948 stories, focusing on one B.P.R.D. agent who was transformed into something more than human — and no prizes for guessing what.

I don’t think all of the middle has been filled in — this book covers a short time in the late ’40s, and that agent I don’t believe has showed up in any B.P.R.D. stories set any later in time than that — so I suspect this is Mignola throwing a ball up into the air and expecting to catch it much later, in some future B.P.R.D. story. (Or maybe there will be a direct sequel, which will end his story; it could go either way.)

So: moody, expressive art from Ba and Moon. Somewhat less dialogue than usual for a B.P.R.D. story, but still plenty of exposition. A conflicted hero and a mass of nasties. (I seem to be channeling Joe Bob Briggs here. I think there are a few breasts, actually. And plenty of blood.) This is a stylish, smart piece of a much larger story that pretty much stands on its own — if you want to sample Mignola without diving headfirst into the tangled mythology, this would be a very good choice.

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

REVIEW: Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

cms1_-beautyshot_01-e1402005438353-6840782We’ve been wondering about the stars since the first intelligent biped stared into the night sky.  Personally, I find the possibilities beyond our atmosphere fascinating and wish I had the mind to absorb the hard science. I took Astronomy in college and when I struggled with the math involved I went to the professor who asked if it was part of my major. When told no, he told me to drop the course. A year later, PBS aired Cosmos: A Personal Journey, Carl Sagan’s lauded and beloved miniseries about the stars. Being in college at the time, I missed watching it or reading the gorgeous companion volume but know it had a major impact on society.

Among those influenced by the show was Neil deGrasse Tyson who recently concluded a thirteen episode sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, which is now available ion a handsome four disc Blu-ray set from 20th Century Home Entertainment. It comes at a time when America relies on Russia for engines to reach orbit and a recent analysis declares we don’t have the budget or political wherewithal to reach Mars anytime soon. We still have members of Congress automatically pooh-pooh any sort of scientific warning about our climate or evolution or the value of exploring the universe.

They should all watch this. We’re reminded of the awe-inspiring vistas of stars, solar systems, and galaxies. Credit goes to Renaissance-man Seth MacFarlane for producing this series, using his clout to get this funded and on the air. Among the executive producers is Brannon Braga, known better for mangling science fiction than embracing science but his presence here is a welcome one. Tyson partnered with Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan to write the series and collects images culled from telescopes and satellites representing a true international collective.

While Sagan was a scientist-poet, Tyson is more of an everyman but still inspires us with his wondrous tour of the cosmos. He honors his predecessor, showing what we’ve learned since the original series and builds on what was presented then. With his own version of a starship, we tour the stars and the intent was to bring a cinematic sweep to the smaller screen and it works beautifully.

The Blu-ray transfer is just shy of perfection with photography and stunning CGI recreations. The lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is more than match for the visuals so watching this again and again will be a pleasure.

Each of the four discs comes with Special Features such as:

Disc One:

“Standing Up in the Milky Way” Commentary from Druyan, Mitchell Cannolo, Braga, Jason Clark and Kara Vallow.

Disc Two:

Celebrating Carl Sagan: A Selection from the Library of Congress Dedication (34:37) . Credit goes to MacFarlane for getting Sagan’s papers delivered to the people’s Library.

Disc Three:

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey at Comic-Con 2013 (40:13) shows that much as we love our spaced fantasy, we’re also geeks for the real thing.

Disc Four:

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey – The Voyage Continues (41:20) shows how the first miniseries informed and inspired the second.

Interactive Cosmic Calendar: Druyan hosts a timeline accessible from any given cosmic “month”.

REVIEW: 47 Ronin

47 RobinProperly channeling Japanese culture for American audiences has been a challenge given how different our tastes and expectations are. We find the content of much of their Manga and anime either not to our taste or outright incomprehensible. So, the challenge of adapting their bushido Edo-era and adding in some powerful fantasy into [[[47 Ronin]]] was going to be a challenge. Mix in American performer Keanu Reeves as a half-breed you have an uphill challenge in making the film palatable to enough moviegoers to justify the $170 million budget.

It has some terrific concepts and incredible visuals but it’s a mess of a movie, with a long, sluggish middle that loses the audience. Even amazing CG and a strong Asian cast can’t support a messy script.

The story, in short: Lord Asano Naganori (Min Tanaka) is disgraced after the efforts of Lord Kira (Tadanobu Asano), conspires with a shape-shifting witch (Rinko Kikuchi). He commits seppuku and Kira takes charge of Asano’s family by arranging for him to marry Asano’s daughter, Mika (Ko Shibasaki). She agrees to the marriage but extracts a promise to have a year to mourn her father. Asano’s 47 samurai has acknowledged the deviltry that befell their master and they become ronin, masterless samurai, vowing revenge. Enter Kai (Reeves), who just happens to be in love with Mika, who partners with Oishi (Hiroyuki Sanada), the ronin’s leader.

While the action is swell along with some stuff I have not seen before, the characters are flat, one-dimensional. There are the brooding glances, clichéd dialogue, and predictable character beats that spoil the film’s potential. Much of this is a result of delays in shooting, studio interference and an emphasis on visual wonder and not enough on content. The film was a major bomb in the United States, bringing in under $40 million. As a result, you likely missed this last winter but can make up for it now with the Blu-ray release from Universal Home Entertainment. The video transfer is stunning with equally strong sound.

Clearly, the studio gave up on the film and went with a perfunctory suite of extras including four Deleted Scenes (8:00), which are interesting but easily excised; a brief Re-Forging the Legend (7:00); Keanu & Kai (4:00); Steel Fury (6:00), which looks at the film’s training, swordplay and battles; and Myths, Magic & Monsters (8:00).

The film is a curiosity and there are glimpses of what it could have been.

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