Tagged: Superman

MW: A Review

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  • November 17, 2007

mw-5615364

It’s difficult for an American to appreciate the place Osamu Tezuka held in Japanese popular culture. Tezuka created the first massively popular character and storyline in manga, Astro Boy – something on the level of Siegel & Shuster’s Superman. But he also owned that character, and ran a studio to produce stories – something like Will Eisner. (And he went on to create more adult, complex works later in life, also like Eisner.) But Tezuka was also a major force in animation – roughly the Walt Disney of Japan. And he was massively prolific for forty years; his “Complete Works” (collecting just over half of his manga) runs 80,000 pages through 400 volumes, and his animation work was similarly large. So his impact is absolutely colossal; I’ve seen some commentators claim that every single Japanese comics sub-genre derives from something Tezuka did.

I’ve only read a few of those four hundred volumes – in my defense, most of them aren’t available in English — but I’ve found Tezuka an interesting but quirky artist. (I’ve reviewed the first six volumes of his Buddha series on my personal blog, and here at ComicMix I’ve looked at Ode to Kirihito and Apollo’s Song.) MW is another graphic novel in the vein of Apollo and Ode: dark, adult, violent and occasionally sexual. It’s from the late ‘70s, several years after Apollo and Ode, and originally appeared in the Japanese manga magazine Biggu Komiku (whose name I never fail to find humorous).

Unlike Ode and Apollo, MW has no supernatural element, and it’s even bleaker than those two works (neither one terribly cheerful). Fifteen years before the story began, a massive, horrific event occurred on a remote Japanese island, and that event bound together a boy and a man. When the story begins, the man, Garai, is a Catholic priest – from what I’ve seen, Tezuka was fascinated by Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, returning to its iconography and doctrines over and over. The man is tormented because of his relationship with the boy Yuki, who has grown into a dangerously attractive young man – and who was warped into a sociopath by the event they lived through.

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Power!, by Dennis O’Neil

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  • November 13, 2007

So you wanna be a superhero. Okay, where are your powers going to come from?

For years – nay, hundreds of years; nay, thousands of years – the brief answer was: From out there. Somewhere. The first superbeings in popular culture (the only kind there was, back then) were either gods, or pals of gods, or imbued with magical abilities, the origins of which weren’t necessarily clear or important. What was important was…wow! – look at what he/she/it can do! And so much the better if it, whatever spectacular thing it is, is being done for reasons I approve of.

That’s still what’s important. But our minds seem to be wired to want reasons for what we see, which is certainly why there’s science and may be why there’s art and civilization. But, oddly, once a reason is supplied, many of seem to be satisfied and require nothing further. The great cosmic snortlefish created the oceans? Swell, now I know why there’s all that water and what’s for dinner?

By the time Jerry Siegel got around to thinking up Superman in the summer of 1934, magic wasn’t terribly fashionable and it had long since become divorced from religion. But science…ah, science was going to deliver us and besides, it was real. And Jerry was a reader of science fiction, which, in those happy days, at least claimed to be rooted in physics and chemistry and astronomy and stuff like that. So it was natural, maybe inevitable, that he would give his übermensch a science rationale. Guy comes from another planet, sure – that’d be why he could be so powerful. Makes sense. Made sense to Jerry in 1934, probably would have made sense to me when I was the age Jerry was when he created Superman, if I’d thought about it.

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Manga Friday: Out of the Past

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  • November 9, 2007

This week, Manga Friday heads into the past…sort of. I picked up the first volume of two extremely popular manga series, to see what they’re all about. But we’ll start with something even less likely.

Siku is the pseudonym for a British cartoonist of Nigerian heritage who’s worked extensively in the British comics industry for the last ten years, including the obligatory stint on Judge Dredd. But he’s done something very different now – a book called The Manga Bible. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a retelling of the entire Christian Bible, in a manga-influenced art style, in two hundred pages. The script was written by Akin Akinsiku, another Nigerian-British comics creator, and there’s a lot of script.

Now, I’ve read Bible comics before. (You might not know this, but your humble Manga Friday correspondent won his church’s Bible Olympics two straight years back in his ill-spent youth.) There was a set of ten or so books that I particularly remember from that time, which adapted the entire bible, one chunk per book. And even those comics were pretty wordy – folks in the Bible tend to talk a lot (even with a New International Version translation, like the Manga Bible uses), and descriptive captions are often required to explain what’s going on and who all of these people are.

The Manga Bible is extremely wordy; each page is nearly covered in captions and dialogue balloons, to the detriment of the art. Yes, the characters are drawn in a manga-influenced style, but the storytelling doesn’t owe much to manga at all. It’s exceptionally compressed, like an early ‘60s Superman story, without the expansiveness and flowing layouts of real manga. The art is eye-catching, though not so stylized as to appear completely alien to American eyes. So it’s a shame that it’s so cramped, shoved into small panels by the relentless flow of words, words, words. (more…)

With Great Power… by Michael Davis

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  • November 9, 2007

It’s no secret that I think that people who worship celebrity are idiots. I mean, come on; do these people really think that Britney is thinking about them? Every night on a popular entertainment news program they have something called “Britney watch.” That is just nuts to me. This show follows Britney Spears everywhere. I mean EVERYWHERE! If she goes to Starbucks there are camera crews watching her sip from a cup. I’m not kidding.

Most of the people we hold up as stars are also looked up to by many as heroes. Really? With that in mind I wondered what would happen if our super heroes acted like today’s stars.

My apologies in advance to DC, Marvel, Archie and everyone else. Hey guys, satire is good for the soul!

High above the skies of Metropolis an epic battle rages. For hours Superman and the evil super villain have traded blow after terrific blow. Neither asking for quarter neither granting any. Finally Superman looks into the face of the evil super villain and shouts, “You can’t win evil, super villain!” The evil super villain produces a green rock from behind his back. He thrusts it out at Superman who withdraws in terror! “ Kryptonite!” Superman says the word as if its very mention is painful to him. The evil super villain flies closer to Superman who is struggling to remain airborne. “Now you will die!!” The evil super villain declares as Superman plummets from the sky! (more…)

A Few of My Favorite Things, by Elayne Riggs

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  • November 7, 2007

elayne100-1811653Back in the days of Usenet, I used to hear a lot of variations of “Why are there so many negative reviews and so few positive ones?” As one of those reviewers who not only discussed the art half of comic books but who also wrote a lot of positive reviews in my 4½ years of doing Pen-Elayne For Your Thoughts, I would see this manifest more as “Why are the threads responding to the few negative reviews so long, as opposed to those on the far more numerous positive reviews?”

The answer was pretty self-evident to most of us reviewers. In general it’s much easier for people to perpetuate clever putdowns, or to pile on a negative thread, than it is to engage in the vocabulary of positive discussion. One of the things we would identify as a next-to-useless post would be someone merely typing “Me too” or “Ditto.” It added nothing of substance to the online dialogue, it just took up bandwidth. But it had the opposite effect of the real-life etiquette advice that “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” It became “If you can’t add something of substance to a discussion rather than just agreeing with the original poster, you’re better off not contributing at all.” I suspect that what some of them actually meant was “Bored now. You’re being too nice; throw us some raw meat.

And of course, that was a shame. I’ve never found it that hard to say good things about comic books. I love comic books. I buy and read quite a wide variety of graphic literature, and as I’m generally not in the assumed demographic for much of it I’ve learned to adjust my tastes accordingly — that is to say, there’s still some subject matter that doesn’t appeal to me, but I’ll generally try to give most of my chosen reading a fair chance, and I think I tend to be easily pleased. Nitpicking details, while worth noting in a review, has never weighed as important to me as how the work made me feel, whether it held together as a whole and moved me during the time it took me to read it.

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Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, by Dennis O’Neil

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  • November 6, 2007

Before we get to this week’s official topic, a continuation of our discussion of how superheroes have been evolving, I’d like to remind you all that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. I’m sure all you fans of the late 19th century biologist Ernst Haeckel – and I know you’re legion – remember that this means that the development of an organism exactly mirrors the evolutionary development of the species.

Okay, now that that’s settled…consider any given story genre the organism and storytelling as a whole the species. The first stories, maybe told around campfires, were not long on characterization. According to some anthropologists, they were basically religious, an effort to give an identity to the forces that shaped people’s lives, the forces they were already acknowledging, maybe, with rituals. Not much characterization in these yarns. They were more about what happened – some deity decides to create the world – than the nuances of the protagonists’ personalities. As storytelling evolved, from an element of religion to entertainment, the characters began to have personalities, sort of, until by the time Homer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre the good guys and bad guys were acting for reasons peculiar to who they were. And by the time of Greek drama, which, again, was part of religious festivals, they were pretty individualized.

Shoot forward about 2,500 years…Along came comic book superheroes (as opposed to all the other kinds of superdoers, who are a bit outside our boundaries, though I’m sure they’re very nice) and…well, they weren’t quite as uncharacterized as those campfire deities. But we do find ontogeny-recapitulating phylogeny, sort of. Clark Kent was, after all, “mild mannered” and Lois Lane was ambitious, but the stories were plot driven – the stuff was more about what the heroes did rather than why they did it. (Batman comes close to being an exception; a few issues into his initial run in Detective Comics, writer Bill Finger actually motivated him. But unless there are a lot of stories I haven’t read, the emphasis on what makes Bruce Wayne tick came later.)

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Spider-Rat, by Ric Meyers

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  • November 4, 2007

Last week I discussed how great, illuminating, extras can turn a flawed film into a DVD must-have. This week, the worm has turned. I now aim to show that all the extras in the world can’t make a misguided movie a keeper.

Spider-Man 3 was a mess. It was especially disappointing because director Sam Raimi showed such a sure helming hand on Spideys one and two. But, perhaps because he thought number three would be his last, he apparently decided to do everything else he ever wanted to do in one go. Whatever the cause, there were too many plots, villains, love interests, moods, approaches, and concepts.

It also suffered from a severe case of co-starilitis – the same affliction which struck Superman Returns’ Lois Lane and Rise of the Silver Surfer’s Sue Storm – in that the heroine’s desire for communication and closure trump any concern for the good of the many, be it city, world, or movie audience. The result is that scenes of relative insignificance go on for what seem like forever, while important junctures are dismissed within seconds (the teaming of Sandman and Venom) or just ignored (the new Goblin’s blackmail of Mary Jane).

What also happens in a film as overstuffed, and therefore unavoidably unfocused, as this one is that the filmmakers develop tunnelvision – concentrating on the “cool” parts (like the multi-million dollar cgi Sandman intro) and ignoring what obviously doesn’t work or come together. Thus we have Spider-Man 3: Two Disc Special Edition, which has reams and reams of extras, signifying essentially nothing.

Normally such stuff as featurettes, documentaries, and audio commentaries are completed during post-production – that is, in the time between the shooting wraps and the finished film premieres — so no talking head yet knows how the film actually fared in the big bad world. So it can be both entertaining and edifying to hear just how misguided the producers, actors, and director were (the techs are mostly invulnerable to these embarrassments, because their work is invariably exceptional and it’s not their fault that the core staff bit off more than they could eschew). (more…)

Fear Factor, by Dennis O’Neil

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  • October 30, 2007

dennyoneil200_sepia-1714086Boo.

Did I scare you?

About that boo…Frankly, it’s a sleazy and probably ineffective way to get your attention. But it is sort of appropriate because it’s a word often encountered in late October and I’m perpetrating this opus a few nights before Halloween, which seems like an appropriate time to be both booing and writing about comics. Because, you know, comics and Halloween are kissing cousins.

Comics, like Halloween, often deal with unearthly phenomena and unlikely characters and, yes, costumes. Both comics and Halloween offer reassurance that after sojourn spent confronting ghouls, goblins, ghosts, vice-presidents and assorted other hellish manifestations of ghastliness, you can retire to someplace comfy and safe.

Fairy tales do that, too, and despite people, including me, frequently comparing comics to mythology, they’re at least as much fairy tale as myth. They don’t, after all, offer cosmic explanations of why we’re here and where we come from, as myths are wont to do, and they almost always end happily. According to a psychologist named Bruno Bettelheim, those happy endings are what make fairy tales useful to little kids. The message is, you can confront ghouls, goblins, ghosts and even vice presidents and you can prevail – you can go home again and maybe score some hot chocolate.

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Green Lantern movie signs director

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  • October 29, 2007

Warner Bros. inked a deal with Greg Berlanti to direct its live-action Green Lantern movie, based of course on the DC Comics character.  Known primarily for his writing and executive producing TV credits (e.g. Everwood, Dawson’s Creek, Jack & Bobby, Brothers & Sisters), Berlanti will pen the script for the movie with Brothers & Sisters writer/producer, Marc Guggenheim and Heroes co-executive producer Michael Green. 

Guggenheim and Green are no strangers to comic books or fans, with Guggenheim having written for Marvel comic books such as Amazing Spider-Man and Wolverine among others, and the latter for DC Comics including Superman/Batman, and was also a writer/producer on Smallville.  Donald de Line is set to produce the picture, with Andrew Haas serving as executive producer.

The Super Powers Myth, by Ric Meyers

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  • October 28, 2007

The last time I’ve spoke to Jackie Chan he said to me: “I’ve done everything three times” – meaning that he’s finding less and less ways, and reasons, to top himself. Unfortunately that also results in schizo, ultimately unsatisfying, films, further hampered by his unwillingness to mature his screen persona. Even so, he keeps looking for ways to challenge himself and keep busy, despite the repetition of his movie and charity work.

But Jackie’s last great film was Legend of Drunken Master (HK: Drunken Master 2) in 1994. He’s made two dozen movies since then – all which included some exceptional sequences, but none which held together anywhere close to his classics of the mid-1980s. Clearly his best films are the ones which showcase his kung-fu, but as he grows older, he keeps trying to avoid that by dwelling on vehicular stunts or repeated attempts to balance his physicality with cgi.

Even so, Sony Entertainment has taken on the task of selling his most recent productions to the American DVD market. Their latest release, and one of Chan’s most creatively bold conceptions, is The Myth, hitting stores on October 30th. It’s also one of the most expensive films in Hong Kong history, and is, if nothing else, a visually splendid treat. Sadly, the film’s central flaw is showcased by Jackie’s admonition that he wasn’t brave enough to make what his director/co-writer Stanley Tong originally wanted: an entire film about a Qin Dynasty general. (more…)

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