Tagged: wrong

Disney Is Watching Your Skin

  • News
  • April 1, 2013

hee6530f5-7724787When we started hearing rumors and reports from WonderCon this weekend, we thought we knew what the story was going to be: Disney/Marvel was following in the footsteps of Warner Bros/DC Comics and going after tattooed fans in an attempt to get a piece of the still-growing body modification dollar.

We were wrong.

Sort of.

Yes, this morning we had the unveiling of the officially licensed tattoo flash with sheets featuring Disney, Marvel and Star Wars characters.

But that’s not the story here. The real story is what happened when corporate executives approached attendees at the Anaheim California Convention Center and what occurred at area tattoo shops.

Unlike the cease-and-desist letters fans received from Warner Bros/DC two years ago, Disney (which now includes their Marvel and LucasFilm divisions) has taken a wholly different tack with fans. “I guess they don’t want the pics from spring break of that guy doing body shots off of me up on Facebook” said one female fan whose right arm has a huge Dark Phoenix tattoo.

“We feel that fans are acting as ‘brand ambassadors’ when they sport tattoos of our characters, and as such have a responsibility to maintain our company’s image, as well as that of our properties’. Therefore we are asking our “inked” fans and devotees to please take care and be mindful of behavior that may be deemed improper,” is how the opening statement of the packets handed out to attendees with the applicable visible ink.

They go on to outline what basically amounts to a morality clause, asking that tattoos be covered up if the wearer insists on participating in objectionable or questionable acts. And Disney “insists upon curtailing the posting of any images to social media outlets where our property is visible while such actions as drug abuse, alcohol use, smoking, or illegal activities are taking place, as well as usage in any nudity or sexually explicit content whatsoever.” Disney states the cease-and-desist letters will be issued should these requests not be fulfilled, adding a bunch of legalese that boils down to threats of copyright infringement lawsuits.poo-tattoo1-3547130

Ah, yes. Copyright Infringements. Because Disney wants to control the images of their characters in the literal sense too. “They asked me where I’d gotten my work done,” WonderCon attendee Sean Law told ComicMix. “They were really interested in it – and really unhappy about it” he laughed, then showed us his tattoo of a maniacal Winnie the Pooh holding Piglet’s bloody head rather than a honeypot.

The Orange County tattoo artist who did Law’s tattoo, as well as artists at dozens of other area shops, received visits from lawyers this morning. Law’s artist was told he had violated Disney’s copyrights by doing the piece. “They objected to both the image and the execution, dude said it wasn’t ‘on model.’ Can you believe that?

“Then he handed me a style guide!”

Martha Thomases: The Needles And The Damage Done

newport_knitting_jun_051-3346578

Twice a week, I teach knitting to people with cancer and caregivers.  Most of you probably think of knitting as something serene, a hobby for little old ladies (current and future).  However, when I teach, my instructions are filled with images of guns and shooting, stabbing people with knitting needles, and  when I make a mistake, I threaten my materials with unspeakably filthy and unnatural acts.

I do this when I teach for a couple of reasons.  Most important, it makes the techniques easier to remember.  However, for this group in particular, it gives a sense of control.  These people have so little control in their lives that it’s great to have control over knitting needles and yarn.

It’s powerful.  When you’re staring the possibility of dying in the face, it’s good to have something that makes you feel powerful.

This is a long, roundabout way of getting to the intersection of a couple of trends I see in our beloved graphic story medium.  As I wrote last week, the industry has a sad tendency to throw away creative talent when it is deemed to be “old.”  There is also a pathetic paucity of work by women, racial minorities, and people whose identify as queer.

Things are slightly better outside of the Big Two (Marvel and DC). but not much.  Not really.

This is a problem.  It’s a problem in many media (especially broadcast news, but that’s another rant) but it seems to me that comics is one of the worst.  It seems like a paradox, but by appealing to a cultural ideal of straight, white young men, comics may be stuck in a closet of marginalization.

We all have impulses and emotions.  Many of these are not welcome by the larger society in which we not only live, but rely on for daily support.  I think it’s healthy and mature to work out inappropriate feelings with the vicarious experience of entertainment.

Specifically, when we feel angry at our lives and helpless within are mortal bodies, we need power fantasies.  Hence, in other mass media, we get not just superhero stories. but police procedurals, sword and sorcery, House and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

There’s other emotions that are inappropriate to express in our daily, public lives.  We don’t show grief or sadness or lust.  Men don’t show nurturing.  These feelings are for private time, or for working out with art.

There are books and movies for these feelings.  Dreary foreign films about death, silly romantic comedies with Katherine Heigl or Kate Hudson.  This movie, which is one of the most bleak, self-loathing things I’ve ever seen.  Sometimes, I need Carey Mulligan to hate herself so I don’t have to hate myself.

There are some brilliant graphic novels that appeal to these audiences, but they are few and far between.

There is nothing wrong with having a target audience.  That’s effective marketing (note:  marketing is not the same as editing, or publishing).  However, if one plans to have an entertainment conglomerate and see some growth, one needs to occasionally try for other audience segments, or at least other audience moods.

In the meantime, if you see any bald-headed women making socks, watch your ass.

Dennis O’Neil: It’s Like A Kind Of Torture

The Cookie Monster finished duct taping Kermit to the chair, stepped back, removed a cattle prod from somewhere within his fur and growled, “Where cookie?”

“I don’t know where your cookie is,” Kermit whined.

The Monster brandished the cattle prod.  “Last chance.  Where cookie?”

Then he jammed the cattle prod into the part of Kermit’s anatomy that would have sported genitals, if puppets had genitals, and pressed a stud.

Fzzzzzzzzt!

“Ow!” Kermit complained.

“One last time,” The Cookie Monster said.  “Where friggin’ cookie?”

(more…)

Michael Davis: Brokeback Bastard

Davis Art 130219DC Comics is hiring a very anti-gay writer named Orson Scott Card to write for them.  That’s bad enough in my opinion, but they are giving him Superman to write.

Damn DC.

Giving a guy who wishes gay people were wiped off the face of earth is one thing, but giving him Superman is just ballsy as shit.

The outcry in the industry is loud and clear. There’s a movement to have DC just fire the guy outright.

Not gonna happen.

Let me be clear, I don’t think DC will fire the guy unless videotapes are found of him doing unnatural things with a German Sheppard… a girl German Sheppard, of course. I don’t want to offend him in case he’s reading this.

This is a win – win for DC. They get a pretty good writer and massive publicity so why fire the guy? When the book comes out they will get another round of colossal exposure so like I said, why fire the guy? For DC this is not personal, it’s business.

I say, let the guy write the book. Really.

If you want to take a stance against him and his views as I do, trying to get him fired is the wrong way to go about it at least I think so. Nothing short of a massive boycott will make a dent in stopping this guy from doing the Superman story.

But there is another way…

Take the writer to task at every turn. Make him own his views. Challenge him all the places where DC will send him to promote the book. Like comic book conventions, or any online forums, or any book signings anywhere he will show his bigoted face. Then the story is about his hated, his views and his failings as a human being. No company wants that shit following them around, over and over and over.

Trust me on this; I know first hand just how hard that sort of bad press hits corporate America. The way they are perceived by the public is easy to weather unless it keeps happening.

Now is if they also just happen to be a publicly traded company…

Yippee Ki Yay Mother Fucker.

I like what DC is doing with its line these days. I don’t like to think that one of my favorite comic book characters is going to be written by a guy who would deny others their right to exist.

I don’t blame DC for hiring the guy, I don’t blame them for standing behind him (although it better not be a guy standing behind him) because like I said for them it’s not personal it’s business.

For me and I’m guessing many of you making his comic book journey miserable is not business, it’s personal.

WEDNESDAY: Mike Gold

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

 

REVIEW: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Part 2

The Dark Knight Returns 2The second part of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns demonstrates how the world has changed since the graphic novel source material was published in 1986. Frank Miller’s reinvention of Batman was also his personal reaction to the conservative, jingoistic United States of America of the decade. President Ronald Reagan was a folksy president, good with a quip, and saw the world in stark black and white terms, which was feeling wrong in the final years of the Cold War. Miller also questioned all authority figures from know-it-all doctors who loved to hear themselves on the growing number of vapid talk shows to the unformed law-enforcement representatives who fired first and then questioned orders. While some of this was evident in part one, which was released last fall, this installment, out on Tuesday, really shines a spotlight on the themes.

Batman punchA visual tour-de-force, Miller’s four-part The Dark Knight took the storytelling techniques he developed for Daredevil and applied them to DC’s two biggest icons. Readers had seen nothing like it before and heralded the work an instant classic. Here we are, more than twenty years later being given a two-part adaptation of this story and suddenly it feels dated. Here’s no question screenwriter Bob Goodman and director Jay Oliva honored the source material and its satisfying as an adaptation.

But the notion that Superman, the ultimate authority figure, was blindly taking orders from the President, and allowed himself to take lives in an international conflict feels wrongheaded. That Batman and the other costumed heroes and villains would all willingly vanish into the shadows that spawned them feels wrong, as well. Much as it felt wrong for Batman to vanish for eight years in the Christopher Nolan films, it also now feels like Bruce Wayne would never stop fighting crime in his city.

tdkr_r2_06604-e1359470838114-9727910But he’s back, pushing fifty, and feeling the effects of time on his bulky form. He’s dealing with a city that needs him but an administration that does not want him, especially as Commissioner James Gordon steps down, turning the police over to Ellen Yindel, who immediately wants Batman shot on sight. Where Oliva’s action sequences totally fail is that the criminals and police alike fire endless streams of bullets with little consideration of the collateral damage being inflict or civilian lives being endangered. Thousands of bullets are fired, but none strike Batman or Robin, which is stunning incompetence (and bad storytelling).

tdkr_r2_03783-e1359471202360-9960922The conflict on the island of Corto Maltese is the backdrop as the Joker talks his idiot doctor into bringing him to a talk show to tell his side of the story. Michael Emerson’s clown prince of crime is cold and maniacal but depicted, he is a homicidal figure, nothing funny about his actions or methods at all. The character design may be Miller inspired but he’s too normal looking, just a muscular specimen in makeup which feels wrong. The criminal madman is free and after Batman after making a stop to humiliate a gone-to-pot Selina Kyle, now a Madame. The Joker and Batman face off one final time and this is when the Dark Knight finally gets hurt, in the Tunnel of Love of all places, a subtle nod to the homoerotic subtext Miller added to their relationship.

superman-vs-batman-e1359470926352-4034295All the episodic explosive action leads up to the inevitable conflict between the symbol of conformity and the agent of justice. Their climactic battle is nicely handled as is the denouement, bringing the 76 minute story to a fine ending.

Peter Weller’s Batman is okay but nothing special while Mark Valley’s Superman works much better. Ariel Winter’s Robin doesn’t get nearly enough to say but plenty to do in the film. The rich voice cast blends well together, aided by a good score from Christopher Drake.

The combo pack contains the Blu-ray, DVD, and Ultraviolet versions of the film. Special features include a too-short 9:24 Superman vs. Batman: When Heroes Collide, as the usual suspects talk about why these two fight and who should win. The longer, 14:07, The Joker: Laughing in the Face of Death nicely uses archival material so his creator, Jerry Robinson gets his say. While it’s good to have Emerson’s take on the character, Mark Hamill’s absence is missed as are his current handlers such as writer Scott Snyder. Oliva takes us through numerous sequences in the 43 minute From Sketch to Screen and he gives kudos to those who took Miller’s work and brought it the screen. Oliva is well-spoken and some of the information provided is interesting to hear and see.

Three episodes from Batman: The Animated Series and Batman: The Brave & the Bold are included on the Blu-ray disc. On the other hand, the promised preview of Superman: Unbound is curiously absence from the disc. Instead, there is another digital excerpt from the graphic novel.

Marc Alan Fishman: Look! It’s a Bland… It’s a Plain… It’s Supermeh!

fishman-art-130126-1664484At the onset of the New52 there was a buzz and excitement over the flagship character of DC Entertainment. Known as (perhaps) the most recognizable comic book character of all time, Superman was all set to be relaunched for a new age… towing the company behind his Nehru collar and underpantsless new uniform. Well, here we are now 16 months after the super-retcon, and I ask you… are things as we’d all hoped?

In a word? No. In more than a word? Not a chance. In a timely metaphor? Not even by a Joe Flacco longshot. The Superman property is, just as it was prior to the New52: convoluted, marred by an already high barrier to entry, and choked on it’s own backwash of continuity errors and creator squabbles. The real question emerges: Why did it all go wrong?

Well, one finger of shame lay with a writer I admire quite a bit. Grant Morrison, for all his amazing contributions of the craft of comic bookery, just over-promised and under-delivered his new Big Blue Boy Scout. The pitch for Action Comics in the New52 was perhaps the boldest of its brethren to see the light of the comic rack. Ditching years of backstory to start us “five years before the present” in a new origin for the character. One that would return him to the roots of his golden age; where he was a more human Superman… fallible, nuanced in his personal politics, and more “of the people.” And for what it was worth the book had a strong start that left unto itself, was quite enjoyable. And then Morrison got itchy.

Action Comics crammed updated concepts and plot threads with reckless abandon. By the time the first arc was over, eight months in, we’d be treated to literary cacophony. I quote myself from my review of Action Comics #8:

“In eight issues we get a shiny new take on Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, Jimmy Olson, Brainiac, Metallo, Steel, the Legion of Super Heroes, the Phantom Zone, the bottle city of Kandor, the history of Krypton, a horde of Kryptonian villains-to-be (that frankly I don’t feel like scouring Wikipedia for names), and of course… Superman himself.”

Suffice to say, I could spend the remainder of this article going over my thoughts on the super Scottsman, but I digress. Morrison was but a single rusty cog in a faulty machine. That is to say he didn’t really have much of a chance to succeed.

As we all know, comic books are first and foremost a business. And as such, a business exists to turn profit. That means that even though continuity would be better understood and appreciated if a single Superman saw the shelves every month… DC and the powers that be would never let such a large property draw on the fan base just once every thirty days. The last(ish) son of Krypton was also being seen in the pages of Superman, another monthly… run by the always-popular, always-festive George Pérez.

Superman was placed in the present of the DCnU, which of course led most readers tackling both books trying to connect the dots of Morrison’s tee-shirt work-boot Supes versus Pérez’s Lee-designed line-riddled version. And where as Action dealt with legacy villains and plot threads… the modern take had new unmemorable villains, awkward call backs to Action comic plot threads, and more focus on “action” than its sister title. This led to an early exiting Pérez, citing editorial discrepancy and a lack of freedom on the book.

In less nice words? Morrison (whether he knew it or not) was driving the character, and Pérez wasn’t along for the ride. Shortly thereafter, new teams were swapped in, and Superman got to fight run-off villains from Wildstorm. And even now Superman, Girl, and Boy are all sharing a (terrible) crossover book… whilst Action slowly ties up its loose ends for Morrison’s announced departure. DC put its editorial eggs in Action Comics, and has let the “family” just mess up the living room while Daddy works downstairs.

This isn’t how to keep a fan base. The whole notion of the New52 was to eliminate confusing backstory, and hook in new readers. It takes time to do this. And hurling two books in two timelines, with conflicting information, new and old villains, all while placing the same character in a team book that takes place at some point between the two main books…. does not make it easy for a new reader to come aboard. Hell, I’m exhausted even typing that.

A short while back I lamented about my guarded optimism (or maybe it was pessimism) over the Man of Steel movie set to debut this year. Recently, super scribe Scott Snyder was announced to have a new ongoing at DC alongside the never-late-on-a-book-except-when-he’s-late-which-is-often-because-he-has-a-very-busy-schedule Jim Lee lending his artistic arm for however long it takes for him to be late again. And while Scott Snyder has done no wrong by me since I’ve picked up his previous titles (all being Bat books), I’m nothing if not entirely skeptical. I gave Action a shot until issue nine, and then fell off. H’El on Earth looked atrocious (and reports from my Unshaven Cohort Matt, who is reading it, confirms this fact). Does anyone else feel the winds of change gathering up under our feet? Could a decent turn at the box office and a shiny new book just make us forgive and forget 48+ books featuring a Superman marred by every convoluted problem he faced long before we knew what the New 52 was?

I’m certain we’ll forget. Superman Red and Blue anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? But forgiveness is another story. And empty promises have always been the kryptonite of the comic book reading public. Your move, DC.

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

A Doctor a Day – “The Long Game”

Using the new Doctor Who Limited Edition Gift Set, your noble author will make his way through as much of the modern series as he can before the Christmas episode, The Snowmen.

Making the same move for new Companion Adam he did for Rose, The Doctor takes the trio to the year 200,000 – the middle of the fourth great empire, mankind at its height.  So when everyone seems to be not a lot further up the social advancement scale than the 20th century, he suspects something’s wrong.  Someone is trying to change things, very slowly, playing…

THE LONG GAME
by Russell T Davies
Directed by Brian Grant

“Time travel’s like visiting Paris; you can’t just read the guidebook, you gotta throw yourself in. Eat the food, use the wrong verbs! Get charged double and end up kissing complete strangers! Or is that just me?”

jagrafess-300x198-4119236The Doctor and co arrive on Satellite Five, news center for the empire, streaming information from everywhere, to everywhere. Journalists and techs are all angling for promotion to Floor 500, where it’s said the walls are made of gold. They’re off by one letter – it’s deathly cold, to ensure the health of the mysterious “Editor-in Chief”, the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe. The Jagrafess has been stunting the advancement of the human race, keeping them from achieving its potential.  His assistant, played with style by Simon Pegg, works for a consortium of banks who are manipulating the news, and as a result, the people, to make things better for their investments.

(Eerily prophetic, isn’t it?)

And meanwhile, new companion Adam has decided to take advantage of the opportunities that access to 198,000 years of future history can provide, and attempt to download enough info to make his former employer look like the owner of a lemonade stand.

A simple done-in-one episode with a strong message and a solid monster, It’s a great example of how much Russell could get into his stories.  The set is both well designed and very efficient, budget wise – a bit of redressing and it takes the role of several separate floors.  And it’ll return later in the season as the plot threads of the season start to get tied up.

Russell T Davies made a running gag of the alien and planet names getting progressively more complex, all culminating in next season’s “cheap episode”, Love and Monsters, where the baddie is from the planet Clom.

Simon Pegg is the first big name to appear in the series, the first of a still-growing list who are all too happy to become a part of the show’s history.  Simon also narrated the first season of Doctor Who Confidential.  While she’s not as well known in the US, Tamsin Greig is a popular comedic actress in the UK. She recently played Sacharissa Cripslock in the two part mini-series Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal.

Interestingly enough, in an earlier draft, Adam has quite a different reason for doing the old Back to the Future Sports Almanac trick.  Originally, it was written that Adam’s father has a disease of some type, and he tries to access medical information in the hopes of saving him. It’s an interesting idea, but for The Doctor to take the information away and chuck him out of the TARDIS in punishment would make him the jerk.  It’d be warranted for breaking the laws of time and space and all, but it would still come off as a dick move.  The idea that he simply wants to profit works much better, and it shows that once again, this new Doctor is not infallible.

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HANCOCK TIPS HIS HAT TO ‘HUNT AT WORLD’S END’!

  • News
  • December 5, 2012

TIPPIN’ HANCOCK’S HAT-Reviews of All Things Pulp by Tommy Hancock
HUNT AT WORLD’S END
By Nicholas Kaufmann (writing as Gabriel Hunt)
Gabriel Hunt created by Charles Ardai
Published by Leisure Books, 2009
cover_big-8506553
There’s something to be said for archetypes.   We enjoy them, we return to them, many sociologists and psychologists say that they are essential to our survival as individuals and a race.  And being a fan of Heroic Fiction and particularly of Pulp, I am darn glad that writers today believe in archetypes as well and don’t shy away from writing a story around a character who is like some previous creation or reminds readers of that guy in that movie.  Many good tales are written because writers, too, enjoy playing with archetypes.
Enter Gabriel Hunt. 
Created by Charles Ardai, the genius behind the Hard Case Crime books, Gabriel Hunt is one of two brothers whose parents mysteriously disappeared and are believed dead.   The brothers are now entrusted with the operation of the Hunt Foundation, which Gabriel leaves largely to his brother Michael while he travels the globe rescuing lost artifacts from the wrong hands in efforts to give them to museums and, if necessary, saving the world in the process.
Sound a tad familiar?  Yes, there are definite shades of Indiana Jones and other such fortune and glory for museums types in Hunt.  But in this tale that opens with a bar fight in an Explorer’s type club and involves chasing down three jewels and an ancient Hittite device, Hunt definitely steps out as his own character.  This is both a blessing and a curse for the story.
The action is well paced throughout HUNT AT THE WORLD’S END, the third novel in the series, and leaps off the page at the reader.  The characters are engaging, colorful, and run the gamut of beautiful I-Can-Take-Care-of-Myself damsel, over the top villain, and even an ancient cult of scaries with worldwide membership thrown in for good measure.   The build up of and resolution of the adventure is nearly flawless.  And Hunt himself provides a heroic figure that the book revolves around easily.
Mostly.
It seems that many writers feel the need to write characters in Heroic Fiction today that will hopefully have a broader market appeal than typical concepts of Heroes as we see them.  There have to be flaws, there must be angst, there have to be internal complications that give breadth, depth and color to the hero, even in some cases making him seem less than heroic.  This is supposed to, I think, make him appear more heroic when he works his hero mojo.
In HUNT AT THE WORLD’S END, all this sort of characterization, most of it done as internal narration, accomplished was to make Hunt seem insecure, arrogant, and whiny.  The middle of the novel is bogged down with Hunt’s concern over a particular cast member being involved in their hunt, his love or interest or whatever he has in the aforementioned damsel, and there’s even a hint of regret for his chosen life thrown in.  All of this is fine if it’s handled correctly, but the way it’s presented in this book makes Hunt’s subsequent heroic actions seem hollow, false.
Another point about this book- and this is more the writer in me, not the reviewer, complaining- is the fact that it is written under a house name of the lead character.  Gabriel Hunt wrote the book and yet it’s in third person.  It would have been much more affective to have this tale told in first person and would have made some of the above mentioned issues with whininess a little easier for the writer- and the reader- to deal with.
THREE OUT OF FIVE TIPS OF THE HAT- HUNT AT WORLD’S END is a great actioner, wonderfully paced with plenty of derring do and baddies for the good guys to contend with.  I just wish I liked the hero more than I did and that maybe in this instance, the author would have stuck a tad more to the archetype than trying to broaden his reader base (that he was doing that is only my assumption, but still…this is my review).

REVIEW: The Princess Bride – 25th Anniversary Edition

the_princess_bride_25th_anniversary_bluray-e1351866973620-4115778Hard to believe it’s been a quarter of a century since The Princess Bride was released to theaters. By then, I had adored William Goldman’s novel which was its basis and over time, as it hit cable then home video, it was watched repeatedly in my house. As a result, the kids grew up with it a part of their lives and they came to adore it with equal ardor. Sadly, when I tried to interest my eighth graders in seeing it recently, they stared blankly.

The conceit in the novel is that Goldman was giving us the “good parts” version of S. Morgenstern’s fantasy tale and that is adapted to the film as a grandfather (Peter Falk) reads the book to his sick grandson (Fred Savage). The rest of the fable involves the romance between beautiful Buttercup (Robin Wright) and dashing Westley (Cary Elwes) and the trials and tribulations that kept them apart – until the end when they finally kissed, one of the five greatest kisses ever recorded in history (or so we’re told). Between meeting and kissing, there are swordfights aplenty, death, resurrection, magic, cowardice, giants, tricksters, weird locales, and much more. Girls can love the romance, the boys can adore the action and both can laugh at the comical performances and clever dialogue.

Rob Reiner’s casting was pitch perfect as was his deft direction so all the elements came together to make an instant, enduring classic. With Wallace Shawn, Mandy Patinkin, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, and Andre the Giant, what could possibly go wrong? Nothing as it turns out and it’s a joy to see it one more time, in the 125th anniversary Blu-ray release from Warner Home Video. Reiner could have gone overboard with the humor but he reaches the edge of slapstick and pulls back time after time.

Given how often this has been previously released on DVD and Blu-ray, it’s comforting to see most of the extra features carried over here including both audio commentaries (Reiner and Goldman), The Art of Fencing (7:00), Cary Elwes’ Video Diary (4:00), a look at the Dread Pirate Roberts (12:00), twin pieces on the fantasy roots (26:00), a Makeup (11:00) piece; and “Untold Tales” (9:00). New to this edition is a 25th Anniversary Chat with Cary Elwes, Robin Wright and Rob Reiner (15:00) and Entering the Zeitgeist (15:00), examining the film’s role in today’s pop culture.

If you own one of the earlier versions, you may not need this but if you don’t have this on the shelf, this is well worth you (and your children’s) attention.

Review: “Costume Not Included” by Matthew Hughes

costume-not-included-by-matthew-hughes-5394161It’s not easy being a superhero in the best of circumstances, so pity the poor man whose powers derive from a demon — and whose mother is dating one of the nation’s leading evangelical preachers. And when that young unfortunate’s name is Chesney Arnstruther, well…that’s someone whom you would not want to switch places with.

Chesney is the superhero of Costume Not Included, second novel in a trilogy called “To Hell and Back” — though it means that more puckishly than most fantasy books would — and I’ll direct you to my review of the first novel, The Damned Busters, for the precise details of how and why Chesney made that deal with the devil, how he did it without forfeiting his immortal soul, and why an actuary wanted to be a musclebound superhero in the first place.

There are two kinds of trilogy-middles: the ones that lose the energy of the first volume and mark time until the finale, and the ones that are happy to have gotten the scene-setting out of the way and leap into creating ever more complications to keep things interesting. Costume, luckily, is of the second type: the first book took a little while to get going, but this one hits its wry tone right up front and charges forward at exactly the right pace.

Really, how could you put down a novel that begins like this:

“I thought you weren’t speaking to me,” Chesney Arnstruther said into the phone.

“I’m not speaking to you,” said his mother. “I’m telling you something for your own good, is what I’m doing.”

I’ve spent the last several years haranguing anyone who wanders into Antick Musings about how essentially funny and entertaining a writer Matthew Hughes is — see my other reviews of Hughes books, all of which you should buy, read, and love, in approximately that order: The Other, Hespira, Template, The Spiral Labyrinth, and Majestrum — so I’ll leave that part as read: Hughes came into the SFF field writing Vance-inspired far-future books, but his influences were always deeper than Vance (not that being able to write as smoothly and sardonically as the great Jack Vance isn’t a monumental achievement to begin with), and he’s since shown that his essential qualities shine through in a variety of subgenres.

So, anyway: Chesney is a superhero, and he’s been doing well at it. Too well, actually: he’s wiped out pretty much all of the Golden Age-style street crime (guys in suits and fedoras robbing banks, muggings, and so forth) in his city, and his deal only extends so far. He can’t directly stop the sources of crime — which, in best superhero fashion, lies with a shadowy cabal that secretly runs that city — and his put-everything-into-the-right-boxes mind is not happy leaving a job undone. (His new girlfriend, Melda, is also pushing him in slightly different directions; she’s like to see him have a higher media profile and perhaps make some money from being the Actionary.)

Adding to the complications is that his mother’s new boyfriend — that noted thriller writer turned TV evangelist, Reverend Hardacre — has his own new, and very odd, theory about the secret cosmology of the world, and it’s becoming more and more clear that Hardacre is right. And the Devil is not entirely happy with the deal with Chesney — that lack of a soul coming his way vexes him, and the Devil’s whole raison d’etre is to trick and twist and sneak — and the Devil has deal with other folks who may help him cause trouble for Chesney.

So complications — very idiosyncratic, unique complications, of the kind only Hughes could create — proliferate, until Cheney finds himself chased closely by a smart police detective, meeting a Jesus Christ, (not the Jesus — not the current one, at least — but a prior, historical version) and having himself proclaimed as a new prophet by Hardacre. But Chesney still has Melda, and his demon Xaphan, on his side, plus his own inextinguishable drive for truth and justice. And there’s still one book to come in this trilogy.

Not to sound like a broken record, but Matt Hughes is a great, wonderfully entertaining writer — his dialogue pops, his people are quirky and real, and his situations could be written by no one else in the world. If you don’t like his work, there’s got to be something wrong with you.

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