I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how good the new Dawn of the Dead was, particularly in light of how mediocre Hellboy was, and in anticipation-slash-worry about how Kill Bill Volume 2 will be. (I’m afraid I won’t be satisfied unless, pace Tenacious D, it rocks my fucking socks off.) So I was tickled to read the following from Chris Puzak, from his positive review of the new Dawn:

This movie’s garnered a lot of positive reviews, although I think if I read another one which talks about what a biting critique of consumerism, the original movie was, I’m going to scream. Yes, George Romero made some jokes about shopping malls in the original, but the movie was basically about zombies eating people. The way people are going on about it, you’d think Michael Moore directed the movie from a script by Howard Zinn. I wish critics would just admit they like watching gory movies instead of pretending they watch them for the alleged social commentary.

My sentiments exactly!

Meanwhile, in the interest of equal time, Chris (and Franklin Harris) liked the Hellboy movie, and Dave Intermittent didn’t like Kill Bill Vol. 1. (Which I guess I can understand, but man, if Quentin Tarantino really is embarrassed about liking female ninjas, making two epic potentially career-killing movies about them sure is a funny way of showing it!) Meanwhile, John Jakala didn’t like the Hellboy movie, and commenter Mason accurately pointed out that this was that rarest of occasion where the grafted-in Hollywood-standard romantic subplot was the best part of the film.

Also on the great minds think alike front, my criticism of Elvis Mitchell from that Dawn of the Dead review I linked to above generated a surprising amount of “hear, hear”s. One of my favorites was from cartoonist Matt Wiegle:

…I also keyed in on Elvis Mitchell’s review as lazy [and] annoying. I may be reading too much into it, but it seemed as if he had some weird class issues going on with the remake, by both slamming it as an “expensive Troma Production” and by saying it was “clearly made in Toronto;” I feel critics often beat a film with the Toronto Hammer when they want to make it seem cheap or lazy. It was as if he was saying “This movie would like to think it’s high-class, but it’s not! See? Toronto!”

Amen. And it’s even dopier than usual to say that sort of thing about a remake you’re unfavorably comparing to an original that was shot in Pittsburgh.

The big news today, obviously, is that Marvel has finally created a seemingly viable creator-ownership option by importing David Mack’s Kabuki and Brian Bendis & Michael Oeming’s Powers to kick off its new creator-owned line, Icon. Near as I can tell there are two largely unexplored angles to this story:

1) The clusterfuck that was the transition between the last days of Bill Jemas’s reign to the first days of Dan Buckley’s must have been even worse than anyone thought. Huge creators like John Romita Jr., Mark Millar, and (especially) Grant Morrison took their respective creator-owned balls and went home because Jemas’s Marvel, despite initial promises, proved unwilling or unable to accomodate them. Indeed, Morrison decamped from Marvel entirely, forcing the company’s number-one franchise into the joint stewardship of Chuck Austen and Chris Claremont, a public-relations disaster from which it will likely take them some time to recover. In essence, Jemas’s mismanagement of the nascent Epic line and the imprint’s subsequent euthanasia at the hands of Dan Buckley and Gui Karyo screwed over not just up-and-comers, but some of the biggest names in the business. It’s simply astounding that it took the company this long to develop some sort of creator-ownership venue, considering the palpable losses the company incurred through its inability to do so sooner. (This is to say nothing of the fashion in which DC has begun stealing some of Marvel’s critical-acclaim thunder, in large part through a recent crop of successful creator-owned Vertigo titles…)

2) New Image publisher Erik Larsen had heretofore been seen as the guy who could turn Image Central’s fortunes around after years of lackadaisacal brand management by ousted publisher Jim Valentino. Several pundits theorized that Larsen’s mandate would include structuring the company’s publishing plans around Image’s existing popular series, two of the most notable being Powers and Kabuki. But Larsen has a long history of bad blood with Bendis, whose work for Marvel Larsen has mocked almost compulsively not just online and in letter columns but within the fictional world of Larsen’s Savage Dragon title itself. Bendis, for his part, has occasionally let on in his own letter columns that he sees Larsen as a habitual whiner. Could this long-running exchange of potshots explain why, at this critical juncture for Image, Bendis and his close friend Mack have defected to the House of Ideas? Larsen’s comments today are far from the usual “we wish them all the best in their future endeavors” boilerplate traditonally deployed in such circumstances, so I’d wager the creators’ mutual hostility did indeed play a role…

AiT/PlanetLar publisher Larry Young has pointed me in the direction of this MillarWorld thread, where he talks up some of his favorite comics blogs. Happy as I was to see yours truly’s on the list, I was happier to see that, as Larry tells it, I played a big part in getting him to take a closer look at the comics blogosphere in the first place. And I think the interaction’s been beneficial to both sides: I got a good interview, lots of bloggers have gotten free AiT/PL comics, and AiT/PL has gotten a lot of free publicity. It’s nice when the internet coughs up a win-win like that, isn’t it?

My goodness, if I ever write something successful, and forty years afterwards people were to go around insisting that writers of that time must treat that successful something with “respect”, I’d just die. Please, artists of the future, disrespect the bejesus out of me!

The work and comments of Darwyn Cooke have raised an interesting question: Must art be respectful to what has gone before, or should the words “respect” and “art” even be used anywhere near each other? Contra Chris Butcher, I’ve got to agree with Dave Fiore and say heck no, at least not when the “respect” in question entails a slavish devotion to the perceived “aims of the original creations” or to the “artistic intentions” of the original creators.

Whenever any artist is fired up or inspired enough by someone else’s work to do something that comments upon it in any way–that’s real respect. It’s the only kind of respect that matters, and certainly the only kind of respect that will engender more good art. Pure conservative homage-paying is about as far from the art impulse as you can get.

And good golly, “ethics” don’t enter into it! This isn’t a company refusing to hand over an artist’s property, or dicking him out of royalties–this is an artist putting a new spin on an old idea. Nobody has the ethical or moral right to have their creations remain unchallenged or unsullied forever and ever, world without end amen. I’d submit to you that most artists wouldn’t want that right even if it were available to them. A revamp or reexamination alters the original work not one iota. It certainly doesn’t violate the rights of the creator of that original work. Go ahead and paint that moustache on the Mona Lisa–so long as you’re not doing it on the original painting and/or destroying all copies of the original in circulation, you haven’t done a damn thing wrong.

This is not to say that all would-be iconoclasts are geniuses, or that all reverential nostalgia-mongers stink on ice–give me Astro City over Rawhide Kid any day. Pisstakes and cheap cash-in revamps can only get you so far (even aside from the “let’s make them all thugs and perverts!” school of kill-your-idols reactionism, I think we’ve all seen enough slick and soulless Hollywood remakes to know that sometimes the original creator’s intent is, in fact, vastly superior to that of his would-be reinterpreters), while sometimes an original work is rich enough to merit all kinds of fairly straightforward re-exploration. But if we decide that the only appropriate way to build upon or comment on the work of artists past is to mimic what we think were their goals and beliefs, how will we ever get anywhere?

PS: Why is it superhero writers who always get called out for this sort of thing? I haven’t heard anyone condemn, say, the Air Pirates for disrespecting the artistic intentions of Walt Disney (aside from Disney’s legal team, that is). For that matter, I’ve yet to see any bloggers wax outraged about how Alan Moore unethically abused poor Bram Stoker by having old opium-addicted Allan Quartermain slip the high hard one to Mina Harker, or how he disregarded the artistic intentions of Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells by having Mr. Hyde anally rape the Invisible Man.

PPS: On tangentially related notes, Marc Singer summarizes the denouement of Grant Morrison’s emotionally expansive and intellectually brilliant New X-Men run (you know, that dopey corporate spandex book he slummed on to make a quick buck without saying anything worthwhile), Dave Intermittent has some questions for fans of the non-fantastic, and John Jakala writes, like, the best JLA/Avengers review ever.

(Light blogging, schmight blogging.)

My military education is limited to one semester of Society and War back in college, so I’m not prepared to make a big announcement about the ongoing battles in Iraq. Well, actually, I am, and it’s that here at home the pro- and anti-war arguments appear to have become completely unfalsifiable. The usual suspects on either side have taken the events of the last couple of days to signal that we’ve now completely blown it, the Inevitable Revolution has begun, and we might as well pack our overweening nanny-state imperialist bags and go home; or that our desperate and savage enemies are acting like complete idiots and we have a golden opportunity to mop the floor with them and pave the way for Iraqi democracy in one fell swoop. “Failed war” and “we’re winning”–it appears that whatever happens, adherents to one or the other of these narratives will find that said happening fits neatly into their storyline.

Me, I’m not so sure. The closest comparison to the current goings on seems to be the Tet Offensive (about which I did learn in that Society and War class, thanks). Of course it’s not exactly the same–Tet was more or less coordinated throughout NVA and VC ranks, whereas it’s unclear how much collusion there is between disparate groups like Sadr’s militia, the Fallujah insurgents, Syrian infiltrators and so forth; much of the current hostilities seems to have stemmed from an extremely unlucky confluence of circumstances, such as the Fallujahn lynching and the shuttering of Sadr’s newspaper. But it’s similar in that it’s difficult to see an outcome to the battles that, in military terms, isn’t a complete disaster for the insurgent groups. Fallujah and Sadr City could have remained relatively untrammelled hotbeds of rebellion and murder for months, but now the insurgents in both places have handed the Coalition an excuse to squash them, an eventuality that the poorly disciplined and outmatched insurgent groups will not long prevent. Like Tet, the outbreak of fighting is surprising, but in the end it will likely be a nightmare for the enemy.

However, like Tet, what matters is not the reality on the ground but the perception both here at home and abroad. Do these battles represent some sort of massive intelligence failure? Can they be seen to represent popular sentiment about the Coalition, even though the people doing the fighting command little general support? Will they produce more casualties than the public can bear, either on our side (doubtful–Americans seem to have learned the lesson of Mogadishu) or among civilians (possible, despite the care being exercised by our forces; these groups are renowned for their use of human shields, residences, and mosques as both safe havens and propaganda generators for the credulous media)?

Which leads us back to our two rival, unfalsifiable narratives. In a situation where the outcome is more or less a given, the spin is everything. Will Fallujah, Ramadi, Sadr City et al mark the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning? It may come down to which of those narratives is shouted the loudest.

I’m vacationing in Colorado till next Tuesday. Blogging will probably be on the light side. Please try to contain your disappointment.

At the place where I now work, someone stole our only copy of Palomar.

This sucks, because that’s less money for Fanta and Beto, but hey, at least someone’s reading it, presumably.

New Frontier auteur Darwyn Cooke appears to have taken up the mantle of unabashed pseudoicon-worshipping nostalgia of the sort occasionally visible in the work of Alex Ross and Mark Waid with a zeal unrivalled this side of John Byrne. The latest target of Cooke’s ire is Mark Millar, who has violated Cooke’s delicate sensiblities by making the Hulk into, essentially, a giant cannibalistic prison rapist. (Link courtesy of Franklin Harris, who’s got a bunch of cool links up there.)

Your mileage may vary when it comes to Millar’s brand of vulgar deconstructionism–like Jim Henley, I can’t quite decide if Millar’s making some sort of point about how we glibly condone bastardry when it’s done by “our bastards,” or if he simply likes blowing shit up; at any rate I like his Captain America–but it’s clear at this point that Cooke has bought into the big corporate superhero companies’ attempts to transform their cheaply churned-out pulp heroes into worship-worthy Olympians. I detected this back when Cooke was going after Frank Miller for mistreating fictional characters in The Dark Knight Strikes Again, and with this new revelation I’m increasingly glad I jumped off the New Frontier-buying bandwagon. I don’t need to spend all that money on some long hagiography of Green Arrow and the Blue Beetle.

(Which is not to say I’ll never jump back on–I like his art and his storytelling style so much on their own merits that I’ll be sorely tempted by the eventual collection. Moreover, Cooke comes across as far less fundamentalist about these issues in his exchange with Millar than he did during his assault on Miller. But if the future of superhero writing is to be with either Cooke on one side or Miller and Millar on the other, I’m pretty comfortable with the side I’m on.)

Man, what a mess they made of Hellboy.

I went to see this movie despite my better instincts. The commercials I’d seen weren’t the least bit appealing. The same, alas, can be said for the movie itself. The grandeur, charm, and eeriness of the comic were nowhere to be found. In its place were a bunch of action sequences that weren’t particularly thrilling, a bunch of slimy monsters that weren’t particularly scary, a bunch of events that weren’t particularly connected, and a bunch of characters that weren’t particularly interesting.

Hellboy himself was played with all the aplomb you’d expect from Ron Perlman, but he was written painfully generically–just the umpteenth brash, wisecracking anti-hero down the pike, with none of the quiet deadpan resignation that makes him such an interesting character in the funnybooks. They took Abe Sapien down a new road, endowing him with extensive psychic powers I don’t remember him having in the comics and giving him the effete accent and demeanor of David Hyde Pierce, but the poor guy disappears halfway through the film and plays no role in the climax (which is probably just as well, seeing as how he was pretty much useless the rest of the time except as a convenient way to insert flashbacks into the flick). There’s a fundamentally pointless everyman character, who besides being boring throws off the balance of the film, which should have been centered solely on Hellboy. There’s Professor Broom (Bruttenholm, though you only see that name in the end credits), who’s dying, but the film completely negates the significance of that revelation by–well, let’s just say cancer’s the least of his worries. Liz Sherman was probably my favorite character; as played by Selma Blair she was believably aching. But even she is weighed down by the needlessly tortuous plot in which characters do this or that thing (start off in semi-retirement, say, then come back due to an event that probably killed hundreds of people but which fact goes unremarked upon; or start off in trouble, then continue to do the thing that got them in trouble, but not get in any more trouble) with no rhyme, reason, meaning, or consequence.

That’s the real problem with the film: Nothing has any weight. Why do we start with Hellboy on the outs with his “father,” Professor Broom, but never show a real reconciliation between them, nor comment on their failure to reach one? Why do we start with Liz Sherman institutionalized when she seems to be just fine, then suddenly bring her back into the fold when she’s a disaster waiting to happen? Why do the bad guys unleash the slimy Samael monsters? Why make destroying them such a central part of the plot if they do nothing to further the story, and if we’re just going to have a character toss in a throwaway line explaining that, after all the main characters have had their asses kicked by them, “we’ve destroyed thousands of their eggs” anyway? And if that’s true, how the hell do so many of them wind up in Moscow? And are slimy tentacled monsters really the *only* monsters worth showing? Seriously, variety is the spice of life, people, especially when you’ve got the entire Mike Mignola bestiary from which to select the damn things! And how is it that getting shot full of holes doesn’t kill the zombie Nazi guy at one point, but getting stabbed full of holes does? And what’s the point of the immortal she-Nazi, anyway? Does she do *anything*? And what’s up with Rasputin? He can apparently materialize anywhere at will and just as easily disappear, so why does he bring himself into contact with his enemies so often in order to use them to further his plans, when he could clearly accomplish quite a bit on his own? And why use Hellboy at all when you contain an apocalypse-causing god within your own body?

Folks, I could sit here writing more of these unanswered questions about dopey plot points all afternoon. That’s what a mess this movie is. And it’s not fun enough or good-looking enough to make up for it, nor are the characters compelling enough or the ideas unique enough. It’s a big, big let-down, even more so when you consider what a genuine marvel the comics themselves are. Do yourself a favor: Take your money and spend them on those comics instead.

April Fools is over. Phew. Now do yourself a favor and go here and breathe in the sweet, sweet perfume of really good comics.

(Link courtesy of Tim O’Neil, as part of a truly epic post including an ungodly long round-up of Secret Wars II and a worthwhile corrective to my Old New Marvel lament. Marvel was always just throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. The problem is that now, they’re throwing it at an entirely different wall. (My guess is it’s the one with all the X-Men wanted posters that Wolverine and Kitty Pride are standing in front of on the cover of “Days of Future Past” Part One. That seems to be a wall they’re fond of revisiting.))