* The same IRL issues that have prevented me from doing a lot of blogging over the past few days have also prevented me from seeing Iron Man, which I think makes me one of five people online who haven’t. So I can’t really speak to Jim Henley’s review of the film other than to say that Jim’s nerdblogging is always a treat and that this passage, about the much ballyhooed in nerd circles post-credits cameo by Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, is quite applicable to similar moments in comic books that rely solely on costume recognition rather than inherent drama for impact:

Downey and Mister Cameo are both great big comics fans, and the irony of Mister Cameo performing in the role that was literally drawn for him is a huge pleasure, but as a scene it’s inert. They give each other nothing. There’s nothing there that you, the fan, haven’t brought yourself.

* Speaking of superhero movies, I thought Batman Begins was absolutely dreadful and I think Tim Burton’s Batman film costarring the Joker is the best superhero movie ever by a country mile, so I’ve had a really hard time mustering any enthusiasm for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. However, I did enjoy the new trailer, and not just because Heath Ledger’s Joker sounds a lot like David Lynch. (But it helped. I wouldn’t say “exactly,” though, Jason–let’s hear him pronounce “chihuahua” first.)

* Neil Marshall’s eminently enjoyable post-apocalyptic action flick Doomsday arrives on DVD July 29th. Note to self: pre-order a copy for Steven Wintle.

* There’s viral pictures of Cloverfield critters circulating around the Internet thanks to the already-underway campaign for Cloverfield 2. I am totally down with this as long as the focus remains on the monsters, which were excellent.

* This reminds me that I re-watched The Mist last week and found myself able to enjoy it more, since I knew what the problems were (Mrs. Carmody, the terrible CGI for the tentacles, a lack of genuine horror-scares, the awkwardly paced ending) and could basically brush them off and focus on the fact that it’s a movie about grotesque monsters killing and eating people trapped in a grocery store, one of the all-time great horror concepts. Focus on the monsters, that’s my motto.

* Kristin Thompson, big-time film scholar and (I still can’t get over this) LotR fangirl and author of The Frodo Franchise, rounds up recent rumors regarding production troubles on Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lovely Bones, most of which now stand debunked.

* In his latest update on the horrendous rape/incest/imprisonment saga of Josef Fritzl and family, Bryan Alexander engages in some amusing alternate-reality headline writing for a world in which the case somehow involved the Internet. That sort of thing is always instructive.

* Here’s a lovely, evocative drawing of some kind of water monster by the great Renee French. One of the things I find so powerful about water monsters is the way that depictions of them can play off size and depth so as to make not only the monster itself but its very environment a locus of horror, and that’s what this drawing does.

* Bruce Baugh points out something I’d really never considered about Hostel and its crappy sequel, namely that they never really explain how and why the torture ring came into existence. It’s a welcome lack of exposition, and I’m almost surprised that the dopey sequel didn’t ruin it along with virtually everything else that was good about the original. Speaking of, I hope Bruce is gonna review Part II at some point.

* Apparently the guy who directed the Saw sequels will be directing the Hellraiser remake. I think the guys who wrote them will be writing it, too? Anyway this makes me–and based on his statements on torture porn, probably Clive Barker–markedly less interested in the prospect of remaking Hellraiser.

* Finally, Mahnola Dargis’s New York Times article bemoaning the lack of worthwhile female characters in both superhero/action blockbusters and arthouse/critical darlings alike is mostly just finger-wagging that also happens to be annoyingly written (last lines: “…you might think that Hollywood would get a clue. [hard return] Nah.”). It does, however, really hit on something when it lists No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood alongside Iron Man, The Dark Knight, and The Incredible Hulk (which she obnoxiously refers to as “Big Angry Green Man” as though no one’s supposed to know who the Hulk is). A while back my wife was listening to a commercial on the radio for Michael Clayton and said, “This is really unappealing.” When I asked why, she said, “It’s just the same thing as every other movie. There’s some guy, and he’s an alpha male, and he’s really tough and serious and he says tough and serious things…blah blah blah.” That made me think that even most of the movies I watch that are outside the various subspecies of the fantastic (there aren’t many, admittedly)–No Country, TWBB, Children of Men, The Departed, Eastern Promises, A History of Violence–could almost all be described as “angry men being mean to each other.” (Link via Keith Uhlich.)

If you liked my list of the 11 Most Awful Songs from Geek Movie Soundtracks over at Topless Robot, you’ll love my new list of the 11 BEST Songs from Geek Movie Soundtracks. Feast your ears!

New X-Men Volume 6: Planet X

Grant Morrison, writer

Phil Jimenez, artist

Marvel, 2004

128 pages

$12.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

New X-Men Volume 7: Here Comes Tomorrow

Grant Morrison, writer

Marc Silvestri, artist

Marvel, 2004

112 pages

$10.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

Originally written on July 19, 2004 for publication in The Comics Journal

Grant Morrison is the X-Men franchise’s angel of mercy. In the two decades since Chris Claremont transformed a third-tier Stan’n’Jack creation into the most popular concept in North American comic books, no greater act of love has been committed on behalf of mutantkind than the truly mighty act of deadwood clearance that was Morrison’s much-heralded run on New X-Men. Culminating in the issues collected in the trade paperbacks Planet X and Here Comes Tomorrow, Morrison’s labor of love meant killing not just characters but concepts, entire ways of writing both the X-Men and superhero comics in general. The posturing villains, the alternate futures, the constant battles, the tortured soap operatics, even the costumes (easily the ugliest in all of superherodom, by the way)–for this potentially fascinating heroic-fantasy concept to be fascinating once again, Morrison says, we’ve got to wipe out everything they’ve come to be known for and start over. And it worked. Naturally, the House of Ideas undid nearly all of it within a month of Morrison’s departure.

Morrison refers to his four-year run on the title as one giant graphic novel; Planet X and Here Comes Tomorrow are the concluding chapters, and as such tie together nearly every loose end of theme and plot left dangling during his incredibly dense tenure. The big reveal that sets this final act in motion is the discovery that Xorn, the Chinese X-Man and healer with a star for a brain (!), is in actuality Magneto, the X-Men’s nemesis, presumed dead in an anti-mutant genocide that kicked off Morrison’s run. In the guise of the gentle Xorn, Magneto has exerted his influence over the Xavier Institute’s “special class” of ugly, poorly adjusted mutant teenagers, while simultaneously sowing the seeds of discontent and death among the X-Men themselves in the form of everything from extramarital affairs to widespread drug abuse. We’ve seen Magneto come back from the dead before, but we know we’re in uncharted territory when his first post-unmasking act is to quite literally destroy Manhattan. (This was sign number one that Marvel would be hitting the big red reset button once Morrison defected to DC. Where’s Spider-Man going to fight Doctor Octopus–Hoboken?)

Despite giving the preening bad guy his brightest moment in the sun, Morrison’s aim with Planet X is to savagely mock the character to the point where the last vestiges of appeal in his violent brand of sci-fi identity politics are erased. Magneto, who throughout the series had become a beloved martyr figure, his image appearing on the t-shirts and bedroom walls of disaffected mutant youths everywhere, quickly finds that he lacks the vision thing. His new “subjects” have seen him die and return so many times they don’t believe it’s actually him now. The special class, unwitting members of the new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, either prefer Xorn outright or just think it’s kinda queer for their fearless leader to have dressed up in costume for months. In one hilarious sequence, the self-styled Master of Magnetism launches into a rousing speech so grandiosely Shakespearean that one can hear the mellifluous voice of Sir Ian McKellen proclaiming it in the next X-movie, only to be told by his henchman Toad that the masses can’t even hear him, seeing as they’re milling about in the street and he’s inside the upper floors of the Chrysler Building. Throughout this volume Morrison displays a genuine comedic gift, particularly in contrast to superhero writers whose idea of a gag is to have Ant Man crawl up his wife’s vagina. Morrison has said in interviews that his brutally satirical treatment of Magneto was a condemnatory reaction against the so-called nobility of a character who is nothing more than a murdering terrorist. It’s a welcome point of view even here in the real world, where we’ve so often been beseeched to “understand” the inexcusable, and where ostensible humanists serve as apologists for benighted fundamentalist slaughter.

Phil Jimenez, a solid if not thrilling artist of the George Pèrez school whose talent (besides drawing a fierce Jean Grey) lies in evoking superhero classicisms well enough to be able to subvert them too, draws Magneto throughout as an eight-foot-tall, floating, purple Darth Vader, but transforms his right-hand man Toad into the type of hip London scumbag who sells E outside of Sophisticats. Before long, the increasingly impotent potentate is addicted to Kick, the mutant club drug/performance enhancer. Bereft of new ideas, he begins dredging up idiotic schemes from X-books past, like reversing the world’s magnetic poles, a move as sure to kill mutants as it is to kill everyone else. By the time this pathetic old asshole finally gets his comeuppance (at the claws of Wolverine, naturally), his long-time rival Professor X has dismissed Magneto’s ossified, coercive philosophies utterly: “…the worst thing you ever did,” he tells the would-be dictator, “is come back.” Or as the stylish living weapon Fantomex puts it to the villain, “Is everything you say a cliché?” Adamantium claws may cut off your head, but having your self-created legend deflated really hurts.

Here Comes Tomorrow is to dystopian-future X-stories what Planet X was to Magneto stories: the final word. Readers of blockbuster superhero titles like Paul Jenkins’s Wolverine: Origin or Jeph Loeb’s Batman: Hush can tell you that while throwing a shock reveal into your story is easy, doing it in a way that’s supported at all by what’s come before, that’s both difficult to figure out before the reveal and impossible to miss afterwards, that enriches your understanding and enjoyment of what you’ve already read, and that generally doesn’t make you want to punch yourself in the face is apparently beyond the ken of most mainstream writers. Not so with Morrison, who after his surprise resurrection of Magneto in Planet X reveals a puppet master behind not just the once-again-dead magnetic supervillain but nearly every bad thing that went down in Morrison’s run and beyond. The “intelligent bacterial colony” known as Sublime was the very first form of life on Earth, and has labored for three billion years to stay at the top of the evolutionary ladder. The inherently powerful and fabulous mutants are the only true threat to Sublime’s self-confidence; he therefore worked behind the scenes in various guises to make sure that mutants were too busy getting killed by both humans and each other to realize their true potential for greatness. Here Comes Tomorrow takes place 150 years in the future, a time in which Sublime is preparing his final assault on the lifeforms of Earth by resurrecting the omnipotent and destructive Phoenix (aka Jean Grey), who was killed by Magneto in a final act of defiance just before his own execution.

If your eyes are already glossing over from simply reading a description of the hoary X-concepts being trotted out here, hang in there. (And ignore the fact that this arc marks the return to Marvel of early-90s superstar artist and Image co-founder Marc Silvestri. I’ve never been wild about the hyperrendered style of Silvestri, Jim Lee, and the like, but nor am I morally offended by it, as are some observers of the scene. There are a few storytelling lapses here–it would have been nice if the oft-mentioned White Hot Room in which the Phoenix resides was actually, y’know, white–but they’re mainly out of Silvestri’s hands. For what it’s worth, I think his style works rather beautifully here, cranking up the intentional superheroic/supervillainous clichés to eleven and giving this crazed, patchwork future a rough-hewn glamour and muscular sex appeal. His Wolverine, for instance, is both a man who is believably ready to die and a man with an unbelievable ass.)

What truly separates Morrison’s story from every other all-powerful-villain-in-a-future-we-may-be-too-late-to-prevent tale you’ve come across is not just his proficiency in generating stunning sci-fi concepts (the Termids, the Crawlers, the Feeders, the Phoenix Corps (!)) or instantly riveting characters (the Proud People (complete with Magic Car and Mer-Max the talking whale), Tom Skylark and Rover, Appollyon the Destroyer), though indeed introducing all of these in a four-issue arc whose world we’ll likely never see again is equivalent to throwing a gauntlet in the face of other writers of imaginative comic-book fiction. (See Morrison’s Seaguy for a similar act of “I’ll see you and raise.”) No, the strength of this book, and of Morrison’s entire tenure with the characters, is his belief that love trumps the horror of the world, and his ability to convey this in a way that’s emotionally direct without being trite or mawkish. It’s Dr. Hank “Beast” McCoy’s heartbreak over his own lies that gives Sublime an entrée, and Scott “Cyclops” Summers’ refusal to let go of a failed love with Jean Grey that ensures Sublime’s success; in the end, it’s connections that are just as personal–between ugly Ernst and disembodied Martha, between the identical triplet Stepford Cuckoos, between human Tom Skylark, his Sentinel parent Rover, and his robotic lover EVA, between the near-immortal Wolverine and his beloved Jean Grey–that set Sublime up for the fall. And it’s Jean Grey’s love for Cyclops, great enough for her to rewrite history and let him admit his own love for her one-time rival Emma Frost, that fixes “the hole at the heart of creation” and undoes Sublime’s machinations once and for all.

Morrison rode into New X-Men at the crest of a wave that saw Marvel taking bold risks with its core characters and ushering in a new writer-driven era of good, and even great, superhero comics; he rode out as persona non grata, his celestially vast ideas out of joint with a newly conservative company aiming mainly either to mimic the methods of blockbuster action cinema or mine fanboy nostalgia. He intended his forty-issue X-Men novel to be a gift to the franchise, but the gift has gone mainly unopened: Most of his new supporting cast has been shuffled offstage, the profoundly fresh relationship between Cyclops and Emma Frost seems poised for the chopping block, and eternal X-scribe Chris Claremont resurrected Magneto almost before Morrison had a chance to leave the building, pegging the villain’s whole Manhattan meltdown on the work of an impostor. (Would that we could place blame for the past twenty years of X-Men comics on a similar entity.) But we the readers are left with one of the most humanistic, richest, funnest, greatest superhero comics ever written. That’s gift enough.

Remember when I reviewed Brian Chippendale’s Galactikrap 2? It didn’t used to be available at the PictureBox store, but it is now…

* I really like the new trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, both because of the subject matter and because I admire the man’s chutzpah for including what in the ADD world of trailer editing have to be considered long takes. (Via Dread Central.)

* Bruce Baugh offers a thoughtful review of Eli Roth’s Hostel. I really appreciated his insights about the look of the film, the redeeming qualities of the American characters, the lingering effects of torture…just a wonderful analysis. Also worth reading is the comment thread where various people explain why they refuse to watch the film.

* Shock Till You Drop’s Ryan Rotten really liked Ryuhei Kitamura’s adaptation of Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train, which may be a good sign.

* Kevin Huizenga discusses the difficulty of making comics starring himself…in comic form!

* This week’s Horror Roundtable is about non-horror movies that hold their own in the horror department. It’s interesting to see the different directions people went with this.

DC Universe #0

Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, writers

George Pèrez, Doug Mahnke, Tony S. Daniel, Ivan Reis, Aaron Lopresti, Philip Tan, Ed Benes, Carlos Pacheco, JG Jones, artists

DC Comics, April 2008

32 pages

50 cents

Four of the six* ongoing DC-published superhero titles I read are written by Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns. The former is as engaging as ever in All Star Superman and Batman (which reads better in chunks than it does in monthly installments), while the latter has truly come into his own with Green Lantern and the Superman series Action Comics (both of which are at this point my all-time favorite main-line runs of their respective lead characters). Morrison, for his part, is my favorite superhero writer, and I enjoyed his earlier collaboration with Johns on 52. So despite having no interest in Countdown to Final Crisis and some innate resistance to the DC approach to crossovers–they tend to be epic discussions of comics-y concepts like continuity and multiverses, as opposed to Marvel’s tendency to root its events, however perfunctorily, in more familiar ideas like the privacy/security tradeoff or post-9/11 paranoia or whether the ends justify the means–I naturally gave this book a whirl based on my appreciation of its writers. I even brought home a copy since Jim Hanley’s was giving them away for free!

It’s a fun book. I don’t think I knew that it was going to be a collection of teases for upcoming storylines rather than a self-contained story, or even a coherent prologue to a larger story. But this approach seemed like a smart way to get across several things:

1) The DCU is heading in a unified direction…

2) …dictated by storylines involving the big iconic characters rather than Donna Troy and the Pied Piper…

3) …and written by Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns rather than Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray. Heck, given the reception of Countdown and its countless spinoffs, even Greg Rucka and Gail Simone, who are riding shotgun with vaguely connected tie-ins, seem like a huge deal.

DC Universe #0 seems to show that DC recognizes that its core characters/franchises (Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, perhaps Wonder Woman) are all pretty strong right now, so why not recalibrate the company’s crossover mojo around them rather than trying to force people to be interested in peripheral nonsense about nobodies? So instead of Monarch and Jason Todd, you get Batman grilling the ever-creepier Joker about a long-running plot thread involving a godlike supervillain gunning for the Dark Knight. You get one of Johns’s now-trademark multi-panel rapid-fire tastes of the rainbow of power rings now zipping around outer space. You get Superman in the future with the Legion of Super-Heroes (a concept I really don’t cotton to, but Johns has earned some credit in this department with his most recent Action arc), preparing to do battle with the hilarious fanboy-entitlement metaphor Superman-Prime. You get Wonder Woman’s godly forebears preparing to replace her with an army of 300 knockoffs, which makes for a funny visual at least. You get a creepy villain holding the scales of justice and trying to recruit other villains into yet another version of the Secret Society of Super-Villains, this one a Scientologyesque cult presumably dedicated to the awesome Jack Kirby villain Darkseid. You get an obliquely established return of Barry Allen, the long-dead Silver Age Flash, that plays itself out primarily through the shifting tone (and colors) of the narrative captions; it’s pretty funny to see Morrison do a mainstream-press-worthy character revival the same way he might establish an obscure plot point like, say, the link between the Undying Don and Ali-Ka-Zoom in Seven Soldiers. And you get the Spectre, but hey, they can’t all be winners.

As might already be apparent, the book is written in the crazy million-things-happening-at-once style of Morrison’s JLA Classified, Seven Soldiers, and those acid-flashback Batman issues from a few months ago, Johns’s Action Comics Annual and Sinestro Corps Special, and the pair’s 52. It’s possible to see the seams between the two writers’ work from time to time, but it takes some doing. I’m really happy to see Johns genuinely collaborating with Morrison and holding his own–it’s worth it for the horrified reaction of blogosphere snobs alone.

The art, needless to say, is of varying effectiveness. (Ivan Reis does what Ed Benes would like to do much better than Benes actually does, for example.) I think the George Pèrez cover is ugly and unnecessarily retro. However, I do like the design of the house-ad teaser pages interspersed throughout the comic to tout the relevant tie-ins–the text so blocky and matter of fact it’s almost funny. And they beat the hell out of either those orange Countdown-slogan teasers or the previous wave of motivational-poster-style teasers.

That being said, the notion that this is at all accessible to someone who isn’t a giant nerd is laughable. But I don’t care, since I am a giant nerd and I don’t give a shit about this particular book attracting new readers. That’s what manga is for! And even then we’re only talking about the first volume in a given series. I think the myth that “every issue should be written like it’s somebody’s first so that superhero comics would be more accessible” might make sense from a publishing perspective, but not necesarily a storytelling one, and maybe not even a publishing one anymore either given who the audience really is. I mean, any given fourth-season episode of Lost or Battlestar Galactica is completely incomprehensible to people who haven’t been following along, yet we fans don’t complain about that because we are fans and that’s who the shows are aimed at. Nobody gets upset because Death Note Vol. 7 isn’t a good jumping-on point, because that volume is for preexisting Death Note fans. Virtually everyone who picks up a comic called DC Universe is going to be someone who is already familiar with what a shared universe is, and that is totally fine. Now, the big corporate superhero companies can claim that the goal of something like DCU #0 is going to woo Johnny Dailynewsreader, but we don’t have to play along by evaluating the book negatively based on that standard. The standard I evaluated it on is “here’s a book by two of my favorite writers at DC that leads into their upcoming storylines on various titles–does it make me happy I’m reading them?” The answer was yes.

* All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder and Ex Machina

* Infocult’s Bryan Alexander tracks developments in the case of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter and their inbred children in hidden chambers in his cellar for over two decades. I’m as astonished by this story as I have been by anything I’ve read in all of my years following macabre crimes. To my surprise, the most outlandish details of the initial reports have not just been confirmed, but surpassed.

* Though I haven’t seen any of the Masters of Horror films that And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRwM is talking about in his review of John Carpenter’s Pro-Life, I greatly admire the way he goes after mainstream critics for myopically focusing on “horror as current-events report” and horror filmmakers for catering to that particular fixation.

* I like the sound of I Love Sarah Jane, a short film about a lovestruck junior-high kid’s experiences during a zombie apocalypse, screened at the Independent Film Festival of Boston and reviewed by Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Katherine Follett.

* Finally, amen. (Via Topless Robot.)