[Read the whole thing]]]> Steven Moffat’s second season running Doctor Who shared one major characteristic with Russell T. Davies’ second season: Both were not as good as their first seasons. Moffat is overall a much stronger writer than Davies and his story arcs have been more interesting (far fewer Daleks, for one thing), but this season felt like he bit off more than he could chew, setting up a complicated set of plot threads, but the payoff has so far been rather disappointing.

Here’s my ranking of this season’s episodes from favorite to least:

• The Doctor’s Wife (written by Neil Gaiman)
• The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon (Steven Moffat)
• The Girl Who Waited (Tom MacRae)
• The Wedding of River Song (Moffat)
• A Good Man Goes to War (Moffat)
• The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People (Matthew Graham)
• Closing Time (Gareth Roberts)
• Let’s Kill Hitler (Moffat)
• The Curse of the Black Spot (Stephen Thompson)
• The God Complex (Toby Whithouse)
• Night Terrors (Mark Gatiss)

Spoilers ahoy!

Individual Episodes:

The season’s best episode was actually outside of the main arc as well as not being written by Moffat, that being Neil Gaiman’s “The Doctor’s Wife”. Given all the River Song shenanigans during Moffat’s reign, I – like I’m sure almost everyone else – expected this would be a key story in the arc, but in fact Gaiman takes the story in a different direction, anthropomorphizing the Doctor’s relationship with the TARDIS. It was a very Gaiman-esque story, with atmosphere and horror and some sweet moments, as well as a lot of tantalizing bits for long-time Time Lord fans. Actually the story’s setting is the sort of thing that a whole season of episodes could spring from, but I doubt it will ever come up again. But that’s okay. The only drawback to the episode was the rather cheap and obvious manipulation of time used to terrorize Amy and Rory.

I previously reviewed “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day of the Moon”, which were pretty good, but are a good example of the problem with the season’s arc: It’s terribly elliptical, and is full of an assortment of weirdness for weirdness’ sake. Why an astronaut suit? Why isn’t the Silence just cleaning up if they have these elaborate electrical powers and are nearly-invisible? Since when can the TARDIS turn invisible? Still, the set-up for the season’s big question – is the Doctor going to die, and if not (since he clearly isn’t), how’s he going to get out of it? – is pretty well done, there are plenty of suspenseful moments, and the Doctor’s solution to the Silence in the second part is rather clever.

Speaking of “cheap and obvious manipulation of time” as I did above, “The Girl Who Waited” was about as un-subtle an episode as one can imagine, taking the original meeting of the Doctor and Amy to its logical extreme via the perils of time travel, and in a ridiculously contrived environment. Yet it still works pretty well, mainly because of Karen Gillan’s portrayal of the two Amys, and the Doctor’s decision at the climax of the episode.

As you can see, I’m already not hugely enamored of the season already. The season’s finale, “The Wedding of River Song”, concerns, well, its title, and also how the Doctor gets out of it. I felt pretty foolish for not seeing it sooner, considering the solution to the problem was telegraphed several episodes earlier, not to mention early in this episode itself. It’s reasonably satisfying, and the Doctor using the trick of hiding in “a Doctor suit” (a good line) to fall “off the grid” so the Silence doesn’t keep hunting him is pretty clever. But the climax felt, well, anticlimactic, very different from the explosive Season Five climax.

The mid-season arc stories, “A Good Man Goes to War” and “Let’s Kill Hitler” were rather unsatisfying. “Good Man” continues the rather silly trend of the Doctor being this universally-known figure, loved by many and hated by many more, which just completely clashes with my concept of the character as this lone, stealth figure doing good deeds under everyone’s radar across the universe. “Wedding” suggests that exactly this has become a problem for the Doctor, but Moffat never really establishes how the Doctor’s status quo changed in this way, so it just feels awkward and uncharacteristic for the series. “Let’s Kill Hitler” focuses on the mystery of River, basically explaining what we’d all guessed earlier when we learned that Amy was pregnant. I found this fairly unsatisfying, especially since it plays way too fast-and-loose with the regeneration rules for my taste. (Heck, Moffat undercuts any reasonable explanation for why River would have been able to regenerated by having her gestate outside of the TARDIS – while Amy is a captive of the Silence – though really no explanation would have satisfied me. It’s another “weirdness for weirdness’ sake” plot device.)

The other stories were one-off tales. “Closing Time” is the best of these, highlighting the Doctor’s fatalistic last years prior to the season ender; Craig from “The Lodger” shows up and the pair basically have a buddy episode, which is quite a bit of fun other than the cliched deployment of the Cybermen as the big threat. “The Curse of the Black Spot”, “The God Complex” and “Night Terrors” are all fairly generic horror yarns, all fairly forgettable; “Spot” gets the nod as the best of the three for its less ridiculous explanation for its mysterious goings-on.

The Season Story Arc:

As I said earlier, I think Moffat bit off more than he could chew in the complicated story arc of this season.

The Silence are a fairly creepy adversary, but they’re also basically a cipher. Considering that we’ve never heard of them, nor has the Doctor, one wonder how long they’ve been around and, more importantly, what it is they’re trying to accomplish. Are they trying to conquer the universe? If so, then their attack on the TARDIS in Season Five was a disastrously bad choice, as it nearly destroyed the universe. Are they trying to destroy the universe, then? If so, why? Are they just trying to kill the Doctor? If so, why? They seem to fanatic to simply be hired guns. Or do they have some other goal, and if so, what, and why do they fear the Doctor so much? This season really didn’t make any progress in exploring any of this. Presumably these elements are what Season Seven will be all about – they’ll end up a pretty weak and forgettable foe if not.

I’ve been conflicted about River Song as a character (though not about Alex Kingston as an actress, who pretty much steals any scene she’s in; ah, if only she’d been able to appear opposite Christopher Eccleston!). For a while she was being deployed in a strict “every time the Doctor meets her occurs for her before the last time we saw them meet” manner, which was a nifty plot device, but one I never really embraced because if both of them can time travel, then why do they have to stick to that pattern? But as a storytelling conceit I was willing to accept it. But the pattern goes completely off the rails here, as the Doctor meets her as an infant (at the end of “Good Man”), and then as (effectively) a teenager (in “Hitler”), and then at two different points in “Astronaut”, and then I gave up trying to untangle their timelines, since it’s clearly no longer important. If Moffat has been planning to build up to a grand “this is the first time River meets the Doctor, and the last time he meets her” scene, he’s already short-circuited the impact of that episode this season. Too bad, since such a scene could be quite cool.

(On the other hand, it would be equally impressive – and maybe have greater impact – if the Doctor manages to reincarnate her from her computer representation back in Season Four’s “Forest of the Dead”. But I digress.)

I thought the notion of the Silence appropriating River’s life to make her a weapon against the Doctor was a pretty nifty idea, although I didn’t understand how she was able to escape their control and short-circuit their plans. It also leaves one big questions about what we know about River: If the Doctor wasn’t killed, why was she imprisoned? How is she able to keep walking out of her prison? What authority imprisoned her? If the Doctor was killed in 2010, but shows up at some earlier time later in his own timeline, wouldn’t that conclusively exonerate her before she’s even imprisoned? For that matter, River seems able to time travel on her own, but we don’t know how. Her timeline is a mess, and I don’t see how Moffat can reconcile it all other than wiping everything away through some deus ex machina. I suspect he has no intention of trying. Maybe he has some notes which make everything fit together, but from the material on film, I can’t see how.

But okay, I admit I’m intrigued and amused by the metatextual mystery set up at the end of “River”, where the first question (of the TV series) will finally be asked: “Doctor who?” Does Moffat have the guts to actually dive into the Doctor’s earliest life and give us some insight into his character that we haven’t been given? It’s never been the purpose of the series to explain everything about the character, and some of that mystery has always been an underpinning of the show, but explaining some of it, especially in a manner that could be built on at some unspecified point in the future, would be very cool, and something that’s rarely been done. (Honestly, what must it have been like for the – far fewer – fans back in 1969 when the Time Lords were introduced? Could Moffat pull off a revelation anywhere near that level? I sure hope he tries.)

So in sum, the season was often interesting, but ultimately disappointing. In a way, it sums up Moffat’s style of writing: Many bits of it don’t make sense, but it’s emotionally satisfying. “The Girl in the Fireplace” from Season Two fits this description to a T, but at his best (“The Doctor Dances”, or “Forest of the Dead”) Moffat manages to overcome his plotting difficulties. But the whole-season arcs of his first two seasons don’t, and given that they rely on intricate plotting, they end up not being more than the sum of their parts. I think Moffat needs to simplify things a bit, and hopefully now that some of the mysteries behind River and the Silence have been revealed, the third act of the Matt Smith Doctor will hang together better than does the second.

From the cover, it has all the hallmarks of something that should be a pretty good comic book: Matt Fraction has a good reputation (I’m not a big fan of his Casanova

[Read the whole thing]]]> The Defenders #1, by Matt Fraction, and Terry & Rachel Dodson, Marvel, December 2011

The Defenders #1 is a bad comic book. From the cover, it has all the hallmarks of something that should be a pretty good comic book: Matt Fraction has a good reputation (I’m not a big fan of his Casanova series – just not my thing – but I quite liked his run on Iron Fist with Ed Brubaker; and I heard good things about The Order). The Dodsons are fine artists (though Terry’s pencils always remind me of Adam Hughes’ style; he’s moving gradually away from that, though). Also, I’ve always had a soft spot the the Defenders; I love Doctor Strange, and this particular combination of heroes (Doc combined with the Hulk, the Sub-Mariner and the Silver Surfer, with a few others tacked on for good measure) usually leads to some quirky stories. While the cover is a bit drab in its colors (why is everyone wearing some combination of red, white and blue-gray? What happened to Namor’s green swim trunks, or Iron Fists’s green costume, or Doc’s bright-blue outfit and bright-red cape with yellow trim?), it’s still promising. But the story: Ugh! “Breaker of Worlds” starts with mayhem in Bucharest as a giant black creature causes rampant destruction. Not exactly something we haven’t seen before – Kurt Busiek’s terrific run on Avengers featured something similar – but not the worst premise for a story. But then we but to Doctor Strange waking up after casually sleeping with a student, and realizing it was a mistake (as does she). This feels utterly out of character for the good Doctor; certainly he’s slept with his student before (back when they were called “apprentices”) (unless he’s a university professor now, which wouldn’t make much sense for the character), but it was always in the form of a serious relationship. Indeed, Roger Stern’s great run on the title in the 80s was greatly concerned with his relationships with a couple of women in his life. Then the Hulk shows up, and asks Doc for help – which is apparently hard for him, although the old, childlike Hulk felt that Strange was one of the few people in the world he actually trusted. The pair gather Namor and the Silver Surfer (who seems to have the new ability to transform himself into snow, which seems gratuitous), and the Hulk explains that his anger and power have taken on their own form, a creature called Nul, Breaker of Worlds, which is the black creature we saw earlier. He’s come to the Defenders for help, but he can’t help himself since he could be sucked back into becoming part of it again. None of the Hulk/Nul stuff makes much sense, either. I’d assume that Fraction is going to explain it all (How can the Hulk’s rage and anger become personified? Who’s behind it? How did the Hulk break away from it? How could he be sucked in again? Why hasn’t this happened before in the Hulk’s years of existence?), but it’s presented as a fait accompli and I don’t have a lot of faith that it will be explained. (Indeed, some of it should probably have been explained by the Hulk, himself, in this issue.) Since the Hulk can’t go along, he recommends the Red She-Hulk pitch in instead. Red is Betty Banner (well, I guess she’s back to being Betty Ross now) for reasons I neither know nor care about (having lost interest in the recent “Red Hulk” stories after about 4 issues), and she’s something of a nonentity of a character here – charitably, I’d say she’s Marvel’s answer to Power Girl. (I always thought Ms. Marvel was Marvel’s answer to Power Girl.) And wait, if the Hulk can have his rage and power extracted into a separate entity, why couldn’t any other of the Hulks not have the same thing happen to them? The team also brings in Iron Fist to provide transportation, since his alter ego of Daniel Rand is rich and owns a super fast plane. I find Fist’s portrayal here to be immensely annoying, as he’s something of a weenie geek who just wants to read comic books when more important things are going on. This doesn’t feel like Iron Fist’s character at all – it’s too cutesy, and not serious enough (hmm, just like Doctor Strange). Anyway, the plane gets shot down, and the team gets ambushed. End issue one on this cliffhanger (well, with a little more thrown in, but that’s the bulk of it). The story here is pretty pedestrian, but that’s not a crime. It’s tough to write a superhero comic that really breaks new ground. But the characterizations are really annoying. Only Namor comes out of the issues not seeming like a substantially different character than the one I’m used to, and that’s just bad writing. Maybe Marvel’s trying to mix up all their characters (in which case, I really have no interest in following them), or else Fraction’s just getting too cute with the characters, writing them the way he wishes they were rather than how they actually are. That my two favorite characters in the book – Doctor Strange and Iron Fist – are the most changed just makes it worse. The Dodsons’ art is fine, of course. Ironically (given my earlier Power Girl comment), it seems like their style is evolving to look a little more like Amanda Connors’. The colors often seem a bit washed out, though, making many of the pages seem a bit flat. But that’s not enough to make me want to keep reading. If issue #2 isn’t significantly improved then I don’t see myself continuing with the series. Which is too bad because I had been looking forward to this series, and this issue was really disappointing.

[Read the whole thing]]]>

Interview With
The Vampire

I think Anne Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles” series didn’t become really big until the publication of The Vampire Lestat in 1985, but look at the copyright date on this book, the first in the series: 1976! Remember the controversy over whether Tom Cruise was an appropriate choice to play Lestat in the 1994 film adaptation – in its pre-World Wide Web way as big a casting brouhaha as anything involving the Twilight cast today – and now realize that this book was published 18 years earlier. Today it seems like you can’t throw a rock without hitting a couple of writers getting rich off a series of vampire novels, but all of these modern vampires owe their popularity – and arguably their very existence – to Anne Rice and Interview With the Vampire This is where it began.

And it’s actually a pretty good book. I first read it around the time of the film (though I never saw the film), and found it engaging and compelling. Which is more than I can say for the sequel, as I thought The Vampire Lestat was borderline-unreadable (and way too long), so I stopped there. But Interview stands on its own just fine.

The vampire of the title is Louis, who is being interviewed by a young reporter in present-day San Francisco (using a tape recorder, since the “present day” is the 1970s here). Relating his life story, Louis was a plantation owner in Louisiana in the late 18th century, when he is attacked and turned into a vampire by Lestat, who desires to use Louis to live a comfortable life of leisure. Lestat is a mercurial personality, filled with anger and ego, who lets Louis know only a little about being a vampire in order to keep Louis tied to him. When Louis shows signs of wanting to leave, Lestat tricks him into helping him turn a 5-year-old girl, Claudia, into a vampire. This ultimately proves to be Lestat’s undoing, as Claudia – who never ages – chafes after several decades at Lestat’s dominance of their triad and eventually schemes to free herself and Louis from Lestat. The pair leave the United States in the late 19th century and head to Europe.

After a period in eastern Europe learning the sad fate that befalls some vampires, they end up in Paris, where they meet a coven of vampires who have set themselves up as a high-class theater. They are nominally led by Armand, who believes himself to be the oldest vampire on Earth, and who wishes to anchor himself to Louis so that he can avoid the disorientation of living through the changing centuries which causes most vampires to ultimately kill themselves. He and Louis plan to allow Claudia to live on her own, but other forces within the theater troupe engineer a series of events leading to tragedy for our heroes and everyone around them.

There’s a lot to like about Interview. For the science fiction fan, there’s the fact that Rice pared down the mythological trappings of the vampire, discarding many elements which felt superfluous (the vulnerability to crosses and garlic, for instance), turning them into predatory creatures of the night. She outlined the mechanism through which humans are turned into vampires, thus explaining why the world isn’t overrun by the creatures (vampires need to deliberately act to transform someone), and even explained why vampires eventually die off. While obviously not everything about a vampire can “make sense”, getting down to the essentials – the blood thirst, the vulnerability to the sun, the strength, speed and heightened senses, and the immortality – makes them terrifying creatures while also tragic ones.

Rice of course also brought the sense of gothic romance which pervades the genre today. While homoeroticism pervades the scenes between Louis and Lestat, and later Lestat and Armand, in a broader sense it’s raw passion and the denial of consummation of that passion which characterizes Rice’s vampires: They react viscerally to the deaths of their victims, moved as much by the shared experience (or what they imagine is the victim’s experience) as the need for their blood. And they cling to each other fervently because there are so few of their kind, and after just a few decades they can no longer relate to mere mortal humans. They are sexless, and the homoerotic overtones of their relationships are I think largely driven by their strong passions towards whomever they connect with than by any homosexual tendencies. But because their motivations are different from humans, their expressions of their desires are natural to them but seem strange to us, inasmuch as they are inhuman entities in human form.

Louis is an awkward protagonist, as he’s what an acquaintance of mine would term a “wussbag”: He’s not a very active character, has trouble making decisions for himself and is easily overwhelmed by stronger personalities, of which there are many around him. Subservient to Lestat, he is repulsed by what he has to do as a vampire to live, and even more repelled by Lestat’s cavalier attitude toward the same. Enthralled by Claudia, he does her bidding despite her being even more alien than Lestat, having never been grounded in human morality before being turned. Armand is less reprehensible but no less domineering, just a softer touch.

But the story is still wholly Louis’; fundamentally, it’s about his eventual fall, though it takes more than a century. He initially resists embracing his vampiric nature, preferring to survive by killing animals, but he eventually gives in. He doesn’t have the courage to kill himself, especially once he has the responsibility to care for Claudia. Having thought he’s finally found a place where he belongs, with the theater troupe, the climax of the story sees him lose everything he cares about, and drives him to finally take charge and retaliate against the parties responsible. He destroys the last bits of his soul in the process, and becomes numb, wandering the world with Armand but no longer seeing or feeling the things around him. His downfall becomes complete in the final chapters as he wraps up his interview in the present day.

It’s hard to say that Louis – or anyone in the book – is an admirable character. Reading about these characters is more like seeing a slow-motion train wreck, played out over decades. While I usually can’t relate to books whose characters I can’t relate to, Rice makes the characters human enough, and the exploration of their world and lives chewy enough on an intellectual and emotional level to keep you reading. Inasmuch as the book is narrated by a vampire, the characters come off a little more sympathetically than they would otherwise, but Rice remains detached from the question of whether vampires are morally reprehensible and whether they can be judged by the same standards as ordinary humans. Of course they can be, but making those judgments is up to the reader, which I think is one of the book’s strengths.

A friend of mine thinks this is a terrible book, poorly structured and featuring loathsome characters, only mildly redeemed through some well-written passages. I think it’s much better than that, if not quite the pop classic it’s become in the last generation, but well worth reading, especially to provide some historical context for today’s vampire mania. Indeed, for me this is all the vampire fiction I feel the need to read.

[Read the whole thing]]]> Legion of Super-Heroes #1-16, Annual #1, Legion of Super-Villains Special, by Paul Levitz, Yildiray Cinar, Francis Portela, Wayne Faucher, et. al., DC, 2010-2011

Following the reintroduction of the “classic” (and now adult) Legion of Super-Heroes in Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes and Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds, Paul Levitz – who wrote the series briefly in the 1970s and then for most of the 1980s – returned to write a new series with the classic team, picking up from where those stories left off. Now, I wasn’t a fan of Levitz’ second, more celebrated run (he screwed up and killed off many of my favorite characters, which made the book a whole lot of Not Fun for me), but having enjoyed those two recent series, I was curious to see what he’d do here. I was impressed with the practical way he wrote off chunks of earlier continuity and started with the new status quo established by Geoff Johns, and the book was being illustrated by Yildiray Cinar, who I wasn’t familiar with but who has a clean, futuristic look to his art. Unfortunately, the book never really gelled for me, and it’s been cancelled with #16, to be relaunched as two titles in the DC relaunch next month. What went wrong? Fundamentally, what went wrong is that – as happened his last time around – Levitz gets too caught up trying to write the book like a soap opera, with lots of little plots running, each getting a small amount of attention in each issue, so it becomes hard to follow what’s going on, and the ultimate pay-off of each plot thread is too diffused to be satisfying. It’s as if the book is being written to minimize the dramatic impact. Here are the stories Levitz crammed into the 18 issues of the series: Earth-Man joins the team (#1-7, 16): The villain of Superman and the Legion, Earth-Man is a Legion reject who became a xenophobic tyrant, and Earthgov forces him on the team for decidedly implausible reasons. His story is I guess supposed to be one of redemption, and he does make the ultimate sacrifice in the end, but sleeping with Shadow Lass and his overall attitude still point him as a bastard, and you never really root for him. This thread was ill-conceived and comes to a pointless resolution. The destruction of Titan (#1-5, 7): Saturn Girl’s homeworld is destroyed and her people are scattered across the cosmos. This is the genesis of the main story at the beginning of the series. Saturn Girl’s children and kidnapped (#1-4): And she steals a time sphere to pursue them, and ends up finding a cult devoted to Darkseid. (Darkseid is intimated connected to the kids, which would be intriguing if Darkseid were even remotely interesting as a villain. In fact his sell-by date passed over 30 years ago.) The mysterious Professor Li (#1-2, 4-5, 7, 11-16): A scientist at the Time Institute, who seems to know something about why Titan was destroyed. We eventually learn where she comes from, but honestly I couldn’t care less. She’s a pointless character with uninteresting mystery behind her. The next last Green Lantern (#1-7, 10-16): An entity named Dyogene decides someone other than Sodam Yat needs to become a Green Lantern to carry on the tradition. First it chooses Earth-Man, who rejects it, and then it chooses Mon-El, who accepts it for a while, and then steps down. There was never really any point to all of this, so I don’t see why Levitz bothered. The assassins from Durla (#2, 5, 7-10): Some shape-shifting assassins from Chameleon Boy’s homeworld come to Earth to punish the United Planets council for letting R.J. Brande die. This story suffers badly from being chopped up among multiple issues, and the capturing of the assassins and revelation of their identities is sapped of any dramatic impact. Saturn Queen and the Legion of Super-Villains (#2-3, LSV special, 11-16): Spurred by the destruction of Titan, Saturn Queen assembles a new Legion of Super-Villains, which dominates the last third of the series. Yes, another LSV arc, yawn. There’s a hint that she’s been used by a greater power to accomplish some mysterious goal, but the revelation of what’s going on is not really interesting. The best part of this arc is Saturn Queen’s imperious behavior, and her ally Lightning Lord chafing at taking orders from her. Lightning Lass and Shrinking Violet go on holiday (#6, Annual #1): I guess some fans enjoy seeing the Legion’s lesbian couple, but since their heterosexual relationships of years past were the subjects of two of my favorite Legion stories, I’m not one of them. Still, the Annual, with the return of the Emerald Empress, and a check-in with Sensor Girl’s medieval homeworld, was one of the most entertaining issues of the series. Mon-El becomes Legion leader (#8, 10-16): Potentially an interesting story, especially since he and Shadow Lass have broken up and he seems adrift in his life, but it gets subsumed by the LSV storyline, and he becomes a Green Lantern too which additionally dilutes the story. Really a lost opportunity to work with the character, much as the Durlan assassins story was a lost opportunity to work with Chameleon Boy’s character. Star Boy returns (#11-16): Having been in a pointless exile in the 20th century for the last few years, Star Boy returns and somehow is a component in revealing the secret of Professor Li. Pretty much everything involving Star Boy and Legionnaires in the 20th century has been a storytelling disaster, and even thought this is a small piece of the series, I’m still scratching my head over why Levitz wasted pages on this. (And why is he wearing the stupid half-mask for much of the story, when he’s back with his friends in the 30th century, who all know who he is?) So the stories didn’t work in two ways: Some of them were too diffuse, so it was difficult to keep track of what was happening in them, and some of them were too long, like the seemingly-endless throwdown with the Legion of Super-Villains (let’s fight this guy, now let’s fight this guy, now these guys, now these guys, and now let’s have a couple of big battles with everyone). I was not a fan of the Great Darkness Saga which was the keynote story of Levitz’ previous run, but at least it was a focused story in 5 issues, steadily building to its climax. But this series just thrashes around without seemingly knowing what it’s trying to accomplish or where it’s going. It was less than the sum of its parts. The series also had the annoying gimmick of introducing every single character, every single issue, with their name, homeworld, and powers. It’s a crutch which quickly gets distracting. The Legion has decades of stories without this schtick, and it’s not like characters with names like “Sun Boy” and “Lightning Lass” really need this crutch. To be sure, the art by the two main pencillers, Cinar and Francis Portela, is terrific, and almost makes the series worth reading by itself. (Cinar is pencilling the upcoming Firestorm series, and I’m going to pick it up mainly because of him.) But the stories, despite having promise, were just very poorly executed. Juggling the Legion’s large cast has chewed up plenty of writers, but keeping it simple and making the stories manageable, or focusing on just a few characters at a time, is usually the key. Levitz seems to have completely lost his touch in this regard, and the end of this series is a good time for me to stop buying the book until a writer whose work I’m more interested in comes on board.

[Read the whole thing]]]> Captain America: The First Avenger might be the perfect superhero movie (so far, anyway): It’s exciting, fun, has a hero who’s heroic but not perfect, and makes you feel for the characters. And it honors its source material rather than belittling it as many superhero films these days seem to (taking the source material seriously is a big reason why Christopher Nolan’s Batman films are the best superhero films of the new century so far).

I get tired of movies always showing the character’s origin (previews in the theater showed the trailer for the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man, which looks like it will show Spidey’s origin again; really?), but Cap’s story is very well done here, and showing Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) – the prototypical 90-pound comic book weakling – and his determination to join the army to fight in World War II, his friendship with the much more physically-able James “Bucky” Barnes Sebastian Stan), and his recruitment by Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci) to be the test subject for the super-soldier program are an essential part of humanizing Cap. Despite his frail physique, Steve never backs down from a fight, but when Erskine asks him whether he wants to go kill some Nazis, Steve’s character is summed up when he responds, “I don’t want to kill anyone. I just hate bullies.”

One could do all sorts of between-the-lines reading about the jingoistic heroism of the film, but that would miss the point that it’s a World War II film named Captain America, and bringing 21st-century cynicism into it would miss the point of the film (I’m sure we’ll get plenty of that in next year’s Avengers movie). Instead, this is about a good, flawed man fighting the good fight for his friends and his country. Even the somewhat-painful scene of Cap being used as a showman to sell war bonds ultimately pays off when he has the opportunity to show his stuff and becomes the army’s secret weapon against Hitler’s mysticism-loving scientist, Johann Schmidt, the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving).

While it won’t win any awards, the acting is surprisingly good for a superhero film. Chris Evans played the fun-loving Human Torch in the two unremarkable Fantastic Four films, but he’s a completely different character here. (If anything, I wish they’d processed his voice early in the film since its deepness and richness seems incongruous coming from his body when it’s been CGI’ed into Steve’s pre-treatment physique.) Weaving chews the necessary scenery as the Skull (though Toby Jones as his lead scientist, Arnim Zola, overshadows him at times with his Peter Lorre-esque performance), as does Tommy Lee Jones as the general overseeing Cap’s special forces unit. Hayley Atwell as Steve’s love interest Peggy Carter isn’t exactly the weak link, but she’s not given a lot to do – Dominic Cooper’s role as Howard Stark (father of the future Iron Man, I presume) is smaller, but he frequently upstages her.

The film looks good, too, a little grimy in the European war scenes, with flat colors in many of the New York street scenes, and bright colors at the World’s Fair and during Cap’s tour selling war bonds. The CGI in the action scenes looks fluid, although it still underscores how unnatural superhero fighting is, and what an accomplishment it was for Jack Kirby, et. al., to make it look natural in those old comic books. And the film neatly sidesteps one of my big gripes about superhero films, that they’re always contriving ways for the heroes to lose their masks so the stars can show off their real faces; the extensive focus on Steve makes it feel natural for Evans to appear as himself, but there are plenty of scenes with Cap as Cap.

The weakest part of the film is the Red Skull’s plot. He finds the Cosmic Cube (which in the comics allows a person’s wishes to become reality, but here is simply an über-energy source) and plans to use it to rule the world. He harnesses the power to create energy weapons, and plans to destroy yhe capitals of the major world powers, but since his men are unable to take on the U.S. Army even with their weapons, it’s not really clear how he plans to actually take control of the world, much less maintain control. The story would have made more sense if he were simply causing mayhem to further the conquests of Nazi Germany (in the comics, the Skull is an ardent Nazi and had the utmost respect for Hitler), but oh well. At least it’s a pretext for some lively action scenes.

Cap’s story is, ultimately, a tragedy, but the film ends without really exploring the depths of that tragedy. Presumably the plan is for the Avengers film to work through some of that, but I doubt they’ll really do it justice given the larger cast and the (presumed) need to fit some adventure story in there. (I think Avengers could be a fun film, too, but I think it’ll be easy for the story to get away from the writers and director if they’re not careful.) However, what we do see here is pretty effective.

Overall, Captain America is a really fun ride, only dragging in a few places, but otherwise engaging, action-packed, and even touching. Why can’t they all be like this?

[Read the whole thing]]]> Spider-Man: The Death of Jean DeWolff HC, by Peter David, Rich Buckler, Sal Buscema, Brett Breeding, Vince Colletta & others, Marvel, 2011

Creators can be a little frustrated when you point to an early work of their as your favorite. Naturally, they feel that they’ve grown and developed as a creator since their early stuff, and that their newer work is generally better. But while skills can improve with experience, sometimes other factors in an early work overwhelm the arguably-weaker craft that went into a work and make it the favorite of some of their fans. So it is with me and The Death of Jean DeWolff, which is no-question, it’s-not-even-close, my favorite of all the works I’ve ever read by writer Peter David, yet it is (to my knowledge) his first published comics work. Some years ago I had him autograph my paperback collection at a convention, and I was a little put off that he sort of mumbled something I didn’t catch when I said how much I loved the story, and signed it with a Star Trek symbol next to his name (he was deep in the Star Trek era of his career, I think). Maybe he harbors some bad memories about the time he wrote Spider-Man, but perhaps more likely he felt a little awkward having a fan gush over his earliest work when he’s done so much more since then that he probably feels is more sophisticated and just-plain-better. I don’t know – I certainly wasn’t inclined to ask him at the time. Nonetheless, here we are: I’m delighted to see that Marvel has given The Death of Jean DeWolff, in my judgment Peter David’s best work, the deluxe hardcover treatment. Now, when this came out in 1985 I was not following Spider-Man, and even today I’ve never read another story with Jean DeWolff in it. Apparently she was a supporting character on the police force in Spidey’s books for a few years. But she was enough of a character in his life that when she’s brutally executed at the beginning of the story Spidey is motivated to help the police find the killer. Teaming up with wry police detective Stan Carter, he learns that a masked nut named Sin-Eater killed her, and is killing other prominent figures in New York. While the mystery of the Sin-Eater’s identity is what initially drives the story, what makes it great is the conflicts the hunt imposes on Spider-Man: The Sin-Eater is all-too-willing to let loose with his shotgun in the middle of a crowd when Spidey’s after him, raising questions about whether Spider-Man’s partly responsible for anyone who gets hurt. (Similar issues come up in the real world when someone gets hurt when the police elect to engage in a high-speed chase.) Spidey’s fellow hero Daredevil, and his alter-ego of lawyer Matt Murdock, also gets involved when a friend of Matt’s is killed, demonstrating the contrast between the two heroes (at least, at the time): Spider-Man is a hero who works to do what’s right, but it basically a vigilante with something of a black-and-white outlook on justice, while Daredevil, who’s both a lawyer and is somewhat older and more worldly, has a more nuanced view, though one which sometimes conflicts with his own vigilante adventures. The two end up on opposite ends of a thorny ethical debate at the conclusion of the story which David handles deftly and satisfyingly. It’s a very emotional and human story, but one which would be difficult to tell with characters who weren’t masked vigilantes. This story includes everything I most enjoyed about David’s writing: His humor is sharp and pointed, with few cheap shots, and his characterizations are vivid (several of Spidey’s supporting cast shine along the way). The plot is tight and there’s little wasted space or verbiage; the pacing is perfect, down to the issue-by-issue cliffhangers. The storytelling is helped considerably by Rich Buckler’s pencils; Buckler is something of a forgotten man in comics history, it seems to be, having been one of a number of Neal Adams-influenced pencillers (the best of them, really), but one who never illustrated any hugely popular stories. With terrific inks (mainly by Brett Breeding), he really shines here. The one downside to this collection is that it left out David’s excellent foreword and afterward from the paperback collection (published in 1990). In particular, this paragraph has stayed with me: [We] killed off a character who had a lot of potential. Readers couldn’t fathom why we did that, “Why kill off a character with whom you could have done so much?” Ah, but where is the dramatic impact in killing off someone with no potential? Someone who the readers are sick of? There’s no drama in that, no sense of “It might have been.” Death should be a tragedy, not a relief. Perhaps in a world where moviegoers laugh at innocent teens being slaughtered by masked madmen, that’s been forgotten. That this story works so well even for me, who had no emotional connection at all to Jean DeWolff, both proves David’s point, and further illustrates how well he executed this story. The new hardcover also has the 3-issue sequel to the original story (from 1987). I was disappointed in this story when it came out, in large part because it’s illustrated by Sal Buscema, of whose art I’ve never been fond (I always preferred his brother John’s style). But reading it today I think it works fine. Once more it’s about the consequences of power as wielded by Spider-Man, and about the demons that haunt a man who’s done terrible things, and whether he can ever truly be rid of them. As a sort of variation on a theme compared to the original, and bringing some closure to some matters left over from the first story, it’s a success. This is one of the great superhero comics, and a high point for a character who’s seen plenty of them in the last half-century. Seize this opportunity to check it out.

[Read the whole thing]]]> The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde #1-4, by Cole Haddon & M.S. Corley, Dark Horse, 2011

Since Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen came on the scene a decade or so ago, there’s been a steady stream of victorian and early-20th-century comic books plumbing the depths of public-domain characters from that era. While LoEG has gotten byzantine to the point of being tiresome (the series’ “easter eggs” have overwhelmed what little story remains, as Chris Sims’ review of the second volume of Century describes), other stories have been worth the effort. I’ve particular enjoyed this little Dark Horse mini-series, The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde. On the face of it, it’s not a terribly clever premise: There are so many real and fictional characters lurking around late 19th century Europe that we’ll probably see every possible combination of them eventually. This one is Jeckyll-and-Hyde and Jack the Ripper, but it’s done well. Inspector Thomas Adye (a fictional character, as far as I can tell) is assigned to the Ripper case, but he enlists the help of Dr. Henry Jeckyll to help profile the killer. The problem is that Jeckyll is himself stashed away in a dank prison, after his exploits as the dangerous Edward Hyde some years earlier. Jeckyll’s descent into depravity is shown in little pieces and in flashback, just enough to show how he was once a good man but is now a calculating lunatic. He’s a much stronger figure than the character in LoEG. Adye is also a strong character, but a bit naive and credulous, just enough so to be taken in by Jeckyll’s tantalizing promises, but also mistrustful of his superiors and feeling he needs Jeckyll to crack the case. And crack the case the pair ultimately does, but with some consequences for each of them. Corley’s art complements Haddon’s story quite well. He has a clean style, a bit stiff at times, but a good portrayal of the period elements. I occasionally had trouble telling Jeckyll and Adye apart, as the two are each clean-shaven, brown-haired men, but that aside Corley has quite a range of facial expressions. Hopefully this is only the beginning for him. Naturally, there’s a collection coming out. Check it out if you can’t find the individual issues.

[Read the whole thing]]]>

Dancing
With Bears

Subtitled “A Darger and Surplus Novel”, this is the first novel I know of about the two con men, the latter being a genetically engineered dog-man, and his fully-human partner. (Maybe Swanwick’s written some short works about them?) It takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, in which our heroes have finagled their way into accompanying the Pearls of Byzantium, a group of enhanced women who are being presented to the Duke of Moscow as his brides. Ambushed in the wastelands on the way to Moscow, Surplus manages to get named the new ambassador from Byzantium, and the group picks up an energetic teenager who’s fallen in love with one of the Pearls, and a religious zealot.

Arriving in Moscow, the pair sets in motion a plan to enrich themselves, but they get caught up in a variety of machinations, both by the Pearls, and an assortment of locals who are plotting an overthrow of the Duke, behind all of which lurks an even more sinister plan to destroy all of humanity. The revolution arrives with much fanfare, chaos, and destruction.

I wonder if Dancing With Bears is named for the old saw (possibly a Russian proverb): “The wonder of a dancing bear is not that it dances well… but that it dances at all.” The book has plenty of dancing bears: Post-singularity entities disguised in various forms, Surplus and his gene-modified brethren, the Pearls, and the Duke himself. It’s a cornucopia of wonders, but set in a medieval-style world and told in the style of a fantasy, and thus very much in keeping with Swanwick’s usual work.

But while I was a big fan of Swanwick’s previous novel, The Dragons of Babel, I don’t think Bears is nearly as good. Fundamentally, while both books are set in fairly dark environments, Dragons transcends the darkness through the character of its protagonist, while Bears focuses largely on the two con men, who are worldly and cynical, entertaining in their way, but not characters you can really root for. Of the others, most of them are engineering their own complex (sometimes evil) plans, and only the boy, Arkady, feels particularly sympathetic. But he’s credulous if not downright stupid, and happens to luck into a point of redemption (and is just smart enough to recognize it), but it’s such an abrupt reversal from his earlier portrayal that it’s not very satisfying.

At its best, the book features many of Swanwick’s carefully-crafted scenes which feel like an excerpt from a fable. I especially enjoyed the bits where Darger was training another young wastrel the art and skills of being a con-man (this particular wastrel actually has the most satisfying story arc of the book). Darger, rather than Surplus, tends to have the more exciting adventures and more inventive escapes; I almost got the feeling he was supposed to be larger-than-life in this regard, but I’m not sure that’s what Swanwick was really going for.

Swanwick also heads full-speed into Tim Powers territory of torturing his characters, which is rather less enjoyable, although it does lend a sense of realism to the political environment of the city. There’s also a heavy dollop of sex and lust, often played for broad comedy.

While I appreciate the craft with which Swanwick constructed his world and set up the plot of the novel, it just didn’t have the heart that Dragons did, and the climax of the various threads was impressive but not entirely satisfying. And I think it does come down to the fact that Darger and Surplus were just not protagonists I could get behind.

[Read the whole thing]]]> Doctor Strange: Into the Dark Dimension HC, by Roger Stern, Peter B. Gillis, Paul Smith, Bret Blevins, Mark Badger, Terry Austin & Steve Leialoha, Marvel, 2011

Roger Stern was one of the best writers in comics in the 1980s (he’s still good today, as his Captain America mini-series supplementing Ed Brubaker’s regular series show), and his 4-year run on Doctor Strange was his very best work (it was published bimonthly from 1981-1985 – remember when comics companies used to do that?). So it’s terrific to see Marvel reprint the end of his run in this handsome hardcover volume. A brief recap: Doctor Stephen Strange was a brilliant but egotistical surgeon before a car accident wrecked his nerves, so he could never operate again. Wandering the Earth in search of purpose, he met The Ancient One, an eastern mystic who eventually took Strange as his apprentice. In the ensuing years, he grew to become Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme, and master of the mystic arts, operating out of New York’s Greenwich Village to defend the world against mystical threats. While many previous creative teams (Lee & Ditko, Englehart & Brunner, etc.) had written fine Strange stories, Stern topped them all, by mixing the cosmic with the personal. Strange became a richly characterized human being, as he lost his apprentice and lover, Clea, when he became romantically entwined with another woman, and he gained friends and allies on his adventures as well as in his household (his manservant, Wong, and his accountant, Sara, developed a romantic attachment). He had some pretty great artists, too, starting with Marshall Rogers, then Steve Leialoha, and then Paul Smith, the main artist in this volume. This story opens with a story in which Strange helps Dane Whitman, The Black Knight, throw off his family’s curse, but the story quickly shifts when Strange realizes that Umar, the ruler of the Dark Dimension, has decided that he is masterminding the rebellion against her rule. He’s not, Clea is in fact behind it all, but her persistent attacks on him force him to take the fight to her. It’s a terrific story in which we see Clea develop more fully as a character, and with a satisfying victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat ending. The story showcases Strange’s humanity and empathy, a man who wields immense power, but who does so with conscience and wisdom. Other writers have often heavy-handedly returned to Strange as a man who achieves catharsis and enlightenment through his experiences, but Stern goes beyond that to show him as a fully mature, rounded individual, a man who still has personal and external challenges to face, but who is as much a role model as any of the mainstream superheroes who live in the spotlight that he avoids. Stern is ably assisted by Paul Smith’s art. Smith had developed considerably from his earlier work on X-Men, but was not quite as fantastic as he would be later on The Golden Age. His stuff is nonetheless terrific. Bret Blevins does a pretty good job of aping his style in a single-issue story (itself quite good) prior to the main arc. All of their work looks terrific in this reprint, and the coloring is bright and vivid, complementing their styles perfectly. Stern unfortunately left after the next-to-last issue collected here, and Peter B. Gillis – the series’ next regular writer – wrote the code to the Dark Dimension story, illustrated by Mark Badger. Badger’s sketchy (if not downright muddy) layouts and pencils have never appealed to me, and Gillis always seemed a very dark writer whose characterizations seemed a bit too simplistic, his stories a bit too convoluted. It’s a disappointing ending to the volume (plus it tied in to the lousy Secret Wars II series Marvel was printing at the time), and I’ve always wondered why Stern departed so abruptly. That aside, the overall package is wonderful. I highly recommend giving it a try, and if you like it, go back and try out the rest of Stern’s run (mostly quite affordable in your back issue bins), starting with Doctor Strange vol 2, #48, and running through #67 (the last issue before this volume). There are many great issues in there, and I guarantee you’ll love it.

The season-opening two parter was

[Read the whole thing]]]> We discovered that Comcast On Demand features Doctor Who, so we’ve been able to watch the first couple of episodes of season six despite not getting the BBC America station. Nice! (Sadly we haven’t been able to see the Christmas episode, but it doesn’t seem like we missed much.)

The season-opening two parter was a little disappointing, though. Spoilers for these episodes if you haven’t seen them.

The biggest problem I have with the story so far is that it has too many elements which seem there merely to seem cool or quirky without serving much purpose. For example:

• The opening sequence taking place in America, and the Doctor wearing a stetson. Yes, bow ties are cool and fezzes are cool, but this is getting tiresome.
• Did I miss something? Since when can the TARDIS turn invisible? Isn’t the whole joke about the broken chameleon circuit that it always sticks out like a sore thumb?
• The Silent that Amy meets in the bathroom killing the woman who’s also in there. This could have been an effective indication of the Silence’s power, but they completely fail to use this ability in any remotely intelligent fashion in the rest of the story, when they should have been able to eliminate most of their opposition trivially. Consequently the woman’s death seems gratuitous.
• The handling of Amy maybe or maybe not being pregnant was extraordinarily clumsy.
• The trick Amy and Rory employed of marks on their skin to indicate how many Silents they saw effectively set up the creepy scene in the orphanage, but in a practical sense it seems pointless; they could have recorded that information in better ways.
• The notion that the girl’s space suit would call the President was rather silly. Why would it bother? What would it expect him to do? Setting up Nixon’s habit of taping everything in the Oval Office was cute, but no more than that.

Oh, and by the way: The Brits get Churchill last season, and we Americans get Richard Nixon? Thanks a lot!

(Bookzombie has his own set of things he liked and disliked.)

To be sure, there are many things for which I give the story a pass, since it seems likely that these are things that will be explained later: Who the girl is, why the Silence needed a space suit, why they put the girl in it, why the girl seems able to regenerate, what the SIlence’s goals are, why they captured Amy, how they survived until 1999 (since we see one in the Utah sequence), who killed the future Doctor and why, why they seem to own the time machine from “The Lodger” (or one similar to it), etc. etc. Steven Moffat has set up a complicated story for the season, and I think he’s a good enough writer to make it all pay off.

However, he must make every one of these elements pay off in order to make the season successful. And even if he does so, I think his predilection for throwing in strange elements for no good reason weakened the season opener. It’s strange that he does so, since it seemed like something that Russell T. Davies would do, while Moffat’s stories for the Davies series were much tighter and contained fewer frivolous elements.

On the brighter side, the most resounding success of the story was how the Doctor managed to deal with the Silence, by essentially programming humanity to kill them on sight. It’s a bit of a stretch when you think about it, but it is fundamentally a cool idea and plausible enough to appreciate.

How the Doctor’s future will play out, now that we’ve seen his future self get killed, is of course the mystery of the season. Will it turn out to be an impostor? A clone? Merely a “possible” future? A future that can be changed? Was he not really dead? After a lifetime of reading comic books and science fiction, this set-up is actually a little less fascinating to me than some of the other mysteries in the story – unless Moffat comes up with some solution I haven’t seen before.

The other big mystery is who the girl is. The prevailing theory seems to be that she’s Amy and Rory’s daughter, who can regenerate because she gestated in the TARDIS, and who might grow up to be River Song. (See, for example, this post at Bleeding Cool.) My personally loony theory is that there’s another Time Lord around, and the last (and first) time we saw her she was, strictly speaking, even younger than the girl we see here. I doubt that’s what’s happening here, but it would be funny if it was.

Whether she’s connected to River, well, it wouldn’t surprise me. After all, we first saw River wearing a space suit, and in an episode titled “Silence in the Library”. Those may both be coincidences, though.

Overall the story was a nice “ride”, but the plotting and storytelling were both rather shaky. It’s very, very hard to tell a serious story with some many superfluous trappings (really, The Avengers is the only TV show I can think of that managed to do it), and I’d much rather have Moffat focus on solid plotting with witty dialogue, and dispense with the stetsons and body markings and assorted silliness. It doesn’t make the story better, and it’s certainly not necessary for a good Doctor Who story.

[Read the whole thing]]]>

Fools Errant

Fool Me Twice

It took me a while, but I finally finished up Matthew Hughes’ novels with these, his first two, which tell the story of Filidor Vesh, nephew of the Archon of Old Earth, and his adventures in the far future. At the beginning of Fools Errant, Filidor is a playboy and ne’er-do-well in the capital city of Olkney, when he’s charged with a mission by his uncle. He’s directed and accompanied on this mission by a dwarf named Gaskarth, who leads him on a tour of some of the eccentric backwaters of Old Earth.

Fools Errant is told in an episodic fashion: In each section Filidor and Gaskarth arrive in a region, Gaskarth disappears to try to make contact with the Archon, whom they’re trying to catch up to, and while waiting for the dwarf to come back Filidor learns about the quirks of the region, gets into trouble, gets out of it, and learns something about himself and the world. Meanwhile there’s an ongoing story in which the two are being pursued by a sorcerer who wants something the pair is carrying with them. The story is somewhat repetitive, though Filidor’s gradual self-realization is deftly handled. The story takes a rather abrupt turn at the end as we learn exactly what the Archon has set the pair to do, and while it’s entertaining, it feels apart from the rest of the book. Moreover, as a whole Fools Errant feels more like a collection of loosely-linked stories rather than a cohesive novel. (Maybe it was published as a series of short stories originally?) It’s fun, and it displays Hughes’ skill with wit and dialogue well enough, but not his ability to weave a compelling story like his later novels do.

Fool Me Twice revisits Filidor a few years later, when he has become the Archon’s official heir, but has fallen back into his former ways. In the course of his normal duties – which not only bore him to tears, but which he finds nearly incomprehensible – Filidor meets a woman with whom he falls instantly in love, but also finds that he’s accidentally ruled against her cause due to his laziness. When they confront each other, she steals his symbol of office, and his uncle charges him to follow her to her remote home to retrieve them. But his quest is derailed when he is thrown overboard from a ship and ends up as a prisoner performing slave labor on an even-more-remote island. From here Filidor must escape, retrieve his belongings, expose the man who tried to kill him, and unravel a plot against the Archon.

I’ve been reading Hughes’ books more-or-less backwards from Majestrum, so I wonder what reading his books in the order published would have been like. These first two novels were published seven years apart, which perhaps explains why there a fair amount of repetition between them: They’re both structured as coming-of-age stories as well as travelogues of Old Earth, but Fool Me Twice shows considerable development in Hughes’ plotting and writing skills. Fools Errant gets rather repetitive before it takes a left turn into its climactic segment. Fool Me Twice is also episodic, but the segments are longer, the settings less contrived, and the pieces build on each other as Filidor gains friends, allies and resources during his travels. Perhaps most cleverly, Filidor recalls that the Archon played games with him in the first book, and wonders whether he’s doing so again here, which serves as part of the puzzle he has to deal with in the last third of Twice.

Hughes re-uses some elements of these books in his later novels (in particular, the scenario in the last third of Errant shows up in Majestrum), but again you can see him becoming a more capable writer along the way, which perhaps makes reading the books in the order written more rewarding than going backwards as I did. But there are plenty of new bits even if you’ve already read the later stories.

Although not his best, both books are still quite entertaining and showcase Hughes’ witticisms. The books are out of print, but worth seeking out in used bookstores.

[Read the whole thing]]]> While no one can take away from Russell T. Davies his accomplishment of getting Doctor Who back on the air, by the end of his 5-year run I found the style of the show under his reign had worn thin; indeed, I liked each season less than the one before. Some of this was because Christopher Eccleston’s performance in the first season was so much better than David Tennant’s (nothing against Tennant, just that Eccleston was a supernova in the role), but mostly I found the stories were getting less sensical and more saccharine, and I was pretty sick of the Daleks and the over-the-top and ever-more-ludicrous season-ending two-parters.

As the new producer, Steven Moffatt, had written many of the very best episodes under Davies, I had high hopes for his first season. But the end result was… not quite what I’d hoped for. While Moffat wrote six episodes in the season, none of them were as good as the best ones he’d written during the Davies run, and while the season overall was more consistent than the last few Davies seasons, there were still several clunkers.

Here’s my ranking of this season’s episodes from favorite to least:

• The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang (written by Steven Moffat)
• The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone (Moffat)
• Amy’s Choice (Simon Nye)
• The Beast Below (Moffat)
• The Lodger (Gareth Roberts)
• The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood (Chris Chibnall)
• The Eleventh Hour (Moffat)
• Vincent and the Doctor (Richard Curtis)
• The Vampires of Venice (Toby Whithouse)
• Victory of the Daleks (Mark Gatiss)

If you haven’t seen the season, be warned that there are spoilers ahead in my review.

The biggest change, of course, is that we have a new Doctor in Matt Smith, and a new companion in Amy Pond (Karen Gillan). The best feature of the new stars is their relationship, as it’s established from the first episode that Amy is fascinated by (and infatuated with) the Doctor, but she also feels betrayed by him because she feels he broke a promise to her when she was a girl to take him with her. (Of course, it was just that darned unreliable TARDIS bringing him back 12 years later, but she doesn’t really change things for her.) Amy’s sorting out of her feelings for the Doctor and for her fiancé, Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill), is a big part of the season’s story arc; it’s basically her coming-of-age story.

Matt Smith is fine as the Doctor, but he didn’t blow me away. Indeed, I was disappointed for the first few episodes that he seemed to just be channeling David Tennant, that his Doctor wasn’t a significant departure from his predecessor (this might be a first for the franchise, which previously has usually made an effort to make the break between Doctors clear and even extreme). At times it seemed like he was Tennant’s Doctor in Peter Davison‘s body wearing Patrick Troughton‘s clothing. Fortunately, he grew on me as time went on, but I’m still hard-pressed to say how his Doctor is materially different from Tennant’s. I think Smith brings a little more empathy to the role: His Doctor is a more sympathetic figure, and that makes those moments when he seems to betray his companions (whether inadvertently or as part of some larger plan) seem all the more emotionally wrenching. But I think Smith makes the Doctor earn the benefit of the doubt more than Tennant did (Tennant’s Doctor often seemed callous to me, putting on his “gosh that’s too bad” face in reaction to other peoples’ troubles; consequently I didn’t have much sympathy for his whining in “The End of Time” when his time was up).

Karen Gillan pulls off the nuances of Amy’s character quite well, excited about traveling with the Doctor, challenging him on some of his stranger behavior, and being stuck between him and Rory (by the way, Arthur Darvill doesn’t get a lot of different stuff to do playing Rory, but absolutely nails it when he does get a chance to show some range, such as in “The Big Bang”). She’s a strong character, though I noticed that she’s another in a line of female companions who seem at dead ends in their lives before they head off with the Doctor: Sure, Martha Jones was an exception, and Sarah Jane Smith is the most prominent professional-woman companion, but Rose was a young woman working in retail and seemingly without direction in her life, Donna was unemployed, and now Amy does “kiss-o-grams”; not really distinguished backgrounds. But to be fair, Amy has the mitigating factor that her life has been turned upside-down by the crack in time and space in her bedroom wall. One could argue that a wandering adventurer like the Doctor is more likely to attract companions at loose ends or without direction, looking for someone like him to give their lives meaning. That certainly seems to be the case for Amy.

The unifying story element of the cracks – as with the running threads in past seasons – is handled a bit awkwardly, with the cracks showing up in various episodes to no real effect other than foreshadowing of the season’s finale. (“Bad Wolf” in season one was basically the same.) The exception is in “Flesh and Stone” when the Doctor uses a crack to deal with the weeping angels, but otherwise they’re more ominous than actually relevant. Then again, the season ends with the “why” behind the cause of the cracks left unresolved, with the promise that it will be central to next season’s story, so if things get better from here, then the fact that the cracks were handled so cavalierly will happily be forgotten.

As far as the individual episodes go, the season contained several pedestrian stories: “Victory of the Daleks” is one of the weakest Dalek stories I can recall, with a ridiculous climax involving World War II airplanes in space. I wonder whether this story played better to a British audience who might feel a more visceral excitement in this sort of recreation of the Battle of Britain, but absent that it’s just a bad episode. “Vincent and the Doctor” is a worse-than-average monster story which is not quite redeemed by the coda where Vincent Van Gogh (nicely played by Tony Curran) glimpses his future. One assumes writer Richard Curtis is a huge Van Gogh fan, since the story has no reason to exist otherwise. “The Vampires of Venice” is a similarly weak monster yarn. And “The Eleventh Hour” is only notable for its nifty set-up of the Doctor/Amy relationship, but the threats (Prisoner Zero and the ridiculous-looking Atraxi) are by-the-numbers.

In the middle of the season’s quality range, there’s the two-parter “The Hungry Earth/In Cold Blood”, which is a bit better than the average monster story (although not nearly as terrifying as the Fifth Doctor story “Frontios”, which also involved people being pulled into the Earth), and brings back the Silurians in (I think) the form of yet another subspecies of this prehistoric reptilian race. The most notable thing here is the absolutely gorgeous depiction of the Silurian city, which might be the single most impressive special effect and set design in the history of the show – really beautiful. “The Lodger” is a more effective horror story, with the Doctor isolated from the TARDIS, renting a room in a flat in which mysterious things are happening, and getting to the bottom of it. Matt Smith gets to play soccer and there’s an entertaining love story among the supporting cast, but the ending was a little disappointing, since the cause of the mysterious happenings felt a little too quickly examined; I’d have appreciated more depth in the history of the thing. “The Beast Below” is a very traditional trapped-in-an-enclosed-space-with-danger-all-around story, except that Moffat turns the premise on its ear by making things be not what they seem, and using it as a means for Amy to demonstrate her worth to the Doctor. It doesn’t quite hit on all cylinders, but it’s pretty good.

Then there’s the best of the season: “Amy’s Choice” and the pair of two-parters written by Moffat. “Amy’s Choice” is a fine suspense piece, cleverly taking place at two different points in our heroes’ timeline, and presenting a difficult puzzle for them to figure out, plus bringing resolution Amy’s conflicting emotions about the two men in her life. “The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone” brings back River Song (Alex Kingston, who has plenty of screen presence to stand as an equal to the Doctor) and the weeping angels. While I think Moffat plays fast and loose with the nature of the angels (it seems much easier to keep them at bay here than in “Blink”), I liked some of the new characteristics that he added to them (“that which holds the image of an angel becomes an angel”, resulting in the tensest scene of the season), and there were quite a few nifty last-minute escapes. Despite this, the story seems overlong, the military crew who show up to deal with the angels don’t seem very competent or prepared, and overall the story has more style than substance. While still quite a good story, it felt disappointing given its heritage in previous great Moffat-penned episodes.

Moffat saved the best for last, in the season’s finale, “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang”, in which River returns to help the Doctor solve the mystery of the Pandorica (which turns out to be a pretty neat idea), and then to help the Doctor and Amy save the universe. “The Big Bang” has one of the best opening sequences of any Doctor Who episode ever, and despite the solution relying on a time paradox, it’s a highly entertaining romp, with the denouement at Amy and Rory’s wedding being great fun. Yes, the Doctor saves the Earth and the universe again, but Moffat brings more gravitas and humanity to the event than Davies did in his season-enders. And yet… I still wish the series would veer away from having to end every season with a big bang (literally, in this case). Honestly when the stakes are this high, you just can’t keep topping yourself every season – it just doesn’t work. It only works here because Moffat is a flat-out better writer than Davies (and Davies certainly didn’t pull it off season after season in his run), and maybe Moffat can pull it off once more, but that’s probably the limit.

I want to make special mention of the season’s incidental music, composed by (I believe) Murray Gold, which is some of the most memorable of the series. I particularly enjoyed the themes he wrote for the Doctor and Amy, which key the final scene of “The Eleventh Hour” as well as the coda of “The Big Bang”. I hope the music gets released on an album, because I’d certainly buy it.

This has been a far longer review than I’d anticipated, which I guess speaks well of the season overall. Certainly I enjoyed it, even if there were a few clunkers along the way. But it did feel like it was struggling to throw off the weight of the immensely popular Tennant era, and having a hard time finding its own voice. It did set up the overall storyline for next season, which I hope will see further evolution and rise in quality.

[Read the whole thing]]]> It’s the last comics haul of 2010! And… it’s the last entry in this series I’m going to do. I’ve been writing this column almost-weekly for over four years, and my enthusiasm for it has flagged over the past year. I’ve decided it’s time to turn my attention to other things and not worry about getting in a column each week. I hope those of you who have followed my ramblings have enjoyed them. I do plan to write about comics from time to time, but probably in a different format.

• Action Comics #896, by Paul Cornell & Pete Woods (DC)
• Green Lantern #61, by Geoff Johns, Doug Mahnke & Christian Alamy (DC)
• Justice Society of America #46, by Marc Guggenheim & Scott Kolins (DC)
• Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #4 of 5, by Warren Ellis & Kaare Andrews (Marvel)
• Captain America #613, by Ed Brubaker, Butch Guice, Stefano Gaudiano & Rick Magyar (Marvel)
• S.H.I.E.L.D. #5, by Jonathan Hickman & Dustin Weaver (Marvel)
• Echo #27, by Terry Moore (Abstract)
• Hellboy: The Sleeping and the Dead #1 of 2, by Mike Mignola & Scott Hampton (Dark Horse)
• The Royal Historian of Oz #3, by Tommy Kovac & Andy Hirsch (SLG)

	I’ve been reviewing each issue of Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis mainly because Kaare Andrews’ covers have been so awful – comically so, really. But this cover is not bad, even if it is another take on the old “warrior with babe hanging onto his leg” image. Warren Ellis’ story is gelling into a new reworking of Alan Moore’s great Captain Britain storyline involving Jim Jaspers, a mutant who can bend reality, the Furies, unbeatable killing machines, and Warpies, mutant-like babies with destructive powers. Other than tying into his invention of universe-hopping Ghost Boxes, Ellis hasn’t really done much very new with the pieces; an army of Furies is even more unbeatable than the original one was, and it’s kind of amazing that none of the X-Men have been outright killed as yet. And it’s hard to see exactly how the story’s going to wrap up in just one more issues. Ellis’ Astonishing X-Men run has been fairly interesting, and it feels like it’s gradually building towards something, but it’s been very frustrating that it’s been so plagued by delays. I don’t know if it’s Ellis’ scripts running behind, or the musical chairs among the artists, or that all of the artists have fallen behind, or if editorial is just asleep at the switch (or doesn’t care), but this run really needed to stay on a decent schedule to work. Long delays are a good recipe for fan apathy, and it’s hard for me to work up much enthusiasm for what Ellis is doing here anymore.
	Strangely, this month’s Captain America is “The Trial of Captain America” part three, and yet the cover (at left) says “It begins!” Huh? The cover is accurate, since the actual trial starts in this issue. Those details aside, it’s another good issue. The Red Skull’s daughter throws a big wrench into the works of the defense, in a typically Brubakeran clever way – she planned ahead. (If you think about it, in comics villains are proactive and heroes are reactive.) I’m not quite sure how Cap’s going to get out of this one, especially since the usual comic book cliché of doing a good deed so that all is forgiven is just not Brubaker’s style. Brubaker’s probably got more tricks up his sleeve, though. (Of course, the most straightforward solution to the problem – that Cap, currently Bucky Barnes, was a foreign agent during the Cold War – is to find a former-Soviet official who can actually testify that Cap was brainwashed into acting as the Winter Soldier. In some ways that seems too simple, yet in others it seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do, in keeping with Brubaker’s writing style.) All things considered, I think Steve Rogers is more interesting as Cap than Bucky is, but I’m not sure where Bucky really fits in in the modern Marvel universe otherwise. No doubt Steve will take up the mantle again eventually, though.
	Jonathan Hickman’s S.H.I.E.L.D. has been getting good word-of-mouth, but I’ve found it pretty tedious. It’s a combination shadow history/conspiracy book: S.H.I.E.L.D. has been around for thousands of years protecting the world against amazing threats (like Galactus). In the 1950s, a young man named Leonid is being inducted, but his father, the Night Machine, tries to stop it. He in turn is stopped by Howard Stark and Nathaniel Richards, and the three disappear. Leonid then learns that he’s in the middle of a power struggle between S.H.I.E.L.D. leaders Sir Isaac Newton and Leonardo Da Vinci, both of whom (along with Nostradamus) seem to be immortal. Aside from feeling that another “everything you know is wrong” story set in the Marvel Universe seems like overkill, the presence of all these real-life figures, still living centuries after their supposed deaths, seems basically ridiculous. Basically the series hasn’t sold me on any of its core elements, and the story itself has been pretty ponderous. That said, this issue is better than the ones that have gone before, as we find that Stark, Richards and the Night Machine have been thrown hundreds of thousands of years into the future, where Earth seems to be devoid of humanity. But they come across the remnants of a city (beautifully depicted in a 2-page spread by Dustin Weaver) strongly reminiscent of the age of Rama-Tut (one of the Fantastic Four’s old foes). Of course, it’s not entirely clear how this diversion fits into the main story, but it is the most gosh-wow moment in the series so far. (It has an appearance at the end by someone whom I infer is Snowbird of Alpha Flight. And the revelation that the Night Machine is in fact Nikola Tesla, which is rather less cool a fact.) The rest of the issue furthers Leonid’s introduction to the Newton/Da Vinci backstory, as well as filling in some of Stark and Richards’ backstory. Decent enough stuff, but still a lot more telling than doing, which is standard for this series. Overall S.H.I.E.L.D. could be really good, but it would have to be really different for that to happen. Unless all of this is the barest introduction to a long arc – which picks up fairly soon – I expect I’ll get bored and drop the series. (And it’s even slower than I’d thought, because it’s being published bimonthly!)
	I picked up the first two issues of The Royal Historian of Oz at the SLG booth at APE in the fall. Although I’m hardly an Oz fanatic, I enjoyed the Baum books when I was a kid, and I’ve enjoyed some of the spin-off titles that have been published in the last 20 years. (Indeed, I think they’re a strong argument for letting creations fall into the public domain once their creators die.) I think my favorite was Oz Squad, which started as a dark take on the series (Tik Tok comes to Earth and his morality spring runs down, causing him to become a psychopath, and the “original four” Oz characters have to take him down and bring him back), but toned down the darkness in later issues in an entertaining time travel story. Royal Historian takes place in a dystopian future in which Jasper Fizzle writes new Oz stories (despite having no talent), and is branded an outlaw by the keepers of Oz lore. But then Jasper finds a way to get to Oz itself, and brings back some of its wonders to put on display. His son, Frank, is the book’s hero, having been embarrassed by his father’s obsession, but then amazed at what Frank brings back from Oz. However Frank is then captured by Ozma and her citizens to be held hostage until Jasper returns the items he’s stolen. This issue focuses on Frank’s reactions to actually being in Oz, and takes the interesting approach of overwhelming him with characters in very short order – also overwhelming me, the reader, as I don’t remember half the characters who show up here. Jellia Jamb I kind of remember, but Button-Bright? The Glass Cat? At first I found it too much to take in, but then I figured that was kind of the point: Given Oz’s substantial backstory and large cast, a real person being thrown into it might be similarly overwhelmed. Kind of clever, if that’s what writer Tommy Kovac intended. After a mishap in the castle, Frank is sent with the Tin Woodsman to live in the countryside, where he gets a more measured exposure to some of the wonders of Oz. The story has been a little slow so far, but it’s getting more entertaining now that we’re in Oz and not on the dreary Earth that Kovacs and artist Andy Hirsch have come up with. Hirsch has a cartoony style (somewhat similar to that of Rob Guillory on Chew), but his panels are pretty complex. It’s always interesting to see how different artists take on the Oz characters, and Hirsch makes the Scarecrow look kind of creepy, while the Woodsman is downright inhuman, albeit likable in his way. I think the biggest drawback to the book is that few characters in it are likable: Jasper is a talentless obsessive, and now a thief. Frank is a bit of a blank slate, largely defined by his frustrating with his father. Most of the Oz characters shown in this issue seem mentally unbalanced at best, and as creepy as the Scarecrow in many ways. The book really needs Frank to become better-defined and his own man. Otherwise it’s hard to find someone to root for, or a cause I can believe they’d get behind. If the creators keep publishing (always a risky proposition for small-press comics) and can work out some of these issues, then this could be a lot of fun. But it’s not there yet.

That’s all for this year! Thanks for reading!

[Read the whole thing]]]> Quite a large week this week – with no collections! And I think every Image comic I buy came out this week. Weird.

• American Vampire #10, by Scott Snyder & Mateus Sontolouco (DC/Vertigo)
• DC Universe: Legacies #8 of 10, by Len Wein, Scott Kolins, Dan Jurgens, Jerry Ordway & Frank Quitely (DC)
• Green Lantern Corps #55, by Tony Bedard, Tyler Kirkham & Batt (DC)
• Green Lantern: Larfleeze Christmas Special #1, by Geoff Johns & Brett Booth (DC)
• Legion of Super-Heroes #8, by Paul Levitz, Yildiray Cinar, Daniel HDR, Wayne Faucher & Bob Wiacek (DC)
• Power Girl #19, by Judd Winick & Sami Basri (DC)
• Zatanna #8, by Paul Dini & Cliff Chiang (DC)
• Fantastic Four #586, by Jonathan Hickman, Steve Epting & Rick Magyar (Marvel)
• Incognito: Bad Influences #2 of 6, by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips (Marvel/Icon)
• Incorruptible #13, by Mark Waid & Marcio Takara (Boom)
• Chew #16, by John Layman & Rob Guillory (Image)
• Dynamo 5 Holiday Special 2010 #1, by Jay Faerber & Marcio Takara (Image)
• Invincible #76, by Robert Kirkman, Ryan Ottley & Cliff Rathburn (Image)
• Morning Glories #5, by Nick Spencer & Joe Eisma (Image)
• The Sixth Gun #7, by Cullen Bunn & Brian Hurtt (Oni)

	I can’t believe it took me this long to realize that DC Universe: Legacies is structurally the same as the 1999 mini-series Superman and Batman: World’s Finest. In fact, this issue walks the same ground as issue #9 of that series, the replacement Superman and Batman from the mid-1990s (plus the Green Lantern/Parallax development). I’ve always had a soft spot for the World Series series, which had an understated story exploring the development of Superman and Batman’s friendship (which started off strained) and some surprisingly good artwork from artists I was not generally familiar with. Despite having higher-profile artists, including some of my favorites, Legacies is not as good a series. The framing story of a Metropolis policeman watching the DC Universe develop from the late 1930s to today is pretty generic and progressing slowly, and not as strong as the (still fairly loose) background story in World’s Finest. Plus, another survey of DC’s history doesn’t really seem necessary; I’d been hoping this series would be more than that. With 2 issues left, there’s time for writer Len Wein to pull a rabbit out of his hat and make this series something surprising. But after 8 issues, it looks like what we see is what we get. It’s okay, but nothing special.
	Jonathan Hickman’s Fantastic Four is on the cusp of its first big development, the death of one of the team members. While I’ve felt the series has been rather slow and even dull so far, his manipulation of the build-up to “Three” has been pretty good, putting the heroes into perilous situations where any of the might die: The Thing has reverted to human form for a month, just as some minions of Annihilus attack the Baxter Building, which he, the Human Torch and the kids must defend. Mister Fantastic has gone into space with Galactus to find the corpse of the world-devourer’s future self, and Reed is trying to evacuate the remaining inhabitants of an artificial world before Galactus destroys it. (This is a pretty clever extension of a story laid down by Mark Millar in his run on the book.) And the Invisible Woman is trying to stave off a war between the Sub-Mariner and his kingdom and the more-sinister-than-they-appear (according to Namor) prehistoric Atlanteans who have recently reappeared. While I’ve been skeptical of Hickman as a master-planner so far (his S.H.I.E.L.D. series has been pretty unconvincing as a millennia-long-global-conspiracy yarn), how he’s assembled the pieces here is actually pretty impressive now that I see it. This is hardly the first time one of the FF has died (or at least been pronounced dead) – it feels almost as old hat as the team breaking up – but it’s how the ramifications of the death are handled which will make or break the event. And of course Steve Epting’s art is always a joy to see. He’s got everything Brian Hitch brings to the table, but with superior layouts faces that seem more realistic. How this guy isn’t a superstar by now, I don’t know.
	Since I last checked in with Dynamo 5 in my blog, there’s been a mini-series (Sins of the Father) and now this holiday special. The characters have recently had their powers switched around among them, a gimmick I’m not really a fan of: It always seems to suggest that the writer either has run out of ideas for the original set-up, or he decided that the original arrangement was the wrong one, and in this case I think the new arrangement is a definitely downgrade to the original. That aside, the story in Sins was pretty solid, leading up to a big cathartic moment for Smasher, the team’s strong-man, who in everyday life is a wimpy kid. This one-shot involves the team trying to track down an escaped super-villain, who seems to have attacked two teenage girls. Not all it what it seems, of course, but unfortunately the heartwarming holiday payoff isn’t really plausible or satisfying. Moreover, I’m not real big on artist Marcia Takara (who also draws Incorruptible for Boom, where I’m also not a fan of his), as I find his sketchy finishes, simple layouts, and minimal backgrounds really make the book not very attractive. I’d say to give this one a miss, except that it wraps up with five short epilogues portending future story directions, and they’re pretty good. But then, I expect what we learn here will be recapitulated when the plot points come to fruition. So yeah, the holiday special isn’t required reading unless you’re already on-board the Dynamo 5 train. If you’re not, either wait for the next mini-series, or pick up Sins when it arrives in trade paperback.

[Read the whole thing]]]>

Cryoburn

It’s been 8 years since Bujold last published a Miles Vorkosigan novel – long before I started this current journal (my reviews of the earlier books are still on my old site). Cryoburn returns to the adventures of her quirky hero, after an identical gap in his own life: Now 39, Miles is happily married with children, but we see little of that, because this adventure takes place on the world Kibou-daini, a Japanese-populated planet whose inhabitants are obsessed with staving off death, and where cryo-freezing of the sick of elderly – or just people afraid of becoming sick or elderly – is common, and a dominating chunk of the economy.

I felt the series was flagging before the hiatus (admittedly a big part of the reason is that I didn’t care for Miles’ wife, in much the same way I wasn’t fond of Harriet Vane in Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels, and those last novels revolved around their courtship and wedding), but unfortunately Cryoburn is anything but a return to the series’ previous form.

The book opens with Miles wandering, drugged and thirsty, through the catacombs filled with cryogenic units. His bodyguard, Armsman Roic, and several other attendees of a cryogenic conference, have been captured by a radical group protesting the widespread use of cryogenics, but Miles had an adverse reaction to the drugs (as he often does) and is released into the catacombs. He manages to stumble to safety, where he’s rescued by an 11-year-old boy named Jin, who lives in a small commune taking care of a menagerie of animals on the roof of one of the building.

Roic and the other abductees, including cyrogenics expert and friend-of-Miles Dr. Raven Durona, escape from their captors, and Miles gets back in touch with the Barrayaran embassy. Then it turns out that Jin’s mother was the leader of a different protest group who disappeared 18 months earlier, under mysterious circumstances. Miles feels curious – and perhaps a bit obligated – to find out what happened to her, though this is a distraction his main mission of investigating one of the cryogenic companies and their interest in setting up a large facility on one of Barrayar’s subject planets, but it forms the core of the story.

Cryoburn mainly involves chunks of sleuthing (what happened to Jin’s mother and her group, who might be connected to their disappearance) mixed with chunks of cloak-and-dagger (stealing bodies from the catacombs, tailing persons of interest, snooping around buildings). The stakes are high for Barrayar’s subject world, but Miles really makes short work of that project, focusing most of his effort on Jin’s mother, whose story presents even greater implications for the future of Kibou-daini.

But on the whole the book is an unambitious story of running around, Miles showing off his stuff, and making his opponents look impotent by comparison, despite operating on a planet where he doesn’t have any actual authority. A friend of mine commented that one of the problems with the Miles books is that his Imperial Auditor’s position combined with his formidable intellect and large network of capable friends and allies means that few problems are large enough to really give him a challenge, and certainly Cryoburn doesn’t really give him one: There are a few speed bumps along the way, but I kept waiting for “the other shoe to drop”, where the people he’s after launch a significant counter-attack, but what eventually materializes is almost comically incompetent. Basically, the “bad guys” have barely any idea that Miles is even after them, so he’s able to poke into their affairs nearly unmolested, and certainly Roic and the embassy’s armsman are more than up to the task of dealing with the obstacles they do encounter. The outcome never really seems in doubt.

In short, Miles just seems too capable, too powerful, for anything less than planetary-level adversaries to give him much of a challenge. And that makes for dull plotting.

The long-running pattern of the Miles books is the adding of new characters, who have varying degrees of sympathy with Miles, and having him either win them over to his side, or make their lives better (often by playing inadvertent matchmaker), and there’s plenty of that here. Sometimes it gets a little tiresome and repetitive seeing these ordinary people dragged along in Miles’ overpowering wake (Roic is keenly aware that he’s a supporting character and bears the role stoically; Raven is immensely capable in his own ways, and mostly gets out of the way to let Miles do his thing), although it can still be entertaining: Seeing Miles evaluate and win over Consul Vorlynkin – a man who, after all, has been posted to a relative backwater and perhaps for good reason for all Miles knows at first – is rather clever. But still, the series seems to have sunk deeply into formula.

While Cryoburn is entertainingly written, with a number of quotable lines, it unfortunately doesn’t feel like 8 years’ absence has recharged Bujold’s batteries from similarly-bland few novels prior to the interregnum.

My best guess is that Cryoburn the novel to refamiliarize readers with Miles after his long hiatus, before launching into a more substantial story. But man, this is a really weak way to lead into such an arc: a rather trivial story with a surprisingly weak by-the-numbers plot. I’d rather Bujold had just gone for the gusto and leaped into the next story with both feet from the outset. Because overall, this book is pretty forgettable.

Spoiler Warning! After the jump I discuss the end of the novel.

I’ve heard it said that the reason for the long delay between novels is that Bujold was trying to work her way up to writing the necessary events to bring Miles to the next stage of his life: His ascension to being Count Vorkosigan, which naturally implies the death of his father, Aral. And Aral’s death is indeed announced on the last page of the novel proper, with five short epilogues regarding his funeral on the three pages following.

Partway through the novel I thought, “Gee, I wonder if she’s going to do something as horrible as killing off Aral summarily at the end of a novel completely unrelated to him? Because if she’s going to do it right, she ought to send Miles off to Sergyar [the planet Aral is overseeing for the Emperor] to have an adventure there.” I was dismayed to see that indeed that’s what she did. Cryoburn is not even a particularly rousing adventure for Miles, so it’s not like he managed to triumph over great personal adversity and then experience a horrible loss just when it seemed he’d come through the worst of it. This approach guaranteed that Aral’s death would have the least possible emotional impact for the reader, since by now he seems like this distant figure who dies off-panel. It really does a disservice to both Miles and Aral to handle Aral’s death in such an offhanded manner. While that might be how life works sometimes, it makes for awful storytelling.

It really just serves to make a weak novel worse. I infer that the next novel will deal with Miles’ transition to his hereditary position, but it’s hard to see how the lead-in to that novel could have been handled much more clumsily than Cryoburn.

Very disappointing.

Last Week:

[Read the whole thing]]]> Despite having Thanksgiving week off, I never did an entry for that week, so here’s the catch-up:

Last Week:

• Action Comics #895, by Paul Cornell & Pete Woods (DC)
• Batman Beyond #6 of 6, by Adam Beechen, Ryan Benjamin & John Stanisci (DC)
• Justice Society of America #45, by Marc Guggenheim & Scott Kolins (DC)
• Madame Xanadu #29, by Matt Wagner, Amy Reeder & Richard Friend (DC/Vertigo)
• Captain America #612, by Ed Brubaker & Butch Guice (Marvel)
• Fantastic Four #585, by Jonathan Hickman & Steve Epting (Marvel)
• Chip: Second Crack #2 of 3, by Richard Moore (Antarctic)
• Incorruptible #12, by Mark Waid & Marcio Takara (Boom)

This Week:

• Action Comics Annual #12, by Paul Cornell, Marco Rudy & Ed Benes (DC)
• American Vampire #9, by Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque & Mateus Santolouco (DC/Vertigo)
• Fables: Witches TPB, by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, Steve Leialoha, David Lapham, Andrew Pepoy, Jim Fern & Craig Hamilton (DC/Vertigo)
• Secret Six #28, by Gail Simone & Jim Calafiore (DC)
• Irredeemable #20, by Mark Waid & Peter Krause (Boom)
• RASL #9, by Jeff Smith (Cartoon Books)
• The Boys #49, by Garth Ennis & Russ Braun (Dynamite)

	The Batman Beyond mini-series has been fairly clever and entertaining, sitting sort of in-between the kids books that DC publishes based on its animated properties, and the more serious mainstream fare. This one attempts to bridge the two continuities – comic book Batman and animated Batman Beyond – and does a pretty good job. I’m not really a fan of Ryan Benjamin’s artwork, which also tries to bridge the styles between the two continuities and I thought just looks kind of weird, the characters not having much emotional range beyond a grimace or a scowl. But it’s okay. The series has apparently been successful enough to warrant a new ongoing series, but while this was a cute little series I didn’t enjoy it enough to want to jump on-board for a longer-term commitment. One of the problems with Batman Beyond was that it never managed to establish itself as a series with a purpose; the best episodes tended to be ones revolving around Bruce Wayne’s past, and while Terry McGinnis – the Batman of the future – is an enjoyable character, he’s not strong enough to carry the series himself. I just don’t see that an ongoing series will provide a satisfying payoff, especially given that the mini-series was fairly light and by-the-numbers. In the “light entertainment” department, this is a pretty good series and the ongoing series may be just as good. But for me, I think I get the idea and that’s enough.
	Madame Xanadu comes to a close with this issue, with Amy Reeder (formerly Amy Reeder Hadley) coming back for the denouement. The series has been erratic, starting with Madame Xanadu’s origins in the days of King Arthur (who is revealed as being Nimue, who in DC continuity is the woman responsible – tragically, in this instance – for imprisoning Merlin prior to the fall of Camelot, and also Morgan Le Fey’s sister), and progressing up through the 1960s. So it’s basically been a big retrospective, since the character is well-established (albeit as a mysterious individual without any personality) in present-day continuity. The series has been an extended story of Xanadu’s maturity, starting as a credulous girl who encounters the Phantom Stranger, meeting him again through the centuries to her frequent regret (it’s also implied that the Stranger is living his life backwards through time, and interesting nugget which isn’t really explored), and also manipulated by her sister, but who gradually gains maturity, wisdom and knowledge to become a powerful sorceress. She’s certainly a more interesting character here than she’s ever been before. Yet the series never really gelled for me, as it frequently wandered away from its main story arc, and seemed to lack focus. I think Wagner was enjoying playing around in the corners of the DC Universe, in much the way Neil Gaiman did in Sandman, but I don’t think he was nearly as effective in doing so; he doesn’t have the same touch for the fabulous that Gaiman does. I often find Wagner’s writing to be rather distant, more interesting for the complex and subtle mechanics of his plots and less for his characters, who tend to be rather flat (I love both Grendel and Mage, but neither is really memorable for its characters). Madame Xanadu is one of his stronger characters, but he seems to struggle with how to develop her in a satisfying manner, especially since the stories have been so low-key in nature. Seen in hindsight it’s clearer how he was building the character, but the emotional impact was often muted. The most effective issue on that score was a 1950s housewife who finds her body being creepily transformed, but I didn’t think the follow-up (after our heroine dealt with the problem) provided a satisfying resolution for the character; Wagner follows up on her here, but her story, although it has a happy outcome, is seen from a distance and doesn’t feel very rewarding for the reader. Amy Reeder’s artwork has been the real strength of the series, channeling a bit of Charles Vess in her designs and layouts, and delivering most of the emotional impact the series did have. I sometimes wished she had an inker who would soften her lines, someone like Joe Rubenstein or even Tom Palmer, but certainly she’s quite a find and I hope she gets more work in the future. Overall, though, Madame Xanadu has been a bit disappointing; I suspect DC hoped it would build a following more in line with Sandman or Starman, but it was never really that kind of book. Really it was just the sort of book that would slip under the radar in today’s market, and it didn’t have any developments or twists that made me want to tell people that they must read this book. 28 issues is a good run for a low-profile book like this, but it feels like Wagner should somehow have gone for the splashier storyline so it could be more high profile. In that way, the series feels like a missed opportunity.
	Richard Moore’s plan seems to be to corner the “cute, sexy, and a little scary” comic book market. He did a great job on this in his regular comic Boneyard, which he wrapped up a while back since I guess it wasn’t making much money. Now he’s been doing a number of little side projects for Antarctic Press, one of which is Chip. This comic features a 4-inch gargoyle who is determined to show he can be just as scary as his brethren, with the help of his pixie friend Ash. He’s not very successful, though. Second Crack is his second series, in which Chip and Ash are trying to capture the Jersey Devil. The thing is, Moore’s gone way too far into the “cute” realm for my tastes, and Chip is a pretty slight book in both plot and characters. His writing style works better when he can develop things over a period of time as in Boneyard, or his more serious wild west fantasy Far West. Moore has a pretty wry sense of humor, but the jokes here seem cheap. Heck, I somehow missed the first issue of this series, and I don’t feel like I missed very much. Hopefully he’ll have the time to do something more ambitious sometime soon.
	I think I’m running out of gas on Gail Simone’s Secret Six. Part of it is that Jim Calafiore has replaced Nicola Scott as the regular artist, and he seems like the go-to guy for second-tier series who need a reliable artist: But while he’s reliable, his figures are too stiff and generic for my tastes. I had the same problem when he was drawing Marvel’s Exiles series. But part of it is that the series has been floundering around, losing its focus, that being a group of mercenaries with extreme personalities who have trouble getting along. The team broke up and splintered into two factions, both of whom ended up in the underground primeval world of Skartaris, fighting each other and the locals, a story which wraps up in this issue. I wasn’t quite clear what they were supposed to be doing there – I think one group was being manipulated by a rogue element inside the US government, while the other was sent by Amanda Waller, but no one seemed to be keeping their eyes on the prize, whatever it was. It seemed like an excuse to have the protagonists beat up on one another. The series has been at its best when it puts its characters – who have questionable morals – in situations which challenge both their well-being and what sense of right and wrong they have. But such stories usually require a pretty strong focus, especially with a large-and-growing cast of characters as exists here, particularly when the characters are a group of anti-heroes at best, and the reader won’t always relate to them. Throwing in an exotic land and a confusing mission as this story featured throws off the balance of the story and makes it difficult to figure out what the story is trying to accomplish. Series about villains are difficult to keep going, especially characters who aren’t ones who naturally tend to work together, and Secret Six is probably the most successful such comic in history (Suicide Squad, remember, was anchored by several clear-cut heroes; Secret Six is more like trying to write a series about The Joker or Lex Luthor). But it feels like it’s spiraling out of control.

[Read the whole thing]]]>

Template

There are many refreshing things about Matthew Hughes’ novels: The old-style galactic empire feel of the setting, and quirky sense of humor he puts into his writing, and even the brevity of his novels, which pack a lot of ideas and plot into stories typically under 300 pages. Template weighs in at under 200 pages, yet it’s not only one of his best, but it’s an excellent introduction to his Archonate universe.

Conn Labro is a professional duelist on the world of Thrais, and also an indentured servant on a world where everything is for sale. But when his owner and patron is killed, Conn is bought by an off-world consortium – or nearly so, as a man he’s gamed with weekly for his entire life has also been murdered, and willed Conn enough money to pay off his debt. More significantly, he’s given Conn a bearer chip which seems to be what the assassins are after. Accompanied by a woman from Old Earth, Jenore Mordene, Conn leaves Thrais to learn what his friend really left him, but he also finds the galaxy to be a much more diverse place than he’d ever expected.

Template wanders all over the place, and yet it’s a pretty terrific book. Initially I’d summarize Conn Labro as being “a Libertarian Mr. Spock”: His upbringing on Thrais makes him believe that all aspects of human endeavor of transactional, things being bought, sold and exchanged, and that anything else is irrational. Yet every other world is considerably different from Thrais, not least the archipelago on Old Earth where Jenore grew up, which is based around art and lacks monetary currency. Hughes comes up with a nifty way to consider different cultures in the Archonate via a brother and sister who have come up with the idea that every human society is based on one of the seven deadly sins. It’s a fun mental exercise.

Conn’s story is his personal odyssey to learn where he comes from (and why that matters), and where he belongs. So he has to grow emotionally to understand how to relate to other people, and a lot of the suspense comes from him making some poor choices along the way. For much of the book he has Jenore to help guide him and inform him, but eventually he has to control his own destiny. Fortunately he’s not without skills of his own (professional duelist, remember?).

While the book drags a bit in the middle when Conn and Jenore are on Old Earth and the plot doesn’t move forward very much (what does it mean when a book under 200 pages “drags a bit in the middle”?), and one could argue that the cultures Hughes portrays are too simplistic to be plausible, it’s still a really fun story. And besides, Hughes at his best – and this is him at his best – portrays both the people and the cultures of the Archonate as a little absurd, having a bit of the feel of a fable even in an otherwise serious story. (It’s not so different from, say, the races in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, actually.)

Overall Template is one of Hughes’ best books, and should appeal to anyone who likes space opera, adventure, or just good old galactic empire science fiction.

[Read the whole thing]]]>

The Commons

If you haven’t read Hughes’ earlier novel Black Brillion, I suggest reading it before reading The Commons, as this novel’s second half replays the events of the earlier novel, but from the point of view of Guth Bandar, a supporting character in Brillion, but the protagonist here. The Commons is a “fix-up” novel, reworked from a series of short stories featuring Bandar, plus the Brillion material. So it doesn’t entirely hang together as a novel, but it’s pretty entertaining anyway. (For what it’s worth, I read The Commons first, not realizing the connection between the two.)

Guth Bandar is a “noönaut”, a man who can enter into humanity’s collective unconscious and explore representations of our racial memories. This domain is known as The Commons, and while it’s a rich source of information, it’s also a dangerous place, as explorers can get trapped in a story or legend, or get wrapped up in the doings of archetypal figures which represent undiluted facets of human experience. The book opens with Bandar as a student at the Institute for Historical Inquiry, and its first half consists of short stories in which he attempts to become a full scholar, encountering repeated setbacks in his competition with another student, Didrick Gabbris, for favor with the capricious and insular faculty. These stories show how the Commons works, and the exotic techniques the educated traveler uses to try to insulate himself from the influences of the scenes he visits. Bandar’s adventures include:

• A visit to a planet where the native life forms are exploited into adopting human archetypes to perform in plays for the human colonists.
• Being waylaid in a contest with Gabbris and having to take the long way around to reach the finish line. (This is the most absurd story, as Bandar alters parts of his body in comical fashion in each episode, but has the best payoff when he gets stuck in a representation of the eternal war between Heaven and Hell.) You can read this story on Hughes’ web site.
• Getting caught up in the collapse of an Event in the Commons – which he inadvertently causes himself – and which reveals something hitherto unknown about the Commons.
• Getting stranded – for reasons I won’t reveal here – as the Helper to a Hero in an ancient scenario of a slaves’ revolt, which leads to a pivotal development in Bandar’s life.

As I said, the second half of the book revisits the events from Black Brillion, in which Bandar meets the policemen Baro Harkless and Luff Imbry, and learns that Harkless has an unusual and disturbing talent for entering the Commons himself. Bandar helps tutor Harkless for a while, and then gets caught up in the case the pair are investigating on the wasteland on Old Earth known as the Swept. Here he becomes the Helper to Baro Harkless’ Hero, a key component but ultimately largely a watcher in the younger man’s story.

Taken as a whole, some key elements of the novel are not very satisfying: Bandar’s life is disrupted by powers beyond his ken in order to accomplish a goal of great importance to all of humanity, but I don’t think Hughes really sells the manipulation of Bandar very well, and the ultimate goal that he and Baro Harkless manage to achieve just doesn’t feel like the sort of thing that the powers that be would have known about years ahead of time, much less manipulated Bandar to be the right man in the right place at the right time. And as a character arc the payoff for his troubles hardly seems adequate: While he finally achieves something like his life’s goals, he’s lost a big chunk of his lifetime because of his career getting derailed, and he ended up being a supporting character in someone else’s story. I really just felt sorry for the guy. Also, it felt like most of Bandar’s maturation occurs off-stage between the first and second halves, when he’s growing from a young man to an experienced one through the natural day-to-day progression of life; he definitely feels more mature in the second half, but we don’t see it happen, which makes it feel like a big part of his character arc is missing.

I think Hughes’ sense of whimsy – particularly the ludicrousness of the situations Bandar ends up in – isn’t as effective here as in other books. Indeed, a problem with both Bandar and Harkless in their respective novels is that they’re both too serious, too humorless, to feel like characters that fit into these situations. While Henghis Hapthorn is himself a pretty serious character, he has both the style and the verbal wit to be an effective actor in ridiculous or belittling situations, in ways that Bandar isn’t.

The book is at its best in portraying the narrative potential of the Commons, especially in the first half, which runs through a number of inventive situations, with clever puzzles for Bandar to figure out within the confines of this strange environment. The story involving the war between heaven and hell is my favorite precisely because Bandar takes advantage of the peculiar nature of a scenario within the Commons, and the fact that it’s not a real event, to be able to get out of his predicament.

So overall I was disappointed with The Commons; I don’t think it measures up to Hughes’ other novels. I hope he revisits the environment again sometime, but with a story that holds together better.