Amused in Review

Welcome to the opening day's column. I'm excited to be here (virtually speaking), and excited that you've decided to drop in. A lot of work went into creating this site--more, I think, than is readily apparent--in hopes of making this place a worthwhile one for you to visit in your regular rounds of the Internet.
     The content of this site will change automatically, each and every day. In particular, the pages named after the muses all have daily content (well, except for Erato--I don't know quite what to do about her), and many of the other pages are slated to have frequent updates. In addition, I'll be expanding the site with new areas and activities as I have time to bring them on-line. (Among the first things I want to do are to create pages for the muses that I've so far neglected.)
     Of course, I'm also open to suggestions from you. If you have something that you'd particularly like to see (perhaps a particular comic that you'd like me to review), then let me know. If I think that I can do a creditable job of providing it, I'll give it a go.
     Meanwhile, why don't you explore a bit, while I go back to fiddling with the things still under the tarps....

Today we're going to look at some humor comics, aimed at very specific audiences:

• Cartoonist
• Three Geeks
• Knights of the Dinner Table

The Cartoonist #1
by Teri S. Wood, published by Dog Star Press, black & white, $2.95
Rating: Neat-O!

I wasn't a regular reader of Amazing Heroes, back when there was an Amazing Heroes, so this strip is new to me, but it's a very good strip indeed, full of comics in-jokes and self-referential humor. The premise is that the cartoonist, Teri S. Wood (presumably the same Teri S. Wood of Wandering Star fame), who appears in the strip as her signature, and her character (a young woman named Silver) have a cartoon-strip in Amazing Heroes to which they invite other comic characters as guests. As I said, self-referential. Each strip is either a page or a half page, and guest characters include John Constantine, the X-Men, the Desert Peach, Dream, one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, Wonder Woman, Mr. Miracle, and so forth. I wasn't busting a gut, but never went for more than a page without cracking a smile. I'd love to see more of this, but I don't know if this was a one-shot, and that's all there is to collect, or not.

The 3 Geeks #3
By Rich Koslowski, published by 3 Finger Prints, black & white, $2.50
Rating: So-so

This, on the other hand, didn't do much for me. Three comic-geeks go to a convention, and do the things at the convention that comic-geeks do. Been there and done that, literally. The cameos of "Tony Whatafella" and "Mark Wait" were cute, but cute only gets you so far.

The Knights of the Dinner Table, issues #4-12
by Jolly R. Blackburn, published by Kenzer & Co., black & white, $2.95
Rating: Gosh-a-rooty!

If you've ever played Fantasy Role-Playing games, and particularly if you've ever played Dungeons & Dragons, this comic--any issue you pick up--is absolutely side-splitting. Like The Three Geeks, it relies heavily on the recognition factor in the readers ("Hey, that's just like me and my friends!"); unlike the 3 Geeks, however, the situations are exaggerated for humorous effect, which actually succeeds in making the book humorous. Actually, humorous is an understatement--when I read these, I can't stop laughing. I haven't tried any of them on my non-role-playing friends yet, but every role-player I've showed them to has had pretty much the same reaction that I've had. The art is, well, primitive is one way of describing it; it's about on the level of Scott Adams' Dilbert, with the added fillip that almost all the art has obviously been scanned into a computer, and is simply re-used from panel to panel; this gives a talking-heads effect much like when Doonesbury shows panel after panel of the exterior of the Whitehouse. Fortunately, KotDT doesn't rely on art to carry it--in fact, the technique works well, in that it doesn't distract from the copious dialogue; it takes much longer to read an issue of KotDT than it does of an average comic.

Let's take a look at Heroes Reboard, or Return, or whatever it's called, shall we? Most everyone reading this column is probably aware that last year Marvel Comics decided to outsource some of its titles (Iron Man, Captain America, Avengers, and Fantastic Four, to be precise) for a year to some of the former-Marvel employees who had jumped ship to form Image Comics. As to the wisdom of that decision, well, according to Marvel, Rob Liefeld was fired from the books that he took over (Cap and Avengers) for failing to meet sales quotas, and in any event all four titles have returned to the Marvel fold. From a personal standpoint, all it meant was that I dropped Captain America for a year, since the other three titles hadn't registered a blip on the interest-meter for years. And now that they're back, three of the titles are in the hands of two of my favorite super-hero comic writers, so how can I complain?

Captain America #2
by Mark Waid and Ron Garney, published by Marvel, color, $1.99
Rating: Gosh-a-rooty!

Waid and Garney are back, and better than ever. Mark Waid was born to write Captain America (heck, he even admits that he used to wear a Captain America outfit when he was DJ-ing on college radio, and to this day you can usually spot him at a convention wearing a Stars'n'Stripes shirt), and the book picks up with no loss of momentum from before the--er--hiatus. In this issue, Cap faces down some Hydra thugs who've seized control of a US nuclear submarine, with the aid of his trusty shield. Reading this comic is the closest thing to watching a big-budget action picture you're likely to come across outside of a theater (unless you read Kenichi Sonoda's Gunsmith Cats), a high-impact adrenalin rush--and unlike most recent big-budget action pictures it has both a decent sense of pace, and a main character that's more than just a lump of flesh to carry the guns around (to steal a phrase from Steven Grant, I think it was).

Iron Man #1
by Kurt Busiek and Sean Chen, published by Marvel, color, $2.99
Rating: Gosh-a-rooty!

It's been a long, long time since I've read Iron Man (which used to be one of my favorite Marvel titles when I was a lad) regularly, and it's been a long, long time since Iron Man's been this good. Kurt's been wanting to do this book since forever, and I've heard some of his plans, and they're doozies. He's already started setting up to move Tony Stark in the direction that he's aiming for (which will answer the question, why does Stark keep wearing the armor now that he doesn't need it to keep his heart beating--or for that matter, even when he did, why did he bother with the anything but the chest-plate. Needing a kind of portable iron-lung doesn't explain going out there and risking your life over and over as a super-hero. It's not like he ever seems to get much of a kick out of it, like Spider-man), and taking the series in a whole new direction, too--and when I say a new direction, I don't mean "Everything you ever knew about Iron Man is wrong!", either. Busiek has too much respect for the readers to do that (at least with a character that he didn't create for the purpose of misleading the readers). Sean Chen does a fantastic job with the armor, too (as anyone who'd seen his work on X-O Manowar would have guessed).

The Avengers #1
by Kurt Busiek and George Perez
Rating: Keen

While there's certainly something to be said for addressing the issue of who's going to be on the new Avengers team by including every character who was ever an Avenger, I confess to being a little disappointed with this issue. Yes, it certainly was an impressive technical achievement, and yes, it certainly did feel like the Avengers, but I prefer to be able to spend more time with the individual characters. Naturally that's going to change for the better, as the new core group gets chosen, but in the meantime this felt a little too much like one of those Giant-Sized Annuals for me to really get into it.

Today we'll be taking a look at some of the holiday season movies.

Tomorrow Never Dies
I'm not sure why I went to see this, since I hated Goldeneye, and I've never liked Pierce Brosnan, but I was pleasantly surprised. It was formulaic to the extreme, but that's a good thing in a Bond movie--it had the comfortable feeling of an old pair of sneakers. All the stunts, neat toys, sophomoric sexual innuendo, and mayhem that you would expect in a Bond film. For some reason, perhaps because he's a few years older, Brosnan doesn't look quite so much like a male model, so I wasn't wincing every time he said, "My name is Bond, James Bond." Jonathan Pryce seemed to be having a lot of fun as a British Ted Turner gone bad (including Terry Hatcher as the beautiful trophy wife), who plans to start a war between Britain and China so that he can clean up in the ratings. The villain's chief muscleman this time out was pretty unmemorable, but the main "Bond-girl" this time is Bond's counterpart from the Chinese Ministry of External Security (I'm convinced I've seen the actress before, but I can't quite place her), and they give her a bunch to do in terms of stunts and fighting before she inevitably ends up hostage to the villains.

Anastasia
The best Disney flick that Disney never made. This is another pleasant bit of formulaic story-telling, and for my money every bit as good as Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King. When I first heard this was coming out, I thought it was a pretty dark topic for a children's movie, but it turns out that they reduce the Russian Revolution and its aftermath to a single sentence, voiced by the narrator Angela Lansbury (as the Dowager Duchess who survived the massacre), and replace the politics with a curse placed upon the Romanovs by the evil Rasputin. Just as well; I don't think the world is ready for an animated Stalin and Trotsky. I know I'm not. Instead the movie focusses on the efforts of two lovable rogues to train Anastasia, who nobody knows is the real Anastasia, since she has lost her memory, to impersonate herself so that they can claim the reward offered by the Dowager Duchess. There are the usual pleasant songs (none particularly memorable, but I haven't found much of the music in Disney's movies memorable since Aladdin), some seat-gripping action scenes, an albino bat as Rasputin's comic-relief henchman, and a nice little romance at the center of the story.

Flubber
Somewhat limp remake of The Absent-Minded Professor, with Robin Williams in the Fred MacMurray role. It's amusing enough, but the movie spends much too much time watching the dancing animated flubber (yeah, yeah, lots and lots of CGI. Big whoop), which in this version has a personality (doesn't keep Robin Williams from exploiting it by rubbing it on shoes, or building it into a car, though), although not much of one. The best part of the movie is Williams' artificially intelligent flying robotic side-kick Weebo, who punctuates all her conversation with clips from Disney movies displayed on her monitor. (Of course, her existence kind of begs the question, if Williams was able to build her, how come the college is in such financial trouble anyway? I mean, the flying part alone would be worth a fortune--and even though they explain that the AI was a fluke that the professor was unable to reproduce, the mere fact that he was able to get it to happen once ought to be enough to keep him rolling in grant money for the rest of his career. Oh, well.)

Yesterday I went to see:

The Postman
Rating: Neat-O.

I went to see this expecting, as usual with movies based on books that I liked, to be disappointed, but it was actually pretty good. The story is about a drifter in post-Apocalyptic U.S. Northwest (played by Kevin Costner) who, after some future plot establishment when he gets drafted into the army of the villainous warlord, stumbles across a Post-Office truck and takes the postman's clothes to keep from freezing. He then gets the idea of taking the postman's bag, and scamming his way into some free food by pretending to be a postman for the "Restored United States of America", which he makes up on the spot. The scam works, but too his surprise and chagrin, it works too well--people are so ready to believe a message of hope and return to normality that they start to do foolish things, such as defying the warlord (who promptly slaughters them); worse, from "the Postman's" point of view, they start to emulate him, and re-establish a mail service, something the warlord won't tolerate. Costner spends most of the rest of the movie wrestling with the sense of responsibility for events that have snowballed out of his control, until he finally (a bit past the time when you want to pop him upside the head) decides to take a stand.
      There was some good acting, some unexpected funny moments, and some genuinely moving scenes. It ran about a half-hour too long, but, then, almost all big-budget pictures run too long these days. (Some observers blame it on too many directors having final cut, but I'm not sure that's the whole story. Why should directors as a group be more prone to self-indulgence than editors or producers?) It also suffered from certain movie conventions: marksmanship that varied in accuracy according to the dictates of the plot, willingness to slaughter minor characters to establish the villain's bona-fides, but implausible immunity for the major characters, a certain moral squeemishness that makes a big to-do over the nobility of the heroes sparing the villain's life at the end, but then makes sure that he's dead in such a way that leaves their hands technically clean. All of these things are pretty typical of action movies (except maybe the last, since action movie heroes usually stand ready to do their own dirty work, and cheerfully blow the villain away with a quip on their lips), but rather jarring in a film that wants to be taken more seriously.

What's new in the DCU?

Batgirl Adventures #1
by Paul Dini and Rick Burchett, published by DC, color, $2.95
Rating: Neat-O.

Excellent story in the "adventures" style, written by one of the best authors of the Batman Adventures cartoon, and featuring some of my favorite characters from the cartoon. Harley Quinn, some-time sidekick to the Joker, stirs up trouble in order to get one of the Bat-clan after her, so that she can lead them to where her pal Poison Ivy is in desperate trouble; Batgirl is the one she happens across first. For someone like me, who's always resented what Alan Moore did to Barbara Gordon/Batgirl in The Killing Joke, much less the fact that they decided to keep it in continuity, this comic is the ticket. (It's sexism, is what it is. Batman can come back from a broken back, Superman can come back from the dead, but BatGIRL isn't important--she's just a dame. Actually, I think the real reason is that nobody wants to get rid of the wheelchair-bound Barbara Gordon/Oracle created by John Ostrander in Suicide Squad--she's too good a character. Sigh. Sometimes I think there's nothing half so dangerous to your favorite characters as a good writer; nobody has any problem agreeing to ignore what was done to Adam Strange or Zatanna. But I digress.)

DCU Holiday Bash II
by various, published by DC, color, $3.95
Rating: varies.

I bought this for the Tony Isabella/Eddie Newell 'Twas the Night Before Kwanzaa, and fortunately it was almost worth the full $3.95 price all by its lonesome, because the rest of the comic (except for the silly Present Tense, which neatly lampoons Darkseid, the second most overused villain in the DCU), wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. The stories ranged from the trite The Gift, to the incoherent The House of Peace.

Gog #1
by Mark Waid, Jerry Ordway, and Dennis Janke, published by DC, color, $1.95
rating: Keen.

I have to admit, I haven't been looking forward to The Kingdom, the upcoming maybe-prequel to Kingdom Come. Mostly its because I look at Kingdom Come as a kind of cautionary tale, a polemic against the kind of "Image-age" version of heroism where a hero is nothing but a name, a costume, and a set of powers, and the "kewlest" one is the one who racks up the highest body-count; if The Kingdom is going to lead the DCU (already perilously close to that sort of thing with the existence of Lobo in the main continuity) further in that direction, even for the sake of a good story (and Kingdom Come was a great story), then that makes me nervous. The industry is littered with the wreckage of once-good comics that were ruined by not-so-great writers trying to imitate the big stories of the great writers (The Dark Knight Returns, and Watchmen come to mind) but coming away with only the surface effects (the whole "grim'n'gritty" phenomenon), and I frankly worry that The Kingdom is going to lead to more of the same, but worse. I mean, the future depicted at the start of Kingdom Come, even before the Kansas incident, was bad--it was not a future that I want to read stories about.
So what does this have to do with Gog? Well, Gog is the prequel to the prequel--it's a lead-up to The Kingdom, introducing the villain Gog, who presumably (by name, costume, and powers, the hallmark of the Image-age character) will result in Magog, of Kingdom Come. It's a good story, with a fairly interesting origin for the villain (what the hell was the Phantom Stranger thinking? I mean, it's clear that the other "Elders" of the DCU have some hidden agenda, but he should have realized that they had something up their sleeves. Oh, well.), but I worry. I worry.

JLA: Year One #2
by Mark Waid, Brian Augustyn, and Barry Kitson, published by DC, color, $1.95
Rating: Neat-O.

I like this book a whole bunch, but I still can't shake the feeling when I'm reading it that this is not the Justice League of America. Sorry Mark, sorry Brian, I know that the mess that is current DCU continuity is not your fault, but the JLA was founded with Wonder Woman, not Black Canary, and Superman was a member. I have the comics that say so. (Actually, I have the Archives, but it's the same thing.) It's a great Elseworlds, but it doesn't hit me like the real thing. I think I'm officially adopting Craig Schutt's explanation that everything in the DCU since Crisis has taken place on Earth-Crisis, and then on Earth-Zero after Zero-Hour. As JLA (Earth-Zero): Year One, this is a bang-up job.

Sunday, acting on a positive review in Tony's Online Tips, I went to see

Home Alone 3
and you know what? I liked it, I really liked it. I had seen the first movie, a long time ago, and thought that it was amusing, but nothing much (the movie-going public obviously disagreed with me), so I skipped the second, and had no intention of seeing the third until Tony gave it a positive review as not only being funny, but having heart. He was right. Pitting the clever eight-year-old against the highly trained hi-tech professional thieves was funny, in a way that pitting a clever eight-year-old against a pair of bumbling burglars in Home Alone hadn't been. I mean, since realism is not an issue (or shouldn't be, if you're going to make any attempt to enjoy a movie like this), it's axiomatic that watching the competent and dignified get their comeuppance and be reduced to buffoonery at the hands of the plucky and brave is funnier than watching the inept hurt themselves. Which is why the Marx Brothers are funny, and the Three Stooges are not (sorry, Stooge fans). There's lots of low physical humor, cartoonish violence, neat Rube Goldberg-esque traps, and (the part which I'm sure warms the cockles of the hearts of the children in the audience) not only does the child get the better of the adults, but they apologize to him at the end for not believing him. Ah, sweet vindication. All in all, I recommend it heartily.

Well, that about wraps it up for this year. Starting tomorrow, I'll have some wrap-ups of the best of the past year (if I can organize my stuff well enough to tell what came out in the past year). In the meantime, have a happy and safe New Year's Eve. See you in 1998.