Gratuitous bouncing for a Sunday morning

A thought after watching WATCHMEN

Yes, I did see Watchmen this past week. And yes, I did like it. Very much.

My fondness for the graphic novel — and I’m one of those who first read it in comic book form back in the mid-’80s — is tied tightly to my love of Steve Ditko. After all, three of the Watchmen characters are based on heroes from Ditko’s run at Charlton Comics in the 1960s. Rorschach is an amped up (but not by much) The Question. Night Owl is based on Ditko’s version of the Blue Beetle. And Doctor Manhattan is pulled from Captain Atom.

So besides enjoying Watchmen the movie as a fine adaptation of the book, my imagination was stretched. I thought how cool it would be to see movie adaptations of the original Ditko source material. Why not a Question movie — or TV series? Why not a Blue Beetle movie?

Just a thought...

Look who's on the Grassy Knoll!

A new Japanese trailer for this spring's much-anticipated movie adaptation of Watchmen shows that the Comedian fired the fatal shot that killed JFK. Jeepers!

THE SPIRIT: No Sale

Until this morning, I'd intended to take a break from the in-laws on this Christmas day and visit the local theater complex to see Frank Miller's The Spirit. Alas, the dreadful reviews have finally overwhelmed even me, the biggest of Miller and Will Eisner fans. This one will be viewed on DVD sometime in the next 3-4 months. I may even wait for its debut on HBO next fall. Hell, maybe I'll never even see it at all.

Refocus on the comics, Frank. Please.

RIP Janet Van Dyne (The Wasp)

When my friend Ray told me that Janet Van Dyne, aka The Wasp, was recently killed in the course of the foolish and unnecessary Secret Invasion "mega-event," I felt like I'd taken a brutal body blow. Jan was not only the finest leader the Avengers ever had, for 45 years, she was one of the hottest babes in the entire Marvel Universe. Damn you, Marvel Comics!

Welcome back, Frank!

I’ve really gotta wonder — why all the griping about Punisher: War Zone, the newest effort to launch a Punisher movie franchise? Not only do the mainstream critics hate it, as I’d expect, the online geekboys are piling on the shit as well. But as a longtime fan of the Punisher in most of his comic book versions, and a fan of 2004’s movie with Thomas Jane, I have to say that War Zone is just about everything I’ve wanted in a Punisher film. It’s over-the-top, it’s unrealistic (as it should be, right?), and it’s a veritable merry-go-round of blood-drenched kickass mayhem. The movie’s got Ray Stevenson doing a fine turn as Frank Castle, and it’s moved Frank to Manhattan (where he belongs), and it’s got hundreds and hundreds of mobsters and street punks ineffectually throwing themselves at Frank, and it’s got Dominic West playing Jigsaw fer crissakes. It’s got it all, and it’s all wrapped up into a balls-to-the-wall gangbuster of an action movie.

Unfortunately, Punisher: War Zone is tanking at the box office. But there is, after all, a long life promised in the DVD world. However, if you’re a fan of the character, you might want to run out immediately and see this new take on the Punisher while it’s still on the Big Screen.

Still another guilty pleasure

Any list of the all-time worst movies based on comic book heroes will inevitably include the made-for-TV Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD, first broadcast on Fox in 1998. Written by David S. Goyer and directed by Rod Hardy, the movie starred David Hasselhoff as Fury, Lisa Rinna as Val, and even had a guy playing a cryogenically suspended Baron Von Strucker. Visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com) and you’ll see that the film has earned a 3.3 user rating (from a possible 10) and comments like “It couldn’t have sucked harder.” The movie definitely has a bad rep.

So here’s the deal: Best Buy now exclusively offers Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD on DVD. And I couldn’t be more pleased.

Granted, the movie’s not great. But after years of having kept my mouth shut, I’ve gotta finally come clean and confess that the Hasselhoff Nick Fury is a guilty pleasure of mine. Hasselhoff may not be today’s Fury (that’d be Samuel L. Jackson, of course), but he sure is the pre-Steranko Fury of 1965-66. Most of his lines sound like they were lifted straight out of the old Strange Tales stories. And Lisa Rinna isn’t much of an actress (although she’s been playing one for two decades), but she’s killer hot. Plus, even though the story’s pretty pedestrian (like most of those original stories from Strange Tales, incidentally), Hydra’s there, the SHIELD logo’s there, the latex jumpsuits are there, and the helicarrier’s there (and it looks damn good).

I watched Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD when it first aired ten years ago. I’ve seen it two or three times on cable since then. And I just picked up a DVD copy at Best Buy.

Guess what I’ll be doing tomorrow night, instead of watching election returns?

A moment of hardboiled Objectivism

“The police are picking up Baggot and his bunch! I’m here to make sure you pay for what you did! Roden marked the money he gave you — where is it?”

“No! No, he lied! You can’t believe a crooked lawyer! I swear I’m innocent!”

“I can make you talk like I made Roden. And you will talk, Purity! How do you want it?”

“I-I hid the money in my apartment! I-I’m not a real criminal! Please, give me a break!”

“You can confess to the D.A. on your own or I’ll drag you in… That is the only break you’ll get or deserve!”

“No, please! I’ll give you all the money! I deserve another chance! I’m sorry — I swear to God I am! I’ll never do it again! It-it’ll just be Roden’s word against mine! Please — have pity on me!”

“You scum, you betrayed the whole concept of justice! You sold out everyone who looks to the law as the protector of the innocent. And why did you do it? No one pressured you. No one threatened you. No one used force to make you! In a battle between good and evil, where there can be no compromise, you willingly chose to be evil’s secret ally! You wanted the advantages of both sides. Money you haven’t earned…respect you’re not entitled to!”

“But I’m sorry! Sob!”

“Your self-imposed blindness is over! You’re going to face up to pay for your sellout! Go turn yourself in!”

“Mr A: Money”
by Steve Ditko
(witzend #4, 1968)

Saturday morning funnies

This is for Brian, who also has a problem with Christian Bale's "crushed-gravel, angry stage whisper."

Gone to San Diego for Comic-Con

Overwhelmed by THE DARK KNIGHT

I’ve really got very little unique to say about The Dark Knight. It’s all being said elsewhere. Deb and I saw it yesterday afternoon. Then I needed a long nap. It’s exhausting. It’s grim, it’s downbeat, it’s scary, it’s unpredictable. Two months ago, I wrote here that Iron Man is one of the best comic book superhero movies ever. I could probably say the same thing about The Dark Knight, except this is less a comic book superhero movie than it is a sweeping noir crime epic. It’s tragic on an operatic scale. There are layers and layers of things to peel away and discuss about The Dark Knight. Right now, I’m just not up to the challenge. I don’t think I can do the movie justice.

But I just knew I had to check in before people started asking me about it.

See the goddamn thing. Just see it.

If you can't get enough of the Dark Knight...

To coincide with The Dark Knight, which opens tomorrow, a lot of new Batman merchandise, both good and bad, has been released to stores over the past couple of weeks. Here’s what I think is the Good Stuff.

The first nine issues of Frank Miller’s All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder have been collected into a nice, hardcover “Volume 1.” This “monthly” comic launched in 2005 and has been plagued by constant delays (only a single issue was released in 2006) and miserable reviews. Just about everybody seems to hate it, complaining that Miller’s portrayal of Batman is too hard, unflattering, and inappropriate. Personally, I see the series as a natural fit with other entries in Miller’s alternative Dark Knight Universe (Batman: Year One, The Dark Knight Returns, and The Dark Knight Strikes Again). Sure, this comic is tough. It’s shocking. It’s uncomfortable. But I’ve never expected anything less from Frank Miller. And Jim Lee’s artwork is exquisite. I just hope another three years don’t pass before we see Volume 2.

On the DVD front, DC Comics’ third direct-to-DVD entry is Batman: Gotham Knight. It’s an interesting though very disjointed 75-minute, anime-style movie made up of six separate episodes by three screenwriters and a half-dozen Japanese animators. It’s supposed to fall into Christopher Nolan’s Batman movie universe, somewhere between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. But even with two viewings under my belt (admittedly, I was listening to the feature-length commentary when I watched it the second time), I don’t really “get it.” The six episodes are too loosely linked for my taste, and the film meanders in all directions. And none of this is helped by the fact that Batman and other recurring characters are drawn differently in each chapter. The only element that really ties everything together is Kevin Conroy, who reprises his voiceover role as Batman from the old Bruce Timm cartoon series. Despite all this, the movie looks cool, it’s never boring, and the two-disc DVD set includes a very nice, 45-minute documentary about Batman creator Bob Kane. Batman: Gotham Knight isn’t essential for fans, but it’s worth checking out if you’re among the hardest of hardcore Batman fanatics, like me.

Also available is the fifth complete season (13 episodes) of The Batman from the Kids’ WB. Again, this is something a lot of Batman fans seem to dislike. But I’ve enjoyed the series from its debut in 2004, even though it’s never reached the heights of Bruce Timm’s cartoons from the 1990s. Just as Batgirl was introduced in the third season and Robin in the fourth, this fifth bunch of shows is highlighted by the appearance of other DC heroes, including Superman, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Flash — in other words, the Justice League. My only reservation about this particular string of episodes is that Batman, notoriously the grim loner, is presented as the great team-builder. But that’s not too big a deal. This is a fun set of cartoons.

Finally, much to my delight, the WB’s short-lived revisionist TV take on the Batman mythos from 2002, Birds of Prey, has finally made it to DVD — all 13 episodes, plus the unaired pilot (really just another version of the first episode, with alternative footage and some different casting). This show was a wonderful bit of kickbutt superhero eye-candy, starring Ashley Scott (who later starred in the Jericho TV series), Dina Meyer (the best thing about the original Starship Troopers movie), and Rachel Skarsten. I was a diehard fan of this show when it first aired, and it’s terrific to be able to revisit it. My only disappointment with this DVD set is that a lot of the original music from the program has been replaced due to licensing problems. This includes Aimee Allen’s memorable title theme, “Revolution.” Regardless, I highly recommend Birds of Prey.

Appreciating Steve Ditko

In 1966, when I was just a wee lad of 11, what then seemed a very big honkin’ piece of my world fractured and dropped away. Steve Ditko split from Marvel Comics and forever left behind Doctor Strange and, most horribly, Spider-Man. Neither character has been the same since. And if I may be so bold, neither has ever again been quite as good.

Ditko was the first comic book artist I really paid attention to, and his famous three-part Master Planner story (Amazing Spider-Man #31-33) locked in a diehard fanaticism that remains today. I followed him through his days at Charlton (doing the Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, and The Question), his brief periods with DC (creating the Creeper and the Hawk and Dove), into those days when you only found his stuff in fanzines like witzend and Guts. Part of Ditko’s magic may have been the mystery surrounding him. He didn’t sit still for interviews. He didn’t rub elbows with fans. As years passed, his work became harder and harder to find. Not until the past few years, when so much old Silver Age material has been collected into beautiful hardcover volumes, have I been able to revisit much of Steve Ditko’s great work.

Now, long overdue in my opinion, here comes Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, an oversized, hardcover appreciation, biography, and analysis by Blake Bell. As soon as this bugger landed on my doorstep, I immersed myself in it. It’s fantastic.

Bell seems to have scraped together every bit of info, every mention he could about Ditko. There are wonderful things here, including a color reproduction (granted, it’s small) of Ditko’s original cover for Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-Man’s debut in 1962; it was rejected and replaced with a cover by Jack Kirby (though Steve did the inking). Likewise, Ditko’s original cover for Amazing Spider-Man #10, featuring the Enforcers, is presented in this lovely book for, I think, the first time. For 40 years, I’ve wondered why an absolutely horrible, plain-as-vanilla Kirby cover graced that issue. I still don’t have the answer, but at least I’ve now seen Ditko’s terrific version.

One of the things that makes Steve Ditko fascinating to me is his steadfast commitment to his principles and the promotion of those principles, which are rooted in Ayn Rand’s black-and-white Objectivism. Not only did Rand shape almost all of Ditko’s work for the past four decades, her philosophy impacted his career and way of doing business — usually at great cost emotionally and financially. Strange and Stranger, as you’d expect, spends a lot of time in this area. Both the author’s account of this long period and his analysis is really first-rate. It’s really a tragic tale, with the uncompromising Ditko playing a defeated Howard Roark in an industry that never fully understands him. You can’t help but respect Ditko's unflinching determination, but at the same time, you’re frustrated whenever he shoots himself in the foot. For instance, the book reveals that about 15 years ago, Frank Miller approached Ditko with the suggestion that the two of them relaunch Steve’s Mr. A, his seminal Randian hero from the late 1960s. Miller wanted to present the character without concessions to political correctness. In the ’60s, the hard-right Mr. A had struggled in a flower power world. But in the tougher ’90s, an era that embraced Miller’s hardboiled classics like The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City, Mr. A might have become a sensation, catapulting Ditko out of the doldrums and to heights he hadn’t experienced since his old Marvel days. But alas, Ditko declined Miller’s offer, believing that Mr. A just wouldn’t sell.

Blake Bell’s Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko is essential for fans of the great artist. And if you’re a comic book fan unfamiliar with Ditko, this book might just pull you into his camp of devotees.

Groovin' on THE INCREDIBLE HULK

So kill me, I like The Incredible Hulk, which I finally got around to seeing yesterday. This is the Hulk movie they should’ve made five years ago instead of that dull film about daddy issues starring Eric Bana. I’ll admit, this new release isn’t the blockbuster Iron Man is, but it is entertaining and crammed with good moments and very good performances. The CGI is good, really at its best in the quiet Hulk scenes (and there are a couple). But most important, unlike its 2003 predecessor, The Incredible Hulk has a PLOT. Stuff happens, a lotta stuff happens, and when you get to the end of the film, you really wanna know what happens next, which is good, because word has it that Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America are destined for an Avengers movie down the road. And that might be a great thing.

Anyway, if you liked Iron Man and are curious just where Marvel Studios is heading with their movies, check out The Incredible Hulk. It makes for a fun afternoon. And hey, the bad guys are, of course, the military and the government it serves. You gotta love that.

Final note: One disappointment for me was that there were signs of SHIELD in the movie but nary a glimpse of Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. Ah well…

Don't yield! Back SHIELD!

…or Wally frolics among the pages of his favorite statist, Cold War comic book series.

It’s been a slow week. We had a new roof put on the house last week. We’ll be launching into phase three of our “home revitalization” in the next few days — tearing up the lawn, replanting with drought-resistant plants, some flagstone work for the patio. In the meantime, though, a slow week.

So when I saw a package sitting on the front porch yesterday, and it turned out to be my eagerly anticipated copy of Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD Vol. 1, things started to perk up. I dived right into the book, revisiting old comic book ground I hadn’t traipsed through in more than 40 years.

This very handsome book includes all the Strange Tales pre-hardcore Jim Steranko stuff. Steranko did draw over Jack Kirby’s layouts for the last three stories in this volume, but he didn’t begin to blossom as artist and writer until just after the last story presented here. So this hardcover is made up of 20 short SHIELD stories from Strange Tales #135-153 and Tales of Suspense #78 (technically, a Captain America tale), plus a pre-SHIELD Nick Fury appearance in Fantastic Four, circa 1963. Kirby fully illustrated maybe five of these yarns, although he provided breakdowns for all of them. John Severin, Joe Sinnott, Don Heck, Howard Purcell, and Ogden Whitney picked up the art chores to varying degrees of success on the remaining stories. So all the series’ initial up’s and down’s, and its shaky footing for almost two years before Steranko’s earthshattering run, are here to experience again. The 1965 Stan Lee-Jack Kirby SHIELD debut in ST #135 is just as I remembered it from age 10 — a quick 12 pages of boffo action and excitement, featuring hooded HYDRA baddies, a super-cool airborne Porsche, and that wonderful heli-carrier that’s now survived 43 years with little variation (that’s how cool Kirby was). Classic. From there, though, the SHIELD series doesn’t quite take a full nosedive but it does move into spotty territory. Kirby’s pencils immediately disappear, for one thing, which hobbles the first five-part HYDRA story, although it manages to be fun overall. A three-part story about an assault on SHIELD headquarters benefits tremendously from a partial return of Kirby. But a two-parter about a guy called The Druid is a real low-point, and the multi-part introduction of AIM (the guys with the bright beekeepers’ outfits) is really just a rerun of the earlier HYDRA tale. Things look up with the last four stories, one penciled by John Buscema and the final three by Steranko. These episodes mark the return of HYDRA, which was a very good thing that later became exhilarating when Steranko fully took over the series.

Don’t get me wrong. Despite some weak stuff (most of which I’d forgotten over four decades), this is a pretty solid collection. And for fans of Marvel’s “coming of age” in the mid to late 1960s, the book’s a lot of fun. And it provides essential background for a full appreciation of Jim Steranko’s brief, shining comics career, which should make up all of Vol. 2. Now that, friends, will be a reprint volume to be reckoned with.

Before government agents scared me...

Speaking of Nick Fury, which I was in my last post, here’s the cover of the very first Marvel comic I ever bought with my own money — Strange Tales #135, which featured the debut of “Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD,” a glorious 12-page story scripted by Stan “The Man” Lee and drawn by the great Jack “King” Kirby. (The bonus was a fantastic 10-page Doctor Strange story by Steve Ditko in the back of the book.) This was May 1965, I was 10 years old, the comic cost only 12¢, and of course the cover caught my eye. After all, I’d just spent eight months watching The Man from UNCLE on TV and had only that month seen Goldfinger for the first time — and I was still too young to see government agents as threatening. Very, very neat stuff for a youngster living in the middle of the Cold War.

Anyway, I collected that first full uninterrupted run of SHIELD stories right through 1968 or 1969, then sold them all for pennies when I moved away to college in 1972. I wish to God I still had ’em. But here’s the good news. While web-browsing yesterday afternoon, I discovered that all the episodes (Strange Tales #135-153) right up to Jim Steranko’s groundbreaking run have been collected for the very first time into a hardcover book as part of the Marvel Masterworks series; they’ve also thrown in Fury’s appearance with Captain America in Tales of Suspense #78 (1966) and his 1963 pre-SHIELD appearance in Fantastic Four #21 (1963). Naturally, I ordered a copy right away. I’ve been dying to read these tales again for more than two decades. (I imagine the Steranko tales will appear eventually in a Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury Vol. 2, and I’ll order the book as soon as I hear of it. But those mindblowing, state-of-the-art stories, which shook up the comics industry in the late 1960s, were republished a few years ago in a paperback edition, so I’ve revisited them recently. It’ll be great to have them in hardcover, though.)

Life is good.

Warning: HULK contains tobacco images!

I’m told that trailers for The Incredible Hulk, which opens Friday, include the warning “Contains depictions of tobacco consumption.” I hadn’t noticed. But I have noticed that smoking is so rare in movies these days that when it does occur, it’s almost startling.

I’m wondering, though, who’ll do most of the politically incorrect smoking in the Hulk film. My guess: Samuel L. Jackson as the traditionally cigar-chomping Nick Fury, director of SHIELD, whose post-credits cameo in Iron Man was, as I recall, free of the beloved stogie.

Summer Box Office Smackdown

IRON MAN is a kickass summer start-up

My first meeting with Iron Man was in 1965 at age 10 — Tales of Suspense #69. That issue featured the first appearance of Titanium Man, a propaganda tool of the Soviets, created solely to kick Iron Man’s butt and embarrass the West. Very cool, I thought. I liked Tony Stark, and I liked the fact that Tony needed The Suit to keep himself alive. But I never saw Iron Man as a top-tier hero. In the Marvel pantheon, Spider-Man was a top-tier hero. The Fantastic Four were top-tier heroes. But Iron Man? Sure, I liked him, but as I trimmed my comic book intake, he became an early reject from my reading list.

Iron Man, the motion picture, shoots the character right to the top of the Marvel Comics superhero pantheon. Here’s a case where the movie is actually better than its source material. All the bits and pieces from the Iron Man mythology are there, but they’ve been cleaned up, shined up, streamlined, and given a modern twist that is irresistible. As the first blockbuster of Summer 2008, Iron Man sets the bar astronomically high for the rest of the season’s movies, and there are a LOT of ’em coming up.

Here’s what I loved about Iron Man: everything. I knew in my gut that Robert Downey, Jr., was gonna be a spot-on Tony Stark, and he is. His is the screen performance to beat this summer. Gwenyth Paltrow (as Pepper Potts), Terrance Howard (as Rhodey), and Jeff Bridges (as Obadiah Stane, aka Iron Monger) are all top-notch, particularly Paltrow, whose chemistry with Downey sizzles. The special effects are extraordinary. The laughs are, well, laugh-out-loud. Director Jon Favreau keeps piling on the surprises. And I liked the film's anti-war bias, mild as it was. Iron Man doesn’t let up for a second, and as soon as Deb and I finished watching it, we were ready to watch it again.

OK, I’ll stop gushing now.

Oh, by the way. I can’t believe that after all these years, people still flee the theater as soon as the credits begin to roll. As is now so often the case, there is an extra 20 to 30 seconds or so, an extra scene, that appears after the credits. Keep your ass planted in your seat for it, especially if you're a comics fan. It had the four or five of us remaining in the theater cheering yesterday afternoon.

Why I love Myke Phoenix

Once upon a time, about the time Neil Armstrong planted Old Glory on the moon, two adolescent boys from opposite ends of the country met through the letters column of The Amazing Spider-Man. In that era before e-mail, they became pen pals. The kid from California launched a mimeographed fanzine of imaginative fiction called Fantasy World. The youngster from New Jersey wrote a handful of stories for that zine, all of them about a superhero he christened H-Man. H-Man had a prosthetic arm that fired energy blasts. Not quite like an H-bomb, but what the hell. It was pretty darn cool.

Within a year, I’d discovered girls and stopped publishing Fantasy World. My friend Warren Bluhm had pushed H-Man aside to pursue other creative ventures. And eventually, we both lost touch, having never met face to face.

Thirty-five years later, in 2005, Warren and I became reacquainted courtesy of kismet and the Internet. Our friendship is one of the longest and most stimulating I’ve ever had. And, alas, we’ve still never met in person.

But here’s the point of this story. Warren has sent me a signed copy of his new book, his first book, called The Adventures of Myke Phoenix, along with an admission that “Myke is a direct descendant of H-Man and Fantasy World.” So I was predisposed to like Myke Phoenix before I even cracked open this volume. I was also inclined to like the book because Warren is a good buddy of mine who just so happens to be a fine writer. But even setting my biases aside, The Adventures of Myke Phoenix is a whole lot of fun, particularly if you enjoy the old pulps, comic books, and, well, superheroes who don’t take themselves too seriously.

In case you’re unaware, there are dead-serious heroes — like Batman, Daredevil, and The Shadow, for instance — and there are lighter heroes not to be taken seriously at all, like The Spirit, She-Hulk, and Hellboy. Myke Phoenix, fashioned in the tradition of the original Captain Marvel, falls into this second group. How so? Well, for one thing, among the bad guys who traipse through the five stories in this book are a half-man, half-duck named Quincey Quackenbos and a thieving philanthropist who goes by the moniker Doctor Skull. Funny, funny stuff. For another thing, Warren writes with — heck, there’s no other term for it — light whimsy. As I read Myke Phoenix, I felt Warren standing next to me, nudging my ribs, pointing out jokes he thought I might have missed, and grinning like the teen wonder he was when he wrote those stories for Fantasy World so long ago.

Yes, friends, the spirit of H-Man lives on in The Adventures of Myke Phoenix. And I can’t think of many better ways to spend a spring afternoon than with this book.