Category Archives: Reviews

Some thoughts on Jim Shooter’s first run on Avengers

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(Total comic geekiness this week. No need to look within for any profound reflections on life. Sorry!)

I started reading Marvel’s premier team book, The Avengers (AKA, unofficially, The Mighty Avengers and sometimes The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes) in 1974. I grew up with it as one of my top favorite comics. As I grew peripherally aware of who was writing the scripts, who was drawing the pictures, I came to see Jim Shooter’s first tour as author of the Mighty Assemblers’ adventures as something of a golden age for the team. But then, to be fair, I pretty much considered the entire run, from about ten issues after I started reading and figured out what was going on, to the time seven years later when I just felt I’d gotten too old for comic books, to be a golden age. (Too old for comic books at 15. I know, right? Y’see, there was this girl…)

But Jim Shooter, the still-very-young writer who, at age 13, had taken over DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes a few years earlier and made it a fan favorite, brought some very special moments to the team’s history, especially when he was working with George Perez, arguably the greatest artist ever to draw the Avengers. (And that’s saying something, when you consider they were also drawn by Neal Adams, Don Heck, John Buscema and Jack Kirby, to name a few.) Continue reading →

Getting to the heart of a character… Captain America: The Winter Soldier (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

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captain_america__the_winter_soldier___fan_poster_by_superdude001-d68na0lTom Sawyer. Huck Finn. Oliver Twist. The Artful Dodger. Tarzan. Rhett Butler. Scarlett O’Hara. Peter Pan. Alice in Wonderland. To some of us, characters like these, and their many, many young siblings, are more real than the people we work with, go to school with or meet on the street. Their images are indelibly stamped on our hearts, so well did their creators fashion them. They are alive for us.

All of these characters have been revisited, again and again, by authors not their creators. That’s because they are so powerful. Because we want more adventures with them. Because they fire the imaginations of even the most imaginative people… and, yes, sometimes the imaginations of the dullest of people as well.

I daresay Captain America is such a character now, for millions of Americans. Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in the pages of Timely Comics (now Marvel Entertainment, thank you very much!) during the early days of World War II, Cap was re-engineered by Kirby and Stan Lee beginning in 1963. Starting as just another patriotic-themed Nazi-buster, in the 1960s, Steve Rogers became a stranger in a strange land, Rip Van Winkle, Buck Rogers, a man who goes to sleep and wakes up in a time not his own. Of course, in 1963 he’d been asleep for only 18 years. Now, since World War II can’t move in time, the movie version of Cap awakes over 65 years in the future, still young, still ready for battle.

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Superman Plays Football… and other tales of woe.

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Superman_1 Every now and then something sort of little gives you pause and makes you consider something… bigger. In this case, “something little” is one of the very earliest comic book adventures of Superman. Published in Action Comics #4 (making it the Man of Steel’s fourth appearance), the story is called, predictably enough, “Superman Plays Football.” (It’s also re-printed in Superman #1.)

Well, that’s its title in the index at the Grand Comic Book Database. On the story, there’s no title. That was typical of Golden Age comic stories, as is the length of this one, just over twelve pages. Also typical, but disturbing, are the attitudes toward life, fair play and personal interaction displayed by the characters. Those are the “something bigger” or “somethings bigger” that I’m talking about. They’re attitudes which may have been typical of the time, but certainly not attitudes I would want to push off on young readers without some kind of comment. (Of course, now, young readers are unlikely to see this story. I think mostly only middle-aged nostalgia buffs like me are bothering to read Superman adventures from the 1930s.)

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I am so mad at Ayn Rand

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judgmentdayI am so mad at Ayn Rand…

Right?

I mean, I never met the woman. She’s been dead for 31 years. And what I’m mad at her about, she did when I was four. And it had nothing to do with me. Still, I’ve just never been so angry and disappointed with one of my heroes before.

Okay, “I am so mad,” is an exaggeration. I experienced a moment of shock and anger is more appropriate. Let me back up a bit and tell you what prompted this. I was reading a book called Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand. Since its original publication in the late 80s, it’s been renamed just My Years with Ayn Rand. Don’t know why. Was the original title too religious in its connotations for the atheist followers of Rand, or was it, perhaps, too subtle for the average reader to understand why what’s essentially a tell-all book (albeit a high-brow tell-all) would be named “Judgment Day.” Hint: It’s because Ayn Rand was noted for saying, “Judge and prepare to be judged” in answer to the Christian admonishment to “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” She didn’t think anyone should go without having to answer for their actions, so every day with her was Judgment Day. I guess it was kinda uncomfortable for a lot of people.

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Review: Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin – Book to Film

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I probably discovered Winter’s Tale in college. It was published my freshman year, and I spent at least an hour a day in the campus bookstore, which, back then, was a respectable establishment. Not only could customers browse the stacks of textbooks themselves, rather than waiting for the staff to fetch them (which meant you had your pick of the lowest-priced used copy), but it was also a well-stocked retail bookstore as well. About the size of my local BooksAMillion, and with about the same ratio of swag to books. No music, though. For music, you had to walk down the Student Union hallway to the Record Coop. (That’s two syllables, if you were wondering. And yes, we all pronounced it as though it held chickens instead of records.)

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Snowy Days and Mondays

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psh3When I decided to go weekly with my blog… November 2011? Looks like then… I chose Mondays as the day. Start of the week. It seemed like the best day to be sure that I could carve out an hour or two and write 1,000 words or so. After all, with the week just beginning, planning to write on Monday evening, you’re less prone to slippage, less prone to have your writing time suddenly filled with other, less fun, less meaningful-to-posterity things than if you set aside, say, 6 PM Wednesday.

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Heroes we can believe in? Superheroes – Capes, Cowls and the Creation of Comic Book Culture by Laurence Maslon and Michael Kantor

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pPBS3-16400338dtI got this book as a Christmas gift. It’s a beautiful work, developed as a companion to the PBS film (which I’ve not seen) Superheroes – A Never-Ending Battle. It’s chock-full of gorgeous shots of comic covers, comic artists at work, rough sketches and unfinished pages of famous characters, and photos of many of the actors who brought superheroes to life on screens big and small. It does a wonderful job of chronicling the genesis of a genre, starting with the pulp magazines which date back to the turn of the 20th Century, and including insights on the industry and the people who made it that I’ve never come across before. That says something, because I have read a lot about comics history. Continue reading →

Chernobyl Diaries – viewing as an exercise in screenwriting

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No experience in life is truly wasted. You can always learn something, and thus time and money spent are merely tuition you paid for that learning experience. So, while you might be tempted, after watching a truly awful film (like the one named above) to scream, “I want those two hours of my life back!”, you should remember there’s always something to learn. (You should also remember that truly awful films are often only 90 minutes, as, again the one named above is. That’s because the director, producer or the studio saw the two-hour cut and cried out to the heavens, “What hath I wrought?!” and tried to soften the blow by at least making the travesty rob one fewer half-hour of life from its viewers.)

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A Christmas Miscellany

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Just a short entry to share some gems of Christmas 2013.

docsavageDoc Savage – Man of Bronze #1 (Dynamite Comics)
Dynamite continues its trend of bringing classic pulp and adventure heroes to modern comics with modern comic art. The result is a triumph. I’m not a huge Doc Savage fan. I’ve read a couple of the books, and actually watched the entire movie with Ron Ely. On second thought, maybe I am a huge fan. Who else would sit through that movie? For the uninitiated, Doc is a genius and a superb athlete, one of a team of heroic geniuses who’ve pledged themselves to help those in need. All of them are engineers or scientists, all are capable of discovering the solution to a complex technical problem and thus saving the day. They’re idealists, too. Doc believes that criminal behavior is merely a disease and can be cured. It’s a very American concept. They’re both intellectuals and jocks (celebrating the American worship of both sports figures and men and women of science), their headquarters is on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building (celebrating both capitalism and technological advancements) and they have a healthy dislike of involving the legal authorities when solving problems (celebrating the American spirit of independence, even from American government.) The artwork is beautiful, and the writing crisp and entertaining. This is a promising series that I intend to keep following. Continue reading →

Celebrating the Outsider at Christmas – Bell Book and Candle

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51+PNg8JS7LI’ve mentioned the film Bell Book and Candle in my rundown of favorite holiday movies in the past. I revisit it now because it’s such an atypical Christmas film. I recall my mother taping it for my father back in the early days of VCRs, when some of us wanted to capture every film and TV show for posterity. We didn’t know YouTube was coming, or Netflix, or DVD collections of complete runs of TV series. One movie cost at least $40 then, and older films which hadn’t won Oscars or been box office smashes weren’t as quick to be released. Local TV stations were still showing movies then, albeit with large chunks missing to allow space for commercials. My family spent many hours sitting in front of the TV remote in hand, pausing for commercials, trying to get the most pristine copy we could.

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