New Mutants Forever #1 Review

If you haven't heard, New Mutants Forever is a five-issue limited series by Chris Claremont that picks up right where he stopped writing New Mutants back in 1987, and ignores everything that's happened since (theoretically).  He's done the same thing with the X-Men (picking up from where he stopped writing them in 1991) in the ongoing series X-Men Forever, which I stopped reading pretty quickly because it sucked.

I went into this with basically no expectations, especially considering how disappointing I found the two or three issues of X-Men Forever that I read before giving up on it, but man, I enjoyed the hell out of this book.  It's certainly not without its problems.  The blatant anachronism is pretty WTF.  This is supposed to be picking up from a story that left off in 1987, so it's just a little weird when they just hop on the internet like it's a thing that exists and that they've been using for years.  And the random new costumes, which they're somehow wearing in that picture the Hellfire Club is looking at on the splash page even though they haven't worn them yet?  And then the explanation for why they have them is that Illyana randomly decided they needed new costumes so she just magicked them up while she was teleporting them?  And then Rahne is somehow wearing one even though she didn't go through the teleport?  Yeah.  Just a little effort could have probably put them into those costumes in a way that made even a tiny bit of sense.  I bet Bobby shows up in a new costume that matches the rest of theirs in the next issue even though he has no way of knowing they've changed costumes.  Also, there's the unnecessary expository dialogue (does Magneto really need to randomly announce to the Hellfire Club that he spent time in a concentration camp as a kid?).  But then that last has always been a feature of Claremont's writing anyway, so it has to get a bit of a pass.

Really, these are all fairly minor complaints (and I know from reading X-Men Forever that it could have been a lot worse), because the upside is finally getting to hear these characters that I love so much actually sound like themselves again for the first time since, well, 1987.  It shouldn't be that difficult a chore for a writer to capture a character's voice.  Plenty of writers manage to do it with plenty of characters all the time, especially in comic books, where a different writer might be writing the character next month.  But I daresay that not a single writer has managed to write the New Mutants with their proper voices since Claremont last wrote them himself.

I'm glad that Marvel gave the New Mutants a new ongoing series, and I'll read it for as long as it lasts, but Zeb Wells has not gotten a single one of their voices right yet.  He does a decent job with Sam and Dani, but he's way off with most of the others.  Especially Illyana and Doug, both of whom he's plagued with completely unnecessary Spock Speak for no apparent reason.  And I know he's trying to do something specific with the characters.  They've both been through big events that have changed who they are in fundamental ways that they're still dealing with.  But until I get some sort of reasonable explanation for why coming back from the dead should make you stop being able to use contractions, I'm going to continue to see it as lazy writing.  Especially when you already have someone on the team (Amara) who's actually supposed to talk that way (and, if I recall correctly, he doesn't have her talking that way).  It's getting to the point with Illyana where if he doesn't figure out how she's supposed to talk soon, I'd rather he just not even use her in the book.  I'll never say that about Doug though, no matter how poorly he's written.  I'll always take a Doug who sounds like Data for no reason over no Doug.

Though at least Wells doesn't write Doug as badly as Matt Fraction did in that last issue of Uncanny X-Men.  I was all excited to see Doug show up in Uncanny X-Men, but Fraction just had him saying the dumbest shit on every single page.  The worst was when he somehow wasn't able to tell when Nemesis was being sarcastic.  I mean, really.  He's got one power.  He can always understand what everyone is saying.  That's it.  It's pretty tough to fuck that up, but damn if Fraction didn't manage to find a way.

Anyway, point is, it's easy to see that no other writer has been able to get these characters right when you read this book and hear them all talk the way they're supposed to for the first time in twenty-three years.  And when you see how naturally it comes to Claremont to write them, you start to wish this was the ongoing.  But I'll gladly take the five issues they're giving us here.

A thought I just had about the Lost finale...

Hey, remember when the show was good?  Here are all those characters who were together when the show was good.  They're together again!  That must mean the show is good now, right?

Ben

I guess it's about time to actually make a post that has something to do with the class this blog is for.  For my Electronic Publishing final project, I redesigned the web site I had created for the midterm.  It's now a multimedia narrative about my long-running fictional character Ben.

It gives a brief history of the character, beginning with the unillustrated comic scripts my collaborator and I initially wrote five years ago, including a few examples.  Then it progresses to the character's appearances in my collaborator's blog, including links to certain entries.  After that, it moves to the videos we had produced for the midterm project, and finally moves on to the new videos we produced for this project, in which a loose narrative of a distinctly meta nature unfolds.

The story is augmented with music and photographs that tie in only loosely and thematically, but hopefully increase the meta-ness of it all.  So, check it out, I guess...

Ben

Angel #32

I think I'm going to stop reading this until they get a new writer.  Willingham's dialogue is like nails on a chalkboard to me.  Especially the ridiculous things he has Spike say.  "Hey, don't bark at me!  Is it my fault you colonials have the odd custom of naming your pee-pees?"  Really?  And what's with the painfully forced conflict between Connor and Gunn?  I did snicker a bit at Illyria's line at the end: "Good evening, Connor.  Your father has given me permission to seduce you."  But that little plot element doesn't ring true to me either, so, yeah.  I think I'm done with this book for now.

X-Force #26

On the plus side, the artwork was really good.  It's been hit-or-miss with the art in X-Force.  I'm not much of a visual artist, so I often don't pay that much attention to the art in a book unless it's detracting from the story in some way.  Which the art in X-Force often tended to.  A lot of it was so dark I often couldn't tell what was happening, who was speaking, who was punching who.  It looked cool, but it was confusing as hell.  This issue had none of those problems.  It was very clear and even had some nice visual moments.  I assume it's a different artist, but I don't remember who the artist was before, so I'm not sure.

Also on the plus side, more New Mutants, including more speaking from Cypher.  I was thinking the other day that it's impossible for them to do the kind of character development with the X-Men that they were able to do back in the day because the cast is so much larger now.  Little hints of character development are all we can get per issue because the issues have to focus on so many characters.  Although they do have books like X-Force and New Mutants, which are supposed to specifically focus on a certain group of characters, but they both keep going through these big crossover stories, so every book is starring, like, all the X-Men every time anyway.  I hope after this one they get back to letting the books focus on smaller groups of characters for a while.

On the minus side...

SPOILERS...

Pan's Labyrinth and The Movie Hero: examination of fantasy

They're both several years old, but I got a chance to watch Pan's Labyrinth and The Movie Hero for the first time this past weekend.  On the surface, they're very different.  Pan's Labyrinth is a very dark fairy-tale/fantasy almost verging on horror.  It's slickly-produced with great special effects.  The Movie Hero is a fairly light romantic adventure with plenty of comedy.  It's a low-budget indie film with negligible special effects.  But what they have in common is that they both examine the role of fantasy, both in our stories and in our lives.

Pan's Labyrinth shows us the fantasy world of a little girl living through the horrors of Franco's regime in post Civil War Spain.  The twist is that this fantasy world she keeps escaping to is quite possibly even more horrible than the real world she's escaping from.  I think it makes sense to some degree.  The horror she's living through is necessarily coloring her thoughts, and shaping her fantasy world as well.  If, indeed, it's fantasy.  It may well be just as real as the "real" world.  You can watch the whole movie and still not really be sure, and that's part of its power.  I had some serious trouble sleeping the night I watched this movie.  I definitely recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it though.  It's really beautiful for all its horror, both visually and emotionally.

I had watched The Movie Hero just beforehand.  In some ways I wish I'd watched it second, because after I'd seen Pan's Labyrinth it was hard to think about anything else.  But I think if I'd watched it after Pan's Labyrinth, I'm not sure I'd even be able to pay attention to it, so it's probably better that I watched it first.  It's about a guy who thinks he's the star of a movie.  Which, of course, he is.  But to all the other characters in the movie, he's just some crazy guy who thinks his life is a movie.  The movie plays around a lot with movie conventions.  As soon as he meets the girl who we can all tell is going to be his love interest, he starts addressing her as "Love Interest."  Lots of funny little things like that.  But what really got to me about the movie is, again, the way it addresses fantasy.  This guy's fantasy of being the star of a movie, from our perspective, is reality.  From the perspective of the movie world though, it's delusion.  What's real and what's not?  Same question I had in my mind at the end of Pan's Labyrinth.

It's a question I ask myself a lot.  It's a question I've addressed in a lot of the fiction I've written, because I think it's one of the most important questions fiction can address.  I was talking about Grant Morrison's meta stuff earlier, and saying it's what he's probably best at, and that may be true, but it's definitely true that that's what interests me the most about his work.  It may be why Animal Man is still my favorite thing he's written, because that's the book where he spent the most time exploring that question.

Anyway, all this is mainly to say that I think I finally have a direction for my screenplay now.  It's been giving me so much trouble.  I just haven't gotten into the characters or the story or anything, and I realized that what I really want to address with my movie is this question of fantasy vs. reality.  That's what I'm the most interested in as a writer.  And I think, knowing that, that I'm finally ready to write this thing.  And it's about time, because I've got less than three weeks left to do it.

I just hope it doesn't turn out looking too much like a bad Charlie Kaufman ripoff.

X-Men Legacy #235

This book is written by Mike Carey, one of my favorite writers in comics today.  He's also writing The Unwritten, probably my favorite book right now, and one I've reviewed a couple times here.  I kind of wish Carey was writing all the X-Men books, although he obviously doesn't have time to do all that.  But after reading this issue, I especially wish he was writing New Mutants.

I haven't reviewed any of New Mutants yet, but now seems like as good a time to talk about it as any.  The writer on that book is Zeb Wells, and he's not bad, but there's something a little off.  It's sort of like what I said about Bill Willingham on Angel.  He just doesn't have the greatest grasp on the characters.  When a writer is writing characters with long histories, especially when I'm as familiar with their histories as I am with the New Mutants, it's easy to tell when they sound wrong.  Wells' New Mutants sound wrong.  They don't sound like themselves.  Especially Illyana, although I think he's doing something specific with her character that calls for her to sound a bit off, but still, the Spock speak he's given her is especially grating, given that she's never ever talked like that before even when she was borderline evil.  I love that he's brought back Doug and Warlock.  And I love that he's giving Doug a chance to reach the potential that's always been implicit in his powers.  But so far, his characterizations just haven't rung true.  Maybe he just needs to write them more, or maybe he needs to read more of the old Claremont stuff, I don't know.  I hope he finds it eventually, because these are probably my favorite characters in the history of comics.

Which is why, after reading this issue of Legacy, I really wish Mike Carey was writing that book.  The New Mutants were as heavily featured in this issue as the X-Men were, and it was great.  I really liked the way Carey wrote them.  I thought it felt more natural than these characters have felt in years.  There were some great moments too.  I liked Doug having to convince Warlock to take out the smiley soldiers and Hodge.  I can see people having a problem with it, but with where this newly-resurrected yet somehow older Doug is at right now, it felt right to me.  The smiley soldiers were an especially nice touch, since they were a big part of how Doug died.  There was a nice bit of revenge below the surface there.

On the downside...

SPOILERS...

Joe the Barbarian #4

I enjoyed reading this issue.  There were some nice moments in it, some clever dialogue, a bit of that meta stuff that Morrison likes to do (which I think may be what he's actually best at).  I'm not sure what to say about it though.

Instead, I want to talk a little bit about Morrison's writing style.  As I said before, for years now, Morrison's stories have been very difficult to follow, and this one's no exception.  So I wanted to try to figure out why that is.  What is it about the way he writes that makes you constantly wonder what's going on?  Is he doing it on purpose?  Is it a good thing?

As I also said before, it makes more sense on the second read than the first.  I think the reason for that is that there are lines that don't make any sense unless you've read the whole story.  A lot of writers do something similar.  It's the whole Chekhov's gun thing.  You set things up early in the story, and then they pay off later on.  But a lot of the time, Morrison does this with lines that seem like random nonsense when they're said.  And because they seem like random nonsense, you've completely forgotten them by the time they pay off.  Or at least I have.  My brain just tosses out random nonsense right after I read it.  If I don't comprehend something, I don't remember it.  So when these things pay off later in the story, it just seems like more random nonsense to me, and at the end of the story, I feel like I've just read a whole bunch of random nonsense.  The second time through, I remember the payoff when I encounter the setup, and I go "Ohhhhh."  I'm not sure if this is really effective storytelling.

I think another thing that makes it difficult to follow is a general lack of exposition.  This is a problem in a lot of comic books today.  When the story spans multiple issues, the reader has often forgotten what has come before.  Sometimes a recap is provided, but often it's not.  It's almost never provided in Morrison books, and his are the ones where it's probably most needed.  I think he often writes with the intention of the whole thing being read at once after it's finished, but that's not how it's released.  I often feel like I should just wait until Morrison's stories are collected as trade paperbacks and buy them then.  Of course, I did that with Invisibles and I still couldn't follow it, so who knows.

But in addition to the lack of exposition given to the audience, there also often seems to be a lack of exposition given to the characters.  A lot of the time, it seems like the characters don't even really know why they're doing what they're doing.  They're just doing it.  Or maybe it just reads that way because I can't follow their dialogue.  It often feels like Morrison's characters are speaking some other language.  They're talking to each other, and they seem to understand each other, but if I was part of that conversation, I'd constantly be going, "Wait, what?  What did you just say?  What does that mean?"

But another thing I said before is that I think Morrison's style is better suited to this story than it is to some of the other stuff he's written, and I still feel that way, and I think it's part of why I did enjoy this issue, and am going to keep buying the book.  It's about the hallucinatory fantasy world of a diabetic kid in hypoglycemic shock, so it doesn't really have to make a whole lot of sense.  It would still be nice to be able to follow the story on the first read though.

The Unwritten #12

This is a stand-alone issue, and it's probably my favorite issue yet of the series.  It's probably not fair of me to do this, but I can't help comparing this series to Sandman.  And this issue felt to me like issue 8 of Sandman.  That was the standalone story that introduced Death, and it was the moment where the series really started to find itself.  That's what this issue felt like to me, like this series is really going to take off now.  I hope I'm right.

Anyway, this was a great story.  It's a parody of A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh stories, though the cover makes it look more like we're about to read an Alice in Wonderland parody, and I think that's probably done on purpose.  What's going on here is that we're in a place that's very much like the Hundred Acre Wood, and we're reading narration that's a lot like Milne's, but there's something off about the cute little rabbit character the narration is talking about.  He can hear the narrator, and he insists that his name is not Mr. Bun as the narrator would have it, but rather Pauly Bruckner.

As the story unfolds, we learn that he does not belong in this storybook world at all.  He has somehow been trapped there by Wilson Taylor, the author of the Tommy Taylor books (the Harry Potter clone that serves as the premise for this series).  Pauly had apparently tried to steal a map from Wilson Taylor, and Taylor somehow sent him into the fictional world of this Winnie-the-Pooh type story, where he is constantly annoyed by cute little brainless talking animals, and he is constantly trying to find some way to either escape or kill himself, but has a lot of trouble doing either.

The Milne parody is very good, and you can tell that the writer, Mike Carey, clearly loves the source material.  And the interactions between this foul-mouthed criminal from the real world and the Pooh character knockoffs are really funny.  The story also has a wonderfully dark ending that I won't ruin.

I think, much like issue 8 of Sandman, this issue is probably going to serve as a great jumping-on point for new readers, so I highly recommend picking this one up.

Secret Six #20

Gail Simone continues to impress.  If you remember from last month, this is picking up from a killer cliffhanger.  Catman's just gotten a call from his son's kidnappers saying they're going to kill the boy, but they'll give him an extra year of life for each of Catman's teammates that he kills in the next five minutes.

The way this was handled was just perfect.  The rest of the team doesn't hear the man on the phone, so they have no idea what's going on.  But they see Catman's reaction, and they know something is seriously wrong from the way he's looking at them.  And this is a team full of really scary people, all of whom either out-power or out-gun Catman, but they are all clearly a bit scared by the way he's looking at them.

But in the end, he doesn't kill any of them.  Instead, he tells the guy on the phone to go ahead and kill his son.  But he will track them down, and he will kill them.

And then he goes off to start.

Another great issue, and I'm looking forward to the next one again.

The Flash #1

I loved this.  The Flash, the Barry Allen Flash, was my favorite super hero as a kid.  He's been gone a long time, and now he's finally back and starring in his own series again.  It's written by Geoff Johns, one of the best writers in comics today, and almost immediately he gave me a moment that made me realize why I loved this character so much.

There's a car hurtling through the air towards some innocent people who won't even see it until it's too late.  Fortunately for them, the Flash has made his way onto the car.  But what can he do?  Well, he's the fastest man alive, so what do you think he does?  He takes the car apart.  Piece by piece.  In a split second.  In midair.

So cool.

The scene has a great kicker too, but I won't ruin any more of the book.  I'm really looking forward to more of this one.  Of the many relaunches the Flash book has had over the years, this is by far the one I've felt the best about.

User Testing

So I asked my sister to do some user testing on my site, and here's what she said...

"I just wandered around your website. It wasn't that hard to figure out. I don't think I'd say it's exactly intuitive about the things at the top for the lowest common denominator of computer user, but it's not unreasonable."

That's basically what I thought.  I had been worried from the beginning that the navigation was a little less intuitive than I'd hoped.  I'll probably completely redesign the site for my final project anyway though.

Uncanny X-Men #523

This is part 2 of the current multi-part huge crazy mult-title-spanning storyline.  It seems like every issue of every X-book (if not every Marvel book) is part of one of these now.  Oh well.  As long as the story's good, I guess.  I don't know if this one is or not yet.  It's called "Second Coming," and it's about this girl who was the first mutant born since the mutant population had been suddenly reduced to 198 worldwide.  And then Cable took her to the future and raised her because a bunch of mutantphobic humans were trying to kill her.  And now he's brought her back to the present where there are still a bunch of mutantphobic humans trying to kill her, but now she's all grown up and can fight them and stuff.  And also, she looks exactly like Jean Grey (who's currently dead, but that never seems to last with her).  Or she's drawn to anyway.  I don't think any of the characters have made any comments about the resemblance yet.  So,  yeah.  Basically your average convoluted X-Men story, and probably a good example of why a lot of people don't read X-Men comics despite the popularity of the movies.

Despite the over-complicated storylines though, there's often some decent writing in the X-Men books.  The other main X-Men title, X-Men: Legacy is currently written by Mike Carey (Lucifer, The Unwritten), one of my favorite writers in comics today.  Uncanny is written by Matt Fraction, who I don't think is quite as good as Carey, but he's not bad.  This issue gave us some good moments.  For one, the rest of the X-Men have finally found out about X-Force, the secret wetwork squad Cyclops has been operating behind their backs.  Nightcrawler is obviously really pissed about it, and I can't wait to see what happens with that.  Also, on the very last page, we got I think the very first shot of the Team Supreme (Cypher and Warlock) in their classic battle mode since they brought Cypher back in the Necrosha storyline.  Hopefully, we'll see more of that in part 3 of this story, since it takes place in New Mutants.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer #34

What the hell?

The same could be said about issue 33, I guess.  And I probably should have reviewed that one, since that was the one where they did the big reveal on Twilight's identity.  Stop reading now if you haven't read it and don't want to be spoiled....

SPOILERS...

The Cup Is Only Reviewing Comics: The Twelve: Spearhead #1

This is a one-shot written by the series' regular artist Chris Weston, presumably to tide us over until they finally get around to finishing the series.  And I have to say, it was really nice to see these characters again.  It's been a year and a half since the last issue of The Twelve came out.  It was odd to read the little expository blurb at the beginning of this issue:

"They are yesterday's men of tomorrow--today!  After being placed in cryogenic suspension by the Nazis at the close of WWII, twelve mystery-men of the 1940s are revived in the far-flung future of 2008."

Hmm.  Makes you wonder what they've been doing for the last two years.  We don't get to find out in this one-shot, as it's set during the war.  It was fun to see a story about them in that setting though.  We got a glimpse of it back in the first issue of the series, if I recall, but not a whole lot.  And this time, we also get to see them interacting with some of the more well-known Golden Age heroes like Captain America and the Human Torch.  We also get an answer to a question that had been bugging me since the beginning of the series: What the heck was a character like the Black Widow doing fighting in World War II?  I won't spoil it, but it's definitely a satisfying answer to the question.

One thing that was kind of odd about reading this story was that it reminded me quite a bit of my main problem with Inglourious Basterds: the revisionist history element.  I generally don't mind stories about fictional alternate histories, but for some reason it just seems a little off-putting when the subject matter is World War II.  Like that event is somehow sacred.  I think that's why DC decided to come up with a contrivance where their heroes wouldn't have been able to participate in World War II.  There's always something a bit garish about these men and women in brightly colored tights flying around and knocking bad guys silly.  But when the bad guys are Nazis, and the superheroes are fighting alongside American soldiers...it's just a little over the top.

Still fun to see these characters again though, and I hope the series picks up again soon.

The Cup Is Only Reviewing Comics: The Unwritten #11

I said I'd review the next issue of The Unwritten when it came out, so here it is.  I've been a big fan of Mike Carey's writing since I read his series Lucifer, which was probably the only Sandman spin-off to hold a candle to Neil Gaiman's masterpiece.  I get the feeling when I read each issue of The Unwritten that I'm reading something really important.  That when all is said and done with this series, people are going to consider it one of the classics.  You can never be sure about that, and this series is really still just getting rolling at issue 11, but I can't shake the feeling that this is one of the most important comic books being written today.

As I said before, the story is ostensibly about a guy whose father wrote a series of novels (basically the Harry Potter novels) about a boy wizard named Tommy Taylor, which was also his son's name, and the real-life Tommy Taylor is gradually discovering that he may actually be the character his father wrote somehow brought to life, and he actually has magical powers of some sort, which he is slowly learning to use.  As the issues have progressed, though, the series has proven to be about much more than that basic premise.  It's about the relationship between fiction and reality, which, as a writer, is a topic I find supremely fascinating.

In the two-part story that concluded in this issue, Tommy and his friends (who are suspiciously similar to Ron and Hermione) have found themselves in a world that seems to be the ghost of a Nazi-era German city, and have met a ghostly version of Joseph Goebbels, who becomes more real and solid the more they acknowledge his existence.  Eventually, Tommy has to deal with the physical manifestation of a story called Jud Süß, which I had never heard of before, but was apparently originally a novel written in 1925 by a German Jew (Lion Feuchtwanger) based on the life of another German Jew (Joseph Süß Oppenheimer), and was the story of a man who had done bad things but ultimately found redemption in his religion.  When the Nazis came to power, Geobbels changed the story and turned it into an antisemitic propaganda film.  So in this issue of The Unwritten, the story, Jud Süß, has manifested physically in this ghost world, and it has become unstable, literally turned inside out, by Goebbels' mangling of it.  But Tommy discovers that through his power, he can right what's wrong with the story, and make it become coherent again.

The series seems to be almost as much about history as it is about fiction, as it's already delved into the past once before this in a story about Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain.  I can't really say what points this series is trying to make yet, but I'm pretty sure they're important, and I'm definitely going to keep reading it, and recommending it to anyone and everyone.

The Cup Is Only Reviewing Comics: Secret Six #19

I can't remember if Deadshot had a personality before Gail Simone or not, but it's irrelevant because he is now Adam Baldwin as Jayne from Firefly...as Deadshot.  Which is awesome.  I think Gail Simone may be my favorite writer in all of comic books right now.  This book has been nothing short of great from the beginning, and this particular issue was no exception.  I also love the way she's writing Ragdoll.  The bit on the first page is the perfect example, so I'll just quote it.

"Oh, forgive me, Thomas.  I was thinking what it's like to be abandoned and tortured and abused and forgotten.  When your life is so worthless that your only degraded value to anyone is when your pain gives them amusement, and the person entrusted to care for you sees you as more disposable than used tissue.  But then I thought, "I wonder what it's like to ^%$# a butterfly?"

The bit where Black Alice hands him the note that says "Do you like me? Check one...[]yes []no" is also great.

Then there's the last page, which is one of the best cliffhangers I've seen in quite a while.  To completely spoil it....I'M SPOILING NOW! STOP READING IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED...

Catman's son has been kidnapped, and the kidnapper has called him on the phone to tell him that they're going to kill the boy no matter what he does, but they'll give the boy one year of pleasant life for each member of the Secret Six that Catman kills in the next five minutes.

I've been engaging in some debates about what to do in various hypothetical moral dilemmas online recently, none of which were remotely plausible scenarios, and this one would go right along with them.  Of course, this is comic book reality, so it's as plausible as anything else they do.  As to what the right choice is in the dilemma, it seems to me that most moral systems would have Catman do nothing.  If they're eventually going to kill the kid anyway, why kill someone else too just to prolong it?

But, of course, there's the possibility of eventually tracking down the kidnappers, and Catman is a master tracker.  But he may only get the chance if he kills a member of his team and buys that year for himself to try.  And, since this is not a super-hero book, but rather a super-straddling-that-line-between-hero-and-villain book, there's a real possibility that he will just take one or more of his teammates out, which is one of the things that makes this book so exciting.

The Cup Is Only Reviewing Comics: Joe the Barbarian #2

Well, this was quite an improvement over issue 1.  Not that issue 1 was bad, it was just so short.  Barely anything happened in it, and there were barely any words in it.  It took me about two minutes to read.  Stuff actually happens in issue 2.

Joe the Barbarian is an eight-issue miniseries Grant Morrison is writing for Vertigo.  It's got a great concept.  It's about a diabetic boy who goes into insulin shock in his bedroom, and starts hallucinating that he's in a fantastic realm populated by the action figures on the floor of the room.  And his attempt to deal with the situation in the real world is paralleled by his adventure in the fantasy world.  It's a much more appropriate venue for Morrison's random nonsense than, say, Final Crisis was.  Not to turn this into a rant about Morrison, but I've really been feeling like every story he's written recently has made less sense than the last.  Possibly going all the way back to Animal Man, which may have been the last time he wrote something that you could actually follow without having to read it several times.  Not that I didn't enjoy his runs on Doom Patrol, JLA, X-Men, and other books, but he certainly doesn't make his work very easy to read.  Actually, that may make the lack of wordiness in Joe the Barbarian a plus.  At least it doesn't take you very long to read it two or three times.  Although I'm not sure you'd get a whole lot more out of this on subsequent readings.  I feel much the same way I did about Invisibles: the stuff that makes sense makes sense on the first read.  The rest of it will never make sense no matter how many times you read it.  Fortunately, it seems like there's more of the former than the latter in Joe, which was decidedly not the case in Invisibles.

I'm a little worried about the fact that we're now a quarter of the way through the series, and still barely anything has happened, but I still have a feeling that this is going to be good.  I hope I'm right.  Vertigo certainly seems to be maintaining its place as the home of the best comics.  I can't recommend Mike Carey's The Unwritten enough.  It's easily my favorite comic I'm reading right now.  Perhaps I'll review the next issue when it comes out.  The book's about this guy who was the inspiration for a series of novels his father wrote about a Harry Potter type character, and the guy is gradually discovering that he may actually be the character and have magic powers and stuff.  It's pretty cool, although I have no idea how they're not getting sued.  Maybe they figure if J.K. Rowling ever says anything about it, they'll just point out that Harry Potter is basically a ripoff of the character from Vertigo's Books of Magic.

Speaking of getting sued, how the hell is Morrison able to get away with putting toy versions of characters like Captain Picard and Snake Eyes into Joe the Barbarian?  I know DC doesn't own the comics rights to those characters.

The Cup Is Only Reviewing Comics: Angel #30

New blog feature: comic book reviews.

Angel #30 is the third issue written by Bill Willingham of Fables fame.  I've never read Fables, but I've always heard good things about it, so I was looking forward to Willingham's run on Angel, but I'm a bit underwhelmed so far.  He's introduced an intriguing story idea: Angel has been kidnapped by people who want to use him to turn people into vampires.  And I'm interested to see where that's going, but there are some things about the way he writes that just grate on me.  The biggest thing is the dialogue.  Sometimes it's okay, especially when he's writing a character I'm not already familiar with, but most of the time, and especially when he's writing one of the long-established characters, there's just something about the way he makes them talk that sounds...wrong.  Like, Spike wouldn't say these words in this order that you wrote him to say here.  It just doesn't work.  Basically, he just doesn't have that great a grasp on the established characters.  He seems to be doing the best with Angel, but even with him, there's some strangeness.

Then there was this thing he was doing in issues 28 and 29 where he'd have everybody in a big group, and he'd have them each say something.  And they wouldn't actually be talking to each other, they'd just each be saying something.  They'd all more-or-less be talking about the same thing, but none of the lines were in direct response to any of the other lines.  It was the weirdest thing.  Thankfully, in 30, he actually has them talking to each other, but I think part of the problem is that the cast is way too big at this point.  There's no reason to have all these people sitting around together all the time.  I don't know whose idea it was to bring Kate back, but she's kind of useless.  And the two forgettable characters who were introduced by the previous writer could stand to go too.  I don't even remember their names.  One of them is an angel and the other's a girl who turns into a cat or something?  Yeah, why are they still there?  And is Gwen still hanging around too?  I can't even remember.  She wasn't in 30, but I feel like she might have been in the previous issues.  Angel, Spike, Gunn, Connor, Illyria, and George is a big enough cast.  Really, George could go too, except I like George.  Or at least I did when Brian Lynch was writing him.  Now he's this not-quite-himself character, the way they all are.

Basically, I miss Lynch.  His stuff got confusing sometimes, but at least he knew how to write these characters.

Humanity

In my Screenwriting class, we've been talking about all of the things that go into writing a screenplay: story, character, plot, dialogue, etc.  One of the things that's been mentioned a couple times as a necessary element is humanity.  I think it's interesting that humanity is something people consider a necessary element of a screenplay.  And not just of a screenplay, but of any story, really.  Every story contains humanity.

The idea has been floating around in the back of my mind for years now to try to write a story that's completely devoid of humanity.  Maybe a story about planets orbiting stars in a completely uninhabited part of the universe.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if I wrote this story about these planets, I'd basically be turning them into characters.  I'd be humanizing them.  I'd be injecting humanity into this supposedly humanity-less story.

So I thought maybe if I told it without any sort of emotion.  It would just be a dry presentation of the facts.  Sort of like an astronomy text, I suppose.  But, leaving aside the question of whether or not that would even constitute a story, there would still be some element of humanity in it.  It would be told in a human language.  By a human.  It is impossible for us to produce anything that doesn't have some element of humanity in it, because everything we produce is produced by a human.  Even if we were to produce a computer that could write a story.  The computer would be the product of humanity, and thus, so would the story.

So I've concluded that it's impossible to write a story devoid of humanity.

Instead, I think I'm going to write a story about a writer who tries to write a story that's devoid of humanity.

Web Site Design

It's a good thing we don't have class tomorrow.  I really haven't gotten very far with my web site design assignment yet.  Although that may be because I had Pip working on it:

She quickly became distracted by Q-tips, which she inexplicably loves:

I'm determined that this will not become a post-cute-pictures-of-your-pet blog, so to get it out of my system, here's one more:

Okay, that's it.

Inglourious Basterds

We watched the beginning of Inglourious Basterds in film class last week, and I rented it and watched the rest over the weekend.  I didn't remember being very interested in it from the previews, but the beginning of the film was really engaging and I had to see the rest.  I enjoyed it quite a bit, but there were a few things about it that bothered me.  In talking about those things, I'm going to completely spoil the film for anyone who hasn't seen it, so if you haven't seen it and you don't want to be spoiled, stop reading now.

Continue for spoilers...

really a cry

Here's what it looks like outside my window right now...

Snowy. La la la (shout out to my sister, who is probably not reading this).

Anyway, our blog posts for this week are supposed to be about anything, so this first one is about snow.  Oh, also we were supposed to put a picture on the blog.  I put three.  There's this one with the snow, and there's my profile picture, and there's the one at the top right where I'm filling a cup.  Astute readers will note that it's not a cup, but rather a glass.  Astuter readers will note that it has the image from an album cover on it.  Astutest readers will be able to name that album.  They will then win the prize of being awesome.

Sluggy Freelance

The first two sites I wrote about were old sites that I've known about for years, so I figure why break the trend. Sluggy Freelance is the oldest site of the three. It's a webcomic, and it's one of the oldest and longest-running webcomics out there. It's been around since 1997. I've been reading it myself since 2002. It started out as a gag strip with pretty crude art, then found its footing with some pretty good pop culture parodies. As the years went by, the characters got a bit more fleshed out, and the stories got a bit more complex, and now, 12 years into its run, it's laden with complicated interweaving plots and a ton of backstory.

In fact, it's almost difficult for me to imagine at this point how someone could come to Sluggy Freelance never having read any of it and get into it. You can't really read today's strip and know anything about what's going on if you haven't read any of it before. When I started reading it in 2002, at the recommendation of a friend, there were five years of previous strips for me to read, and I was unemployed at the time so I didn't have much to do besides read it, and it still took me weeks to get caught up. I don't know if anyone would put the effort in to read 12 years of old strips. Maybe if they had a really persistent friend recommending it.

Like the Chapman brothers, Sluggy Freelance cartoonist Pete Abrams has been able to make a living by selling merchandise on his website. He's cultivated a pretty loyal fanbase over the years, and they've supported him. I remember a few years back he ran into tough times for a while where it looked like the merchandise alone wasn't going to be enough to support his family. Then he instituted Defenders of the Nifty, a new part of the site, which people would have to pay if they wanted to access, that would give them extra content that wasn't available on the free version of the site. That seems to have been successful enough for him to continue not having to go out and look for a nine-to-five.

I want to try and figure out what it is that's made the three sites I've talked about this week so successful. I think they've all been fairly lucky to some degree. They have all relied on the viral nature of word-of-mouth on the web. Like I said in my previous post, with e-mail and search engines, lots of people can find out about a site very quickly. But there are a ton of sites out there that most people have never heard of anyway, so there's definitely some amount of luck involved here. But I think the more important thing is that all three of these sites have good creative content that appeals to a lot of people. There are probably a ton of sites that a lot of people have heard of, but just looked at once and then forgot about. Whereas these sites, people checked them out and remembered them, and kept going back to them, and told their friends about them. And the reason for that is because these sites are producing a good product that people really enjoy. There are probably a lot of things you need to do to stand out on the web, but that's definitely one of the most important.

Homestar Runner

Today I'm going to talk about another site I've known about for years and years, which also happens to be another site with funny cartoons.

I wonder if there's anybody on the net these days who hasn't heard of Homestar Runner. Mike and Matt Chapman have been making cartoons starring their continually-growing cast of original characters for over a decade now. A friend first showed me the site back in 2001, and I've been hooked since then. I'm also one of the many, many people who have contributed to making it possible for the Chapman brothers to support themselves selling Homestar Runner merchandise.

It's hard to pin down what it is that makes Homestar Runner work. They started out trying to write stories for kids, and I think they quickly decided to open it up to something anyone of any age could enjoy. Although I think there are a lot of references that are specifically geared to people who grew up in the 80s and 90s, who probably make up a large portion of web-surfers anyway.

The big thing Homestar Runner and Angry Alien have in common is that both sites' content consists mainly of Flash animations. Cartoons created with Adobe Flash have been a big thing on the web, and even on TV, for the last ten years, and those two sites have both capitalized on the popularity of the medium.

I'm not sure how Homestar Runner got to be as popular as it has. I think word of mouth is a big part of it. Like I said, I first heard about it from a friend, and I'd bet a lot of other people did. And on the web, word of mouth is a much stronger force. People can e-mail something they like to everyone they know. Search engines will pick something up and tons of people will stumble across it that way. Blogs, like this one, will link to something, and then more people will discover it.

Homestar Runner is probably one of the best sites out there in terms of creative presentation and representing the creators' work. It's a lot of fun to play around on the site because all the links are part of the interactive Flash animations. The links to the store are obvious but unobtrusive. They do a really good job, and I encourage anyone who hasn't seen it before (if there is anyone like that) to check it out.

Angry Alien

Welcome to my Electronic Publishing blog!  This here's the place where I talk about Electronic Publishing thingies!  And complete assignments for my Electronic Publishing class!  It's fun!  This I command!

This week, I will be writing three entries about web sites that do a particularly good job of presenting a creative narrative and representing a writer and his or her work.  Today's entry is about an old web site that I first discovered years ago, but it was the first thing I thought of when I read the assignment.

Angry Alien Productions gives us 30-second reenactments of movies performed by cartoon bunnies.  I don't know where that idea came from, but it works really well.  30 seconds is a great length for these.  It's fun to see how they cram all the major plot points and classic lines from the movies into that small a time frame, and because it takes so little time to watch one, you feel compelled to watch another one, and pretty soon you've spent quite a while on the site watching a whole bunch of them.  Also, the bunnies are cute and have cute little bunny voices.

There are also a few other features at the bottom of the site, my favorite of which is Amy's Diary, which features animated readings of third-grade diary entries.  I think the voice work is what I like best about it.  There's something really funny about adults doing dramatic readings of a third-grade diary and keeping spelling errors like "dear dairy" and "ect, ect, ect" intact.  Actually it sounds kind of mean when I put it that way, but of course the diary belongs to one of the people involved in making the site, so it's okay.

The creator of the site, Jennifer Shiman, is primarily a cartoonist rather than a writer, but she certainly did a fair amount of writing to script those 30-second reenactments, so hopefully this counts as a writer featuring her work on the web.  It's obviously been a successful piece of promotion for her.  Her work is featured on Starz, and the site has gotten tons of hits and press.  There are also merchandise links at the top and bottom of the page, which seem like pretty good places to put them to me.  They're not annoyingly in your face, but you definitely notice them.  I don't know for sure, but I feel confident in estimating that lots and lots of people have bought shirts with the cute little bunnies on them.  All in all, I think this site is an excellent example of both a creative product and good self-promotion.