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...