COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (11 April 2022)

Posted on April 11, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

Because old crime series are also cool, this week’s reminder that comics can be awesome is a tribute to the amusing covers of 1940s’ and 1950s’ Real Clue Crime Stories:

 ZolneJohn PrenticeJohn Prenticecrime comics John PrenticeDan ZolnerowichZolne Rowitchold crime comiccrime comiccrime comics

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Catching up with crime comics – part 1

Posted on April 7, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

In the past decade, the small screen has excelled in engrossingly dramatizing capitalism, from the inner workings of corporations in Mad Men, Succession, and Halt and Catch Fire to the parallels – and connections – to organized crime in Better Call Saul, Ozark, and StartUp. Martin Scorsese, after shooting stockbrokers like a variation of gangsters in The Wolf of Wall Street, depicted the history of American big business, racketeering, and political power as one and the same in The Irishman. To be sure, the notion of crime syndicates as basically companies and conglomerates isn’t new… In cinema, for instance, it can be found in classic film noir (Force of Evil), in old B-movies (Flight to Hong Kong), and in avant-garde thrillers (Point Blank). Yet it fascinates me that a growing interest in the dynamics of modern work and business models has led to such a stimulating boost in crime fiction.

That the overworld has become the new underworld isn’t an entirely shocking development, since crime yarns have their own aristocratic lineage (as Ernest Mandel put it in his thought-provoking book Delightful Murder, the fair-play mysteries perfected by Agatha Christie already signalled their origins, as the art of the clean subterfuge is the quintessence of British upper-class ideology). That said, you don’t have to be a cultural historian to look at the 2008 global financial crisis as an obvious turning point in terms of drawing attention to the overlap between legal and illegal forms of swindling and extorsion (it didn’t take long for veteran director Johnnie To to poignantly capture this intersection, in Life Without Principle).

As far as comic books go, these are also prolific times, with creators putting interesting spins on various storytelling traditions. With that in mind, I thought it’d be fun to do a balance of the crime scene in comics and see how they’ve been tapping into the current zeitgeist, from cybercrime to the gig economy. So this is the first of a new irregular series of posts catching up with recent crime comics.

newburn 1     second chances cover     chicken devil cover

One the best two ongoing crime series I’ve been keeping up with is A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance, which follows a man who wanders into that most neoliberal of the genre’s tropes: freelance contract killers, whose entrepreneurship apparently has found a new platform in the dark web, giving it a particularly contemporary spin (in addition to the fact that this is a rare comic where some of the background characters actually do wear disposable masks when getting on a bus).

That A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance hit the ground running isn’t much of a surprise, since it’s written by Rick Remender, an expert at grabbing readers with kickass first issues (even if he isn’t always able to sustain the momentum later in his series). Part of Remender’s talent involves shaping the material to suit the strengths of different artists in what I assume are pretty tight collaborations. Here, he works with André Lima Araújo to craft an exceptionally slow-burn, quasi-wordless thriller that resembles a meticulous storyboard for a Johnnie To flick, gorgeously colored by Chris O’Halloran and ingeniously lettered by the great Rus Wooton. More than the subject matter, then, so far this is a comic to read for the sheer pleasure of reading… and not in the sense of reading words, but in the sense of watching visual storytelling progressively unfold.

rick remendercrime comicA Righteous Thirst for Vengeance #1

The other best new series in the field has been Newburn, which approaches the business-like dimension of organized crime from another direction altogether by having New York gangsters come to an understanding and basically establish their own parallel investigative branch of (out)law enforcement. Easton Newburn is a detective on retainer to all the major crime families, called in to clarify matters whenever an unclear incident threatens to escalate into gang war, with the mutual understanding that nobody touches him (‘I’m a U.N. inspector wandering through a war zone.’). In other words, the starting point is an appealing fantasy about walking between legal worlds and pursuing leads wherever your reasoning might take you, exploring hidden corners of society with little regard for consequences.

So far, each issue has focused on solving standalone mysteries, thus making for a rewarding monthly read (there are also curious ongoing backups, first one by Nadia Shammas and Ziyed Yusuf and now one by Casey Gilly and Soo Lee). However, you can tell creators Chip Zdarsky and Jacob Phillips are playing a long game here, establishing recurring characters and conflicts that are bound to pay off further down the line, when Newburn inevitably loses his immunity status and is forced to deal with retaliations from all sides. Hell, the series’ pitch and execution are so neat in this one that I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before it gets adapted for a show…

crime comicsNewburn #1

In terms of graphic novels, last year gave us Fantagraphics’ English edition of Bastien Vivès’, Florent Ruppert’s, and Jérôme Mulot’s The Grande Odalisque, a hilarious French caper (from 2012) about a team of women hired to steal the titular painting from the Louvre… but they keep getting sidetracked by romantic troubles and by a bonkers subplot about a drug war in Mexico. It’s a sexy book full of acrobatic action – including plenty of shattered windows and spectacular motorbike chases – and with a definite exploitation vibe, so I was all over this!

I’m a fan of Ruppert & Mulot, whose quasi-absurd non sequiturs and off-color comedy tend to go hand in hand with an impressive command of the medium (notably, their Portrait of a Drunk, with Olivier Schrauwen, is one of the most gorgeous-looking adventure comics in recent memory). For instance, look at everybody’s amusing, yet subtle, body language in this scene:

crime comicruppert & MulotThe Grande Odalisque

(The sequel, Olympia, has just come out, but I haven’t managed to get a hold of it yet!)

2021 also saw the publication of The Mess We’re In, the final volume of the four-book series November, which follows three women whose paths cross on a night when a group of crooked cops’ side business goes terribly, terribly wrong. The story gets pretty gritty, but it’s made smoother by Elsa Charretier’s pleasingly cartoony style (she appears to be channeling Darwyn Cooke, which is appropriate for this material), even if Matt Hollingsworth’s unnaturalistic color choices are somewhat sickly and Kurt Ankeny’s squiggly letters not always easy to decipher.

Matt Fraction’s script has a puzzle-like structure, with snapshots of flashbacks and flashforwards cutting through while chapters zoom in on different characters’ POVs in non-sequential order (some of them take place simultaneously, so you have to flip back and forth between sections to match events and conversations). Beside the Tarantino-esque entertainment value of putting the pieces together in your mind, November’s fragmentation cleverly conveys the limited perspectives of each cast member, placing them in frustration- and anxiety-inducing positions. This device, coupled with the fact that key aspects of the crime ring are kept vague even from the readers, reflects the noirish notion that we’re all little pawns at the mercy of larger forces, caught in a complex web we don’t fully understand…

matt fractionNovember: The Girl on the Roof

Although soaked in bloody shootouts, The Mess We’re In couldn’t match the awesome chase scene of November’s previous volume, but it did wrap up the narrative in a satisfying way, with fitting payoffs for each of the main characters.

Meanwhile, one of last year’s most promising comic-writing debuts was Ricky Mammone, whose mini-series Second Chances (which has just been collected) took the high concept of a guy who helps criminals forge their deaths and get a new identity – much like Breaking Bad’s Ed ‘The Disappearer’ Galbraith – and spun it into a Milligan-esque labyrinthine yarn about regret, redemption, and existential angst. Although ultimately falling under the weight of its ambition, Second Chances delivered an action-packed, quick-paced thriller spiced up with eccentrically costumed assassins (the Kabuki Twins!) and a subplot about chemically-induced amnesia, blowing up neo-noir motifs to a point that cannot help but bring to mind Sin City.

The result is hardly perfect, but this is just the sort of near-miss (or, as George Carlin preferred, near-hit) that appeals to me, perhaps because the whole thing looks like an audition tape for Batman comics, especially as artist Max Bertolini fills the backgrounds with gargoyles, zeppelins, and objects from various eras, suggesting this story could comfortably take place in Gotham…

crime comicsSecond Chances #1

Speaking of wild mini-series, the Breaking Bad influence was even more pronounced in Chicken Devil, where a guy finds out his chicken business is being used to smuggle heroin, witnesses an attack on his family, and eventually embarks on a deadly rampage of vigilante justice… dressed in a chicken suit!

For the most part, Brian Buccellato’s writing appears little more than serviceable – and perhaps trying too hard to be cool – but the final couple of twists totally won me over, playing with genre conventions in quite a funny way. Mind you, even without it, this comic would be worth checking out thanks to artist Hayden Sherman and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, who craft a truly vivid, over-the-top reading experience through offbeat layouts, bold color choices, and word balloons with all sorts of weird shapes, sizes, and placements…

crime comicscomicsChicken Devil #2

If you prefer a more conservative look, SAF comics has published translations of the first two albums of Aloma – namely The Treasure of the Thrill Seeker and its follow-up, Pope’s Head – about a Catalonian art trafficker who keeps getting entangled in two-fisted adventures where a bunch of shady figures compete against each other to find precious antiques, not unlike The Maltese Falcon (which the text explicitly acknowledges). Although the original works are quite recent (the first book came in 2018), the whole thing has a classic Eurocomic vibe in terms of both plot and visuals.

Veteran Spanish creator Alfonso Font is completely at home here: his track record stretches back to the 1960s and he has built an enviable career doing genre work not only in Spain, but also for British and American publishers (Klaus Janson credits him as a major influence), so while you shouldn’t expect anything groundbreaking, what you get is pretty solid storytelling, in an escapist fluff sort of way, as long as you don’t mind the occasional cheesecake (Font goes out of his way to establish that the titular character is smoldering hot).

AlomaThe Treasure of the Thrill Seeker

Catalonia has churned out its fair share of offbeat mystery yarns, most notably the amusingly witty novels of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Eduardo Mendoza (by contrast, what I’ve read of the Andalusian Antonio Muñoz Molina is much more melancholic). Font isn’t exactly in their league, but he knows how to navigate this territory, stealing from the best while updating a classic set-up into our contemporary world of climate crisis, war on terror, and transnational money laundering schemes.

That’s it for today. I hope to do another round of these in a couple of weeks!

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (4 April 2022)

Posted on April 4, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

A dazzling reminder that comic book covers can be awesome.

Sam WeberJelena Kevic-DjurdjevicKris Anka Joelle Jonesmike del mundo
Mikel Janiniron fist
Javier PulidoWes CraigDustin Nguyen

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On Tunnels

Posted on March 31, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

When I chose The Department of Truth as Gotham Calling’s 2021 Book of the Year, I made a point of stressing that I still hadn’t managed to read Rutu Modan’s Tunnels, which was bound to be one of my favorite comics published last year. After all, I loved the mordant, unsentimental-yet-humanistic tone of Exit Wounds and The Property, which somehow deliver highly enjoyable narratives around grim issues (a suicide bombing, the Holocaust). Both of them seamlessly weave together intricate plotting and evolving character dynamics with several juxtaposed layers of political and existential meaning without sacrificing the story in the service of a closed-ended message.

And, sure enough, I found Tunnels yet another phenomenal book by a creator who is yet to disappoint me – and who once again mercilessly pits petty, flawed individuals against large historical processes. However, rather than analyze Modan’s habitual craft and recurring motifs (family secrets, self-absorption, unsettled national identity), today I just want to share a few impressions on what makes her latest opus stand out from what came before.

rutu modan

Translated from Hebrew by Ishai Mishory, Tunnels revolves around an archaeological dig in search of the Ark of the Covenant that gradually builds into a series of interconnected conflicts – and not just between Israelis and Palestinians, but also between zealots and non-zealots from both sides… not to mention the fierce competition among academics in their quests for tenure.

This premise could’ve lent itself to efforts to preach or shock, but Rutu Modan is playing by her own rules. Her approach is consistently amusing, often venturing into satire before culminating in explosive slapstick (including a flying cow). The result feels closer to the darkly comedic spirit of Elia Suleiman’s film Divine Intervention than to the somber dramatization of the HBO crime show Our Boys (to name just a couple of brilliant works about the sociopolitical tensions in Modan’s native Israel).

modan

There was dry humor running through the author’s previous books – and even some outright hilarious moments here and there – but Tunnels is, for the most part, a full-on screwball farce… and a twisted one at that! No doubt drawing on her experience as editor of the Hebrew edition of MAD magazine, this time around Modan tones down nuanced characterization in favor of witty dialogue, caricatural behavior, and a cast with grotesque personalities, like the colonel who mounts a military operation as part of his sons’ Bar Mitzvah or the antiquity dealer who complains that everybody lies to him except ISIS (you can see him above, hiding in a sarcophagus for sitcom-y reasons). All the characters are despicable in some way (including Nili, the protagonist), although their depiction is typically non-judgmental.

Likewise, while the art resembles Rutu Modan’s signature version of ligne claire, Tunnels is way cartoonier than its predecessors, with rounder eyes, distorted facial expressions, hairs raised in astonishment, and characters occasionally bursting into stylized tears. I wonder if this is Modan compensating for the story’s depressing setting in the Israeli-Palestinian border (making it more digestible through unrealistic visuals) or just her having a blast as she cathartically slaughters one sacred cow after another, subverting the seriousness that permeates even the most absurd ideas circulating in her country by subjecting them to overblown visual gags. It’s as if Joe Sacco suddenly decided to tackle this conflict, not through the respectful journalistic approach of Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, but through the caustic style of his earlier, trippier comics (the ones collected in Notes From a Defeatist).

israel

Along with the madcap designs, there’s a multilayered mise-en-scène, often staging simultaneous events in the foreground and background, thus creating a sense of constant movement and semi-chaos (as you can see in the sequence below).

Regardless, my biggest laughs didn’t come from the exaggerated drawings and rhythm, but from the *lack* of passionate reactions, i.e. from the viciously desensitized, matter-of-fact attitude with which everybody seems to deal with the violent occupation and resistance around them. It’s to Modan’s credit that, even though Tunnels is a pitch-black comedy, it never appears to go for easy shock value – the humor derives smoothly from ironic situations that play with the perversity of the real-world context, like when a gang of Zionists have to stop the construction of a settlement in order to obtain a bulldozer for Nili’s archaeological expedition.

palestine

Wild comedy isn’t the only innovation in terms of tone. Rutu Modan’s aesthetics have often been compared to Hergé’s (thus perversely reappropriating the imagery of works that occasionally traded in antisemitic stereotypes). Curiously, although Tunnels is comparatively less beholden to that pictorial style, the narrative feels much closer to Tintin’s yarns of intrigue and adventure. In fact, while Exit Wounds filtered elements of mystery and romance through a peculiar, understated sensibility – and The Property did the same for family melodrama – Tunnels comes off as much more of a pure genre piece (which is not to say you can’t hear Modan’s distinctive voice all over the material).

And yet, Tunnels doesn’t force an intertextual reading. There are no character types or specific set pieces borrowed from Hergé, just the *sort* of situations that could’ve been featured in The Adventures of Tintin (like the sequence in which a character ingeniously figures out a way out of a cave by drawing on historical knowledge). Likewise, Modan manages to do a whole book about people with guns searching for the Ark of the Covenant without bringing up Indiana Jones a single time. Refreshingly, her dialogue is less with western popular culture than with the myths informing the violence in her country.

When she does go for pastiche, it’s not of films or comics, but of much older illustrations:

modan

Then, of course, there’s the politics. On the surface, the text seems uninterested in preaching for either side – it just takes racism, fanaticism, and paranoia for granted, without feeling the need to explicitly condemn or comment upon them. Rutu Modan frames most of the story from the perspective of Jewish characters, but the book is no more or less sympathetic towards them than towards the Arabs, portraying the radicals on both camps as a bunch of goofy kids.

Not that this is one of those symmetrical tales about how there’s good and evil people everywhere. Like I said, practically every character comes off as selfish and manipulative, but most of them are multifaceted, so you may end up feeling more lenient towards some members of the cast than others.

Once you start to dig (see what I did there?), you’ll find a more provocative subtext. For one thing, the whole excavation is brazenly allegorical, as the clashes over ownership of the tunnels clearly mirror the clashes over ownership of the territories above them….

israel palestinepalestine

The conflict over ownership isn’t reduced to this heavy-handed metaphor. Rutu Modan, who already explored the issue of property in her earlier books (most obviously, in The Property), also develops a whole subplot about a dispute for academic credit that further illustrates how subjective this topic can be. Who should claim a finding? The person who did the groundwork research or the one who turned the interpretations into books and articles? Who can own a tunnel? The person who dug it or the one in charge of conceiving the dig? And, yes, to whom belongs a piece of land? To the ones who occupied it first, most recently, or the longest?

The thoughtful afterword expands on the book’s themes, interestingly bridging them with those of The Department of Truth (which, I guess, denotes my own interests). Against today’s general loss of agreement over reality, exacerbated in the pandemic, Modan proposes more fiction that doesn’t claim to tell the truth – unlike the stories feeding religious strife in her region – but which instead tries to suture the narratives of different peoples into complex, turbulent plots full of contradictions and characters that do both terrible and wonderful things. After all, as any comic book fan knows, conflicting stories ‘can happily coexist in our brains,’ even if they haven’t always been able to coexist in the material world.

israel

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (28 March 2022)

Posted on March 28, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

Your weekly reminder that comic book covers can be awesome. More Strange Adventures!

Gil KaneMurphy AndersonGil KaneSilver Age comicsmurphy andersoncaptain cometgil kanemurphy andersonsci-fi comicsmurphy anderson

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A few loose thoughts on Matt Reeves’ The Batman

Posted on March 24, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

So, I finally went to see The Batman…

batman 2022

Overall, I thought the movie was a baffling mess, although not entirely without merit. I kept trying to like it, but it kept fighting back. I’m not going to write a cogent essay about it today, though, just some very loose notes that occurred to me as I was negotiating my conflicted reaction…

The script has a lot going for it, actually. I’ll point out some missteps below, but the general approach is just what I wanted: the Dark Knight investigating an elaborate murder mystery with various familiar rogues in different functions (suspects, wild cards, temporary allies), with shades of film noir. Not only is this right up my alley in terms of what I dig in a Batman story, but it is something original on the big screen, where even Christopher Nolan’s intricate plotting downplayed the World’s Greatest Detective angle.

Since this is such a cool and integral side of the franchise, it makes sense to go there, especially as DC/Warner and Marvel/Disney have been gradually expanding the limits of what mainstream audiovisual superheroes can be, ranging from the grey behemoth that is Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League to the lighthearted teen shows Supergirl and Stargirl (which are surprisingly faithful to the shmaltzy tone and colorful content of the original comics, complete with a barrage of geeky DCU cameos), not to mention the metafictional experimentation of WandaVision…

The choice of doing a relatively grounded, out-of-continuity tale set early in Batman’s career automatically evokes some awesome comics from the Year One and Legends of the Dark Knight lines. And damn it if Matt Reeves (who co-wrote and directed) doesn’t fully commit to this approach for a couple of hours, at least until the movie completely loses its way towards the end, in the anti-climactic final act.

The story is twisty and twisted, with the serial killer investigation turning into a conspiracy thriller revolving around Gotham City’s corruption and politics. Although lacking any depth whatsoever, The Batman provides many of the beats and joys associated with this sort of pulp material: accessing an underworld of crime and vice, struggling to keep up with the confusing maze of relationships and revelations, recognizing variations of the genre’s clichés… Reeves even opens the film with his own contribution to the longstanding trope of killing Gotham’s mayors!

The fact that I appreciated the general story so much, however, only made the rest of the experience even more frustrating.

Dark KnightBatman #318

I know I’m in the minority here and that’s fine, but Matt Reeves’ direction really didn’t do it for me at all. Between the engulfing darkness and the awkward framing, I found it difficult to even see what was going on a lot of the time, despite a few stand-out moments (like the debut of the cool-looking batwings or a fight sporadically illuminated by gunfire). For the most part, the pacing was off, the emotions fell flat, and the soundtrack was overbearing, even if the choice of basing the score on a Nirvana song is both captivatingly bizarre and eerily suited to the movie’s teen angst motif, subliminally suggesting Bruce Wayne’s own suicidal drive.

Visually, I expected more from the guy who did the recent, stunning-looking Planet of the Apes trilogy. Reeves tries so damn hard to shove the Caped Crusader and the Riddler into a relentlessly dour, gritty pastiche of David Fincher’s Seven and Zodiac – with some Saw thrown in for good measure – that the result often seems unintentionally silly. (Come to think of it, Fincher would make a great Batman director!)

Batman narratives have always required a balancing act between earnest atmosphere and embracing the outlandish. Unable to pull it off, The Batman desperately compensates by soaking Gotham City in lots and lots and lots of rain.

azzarelloBatman #620

Another key problem I had with The Batman was, well, Batman himself. Robert Pattinson’s emo performance somehow managed to give us the most humorless Batman on screen (even in the grim Snyderverse, Ben Affleck got to play with the character’s dark wit). I guess he’s meant to feel broken, but he feels empty instead, which seriously undermines the dramatic payoffs we were presumably supposed to get from his relationship with Gordon, Catwoman, and the memory of his dead parents.

Reeves and co-screenwriter Peter Craig appear to be confusing seriousness of purpose with jaded numbness. This Bruce Wayne looks so depressed that it’s a wonder he manages to get out of bed, not to mention go out onto the streets every night to beat up young delinquents (it could be a new take on the façade for his secret identity, except that he acts this way even when he’s alone). Even worse, he looks like a pretentious poseur. Pattinson, so charming in Tenet, is stuck with a frowny, one-note personality and isn’t even allowed to properly Bruce it up at parties.

Part of the allure of the Caped Crusader, for me at least, has always been the way he navigates different emotional levels, articulating his core determination and even his inner melancholia with the external roles he has to play, as both Batman and Bruce…

bruce wayneShadow of the Bat Annual #3

I like the fact that we finally got a reboot that doesn’t feel the need to show us Batman’s origin for the millionth time. Everybody knows it by now and it’s not that complicated anyway. And I don’t mind how odd the whole set up at the Wayne place is, with Bruce’s reclusive scientist and Alfred’s ill-defined status (he no longer does the cleaning: they’ve hired an old lady for that) clearly meant to simulate the home of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The set up at Wayne Manor has always been pretty weird, in a surreal gothic kind of way, so this is just another variation.

In fact, for all I care, The Batman can do whatever it wants with the property, as long as it’s interesting. But this is not interesting. I’m not saying Bruce Wayne has to pose as a wisecracking playboy, but there should be *something* there.

Honestly, I would’ve settled for a couple of small gestures hinting at the way Bruce never drops his guard, for example a nod to that fun tradition (which you can also see above) of getting everybody around him drunk while secretly keeping sober by pouring his drinks into the nearest vase:

alcoholThe Brave and the Bold #194
BruceGotham Adventures #15

It gets worse. Once again, filmmakers stick the Dark Knight in a blocky rubber suit, so instead of looking like an athletic ninja he comes off like a slow, clunky fighter without a trace of elegance.

And he’s not that great a detective either, which sort of defeats the purpose of throwing him into a mystery plot – the Riddler strings him along until the end, so Batman mostly solves clues that were designed to be clues (in fact, Alfred solves two of the puzzles for him), showing very little deductive reasoning. This is particularly odd because there is such an established, successful format when it comes to Riddler stories: the Caped Crusader tends to win when, instead of just following the breadcrumbs, he sidesteps the rules of the game and outsmarts his opponent.

Hell, The Batman’s Batman isn’t even much of a hero, in the end. By the time the movie is over, countless people have lost their lives and the Dark Knight awkwardly saved but a few. It’s such a defeatist take on the character that I kept wondering if we were still in the mind of the Clown Prince of Crime, continuing the fantasy he concocted in Todd Phillips’ Joker (which would help explain the uncomfortably long cameo near the end).

PenguinLegends of the Dark Knight #208

What about the Rogues’ Gallery? Reeves goes with a version of the Penguin I enjoy, i.e. the mobster-like owner of the Iceberg Lounge willing to play the various the sides against each other in order to make a profit, ultimately developing a precarious arrangement with the Dark Knight, who tacitly tolerates some of his criminal enterprises in exchange for information. And Colin Farrell, visually unrecognizable, plays him with gusto, especially in the scene where he correctly points out how terrible a detective Batman is (later, the Riddler makes the same valid point).

That said, the aggressive exchanges in the Penguin’s office – which by now have become a staple of the franchise – nevertheless lack the playfulness of the comics, where the two characters have settled into a sardonic groove over the years…

Batman PenguinBatman #622

John Turturro is spot-on as gangster Carmine Falcone, who could’ve stepped right out of Miller’s Crossing (where Turturro plays a different type of immoral lowlife, further down the ladder of organized crime).

And while Zoë Kravitz’s sinuous Selina Kyle, with her cat-like body language, doesn’t have the strong presence of a Michelle Pfeiffer or an Anne Hathaway, refreshingly she does get to display a broader emotional range than Pattinson’s eternally brooding Bruce Wayne – her Catwoman is compassionate, anxious, funny, mean, brave, sexy, bloodthirsty, and class-conscious (the latter trait earns her the movie’s best line, in the final conversation with Bruce).

RiddlerThe Long Halloween #11

This brings us to the Riddler, played by Paul Dano in a consistently unpleasant performance – deliberately so, I suspect, but ultimately more annoying than unsettling. At first, I thought the boring S&M mask was Reeves’ uninspired attempt to restrain the character’s colorfulness in line with the movie’s steadfast grimdark tone, but then Dano kept freaking out and chewing the scenery… His sudden vocal shifts are campy as hell, even before he starts singing to Batman (and even before the film surrenders to the Riddler’s appealing goofiness by having him sit next to a cappuccino with foam shaped like a question mark).

The characterization is quite puzzling (I wonder if it’s a thematic choice). In the comics, the Riddler sends riddles to Batman to prove he’s the smartest guy around. Many writers have suggested the Riddler has a specific pathology, so he cannot help but give himself away, even if he tries to hide his clues within complex charades. And there’s the whole ‘crime as artistic performance’ angle as well.

Yet this Riddler is not toying with Batman or trying to mislead him at all. I’m not sure why he set up all those games, other than some generic explanation about his deranged state of mind. And the Dark Knight seemed as lost as me, which is a shame, as the Riddler is up there as one of my favorite rogues and I normally get a kick out of his interactions with the Caped Crusader…

Batman RiddlerBatman: The Brave and the Bold #9

I get that the Riddler’s snuff videos and dark web message board army are meant to evoke all sorts of sinister real-world phenomena (terrorist incels? Capitol invaders? QAnon?), but The Batman doesn’t have anything to say about any of that beyond a general acceptance that a populist youtuber can easily mobilize his followers into acts of violence.

If anything, the story validates conspiracy theories about shadowy cabals pulling the strings of corrupt institutions, but even this would be giving the film too much credit. The Batman’s politics are as shallow as everything else in the movie. An underdeveloped subplot about a mayoral election is handled as an afterthought, leaving plenty of unanswered questions (did Bella Reál end up running unopposed?!).

I’m not saying we should’ve gotten a political treaty or a polemic, Dark Knight Rises-style, but if the film wanted to feel topical, then at least it could’ve recontextualized our world’s problems in some imaginative way, rather than just mimicking them. It has become a truism that the 21st-century rise of the superhero blockbuster has involved a close interaction with the ideological and technological zeitgeist. War on Terror imagery was all over the Nolan and Snyder movies, not to mention the first MCU entries (between Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man 2, it’s interesting to note that the main threats in the early MCU were not supernatural portals, but the military-industrial complex). Yet those works exploited our anxieties and fascinations in intriguing, if often problematic, ways by crafting strange, quasi-satirical fables. Then again, who knows, after a couple of years of Covid-induced isolation and in a time when western TV screens are filled with devastating images of Ukrainian orphans, perhaps The Batman‘s theme of lingering trauma will find its own resonance, regardless of the execution…

Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure there is a lot to squeeze in here, especially in terms of the recurrent debate about superhero fiction as adolescent power fantasy. It’s just that The Batman doesn’t seem to bring anything particularly new to the table in that regard. All the old arguments apply.

RiddlerSolo #7
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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (21 March 2022)

Posted on March 21, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

Just yet another reminder of how awesome comic book covers can be…

nick cardyRich Bucklerjoe kubertruss heathgil kaneJohn Rosenbergergil kaneMatt BakerJoe DoolinLou Fine

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If you like Miller’s Crossing…

Posted on March 17, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

I still haven’t seen The Batman, but here is a great crime movie that I can wholeheartedly recommend:

coen brothers

For fans of film noir, like me, few experiences can be more delightful than watching – and endlessly rewatching – Miller’s Crossing (1990). Set in the Prohibition era, in an unnamed city brimming with corruption (in my mind, the Gotham from Batman: The Animated Series and The Batman Adventures), Joel and Ethan Coen’s breathtakingly elegant thriller follows an Irish mobster’s right-hand man trying to prevent an all-out gang war from escalating, which involves trying to figure out – and to manipulate – the Machiavellian agendas of a dozen different players. Rich in plot, stylish dialogue, and memorable characters, the methodical script and tight cinematography are matched by the cool performances of an outstanding cast (including Coen regulars Jon Polito, Steve Buscemi, and John Turturro), clutching their fedoras while spouting ultra-witty lines at a machine-gun pace (and also firing actual machine guns from time to time). I suppose you can read in the story a subtext about business and politics (allied in the form of powerful men who keep cynically throwing the authorities around to do their bidding), but Miller’s Crossing is an ode to genre above everything else, with the Coen brothers distilling the writings of Dashiell Hammett and decades of crime cinema, from 1930s’ gangster pictures (the likes of the original Scarface and the underrated Bullets or Ballots) to later American and European classics. Then again, fiction and narratives (especially from Hollywood) have always been such a key part of US history that this ends up being a relatively moot distinction.

heistfilm noirlast days of prohibition

Having recently ventured into Coen-esque crime comedy territory with Logan Lucky, last year Steven Soderbergh returned for No Sudden Move, a neo-noir that also borrows from various eras: it’s set in the mid-1950s but shot like a 1970s’ picture (including at least a couple of nods to Sidney Lumet). The tortuous twists and turns make Miller’s Crossing feel like linear child’s play in comparison, as if someone has fused a Brian Azzarello comic with a Paul Playdon script for Mission: Impossible. The movie starts out as a recognizable heist yarn, with hardened crooks recruited one by one for the job, but the exponential number of complications and double-crosses plays almost like a parody of the genre’s conventions. While hardly innovative, No Sudden Move is another pitch-perfect rendition of this type of stories, especially of their underlying themes: the more the protagonists work their way up through the chain of command, the blurrier the line becomes between organized crime and corporate capitalism.

Or you can just forget about pastiches and throwbacks and actually go back to the original movies from the noir period. Although it doesn’t involve gangsters, one of the closest examples to Miller’s Crossing I can think of, in terms of rhythm and vibe, is Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success. It revolves around a press agent tasked with breaking up the relationship of the sister of an influential columnist, so there are less murders involved, unless you count character assassinations… That said, not only is it a drama shaped like a crime thriller – complete with bent cops, a couple of beatings, and a labyrinthine plot driven by a ruthless, desperate lead – but it’s also shot like one: every image is gorgeous, every line is cackling, every scene packs a punch. A masterpiece.

When it comes to comic books, you should track down Blue Note: The Final Days of Prohibition, a two-volume French series published in English by the digital platform Europe Comics.

noir comicgangster comicsBlue Note: v1

The two volumes are set at the same time, running parallel with each other while focusing on the perspective of two different men in a rainy American metropolis during the tail end of Prohibition: a disgraced boxer trying to prove his worth and a blues guitar player in search of inspiration, both of them caught in a web of organized crime as the mob makes preparations for the changing status quo. Even more than the period setting, the noirish gangster plot about fixed fights, and the theme of Irish-Italian distrust, what brings Blue Note and Miller’s Crossing together are Mikaël Bourgouin’s autumnal colors and facial designs (the cast looks made up of character actors), not to mention the beautifully precise framing, reminiscent of Barry Sonnenfeld’s cinematography. As for the script, by Bourgouin and Mathieu Mariolle, it confidently taps into all the clichés of fiction about this era in a classic example of European love/hate infatuation with the United States – particularly the US as visualized by Golden Age Hollywood, but also by the Coen brother’s filmography, so beloved in the old continent (and quite possibly a direct inspiration for this comic).

 

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (14 March 2022)

Posted on March 14, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

Between the war and other concerns, I haven’t even managed to watch The Batman movie. It looks boringly grim, but perhaps they’ve pulled it off. In any case, just for contrast, this week’s reminder that comics can be awesome is a tribute to the colorful and charmingly bizarre covers of Silver Age Batman:

batman robotcurt swantwo face
Win Mortimersilver agesilver agemad hatterbatman superman robinGaspar SaladinoSheldon Moldoff

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Spotlight on The Unknown Soldier, 1988-1989 – part 2

Posted on March 10, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

phil gascoine

As I started to discuss last week, 1988-9’s exhilarating The Unknown Soldier limited series is miles apart from Joe Kubert’s original iteration of the character. For one thing, instead of a fully-committed agent of an unquestionably righteous American war effort, this version of the Unknown Soldier is a highly conflicted and increasingly frustrated anti-hero who often voices a harsh critique of the moral compromises that come with armed conflict and espionage. At best, he views his assignments with utter cynicism:

DC war comicThe Unknown Soldier (v2) #12

Still, there was a precedent for all this. Archie Goodwin, Frank Robbins, and even (sporadically) Bob Haney all wrote their fair share of anti-heroic moments into the Unknown Soldier’s saga, a tendency that was taken to the extreme during the David Michelinie run of the mid-1970s (as spotlighted here). For example, here is the ending of the two-parter that ran in Star Spangled War Stories #186-187 (cover-dated April-May 1975), about a particularly vicious mission involving dead children and the murder of a well-meaning priest… and which turned out to have been in vain:

david michelinieStar Spangled War Stories #187

As you can see, Christopher Priest’s characterization is not all that inconsistent with the past, especially if we take into account that we are looking at an older version of the Unknown Soldier, who has been through a lot and is understandably getting more and more sick of the endless march of war.

Visually, there is also a great deal of continuity, even if the original character was generally depicted as a taller, more imposing figure (when he was not in disguise, of course). Priest and artist Phil Gascoine did away with the preposterous notion that the Unknown Soldier wrapped his face in bandages as a default look and wore his perfect masks over those bandages… Instead, he is now shown normally wearing a fabricated face and, at first, we only see the bandages in his imaginary reflection when he is contemplating his darker side. Later in the series, he starts wearing the bandages more regularly, perhaps because this is such a distinctive – and cool – feature of the property (which also explains why he is shown wearing them in every cover).

The biggest change to the Unknown Soldier himself is that he was now given super-strength and a Wolverine-like healing factor, thus literalizing the ‘Immortal G.I.’ nickname used in the old comics (and justifying the fact that a WWII vet was still kicking butt in the late 1980s). The element of immortality obviously had a toll on the character’s psychology, his constant regeneration ironically giving him more of a world-weary core. I love how Priest addresses this in a few passages that even manage to imbue a deeper meaning into the bandaged-face gimmick:

christopher priestThe Unknown Soldier (v2) #12

This is not to say the series follows the same continuity as the earlier stories – it’s definitely a reboot, but it does leave a lot of room open to incorporate the Unknown Soldier’s previous adventures. There is even a cameo by the former supporting character Chat Noir during a flashback to World War II, in issue #6, although it feels more like a nod to the fans than like proper piece of continuity, if nothing else because the original character wasn’t actually called Chat Noir (this was just a codename he had picked up after joining the French Resistance). That said, Christopher Priest, who is famous for his concern with racial representation in comics, does introduce two new sympathetic African-American cast members, including Roger Simmons, who becomes the Unknown Soldier’s closest friend, effectively taking the place of Chat Noir…

(Curiously, though, there is never a clear response to the fact that, while there were several stories about race in the original (for example, ‘No God in St. Just!,’ The Unknown Soldier #237), they mostly boiled down to the notion that black people should set aside their concerns with American racism and privilege the fight against foreign enemies, the subtext being a subordination of divisive Civil Rights struggles to the Cold War consensus.)

What makes this a reboot, above all, is the radical revision of the Unknown Soldier’s origin. His origin tale, which had been told multiple times by Joe Kubert and Bob Haney, used to boil down to two key aspects. One of them was the fact that his father motivated him and his brother, Harry, to fight in World War II by educating them about their family’s proud tradition of fighting in the United States’ wars, going back to the American Revolution…

war comicsbob haneyThe Unknown Soldier #205

In line with the ‘anti-war’ stance of Priest’s The Unknown Soldier series, the reboot turns this premise on its head by cleverly keeping all the core ingredients while shifting the father’s posture (and thus the whole discourse about belligerent nationalism) from benign teacher to sinister drill instructor:

james owsleyThe Unknown Soldier (v2) #1

The other foundational moment took place in the Philippines, where, according to the previous accounts, Harry had bravely sacrificed himself, jumping over the grenade whose explosion nevertheless disfigured the future Unknown Soldier, inspiring him to carry on the struggle… This scene was depicted numerous times, but never in a more epic form than in Joe Kubert’s first rendition, which shifted from a wide splash to a set of tiny panels, slowing down the time to convey the historical importance of what was taking place before culminating in two powerful horizontal panels that showed the birth of the (previously hesitant, yet henceforth intrepid) faceless Unknown Soldier:

Unknown Soldiercomics world war IIStar Spangled War Stories #154

Again, the 1988 version keeps the basic outline while dramatically turning the tone and message upside down. Instead of an honorable sacrifice, Harry’s death is now the pointless product of a mental breakdown. To drive the contrast home, Phil Gascoine’s four-panel tiers even look like a deadpan parody of Joe Kubert’s original layout:

Phil Gascoinechristopher priestThe Unknown Soldier (v2) #1

The page above is near perfect. Gascoine draws the explosion as a bleed that takes over the whole background, which makes sense because the explosion does – and will – remain in the back of the Unknown Soldier’s mind. The dialogue is provocatively ambiguous, since the protagonist’s lying answer about the Japanese grenade insinuates that perhaps what we’ve seen in the previous series was actually the version of reality the Unknown Soldier told others (and himself?) in order to cope with what happened…

Besides being quite a revisionist twist, such a reading also works thematically: the lie, although presumably told for personal reasons, is completely in tune with the Army’s reputation for whitewashing its self-inflicted casualties, so it fits into the overall propaganda about the heroic nature of World War II, which was later used to justify further foreign interventions. This allegorical interpretation is reinforced by the transition, in the lower half of the page, from the WWII era to the Vietnam War (where the Unknown Soldier, who was recalling his past, repeats the lie as he wakes up).

Priest also made a point of subverting the original’s recurring inspirational line about how ‘one man in the right place at the right time can make a difference,’ but I won’t spoil it here… Suffice to say that when that line is finally uttered, near the end of issue #6, it’s in the least inspirational tone you can imagine!

christopher priestOur Fighting Forces: House Call

I like Christopher Priest’s take on this material so much that I wouldn’t mind reading another handful of stories by him. In 2020, DC let him have another go at it in the special one-shot Our Fighting Forces: House Call, which had a shinier look – courtesy of artist Christopher Mooneyham and colorist Ivan Plascencia – but where Priest’s voice was as distinctively cool as ever (as you can see in the page above). Let’s hope that, more than a brief sequel, this one-shot turned out to be a pilot for his return!

After all, as the last couple of weeks have painfully demonstrated, the world isn’t going to run out of international conflicts any time soon… In other words, no, it’s not all over for the Unknown Soldier.

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