Animation Sidebar : “Batman : Under The Red Hood”

 

If you’ve not been keeping up with DC comics on a month-to-month basis lately — and I can’t say I’d blame anyone for that given the hopelessly derivative, editorially-fucked-with-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life state of most of their output — you may not be aware that Robin recently died. Again.

I know, I know — it’s getting to be old hat by now, isn’t it? At least the Batman of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight had the decency to put his cowl in mothballs for awhile after getting one of his teen sidekicks killed, but in the DC universe proper, he just seems to keep on going no matter how often he reverses the typical “worms are food for robins” course of nature. To make matters even more grim/depressing/tasteless, the latest Robin to be violently ushered out the side door was Bruce Wayne’s own son, Damian, and he was killed by his mother, Talia al Ghul. Couldn’t they have all just gone on Jerry Springer and tried to work out their differences in at least a somewhat less deadly or embarrassing fashion?

Obviously, as is usually the case in comics these days, this latest Robin death is, blatantly and on its surface, little more than a crass ploy to generate extra sales for the army of Bat-books cluttering up the racks — but believe it or not, in that regard it still has a long way to go to match the brazen commercial pandering and expiloitive, “we’ll kill any character for a buck” crudeness of the first  Robin death, back in 1988.  Ya see, that was the time,  as you may have heard (if you weren’t following along yourself), when DC decided to bump him off based on the results of a fucking telephone survey.

You only think I’m kidding, but I’m not — The Joker rigged a an bomb at a warehouse with Robin bound and gagged inside, the building went “boom!,’ and readers were instructed to call one of two 1-800 numbers (at a cost of 75 cents a pop) to register their “Live or die” choice, then come back next month and find out which option won out (this morbid trope was wonderfully spoofed by Rick Veitch in his seminal deconstruction of the entire “teen sidekick” phenomenon, Brat Pack).

Without lingering too long on the disturbing implications of a bound-and-gagged teenage boy in tights being abused by a man with a face full of makeup (all this is a Code-approved book, no less), let’s just consider what it says about a comic book publisher that they’re willing to kill kids in their stories to bump up sales, and what it says about comic book fans that more of us voted to see Robin get bumped off than have Batman save the day. I’d say the message is clear : publishers are cynical, manipulative, and utterly without conscience, and readers are sadistic bastards. No wonder mainstream comics are in what basically amounts to a two-decade-old death spiral.

 

Still, if you know DC and Marvel, you know that no death lasts forever, and it was only going to be a matter of time before Jason Todd (who was, in actuality, the second Robin, the first being Dick Grayson, who miraculously-in-retrospect survived the job and went on to be a proper superhero in his own right, operating under the handle of Nightwing) somehow turned up again — the only surprise is that it took almost 20 years for his “resurrection” to happen.

For the better part of 2005, and a pretty good chunk of 2006, several of the monthly Bat-titles were consumed with a seemingly endless storyline by writer (and former contest on MTV’s The Real World) Judd Winick, and illustrated by a bevy of artists (most notably Doug Mahnke, co-creator of Dark Horse’s The Mask) that detailed the apparent return of a one-time super-criminal named The Red Hood (who was actually, in his former incarnations, a collection of several different hoodlums, one of whom was none other than The Joker himself back when he was, relatively speaking, “more human” — but that’s another story for another time), who was keeping himself busy by screwing up the operations of a Gotham City crime boss known as The Black Mack (so called because, well — he wears a black mask).

This wasn’t a bad story, even if it dragged on for waaaaaay too long, but it was hardly an all-time classic, either. Most of the investigations into Red Hood’s “secret identity” undertaken by Batman and Nightwing (who plays a big part in the proceedings) were go-nowhere run-arounds and it was fairly evident fairly early on that this latest Red Hood was, in fact, Jason Todd.  The only question was — how the hell did he survive? The answer was pretty uninspired — Ra’s al Ghul utilized one of the infamous “Lazarus Pits” that give him immortality (or close enough to it) to resurrect the freshly-dead youngster, and Jason ends up going on to form his own sorta-super-team called, blandly enough, The Outlaws. Which, I guess means that the second Robin is now a zombie. At least technically speaking, But whatever.

 

When Warner Premiere released its direct-to-video animated version of Batman : Under The Red Hood in 2010, it’s fair to say I wasn’t expecting much beyond a reasonably competent little run-around, but truth be told, truncating this tale down to a manageable 75 minutes actually makes it a much stronger and more effective story, and while any “surprise” as to who is, indeed, “under the red hood” is lost, it’s really no big deal since, as mentioned, it was never that “shocking” a “revelation” anyway. Perfect voice casting helps — Bruce Greenwood is one of the better actors to give Batman’s vocal cords a go, Jensen Ackles is flat-out superb as Red Hood/Jason Todd, John DiMaggio is a terrific Joker, Jason Isaccs is suitably dour as Ra’s al Ghul, Wade Williams is obviously having a blast as Black Mask, and Neil Patrick Harris is a more or less perfect choice to deliver Nightwing’s lines — but all in all it’s the smart work done by director Brandon Vietti and Winick, who adapts his own story for the (small) screen here, that turns a decent multi-part comics story into an excellent (and concise) animated adventure yarn.

Going in with suitably low expectations probably leaves me feeling more generous about the quality of the finished product here as well, I suppose, but honestly, this is pretty good stuff, and while the more grim aspects of the story aren’t glossed over, they’re not celebrated in agonizing detail, either, as is too often the case with many of Batman’s “darker” storylines of recent vintage.

 

As is the case with Batman : Year One, there are no less than three different home viewing options out there for the discerning viewer who wants to give Under The Red Hood a go : standard, single-disc DVD; single-disc Blu-Ray; and two-disc “special edition” DVD. All three feature extremely-well-done widescreen picture and 5.1 sound and come with a rather uninspiring Jonah Hex short (remember when it looked like he might be DC’s next “hot property”?) as well as some promo spots for other DC Universe titles, while the Blu-Ray and “special edition” DVD packages also include a behind-the-scenes featurette on the making of this story in both its print and animated versions and a selection of four cartoons from various iterations of the Batman animated TV series that have at least some bearing on the lead feature here.

At the end of the day, then,  Batman : Under The Red Hood is far from the out-and-out classic that either Year One or The Dark Knight Returns are, but it’s a solid-enough little piece of modern superhero storytelling that treads the fine line between being “heavy” and “too heavy for its own good” more or less successfully, and greatly benefits from having a lot of its fat cut for this abridged animated retelling. I got a kick out of it, and if you have any love for/interest in these characters, chances are that you will, too.

Animation Sidebar : “Batman : Year One”

 

What the hell, these reviews of titles in Warner Premiere’s “DC Universe” straight-to-video animation line seem to be getting a reasonably healthy response around these parts, so let’s plug away and do at least a couple more until I’m bored with the whole thing and feel like getting back to horror, exploitation, and all that other good stuff, shall we? And seeing as how our first entrants in this little sidebar series took a look at the two-part Dark Knight Returns, based on Frank Miller’s justifiably legendary take on the “omega” phase of Batman’s crime-fighting career,  it seems only right that we next turn our attentions to 2011′s animated adaptation of Batman : Year One, based on Miller and artist David Mazzuchelli’s take on the Caped Crusader’s “alpha” period.

Again, a little background for those not steeped in comic lore : hot on the heels of the success of The Dark Knight mini-series, Bat-books editor-at-the-time Denny O’Neil (a fairly accomplished author of numerous well-regarded Batman stories in his own right), approached said title’s creator, Frank Miller, with a proposal to essentially give him carte-blanche to retell the Gotham Guardian’s origin story as a way of “re-setting the table” on the regular monthly Batman series. Miller agreed, but only wanted to write it, bringing in as his artistic partner on the project one David Mazzuchelli, with whom he had collaborated on a recent run of stories for Marvel’s Daredevil book. Mazzuchelli bought a distinctly noir-ish and cinematic sensibility to the proceedings, and the end result , while admittedly a fairly basic, if extrapolated, take on events we already knew which sees Bruce Wayne return to Gotham to embark on his one-man war on crime, form an uneasy alliance with then-Lieutenant Jim Gordon (who seems to be one of the few honest cops in town), have his first series of encounters with a prostitute-turned-cat-burglar named Selina Kyle, and go after the beating heart of the city’s organized crime operation in the form of Carmine “The Roman” Falcone, is nonetheless a deeply resonant character-driven piece with a pleasing “pulp detective” artistic sensibility that feels both nostalgic and oddly contemporary at the same time. If the word timeless comes to mind from the brief run-down just provided, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark, as this brief-but-no-doubt historic four-issue Batman run, which has since been collected in near-innumerable paperback and hardcover iterations, feels as fresh and vital today as it did when first published way back in 1987.

 

The real genius of what Miller chose to do story-wise,though,  is that, despite the fact that we are granted numerous takes on the events depicted from the vantage points of both Batman and Catwoman, this is more or less Gordon’s tale, and we see get to see both the cesspool of corruption and vice that is Gotham City, as well as witness the dawn of a new age of weirdos in costumes, through his eyes. Miler’s version of Gordon is hardly a flawless hero — he’s stepping out on his pregnant wife with one of his colleagues on the force (who long-time Bat-fans will know becomes the second Mrs. Gordon at some unspecified future point), for instance, but by and large this is a decent guy trying to make sense of circumstances, and a city, that he can’t quite get his head around.

The powers that be in the suits at Warner and DC wisely decided to retain this Gordon-centric narrative structure when they adapted the story for home video release in 2011, and even more wisely opted to cast Bryan Cranston as Jimbo’s voice ‘artist,” so needless to say — expect some great things here. Yeah, okay, again it would have been nice (and frankly pretty gutsy) for directors Sam Liu and Lauren Montgomery to have their animators hue a bit more closely to Mazzuchelli’s visual style, but the finished product probably would have been considered somewhat inaccessible for, at least, a non-comics audience (although I gotta wonder how much a “non-comics audience” would even care about this thing in the first place), but at least most of the characters in this one look like real people rather than the non-green Hulks of (the otherwise generally excellent ) The Dark Knight Returns.

 

As far as the rest of the cast goes, Ben McKenzie positively nails it as Bruce Wayne/Batman, GreyDeLisle is pitch-perfect as the suffering-in-silence Barbara Gordon, Katee Sackhoff is suitably sultry as the object of Jim’s extra-curricular affections, Detective Sarah Essen, supposed “nerd culture” sex object Eliza Dushku inhabits Selina Kyle/Catwoman quite nicely, and it’s an out-and-out treat to hear the great Alex Rocco giving vocal “life” to Falcone. It’s Cranston’s show all the way, but these folks add plenty of spice to the stew.

On the technical specs front, Batman : Year One is available on three different home video formats : single-disc DVD, single-disc Blu-Ray, and a double-disc DVD “special edition.” All three feature superb widescreen picture and a genuinely dynamic 5.1 sound mix, as well as a rather risque but otherwise generally uninteresting Catwoman short, and a smattering of promo stuff for other entrants in the “DCU” line. The Blu-Ray and two-disc DVD also feature a pretty sold little mini-documentary on the genesis  of, and influences on,  Batman : Year One in its original comic book form, and a couple of episodes of the Batman animated TV series that are at least tangentially related to the main course on offer here (again with the food metaphors, sorry — haven’t eaten lunch yet).

Final verdict, then : as with Miller’s Dark Knight, this is a seminal Bat-story that most definitely live up to all the hype, and its home video animated offspring is a faithful, exciting, well-constructed work that sticks to the character-driven narrative design of its printed-page progenitor for a highly-accessible translation that retains both the boldness and simplicity of Miller/Mazzuchelli while smoothing out its rough (but oh-so-lovely) edges just a bit.

Hell, just writing about it puts me in the mood to watch it again.

Animation Sidebar : “Batman : The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2″

Okay, this one’s probably going to be something of a “quickie” given that we’ve already covered all the relevant background info and what have you in our (alright, fair enough, my) review of the first film in this series — suffice to say that if you enjoyed Batman : The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 you’re absolutely gonna love part two (released in January of this year), because this is the one  where the shit really hits the fan.

Fresh out of a self-imposed 10-year retirement, and having already taken down both Two-Face and the leader of the vicious Mutant gang, a newly-reinvigorated Batman (Peter Weller), together with the latest version of teen sidekick Robin, an all-heart-but-no-training adolescent girl named Carrie Kelley (Ariel Winter),  find themselves tangling this time around not only with a crazier-than-ever Joker (fantastically voiced by Michael Emerson), but in the crosshairs of none other than Superman himself (Mark Valley), who has been dispatched by the highest powers imaginable to put a stop to his one-time friend’s self-decla vigilante war on crime in Gotham City.

Things start out on a fairly absurd note as The Joker is invited onto the Letterman-in-all-but-last-name “David Endochrine Show” (Endochrine himself being voiced by none other than Conan O’Brien), but quickly turn quite deadly when he kills the entire studio audience and has his final, and decidedly gruesome, confrontation with Batman at, appropriately enough, a carnival. All this is realized at a thoroughly fun, breakneck pace by director Jay Oliva, but for my money it’s when the inevitable Batman/Superman confrontation occurs that this story really kicks into another gear, as the story invites us to take a hard look at the philosophical and attitudinal discrepancies that have always made for an uneasy-at-best alliance between DC’s two “flagship” characters. When the thin strand of mutual (perhaps) aims between the two finally breaks, it makes for one of the more thought-provoking and multi-textured psychological analyses ever presented in a mainstream superhero comic (or, by extension, a mainstream direct-to-video superhero animated flick).

Fans of Frank Miller’s original work will be pleased to see that Batman : The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2 doesn’t shy away from the book’s rather disturbing, even quasi-fascistic portrayal of the Caped Crusader, but likewise it isn’t afraid to ultimately portray him as a hero, either — a complex, deeply flawed hero, to be sure, but far from the heartless basket-case that so many subsequent writers have too easily pigeonholed him as. And in Miller’s world Superman is far from perfect, as well, so that’s a relief.

Don’t let all my talk of the subtexts inherent in this movie’s source material scare you off, though, because above all this is a piece of fun, kick-ass entertainment — just one that has the added bonus of being open to a deeper and more considered reading should you choose to give it one. On the surface, it’s one well-realized action sequence after another, and that can be a plenty good time in and of itself. Old friends (David Selby’s Commissioner Gordon) exit the scene while other old friends (Robin Atkin Downes’ Oliver Queen/Green Arrow) enter it, every old score is finally settled, and by the time the end credits roll a thoroughly satisfying, heartfelt, and respectful conclusion ends things on, believe it or not, a note of optimism that the sunny-out-of-nowhere wrap-up to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy could learn a lot from.

On the minus side, pretty much all of my criticisms from part one — the guys look like they’ve been gobbling ‘roids for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; Miller’s idiosyncratic, free-form art style is replaced by a more typical “house” animation look; Selby’s take on Gordon just doesn’t ring true; the script adaptation can be a bit too hyper-condensed at times; etc. — all hold here, but that’s all small potatoes compared to the number of things Oliva and his cohorts get resoundingly, joyously right here. A genuine treat for long-time fans of the book while being immediately accessible to those unfamiliar with it, Batman : The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2 is pretty much everything you could ever hope for in an animated superhero flick, and I guarantee it’s one you’ll enjoy again and again over the years should you go ahead and give it a purchase.

Speaking of which — I went the cheap route again and opted to pick this up on DVD rather than Blu-Ray, given that I can’t see what the hell difference there’s gonna be in image quality for an animated feature between the two formats, and while the widescreen picture and 5.1 sound are plenty great (at least to my mind) on DVD, it is, once again, free of extras apart from promotional preview material for other titles in the “DC Universe” animated line. The Blu-Ray disc, on the other hand, does have a smattering of pretty cool bonus features from what I understand, but not having seen them I can’t fairly critique, or even summarize, them here, so I guess that’s a wrap as far as the technical specs are concerned.

Still, whatever format you choose to go with, the point remains — get out  there and buy, or at the very least rent or steal (whoops, did I just say that? ) this thing now. Too few “legendary” comic stories live up to their status on either the printed page or the screen (if they make it that far), but this is one that does. If you’re unsure as to what all the fuss is about, you owe it to yourself to find out, and if you’re already familiar with the work, you’ll be pleased as punch to see it translated into a new format with so much care and respect.

Animation Sidebar : “Batman : The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1″

Quick, what was the best Batman flick of 2012?

If you’re like most, your answer to that is simple : “what are you talking about, dumbass? There was only one Batman flick in 2012, it was called The Dark Knight Rises, and even if you didn’t like it much, it wins ‘best’ of the year award by default!”

If you’re a hard-core comic geek, though, you know that’s just not true, because there was another Bat-movie that came out last year. It was an animated, straight-to-video feature called Batman : The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1, part of Warner Brothers Animation’s “DC Universe” line, and it was a hell of a lot better than The Dark Knight Rises.

Or should I say — it was a hell of a lot better than The Dark Knight Rises provided you’re part of the admittedly-much-smaller audience it was aimed at. Not that “newbies” to this won’t find it a pretty sold thrill-ride, as well, but we’ll get to all that in due course.

For those of you who don’t already have at least a passing knowledge of comic- nerd legend and lore, here’s a brief (and very specific) history lesson : in the mid-1980s, the tired old super-hero archetype was getting a bit stale, and a small handful of creators figured the time was right to do something about it by injecting a bit more realism and psychological complexity into the proceedings. For a brief moment there, these “revisionist” super-hero works became all the rage, even garnering the medium as a whole the kind of semi-respectable “mainstream” press attention that the art form’s partisans had always longed for given that, hard is may seem to believe now, up until that point comics weren’t even considered “cool,” much less potential springboards for billion-dollar Hollywood special effects boondoggles — err, epics.

Truth be told, this new “darker,” “more mature” take on crimefighters in tights got pretty old pretty fast, but that’s neither here nor there. The simple fact is that two standout works emerged from this revisionist craze that have pretty much hung over the superhero comics medium like a Sword of Damocles ever since : Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, or, as it was more commonly referred to until a movie of the same title came along, simply The Dark Knight. Nearly three decades down the line, these works have been constantly imitated, but frankly still never equaled.

Watchmen and its various  cinematic adaptations, comic prequels, etc. is old hat by now for long-time or even casual readers of this blog, so we’ll just pass right over that and talk Dark Knight, shall we? Again with the history lesson for those not in the know : essentially, this is the story of an aging and bored Bruce Wayne, who decided to hang up the cowl when his teenage sidekick, Robin, was killed (an event that was later mimicked in the “proper” DC Universe itself a few years down the road — except for the retirement part — and has just taken place again in DC’s current “New 52″ line, continuing their less-than-proud track record of having no new ideas whatsoever since their much-hyped relaunch).  As you’d no doubt expect, Brucie-Boy has a tough time adjusting  to “civilian” life,  and  eventually a city-wide crime wave perpetrated by a street gang known as “The Mutants,” coupled with a plastic-surgically-altered Harvey “Two-Face” Dent reverting to his former outlaw ways, prompts Wayne to get his costume out of mothballs and take to the streets again. He vanquishes foes both old and new, picks up a new, female Robin in the form of teenager Carrie Kelley, finally settles his long-standing score with The Joker, and eventually comes to blows with the Man of Steel himself, who is sent to put Batman down by no less than then-President Ronald Reagan himself.

It’s all pretty heady, exciting stuff, and for those who were sick to death of comics being metaphorically ghetto-ized basically ever since their inception, it was a watershed moment. Here, we figured, was finally proof that our beloved medium wasn’t just stupid kids’ stuff. This was a story that was so damn good you could show it to anyone and they’d have to agree that comics had come a long way.

Little did we realize the far-reaching implications this book would have — in fact, it’s fair to say that Miller’s take on the Caped Crusader has informed everything that’s been done with him since. There certainly would have been no Tim Burton Batman film without it, and without Burton there would have been no Nolan reboot, etc., but concurrent with the ever-darker Dark Knight of the movies has been an increasingly more somber and humorless take on the character in the comics — a trend that still continues to this day. I generally enjoy the work of current “lead” Bat-writer Scott Snyder, for instance, but let’s face it — Batman’s such a far-gone, morose, obsessive head-case now that once in awhile it’s nice to watch a few reruns of the old Adam West series just to relieve the pressure from what’s now a quarter-century-old parade of grimness.

I’m not sure that’s the end result Miller necessarily had in mind for the character once his book was finished, but that’s what we’ve gotten, and because of that — because this was the point at which “the change” began — it’s sometimes easy to forget just how much fun this comic itself actually was. Sure, this is a a wracked-with-guilt, consumed-by-anger iteration of Batman we’re talking about here, but it’s also a story in which punks in multi-colored visors speak their own goofy lingo and The Joker gets invited onto a Letterman-esque late-night talk show.

Granted, he kills everyone in the audience, but still —

Fortunately, this new two-part animated feature (we’ll take a look at the second installment either later today or tomorrow, time permitting) is here to remind us, and it couldn’t have come at a better time, what with the unrelentingly bleak Nolan film series having just wrapped up and the tragedy in Aurora still weighing heavily on the public consciousness. It’s a good time, in short, to make the Batman property as a whole fun again, and sometimes you gotta look backwards to move forwards.

Yeah, okay — Batman as voiced by Peter Weller is pretty gruff and humorless, David Selby doesn’t strike me as the most effective vocal choice for Commissioner Gordon, all the male characters in the film are drawn like steroid-enhanced freaks, and Frank Miller’s distinctive, immediate, and sometimes very raw art style has been replaced with a more typically “clean” animated look, so the film has its flaws (perhaps the most notable of which is the fact that for long-time fans of the book the script  essentially comes off as  a Cliff Notes version of the story we know so well), but it’s still hard not to be taken in by director Jay Oliva’s fast-paced, dynamic take on things, Ariel Winter’s spot-on work as Carrie Kelley, and the genuine reverence for the material that more or less everyone who had a hand in this project seems to bring to the table. This was the “dream job” for a number of the principles involved on the DC side of things, and it shows.

I’m not sure how well the obviously-to-be-continued non-ending will play with a non-comics audience, this being a pretty literal interpretation of the first two parts of Miller’s four-issue series, centering on Batman’s conflicts with Two-Face and The Mutants, and it probably would have played out better to just do the whole thing  in one take, but comics fans are used to being fleeced at every turn by the “Big Two” publishers, so the decision to divvy it up into two parts is hardly surprising, and is more than made up for by the out-and-out coolness of seeing so many of the comic’s most iconic moments come to life on the screen (although am I the only one who’s a little bummed that we never get to hear Weller say “in my gut the creature writhes and snarls and tells me what I need? “) in a way that even folks who are not familiar with the story will find terrifically exciting and entertaining.

A lot of nerd-gasms were had when this project was first announced, and I’m pleased to say that it by and large delivers on all that we had been hoping for, while at the same time being a highly accessible work for newcomers to the material.  I wish the DVD had a few more extras than it does (essentially just promo spots for other “DC Universe” stuff), but the widescreen picture and 5.1 sound are both superb and anyway, I understand the Blu-Ray has more by way of bonus features for those interested. Personally, I can’t see shelling out an extra five or six bucks for an animated movie on Blu (and one barely over 70 minutes long at that), but maybe that’s just me.

I’ve watched Batman : The Dark Knight Returns at least a dozen times since it came out last September, and it leaves me smiling from ear to ear each time. Best Batman flick of 2012? That’s a no-brainer.

The BW Review : “Before Watchmen : Ozymandias” #6

Hmmm — maybe it’s just the so-called “soft tyranny of low expectations,” but the fact is that I wasn’t quite as offended by the sixth and final issue of Len Wein and Jae Lee’s Before Watchmen : Ozymandias  as I was expecting to be and it didn’t quite piss me off as much as the previous five had.

Oh, sure, it’s still more than fair to say that nothing actually happens here, and that we’re just spoon-fed a bunch of over-written flashback scenes that don’t even do much to flesh out events as initially presented by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons over a quarter-century ago — as a matter of fact, Wein even goes down the ultra-lazy route (one he’s traveled before) of including a scene previously written by Moore verbatim here (in this case it’s the Comedian’s famous late-night visit to Moloch’s apartment and it takes up two of this issues 23 story pages), which I hope resulted in a commensurate docking of his pay.

And Lee’s art still sucks, too — it’s as stiff, lifeless, and devoid of backgrounds as ever. How this book ever ended up getting behind schedule is beyond me, as his panels are the most basic thing you’ll ever see. His cover (as shown above) is decent enough as far as these things so, as is Ryan Sook’s variant (shown below), but honestly, where all the “ooh”ing and “aah”ing in fandom comes from in regards to the art on this series is absolutely beyond me.

So, what did I actually like  about this concluding chapter? Well — nothing, I guess, but I actually don’t recall saying I liked  it, only that I didn’t actively dislike it as much as I had some prior installments. Look, Wein actually has Adrain Veidt say “heavy is the head that wears the crown” in this issue and seems to be writing the scene with a straight face! So, no, this isn’t a good comic. In fact, it’s a decidedly lousy, completely unnecessary one.

But hey — it’s not as lousy and completely unnecessary as parts one through five. The conversation Veidt has with writer Max Fisher, and the explanation Wein provides for the pretext under which he recruited the artists, writers, scientists, and other “visionaries” to work on his hidden island, are actually somewhat interesting — if not terribly surprising or imaginative. So this book has a couple of things going for it, I guess (sort of), and that’s more than you can say for the segments of the story which preceded it.

Yeah, I know — that’s definitely damning with faint praise.  It’s also the first and only praise I’ve had for this series — and since this is the final issue it’ll be the last, as well.

The BW Review : “Before Watchmen : Rorschach” #4

Another week, another Before Watchmen book draws — mercifully, I might add — to a close, as we reach the “climactic” final issue of Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo’s four-part Rorschach mini-series. And frankly it’s not a moment too soon.

I’m not even sure how to properly convey my overall disappointment with this one, folks — and at this point I wasn’t even expecting much. It’s no secret I’ve been more than a tad disappointed by the entire BW project as a whole, but the concluding chapter of Before Watchmen : Rorschach really lets down the side —  even when compared against the slink-out-the-door, complete-cop-out ending of J. Michael Straczynski and Adam Hughes’ Dr. Manhattan series. The scripting  — as we’ve come, sadly, to, expect from Azzarello — is lazy, the dangling plotlines are “resolved” in a completely rushed and unpredictable-only-in-terms-of-their-ineptitude manner, and all in all, well, the book just plain sucks.

If you’ll recall, last time around things were finally starting to come together a bit — Rorschach had been captured by super-criminal Rawhead and his boys (again) and was being trussed up in preparation for a gruesome death (again) while the serial killer known as “The Bard” zeroed in on Rory’s only friend in the world, the Gunga Diner waitress he was all set to meet up for a dinner date. On top of all that, the lights went out in New York City as the infamous blackout of 1977  hit. Simple as it would be to bring all these disparate plot elements together in a semi-satisfying, if unambitious conclusion — Rorschach gets away, saves the girl in the nick of time and/or doesn’t but manages to kill “The Bard” anyway, and the lights come on — Azzarello can’t even pull that off. Oh, sure, Rorschach escapes from Rawhead’s clutches (although how he actually manages to do so is barely shown), the girl gets away from “The Bard” on her own (somehow — in this case they don’t even bother showing us how), and five years later, when “The Bard” gets outta the joynt, Rory busts into his apartment and kills him in an epliogue that completely lacks any sort of “payback”-style drama because, well, even though “The Bard” has been hanging around the outskirts of the story since the beginning, he never once tussled with the star of the book.

What does “Azz” take up the remaining pages of this scantily-scripted issue with, then, you may wonder? Some lame-brained, last-minute “twist” to the plot featuring Rawhead hitting the streets in Rorschach’s mask and getting himself killed — all of which is, as you’d be right to guess, about as stupid as it sounds.

On the plus side, after the obvious deadline-rushed work of issues two and three, Lee Bermejo’s art improves here and is more or less back up to the standard he set in the book’s opening installment. His cover (shown atop this post) is pretty good, too, and Ivan Reis’ variant (shown above) is flat-out incredible. But pretty pictures alone can’t save this work, and somewhere I think Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons are probably shaking their heads.

Then again, I’m sure they had better since than to actually read this thing. Wish I could say the same for myself.

The BW Review : “Before Watchmen : Dr. Manhattan” #4

 

Remember the first issue of this series? When it looked like, out of all the various Before Watchmen books, this one might be the most relevant? That it might actually fulfill the entire project’s supposed remit of “getting us to look at these characters in a new way?” That it might  have something  to add to our understanding not only of  Dr. Manhattan , but the entire Watchmen “universe” itself? That it might have some genuine ambition? That it might, at the very least, have something to say?

 

Yeah, I don’t remember that anymore, either. J. Michael Straczynski took that intriguing cliffhanger he left us with way back at the end of the first ish and followed it up with a second installment that basically took us into Marvel Comics What If —? territory, with Dr. Manhattan filling The Watcher role, then gave us a third that was basically the Watchmen equivalent of (a very condensed) Crisis On Infinite Earths, with “Big Blue” as The Monitor, destroying all other possible realities to save our own, “real” one. Now we’ve come to the “big” finale, and — well, the whole thing just kinda limps out the door with a cheap, gimmicky, completely uninvolving supposed “plot twist” that tries, in a clumsy way, to bridge the variant endings between Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original Watchmen series with Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film and ends up doing a disservice to both.

And speaking of cheap gimmicks, artist Adam Hughes — whose work on this project has been, and remains, generally superb — actually resorts to flipping his work upside down halfway through the book when the narrative perspective “flips” from Dr. Manhattan to Ozymandias. I don’t lay the blame on Hughes for this painfully obvious stunt, since it was likely and editorial call, but it’s certainly as dumb as it is unsubtle, and I hope that either the artist himself or at the very least somebody, somewhere behind the scenes kicked up at least a little bit of a stink about it.

Beyond that, there’s nothing much to report here. The alternate covers by Hughes and Bill Sienkiewicz (respectively, as shown) are both fine, even if Hughes’ makes it look like something interesting might be happening in this book when, in truth, nothing is, but that’s just basic comic book hucksterism 101 and again, I’m not gonna lay much blame for that at the artist’s feet when the writer — and editors — are clearly the ones with no vision here.

We finally leave things off with the old “Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends” line, and see Dr. Manhattan walking around on his new faraway planet, contemplating the idea of creating some new life form of his own. In other words, right smack-dab  where we started. Which is probably Straczynski’s point, I suppose, but it’s a point that Moore had already made 25 years ago and it renders these past four issues not only totally unnecessary, but meaningless.

Nothing ever ends? Fair enough. But I’m glad this series is over all the same.

The BW Review : “Before Watchmen : Comedian” #5

Anyway, here we go — the long-delayed (it’s been something like two months since the last issue) answer to the question “what exactly did the Comedian do that had the other guy so freaked out last time around?” is finally here, and it’s about as surprising and unpredictable as, say, a Denny’s omelette — evidently, he committed some mass-scale, My Lai-ish massacre on innocent villagers in Viet Nam. Women, kids, all that.

Ya know — the kind of thing that was pretty much hinted at way back in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen #2. At least give writer Brian Azzarello and artist J.G. Jones credit for consistency, then — this issue is every bit as pointless as all those which preceded it. “Azz,” as he is known to his hopefully dwindling legion of fans, throws in a last-second piece of supposed intrigue involving some machinations vis a vis Eddie Blake between the Nixon and Bobby Kennedy  camps — my best guess at this point is that Bobby never runs for president in the “Watchmen universe” and may indeed still be alive, but who really cares — but that’s some final-buzzer shoehorning that rings pretty hollow after four installments of nothing but useless flashback material that has, despite an admittedly promising start, managed to reveal exactly nothing new about one of Moore and Gibbons’ most interesting characters.

Honestly, it’s a pretty tight race at this point between Ozymandias, Rorschach, and Comedian for most redundant (and therefore useless) Before Watchmen min-series, but this one might hold a slight edge just because it’s also the most lazily scripted. At least over in Ozymandias Len Wein is determined to give us our money’s worth by drowning his plotless reverie in a sea of shamelessly purple prose. Azzarello can barely manage 20 words of script on most of his pages.

Shit, though, what am I complaining about? As hackneyed and pedestrian as his dialogue is, the less we have of it to deal with, the better.

The variant covers by Jones and Gary Frank (respectively, as shown) aren’t too bad, I guess, nor is Jones’ interior art, but it’s all far short of being memorable or even involving enough to look at twice. Four bucks, four minutes, and Before Watchmen : Comedian #5 is firmly in your rear view mirror — and you aren’t even bothering with so much as a solitary backward glance; you’ve ( I sincerely hope) got better things to do. Heck, this book doesn’t even linger around long enough to fade into the distance — this is strictly “poof! It’s gone!” stuff.

So,  we’ve got one more to go with this series, and only five BW books remain in total across the board. And just in time, as far as I’m concerned — I’m running out of creative ways to say “this book sucked.” Hell, at this point I’m running out of uncreative ways to say it.

The BW Review : “Before Watchmen : Ozymandias” #5

 

Just when I’m starting to lighten up a bit on the entire Before Watchmen enterprise, along comes a one-two punch from Len Wein to fully hammer home this project’s essential pointlessness all over again. It’s honestly tough to pick which is a bigger gaping black hole of nothingness, script-wise — the Dollar Bill one-shot, which I savaged in an earlier review today, or the fifth installment of Wein and Jae Lee’s Ozymandias mini-series. I’m happy to call it a draw, bag and file both books away, and not think about either one ever again, thank you very much.

I know, I know — this is a review, so a plot recap of at least some sort is in order, but seriously : nothing fucking happens here. We continue with Adrain Veidt’s narrated recap of his life and exploits and more a little bit closer to and ending that was already given to us 25 years ago by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. That’s it, barring a couple of admittedly somewhat interesting wrinkles, the first being that we get to see the origin of Ozy’s genetically-engineered super-cat companion, Bubastis, and the second being that we get to see how a famous episode of The Outer Limits that Moore’s often been accused of cribbing his conclusion to the original Watchmen from actually fits into the so-called “smartest man on Earth”‘s master plan.

Apart from those quick little touches, this is a dull and lifeless affair, in terms both literary and artistic, from cover to cover. Hell, even the supposedly climactic scene where Veidt reveals the secret of his dual identity to the press — and, by extension, the world — seems to catch none of the assembled media throng by surprise. And while Wein is bombarding us with his by-now-standard purple prose that says a lot but communicates nothing of any actual value, Lee dishes up 22 pages of artwork that frankly fits the bill perfectly by again being all style and no substance. Once again his work is completely stiff and lifeless, devoid of backgrounds, and he resorts to mere shadow-outline images whenever and wherever possible. There’s no flow to any of it, and it would all work so much better as a text story with an accompanying illustration or two on each page, because as a sequential narrative the marriage of Wein’s words and Lee’s drawings is a complete failure.

 

Hell, even the covers this time around — by Lee and Jill Thompson, respectively, as shown — suck. This series has been struggling to prove its relevance from the outset, and with its fifth issue, Before Watchmen :Ozymandias seems to have finally given up altogether and Wein and Lee seem happy to just cash their checks and run out the clock.

The BW Review : “Before Watchmen : Dollar Bill” #1

The fine comics blogger J. Caleb Mozzocco, whose work can be found at everydayislikewednesday.blogspot.com, among other places, had this one pretty much pegged : he said that the very existence of a Dollar Bill one-shot as part of the Before Watchmen project is proof positive that DC comics in 2013 has become effectively immune to parody, because they’re spoofing themselves without even knowing it.

It makes sense, when you think about it — Dollar Bill, after all, isn’t even so much a character as he is a quick little cautionary tale in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen : he’s the guy who got shot by bank robbers when his cape got caught in a revolving door. That’s pretty much all we need to know about him. Expanding his story into a book-length tale literally can’t be seen as anything other than an exercise is complete and utter fan-wank. It’s a move that would only be made by a company absolutely bereft of anything that even smells like a new idea.

Still — who knows, right? Maybe writer Len Wein and artist Steve Rude have something up their collective sleeve when it comes to Bill Brady. Maybe there’s something we don’t know about the guy that wasn’t revealed in Moore’s “Under The Hood” text pieces back in the original series. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a treasure trove of great stories to be told about the guy who was a superhero-for-hire employed by the fictitious National Bank chain.

Or, hey, maybe not.

Honestly, Before Watchmen : Dollar Bill makes the two-issue Moloch series look relevant by comparison. There is quite literally nothing in the 26 pages of story and art in this book that Moore doesn’t cover in a couple sentences back in his “Under The Hood” backup text pieces, which I’ll prove in the wrap-up to this review (no skipping ahead). What’s even worse, Wein hasn’t even bothered to disguise the fact that he’s completely mailing in his effort here. While playing college football for Dartmouth, for example, Brady suffers a career-ending injury, and his team then “declines an invitation to the Rose Bowl,” because they know they have no chance to win without him. Excuse me? No college football program has ever turned down any invitation to any bowl game for any reason, even if they know damn well they’re probably going to lose, and sorry, but even in the “Watchmen Universe” it seems unlikely that an Ivy League team would play in the Rose Bowl — that’s been strictly a Big 10-vs. Pac 10 (now 12) affair from day one. And while little touches like naming the three executives who run National Bank Misters How, Dewey, and Cheatem, respectively, is a clever little touch, it also shows just how “seriously” Wein is treating this assignment.

The same, fortunately, can’t be said for Steve Rude (who also, for the record, handles the lettering chores on this book). Ever since his days drawing Nexus, “The Dude” has been, well, the man in my book, and he absolutely knocks it out of the park here. For proof of how far and wide this guy’s artistic influence has been, look no further than the work of Minutemen writer-artist Darwyn Cooke (who just so happens to be responsible for the second variant cover, shown directly above, for this book, the first — at the top of the post — being by Rude himself, and the third — reproduced below — being the handiwork of Jim Lee), whose style owes a very heavy debt to Rude’s retro- visionary stylings.

As a matter of fact, it’s a pretty sad commentary on the state of the mainstream comics industry in 2013 that Rude has to stoop to this level to find work. If this were a just world, he’d still be ranked among the top talents in the business and names like Jim Lee would be forgotten to history. He hasn’t “lost a step,” “fallen behind the times,” or any of those other quasi-polite ways of saying “this guy just plain can’t draw anymore.” His work still looks as crisp, fresh, and vital as ever. Seeing him waste his talents on a project like this is, frankly, depressing.

And now for that wrap-up I talked about earlier that will prove the utter pointlessness of this one-shot beyond any shadow of a doubt — Bill Brady was a star college athlete who was hired by a bank chain to be its resident “super hero” as a PR stunt. He got shot by some robbers when his cape got caught in a revolving door. That’s what we knew about Dollar Bill going into this book, and that’s what we know about him going out. We get some very pretty Steve Rude illustrations here to accompany these two sentences’ worth of information, but that’s it. Waste. Of. Time.