...instant karma's gonna get you, gonna knock you about the head...

Sometimes I’m a petty, petty man.

Ever since they firmly established Iron Man as the deacon of super-dickery during Civil War (yes, I know that ol’ Tony has been campaigning for that title for a long time but his manipulative, duplicitous, and smug actions during CW sealed the deal for him in my mind) I’ve been waiting for him to get a little karma slapped upside his arrogant head.

Asked and answered :-) First, he had his ass handed to him by the Hulk and now (I’m not sure where the new Thor series falls in regards to World War Hulk continuity) he got himself a serious beat down from an unamused thunder god in Thor #3 (our recently revived pal Thor apparently not being at all happy that Stark stole his genetic material and used it to co-create the Thor clone that killed Goliath…go figure.)

I presume that Marvel will at some point set about to rehabilitate the image of the comic book Iron Man/Tony Stark (especially with the movie coming out next year)…though they’ll have a long way to go to get me to see the character as likeable again…but for now I’m jazzed to see Shellhead get punked as hard and as often as possible.

Like I said, sometimes I’m a petty, petty man :-)

Gonna Wait 'til the Midnight(er) Hour...

I’m of the opinion that had The Authority ended when Warren Ellis decided to leave it would be regarded with the reverence given to super-hero comics like Watchmen. It was an absurdly over-the-top, cheeky, cynical, audacious, and fun send up of the conventions of super-hero groups with the team…all ridiculously powerful and full of hubris and snappy quips…battling a mad scientist with an army of supermen, an invasion from another dimension, and, ultimately, “God”. The 12 issues of The Authority (following the lead-in from the old Stormwatch series) were pure, almost perfect pop insanity.

But The Authority was a hot commodity at the time and DC/Wildstorm was not going to let it just go after Ellis left. Unfortunately, every writer who has followed has beaten the concept to death, making The Authority pedestrian and…worst of all…dull. But then once you’ve beaten “God” how much juice can you get from smacking around analogues of the Avengers or even becoming temporary totalitarian rulers of the world?

Of all of the Authority members the one who I found most dull was the Midnighter who became a surly joke…the gay (the seemingly insecure writers after Ellis seemed to need to keep that at the fore as one of his most important character traits…Ellis presented the relationship between the Midnighter and Apollo with respectful subtlety while the writers who followed him treated it with self-conscious oafishness which included every opponent the Authority faced firing off homophobic jibes) Batman/Punisher analogue who likes hurting people and who can kill you in one zillion ways before you can blink an eyelid (or something like that.)

I gave up on The Authority a while back so I was kinda of surprised when I decided to give the Midnighter solo series a try. But I’m glad I did. In the first few issues…a odd, amusing time-travel story involving an attempt to assassinate Hitler…Garth Ennis brought some much needed humanity, humor, and reflection to the character.

Keith Giffen has taken up the reins as the new regular writer starting with issue #10 where a victim was so afraid of the Midnighter that she threw herself out of a window. “You killed God”, the girl said after the Midnighter had brutally dispatched her captors. The Midnighter, shaken to his core, reflected on what he was and then he sat off a mission to discover the man he used to be.

Giffen gives him an assistant to play off and delves into his prickly relationship with his adoptive daughter before sending the Midnighter off to a seemingly normal…but frighteningly abnormal…town that may or may not be where he came from before being brainwashed and turned into a killing machine. At the same time, Giffen doesn’t soft-pedal what the character is as evidenced by his brusque dispatching of a computer nerd/pedophile he drafts to help him in his quest to rediscover his original identity.

In his first two issues, Giffen makes the Midnighter more interesting than he’s been in quite a while while not scrimping on the action. The book is further enhanced by the sterling storytelling of artist Chris Sprouse (in #10) and ChrisCross (in #11).

Midnighter is a comic worth checking out…and who’da thought that :-)

Benny Goodman - All The Cats Join In

Cool tune and cute animation.

A Comicbook Orange: Green Lantern, Thor, Olivier Copiel

...and yet we remember...

The years pass...the pain recedes...and yet we remember. For all of the blood and sweat and tears shed on the day...shed on the bloodied streets and battlefields since that day...attention must be paid.

The years pass...and yet we remember.

The years pass...and yet we must remember.

All politics are Local...

Indeed. That old saw is, of course, right on the money. All politics…especially the intimate politics of the heart…familial, passionate, emotional…are achingly local. Local…written by Brian Wood and featuring evocative art by Ryan Kelly…explores these politics through a series of 12 self-contained stories about people coping the politics of the heart in different communities in the US and Canada. Each of these locations informs the stories with such unique vibes that they are, by design, characters in the stories being told in their own right.

Local, published by Oni Press, has a (kind of) focal character in the form of Megan McKeenan, who we first meet as a restless 17-year-old in Portland, Oregon as she is contemplating the consequences of trying to score drugs for her strung-out boyfriend using a forged prescription. By the 12^th (and final) issue of the series Megan will be 30 (and fairly well-traveled.)

It’s Megan’s journey but it’s not always her story.

In some issues, Megan is in the forefront…issue #2’s “Polaroid Boyfriend”, for example, she is in Minneapolis and engaging in an odd “relationship” by exchanging instant photos with a guy who breaks into her apartment every day while she’s away at work. Issue #4 finds Megan living out myriad identities (maybe searching for one of her own) while she works in a rundown movie theater in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

In other issues, Megan is a peripheral character in the stories of other characters we meet along the way. She has a poignant cameo in the 3^rd issue, set in Richmond, Virginia, when she has a disillusioning encounter with a member of a defunct band that she was a fan of. The band…Theories and Defenses…and the reasons for its breakup is at the heart of that issue. In the 4^th issue, Megan is an unwilling bystander as an awful…horrifyingly mundane and inevitably violent and tragic…Cain and Abel tales plays out in a roadside café outside of Missoula, Montana.

Each issue tells a bittersweet…but obliquely hopeful…story of characters trying to make their way in a world that they don’t completely understand. Brian Wood has a gift for naturalistic dialogue and for fleshing out characters and drawing you inexorably, compellingly into their lives. Ryan Kelly’s artwork is a wonderful compliment to Wood’s writing beautifully with impeccable pacing in the storytelling and with wonderful detail and strong pencil and ink work that is, as I said early, incredibly evocative.

I’m sure that this series will be collected when it finishes its 12-issue run (10 issues are out as of this writing) but I think that Local is best savored one issue…one town…one compelling story at a time.

Powers: Who Killed Retro Girl?

The acting is a bit stiff but this is still a clever short film adaptation of part of the Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming story.