Holy Golobulus!

So, Jon and I saw "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" last night. We've posted our review over at Movies Schmovies. Go and check it out!

A pressing Who-related question

I mentioned before how much I enjoy listening to the Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas, in particular the ones featuring Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor. The series, despite lacking a visual component (or perhaps because of it) has cemented McGann as one of my absolute favorite incarnations of the Doctor, and as I'm catching up to Charley's departure, I feel compelled to begin listening to the plays where she joins up with the Sixth Doctor as well.

I'd stopped listening to the shows for awhile. I was spending less time in the car, so my podcasts tended to last longer. More to the point, I'd gotten into the season where the Doctor and Charley were trapped in another universe. While there were some good episodes in that season ("The Natural History of Fear" is a positively brilliant story that uses the audio format in some really surprising ways; it's one of those rare stories that could only possibly work in that particular medium), most left me flat (especially the bizarre "Scherzo," which failed biology forever in its headbangingly awful use of something called but bearing no resemblance to "evolution"). After "Natural History," I took a break, which I unbroke recently. I've been on a marathon run through the Eighth Doctor stories, mostly because I wanted to get out of the "alternate universe where no one had a concept of time but time clearly existed anyway" arc. Right now, I'm listening to "Time Works," which is part of the (Spoiler text) "The Doctor and Charley don't realize that C'rizz is a death-worshipping sociopath" story arc.

Anyway, the reason for all this rambling is because this episode features a particularly well-fleshed-out world called Industry, where the people are kept constantly working by a totalitarian clockwork regime. Among the many clock-based euphemisms and phrases abounding in the story is the derogatory term "clockstopper" for someone who wastes time. Now, this struck a chord (or perhaps a chime) somewhere in my memory, of the same (or a similar) term being used as part of some moderately Randian philosophy or self-help fad. Particularly the notion of avoiding people who waste your time by not working or preventing you from working. I know that's vague, but I thought maybe somewhere out there in Internet land could give me an idea of where I'm remembering this from.

And if not, well, just take a couple of hours out to listen to the story. It's pretty good.

Just(ice) when I thought I was out...

So, if DC were trying to get me to re-subscribe to a Justice League book, they could do a lot worse than combining Mon-El and Mark Bagley.

And Congorilla's involved too. Damn it, I could have used that $3 a month.

Revenge of the Fallen

On one hand, the title is a reference to my triumphant return from being in Internet limbo. On the other, it's a reference to my ridiculously late review of the second Transformers movie, which I saw the weekend it opened (or perhaps the week after). It's been a busy month or three. Spoilers ahead.

So since it has been so long since I saw the film, and since I'm still pretty busy, I'm just going to lay this out in bullet points.

• Starting with the good: the effects, as usual, were very good. I think I would have liked to see a little more use of the alternate modes for most of the robots, but in general the effects were great.
  
• One thing I really liked about this is the way it corrected one of the first film's major mistakes: failing to characterize the Decepticons. I thought Starscream and Megatron got some great character moments this time around, and the Fallen was pretty well fleshed-out as well.
  
• Optimus Prime was fantastic. Every moment that he was around was classic. He had great dialogue, his characterization was spot-on, and he got to have some epic fights. Optimus was the highlight of the film. I think the best bit, besides his death-battle, was when he told the government agent flat-out that he and the Autobots would leave if they were presenting a danger to Earth.
  
• Which brings me to another positive: the homages. Now, honestly, I haven't watched any G1 Transformers cartoons in quite some time, but I thought there were some plot points that really mirrored some of those early G1 stories. Obviously Prime's death and the Matrix stuff were reminiscent of the original Movie, and Soundwave sounded a great deal like his classic self. But besides that, I thought Optimus's promise to leave if asked was fairly reminiscent of "Megatron's Master Plan," where the Autobots leave Earth after being (falsely) convicted for terrorist acts. Moreover, "Decepticons find a powerful ancient weapon in a pyramid" was also the plot of the G1 episode "Fire on the Mountain." Even Jetfire's sacrifice hearkens back to the various versions of Jetfire (Armada in particular) which could become armor for Optimus Prime. I'm going to assume that this is all intentional, and I approve.
  
• And, well, I don't approve of too much more than that. My first complaint, I think, is the amount of military porn. It seemed like there were way too many shots of nameless military personnel ordering things over radios, apparent stock footage of jets flying places, and army guys fighting with some robots wandering around in the background. I actually liked the army guys in the first movie; they were characterized in fairly broad swaths, but they got some good moments and some great dialogue. This time around, I wasn't even sure that Tyrese was back, since he had something like two lines (and neither was "left cheek!"). Major Lennox got in some good scenes, but everyone else was green-shirt filler. Which wouldn't have been such a problem if they weren't apparently the primary focus of the film.
  
  More succinctly, as I said to someone in the week after seeing it, I thought that "Revenge of the Fallen" was a pretty good G.I. Joe movie. Sadly, I think it'll turn out to have been a better G.I. Joe movie than "Rise of Cobra."
  
• The plot felt really, really disjointed; a lot of this was due to setting issues. The movie jumped around from place to place--Japan, Washington, Egypt, the Moon, and so forth--far too much for any kind of coherent continuity. I swear, the traipsing about in Egypt was done solely for the "Hey, remember that other movie Shia LeBouf was in, wink wink?" factor.
  
• That excess of settings might not have been quite so bad if not for the terrible excess of characters as well. Sure, we got lots of new Transformers, but I'd be hard-pressed to name most of them--the filmmakers apparently were too. I think maybe a third of the new Transformers got names, and far fewer got characterization to any degree. Lack of distinguishing characteristics was a problem with the Decepticons in the last film; in this one, it plagued the Autobots at least as much. Very few characters got an opportunity to shine at all. And the ones that did, aside from the ones I mentioned before...well, we'll get to that later.
  
• I felt more than a little cheated by Alice, the creepy stalker girl who turned out to be a creepy stalker Decepticon. So far in the series, we've seen that Transformers can take the forms of just about any electronic device, but until that point, it was only electronic devices. Now, I've heard there's some backstory which says she scanned an Alice in Wonderland animatronic robot, but that's lame. Find me an Alice in Wonderland robot that looks like that, and I'll find you a really creepy Imagineer. If the movie were going to introduce Pretenders or Beast Warriors, as this kind of sets the precedent for, it should have been alluded to before we met Alice.
  
• The scenes with Alice are a good opportunity to bring up one of my biggest problems with the movie. Now, the last film had some strong language, lots of violence, and some T&A, but I wouldn't feel too terrible about watching it with my kid brother. When my parents were going to take him to see this one, though, I strongly advised against it. The amount of lewd humor, T&A, and strong language made me uncomfortable. Okay, the wrecking balls on Devastator were pretty funny, bur I could have done without Jetfire's parachute incontinence. And I certainly could have done without Wheelie humping Megan Fox's leg. Honestly.
  
• What's with the obnoxious sidekicks? Wheelie was pretty close to unnecessary, Sam's roommate was useless and whiny (Sam was mostly just whiny this time around), the Decepticon doctor's strange accent made him incomprehensible (and he wasn't the only 'bot with intelligibility issues), and so forth. But it seems like I'm forgetting something relevant here.
  
• Oh, yes, the twins. So, the filmmakers picked two Autobots to dominate the screen time in this installment, and then made the bold moronic choice to turn them into robotic minstrels. Now, I'll give Bay & Co. the benefit of the doubt and assume that Mudflap and Skids weren't intentionally really horrible racist stereotypes; I imagine that it was more the Jar-Jar effect, where obliviousness and ignorance conspire to create offensiveness. The "we can't read that" bit didn't help, even if it was pretty clearly implied that none of the modern Transformers could read the ancient language. It was just one more thing to toss onto the unfortunate heap.
  
  Anyway, not only were they stupid and offensive, but they were incredibly obnoxious as well. Now, I've been a fan of Transformers for a good long time, through the original Wheelie, through Nightscream, through RiD Ultra Magnus, through oodles of annoying characters, and I have never, ever been more disappointed to see a Transformer not die than when Mudflap shot his way out of Devastator's head. Honestly, it'd be as if Jar-Jar were the one to cut Darth Maul in half. Why on Earth would you give the Scrappy a Crowning Moment of Awesome?
  
• Hey, how about that climactic battle? You know, the one that was over in thirty seconds? Where the world-destroying superweapon was taken out by a single shot and Optimus tore the Fallen's spark out with almost no effort? Yeah, I could have done without three or four minutes of twin banter and airplanes flying places, if it meant we would have gotten less of an anticlimax.
  
• Overall, I was disappointed. I thought the first film was great; about the only misstep there was that the Decepticons got too little characterization. This time around, it felt more like they were trying to do too much of too many things, and consequently there was very little substance. I just hope the third one doesn't confuse "more" with "better."

Pronoun-free Personal Update

Spent today moving. No Internet--posting from phone. Start new job tomorrow. Hopefully get cable and Internets hooked up this week. SilverHawks postponed. Out in street, inspected defaced building: silhouette picture in doorway, man and woman, possibly engaging in sexual foreplay. Didn't like it. Makes doorway look haunted. Posting to resume soon. Hurm.

Ultra-Retconite

I've been buying Power Girl's series out of curiosity. I like Amanda Conner, after all, and I've generally liked the take on the character which has predominated since those first issues of JSA Classified. And in general, I've liked the book (for the two issues I've read, anyway). The second issue even serves to reintroduce the Ultra-Humanite into the DCU. He's popped up a few times here and there in stories like the Lightning Saga, but he hasn't been a major player since he died in the JSA: Stealing Thunder story arc. Unfortunately, Gray and Palmiotti seem to have forgotten that the Humanite has this history, and have decided to give him a new, contradictory, and cloyingly sympathetic origin.

Now, I think I've been pretty good in recent years about not being a continuity wanker. I do my best to not mind the little inconsistencies anymore. But I'm also a firm believer in letting characters and stories live up to their full awesomeness potential, and I think this particular retcon goes against that principle. The Ultra-Humanite is a superintelligent mad scientist and one-time Nazi with a penchant for transferring to new bodies whenever the old ones wear out. He's been, at different times, a decrepit old man, a hot actress, an albino gorilla, and Johnny Thunder. In terms of sheer awesome origins, he's only a few points shy of Marvel's Nazi scientist made of superintelligent mutant radioactive bees.

And in terms of story opportunities, this one's rich. Here's a long-time JSA villain who killed an early member of the JSA, who has once possessed a beautiful woman's body and is looking to possess another, and who is the counterpart of a villain who routinely battled Superman on Earth-2. Power Girl is a one-time JSA chairman, a beautiful woman, and the cousin of Earth-2's Superman. Somehow, though, none of this gets mentioned in the Power Girl issue. Instead, we see that Humanite grew up sickly in what appears to be the modern day (if only because his lab assistant, Satanna, has dreadlocks and a midriff shirt reading "C U Next Tuesday," which would look out of place in the early 1930s, and because another technician mentions PETA, which was founded in 1980) and experimented for a lifetime with brain transplantation so that he could escape the prison of his physical form. Eventually, he was forced by his impending death to transfer his brain into an albino gorilla, and so goes the status quo.

I can't quite decide what the biggest problem with this new origin is. It's problematic in that it reduces one of the DCU's oldest villains to yet another sympathetic, misguided genius (the Nazi gorilla mad scientist quota is becoming dangerously low). It's problematic in that it disregards much of the JSA's history--even their recent history, since "Stealing Thunder" happened only a few years back and set the current status of the Thunderbolt and Jakeem. It's problematic in that it turns a story that should be resonating with the relevant history between the two characters into a story that resonates only with the idea that people only see Power Girl for her body. It's problematic because the story they've told would have worked better if they'd replaced Ultra-Humanite with The Brain and Monsieur Mallah. It's problematic because, aside from perhaps the surgery and the robot assault, the story could work just as well if the villain were Jericho.

But I think the biggest problem is that this is a good creative team, working on a story with a lot of potential. I'm enjoying this story, but I think I'd be enjoying it a lot more if it used the potential it's squandered with an unnecessary and unnecessarily standard supervillain origin.

SilverHawks Sunday XI: Odd Cyborg Out

All the SilverHawks have individual quirks--Quicksilver controls Tally Hawk, the twins have a telepathic link, Copper Kidd has his cool frisbees--but they all had the same basic abilities: wings, boot jets, heel talons, shoulder lasers, face masks, etc.

All except Bluegrass. He has no wings, he never uses a mask like the others, he doesn't have shoulder lasers, and I don't recall him ever displaying boot jets or heel talons. Heck, his name doesn't even fit the scheme; while every other SilverHawk has the name of a metal in his or her codename, Bluegrass gets a variety of plant. Of the original SilverHawks characters, only Commander Stargazer shares these different attributes, and that might be due to his status as an earlier model.

Bluegrass, naturally, has individual traits to make up for these differences. I mentioned his weaponized guitar and sound system, Hot Licks, which seems to be a considerably powerful, if overly stylistic, weapon--at least as powerful as the SilverHawks' shoulder lasers. He is the team's pilot, which means he does most of his flying in the Miraj, or in the Hot Seat, the Miraj's detachable cockpit (and I believe it houses or interfaces with the Hot Licks system). He's no slouch, but he's perhaps a little overdependent on external devices for his abilities.

I can't help but wondering why he has these differences. Looking at a list of typical U.S. police rankings, and assuming they have some application to the police force of the distant future in another galaxy, it would seem that Colonel Bluegrass is the highest ranking member of the SilverHawks, likely just under Commander Stargazer. This is in line with Stargazer's comment in the second episode, though somewhat odd given Lieutenant Quicksilver's position as de facto team leader and general protagonist. It's possible that ranks become fluid in the mean streets of the Limbo galaxy and Bluegrass recognizes Quicksilver's natural leadership skills, or that Quicksilver is a field leader despite being a lower rank. Or something else; it's pretty unlikely that there'll be a canonical answer.

Given all that, though, it's possible that only the lower-ranking officers are the ones issued the personal weapons and modes of personal transport. This isn't entirely unreasonable; aside from some adventures that we never (as I recall) see, Stargazer basically has a desk job. Bluegrass sees his share of action, though, and they sent him to Limbo knowing what part he'd be playing on the team, so it's not as though he was being groomed for a desk job himself.

On the other hand, it's possible that the powers that be deemed that Bluegrass's de facto position as heavy weapons specialist (given that he's the pilot and the only one with specialized weaponry) made built-in weapons and flight capability unnecessary. This makes sense at first, but it seems to me like giving a soldier a bazooka and not a pistol. Sure, his guitar is pretty cool, but if he ever happens to not have it for one reason or another, he's kind of out of luck. Whatever organization is behind the SilverHawks must be operating on a pretty thin budget if they can't afford a set of just-in-case lasers for guy who's piloting their most advanced spacecraft. Then again, they're staffing an entire galaxy with a police force of six people and a bird (apparently a five-person increase from the previous assignment), so that might actually be the case. I'm not entirely sure that I'd be willing to entrust my body, my health, and the next few hundred years of my life to an organization that's so eager to cut corners.

There's also the possibility that something about Bluegrass's construction is designed to enhance his piloting abilities or to give him some kind of connection to Hot Licks. This is the most charitable explanation for the SilverHawks' parent organization, but I'm not sure how well-supported it is by the series. It'll be interesting to see if other characters pilot the Miraj or operate Hot Licks ever, since that would give us some idea about the validity of this theory.

The good news is that Bluegrass isn't totally alone in his situation...at least, not permanently. Eventually we'll meet wingless Condor, who has his own jetpack. In the meantime, Bluegrass remains our little anomaly.

Didn't this used to be a comics blog?

I've stuck with Superman through the thickest and the thinnest. As I've mentioned before, I've been buying every regular Superman title on the shelves since 1993. I've seen the demise of Adventures and Man of Steel, I've seen the rise and fall of Man of Tomorrow. I've read countless miniseries, from "Day of Doom" to "Metropolis" to "Superman's Nemesis Lex Luthor." I've stuck through good runs (Greg Rucka's incredible turn on Adventures, which got moderately derailed by various Crises) and bad (Steven T. Seagle's run on Superman, wherein every use of a superpower was accompanied by a caption naming said power). I can't tell you how many massive story arcs and crossovers and world-changing events I've seen (World Without a Superman, Fall of Metropolis, Trial of Superman, Final Night, DC One Million, Electric Superman, Our Worlds At War). I've been reading the New Krypton storyline, which excites me a great deal, and I'll be reading the Codename: Patriot storyline, which I'm not sure I could be less interested in.

In short, I can't think of many things that would cause me to actually drop a Superman book.

But I swear to Rao, if James Robinson kills Steel again, it might mean the end of my subscription to Superman¹.

I've not been too impressed with Robinson's run so far. I haven't found too much to dislike specifically (though I can't recall if anyone's discussed yet what relationship the Science Police has with the Special Crimes Unit, and that bugs me), and hey, Mon-El, so there's at least some incentive for me to keep reading it, but there's nothing here that has blown me away like Starman did. Heck, that's a significant part of why I'm not buying "Cry for Justice"--not only has the JLA lost my interest recently (thanks, DC editorial!), but Robinson's recent work just hasn't done anything for me. That, and the art looks like it was done entirely with screenshots from "Mortal Kombat/DC Universe."

So really, Robinson's run is suffering from the crime of being mediocre. But this most recent turn, with the plot to kill Steel with Atlas...it bugs me. It bugs me because I really like John Henry Irons, and I'd like to see him be a major supporting character in the Superman books. It bugs me because there is a startling lack of people of color in the Superman family. It bugs me because this latest issue really had the feeling of greatness for awhile there. It took some shortcuts (all it took to shut up Fox News-style blowhard Morgan Edge was Jim Harper's word? Why hasn't anyone on the Science Police noticed Kent's absence?) but Mon-El's world-traveling superheroics, told in brief vignettes, were the stuff of genius. Every page could have been a full issue, if not a miniseries, and I would love to see someone explore those in greater detail. Heck, I'd do it for free.

So to end the issue with "by the way, Dr. Irons, you're worm food" left me with a sour taste in my mouth. I hope this is just the setup for (yet another) Crowning Moment of Awesome for Steel, but the current state of comics (and Robinson) have me concerned that it'll just be more fodder for Blackest Night.

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1. In all honesty, it probably wouldn't. I'd stick it out just to see if it was some kind of stunt, but I'd be very cross about it. In other words, I'm a lying addict.