Mindless Ones

I haven’t read much of the comic as there’s only so much misanthropy and homophobia that I can take, so this won’t be an exercise in comparing texts. Actually, unless your name’s Charlie Kauffman I’m not sure anyone should bother overmuch with that sort of thing. Personally I’m much more concerned with the question of whether or not the thing in front of me has anything going for it than whether the thing in front of me has anything in common with some other thing that isn’t in front of me.

So was this particular thing good? The further I get away from it the more I’m inclined to go with not so much. Don’t get me wrong, it is entertaining up to a point but it’s also rather irritating in retrospect and much of what I enjoyed I’m not sure would do it for me on a second viewing. To begin with Kick Ass sets the audience up with expectations that it just doesn’t deliver on. You start off thinking you’re watching a comedy intent on skewering the whole idea of superheroics, but what you get is Superbad meets The Punisher. We’re told by actual fer real characters and actual fer real plot events that superheroing isn’t just physically impossible it’s practically unfeasible and the province of the psychologically disturbed, and you know what? It’s pretty hard to disagree. If anything I’d go further and add a clause about ethics and morality, but ya know this is a popcorn flick based on a Mark Millar comic so you can’t have everything.

Had the film stopped at turning a rather definitive statement about the physical impossibility of superheroics into what amounts to the part of the origin story where the hero gains (admittedly very rubbish) superpowers I probably wouldn’t be of a mind to complain. It’s a kind of thematic and intellectual betrayal but it’s a reasonably fun idea and for a minute there it looked as if the movie might have had something vaguely interesting to say about our culture of voyeurism and its relationship to our unwillingness to intervene when we see wrongs being committed. Sadly the film has nothing to say that’s worth saying about any of that and the powering up of Kick Ass turns out to be a direction of travel that culminates in the very definite assertion that being a superhero isn’t just possible, it completely fucking a-one awesome! Kick ass, dude!

In fact if the movie has anything to say at all it’s that in the real world you’d have to do superheroics with firearms and that you’d have to kill people (but hey that’s completely awesome too), that being a comic geek is really cool, and that being a gay is totally gay. Yes along the way we get to meet Hit Girl and yes she steals the film, and yes some of it is quite funny, and I’m sure teenagers will love the flick. The teenagers in the cinema with me sure as fuck did. But in the end there’s only so much nerd wet dream I need in my life.

As a side note about the action sequences, it struck me that Vaughn’s film, in common with the vast majority of modern action movies, is a prisoner of its own stylisation. The hackneyed John Woo-esque action-balletics which have come to own contemporary cinema just couldn’t exist in a film which was really concerned with bringing any kind of realism to superheroing. Had they decided to remove those stylistic elements they would have ended up with a very different and perhaps far better movie.

I award Kick Ass two brains out of five.

Green Lantern #52, Geoffrey Johns, Doug Mahnke and Christian Alamy

So a white light entity created the universe starting with Earth and on that Earth the first emotional beings were born and through them emotional energy was unleashed upon the rest of the universe (which evolved after Earth, naturally). And some of that energy became special beings like the Predator (made from love, naturally), and Ion (made from the emotion we call willpower, naturally), and Parallax (made from fear, or should that be other people’s fear? Whatever, dude). And then came the Guardians who harnessed that energy and made the Green Lanterns.

Amen

But did you know that Adam and Eve and the story of Cain and Abel and probably all that religious shit to do with Jesus and Buddha was tied into this stuff? It makes sense if you think about it. It all fits. It all comes back to Green Lantern and it’s all getting laid out and resolved in the pages of Blackest Night by these guys.

Fair enough Final Crisis had the Earth as the gods’ battleground, as a kind of notional universal center, but Morrison had so much other stuff going on that it would be silly to accuse him of geocentrism. His Earth was the center of the universe because it’s the center of the fictional construct (the DCU) that was the meta-textual concern of his very meta-textual story, and he went to great pains to get us to understand that that was where he was coming from. If Final Crisis is a story about DCU stories, which it undeniably is, then of course Earth is the most important place in the universe. Also, whether or not you like Final Crisis, whether or not the series succeeds, Morrison was undoubtedly trying to say interesting stuff with his mythological noodlings: about genre conventions, about art and about life. It’s striving to be bigger than the sum of its parts,  and at the very least provides us with some fun, internally consistent, higher order game playing.

Johns on the other hand, he’s not saying anything that isn’t written on the tin and what’s written on the tin is genuinely weird*. The Green Lantern concept allows Johns to quite literally reify just about anything he likes and so he has: Life? Check. Death? Check. Avarice? Check. Rage? Yup. Everything is reduced to spandex and glowing energy. In that way he’s not entirely unlike Kirby or indeed any number of other writers, but unlike some of those writers Johns has none of Kirby’s wild creative energy, add that to the very particular world view that comes through in his comics (love=the Predator remember) and the overall deficit of broader, non-DCU, non Green Lantern orientated concerns gives Johns’ mythology a parochial and bizarrely concrete feel. It seems to me that unlike Morrison Johns can’t easily sidestep questions about how his new mythology relates to the physical history of the universe. Morrison doesn’t need to worry over much about things like physics because he understands and he wants you to understand – as he explicitly demonstrates in Final Crisis – that the history of the DCU is the history of a fiction, and within fiction things are more flexible, ambiguous and open to interpretation. Johns mythology is modelled rather more on the history of real places, it’s an unambiguously physical history of life the universe and everything. The consequence being that the reader – even the reader disinterested in big C Continuity – is tempted if not quite compelled to start asking really awkward questions like: is DCU Earth older than the Sun? What about all those other ancient DCU civilisations? What about evolution? How does this fit in with all that other DCU mythology?

That all this is rolled up in the continuity of the writer’s favourite character and you have a comic that makes me struggle for words. Johns’ vision is so personal and odd, what he seems to be saying about the world so strange (if he actually thinks love=the Predator is a good fit he’s not talking a language I understand, if he doesn’t but just thinks the idea is cool then I’m happy to be a dweeb), his focus so narrow, that I’m just left scratching my head.

Jarvis Cocker once made a TV series about American folk-artists and their eccentric, obsessive work, and there’s a sense in which Johns reminds me of one of those guys and I want to like his work more than I do because of it. Johns is an original: there’s no-one out there doing what he does, no-one else who would feel it important to explain the historical significance of Ion, and that’s probably a big part of why he’s so successful. But where others see awesomeness, I see comics that are fixated on comics and nothing but comics – Green Lantern comics in particular. I suppose there’s a kind of awesomeness to that, but it’s not a variety that I enjoy.

I award this comic 5 anti-brains

*I know I’ve condemned the word “weird” as a short cut to thinking before now, but if anything ever qualified it’s this.

Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay…

http://toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.com

So is this guy, and if you’re a mindless fan I’d say his thoughts are definitely worth a peek

That alternative universe then, could it be that it’s the world according to Evil Locke? So far most of the flash-sideways have been cheery affairs but…

1. The Island has been destroyed and everyone (with the exception of Ben, Ethan, Dogen, etc…) was annihilated in nuclear fire. Sounds like the sort of thing Evil Locke is working towards

2. Evil Locke claims that he always does what he says he will do. Recently Evil Locke has been making lots of promises to the Losties. Interestingly the alternative universe seems to be a place in which people get what they want (even Sayid to some extent).

3. It would be a good fun dramatic reversal to have a world (the alt world) which seems slightly more soft and cuddly turn out to be the nightmare scenario

4. I like the idea that Evil Locke’s plan has in some way already reached fruition, and that everything we’ve seen has been it’s wheels spinning in motion

The thing which really appeals to me though, the backbone of these noodlings, is the gulf between Jacob’s modus-operandii and Evil Locke’s. With Jacob it’s all mystery and faith and choice, with Evil Locke it’s all answers and visibility and certainty (“I always do what I say…”) and not having to make choices: Do this or die, do this and get exactly what you want, follow me and don’t think.

Anyway, just another bunch of Lost thoughts.

Dark Avengers #14 by Brian Bendis, Mike Deodato & Rain Beredo

The characters demonstrate the expected dialogue ticks, the speech balloons are bloated fit to burst, and the most powerful people on the planet don’t kick anyone in the face or blow up any universes, but instead sit around having Important Conversations About Themselves. If you asked someone who didn’t like Bendis’s work to describe one of his comics this is exactly the sort of thing they would come up with. A move away from what the genre supposedly does best – ideas, iconography, adventure, action, scale – towards character psychology, character motivation, and character relationships. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s some of my annotations that I didn’t put up because I was too busy writing a script for my new Young Heroes in Love series that’ll be hitting the shelves in…uh, oh, I don’t know, let’s keep it positive, sometime over the next three years.

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It’s been a long time coming but at 8 o’clock tonight the UK finally gets to see the Season 6 premiere. In an effort to get into the mood, Zomina and I sat down to rewatch the Season 5 finale last night. I was a little worried going in, as the last time I’d seen it I’d come away dissatisfied, in fact the whole season with its proliferation of sci-fi and fantasy trappings, has shaken my faith a little. It has all started to feel a bit too arbitrary, a bit too incoherent. Lost has trod the fine line between enjoyable absurdity and the irredeemably ridiculous since the beginning, but until Season 5 I thought it had always been on the right side of that line, or at least on the right side most of the time.

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Bob: This is not only the best issue of B&R yet, but the best single issue of Morrison’s batman run by some margin, and as dense and full a piece as he’s written since Seven Soldiers #1, with which it shares many links and referents, both deliberate, accidental and incidental.

Zom: Tan’s a nice chap, some of us around here were quite keen on his work, but if you ask me thank God for Cameron Stewart: Batman & Robin is back at long last. This isn’t my favourite issue and I’ll get into some of the reasons why later, but it’s a bloody good one.

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