You may recall that, on a couple of occasions early this year (January and February), I mentioned that a new book of old Japanese Batman comics, cashing in on the '60s Adam West show, was due out. So the paperback edition of this book is out now - the hardback, which apparently has the cover used in those entries, and which contains additional material, has not yet been released - and, with it, there has come a stink.

It's interesting to note the words that I chose when I mentioned this book at the time: a book of "...crazy 60s Japanese Batman comics by Jiro Kuwata" and, after I read a subsequent interview with Chip Kidd, the book's designer and primary credited author, and his collaborator, Saul Ferris, "...a collection of Jiro Kuwata's weekly Batman comics, in the context of 'lookit all these weird Japanese Batman toys' was in the planning stages..."

Because, if I may go back and explain my thoughts, somehow I was given the impression that this book was to function as a reprint of Kuwata's comics. So I was bothered at the time that the book's cover said CHIP KIDD in large, friendly letters, but not JIRO KUWATA, but I figured that: the cover image provided was a placeholder, that I would need to see the book before making rash judgements, and that getting testy over the contents of material not yet seen would make me look like a regular poster over at Outpost Gallifrey.

Well, while I do not yet own Bat-Manga (as the hardback which Bizarro Wuxtry ordered for me has not yet been released), I did sit down for a few minutes with the paperback last weekend at Borders. (That's BORDERS BOOKS & MUSIC, in KENNESAW GEORGIA, which needs ALL YOUR CHRISTMAS MONEY, before the DAMN CHAIN GOES OUT OF BUSINESS. Thank you.) My preliminary thoughts were:

1. These comics are completely terrific. If you like Adam West's Batman, and if you like 60s Japanese design and/or comics, you are going to love these comics.

2. The book is fancy as all get out, and is printed on extraordinarily nice paper.

3. The reproduction of the comics themselves, however, is on a whole 'nuther plain from ideal. The decision was made to reprint them as artifacts, and compile them through the mindset of authorial distance. It would appear that all of the comics included - it is not a complete reprint - were photographed from faded, beat-up editions of those phone-book thick weekly volumes in which Japanese comics originally appear. You know how, in the absence of the original artwork, Titan scans old issues of Battle and cleans up the art before printing another volume of Charley's War? Or how, as I linked recently, Fantagraphics has done an amazing, laborious job restoring Humbug? That's not what was done here. So what you have here is astonishingly nice reproduction, not of the comics, but of horribly beat-up copies of the comics.

4. In January, I wondered "No word on whether designer Chip Kidd will have found a Japanese Batman Pez dispenser to photograph in extreme closeup with the contrast cranked all the way up for the book's frontspiece." No fears there. He found all sorts of goofy old shit, and photographed it in extreme closeup, and cranked the contrast all the way up. That I've been dismissing Kidd with this sort of criticism for as long as I have, after he's filled so many volumes of books with so many similar sorts of photos, might indicate that his style has become something of a stereotype.

5. Jiro Kuwata's name, I noticed, was not on the cover, despite the overwhelming bulk of the book being COMICS BY JIRO KUWATA. His name's on the inside front flap, however.

And the last of my preliminary observations was something unkind about Chip Kidd, but I digress. We'll have to come back to point five in a bit.

At any rate, I was very disappointed in this book. I look(ed) forward to owning it, in order to get the Kuwata comics and read them at length (or, more accurately, read the presentation of them), but I don't care for Kidd's style and I don't like the reproduction of the comics, and I sure as hell don't appreciate Kuwata being left off the cover, because he's the draw, not Kidd. Put another way, Kidd released a book some years back called Batman: Collected which I decided against buying. This is because while I've been known to buy an action figure or twelve over the years, and would not object to a book of photos showing them all, I don't need 8x11-sized images of the tops of Killer Croc doll heads, lit in red.

Okay, so I mentioned a tempest. And the first wave came last Friday and seems to have continued at the following places. This is in roughly chronological order, and some of these were subsequently updated to reflect information in blogs posted later.

Andrew Wheeler - holy shit, I thought the hardcover was $40, not $60!!! $#%^#%!!
Jog the Blog - note my inaccurate comment; I'd forgotten that I also bought Batman: Animated, the book chiefly responsible for my dislike of Kidd's style. The book is shelved, unloved, downstairs.
Leigh Walton
Laura Hudson
Heidi McDonald
Johanna Draper Carlson
Chris Mautner
Chris Butcher

If you'd rather not follow along, a summary could be: "Hey, Jiro Kuwata's name should be on the front of this book / yes, it really should / hey, what's the deal here / I asked Kidd and OH NO HE DINT"

(You can tell I'm dying of jealousy, can't you? If only I'd have said "Hey, why the hell's Jiro Kuwata's name not on the front of this book full of Jiro Kuwata comics" back in February, I could claim Original Outrage and win ten million Internet Dollars or something.)

If I may take a moment to respond to Kidd, who writes "I am heartened that you all have such concern for Mr. Kuwata’s welfare. So here’s a question: where were YOU for the last thirty years, while he was languishing in obscurity both here and in his own country?" before explaining that this is not a collection of Kuwata's comics, it is, rather, a collection of Chip Kidd's photographs of Kuwata's comics. (See point five above; Kidd would perhaps disagree with me when I claim "the overwhelming bulk of the book [is] COMICS BY JIRO KUWATA" as, in his eyes, the overwhelming bulk of the book is PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHIP KIDD.)

Kidd's wrong. The selling point of this book, to this buyer, was never Japanese Batman Halloween costumes. If I wanted to spend money on that, I'd have friended batfatty years ago. (He's not updated in ages; don't tell me he finally ran out of weird stuff.) That's not to say there's not a lot of amusing, crazy, funny stuff to be found in the wild world of licensed and unlicensed merchandise and tat, but my interest in it is low enough to not need it on my LJ Friends Page, and I don't like the way Kidd frames it. The selling point was JIRO KUWATA BATMAN COMICS.

But to see the shoddy way the comics are presented, to know that a properly restored reprint would have been a million times more preferable, to see bloggers I respect raise a reasonable eyebrow over the issue of credit, and to see the "artist" respond by being such a complete and utter heel in his e-mail to Mautner... well, I have an obligation to my local comic shop to actually pay for the material that I requested he order, but that's not a mistake I'm going to make with Chip Kidd again. And if anybody would like to buy this book from me once it arrives, well, I am fortunate enough to at least receive a generous discount from the comic shop, and would happily pass that discount along to you.

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

October 1998: Years and years in the making, Die Laughing finally limps into stores amid a small publicity blitz from Fleetway and a noticeably smaller one from DC Comics. This was the fourth time that John Wagner and Alan Grant scripted a team-up between Judge Dredd and Batman, but although this was the biggest - a 96-page story told across two squarebound editions in the US - it is a story long past its time.

When Dredd and Batman first met in 1991's Judgment on Gotham, it was a huge success that sold by the truckload. A sequel was released called Vendetta in Gotham which didn't sell quite as well, perhaps in part because Cam Kennedy's splendid artwork on the second did not have the fully-painted wicked-cool heavy metal bloodsplodo of the first book's Simon Bisley work. It's certainly fair to speculate that many of the first comic's buyers picked it up more for Bisley than for following the continuity of either character.

Die Laughing was intended to be the third story, and was pencilled in to be released in 1995 to capitalize on the Batman Forever film. But the artwork was not ready in time, and another title, The Ultimate Riddle, appeared in its place. By the time Die Laughing finally did make its way into shops, it was no longer anything special. DC was releasing at least one, and as many as three, "prestige format" Bat-books a month, ranging from "Elseworlds" stories of Batman as a Victorian detective or a space vampire to crossovers with every comic company on the planet. Judgment on Gotham had been a novelty, and an occasionally impressive one, in its day. Eight years later, with comic shops sagging under the weight of shitty squarebound Batman comics jammed into longboxes that nobody wanted, this two-parter seemed to get little attention from anybody.



The delay was mainly down to Glenn Fabry, who had been contracted to paint the adventure, but in the end completed less than forty pages, with Jim Murray and Jason Brashill stepping up to finish the project. The story isn't Wagner and Grant at their finest. Forced once again to contrive some reason to get the characters and their villains together, they have the Joker get hold of a dimension-hopping device left over from the first story, pop to Mega-City One, learn the lay of the land, take over a criminal gang and, in the most credibility-straining incident since disbelief was first suspended, this gang hijacks the armed transport carrying the disembodied spirit forms of the Four Dark Judges.

It gets even stupider. Despite a pretty amazing track record of murdering every self-serving criminal who's ever released him from the judges' custody, Death doesn't kill the Joker immediately, but instead arranges for the Clown Prince of Crime to become the fifth Dark Judge and... oh, just stop it now.



It would be another five years before Judge Dredd crossed over into anybody else's fictional universes. That would be 2003's excellent "Judge Dredd vs. Aliens," published in tandem with Dark Horse, and it would be many, many times better than this. Nevertheless, "Die Laughing" is available, along with the first and third crossovers, in the first of the titles co-published by DC and Rebellion in 2004, The Batman/Judge Dredd Files.

Next time, Sinister Dexter take a Caribbean holiday and meet some ugly, ugly artwork.

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Showcase Presents Batman volume three (DC, 2008) and Bad Company: Kano (Rebellion, 2007).




More of the same. Depending on your opinion of mid-to-late 1960s Batman, agonizingly more of the same. The book features several television-friendly villains, even ones they never used in the 60s TV series such as the Cluemaster and the Getaway Genius, but sometimes in grandiose schemes that could never have been realized on that show's budget. It features the old-styled, retarded Catwoman who was obsessed with stealing anything with "cat" in the name, be it catamarans or catawba grapes. There's some nice artwork from the likes of Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane, but you'll probably like this book a lot more if you're one of us who love the show.



Oh, I wish I could recommend this a little more strongly. The first series of Bad Company, back in 1986-87, was really amazing. Peter Milligan's been a really uneven writer, ranging from utterly compelling (as seen in that first series and, say, Enigma), and then there's well, the last two years of Shade the Changing Man and most of this. The book reprints two storylines. The first, in which the battle-scarred Kano attempts to retire to a farming community beset by ghosts and by creatures in the forest, has elements of genius, but it's completely undermined by Brett Ewins' artwork, which is even more stiff than usual and colored in that garish watercolor he seemed to be using throughout the early 1990s. The second features far better, more vibrant black and white work that recalls the earlier adventures, but the story is Milligan on autopilot. There's very little here which will convince new readers just how amazing that first series was.

We sorta fell off the face of the planet this weekend; it was great. Friday night I decided to just stay home and read and play online and get a good night's sleep. Saturday morning, Marie arrived with her cat and (most of) the rest of her stuff, and now the long job of unpacking begins. We left around 2 to go get the kiddos in Chattanooga. We had an early dinner at Sticky Fingers - I told the manager that we have never actually eaten at any restaurant in Chattanooga other than Sticky Fingers, on account of it being so good.

The kids were all sweaty and wired and glad to see us. Deb had that dental surgery you might recall I mentioned a couple of weeks back and was hung over from vicodin, and the Hipster Nephew was pretty cranky, but we had fun playing a little game called "MY Bottle." After supper, we said our goodbyes and took the kids to a ball game, about which more once I get pictures off my camera. Got home a little after midnight and slept horribly since the cat wanted to complain about being kept downstairs.

Sunday, the kids started doing some laundry, and I took the Hipster Son to get his haircut, and then dropped him off at a friends' house. The rest of us went out and had some lunch and went to Harry's to get some groceries and then I took a nap and read a little, and in the evening, we went over to see my dad. He took us to dinner at Olde Mill Steakhouse. I think all of us had meals the likes of which we rarely see in this day and age. Dad's grouper was even better than the one I have down in Mobile, and my sirloin was possibly the best I've had in my life.

After that, we went to see The Dark Knight and OH MY FUCKING GOD HE MADE THE PENCIL DISAPPEAR that was even better than I hoped it'd be. I enjoyed the dickens out of that. Having said that, I'd have been happy to have seen a sneak preview of Righteous Kill instead; that there is a fantastic trailer. Between that, Watchmen and Quantum of Solace, I was all set. Good batch of trailers, really. But The Dark Knight was just excellent, apart from Bale's Bat-voice, which is awful. I wonder how in heaven they'll follow that up, or if they'll even try. Seems like the over-arching story they started to tell has concluded, hasn't it? And Heath Ledger was just amazing... one of the many things I disliked about the film Se7en was how dull and ordinary Kevin Spacey turned out to be. Here was a film which presented a similar tone of menace and panic, and paid off completely with the killer, astutely identified as a terrorist, being this unreasonable force of nature. And smart. I really, really enjoy watching a story with a smart villain.

Well, that's that. The kids are off to summer camp in Alabama, and I've got this gorgeous woman living with me... and I'm stuck at work. Bah!

Well, Friday's the day. Great big moving day. Marie's getting the truck and loading up all her big stuff and that's what we'll do Friday evening is unload and set up and get a little celebratory dinner. She'll be back in Athens for one last week of work, and then she and the cat'll be with us properly, and I'm very restless and excited about this.

Anyway, in other news, lots of little things to report:

* Elvis Costello's new album Momofuku is really good. Elvis releases a ton of records, most of which seem to fly under my radar these days, but this is one that I heard about and made sure I bought. Darn good stuff.

* Coming later this fall, new albums by both the Bunnymen and the Cure. Apparently the same day - September 13! I think I've come to terms with the reality that, as much as I enjoy hearing new music, the stuff that gets me really excited is the stuff from artists who had their chart heyday twenty years back.

* Contradicting the above ever so slightly: Holy thunder - Magnetic Fields are playing Woodruff Hall on October 17. Y'all be back from your honeymoon by then, Ric?

* Also new, IDW has released a trade collection of their colorised Doctor Who Classics. This collects three Fourth Doctor serials by Pat Mills, John Wagner and Dave Gibbons, along with a two-parter by Paul Neary. These are already available in their original black & white from Panini in the book The Iron Legion, but it's more likely that your local comic shop will have this in stock. The coloring is not all that bad, I must say - it's better than the job Marvel did on these stories twenty years ago - but while I'll stick with the originals, the important thing is that, if you like Doctor Who, you should really check these stories out.

* We're considering a one-day trip to Dragon*Con, on account of Adam West being there. I mean, damn, can't miss Adam West.

* I was so completely stuffed by dinner last night that I only wanted some French fries for lunch. So I went to McDonald's for some, and the manager, a fellow who looked to be in his early sixties, saw my Showcase Green Lantern book that I'm reading and said "Green Lantern! I remember him! That was a great show - Bruce Lee played Kato!" No kidding.

* The Hipster Son's apparently caught a summer cold, but he's in good spirits.

* Well, I don't much like "Harry Worth" on the new Elvis Costello album. The rest's good.

* I've watched so much Law & Order and its spinoffs over the last month that I felt that I'd be committing some sin by missing out on the season premiere of Saving Grace, which was promoted with an ad in every single commercial break across two channels. That wasn't bad. Downright odd in places, but I wasn't completely taken. I'll probably check out another episode or two. I wish USA put Burn Notice at a convenient time; I'd like to see that.

* We all went to see Hellboy II the night before we went to Nashvegas and it entertained us all, mightily. It was genuinely fun, and kept subverting the convention of the narrative with wild design and humor. I'm tempted to go see it again. Seems like, over the last five or so years, it's the comic book movies that prove exceptions to the old rule about sequels never being as good as the originals. You remember how that always used to be the case, but this was better than the first one. So were Spider-Man and X-Men and Fantastic Four and probably Batman as well.

* The fellow who designed those godawful 2000 AD ads that ran in Loaded in 1997 stopped by that entry where I talked about 'em to offer a mild defense, should you be interested.

* You know, I was only mildly interested in seeing Frank Miller's Will Eisner's "The Spirit", but even that mild interest has been killed stone dead by that trailer.

* Did I miss anything? What do you wanna talk about?

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews of Batman: The Dailies 1943-1946 (Sterling, 2007) and Rumic Theatre (Viz, 1996).



Boy, a little of this goes a long way. In the early 1990s, the now-defunct publisher Kitchen Sink teamed up with DC to reprint the entirety of the wartime Batman newspaper strip. The three books, poorly designed to my eye, with only two strips per page, sold badly and more than fifteen years later, Sterling cobbled up the innards, not even modifying the page numbers, and put them all in one mammoth, heavy hardback that'd bludgeon a runaway hoodlum, apparently with an eye on the remainders table at larger chain bookstores. If you can stand the discomfort of reading the 600-page thing, there's some good stuff. Batman in the 1940s had a lot more in common with Dick Tracy than the modern super-ninja, and our hero routinely comes out on the wrong side of a fistfight with thugs. He gets knocked cold by a thrown can of tomatoes at one point! Only one of these sixteen serials features a name supervillain - the Joker - the rest are pretty colorless villains with pretty colorful criminal schemes. The strips are supplanted with an amazingly exhaustive series of essays and interviews, meticulously researched and not a little dry, but more like the sort of supplements I'd prefer to see more publishers attempt. I reviewed Sterling's companion volume of Sunday strips in the spring (See here.) and can't help but feel that's the better volume, but I'm perhaps biased against this awkward, heavy book which, redesigned to display three or four strips a page would have been a lot thinner and manageable. Recommended with reservations; look for low-cost options first.



Now Rumiko Takahashi is of course well known for her long-running serial stories, but it looks like every few months she creates a one-off thirty-odd page story which appears in one of those weekly Japanese anthologies in addition to, or in lieu of, an episode of Ranma ½ or InuYasha. These are typically light romances, occasionally with some supernatural or magical element. I'm not certain how these were originally compiled in Japan, but this is a mid-90s Viz effort which packages six of these stories in that awful old neither-fish-nor-fowl $16 format that Viz used to use before giving in and going with low-priced digests like they do today. It's long out of print, but you shouldn't have much trouble tracking down a copy - Amazon has links to sellers letting it go quite cheap - and you certainly should, because each of these are charming and clever and, if we're honest, a whole lot better than InuYasha.

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



I reviewed this three years ago for my old Weekly Comics Hype, but this time around, I was not as engaged by Morrison's weird world than I had been. The narrative is occasionally very frustrating; I got lost wondering where some of the bizarre encounters with the Hand and its agents actually happen, and became aggravated by the multiple layers of the story. On just one level, it's one of Grant Morrison's very best stories, but it's too obscured by too many odd things to really resonate. On the other hand, some of the actual incidents are still pretty damn amazing, including one of the best death scenes ever, when Slade's fight with an assassin results in a neighbor getting... well, I shouldn't say. Chris Weston's art is amazing. Recommended if you like The Prisoner.



Oh, this is fun stuff. Originally published in 1990 by Kitchen Sink, Sterling Books last year reissued this in a low-priced hardback edition. It's the complete four-year run of Sunday Batman and Robin comics from 1943-46, back when the character was a detective adventurer for children, free from angst and the continuity of modern comics. Most of the stories are told over the course of two to eight dense pages, with lots of fun old art, mostly by Jack Burnley. Other contributors include Bill Finger, Dick Sprang and Bob Kane. The stories play like shorter Dick Tracy cases, and Batman's periodically lighthearted encounters with his foes are quite refreshing. They're not all whimsical, however. A great case where a "fortune teller" is murdered on a live radio show, only to curse his four killers with his dying breaths to cruel deaths of their own, is about as good as kids' entertainment can get. On the other hand, the old-fashioned art was an instant turnoff to the Hipster Son, who didn't stick around long enough to see Batman and Catwoman fight on the steps of the Parthenon in Nashville's Centennial Park. Seriously! Recommended for nostalgic readers.

Last month, I mentioned that a collection of Jiro Kuwata's weekly Batman comics, in the context of "lookit all these weird Japanese Batman toys" was in the planning stages. It's due out in late October of this year, and Deb Aoki at About.com has an interview with Chip Kidd and Saul Ferris, who have compiled the book. Click the image below for more.



In a strange bit of synchronicity, Kuwata's Batman comic was commissioned to cash in on the 60s Batman TV show, which is, by far, the Batman material I enjoy the most. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that sprocketship had made a remarkable find at the Atlanta Comics Expo. We had company over for Movie Night yesterday (we saw the "Weird Al" Yankovic film UHF, which isn't a very good movie, but it has four or five very funny moments) and he brought me something he'd found in the dealer's room: a bootleg set of 116 of the 120 Batman episodes, almost all taken from the original masters. Beautiful transfers, superb sound and color, some bonus material... and all of it, stupidly, not available for public purchase owing to a rights issue. (The program itself is now owned by Fox, but as the characters are owned by Warners, nobody seems to be able to do anything with it.)

I've worked some extra hours this week so I can get off early, in about an hour, and go to Athens. At some point, Marie and I might see Persepolis at Cine. I hope everybody has a wonderful weekend!

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



And then there was the time that Superman and Batman got married in the 1950s and had kids. Clark Jr. and Bruce Jr. grew to be teens in the mid-70s and had to totally deal with their square parents, who were just were not with the scene, man. And because Superman Jr. was only half as powerful as his dad, the old man was always laying down the law and saying he shouldn't get involved with either criminals or chicks. Talk about a generation gap! Didn't these relics understand this was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius? Sometimes a cat's just got to do his own thing, you dig?

DC actually published this lunatic stuff for years in the pages of World's Finest Comics. One month, you'd have Superman and Batman in a traditional team-up, and the next month, you'd have their otherwise unmentioned teenage sons riding around the country on motorcycles having bizarre, quasi-socially relevant adventures. The Super-Sons were quietly shelved after Bob Haney moved on to other titles, apart from an odd, unnecessary retcon published a couple of years later. Every Super-Sons appearance is reprinted in this collection. Recommended for nostalgists and completists.



Oh, it's Robert Kanigher again.

This isn't quite as much of a slog as Kanigher's other 1960s titles, but it's still very repetitive and very uninspiring. Actually, the principal draw is Joe Kubert's artwork, but you won't believe the shortcuts he chose to take to get all these pages turned in. There are countless panels with nothing but explosions or helmets flying, or close-ups of rifle barrels.

DC wasn't entirely like this in the 1960s - the TV show era of Batman, for instance, is silly and inventive and fun - but Kanigher's books display an amazing sense of malaise and a lack of imagination. They weren't made to be read one after another, and the total absence of any continuing subplots or storylines mean that you can put this book down at any time, not missing anything. I hoped Rock would have aged better than this, but it didn't. Not recommended.

Check out what will be in stores later this year: Not merely crazy Japanese Batman comics, not even merely crazy 60s cash-in-on-the-Adam West show Japanese Batman comics, but crazy 60s Japanese Batman comics by Jiro Kuwata, done just after he'd finished the incredibly goofy cyborg comic 8 Man.



You know 8 Man, right? He's the guy who fought crime when the FBI was helpless, you recall. Anyway, the book's coming out from Pantheon in September '08. September?! It'll be time for college football and the chili cookoff again by then!

No word on whether designer Chip Kidd will have found a Japanese Batman Pez dispenser to photograph in extreme closeup with the contrast cranked all the way up for the book's frontspiece.

Source: Deb Aoki's page on about.com, which also notes that a four-plus volume of a Japanese bio of Robert Johnson is coming from Del Rey in the summer. Huh.

Here's how this works: I finish reading a comic collection, and I tell you about it, and I try not to go on too long.



I never had a copy of this book as a kid, though it seemed, growing up, that so many of my friends had either it or the companion Superman volume. Must have been a common enough Christmas present. It's a pretty good cross-section of reprints, about 400 pages, mostly in black and white. The goofy late 50s stuff is probably the most entertaining; the more critically-praised Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams stuff from the 1970s is damned, in the cold light of modern eyes, by a whole lot of coincidental plot exposition right when the hero hides from "somebody coming," that somebody being a motormouth who needs to explain how far along the evil scheme is. Come to think of it, the same creators' lauded Green Lantern/Green Arrow run is completely full of that as well. I prefer the silly old story where Luthor and the Joker team up and launch an incredibly successful business selling robots to industry, but then blow it all by using the robots to steal money instead of just sitting back and earning it. Recommended for nostalgists.

Three excerpts from "A Touch of Poison Ivy," a 14-page story first seen in Batman # 183 (Aug. 1966) by Robert Kanigher and Sheldon Moldoff, and reprinted in Showcase Presents Batman Vol. 2, in stores now...







I got nothing, friends list. Something occurs to you, comment away.

Before I forget, I wanted to let everyone know that I've found a serious challenger to The Vortex's crown as the best burgers in Atlanta. It's this little place called Five Guys in Alpharetta. They've been winning awards in D.C. for years for the best burger and the best "cheap eats," and have slowly been expanding into Virginia and North Carolina. This is their first Georgia location. It's on Windward Parkway near Hwy 9 and it's amazing.

Anyway, I've been reading through volume one of Showcase Presents Batman, which reprints a run of 1964-65 issues of Batman and Detective Comics, where they started "modernizing" the character by giving him some mysteries to solve, and far fewer repeat appearances by gimmicky villains. Which is pretty nice, considering the gimmicky villains they introduced at the time were really stupid. There's a reason you can't buy action figures of MR. MAKE-UP or THE GRASSHOPPER or indeed, GORTHA, GODDESS TO ALL ELEPHANTS. There's also a reason hundreds of thousands of more kids were reading Lee & Kirby Fantastic Four comics instead of these.

On the other hand, it does have the first Riddler appearance in about sixteen years, which Lorenzo Semple or somebody read on an airplane and decided would make a good TV show. It formed the basis of the 1966 TV show's first episode, which is kind of neat.

DC has also solicited Showcase Presents Shazam! for December, and that's going to reprint every issue of the 1970s Shazam! comic, except for one. Y'all might remember that Filmation made that live-action Shazam! Saturday morning show, and then spun off The Secrets of Isis from it? Well, DC licensed the rights to Isis from Filmation to make an Isis comic book, and introduced the character in the pages of Shazam! # 25. Unfortunately, DC could not get the rights to re-license Isis and reprint that issue, so it won't be included. Happily, I double-checked yesterday morning and I have exactly two issues of Shazam! - that one and one of those "100 Pages for 60 Cents" issues, which is full of reprints from 1940s Captain Marvel adventures. I wish they'd reprint those cheaply in the Showcase format, because those comics are awesome.

(DC has since introduced its own character named Isis into their Captain Marvel continuity, and she doesn't wear the TV character's costume or look like Joanna Cameron. From a management perspective, that was overdue.)

Anyway, it's been a fun weekend for sports. It started Friday when I looked over the Gwinnett Gladiators' final roster and learned that the Atlanta Thrashers had called up Adam Smyth. Furious, I sent a petulant and silly "pissed" e-mail to Deb. This was, of course, ridiculous. Players want to be called up by the NHL, and of course, devoted fans of minor league teams wish the best for their boys and congratulate them on being called up.

On the other hand, Smyth is the most fun player out there, since he's both (a) extremely talented and (b) a short-tempered fight-starting wonder, and since I'd rather see the Gladiators than the Thrashers, on grounds of cost, schedule and my preference for the minors, and since the Thrashers' roster is already packed with talented starters, I'll not have many chances to see him in action. Bah. Well, good luck to him all the same.

The Glads won their home opener Friday night against the South Carolina Stingrays, but fell last night on the road against Augusta, our nearest rival, 6-5.

So I was thinking Friday that I'd take the kids to see the Thrashers Saturday night, since there is currently a very nice kids-tix promotion going on. Late Friday evening, a better option came up, and so I made plans for that instead. Then I stopped into Titan on the way to take my kids to flag football Saturday morning to say hello to some of the folks I play Clix with, and congratulate Derek and Liza on their wedding, and by chance was there when a Thrashers representative came into the store to sell one of their neat little packages. You pay $40 and get a pair of $55 tickets and four buy-one-get-one-free coupons. I guess sports teams do this to get committed purchases instead of intended purchases, if you take my meaning.

This worked out well, since I was going to spend $40 to take the kiddos to the game that evening, but I had new plans, and now I had better seats to use some other day. Then I got on the road and my plans got changed and I'd already spent my hockey money. Shame, we seem to have missed a good one. They beat Florida 4-2. They also beat the Capitals on Thursday night, 4-3. Since I decided I dislike the Capitals for purely petulant reasons, I am pleased.

Speaking of purely petulant reasons, I'm hoping the Detroit Tigers rebound from their game one loss and whip the Cardinals in the World Series. I still pretend I don't like them.

Anyway, the Hipster Son's flag football team can't find another win. Apart, sadly, from missing his man running a reverse once, he played almost flawlessly, but his team has neither the talent nor the coaching to be consistent. Poor guy.

This is the second week that I've missed following the Dawgs while at my boy's game, but I was glad to hear they won yesterday, kinda-sorta making up for that shameful loss to Vandy. We went over to my folks' house after finishing at the church to watch some college games. My parents had gone to some lake for a weekend getaway with some other people, so we had the place to ourselves. I watched Notre Dame pull a last-minute win over UCLA out of nowhere, and watched Bama fail to keep its lead against Tennesee, which was a heartbreaker.

I read a little and went to bed early. I'm rereading a mean-spirited and hilarious Joe Queenan book where he spends many pages lamenting the inexplicable career of the awful Billy Joel. It's pretty hilarious.

And I'm in a bidding war for one of the last Doctor Who tapes we need. Grah, eBay can be maddening. Whoever this is does not need it as much as the kids and I do, so he needs to go away.

Ongoing computer issues (power supply) are keeping me from getting much typing done. So, since I haven't had the chance to type up this week's scheduled Weekly Comics Hype, you can get ready for next month's debut of the new Grant Morrison Batman series by reading this older recap of a very good Batman adventure, The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale.




Over the years, I've picked up quite a few inexpensive Batman collections and graphic novels. If I find one for under $5, I figure it's worth the read and one day my son might enjoy it. Most of them aren't all that interesting; with about eight monthly titles plus assorted spin-offs, one-shots, crossovers and "Batman in ancient Egypt / Victorian London / Transylvania" goofiness, it's pretty easy to lose sight of quality control. Happily, there are some decent books out there. Matt Wagner's Faces is as good a Two-Face story as you're likely to find but it's a little slight. Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's The Killing Joke is interesting, but an honorable failure, unlike Grant Morrison and Dave cKean's Arkham Asylum, which is an honorable disaster, which doesn't just creak from the weight of pomposity, but shatters altogether, but boy, it looks pretty.

The problem, looking at the vast catalog of Batman books out there, is that he's an extraordinarily difficult character to get right, which is why damn near every Batbook you'll ever find is, like the Burton / Schumacher films, deeply unsatisfying. Alan Grant could do the character right (as can the producers of the Justice League cartoon and the '90s Batman show which preceded it), but little of Alan Grant's take is available in trade. That leaves, as your best option, The Long Halloween, a brilliant little mystery with a number of creepy and unexpected detours.

The story begins very early in Batman's career, before he and Commissioner Gordon formed an alliance, and when he had only met the members of his colorful rogues' gallery perhaps once or twice each. Gotham, at this stage, is under the control of more traditional gangsters. The Maroni and Falcone crime families are carving up the city in a turf war, and the Falcones are losing their members in what initially looks like mob rubouts, until it becomes evident there's more of a method to the killings than it first appeared. Are the Falcones being targetted specifically by some third agent, or is there
a serial killer working the city…?

Loeb, later to become a writer/producer of Smallville and scripter of several consecutively less-interesting comics that use a template downright identical to this one, does a masterful job of deception with this story, which was originally serialized across thirteen monthly issues. Compiled together in this 350-page collection, they read astonishingly well as an excellent example of a hard-boiled detective thriller for the late 1990s. After all, there aren't many streets meaner than those of Gotham City. Tim Sale's artwork is extremely interesting. He has a brilliant sense of layout and pacing, and his designs for the more garish members of Gotham's criminal community are as grotesque and enthralling as they've ever been.

The Long Halloween is available from Amazon by clicking the image above, although I caution you not to read the customer reviews, as some of them go out of their way to spoil the daylights out of the darn story. (Still, a 4 and a half star average from 59 reviewers is pretty sound, for those of you who consider those.) Alternately, your local comic shop would enjoy your custom; new books ship on Wednesday, so why not stop in after work?

It should come as no surprise that, of all the downright amazingly weird and painfully entertaining productions ever made for television, I've got a soft place in my heart for Legends of the Superheroes, a pair of variety specials made by Hanna-Barbera for NBC when the company was trying to expand out of bad Saturday morning cartoon production into bad Saturday evening variety production. Sid & Marty Krofft had successfully managed the transition; Hanna-Barbera less so. The two specials starred Adam West, Burt Ward, Frank Gorshin, William Schallert, Ruth Buzzi and Jeff Altman from Pink Lady & Jeff. And lots of other people who went right back to waiting tables. And Ed McMahon.

Scott Tipton at Movie Poop Shoot has a wonderful discussion of the show, with lots of screencaps. I think his bootleg copy is one generation higher up the chain than mine.

I'm sorry, mpceccato, but the screencap of Ghetto Man still probably isn't of good enough quality to be made into a userpic.

http://moviepoopshoot.com/comics101/117.html

Holy Joe Christagau, great god of rock critics! Last night, 92.9 Dave-FM played TWO songs by Big Star. I think the only time I’ve ever heard anything by Alex Chilton on the radio, ever, was when I asked WUOG to play “September Gurls” about fifteen years ago.

The girl and I had left the Hipster Son at my parents’ house and were on our way home after dinner. The doctor phoned me at work yesterday morning to say his culture had come back positive for strep. Why this took 48 hours I had no idea, but I phoned Mom to let her know and she volunteered to go get him around lunchtime. So I went over there after work and watched the second half of Batman Returns with him.

You know, that film’s better than I remember it being, he said, damning with faint praise. It’s still the best of that four, even though their depiction of the Penguin is so goddamn wrong, wrong, wrong that he should have had a different name entirely. This is entirely Tim Burton’s fault. I realize this comes as a shock to Livejournalling people, but I llooaatthhee Tim Burton, who has made exactly two films which have entertained me, Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow, which wasn’t all that great either, and hours upon hours of bombastic shlock overscored by fucking Danny Elfman, who has never known “subtle” in his life.

Burton’s vision of Batman is informed by the very stupid notion that the players are all forced by their freakish psychoses into action; none of the four main characters in his two films have free will. Burton’s Penguin actually says the unbelievable line “You’re just jealous because I’m a real freak and you have to wear a mask!” Well, no. Maybe in this world, but who the hell wants to visit this place?

The Penguin, for those of you who missed the memo, is a short criminal who likes prop umbrellas and has a big nose and a big vocabulary. He is refined, and not insane. He is vulgar, but not disgusting. He is eccentric, but not anachronistic. Even the Hipster Son knew that what he was watching wasn’t right. It was Batman fighting two criminals he’d never see in any other fiction again, with good reason. He still wants to see the others because he likes Batman, but he still, mercifully, hasn’t hit that age where he turns his back on the Adam West show.

Most people do, when they hit middle school and they decide that series is silly and stupid, but the sensible ones realise a bit later on in life that the concept of Batman itself is silly and stupid, and at least the Adam West series seems to know this, and revel in this, and therefore provides some of the most entertaining television ever made. That’s not to say there haven't been some pretty darn good comics with the character, usually drawn by Jim Aparo or Norm Greyfogle, or written by Morrison or Haney or Alan Grant, sometimes for entirely different reasons.

I still think one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen on television comes early in an episode where the Gotham City politicos are celebrating Batman’s anniversary as a crimefighter and all the actors are trying their damndest to overact each other with exagerated syllables and dialogue nobody except these loudmouthed wingnuts could deliver with a straight face. All except Adam West, who puts two fingers to his chest and, humbled by the praise, lowers his head almost imperceptibly, instantly stealing the show from everybody else in two teeny gestures. It’s one of the funniest things ever.

(That’s not to say we don’t love Adam West for entirely the wrong reasons sometimes. I’ve started a small trend among local Heroclix players. When you include Batman in a Heroclix team and you roll badly, you just sigh “Oh, no wonder, this isn’t Batman, it’s Adam West.”)

What else is going on? Well, that banner at the top of this entry indicates I’m supporting the Jylland-Posten in their position of freedom of speech trumping the loonier aspects of Islam. Read more about it at Wikipedia.

I’m also supporting the Steelers this weekend. Firstly because they’re michaelpop’s team, and secondly because Hines Ward plays for them, and thirdly because they’re the traditional enemies of the Cleveland Browns, and I take some petulant satisfaction in cheering against my ex-wife’s teams. Haw, indeed, haw.

I’m also bored out of my head and a little sad, but I have forty more dollars in the bank than I thought I’d have. Off to Jackson-Hewitt with my W-2s and stuff on Monday.

Julia Fordham lyrics which struck me today, for someone who needs a hug and a little time:

Monday, I’m at square one
Tuesday, what have I done
Wednesday, I’m all right jack
Thursday, I want you back
Friday, I’m out with my friends
Saturday, I’m on the up again

Then it’s downhill Sunday,
Downhill Sunday…

I think I’ll sleep in tomorrow. Late. Very late.

Happy Halloween!

Today, for the first time in two years, I’m dressed as my nefarious alter-ego Mr. Monopoly. He’s my take on a 1960s Batvillain, who would have been played by Vincent Price in the second season of the TV series. (After the two-part story was “shelved,” Price was recast as the villainous Egghead. The two-parter would have been entitled “Mr. Monopoly Shifts the Blame” / “Batman Plays a Dangerous Game” and would have been aired second in the season. I have a quite elaborate backstory for the character…)

Tonight, the Hipster Daughter will be dressed as a princess and her brother as an injured hockey player. If you’d like to trick or treat with us, stop on by!!

Anyway, the weekend itself was something of a catastrophe. I got a lot of sleep though. This week should be better. I’m not making any plans yet though.

I can’t think of anything to talk about. I think it’s going to be a pretty decent day and I hope you all have a magic, fun, fantastic time tonight no matter what you’re doing or with whom you are trick-or-treating!

EDIT: I won the office costume contest!

(Originally posted October 31, 2005, 08:55 at gmslegion, three comments after the cut.) ( Read more... )

There's no 2000 AD book in stores this week, so once again I'm going
to recommend you pick up a backlist item. This time, my suggestion is
Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale.




Over the years, I've picked up quite a few inexpensive Batman
collections and graphic novels. If I find one for under $5, I figure
it's worth the read and one day my son might enjoy it. Most of them
aren't all that interesting; with about eight monthly titles plus
assorted spin-offs, one-shots, crossovers and "Batman in ancient Egypt
/ Victorian London / Transylvania" goofiness, it's pretty easy to lose
sight of quality control. Happily, there are some decent books out
there. Matt Wagner's Faces is as good a Two-Face story as
you're likely to find but it's a little slight. Alan Moore and Brian
Bolland's The Killing Joke is interesting, but an honorable
failure, unlike Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's Arkham Asylum,
which is an honorable disaster, which doesn't just creak from the
weight of pomposity, but shatters altogether, but boy, it looks
pretty.

The problem, looking at the vast catalog of Batman books out there, is
that he's an extraordinarily difficult character to get right, which
is why damn near every Batbook you'll ever find is, like the Burton /
Schumacher films, deeply unsatisfying. Alan Grant could do the
character right (as can the producers of the Justice League cartoon
and the '90s Batman show which preceded it), but little of Alan
Grant's take is available in trade. That leaves, as your best option,
The Long Halloween, a brilliant little mystery with a number of creepy
and unexpected detours.

The story begins very early in Batman's career, before he and
Commissioner Gordon formed an alliance, and when he had only met the
members of his colorful rogues' gallery perhaps once or twice each.
Gotham, at this stage, is under the control of more traditional
gangsters. The Maroni and Falcone crime families are carving up the
city in a turf war, and the Falcones are losing their members in what
initially looks like mob rubouts, until it becomes evident there's
more of a method to the killings than it first appeared. Are the
Falcones being targetted specifically by some third agent, or is there
a serial killer working the city…?

Loeb, later to become a writer/producer of Smallville and
scripter of several consecutively less-interesting comics that use a
template downright identical to this one, does a masterful job of
deception with this story, which was originally serialized across
thirteen monthly issues. Compiled together in this 350-page
collection, they read astonishingly well as an excellent example of a
hard-boiled detective thriller for the late 1990s. After all, there
aren't many streets meaner than those of Gotham City. Tim Sale's
artwork is extremely interesting. He has a brilliant sense of layout
and pacing, and his designs for the more garish members of Gotham's
criminal community are as grotesque and enthralling as they've ever
been.

The Long Halloween is available from Amazon by clicking the
image above, although I caution you not to read the customer reviews,
as some of them go out of their way to spoil the daylights out of the
darn story. (Still, a 4 and a half star average from 59 reviewers is
pretty sound, for those of you who consider those.) Alternately, your
local comic shop would enjoy your custom; new books ship on Thursday
this week, so why not stop in after work?

Someone on a message board I frequent did not understand - at all - what Joel Schumacher's deal with all the fetish imagery in his Batman movies was. I explained.

Schumacher's problem was that he believed there was box office gold in emulating the 1960s series, and then did everything wrong that the old series did right.

(I'm of course very aware that many younger viewers and many Batman purists detest that show, usually for reasons I just don't get. I mean, you can appreciate Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes films for what they are, even if they don't have anything to do with Doyle's originals and usually have him fighting Nazis or such, but the 60s Batman apparently trod on more sacred sod than Rathbone...)

Anyway, there was an honest feeling in Hollywood that the second film was not as successful as the first because Burton made it "too dark." The 60s series is actually remembered among a segment of eldsters because it was so colorful - one of the first network offerings to be shown in color - and so imaginative in its visual flair.

How Schumacher got the Batman job I have no idea, but apparently his research led him to watch perhaps six episodes of the show (almost certainly the one with Liberace as the villain) and read some background on the series, where he invariably learned that the original show was "camp."

Unfortunately, and here I'm getting obscure, the term "camp" does not mean at all the same thing now as it did when Susan Sontag coined the term in the early 1960s, and we can actually "thank" Batman for that. Camp, as described by Sontag, refers to any behavior which is very self-aware, acting on a meta-level which lets audiences know that the actor or artist is aware that their pose is affected and mannered. You see a lot of camp acting in Andy Warhol's films, in Bryan Ferry's absurd "tux by the poolside" photo on the cover of his Another Time, Another Place LP, and all over the Batman show, where every single actor, with the possible exception of Alan Napier, overdelivers their lines and moves in a manner that is abundantly obvious that these are *not* real people, they are actors reading unbelievable dialogue in as exaggerated a manner as possible. Neil Hamilton, who was Commissioner Gordon, is actually the most truly camp of the lot. He poses like a lump of granite in every scene and overemotes every line wonderfully: "Iiiiii don't know WHO he is behind that mask of his, but Gotham City owes him a debt whiiiiich weeee caaaan NE-VAH repay!!"

The problem with this camp definition is that the outre segment of the homosexual community has also long had a very camp element, as seen in the outlandish dress of, say, Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward or Quentin Crisp. It just took Sontag to define what the heck you called it. There are lots of intersections between outre gay culture and 1960s Batman, from Liberace to the frequent dressing in drag to the casting of female gay icons like Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt and so forth. Batman was much beloved by the gay community at the time, and still is by many. After all, the forces of law and order (normalcy) are a bunch of boring, uptight nerds. It's the villains - those who refuse to conform to Gotham's boring normalcy - who have the best clothes and the most fun. I don't know why anyone reading this might dislike the 60s Batman, but I'd argue the main reason for a Batman trad to dislike it is that the "heroic" Batman is a square, daddio. The Mad Hatter and the Riddler and Lord Ffogg are having the time of their lives doing their own thing! Don't believe me? The only time any of the heroes ever laughs on that show is when they've been gassed. The villains are always smiling.

So anyway, particularly as the early 70s came around and the more flamboyant "out" gays became even more flamboyant than ever, under the safe confine of wild dress and behavior that glam rock, Ziggy Stardust and T. Rex offered, the word "camp" became irretrievably lost to mean "flamboyant gay behavior," particularly of the "hello sailor"-bent wrist stereotype. Throw in a pink feather boa and you've got a walking cliche, which answers the question above about the 90s Batman cartoon's caricature of Joel Schumacher. It's actually a pretty clever gag. Schumacher is an out homosexual. Caricaturing him with a pink feather boa neatly encapsulates his fetished take on Batman.

Honestly, Batman Forever isn't a terrible movie. I like parts of it quite well, but everything about it just feels wrong. The Riddler's constantly changing hairstyles don't make sense. His glitter rock Man Who Fell to Earth jumpsuit doesn't make sense. Two-Face's loud leopard-print suit doesn't make sense. The way they laugh together and hold each other doesn't make sense. They do not have the anger, angst and attempt at sympathy that the (attempts at) tragic portrayals of the Joker, Penguin and Catwoman in the first two movies have, and so they don't make sense.

Until you realize that what Schumacher was doing was trying to make a "camp" Batman movie to emulate the success of the original colorful series, which, in his pretty untalented mind, basically means filling a movie with as many gay subtexts in behavior and style - rubber nipple fetish costumes - as possible. In other words, Schumacher believed the original series was made with an undercurrent of homosexual subtext and made his big-budget movie the same way. What Schumacher missed is that the original show was not at all camp because of a gay subtext. It can be read that way and can work on that level, but it was camp because of how it was played. Ironically enough, the original show was camp because it was played so straight.


(Bernice Surprise Summerfield Sticky Note: Oddly, a bit later on, I was reading about the novel Damaged Goods and its writer, Russell T. Davies, has an article where he cites Schumaker in getting the US version of Queer as Folk on the air.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv_and_radio/story/0,3604,1042119,00.html )

(Originally posted September 17, 2003, 14:28 at gmslegion.)

Three good things happened yesterday. I got a rookie Heroclix Superman in trade for a rookie Boom-Boom, my brother disconnected the stupid car alarm in the Pimpmobile, and I watched Legends of the Superheroes with my son.

What’s that? You haven’t heard of the greatest variety show, one of the very best moments in all of Bad Television? Well, I’ll explain…

Legends of the Superheroes was one of several misfired attempts by Saturday morning perennials Hanna-Barbera to get a show on the air in prime time. They shoveled out lots of family variety pilots, trying to ape their kidvid rivals Sid & Marty Krofft in packaging tacky, dancing fun for the whole family in the 1970s. (The Kroffts’ most successful prime-time show was Donny and Marie, which ran for four garish, yet successful years.)

The best I can figure, Superheroes was intended to glue small children to the set with costumed action, with enough light innuendo in the comedy to amuse the parents, alienating everyone on the planet in between. Even this simple task was bungled, due to the hoary, embarassing, massively unfunny attempts at comedy. The only people who could possibly love this schlock would be, in fact, small children and people who just adore really bad television. Prime time advertisers court neither of these demographics.

The rights to Superman and Wonder Woman were unavailable, but Hanna-Barbera assembled a pretty solid crew of known DC heroes for their romp. The heroes in episode one were Batman, Robin, Captain Marvel, Hawkman, Black Canary, Green Lantern, Flash and the Huntress. The villains, and God knows how they came up with this bunch, were Mordru, Solomon Grundy, Sinestro, Weather Wizard, Giganta, Dr. Sivana and the Riddler. There were minor character changes for episode two: the Atom showed up, and the Riddler wasn’t present, although Aunt Minerva was.

Of the cast, there are few lights to be seen. Adam West and Burt Ward reunited in what were passable recreations of their 1960s costumes, although the Bat-cowl and the mask don’t seem to fit them right. Black Canary was played by a model named Danuta. Frank Gorshin reprised his role as the Riddler. Weather Wizard was played by Jeff Altman, best known for the astonishing Krofft-produced Pink Lady, but also for playing Boss Hogg’s nephew Hughie in The Dukes of Hazzard. Solomon Grundy was played by Mickey Morton, a really big actor who guest starred in everything from The Monkees to The Bionic Woman. Connoiseurs of horrible TV should also note Morton played the role of Malla in the previous year’s Star Wars Holiday Special. Aunt Minerva was played by Ruth Buzzi. Considering the rest of the actors were total unknowns, it strikes me that Gorshin is in one episode and Buzzi in the other because Hanna-Barbera couldn’t afford to pay them both at once.

Well, episode one begins with the villains all meeting in their underground lair, which contains a doomsday device. This set, as well as the heroes’ set, is a large, very stagey affair which was taped before a studio audience. Riddler attempts to call the roll by asking each name in the form of a riddle, and each villain torments him in some way. Solomon Grundy tries to hit him with a big rock. After establishing they are all present, Sivana activates the doomsday weapon, vhich vill destrrrroy the entire vurld in vun hour. Riddler then sends the superheroes a challenge to defuse it, and then all the villains go out to delay the heroes from finding them. No, this plan doesn’t make any sense to me, either.

Now, you’d think that since, for the ease of production, the heroes and villains have their secret bases conveniently about three miles apart from each other, the heroes wouldn’t have any trouble finding the baddies. But the villains have interrupted a retirement ceremony for the aged Scarlet Cyclone, and so it takes a little while to get started.

This ceremony. . . well, this is just painful. For starters, Scarlet Cyclone is played by William B. Schallert. You might remember him as the dad on The Patty Duke Show. He was also president of the Screen Actor’s Guild for frickin’ years. But he is perhaps best known – and see, you don’t know who I’m talking about – for broadly playing very old men who lose track of their thoughts with their finger in the air before falling over. He perfected this breathtakingly unamusing performance in the recurring role of the Admiral on Get Smart. Scarlet Cyclone is every bit a work of subtle, nuanced comedy as the Admiral. Adding some topical humor to the proceedings, Adam West is forced to deliver the worst lines of his career. “Fellow superheroes, or, in deference to the ladies, super persons,” he winces.

Then there’s some wacky comedy on location in rural southern California. The Batmobile’s engine has been tampered with, so they have to pull into a gas station where Solomon Grundy is posing as a service station attendant. Then Batman and Robin try to buy new wheels from the Weather Wizard, posing as a used car salesman. Then there’s Sinestro. He poses as a gypsy fortune teller to delay Green Lantern. Sivana poses as a psychiatrist to delay Captain Marvel. On your walls, the paint dries.

Episode two is a celebrity roast, in which our compere Ed McMahon introduces the villains as guest stars who are roasting the heroes. No, this doesn’t make any sense either. Well, there’s a celebrity gossip bit which has a little interview with the Atom and Giganta, who have fallen in love. Weather Wizard does a standup comedy bit. Robin and Captain Marvel conspire to keep Batman in the dark that Robin has totalled the Batmobile. Aunt Minerva comes by, looking for a man, and asks the heroes their credentials. Flash says “I’m the fastest man alive,” and Aunt Minerva says “Pass!” (See, that’s a sex joke! Get it?! A SEX joke! Isn’t it FUNNY?!) (Hmmmm. Started channelling Mark Prindle there. Must watch that.)

I was pleased to see that the part Julian liked best was also the part I liked best when I was seven. Ed McMahon tries interviewing Solomon Grundy, but every question somehow leads back to the subject of water, which reminds Grundy of swamps, and he shouts “HATE SWAMP!” and clobbers Ed.

Then, just when things can’t possibly get any worse, the greatest thing ever taped for television happens. Now, you may well have seen every episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and you may have seen Billy Barty pretend he was Joe Namath, but brother, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Mordru sing “That’s Entertainment.”

I don’t know where to start with this one. Firstly, the new lyrics, which include “Oh, a brute! Who thinks torture is cute!... Or a blaze! Which keeps burning for days!... A disease that is chronic, a plague which is bubonic...” are just too silly for words. Then there’s Gabe Dell, who plays Mordru and can neither sing nor dance, stomping around this unbelievably stagey set in Mordru’s ridiculous costume. As traffic accidents go, this thing is serious. Mercifully it all ends when Batman hits Mordru in the face with a pie.

After that breathtaking climax, Ed McMahon says a few quiet words about how superheroes inspire us to all be heroes. Then he shouts a magic word and flies away. My son, who has no idea who Ed McMahon is, loved this part. “He was a superhero the whole time!” he shouted.

Legends of the Superheroes, tragically, is unavailable on home video or DVD. There is no justice in the world.

(Originally posted July 21, 2003, 09:17 at gmslegion, six comments after the cut.) ( Read more... )

There are certain movies which are not great, but they are great for their time. Take The Breakfast Club. The same film could have been made at any point in history, but I would argue its success and its popularity among thirtysomethings comes more from its iconography and use of popular styles, dress, attitude and cast than from its script, which could be jerry-rigged with minimal effort onto any set of five students. The Breakfast Club is not a great film, but it’s a great eighties film, because it perfectly captured one of the many facets of the era’s zeitgeist.

Likewise, last night I picked up two DVDs for all of 21 bucks and change which are not great films, but they are spectacular sixties films: Batman and Casino Royale. Shamelessly vibrant, mad and fun, they’re both stupid beyond reason at times, but that just proves there was much about the sixties which was stupid. Batman aspires to being a big film, but it is merely a wide one. Casino Royale is gigantic. Movies simply don’t get any bigger.

Batman, produced at the height of that series’ popularity – which spanned February 1966 to February 1967 before burning out – can’t be big because it doesn’t look expensive. This was not a film which had to be abandoned because the parts weren’t cast; they just brought the TV actors over and built about twelve new sets and shot them in widescreen. I could wax eloquently about Batman for hours. For something as repetitious and formulaic as that show was, when that show was firing on all cylinders, it was incredibly entertaining. The film has a solid structure, albeit a lumpy one, and it does an impressive job of following a confusing plot by the villains in a coherent manner.

Speaking of the villains, I challenge anyone to watch either of the Joel Schumacher films next to this and tell me the later pieces got the bad guys right. Watching how the actors who play the villains in the 1966 movie both demand their own spotlight but respect the others is amazing: Gorshin, Meredith, Meriwether and Romero each steal the show but leave three equal spaces for their colleagues. You can watch this film four times and focus on each actor each time: watch how Frank Gorshin just simmers and clenches like a ticking time bomb while someone else is speaking. If you’re paying attention to (say) Cesar Romero’s delivery, you won’t notice Gorshin, and if you’re watching Gorshin, you won’t notice Romero. The actors are that good. It’s an absolute treat.

But enough about that. Have you seen Casino Royale? I mean, have you seen Casino Royale?

Let’s clarify one thing immediately: this is not a good film. It is, however, a fantastic one. It was made in 1967 at the behest of Charles Feldman, who had most recently produced The Seven Year Itch and had the (apparently pot-fueled) idea to make a James Bond send-up using four different directors to helm four separate linked segments. It’s an idea which simply cannot work, and doesn’t, yet does.



The film is a spectacular mess. It deals with MI-5 coaxing the original James Bond out of retirement. He is played by David Niven and he thinks little of his replacement, referring to the character played by Sean Connery in some other movies. When that Bond vanishes, Niven’s Bond suspects a plot by SMERSH and, to confuse the enemy, assigns the James Bond – 007 code to everyone in British intelligence, including the quickly-recruited Evelyn Trimble (Peter Sellers), before going to find his own daughter, Mata Bond (Joanna Pettet) and confronting the evil duo of Le Chiffre (Orson Welles) and his nephew, Jimmy Bond, who has taken on the new name of Dr. Noah and who is played by Woody Allen.

A few years back, I watched the first Austin Powers movie and was stunned by how unimpressive it all was. The chief issue is that practically everything in it was done about thirty years previously in Casino Royale, except for the bits that were done by Our Man Flint and by 1993’s The Preventers, a BBC comedy special which had slightly different targets, but the same edge. (Actually, the one bit in Austin Powers which I hadn’t seen before was the funniest part: Austin’s two-minute pee.) While Casino Royale is an almighty chaotic mess with an incoherent structure, it is full of incredibly amusing set pieces and really good gags. The set design is triumphantly silly, with Dr. Noah’s headquarters a gigantic, pretentious series of metal corridors and rooms with high, soaring ceilings and sunken floors.

It’s a wonderfully goofy film, filling its 135 minutes with cameos and weird cinematography and bright colors and camera tricks and groovy music and go-go boots. By the climax, in which someone suggested that a brawl in an elegant casino was only one step away from a brawl in a Western saloon and brought that to its natural inclusion by sending Hollywood cowboys and indians into the fray, you’ve seen everything you can possibly see in a film except for George Raft, so they hired him, too. It’s a mammoth film, and, with the possible exceptions of Thunderball and The World is Not Enough, has the best Bond song ever.

...with GUNS! and KNIVES!... we’re fighting for our LIVES…

There is also, in the annals of "categories you never thought to fill," the best sound effect in cinema history, when the big Scotsman tries to lift the really big shotput and his spine snaps. The way David Niven winces is beautiful.

The DVD of Casino Royale, which is available for only $15 at Wal-Mart, also contains the very first screen appearance of James Bond, in a 1954 episode of the live NBC drama series Climax, starring Barry Nelson and Peter Lorre, along with a 20-minute interview with Val Guest, one of Casino’s four directors. I recommend it without reservation.

It’s a nice word, zeitgeist. Did your eyes roll when I used it in the introduction?

(Originally posted April 24, 2003, 09:37 at gmslegion, only comment was:)

mpceccato
2003-04-24 06:57 am UTC (from 63.68.53.7) (link) Select
You have to give credit to MGM for making Casino Royale the way they did. It's not a Bond package film, but another SE for a film that you have to wonder why they did it, like UHF. As for the 1966 Batman feature, the movie is worth seeing for the film's last two minutes alone. Sheer brilliance.
(Reply to this)

Decorating this house on what's going to be a very tight budget isn't going to be easy, but I picked up some nick-nacks Saturday. Dave and Shaindle came to rescue me and we went to the Lakewood Antique Mart. I got a metal "Ted Williams Says Drink Moxie" sign (perhaps for the bathroom?) and some still-sealed old soda bottles: a Cherry Crush and a "double measure - double pleasure" Double Cola. I didn't pay much for either, but some other dealer actually wanted $12 for his Double Cola bottle. I told Shaindle I've bought a lot of dumb shit in my time, but twelve bucks for a bottle of flat cola's just beyond my limit.



To reward his good reading, my son's teacher gave him four coupons for free personal pan pizzas at Pizza Hut, so we're going to exchange one for dinner tonight. Then he and I are going to move some more boxes to our new house. He hasn't been there since I started moving stuff in. Saturday is furniture-shifting day, and I think our first night proper will be Sunday.

The truck move should not be a big issue, since the boxes are going separately. We'll have to shift:

Bedroom dresser
Television
TV stand
Computer armoire
Two cherry bookshelves
One other bookshelf
Small shelf
Loveseat
Couch
Coffee table
Small table
That piece of nondescript furniture used as a credenza
Filing cabinet
Two kids beds
Two small kids dressers
Toy box
Kids desk

We can get all that loaded in two hours and unpacked in less. If anyone plans to lend an arm, the pizza, beer and soda are on me, and if we get started at 10 am, we'll surely be done by three.

Still, I kind of wish we didn't have to slog through this entire week before we can get it done and over with.

Driving down 400 this morning, I got stuck in another logjam that ran from the Pitts Rd bridge down to the North Spgs station. As I sat there, I was distracted by movement to my left. I turned and saw the woman in the car next to me crying and pounding her steering wheel.

I couldn't have been turned for more than two seconds before she noticed me looking. Eye contact was made and I turned, probably more embarassed than her.

Neal came over last night with some Newkie Brown Ale and we watched Return to the Batcave, which, as predicted, was dumb but very entertaining. I love the way Adam West was alternately oblivious to, or completely on top of, the situation. The plot, such as it was, wasn't miles removed from my suggestion a few days ago, and they incorporated footage from Lyle Waggoner's screening test into the film. It was splendid entertainment.

(Originally posted March 10, 2003, 08:27 at gmslegion, only comment being:)

pizzalero
2003-03-10 12:32 pm UTC (from 24.48.38.226) (link) Select
Aside from the fact that there was no payoff at the end, the thing that bugged me the most was that Lyle Waggoner was used as the narrator.

When the narrator first started talking I was like, "No. Whoever is speaking was terribly miscast." They really needed a "Mr. Big Voice" type narrator like in the tv series.

That was my biggest grudge.

I don't really understand why they needed the modern material of West,Ward, Gorshin, & Newmarr. I would have been happy with a two hour movie starring the guys playing the young West and Ward. They were great. (Then, they could have chucked in the cameos for fun.)

But I guess West & Ward wouldn't do it unless they were the stars. Sadly, they're no longer Batman & Robin. They're more like Ham & Cheese.

But, I love 'em anyway.
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Regarding Return to the Batcave:

Honestly, I think a film from the villains' perspective would be far more amusing. Apparently the movie is about Adam West and Burt Ward reteaming to find the stolen prop Batmobile. That's cute, but wouldn't it be more fun to see a gang of actors who played villains in the show teaming up to destroy West and Ward? Unfortunately, so many of them are dead. Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, Maurice Evans, George Sanders, Otto Preminger, Roddy McDowell, Vincent Price, Liberace, Walter Slezak, Rudy Vallee, Ida Lupino, Victor Buono and Tallulah Bankhead are all gone; probably some others too.

Frank Gorshin and Julie Newmar are still with us.


And really, the villains did win, because West and Ward found themselves typecast and the subsequent butt of jokes for almost forty years now, while the actors who played the bad guys are all respected, and their stint on Batman a note of amusing coolness and "cred." I mean, who wouldn't have wanted to play a villain on Batman? Well, a villain in the pre-Batgirl days anyway. (And did nobody invite Yvonne Craig to do this film?)

The Black Widow was the final screen appearance of Tallulah Bankhead, who drank more than all of you put together, and was a goddess (albeit one, unlike Julie Newmar, who did not age well), introduced herself to Norman Mailer by dismissing him. "You're the one who can't bring himself to spell 'fuck'."

Should I meet her in heaven, I'd like to buy Tallulah a martini.

(Originally posted March 05, 2003, 22:31 at gmslegion, four comments after the cut.) ( Read more... )

It’s odd how each of the four drama shows I’ve watched this week were each demonstrably poorer than the previous entry. Life’s like that on the WB, I guess.

Gilmore Girls was as solid as ever Tuesday evening, with just about everyone who needed to be taken down a peg or two ably put in their place. While I like Lane immensely, I am tiring of the stagnant home situation and wish that something can be done about it. Perhaps next season when she’s away from her mother. Smallville had a pair of fabulous moments -- Allison Mack’s remarkably played confession of her love to an unconscious Clark and the completely unexpected revelation that Martha is pregnant – but overall the plot was drilled with holes and a straining of credibility that none of the actors could overcome.

And then there was Birds of Prey, wrapping up its low-rated run in a “movie event” (actually the final two episodes) subbing for Dawson’s Creek and Angel, neither of which the WB wanted to sacrifice against American Idol. Next week, the pilot for the doomed Young Lone Ranger series is running. From the scenes in the preview, everyone who ever sad a bad word about Birds owes it an apology.

Birds definitely had heart, which is why I enjoyed it. The actors were always putting in great performances, which made it watchable most of the time. What it lacked were brains and a budget. The pilot, for instance, had a villain who was making people die of fright from the things they most feared. It was a decent character played reasonably well by the guest star, but it occurred to me later that the same role could have, and should have been, the Scarecrow. Apart from the same cliched bungles regularly made by action series – both the cop from another town and the superhero from another town were (gasp!) actually villains – and a criminally small budget that was rarely evident onscreen, the producers seemed schizophrenic, respecting the audience’s intelligence enough to populate a city full of unusually-powered heroes, but so terrified of the source material that they seemed more embarassed by the established backstory than their own guest villains and their occasional over-the-top performances.

Well, last night they addressed part of the problem in the first of the two hours by using Clayface as the villain. He was locked in Arkham and the makeup people did a good job on him. They wrote him as a frustrated artist devoid of inspiration and the actor had a distinctive voice. Sadly, Clayface functioned as one of those "go to the master criminal for advice and risk your soul" roles that The Silence of the Lambs has damned us forever to watch. See? No brain. Huntress cracked his glass cell and he oozed out, but we didn’t see it (no budget) and when he joined his similarly-powered son to commit a big crime, he didn’t change shape again and actually wore the "normal" face (the actor’s) instead of the heavily made-up one (again, no budget). It’s so frustrating watching good actors struggle against a horrible script and no production values. At least BBC dramas tend to have good scripts.

Worse still was the series finale, which had three big points in its favor: first, they took the unexpected avenue of having Harley Quinn murder Barbara’s boyfriend, who’s been around since episode one. Second, there was a wonderfully self-conscious moment when the Birds realized Dr. Quinzel was behind everything and referred to her as "the big bad," which is Buffy fan-speak for "the behind-the-scenes villain up to whom we’re spending all season building."

Finally, there was a fantastic and very long fight scene where the clock tower got trashed and two of the characters swung in through the glass clock face, shattering it. That’s what this show had needed since day one: characters making unexpected set-destroying entrances instead of popping in off-camera because it’s cheaper that way. Mercifully, the costume designer finally gave Mia Sara something akin to the proper Harley Quinn costume for the big fight, which, I stress, was a joy to watch. And Alfred had a shotgun.

However, in every cringe-inducing moment building up to this fight, I was telling myself Hey, the producers knew they were cancelled before they shot this hour. Is this the best they could do? It was an action teevee plot around the same level as those awful first-run syndication shows which networks don’t buy and local channels run at 3 pm when there are no sports on, and it was crippled by two obnoxious, overlong "doubts" scenes.

When Huntress backs out and hits a bottle and Reese has to talk her down, all I could think of was where the fuck are Batman and the Joker? This should have been everything and the kitchen sink, but it was safe, tame and stale*. Hell, you’re cancelled, why stop with Wade being dead? Why not have Bane show up and throw Dinah out a window to her death? It wasn’t just that "this is a superhero show, let’s see some costumes and garish action," it was amazingly annoying that, having been axed, the producers went for safe and cozy and a feel-good ending instead of something edgy and wild. I’d like to think that the only reason producers make such compromises in their art is because they don’t wish to offend overly-cautious programming executives and stay on the air a little longer. Having been axed, no such compromises were needed, now get on with the fun. The very best endings in all of television came when producers went the extra step and pushed the boundaries: when all the heroes of Blake’s 7 were killed, when St. Elsewhere and Newhart screwed with our expectations, when Radar told the doctors that Col. Blake was dead, when Fitz ended his marriage on Cracker by telling his wife he would not die for her, or when Bret Maverick was given his final line: "Fuck ‘em, Louie, we can buy and sell the bastards."

All right, so they didn’t actually shoot that episode because NBC said they would not buy the last five episodes of the order (this was the 1981-82 series), but the writer, Marion Hargrove, wrote it because he knew it would be the end. And the end of Birds of Prey was our three friendly heroines being all warm and girly in front of a rebuilt clock face, and Alfred on the phone to Master Bruce telling him that Helena was doing just fine. Which, excuse me, still doesn’t explain where the fuck Batman has been for seven years. Tell me he’s been in the Middle East fighting Ra’s al-Ghul and the League of Assassins in a 1970s Denny O’Neil script for seven years, but tell me something.

Instead, they told me nothing other than that I already knew: these producers had no brains, and, more critically for this example, no guts.

*Bizarrely, I did a "rit of fealous jage" bit on that sentence and typed "stafe, same and tale" and then looked at it for two minutes and wondered what the hell that meant.

(Originally posted February 20, 2003, 09:34 at gmslegion.)

Well, everything in my amazingly hectic life came to a crashing halt at 7 pm because the first two parts of one of the best Batman stories was on: "The Londinium Larcenies," in which venerable Ireland Yard requests Batman to come overseas to a country which doesn't look a damn thing like England, but a barely dressed version of the Warners backlot, and which Dick Van Dyke grumbles that all those people who make fun of 'is accent in Mary Poppins 'aven't 'eard nuthin yet, guv'nah.

But the odd thing is that most all of the belly laughs come from the production. The script is sharp as nails and presents a weird challenge played totally straight: Batman suspects one of Londinium's most prominent aristocrats, Lord Marmaduke Ffogg, of committing major thefts, and the local constabulary, led by Superintendent Watson (groan...) from an office identical to Commissioner Gordon's, won't 'ear a wood of it.

Earlier tonight, my pal Simon went to a live taping of David Bowie for BBC-TV. Hope he got in.

Not much else is going on. I've gone from being bored out of my mind at work to having too damn much to do in one day. Lucky me. I'm supposed to be hammering a script treatment together for Randy. I'll type that up on Monday and send a copy to Dave for his once-over, or a second draft entirely or something.

And whoever bought me the year of paid service, really, thanks. That was nice. See, new user piccies and everything!

(Originally posted June 27, 2002, 21:15 at gmslegion.)

Well, nothing too amazingly bad has gone on the last few days. We watched the phenomenally dreadful and completely wonderful Liberace episodes of Batman last night. Apparently these were the highest-rated episodes of the series when it first aired. Midway through episode one, the Hipster Son said "This is not good."

And I said "Oh?"

And he said "No. Batman's on vacation and that evil piano player is going to commit a crime."

Tonight and tomorrow are Deb's last nights delivering pizza -- she starts a phone job for 26k/yr on Monday. That will be nice. She worked up a budget for the next couple of weeks, but unfortunately we overlooked the $150 it will cost to register the kids in their new day care, and a teensy gap between the rent being due and my next pay check, and an equal gap between the amount of money in the bank and the cost of the rent. So we'll have to scramble around, again.

Day care is going to cost about 40% of Deb's new take-home pay. But the other 60% is better than she has been earning, so, fingers crossed.

I got several new live CDs in the post yesterday. Now all I need is the time to listen to them!

One of life's little joys is waking up my daughter, because she is a bad-tempered terror upon arising and it's so cute. No matter how gentle or sweet, she's still quick to scream "NO! NO! LEAVE ME 'LONE!" Imagine my surprise when the li'l runt decided to wake up on her own this morning, depriving me of my morning comedy.

You know, ever since we saw Star Wars, I've been hearing those 70s robots saying "Reunete on ice." "That's nice." I'd LOVE to see those old ads again. I wondered briefly whether that wine was worth drinking. Remembering the ads and noting its absence from shelves, I will have to guess "probably not."

(Originally posted May 31, 2002, 07:52 at gmslegion.)

Anybody can overact by getting histrionic and loud. It takes true talent to do it with subtlety.

The Hipster Son's been watching my tapes of Batman. He really doesn't like the new films, but he adores the original series with Adam West. I've got three tapes with 13 stories across them.

Last night, I sat down to watch "Batman's Anniversary" with him. This is a late second season story, and from what I understand (and see) the production was falling apart at the seams by this point. The producers started shooting the season late since they were focussed on the movie, and they paid far more attention to the big-name guest stars at the top of the season, and they were also doing The Green Hornet, and the spectacular craze which launched season one to the top 5 of the Nielsens was gone, and the ratings were dropping, so by the end of the second season this was an increasingly painful show to watch.

Worse, Frank Gorshin didn't want to come back after the movie, so throughout the second season they were without the Riddler. (Modern audiences probably don't know that the Riddler was initially the most popular show villain, who made the most appearances in season one.) They had two Riddler scripts in reserve hoping he'd return, and finally, in desperation, used this one, casting The Addams Family's John Astin in the part.



Now, I'll give John Astin a hell of a lot of credit. He's a fantastic actor, who brings a lot of manic weirdness to any role. (Those two Addams films -- before they made it into an awful kiddie show -- are pretty good, but Raul Julia wasn't a patch on Astin.) But Astin bombed as the Riddler... he had none of the lunatic, jumping madness you expect from Gorshin. Consequently, people don't even bother with "Batman's Anniversary." And we're wrong to do so, because we miss the funniest damn thing I've seen in years.

The mayor and Commissioner Gordon throw a surprise anniversary party at "The Plaza Hotel" for Batman's "anniversary as a crime fighter." So there's a big, formal thing with a table at the head of the room. Chief O'Hara and Gordon sit on one side of the mayor, who's at the podium, and Batman and Robin sit on the other side. The mayor talks some nonsense about how the citizens of Gotham owe Batman such a remarkable debt of gratitude, the magnitude of which, theeeey caaaan never repay.

And while he's blathering on with fulsome praise, Adam West puts his left hand to his chest, narrows his eyes just a hair, and, slightly to the point of imperceptibly, bows his head. He completely steals the scene, going more over the top than William Shatner at his most eye-popping best -- and he does it with two tiny gestures. I've never seen anything so brilliantly awful.

I mean, anybody can steal a scene and overact by being a ranting, Richard III-type loudmouth, but it takes real talent to do it with that little effort.

(Originally posted July 25, 2001, 07:46 at gmslegion)