Marvel Comics - The Untold Story

 

Treasury Edition

Marvel Comics - The Untold Story
by Sean Howe
Harper Perennial
ISBN: 9780061992117

Around about a year ago, I read and reviewed (right here) a book called Slugfest - Inside the Epic 50 Year Battle Between Marvel and DC by Reed Tucker. It was a pretty good read and I wanted to follow it up with another look at something about one of the comic book companies. Marvel Comics - The Untold Story by Sean Howe more than fits the bill. In fact, there’s not a lot of crossover at all between this and the earlier book I’d read. I mean, sure, there’s mention of DC but, when it comes to professional rivalry, Howe’s book looks as much at some of the more threatening independent labels like Image and Malibu as it does at DC.

So, as I started to read with a certain amount of trepidation, it soon became clear that I wasn’t just going to be reading a load of legendary and well told anecdotes about the long history of Marvel Comics. I mean, sure, they’re there but, at well over 400 pages, this book really gathers a lot of first hand research and the writer weaves it into a rich tapestry of many things I didn’t know about the comic book company (some of which I may have been happier not knowing, truth be told).

He does, however, start off with a revisitation of a famous point in Marvel Comics history, that of the day in 1961 when the lonesome Stan Lee, having been ordered to fire most of his staff and now working almost alone, decided to make one last grab at the market by publishing some superhero characters his own way while, at the behest of publisher Martin Goodman, coming up with something that could compete with the new Justice League Of America super group book that DC were cleaning up with. Thus, with Jack Kirby and also Steve Ditko on board, we had the birth of the Fantastic Four followed by The Amazing Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk and The Mighty Thor. At least that’s the way Lee tells it... the way Kirby remembered it was a lot different, as I’m sure long term fans of the comic world would know and, yeah, this book certainly addresses all that stuff later on too.

And it was at this point where I began to question things and say to myself... why the heck is this guy starting so late in the game? After all, Marvel started out as Timely (among others) with the 1939 issue which introduced characters such as The Human Torch (the original), Namor - The Sub Mariner and The Vision (the original) etc. Not to mention Jack Kirby and Joe Simon working on a Captain America comic during the war. And then I realised, like a typical Marvel Comic from a certain era of my youth, Howe was playing the game of starting off on a major action scene and then flashing back to the beginning of the adventure before catching back up with the tale and then moving forwards from there. So already I could tell he was really thinking about the way he structured this thing to resemble the subject matter he was exploring but, also, it turns out he’s a really great writer of this kind of stuff.

I mean, it’s one thing to do the research, organise all the facts into some kind of timeline and then diligently report them to the reader in as accurate and fair a manner as possible (I won’t say unbiased because, no piece of writing ever truly is but, you know, he probably comes close to that too). What the writer does here, though, is to go that one step further and takes you right into the details and action of the true life incidents like you’re reading a fictional tale come to life. Okay, it does get a bit more listy as the tome wears on when everything gets to be about deals and legality and office politics but, Howe impressed me with his knack of taking all those facts he’s had to crunch through and putting me right into the heart of the story with people like Bill Everett and the aforementioned Kirby.

And, because space and economics played against me for the last 30 years, he also goes into what is, for me, totally unknown territory and explores the changes and challenges of the company right through to around about ten years ago when this book was written. So, Stan Lee was still alive and, it would seem, available for comment (along with a whole host of creators and executives, many of whom have passed on now and it took this book to let me know about the deaths of the names behind the comics I used to see printed on pages regularly in the 1970s and 80s) and the Marvel Cinematic Universe had just started to get really successful with the first Avengers movie.

So, yeah, you’ll get stuff like that legendary, infamous weekend in the 1940s where all the artists and writers holed up together for a 48 hour period in a hotel room, working through the night and not sleeping (or sleeping in shifts) with the radio blaring as they quickly put together a 60 paged length Human Torch VS Sub Mariner tale which would rack up huge sales. But then, some 200 or more pages later, he’ll come up with an echo of that exact same behaviour in the 1990s or 2000s which was the equivalent, almost, of the same burst of creative energy from the early days in the 1940s.

He’ll highlight the things which made Lee and Kirby’s heroes different and appealing - the teenage angst, the insecurity, the fact that the Fantastic Four didn’t have secret identities - and he’ll also deal with the little things which would lead to injured parties having inflated negative feelings as the decades grew... such as Kirby assuming Lee got him fired from Timely at one point (while Kirby was moonlighting for DC as a kind of therapy for not being given proper profits shares for the amounts of money Captain America was raking in).

So yeah, there’s a lot of stuff which was new to me here and the writer takes you by the hand and leads you through Marvel history - Claremont’s X-Men, the arrival of John Byrne and Frank Miller, the split with Todd McFarlane, the issues with Steve Gerber - as well as all the politics and office wars along the way which resulted in many people walking away from the ‘house of ideas’ and into either a rival company or to start up a new one. And I have to say, it gets a lot darker than I thought it would.

Marvel and, even the likes of Stan Lee, are not painted in the best light here and you have to question a lot of the unbelievable stupidity on the part of the different management teams over the years who really, it seems to me, knew little about comics and were more concerned with the money than actually being true or even sensible to the characters in the Marvel stable. There are grudges aired, friends and colleagues betrayed by one another and even a few deaths, most likely from the stress of the situation that various managers made, that fill these pages and sometimes make the policies of the famed comic book company seem a little like a road accident. You know, those times when you pass a particularly bad one and curiosity compels you to look.

But you’ll also get insights into a lot of things such as the way in which Stan Lee wrote the stories... I still think writing using ‘the Marvel method’ is certainly still a topsy turvy way of doing things but it seems a lot less loose and random now that I think I understand the process a little better, for sure. I can also see how Stan’s ‘method’ could easily imbue everyone working on a title, including himself, with a sense of ownership which was much more of a team situation than various people might like to imagine.

So yeah, that’s me done dwelling on this stuff for a while, I think. Marvel Comics - The Untold Story is a dark but honest and, perhaps more importantly as far as the reader is concerned, hugely entertaining and fascinating insight into the behemoth that is the legendary comic book company. Not quite modern Marvel because, well, they weren’t owned by Disney then but, even then, there were some insights the author conveys about the idea of Disney looking into buying Marvel which, perhaps, he’d be less able to get away with now. But don’t take my word for that, read the book. It’s a great thing. My only real complaint, at least for the one I was gifted, is that there are pages of fascinating notes relating to each chapter in the back but, somehow, the numbers are left off the actual pages in the chapters so you’ve got no idea which note hooks up with which piece of text. Apart from this bizarre oversight though (I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen that particular mistake in a publication), it’s a stupendously interesting book and if you’re into comics and the state of the various environments behind them (art, writing, publishing, printing and, very importantly, distribution), then you will get a lot out of this one.

Sin City - A Dame To Kill For

Miller’s Kiss

Sin City - A Dame To Kill For
2014 USA
Directed by Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller
UK Cinema release print.

Warning: One slight spoiler to kill for here... although if you’ve not read the original comic then you may not even realise there was a twist reveal in this movie at all.

Okay, so I’ve not been to Frightfest much since it first started to be “a thing”.. I think I’ve been maybe four or five times only and two of those were for UK premieres of Dario Argento movies The Card Player and Giallo. The other one that sticks in my mind was back in 2005 and it was the first and last time, to date, I’d ever booked a ticket for a “surprise movie” at any festival. I hate the uncertainty of those kinds of screenings and on that one time I took a gamble that the surprise movie would be some kind of UK premiere of Sin City and... I’m happy to say I was right. It blew me away too. Sin City was a great movie and a faithful adaptation of Frank Miller’s original source material. A film I can watch over and over again throughout my life without getting bored.

I was kinda worried about the new film for many reasons, one of which is the fact that it’s now nine years since the last one and audiences seem to have short memories these days. I was also aware that some of the original cast had died, far too young (Michael Clarke Duncan, Brittany Murphy), and that it would be a shame having to see their characters played by different people. As it happens, that wasn’t as distracting as the one character I wasn’t’ that worried about having a change of actor for... basically because the original Frank Miller comic book it’s based on kinda dictated it. However, the way the “reveal” in the comic book is dealt with here is one of the very few false notes in an otherwise perfect second helping of the beautiful union between the semiotics of comics and movies that is the Sin City franchise.

Yeah, that’s right. Near perfect. I know this has done really badly at the box office already and I’ve astonishingly seen some bad word of mouth tweets on the film by people whose verdict on all things cinema I would normally trust. I really don’t know why this incredible wave of negativity is happening with this film though because, frankly, I had a blast with it.

It’s been said that the language of cinema and the language of comics are very similar. Both deal with the telling of events and incidents in a fashion perceived as linear, with comics using a series of static panels to do the same thing as films... but personally I think that’s a little too cut and dried. After all, what is film other than a series of static images projected at a rate the human eye can perceive as motion? It’s not a great leap from 24 frames a second to 24 panels a second. I think, for me, the rich visual language of comic books, much like the edgy subject matter they can sometimes tackle head on in a way that a commercially conscientious movie cannot, is far superior to the visual styles used in the majority of movies. You think it’s a case of film being like a comic book but actually it’s more a case of comics being visually closely allied to film... and then pushing that collision into other realms which aren’t necessarily the most expressive or appropriate ways to explore the territory they are trying to understand. Ang Lee’s Hulk movie, for example, is a perfect example of a film trying to be more like a comic book in the way that it encompasses a very similar visual language by using the background organisation of the printed comic page being split into panels and then finding a way to, sometimes very cleverly, use those panels to make a narrative which can speed up or slow down your perception of time as required by the confines of the story.

The first Sin City film followed the stark black and white colouring shot through with odd, bright colours highlighting various characters and objects which was used in some of the issues... although I seem to remember the original A Dame To Kill didn’t actually use any colour in it (if memory serves me correctly). Like the first movie, though, it serves to enhance the overall look of the Sin City branding and it’s certainly used very effectively. This film looks every bit as spectacular as the first movie in the franchise and, once again, Rodriguez and Miller have done a fine job of adapting this masterwork, even going as far as to graphically bring many of the comic book panels to life as almost “animated moments” like they were in the first movie.

I have very few complaints but one of them would be Jessica Alba in the role of Nancy. Don’t get me wrong, she’s an incredible actress and does a fine job here but... again, in Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, we see her obviously reluctant to take her clothes off like the character does in the comics and this really does kinda blow the credibility of Nancy on film in terms of someone who is an infamous stripper dancing in one of the sleaziest bars in Sin City. I love Jessica Alba as much as the next warm blooded guy or gal but, for such a crucial part, there really needs to be a lack of clothes, I feel.

My other complaint would be the character of Dwight, as played by Josh Brolin, who does very well in the part and bounces off of Mickey Rourke’s exquisite return engagement as “the tough guy’s tough guy” Marv in just the way you need him too. I wasn’t too worried about Brolin replacing the already excellent Clive Owen in the role of Dwight for the simple reason that, if you’ve ever read A Dame To Kill For, you’ll know that they would have had to have used a different actor for the majority of it. The story is set before most of the events that took place in the previous movie and so you get to find out why Manute has a bright yellow eyepiece and why Marv, and Goldie and her sister, of course, are all alive in this one. In the original A Dame To Kill For, Dwight gets his face changed after sustaining some fairly fearsome injuries and, when the bandages come off, he is revealed as the later version of the character which he was portrayed as in the previous comics/films. This is a great reveal and I was really looking forward to Clive Owen coming back for the last part of this movie as the Dwight we knew and loved in the first film.

Alas, it wasn’t to be.

Apparently Owen’s schedule would not let him return for his part of the role in this one. Now, personally, I would have waited him out because, although they’ve tried their best with prosthetics to make Brolin look like the version of the character Owen played earlier, when the bandages come off in the movie it kinda just looks like Brolin with a haircut that... really doesn’t suit him. This is the one thing that fails the movie big time, I reckon, because... if you haven’t read the comic, and most of the audience wouldn’t have... it doesn’t come across that Dwight’s face is supposed to be as it was in the first movie. Without Owen there to sell the illusion, the fact that there is even supposed to be a reveal here... rather than just Brolin with a scruffy mop top... is probably not something most people are going to pick up on. So that’s a real shame and, like I said, I wish they would have just delayed the film again and waited for Owen’s schedule to clear up. It wasn’t, after all, the first time this particular sequel had been delayed.

Aside from that though, Miller’s beautifully written noir dialogue and the heavy blacks and bleached out whites colliding with the reds, blues and yellows makes for another Sin City film which is pure visual poetry. And added to that you’ve got Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing a brand new character to the Sin City universe, Rosario Dawson back as Gail (although not nearly enough of this gorgeous actress as I would have liked to see... she’s always fun to watch and listen to) and the always stunning Eva Green playing the title character Ava, literally A Dame To Kill For. And I’ll tell you people who have an interest in this kind of thing up front... Eva as Ava goes through most of the picture not wearing much of any clothes at all, for the most part... so in terms of the celebration of naked femininity on screen, she more than makes up for the lack of Nancy strutting her stuff like she does in the comics... although I still think it’s a bit of a heavy credibility issue to have a stripper who doesn’t strip, to be honest.

The music to the first film was supplied by Rodriguez himself, working with composers John Debney and Graeme Revell. For this one, however, he’s working with a composer called Carl Thiel but, honestly, you wouldn’t notice any change because the music uses themes and orchestration which are the dead spit of the style of the first movie in the series and the continuity between the two of them is completely copacetic, I’m happy to say. I can’t wait for the release of the CD of the score in September so I can give it some play.

One last thing I will say though is this... I don’t know why this movie has had such a disappointing weekend but I do know that the Sin City films are absolutely the kinds of films that are meant to be seen at the cinema. They are what film is all about and they are little masterpieces of modern art that, if ignored now, will resurface and be reappraised in decades to come and your support for films like this is badly needed so future generations don’t turn around and ask us all, through the mists of time, why only two of these movies were made. Minor gripes aside, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is an absolute corker of a movie and should appeal to true cinephiles the world over. Go and soak it up in all its 3D goodness on a big screen while you still can.

300 - Rise Of An Empire

Spartan Fink

300 - Rise Of An Empire
2014 USA
Directed by Noam Murro
Playing at UK cinemas now.

I quite liked the first 300 movie... in a way.

Now, to be fair, Robocop 2 taught me long ago of the complete unreliability of the phrase “You can’t go wrong with a bit of Frank Miller” but I thought the original 300 was a pretty good attempt at getting the look and feel of his writing and illustration on screen in a fairly entertaining manner. I wasn’t too thrilled when I heard there was going to be a sequel and, to be honest, I was in two minds about bothering with it.

One thing that changed my mind and that was the fact that the trailers revealed that Eva Green was playing a villainous spin on the character of Artemisia in this one. I really like that actress quite a bit and I was hoping that she’d read the script before filming and made an informed choice about being involved in this one. So that was the way I found myself waiting in line for this movie, anyway.

What I didn’t know is that Frank Miller, by the looks of things, hasn’t had all that much involvement in this sequel to the movie of his former comic book. I understand that he was writing a sequel comic specifically so it could be filmed, called Xerxes, but that the story in the screenplay was changed quite a bit from that and, to boot, he’s apparently only written the first two issues so far. So not much of Miller’s spin on what a sequel might be like seems to have made its way into this film, I’m afraid.

Also, with regards to recapturing the spirit of the vision of Frank Miller, I’d have to say that 300: Rise Of An Empire has a little less of a graphic look than the first movie. It’s certainly highly stylised, don’t get me wrong, and frankly it looks fantastic... but the “is it a comic book panel or is it live action?” kind of visual attitude deployed at key, strategic moments throughout the first film seems to have been ratcheted down, somewhat... or at least that’s how it felt to me.

The action in 300: Rise Of An Empire takes place before, during and after the events of the first movie and, although this is a valid, and quite interesting at times, solution to the path that a sequel might take, the story does seem to leave much to be desired. It kinda works, but it does seem a bit hollow and, also, the dialogue felt equally vapid to me in a lot of places, which didn’t help me accept the movie too much, even though some serious stabs at humour are attempted throughout... with some success in places and then, in other places, where it just kinda falls flat. The actors are all really great in this film but they just don’t have lines of any real weight or substance for the majority of their screen time, so that gives them all a bit of a grandiose feel, I think.

However, what that leaves us with is a film which still looks quite good and with more action scenes than you can shake a bloody spear at. The spectacle is enough, in this case, to at least have yourself a fairly good time at the cinema... although the action does keep stuttering in and out of slow motion to highlight moments of battle and, it has to be said, this does get quite irritating after a while (where “after a while” equals 30 seconds). There are lots of overly gory sequences played out, for example, which the censors may not have let the film-makers get away with if they had been used in the context of a horror movie. Here, though, the “still stylised to an extent above and beyond the realms of anything like reality” context of the violent content, with lashings of blood literally tracing slow motion splashes across the screen at various intervals, seems to be more acceptable to our current, self appointed and terribly sinister moral guardians than if the film were presented in a less fairy tale-like manner, I suspect.

One of the more puzzling things I felt myself contemplating in the cinema, as I became more and more jaded to the incredible amount of mindless but fairly beautiful on-screen violence, was the curious incidents, on a number of occasions, where the CGI blood artifically splashes the lens of the camera, like a drop of watery spray hitting the equipment, which then disappears when we cut to another shot. Yes, I know stuff like water splashes and lens flare are deliberately added on with CGI these days to try to manipulate a more “fly on the wall” connection with the audience... but that’s precisely my point of why I think this kind of effect is out of place here. Surely, when you are taking time and patience to give the film a “through the looking glass”, mythical comic book look... the last thing you want to be trying to do is then bring the viewer back down to reality, no? I’m not saying it doesn’t work (well, okay, it obviously didn’t work for me... just popped me straight out of the movie. I doubt if the director was going for “the Goddard effect” here), but I do find the decision to utilise this kind of visual technique quite bizarre within the context of the other artistic decisions going on here.

And of course, the other big special effect the producers have going for them here is Eva Green.

Not only does she come across as a strong and powerful warrior, utilising her almost trademark sideways glances and facial expressions to convey a total “don’t f*** with me, sweetheart” attitude to the characters surrounding her (not to mention the audience), but she also goes topless while brandishing her sword for a very (too) short sequence. Given that I saw the 3D version of the movie, I found this to be very appealing and, frankly, the best of all the eye candy and other technical jiggery pokery found on the screen during this movie’s running time. A much appreciated turn out by Eva, once again.

What I didn’t appreciate too much about the visual content, however, was the almost total lack of surrealistic and just plain odd imagery in this movie. The first 300 film got quite freakish, if I am recalling correctly, whenever you got into the scenes with Xerxes and his entourage. In this one, everything seems mostly within the realms of the everyday and somehow less bizarre than I would have liked. So that was a bit of a disappointment, then.

So there you have it. 300: Rise Of An Empire is not a patch on the original 300, and it feels like it has a lot less substance behind it than even that movie had on offer... but at least it all looks lovely and while I’m not sure if I’ll ever give it a second spin when it comes out on Blu Ray or not, there are certainly a lot worse ways of spending your time at the cinema at the moment. Especially if you have a lot of affection for the original movie... you probably won’t want to miss this one, in that case, because of the way it interpenetrates into the timeline of the first movie. If you really didn’t like the first one, however, this is less than more of the same... so those of you in that camp may want to miss this one.

The Wolverine 3D (X-Men 6)

Ronin Around

The Wolverine 3D (X-Men 6)
2013 USA
Directed by James Mangold
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: There will be some big spoilers slicing 
away at you in this one. Approach with caution.

You know, I really quite like the X-Men movie franchise, even though it’s nothing like The Uncanny X-Men I used to read very occasionally as a kid. I used to read the odd British reprint in the very early 70s, harking back to the early 60s (in fact, I think I read the first few issues of the original series) which was many years before the creation of the super-group’s most popular member, Wolverine (or Weapon X as I believe he used to be known, back in the days when he was kind of a villain?). To me the characters were Professor X, Beast, Cyclops, Iceman and Marvel Girl (now better known by her civilian moniker of Jean Grey). They were the X-Men I wanted to see back when they brought the first movie out 13 years ago.

However, I really liked that movie and, of the five previous films in the franchise, the only one which let me down big time and made me curse the internal politics of the Hollywood suits who, by all accounts, deliberately waited for the original director of the first two to leave the production, was X-Men: The Last Stand (X-Men 3). That particular entry into the franchise was a) not their last stand, clearly and b) really quite rubbish. Especially since the original film's writing/directing team had beautifully set up the Dark Phoenix plot from the comics so brilliantly with the death of Jean Grey at the end of the second film... hinting at the continuation with a “held” camera shot panning across a lake. Everybody knew Marvel Girl would be resurrected as a dark villainess destroyer like she was in the comics and everyone was so psyched to see what would happen next. Unfortunately the change of director meant that the Dark Phoenix fulfillment story became relegated to a minor plot point in the third movie... which was a real mis-step for the franchise (but don’t worry, I’m reminding you of all this for a reason pertinent to this review).

When X-Men Origins: Wolverine burst onto our screen, my impression was that nobody was that interested in the X-Men anymore. The disappointment of that previous movie had kind of killed off the audience it seems to me. However, I went to see it and really quite liked it (my review of it is here). It wasn’t a perfect movie but it did feel like a modernish b-movie in terms of the fun of the way it was put together. Kind of like an early to mid 80s straight-to-home-video release but with a bigger budget thrown at it. It kinda worked on the level it was going for and, like I said, it had some fun in it.

The fifth X-Men movie, X-Men:First Class (reviewed here) was a bit of a strange prequel. It had stuff happening in it which totally contradicted the events which were flashed back to in the third X-Men film, as though the powers that be wanted to completely forget that third mis-step and reboot the series. Except it couldn’t be a reboot because there were a couple of interesting actor/character cameos in that film and... to be honest... this movie totally screws any continuity with the previous installments in the series. That it was so successful at the box office is because of one thing alone... it’s a completely brilliant, kick ass movie which succeeds on nearly every level and rivals the first two movies in every way. Such a brilliant, if continuity challenged movie.

Now, stick with me if you’re finding all this continuity stuff interesting because there’s a sequence at the end of The Wolverine which directly links it into the other parts of the franchise and sets up the new movie, X-Men: Days Of Future Past, currently filming, which combines the casts from the original X-Men movies and X-Men: First Class... I’ll come back to all this towards the end of this review.

And so, here we have Hugh Jackman’s sixth time playing Logan (Wolverine) on film. He’s a character who, as we know from previous movies, can heal himself very quickly and, because of this, has lived many hundreds of years (along with his brother who was cursed with the same talent/misfortune). We also know about his adamantium skeleton and we know that even before he had this technology thrust upon him, he had bone claws which would emerge at will from his knuckles. We also know that Hugh Jackman, a fan of the character, turned out to be completely perfect casting and plays him with the seriousness and gravitas that a fan-favourite character of this magnitude requires. So we know nothing is going to be wrong about his performance here and, what do you know, he’s still perfect in the role. And from hereon in, this review gets spoilery people!

This film is an adaptation of the 1982 comic-book 4 issue mini series The Wolverine, by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller. I’ve not read that and can’t tell you whether it’s a completely faithful adaptation or not but this film certainly feels like it was adapted from something. It’s got a lot of substance to it and is not, contrary to what the trailers will have you believe, just a load of action sequences strung together. In fact, the action sequences in this were the ones which left me a little disappointed, to be honest. I found them a trifle long winded at times but, frankly, it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of a beautifully put together movie. Logan’s relationship with the two lead Asian actresses in the film is really quite wonderful and, as always, Jackman makes you believe in the character through his sheer lack of sociability and resignedness and the way that vibe bounces off of friend and foe alike is a sheer delight to watch.

There are also some nice shot compositions, especially the first shot where the World War II Japanese concentration camp is established, which works particularly well in 3D when it pans to the right of the shot. And really nice set ups during the period when Logan is staying with a character called Mariko at her private hideaway, which play with size and perspective in a really nice way, pitching extremes of size directly against each other in the same shot for some nice angular and sometimes, triangular designs.

There's a really silly slip up, though, during that last mentioned set of sequences. There's a scene at a dinner table where much attention is drawn to the positioning of chopsticks and, well, all I can say is it's the mystery of the bizarrely moving chopsticks from horizontal position to vertical position again. Now this can have happened in two ways. One is that the dinner conversation was originally much longer and the chopsticks were "reset" during that conversation but then the sequence was shortened in the editing and that part cut out. Frankly though, because your attention is drawn towards the offending culinary objects, the slip up is quite blatant. I think what might have happened is the final shot which finishes the sequence off, a shot which has no conversation in it and which includes the problem, may have been spliced onto the end from an alternate take of an earlier shot to have something in medium shot to finish the sequence off... either way, the effect is quite comical and perhaps a little unwanted.

Plus some interesting choices in continuity with the rest of the franchise and this is where it gets interesting since The Wolverine is also, it turns out, a direct sequel to X-Men: The Last Stand. Haunted by the spirit of Jean Grey, who he had to kill in her Dark Phoenix incarnation in that film, Logan has a fair few dream-like conversations with her throughout this movie (Jean Grey again played remarkably charismatically by Famke Janssen) in a sort of The Ghost And Mrs. Muir kind of existence (or younger readers might take the analogy of Six and Baltar in the modern incarnation of the Battlestar Galactica TV series, if they prefer). This works pretty well to add a certain amount of depth to the character and explains the almost nomadic existence he has been living since the events in that third film. Also, it makes sense to link it with that movie in some ways because the events in X-Men Origins: Wolverine were clearly taking place at a point before the first X-Men movie and don’t require this film to tie up any loose “character” ends from that film.

This movie plays out really well though and, all in all, it’s quite extreme and raw for the rating... although nowhere near as extreme as I would have liked and had hoped for when director Darren Aronofsky was originally attached to the project in its early days. Well, okay, it’s raw for “modern” Hollywood anyway, and we can’t help but be trapped in the censorially worse-than-Victorian culture we are living in at the moment, I guess.

The score by Marco Beltrami, who is the 6th composer to work on an X-Men film (so much for musical continuity between films, you idiot producers) is actually quite mellow but not as pseudo-Japanese style as I was expecting. Perhaps that would, to be honest, have been a wrong move and this score supports the drama quite well. I’ve no idea as yet whether it works as well as a stand alone listen because I was only able to sneak enough time in to listen to the first third of the album over the week before I saw the movie, but I’m guessing it’s a nice enough listen and Beltrami’s a solid composer.

Now then... you will have hopefully seen this movie by now and if you did, I sincerely hope you stayed for the mid-credits epilogue sequence. If you didn’t, well, maybe you should try to see it. There’s been a lot of complaints, including from myself, that the last X-Men film brought about so many impossible continuity errors that it just made a mockery of the series. Now Bryan Singer, the original director of the first two movies in the franchise, who is making the next one, has said that he has recognised this and will try to do something about it. Now, they’re doing Days Of Future Past and all the actors who played the characters in both sets of movies, are reuniting to play the same characters at different points in time, presumably at the same time - Professor X meet young Professor X etc... but I don’t see how any of that can reunite the two timelines unless, one of the timelines is significantly altered. Now, the post end credits sequence on the third movie implied that the mind of Professor X had somehow survived in someone else’s body but, if I recall correctly, both Professor X and Magneto, played by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, were destroyed. With me so far? Okay...

The mid end credits sequence in The Wolverine is set two years after the events that take place in the main body of the movie. There, at an airport, an uncredited Ian McKellan as Magneto and an uncredited Patrick Stewart as Professor X try to enlist Logan’s aid. Logan is suitably baffled by their presence, and so are the audience. Also, the implication could be that even Jean Grey somehow survived and that’s why she is always in Logan’s head throughout this movie (okay, so that last might just be wishful thinking on my part but, what the heck?). However, this does give me hope for the future of the franchise because, if Singer is able to come up with a good reason for Magneto and Professor X to still be walking the earth, then surely the continuity errors from the last movie should be small enough in comparison for him to take care of. Let’s hope so anyway. I guess we’ll find out during May 2014, which is when X-Men: Days Of Future Past is due to be released.

Until then, enjoy The Wolverine. It’s not as fun as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, to be sure, but it’s certainly got a more mature feel to it and a lot more narrative and character development to get your head around. And Jackman is always good to watch as Logan, bringing a lot to the role and embedding it with a continuity in character attitude that elevates the role to being one of the great on-screen characters of our time. He even gets away with doing a quite blatant homage to James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever... and if you've seen that film then you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Don’t miss out, bub!

John Carter, Warlord Of Mars

TharkXpress

John Carter, Warlord Of Mars
by Various Artists and Writers
Marvel ISBN: 978-0785159902

When I was about ten years of age I used to love going into science fiction book and comic shops like my all-time favourite shop Dark They Were And Golden Eyed (which sadly didn’t survive into much of the 1980s), Eye In The Pyramid (ditto) and Forbidden Planet... and peering intently at all the books and comics I couldn’t afford. Among all the Doc Savage, Flash Gordon and Conan books and comics were the John Carter tales and I especially used to like the prominently displayed covers of Marvel’s late 1970s run of John Carter, Warlord Of Mars.

I never caught up to the comics at that point but I did, very slowly, put together a library of the US paperback reprints of the series, over time, and thrilled over Edgar Rice Burroughs tales of, initially, a gentleman of Virginia who finds himself thrust into a Barsoomian (aka Martian) world of red men and women, giant four-armed green Tharks, great white apes and many other fantastical elements which brought a similar kind of thrill as those early 1930s Flash Gordon serials I used to watch when I was a kid. I even remember going into a specialist shop in Southend for a copy of The Chessmen Of Mars and getting into a discussion with the know-it-all store owner there who pointed out to me that having written all those stories of Tarzan The Ape Man over the length of his career, Burroughs had never once gone to visit Africa, where Tarzan made his home. I, of course, then felt it beneficial to myself to point out to the store owner that, yes, that was true, and with all those John Carter novels under his belt, Burroughs never once bothered to visit Mars either.

Yeah, I could be a bit sharp when I wanted. It was all said in fun though.

I’ve always loved the John Carter novels and the character’s obsessive love for his Martian wife is something I find admirable and has instilled in me a good sense of loyalty and appreciation of the fairer sex. This is a good thing.

It wasn’t until the early nineties that I finally caught up, properly, with the 1970s Marvel Comics. I had fallen prey to RSI aka Repetitive Strain Injury not too long after starting full-time employment. I don’t expect anyone who has not suffered from this condition to sympathise or to even understand it. I didn’t even take it seriously myself until it, practically overnight, knocked out the strength and ability for me to use both arms for a good few months. At this point I decided to start reading comics again and, frankly, it was a choice made of necessity. Hardbacks were more expensive in those days and paperbacks were something I just couldn’t keep open and practically read in the condition I found myself in for a while. Comics could just be opened flat so, it was at this stage of my life, that I started travelling around the comic fairs again and scouring London for various surviving comic shops. Over the space of a year I managed to put together a full run of the entire 28 issue series of the John Carter, Warlord Of Mars comic, plus the three “annual sized” issues they put out. And they were great.

Just recently, Marvel have reprinted these as a single volume hardback, presumably to tie in with the movie version of John Carter (reviewed here) and it was something I really wanted to revisit in this format, rather than pull out all the back issues and look at them printed on the cheap 1970s paper which suffered from dot gain and other issues at the time. However, the tome in question was very expensive and I ummed and ahhhed over it for a while... until my brilliant girlfriend came to my rescue and purchased said tome for me as a Christmas present. What a gal!

And it’s a really special and beautiful volume, too, it has to be said, The paper stock it’s printed on does absolute justice, probably for the first time ever, in capturing the truly beautiful artwork of the amazing artists, such as Gil Kane, Carmine Infantino, and Dave Cockrum, who worked on this series. Heck, there’s even a guest issue or two by a young Frank Miller... those were the days. Seeing these fabulous illustrations printed on a stock which finally brings out the details of the inking and colours of the issues is something of a revelation and reminded me of just why I loved reading these comics twenty odd years ago.

The stories told in these pages take place, according to writer Marv Wolfman (one of a few writers in the series) between two paragraphs in Chapter 27 of Burrough’s first John Carter novel, A Princess Of Mars (originally titled Under The Moons Of Mars on first publication) and the love of the writers working on this for the original material is self evident as soon as you start reading it, as narrated by John Carter himself.

There are always going to be one or two things about the Martian series that modern ideas of censorship won’t allow contemporary translators and explorers of Burrough’s books do right (the first book was written 101 years ago at time of writing this article), such as the fact that Martian men and women really don’t go in much for wearing clothes, but what the writers and artists here were able to get right, they did... for the most part... I think Frank Miller may have screwed up on some of the Barsoomian beasts and the addition of a shipboard “computer” on one of the sail-barges in one of the later issues shows the influence of the then current movie blockbuster Star Wars on the comic more than Burroughs, but without that first Star Wars movie coming out, to be fair, it’s doubtful that Marvel would have bothered buying the rights to these characters in the first place, is my guess.

The book gets the tone of the John Carter character just right... he is forever going on, issue after issue, about his lovely wife, the incomparable Dejah Thoris and he acts as a gentleman, where possible, throughout the entire run, as oppose to the lovable rogue he was portrayed as in the recent movie version (I’ve not seen the low budget movie version before that one yet, featuring ex-porn actress Traci Lords, although I hear its relationship to the actual source material is tenuous at best). The artwork is also, for the most part, totally reflective of the descriptions found in Burrough’s original stories and with little, throw away references to later characters in Burrough’s stories, such as Carter’s future son Carthoris and Ras Thavas - The Master Mind Of Mars, the comics come alive in much the same way that the classic stories do. They are definitely not disrespectful of the original material and equally as entertaining.

If you’re a fan of Burrough’s original ten novels (and the collected short stories) about life on Barsoom then you will certainly find a lot to admire and enthuse over in this hardback reprint, which lovingly reprints the entire 28 issue run plus the three annuals. And if you don’t know the character of John Carter very well, and want to dip your toes into the Martian landscape, then these are definitely the next best thing to the original stories that you could read to give you a flavour of the sprit of adventure and sense of honour imbued in the character. A general, all round recommendation from me on this one... and with much thanks to my gal friend!