The Fantastic Four - First Steps

The Foxy Mr. Fantastic

The Fantastic Four - 
First Steps
Directed by Matt Shakman
UK/USA/Canada/New Zealand 2025
Marvel/Disney
UK cinema release print.

Foreshadowing: The only spoilers in this are hints of what doesn’t happen. I think you can read in safety... or, you know, Reed in safety. 

What is it with the July Blockbuster trailers this year?

I mean, the marketing has been terrible. 

The Jurassic World Rebirth trailer looked as awful as I assumed it would be, the Superman trailer, Krypto aside, looked pretty appalling and the trailer for The Fantastic Four - First Steps, was surprisingly bad. I’d been looking forward to that last one because I knew it was going to be set in the 1960s and, admittedly this meant the film had to have been set in a multiversal alternative version of Earth (since they are not past characters in the current Marvel Cinematic Universe aka MCU, other than in alternate cameos)... but they are right up front about that in this movie, with the characters living in a version of Earth named after original co-creator Jack Kirby’s birthday. 

And in each of the cases of the promotional campaigns mentioned above... the films they represented were some of the best blockbuster movies we’ve had in a while. Jurassic Park Rebirth (reviewed here), while totally not needed, was one of the better franchise entries. Superman was pretty solid (it probably helped that Krypto gets a lot of screen time... reviewed here) and, yeah, despite being totally miscast in terms of the way the characters look in the comics... with Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/Susan Richards (The Invisible Girl), Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Benjamin Grimm (The Thing*) and Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm (The Human Torch)... this film is actually one of the better MCU entries to date. 

The main leads all work well together in terms of their on-screen chemistry and the whole movie looks spectacular in its creation of a kind of retro-fitted, futuristic vision of the 1960s. An aesthetic which I thought would work (until I saw the trailer) but, yeah, in spite of that, it still looks pretty amazing. One might even say... fantastic. 

The film kinda had me from very early on when, after skimping on a proper origin story... much like superhero movies are finally learning to do again, from their 1940s and 1950s on screen counterparts, just cut to the chase... it does a brief potted history of the origins of the team on an Ed Sullivan parody TV show and one of, I’m sure, many comic book homages throughout, it recreates, in live action format, something approximating the cover of the very first issue of the comic, dated November 1961. You know... the titular characters’ famous battle with the Mole Man. Actually, the Mole Man takes on a much more significant role as the film moves forward, rather than just being used as a throwaway for this sequence, it turns out. 

There’s even an homage to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, if my brief glimpse of them working in the offices of Timely Comics (Marvel’s original name in the 1930s) was correctly decoded by my brain. So, yeah, there are lots of homages to the original comics, even if the film strays far from the fine details. 

For instance, I meant to watch the WandaVision follow up TV show Agatha All Along before seeing this (I forgot) because I’d heard Sue Storm is pregnant in this one. So, obviously, Franklin Richards would need a babysitter and, in the comics, that was the witch Agatha Harkness. But, nope, she doesn’t make an appearance here. 

And similarly, you’ll know from the trailers (which include material which didn’t make final cut, by the looks of it) that the big bad of the movie is the mighty Galactus (and he actually looks just like him this time around). So, of course, that means his herald, the Silver Surfer will be making an appearance and... make an appearance he does. Um... no... actually that’s, make an appearance she does. Instead of Norin Rad being this movies Silver Surfer, we have his lover Shalla-Bal, played by Julia Garner, filling that spot. So, yeah, wrong again but, also again, it kinda works here.

What doesn’t work is that damned robot Herbie, who finally makes it to the screen. And why it doesn’t work too well is because, though it speaks English, you can’t really make out what it’s saying. At least, I couldn’t. Could maybe have used some subtitles here guys. 

But it is fast paced, simpler than the usual overcrowded superhero fest (in exactly the way Superman wasn’t... but still managed to make it work) with a lot of oomph and, actually, quite a lot of emotional heart. All set to a Michael Giacchino score which, again, despite being terrible in the trailers, really works for the movie... bet there’s no CD release though, because Marvel seem to have given up on giving their more music literate fans a score on the one useful format they could have put it on. Yeah, not getting into this again right now... their music policy sucks. 

But yeah, other than not being able to enjoy the music for the film away from the movie because it’s not released in an acceptable format at time of writing, The Fantastic Four - First Steps was a surprisingly charming movie and a good time at the cinema, for sure. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this links in to Avengers Doomsday next year (or even, since it’s not picked up here, how it related to the post credits scenes of Thunderbolts, reviewed here). A small hint might be found in the first of the two post credit sequences of this film, methinks.

*Actually, The Thing is based more on his original, early 1960s look here, instead of the more defined, better known version of the character from the 1970s. 

Eternals

Eternally Yours

Eternals
USA 2021
Directed by Chloé Zhao
Marvel Studios

Warning: Slight spoilers as to the nature of the main ‘super hero’ characters here.

Okay, let’s address the first of the two elephants in the room here... Marvel’s Eternals is based on the old Jack Kirby Marvel comic The Eternals. Now, I never used to read that one, although I saw it floating around newsstands a lot as a kid in the early 1970s and it seems to me the whole look as in costumes and characters probably has not much in the way of links to what Marvel have done to it in the movie version. Maybe that’s why the producers thought the word The in the title was somehow either superfluous or a way of defending it against the criticisms of the various changes. I’m reading that there were, indeed, a lot of changes from the comics and Kirby’s original vision but, hey, that’s what I’ve sadly come to expect from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So, yeah, can’t compare it and maybe going into it blind was best for me because...

I really don’t understand the almost overwhelming negativity about this movie. I literally only know one person who liked it... everyone else I’ve seen commenting on it on social media (for example) has given it a big thumbs down but, honestly, I’d have to say this is one of the more watchable and entertaining of the Marvel movies. Due to the comments, I actually put off seeing this one for a while and was expecting it to be really quite bad or, I dunno, lacking in action somehow but, no... it’s chock full of action and it’s got a load of great actors... Salma Hayek, Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie, Kit Harrington, Kumail Nanjiani (yay, Stuber!), Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Ma Dong-seok and Bollywood star Harish Patel playing a bunch of interesting and diverse characters who don’t always get along with each other and don’t always do the things Marvel good guy/bad guy characters would usually do (this is not a bad thing). Which can also be said, to a certain extent, about the way the film’s storyline goes in general (I kinda wish the studio had the guts to present the audience with the original preview ending of the movie, which is a lot bleaker from what I can understand).

Yes, it’s a long film but that’s because it’s got an epic storyline and, intimate and comedic moments aside, it has a real epic feel to it too. One of the things which gives it that is that the story keeps flashing back from present times to various points in Earth’s history to reveal the reasons behind why the titular heroes have separated and hidden themselves among mankind in the first place. It also addresses the other elephant in the room... why they’ve not done anything to save humanity during its various historical crises, such as the Thanos snap... out of the way fairly quickly and, I thought, glibly at first. That is until it’s addressed again later in the movie as a more satisfying motivation on the part of these once and future heroes.

Now there were some things that maybe let it down a bit. For instance, when one of the heroes turns up dead fairly early on in the modern sections of the film, there was no question in my mind that the film was probably going to reveal a very Watchmen style twist somewhere near the last act... which proved entirely correct so, yeah, no real surprises there. Also, one of the characters is established and then seemingly tossed aside as he only seems to be there to make the most of in the first of two post credits scenes (the mid credits scene in fact) so that his character can be used to set up two other Marvel comic book characters, who will no doubt be appearing in Phase IV of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (one of them is only a voice at this point so, yeah, he got even shorter shrift in terms of appearing in the movie... I won't spoil it for you by naming him here).

The one big problem for me though... apart from some anachronistic sign language used in the wrong part of human history, was the fact that if these beings were created to be perfect beings at carrying out a specific mission... as it’s established they were... why give them specific defects such as, well, one of them being deaf. I mean, yeah, great that deaf people are represented but the concept of giving that character the origin she has makes absolutely no sense in this specific context, it seems to me.

Still, I’m willing to forgive the movie things like this because, as I said, it’s an entertaining movie and much better than some of the weaker entries in the MCU, such as Iron Man 2, Thor 2, The Incredible Hulk or the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies. I was thoroughly engaged with it and it certainly didn’t seem as long as two and a half hours.

One very interesting thing, given it’s a Marvel movie, is that there are two DC references in the film... specifically in terms of talking about both Superman and Batman at different points in the movie. Now, at first I thought that this may be some big money making plan on the part of Marvel (and it certainly would be a licence to print their own money) to cross over with Warner Brothers’ DC Universe at some future point but, thinking about it, certain secrets about the characters are revealed and so, what I think it actually does is establish that DC comics are alive and well in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but... they are just that. Fictional comics and media and not something which meshes with the MCU in a more interesting way. So now, I have to say, I’m fairly puzzled as to why I’m hearing these references to rival comic book companies in a Marvel movie (and, yeah, you can bet DC will get their own reprisals in on their up and coming movie slate, for sure, when it comes to referencing Marvel comics).

But, yeah, other than that... not too much to say about Eternals other than... I think the audience seem to have reacted really harshly (maybe because it’s not just straight Bam! Kapow! Kablooey! this time around) and I really hope to see some of these characters again in future Marvel movies. Which, despite the low box office take, I think they will be practically forced to do at some point because it seems to set up so many future MCU events which would dovetail nicely into this. And, while it probably doesn’t adhere closely to Jack Kirby’s original ideas, I could definitely see some of his ‘cosmic influence’ on certain sequences in the movie... which did give a few scenes a more Kirbyesque look, it has to be said. Splendid stuff and I hope that Marvel don’t listen to the audience response on this one.

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.

Giant Super Hero Holiday Grab Bag

Grabby Christmas

Giant Super Hero Holiday Grab Bag
by various writers and artists
Marvel Comics 1974-1976

Imagine, if you will, a young boy aged six years old, out in London with his parents at the tail end of 1974. There I was, in either Berwick Street in Soho or just down the road and around the corner in St. Ann’s Court (just off Wardour Street, depending on when the place I'm talking about moved) in what was my all time favourite shop, Dark They Were And Golden Eyed. This was the forerunner of such future shops as the short lived Eye In The Pyramid and, of course, Forbidden Planet (pretty much the only one of these types of stores which made it out of the late 70s/early 80s and which is still with us today, although there are some modern variants like Mega City Comics and Orbital, of course).

So, anyway, there I was in my favourite science fiction, fantasy, horror and comic shop gazing up at a huge (well, to me it seemed huge) tabloid sized, cardboard covered Treasury Edition called Giant Super Hero Holiday Grab Bag. There was a load of Christmas Holly with red berries on the cover forming a wreath and, bursting through all that rich greenery were Spider-Man, Thor, The Hulk, Captain America, The Thing and The Human Torch. And then, on the back, there was a reverse of the cover with the same scene but with a view of them from behind, doing the bursting. It was gorgeous and I was actually very surprised when my dad took the thing down from the shelf and said we could take it back home with us. Surprised because, honestly, it was an exorbitant amount of money for the time... a real luxury item. Yep! It was 50p (I believe the US price was about $1.50, which says something about the state of the pound against the dollar these days, I think). How could a comic be priced over what was five times the amount of a regular comic back then? Honestly, fifty pence?

Anyway, we took it home and it got a lot of love and, I still have this and both the other two ‘sequels’ to this tome to this day... and it’s those which are the subject of today's review, an excuse for me to read and hang out with the fond memories. I think it was the first Treasury Edition I’d ever seen. Both DC and Marvel did these tabloid sized Treasury Editions (as they were loosely known at the time) and, although there were a few which pre-dated this one by a matter of months, I believe this was the first year that the two big companies started releasing them. Not a huge amount of them have survived these days because they didn’t travel through the mail too well and their relatively cumbersome size meant they tended to get folded and bent quite a bit. Not mine though. I managed to keep most I had and, although some were given away, I managed to buy many of them back and a few others in the interceding years. Actually, there are two I used to have which I still wish I could get back but, for some reason, those ones seem to go for very big money. As it is they usually go for a fair whack if you’re lucky enough to see them about in the wild. I have maybe 30 to 40 of these things and I still think they’re great buys, with their oversized artwork reprinted at something almost as large as the original artwork might have been before reproduction and with a full colour, no adverts experience of around 80 to 90 pages in total. These were a great deal.

It’s actually now that I read them again that I realise that, although the covers really 'brought the Christmas', the stories inside (which were mostly reprints in the case of these particular editions), were mostly not seasonal tales.

Here is what lurked between the covers...

Giant Superhero Holiday Grab Bag
Marvel Treasury Special - 1974
First up we have what was pretty much the only Christmas tale in this one (honestly, these things feel much more Christmassy than they actually are) with a tale teaming up everybody’s favourite web slinger Spider-Man with the Silver Age version of The Human Torch, Johnny Storm of The Fantastic Four. This is Have Yourself A Sandman Little Christmas by Roy Thomas And Ross Andru and it’s a truly brilliant little tale which humanises the super villain and in which, for a little while, the two lead heroes turn a blind eye for a minute and let him keep his annual ritual of visiting his sick mother in bed on Christmas Eve. It’s a heart warming story and nobody is really worried that The Sandman gets away at the end.

The next, very non-Christmassy story is In Mortal Combat With... Sub Mariner by Stan Lee and Wally Wood. This is a tale of Namor seeking a lawyer to challenge mankind’s rights to be the ruling surface dwellers and, yeah, no prizes as to which legal team he goes for. It’s not long before Daredevil and Sub Mariner are locked in deadly combat in the streets of New York.

And then there’s... And To All A Good Night by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan. Along with the opening tale, this is the other strong story in this collection and, although it has a Christmassy title, it could frankly be set on almost any night of the year. This one shows Black Widow’s chauffer rescuing a suicidal young man from taking a plunge into the river, so he takes the kid back to Natasha to help him. Alas, when the hoodlums who are the cause of the boy’s troubles attack them all in Natasha’s building, the teenager goes to save her and ends up plunging to his death from the rooftop anyway... much to the upset of the teary eyed Black Widow. This one is pretty grim and depressing and really shows that Marvel could take themselves seriously with different kinds of stories when they wanted to.

The last two tales in this first Grab Bag tome, Battle Of The Century - The Hulk VS The Thing and The Avengers Take Over is a two part tale by the classic writing and art team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. It does what it says on the tin and shows the first real meeting between The Fantastic Four and the fairly newly formed The Avengers, as they learn how to work together in the second part to end The Hulk’s current rampage. It’s made more than clear in this story that The Hulk’s alter ego is very much Bob Banner... that would change over time.

And that was that for this first volume. Dynamic and, much simpler but much more engaging somehow, artwork than a lot of comics today and certainly a lot of fun. However, this must have been a very successful experiment on the part of Marvel because, a year later there was...

Giant Superhero Holiday Grab Bag
Marvel Treasury Edition Number 8 - 1975
This one goes with the same format with only two actual Christmas tales but there’s also a New Year’s Eve story in here too... of sorts.

Twas The Night Before Christmas by Gary Friedrich And Frank Springer is a nice opening story about Nick Fury, Agent Of S.H.I.E.L.D going up into space to defuse a world threatening bomb on Christmas Eve. But it’s a trap and Fury is face to face with a Ku Klux Klan style super villain called The Hatemonger, who straps him to a capsule with the bomb and sends him back to Earth. If it wasn’t for a serendipitous intervention from an unknown entity (it’s strongly implied it’s Santa and his sled) then things might have turned out badly. Nice idea and love that there’s a Sean Connery reference in this, paying homage to the original idea of resurrecting the star of Sgt. Fury And His Howling Commandoes as a secret agent in the Cold War.

After this, there’s a reprint of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s classic Spidey Goes Mad story, where Mysterio posing as a psycho-analyst almost makes Spider-Man think he’s going off his rocker with his illusions... if it wasn’t for J. Jonah Jameson accidentally foiling his plans, much to the editor of the Daily Bugle’s dismay. Next up is the second Christmas story, Jingle Bombs by Steve Engleheart, George Tusca and Billy Graham. This one tells of a super villain visiting Luke Cage, Hero For Hire on Christmas Eve and attacking him as people from the past, present and future (in a nod to Charles Dickens) before finding him worthy enough to tie up in his lair so they can die together when he lets off an atomic bomb. This isn’t a great story but it has a certain atmosphere to it that makes up for the clumsy plot.

Then we have Roy Thomas and Herb Trimpe’s Heaven Is A Very Small Place, which is... literally The Hulk in the desert reacting to a mirage of a friendly town before it fades out again. It’s... not got a lot of substance to it but at least it’s fairly short.

The final tale in this edition is Eternity! Eternity! by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan and is about Doctor Strange (back in the phase when he used to wear that blue face covering) and is about Nightmare and Eternity trying to destroy mankind on New Year’s Eve. It seems to be the first installment of a two parter because, just as the big fight is about to start, the editors obviously decided they didn’t want to go over the page count and instead have Doctor Strange reminding the readers that everything came out alright in the end.

So, yeah... that one was a bit of a cop out but it must have sold well because it once more paved the way for...

Giant Superhero Holiday Grab Bag
Marvel Treasury Edition Number 13 - 1976
Okay, so Marvel obviously never used to do that many Christmas stories (and I can sort of see why in terms of the long game and the age of the characters) because they manage to have their cake and eat it here. By that I mean, none of the reprints are Christmas themed in this edition but, to ease this and attempt to give the whole thing a seasonal feel, there’s a framing story of a bunch of completely new pages, called ‘Tis The Season, by Roger Stern and George Tuaka, which takes place during and after a Fantastic Four VS The Avengers charity snowball fight event... where various of these and other superheroes interact with the characters and each encounter has one or more of the characters reminiscing about a previous adventure... with a few pages of this popping up between each story and the bookends.
 
The regular stories start with ...As Those Who Will Not See! by Gerry Conway and Gill Kane, when Spider-Man turns up and we get a tale featuring him plus The Thing  and his blind girlfriend Alicia Masters teaming up to follow a thread created by Alicia’s step-dad, The Puppetmaster. It tries to be an emotional story of a father gone bad but, in the end, it’s not really a great story. The next in the volume reprints the story of The Vision becoming a member of The Avengers with the classic Even An Android Can Cry by Roy Thomas and John Buscema.

He Who Strikes The Silver Surfer by Stan Lee and Marie Severin is next but, nothing much happens as two titans, Hulk and Silver Surfer, lock horns and trade fists. Marvel seemed to be good at having ‘nothing much happening’ while two characters are pounding on each other for the required number of pages. Something to note here though is that Robert Banner has now become Bruce Banner (later this was glossed over with the explanation that he’s Robert Bruce Banner, if memory serves).

The last story, Once Upon A Time - - The Ox! by Gerry Conway and Gene Colan is Daredevil VS The Ox who, if memory serves, was originally one of The Enforcers in The Amazing Spider-Man but now seems to be a dormant personality in another character. It doesn’t make much sense and is not a fun story, as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s me done with these for the forseeable future. They’re not what I remember them to be but it was nice to revisit these things and I’m surprised that Marvel haven’t gathered some of their more Christmas themed stories from the last sixty plus years of comics and released them under a money grabbing trade paperback reprint but, you know, that’s just what I’d do (and I’d certainly grab a copy for myself). The Treasury format is one of my fondest memories of comic book buying in the 1970s and, despite the weak content in some of these tomes, they will always hold a special place in my heart. Definitely worth tracking down if comic books are your thing.

Slugfest

Superhero Slamdown

Slugfest - Inside the Epic 50 Year
Battle Between Marvel and DC
by Reed Tucker
Sphere ISBN: 978-0751568974

Well, this is certainly a book I didn’t know I needed. The title says it all... Slugfest - Inside The Epic 50 Year Battle Between Marvel and DC. I didn’t even know there was an ‘epic battle’ and both companies have been going, in one form or another, since the 1930s so... maybe the title is a little misleading in terms of the timeframe (although I’ll get to that in a little while).

I was always a bit of a DC kid when it came to comics but then again, I also used to love both Harvey Comics and Marvel Comics too, growing up in the late 1960s/early 1970s. In fact, I learned from this very tome that Marvel, who pretty much always used to copy other people’s products, at least until the early 1960s (although a big case could be made for after too) had tried their own version of the Casper, The Friendly Ghost comic called Homer, The Happy Ghost. I’d love to see one of those. So I read more Superman, Batman, SHAZAM! and Casper than most other titles but I was always there for Marvel’s Spider-Man, Captain Britain and various others of their comics too. What did it matter who was publishing the things... isn’t there room for all the publishers in the marketplace?

As I got older and went to College, I got my first inkling that, quite ridiculously, there are people... many of them... who are either for one or the other. They lived in a world of exclusivity which meant that if they enjoyed DC, then they wouldn’t buy or support Marvel (Marvel and DC have always, until maybe very recently in terms of actually selling comics, been the dominant two of the four-colour comic book publishers on the block). And there was a wild rivalry between the fans of each... a bit like that bizarre split in fandom nowadays which means a lot of people are either Star Wars or Star Trek people. I mean, c’mon folks, really?

The thing is, I’d always assumed that this rivalry between the companies was only existent in the heads of the readers themselves. After all, grown adults working for these companies wouldn’t stoop to such shenanigans, would they? Well, as it turns out, the answer is yes and that’s why I needed this book to come along and make me realise that the constant, perceived rivalry between Marvel and DC was and, very much still is, a very real thing... and this details quite a lot of the interesting stories from 1962 onwards, when Marvel started launching their very different superheroes such as Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. Almost immediately they became a serious threat to the huge market share that DC had a grip on prior to those early days, as Stan Lee at Marvel finally hit on a winning set of ingredients for the comics that Marvel were putting out. So yeah, Marvel have been around almost as long as DC but this really looks at the early 1960s onwards.

Now, it has to be said, while writer Reed Tucker does a truly fantastic job of researching this with some of the key players and their colleagues, getting this stuff down in as entertaining a way as possible, he owns up right from the start of the book that he was pretty much a Marvel kid. Nothing wrong with that of course, one of my best friends is similarly blinkered in that respect but... I did feel that the book is definitely written with a not so hard to detect bias towards Marvel comics. So what we have, for the most part here, is a catalogue of errors as DC start to slide and continue to lose more of their place in the market, with the occasional period of upturn every now and again where they are holding their own against Marvel. Now, I’m pretty sure it’s all true and that, from the stories indicated here, DC weren’t always doing things right... and a lot of that came from the head people who were, quite often, fairly distanced from the product they turned out. They are the classy, distinguished, ‘olde worlde’ comic book company (not that Marvel were any less old) who ran their line of comics like a well oiled machine... Marvel were the upstart pranksters who were mixing it up and outselling them (proportionately, based on the sale or return model of comic book distribution... so they were selling less comics but pretty much most of their print run as opposed to DC who were putting out loads of comics with huge print runs, technically outselling Marvel but with a huge amount of their comics returned unsold).

It’s a fascinating story and there are lots of hugely serious Marketing mistakes made along the way in a desperate bid to gain dominance of the four colour market, many of them by DC but occasionally by Marvel also. So you get the industrial spies, the defection of major creative names to one side or the other and a lot of grim stuff happening... like the time Marvel were printing special versions of their issues which they knew their distributors could charge higher prices for in return for pulling 10 covers off the DC product for each copy and sending it to them so they knew the competition’s comics were not getting to the shop floor. So yeah, underhanded stuff like that.

A favourite story detailed here is where there was a big board meeting held at DC in the early sixties, with a big stack of Marvel comics on the table, so that everybody could figure out why Marvel had gained such a significant share of the market and work out how to combat it. The ‘kids’ in the room knew exactly why Marvel were winning but the executives and managers would not ever deign to actually read one of their competitors comics. They saw the art as crude and bad compared to theirs and they focused on things like... well Marvel have been using ‘more red on the covers’ or using ‘more speech balloons on the covers’, so that’s what needs to be done. They didn’t once think to stoop to reading what was actually between those covers and twigging just why the Marvel superheroes were so different from theirs. And this was going on for a huge amount of years.

And when they did manage to score a major, famous Marvel talent to defect to DC, such as the time they got Jack ‘King’ Kirby, who was pretty much the co-creator, along with Stan Lee, of the Marvel Universe (which was always a more coherent universe than the Distinguished Competition’s comics), the people at the top didn’t know why they needed him, thought he was a terrible artist and treated him badly. For instance, the young executive who managed to get him hired gave him Superman to work on but, the people at the top didn’t like the way Kirby drew him (which was the reason you would hire Kirby in the first place, frankly)... and so they ordered other artists to retouch the artwork by drawing new faces and hands on the character. Seriously? This is not how you treat a legend like Jack Kirby!

There’s a lot of stuff not covered in this book obviously... probably because it showed nothing of the rivalry between the two companies... such as highlighting the coming of the brilliant Jeanette Khan to DC without actually talking about, or perhaps even mentioning, the DC Vertigo line.

It does, however, cover some amazing stuff such as how some of the company crossovers like the original Superman VS Spider-Man Treasury from the mid-1970s (yep, still got mine) came to be. One of the things I either learned from this or had probably just forgotten was that the first crossover project between the two companies was another Treasury Adaptation of the 1970s, The Wizard Of Oz... so there’s a lot of these things covered in this tome. Not to mention... secret company crossovers that even the editors didn’t know about... but I won’t spoil that for you here, read the book. I especially liked the inclusion of the whole Captain Marvel/SHAZAM! legal issues which have dogged the original Fawcett Comics character since he was owned by DC too.

And yeah, not going to say much more about this book because the writer does manage to cover a lot of stuff and he does so in a very entertaining manner... even if Marvel almost consistently come acrosss as ‘the winners’ from decade to decade. Especially when it comes to the chapter talking about the movies and TV shows of the two companies. This book, however, came out before the release of Wonder Woman in cinemas and so the author didn’t know yet that, despite the Justice League movie, DC have made three truly great movies that are easily as good as the Marvel films... since this book was written we’ve had the aforementioned Wonder Woman (easily better than anything Marvel has ever done, cinematically speaking), the pretty great Aquaman movie and, of course, the truly brilliant Captain Marvel movie which DC were forced to call SHAZAM! due to the legal wranglings you’ll find detailed in this book. So maybe the author will update those chapters and give DC a better time in the movie section in future years, assuming they can keep up their winning streak at the cinema and it’s not short lived.

Either way, Slugfest - Inside the Epic 50 Year Battle Between Marvel and DC is an interesting and satisfying read, not just for fans of comic books but also, I suspect, for people who want to see how Marketing can just go wrong and backfire on companies (Can I hear you say Variant Enhanced Cover?). Much to be recommended in this book and I’m certainly glad I have this one on my shelf.

Doctor Mordrid

Drid-fully Delightful

Doctor Mordrid
USA 1992 Directed by Albert Band, Charles Band
Full Moon/88 FIlms Blu Ray Zone B

Oh wow. This is a film and a half.

I only have two scores by B-movie composer Richard Band on CD. One is Trancers III (a film I’ve not seen) and the other is to one of the great 1980s attempts to revive the 3D format in theatres, Metalstorm - The Destruction of Jared-Syn. However, I was sitting reading my Twitter timeline one morning and there was an excerpt from an interview with the composer and he mentioned Doctor Mordrid, a film co-directed by his father and brother and of which he seemed to make no bones about being a rip off of the Marvel comics character Doctor Strange (who is currently being played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the second on-screen iteration of the character). It seemed the production company did, at some point, have the rights to make a movie about the character but, by the time the production came together, they didn’t have enough money to renew the rights so... they didn’t and just changed the names of various characters and shaved off Doctor Strange’s moustache, leaving the rest of his costume pretty much as it is in the early comics, to get around copyright (allegedly... and it does seem to be the case if you read between the lines as well as use the evidence of your own eyes when you let this amazing little movie burn its delightful path onto your retinas).

I was interested in seeing this straight away, of course, but... well I highly doubted there would ever have been an official, commercial release of this movie in the UK. Cut to two or three hours later and there I was standing in Fopp records looking at a fairly new, cleaned up Blu Ray transfer of Doctor Mordrid for the less than princely sum of £6. This was too good to be true and, when I finally got around to watching the movie a couple of weeks later... I found that, not only was it too good to be true... it was also too bad to be true but, in the best way ever.

Seriously, Doctor Mordrid is a amazing and wonderous film and a bit of a strange conundrum of a picture in the sense that... it’s both one of the best ‘so hilariously bad it’s good’ movie’s I’ve seen in a good long time but, also, it’s actually got a bizarre kind of coolness to it. This last element is provided quite definitively by Jeffrey Combs in the title role, who absolutely plays all of the unfolding nonsense with, not just a sense of seriousness and gravitas which this kind of character needs to thrive but also with a lot of charm and on screen presence, it has to be said. Of course, he’s not Doctor Strange, Master Of The Mystic Arts he’s... Doctor Mordrid, Master Of The Unknown which would, I dunno, imply that if he’s a master of unknown things then he must know about them and thus negate the veracity of this contradiction of a title but... well, you get the picture.

And I don’t know if my words can fully do justice to the sheer brilliance of the stupidity of the film but... I’ll give it my best shot.

The film opens with a credit sequence which is a slow pan around Doctor Mordrid’s inner sanctum, the mysterious books and artefacts he has in his collection very slowly examined by the camera as... Richard Band’s opening title music goes completely over the top in a full on gallop of a heroic march which is both completely inappropriate to the style and pacing of the visuals while still being a great melody and piece of music in its own right and which would ably support some of the most heroic title sequences in the history of cinema... just not this one (although I am pleased to say that I did manage to find a reasonably priced second hand CD of the score which arrived in the post a week later). Amongst the credits we also have the legendary caption which says the film is ‘Based on an original idea by Charles Band’ so... yeah, you know what? Let’s not even go there. Unless you want to get into an argument about the meaning of the word ‘original’.

We then get the first scene which gave me pause for thought and made me think straight away of the mighty Marvel artist Jack Kirby... Doctor Mordrid consulting with ‘The Monitor’ (maybe that’s a non-Marvel version of The Watcher) who appears to him as a pair of giant, floating eyeballs in space. Oh yeah, this is something which seems just like Jack Kirby would have been doing in the late 1960s and mid 1970s and it all just felt somehow familiar. As it turns out, what I didn’t know until I looked it up after, is that Jack Kirby actually had been on board with the project at some point in the early stages of the film (presumably, before the money ran out) and so I’m guessing this was one of his contributions.

Anyway, The Monitor warns Mordrid that things are happening and elements are coming together towards the final showdown between Doctor Mordrid and his childhood enemy, a dark sorcerer called Kabal, who Mordrid has locked away in his castle dungeon which is a bit like his own personal Arkham Asylum for demonic villains, watched over by a big prison warden, Gunner. Oh... and another possible Kirbyism is that this castle is solitary in that it’s floating on a big rock in space.

But, back on planet Earth, we find ourselves in Rio De Janeiro... I know it must be there because the establishing shot is a still photograph of that big Christ The Redeemer statue and, should we be suspicious that they are just going to cut back to some footage taken nearer to the studio, it also tells us that in big letters to re-enforce that idea. Now then, wherever we are, we have a truly great moment in the film... perhaps greater than some of the sorcery we shall see later in the way it truly defies the physics of the situation. A guy with a truck load of... can’t remember, maybe diamonds... shoots the guy in front who is driving. So... where you might be correct in thinking this would cause the van to veer around the road in an ‘out of control’ manner and hurtle to destruction, this film tells us this is just not would happen in this situation. Instead, after he is shot dead, the driver would slump over the steering wheel and the van would suddenly slow down and stop because... um... what the heck? What are we being asked to believe here? This is completely ludicrous.

However, this complete lack of a coherent adherence to the laws of physics is soon forgotten as the villain of the piece, Kabal, makes his first appearance. And, it has to be said, he looks like an elaborately comical, long haired, blonde viking with sunglasses trying to find the nearest surf board. Wow. This guy is certainly striking and, a closer look reveals that he is... in fact... Brian Thompson, the lead villain of the Sylvester Stallone movie Cobra. Except here, instead of quite literally spitting the word ‘Pig’ at all and sundry, he says a lot of mystical things, fondles a naked woman, enslaves willing servants to do his every bidding and casts some really cool but probably silly spells.

We then get a proper introduction to Jeffrey Combs and also to his pet raven called Edgar. And, just in case you really didn’t get that comical allusion... he later refers to him as Edgar Allan, just to be sure the audience can appreciate the level of referencing on display here. What this raven can’t explain, though, is why several books catch on fire when Doctor Mordrid crosses through his handy portal to visit his castle. When he gets there, he meets up with Gunner, who walks around with two big holes where his eyes would normally be. Turns out Kabal has escaped, melting out Gunner’s eyes in the process (although, to be fair, this doesn’t seem to have slowed him down any). Mordrid restores Gunner’s eyeballs and goes back to Earth to make friends with a lady lawyer with a passion for mystical and spiritual phenomena, who happens to be his next door neighbour and who will help him out later in the film (charmingly played by Yvette Nipar).

Now, when I started watching this movie I’d figured it was made for a TV audience because the obvious cut away shot of blood spraying onto a statue was done without actually having any blood after someone was shot... therefore I just assumed it was being made to get around certain potential censorship problems. So I was pretty surprised when various characters actually start swearing and, on top of that, we have female nudity on screen. Not complaining, mind you but... it did manifest a certain tonal shift which doesn’t, in all honesty, do much harm to the movie.

After a while, the battle between the forces of good and evil is on and things are kinda predictable but always pretty fun and, not once, do the actors suggest that there’s anything wrong with the preposterous dialogue they are having to recite... which can be a lot of the battle on the credibility of these things, to be honest. Not that I’m suggesting the movie has any credibility but, you know, at least people aren’t laughing at themselves here. Even when either Mordrid or Kabal are walking around in their astral forms.

Now then, about the astral projection in this movie. When either Mordrid or Kabal appear before the other in their 'astral form', the budget of this movie does nothing to help portray this fact. They don’t in any way appear to shimmer or change colour and... it’s just the actors walking around like normal, proclaiming their status as such. Luckily, one or the other will usually either throw something or shoot bullets at the ‘astral person’ which will pass through them and then this will be followed with a handy piece of revealing dialogue which is not entirely dissimilar to one or other of them saying... “Ha! Your rocks/bullets/throwy object cannot hurt me, as I am in my astral form.” So there you have it.

And then everything stacks up and we get to the finale of the movie and... it’s a bit of a quick denouement, to be honest. Kabal and the astral form of Doctor Mordrid go toe to toe in some kind of American equivalent of the natural history museum and, to my delight, Kabal brings to life the skeleton of a dinosaur which then rampages around menacing people. And, considering this film was made in the 1990s, it’s actually proper old school Ray Harryhausen style stop motion animation as said dinosaur skeleton, not to mention the woolly mammoth skeleton Doctor Mordrid reanimates to fight the dinosaur, picks up a museum guard and proceeds to eat him. And it’s brilliantly naive and charming because, just like those old Harryhausen adventures, the guard suddenly turns into a stop motion puppet of the guard waving his arms and legs about. Of course, logically I couldn’t work out where this skeleton’s digestive system is supposed to be found or what good masticating on a guard would do it but, hey, I’m no palaeontologist. What do I know?

As Kabal gets quickly defeated by means so alarmingly underwhelming that after only a week since viewing this I have forgotten what they are, Gunner is using some kind of bizarre, laser shotgun to ensure no demons in the castle prison place can escape, as was Kabal’s plan. And then that’s it, the end... apart from fulfilling some romantic obligations between Mordrid and his lawyer friend.

As soon as the film had finished, I realised I could quite easily watch it over again and for multiple viewings. Doctor Mordrid is the perfect ‘night in with drunken friends’ kind of movie that can be enjoyed on all kinds of levels and which owns a certain sense of coolness at odds with the silliness of the story, the banality of the dialogue and the cheapness of its budget. A mini masterpiece of, possibly, inadvertent comedy which still maintains a certain gravitas and commands a certain amount of respect in spite of this. One of my new ‘to be recommended to friends of a certain disposition’ movies to be sure.

Amazing Fantastic Incredible

Ex Sales Sayer

Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir
by Stan Lee and Peter David and Colleen Doran
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4711-5259-7

Well this was a nice surprise present for Christmas... mainly because it wasn’t even a blip on my radar. I didn’t know it existed but I would have jumped on it myself, straight away, if I’d have known about it.  Subtitled ‘A Marvelous Memoir’, Amazing Fantastic Incredible tells the story of one of the giants of modern culture, the man behind so many of the fantastic characters that people have loved since their inception in the early 1960s... Stan Lee. And what’s so wonderful about this autobiography is that it’s done, as it really should always have destined to be, I think... in comic book form. A hardback graphic novel, if you want to get technical about it, although I would have loved it if this had been serialised monthly with cheaper looking covers.

Wait, did I say autobiography? Well it’s co-written, by the looks of it, by the famous Peter David and illustrated quite wonderfully by Colleen Doran. So the question really arises as to what this book actually is because... well it’s kind of shimmering incandescently in a state between autobiography and biography... I think. For the sake of my own sanity and as something to refer to it as for the purpose of this review... I’m going to remind myself that a lot of autobiographies were actually ghostwritten by or with other people and don’t technically count as an autobiographies at all. At least this book is giving all the credit where it’s due and, since Stan so obviously has a strong stamp on what his life story contains and how it plays out here... yeah, I’m going to go with autobiography. ‘nuff said.

So I have to start off here by saying that it’s a wonderful book. There are some things I would have liked to have seen a little more of and I’ll get to those in a minute but one of the main plus points here is that it’s a vastly entertaining read and, luckily, it’s really well written. Stan Lee’s personality and jokey trademark sense of aggrandizement shine through the pages right from the outset as it tells the tale of young Stan Leiber and his home life, growing up poor, and how he joined the company which, decades later, would become Marvel Comics. Also, how he took some time away in the middle of his job there to serve, in a capacity he probably didn’t expect, in the Second World War and of the various challenges of creating and editing some of the characters he’s come up with over the years.

And it’s really warm, fuzzy and lovely... some of it actually brought a tear to my eye... oh, lay off, I’m getting older and the tear ducts open up at the drop of a hat, these days, okay? Also, though, he did manage to surprise me a few times.

The structure is not completely linear, instead he opts to do what many good tale tellers do by highlighting things which lead in to one another and go together which could be many years apart. Obviously this helps to focus on the points being made... rather than completely doggedly following a straight route through the timeline. Lee also accentuates this necessity himself in the context of that structure and it gets him to places where he’s eventually talking to his younger self about his future. It’s pretty good in the way it does this...

... but that’s not what I meant by it managing to surprise me.

What I meant is that there are a few times in here where Stan The Man’s humour got the better of me by setting up a ‘story beat’ to follow a pattern of ‘monologuing’ he might have been using earlier in the strip and then, as you turn the page, pulling the rug out from under you... making you smile and also keeping you interested because you know you can’t always predict when his humour is going to kick in. Like the time he tells of his quick divorce and marriage (into one office for his future wife’s divorce and then into the next office to immediately get married) which had a nice little set up in the style of writing that when you turn the page... oh heck. I’m really not going to spoil it for you here.

Now this book is probably going to come under fire from some quarters, I’m guessing. I was expecting Stan to gloss over certain things and, I suppose, to an extent he does. He does, however give full page (and sometimes more) shout-outs to some of his co-creators over the years, the most famous (and possibly most troublesome in terms of whose side of the story you believe) being Steve Ditko and Jack ‘King’ Kirby. Now, as it happens, I don’t think Lee is trying to make light of any of the serious issues which became problems at certain stages in the history of the company... such as when Steve Ditko parts ways by becoming a ghostly, vanishing figure from his desk. The story about the big argument surrounding the identity of The Green Goblin is a well known one and I’ve certainly heard Stan tell it himself in various interviews... so I don’t think he’s particularly trying to hide anything here... he just doesn’t mention it again because it’s such a well known one, I suspect.

We’ll probably never get to hear about the full stories behind some of these problem issues where people became kind of casualties but one throwaway comment he makes about artists retaining their work and why he wasn’t able to do that did remind me of one thing... Stan Lee is not Marvel Comics. Sure, he is synonymous with them and he’s their mascot but... he is not always guilty for some of the mistakes made in the past. When you become a figurehead, though, sometimes you find yourself caught in the crossfire whether you like it or not. I’ve got no idea myself so I’m just going to shut up about these issues now... other than to say it certainly felt like Stan has done a good job here in giving people their due and there must have been some moments in this memoir (or autobiography as I like to call it), not just dealing with the day in and day out of Marvel, that must have been very painful for him to write and include. However, if you’re going to do a project like this, I think you have to realise there’s stuff you can’t leave out and, thankfully for us, Stan certainly seems to realise this too.

The artwork by Colleen Doran is amazing and when Stan talks about some of the comic books successes, we are presented with reproductions of the covers in question with Stan’s monologue continuing the story in little strategically placed boxes over them. It’s a nice touch, as are the pages which give you a fly on the wall perspective of the recording of the first Merry Marvel Marching Society record. Its great stuff actually and although I never had much of this kind of stuff at the time, it took me straight back to being a kid in the 1970s again because... well, Marvel were never shy on their self promotion were they? We all knew about this fan club stuff, even over here in the UK.

One thing I really would have liked to have seen, since Stan mentions his rivals DC a fair few times, is the inclusion of what was, when I was a kid, one of the most stupendous publications around. The first teaming up of Marvel and DC heroes in the Giant Sized Treasury Edition of Spider-Man VS Superman is not mentioned here... and it’s a shame because I used to love laying that big tome out on the floor as a kid and pouring over the words and pictures as Lois Lane and Mary Jane Watson got themselves into trouble.

The other thing I would have liked more of is actually dates put to incidents. You kind of have to guess a lot about when things were happening and reference your own knowledge of when certain incidents might have slotted into history... so there’s a possibility some readers may have trouble keeping up in certain areas, I think. Especially when, as I said, the narrative structure tends to hop around a bit in terms of the time frame. It doesn’t make the narrative any less compelling, though, so it’s not something that should stop anyone from picking it up.

These minor quibbles aside, I have to say that Amazing Fantastic Incredible is one of the more entertaining books I’ve read in a while and is... exactly what the title says it is. It's also a lovely homage.. or self homage... to one of comic book fandom’s greatly loved figureheads which even takes us right up to date with his cameo appearance in Avengers: Age Of Ultron earlier in the year. A nice thing to own and done in a medium which really captures the spirit of the man... or at the very least the spirit of his public persona. Greatly enjoyed and recommended by this reader, at any rate. What more is there to say?

Excelsior.

Argo

Cogito Argo Sum

Argo
2012 USA
Directed by Ben Affleck
Redemption BluRay Region B

“Argo f*** yourself.”

A phrase which takes on a little (just a little) extra resonance during the course of this movie, which I finally caught up with on Blu Ray... although I really had wanted to go see it at the cinema and found myself thwarted by a “too full up” life at the time. That I wanted to go see a movie involving some politics, a subject I know little about nor have any interest in, may have surprised a good deal of my friends but I’ve always been a bit of a Ben Affleck fan after his sterling work in his films with Kevin Smith, particularly the third and fourth of the Jay And Silent Bob movies, Chasing Amy and Dogma.

I also wanted to see the old Saul Bass Warner’s logo, which this movie opens with, on a big screen again... another thing in which I was stymied but that’s okay. People will keep coming back to that logo in homage for many years to come, I reckon. It also signals the kind of film Ben Affleck is trying to make... that is to say... something mired in the style of seventies Hollywood filmmaking and which stands up against such political thrillers as The Parallax View and All The President’s Men. Indeed, I’d heard that the style of the filmmaking was very close to those kinds of movies but I think that might a bit of wishful “interpretation” in this case.

Certainly, the film does more than hold up against the two films I just mentioned and many more of their ilk... Argo is a great movie and a great achievement and, perhaps, even deserved its Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards this year, in as much as any of them deserve it (which is pretty much never, in my book, but that’s another story). But, though it does eschew a few obvious modern film making techniques, and while Ben Affleck has certainly gone to some lengths to keep the film very close in style to a seventies movie (copying sequence structures and blowing up film so the grain is more prominent), I think the film still has quite a strong feel of the contemporary about it and I think there’s more than a little of nostalgia, as it relates to post-modernism, in the make-up of this movie than was perhaps required.

And that’s not a dig at Ben Affleck (nor the movie) as I don’t think that “looking back” symptom of nostalgic reverence is something that can easily be escaped or ignored and, I think, it’s probably a mistake to think you can do that... and possibly box office suicide too if you were 100% successful.

Having said that, the film does have long sequences where it does feel very “1970s” like and hats off to Mr. Affleck for making this all work so well. There’s an unwillingness to use hand held camera for most (if not all?) of the film but that doesn’t stop there being a lot of motion in the camera and the long smooth tracking shots which twist and turn and then are cut against other similar kinds of shots and then broken up completely by little short shots is something which works really effectively as a modus operandi here and, dare I say it, kinda brings a modern sensibility and thrill to a movie by subverting the very techniques it is intending to imitate.

What this leaves us with is a brilliantly shot (actually) motion picture which, even at it’s most Hollywood near the end when a series of freak coincidences, which I in no way believe happened that tightly in real life, are drawn out to make the suspense almost unbearable... is a very satisfying film to experience. I now look forward to seeing the extended cut of the film which is also, apparently, on the Blu Ray disc... as well as some of the fascinating documentaries included with the two versions of the movie.

Also, as would be expected for an enthusiastic individual like Affleck, he’s got some of the best actors giving amazing performances in this film, with no one really being narrowed down as actually owning the film (although Alan Arkin comes close) and with Affleck giving a very downbeat and reflective performance which allows the people around him to also come to the fore - Affleck is wise in that he really doesn’t let loose with anything showy in this one, performance wise, because I’m not sure this kind of delicately toned drama could have held itself together if he, or any of the others for that matter, had gone the more “theatrical” route (after seeing his performance as Bartleby in Dogma, I’m pretty sure this guy could have just dominated the movie if he wanted to... but he cleverly reigned it all in and showed a certain amount of taste unexpected from someone entrenched in the Hollywood community).

The film is a powerful masterwork because it takes a very real, intense situation and manages to keep the tension on it when the way it would have been filmed by many other people would have lessened and devalued what is at stake. It is, after all, a very simple story about a very simple incident. However, because of the way Affleck approaches the material, that is to say, as a true artist (or as much as one can be a true artist in the crazy and collaborative world of movie making), it means the audience never once loses sight of just what is at risk (seven lives) and is kept at the edge of their collective seat because of this approach.

The great Alexandre Desplat’s score is something I wasn’t really picking up on in the context of the movie and is something I need to hear again, but it certainly doesn’t sound out of place in this and the choice of someone who can be as subtle as Desplat is another brownie point for the production team. A very well put together package.

My only regret on my first watch is that I didn’t know the guy playing the storyboard artist for the fake film within a film was actually playing real life comic book icon, Jack Kirby... so I’ll have to look out for him again when I watch the other cut. Amongst other things.

Argo, then, is a great and powerfully entertaining movie and one of the best American films made in the last few years (although I still would have given Moonrise Kingdom - reviewed here - the Oscar for best picture last year) and certainly something any serious lover of cinema is going to want to add to their “watched” pile, if only to have some kind of opinion, good or bad, on it.

And to anybody who says anything any different, well there’s a phrase in the movie which would best sum up my response to that. I’m sure you can remember what it is.