Ms. Marvel

Candid Kamala

Ms. Marvel
USA June - July 2022
Six episodes

Okay, so Ms. Marvel is yet another of these Disney Marvel TV shows, which I am really finding a bit hit and miss but, really not as miss as the Star Wars shows they are really screwing up with. And, I’m happy to report, that Ms. Marvel, both the show and the character, are a delightful addition to the current crop of Marvel TV shows... definitely one of the better ones they’ve produced so far, for sure.

Now, this is not the Ms. Marvel I know... or knew. I remember when Ms. Marvel was announced as a new comic book when I was a kid... it was around the same time, or maybe just before, they announced the Spider-Woman comic and it seemed like a big thing for Marvel to be trying to create more female super-hero characters, back in the late 1970s. The fact that it was considered by many to be a specific attempt to reach a female target audience (hey... anyone remember Dazzler?) really says much about the times we were living in those days. And there were already plenty of female superheroes and villains around by then anyway, put out by most of the main comic book companies but, still, it seemed like a very definite audience grab at the time. However, Ms. Marvel in those days was the version of her known as Carol Danvers, who many people will know got promoted to being yet another incarnation of Captain Marvel, a little ahead of when her movie came out (reviewed by me here). So this show isn’t based on that Ms. Marvel.

This one is actually based on the fourth character to inherit the mantle of Ms. Marvel in the comics, namely Kamala Khan, played here by Iman Vellani (I’ll get back to this actress in a minute). This makes her, as the Marvel comics, the first Muslim superhero. And, although the general storyline is a little weak in places... which I kinda expect with ‘origin’ stories anyway (that’s why I always wish film and TV franchises wouldn’t start off with such a thing)... it’s actually got a lot going for it.

For a start, it’s very colourful throughout... the art department do some great stuff here. Also, it’s got a very fresh feeling, almost 1960s temperament to it in terms of using visual expressionism and experimentation to elabourate on some of the action... such as texts from one character to another appearing as writing, written in various scripts on various objects on a set... or drawings or graffiti in the background coming to life in animated form to help illustrate the points being put forward by somebody, to add weight to their words. It’s a nice approach and it helps the story, such as it is, zip along at a mostly hasty pace, which keeps thing fresh and, hooray, never as boring as certain other of the Marvel shows at certain points.

And the big and completely unexpected trump card, at least as far as I was concerned, is Marvel’s secret weapon here... the actress playing the main lead, aka Iman Vellani. I say surprising because this is her first ever role and, frankly, there’s no messing here, she knocks it out of the park right from the word go with her truly bubbly personality and extremely expressive eyes. For a 20 year old actress in her first part, let alone such a big part, she really does do wonders and I’m now looking forward to her teaming up with Carol Danver’s Captain Marvel in next year’s feature film The Marvels, for sure (with that in mind, make sure you stick around for the mid end credits scene at the end of the last episode here, if you want to see Brie Larson back in action). This actress needs more roles offered to her fast, in my opinion.

I do have a couple of things which disappointed a little so, I guess I might as well mention them. Okay, so yay for her being the first Muslim superhero represented on screen and all that but the whole religion of the character seems to be highlighted at every opportunity. I don’t see that many Christian or Catholic (for example) movies or shows doing that unless they are deliberately meant to be highlighting that element of the story. I’ve got nothing against it but it does seem rather rammed down everyone’s throats here a little, I thought.

Secondly, she has a support group, all of whom know who she is and they’re ready to help her. I’ve noticed that a lot of superhero shows over the past ten years or so have gone down this route and, honestly, why can’t we go back to having a lone superhero just doing her/his own thing rather than all the ‘guy in the chair’ characters that seem to be everywhere nowadays. Even Superman somehow has Lois Lane in on the act and helping out lately... what the heck? It just seems a little bit of an overdone cliché at this point, to be honest but, hey, them’s the breaks I guess.

All in all though, I thought Ms. Marvel was one of the more fun and refreshing shows put out by ‘Disney branded Marvel’ and I’m looking forward to hopefully seeing the absolutely ‘marvel-lous’ Iman Vellani strutting her stuff on the big screen MCU sometime soon. I’m not quite sure why this particular show has got lower ratings and a negative reputation compared to the others but... don’t believe it! This show is well worth a watch. More like this please.

1900th Post - The Traveller

For my 1900th post I thought I’d try my hand at a very short piece of fiction. Hope you like...

I was nine years old when I first met the traveller.

It was around the end of August 1962. He spotted me in the street and we got to talking. He had one of those faces which always seem familiar and I kinda trusted him from the start. Good move by me, for sure.

He bought me a coffee in a local cafe and started to tell me about his talent for prediction. He must have been in his fifties and we hit it off straight away. At the end of what, even for me, was a most unusual conversation, he looked down at the comic I was reading. It was an issue of Amazing Fantasy and it featured the first tale of a brand new character called Spider-Man. I didn’t expect the comic to last but I kinda liked the story on this one. Anyway, I digress, he looked at the comic and pulled out two £10 notes which, frankly, was more money than I’d ever seen at the time... and told me to buy a few more copies of the comic and to save them for later. To take real good care of them and then he gave me a list of other comics which, he said, his contacts in publishing told him would be coming out in a few years. He told me to buy a few issues of each and to keep hold of them and to never forget. Just keep them safe. Put them in an attic or something but save them until I could sell them for some real cash. And after that it was a few years before I saw him again.

I don’t know why I trusted him then or, well, what made me do it anyway but I did what he said and didn’t think back on it. But then, every few years, I’d run into him in the street in exactly the same place and every time he’d have a hot tip for me. Like who to bet on in an upcoming Grand National or, as I got older, which artist to invest in. And, after a little while, I got used to him being right. I started looking forward to these random encounters and, though I didn’t see him every year, he usually had a good piece of financial advice with him. I managed to get the fees to pay for college to study the sciences, all off of the money made from buying the things he told me to procure. I mean, it took a while for the comics to suddenly become worth a fortune but, other stuff had a quicker pay off and, after a while, I stopped questioning him about why or how he knew this stuff because I’d figured it out by then, of course.

I mean, I didn’t know who Damien Hurst was but I know investing in his art helped me pay my way for a better house and the money I made meant I was doing my own research for myself. I was my own boss and the things I was interested in were what I got to study every day, in my own laboratory which, due to my mysterious (seemingly ageless) benefactor, I set up not far from where we’d first met.

And when those comics paid off in the late 70s and early 80s... which amazed even me (nowadays everyone knows who Spider-Man, The Hulk and The Avengers etc are)... I was able to use the money I’d invested in them to buy shares in a new computer company he told me about called Apple. It took a little while but, honestly, not too long before... well, you know Apple I’m sure?

Of course, by now I had a pretty good idea of who my mysterious benefactor was and, I suspect you do too, right? I mean, my scientific research into things that interested me was going pretty well and though I didn’t outright say much about it, I think he knew I had figured things out by now too... just as he’d figured things out back then, so to speak.

What I hadn’t expected was for the visits to not stop when I’d caught up with him... or we'd caught each other up.

I mean, sure, the visits slowed down a lot... the intervals when the traveller came to me were now sometimes as much as six years apart but, once I’d finished inventing the time machine (my chrono-perambulator, as I called it) which... well let’s still call him 'The Traveller' shall we? When I’d finished my time machine, which 'The Traveller' had told me never to tell anyone about, I expected the end goal had been reached but no, even as I went back to visit my younger self and advise him... um... me... about the comics and the art and everything else, I was still getting visits from myself. So I did what I always did and kept taking my own advice... or rather, his own advice. Gets confusing sometimes. 

 So there I was in 2012. I was 59 years old and, honestly, The Traveller seemed like he was getting slightly younger every time he popped up. Or, at least, the frequency of his trips, from his point of view at least, were obviously getting less spaced apart and I was really catching up with myself, if that’s the right way to say it.

I never once questioned the paradox I was living. I guess a more philosophical man might have stopped to wonder how this cycle got started in the first place but... well, I have no room for philosophy. I am a man of science or I would have never invented my chrono-perambulator in the first place.

But, I’m getting away from myself again... so there I was in 2012 and he tells me to start building a big storage warehouse out of town and to start filling it with canned foods and then, he tells me, start storing water around about mid-2019 and also... you know those little surgical masks you see people wearing in countries where they’re worried about infectious diseases? Get some of those, he says. So, since I know enough to trust myself, I did what he... is ‘he’ the right word? I did what 'I' said.

So now it’s 2020, right? I’m just getting the first reports of the new breed of Coronavirus in China and I figure, this is it, we’re going to have a pandemic this year... just like The Traveller implied...

I was hoping to see him again just to make sure we’d survived this whole Covid 19 thing okay but, I tell you, now I’m self isolating with my stash of water, tinned goods and, yes, loo rolls... well, I really worry when I think about when he last came to see me a few weeks ago. I’d gone back and advised myself to stock up on these things as soon as I had a spare minute, of course.

However, when I last saw him he was looking decidedly dishevelled... a far cry from the impeccably dressed, older version of myself I had been used to seeing over the years. I even think I noticed a rip on his sleeve but I didn’t say anything about that... nor about the bruise on the left side of his head, either. He said he couldn’t have more than a few minutes stay this time because he had to get back to... well wherever... make that whenever... he came from but he just wanted me to know that, 2020 was just the start of our problems and, stupid as it may sound, I should try my best to gather some of the things on the list he handed me as soon as possible. He knew I was good for the money, he'd... okay, we’d... been investing in profitable items for almost sixty years but he warned me I needed to keep an open mind about how things were going to go.

He then went his merry way but... I don’t know... I’m not so certain I’ll be seeing him again. He bounced back to his own time quicker than usual (the shorter the length of the journey the shorter the duration of the visit before the physics of the situation mean that it’s a good idea to bounce back to your point of departure or... untested things might happen to you... don’t ask me to explain the technical stuff unless you can keep up).

Anyway, I hope I see him again someday but, in the meantime, I have the latest shopping list to get to. The machine guns and ammunition shouldn’t be a problem. But the amount of timber and the necessity for crossbows might take a little longer. Goodness knows how I’m going to be able to get all that Holy Water from the church though... I wouldn’t even believe in such a thing if it wasn’t on this list. I wonder what happens to make me become all religious in the future? Only time will tell, I guess. Like I said, I hope I see that traveller again soon... there are some pointed questions I’m just going to have to ask him.

The End

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.

Avengers - Endgame

Snappy Endings

Avengers - Endgame
2019 USA Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo
UK cinema release print.

Pre Spoiler Warning Warning: Okay, so it’s not going to be that possible to point out at least one of the glaring faults with this movie without going into fairly mild spoiler territory to do with the story solution of this one but I’ll put a big warning sign up before the relevant paragraphs.

Okay so... I really loved the last Avengers movie, Infinity War (which I reviewed here) and was kinda looking forward to seeing the resolution to the ten years of Marvel Cinematic Universe which it’s all been leading up to. Alas, my best hope for this movie now is that, somehow, I flip flop on this film once I’ve processed all the information for a subsequent viewing. I’ve done this before in my reviews of Star Wars - The Force Awakens and Avengers - Age Of Ultron, where I didn’t much care for the films in question at all on the first watch but then loved them on subsequent viewings. So my fingers are kinda crossed that I can find something good in Avengers - Endgame on any further revisits but, in all honesty, my anger has been growing steadily since I watched this one.

I don’t understand how a creative team responsible for Avengers Infinity War, one of the most dramatic, hilarious and beautifully put together films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, can make a follow up movie which... well... is the opposite of all those things. Now I’m going to try and give as little away as possible until I get to the really unforgivable stuff, which I’ll put a warning on, but I’m going to try and find some nice things to say about this first.

Okay, so here goes with the nice things.

Um... performances were mostly good, which I’d expect from actors of this calibre who are used to these parts. However, I must say that the path they’ve gone down with both Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk/Banner character and Chris Hemsworth’s Thor character really didn’t amuse me. I thought their dialogue and story development was awful, considering how great these characters have been in the past... especially in movies like Thor Ragnarok (reviewed here) and the aforementioned Avengers - Infinity War.
Another nice thing was the opening of the movie (pre-title) and also the quick culmination of events to the Avengers finally doing some actual 'avenging.' The expected resolution to events is over within the first half an hour but, this brings its own consequences and I thought this was a brilliant piece of dramatic misdirection from the film-makers. Alas, this set of consequences kind of dictated a specific kind of solution so, pretty early on, you get a bit of an idea which direction this story is going to take. And take that option it does... failing quite spectacularly on the way.

Okay, onto the bad stuff...

Well I thought the character development between Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow and Banner was selling both of these people short. There has been a set up to their story arc in Avengers - Age Of Ultron and this has not been honoured, as far as I’m concerned.

I know a lot of audiences coming out of the initial screenings of this were saying it was a good film but with not very much action and, I’d have to say I do agree with the second part of that sentiment. Infinity War was filled with spectacle and action... Endgame, wasn’t. And when audiences did get to see the battle royale they had been expecting to turn up in the previous Avengers movie, it was quite badly edited, I thought. It was not put together nearly as well as the two, simultaneous conflicts that ended Infinity War and consequently, some pretty heroic and dramatic moments, which I’m sure looked great on paper, just felt a bit numbing. They didn’t want to make me cheer and, similar, certain moments in the film which people have said had them crying didn't affect me at all because I was already quite cross with the film by the time these scenes arrived. And I cry easily in movies, usually.




And a troubling loose end which seems to be left unanswered from Infinity War is this... Why does Thor's new axe Stormbreaker still have a handle when the rest of Groot turned into oatmeal after the finger snap in the last movie?

OKAY... SPOILER WARNING TIME.
EVERYTHING IN THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS COULD BE SEEN AS A SPOILER...

Okay, so if you guessed from the opening half hour that the rest of the movie must therefore involve time travel... yeah, you’d be right. And rather than bothering to think about things logically, these people make the same rudimentary mistakes to do with temporal mechanics that Back To The Future 2 famously did. If you stop a past version of someone from doing something that they will do by changing their path before they even do it, you can’t both have your cake and eat it by having that event still have taken place in the past. It’s impossible and it’s not rocket science. And, no, badmouthing the Back To The Future trilogy on screen in your movie does not give you carte blanche to make exactly the same mistakes in your own film, hoping people won’t notice. It’s preposterous. Even if you place certain key objects back the way you found them in the past... the focal point never gets to happen because that person is no longer around at that time. So immediately we have a paradox.

 And the idea of a person killing a past version of themselves when that past version comes into their own future? The person who killed that person would never have been there to pull the trigger and live to tell the tale because she never got to that point in the first place... her future self had already killed her. So, yeah, this movie really is a catalogue of schoolboy errors and I wish that was the only thing putting me off the movie because I’m more than happy to throw common sense out of the window for a bit but... the movie was so humdrum, especially the bulk of the dialogue which was nowhere near as sparkling and witty as Infinity War, which had me laughing a lot). This film kinda failed big for me, I’m less than happy to say.

OKAY, THAT”S THE END OF THE SPOILER ZONE. NORMAL SERVICE MAY NOW RESUME.

Alan Silvestri’s score was nice at some points but it didn’t have the emotional impact, for me, of the heroic version of his original Avengers theme which he used in the Scottish Train station scene in Infinity War. I am hoping to get to listen to this as a stand alone CD when it’s released in a while but I’m not that fussed about hearing it again at the moment, truth be told. But hopefully the score CD will be a bit of a revelation when I hear it without the distracting sound effects in the mix.

And... yeah, that’s me done, I think, on Avengers Endgame. I was really hoping this would be a good follow up to Infinity War but even Captain Marvel, who debuted only last month in her own feature film (reviewed here) was totally wasted in this one. She has, what amounts to a couple of basic cameo scenes, as far as I’m concerned and I was really expecting the Russos to make more of her in this. Alas, it was not to be and her status as a character seemed much diminished in this, I thought. There’s not much point in me saying steer clear of this one because this has a built in audience who wants to see what happened after Infinity War and, rightly so, is what I say. Personally I don’t think this movie is anywhere near top tier Marvel and if I was ranking these films it would be way down the bottom of the list along with the likes of Iron Man 2, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America - The First Avenger, Captain America - Civil War and Guardians Of The Galaxy Volume 2. As in... films I can tolerate to give me a greater appreciation of the better Marvel movies in the ‘three phases’ to date. It’s just a shame that such a major, concluding piece of the puzzle turned out to be a little more wanting in most departments than was usual, it has to be said.

Wonder Woman The Golden Age Vol 1

Ropes N’ Tropes

Wonder Woman
The Golden Age Vol 1
by William Moulton Marston
DC Comics 
ISBN: 978-1401274443

I’ll be the first to admit that I was never much interested in Wonder Woman as a kid growing up in, mostly, the 1970s. Sure I watched the Lynda Carter TV show from time to time, primarily because there were so very few live action superhero characters on television then that it was a huge novelty to get someone doing this kind of stuff on air (and even less so in the UK where we only got a few of the small selection of live action comic book characters that the US were putting out in shows and movies). So my primary experiences of Wonder Woman were when she used to show up in the odd issue of the 1970s Justice League of America comics, which I might find laying around at my Uncle’s place and, of course, in one of my favourite cartoon shows, The Superfriends (which was kind of an animated Justice League lite). Of course, Lynda Carter would return to my fantasy life just a few years later in the Wonder Woman costume but... err... yeah, that was purely for other reasons and perhaps it would be inappropriate to explore that here.

All that changed last year when I saw what is, to date, the greatest superhero movie of all time, Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (reviewed here), starring Gal Gadot as the titular character. This film both moved me and caught my eye on almost every level and, coupled with the unbelievably brilliant biopic Professor Marston And The Wonder Women (reviewed here), it was obvious I was going to want to read more about this beloved comic icon and, what better way than to read these new reprints of her earliest days.

Wonder Woman The Golden Age is a generous tome and reprints all of the stories appearing in the first year or so of her existence from late 1941 and into 1942, covering her first appearance in All Star Comics, followed by a continuation of that origin story in Sensation Comics, followed by her features continuing in Sensation Comics and also in the issues of her own Wonder Woman comic, once the character was proven to be successful.

The artwork is pretty much what I was expecting from a 1940s comic book although, that being said, the drawings aren’t quite as crude as the early Superman comics from 1938, nor the various Timely (later Marvel) comic characters from 1939 such as The Human Torch and The Sub Mariner. I think by the time Wonder Woman was launched onto the scene, the comic book artists were starting to get the hang of the idea that comics were a big thing and a regular paying job, so the artwork by various artists was probably improving all the time (that’s my theory, anyway) so, while you can probably easily date the artwork in these issues to more or less the correct time period (not to mention the structure of the pages as a whole), they aren’t in any way flat or boring and are easier on the eye than you might expect.

It’s interesting to note that while the origin of the character (as told in a couple of different versions in this first year) is quite a bit different from the version in the latest movie - presumably it’s been much revised over DC’s lengthy history - there are also a lot of elements from the original early issues that did make it into the recent film version. Whether that’s Jenkin’s and her writers cobbling bits of Wonder Woman history together herself from the early days or if these are elements that have been picked up in various revisions of the comics over the years, is not something I am qualified to make a good guess at.

So, for example, the origin includes the theft of Queen Hypolyta’s girdle by Hercules who then enslaves all the amazons. When Aphrodite eventually sets them free and hides them on Paradise Island, they all still have to wear shackles/bracelets as a reminder of the nature of man (this is pretty good, feminist stuff for the early 1940s I reckon... at least it’s probably quite ahead of its time in terms of seeing publication in a popular print form for the period). Also, when Wonder Woman, aka Princess Diana, aka Diana Prince (her alter ego as a simultaneous Army Nurse and Secretary to Steve Trevor’s superior in the army) has shackles attached to those specific bracelets and they are put on by a man, she basically loses her powers until they are removed (this was one of the few equivalents to Superman's Kryptonite the character had at this stage).

However, the little things which did make their way into the film in one shape or form are clearly visible here. For instance, in one issue we have the villain as Dr. Poison, who is revealed at the end of the strip to be a woman (the character was played by Elena Anaya in the movie). Also, although the World War Two setting was relocated to World War One for the movie, the second Wonder Woman strip (the first to feature in Sensation Comics) also includes a storyline involving the villain's perfection of a new kind of gas that penetrates all known gas masks... another element from the recent motion picture.

There are also many things which wouldn’t have translated too well from page to screen, for sure. For instance, the fetishistic overtones of female domination and lezdom spanking, often seen in relation to Diana’s friend Etta Candy, was mostly edited from the movie. Etta herself was a completely different personality in the movie but they did get her trademark cry of “Woo! Woo!” into the film... albeit very subtly. Perhaps another thing that may have been a big mistep if the film version had gone into a more faithful adaptation, especially in the scenes on Themyscira where the Amazons are fighting the Germans, would be the fact that, rather than ride around on horses, the Amazons of Paradise Island tend to ride around on giant kangaroos. That's an idea possibly best left in the 1940s as regards to movie credibility, methinks.

There are also some subtle differences too.

Yes, Professor Marston was, along with his wife and live in mistress to them both, the real life inventor of the lie detector... and he does have a lie detector appearing in more than one issue in this first year. However, rather than being a specific ‘rope of truth’ as it came to be over the years, the golden lariat was actually a piece of equipment that compelled the wearer to do whatever the wielder commanded... unless the person giving the orders was a man, of course.

Due to the setting and the times, the comic has a lot of contemporaneous references and also, like many of the comics of the time (especially the early Superman strips, if memory serves), a lot of social messages about how the young readers should be living their lives in the face of corruption and, of course, the war. So, you will sometimes get stories devoted to fairer wages for the shop assistants in department stores or factories keeping the price of milk down for the people. And, naturally, the usual stuff about buying lots of War Bonds and helping the war effort. There are also referrals to things which, while not quite yet lost to the period in which they were written, were things I had to look up. Ignatz Mouse and Krazy Kat, for example, rang a vague bell but I had to research them before I was any the wiser.

That being said, one of the most problematic things with these early comics is the war itself. Since the character, like many of her costumed contemporaries, is all powerful, you wonder why she doesn’t just go over to Germany and deal with Hitler herself and end things in a few minutes. I don’t know exactly when DC wrote in the mystic powers of the infamous and, possibly, real life Spear Of Destiny into the strip, to keep superheroes from getting near Hitler but... it doesn’t seem to be much in evidence in these stories for sure.

One of the delights of these comics is the advancement of the form itself. Things in the artwork are evolving such as one page splash panels to start off the story or using bubble edges around panels which are flashbacks. It’s nice to see this evolution of the art of the comic strip although, it has to be said, when they flash back to her origin story (and change it slightly), you have the former versions of the story on hand so you can see how the colours have been changed on later versions of the back story. Deliberate ‘errors’ like this certainly keeps the readers on their toes and it makes things interesting. It’s also astonishing to see how far ahead of her time, in some ways, Diana was in the comics. Not just in terms of feminism but with fantasy ideas too. For example, she was having adventures on other worlds as the astral projection of her form two decades before Marvel’s Doctor Strange character was doing this more regularly. My guess would be that this was very much influenced by the ethereal transportation of John Carter to the planet of Barsoom (Mars) in the Martian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs (alas, the film version of A Princess of Mars, called just John Carter, changed it to teleportation to make the concept more palatable to modern audiences). I’m sure they’re something Marston would have at least been a little familiar with, at any rate.

So that’s the first year of Wonder Woman read and I have to say, I really enjoyed these things... especially when you know a little of Marston’s history and kinks and see how they made their way into the strip in some subtle and, often, not so subtle ways. These reprint books from DC are really appreciated and much cheaper than the old DC Archives hardbacks from a number of decades ago. They bundle the appearances together chronologically from all the simultaneous titles, rather than just reprint the one title and leave you with references to other stories you’ve not read yet.. I’m definitely going to have to catch up with some more of these Wonder Woman reprints... and probably some of their other characters as well. I’ve already picked up the first volume of Batman and I’ll hopefully be able to get to that one sometime soon.

900th Blog - Mega City Kids

900th Blog - Mega City Kids

You know, I’ve been umming and ahhing for a few weeks now about what I was going to do for my 900th blog post. Normally, when I hit each 100 posts, I like to do an entry to mark the moment which is sometimes a picture or design I’ve created, sometimes a reminiscence about some things which have happened to me in the last year or, occasionally, a run down of what I am expecting to do more of over the next few months/year (which is sometimes wildly inaccurate as other things often take priority). This year, my latest 100 is coinciding with the run down to Christmas and I knew I wouldn’t have time to do any new images on top the other stuff I’ve got to get done before the end of the week even (let alone by the 25th)... so I wanted to touch upon something quick and simple.

On the other hand, I didn’t just want to throw the post away on a quickie so I figured... there must be some kind of worthy cause or person out there who is doing something to help people out as best they can and who I can give a shout out to on my blog. So I had a bit of a think about this and I realised the one person who I do have to bring to your attention is Wendy Kravetz of Mega City Comics in Camden Town... and this is why...

My most loyal readers may remember my comments on how I learned to read as a kid. I think I’ve mentioned it a few times but, in case you don’t remember or, more likely, haven’t read it, here’s the introduction to my Man Of Steel review from June 2013...

“When I was two or three years old, I was encouraged to read via Superman and Batman comics which my dad or my uncle would pick up from the stand, long gone I imagine, at the Angel, Edmonton in the very early seventies (1970 in fact, I suspect). These comics, along with Green Arrow/Green Lantern, World’s Finest, Shazam!, Justice League Of America, Daredevil, The Amazing Spider-Man and also the annual “Christmas Time” reprints in such tomes as The Batman Bumper Book, The Superman Bumper Book and, wait for it, The Superman and Batman Bumper Book, were pretty much how I learned to read and by the time I got to junior school I was already out-reading all the other kids in the class (and writing epic length tales of imaginary spaceway heroes in some lessons too, from what I can recall). I particularly remember the cover to one specific Superman comic I read which, unfortunately, was the only comic which didn’t survive my childhood because I just read it too much and it finally fell apart. But the cover was so good to a kid my age... Superman VS The Electronic Ghost of Metropolis. It would probably cost an inappropriate amount of money these days if I were to track it down in the chance I could read it again but that cover will always live on in my memory.”

I think that paragraph there pretty much sums up my thoughts on how I learned to read and how much of an advantage it gave me over all the other kids at the time. The reason for this is quite simple... the characters and situations depicted in the panels of a comic book or, as they tend to sometimes call them these days, a graphic novel (although they often mean trade paperback reprint), tell of wonders and action and places and people that are so compelling that, at a very young age you actually want to read this stuff. It captures your imagination and you find yourself quickly learning how to decode the words and find out what your new found friends and heroes are up to... be it Captain Marvel teaming up with Tawky Tawny The Talking Tiger or Casper The Friendly Ghost trying hard not to scare anybody. It grips the mind of a child (and also an adult’s imagination... but that’s not what I’m here to discuss) and doesn’t let go.

Of course, once the flood gates are open, all kinds of reading materials which were somehow a locked room become fair game. I remember the tales of Enid Blyton’s various creations, the adventures in Richmal Crompton’s William books and, my favourite, Anthony Buckeridge’s mis-adventures of Jennings. And once you’re there... it’s only a very small step to entering the worlds of Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury, Ian Fleming, Philip K Dick, Kenneth Robeson, William F. Nolan etc. The point is... by reading comics from an early age, you don’t restrict your kids imagination or blinker them in any way... you actually give their thoughts room to soar and the reading skills tend to catch up with that real quick. Why? Simply because you’re giving your kids something that they want to read because, lets face it, whatever their age... the adventures of Janet & John or Peter & Jane just aren’t going to cut it.

And that’s why Wendy Kravetz at Mega City Comics is important to people right now. She hasn’t asked me to write this post... in fact, until it’s actually live it’s probably going to be a surprise that I have... but I wanted to shout her out here because I think she’s doing a terrific job with something that more people ought to cotton on to. She’s recognised the good her comics can do herself and she’s in charge of a scheme/brand called Mega City Kids, which enables her to hand pick suitable comics for various age groups... in an era when “suitable” comics really are something you need to watch out for (it’s very different territory now from when you and I were young whippersnappers). The scheme isn’t a charity, as far as I’m aware, but these people are recognising that the four coloured panels of certain comic books are going to help your kids fly through reading... and not hobble their expectations like, it has to be said, some teachers might.

But don’t take my word for it... check out Wendy and Mega City Kids for yourself if you think you know someone who is struggling with their reading and you want to watch them plough through their lesson materials faster than a speeding bullet and be able to leap tall spelling obstacles in a single bound. Her twitter account is here https://twitter.com/Megacitykids for you to see what she’s up to and the Mega City Kids facebook page is here... https://www.facebook.com/Megacitykids And if, like me, you have a passion for comics and like hanging out in places like Forbidden Planet, Gosh! and Orbital... and you don’t know about Mega City Comics... well add them to your list of favourite wallet torturers. They are based a couple of minutes walk from Camden Town tube station on the London Underground Northern Line and their website can be found here... http://www.megacitycomics.co.uk Look them up next time you’re passing or surfing. Especially at this time of year because, hey, everybody likes to get a good comic at Christmas.

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.