Loki Season 2

Loki Cokey

Loki Season 2
USA 2023
Marvel/Disney
6 episodes 

Okay, so I’ve finally caught up with Loki Series Two and the good news is... it’s markedly better than the first series. It might be because all of the episodes here are directed by the great Benson and Moorhead but, given the absolute state of Disney’s Marvel TV shows (not to mention the Star Wars franchise they’re also currently ruining), it counts for a lot, I think, that this follow up series is any good at all.

Once again, this one stars Tom Hiddleston, reprising his role as the multiversal variant of Loki who split off from the regular timeline in Avengers Endgame (reviewed here) and, also returning are most of his co-stars. These include the brilliant Sophia Di Martini as a female variant Loki, Owen Wilson as Mobius, Wunmi Musaku and Gugu Mbatha-Raw and... Jonathan Majors as ‘the big bad’. We also have a new regular, the delightful time scientist OB (aka Ourouboris) played by legendary actor Ke Huy Quan… aka a grown up Short Round from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, who also won an Oscar last year for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (reviewed here).

Now, if you remember my review of the first series of Loki (reviewed here), you will remember I said it had one weakness which was to introduce or re-enforce Jonathan Majors (from Ant-Man And The Wasp - Quantumania, reviewed here) as the ultimate threat to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and so all the episodes seemed ultimately to play second fiddle to that idea. And the post credits on one of the Marvel movies featuring that actor along with Loki and Mobius, I forget which one now, dovetails into an episode here.

Well, there’s a similar weak point here. Now that Majors has been found guilty of spousal abuse and effectively cancelled, it’s pretty clear that he can no longer go on to be the future lead villain of what, I assume would be, a future Avengers movie. So, although Majors is in this a lot, mostly playing a much nicer template variant named after the original comics company that became Marvel… Timely… this series is very much involved in a single story arc to eradicate him as the big bad of the future, effectively writing him out of any future Marvel movies and TV projects. So the whole of the series pretty much just serves this resolution… albeit in the most twisted way imaginable.

That being said, it’s certainly a very fun and fast paced series despite, like the first one, not having many action sequences… even less I would say. But it doesn’t matter because it’s lightning fast and though a lot of it is expository dialogue, most of which I didn’t understand a word of by the final episode, it never gets dull and the performances of the high calibre actors involved certainly carries it. Also, although I clearly should have watched this before going to see Deadpool And Wolverine (reviewed here), it didn’t really matter that it includes one of the lead characters in a position of Time Variance Agency authority, which she hasn’t yet attained here.

Ultimately, then, I really enjoyed this second series of Loki way more than the first and, though I’m sure it’s almost certain that Loki himself will return (in films for sure and maybe even a third series), this one doesn’t leave things on a cliff hanger… it has a definitive ending. Which is a bit unusual for modern Marvel I must say. And no episode here has any kind of post credits sequence attached to it… so I am grateful to latch onto those small mercies while I can.

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.

Scooby Doo and Batman The Brave And The Bold

A Dog Out On A Dark Knight

Scooby Doo and Batman
The Brave And The Bold
USA 2018 Directed by Jake Castorena
Warner Brothers DVD Region 2

Warning: Slight spoilers.

The Brave And The Bold was a comic book series which ran from 1955 to somewhere in the 1980s. It was originally an adventure story orientated comic book but, after a few transformations, got injected with some of the superheroes that DC had in their catalogue and became something more like their World’s Finest comic book (which basically teamed up DC’s two biggest A list characters, Superman and Batman, on a regular basis). The Brave And The Bold, before long, became a revolving team up anthology which would feature The Batman plus any one DC hero or group of collective heroes within the pages. The series has been revived a number of times since the 1980s and is currently, I believe, a regular series once again.

This new animation, Scooby-Doo And Batman - The Brave And The Bold, teams up (for the third time, for the record) Batman and the Scooby Doo gang. This one being made some 47 years after the last two shorter episodes of The New Scooby Doo Movies TV series which also featured the dynamic duo. Although this feature length production from last year was apparently inspired by those earlier team ups, this is a fairly different kind of beast with a much more self aware attitude to the main, stylistic components of its own DNA. And it’s actually quite good, if a little more juvenile in places than I had expected... mainly with the treatment of Aquaman who looks more like the 1970s incarnation of Oliver Queen (aka Green Arrow) and seems to shout “Outrageous!” whenever he gets the chance to say much of anything.

The plot starts off with Mystery Incorporated... that’s Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby Doo, to the uninitiated... as they finish up an adventure. However, when the spooky foes are unmasked it turns out to be Jon Jonz (aka Martian Manhunter) and a talking ape wearing a Sherlock Holmes style deerstalker called Detective Chimp (I really have no idea who this is and would just like to blot him out from my memory as quickly as possible, to be honest). It turns out Batman has cast this mystery as a test to see if Mystery Incorporated are worthy to join what is, more or less, a lightweight version of the Justice League of America (as it was always known when I was a kid) called Mystery Analysts of Gotham. The group comprises Batman, Martian Manhunter, Detective Chimp, The Question (a hero who has no face), Plastic Man (one of my favourite super heroes, although his sidekick Woozy Winks is nowhere to be seen) and Black Canary.

So the plot thickens when, while Scooby and the gang are helping these heroes solve an old crime, it dovetails into Batman’s one unsolved, old cold case where he failed to save the day and this new adventure sees his past coming back to haunt him. Just as bad, both Batman and Mystery Inc are framed for a crime and so are trying to finish the case while also evading both the police and the other superheroes... not to mention the lethal villain of the piece.

So, yeah, this is a nice enough, if quite childishly written (in places) caper and it makes for a diverting enough animation. There’s some nice dialogue in here too... for instance when Fred makes a device for trapping life-sized puppets, really consisting of just a net, he calls it a ‘mario-net’. Another great moment is when one of the other characters makes a terrible joke and The Question, who is featureless, says... “Just so you know, I’m rolling my eyes.”

Another nice thing about this movie is that the Batman character, while a bit angularly designed and looking like he has half of his face missing at some angles, is quite obviously an homage to the old Batman TV show in design (if not manner) and I can’t help but think that if Adam West himself had lived for just a few more years then he would have been providing the voice for this movie. As it is though, the costume with its  pale eyebrows and yellow ellipse around the bat symbol on his chest (something which actually didn’t start in the comics until the TV series first aired in the 1960s) disappear when the character flashes back to his previous, historically unsolved case in the nicest way. For this sequence the suit is replaced with the old style costume from his earliest comic book issues, with the extra long ears and the black bat symbol directly drawn onto the chest. This was a great little touch for longtime followers of the character and I really appreciate stuff like this. Also, the Batmobile in this section is one of those old, closed top versions with the big fin on the roof. Whereas in the main body of the film it’s the sixties one and it has the moving sign entry approach to the Bat Cave which people will remember from the old TV show.

Another nice stylistic touch is the little ‘highlight’ sections which pull out one of the characters such as Batman in mid punch to give a slow moving, not quite static splash page effect of the violent moments with a big musical sting behind each which is, almost, reminiscent of the old TV show and I’m pretty sure this is why this was done. The visuals aren’t quite the same but the stylistic punctuation of the fight scenes serves exactly the same effect. Also, the first time in the movie we see this done is when Shaggy and Scooby have to ‘eat their way out’ of a room full of super-villains such as Harley Quin and Poison Ivy in Arkham Asylum... with little staged moments of them chowing down on food as they evade the bad guys running. It’s nicely done, chum.

There are some problems too... like I implied, there’s no real ‘adult level’ to the scripting here and that’s a problem when it runs for an hour and a quarter. But my real problem was with Black Canary. Now, I love Black Canary but she always, almost without fail, wears fishnet stockings and that pretty much helps define her look as much as Superman’s red cloak or Green Lantern’s power ring. However, here there are no fishnets to be seen and I almost didn’t recognise her. She has pale, grey, lifeless stockings and... I’m sorry, that’s just not Black Canary. Heck, even the Lego version of her character has the iconic fishnets. Secondly... she has a super power of some kind of canary voice. What? Since when? Well, I think since sometime in only the last 30 years or so which, frankly, is a bizarre gimmick and certainly the Black Canary I know, from the 1970s (and earlier) never had any kind of canary howl. This is a pretty lame addition.

All in all though, it’s not a bad movie and the kids among you should definitely like it.

There are a couple of extra movies on the disc too, those being the two original episodes of The New Scooby-Doo Movies which featured Batman and Robin from 1972. Now, I tried to watch these on DVD a few years ago and was disgusted because, not only were they both ‘top and tailed’, as in the opening and closing credits were not present... they also had a dire, canned laughter track which made them pretty unwatchable. Indeed, the last time I tried to watch these I had to give up after about three minutes because I just can’t stand laughter tracks. Their treatment on this disc is a little bit better but it really is a mixed bag...

On the plus side, both cartoons have had their opening and end credits restored so... that’s pretty good. Also and, quite surprisingly, the first of the two episodes, The Dynamic Scooby-Doo Affair, has had it’s laughter track completely removed. Yes! High five to Warners for being able to get hold of the isolated elements and wipe the horrible laughter track from this one. Hoyt Curtin’s musical shenanigans certainly benefit from it. Alas, for the second of the two shows, The Caped Crusader Caper, it seems they’ve been unable to do this but I suspect there’s a lot less than there was on there originally and it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a sweetener laughter track which intruded onto the sound effects tape and they were just left with that one when they stripped it off. It certainly doesn’t seem as distracting as it could have done though so, I definitely think some work has been done on it. That being said, the visual quality isn’t great and these two look a little pixilated, to be honest. Although, I guess they always would seem like that when you compare them to the modern main feature on here.

Okay so... the content of these two films are... terrible. In both cases we have The Joker and The Penguin teaming up and acting completely out of character to have fun scaring those ‘meddling kids’. The 1960s Batman vibe is still definitely something which certain elements have been borrowed from though... like the same approach to the Bat Cave that the modern cartoon used and also the speech patterns of The Penguin being very much in the style of Burgess Meredith’s outstanding performance of him in the sixties. The Joker’s voice though... the less said about it the better, believe me. There is the odd good pun though, such as when the fiendish villains drop Batman and Robin into an inescapable pit in the ground. “Our pit is full... how pitiful!” quips The Joker and I have to say this high quality punning surprised me at this point compared to much of the rest on offer in these cartoons. I still haven’t figured out, though, how Batman can look through his binoculars and see the same footage we saw earlier, from different angles into the shot even, though Batman is still observing from the same viewpoint. What the heck?

Ultimately, Scooby-Doo And Batman - The Brave And The Bold is a fairly fun time and with all three crossovers to date of the title characters included, this DVD (and also Blu Ray in the US, apparently) is a nice little package. It’s a shame there weren’t any documentary extras on here too as I was curious about the history of this team up and the decisions that brought the original TV productions to life but, alas, the two episodes are the only bonus features present. Still, if you are on the lookout for unusual team ups then this one definitely fits the bill and the main movie, at least, should give you something interesting to look at. More ‘Zoinks!’ and ‘Jinkies!’ than you can shake a stick at in this one.

Wild Cards - Texas Hold 'Em

Bubble Mum and
the Beautiful Dreamers

Wild Cards - Texas Hold 'Em
Edited by George R. R. Martin
Tor Books
ISBN: 978-0765390592

So here we are at the 26th of the George R. R. Martin edited Wild Cards mosaic novels, Texas Hold ‘Em. Now, I’m usually quite positive and enthusiastic about pretty much all of the Wild Cards novels, which I’ve been reading since they first started in the 1980s and, this time too, I’m going to be just as enthusiastic. I do though... and this is quite unusual for me in terms of the series in general... have one, possibly three, slight criticisms. I’ll get to the other ones in due course but the first one is based purely on my expectations and it is this...

Since, I think, Tor Books have been publishing the later novels (and, I think, reprints of some of the earlier novels), they have kind of retroactively bunched both these and all the old ones into clusters of  named story arcs. Now the previous ‘trilogy’ was called The Fort Freak Triad and it was pretty heavy and dramatic for all the active players in the contemporary Wild Card universe (and you can read my reviews of it here, here and here). It started off soft and then got really heavy, very quickly by the end of the second volume. This current trilogy, which is the last of a trilogy called The America Triad, started off with a very dramatic and moving story promising lots of future consequences for some of the characters, called Mississippi Roll (reviewed here) and then went full steam ahead to a completely unrelated time travel story for the next volume, called Low Chicago (reviewed by me here). Now, I commented at the time that I was going to assume that, like the last trilogy, the final tome in that sequence would bring all the loose ends from these two together and close out the trilogy as recognisably a single arc. Well... I’m wondering just who is it is imposing these collective cluster titles on the books now because, frankly, this third volume really has nothing much to do with either of the previous two novels. So, there you go... that’s one grumble.

Okay, so the plot set up is very simple for this one. The Amazing Bubbles, who went through such a hard time at the end of the last trilogy, has been talked by her Deuce daughter Adesina, into being one of her high school joker jazz band’s chaperones for the national jazz band competition finals in Texas. This book covers just under a week of the incidents that happen to the kids and the competing bands while they are staying at the hotel for the competition and, perhaps somewhat predictably, deals almost solely with the issues surrounding ‘joker prejudice’ and is pretty much, in some ways, dealing with exactly the same kind of not-so-much-of-a-stretch metaphors that the original 1960s The Uncanny X-Men comics were dealing with when Stan Lee first created them. And... well I have to say that it’s a very light and frothy, for the most part, mosaic tale with the various writers concentrating on certain characters in mostly short bursts and then handing over the next crossover of characters to the next person before returning back to them... and most of the writers span the whole length of the novel with just a couple of exceptions.

Now, I usually like the lighter, whimsical stories in the Wild Cards universe and they are often a refreshing and welcome respite from some of the heavier issues but, in all honesty, this does somehow give this particular tome a kind of ‘young adult’ vibe and, well, I normally wouldn’t be caught dead reading something written especially for such a dubiously titled section of the audience. This novel is great fun and that’s fine but... it just feels like there’s absolutely nothing at stake. In the last ‘trilogy’ the whole world was almost obliterated and even in the previous volume in this trilogy, the whole world was at risk of being completely rewritten. Heck, even Mississippi Roll, which was much more a lighter tale, was extremely moving and you cared about the characters because the stakes to them personally were quite high. Here, the stakes are... I dunno... maybe trying to win a competition and trying to figure out teenage hormones, I guess. Which, frankly, makes the big finale, set piece battle of the novel seem kinda superfluous.

I did enjoy the inclusion of Creighton, the shape shifting detective who is ‘popped’ over by Popinjay to help clear up the ‘behind the scenes’ sabotage at the competition. I love the fact that he often uses old movie stars to base his character on so when he changes to Dwight Frye, the James Arness incarnation of The Thing (From Another World) and the William Powell version of Nick Charles from The Thin Man films, it’s always a pleasure to read his antics. And there are some great comic moments too when he has to impersonate Bubbles and babysit her grounded daughter while she has to go and take care of some business herself. This is not a bad novel by any stretch and, certainly, there are no really bad Wild Cards novels... but it’s possibly the most trivial of the series for sure.

So, as I said before, the story has a big action set piece at the end of it and, don’t get me wrong, it’s a pleasure to read. It involves Creighton who has gotten so drunk in his impersonation of The Thin Man that he has morphed into Mighty Joe Young and is rampaging his way towards The Alamo and, well, the way he’s stopped from obliterating this historical landmark is something that I’ll just say that anyone who is a fan of the original version of that particular movie (I’ve not seen the remake and don’t even talk to me about that) will absolutely love and applaud. And I don’t know why I didn’t see it coming even sooner than I did because it’s frankly the only solution that would do in this case. I have the original movie on Blu Ray now so I’ll probably revisit it sometime later this year and do a review here.

However, although this sequence is, again, a joy to read... the whole thing felt like it was just tacked on because the writers or possibly editor felt like they needed to have some kind of big ‘potential carnage’ scene at the end and, it doesn’t really have any consequences to do with the rest of the novel at all. It’s just a piece of spectacle similar to what Hollywood might add on to the end of a film to make it seem a little more punchy. However, brilliant as it is... it really doesn’t add anything to the book and, in all fairness, with so little at stake, there doesn’t seem to be much point to any of it.

So there you have it. Texas Hold ‘Em is another, hugely entertaining tome in the Wild Cards shared universe but, in all honesty, it’s also one of the worst and, almost certainly the least relevant of the series. Regular readers may like to know that there are no new Croyd Crenson sightings in this book but the character is referred to at least twice over the course of the story. However, with only a few Aces in sight and mostly just a bunch of jokers and the odd deuce, there’s not really a lot going on in this one. However, if you are a regular reader of the series, like me, then of course you will love it and want to read it for sure. So that’s me done and I’ll hopefully get around to reading the next novel in the series - which jumps back right to the beginning of the series but taken from a British viewpoint - sometime fairly soon.

Wild Cards - Low Chicago

Temporal Temptations

Wild Cards - Low Chicago
Edited by George R. R. Martin
Tor Books
ISBN: 978-0765390561

Warning: Slight spoilers on character appearances in this one if you’re a regular Wild Cards reader.

Low Chicago is the 25th of the long running Wild Cards mosaic novels which have been going, on and off, since the 1980s. If you’ve not read these before they map out a complete alternate history of the world since the Wild Card Virus was released in the Earths atmosphere in the 1940s, dividing the survivors into either Aces (with different superpowers), Jokers (deformed creatures, some of whom can still access superpowers) and the Nats (those somehow unaffected). The virus is passed down from generation to generation throughout history and these novels are seen through the eyes of multiple characters by multiple writers, often given a section of a novel each involving their character with one writer weaving all the bits together to make a coherent whole. George R. R. Martin used to be one of the many contributing writers (and it was his project from day one in the 1980s, from what I remember) but these days he’s usually just listed as editor (not that this isn’t a significant job).

The last decade or so has seen the series divided up and reclassified into trilogies and other sized sections which kinda makes sense when you look back on things. This book is apparently the middle section of one such trilogy, following on directly from the last novel Mississipi Roll (which I reviewed here) but, honestly, I can’t work out what that last one has to do with this one. That being said, the previous 'trilogy' did exactly the same thing to me until I realised how everything was tying together in the third part so... I’m keeping an open mind until I can see how they are going to link this in down the line in the near future. If it hadn’t been for that I would have said that this is a good jumping on point for people who haven't read one of these before but... yeah... I have no idea how this is going to link in later.

The book itself is the usual blend of well written, attention grabbing short stories held together by an overall arc. That arc being a high stakes card game in Chicago played out by rich people with a number of Ace bodyguards in tow. Fans who have been with the series since it’s inception will possibly be interested to know that Jack Braun, aka Golden Boy, is one of those players. I’d never thought about it before but I guess he doesn’t age so much and still looks pretty much the same since we first met him in the 1940/50s. That being said, a few old faces return in this volume because, for the first time that I can remember in Wild Cards history, this book is all about time travel. One of the players, or bodyguards actually, is fan favourite Croyd, who was originally created by the late, great Roger Zelazny from what I can remember but the character has been turning up, off and on, since the first volume. Like certain other characters, he doesn’t get old and die, due to the nature of his ace. Croyd Crenson is also known in the novels as The Sleeper and that’s because he tries to keep himself awake for as many weeks/months possible (getting more and more paranoid the longer he is awake due to the large quantities of pills he pops to keep him alert) before crashing out big time and sleeping for months at a time. The reason he does this is... well... because he never knows who he’s going to wake up as next. His ace is that he draws a new Wild Card every time he goes to sleep... so he knows he’ll either be an ace or a joker (or a combination of both) and he always dreads waking as a joker (at which point he just sleeps it off as quickly as he can).

Anyway, Croyd is at the table, along with many others including another long lived Ace born before the Wild Card extended his life, Nighthawk. And the linking story which pulls all the shorts here together is of Croyd and Nighthawk working together to rescue various people in the room since tragedy struck. A kerfuffle in the room in a hotel meant that Croyd accidentally, by reflex, defended himself with his new powers which he’s still trying to get to grips with... the power to travel in time. He accidentally transports a large number of people and they are all thrown into separate parts of history before the card game... some even before the Wild Card virus infected the Earth in the first place (and some of those by several million years). It’s up to Croyd and Nighthawk to keep dipping back to other times to re-teleport each one out of there before they change history which, given the time storm that starts to occur outside the hotel in the present, may well be a huge problem. And although this sounds like a good starting point to revisit some of the long dead characters from Wild Cards history... the book doesn’t do this as a main agenda and a surprising amount of the stories are, in fact, free of old characters at all. Although, the sequence where Croyd and Nighthawk meet the P. G. Wodehouse characters Jeeves and Wooster seems a bit odd as one would assume they are also fictional characters in the Wild Cards universe?

Anyway, the book uses the various characters stranded for weeks, months or years in another time before Croyd can find them to explore their personal histories in detail and also to craft some entertaining stories where the main character of each story can at least, if they know their history, predict certain events before they happen. Some of the writers also, quite cleverly, do leave history changed at the end of their stories, only to have Croyd and Nighthawk arrive in the next chapter of the linking story and go back to before that character had changed history too. And sometimes not. There’s a wonderful argument in the book about who wrote the famous science fiction story where treading on a butterfly in the past changed all of future history and this gives the novel its basis in terms of where everything is going... not to mention a nice punchline to the perpetual argument in the closing sentence of the novel.

That being said, there is also a lot for long term fans of the series regarding appearances and interaction. For instance, we are reminded that in the Wild Cards universe, Kennedy was still assassinated but Marilyn Monroe went on to live a full and healthy life. That being said, there’s a wonderful set up in this book, in a story which takes place in the Playboy Mansion over the week the magazine was officially launched, that gives us a perfect ‘future character’ if these novels are still being written in 20 or so years time. Asides from this return to the plot threads of an old storyline, we have appearances by fan pleasing characters like The Great And Powerful Turtle, Fortunato and there’s even an appearance by the Joker Brigade Army Sergeant who went on to become the Jokertown priest Father Squid in later years (a character who, when we last left him, was seemingly killed by being turned into a pew by Baba Yaga a couple of novels ago). There’s also a brilliant story set at the dawn of time where one of the characters bumps into an alien who she thinks is Jube, the news vendor in her street. Jube is a walrus looking character disguised as a Joker who is really an alien from the same species as this new character and who has been on Earth a long time (and is presumably named after The Beatles song I Am The Walrus... you know, "goo goo ga joob"). New possibilities for a future story arc are presented when this alien is also teleported back to the present day by accident so... I’m sure one of the writers will start to pull on some alien invasion threads in a few year’s time (it wouldn’t be the first time in Wild Cards history).

Low Chicago is yet another great set of Wild Cards stories and fans of the series should eat this one up. I’m quite looking forward to reading the next installment which was published in the US in October but, before then, there is already another trilogy started in the form of a British series of Wild Cards books involving British characters... so I’m really not sure of which one to read first, to be honest.

Aquaman

Curry On Sea Men

Aquaman
2018 Australia/USA
Directed by James Wan
UK cinema release print.

Okay... so this was nothing like what I was expecting this movie to be. I was assuming this would be, like most of the other recent DC movies in this particular cinematic strand of continuity... something of a mess. As it is, this is easily one of the most engaging and entertaining of the DC universe films, second only to Wonder Woman (reviewed here). That being said, I can’t imagine any other superhero movie ever coming close to Wonder Woman in my lifetime so, yeah, I guess you can say I thought a lot of the new Aquaman movie, even though he really isn’t the Aquaman I used to love as a kid.

Aquaman stars Jason Momoa as Arthur Curry, the title character, reprising his role from Batman Vs Superman - Dawn Of Justice (reviewed here) and Justice League (reviewed here). He bookends the narrative with voice-over narrative telling a big story of political battles in the undersea kingdom which threaten all the non-ocean dwellers on the planet but, he comes at it through the eyes of his personal story and... this is something which hooked me in right from the start... he tells it from the angle of a love story. A love story between his dad, Tom, played by Temuera Morrison (who you might remember as Bobba Fett’s father Jango Fett, plus a bunch of clones of his character, in the prequel Star Wars movies) and his mother, Atlanna, played by Nicole Kidman.

And it’s quite charming and heart warming and from this simple, fish out of water start where Tom rescues Atlanna and cares for her in his lighthouse, I was completely hooked. There’s a wonderful action scene in said lighthouse where Nicole Kidman goes full-on warrior and bashes up a load of Atlanteans and then sacrifices her freedom to return to the oceans, leaving Tom to raise their child... who we soon see has lots of cool, undersea powers from his mother.

From then on we get two parts of the villainous plot introduced... as Black Manta, a modern pirate played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, is left hating Aquaman for reasons I won’t go into here while regular James Wan collaborator Patrick Wilson, as Aquaman’s half-brother King Orm, tries to persuade and manipulate wise King Nerreus, played by Dolph Lundgren, to raise up Atlantis, unite all the armies of the kingdoms of the oceans and wage war on the surface dwellers who have been polluting their oceans for centuries. Meanwhile, over the years, we have Orm’s advisor Vulko, played by Willem Dafoe, who has been secretly training Aquaman in his fishy ways over the years and Mera, played by Johnny Depp’s nemesis Amber Heard, reprising her role from Justice League, who wants Arthur Curry to find an ancient trident which will give him power to gain the kingship of the ocean and defeat Orm’s attempt to be Ocean Master.

So, basically, what we have is an action spectacular with a kind of road movie treasure hunt involving Aquaman and Mera, who are trying to gain the trident and avert disaster and... you know what? It’s a real fun ride.

James Wan is somebody I usually only associate with low budget, fairly high quality horror films but, it looks like he can really knock out a good, large scale action blockbuster if he’s given enough money to play with. Like Wonder Woman, the big action is matched by a very overt, emotional, beating heart which gives the audience something to invest in when the battle scenes come and this really took me by surprise since, frankly, the Aquaman character didn’t really get much of a chance to shine in Justice League. So the writers have really thought about this one and Wan has managed to pull it all together to make a very confident looking, big screen spectacle.

This is not the blond, short back and sides version of Aquaman I grew up with... reading him in his appearances in titles such as Justice League Of America and The Super Friends. I used to love the little Comic Action Heroes figure from Mego I had as a kid, despite the fact that my Uncle had squeezed it too hard one day and Aquaman’s leg would fall off whenever he went into action after that. So I was not very happy about the look of the character they’ve brought to the screen here but I really mellowed to it once I saw how well the film works. Also, there are a fair few throwbacks to those original Aquaman strips... including those little circles they used to draw to symbolise him talking to the creatures of the ocean and also, in the endgame of the picture, his old, colourful orange and ‘green gauntlets’ costume which I used to like so much.

Now, there are a couple of problems with the movie so let me just cover those here...

It’s been quoted many times over the years that ‘continuity is the hobgoblin of the small minded’. Well then call me small minded but I think story arc continuity is an important and much valued building block when fashioning a cinematic universe (or in any other kind of story medium, to be fair) and I got the feeling that if I were to sit down and re-watch Justice League right now, I’d find a couple of glaring mis-matches. However, there’s very little shout out to the former film, although it clearly takes place some time after that one and... they kind of get away with certain differences, I think.

The other problem is that it’s just too long... it kinda slumps about two thirds of the way through and the action scenes towards the end could have done with a fair amount of trimming it seems to me. Also, a more lengthy and personal fight between Orm and Aquaman may have been a little more satisfying. That being said, it didn’t detract form the sheer impact and brilliance of the film overall and I think this is definitely one of the DC films from this period which will be remembered in a positive light, providing audiences are willing to go and see it after the not so great Justice League.

But it also has a lot going for it... great acting, great story, some well choreographed action in the middle of the film and a beautiful score by Rupert Gregson-Williams, who also did such a great job on Wonder Woman. Also, it’s easily the most surreal of the contemporary DC movies, with characters riding armoured battle sharks, giant crabs and militarised crustacean people... it’s like if Salvador Dali was allowed to design the extended underwater battle from the James Bond film Thunderball (reviewed here) and did his own thing with it. Which is never going to be a bad thing.

Also, it’s got some amazing transition scenes in the movie including flashbacks which take you completely by surprise and a lovely transformation from a shot of a snow globe to the next narrative point in the story, fairly early on in the film. There’s some really nice stuff in here and I think James Wan has done a truly remarkable job cramming in all this great stuff in a compelling, visual way.

So yeah, that’s my take on Aquaman. There’s a mid post-credits scene which gives you some insight into where they might be going with a sequel and, if it does the numbers I’m hoping it does at the box office, then we should be seeing that at some point in the future (fingers crossed). If you’re, like me, wondering why the hell DC have been getting everything wrong lately other than Wonder Woman... well, wonder no more. If you decide to go and see Aquaman then you’re in for an aquatic treat. Thoroughly enjoyed this although, a quick ‘heads up’ to say that, since I saw this, I’ve found out it’s been cut under advice from the BBFC in this country... which means I’ll definitely be importing the Blu Ray from the US when it comes out, rather than buy the truncated, vandalised English version.

Incredibles 2

Fantastic Five

Incredibles 2
USA Directed by Brad Bird
UK cinema release print.

Okay, this one’s kinda fun.

Despite dropping the definite article preceding the rest of the title, Incredibles 2 is still a sequel, 14 years later, to The Incredibles. I guess they’re thinking that if they want to ignore this sequel later down the line they can slap it back on and call that one The Incredibles 2 maybe?

Now there was no way in my mind that this follow up was ever going to be as good as The Incredibles because, frankly, that movie was one of the top ten greatest animated feature films of all time, as far as I’m concerned. However, I have to say director Brad Bird has done a good job on this one and it’s still a pretty great movie. It’s also not, quite, just a repeat of the first film although, honestly, there are some structural similarities and the ‘not such a surprise’ villain is a similar kind of reveal, in some ways, to the plot twist of the first movie (which I think was handled a little better).

This one concentrates on Elastigirl, voiced once again by Holly Hunter, as she embarks on a superhero campaign, marketing to bring ‘supers’ back into the limelight and stop them from being illegal anymore. Meanwhile, Mr. incredible, voiced once more by Craig T. Nelson, is left at home holding the baby and being a house husband trying to keep things going by solving a problem with Violet’s love life and Dash’s mathematics homework while trying to cope with baby Jack Jack’s growing list of super powers. And, like the first one, it all seems to work really well.

Now, the director does take things into slightly different waters where the first movie didn’t go, in one scene where he has anthropomorphised an animal... which does seem to mark new territory here in that, like in the first of the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons of the 1940s, it seems a little out of place in a film which is primarily a version of the world we live in (albeit one where super powered humans actually exist). However, I have to say that the sequence in question, where Jack Jack goes toe to toe in a ferocious fight with a racoon, is a pretty cute scene and it’s not too intrusive within the chemical mix of the rest of the movie, in that it in any way dominates the style of the remainder of the story. It’s just a fun scene which you can let go of as soon as it’s over without, necessarily, thinking about the way the ecosystem of the ‘Incredibles Universe’ works in these films.

As with the first film, it’s all very nice to look at with rich colours, neat editing and it all moves along at a breakneck pace. Everything, again like the first film, is held in place and glued in all the right places (pretty much wall to wall, in this case) by Michael Giacchino’s incredible score. Now, it has to be said that while the soundscape he used for the first movie is back here, as it should be, the film is not quite as derivative of the style of the first film’s rejected composer John Barry. For instance, you can hear the temp track of films like Goldfinger and Thunderball screaming through in the music from the first film to such an extent that you can literally just drop tracks from the Bond films into The Incredibles and they would be timed to hit exactly the same dramatic points. That being said, there’s one cue in the new film where Elastigirl is on the way to her first day on the new job which sounds like a glorious mash up of John Barry’s Into Miami from Goldfinger and Jerry Goldsmith’s Your Zowie Face from In Like Flint so... you know... some of this homage is still present in a few places. It’s maybe not quite as fun as his first score but it’s still pretty great and works well, again, as a stand alone listen.

I think there were maybe a few missed opportunities in terms of cameos of characters from The Incredibles that might have made it into the second but because it’s trying to do, to some extent, it’s own thing in terms of story (although there are some marked similarities, too), I can’t really blame the writer/director for having a few characters sit this one out. That being said, he still has deliberate echoes of the first film finding their way into this so the fans and admirers of the original don’t feel too disappointed. So... we have a scene with Edna Mode, voiced once again by the director, getting to grips with baby Jack Jack’s new powers and we have a plot set up involved around a superhero coming out of retirement and facing possible betrayal at some point in the story. The point is, though, that despite having this kind of thing built into it, it never really feels like you're retreading old ground and Bird seems to really hold everything together in order to give us a new adventure from the heroes we’ve come to love.

And that’s me done on this one. Incredibles 2 lives up to the superlative of its title and gives people who loved the first one something else to give their affection to. If you’re already on board with these characters then you should have a great time with this one. If you’ve not seen the original, however, you might want to go back and watch that one first as this one starts off literally with a flashback scene which picks up, to the second, where the last one finished. Whichever film you watch first though... have a good time.

Wonder Woman Unbound

Lost And Bound

Wonder Woman Unbound
by Tim Hanley Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 978-1-61374-9098

Wonder Woman Unbound is the first of what will be, I’m sure, many books I’ll be reading for this site dealing with various aspects of, to quote this book’s subtitle, ‘The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine’, in the wake of last years truly great cinematic incarnation of the title character. I was given this at Christmas and, despite the bold cover, it looked a slight thing in terms of how much value it could bring to my understanding of the Amazon Diana and her heroic persona. However, looks can be deceiving and are not the best things to rush to judgement on and so it proved to be with this.

Tim Hanley’s book is a knockout and a gold mine of great information, much of which could only be researched in the wake of the availability of expensive duplicates of the early comics which were reprinted for the general public more recently than when some of the other tomes which have tried to look into Diana’s background were written. I truly learned a lot from this valuable book, which doesn’t just limit itself to looking at creator William Moulton Marston’s original take on the character but also brings us right up to date... or at least as up to date as 2014 when it was written.

After an introduction which touches upon some of the issues Hanley wants to cover in the book, he gets right into things with the first section, entitled The Golden Age. In this he recaps, for the less comic literate, the history of the medium and the various things that happened to the strips... such as a, surprisingly, balanced view of what Wertham was really saying when he sparked those comic book witch hunts with their grim fallout involving the creation of the Comics Code. Not to mention the slumps in sales and how the various strips and characters weathered these things through this and certain other periods of modern history.

Diana’s origins were slightly different from the current version of the character as portrayed in the movies.... with the amazons imprisoned by Hercules before escaping to Paradise Island where they fashioned bracelets from their chains to remind them of the world of men... although the idea that Diana was sculpted from clay by her mother and given life from the Gods was there too. However, the origin was revisited and changed a few times over the years... as it has been for a lot of comic book characters over the decades (especially DC characters) and this is perhaps due to the longevity of the Golden Age characters... when many other of the superpowered giants were refashioned (with some notable and legendary exceptions) as brand new characters with different origins... I might mention the Golden to Silver and Platinum Age transformations of such characters as Green Lantern, The Flash or The Human Torch (who originally wasn’t human at all), for example.

Another very good point that the author makes, and it’s not something I’d even thought of before, was that many of those Golden Age heroes were born from personal tragedy... Superman fleeing the destruction of his race, Bruce Wayne’s parents gunned down in front of him etc... whereas Wonder Woman was not. Her origins seem way more upbeat and optimistic in comparison and perhaps that’s why she tries to solve all the problems she faces from various villains with a sense of love and reformation rather than with overt antagonism (something which came over very well in the recent movie version of her character, reviewed by me here).

So, for example, it talks about how she would recognise the good traits of her enemies and use those to suggest alternate career paths and how she had set up ‘Reform Island’ to rehabilitate those foes who survived her attentions (something which I’m guessing may have been purloined from either Doc Savage’s Crime College or The Shadow’s similar reforming island.

It also talks about the gender role swap and compares Steve Trevor to Lois Lane in terms of being a 'damsel' to rescue. Batman’s Robin fulfilled a similar role but was, also, always quite useful to Batman whereas Steve Trevor seemed to be completely ineffectual against his enemies and would have to be bailed out by Wonder Woman time and time again. Hanley then looks at how alter ego Diana Prince fulfilled the same weak role in comparison to Steve Trevor, before transforming herself into Wonder Woman to save the day.

The author is also not afraid to take on all the issues of Marston’s personal psychology and how his much celebrated and still used to this day (if my understanding is correct) DISC theory was the underlying message of the propaganda living inside the strip and also points out the difference between this and the undeniable sexual kinks depicted metaphorically in the book... which are problematic not by their nature but by being somewhat contradictory in their gender representation to the underlying tenets of DISC.

He goes on to show various charts of his research to point out the high percentage of her time Wonder Woman spent in bondage or, most importantly, binding others compared to her nearest male rival in terms of ‘getting tied up’, Captain Marvel. Of course, the big red cheese’s* bondage content was often a necessity of the writers finding ways of incapacitating his alter ego, Billy Batson, so he could be gagged and unable to say the magic word SHAZAM!, which would bring Captain Marvel into the world... so it has the highest amount of bondage in any male oriented comic book. Wonder Woman had stacks more and the writer also looks at the different ways it was shown in relation to who was getting tied up (male or female) and if it was, perhaps, a disservice to Marston’s own theories of female dominance being depicted.

Hanley also talks about Marston's theory about the positivity of submission being at odds with the way it was portrayed in the strip but shows that other elements of the stories also supported the strong feminist ideal that the character was meant to represent. Also, that the strip was very much aimed at a male readership, as well as female readership and that, for the most part, the male readership was much higher. He does this very impressively by gleaning the amount of data to be found in the letters pages of the comic over the years and also by looking at the kinds of ads which were being pitched (mostly to boys) in the Wonder Woman comics.

The book goes on to cover the character in the wake of Marston’s death, looks at the various other important writers contributing to the strip (including other, very interesting features in the pages of the various comics starring Wonder Woman) and gives an overview of how ‘in touch’ they were with Marston’s principles... including the use of the phrase ‘Suffering Sappho’ and how the evidence from a lot of the comics is undeniable that Diana was, especially at the start, a lesbian... although I suspect what she became very quickly, in terms of her alter ego, was at least bisexual (something which I think is another element which the recent film makes as overt as possible for a family audience). Although the Amazons, as they stand in the movie, surely must have been created as bisexual because their original mission was to appease/calm down and ‘sexy up’ mankind, if I’m interpreting the movie version correctly.

Hanley explores the differences between the character and the silly plots of the Silver Age in the wake of the shake up after the EC comics years and the ‘Wertham effect’. How the women in the comics, including Diana, were injected with ideals of ‘female domesticity’ propaganda after the death of her creator (something which I don’t think would have necessarily have happened if he had lived longer).

It investigates and demonstrates these things by giving us a very welcome potted history and summary of various other characters in comics at the time... including the female characters. This shows that, in many ways, Diana at this time was even less independent than the title character of the ‘Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane’ comic book. Other DC female characters were far stronger in terms of their identities and roles in the DC line.

Thus, it shows how the women's liberation movement of the fifties and sixties totally passed Diana by. In fact, in a very interesting run of the comics, her superpowers were taken away from her, as was Steve Trevor, who dies as her motivation to become a kind of mentored, kung fu killing machine spy who was falling in love with every man she came across and who was as interested in wearing the right fashions as she was anything else. Actually, this run of the comics sounds fascinating and, although they completely destroyed Diana’s character, I would truly love to read these ones. Unfortunately, I don’t think they’ve been reprinted so it would take a lot of time scouring comic book shops for expensive back issues if I were to ever get that opportunity, methinks.

So after making the point that while women were rising up and claiming independence in real life, Wonder Woman was doing the exact opposite... it shows how Gloria Steinem reclaimed Wonder Woman in the 1970s by putting her front and centre on the cover of the first issue of her phenomenally successful Ms magazine - celebrating her inside the covers and engineering the restoration of her superpowers with a powerful friend at DC to tie in with this.

As Hanley covers the next four decades, bringing us to the somewhat sorry state of the character in 2014 (in terms of sales at least) it becomes increasingly clear that he knows a lot about the history of feminism in its many incarnations (many of them opposing)... including one based on theories of an all female genesis for our species through a process called parthenogenesis which, in all honesty, does nothing to make me take certain somewhat respected splinter groups of feminism in any way seriously. I mean... oops.

It’s a shame, in a way, Hanley didn’t wait another three or four years before he published this so he could see what a successful phenomenon Wonder Woman has become again, especially in terms of the film which has become probably one of the most successful DC superhero movies of all time (deservedly... it’s one of the great works of art in modern cinema). I suspect he might want to revisit the book at some point and revise it in light of what Diana has become to modern audiences and I would love to read what he makes of this recent chapter in her ongoing history.

That being said, though, Wonder Woman Unbound is a truly wonderful tome to have in one’s personal library and it certainly armoured me up with a lot more knowledge about the character than I was previously aware of. It’s concise but thorough and extremely well written... it also includes a number of interesting photos of key covers, adverts and other items of note from her history in a section about two thirds of the way through the book. Now, admittedly, I am a novice when it comes to this character so don’t know how this holds up to more knowledgable fans of Diana and her story but I can certainly recommend this as required reading for anyone who is a little in the dark about Wonder Woman’s place in comic book history. I had a really good time with this one... perhaps you will too.

* Arch enemy Dr. Sivana's name for Captain Marvel (played by Mark Strong in next year's movie version).