Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Uncanny X-Men #250

[Jason Powell keeps on truckin with every issue of Claremont's X-Men. People in the comments have been disagreeing with him, which is cool, as long as you remember two things: 1. that you are wrong and 2. that Jason is right.]

“The Shattered Star”

Compared to other multiple-of-fifty anniversary issues that comic-book creators love to make a big deal out of – Claremont being no exception – Uncanny X-Men #250 arrives with little fanfare. A caption reminds us that it is the 250^th issue, but apart from that it feels much less like a turning point than issues 150 and 200. Though there is one subtle acknowledgement of history: The story sees Lorna Dane placed into a giant plot device that magically strips her of her magnetic powers, a moment dramatized on the cover. This makes it a bookend with the 50^th issue of Uncanny X-Men, which saw Lorna placed into a similar device to activate those powers in the first place (a moment also chosen for dramatization on that issue’s cover).

Blog Updates

I realize that I hardly every blog here, in part because I have become busy, in part because I have become more than a little jaded about things like the current comics scene, in part because I am lazy, and in part because twitter allows me to do a lot of things I used to to with this blog in an easier and more economical way. This is not an announcement that I will be blogging less, so much as an acknowledgement of the fact that it appears the amount I blog currently is probably not a temporary position -- although I still hold out hope that I will come roaring back, or take up some big issue-by-issue or episode-by-episode thing. I will certainly be blogging about each of the final 18 Lost episodes, for instance, and really should return to the Maxx. And I am on Winter break now, which means I will finally go to the movies (the last one I saw was Inglourious Basterds): Avatar, Nine, Where the Wild Things Are, The Informant, 2012, The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Box and The Fantastic Mr Fox and the upcoming Legion are all on my list. I expect to have some strong opinions on at least some of those. If I do, I will share.

What is the point? The point is that I used to post, and then add labels to distinguish guest bloggers -- so that if you wanted to follow Jason Powell you could use your RSS reader and his label to just see his posts. But I figured I was the default blogger and you would see mine just from following the main link at geoffklock.blogspot.com. No more. All my posts now have their own labels -- which you can use to avoid me or follow me specifically or whatever. The toolbar on the right has been altered to reflect this, and I have made sure each of our primary guest bloggers has the link to their posts with their names.

http://geoffklock.blogspot.com/search/label/geoffklock

Mister Miracle 11 & 12

[Andy Bentley continues his look at Jack Kirby's New Gods series -- for the final volume, generally considered to be a major fall off, he is going to look at two at a time. I, myself, wanted to read all of the New Gods issues after Final Crisis, but stopped right around here.]

“The Greatest Show Off Earth”
“Mystivac”

From here on out, I’m going to combine two Mr. Miracle reviews into one post. As mentioned previously in my column, the other Fourth World titles have been suspended indefinitely and Kirby has a mandate to make the Mr. Miracle title friendly to new readers. The result is a standard superhero tale with little mention of Apokolips or any other aspect of the ongoing saga.

“The Greatest show on Earth” involves the return of Doctor Bedlam to once again challenge Mr. Miracle’s skills as an escape artist. This is the first repeat villain we’ve seen in the series which is a sign something is off. If you do not remember, Bedlam is merely a consciousness which can inhabit any of the blank animate robots he controls. Like his last appearance, this one centers around the power of the mind and overcoming fear. The plotting is quite familiar: an elaborate trap that Miracle escapes with a generous contribution from his mother box.

Kevin Geeks Out Tomorrow

[I will be at this tomorrow, as will Sara. If you are in NYC, come visit. Sara talks about Smurfs and I talk about how Ocean's 12 is the best movie ever, which you may have heard me talk about before, but not as fast as tomorrow night.]

Part of the series Kevin Geeks Out!

Kevin Geeks Out is the comedy-variety show hosted by writer-comedian Kevin Maher – a monthly confabulation of vintage film clips and videos, new finds, guest experts, games and curiosities. To geek out with Kevin you don’t need to be a geek, you just need to love cool stuff.

This month, Kevin gives the audience a Holiday Grab Bag; an evening filled with surprise video entertainment. Eight Special Guests give the gift of weird, wonderful movie and TV clips, with topics including Godzilla: History, Biology and Behavior of Hyper-Evolved Theropod Kaiju; How He-Man spends the Holidays; Gratuitous Shark Scenes in post-JAWS Cinema; and using the Socratic Method to debate whether or not Oceans 12 is the greatest movie ever made. Guest Speakers/Presenters include:

Professor Geoff Klock (author of How to Read Superhero Comics and Why)
Shyaporn Theerakulstitb (actor/writer/director/D-List YouTuber)
R. Sikoryak (author of Masterpiece Comics)
Sara Reiss (occasional blogger and self-described “hater”)
M. Sweeney Lawless (writer for The Lowbrow Reader)
Noah Tarnow (host of Big Quiz Thing)
Craig Wichman (writer-director-actor of award-winning radio dramas)
Nick Nadel (blogger for Comics Alliance and American Movie Classics

All this, plus holiday cupcakes, trivia prizes and video tributes to Chanukah and Christmas and other secret surprises that will not be revealed until the night of the show.

CLICK HERE for directions/tickets.

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Uncanny X-Men #249

[Jason Powell. Chris Claremont. X-Men. Every Issue. Seriously. It's like a blog inside the blog.]

“The Dane Curse”

The Savage Land, another classic X-riff, is reprised here. Neal Adams’ Savage Land mutates are brought in as the villains, a development seeded in X-Men Annual #12. There’s something very poetic about the way the classic settings and characters start returning during this phase of Claremont’s run. There is the feeling that everything is coming full circle before Claremont’s story ends. And thanks to Harras’ tight editorial rein (a double-edged sword in many respects), the integration of subplots seems more focused than in earlier eras. It’s nice that the Zaladane subplot from the “Evolutionary War” annual is not being left to languish on the vine for years, as it might have back during the Simonson or Nocenti editorial tenures.

Uncanny X-Men #249 is an issue in two parts. The earlier half sits in a murky psychological darkness, with Alex lamenting recent deaths and the overall unraveling of the team. Both his soliloquy and the accompanying images by Marc Silvestri turn a bit meta. We see Havok slashing red “X”’s through portraits of his lost teammates, which were originally painted – we are told – onto a giant conference table by Madelyne Pryor back before “Inferno” began. This is all rather out of the blue; we were never shown the X-Men using this table, and such a garish chunk of furniture feels like something out of DC’s Silver Age. And crossing the heads off with “X”’s as the corresponding characters leave the series feels like something a fan would do, not an actual character within the story. It is all rather surreal, almost as if this were a dream sequence. It is only compounded by the illogical and/or outlandish plot turns. Some of them are deliberate on Claremont’s part: The computer’s seeming to be alive and able to heal itself is deliberately pointed up as a mystery to be solved. Others seem the result of sloppiness: How did Lorna have the phone number to the X-Men’s secret base in Australia? But the compound effect of so many bizarre twists coming one after the other is kaleidoscopic, and contributes to the issue’s overall tone of psychological turmoil and existential despair.

Dollhouse's "A Love Supreme" (Season 2, Episode 8): some random thoughts

Spoilers.

I wont go crazy with Hulu clips, since it takes too much time and ends up also being kind of culturally chauvinistic, and basically people reading this post should probably have simply seen the episode anyway.

I had a few disconnected thoughts about this episode, which I saw moments ago, that I thought maybe worth a share. All on my old hobbyhorse: influence and allusion.

Since I seems to think in twitter posts:

1. The cold open reminds me of Kill Bill -- the music, the way Alpha's head is kept off screen, the focus on feet, the desert, the voiceover, blades, themes of love. It reminded me both of Bill approaching the bride in the beginning of the movie and of the Sheriff approaching the bride in the church.

2. Which doesn't mean anything except at the end when Alpha activates all the dolls in the dollhouse to go crazy and fight in order to screw with our girl hero, -- the setting and action is straight out of the House of the Blue Leaves, sans budget. This episode of the Dollhouse is bookended with the bookends of Kill Bill 1.

3. Alpha was very much Frank Miller's dandy Joker from Batman: Dark Knight Returns: the focus on the suit, the reference to Beau Brummel. But it was by way of Heath Ledger's Joker: the monologuing, the knives, the bombs.

4. Look also to Grant Morrison on Batman. When Echo finds Alpha's first victim notice the rose petals on the black and white checkered floor -- a staple of imagery of Morrison's ambitious failure in Batman: RIP, which also introduced his new Joker.

5. Notice also that Echo and Alpha are kind of set up as these post-human super-men because of their multiple personality thing -- which is how a psychiatrist describes the Joker in Morrison's Arkham Asylum.

6. Notice also that the unaired season finale of Season 1, Epitaph One, jumps into the future, then kind of jumps right back to the present for the start of season 2, which we now feel alluding to that future. Same thing in Morrison's Batman.

‘Tis The Season…. To celebrate the Simpsons Turning 20!

[Scott on the Simpson's 20th. Jesus Christ, that show is like Law and Order. Two thirds of my LIFE you know what I am saying? OF MY LIFE.]

It was 20 years ago that the first full length episode of the Simpsons, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire”, debuted on Fox thus inaugurating the beginning of one of the most influential shows ever to grace the airwaves. It is no secret that I am a HUGE Simpsons fan, Geoff can testify to the fact that my knowledge of the show (at least the first 10 seasons) is downright encyclopedic. A short while back, I challenged the blog to think of their favorite latter day Simpsons moments, those from the era when most considered the show past its prime; however, prompted by TV Guide’s recent list of the ’20 Best Episodes’ , a list that feels like it was almost contractually obligated to shoehorn newer episodes with true classics, I’ve decided to compile a list of that , I feel, is truly more representative of the best episodes from the show’s golden age.

The New Gods #11

[Andy Bentley. Kirby's New Gods Epic. Every issue. I was late putting this up folks. Sorry. End of term stuff, as usual.]

“Darkseid and Sons”

The final issue of The New Gods appropriately contains the most conclusive and important chapter of the Fourth World Saga to date. The issue features the second battle between Kalibak and and Orion, but this iteration has more depth and meaning. Kirby also reveals more backstory around Darkseid which makes his tale more shakespearean than totalitarian. Although it isn’t the ending Kirby hoped for, he finds an appropriate one for the situation.

After an opening prologue where Kalibak breaks free from the police force, the scene shifts to Orion and Lightray at their friend Dave Lincon’s apartment. Here, Orion is at his most manic and crazed. Kirby might has well drawn foam on the corners of his mouth. This characterization is unfortunately the one Morrison uses for his JLA run. I much rather the stoic and passionate version found in the early issues of the saga which is similar to the take Bruce Timm had in the recent DC cartoons. Although the attitude is grating, Orion’s point is quite welcome. His argument to Lightray is that they must be more proactive and take the fight to the villains of Apokolips. An organized effort from New Genesis to take on the invaders from Apokolips is something I have been looking forward to for quite a while. The point becomes moot when Orion learns of Kalibak has escaped and is moving quickly toward their location.

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Uncanny X-Men #248

[Jason Powell is like Hercules, if Hercules wrote blogs about Claremont's X-Men. And was also really nice and smart. He continues his issue by issue look at the greatest X-Men run ever. What will this blog do when he goes? It keeps me up at night.]

“The Cradle Will Fall”

There is a great bit in the documentary that Patrick Meaney is doing on Chris Claremont, wherein the author and Ann Nocenti are recounting a bit of their history on The Uncanny X-Men. When Nocenti mentions that she left her assistant Bob Harras in charge when she went freelance in 1988, Claremont gives her a loaded look and wryly says, “Thanks.”

Continuing the analogy of the Seige Perilous being a safe haven for Claremont’s children against Harras’ ever-expanding reign of editorial terror -- with Rogue going through first because she’s the one Claremont created himself -- what does one make of the unceremonious departure of Longshot in Uncanny X-Men #248? Longshot, of course, is Nocenti’s child, deliberately imported into “Uncanny” during her tenure so that nobody else could touch the character. When Longshot is torn to shreds in this issue’s dream sequence, then dropped from the series permanently in Storm’s blink-and-you-missed-it hallucination, is it a kind of tit-for-tat for the way Nocenti abandoned Claremont to Harras’ tender mercies?

Mainstream Comics Are Increasingly Lame (it's not just Tim Callahan and Chad Nevett)

Tim Callahan and Chad Nevett are blogging about Mainstream Comics Being Increasingly Lame (Or Is It Just Them). It may be just them, but if it is, then it is just me too.

Tim says "I was easily reading 25-30 comics a week in 2008, I'm down to 8-10 a week right now." Well I used to read 4-6 comics a week and now I am down to one -- Morrison's Batman -- that I am getting, not be cause I like it, but because Morrison-Stewart and Morrison-Quitely have enough capital built up with me that I sort of owe them at this point. But just barely. Oh, and I get Detective Comics because the JH Williams art is awesome, but I also have this bad habit of just forgetting to buy it, which I supposed speaks to my involvement being minimal. It is the kind of thing I would like to admire in a nice hardcover. Because I am not invested in the story, only the art, I was never really "hooked," though I will eventually get every issue.

Tim writes

Maybe it's the Morrison lull that I'm feeling -- or we're all feeling -- with the giddiness of "Final Crisis" and "Batman" being replaced in recent months with the atrocity of the most recent "Batman and Robin" arc. I'll take Tony Daniel over Philip Tan any day, if I were forced to make such a choice. Or maybe it's the kind of events we're seeing now compared to last year. I don't think "Blackest Night" is aesthetically worse than "Secret Invasion," but Bendis's event comic at least sparked plenty of discussion. With "Blackest Night," the conversation amounts to, "who's going to come back as a zombie next?" And even though you may or may not enjoy the series -- I do, and you don't -- nobody seems to care about the answer to that question. And justifiably so.

It's diminishing returns.

PERSONAL Best of the Decade Lists

In the comments to this post I would like to see your best (or worst) of the decade list in all the usual categories (Movies, TV, Music, Comics, Games, Books) and maybe some less than usual ones (single best panels? Death scenes?). The catch is I do not want you to go for any objectivity here. I want a shameless list of your personal favorites with no consideration of representing anything for anyone else -- so if your three favorite movies are the three parts of Lord of the Rings let them hold the top three slots. Let your guilty pleasures be seen with your "important cultural landmarks" -- and maybe even beat them.

Forever People #11

[Andy Bentley continues his issue by issue look at the New Gods, where he takes on the last of the Forever People. On a personal note, I wish I had a good reason for not updating the blog yesterday but the truth is I just plain forgot. Sorry about that. Also -- what is the origin of this "five guys become / summon one guy" thing as seen in The Forever People, Voltron and Captain Planet?]

“Devilance The Pursuer”

This marks the final issue of the Forever People and with it Kirby provides at least a temporary resolution for the teens from New Genesis. The story features the return of a forgotten character and even a brief appearance by Darkseid and Dessad, but the issue is one long chase scene that provides very little in new concepts or deep characterization.

The final antagonist for the Forever People is Devilance The Pursuer, who bears more that a passing resemblance to the Manhunters, the robots the Guardians of the Universe retroactively used to police the space sectors before they enacted the Green Lantern Corps.. This is no coincidence, as Kirby would go on to create these cold and unrelenting soldiers in DC Comics 1st issue Special #5 in 1975. Devilance, like the Manhunters, is clad in red, carries a staff, and has an undeniable will to capture his prey. He shows up on the Forever People’s doorstep and tracks them over many lands to a final showdown on an unknown island. The FP’s take him on one by one to varying degrees of success and it isn’t until the return of the Infinity Man that the group is able to take the Pursuer head on.

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Uncanny X-Men #247

[Jason Powel, not unlike Beowulf were he doing an analysis of Claremont, forges ahead undaunted by this huge task of covering every issue of Claremont's X-Men run.]

“The Light That Failed”

The previous issue was one of Claremont’s typical “characterization”-heavy issues, with just a few pages of superheroics right at the tail end. Uncanny #247 is given over entirely to full-out action, superbly rendered by penciler Marc Silvestri and inker Dan Green. Indeed, “The Light That Failed” is extraordinary for containing some of the most exhilaratingly rendered superhero violence of the Silvestri/Green era.

The central conceit has an appealing symmetry to it: Mastermold, the very first Sentinel, merges with Nimrod – which previous stories established as the “ultimate” Sentinel. The alpha/omega concept works beautifully, especially given that this would be Claremont’s last Sentinel story before quitting in two years. His resolution to Nimrod’s arc is tidy and quite satisfying, and hearkens back to the classic “robot defeated by logic” trope that also ended Roy Thomas’ and Neal Adams’ Sentinel story 20 years earlier. (In fact, it was Claremont who – as an intern at the Marvel offices in 1969 – suggested the ending to Roy Thomas back then.) Nimrod defeats both himself and Mastermold with a syllogism: Sentinels destroy mutants. Yet Nimrod and Mastermold have evolved beyond machines, to become living organisms. Therefore they have mutated, and therefore they must destroy themselves. Even the delivery – with Nimrod’s dry logic counter-pointed against Silvestri’s visual bombast, recalls the Thomas/Adams “Sentinels fly into the sun” sequence. Both as a new story and as an homage, “The Light That Failed” succeeds admirably.

Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2010

[Scott gives us another post about music and does it without mentioning U2! Since the Mountain Goats and Neutral Milk Hotel are not even eligible so I am just going to stay away from this thing. I know nothing about classic rock. I do like me some Carl on Aqua Teen Hunger Force.]

We could debate the merits the Hall of Fame itself but, at the end of the day, what is it other than just another list and, as we’ve mentioned on the blog before, everyone loves a good list, if for no other reason than to debate the choices on said list. And, for all of it’s shortcomings, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame remains the most prestigious way of honoring the proponents of the music that I love.

Recently, the nominees for 2010 were announced; from this list, only 5 performers will actually be inducted:

ABBA
The Chantels
Jimmy Cliff
Genesis
The Hollies
Kiss
LL Cool J
Darlene Love
Laura Nyro
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Donna Summer
The Stooges

So, what I thought we could do here is give our picks for which 5 of these artists should go in, as well as bring up artists that the Hall has, thus far, ignored (Rush fans, let your voice be heard!). Remember, the only qualification for eligibility is the artist must have had their first widely released recording at least 25 years ago.

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Uncanny X-Men 246

[Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Claremont's X-Men run in a series that has become downright EPIC.]

“The Day of Other Lights”

“The Day of Other Lights” is a modest offering – mostly a character piece, which only hints at the impending chaos of Claremont’s final, massively ambitious overplot. The opening sequence is significant in bringing back the bizarre “Seige Perilous” concept to the series (which had more or less been ignored after Claremont introduced it a year earlier, in Uncanny X-Men #229). Readers are reminded – through a hallucinogenic montage of Dazzler’s possible other lives -- that the Seige functions as a dispenser of instant karma. (Why Alison is sitting in the catacombs, in a bikini, holding the crystal in the first place, we are never quite sure … perhaps artist Marc Silvestri’s penchant for T&A is to blame?)

The scene recalls Uncanny X-Men Annual #11, in which each member of the cast was given a chance to live out their fantasy lives. The Seige Perilous concept takes this a step farther, suggesting that the characters’ actual realities can change by stepping through the portal. That seed will bear fruit in five issues’ time.

Mister Miracle #10

[Andy Bentley continues his issue by issue look at Jack Kirby's New Gods. I make a comment below about Morrison.]

“The Mister Miracle to Be!”

As I opened the fourth and final Omnibus of Jack Kirby’s Fourth world, I was taken aback by the table of contents. There were no less than 9 Mister Miracle stories and only one remaining Forever People and The New Gods titles. I quickly turned to the introduction by Paul Levitz, who recently stepped down from the office of President and Publisher of DC Comics. Paul wrote a concise and affectionate letter about Kirby and his work at DC Comics. Levitz reinforced the fact that Kirby was the first to plan a series of interwoven titles rather than have the connections made after the fact ala the Marvel universe. He also praised Kirby for his imaginative storyboarding - something I believe Kirby learned through his love of film. The letter reinvigorated my spirit and I plunged into the first Mister Miracle issue. Unfortunately, the story did not live up to Levitz’ send off.

Johns v Moore, and comfort reading

More than a week ago Scott posted on an Alan Moore quote on Blackest night and the comments just exploded into nearly 100. I said I would respond but thought the best way to do so would be to grab some of the stuff I wanted to respond to, put it here, and make a new post out of it, while also directing people to that huge and great conversation. Here are the key highlights.

Patrick writes

Couldn't you make the same critique of virtually any Alan Moore story? He wrote Watchmen based on some Charlton comic published twenty years earlier, or Lost Girls is just slashfic based on books published a hundred years ago. Because it's high culture stuff Moore's generally riffing on, he gets away with it, but I see a ton of similarities between Johns endlessly referencing the stuff he likes in the DCU in his books and Moore endlessly referencing whatever he likes in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Re-live the Wire in 10 minutes

Via Kevin Church and Poor Mojo. Very satisfying.

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

The Third Age

[Jason Powell takes a look at Patrick Meaney's new webseries.]

Today, Nov. 17, marks the online debut of a new webseries entitled “The Third Age,” co-created by Patrick Meaney. Patrick is a gentleman, scholar, blogger, author and fellow Claremont enthusiast. It seemed appropriate to bump the usual Tuesday Claremont review for a review of “The Third Age,” especially since Patrick was kind enough to give me a sneak preview of the first seven webisodes.

A stylized sci-fi thriller, “The Third Age” will be serialized over 26 eight-minute installments, the first few of which cut back and forth between two parallel threads: A depressive low-level drug-dealer meets a beautiful, enigmatic woman called “Morning” and finds himself unwilling to part with her; meanwhile, an ambitious scientist pursues unorthodox methods as he attempts to create a chemical substance that will take humanity into a new phase. A narrative link between these two threads exists from the start, but only over time are the details made explicit. (The cliffhanger in Episode 7 drops a large bombshell in this regard. Clever to make that the last one I was allowed to see, Patrick. Now I’m hooked.)

Lost Revisited - Season 2

[Andy Bentley continues his revisiting of LOST. I make a brief comment below.]

Space Ghost: But why, Warren?
Warren: Well... (laughs) (dramatic sting music) Never mind why. The past is just the future that already happened. Now come on over here and I'll cradle you.
-Space Ghost Coast to Coast, September 4, 1998

To recap, our survivors of Oceanic 815 have been scattered. Jin, Michael, and Sawyer have had their ship destroyed and Walt abducted by “The Others”. Charlie, Claire, Sun, Shannon and Sayid are at the beach camp and Jack, Kate, Locke and Hurley are standing over the blast door looking down at.....

The Hatch

The Hatch leads down to an underground station known as The Swan which will replace the waterfall camp as the other main setting on the island. The station was once one of many outposts for the DHARMA initiative, a 1970’s research outfit that was exploring the island’s “unique properties”. DHARMA loses a bit of it’s mystique and mystery after seeing this past season, but the discovery of it’s remnants is still excellent - particularly the orientation film. The film is spooky with it’s institutional look, weird synth soundtrack and it’s deliberate omitted scene. The fact that it’s all from 30 years ago gives the mystery more heft. The Station provides many modern conveniences including running water for a bathroom and shower, music, literature, processed food, and unfortunately a fresh set of guns and ammo. These modern conveniences are a large part of the survivor’s desire for rescue. With them satiated, the second season becomes less about survival and rescue, and more about the mystery of the island and it’s inhabitants. However the most significant aspect of The Swan is...

Alan Moore on Blackest Night and the reusing of ideas in comics

[My friend Brad called Geoff Johns on Blackest Night "the Michael Bay of comics." Then Scott sends me this. I always thought Blackest Night had to join Planetary, New X-Men and Event Horizon on a chart of great ideas badly executed. Now I see that Blackest Night was not even Johns' idea. I make a brief comment below.]

The following is a quote from Alan Moore that’s been circulating online regarding Blackest Night:

I was noticing that DC seems to have based one of its latest crossovers [Blackest Night] in Green Lantern based on a couple of eight-page stories that I did 25 or 30 years ago. I would have thought that would seem kind of desperate and humiliating, When I have said in interviews that it doesn't look like the American comic book industry has had an idea of its own in the past 20 or 30 years, I was just being mean. I didn't expect the companies concerned to more or less say, "Yeah, he's right. Let's see if we can find another one of his stories from 30 years ago to turn into some spectacular saga." It's tragic. The comics that I read as a kid that inspired me were full of ideas. They didn't need some upstart from England to come over there and tell them how to do comics. They'd got plenty of ideas of their own. But these days, I increasingly get a sense of the comics industry going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of the night.

(the story in question is ‘Tygers’ and can be found in both the DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore and a Blackest Night tie-in collection)

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Uncanny X-Men #245

[Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Claremont's X-Men Run]

“Men”

Another complaint about Claremont (there are so very many) is that his brand of superhero feminism was less than it should have been, because he “cheated” by making his female characters into powerhouses. A letter was published in Uncanny late in the run, opining that Claremont had only three males -- Xavier, Magneto and Wolverine – who could stand alongside the females in terms of raw power.

I honestly have a hard time not seeing a bit of sexism in this complaint as well. Are males so threatened by powerful females that they can’t even stomach having a bunch of them in a comic book? If X-Men is filled with powerhouse women, we must surely view this in relation to the rest of the superhero landscape, which is dominated by scores of powerful males.

The New Gods #10

[Andy Bentley continues his issue by issue look at Jack Kirby's New Gods.]

“Earth...The Doomed Dominion!”

New Gods #10 brings Mantis and his army of bugs to Earth which validates Orion’s warnings to the police department of impending doom. The conclusion to the battle is rather simple with a few interesting details.

As Mantis begins the march of the oppressed bugs towards Earth, the defector Forager is already there and causing quite a stir. He has pinched some food from a local bakery and is bounding across the city with the police in pursuit. My thoughts immediately drifted to Spider-Man who also crawls around in a half red suit, often on the wrong side of the law. Eventually the police capture him and take him to police HQ where Orion and Lightray are being detained. Forager recognizes Orion who greets Forager with disgust. Forager proclaims he is not a bug, and one of them. He removes his mask to reveal his human visage which convinces Lightray. This clears up some of my confusion on race and species on New Genesis, but also raises some more questions. However there’s no time for that with Mantis approaching. The district attorney orders the trio to stay, but Lightray whisks them away in a flash of light. The three hide above on a rooftop until Mantis and his horde approach. The battle begin in a kinetic splash page between Mantis and Orion and Forager and the bugs. Lightray realizes the numbers are against them and flies off to look for another option. I’m again struck by how well Orion and Lightray compliment one another. If the New Gods do in fact exist after Final Crisis, I’d like to request an Orion - Lightray book. Lightray discovers a Sonic R&D building which houses a transmitter that can reach the entire city. He requests their services to transmit a special frequency that only the bugs can hear. This turns the tide of the battle as Mantis and the bugs double over in pain, clutching their ears. They return to New Genesis via a boom tube as Orion, Lightray and Forager stand triumphant.

Rememberance of Comics Past: Marvel's Star Wars

[Scott continues his series. He would like to remind everyone that the 'Rememberance of Comics Past' banner is open to anyone who would like to revisit a favorite comic of their childhood, whether it be a series or just a single issue]

Princess Leia flying her very own Y-Wing with C-3PO as her co-pilot, Lando Calrisian: Master of Disguise, Mandalorians with Scottish accents, Luke Skywalker with a companion who is, basically, a telepathic bunny rabbit known as a Hoojib…. Where did I get all of this? From some fever dream I had as the result of eating too much Hawaiian Pizza and falling asleep watching a Star Wars marathon on Spike TV? Nope. These stories all actually happened in Marvel’s Star Wars comics of the late seventies and early 80’s.

The series, which picked up as a continuation of Marvel’s adaptation of the original Star Wars and lasted from 1977-1986 and actually helped keep Marvel afloat in a sales slump, pre-dated the strict canonical continuity that exists today in the ‘Expanded Star Wars Universe’. For the record, as big a Star Wars fan as I am, I never really got into the ‘Expanded Universe’; I’ve only read one Star Wars novel and I picked it up because, looking at the description, it seemed to be an adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness only with Mace Windu (which it totally was, still not really worth the read though). On the DVD commentary of the original Star Wars (I’m a purist so it’s always ‘Star Wars’ to me… not ‘A New Hope’) George Lucas himself pointed out that one of the beauties of the movies was that you were sort of thrown into this strange world without any real explanation of what was going on; you were given just enough information so you understood what was going on but the rest was sort of left up to your imagination (Ironically, he would later spend three whole films explaining what was going on).

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Uncanny X-Men #244

[Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Claremont's X-Men run. Can you believe how far he has gotten?]

“Ladies’ Night”

Claremont wrote Uncanny X-Men for 17 years, and it has now been 18 (and counting) since he stopped (the first time). His accomplishment and his status in the industry has unsurprisingly diminished – which is partly why I started doing this blog in the first place – but two decades ago, as the writer of the #1 comic-book of virtually the entire 1980s, Claremont loomed large on the comics scene. Even The Comics Journal, which tried its best to ignore superhero material as much as it could, had plenty to say about Claremont’s work. It was as hard to ignore back then as it seems to be easy to ignore now.

Thus, a review of any comic-book with female protagonists would garner the inevitable comparison to Claremont, whose X-Men work was populated with so many well formulated female characters. “These are real women,” the Journal would rhapsodize about whatever black-and-white indy book had won their hearts. “Not men with breasts, like Claremont writes.” The implication being that Claremont’s women are simply superheroes who happen to be girls, but aren’t readily distinguishable in any meaningful way from their male counterparts.

The Forever People #10

[Andy Bentley continues his issue by issue look at Jack Kirby's New Gods.]

“The Scavengers!”

Deadman overstays his welcome in this second issue of his team up with the Forever People. Kirby’s apathy towards the character shows in the story’s flaws in continuity and resolution. DC editorial foisted this team up upon Kirby and it proves editorial must respect the boundaries of creative.

We open on a quasi-futuristic carjacking complete with magnetic boots and ejector seats. The criminals are a group known as The Scavengers and they have a Diabolik-type feel with mysterious code names and wild technology. They’re run by the director who bears more than a passing resemblance to the Batman villain, Humpty dumpty. He also has a hook for a right hand, implying he is the true killer Deadman is seeking out. The Scavengers have been scouting The Forever People for their super powers which in turn reveals Deadman’s resurrection to the Director.

James on Watchmen / Savage Critics on Dark Knight Strikes Again (comment pull quote, link)

James wrote in the Free Form Comments

Watchmen, bloody Watchmen. Finally read my Absolute Edition, after what, 2 years? 3? (Actually, I haven't read all the scripts and stuff in the back, yet. It's a lot of book.)

It's a beautiful edition. There's recoloured versions of the regular trade now, but they don't come close to the quality of print and paper in the Absolute, and you can't imagine how different the art looks at this size. Proper gorge'.

I can't remember if I've linked to Andrew Rilstone's Watchmen essay before, but it's the best analysis I've read since Geoff's, check it out. He says he admires the comic, but can't bring himself to love it - a view I think Geoff shares, and one I've always resisted. It's not just a clinical literary exercise! It's a rollicking good story in its own right! Isn't it?

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Uncanny X-Men #243

[Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Claremont's X-Men.]

“Inferno: Part the Fourth — Ashes”

The previous issue ended with a cool and sexy cliffhanger, as Dark Madelyne stood atop a tower -- Dark Havok by her side, Jean Grey her prisoner, and her own baby about to be sacrificed. From there, Claremont passed the narrative baton to the Simonsons, who turned in a pretty ugly issue, both visually and textually. But, it did at least offer a definitive origin of Madelyne Pryor, every loose end accounted for and every old plot thread addressed. (Claremont is rarely as neat and tidy.)

X-Factor #38 is a faintly depressing comic in terms of production value – but, from there we bounce back to Uncanny X-Men, and we get a gorgeous splash page of Madelyne Pryor, whose cape is a black Phoenix bird, every fold of which is gorgeously rendered by guest-inker Hilary Barta. Claremont’s narration is comfortingly baroque (with Madelyne described as a clone grown from “a clutch of stolen cells” – lovely); Silvestri’s figure-work is beautiful … ah, all is right with the world.

Mister Miracle #9

[Andy Bentley continues his issue by issue look at Jack Kirby's New Gods. I am not going to lie to you. I literally just forgot to blog today, which is why this is going up after midnight. Sorry.]

“Himon!”

Like “The Pact!” before it, “Himon!” opens with a note from Mr. Kirby thanking us, the readers, for indulging his efforts on this issue. I’m at a loss as to what I’m indulging, as I found Himon to be as enjoyable as “The Pact!” before it. Kirby finally gives us the details of Scott Free’s escape from Apokolips which delves heavily into freedom of creative expression- something that if you have been following along, is a common theme in Kirby’s work at DC.

“Himon!” takes place after “The Pact!” but before the first issue of Mr. Miracle. The prologue sets up the issue’s villain, Willik, who is in the slums of Apokolips looking the legendary peaceful objector to Darkseid’s regime named Himon. Willik rounds up the people of the area and demands Himon step forth. Believing Darkseid’s subjects would willingly die for his regime, he sets the entire crowd afire to weed out the rabble rouser. With this act (and one further in the story), Willik becomes a more dangerous villain that any of Darkseid’s colorful flunkies we have seen before. His costume is not flashy, he has no gimmick or powers, yet he proves he will murder innocents for Darkseid rather than just threaten it. Kirby’s Fourth World is often said to have one foot in the past and one in the future. Willik is the villain of the future.

Twin Peaks, Season 2 Episode 22: THE END

By Jill Duffy, girl reporter [completing her episode by episode look at Twin Peaks. I make a brief comment below.]

“And now, an ending. Where there was once one, there are now two. Or were there always two? What is a reflection? A chance to see two? When there are chances for reflections, there can always be two or more. Only when we are everywhere will there be just one. It has been a pleasure speaking to you.” –The Log Lady

When the Log Lady speaks her parting words about duplicity, sameness, and reflection to introduce this final episode of Twin Peaks, I honestly wonder what she wants us to think about.

There is no obvious answer, but the two “twos” that come to mind first are Bob and his “host” (Leland, for example), and Laura and Maddy.

Let’s start with Bob. We haven’t seen much of Bob lately at all. Then there’s Leland, who came apart at the seams and finally died a few episodes back. Maddy has been dead for quite some time, and Laura was never seen alive on the show ever.

I never really thought about that until now. Laura Palmer isn’t really on the show.

I guess for Laura at though, her absence was her presence. Her whole role in the show was that she was dead at the start of it.

But in this final episode, directed by David Lynch, many of these people come back.

What Happens

The show gets off on a roll. There’s some turmoil in the beginning about Pete and a stolen truck—just enough to establish a conspiracy and pick up some momentum. Pete thinks Margaret, The Log Lady, stole his truck, but it was actually Windom Earle disguised as Margaret. (More Bugs Bunny stuff for you right there!)

Earle has kidnapped Annie and is taking her to the woods in the stolen truck. His plan is to invoke fear in her, because he needs fear in order to open the gateway to the Black Lodge and the other side.

I feel like it’s strange to watch Annie at first in this scene because she’s almost cold. But something else about her seems strong, like she is deliberately trying to not show fear so that Earle can’t get what he’s after. None of that is explicit, and maybe it wasn’t even intended, but that’s how I felt about her performance.

Annie at first repeats prayer (she used to be in a convent, if you recall) and talks to her captor rationally. But aggressively, Earle makes her submit and forces into a circle of sycamore tree. The moment she steps into the circle, she becomes totally washed over.

A flashlight shines on Annie in the darkness, with high contrast, and she looks a little like Laura at a glance. Then she and Windom walk behind a red curtain that appears in the backdrop. They just slip behind it and disappear in the woods. I can’t imagine what that moment must have been like to see on television when this episode first aired.

Meanwhile. . .

Nadine and Mike suffer head trauma, which causes Nadine to come back to full consciousness and adulthood again. She back in reality, but she’s also back to her frail and crazy self.

I don’t like the Nadine thing ending this way. It’s sad to see her acting like a hysterical woman, screaming about drape runners again, when she had become such a strong and fearless young woman.

It’s strange that this scene is butted up against the one with Annie, as two women who were momentarily strong are not anymore.

As for Donna, she has learned that Ben Horne is her biological father. There’s a confrontation, and Doc Hayward goes berserk, punching Horne hard and causing him to spin, stumble, and crack his head open on the fireplace. Doc Hayward falls to his knees, shaking his fists and head in anger, or in frustration at being overcome by emotion or darkness enough to knock another man out cold. That was totally unexpected. Doc Hayward is the last person you’d ever suspect to lose his cool, or worse, be overtaken by Bob—and there’s a hint from the music cues and the level of gore in this scene that maybe that’s what’s about to happen.

Back In The Woods. . .

Cooper goes to the woods, in pursuit of Windom Earle and Annie, with Harry, but says he has to go forward alone. The lighting uses a lot of flashlights, and there’s a lot of handheld camera work. It’s very Blair Witch Project, only less nauseating.

Cooper finds the circle of 12 sycamore trees, sees a pool of oil, and just like that, slips behind the same red curtains where Earle and Annie disappeared.

Harry seems to look on. Can Harry see the curtain? When the camera is from his perspective, it’s there, though I’m not 100 percent convinced he can see it. Maybe he sees Coop just disappear into a little strike of light.

Behind the Curtain. . .

Behind the curtain, the dim spot-flashlight lighting changes and we get strobe instead. There’s an old singer with an old-fashioned mic with heavy reverb. The little man is there.

We see the little stage area of two couches and a statue where Laura once appeared with the Little Man in Cooper’s dream.

The red room is what’s memorable about Twin Peaks, so I understand why Lynch and Frost want to end the series here. But it is odd that so much time has passed since Twin Peaks took place in the red room. This is riveting for television, and what I think makes it riveting is returning to this magical and special place that was never explained to us. We get to return to this place that we wanted to know more about.

Seriously, riveting! The characters in this show go into another dimension, where there are strobe lights, murdered high school girls, a midget—and!—this isn’t even the first time they go to this place! There are people on the outside, namely Harry now, waiting for the characters to return to the normal world. Usually if this kind of alternate universe were taking place in a television show or movie, no one but the character experiencing it would know so that we, the audience, would always have to wonder if the entire experience were only some allusion or delusion.

In Twin Peaks, though, we have Harry, Hawk, Margaret, and Briggs to back up the story. We had the one-armed man Mike. We had the little boy who made the creamed corn disappear. All the corroborated stories tell us, “This is really happening!” This place really exists.

At daylight, Andy and Harry are waiting for Cooper to reemerge. It’s been about 10 hours, they say.

Again, Meanwhile. . .

Audrey goes into a bank and handcuffs herself to the local Savings and Loan to protest its investment in Ghostwood.

There’s an excruciatingly old man working at the bank. I like the old geezer cameos, like the one in Cooper’s hotel room after he has been shot. They walk as if they need a walker or cane, but can manage to take just a few steps on their own... just a few more… just a few more. They limp along at a hilariously slow pace.

In the bank vault, we get a lot of Lynchian shots, where we watch, in one continuous shot, the old man walk way down a hallway, fetch a glass of water, and then walk all the way back to Audrey, and then walk another stretch to put the glass down, and then pace around some more.

This long distance shot, which is still in effect when Andrew and Pete show up, puts a huge amount of distance between us and them. It also, though, tells us that the action is due to move back our way any moment now.

Andrew has come to the bank because he has a key from Eckhart that is, apparently, for a safety deposit box. Andrew finds the box, opens it, and inside there is a note—“Got you, Andrew”—and a bomb that immediately blows the whole place to smithereens. We can only assume everyone is dead.

At the R&R Diner, Shelly and Bobby are hanging out. Sarah, Laura’s mother, and Dr. Jacoby enter looking for Briggs and his wife, telling them they have an urgent message. Sarah sits down and tells Briggs, in a crazy demonic whisper, “I’m in the Black Lodge with Dale Cooper.”

Who is channeling Sarah to say this? Is it Bob? Windom Earle? The midget? Laura? Suddenly, there is a shot of the red room hallway, and voice saying, “I’ve waited for you.”

We are now 31 minutes into this 49-minute show, if you can believe it. I can’t. That’s why I made a note of it.

In the red room, Laura arrives. The elderly hotel porter arrives. The giant arrives and says, “One and the same,” as people continue to appear and disappear or turn into someone else.

One unique thing about Twin Peaks that I’ve harped on before is how explicit the show is in getting across some of its messages. When Bob inhabited Leland, nothing was left up to interpretation. We saw and heard several times how Bob took over Leland’s body. There was never any doubt in anyone’s mind about what was happening.

Now, however, what the hell is going on?

It’s kind of great. What could be creepier? And again, I can’t believe this was ever on prime time.

Cooper picks up a cup of coffee. It’s fake and the liquid is fake, and doesn’t pour. He rights it, tips again, and now it pours like normal. He rights it again, pours again, and now it pours like molasses. Cooper is experimenting in the world, I think, testing things out to see what happens. The problem is, objects do not seem to have fixed properties, much like how people morphed into one another only moments before.

The Little Man says, “Wow Bob, wow,” and “Fire walk with me.” Then more strobes.

Cooper exits to the hallway, through the curtains, and parts the curtains on the other side only to find a replica of the room he was just in, except devoid of people. He returns to the first room, and the Little Man yells at him, “Wrong way.”

He exits again, goes back to the second room again, and finds the Little Man there this time, yelling and gyrating. He says, “Another friend,” and we see a silhouette coming from behind the curtains. It’s Maddy. She says, “Watch out for my cousin.”

Cooper goes to the first room.

It’s empty.

Then the Little Man appears, but his eyes are messed up. He says, “Doppleganger.”

Laura appears, also with messed up vampire eyes. She screeches and screams, blood curdling, for a long time. Cooper runs away. Now he’s bleeding. He goes back and forth between the two rooms so much that I lose track of which was the first room and which was the second. Where are people good, and where are they bad?

He enters one again. Each time it’s different. Now he sees Caroline dead on the floor lying next to his own body double. She rises and it becomes Annie, with a bloody and punctured throat.

He exits, reenters. Annie is there. “I saw the face of the man who killed me. It was my husband.” Then Annie becomes Caroline, then Annie again, then Laura, then Windom. He says, “If you give me your soul, then I’ll let Annie live.” And Windom seems to take his soul. Then fire. Then Bob tortures Windom.

Bob tells Cooper to go, that Earle is “wrong.” “He can’t ask for your soul. I will take his.” As Bob laughs like crazy, Cooper flees the room, toward the camera. Then there is a shadowy figure behind the curtain at the opposite end of the room, and in through the curtains comes Cooper, now with messed up eyes, and he joins Bob in laughing.

We are 45 minutes in. I can’t believe how much happens in this episode in only 45 minutes.
Leland appears with the cataract eyes, and colored hair again (remember his hair went white). He says, “I did not kill anybody."

Another Cooper appears in the same shot. Cooper 1 leaves. Cooper 2 approaches Leland. Cooper 2 has an evil grin. Cooper 2 goes after Cooper 1.

The two Coopers run in circles, as much as where they are can be said to put them in circles. The evil Coop catches up with the good one just as we cut to the woods and see Harry waking, and yelling out to Cooper, who is now in the ground in the sycamore circle. Annie is there as well, knocked out, with a bloody face.

This is the 47 minute mark.

Cooper wakes up in the hotel room. Harry and Doc Hayward are there. He says several times that he needs to brush his teeth and goes alone into the bathroom. Something is off about him. Obviously, he’s upset, and that’s an understatement.
Once in the bathroom, he squeezes toothpaste into the sink, then raises his head at the mirror and smashes it into it, bloodying his face, cracking the mirror. As he lifts his face, it’s Bob’s reflection. In a maniac’s mocking voice, he repeats, “How’s Annie? How’s Annie? How’s Annie?” and laughs at himself. And that’s how it ends, at 49 minutes: Bob takes over Cooper.

Last Rites

I don’t know what to make of it. I’m glad the show is over because I wouldn’t have wanted a season three in which Bob manifests as Cooper. What would have been the plot? Waiting for Cooper to kill Annie or Audrey or some other young girl? That would have been too dark, too grim, and too much of a stretch with Cooper’s character.

I think Cooper already became someone that I wasn’t as crazy about in season two when he fully became a community member of Twin Peaks. In season one, he is an outsider, hanging upside down in his hotel as part of his daily exercises, making voice recordings to Diane, his secretary back at home base, in short, a kooky guy who has brought his kooky ways to this small town, which he then learns has its own kooky ways.

Knowing that at the end of this episode, there is no more Twin Peaks the television program, I think it works to end it this way. Having Cooper be overtaken by Bob works only if it isn’t explained or followed through on. It works because we don’t know what will happen next.

[I kind of disagree about not knowing what will happen next, but I am in the minority on this. I think that just like in Lost Highway the whole thing comes full circle. Next up: a beautiful young girl is murdered, and the person who did it is the person you would least expect: someone who loved her very much. I think this is partly why when Lynch does the Fire Walk With Me movie it does not really advance anything -- it just acts as a prequel, not really revealing much.]

[Also: Thank you very much Jill Duffy!]

FlashForward

Some spoilers for LOST season 5.

I got into a conversation today with Brad who I had not talked to in a while and we discussed Flashforward: we discovered that we had the exact same reaction. We liked the first episode, but immediately put it on the burn pile because of the second one. Flashforward is a great premise: everyone on earth gets a glimpse of 6 months in the future, and then has to grapple with what it means, and how it happened. Just the neatness with which you can describe the thing shows that people are working hard to make this thing work. It makes a calculated full frontal assault on the throne of LOST at ABC, which goes off the air in May. Not just with the casting of Lost's Penny and eventually Charlie, but with that opening sequence which introduces our main man just as Lost did.

Free Form Comments

Say whatever you want to in the comments to this post -- random, off topic thoughts, ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, criticisms (which can be anonymous), surveys, introductions if you have never commented before, personal news, self-promotion, requests to be added to the blog roll and so on. If I forget, remind me. Remember these comments can be directed at all the readers, not just me.

ALSO. You can use this space to re-ask me questions you asked me before that I failed to answer because I was too busy.

AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore.

You do not have to have a blogger account or gmail account to post a comment -- you can write a comment, write your name at the bottom of your comment like an e mail, and then post using the "anonymous" option.

WRITING FOR THIS BLOG. If I see a big free form comment that deserves more attention, I will pull it and make it its own post, with a label on the post and on the sidebar that will always link to all the posts you write for this blog. I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music, books and iPhone apps.

Uncanny X-Men #242

[Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Claremont's X-Men. An especially good entry here, in its look at Cyclops and Havok.]

“Inferno: Part the Third — Burn”

In 1988, Marc Silvestri and Dan Green earned a place in X-Men history, drawing the first issue of Uncanny X-Men since 1969 that featured the original five members of the team as the chief protagonists. They are even the main focus of the cover, charging towards the reader heroically while Storm, Wolverine and Havok loom above them like villains. The entire first half of Uncanny #242 sees the current X-Men – the ones who had spent all of 1988 being terrifying and alien – taken to that extreme. They are being influenced (albeit not outright possessed) by a demonic invasion, and further manipulated by Madelyne Pryor, and as such end up acting more as antagonists; while the pure-hearted, Silver Age X-Men seem somehow immune to “Inferno”’s psychological effects. This is a nice twist on Claremont’s part.

The “new X-Men vs. old X-Men” story here is, oddly enough, a first. There were a couple such issues back during Claremont’s earliest days, but in both of those cases, the “old X-Men” who showed up were imposters – robots, in one case; illusions in the other. This is the first time in the franchise’s history that the “real” Silver Age X-Men fight the “real” new X-Men.

LOST revisited - Season 1

[Andy Bentley takes a look at the first season of LOST. I make a brief comment at the bottom.]

“Its comin' back around again” - R.A.T.M. People of the Sun

In the summer of 2004, I obtained the screener copy of the first two episodes of LOST. I was intrigued by the concept, particularly the sci-fi aspect to the show. But it also had a lot of hollywood gloss to it and I doubted the show would ever move beyond the island. When I saw the creepy title sequence had survived the summer and made it to broadcast, my respect for the show grew. By the time I saw Walkabout, the episode which cleverly reveals Locke’s paralysis in the final moments, I was completely hooked. I’ve watched all the episodes in real time week-to-week which is something I now rarely do. Many of my friends have blown through a season or three and then felt helpless to be at the mercy of ABC’s scheduling. With all of us losties now eagerly awaiting February 2010, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the show: 1 season a month.

First seasons feels a little incongruent to a show as a whole and Lost is no exception. The actors feel a bit less genuine in the 1st 12 episodes or so but soon settle into their characters. Many of the people we follow from the crash try desperately to rid themselves of their past lives but all end up back where they started. Let’s go over the principal players:

Twin Peaks, Season 2 Episode 21 (or episode 28): The Penultimate Episode

By Jill Duffy, girl reporter [continuing her episode by episode look at Twin Peaks.]

What is the purpose of this episode?

Given that the final installment of Twin Peaks is near at hand, this episode should theoretically help to speed up some plots, give vital information, and otherwise help tie up loose ends. And in many ways, it does. We learn some things that are crucial to understanding the last episode and understanding the true nature of a few characters. For example, Windom Earl reveals that he was the one who actually killed his wife: “I haven’t been this excited since I punctured Caroline’s aorta,” he says when he learns how to get inside the Black Lodge. I think we’re supposed to gasp a little bit at this moment, having previously believed that Caroline was killed by some villain who was really after Cooper (that’s a basic summary, though it’s slightly more complicated than that).

But at other moments, this episode is a free-for-all. There are three -- count ’em, three! -- dance numbers. They all take place during a “Miss Twin Peaks Beauty Pageant,” but three dance performances is fluff no matter what context it’s in.

Plok Interviews Me on his Blog

And in that interview I say:

My point of reference when I worked [as a nightwatchman for two years] was the final issue of the Invisibles, where someone says “My Invisible initiation involved three years as a trainee accounts manager. I learned to shovel numbers, go home and dream, get fat on tortillas and Oreos. Then when I was ready, I found them again.”

Click the quote for the whole thing.

Uncanny X-Men #241

[Jason Powell continues his issue by issue look at Claremont's X-Men.]

“Inferno: Part the Second — Fan the Flames”

It’s excessive, it’s bloated and it’s plagued by more than a couple dubious leaps in logic, but for all of that, the “Inferno” crossover can be said to have delivered some major climaxes to several long-running mysteries and plot threads. The X-Men had been talking about bringing down the Marauders for a good long while now … indeed, the Marauders were the reason the X-Men decided to “let the world believe them dead.” Now, in the previous issue and this one, they finally take those bastards down. Silvestri is in excellent form, and he has a lot of fun with the action sequences. He and Green sell the Marauders’ last stand with gusto.

Meanwhile, we also get (as the cover blurb puts it) “At last! The startling secret of Madelyne Pryor!” Indeed. Now, again, Claremont has always, always said that Madelyne was meant to just be a dead ringer for Jean, and the whole “Is she Phoenix reincarnated” mystery was a red herring. He maintains that position to this day. In this issue, we learn that she was a clone of Jean Grey, but this is a ret-con that was shoehorned into Maddie’s backstory, so that she could find out about it and thus have more reason to become an insane villain. This is still Claremont’s idea, presumably, but not one he seems to have liked very much.

New Gods #9

[Andy Bentley continues his issue by issue look at the New Gods.]

“The Bug!”

This issue introduces readers to Forager, a character I have only seen in the Justice League cartoon series. In the episode, Twilight, Forager bravely rescues Wonder Woman and Batman in New Genesis yet he seems to have a self esteem issue. “I’m just a Bug” is the line I remember from him. Forager appears to be defeated by a social class system where the New Gods in the golden floating city above look down upon the lowly people below. A heavy handed metaphor, but that’s the way Kirby likes them. In the end, he is commended by the New Gods for protecting the children of New Genesis. By the end of this issue, Forager has arrived on Earth to seek out Orion which leads me to believe similar accolades from the New Gods are on the way.

The opening soliloquy by Kirby explains that “micro-life” emanated from the great clash between the New Gods bringing forth Forager and the race of Bugs that he belongs to. Kirby uses the words “Toxic” and “Festering” to describe this race of... well what exactly are they? They appear to be humans in superhero outfits that resemble insects to varying degrees. They have a hive type of culture where drones are sent out to hunt for food by a queen. However Forager is different than the rest of his species. His mentor (and consigliere to the Queen), Prime One, explains that Forager is more evolved because he questions the nature of their lives and sees a future where their race could roam New Genesis free of persecution. Prime One seems to suggest that their prison is self made and that the bugs must overcome their own fears first. However there is definite contempt for their species by the New Gods as we see flying drones sent by High-father that spray a sort of pesticide that kills the food crazed bugs.

This rumination on the way of the world is interrupted by a familiar face. Kirby has brought back Mantis who’s powers fit the insect theme nicely. Mantis has been rabble-rousing the Bugs into a war with the New Gods in order to carve a spot on the planet for themselves. This sets up a Magneto/Professor X type of conflict with only Forager on the side of peaceful integration. He returns to find his mentor, Prime One, about to be executed by the queen. It is explained that this is ritual, yet it feels like he’s being killed for his views. Forager leaps to save him but is restrained by the royal guards. Prime one offers one last command to Forager: Find Orion. With his Obi-Wan Kenobi gone and his people set to murder him for heresy, Forager attempts to escape to the surface of New Genesis but is instead pulled into an boom tube pointed towards Earth. Where Orion is. Very convenient.

During all this, Orion has been healing his wounds from Kalibak on the rooftop of one Eve Donner. Eve is a playwright who compassion towards Orion turns to pity after she sees him shouting at the heaven’s for Darkseid. Once healed, Orion and Lightray take off towards Dave Lincoln’s apt where the authorities are ready to take the two in. Whether they will oblige will be revealed next issue.

Orion has the smaller part of this A + B story, but it does setup a contrast and comparison between him and Forager. Forager’s savior, Orion, is as one sided and visionless as the bug culture. Both men seek freedom from tormentors, and are looking to escape their heritages. Orion is abrasive and unlikable whereas Forager’s intellect and optimistic spirit are refreshing and could motivate others. Maybe a little Forager will rub off on Orion next issue. We shall see.

Final Musings

-The caste system of New Genesis bring me back to the question of races on these planets. Are bugs a subspecies descended from the gods? If so, why have they forsaken them? If the bugs lacked a human resemblance, how different would the story be?

-Prime One refers to the New Gods as “Eternals”. This word was obviously bouncing around Jack’s head as he would go on to create The Eternals over at Marvel in ’76 which explored many of the themes seen in The Fourth World saga.

-Forager’s design is just plain awesome. Like many other action figure enthusiasts, I am anxious to get ahold of the new figure of him. A Wal-Mart exclusive:

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Planetary 27

[Jason Powell's next X-Men essay has been pushed to Thursday, because I have gotten a lot of calls for this, and I don't want it to be untimely.]

Major spoilers for the series, and this issue in particular.

More than ten years later, the series that got me to write my book on superheroes comes to a close with its 27th issue. The series began very much in the debt of the X-Files: the investigators look into the "freak of the week" which is culled from various pop culture while revealing an overarching conspiracy. It took so long to come to a conclusion that X-Files knock-off Fringe appeared, and became successful, in part because a chunk of the viewing audience was simply too young to remember the X-Files.

A third of my life passed between the first and twenty-seventh issues, which makes it very hard to review. People bitched about the long wait between issues, but I think the worst effect was that I can only guess what my 20 year old self would have thought about this issue.

At 20 I wanted good ideas to write about primarily, and the Planetary delivered. I was interested in how a work of pop culture incorporates, revises, and attempts to ultimately transcend its influences. Planetary put that theme front and center. The best example of this was issue 10, which showed how the Four (analogues for The Fantastic Four, but evil, and the main antagonists) destroyed three beings that could have been so valuable to earth -- beings who were analogues of Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Green Lantern. Put that with the first issue in which analogues of pulp novel heroes -- The Shadow, Doc Savage, Tarzan, Fu-Manchu, G-8 -- get into a battle with a group of creatures that are clear analogues to the classic Justice League of America. The Pulps battle their comic book successors, just as the Silver Age of comics kills the Golden Age of comics, in order to supersede them. I argued in my book that Planetary made this battle between creators for imaginative supremacy into the plot of the story in order to establish itself as the herald of a new age -- because of course ultimately they would take down The Four just as the Four took down the Golden Age and the Golden Age decimated the pulps.

Planetary was great because of all the things we got to see along the way especially in the first 14 issues: Godzilla monsters, Hong Kong Ghost Cops, Vertigo comics, 50s B movies, Bond, Sherlock Holmes teamed up with Dracula and the Invisible Man, and the X-Files. It was fun getting to see Ellis and Cassaday riff on all these things, and organize them as a critic might: William Leather (The Johnny Storm analogue) was the son of the Lone Ranger, if I am remembering this correctly.

In the back half of the series, after the first major 2 year hiatus, the series had to head for a conclusion, had to begin to wrap up the overarching plot. Analogues were still there, but they were less important - -partly because it felt like Ellis was just sort of done with this thing and wanted it over. There was a ton of build of to the reveal of Jacob Green (the Thing analogue), for instance, but the reveal was pretty anti-climatic -- after many years of hearing about how evil and terrifying he is we see him in full sunlight, with none of our characters anywhere near him. And just like that he is blown up remotely without costing our guys hardly anything. In the end the Four went the same way just sort of getting their asses kicked pretty quickly, at no cost. Ellis has a point here about how it was never really about them, how they are just small things in the nature of the universe of the series. It is a nice point, drawing our attention back to those one off issues from the first half of the series and enjoying the journey more than the destination, but it does not make for satisfying storytelling. You can't spend huge amounts of time building something up and then just have it be no big thing, unless you have a really good plan for a left turn (e.g. Bill in Kill Bill turns out to be a very different kind of threat: the threat of forgetting about revenge and living happily ever after).

After 10 years I care less for ideas and themes, and more for the ability to deliver a good story. From its first issue Planetary had a bit of trouble with story just in terms of structure: a lot of the time, like Hellboy, the characters would stand around while something happened in front of them, or hear a story (like Doc Brass's story in the first issue) and then be done. The Planetary could be like that hanging Scrabble tile that you could use as part of the seven letter word you were building -- you need the letter but the letter is not the word. Ellis was always interested in ideas first, and because the ideas were good it was not so much of a problem. But when he had to wrap up the story, had to have his main characters be MAIN CHARACTERS he runs into trouble. He is just not interested. It is very telling that interviewers have gone to him for a statement now that the series has come to an end, and all he can say by way of getting excited is "it reminded me of a bad time, and I am glad to have it behind me." In issue 26 he even has Snow say something to that effect.

So here we are with 27, which is frankly a pretty bad story. Three panels showing us through news broadcasts and a conference that the Planetary have changed the world, followed by a long science lecture, and a mostly tension free experiment, followed by a happy ending, with no cost.

I am going to edit the text of the issue into something slightly different, and people are going to say I am being unfair, but I think there is something to the exercise. Here it is:

"He raised a non-physics bubble around himself. He was a natural description-theory engine; inside that bubble he could select what physics could actually do. He could slow down time. I saw his descriptor effect the second before he vanished. ... You cant go back in time beyond the point the where the time machine was switched on. If you're in the future and you've got a time machine, and you're interested in history what's the first thing you'd go look at? Dinosaurs? The Crucifixion? The Great Flood? You can't. Because the farthest you can go is the point where the first time machine was switched on. You would go look at that. You and everybody else. Everyone from the entirety of future history arriving at once, the second after you flipped the switch. Therefore the whole of the future can be said to have happened at once. And you can't change it because it already happened. That's planetary apocalypse condition. What's the point of anything if it's all already happened? It's Schrodinger's cat writ large. The future currently exists as a mass of probability waves, collapsing into choices and events one at a time as we move forward. Turning on a time machine collapses them all at once. An infinite number of dead cats all arriving on your doorstep at once. It's a loop of light, and moving along the loop moves you along in time. (We're all living on two dimensional planes of of information. The fact that we live and breathe is a side effect of the universe.) There should be Chernikov radiation coming off of the surface of the descriptor bubble. In order for the closed loop of light to do what it's got to do, it needs a massive amount of power. If the bubble is still up there's going to be something called quantum foam around it, the outward sign that something weird and disfiguring is happening to the fabric of reality. If we can visualize that it is going to look like 800 tornadoes in a box. Those vortices create vacuums that give off energy -- massive power from nothing. Supermassive Frame Dragging: big rotational objects pull the fabric of spacetime around with them. Frame Dragging effects time and objects. So we create a closed loop of light, make it incredibly powerful and it will do the same thing only locally -- supermassive frame dragging. These extend down into the quantum foam and draw off the energy we need to power the machine."

It's not that I don't enjoy the hell out of some mad-science / gorgeous-nonsense but a little bit goes a long way: this is a lot of undigested material, like an essay in comic book form. Drums even illustrates his lectures -- not too helpfully I thought -- with a magic pen writing on air, but it was still not so far removed from just a powerpoint lecture.

Plok wrote recently about how a lot of storytellers hit the beats of a story pretty mechanically. There are worse things -- Superman Returns failed to hit some beats AT ALL -- but Ellis seems to fall into exactly the trap Plok describes. Everyone has to learn something and so Elijah learns some science stuff from Drums ("I read your damn books!") and Drums learns to bark orders like Elijah ("You're starting to sound like me, Drums") all because that is what you have to do in the last issue of something. The real image of this issue is Jakita: she is feels useless because she doesn't have anyone to hit in this utopia of mad science. It feels to me like Ellis failed to give her anything at all to do in the first draft of this script, then writes the problem into the script as her discussion with Elijah (resolved in her future self telling her (not showing her) everything is going to be fine). But then he still wants her to have something to do visually (since a lot of the "action" in this issue is pretty hard to make visual, such as "putting more power to the pulse lamps"), so she gets to leap into action and GRAB A LAMP like a monkey.

And then there are the really pointless beats: one of the medical team telling Jakita DURING THE RESCUE "we've never had so much prep time for emergency treatment in out lives but it'll still be touch and go" in response to her "you know what to do, you're all briefed on his injuries." Why, you know ON EARTH, would they be having this conversation NOW except for the fact that Ellis needs to put some exposition in and he needs it in conflict form to jazz the scene up because there is not a heck of a lot going on here; it reminds me of nothing more than the Simpsons moment when the family goes to the library and Homer bemoans having to go as soon as they enter and Marge says "Why do you always wait till we arrive somewhere to complain" (or something -- Scott, help me out here).

And the "required" beats just keep on coming. One page of news broadcasts to telling, not showing, how the world has changed: on the one had this is lazy writing, but on the other hand I can understand why you would just allude to this -- it would take a bunch more issues to show how the world was different; and again, Ellis is just THROUGH with this now: all he can to is point ahead, because he does not want to write anymore. We get cameos of Hark and Doc Brass to bring things full circle (remember when we thought maybe Doc Brass would become an antagonist?). We have the recap of the fictional survivor plot from issue 9, and Elijah's dismissal of that whole storyline ("We never found out what happened to the person they brought back" -"Probably never will"): again, I get that maybe you don't want to explain EVERYTHING (sometimes mysteries are just better as mysteries) but you also don't want to feel Ellis's exhaustion with this whole thing -- he just does not want to write this book anymore and has no interest in following up on one of the most interesting and ominous things he introduced even a little bit.

There is the pointless callback of "It's a strange world. Did you think for a minute that I wasn't going to keep it that way" -- I am not at all clear HOW is he keeping it that way, except I guess it is strange to Drums because Elijah did not give him enough information to understand what is happening when the "future" arrives. (Snow has always been Ellis's stand in character, and here we see they are alike -- they keep the tension up by just keeping key information to themselves in the cheapest way).

And worst of all -- the doctor in one of the final pages saying of Ambrose "No. No, that's it. That's all we can do." I get that TECHNICALLY this is ambiguous but I cannot see why anyone with any sense would say something so ambiguous in front of friends worried about their friend dying -- except for the fact that the happy ending is forgone conclusion, which lacks tension: so Ellis goes for the cheapest kind of tension, one notch above the bait and switch of horror movies where you think the character is in trouble and it turns out to be the cat in the cupboard or something equally lame.

This is what my 30 year old self things of this issue. But I thought it would be nice to see if I could think back to what I would have said at 20. I am not sure I would have wholly loved the issue but I would have had some good things to say about it. I would have said that Ellis has always been kind of amazing with this book in terms of tropes of past and future. There are those I have already mentioned above about the Pulps vs the Golden Age vs the Silver Age, but there are others, particularly an issue in which Snow visits a woman who gives this whole trippy lecture about how drugs come from plants that are nourished by the dead, so that we are seeing visions inspired by the dead, literally eating and incorporating our precursors. He does not fail to deliver an equally, even more powerful image here -- because no one can go further back in time than when the time machine was switched on all of future history will come back to see it the moment you flip the switch: the end of all history essentially. The twist is that only future versions of the Planetary arrive, all of them intact, and the only difference between them and the current team slight changes in dress and hair. In my book I argued that Ellis was organizing all past comic book history to set up the fight between the Four and the Planetary that the Planetary would WIN establishing themselves as the future of the genre. That pretty much literally happens here: there is NO FUTURE BUT THEM. In the entirety of future time they are the only ones to have this technology -- they never share it, and no one else ever duplicates it. If they did --then where are they? The whole of Drums' discussion of the future collapsing is meaningless if this is not how we are to read this scene.

There was a time many years ago when noticing as Jog does the Four as the Comics Company metaphor (the people who rape and profit from a naturally imaginative world where people who can do amazing things should be able to control their own destiny); and noticing Ellis' mean streak (I did not appreciate what a sentimental guy he was back then) I imagined he might end Planetary with the Four winning. He is after all writing X-Men nearly ten years after he attacked Morrison for writing X-Men instead of creator owned stuff with the line "sometimes your friends fuck ugly girls." It feels like the corporate side is doing pretty well. Looking at the ending we did get I notice that the split second we get the Fourth Man back on the Planetary Team we get a vision of nothing but the Four of them on and on through all of future time, having shared the time travel technology with absolutely no one. It is probably over-reaching to say this, and even more over-reaching to claim that they also snuffed out anyone else coming up with this time travel tech at all points in all future -- but then where IS everyone else when the time machine is switched on? This issue could have ended with a big fold out tableau along the lines of the cover except with new stuff -- a vision off the amazing new world of new things that have opened up because of the Planetary, but it does not. "A long long future lies ahead of us all. It's taken a long time to get here but you and me and her and him -- we're just getting started." Ellis figures his 10 year Planetary run as prelude -- but prelude to nothing but more Planetary adventures, adventures we will never get to see. It is a new kind of Four that dominates all future time.

It is a strange world, and Ellis did keep it that way, but I am not sure he intended to keep it strange in THIS way.