Buffy 11. The ever-uneven Buffy comics run is nearly at issue 12, surprisingly, and this is one is a good issue. This series is around 50-50. We learn the identity of the person who kissed Buffy and woke her up, we get that heartfelt conversation in the middle of a fight that Buffy does so well -- and the flip conversation gets serious quickly and once again I have to ask myself why I am such a sucker for this device. It gets me every time. Finally we get a pretty good confrontation with the big bad that includes a really funny joke about his unmasking - one of those classic Buffy moments that makes you wonder why no one ever did that before.
Newsarama has an interview with Fraction about Thor that has some really funny bits.
Review, recommend, and discuss this week's comics and comics news. My review of the glorious new LOST episode will be up tomorrow.
Friday, February 08, 2008
Thursday, February 07, 2008
The Tim and Eric Show
For a long time I did not understand Adult Swim's The Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! I would watch it every time it was on anyway, and eventually I realized that, weirdly, I clearly did like the show -- I just did not get why. Then I saw, on regular television at 10 AM, this commercial for Pancake Puffs. Let me emphasize that this is a real commercial -- in the YouTube clip a guy is recording his TV with a videocamera:
You see something like that and you realize that Tim and Eric are necessary. Deeply necessary.
Just for fun, here are some old comments on the Tim and Eric Show burried in a long dead Free Form Comments post:
Brad Winderbaum Wrote
Geoff, when you talk about Morrison at his best, you often say that his comics feel like they're from the future. Well Tim and Eric make comedy from the future. This is what SNL will look like in 2027. My experience goes something like this: I start watching one of their segements, and it's colorful, and it's pulling from at least ten different genres simultaneously. And the characters are acting wild and the form in which they exist is not sacred to them: whatever they're context or whatever the narrative, the characters are playing right at the very edge, where they'll either fall into an abyss or pop the bubble they're living in and send the universe imploding in on itself. Then all of a sudden, something magical will happen. I will have a moment of clarity. Every aspect of their surreal antics will align, and I will peak like a hippie in the desert. I'm filled with unexpected joy. It's hard to define, but I'll try: Hardly anything saturates my entire brain anymore. In this media-soaked world, my brain is distended. Most things just fall in there without eliciting a visceral response. But Tim and Eric manage to fill the whole fucking thing up. And once my threshold is reached, it's unrelenting, and I'm laughing like I'm being pinned down and tickled. And I'm grateful to them for making me lose control.
Matt Fraction Wrote
I only saw the pilot for TIM & ERIC but by the time it was over, two drops of pee had come out.
I don't know if that's because of the show or not.
You see something like that and you realize that Tim and Eric are necessary. Deeply necessary.
Just for fun, here are some old comments on the Tim and Eric Show burried in a long dead Free Form Comments post:
Brad Winderbaum Wrote
Geoff, when you talk about Morrison at his best, you often say that his comics feel like they're from the future. Well Tim and Eric make comedy from the future. This is what SNL will look like in 2027. My experience goes something like this: I start watching one of their segements, and it's colorful, and it's pulling from at least ten different genres simultaneously. And the characters are acting wild and the form in which they exist is not sacred to them: whatever they're context or whatever the narrative, the characters are playing right at the very edge, where they'll either fall into an abyss or pop the bubble they're living in and send the universe imploding in on itself. Then all of a sudden, something magical will happen. I will have a moment of clarity. Every aspect of their surreal antics will align, and I will peak like a hippie in the desert. I'm filled with unexpected joy. It's hard to define, but I'll try: Hardly anything saturates my entire brain anymore. In this media-soaked world, my brain is distended. Most things just fall in there without eliciting a visceral response. But Tim and Eric manage to fill the whole fucking thing up. And once my threshold is reached, it's unrelenting, and I'm laughing like I'm being pinned down and tickled. And I'm grateful to them for making me lose control.
Matt Fraction Wrote
I only saw the pilot for TIM & ERIC but by the time it was over, two drops of pee had come out.
I don't know if that's because of the show or not.
The Broken Logic of Aqua Teen Hunger Force
In an early episode, the Mooninites arrive, and encourage Meatwad to steal neighbor Carl's pornography, and also, randomly, his dresser. The drag both out to the woods. The porn is a big hit but the dresser is "infinitely boring" (the Mooninites use words like "infinite" in an attempt to talk more sci-fi, since they are from the moon). The Moonities want to set the desk on fire, but Meatwad objects, saying that that is where Carl keeps all his clothes. "But look at these girls" the Mooninite says, referring to the pornography, "they don't have any clothes and they are very happy. Look, these two are kissing." Surreal is not just random, it breaks apart things that work perfectly well and reassembles them into new weird forms. You can see that there is a logical thread here, even though you would never be persuaded by it.
In another episode, on of my favorites, the gang is faced with a doll, a doll that is alive for no real reason. The doll belongs to Meatwad, and Master Shake would love to set it on fire just to wreck it, but is dismayed that it wants to commit suicide. So Master Shake has to rethink how to be evil. He proposes to throw it off a cliff, a cliff he claims is the one from the movie Highlander. It will make the doll immortal, and thus impervious to suicide. When Frylock objects that this is not the cliff from Highlander, and that the Highlander was just a movie, and besides you have to be born a Highlander, Master Shake says "I saw cliffs in that movie. The Highlander was a documentary that was filmed in real time." "Real time" of course, has nothing to do with being realistic, it just means that, as in 24, the thing takes as long to watch as the time the characters experience. Highlander was not filmed in real time, but there is a free-associative logic to his thinking that you can almost understand, if only for a split second.
In another episode, on of my favorites, the gang is faced with a doll, a doll that is alive for no real reason. The doll belongs to Meatwad, and Master Shake would love to set it on fire just to wreck it, but is dismayed that it wants to commit suicide. So Master Shake has to rethink how to be evil. He proposes to throw it off a cliff, a cliff he claims is the one from the movie Highlander. It will make the doll immortal, and thus impervious to suicide. When Frylock objects that this is not the cliff from Highlander, and that the Highlander was just a movie, and besides you have to be born a Highlander, Master Shake says "I saw cliffs in that movie. The Highlander was a documentary that was filmed in real time." "Real time" of course, has nothing to do with being realistic, it just means that, as in 24, the thing takes as long to watch as the time the characters experience. Highlander was not filmed in real time, but there is a free-associative logic to his thinking that you can almost understand, if only for a split second.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
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 a week goes by and I have failed to add you to the blog roll TELL ME TO DO IT AGAIN, and KEEP TELLING ME UNTIL IT GETS DONE. I can be lazy about updating the non-post parts of this site. 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 (but now might not be). That is often the reason I fail to get back to people, and on a blog, after a few days, the comments thread dies and I just kind of forget about it. Let's use this space to fix that, because it does need to be fixed; I look like a jackass sometimes, leaving people hanging. I will TRY to respond to any questions here.
AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore. For example, if you thought of a great quote for the great quote commonplace book, but now no one is reading that, you could put it here.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 you think your free form comment here might be better as its own post, but you do not want it to be public yet, email it to me. My email address is available on my blogger profile page. If I think it will work on this site, your post will be published here with your name in the title of the post. You can propose what you will, I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music and books.
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 (but now might not be). That is often the reason I fail to get back to people, and on a blog, after a few days, the comments thread dies and I just kind of forget about it. Let's use this space to fix that, because it does need to be fixed; I look like a jackass sometimes, leaving people hanging. I will TRY to respond to any questions here.
AND you can use this space to comment on posts that are old enough that no one is reading the comments threads anymore. For example, if you thought of a great quote for the great quote commonplace book, but now no one is reading that, you could put it here.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 you think your free form comment here might be better as its own post, but you do not want it to be public yet, email it to me. My email address is available on my blogger profile page. If I think it will work on this site, your post will be published here with your name in the title of the post. You can propose what you will, I am always looking for reviews of games, tv, movies, music and books.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Jason Powell on Classic X-Men 12b
[This post is part of a series of posts looking issue by issue at Chris Claremont's X-Men run. For more in this series, see the toolbar on the right.]
“A Fire in the Night”
The first reference to a new origin for Magneto, rooted in the Holocaust, saw print in Uncanny X-Men #150. Again, however, Claremont weaves his ret-cons in early via Classic X-Men, and the present example – a story that lays out large parts of Magneto’s origin – is one the series’ most powerful accomplishments.
The flashback begins with Magneto – whose real name is never given here – helping the woman he loves, Magda, to escape from Auschwitz during the final days of World War II. According to an essay by Rivka Jacobs, who seems to have invented the art of Magneto scholarship online, the scene – in which Magneto fells a guard about to kill Magda and then escapes with her into a snow-covered forest – is historically accurate. Jacobs writes:
“[The scene] takes place on Jan. 20, 1945, two days after the camp was evacuated and the death marches began. Some 70 of the Sonderkommando were kept to help destroy the evidence of the death factory, before they were to be killed. Some 200 women from the woman’s camp, Jews, were chosen to fill in the huge pits where bodies were burned. They had to haul ashes, break up human bones, all in the coldest part of winter. The SS soldiers sent back on Jan. 20 were sent to kill the women. That is exactly what you see in this comic book, because Claremont and Bolton took the time and cared enough to do their research.”
Even the geography is correct, she asserts. “If they were out by the burial pits to the northwest of the camp, that is a point close to the forest.” Claremont is being careful here not to take his sensitive subject matter lightly, deliberately grounding it in as much fact as possible without distracting from the narrative.
The term Sonderkommando is defined by Jacobs as “Jewish prisoners who were forced by the Nazis -- in all the death camps -- to do the dirty work of killing. It was Nazi official policy. ... The Jews would be the ones to lead the victims to the gas chamber, to haul the bodies from the gas chambers to the ovens, to burn and bury the dead.”
Jacobs’ thesis is that Magneto was not only a Jew (something Claremont never states explicitly in the comics), but also a member of the Sonderkommando. Text in Classic X-Men #12b supports it, particularly the line in the narration that Magneto was at Auschwitz “from the start ... grown to manhood within its electrified, barbed wire fence.”
Jacobs posits that there is simply no way anyone could survive that long in Auschwitz unless they were either a Nazi or a member of the Sonderkommando. She further points out that even though much of this is kept implicit by Claremont (possibly because the sensitivity of it would have been too much for a mainstream superhero comics during the 1980s), there is an internal coherence in the various references Claremont will make in his Magneto stories during his X-Men tenure. In drawing connections between those references, Jacobs makes a very strong case for the chronology she’s assembled of Magneto’s early years, not only on an intellectual, scholarly level, but as an expression of why these details are important thematically. Her essay, linked to above, is highly recommended.
“A Fire in the Night” is a true triumph of collaboration. Claremont builds the story very carefully over its slim 12-page length, and John Bolton turns in masterful work – his finest artistic achievement on this series. Note the panel sequence on Page 4, which takes Magneto and Magda from their tragic circumstances immediately after their escape to the moment in which their daughter, Anya, is born. Each panel is a work of art in itself, imbued with realism, subtlety and poignancy. Glynis Oliver, meanwhile, a typically bold colorist, seems to be working with a more muted palette here, dominated by browns, oranges and greys.
The subdued tone is key to the story’s success. Published in early 1987, “A Fire in the Night” is post-Miracleman, post-Watchmen, etc., and Claremont is – quite successfully here, thanks to his collaborators – attempting to replicate that Moore-esque tone in this story, wherein Magneto discovers his superhuman powers. By keeping everything grounded in muted simplicity, Claremont makes us forget about the story’s context – aliens in bright red Viking armor – and the simple birth of Magneto’s powers seems extraordinary, to us and to him. (He has a wonderful line after his power has manifested only twice so far: once to let him sling a crowbar at an antagonist and then later to create forcefield protecting him from falling wreckage: “How do I make this power work?! Do I desire a thing with all my soul ... and somehow, the power makes that wish come true?!” The line perfectly expresses Magneto’s lack of context. Nothing in his life has prepared him for this development.
The story’s tragic ending pulls no punches, but the carefully maintained tone of stark realism in the art grounds Claremont’s choices. He is a fantastic writer of melodrama, but his work here – and that of his collaborators – cuts deeper. This isn’t melodrama. It is drama, period.
[Jason's best post so far in this series.
I don't mean to break the tone here but I have to ask a kind of silly-stupid question -- does Magda not appear in later comics as a woman with the head of a cow? I have a very dim memory of this in the post-Claremont X-Men comics I grew up on, but it may have been I dream I had.]
“A Fire in the Night”
The first reference to a new origin for Magneto, rooted in the Holocaust, saw print in Uncanny X-Men #150. Again, however, Claremont weaves his ret-cons in early via Classic X-Men, and the present example – a story that lays out large parts of Magneto’s origin – is one the series’ most powerful accomplishments.
The flashback begins with Magneto – whose real name is never given here – helping the woman he loves, Magda, to escape from Auschwitz during the final days of World War II. According to an essay by Rivka Jacobs, who seems to have invented the art of Magneto scholarship online, the scene – in which Magneto fells a guard about to kill Magda and then escapes with her into a snow-covered forest – is historically accurate. Jacobs writes:
“[The scene] takes place on Jan. 20, 1945, two days after the camp was evacuated and the death marches began. Some 70 of the Sonderkommando were kept to help destroy the evidence of the death factory, before they were to be killed. Some 200 women from the woman’s camp, Jews, were chosen to fill in the huge pits where bodies were burned. They had to haul ashes, break up human bones, all in the coldest part of winter. The SS soldiers sent back on Jan. 20 were sent to kill the women. That is exactly what you see in this comic book, because Claremont and Bolton took the time and cared enough to do their research.”
Even the geography is correct, she asserts. “If they were out by the burial pits to the northwest of the camp, that is a point close to the forest.” Claremont is being careful here not to take his sensitive subject matter lightly, deliberately grounding it in as much fact as possible without distracting from the narrative.
The term Sonderkommando is defined by Jacobs as “Jewish prisoners who were forced by the Nazis -- in all the death camps -- to do the dirty work of killing. It was Nazi official policy. ... The Jews would be the ones to lead the victims to the gas chamber, to haul the bodies from the gas chambers to the ovens, to burn and bury the dead.”
Jacobs’ thesis is that Magneto was not only a Jew (something Claremont never states explicitly in the comics), but also a member of the Sonderkommando. Text in Classic X-Men #12b supports it, particularly the line in the narration that Magneto was at Auschwitz “from the start ... grown to manhood within its electrified, barbed wire fence.”
Jacobs posits that there is simply no way anyone could survive that long in Auschwitz unless they were either a Nazi or a member of the Sonderkommando. She further points out that even though much of this is kept implicit by Claremont (possibly because the sensitivity of it would have been too much for a mainstream superhero comics during the 1980s), there is an internal coherence in the various references Claremont will make in his Magneto stories during his X-Men tenure. In drawing connections between those references, Jacobs makes a very strong case for the chronology she’s assembled of Magneto’s early years, not only on an intellectual, scholarly level, but as an expression of why these details are important thematically. Her essay, linked to above, is highly recommended.
“A Fire in the Night” is a true triumph of collaboration. Claremont builds the story very carefully over its slim 12-page length, and John Bolton turns in masterful work – his finest artistic achievement on this series. Note the panel sequence on Page 4, which takes Magneto and Magda from their tragic circumstances immediately after their escape to the moment in which their daughter, Anya, is born. Each panel is a work of art in itself, imbued with realism, subtlety and poignancy. Glynis Oliver, meanwhile, a typically bold colorist, seems to be working with a more muted palette here, dominated by browns, oranges and greys.
The subdued tone is key to the story’s success. Published in early 1987, “A Fire in the Night” is post-Miracleman, post-Watchmen, etc., and Claremont is – quite successfully here, thanks to his collaborators – attempting to replicate that Moore-esque tone in this story, wherein Magneto discovers his superhuman powers. By keeping everything grounded in muted simplicity, Claremont makes us forget about the story’s context – aliens in bright red Viking armor – and the simple birth of Magneto’s powers seems extraordinary, to us and to him. (He has a wonderful line after his power has manifested only twice so far: once to let him sling a crowbar at an antagonist and then later to create forcefield protecting him from falling wreckage: “How do I make this power work?! Do I desire a thing with all my soul ... and somehow, the power makes that wish come true?!” The line perfectly expresses Magneto’s lack of context. Nothing in his life has prepared him for this development.
The story’s tragic ending pulls no punches, but the carefully maintained tone of stark realism in the art grounds Claremont’s choices. He is a fantastic writer of melodrama, but his work here – and that of his collaborators – cuts deeper. This isn’t melodrama. It is drama, period.
[Jason's best post so far in this series.
I don't mean to break the tone here but I have to ask a kind of silly-stupid question -- does Magda not appear in later comics as a woman with the head of a cow? I have a very dim memory of this in the post-Claremont X-Men comics I grew up on, but it may have been I dream I had.]
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