Grant Morrison's New X-Men 142

[This post is part of a series of posts looking at Morrison's New X-Men run; for more posts in this series click the New X-Men label at the bottom of this post.]

The last group of New X-Men issues have been bad -- Morrison lost his way for a dozen issues, maybe more: a year of reading has been pretty good at best, and issue 140 was the low point. With 141 Morrison comes roaring back, creating the first perfect arc since E for Extinction, and the first perfect issue since the silent one. You can disagree with my assessment of the last 12 issues, but if you have been following these posts you know ALL my reasons for thinking it.

Years ago I wrote an essay on Mark Millar's Ultimate X-Men, Grant Morrison's New X-Men and Gnosticism. Section Six of the essay focuses on Assault on Weapon Plus (New X-Men 142-145). In that section I said the bulk of what I have to say about that arc, so if you want the main review you will have to go there. I am just going to make some quick notes for this post, and the next three posts, on things in those issues that I did not talk about in the essay.

Bachalo's artwork in in top form, and Morrison has brought writing to match. We get an extreme close up of Cyclops's visor as he gets drunk watching a stripper at the Hellfire Club -- we get so close one panel, the maximum zoom, is just red; Cyclops responds to the stripper's "you really know how to murder a nice romantic mood" with "Yeah. I guess so. I think it might be my new mutant power", and then we just get empty space at the bottom of the page. The art is great and the line is sweet, silly, funny, perfectly in character (he ruined the mood by talking about the junky outfit the stripper will wear when she goes home to her boyfriend) and a parody of Morrison's introduction of "secondary mutations" to justify giving the Beast a new look or Emma a new power. The empty space at the bottom of the page makes the comic timing work. Cyclops notes the reserved table across from him and club honor gets from Sebastian Shaw, "reserved -- a little like yourself." Its these little things, this understanding of how characters speak, that tells me Morrison is back.

Bachalo does a great job with single color tones -- the club is burnt read, the bathroom is all white. Cyclops and Wolverine drinking is fun, and Bachalo draws one page in a twisty road shape to capture their intoxication. When Wolverine goes to the bathroom Bachalo plays a perspective game with a little picture of a pinup girl over the urinal -- we see her as closely as Wolverine does -- before Wolverine and Sabertooth get into a conversation about penis size. A glamour shot of the stripper is wonderfully used to punctuate a scene and to indicate time has passed.

Fantomex is drinking Champagne -- of course he is, he is French, or at least pretending to -- and he orders Tylenol for Cyclops, who now has little green bubbles around his head to indicate his drunkenness. They stand out in pages and pages of red, and are fun. This is what Bachalo
does best, and why I love him. He has a sense of humor. I think he would pair well with Whedon, and would have been my artist of choice for Whedon's Runaways.

The issue ends with Wolverine telling Fantomex that there is no one he would rather have in his corner than Scott Summers, which is really nice: Bachalo really sells it, ending the issue a page later with a single panel, surrounded with empty space (like the camera is backing away), of Wolverine and Fantomex standing over Cyclops who is on the floor saying "*hic*". The humor sells the emotion, which is Whedon's main device (the final lines of Serenity are the best example of this, I think).

Tim Minear's Drive

I discovered on Stephen Frug's blog that Tim Minear's new TV venture Drive was cancelled after only four episodes. I watched the better part of the first three (I was cooking at a friend's house while it was on and may have missed a few details), and I wanted to share what I thought was wrong with it, beyond the Google Earth scene transitions (a complaint registered by Sara). What was right with it, by the way, was Nathan Fillion and that girl from Heavenly Creatures. Also right was that is was a show about something other than teens, doctors, lawyers, or cops.

Minear pitched his show about an illegal cross country race to Fox by saying "Drive will be to the Amazing Race what Lost is to Survivor." In interviews he joked about how his earlier shows got cancelled, and cited the titles as factors: "Wonderfalls" and "Firefly" aren't super clear about the content of the show and so he called his new show "Drive" as an analogue to the super clear LOST.

Minear's Wonderfalls and Firefly are great, and should not have been cancelled; you get the feeling that with Drive he has decided to try to cater more directly to the execs and a large a public as possible, try to stop being all "artsy" and get something on the air that will stay on the air. Lost is clearly his model.

And it is Lost that ultimately sinks Drive. Very different from Lost on the surface, Minear's Drive is reaching into the essence of Lost and trying to recreate it in another format. But it is too close to survive. Drive has a huge cast that have been thrown together and must figure out how to get along regardless of their very different backgrounds. Each episode can feature one particular character and his experience of the race -- in his interaction with his partner, we can learn his back story, what got him involved in the race and who he is. This slows down the frame sotry about the race, just as the flashbacks slow down the island narrative. Not everyone is who they seem. There are little side adventures off the beaten path to provide variation from the main story, like having to rob a bank. And most importantly, the whole thing is being manipulated by a shadowy group behind the scenes who love secrets and mind games and speak through soft spoken representatives.

As if this was not enough like Lost, the third episode brings it home in a thudding way. Nathan Fillion from Firefly is pulled over during the race by an aggressive cop who clearly hates him for apparently no reason, and smashes him in the head with a nightstick after putting him in the squad car. When he awakes he is in a police interrogation room with one of those two-way mirrors. As far as we know Fillion is a farmer from Nebraska whose wife has been kidnapped; he was dragged into the race by shadowy people who hint if he wins he will get her back. One character remarks that they must really want him in the race bad if they went to all this trouble -- who is Fillion really, we wonder. The cop insists he is the getaway driver from a robbery that went wrong, and says he is a murderer hiding from his past. Fillion insists over and over that that have the wrong guy. When he finally admits who he really is, the cop laughs and says "I wondered how long it would take you to realize who you really are." He smashes the window, and -- lo and behold -- they are NOT in a police station, but in a warehouse, and the cop is not a cop but part of the mysterious people who run the race; he gives Fillion a muscle car -- Fillion's "real car" and not the beaten up truck he has been driving. Fillion takes charge and heads to the front of the race.

The worst detail: the actor who plays the cop -- Buck from Kill Bill -- was, earlier this year, one of the Others from Lost, the guy who wants to kill Sawyer and who Juliette shoots. Could it be any clearer that Drive is Lost? Did you have to cast one of Lost's low level mysterious manipulators of our main characters as one of Drive's low level mysterious manipulators of our main characters?

TV Week in Review

LOST: This week's Lost was extraordinarily strong, especially on the emotional level -- Sun's dilemma and her reaction to it was very moving; it involved a lot of complex emotion that was well handled. We also get to see her being quite tough at the end of her flashback. And a note on how to handle exposition, which is something I complain about all the time in comics and elsewhere -- When Jin and Sun argue over his past, over how old he was when he joined the army, the bit about him being in the army is not the point: the point is he is avoiding talking about it. But when we return from the flashback to the island we see Jin fight and it works because they slipped in information about him being in the army before we realized it. With Desmond and company, we get more than one big surprise, but nothing much to talk about yet. There are only four more episodes of this show this season, and they all look like dooseys from the previews -- you can read little captions about them on Wikipedia, including whose flashbacks they are. I won't spoil any of them, but they look very exciting.

I also won't spoil what I learned about the numbers, but let me tell you where you can spoil it for yourself, if it is not just mis-information. Between seasons two and three ABC (and Chanel 4 in England where I saw it), tried out a viral marketing campaign for Lost, advertising designed to beat tivo. There was a TV ad for the Hanzo corporation (the money behind Dharma); call the number on screen and it would lead you to a website, which was then hacked by a woman whose last name is Blake (another philosophy name; this is all quite silly but I love it) -- you follow what she is trying to tell you by following different secret links on the website and calling telephone numbers and so on. A guy claiming to be a Hanzo employee was on a real life talk show; someone claiming to be Blake showed up at a comic con, and so on. You get the idea; it is not something I would have wanted to participate in (it all sounds maddening, especially as it included a lot of product placement, Sprite and so on), but you can read all about it on Wikipedia. At the end, just before season three aired, people who followed this learned what the numbers mean. I have to tell you I found the answer surprisingly satisfying, which makes me think it is not mis-information -- it ties in very well thematically. At the same time, if it proves to be the material in the season finale in a few weeks, I may wish I did not know ahead of time. But someone wanted some Lost fans to know, so you might not condider it a spoiler. And also, again, it might not be true. Head to Wikipedia if you want to know.

Free Form Comments

Hey -- its those free form comments again. Say whatever you want in the comments: introduce yourself, express random "off topic" ideas, suggestions, questions, recommendations, and request to be added to the blog roll which I never update, but really should start.

Edit: Update: Newsarama is breaking news today that Whedon will be putting out an Angel Season 6 (to match his Buffy Season 8) and they reviewed Spiderman 3.

Note: no new post today

I am not going to put up a new post today. I posted twice yesterday -- I wanted to put the Satacracy post up early once I realized voting for it to win an award closes Friday.

I also put a big comment in this week's Comics Out post today; I half accept and half defend charges that I have been mean spirited toward comic books as of late.