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Terror on the roller coaster-- thoughts on Greg Rucka's ALPHA

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Tasting copper in his mouth.


The vibration of his head hitting concrete again, the blurred flash of Pooch looming over him, human hand and dog's paw, the knife gone. His hair tearing. Kicking back, struggling, and then the world losing sound, vision splintering, as his skull was bashed into the floor.


And his last thought, bitter and angry, as he saw Pooch's insipid, eternal grin.


Mission failed.


From the prologue to Greg Rucka’s Alpha, which you can read on Facebook .


Whether it’s in novels or comic books, Greg Rucka’s storytelling is some of the leanest writing out there.  He lives and writes by the rule of “why use three words when you can use one.”  His latest novel has a simple high concept pitch which even Rucka has used jokingly but accurately to describe Alpha.  It’s Die Hard in Disney Land.  But it’s not: that’s just a surface read of Alpha.  Undercover Delta Force operative Jad Bell is not John McClean.  There’s no “yippy kay yay, mother fuckers” here.  Bell is a professional and so is Rucka.  

Rucka's previous novels, particularly the Atticus Kodiak books, were about people who make mistakes. I think it's his first novel Keeper that opens with Kodiak taking his girl friend to go get an abortion. Without a judgement call, that opening just implies that something the characters  did didn't go as planned and now they're forced to face the consequences. Atticus was not a major screw up or anything but Rucka's wrote him with these blind spots, both personal and professionnel, that showed a man who didn't always know the right thing to do.  

The last couple of Kodiak novels, where Kodiak learns the skills of a professional assassin, veer off into different kinds of trouble for the character that I'm still not too sure if I understand. Kodiak became almost superhuman at that point and too skilled to goof things up like he did in older books. Whether it's Tara Chase (Queen & Country,) Bridgett Logan (Shooting At Midnight,)  Kate Kane (Batwoman) or Dex Parios (Stumptown,) Rucka gives his characters plenty of room to make the wrong calls because he commits to following those mistakes no matter how ugly the consequences may be.

Jad isn't a character who makes mistakes. Assigned to work undercover at a Disney-like theme park, he and his team of special operatives are right where they need to be when they need to be there. It says a lot that the attack and take over of the park begins at only a third of the way into the story. Rucka only gives us 90 pages or so to meet and get to know these characters before he launches into the actual attack. Actually, like the original Die Hard movie, Rucka gives us all we need to know before the fireworks begin but he doesn't stop developing his characters. As the terrorist attacks begin, we start to really see Jad and to understand how he processes the world and the threats around him.

Professionally Jad doesn't make mistakes but personally?  That's another story.  As he plays up the high concept parts of the novel, it's easy to miss the characterization that Rucka slowly and deliberately builds.  He's divorced and he has a deaf teenage daughter. And while it's never explicitly said, he's divorced because work always came and still comes before his family. It's a character flaw of the character but it's also what really drives the book as his daughter is at the park the day the attacks happen.

He never has Jad's wife come out and yell "we got divorced because of your damn job" but he still makes that as explicit as possible shows.  Rucka builds his stories around what's not said as much as it is around what the characters do. That he lets his ex-wife and daughter come to the park when there's a possible threat and that he smartly realizes that others on his team may be better equipped to rescue his daughter speaks more about the character than any forced exposition could.

Rucka doesn't just tell us about his character's. He uses the story to show us who they are. The problem with a story like this and a character like Jad is that there may not be that much to tell. Maybe Jad is just a special ops workaholic but there doesn't seem to be that much more to him than that. Rucka is so specific in his research and his characterizations that Jad is the one of the least developed characters in the book.   

He gets us into he heads of his terrorists; Gabriel, a sleeper agent, and his handler the Uzbek. Rucka has always worked hard in his novels to make sure we understand the bad guys as much as we understand the protagonists but with Alpha, we understand the antagonists so much better. We understand their motivations and their fears. We understand the life Gabriel wants even as he holds on to the thin belief that he will get out of the amusement park alive. We never get into Jad's mine the way we get into the terrorist's minds.

At some point, Rucka made a decision on who Jad is and how he was going to reveal him to the reading audience. Like Rucka, Jad is a man who uses as few words as possible who is as professional and skilled as hey come. In that way, Jad and his writer are very similar. Rucka writes Alpha as if was the man on the mission, pounding away on the ground to create this amusement park, the terror and the man who will protect it. Jad is a soldier; hopefully in later books Rucka will show us more of Jad, the man.

Random Quote: David Brothers on Before Watchmen

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I dunno, man. Before Watchmen is loathsome. It’s going to come out and people are going to buy it, but my advice to you, my request, is that you think about the series and what it represents, and then decide if that’s the comics industry you want to build for yourself. (David Brothers via 4th Letter)

Yeah, so I've been trying to figure out how of if I should say something about Before Watchmen here. My simple statement is that I'm not buying any of it.  It's an ugly project for so many reasons, not the least of which is that I don't think Watchmen needs prequels or sequels or anything.  And I'm one of the few people who own that big DVD boxset of the movie because I get a slight kick out of seeing the Owlship brought to life.

I would be excited for almost any creator-owned project most of the Before Watchmen writers and artists would do.  I'll support that stuff from them.  Part of why we have Before Watchmen is that we're not supporting Spaceman or... It's almost sad that I can't name any other current creator-owned project by any of the creators but it's to be expected.  I think Cooke owns the artwork for the Parker series so there's that, I guess.  With this, the Watchmen characters become just another corporate IP.  They're to be used, exploited, made money off of and continue the cycle.  That makes them no different than Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Superman or Captain America.  They're also no different than Captain Carrot or the Inferior Five.  They're part of a portfolio now and Warner Brothers Comics (the house formerly known as DC) hopes that they're the next Batman.  

I feel sad that Darwyn Cooke, Brian Azzarello and Amanda Connor are doing these books.  They're good creators and I want to see them blazing their own paths rather than redoing something that was arguably a redo back in the 1980s.

And that's all I have to say about Before Watchmen.

The Avengers, Justice League Origins and Colorform Storytelling

Marvel's The Avengers got it right. The movie is basically one gigantic getting-the-band-together story. It's Ocean's 11 just with Nick Fury instead of Danny Ocean. Joss Whedon and his actors showed an audience larger than 200,000 people why superheroes are cool and why teams can even be cooler. Characters coming together to fight a threat bigger than any one of them could handle isn't all that super-heroes and super-hero team ups are all about. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby showed us in the first issues of Avengers back in 1963 that the conflict comes from the characters, something that DC with their Superman and Batman comics hadn't yet learned. The fireworks begin when you put Thor, Hulk and Iron Man into the same room and wait to see what happens  Lee and Kirby redefined how superheroes got along every time that the Hulk fought the Thing. It wasn't a brotherhood; it was a rivalry. That was the secret of Marvel and since the 1980s DC has been to one degree or another trying to replicate it.  The Avengers movie captures and updates that Lee patter and Kirby showmanship in a way that the Marvel Avenger comics are disappointingly missing it right now.



If Bendis and his many artistic cohorts aren't delivering the same joie de superheroes that Whedon showed us on the big screen, the closest thing right now that we may be getting to it is Geoff Johns and Jim Lee's Justice League Volume 1: Origins, which essentially hits the same plot points that Whedon's movie did.  Origins is DC's story of gathering a disfunctional team together. If the original Justice League were the boy scout heroes of the 1950 and 1960s, this early 21st century version of the team is the bad boys of the DCU. Set five years ago as superheroes were just showing up on the scene, Johns and Lee tell a story of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and everyone else meeting for the first time and trusting one another only slightly more than they distrust them. Johns tries to taps into that ole Stan Lee razzmatazz to show us how seven heroes came together to be one team.

So the basic goal of Geoff Johns comic and Joss Whedon's movie are the same; forge a team that can face the threats that no one can face alone. But there's something wildly different in the two stories. The Avengers was a fun movie, full of personality and moments that felt real for the characters. The little moments for Tony Stark and Bruce Banner and the rest of them actually serve the characters and help build up to the big action scenes. Whether it's Stark literally needling Banner, looking for some hint of an uncontrollable monster or Agent Coulson gushing about having a small hand in redesigning Captain America's uniform, Whedon uses those moments to build his characters. It's what he's always done from Buffy to Cabin in the Woods; he uses the scenes between fights and action to reveal bits of his characters. It's what leads to that idiosyncratic Whedon dialogue. He loves to fill his characters with words and chatter that defines them.

I don't think anyone has ever really talked about how Johns uses dialogue to reveal characters and I really doubt anyone ever will.  Johns doesn’t reveal characters in this book as much as he pummels you with them.  In Origins, Green Lantern is a brash hotshot.  Wonder Woman is a warrior babe in the woods.  Aquaman is the pompous ruler and Superman is the alien.  These aren’t characters; they’re types of the character, fitting into the roles that DC has been pushing these characters into for years.  Now Johns get a fresh reboot and a clean slate to really slam home who He and DC thinks they are.  For too long now, probably since at least Infinite Crisis, it’s felt like Johns doesn’t know how to write anything more than cardboard personalities. His characters fit nice and neatly into the squares that the plot needs them to.

The roughest character in the book is the “angry” character; Cyborg.  I believe Johns thinks he’s our everyman into the book, the point of view character through which we should be seeing this “new, wonderful” world.  To go back to the Avengers comparison, he’s our Agent Coulson, the man who should stand around and go “how cool is this” when he sees the world he’s entering.  The only problem is that Johns and Lee don’t give him anything to do other than stand around and be angry because his daddy doesn’t love him enough.  That’s part of the character going back to the Wolfman/Perez days of The New Teen Titans but there’s absolutely nothing to the character other than his daddy issues.  He isn’t a hero, he isn’t even trying.  He’s a privileged boy who doesn’t do anything in the whole book.

With a little bit more Robert Downey Jr. and a little less Ryan Reynolds (rent the Green Lantern movie if you don’t get that,) the new Justice League could have been something special, earning that “must read” pull quoted on the cover.  As it is, Johns’ dialogue all painfully blends together until there’s just words, words and more words on the page without any need to care about who is saying what.  The characters talk as much as they do in Avengers but they never really say anything.  Thanks to Johns' inability to really create anything more than a surface level reading of any of the characters, this is a book that's full of costumes and not people underneath those masks ans capes.

It’s like Johns is relying on Jim Lee’s artwork to develop the character through the images.  With the right writer like Jeph Loeb or Frank Miller (two examples I can’t believe I’m using with the word “right”) Lee has that character to work with.  With Johns, he has superheroes and that’s not a character; that’s a role.  I’ll admit to being a Jim Lee apologist; I like his artwork.  His Art Adams-meets-Neal Adams need to dedication to the image works for bright, colorful superheroes.  It’s not lively and it’s not graceful.  It may end up just being a fifth generation copy of Jack Kirby, filtered through Buscema, Byrne, Adams, Golden, Cockrum, Perez and Starlin, watered down with each year removed from the originator of modern superhero drawings.  That’s what his work often is in books like Divine Right, a lot of his Wildcats stuff and parts of Superman: For Tomorrow.  The problem with his book though is that too much of it feels like Colorform storytelling.

You may not be old enough to remember but Colorforms were these static images that somehow magically (remember I was a kid myself at the time) stuck to a background image.  They could be anything but I always had the superhero Colorforms, creating these epically fantastic images of Iron Man fighting an array of badguys.  Of course, these images weren’t stories; they were just pieces of plastic overlapping other pieces of plastic.  Unfortunately, that’s what so much modern comics are: images overlapping other images with little or no relationship to one another.  See almost any Greg Land comic for prime examples of Colorform storytelling.

O.k, so Jim Lee is better than that but just barely. The same kind of discrepancies happen all the time in movies that try to use computer effects.  The first Spider-Man films are difficult because there is no relationship between Spider-Man and his environment as he’s swinging through NYC.  Like that, Jim Lee’s characters have the tendency to act independently of anyone else, even people they are fighting.  In one key moment, where the Batmanless and Supermanless Justice League has to rally, the characters look like they were drawn on completely different pieces of paper and just composited together on a computer screen. From that moment on, none of Lee’s drawings come together in any kind of meaningful way.  It’s the same as bad green-screen in a movie; you can see the seems in the story and it just feels fake.

The lynchpin of The Avengers wasn’t Nick Fury or Iron Man or Captain America.  Loki, the villain, brought the whole thing together.  This is where Origins is a joint failure by both Johns and Lee.  Their Darkseid isn’t the schemer that Kirby’s creation was.  He’s not a mad god or even a villain.  He’s a mountain.  He’s a huge piece of rock that the heroes throw themselves against, trying to make it move.  There’s nothing to him in this book other than an occasional “I am Darkseid” (shades of Grant Morrison’s JLA run) and some fighting.  As Johns and Lee are trying to show how Aquaman and Flash should be standing next to Superman and Wonder Woman, they put them all up against a villain who does nothing.  That’s the threat that brings the Justice League together.  Not a giant starfish from space.  Not some elemental aliens.  It’s a hunk of rock.  That’s how much personality is in the big bad and in any of the heroes in this book.  They’re all stone and wood with all of the personality that were in my Colorform scenes when I was a kid.

Maybe it’s telling that people will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to watch superhero movies and yet avoid the comic books no matter how simple it is nowadays to find them.  After the success of The Avengers, Marvel blindly refuses to publish a comic that has the same energy as Whedon’s movie and DC tries to but just can’t find the same fun in the characters or danger that the movies have.  Justice League Volume 1: Origin should have been DC’s answer to Whedon’s movie but instead it feels like it’s brought to us by the same people who gave us the Green Lantern movie.  There is no understanding of the joy of superheroes, the madness of them or the sheer exhilaration that can exist in these brightly colored pages.  Justice League Volume 1 misses injecting blockbuster movie storytelling onto a comic book page.  





Hopefully someday I'll understand what Brandon Graham is doing with Prophet #25

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My babbling review of Prophet #25 went up at Newsarama earlier this week.

Brandon Graham makes the book disorientating by never telling us exactly what’s going on. He and Giannis Milonogiannis show us everything that the trio of Prophets is experiencing on this Euro-punkish sci fi, but they’ve kept as at arms length away from the story by constantly introducing these new versions of Prophet and their stories. Just as we begin to think that we find some understanding in one issue, Graham has no problem changing the story so it feels like we’re starting over again in this issue. We thought we knew who Prophet was after the last issue but now we’re introduced to three essentially new characters and their stories.

Flashmob Fridays: Harvey Pekar's Cleveland

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For some reason, I'm about a week behind on this.  Last Friday's Flashmob Fridays was all about Harvey Pekar and his new book Harvey Pekar's Cleveland.

As Pekar chronicles the history of the city, for every success there is an equal or greater failing that the city experiences. His recounting of the 1948 World Series at the beginning of the book perfectly introduces this pattern. They won in 1948 but the Indians would go on to lose the 1954 World Series. It would take them another 40 years to reach the World Series but they lost twice during the 1990s and haven’t been back since. “For me,” Pekar writes, “the 1954 World Series was a turning point. I always looked at the Indians as an up-and-coming team. But now they seemed to be rotten to the core with success... A few years later, that’s how I viewed Cleveland: rotten.”

You can read my, Alan David Doane, Christopher Allen, Roger Green and Johanna Draper Carlson's essays here.

This book is actually due out in a month or two.  If you've never read any Harvey Pekar, it's actually a fascinating look at the man and the city.  You can see a lot about how one defined the other.  

Is that the smell of 90s nostalgia? A review of Prophet #21 @ Newsarama

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So last week a comic about a Spider-Man clone came out and this week, it's the return of the posterboy of 90s comics Prophet.

Instead of picking up where the series left off in 1997 (at least that’s the closest I can figure out to when a new Prophet comic book was last published) with its hyper-muscular bodies and headwear out of some medieval sport, Graham and Roy begin a brand new story and a brand new character. He may share a name with the old Prophet but this one looks more like an astronaut in an orange jumpsuit. Imagine more Charleton Heston in Planet of the Apes as a stranger in a strange world and that’s the story that Graham and Roy are telling. Prophet wakes up 10,000 years in the future and has to survive long enough to find out what his mission in this world is. Maybe there will be ties to the old character later on but this issue starts out fresh, like we’re seeing a new character in a new world.

You can read the whole review here.

Have you ever been Snarked? Well, I have...

Even as the character have a life their own on the page, this story is missing some of the manic energy of Langridge’s earlier work like Fred the Clown or even The Muppets. Because those comics were made up of short bursts of stories, sometimes even in one page, Langridge gave those books a real forceful energy that enveloped the reader as well as the characters. Snarked #4 is sadly missing some of that driving energy because it gets diluted as Langridge is working on a larger story. The lively characters are still there as is the humor but this book could use some of the propulsive power that kept his Muppets comics a lively read on every page. His previous work had a bang on nearly every page while Snarked is much more quieter and deliberate. It’s like his Thor: The Mighty Avenger work that way. The story builds up over the span of pages where his earlier humor work built up energy over the span of panels.

You can read the full review here.

The Wrap Up Show at FMF-- Action Comics #5

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So, this is kind of embarrassing.  You see, I wrote a piece on Action Comics #5 for last week's Flashmob Fridays but was kind of shocked when it didn't show up in the Friday roundtable post.  I thought maybe I had been kicked out already for saying I really didn't get Carl Barks' comics the previous week and that Alan just hadn't told me yet.  I had finished it up last Wednesday, well before out deadline but somehow I never emailed it.  So for the week, I get to show up on our Monday Wrap Up Show, talking a bit more about Action Comics #5 and how so far this seems to be a series of unfulfilled potential.

In this last few years of political, economic and social upheaval in the United States, I think Morrison is on the right track in trying to redefine Superman. The 21st Century started out with a Superman that somehow tried to renounce any American citizenship and even was proclaimed as standing for “truth, justice and all of that other stuff.” But like the times when Superman was created, the “American way” is either corny, an anachronism or a lie depending on your views of the country. And how does the country’s #1 adopted son respond to that? That’s the story that it felt like Morrison was trying to tell in the first two issues of Action. How does the ultimate boy scout live in an era where the Boy Scouts are eventually sent overseas to fight wars that no one understands while those who stay home get rich and fat? 

You can read the full review here.

@Newsarama- The Shade #4 and Wolverine and the X-Men #4

So Thursday is supposed to be our pellet review day at Best Shots but I think last week I ended up rambling a bit on a couple of comic books.

Wolverine and the X-Men #4:  Jason Aaron and Nick Bradshaw have given us “The Breakfast Club” of the X-Men as we get to see these kids in a class that’s just a thinly veiled fortune telling session.  Instead of “ a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal,” we get a killer, a monster, an alien, a madman and a Phoenix.

The Shade #4: Cooke pulls you ever closer and closer into the confidential discussions of these two men and then quite literally broadens your horizons with large panels as Shade begins telling the man about his grand adventures.  And it all works because Cooke makes you privy to the personal moments just as skillfully as he gets you excited by the fighting and punching.

You can read both reviews here.

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Weekly Comic Shopping List 1/11/12

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  • Lobster Johnson The Burning Hand #1 Regular Dave Johnson Cover
  • Star Wars Agent Of The Empire Iron Eclipse #2
  • Star Wars Legacy Vol 11 War TP
I'm beginning my yearly reread of B.P.R.D. so I'm looking forward to hitting the Lobster Johnson stuff in there again.  I think Star Wars Legacy was one of the best books of the past 5 years that no one was reading.  John Ostrander built this fantastic take on the Star Wars myths and created a richer story than Lucas was ever able to consistently achieve in the movies.  
  • Batwoman #5 Regular JH Williams III Cover
  • Frankenstein Agent Of S.H.A.D.E. #5
There's no denying that the artwork on Batwoman is gorgeous but Williams III and Haden-Blackman are just playing setup-the-future-stories right now.  I dare anyone to tell me from memory what the main thread that Batwoman is facing right now?  Something about water and missing children I think and I just read the first four issues over the weekend.  I really like the Kate Kane plot threads in the book and the stuff with the DEO is fun but the story loses me whenever Batwoman actually shows up.  
  • Avengers 1959 #5
  • Wolverine And The X-Men #4 Regular Nick Bradshaw Cover (X-Men Regenesis Tie-In)
I'm still not sold on Wolverine and the X-Men #4 so I may end up leaving this one at the shop (or more likely on the digital stand.)  It's cute and clever but it just feels like it's too much.  Enough people are liking it so I think it's more just me.  The whole Regenesis thing has left me kind of bored because it doesn't feel that different than the last couple of reboots of the X-Men and I'm sure we'll be seeing some "brave, new direction" in another year or two.
  • Roger Langridge's Snarked #4
 I haven't quite gotten into this series the way that I want to.  I think I need to sit down with all 4 (5 including the #0) issues and give it another go.
  • Before The Incal Classic Collection Deluxe HC
  • Ballad Of Halo Jones TP Simon & Schuster Edition
  • Complete DR & Quinch TP Simon & Schuster Edition
How would you like a bit of Jodorowsky and Alan Moore together in one week?  That would be a good week, wouldn't it?  And artwork by Zoran Janjetov, Ian Gibson and Alan Davis?  That's just icing on the cake.  Actually, this edition of Before the Incal is a bit too rich for my blood but I would recommend waiting for the inevitable non-deluxe Classic Collection, like the one that they did for The Incal.  (note: I guess those two Alan Moore books came out last fall but Midtown Comics was listing them this week.  Either way, they will be mine.)