Do or Do Not.

Today’s happy-making thing is comics/TV author Brian K. Vaughan. Or, rather, Mr. Vaughan’s writings; while I have no doubt that his personal happy-making skills are considerable, I’ve never met the guy, so we’ll just stick with the stuff he’s written for now.I’ve never read any of BKV’s output that I haven’t at least liked, and most of it I’ve absolutely loved. As I told Timmy B. a few days ago, I’m pretty sure Vaughan could write a long-form comics series focusing on the trials and tribulations of a multi-generational clan of overly-flatulent mole rats and I’d dig the hell out of it. The man can almost do no wrong by me, and I say the “almost” only because there’s always a possibility he could write something that just didn’t hit me right. So far, though, that possibility remains theoretical.

I truly love the fact that if you boil most of Vaughan’s works down to the one-sentence high-concept pitch, they don’t necessarily sound like anything exceptional, and can even border on the trite — I love it because it’s proof that execution trumps concept (at least in his case), and that’s inspiring to me as a writer who doesn’t feel like his ideas are anything exceptional. C’mon… Y: The Last Man isn’t exactly the first “last man on Earth” story ever written, but what BKV has done with the story has been moving and compelling and exciting and generally most excellent. I’ll happily leave the “mad ideas” to the likes of Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis, but I’ll take Vaughan’s work over theirs most any day. [1]

Some selected highlights from the Vaughan Oeuvre:

• Runaways. Six kids in L.A. discover that their parents are super-villains and, well, run away. Vaughan makes the personalities of each of these kids distinct and appealing in their own way (especially appealing: eleven-year-old mutant Molly). Sure, BKV frequently succumbs to Joss Whedon-esque Real Kids Don’t Talk This Way syndrome (Vaughan actually turned the writing of this book over to Whedon after thirty issues), but hey, what the dialogue lacks in realism it more than makes up for in entertainment value.

• Y: The Last Man. As noted above, not the most original concept ever, but just a terrific batch of characters and situations. Y shows off one of the things Vaughan does best: thinking through the ramifications of his setup and of the actions of his characters. Almost every issue of Y features a moment of “Well, duh, of course that’s what would happen if suddenly all the men were gone.”

• Pride of Baghdad. A graphic novel based on the true story of four lions who escaped from the ruins of the Baghdad Zoo after the U.S.’s initial attacks on the city in 2003. Disturbing, sad, haunting… and I mean that as a compliment.

• Ex Machina. Not quite Runaways-good or Y-good, but still damn enjoyable. One-time superhero Mitchell Hundred uses the goodwill he generated after saving New York City to get himself elected mayor. Ex Machina boasts far more political intrigue than it does big superhero action (though it has a fair share of that, too). Vaughan tries hard to strike some balance and not let Hundred’s liberal tendencies turn this into a left-wing diatribe; Hundred’s idealistic liberalism gets regularly smashed by the realities of a less-than-ideal world. Also: the first issue of Ex Machina features one of the single most breathtaking final pages of any comic I’ve ever read.

• Doctor Strange: The Oath. I just read this one last week — thanks, Timmy B! I’ve never cared all that much for Doctor Strange; I didn’t hate him, but neither the character nor the mystical corner of the Marvel Universe he inhabits eever interested me much. Vaughan, however, wrote a Doc Strange I’d be happy to read more about: arrogant without being assholish, fiercely loyal to his friends, charismatic, possessed of a biting sense of humor and immensely powerful.

Vaughan’s been scaling back on his comics work over the last year or so as he’s now a story editor for Lost, which makes me want to watch that show again (as does the presence of Buffy vet Drew Goddard on the writing staff). But as good as Vaughan would be at the TV game if he gets pulled farther in that direction — his episodic storytelling skills seem profoundly influenced by television — I hope he keeps several toes in the comics pool, as I’d truly miss reading his words.

(Cross-posted in a slightly altered form at Jimmy Olsen’s Blues.)

[1] Not knocking either Morrison or Ellis, both of whom consistently pump out entertaining and thought-provoking works of high quality; BKV’s just more to my taste.

Edward Norton has been cast as Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk, the quasi-sequel to 2003’s near-disastrous Hulk. (I say quasi-sequel in that I believe they’ll be skipping over all of the origin hoo-hah and such, acknowledging that we’ve already seen those bits without referencing the first movie at all.) Norton’s actually an excellent choice to play Banner — Banner’s supposed to be a world-class scientific intellect, and Norton, one of my favorite actors, is one of the best of his generation at playing smart. [1] Plus, scared and/or angry and/or conflicted Banner? Norton will be all over that.

The Incredible Hulk will be directed by Louis Leterrier, director of the Transporter movies, so we know we’ll be getting far more of Angry Action Hulk than Angsty Emo Hulk, which suits me just fine. As much as I respect Ang Lee and what he wanted to do with Hulk, it just didn’t work well. Knowing that the next movie will have Edward Norton and much more in the way of “Hulk smash?” Oh yeah, I’m there.

Unfortunately, this new configuration means I’m doubting we’ll get any Jennifer Connelly in the next movie, and that saddens me, but it’s a tradeoff I can live with.

[1] Jessica Alba as a genetic engineer in Fantastic Four? Not so much. Now if they’d cast Leelee Sobieski… her I could’ve bought as a big-brain scientist.

• I’m willing to grant everyone involved with the production of the kinda stinky Ocean’s 12 an Official Do-Over and pretend like Ocean’s 13 is the direct sequel to Ocean’s 11.  The trailer for O13 sure makes it look like it’s going to have all of the same qualities which made the first one so much fun — qualities which Soderbergh, et al. apparently left in their other pants when making O12.  This one’s now gone toward the top of my Most Anticipated Movies of Summer 2007.  (Hmm, what’s that smell?  *snf snf*  Oh, yeah, I think that’s the smell of another blog post coming up!)
• Hey, fans of Firefly:  Yahoo! TV has a four-minute video preview of Drive, the new show from Nathan Fillion and Tim Minear.  (The video’s on the right-hand side of the page.)  I was planning on watching this anyway just because of the presence of Fillion and Minear, but after watching the preview I’m actually interested in seeing Drive on its own merits.  OK, yeah, what little bit we saw of the battered wife was pretty cliche, but the scene with Fillion was intriguing.  Time to TiVo up!
• Lee Iacocca has had enough from the current administration.   Yes, legendary industrialist Lee Iacocca expresses his outrage at the Republican White House — kinda says something, doesn’t it?  Iacocca rightly points out that the guys in office right now might be in charge, but they’re not showing a damn bit of leadership.  Big difference there.
• At long, long last, the final issue of The Ultimates 2 has gone to the printer, and Marvel was kind enough to celebrate by offering a preview of Bryan Hitch’s stunning eight-page foldout spread from that issue.  I’m not sure that any comic has ever needed an interior eight-page foldout spread in it before, but I’d imagine this one does, and that Hitch artwork is simply jaw-dropping.  Personally, I’m just glad this comic’s finally coming out since that gets us that much closer to a hardcover collection, which means I can get that to go with my hardcover of the first Ultimates series.
• The Inbox of Nardo Pace, The Empire’s Worst Engineer.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight #2
“The Long Way Home, Part II”
Joss Whedon, writer; Georges Jeanty, penciller

See, now, this is what I’m talking about. While I really liked the first issue of Joss Whedon’s continuation of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, it didn’t absolutely thrill me. I feel like I’m praising it with faint damnation when I say that, and I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about my take on #1. It was very well done — it had some typically entertaining Whedonesque banter and solid artwork — but it felt just a little bit, I dunno, slight to me. That was to be expected, I suppose, since that first issue was almost entirely setup. We only got to catch up with a handful of old characters and were dropped headlong into an entirely new status quo, so yeah, it wasn’t superb — but then again, the seven season premieres of the TV show weren’t necessarily barnburners, either. (The season finales, though? Oh, man.)

So in the end, the first issue of BtVS:S8 was really good if not spectacular.

The second issue, though… the second issue is pure Buffy.

Now we’re starting to get more of our familiar characters back — we have Giles now, we have Andrew! — and it’s almost like they’ve never been away. Ah, but that’s not quite true: they have been away, and they’ve been growing during their absence (some a bit more literally than others). The action in the second half of this issue, for instance, demonstrates just how capable the formerly useless Xander Harris has become at leading an international squad of Slayers. (Strangely enough, the character who seems to have grown the least during the gap since the end of Season 7 is the eponymous heroine herself, though I’m sure we’ll be treated to plenty of growth opportunities for her later.)

The one aspect of this issue which grabbed me most — and I can’t imagine this should come as much of a surprise — is the dialogue. The wonderful thing about Whedon writing these characters he created and worked with for so long is that he knows how they should speak better than any other writer, so it’s almost useless saying that Buffy, Xander and the rest sound the way they’re supposed to. It might be nearly useless, but I’m saying it anyway: the words Whedon puts into their mouths strike notes so perfect that I can hear the actors reading the lines in my head. I realize that for many of you, that distinction might not be particularly profound, but normally when I read (comics, novels, whatever), all of the characters’ voices sound, well, like mine. Jeanty’s art helps — the likenesses might not be photorealistic, but they’re suggestive enough of the actors that it makes hearing their voices that much easier.

We’re only two issues in, but there’s already questions aplenty to be answered: Who’s the floaty guy stalking Buffy (and her dreams)? Who is — or was — Amy’s gross, mysterious and so far unseen survivor of the collapse of Sunnydale? (Dollars to donuts both characters have Buffyverse histories, though I honestly have no idea who either is supposed to be just yet.) And one of the biggest questions I’ve got, one that hasn’t even been directly addressed as a mystery yet: where in the hell did Buffy and company get all the money to finance this massive operation? How are they affording all of this technology, room and board for several hundred teenage girls, and at least two separate compounds (since Giles clearly is somewhere other than Buffy’s Scottish headquarters)? When I watched the original series via Netflix, I usually didn’t have more than a couple of days to wait for new episodes. Knowing it’s going to be thirty days before even getting any more hints is going to prove painful.

If you’re a fan at all of the Buffy TV series, you need to be reading this comic (or at least need to pick up the collections once they come out). So far the series feels very, very similar in tone to the show, though now they’ve got the unlimited budget only comics can provide (just imagine the last page of this issue being done anywhere near as effectively on the small screen). As my boy Timmy B., a recent Whedon convert, said today: “I can’t believe that shmuck was wasting his time in TV.”

As a follow up to Wednesday’s post about (among other topics) Legion of Super-Heroes’ own Round Mound of Rebound, Bouncing Boy:

Thanks to some random, poking around of the archives at BeaucoupKevin.com while avoiding work, I found proof positive that fat, greasy, annoying teenage geeks 1,000 years from now will have the same revenge-on-the-popular-kid fantasies that contemporary fat, greasy, annoying teenage geeks do. (Yes, I’m speaking from experience here.)

You just know Bouncing Boy’s gonna blog all about this later.

Time now to play a fun little game I call “Going Through My Referrer Logs To See Which Search Engine Phrases Brought Users To My Site In The Last Week.”  Honestly, though?  I think I need to come up with a better name for the game than that.  I like to feel that I’m doing a public service here, providing answers to those questions that Google seems to think I’m uniquely capable of answering.  It’s a responsibility I take very seriously, and I’ll do my best to help soothe the mental anguish and sleepless nights these answerless questions must be causing to the questioners.

opening band for adrenalize tour

This one came to me in several different forms, all from former metalheads like myself desperately yearning to know which band or bands opened up for Def Leppard on their Adrenalize tour in 1992.  Well, Google led you people to the right place.  I’m gonna give you the answer right now.  You ready, my fellow headbangers?  Here goes:

No one.  That’s why you’re having such trouble finding the answer.  Def Leppard didn’t have an opening act that time out…they played a three-plus hour set without any supporting bands on the bill.  You shelled out all of that money hard-earned by busing tables and selling pot for a 100%-all-damn-Lep set, bay-bee.  Did you wanna get rocked, the Lep asked you?  Oh yes, you answered.  You wanted your asses rocked into near cataonia by a three-hour syringe full of pure grade-A Leppard.

(This was the case for the American portions of their tour, anyway; it’s possible the answer’s different in other parts of the world.)

A Love Song for Bobby Long spoiler

You want a spoiler for the mostly-wretched movie A Love Song for Bobby Long?  OK, here goes:  John Travolta sucked mightily in it.  How’s that do you?  OK, fine, here’s a bonus spoiler for you:  yes, it’s true — you do get a nice side-shot of Scarlett Johansson’s boob.

give me a warm enema daddy

Um.  Sorry, can’t help you there.

“inflated boy” superhero

My best guess here is that someone was trying to find out some more information about Chuck “Bouncing Boy” Taine, storied member of the Legion of Super-Heroes (and nowadays featured on the cartoon about said futuristic teens) and role model for fat kids the world over.  Well, unknown person, now that you know his actual name (though I honestly don’t think “Inflated Boy” is any less ridiculous than “Bouncing Boy”), you can read up on his heroic legacy at the Wikipedia.  Always remember:  Chuck might have been the fat kid in the Legion, but he still ended up with a smokin’ hot wife…two of ‘em, technically.

layer cake+what is his name

Another one which came to me in a number of permutations, all of which wanted to know the name of Daniel Craig’s character in the excellent film Layer Cake.  I don’t think this is a spoiler, so I’m going to give you the answer:  we don’t know.  And not only don’t we know, we’re not supposed to know.  The character himself said as much:  “If you knew my name, you’d be as clever as me.”  Whatever the character’s real name was (he’s referred to in the credits only as “XXXX”), it wasn’t revealed within the movie itself or the novel on which the movie was based.  Any site which tries to tell you his name, unless it comes directly from J.J. Connelly, the novel’s author, is lying to you.  This particular bit of information is one you’re going to have to get used to not knowing.

fuzzy storytelling guy

Yup, that’s me!  (Though I hope the “fuzzy” refers more to my propensity for hirsuteness than to my storytelling techniques, else I’ve got a problem.)

actress who did not wear panties to the oscar

Can’t help you there, either, though I must admit I’m more than a little curious to know the answer myself.

im into fuzzy rabbits.  kind of smart i have a big

Ladies and gentlemen, this week’s winner for the Search Keyword Which Causes Me The Most Mental Discomfort Award!

I might not have the love for Spider-Man that I do for Superman, but I’d be seriously remiss in my geeky duties if I didn’t let you people know that the first teaser trailer for Spider-Man 3 was released today. And while I’ve never been a fan of Venom, what they show of the alien symbiote does actually look pretty sweet… as does the black costume. And the Sandman.

It’s certainly not enough to distract much of my attention from the fact that I’ll be watching Superman Returns in <checks watch> 28 hours and seven minutes, but it’s nice to know that I’ve got what looks to be a kickin’ superhero epic to look forward to next summer.

Unlike, say, 2008’s Iron Man, which I have a feeling is going to suck hard enough to pull my stomach lining out through my mouth.

So in this space today, you were supposed to get a review of the first issue of Neil Gaiman and John Romita Jr.’s new Eternals miniseries. I wanted to help persuade all of my Gaiman-loving but not necessarily comics-reading friends to find their way to a comics shop to pick the book up. (Assuming that the book’s good enough to recommend… oh, who am I fooling? It’s Gaiman.)

You might notice that this ain’t that.

And you know why? Because the guy who runs my local comics shop apparently has a brain the size of an M & M underneath his dyed-blonde mullet.
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For too many years, I wanted to be Jim Lee.

I fell passionately in love with Lee’s amazingly detailed and dynamic artwork and design sense while he was the artist on Uncanny X-Men in the late 80’s and early 90’s, right before he and five other über-popular artists left Marvel to found Image Comics. I’d been drawing comics-style artwork for most of my life, but Lee quickly became my number-one influence [1]: I used Lee’s artwork as reference material, as inspiration — and ultimately as the yardstick I measured my own work against.

And I’m wondering just how much damage I might have done to my artistic sensibilities over the last fifteen years by doing so.

Somewhere over the years I lost much of my desire to draw, and I think that a lot of that was because I was unfairly judging the quality of my work against unrealistic standards. My expectations for myself were so high that I couldn’t possibly achieve them — if I couldn’t draw something that was somewhere at least approaching the the ballpark of Jim Lee quality, then the drawing was shit.

Thing is, there’s only a handful of artists out there that I think are in that ballpark, so expecting myself to be able to pull that off and berating my skills when I couldn’t… well, that wasn’t being very generous to myself. I think I judged myself so harshly that I found myself not wanting to draw at all. It’s not fair, of course — I’m not Jim Lee, and I never will be.

But when I say “I’m not Jim Lee,” I mean more than just that he’s a better artist than I am, though I think that fact goes without saying (not knocking myself there, just being honest). I also mean that my natural art style, the style that tends to come through when I’m not forcing a particular look on it, doesn’t resemeble his work at all — my “voice” differs from his considerably. I tend toward more open shapes, toward thicker and more angular lines, toward less rendering and cross-hatching. For years, though, I defined “professional” in my head as “Jim Lee-like” and tried to make my stuff look more like his. It’s like I was trying on a series of suits, each of which might have looked fantastic on someone else but none of which were flattering on me — but if I just kept trying them, dammit, I’d find one that fit perfectly.

Problem is, I never found that perfect suit and quit looking altogether.

Now, though, I want to get back into drawing again. I miss it. Not drawing has never felt right, but every time I’ve tried getting back into it, I’ve run face-first into that same wall of anxiety over and over again — I feel like I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t know how to draw in any style other than this one that doesn’t feel natural to me, and I hate it.

But no more. I’m reclaiming my “visual voice,” I’m no longer looking to Jim Lee as an influence, or at least not as a major one. I’m rejecting that overly-rendered style as Just Not Me; there are plenty of artists I can learn from and gain inspiration from whose work more closely mirrors my natural style. I want to try to separate myself from the frustration and self-flagellation of the last ten years and try something all-new, all-different. I want to enjoy drawing again, both the process and the results.

I don’t need to be Jim Lee. What I need to be is the best me I can be.
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[1] Funny thing: Even as I took him on as my primary influence, it seemed obvious to me that we were both influenced by the same artists when we were starting out (mainly George Perez, John Byrne and Arthur Adams). He just has way, way, way more talent than I do and was able to synthesize those influences into something new and exciting while I… didn’t.

It might have been billed as The Last Stand, but the third X-Men movie isn’t likely to be the last — not after grossing more than $120 million in its opening weekend. I mean, c’mon — we’re talking about Hollywood here. Rarely do they turn down the prospect of making easy cash off of a lucrative franchise such as this one, especially not one that could clearly be milked for several more movies.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that there will be an X-Men 4, and maybe even a fifth and sixth installment, too — who’s going to make up the team we’ll see in those flicks? Between plot points which occurred in The Last Stand and the fact that the three-movie deals most of the cast signed when the franchise started have now expired, there’s going to room for a lot of new mutants. So what follows are recommendations for the team I’d like to see.

POSSIBLE SPOILER WARNING: I’m not going to get too much into detail about X-Men: The Last Stand, but I’m going to discuss the plot in broad strokes, so consider yourself warned. Go see the movie, then come back and read this post.
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