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May 31, 2005
Comics Book Writers: Brian Azzarello
Writer: Brian Azzarello
Current Comics: 100 Bullets
Brian Azzarrello does great noir, and can be very effective when his stories are tightly plotted. The first few storylines of his long-running series 100 Bullets are gems of hard-boiled storytelling. The concept behind 100 Bullets is a great pulp premise: a shadowy organization selects people who've been betrayed in some way, and gives them a gun and 100 guaranteed untraceable bullets to use as they see fit to rectify the situation. Violence, of course, usually begets more violence, and revenge is rarely a simple matter. The agenda of the organization itself is only gradually revealed over the course of the series.
At its best, 100 Bullets mixes the campy-but-gritty pulp of Sin City with the paranoia of X-Files. Unfortunately, as the conspiracy grows ever more elaborate, the storytelling has grown more opaque - there are simply too many conspirators to keep track of by now. Likewise, Azzarello's recent runs on Batman and Superman were shaggy and disappointing - full of portentious dialogue and moody lighting, but missing the payoffs. He's clearly having trouble adapting his style to the superhero mainstream - although if he can ever make it work, the results could be spectacular.
One hint of that promise is a great Hulk miniseries he wrote a few years ago, Banner
Posted by tedf at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)
May 30, 2005
Comic Book Writers
OK, the semester's over, I'm coming back from my prerequisite end-of-semester illness, and it's time to start consistently blogging again. I hope some of you have stayed with me through the thin weeks - I promise I'll start posting with more consistency now, as I've got a huge backlog of stuff to talk about.
To begin, I'm going to start a new series of posts on my favorite comic book writers. I'll try to cover every writer whose work I read regularly, from Brian Azzarello to Bill Willingham.
I actually organize my comics in a way I've never seen anybody else do it: by author, rather than title, artist, or publisher. Many people would assume the true auteur of a comic is the artist. The cult of Marvel great Jack Kirby, for example, rests on the claim that while Stan Lee may have written the dialogue for those great Silver Age heroes, it was Kirby who not only conceived of their looks, but structured the storytelling panel-by-panel, the way a director crafts a film from the raw material of a screenplay.
But while that may have been how Lee and Kirby worked (although I think that story gives short shrift to Lee's inventiveness), it's not an accurate reflection of how most comics seem to be written today. Alan Moore, author of the epochal Watchmen, is clearly the guy who raised the bar here - he's published some of his comic scripts, and you can see how completely he envisioned the material he handed to artist Dave Gibbons - not simply writing the screenplay, but storyboarding down to the smallest detail of the mise en scene.
The fallacy of the artist-as-creator was driven home by the crash-and-burn of Image Comics in the early 1990s. The Image founders were a bunch of superstar Marvel artists like Todd McFarlance and Rob Leifeld who left to develop properties they could own themselves. After having worked with writers at Marvel, they began writing their own stories. No more chafing against the demands of plot and character - they could stretch out that fight scene for as many pages as they felt like, with nobody to tell them otherwise. The results were some slick-looking characters like Spawn, but pompous, bloated storytelling. Eventually, the fans caught on. Today, for many comics fans, the real heroes are justly celebrated writers like Brian Michael Bendis, Greg Rucka, and Bill Willingham. Art still matters, of course - sludgy art, as on Rucka's Gotham Central, can bog down excellent storytelling, while great art like Cary Nord's work for Kurt Busiek on Conan can transport the prose. But a dull story is a dull story, however beautifully drawn. And if a story is well-written enough, it'll peek through the cracks of the most uninspired artwork (as in Gotham Central.)
I buy a lot of comics these days - many more than I did when I was part of the putative target audience. And I buy more mainstream comics - and fewer underground comix - than ever before. The decline of the underground is a huge disappointment. A generation of brilliant writer/artists like Chester Brown, Seth, Joe Matt, Mary Fleener, Roberta Gregory, Peter Bagge and Dan Clowes have either slowed their production way down or moved out of the medium altogether, while few new artists have emerged to pick up the slack.
On the other hand, the mainstream is more vibrant than at any time since 1987 - the year of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns as well as Maus, and not surprisingly the year that got me excited about comics again after rejecting them in early adolescence. Writers like Bendis and Rucka are exploring not just the psychology of individual characters, but how those characters intersect to create rich mythic universes.
For those of you who've read my previous posts on Joseph Campbell, Star Wars, and the politics of myth, you could see why I'd be interested in these themes, and fascinated by these writers' explorations in these rich, resonant universes of story. In the next few weeks, I'll try to work through my ideas about these storytellers, one writer at a time.
Posted by tedf at 05:38 PM | Comments (2)
May 24, 2005
"George Jetson Gets a Present From Dove"
Stay Free! Daily: George Jetson Gets a Present From Dove
Posted by tedf at 02:08 PM | Comments (0)
May 22, 2005
Summer Movie Pool
For the past few years I've been participating in the Summer Movie Pool, a kind of movie box-office version of fantasy baseball in which a bunch of us - some film academics, some just fans - compete to predict the top ten grossing films of the summer.
In my very first year, I finished in the money, coming in third out of fifty or so entries. Since then, though, it's been downhill. Perhaps I've been losing touch as I become more ensconced in the ivory tower. So this year, I've decided to shake things up by submitting three entries representing three approaches to prognostication: one from my gut (the Malcolm Gladwell Blink approach - reflexive box office instincts), one from my heart (the fanboy approach - the movies I'm rooting for), and one from my brain (the James Surowiecki Wisdom of Crowds approach - the top-listed stocks on Hollywood Stock Exchange). My other organs will keep their opinions to themselves.
Below are the three entries. For more on the pool, check out the official website.
Ted's Gut:
1. Star Wars III
2. War of the Worlds
3. Batman Begins
4. Longest Yard
5. Madagascar
6. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
7. Island
8. Mr. and Mrs. Smith
9. Weding Crashers
10. Stealth
LS: Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants
LS: Hustle and Flow
LS: Dukes of Hazzard
Ted's Heart:
1. Batman Begins
2. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
3. Fantastic Four
4. Wedding Crashers
5. Bad News Bears
6. Brothers Grimm
7. Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl
8. Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants
9. Hustle and Flow
10. Sky High
LS: Rize
LS: War of the Worlds
LS: Star Wars III
Ted's Brain:
1. Star Wars III
2. Batman Begins
3. War of the Worlds
4. Madagascar
5. Fantastic Four
6. Longest Yard
7. Island
8. Mr. and Mrs. Smith
9. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
10. The Wedding Crashers
LS: Dukes of Hazzard
LS: Stealth
LS: Monster-in-Law
Posted by tedf at 03:41 PM | Comments (2)
May 12, 2005
Patio Container Garden, Week 5
Here's a partial inventory:
Annuals: Verbena, Dianthus, Impatiens (the new transplants), some other new stuff whose little plastic ID spikes I promply lost
Shrubs: Azelia
Herbs: Basil (two kinds), Oregano, Spearmint, Apple Mint, Sage, Catnip
Vegetables: Peppers, Fennel
Fruit (hypothetically - nothing's very far along): Raspberries, Strawberries, Miniature Orange Tree, Watermelon. (You're not supposed to plant watermelon in a container, but I just couldn't resist. I've got 5 sprouts in one huge container - I'll probably do triage and just keep the healthiest one. )
Cat: Moby
Not pictured: On the other side of the patio, I've planted some lettuce and snap pea seeds. I know - it's probably already too late into the spring, since they're supposed to need cool nights. But I bought the seed packets a month ago, and I figured better late than never.
I'm spacing on the names of the flowering vines Kate picked out. Kate, want to help me out? . . .
Posted by tedf at 05:06 PM | Comments (2)
May 10, 2005
"Bush in 30 Years" Flash Contest Winner
Here's the winner of MoveOn.org's contest to create a Flash animation on the subject of Bush's Social Security proposals. It's a great example of the communicative power of clean, elegant graphic design. And what it actually proposes is both eminently sensible and far to the left of most of the Democratic party: simply removing the $90,000 cap on taxable income for social security payments, so that all taxpayers contribute an equal 6.2% of income.
Posted by tedf at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)
May 04, 2005
Mouse Baseball
I don't understand this, and I can't begin to explain it. My favorite detail is the third base coach.
The mouse baseball game diorama, St Johnsbury, VT
Posted by tedf at 06:11 PM | Comments (0)
May 02, 2005
Interesting New Distribution Plan
Simultaneous release of films in theaters and on DVD sounds like a wacky idea, but the guy behind this - Mark Cuban - is very savvy about experimenting with new film distribution ideas. With the demise of Madstone, his Landmark Theaters is the one artplex chain left standing. Without them, most cool indie and foreign films would never make it to cities outside of NYC and LA.
Soderbergh, 2929 See Same-Day Film/DVD Release - Yahoo! News
Posted by tedf at 05:49 PM | Comments (0)