SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN

SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN

Or, How I Finally Got My Hands on a Copy of Domu: A Child's Dream

Domu: A Child’s Dream was always one of those books that I was curious about. Lurking in the back pages of issues of Dark Horse Comics, I was always struck by the abject creepiness of the thing. It was Japanese. It was somehow related to Akira (a name I knew, but, at that point, not a film that I had seen). And it involved

 Luckily, after one of my podcasting partners went blind, I managed to fall into a spare copy of Domu. Among other things. It was well worth the wait. I mean, definitely not worth Alex going blind, but here we are. What are you going to do?

Written and drawn by Katsuhiro Otomo, Domu tells the story of a series of strange accidents and suicides at a modern public housing complex in Japan. It bounces around various residents of the housing complex, ranging from a newly arrived little girl to a local latchkey kid and on to the local detectives trying to make sense of this case (and to figure out whether it's really even a case at all). Eventually culminates in a sequence of urban destruction that only Otomo can pull off. Unlike Akira, one of the great epics of the medium, one of Domu's strength lies in its brevity. It's short, bloody, and brutish. And it's a damn good comic.

Me opening my Twitter feed.

Otomo, for lack of a better phrasing, is doing some next level shit. We're thirty years past this comic book coming out and it still looks like something out of a different sub-set of space and time. It’s like hearing violin music your entire life and then suddenly hearing what an orchestra sounds like. Otomo feels like he’s working from a different tool set than the rest of humanity. It’s amazing that a human being—a living human being, no less—can use a pen and pencil to pull off the things that’s he’s pulling off.

Usually when people describe comics as being "cinematic" it's because they secretly don't respect the medium*.

Personally, I find it kind of irritating. It’s reductive of the work itself. It’s a compliment that states that the work isn’t complete until it is something else (and something completely different). In the case of Domu, I’m not sure if that’s an insult (especially when you consider that Otomo has worked in film for the past thirty years).

These aren’t discreet drawings. They are a continuity. There is a flow from one image to the next without any visible or conscious break. It's a flow that moves beyond the mere aesthetics of Domu. There is a pacing of the panels, and a willingness to intercut between various plot threads that lets gives the impression of movement-- more than that, that the thing has energy. It has a pacing and a heartbeat that, again, I don't know that I've ever seen accomplished on this level. Part of me wonders if there is just something special about Otomo that I love or if Otomo is just working on that high of a level. Either is equally possible.

It accomplishes what film is supposed to do, which is transport you from your world into another world using the illusion of movement. With pure draftsmanship and design, Otomo has managed to do this with six panels to a page instead of twenty-four frames per second. In all of the important ways, Domu out cinemas cinema.**

OTHER THOUGHTS:

• Otomo is the best at drawing. He's just. . . Why the fuck does anybody else even bother?
• Man, I haven't seen this many kids killed in a thing since Logan. Not that I'm complaining!
• There is a sparseness to setting up the premise of the story that is almost invisible in how incidental it is. There is no wasted space in this comic. Both artists and writers could learn something from this dude. I know I can. So, again: It's cinematic. It's packing a lot into a little and he makes it look so easy.
• I kind of want to hunt down a bunch of single issues from the original run on Dark Horse. I kind of want to huff those sweet, old comic book pages. I know that makes me a sick person.
• Man. this comic is so goddamn good.

Unfortunately, it looks like Domu is back out of print. The rights moved from Dark Horse to another company and, now, like a lot of obscure works, it’s been relegated to the second-hand (and marked up) market. But it’s so good, damnit. It’s so damn good.

Domu is a compact, succinctly beautiful book that deserves to sit next to Akira as one of the great (Japanese) comic books of all time. It’s got beautiful art. It’s got a great story, with wonderful characters. It’s has horrific ultra-violence. It’s everything you want in a comic book. I mean, you know, if you like good comics.

A post shared by James El Kislingbury (@kislingwhatsit) on Mar 29, 2017 at 11:46am PDT

*Though. I'm no hardliner. "Camera angles" makes a lot more sense than "panel angles." Camera, at least, gives off the sense of three-dimensionality. A panel, though? That's a flat picture. Let's not lose our minds in our search for purity.

 *And, as it turns out, Domu is being adapted into film. Along with Jordan Peele being in discussion to direct a long-awaited live-action Akira, Otomo has been having a nice little year).

James Kislingbury is a writer, a podcaster, a newscaster, a doodler, and a crank. If you are so inclined, you can support his endeavors at his Patreon. Or at the very least, rate, like, and subscribe to what you can. It's either this or re-dedicating myself to my eBay account.

The Predliest Game

A Review of Predator #3
Part Thirteen of "James Versus Fire and Stone"

There isn't much more to say about this book that I haven't said already. It's like a good AC/DC album. Do you like what AC/DC does? Well, issue #3 is another AC/DC album. Go buy it because you like good things. Instead, this week, I want to talk about the Predator movies.

As a kid Predator sits alongside The Terminator, Aliens, MIA, and First Blood: Part II. It was part of the canon that I gradually built up over the years watching action movies on a Saturday afternoon. As such, it digs deep into my cache of nostalgia. As such, it's one of these great action movies of a certain era. But, then, I turned eleven. And then twelve and then, at some point, I was poisoned by film studies and here I am, three hundred dollars deep in Bunuel films. And I don't know that Predator is as great of a film as I remember it.

In the cold light of day Predator lacks a certain something that other action movies of the era have. Die Hard has more high moments and it actually manages to be about something. The Terminator is a movie that has a lot going on with it thematically. Even First Blood: Part II (and MIA 2) is about something that is in the public consciousness. Predator, though? It's The Deadliest Game with a monster and muscles instead of characters. It's a lot of violence and special effects concealing the fact that it isn't a movie about anything more than violence and special effects (and that awesome score).

But it still stands out there on it's own as a film of some importance. I mean, it still has comics and sequels and over priced statues coming out with its name over twenty years later. Why? Why any of it? Why these sequels? Why these movies? What is it about this aesthetic that survives? Why does Enemy Mine and Outland  and even Blade Runner languish, yet Predator keeps on chugging along?

Well, it's kind of obvious: It's Arnold Schwarzenegger. Between the years 1985 and 1998, he was the coolest man in the world. And, at the time, perhaps the coolest man of all time. I re-watched Terminator 2 fairly recently and remembering just how important Arnold was to pop culture in the early 90's is staggering. He's a titan in a way that movie stars just are not any more. He isn't an actor, he's a movie star.

And he fucking sells the shit out of Predator. I talked about this when I reviewed Lone Survivor, but commandos in movies don't look like how commandos look in real life. But Schwarzenegger looks like our idea of a commando. He looks like the type of guy who could hike a hundred miles through a jungle to kill a narco-state dictator and then hike another hundred miles out. And that type of guy is a greased up, Austrian adonis. Him, along with the bulging, oiled up hulks that make up the rest of his cast, the movie somehow manages to work. At least, it works far better than it should.

Now, Predator 2, there's a movie I don't remember much of. I know that it's tinged with racist imagery. I also know that it was the first time my friend and I paused a movie to see a woman's vagina (or, more likely, a merkin). It also has a few set pieces that are really pretty solid. Outside of that, I don't know. Danny Glover? Really? Also, it is fun to watch a movie about what a gang infested hell hole that LA was. A certain part of me is sad that that image of Los Angeles has been lost to time. I mean, even the LA River is kind of nice now. How the hell is a Predator supposed to operate in an atmosphere like that? There's probably a fucking artisinal handbag store where Predator scored his first kill in this movie.

The AvP movies are garbage without value. They are the gutters beneath the gutters beneath an asylum paved over by good, upstanding public works officials. They are films in that, at some point, light passed through a lens to make an image. The first one was tolerable and the second one, as I have repeatedly stated, is one of the worst movies that I have ever seen. And I've seen Lemora and the first Hobbit movie.

Now, Predators. . . There's a real bummer of a movie. Predator works for a lot of reasons that I have stated above, but one reason it survives to this day and why it had such a good second life on TV was because there wasn't anything else like it. The movie looked great, it had a cool design, an enemy that we had never seen before, Jessie Ventura, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It doesn't all work, but it's a unique movie. That isn't true of 2011's Predators.

We've survived two crossovers, a sequel nobody liked, a heap of bad video games, comics, tie-in novels, and more references to it than I could count. By this time the Predator is not the unique artifact that it once was. It's a going concern. That's the problem with Predators, by the time it came out, it was just another installment in a flagging franchise. It isn't original and it isn't very good. It's just a pile of semi-flavored mush with a name you recognize.

Based on an semi-abandoned Robert Rodriguez script, Predators tells the tale of a collection of GI Joe villains dropped into a jungle, who are then forced to team up and fight, who else? The Predators. Also, some slightly larger Predators, who I guess are bad guys? Like, worse guys?

But, whatever. The movie completely misses the point. Predator was never about the Predator! It was about Arnold! Without him, you don't have a film anyone cares about. You just have special effects (which do not impress like they did in the early 90's) and a bunch of actors and some updated gore effects. That isn't a movie worth watching.

Schwarzenegger, for years, survived just off of being Arnold Schwarzenegger. And, as a corollary, all of his films are elevated simply for him being in it. Is Commando enjoyable without him in it? Would you have ever watched Junior or Kindegarten Cop without Mr. Universe in it? Predator is the same way. It's a cut-rate, straight-to-video film that just happens to star the world's biggest movie star and that one fact makes all the difference (though it does have some pretty killer one-liners, I'll give it that).

Predators has more actors, more special effects, and more names behind the production, yet, it's this featureless, entirely missable film. Why? No Arnold.

Fortunately Shane Black is supposed to be working on Predator 4 (Jesus, is that all? It seems like so many more). As fed-up as I am with re-hashes of busted, old properties, at least this one has a potential to be good. He's a talented filmmaker who also has history with the series. So, best of luck to him and everyone else. At the very least it might help hose out some of the stink the AvP movies have left lying around.

All that said Joshua Williamson and Chris Mooneyham have turned out the best thing in the Predator series since perhaps. . . Uh, well, Predator. I said it before, I'll say it again: It's fun, go read it.

And speaking of Enemy Mine, I would watch a crossover of Enemy Mine and Predator. Now there's a crossover that would work. Somebody get Joshua Williamson on the phone. Wait. . . I'm pretty sure I can do that. Alright. Hold that thought. I'll be right back. . .

MUTANT OF THE WEEK:

THERE IS NO MUTANT OF THE WEEK THE TRUE MUTANT IS MAN ALL ALONG PLEASANT DREAMS FUCK-OOOOOOOOOO'S

Predator #4 of Fire and Stone receives FOUR FACEHUGGERS OUT OF FIVE for its continued competence, it's sense of fun, and it's wonderful art. As much as I am looking forward to the conclusion of this story (it's going to have a Predator/Engineer fight!), I really hope Williamson and Mooneyham carry on with this book. A thousand more years to these gosh-darn sons of onions!

You can read the previous installments of "James Versus Fire and Stone" below:
Aliens #4
Prometheus #4
Alien Versus Predator #3
Aliens #3
Predator #2
Prometheus #3
Alien Versus Predator #2
Aliens #2
Predator #1

Prometheus #2

Alien Versus Predator #1

Alien #1 and Prometheus #1

"My World is Acid and Blood"

A review of Predator #2
Part Eight in "James Versus Fire and Stone"

Am I behind on this? Yeah, I'm behind on this. Sorry. Things have come up. Like this Farcry 4 review. And the podcast's new home. But all that's behind me and you have my full attention. Come on. Sit down right here and let Papa K-berry tell you a thing or two about Fox Media franchises.

I looooooove Predator #2. It's a hulking amalgamation of high adventure and scummy sci-fi exploitation. It's everything I ever dreamed a Predator comic could be.

It's basically an amalgamation of 1980's action movies cliches packed into a fairly straight-forward comic. It is exactly as dumb as it is smart, and that is exactly what a sci-fi action movie needs to be. As a testament to its quality, that assemblage of ideas and tropes are not the kind of thing I flock towards. That's my friend AJ's thing. Maybe that's even Cruz's thing. It is not mine. But here, it's simple, it's fun and I don't have to think about what this says about the human condition or whatever other French junk that's bouncing through my head.

Props to Lucas Graciano for a great cover.

Williamson and Mooneyham decided that this comic wasn't packed with enough classic action movie tropes, he has made Galgo the Merc and the Scarred Predator into a kind of odd couple pairing. But instead of them being a good cop/bad cop team, they're a bad cop/intergalactic trophy hunter cop. Unlike a lot of concepts on paper, this one is as good as it sounds.

It then gilds this concept by chaining the predator and Galgo together, because why the hell not?

Oh man. The predator is also missing an eye, because he's a crusty old predator and he's seen some things in his day.

Oh man.

A lot of licensed comics feel like somebody is checking off a list. Predator? Check. Jungle? Check. Gore? Check. I won't accuse any of the other books on the Fire and Stone line up of doing that, but, the worst of them seem so rote. Or they seem like somebody got real excited that their fanfic was elevated. There's no life to the book. Predator #1 and #2 don't read like that. They read with a healthy mix of enthusiasm and daring.

What makes Predator work is that the premise is clear. The direction and motives are clear. While there are some mild surprises here and there, they aren't in the actual substance of the story. At no point was I forced to ask the questions “What?” or “Really” or “The fuck is this shit?” It works on its own steam and good for everyone involved for pulling that one out of the hat.

MUTANT OF THE WEEK: I am sorry to say that no proper mutants have appeared in the comic book-- YET. Presumably they're saving that for an issue #3 reveal. In the mean time what we get instead is a giant alien bull-thing (patent pending). It hardly counts as a mutant of interest, but Merc Cop and Pred Cop do manage to decapitate it with their laser handcuffs.

Go home, GIS, you're drunk.

TRIPLE LASER POINT OF EXCELLENCE. Williamson and Mooneyham have put together a nice little sci-fi/action story that is exactly what it needs to be. It's big. It's crazy. It's fun. Remember fun? It makes sense that the rest of the items in Fire and Stone aren't “fun” (even Aliens, which has the distinction of being simply “good” is rather dour). Fun is what this cluster-eff of an event needed.

I give Predator #2 a FIVE OUT OF FIVE CHESTBURSTERS. This comic almost makes this entire Stone and Fire series worth it. I mean, I don't think I would have picked this book up and enjoyed it in the way that I am if it wasn't for this entire, dumb series and this even dumber dare that I gave myself. For that, I suppose, I am thankful. Still doesn't make AvP any more literate, but I'm still grateful.

Put that blurb on your cover, Dark Horse.

Apropos of nothing, if you want pulp fiction, check out Bitch Planet #1, which came out this week. It's got. . . Lord Jesus, so many nipples.

You can read the previous installments of "James Versus Fire and Stone" below:
Prometheus #3
Alien Versus Predator #2
Aliens #2
Predator #1

Prometheus #2

Alien Versus Predator #1

Alien #1 and Prometheus #1

James Kislingbury is a boxed wine connoisseur, a writer, and a podcaster. You can support his show A Quality Interruption here.

WILD CYBERPUNKS RUNNING THE STREETS

WILD CYBERPUNKS RUNNING THE STREETS
Or "How I Got My Shit Together and Finally Started Reading Akira"

I started reading Akira.

More specifically, I finally started reading Akira. I might have been inspired by iFanboy's series on the show or I maybe Spex mentioned it to me one time to many. Or maybe my collective ignorance finally made me feel guilty enough to finally check the damn thing out. Maybe I just broke. You happy now?

I think the first time I ever saw this book on display was at the Virgin Records in Burbank. If you're looking to help date this: Virgin Records no longer exists. I'm fairly certain Burbank has been taken by the mole people, as well.

It wouldn't have been too long after seeing that I began my short foray into the world of anime. It's not a time I'm super proud of, but it wasn't nearly as dark as it could be. One of the reasons for this is that Akira was being re-released in theaters with a new voice acting (I didn't let the fact that Tetsou sounded exactly like one of the Digimon kids distract me. . . Mostly because I really like Digimon).

I might have seen Princess Mononoke at that point (on a VHS tape at my friend's house along with The Big Lebowski and Rushmore and, for whatever reason, Heavy Metal 2000), I was certainly aware of the medium-- but seeing Akira play out was like hearing Led Zeppelin* for the first time. It was the kind of seminal moments that you get when a work of art completely expands your horizons. It was what the medium was supposed to be. Looking at the comic book, even with it being nearly thirty years old, I realize that it still is everything the medium should be.

Akira is the first comic in a long time where I've though "Can you even do that?"

Katsuhiro Otomo does things in the comic that should be impossible to do in the medium. You see a lot of this in bad comics. You see people trying to fit too many words onto a page. You see people used to working in one medium (almost always film or prose and almost always as failed movie pitches) failing to work in the other. You see all kinds of mistakes based on a basic misunderstanding of how comic book grammar works.

As an amateur, I've caught myself doing this when I write. Most of my mistakes involve a character doing too much in a panel (like, you know, moving) or it involves a sound effect (Note: You cannot cut on a sound in a comic). It's a terrible habit and it's something easy to do if you aren't completely versed in what a comic book can and cannot do.

With Otomo what you see is a man who knows the rules and who breaks these rules whenever he feels like it, and who then gets away with it.He inverts panels, he turns them on their head, he stacks them up and cuts up their borders. He chops things up, he shifts back and forth. He hides things from the reader. This comic has dissolves-- dissolves, for God's sake! That's not a thing you can do in comics! But he is and he's getting away with it!

What's impressive, beyond the strength of the actual artwork, is how seamless it all looks when you're reading it. It doesn't read as a man showing off what he can do, it just reads as good comics. It's the kind of good that seems so simple and so obvious that I wonder why more people don't straight rip it off. At least I know why I haven't ripped this book off.

In all those decades I can't think of anybody that has done what Otomo has done. I can only think of imitators and I can only think of imitators that fall short. And, really, that's all there is. There is Akira and then there's everything else that came after Akira. It isn't only that Otomo is a master draftsman, there is something magical going on inside this book that I can't quite put my finger on.

Again, it makes me feel like an idiot for having waited this long. Don't be like me, go out and read it right now. You won't be sorry for long.

I'm two volumes into the book. I only stopped because, for whatever reason, I'm missing volume three (which means I need to drive over to Long Beach and steal that copy from my friend Alex or just break down and actually buy the damn thing). I can't wait to blaze through the rest of this book. And to finally pick up Domu, which has sat in the back of my mind for nearly two decades with the rest of my hazy memories of Dark Horse's ads. That is if I can find a copy of Domu. After that I'm going to watch the movie again. And then I'll check out Steamboy one more time. And then. . .

James Kislingbury writes comics and podcasts. You can follow him on twitter.



SIDE NOTE:
Actually, you should all go and see Memories. I think I wrote about it once. . . Anyways, one of the shorts in the film is directed by Otomo and you should check that out, because nobody directs rusty industrial design quite like Otomo.

FOOT NOTES:
*I now realize that Zeppelin is one of the most profoundly over-rated and over-played bands in all of time and space, but we were all fourteen at one point and, thankfully, we were only fourteen once.