More like "Days of Future BLAST"

THE CLUSTERFUCK THAT COULD

 An Unwanted Rundown of X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

Everyone expected Days of Future Past to be a shitshow, right?

There were too many characters. At best there are only two good X-Men movies, the last one coming out nearly a decade ago. There was Superman Returns hovering in the background, the creepy, pseudo-deadbeat dad that he is. Then there's those horribly misjudged Carl's Jr. ads, which seem to dare you not to rip your eyes out and throw them at the screen. That's not even to mention that it seemed as though Fox decided they were going to beat the Avengers in a Reagan-like gambit by outspending them. There have been superhero flops before, yeah, but it looked like the House of Ideas was poised to have its very own Heaven's Gate.

I'm sorry to say that Days of Future Past is not the shitstorm of the century. It isn't even going to be the shitstorm of the year. I'm sorry to say that it is actually quite good and might be a perfect counter-point to the soft-focus antics of the Avengers on one side and whatever the fuck DC thinks it's doing on the other.

What Days of the Future Past does do, is something that we all thought was impossible: Tell a storythat jumps between time lines, tries to weave itself into real world events, and still deliver an adventure that is about conflicting ideologies rather than about how big of a building our heroes can blow up. Thought it does have a lot of that too and it's really awesome.

 

AMERICAN HISTORY X-MEN

Like most people my age my first exposure to the X-Men was via the Fox Kids cartoon. That lead to buying the toys (Mr. Sinister, two different Cables, two different Apocalypses, the Wolverine with the spring-loaded claws), which, in turn lead to me picking up a book or two. There's a certain snobby class of people that look down on the cartoons, but these people are snobs and can go get fucked. For a lot of people the X-Men cartoon wasn't just their first exposure to the X-Men, it was probably their first exposure to comics.

I never got into the comics. If we exclude Wolverine, I can probably count the number of X-Men comics I've bought on one hand. There's something about a story that never ends or can get reset or can languish for years under the control of any number of idiots. It's why I stick to "indie" comics. It's just easier to find somebody to blame when it comes to those sorts of things.

There's something about a cartoon that keeps a sprawling world like that of the X-Men managable. I'm sure they're great, they're just not my thing. For that same reason, the movies work. They took a concept that we like and consolidated decades of back story into a serviceable, enjoyable package.

The first two X-Men films, while not perfect, as great pieces of popcorn entertainment. They renewed my interest in the X-Men and, whether the purists like it or not, they're more or less responsible for the state of the modern blockbuster. We wouldn't have Avengers or the Dark Knight trilogy. Then again, if it wasn't for Bryan Singer we wouldn't have the Man of Steel, The Last Stand, Iron Man 2, or Green Lantern.

You know what, maybe those snobs had a point. . .

I HOPE YOU BROUGHT A REFERENCE SHEET

I'll say this: Ian McClellan and Patrick Stewart are, as always, absolute delights. It feels that somehow, despite themselves, they actually seem to enjoy playing superheroes on screen. They're men that have truly embraced the "Wizard Phase" of the elder British actor's cycle. They're men that are better than the film around them and, yet, you couldn't imagine having this film without them.

The problem is that, while there are plenty of great actors milling about, almost every single one of them is underused by design. There's Halley Barry, who seems to be flying by to pick up a paycheck. There's Ellen Page who is saddled with the clunkiest, Basil Expositioniest dialogue in the entire film.
Even Jennifer Laurence, she of the Academy Awards, takes a backseat to the film's lead trio of James MacAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Hugh Jackman. Academy Awards or not, the film belongs to them.

Luckily, the film is in great hands. Like some artsy superhero team, each actor is capable in their own way. Fassbender does his intense staring thing, MacAvoy suffers like no one else can, and Jackman stands around being charmingly buff. It's everything you want out of the film and it's everything the film needs for its story. They're serious enough for you to buy all this time travel and Kennedy assassination bullshit, yet fun enough to forgive all this time travel and Kennedy assassination bullshit.

The one notable addition to the franchise is Peter Dinklage playing the evil genius Bolivar Trask. As an actor, Dinklage is a known quantity and in Days of Future Past, he brings the same sort of energy that he brings to Game of Thrones. And he gets to appear just long enough to give a kind of oppressive weight to the otherwise bright 1973 timeline (I mean, without all the Vietnam War stuff and terrible shades of brown).

The only unfortunate part of his performance is the same albatross around everyone's neck: He has a kind of silly look and a pretty stupid name. But he, like everyone else, moves deftly enough through the script that you barely bat an eye at the fact that his first name is “Bolivar.” Even if you are the type that giggles at the word midget, in a world full of blue people, giant robots, and Richard Milhouse Nixon, Dinklage is one of the most anchored characters in the movie.

Singer carefully jumps between characters (and timelines) just enough to remind you that there is a world outside of the younger Wolverine, Magneto, and Professor X. And if he isn't doing it carefully, he's doing it with enough energy that you don't really notice that Rogue was on a magazine cover and that she's, literally, in three seconds of film. It's incredible to see, not only because, like the rest of the film, it works and there's no damn reason that it should.

TRUE COMIC BOOK MOVIE

Days of Future Past might represent the moment when comic book movies, or at least X-Men movies, cross the event horizon and finally, exorably disappear up their own ass for all time. In that way it might be the world's first true comic book movie.

That isn't to say that a film can't be complicated and still be enjoyable (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy always jumps to mind). What I am saying is that comic book movies should take a moment to check themselves before a graph is a required hand-out before the film starts.

I find that drama works if you can trust in the main characters. I might not know what the score is, but Harry Remas seems to be making a fine go of it, so I'm going to play along. This film does a solid job of that because, as a human being, one cannot help but love Hugh Jackman, but it's hard to go along a character when his relevant backstory is buried in a movie that's fifteen years old.

It's an odd place for me. As a nerd, I get it and I appreciate it. I like that it rewards those who pay attention. As a film snob enthusiast, I wonder how good a story can be when most of it isn't getting told. Why should my sister have to spend nine hours getting caught up to make a movie watchable? Looking at the box office receipts, I'm probably making a mountain out of a mole hill.

I guess maybe the possible confusion around the plot is one more point in its favor. Most blockbusters-- like the kind of mind-numbing dreck that Michael Bay turns out-- lean towards making blockbusters dumber and dumber. Singer might have bitten more than he could chew with this one, but at least he's trying. This isn't Inception, but he's willing to give the audience some credit when it comes to them no being braindead, popcorn munching faces. That's obviously more than I'm willing to give. . .

THE UNCANNY UNCANNY VALLEY

Oh man. Remember this?

Good God, some of the CGI in this movie sucks.

 It's bad enough to look at crappy CGI, it's even worse when you realize that this movie cost over two-hundred million dollars and this was the best they could come up with. Ignoring the tacked on post-credits scene, which was probably whipped up out of the money that fell out of Bryan Singer's pockets, this movie has some surprisingly bad looking visual effects.

What's annoying is that it isn't all terrible. Some of it is downright awesome. For example, there is a scene towards the end of the film where the Sentinel carriers being hit by some ill winds, stands out as an exceptional piece of visual effects. They look cool, they carry with them this sense of heavy forboding, and they're so good looking, they almost looks like miniatures from the 1970's.

On the flip side, we have Magneto, spoiler alert, moving a massive piece of real estate to do some dirt. It's an ingenious bit of imagery until the damn thing starts moving** . At that point it looks as though somebody dragged and dropped it from an old version of Photoshop. It looks like somebody wanted to do a few more passes on the shot, but then somebody else higher up went “Fuck it, I'm not losing my lunch break.”

Again: It cost 20^th Century Fox 200 million dollars to make a movie where parts of it might have been put together by people who were drinking on the way to work.

To end this on a positive note: I was actually taken out of a scene-- maybe the best in the film, no less- by how good it looked. There weren't any special effects. There was just a camera, lighting, and two people talking in a room. It's in that moment that as great as the special effects may or may not be, it's these characters that keeps you coming back.

AGE OF AVENGERS

Despite its size, Days of Future Past doesn't lose sight of its characters or its core message. It's a testament to Bryan Singer's skill as a director. It's also proof positive that, like Inception and even Avengers (or maybe even Godzilla by a cat hair), that storytelling and character does not need to disappear in favor of spectacle. For some reason we need to be reminded of this every once and a while.

I've done little to mention the action, but it's damn good. Singer handles these scenes as well as he handles the characters (and without a balance between the two we either end up with a boring action movie or a stupid drama). The scenes involving Blink, a mutant who can generate portals, stands out the most. Each scene she's in has complexity to the action that looks like a blend between a good Jackie Chan movie and Portal.

Days of Future Past is guilty of a lot of sins, but it powers through these awkward moments, making you forget these flaws long enough to enjoy the film. In a market where as most superhero films seem to be getting more cynical and involve destroying bigger and bigger cities (and in one case  a bunch of disabled veterans), it's good to see a movie find strength in the idea of simple, human decency. It's a movie that makes a stand and says that good people matter in the world and that they matter in a narrative.

In all of this we get a movie that is as complex as it is complicated. As much as it is a movie about clashing ideologies, it's also full of giant robots, time traveling, and a climax that revolves around Richard Nixon being a decent human being. It's a damn good film and if this represents the future of super hero movies, that's something that I can live with. We could all use a lot more blockbusters as messy as this one.



That ain't it. Maybe this is. . . 

 

No? Fuck  it. Whatever.

SIDE NOTES

It is then followed by a title card-- and this is the only time I've seen one like this-- that said "This film helped provide 15,000 jobs." And all I could think was "Uh, yeah."

I saw this at the Arc Light in Pasadena, and while waiting for the movie to start at the bar, one of the bartenders was getting rid of old stock. I piped up when he mentioned how some of the beer had gone bad. So, he offered me a free beer to “taste test” because it went bad. I work at a market, so I'm aware that most food that's past its sell by date is perfectly fine, and, as a God-fearing Christian, I would never turn down a free drink.

It wasn't until I drank a glass that I checked the bottle. It did indeed expire on the 24^th of May, more specifically, it expired on the 24^th of May 2013. This beer was one day short of having expired one year ago. It was then that I realized it wasn't the coffee and the Fat Tire that was making the beer taste funky, it was year old funk that was making my beer taste funny.

It was a fine gesture on behalf of the bartender and I'm grateful to him for giving me the opportunity to both drink beer and be a bonehead for free. Mostly I'm grateful that my movie going experience wasn't interrupted by explosive diarrhea. It's always nice to reflect on something like that, it's even nicer when you're watching a movie that you're genuinely enjoying.

FOOT NOTE

* There are some “vintage” Adidas ads in the background. Am I stupid for thinking that an Adidas billboard in 1973 is an anachronism? Does it matter?

James Kislingbury writes comics and records podcasts. You can follow him on Twitter @kislingtwits.

The War of All Against All: A review of Fury: My War Gone By

Editor's Note: Alright. I lied. My next piece wasn't going to be about how I liked Wonder Woman. That's coming. I swear. Also, having Breaking Bad on in the background as I edit is doing nothing for my grammar.

Josh Flanagan of iFanboy believes that Fury: My War Gone By is the best book Ennis is written since Preacher. I don't know if he's right. I do know that if he is wrong, he isn't far off the mark. However Fury lands in the pantheon of comic books, Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov's run on Marvel's Max inprint is one of the most original and well executed comics that I've seen in a long time. It is a book that is well worth arguing about.

My War Gone By is a book about a lot of things. It's an analysis of America's track record during the Cold War. It's a meditation on the kind of men that fight the wars we don't have to see. And, utlimately, it is a tract about Garth Ennis' own opinions about his adopted country's spotty history. Despite all of its seemingly highfalutin ideas, it is still, ultimately, a thrilling action book.

The first volume was a journey through the beginning of the Cold War through the eyes of four people-- the quiet American, Agent Hatherly, the All-American spitfire (name) Defazio, the corrpulent and corrupt Senator McCluskie, and, naturally, Colonel Nick Fury, a gladiator that was born in the wrong millenium.We see each of them course through the beginnings of the modern era, from Indochina in 1955 to the failure of the Bay of Pigs.

The second volume is that car crashing head first into a brick wall.

The world of Nick Fury is a cynical, mean one and it's only natural that it all culiminates in heartbreak for everyone. After all, it isn't as though the real world walked out the Cold War feeling better. It's a counter-point to the self-assured jingo of Black Ops, yet it also isn't so naive to believe that there aren't good people out there or that there aren't good people out there in the world. There are people worth fighting for. It's just that this book isn't about those people. They've got nothing to do with the kind of wars Nick Fury fights or the kind of mess that a certain segment of America has made for itself.

It'd be fun to fight against the worldview this book espouses, but Garth Ennis' dialogue would just grind you into dust for the effort. He's a man who knows his history and, as much as Nick Fury, he is a man who has opinions about it. At the very least, he is a man who can see these opinions and find a home for them, even if he doesn't quite believe them. While the shape of the world might not be as much of a horror show as the one Ennis describes, it certainly is the world that men like Nick Fury have made for themselves.

As much as this book is for war history nerds, it also does a far bit of fan service to the continuity Ennis created on his run on Punisher (or runs, really). He does so by featuring a young Frank Castle in Vietnam, hired to kill a Vietnamese general that featured in the last book. (Fresh from his days in The 'Nam, I presume).

Ennis' Punisher MAX run is an interesting one for a lot of reasons and I could go on about it for days. The one that is most relevant to My War Gone By is how he treats the Punisher as a supporting player. There are tons of bad Punisher stories. He's a hard guy to write. Ennis avoided that pitfall by taking a fundamentally uninteresting character and making him interesting in the same way that Ian Fleming made Bond interesting (an appropriate way to go about it considering that the best known incarnation of Nick Fury was a rip-off of 007).

Ian Flemming avoided Bond looking like the bore that he is by filling the world around him with interesting people and things. In this case, he takes the inverse route, by attaching the taciturn Frank to the philosophizing Fury.  Fury is accented not by the Punisher's lively personality, but by his stoicism. Frank, more or less, tempers Fury down to his most basic personality trait: Action.

This is most clear when the men go to work on the North Vietnamese Army. You see that they're not movie action heroes or buddy cops, they're men going to work. There we see the interact less like to men and more like pieces of some great murder machine. Fury and Castle respect each other, but they aren't getting beers together after a mission. They are not men who bro-out.They work together like two pieces of the same machine. They each know what the other needs and you can see that on the page.

He also includes one his more horrific villains, the Barracuda, a man with all of the sensitivity of a rabid pitbull. It's nice to see the Barracuda pop up again (along with at least one of his comrades from his eponymous mini-series). Though, these touches work because they add something to a story.As much as I would have liked to have seen him delve further into this world he set up, these characters appear because they add something to this world that Ennis has fashioned. Besides, if one could choose a face for a Latin American death squad, it would be the Barracuda's.

As great as Ennis' characters and storytelling are, these things come alive because of the work of Goran Parlov. The two have worked together previously the mini-series Barracuda and on several Punisher stories (most notably in Ennis' final two story arcs).

Parlov is a man who understands comic books as well as Ennis and it shows in the work they've done together.He has all of the exactness of a draftsmen along with the energy of a cartoonist.Yet these two styles never compete, never conflict with one another. It's the kind of invisible storytelling that I appreciate the most. It's a balance that shows the man's talent.

There's a line from Band of Brothers (in fact, it is the final line of the show), where Major Dick Winters replies to the question "Were you a hero?" and he replies, "No, but I served in the company of heroes."

My War Gone By is the dark corollary of that statement. Fury lives in a world where all of the heroes he knew are dead.It is a world where the men in the trenches never get to be something that noble.  What we're left with is the wreckage, the broken pieces left all over the world and the sense that we've got to put them back together. It's what he's left with. Life in this world is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. For his sins, Fury gets to live in it.

Fury: My War Gone By feels like the culimation of something Ennis has been trying to say for the past ten years. You see it in his work on Battlefields and on the edges of Punisher MAX. In this book Ennis' views on war and warriors and on the legacy of men like Colonel Nick Fury are on full display. They're vivisected and splayed out for you amusement.

Like Ennis' work on Battlefields and War Stories, Fury: My War Gone By has something to say about history, war, and the people who fight them. So does Nick Fury. It's much more than a fun action book, yet, at the same time, it doesn't believe that you should be lectured or that it knows better than you. Ennis and Fury know better than that.It has opinions, it has beliefs, it just doesn't know what the answer is. Is there a greater idea to put Band of Brothers in stark relief than that?

Social D was Right

I was wrong about The New Frontier. I was wrong and I'm sorry about that. So very, very sorry.

My main problems were that the beginning of the story struck me as dirivative of Watchmen which I think is a fair assumption considering how much of the landscape of comics is dirivative of Moore and Gibbons' work. (Also Cooke wrote and drew a Before Watchmen story and wrote another so, in hindsight, I am not all that far off base. But let's not waste any more calories than we already have). Where it becomes a stupid opinion is that it's much, much more than that, which is something most Watchmen rip-offs do not manage.

There's also a few more nebulous problems like the lack of Batman (and the Trinity in general), the appropriateness of the Centre as a villain (and it's inexplicable and hateful British spelling), and the fact that it's both too sprawling and too small.

Yet, now I feel the flaws less acutely and those few niggling doubts are overcome by the quality of the art and the quality of the storytelling. They're just mars on the piece, they aren't the piece itself. Darwyn Cooke might not be the literary heavy weight that Alan Moore is (which I mention because, rightly or wrongly, he weighs heavily in my outlook on comic books. . . mostly wrongly the more time goes on) or as prolific as a Jason Aaron or as clever as Jonathan Hickman, but he delivers something that none of these men can, which is that he can draw the stories that he writes.

He delivers something that is inherently part of the whole. There is no invisioning, there's no collaboration or compromises, there's just the finished work. Not every comic written and drawn by the same guy have that cohesion, though. Darwyn Cooke is just the guy who can fuse those things together, through style, though design, and through story. As a guy who piddles about with pens and pencils sometimes and has a back catalog full of genre bullshit that is inspiring. It means that someone can do it and do it well.

I think a lot of my esteem for Cooke comes from the work he did after The New Frontier (ie: the work I read after I read The New Frontier). Books like The Spirit and his odd story in Jonah Hex (a Canadian western? Okay. I guess that's not too weird) and especially his work on the Parker graphic novels have opened my eyes to the talented writer and artist that he always was. It wasn't that he got better it was that I was just too full of shit to see what was in front of me. The guy who forged that epic run on The Spirit is the same guy who spun out this wonderful not-quite Elseworlds tale.

Cooke loves good old fashioned fun and The New Frontier is chock full of that feeling-- that feeling that some things were better back then and if they weren't, at least they were simpler, more pure, more black and white. It's nostalgia done well. It doesn't shy away from the ugliness of the past, either. That's just another layer that he uses.

Another thing I find myself saying a lot and writing a lot is that this feels like storytelling judo. Cooke isn't screwing with things or skewering them or anything, instead he's it's using the momentum of nostalgia and the weight of the past to move into something else, bigger, and more impactful. And, again: It's great to see that someone can actually manage that.

I'm know I'm not breaking any news, I just wanted to make a correction. At least to increase the power of my other opinions, I'll say it again: I was wrong about The New Frontier.

That cartoon is still unlistenable, though. You'll bury me with that opinion.

And here's a Social Distortion song--


SIDE NOTE: The New Frontier was also a Las Vegas hotel. Like most of Las Vegas, it is thankfully long gone. What remains, though, are a few precious shards of history. I was going through an auction catalouge on my road trip with my dad and I found, coincidentally, some New Frontier chips for sale. They were estimated to sell for at least a thousand dollars. We are all obviously in the wrong racket.

De-Programme

I can safely say that The Programme Vol. 1 is one of the legitimately worst comics I've read in a long time. It's a mess from start to finish and while the first issue does set-up an intriguing premise it not only fumbles that idea (being that the Nazis developed superhumans, but instead of deploying them in the war, they fell into the hands of the US and the USSR, developing a secret side-game in the Cold War. In a modern generic Middle Eastern country at war, those weapons have been awakened into a world they cannot understand), it obliterate it in a fever of poor art, poor design, and the most facile political points this side of a high schooler's peechee folder.

It's a poor, poor book and I want to make fun of it. Join me, won't you?

(See this cool cover? It's the last good thing you'll see in the book.)

I recently posted that I liked Prometheus because, despite its flaws, there are some really cool things going on. The Programme is the inverse of that where I hate something even more because of how badly it screw up its potentially cool ideas. I'll try to come up with a smart corollary rule for that.

(And besides a successful version of this story already exists, it's called The Winter Men and it was amazing.)

The dialogue and the general themes of the book have all of the relevance of a Human Shield in the months before the Iraq War. There's nothing wrong with a book being political and there's certainly nothing wrong with the kind of angry liberal politics inside of this book (I'm more of a Mort Zuckerman-man myself, but that's just me). What is a problem is when the politics of a work have all of the energy and poignancy of a bumper sticker on an ugly car.

V for Vendetta managed to be a strident attack against the policies of Margaret Thatcher and a statement on the feelings of the time, but it also managed to be a parable about political power in general and, most importantly, be a well-told story. That's an intensely liberal-minded story. It works and people from all over the political spectrum enjoy it because it is much more than a rebuke of a political philosophy that no one can recall in detail.

This book ended its much too long 12 issue run in 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected as President of the United States. Could you think of anything less relevant than the angry hysteria of the Iraq War protest movement in 2008 (and, also, wasn't Obama going to fix that whole mess)? The Programme seems to be written as a reply to an argument long since paved over in light of the forward movement of reality.

The politics are a kind of whiny, rambling dissidence that was annoying during the Bush years, but now has all of the heft a homeless man arguing with a dumpster. Vague anger and political buzzwords isn't a theme. When a forth of a page is taken up by the panel "THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS A DANGEROUS PSYCHOPATH" (is there any other kind of psychopath?) apropos of nothing you can't help but conclude that not only is this book without subtlety, it's a book that values making a statement over creating a story.

Plus, we know the US president is a dangerous psychopath, he just fired off a nuclear warhead. Psychopathy is implicit in the act of firing off a nuclear warhead. We don't need to be told that. . . unless of course you were making an important political point! In which case we should all stop and ruminate on the important things you have to say, oh mighty swami!

The plotting is even worse. It reveals things with such little weight or care that it all feels incidental. Flashbacks come and go with no real context and while they do fill in the background of some of the characters they don't seem to actually be relevant to anything that is happening in the present. It'd be like if Dr. Manhattan's flashbacks were all about him attending physics classes in college. Too be fair, though, the flashbacks are the least agonizing thing about the book because at least stories begin and are concluded in them.

It's one of the only books I can think of that has managed to move both too quickly and still manage to drag everything out. Every opportunity for explanation or intrigue is wasted or tossed away in favor of vague references to imperialism or the worker's republic or whatever else. And they aren't concepts or thoughts, they're just words that people say. They're saying them enough times so they must mean something!

The biggest waste of an opportunity is present in the presumed protagonist, Max. Our boy is a superhuman made by the Nazis and programmed by the US government as a protector of truth, justice, and all of that other fun stuff that has no place in a comic this lifeless. As a protagonist he would make the main character in The Stranger blush with his ineffectualness. Bartleby the scrivener would tell him to get his shit together. Besides super strength and speed, his main power seems to be to make me want to throw a clock radio at him.

When he's told that he was a baby made by the Nazis and brainwashed by the military industrial complex by the CIA he takes it with all of the excitement of being given a pastrami sandwich instead of a Reuben. He doesn't seem to want any documentation on his heritage as a Nazi superman and just takes the spooks that show up at his word.

Then he proceeds to do nothing for the entire comic. He escapes from a CIA holding facility, but instead of going on the run like a normal plot would make him, he ends up running. . . right back to the bar where we found him in the first place where he proceeds to do. . . even more nothing. His personal problems are then explained away in one line of dialogue and he goes back to having a non-debate with himself for three issues. Because, again, if people like anything in their stories it is for comflict to present itself, however stupidly, then be instantly swept away with a declarative sentence.

Eventually another superhuman named Senator Joe, who is woken up and convinced that the US government is overrun by commies and pinkos, is sent to retrieve the reluctant superhuman.

But, of course, that character is wasted as well. He goes from being a super-powered Red-baiter to a being a guy who just wears a hat (Max, importantly, does not wear a hat). His change of heart happens off panel and is explained away in the next scene he appears in. So what you have is a super-powered right-wing nut job and a psycho-out-of-time changed into a guy who just kind of hassles Max ineffectually for half of an isse. Good. Great. That's the kind of crack story-telling people come to comics for!

At some point Max has a crisis of character, which is that he's a weapon of mass destruction that hates destroying things. At no point does anyone state the obvious which would be "Then don't fucking blow up anyone, you jackass" or "Good, because blowing up things for fun would make you a fucking asshole and everybody hates assholes." No, the scene is about. .  . I don't even know. There's nothing I can tell you factually that would be more interesting than whatever you imagine the scene is actually about.

Here's the writing prompt: Timothy Lehery and Superman are in a bar. They are talking about brainwashing. Go.

Alright, good work everybody.

Anyways, the scene drags on and, again, nobody states the other incredibly obvious point about how his mind has been messed with, which would be "It's called a conscience, you dingus. You're welcome for not being a soulless monster." Milligan doesn't seem to understand the difference between a revelation and a premise.

Then again having any motivation at all in our heroes puts the villains into sharp relief since they have all of the depth of a henchman in a Die Hard fanfic. They're Soviets! And they're evil! And they're attacking a faceless composite of Middle Eastern nations! And these Soviet guys are. . . doing bad stuff! Why? Because they are going to destroy American imperialism! Why? Because they're good Soviets and good Soviets murder Americans! Apparently!

There's no motivation, there's no plot, there's just a vague set-up that never really goes anywhere. They're plot is cardboard thin. They keep on referencing Joseph Stalin, but thinking on that mass murderer I can't help but feel he was a far more rational actor than these group of weirdos. If you made them Nazis or Christian fundamentalists or Martians or irrate mathematicians literally nothing would change in their motivations or actions.

Strangely the first Soviet super villain introduced seems to be intensely concerned with killing American soldiers, but doesn't even seem to be aware of the concept of there being people living in the country they're invading. Milligan doesn't seem to be either. He seems to want to bristle at the hubris of the American empire invading a country, but doesn't seem to be interested at all in the people they are presumably conquering and killing. He also seems perfectly fine in lumping the entire Middle East together into one big ball and calling it "Talibanistan." Real progressive work you're doing there, buddy.

Questions are all I have for this book. Angry questions. Is this an important moment? Is this a side character? Why is this happening? Who the hell is that? Do I give a shit? Questions like this pop into my mind at such frequency that I have to wonder whether Mr. Milligan ever asked "What the hell am I doing here?" It would have been a more constructive question to ask instead of what exactly we're doing in Iraq. At the very least there'd be an answer and my pain would end.

Then there's the art.It's a hideous neon-soaked nightmare that is so garish and blown-out that it would make Andy Warhol vomit in rage.There is really nothing redeemable about it. At its best it's merely competent. It is on a page, it is of people, and the word balloons correspond to those.

The coloring is an obnoxious mess. It reminds me of how Jae Lee's artwork is handled, which is it is very flat with maybe a few textures thrown in, but overall the colorist (Richard Isanove, especially) let's Lee's sparse line work and heavy shadows do the heavy lifting. Jae Lee (and Richard Isanove who seems to work with Lee most often) are talented artists though and CP Smith and Johnny Rench don't seem to know what a comic book is or even how to draw.

The color palette is a clear stylistic choice, which is fine. Had it worked it would have been a bold and striking style for the comic. Unfortunately the coloring seems to be barely competent, more reminiscent of something out of the late 90's when people started figuring out this art on computers business. The texture work is quite transparently just a texture out of Photoshop and the actual artwork itself is so reliant on tracing photos that its hard to tell when the shitty coloring stops and where the crappy drawings begin.

Most egregiously there are some pages that are digitized and chopped up to the point of actually being pixelated. I'm reading a comic book made in 2008 and I am looking at textures that seem to have fallen out of Kid Pix. It makes me ask another question which is whether somebody intended for it to look this lackluster or if this was a plan all along?

It's all made worst with a sickeningly dull layout. Every page seems to consists entirely of "Digitally traced people covered in too much shadow making weird faces at each other.While those silly faces aren't crammed with too many word balloons or caption boxes, the story's glacial pace makes me think that even the meager potential of these panels is being wasted on a poorly paced story.

The book is filled cover to cover with pictures of people standing with the odd addition of somebody maybe flying. The backgrounds are few and far between and what we do get, like the people in the comic, are clearly just photos of ugly places made uglier with Photoshop filters. Brian Lee O'Malley made it work. This CP Smith is no Brian Lee O'Malley.

You look at the artwork of Tony Harris and you realize that tracing and heavy photo referencing can be done and done to great effect. I'm fairly certain even Darick Robertson used photo references for characters in Transmetropolitan and that book looks amazing. So, in both the case of the flat, digital coloring and the tracing there are excellent examples of that work.

(To be fair, though, this Wolverine cover by CP Smith is pretty killer. I also seem to vaguely remember the issue being competently drawn.)

Fuck this book. If I wanted to read a half-assed and hideous version of Watchmen I'd vomit into my Absolute edition and shut it. This is a book without redeeming qualities. I let you know this because not only is it great fun to inflict retribution on this book, but it also presents a pause for us to reflect upon how great some of the comic books in our lives are. While not every superhero book is All-Star Superman or Powers at least there are also very few books like The Programme.

(Alright. That's enough of that. I promise to write about something good in the future)

Nothing Ever Adds Up to Exploding Dogs

For a long time I've been interested in the Cold War (or really, anything that ends in "War") and the lengths the Russians and our own people went to to try and destroy each other. Besides the dozens of proxy wars the two sides fought, there's of course the seventy or so years between the establishment of the Cheka and the collapse of the USSR in 1991. There's a rich history there, stuff you could read about forever.

Or write about.

There's hundreds of brilliant ideas to come out of both sides in that time. There's the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico with an ice pick, there's the infamous ricin tablet gun concealed in an umbrella, there's training the South Vietnamese army with our Green Berets, or filling the CIA, FBI, and NSA so full of Soviet double-agents that we couldn't do shit without them knowing for a good twenty years after WWII ended.

Good times, though.

There's also been more than a number of utter failures on both sides. In 1979, the Soviet government invaded Afghanistan on the pretense of supporting the communist regime that had taken power there. Of course the communist government was not the entirety of Afghanistan and a mix of cultural intolerance and rampant brutality that led to the mujahadin eventually wresting control of the country away from anyone sane. Our role in that was a rather ingenious one, though. We bled the Soviets dry by keeping the rebels well armed and well fed, the same thing they (and the Chinese) did in Vietnam. The only difference there is we didn't stack up the chairs and turn out the lights two years after we left Saigon.

And that's just the serious side. We've got MK ULTRA to explain and the Soviets have to explain the fact that they killed off most of their officers in the dawn of the second world war (in addition to spies that warned about Hitler invading the Soviet Union, good call there), among other things.

It's kind of funny that for all of the moles and foresight the Soviet intelligence organizations had, they still didn't see their collapse on the horizon. Then again, I don't suppose anyone does. Though, just to keep this in perspective, the Soviets were also the ones who came up with the idea of remote controlled exploding dogs and half-man/half-ape slave soldiers.

But never have I heard of a twenty-million dollar spy cat. Because a twenty-million dollar spy cat is just plain stupid. That is a dumb idea.

So of course it got made.

Besides the multi-million dollar espionage kitten, there was other bright ideas the intelligence community dredged up like the even dumber (but much cheaper) microphone hidden in dog poop (because who would bother to pick it up and throw it away) and the actually quite brilliant idea of mixing microphones into the concrete that would be used to build an embassy.

But a multi-million dollar spy cat, really?

That's just plain silly.