As requested (well, someone requested it…) here’s a list of my recommendations for the ten “gotta have it” series/volumes (as before, I cheated a little by suggesting some series that have multiple volumes) that DC has produced as part of its Showcase Presents line of oversized, cheap, black and white trade paperbacks. As before, I’ll start with the caveat that I don’t think there are really any bad choices; DC has gone in for variety instead of depth, producing a staggering array of different series from their Silver Age. Only a few have gotten more than one volume (ironically, two of those are what I’d consider the most skippable, the staggeringly dull Flash and Green Lantern…yes, I went there, Geoff Johns…) and so there’s a lot of material to choose from. Best of all, they’ve been very good about representing their non-superhero material. DC was sometimes at its best when doing war, horror, or western comics, and they’ve put some of their best stuff out. (Cutting Enemy Ace from this list was the hardest thing I’ve had to do in a long while.) (I lead a sheltered life.)

10. Ambush Bug. To be honest, I’d actually have left this off the list, except for my lingering fear of a miniature jihad being declared upon me in the comments list by rabid Ambush Bug fans. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some very funny, very iconic material here. But it took Giffen a while to figure out what was funny with the character, and fan demand forced him to keep going back to the well long after his best material was used up. So what you’ve got is a volume with a very funny middle, and a tremendously uneven beginning and end. Still worth reading for the middle, though.

9. Hawkman. I seem to be all alone in feeling this way (or, at least, I didn’t get the chance to impose my fanboy opinions on DC continuity for a generation like some comics writers I’ve already mentioned…) but I’m of the opinion that the Silver Age Hawkman was the most fun incarnation of the character. Sure, he’s a little goofy; he’s a space cop with a medieval weaponry collection who’s come to Earth to learn our law-enforcement techniques. But the backstory they cobble together actually makes it all work, and Katar and Shiera are a fun couple with good romantic chemistry. And there’s just something fundamentally awesome about seeing a superhero swoop down and beat the crap out of a guy with a mace.

8. Adam Strange. Of course, now we know that he’s part of the DC universe and is an honorary Justice Leaguer and is probably Doctor Strange’s sixth cousin once removed or something, but back in the day, this was a great stand-alone science fiction comic. Adam was a fun character, Rann was a fun setting in the Flash Gordon mold, and the (literally) star-crossed romance between Adam and Alanna is sweet and touching in a way that you don’t traditionally get in “boy’s comics”. (I’m not saying they’re only for boys; only that DC aimed them at a predominantly male audience at the time.) The series suffers a little once the JLA gets involved–too many space-traveling characters makes his plight a little harder to sustain–but there’s still a lot of good material here.

7. Superman. Yes, yes, yes. We all know that Superman is square and lame and uncool and overpowered and bland and…except that he’s not. Back in the Silver Age, Superman was a snarky wiseass who almost appeared as a Trickster figure in most stories (not the Barry Allen Flash bad guy, the archetypal Trickster of myth who provides moral guidance to the hero in the form of cryptic riddles, jests, and pranks.) There are issues where he acts as a “genie” to a criminal he inadvertently wronged, making amends with “wishes” that he deliberately gets wrong; issues where he turns the tables on Mr. Mxyzptlk by going to the 5th dimension and playing pranks on him; there’s even an issue where Superman contends with the IRS. The Silver Age has a reputation for goofiness, but most of the comedy was intentional, and it holds up pretty well even today.

6. Legion of Super-Heroes. The problem that the LoSH has in attracting new readers is that it has a large cast and a long, tangled, sometimes impenetrable mythos (which has been confused even further by multiple reboots.) The solution? Start at the beginning, and read it in big chunks. You get many of the classic Legion storylines here, before the retcons and the reboots and the re-reboots and the un-retcons and the time-jumps and the clones and the time-jumped clone retcon reboots clutter it all up. Plus, Lightning Lad gets space madness and hunts down a giant space whale. Hooray for Gooba!

5. Metamorpho. This is the absolute apex of comics as Pop Art. It effortlessly straddles the line between inadvertent camp and expert satire of camp until you’re never quite sure whether it’s taking itself seriously or not. It has the best set-up of any comic book ever; Metamorpho is working for the only guy who can cure him of his freakish super-powers, only the man in question is an amoral crackpot who wants to kill Metamorpho for dating his daughter. Only, of course, he can’t, because he needs Metamorpho to keep resolving all the crises he keeps getting himself into. Add in the actual freaking reanimated Neanderthal butler, and you have a recipe for brilliant insanity. If I could pick a single title to revive, I would go back and revive Metamorpho and I would shamelessly hammer things back into the shape they were in the Sixties, because it is fucking awesome.

4. Jonah Hex. Things get just a little tricky here, because I picked the best horror, war and western comics for 4, 3, and 2, but my placement of them is slightly arbitrary. If you prefer westerns to horror, or war to westerns, rejigger these three accordingly. Because really, there’s nothing concrete in my head that puts Jonah Hex behind the next two on the list. It’s a sharp, nasty, wickedly grimly funny comic about a heartless drifter who desperately tries to conceal the fact that he’s not quite as heartless as he pretends to be…but who’s still a lot more heartless than the bad guys he comes across. It’s a wonderfully prescient take on the genre that feels oddly modern despite being almost forty years old.

3. Sergeant Rock. This is where Enemy Ace almost went, but really, it’s so hard not to recommend Sergeant Rock. This is Joe Kubert at his finest (yes, so was Enemy Ace) but it’s also one of the most iconic heroes of the genre. Rock is the archetypal sergeant, and even the most fervent pacifist will feel their blood stirring as he guns down Ratzi troops with the help of Easy Company. Really, once you’ve read these, you won’t need to read any other WWII comic.

2. House of Mystery. What’s to say? This is Joe Orlando taking the horror comic back to its roots after years of blandness and boredom, skirting the edges of the Comic Code and relying on the snarky, self-aware humor of Cain to glide over the bumps. It’s got some wonderful Sergio Aragones gag pages, some excellent twist endings, and beautiful art that looks great in black and white. And you’ll probably understand a lot more Sandman references afterwards, too.

1. The Elongated Man. Yes, really. The Elongated Man is the single best volume of Showcase Presents, a non-stop joy from beginning to end. It’s like reading an Agatha Christie collection, except that Tommy Beresford has stretching powers. Every single one of the strips presents an instant grabber of a mystery, and Ralph and Sue solve them all with grace, style, and panache. (Perhaps it’s more like The Thin Man, with a super-stretchy William Powell…) And the art…the art will make you understand exactly why Carmine Infantino was a motherfucking legend of the Silver Age. His pencils are dynamic, powerful, and his use of Ralph’s powers in the fight scenes is absolutely inspired. You’ll actually believe that a guy who stretches is a major ass-kicker, and you’ll also believe that he’s a brilliant detective and a devoted husband and an awesome character that deserves to have his own A-list series. (Warning: Side effects may include wanting to cockpunch Brad Meltzer.)

There you go, my recommendations for the top ten. You may present your alternate takes in the comment section. (I’ll probably agree with them, too. I had to make some hard choices to get this down to ten: Batgirl, Batman and the Outsiders, Booster Gold, The Doom Patrol, Supergirl, The Unknown Soldier…)

“Hey, we need to create another character for the “Justice Society 2″ project.”
“Okay… so we got two kids Green Lantern had, Hawkman’s son, Wonder Woman’s daughter, and the Atom’s grand-nephew or something like that. Who else can we throw in?”
“Maybe the Flash has a kid?”
“Nah, I don’t like it. Dr. Mid-Nite?”
“Blindness isn’t heriditary. Doesn’t make sense. Hourman?”
“What, a kid who takes the same pill? We want superheroes here. We’ll save that idea for if we ever get desperate.”
“Well, that knocks out a lot of them. I mean, the JSA were a lot of guys who barely had powers if at all, right?”
“Yeah. Maybe Hawkman could have another kid?”
“What, another one? We already did the Egyptian thing with the first one.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t have wings. How about we give him a kid with wings?”
“Why would one kid have wings and the other kid doesn’t have wings? Come on.”
“Okay, okay, I get your point, but I think a winged superhero has the look to round out the team.”
“I don’t disagree, but how does he have wings? Hawkman’s wings aren’t hereditary either.”
“…maybe he’s not Hawkman’s son.”
“But that’s the whole point of this series. It’s the next generation of Earth-2 superheroes.”
“Maybe he’s… his… godson?”
“I’d say that’s weak, but we already got the Atom’s grand-nephew in this, and really he’s only an honorary grand-nephew at that.”
“Okay, godson then. But how does he get wings?”
“He takes a pair of Hawkman’s old wings. It’s not rocket science.”
“Come on, we can do better than that. I’m thinking that he’s actually a bird-man.”
“What?”
“A bird-man.”
“Like Koko B. Ware?”
“No, I mean a bird-man hybrid. A man-bird, if you prefer.”
“So, like, a guy with a bird-head and wings and talons.”
“No, that’s a little too freaky. I’m thinking just the wings. Maybe he can have some feathers in place of hair or something.”
“And this is Hawkman’s godson.”
“Yeah. Uh… a friend of his married a bird-woman.”
“A bird-woman.”
“From a race of bird-people.”
“This is one sexual deviant we are talking about here.”
“No, they mostly look human. But they’re evolved from birds, like we evolved from apes.”
“So he’s only slightly kinky.”
“Shut up.”
“Does he call her Beaky?”
“The point is that they had a kid.”
“And he’s from the race of bird-people. Which live where?”
“…a hidden secret city?”
“I can work with that. Where’s it hidden?”
“How about the Arctic?”
“You know what I think of when I think of the Arctic? Birds.”
“Well, that’s exactly why they’re hiding there, wiseass. Because nobody would think to look for bird-people in the Arctic.”
“I guess they probably had a hidden city in temperate zones first, but people kept coming up to it and saying “gosh, a hidden city of bird-people! It was right where I expected it would be!””
“Anyway. So we’re good on the origin, then?”
“Yeah, why not. Does he have any powers other than flying?”
“Does he need any?”
“Well, you’ve got one person who flies and can shoot energy blasts, and one person who flies and is basically a living Green Lantern ring. Doesn’t that make Kid Bird-Man kind of redundant?”
“This is a superhero team. There’s always room for a person who only flies and nothing else.”
“Fair enough. But I bet someday that somebody’s gonna take this guy and go full-on freaky-looking bird-man with him.”
“Might as well guess that he’ll get turned into a zombie or something.”
“That’ll be the day.”

Is it okay that I am kinda skeeved out by this?

I mean I been busy the last few weeks because I was in America and all and I’m totally gonna talk about that later when I’m not busy being me, but… ewwwwww, Kevin Church! Ewwwwww!

So in catching up on my comics reading after weeks of being too busy, I finally got to read Brightest Day #0 and yeah, it’s a pretty bad comic. Whenever a character refers to the title of the comic unironically, you know you’re in severe hit-or-miss territory, and between Captain Boomerang explaining The Shawshank Redemption to the Flash in a scene that just feels like treading water for a page or this whole “Deadman as Life-Man!” thing or the truly inexplicable return of Hawk (and everybody just forgetting that whole “hey, remember when he tried to conquer the universe and kill us all?” bit) or Hal Jordan being, well, Captain Needs A Dick-Punch again (seriously, there is no comics character I hate as much as Hal Jordan, with the possible exception of Beast Boy. Fuck Beast Boy), it’s pretty much mostly a miss all the way.

Don’t get me wrong: there are some good ideas in there. I know a lot of people hate the Max Lord revamp, but my thinking is if you’re going to have Max Lord be a baddie, then go full-out with it, and the idea of Max Lord making the whole world forget he ever existed (except for the old JLI, of course) is kind of appealing. And although Cry For Justice was dogshit in numerous ways and the worst possible way to get to the end result of “now there is a giant star-shaped forest in Star City and that is where Green Arrow will hang out,” that end result is not half bad.

But mostly it’s just bleh. I mean, you know what I’m sick of? Other comics characters constantly referencing the fact that J’onn J’onzz likes Oreos.1 I mean, here he is, your buddy back from the dead, so what do you do? You bring him cookies. Because he likes cookies. Granted, it’s at least nice to have comics characters making a thoughtful gesture, but you’ve got to figure at some point J’onn is going to be all “…you know, I do like other things that aren’t cookies. You could have brought me a book. I like to read. Or maybe some nice incense for when I meditate. Or something I’ve never seen before, to express the wonder that is Life that I may once again enjoy. That sort of thing.”

I mean, J’onn can just go to a supermarket if he wants some cookies. Bringing him cookies is like buying your loved one a birthday present at the gas station because nothing else was open – it actually manages to be almost worse than a gift certificate. Can you imagine anybody doing this sort of thing in real life? “Hey, dad! I know you like barbecue, so for your birthday I brought you five pounds of raw pork shoulder!” It just makes J’onn’s friends seem like assholes who don’t care about him enough to know him better than “he likes cookies”; it rings false.

The other thing that really bugged the shit out of me was the treatment of Aquaman.2 This is not because Aquaman was brooding, because Aquaman should brood. Really, I know there’s a large contingent of people who think Aquaman is just a less interesting version of Namor, but they are wrong: Aquaman is a more relatable version of Namor, who is, let’s be honest, kind of an unlikable dickhead. And it’s not like Arthur doesn’t have interesting narratives: he’s the King of the Sea, for crissake. You can do political narrative with Aquaman all day long and, unlike other characters, it doesn’t come across as forced or uninteresting: court intrigue as superheroics is something nobody else (other than Namor) can really pull off. And on top of that, he’s got an archenemy who killed his son. Like, not a son analogue a la Joker killing Jason Todd – his actual honest to god son. I have yet to see a writer really convey the sheer amount of hatred Aquaman must have for Black Manta; I’m not expecting to see it anytime soon, especially considering the three pages he got in Brightest Day.

I’ve seen other people describe this comic as being the worst comic of the year. It’s not. It’s mostly just weak, tepid sauce, the same weak tepid sauce that is ninety percent of DC’s output these days. If DC Comics was fast food, it would be Taco Bell to Marvel’s higher-end burger shack (nothing surprising, but better than average level of quality across the board).

1. Oh, sorry, “Chocos.” []
2. WHO STILL DOES NOT HAVE HIS BEARD. Rectify this, DC! OR FACE MY FURY. []

So somewhere on this site I’ve said that I’m willing to review products that are sent to me. This is for one major reason: I like getting free things. I am not at all ashamed of getting free things or being sent free things. If Apple wants to send me an iPad, I will review the fuck out of it. If the New Zealand Board of Tourism (or whatever they have. Presumably they have somebody who does tourism stuff) wants to buy me a trip to New Zealand to review, well, New Zealand, I am totally on board with that. I like getting things for free.

I mean, recently Torontoist was contacted by Kia Motors, who offered to send somebody to South Korea to review the new Kia Driveycar or whatever they made this year. Torontoist ultimately turned down the opportunity because they couldn’t find any reason the story was Toronto-related. I was all “but I’m from Toronto, surely that should count,” but ultimately journalistic integrity won the day because they are boring people with sticks up their asses who won’t let me go to South Korea to drive a car around a stunt track and do awesome skid turns. (I assume I would get the opportunity to drive the car around a stunt track and do skid turns. I mean, you got to figure Kia would want me to say nice things about them.) So you know I’m entirely willing to engage in the review process.

But I’ve got my limits. I say that right up front: I’m not going to be your marketing partner. If you want to send me something, that is awesome and I will review it in good faith and with an open mind. But guerrilla marketing is not something I engage in for anybody who is not me.1 If I get your product and I think it is shit, at best I will just not mention it on the site (and you’d have to be, like, really nice and send me homemade cookies because you’re so happy that I’m reviewing your thingy to get me to do that), and at worst I will say exactly how shit it is. That’s my line of integrity, right there.

Anyways. During my intense studytime, I was surprised to see this in my inbox:

This might be out of left field but I have a post idea I wanted to run by you. It’s quirky but something I think your readers might enjoy!

This opening is pretty common; I get a fair number of people who want me to post their Youtube or talk about their site. Sometimes I actually do it if I like whatever it is they’ve done. Not often, but sometimes.2

I want you to share your power anthem! Your anthem is an event or experience that changed you. It can be anything but I was thinking perhaps a wild night or a special event that changed you forever and left you feeling less than squeaky-clean. It can be anything so use your imagination. The point is, no matter what goes down AXE can fix you up.

Yes, that would be AXE as in “the crappy line of men’s beauty products.” People my age will remember that, when they were teenagers, Old Spice was the scent of desperate boys trying to get laid and who thought Old Spice would make them smell manly and intoxicating, rather than smelling like Old Spice. AXE is, more or less, this generation’s Old Spice, except instead of selling it with an aura of sophistication and dignity, they have gone with “we’re the brand for douchebags” as their selling point. Of course, AXE does reasonably well in the marketplace – or so I understand – so who am I to criticize them selling stuff to douchebags?

Of course, that is not the problem currently facing me right now; I don’t have to smell AXE. I am just reading an email and trying to figure out what the fuck this marketing campaign is supposed to be. As near as I can figure out, Marketing Person is asking me to take a bad experience and… use it to help them sell AXE. I don’t quite get this. “Hey, remember that time in your life when you were totally down in the dumps and feeling like a shitburger? We can use that to sell our product!” This makes no real sense as a marketing campaign to me.

And how is this a “power anthem,” anyway? I mean, when I think “power anthem,” I think something like this.

That is a power anthem. How does a bad time in my life have anything to do with Stan Bush? Stan Bush is all about the awesomest times in your very existence. Stan Bush is the radical kickflip that is your life. Sometimes, when I am depressed, I imagine what life would be like if I were Stan Bush, or maybe Rodimus Prime. Both are pretty much more excellent than anything you could possibly imagine.

Where was I? Oh, right. AXE. Okay, really, AXE is talking more about “hey, remember that time you partied so hard that you puked all over yourself and then you puked on your date and your date puked on the big guy and then the big guy puked on himself and he was so mad about the puke that he beat the shit out of you but that didn’t matter because you were already unconscious because you’d passed out because you’d partied so hard” variety of bad experience, the sort of Plan 9 From Outer Space or Manos: The Hands of Fate equivalent of so-bad-it’s-good experience. But these, too, are not power anthems. As was just cited, power anthems are so tubular that they force you to describe everything exclusively in parlance that either originated in the Eighties or was popularized at that time.

Confident your readers are interested in learning about your power anthem here’s what I hope you’ll be interested in doing:

First off, I’m pretty sure that if I stopped talking about comics which suck and/or rule that ninety percent of you would probably go find something else to read and most of the rest of you would only stick around in the hope of seeing El Tyrano Magnifico again.

But secondly, who the hell is interested in hearing about some distant-past emo dark time or pukefest in somebody else’s life? I mean, I don’t want to hear about emo dark times in the distant past from people I actually know and like in real life. (I’ll listen, of course, because that is what friends do, but I sure don’t look forward to it, and if you do you have issues.) And pukefests are all “you had to be there” things because we’ve all done it at one point or another and the minute details of the event are only funny to other people after the fact when you lie like a motherfucker and you’re all “oh man Stitz and Weasel and I we went out and we got so wasted that we stole police cruisers and we raced them through a stripmine and we each picked up a stripper then we drove the cars into the lake and the strippers drowned but it’s all good because they were also international drug dealers so the police gave us a medal and then we puked on the commissioner’s shoes, but he was totally cool about it and then he invited us upstairs and we got even more hammered on his private stash of Glenfiddich.”

But wait, what are they interested in me doing?

– Share your personal anthem on your blog

…I thought I was supposed to start off by doing that? What is up with you, Marketing Person? Do you expect me to tease this shit out? Like, on Monday i’ll be all “hey guys I’m going to have a total POWER ANTHEM post for you tomorrow” and then on Tuesday I go “sup guys, POWER ANTHEM is delayed until tomorrow, in the meantime here is a picture of Jughead eating a hamburger,” and then on Wednesday I drop the POWER ANTHEM post and it’s about how when I was in high school this one girl told me I’d never get laid because I was too weird,3 but that doesn’t matter because AXE products make me smell like a frathouse after it’s just been cleaned because everybody’s parents are visiting the next day.

* Encourage your readers to share their own anthems for a chance to win a Flip Camera from AXE. This way they can capture their next wild experience in real-time. Feel free to share the video link with them to better explain what an anthem is.

I am not sharing the video link with you. It’s about this guy who goes to a party and gets wasted, and then he goes to a motel and has kinky sex with a kinky girl, and then he has a shower with two hot chicks and then gets the crap kicked out of him, and in between he showers with AXE. If I showed you the video link, I am fairly sure I would be causing a spike in suicides.4

But besides that, they’re asking me to ask you to tell me about emofests or puke adventures. Who the hell does that? Do they even read this blog? We’re fucking nerds. Every story would have Stormtroopers in it.

* Get your readers talking and we’ll send you a basket of AXE shower gel line-up and 2 Flip Cameras – one for you and one for a lucky reader.

See, now I know one-third of you are totally going to be all “dammit MGK I wanted a Flip Camera,” but Flip Cameras are dogshit cameras for bad people, and I know that most of you are not bad people. But what really irks me is that AXE here is asking me not only to whore my blog out for a basket of shower gel I don’t like and a shitty-ass camera I won’t use, but they’re asking me to do it on contingency. Kia Motors was willing to fly me5 to motherfucking Korea in the hopes that I would say nice things about the Kia Driveycar but AXE isn’t willing to send me $500 worth of shitty phones and shitty shower gel unless I prove to them in advance that I will suck their marketing dick, and that I will do so to their satisfaction to boot.

Needless to say, I ignored the mail, because of all of the above and also because I thought passing Business Associations might be a good idea so that law school was not a complete waste of time. But then, a couple of days later, they sent me another email.

Just sending a quick follow up note to get your thoughts and feedback on the proposed blog post idea.

Dude. I hope you do not do online personal dating or anything like that, because when somebody ignores your initial post, it’s practically never because they missed it, no matter how many times you might tell yourself otherwise. It’s always for one simple reason: they are not that into you. Because you are in marketing for a career, this is probably even moreso the case. I was just going to be all “fuck it,” and just delete the email and move on, but then you had to bother me again. And this is what happens when you can’t let something go: you get mocked on a B-level nerdblog!

HOLY SHIT I DON’T BELIEVE THIS UPDATE: I was just checking my email as I am wont to do and Marketing Person emailed me again.

I just wanted to touch base one final time to see if there is any interest in this AXE sponsored story and FLIP camera giveaway.

This is after I just spent a thousand words or more trashing his marketing method, the product he’s trying to market, his idea for marketing that product, and Flip Cameras. I am just totally blown away, I really am. I mean, is he gonna keep going? Is this really the one final time he contacts me? Or next month is he going to suggest that I hold a “totally awesome” essay contest about how much you all love Crest toothpaste, and offer to send me a bucket of Crest plus two Razor phones, one for me and one for one of my readers?

1. Coming soon: viral Youtube campaign designed to get me an articling position and/or a gig at Marvel! Actually, possibly both at once. []
2. And then, of course, there are the people who just want me to talk about Power Pack. []
3. This did not in fact happen. I am making a point. []
4. Or, alternately, you would band together to find the guy in the video and beat the shit out of him. []
5. Well, theoretically. []

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

See, all the hype lately is about how Grant Morrison is going to write a story where Batman travels through time and is Batman in different eras. But Batman is totally stealing this schtick. Who beat him to it?

Obviously, Batman draws his inspiration from Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog, as is right and proper.

It is said that they’re making a fourth Mission: Impossible movie, and that Brad Bird is in talks to direct it. I think this is a fantastic idea.

A big reason for my enthusiasm is, of course, the involvement Brad Bird himself, a talented filmmaker who made one of the best superhero movies there is with The Incredibles, and who topped it by making a movie about a rat with a keen interest in French cuisine just as engaging.

But the fact of the matter is, I love the Mission: Impossible movies. “But Justin,” you might well say, “the Mission: Impossible franchise … well, it’s hardly even a franchise at all, is it? It’s just generic spy action – those could be any movies. Why, you don’t even have a memorable lead character! Ethan Hunt has no distinguishing characteristics; he’s just Tom Cruise with a gun, which means all he really does is alternate between his intense face and that cocky smile he does, depending on the situation.”

Well, the first thing I would say is that Cruise may only have two expressions, but he does them both so very well. I usually like watching Tom Cruise in things, and I can think of no reason for this other than he just radiates charm; certainly it’s not a mystery why this guy is a movie star, right?

But onto the larger issues … look, the thing is, not a whole lot of people today – especially not in that youthful demographic the films are aiming for – have ever seen the original TV show or know what it was like (for the record: I’ve never seen it either). But you know what everyone in America does know, even if they’ve never seen that show?

Bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da deedillooo…deedillooo…deedillooo…da na. BA-NA-NAAA…BA-NA-NAAA…BA-NA-NAAA…NA NA!

Um, and so on. They are not making the movie version of the show, they are making the movie version of that song, because that is one of the most stirring television themes ever written.  The producers felt pretty safe that as long as you had that theme, a couple of catchphrases from the show (“Your mission, should you choose/decide to accept it” and “This message will self destruct in five seconds,” which everybody also knows despite never having seen that show) a bankable leading man, and a lot of explosions, you could put pretty much anything in there and it would sell.

Instead of being a weakness, however, it turns out to be the franchise’s greatest strength.

See, James Bond movies are very clearly defined stylistically. There is a relatively narrow range of things you can do with Bond, and when you start moving out of that range, moviegoers go, “Hmm, I don’t know…it doesn’t feel like James Bond.” You could never put, say, Quentin Tarantino, or Edgar Wright, or John Carpenter on a Bond movie. It wouldn’t work, because their styles are all so distinctive and so not-Bond. What you need are extremely talented, but not flashy, directors to do 007. The direction must serve the franchise.

But the Mission: Impossible franchise, as it exists, has no unity of theme or character or style, so it doesn’t matter if they don’t match up. There is no recognizable franchise to serve, so you can get very talented directors and just let them go nuts. So the first movie is very much a Brian DePalma movie, very stylish and glossy. The second movie is John Woo doing his ultracool gun stuff, right down to the doves. And the third one lets J.J. Abrams revisit his Alias political-intrigue-and-personal-stakes bag of tricks. Three different directors with three different styles produce three movies that have absolutely nothing to do with one another. So the sort of metatextual brilliance in all this – which I’m sure was not planned, but it’s there anyway – it’s not just Ethan Hunt being given his assignment, it’s also the directors…

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make an action movie using the following elements:

1. Tom Cruise, and a box for him to stand on when interacting with taller actresses.

2. Ving Rhames as a guy who constantly points out how dangerous/impossible/crazy the mission they’re on is as a way to pump up the tension a bit.

3. A pre-existing suspension of disbelief that you can make masks so lifelike that they’re indistinguishable from the original person (despite differences in height, weight, etc.), yet peel off painlessly with one good tug.

…and of course…

4. Bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da deedillooo…deedillooo…deedillooo…da na. BA-NA-NAAA…BA-NA-NAAA…BA-NA-NAAA…NA NA!”

I make no secret of it; I adore the Marvel Essentials line of trade paperbacks. My own blog, Fraggmented, has dozens of posts devoted to these insane 500+ page black-and-white chunks of classic comics, each one giving you twenty or more issues of a title for an almost sickeningly reasonable cost. (Some of the collections of late 80s and early 90s comics, like X-Men and Wolverine, actually give you the comics for less than the original cover price.) There’s something so wonderful about being able to sit down with a comic and see the long-term plotlines unfolding in front of your eyes, taking in years of development in just a few volumes. I’ve been buying these for years now, picking up classic runs of Fantastic Four and Avengers for a song and taking a chance on comics like Man-Thing and Killraven that I probably wouldn’t have bought if not for the cheapness of the format. I won’t say that this is the last word on the subject–heck, I could probably do a whole other post on the similar Showcase Presents line at DC–but here are my top ten Essentials for those of you interested in dipping in.

10. Captain America, Volume 1-4. There’s a Volume Five coming out soon, and I’ll probably buy that when finances permit as well. For all that Captain America is seen nowadays as a stodgy, stuffy agent of the status quo, he was originally a counter-culture firebrand and a lens through which a variety of excellent writers looked at the changing face of America. And for all that Ed Brubaker tries to inject some “edginess” into Cap, he’s still light-years away from the smack-talking rebel Stan Lee once wrote, and you’ll be amazed at how interesting Steve Rogers was as a person before Mark Gruenwald bowdlerized him in the 80s. (Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of what Gruenwald did, but he seriously blanded down Steve Rogers’ personality.) The series is a little inconsistent, but there are long stretches of good stuff in every volume. Highlights include Cap fighting it out with Nixon on the White House lawn, and delivering a humiliating smack-down to a villain that was so thorough the character never appeared again.

9. Defenders, Volumes 1-3. Actually, you could probably stick to the first two books and come away happy–Steve Gerber’s magnum opus that closed out his run on Defenders hasn’t entirely aged well, and comes off a little pretentious now that the 70s culture that nurtured it has faded away. But this is still a classic Defenders run, and the reason the series is fondly remembered long after the multitude of failed relaunches and reunions. (Tip for prospective Defenders relaunchers: If you go back and read these books, the Silver Surfer and Namor left the team after about five issues. For the most part, the stable Defenders team was Doc, Hulk, Hellcat, Valkyrie and Nighthawk.)

8. Power Man, Volume 1. It’s interesting to see the way that Luke Cage has been almost a cultural mirror of African-Americans over the course of his appearances in the Marvel Universe; he went from being a raw, hard-edged underdog who refused to let his oppression at the hands of a racist prison system break his spirit, to a walking comedy jive stereotype, to a street hustler and borderline thug, and finally to a cynical, worldly-wise veteran of the revolutionary 70s. But he was never better than in his first few appearances, when his character was treated with total sincerity by writer Archie Goodwin, and it’s worth picking up the book to read those old stories. (The later volumes are good too, as is the Iron Fist solo series, but I’m sticking with the best stuff for purposes of this list.)

7. Silver Surfer, Volume 2. Volume 1 is fairly readable, more notable for its lovely Buscema art than its stories, but Volume 2 is where the story really begins. Steve Englehart finally figures out how to make the Surfer work in a way that no previous writer ever had, simply by freeing him from his imprisonment on Earth and putting him in space, his natural millieu. You’ll need to have a tolerance for certain Englehart-isms (oh, look! It’s Mantis again! And she’s even more bad-ass!) but the series is space opera at its epic best. Definitely deserving of a third volume.

6. X-Men, Volumes 1-4. Yes, it’s probably blasphemy to put the Claremont/Byrne era of the X-Men this low on the list, but trust me–when you actually go back and read them, you find that all of Claremont’s annoying little tics as a writer (his over-narration and purple prose, his borderline creepy obsession with his female characters, his habit of having everyone reiterate their major personality traits for the reader every few pages) didn’t start when he returned to the series in the 21st century. Even so, this was a collaboration that was more than the sum of its parts, and the work they did here has let every subsequent writer coast on their efforts, so it’s worth picking up just to get the backstory.

5. Spectacular Spider-Man, Volumes 1-2. Bronze Age Spider-Man was always a treat–in the wake of the death of Gwen Stacy, there was always a feeling of uncertainty and adventurousness about the title. Just like in the early days, there were no sacred cows…or at least, it seemed like it…and this is some particularly fine Bronze Age Spider-Man. You’ll find Gerry Conway, Roger Stern and Marv Wolfman all writing the title in these two volumes, and those guys are master craftsmen of a sort that the medium just doesn’t turn out anymore. (OK, I tell a lie. Jeff Parker and Fred van Lente have shown huge chops in that regard as well. But Roger Stern still shows everyone How It Is Freaking Done.)

4. Super-Villain Team-Up, Volume 1. Despite my complaints about “decompression” and “event comics” on my own blog, this was a big epic crossover before there were big, epic crossovers, and I love it. Doctor Doom and Namor team up to crush the surface world, only to wind up opposing each other in a gigantic saga of double-crosses, clashing egos, and duels of sheer will between two of Marvel’s best bad guys. There are a few other stories that close out the book (the “Red Skull vs. Hitler” one is a classic, as well) but you’re buying this one for the big Doom/Namor war, and it’s worth it.

3. Doctor Strange, Volume 1. Speaking of collaborations that are more than the sum of their parts, this is Ditko and Lee at their finest. Doctor Strange’s origin story has the elegant wonder of a child’s fairy tale, and the stories that follow introduce an entire epic mythos of cosmic strangeness that has probably never been equaled in the comic-book medium. (Perhaps by Lovecraft in the pulps, but nobody did weird tales in comics the way Ditko and Lee did it.) Later volumes are alright as well, but they’re definitely all trying to imitate the effortless grace of these awesome early stories.

2. Tomb of Dracula, Volumes 1-4. A bold, experimental, almost unprecedented comic, this Marv Wolfman/Gene Colan collaboration (they worked together on almost the entire run of the series) puts the focus on Dracula not as a mere monster, but as a tortured soul in the vein of Milton’s Satan. He is constantly the prisoner of his own pride as much as anything else, denied the delights of a living existence and yet unwilling to surrender to death. As drawn by Colan’s gorgeous, evocative, moody pencils (this is one book I’d recommend in black and white over color), it’s a helluva ride, especially given that Wolfman also gives us a great group of sympathetic vampire hunters to root for. (Yes, this is where Blade first shows up. He’s not even the coolest of the bunch.)

1. Spider-Man, Volume 1. And this is Lee and Ditko at even finer than their finest. It’s a collaboration that finally burned them out on each other, but what the hell, the Beatles didn’t last forever either. And this…every single Spider-Man writer since then, including Stan Lee himself, has been trying to recapture the singular alchemy of these 22 issues. Everything from Spider-Man’s origin to his battles with the Chameleon, the Lizard, the Vulture, Doctor Octopus, Kraven the Hunter, the Enforcer, the Green Goblin, Electro, the Sinister Six and the Scorpion has damn near been carved into stone as the Way Spider-Man Should Be, and here Lee and Ditko seem to bring it off almost casually. Much has been made of the question of “Who deserves the credit for these?”, but that misses the point; Lee needed Ditko’s imagination and unflinching moral sensibility, and Ditko needed Lee’s humanizing touch and deft dialogue. If you’re someone who thinks that Stan Lee is a tired old hack who had more of a knack for self-promotion than for writing, read this comic. It still holds up, even after all these years.

Your guest judge is Tasty Oreo, who is amusingly bewildered when Jason Coleman leads the crowd in a round of “Aussie Aussie Aussie/Oi Oi Oi,” which is not coincidentally also the cheer for Osgoode Hall law school students. (We stole it, of course.)

Top four: Broadway. And of course we start off with a Tasty Oreo Broadway, because that is what Tasty does and this is a final competition episode don’t you know. This was perfectly fine and decent and not nearly so cliched as a lot of Tasty’s routines can be. That is all.

Ivy and Robbie: rumba. It’s odd because I liked this, but on the other hand, throughout the whole routine as I was watching it and enjoying it, I kept thinking how un-Latin Robbie’s dancing was, and I think I peg that more on the choreo – which was really reminiscent a lot more of a smooth waltz with some ballet overtones than a rumba – than on Robbie, because really it was seamless. But a lot less Latin. Ivy’s flourishes were lovely, but Tasty makes a very good point noting the lack of resistance in the movements. So this was good, but not quite a proper rumba, to say the least.

Jessie and Philippe: jazz. Philippe is one of the best forklifts I’ve ever seen: he’s just seamless in his lifts, utterly without flaw. I liked this routine but I thought the choreo got just a bit frenetic in a few points, and the first unison section did suffer just a bit with a couple of very small missteps. Still, on the whole this was very good and I have little else to say.

Philippe and Robbie: hip-hop. GRATITUOUS SHIRT REMOVAL FOR ALL THE LADIES! This was probably the best two-man hip-hop routine out of all the SYTYCDs ever – even better than Benji/Travis from season 2. The judges were all over Robbie, but honestly, I think Philippe danced this better: it wasn’t that Robbie was bad – he was probably just about at his best all season and his improvement continues apace – but Philippe was just so completely confident that he didn’t need to up the intensity because he was able to dance the routine with pure cool.

Jessie and Robbie: contemporary. And it’s the Avatar-themed routine that the Twitters were telling me about in advance. Robbie makes me sad by saying how Avatar is his favourite movie of all time. This was… okay. Kind of bland, to be honest, and given that the choreography was obviously very difficult in its physicality that doesn’t really say too much for what was being done with it. Good unison, but I felt at points that both Jessie and Robbie were letting their exhaustion show. I wanted to like this and I didn’t.

Ivy and Philippe: contemporary. A lovely little number that three weeks ago would have been remarkable and at this point is just sort of in the middle. (It doesn’t help that this season has been really, really heavy on contemporary and jazz: there’s a reason you want to mix genres, it keeps them from getting stale.) Absolutely nothing else to say about this.

Ivy and Jessie: jazz. I will first express appreciation for the lack of a “hey look at the girls they are so pretty” contemporary routine where the two girls do a dance about feelings or rainbows. This was rough and dirty and brutal (good brutal) and a lot of fun. I thought Jessie danced this a hair better than Ivy did, relying more on her moves than facial expressions where Ivy occasionally did the opposite (Ivy unfortunately does have a tendency to be a bit of a ham). But it was a very slim difference and this was very good.

Philippe’s solo: Smooth and cool. The cane was perhaps a bit awkward for a few bars, but that is a minor complaint for a solo that was really very good.

Ivy’s solo: Unfortunately boring and sort of predictable. Dancing to “Missionary Man” by the Eurythmics should especially not be boring, and yet this was.

Jessie’s solo: A very good contemporary solo without anything that especially distinguished it from most other contemporary solos.

Robbie’s solo: Skillful controlled thrashing combined with solid technique: a strong piece of work.

Top four should be: 1.) Robbie 2.) Jessie 3.) Philippe 4.) Ivy
Top four will be: 1.) Robbie 2.) Philippe 3.) Jessie 4.) Ivy

I don’t think a lot of people still read Al Capp’s Li’l Abner; Capp’s extreme misanthropy, combined with his shift to the hard right late in his career, can make the strip a bit of a slog at times. But at its best, it was comics genius. And it was never better than in the story where Capp finally, after years of almost making it happen, forced the title character to marry Daisy Mae, the beautiful girl who pined for him in vain (because Li’l Abner was too stupid to have any concept of sexual attraction to anyone, he just considered her a nuisance). I found the story in an old book, and thought I’d share it here, because after almost 60 years, it still puts most comics to shame when it comes to handling an “event” story.

The full story can be found a this link. But one thing you need to know to understand the story, or at least how it looked at the time, is that Capp had constantly made it look like Abner would have to get married, and then found some twist to get him out of it. That’s what comics creators do: they toy with us. By the time this story ran, no one really believed that Abner would marry. Everyone was on to Capp’s tricks. So what does he build the story around? The fact that everyone is in on his tricks. The whole story is like a huge meta-game with his huge audience, starting as soon as Abner’s “Uncle Future” predicts that he will get married:

The biggest stroke of brilliance, though, was the device Capp used to marry Abner off. For years, one of Capp’s most popular recurring ideas was “Sadie Hawkins’ Day,” where boys are forced to marry the girls who catch them. Every year, someone would catch Abner and there would be some crazy reason why he stayed a bachelor. So by 1952, anyone who had ever read the strip assumed that if Abner got married (unlikely) it would be because of Sadie Hawkins’ Day. So Capp doesn’t even bring that into the story at all. Instead, he uses Fearless Fosdick, the Dick Tracy-style strip-within-a-strip that produced many of his best stories (Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad was so influenced by Fosdick, with its gruesome cartoony violence and take-that attitude to the comics, that it bordered on copycatism at times). Because Abner was a devoted reader of Fearless Fosdick, he would sometimes echo Capp’s own thoughts on comic strips and comics readers. But here, he takes a vow: from now on he’ll do exactly what Fosdick does, all the time. This will keep him safe from marriage because Fosdick is the most famous lifelong bachelor in all of comics.

So having set up this meta situation, Capp takes it up a notch by having Daisy Mae meet “Lester Gooch,” creator of Fearless Fosdick, and tell him some of the same things that Capp himself had probably heard: by portraying an anti-marriage hero, he’s setting a bad example. I doubt Capp actually decided to do the marriage for this reason, but he is, as we now say, putting it out there. He’s added an extra layer of irony, as we try to figure out whether Lester Gooch is speaking for Capp, or just standing in for the way people saw Capp’s reasons for doing this storyline.

So Gooch creates a storyline where circumstances push Fosdick closer to marriage, and because Abner has promised to do whatever his comics hero does, Abner is going to have to undergo a “real” marriage the very day one happens in the comics. Here’s where it gets really byzantine, because Abner starts speaking for his own readers, the ones who were hep to all Capp’s tricks and knew (or thought they knew) that Capp would put in some twist to get his hero out of it, as usual. Abner points out that gullible comics readers belive that these gimmicks — like marriage — are real, while the savvy comics reader knows that Fosdick (and therefore Abner) will just go back to the status quo in the end.

But Fosdick gets married, in what is undoubtedly the biggest event in the comics-within-comics world, with Abner — standing in for his own readers — expressing shock and appallment (appallitude?) over this.

And the day after Fosdick’s strip-within-a-strip wedding comes a similar “event” wedding in the strip itself. Once again speaking for the readers, Li’l Abner wonders how this could happen after all the times he’s gotten out of it. While his parents, more or less breaking the thin fourth wall that this story had up to now, sort of acknowledge that this (heavily-publicized) comics story is being read by millions, even “billyuns,” around the world.

But of course that doesn’t end things, because we know that even when the big event happens, it doesn’t “really” happen. This is the comics, after all. Abner keeps clinging to the idea that a “miracle” will happen to restore the status quo, even as he and Daisy Mae set off on their honeymoon. One possibility Capp keeps referring to, with his typical gruesomeness, is that Daisy might just get killed off; a couple of strips end with it looking like she might be about to die, or even shot dead.

But most readers had one explanation in mind. People who read the 1952 equivalent of TVTropes could tell you what a comics creator would do after marrying his bachelor hero off. And sure enough, it happens — but not in Li’l Abner, in Fearless Fosdick.

Yes, in the final game between Capp and the reader, he’s used the last-ditch trick, the one cartoonists always use, the “imaginary story” gambit we were all expecting — but not in the world of the strip. Instead he uses it as a way of showing that this is absolutely final for Abner: there’s no miracle to save him, and it’s not a dream. (Capp is also distancing himself from other comics: the “it was all a dream” trick is something they use, not him.) As Mammy explains to him, and us, things will never be the same in this comic again. Abner was wrong in thinking that this was all going to blow over, and so were we: Capp has put one over on all of us who thought we knew all the tropes.

There are differences of opinion as to whether this marriage was even a good idea. Some people think it hurt the strip; others think it had a natural rate of decline that was going to happen whether Abner was married or unmarried. But one thing’s for sure: no one had ever turned a comics marriage into a gigantic exploration of the whole process of reading comics, the relationship between reader and artist, and the audience’s ability to anticipate comics clichés. Well, it beats the hell out of another “Superman marries Lois Lane” cover.

1.) The voice shouting “He my nun!” on Midnite Vultures track “Hollywood Freaks” is actually a sample of David Duchovny.

2.) Did a guest voice on an episode of Animaniacs under a pseudonym.

3.) An early version of Guero contained a track called “Octorok Motherf****r” that has never been released.

4.) Big fan of the comic strip “Pickles.”

5.) It is not known whether the reason is physical or psychological, but he is incapable of hitting a C# in any octave; only skillful use of Auto-Tune conceals this.

6.) Favorite book: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.

7.) Featured in an episode of Bosom Buddies at age 11 as Sonny’s bratty nephew who stumbles onto Kip and Henry’s ruse and threatens to rat them out if they don’t take him to a baseball game.

8.) The one and only time he has ever eaten olives was Christmas 1991, and there is a good reason he has never done so since.

9.) All of his songs are originally composed on a steam calliope, and it totally makes sense if you think about it.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

The wonderful thing about the DVD revolution is the way that it makes it possible for just about anyone to become a film student. Videotapes began the process, of course, but their limitations meant that the really nice versions of a lot of movies were only available to someone who was willing to shell out the big bucks for a laserdisc player (and the expensive discs it played.) Once DVDs really caught on, though, science-fiction fans like myself could take an informative, exhaustive, and above all cheap trip through the history of the genre.

All of which is by way of introduction to my decision, some years back, to sit down and watch The Omega Man, Logan’s Run, and Soylent Green. I figured I might learn something about my sci-fi geek ancestors by watching what I thought of as an informal, accidental trilogy. All three of them had come out on DVD, and all three of them had come out in very reasonably-priced versions. And most importantly, all three of them had become, in their own way, pop-cultural touchstones. I didn’t know exactly why I grouped them together in my head beyond that, but I figured it would come to me as I watched them.

It actually didn’t. Perhaps it was because the project took a little longer than planned; I watched Logan’s Run in 2002, but I didn’t get around to watching The Omega Man and Soylent Green until about four years later. (In my defense, in the intervening time I bought a house, wrote a couple of books and some short stories, and watched lots of other movies. Oh, and I started a blog.) Even after I’d finally watched all three, though, the connection never gelled in my mind. I knew it was there; I was sure I was right to see them as somehow linked. But it still didn’t click as to why.

Until recently, when I read about another movie that came out not long afterwards. It’s a little cult film from a director that only did a handful of movies, a sort of avant-garde sci-fi flick that tried to graft the techniques of cinema verité into a new genre. You might have heard of it, though. It’s called Star Wars.

(pause for laughter)

(pause some more for laughter)

No? Not even a little? OK, I’ll move on. The point is, Star Wars came out only a couple of years after Logan’s Run, but the two of them look like they’re from different decades. Logan’s Run is a very technically polished science fiction film, with effects that no doubt dazzled contemporary audiences, but it’s still one of the last pre-Star Wars films, whereas Star Wars is the first post-Star Wars film. (Yes, Star Wars is a post-Star Wars film. I’ll explain.)

All three of the films in my informal trilogy share that same elusive element, that quality that changed in the watershed moment when Star Wars transformed science-fiction cinema for better and/or worse. They’re better, simply in terms of production quality, than 50s sci-fi movies like The Thing, It Conquered the World, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers…but you can see a continuum of evolution between those movies and Soylent Green, whereas something like Transformers doesn’t even look like it came from the same breeding stock. It looks more like a descendant of Star Wars…OK, a brain-damaged, atrophied descendant, but a descendant nonetheless.

I think the key is Lucas’ decision, with Star Wars, to create an immersive environment. People talk about the special effects of Star Wars as though that was the film’s great breakthrough, but it really didn’t make that many advances beyond what was already possible. (Which is not to denigrate the advances it did make–motion control cameras allowed for fluid, realistic shots of space battles that were essential to the director’s vision.) But the real change was the extra care that was taken in crafting the models, the costumes, the sets and the locations. Lucas wanted you to feel like he was shooting a documentary, not a science-fiction movie.

Previous science-fiction effects artists weren’t lazy when they didn’t take that same amount of care–they were just thinking about the effects in a different way. To them, the science-fiction genre was the genre of ideas; everything was an allegory, a representation of existing concepts. Logan’s Run was about the generation gap. Soylent Green was about overpopulation and pollution. The Omega Man was about nuclear war. Likewise, the effects were representational instead of realistic. Prior to Lucas, science-fiction was the cinema of ideas.

Actually, Star Wars is an allegory too. It’s a movie made by a cynical veteran of the 60s, with the Empire as a stand-in for a pre-Watergate Nixon administration that seemed (at the time) to be about one bad week away from dissolving Congress and declaring martial law. The only solution, according to Lucas’ actually pretty radical and highly politically-charged script, is for armed rebellion against the tyrannical government, aided by all the other races that the Powers That Be ruthlessly oppress. (Early drafts of the script contained sequences that later trickled into Return of the Jedi. The highly trained, professional soldiers with all the cool technology getting their asses kicked by natives with pointy sticks and stolen guns? Gee, what war was going on right around then?)

The problem is, Lucas made the film so immersive that nobody noticed the allegory, and the effects so beautiful that everyone judged all subsequent films by the standards he set. From now on, an important aspect of all science-fiction movies would be, “Are the effects realistic?” The cinema of ideas was replaced, in that instant, by the cinema of visceral experience. Sci-fi became all about making you feel as if you were there, recreating the documentary feel of Star Wars instead of the philosophy of it. A post-Star Wars movie was one you lived, not thought about. (Which is why, despite having intended to make a pre-Star Wars movie, Lucas made a post-Star Wars movie in the eyes of everyone who saw it. See? Makes sense now, right?)

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that every science-fiction movie made before Star Wars was a deep, insightful allegory, any more than it means that every post-Star Wars film was a brain-dead piece of eye-candy. Writers and directors still have things to say in their art, and that’s a constant in any time and any genre. But the emphasis shifted with Star Wars…and by watching Logan’s Run, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green, you can see some of the most advanced examples of films made before that watershed moment, the apex of the cinema of ideas.

And, um…if you haven’t seen them, please don’t read the comments section. Because someone’s going to spoil the ending of Soylent Green, I guarantee it.