My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Also, it’s not airing on Canadian telly so it’s not in the column, but – the new American version of Top Gear is really dreadful, isn’t it? Jeremy Clarkson might be a colossal dickhead, but at least he’s sort of self-aware about being a colossal dickhead, and May/Hammond similarly recognize that although their love for cars is heartfelt it’s also sort of absurd. You don’t get that from the American hosts (Adam Ferrara and two professional car-guys who are wastes of on-camera space). They’re totally serious about how much they love cars. It’s kind of boring.

Interior, Gambit’s bedroom. The room is lit by candlelight, with a bottle of champagne chilling on ice in a bucket on the bedside table. The bed is freshly made with silk sheets. A stereo is playing in the corner (if we can show the lyrics, it’s Barry White.)

Enter Gambit and Rogue.

ROGUE: There’s just no point, Remy. I know you love me, but my powers are my curse, we both know that. The second ah touch you, ah’ll steal your mind and your powers.

GAMBIT: So you keep saying, ma petite chere…but I’m a gambler, non? I’m willing to press my luck, especially when the rewards…

He leans in.

GAMBIT: …are worth the risk.

Rogue pulls away, but not too far.

ROGUE: Ah, ah can’t, ah can’t risk it…

GAMBIT: You’re not the one taking the risk, amie. I am…

He leans in again, and this time his lips make contact.

GAMBIT: Definitely worth it.

Rogue’s eyes widen in shock. Speechless, she allows Gambit to lead her to the bed. He sits down and pulls her down to him. They kiss again, more passionately and longer this time.

ROGUE: Ah don’t believe it!

GAMBIT: Neither do I, chere. You never expected a man to kiss you but you still wore flavored lip gloss.

Rogue giggles, and the two of them clinch together in a longer, more fevered embrace. Gambit pulls Rogue’s gloves off and takes her hand in his, and then reaches out to undress her further…

Suddenly, the stereo stops.

GAMBIT: Merde!

He leaps to his feet.

ROGUE: What’s the problem, sugah? It’s probably just the end of the CD, and…say, did you hear something?

GAMBIT (fumbling with the stereo player): No! No, ma petite chere fille amie, it’s probably just, um, the pounding of your heart.

ROGUE: No, it sounds like it’s coming from under the bed.

GAMBIT: What? Ahahahahaha! Oh, that’s rich. There’s nobody under the bed!

ROGUE: Who said anything about a person?

GAMBIT: Nobody! You’re just imagining crazy talk, that’s all. Worrying about nothing. Now let me–

ROGUE: That was a thump. Ah distinctly heard a thump.

GAMBIT: It was nothing! I mean, nobody! I mean–

Rogue gets up and kneels down next to the bed. She peers underneath the hanging bedspread.

ROGUE: Oh mah God! Is that Leech!?!

GAMBIT: I can explain, ma petite chere petite fille petite–

ROGUE: Did you tie him up down there?

GAMBIT: A little, maybe, but it was for us!

ROGUE: When were you going to let him go?

GAMBIT: Um. Depends. You gonna stay the night?

…because if you are a nerd then this is the movie you should be anticipating. Directed by Duncan Jones, whose first film was Moon, one of last year’s best movies, and who finally answered the longstanding question of “what if Groundhog Day was a thriller instead of a comedy?”:

…but I spent last night playing Corporation Inc., which will probably explode in popularity once it spreads around due to its mini-sim-ness quality to it.

Still feels very much like the start of a game rather than a game itself; this is something where you can see the designers inventing missions, objectives, customizing it in many different ways, etc. But it’s well worth a play or six hundred.

So in lieu of a fascinating post here is some Wintersleep for you lot.

FLAPJACKS: The trailer for the Green Lantern movie is online.
ME: Oh good.
FLAPJACKS: That sounded sarcastic. I don’t get why you’re being sarcastic. This is a comic book movie directed by Martin Campbell starring Ryan Reynolds and Peter Sarsgaard. There is nothing in that sentence you don’t like.
ME: Probably because the word “Green Lantern” was not in that sentence. I am not particularly a fan of Green Lantern, or of things both greenish and lanterny at once. The concept has never appealed to me the way it does to some. I am fine with this. And I especially particularly do not like Hal Jordan, who is the character I hate second-most in comics.
FLAPJACKS: The first being…
ME: Beast Boy.
FLAPJACKS: Why do you hate Beast Boy?
ME: Because fuck him, that’s why.

ME: Oh, god, we’re starting out with Hal Jordan as super-stud.
FLAPJACKS: You don’t complain when Iron Man bags chicks.
ME: That’s because it doesn’t seem like desperate trying when Iron Man sleeps around. But years of DC telling us over and over again that Hal Jordan is hot shit and he totally has threeways with DC superhero ladies like all the time have poisoned the well. That they’re having him played by Ryan Reynolds just underscores the point.
FLAPJACKS: But you like Ryan Reynolds.
ME: Because he’s good at playing “douchebag bro,” whether straight or for ironic purpose. Like, consider Tony Stark again. When Tony Stark wants to bail on a woman he just nailed, he just goes downstairs and tinkers with cars while Pepper Potts and his AI butler shove the girl out the door. It’s a dick move, pure and simple, which makes him sort of admirable in a way because he doesn’t pretend it’s anything but a dick move. Hal Jordan, on the other hand, is passive aggressive. “Hey I’m totally a decent guy, One Night Stand lady, I just have to go fly a plane so I’m gonna pretend I’m not an asshole for ten seconds okay bye.”
FLAPJACKS: You think about this too much.
ME: And now comes poetry about how awesome it is to fly a plane. Nobody in the whole world likes this. Nobody wants to hear about your hobby or your job completing you and putting you at inner peace.
FLAPJACKS: Abin Sur looks kind of awesome.
ME: The spaceship isn’t bad either.
FLAPJACKS: Man they are showing a lot of Abin Sur’s spaceship. That makes me worry. When the awesomest thing they’re showing is the spaceship that blows up in the first twenty minutes it kind of makes you wonder about, you know, the rest of the movie.
ME: The wormhole looks decent.
FLAPJACKS: Oa looks decent.
ME: Sinestro looks… like a horrible CGI experiment gone wrong.
FLAPJACKS: Oh my god he looks like an extra from Delgo.
ME: And the thing is that we know that’s actually Mark Strong. What is up with that? Is this like Avatar where they motion-traced people and then did it all with computers, or is the makeup job just that bad?
FLAPJACKS: I’m not sure. I hope it’s the latter. The former sounds like a horrible idea if you don’t have James Cameron and lots of millions of dollars handy.
ME: Pieface!
FLAPJACKS: I don’t think you’re allowed to call him that anymore.
ME: I bet it’s, like, his college bro nickname. “Pieface! PieFAAAAAACE! I can call you that because of all the pussy you ate.”
FLAPJACKS: Hal seems to have self-doubt.
ME: Presumably somebody realized at some point that Hal’s standard “overconfident asshole” schtick wasn’t a great selling point as a character and decided to go a different route, which is “pretend Hal is actually Kyle Rayner so people may end up liking him.”
FLAPJACKS: You really hate this character, don’t you?
ME: Oh my yes.
FLAPJACKS: That green fist was sweet.
ME: It was.
FLAPJACKS: Oh wait never mind the self-doubt is just to pick up chicks.
ME: That’s our Hal!
FLAPJACKS: Kilowog looks cool.
ME: I wonder if he will say “poozers.”
FLAPJACKS: He had better say “poozers.” If he doesn’t say poozers thousands of angry nerds will storm Hollywood asking for a refund.
ME: Hector Hammond looks decent as well.
FLAPJACKS: You know, for a movie about Green Lantern I was kind of hoping the trailer would show me a few more Green Lantern tricks.
ME: Well, they had to show you that first thirty seconds of Hal flying planes or you wouldn’t know how awesome he totally is.
FLAPJACKS: And the pre-title flash is the “hey ladies look how ripped Ryan Reynolds is” shot.
ME: Cross-marketing!
FLAPJACKS: Oh wait they said part of the oath! Everything is all right now.
ME: Shut up.
FLAPJACKS: But we’re going to go see this, right?
ME: Probably. I think we’ve established our standards are low.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

“Batman, Incorporated”, huh? Well, it sounds like an interesting idea, and Grant Morrison does have a pretty good track record in comics…but I think it might run afoul of the Five-Year Rule. What’s the Five-Year Rule, you might ask? Well, it’s actually more of a guideline than a rule. But roughly, it equates to, “The success or failure of any change to a comic book ‘status quo’ is roughly equivalent to the degree of recognition the book has from a fan who hasn’t picked it up in five years.”

To give some examples: I’m a fan of, say, Spider-Man. I haven’t read the series in a few years, and I decide to step into a comics store and browse the latest issue on the stands. I pick up a copy of “Amazing Spider-Man”…and Spider-Man is a Starbuck’s barista named Ben Reilly, with no sign of MJ, the Daily Bugle, Aunt May, or anything else they recognize. I shrug, and put that comic back on the shelves. Maybe I come back in another year, maybe I don’t.

Or I’m an X-Men fan. I’ve been away for a while, and I pick up an issue…the team is headquartered in San Francisco instead of the X-Mansion, and Cyclops is the team leader. But there are still characters and sub-plots I recognize, and the basic concept–mutants protecting humans from world that fears and hates them–remains more or less intact. I decide to pick up an issue for old time’s sake, and who knows? I might even get hooked again.

Or I’m a Hulk fan. I pick up an issue of the book, and the Hulk is red and smart and uses guns. I roll my eyes, since as an established comics fan I know that it’s probably just a gimmick and the real Hulk will come back soon.

But you get the basic idea. The further away the series gets from that mental snapshot the fan takes of “what the series is like”, the less chance that they’ll come back to it. Iron Man has machine-controlling powers due to a techno-virus called “Extremis”? Um, okay, we can kind of see it. Iron Man as a teenager from an alternate timeline who has to wear the armor to stay alive due to fatal injuries he sustained in battle with his future self? Check, please! The concept of a series has a lot less elasticity than writers, editors, and even established fans think. (Admit it, you all felt a subconscious feeling of relief when Bruce Wayne came back as Batman, didn’t you?)

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m boring, and my column “eats”. 🙂 No, seriously, you’re wondering about the Silver Age. Surely, turning Green Lantern into a space cop and the Atom into a shrinking scientist and Hawkman into a different kind of space cop and the Flash into a different kind of scientist…that has to violate the Five-Year Rule, right? But the difference is, back then those characters didn’t have a fanbase to speak of. Comics were a different animal back then, one without a devoted group of long-term fans who would follow a series for years. The Silver Age revamps built their fanbase from scratch, something that comics have a lot more trouble doing these days without a newsstand distribution system. It’s something that comics companies might bear to keep in mind during their next reboot.

Mr. Mxyzptlk is a great character because he effectively inverts the entire Superman storytelling model.

Superman stories are in many ways about God. Superman can be capricious (as he often was with his tricks in the Silver Age). Superman can be merciful. Superman can be compassionate. Of course the Superman-as-God metaphor has been stretched awfully thin at this point so I won’t go into further detail on that score, but you get the point: most Superman stories are about a being more powerful than humanity ever can be.

And then Mxyzptlk comes along and now Superman isn’t squat. This is because while Superman is a dandy metaphor for God, Mxyzptlk, for all practical intents and purposes, is God. Mxyzptlk can’t be beaten, stopped or destroyed; he only goes away when you satisfy the rule he made up on a whim. And, like God, he’s basically unknowable; you can see aspects of Mxyzptlk but never the whole.

There’s Chubby Purple Bowler Hat Mzyzptlk, who’s probably the nicest and kindest version in the “trickster god as secret friend of humanity” model (and indeed that version of Mxyzptlk claimed to have been Anansi, Coyote and Loki). There’s Skinny Orange Skirt Mxyzptlk, who’s meaner, nastier, and inevitably self-impressed with his own schtick; where Chubby Bowler Hat will show up as often to help as much as play, Skinny Orange Skirt isn’t really interested in helping anybody. For a brief streak there was that version of Mxyzptlk that was an extremely evil and nasty pair of twins (which instantly reminded everybody that Alan Moore had a very terrifying point when he suggested that Evil Mxyzptlk would be the greatest of all Superman foes).

(The fact that Mxyzptlk is a good character for postmodern commentary on the story he’s appearing in is, if anything, a bit of a crutch at this point: it was cute to have Mxy chat with DC editorial once or twice, but at this point when you’ve got Mxyzptlk, Animal Man, Deadpool, the Joker, Squirrel Girl and god knows how many other characters all knowing they’re inside a comic book it gets old fast.)

And as has been demonstrated on other levels, Mxy works as a foil for just about any character. He’s best for Superman, of course, because of how he turns Superman stories inside out. But “placating a capricious god who will happily cause you to lose whatever dignity you might possess” is a story that works for anybody.1

You don’t want to overload on Mxy. He’s best in small doses, every once in a while, and he should never again be used as a prop to make somebody else look scarier. (“Emperor Joker” was enough, but then DC decided to let Superboy Prime beat up Mxy to get additional superpowers for some reason and that was just one more reason that Countdown was the worst thing DC has ever published.) You can’t downplay God if you want him to have full impact when he does show up, after all.

(Seriously, though, bring back the twins aspect. They were scary as hell.))

1. Granted, Batman works better with Bat-Mite because Batman loses his dignity much faster with a super-fan rather than a super-foe, but that’s just tailoring. [↩]

10.) JLA: Another Nail. After writing one of the truly clever and involving Elseworlds – one that hews more to the “what if” idea by making it more of a What If in the Marvel sense, and rather than setting characters in a drastically different setting just changes one key event in the DCU – Alan Davis and Mark Farmer return to the scene to answer all of the questions nobody asked, to write a story that has such a lack of attention span it makes you wish the pages were infused with Ritalin, and to remind everybody that the reason Grant Morrison killed off the New Gods is because they got used as shorthand for “wild fantasy” so often that they stopped being wild and/or fantastic. Also: Batman is saved from Hell by Ghost Robin.

9.) Batman: The Blue, The Gray, and the Bat. It’s Batman! In the Civil War! And Robin is an Native American! And… yeah. Many Elseworlds suffered sharply from plug-in-the-appropriate-characters-into-setting-X stories, and this is one of the worst: an amazingly dull plot with Bat-elements shoehorned in via the most ridiculous methods possible. (Native Robin is the worst.) Also goes to the “when you have no actual story worth telling, throw in historical references to make it seem more genuine” well. (Mark Twain AND Bill Hickok!) Lovely art from Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, to be sure, but Eliot S! Maggin’s story is just not worth the bother.

8.) Legionnaires Annual #1: “Castles In The Air.” A pastiche of half a dozen old Legion stories set in a slightly alternate future where the Legion are, like, knights or something. But still in the future. Wants desperately to be a grand heroic epic, but the problem with grand heroic epics is that they have to be longer than, say, sixty-four pages of story, so there’s tons of fast-forwarding (“and then THIS happened”) and character development feels arbitrary rather than earned. And the payoff is… The Slightly Different Legion of Super-Heroes? Pass.

7.) Batman: Castle of the Bat. Bruce Wayne as Dr. Frankenstein, animating his dead father to be the Bat-Man. Has potential as an idea, but the murky art makes it almost unreadable and the writing veers sharply into the least interesting kind of pulp. Also: Alfred is a hunchback. Also also: features the only Elseworlds appearance of Ace the Bat-hound.

6.) Action Comics Annual #6: “Legacy.” John Byrne’s participation in the Elseworlds Annual experiment was one of the big selling points: DC plastered “by John Byrne” in all the ads for this. (This was back when people were only just starting to realize that Byrne had lost a lot of his mojo.) The story, where Kal-El is three-quarters human as a result of his Kryptonian grandfather coming to the world and conquering it in the 1700s so the American Revolution never happened and neither did the Industrial Revolution for some unexplained reason, is overexplained at every possible point, and the ending falls extremely flat: Byrne sets up a conflict and then fails to resolve it satisfyingly. A thudding disappointment.

5.) JLA: Act of God. A magic wave of Writer Fiat hits the Earth and everybody loses their superpowers! (You might say “wait, it doesn’t make sense for characters like Superman or J’onn J’onzz to lose superpowers which are based on the inherent properties of their biology, or for Green Lanterns to lose “powers” which are really just weapons” and Doug Moench has a clever answer for this which is “shut up.”) Anyway, some superheroes get real depressed and others train up with Batman to become new-wave powerless vigilantes. If you can get past the stupid idea, the bad characterization and the ludicrous plotting, there’s a mediocre comic in here just waiting to be discovered. On the bright side, though, Doug Moench demonstrates that all it takes to get Superman and Wonder Woman together is really, really bad writing! (Also: Kyle Rayner’s plotline involves him getting heroically impaled on a sharp rock. No, really.)

4.) Wonder Woman: Blue Amazon. So the Lofficier brothers and Ted McKeever first wrote Superman: Metropolis, an Elseworld based on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and it was pretty decent. Then, because that comic did well, they did Batman: Nosferatu, set in the same world as a sort of sequel and basing Batman in it, but now using Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as their influences, and it was still pretty good if a bit clumsy in places. Then somebody decided this should be a trilogy about superheroes if they were in German expressionist films, and you get this piece of tripe supposedly themed after The Blue Angel, a drama which launched Marlene Dietrich to fame. The problem is that unlike Metropolis and Nosferatu, The Blue Angel isn’t sci-fi or horror or anything like that; it’s a straight-up drama, so really the comic is not about anything whereas the first two actually had a real idea motivating them. This is just iteration number god knows how many in the “Wonder Woman is just as important as Batman and Superman no really she totally is” series on which DC will never, ever give up.

3.) JLA: Destiny. A “what if Batman and Superman never existed” story, and the answer is apparently that if Batman and Superman never existed a bunch of really lame superheroes would show up, and they would all be based on minor Golden Age Fawcett heroes nobody really cares about, like Mr. Scarlet and Midnight and the like. Reads like somebody telling you about their “awesome Champions campaign.” The twists John Arcudi puts in his story don’t matter because you simply don’t care about the characters. Remember Triumph? He’s in this comic. Actually, it’s a second-rate version of Triumph, and given that Triumph was originally a third-rate idea that makes this Triumph sixth-rate by virtue of mathematics.

2.) Batman: Brotherhood of the Bat. So when DC was redesigning Batman’s costume back in the 90s post-Azrael to be “darker” (end result: more black), they commissioned a dozen or so artists to come up with new Batman costumes. Most of these were ungodly terrible, as revealed in a gallery book DC published because they wanted to make some more money off Batman fanboys. Naturally, the only course of action was to come up with a story set in the future where Ra’s Al Ghul put anonymous members of the League of Assassins in all of these costumes, and Bruce Wayne’s son via Talia Al Ghul (named “Tallant,” which gives you appreciation for a relatively unsubtle name like “Damian Wayne”) fights each of them individually as he becomes the new Batman. A terrible, cynical comic, the most obvious form of cashout. What could be worse than this?

1.) Batman: League of Batmen. Oh, right, the sequel. Wherein Tallant – a character so boring he makes Geo-Force seem positively dashing – recruits “men of honor” to wear all of the terrible Batman costumes and be a league of some sort, possibly designed to enact justice. And then Ra’s Al Ghul comes back, except now he is a literal demon. You kind of get how readable this is already, don’t you?

A good outing this time around from Pratchett, and although the Tiffany Aching novels are marketed as “young adult” fiction, frankly you could fool me: this one has quite a bit of brutal violence in it, albeit almost all of it offscreen. (Then again Nation had as a set piece the protagonist having to bury his entire village and then nearly committing suicide, so needless to say Pratchett’s idea of what constitutes “young adult” differs markedly from, for example, The Baby-Sitters Club.)

The question of “so what is this Discworld book about” is always raised when a new one comes out. Generally the Tiffany Aching stories don’t aim for larger motifs; Unseen Academicals is about sport and its place in society, for example, and Making Money is about the necessity of (responsible) modern finance, but The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith, while certainly not simple stories, are still more or less straight-up non-ironic fantasy adventures that just happen to be set in the Discworld.

I Shall Wear Midnight breaks from that mold because Pratchett for the first time is using Tiffany to talk about something wider. It’s still a bit vague – Pratchett still wants Tiffany to be his “just a story” character, obviously – but there are enough allusions to The Crucible to let you know that this is, first and foremost, a story about justice. The villain of the story, while certainly evil, is too impersonal to ever really be striking; by the end he’s just a bog-standard evil spirit. All of the best oh-my bits happen in the middle and are only obliquely about the villain.

That having been said – an enjoyable read and as always chock-full of brilliant snatches of writing. But definitely a bit uneven, as a story.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Also, because I like it: