Hey, guys. You probably noticed no updates from me last week. Well, I had some paid time off from the Day Job and decided to take some personal time for R&R. It's not that I don't love you guys, but self care matters.This week saw two primetime comic shows premiering: the long awaited, long hyped Gotham and the returning Agents of SHIELD. I was interested to see how SHIELD opened up after really turning things around in their last leg, becoming the show that it really should have been all along. It had an awkward start because of the Marvel films it tried to capitalize off of, but once its plot in the second half of Season 1 borrowed from Winter Soldier, quality stepped up by leaps and bounds. Gotham had received much hype and understandably so. I mean, there's just no reason DC shouldn't be able to sustain a show about Young Jim Gordon. The Zero Year run of Scott Snyder's Batman is proof positive that, just beneath Batman himself, Gordon is easily Gotham's foremost champion of the law.
With all this in mind, Gotham started off with kind of a mixed bag. To its credit, the show does a great job of creating the right atmosphere for dark, foggy, hopeless Gotham City. And Ben McKenzie is a great pick to play Gordon. But there are some glaring problems with this reimagining. For one, we seem to see a lot a young Selina Kyle....but it's a LOT of her doing absolutely nothing. At all. Whatsoever. So far, her entire purpose on this show seems to be feeding stray kittens and standing on top of things for NO reason. It was downright irritating how little someone who appeared so much actually mattered in the plot. And the show really should consider toning down the Batman easter eggs. I understand that without the fun tidbits for fans, this would just be a regular procedural cop drama with a famous name, but at the rate the writers were cramming in stuff from every nook and cranny, they're not going to make it to Season 3.
Meanwhile, Agents of SHIELD got off to an impressive start with their season 2 opener. For one, they're obviously spending more money on this show (at least as far as budgets for primetime network television go). It's nice that they have a bit more direction. Riding the Captain America 2 tidal wave worked out pretty well and they seem to be using the whole "new SHIELD regime" thing to their advantage. Skye is a far less annoying character now that she's a full on field operative with more to do than be a nondescript outline for a standard Joss Whedon character. The addition of some notable characters from Marvel lore certainly help the appeal of the show. Absorbing Man was a fun foil that I hope we see more of throughout the Marvel Cineverse. The possibilities for cameo appearances has always been way too wide for this show to just limit itself to being a promotional tie-in for movies And it's nice that the show is finding some focus aside from "Hey, look, it's Phil Coulson" and not leaning as much on Clark Gregg being the best actor on the show so far except for maybe Hudson's recurring gig in Season 1 (Yes, I know he's Bill Paxton but I will forever think of him as Hudson....because Aliens).
All in all, if I had to put one show or the other in the lead, it would have to go to SHIELD right now. Season 1 was an experiment and now they see where they went wrong and are improving and working out the kinks. Granted, no matter how much it improves, this is still going to end up being That Marvel Thing That's Definitely Not For Everyone. Meanwhile, Gotham just has too much uncertainty floating around it. The material they try to cram into a single hour makes me feel like they're going to blow their strongest gimmicks in three seasons like Lost did.
Then again, these two are just holding me over until Arrow and The Flash debut, so whatever.
-Anyway, don't forget to check out my exclusive interview with Christopher Bird and illustrator Davinder Brar, the creative team behind one of my new favorite webcomics, Al'Rashad: City of Myths. The book really is amazing and the guys are both class acts with tons to say on comics, movies and writing characters of color
-Also, as always, my comic reviews for the week are up and available on Black Nerd Problems for your viewing enjoyment. It was a light week for me in the review department since I've been taking it easy with my time off from the day job so think week, I only reviewed:
Batman Eternal: Listen. I know I've spoken before about how important artwork is when you have a constantly rotating wheel of creative talent bringing drastically varying styles and voices to the same set of plots, but fuck's sake did they ever screw the pooch visually. I'm not about to be that troll critic nobody likes. At the same time, the art was REALLY awful. I can't imagine there's anyone who was sitting around wondering what Batman would look like if he were doing a guest appearance on Bob's Burgers. I don't think R.M. Guera has worked on the book previously, but he just shouldn't. To call the art "laughable" implies that there something funny or endearing about looking at this shabby shit.
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