Why Fans Should Suck It Up About Comic Book Movies

Recently, I came across an article from a conservative blogger about how he'd elected to never spend another dime on superhero films because Hollywood, at every turn, has completely raped his childhood and made the superheroes he grew up completely unbearable and he's not going to take it anymore.  Now, I'm acknowledging ahead of time that his blog post is mostly poorly argued and unresearched (which is the most I should probably expect from what is basically the Fox News version of my own blog), but his complaints are not uncommon among the fickle and sometimes downright hateful mob that is comic fandom. Granted, I understand why people would complain that studios are better off sticking closer to the source material. After all, NOBODY wants another Jonah Hex or X-Men: The Last Stand. Still, here a few things this guy....as well as a lot of fans....should consider.

1). Faithfulness to the source material does NOT always equate to a good movie. I mean, for a commendable project that packed tons of material into a two hour movie, Watchmen was such an imitation (despite some people having perfect bodies when they shouldn't, but....Hollywood) that it was practically hermetically sealed in its original comic packaging. And even still, it was met with mixed reviews among critics and fans. Tim Story's Fantastic Four was moderately close the comic (MODERATELY...except for Doctor Doom being a superpowered Donald Trump analog) and even that was considered mainly a failed attempt.

Green Lantern pretty much hit all the bullet points required of the Geoff Johns-ified version of Hal Jordan's (except for Movie Hal Jordan being a complete pussy) origin story and yet it still managed to be chastised as one of the worst comic movies of the past five years. Also, it eventually leads to fans complaining that they're not seeing anything they've never seen before. For years, Superman loyalists have whined and whined that we haven't seen anything out of those movies (until Man of Steel) that we've never seen before ("Really, Lex Luthor again???"). Now, I think that they're asking a LOT from Superman's list of villains, but they also have a point in the fact that remaining too close to what comic fans know doesn't do anything to add to the mythology of the hero in question. Taking an entire comic book and pasting onto the silver screen doesn't always lead to success. This leads to my next point......

2). New ideas from directors have been known to enhance comic book lore. When directors are allowed to toy with certain aspects of the source material, THAT is when innovation happens. People bitch and moan about X-Men all the time. Some people don't like Hugh Jackman's Wolverine because historically, Wolverine is a short, hairy guy who likes beer. This is entertaining enough for a comic book until you realize that if you translate that same description to a movie storyboard where you have cast a REAL actor, the person you're describing is Danny Devito.

I wasn't kidding. Giant smoke kraken.

Honestly, Green Lantern could have stood some outside innovation from Martin Campbell (except maybe not making Parallax out to be a former Green Lantern turned giant smoke kraken). General Zod was essentially a throwaway villain from an obscure issue of Adventure Comics until Richard Donner brought him to the forefront in Superman II. Furthermore, even though it was always canon that he was a small town kid, it wasn't really established that Clark Kent was raised on a farm in Kansas until Donner's movie placed Smallville in Kansas. Gotham City wasn't a perpetually gray, crime infested wasteland of art nouveau and towering gothic cathedrals until Tim Burton and Anton Furst designed it that way. More often than not, it takes a movie, something absorbed by the collective consciousness (comic nerds and casual moviegoers alike) to establish baseline characteristics for a superhero or their surroundings which simultaneously why Robert Downey Jr. IS Iron Man for the forseeable future and why DC could only benefit from making a Wonder Woman movie.

3). Once a comic becomes a movie, it's not exclusively yours anymore. You know who understands concepts like this? Children. When my friends and I played make believe Power Rangers, it was easy. There were commonly six of us and there were five Power Rangers (the Mighty Morphin days....Sweet Jesus, I'm old) so, except for the inevitable argument over who would be the Green Ranger, it was simple. Then, someone else would come along and want to play with us. Now, the likelihood of them wanting to be Zordon, the giant, omniscient floating head that told the Rangers to do shit was slim to none (although, in retrospect, when I put it that way, why the FUCK didn't I ever want to be Zordon), so they wanted to be a Ranger, too. Despite there only being six Rangers, there were, of course, more than six colors in the spectrum of colors, so fuck it. Little Amy can be the Violet Ranger and she can have a giant Velociraptor robot. Peace was maintained and playtime could continue.

The moral of that little story was that when other people want to be a part of what you're into, you have to share. In this day and age, movie adaptations are ideally the sign that a larger audience (Hollywood, non comic nerds, kids, whatever) wants to be in on what was once a very niche fiction of, at it's best, a million readers. Nerds (I'm guilty of this, too) have to understand that it's inevitable that when something becomes popular enough, corporate America will create a medium where it can be consumed by anyone. This happens with rap, spoken word, art house film-making, etc. Comic books aren't immune. The sad truth is that if Hollywood can fail us by keeping Channing Tatum in movies and allowing James Cameron to make Avatar sequels, it's not too farfetched that they would fuck up Ghost Rider and Elektra.

In summary....SUCK IT UP.

The Goddamn Batman Problem.....

So, I was catching up on New 52 Batman recently. As hard as I am on the reboot material coming out of DC for the past couple of years, I actually really enjoy Scott Snyder's work on Batman. He really has a penchant for Snyder-ising a lot of well-known aspects of the Bat-mythos and making them feel undiscovered. His "Court of Owls" story arc was particularly engaging while still exciting and fast paced. But there was one particular plot point that bothered me, though.

In his fight to defeat the Court of Owls conspiracy threatening to envelop Gotham from the inside, Batman had to exploit the weakness of their nigh-indestructable "talon" assassin agents (imagine ninjas who dress like owls) which has to do with extreme cold. Obviously, this led to the Bat-family having a brief run in with Mr. Freeze. While his driving motivation is still his beloved icicle of a wife, Nora, this retconned version of Victor Fries has actually never met Nora and is just a lonely man who became obsessed with her during his early days of researching cryogenics. Batman recounts this story to exploit as a weakness and, of course, beat Freeze. It was a decent, well-written story, but it also sheds light on my biggest problem with contemporary Batman.

The thing about Batman villains is a lot of the really good ones tend to have a sort of driving force that gives the reader a way to connect and, sometimes, sympathize with them. Granted, this isn't exclusively Batman territory, but Mister Freeze was definitely a character who, over the years, has been particularly popular because of his understandable motivations. Despite being released as a straight to video animated feature (probably because the "Batman and Robin" movie still had a stink on it so strong, it may have been mistaken for actual chemical warfare), SubZero was a very well received movie essentially about Supervillain John Q, a guy trying to save someone he loved and was willing to be an asshole to do it.

This was interesting, but not only because it adds depth to the bad guy. Ideally, it adds some layers to the good guy. Batman actually had to understand someone's motives outside of "because I'm an asshole, that's why." More often than not, during the time of "The Animated Series," Batman went out of his way to still try to save his foes when outside variables seemed to fall apart. By the time he met Animated Series Superman, this gave them something to have in common despite varying methods of getting the job done.

The whole point of the World's Greatest Detective is that he's smart and physically capable, but he's still just a man and, in his own way, serves as not only Gotham's protector, but its conscience as well. The Batman Problem comes when you do things like reduce Mister Freeze, a villain with depth, to a delusional dickhead who never had hugs as a kid just so Batman can look tougher and "above it all" when he beats his ass. In fact, if you look closely, he spends a lot more time outsmarting and looking tough in front of his own Justice League teammates than he does the bad guys You can even see it in the Dark Knight trilogy (although I loved those movies) where Batman's code about not killing holds up....until he kills someone (Ra's Al Ghul, Two Face, Talia). Even though it's awesome at times, the Problem is that Batman has gone from a badass Sherlock Holmes analog with a roguish attitude to the New Chuck Norris.


I would also like to point out that the same nerds who think Batman is awesome because he's seemingly all powerful, unbeatable and omniscient are the same nerds who chastise Superman for being seemingly all powerful, unbeatable and omniscient (in other words, Superman haters, your argument is invalid).

I could throw a digital rock out into the internet and hit millions of memes that all pretty much reduce Batman to Punch'emInTheFuckingFace Man. I was watching a commercial promoting the Arkham Origins video game and it was comprised primarily of Bruce Wayne growing up 1). scowling and 2). beating the unholy shit out of people until he became Batman scowling and beating the unholy shit out of people.

Don't get me wrong....it makes for some really fun action more often than not, but it also cheapens a character capable of so much more which is evident, by the way, in Long Halloween and Year One. Honestly, this is why I'm actually very excited about Superman's upcoming team-up with the Caped Crusader in Man of Steel 2: Superhero Boogaloo. This is a chance for one of Batman's peers (who is pretty much the epitome of superhero morality) to show him something about moral discernment, something we didn't see much of in the Dark Knight movies because Batman had to be portrayed as knowing better than everyone else even though he really didn't (seriously....WHY THE FUCK DID HE TAKE THE BLAME FOR COLD BLOODED MURDER????....They could have easily blamed all that shit on the Joker....I mean, they're lying either way, so.....).

Oh, and by the way.....I'm completely fine with Ben Affleck Batman. Fight among yourselves, internet.

In Defense of Darkman or....Superhero Movies Hollywood Could Learn Something From

With this year in superhero films wrapped up, Marvel ready to shove out their new batch and DC getting everyone's mouths watering with Arrow being a breakout success (despite mixed reviews from fanboys) their Flash television pilot, and of course the several rumors and announcements behind the casting of Man of Steel 2: The Steel Strikes Back, I thought I'd pull a few movies with cult success (despite questionable box office numbers) out of the vault and take a brief look at some of the lessons modern comic book cinema could take from them

Darkman: It sort of saddens me that we're quickly approaching (if we're not already in the midst of) a generation that will never know the glory that is Darkman. When you watch Sam Raimi's first jump into the superhero genre, it's actually a big insight into why he got tapped for the Spider-Man series in the first place. Even though, at first glance, it comes across as a teenager's ultraviolent fantasy, it's actually very indicative of what many comics were at the fringes of early comic culture: melodramatic pulp adventure. A psychotic, disfigured scientist returns from "death" to take revenge on the mobsters and crooked officials responsible? If Darkman had originated as a comic book hero, the story itself would have been more of a horror story than anything and Raimi has a far better understanding of the comic book genre than anyone gives him credit for. The movie made absolutely NO apologies for the fact that Peyton Westlake was more or less just a really demented guy who a). wanted his face back and b). wanted to kill a lot of people (basically what would happen if someone set Kanye West on fire).

Moral of the Story: The lesson that Current Hollywood can (and should but won't) take from this movie is that every superhero film doesn't have to be one of virtue because not every superhero is a virtuous one nor should they be. This is where the Punisher and Ghost Rider movies went wrong (well, they went wrong a LOT of places...Nic Cage being a notable one....but virtue was prime among their sins).


The Phantom: Now, here's a movie that holds a very special place in my heart while many others have forgotten about for understandable reasons. The 1989 Batman was something of a game changer for superhero movies. When Jack Nicholson's Joker uttered the line "Where does he get those wonderful toys?"....his reaction was one that turned out to mirror the audience's. I mean, for the time in which it was conceived, watching a hero swing onto rooftops, lob smoke bombs and evade the law in a tricked out car was pretty goddamned exciting. Then, you find yourself watching a period piece about hero you mainly only know from the comics section of your newspaper. So, needless to say, Lee Falk's jungle hero had the odds against him right out of the gate. He was an Indiana Jones-type hero at a time when moviegoers had decided they were pretty much over Indiana Jones.



Having said that, there's a lot to learn from The Phantom. First of all, there's Billy Zane's performance. With a period piece like this, it's importance not to take yourself too seriously. Zane went a different way than what would be expected from a story about a mythical hero who lives in a secret jungle surrounded by tree people who revere him as a living ghost protector. Let's face it...if you go dark and play the Phantom like a guy He dashed to and fro, punching and shooting with a wink, a smile and a "pardon me, ma'am" at every turn. We call this kind of shit "cheesy" and "hamfisted" nowadays, but it's also the sort of thing that makes us smile and induces a feeling of escape which is what we commonly go to the movies for in the first place.

One of the best "quiet as kept" scenes is when Phantom is chasing thugs who've kidnapped Kristy Swanson (By the way, Diana Palmer's awesomeness dwarfs pretty much EVERY incarnation of Lois Lane except maybe Amy Adams in Man of Steel), bumps into a woman by mistake, stops to pick up her purse like a gentleman and goes on to leap from car to car in traffic, steal a cop's horse, riding off in hot pursuit....LIKE A FUCKING BOSS.

Moral of the Story: The thing that should really translate well here for Current Hollywood is that every hero doesn't have to be edgy and dark. Granted, Ghost Rider really should be which is why that failed, but there's no reason modern day swashbucklers can't be fun.

The Rocketeer: For a movie that doesn't really get the credit it's due, maintaining a 63% rating on Rotten Tomatoes isn't exactly anything to sneeze at. Unfortunately, it suffered from the same societal epidemics as The Phantom where a). if a movie didn't open and sellout in every theater worldwide like Dark Knight or The Avengers recently, it's automatically dismissed as a failure (keep in mind that several failures have done very well in the box office in the same way as when you go home with the guy at the bar who seems to mean well only to wake up once you're sober and say "What the fuck was I thinking?"....I'm looking at you, Transformers 2 & 3) and b). was portraying a sort of bare bones "everyman" hero in the era of Batman.

In many ways, this was a movie that Hollywood, in fact, may just have learned something from for better or worse. I mean, honestly, Rocketeer was the epitome of a period-piece hero epic. A douchebag test pilot finds Howard Hughes experimental jet pack, battles "G-men", the mob, and Nazis all for the love of Jennifer Connelly's boobs? That pretty much sums up American propaganda heroes of the 1930's. For all intents and purposes, this was something of a blueprint that would later make the way for asshole superheroes like Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man. One of the big highlights from this movie that deserves consideration (aside from a delightfully fun Timothy Dalton villain) is the dialed back usage of special effects. Don't get me wrong; it's not like they tied Bill Campbell to a big rope the whole time and told him to holler in front of a house fan the whole time, but Peter Travers had it right when he referred to it's movie magic as "the kind that charms us, rather than bullying us, into suspending disbelief."

Moral of the Story: On one hand, when you have movies about gods with magic hammers, giant green beasts, asshole space cops with magic wishing rings and....well, Superman...it's hard for visuals NOT to be a contributing factor to their success. On the other hand, special effects don't have to subtract from the story's personality. Joss Whedon understands this pretty well. So does Rocketeer director Joe Johnston which is probably why Marvel ended up tapping him to direct Captain America, which, in addition to being a pretty damn good origin story, ended up being a terrific send up of old Republic serials.

The Art of Snapping or Maybe Cyclops WAS Right.....

I'm apologizing in advance because I have to talk about Ghostbusters II for a second. In Ghostbusters II, Bill Murray and company had to fight a demonic overlord trapped in a painting who was dumping slime into the sewers that turned all of New York into assholes who are awful to each other for no reason (though I'm still not sure how he did that from inside of a painting). Basically, he meant to take over the world by turning NYC in the center of all evil. In other words, Dallas. Watching this movie as a kid has clearly affected my state of mind now because it is my genuine belief that comment sections online are basically the focal point of all digital evil on the World Wide Web. Having said all that, sometimes, when I'm on the internet reading articles and I'm feeling very adventurous, I'll put on my hazmat suit and dive into random comment sections. Why, you ask? Because fuck it, that's why?

Anyway, one of the biggest criticisms I've read this year in comment sections and message boards is about the direction in which Marvel has taken Cyclops and it got me thinking about why. I mean, Marvel's whole thing is that their characters tend to live a little closer to the human condition of the everyman while a lot of DC characters tend to be more static archetypes. Even though Uncanny X-Men is, thus far, serving a purpose similar to Dark Avengers from a few years back during the "Dark Reign" event, Cyclops didn't " go bad" necessarily.

You're Scott Summers. You haven't looked anyone in the eye since you hit puberty. You've been raised by a kind, well-meaning man who wishes for peace between humans and mutants while training you to fight giant robot death machines since you were 15 years old. You're basically the quintessential All-American captain of the football team for mutantkind. As time goes on and you grow into an adult, people from the future you've been taught to fight for come to the present day and basically tell you that you eventually fail. You watch your wife (who is basically your high school sweetheart) silently fawn over your hairy, homicial teammate. That same wife died, came back to life as a world-swallowing space god, died and came back to life and died AGAIN. Eventually, the race of people you're sworn to protect are magically dwindled down to barely enough to reach full capacity at Chick-Fil-A. Now, you're an endangered species living an island that's pretty much a reservation. At some point, that same world swallowing space god possesses you and you convince yourself that you're righting your dead wife's wrong by healing the world. Then, it drives you power mad and you kill Charles Xavier, your only father figure, in cold blood and you're thrown in jail. Cyclops didn't "turn evil." He snapped. Plain and simple.

It's not even a new phenomenon in Marvel. Take the Ultimate Universe, for example. Early on in Ultimate Spider-Man, Nick Fury confessed to having a file on Peter Parker because with everything that had happened to him and his family over the years (father killed in a Hulk attack, father's best friend's son becomes Venom, Uncle Ben, Norman Osborn, etc.), he was the most likely to snap and become the next big supervillain. Of course, Ultimate Peter Parker didn't snap. In fact, he went on to die in the service of not snapping and being exactly the kind of guy Uncle Ben wanted him to be (although I can't help but wonder if that's because Black Fury also said "When you turn 18, you're mine"....turns out that guy's a lying piece of shit in EVERY dimension). Meanwhile, Ultimate Reed Richards had endured equally fucked up circumstances (piece of shit father, being responsible for unintentionally wiping out another dimension, turning his best friends into a monster, his girlfriend being an indecisive ass, Doom, etc.) and, while nobody was looking, turned into the next big supervillain, almost wiping out humanity at least twice. You don't necessarily like or forgive the character for it, but you get it.

The same thing applies for others like the Norman and Harry Osborn, whose Green Goblin incarnations are completely about regular people just plain losing it in the face of bad shit happening. Brian Michael Bendis' run on Daredevil, which has turned out to be one of the most definitive eras in DD history other than Frank Miller's, is entirely the story of what happens when Matt Murdock has pretty much the worst time of his life (unable to cope with his girlfriend's death, secret identity outed to the press, Bullseye's return, declaring himself Kingpin of Hell's Kitchen, disbarred and thrown in prison, etc.) and being utterly unable to cope with the black hole his life had become.

You see it in real life all the time. Kanye West's evolution is pretty much the best real-life example I can think of when I think about what a hero-to-villain transformation looks like, but that's a whole other post.

Have you ever known someone before a relationship and seen them AFTER a breakup? After the death of a loved one? Post-traumatic stress is more present in America than its probably ever been. Often times, soldiers come home from war changed by their experiences and understandably so. Their job is literally to get shot at so you don't have to. Now, compare that to "superheroism." People who get shot at and attacked by all kinds of unthinkable supervillain shit every single day are bound to be deeply affected and changed in the wake of what they've seen.

No, seriously....WHY hasn't Marvel made
these shirts? You're leaving money on the
table, Marvel.

Having a major character go through a major change like that isn't necessarily always a perversion of who he or she was meant to be. Sometimes, it's the next logical step. It's evolution. Sometimes, people just snap. Comic book characters shouldn't have to be immune.

Let's Talk About Doctor Who

David J. Anderson, one of my favorite readers, asked me a while ago about my take on Steven Moffat's run thus far on Doctor Who (particularly the season that just wrapped).....

WARNING: Even though they are minor and don't take very much away from the viewing experience, there are small Day of the Doctor spoilers in this piece. Just telling you. Don't say I didn't warn you. Okay. Here we go.

The thing about Doctor Who is that it's, at its best, what I like to refer to as "pure sci-fi" that exists in a sandbox so wide, the possibilities are hard to exhaust. I mean, let's face it...."all of space and time" is a pretty big playground for a writer/showrunner. Eventually, a series like that stops being a series and starts becoming a tradition, hallowed ground almost, a family business passed down from one generation to the next in the hopes that they'll continue in the practices that have allowed that legacy to thrive in the midst of changing time. Who is a bit weird in that regard because, for years, it's been a very niche kind of sci-fi geared toward a very hardcore sort of geek whose reverence for the show has fueled its success for 50 YEARS. There haven't been a lot of shows in ANY genre that can lay claim to such a thing....certainly not in its primary genre. Though the series itself was short-lived, Firefly has one of the most rabid fanbases I've ever seen and even that's fizzled out a bit. A fellow blogger referred to Doctor Who as the Flintstones of science fiction. To make such a comparison is to underestimate Doctor Who and to vastly overestimate the Flintstones. A cartoon like the Flintstones appealed to a much wider audience that eventually got tired of it until it was replaced by The Simpsons which has been pretty much replaced by Family Guy (hot wife married to lovable dummy).

Who dwarfs these shows with almost no effort because of a simple fact that Steven Moffat understands better than people think. Doctor Who is the type of show that is, on a good day, any genre you want it to be. It can be (and has been) a romance saga, a revenge tale, a period drama, a swashbuckler story, etc. When your main character is a lonely guy who can go anywhere and do anything within the whole of everything that is or ever was, there really isn't any scenario that's too farfetched. Grant Morrison could very well be hired to write a Doctor Who crossover with Batman or Vince Gilligan could team him up with Walter White and either of those would, ideally, be within the confines of good reason. I mean, can you think of a story in which "Time Traveling Sherlock Holmes" (because that's basically what the Doctor is) doesn't work?

With that said, Moffat understands the necessity of doing something with a 50 year old series to not only keep it fresh, but to widen its audience. And Steven Moffat has certainly widened the audience in a way that I, for one, have never seen out of this series in my time. I can't remember a single time before Moffat where I'd seen billboards, ads in comic books and on the sides of buses, toy commercials, worldwide simulcasting of its big anniversary special (which was absolutely lovely, by the way...Smith, Tennant and Hurt all had ridiculously great chemistry together...the result was more of a game changer than people think...and I didn't completely despise Not-Actually-Rose Tyler's appearance even though I completely despise Rose Tyler). I mean, Sweet Lord, Day of the Doctor even had a simulcasted post-show where people sit around talking about what they just saw a la The Walking Dead, a phenomenon I will NEVER understand if I live to be 100.

Honestly, I think the overall direction of the show and the kind of legend Moffat drives to remind us the Doctor is ("You decided the universe would be better off without you, but the universe didn't agree.") is actually reflective of the pop culture phenomenon Doctor Who has become. The reverence for his very name that oozes from the majority of characters' pores (even River Song...which is what became the problem with River Song) in most Moffat episodes isn't terribly different from the chill of excitement that comes over the growing fanbase at the first note of the theme song. I was at work and someone's phone rang, playing the Tennant era version and most of my coworkers grinned to themselves at the familiarity.

The other thing that I think some people don't quite see in Moffat's "Who" is that he's trying to keep it fresh by doing things that are haven't been done before (or at least in a while) with the stories. He likes making "that unsuspecting thing everyone has" into a dormant alien invasion like in The Bells of St. John, he has a thing for eerie sayings throughout the episode ("I don't know where I am"...."Can you help me?"...."Silence will fall") and he loves, loves, LOVES making the Companion and other supporting characters as important if not more important than the Doctor himself (Amy Pond, River Song, and certainly Clara). Last but not least, he recognizes that anything good, if it goes on long enough, starts basically being fan service. Moffat certainly demonstrates this in the 50th Anniversary with the callbacks (Tom Baker..."I don't want to go"...."timey wimey").

Overall, even though I will always hold a very special place in my heart for Russell T. Davies....mainly because his run gave us Martha Jones....I think Moffat is doing a fine job carrying the burden he's been given of being a geek messiah and a geek antichrist all at once. And who's to say it won't undergo another massive change in status quo as time goes on? After all, as I mentioned, the great thing about Doctor Who is that no matter what level of geek you are or how science fiction-y you like your science fiction, it always stands a very good chance of being exactly the sort of story you like. And in addition to being a huge part of what makes the Doctor such a compelling character (no matter who's playing him), it's also what's made for 50 years of television worth watching.

Stuff I Read This Week Episode 33 or I'd Rather Be Trapped Underwater With Evil Mermaids Than Kris Jenner

Harley Quinn #0: Harley Quinn has enjoyed a reasonable amount of time in the spotlight since the "New 52" reboot even if the titles she's featured in have had somewhat mixed reviews. It was only a matter of time before DC took a crack at a solo title. This was a tough book to review because, honestly, at first read, you're not entirely sure what kind of book it's supposed to be. Commonly a zero issue for any book serves as either a prequel for the first story arc or one shot primer to give you a taste of what to expect from a series as far as tone and art. Jimmy Palmotti and Amanda Conner take a slightly different tact.

By "slightly different tact", I mean, they seemed to make the Clown Princess of Crime....into Deadpool. For the most part Harley spends most of her time breaking the fourth wall interacting with the writers in a daydream about what it would be like to have her own comic book. She travels from one page to the next auditioning a Who's Who of artists to see whose style would best suit her. I found a few of the jokes funny but mainly because I'm familiar with most of the artists. The overabundance of inside jokes doesn't make this terribly accessible for incoming readers and the uninitiated. Despite this, it still makes for a mainly entertaining farce.

The artwork, given that it's a pretty star studded cast working on each page is pretty "alphabet soup" but mostly awesome. My particular favorites are Dan Panosian and Charlie Adlard. I was really looking forward to Jim Lee's page but that ended up being a bit of a bubble burst since he just rehashed a page from Hush. Also included is a page from fan contest winner Jeremy Roberts. Although "Draw Harley Quinn killing herself" contest was easily one of DC's dumbest ideas all year, Roberts can draw his ass off. I'd be very excited to see him on this book on a regular basis. Still, Chad Hardin, who illustrates the final page, does a pretty good job of capturing Harley's brand of crazy and I'll be looking forward to seeing what he has to offer.

Bottom Line: Not much plot but it's still fun and well rendered enough that it's a fun little primer for the series. 7.5 out of 10.



The Wake #5: Well, we've reached the halfway mark of what could quite possibly be the "holy shit" survival horror series of the year and it has been quite a story thus far. Quiet as kept, this has been one of the most consistently entertaining and good looking books in the business right now. Scott Snyder's taut tale of Dr. Lee Archer's crew and their fight to survive evil mermaid creatures at the bottom of the ocean has been an utterly compelling thrill ride that EVERYONE should be reading. Having said that, with this issue, Snyder wants you to know that the story begins now. Did you hear what I just said? A claustrophobic, horrifying tale about evil mermaids in the darkest parts of the sea....and Snyder is just getting started?

This issue deals largely with the revelation of what these monsters are, what they want and Dr. Archer's connection to them. The action beats are really well thought out and make for pretty good adventuring, but Snyder is at his best, as usual, during the claustrophobic moments when you feel trapped in dark corners with these poor bastards down below. It's almost as scary as being Kris and Bruce Jenner being trapped with each other's ever changing faces, not knowing what they're going to wake up to the next morning. Almost. Of course, Snyder can't take all the credit for the creepiest part of this book. There's also Sean Murphy's pencils, which capture some utterly maudlin moments like one character alone in the darkness with nothing but the light from a video screen.

Bottom Line: If you're not reading this book already, start. Start now. Immediately. Stop reading this blog, turn off the television, get dressed, tell your girlfriend you'll be right back and go get the past five issues of The Wake. Do it. Do it now. It's your homework assignment. It's your one job right now. Seriously. 9.5 out of 10.

Graduation Speech at the Xavier School for the Gifted.....

Congratulations, Class of 2013. Your being here this morning marks a momentous occasion. You have all not only learned a unique mastery over your gifts, but you've also demonstrated a willingness to harness those gifts in the interest of bettering society once you venture out into the world instead of being a complete tool like SOMEONE who will not be named...**cough** Erik **cough**. Anyway, your walk across this stage means that I have nothing left to teach you.

It also means you didn't die. Because, whew....could THAT have ever happened? I mean, giant robot death machines? I was trying not to freak anybody out but HOOOOOLLLLLYYYY SHIT we almost died fighting those things! And the Legacy Virus? Fuck, man.....talk about "not enough Thera-Flu in the world," huh?

Little joke there....really?...nothing? Okay, okay, too soon.

Moving on. We here at the Xavier Institute are 100% confident that we have thoroughly prepared you for the challenges you'll face out there in the real world. And make no mistakes, my fellow mutants, there WILL certainly be challenges. Like bigots who will hate you before ever actually meeting you because of your differences. And the future. Seriously, guys, the future will try to kill you. A lot. All the time. But persevere, hold your head high in the face of adversity and don't EVER give the future your credit card number. Trust me on that one. Oh my God, if I ever get my hands on that little...ahem...sorry. Got a little carried away there.

In closing, the Institute is honored to have been a part of your education and, ultimately, your lives. The bonds you've built, the fears you've conquered, the lessons you've learned....carry them with you always. Hold them close to your heart. Time flies quickly and you'll miss these days when they're gone. And remember: Humans good. We like humans. No vaporizing. Maybe a little mind wipe here and there, but no vaporizing. Please don't turn into a mutant overlord despot. Please. I can't stress that enough. I can't deal with more interviews with Fox News like last time. Honestly, that Sean Hannity guy. I don't see how he sleeps at night. Bottom line: No evil mutant shit.

My friends, my students, my fellow children of the atom....it is my honor, my privilege, my pleasure to welcome you to the first day of the rest of your lives. Also, the beginning of paying off your student loans. Because the government doesn't pay for this shit. Bear in mind, rocketships under the basketball court don't grow on trees.

Now, who wants a diploma!!!