21Six.net

While browsing for things to read, I’ve come across a new comic that’s piqued my interest. The story is called “Absolution” which is by Christos Gage with Robert Viacava doing the artwork for it. This, like one of my favorite books, Doktor Sleepless, is published through Avatar Press– known more for their particularly less-than-pleasant take on various aspects of the comic book genre.

With only two issues out there, I’m already hooked on this series.

I’ve never read anything before of Christos, so I didn’t know what to expect with this book. However, I’m more than willing, after seeing this, to read more. But enough. Let’s talk about this book. This is described on the purchasing page for the comic at Comic Cavalcade as:

ABSOLUTION introduces John Dusk, a superhero in a world where they’re a sanctioned arm of law enforcement. But this veteran hero has been scarred by his exposure to man’s infinite capacity for evil, and he’s seen one too many perpetrators escape justice. One day he crosses the line…lets a murderer die…and discovers it feels good. Surrounded by sociopaths, both human and superhuman, who he knows will prey on others if they’re not stopped–permanently–how far will he go, knowing every step he takes puts him further on a collision course with his teammates Alpha and The Servant, not to mention his homicide detective girlfriend?

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a vigilante-gone-wrong comic, but there’s something about this book that just strikes me as really interesting so far. There’s just something about it that’s appealing to me, and I think part of it has to do with how the book, so far, just isn’t a generic superhero book. One of the things that’s nice, for instance, is the oddly practical look of the costume which you can see in the link I posted up there. The suit is armored, and the pants of it look kind of like jeans. The helmet is a helmet. It looks like something someone might actually wear if they needed a suit like that.

The muscle definition, then, is justified.

I can’t, given the little bit that’s been shown in issues #0 and #1 properly determine if I’m going to accurately like this book, but I think I will. The way the man seems genuinely haunted by the things he’s seen in the past, and takes it out in a brutal way while simultaneously trying to avoid being caught by his love is an interesting conflict that I’d like to see elaborated on.

He also has an interesting looking power that I’d like to see developed more. He creates something to the effect of glowing tendrils that he uses to get around, and manipulate his surroundings. It’s like a, if you’ll excuse the awkward phrasing, tangible telekinesis. Or like Doctor Octopus if it was energy instead of robot arms.

I can’t wait to see where it goes. I wholly recommend this book.

Whenever Jeph Loeb took the reigns from Mark Millar for the new “Ultimates” story, I was less apprehensive than a number of my peers. Jeph Loeb, to me, was still the man who wrote The Long Halloween, Dark Victory, Hush, and Spider-Man: Blue. Great stories that I still read every chance I get. Stories that help, for me, better understand aspects of characters I wouldn’t have otherwise even considered.

But somewhere along the time something happened I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it. I had, earlier, complained about how “Ultimates 3” was basically a sham, and a disgrace to the Ultimate Marvel line. Poor storytelling by means of blending 616 Marvel aspects and Ultimate into something that wholly failed to resemble anything and everything I had considered to be part of the continuity of the story. It was something that felt so unlike what I had read before that I was fairly certain (which was perpetuated by rumors on the Comic Book Resource forums among other places) that “Ultimates 3” was essentially a 616 story that Loeb had manipulated into Ultimate Marvel.

I had hoped, following that, Loeb would leave. I wanted to make sure that my image of Loeb hadn’t been tarnished. It wasn’t, completely, tainted by the story. After all I still had the stories I read first, back when I thought he had decent stories to tell. And the rest of the Ultimate Universe, barring inclusions of Greg Land and similar people, was a more or less peaceful situation with stories that were genuinely interesting, as well as surprising takes on different aspects of the 616 continuity– such as the Ultimate Clone Saga.

Loeb, of course, didn’t leave. And, in the end, I’m not surprised or disappointed or outraged or anything. I knew he was tapped to do the Ultimate Marvel event titled “Ultimatum” and, following my disappointment in the “Ultimates 3” book, I simply decided to not read the story through. I read the first issue and stopped.

Well, recently I decided to go back and actually read the story, since it has finished, and I wanted to see what happened to the characters I had grown fond of, and the actions that led to the creation of the books under the title “Ultimate Comics”.
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Whenever I last posted, we were discussing the events of Batman R.I.P. and how they were affecting mainstream Batman continuity and so forth. However, things have become a lot more interesting since I stopped posting two months ago for whatever reason, and I learned that there are a number of new books out that require my attention. So, I’ll continue what I was talking about– including the whole of Battle for the Cowl– and to make it nice, I’ll even briefly summarize a few of the new books that have been published since the end of that. Including, but not limited to, the main Batman book, Detective Comics, and Morrison’s new piece– Batman and Robin.

Where I last left was that Batman has just freed himself from Darkseid’s captivity and decides to haul ass to do what he can to be awesome stop the Crisis from going any further.
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Subtitled: Why Grant Morrison Is A Mad Scientist Disguised As A Comic Book Writer.

I have a tendency to talk about Batman a lot. It wasn’t something I intended whenever I remade this website into what it is, but I read a lot of Batman comics, so it stands to reason that Batman would be, by extension, a character I write about rather frequently. I’m also a fan of Grant Morrison, which has really only recently been cemented with things like “Final Crisis” and “Batman: R.I.P.”– as enraging to some fans as they may be.

But, then again, there are some fans who will be enraged by anything that isn’t exactly the vision they have in their minds of what the comics/movies/television show should be. I’ve been known to fall victim to that more than once, so I can’t complain too vocally about it without falling into hypocrisy. Also, that’s not what this post is about.

This is about Grant Morrison’s Batman masterpiece, his Bat-masterpiece, “Batman R.I.P.” and the event that has followed it, “Battle for the Cowl”. One of the things I’ve definitely learned, in just trying to properly get information on this event, is that you need to be at least tangentially aware of a number of things that existed within the context of the Silver Age. However, having full knowledge of them isn’t entirely necessary.
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It’s not very often I go into a movie with the expectation of being let down and/or so frustrated by the horrible things done to the continuity that I consider going to just so I can feel a lot of negative emotions and pick it apart in a general way that only a fanatic nerd can do. I’ve been avoiding, for this very reason, the current X-Men movie which pretends to be an origin of Wolverine, but seems to be another instance of Marvel shoving random mutants around with stories that may or may not resemble the things that actually took place in the comic.

As I said, this movie was a complete letdown, especially compared with the fantastic Iron Man movie, and the good-but-not-as-good-as-Iron-Man movie featuring The Hulk. Also, it’s not as good as The Spirit and to even consider this on par with the previous X-movies is shameful. And, as you might expect, I have more than enough nerd rage built up after having seen it, and my general knowledge of X-Men (though not on the level of some, I feel I have enough information at my disposal and knowledge of the characters to be properly annoyed by the film) to fill something that is adequate entry. But, before I go into that, I figure I can get the good parts out of the way.

The good parts: Ryan Reynolds felt, for a brief moment, like Deadpool. The specific point in that movie when I felt like he was the characters rather early on (for obvious reasons) when he said “Okay… people are dead.” Also, whoever played Gambit looked like something akin to Ultimate Marvel’s incarnation of Gambit, but with better hair. Gambit and Deadpool, it should be noted, are two of my favorite characters in Marvel.

That’s pretty much it.

Now onto the bad stuff
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It’s been out on DVD for a while now, but I finally got around to seeing Frank Miller’s incarnation of Will Eisner’s series The Spirit. I was skeptical about the movie when it was in theaters. I’m not a huge fan, or particularly familiar, with the character of The Spirit and his stories, but I knew a few basic things going into it. The first thing I knew was that The Spirit was a brightly colored book, which seemed sharply contrasted with Miller’s preferred style of noir-esque, high contrasting art. The second thing was that The Spirit was funny. Miller’s funny isn’t often well received (look at his most recent entries in the Dark Knight collections) and the previews all suggested that it was a very serious movie.

For a little bit of background, The Spirit is a man named Denny Colt who was a police officer. During a big to-do, he was somehow killed. But he didn’t die, not entirely. He was buried, and dead for all intents and purposes. But, Denny didn’t stay dead. Denny came back, somehow or another, and decided to become a kind of shadow, or spirit, to the city. He wasn’t Denny anymore, he was simply The Spirit. And that’s how it was, and that’s how it was always going to be.
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I’ve decided to do another one of these, since I need to bring SOME content back to this website, or else it’s just a waste of space on the Internet. So let’s do this. Today we’ll be covering the bathroom at Target located at 35 Computer Dr in Haverhill, MA
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I was, originally, going to wait until I had seen this movie again, to be able to appreciate it on multiple levels, before I started writing this review of sorts on the movie. However, I decided that the best course of action would be to talk about it now, and get it out of the way.

I have said, before, in concurrence with people, I feel there is an inverse relationship between the amount of material for a given story and how said material is used. In using Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta we see that there were a lot of instances removed. Possibly for time, possibly for reasons I neither know nor care about. I’m going for the latter, personally. Watchmen is less than fifteen standard issues long. It’s slightly longer than V, but still falls victim to the same kind of constraints of time and medium change that it’s predecessor went through.

But is it a good movie? Or is it bad?
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In V for Vendetta, the title character, V, the man from room five makes the following statement before he dies.

There. Did you think to kill me? There’s no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There’s only an idea. Ideas are bullet-proof.

I’ve been reading Captain America volume four, the most recent incarnation of the book with that name, and in this book, Captain America– specifically Steve Rogers, the Man Behind the Mask– is killed. So I got to thinking… Captain America himself is an idea, really. Steve Rogers was man, yes, but he represented something. Captain America, not Steve Rogers, was the symbol of the triumph of America. He was the Super Soldier, the man who would help turn the tide against the Axis powers and win The War.

And he did. And he was a hero. He was the epitome of the Golden Age superhero for Marvel comics. The man was Good to the very core of who he was, and no one tried to change that about him. Though some would try to write him, in varying incarnations, some kind of backwards and old-fashioned to an extreme, they always maintained the nobility of the character and the spirit he represented as Captain America.

This brings me to “Civil War”, which is, “A Marvel Comics Event”.

Civil War brought with it the idea of, like so common within Marvel, ambiguity in the ideas of justice. Captain America was adamantly opposed to the idea of the Superhuman Registration Act– which was, in part, the idea behind this event. The heroes were divided. Steve believed that the idea behind it, of forcing the compliance of heroes to the government and the revealing of their identities, was against everything that he had fought so hard (and lost so many decades) to protect.

He knew, like so many other heroes, the cost of having your identity known by even just one person with malicious intent. After all, if it wasn’t for the SHRA, we wouldn’t have Spider-Man where he is today. If Norman Osborne had not known Parker was Spider-Man, he might have stayed with Gwen. But these are “What If” ideas that the writers had decided wouldn’t happen. Gwen had to die, and that’s another ramble.

Steve knew, in his heart, that it was wrong to do what they were doing. He couldn’t stand for the things that were happening and he rebelled. It cost him respect, and friends, but he felt that his cause was more true than that.

In the end, though, Steve saw what he was doing, and how he was tearing everything apart. Steve surrendered. The Civil War that was fought over six issues and several cross-over books was done. The man, the ideal, was done. But Captain America lived on, still, even if he was just a man with a shield.

Steve Rogers was killed in issue #25, immediately following his surrender. It wasn’t detailed in any way, there was no pointing out the event. It was just “In this issue: The Death of a Dream”. The previous issues didn’t lead up to this, directly. Brubaker, however, is a fantastic writer and foreshadowed this almost immediately. Steve Rogers was dead now. The Man Who Was Captain America was gunned down in public, and with that, hope was lost for the other side.

The point I’m not really making is that Steve Rogers was a man behind an idea– specifically the idea of an Ideal America. Of freedom, for lack of a better word. Captain America was that idea. That ideal. He fought for what was right, no matter if he wasn’t the best laid plan or the most ethical. It was right. And that’s what you do.

The idea of Captain America didn’t die with him, the offshoot mini-series “Fallen Son”, and the later issues of the solo book showed that Captain America influenced many people and kept the idea of truth and liberty and justice and everything else alive. He lived on, Captain America, because he was what people wanted in America.

It wasn’t Captain America that day who surrendered, really. It was Steve Rogers, a man bound to another name, but who felt the same way. It was Steve Rogers who was killed, not Captain America. Captain America is bulletproof, because there can always be someone else to take up the mantle of the Name, and to carry on the ideals and the mission behind the name.

I’ve said before, many times, I’m a huge fan of the Justice Society of America. I think it could even be said that I like them more than the League. Alan Scott, Jay Garrick, and the rest of them have a kind of, well, goodness about them that emanates through the entirety of the book and brings out some of the best aspects of the characters. The best way I can explain it is to paraphrase a line from the deluxe edition of Batman: Year One in the specials section.

The artist was talking, and, with a modified image of Action Comics #1, with “Tautology” replacing “Action”. The artist said that he appreciated the heroes of the Golden Age– those of the Justice Society– because they were inherently Good. They were always on the side of justice, and righteousness. They did good things because they were good. And there’s a certain quality of this tautology that’s admirable. They did these things just because they were good, and people should do good things.

You stopped really seeing that in the 90s.

Anyway, these characters also have a presence about them that the League doesn’t. Sure, you have The Big Three: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and these people are the kinds of people who are looked up to, and admired. But the JSA are the people that even the League looks up to and admires. Alan Scott alone has enough tenure as a superhero to merit someone of the likes of Batman using him as a consult, or conceding to him.

But, anyway. I’m here to actually talk about a specific story arc.
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