John From Cincinnati: 'His Visit: Day Six' (1x07)

This week’s episode continues the show’s evolution into something totally different from what’s come before on television. Most shows like to keep a fairly fixed cast and have the characters interact within that set social pool. On shows like Buffy and Six Feet Under, the people generally had one or two friends outside the main circle, if any, and interacted with them every week. But, here we’ve got the continuing evolution of a community, new characters being organically added to the world every week as the story demands. And, I use that word story loosely, this episode isn’t really about narrative at all, stuff happens, but it’s more about the mood, just spending time with the characters, and that’s a joy to do.

It’s hard to single out what the major plot threads of this episode were. Probably the central thing was Butchie trying to stop Shaun from turning into a next generation version of himself. At the beginning of the series, Butchie was very much still a child, looking out solely for his own interests. He took John in only so that he could use him, his only concern was getting enough money to get high. However, over the course of the series, he’s become more aware of the world beyond himself, and this episode is the culmination of that. When he walks back and sees Shaun smoking, he sees the kid that he was. Even though Butchie himself was cracking on Dwayne moments earlier, he’s mad at Shaun for not giving the man any respect.

In both this and the last episode, we’ve seen Butchie pushed into the role of diplomat. He jokes that he’s not the U.N., but lately all he’s been doing is negotiating meetings, trying to make things better for the people around him. Tina’s arrival, his mother’s subsequent crisis and his father’s absence have forced Butchie to step up and become the man of the family. In the end, he and Shaun come to an agreement and enter the water together. Butchie says he’s going to surf like he used to, on the board that Kai retrieves for him from storage. He is trying to reclaim the potential that he sacrificed so many years ago.

Throughout the series, I’ve posited that John’s purpose on the show is to help the Yosts get things together and reclaim the glory they’ve lost. John set that in motion for Butchie, and now Butchie is doing things for himself, returning to the right path. With one student a success, John’s main focus now seems to be Cissy.

He’s much more direct with Cissy, attacking her negative characteristics in a more cogent way. With the other characters, John is merely a parrot, repeating what they say. With Cissy, he channels the things she knows, but doesn’t want to hear. At this stage of the series, he seems to have become a more mystical figure. Early on, he was an idiot savant, but still most definitely an idiot. Now, he’s more of a sage, helping the characters recognize things about themselves, and all the while remaining on a higher mental plane.

Once again, John appears in a variety of places at the end of the episode, participating in moments of great importance. My favorite scene in the episode was Cass looking at the footage, the drum circle and just crying. For the past two episodes, she’s been looking for something, locking herself in this room and trying to find the secret John referred to. I love the way these scenes were constructed, with the intentionally jarring jump cuts putting us in Cass’s uncertain mental space. Last week, her mental instability was proven by the fact that she ate all those overpriced minibar items; here it’s simply her continued stare at the computer monitor.

Last week John talked about how Cass’s camera held some kind of secret, it’s a major piece of John’s mission here. There, she also talked about a drum circle, and hit a pan repeatedly, seeking a beat. Here, she watches the drum circle on video, and just begins to cry. She’s touched something of primal significance, and turns to John, seeking comfort. This moment reminded me of similar moments in Grant Morrison comics, where characters cry not because of some emotional trauma, rather because they came in touch with something of such profound cosmological significance, it’s overwhelming. I love that kind of emotion, and had never seen it in anything outside Morrison’s work, but it was there on Cass’s face in that scene. This is the kind of storytelling that has significance for humanity as a whole, and I love the fact that we’re getting it from a TV show every week.

And what of John’s cryptic comment that Shaun will soon be gone? That raises a lot of questions. In the second episode, Shaun was pulled back from death, and it was this resurrection that set in motion the building of the new community that has formed at the motel, around the Yosts. John’s appearance set that building in motion, but it was Shaun’s ‘miracle’ that crystallized their association, and brought Dr. Smith and Tina into the circle. Has Shaun only returned for a time, to play some role in the overall plan, then disappear again, as he was meant to after the accident? It’s possible that Shaun is a sacrificial character, who must die so that Butchie can be healed. There’s been a lot of talk about the religious symbolism of the show, with John as John the Baptist to Shaun’s Christ. So, it would make sense that the son would die to save the father. But, that seems a bit negative, Shaun’s death would likely destroy everything that has been built during the series. But, it’s interesting to watch Shaun, John and Butchie all walk out to surf together at the end of the episode.

Elsewhere, we’ve got a lot of drama at the motel. Palaka’s infection forces Dr. Smith to evaluate what his role is now. Does the loss of his job mean he can’t be a doctor now? That’s the issue he faces during the scene where Freddie tries to take Palaka away. Smith sees this treatment as a way to prove that he still has a purpose and the hospital lawyer can’t take that away. Even though the hospital is setting him up for a fall, Cissy is looking out for him.

Beyond the Yosts, the central focus of the series is the formation of this new community, where a whole bunch of societal rejects can gather and find togetherness. At the end of Babylon 5, there’s a voiceover that says that station “gave us hope that there can be new beginnings, even for people like us.” People like them were nowhere near as far from redemption as people like the guys on this show, but the sentiment is the same. The motel has become a place where everyone can leave behind the baggage of who they were and coalesce into a new communal entity. Much like with Deadwood, this isn’t always easy, people rarely say what the others around them mean to each other, with the exception of Barry, who is always ridiculed for it.

But, with Palaka sick, the community draws together to care for him, and ultimately that’s what society is about, providing a safety net to ensure that those who can’t help themselves will still be protected. The characters who have willingly engaged with this community are helped, those who resist remain troubled. The two main resistors are Vietnam Joe and Bill.

Bill remains uncertain about his role in the community. A couple of episodes ago, Zippy told him to go out and sit with Freddie, he did this and was happy for a bit. But, now he’s retreated back into his cave, talking only to Zippy. It’s notable that he says he has no friends, and nowhere else to go besides his house. He doesn’t recognize the fact that there is a community that cares for him, instead he cowers below the second floor of his house, unable to leave the stairs. I’m guessing that one of John’s tasks in the last three episodes of the season will be helping Bill finally resolve the issues with his wife’s death.

The other major strand is Linc’s departure from Stinkweed. Right now, he’s the major outsider, a threat to the burgeoning community. Will his departure from the company make him stop being a threat and let him embrace the pure joy of surfing and the community surrounding it? I’m thinking that’s unlikely, he seems to have some kind of scheme going on with Tina, and they will likely be the central threat of the end of the season. But, considering the laid back feel of this episode, I’m not expecting a major climax for the close of the season.

Other notable stuff is the return of Paula Malcolmson, who’s apparently become a regular, another character on this Polyphonic Spree of TV casts. It’s good to see her working with Milch again. While I can certainly sympathize with people who were angry at Deadwood’s early demise, I think this show is much stronger and more unique.

So, once again this show surprises and challenges with another great episode. It’s not as singularly mindblowing as last week, but it’s still got a unique feel and atmosphere that’s unlike anything else on TV. It’s depressing to think that there’s only three episodes left, I really hope that HBO gives this another season. Next to The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, this is the best show they’ve ever done. And if things keep up the way they are, it could one day eclipse those masterworks.

John From Cincinnati: 'His Visit: Day Five' (1x06)

After a bit of stumble last week, the show surges back with arguably its best episode yet, a filmic experience like few I’ve ever seen. This episode works on all levels, giving us a glimpse into John’s purpose, some crucial backstory for the Yost family, more great stuff with the hotel crew and in the end, an absolutely dazzling setpiece.

This episode was all about characters putting old troubles behind them and moving together to build a new community. We see that most obviously with the hotel crew. They’re working together to clean up to the site, everybody pitching in. It’s such an odd happening, how all these people have come together, and now committed to doing something. The scenes have an oddness that makes them captivating, I love the incongruity of Palaka cleaning the pool, and Ramon’s attempt to involve Barry in the cleanup. Even a scene as small as Dickstein showing Butchie how to rope off the garden has a lot of sweetness in it. These people who were strangers have become connected, and this motel will be the physical evidence of that connection.

Concurrent with this, we’ve got Butchie and Cissy’s attempt to rebuild their family. Butchie is trying to make things work for everyone, to make Cissy and Tina work together, but dealing with them is bringing out all his worst tendencies. However, there’s some deeper tension separating them, most notably what John reveals to us during his speech to Cissy. While on an acid trip, she gave Butchie a handjob, an act that has cast a shadow over their relationship, and explains a lot of why they’re so torn apart throughout the series. This one moment of weakness haunted Cissy and drove her and Mitch to near oblivion, until they were saved by the arrival of Shaun.

Shaun was a chance to prove that she could be a good mother, to atone for her sins. And, at the same time, it made her transgression seem insignificant in comparison with Tina abandoning her child. Much of Cissy’s rage at Tina comes out of the same she feels, and Tina’s line of work doesn’t help things any. That’s also the reason why Cissy is so uneasy with Shaun having Tina’s tape, he’s being put in the same situation she put Butchie in, and that cycle of mistreatment could too easily continue.

That reveal works really well because it makes the characters’ motivations much clearer. Rather than just being generally fucked up, they’re dealing with the spectre in the past, something that society gives them no easy way of dealing with. Is it abuse, or was it implicitly consensual? And which is worse for the family? Clearly both of them are deeply uncomfortable with each other as a result of what happened in that moment, and that’s something Cissy has to confront.

Throughout the series, John has forced people to confront their demons, to bring their problems out in the open and let them grow. In that respect, he has a lot in common with the cleansing disease of Grant Morrison’s The Filth. There, it was only through engagement with the worst things in the world that Greg could understand himself. You have to bring the bad to the surface to move forward, and that’s what John is making people do here. He forced Joe to confront his worst moment, letting a friend in Vietnam die, now he does the same for Cissy, and it looks like he will soon help Bill deal with the death of his wife.

This is all wrapped up in the ending. The closest analogue I can think of to that scene is the sequence at the end of episode 2.7 of Twin Peaks, where all the characters gather at the Road House and listen to Julee Cruise sing, each of them touching some kind of primal nerve, connecting on a deep emotional level. That sequence was one of the best things ever put on television, and it’s great to have something that comes close to it.

Over the course of the series, John has gathered all these characters together. Here, he appears to each of them and brings them together in a kind of dreamspace. Bill’s spiral staircase ascends to nowhere in the parking lot, while Bill and Freddie jam together. That was a wonderful touch, as was Ramon continuing to cook as John spoke to the assembled masses. He talks about his father, and Cass’s camera, and it’s unclear what it all means. He makes reference to a lot of what’s happened in the first few episodes, but for me now, the content of the speech is less important than the hypnotic delivery. The entire sequence, from the emergence of the weird grey guy on was just enchanting, one of the most magical things I’ve ever seen on TV. It was an experience, one that we shared with the characters, through the camera. This show is working on a subconscious level, and I love that, it’s emotion and intuition guiding us forward.

In addition to all this, we got some great stuff with Cass and her restless attempts to work. Plus, there was the odd scene in the diner with the guy with the Yost website and an appearance by Paula Malcolmson, a.k.a Trixie of Deadwood. And, if that scene at the end is any indication, the circle of people will only expand, John’s influence growing stronger. I can’t wait to see more, this episode was such a joy to watch.

But, the question remains whether we’ll see a second season. At the TCA tour this week, HBO left things open, but in a dumb move, made it pretty much an either or situation with regards to the continuation of John From Cincinnati and Deadwood. If you already pissed off a huge chunk of the potential audience for this show by botching the end of Deadwood, it’s probably not a good idea to say the only way we’ll get more Deadwood is if this show fails. I’m not sure why they just don’t space things out so both are doable, I wouldn’t mind waiting a year and a half or two years for a new season of John if it meant getting the Deadwood movies. But, regardless of whether or not that’s doable, it’s bad business to say that you can only get one or the other.

X-Force: New Beginnings

I read a lot of comics, but in the past couple of years, the vast majority have been written by either Grant Morrison or Alan Moore. Reading almost exclusively from those guys’ output can make it tough to read anything else because it just feels so inferior. Last summer, when I was reading Morrison’s JLA run, I thought it was pretty good, but it wasn’t until I reached the crappy fill in issues by Mark Waid that I realized just how good it was. Last week, I read the Paul Dini Detective Comics issue with Zatanna, just to check in on how she was doing post Seven Soldiers. It wasn’t a bad issue, but it just didn’t seem worth the three dollars. I had no particular concern for what would happen and saw no need to pick up the next issue.

So, I usually have to scale down my expectations for anything non Moore/Morrison. That’s why I was thrilled when I picked up the first trade of Peter Milligan’s X-Force and found an absolutely riveting, intellectually challenging, poptastic book. I’ve heard great things about this book since it first started, and I even remember the controversy surrounding the initial announcement of the book. Back then I was more an X-Men fan than a good comics fan and I was a bit annoyed that they would replace the existing X-Force book with a totally different book. To this day, I think it was an odd choice. I don’t think any readers who weren’t on the internet would know this wasn’t your father’s X-Force, and people who did like the old book are not likely to take to this updated version.

But, the book happened and had some success, so those old debates are no longer relevant. Instead, this book stands as one of the most outrageous superhero books ever published by Marvel or DC, simultaneously tearing apart old genre principles and providing old school thrills that top what you get from more ‘standard’ books. DC and Marvel have a pendulum like relationship, with one always pushing the boundaries, while the other retreats to tired conservatism. Currently, DC, under the guidance of Morrison and others are doing more exciting comics, while Marvel is publishing six month long X-Men crossover events. But, a mere six years ago all was different. Marvel was really shaking things up, and with Morrison’s X-Men leading the way, they created a series of challenging, exciting books.

This book is the perfect companion to Morrison’s X-Men, arguably topping it in its mission of delivering a cool pop look at mutants as cultural trendsetters. The thing I love about Morrison’s X-Men is the way he created a real mutant culture. If mutants are to be a viable metaphor for the minority experience, it doesn’t make sense to have them constantly being assaulted and hunted to death. It’s nice to also explore the way that subcultures provide the raw material that fuels our culture forward. The same kids who listen to rap music may be incredibly racist in their daily lives, and they see no hypocrisy in that. Morrison’s X-Men explored that idea, and X-Force takes things even further, with its portait of a media savvy mutant team who are famous as much for being famous as they are for any actual achievement.

This is a theme that’s even more relevant today than it was back when the book came out. This is the perfect book for a world where Paris Hilton’s jail stay is the biggest news story of the summer, and not covering the story becomes its own story. We live in a celebrity obsessed culture, and these celebrities become characters in a kind of reality based soap opera. The stories are written in Us Weekly and TMZ, the reality of these peoples’ lives irrelevant to the narrative built up around them. Many of these people claim that being famous is a burden, but the benefits are undeniable, and this book explores that dichotomy.

It was on the second page that I fell in love with the book. The first page situates us in archetypal X-Men territory. The untimely onset of Zeitgeist’s powers is essentially the same story as Rogue’s power manifest. We’re introduced to another angsty X-hero, an image which persists until panel 3, page 2, where we see the real Zeitgeist, relaxing in a chair flanked by two beautiful women, in the prelude to a threesome. This is a guy who kills for a living, quite violently, as we see in the surrounding panels, and has no qualms about using his skills to get him whatever he wants.

The opening sequence recasts the entire notion of superheroes, this is a guy who’s totally selfish, with no aims for real good. He only wants to make himself more famous, and have fun until he gets back on “the catwalk.” The title page equates Zeitgeist and his team with the models he’s having sex with, they’re all posed in the glammest way possible, surrounded by the remains their battle has left behind.

I know Morrison and Milligan are friends, but I’d be curious to see how closely they worked in building their respective X-books, because this is a perfect companion to New X-Men. There, Grant dressed the characters in cool clothes and made them like models, glam ambassadors to the human world. Here, we see characters who are nothing but that cool, soulless media manipulating image. The first issue culminates with the team going to save Boyz R Us, a manufactured boy band. This team is built along those lines, a series of archetypes with the illusion of unity. But, at their core, both groups are just a construct designed to make money.

The massacre of virtually the entire team in the first issue really surprised me. I figured Zeitgeist would be saved in some way and was surprised to read the next issue and find out he was really gone. The casual deaths of Bloke and Saint Anna in a subsequent issue reinforce the fact that anyone can go. The anonymous nature of these characters makes their mortality more real. You know Superman’s coming back if he dies, but does anyone really care if Bloke is gone?

This leads to the introduction of the new team, and the series’ central character, The Orphan. The central conflict is apparently can someone genuinely be a hero in an organization as soulless as X-Force? While the others have all joined for their own personal benefit, The Orphan does want to help people. In issue 120, we see the way that his tactics have caused trouble for the Coach. The Coach brought him in to build tension within the team, but things backfired when The Orphan actually turned out to be a good leader. It’s an interesting conflict, but with Coach out of the way, I hope that the team doesn’t move too close to traditional heroism.

Coach himself is clearly a dark spin on the Professor X archetype. You can read a lot of the book as reinterpretation of the X-mythos, removing any pretense to nobility and replacing all the characters’ motivations with pure selfishness. The Coach also dies, reinforcing the fact that no one is safe. By using characters based on archetype, Milligan is able to quickly develop and dispose of people as suits the story.

My favorite character is Edie, a character I’d assume is modeled on Edie Sedgwick. Sedgwick was the ‘creation’ of Andy Warhol, whose fifteen minutes of fame media musings were a likely inspiration for the book. Both Edies have short hair, heavy eye makeup and a drug problem. This Edie has a lot in common with the Lindsay Lohans of today, what with her media circus trip to rehab. That stuff is prescient, perfectly capturing what’s going on right now.

Edie’s essential dilemma is her pull between selfishness and doing what’s right. This is something a lot of characters face, but it’s not that effective if they start out on the good side. Because Edie is such a heedless, self indulgent character, it’s genuinely effecting when she stands up for the Orphan in #120. I’d imagine her arc over the course of the series will see her reconciling her desire for power and celebrity with a legitimate desire to do the right thing.

The rest of the team hasn’t been developed that much. Tike is the only character who’s stuck around long enough to get real examination, but I imagine we’ll see more of him in later issues. Doop has been floating around, but his alien language makes it difficult to follow what he’s saying. I did like the Wolverine guest appearance, it was great to see him back in the Morrison era clothes, not the spandex he’s wearing today. I loved the Morrison run so much, it’s nice to get a new piece of the characters at that moment.

I think that makes this book so successful is the fact that it’s simultaneously a satire of superheroes and a successful superhero comic. Much like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, yo can enjoy it as a comedy of ridiculousness, with over the top characters and melodramatic motivation. Yet, it’s still emotionally affecting. The violence is visceral and Edie’s dilemma really made me feel. I love works that walk that line, it’s not easy to do, but these first five issues manage to pull off both comedy and real drama. It’s on par with what Morrison was doing over in New X-Men, I really love both books.

Those two books presented the first real evolution of the concept. Claremont’s run was brilliant, but after sixteen years, I think it was covered. Mutants as a metaphor can be about much more than just fighting, this book might very well join Claremont and Morrison’s run as one of the only necessary pieces of the X universe. I’ve got the next trade already and I’ll be starting it tonight.

John From Cincinnati: 'His Visit: Day Four' (1x05)

Reading some reviews, the consensus on this episode of JFC is that it’s the show’s weakest, and I’d agree with that. After carefully building a vast cast and community, we spend almost all this episode with the Yosts themselves, and despite being at the center of the series, the Yosts are pretty much uniformly the least interesting characters on the show. So, it was a bit of a step down from the greatness of the past few weeks, but there’s still enough strong stuff here to make it a worthwhile episode.

What really worked was the stuff with John and Cass, particularly the scene out on the pier. John remains enigmatic, in a really interesting way. At times he drifts into classic idiot savant, Forrest Gump kind of territory, but there’s always something edgy or odd enough to pull him back from that. When they’re walking on the pier, we see everything through an odd, grainy filter. It’s detachment from contemporary reality echoes the credits, which mix a variety of type periods together. The credits are also echoed during John’s interaction with the masked wrestler.

What really interests me about this segment is the way John is juxtaposed with a variety of religious figures. We’ve only seen him working one on one with a different character each week, out in the world, his power seems to extend over all the people in the crowd. He becomes an odd center of attention, and I’m curious to see more of him out there. It’s notable that John tells Cass that the magic behind the levitation is on the tape, but all that she filmed during the day is him.

The other really strong part of this episode was Vietnam Joe’s attempt to deal with what happened to him last week. At first, he’s skeptical, but gradually he realizes that maybe he did heal this guy, and this opens up to a myriad of interesting possibilities. He’s the first person who actually seems to be happy with John’s intervention in his life. Kai never wanted to “see God” again, Butchie was baffled by his lack of dopesickness, and Bill continues to be suspicious. However, Joe has come around and embraced what John can do. Is this the path that other characters will follow over the course of the season? That would be a logical narrative progression, but I’m guessing that things won’t be that easy.

While the stuff with the family was solid, it lacked the magic of earlier episodes. What interests me most about the show is the supernatural stuff, and the way these occurrences are responsible for building up a circle of people connected around the Yosts. Those people are very interesting, and totally unlike anything I’ve seen on other TV shows. The Yosts’ drama is a bit more traditional, particularly the soapy turns that this episode takes. That’s not to say it can’t be good, it still is, but it’s not as uniquely fascinating as the other elements of the show. Part of what hurts them is John’s distance from the family, he helped to shake things up, now they revert to the more obvious fighting of the pilot.

What’s most affecting to me in this storyline is Kai’s sadness. She thinks she finally has what she’s been wanting for so long, and the return of Shaun’s mother complicates everything. Butchie is caught in the middle, unable to act, leaving Kai alone to be mocked by her CD player. The song that was so special to her last episode is now a joke on her. It may be hitting classic TV soap territory, but the story still worked well.

I also liked the relationship between Linc and Tina. They’re both on the periphery of the family, working on a different wavelength than the other characters in the show, and as a result they’re natural allies. Tina sees Shaun as her gateway out of the world of porn, and Linc sees her as a natural ally in his battle for Shaun.

But, Cissy remains a frequently annoying character, and the drama over Shaun just felt too conventional. I felt like I’d seen this all before, and I couldn’t say that about anything else that’s been on the show. It added some layers to the characters, but I really missed the motel trio and Dr. Smith. It’s a testament to Milch that he’s created such a deep cast, I want to see them all. At least throw me some more Freddie and Bill.

So, this wasn’t the best episode of the show, but it’s still interesting and the stuff with John at the fair was as strong as anything they’ve done. I’m eager to see more of him and Cass, and am still really looking forward to next week’s episode.

Lost Girls: Volume I

I’m as big a fan of Alan Moore’s work as anyone. He’s done more than any writer to change peoples’ perceptions of what is possible within comics, and paved the way for the Vertigo revolution that gave us Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis, and from them, we got the newer generation of prominent writers, like Brian Bendis and Brian K. Vaughan. Alan has always seemed to have a somewhat contentious relationship with the medium and its readership. He’s been in a feud with nearly every major publisher and has “retired” from comics countless times. But, he keeps coming back to do great stuff, so it’s easy to overlook his sometimes frustrating behavior.

Moore has been pretty quiet since the end of ABC comics a while back, but he did release one major new work, Lost Girls. I bought the book shortly after it came out, but didn’t get around to reading it until now. After reading the first of three volumes, I’m not particularly impressed. It seems to indulge all of Moore’s worst tendencies, and is generally devoid of any real characters or emotional engagement. The goal was to make a legitimately erotic book, but it comes off as a really pretentious piece of pornography. If pizza delivery existed in the 1920s, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the pizza guy get into the action in one of the later volumes.

Alan Moore very rarely uses entirely original characters, instead he draws on archetypes and reinvents them to suit his own thematic purposes. The one major exception to this is likely Big Numbers, but I haven’t read it, so I can’t say for sure. Watchmen, Promethea, Supreme, From Hell, all these works draw on archetypes that are part of our cultural mythology and forces us to look at them from new perspectives. The most obvious reinvention of existing characters was League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which reimagined a variety of literary characters into an 18th century superhero team. This book does essentially the same thing, taking three characters from classic childrens’ stories and bringing them together for a variety of sexual escapades.

I guess my central problem with this setup is that it’s too obvious in making the subtext. Yes, you could read all these stories as sexual allegories, but as we see each of the characters retell their stories as discussions of their first sexual experiences instead of the fantasy based stories we’ve come to know, it seems to miss the point. You could read those stories in that way, but in making the subtext text, I think Moore takes some of the magic away from what happened there. For someone who’s so interested in saluting the power of story in Promethea, it’s odd to reduce the whole of Oz, Wonderland and Neverland to a sexual experience. Now, it’s possible he’ll better reconcile the dual nature of the experience in the later volumes, but right now, he seems to be puncturing the mythology rather than contributing to it. And ultimately that feels a bit juvenile. The tornado in Oz works well, but having Peter Pan be some guy who comes into the room and starts an orgy is just goofy.

Now, this wouldn’t be a problem if the book worked better on its own terms. With League, Moore took existing characters, but made them his own. Here, the characters are fairly shallow. They each have some basic characteristics, but there’s not much complexity or emotional engagement.

The central reason for this is the book’s structure. Moore is notorious for creating restrictions on himself, like the use of the nine panel grid on Watchmen. Here, each chapter is eight pages, which makes the book feel like more a series of short stories than a fully realized continuous work. All the breaks take you out of the reality and prevent you from engaging with the characters on a long term basis. And that’s even with the fact that I’m reading the chapters consecutively.

And, within each chapter we’ve got a sex scene. While the sex scenes are pretty sexy, with great art by Melinda Gebbies, they don’t do anything more than regular porn because we don’t have real attachment to the characters. If they had developed the characters first, then moved into sex scenes, it would have a more wholly satisfying work. I’m thinking of something like The Dreamers, which works because you learn to care about these people, then they move into their sexual enchantment.

I think of porn as analogous to comedy or horror. In each of these genres, you’ve got a central to goal, to either arouse the audience, make them laugh or scare them. But, that’s not enough to make a good work. In the best kind of works like this, you should not only satisfy that basic desire, you should also make something that works on a story level, and I don’t think this book does that. Or at least it doesn’t in the first book, we’ll see what volumes 2 and 3 have to offer.

Rilo Kiley's "The Moneymaker"

I've liked Rilo Kiley for a while, "Plane Crash in C" is one of the best songs of the decade, and their whole last album is very strong, particularly the aching, gorgeous, "Does He Love You." That album's country flavor was taken to the extreme on Jenny Lewis's solo album, the solid, but not exceptional Rabbit Fur Coat. I like that album, but I was eager to see what would happen when she got back together with Rilo Kiley. I was not at all expecting what they delivered from the first single, "The Moneymaker."

The video for the song begins with nine minutes of interviews with various porn stars, then segues into a nasty funk bassline, and snaps into motion as Jenny appears on screen. First, I'll talk about the song, then the video. The song is a radical departure from their previous work, embracing a sleazy, funk vibe for something that sounds like an 00s version of a 70s exploitation movie. The song is structured on a really catchy, descending riff that seems to be played on the same instrument that gave "Superstitious" its phenomenal bassline. This riff segues into a stomping chorus that quickly subsides back to the funk riff.

The song works because of its atmosphere, the vocals and instruments all feel semi-robotic, capturing the mechanical emotion of porn. They're playing at being sexy with the song, and it works well. This is echoed in the video, which calls back to the porno chic of the 70s. The closest video to this one in stylistic terms if Fiona Apple's "Criminal," which featured an almost oppressively sleazy 70s vibe. That one felt like you were on the set of the porno, this one feels like you're in the world of the porn, and that's a critical difference. The Fiona video gave you the feeling that she was being exploited, but here, they're all into it.

The video is actually quite similar to "Portions for Foxes," which featured the band in a taxidermy shop. Here, we've got the band in a porn set, surrounded by dazed looking porn actors. These scenes are ok, but the insert shots are really well done. I love the shot of Jenny flanked by two inanimate porn queens, and the 70s style overlay of the two women singing backup vocals. I also really like the overhead shots of the porn actors. But, the high point is the shot of Jenny in a black void, lit from above. It's the kind of image I absolutely love, a really striking use of light to create a strong tableau. It echoes UFO abduction imagery, but also taps a kind of spiritual place.

I love the way this video enhances the vibe of the song. Listening to this on the record I would probably think of it as a slightly sleazy funk song, now it's a full on dispatch from porn world. The video makes the song better, and that's what the goal of every video should be. It's a bold choice for the first single, but I love it and hope the rest of this album is as inventive and adventurous. Perhaps Rilo Kiley will have a Belle and Sebastian like late period reinvention, moving from a band that does one type of song to one that mixes all kinds of genres and styles together, all the while keeping a singular voice. I can't wait for this album.

John From Cincinnati: 'His Visit: Day Three' (1x04)

With its fourth episode, John From Cincinnati continues to do something that now show since Twin Peaks has succeeded in doing, and that’s create a really odd, but totally believable set of characters, a world that you the viewer can enter into when you watch the show. It’s a world with its own rules, rules we’re still not quite clear on, but more than the rules, it’s a feeling. What’s so wonderful about watching the show is the sense of touching some kind of mystical presence, being privy to something outside the ordinary. Ultimately, isn’t that what’s art is about, to take us out of our everyday lives and show us something more?

Last week, I said that this episode would give us a better idea what the show’s structure would be like on a weekly basis. Using this episode as the template, it would seem that the story centers on the Yosts, they are the most significant players in the cosmic drama, but the show is actually concerned with looking at the way a community joins together around this family. In each episode, we’ve seen new characters gather at the motel and just be together. First, it was Ramon and Dickstein, joined by Barry. Now, Freddie and Palaka have set up shop there, joined by Bill at the end of the episode. Cass and Vietnam Joe are also mysteriously drawn in, as well as Dr. Smith.

I feel like John’s purpose during “His Visit” is to help set the Yosts back on the right path, and part of that is building up this vast support network around them. Clearly Shaun and Mitch have access to some kind of larger power, and it’s likely John’s mission to help bring that out, to actualize their full potential. Most of what John has done in the last few episodes is to help bridge the gaps between people, to look beneath surface interactions and find the essential connectedness at the base of humanity. Clearly, the “See God” line is very important, and it’s notable that when he says this what people see is not some higher power, rather it’s other people, going through the same things that they are suffering from. The implication is that seeing God is seeing yourself in others, the oneness of all things.

This is all instigated by John’s disappearance and the subsequent assault on him. He deliberately provokes this assault as a way of letting Vietnam Joe relive a moment in his past when he failed to save a fallen comrade. Here, he says that there’s nothing he can do, but John shows that there actually is. Joe thinks that the whole thing is a practical joke, that someone has gone to these lengths to reenact his greatest failure as a way of taunting him. However, what’s actually happening is John is trying to show Joe that he needn’t consider himself a failure. He may have lost one comrade, but live goes on and there are opportunities to save others.

Joe was caught up in his own guilt, much like Cass was, and I’d argue that’s why the two of them were connected by the vision. Both felt trapped by the idea that they had to be someone they didn’t want to, Joe the guilt ridden vet, and Cass the pawn of Linc. She was using Mitch, and feeling increasingly guilty about it, but it’s not until she sees John’s vision that she recognizes there’s something else she could be. John seems to be moving through the characters’ lives, helping one an episode. First, he helped Butchie get off drugs and turn his life around. Last week, he showed Kai something larger and opened her up to get together with Butchie, someone she’s clearly been in love with for years. Here he saves Joe, and it looks like next episode he’s going to show Cass how to be something other than a pawn of others. We already see that things are working when she walks away from Linc in the hotel, even as he tries to control her with worldly concerns, like money and security.

Amidst all this larger mystical stuff, we’ve also got some nice quirky world building. Dr. Smith has resigned from the hospital and now is set to become a disciple of John, seeking an understanding of what it is that healed Shaun. It’s an interesting comment on medical practice that he has to resign because Shaun was cured, society just isn’t equipped to deal with a miracle. I’m guessing that Dr. Smith will wind up joining the motel crew, Ramon already mentioned that there might be an opening for a staff physician. They recognize that this is a guy without direction, and it would be a kind gesture to offer him a place to say.



It’s interesting that they chose a motel to be the base for all these characters to gather. Such a place is by its nature transient, guests come and go, but instead of drifting on, these people have stopped and begun to call it home. I go back to Deadwood, and the way the various characters all just seem to have stopped on their journey and chosen to camp rather than move on. This is how worlds are built.

Bill’s soliloquies are really interesting, a Shakespearean departure from television norms. He eventually comes to the realization that he needs to stay out in the world, drifting off into his personal world of grief will only lead to insanity. He may appear annoyed on the surface, but nothing makes him happier than when Butchie and Kai come to ask him help in the search. He eventually decides that his place is keeping an eye on the family, and since Freddie might be a threat, he decides to join him. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of comic gold in this pairing, throw in Palaka and you’ve got quite a team.



Also well done was the stuff with Kai and Butchie. We’ve seen her as mostly an aggressive, self confident character so far. Here, she lets her guard down, strips off the public persona and shows him a more sensitive part of herself. Playing the song, she retreats back to a place she was years ago, when she was in love with him, and finally gets to fulfill the dream she had then. It’s a wonderful scene, and I hope the return of Shaun’s mother doesn’t make things too soap opera for them.

I’ve been reading a lot about Milch’s writing process, and its reliance on improvisation and development in the moment. That’s very evident as you watch the show, characters come on and seem to take on a life of their own. There’s certainly something to be said for a Babylon 5 style exact plan, but I love the notion that Milch didn’t know exactly where things were going, but chose to just let the story guide itself. It allows for wonderfully real moments, and a sense of organic evolution. It doesn’t feel like the characters are inserted in contrived ways, they come to the show, the show doesn’t come to them. I love watching this show evolve, it hits that exact same spot as Twin Peaks, simultaneously presenting a vast cosmic mystery and just real, quirky moments of everyday life. I’ve got some minor issues, like John’s healing potentially becoming a deus ex machina, but I’m confident that Milch and co. will guide the show well and keep things as strong as they are now.

The New Pornographers @ Battery Park

Setlist (Approximate)

All of the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth//Use It//The Laws Have Changed//All the Old Showstoppers//Jackie Dressed in Cobras//Mutiny I Promise You//Mass Romantic//The Spirit of Giving//The Bones of an Idol//My Rights Versus Yours//Sing Me Spanish Techno//Go Places//From Blown Speakers//Twin Cinema//Bleeding Heart Show

Encore: These are the Fables//Testament to Youth in Verse//Slow Descent into Alcoholism

I’ve seen The New Pornographers a couple of times before, but this show was the first time I’ve seen them with Neko Case. It’s not quite the full band, Dan Bejar was still MIA, but he’s slated to tour with them in the Fall, so perhaps I’ll get the chance then. Anyway, this show was outside at Battery Park, the same place as the Belle and Sebastian show I went to last year, and like that show, this one was shadowed by the threat of rain. It got a little iffy at times, but luckily the rain held off and the show went on without any issues.

The good thing about this show was that it was free, the band thing is that means the crowd isn’t going to be as into it as they will be at a show they paid to get to, and for this band, and every band, that makes a difference. At The Polyphonic Spree earlier this week, so much of the joy of the show is being a part of the crowd, singing the lyrics back and getting really caught up in things. When I first saw The New Pornographers, opening for Belle and Sebastian in March 2006, I was a bit underwhelmed. They played a good show, but it didn’t have that transcendent energy the best shows do. When I saw them last August, it was a whole different story, that was an amazing show, with a lot more energy.

Here, they not only had the free show issue to deal with, they also had to deal with the fact that they’re playing material from an album very few people have heard. I got a review copy of the album, and have been playing it nonstop for the past couple of weeks, so I was all set to enjoy their new stuff. But, most people aren’t familiar with it, and as a result, they weren’t as into the new songs. I think their new album is as good as anything they’ve ever done and I was really eager to hear the songs off it, but I can understand people not connecting with unfamiliar material.

That’s not to say it was a bad show, they played great, and there were some really strong moments, it’s just that on the whole, it didn’t quite match up to last August’s Summerstage show. And, this whole perception could be due to where I was in the crowd, when I got to move up towards the end, things definitely improved and I was more into it. The final run of songs was fantastic.

But, let’s backtrack. I’d read that seeing the New Pornos without Neko Case wasn’t the real experience, and I was skeptical. They sounded fine to me. However, she is a great stage presence and has a phenomenal voice. I thought of Carl Newman as their frontman, and when she’s not there, he is. But, with her there, she pretty much controls things, overpowering his vocals when she comes in to sing. On the songs that spotlighted her, like “Go Places” and “Mass Romantic,” she owned the show, and if this was my first time seeing them, I couldn’t even imagine them playing without her.



The tracks off their new album are a bit more varied, both in terms of tempo and emotion. The band was supported by a four piece instrumental section that helped to flesh out the new material. While I love their first three albums, I’ll admit that the songs are very similar. It’s a great sound, so I don’t mind, but it’s exciting to hear the band do a song like “Go Places,” which is more subdued and emotionally involved. Neko’s performance on this song was phenomenal, and the emotion behind it was great, it was a shame that people seemed to zone it out because it was new material. “The Spirit of Giving” is another highlight off the album, which sounded great live. Though I’m still unclear what the repeated line on that final segment is, at first I thought it was “Corporate America mourns,” now I’m thinking “Love the American mall.” It’s unclear, but the song itself is so well put together, I don’t care. The song, like many New Pornos tracks, moves through a series of sections before resolving itself in a layered singalong chorus. That mysterious line is repeated, then another vocal is added on top. It’s a spectacular close to the album.

The one track I was really missing from the new album is “Unguided,” an epic six and a half minute track that soars to one of the most beautiful choruses they’ve done. It’s another really emotional song, hopefully it’ll get some play when they tour for the album. Other than that, most of the songs I wanted to hear were played. They’ve got such a deep back catalogue, it’s getting to the point where you’re not going to hear a lot of great songs. I would have liked to hear “Letter From an Occupant” with Neko singing, and “Falling Through Your Clothes” is always welcome, but this assortment was well chosen.



The old material sounded good still, though the crowd wasn’t really feeling things until “Mass Romantic” hit. That’s the one song that everyone knows, and there was a lot of excitement then. The lengthy stage banter slowed the show’s momentum, tightening things up a bit might have helped sustain the energy. It was funny when the drummer forgot which song they were going to play, but other lengthy digressions were just annoying.

The highlights of the show came at the end, with a triumphant “Bleeding Heart Show” to close out the main set and “Testament to Youth in Verse” during the encore. Both of these songs are anthemic, singalong masterpieces and I hope they remain in the setlist for as long as the band’s around. By the time of the encore, some of the less devoted people filtered out and the crowd’s energy raised a bit. The spattering of rain only added to the drama, though it would have been a lot nicer if it was about ten degrees warmer out there.

Ultimately, this was a nice preview of what the band will do on their next tour. It was great to get a chance to see them play for free, but I’d rather have paid some money and got to see them in an indoor venue with more devoted fans. Once people get to know the new album, they should get a lot more crowd involvement. But, any day where you get to hear “The Bleeding Heart Show” performed live is a good one.

The Polyphonic Spree @ Warsaw

I first saw The Polyphonic Spree in concert in 2005, when they were supporting Together We’re Heavy. It was an almost overwhelming experience, a torrent of sound unlike anything I’d heard before. I saw them again at the Across the Narrows Festival later that year, but it’s been a year and a half since I last had the chance to experience the best live band playing today. I’m not sure if last night’s show at the Warsaw was my best experience with them, but it certainly seemed to be Tim DeLaughter’s. The Spree frontman kept things going for nearly two and a half hours, drawing out the encore to the point that it was as long, if not longer than the actual set. It was a high energy, incredibly fun show, a reminder of just how powerful people getting together to play music can be.

The show opened with Tim cutting a heart into a giant piece of red paper to reveal the band, who were wearing their black fragile army uniforms. They opened with “Running Away,” the exhilarating first single from the new album. The first time I saw them, the sound was mixed so loud that I essentially lost the higher frequencies midway through the show. This venue felt like my elementary school auditorium, just a really big space, and the sound was mixed much better, such that I didn’t have any more hearing issues than at your average concert. Now, this does sacrifice some of the initial impact of hearing them, but it was good in the long term. I still think “We Sound Amazed” is the optimum show opening song, it’s a shame it’s drifted off the setlist.



But, we can’t live in the past, the new album has plenty of great tracks, and nearly all of them were performed during that initial set. “Get Up and Go” was an early highlight, bringing a heavy guitar riff to the fore, in a way you don’t usually hear with the band. “The Fragile Army” was also fantastic, letting the chorus do some weirder vocalizations than usual. But, even though the new album is on par with the rest of their work, it’s tougher to get into live because I just don’t know those songs as well, and neither does the audience. With a couple of exceptions, no one is really thrilled to hear the new song, in the same that they are when Tim reaches back to the first two albums. That’s an inevitable consequence of doing a show promoting a new album, particularly one that came out a couple of weeks ago.

That said, the crowd was on board for pretty much all the new songs. I think a large part of that is due to the sheer spectacle of their show. There’s so many of them, and the songs have such consistent positive energy, it’s easy to get caught up in the moment, the ebbs and swells of the song. There’s nothing like hearing the whole band go from quiet to a sudden burst of sound. These sudden bursts were frequently accompanied by confetti blasts. I particularly liked how their roadie would just run out with the confetti gun and launch it on beat, he seemed so excited to get the chance to do that.



Most of the back catalogue stuff in the main set came from The Beginning Stages. There was a great, stripped down version of “It’s the Sun.” Normally I’m not a fan of the acoustic cut down versions of songs, but playing things down let us better hear all the instruments and their interplay. Plus, we did eventually get the full version during the encore. My major issue with the show was that Together We’re Heavy was virtually ignored. There was an amazing version of “Hold Me Now,” but that was it until the encore. There’s a lot of great songs on that album, “Two Thousand Places,” and “We Sound Amazed” most notably, and I’d love to have heard them.

The initial set closed with “The Championship,” the closing track off The Fragile Army. They tore the song up, building to the closing “Raise our Voices” part. The recording of the song fades too soon on this part, I would have loved to just let it go, so it was great to hear them extend it out live. They kept the refrain going as all the band members gradually left the stage. Tim left, and it was just the audience keeping the song going, and it went on for a good five minutes. I’d never heard anything like it before, people just singing on their own, continuing the show without the band. I think that moment was one of the best testaments to what the Spree do, because there’s so many of them, it fosters a very inclusive feeling. They seem to be having so much fun, you just get caught up in it.

The singing kept going until “Together We’re Heavy” began playing over the speakers and gradually the band filed back up to the stage, passing through the crowd. They did this at the Irving Plaza show in 2005, but it was still an amazing moment, to watch them ascend the stage and start playing again, overtaking the record. They were wearing their white robes now, and this was such a sense of joy in the place. What came after was still great, but that was probably the high point of the show for me.

The first part of the “encore” was a couple of covers, both off the Wait EP. First was Nirvana’s “Lithium.” This was a fun song to see them do, but the subsequent “Sonic Bloom” was more satisfying. I think the Nirvana cover probably worked better for people who aren’t as big fans of the Spree. I’d love to eventually complete the rumored covers album because they really transform a song once they play it.

Following this was a rousing rendition of “Light and Day.” This song is their trademark and it always kills live. The chorus is so easy to sing along too, and by the end I think everyone in the place was with them. I figured that was the end of the show, little did I know there was a good 40 minutes left. Next up was “When the Fool Becomes a King.” This track is an epic, ten minutes on the album, and at least fifteen minutes here. It’s one of my favorite songs of there, filled with the builds and explosions that only they can do. The extended runtime was due to the lengthy theatrics within the song. There was a good five minutes where the band froze and Tim messed around on stage. This went on a bit long, it did build anticipation, but when you’re so far into the show, you don’t want to kill all the momentum of the song. The three minute long piano solo also took a lot out of me, but it was still a great moment when we finally made it to the “It’s the Sun” close of the song. I’m glad that song is still in their repertoire, it’s a great set closer.

With both their big songs performed, I figured that was it. However, Tim wanted to keep going, and the audience was still very enthused, so they broke out “Soldier Girl.” This is another great singalong song. Even though I prefer the more developed songs on Heavy and Army, those Beginning Stages songs kill live.

Throughout the show a drunk guy near me was yelling out “Ride, Captain Ride” repeatedly. I thought it was just a random shout, but the band still had some energy and they started up one more song, “Ride Captain Ride.” This was a great closer. It’s a simple, but anthemic song, and as they went, the chorus and other band members moved to the front of the stage, and Tim went into the audience. It felt like the end of Saturday Night Live, when everyone just gathers on the stage and celebrates a job well done.

At this point, they brought out a cake for guitarist Mark Pirro’s birthday, and sang “Happy Birthday” to him. He wrapped things up with a lengthy odd story about his fear of the song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” This was a ramble, and that marked the end of the show. It took away some of the momentum coming off the show’s close, but with so many songs, who was I to argue.

This was an amazing show, primarily for what happened after the encore. After the initial set, I was really liking it, but the encore took things to another level. After the Spree filed through the audience, everything was higher stakes, with more crowd involvement and enthusiasm. This was a huge room, but it felt like everyone was completely into what was going on. I’ve seen them three times now and they never cease to amaze me with their communal enthusiasm and joy at being able to play music. I can’t wait to see them again.

52: 1-13

As 52 was coming out, I was uncertain whether I’d ever bother reading it. I’ll give pretty much anything that Grant Morrison writes a look, but I wasn’t sure if it would be worth my time to slog through a book that was only a quarter Morrison. I thought that I didn’t have that much attachment to the DC Universe, and this seemed to be a project mired in obsessive continuity and obscure characters. But, with the first trade coming out at $20 for 13 issues, I figured it was worth a look and I am extremely happy that I did.

Growing up, I was always a bigger fan of the Marvel Universe than DC. The DC heroes were icons, inapproachable godlike characters, not the more relatable street level characters of Marvel’s books. Plus, DC had such a lengthy, convoluted history, it was impossible to keep track of who was who and what sort of relationships they had with each other. I think the DCU lacked any sort of direction, but recent years have seen increased focus and cohesion that’s led to some interesting books. While it was obviously a highly controversial and not entirely successful work, I admire Identity Crisis for crafting a story that has consequences and is a bedrock event other writers can work from. Having read that book, I can understand Zatanna’s motivation in her series, as well as Ralph’s in this book.

I didn’t read Infinite Crisis, so I’m not sure about the details of everything that led up to 52, but I’ve come to realize that’s not necessarily a problem. The book that turned me around on the DCU, and is the clear predecessor to this book, is Seven Soldiers. I loved that series like I have very few other works of fiction. Each of the seven miniseries was a seminal work for me, creating a character who I really wanted to see more of. While the series is self contained to some extent, it’s awesome to know that these characters have lives outside of the four issue series. So, seeing five of the soldiers turn up in issue 1 was incredible, as was the Ali Ka Zoom cameo in issue five.

But, beyond the specific joy of the series, what I loved about the series was its take on street level superheroes. The soldiers were ordinary people, living in the shadow of the legendary JLAers. Morrison has talked a lot about making the DCU sentient, and part of that is developing it beyond just those central characters, showing what life is like for both ordinary people and for lower level superheroes. Seeing the treatment of Superman and other high level superheroes in that book made it easier for me to understand Morrison’s JLA. Those characters weren’t meant to be approachable or traditionally human because they’re not. They are icons, gods, and they’re going to be fighting the biggest foes, while Bulleteer battles Sally Sonic down on Earth.

The mission of Seven Soldiers was to develop obscure DC characters into viable vehicles for future stories. It worked for me, I’d love to see someone tackle ongoing books with any of those characters. 52 is doing a similar thing, by taking Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman out of action we get to focus on a variety of characters, ranging from low level JLAers to quasi villains and detectives. I was expecting the series to be entertaining enough, but right from the first issue I was completely hooked and I quickly sped through the rest of the issues.

What makes this series different from most comics today is that it’s not based on a film structure, i.e. one big story that will resolve itself at the end of six issues or so. Instead, we’ve got something that’s structured like Claremont’s X-Men meets a Robert Altman film, as we move through a massive number of subplots which gradually progress over the weeks. It’s closer to a TV series, and for an ongoing series, that’s what I like. I love long form narrative and, as a single 52 issue story, you don’t get much more longform than this. I also really like the way we move in and out of the characters’ lives. The weekly format meant hat they could not have a character appear for four issues, without four months of real time elapsing. The weekly format is ideal for stories like this, and I think they did a great job of utilizing it to their advantage.

But what about the stories themselves? As an ensemble series, some of the plots are inevitably going to be better than others, but there’s few clunkers here, nearly everything is compelling. I’ll start with the storylines that aren’t working so well. Steel’s family drama is soap opera in a bad way, with a lot of pointless angst. The character is meant to be an everyman, and that kind of character works best when placed in weird surroundings, as Morrison did with Buddy in Animal Man and Cliff in Doom Patrol. There, their normality served as an anchor for the audience to cling to while all the craziness was going on. Steel’s story is just bad melodrama.

The other plotline that isn’t entirely working for me is the Renee Montoya stuff. It’s not bad, it’s just not as fun as the crazy pop of the other storylines. It feels like they just wanted to give Greg Rucka something to do, and as a result had him put his pet character through this lengthy mystery. The noir voiceover is a bit cliché, and the relationship between Renee and Kate isn’t totally working. But, there’s some good moments here too. I like the moment when we first see Batwoman. As Rucka talks about in the bonus material, this was a moment that needed to be a splash page. Because the book is generally so compact and narratively dense, the splash page has real impact. I hate books that overuse splash pages because it drains it of any effect. In the closing run of Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis would inevitably pepper each issue with full page shots of the city in the rain, and by using them so much, without any denser pages in between, they lost any meaning. It’s all about contrast.

My favorite storyline so far is the heroes stranded on the planet. We get to see Morrison writing Animal Man again, which is great. It was largely the character’s rather generic background that allowed Morrison to turn him into a blank canvas for the epic metafictional journey that was his run on the book. But, before he could tear Buddy’s world apart, he had to build it up and we see that reflected here. Not only does Buddy appear, we also get to see his wife and kids again. Ellen has thankfully ditched the awful 80s white afro she was sporting back then, though it’s odd to see her change, twenty years pass, and Buddy’s daughter remain the same age. But, on the sliding continuity scale, I suppose the adventures of Morrison’s run only happened a few years ago. I really need to reread that run, it’s been nearly four years.

The fun of the stranded planet stuff, and the series as a whole, is the way the series embraces the sometimes ridiculous nature of superhero comics and uses those narrative rules as the underlying principles of its universe. This is a world where someone gets stranded in space and we just accept that, it’s a world where people routinely come back from the dead, a world where strange occurrences happen and people just accept them as part of what life is.

Issue five is the best of the series so far, full of crazy Morrison stuff, like the giant Hawkgirl and the great page where Alan Scott describes the aftereffect of the rift closing. That’s a really dynamic page layout, which sets the stage for the stranded planet stuff. This is pure pulp fun, working in the same vein as Seven Soldiers, embracing the absurdity and fun of classic superhero comics but bringing more emotional reality to things. I love how Adam Strange has no eyes, and Buddy’s total disinterest in Starfire’s shower. Starfire wants to have fun, Buddy wants to get back to his family and Adam Strange is just trying to do his hero thing. It’s a fun dynamic with a lot of story potential. I generally don’t like when superhero comics bring in space because it usually leads to bad stories. But this is so fun, I’m giving them the pass.

My other favorite storyline is the troubled adventures of Booster Gold in the distant past. The idea of a time traveling superhero using his knowledge of past events to be at the right place and right time to save people is pure Morrison, raising all kinds of questions about the nature of the future. Is this an Invisibles style situation, where Booster actually was in the past and he’s just completing the time loop? I don’t think so, primarily because he’s already seen disparities between his account of the past and what actually happens. However, it’s also possible that they write history this way so that he will do the same things he did, thus ensuring that the current timeline works itself out. At this point, it’s unclear, but something is definitely up with Skeets.

Regardless of the future issues, Booster’s got a lot of interesting stuff happening to him. He is completely lacking in traditional morality, hoping only to make a name, and money, for himself. The corporate sponsorship jokes wear a bit thin, the omnipresent advertising on his jumpsuit telling us all we need to know. It’s been interesting to watch him go from ultra confident smooth talking hero at the beginning to rejected loner by the end of the volume. The incident with Manthrax is great stuff, it’s so tough watching Booster get betrayed, his scheme exposed and everything come crashing down. Even though he’s a scoundrel, we like him. I’m assuming he’ll eventually discover the true meaning of heroism, but for now we’re left with a series of brutal rebukes, most notably the great scene with him and Ralph Dibny.

Ralph has the DCU’s punching bag for a few years now, and he spirals out of control over the course of these issues. As I mentioned before, having Identity Crisis as a touchstone is critical to the success of his story here, we understand the pain he’s feeling and his desperation as he tries to find some way to get Sue back. There’s some over the top stuff in this story, but it all builds well to the climax of issue thirteen, where Ralph tries to go through with the resurrection ritual and winds up with a creepy moving wicker Sue. In this world, it is possible that they could bring her back, and Ralph’s incredulity at what his friends did is legitimate pain. That was good stuff, but I still feel like Ralph goes a bit too far over the top sometimes.

Another interesting thread is Lex Luthor’s metagene program. This is another very Grant-y concept, particularly interesting in light of how Grant presents Lex in All Star Superman. There, Lex was jealous of what Superman could do, and felt like Superman inevitably made regular humans less in comparison. Here, we see Luthor trying to level the playing field and make everyone a superhero. Why exactly is this such a bad thing? Is it simply that Luthor’s behind it and something sinister must be going on, or is it more that our heroes are worried that if everyone has powers, they’re no longer special. I’m reminded of the great moment at the end of Grant’s JLA run where everyone is given superpowers for a day and they form into an army that battles some massive alien force. Oracle says “All this amazing stuff you're seeing and feeling is what Superman feels like all the time. It's why he wants to save us.” Can Lex give that to the people, or is he simply exploiting the absence of Superman and Batman? I’d lean towards the latter.

The most interesting thread cropping up near the end of the Volume is Black Adam’s attempt to remake his world using his superpowers. Black Adam seems to be another spin on the Captain Marvel archetype, and there’s clear echoes of Alan Moore’s Miracleman work here. There, we saw Miracleman remake all of society in his image, can Black Adam do the same, and create a viable new world in his kingdom? I really like the dynamic between him and Isis. As Adrianna, she was completely subject to Black Adam, but when she transforms into Isis, she gains control and is able to lean Adam down a new path. I’d imagine things will end in some form of tragedy, since heroes can’t really change the world. If Black Adam does that, it’d make Superman look ineffectual in comparison. But, I love what’s going on there, the relationship between them, and the way she opens him up to new ways of being. I’m really curious to see where that goes.

And, the cover of issue twelve is one of the best depictions of superheroes in love since the sequence where Miracleman and Miraclewoman fuck in the sky in Miracleman #16, or Superman and Lois on the moon in All Star Superman #3. They just seem to be so much more than we are, they are something we can aspire to be. I really hope things do go well for them, we shall see.



Ultimately, what makes the series work so well for me is primarily the characters. Much like with Seven Soldiers, they’ve taken a bunch of B and C list superheroes and turned them into real people in crazy, fantastic world. Booster Gold may have ridiculous stuff happen to him, but he feels emotionally real. They make poke fun at the conventions of the superhero universe, but it’s all love behind this work. The creators clearly love these characters and hope to make you love them as well.

I also love the way it spans so many genres and styles within the basic superhero mold. We’ve got space opera, noir, classical epic and family drama. Superhero comics get a bad rap, as juvenile power fantasies, while works set in the real world, or historical periods are hailed as adult and worthy of awards and serious criticism. I think basing a work off a historical event, setting a story in the past is the easiest way to kill any sort of energy or emotion in the work. You have to work hard to overcome the feeling that this is something that happened and as a result is not of particular concern to me. There can be good historical works, but those films aren’t usually treated with imagination or wonder. They stick to preconceived notions of what is socially acceptable in fiction.

But jump over to a book like this, it’s brimming with crazy ideas and concepts. There’s so much story going into this book, so many interesting jumping off points for you to create your own things. I think people who read comics are more likely to conceive of fiction without traditional boundaries. Superhero comics can jump from the most absurd action scene to deep real emotion, the two are not mutually exclusive. What comics have done for me is make me accept that weird stuff can happen right in reality. If you can accept these spandex wearing heroes as real people in a real world, it’s not that hard to accept increasingly crazy things. Most people are way too quick to write off anything out of the norm as “weird,” but reading comics make you accept pretty much anything. That’s not to say that this necessarily leads to good stories, but with a film like The Fountain, you can see a filmmaker who was influenced by comics and had no problem juxtaposing wildly disparate elements into one work.

So, this work’s wild shifts in tone, style and genre all serve to show what only comics can do. Structuring the book for the weekly format increases its addictiveness, such that I was always looking forward to the next issue and am now counting the days until the end of July, when the second Volume comes out. It’s not as distinct or precise as something like All Star Superman, but it’s just so much fun, it’s almost easier to read. Reading a Morrison/Quitely work, I’m savoring and analyzing every page, here I’m hurring to get to the next and see what happens.

John From Cincinnati: 'His Visit: Day Two: Continued' (1x03)

This third episode confirms John From Cincinnati’s place as the best show on TV right now, and one of the strongest shows out of the gate ever. The thing that makes me love the show so much is the same thing that made Twin Peaks special, an intangible sense of atmosphere that makes each episode like a trip to a dreamy world of beautiful mystery. Most great TV is character based, telling large scale stories of peoples’ lives changing with time, and as the series moves forward it could get to that, but for now, what makes it great is just hanging out in this world, where it feels like anything could happen.

This episode follows directly after the powerful finale of episode two, exploring the impact of Shaun’s rebirth on the family and those around them. It’s interesting to watch the show’s structure evolve. We’ve got the core family, who are the center of everything, but they very rarely actually do anything. Particularly in this episode, nearly all the action was instigated by the increasingly large circle of odd hangers on who populate the world of Imperial Beach. John was the first to take an interesting in their lives, but at this point we’ve got the three hotel guys, Freddie and his sidekick, Linc and Cass, and now the Doctor.

Because they are the ones who act, I feel like I understand them better and in some ways care about them more than the Yosts. The Yosts are a blank vessel that they can put their hopes and dreams into. Everyone seems to either want to save the Yosts or use them, but we have no real sense of what the Yosts want. I think that’s a large part of what troubled critics and some viewers about the series, we don’t have any sort of traditional central character, it’s just a bunch of weird people going along. We can’t latch onto Mitch or Butchie as the moral center of the series, the role that Bulloch served on Deadwood. We don’t know who’s good or bad, or if good and bad even have any particular meaning on this show.

But, I think the odd ensemble structure works well, particularly as we get to know the characters better. Watching the earthquake at the end of episode two, I immediately thought of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and its ensembles of semi-connected characters. Both the “See God” sequence and the final half pipe scene again unite disparate members of the ensemble for a climactic moment. Milch has created such vivid, unique characters already. Freddie’s rambling monologue about “Con Te Partiro” was hilarious, and I love that they took the time for a digression like that. It told us so much about the character. And John really started to work for me this episode, he felt like more like a real person and less like a narrative device.

This episode has three music scored setpieces, all fantastic in their own way, which provide the spine of the episode. The first is the escape from the hospital, set to the cover of “Con Te Partiro.” I like how they staged the escape from Freddie’s perspective, so we weren’t just observing the action, we were observing it through his eyes. I loved the lingering, stagy shots of Cass walking across the frame, then Mitch following in an identical shot. That was an artistic flourish that struck me. Then, the scene of Freddie and Palaka trying to distract the media while the Yosts escape was both exciting as an action sequence and really funny.

One of the interesting things about the show is the way only the peripheral characters seem to acknowledge the weirdness of what’s going on around them. The Yosts just sort of accept that Shaun is back, much like they previously accepted that this weird guy John had entered their lives. However, Bill has been aware of this weirdness, he’s the one who questions John and he’s also the one who thinks to bring Zippy into things. The Doctor is the first one to really ponder things, asking questions that no one can really answer. I believe he’s in the credits, so he’ll likely stick around to investigate more of these odd goings on.

As I said, John felt much more real and interesting this week. Before, he was mainly a sounding board for Butchie, but here we see him taking more initiative during his quest to “bone” Kai. John functions in a similar way as Anya or Illyria on Buffy, a not quite human who forces us to look at the world from a new perspective, and see the absurdity of our customs. This was used to comic effect in the “dump” plot last week, here it’s got more edge. The boning starts out as a joke, but becomes more and more odd as things go on.

Everything builds to the crazy scene in which Kai and John finally “bone” and he orders her to “see God.” It’s moments like this that make the show so special, no one else is doing work this idiosyncratic and uniquely powerful. This is Grant Morrison or Alan Moore territory, creating a world where crazy psychedelic experiences just happen and there’s always a larger metaphysical significance to the actions occurring in the narrative.

When Kai sees God, she seems to experience a collective moment of odd buzzing and pain, which she shares with Ramon, Butchie and Vietnam Joe. Speaking about the series, Milch said he chose surfing because waves are the closest we can come to representing the physical field of oneness that connects all things. This is a philosophical notion that has much in common with Morrison’s conception of the universe, that we’re all one organism, which needs to evolve beyond the misconceived notion that we’re actually separate.

So, in that moment do Kai, and the people she or we see experience that oneness? It’s notable that all the people she sees in the vision are people John has come into contact with. Is John there to open their minds to this new evolution? He’s talked a lot about how “The end is near,” so is it possible he’s talking about the end of our current world as the prelude to an impending leap of consciousness. I’d love to see that, and on this show, it’s quite possible. Mitch’s floating could be an expression of his increased consciousness, as is Shaun’s ability to heal.

Regardless, the moment had an odd trippiness to it, and was made even weirder by John’s total ignorance of human social custom. Kai didn’t want him to make her see God again, but he tells her anyway. He doesn’t understand the way things work, a deficiency that seems to get him into some trouble next week. We have a set of social customs that guide our behavior, an understanding of what is and isn’t acceptable. It’s difficult to watch someone just totally disregard those customs, as John does here. It exposes the essential falseness of the social system we’ve established.

Concurrent with this, we’ve got Mitch and Cass talking on the beach. Mitch has a lot of issues with Cissy, with the life he’s leading, and Cass serves as a sounding board for his problems. Mitch probably on some level senses something awry about her, everyone else has connected her to Linc, but Mitch just lets himself believe in the lies she’s constructing for him. He wants that escape from the troubles at home. While we see in the first episode that he and Cissy still love each other, it’s been nothing but tension between them these last two episodes. On a mythological level, Cass is a siren, luring Mitch away from his family to a false idea of happiness.

While the show has a lot of odd stuff, there is still the family drama at the core, and Shaun’s injury has strung out everyone’s emotions. He has no sense of what they’ve been through, but it’s nothing but tension between Butchie and Cissy, who are there without Mitch to mediate their troubles. There’s a lot of raw emotion here, and I think it works well. These characters aren’t as interesting as some of the peripheral figures, but they’re at least emotionally viable.

Butchie’s conversation with the Doctor about his implants was interesting. He recognizes that John can do strange stuff, and also finds it odd that he isn’t dopesick. It’s an interesting statement about addiction that Butchie is worried he’s not sick. The addict creates a cycle of trouble for themselves, if just stopping is this easy, then there’s no excuse for staying on the drugs.

Everything ends with Shaun returning to the half pipe in a scene that swells with meaning and power. Much like last week’s final moments, all the characters come together and we have the sense of a real mystical happening. John again tells Kai to see God, but this time it’s Shaun on the halfpipe, enjoying himself. The cover of “Feeling Good” is a perfect score and the sense of community surrounding the event is what makes it so special. I love the entire sequence, and was happy to see this week’s ending match the power of last week’s.

I can only think of a couple of shows that came out of the gate this strong, Twin Peaks being the prime example. That was a show that absolutely owned in its first three episodes, crafting a unique universe with odd, but well defined characters and a palpable atmosphere of mystery. John does the same thing, and luckily doesn’t have to deal with having a central mystery to answer. There’s so much stuff going on, it’d be easy to keep the show going for a few more seasons. Sadly, it’s already been written off as a failure, but I talked to a few people who have started getting into the show and if it could build an audience by the season finale, maybe we’ll get another year.

I know this may be seen as sacrilegious by a lot of people, but having seen six episodes of Deadwood and three of John, I’d consider John easily the better series. Deadwood is a great show, but it doesn’t have the totally unique voice of this one. I can understand why people hate John for “replacing” Deadwood, but just look at them as two separate show and be happy we’ve got something this great on TV.

Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers: To Live and Die in Starlight

Back in November, I watched the Babylon 5 pilot. Now, seven months later, I have finally watched the most recent Babylon 5 production, the uninspiring TV movie Legend of the Rangers. Worse than Crusade, worse than the other TV movies, this one does some things well that the show didn’t, but is missing practically everything that was good about the show. It’s a better production, more watchable than The Gathering, but it lacks any real artistic motivation. I see no particular reason for this movie to exist.

I’ll start with what’s good about the production. The effects and visual style are much stronger than what was in the series. The effects were rarely a huge concern for me, once you get into the show’s universe, you just accept that this is what the world looks like and there’s nothing we can do about it. Here, the effects look pretty good, though they still don’t have the realism of a Battlestar Galactica.

A bigger improvement is the visual style. The ship doesn’t look as much like a set and the camera has more energy. The aliens generally look more believable, not just a bunch of masks that were sitting around, and the alien guy with the weird hair was quite cool looking. The director was Mike Vejar, who did a bunch of B5 episodes, and he raised his game here. It’s a moody, atmospheric film. I would have loved to see this level of visual urgency on Babylon 5. The series generally looked almost like a theater prouction, with actors standing on what were clearly sets, this makes it more like real life.

On top of that, this episode is a much more traditionally engaging pilot than The Gathering. That episode was practically unwatchable due to the absurdly bad acting of much of the main cast. Those characters felt like they were written by someone who’d never actually seen humans behave. The characters on this show still don’t feel real, but rather than seeming completely inexplicable, they seem like they were written by someone who’s seen a lot of TV shows. They feel like characters, and at least that’s an improvement over feeling like actors standing on a stage, reading off cue cards. But, they are still far from feeling like real people.

And then gets to the central problem with the work. As the pilot for a TV series, you don’t expect to get to know everyone in depth, but these characters are so undeveloped we have to have a scene where they literally say their name and a vague line about their purpose. But, when you’ve got ten of these in a row, you don’t really remember them. I couldn’t tell you much about the characters from this show and I watched it yesterday. They weren’t memorable at all, and none of the actors brought the intensity that Peter Jurasik or Andreas Katsulas did to The Gathering.

The captain is perhaps the most generic captain character I’ve seen. He dislikes authority, always does his own thing, and oversees a ragtag crew on an old ship that no one else likes, but he has affection for. Am I talking about Han Solo, Mal from Serenity, Jet from Cowboy Bebop or David Martell from this show. He’s the same archetype as Sheridan as well, and like almost all JMS human characters, his only real flaw is that he cares too much about his people and is willing to go off the book. I’d like to see JMS write a really troubled human character, like Londo or G’Kar, because it’s only when we know that someone has the capacity to do bad that we care when they do good. That was the problem with the original series, with Crusade and now with this, the characters have nowhere to go arc wise. If they are already what they want to be, the only problems come from outside, and that’s not as compelling as internal conflict.

The rest of the characters don’t really jump out at you. Now, that’s always going to be an issue with pilot, but this one is 90 minutes, and really, you should care about someone. If the show ended with the ship exploding and everyone dying, I’d probably just be like, oh well, what can you do? JMS’s greatest strength is the way he develops massive plots that affect an entire universe. Watching an episode like “The Fall of Centauri Prime,” it’s profoundly sad because you can feel the weight of an entire universe dooming Londo to his imprisonment with the Drakh. Maybe in three years, someone here would reach that point, but generally speaking, people aren’t going to wait that long for payoffs. It astonishes me that Babylon 5 stayed on the air to even reach that point. I know I wouldn’t have made it through the first episode, let alone the first season if I didn’t have people assuring me it would get great.

In today’s TV world, I don’t think you have the luxury of time that 90s creators did. Shows like Seinfeld and The X-Files took a couple of seasons to find their voice, but when shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under are brilliant right out of the gate, it’s a lot harder to get the benefit of the doubt from the audience. And this show does nothing to earn that benefit of the doubt.

It surprises me that JMS would again run away from the greatest strength B5 could bring to a spinoff, its characters. It was great to see G’Kar again, even if he got nothing to do but make some lame jokes and deliver some exposition. The character has so much residual affection that the show picked up any time he was on screen, even though he has virtually nothing to do with the show. Would he even have been a regular? I don’t know, presumably not, but it would have been much worse without him.

But, if you’re doing a show with rangers, why not have Lennier on the ship? We never found out what happened to him and this would be a chance to explore that. If you’re going after new viewers, you could present him as just a troubled older ranger. Just putting a character in the show is about as much development as any of these others got. That’s such an obvious inclusion, and would have really helped get fans hooked on the show, I don’t see why JMS didn’t do it. While I was intrigued by the brief mention of Lyta, who’s gone now, this was so peripheral, the use of Babylon 5 seemed like a cashin.

This show barely even seemed to take place in the B5 universe. Minbari looked very different from what we’d seen, and this just didn’t jive with what we’d seen in Crusade. It makes no sense to undermine the central conflict of the show, the Shadow War, by presenting this new foe who claim to be so much tougher than the Shadows. Either those guys are lying, or JMS has completely screwed up continuity by inventing a major foe who never are mentioned in any of the other post series stories. It makes no sense.

So, let’s say they’re trying to reinvent the universe, cater to a new audience. Then why do they end the show with a trip to Babylon 5, without explaining the significance of the station. This is clearly meant to be a big dramatic moment, but if you were watching the show for the first time, it wouldn’t work at all. That implies that the show is targeted at previous viewers. But, in that case, why not really cater to them and give us more classic characters and not screw with the Shadow mythology.

While I liked the shooting style, I think the ship was quite poorly designed. It feels like a submarine, and the constant darkness makes the show feel claustrophobic. I’d have liked to see at least a couple of windows. The Excalibur was a much better looking vessel. I actually liked the first time they did the virtual reality weapons thing, the second montage was just overwhelmingly goofy, with her over the top expressions revealing the underlying goofiness of what was going on.

Ultimately, it was a watchable film. Everything was put together competently and the story flowed in a logical way. It felt very much like a pilot made to satisfy a network, full of action and attitude having younger characters. JMS seems to have abandoned everything that worked about B5, in favor of basically making the show TNT wanted from Crusade. There’s no intellectual subtext to anything here, it’s just straight up action and I see no future here. It’s better than a lot of first season episodes in terms of enjoyment, but it’s also completely superfluous and lacking in any kind of substance.

And from the point of view of developing the universe, it gives nothing really notable to the fans. I think the Lost Tales project is a much smarter way to do things. I don’t really need another series, but I’d love another hour with Londo, Lyta and others. So, it’s probably for the best this didn’t go to the series, and instead the universe got the chance for a new reboot.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that this is the final appearance for G’Kar. I feel like the greatest piece of the story that’s not yet told is how G’Kar got to the point where he killed Londo and the keeper. I imagine him and Vir as part of a small rebel organization fighting to liberate Centauri Prime once he finds out what happened with Londo. Their relationship was what made the series great, and it would have been incredible to see G’Kar finally realize why his friend has changed and go back to the planet to save him in the only way he could. I wish JMS had covered that in one of the TV movies or instead of one of the countless goodbye episodes at the end of the show. And now that Andreas is gone, we’ll never see it.

I’d be curious to see some interviews with JMS about the goals behind this project, and where it would have gone in the future of the possible series. All I can find is one anecdote where he talks about how a Colts/Patriots playoff game caused the show’s ratings to fall below expectations. But, this feels like such an odd, troubled project, I can’t imagine what was going on with him that led to its creation.

Well, it’s been a long journey, and it’s not over yet. I’m now caught up and ready for the Lost Tales film. I have to say, Sheridan is probably the character I’m least interested in following up on, we know everything about him. But, hopefully this will succeed and lead not only to a wide ranging series of B5 films, but also similar projects for other series, like, perhaps, just maybe, Buffy. B5 changed sci-fi TV with its introduction of long form arc based storytelling. Maybe it will change things again by opening direct to DVD as a legitimate vehicle for continuing cult series.

John From Cincinnati: 'His Visit: Day Two' (1x02)

After an intriguing, but not entirely conclusive first episode, John From Cincinnati comes into its own with a mesmerizing second episode. I can think of very few series that have had me hooked as much as this one does at this point. Much like Six Feet Under, this one just feels special, it’s a unique world that I want to learn more about and I really can’t wait to see what they come up with next week. But first, let’s review what went down this week.

I’m still a bit baffled about how baffled some people are by the series. There’s some mysterious elements, but also a strong central narrative that anchors us emotionally. The major issue this episode is the merits and problems with the mysterious promoters. Cass tries to lure Mitch into a starring role in her documentary film, but there’s some kind of larger agenda involving her and Linc. Thematically, we’re addressing the troubles with commercialization. Mitch still loves to surf, he’s out every morning, but he doesn’t want to be a part of the surfing machine that has grown up around the sport. He sees what it has done to Butchie and hopes to save Shaun from the same fate.

I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of Deadwood, but that show was interested in the way a society is formed out of chaos. Here, we’re looking at people in an almost apocalyptic world. Whenever they’re away from the water, the color is almost overwhelmingly yellow, an oppressive sun you can feel through the screen. This is a world slightly removed from traditional reality and authority, and the promoters are working to spoil the edenic life Mitch has built for Shaun and his family.

Concurrent with this, we’ve got more stuff with John. It’s still unclear what his exact nature is, but it’s a lot of fun to watch him mimic the actions of those around him and play at being human. The scene in the bathroom at the hospital is particularly cool, as he makes sound effects to mimic what’s going on around him. In this episode, he seemed a bit less like a prophet and a bit more like a mentally challenged person, but there’s clearly something larger going on here.

The earthquake, which leads into Shaun’s accident works in the same way that the earthquake in Altman’s Short Cuts does, giving us a major incident that unites all the disparate plot lines. We see the people at the hotel, the Yosts at the ocean and Bill in his apartment, all wondering what’s going on. It’s easy for a show to get splintered into a bunch of little shows, with no overall unifying direction, so this works well to give things a unity and singular sense of purpose.

Shaun’s accident also serves this purpose, and it was a pretty shocking development. The scene with Mitch, Cissy and the Doctor is the first moment when the characters felt emotionally real. On the best shows, the characters take on a life of their own and begin to write themselves. Joss Whedon talked a lot about this, how in a longform narrative, the characters determine their own destiny. On shows that don’t quite work, you always feel the writer’s hand, manipulating characters to fulfill specific plot points. On great shows, you don’t even think about the writer, everything that happens feels like an inevitability. Last episode, there was a lot of quirkiness in the characters, and that always makes you feel the writer’s hand. It can still be cool, but it’s not going to feel emotionally real.

Shaun’s accident is an artificially imposed incident, but it puts the characters in a very real emotional moment, and through their reactions, we can understand a lot about them. It’s notable that a lot of successful shows begin with a traumatic event. When we see Nate Fisher on Six Feet Under reacting to his father’s death, we see him stripped raw, and then can better recognize the layers of personality that he puts on to deal with others. Ultimately, the best shows are ones where you can tell when characters lie because you know them so well that you can understand why they lie and what they’re hiding. I’m not saying this show is there yet, but the hospital scenes do give us great insight into the characters and bring them closer to that point of taking on their own life.

The episode ends with Bill bringing the bird into the operating room, drawing Shaun back to life. It’s an incredible moment full of a deep, mystical power. The show has a weird vibe and there was real magic in that moment, the sense of something much larger than the characters falling into place. The cut to TV on the Radio’s “Staring at the Sun” for the closing credits did a great job of sustaining that mood.

That scene, combined with John’s odd muttering all built up a lot of mystery and possibility for next week. I really loved this episode, it took the potential of the first episode and transformed into a legitimately great hour of TV. And next week looks even better. One line from the preview had me particularly interested, John saying “Kai, see God.” This show has that same unique feel that Twin Peaks did, and I don’t think I’ve seen on TV since. It’s not forced quirk, it’s an askew worldview that creates a world of mystery and wonder to journey to each week. This show is fantastic, and I hope it gets a chance to build the fanbase it deserves.

All Star Superman #6: 'Funeral in Smallville'

The first TPB comes to a close with an issue that’s fairly schizophrenic, bouncing between the emotion of Pa Kent’s death and the bizarreness of the Superman Squad. Much of the series has been about that balance, simultaneously embracing the Silver Age wackiness and more grounded, realistic emotion. But, this issue doesn’t quite pull it together as well the others. There’s moments here that are as strong as anything in the series, but it doesn’t quite cohere into a cohesive whole.

The opening few pages of the issue are probably the most unqualified success. You simultaneously experience the Superman and Clark parts of his personality. He’s still reverent towards his father, embarrassed when he tells the story about how he crash landed on Earth. But, once he gets to use his powers, he’s having fun again, chasing Krypto up into space.

The best thing about the space stuff is how much fun Clark is clearly having. While I do love the angsty superhero soap opera of something like X-Men or Buffy, all that worrying frequently obscures the basic joy of being able to do something that other people can’t. Superman doesn’t go to the park to play fetch with hi dog, he goes to the stars and rests on the moon.

Superman has that classic hero’s journey arc. Much like Luke Skywalker, he has to leave the family farm and go off into the big city. Unlike Luke Skywalker, his home wasn’t destroyed, so he can return back and imagine what could have been. Did he make the right choice in going to Metropolis and becoming a hero, or would it have been better to just say home and work on the farm. One of the strong things about the issue is that it makes it feel like a legitimate conundrum. Sitting in the diner with Lana, it seems like he would gladly stay there forever.

However, adventure calls and in a funny panel, Lana claims that he must be Superman. This is the opposite of what Lois Lane says, she is unable to believe that Clark could be Superman even after he says he is. Lana knows that Clark is. I’m not that familiar with Lana’s place in the Superman mythos, but just judging from this issue, she’d have known him growing up and would be more aware of how he felt developing the powers. So, she’d notice when Clark started acting weird, acting like Superman.

Superman then meets the Superman Squad. This is a concept that cropped up in Morrison’s JLA: One Million, which, if I recall correctly, also featured the Unknown Superman and Kal Kent. The Superman Squad is a cool concept for JLA, since that was a universe full of superpowered characters. However, here in All Star, I always got the impression that Superman was the only superhero. He does mention Batman, but we never see anyone else, and I feel like it undermines his specialness to have three other Supermen around.

The Chronovore is a cool concept, right in line with a lot of Morrison ideas. The idea that he turns “Farmer Stone’s cows into the hamburgers they were destined to become” is great, very Invisibles. But, the 5-D Superman is just annoying. So, it’s not all good.

What I like about the issue is the way it shows how far Superman has to go. He recklessly rushes in to show up Kal Kent and in the process misses his father’s final moments. One of the best panels is Superman rushing across the grass, screaming “I can save him! I can save everybody!” That sounds a bit like Anakin Skywalker, the hubris of the young hero with near unlimited power.

I suppose the thematic reason for combining the story of the Unknown Supermen with the death of Pa Kent was to force Superman to confront forces larger than him, and to grow up in the process. At the beginning of the issue, he’s happily bounding through the sky and meeting with childhood friends. By the end, he’s been shown up by the Superman Squad and also been rocked by death for the first time. He can’t save everyone and he recognizes that in the funeral scene.

I love the speech that Clark gives there, it’s exactly the sort of thing that Superman would say. However, this again positions Clark as a young man, I felt like he was older in the first issues of the series. The Superman who was faced with mortality in issue one felt more middle aged than this guy who seems barely into his twenties. I suppose he puts on a more mature approach as Superman, but reverts to a younger mentality when he’s back home.

The issue ends on a curious note, as we find out that the Unknown Superman is actually Clark himself. It’s interesting that the 5-D Superman says it took Jonathan Kent’s death to ensure that Superman left Smallville and moved out to the big city. He flirted with staying a child, but realized that he does have to grow up, and become something new.

The issue is quite ambitious, mixing a lot of elements. I think I see better now what Grant was trying to do, but it’s still tough to fit all these things together into a cohesive whole. I would have toned down the oddness of the Superman Squad a bit, but I think it works as a glimpse into Superman’s future. This is his legacy, but it’s also Jonathan Kent’s legacy, and Jonathan wouldn’t have wanted Clark to stay home. That’s why he hired help on the farm, he knew Clark was destined for something bigger and needed a little push out into the bigger world.

When the series first started, there was a strict division between Clark and Superman. It was represented in their physical appearance and characterization. I felt like Superman was the real guy and Clark was just a disguise. But, as the series has gone on, the line has blurred to the point that they’ve become one interdependent entity. The first issues presented a really iconic, chill Superman, but as they’ve gone on, we’ve gotten a bit more character development. I think he’s still true to the Superman that Morrison met, but his possible death has forced him to reassess things a bit.

I’m probably going to start following the series in singles, since the individual issues are essentially self contained and satisfying enough to bridge the gap between publication. So, I’ll be getting issue seven next time I’m at the comic store, then it’s time to wait for things to get rolling. In the meantime, I’ve been reading the first trade of 52, a review’s coming soon, but the quick summation is surprisingly good, and inexplicably addictive. It’s like the methadone to Seven Soldiers’ heroin.