22Pages.com (Comic Books & Action Figures)

If you are looking for a great holiday gift this year for a comic lover you know (perhaps even for your inner comic lover), I suggest a subscription to one or more of the great titles out there. You can event save money this way with a service like MailOrdercomics.com that will give you up to 75% off your new comics.

Personally I would recommend a subscription to Hunter Killer, Ultimate X-Men, or anything by Joss Whedon or Grant Morrison. Nobody sends letters anymore, so subscriptions are really the only way to make the mail something to look forward to!

FearIsTheEnemy.com is the home of the FITE Institute, an online school dedicated to training people to achieve their superheroic potential. Right now they are still in beta, and only invited members can use the site. However, the public launch is only a couple of weeks away and the site looks to be quite fun.

How it works is you create an account and submit answers to a test called the SHAPE exam (Super Heroic Aptitude Placement Exam). Based on the answers to the test you get placed in a college and assigned quests. Quests are basically challenges to accomplish tasks related to your interests. So a musician would be challenged to perform a gig at a local club or an artist would be challenged to put their work up in a local cafe. Once you finish a quest, you put in your story and a photo and earn credit.

You can suggest quests for other people, so it looks to be a fun community site based on the superhero theme.

There are some comic book movies that just make me angry, taking wonderful universes built upon years of great writing and artistry and dragging them through the pointless muck that is hollywood film-making at its worst. This is one of those movies.

The first two X-men movies were quite good, thanks largely it would seem to director Bryan Singer, who did not direct the latest episode. While they had faults, the first two moview had some semblance of a story, character arcs with some direction, and a basic understanding of the importance of inter-team dynamics to the appeal of the X universe. All of these get lost in the latest disaster, which was more boring and amateurish than most episodes of Power Rangers.

It's hard to know where to begin. I think the major dilemma was that they tried to take two major storylines, the classic Dark Phoenix story, and the Mutant "cure" arc from more recent comics, and jam them together, to the disservice of both. Dealing with the Phoenix story well would require a mini-series, and certainly depends upon getting the Jean and Scott dynamic right. The whole thing is terribly botched here with Scott basically out of the movie in like 2 minutes. While the Phoenix's powers are demonstrated with some interesting yet confusing special effects (phoenix apparently is all about disintegrating things now into lots of little pieces) you really don't care about her as a character or worry much about the fate of the world. Her powers don't rise to the cosmic levels that made the comic books so compelling. The lesson seems to be don't invite her to your house rather than something more menacing about her collapsing the universe.

On the mutant cure front, we have Beast and Rogue, both of whom should have tremendous conflict about the whole thing, and instead of delving into any kind of complexity of character, the film gives us a movie of the week type take on the issues. Rogue wants to hold her boyfriend's hand. Wow, that's deep. Beast doesn't like being blue (but doesn't really wallow in the indecision we saw him in during the last few years that this storyline was in the books). After a while you just wish there was some kind of cure you could take to get yourself out of this lousy picture.

And let's talk about major letdowns. There is a Sentinel in the movie. Kick-@ss you think, yet, no, you never see the body of the thing and only see it's lame head cut off tumbling out of a fog. What a lame cop out. Juggernaut is in the movie. Awesome you'd think, yet no. He looks more like the guy from He Man with the battle helmet on (the one with the spring legs that was like the battering ram guy) mixed with the artistic touch of the prop department of your local high school (no offense to most high schools who would have done a better job I'm sure) and you end up with someone you just want to see run away, rather than running through walls clobbering people. Angel is turned into a nonsense teen character who needs to reconcile his mutanthood with his dad (lifetime will love this movie). The multiple man is in it for like two minutes and not used to good effect. Way to take a bunch of great stuff and cover it in toilet water guys!

Rumor has it Halle Barry wanted a more significant role in this film and I guess she got it, yet probably not in the manner she desired. Every two minutes you get to watch her put her head back and have her eyes become completely white before some lame weather special effect kicks in. I always thought of Storm as sexy (especially in her mohawk queen of the morlocks phase) and they manage to make her in this film into a revolting white eyed thing you just want to stop seeing on film.

In short, this movie is terrible. There is no reason to see it in the theaters, and even when it comes out on video, wait till you can get it on a two for 1 day. I hope this is the last movie this bad hollywood cranks out for the X franchise as I certainly couldn't stand any more.

The Great and Secret Show is based on the novel of the same name by Clive Barker. I have never read the novel, but some had compared it to The Stand by Stephen King, a fine work. IDW has been putting out some great comics lately (such as SuperMarket, a must read by Brian Wood) so I thought I'd give this one a try, and I'm very glad I did.

The story follows Randolph Jaffe, a down and out postal clerk working in the dead letter office of an Omaha post office. Jaffe's job is to go through mail the post office has been unable to deliver to look for items of value. In his search, instead of finding cash, he stubles upon "the Art", an occult force he pieces together from the text of various letters. His spiritual awakening sends him on a quest to find out more about the Art, and the Shoal, the group of mystics practicing it. Like Faust, his ambition sends him on a dark path full of violence. By the end of the first issue we see Jaffe set up as the force of evil in opposition to Richard Fletcher, an evolutionary biologist / mescaline addict who is a fellow seeker of the Art with more pure motives. They end up on Palmono Grove, California, a town clearly destined to have an unusual year.

A successful comic requires good characters and a sufficiently interesting world to give rise to their interactions, and the Secret Show has both of these. The mystical backdrop to the story is enjoyably fertile ground for a comic series that could spend lots of time milking it to its full potential. Jaffe is a good character, though Fletcher needs much more development to stand against him in a balanced way. Fletcher's 'creation', Raul, is a simian creature who seems to have potential and will hopefully reappear in later episodes.

Chris Ryall's adaptation of the story seems quite good as he's clearly having to boil down a massive story into a small comic. He does a good job of laying out the complicated backdrop of the mystical underbelly of America while still moving the story forward.

I really like Garbriel Rodriquez' art on this book. His precise and dark lines work great in this horror context. The use of hazy, blurred backgrounds against the focused foreground where only Jaffe's body is clearly marked is a very nice technique demonstrated in pages 10 and 11. Jay Fotos' use of color is also well done, creating the tone well with a muted shades.

Robbie Robbins also deserves credit for doing the lettering well. For the first time in a long time the words that get bolded in the chracter's speech balloons actually make sense as emphasized words. One of my pet peeves is the use of word bolding which has no relation to what words really should be most prominent, a failing that sadly most comics have.

All in all this is an interesting project and I look forward to issue 2. Congrats to IDW on another successful book.

On one level, given the current political climate, this was a daring movie to make (with its pro-anarchist / terrorist bent). However, I wish they would have followed Alan Moore's vision from the comic book series more closely. The directing and story rewrite are both clumsy, leading to a film which is badly paced and lacks the depth of the original comic vision.

As with many superhero movies, this movie is cast as the story of a man, V. I didn't like how aggressively the movie set this up as his story, given that the comic is really about a number of different important characters and how they react to and come to grips with climbing out of a totalitarian England into something wilder and freer. V, in wearing a mask and always spouting the quotes of others is very much an anti-individual, representing instead ideas and symbolic roles rather than an egoistic role in the narrative, so the story of a man angle didn't really work for me. The ending, where everyone is wearing the V mask in an "I am Spartacus" kind of moment felt particularly like a Hollywood cliché.

Also, despite the claims made in the commercials for the movie that this is an 'uncompromising' vision of the future, quite a few things have been sanitized from the comic version. Evey starts out not as a street urchin offering her body for money, but instead as a government office worker unluckily trapped out after curfew. V's speech is cleaned up quite a bit, so despite some hyper eloquent patches in the beginning of the movie, he does not have as unique a voice as in the comic. Lots of strange bits of the comic are left out as well, such as the leader's psychosexual fascination with Fate, the computer in the comic that essentially runs the government (left out completely from the movie).

The world is clumsily constructed, especially as compared to the comic series. Though the thug characters are described as Fingermen, the movie never explains that there are the different government agencies of the Nose, the Eye, the Ear, etc. The overall process whereby V dismantles the government's credibility is reordered in the movie, and coupled with the lack of explanation about how the government is setup makes the story less coherent or believable.

Lastly, and most importantly in my mind, the film totally botches the part of the story where V incarcerates Evey while tricking her into thinking she is being held by the government. In the comic, the incarceration is more brutal, and the reveal is spookier and more troubling. Valerie's letter, one of the more beautiful bits of prose in modern comics, gets lost in the movie as the interspersing of the text of the letter with images of captivity is done rather weakly. Perhaps the intertextual play possible in comics, and handled most superbly by Alan Moore, just doesn't work in film. However, in this case, it felt more like a directing problem than a limitation of the medium.

If you haven't already, please read the comic. If you just see the movie you'll lose out on the powerful vision and voice that Alan Moore constructed to problematize the safety of contemporary society.

If you aren't already aware of it, check out Drawn. Drawn is a graphic arts blog with several talented contributors. I especially like the work of Jared Chapman, who has a portfolio site of his own. Many of the contributors to this site have their own blogs as well which are well worth a look. I especially enjoyed Ward Jenkins' blog.

While you are over at Drawn, be sure to wish them happy birthday, as today marks the one year anniversary of the site.

I always loved the Sandman covers McKean did for the Neil Gaiman series, and had high hopes going into this film that it would be a visual stunner. I wasn’t disappointed, and Dave McKean’s designs coupled with the animatronic genius of the Jim Henson Company create a fanciful, beautifully layered world of imagination. Imagine Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Miro and Dali, and you have some sense of the feel of MirrorMask. If you like Brothers Quay, you’ll like this picture.

The story follows Helena, well-played by Stephanie Leonidas, a young girl who finds herself in a dream world of her own creation, struggling to bring balance to the world to save her ailing mother. The overall story is quite familiar, and is in some ways reminiscent of Gaiman’s work on Neverwhere. Helena and her jester for hire companion Valentine traverse a fantastical world haunted by hungry Sphinx cats and menacing shadows. The film is slow to get going, but once we are embedded in the dream world there is more than enough eye candy to satisfy just about anyone. There are some wonderful moments, but overall the narrative lacks the strength of the visual world created in the film, and the pacing as a result ends up feeling a bit lethargic overall. While the story initially seems built around Helena’s need to apologize to her mother, this gets lost midway through the story and Helena’s character arc fails to achieve much of anything as a result.

The tone is quite creepy and frenetic at times, with much of the musical accompaniment setting one’s mind at disease. The masks throughout are fabulous, and there are some wonderful creatures such as the porcupine guard of the black queen and a floating giant couple that speaks incredibly slowly. While this won’t knock your socks off on a narrative level, there are tons of visual suggestions that will give you dream material for weeks to come.

As a big fan of the Ultimates series, I had high hopes but low expectations for Ultimate Avengers the Movie. I was worried they would strip out much of the darkness and complexity that makes Millar's vision of the Avengers so interesting. The film was better than I had predicted, but still fell short of the high standard set by the comics it is based on.

The film pretty much rehashes some of the major themes and story elements from the first volume of the Ultimates. The plot has been altered somewhat, with new incidents and elements, so even if you've read the comics it is worth seeing the movie.

Let's spend a few minutes on the positives of the movie. The quality of the animation is excellent, and the film is visually engaging. Some of the characters are very well done also. The raging Hulk character is great, and his fights against the rest of the Ultimates are very entertaining. Too often animated superhero fights are too tame and abstract, which is not the case here. The Hulk attacks in a specific, graphic manner that makes you feel viscerally the pain the other characters are enduring. The Hulk works great in an animated context because he can crush tanks, etc. in a really exciting way that just doesn't work in a live action context. I think Marvel should put together a regular Hulk series that is more adult oriented and try it as an evening show rather than a morning cartoon. Captain America's confusion about modern life and his alienation and loneliness come across pretty well. One of the sweetest aspects of the Ultimates as a series I think is the relationship between Cap and the aging Bucky. We get part of it here, but it could have been even more developed. Finally, Nick Fury was done very well, both from a voice acting and character development standpoint. I would be interested in seeing a SHEILD series coming out of the house of Marvel alongside a Hulk series. Other than the characters, the movie also does a fairly good job of keeping the dark character of the series. There is quite a bit of realistic physical violence, from the Private Ryan-esque opening of the film through the Hulk nearly choking Giant Man to death. The human tension from the series, with characters that are really nasty to each other is there as well, though tamed down from the comic.

Now to the bad news. The studio clearly drew a line that this picture wasn't supposed to cross and it is drawn too close to the middle of the road for my taste. The Thor character while still being an environmental activist, doesn't really rail against the system to the same degree as in the book. The intra-team conflicts exist but the Henry Pym - Wasp domestic abuse issue gets left out. I found this particularly unfortunate as the ant attack episode from Volume 1 of the Comic series is one of the most realistically terrifying incidents in modern comics. The issue around the execution of the Hulk doesn't arise, and Fury is represented as less of a potential fascist / bootlicker than in the series. So, while the darkness remains, much of the ethical complexity has been washed away.

The film was too short, leading to a feeling that many things were rushed and the underdevelopment of many key characters. In particular, I would like to have seen more of Thor who is in the movie for a very brief period of time. Tony Stark, Henry & Janet Pym, and the Black Widow could all have been developed more. We don't really get much of why they do what they do or what is motivating them. The main plot suffers from this to a huge degree. The aliens that helped create a nuclear warhead in 1945 for the Germans are still hanging around in hiding 60 years later. Since they have what seems like completely invulnerable technology, one wonders why they have been hiding so long. Also, there is no attempt to give an indication of what the aliens' agenda is. Did they travel across the universe just to hang out on Earth? The Ultimates was a fabulous series that had more than enough material for a 2 1/2 hour project, but we get a mere 71 minutes.

Overall, if you are a fan of the Marvel Universe, and the Ultimates in particular, I would recommend seeing this film. It isn't as good as the comic books it is based on, but it's still worth the money to rent from the video store. If you aren't familiar with the Avengers, I would hold off on seeing the film until you've read through The Essential Avengers Vol. 1 as well as The Ultimates Volume 1. My fear is if you haven't read them before you see the movie, you won't be inspired by the movie to do so.